TRIGGERnometry - "We Evolved to Manipulate" - Diana Fleischman

Episode Date: April 26, 2020

Diana Fleischman (@sentientist) is an evolutionary psychologist and returning guest to the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our brilliant guests this week is one of our favourite ever guests and favourite ever human beings on the planet. She's an evolutionary psychologist, Dr. Dana Flashman, welcome back to Trigonometry. Hi, guys.

We butted you up with that intro. I feel so happy and warm, though. But you genuinely why. I mean, if you haven't seen our first interview with Diana, go back and watch it. It is absolutely brilliant. It was quite early in the day for the show. And genuinely, it was a great pleasure. I had a really good time.

Which is why we're delighted to have you back, which is why it pains me to ask the first question that I'm going to ask, which is I've met some people recently who I told that I do the show who I hadn't seen for many years. And I mentioned that we've had some evolutionary psychologist on. And the reaction that I got was literally like I'd advocated for resurgence of the Third Reich. So why is it that evolutionary psychology has a bad rap? Because the argument that particular person was making, it's all about reinforcing gender stereotypes. It's all about getting women back in the kitchen where they belong.

Getting women back in the kitchen, barefoot. And pregnant. Where they belong. So I do think that people have this impression that evolutionary psychology is reactionary because it says that many of the gender roles and the patterns that you see cross-culturally, especially between men and women, are a natural state of affairs. So they would say potentially that some sex roles, like things that women are more nurturing and that men seek status, things that I talked about also in the first interview, are less malleable than one might think. And if you advocate that something is less malleable than, say, more progressive people or social psychologists might say, then the implication is that that's how you wish it to be.

Right. And I'm just saying that these sex roles and gender roles that you see cross-culturally, they are the way they are. and they are fairly universal. And that's not how I wanted to be. That is how I think it is. And in my view, if you want something to be a certain way, you have to know how it is to begin with. And so I think all the wishful thinking in the world

about what men and women are like is actually not going to change what men and women are like. I mean, there are some narratives that I think are important. Another reason that I think people don't like evolutionary psychology is because that there are some very popular evolutionary psychologists who are well known like in the social sphere. So Steve Pinker, Jeffrey Miller, my partner, me, we're a little bit louder on Twitter than other people. But there's also been some controversy about people.

For example, there's a researcher called Satoshi Kanazawa. And Satoshi works at the 11th School of Economics. And he wrote a paper that said something to the effect of black women are less attractive because they have higher testosterone, something to that effect. And it was a very odd thing to say. it was an odd blog. I don't think that he thought that it was going to be perceived as racist because that was not very smart on his part. So these are the evolutionary psychologists that people are more likely to hear about are those people who have very strong political views, right? And the people who are just getting on with their work and doing stuff that is some really amazing work that

people are doing, oftentimes in the service of very progressive causes, there's even, you know, a survey from about 12 years ago done by Josh Tyber. another evolutionary psychologist who works on disgust and Jeffrey Miller showing that on average, people who take adaptationist views of evolutionary or of psychology, like evolutionary psychologists, tend to be left leaning. Most of these people are left leaning, but those are not the people that people commonly hear about. So they think about evolutionary psychology and they think about some very controversial stuff, even though that's not, you know, what the mainstay of evolutionary psychology is.

And finally, I just think, yeah, this evolutionary psychology. psychology kind of goes against this malleability argument, which the progressives don't like. And then it also compares people to animals and says, we are very much like non-human animals, right? We do things. We, you know, eat and shit and have sex and have normal responses that others have. And we are, you know, as I'll say in this lecture I'm giving tonight, you know, we're machines that were designed by natural selection to do very things like find mates, find food, etc. And people think this undermines human dignity. So the right wing also doesn't like that.

And the left wing doesn't like that. This idea that we are essentially machines designed by natural and sexual selection. And the focus on sex, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people have a problem with it. So I think that if people really understood that evolutionary psychology is really just using the lens of evolution to come up with hypotheses about human behavior and human nature. And if they just thought, okay, these people, they come up with hypotheses, these things get falsified, et cetera, then there wouldn't be such a, you know, rabble about it as there is now about evolutionary psychology, either being evil and reactionary or a pseudoscience if people knew more about what the mainstream was like. So do you think part of the problem with the way the progressives perceive evolutionary psychology is simply because you're denying their reality, that we're all the same. are no differences between us. Yeah, I am denying the reality. So the idea that the progressives have, which I really have a lot of empathy for, the idea that if you actually make a narrative,

that people will stick to it. So if there's a narrative that we are all the same, it's actually going to make it more likely to be real, because as humans, narratives actually form part of how we perceive the world and actually how we act in the world. If you have a teacher who thinks that you're especially gifted, even if you, you know, have an IQ of 80, right? Then you're going to do much better than if you have a teacher who has more realistic expectations of you, shall we say. This even happens in relationships, right? There's actually evidence that positive delusions, improve relationships.

I had a huge argument with an ex-boyfriend about this, actually, where we ended up both doing a deep dive. And I said, if you're deluded about how good I am, we're actually going to have a better relationship. And he said, cool, I'm going to cultivate positive delusions about you. So there's a different, there's definitely a tension here. between truth and actually what could be beneficial for people. But from my view, we are getting to the point in society and in science where we actually

have to understand what the baseline is. We have to understand what differences actually happen in order to understand how to make things different. And I've talked about myself as being an evolutionary psychologist and also being a transhumanist. So transhumanism is the idea that we can use technology to improve ourselves, right? that we can use technology to augment our cognition to improve our morality even. Very interesting paper that I talk about where people say that they would actually rather improve their language ability or improve their memory than they would be likely to want

to improve their morality. People are, it's very weird, actually, if you said, would you like to take a pill to improve the number of hours of sleep that you get per night? Would you like to be able to get on less sleep? Would you like to be able to have better memory? People say that they would take a pill for that. people are least likely to say that they would take a pill to improve their moral views, right? But isn't that as well because if we have a high level of morality, that in a sense limits us and it limits our choices?

