David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences

00:00:00.000 | what do women want?

00:00:01.640 | Tell me all the things women want in a long-term mate.

00:00:04.960 | And so I would start at one end of the blackboard,

00:00:07.960 | there were like five blackboards,

00:00:09.280 | and I'd say, well, I want a mate who's kind,

00:00:12.000 | who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy,

00:00:15.160 | who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values,

00:00:18.480 | and I'd fill up five blackboards and then run out of space.

00:00:22.480 | So then I turned to the men and I'd say,

00:00:24.920 | well, what do men want?

00:00:25.960 | And then I run out of space

00:00:27.720 | after about a blackboard and a half,

00:00:29.360 | 'cause they can't think of anything else.

00:00:32.000 | So women-

00:00:32.840 | - I think there's a lot of explanations for that.

00:00:35.160 | The following is a conversation with David Buss,

00:00:39.600 | evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin,

00:00:42.120 | researching human sex differences in mate selection.

00:00:45.640 | He's considered one of the founders

00:00:47.440 | of evolutionary psychology

00:00:48.920 | and has authored many exciting and challenging books,

00:00:52.180 | including "The Evolution of Desire,

00:00:54.320 | "Strategies of Human Mating,"

00:00:56.440 | "Bad Men, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,

00:00:59.040 | "Harassment and Assault,"

00:01:00.880 | and "The Murderer Next Door,

00:01:03.240 | "Why the Mind is Designed to Kill."

00:01:06.160 | We talk a lot about sex, dating, relationships, and love.

00:01:10.540 | I take these, at times, controversial topics very seriously,

00:01:14.300 | but I also try to inject humor and ridiculousness

00:01:19.120 | throughout this conversation, and all conversations I do.

00:01:23.080 | Please do not mistake my silliness for a lack of seriousness

00:01:26.920 | and my seriousness for a lack of silliness.

00:01:30.560 | And above all, do not mistake my suit and tie or my PhD

00:01:35.560 | as a sign of intelligence or wisdom.

00:01:37.920 | I barely know what I'm talking about on most days.

00:01:41.800 | I'm simply curious and hoping to understand

00:01:44.660 | the way a child does, what the heck is going on

00:01:47.280 | in this weird and wonderful civilization of ours.

00:01:50.040 | If I say something stupid, as I often do,

00:01:53.060 | I promise to learn and to improve.

00:01:55.800 | As Mark Twain said, "I do not want my schooling

00:01:59.320 | "to interfere with my education."

00:02:02.040 | Open-minded curiosity, I think, is the best guide

00:02:05.560 | for a proper and fun, lifelong education.

00:02:10.280 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:12.200 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:02:14.180 | in the description.

00:02:15.420 | And now, dear friends, here's David Buss.

00:02:18.880 | What is more important in the history

00:02:21.860 | of the development of human civilization,

00:02:24.120 | sex or violence?

00:02:25.960 | So mating strategies or military strategies?

00:02:29.080 | - Oh, well, both are important.

00:02:30.800 | I mean, first of all, humans are a sexually

00:02:33.680 | reproducing species, and so everything

00:02:36.520 | has to go through sex.

00:02:39.040 | So our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex

00:02:44.040 | because to succeed, for us to be here now,

00:02:49.200 | all of our ancestors in an unbroken chain

00:02:53.080 | have had to succeed in selecting a fertile mate,

00:02:56.600 | attracting that mate, be mutually chosen by that mate,

00:03:00.800 | stay together long enough, do all the sexual things

00:03:04.800 | you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive,

00:03:07.680 | et cetera, so everything has to go through mating.

00:03:10.520 | And in that sense, I think it's, I mean,

00:03:12.720 | survival is really only a means to an end, if you will.

00:03:17.720 | So sex has gotta be important, and humans have

00:03:21.680 | a very rich, evolved sexual psychology

00:03:25.120 | or an evolved mating psychology.

00:03:27.520 | Okay, but I wouldn't minimize the importance

00:03:30.760 | of violence either.

00:03:32.320 | There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved

00:03:36.000 | in the context of small groups and with a fair amount

00:03:40.400 | of small group warfare, so intertribal warfare,

00:03:45.160 | where, and this is a harsh realization,

00:03:50.400 | but there historically, this is part of our bad

00:03:54.840 | evolutionary history, it has been advantageous

00:03:57.920 | from a purely reproductive standpoint to conquer

00:04:02.400 | a neighboring group, kill the males,

00:04:05.360 | and get whatever resources they have,

00:04:08.200 | including females and sexual resources,

00:04:12.160 | as well as tools, weapons, territory, and so forth.

00:04:15.880 | And so I think that we have, and of course,

00:04:19.920 | it's typically males who do that.

00:04:24.720 | I mean, yes, some females have participated in warfare,

00:04:27.480 | but as far as I know, there's never been a single case

00:04:31.440 | in all of human recorded history of women forming

00:04:35.080 | a war tribe with other women to attack another group

00:04:38.200 | of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands.

00:04:42.680 | But this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record

00:04:48.920 | and small group studies.

00:04:51.640 | It's part of our common thing.

00:04:54.480 | So just one concrete example, unfortunately,

00:04:57.640 | he's dead now, he passed away, Napoleon Chagnon,

00:05:00.400 | who studied the Yanomamo for many, many years,

00:05:03.460 | when he first started interviewing them,

00:05:06.240 | he asked them, "Why do you go to war?"

00:05:10.640 | And they said, "Well, to capture women, of course,

00:05:14.600 | "but it's the only sensible reason."

00:05:17.640 | And then he said, "Why does your culture go to war?"

00:05:20.800 | However they phrased it.

00:05:22.280 | And he said, "Well, we go to war to spread democracy

00:05:25.220 | "and ideas and everything."

00:05:26.800 | They basically fell off their logs laughing

00:05:29.600 | at such a stupid reason, because why risk your life

00:05:31.960 | for anything other than women?

00:05:35.160 | Of course, it's more complex than that,

00:05:36.680 | because some go to war for reputational reasons.

00:05:41.680 | They say, "If we don't retaliate,"

00:05:45.880 | 'cause we've been attacked and they've stolen

00:05:48.080 | three of our women, "If we don't retaliate,

00:05:50.740 | "then we will get a reputation as exploitable,

00:05:53.940 | "and then other groups will start to attack us as well."

00:05:57.640 | And so they get into these cycles of,

00:06:00.020 | like the Hatfields and McCoys of attacks, counterattacks,

00:06:04.660 | retribution, and part of it is reputation management.

00:06:09.660 | So that's between groups, and I think that's been

00:06:13.680 | the primary source of violence, but not the only source.

00:06:18.680 | So there's also within-group conflict,

00:06:22.560 | and so many ethnographies, many traditional societies

00:06:26.440 | have things, some of them are ritualized,

00:06:29.200 | like wrestling matches, or in the Anamama,

00:06:33.920 | they have these, or used to, these chest-pounding duels,

00:06:38.160 | where, so if we're in this match, you challenge me,

00:06:41.480 | and I have to, of course--

00:06:43.160 | - Chest-pounding duel.

00:06:44.920 | (Dave laughs)

00:06:45.760 | I like this.

00:06:46.600 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:06:47.420 | - So you're not hitting each other,

00:06:48.360 | you're just, it's like peacocking, you really--

00:06:50.160 | - Oh, no, you're hitting each other.

00:06:51.600 | - Oh, sorry.

00:06:52.440 | - Yeah, so they get 20 paces away, and they run up,

00:06:56.760 | and you punch the other guy in the chest,

00:06:59.640 | and he has to basically stand there,

00:07:01.680 | and then he does the same to you.

00:07:02.520 | - Wrists and everything, oh, wow.

00:07:05.000 | - And then it's basically last man standing.

00:07:08.080 | - That's, well, I suppose that's better than the face.

00:07:11.160 | That's an interesting decision with the chest.

00:07:13.480 | - Yeah.

00:07:14.320 | - I mean, I'm sure if you get good at that kind of thing,

00:07:16.280 | you could start breaking ribs,

00:07:18.240 | and you can get loose about the rules

00:07:19.960 | of where exactly in the chest you can hit.

00:07:22.160 | And there's that guy who's always known for hitting

00:07:25.800 | not exactly in the chest, accidentally missing.

00:07:28.720 | - Right, right, the Mike Tyson of--

00:07:30.920 | - Exactly, eating your ear off.

00:07:33.520 | So interesting, so there's ritualized conflict,

00:07:38.000 | sort of purify the competition,

00:07:43.000 | and that resolves some kind of issue.

00:07:46.360 | - Well, yeah, it's important to establish status hierarchies.

00:07:49.960 | But also, and here's just one more concrete point on that.

00:07:57.600 | Yanomamo, we don't have this in our language.

00:07:59.720 | We just have one word for kill or murder,

00:08:03.400 | but Yanomamo have, you're either an,

00:08:06.760 | if you're a male, you're an unokai or a non-unokai.

00:08:11.160 | The non-unokai are men who have not killed.

00:08:14.840 | If you're an unokai, that means you have killed someone.

00:08:19.200 | And the unokai among Yanomamo historically

00:08:22.960 | had higher status and more wives,

00:08:25.360 | so they're a polygynous society,

00:08:28.880 | which has been true of something like 83 to 85%

00:08:33.520 | of traditional societies, or actually,

00:08:37.200 | I was just corrected by an anthropologist.

00:08:39.400 | She said, "We no longer call them traditional societies.

00:08:41.720 | "We call them small-scale societies."

00:08:44.480 | - So nothing can be called traditional?

00:08:46.680 | - I don't know.

00:08:47.520 | - Is bacteria the traditional society?

00:08:49.720 | - Yeah, I think it's just one of these things,

00:08:52.480 | the language, the words that are deemed appropriate

00:08:56.120 | to use to describe things change over time.

00:08:58.760 | - Yeah, so words can hurt people.

00:09:02.360 | They can inspire people.

00:09:04.040 | Words are funny, powerful things.

00:09:07.680 | You authored a textbook titled "Evolutionary Psychology,

00:09:10.440 | "the New Science of Mind" in its sixth edition.

00:09:14.920 | What is the magic ingredient

00:09:16.320 | that gave birth to homo sapiens, do you think?

00:09:18.920 | Is it fire, cooking, ability to collaborate,

00:09:23.360 | share ideas, ability to contemplate our own mortality,

00:09:26.920 | all that kind of stuff?

00:09:27.760 | - Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate one factor.

00:09:30.920 | I know you've had Richard Wrangham on this podcast.

00:09:34.480 | It was a wonderful, wonderful interview.

00:09:36.520 | He used to be a colleague of mine

00:09:38.640 | when I was a professor at Michigan.

00:09:40.720 | I've stayed in touch with him.

00:09:43.240 | He's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

00:09:46.200 | And he thinks fire and cooking

00:09:48.360 | have been one of the key things.

00:09:50.760 | But I think it's hard to isolate.

00:09:53.360 | I would trace at least part of our uniqueness

00:09:57.720 | to the uniqueness of our mating system.

00:10:01.040 | So we have in mating,

00:10:03.360 | unlike chimpanzees, who are our closest primate relative,

00:10:07.600 | and of which Richard Wrangham is a world's expert,

00:10:11.480 | but they have basically no long-term pair-bonded mating.

00:10:16.480 | Female comes into estrus, all the mating,

00:10:19.480 | all the sex happens, most of the sex happens

00:10:21.560 | during that window.

00:10:23.360 | But humans have evolved long-term pair-bonded mating.

00:10:27.600 | And it's only one mating strategy,

00:10:29.880 | but it's a really important one.

00:10:31.280 | And then you have with that male parental care.

00:10:35.960 | So basically, again, you go back to chimps,

00:10:38.720 | and chimps, with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA,

00:10:43.720 | males don't do anything.

00:10:45.520 | So they inseminate the females,

00:10:47.680 | but then when the kids are born,

00:10:49.800 | they basically don't do much of anything

00:10:51.960 | in terms of provisioning and so forth.

00:10:54.400 | But human males do.

00:10:55.880 | We invest in the modern environment,

00:10:58.280 | could be decades, especially with the Boomerang kids

00:11:01.600 | and everything, but we're, not all males do,

00:11:05.720 | but compared to the vast majority of mammals,

00:11:09.480 | we are a very heavy male parental investment species.

00:11:14.480 | - Could you, if it's okay,

00:11:16.440 | and I'll ask you a bunch of dumb basic questions,

00:11:19.440 | 'cause those are fun, could you define mating here?

00:11:23.280 | Does mating refer to the series of sexual acts

00:11:28.280 | that lead to reproduction?

00:11:30.000 | Does it include dating and love and camaraderie,

00:11:34.460 | loyalty, all those things?

00:11:37.080 | - Yes, I, you know-- - Yes.

00:11:39.480 | - Yeah, when I first started studying it,

00:11:41.200 | yeah, I don't, when I first started studying it,

00:11:43.800 | I looked for the right term.

00:11:46.120 | And obviously, it's much broader than sex.

00:11:49.320 | So by mating, I include things like mate selection,

00:11:54.320 | mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention,

00:11:58.600 | mate poaching, mate expulsion.

00:12:01.680 | - Mate poaching, that sounds fun.

00:12:03.360 | So the early, the game theoretic strategy

00:12:07.480 | of mate selection is primarily what mating is about,

00:12:11.040 | or do you include the long-term,

00:12:13.960 | once you agree that you're gonna stick this out

00:12:17.880 | for a while and have multiple children,

00:12:19.680 | is that also mating?

00:12:20.680 | - Yes, I include that as well.

00:12:21.960 | So it's a broad-- - Broad category.

00:12:23.840 | - Broad definition, and absolutely includes

00:12:27.360 | the emotion of love.

00:12:28.920 | And of course, there are many different types of love,

00:12:32.320 | brotherly love, love of parents for children.

00:12:36.200 | But love, I think, and this is one of the shifts

00:12:39.140 | in the social sciences.

00:12:40.320 | So when I was an undergraduate, for example,

00:12:42.080 | I was taught that love is this invention

00:12:45.960 | by some Caucasian European poets a couple hundred years ago.

00:12:50.640 | And it turns out that's not the case.

00:12:53.040 | So there's been extensive cross-cultural evidence now

00:12:57.920 | that people, not every person in all cultures, of course,

00:13:02.920 | but some people in all cultures experience this emotion

00:13:06.500 | that we call love.

00:13:07.840 | - And for the word love, are we going to,

00:13:10.240 | in this conversation, try to stick to sort of romantic love

00:13:13.400 | for the meaning of the word love?

00:13:16.000 | - Well, that's a great question.

00:13:18.640 | But I mean, it's pretty well established

00:13:22.480 | that there are these different phases of love.

00:13:25.480 | So there's this infatuation phase where our psychology,

00:13:30.480 | we get obsessional thoughts.

00:13:34.160 | It's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person

00:13:37.960 | we're thinking about, the other person constantly.

00:13:41.200 | So there's kind of like ideational intrusion

00:13:45.120 | into our psychology, but you can't sustain that.

00:13:48.280 | I mean, it'd be, and then of course,

00:13:50.640 | there's a, pardon the phrase,

00:13:53.560 | but what I described as the fucking like bunnies phase

00:13:56.120 | of this intense sexuality.

00:13:59.300 | But people have other adaptive problems they have to solve.

00:14:03.240 | And so you can't stay in that state for too long.

00:14:05.640 | And so that subsides over time

00:14:07.960 | and develops into, at least in many cases,

00:14:12.960 | this warm attachment.

00:14:15.240 | - Cuddling bunnies, long-term cuddling bunnies.

00:14:17.960 | - Yes.

00:14:18.800 | - Phase of the relationship, but still romantic,

00:14:21.180 | not like brotherly love or, you know,

00:14:24.240 | 'cause I talk about love a lot.

00:14:26.880 | And for me, you know, love is a broader experience

00:14:31.560 | of just experiencing the joy and the beauty of love

00:14:36.840 | and the beauty of life.

00:14:38.680 | So like just looking out in nature,

00:14:41.680 | that's the kind of love, like whatever the chemicals

00:14:44.200 | that lead to a feeling that at least echoes

00:14:46.760 | the same kind of feeling that you get with romantic love,

00:14:49.440 | you can experience that with even inanimate objects.

00:14:52.640 | That sounds weird to say,

00:14:53.460 | but just a gratitude and appreciation,

00:14:57.020 | not in some kind of a weird Zen way,

00:15:01.040 | but just in a very human way.

00:15:02.440 | Just, it feels good to be alive kind of feeling.

00:15:04.720 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess I would,

00:15:07.040 | I mean, that's an interesting thought.

00:15:08.560 | I hadn't thought about that.

00:15:10.520 | I guess I would use other terms to describe that.

00:15:14.600 | So like the term awe, for example,

00:15:17.320 | when you see a beautiful sunset, you know,

00:15:19.840 | that's why I kind of started out by saying,

00:15:21.240 | I think there are different types of love

00:15:23.600 | and I'm focusing on the mating type.

00:15:26.240 | - And we'll talk about that.

00:15:27.320 | But so yeah, there is a sense of beauty

00:15:30.000 | and there's a sense of sexual appeal.

00:15:33.620 | Maybe that's a good, and those intersect

00:15:35.920 | in fascinating ways.

00:15:36.760 | We'll talk about that.

00:15:38.480 | We'll talk about all of that.

00:15:39.480 | But you're saying mating strategies,

00:15:42.040 | not that we've kind of placed ourself

00:15:45.560 | on what we mean by mating.

00:15:46.440 | Mating strategies is one of the cool features

00:15:50.920 | that made humans what they are.

00:15:52.760 | One of the initial inventions

00:15:54.600 | is the weird and wonderful ways that we mate.

00:15:59.000 | - Yeah, and I mean, if you go to even things

00:16:02.800 | like how we compete for mates,

00:16:06.080 | and this is another kind of strange,

00:16:08.640 | for some people, angle on it,

00:16:10.500 | but mating is inherently a competitive process

00:16:15.000 | in that desirable mates are in scarce supply

00:16:18.880 | relative to the numbers of people who want them.

00:16:22.920 | And so even post-mating, that is after mate selection,

00:16:27.920 | mate attraction, and mutual mate choice,

00:16:30.760 | desirable, that's why there's mate poaching.

00:16:32.840 | Mate poaching is one of the strategies

00:16:35.140 | that we in my lab with David Schmidt have studied.

00:16:39.980 | And so, okay, but one of the unique aspects

00:16:44.800 | of humans is that we compete using language.

00:16:48.380 | And that is we have reputations,

00:16:53.120 | and humans devote a lot of effort

00:16:55.180 | to maintaining the reputations,

00:16:57.760 | to building the reputations,

00:16:59.380 | to trying to recover reputations

00:17:03.600 | after a loss of reputation for various reasons.

00:17:08.500 | But we compete for mates using language,

00:17:12.880 | and that includes sending signals

00:17:15.840 | to the person that we're trying to attract using language,

00:17:18.960 | verbal fluency, and obviously

00:17:23.320 | some more recent things like poetry.

00:17:26.280 | But also we use language to derogate our competitors.

00:17:30.300 | So one of the papers I published very early on,

00:17:33.140 | it was a research project on derogation of competitors,

00:17:37.140 | the ways in which people impugn the status,

00:17:40.540 | character, and reputations of their rivals

00:17:43.940 | with the goal of making them less desirable to other people.

00:17:48.540 | And humans do that, and women and men both do that.

00:17:52.500 | So it's an interesting thing that we're,

00:17:54.860 | male competitions, we were talking about

00:17:56.600 | the Yanomamo earlier, and some of these overt physical,

00:18:00.840 | or what animal biologists call contest competition,

00:18:04.540 | where there's a physical battle.

00:18:06.900 | Males do that, and so a lot of the early attention

00:18:09.760 | on mate competition was focused on

00:18:12.240 | these sort of ostentatious overt battles

00:18:15.880 | in contest competition.

00:18:17.840 | But we compete through language,

00:18:22.480 | and so there's this big overlooked domain of women,

00:18:26.320 | the ways in which women compete with each other

00:18:28.640 | using language.

00:18:29.520 | And one of the things that astonished me

00:18:31.540 | is how observant women are about the subtle imperfections

00:18:36.540 | in their rivals and take pains to point them out.

00:18:42.760 | So just as a random example, I went to a party,

00:18:47.760 | this is back in my youth, but went to a party

00:18:51.840 | with my girlfriend at the time.

00:18:54.840 | And I got into this conversation with another woman

00:18:58.940 | who happened to be very attractive.

00:19:01.140 | But then we leave the party, and she said something

00:19:04.480 | just casually offhanded, like, she said,

00:19:06.720 | "Did you notice that her thighs were heavy?"

00:19:10.120 | And I hadn't, but next time I saw this other woman,

00:19:14.160 | I found my attention being drawn to check out her thigh.

00:19:18.200 | Well, and originally it puzzled me

00:19:20.560 | why women would derogate other women on appearance.

00:19:23.600 | Well, they do it, of course,

00:19:24.680 | because men prioritize appearance.

00:19:27.580 | But I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly

00:19:31.960 | with his own eyes.

00:19:33.480 | Why would verbal input alter his perceptions

00:19:37.200 | of how attractive he was?

00:19:39.720 | And I think that part of it is,

00:19:41.760 | I think there are actually two quick answers to that.

00:19:45.000 | One is the attentional one.

00:19:47.280 | So our attentional field,

00:19:49.320 | when they draw attention to it,

00:19:50.960 | those what could be very small deviations

00:19:55.520 | from perfect symmetry or whatever they are

00:19:57.600 | become magnified in our attentional field.

00:20:00.680 | But the other is that who we have as a mate

00:20:05.680 | is also a reflection of our own status.

00:20:09.240 | And you saw this in a kind of overt and way

00:20:15.240 | in the 2016 presidential election,

00:20:20.240 | where Donald Trump was saying,

00:20:25.840 | this was when he was in competition with Ted Cruz,

00:20:28.240 | I think, in the primary, he said,

00:20:29.920 | "Look at my wife, look at Ted Cruz's wife."

00:20:34.280 | And he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife.

00:20:39.200 | - So using language, you can alter the dynamics

00:20:44.640 | of the social hierarchy, the status hierarchy, sorry.

00:20:47.560 | So you can change the values subtly,

00:20:50.280 | or if you have a large platform in big ways,

00:20:53.240 | you can move things around just with your words.

00:20:55.760 | - Yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:20:57.440 | - Right, which is fascinating.

00:20:59.480 | Because it's all socially constructed anyway.

00:21:03.200 | So this, I mean, the question I have is,

00:21:05.440 | you said there's the interesting thing

00:21:06.800 | about mating strategies is there's a small pool

00:21:11.000 | of desirable mates.

00:21:12.960 | And what the word desirable means is socially defined

00:21:17.960 | almost by on purpose to make sure

00:21:20.400 | the pool always stays small.

00:21:22.360 | - I would have a couple thoughts on that.

00:21:23.920 | It's an interesting issue, set of issues you raise.

00:21:26.720 | Okay, one is that I think we have evolved adaptations.

00:21:31.720 | Part of our psychology is to detect differences.

00:21:35.580 | And so this is why, like a, I don't know,

00:21:39.920 | a Martian or an alien coming down,

00:21:42.840 | they might look at humans and say,

00:21:44.480 | "Boy, they all look alike."

00:21:46.920 | Just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever,

00:21:49.320 | and we think they all look alike.

00:21:51.160 | But what's important in decision-making,

00:21:56.000 | especially in the mating domain, or even friendship domain,

00:21:59.120 | or coalitional selection domain, is the differences.

00:22:04.120 | And so I noticed this, just a concrete example of this.

00:22:09.440 | I was sitting around, this is, again, ages ago,

00:22:13.200 | watching something like a Miss America beauty contest,

00:22:17.400 | and people in there with a bunch of other people,

00:22:19.680 | and they were saying, "Boy, did you see Miss North Carolina?

00:22:23.520 | "What a dog."

00:22:24.720 | And so this is astonishing.

00:22:27.080 | So here are like 50 contestants who are selected

00:22:30.440 | as the most attractive in their state, presumably,

00:22:33.420 | although they claim it's based on talent.

00:22:36.640 | But we notice the differences.

00:22:39.620 | And this is why I would push back a little bit

00:22:45.320 | on the term socially constructed,

00:22:47.080 | because I think there are many different meanings

00:22:51.600 | of that phrase.

00:22:53.080 | And one meaning that some people have,

00:22:56.280 | one connotation is that it's arbitrary.

00:22:58.920 | And I don't think it's arbitrary.

00:23:00.300 | So this has been another shift

00:23:03.280 | in understanding standards of beauty,

00:23:06.280 | where it used to be believed in the social sciences.

00:23:10.680 | You can't judge a book by its cover.

00:23:12.400 | Beauty is only skin deep.

00:23:15.000 | Don't judge people on the superficial characteristics.

00:23:19.840 | But in fact, physical appearance provides

00:23:22.640 | a wealth of information about the health status

00:23:26.200 | of someone there, in the case of males,

00:23:29.660 | their physical formidability.

00:23:32.000 | And we have formidability assessment adaptations.

00:23:35.280 | And then fertility as well.

00:23:37.320 | So there are a very predictable set of cues to fertility

00:23:42.120 | that have evolved to be part of our standards

00:23:44.960 | of attractiveness.

00:23:45.920 | And they're not arbitrary.

00:23:47.840 | There are some culturally arbitrary ones.

00:23:49.800 | So like you go to the Maori in New Zealand, for example,

00:23:53.920 | and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive.

00:23:58.640 | So there are some culturally arbitrary things.

00:24:02.720 | But standards of beauty like cues to youth,

00:24:06.920 | cues to health in women, clear skin, full lips,

00:24:11.920 | clear eyes, lustrous hair, a small waist-hip ratio

00:24:17.160 | that is circumference of the waist relative to the hips

00:24:20.440 | is a cue to youth and fertility,

00:24:23.740 | and a cue to health.

00:24:25.680 | Symmetrical features.

00:24:27.000 | So we are a bilaterally symmetrical species,

00:24:31.580 | but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry

00:24:36.240 | that are due to different things.

00:24:38.320 | So mutation, load, environmental insults,

00:24:42.040 | diseases during development, and so forth.

00:24:45.120 | - All right, but that's kind of deeply biological.

00:24:48.680 | Like there's cues that indicate something

00:24:51.460 | that is biologically true about a particular human.

00:24:54.640 | So if we talk about both men and women.

00:24:58.660 | So we're now talking about what men want

00:25:01.640 | in the mating strategies when they look at women.

00:25:06.240 | So you're saying small waist to hip ratio.

00:25:10.560 | - Right.

00:25:11.400 | - How much of that is our deep biological past

00:25:18.020 | on top of which we can build

00:25:19.400 | all kinds of different standards of beauty?

00:25:21.720 | So we have many things going on in our brain.

00:25:27.080 | Our value of other humans in selecting a mate

00:25:31.220 | might incorporate a lot more variables

00:25:34.260 | as we get into the 21st century.

00:25:36.700 | So how quickly does our valuation of a mate evolve

00:25:41.700 | relative to the evolution of the human species?

00:25:49.020 | - You're using evolve in the sense of culturally evolve?

00:25:51.700 | - Culturally evolve, and then relative

00:25:54.100 | to biologically evolve.

00:25:55.700 | - Yeah, well, I think that there are some things

00:26:00.700 | that are biologically evolved,

00:26:04.340 | some standards of attractiveness.

00:26:07.300 | And there are some of the things that I mentioned.

00:26:10.300 | So in male evaluation of females,

00:26:13.060 | let me back up and just say,

00:26:14.940 | what is the underlying logic?

00:26:16.400 | Why would we have standards of attractiveness?

00:26:18.340 | So here's the interesting thing,

00:26:22.020 | and this gets back to your earlier question

00:26:23.940 | about what is unique to humans,

00:26:26.500 | or what distinguishes us,

00:26:28.340 | or what set us off on the path that we did,

00:26:31.000 | is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty

00:26:36.000 | figuring out when a female is fertile.

00:26:39.620 | She signals that like crazy

00:26:42.020 | with the bright red genital swelling,

00:26:43.860 | olfactory cues, she goes into estrus.

