The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 403. Attraction, Beauty, Growth, and Sex | Dr. Sarah Hill

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with researcher, professor, and author, Dr. Sarah Hill. They break down sex-based differences in regret, competition, and academia; the balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child; the practice of “mate-choice copying” among women; and why our hormones are a foundational part not just of our physical makeup, but also of who we are and who we have the potential to become. Dr. Sarah E. Hill is a researcher and professor at TCU and author of “This is your brain on birth control: the surprising science of women, hormones, and the law of unintended consequences”. In addition to being at the forefront of research on women’s sexual psychology, Sarah is also a sought-after speaker, consultant, and media expert in the area of women’s hormones and sexual psychology.  - Links - For Dr. Sarah Hill: Website http://www.sarahehill.com On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sarahehillphd/?hl=en On X https://twitter.com/sarahehillphd?lang=en On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sarahehillphd2/ “Your Brain on Birth Control” (Book)  https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Birth-Control/dp/0593713915/ref=asc_df_0593713915/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=658806742010&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8951630360526719621&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9013185&hvtargid=pla-2188306336691&psc=1&mcid=7d514ad8aff23a3b83c3018ff98076d9 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with researcher, professor, and author, Dr. Sarah Hill. We discuss her new landmark book. This is your brain on birth control, the surprising science of women, hormones, and the law of unintended consequences. We break down and analyze sex-based differences in regret, competition, and academic striving. The balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child, the practice of made choice copying among women, and why our hormones are a foundational part, not just of our physical makeup, but of who we are most deeply, and who we have the potential to become. So Sarah, I thought for years that the 20th century would basically be remembered for three things. The hydrogen bomb, the transistor, the microchip, and the pill, and that the pill

was perhaps the most revolutionary of the three, and that it was also equivalent to a speciation mutation, that that's how profound it is. Now, the first chapter of your book, this is your brain on birth control, is what is a woman? And that's become a trope and a satirical, and a satirical cliche. And people laugh at the fact that it's even being posed,

but actually don't think it's that funny, because I think that with the advent of hypothetically 100% reliable birth control, the question of what is a woman actually becomes a real question, because a woman who has voluntary control over her reproductive function is not the same creature as a woman who doesn't, and not even a little bit. And so then the question, so it's imagine this, and then we can talk through the book. If sex is no longer tied to reproduction, then in principle women's sexual behavior can

become equivalent to men's sexual behavior, because the risk is now the same. If women are acting like men sexually, then why aren't they men? Like how are they different? And then if sex is no longer tied to reproduction tightly, and women are free from involuntary child rearing and bearing, then how are they different from men in the broader labor market and with regards to general productivity? And the answer is we have absolutely no idea.

And that's why the question comes up. So I'd like to know, why did you start the book with this question? What is a woman? What the way you open something is obviously to some degree the way you frame it. So why did that phrase jump out at you? Well, for me, it was really important

because my background is in evolutionary biology. And so I spend most of my career trying to understand behavior using the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution by selection. And one of the big paramounts of that theory and something that's really a cornerstone to it is the differences between the sexes, right? And they have biological males and biological females.

And how do we define them? You know, how do we define what is a male, what is a female? And what a male is is the sex that has the smaller mobile gametes that has less investment in offspring. And females have the metabolically expensive immobile gametes, and they have a relatively large minimum investment. And so one of the big ways and then sort of the foundation of all reliably occurring sex differences in all sexually reproducing species are these small differences.

And this doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal. Wow, like your sex cells are smaller than my sex cells, like who cares? And but that actually turns out to be completely foundational in terms of setting the stage for different minimum levels of investment in offspring, which then sets the stage for the evolution of sex differences. Okay. Okay. So let's dive into that a little bit because people are, people need to understand exactly what this means. So you relate sex differences when you're trying to define a woman

to the difference in size between the sperm and the egg. And an egg is pretty small, and it doesn't look like much of an investment, but a sperm is way smaller. But the thing that's so interesting about that is that you could say that that difference is fractal in nature, is that it's echoed at every single biological level

all the way up the chain to avert behavior, right? And so the definition of a woman, the definition of female maybe even more broadly female is the sex that Invests more is compelled to invest more in sex and sex and reproduction and reproduction wouldn't be just sex. This is another thing that the the narrower evolutionary biologists get wrong I think it's one of the flaws in Dawkins thinking, for example, is that you can reduce sex reproduction to sex, but that's foolish because human beings have a high investment strategy in relationship to the propagation of their children. And so,

reproduction for human beings doesn't end with sex. For mosquitoes it ends with sex. For human beings it just starts with sex. And we have an 18 year investment. And at least the first three years of that falls, I would say, by necessity more heavily on women and really heavily on women. Right, I think they say among chimpanzee females, the chimpanzee mother

carries its infant something like 500 miles class to its chest in the first year. So a woman, not another issue maybe too, is that is a woman a single organism or is a woman Like, is a woman a single organism or is a woman a part of the mother infant diet? Right. Right. So, right. Well, so that's a whole, that's a can of worms that we can, we can open. I mean, there's this whole theory. It's Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, which is just this idea that your own fitness, just in terms of what your genetic representation and future generations is likely to be, is something that depends both on your own genes, but then also the genes of your relatives. Right. And for women, in particular, who have all of that, you know, invested in

their offspring, that this, I mean, it is an extension of yourself. And our relatives are an extension of ourself. And there's no relationship that is like that evolution has shaped in a way that favors just unmitigated investments in the relationship between mother to child. And because there's certain 150% relatedness, some others always know that this is their child. You have mother's reproductive value, meaning the possibility that she could translate her energy into additional reproduction. That is decreasing, while that, for infant, is increasing. And so it's essentially like passing the evolutionary

baton from one generation to the next between these two individuals who have the highest levels of relatedness as possible in nature outside of identical twins. So I've wondered about this with regard to the transformation at puberty in female emotional response. So the personality data indicates that boys and girls are approximately equivalent in terms of their sensitivity to negative emotion. But that changes that puberty. And so, and so, and the change seems permanent. And it seems like it's harmoniously mediated.

And so, I've been trying to understand. And so, and so what happens at puberty is that women become more sensitive to the entire panoply of negative emotions because they clump together. And so, and you might say, well, that's cultural, but it's not because if you look at these societies that have advanced the farthest in terms of gender equality at the social and economic levels,

the differences in trait neuroticism, so that's that sensitivity to negative emotion between men and women are larger than they are unless egalitarian, less egalitarian societies. So when the society becomes egalitarian, the genetic difference is maximized rather than minimizing. Okay, so then the question is, well, why would women be more sensitive to negative emotion? Because that comes at a cost and the cost is at minimum higher levels of depression and anxiety, but also higher general levels of unhappiness.

So then you think, okay, they're more sensitive to threat. Why is that useful? Well, they're smaller than men of puberty. And so they should be more sensitive to physical combat threat. But they're sexually vulnerable, and that's a huge, that's a huge deal and not to be underestimated. Yes. And I mean, in most societies, for most of human history, an unaccompanied woman was a target of attack. Right.

So, but then the third thing that's most important, I think, I want to know what you think about this, is that, well, women are more attuned to threat because they're proxies for the vulnerability of their infant. And so women may pay a psychological cost for being more sensitive to threat, which is that they're more unhappy and that they're more anxious. But the benefit of that is that they're more alert to any signs of danger or predation or threat in the environment, and they can alert, well, they're going to alert their husband generally speaking or the rest of the community to that.

Now, that also means they're gonna be more susceptible to false positives, right? They're gonna respond to threat when there's none there, but if you're taking care of a dependent infant and you're over-responsive to threat, that's probably the right place to tune your errors. So, and that seems to me also a reflection of this increased investment by women.

So they have an increased emotional investment in their offspring as well as an increased physiological investment. Right. So, right. So, so I'll start with the woman piece, but there's also some interesting things that happen with testosterone during puberty to men. Right, right. Turn that off.

Right. And so I want to beberty to men, turn that off. And so I want to be able to return to that as well. But with women, I mean, absolutely, the thing that we need to remember is that the process of evolution by selection didn't wire us to be happy or satisfied or any, it's like it has designed us to survive and to reproduce.

And part of that means that we're going to feel kind of terrible some of the time. And part of women's design, sort of the design of our psychology is such that it does. It's like a smoke detector. It's tuned to picking up on even subtle cues of possible danger just because the potential costs associated with what would happen if that danger is real

is much greater for women. I'm for a lot of different reasons some of which you've touched upon. I mean, there's one, is that women are mothers. So it's like, you know, it's like you're like, you're eating for two, you're feeling danger for two, you know, you're having to protect yourself and your offspring. You're more physically vulnerable because of course, you're physically, you know, women are smaller and have less upper body strength. Sexual vulnerability for the reasons you talked about, I mean, unfortunately, sexual violence has been something that's been present as long as we've been around. And certainly it's something we see in all species with cheesy females.

You'll have males who want to override that choice. And so there's a lot of reasons that women may... Nipulation, too. It's not merely that women are overpowered physically. It's that they're also susceptible to very devious manipulation on the part of Machiavellian and psychopathic men. And they need to be alert to that form of deception

as a threat as well. Right. Yes. And even also with other females. And the reason for this is that, when you think about the cost, for a woman, if she's duped, so let's just talk about sexual deception. If a woman is duped, she could end up pregnant.

There's a nine month investment there. And if you look, especially at historical types of populations, like modern hunter gatherer groups, if you have a woman who doesn't have a father investing in the child, the risk of infant mortality is like 80%. I mean, it's very high. And the risk of death during childbirth even is very high. So women are putting their lives at risk every time they get pregnant.

And then to get pregnant and have a really high risk infant that's not getting invested in, she's not getting- And the reputation too. Yeah, and the reputation, I mean, there's so many costs to that. And the costs just aren't that, you know, it's not symmetrical for men. The cost of those things aren't the same.

And so our brains are wired to be differently sensitive to those kinds of cues because the consequences are so much more dire if you have a female body compared to if you have a male body. Would you just, do you know it? Is there a literature on, okay,

wanna tell me if I got this wrong. Okay. All right, so we talked about the different reproductive strategies, say of mischitos and human beings. Mischitos have like a zero investment strategy. You have a million offspring. All of them die, but like one, but that's okay

because that's replacement. Whereas human beings, it's unbelievably heavy investment. Then you look within human beings, women invest more than men. Then you could look within men, and you could say there are men who invest less and men who invest more. Okay, so the men who invest less, they're the short-term major types. Now, I've been looking into the personality predictors of short-term mating strategies, and they're not that positive. So, the personality theorists who've been investigating the so-called dark tetrad, which is a group of, you might say, undesirable descriptors,

psychopathy, narcissism, macchivalonism, which is manipulativeness, and sadism, because they had to add that to it. Those traits are much more pronounced among men and women, but particularly among men who adopt a shorter mating strategy. And so now, so one of the things I'm wondering about is it that's related to that. So the men who adopt that shorter term may be made in strategy. They love them and leave them, right?