Yes. So people, as I think I talked about last time, I said, why do women like bad boys? People like potentially exploitative men because it's important in a society where many people are potentially exploitative to have some of that yourself. I think also people don't want to be disadvantaged in relation to other potentially exploitative people. And so being exploitative is sort of positional in that sense. You want to be a bit more exploitative than the average person. You want to be a bit less moral or be able to exploit moral loopholes a bit better than the average person. You know, no matter how good you think you are. And we have this moral view. We think that we're more moral than other people. I definitely am.

And we talked about vegans last time and you said you're very funny for a vegan. I said that actually. I realize what a backhanded compliment. But in essence, people think on average that they're more moral than that a vegan. than other people. And even if you were to ask them, you know, how moral is somebody like a vegan or Mother Teresa or somebody who never flies or whatever, depending on what your moral views are, you would be likely to say that those people are or still less moral than you are, although they might be more moral than the average person. But to get back to your question, you know,

this kind of progressive view about maliability, yes, that's part of it. But part of it's also, as I will talk about, I'm giving a talk about this tonight and also in Ghent, is that people really buck against control. So Gina Ripon, who I did a sort of debate against on John Stossel's YouTube, I said, you know, she and I went back and forth. We weren't in the same room. But she wrote a really interesting book, which is called The Gendered Brain, I think. And it's interesting in that it's, there's a lot of sophistry in the book, unfortunately.

She's a very nice woman. I think that she has really great aspirations. But her book is terrible. I didn't get through the whole thing. I got through about half of it. Yeah, she's just like, she's really critical of some fields, and then she's not at all critical of something like stereotype threat, which has not been replicated at all, but in any case, so she says something to the effect of there's no structure or pattern that distinguishes

male brains from female brains, and that's not true. If you look at a bunch of different structures in the brain, you can actually distinguish a male brain from a female brain with about 80% accuracy. And it doesn't even matter that much because you wouldn't be able to distinguish a physics professor from a murderer of looking at their brains. That doesn't mean they're not different, right? It just means that our brain science or the ability to distinguish people based on brain structures isn't very good. But I think that what people are really bucking against as a society is this progressive idea that there are people in power and that there's a hierarchy and they're

trying to take advantage of other people. It's all about power in this sense. And I think that something that is really atrophying, our ability for science to actually make headway, is our desire to not be controlled. So people don't want you to be able to guess anything about them based on whether or not they're male or female. So now people are saying that they're non-binary or that they have these other very complex gender attributes, because they don't want you to be able to say, okay, I'm going to have a very good idea of what your attributes are like. people, I was even in arguments on Twitter and other social media lately where they said you couldn't actually tell above chance whether or not somebody was likely to have some medical conditions more or less based on their ethnicity. Or if you could, it was because of the discrimination and the social pressures that they faced actually.

So I talk about being an evolutionary psychologist and a transhumanist because I think that the best way to equalize our society and to make some people better off. than who are currently worse off is actually through technology and through biological engineering rather than through changing perceptions. There's only so far that changing perceptions about who can do what can actually do, unfortunately. And I think everybody is given a kind of genetic lottery ticket. Some people are born attractive. Some people are born smart. Some people born with really good willpower. Some people are not. Some people are born with likability, Constantine. Some people are born with that haircut. It's a great stuff.

But we're joking about it, but to me there's a really serious side to what you're saying. And the problem that I find with progressivism is you're engaging essentially in a lie. It might be a well-meaning lie, but it is still a lie. And if you are lying about who you are fundamentally,

that is a way to make yourself deeply, deeply miserable. I think I get what you're saying, but I don't entirely agree. So I think that there are some things that we can all be. diluted about that are kind of important for everybody to be deluded about, right? The idea that you can be anything and do anything on an individual level, this kind of what they call the growth mindset, we are incredibly limited by our genetic potential and the kind of hand that we're dealt

when we're born. But if you were to think about that realistically all the time, it would be really bad, right? I don't really think that humans have free will. I think that we live in a deterministic universe, and I think that humans are part of that. But the idea that you can change your behavior, it's true that if you tell people we live in a deterministic universe, they start to think things like it's less important to act morally or it's less important to be good to other people. So it is true that some degree of self-deception and deception I think is good. But I think if we are going to make headway in terms of science, that that deception can't be circulated by the people who are the experts. It can't be circulated that, for example, some ethnic disparities in health are entirely due to social stigma and discrimination. We have to understand that men and women have biological, psychological differences, and that genetics also have a very strong determining factor in our psychology, not just individually, but also potentially between populations.

This is all stuff that's super important. And if we don't get that, we're going to keep trying to make interventions that. don't work. Well, this is the interesting thing. Like, I watch a bit of Joe Rogan's podcast every now and again. This is one of the things. He's someone who's definitely advocating for people to have a growth mindset on the one hand. But on the other hand, there are times when that ideology clashes with reality. So, for example, a guy who's never fought in the ultimate fighting championship, the UFC, like CM Punk suddenly decides that he can do it. And he goes in and gets his ass kicked because there's a limitation to that mindset. But equally, it's useful.

to have on an individual level. Anyway, let's move on to talk about your upcoming book. Yeah. Which is called How to Train Your Boyfriend. My girlfriend is never getting that book. She's never been made aware of it. Sorry, carry on. No, no.

I'm sending it to her directly. See, he'll be in the post, Ellie. Anyway, we got a chance to listen to you. Talk about her. You send us an advanced copy. It's fascinating stuff. I think it's something that, you know, you've gendered it for reasons that we'll get into.

But generally speaking, I think every human being in the world is interested in essentially getting other people to do what they want, if you put it crudely like that, right? There's lots of stuff that we all want, you know. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what the angle is and some of the kind of maybe practical applications like how do you get your podcast pardon to stop frowning during interviews, you know, what would be the best way to achieve that? So I've been reading a ton of BF Skinner, who is a very famous, well, the most famous behaviorist, basically. And he was probably the most famous psychologist for some period of time, you know, behind Freud. And he just had really, you know, fascinating ideas. A lot of these ideas that I've just told you about control, for example, that people really buck against control.

