EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Bret Weinstein

[0] Hello, everybody.

[1] Welcome to armchair, expert, experts on expert.

[2] Boy, do we have a juicy protein brain bomb for you today?

[3] Yeah, we do.

[4] Ooh, do we like this guest?

[5] He's joining the top rung of our favorite intellectuals who've come on here and made time fly.

[6] We may want him to come on as a recurring guest.

[7] We're thinking about having him as much as he'll stop by.

[8] Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist.

[9] We discovered him on another podcast where he just is the most well -spoken person we've ever heard ever.

[10] You can throw any topic at him, and he will just start munching on it.

[11] He was a professor as well.

[12] At Evergreen, where there was a very exciting protest in his classroom.

[13] It was filmed on YouTube, and by all accounts, he prevailed in that interaction, people trying to silence his speech.

[14] He thinks about everything with the most unique perspective, right?

[15] We were just kind of launching bizarre things at him.

[16] And he would run him through his little evolutionary biology calculator.

[17] And he has such an interesting take on everything.

[18] Yeah.

[19] And I do want to say what we said about some of the other guests we've had on that you might not agree with everything he says.

[20] And you also might bristle at some of the things he says.

[21] but it's his opinion and lens and his knowledge base.

[22] He views the world through evolutionary terms.

[23] Yes.

[24] That is how he is making sense of the world around him, and it is a fascinating pair of glasses to slap on for a couple hours.

[25] Very.

[26] So, without further ado, please enjoy who we hope will be a recurring guest, Brett Weinstein.

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[31] Brett Weinstein is here, who I have long admired and, you know, just kind of worship.

[32] Monica and I both.

[33] Yeah, we heard you on Sam Harris.

[34] Our conclusion was you're maybe the most articulate person we've ever heard without being to esoteric.

[35] We heard that episode and we were like, geez Louise, this guy, I mean, he was basically throwing you grenades that the pin had been pulled two seconds ago and you had about a second to unload it before it exploded.

[36] And you just navigated it all so well.

[37] There's so many hard, hard topics confronting all of us right now.

[38] And you have kind of a unique way to, I don't know, to stay above it yet get into it.

[39] It's really admirable.

[40] I really like it.

[41] So I'm super excited you're here.

[42] Well, thanks.

[43] I should say in the Sam Harris case, I definitely cheated.

[44] Oh, you did.

[45] Tell me how.

[46] Absolutely.

[47] And I always do.

[48] I'm going to cheat now, too.

[49] Oh, good.

[50] What I do is I spend a huge amount of time obsessing over what's wrong with what I think.

[51] And so, you know, at some level, it does unearth the errors and the ambiguities so that at the point they come up in conversation, you know, might seem like you're able to come up with an answer right away.

[52] really the point is it's a rehash of something that's occurred in private.

[53] Right.

[54] So do you do this?

[55] Do you compulsively have arguments with yourself in your head?

[56] Oh, absolutely.

[57] All the time.

[58] And in fact, I would argue this is one of the keys to human uniqueness is the fact that we can literally hold two views that cannot be reconciled simultaneously and have what amounts to a literal argument with ourselves about the truth of it.

[59] Yeah.

[60] And the ability to do that puts us in a great position to discover what we don't know, basically to bootstrap knowledge.

[61] Right.

[62] It's also crazy, helpful in a relationship, isn't it?

[63] It is so good unless you get to one of these places where you really don't understand the other person's position.

[64] And so your attempt to hash it out with yourself, just...

[65] Well, that happens to me all the time.

[66] I have the argument with my wife in my head before I bring it up at dinner.

[67] And by God, she never goes with the script.

[68] It's like I predict what she's, what objection she's going to raise to my thing.

[69] And I've already got an answer for it.

[70] And then invariably, she never goes down that path.

[71] Right.

[72] Yeah.

[73] Well, she's seen you coming and she knows it won't be a winner.

[74] So she'll go some other direction, which, you know, frankly keeps it interesting.

[75] Yeah.

[76] And also, it's kind of enlightening in that like, oh, she genuinely has a different perspective that I often can't get to through any technique.

[77] I won't be able to get to her perspective sometimes.

[78] Yeah, almost like she's an entirely.

[79] separate people.

[80] Can you imagine?

[81] Crazy.

[82] But we, right when you sat down, I was admitting that I kind of project onto people who I idolize for being smart.

[83] All my character defects, I'm praying they have when they arrive.

[84] So, like, I'm hoping they drink too much coffee or maybe they have nicotine or something.

[85] You know, they maybe flip someone off on the way here.

[86] Oh, definitely.

[87] They didn't even do anything.

[88] I just felt the need to get it out of my system to clean out the carbon of the engine.

[89] But yeah, you started talking about empathy and the limits of empathy and how it kind of works.

[90] Well, what I was getting at is that empathy is basically predicated on the model that you carry in your head for somebody else's architecture.

[91] So if I'm going to, I have my own sort of technical definition for it that I've used in the classroom.

[92] And basically what I say empathy is, is it is running the data of somebody else's experience through your brain architecture in order to see how.

[93] they will feel and to predict what they're going to do, which, you know, we, I think we incorrectly view empathy that that circuit is useful whether we're talking about somebody who's an ally of yours or an enemy, right?

[94] You want to know what an enemy is going to do, maybe even it's a higher priority than knowing what your allies are going to do sometimes.

[95] So just simply, you know, understanding, for example, why Hitler kills himself as the Russians are descending on the bunker is important.

[96] you empathize in order to understand why he would do that, but you don't sympathize with him, right?

[97] Right, right.

[98] So in any case, in order to empathize well, you have to have architecture that mirrors what's on the other side.

[99] And there are really two ways that you can get that.

[100] One is that your experience is similar enough to another person's experience that your architecture just simply is like theirs.

[101] And the other is that you can put yourself through some kind of exercise that generates architecture that's close enough.

[102] like, for example, all sorts of narratives that we are, you know, obsessed with, whether they're literature or movies, you're really, what you're doing is you're understanding what it's like to be a character who's living some very different life.

[103] And if the character is well drawn, and they have to be, if they're not plausible, they're not compelling.

[104] So if a character is well drawn by somebody who does understand the mindset of what's on the other side, then you basically import, you know, it's a sketch, but a sketch that allows you to understand what lies there.

[105] So, for example, presumably most of us don't live a life like Tony Soprano, but an awful large number of people followed the story enough that his emotional states made sense.

[106] Yes.

[107] So anyway, the upshot of this view of empathy is that sometimes, for example, in my case, I actually met my wife in high school.

[108] We were not going out, but we've been together a very long time.

[109] So, you know, we traveled in the same circles for most of our lives at this point.

[110] Yeah.

[111] Which means, you know, I have a very good understanding of who she is right up to a point.

[112] And the point is the point where it's different to be male than female, right?

[113] Those circuits, I have to be careful to, you know, draw on experience that isn't mine and doesn't mirror my architecture.

[114] And I think there's a lot in that that is really a lot of trouble in relationships can be avoided.

[115] If you simply understand that you're, if you're trying to imagine how well do I understand this other person and you extrapolate from the way they view art or the way they view circumstances or other cultures, you may be misled into believing, oh, I get this person completely.

[116] And then in the zones where you don't get them at all, you'll trip over something.

[117] So learning where your model is not a good predictor is the key to a good relationship, I think.

[118] Yeah, and you know, actors do this, or it is a technique in acting.

[119] I certainly employ it, which is, and Monica and I have had debates about this.

[120] Now, I do not know the Black experience.

[121] There's no way I ever will.

[122] I concede to that for sure.

[123] But I was dyslexic, and I left the room for an hour every day to go to what was then called the retard room.

[124] So I certainly know what it feels like to be excluded.

[125] You know what I'm saying?

[126] And there seems to be some hesitant or some resistance, I understand not knowing someone's story, but I also reject a little bit that I don't know the emotions at the bottom of the story or that I can't relate as a human to feeling rejected, ostracized alone, all these things that or scared, all these emotions that are maybe like root -based emotions that are the, you know, the end result of these unique situations, that I feel like I can relate to people on.

[127] But it's very tricky and murky.

[128] and dicey?

[129] Well, the question really is, do you have a good detector for where your ability to predict falls off, right?

[130] And so, you know, I also am not black, and I know for sure that there's a level of ignorance that I will, that I just can't get beyond.

[131] And I'm very interested to, you know, to erode that level of ignorance and to understand as much as I can.

[132] But, you know, I can't understand what it's like to be black anymore than I can understand what it's like to be a woman.

[133] And it's just not the same level of experience that one has with self.

[134] Yeah.

[135] On the other hand, you know, I had an interesting experience.

[136] My first research gig was in Jamaica, in a little town, hell and gone from anywhere, Southfield, Jamaica.

[137] And I was brought there by my advisor at the time, Bob Trivers, who's actually a very famous evolutionary biologist, who spends a lot of his time in Jamaica.

[138] And at one point, he left to go, I think actually he was giving.

[139] a lecture at the CIA.

[140] He left, and I was the only white person for, I don't know, 15 miles in any direction.

[141] Sure.

[142] And the thought is, oh, that'll tell you what it's like to be the only black person in, you know, a white town in the U .S. It doesn't.

[143] Oh, yeah, to break that down, tell me why.

[144] Because I'm a narcissist egomania.

[145] Can I go, oh, this is exactly, now I know.

[146] I'm so glad you're here.

[147] I'm so glad we're doing it.

[148] Well, the thing is, in Jamaica, um, And I've now encountered this in lots of other places.

[149] There are sort of two parameters.

[150] There's are you the minority?

[151] That part tracks, right?

[152] For me, when I was the only white guy in Southfield, I stood out like a sore thumb.

[153] And, you know, as I walked, my motion through town was easily tracked.

[154] People were probably always presently aware of your whiteness.

[155] Right.

[156] Right.

[157] And, you know, it came up as I would pass.

[158] People are not self -conscious about this fact to the fact that I was a white person, meeting black people was like central to the interaction.

[159] Yeah.

[160] But there is a thing that doesn't flip, which has to do with power.

[161] Right.

[162] Because it was clear that I was coming from the U .S., and, you know, these are economically very different worlds.

[163] The point is the power dynamic did not flip.

[164] And so it was like, yes, this person is other, but they are also from the powerful culture.

[165] And, you know, I would have jettisoned that in a second if there was any way to do it, but there wasn't.

[166] You're inexplicably linked to the hegemonic power -bearing race for bad term.

[167] And even more jarring.

[168] You know, I mean, this was, I was 20, so I was naive, and I was learning about how the world really works.

[169] But there was a couple of events, like a child was born in the town, somebody not connected to the people I was living with.

[170] but the child was very light skinned and this was celebrated and boy you know that's a piece of knowledge I did not want to have that you know these that the colorism within yeah that there was bias in favor of light skin yeah even in a place where everybody's black yeah it's so deep you can't even begin well it's not only deep but it's rational because the thing is to the extent that the world is biased in this direction.

[171] You know, you want the best for some child who's been born into your community.

[172] And to the extent that they're going to have unfair advantages because their skin is light, that's good.

[173] Right?

[174] Yeah, yeah, right.

[175] Yeah.

[176] Right.

[177] You want your child well positioned to deal with it.

[178] Any advantage they can have you want.

[179] So that was, that was eye -opening to say the least.

[180] And, you know, it took a lot of, um, a lot of work internally to sort of reconcile myself to, okay, this is, this is the world you live in.

[181] But now, you know, I've spent a lot of my research time in Central and South America and the bias is there too.

[182] And, you know, you want to see it?

[183] Go look at the products in the supermarket, right?

[184] All of the models on the packaging are Latino, but they're all light -skinned.

[185] It's all this European aesthetic and, you know, it doesn't look like the people on the street.

[186] Right.

[187] Right.

[188] Yeah, it's not representative.

[189] It's not representative.

[190] So anyway.

[191] Well, I have a friend, a good friend who is, his father is black and his mom's either white or she's maybe half white and half black.

[192] Regardless, he was brought to his father's side of the family down south and they're from Washington.

[193] And the first thing the grandma said, they were little boys and he's a set of identical twins.

[194] And the grandma looked at them and she goes, ooh, keep them out of the sun.

[195] They could pass.

[196] That was like the first sentence.

[197] And I was like, oh, wow, that I would have not.

[198] You know, there's so many layers to it that I would not cross my mind.

[199] I grew up with that with my grandparents.

[200] Same thing.

[201] Like, they would, when they were talking to their friends, the color of our skin and my brothers would come up as like, how are they?

[202] That was part of the answer.

[203] Oh, like they're tracking light or dark?

[204] Yeah.

[205] Oh, wow.

[206] And they are all on my mom's side pretty light skins.

[207] And I think they really, there's like a pride in that.

[208] And that also probably comes from the British and, you know, that's like a whole thing.

[209] But it's interesting.

[210] It's always a part of it.

[211] It is.

[212] And, you know, is that a historical thing will shake at some point?

[213] Is there a trajectory out?

[214] Is there an answer?

[215] How do we like, you know, is the melting pot the solution where everyone's just some kind of shade of caramel?

[216] How do we transcend that huge chunk of history?

[217] It's a great question.

[218] And it's one I'm obsessed with because it's really.

[219] it's a special case of a more general problem.

[220] And to me, I think it's the problem that dictates whether or not there's going to be a viable human population on planet Earth 200 years from now.

[221] And the question is, can we escape the programming that has evolved in us for essentially tribal conflict?

[222] That program makes perfect evolutionary sense.

[223] And it is absolutely fatal in a context where you're dealing with the kind of weaponry and industrial power we have at our disposal.

[224] So once you spot that we are wired to exclude people who are likely to have less genetic overlap with us than other people and that we are capable of doing something alternative.

[225] I mean, this conversation right here is not predicated on the fact that we are closely related to each other.

[226] Our distance is arbitrary and it's productive.

[227] So there is this other basis for cooperation but we have to essentially recognize what our genes are up to be properly horrified by it because it is horrifying and be ahead of it right well but the hardest part it's relatively easy to say no it's relatively easy not to do your genes bidding on this front what is not easy is to step away from your genetic program and not lose the game so you explain that better to me i i'm if i fell off if enlightened people reject the genetic program for tribal conflict because it doesn't match their values, which is, I think, what we will all do.

[228] We will be at a competitive disadvantage genetically to people who didn't reject the program.

[229] Sure.

[230] Or even cultures around the globe that aren't embracing that, right?

[231] Right.

[232] In fact, that endeavor can be used against us.

[233] It is inherently a competitive disadvantage.

[234] Right.

[235] So in some sense, we either have to architect a way in which people's tribalism is a disadvantage, or we all have to step away from it together.

[236] And both of those are not easy to imagine.

[237] It's so true.

[238] When you look at just geopolitically what's happening at the moment, there's so many ways to look at some of the stuff.

[239] So I want very much for us to head in that direction.

[240] I believe that the Enlightenment, the ideals of the Enlightenment are worth fighting.

[241] for and we should be embracing those.

[242] And yet I also recognize that perhaps Iran and North Korea aren't playing with that same set where, I mean, the very cynical evil part of me, probably the male part of me is like, well, what we need to do is just dominate the entire planet so that then we can flip the switch and be enlightened.

[243] It seems like that's the only route out.

[244] But then another part of me goes, no, maybe we have our carrot is so appealing that everyone else will want to join us.

[245] It's all, it's hard to figure out, right?

[246] Well, it is and it isn't.

[247] Okay.

[248] You know, I think, I mean, partly the solution involves doing exactly what we're doing now.

[249] And the irony, I don't know if either of you feel it, but I certainly feel that the topic we're on, you know, there's part of me that's reviewing what we've said here and wondering, well, was that it?