There's no, let's say, there's little post-coital regret. There's no guilt or shame associated with short term mating opportunities. Do you know if there's a literature detailing the difference in response to short term mating episodes between men and women? Are women more likely to events regret in the aftermath of short term mating episodes between men and women are women more likely to events regret

in the aftermath of short term mating episodes. One night stands. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's a rich literature and sexual regret. And exactly as you would expect, when you look at what people regret sexually, women regret more these short term mating opportunities that they participated in. Man more often regret those that they didn't participate in. So men on that, yes, misopportunity. So men's sexual regret tends to sort of cluster around things that they wish they would have taken advantage of

and they did not. Whereas women's tends to cluster more and I really wish I wouldn't have had sex with that idiot. Right, right. Now, do you know, is there a personality literature that's looked at individual differences in post short term sex regret? So like, are the women less likely to show regret also more likely to have dark tetrad personality traits? Like, there's got to be predictions of regret, right? Yeah, yeah. And expect neuroticism would be one, because that would just predict negative emotionally. Generally, I suspect agreeableness is another predictor,

is that the women who are more agreeable, compassionate, polite, more inclined to care-take and bond. So I would suspect that it's the more feminine women who are most more likely to show post-coil regret. I suspect the same thing would be true. Man, I bet you the more feminine men are most more likely to show post-coil regret. I suspect the same thing would be true. Man, I bet you the more feminine men are also more likely to manifest that pattern of regret. But yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, so I think with women, a lot of it, so in the personality literature, and I'm aware of that, I only know that there was a dark

triad. So I know it's expanded. It had to It had to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add to add I'm not terrible. I'm familiar with that. But when I think about things, I tend to think about just because personality isn't really my area. It's more of the evolutionary area. Area, I tend to think about the, my prediction would be from an evolutionary perspective would be that we would see women experiencing more sexual regret when the costs are higher. So what are the costs associated with having

made that decision that you made? So whether it's a reputation of cost. So for example, one menu has more to lose reputationally from having capitalized on that short term meeting strategy. I think that you would experience stronger sexual regret. I bet you could predict that by looking at the relative. So imagine there's a continuum of men with regards to the socioeconomic status markers of their potential as providers. I suspect that this might seem obvious, but it would be nice to see it demonstrated that the larger the gap between the woman and the man in terms of status, the more regret.

Yes, I would think so. Because she sold herself short and the risk of that is too high. Right. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I mean, even that things that would influence her biological costs. Right. So, for example, if we're talking about short, like, immediate regret, a woman who's near high fertility and her cycle, where pregnancy is possible. I'm assuming that interoperational thing would be predicated, would to be telling her like, oh shit, like that was terrible. Like why did you do that? Or and I would also expect you to see more sexual regret at peak

fertility across the lifespan. So now we have a perfect study design. Yeah, I know. Look at personality, dark tetrad traits, and number of days deviation from maximum fertility as predictors of short-term coital regret. Yeah, and across the lifetime too. We can spend three years getting that through an ethics. Yeah, and another three years, and then another three years trying to get it published. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right, so back to, so back to what is the woman. So, okay, so what we've talked about so far is that what is the definition of female.

Okay, and the female is the member of sexually reproducing species who invests more, at least at, see, that's the issue, at least at the level of the gamete. Do you want to explain to everybody what a gamete is? So a gamete is a sex cell. It's your egg or it's your sperm. So it's like 50% has 50% your genetic material in it. And it is fused with a gamete of the other kinds. If you make eggs, it fuses with sperm. And that is how we

produce life. And yes, you know, the initial greater investment that women make is just the starting point. If, as you said, it's like fractal. It's exponential increased investment because a selection continues to reinforce greater investment because of that large initial investment. It's like a hand of poker, right? If you put in 500. So it's like a sad crystal that makes a diamond around it. Right, exactly.

So if you put in $500 in the first round betting and we're playing poker and I put in a bug, you have more to lose if that hand goes sideways than I did. Right, and that echoes all the way up the chain. And it all the way up the chain. Okay, so that's very interesting too, because the people who claim that sexual identity is merely culturally constructed, failed to take into account the fact that that difference in investment echoes at every single level of the biological ladder. It's not merely something, it's certainly not something that's reducible to chromosomal

difference, which is another way of defining the difference between men and women. You didn't pick that. You picked investment. Okay. So why did you pick and it's not just you? I know that that tends to be the biological stance. But would you say that the chromosomal difference, XX versus XY is of lesser significance than the investment issue or doesn't matter because they're so tightly linked. Well, they are so tightly linked, but I mean, honestly, if evolution by selection doesn't see it, it doesn't matter. Like in a lot of ways, the gears and sprockets that create us, those pieces, like if you're trying to make predictions about behavior and sort of like the, you know, what types of things have been reinforced by this process of inheriting traits that work, meaning that they promote survival and

reproduction and those that don't. It's only what selection sees that matters. And it never sees our chromosomes, what it sees is investment, right? And those individuals who have this really large, you know, minimum investment and they're only able to produce X number of offspring, instead of X prime number of offspring, that those individuals, the best way that they can increase

the probability of continuing their genetic lineage, is through a heavy investment strategy, and that's less true for this other sex. So sex in biological sex, and again, it starts off with these small differences in the size of our sex cells, but then sort of recapitulates that every and all these other things that we can investment.

Well, we can even imagine just for the sake of argument, how that would recapitulate even cognitively. Yes. Right now men, for example, men understand that there's a relationship between how successful they are and how attractive they are to women. And part of what they motivates them is the game of that competition. So I worked with high-end lawyers for about 15 years, both men and women, and found some

very interesting differences in that. But the men, even regarded the money they made in bonuses at the end of the year for outstanding performance, they weren't so interested in the money, they were interested in the money as a means of keeping score, it was a means of winning the competition. And you might say, well, competition for what? And the answer to that is, well, let's call it competition, not for status exactly, but for reputation. But the consequence of a stellar reputation is that, and men who have that are much more attractive to women.

And you might say, well, women go after wealth, but I think that's nonsense. And I think that's also be lied by the relevant evolutionary biology theory, because what it shows and tell me if I've got this wrong, is that women use wealth as a marker for attractiveness because they use wealth as a marker for competence. And what they're after is the ability to generate wealth and to share it and to be generous with it. It has to be both productivity and generosity. And a decent marker for the capacity to generate wealth is wealth, although it's not the only

criteria. So women are looking for competence, and men, it's a very strange thing about men. They compete among themselves for competence-based reputation. Now, I've been trying to figure out why, because you can imagine a movie scenario where the quarterback of the football team wins a major championship and all the other men put him on his shoulders and bring him out of the stadium and he sleeps with the cheerleader that night. And you might ask yourself, well, why in the world would the men group together to elevate

a given man to that sort of status if it means that he's going to be the one that successfully reproduces, and my suspicion is that men learned to value competence, probably as a consequence of hunting. So any given hunter, no matter how good he is at hunting, is going to fail in most hunts. So now if men band together to hunt, then the collective success is much larger. And so what that means is that if you're going to be a hunter that provides across hunting bouts, your skill as a hunter is one determinant,

but your interpersonal skill in negotiating and establishing relationships with the rest of the hunters is even more important. So among hunter gatherers, for example, if you're the one who brings down the animal, it's incumbent on you to downplay your contribution and to distribute the best parts of the animal to other people. And you're doing that to foster your reputation as a generous person, and you're doing that in part to ensure that there's reciprocity in food distribution across multiple hunts. Now, the men are going to be willing to elevate the highest hunter to the highest position, because I think it's in their collective interest,

it's in their collective interest and in their individual interest to be the followers of the best man. And I think that's so important in terms of their own reproductive fitness, which would be tied to the provision of food across Hunts, that they're willing to take the reproductive hit. That's what would you say, implicit in elevating any given man among all other men. You could think about that in terms of hunting

and you could think about that in terms of hunting and you can think about that in terms of combat, too You know if you put the most heroic warrior on your shoulders, you give him an evolutionary edge but if you're in his group, well then You've got the benefits of being with the greatest warrior and the greatest hunter And so I don't know if the evolutionary biologists have been able to calculate out the relationship between establishing a reciprocal relationship with a great hunter or great warrior versus the costs of men competing to elevate a given man to the highest possible position. It's a very weird thing that men do. No, I think that I think you're I think you hit the nail on the head though. I mean, I think that the benefits of aligning yourself with somebody who's very powerful,

that I mean, think about it. There's somebody, and like, let's say that he's, you know, 1.0 and you're sort of 1.1. And so there's somebody who's a better performer than you. You could hear ask kicked if you keep trying to have to, you know, fight with this guy. So there's a big cost to you to try and go to overturn this person, and there's a lot of benefits of aligning with the person who's also really competent. And so I think.

Especially true if it's a pre-do distribution in terms of competence, right? Because the really competent person might be like a hundred times more competent. Right, exactly. And so it's like, I think that there's a lot of benefits that come, especially to men because of the hunting context. Yeah context of aligning with another man in that context. And there's also this tendency in other, so this has been very well studied in non-human animals. But we see a very similar version of this in humans.

But have you ever heard of lacking, lacking behavior? So a lack is a place where males within a species will gather to attract mates. It's almost like a club. It's like the frogs, like frogs, for example, are lacking species. And the males will all go to this display area and they croak, right? And this is what attracts the females.

And so the females will go toward where they hear the loudest, most impressive croak because that male, I'm generally as large a room, body size and has higher levels of testosterone, and it will have a lot of male attracts all the females. All the females, and so the males all want to hang out with this guy because he's attracting all the women. And it's the same as true,

if men align themselves with somebody who's really high-performer, I mean, if you go out for drinks with Tom Brady, it's not too bad to be Tom Brady 2.0. Right, right, right. You're going to be able to pass in the reflective glory. Yeah, you're asking the reflected glory. Right. Well, and the women would also assume that if the extraordinarily high status male is hanging around with some character who looks like a dweeb on the surface, that there might be

hidden depths and utility to his character or advantages in the mere fact that he's proximal. Absolutely. So women use that a lot. And in fact, some of my very early research, this is like, this is going deep. This is when I was in graduate school. I studied this phenomenon in humans, made choice copying, because this is another thing

that you see in females of other species, but you also see it in us. And this is males tend to be a somewhat ambiguous stimulus package. Because most males, a lot of the qualities that women are looking for aren't immediately available, just based on physical evidence. Right.

So women have to kind of suss out, what is there about this guy? And so when women see a beautiful woman with kind of an average looking guy, the first thing they think is what? He must be rich. Or he must have some really amazing personality. He must be really high in status. And it is.

I wonder, is that magnified if he's unattractive? Because one of the things you might suspect is that if a very beautiful woman is with a man who's very non-descript, that there must be something about him that's absolutely stellar. Absolutely, yes. And so the magnitude of the gap between the woman, how beautiful the woman is,

and then the appearance of the man, sort of is linked with the degree to which women perceive that he has these amazing hidden qualities that make him a desirable partner. The bigger the gap, the more amazing the qualities, the smaller the gap, the less amazing the qualities. Oh, that's very funny. So the proper mating strategy is if you're spectacularly

under an in-doubt male, is to hire a beautiful woman to go to clubs with you. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you would actually probably do better than a more attractive man with the same woman, because people would think that you must really have something going on to have

attracted her and look like that. Right. Right. That's insanely complicated. That's insanely, insanely comical. Comical. That's insanely comical. Yeah.