And that's part of what's addling the science of psychology come from Skinner. But how to train your boyfriend. So the basic idea is that we all have evolved abilities to try and control other people. We all have evolved the ability to use reinforcement and punishment to try to control. other people. And because we lived in an environment, you know, that was, we had very little attention to break off. We had lots of other things that were taking our attention. We had limited amounts of time. We were trying often to use the quickest, dirtiest way to control other people. And that is often punishment. So one of the main ideas is that people overuse punishment and they underuse

reward when they're interacting with other people. And this is very common idea that punishment doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work. Right. Otherwise, we wouldn't, one reason, it's a tautology, but one reason is that we actually wouldn't be so inclined to punish other people. So how to turn your boyfriend is essentially trying to appeal to women's self-interest about how to try and get what they want, but also it's a way of trying to limit something that I call the alpha, which is the part of your mind that is actually very intent on controlling the behavior of other people. And controlling the behavior of other people has been very important throughout our evolutionary, history and we're not very good at it in part because we actually can't really be cognizant.

We're not consciously controlling other people. The more you consciously control other people, the more other people are going to resist your control. So if I tell you, Constantine, you really need to go on a vacation or a holiday. I fucking do. Believe you, me. I'm straight. You might be like, oh, that's a great idea day. And I'm like, let me tell you my package to Cancun, right? You're going to take my, you're going to be more cynical or skeptical of me if I have some self-interest. And so if we're not aware, if we're self-deceived about our self-interest and controlling other people, then we're going to be much better at it. But another aspect of this idea about control is that the best punishments and reinforcements happen very soon after a

behavior within milliseconds, if not, within under a second of that behavior. And so if you are hyper-aware, this is the same kind of thing as the, you know, take your hand off the stove principle, right? If you think this stove is hot, I should remove my hand. By the time you've thought all of that, your hand is completely burned. In the same way as if you do a behavior that I like or I don't like, right, if I deliberate about whether or not it's a good behavior for me or not, rather than that, I would just have an emotion and instantly punish you or reinforce you. And I do think that this is a lot of the way humans behave to one another, especially in romantic relationships because those were such high-stake situations, especially for women.

And so men, as I talk about, is that men have always had an ability to control other people in a very simple way. And that is either through force or threat of force, right? I mean, big men, especially, have this ability, whereas women have not really had this capacity as much. And so they had to develop more sophisticated methods. So women are better at it? I mean, my view is that women are better at it.

And they spend more time considering it. And, you know, certainly I went on a 10-day meditation retreat in Hertfordshire. I really recommend meditation retreats because you get an idea if you're on a, what they call a dopamine fast. You have like, you're very, very significantly bored a lot of the time. You've got nothing to keep your attention. You've got no YouTube. You got no phone.

You got no books. You have no conversation. You are really in this very austere environment. And what is it that you're thinking about all the time when you're at? in this austere environment. Well, I mean, I asked a bunch of the women that I was on meditation retreat with, and they often think about conflicts

they had with other people, they think about conversations, things that they should have said or should not have said, ways that they should have engaged with other people, people that they should have forgiven or not. And to me, what's happening in your brain when it's devoid of stimulation a lot,

is thinking about how you could better or your regrets about social control. But one thing I've found really interesting about, well, there were many things, But one thing in particular was these women who had a highly developed sensor alpha and were very good at it were far more likely to pass on their genes than women who weren't. Yes. So the main idea that I have here is that it's definitely an evolutionary psychology kind of argument is that women are not built in a way that's like easy to, easy to please and unlikely to care about the behavior of their partner. Because those kinds of women who didn't care about those things, they didn't actually try and control.

the behavior of their partner would have more likely been evolutionary dead ends. So we talk about this a lot in evolutionary psychology, even though it's a difficult thing to actually prove, which is something called the mismatch hypothesis. And the idea is that our modern environment differs in many fundamental ways from our ancestral environment. And the ancestral environment is not just whatever cavemen or whatever, whatever movie you want to think about it, right? It's also the whole history of mammalian evolution.

It's also all of the hominids that led up to us, right? So that's our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. And one of the main differences in those environments is that those environments were much more dangerous. They were much more stressful. And the stakes of whether or not you were going to be able to have living children were much higher. And so, in my view, the way we engaged in relationships, especially the way that women engage with men is often as if whether or not you took out the rubbish is a life or death situation. Because if you are with a man who actually doesn't consider your needs or who is neglectful,

another weird mismatch is to not see somebody all day every day or not see anybody interacting with other people. That's a very strange mismatch as well. But if you don't see a man engaging competently with your needs, then that's going to be something that's going to be upsetting, even though it's no longer a life or death situation. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

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So guys, in order to show hair loss, who's boss, go to www.s.com.com. Use the code trigger and you'll be able to get your first month for 10 pounds. That's right, your first month for 10 pound and you'll get hair like this and not like my lovely co-host who is desperately thinning on top. I didn't actually have to say that. I just thought I'd hammer it home. Something I want just to pop into my mind. One of the things that I've been thinking about as well, there's this in relationships between men and women, there is this sense that on the one hand, the woman would like to be able to influence the man to do

essentially whatever she wants. But on the other hand, I have some personal experience of the fact that if a man kind of stands up for himself, so to speak, and pushes back against that, that can be actually perceived as quite high value by their female partner. Yeah. What's that all about? So there's a thing called chit testing in the Red Pill community. You can call it testing the bond.

There's a lot of different ways that you can talk about it. But let's say I have a partner, and I do. And I say, you know, tell me you love me, tell me you care about me. He can do that all day long. That's a very cheap talk, right? But if I make a scenario incredibly unpleasant for him, I act unreasonable, beyond belief, and then I see, okay, where does his patience break, right? Is it 15 minutes?