00:26:47.640 | In humans, we have, and this was actually a third thing

00:26:51.600 | that I wanted to add earlier,

00:26:53.100 | we have concealed ovulation, okay,

00:26:55.780 | relatively concealed ovulation,

00:26:57.700 | which is remarkable given how close we are

00:27:00.620 | primatologically to chimpanzees.

00:27:03.660 | And so there's a little bit of evidence

00:27:08.660 | that there are subtle changes that occur

00:27:11.620 | when women ovulate, women not on hormonal contraceptives.

00:27:15.980 | - But it's mostly concealed.

00:27:17.260 | - But it is largely concealed.

00:27:18.860 | - Do you think that's a feature or a bug?

00:27:21.340 | Like do we evolve that, is that a cool,

00:27:25.840 | a powerful invention for the human species?

00:27:28.000 | - I think it's an adaptation in women,

00:27:30.980 | that women have evolved concealed ovulation.

00:27:34.260 | And I think it's a feature, not a bug.

00:27:36.940 | - That gives more, would it give more power

00:27:39.980 | for women to select a mate?

00:27:44.980 | - There are a couple different hypotheses about it,

00:27:47.620 | but the one that I think is most plausible

00:27:52.300 | is that, again, comparing it to chimps,

00:27:57.000 | female goes into estrus, the male just has to try

00:28:01.340 | to monopolize her while she's in that estrus phase,

00:28:04.260 | and then they basically ignore the females after that.

00:28:07.780 | If you can't know when a woman is fertile,

00:28:11.460 | then you have to stick around a lot longer.

00:28:14.700 | And so I think long-term pair bonding co-evolved

00:28:19.420 | with concealed ovulation.

00:28:22.300 | And with that, also, a very different form of sexuality,

00:28:25.920 | which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle,

00:28:30.380 | and chimps don't.

00:28:34.100 | There's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex

00:28:36.660 | toward the edges of the estrus cycle, but very little.

00:28:40.980 | - So that actually makes mating a more fundamental part

00:28:45.020 | of interaction between humans than it does for chimps.

00:28:49.380 | So meaning like year-round, every day,

00:28:52.900 | constantly selecting mates in terms of biologically speaking.

00:28:55.780 | So what else do men want?

00:28:59.500 | Today, in the 21st century, versus in the caveman days?

00:29:04.500 | - A wonderful question.

00:29:06.380 | To answer it, though, I have to distinguish

00:29:08.500 | between long-term mating and short-term mating.

00:29:11.820 | And in long-term mating, it gets very complicated.

00:29:16.740 | So as a--

00:29:18.620 | - That's one way to put it, yeah.

00:29:20.980 | - Well, so I teach a course in human sexuality

00:29:24.820 | at University of Texas at Austin.

00:29:27.140 | And one of the things, this is back in the days

00:29:30.660 | when there were chalkboards, and you taught

00:29:34.500 | with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board.

00:29:37.780 | And what I would do is I would ask the class,

00:29:39.740 | I'd teach this large class, one to 200,

00:29:42.540 | I'd say, what do women want?

00:29:45.020 | Tell me all the things women want in a long-term mate.

00:29:48.380 | And so I would start at one end of the blackboard,

00:29:51.340 | there were like five blackboards, and I'd say,

00:29:52.940 | well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding,

00:29:56.360 | who's intelligent, who's healthy,

00:29:58.540 | who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values.

00:30:01.860 | And I'd just go, and I'd fill up five blackboards

00:30:04.460 | and then run out of space.

00:30:06.300 | And so first, this large number of characteristics

00:30:10.420 | that people want, and then specific magnitudes

00:30:14.180 | of those characteristics or amounts.

00:30:16.220 | So I'd say, you want a mate who's, say, generous

00:30:19.180 | with their resources, and they'd say, yes,

00:30:21.140 | I want a mate who's generous with their resources.

00:30:22.660 | So I said, so like a guy who, this is in women's mate

00:30:25.820 | selection, a guy who, at the end of every month,

00:30:28.340 | gets his paycheck and gives it to the local wino

00:30:32.500 | on the drag, and I'd say, well, no, not that generous.

00:30:36.180 | Generous toward me, not indiscriminately generous.

00:30:40.260 | And so you want a mate who's ambitious,

00:30:44.460 | who's a hard worker, yes, but not a workaholic.

00:30:48.060 | And so then you get to interactions

00:30:52.940 | among different characteristics.

00:30:54.980 | - So there's a lot of characteristics, a lot of variables

00:30:57.580 | in this very complex optimization problem for women.

00:31:00.560 | - Yes, that's right, and more so for women than for men.

00:31:04.380 | So then I turn to the men, and I say,

00:31:06.780 | well, what do men want, and then I run out of space

00:31:09.580 | after about a blackboard and a half,

00:31:11.180 | 'cause they can't think of anything else.

00:31:13.820 | So women-- - I think there's a lot

00:31:15.220 | of explanations for that.

00:31:16.720 | Besides the lack of the number of variables, it's also,

00:31:20.620 | you know, I mean, that's interesting.

00:31:24.220 | So what's the difference between the variables?

00:31:26.100 | So on the men's side, what are the variables?

00:31:27.780 | - Well, in long-term mate selection,

00:31:30.220 | there's a lot of overlap.

00:31:32.100 | - Sure. - Okay.

00:31:34.180 | So things like intelligence, good health,

00:31:39.180 | sense of humor, an agreeable personality,

00:31:43.820 | someone who's not too neurotic or moody

00:31:46.820 | or emotionally volatile,

00:31:49.540 | but there are key differences as well.

00:31:52.420 | And the differences stem from,

00:31:55.380 | they basically fall in the delimited number of domains.

00:31:58.780 | So for men, it's physical attractiveness,

00:32:02.180 | physical appearance, and youth are the two real big ones.

00:32:06.740 | Okay, men prioritize those more than women do.

00:32:10.220 | And so that's why you have phenomena such as this,

00:32:13.700 | I'll quote, "Love at first sight,"

00:32:15.980 | where sometimes men can walk into a party

00:32:18.580 | and they see a woman across the room,

00:32:20.060 | and they say, "I'm gonna marry that woman.

00:32:21.880 | "That's the woman for me."

00:32:23.260 | Women very rarely do that.

00:32:25.380 | Now, most men don't do that either,

00:32:27.020 | but men are much more inclined to fall in love

00:32:29.860 | at first sight, that's because they prioritize

00:32:32.180 | physical appearance.

00:32:33.780 | Why?

00:32:34.620 | Because physical appearance provides this wealth

00:32:37.380 | of information about a woman's fertility status.

00:32:41.220 | And this is from an evolutionary perspective,

00:32:44.340 | from a purely reproductive perspective,

00:32:47.060 | in business school, they would call it job one.

00:32:50.860 | Job one is you have to select a fertile mate.

00:32:54.280 | So those who, in our evolutionary past,

00:32:57.460 | who selected infertile mates,

00:32:59.820 | so postmenopausal women, for example,

00:33:02.400 | did not become our ancestors.

00:33:05.300 | So we are all the descendants of this long

00:33:08.660 | and unbroken chain of ancestors,

00:33:11.420 | all of whom succeeded in selecting a fertile mate.

00:33:14.980 | But fertility cannot be observed directly.

00:33:18.600 | - It can use some cues.

00:33:21.300 | - Exactly, and there are cues that are probabilistically

00:33:25.740 | related to this underlying quality of fertility

00:33:28.620 | that we can't observe directly.

00:33:30.340 | - And we're doing that computation in our heads.

00:33:32.400 | What about men?

00:33:34.180 | What do men want for short-term mating?

00:33:37.380 | - Well, so for short-term mating,

00:33:39.140 | for both sexes, physical appearance looms very large.

00:33:45.460 | So women are, no, physical attractiveness and appearance,

00:33:50.980 | they're important for women in long-term mate selection.

00:33:53.420 | So I don't wanna mislead anyone on that.

00:33:56.940 | They're just not as important as they are for men.

00:33:59.820 | And so a lot of characteristics come for women

00:34:04.520 | before physical appearance, physical attractiveness.

00:34:07.540 | - So women, so if we switch to women,

00:34:11.740 | what do women want?

00:34:12.780 | They want also physical appearance for short-term mating,

00:34:17.780 | physical attractiveness, what else?

00:34:21.740 | - Well-- - Some cues that represent

00:34:23.700 | physical attractiveness that maybe represent health.

00:34:26.420 | - Well, here's, this is your--

00:34:29.020 | - I'm learning a lot here.

00:34:29.980 | - Yeah, well, so, but you're also asking

00:34:32.820 | a very interesting question about what is controversial

00:34:37.140 | within the evolutionary psychology field, right,

00:34:41.700 | and not totally resolved.

00:34:43.380 | So-- - That's why you're

00:34:44.460 | on the sixth edition of the book,

00:34:46.020 | and there could be a lot more editions coming.

00:34:48.540 | - Yeah, I revise it every four years or so

00:34:50.780 | because there's four years of new, interesting work,

00:34:55.180 | and so it deserves updating.

00:34:56.660 | But the traditional, I should say,

00:35:00.600 | answer to your question is that women go for good genes,

00:35:06.900 | cues to good genes in the short-term,

00:35:09.380 | and cues to resources in the long-term.

00:35:12.740 | And this has been a hypothesis that advocated,

00:35:15.740 | I didn't come up with this one,

00:35:18.380 | by Steve Gangestad, a former student of mine,

00:35:22.220 | Marty Hale, Randy Thornhill,

00:35:24.140 | and some other very smart players in the field.

00:35:28.580 | And what they used as markers of good genes

00:35:33.580 | are things like symmetrical features and masculine features.

00:35:38.580 | So strong jawline, high shoulder-to-hip ratio,

00:35:46.180 | other sorts of masculine features.

00:35:48.780 | But I started to doubt this explanation

00:35:52.540 | for what women want in the short-term

00:35:54.780 | because of some other findings.

00:35:59.180 | So for women, a lot of short-term mating

00:36:02.500 | is not one-night-stand mating,

00:36:05.700 | but rather it's affair mating.

00:36:09.540 | So if you ask the question, why do women have affairs?

00:36:14.500 | So let's restrict the question for the moment.

00:36:17.500 | My colleagues would argue, well, women have affairs

00:36:21.380 | because they're trying to get good genes from one guy

00:36:24.180 | while they're getting investment from the regular partner,

00:36:27.780 | the husband.

00:36:29.500 | Okay, but the problem is that when women have affairs,

00:36:34.340 | 70-plus percent tend to fall in love with

00:36:37.980 | or become attached to their affair partner.

00:36:41.060 | - Oh, sorry, what percentage, 70?

00:36:42.860 | - Yeah, 70--

00:36:43.700 | - A large majority.

00:36:44.700 | - Yeah, 70% or more.

00:36:47.420 | In contrast to men, where it's more like 30%

00:36:50.900 | of men who have affairs fall in love with

00:36:53.580 | or become attached to their affair partner.

00:36:56.180 | But from a design perspective,

00:36:58.740 | an engineering perspective, if you will,

00:37:02.540 | that's a disastrous thing

00:37:03.900 | if you're just trying to get good genes.

00:37:05.340 | So you're trying to retain the investment of one guy

00:37:09.340 | while getting good genes surreptitiously

00:37:12.460 | from this guy who presumably has more.

00:37:16.460 | Falling in love with them, becoming attached,

00:37:18.780 | that's not a feature you want.

00:37:20.180 | - Yeah, it's bad engineering.

00:37:21.980 | - Yeah, exactly, it's bad engineering.

00:37:23.820 | And so I developed an alternative hypothesis

00:37:27.860 | that I call the mate-switching hypothesis,

00:37:30.460 | which is that affairs are one way

00:37:33.940 | in which women divest themselves

00:37:38.540 | of a cost-inflicting partner

00:37:41.820 | or a partner who things aren't working out well with.

00:37:45.660 | And it's a way to either transition back

00:37:47.620 | into the mating market or to trade up in the mating market.

00:37:52.380 | And so, anyway, so these are probably

00:37:56.540 | the two leading hypotheses about why women have affairs.

00:38:00.140 | And I am putting my money on the mate-switching hypothesis.

00:38:05.140 | My esteemed colleagues are putting their money

00:38:08.140 | on the good genes hypothesis.

00:38:09.580 | But I think the evidence for the good genes hypothesis

00:38:12.940 | is starting to look shakier than initially.

00:38:17.260 | - Well, this is a heated debate.

00:38:18.540 | I mean, mate-switching sounds like a,

00:38:20.940 | so from a game theory perspective,

00:38:22.740 | from an engineering perspective,

00:38:23.860 | it seems to make a lot more sense,

00:38:25.500 | unless you put a lot of value in lifelong,

00:38:29.220 | sort of in the long-term mating,

00:38:31.200 | some kind of value in the lifelong singular relationship

00:38:37.340 | like monogamy.

00:38:39.100 | - Yeah.

00:38:40.620 | - And maybe we do, psychologically.

00:38:42.300 | Maybe there's a big evolutionary advantage to that.

00:38:45.660 | - And we do, but we also know that divorce is,

00:38:49.700 | you know, and breakups are also common

00:38:53.180 | and occur in all cultures.

00:38:54.740 | So that's--

00:38:55.580 | - Yeah, we're just not very good at this thing.

00:38:57.740 | Well, either we're not good at the mate selection,

00:39:00.300 | such that maybe we're not incorporating

00:39:07.540 | all the variables well,

00:39:09.580 | or we're just not good at monogamy, period,

00:39:13.020 | from an evolutionary perspective.

00:39:14.180 | - Well, I think there, that's--

00:39:16.740 | - Another debate?

00:39:17.780 | - No, that raises an interesting set of questions.

00:39:20.300 | So I think that, I mean, one issue is longevity.

00:39:24.540 | So, I mean, we didn't live to be 70, 80 years old

00:39:29.540 | in over 99% of human evolutionary history.

00:39:35.260 | And so we didn't necessarily evolve to be mated monogamously

00:39:40.020 | with one person for decades and decades and decades.

00:39:44.060 | But I also think that long-term peer bonding

00:39:48.340 | is a critical strategy,

00:39:49.780 | but mate switching is also a critical strategy.

00:39:53.340 | So if you have a mate, for example,

00:39:55.100 | who becomes cost-inflicting

00:39:59.060 | or becomes sufficiently debilitated

00:40:02.060 | or who suffers an injury such that,

00:40:07.020 | like in hunter-gatherer societies

00:40:08.780 | where the mate can no longer hunt,

00:40:10.860 | can no longer provide resources

00:40:12.540 | for their kids and the woman,

00:40:16.300 | this becomes a problem.

00:40:18.460 | And so I think that we have adaptations to mate switch

00:40:22.860 | and to divest ourselves from some partners

00:40:26.900 | and trade up in the mating market

00:40:29.300 | under certain conditions.

00:40:31.140 | - So, okay.

00:40:32.140 | - And those conditions will differ for men and women.

00:40:34.340 | - What are some of the cues in terms of what women want?

00:40:37.920 | You know, I go to the gym.

00:40:40.580 | It's a hotly contested debate.

00:40:43.300 | You said evolutionary psychology,

00:40:44.980 | and this is in the bro psychology forums

00:40:49.300 | that I visit multiple times a day.

00:40:51.980 | No, I'm just kidding.

00:40:52.980 | What's the most important cue of appearance for guys?

00:40:59.900 | What muscle group is the most important to work on?

00:41:02.500 | Do women care about biceps is what I'm asking.

00:41:04.980 | - In terms of physical appearance,

00:41:06.700 | a good shoulder to hip ratio,

00:41:12.820 | so relatively wide shoulders relative to hips is one.

00:41:17.820 | Women tend to prefer men who are physically fit

00:41:24.100 | and well-toned but not muscle-bound.

00:41:29.700 | So, like if you go to, I don't know,

00:41:32.020 | some of those early,

00:41:34.340 | when Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing the Mr.

00:41:38.740 | whatever it was contest,

00:41:40.540 | you see the women don't find those attractive,

00:41:43.020 | the extremely muscle-bound guys,

00:41:45.620 | but they like a guy who's physically fit,

00:41:49.300 | high shoulder to hip ratio.

00:41:51.540 | They like guys who are physically taller than they are

00:41:54.900 | and guys who are a bit above average in height.

00:41:59.460 | So, if the average is, I don't know,

00:42:04.460 | five nine, five 10 and up there for humans,

00:42:07.700 | depending on the culture,

00:42:09.180 | women prefer an inch or two taller than that.

00:42:12.360 | - So, shoulders, height, dad bod, what's that about?

00:42:20.340 | Why do you want a dad bod?

00:42:22.820 | How do I define dad bod?

00:42:27.060 | - What is a dad bod?

00:42:28.300 | - Dad bod is not muscle-bound.

00:42:30.260 | - Okay, so out of shape.

00:42:31.820 | - No, no, just a little bit.

00:42:34.180 | A little bit of a cushion for the pushing.

00:42:38.340 | I don't know what the kids call it these days,

00:42:40.820 | but just a little bit, a little bit of fat.

00:42:43.480 | So, why do they not want guys to be obsessed

00:42:46.660 | with their body?

00:42:47.500 | Is that, or is that some evolutionary thing?

00:42:49.660 | - Yeah, I think that women might interpret a guy

00:42:55.620 | who is so obsessed with his body that he's,

00:43:00.300 | they might view that as a sign of darn narcissism.

00:43:02.820 | - Yes.

00:43:04.340 | - And that's not a good trait.

00:43:06.340 | - What about cultures where large,

00:43:11.660 | sort of overweight men are valued?

00:43:13.900 | Is that, how do you explain,

00:43:16.020 | like how much can we override the evolutionary desires

00:43:18.980 | with our sort of cultural fashions of the day

00:43:23.300 | that maybe represent other desirable aspects like wealth?

00:43:27.100 | - Well, wealth is, resources have always been important,

00:43:32.020 | especially to women.

00:43:34.460 | So, is a man able to acquire resources,

00:43:38.460 | and is he willing to dispense them to her and her kids?

00:43:42.660 | So, that's always important.

00:43:44.260 | In traditional cultures, that boils down to hunting skills.

00:43:48.260 | So, if, so I asked a colleague, friend, Kim Hill,

00:43:52.940 | who's probably the world's leading expert

00:43:54.980 | on the Ache of Paraguay,

00:43:57.500 | and you ask him like what leads to high status

00:44:01.900 | in the Ache in males, hunting skills.

00:44:04.700 | That's the one thing, the big variable.

00:44:08.020 | - And that's resources.

00:44:09.500 | - And that's resources.

00:44:11.020 | Now, what's interesting about modern culture

00:44:14.580 | is we have cash economies,

00:44:16.660 | but cash economies are relatively recent.

00:44:19.620 | And historically, there's over the vast,

00:44:23.700 | 99% of human evolutionary history,

00:44:26.340 | you weren't able to stockpile resources

00:44:28.700 | in the way that you are today.

00:44:30.700 | Although there are interestingly certain ways you can do it.

00:44:35.340 | So, like you kill a large game animal, okay?

00:44:39.380 | You bring it back, you get some status points

00:44:42.020 | because you give some to your family,

00:44:44.860 | you can share it more widely with the group, et cetera.

00:44:49.600 | But it's gonna go bad, right?

00:44:52.400 | You can't just say, I'm gonna keep this carcass around

00:44:55.160 | for the next several months, okay?

00:44:57.040 | But, and I think it's a Steve Pinker

00:45:00.560 | who might've used to coin this phrase

00:45:02.160 | that they store the meat in the bodies of other people.

00:45:06.680 | And so, for example, they store it in their friends.

00:45:09.160 | So, you know, hunting success is,

00:45:13.480 | you know, it's a hit or miss kind of thing.

00:45:16.600 | So, you might come back empty handed four times out of five,

00:45:20.520 | but when you do, you share your meat with others.

00:45:23.840 | And then when, you know, and then they reciprocate

00:45:27.200 | by sharing their meat with you.

00:45:28.360 | And so, you can store resources

00:45:30.960 | in the bodies of other people,

00:45:32.760 | which is I think an interesting way to think about it.

00:45:35.240 | But that can only go so far.

00:45:36.880 | And when you have cash economies,

00:45:38.860 | you have both the ability to stockpile resources,

00:45:42.240 | but also this kind of explosion and inequality of resources.

00:45:47.240 | And that's evolutionarily recent.

00:45:50.160 | - What about, now this is the difference

00:45:52.000 | between the Huberman, the excellent Huberman Lab podcast

00:45:55.760 | that you did that people should listen to.

00:45:57.840 | He is a brilliant scientist,

00:45:59.920 | a sort of a rigorous analyst of what is true

00:46:04.920 | in the scientific community.

00:46:08.440 | Also helps you with great advice on how to live.

00:46:12.400 | Now, in contrast to that, I am a terrible,

00:46:17.400 | almost idiotic level journalist.

00:46:22.320 | So, this is what you have to deal with.

00:46:24.600 | Another thing that people talk about

00:46:26.640 | that women care about is penis size.

00:46:29.160 | Does penis size matter for women in sexual selection?

00:46:32.940 | - Well, there's controversy about that.

00:46:35.640 | - In the evolution of psychology community?

00:46:37.400 | - Well, I-- - Is there papers on penis size?

00:46:39.960 | - I wouldn't say scientific papers,

00:46:42.600 | so speculations about-- - Sure.

00:46:45.240 | So, not in nature or in science?

00:46:47.320 | - Yeah, yeah, no, nothing that I've seen there.

00:46:50.940 | I think that there's individual variability.

00:46:56.960 | So, this is something that comes up again.

00:47:00.440 | When I ask women in my classes, what do women want?

00:47:03.520 | Some will say, a large penis.

00:47:06.680 | But I think there's variability in that preference.

00:47:11.320 | And it also might depend in part on the variability

00:47:14.440 | in the woman's anatomy.

00:47:16.960 | - Do you think there's something fundamental

00:47:20.560 | in terms of evolutionary psychology, in terms of evolution?

00:47:23.680 | Or is this a quirk of culture that's current,

00:47:27.240 | that's maybe somehow connected to pornography

00:47:29.800 | or something like that?

00:47:30.640 | - Yeah, my guess is it's something

00:47:33.000 | that's perhaps a quirk of culture

00:47:35.840 | or something that is evolutionarily recent.

00:47:39.840 | But I don't know.

00:47:42.800 | I mean, it's a topic that hasn't been explored much.

00:47:45.360 | I've never done work on it.

00:47:47.760 | - Well, somebody should do a PhD,

00:47:49.880 | some archeologist should do a PhD

00:47:52.680 | on the history of human civilization

00:47:56.560 | and its valuation of penis size

00:48:01.280 | and the correlation of penis size to the value of the male.

00:48:05.020 | Okay, moving on.

00:48:07.160 | Another absurd question in terms of what men want.

00:48:10.120 | Again, definitely not a Huberman Lab podcast question.

00:48:14.940 | Why do men, let's say a large fraction of men, love boobs?

00:48:20.640 | - Well, I think that--

00:48:24.160 | - You're one of the most cited evolutionary psychologists

00:48:29.440 | and this is what you signed up for,

00:48:31.720 | these kinds of questions.

00:48:32.560 | - Questions like this, yeah.

00:48:33.840 | Well, so again, this is something

00:48:35.420 | I haven't studied directly, but scientifically.

00:48:40.420 | - Yes, yes.

00:48:41.820 | - But yeah, there's been some work on that.

00:48:44.220 | - Another cultural quirk, perhaps?

00:48:47.180 | - No, I don't think it's a cultural quirk

00:48:48.900 | because I think it's the shape that matters a lot

00:48:53.860 | because shape is gonna be a cue to fertility.

00:48:58.220 | So one of the things that humans are attracted to

00:49:03.580 | in the opposite sex is sexually dimorphic features

00:49:07.280 | and breasts are a sexually dimorphic feature.

00:49:10.500 | - What's dimorphic mean?

00:49:11.700 | - Difference in morphology between males and females.

00:49:16.700 | - Got it.

00:49:18.220 | - Diming to morphic morphology.

00:49:20.960 | And women don't develop breasts until puberty

00:49:28.540 | or post-puberty.

00:49:32.260 | And so as a sexually dimorphic characteristic,

00:49:36.020 | we tend to be attracted to that.

00:49:37.060 | Same is true, by the way, with the waist to hip ratio

00:49:39.460 | that we mentioned earlier.

00:49:41.420 | Prior to puberty, males and females

00:49:43.460 | have very similar waist to hip ratios.

00:49:45.980 | But at puberty, there's a differential hip development

00:49:50.980 | and fat deposition that creates a sexual dimorphism

00:49:55.940 | with respect to waist to hip ratio.

00:49:58.180 | And so again, men are attracted to this waist to hip ratio.

00:50:01.900 | No man consciously says that.

00:50:03.700 | They find this woman more attractive than that woman.

00:50:07.060 | They don't think, ah, she has a waist to hip ratio of .70.

00:50:10.260 | That's true.

00:50:11.100 | - That's exactly what I do, but most men, most men, yes.

00:50:14.140 | So isn't that fascinating that we just build

00:50:18.900 | these entire industries of fashion

00:50:21.100 | and what we find beautiful around these kinds of ideas?

00:50:26.100 | And we just, and then not just fashion,

00:50:30.140 | and then we build, we have sociological tensions

00:50:35.140 | about whether we should care about this kind of thing or not.

00:50:38.340 | There's battles in that space.

00:50:40.460 | It's like, they seem so simple.

00:50:44.260 | It's just the human body.

00:50:45.340 | And we wear clothes, first of all.

00:50:46.820 | That's a funny thing.

00:50:48.700 | What's the, why are we wearing clothes?

00:50:50.380 | What's the shame aspect of covering up the body?

00:50:53.660 | Is that another feature, or is that, what is that?

00:50:55.420 | - Yeah, that's an interesting question, and I don't know.

00:50:59.020 | It's just like hiding ovulation.

00:51:00.900 | Maybe that's another hiding.

00:51:03.140 | Like, maybe hiding is a great game theoretic thing

00:51:06.660 | to play with, 'cause it can give you,

00:51:08.460 | it can give the powerless more power by covering, maybe.

00:51:12.700 | - Well, I think there are a few things.

00:51:14.100 | So one is the sort of arbitrary features of fashion,

00:51:18.500 | and then the other is the aspects of fashion

00:51:21.580 | that attempt to magnify what is inherent

00:51:27.180 | in our evolved standards of beauty.

00:51:29.500 | So for example, women tend to wear things

00:51:33.300 | that accentuate their waist-hip ratio.

00:51:35.760 | So, I mean, historically, those,

00:51:40.420 | in the old days, corsets, for example,

00:51:42.220 | cinched the woman's waist.

00:51:44.420 | And you wouldn't see fashion develop in a way

00:51:50.180 | that made a woman seem old, unhealthy,

00:51:55.180 | or pockmarked signs of open sores or lesions.

00:52:00.180 | There are certain domains, design spaces,

00:52:05.340 | that you wouldn't, that no culture would develop.

00:52:08.220 | So, but there are arbitrary features,

00:52:12.340 | but sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary,

00:52:14.620 | or they're arbitrary at one level of description,

00:52:16.940 | but not at another.

00:52:18.380 | So for example, fashion tends to be linked with status,

00:52:23.380 | and that's why it constantly changes.

00:52:25.940 | The high-status people start wearing

00:52:28.540 | a certain type of clothing,

00:52:31.420 | and then when the lower-status people imitate them,

00:52:33.820 | then they have to shift to signal their status.

00:52:37.380 | And so I think the fashion and clothing

00:52:39.660 | is in part linked to status.

00:52:42.380 | - So this is not you talking, this is me.

00:52:43.980 | I just wanna make a statement, a profound statement,

00:52:47.660 | that I think yoga pants, now this is broadly speaking,

00:52:51.420 | but yoga pants is one of the greatest inventions

00:52:53.580 | in human history.

00:52:54.420 | There's fire, and yoga, and I'm just gonna leave it there.

00:52:58.260 | I'm a fan, and I have female friends

00:53:02.380 | that talk about how comfortable yoga pants are,

00:53:05.260 | which is what I'm referring to when I say

00:53:07.300 | it's one of the greatest inventions,

00:53:08.700 | because comfort in fashion is really, really important to me.

00:53:13.060 | Let me ask about sort of the sociological aspect of this.