[250] Did I step over a line that this is now going to become, you know, the focus of of my story that I'm maybe not a decent person for thinking thoughts about race and how it functions and my guess is we haven't stepped over such a line yet but the fact that there are such lines complicates the process of sorting this thing through and really what we need is to raise the threshold of offense so that decent people can hash this out they can say things that are wrong they can discover that they're wrong they can honorably back up and say okay I'm convinced I no longer believe that thing.

[251] I believe this thing instead.

[252] That conversation can get us to a more hopeful path than what you're describing.

[253] I mean, you can imagine what people in the part of the world that you're suggesting would have to be dominated and led to the Enlightenment would hear in that statement.

[254] Of course.

[255] Let me just acknowledge that that's probably the same rationale that's led to every evil thing we've done historically, imperially.

[256] Well, and in fact, we've done quite the opposite.

[257] We've taken honorable experiments in enlightenment, and we've installed dictators who were more favorable to our international policy all over the globe, and we've done it again and again.

[258] So the fact that we have not been...

[259] We're not good at doing this.

[260] Yeah.

[261] We're not good at doing it, and we're not even always trying to do it.

[262] And so somehow we have to get on enough of the same page that, A, we recognize we're in tremendous danger if we don't all that is humanity don't all get to a similar enough page soon enough that we can stand down the intertribal conflict that is so dangerous to us and replace it with something better but i do just want to throw one innocuous example and i think the the example so innocuous that i'll hope maybe frame why what you're saying should be embraced which is there was a famous court case here in l .a and it was by an assistant in the writer's room of friends And this assistant was suing for being subjected to sexual content relentlessly and all these different things that made the person feel less than.

[263] And the outcome of that, and you're probably aware of this core case, but the outcome of that was no, the writer's room on a television show is a creative space.

[264] And in the creative space, for us to get to the joke that makes it on TV that's not broadly offensive to 30 million Americans, we have to make about 28 terrible jokes.

[265] we have to make some that are racist, some that are sexist, some that are all these things.

[266] We're throwing everything against the wall.

[267] And then collectively we're going, no, that's actually racist if you break it down.

[268] Like, okay, great, let's get rid of that.

[269] What can we replace it with?

[270] And there's this process that has to happen for us to get to the joke that you're going to accept on television.

[271] And so luckily, I think, that process was protected in this court decision.

[272] And so now when writers enter a writing room, they're kind of warned.

[273] And this happens on sets as well, which is like, if you're at the monitors with the director and the actors, you're going to hear some shit you don't want to hear because we're going to try some things that are not going to work.

[274] And then we're going to come to the things.

[275] So that also has to happen in philosophy.

[276] It has to happen in biology.

[277] It has to happen everywhere.

[278] We have to have a safe place to throw shitty ideas up on the wall before we.

[279] But there's a fine line, right?

[280] Like they can't, you should be able to make jokes that could be offensive, could not be offensive, but you can't like pull your pants down.

[281] And jerk off as a joke?

[282] Exactly.

[283] And say, is this funny?

[284] You know, there...

[285] Odds are it would be funny.

[286] It would be funny.

[287] We can all agree on that.

[288] But, you know, you have to be careful when you give carte blanche.

[289] You do.

[290] As all these things, I think there's nuance and context and all these things.

[291] But I think here's the part where I think people are so scared and this frustrates me. We have the ability to discern whether pulling down your pants and jerking off in front of the writer's assistant.

[292] we can figure out that that's that sexual harassment and or predatory we we have the ability to navigate these things and i think people are so afraid that we can't navigate them that we just need these hard black and white rules that will hopefully get us out of ever having to think about something complicated again um but i just don't think that's how progress is made i've stole the floor for a very long time did any of that spur on any thoughts on you so many okay we have about Six hours of pent -up stuff.

[293] So, first of all, I would just point out the elephant in the room is that we don't even have a good evolutionary explanation of what humor is.

[294] And so we're trying to navigate what the rules of it should be without even talking about what its function is.

[295] And this is a terrible mistake.

[296] Yeah, are there theories?

[297] Because, I mean, I can whip them up.

[298] They all suck?

[299] Yeah, they do.

[300] Okay.

[301] But I would argue that superficially, let's just put a placeholder, not a theory, but a hypothesis in place here.

[302] And the hypothesis is that humor treads at the edge, the fringe of consciousness.

[303] And that what happens when a comic finds a truly funny joke, what they are doing is unearthing a truth that people are only kind of aware of, but is so universal that the whole room suddenly grasps that everybody else gets the same thing.

[304] Has an aha moment.

[305] Right.

[306] And in fact, you know, I was playing with this hypothetical.

[307] hypothesis and I mentioned it to somebody and they said that Tom Stoppard had said laughter was the sound of comprehension which is somewhere it's a near neighbor to the same idea but anyway the point is I would argue that this this mechanism humor is the mechanism in which we sort out what's in the gray area if you eliminate that tool by saying hey you can't say anything there that's over the line well then how exactly do we figure out where the line is and what it's made of Yeah, inherently, by design, one has to step beyond the line to figure out where the line is.

[308] Right.

[309] And to the extent that somebody steps over the line and the room erupts in laughter, well, now you actually know something, right?

[310] You know that if it's racism that has caused the room to erupt in laughter.

[311] Yes, you have a problem, but the problem isn't what the comic said.

[312] And so to the extent that this unearths something, now we at least know what landscape we're in.

[313] You can see that something systematic.

[314] You can go like, oh, Everyone here seems to have the same.

[315] Right.

[316] Awareness of something.

[317] Let's put it this way.

[318] I don't think you can write a rule about this topic is off limits, right?

[319] Right.

[320] Because you can't anticipate every edge case.

[321] I've forgotten the comics name, the Australian comic who has a song about only a ginger, can call a ginger ginger.

[322] Have you heard this?

[323] Oh, I haven't heard that.

[324] Well, the thing is, this song is entirely the whole.

[325] all the humor in the song, and the song is quite brilliant, it's very clever.

[326] It treads right next to the N -word for the entire thing.

[327] And the idea is it does it by substituting another concept, which actually isn't a sensitive concept.

[328] But this is an unanticipated case.

[329] So we can decide maybe that it's over the line.

[330] Yeah.

[331] You can't decide it's not clever.

[332] It's clever.

[333] Right.

[334] So what I've also, if you get old enough, which I'm getting old enough, I start seeing things in comedy that are very telling.

[335] One is one of my very best friends who directed a ton episodes of a show I was on who's Jewish and very Jewish goes to synagogue and is involved.

[336] He was telling me why he likes Passover and one of the reasons was his rabbi tells him all these jokes.

[337] And so he was repeating some of these jokes, right?

[338] And as he was repeating them, I started noticing.

[339] So one of them was this guy can't get his wife to reach orgasm.

[340] So he goes and says to the rabbi, I don't know what to do.

[341] And the rabbi says, well, here's what I want you to do.

[342] I want you to go to a bar tonight and find the biggest Gentile you can.

[343] And bring that Gentile into the room and make love to your wife.

[344] And while you're making love to your wife, have the Gentile spin a towel over his head.

[345] Spin the towel over and over again to make love.

[346] And she should reach climax.

[347] So he goes and finds a big Gentile.

[348] The guy, she does not reach climax.

[349] And then he goes back to his rabbi and says, I don't know what happened.

[350] She didn't reach climax.

[351] And he goes, hmm.

[352] I tell you what, this time tonight have the Gentile.

[353] make love to your wife and then you swing the towel over your head and he says okay i'll do that so the gentile starts making love to his wife he's swinging the towel over his head and his wife starts coming like crazy and he goes that's how you fucking spin a towel and as he told these jokes i started realizing that in my own community of white people we had almost all the exact same jokes but replaced it with black guys so we had that basically that same joke but was go find a black guy to have have sex with your wife.

[354] And then I realized, oh, all these jokes are playing upon these other strata that are, that group finds emasculating in some capacity.

[355] So like somehow the gen, in this Jewish joke, the Gentile is emasculating the Jewish guy.

[356] And then in our version of it, my white neighborhood, it was a black guy's emasculating.

[357] But the theme is emasculating the group that the joke's about.

[358] And I just found that very funny that, oh, the joke's the same.

[359] It's just what cultural inner group dynamic is are you plugging into the same equation is fascinating it's interesting you've got both dynamics sometimes you have jokes that are canonical and you can swap in different ethnicities or something and some and you know across certain cultural boundaries the jokes just don't translate at all right yeah that's true yeah it's actually you know if we go back to the original topic that we were talking about it's it's a way that you can become aware that to the extent that you feel like you understand somebody from this other culture, you actually don't.

[360] Because if you did, you'd get why the joke was funny.

[361] Stay tuned for more armature expert if you dare.

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[383] Yes.

[384] And so I'm on, an area that I've started to slowly evolve towards is, and let go of is, you know, I want to defend comedy at all costs.

[385] And, but what I am coming to recognize and owning and changing on is, it's great for you to make that joke about the towel.

[386] It's not great for me. I can now recognize that.

[387] There's jokes I can tell and there's jokes I can tell, can't tell.

[388] And that's fine.

[389] Someone will tell them.

[390] I don't need to protect comedy for white males to have access to all comedy.

[391] Dave Chappelle's going to make jokes that I can't make that are better than I could ever make them.

[392] And rightly so.

[393] And he should and I should make fun of my things.

[394] So I do think we're finding that the white male wanted to just kind of invade every single type of humor and tell whatever that white male thought was funny.

[395] And I do think I'm accepting that it's probably healthier and better that I just kind of tell the jokes about me and I do the accents and the voices that may be pertaining to me and that all will benefit from that.

[396] Well, to a first approximation, yes.

[397] But the problem is when you decide that you can draw the borders of what jokes you're allowed to tell based on a topic.

[398] So for example, I was on stage with Dave Rubin last night.

[399] I've done several of his comedy shows with him.

[400] And I'm not really expected to do comedy, but I kind of like to.

[401] I think humor is fascinating and tremendously fun and really great when you explain why it works.

[402] Yeah.

[403] Anyway, the thing is I like to joke about Dave's being gay.

[404] Uh -huh.

[405] Right?

[406] Now, here's the thing.

[407] The actual core of the jokes I'm telling are not about Dave being gay, right?

[408] They are actually about straight guys being dim about homosexuality.

[409] Right.

[410] Right.

[411] But the point is, if you say, well, you're a straight guy, you don't get to joke about gay.

[412] Well, then the point is, actually, we can't navigate this other topic, right?

[413] The fact that straight guys do not intuit what gay guys are about.

[414] And in fact, that there's a whole horrible history associated with that failure to grasp it is something we need to navigate.

[415] So I don't want to be told I can't tell a gay joke because I'm straight.

[416] But I do want to police myself.

[417] There are jokes that Dave can tell that I can't.

[418] Well, let's just say really quickly, I'm assuming you were the butt of every gay joke you made.

[419] That's the point.

[420] That, yes.

[421] But now Dave can tell jokes where the gay guy is the butt of the joke.

[422] Absolutely.

[423] Yes.

[424] I guess that's a great distinction to make.

[425] That's the truth.

[426] But the problem is I challenge you to write the rule that actually defines that border.

[427] Right.

[428] That'll stand up in court or.

[429] Right.

[430] And it just won't work.

[431] Because even if it works in the room, and it always does.

[432] Right.

[433] because these are people who have shown up to see Dave.

[434] Once you decide that the borders of the room aren't the walls of the room and the borders of the room are actually the internet and what really matters is that there's not, you know, a thousand motivated people who don't like the joke because they don't think you get to tell jokes about gay people if you're not gay, then you've got a problem.

[435] So what we're really dealing with is a bunch of novelty effects where we are not built to understand the dichotomy of I'm in a room there are 150 people in it but the actual room is millions of people right that's that's a novel phenomenon that we don't have good architecture for so you and i are jumping ahead to a lot of things so i want to start with just a couple of really base um thoughts uh so that we can launch in a couple other things one is um and we both agree upon this uh you have a great breakdown of it so you've got to think of a human being as being two things really there's there's a genetic part of being a human being and that that that human being has evolved uh as a primate for you know 2 .5 million years as a hominid all these things now culture and your your analogy which i love is basically the human is the computer and culture is the software the computer is running and we're a very very unique animal in that we have off put a lot of our genetic coding uh and we've left it for culture to fill in these blanks.

[436] Can you just break that down in a better way that I just did?

[437] Yeah.

[438] So let me just say you can do this analysis and you can go deeper and deeper and add more and more nuance.

[439] So I would argue, you know, in a conversation like this, probably it's worth going to three layers and saying a human being is a machine, a robot effectively.

[440] It's got a computer on its shoulders.

[441] The computer runs on software.

[442] It also has firmware, though, right?

[443] So software can be swapped out pretty readily.

[444] Firmware is a more difficult process.

[445] So what's the firmware in this case?

[446] Well, firmware is the stuff that we inherit, the stuff of deep culture.

[447] And it gets swapped out by a different process.

[448] The software, you know, what you understand about your world may be very different than what your grandparents understood about their world at the level of how you, you know, interact with transportation.

[449] Plastics.

[450] Yeah, tools, plastics, all of that novel stuff.

[451] stuff.

[452] But then there's another way in which we are all speaking English in this room.

[453] I have no English ancestry whatsoever.

[454] I have picked up a software program that happens to be useful for interacting with other people who have that same software program online.

[455] And were I to move to Brazil, I would struggle to pick up Portuguese, but my kids would pick it up.

[456] And that would be the software program they used to interact because the people around them would be speaking Portuguese.

[457] So in any case, the thing that throws people, people are so used to drawing the dichotomy between our biological selves and our cultural selves.

[458] That is not a correct dichotomy.

[459] Culture is every bit as biological as genes are.

[460] So you can draw a distinction between genetic and cultural, which is still hard to do because many things have components that live in both spaces.

[461] But you have to realize that most of what you are is the product of an evolutionary adaptive process, irrespective of whether it has come to you through genes, through culture, through software, or a mixture, which is very frequently the case.

[462] This is basically the nature -nurture argument, right?

[463] Like what percentage, we think of this as being the same way we thought of the emotional brain and the logical brain.

[464] All these different binary black and white things so there's nature which you were born to be and there's nurture what you were brought up and changed as a result of your environment so right we we want to think of these as binary and opposites and you're suggesting they're not like that they're not like that at all it just doesn't stand up to a proper evolutionary analysis in other words if culture could you give us one concrete example of how culture has invaded genetics or vice versa it's not invaded at all They are partners.

[465] And what has happened, you know, you said the right thing, which is that much of what in other animals would be transmitted genetically has been offloaded to the cultural apparatus.

[466] The question is why.

[467] Cultural apparatus is prone to failure.

[468] You know, if you are from a culture that has a long tradition of building dugout canoes for the purpose of getting between islands or something like that, a single generation of not building a canoe can wipe out the information so that you can't recover it that's a big volume meaning everyone that chose not to use a canoe would die or not reproduce or not is that what you're saying that the genes in essence would die off because the culture would the culture one one generation of nobody knowing how to build a dugout canoe because it didn't happen either you know maybe there's a fire and there were no logs to build the canoes out of or one can imagine a scenario but the fact of nobody having sat their mentee down and saying, here's how you make a dugout canoe, can wipe out the information about how to do it, which is not true genetically, right?

[469] Right, right, right, right, right.

[470] You might have some compound that you have an enzyme to break down and you might not encounter that compound for, you know, your population might not encounter it for numerous generations.

[471] And then when they encounter it again, the enzyme is still...

[472] When they need it, they have it.

[473] Got the code for it.

[474] So why would you have an apparatus that is vulnerable to losing information that way.