Alright. So, okay. So, what is the woman? So, we've defined that as the sex that invests more. And we pointed out that across all the way echoing, all the way up the biological ladder from the cellular to the cognitive women, females are the sex that invests more. Oh yeah, the other thing about that was that, well, women are going to invest more too, because, and you already pointed this out, but it's worth making it clearer because they have to.

So I think I looked at one point, I looked up the world's record for most children a woman ever had, and I think it was in the hundreds actually. Maybe not, maybe I've got that wrong. Maybe I've got that wrong. It doesn't matter exactly because you could imagine if a woman had, you know, a set of triplets every year for 10 years, then that would give her 30 infants. So we could say they upper bound on female fertility with regards specifically to her children is going to be no more than 50.

Right. And that's a generous estimate. Whereas with men, it's like 10,000. That be no more than 50. Right. And that's a generous estimate. Whereas with men, it's like 10,000. That's reasonable. Yeah. There's no limit. There's none.

Right. So women are going to invest more in their children too, because every child, and you already pointed this out, is comparatively more valuable. And then you also said something interesting, which is that as a woman ages, her children actually become comparatively more valuable than she did. So does this mean this is strange thing though? Is there evidence that women's love for their children increases as their children age? I mean, because women are so invested in infants, it's hard to them. Maybe it's like this?

I don't. So I've not seen anything specifically that has addressed that very question, but they have done studies where they look at the difference between, for example, older mothers and younger mothers. It's a world of difference. I mean, when you look at the amount of investment that goes on, like if you're an older mother compared to a younger mother, older mothers invest more.

They spend more time investing. And all of these things that you would expect, given that their reproductive window is closing. more, they spend more time investing and all of these things that you would expect given that their reproductive window is closing. So it's like, the opportunity costs of investing in that child are less than it would be if you're a 20-year-old woman. So if you're a 20-year-old woman and investing in an existing child, there's an opportunity cost that comes to you for not using that energy to have another child. And so you're not making that trade off when you're an older mother. And so, um...

Think that you think there's an optimum there that we don't know? Because, you know, high Jonathan Hight wrote the cardling of the American mind. Okay, and I've been very interested in this rise of what I like to think of as the devouring mother is that the over-invested parent.

Yes. Okay, so instead of putting that on the shoulders of the given parent, as the devouring mother is that the over invested parent. Yes. Okay. So, instead of putting that on the shoulders of the given parent, I've been trying to understand the cultural context that might make over investment more likely. So you can imagine, well, fewer children. Yes. So, if you have 10 children, you're obviously not going to invest in, you're not going to attend to each of them as much.

They're going to attend to each other more. So, more one child family. So, okay, older parents, right? So, they're going to be more conservative to begin with, because you get more conservative as you get older, but they're also going to invest more in their children, right? And so, and so, so older, and then also richer parents, because if you're older, you're richer. And so, part of the reason that children parents because if you're older you're richer. And so part of the reason that children are coddled as far as I can tell to the degree that they are and overprotected is because mothers are not old enough to be grandmothers. They're rich and they only have one child.

Right. And too much time on their hands. Too much time on their hands also because it's like historically women would have been out gathering food all the time and now if you have women and there's plenty of women who work and are in our still you know overindulging in their children but a lot of times when you see this it tends to happen more frequently and more sort of exaggeratedly in in homes where women are't working as a family. Yeah, so that, you know, one of the things I've talked to my daughter and my daughter-in-law about when they're trying to figure out how to optimally care for their young children is how they, and I talk to a lot of my clients too, because they face the same problem, is how do you balance as a woman, how do you balance the need of your children, especially under the age of three for continuous continuous intense maternal presence with the pursuit

of your own interests. And my sense is that there is an optimized balance there because one of the things that children should see is that adults, including women, have good things to do with their adult time. And so that's a good thing to model. But then also, if you have your own pursuits as a woman, then you're not going to interfere too much in your child's life because you actually have a life. And one of the things I think that protects children against that proclivity of maybe excessively

neurotic women to over invest is that they have their own things to do that are important. Yeah, I mean, having nothing else to do but just shine love on your child and over invest them and make sure they never fall down. This is a, this is not, this is historically unprecedented. You know, most of human history. No one was that rich. No, I mean, yeah, women never, I mean, it was like we always played a role in

subsistence, you know, even though women were also mothering, they were also finding food and they were also, you know, attending to whatever the dwelling was and having to maintain relationships and having to go and get water and the children were having to go to work and help with these things. And so it was a very different situation where now nobody is actually having to do anything to run the household because there's staff and you have children that aren't having to work. You have parents who don't have anything or mothers in particular who don't have something

else that's sort of pulling their time away from just spending all their time thinking about, you know, Johnny and his younger and less. It's also not diluting their insanity. You know, if you're in a tribal group, I mean, one of the advantages to having two parents is that the average of two parents is on average more sane than either of the individuals, right? That's absolutely right. Right, right, right. And well, and partly what you do in marriage is you keep each other sane.

You see where your partner has a tendency towards excess and you rein that in, right? And you do that for each other and hopefully you do that with each other's best interests and the relationship and the quality of the relationship firmly in mind. And you do that for the children as well. In a more communal child-wearing environment, a child is going to have in some real way multiple mothers, like ants for sure, in a tribal group, most people are kin. Anyways, and so the role of mother is going to be distributed enough so that even if any given mother is a bit adult in her preoccupations, there's going to be other people to whom the child can turn. In a narrow nuclear family where there's an overindulgent mother, let's say, who has far too much time on her hands, the child can be shielded from all other potential influences, which is also something that the more narcissistically overindulgent

mother is likely to arrange. So, it's interesting, because what it suggests is that what it indicates is that even though human beings are a high investment species and even though women are the higher investment sex within that confine, there is a point where investment becomes a burden rather than an advantage. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, you can't, if you don't teach, if your children don't have to have the opportunity to learn how to navigate the environment on their own, they have no navigation skills. And I think that that's essentially what we're seeing. Why did you use word navigation there? I used to word navigation because life is a journey, right? I mean, we have to navigate our environment. And that means that we have to learn how to acquire resources. We have to learn how to manage other people.

We have to learn how to get along with other people that we don't like. We have to, I mean, there's a lot of things that we have to navigate resources. We have to learn how to manage other people. We have to learn how to get along with other people that we don't like. I mean, there's a lot of things that we have to navigate through storms. Yes. And so if you're response to your child is there'll be no storms in your life. Right. Or I'll clear all of your storms. Don't worry. And then all of a sudden you put children out in the world and they have no hope to skills. Yeah, they don't have any coping skills. And we see this a lot, you know, as a college professor, I see a lot of this and at a private school with a very high price tag, where we'll have students who come in

and it's really a wake up call about what life is like because they've had, you know, parents who are very well-meaning, you know, I think that the parents who do this, they have the things that they're- God deserves from well-meaning. Yeah, I know. I think that they think they're doing the right thing, but it's not, you know, if you carry somebody too long, they're muscles atrophy. Yeah.

And you can't do that. I heard a good rule from, I think it was my brother-in-law who told me this, and he had spent a lot of time caring for very elderly people. And he said that the appropriate rule of thumb for elder care is never do anything for your client that they can do themselves. And the reason for that is that you facilitate you you you devour their independence. Right. And so then that so there's an interesting paradox here with regards to love, right, because there's the love that

eradicates emotional distress in the moment, okay? And then there's the love that is devoted to fostering adaptive behavior over the medium to long run, right? And that's a love that's much more allied with judgment so for example if you call your child out on their misbehavior, you cause them short-term emotional distress. But the long-term benefit of that is that if they integrate the impulses that are making them, let's say, unduly aggressive or reactive, then they're going to be more acceptable

to their peers and to the broader social community. So you'll allow them to be hurt in the short term for a long term gain. Now, do you know if there are sex differences in that temporal focus? Because see, here's the paradox as far as I'm concerned. And I watch women try to negotiate this with their children at about 12 months of age. The thing about infants infants because they're so dependent is that the proper response of a mother to the distress of an infant nine months and younger is fix that now regardless, right? So you could say in a sense that the emotional distress of an infant

is an omniscient signal that care has to be administered. But once the child starts to become somewhat autonomous, and that starts to occur when they can start to crawl, then the mother has to make a transition from immediate reaction to emotional distress, to allowing the child to dwell in that emotional distress, or even sometimes causing it herself. And that's a very tricky transformation because the woman has become so attuned to the infant and so bonded to that infant and so responsive to its signals of distress that to pull back from, I think most of the way women pull back from that historically was they just had another child.

I was just about to say that exact thing. I think that our inter-birth ratios and like sort of lengthening the spacing between children has probably made that conflict. And we call it weaning conflict and that my way of science has made that more different. Exacerbated it. Yeah, because one of the things you think of a choice,

you know, also, also, if you have a 13 month old and no other children around, the 13 month old is an infant. But if you have a 13 month old and no other children around, the 13 month old is an infant. But if you have a 13 month old and then you have an infant, the 13 month old is now a child, clearly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. 18 months old, I think that's about right. And you know, she's still pretty little, but

compared to a newborn, she was an adult, right? And that was also the point where she turned more to me. And I, you know, there seems to be something that's, apart from the interbirth interval, let's say, there seems to be something that's crucial about the role that men play in the facilitation of that longer term orientation. Because men are less susceptible to the emotional distress of both infants and toddlers. And along with that, I think it gives men the opportunity to be less affected by the emotional distress of children, and therefore to prioritize medium to long-term adaptive strategies over short-term gratification of emotional demand.

And I think that's part of the cardinal role that men plays. Well, they are agents of the patriarchy, right? They're going to be socializing agents. Well, but seriously, they're going to be, they seem to me to be... Right. The women are oriented very strongly towards the primary care of infantile emotional distress, but that's not a good long-term strategy. Okay, so I have a vicious question to ask about. All right, we talked a little bit at the before we started this podcast about the corruption of

the universities. Yes. Okay, now you write in your book a fair bit about what's being the interpersonal and social consequences of women moving on mass into the workforce. So I have a proposition for you. All right, let's hear that. The default moral ethos of women does not scale. It doesn't scale beyond the family. So if you, now, I'm perfectly willing to debate this because I'm horrified by the fact that it might be true. I've watched the universities transform themselves into holding pens for infants. Yeah, no, that's a fact. Okay. And I've watched them transform themselves into holding pens for infants as they become

dominated by women who don't have children. So let me say this, because I was actually just having this, a very similar conversation with a colleague of mine. And actually, here's what I've noticed. And so now, here's the part where I'm going to say something that's a little bit awful. Okay. Okay. Steal yourself.

I'm like, well, no, I'm just thinking like, oh, Lord, I'm gonna get myself in trouble with this. Okay. If you are... That's how you know it's probably true. Yeah, I know, I know. So what I am seeing at universities is that there is a real bifurcation in the performers

and the not performers. And the people who are the performers are the women. And the people who aren't, the performers are men. And I'm gonna tell you why. If you are a man who wants all the things that men want, status and power and you're achievement oriented and you're bright and you're a go-getter, are you going to go into a job where you go to Oxford and make $60,000 a year? No, definitely not. No, you're not. What types of men do you think attract the university jobs? You mean now? I mean, ever. You may think it's $6,000 a year.