00:53:18.180 | So I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg,

00:53:21.640 | the meta who's the CEO, founder of Facebook,

00:53:27.140 | and now meta and owns Instagram.

00:53:28.820 | - Right, I've heard of him.

00:53:29.940 | - Yeah, he's a, yeah. (laughs)

00:53:32.900 | He holds the American flag and likes the water.

00:53:37.900 | Anyway, so there's been criticisms

00:53:43.020 | of social networks and so on,

00:53:45.660 | and I just wanna ask you about the broader question here,

00:53:48.220 | that there's objectification of the human body in the media,

00:53:52.820 | and that creates standards for young women,

00:53:55.860 | for young men, perhaps, but more young women.

00:53:59.020 | You mentioned to the cruelty that women can have

00:54:02.420 | towards each other in terms of,

00:54:03.740 | well, let's, you know, cruelty is already a moral judgment.

00:54:07.740 | Just, you've made a statement about the fact

00:54:10.180 | that women seem to point out imperfections in other women.

00:54:15.580 | Do you think it's a problem in our modern society

00:54:19.860 | that we objectify each other in this way?

00:54:23.820 | Do you think this is a fundamental aspect of our biology

00:54:28.820 | that we need to suppress versus celebrate?

00:54:33.860 | Just like we might suppress our natural desire for violence

00:54:41.620 | if such exists in modern society?

00:54:44.940 | - Well, a couple thoughts on that.

00:54:46.580 | I think it is damaging,

00:54:49.540 | the fact that so many images are displayed in social media,

00:54:56.020 | and so what I would say is that there's what's called

00:55:00.340 | in the field an evolutionary mismatch.

00:55:04.140 | So we evolved in the context of small group living

00:55:07.820 | where there was made competition,

00:55:10.060 | but your competitors were a small number

00:55:12.700 | of other potential individuals,

00:55:15.020 | and so people do comparisons.

00:55:17.280 | But now what we have is this bombardment,

00:55:24.380 | bombardment of our visual system and our sexual psychology

00:55:29.380 | and our mating psychology with thousands and thousands

00:55:33.700 | of images that are not at all representative

00:55:37.460 | of who our actual competition is in the mating domain.

00:55:42.580 | And so I think that, and there's actually evidence on this

00:55:46.380 | that Baz Luhrmann actually said something like this

00:55:51.300 | in his "Sunscreen Song."

00:55:52.780 | I don't know if you ever heard that,

00:55:54.140 | but it's like a set of, it's a wonderful string of advice,

00:55:57.900 | song about advice, but he says--

00:55:59.580 | - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, sorry.

00:56:01.060 | - Yeah, he says, "Don't read beauty magazines.

00:56:04.740 | "They will only make you feel ugly."

00:56:07.500 | I think that there's truth to that,

00:56:09.540 | that is, especially with women,

00:56:11.420 | they look at all these images,

00:56:13.100 | and of course, they're photographed, they're Photoshopped,

00:56:18.100 | they're highly selected and not at all representative,

00:56:22.860 | and so women compare themselves to that.

00:56:25.380 | So I think this social comparison

00:56:27.420 | is an evolved feature of humans.

00:56:30.140 | I mean, males do it, females do it,

00:56:32.780 | but it's exacerbated in the modern environment

00:56:35.340 | in wildly evolutionarily mismatched ways.

00:56:39.140 | And so I think that it is destructive, it's harmful.

00:56:42.900 | There's evidence that it hurts women's self-esteem.

00:56:47.580 | So here's just another factoid, or fact, if you will,

00:56:52.580 | that at least in Western cultures,

00:56:55.600 | males and females have roughly the same

00:56:58.300 | overall average levels of self-esteem,

00:57:01.260 | but once puberty hits, all of a sudden,

00:57:04.820 | women's self-esteem starts to drop,

00:57:07.140 | and I think it's because when they enter, make competition,

00:57:10.260 | then they start elevating the importance

00:57:14.500 | they attach to physical appearance,

00:57:16.140 | and then as you point out, the tremendous objectification

00:57:20.820 | that saturates social media and media in general,

00:57:24.940 | it's damaging and harmful.

00:57:27.940 | I don't know how to undo it, though.

00:57:29.860 | I don't know how to design a society that undoes that.

00:57:34.060 | - Well, one of the ways we undo things,

00:57:36.660 | just like you pointed out, is we use words.

00:57:39.500 | When we manipulate society,

00:57:42.460 | we manipulate social and status hierarchies

00:57:45.220 | using our words for ill, and we can do the same for good,

00:57:49.460 | and that's why there's a lot of clickbait articles

00:57:52.780 | about Instagram leading to a lot of suffering

00:57:57.780 | amongst teenage girls and all those kinds of things.

00:58:05.880 | I'm criticizing the clickbait nature,

00:58:08.840 | not the contents of the articles,

00:58:10.840 | but in those articles, hopefully become viral

00:58:13.520 | in a way that makes us rethink

00:58:14.960 | about how we build social networks

00:58:17.720 | that kind of allow us to too easily misrepresent

00:58:21.240 | how we look when we are quote-unquote influencers

00:58:25.160 | and what mental effect it has on young people

00:58:29.600 | that look up to those influencers,

00:58:31.320 | but I guess it's not the objectification fundamentally

00:58:34.320 | that's the problem.

00:58:35.480 | It's the inaccurate, it's the fake news,

00:58:39.520 | it's the fake news, misrepresentation.

00:58:43.320 | You still objectify the male body, the female body,

00:58:48.240 | but you do so while misrepresenting the actual truth,

00:58:53.000 | and so you're moving the average,

00:58:54.840 | you're moving the standard representation

00:58:56.400 | of what a male should look like,

00:58:57.520 | what a woman should look like,

00:58:59.280 | and the dishonesty's the problem, not the objectification.

00:59:03.800 | - Here's just one other interesting empirical finding

00:59:07.200 | on that, and it has to do with another dimension

00:59:10.200 | that I think is harmful, and that's the thinness dimension.

00:59:14.040 | These are studies originally done by Paul Rosin,

00:59:19.040 | but they've been replicated, where if you ask men,

00:59:22.320 | okay, what is your ideal figure in a woman?

00:59:25.320 | And so they have these, say, nine figures

00:59:27.480 | that vary from very, very thin to average to plump.

00:59:32.240 | Men give it the midpoint.

00:59:34.120 | They say the midpoint is in relative thinness or plumpness

00:59:39.120 | is what I value, and you ask women,

00:59:41.800 | what is your ideal body type for you?

00:59:44.800 | They give it, they say thinner, but then if you ask them,

00:59:49.120 | what do you think male's ideal body type is?

00:59:52.440 | They put it in exactly the same spot

00:59:54.840 | that they put their own ideal, which is thin,

00:59:58.200 | and so there's actually an inaccurate perception

01:00:01.200 | of how thin men desire women to be,

01:00:05.520 | and I think that's partly exacerbated

01:00:08.480 | by the fashion industry, where the models

01:00:11.480 | are often real thin, and the lore is that clothes hang better

01:00:16.480 | on thin models, and then on TV, they say you gain 15 pounds

01:00:23.800 | over what you really are or whatever,

01:00:25.920 | but for whatever reason, women misperceive

01:00:28.840 | how thin men want them to be,

01:00:31.000 | and so you have, this is another huge sex difference,

01:00:34.240 | is eating disorders, anorexia, for example,

01:00:39.200 | bulimia, binging, purging, where these eating disorders

01:00:44.000 | are nine to 10 times more common in women than in men.

01:00:48.440 | - Can I just take a small tangent,

01:00:52.080 | 'cause it was such a beautiful, the Sunscreen Song,

01:00:55.480 | such a beautiful one, if I can read

01:00:57.480 | some of the words from it?

01:00:58.720 | - Yeah. - I really enjoy it.

01:01:00.200 | - Yeah, it's a great song.

01:01:01.960 | - For people, you should check it out,

01:01:03.640 | it's called Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen.

01:01:05.760 | I guess it's actually a speech to a class,

01:01:09.040 | I don't know if that's artificial or real,

01:01:10.640 | but it's a speech that gives advice,

01:01:13.320 | and it goes, "Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97,"

01:01:18.240 | I just remember it even now, those words,

01:01:20.600 | "Where's sunscreen?

01:01:22.120 | "If I could offer you only one tip for the future,

01:01:24.560 | "sunscreen would be it.

01:01:26.380 | "The long-term benefits of sunscreen

01:01:28.080 | "have been proven by scientists.

01:01:29.920 | "Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable

01:01:33.280 | "than my own meandering experience.

01:01:35.560 | "I will dispense this advice now.

01:01:38.440 | "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth.

01:01:41.280 | "Oh, nevermind, you will not understand

01:01:43.080 | "the power and beauty of your youth until they're faded.

01:01:45.900 | "But trust me, in 20 years,

01:01:48.140 | "you'll look back at the photos of yourself

01:01:50.520 | "and recall in a way that you can't grasp now

01:01:53.560 | "how much possibility laid before you

01:01:55.800 | "and how fabulous you really looked.

01:01:58.280 | "You are not as fat as you imagine.

01:02:01.420 | "Don't worry about the future.

01:02:03.100 | "Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective

01:02:06.460 | "as trying to solve an algebra equation

01:02:08.480 | "by chewing bubble gum.

01:02:10.040 | "The real troubles in your life

01:02:11.640 | "are apt to be the things

01:02:12.760 | "that never cross your worried mind.

01:02:14.960 | "The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m.

01:02:17.000 | "on some idle Tuesday.

01:02:18.360 | "Do one thing every day that scares you.

01:02:22.440 | "Saying, 'Don't be reckless with other people's hearts.

01:02:26.900 | "'Don't put up with the people

01:02:28.420 | "'who are reckless with yours.'

01:02:30.380 | "Floss.

01:02:31.820 | "Don't waste your time on jealousy.

01:02:33.920 | "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.

01:02:36.740 | "The race is long, and in the end,

01:02:38.920 | "it's only with yourself.

01:02:40.840 | "Remember compliments you receive.

01:02:42.880 | "Forget the insults.

01:02:44.560 | "If you succeed in doing this, tell me how."

01:02:47.020 | (laughing)

01:02:49.440 | Keep your old love letters.

01:02:50.760 | Throw away your old bang statements.

01:02:53.000 | Stretch.

01:02:54.300 | Don't feel guilty if you don't know

01:02:56.200 | what you want to do with your life.

01:02:58.080 | The most interesting people I know

01:03:00.240 | didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives.

01:03:03.800 | Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know

01:03:07.440 | still don't.

01:03:08.840 | For me, that's true for 50, 60, and 70-year-olds, honestly.

01:03:13.320 | Get plenty of calcium.

01:03:14.720 | Be kind to your niece.

01:03:16.280 | You'll miss them when they're gone.

01:03:18.080 | Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't.

01:03:20.280 | Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't.

01:03:22.640 | Maybe you'll divorce at 40.

01:03:24.600 | Maybe you'll dance the funky chicken

01:03:26.440 | on your 75th wedding anniversary.

01:03:28.600 | Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much

01:03:32.280 | or berate yourself either.

01:03:34.680 | Your choices are half chance.

01:03:36.720 | So are everybody else's.

01:03:38.780 | Enjoy your body.

01:03:41.280 | Use it every way you can.

01:03:43.440 | Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it.

01:03:46.560 | It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

01:03:49.080 | Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it

01:03:52.280 | but in your own living room.

01:03:54.000 | Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

01:03:56.840 | Do not read beauty magazines

01:03:58.440 | that will only make you feel ugly.

01:04:01.000 | Get to know your parents.

01:04:02.480 | You never know when they'll be gone for good.

01:04:04.960 | Be nice to your siblings.

01:04:08.040 | They're your best link to your past

01:04:10.280 | and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

01:04:13.720 | Understand that friends come and go,

01:04:16.760 | but a precious few who should hold on.

01:04:20.640 | Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle.

01:04:24.200 | For as older you get,

01:04:26.400 | the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

01:04:29.640 | Live in New York City once.

01:04:31.080 | I actually took this advice.

01:04:32.300 | This is fascinating advice.

01:04:33.560 | I remember this advice well.

01:04:36.840 | It's broadly applied.

01:04:38.600 | Live in New York City once,

01:04:40.320 | but leave before it makes you hard.

01:04:43.120 | Live in Northern California once,

01:04:45.040 | but leave before it makes you soft.

01:04:47.760 | Travel, accept certain inalienable truths.

01:04:51.460 | Prices will rise, politicians will philander,

01:04:55.240 | you too will get old.

01:04:56.960 | And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young,

01:05:00.320 | prices were reasonable, politicians were noble,

01:05:03.320 | and children respected their elders.

01:05:05.960 | Respect your elders.

01:05:07.680 | Don't expect anyone else to support you.

01:05:09.920 | Maybe you have a trust fund,

01:05:11.560 | maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse,

01:05:13.600 | but you never know when either one might run out.

01:05:18.600 | Never mess too much with your hair,

01:05:20.840 | or by the time you're 40, it will look 85.

01:05:24.200 | Be careful whose advice you buy,

01:05:26.880 | but be patient with those who supply it.

01:05:29.320 | Advice is a form of nostalgia.

01:05:31.200 | Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past

01:05:34.720 | from the disposal, wiping it off,

01:05:36.880 | painting over the ugly parts,

01:05:38.560 | and recycling it for more than it's worth.

01:05:41.240 | But trust me on the sunscreen.

01:05:43.680 | - So this is, thank you for allowing me to read it.

01:05:47.040 | It's almost sentimental for me.

01:05:48.640 | I don't know when I first heard it,

01:05:50.400 | but there's a few pieces of advice in that,

01:05:53.860 | similar to the poem "If" by Rajat Kipling,

01:05:57.740 | there's some deep truths when you step back

01:06:01.320 | and look at it all.

01:06:02.200 | And also the places where you live.

01:06:05.680 | 'Cause I lived for a time in, I guess, Northern California

01:06:11.600 | with Google and so on.

01:06:14.200 | And one of the reasons I had to leave

01:06:16.760 | is I felt I was becoming soft.

01:06:19.360 | This is my own personal experience.

01:06:22.340 | And the same is true for the cities of the East.

01:06:28.360 | They can, if you're not careful, make you hard,

01:06:31.480 | 'cause everybody's super busy and rushing around,

01:06:34.340 | and there's just a buzz to the city, which is exciting.

01:06:38.000 | It's empowering, but it can change you in ways.

01:06:41.680 | And so it's one of the reasons I'm here in Austin.

01:06:44.920 | I fell in love with the city,

01:06:46.080 | 'cause it's such a nice, balanced--

01:06:46.920 | - Yeah, it's a great move.

01:06:47.920 | And yeah, I've lived on both coasts as well,

01:06:51.440 | Boston area and then Berkeley, California.

01:06:55.600 | So I'm familiar with both.

01:06:57.840 | - How'd you end up in Austin?

01:06:59.640 | As a small side.

01:07:00.800 | - Well, I got my undergraduate degree here

01:07:04.620 | and then left for 20 years

01:07:06.520 | and migrated around.

01:07:08.800 | So went to UC Berkeley for my PhD,

01:07:12.840 | Harvard for my first job, University of Michigan.

01:07:16.240 | And then a job opened up at University of Texas

01:07:20.320 | for an evolutionary psychologist.

01:07:22.480 | And so they wanted me, fortunately.

01:07:27.480 | So I was very happy to,

01:07:28.760 | so I've always loved Austin.

01:07:30.800 | - Yeah, the love never died, it was there.

01:07:32.680 | - Yeah, yeah, it's a great town.

01:07:34.120 | I was glad that I left.

01:07:35.680 | So, and experienced, well, both coasts

01:07:38.960 | and also the Midwest,

01:07:40.360 | but happy to be back in Austin.

01:07:43.800 | - Let me ask a difficult question.

01:07:45.640 | Now we did pretty good

01:07:46.460 | with some difficult questions already,

01:07:48.000 | but there are people in this world today

01:07:51.280 | who believe that gender is purely a social construct.

01:07:55.600 | You, I think, are not one of those people.

01:07:58.160 | To you, what are the difference between men and women?

01:08:01.960 | How much of those differences are in nature

01:08:05.360 | and how much is nurture?

01:08:07.160 | - I guess if you're asking the question morphologically

01:08:11.880 | or psychologically, I assume you're asking psychologically.

01:08:15.520 | - The question is what it is.

01:08:17.320 | And the answer, sometimes the questions

01:08:20.560 | don't contain with them

01:08:23.280 | the trajectory you take with the answer, right?

01:08:25.560 | So I think I was asking both.

01:08:30.560 | And the fact that both are a thing is an interesting thing.

01:08:35.040 | - Yes.

01:08:35.880 | - So you wrote a book, textbook, I should say,

01:08:38.800 | Evolutionary Psychology, right?

01:08:41.360 | - Yes.

01:08:42.200 | - Both of those words are in the book title,

01:08:44.840 | psychology, that's the human mind.

01:08:47.280 | - Yes, yeah.

01:08:48.440 | - How much of gender, how much of sex is the human mind?

01:08:53.440 | And how much of it is the biology?

01:08:56.080 | - The way that I phrase it,

01:08:57.480 | so I don't like sort of dividing the world

01:09:02.120 | into two categories, things that are biological

01:09:05.240 | versus things that are not biological.

01:09:07.760 | So the biology is actually defined

01:09:12.520 | as the study of life and life processes.

01:09:15.400 | And so at that sort of abstract level,

01:09:17.920 | everything we do is biological,

01:09:19.960 | including culture and our capacity for culture,

01:09:23.440 | which I think is an evolved capacity that humans have.

01:09:28.760 | - When you get to the issue of sex and gender,

01:09:32.640 | I mean, one cut at your question is,

01:09:36.440 | are there universal psychological sex differences?

01:09:40.340 | And the answer to that question is, yes, there are some.

01:09:44.760 | So for example, well, and this is in one of your areas

01:09:49.360 | of specialty, engineering, one of the interesting things

01:09:54.120 | is that it's called the people's thing dimension.

01:09:59.120 | So do you want an occupation?

01:10:02.520 | You want a job that involves people, social interaction,

01:10:07.520 | or are you happy with a job that just involves things,

01:10:11.120 | mechanical objects or computer code or whatever?

01:10:15.720 | And this is one of the largest psychological sex differences

01:10:18.920 | that exists, and it's true in every culture.

01:10:21.920 | So in terms of, I don't know, magnitude of effects,

01:10:26.520 | it's an effect size of more than a standard deviation,

01:10:30.360 | difference between the means

01:10:32.600 | on this psychological sex difference.

01:10:35.200 | And so one of the interesting things is,

01:10:37.720 | so if you go to places like,

01:10:39.120 | go to the most gender egalitarian cultures in the world.

01:10:44.120 | So places like Sweden or Norway,

01:10:49.680 | which are explicitly gender egalitarian

01:10:53.520 | and are truly in many, many ways,

01:10:56.840 | but you allow people freedom of choice,

01:10:59.480 | some of these sex differences actually get larger,

01:11:02.120 | the psychological sex differences,

01:11:04.000 | and also assortment into different occupational choices.

01:11:09.000 | Now, but this is not something that I study.

01:11:12.920 | I study mating, and the sex differences,

01:11:18.160 | if you ask in what domains

01:11:21.480 | are the sex differences the largest,

01:11:24.080 | it turns out they occur

01:11:25.720 | within the domain of mating and sexuality.

01:11:28.640 | So our evolved sexual psychology,

01:11:31.320 | our evolved mating psychology

01:11:32.920 | is to some degree sexually demorphic.

01:11:36.040 | Okay, with the very important asterisk

01:11:40.160 | that we're talking about overlapping distributions.

01:11:43.760 | So there are some things that,

01:11:45.160 | so if you look at human morphology,

01:11:47.640 | we talked about breasts earlier.

01:11:50.600 | Women have evolved functional breasts

01:11:53.840 | that's functional for lactation.

01:11:56.360 | Men don't.

01:11:57.200 | So there's no amount of culture or social coercion

01:12:01.880 | can cause men to have lactating breasts.

01:12:05.840 | Psychologically, we don't see dimorphism that extreme

01:12:10.040 | where something is literally present in one sex

01:12:13.440 | and totally absent in the other.

01:12:14.920 | So there's overlap in the distributions.

01:12:17.320 | So I mentioned earlier that in the mating domain,

01:12:21.320 | men more than women on average

01:12:22.880 | prioritize physical appearance,

01:12:24.760 | physical attractiveness, relative youth.

01:12:27.560 | Women on average prioritize resources,

01:12:30.600 | resource acquisition,

01:12:32.040 | qualities that lead to resource acquisition

01:12:34.400 | like status, ambition, industriousness, and so forth.

01:12:37.760 | But there's overlap in the distributions.

01:12:39.520 | So some women place the total priority

01:12:43.480 | on how physically attractive the guy is,

01:12:45.840 | and some men view that as irrelevant.

01:12:50.520 | And so the point that I'm making

01:12:54.000 | is that there are psychological sex differences

01:12:58.480 | that make some people uncomfortable.

01:13:01.960 | But it's one of these things where I'm a scientist,

01:13:06.960 | I'm not a political advocate,

01:13:11.120 | and so I adhere to the empirical data.

01:13:14.680 | Empirical data are very strong in these domains.

01:13:17.120 | So with respect to sex differences

01:13:19.280 | in the mating domain and sexuality,

01:13:21.880 | and things we haven't even talked about

01:13:23.600 | like desire for sexual variety

01:13:26.040 | and sex differences in the whole desire

01:13:29.440 | for short-term mating, huge sex differences there.

01:13:33.960 | And these have been documented universally in all cultures.

01:13:36.680 | So, okay, now, are there things that are culture-specific

01:13:41.680 | or social-cultural overlays

01:13:46.840 | onto these fundamental psychological sex differences?

01:13:50.320 | Absolutely.

01:13:51.240 | But there's also an issue of levels of analysis,

01:13:57.560 | levels of abstraction,

01:14:00.000 | and how closely you look at the phenomenon.

01:14:02.880 | So quick analogy, language.

01:14:06.040 | So you say, well, in China, they speak Chinese.

01:14:10.280 | In Korea, they speak Korean.

01:14:12.120 | In Brazil, they speak Portuguese.

01:14:14.920 | So look how culturally infinitely variable languages are,

01:14:18.200 | which they are at that level.

01:14:20.080 | But do humans have a universal human innate grammar?

01:14:25.080 | And I think the evidence points to the answer yes to that.

01:14:29.520 | At least that's what Steve Pink or Paul Bloom

01:14:32.480 | and some others argue.

01:14:35.280 | So at one level of abstraction,

01:14:37.640 | things are infinitely culturally variable

01:14:39.920 | or at least highly culturally variable.

01:14:42.400 | At another level of abstraction, there's universality.

01:14:45.400 | So here's one example in the mating domain of this.

01:14:49.320 | So Margaret Mead, who is a famous anthropologist,

01:14:54.000 | studied the Samoan Islanders,

01:14:57.240 | and she tried to argue basically

01:14:59.680 | for the infinite malleability of things like gender

01:15:03.040 | and gender roles and so forth.

01:15:04.880 | And she said, look at this culture.

01:15:07.200 | In this culture, it's the men who paint their face,

01:15:10.600 | whereas in Western cultures,

01:15:12.920 | it's the women who wear makeup and so forth.

01:15:15.760 | Well, it turns out if you look carefully at the culture

01:15:19.320 | where men paint their face,

01:15:20.660 | they're painting war paint on their face.

01:15:23.840 | They're not putting on makeup

01:15:26.880 | to enhance their cues to youth and cues to health.

01:15:30.400 | They're putting on war paint

01:15:31.760 | to make themselves more ferocious

01:15:33.680 | or to demarcate what tribe they're in,

01:15:36.800 | what coalition they're in.

01:15:38.480 | And so at sort of one level of abstraction,

01:15:41.240 | you could say, well, there's high cultural variability

01:15:44.480 | in application of face paint,

01:15:46.780 | but on another level,

01:15:47.840 | there's really a fundamental functional difference

01:15:51.040 | in the purpose to which the paint is applied.

01:15:55.120 | - Yeah, and then you can abstract the paint away

01:16:00.240 | and fashion in general is magnify the characteristics

01:16:03.800 | that are appealing to the opposite sex.

01:16:06.240 | 'Cause war paint is probably,

01:16:07.840 | you're magnifying the characteristics

01:16:10.760 | that are appealing to the other sex.

01:16:13.720 | So ability to gain resources, maintain resources,

01:16:16.880 | status in the hierarchy, all those kinds of things.

01:16:22.040 | - Well, that's part of it,

01:16:23.800 | but I think another part has to do with,

01:16:26.280 | in that case, male coalitions.

01:16:28.440 | So we were in a intense,

01:16:31.360 | this is another unique characteristic.

01:16:33.080 | I don't know if you got into this with Richard Wrangham.

01:16:35.320 | I don't remember you talking about this,

01:16:36.920 | but he's written a lot about male coalitionary psychology

01:16:41.000 | and humans cooperate to an extraordinary degree

01:16:46.000 | in forming coalitions for the purpose

01:16:50.680 | of competing with rival coalitions.

01:16:53.160 | And so you even see this with,

01:16:55.720 | well, you see it in the sports arenas

01:16:58.080 | with team sports, where this team wears a different uniform

01:17:02.560 | than that team, they have different mascot, et cetera.

01:17:06.280 | And so part of that is male coalitionary psychology.

01:17:11.280 | - Well, so you write, again, returning to the textbook.

01:17:16.080 | Now, people should know you wrote a lot of incredible book

01:17:18.520 | that is maybe more accessible

01:17:20.280 | than the evolutionary psychology textbook, but--

01:17:22.680 | - The evolutionary psychology textbook is very accessible.

01:17:27.280 | - Yes, it is extremely accessible,

01:17:28.800 | but that's not your thing.

01:17:30.320 | And on Amazon, you can't, it's a pain.

01:17:34.520 | It's a textbook.

01:17:35.480 | It's a little bit more of a pain to purchase,

01:17:38.400 | which I did, I bought all your books.

01:17:40.600 | They're amazing.

01:17:42.120 | We'll talk about a bunch of them.

01:17:43.920 | But in terms of coalitions,

01:17:46.720 | in chapter 12 of your evolutionary psychology textbook,

01:17:49.680 | you write about status, prestige, and social dominance.

01:17:53.840 | So how do hierarchies of status and social dominance emerge

01:17:57.440 | in human society?

01:17:59.040 | And what's the value of status in sexual selection?

01:18:02.800 | We talked about cues of individual health

01:18:07.000 | and all that kind of stuff,

01:18:08.280 | but what the heck's the purpose of status?

01:18:10.080 | Why does it matter if I'm the big boss?

01:18:13.360 | - Well, it matters because status

01:18:20.360 | influences your access to resources

01:18:23.920 | and your ability to influence other people

01:18:26.520 | within your group.

01:18:28.800 | And so this is part of the reason why women

01:18:32.800 | prioritize a man's social status,

01:18:37.160 | how he is viewed in the eyes of others,

01:18:39.320 | because high-status men have access to more resources.

01:18:43.840 | It's interesting that you ask about that

01:18:47.220 | because I've just published,

01:18:50.160 | this is with Patrick Durkee,

01:18:52.000 | a former graduate student of mine.

01:18:53.640 | We published a couple papers on precisely this issue

01:18:56.400 | where we looked at what we call human status criteria.

01:19:00.320 | That is, what are the things that lead to increases

01:19:02.840 | or decreases in status?

01:19:04.500 | And we did this in 14 different cultures.

01:19:07.240 | And we found some things that are universal,

01:19:10.000 | but also some things that are sex-differentiated.

01:19:12.900 | And so universal things like people value

01:19:19.440 | trustworthiness, they value intelligence, wisdom, knowledge.

01:19:24.440 | So it's even, if you go across cultures,

01:19:29.920 | even to the small-scale cultures that we alluded to earlier,

01:19:34.920 | there are these wise people, wise men, wise women

01:19:38.940 | in the culture who have people go to for advice, for wisdom.

01:19:43.940 | And so having a wide range of knowledge

01:19:48.240 | is a universal status criterion.

01:19:51.320 | And there's some things that are sex-differentiated,

01:19:53.600 | and they often fall into the mating domain as well.