[475] Well, the answer is that downside is matched with a much greater upside, which is the flexibility of having things in a software layer that can be swapped out.

[476] If I ask you, for example, what is the human niche?

[477] If I ask you, what is the niche of a marmoset, we can talk about what it eats and where it spends the night and how it gets from place to place and we could define that niche.

[478] Do it for a human.

[479] What's the human Those humans on Everest and in the Bering Strait, so.

[480] And sub -Saharan Africa and every crazy thing.

[481] I mean, you've got people who have survived hunting marine mammals from a skin kayak.

[482] Yeah.

[483] You know, you've got people who have enriched poor tropical soils by doing advanced chemistry, who terraced hillside.

[484] Well, by the way, this is when I always kind of brussel when they have a new diet breakthrough about what humans are supposed to eat.

[485] And then I think, well, you have Inuits who are eating very, Virtually whale fat, just their whole diet's well fat, and it's 8 ,000 calories a day.

[486] They don't have heart disease and then you got people, the Maasai, just drinking milk.

[487] You know, there's no way there is a diet for us just simply by looking around and seeing how many different ways we've lived.

[488] It's a preposterous notion once you realize what, how marvelous and special the human animal actually is.

[489] Yeah.

[490] It can't be a human diet.

[491] And this raises all kinds of questions, right?

[492] So it even raises questions about the philosophy of science because philosophy of science is predicated around the idea that you advance a hypothesis, it makes predictions, and then you see if those predictions are false.

[493] If it's replicatable, that's a big part of it, right?

[494] If you can do that experiment.

[495] Let's say that we have the hypothesis that, you know, a diet without X component causes heart disease, right?

[496] And then you test it on the Inuit.

[497] right right almost none of these components in their diet have this very special diet you will discover that it is false even though it may well be true for some large fraction of the human population so complex systems don't function in a way that lends itself to the tools that we invented for the chemistry lab or the physics lab we're probably the worst thing to study on the entire planet wouldn't you agree the hardest most difficult yes uh where it's an incredibly noisy system And, you know, to compound it, I think what we've done is we have backed out the rules of science from the places that we succeeded early.

[498] And the problem is that all of the places that we succeeded scientifically early were on the simple end of the continuum.

[499] Now, I don't mean simple, like easy to understand.

[500] Physics is hard to understand.

[501] But the actual material in physics is simple.

[502] Right.

[503] Right.

[504] At the complex end, and humans are at the far end of the complex end, the rules of science have to be different.

[505] It just doesn't work the same way because it's too easy to falsify a true idea based on the noise rather than what's actually taking place.

[506] Right.

[507] And we don't have the rules for the complex end of the continuum yet because we haven't succeeded there well yet.

[508] Right.

[509] So if I understand you correctly, like a really simple way to think of this would be if you compress gasoline in a cylinder and ignite it with a spark plug, it should create an explosive.

[510] 100 % of the time, right?

[511] And if that doesn't occur, we know we have a problem.

[512] Now, if we say to a human, you feed a human X, and then they have this education, you should get this result.

[513] At best is the solution for us to have maybe a bar where we're like, this should have a 70 % outcome.

[514] That would be acceptable as kind of a truth or a fact or a law when studying humans, just because there's so much variation.

[515] Could we arbitrarily put some kind of percentage?

[516] Because we can't deal and 100 %?

[517] Well, you know, I mean, there is a way to deal with such phenomena.

[518] You can talk about what percentage of a particular pattern is accounted for by a given influence.

[519] And, you know, this is actually the reason that the pattern of diminishing returns is universal in complex systems where there's a goal, is that you tend to find the biggest contributor to the pattern early.

[520] And then, you know, you've got the next one down and the next one down.

[521] And at some point, you get to influences that are so small that they're almost impossible to isolate.

[522] And so we begin to understand how to do this.

[523] But what we don't have is a way of explaining how to think about such concepts, right?

[524] We tend to say, well, you know, it's science.

[525] And the fact is what groups biology with chemistry is really only an approach.

[526] The two topics are not similar because in biology, you do have a goal.

[527] Biological creatures are attempting to accomplish something.

[528] Chemical compounds are not.

[529] And so these systems don't function like each other at all.

[530] And, you know, if you wanted to...

[531] In biology, the goal is to reproduce in past genes.

[532] I mean, I hate to say it so simply because it's really not very fun to think about at that level.

[533] Yeah, yeah.

[534] No, it's good to remind yourself of it every now and then.

[535] When you're obsessing about what color car you want, you go, wait a minute, this is a very fringe goal.

[536] I've already reproduced.

[537] Everything's taken care of.

[538] So let's just right size this concern.

[539] Right.

[540] Well, and also, you know, I mean, we've run off the end of the evolutionary tape in a way because, you know, after birth control, what we do and our motivation to do it, which in a past environment would have had an influence on reproduction of one sort or another, is now so disconnected from this phenomenon that we are just, you know, We have become absurd.

[541] Right, meaning that in the rest of the animal kingdom, if you have sex, there's a great chance that you're going to be settled with an offspring at the end of that.

[542] But now that we have birth control and we understand cycles and whatnot, you're now having sex for recreation.

[543] You're kind of choosing when you want to have a kid, when you don't want to have a kid.

[544] All these things throw the whole, our conventional Darwinian evolution model out the window.

[545] Well, it's even one step more interesting than that.

[546] Because what you said is right about other creatures.

[547] Very few creatures have sex when females are not fertile.

[548] Bonobos, yeah, that's why we like them so much.

[549] Yeah, although the story on bonobos may not be...

[550] It's a little exaggerated?

[551] It's a little exaggerated.

[552] I've still seen a lot of tape of women rubbing their vaginas together and stuff and bisexual stuff.

[553] You're talking about in bonobos.

[554] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[555] So you don't really mean women.

[556] Oh, right, right, yeah.

[557] Okay, female bonobos.

[558] You mean, you may have seen that too, but help me. I've seen conflict resolution with sex, which to me seems really ideal.

[559] It might have been inflated, but I do love the idea of me and a guy getting in a shoving match at the grocery store and going, you want to jerk each other off?

[560] It doesn't seem like a more peaceful way to do it.

[561] Well, okay.

[562] So the bonobo story, I'm just saying I would like to put an asterisk on it.

[563] I'm not convinced that we have it as clearly as we have portrayed it.

[564] Okay.

[565] But there is something very unusual going on bonobos and sex.

[566] about it but here's the here's the interesting thing about humans long before we had birth control we had sex for pleasure now the question is why so in humans we have concealed estrus right right so we don't know even women and you will get pushback when you say this to a classroom full of women because there are ways to know when you are fertile your breasts get larger right but isolating the actual period of time in which a woman's eggs can be fertilized is a very dicey business at best.

[567] Right.

[568] And so I just want to break that down late person.

[569] So when a baboon is fertile, her vulva swells up and turns a different color, and all the males go, oh, she's fertile.

[570] And we've now lost that visual marker.

[571] She's willing to have sex.

[572] The sex is likely to be reproductive, and males are interested.

[573] And when she's not in asteris, she's not willing to have sex and males aren't interested.

[574] because there's no point.

[575] The thing is, evolution, for whatever reason in human beings, has altered that program.

[576] And it has created, long before there was birth control, it has created sex for pleasure.

[577] Thank God.

[578] Yeah.

[579] That's a freaking...

[580] One of the only gifts we were given.

[581] You're saying because those markers aren't as identifiable and human women.

[582] Even women don't know when they're fertile.

[583] And so having sex outside of your fertile period is a...

[584] about sexual pleasure.

[585] And sexual pleasure happens outside of this fertile period.

[586] So the question really is, why would evolution have done that?

[587] Why would it have relaxed that parameter?

[588] And why would it, you know, it's one thing to hide estrus from males.

[589] There's a reason that females might not want males to know when they're fertile.

[590] The fact that it's hidden from females is particularly interesting.

[591] Because what it does is it effectively protects women from having information that might arguably be, a hazard to them, right?

[592] How so?

[593] Well, think about it this way.

[594] To the extent that a woman knows that she is fertile, but shows no sign of it, a powerful man might be able to get that information.

[595] To the extent she doesn't know, there's no point in trying to get the information because she doesn't have it.

[596] So that might be a protective mechanism.

[597] But what is, I think, clear is that sex for pleasure and the very nature of actually the physiological chemistry that goes along with oxytocin and love and yeah oxytocin on the female side um is that this has to do with bonding yeah and the thing is that we don't groom each other's hair anymore right yeah we have hairbrushes yeah hair dryers and all that but you do look at any group animal there's so many activities that are the sole goal of it is to keep those bonds alive and to keep your alliances known but we don't really do that we don't i say that jokingly but yeah chimps groom each other all day long and that's just them telling them yeah i'm with you i'm bonded to you right yeah i mean we do do some of this stuff it's not physical but you know when as you know uh when anthropologists have studied what human beings actually talk about a huge fraction of it i mean i hesitate to use the term gossip because that's kind of a dismissive way to say it but Like people obsess about the details of the social interactions of the people around them.

[598] And now they obsess about the social details of, you know, the lives of celebrities because they don't really detect that those people aren't actually in their circle.

[599] Yes.

[600] But anyway, we do these kind of ritual things.

[601] But, you know, in a pair, sex is a bonding ritual.

[602] And it happens not only does it happen at times of the month when no child is going to be produced, but it happens, you know, after a child has been born and the woman is in lactational amenorrhea.

[603] And she's not going to be fertile for some time because in an ancestral circumstance, she wouldn't have been able to produce another child and have it be viable, you know, until the first one has weaned.

[604] So we have this mechanism.

[605] Evolution gave it to us.

[606] It is a gift.

[607] And I don't think we treat it very well.

[608] No, no, I haven't in the past.

[609] I don't know what that means.

[610] Well, I've been, for 11 years, I think I've treated it well.

[611] But there was definitely periods where I used it.

[612] The bonding was not there.

[613] I was not in search of bonding.

[614] No, I was in search in regulating my internal emotions with an external pleasure.

[615] Got it.

[616] So do you think men bond in the same way the females do or no?

[617] Well, okay.

[618] This is where we get dicey.

[619] Mertie, but interesting.

[620] Men do bond in the same way.

[621] Okay.

[622] That's the easy part of this.

[623] So let's put it this way.

[624] Much about human sexuality and relationships can be much better understood if you understand that females historically have had one reproductive strategy and males have had two.

[625] Those two reproductive strategies in males are perfectly capable of living together in the same man and functioning at once.

[626] So in females, the reproductive strategy involved.

[627] high investment, which typically involves bonding to a mate and both the mate and the woman investing heavily in the offspring.

[628] Men have that mode, and in fact, it is almost certainly the most common mode by which men have succeeded in reproducing.

[629] And when men are in that mindset, they are actually not the same as women.

[630] There are distinctions in the way they see reproduction, but they are similar.

[631] It's a yin -yang kind of a parallel.

[632] But men also have this other way of reproducing, which involves, by one mechanism or another, fertilizing a female in whose offspring they will not invest.

[633] Women can't succeed in that in a historical context very easily.

[634] And in fact, there's something special that happens in cultures where, for whatever reason, the pattern of mating obscures the paternity, obscures who is the actual father.

[635] which is when the certainty of paternity drops below something like 50 % males invest in the offspring of their sisters rather than the offspring that they have likely produced because they can be sure that their sister's offspring are actually related to them where they can't be sure that offspring that are ostensibly theirs are really theirs.

[636] Interesting.

[637] That's called the mother's brothers phenomenon.

[638] But I do just want to bring one thing up to speed, which maybe is not abundantly clear.

[639] So a woman, even if she did not want to invest in her offspring, minimally she's going to carry the baby for nine months.

[640] So even if she's immediately having the kid handing it off to a wet nurse and then becoming pregnant again, I think you said the record, the all -time record is 60.

[641] One woman had 60 kids and that also includes that the woman would have had to have had twins at times and whatnot.

[642] Many twins and handed them all off.

[643] And it's very best a woman could produce 60 offspring carrying on her genetics.

[644] And a man could, I don't know, an average man probably could have sex three times a day.

[645] You know, over the course of a year, he could have a thousand kids.

[646] You multiply that by 60 years of fertility versus 20.

[647] And you just look at how rewarded an animal would be that proceeded that way.

[648] As far as just passing his jeans on, he could pass on his jeans 10 ,000 times.

[649] And a woman at the best could pass him on 60 times.

[650] So that's just the math.

[651] That's the math.

[652] the tricky part is very few males would have had the opportunity to honorably reproduce without committing to a female because in the past no female would have consented to this right to the extent that there is any mechanism in a culture to require evidence of commitment before producing offspring these things are taken very seriously for a reason which is that the prospects of the kid are that much greater if there are two investing parents.

[653] I mean, they're really quite different.

[654] So men are obsessed with the possibility of reproducing without commitment because it's such a bargain, not because it would ever have been common.

[655] But in modern circumstances, behavior that feels like one is engaged in the sort of thing that might produce offspring for which one is not going to be responsible is so common that effectively men are behaving as if they are you know that everybody is a a sultan producing lots of osprey right right i mean the chief the chief something everybody is you know is some kind of hunk spreading their seed everywhere and you know their genes are so desirable that no woman is you know going to try to pin them down the jeans are just worth it on their own which is just nonsense but it um like bickram's seaman i don't know if you've heard the bickram the bickram podcast it's fascinating but it's the side now but he maintains people have offered him a million dollars for his semen but that's neither here nor there yeah yeah in his mind he is one of those big chief sultons who people are dying just to have that genetic package amazed that anybody thinks there's i envy the confidence but that's a cult that's a psychological cult issue yeah I do feel compelled just to throw out because I'm sure you know of this.

[656] There's, in orangutans, what's interesting is the females get raped and somehow, and they don't really know, maybe they do know since I learned about it, but they don't understand how the female is choosing who to become pregnant by.

[657] And it's not just through the sex act, because they're having sex with people that don't want to.

[658] And yet they're seeming to have offspring with the partners that have invested.

[659] well uh i don't see any reason that that should be a difficult mechanism to evolve doesn't mean we necessarily know exactly how it is but you know the fact yes a simple chemical could be released i right a simple chemical could be released and would abort that and would yeah fertilize ovum or whatever so such a large fraction of uh implantations end up aborted anyway for natural processes well 50 % of all pregnancies in humans self -terminate, which I don't think people really get.

[660] Right.

[661] Which, you know, there's a lot of meaning in that, and we have not delved deeply there.

[662] I think we can say that one of the mysteries about sexual reproduction is that it basically takes a half a genome and fuses it to another half a genome and creates a totally novel combination of genes every time.

[663] And that process is fraught with hazards.

[664] One of the hazards has to do with non -disjunction, but there are lots of other ways in which something that isn't quite right can emerge from that.

[665] And from the point of view of a woman who is going to invest, you know, nine months and likely five years, likely decades actually at one level or another, it makes sense to take any project that doesn't show every sign of being functional and end it and start over.

[666] It even makes sense from the point of view of the embryo that's supported because the sibling that will be produced that isn't compromised in the same way carries 50 % on average of the genes in the aborted embryo.

[667] So basically everybody is on board with the idea that the only projects that are worth bringing to fruition are ones that show signs of having the potential to become functional adults.

[668] You don't build a house on a cracked foundation.

[669] Yeah, right.

[670] Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

[671] If you dare.

[672] So here's the rub on the difference between males and females in this regard.

[673] When female, so this is, I'm speaking very generally and I have, you know, again, this is a place where I wonder if I'm going to say the thing that causes me to be driven into the sea.

[674] Anyway, the thing is, we know that females typically release oxytocin in response to sex.

[675] So it is, you know, there's basically a physiological obstacle to...

[676] And oxytocin is generically called the love hormone, right?