Yeah, but I think it's changed. And so, so, so, women who go into university jobs are generally women. And this isn't en masse true, but it's, in my experience, more true than it's not, are people who are very competent, driven, motivated, but also want flexibility because they have children. I work 60 to 70 hours a week, but I get to pick the 60 and 70 hours a week I work. I love my job. I have two kids. I spend a lot of time doing things with them, and I like the flexibility, and most of the really competent academics that I know who are just kicking ass and doing a really good job in terms of like discovery are women. Okay, okay. So I think that the

university is like falling apart because there's a lot of people who are mediocre and they're generally old men who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity, and then you have performers coming in, and there's a lot of fission that's being created. Okay, so there's two elements that play there. There's an element of sex and there's an element of performance. Okay, so let's take this apart a bit and see if we can get to the bottom of it. Well, first of all, you can't pathologize the behavior of one sex without pathologizing the behavior of both. Right.

Right. Okay, so we'll use that as an axiom. And then you ask me what sort of men were attracted to university jobs. When I started my career, the answer to that was men, the one in the universities that were really working. I think my supervisor was a good example of that. He was a football player, he's a tough guy. He was extremely, extremely curious.

Right, so he went into a university position because he wanted to do research. And I was fortunate when I did my graduate training at McGill. I was surrounded mostly by professors who actually were oriented towards discovering the truth in the course of their research. But I saw that over time deteriorating in favor of careerists. And I would put most university administrators in the bin of careerists.

And careerists are interested in the secondary benefits of their career, maybe that security and maybe its status, and not interested in the pursuit. The only people I saw who pursued a university career who had justification for it, who were men, their justification was, I'm so interested in pursuing, let's say, scientific truth in the expansion of knowledge, that I can find my status, my interests there. And if I have enough money to allow that to occur, that will be fine. And I thought that was a perfectly reasonable game. Now you brought up a couple of things there.

Now, and let me say that there's a lot of people who go into science for the, I went into science because I love research and I love discovery and I'm creative. And it's a perfect venue for a creative person to just think about things, and then go test them. It's so fun. And I don't think that what I was saying is characterizing all people in all the motivational states. I'm saying on the whole, it seems like that,

like when we look at who are these careerists that go into this field, and essentially because it's low risk and you know and you have this stability. When you have men who are making that choice, it's a very different, it's a very different phenotype than a woman making that. Okay, so maybe we have a feedback loop. Okay, so imagine this, imagine that as the universities become comparatively lower paying and more maternal in their orientation towards the students, they attract a larger and larger proportion of relatively dependent men who aren't adventurous enough to make it outside of that sheltered

environment. And that, and what that does turn, because the man act out that pattern of dependency, is it reinforces the idea that the inappropriately, maternally oriented women have what would you say insufficient charges that they need to take care of. You know, like things that things really do tend to spiral out of control when a positive feedback loop emerges. Right. Right. So if you want to become alcoholic, the best way to do that is start to drink to cure your

hangover. Right. Because it works. Right. But it produces a worse hangover. Right. And if you want to develop agrophobia, have a panic attack and then avoid. Right. Right. Right. So most forms of serious psychopathology, if you want to become depressed, get sad and then isolate. So many forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops, so we can imagine that when a social institution starts to spiral, that there's multiple causes and forces that work that are reinforcing each other.

Because that would also produce a rapid transformation. But, okay, so you countered my proposition that the universities are deteriorating because they're being invaded by inappropriately, maternally oriented women by saying, yes, but they're also inhabited by, and I don't want to put words in your mouth by men who are looking for a dependent and less competitive niche. Yes. Is that a fair summary? Yes. Do you think that's in keeping with what you're observing?

Um, I, yes, maybe the, the, um, the maternal side of it thing I don't see, but I'm, you know, I'm a woman. And so it might be harder for me to say like, I don't see, but I'm a woman. And so it might be harder for me to say, like, I don't know. I see it in the concern with microaggressions, with the concern with equity, with like the all these, okay. But we have that. I mean, we have so much of that. And I was just telling one of my colleagues, for the very first time in my entire life. And I've been teaching for 15 years. This semester was the first time I didn't just have like unfettered enjoyment teaching my evolutionary psychology class. And it's because I'm terrified every day. I started my class.

2016 when I was teaching. Yeah, that I go into my class telling terrified. Like I'm talking about biological sex. And I've just spent a lot of time, you know, talking about what biological sex is, what gender is.'m talking about biological sex, and I've just spent a lot of time talking about what biological sex is, what gender is, and talking about, because the two things play into each, in really interesting ways, actually. So I spend time talking about that, but I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to get totally destroyed because everything ultimately and evolutionary biology comes down to sex. And the reason I started my book off

with a chapter, what is a woman, is that it's so foundational, this idea that is a biological female, that you invest more in offspring. And what this means for you as a woman, is it means that the costs of sex are higher. And this creates a completely, like a mating market where women essentially get

to call the shots with sex, right? And men sort of do the things that they need to do in order to get chosen. But then what happens when there's no consequences for women's sexual behavior? I mean, you know, because the fact that women have consequential sexual behavior has set the stage for things like women being choosier about sex, men being more competitive, to be able to get access to the things that women want in partners. And when all of a sudden we make sex non-costly for women, which has been a huge achievement for women, but it has these huge consequences on everything, because so much of who we are and our social behaviors and the types of things that motivate us are sort of built around the system of sex being costly for women. Do you do you think has okay.

Obviously. The consequences of sex are extremely high for women and then secondarily for men. Clearly. And it is because we're a high investment species and our children have an incredibly lengthy and costly dependency period. Yes. Okay. So we're not going to eradicate that. Now, you could say, because you know, you entitled your book, interestingly, the subtitle, we

should just point this out, is that this is your brain of birth control, the surprising science of women, hormones, and the law of unintended consequences. Okay, let's concentrate on that last part, that law of unintended consequences, because it isn't obvious to me, and I think this is implicit in your book. If the birth control pill is a biological mutation that exceeds the development of the hydrogen bomb in terms of its explosive consequences, it could easily be that the unintended consequences will swamp the benefits. Now the benefit, let's investigate this as thoroughly as we can. The benefit is that

women are no longer prey to the terrifying consequences of sexual interaction. Right. Okay. But also more so that sounds small right now. And in some ways it doesn't sound small because the idea of women not being prey to sexual behaviors is obviously a big problem and that that's a grade that women don't have to worry about that.

But more than anything, in my view, the thing that's been most important and sort of groundbreaking about the birth control pill and having reliable contraception is that it's allowed women to plan. Well, okay, so let me ask you about that because I'm not so sure about that. Okay. So, well, it's not something I want to toss away because obviously the problem of birth control is a walloping problem. Yes. Okay, so we're not going to underestimate the complexity of that problem.

It's the complexity of reproduction. And so, but so here's a statistic. Now half of all 30-year-old women in the West are without children. Okay, half of them will never have a child. So that's 25% of women. 90% of them will regret it. So now we're have a situation now. Imagine this propagating across the decades. We have a situation now where one in five women will be involuntarily childless. And that means that means from the time from 30 on onward for 60 years alone.

Right. Right, okay. Now, that's a walloping cost for 20% of women. And they're just the women who have it the worst. Now, we can set that against the fact that women are much more educated and they're much more autonomous. And the whole human race has now access

to the intellectual capacity of women in a way that just wasn't possible, say, before the 1960s. We know that women's educational attainment is the best predictor of their children's educational attainment after you factory and IQ. We know that the countries that prioritize women's rights are the countries that are most likely to develop economically. So there seems to be a huge benefit in the general emancipation of women, but the costs are overwhelming and it looks to me like they're mounting. You know, because you also see, I think it's now 30% of Japanese people under the age of 30 are virginal.

And the amount of sex that young people in the West are having, at least actual sex, is plummeting, and it's harder and harder for women to find a long-term relationship. And so, do you believe that, why do you believe overall, or do you even believe that the benefits of the pill have outweighed the costs? I don't know that I believe that. I mean, honestly, I think that this is one of those things where we can't make, I don't think that I can make a blanket statement about that for everyone.

Do you know what I mean? That's a blank, that's an individual level. Chorges. Yeah, so that is a total freebie. For me, right, using birth control for the number of years that I did, absolutely, that benefits outweigh the cost because of how I played things. I mean, it allowed me to get my degrees and, you know, start my research lab and I had

my kids when I wanted to. How many kids do you have? I have two. I have a daughter. Was that enough? In a son. Yeah, I was done. Okay.

Okay. So that was good for you. I was comfortable with that. Yeah. I felt good about that. So, right, so you managed all that. I did. And I think that there are many women who do. There are some women who don't.

And so I think that the question of whether or not the cost that way the benefits, something that's best answered at the individual basis, which is why I think the best thing that we can do for people is to educate them about what the trade-offs are that you're making and what the risks and benefits are. Because like you said, I mean, I think that there is, women are taught almost nothing about their fertility,

like nothing. Well, they're taught lies. Well, yeah, I mean, I've women coming into my class talking about how so and so had a baby at 40, saying to my, I'm saying to it, like, no, like, here's the fertility curve. Tell me, describe the fertility curve. The fertility curve peaks at 25.

And then it begins to decline. So women are at their most fertile at 25 years of age. And then it begins to decline. It declines very precipitously after 35. And the probability of getting pregnant from a general act of sex is much, much lower than it is when you're in your 20s. And this is really hard thing for women to have a wrestle with because of course, I mean,

you know, I look at myself and I had to, you know, I was in graduate school when I had my first child. And I had to make the decision, am I going to, you know, incur the cost to my career to go ahead and try to have a baby now. And I know that it'll be relatively easy for you. Biology. 28. Right. Right. So you were already by historic standards. Old. Yeah. But I wanted to go ahead and get that one. Why did you take the risk? I took the risk because I study women's fertility. Okay. So you knew. And it's like, so I know, I know exactly what's going to happen if I wait. And I wasn't that was in a chance that I wanted to take.

And I think that if we do things like educate women on what the costs are that they're sort of facing, if they choose to restrict their fertility for all of these years, like what is the outcome of that? Okay, so first of all, they should at least know what the facts are. Yeah, I don't think that they, I don't think that they were educating them about this. Not at all. No, we like, there's no one who's lied to more than 19 year old women. They're lied to in all sorts of ways. The first lie is there'll be nothing more important to you in your life than your career.

Is that, I think that's a lie because I know almost no one for whom that is true, whether they're male or female. Right. Like, I think on average, for men, career is more important than it is on average for women. But having said that, men who have a successful family and a successful career are much more likely to value their family over their careers. So, and I think that's even more true for women. And part of the reason I think that,

you can tell me what you think about this. These lawyers I worked with as part of my clinical practice. So I worked with partners of law firms in big law firms in Toronto. And so we have Bay Street in Toronto, which is kind of the equivalent of Wall Street on a Canadian scale. And there are large law firms there

that are internationally competitive, especially in the world of finance, Canadian scale. And there are large law firms there that are internationally competitive, especially in the world of finance, because Canada bats above its weight on the financial side, partly because of our banks. So I worked with these, so the deal we put forward to the law firms, this little company I was working with was you send us your best people. And we will endeavor to make them even more productive than they are. Now, in any law firm, there's a small proportion of lawyers who are hyper-competent at law, but also hyper-competent at generating business. And they're unbelievably valuable because

they feed all the lawyers in the law firm who can do law, but can't generate business. Right. Now, some of them are men and some of them are women and the law firms are hypermotivated to keep those women and they can't. All the women, all the women quit. Right. The bet between 28 and 32. So what happens is they're hyper conscientious and brilliant. They're usually attractive as well.