01:19:56.880 | This is where mating and status

01:19:58.620 | are interestingly related to each other

01:20:02.520 | in that successful mating increases your status,

01:20:07.520 | but having high status also gives you access

01:20:10.680 | to more desirable mates.

01:20:12.520 | And so the game gets harder and harder always.

01:20:16.920 | - So wait, so are we talking about what are the characteristics,

01:20:21.480 | what's the role of power and wealth, those kinds of things?

01:20:26.240 | So you said wisdom is universal.

01:20:28.120 | - Yeah.

01:20:28.960 | - What about wealth and power?

01:20:29.800 | - Yeah, well, I guess it depends on what you mean by power.

01:20:33.840 | So I think of power as the ability to influence--

01:20:37.600 | - A large number of people.

01:20:38.560 | - Yeah, so, and this is one of the interesting things

01:20:44.200 | about the fact that cash economies

01:20:47.040 | are evolutionarily very recent,

01:20:50.840 | in that people are like, so I guess recently,

01:20:53.960 | or it's about to happen,

01:20:55.800 | that Elon Musk is gonna buy Twitter.

01:20:59.960 | - Yeah, it's happened.

01:21:01.420 | - Has it happened already?

01:21:02.360 | - Yeah.

01:21:03.200 | - Okay, so they say that the wealthiest,

01:21:05.400 | or one of the wealthiest men on Earth

01:21:07.760 | has now purchased the most influential media platform

01:21:11.400 | on Earth.

01:21:13.720 | So obviously, you or I couldn't compete with Elon Musk

01:21:18.720 | for the purchase of Twitter.

01:21:21.720 | And so the fact that cash economies

01:21:25.840 | allow the stockpiling of unprecedented amounts of wealth

01:21:29.680 | produces these tremendous power differentials

01:21:33.920 | that didn't exist in over most

01:21:37.020 | of human evolutionary history.

01:21:38.620 | - So their wealth is power,

01:21:41.320 | but you can also be,

01:21:42.720 | power can be attained through other ways.

01:21:47.080 | - Yeah, but I would say that the interesting thing

01:21:49.840 | about wealth is that it's an infinitely fungible resource.

01:21:54.840 | So you can use it and translate it

01:21:59.960 | into many, many other things,

01:22:02.280 | like buying Twitter, or buying a big house,

01:22:07.320 | or even getting mates, or an artificial,

01:22:12.320 | I don't know if you wanna get into that at all,

01:22:16.200 | but I know they have these sex dolls,

01:22:18.680 | or virtual reality sex that some people are developing.

01:22:23.680 | If you have enough resources,

01:22:25.960 | you can purchase things like that.

01:22:27.480 | So you can translate wealth into a variety

01:22:32.360 | of other tangible things in ways

01:22:35.880 | that you couldn't ancestrally.

01:22:37.680 | - That's one really powerful thing.

01:22:40.280 | But there is still power that's correlated,

01:22:43.400 | but not intricately connected to wealth,

01:22:47.200 | which is like being leaders of nations.

01:22:49.720 | Technically, the President of the United States' salary

01:22:51.920 | is not very high.

01:22:53.680 | - Right.

01:22:54.840 | - Presidents, and then you go outside of that,

01:22:58.120 | and to the half of the world

01:22:59.440 | that's living under authoritarian regimes,

01:23:02.080 | you have dictators.

01:23:03.800 | And those are very powerful, usually men.

01:23:07.880 | And presumably, there's some value there

01:23:14.800 | in the mating selection aspect.

01:23:16.840 | - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:23:18.400 | And it's not by chance that most of them are men.

01:23:22.900 | And this is gonna sound strange,

01:23:27.760 | and hopefully not offensive to people,

01:23:29.680 | but if you ask the question,

01:23:32.720 | why is it the case that men are in positions of power

01:23:36.400 | so much more so than women?

01:23:39.360 | Well, in part, it can be traced to women's mate preferences.

01:23:43.820 | So it's one of the sex differences

01:23:45.400 | that women have, over evolutionary time,

01:23:47.960 | preferred men who had power, status, resources, et cetera.

01:23:52.960 | And what that has done is it's created selection pressure

01:23:56.480 | on men to attach a high motivational priority

01:24:00.800 | to clawing their way up the status hierarchy.

01:24:04.080 | And studies of time allocation distribution show this,

01:24:09.080 | where men, they're more willing to sacrifice their friends,

01:24:13.520 | their grandmother, their kin, or whatever,

01:24:15.920 | to claw their way up to the top of status hierarchies.

01:24:18.860 | Women, much less so.

01:24:20.400 | Women spend more effort maintaining relationships

01:24:24.560 | with their kin, with their friends,

01:24:27.040 | their friend networks, and so forth.

01:24:28.760 | So, and so in a way, you could say,

01:24:33.720 | not only are men in positions of power more than women,

01:24:38.400 | now you're blaming women for why they are.

01:24:41.320 | And it's not a matter of blame,

01:24:43.000 | but I think that what I just outlined

01:24:45.960 | is an essential part of the causal process,

01:24:49.280 | the co-evolution of women's mate preferences

01:24:52.240 | with men's motivational priorities.

01:24:54.700 | - How much do you think these mating strategies

01:24:58.080 | underlie all of human civilization?

01:25:00.400 | Like, what motivates us?

01:25:01.880 | You know, there's Becker with the denial of death.

01:25:08.840 | Why do we build castles and bridges and rockets

01:25:13.440 | and the internet and all of this?

01:25:16.320 | Is it some complex mush, or is it underneath it all,

01:25:19.480 | or are we all just trying to get laid?

01:25:22.000 | - Well, I wouldn't reduce it to something

01:25:24.280 | quite as trying to get laid.

01:25:27.040 | But I think mating is certainly a part of it.

01:25:31.740 | - I wonder how big of a part,

01:25:34.320 | 'cause so with Ernest Becker,

01:25:37.320 | the idea is that we're all trying to achieve

01:25:40.120 | an illusion of immortality.

01:25:42.400 | So we're trying to create something that outlasts us,

01:25:44.600 | and therefore we create bigger and bigger things

01:25:46.920 | in societies and bridges and architecture.

01:25:49.120 | - Yeah, well, I think what's missing

01:25:51.080 | from Becker's analysis is, you know,

01:25:54.600 | I mean, it's a fascinating book to read,

01:25:57.360 | Denial of Death, but what's missing is

01:26:00.000 | that I think that the reason that,

01:26:03.280 | and again, I think it's more men than women.

01:26:07.080 | I think there's a sex difference on this,

01:26:08.840 | that men want to build a lasting legacy

01:26:13.840 | because that will in turn affect their lineage.

01:26:20.880 | And although I do, now, Woody Allen is out of favor,

01:26:25.680 | but I remember this quote from him.

01:26:27.320 | He said, he said, he didn't want to achieve immortality

01:26:30.400 | through his work, he wanted to achieve immortality

01:26:33.440 | by not dying.

01:26:34.700 | - Oh boy, the funny ones are also deeply flawed often.

01:26:42.240 | Staying on the topic of sex differences

01:26:47.380 | in a very different way, perhaps.

01:26:49.280 | So dominance and submissiveness,

01:26:52.740 | something you've also written about.

01:26:54.240 | What's the role of that inside relationships

01:26:56.400 | about this human dynamic of dominance and submissiveness?

01:27:01.160 | Is that a feature or a bug?

01:27:06.480 | So the stable state that these dynamical systems arrive at,

01:27:10.060 | is it good to have an equality within a relationship

01:27:16.440 | or is it good to have differences in a relationship?

01:27:19.880 | - Are you talking about romantic relationships

01:27:21.600 | or just in human relationships?

01:27:23.560 | - Romantic, probably, because unless it could be generalized

01:27:26.800 | to human relationships,

01:27:28.360 | perhaps it could be generalized to human relationships.

01:27:30.720 | I wasn't thinking that, but perhaps it could be.

01:27:32.640 | But let's start with romantic, I guess one-on-one.

01:27:36.120 | - I'm personally in favor of equality on that dimension

01:27:41.120 | within romantic relationships

01:27:43.200 | and I don't talk about my personal life,

01:27:48.200 | but I've been in relationships

01:27:52.040 | and the best ones tend to be those where there's equality

01:27:56.040 | and one person does not dominate the other.

01:27:59.860 | But I guess the reason I ask you

01:28:03.720 | is in what type of relationships,

01:28:05.220 | because there's some things like coalitions

01:28:08.760 | where hierarchy is very important

01:28:12.440 | to the function of the coalition.

01:28:15.040 | So it's like if you're like a war coalition or something

01:28:19.200 | in small group warfare, you can't just have equality.

01:28:22.560 | You have to have leaders

01:28:25.480 | that are determining the battle plan, so to speak.

01:28:30.480 | And so if you're attacking a neighboring group or something

01:28:36.560 | and everyone gets an equal say,

01:28:38.320 | it's not gonna work that way.

01:28:39.680 | And so we tend to appoint as leaders those who are,

01:28:44.600 | so it's not always work out well,

01:28:47.560 | but those who are presumably wise or good, effective leaders

01:28:51.520 | and even talk about, and I'm sure you're familiar with this

01:28:54.840 | and I'm not an expert on this,

01:28:56.280 | but wartime leaders versus peacetime leaders.

01:28:59.200 | And so, again, it depends on what the goal is

01:29:03.720 | of the group that you are a part of.

01:29:07.400 | And so I think there is functionality and utility

01:29:12.360 | to a lot of our evolved psychology of status

01:29:16.960 | and dominance and submissiveness.

01:29:20.040 | So for example, and you have to look

01:29:22.640 | at the individual psychology,

01:29:24.240 | and this is actually something I'm currently studying,

01:29:27.280 | again, with Patrick Durkee,

01:29:29.060 | where one advantage of the status hierarchies

01:29:34.640 | is that you're not always battling.

01:29:36.600 | So you determine, and that's why,

01:29:41.800 | here's another sexually dimorphic aspect of our psychology,

01:29:46.520 | formidability assessment.

01:29:48.560 | So there's evidence that males engage in this,

01:29:52.760 | can I take this guy or can he take me?

01:29:56.400 | And it's like a-- - Entirety of my life, yes.

01:29:58.600 | - It's like a spontaneous assessment of formidability.

01:30:02.880 | And it also, that information is critical

01:30:07.320 | because that means who you should not challenge

01:30:11.120 | or who you can challenge with impunity.

01:30:15.000 | And there's functionality to submitting as well,

01:30:21.520 | because you defer to someone so that you don't get vanquished

01:30:26.320 | and you live to see another day.

01:30:27.920 | So I think we actually have a very rich psychology

01:30:32.000 | of status hierarchies and dominance and submissiveness.

01:30:35.640 | - So especially sort of violent conflict, yes.

01:30:40.640 | But back to relationships.

01:30:44.960 | So maybe phrased another way,

01:30:49.880 | what is masculinity, what is femininity?

01:30:53.280 | Is there value inside a relationship for differences?

01:30:58.280 | You talked about mating,

01:31:00.320 | mating strategies with the dating stage

01:31:03.800 | where you're selecting the mate,

01:31:05.480 | but also within, mating broadly defined

01:31:09.760 | as the entirety of the process.

01:31:12.040 | Should those differences be magnified and celebrated

01:31:17.040 | or sort of suppressed?

01:31:21.720 | - I've seen enough different relationships work

01:31:24.840 | and I've seen enough relationships implode

01:31:27.840 | to say there's not one size fits all on these things.

01:31:32.840 | So even with respect to masculinity and femininity,

01:31:36.480 | some reduce it psychologically to two other terms,

01:31:41.120 | which are agency and communion.

01:31:43.880 | So where agency is, are you instrumental, goal-oriented,

01:31:48.880 | get tasks done, et cetera.

01:31:51.260 | Communion is more the love and forming connections

01:31:55.240 | with other people and so forth.

01:31:57.720 | And I published a study a while back

01:32:01.000 | on what's called unmitigated agency

01:32:04.880 | and unmitigated communion.

01:32:06.760 | So there are like good and bad aspects

01:32:09.640 | of agency and communion.

01:32:11.680 | - So there's toxic, as they say, masculinity,

01:32:15.440 | toxic femininity, you can just rephrase that saying

01:32:18.900 | there could be toxic agency and toxic communion.

01:32:21.400 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:32:22.240 | And so some elements of masculinity,

01:32:27.240 | the unmitigated masculinity is, I think, terrible.

01:32:32.200 | I was actually walking around downtown Austin earlier today

01:32:36.040 | and I'll just give you this example.

01:32:37.560 | And this guy was, I guess, stuck

01:32:42.560 | and wanted the car ahead of him to move.

01:32:45.200 | And all of a sudden he screamed out of his,

01:32:49.080 | move your fucking car!

01:32:50.960 | And then jumped out of his car and to a person,

01:32:55.920 | to me, that's toxic masculinity, if you will.

01:33:00.880 | We don't need that.

01:33:02.060 | - Yeah, so, and by the way,

01:33:05.280 | as somebody who worked with cars quite a long time

01:33:08.080 | in terms of human interaction with semi-autonomous vehicles,

01:33:10.740 | it's so fascinating how the car and traffic

01:33:15.440 | brings out the worst in human nature, in a sense,

01:33:20.480 | or maybe to rephrase that,

01:33:22.560 | it maybe challenges you to explore something that,

01:33:29.160 | in terms of temper, in terms of anger,

01:33:31.120 | in terms of anxiety that you have been bottling it up.

01:33:35.360 | There's something where the car is like a vessel

01:33:38.800 | for psychological experiment of how much stress

01:33:41.520 | you can take.

01:33:42.440 | And some people, that stress is like heating,

01:33:45.960 | it's making the water boil.

01:33:48.360 | And it's fascinating to see what that results in.

01:33:50.560 | I think if you are the kind of person

01:33:53.040 | that explodes emotionally in traffic,

01:33:56.720 | that means there's deeper issues to sort of confront.

01:33:59.680 | And it seems like the traffic and the car

01:34:03.520 | is a place where you get to confront the shadow,

01:34:08.520 | Carl Jung's shadow.

01:34:10.360 | There's something deep within that that we don't often fish.

01:34:13.200 | We're alone with ourselves

01:34:14.680 | and we get to see who we truly are.

01:34:17.660 | - Yeah, well, yeah, it can bring out road rage.

01:34:22.440 | And also there's this, I don't know,

01:34:25.800 | when you're in the vehicle,

01:34:27.640 | you have this shell around you.

01:34:28.920 | And so there's this feeling that you are protected from.

01:34:32.320 | - Yes, so you could be yourself,

01:34:34.720 | you could be your true self in this moment.

01:34:37.000 | And sometimes that true self in this moment

01:34:39.640 | is an angry, screaming person,

01:34:41.480 | which means you have to introspect that shadow,

01:34:46.960 | shine a light.

01:34:47.960 | Let me ask you about something that's ongoing currently.

01:34:52.020 | It'd be fascinating to get your opinion on.

01:34:54.140 | So something I've been watching,

01:34:58.020 | some of the world has been watching,

01:34:59.940 | is the defamation trial brought by Johnny Depp

01:35:03.460 | against Amber Heard.

01:35:05.180 | Have you gotten a chance to watch any of it?

01:35:07.060 | - I haven't watched it, but I've read some reports of it.

01:35:10.420 | - What's your analysis on this particular dynamic?

01:35:16.380 | We talked about toxicity

01:35:18.340 | in the space of agency and communion.

01:35:20.620 | What do you make of this relationship

01:35:25.540 | that's presented to the world in its raw form?

01:35:29.060 | - You know, I don't have strong opinions on it.

01:35:31.340 | I think in this stage in the trial,

01:35:33.300 | we've heard from him primarily.

01:35:35.940 | - We have not, and we should say,

01:35:37.580 | for people listening,

01:35:38.420 | in case this is published a little bit later,

01:35:40.500 | we have not heard from Amber Heard.

01:35:43.700 | - Right, not heard from Heard.

01:35:45.780 | We've heard from Heard.

01:35:46.820 | We're doing that.

01:35:47.660 | That's going to be happening this week.

01:35:49.540 | - I don't know.

01:35:50.620 | I think that I've seen,

01:35:54.300 | and this is another topic that I have studied,

01:35:56.620 | is intima partner violence

01:35:58.660 | and some of the nastier stuff

01:36:01.860 | that goes on within relationships.

01:36:03.640 | And I think that when this nasty stuff happens,

01:36:08.500 | sometimes it's asymmetrical,

01:36:11.460 | but sometimes it's symmetrical

01:36:12.980 | in the sense that they get into these downward spirals

01:36:16.140 | where one is insulting the other,

01:36:18.340 | or even with physical violence,

01:36:20.100 | one starts pushing the other,

01:36:21.820 | shoving the other, hitting the other,

01:36:23.180 | and then the other hits back.

01:36:24.820 | And so you get into these cycles.

01:36:27.900 | And so coming at one point in time,

01:36:32.900 | in this case of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard,

01:36:36.000 | years later and trying to disentangle

01:36:41.120 | what actually went on in their relationship,

01:36:43.780 | I don't feel qualified even to do that.

01:36:48.260 | - Well, it's fascinating to see.

01:36:49.300 | So first, I mean, I have a lot of opinions,

01:36:52.740 | particularly because I'm just a fan of Johnny Depp

01:36:55.740 | as a person and a fan of Johnny Depp, the actor,

01:37:01.920 | and the kind of characters he created.

01:37:03.660 | The person, because maybe this is fiction,

01:37:06.860 | maybe this is reality, but they tend to rhyme.

01:37:10.340 | And mirror each other,

01:37:12.000 | but his fascination with Hunter S. Thompson,

01:37:15.660 | and then some aspect of him taking on

01:37:17.600 | the Hunter S. Thompson personality,

01:37:19.560 | where there's this layers upon layers of wit and humor,

01:37:22.940 | and also anxiety and darkness with the drug use

01:37:27.840 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:37:28.680 | So it's very human, very real person.

01:37:31.360 | And so you get to,

01:37:32.440 | one of the beautiful things about this trial

01:37:34.080 | is you get to basically have a long-form podcast.

01:37:38.720 | And you get to reveal the complexity of this human,

01:37:40.900 | the humor under pressure, under stress,

01:37:45.900 | but also just the rawness of love,

01:37:48.980 | the things that love makes you do, or whatever that is.

01:37:52.180 | Whatever the things that keeps us in relationships

01:37:56.540 | that are toxic in that turmoil,

01:38:00.200 | the hope, the self-delusion,

01:38:06.500 | the push and pull of longing and fights,

01:38:11.500 | the ups and downs, whatever the--

01:38:16.180 | - Yeah, the rollercoaster. - The rollercoaster.

01:38:18.420 | - The make-up, sex. - Yeah, exactly.

01:38:20.420 | - You know, yeah.

01:38:21.940 | - And the questions arise whether that's a feature or a bug.

01:38:24.900 | Like, why are we drawn to that?

01:38:27.060 | You mentioned inmate selection,

01:38:29.020 | for long-term mate selection,

01:38:30.580 | I think you said women, but I think maybe both

01:38:35.020 | don't want a kind of,

01:38:37.700 | you had scientific and eloquent words to use,

01:38:40.420 | but basically crazy people.

01:38:42.540 | You want somebody who's stable.

01:38:44.740 | - Emotionally unstable, yeah.

01:38:46.340 | - But here it seems like maybe we're drawn to that still,

01:38:53.260 | like flies to the light.

01:38:54.660 | - Right, well, it can be addictive,

01:38:56.980 | but it's not good for long-term relationships.

01:39:00.540 | I mean, that characteristic,

01:39:02.380 | and there is a stable personality characteristic.

01:39:05.660 | It goes under different names, anxiety, neuroticism,

01:39:09.020 | emotional lability, et cetera,

01:39:11.820 | but that's the single personality characteristic

01:39:14.980 | that is most predictive of breakups and divorces.

01:39:18.300 | And in studies that I've done,

01:39:21.760 | predictive of conflict in couples,

01:39:24.580 | people who are emotionally unstable,

01:39:27.060 | they just get into a lot of conflict with their partner.

01:39:29.980 | They create havoc.

01:39:32.120 | Now, that can be exciting,

01:39:36.600 | but bad for long-term happiness.

01:39:41.060 | - They seek conflict in order to attain intimacy.

01:39:46.060 | So conflict creates attention.

01:39:50.020 | - Yeah.

01:39:50.860 | - If you take intimacy broadly, it's intimate.

01:39:58.820 | 'Cause you're like raw, fragile, you're right there.

01:40:02.860 | - Yeah, well, and I mean, there's one hypothesis

01:40:06.780 | that was put forward by an Israeli biologist

01:40:10.740 | named Amos Zahavi called the testing of a bond.

01:40:15.740 | And so he asked the question,

01:40:18.100 | like why do people inflict costs on their partner?

01:40:20.700 | Even like kissing, you're introducing,

01:40:25.140 | it's a disease vector.

01:40:26.540 | Why do people do these weird things, inflicting costs,

01:40:31.460 | or emotional liability as a way of inflicting costs?

01:40:35.180 | And what he argues is it's the testing of a bond.

01:40:38.620 | If the person's willing to tolerate this level of stress,

01:40:43.260 | this level of cost imposition,

01:40:45.580 | then that means they must be very committed to me.

01:40:48.260 | And so, and I think that's something people do

01:40:50.660 | in romantic relationships,

01:40:52.880 | is they do test the strength of the bond.

01:40:55.460 | They test the commitment of the person.

01:40:59.100 | And I think that's a feature, not a bug,

01:41:02.700 | in the sense that,

01:41:04.540 | especially in the early stages of love, romantic love,

01:41:09.860 | we tend to overly romanticize and idealize our partner.

01:41:14.500 | So when there's an absence of evidence,

01:41:16.660 | we impute positive values.

01:41:19.780 | And this is one of my recommendations

01:41:23.700 | to friends that I know is,

01:41:26.500 | if you're really considering a good long-term commitment

01:41:29.860 | to this person, go on vacation with them.

01:41:32.420 | Ideally to a foreign country

01:41:35.820 | where both of you are unfamiliar.

01:41:37.580 | - Oh, I love it.

01:41:38.420 | Road trip or something like that.

01:41:39.460 | - Yeah, so where you experience unexpected things,

01:41:43.020 | stresses, you get a flat tire or whatever,

01:41:47.060 | you encounter, and you see how the person deals with stress,

01:41:51.540 | and you see how you deal with each other under stress.

01:41:55.180 | And I think that that's,

01:41:56.600 | unless you have put stress tests on relationships,

01:42:01.140 | you really don't know where things stand.

01:42:03.140 | - Yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it.

01:42:04.820 | I'm a huge fan of that, like road trip.

01:42:06.700 | And not just late in a relationship, like day one.

01:42:11.300 | - Yeah. (laughs)

01:42:12.340 | - Road trip, not day one, day negative one,

01:42:15.040 | before it even happens, just see, stress test.

01:42:17.720 | 'Cause it makes everybody better.

01:42:20.020 | It creates intimacy, or it creates,

01:42:22.220 | it creates or it destroys.

01:42:24.740 | But, you know, on the Johnny,

01:42:28.460 | so they also, they both suffered childhood abuse.

01:42:32.260 | One of the things that I took away from the trial,

01:42:35.260 | for me, it was just educational.

01:42:38.140 | I don't get to see inside, as most of us maybe don't,

01:42:43.140 | like toxic relationships or fights and so on.

01:42:46.420 | A lot of things that people maybe do inside of relationships

01:42:49.340 | and we don't get to see it presented in such a raw way.

01:42:52.820 | So, one of the things I learned is that,

01:42:56.340 | you know, in terms of partner violence,

01:43:00.900 | a woman too, can be violent.

01:43:03.540 | - Yeah, absolutely.

01:43:05.100 | - That to me, so emotionally and physically violent,

01:43:08.700 | that, I almost don't want to, you know,

01:43:13.700 | Amber Heard, I mean, there's no limit

01:43:18.380 | to my dislike for that person in particular.

01:43:21.280 | Because clearly, to me at least, I stand with Johnny Depp.

01:43:27.120 | To me, that guy is full of love.

01:43:29.660 | And, but full of demons because he's drawn

01:43:33.220 | to whatever the chaos that's created there.

01:43:35.680 | But also, it's just an education for me that,

01:43:39.060 | I tend to associate sort of men with violence

01:43:42.780 | and toxicity and destruction inside relationships.

01:43:46.980 | But it was interesting to see that women too

01:43:50.260 | can be like directly violent.

01:43:53.020 | - Yeah.

01:43:53.860 | - And men too, which was also surprising to me,

01:43:58.180 | have the capacity to stay in such a relationship

01:44:02.260 | and to not walk away.

01:44:03.820 | Which is what I thought is my,

01:44:05.260 | in terms of toxic violent relationships,

01:44:07.220 | I thought there's a male figure who will do emotional

01:44:11.060 | and physical, mostly physical violence

01:44:13.740 | and then kind of manipulate the mind of the female

01:44:18.140 | to stay in the relationship.

01:44:19.500 | But that dynamic goes, can go both ways.

01:44:22.100 | - Yeah, it does go both ways.

01:44:24.020 | And I think even the emotional abuse

01:44:28.420 | is sometimes even worse than the physical abuse.

01:44:31.660 | I mean, you see that in studies of,

01:44:34.500 | even like childhood abuse,

01:44:36.220 | where it's the emotional abuse that is the most damaging.

01:44:40.980 | What about the role of jealousy?

01:44:43.700 | Something you also written about in a relationship.

01:44:47.080 | Is that a feature or a bug?

01:44:51.380 | You started to speak about it,

01:44:53.060 | but is it good to be jealous of your partner

01:44:57.420 | inside of a relationship?

01:44:59.380 | How does it go wrong?

01:45:01.020 | The pros and cons.

01:45:03.500 | - So I've written a whole book on this

01:45:06.020 | called "The Dangerous Passion."

01:45:08.700 | Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Sex and Love.

01:45:11.420 | And I think that one cut at your question

01:45:17.420 | is that a moderate, so first of all,

01:45:21.020 | I think it's a feature, not a bug in most cases.

01:45:24.180 | So in the sense that you have to have an adaptation

01:45:29.180 | that is sensitive to threats to a valued relationship.

01:45:34.820 | Because, and I think I alluded to this earlier,

01:45:38.660 | that just because you're in a relationship

01:45:41.460 | and you're in a relationship with a desirable partner,

01:45:43.940 | doesn't mean that you've finished solving the problems

01:45:48.340 | of mating that you need to solve.

01:45:50.220 | Because there are threats from the outside.

01:45:52.740 | So mate poachers, people who try to lure your partner away

01:45:56.940 | for either a sexual encounter

01:45:58.700 | or a more committed romantic relationship.

01:46:02.380 | And then there's also dissatisfaction

01:46:04.340 | within the relationship.

01:46:05.940 | So your partner might become tempted

01:46:08.580 | to be sexually unfaithful or romantically unfaithful

01:46:12.100 | or emotionally unfaithful.

01:46:13.940 | And so we need humans with the evolution

01:46:18.140 | of long-term pair bonding,

01:46:19.900 | we need adaptations to guard the relationship

01:46:24.220 | and be sensitive to threats to the relationship.

01:46:28.020 | And I think jealousy is one of those.

01:46:29.740 | I think it's a key one.

01:46:31.900 | And now that I think that there are a variety

01:46:36.900 | of benefits to it, but also a variety of costs

01:46:41.940 | or downsides to jealousy.

01:46:43.380 | Because we know that jealousy, male sexual jealousy

01:46:46.980 | is the leading cause of spousal abuse

01:46:49.900 | and spousal violence, physical violence,

01:46:52.780 | probably emotional violence as well,

01:46:54.740 | or psychological violence.

01:46:57.300 | And so that's why I call it the dangerous passion.

01:46:59.700 | It's a necessary emotion,

01:47:02.420 | but it is also a dangerous emotion.

01:47:05.420 | Leads to homicide.

01:47:07.620 | You know, leads to...

01:47:10.260 | And I've studied also homicidal ideation,

01:47:14.180 | which intersects with this topic

01:47:16.420 | in that men, sometimes women to a lesser degree,

01:47:21.300 | develop homicidal ideation about people

01:47:23.940 | who are trying to poach their mates

01:47:25.500 | or who do poach their mates,

01:47:28.300 | successfully poach their mates.