Is it 20 minutes? Is it two hours? I have a very patient partner, I tell him. He's really lovely. He is, yeah. He's very patient with me. So I try not to do this, but I do understand that I am in this kind of scenario. So on the one hand, if he's incredibly patient with me, I think this person is very committed

and heavily invested in me. But a man who's high status is necessarily not going to put up with as much bullshit as a man who isn't, right? And so when you test somebody in this way, when you ask them not to just tell you how they feel, but you actually say, I'm going to engineer a scenario. This is obviously stuff that totally doesn't occur consciously. And I'll tell you about when I'm most likely to do it. Then you actually see, okay, there's a certain threshold at which he's no longer going to put up with where I'm at,

or what I'm imposing on him. And at that point, you think, okay, this man has got either other options or his high status. There's this thing called the polygyny threshold model. So the idea is that women either had a choice of having a monogamous relationship with a somewhat lower status man, because 80% of societies throughout evolutionary history of human societies have been somewhat polygynous. That means very high status men

occasionally had more than one partner, whereas low status men generally had one partner. And there were some men who were out of the game entirely. It's kind of the Genghis Khan model. That's right, the Genghis Khan model. Or the Premier League football model. Genghis Khan doesn't have like half of 1% of the world is his descendants because he mastered the art of central massage.

It's because he killed thousands of men had sex with thousands of women, and often these were the women that no longer had men to protect them. Where was I at? Sorry, I shouldn't have jumped in like that. But you were essentially talking about the fact that most over 80% of societies in history. Oh, yes, there's pollutionists, yeah. Yeah. So this is one thing that happens is that a woman who is with a very high status man is sharing that man oftentimes with other women throughout evolutionary history, even now to some extent, right? And so he has other options,

so he's not going to put up with this much. It's just a very simple market forces kind of model. It's very, very simple. And so if he's not going to put up with as much, she thinks, okay, he's got other possible options. And therefore, it's a circular thing, but if he's putting up with less stuff, that means that he has other options.

When he has other options, he puts up with less stuff. And I'm taking some of the red pill stuff that people really rail against, and I'm saying, how can women use this in a way to understand better themselves and their relationships with men? And what's answered to that question? Well, you have to read my book, which will come out at some point. And now there's a counter argument to that, and I can imagine the progressives,

probably somebody with an indecently short hair. You feel really bad about the progressives today, don't you? No, I fucking hate it. With three colors in their hair of indiscriminate gender who'd be saying... He hasn't had his breakfast. Sorry about this guys. Yeah, I haven't had my requisite carbahe. or nicotine, but who was saying, hang on, are you just teaching people, especially women, to be manipulative?

Yeah, manipulative is a dirty word, but we're all manipulative. So I talk about babies. Babies cry when they don't get what they want. You know, there's a reason why babies like to be held and bobbed up and down. It's because if you're holding a baby and you're bobbing them up and down, there's nothing else that you could possibly be doing. It's useful, right? A baby knows that they have all of your attention when you're doing that.

And do people call babies manipulative? I don't think they do because babies are unaware of what they're actually doing. So the idea is that you're not manipulative unless you actually are aware of what you're doing. And if you shame people for being aware of how they're being manipulative, then they're just more... They're running more automatically. Yeah, I was going to say, just being manipulative, the kind of automatic pilot manipulation that people tend to do is actually much worse than any kind of conscious manipulation than you could engage. in. And the thing the problem people have with conscious manipulation is because it's a characteristic of sociopaths and psychopaths, right? Psychopaths and sociopaths are very aware

of how they're manipulating other people. But a lot of what we're doing in relationships other people is manipulation. And my view is that if we're cynical about our own behavior, then we can actually figure out what's the best way of getting what I want as opposed to what's the automatic way that I'm trying to get what I want. So interesting thing that happens So I was in a long distance relationship for a long time, and now I've moved in with my partner. We're getting married in a month's time, actually. And so one thing that I noticed is that when we reconnected again, after we've been apart for several months, I was really angry with him in some sense. Like I would go see him, or he, especially if I was in one place and he was leaving, I would feel a desire to be punitive towards him about small things before he left.

And what's happening basically is that my evolved psychology doesn't know that he's not leaving because he wants to go off with somebody else or that he's not leaving because he's leaving me and abandoning me. It's because he's got to work somewhere else or I have to leave, right? And so when I would see him again, none of the romantic stuff that he had done, none of the phone conversations we had were really mapping on to him in person. Jeffrey, you're a sane man. Right? None of that. It's like, it's like, you know, like a cat hissing at its reflection in the mirror. Like, I understand consciously what's going on. It's like when you see an optical illusion, you can understand consciously what's going on, but you still see it. And so even though I know

consciously what's going on, I know that I'm going to do a lot more kind of testing the bond if I haven't seen my partner in a month's time, because in some sense I'm going to be saying, I want to test you. Are you still invested in me? What's your status like right now, right? I want to test all those things because what he says, what people say is cheap talk. People can say whatever they want. And so I think humans have evolved to test one another in this way. And you see this. It's funny when people say that this doesn't happen with adults because it happens with children all

the time. The idea is that we kind of grow out of it. But when a toddler throws a tantrum or a baby cries or any, you know, you see if you go anywhere where people are taking care of children, you see children just completely manipulating adults. And in some sense, actually not in some sense, in almost every sense, adults really cultivate that. They really cultivate their child's ability to manipulate them. Oh, absolutely.

As a former teacher, I used to see it all the time. My favorite question that the parent used to ask me was, how do I stop my child from using the iPad? And I would get that at least twice every parent's evening. And I would say, well, it's very simple. You just take it off them. I went, but I can't do that because they'll get upset. This is interesting.

There's a really great Brian Kaplan book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, where he talks about, it was actually a book I think he wrote to try to get his wife to have two more kids. Yeah. And he says, you know, most of what happens with children and their educational attainment and stuff is actually just genetic. So if you just give them like a nice nurturing environment, you don't neglect them and you don't abuse them, then they'll generally turn out fine. But because of this progressive idea that the environment matters so much, there's become a signaling about how much you're willing to invest in your kid.

I think some of it has to do with like attachment parenting, you know, you don't want to be pushing your kid away in a carriage, you want to be wearing them all the time, this kind of thing. And I recently read an amazing essay from BF Skinner about something he designed for his second daughter, which is called an air crib. And he says that he got down, taking care of a baby, down to only an hour and a half a day. But, you know, we don't count laundry. So essentially, He designed this air crib, and it's got a plastic sheet in it, and the air quality inside is regulated for a newborn at 86 degrees. I'm going to build one of these things.