[677] Which is a little bit of a cheat because, in fact, it's sort of the in -group -out -group hormone.

[678] It is also involved.

[679] It signals this as persons in your in -group?

[680] In your in -group, but it also, you know, elevates the tribalism that defines who's not in your in -group.

[681] So anyway, it's in all of the architecture.

[682] For this sake, we can call it the love hormone.

[683] Yeah, that's the sweet way of thinking of it, I guess.

[684] But the thing is, in males, because of the distinction in the way males can reproduce, males, as I mentioned, have the same kind of interests in long -term bonding relationship.

[685] That's most of where male reproduction has taken place for our ancestors.

[686] And so males are looking for many of the same things that females are looking for in that relationship.

[687] They're looking for somebody who will go the distance, who, you know, is going to be a good parent who, you know, can face novel circumstances and be clever about what to do about them, all of those things.

[688] At the same time, males are looking for, they're looking to score for free.

[689] And because of that.

[690] For free.

[691] That's a big.

[692] For free.

[693] Yeah.

[694] And so the thing is, if you don't know this, then, you know, let's say, let's, let's, A woman might think, well, men are very focused on sex.

[695] So if I'm looking for a mate, then I'm going to go have sex.

[696] That's going to get a male's attention and maybe it will blossom into a love relationship.

[697] But actually, rushing to bed is going to inhibit that very process because males are aware on these two channels of sexual opportunities.

[698] They're aware of opportunities that are long -term investment opportunities and they're aware of these sort of.

[699] Free ride.

[700] Free ride evolutionary bargain opportunities.

[701] And to the extent that somebody advertises that they are an evolutionary bargain opportunity, they're actually not a good mate for the long term because who knows who else they're going to offer that opportunity to.

[702] And so to the extent that men are, I'm not saying this is good.

[703] I'm saying this is what is.

[704] To the extent that men are wired to fear cuckoldry, to fear their mate having sex with somebody else and an egg being fertilized and then raising that offspring as if it were their own, being fooled into that situation, they are wired to be alert for behavior that would put them in that jeopardy.

[705] So the thing is, apparently, and I learned this from somebody else, I was at a conference and somebody gave a talk, turns out there's actually a physiological underpinning to this and that males apparently use a different hormone.

[706] I've heard this, and I was about to ask you this, because I heard.

[707] recently that when a man orgasms he gets basically almost the opposite of oxytocin well he gets a get the fuck out of their uh chemical is that is that what was part of this i'm not i'm not an expert on this and i don't want to say more than i know okay great i believe i understand about this is that when uh sex happens too early in a relationship an inhibitory uh compound is released i think it's fast suppressant That prevents oxytocin from being uptake?

[708] Well, no, it sends another signal, which says this is a short term.

[709] This is a score.

[710] This is not a potential.

[711] Invesment.

[712] Right.

[713] Exactly.

[714] And so, you know, again, I'll just say it really clearly.

[715] I'm not saying this is how it should be.

[716] But I'm saying it makes sense to understand how things are.

[717] Even if males look at this and they say, I don't want to be that way.

[718] Because even in the simplest way, let's just acknowledge it.

[719] well, there is no man in Los Angeles right now who's trying to get laid, who's thinking, I got to spread my genes.

[720] You're not even aware what the underpinning of this urge is, what the basis is.

[721] So it doesn't even require your awareness for you to be acting on it.

[722] Absolutely.

[723] And that's what's tricky, I think.

[724] That's what gets very hard when we're trying to assess our own behavior, be honest with ourselves, is we're getting signals that we don't really know why they're driving us.

[725] Here's the question.

[726] I don't understand why people have a hard time grasping that no matter what else is true about sex, no matter what has been stacked on top of it, the foundational truth of sex is reproductive, right?

[727] So all of this other stuff, including sex for pleasure, right, which has evolved in us before there was ever birth control, even that is built on top of a foundation that had absolutely everything to do with the production of offspring.

[728] So I don't really understand.

[729] I mean, to me, it looks like men are baby crazy.

[730] They're just too dimmed to realize it.

[731] Right, right, right.

[732] Yeah, it's kind of ironic.

[733] Yeah.

[734] But, I mean, it's, you know, it's staring us in the face.

[735] What are, you know, men obsessed with about women's bodies?

[736] Parts that are involved in reproduction, right?

[737] It's, you know, a path to the ovaries.

[738] It's, you know, it's milk glands for babies.

[739] How does anybody miss that this is?

[740] is about reproduction, and that to the extent that we are going to co -op that system for some other purpose, we still have to work around what it was built for.

[741] See, now this is kind of, and this becomes, you'd be shocked at how often this is a recurring concept, not just in biology, but if we have an actor on here and we're talking about things, and I always try to make this distinction a lot, there's a big difference between an explanation and an excuse, and I want people to always think about that.

[742] they're hearing an explanation, not an excuse.

[743] So just because we've explained the underpending of why a guy would act like an asshole is in no way us saying that's an excuse.

[744] Well, I'll go one step further.

[745] Please do.

[746] And this is where I'm definitely going to lose a piece of your audience, especially a male in the chunk of your audience.

[747] We're mainly.

[748] We're mostly female.

[749] Yeah, yeah.

[750] We'll see.

[751] Actually, yeah, increasingly this sort of logic is just not welcome anywhere but it seems to me that we actually have an obligation to choose what sort of sexual creature we are going to be and that this has deep moral implications that none of us are perfect at it but that what has what the market has done to us by figuring out how to hand us everything that we will buy is it has obscured our obligation to be deliberate and thoughtful about who we are.

[752] And so, I don't know, does anything ever, does anything good ever come from lowering the bar to sex so that it is a non -special casual activity?

[753] It's weird, because I've argued at different points in my life on different sides of it.

[754] So, yes, I could say, you know what, it's just a great physical activity.

[755] if both people have their expectations correct, there's zero harm, and why shouldn't two people have an orgasm in the middle of the day and get their heart rate up?

[756] Yep.

[757] It's totally beneficial.

[758] Sure is rewarding.

[759] Yeah.

[760] I know, though, can evaluate the overall health of my life when I behave that way versus the overall health of my life now and just my own anecdotal experiences, oh, whatever benefits I was receiving from that cardiovascular activity and my ego and whatnot, the long -term result was that I had lower self -esteem, ironically, and now that I don't live that way, I have generally increased self -esteem.

[761] So just in my own experience, but only through having both sides of it, could I go, oh, well, I can just tell you I felt, I feel better this way.

[762] Okay, but, so you feel better this way.

[763] That tells us something.

[764] We don't know why, but it's something.

[765] But the question is you are interfering when you engage in a kind of low stakes sexual interaction that would not have existed in a past landscape because women, just as men fear being cuckolded, women fear being left to raise a child.

[766] Abandoned.

[767] Being abandoned, exactly.

[768] That architecture that structures the way we see sexual opportunity is also tied up in the most important human relationships that we have.

[769] To the extent that you interfere with the way you see sex with your eventual mate by having a lot of random sex that means exactly nothing, is that a gamble worth taking?

[770] Is it a good idea?

[771] So that's really my question.

[772] I don't think you can separate completely your low -stakes sexual encounters from your eventual sexual self that participates in a partnership.

[773] And, you know, am I saying people shouldn't be free to decide they don't want those partnerships?

[774] No. Am I saying that anybody should tell you you can't have casual sex?

[775] No. But deciding yourself whether or not it's a good idea.

[776] With all the knowledge as well.

[777] Right.

[778] Given what you know it's connected to, is it a good idea?

[779] That's the question.

[780] genuinely don't know the answer, but I do suspect that there is...

[781] You could know the answer and then also choose wrong, but it'd be my preference that you knew the answer.

[782] So if you want to abuse alcohol, I happen to be sober.

[783] I came to find out for me it wasn't good, but I want someone to have the full option to do that, but I also want them to have the full knowledge of what they're actually signing up for.

[784] Yeah.

[785] And I think that kind of is the way I would have like a libertarian view of this society is like, I'm totally, cool people making decisions that ultimately are self -destructive, but I would, it would be my wish everyone knew what they were signing out for.

[786] Do you think psychologically women, even when they're having casual sex, it's still about finding the partner, like finding investment, even though the chances are low, it could be?

[787] Okay, well, here's where we're going to get me some hate mail.

[788] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[789] What I, so.

[790] First of all, I'm...

[791] But by the way, we already said at best you could hit a 70 % but probably even that's high.

[792] So certainly we would agree with seven billion people in the world.

[793] You're not speaking for everyone.

[794] Some people are probably having sex for other reasons we can't even comprehend.

[795] Right.

[796] That being said.

[797] Some people may be having sex as they are listening to them.

[798] Oh, I hope so.

[799] Oh, I really hope.

[800] Yeah.

[801] All right.

[802] So here's what I'm saying.

[803] And this is based partially on evolutionary theory and what I think.

[804] ought to be the case and it's based maybe even more on discussions with lots and lots of people so I'm building a model of what is and matching it up with what I think probably is likely to be true and somewhere somewhere out of that emerges the picture yes I think well first of all let's draw a distinction we all have a conscious self and that conscious self is more or less the person that we refer to when we say I and then there is a vast mysterious self that we don't have access to in some places we have a little access in some places we have no access at all and that's actually most of us at the level of our architecture so and can i just as i think i understand it just put concrete examples on that so for the guy who's horny the self the eye the conscious is horny but the other unknown self is the genetics that have this whole program to produce horniness in the conscious.

[805] And that conscious state is unaware of all that other stuff.

[806] Yes.

[807] And in fact, all the conscious state needs to know is you're horny and this is the kind of thing you're looking for.

[808] Right.

[809] You just need enough information to seek.

[810] You need a direction to be pointed in.

[811] But you don't need too much.

[812] I mean, this is in fact the answer to what we were talking about a second ago, which is that the guys aren't aware that they are trying to produce babies.

[813] Yeah.

[814] Because they want it.

[815] That wouldn't be helpful.

[816] That doesn't make you horny.

[817] Right, exactly.

[818] It's antithetical to hornyness.

[819] But what I do think is true is that the conscious mind of modern women often tells them something like, you know, men have been pursuing casual sex forever.

[820] And to the extent that things are unfair to women, we want access to that privilege too.

[821] And why shouldn't we have it, right?

[822] Sex is pleasurable.

[823] So we want as much access to it as men have.

[824] And then when they take that idea, which is superficially plausible, and they deploy it, they find it is not satisfying.

[825] Does that mean there is not a category of 100 women who would say absolutely not?

[826] It is very satisfying.

[827] And who are you to tell me how to feel about it?

[828] And they're right.

[829] I'm nobody to tell them how to feel about it.

[830] On the other hand, do I hear again and again from women who have tested the hypothesis that in fact, casual sex just isn't all that rewarding.

[831] Right.

[832] And that they are confused about the way it interacts with dating.

[833] Anecdotally, you only need to have a conversation with your wife about who her hall passes are.

[834] because my wife's hall passes, which by the way, Brett, there's, it's so voluminous, right, Monica, thousands of hall passes for Kristen.

[835] Yeah.

[836] She's, there is no. I have been, I have been cloistered in an academic environment too long.

[837] I've never heard this term a couple times, but I don't know what it means.

[838] What?

[839] Hall pass.

[840] Oh, Hall Pass is so you're married and your Hall Pass is the one person you're allowed to have sex with without causing any marital problem.

[841] So for most people who are never going to run into Brad Pitt.

[842] It's normally a celebrity.

[843] Yeah, it's generally celebrity.

[844] So it's like a married couple in Wisconsin, the wife says, look, hon, if I ever meet Brad Pitt in elevator, I'm taking them up.

[845] And the husband goes, you're right, hon. Go ahead and do that.

[846] If you should run into Brad Pitt, I want you to go ahead and have that experience.

[847] So my wife's hall passes, I would challenge.

[848] any algorithm to model what she's after.

[849] It couldn't be discovered.

[850] Peter Dinklage, do you watch Game of Thrones?

[851] Yeah, that's one of her number ones.

[852] And then at the same time...

[853] Good choice.

[854] If you're going to have a hall pass, that is a good choice.

[855] But then on the other hand, it's T .I. The hip -hop artist.

[856] And then on the other, that's Vincent Donofrio.

[857] I mean, there is no common tissue between any of these people, which to me, if you ask me, if you ask my hall passes, what you're going to discover in short order is they're all going have a big ass and dark skin and you're going to go oh i can predict what his hall pass is but i mean to me that's so telling that in and of itself is very telling of what she desires and first is what i desire and she'll be the first to admit this she wants the approval of this person who she has deemed having a quality she admires well first of all this is the perfect example of what we were talking about about where your empathy goes along you understand christin really well up to this point at which she's a total mystery yeah i can't predict yeah But it's in keeping with this because those people on her list are people that she likes to spend time with and would invest with.

[858] For sure.

[859] It is all the, it is these things, essentially.

[860] Yeah.

[861] Now, granted, again, I know there's a ton of women out there that their hall passes are Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp.

[862] You know, it's just hot dudes.

[863] So I get it.

[864] But just in my anecdotal situation, it's very glaring between my wife and I, this difference.

[865] So can I ask you a question about this hall pass thing?

[866] Yeah, absolutely.

[867] You want to get the legal terms correct when you present it to your wife?

[868] Actually, so first of all, I think there's an entire landscape surrounding monogamy, a mental landscape that we don't know well.

[869] And just like marriage has gotten a terrible rap that does not actually match the actual experience of a good marriage at all, our understanding of how monogamy works is, there's no place you can go to find out.

[870] what the truth of monogamy is.

[871] I mean, it's a little bit like sex.

[872] The mythology is so off that we just don't have a good source of information, which means that everybody is sort of on their own to discover the reality.

[873] And then once having discovered it, they can't talk about it because it's at odds with what's supposed to be true.

[874] Well, it's kind of been imprisoned by religion.

[875] In my mind, at least where I grew up, it has a religious connotation to it traditionally.

[876] It does.

[877] And religion is fraught with it.

[878] psychologically dishonest about it.

[879] And because of that, it's like, okay, we have this iconic thing, which isn't right, and no middle ground between that and a belief that it's actually a kind of a fiction, that it's something imposed on the world by people who, you know, powers that be.

[880] Wanted to wag fingers rather than something else.

[881] But in fact, it is not true that monogamy is the human mating system, but it is true that monogamy, me is a human mating system and that it is a product of evolution where it happens.

[882] So that raises a question about why evolution would ever build that system.

[883] Well, and anthropologically speaking, far more data supporting that it is more of an anomaly.

[884] As far as just when you look at hunting and gathering societies, which we spent the bulk of our time being, it's very rare in there.

[885] Well, this again, it's a great example of something we were talking about earlier, which is if you think that the evolutionary nature of a human being is all on the hardware side, then you're right at the level of the hardware human, the vast majority of hunter -gatherer cultures, which is the vast majority of the time that human beings have existed, were not monogamous.

[886] Now, they weren't wildly polygynous either, but they were not monogamous.

[887] On the other hand, if you look at the vast majority of people on earth today, they belong to cultures that are at least nominally monogamous now i have to say there's no monogamous culture that's actually perfectly monogamous and there's no creature that we have studied yet as far as i'm aware when we say a creature is monogamous what we mean is it has a high degree of monogamy not that there's perfectly monogamous creatures anywhere we look but if we make those allowances monogamy does exist and it is not an accident i would argue that it is a feature of the cultures to which most of us belong right modernity has fostered the spread of monogamy and it's not incidental.

[888] I would argue that the reason that modernity has favored monogamy has to do with the difference between the way evolution works in what we would call zero -sum circumstances where a population isn't growing and non -zero -sum circumstances where a population is expanding.