01:47:30.300 | So what jealousy does is it alerts you

01:47:32.740 | to a threat to the relationship,

01:47:35.940 | and it motivates checking out the source of the threat.

01:47:39.740 | How threatening is this?

01:47:41.420 | So people tend to increase vigilance

01:47:44.500 | of their partner in the modern world

01:47:46.580 | and includes hacking into their cell phone or computer,

01:47:50.380 | monitoring them, sometimes stalking them.

01:47:57.220 | But also can include positive things.

01:48:00.740 | So it might be that...

01:48:02.580 | So one trigger of jealousy

01:48:04.020 | is a direct threat to the relationship.

01:48:06.660 | But there's another more subtle trigger of jealousy,

01:48:10.340 | which is a mate value discrepancy.

01:48:13.100 | So usually when people mate,

01:48:16.340 | they assort or pair up on overall mate value.

01:48:19.540 | So in the American 10-point scale,

01:48:22.940 | the eights tend to pair up with the eights,

01:48:24.740 | the sixes with the sixes,

01:48:26.540 | the tens with the tens, and the ones with the ones.

01:48:28.380 | - American, is there other scales?

01:48:30.660 | I wonder if the numerical systems,

01:48:33.540 | well, there's a binary.

01:48:34.660 | I just call it binary, zero, one.

01:48:37.260 | Sorry, go ahead.

01:48:39.140 | The eights pairs with the eights, sevens.

01:48:40.860 | - Yeah, yeah, so in general,

01:48:42.460 | but there are errors in mate selection.

01:48:44.820 | You kind of alluded to that issue earlier

01:48:47.380 | that sometimes people make errors in mate selection,

01:48:50.380 | which they do.

01:48:51.220 | So sometimes you think this person

01:48:52.980 | is well-matched on mate value, but they're not.

01:48:56.580 | But then things change.

01:48:58.140 | So let's say they're the same,

01:49:01.460 | you have two sixes,

01:49:02.700 | and then all of a sudden the woman's career takes off.

01:49:05.620 | All of a sudden she's getting promotion,

01:49:09.340 | she's acquiring wealth,

01:49:11.860 | she's attracting men who are of a different mate value

01:49:16.860 | than she previously did.

01:49:18.580 | Well, that triggers jealousy in the guy.

01:49:20.740 | Even if she swears she's gonna be totally loyal

01:49:23.500 | and she has no signs of leaving or no signs of infidelity,

01:49:27.020 | a mate value discrepancy is gonna trigger jealousy.

01:49:30.140 | Now, what can it do?

01:49:31.620 | Well, it can do, in the broadest sense,

01:49:34.900 | people can do two classes of things.

01:49:36.980 | They can do cost-inflicting things

01:49:38.780 | or benefit-providing things.

01:49:41.020 | So the man in that situation might say,

01:49:44.140 | "Okay, I need to devote more attention to my partner.

01:49:47.100 | "I need to up my game

01:49:48.820 | "when it comes to resource acquisition.

01:49:50.700 | "I need to lavish more attention and gifts on her."

01:49:55.700 | And so there's a whole suite of benefit-provisioning things

01:49:59.580 | that can help to reduce that mate value discrepancy.

01:50:02.760 | And then there's also cost-inflicting things.

01:50:07.020 | And humans, unfortunately, do both sets of things.

01:50:11.660 | - Yeah, there's also this, maybe that's love.

01:50:16.540 | I notice the people I especially love

01:50:21.540 | or have a connection to romantically or otherwise,

01:50:25.140 | there's a feeling like I don't deserve you.

01:50:27.360 | So with friends, with so on,

01:50:30.700 | like, I mean, I tend to think that about almost everything,

01:50:34.460 | which is why it's a strong signal

01:50:35.740 | when I don't feel it that way,

01:50:37.580 | which is like, I can't, how lucky am I to have this?

01:50:40.780 | And that's a weird illusion of inflation of value

01:50:46.460 | or something.

01:50:47.300 | I think that the positive effect of that

01:50:50.540 | is it motivates me to be better,

01:50:54.180 | I guess on this one to 10 scale, to be higher.

01:50:57.460 | And you sort of kind of have to,

01:50:59.740 | it's a nice feature that your mind sees others

01:51:04.580 | that you have affection towards as higher value,

01:51:07.740 | and it forces you to have that.

01:51:10.540 | I'm a person that experiences jealousy,

01:51:12.660 | and that forces me to be better.

01:51:15.100 | I get my shit together.

01:51:16.300 | - Yeah, well, and I think that

01:51:18.060 | sometimes the best relationships

01:51:21.220 | are when both people feel lucky to be with the other person.

01:51:25.620 | - Yes, exactly, it's balanced that way.

01:51:27.900 | And then that's when you, in terms of jobs,

01:51:30.300 | in terms of going to the gym, all those kinds of things.

01:51:33.100 | And yeah, so a little bit of jealousy.

01:51:36.420 | I have discussion with those people.

01:51:37.700 | I always wonder, there's people in relationships

01:51:40.620 | where like, no, no, they never experienced jealousy.

01:51:44.460 | I wonder what that's like,

01:51:45.380 | 'cause they're very successful relationships,

01:51:47.540 | and I always wonder, I'm currently single,

01:51:50.660 | so I always doubt that I know what the hell I'm doing at all.

01:51:54.100 | But I'm definitely somebody that experiences jealousy

01:51:56.620 | and kind of enjoys jealousy, like a little bit.

01:52:00.740 | I like missing, to me that's like,

01:52:03.620 | you're missing the other person.

01:52:05.340 | - Yeah, well-- - Or longing

01:52:06.580 | for the other person.

01:52:07.420 | - And here's another interesting wrinkle

01:52:10.340 | that I also talk about in the book is,

01:52:13.100 | sometimes people intentionally evoke jealousy

01:52:16.540 | in their partner.

01:52:17.600 | And I think that's also a kind of testing of a bond

01:52:23.180 | kind of issue.

01:52:24.460 | So, and especially women, but I think both sexes

01:52:29.100 | interpret a total absence of jealousy

01:52:32.420 | as a sign that their partner's not sufficiently committed

01:52:35.220 | to them or sufficiently in love with them.

01:52:37.860 | So if you like to say, I don't know,

01:52:39.820 | if you go to a party with your partner

01:52:42.340 | and then you leave the room for some reason,

01:52:45.100 | you come back and your partner is passionately kissing

01:52:47.540 | someone else and doesn't bother you at all,

01:52:50.200 | that might be a cue to the partner

01:52:52.660 | that maybe you're not very in love with that person

01:52:55.700 | or not very committed to them.

01:52:57.980 | And so-- - So it's a good way to,

01:53:00.900 | it's a good way to test.

01:53:01.980 | That said, I mean, I love the term mate poaching,

01:53:04.340 | by the way.

01:53:05.260 | I believe here in Texas, mate poaching is officially illegal

01:53:08.140 | so I'm allowed to, one of my favorite songs by Hendrix

01:53:11.100 | is "Hey Joe."

01:53:12.160 | Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

01:53:16.380 | And yeah, I actually always wanted to play that song

01:53:19.740 | but I get, I start to think about guns and so on.

01:53:24.180 | I think it's supposed to capture a feeling.

01:53:27.340 | It's not actual violence.

01:53:28.620 | It's saying, I'm gonna shoot my old lady.

01:53:30.620 | I caught her messing around with another man.

01:53:33.380 | That's a blues type of feeling, like of anger,

01:53:40.180 | I guess for mate poaching, for mate switching

01:53:43.500 | performed by the partner and then the frustration

01:53:46.940 | and the anger that's resulting.

01:53:48.740 | I always wondered why the violence

01:53:51.780 | is directed towards the partner

01:53:54.440 | versus the person who did the other male.

01:53:58.140 | - It tends to be evenly split.

01:54:00.520 | So sometimes, and that's, I mean, men especially,

01:54:05.520 | when someone poaches on their mate,

01:54:07.900 | they have homicidal fantasies.

01:54:10.580 | - Towards which, equally split?

01:54:13.300 | - Towards the mate poacher, yeah, but equally split.

01:54:16.260 | So it's, I think the non-lethal violence

01:54:21.260 | tends to be more directed toward the mate

01:54:26.140 | because it's, and this is a horrible thing

01:54:30.700 | of male sexual psychology,

01:54:32.500 | but I think part of the violence is functional

01:54:35.280 | in the sense that it's designed to keep a mate

01:54:38.780 | and prevent her from engaging in anything

01:54:41.460 | with other potential mate poachers.

01:54:45.220 | But people do.

01:54:49.160 | So even, it goes back to the French law

01:54:54.060 | where they had the so-called crime of passion.

01:54:57.380 | So if a husband walked in and found his wife

01:55:01.540 | having sex with some other guy in bed and shot him,

01:55:05.360 | that was viewed as a crime of passion.

01:55:06.880 | It's still not legal, but you kind of get a discount for it.

01:55:11.580 | Whereas if he goes home, thinks about it for a while,

01:55:14.620 | then gets the gun and comes back,

01:55:15.880 | then that's premeditated murder.

01:55:17.800 | - Yeah, see, to me, I guess everybody's different.

01:55:21.080 | To me, I have zero anger towards the partner

01:55:24.560 | in that situation, to me, 'cause that's definitive proof

01:55:27.880 | of the soliloquy.

01:55:29.840 | So what's the function of the anger there?

01:55:32.760 | To me, all of my anger is towards the guy, the poacher.

01:55:38.580 | Because some of it has to do probably

01:55:44.140 | with the status establishing.

01:55:45.700 | What was the term you used?

01:55:48.220 | Formidability?

01:55:51.140 | - Yeah, formidability assessment.

01:55:52.700 | - Assessment.

01:55:53.540 | And I'm like, wait, wait, wait,

01:55:54.380 | did you just say you're more formidable than me

01:55:57.460 | in this situation?

01:55:58.380 | I wanna reestablish, at least in my own mind,

01:56:00.640 | the formidability.

01:56:01.800 | And that seems to be, I guess we're all different,

01:56:05.680 | but maybe 'cause I roll around with guys a lot,

01:56:07.920 | like grapple and wrestling, all that kind of stuff.

01:56:10.120 | To me, to establish status is competing with other males,

01:56:13.040 | not with the female.

01:56:14.200 | 'Cause that's a break of loyalty.

01:56:16.140 | What's the point of anger at this point?

01:56:19.440 | That's just betrayal.

01:56:20.680 | - Well, except that a lot of the mate poaching

01:56:25.040 | is discovered, or cues to mate poaching

01:56:28.620 | are discovered before the consummation of the act.

01:56:32.300 | So it might be just--

01:56:33.140 | - Oh, like the emotional cheating leading up to it.

01:56:35.660 | - Or mild flirtation, things like that.

01:56:40.620 | And so the violence is designed to head off the threat

01:56:45.620 | before it becomes real.

01:56:50.240 | - Boy, aren't human relations,

01:56:52.220 | especially romantic ones, complicated?

01:56:54.480 | - Very.

01:56:55.320 | But that's what makes them so fascinating to study.

01:56:59.300 | - Yes, exactly, from a science perspective,

01:57:01.740 | and to study from within,

01:57:03.100 | like Richard Ranham with the chimps,

01:57:06.980 | be in it.

01:57:11.140 | Study from the N of one perspective.

01:57:13.460 | What do you make of polyamory?

01:57:15.360 | So what the heck is, what do you make of marriage?

01:57:18.900 | What are your thoughts about marriage?

01:57:20.380 | What are your thoughts about lifelong monogamy?

01:57:22.700 | What's your thoughts about polyamory,

01:57:25.600 | given that we've been talking about ideas

01:57:27.360 | of mate switching and poaching and all that kind of stuff?

01:57:29.800 | - Yeah, I think that we evolved to be,

01:57:32.400 | I prefer the term pair-bonded species.

01:57:36.400 | So pair-bonding is one of the strategies.

01:57:41.080 | Pair-bonded long-term mating is one of the strategies.

01:57:44.300 | But that doesn't necessarily mean for decades and decades

01:57:47.520 | and our lifelong, 'cause we often pair-bond serially.

01:57:50.760 | So we get into a relationship that might last a year

01:57:53.820 | or five years and then break up

01:57:55.900 | and then form another relationship.

01:57:57.780 | So we engage in serial mating.

01:57:59.640 | We engage in infidelity.

01:58:02.900 | We engage in some short-term mating.

01:58:07.900 | And so we have what I describe

01:58:10.620 | as a menu of mating strategies.

01:58:12.860 | And which particular mating strategy an individual adopts

01:58:17.200 | depends on a wide variety of factors.

01:58:19.600 | I think some are just kind of personal proclivities.

01:58:22.920 | Some depend on your mate value.

01:58:24.580 | So if you are an eight, a nine, or a 10,

01:58:27.300 | you have more options

01:58:29.340 | for what mating strategy you wanna pursue.

01:58:32.480 | If you're a one or a two,

01:58:33.860 | you're not gonna be able to be polyamorous

01:58:37.360 | in all likelihood.

01:58:38.660 | There's a lot of attention to polyamory now.

01:58:42.240 | And it's unclear whether there's an increase in it

01:58:47.480 | or whether people are just talking about it more.

01:58:50.200 | It is the case, and I know several people

01:58:55.500 | who are in polyamorous relationships

01:58:57.340 | and I've talked with them in detail about them.

01:59:01.220 | And jealousy is often a factor in that.

01:59:04.440 | And they describe it as kind of like an emotion

01:59:08.900 | that has to be somehow tamed or dealt with in some way.

01:59:13.020 | And so in polyamory,

01:59:14.900 | there are many different types of polyamory.

01:59:17.920 | So in like one type, for example,

01:59:20.040 | is you have a primary love partner

01:59:22.760 | and then some others on the side that are permitted,

01:59:26.860 | usually within in consensual terms,

01:59:29.720 | within an explicit contract

01:59:33.680 | that the primary partners work out.

01:59:35.540 | So it's okay if you,

01:59:37.480 | I know as one couple,

01:59:40.080 | it's okay if you do it outside the city limits

01:59:44.080 | of Los Angeles, but not within.

01:59:47.000 | Some say it's okay for Thursday,

01:59:49.160 | but I want the weekend, Friday and Saturday nights to me.

01:59:52.880 | It's okay if there's sexual involvement,

01:59:57.920 | but no emotional involvement.

01:59:59.940 | So there are different strategies that people work out.

02:00:03.680 | And some of them are designed to try to keep jealousy at bay.

02:00:07.880 | So I think it's an evolved emotion

02:00:09.640 | that is a natural emotion that people experience.

02:00:14.220 | Now, interestingly, there's a,

02:00:16.540 | while we're on this topic,

02:00:18.000 | there's a sex difference therein,

02:00:20.060 | namely if you contrast sexual jealousy

02:00:23.820 | with emotional jealousy

02:00:25.740 | or sexual infidelity with emotional infidelity.

02:00:29.580 | And so we, in one set of studies,

02:00:32.760 | I put my participants,

02:00:35.020 | or we used to call them subjects,

02:00:37.400 | into this, what I call the Sophie's choice

02:00:39.780 | of the jealousy dilemmas.

02:00:41.780 | Where I said, imagine your partner

02:00:43.580 | became interested in someone else,

02:00:45.780 | and you discover that they have had

02:00:48.780 | passionate sexual intercourse with this person,

02:00:51.580 | and they've gotten emotionally involved with them,

02:00:55.460 | they've fallen in love with them.

02:00:57.460 | Which aspect of the infidelity upsets you more?

02:01:01.500 | And when you, and that's why I call it the Sophie's choice,

02:01:05.020 | both terrible choices, right?

02:01:06.980 | - Yeah.

02:01:08.040 | - But men much more likely to say

02:01:10.100 | the sexual infidelity is what upsets me.

02:01:13.260 | More women, it's like, why are you even asking me?

02:01:15.540 | It's a no-brainer.

02:01:16.420 | 85% of the women say the emotional infidelity

02:01:19.220 | is what bothers them more.

02:01:21.100 | Former student of mine, Barry Cooley,

02:01:23.420 | did a really interesting study of analysis

02:01:26.340 | of this reality show called Cheaters.

02:01:28.740 | I've actually never seen it,

02:01:29.860 | but where if you suspect your partner of cheating,

02:01:35.180 | then a detective from the TV team will follow the person,

02:01:39.700 | and then they'll call up and say,

02:01:42.180 | we've just found your husband here in the No-Tell Motel,

02:01:46.180 | do you wanna come down and talk to him?

02:01:48.060 | And so what he analyzed, though,

02:01:50.140 | was the verbal interrogations that people had

02:01:53.660 | when they confronted their partner,

02:01:55.540 | and women wanted to know, are you in love with her?

02:02:00.540 | Men wanted to know, did you fuck him?

02:02:04.580 | Or did you have sex with him?

02:02:06.260 | And so it's this sex difference in sensitivity

02:02:09.540 | to these different cues of infidelity.

02:02:12.500 | And of course, there's an evolutionary logic

02:02:15.020 | to this sex difference, and it's been replicated,

02:02:18.940 | not the Cheaters study,

02:02:20.500 | but the hypothetical Sophie's Choice study.

02:02:24.940 | It's been replicated now in Sweden and China,

02:02:27.780 | and it's a universal sex difference.

02:02:30.900 | - So given that sex difference,

02:02:32.620 | and you mentioned another one that just returned to,

02:02:35.300 | which is in the engineering disciplines.

02:02:38.540 | - Yeah, person thing, orientation.

02:02:40.900 | - So until I started to see,

02:02:43.220 | writing about it in the psychology literature,

02:02:46.580 | I observed this anecdotally a lot.

02:02:48.860 | And the reason I observed it is I was confused.

02:02:51.340 | So I care a lot about robots, I'm a robotics person.

02:02:54.620 | And so a lot of males in the robotics community

02:02:58.320 | really didn't care about what's called

02:03:00.100 | the human-robot interaction problem,

02:03:02.260 | which is like robots when they interact with humans.

02:03:05.140 | And then a lot of females, all brilliant

02:03:08.900 | in the robotics community,

02:03:10.540 | cared about the human-robot interaction.

02:03:12.340 | They cared about the human,

02:03:14.100 | what the robot communicates with the human,

02:03:16.340 | human in the picture, human in the loop.

02:03:18.700 | And I was really confused, 'cause the difference to me

02:03:21.780 | in my anecdotal interactions,

02:03:24.820 | but the N is quite large there.

02:03:27.300 | I'm in the robotics community, I know a lot of people.

02:03:31.380 | And I was confused because for me,

02:03:34.620 | I really care about human-robot interaction.

02:03:37.180 | I care about both a lot.

02:03:40.700 | And the same thing here in terms of emotional cheating

02:03:44.980 | versus physical cheating.

02:03:46.860 | I care a lot about both, and I have this oscillating brain.

02:03:50.500 | So I wonder what that says about my brain.

02:03:53.000 | So I'll often wonder this,

02:03:54.980 | 'cause there's specific sex differences

02:03:57.300 | that are represented in the data in the literature,

02:04:00.100 | and they seem to oscillate depending on mood.

02:04:03.380 | And I wonder what that says about me.

02:04:06.140 | Why do I care so much about that robot on the floor?

02:04:09.900 | I care not, half I care about how it works,

02:04:14.420 | and the other half, how it makes other people feel.

02:04:18.060 | What is that?

02:04:18.900 | - Yeah, so I guess what I would say,

02:04:20.380 | this gets back to our earlier discussion

02:04:22.880 | of agency and communion,

02:04:24.780 | where I actually think that it's a sign

02:04:29.100 | of being well-balanced, to have both capacities within you.

02:04:34.100 | And so you get people who are unimodal,

02:04:39.100 | or they just have one mode of operating.

02:04:42.300 | Let's say it's the thing mode,

02:04:43.980 | which engineers tend to be good at.

02:04:46.940 | You have to be good at it to be a good engineer,

02:04:50.380 | 'cause things have to actually work.

02:04:52.340 | It's not in some dream or hypothetical state.

02:04:56.020 | Things have to actually work.

02:04:58.480 | But with the agency and communion,

02:05:00.540 | I think it's good to have a balance.

02:05:02.540 | And that's why I think some of the best

02:05:04.740 | romantic relationships are those where people are,

02:05:08.620 | they're high on what they used to call androgyny,

02:05:12.180 | where they have both the positive features

02:05:15.860 | of agency and communion,

02:05:17.500 | the positive features of masculinity and femininity

02:05:21.740 | within the same mix,

02:05:23.020 | but also with the footnote of not the unmitigated agency

02:05:28.380 | or unmitigated communion, both of which can be negative.

02:05:32.000 | And so I view these as capacities,

02:05:35.360 | and some people are out of balance,

02:05:38.400 | some people have a good balance between the two.

02:05:40.560 | It sounds like you have a good balance between the two.

02:05:42.440 | - Well, but also the allocation.

02:05:43.820 | I feel like it's a very dynamic thing.

02:05:46.060 | It's like, I'm at least aware, for me personally,

02:05:51.060 | of the beauty between humans,

02:05:54.960 | of the dance of the push and pull,

02:05:57.800 | of the different moods.

02:05:59.640 | It's like a dynamical system.

02:06:01.200 | It's not two static entities fully represented

02:06:04.880 | and consistent through every interaction.

02:06:07.120 | Sometimes, you know,

02:06:08.720 | people might confuse the fact that I often talk about love,

02:06:13.160 | and I love humans, that I don't have a temper,

02:06:17.480 | that I don't have, like, I lose my shit all the time,

02:06:20.880 | especially on things I really am passionate about,

02:06:23.800 | like people I work with and so on.

02:06:26.440 | I'm all over the place.

02:06:28.200 | But underneath it, there's a deep love and respect

02:06:30.760 | for humans, but I lose my shit all the time.

02:06:32.960 | And that chaos, that rollercoaster,

02:06:38.600 | I think that's what makes human relations awesome.

02:06:41.200 | I mean, the push and pull of it.

02:06:43.480 | Of course, it can oscillate too far,

02:06:45.980 | which is when it becomes Amber Heard type of situation,

02:06:48.880 | when it turns to emotional or physical violence,

02:06:51.640 | when it turns to jealousy, crosses a line where it's hurtful

02:06:55.920 | and there's like, it crosses that vast gray landscape

02:07:00.920 | of what is abuse versus what is just beautiful turmoil

02:07:06.840 | of human nature, right?

02:07:11.640 | - Yes, yeah.

02:07:13.040 | - And it's complicated, yeah.

02:07:15.560 | - Yeah, it's complicated and it's dynamic,

02:07:18.400 | and I would just add to that.

02:07:20.560 | I thought you phrased that brilliantly,

02:07:22.520 | but I would just add to that.

02:07:24.920 | It also depends on sort of what you're trying to do.

02:07:27.720 | And so I think some of the oscillation can be what task,

02:07:32.120 | what problem you're trying to solve.

02:07:34.480 | And so if you're, I don't know,

02:07:36.440 | trying to build a bridge or something,

02:07:40.160 | you need to be very thing oriented

02:07:42.960 | and make sure the damn thing actually works

02:07:47.920 | and doesn't collapse when a car goes over it.

02:07:51.960 | If you're trying to form a relationship,

02:07:55.520 | and you're entirely thing oriented,

02:07:58.640 | it's not gonna work.

02:07:59.840 | And that's one of the people,

02:08:03.120 | one of the things with, and males tend to be more

02:08:06.320 | on the so-called spectrum side of things

02:08:10.360 | where one of the hallmarks is a deficit

02:08:13.400 | in social mind reading.

02:08:16.200 | It's just to add to your point about,

02:08:17.560 | I guess I've already made it,

02:08:18.920 | of the dynamic properties of the roller coaster

02:08:22.800 | is depending on what problem you're trying to solve,

02:08:25.520 | you might wanna toggle back and forth

02:08:27.640 | to one pole or the other.

02:08:29.840 | - You wrote a book called "Why Women Have Sex,

02:08:33.680 | Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge,"

02:08:37.680 | that sounds fun, "and Everything in Between."

02:08:40.480 | So why do women have sex?

02:08:42.160 | - Well, I co-wrote it with a female,

02:08:44.680 | who is Cindy Meston, a wonderful friend and colleague

02:08:48.680 | and co-author and co-collaborator.

02:08:51.840 | I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to write a book

02:08:55.160 | called "Why Women Have Sex" by myself as a male.

02:08:59.120 | - Did you contribute anything to this book?

02:09:01.080 | I'm just kidding.

02:09:02.600 | - I did, but I have to tell you a story

02:09:04.760 | about the origins of this idea,

02:09:08.040 | which I give credit to Cindy Meston for.

02:09:12.400 | And we were, she's a colleague

02:09:14.920 | in the psychology department with me,

02:09:17.000 | and we would go out to dinner once a week or so,

02:09:19.040 | and we were just talking about this, she raised this issue.

02:09:21.920 | And so we started to brainstorm.

02:09:24.320 | Originally, it was why humans have sex,

02:09:26.360 | and that's the scientific article we published

02:09:28.640 | was why humans, 'cause we're interested in males and females.

02:09:32.000 | And so I said, I would come up,

02:09:34.080 | "Well, they have sex because of X."

02:09:37.200 | And then Cindy Meston would come up, she'd say,

02:09:40.280 | "Oh, here's seven other reasons."

02:09:42.360 | And then I'd come up with one more,

02:09:43.680 | and she'd come up with another seven.

02:09:45.080 | And so it was like, so she's in some sense,

02:09:48.920 | importantly, the originator or fountain of this idea.

02:09:53.920 | - Oh, so she's able, there's something

02:09:57.040 | about the way she thinks about sexuality

02:09:59.240 | that's able to deeply introspect about reasons for sex.

02:10:02.280 | - Yeah, and probably especially about female sexuality.

02:10:06.200 | And this is one of the interesting things,

02:10:07.800 | and why it's so fun for me to collaborate with,

02:10:11.440 | in this case, female, because they do have

02:10:14.600 | a different sexual psychology than males.

02:10:17.560 | And I've noticed this, that's why in my graduate,

02:10:21.080 | so I've had 30 or so PhD students,

02:10:24.360 | about half have been male, half have been female,

02:10:27.040 | and the women come up with different questions,

02:10:30.920 | different scientific questions

02:10:32.480 | that I wouldn't have thought of necessarily.

02:10:35.300 | And so anyway, so it turned out to be a good collaboration.

02:10:39.920 | I will say that we co-wrote it,

02:10:42.280 | and that I did contribute to it.

02:10:44.160 | - Good. (laughs)

02:10:45.640 | - And especially the evolutionary insights.

02:10:50.520 | - So is there a good few words you can say

02:10:52.640 | to why women have sex?

02:10:56.880 | What are some primary motivations?

02:10:58.760 | - Well, we originally came up with a list of 237 reasons

02:11:03.760 | for why humans have sex, and they range from,

02:11:10.040 | you know, some of the obvious ones,

02:11:12.240 | because it feels good, because I want it to relieve stress,

02:11:17.240 | to relieve menstrual cramps, to get rid of a headache,

02:11:21.760 | to get my boyfriend off my back

02:11:24.680 | so I could get some work done.

02:11:26.160 | So things like that.

02:11:28.640 | To others, like, here's another one,

02:11:32.760 | so that he'd take out the damn garbage.

02:11:37.480 | It was kind of interesting that one nomination

02:11:40.920 | was to get closer to God.

02:11:43.880 | So there were some that were kind of spiritual motivations

02:11:48.480 | for having sex.

02:11:49.960 | And then some of the nastier ones, like to get revenge

02:11:53.120 | on my partner, or to get revenge on a rival.

02:11:57.080 | So that's like sleeping with my rival's boyfriend.

02:12:02.080 | So there's some nasty stuff and some good stuff in there.

02:12:06.960 | - It's so fascinating, because, yeah,

02:12:08.200 | sex has such a powerful role in our psychology,

02:12:11.600 | but also in our culture.

02:12:13.200 | So you can make significant statements

02:12:16.520 | in the status hierarchy about your sex,

02:12:20.520 | the selection of your sexual partner.

02:12:25.400 | It's interesting, so it's not just 'cause you're horny.

02:12:27.680 | It's all those other kinds of things.

02:12:29.200 | - Yeah, well, hornyness is one.

02:12:31.320 | But there are other reasons.

02:12:34.120 | What about different kinds of sex?