It's regulated at 86 degrees, and then the air quality is filtered through, right? And then the baby only has to wear a diaper, doesn't have to wear any clothes. Because if you look at parents dealing with children, they're like taking on tidy cardigans, pulling off tiny cardigans, putting on their tiny shoes, taking off their tiny shoes, they're always dressing them up and doing things. Skinner basically says you just keep them in a temperature-controlled environment. with the air filtered, and they can wiggle, waggle, any way they want, newborns want to always be moving around,

not newborns, but babies want to always be moving around. And there was this incredible rumor, like total urban legend, that his daughter was miserable and that she tried to kill herself, because she lived in this crib most of the time until she was about two years old. And what Skinner is saying is that they looked at all of the stuff that parents do for children, and they said, what is necessary for the child's psychological and physical well-being and what isn't and when it wasn't necessary for their well-being they just cut it out right and they came ended up totally fine so

what i think people are doing when they like really hot-housed their kids in this way of course total disclaimer i have no kids yet i'm you know you're going to see me in a couple years potentially and i'm going to be like one of these you know baby-wearing women who just you know like my boob is constantly in my kid's mouth until they're like 10 years old I have no idea like what kind of that's the scary thing about motherhood actually Like that crazy woman from Game of Thrones

Exactly That's gonna be you You're gonna be shoving people through the moon door Incredibly scary thing about motherhood Is that I have no idea how fundamental My personality change is gonna be So scary But and that leads us really nice young

Because you would We touched on it earlier About how we were machines Who is designed to pass on our code Yeah So really Are we just a slave to our hormones? And you said yourself about motherhood that you don't know how you're going to behave.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the really scary thing about it. I don't know if slave is the right word, but I would say that we are definitely, you know, we are determined. And luckily, you know, we can change our environments. Like I can, you know, I have some decision about who I spend time with. Other environments and influences have on me. But in some sense, I have no control over that because that's a process that's going to happen. And I'm going to be beholden to my hormones.

I mean, you even find this in day-to-day life that you can feel anxious or depressed, and you don't know how to hack yourself. You don't actually know how to change how you feel. And there's a lot of really great stuff about this. There's a really good book out by Randy Nessie called Good Reason for Bad Feelings, and he talks about mental health and mental illness from this Darwinian and evolutionary perspective. And I just think it's incredibly important to think about. yourself in this way. If you think about yourself as a machine that's designed to perpetuate your code, or that's designed to perpetuate your code, not just through direct reproduction, but also potentially for caring for family, caring for friends, building a good reputation, all these

kinds of things, then you will have a much better understanding of why you feel bad, why you feel good, what's working for you and what isn't. And I think a Darwin perspective does have an incredible promise for improving individual lives, if we understand it well enough. Well, one of the interesting tidbits of information you mentioned in the book is that the strongest predictor of an argument between in a relationship is blood sugar levels. That's right. Yeah. So people are essentially arguing because they haven't eaten, basically. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, the low blood sugar is a, yeah, so this is an interesting feature of punishment. So as I said, if you want to get somebody, like if you wanted Francis to stop frowning, if he wanted to get Francis to stop frowning. Yes, I do. You've got my full undividing attention there. You could put a shock collar on him, and you could shock him every time he frown. Anton, can we get one of those?

For next time, let's get one for tomorrow, man. Not actually because he's a really quick, easy way of doing it. If you want him to stop doing it. No, no, I'm fine there. Let's find that. I'm sold. I don't need to go on. But another way to get somebody to do something you want

is to shape their behavior otherwise. So if you want to get a dog to sit, first you reward them for looking at you, then you reward them for their bottom moving, slightly towards the ground and then that's an iterative process. That's actually much more complicated than just punishing somebody is. So what you see in non-human animals is that punishment is often the first course of action. So if you feel bad, there's some chance that somebody around you made that happen, right? And so you automatically punish them. You see this in non-human animals. So there's this

kind of sadistic experiment they did where they put two rats in a cage, one's tied up, one's not, and they electrified the floor. And what happens when you electrify the floor? The one rat attacks the other rat. The free rat attacks the tied up rat. Yes, that's right. The free rat attacks the tied up rat just in case it's a tied up rat's fault. Right?

And you see this, you think, oh, we're smarter than rats. No, we're not smarter than rats because if I'm hungry, I'm going to be bitchy to whoever's around because it might be their fault that I haven't been fed. Yeah. Well, we're taking you out for lunch after this. It's all good. It's all good. We're definitely going to feed you.

So this is, you know, one thing that happened. Then you also see this, like, it's very funny. There's a kind of meta punishment that happens. So this guy that I was friends with, we were out to dinner, and then his wife calls him up, and she said, where are the towels? And he said, I put them in the dryer. And she hangs up really abruptly. So it was funny because she wanted him to have done something wrong.

She wanted him to have left them out wet so that she could yell at him. And then when she couldn't yell at him, she was upset. So we also get reinforced for engaging in punishment, and we can actually punish people for not doing something that would let us punish them. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So there's this stuff that these cycles that happen. And I think that understanding your impetus to punish, especially when you're hungry. So one thing that there was a weird explosion on Twitter recently about was fasting. I think fasting is really good. I think it's really good for health. And I do like a week-long fast or a 10-day fast twice a year. I think it's really good for you.

There were lots of people speculating that I haven't eaten disorder. I love food just fine. But you're not starving if you have food. If you mean, you have food on you. Right. So what happens is you definitely don't want to be around your romantic partner, like the first two days potentially. You can be, but you have to just decide that you're not going to talk to each other very much.

because you will be incredibly difficult to be around. You will be very, very irritable. And part of that ability is to punish kind of whoever's around, no matter whether they've done anything wrong or not. And is part of that, like, let's say in a woman's case, is it like, well, this guy hasn't brought home a hunk of meat recently? Is that it? When we're being really, like, crude, you know, whatever clan of the beer,

whatever that stupid movie is, when, yeah, Jeffrey and I do joke about that. He's like, I'm sorry, I didn't bring you a kill. I'm hungry Yeah so this is an interesting thing About punishment But another interesting thing about punishment And women is that women really want men

To do stuff for them Because they want to Right So I have an interesting story about this I had a boyfriend Who Lovely Love a guy actually But on my first ever birthday

He came from a family Where they didn't exchange cards They didn't exchange gifts So for my first birthday That we were together He bought me a Kindle book And no card and I tore into him.