And so they do extremely well in high school. They do extremely well in high school. They do extremely well in college and university. They do extremely well in law school, like they're on a track, high achieving track. They climb all the way up this track until their senior partners and their work in like 70 hours a week. And often by this time, but not always they're married and usually to someone who has a high income. And they look around having hit the pinnacle and they're 30. And they think, why the hell am I working 70 hours a week? Now, the male answer to that is to win the contest.

We know that winning the contest makes men sexually attractive, but that isn't the case at all for women. So what the women do invariably is bail out and take a job that gives them more flexibility in shorter hours and parties because they want to have a family. Right. Well, no, absolutely. I mean, this is something that's, and people don't talk about it very frequently, but I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

That's exactly what happens. I mean, women generally want to have more work-life balance than men do, and it's just because the reward structure is very different from male and female brain of winning the contest, as you say. And for men, there's a real reward that comes from that and historically, evolutionarily. There isn't anything more important than being close to that. Yeah, and for women, it's about when, you know, it's like we like to win the competition, but we also value investing in our family and in our relationships and that sort of thing to a greater extent than men. And most women that I know, even women who are really high achievers and have, you know,

high performing jobs, also value their family time and a lot of them aren't willing to make those costs. I know more people that are women who foregone, you know, really big promotions and opportunities to sit on this board or that board. I'm saying no to it, even though it's an amazing opportunity, just because they don't want to compromise their time with their children and their families. And this is, yeah, it's a real thing for women. It's a real thing for women. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that too, tell me what you think about this. So my observation of people who practice as scientists is that one in a hundred is an actual scientist. Right. I agree with that. Okay. Okay. So then

if one in a hundred is an actual scientist and all the scientific progress depends on that one in a hundred, which is also what you'd conclude if you looked at both publication rates and impact of publications, same pre-dodistribution problem. And men are more likely to hyper-focus on their careers. What happens if we take the man out of those positions and we substitute in women? Because are we going to attenuate the productivity of the highest performers at the highest level of performance? Well, so I don't think that when you look at the distributions of like, let's just say like supergeniusists. Let's assume that scientists are supergeniusists. And when we look at things like IQ and we look at the distribution of IQ between men and women, we know that women have a more clustered around the mean type of a distribution.

There's less variability. And for men, there's more variability, which means that with men's IQ distribution, you have fatter tails, meaning you have more men. Why are you terrified about getting into trouble? That's pretty much what killed Larry Summers. Well, I know. I know. And I talk about this in my class. And this is something that nobody has problems with the fact

that if you go to an institution, like an institution for people who are profoundly cognitively challenged, that the sex ratio there is like two to one male, three to one male. And we know that more males have profound cognitive disabilities relative to women, but on the side of super geniuses, it's the same thing. And we see more male super geniuses than we do female super geniuses.

But I think with that, sometimes where things get, you know, everybody gets upset about that, which I don't think is necessary, is that it's not saying that there's not female super geniuses, or it doesn't make predictions about any individual one case. Because patterns aren't good at making predictions about what happens with you, or with you, or with you. Yeah, so we know that that's true. There's a gazillion publications that have been published to that effect, whether we want it to be true or not, it is.

What this means is that when you get to the upper echelons of any type of a career that requires a lot of G or a lot of intellectual power, you do tend to see that there is a little bit of a sex ratio I'm with men to women. This being said, there's a lot of like really valuable jobs that don't require as much G that play to some of women's intellectual strengths. For example, things like science and medicine are becoming more female, and that's because those are things that women are really good at.

Well, at those very high levels of achievement, you're going to require the intersection of rare traits. So imagine in engineering. First of all, you have to be more interested in things than people. Okay, so that's going to skew it male right away. Yeah, then you have to be super bright. Okay, now at the highest echelons, there's also going to be a bit of a male skew there. And then you might also hypothesize that you also have to be either hyper dedicated, so that would be conscientious or or hyper competitive, or both. Right.

So, yeah. And we could be in a perverse situation where, well, let's play out the extreme case, on average, women will make better scientists than men, but the best scientists will be men. And we could be in a situation where we'd have to balance that those probabilities. So I wouldn't say the best scientists are men because to me that's like making predictions

about individual cases based on pattern. So I will say on average, right, we should expect to see that in the pool of best scientists that is a male bias sex ratio, I would agree with that statement. Okay. Okay, so let's clarify that. Because the absolute best scientist could actually be a woman and that wouldn't violate the patterns of it. And I'm not saying that. Yeah, okay. So let's clarify that little absolute best scientist could actually be a woman and that wouldn't violate the patterns of it. I'm not saying that. Yeah. Okay. So you said it more precisely. But yes. No. I know. Which is but I think that that matters when you're talking about something like this. I think that does matter. It matters a lot. Yeah. Exactly. And so I think that we yeah. So precision support. Yeah. Yeah. Now okay, so that all right, so let's move on to another issue We talked about what is a woman and that took a long time and you wouldn't think so because you would think that would be obvious

And it is because people can perceive the difference between male and female at a second You are your hormones and you and the time of fertility those are the two of the first three chapters So what do you mean you are your hormones? What I mean is a lot of times, especially culturally in the US, and I don't know whether or not this is true elsewhere, I just know my experience is here. We have a tendency to talk about our hormones, like there's something external to us. Like there's us, our sort of hormone-free rational self, and then there's us under the control of hormones. And that's just us under the control of hormones.

And that's just simply not the way that it works. Our hormones are part of the signaling machinery that our brain uses to create the experience of being the person we are. So they're like neurotransmitters or anything else. When we consider the fact that there's a bunch of gears and sprockets that all work together to make us the sort of person that we are

with our restaurant preferences and personalities and, you know, likes and dislikes, our hormones play a role in that. That's like part of the machinery. So that shouldn't be segregated off. That's exactly right. As this thing that happens to us. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that this is something that on the one hand is really obvious because it's like, I don't think if you tell that to somebody, they would say, yeah, of course it is. But it said, but then what happens when we change people's hormones?

Yeah, right. Well, testosterone is another great test case where here we have a testosterone clinic on every corner in these days. And so people are changing their hormonal profile thinking about what it's gonna do to this thing or that thing. So for example, if a man is taking testosterone thinking like, oh, I'll get my upper body strength back or maybe it'll improve my libido, or women go on birth control pills thinking,

oh, I won't have to get my, you know, I won't ovulate and I won't get pregnant without thinking about the fact that you're actually shutting down your body's ability to produce its own hormones. You're taking a daily dose of this synthetic hormone, and when you change hormones, because hormones are literally a part of what your brain uses to create you, it changes you. And so that whole chapter is just really trying to orient people. Okay, so you're trying to bring people back into their body in some way.

Bring them back into their body. You can understand why people have a problem with this because imagine you get angry. And then later you regret it. You're going to feel like the anger overtook you, like it was an alien force in some ways. It seems to me that the part of us that we identify with is something like the integrated self. And then that integrated self can fall under the sway of impulses that are more neurologically primordial. Right. And we do feel that as a defeat. We do feel that as a subordination or even as a possession.

And so you can see why people have that hesitancy to identify with their hormone-driven impulses. Right. But by the same token, those elements of you that might be excessive when isolated are a part of you and have to be integrated, then they also have benefits that in all likelihood far outweigh their costs. Okay, so what do you think the costs are? Now, you talked about hormonal substitution in women with the birth control pill. Now, there's maybe there's two aspects to that. One is that the consequence of the suppression per se, and we definitely need to talk about that.

And then there's also the fact that what the normal hormonal regimen is being what the substitution for that is, isn't the same hormonal profile, right? It's not the same chemical. Okay, so let's start with the consequences of the hormonal transformation. What is that done to women? And what is it due to the relationship between men and women? Yeah, and really great questions. I mean, our hormones, we have them for a reason.

Like, evolution by selection doesn't select for costly traits. And hormones are expensive. You know, they And hormones are expensive. You know, they're metabolically expensive. They make our brain reorganize themselves every month. None of that stuff would go on if it wasn't doing something to promote survival or reproduction.

And so by eliminating that, by decreasing, or sort of minimizing women's exposure to cyclicity and their hormonal profiles. You're essentially changing a lot of the things that are fundamental to being a woman. So just to give us some examples of this, for a naturally cycling woman,

which is what we'll call a woman who's not on the pill, because she's naturally cycling between her two hormones. Hormones go through two different states across the state of a cycle. It starts off with hormone levels are really low when a woman gets her period, which is the first day of her cycle.

And then estrogen levels begin to increase as her egg follicles are being stimulated. And as they're beginning to mature, that releases high levels of estrogen. And when estrogen increases, because it's nearing the time when women are able to conceive in the cycle, it causes a lot of physiological, physiological, and psychological changes that make women primed for sex. So it makes women smell better to men. It makes women look more attractive to

men because their skin becomes more vascularized or cheeks become rosier. They just look more, their skin becomes more vascularized, their cheeks become rosier, they just look more, they just look sexier, they smell sexier, they move sexier, their voices are sexier. There's all of this research that's been showing that when estrogen levels are rising in the cycle that it's associated with.

Drippers get more tips. Drippers get more tips. Yeah, they earn more tip money. I mean, it's a real phenomenon. And this, you know, this happens right as women are. So why not flatten that? Why is that just annoying for women? And so they can replace that with a more regulated, emotional life and one less unpredictable. Right. But yeah, but that's like a quating, that's like a quating normal and predictable with the male

pattern. Yeah, right. And that's not true. It's like that's normal for males and predictable for males, but that's not true for women. That's not predictable for women. We're different entities. And I think that we've been in this cultural paradigm that equates normal with male for so long that we're even afraid to ask the question of what if both of our hormonal states matter? Like, what if there's two halves to a woman? You don't think it's okay. It seems to me that, and maybe this is unfair, but it seems to me

remarkably perverse that at least some of this can be laid at the feet of the feminists. Well, let's look at a couple of the strange things that we have as a consequence of the feminist world. We have the insistence that we have as a consequence of the feminist world. We have the insistence that career is going to be the most important part of a woman's life. Now, the leftist feminists, and they're generally leftist, are anti-corporate, but they're pro-career. Okay, so that's very weird.

A career is to have a career is to be embedded in what the feminists object to as the patriarchy. To subordinate your seclicity to the hormonal rhythms of a man, you can't imagine something that would be more like subordination to the demands of the oppressive patriarchy, right? That kind of like sums it up. You're going to suppress the biological manifestations of femininity in favor of a persona that makes you optimally functional in the corporate patriarchy. Right, right. So all of that, I mean, there's so many, I mean, there's so many contradictions at the heart of that, right? Because another one is,

you know, we need to hire women and equal numbers as men because of the diversity that they bring to the workforce, but women are just like men. Right, right. Well, if we do everything we can to suppress their homo variation, that would in fact, mean, definitely. Yeah, no, yeah, no. And you're right. I mean, a lot of the people who really get nervous about talking about seclicity and talking about hormonal changes are sort of the old guard feminist.