[889] And the thing that happened in the last phase of history is a massive expansion in the human population, including many of the ancient populations discovered new continents.

[890] And so we're talking about everything here from people from Asia, having migrated into the new world, something like 13 to 15 ,000 years ago through the Bering Strait.

[891] But the basic fact of expansion actually favors cultures that mate monogamously.

[892] And the reason is a subtle one.

[893] we tend to think of polygynous cultures, what might be called polygamous cultures in humans, but polygynous cultures as maybe more sexual, but it's not the case.

[894] The thing about monogamy is that it provides mating opportunities for every able adult, both male and female, because everybody's pairing off and because the numbers of males and females that are born tend to be similar, a monogamous culture brings all adults into child rearing.

[895] And what that does is it allows a population to grow at the maximum rate.

[896] Now, if your population isn't growing, that parameter isn't favored.

[897] But if your population is expanding into a new territory, then how rapidly it can expand across that territory may dictate how much of that territory it ends up with.

[898] Anyway, we have a monogamous program.

[899] It isn't the default for humans, but it is encoded on this cultural side rather than on the hardware side.

[900] Why is it encoded on the cultural side?

[901] because there are things that can happen that would cause another system to be advantageous.

[902] In other words, every expanding population runs into a limit at some point, at which point the mating system might change, which might be exactly what we are seeing right now.

[903] There's no new landmass to discover, and lo and behold, we have a whole lot of serial monogamy by powerful males.

[904] Well, serial monogamy isn't really monogamy at all.

[905] It's serial polygony, right?

[906] So the point is that's what you would predict.

[907] You would predict a breakdown of monogamy and the re -evolution of polygyny.

[908] And that's a very dangerous fact for society, but nonetheless, let's call it what it is.

[909] So, in essence, the question really is, what's the truth of monogamy?

[910] Can we read it or discuss it or anything so that people have at least good data to go on that allows them to choose whether or not to engage in experiments with something else?

[911] I don't know the answer, but...

[912] Yeah.

[913] And this brings me to the kind of global thing I hoped we would talk about because it's something I'm fascinated with, which is there are certain elements of our firmware or our hardware that we seem to be aware of as a society, that we've accepted, right?

[914] A part of our hardwiring that I think gets underestimated all the time is being a group animal.

[915] I think when you have a dog, now if I could use an analogy, people seem to really get that dogs are group animals and that dogs have alphas and betas and gammas and zetas and they will they will behave pretty predictably based on their desire to please an alpha and we see that in practice all the time when we train them i think people are generally unaware of their own obsession with status with alpha with gamma with beta and they're driven by it so much and it's i see it as a very very destructive force and i just want to talk about kind of how we evolved what kind of things you can count on with a group animal evolution and how we've broken out of that paradigm and we're paying kind of a heavy price and already 20 things have come up about that.

[916] So one of them you already brought up was our brains know how to compute talking to 100 people.

[917] Our brains don't know how to compute talking to 1 million people.

[918] One of the things I think of all the time is we lived in groups, let's just say generally, about 100 people or so.

[919] If you grew up with 100 people, you're going to be the best at one thing.

[920] You're destined to be the best at one thing.

[921] And you're probably destined to derive a lot of self -esteem from that one thing.

[922] You can make arrow tips better than anyone else.

[923] Or you can shoot better, whatever that thing is.

[924] And we now live in this community.

[925] Really, that's 7 billion people if you're on Facebook.

[926] You have access.

[927] And you will never be the best at anything.

[928] You won't even be in the top 10 % of anything.

[929] And the mental anguish that creates and the anxiety and the many different kind of, I think, pandemic mental health issues we deal with are really, I think, an art growth of us being designed to live with 100 people, and yet we're living with 7 billion people.

[930] And so just if you could tell us just in very broad strokes, the difference between being a solitary animal and a group animal.

[931] Well, there's such a huge difference.

[932] And, you know, we are, there's a, as you know, there's a saying in anthropology, alone baboon is a dead baboon, which is really a statement about people more than baboons.

[933] Yeah.

[934] The idea is we are so thoroughly pendant on our social structure, just even for basic survival, that to think of us as independent entities is a mistake.

[935] And, you know, if you think about it is virtually impossible for any human being to survive in any natural habitat on Earth alone.

[936] That's going to sound wrong because you can imagine.

[937] imagine, well, okay, there are habitats where I could fish alone.

[938] On the other hand, how much of your fishing is predicated on the fact that you've got somebody doing metallurgy to make hooks, or if you're not going to use hooks, that somebody's making monofilament line, and if you're not going to use line.

[939] So anyway, I taught a class once, one of my favorites, actually, called Lights Out.

[940] And the premise of the class was that what if civilization stopped running and suddenly you know not alone but grouped with people had to bootstrap just basic survival skills eat sleep drink water right and how quickly you discover just how difficult these things are in fact i had a policy in the class that anybody who by the end of the 10 weeks could start a fire with only materials that they had come up with uh in nature would get full upper division credit and a glowing evaluation and nobody did it.

[941] Have you ever seen this show naked and afraid?

[942] I mean, I know there are a lot of these shows.

[943] I haven't seen that.

[944] There's one called naked and afraid and yeah, you've got to watch it because it is absolutely laughable.

[945] Even my own assessment of how I would do got shattered by watching people who are even survivalists.

[946] Like they've trained.

[947] They drop them somewhere naked and there's just two of them.

[948] Right.

[949] They get to bring one thing.

[950] And just finding water.

[951] just you underestimate the necessity of just clean water that could be a 20 hour a day job oh it's a huge in fact my first assignment in that class i brought my students out into the woods and i was like okay you need to bring a small amount of water to this location and you can't use any modern tech and it's like suddenly the value of a bucket because of a bucket that's practically free you know we're just throwing them and it's like, you know, people, I mean, they were clever.

[952] Yeah, you got to find a gourd.

[953] Right, you've got to find it.

[954] Well, you know, I mean, if you look at, you know, the kung, for example, you will find them using ostrich eggs to transport water.

[955] And it's like, that's weird, but no, that isn't weird at all because that thing is or stomach linings or exactly.

[956] Yeah.

[957] And, you know, you do figure out these things.

[958] There are things in nature, but we have a very off sense of how easy it is to do.

[959] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[960] So anyway, the point is you, you're very existence.

[961] assumes partnership with people who you may never meet who have done some job or they've innovated something.

[962] I mean, you know, to flintnap a stone to make it sharp enough to be an arrow point is not an easy thing to learn.

[963] But once somebody's learned it, they can transmit the information pretty effectively.

[964] Doesn't that make you miss school, the idea of that class?

[965] It does.

[966] Even when he says I had like he's teaching a class or he's got students, the whole thing is, yeah.

[967] My teaching life, both Heather and I were teaching at Evergreen and Evergreen was so different in terms of what it allowed us to do and what it facilitated our doing it was it was paradise that's up in Oregon it's in Washington oh in Washington oh okay yeah so you had access to going outside with the well I mean the key to it was a nobody was in a position like officially nobody was in a position to tell us what to teach or how to teach we could literally oh wow the rule book and do it some whole other way which Heather and I both did and the other key to it was our students took one class at a time.

[968] And we taught one class at a time.

[969] So the point is, when I say my students, these were people I knew well.

[970] Yeah.

[971] So, you know, every person was a full - Their course load was one class?

[972] Well, it's one 16 credit class.

[973] And, you know, it could be team -taught.

[974] You could, Heather and I taught together sometimes.

[975] We took a class to Ecuador for 11 weeks.

[976] Wow.

[977] A year -long class.

[978] We went for 11 weeks to Ecuador and traveled around.

[979] But anyway, that kind of high level of contact between professor and student allows you to teach to every individual in the room.

[980] And so, you know, Heather and I got good at delivering stuff at the front of the room, but watching each person in the room.

[981] And, you know, you knew somebody well enough to know how a particular idea was going to land on them and you could tailor it.

[982] And if it didn't land, you could figure out why didn't that hit?

[983] And anyway, it was a marvelous experience.

[984] And anyway, I do miss it.

[985] Yeah, that's special.

[986] We were talking about status and group animals.

[987] So I think a couple things are going on.

[988] One, we are thoroughly group animals, and we are living at a scale in which the groups that we evolved to understand don't make sense.

[989] And there are, of course, some famous things about this, like Dunbar's number, which is ostensibly the number of individual identities you can carefully track, which is a low number compared to the number of people that we actually do encounter.

[990] I don't know how accurate Dunbar's number actually is, but the concept has to be right.

[991] Right.

[992] We are just not built for this.

[993] We have a capacity.

[994] Right.

[995] But even worse is we have all of these technologies which we are not, our conscious mind understands how we are being given bad data, but I don't think most of us gets it.

[996] And I think we can actually prove that most of us doesn't get it.

[997] So, for example, You have a box on the wall of your living room and it shows photorealistic moving pictures of people who you actually know who they are, right?

[998] And you can know things about their life and you can look into what looks like their living room.

[999] And here's the thing.

[1000] A hundred years ago, if you looked through a window and you saw somebody's living room, it was actually an indication of something that you could evaluate because that living room was near enough for you.

[1001] for photons to be bouncing off it and going into your eyes.

[1002] So that means, let's take an example.

[1003] Human beings are focused on relative success.

[1004] So we know from careful sociological work that people feel much less good about some level of success if somebody they know.

[1005] By comparison.

[1006] Right.

[1007] They're not focused on the absolute level of buying power.

[1008] They're focused on the relative level of buying power, or seems extremely petty.

[1009] Yeah.

[1010] But it's not.

[1011] If you think about an ancestor in an early, a primitive environment, well, let's say that you are farming and your neighbor is farming a similar piece of territory across the fence, but they're harvesting twice as much.

[1012] Corn.

[1013] Right.

[1014] Well, now you know something.

[1015] There's something in this environment that I'm getting wrong.

[1016] I'm leaving corn on the table somehow because they're doing something I'm not doing.

[1017] So being obsessed with what they've got that I don't and feeling bad about it, enough to be motivated to figure out what they might be doing that I'm not doing, that's a route to success.

[1018] Maybe I can figure out if that guy has a wheel and his wheel is allowing him to invest the same amount of effort and get a much higher yield, then I'm going to notice that that wheel exists.

[1019] I'm going to think, I need one of those.

[1020] How do I make one, right?

[1021] Yeah.

[1022] So super beneficial for a time.

[1023] Yeah.

[1024] Super logical.

[1025] Yeah.

[1026] But now what happens when you stick that ball on the, I mean, that box on the wall of your living room?

[1027] Yeah.

[1028] Now you're looking at living rooms that, A, don't even exist, right?

[1029] Somebody shows what to show you.

[1030] You know, a whole team of people picked out the curtains.

[1031] The whole team of people picked out the curtains and maybe they did it because you're wired to be obsessed with somebody who's succeeding.

[1032] They also had 12 attempts at the dialogue you're hearing them say.

[1033] Right.

[1034] So it's perfect by the time you hear it.

[1035] and you're discounting, like, why aren't I that witty in real life?

[1036] Well, if you had 12 runs at it.

[1037] 12 runs and a team of writers.

[1038] Yeah.

[1039] We can't compete.

[1040] No. So that puts us in a bind that we're not actually in.

[1041] The people were actually, I mean, we're not even in competition with the people who live next door to us, the actual people who live next door to us, because maybe we're in a different industry than they are.

[1042] And so those people are really irrelevant to our calculation, but nonetheless, we're processing the data of who they are and what they're about.

[1043] So my point would be, this is so novel that we're just confused about what to process.

[1044] And we're processing data that makes us act in a completely arbitrary fashion, right?

[1045] We could be potentially much happier where we are.

[1046] We could be more successful because we would figure out what it is we should focus on and what we could ignore.

[1047] But this doesn't happen because nobody sat you down at some point and said, look, you're a modern human.

[1048] The problem for modern humans is novelty.

[1049] you're going to face all kinds of things for which you're miswired and you need to know how to ignore them.

[1050] It'd be great to be able to process the right data and throw out the data that's irrelevant.

[1051] Well, another one, and you brought it up, and there's so many of these things where I get very judgmental of it.

[1052] And then I start really, really thinking them through.

[1053] So one of them is gossip.

[1054] And I sometimes, by my perspective, am the victim of gossip because I'm one of the people on your TV.

[1055] So I'm naturally.

[1056] The victim of other people's gossip.

[1057] Yes.

[1058] And I am, I find gossip repugnant.

[1059] or a repellent, and I have a judgment that it's a moral failing.

[1060] But then I actually learn in anthro the utility of gossip, and here's how it works.

[1061] Hunting and Gathering societies were very egalitarian.

[1062] They were not prone to dictatorship.

[1063] And the reason they weren't prone to dictatorship is that if enough people started talking about the leader, the chief, and the chief was kind of exploiting people and the benefits weren't there, and they were taking more than they were giving.

[1064] gossip served the purpose of forming a coalition.

[1065] Now, one chief might be the strongest, but he's not stronger than four other people who have decided he has male intention.

[1066] And that gossip could have saved the whole group, right?

[1067] It had such a fundamental purpose.

[1068] And I just, then I go, oh, it's no one's fault.

[1069] We're kind of hardwired to gossip.

[1070] It's like kept us out of the weeds.

[1071] And I'm a little more sympathetic to the desire.

[1072] And I have it.

[1073] I love talking about other people, how much they make what they're doing wrong i can't uh resist and again it helps me be a little less angry at myself too when i recognize oh this i'm inclined to do this well i mean that this is why i said i was uncomfortable using the term gossip is that i think it dismisses something important but when people gossip about you because you're famous or you and your wife because you're both famous the reason that we are obsessed is not relevant, right?

[1074] What you guys do and don't do is not a factor in the lives of most of the people gossiping.

[1075] But because they're not processing, hey, this is not productive gossip, you know, it's just fun.

[1076] Yeah.

[1077] They do it.

[1078] Yeah.

[1079] And so somehow becoming aware of where we've run afoul of some piece of novelty and where we're doing something that makes no sense or is even destructive.

[1080] Just becoming conscious of it lets you navigate it better, which is why I think I'm going to go back to the hall pass thing.

[1081] Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

[1082] I know.

[1083] We really introduced a concept that you would.

[1084] I hope you really take that in and use it for your whole life.

[1085] Well, here's the question.

[1086] By the way, your wife has a hall pass.

[1087] She just hasn't told you.

[1088] She decided in her head if she, there's one person she met on an elevator in Beijing.

[1089] She already knows her hall pass.

[1090] I think it's Peter Dinkler.

[1091] but um she'll have to fight christin bell to get to him but so here's here's the question um i suspect that the hall pass thing so let me just ask you a question yeah i want the real answer you're gonna get it if you know it yeah um if you ran into your hall pass and they were willing would you do it well so what's obviously unique about us in the hall pass situation is we are going to see Brad Pitt in an elevator.

[1092] I have seen him this year.

[1093] Not on an elevator, but I see him.

[1094] Totally.

[1095] The hall pass game for us has to be way more...

[1096] It's higher stakes.

[1097] It's just more fun.

[1098] I do think if we both lived in Michigan and I did see Jennifer Lopez on an elevator, and she said join me, I would.

[1099] Because this is going to be a once in a lifetime thing and I'm going to take it.

[1100] But I'm in a very weird position where most of my hall passes I meet up with occasionally.

[1101] Or I may end up even playing a love interest.

[1102] So it's a dicey game in our household.

[1103] Yeah, it's actually that you Hollywood types do have that thing, which is that the script sometimes calls for stuff that your spouse has to deal with.

[1104] Yes.

[1105] Yep.

[1106] Okay.

[1107] So let's let's try it the more difficult way for a guy.

[1108] So Kristen runs into her hall pass.