I didn't want to. It was like I just couldn't help it. Like I was really, I'm very punitive by nature. That's the Latin American side. Jeffrey, you have a sincere condolences, mate. Very punitive by nature. This is partly me trying to control it. So I realized what I had done.

I felt bad about it, but he got me, you know, that year, he bought me a card like the next day. And then the next year, it was my birthday again. And I had almost completely forgotten about the total, like, shit show. The total shit fit I had thrown the year before. And then I found out he brought me like a very nice set of earrings in a necklace. And he got me a card. And I was very pleased.

But then I realized he told me that he had gone to the jewelry shop three separate times. They had spent, I don't know how long, picking out a card for me. And that he was incredibly anxious giving me the gift. Picking out my gift and picking out my card had brought him no pleasure because he was doing those things. to avoid my punishment. He wasn't doing those things because I had been so delighted when he had given me a card or that I had shaped his behavior in any way. And you see this with dogs and other animals too. If you punish them for not doing a behavior, like if you punish a dog for not coming quickly enough, they will come fairly quickly, but you'll see the ambivalence about what they're

going to do because they're approaching the person who punish them. Whereas if you give them a treat every time they come quickly, they'll bound over. There's no ambivalence about it at all. And the same thing happens in human relationships where if you get what you want through punishment, you know, if I don't want my partner to be on his phone when he's at dinner with me, and I punish him for doing that, I don't care why he's not on his phone. I just care that he's not on his phone, right? But if I want somebody to give me a gift because they love me, then if you punish them for not giving you a gift, you're going to get Stockholm syndrome. You're not going to get, you know, which is a certain kind of love. But you're not going to get

the kind of motivation that you want. I was attending a, uh, a, uh, a lecture by an education expert who was talking about reward and punishment and essentially getting children to behave. Yeah. And he was saying that it's been proven that it's not how severe the punishment is, it's how regular the punishment is.

So children don't behave, and essentially adults as well, by how punitive something is, it's if they know something is going to happen. Like if they know, if they come back from the pub, 15 minutes late, they're going to get the cold shoulder then if you go absolutely nuts once every six times.

Yeah. What do you mean they go absolutely nuts every single? They just lose their temper. Oh, they live. He's back on to men and women, I think. He's talking about coming back from the pub. These five-year-olds are coming back from the pub, 15 minutes late. There's one of those are a funny joke about that where a guy,

there's two guys, and they're talking about how they came home last night to their wives. and one guy says, well, I got so drunk last night, I went out to the pub, and I knew that I was going to catch hell. So I came home, I put the car in neutral, I turned the lights off, I snuck up the stairs, I was as quiet as a mouse, and my wife still woke up and gave me total hell. And his mate says, well, that's funny, because I came home, I raced into the driveway, I screeched the brakes, I left the lights on, I slammed the door, I came up the stairs, I slapped my wife on the ass, and I said, how about it? And she was still sound asleep. So I think that what you're talking about is like if you catch hell every six times,

consistent punishment can be really good. I think even just random punishment can be more frightening. Generally people are, if they really want to do a behavior, they're trying to get in through loopholes. And I found this myself, right? I'm trying to make a skinner box for myself to write this book. I'm trying to engineer things where I'm actually rewarding people for punishing me for not getting my word count done for the day.

I'm actually trying to build in accountability procedures. And it's amazing to me that we don't have more kind of these kinds of protocols in place. Like there's no way that you can at work sit in a Skinner box with like a penopticon where like somebody's watching what you're doing. Because in some sense, we all want to avoid control. That's part of the reason why we buck against categories that actually can accurately describe our behavior. That's part of why we don't want to be genetically tested. That's part of why we don't believe in determinism. It's actually because we want to believe that we have free will

and we believe that other people can't control us. But to me, it's really weird that we don't have better systems to make people productive. If you actually had like a skinner box for me to live in, right, where you could regulate my access to social media, if you could control every aspect of my behavior so I could get what my goals are done in a more effective way and have more free time.

I would absolutely sign up. Actually, having said this, I thought probably the most productive people on the planet, and this is just a theory, and maybe this is something for people to explore, asexuals. Imagine how much more you could get done if you didn't feel the urge every 15 minutes.

Yeah, this actually gets us under Polly. So people are always like, oh, polyamory, you know, because Jeffrey's talking about being polyamorous and I've talked about being polyamorous. It's very funny because people always think he convinced me. Like, he definitely has power. Having spoken to you or not so sure. So people are like, oh my gosh, polyamory must be like so, so complicated.

And I was like, yeah, monogamy is also complicated. If you want the least complicated thing, just be celibate. Like, that's, if simplicity is what you're after, don't have any relationships with anybody. That is by far the, if you don't want any drama or complications, the easiest use of your time. But yeah, I haven't met some really amazing people who are asexual. And I have wished at times that there was some kind of ability to, to, to, you know, change myself so I could be asexual for some period of time. Apparently, you know, some parts of child rearing are like that anyways.

Another thing for you to look forward to, Jeffrey. It's like another game with throne reference, Lodvarez, the one who's a eunuch, yeah. He gets all the shit done in that. Probably a great singing voice as well. Exactly. But I was going to ask you, I mean, you talk about this urge to avoid control. What is the evolutionary stimulus, the evolutionary rationale for avoiding other people controlling your actions? Okay. That's a really good question.

That's always what people say when they want to delay answering a question. Great question. So each of us has adaptive strategies, right? My adaptive strategy might be to increase my status, to improve my reputation, for other people to think I'm moral, et cetera, right? And then I might have a person in my life who has different strategy. So let's say I have a partner and my adaptive strategy is to monopolize his resources and his attention completely. And his adaptive strategy is to give me just enough resources and attention to keep me around,

but also to see many other women on the side, right? What he might do is try to control how much I demand of his attention. And what I might want to do is punish him every time he doesn't give me enough attention. So that's one very familiar kind of dynamic that people have. If somebody is able to control you, then that necessarily means that they will be able to get what they want from an adaptive strategy perspective. They'll be able to say that they have better status than you or have a better reputation than you or that they're more moral than you. So they'll be able to get over on you potentially. And that's why we're so resistant to control.