Where they, and where they, and you know, I understand where all of that originated. I mean, women, as we've had a very bad history of being treated pretty poorly because of the fact that our hormones changed. But it's like, I think that it's time that we need to move past that and say, you know, all of this, this idea that there's something problematic about cycling hormones is assuming that there's only one way to be this correct and that way is male. And that's wrong. I mean, to me, it's like, I reject that. And yes, our hormones change. And you can say that they make us unpredictable,

but it's actually incredibly predictable. Like, if you would throw, give me any woman, you bring her in, off the street and put her here. And I ask her how old she is. And when was the first day of her last menstrual cycle? I can tell you with pretty good certainty what her hormones are doing at that moment. Right? If I bring a man in off the street, I have absolutely no idea what his primary sex hormone is doing. Because testosterone is reactive.

It increases when there's a beautiful woman around. It decreases if your sports team loses. It increases if your sports team wins. Your political candidate loses the decreases. So testosterone is incredibly reactive. So that's also relevant to why the men would be hanging around the high status men. Because if your sports team wins, then your testosterone levels... Right, right, right. You need to go a few more. Right, right, right. Yeah, no, so I mean, so I, a lot of these, these ideas that people have been using to reject, the idea or object to the fact that women are, are, they have cycles and that there's something problematic about that are all very much steeped in the idea that the male way of being is optimal, normal, and correct and that the women, the women, the female way of being is pragmatic.

And I absolutely reject that. And so when we take the birth control pill, what it does is instead of allowing you to cycle between these two hormones, because you start with this baking increase in estrogen, which is coordinating all the activities related to sex and conception, because this is the period in the cycle in which sex can lead to conception. How long a period is that?

It's about four, so that period of time is about five to seven days. So about five days prior to ovulation and then within 24 hours of ovulation during that window, which we call the fertile window, sex can lead to conception. And how many days a month? It's about five to seven. Yeah, right. So, and then after ovulation, a little temporary endocrine structure forms

from the empty egg follicle. And it begins releasing women's other primary sex hormone which is progesterone. And when that hormone is being released, it tends to make a sleepier, it makes us hungrier, it makes us, it lowers our testosterone levels,

it does a bunch of things physiologically that are helping prepare women's bodies for pregnancy, right, and prepare ourselves for the possibility that an egg might implant. And so women generally are less likely to be going out and doing risky things and more likely to avoid contaminants. So women's discuss sensitivity increases. There's all of these things that go on that are essentially preparing our body. That's when they have maximum post-cordal all of these things that go on that are essentially preparing our body. That's when they have a maximum post-cordal regret there. I bet that you're, yeah, that's so funny. And so you get this waxing and waning between these two hormones that are organizing our bodies

for two different activities, implantation and conception, or pardon me, sex and conception, and then implantation and pregnancy. And we go in between these two states, and each of these hormonal states is associated with different types of psychological patterns and physiological patterns. I mean, even they've done studies where they scan women's brains every day across the cycle and take hormone measures and it's like you see things like white matter density increasing when estrogen is high. Spinal, you get new dendritic spines in the hippocampus when estrogen is present.

And then these things retreat when you're under the control of that progesterone. And so we experience all these changes. And that's a very normal part of being a woman. And when you take the birth control pill, what it does is you get a daily dose of a relatively low level of synthetic estradiol, so estrogen, and a relatively high level of synthetic estradiol, so estrogen, and a relatively high level of synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin, because it's not biologically identical. And this mimics the state that a woman's body is in during that second half of the menstrual cycle when conception isn't possible. And what this does is it sends a signal to the hypothalamus,

not to stimulate the ovaries to produce a new egg, because it's essentially waiting to see what happens with the one that was just ovulated. And so, when you're taking the pill, you get the same daily dose every day of the synthetic hormonal state that's kind of keeping you in. So, in principle, in principle, the body's reacting as if the woman has been sexually satiated in the most fundamental way. She might be pregnant essentially is what that is saying. So one of the logical consequences of that would correct me if I'm wrong. She should be less interested in sex. But then this also ties into her change in her preference for men.

So let's talk about that a little bit. Because one of the things that really shocked me when I came across this, probably 10, 15 years ago, was that there was pronounced variability in the facial, in the faces that women found attractive across the menstrual cycle. And so if you take photographs of the same man and you widen or narrow the jaw, widen, widen, why the jaw is this sign of more classically dominant, it's the wrong way of thinking about it. Confident, confident, masculine faces, you can do it with the same man. And the women who are in their most fertile periods prefer the wider jawed man.

Yes. And so, okay, so, so then I thought, oh, this is a problem because it means that women who are on the pill prefer feminine men. Then I thought that's a real problem because it might be that women on the pill really don't like masculine men. Oh, that's probably a problem because we have a lot of tension between women and men in our society and we have no idea how much that's driven by the fact that the pill is transforming the manner in which females perceive the most masculine men. I mean, it's terrifying if that's the case. Right.

No, it's very provocative. That's the word I would use. It's incredibly provocative because research has been showing now for about 20 years that when women are in the point in the cycle when estrogen is high, that that's associated with an increased preference for testosterone cues. Like you said, vocal, facial and behavioral masculinity are things that women are really zeroing in on, right near high fertility in the cycle. And this of course begs the question, well, then what happens if a woman is on hormonal birth control and is never in the estrogen-dominant phase of her cycle? Then what happens and researchers have since asked that question

and what they tend to find is that women who are on hormonal birth control desire a somewhat less masculine male face and male voice and there's been some research even showing that if women chose their partners when they're on hormonal birth control and then discontinue it, that this can lead to changes and how they perceive and how attracted they are to their partner. Yeah, I read that tell me if this is right, that if they picked a detractive partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even more attractive, but if they picked a less

desirable partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even less desirable. So it seems to be okay, so that's right. It magnifies the consequence of their choices. Yeah, it's like all of a sudden the blinders were off. And so now they can, if they chose somebody who, that they found attractive and because they weren't really paying that much attention to that or weren't prioritizing that when they were on the pill, all of a sudden the blinders are off, they see it, they love it, they're attracted to it, their relationship satisfaction goes up, their sexual desire and their relationship goes up.

And if the opposite happens, it's the opposite. And we just do women on the pill pick friends as mates? Oh, interesting. I've never seen a study looking at that, but I mean, it wouldn't be a far stretch to make that prediction just because it does seem like women who are choosing their partners on the pill, if there's a pattern that's found,

the pattern is that women are generally zeroing in on qualities that have less to do with sexiness, the sexiness, the higher and masculinity, and more is zeroing in on things like safety and is this like part, yeah, independent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, you can see that women have a very, very difficult choice to make, right? Because they want to pick a guy who can win a competition with other guys. They want to pick a guy who can keep the psychopaths at bay.

They want to pick a guy who's productive. But they also need to pick someone who's generous and capable of forming responsible relationships, well, you know, talk about a play of offices. And you could imagine that any shift in hormonal balance is going to skew that in one direction or another. Right. Yeah, I mean, for partner choice, I always tell my women in my class and also the men, the few men that are in my class because it's a university and it's all women now. But what we generally, what I tell them is

it's all about making trade-offs. Yeah. And sort of which side of the table you're stacking your coins. Are you stacking your coins more on the sort of sexiness? Keeping the psychopaths at bay, kind of masculine at E types of qualities. Are you stacking your chips all the way over here of good caregiver provider? Going to help with the children. I'm re-putting them more toward the middle. Everybody makes a trade-off. And essentially what we do, what our hormones hormones do is it kind of nudge where

we put our stack. And what we can see when this happens on mass, as you can see, and mass changes in partner preferences, potentially, which is pretty provocative. Well, we have no idea what the political consequences of that are. Right. Because you could also imagine, this is like the worst case scenario, imagine that there's a distribution of women who are affected by hormonal transformation. And some women are relatively unaffected, and some women are tremendously affected.

Well, you could imagine that the tremendously affected women would have more impetus to engage politically. Right? So the ones, right. So imagine that there's a subset of women for whom the birth control pill makes masculine men particularly undesirable. Right. Now imagine that that transforms itself into political motivation because it might.

I don't not saying we know this, we don't know it because we don't know anything about the relationship between hormonal transformation and political activism, but the probability that there's no relationship is zero. Right. So we've thrown this new monkey ranch into the works in 1960 that's transformed the relationship between men and women and we have no idea, we really have no idea what the consequences of that are. No, you know, I was just talking to my class about this because I think it's really fascinating

because I think culturally we're, I think culturally we've been feeling the tensions that are created by this for a very long time now. And again, I'm somebody I feel very much like I benefited from the pill I was on for a decade. It was the great time of my life to be on it. It didn't cause me any problems that I'm aware of. I got to have my kids and I wanted to go to invest and so on and so forth.

But at the same time, you know, having this, having women have the opportunity to invest really heavily in their careers, essentially sets up these expectations where women are supposed to be both women and men. Right? And so women, now it's like, because it's not either or. You know, it's not like, oh, are you going to go to work? Yeah. Or are you going to stay home and take care of your kids?

It's like, no, I'm doing both things. So we've set up this expectation where women are supposed to be women and men. And I think women's mental health is suffering hugely as a consequence of this. I think it's been very hard for women trying to balance everything. And with the expectation that they're supposed to be doing all of it. Yeah, but it also begs the question of what's left over for the man. Well, and this is what I think is really interesting. So this was the revelation I just had a couple days ago. I actually had it when I was teaching and I told my students about it.

And I'm like, I think I'm onto something with this. But you know, testosterone levels are an absolute naiter right now. I mean, they're at an all-time low. And there's a lot of reasons. Could that be a consequence of excess masturbation? Just out of curiosity? I don't think so. No, no, no, no.

I know what, because I thought masturbating, and it matches the increase in pornography, you say. Yeah, no, I completely, yes. And that goes on concurrently, but it's a lot of levels. But no, you don't. No, because usually when men are seeing a lot of attractive women, it makes their testosterone increase. And then that's not something that takes them to the age or get after masturbation. So you think that's been put to rest?

I think testosterone levels are the low. So testosterone levels are super low. And there's a lot of reasons for this. We know there's a lot of zenoastrogens in the water and that that might be messing with the hormones. And men are heavier than they used to be. And fat or Romanizes testosterone and makes it turns it into estrogen, which also lowers men's testosterone levels. Another advantage of an old carb diet. Yeah, but so here's another interesting thing. I don't know if you know about this research, but it's really fascinating.

So, you know, culturally, we tend to think about testosterone as being this thing that like is always good to have super high, right? We think masculinity and virility and protection. And, but testosterone is, among other things, it's a hormone of mating effort, right? It's like effort that you're directing toward winning and doing things that are going to attract partners. It also, it's linked with men's interest in extra-pair partners and all of these other types of counterproductive behaviors within the context

of a long-term pair bond. And so what research finds is that when men get married or are in a long-term committed relationship, their testosterone level is decreased a little bit. And this happens absolutely functionally because it's essentially taking the, using the foot off the gas pedal because it's keeping men from doing counterproductive things within the context of a pair of them.