[1109] She takes him up on it.

[1110] How are you with that?

[1111] I'm totally cool with it.

[1112] And I'll tell you.

[1113] you why.

[1114] And this is super unconventional, but this is where we're at.

[1115] So my first long -tum girlfriend was of five years.

[1116] She lived in Michigan.

[1117] I lived in L .A. We were both 18 through 23.

[1118] The reality of being that age, we had to open it up.

[1119] Or maybe we didn't have to, but we chose to.

[1120] We chose to open it up.

[1121] And we had a policy kind of like, what I don't know, I don't care about.

[1122] My conclusion at the end of that relationship was it had had zero impact on how much she was in love with me or vice versa in my experience.

[1123] I then had a nine -year open relationship and we lived together.

[1124] And in practice, it was more theoretical.

[1125] It was, hey, I'm 23, you're 22.

[1126] I'd like to be with you forever.

[1127] I can't see us getting through the next 15 years being monogamous.

[1128] I just looking at the data, I would say, I don't think it's going to happen.

[1129] And I wouldn't want to lose you over that because I actually love you and want to be with you.

[1130] So in that case, we lived together.

[1131] We were together every night, but I wasn't always with her.

[1132] She wasn't always with me. Things definitely happened over that nine years.

[1133] Again, I did not see a reduction in how in love she was with me or vice versa.

[1134] Now, it did have an impact, I believe, on our sex life.

[1135] Yeah.

[1136] Because I do think this sexual component of a relationship is the very hardest to keep healthy.

[1137] And it requires so much vulnerability.

[1138] And that's the hardest thing for us to do.

[1139] So I do think when it's that hard and you have an option that doesn't require any of that work, you're going to take the option that doesn't require it.

[1140] and you're going to delay dealing with those issues all people in relationships deal with.

[1141] So I do think it was destructive in that respect.

[1142] But all that told, what I did surmise after 14 years of being in open relationships is I don't subscribe to the fact that you can't be very in love with someone committed to them and be there for them.

[1143] I also think that our priority list in relationship is a little weird.

[1144] I think a lot of people have partners that are, they have disdain.

[1145] for them, they are bad partners.

[1146] They're not good dads.

[1147] They're out with their friends all the time, right?

[1148] By all accounts on my list, they're a shitty partner, and that'd be a deal breaker.

[1149] Yet, just because they're not fucking someone else, that math to them makes sense.

[1150] The one thing that person can't do and still be a good partner is fuck someone else.

[1151] Now, if you gave me the option, Kristen will be a wonderful mother to your kids.

[1152] She'll be home every night.

[1153] She'll meet all your needs.

[1154] and she's fucking someone and I don't know about it, I'm picking that over.

[1155] She never fucks anyone, but she doesn't really listen to me. She's not really meeting my needs.

[1156] So I personally, and I don't prescribe this to anybody, but my priorities are not fidelity.

[1157] That to me is not what's important about this partnership.

[1158] Her being a great mother is a, that's everything.

[1159] You know, her meeting my needs, that's everything.

[1160] So I have a unique perspective on it.

[1161] I really don't care if she fuck someone I never knew about it.

[1162] I care of my needs aren't met.

[1163] Yeah, that's unique for a guy.

[1164] Evolutionarily, you would expect that posture to be more likely for a woman, and then a woman would be more sensitive about emotional infidelity.

[1165] Mm -hmm.

[1166] Well, by the way, I am more threatened by my wife admiring her boss.

[1167] Like, you want to talk about where my jealousy comes up.

[1168] It doesn't come up in someone, and by the way, this is all rooted in people's, and no one really likes to think about that.

[1169] it's all rooted in your own personal insecurities.

[1170] I'm not evolved enough for my wife.

[1171] I'm not as empathetic as she would like.

[1172] I don't commit to charities like she does.

[1173] Her boss is all those things.

[1174] She idolizes the way he moves through the world.

[1175] That is far more threatening to me. So rooted in your fears, I think.

[1176] Well, it's rooted in your fears except that there are certain canonical fears for men and for women.

[1177] And it sounds like you are exceptional for whatever development.

[1178] developmental reason.

[1179] But I concede.

[1180] So here's the weird thing.

[1181] Now, here's a bracket where I could listen to someone describe men and how they're jealous.

[1182] And I could raise a big stink online and go, not me. But I can be me and recognize, yes, the trend moves towards that.

[1183] And I have many friends who would choose.

[1184] This is a game I play at my house at dinner parties.

[1185] Your option is one of these two things.

[1186] Your partner drives your children, very drunk.

[1187] somewhere, picks them up from school.

[1188] What are my children drunk on?

[1189] Sugar, as always.

[1190] You choose that one of these two things is going to happen.

[1191] Either your husband is going to drive your kids heavily intoxicated, home from school, or your husband's going to get a hand job in Atlanta on business.

[1192] And in a judgment -free zone where I foster that, you'd be shocked to learn that many people would pick their, their husband in danger, their child's life, over, get a hand job in Atlanta.

[1193] And I think there's a hiccup in logic there.

[1194] There is, although I also wonder about the setup of your experiment because there is the question about...

[1195] Thank you for calling it an experiment like it's official.

[1196] Believe me, I'm a big fan of thought experiments, and that qualifies.

[1197] But the problem is that in asking that question, you are also eliciting an advertisement of values from somebody who's actually in a live fire exercise with their mate.

[1198] So in other words, to the extent, let's say that you were asked this question.

[1199] Yeah.

[1200] And you know that you're being okay with your mate driving your kids in a very drunk state is not likely to happen because your mate wouldn't put your kids in danger.

[1201] So there's no value in turning up the penalty on that one because there's plenty of penalty already.

[1202] but you don't want your mate messing around and thinking you're okay with it so you have to advertise something about the penalties for it so the question is can you get good data on what people actually think and in fact many people have pursued data on what people are threatened by and it's very interesting so you know for example not surprisingly men are most threatened by vaginal sex by infidelity that involves vaginal sex and other kinds of sex they're much less threatened by well why would that be because no other kind of sex is going to produce a baby that they end up raising under false pretenses now that is interesting and i you you can stay mum on this because you're an academic and you don't want any part of this statement i'm going to say but i would be curious if given the option for men if they would rather had their their wife had anal sex with a guy or vaginal sex.

[1203] I have to say they'd prefer they had vaginal sex.

[1204] I bet she'd be wrong.

[1205] Really?

[1206] Because there is, I mean, geez, I'm so hesitant to bring academics.

[1207] You don't have to.

[1208] No, no. You can bail out at anything.

[1209] I'm an evolutionary biologist.

[1210] I'm impossible to embarrass.

[1211] But I don't want to speak about things I read and then go back after the podcast and realize, I had misremembered something.

[1212] But my memory is that there is good data about how.

[1213] how much trouble is produced in a relationship by stranger rape that is vaginal versus anal.

[1214] And it is much less troubling to a relationship if it is non -procreative.

[1215] Wow.

[1216] Interesting.

[1217] Also, whether a condom was used.

[1218] So, you know, again, none of these are surprising from an evolutionary point of view.

[1219] Right.

[1220] Right.

[1221] So, anyway, I do think there's a landscape, it's asymmetrical, but it's also interpretable.

[1222] Your situation sounds unique, maybe because you're Hollywood people or because you've developed.

[1223] I think my own just passed, and again, my own fears.

[1224] I was going to hypothesize that the Hall Pass phenomenon, which apparently I have never.

[1225] You're new to this discussion.

[1226] Monica, we introduced something new to Brett.

[1227] It's exciting.

[1228] Very exciting.

[1229] But I was going to argue that it plays a role that is not exactly what's on the brochure.

[1230] So I find that with, you know, with Heather and me, we joke about issues of fidelity.

[1231] We joke about whether the kids are actually mine.

[1232] Sure, sure.

[1233] And this is actually a kind of a bonding ritual.

[1234] Yeah.

[1235] And the point is it's sort of evidence of security and evidences that we both get that there's a...

[1236] It's a safe way to be vulnerable.

[1237] It's a safe way to be vulnerable to, you know, to check in on that territory.

[1238] You know, everything's cool, that kind of thing.

[1239] And, you know, I also, I just, for whatever reason, I think it makes us stronger as a couple.

[1240] That pretending that this issue isn't in existence is a vulnerability, right?

[1241] Because who knows what can emerge in that space that you're not talking about?

[1242] But to the extent that it's sort of out in the open.

[1243] So anyway, the hypothesis was that Hall passes some sort of a formalization of a game that isn't really about anybody actually having licensed that they would use.

[1244] but it is about a sort of a pressure release.

[1245] Uh -huh.

[1246] I like that.

[1247] Even knowing that your mate.

[1248] Acknowledging.

[1249] We are both aware that we have attractions outside of our pair bond and that that in principle is a threat and that we could, we're cool enough with each other that we could formalize some sort of a discussion around that.

[1250] And so anyway, the question is how often are these hall passes actually used and how often is it actually functioning in some way that doesn't have anything to do with people going to bed with each other?

[1251] Right.

[1252] I mean, never, right?

[1253] People are never meeting their, although I do wonder if nearly every woman Brad Pitt bumps into, he's probably at least a high percentage.

[1254] Everybody's a bizarre reality that like everywhere you go, there's 50, 50 shot, everyone's hall pass in the room is really a fun conundrum.

[1255] Well, I mean, but I also think there's something, boy, this is, we haven't, I have not talked about this anywhere.

[1256] there is also something to the question of who you're allowed to fantasize about which most people I think would say you know it's between your ears whose business is it what you're fantasizing about and I actually think this is just wrong because I suspect if you think about the way sexual fantasy actually works it's more regimented than you would imagine right your brain has rules for itself and I think those rules are about something and my conjecture would be that actually fantasizing about somebody who's actually someone you could end up going to bed with increases the likelihood that it will happen.

[1257] I'm going to get real, real with you.

[1258] When I masturbate, which is increasingly infrequent, which is troubling, that's a side note of getting older.

[1259] But when I do do it, this is why I don't enjoy pornography as well, is I need there to be some plausibility to the fantasy or it just doesn't work.

[1260] I would never, yeah, I would never masturbate to someone in a magazine lingerie thing because it just, I can't work up a plausible fantasy.

[1261] I have to believe that it could happen for it to work.

[1262] So your brain is actually testing out things that might plausibly result in reproduction.

[1263] Yes.

[1264] Right.

[1265] And like an addict, I'm working through insane steps by which I could end up in this situation.

[1266] Like there's so much foundation laid before I get to the sex part of the fantasy.

[1267] It's like, well, then I went to that restaurant where she works, and then I said this.

[1268] You know, I need this whole preamble for it to be plausible in my head.

[1269] I've always wondered if this is what the song, a short skirt long jacket is about.

[1270] I don't know that song.

[1271] It's a cake song.

[1272] Oh, okay.

[1273] He's describing some woman and he just, you know, they meet accidentally.

[1274] Yeah, it's Citibank when she borrows his pen.

[1275] I mean, yeah.

[1276] Yeah, so clearly detail.

[1277] It's not metaphorical.

[1278] No, but it's very much, it's very much like male fantasy, which is to say it's not a free -for -all.

[1279] It's about stuff that can happen, and that that's a problem.

[1280] So to the extent that it is good to have people in pair bonds that are secure, maybe it's not so good to have people believe that their fantasy life is nobody else's business.

[1281] At one level, it's nobody else's business.

[1282] On the other hand, do you have responsibilities to, you know, Oh, boy.

[1283] I believe you do.

[1284] You have responsibilities.

[1285] I do.

[1286] I believe that things become pathologies when they're secrets.

[1287] Because it's good to check in with people to get outside perspective.

[1288] I think there's a book called On Killing, and he makes this parallel between our obsession with killing on television, being related to us no longer processing animals ourselves, no longer burying grandma and grandpa in the backyard or watching.

[1289] them die because we have no firsthand experience with it.

[1290] We are now obsessed with it.

[1291] We've been, we've been separated from it.

[1292] And he makes the parallel that you can kind of track sexual pathologies back to when we stopped living in the same room with one another.

[1293] Because as a child, you heard mom and dad have sex.

[1294] You heard aunt and uncle have sex.

[1295] You had a lot of familiarity with sex by the time you were ready to have sex.

[1296] With actual sex.

[1297] Yes.

[1298] Actual.

[1299] With the noises and is a total fictional landscape in which porn is teaching people how sex happens and porn is designed around getting you to buy something.

[1300] So it's giving a completely misleading.

[1301] Yes.

[1302] So they say when you start separating kids into their own bedroom and they have no firsthand interaction with sex, they're left to fill in the blanks.

[1303] And again, that's why you need to check in say, oh, I filled in these blanks.

[1304] And then someone else goes, well, I tried that once with a woman and she did not enjoy that.

[1305] Like, you need those check -ins.

[1306] I think they're healthy.

[1307] Yeah, they are healthy.

[1308] And we haven't, you know, there's no, as far as I'm aware, there's no good guidance for somebody who is trying to navigate this and figure out what they shouldn't, shouldn't be doing.

[1309] There's nowhere to go.

[1310] Totally.

[1311] It's a terrible.

[1312] If you do a search, clearly there's some sites that would be productive, but they'll be on the 85th page of Google.

[1313] Right.

[1314] Before you get through all the stuff for sale.

[1315] All the high dollar stuff will have gotten your attention long.

[1316] before you figure out who might be worth listening to.

[1317] Yes.

[1318] You have a concept that I believe you coined the phrase, and it's called a metaphorical truth.

[1319] And I want to see if I can get it to couple a little bit with these broader things that are happening, on the debates that are happening.

[1320] And you're involved in a lot of them, and your brother, Eric, is involved in a lot of them.

[1321] Sam Harris is involved in some of them.

[1322] Jordan Peterson is involved in some of them.

[1323] And I find myself straddling two worlds, or at least as I understand them, right?

[1324] I find myself getting very intoxicated by the thoughts and viewpoints and what's being called the intellectual dark web.

[1325] And then I go home and I check in with my wife.

[1326] And I think my wife has this emotional genius to her.

[1327] And she pokes good holes and stuff.

[1328] And I find that we have a little bit of a binary option between no facts and all facts.

[1329] And I don't think the truth is in there.

[1330] And to give the simplest example, without getting political, because if we don't do that on the show, we try to avoid it.

[1331] This issue of building a wall, the left's defense of it is to point out the logic of how ineffective a wall would be.

[1332] And that's the full brunt of the defense of why we shouldn't have one.

[1333] And I'm sitting over here thinking you're still failing to address the emotional trauma that is leading people to want a wall in the first place.

[1334] You're hitting them with facts about the pregnantability of a wall and not addressing what are people feeling in this country that that seems like a great option?

[1335] What's the emotional thing that's happening?

[1336] And how do we treat emotions and how do we acknowledge that we're not a chemistry set?

[1337] We're not predictable.

[1338] all these things we've just laid out, the end result of that is that quite often facts are only part of it, and it feels sacrilegious on either side to say that.

[1339] But I really like your thing about metaphorical truth, and just explain that to us.

[1340] Sure.

[1341] Metaphorical truth is a concept I came up with to solve a problem, which is that it is clear that religious belief in particular is producing, it is driving a tremendous amount of human behavior, at least historically.

[1342] And a lot of expense is spent on it, right?

[1343] Elaborate buildings, rituals, time taken away from productive activities are spent on these belief structures.

[1344] And the belief structures, I think we can say they just aren't an accurate description of the universe.

[1345] Many of them are unfalsifiable, but there just isn't any evidence for the things that are described in these religious texts.

[1346] But these texts cannot be nonsense because if they were nonsense, then those who simply didn't believe them would have a massive advantage because they weren't spending all of that on buildings and rituals and time taken out of their schedule.