02:12:36.360 | Again, this is not the "Humor in the Lab" podcast.

02:12:41.800 | Rough sex versus, quote, "making love."

02:12:45.360 | What's the explanation between all of that?

02:12:47.360 | All the various kink?

02:12:48.720 | Now, that's just a basic sort of split,

02:12:52.200 | but all the different kinks that humans establish,

02:12:54.920 | all the different fantasies and all those kinds of things.

02:12:57.320 | - Yeah, well, that's a complicated question,

02:13:01.680 | for which I don't think we have sufficient time

02:13:04.840 | to get into that in detail.

02:13:07.080 | And it is complicated,

02:13:08.440 | because there are some sexual fantasies that,

02:13:12.440 | sexual fantasies, by the way,

02:13:13.520 | I think are a really fascinating window

02:13:15.520 | into our sexual psychology,

02:13:17.720 | because in a way, they're unconstrained

02:13:20.840 | by things like rules and norms in society

02:13:25.120 | and cultural presses that you're kind of free

02:13:28.100 | to fantasize about whatever you want to fantasize about.

02:13:31.920 | So I think it provides an interesting window

02:13:34.240 | into human sexuality.

02:13:35.800 | And there are some predictable ones,

02:13:39.240 | and then there are some also individual

02:13:42.760 | or idiosyncratic ones.

02:13:44.320 | And again, there's a fundamental sex difference in this,

02:13:49.320 | in that when you talk about fetishes

02:13:54.880 | or like shoe fetishes, leather fetishes,

02:13:58.480 | different types of things,

02:14:00.880 | males are much more prone to those than females.

02:14:05.880 | - Shoe fetish, you said?

02:14:07.280 | - Shoe fetish, almost all fetishes.

02:14:10.840 | Males are overrepresented.

02:14:13.440 | And I think it's partly because there's some evidence

02:14:17.400 | that they're classically conditioned.

02:14:19.120 | So I think that first or early sexual experiences

02:14:23.680 | that people have kind of condition them

02:14:25.960 | to the cues that are present during those early ones.

02:14:29.800 | And so if your first sexual experience happened to be,

02:14:32.520 | involve visual images of shoes,

02:14:36.760 | or you're having to look in your shoes

02:14:38.160 | when you first had sex,

02:14:39.880 | that's just an example,

02:14:41.000 | or leather or zippers or whatever the case is,

02:14:45.140 | that people develop these very individualistic

02:14:50.160 | sexual turn-ons based on these early sexual experiences.

02:14:54.920 | - So it could also be, you said have sex,

02:14:56.960 | but it could also be sexual feelings,

02:14:59.640 | early sexual feelings.

02:15:01.000 | So I wonder what that is about men,

02:15:07.280 | that they have a more,

02:15:08.480 | when they first start experiencing sexual feelings,

02:15:10.760 | that they're more sensitive to the cues,

02:15:13.560 | and those cues somehow have a deep psychological effect

02:15:16.520 | on their development of their sexuality.

02:15:18.560 | So if they have kinks,

02:15:19.880 | that means they're somehow more cue-sensitive,

02:15:23.200 | and maybe, does the matter of society

02:15:25.680 | like slap someone on the wrist for it?

02:15:28.480 | Does that help solidify the kinks?

02:15:31.640 | - Yeah, I don't know about the society

02:15:33.840 | slapping on the wrist,

02:15:34.800 | but I think what it is is this,

02:15:37.040 | I think this is the evolutionary hypothesis anyway

02:15:40.920 | about why there's this sex difference.

02:15:42.840 | And that is that men are conditioned

02:15:46.160 | to anything that's gonna lead to sex,

02:15:49.280 | because whereas women don't have to be.

02:15:53.360 | From a male perspective,

02:15:56.800 | because of women's greater investment,

02:15:59.280 | because the nine-month pregnancy, et cetera,

02:16:02.600 | in order to reproduce,

02:16:05.080 | women have to invest this tremendous amount.

02:16:07.720 | Men don't.

02:16:09.640 | One act of sex can produce an offspring,

02:16:11.840 | and so for men, but not for women.

02:16:15.120 | And so this huge asymmetry in investment

02:16:18.000 | means that the payoff matrix

02:16:22.720 | of different sexual strategies differs for the sexes.

02:16:26.760 | In that context, women become the valuable

02:16:29.840 | and scarce resource over which men compete.

02:16:33.000 | So anything that leads to successful sex

02:16:35.920 | is gonna be selected for it.

02:16:37.480 | And so men are very sensitive to being sexually conditioned.

02:16:42.040 | That's what's called sexual conditioning,

02:16:44.080 | to whatever cues are associated with sex happening.

02:16:47.960 | From a woman's perspective, sex is not a scarce resource.

02:16:54.040 | So a woman could go out here in Austin

02:16:57.560 | any night or probably any day on 6th Street

02:17:01.600 | and have no problem having sex with a guy within 10 minutes.

02:17:06.600 | Guy would have more difficulty.

02:17:13.440 | He's not gonna go out,

02:17:14.920 | unless he's Johnny Depp or really, really charming.

02:17:18.160 | - Yeah, yeah, that's a fascinating dimorphism

02:17:23.440 | or asymmetry in our mate selection.

02:17:27.320 | What do you think is the effect on this young male brain,

02:17:31.560 | but female too, of pornography?

02:17:33.840 | So one of the fascinating things

02:17:35.760 | that the digital world brought us,

02:17:39.360 | now I grew up at a time when a magazine,

02:17:44.360 | like a Victoria's Secret magazine

02:17:46.400 | was my source of sexual inspiration.

02:17:51.400 | But that was before the internet.

02:17:55.640 | And now the internet with pornography

02:17:57.440 | makes it extremely accessible.

02:17:59.520 | All kinds of kinks, all kinds of wild variety.

02:18:02.280 | I mean, variety in quantity is immense.

02:18:08.880 | So what do you think that has,

02:18:12.160 | how that affects mate selection, mating,

02:18:16.840 | and just the human psychology of the two sexes of the species?

02:18:21.840 | - Yeah, great question, a big question.

02:18:26.280 | So, I mean, we could have a whole podcast just on that

02:18:30.280 | or at least talk for a while about it.

02:18:31.800 | So I'll just say a couple of things about that.

02:18:34.400 | One is, again, there's a sex difference.

02:18:37.400 | And I feel like I'm a broken record here,

02:18:39.280 | hammering on this, but it is--

02:18:41.360 | - So a lot of, just to actually echo the thing,

02:18:43.320 | please be a broken record, 'cause it's interesting.

02:18:46.520 | The more we get to the mating,

02:18:48.660 | the more there's sex differences present themselves.

02:18:53.640 | They surface. - Yeah, that's right.

02:18:55.080 | And in many psychological domains,

02:18:57.240 | there are no sex differences, or the sexes are very similar.

02:19:01.080 | But pornography is consumed,

02:19:03.040 | about 80% of the consumers are men.

02:19:06.020 | So it is very heavily a male consumer industry,

02:19:10.200 | if you will.

02:19:13.520 | And I think that it can have positive and negative effects

02:19:18.520 | depending on the circumstance.

02:19:21.920 | So one potential negative effect

02:19:26.680 | is that men might develop unrealistic expectations

02:19:31.680 | about what sex will be like or should be like

02:19:35.560 | in real life.

02:19:37.120 | And so I remember actually this,

02:19:39.900 | I just heard about this one case of,

02:19:42.460 | won't mention any names, where a man got married

02:19:47.020 | and he had been accustomed to seeing very large breasts

02:19:52.020 | in his pornography consumption,

02:19:54.380 | and discovered that his wife had what he perceived

02:19:59.300 | to be very small breasts.

02:20:01.440 | In fact, they were actually just medium-sized,

02:20:05.460 | but because he had been so heavily exposed to pornography

02:20:10.380 | and the artificially enhanced breast size

02:20:13.820 | that is often depicted in pornography,

02:20:16.020 | that he had come to expect something that was unrealistic,

02:20:21.020 | in this case, not leading,

02:20:25.180 | that's not the way to lead off to a great sex life

02:20:28.060 | with your wife by being disappointed in her breast size.

02:20:31.320 | So I think that people can develop,

02:20:34.700 | in this case, men unrealistic expectations,

02:20:37.500 | also about the kind of sexual acrobatics

02:20:40.280 | that porn stars engage in,

02:20:42.180 | and when they get in real life situations

02:20:44.900 | can put pressure on women to become,

02:20:48.700 | to fulfill those kinds of images.

02:20:52.660 | But the other thing,

02:20:54.820 | the other kind of detrimental effect that it has is,

02:20:58.020 | and this is something that is emerging culturally,

02:21:01.980 | is I think it has a dampening effect

02:21:04.020 | on men's pursuit of real-life relationships,

02:21:09.020 | because in some sense,

02:21:10.340 | it kind of bleeds off some of that sex drive

02:21:14.100 | or sexual desire, sexual energy,

02:21:16.780 | and so they're, and some men get addicted to it,

02:21:20.980 | so they're spending hours and hours and hours a day

02:21:23.180 | consuming pornography,

02:21:24.600 | and so I think it can have a detrimental effect

02:21:28.660 | even on men's ambition.

02:21:31.340 | - Yeah, there's something really powerful

02:21:33.380 | about that sexual energy,

02:21:35.100 | not to be all spiritual about it,

02:21:37.780 | but it seems like that's somehow correlated with ambition.

02:21:42.340 | So one of the things that pornography can take away

02:21:45.940 | is exactly as you said,

02:21:48.180 | is your pursuit of love out there,

02:21:52.820 | including women, but also love of things,

02:21:57.380 | meaning building awesome, epic things,

02:22:00.620 | so the love of both bridges and women,

02:22:02.820 | bridge building and relationship building.

02:22:07.580 | Yeah, there's something about that energy,

02:22:10.220 | and also, yeah, there's a sort of a vicious downward spiral

02:22:15.220 | because it somehow staunts your development

02:22:20.980 | because it limits social interaction,

02:22:22.900 | the push and pull of romantic social interaction,

02:22:29.220 | it cuts the edge off of that,

02:22:31.740 | and it forces you to be,

02:22:33.400 | to spend way too much time with yourself

02:22:37.260 | without the development of that social interaction.

02:22:40.340 | I don't know, but there,

02:22:41.660 | so outside of the expectations

02:22:44.820 | on all those kinds of things,

02:22:45.780 | it seems to have a detrimental effect

02:22:47.180 | on the development of the human mind.

02:22:50.100 | - Yeah. - What is that?

02:22:51.300 | I don't, 'cause some of that is echoed

02:22:54.020 | in people talk about the metaverse,

02:22:56.140 | that some of our life would be in the digital space,

02:22:59.260 | and it's like, on one hand,

02:23:00.620 | well, if it brings you happiness,

02:23:01.940 | if it brings you joy, short-term and long-term,

02:23:04.900 | why is the metaverse not the same

02:23:07.660 | or better than the real world?

02:23:09.980 | But there is something still missing, and what is that?

02:23:12.740 | Something of the pleasure you feel with porn

02:23:17.140 | is still missing, it's really not representing

02:23:21.340 | some of the fundamental pleasure you feel

02:23:23.780 | when you interact with real people,

02:23:26.100 | and that could be just the growth you experience.

02:23:29.300 | Like, real people can reject you.

02:23:31.460 | (Dave laughs)

02:23:32.300 | The challenge, again, the push and pull,

02:23:35.420 | all of that, the dance of human relations.

02:23:37.220 | - Yeah, yeah, and the exploration of your sexuality.

02:23:41.260 | So on porn, you can kind of passively explore

02:23:46.060 | because you can see, as you mentioned,

02:23:49.940 | a wide variety of things, and people do that,

02:23:53.860 | but in terms of exploring your own sexuality,

02:23:57.780 | I think there's no replacement for a real human being.

02:24:01.940 | - So you've written about violence,

02:24:03.300 | and here we're talking about porn and sex.

02:24:06.300 | I don't know if you have thoughts on this,

02:24:07.420 | but I'd love to ask your opinion on, quote, incels.

02:24:11.940 | So here I would like to quote Wikipedia

02:24:14.180 | that define incels as members of an online subculture

02:24:18.340 | of people who define themselves

02:24:19.860 | as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner

02:24:22.660 | despite desiring one.

02:24:24.540 | They also write, now, I don't know if Wikipedia

02:24:27.620 | is the accurate source about incels, but here it is.

02:24:31.340 | They write, quote, "At least eight mass murders

02:24:34.060 | "resulting in a total of 61 deaths

02:24:36.340 | "have been committed since 2014 by men

02:24:39.420 | "who have either self-identified as incels

02:24:42.180 | "or who had mentioned incel-related names and writings

02:24:45.900 | "in their private writings or internet postings.

02:24:48.620 | "Incel communities have been criticized

02:24:50.300 | "by researchers and the media for being misogynistic,

02:24:53.740 | "encouraging violence, spreading extremist views,

02:24:56.460 | "and radicalizing their members."

02:24:59.900 | Is there some insight that you draw

02:25:02.140 | from this connection of sex and lack of sex to violence?

02:25:06.180 | - Well, I think sex and violence are linked

02:25:11.180 | in various ways, and it's not just incels.

02:25:19.300 | So if you look at serial killers, for example,

02:25:24.300 | and this is another thing that I've,

02:25:30.540 | true crime is kind of an avocation of mine.

02:25:34.460 | I just enjoy reading about true crime

02:25:36.380 | and following true crime stories.

02:25:37.820 | - It's an avocation.

02:25:38.760 | - Hobby. - A hobby.

02:25:40.940 | - Side interest.

02:25:42.860 | - Super fancy word for hobby, I got it, cool.

02:25:46.020 | - That, like Ted Bundy,

02:25:48.940 | he was actually very charming

02:25:50.940 | and didn't have any trouble attracting women,

02:25:53.580 | but his killing spree started shortly

02:25:57.380 | after he was rejected by a very high-status,

02:26:01.900 | attractive woman, and he felt a rage

02:26:06.780 | about being rejected by her.

02:26:10.540 | Now, who knows, that's an N of one,

02:26:12.420 | and we don't know if being rejected

02:26:16.860 | causes serial killing per se,

02:26:18.780 | but sex and violence are related in different ways.

02:26:22.820 | I argue, and I haven't studied the incel community

02:26:29.200 | in detail, I actually have an incoming graduate student

02:26:32.660 | who's gonna start in the fall

02:26:33.940 | who has been studying the incels,

02:26:36.420 | and so he'll have a more informed picture,

02:26:39.020 | but my attitude is there are ways

02:26:42.660 | to improve your mate value.

02:26:44.260 | If you're having trouble attracting a mate,

02:26:46.800 | there are ways to improve your mate value,

02:26:48.580 | because a lot of things that women want in a mate

02:26:52.380 | are improvable.

02:26:53.900 | Women want guys who are compassionate,

02:26:59.500 | who are understanding, who are ambitious,

02:27:03.900 | who acquire resources, et cetera,

02:27:06.380 | who are physically fit.

02:27:08.500 | There are things you can do to improve your mate value,

02:27:11.180 | and so I would say, rather than,

02:27:14.400 | I would encourage incels or the incel communities,

02:27:17.060 | rather than being hostile toward women

02:27:19.340 | or being angry at women,

02:27:20.840 | just do things to improve your mate value,

02:27:24.420 | and then you will be more successful at attracting women.

02:27:27.900 | - Yeah, I mean, some of it, that's a fascinating,

02:27:29.900 | so your student will be studying that.

02:27:32.500 | Listen, I love the internet.

02:27:36.600 | The internet always wins,

02:27:38.980 | and there's a fascinating aspect to it,

02:27:40.460 | which is just humor,

02:27:42.300 | and I'm fascinated by seeing the humor,

02:27:45.640 | whether it's 4chan or Reddit and all that kind of stuff,

02:27:48.560 | where people maybe will self-identify as incels as a joke,

02:27:53.040 | as a kind of, basically representing the fact

02:27:55.520 | that it's hard to get women.

02:27:57.480 | This is the struggle, the struggle,

02:27:59.280 | and for women, it's hard to get a mate that they,

02:28:02.480 | they're basically jokingly representing the challenges,

02:28:06.600 | the difficulty of the mate selection process,

02:28:09.160 | that the desirable group is smaller than the entire group.

02:28:12.740 | That's it, and they're joking about it,

02:28:14.740 | but then it's interesting how quickly humor,

02:28:17.580 | again, a dynamical system, it can turn into anger,

02:28:23.700 | and that, on the internet, is so interesting to watch,

02:28:27.060 | like how trolling, light trolling, is humor,

02:28:31.940 | but it can turn into aggression,

02:28:34.320 | and I've just seen, it's weird.

02:28:39.320 | It's weird how, this is true on the internet,

02:28:42.800 | but you also just look at the dark aspects

02:28:44.960 | of the 20th century that I've been reading a lot about,

02:28:48.460 | how kind of lighthearted things turn dark quickly,

02:28:53.460 | and it's interesting.

02:28:56.560 | I don't know what to make of it,

02:28:58.080 | because it's basically sexual frustration

02:29:01.060 | that all humans feel, it's dating in general,

02:29:05.920 | can turn into anger,

02:29:08.760 | can turn into sophisticated philosophical constructs,

02:29:14.680 | like about how the world works,

02:29:17.600 | of who really is pulling the strings,

02:29:20.200 | and that turns some of the worst crimes committed

02:29:24.360 | by the Nazis, for example,

02:29:26.160 | or by extremely intelligent people,

02:29:28.600 | that constructed models of how the world works,

02:29:32.980 | and there's something about sexual frustration

02:29:36.580 | is one of the really powerful forces

02:29:38.400 | that could be a catalyst for constructing such models,

02:29:40.980 | and once you've done that,

02:29:42.380 | shit gets a lot more serious,

02:29:46.260 | and it's no longer joke, it's serious,

02:29:49.060 | but at the same time, when you just look from the surface,

02:29:51.260 | it's kind of jokes.

02:29:52.340 | - Yeah. - It's just weird.

02:29:53.660 | - That's interesting points that you're making.

02:29:56.140 | I think that this is one way in which evolution

02:30:00.680 | has built into us a feature

02:30:05.680 | which is really bad for our overall happiness,

02:30:10.040 | and that is that it's created desires

02:30:13.320 | that can never be fully met,

02:30:15.800 | and that includes in the mating domain,

02:30:18.440 | so even with people who are successful in attracting

02:30:23.460 | somewhat desirable mates, maybe they want,

02:30:25.680 | you know, Giselle Bündchen or some,

02:30:28.820 | you know, they desire things that are,

02:30:32.900 | women that are higher in mate value

02:30:34.780 | or a larger number of partners

02:30:38.660 | than they can successfully attract,

02:30:40.540 | and in a way, I mean, these serve as,

02:30:43.700 | evolution's built into these

02:30:45.020 | because they're motivational devices.

02:30:47.540 | They motivate us to try to get what we want,

02:30:50.380 | but it also makes us miserable

02:30:52.520 | or at least unhappy or dissatisfied

02:30:54.760 | because there are desires that can never be fulfilled,

02:30:58.280 | and this is, to mention one more sex difference,

02:31:01.300 | this desire for sexual variety,

02:31:03.860 | meaning a variety of different partners,

02:31:05.720 | is much, much greater in men than in women,

02:31:08.160 | and so that's why even like in pornography consumption,

02:31:12.120 | men will, like, you know, go through

02:31:14.560 | multiple, multiple, multiple images

02:31:17.840 | and sex scenes and so forth compared to what women

02:31:22.400 | who consume pornography go through,

02:31:24.500 | but this desire for sexual variety

02:31:27.780 | is something that makes men miserable

02:31:31.360 | because it's something that they can't,

02:31:33.840 | most men, unless you're a king or a despot

02:31:36.720 | or, you know, have a harem,

02:31:41.680 | it's something that can never be fulfilled in everyday life,

02:31:45.320 | and so I even think that, you know,

02:31:48.360 | you talk to men who are walking down a city block

02:31:52.080 | in Austin or New York City or San Francisco or wherever,

02:31:55.800 | and they pass by, they could pass by six women

02:31:59.640 | and feel a sexual attraction to six different women

02:32:02.960 | in one city block, you know?

02:32:05.400 | (Dave laughs)

02:32:06.360 | Now, and so this is, again, where evolution

02:32:09.720 | has created in this desires that can never be fully met.

02:32:13.920 | - It's the evolution.

02:32:15.040 | Well, it's useful, right?

02:32:16.520 | And the hilarious thing, this always,

02:32:18.840 | by my own mind, by just observing people,

02:32:22.480 | once you get that 10 or that beautiful woman

02:32:27.480 | that you've been lost, you take her for granted

02:32:29.880 | and you move on to the next thing.

02:32:31.240 | - There are classic cases like,

02:32:33.560 | I don't know if you remember this case,

02:32:36.000 | but Hugh Grant was with Elizabeth Hurley,

02:32:39.040 | who is a gorgeous model, and he was caught having sex

02:32:43.600 | with a prostitute, I think it was in LA or whatever,

02:32:46.080 | and he's got Elizabeth Hurley,

02:32:48.800 | why are you having sex with a prostitute?

02:32:51.120 | But it's the male desire for sexual variety.

02:32:54.960 | - Well, let me do a little bit of a tangent here

02:33:00.680 | and ask you about just your work in general

02:33:05.240 | in terms of its interaction with the scientific community

02:33:08.760 | and with the world at large.

02:33:10.400 | So many of the ideas you do research on

02:33:12.840 | are pretty controversial,

02:33:14.200 | or at least the topic is controversial somehow.

02:33:18.240 | Maybe you can speak to that.

02:33:19.760 | But what are your thoughts in the current climate

02:33:23.120 | of cancel culture, or maybe there's a better term for it,

02:33:26.880 | that word is like loaded now,

02:33:29.080 | about you doing research in this space

02:33:33.880 | that is so essential, so crucial

02:33:37.960 | to understanding human nature?

02:33:40.280 | What are the difficulties, what are the concerns for you?

02:33:42.800 | To be able to freely explore.

02:33:45.080 | - Yeah, I've been doing research on these things.

02:33:49.760 | So when you combine sex or sexuality

02:33:54.760 | with sex differences, with evolution,

02:34:01.440 | each of these topics are controversial by themselves,

02:34:05.000 | and you bring them together,

02:34:06.480 | the intersection becomes especially controversial.

02:34:10.280 | But I guess view myself as a scientist,

02:34:15.280 | and so I would rather be scientifically correct

02:34:21.560 | than politically correct, if you will.

02:34:25.280 | So I have no interest in, I don't have an agenda,

02:34:29.720 | I don't have a political agenda,

02:34:31.240 | I don't have any agenda other than discovering human nature.

02:34:35.800 | That's what I've devoted my scientific career toward,

02:34:39.800 | and that's why I do the studies

02:34:42.280 | in response to empirical data,

02:34:44.120 | and the best theories that we have available,

02:34:48.040 | the best conceptual tools.

02:34:49.920 | So do some of these things upset people?

02:34:54.000 | Yeah, yeah, they do.

02:34:55.280 | As a matter of fact, even early in my career,

02:34:59.060 | before I started publishing on some of these things,

02:35:02.480 | I gave a talk in the sociology department.

02:35:05.000 | This was at University of Michigan,

02:35:06.920 | and a female professor came up to me afterwards and said,

02:35:11.240 | you know, you really shouldn't publish

02:35:12.800 | the results of your studies.

02:35:14.380 | And I said, why not?

02:35:16.360 | And she said that women have it hard enough as it is

02:35:21.240 | without knowing about these things.

02:35:24.560 | And my view is that's naive.

02:35:28.760 | I think suppression of scientific knowledge is a bad thing,

02:35:32.560 | and suppression of scientific knowledge

02:35:34.920 | about sex differences is a bad thing.

02:35:38.360 | Men and women are not psychological clones,

02:35:41.600 | especially when it comes to the mating domain

02:35:44.480 | and sexuality domain.

02:35:45.840 | The only other domain that shows massive sex differences

02:35:49.240 | that we haven't touched on is aggression and violence.

02:35:52.280 | So the leading cause of violence is being a male.

02:35:57.280 | Males have, and the more extreme the violence,

02:36:00.480 | the more males have a monopoly on it.

02:36:02.320 | So when you get to homicide, warfare,

02:36:05.480 | males have a monopoly on it.

02:36:06.920 | And we need to understand human nature,

02:36:10.280 | and we need to understand sex differences therein

02:36:13.400 | in order to be in a position to effectively solve

02:36:17.680 | some of the social problems

02:36:19.400 | that these sex differences create.

02:36:21.280 | So, you know, so I've been gotten some flack.

02:36:27.360 | No one's tried to cancel me in my work so far.

02:36:32.280 | So I'm--

02:36:33.680 | - Just wait.

02:36:34.640 | - Yeah, just--

02:36:36.320 | - But does it hurt you personally?

02:36:37.880 | Just is it psychologically difficult to do this work?

02:36:41.040 | 'Cause what is research is thinking deeply through things

02:36:44.200 | and like doing studies, but also interpreting them

02:36:49.200 | and thinking through what is the right questions to ask.

02:36:52.840 | What does this mean?

02:36:54.320 | And for that, you have to have a clear mind,

02:36:56.600 | an optimistic mind, a free mind, and all of that.

02:37:01.800 | So you're just a human.

02:37:03.440 | So psychologically, is it difficult?

02:37:06.160 | Does it wear on you?

02:37:07.240 | - Yeah, I would say not really,

02:37:10.640 | but I've been, I think, fortunate.

02:37:13.400 | So even say my latest book,

02:37:15.680 | I published a book recently on conflict between the sexes.

02:37:18.800 | And it deals with very controversial topics,

02:37:22.200 | including intimate partner violence,

02:37:24.840 | like with the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard thing.

02:37:28.360 | And I don't talk about that in the book,

02:37:30.240 | but, and it's been largely well-received.

02:37:35.240 | And I think partly it's because I am careful

02:37:40.800 | in my publications not to endorse it.

02:37:44.160 | So one of the common conflations that people make

02:37:46.280 | is they think that it's something that you think is good.

02:37:50.200 | If you find a sex difference,

02:37:53.800 | that there should be a sex difference.

02:37:55.280 | This is the is-ought confusion.

02:37:58.080 | And so I try to make it very clear

02:38:01.120 | that I'm studying what is not what ought to be.

02:38:05.040 | And a lot of things that I discover about what is the case,

02:38:09.920 | I would prefer them not to be.

02:38:13.280 | And I think you kind of alluded to this earlier

02:38:15.560 | by saying that we have to override

02:38:19.360 | some of our violent inclinations or impulses,

02:38:23.280 | or the way I would phrase it is we have to,

02:38:27.460 | - Control them?

02:38:29.180 | - Control or keep quiescent or suppress

02:38:33.140 | some of the nastier sides of human nature.

02:38:37.020 | And we've successfully done that in some domains.

02:38:39.980 | So you can talk about, like one group that fascinates me

02:38:44.380 | is the Vikings and the whole, that whole era.

02:38:48.020 | And so you have in Sweden, Norway, for example,

02:38:56.260 | these have like the lowest homicide rates on earth.

02:39:00.900 | But you go back 400 years ago, 600 years ago,

02:39:06.300 | people were killing each other right and left.

02:39:08.600 | And so finding that, so this leads me to be optimistic

02:39:14.780 | that we can change conditions

02:39:19.180 | to suppress our evolved proclivities.

02:39:22.700 | Just like one physical example that I sometimes use

02:39:26.660 | is callous producing mechanisms.

02:39:29.140 | We have evolved callous producing mechanisms

02:39:31.060 | that are very valuable.

02:39:32.500 | We develop thickness in the areas of our skin

02:39:35.620 | that have experienced repeated friction.

02:39:37.780 | But we can in principle design environments

02:39:41.060 | where we don't experience repeated friction.

02:39:43.660 | And so we won't grow callouses.

02:39:45.860 | And so you've designed an environment

02:39:47.660 | that basically prevents the activation

02:39:50.460 | of our callous producing mechanism.

02:39:52.240 | I think we can do the same thing

02:39:53.540 | with some of these other inclinations

02:39:55.820 | and have succeeded in reductions of homicide

02:40:01.780 | even in the last couple hundred years.