When men have young children, they're just the more to the, oh, okay, go ahead. Men have children. They're testosterone levels decrease again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the more caregiving that men do, the more they're testosterone lowers. And this is impermanent, right? This is a shift that men's bodies make in response to the environmental cues that's very adaptive

and makes a whole lot of sense with our. Well, they should be sexually attracted to the children for example. Well, right. Exactly. They should be attracted to the children. And they also, like, if you've got young children at home who are survival dependent on you, you need to keep your eye on the ball and not on the next door neighbor. Right, right.

And, um, and be raising your children. And so I started to think about this and and I was thinking about this idea that women are being expected to be both women and men, men are being expected to be both men and women. And it was what men are now doing more household work and more childcare than they ever have before. Which women also tend to find no one attractive. Well, no, they do.

It creates problems within the relationship because they have women lose sexual attraction in that context. a lot of people are trying to know about attractive. Well, no, they do. I mean, it creates problems within the relationship because they have women lose sexual attraction in that context. But then men's testosterone levels could be decreasing in response to that. And that could be one of the factors that's contributing to men's low to

testosterone currently, is that we've created a case where men are having to be women and men and men are having to be men and women. Right. And so, so what it does, and it's for you to do this. Conversely, for the men is that the men who are adopting the caregiver role more explicitly also put themselves in the terrible position where they're less sexually desirable. Right.

I saw a very funny study at one point, and might have been David Bus, because he does funny studies all the time, because he's still allowed to. I think what they showed, they showed university age women the same men engaging in male stereotype activities and female stereotypes activities like vacuuming, for example. Right. God only knows why that's female stereotype, but has something to do with nesting, I suppose. And reliably, the women rated the men who are engaged in the more feminine activities as less sexually attractive. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that is such a, that creates this cruel bind. But I also think, you know, it's funny. I was having a teacher class called Evolution Sex in the Brain. And we asked big questions. So this is a class that really enjoy teaching because they encourage us to ask difficult questions that nobody really knows the answers to. And one of the questions I always ask them is about seduction.

Because seduction is such an important part of women's sexuality. The idea of a man who has some sort of status and dominance, sort of like being masculine and women find that attractive, and they find that sexual, that sexually arousing, and there's this whole literature about the idea of one one of the things that men do is sort of a Waken women's sexuality with and then the kiss of the prince. Well, yeah, and so then the idea that that now we're in this environment where we say that we can't do that. Yeah, right. And but but it's like also at the same time, you know, it is important that women have exercise choice. Obviously, we don't want women getting sexually assaulted. How do we create a space culturally? What is the conversation

that we need to be having where it's like, seduction is okay except that it's not? You're definitely going to get fired, you're absolutely 100%. Well, I see one of the things that's so perverse about the modern university campus is on the one hand, there's this absolute insistence that every possible form of sexual behavior is not only to be tolerated, but celebrated or even worshipped. And on the other hand, every single interaction between a young man and a young woman is so rife with danger that it has to be formulated into a contract before it can be undertaken.

Right. Well, you get with that sort of absolute licentiousness, you're going to get a call for like tyrannical regulation of sexual behavior because you can't have that much looseness without a demand for tightness, but it does beg the question that you're putting forward. And, and while one of the answers to that, I would say, this is a sort of a sideways answer, is that alcohol is a very bad thing to pour into the mix. Right, yes. Because it's the case that almost all sexual assault, especially the date rate types,

but even the more violent types, almost all spousal abuse, all of that would disappear if alcohol disappeared. This is a conversation nobody will have about campuses because part of the problem on campuses is that young men and young women who don't have that much experience with each other and who are also anxious as a consequence generally meet each other in alcohol fuel bounce. And that's like, you would, you can't say that alcohol causes violent crime, but you can damn near say it. 50% of people who are murdered are drunk. 50% of the murderers are drunk. The stats are even worse with regards to sexual assault.

If we had alcohol, yeah, yeah, without alcohol, it would almost never happen. That's something that could be started as a topic of reasonable discussion on university campuses. Are there places where young men and young women can congregate and meet that aren't fueled by alcohol-induced stupidity and recklessness? Right. Now, it's complicated because part of the reason that people drink is so that they can engage in alcohol-fueled stupidity, because it's fun.

One of the problems with the pill is that it actually allows that to occur without it being utterly catastrophic. Now it's catastrophic in that the rate of sexual assault skyrocket, and that's not trivial, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you wrote a letter to your daughter at the end of your book, okay? I did.

Yeah, and so I want to ask you about a couple of other things here. The curious case of the missing cortisol, let's do two things. The curious case of the missing cortisol, that's very interesting. And also a letter to my daughter. Sure. Okay. So, cortisol. Yeah.

This actually is the reason I wrote the book. And I'll say that it's the reason I wrote the book because I was sitting in a research talk about the effects of early life trauma on the stress response and adulthood. And I'm sure you're very familiar with all of this work because one of the things that I do research on is early life adversity and how it affects developmental outcomes. And I was in a research talk on that. And the researcher was just like mentioning, you know, oh, we collected data on X number of men and women. And we only analyzed the data of the men in our sample because the majority of the women in our sample

happened to be on hormonal birth control. And everybody knows that women on hormonal birth control don't have a cortisol response to stress. And then, yeah, that was me. I was like, no, who, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no long term. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's really, really bad. And so it's, it means no play in response to stress. No, no adaptation in response to stress. No, I know, it is funny because everybody always thinks that like cortisol is this bad guy and like, whoa, it's got to be great. And it's like, no, like stress is the bad guy. Cortisol helps you adapt

to stress. Like cortisol is a good guy who comes in to help sort of restore homeostasis after your body's gotten all screwed up from whatever's stressing it out. And so I went and I talked to my colleague afterward and I said, did you say that women on hormonal birth control don't have a stress response? And he's like, yeah, they don't.

I was really surprised by it too, but then I went to the literature. They don't have an adaptive stress response. Yes, yeah, they don't because they they they report experiencing stress. Right. And they haven't their sympathetic stress responses still going off. Yeah. But they don't they don't have any cortisol release. And so I went to the literature and he was right. There people had been publishing on this since the 90s. And I'd never heard anything about it.

And I was on the pill and I'm a woman, and I studied women's hormones. And anyway, after that, I was like, what else don't I know about hormonal birth control? And that was what led me in the rabbit hole that essentially led me to write the book. Because there were so many things that the pill does in terms of neurobiologically, like what it does in terms of the brain,

and then you just psychologically proximally, in terms of mood, sexual desire, partner choice, which we talked about in attraction. And what's the consequence of the intent? Okay, so women get stressed. So women get stressed. They don't have a cornerstone. They don't have a cornerstone.

Okay, so what's the consequence of that? So here's the really great answer. Nobody knows. I'll tell you what we know from research that's not, that hasn't directly linked the things together. We just did a study where we found that you get changes in the inflammatory response to stress in hormonal birth control pill users in ways that's consistent

with the type of inflammatory response that tends to lead to things like autoimmunity, which we know women are at a much greater risk for the men. Does it lead to depression? Because the development evidence that depression is an inflammatory condition. Yes, depression and anxiety are also some things that we know that being on hormonal birth control puts you at a significant greater risk for. And all of these things are what you would expect in the case when you have a blunted cortisol response to stress.

So what does the normal cortisol response do? So if you're stressed. Right. So normally if you and I are, you know, if I'm being filmed, let's say, to be on a podcast of a lot of people listen to, what would generally start happening about five minutes after I arrived here is my cortisol would start to increase. And it's doing this because it knows that I am in a high pressure situation, right? It could be high pressure good or high pressure bad because stress is something that we get

when we're being chased by a pack of hungry Wolverines, but it's also something that we get on like our wedding day or Christmas morning for children as a time when cortisol is really high opportunity and opportunity and threats. It's essentially flagging your brain, something important has happened. Right. So you should have heightened attention. High and attention. So our brain is aware. It's on its game. We start creating new neurons in our hippocampus, are being birthed and responsible for all. That's because you should learn, you should learn when there is maximum opportunity and

threats. Absolutely. I'm the hippocampus is crucial for that. Absolutely, and that's exactly what's going on. So that's an important thing that our bodies do is is grabbing on. It's helping us absorb these important experiences so that way we can have them for later. Right. It dumps fat and sugar. Sugar change to change. Yeah, to change. It dumps fat and sugar into our bloodstream.

So that way our brain has access to glucose but also so our muscles do so we can make a quick getaway if we need to get away quickly if we're being chased. It's a so it should it should mean that blunt cortisol response should mean that women on birth control don't update their navigational maps is effectively because the hippocampus is also the fundamental place of the origin of hippocampal maps. Yeah, for hippocampal maps. Navigal maps. Yeah, for hippocampal maps. A magnifying maps, right? Yeah, and I've never seen any research on that in particular, but I have seen it with emotional memories and what they find is that women who are on hormonal birth control have a harder time encoding emotionally valanced events when you stress them out, which is exactly what you would expect.

Right. You know what a dare sponsor is? Yeah. You know what a dare sponsor is. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I turned. That's really not good. No, it's not. And I actually heard from a woman who's

practicing therapists because I had gotten several emails. And finally, somebody called me and I answered the phone, which I don't usually do. And I don't know the number. But it was one of these therapists asking about PTSD and therapy when women are on hormonal birth control because they all have the same theory that women don't respond as well to therapy for PTSD.

To exposure. Yeah, when they're on the pill. Oh my God, that's also terrible because there's no difference between exposure therapy and learning. Right. Exposure therapy is just the technical use of the learning situation in the therapy context. Right, exactly.

Yeah, and she said we don't get the kinds of outcomes that we need when we have women or on the phone. Okay, so what that implies is women don't, women on the pill count update as well. Yeah, exactly. Jesus, that's brutal. Yeah, and so this is, I mean, obviously, and here's this thing that we're taking just not to obviously, and in some cases, women are being put

on this teenagers for their skin. Yeah. And it's like, we know nothing about the long-term consequences, a brain development, of blunting a woman's hormonal own hormone production, and then replacing it with these synthetics. So talk about that. There's no way it doesn't affect brain development.

I mean, it's like post-puberant all brain development is coordinated by our sex hormones. And if you blunt that, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, you go through this period of estrogen and then progesterone and estrogen and progesterone. And when you shut that down and then just put in this daily synthetic dose, the idea that that's going to lead to the same brain development outcomes is getting cycling. Is that an extension of pre-puberty hormonal balance? Yeah, I mean, yeah, pre-puberty hormones are such a disaster because women's HPG axes are still regulating themselves. I mean, their brains and ovaries are still learning how to

communicate everything. And so women cycles tend to be messed up a little bit, you know, screwy at that time because everything is learning itself. So does putting women on the pill when they're very young, interfere with the full manifestation of puberty? That's a really great question, and it's not one that anybody knows the answer to. Well, it seems like a logical conclusion to what you described.

Well, exactly. It's not something that I know, and the thing is, we've been putting women on these drugs forever. I've only seen three studies that have looked at long-term consequences of hormonal birth control use during adolescence and on development. What about what? The research is pointing in the direction of the fact that using hormonal

birth control during adolescence puts you at a greater risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of your lifetime even after you've discontinued it. Not good stuff. Not something that you want your daughter to be suffering so that way she doesn't have acne. And I don't think that this is being very well communicated to the parents of girls. And I think it's a travesty. I really do. Okay, two more things. These hormones that women are put on aren't the bioidentical hormone. Okay. So let's talk about that and then let's talk about your.