[1347] So the fact that these sacrifices and offerings and all of these most amazing phenomena, all of those things would be nothing but a vulnerability if these things were just purely not true.

[1348] So if they're not true at a factual level, what are they?

[1349] Well, the answer, believe has to be that they are functional beliefs, which is to say, if you act as if they are true, you come out ahead of where you would if you act according to the fact that they are false.

[1350] So they are, what I said in class is literally false, but metaphorically true.

[1351] Metaphorically true just means it's a belief that provides you an advantage.

[1352] And the nice thing about this is it's a continuum, you know, the degree to which something is a factual description and the degree to which it's functional but not factual can be slid all over the map sure but all we need to know is that for a belief to for an expensive belief to travel through history with some population over a long period of time it must be paying its way somehow right and so that means we are now justified at looking at those traditions and saying well what's what function might it have been serving and is that still relevant to us or isn't it if it's not something that's still valuable to us.

[1353] Maybe it's something we can afford to jettison, or maybe it's something we have to replace with something that's functional in our circumstances.

[1354] So that's the basic architecture, is that it isn't a binary between fact and fiction.

[1355] There is something intermediate, which is a functional fiction, basically.

[1356] And so I think your wall example is an excellent one at a bunch of different levels.

[1357] I believe Trump played on the fact that there are lurking sympathies.

[1358] There are fears of the other.

[1359] There are fears of people flooding over the border and taking opportunities.

[1360] And irrespective of what the reality is about whether or not on average immigrants coming across that border are having a positive or negative effect on the culture, the fears are very real.

[1361] They're very ancient.

[1362] Xenophobia is not a good thing but I would argue it is an evolved thing and we all carry that program and the question is can we successfully unhook it can we build an immigration policy that is not built on a facile fiction of immigrants good immigrants bad right neither one of those things is true correct but the fact that the wall has become the issue that it is is all about the question of our internal fears which are not being addressed by the technical question much as you as you argue and as you point out and i think it's really an excellent point the debate rings hollow because it focuses on a factual level that is at best a part of the equation um and so yeah i hear so much on that side of the aisle of this stripe where it's like they're talking to themselves right it is a matter of making a point to other people who already agree with them rather than engaging what's actually in front of them.

[1363] And it's certainly no way to navigate policy.

[1364] We are often juggling one, two, three ideals.

[1365] We're actively trying to service three ideals that are often contradictory.

[1366] So even in our Constitution, we have equality and we have liberty.

[1367] And these things are often mutually exclusive.

[1368] And yet we value both.

[1369] And what we fail to recognize is at best, we will have the pendulum somewhere we, the majority agrees with.

[1370] We will never have all liberty and we will never have all equality.

[1371] And so just starting the conversation with, look, we're all going to have give a bit.

[1372] We both want both these things to be thriving, yet we know they can't both be thriving.

[1373] And for people, people are so drawn to decisiveness, this is one of the things people loved about Donald Trump is things were quite black and white for him.

[1374] And there's comfort in that decisiveness.

[1375] There's a lot of unease in some weird compromise.

[1376] Is it 60 % equality, 40 % liberty?

[1377] That's uncomfortable for us.

[1378] But I think we're going to have to learn to explore that more and think of that as a zone we're going to live in.

[1379] Is that my making any sense?

[1380] Oh, yeah.

[1381] This is actually one of my favorite points because I think there's actually something very hopeful.

[1382] at the end of it, which is if you get to the stage of having an adult conversation, which we're having trouble with in public, but privately it's possible, where you do say, hey, you know what, it's not that liberty and equality cannot both thrive.

[1383] They actually can't.

[1384] What you can't do is maximize either one, right?

[1385] Anytime you try to maximize a single parameter, every other value you have will crash as a result.

[1386] So anybody who's got a one -parameter objective can't be allowed near the levers of power.

[1387] But once you accept that and you say, look, I really like liberty, but I'm not ready to surrender on equality.

[1388] What if you could have 80 % of both, but you had to accept you weren't going to get perfection in either case?

[1389] That you can probably do.

[1390] It's in the nature of diminishing returns.

[1391] And so what we really have is a complex dynamic system.

[1392] Complex dynamic systems are always about tensions between competing values.

[1393] I mean, this is how your body works.

[1394] Your temperature is maintained by something that looks out for it being too hot and too cold and it's constantly pushing parameters around that you're not even aware of.

[1395] And we have to have a body politic that works that way.

[1396] And in fact, I think this is one of these places where we've inherited a structure from, the 18th century which made sense then it was about as good as you could do and really I can hardly fault the founding fathers for how far -sighted they were they did a great job oh it's incredible but there's no way they could have foreseen this world and so it as much as we can honor what they were attempting to do and what they actually accomplished it's time for us to figure out how to how to extract the values that they held to add to them where they didn't quite get it and to build a structure that's capable of protecting those things in the 21st century and it's not going to be done with a pendulum swinging back and forth there's way too much carnage in that process it has to be done more like the way a body is regulated where there's you know thermostat like control that navigates between competing parameters and allows you to say well you know what actually we got the balance wrong we didn't get enough liberty we were too focused on equality and you can move the slider that way or you know what we didn't get enough equality we had much, too much liberty and too many people got frozen out and you can move the slider back and then have the thing function to hold us in some desirable compromise state.

[1397] And acknowledge that as culture evolves, as it always will do and we'll never stop, we will never reach the finish line, that is going to be forever sliding.

[1398] We're going to be required to the end of time to constantly recalibrate.

[1399] As new information arises, and we can't revere these tests.

[1400] the way we do as if but it just to me it points out our predilection towards religion alphas the whole group thing it's kind of all present in our our obsession with that document well this is uh i mean i actually again i see a lot of hope because i see the conversation that needs to happen breaking out you know you have sam harris and jordan peterson talking about the nature of truth And what emerges in that conversation is the fact that, you know what, you can't dismiss all of this ancient mythology.

[1401] It's really important.

[1402] On the other hand, there is not only no indication that it is timeless, there is no way it could possibly be timeless.

[1403] The Constitution is the same way.

[1404] And, you know, if you think otherwise, you know, check in with, is it the Third Amendment that protects us from soldiers being courted in our houses?

[1405] That turns out not to be as big an issue as it was made out to be.

[1406] You know, it was a giant issue at the time.

[1407] But the point is, it's not a timeless document.

[1408] Yes.

[1409] And there's evidence of it right there.

[1410] And not just there.

[1411] Obviously, there's places, you know.

[1412] So.

[1413] And by the way, those guys recognize that it would have to be amended.

[1414] That's why it was created in a manner that allowed for change.

[1415] Right.

[1416] And I think, unfortunately, what they didn't count on was that it would be mistaken as a religious text.

[1417] And so that the.

[1418] The caution around amending it has been too great.

[1419] Yes.

[1420] And it's not even clear at this point you could amend yourself to a stable fix.

[1421] It may be just too rickety relative to the problems that it faces.

[1422] But, you know, it's been said by many people.

[1423] They'd be shocked at how little we had altered that document in light of how much to change there is.

[1424] Yes.

[1425] You can see Jada Adams going like, really, guys?

[1426] Nothing?

[1427] Let me see that phone again.

[1428] Yeah, it's incredible.

[1429] Well, you are such a pleasure to talk to.

[1430] And I honestly think we got to one of 26 things I had written down.

[1431] I wanted to talk to.

[1432] I really hope you'll come back.

[1433] I would love to.

[1434] And I'm very encouraged by you because you do to me, and this is something that can't be measured or quantified or tested.

[1435] But there's something weird about feeling someone's intentions.

[1436] That's why intentions are relevant in these conversations, especially in these PC, conversations where things happen at Evergreen are here or there.

[1437] People's intelligence, we want to say it's not relevant, it's relevant.

[1438] But I can feel you being a force of good, and I'm just so excited you came and talked to us, and I could have done this for six hours.

[1439] So hopefully you'll come back.

[1440] I would love to.

[1441] Do you have a book out or anything right now that we could promote?

[1442] I am working on a book and a couple of big projects, but I got nothing to announce.

[1443] But people can find me on Twitter.

[1444] Please, yeah.

[1445] They can find me on Patreon.

[1446] What's your Twitter handle?

[1447] At Brett Weinstein.

[1448] At Brett Weinstein.

[1449] How are we deciding whether we say Weinstein or Weinstein?

[1450] Ah, that's actually relatively easy because Weinstein is correct.

[1451] Yeah.

[1452] Also, the Weinstein clan has been compromised by Hollywood behavior.

[1453] Yes.

[1454] Definitely Weinstein.

[1455] And, you know, it's a German word.

[1456] It has a meaning.

[1457] And so it's a correct pronunciation.

[1458] Okay.

[1459] And it's Weinstein.

[1460] It's Weinstein.

[1461] All right.

[1462] So you're at.

[1463] Brett Weinstein 1T.

[1464] Yep.

[1465] And you're not on Instagram.

[1466] Are you on Instagram?

[1467] I am on Instagram.

[1468] And is it the same at an Instagram?

[1469] It's a really good question.

[1470] I don't remember.

[1471] I think if you plug in my name, it will come up in the search.

[1472] Okay, great.

[1473] Yeah, well, we love you.

[1474] Thanks for coming.

[1475] So great.

[1476] This was awesome.

[1477] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1478] Monica, Monica, Monica.

[1479] Hi.

[1480] My little buddy is ailing.

[1481] A little bit.

[1482] Not a little bit, quite a lot of bit.

[1483] You had a 1 .6 this weekend.

[1484] Yeah, you had a temperature of 103, which has been labeled by Delta as a 1 .6, right?

[1485] That's the highest temperature you can have.

[1486] Yeah.

[1487] What did I bring you this weekend?

[1488] I brought you over a computer charger, returned a computer charger.

[1489] It was your computer charger.

[1490] And you looked like you had been having quite an experience in the that apartment for the last couple days.

[1491] It's been a tough couple of days.

[1492] It really looked like I arrived at like a FEMA tent, you know, like someone had just been getting by in there.

[1493] Oh, that's unsettling.

[1494] Well, I really was hoping there was something I could bring you, like some chicken soup or, you know, pediolite, something exciting to give you a little spring in your step.

[1495] And you just, you weren't in the mood for anything except for those crispy french fries.

[1496] Yeah, I got some French fries.

[1497] I don't think it was the best idea.

[1498] Tell me why.

[1499] And I'm sad to say that because, I mean, it was.

[1500] Temporarily.

[1501] Well, you get to be a point, right, when you have an illness of this caliber, you lose your appetite.

[1502] Very much.

[1503] And at a certain point, you're like, I've got to put some calories in my body.

[1504] I don't care how terrible or absent of nutrition they are.

[1505] Yeah.

[1506] And need some calories.

[1507] In fact, it's a good time to just go all the way, go hard.

[1508] Go ham, as they say.

[1509] Go ham bone.

[1510] Yeah.

[1511] And you and I agree that in those moments of weakness and despair that we often turn to crispy hot French fries.

[1512] Yeah.

[1513] We won't tell you the provider of them because this is a weird endorsement to say we only eat them when we have diarrhea or vomiting.

[1514] But they're darn crispy and hot and delicious.

[1515] And we'll eat them when duty calls.

[1516] Yeah.

[1517] How much of that large fry did you get through?

[1518] You sent me a little photograph of them splayed out.

[1519] Just half.

[1520] Yeah, half.

[1521] It was large.

[1522] Buddy.

[1523] What?

[1524] See, eat that whole large fry.

[1525] Well, I had a cookie also.

[1526] Oh, you love your cookies.

[1527] Yeah.

[1528] But I didn't have a good night.

[1529] You didn't.

[1530] And I think I should probably have just not eaten anything all day.

[1531] No. But it was fine.

[1532] It probably bought you 30, 40 seconds of pleasure.

[1533] It did.

[1534] God, do they taste good?

[1535] Oh, they're hot and oily and salty.

[1536] I do not like the science we're seeing come out about French fries.

[1537] It's a little discouraging.

[1538] I know.

[1539] I don't want to believe it.

[1540] They're gunning for everything we like in this world.

[1541] What's next?

[1542] Cigarettes are bad?

[1543] No, never.

[1544] We were probably in the clear on that.

[1545] Okay.

[1546] We had a beautiful live show this week.

[1547] Oh, we sure did.

[1548] Yeah, boy, did we have a fun live show in L .A. And I was 48 hours out of a significant foot surgery.

[1549] You were.

[1550] I've got a steel rod coming out of the end of my toe currently.

[1551] Do you want to post a picture of it?

[1552] Well, probably the x -ray is fine.

[1553] The other photos, way too triggering.

[1554] I think people would lose their lunch.

[1555] Cookies?

[1556] They would lose their cookies if they saw.

[1557] It's pretty mangled looking.

[1558] Wouldn't you agree?

[1559] It would get your attention.

[1560] Yeah.

[1561] It definitely would stop your scrolling.

[1562] Yeah.

[1563] Yeah.

[1564] Or pick up the pace on your scrolling.

[1565] It's really hammered.

[1566] But at any rate, yeah, 40 -some hours out of surgery, I was a little nervous.

[1567] I wouldn't put on a good show.

[1568] And then everyone else just picked up that slack.

[1569] No, you did.

[1570] You did put on a good show.

[1571] You rallied and you did good.

[1572] How's your foot feeling now?

[1573] It feels good.

[1574] It does?

[1575] It doesn't hurt.

[1576] Considering it's gotten very little rest since the procedure, we had the live show, then we had an award show Friday night.

[1577] and a photo shoot all day to day.

[1578] It's probably not what the doctor prescribed.

[1579] But with that said, we're going good.

[1580] I feel good down there.

[1581] Even with a rod in there, it doesn't hurt.

[1582] It doesn't hurt.

[1583] I just live in total fear that someone's going to bump into it and drive that rod deeper into my toe.

[1584] That's so interesting that you can have a rod coming out of your foot.

[1585] And it can be painless.

[1586] Make no mistake.

[1587] There's an inch of rod hanging out of my toe.

[1588] It is.

[1589] It looks like.

[1590] you should be dying.

[1591] It looks like they put a tag on my toe because I've passed.

[1592] Oh, yeah.

[1593] Yeah.

[1594] But back to the show, what happened was I was trying to rally and I was a little nervous and you were starting to feel a little rough too.

[1595] And we sat in the wings at the opening of the show as you and I do.

[1596] And Bob started playing his mashup of all the many different great songs that started in L .A. Yeah.

[1597] And Kristen sang, Jackie sang, Hannah sang.

[1598] Oh, yeah.

[1599] And Andrew Bird, the most accomplished whistler in the world.

[1600] Which you're going to be quick to write that off, like, oh, as I was, like, oh, the greatest whistler in the world.

[1601] Who cares?

[1602] It's whistling.

[1603] I was eating that yummy crow because he whistled our theme song, chills central.

[1604] It was so, it's like.

[1605] It was the most unique thing I've ever experienced or heard.

[1606] So special.

[1607] It was so jealous and so happy.

[1608] Yeah.

[1609] And then the waves started coming.

[1610] So the waves were kicked off by that whistle.

[1611] And then they were just punctuated with the Hannah, Jackie, Kristen, singing.

[1612] Bob's amazing melody.

[1613] And then you and I just got, we rode the wave.

[1614] We got high as hell on those chills.

[1615] And then by the time we got on on that stage, it was go time.

[1616] And I felt spectacular.

[1617] Yeah, it was awesome.

[1618] And then our guest was like unbelievably 10.

[1619] Yeah, it was awesome.

[1620] And then, on Friday, you won your first award of your whole life.

[1621] Yeah, we want, well, we, wabiwob, Wamika, and Wax won the IHeart Radio breakout podcast award.