02:40:04.620 | - And some of that has to do with the myths and stories

02:40:06.820 | we tell ourselves, like again, it's language.

02:40:08.900 | 'Cause I mean, I love the Vikings.

02:40:10.800 | Valhalla, that idea.

02:40:14.900 | That's a myth, that's an idea,

02:40:18.940 | that's a promise for the great land beyond,

02:40:23.280 | over there beyond the mountains.

02:40:25.240 | It's like Animal Farm, Sugarcane Mountain,

02:40:27.820 | that is promised to you if you're a great warrior.

02:40:32.760 | I believe Valhalla is where half the soldiers go

02:40:36.200 | as a reward for great soldiering, for being great warriors.

02:40:42.040 | And the thing I just recently have been reading

02:40:44.200 | quite a bit about Valhalla,

02:40:45.360 | which is it's such a fascinating

02:40:48.280 | how these myths are constructed.

02:40:50.420 | I believe, I just think this is such an awesome setup

02:40:57.140 | in terms of a kind of heaven,

02:40:59.480 | which is they spend the entire day fighting

02:41:02.240 | for joy, and if they die, they're reborn the next day.

02:41:09.520 | So it's, you're basically the passion,

02:41:13.080 | the thing you're passionate about without the consequences.

02:41:15.640 | On top of that, I think there's a pig or a boar

02:41:19.120 | that is, they keep eating.

02:41:23.760 | So it's regenerated every single day.

02:41:25.560 | So unlimited food, and there's unlimited beer, I believe.

02:41:29.820 | So it's like-- - Or mead, maybe.

02:41:31.680 | - Mead, mead, yes, yes, yes, it's mead.

02:41:34.280 | I don't know, that's fascinating

02:41:35.880 | that we construct these myths.

02:41:37.520 | And at the same time,

02:41:41.320 | these myths can be used to get humans

02:41:45.480 | to do some of the worst atrocities.

02:41:48.080 | So some of the violence requires us to have those myths

02:41:51.760 | of what is waiting for us beyond death,

02:41:54.160 | sort of beyond over there in Sugarcandy Mountain,

02:41:57.880 | as Crow says that in Animal Farm.

02:42:00.840 | And so I think the more and more in this modern society,

02:42:05.000 | the positive of not constructing so many myths

02:42:08.000 | is that we get to live more in the moment,

02:42:09.800 | and that forces us to optimize and improve the moment,

02:42:12.960 | and we get to face the irrational

02:42:16.240 | and the painful aspect of violence.

02:42:17.760 | Maybe we should reduce that in the here and now.

02:42:20.120 | Yeah, the downside is we may not,

02:42:22.120 | if we dispose of God or these kinds of religious

02:42:25.240 | and spiritual ideas, we might descend into,

02:42:29.520 | we need to worry about with nihilism.

02:42:32.080 | And it's a beautiful dance,

02:42:33.480 | 'cause humans seem to tie themselves together

02:42:35.320 | with narratives. - Yes, yeah.

02:42:37.360 | - And with myths and stories that we all believe,

02:42:40.400 | if you completely dispose of them,

02:42:42.160 | society, I don't know, we don't know.

02:42:45.000 | We don't know what's going to happen,

02:42:46.920 | if it's going to collapse,

02:42:48.000 | or if it's actually going to rediscover better myths,

02:42:50.760 | better stories, more scientifically grounded ones,

02:42:54.400 | ones that are driven in data and all those kinds of things.

02:42:57.360 | - Yeah, I don't know.

02:42:59.840 | I mean, it's an interesting question.

02:43:01.760 | I mean, I don't have any brilliant insights into it

02:43:05.440 | other than that, to agree with you,

02:43:08.600 | that people construct narratives,

02:43:12.600 | well, of their own lives,

02:43:13.920 | and sometimes the life after death.

02:43:17.040 | But I guess I would add,

02:43:19.520 | and this is maybe a more cynical view,

02:43:21.640 | but you mentioned atrocities.

02:43:23.520 | I think that leaders can sometimes exploit those under them

02:43:31.680 | to create forms of violence or justification for warfare.

02:43:36.680 | Like in the group that we are conquering,

02:43:45.760 | they are a subhuman, they're insects,

02:43:49.160 | they're an infectious disease that is,

02:43:52.640 | and so these narratives can be used by leaders

02:43:56.800 | to exploit and motivate people under them

02:44:01.040 | to commit these atrocities.

02:44:03.560 | So it's a nastier part of our psychology,

02:44:07.640 | both that leaders do that,

02:44:09.000 | but also that people are vulnerable

02:44:11.400 | to narratives of that sort.

02:44:13.400 | - Yeah, it's fascinating to look pre-internet.

02:44:15.960 | You hope the internet makes us more resistant to that,

02:44:18.960 | which I do have probably a question on that.

02:44:21.200 | But if you look at just the propaganda machines

02:44:23.720 | during World War II,

02:44:25.280 | on the Nazi side and on the Soviet side,

02:44:28.680 | on every side, but particularly in those two,

02:44:32.160 | it's so fascinating both how effective

02:44:35.000 | a simple message can be in a leader being able

02:44:38.960 | to convince the small inner circle around them,

02:44:42.340 | convince themselves, which is fascinating, propaganda,

02:44:47.440 | and you start to believe the propaganda you generate,

02:44:50.000 | and then how easily the populace is convincible.

02:44:53.800 | Again, you hope that the internet,

02:44:56.280 | the distributed nature of the internet

02:44:58.280 | makes it more difficult to run a propaganda campaign,

02:45:01.920 | at least of the classical sort.

02:45:03.560 | I do have a question about this,

02:45:05.680 | 'cause you mentioned Elon Musk.

02:45:07.360 | When we're talking about status hierarchies,

02:45:09.800 | like you and I can't buy Twitter.

02:45:11.360 | - And we're a wealth accumulation, yeah.

02:45:13.720 | - What do you think about Elon buying Twitter,

02:45:16.340 | in particular, in the reason, the state of reason,

02:45:22.200 | that he's doing so in emphasizing free speech?

02:45:26.280 | - That's an interesting question,

02:45:27.360 | but I don't really have an informed opinion about it.

02:45:30.280 | I don't know, it's not my area of expertise,

02:45:34.640 | and I don't know enough details,

02:45:37.280 | and I also don't know what his plans are for Twitter,

02:45:40.920 | what changes he proposes to implement.

02:45:44.760 | - Well, the reason I bring that up is because,

02:45:47.400 | and you've kind of said you don't necessarily

02:45:49.880 | feel a tremendous amount of pressure,

02:45:51.800 | but in doing controversial research,

02:45:54.440 | in doing research on controversial topics,

02:45:57.760 | you're also a communicator,

02:45:59.160 | and Twitter is a platform in which you communicate,

02:46:03.120 | and there's going to be, if you get canceled somewhere,

02:46:05.440 | you get canceled on Twitter.

02:46:07.040 | - Yeah. - And so, there's pressure.

02:46:09.440 | So what does free speech look like in these public platforms?

02:46:14.280 | It's communicating difficult ideas.

02:46:16.540 | It's changing your mind, it's exploring ideas,

02:46:19.560 | and not fearing the mob.

02:46:23.860 | The mob that pressures the platform

02:46:27.460 | to remove you from the platform,

02:46:29.540 | or to ban you, shadow ban you from the platform,

02:46:33.100 | decrease your reach artificially on the platform.

02:46:36.140 | And those are really fascinating questions

02:46:38.140 | that we get to deal with in this new digital age.

02:46:41.660 | So there's a lot of ideas.

02:46:43.860 | You said what Elon is planning to do.

02:46:46.100 | Forget Elon, how do you do this well?

02:46:48.740 | That's the question.

02:46:50.260 | And there's sort of an absolutist view of free speech,

02:46:52.780 | let anyone say anything.

02:46:54.580 | And I tend to be a person that believes

02:46:57.220 | everybody should have the freedom to say anything.

02:46:59.700 | The question with a social media platform is,

02:47:02.260 | well, can you force anyone to hear what you have to say?

02:47:07.260 | Because the virality, the viral nature of communication

02:47:13.740 | means that you can control who hears what you say.

02:47:19.900 | The virality of that, the search and discovery aspect.

02:47:23.340 | And I think that's a fascinating question

02:47:25.620 | from the algorithmic perspective.

02:47:27.620 | The amount of data out there, just like papers,

02:47:29.500 | there's a huge amount of papers.

02:47:30.980 | What you want is to find the best papers,

02:47:35.400 | the ones you agree with,

02:47:36.880 | but also the ones that challenge you.

02:47:39.040 | And you don't want to nonstop read

02:47:41.540 | the papers that challenge you.

02:47:42.740 | You're going to be mentally exhausted.

02:47:44.620 | There's a bucket of attention and focus

02:47:48.040 | and mental energy you can allocate.

02:47:49.900 | The ones that really challenge you,

02:47:51.540 | the ideas that really challenge you are exhausting.

02:47:54.040 | It's good.

02:47:54.880 | Just like going to the gym, it's good.

02:47:56.720 | But then you also want to read things that are fun for you.

02:48:01.280 | And those are, you know,

02:48:02.720 | if you're spending your whole life in arguments,

02:48:06.920 | that's going to be exhausting.

02:48:07.960 | You want to hang out, chill with your friends,

02:48:10.080 | watch some Netflix, have fun, whatever, easygoing.

02:48:13.880 | And sometimes have difficult academic arguments

02:48:16.680 | with people, for example, with people you disagree with,

02:48:19.040 | but not all the time.

02:48:20.480 | And you have to have a platform.

02:48:22.080 | What does free speech actually looks like?

02:48:24.000 | It's a platform where everybody can challenge anybody,

02:48:27.360 | but not destroy them by doing so mentally.

02:48:31.380 | So you have to balance personal growth

02:48:35.040 | of each individual person on the platform.

02:48:37.380 | But definitely removing people from a platform

02:48:39.960 | is a terrible thing.

02:48:41.400 | So on top of that, it's like,

02:48:44.160 | how do you get measures that the platform is doing good?

02:48:49.160 | What I really like what Elon said,

02:48:52.280 | and I've talked to him about this,

02:48:53.720 | is pissing off everybody equally,

02:48:57.560 | the extremes of every side equally.

02:48:59.680 | In the political spectrum,

02:49:00.680 | you could say the left and the right

02:49:02.360 | is measuring by pissing off the extremes equally,

02:49:06.400 | because currently there seems to be an asymmetry in that.

02:49:09.340 | So that's one good measure that allows you to maximize,

02:49:12.000 | as he says, the area under the curve of human happiness.

02:49:15.640 | That's one thing.

02:49:18.200 | The other is people representing themselves honestly.

02:49:23.200 | So removing the bots from the platform.

02:49:25.360 | It's such a weird world we live in,

02:49:26.880 | where you don't know who's real or not.

02:49:29.520 | So anonymity is an awesome thing.

02:49:31.940 | The awesome aspect of anonymity

02:49:35.880 | is it protects people's privacy.

02:49:37.600 | It actually gives them freedom to think,

02:49:39.780 | freedom to speak even more so.

02:49:42.380 | But when anonymity is weaponized,

02:49:45.380 | it allows you to be cruel to others

02:49:48.560 | without the repercussion of cruelty

02:49:50.100 | that you would feel in the physical world.

02:49:52.660 | So you wanna use anonymity as a shield versus as a sword.

02:49:57.660 | So to protect yourself from the attacks of others,

02:50:00.860 | but not as a way to hurt others.

02:50:02.780 | And those are all really tricky things to figure out.

02:50:06.100 | And not all of it's gonna be solved

02:50:09.340 | with an edit button,

02:50:10.300 | which I believe is the most requested Twitter feature.

02:50:13.260 | Anyway, I think this is fascinating,

02:50:16.940 | not just for people talking about politics,

02:50:19.980 | which is what everyone seems to care about,

02:50:21.980 | but also for science,

02:50:23.700 | for people challenging each other in the scientific domain.

02:50:27.780 | 'Cause I at least have hope for scientific communication,

02:50:30.860 | where people can start playing around

02:50:33.540 | with different mediums of communication.

02:50:35.100 | So not just academic papers, but just ideas,

02:50:37.860 | playing with those ideas.

02:50:38.940 | - Yeah, absolutely.

02:50:40.220 | - Especially when you have, so evolution, psychology,

02:50:42.660 | well, no, even that, it can be super high

02:50:46.300 | turnover rate of importance.

02:50:50.220 | But you have with COVID,

02:50:52.260 | it seems like the progress of science and scientific debate

02:50:55.860 | is most powerful in that context

02:50:59.140 | if it's done really quickly.

02:51:00.460 | And it feels like Twitter,

02:51:01.660 | like most of the best things I've learned about COVID

02:51:04.940 | to stay up to date was on Twitter.

02:51:08.140 | It's so exciting to see science happening so, so, so quickly

02:51:12.380 | in all kinds of domains there.

02:51:13.860 | And that was great.

02:51:15.980 | But then you step in with labels of what's misinformation,

02:51:19.860 | you have this kind of conformity seeking labels

02:51:24.860 | of what is true and not,

02:51:29.060 | which is a very unscientific thing to me,

02:51:31.700 | in the name of protecting the populace.

02:51:34.060 | It's a weird impulse that people have,

02:51:38.540 | which is, well, here's an organization,

02:51:40.980 | here's an institution that is a possessor of the truth

02:51:43.980 | and everybody else is untrue.

02:51:45.820 | Now, a lot of the time, maybe majority of the time,

02:51:49.780 | that institution is going to be correct.

02:51:52.340 | This consensus, consensus is the consensus

02:51:55.020 | because it's usually correct.

02:51:56.700 | But the biggest ideas are going to be against the consensus.

02:52:01.340 | - And certainly that's true in evolutionary psychology,

02:52:04.500 | where it seems like, are we even, is the cake even baked yet?

02:52:09.460 | It feels like there's a lot of turmoil

02:52:11.620 | in terms of figuring out human psychology.

02:52:14.220 | - Well, there's a lot that we don't know.

02:52:16.780 | I mean, if human psychology, if it were a simple thing

02:52:21.780 | and we only had three or half a dozen

02:52:27.220 | psychological adaptations,

02:52:29.300 | we would have discovered all of them by now.

02:52:31.500 | It's that it's so complex, multifaceted,

02:52:35.700 | multi-mechanism part that describes human nature

02:52:40.700 | that it was what makes it exciting,

02:52:44.860 | but also the amount that we know is small

02:52:47.900 | compared to the amount that we don't know.

02:52:49.540 | And so that's why you have to approach these things

02:52:52.580 | with a certain humility.

02:52:55.980 | And that's why even like in the mating and sexuality domain,

02:52:59.280 | which I've been studying for a number of years,

02:53:02.100 | I keep coming across things that I don't know,

02:53:05.460 | questions that are unanswered,

02:53:07.260 | which makes it exciting from my perspective.

02:53:12.460 | I mean, that's what the joy is of being a scientist.

02:53:15.980 | - You mentioned, I gotta return real quick to Ted Bundy.

02:53:21.180 | You mentioned you have,

02:53:22.340 | so you've written about murder and violence

02:53:25.580 | in a long distant past,

02:53:28.140 | but the thread runs through your work today.

02:53:30.880 | Who to you is the most fascinating serial killer

02:53:33.380 | of the true crime things that you've explored?

02:53:39.440 | - I think, well, Ted Bundy's way up there.

02:53:42.840 | I think Charles Manson is another.

02:53:45.340 | - Have you seen on Ted Bundy,

02:53:51.120 | 'cause I find him super fascinating.

02:53:53.320 | Have you seen, there's a lot of movies on him,

02:53:56.160 | extremely wicked, shockingly even vile.

02:53:59.820 | It's a retelling of his life

02:54:02.060 | from the perspective of his long-term girlfriend.

02:54:04.780 | - No, I have not seen that one yet.

02:54:05.940 | - Which ties together a lot of our conversation.

02:54:08.860 | So it's probably my favorite one.

02:54:10.900 | A lot of people say it's the best movie on Ted Bundy.

02:54:13.540 | So you should definitely watch it.

02:54:14.540 | - I will.

02:54:15.480 | - I recommend it to others,

02:54:16.580 | but it's from a perspective of the relationship.

02:54:21.500 | And it just, one of the really powerful windows

02:54:26.500 | into a serial killer that I saw there

02:54:30.640 | is that from the perspective of the relationship,

02:54:32.560 | you can have just this healthy looking relationship.

02:54:35.000 | Yeah, there's some fights and so on,

02:54:36.920 | but the usual dating and all that kind of stuff

02:54:39.520 | was all there.

02:54:40.600 | So all the murders he was doing,

02:54:42.120 | he had a long-term girlfriend throughout all of that.

02:54:45.680 | And also throughout all of that,

02:54:47.920 | I'll try not to give away,

02:54:49.320 | in case you don't know the story,

02:54:50.920 | throughout all of that, she stood by his side.

02:54:53.440 | She refused to believe everything that was happening

02:54:56.640 | until the very end.

02:55:00.980 | Of course, it shifts in the very end,

02:55:02.500 | and that's a fascinating shift,

02:55:04.400 | the breaking of the illusion.

02:55:07.240 | But it's really fascinating

02:55:09.160 | that you can have those two things.

02:55:11.340 | - Yeah, well, I think that part of it is

02:55:15.560 | we have these stereotypes that we expect

02:55:20.200 | people like serial killers to be these

02:55:22.960 | ugly, drooling creatures that are sort of evil all the time.

02:55:27.960 | And so, that's why even like you had,

02:55:33.320 | I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly,

02:55:36.360 | but like Stalin, who killed millions of people,

02:55:40.600 | apparently loved his kids and loved his family.

02:55:44.440 | So we have, as part of the complication,

02:55:47.840 | the complexity of human nature and human psychology

02:55:51.520 | is we don't have just this one,

02:55:53.860 | this one property that dictates

02:55:59.400 | how we behave in all circumstances.

02:56:01.720 | - Yeah, the devil is going to be charismatic.

02:56:07.480 | That's why, that's one of the things I've learned

02:56:12.600 | about just looking at evil people,

02:56:14.280 | looking at Jeffrey Epstein,

02:56:16.280 | who seemed to have hoodwinked quite a lot of people.

02:56:18.840 | - Yes, yeah, that's another fascinating case.

02:56:21.920 | Yeah, not that he wasn't a serial killer,

02:56:24.040 | but a serial sexual predator.

02:56:26.140 | - And a lot of people I know and respect

02:56:32.000 | didn't see the evil.

02:56:35.680 | - Yeah.

02:56:36.740 | - And so I never met the guy,

02:56:39.480 | but it's like, are you guys oblivious?

02:56:42.440 | Like, there must have been something,

02:56:44.600 | from everything I see is purely just charisma.

02:56:47.800 | It's the smoke and mirrors that--

02:56:51.120 | - Yeah, well, he was a very charming psychopath.

02:56:54.400 | - Yeah, but I think every psychopath

02:56:57.520 | to be effective has to be charming.

02:56:59.220 | - Yeah, the successful ones, yeah.

02:57:01.760 | Yeah, successful psychopaths.

02:57:03.660 | - Oh, yeah.

02:57:06.720 | - And that was, I mean, Ted Bundy was one.

02:57:08.920 | He was a good-looking guy, intelligent,

02:57:12.520 | and could turn on the charm, and then had this evil.

02:57:16.940 | - Is there something interesting to be said

02:57:19.800 | that I think a large percentage of the fan base,

02:57:22.720 | like I've seen numbers like 80% plus of the fan base

02:57:25.840 | for true crime shows is women?

02:57:28.320 | Is there some psychology behind that?

02:57:31.000 | - I haven't seen that.

02:57:32.040 | I'm not aware of a sex difference that I'm not aware of.

02:57:36.060 | - I mean, I've heard that in a lot of places.

02:57:39.640 | I wonder if there's something about true crime,

02:57:44.640 | maybe because it's just like sexual kinks

02:57:49.480 | for men develop early on, the cues.

02:57:52.720 | Maybe for women, there's the cues of the threat of violence.

02:57:56.540 | The attentiveness to violence develops early on,

02:58:00.680 | and therefore, fascination with violence.

02:58:03.120 | - Well, I think that, I mean, one thing is that,

02:58:06.860 | well, with serial killers specifically,

02:58:08.680 | I don't know if this is true of true crime in general,

02:58:11.160 | but serial killers, you find a lot of people,

02:58:16.160 | well, a lot of women fall in love with them,

02:58:19.360 | or even if they're jailed for serial killing.

02:58:23.240 | And I think one of the features of it

02:58:26.040 | is that it parasitizes or hijacks status mechanisms

02:58:31.040 | in that a key cue to status is the attention structure.

02:58:37.600 | That is, the high-status people are the people

02:58:40.500 | to whom the most people pay the most attention.

02:58:43.120 | And so serial killers garner a lot of attention,

02:58:46.560 | and even though for evil deeds, it's still attention.

02:58:51.560 | So I think that that hijacking

02:58:56.200 | of our status allocation adaptations

02:58:59.880 | is partly responsible for that.

02:59:02.640 | - Is there, given the trajectory of your life,

02:59:05.600 | you mentioned Berkeley and the East Coast and Michigan,

02:59:09.160 | you got everything.

02:59:10.360 | Is there, given the trajectory of your life,

02:59:12.800 | in geography and in science,

02:59:16.880 | can you give advice to young folks today,

02:59:19.600 | high school, college,

02:59:20.720 | thinking about how to make their own trajectory,

02:59:23.760 | how to make their own way through life

02:59:25.360 | that they can be proud of,

02:59:26.840 | either career or just love life or life?

02:59:32.480 | - Yeah, well, not necessarily on careers,

02:59:36.480 | but I can give advice on mating.

02:59:40.200 | And I think it's one of these things

02:59:42.000 | where we have requirements for the courses

02:59:47.000 | that students have to take in high school, for example.

02:59:51.800 | And I think there should be a required course

02:59:53.520 | on relationships, on mating.

02:59:57.000 | - So not just sex?

02:59:59.300 | - Yeah, not just sex at all, yeah.

03:00:01.880 | 'Cause I mean, most of what's taught

03:00:03.320 | is they teach about sexual health

03:00:05.240 | and how not to get an STI and so forth.

03:00:08.280 | - Yeah, my teacher put a condom on a banana.

03:00:11.760 | - Right, right.

03:00:12.600 | - It was very exciting.

03:00:13.760 | - But how to select a mate?

03:00:16.880 | How do you know if you're in a bad mating relationship?

03:00:20.160 | How to get out of a bad mating relationship?

03:00:25.160 | I think that there's, at this point in the science,

03:00:30.160 | even though there's a lot that we don't know,

03:00:31.920 | we know enough to at least provide some heuristics

03:00:35.440 | or general guidelines to things to watch out for.

03:00:39.200 | So just as a concrete example,

03:00:42.160 | with intimate partner violence,

03:00:44.040 | and this is male to female,

03:00:47.160 | there are statistical predictors of,

03:00:50.380 | is this guy, does he have an increased probability

03:00:53.280 | of beating you up?

03:00:55.040 | And there are things like if he starts to insist

03:00:57.720 | on knowing where you are at all times,

03:00:59.880 | if he starts cutting off your relationships

03:01:02.280 | with your friends and your family.

03:01:04.200 | So there are these kind of early warning signs,

03:01:08.800 | and I think women should know about those.

03:01:11.840 | Or even things like that women are most in danger

03:01:16.840 | of being killed by an ex during the first three

03:01:20.940 | to six months after they've broken up with him.

03:01:23.380 | That sometimes they think it's,

03:01:26.160 | the guy will say, "Meet with me one last time,

03:01:29.400 | and then I won't bother you again."

03:01:31.200 | No, this is a dangerous time.

03:01:33.640 | So I think there's some knowledge that we do know

03:01:37.200 | that can be used to make informed decisions

03:01:39.720 | about our mating lives, and I think that should be taught.

03:01:42.600 | - So consider that, like take the mating strategies,

03:01:47.080 | the mating life seriously.

03:01:49.600 | - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

03:01:51.080 | And because, aside from a small number of people

03:01:56.080 | who are totally uninterested in any kind of mating

03:01:59.760 | or sexuality, and there are a small percentage

03:02:02.800 | that fall into that category,

03:02:04.240 | we all confront problems of mating.

03:02:07.720 | - How do you, you know there's that,

03:02:10.000 | called the mathematical model,

03:02:11.800 | like secretary problem, marriage problem.

03:02:14.240 | I don't know if you're familiar, but basically,

03:02:16.200 | you have, it's a silly, perhaps not,

03:02:19.580 | it's a formalized, simplified,

03:02:24.560 | queuing theory type of thing, where you have N subjects,

03:02:28.560 | and you get to date some number of people,

03:02:33.560 | and then there's a stopping condition,

03:02:36.200 | I believe it's N over E,

03:02:38.640 | beyond which you pick the next partner,

03:02:42.000 | which is better than anybody you've dated before.

03:02:44.560 | So let's not overemphasize that idea,

03:02:49.000 | but if I were to psychologize it,

03:02:53.600 | I would say that some exploration is good,

03:02:56.760 | some dating is good, but at a certain point,

03:03:00.200 | you pick somebody, given the set of people you've explored,

03:03:04.480 | you pick somebody who is pretty desirable

03:03:09.480 | within that group.

03:03:11.880 | - Yeah, yeah, but I would add that what you also wanna do

03:03:15.360 | is you want to mate with someone

03:03:19.560 | who's equivalent in mate value,

03:03:21.960 | or has even what's more difficult is,

03:03:25.480 | has a likely equivalent future mate value trajectory,

03:03:30.480 | because nothing remains static.

03:03:34.200 | - Yes, that's beautiful.

03:03:36.760 | - But it's also the case that there are individual things,

03:03:39.920 | we haven't talked about these,

03:03:40.920 | but things like religious orientation,

03:03:44.800 | political orientation, values,

03:03:48.360 | these are extremely important to be compatible on.

03:03:51.520 | And so you do have cases of, let's say,

03:03:54.560 | a Democrat marrying a Republican,

03:03:57.680 | and that sometimes works,

03:04:01.240 | but you're gonna get into a lot of conflict,

03:04:03.720 | other things being equal,

03:04:05.320 | or someone who's deeply religious

03:04:08.040 | versus someone who is not at all religious,

03:04:10.480 | that's gonna be a problem,

03:04:11.800 | or someone who's of a different religious faith.

03:04:14.200 | And so compatibility on those things,

03:04:18.800 | compatibility also on personality dimensions,

03:04:21.600 | I think there's some main effects,

03:04:22.920 | so I would recommend avoiding that dimension

03:04:26.360 | we talked about of emotional instability,

03:04:29.080 | 'cause if you sign up for that,

03:04:31.400 | you at least should know you're gonna be in for

03:04:33.840 | a lot of conflict.

03:04:36.000 | It may be exciting at times,

03:04:37.560 | but there's gonna be a lot of ups and downs.

03:04:39.560 | - Know what you sign up for.

03:04:40.920 | What about how much to date?

03:04:43.320 | So there's a culture,

03:04:45.120 | I'm speaking soon to a founder

03:04:48.640 | and long-time ex-CEO of Tinder,

03:04:52.280 | so there's that culture of digitalized dating,

03:04:56.840 | of swipe right, swipe left.

03:04:58.920 | Is it positive, negative?

03:05:01.800 | How much should you date?

03:05:03.840 | What's the number?

03:05:04.760 | And also, what number of sexual partners should you,

03:05:08.480 | what's optimal, asking for a friend?

03:05:10.680 | - I don't know if there's a single optimum there.

03:05:13.720 | - I was hoping there was.

03:05:15.600 | - I think that--

03:05:16.440 | - Is it single digits or double digits?

03:05:20.320 | I need answers.

03:05:21.440 | - Well, I don't know.

03:05:22.320 | I get some of my wisdom from lyrics, from songs.

03:05:25.880 | - Me too.

03:05:26.720 | Bruce Springsteen.

03:05:28.200 | - This Eagles song, I think Don Henley said something like,

03:05:32.560 | there are too many lovers in one lifetime,

03:05:35.120 | ain't good for you, or something like that.

03:05:38.280 | But I think there is--

03:05:42.440 | - Take it easy is a good one too.

03:05:44.040 | - Yeah.

03:05:45.840 | Basically, don't get too attached.