My daughter. Okay, so the synthetic hormones that are in hormonal birth control, you think that they would be sort of biologically identical to our body's hormones. And for the most part, the synthetic estrogen that is in hormonal birth control is, has nice binding affinity and nice binding specificity to estrogen receptors. The synthetic progesterone or the progestins that are in hormonal birth control are not. And most of them aren't even synthesized from progesterone.

They're actually synthesized from most of them from testosterone. And so chemists modify testosterone molecules in ways that make them able to stimulate progesterone receptors, but they don't always have perfect binding specificity, meaning that they also bind to other receptors for other hormones, and they don't necessarily have their messy, and they don't have good binding affinity where they'll stimulate the receptor and then fall off.

And then what that means is you need higher doses. Yeah, as you need to take higher doses to make sure that you're getting enough progesterone action. Which increases the degree to which they're activating things they shouldn't be activating. Yeah, and that's and that's actually reason to be the explanation for why women experience the blunt and cortisol response in response to stress is that the progestines in hormonal birth control, some of them will stimulate glucocorticoid receptors, essentially making women's bodies believe that they're in a straight state of chronic stress. And so women's bodies are then shutting down the stress response.

Well, yeah. Because the consequence of being in constant stress. Well, absolutely. And when you look at the patterns, I mean, the thing about this is that when you look at the, it's all pointing in this direction where, when you look at the risk of depression and even the suicide risk for women who are on hormonal birth control,

especially in adolescents, so 19 and younger, is really high during the first three months of use. And think about it, this is when theirocorticoid receptors are probably just being flooded with these non-specific progestines that are stimulating those, making their body think that it's World War II, you know, and feeling. Oh, that's just what you need at puberty. Oh, I know. And so it's already world war II.

Yeah, I know. And so they're feeling terrible until their body finally shuts down the stress response and then you don't get any stress response to stress. But women actually end up feeling a little bit better because they're no longer sort of psychologically being put into the state of trauma, the constant trauma. I think that it's crazy to me that this is the best we can do. I feel like I think about how important we are. Why aren't we doing better than this? It's crazy to me that this is the best we can do. I think about how important we are.

Why aren't we doing better than this? I think that the reason that we, it's because there's nothing more important than this. No, fertility regulation is so important for women in terms of being able to meet their goals, that most women are willing to put up with all the bullshit that goes along with it because they don't feel like they have any other choices.

Well, they also don't know. Right. And they don't know. And then the drug companies are like, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, well, the women are taking it, you know, so who cares? And women are like, you know, we're just having to deal with it.

But what we need to do. Yeah, man too. And no, we need to do that. I mean, and I look at what they're doing now, they're investing in male birth control, but all that they're doing is shifting the problem that we have for women and shifting it onto men. So currently what they're looking at, and you tell me how many men you know that would take this, they're looking at a gel that men rub on themselves that will lower their

testosterone to such a degree that they'll no longer produce sperm. I mean, don't you think that's the thing that's going to take off like inkbusters? Yeah, sure. Yeah, as much as testosterone. There's a bunch of guys in the room here lined up to take it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it's like nobody's going to, it's just a dumb idea and all it's going to, and it causes the same side effects in men that our hormonal birth control does in women

because it's shutting down their sex hormones and the men that they try it on are like these side effects are terrible, I'm not taking this. And these are the side effects that we put up with because we don't have another choice. Like because we're the ones who have the baby if we end up with the slip up. And so I really, my whole push with all of this is not that the birth control pill is terrible and that it's done all these awful things. I mean, it's a trade-off and it's definitely going to have societal consequences that we haven't even begun to begin to put our fingers on. But it's all about educating yourself, what are the trade-offs that are being made when you go on hormonal birth control? And then also putting pressure on people like drug makers and

policy makers who are investing in companies and invest in drug companies and other types of technology to do something better because we need to be able to do better. We need to be able to do better for women. You need to go to Washington and talk to the Republican study committee. I mean, seriously. I'm seriously, yes. You need to do that. Yeah, seriously.

Yeah, I mean, we can do better for women. We can do better for men. We can do better for to do that. Seriously. Yeah, I mean, we can do better for women. We can do better for men. We can do better for the people that love them. And so my last chapter in my book, the letter to my daughter, I wrote because I have a daughter. I have a 16 year old daughter. And you know, one of the things that I've thought about, just as soon as I was writing

this book was, what does this mean for her? You know, do I, would I recommend for her, if she's sexually active, when she's especially a teenager, would I recommend for her to go on hormonal birth control, which I know works, right? And it's effective and it's easy to use and it's easy for a teenager to use, or would I tell her to use something else? And ultimately, my conclusion to that is that the answer to that question is going to be unique to every single woman. So I included that chapter in the book because I wanted all women to hear what I will say to my daughter when we're having to make that decision in terms of what are some of the

things that you need to think about. That's how you made it personal. Right. Yeah, because, I mean, this is a really, this is a personal choice. And I think that it's really important that we think about, like so, for example, how old are you? Right? So we've been talking about brain development. choice. And I think that it's really important that we think about like so for example, how older you right? So we've been talking about brain development, you know, if my daughter wanted to start hormonal birth control before the age of 19, I would want her not to be on it. If there's any other thing

that we can do that I know would prevent her from getting pregnant if she was sexually active. Um, just because I know about brain development, After 19, the effects seem to be more or less reversible. Like, I mean, so even if you go on it and something bad happens, if you discontinue it, no harm, no foul, right? But before that, I'm not- So the earlier the onset- The earlier the onset though- Yeah, well, you know, that's also the case with sexual behavior.

So the biggest correlate, one of the biggest correlates of early sexual behaviors, anti-social personality. So when it goes back to that dark tetrancy- Yeah, yeah, anti-social personality. And it goes back to that dark touch. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So, thinking about that and then thinking about what are your life goals? Why do you want to be on it?

Because some things, preventing pregnancy, especially if you're like a teen girl, for example, that's the most important thing you can do, really, because you know, there's no bigger predictor, a poverty for women than single motherhood, nothing. Especially when you're a young single mother, that's just like putting you on the wrong path in terms of like what the, your aspirational hopes are. And so, you know, it's like considering where you are in your life, considering age, considering the product that you're on, and then sort of going through the different types of things that are out there, considering non-hormonal options,

and like what the costs and benefits of those things are. But this is essential. So we need to be mature enough as a society to actually have a serious conversation with young people about sexual behavior as such. Because one of the things, you know, one of your chapters, I can't remember exactly the title, but why didn't I know this? Right? Well, we're not very good in our sex education at schools

of walking people through the dangers of short-term sexual mating strategies either, because you might say, well, I want to be on the pill. I'm 16 because I want to have casual sex because that's really the issue. It's like, well, do you really want to have casual sex? It's like, what does that mean exactly? What are you sacrificing of yourself? Who is that going to make you attractive to? Who are the males that are most likely to accept that invitation? Because we had this idea and the pill produced this in large part that we could divorce sex

from its broader context. Its broader relational context, let's say it's political and social context. And I don't think any of that's true. And so for a comprehensive sex education, not only would people have to be educated in relationship to the sort of biological realities that you're describing, they'd also have to be educated in relationship to the psychological realities, the difference between short-term and long-term mating strategies. How that's associated with personality is very, very complicated.

Yeah, and I think that there's a lot of, especially in, because we tend to think about high school students or college students in short-term sexual behavior, but a lot of the people seeking birth control are people who are in long-term relationships that are just trying to not get pregnant in the context that they're long-term relationships that are, you know, just trying to not get pregnant in the context of their long-term, committed relationship. And even just having honest, yes, I love the idea of honest conversations about, you know, sexual development. Yeah, well, and then sexual relationships.

Those long-term relationships, tell me what you think about this. You know, my sense is that you get to try out about four people in your life, and that's it, right? Well, because if you think that fertility window, it's in trouble by the age of 30. So you've really got, by the time you have a bit of a brain, so let's say 19, you've got 11 years. Okay, so how many people can you get to know, evaluate for long-term mating suitability in 11 years? Well, five's a lot, I would say. Right, right.

So, yeah, no, I think that's funny. I love that you landed on four. I mean, it seems reasonable, right? Like, I don't know. Yeah, well, it's, but the thing is, it's reasonable. It's very finite. Yeah. And so that means the importance of your choice of a committed dating partner is likely

far more important than you think, right? Because maybe when you're 17, you think, I have lots of time. It's like, well, you're 17 and you only be alive for 17 years and 10 years might seem like a long time, but it's not. Right. Right. Especially when you have to push leaving home, adopting the responsibilities of an adult, becoming educated, establishing a career, finding a long-term partner.

You got 10 years to do that. You're going to be running, especially if you're female. Right. Yeah. So, interesting. All right. Well, any parting words for the young women who are, how is this changed here? Let's let's close with this. Yeah. What has learning all

this done to your, to your views on birth control? That's good enough. Okay. Okay. Let me think about this for a moment. What I mean, to me, I had the same blind spot everybody else had. I was on hormonal birth control for more than a decade of my life. All the while, I was studying the effects of women's hormones on the brain. I was studying psychology and behavior and the way that women's motivational shifts change in response to hormones. And I never spent one second thinking about what the hormones in my birth control We're doing to me psychologically like I have

That's all but I mean no cost yes, I had an absolute blind spot and so for me this whole process really removed that blind spot I'm and I mean it was embarrassing it was really embarrassing to be a psychologist and I like to think I'm a pretty good one And then and then I know a lot about a lot. And never have to made that connection really felt like, I was like, this is the most embarrassing thing ever. Right, right. But that's how it was sort of blind we all are to it. I mean, it's also one of the things I talk about in the book

is like, andabolic steroids are illegal because of the impact they can have on men's health because they're sex hormones. And how these non-specific effects all throughout the body, hormonal birth control has all these, you know, non-specific effects throughout the body and it's available over the counter.

So, you know, we've got, we've got, we've got, it's just a total blind spot on the way that we treat these two things. And- Well, we've only had three or four generations to adapt to the biggest biological transformation in our species history. Yeah, no, I agree. Right, so we're in the early days of this, but it is insanely complicated and right

with unintended consequences, which you're doing a stellar job of pointing out. And hopefully that will help spark a conversation that's a bit more productive, productive, mature, and focused on the fact that everything has a price. Everything has a price. Right. Thank you. You bet. Right. To everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your attention to the daily

wire people, plus people for facilitating this live conversation, which we're going to be doing a bunch of in the next couple of months. Thank you for the time and effort expanded on that. I'm going to talk to Dr. Hill for another half an hour behind the daily wire plus platform. That's usually where I delve into more autobiographical issues

very interested in how people's interests, how their calling makes itself manifest in their life often from an early age. So we're going to find that out. He's very useful conversations to attend to if you're interested in, while hearing from people who've had a stellar career and often done a good job of balancing that with their life, how they managed it, you know, and you can't hear too much about that as far as I'm concerned. So thank you everyone for your attention. Talk to you soon.