And you also see this in families, right? children tend to be pretty credulous about their parents up into a point, and then they get very rebellious as teenagers. And why do teenagers get rebellious? Well, you start to buck against what your parents want. Your parents' values and your parents' desires for you are going to be in their best self-interest. But your self-interest as a newly, you know, reproductively viable person, as somebody who can choose your own mate and things, is going to be different than theirs. So in every relationship, there is conflict. You even see this in pregnancy, right?

A fetus actually causes gestational diabetes because the fetus wants sugar to be in the bloodstream for as long as possible so that they can get as big as possible because the fetus has only one chance to get big and strong, whereas the mother doesn't want to have gestational diabetes. She wants her body to be able to use to have further offspring. So in every relationship, no matter how beautiful, and people talk about pregnancy that way a lot, The reason the pregnancy isn't entirely delightful is because there is conflict between mother and fetus. And there is conflict in terms of the end goals in every relationship. And that's part of why monogamy and pair bonds make sense because it aligns people's strategies.

You see this in non-human animals as well, that in a species where the males have multiple females, that they're less invested necessarily in each one of them. I when I was reading your book there were it was fascinating all the way through there were certain moments that particularly peaked my interest in particular when you touched on BPD borderline personality disorder would you like to go and talk about that a little bit more yeah so borderline personality disorder there is this idealization and devaluation that's one that's one major component of it and I'm familiar with BPD because I've made I had a couple close friends with BPD, and I have a very, very close family member who has BPD. There are funny stories to tell about her that maybe I'll leave for another time. They're funny now, in retrospect. At the time, they were not very funny.

Diana, just finding what he doesn't know at all what borderline personality disorder is. Just start from the very basic. Start from the very beginning. So borderline personality disorder is called borderline personality disorder, actually because it was unclear if it was a personality disorder or a more significant disorder, right? they weren't clear about where it actually fell. So it's not at all like dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities.

It's actually a disorder where you have very volatile relationships. These people often have problems with drugs and alcohol. They have problems keeping any kind of romantic relationship. And they also vacillate very quickly between idealizing and devaluing their partners. There's someone who looks up to you like your guard one minute and then just thinks you're the worst person in the world the next day. Yes. I was to wonder why those people struggle to keep relationships. Yeah, so a big part of it is volatility.

But if you define borderline personality disorder, some people would argue with me and say, it's not more common in women than men. I think it's much more common in women than men. If you want to say that men have an equal rate of it, you have to define it, I think, quite differently. So I'll just talk about women's borderline personality disorder. But I think all women have a touch of this, and I think it's kind of like hyper-training. So you can be incredibly reinforcing to somebody one minute. These women escalate romantic involvement often very, very quickly.

And I dated a woman who had borderline personality disorder. And there was just so many amazing things about her. Like she knew everything about me. She had so many pictures of me in her room. We were at university together. The people knew who I was. She had a picture of me. She knew all my preferences, all my favorite things.

If I told her a story once she would remember it forever, right? She had an amazing social message. memory, but I took her to a party once, right? We was like a Halloween party around this time of year many years ago. And she was just wearing like a coat and lingerie. And I literally talked to somebody else for five minutes. And she left and started walking down a not dangerous part of Texas, but a dark part of Texas in the middle of the night, in just lingerie in a coat in order to punish me, basically, for talking to somebody else, for diverting my attention for five minutes. And women who have borderline personality disorder also more likely to do what's called paris suicide, to say that they are going to attempt suicide or threaten to attempt suicide.

So what I talk about in the book is basically that this is like a training and overdrive. Right. It's these women can be, they're really good at remembering your preferences. They know what's uniquely reinforcing to you. Sex is something that's uniquely reinforcing to men. They know how to use that. They know how to use their. They're incredibly compelling in many ways, but they can also be incredibly punitive. And the family member that I have is amazing, amazing at figuring out where the jugular is of somebody. What is like the worst thing that you could say to somebody that they're going to be thinking about for months or years? And this is something else that they're really, really good at. And it's an incredible, it's kind of a superpower.

But in the sense that, you know, in X-Men or any of these other movies, you see some people who have superpowers use them for good and some people use them for evil. I do think that women have this ability, and if you know about what you're trying to do with it, you can use it to really strengthen and improve your relationships, rather than make somebody else miserable and control them completely. This episode is brought to you by Ultima Replenisher. Health is all about balance, like a salad with fries. So why not have balance in your hydration? With six essential electrolytes and no junk, Ultima provides balanced hydration you can enjoy every day. That means no sugar, calories, or carbs, and it's not loaded with sodium.

Just delicious plant-based flavors you'll actually look forward to drinking. Shop ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. But it sounds as if there's traits of narcissism there as well. That there's similarities between the two, or have I got that completely wrong? That hmm is a no. I've learned to read it. Narcissism, there's often commonality with narcissism. I think narcissism gets defined so broadly now that I actually don't know. There's all these videos on YouTube and things about like how to deal with a narcissist.

And narcissists is kind of just code, now, a psychology code for like shitty person. Hsson. Yeah. So narcissism, yeah, there is some degree of it. And then there's this thing called fragile narcissism, which even expands the definition further, where you're like, okay, well, somebody who thinks really highly of themselves, but sometimes also doesn't think highly of themselves. That's kind of everybody. So there is an aspect of it there in that they think that they're so important that somebody else should give over all their attention and energy and resources to them. So I would say that is actually accurate.

And one thing I wanted to deal with before we wrap up the interview, you talked about the differences between men and women in some of these areas and manipulating other people or that's a negative word, but influence on other people, let's say. One of the experiments you talk about is that a four-year study, I think, of couples found that if the woman was less forgiving, at the end of that four-year period, the man was essentially better trained, let's say. But it wasn't replicated on the other side. If the man was less forgiving and used punishment and whatever, the woman didn't tend to change. So what is that all about?