03:05:48.680 | Don't take heartbreak too seriously.

03:05:51.400 | - Yeah.

03:05:52.240 | So, but I think, I mean, internet dating,

03:05:55.120 | and there's been some work on them,

03:05:57.720 | I think has its pluses and minuses.

03:06:00.480 | And one of the pluses is it gives you access

03:06:03.320 | to potential pools of mates

03:06:04.880 | that you could never possibly meet in real life,

03:06:08.520 | where mating and dating used to be either people you knew,

03:06:12.120 | or friends of friends, or you go out to bars, or parties.

03:06:16.960 | But so that's the good thing,

03:06:18.840 | gives you access to those extended pools.

03:06:22.480 | But also it gives people the illusion

03:06:26.120 | that there's always someone better out there for you.

03:06:28.640 | Someone who's just a little more attractive,

03:06:30.440 | a little more compatible, a little more.

03:06:32.280 | And so it produces what's sometimes

03:06:35.400 | called decision paralysis.

03:06:37.560 | You have too many options and you can't choose.

03:06:41.200 | I think one other potential negative,

03:06:45.400 | which I think could be corrected

03:06:46.800 | by these internet dating sites,

03:06:48.720 | is that the picture, the photographs of the face and body

03:06:53.720 | tend to overwhelm all other sources of information.

03:06:59.360 | And so, especially if you're just looking for a sex partner,

03:07:02.120 | that's one thing.

03:07:02.960 | Physical appearances, it's fine for that

03:07:05.880 | to be overwhelmingly important.

03:07:07.600 | But if you're looking for a long-term mate,

03:07:09.200 | there's so many other things

03:07:10.360 | that are really, really important.

03:07:13.080 | And so, but people tend to be swamped

03:07:17.680 | by the visual input, which is natural

03:07:21.200 | because that's where we evolved to respond to visual input.

03:07:24.160 | We're not evolved to respond to words,

03:07:27.000 | like, "Oh, I like to go fishing," or something like that.

03:07:32.640 | So if there's some way for these sites to,

03:07:37.160 | in long-term mating, for these other characteristics

03:07:40.640 | to be made more salient in people's information processing,

03:07:44.800 | I think that would be a valuable improvement.

03:07:47.520 | - Yeah, because even, forget long-term beauty,

03:07:50.320 | even sex appeal is,

03:07:54.380 | like, even the word appearance,

03:07:57.600 | it feels like, to me, people that are super sexy

03:08:00.520 | in real life are a lot more than their picture.

03:08:04.120 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:08:04.960 | Like, it's actually surprising.

03:08:07.520 | Like, they come to life in different ways.

03:08:09.360 | - Yes.

03:08:10.200 | - It could be either submissiveness as shyness

03:08:12.160 | or extravagant wit and humor,

03:08:17.160 | or like super confident or super,

03:08:20.400 | like, whatever they are,

03:08:22.040 | whatever the weirdness that they are comes through.

03:08:24.920 | So when people say, well,

03:08:27.120 | that was just the case of the,

03:08:28.600 | sort of proponents of dating apps,

03:08:31.600 | it's like, well, when you meet somebody at a bar,

03:08:34.040 | you're getting the same experience as you do

03:08:35.760 | on a dating site, you have very little information,

03:08:38.680 | all you get is appearance.

03:08:40.680 | But I don't think appearance on the screen

03:08:43.480 | is the same as appearance in real life,

03:08:45.440 | especially with people that, for some reason,

03:08:47.400 | you find super sexy.

03:08:48.920 | 'Cause, like, and again, the objectification

03:08:51.480 | that we mentioned earlier is the,

03:08:53.220 | it over-optimizes for people

03:08:56.760 | who are good at taking pictures of themselves.

03:08:59.120 | Like, they're representing themselves inaccurately.

03:09:03.120 | They're not just even in the physical features,

03:09:06.060 | but in the way those physical features

03:09:07.680 | are used in physical reality.

03:09:10.000 | Like, in terms of body language,

03:09:11.540 | in terms of flirtation,

03:09:13.200 | in terms of just everything put together.

03:09:16.320 | So I just, I wonder if there's a way to close that gap.

03:09:21.320 | And I don't know what that is exactly.

03:09:24.420 | I tend to believe more information is good on dating.

03:09:27.400 | I don't use, actually, dating apps.

03:09:28.760 | I just, 'cause they don't make any sense to me,

03:09:31.680 | 'cause there's not enough information.

03:09:33.680 | Like, what this, like, to me,

03:09:37.600 | like, whether you know Dostoevsky or not is important.

03:09:41.800 | And I don't mean that because you've read,

03:09:43.280 | specifically, a book by Dostoevsky,

03:09:45.640 | but there's something about, have you suffered?

03:09:49.160 | Have you thought about life deeply?

03:09:51.200 | Have you been shaken in some way?

03:09:53.680 | And that's not, sometimes books can reveal that.

03:09:56.560 | Sometimes something else can reveal that.

03:09:58.000 | But this kinda very shallow resume,

03:10:00.960 | like, I like to travel, I have boobs.

03:10:05.320 | It's like this kinda thing is,

03:10:07.320 | it loses the humanity of it all.

03:10:09.880 | Because, listen, as a fan of technology,

03:10:11.800 | I would love dating to open up, like you said,

03:10:15.200 | the pool of possibilities out there, the soulmate idea.

03:10:18.560 | Like, I believe that there's an incredible people

03:10:21.600 | out there for you that is an emotional connection,

03:10:24.560 | not just a physical connection.

03:10:26.280 | And so that the promise of,

03:10:30.920 | digital tech is that you can discover those people.

03:10:34.120 | And that's not just for a romantic relationship,

03:10:36.000 | it's for friendships, it's for business partners,

03:10:38.160 | it's for all that kinda stuff, like your friend groups.

03:10:41.600 | But yeah, there's something,

03:10:42.920 | seems broken about dating sites.

03:10:44.760 | - Yeah, well, that's why, I mean,

03:10:47.040 | when I'm asked for advice on this,

03:10:49.720 | I say, if you feel like you have a connection with someone,

03:10:53.560 | meet them in person, meet them in real life.

03:10:56.840 | - And take the road trip, like you said.

03:10:58.360 | - Yeah, take the road trip. - Stress test it.

03:11:00.320 | - Yes, yeah, 'cause there's only, I mean,

03:11:03.520 | so much you can learn through messaging and so forth.

03:11:08.520 | - Amongst all of this, we didn't really,

03:11:12.880 | we didn't really mention love, which is hilarious.

03:11:17.240 | So let me ask you, in the last just few questions,

03:11:21.520 | what's the role of love in all of this

03:11:23.360 | in the human condition?

03:11:25.840 | So if we talked about mating,

03:11:29.880 | we talked about mate selection,

03:11:32.000 | we talked about all the things we find attractive in a mate,

03:11:34.760 | the status hierarchies and all that kinda stuff,

03:11:37.120 | what about that deep connection with a human being

03:11:39.440 | that's hard to explain?

03:11:41.440 | - Well, we talked about it a little bit,

03:11:42.960 | but so we're talking about love, like romantic love.

03:11:46.820 | I think it's an evolved emotion

03:11:51.600 | that evolved in part to solidify long-term pair bonds.

03:11:58.960 | And is it different from the love of a parent for a child

03:12:02.320 | or brotherly love or sisterly love or other friendship love?

03:12:07.280 | I think these are different phenomena.

03:12:10.000 | But if we're talking about romantic love,

03:12:12.400 | I think it's an evolved emotion.

03:12:14.220 | Leading hypothesis is that it's a commitment device.

03:12:19.480 | So if I say to a potential mate,

03:12:24.560 | oh, you exceed my minimum thresholds

03:12:27.640 | on intelligence and looks,

03:12:30.560 | I think we make a good couple.

03:12:32.520 | - That's a good pickup line.

03:12:33.720 | - Yeah, it wouldn't do much emotionally.

03:12:37.880 | But if you say, I love you,

03:12:41.200 | it's I can't stop thinking about you,

03:12:44.160 | it's this uncontrollable emotion that I feel toward you,

03:12:48.200 | it's a sign that I'm committed to you,

03:12:53.260 | at least for a while,

03:12:55.340 | and I'm not gonna abandon you when,

03:12:57.300 | if you're an eight, and when an 8.5 comes along,

03:13:01.280 | I'm not gonna drop you and go with the 8.5.

03:13:03.880 | - Yeah, that's so interesting,

03:13:06.500 | but it's still the reality of the emotion is there,

03:13:11.500 | however it evolved, it's still there.

03:13:14.360 | And it's interesting.

03:13:15.200 | It's one of the more puzzling pieces here.

03:13:18.340 | Even broader than romantic love,

03:13:21.160 | but in romantic love, what is that?

03:13:24.440 | How much of that is nature, how much of it is nurture?

03:13:27.240 | 'Cause even, I mean, I ask that myself all the time,

03:13:32.240 | like I'm deeply romantic, how much of that is nature?

03:13:36.360 | How much of it is nurture?

03:13:38.160 | How much is the people I spent my childhood with,

03:13:42.960 | the ideas, I mean, the Soviet Union

03:13:47.640 | sort of is known for the literature

03:13:49.280 | and the movies and so on that are very over,

03:13:53.480 | that are heavily romanticized.

03:13:55.000 | I don't wanna say over-romanticized.

03:13:57.200 | Maybe there's no such thing, but so maybe, what is that?

03:13:59.560 | Is that my upbringing, or is that somewhere in the genetics

03:14:02.560 | that I value that emotional connection a lot?

03:14:06.080 | - Yeah, well, most humans have the capacity for love.

03:14:15.320 | Whether it is activated in any individual person

03:14:20.320 | such as you or anyone else,

03:14:24.680 | it is gonna be adjusted or suppressed

03:14:28.640 | by different social and cultural and upbringing factors.

03:14:32.520 | I mean, there are cultures where parents

03:14:36.320 | basically lock away girls, they cloister them,

03:14:39.440 | and so they can't ever meet anyone else

03:14:41.960 | until the parents arrange to marry them.

03:14:44.000 | So they override any possibility of love.

03:14:48.160 | But I think it's an evolved emotion.

03:14:54.640 | And I mean, one kind of test of this,

03:14:59.640 | and this is just slightly circumstantial evidence,

03:15:04.400 | but in China historically, there have been arranged marriages

03:15:08.400 | and then individual choice marriages.

03:15:12.960 | The arranged marriages tend to have higher breakup rates

03:15:15.800 | and lower child production

03:15:19.360 | than the ones that are sort of voluntarily chosen.

03:15:22.800 | You know, so-called above-max.

03:15:23.640 | - I've heard sort of contrasting stuff from India.

03:15:26.220 | I wonder, contrasting, so where the arranged marriages

03:15:31.720 | are longer-lasting.

03:15:33.040 | It's so interesting, 'cause you said China.

03:15:36.400 | - Yeah.

03:15:37.240 | - I would love to see the data and the dance of that,

03:15:39.100 | because maybe there's a lot of other interesting factors,

03:15:41.560 | like how the arranged marriage is arranged.

03:15:43.560 | - Yes.

03:15:45.120 | - Is it for the families, is the interest of the families

03:15:49.040 | for some kind of like in the monarchies

03:15:51.680 | to make agreements to trade resources,

03:15:53.760 | or is the interest of the family

03:15:55.480 | to maximize the success of the marriage?

03:15:57.920 | So compatibility, is it,

03:15:59.720 | are they looking for maximized compatibility,

03:16:01.840 | or are they looking to maximize resources?

03:16:04.200 | - Well, historically, it's often been an arrangement

03:16:08.860 | where they're trying to maximize the status and power

03:16:12.560 | of the alliance with this other extended family.

03:16:16.640 | But that also varies from culture to culture.

03:16:21.160 | Like there's the Tiwi culture,

03:16:23.880 | where there's, you know,

03:16:25.880 | the men basically bestow their daughters on other men,

03:16:30.840 | and they try to gauge which men,

03:16:33.980 | which of these young up-and-coming men

03:16:36.440 | are really gonna be, you know, chiefs, high-status guys,

03:16:40.060 | and which ones are gonna be losers.

03:16:41.620 | And so you have this weird phenomenon,

03:16:45.700 | they have a peligrous marriage,

03:16:47.860 | where a guy will get one daughter bestowed on him,

03:16:52.640 | and then other men use that as information

03:16:55.060 | that this guy must be rising in status,

03:16:58.020 | and so they give their daughters to the guy as well.

03:17:00.020 | And so the guy might go from like zero to seven wives

03:17:02.980 | in a very short span of time.

03:17:03.820 | - Yeah, the rich get richer.

03:17:05.300 | That's fascinating.

03:17:07.060 | The Game of Thrones, and sex is a part of that game.

03:17:11.860 | Let me ask you about yourself, your own self.

03:17:17.680 | We mentioned Richard Wrangham, think about mortality.

03:17:22.080 | Do you think about your own mortality?

03:17:24.940 | Are you afraid of death?

03:17:27.560 | - Yeah, interesting.

03:17:29.960 | I'm not afraid of death.

03:17:31.920 | I agree with Richard Wrangham.

03:17:34.340 | I'm not eager to leave the party.

03:17:36.460 | I don't wanna leave the party soon.

03:17:38.380 | I enjoy life in all of its interesting complexities.

03:17:42.540 | I enjoy my scientific work.

03:17:45.420 | I enjoy my relationships with other people.

03:17:48.140 | I enjoy exploring the universe.

03:17:49.780 | So I'm not eager to leave, but I'm not afraid of it.

03:17:53.980 | And I think part of that is that I was married for a while

03:18:01.140 | and my wife died prematurely of cancer.

03:18:06.140 | And so I spent basically eight months with her

03:18:10.500 | watching her die after she was diagnosed.

03:18:13.200 | And there's some, it was a horrible time for me

03:18:17.180 | and for her, obviously, but there's some way

03:18:19.880 | in which it kind of made it more familiar

03:18:24.880 | so that it became a lot less frightening.

03:18:30.940 | But--

03:18:31.780 | - How did that experience change you?

03:18:36.380 | Just as a scientist, as a thinker about humanity,

03:18:39.660 | as a human yourself?

03:18:44.420 | - Well, I--

03:18:45.740 | - So you're saying you felt,

03:18:47.240 | like you felt a little bit more ready

03:18:50.100 | for this whole end of the party.

03:18:52.720 | - Well, yeah, it's, I mean, 'cause we tend to be afraid

03:18:57.120 | of things that we're not familiar with, you know?

03:19:00.340 | And so if you're familiar with it,

03:19:02.480 | at least in my case, that caused a lessening

03:19:07.620 | of fear on that dimension.

03:19:10.340 | But I don't know, it also kind of, you know,

03:19:13.340 | there are these existential thoughts that it brought about,

03:19:17.300 | like how ephemeral life is.

03:19:20.620 | And I remember this Richard Dawkins quote,

03:19:24.180 | he said something like, "We are all gonna die

03:19:28.060 | "and we're the lucky ones."

03:19:30.020 | (laughing)

03:19:31.860 | - Yeah, that we even got a chance.

03:19:34.980 | - Yeah, or even, you mentioned Russian writers.

03:19:38.940 | One of my favorite writers is Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov.

03:19:42.460 | I don't know if you've read him,

03:19:44.100 | but he said once that life is a chink of light

03:19:49.100 | between two eternities of darkness.

03:19:52.540 | - And you're saying that's not terrifying to you?

03:19:57.200 | - Well, I prefer, I'm happy with the prior,

03:20:00.300 | the first eternity of darkness,

03:20:01.980 | I prefer the second not to occur,

03:20:04.980 | but it's going to occur.

03:20:07.140 | I mean, we know that Elon Musk aside,

03:20:11.900 | I'm skeptical that we'll be colonizing other planets

03:20:16.900 | in any substantive way.

03:20:19.420 | And so our star, our sun will burn out.

03:20:25.140 | And so it's gonna take a few billion years or so,

03:20:28.620 | but it will eventually, the Earth will become a cold lump

03:20:33.000 | of dirt floating around in the universe with no life on it.

03:20:38.000 | - So it's not just your light,

03:20:40.380 | the light of your consciousness,

03:20:42.520 | it's the light of our human civilization

03:20:45.740 | that will eventually go out.

03:20:46.840 | - Yes, everything.

03:20:48.040 | At least here.

03:20:51.200 | I do believe that there is life and intelligent life

03:20:54.600 | in other parts of the universe on other planets.

03:20:59.600 | - I sometimes wonder if the second eternal darkness

03:21:04.740 | is the thing that makes the light possible.

03:21:08.780 | So in the other places out there,

03:21:11.260 | I wonder how successfully can you truly be

03:21:15.300 | without the deadline of death,

03:21:17.260 | both at the human scale and at the civilizational scale.

03:21:22.060 | I feel like in order to create anything beautiful,

03:21:25.540 | we'll have to live on the edge of destruction.

03:21:27.840 | That seems to be, some people would say

03:21:32.000 | that's just a feature of our past,

03:21:34.140 | that our future can be otherwise.

03:21:35.540 | But like you, I'm somebody that looks at the data.

03:21:40.080 | And currently the data says otherwise,

03:21:43.180 | but of course we're constantly changing the data

03:21:46.180 | because there's change.

03:21:48.480 | So we'll see.

03:21:50.180 | I wonder what the future holds for us.

03:21:52.860 | Speaking of which, as somebody who wrote a textbook

03:21:57.860 | on evolutionary psychology,

03:22:00.880 | what do you think is the meaning of the whole thing?

03:22:05.300 | What's the meaning of life?

03:22:06.940 | You're very good at describing

03:22:10.060 | how the human mind is the way it is,

03:22:12.980 | but why is it here at all?

03:22:15.320 | What's the purpose?

03:22:16.440 | - Well, I can give you my answer to that,

03:22:18.500 | but I would actually love to hear your answer

03:22:20.520 | because I know you've asked this question

03:22:22.540 | of dozens and dozens of people on your podcast.

03:22:25.900 | And what are your thoughts on that?

03:22:28.940 | - Well, first of all, my mind changes on that a lot.

03:22:32.260 | And I think the process of answering the question

03:22:34.740 | is the fun thing, not the actual final answer.

03:22:38.060 | I think the question itself is the most fun thing.

03:22:40.420 | But for me, usually is two things.

03:22:45.820 | One is love, and we can talk a long time.

03:22:49.500 | What I mean by that is it's not just romantic love.

03:22:52.520 | And two is to create and hopefully to create beauty.

03:22:57.520 | So, and again, I can talk forever what that means.

03:23:00.820 | For me personally, creating beauty means engineering

03:23:05.820 | and creating experiences, like connection with others.

03:23:09.820 | On the love side, it's just the actual feeling,

03:23:15.380 | the experience of deep appreciation

03:23:20.140 | of everything around you,

03:23:24.460 | like the sensory experiences of everything around you.

03:23:27.400 | Just feeling it every single moment,

03:23:31.080 | saying I'm damn glad to be alive.

03:23:35.960 | That light with the darkness on each side,

03:23:38.920 | just being appreciative,

03:23:40.020 | like being in the experience of truly

03:23:45.760 | present and experiencing it.

03:23:48.760 | 'Cause it's not going to be there for long,

03:23:52.200 | the whole thing ends.

03:23:53.400 | And that to me is love.

03:23:54.640 | And the reason romantic love is so important

03:23:57.760 | is that other people are just awesome.

03:24:01.680 | They're fascinating black boxes

03:24:05.240 | that can generate awesomeness.

03:24:07.920 | So can like other animals and objects for me,

03:24:11.620 | but humans in particular for some reason,

03:24:14.880 | are just generated of awesomeness.

03:24:17.480 | They surprise us.

03:24:18.520 | And therefore a good target of love.

03:24:22.640 | - Well, so that's a much more eloquent answer

03:24:26.680 | than I could give,

03:24:28.480 | but I'll just say a thought or two on that.

03:24:32.040 | And I mean, one of the things,

03:24:34.780 | what is the meaning of life?

03:24:39.040 | I mean, in some sense,

03:24:42.600 | if you're thinking about some eternal purpose,

03:24:46.240 | meaning like if we look 5 billion years hence,

03:24:51.000 | will any of this mean anything?

03:24:52.640 | I think the answer to that is probably no.

03:24:56.120 | Okay, but, and this is I think where my answer

03:24:59.440 | would concur with yours is that I think we have a rich,

03:25:04.200 | evolved psychology that contains many complex adaptations.

03:25:11.200 | And at any one moment in time, most are quiescent,

03:25:16.200 | most are not activated.

03:25:18.280 | But for me, part of the meaning of life

03:25:22.080 | is experiencing the activation

03:25:26.100 | of a lot of these complicated,

03:25:29.340 | evolved psychological mechanisms.

03:25:31.200 | And they include romantic love, they include friendship,

03:25:35.000 | they include being part of a group or coalition,

03:25:38.680 | 'cause I think we're an intensely coalitional species.

03:25:41.880 | So there's something about being a group member.

03:25:45.560 | So just even, I don't know, if you're in sports,

03:25:49.280 | if your team wins, you feel that somehow

03:25:52.240 | that's your part of that.

03:25:53.880 | But this goes for both the positive

03:25:59.240 | and the darker sides of things.

03:26:02.360 | So for example, warfare,

03:26:06.740 | you see these men who have been through a war together

03:26:10.900 | and where their lives have depended on each other,

03:26:14.280 | and they're like best friends for life

03:26:17.000 | and have a bond that is stronger

03:26:19.780 | than most people form with a friend ever in their life,

03:26:24.300 | 'cause they've been through these life or death experiences.

03:26:28.700 | And so I wouldn't want to,

03:26:34.940 | doesn't cause me to want to charge off and be in war,

03:26:38.180 | but there are some types of adaptations,

03:26:42.180 | even like warfare adaptations,

03:26:44.180 | where in principle, I would like to experience them.

03:26:47.540 | I would like to experience, and never will,

03:26:49.980 | but what is it like to be in a coalition

03:26:54.980 | where you are in combat with another coalition?

03:27:00.020 | Not modern warfare, 'cause it's horrible,

03:27:03.140 | but where your life is in danger,

03:27:04.780 | where you depend for your life on other people

03:27:09.460 | and they're depending for their life on you,

03:27:11.580 | and there's this kind of coalitional solidarity

03:27:14.980 | that is unique.

03:27:17.900 | Now, another thing that, of course,

03:27:22.140 | I'll never be able to experience is murder,

03:27:25.100 | 'cause I'm never gonna murder anybody.

03:27:27.060 | - The night is young.

03:27:30.020 | - But studying homicidal ideation really gave me,

03:27:34.060 | it was an eye-opener.

03:27:35.180 | It was as interesting as studying sexual fantasies,

03:27:39.660 | because if you ask what triggers homicidal thoughts,

03:27:44.220 | ideation, most people have had them.

03:27:46.420 | 'Cause I asked this question,

03:27:49.340 | have you ever thought about killing someone?

03:27:51.380 | And I get about 90 to 1% of men say yes,

03:27:54.820 | and about 84% of women say no.

03:27:57.140 | And even when I talk to people, they say,

03:28:00.180 | one-on-one, they'll say, "Oh, no,

03:28:01.420 | "I've never thought of killing someone.

03:28:02.740 | "What kind of person do you think I am?"

03:28:04.620 | And then 10 minutes later, they'll say,

03:28:06.180 | "Actually, there was this one time

03:28:08.700 | "when this guy humiliated me in public."

03:28:12.100 | But I think thoughts about killing, homicidal ideation,

03:28:19.740 | and they're very predictable

03:28:21.340 | from an evolutionary perspective.

03:28:23.740 | We mentioned mate poachers earlier, and infidelity,

03:28:27.460 | and there are other things,

03:28:28.460 | but things like that, being humiliated

03:28:32.220 | in public, status loss, do trigger homicidal thoughts.

03:28:37.220 | So anyway, I don't go off too much on that,

03:28:40.860 | but I guess what I'm saying in answer to your question

03:28:43.620 | is experiencing the rich array of complex psychology

03:28:48.620 | that we have within us, most of which remains unactivated,

03:28:57.020 | and some of which will never be experienced.

03:29:01.220 | Like, there's some people who never experience love,

03:29:04.420 | for example, because of cultural restrictions or whatever.

03:29:09.420 | And so, to me, that's part of the meaning of life.

03:29:13.420 | - So that's so beautifully put,

03:29:15.220 | the saying that they're kind of dormant,

03:29:17.020 | inactivated aspects of the psychological mechanism.

03:29:22.020 | So we have the capacity to experience a bunch of stuff.

03:29:26.320 | It's almost like in video games,

03:29:27.540 | you can unlock levels and so on.

03:29:29.780 | - And so this is basically,

03:29:31.980 | there's all of these things that are dormant in our mind

03:29:36.980 | that we have the capacity to experience.

03:29:40.180 | And part of the meaning is to try to experience

03:29:43.700 | as many of them, or as many new ones,

03:29:49.580 | novel for the particular society,

03:29:51.940 | or maybe the entirety of human civilization, who knows?

03:29:54.920 | Psychedelic drugs, like you said, violence.

03:29:59.680 | Experiences that might have to do

03:30:01.320 | with brain-computer interfaces.

03:30:03.000 | The interaction with all of those are experiences.

03:30:05.660 | And so the question is, what is the ceiling?

03:30:08.460 | How infinite or nearly infinite is the capacity

03:30:13.940 | of the human mind to experience all those things?

03:30:15.640 | And we'll get to discover those things.

03:30:18.680 | So I'm glad you never got a chance,

03:30:21.100 | and never will get a chance to murder,

03:30:22.900 | but I just want to put it on record that,

03:30:24.900 | that's definitely something on my bucket list.

03:30:29.420 | Why do you think I dress like this?

03:30:31.580 | Anyway, there is something appealing.

03:30:34.660 | Like one of my favorite movies is "Leon the Professional."

03:30:37.220 | - Oh, I love that movie.

03:30:38.700 | - What is that?

03:30:39.540 | Why is that so exciting?

03:30:40.900 | Listen, maybe it's the OCD thing,

03:30:42.800 | like killing other bad guys.

03:30:47.060 | - No women, no children.

03:30:48.780 | - No women, no children.

03:30:50.500 | Also loving that with-

03:30:52.340 | - Natalie Portman.

03:30:54.260 | - Natalie Portman, incredible actress.

03:30:56.780 | Also the complex, whatever that is,

03:30:58.940 | the fatherly or romantic,

03:31:00.860 | whatever that is, like Lolita type of thing.

03:31:02.740 | I don't know what, I've never like read a PhD thesis

03:31:07.300 | on that interpretation of that movie,

03:31:09.580 | but that's a fascinating one.

03:31:11.440 | Violence and love and sex,

03:31:15.140 | that's what makes life worth living.

03:31:18.140 | That's what makes it fun.

03:31:19.500 | David, you're an incredible person, incredible scientist.

03:31:21.860 | It's a huge honor to share a city with you,

03:31:24.580 | or I'm the visitor.

03:31:26.420 | You own this place, you run this place.

03:31:28.020 | - Well, I don't, we both live here now.

03:31:30.900 | - Yeah.

03:31:31.740 | - And it's been great talking to you.

03:31:33.740 | It's a great honor for me.

03:31:35.460 | I mentioned, I've followed your podcast

03:31:37.460 | for a long, long time now,

03:31:39.060 | and tremendously enjoy your interviews.

03:31:42.380 | And you have a very inquisitive, inviting style

03:31:47.380 | that brings out things in your guests,

03:31:51.100 | which I think is fantastic.

03:31:52.540 | Activates all those dormant psychological mechanisms.

03:31:55.820 | That's what life, that's what conversation is all about.

03:31:58.580 | Thank you for talking today.

03:31:59.860 | - Thank you.

03:32:01.440 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Buss.

03:32:04.140 | To support this podcast,

03:32:05.300 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:32:07.900 | And now, let me leave you with some words from E.B. White.

03:32:11.900 | "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.

03:32:15.660 | If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.

03:32:19.140 | But I rise in the morning torn

03:32:22.340 | between a desire to improve the world

03:32:24.500 | and a desire to enjoy the world.

03:32:26.860 | This makes it hard to plan the day."

03:32:29.540 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:32:33.500 | (upbeat music)

03:32:36.080 | (upbeat music)

03:32:38.660 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast #282

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