And maybe since the book is gendered towards women, what are some tips for men for how to behave with their romantic partner if she is female? Okay. So forgiveness is just the suspension of punishment. So anger forgiveness is just when you stop being angry and it's a form of reinforcement

in the same way as if I was just hitting you over the head I don't know why I keep it looking just hitting you overhead and then I stopped it would be reinforcing even though me not hitting you overhead right now is not reinforcing

I know why you keep looking at him because out of the two of us in your mind he's the only potential available romantic party because you think I'm gay for some reason Diana so let's go we'll go back to this I thought that

constant when in the last interview I kept saying like well you don't have to worry about this constant yeah I was like I remember at the time I was like a gay Jewish Russian can you tell me about how you sought asylum you poor poor thing and you see this is the way the going for the juggler and I was thinking for like a month after that what are the vibes that I'm sending off well you said my partner Francis and then I met Francis you guys never did that again you guys should do something for the female gays right now But anyway, yes, I did totally think Constantine was gay. So the partner thing is super weird.

So hitting somebody over the head, forgiveness. So in this long-term study, they found that a woman whose forgiveness increased over time had a partner whose conscientiousness increased over time. That's a very, very fancy way of saying that essentially women were using punishment to change their partner's personalities. And conscientiousness is a major personality characteristic. that you would want in a husband. Conscientiousness means that he's going to do things that he said he was going to do. He's going to feel bad when he didn't do the things that he said he was going to do,

and he's also going to be attentive to your needs. Those are all conscientiousness things. And so even though it's unclear how much environment can change personality, it is interesting that there's actually not more studies about how much wives and husbands can change one another's personalities. So in this study, they actually found that women were changing men's personalities, their husband's personalities, more than vice versa, and that men's forgiveness had no influence on women's conscientiousness. Now, this could be a novel, modern thing. You know, it could be that men had more control over their wives in the past, and that dynamic has flipped, or it could be that women are using these more sophisticated methods in order to change personality, and that the, you know,

the method that a man would have had at his disposal, which is threats, has become morally frowned upon, right, to put it lightly. And so that could be it. I'm not really sure why, but it does seem that women are better at this particular skill, in my view, than men are. And the second part of my question was about, so if that way of influencing doesn't work for men as well as it does for women, what are some of the kind of tips that you might have for a man in that kind of relationship where they also want to, you know, influence their partner for the better? Yeah, so it's a little bit more complicated. Most of the time, men want to influence women to influence them less, if that makes sense.

So mostly men's complaints about women in relationships is like, I wish that she would be trying to control me less, or that she would be less interested in the minutiae of my behavior, et cetera. Whereas women more often are interested in actually trying to get their partner to be more attentive and interested in receiving. and responsible, things like that, right? And so if a man wants to train a woman to train him less, then he has to show her that if she engages in positive reinforcement, if she is reinforcing instead of punishing, she's more likely to get what she wants, right? So there's a kind of meta-training that can happen where if a man engages with a woman, if a woman is punitive and he just caves immediately, and this is something that I've actually

trained Jeffrey to do. I want to be less punitive. And so it's a little bit like being strapped to the mask, like Odysseus, right? Where like I'll be in the middle of a, like, I'll be really angry with him. And I'm like, you better not give me what I want right now because I don't want you to reinforce me for this. This is shitty. It feels bad. I do not want to get what I want in this context.

And, you know, similar thing when we first started dating, he has was, he was dating other women. We would date other people. And I didn't want him to give in to other women as quickly either. That's an interesting thing about polyamory. So I was like, can you empty out this drawer? It was like midnight. So can you empty out this drawer for me? And he's like, okay, I was like, no, this is an unrealistic expectation.

This is an irrational demand. You will not empty this drawer at midnight. It doesn't make any sense. He's like, okay, this is fine. So basically, I've tried to train my partners to get me to be less punitive and more reinforcing and also just less interested in minutia. at this boyfriend who always would joke around. I'd be like, oh, you didn't empty out the dishwasher.

Do you even love me? You didn't, you know, lock the door. Do you even love me? And the idea there is that women are using these subtle signals of whether or not you remember to do minute things as signals of responsibility and care and attention. And oftentimes people can just become forgetful. And so it doesn't really make sense.

I'll just give one last example, is that, you know, Jeffrey is quite forgetful. sometimes, especially about stuff that happened in, you know, when we went on holiday together or social events that we went to together. And it doesn't help at all. My first instinct, if he doesn't remember something, is to actually. And, like, that's not going to help him remember anything. And I have developed tactics actually to help him remember things better, but I have to

read about them. Well, this is a great thing about, it comes very much back to your question earlier, which is about manipulation versus persuasion or influence or whatever. But what you were really talking about, what I hear in that, is an evolved relationship where you're trying to take control of the shitty parts of your brain, as we all ought to, and manage them better so you become a better partner to your partner. Yeah. And I think that's a very healthy thing. And I think we can get caught up too much in this idea that we're all evil running around, trying to manipulate people in this conniving evil way. Actually, I think if you want to have a better, healthier relationship, what you're talking about is pretty much the only way to be.

get there, actually. Yeah. And on that note, we need to wrap up because I'm hungry and I'm going to start smashing shit up. Fantastic. Well, in that case, we've got one final question for it, as always. And as always, the last question is, what's the one thing that we're not

talking about as a society that we really should be talking about? I think I've been talking about it. Yeah, I think that this is our inclination to manipulate other people about how that it isn't necessarily bad and about how a cynical view of our own evolved psychology is actually the best way forward in

order to treat each other better and have better relationships. Well, fantastic, Dana. Thanks for coming on the show, coming again on the show. When is the book out? The book has not got an out date. It's not got an out date, but we'll be plugging it once it comes out, absolutely. Follow Diana Fleischman. Remind us to your Twitter. My Twitter handle is at Sentientist, S-E-N-T-I-N-T-I-S-T. And you also now have a YouTube account. I have a YouTube account. I've only put a couple things up. More things will come up. I also have a blog called Dianaverse. That's the only thing that could capture all of the weird shit I'm into. So it's Dianiverse.

Yeah. Well, we'll put all those links in the description. Thanks very much for tuning in this week. And we'll see you in the week's time with another brilliant episode. Take care. See you next week, guys.