[1622] Yeah.

[1623] Which was so fun for us.

[1624] It was really fun and exciting.

[1625] I was proud of you.

[1626] I was proud of you.

[1627] And you made a speech.

[1628] Wabiwob smiled and all was good in the world.

[1629] Then we went home.

[1630] Well, we didn't actually, we weren't given a trophy.

[1631] We're told there'll be a trophy, but they gave us a fake one to hold and then a fake one to take a picture with.

[1632] And then we left, we're like, well, where's our thing?

[1633] And they're like, tough titties.

[1634] Yeah, they're like, oh, we need that back.

[1635] Just like Ma and Sheila, they said tough titties.

[1636] So yeah, what a week.

[1637] Okay, well, and one more thing I want to say.

[1638] We beat out your favorite podcast, Dr. Death.

[1639] Yes.

[1640] And I hadn't heard it at that time, but I've been very ill, as you said.

[1641] And so I binged it.

[1642] Did you love it?

[1643] Yes.

[1644] I loved it.

[1645] It also was...

[1646] It's horrifying.

[1647] It's very disturbing.

[1648] It's very hard to listen to, especially when you feel like your body's failing you.

[1649] Mm -hmm.

[1650] Bless you.

[1651] Don't do that.

[1652] I bless Monica when she...

[1653] She coughs and she hates it.

[1654] But her cough sounds often like a sneeze.

[1655] It does.

[1656] I'm just embarrassed by it.

[1657] And I think just take all the blessings, you know?

[1658] Yeah.

[1659] Poor buddy.

[1660] Sorry, little buddy.

[1661] It's okay.

[1662] So I listened and it was really disturbing and good and scary.

[1663] Yeah.

[1664] I'm so scared to ever have a surgery.

[1665] And my dad's about to have a surgery and I got really scared.

[1666] He's about to have a very easy eyes.

[1667] surgery, but still, cataracts, but still.

[1668] Yeah, he'll be fine.

[1669] And, you know, I had surgery just after listening to that.

[1670] I know.

[1671] I'm glad I didn't hear that before you went into surgery.

[1672] Well, I found myself talking to the nurse prior to the procedure saying, like, oh, have you listened to Dr. Death?

[1673] No, oh, well, let me tell you about blah, blah, blah.

[1674] And then I'm really all I'm getting to is like, boy, if those nurses had felt more empowered, they knew that the procedure was going wrong, but they were not empowered to stop it.

[1675] boy, I hope those things are, I mean, I'm basically saying a nurse, if you see some shit going sideways during this foot thing, you tell somebody, stop, stop this person.

[1676] But let me tell you, Dr. Weissman, he was like a F -16 fighter pilot.

[1677] Boy, he got in there, snip, snip, I was in and out, no problem, no issues.

[1678] He did a bang -em -up job.

[1679] No need for nurse intervention.

[1680] He's not a doctor death, no. No, no, he's the antithesis.

[1681] Yeah.

[1682] It was the advice that they gave on the podcast, like, talk.

[1683] to your nurse.

[1684] She's your advocate or he's your advocate, generally.

[1685] Oh, my God.

[1686] It's so good, though.

[1687] Everyone should listen to it.

[1688] Yeah, it's great.

[1689] By the same folks who did Dirty John, which we also loved.

[1690] Man, there was a lot of great podcast this year.

[1691] Yeah.

[1692] When you saw, like, the category we're here and they were naming people, we're like, well, no way.

[1693] There's no chance.

[1694] We don't have a shot in hell.

[1695] Yeah.

[1696] I mean, seriously, Dr. Death, I'm like, no way.

[1697] No. You got to give it to Dr. Death.

[1698] Like, it's a lot like when I won my first state championship.

[1699] It was the same.

[1700] There were so many good people in our category.

[1701] Yeah.

[1702] So many good teams.

[1703] There were, it was, it was a long shot.

[1704] Mm -hmm.

[1705] A crapshoot.

[1706] Yeah.

[1707] Well, I love that I've piggybacked on your winning streak.

[1708] Me too.

[1709] Yeah, I'm trying to absorb some of your good luck.

[1710] And it seems to be working.

[1711] Yeah.

[1712] Oh, one more thing that was so sad.

[1713] The saddest part of the whole weekend.

[1714] And I had a really...

[1715] I know where you're going with this.

[1716] I had a plan.

[1717] A date with your mom and daughter.

[1718] I had a date with my mom to go to see a really cool magic show.

[1719] And I was going to go.

[1720] I was going up until 103.

[1721] Yeah, when your temperature hit 103, you thought better of it.

[1722] I thought.

[1723] Because this magician, Justin, Willman, he um shout out he listens okay this magician is awesome he is the magic for humans guy on Netflix yeah he made uh he got you some tickets he was generous enough to find a couple seats in a sold out show for you and mom aka Kristen and you were gonna go so it broke your heart to have to call that off yeah but he has a little baby at home so I felt you're a I'm responsible bringing my sickness into that room at 103.

[1724] You thought you might be kissing him at some point during the show?

[1725] Well, I figure that's part of the magic show.

[1726] Yeah, call you get a volunteer to come up from the, come up on stage and kiss the magician a little bit.

[1727] Yeah.

[1728] Anywho, but I'm going to try to go.

[1729] What if you would have gone and it did prove to be too much for you and you did die during the show?

[1730] It'd probably be great promotion for him.

[1731] I'm like his magic so death -defying, it caused a death.

[1732] Oh, but no, but you want it to be, you want it to be death -defying.

[1733] Death -inducing, though.

[1734] So for me, I'm not terribly interested in going to see a magic show, but if I found out that one in a hundred people that attend will die of being impressed, I probably would go.

[1735] That's true.

[1736] If it was death -inducing, I'm there.

[1737] Because I like to beat the odds.

[1738] I told you, I only have fun if I think there's a viable threat of death looming.

[1739] That's when I really start having a good time.

[1740] Jumping off the roof of something into a pool.

[1741] You know, something with a motor strap to you.

[1742] That's when things really come online for me. Yeah, you like high risk.

[1743] Yeah, then my adrenal glands are shot.

[1744] That's why I got to really poke them hard.

[1745] Give them a good kick in the groin.

[1746] They're perfect.

[1747] Yours are very, yours are overflowing.

[1748] Yeah.

[1749] Okay, Brett.

[1750] So, you mentioned the court case about friends.

[1751] My favorite show.

[1752] Mm -hmm.

[1753] You didn't even let me talk about how good of a show it was, but that's funny.

[1754] Did you think that was the time and place for it?

[1755] Yeah.

[1756] Okay.

[1757] I did.

[1758] Well, then I apologize.

[1759] Brambled on.

[1760] I really apologize for not allowing you to pontificate on the value of friends.

[1761] Okay.

[1762] So that was in 2006.

[1763] What was in, oh, the court case was in 2006.

[1764] Uh -huh.

[1765] And the California Supreme Court threw out a sexual harassment lawsuit against the makers of the hit comedy, friends, ruling that vulgar and coarse comments by the show's writers reflected the, quote, creative workplace for a comedy with sexual themes.

[1766] In ruling unanimously for Warner Brothers Television Productions, a state high court said the show's writers did not direct their lewd comments at the woman who sued them or at a woman particularly, or at women particularly.

[1767] State law does not outlaw sexually coarse and vulgar language or conduct that merely offends.

[1768] Justice Marvin R. Baxter wrote for the court.

[1769] Baxter said that the court based his decision on the totality of the undisputed circumstances, particularly the fact that Friends production was a creative workplace focused on generating scripts for an adult -oriented comedy show featuring sexual themes.

[1770] Mm -hmm, yummy, yummy sexual themes.

[1771] Yeah.

[1772] I mean, which I, that's true -ish.

[1773] You know, it's not really a show about sexual themes that has sexual themes.

[1774] I could, I could tell you about all the episodes if you want.

[1775] You don't think a lot of them dealt with sexual things?

[1776] I mean, I've never watched the show, so I can't really.

[1777] Some, and I mean, there's like through lines like, you know, Joey is horny for everybody.

[1778] And he's always saying, how you doing?

[1779] Uh -huh.

[1780] And, you know, that.

[1781] And different cast members were involved in sexual Congress throughout the series, right?

[1782] Different cast members.

[1783] No, no. On the show, didn't members of the friends group date one another?

[1784] Yeah, one another.

[1785] And Lauren?

[1786] Joey and Lauren.

[1787] I don't know.

[1788] Are you saying?

[1789] One of the girls and one of the boys dated.

[1790] Rachel, you never watched any of it.

[1791] I didn't.

[1792] I didn't watch the show because I heard that the writers were sexually vulgar in the writing room.

[1793] And I was like, I want no part of that.

[1794] Right.

[1795] That sounds like you.

[1796] Look, people shouldn't aim their sexual jokes at any person.

[1797] Yeah.

[1798] That's wrong.

[1799] Sexual harassment's wrong.

[1800] No woman should have to go to work and hear some asshole dude's thoughts about them personally.

[1801] Yes.

[1802] That goes without saying.

[1803] Well, it doesn't.

[1804] Okay, it doesn't go.

[1805] I'm going to say it.

[1806] So I'm saying it.

[1807] And then I'm also saying that nobody has a constitutional guarantee of not being offended.

[1808] I agree.

[1809] Being offended is a part of being on planet Earth.

[1810] It's a part of all discourse.

[1811] You know, guess what, guys, you're going to be offended.

[1812] That's part of life.

[1813] Yeah.

[1814] There'll be no protection of being offended.

[1815] But you said in this conversation, you got really relaxed.

[1816] Just now?

[1817] Me?

[1818] Well, I'm supposed to put my foot up.

[1819] Oh, interesting.

[1820] So I decided to recline my lazy boy.

[1821] I got comfy.

[1822] Yeah, you got comfy.

[1823] And then the whole point was to keep.

[1824] the leg up, then you just put your leg down, so I don't know what's happening.

[1825] You are so emblematic of the call -out culture.

[1826] Look at you.

[1827] I mean, you're just trying to expose all my indiscretions to gain...

[1828] I just don't know what you're doing.

[1829] We're not connecting because I can hardly see your eyes and then you're pretending like it's about your leg and it's not.

[1830] It is.

[1831] It is.

[1832] I can see you perfectly.

[1833] Can you not see me?

[1834] I mean, kind of.

[1835] What do you mean, kind of?

[1836] You can see your chin and you're...

[1837] Oh, my goodness.

[1838] It's hard to see your eyes.

[1839] Anyway, oh, well, we were talking about this, and you said, well, yeah, I mean, we have the ability to discern whether pulling down your pants and jerking off in front of the writer's assistant is sexual harassment.

[1840] And, you know, that's true.

[1841] It seems like that's obvious.

[1842] But sometimes weird stuff does happen in these rooms.

[1843] and the boundary is really blurry.

[1844] It's more blurry than I think...

[1845] Doing structural engineering.

[1846] Well, yeah, but it's just more blurry than anyone really...

[1847] Wants it to give a credit for?

[1848] Yeah, and it's just hard to navigate.

[1849] I think it's harder to navigate than you were giving it credit for.

[1850] Well, no, I stand by everything I'm saying, but I will also add that a lot of this problem would completely go away if half that writer's room was female.

[1851] And half of every writer's room should be female.

[1852] So that's a problem that we should address, right?

[1853] And confront.

[1854] Because once you're not the sole woman in a room with nine guys, that that dynamic shifts dramatically.

[1855] If I'm the sole guy around nine women, that's a different thing.

[1856] And I recognize that.

[1857] But that's not, let's just not tag the wrong issue you know so to me the issue in that situation is like it should be a pretty equal environment to go to work at to begin with and now you have allies and friendships and all these things and you don't feel isolated and there's just a lot of dynamics that could um be beneficial to just have make sure those writing writing rooms are are there's some equity there yeah i agree i think both things are true okay who's the australian comic that's saying a song that was only a ginger can call a ginger ginger, and that song is called Prejudice, and it's by Tim Minchin.

[1858] So people can watch that if they would like.

[1859] Okay.

[1860] And so you talked a little bit about the diets of different people, different groups, and how, yeah, we can't really make any asserting judgments on anything based on that.

[1861] And you mentioned the Messiah just drinking.

[1862] drinks milk.

[1863] Or cow's blood they drink.

[1864] So that's what, yeah.

[1865] So they're a tribe living in Kenya and northern Tanzania.

[1866] And their traditional diet consists almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood.

[1867] Yeah.

[1868] Oh, blood.

[1869] Two -thirds of their calories come from fat, and they consume 600 to 2 ,000 milligrams of cholesterol a day.

[1870] Wow.

[1871] You know what's funny, though, is I made terrible analogies, though, when you point that out.

[1872] because I was basically trying to position them in Inuits as opposites when, in fact, they're kind of dead similar.

[1873] Oh, right.

[1874] So I made a bad.

[1875] I could have picked a much better group that had like a 99 % vegetarian diet or something, you know.

[1876] That's true.

[1877] So I made a bad.

[1878] But you were just saying, like, I mean, we Americans would never take on that diet.

[1879] Like, that would sound crazy.

[1880] That would sound very irresponsible.

[1881] And what's bizarre is it would, it would result.

[1882] result in a different health outcome here than it would there, which is also so fascinating.

[1883] It's crazy, yeah.

[1884] It's like, I want to say it's Papua New Guinea where in the past, I don't think it's this way now, but as recently, it's like the 70s, they would wean children from breastfeeding with cigarettes and people there smoke from the time they're like five years old on and they did chest x -rays and no one had lung cancer.

[1885] Really?

[1886] And then it becomes a big debate about like, well, is it the additives and American cigarettes and blah, blah, blah.

[1887] But again, just so counterintuitive.

[1888] Yeah, crazy.

[1889] Here, I'm going to make this back to normal for you.

[1890] No, I need your foot to be rested.

[1891] No, no, you know what?

[1892] I need to be there for you today.

[1893] You were there for me. You took, let me just say that to the armcherry's that you took spectacular care of me. You picked me up from my procedure at 10 in the morning in Bev Hills.

[1894] And you drove me and then you drove me to my follow -up appointment.

[1895] and you administered my pain medicine, which I'm not allowed to have access to, you really took of me. So the least I can do is sit upright to talk to you in your moment of need.

[1896] Well, I like taking care of you.

[1897] Thank you.

[1898] And it's a burden for you to take care of me by sitting up.

[1899] And I don't want that.

[1900] I want you to be comfortable.

[1901] It's a burden to drive to Beverly Hills in early morning.

[1902] No, I like taking care of you.

[1903] Okay.

[1904] You have different likes.

[1905] Well, I like sitting up for you.

[1906] enjoying this quite a bit.

[1907] I'm gonna get you that box to put your foot up.

[1908] No, watch this, watch this.

[1909] Watch this.

[1910] Watch this.

[1911] Oh yes.

[1912] Look it.

[1913] Elevated.

[1914] I don't think that's comfortable for you at all.

[1915] Very comfy.

[1916] I hope I don't fall asleep like this.

[1917] That's my only fear.

[1918] Yeah.

[1919] Do you think that's part of why you don't like getting help?

[1920] Like, because then you feel like you owe them.

[1921] I used to think that.

[1922] I used to think I didn't ever ask someone to drive me to the airport because I didn't ever want to be asked to drive someone to the airport, but I, through more thinking about it, I recognize that's not what's going on.

[1923] What's going on is single mother, three children, everything stretched to its limits, all of us as a team having to be completely self -sufficient and not be a drain on the other person.

[1924] And that that was exactly how you demonstrated your love for someone in my family, is that you would never be a drain on them.

[1925] So when I'm on, when I'm a drain on people, I feel like the message I'm sending is that I don't love you or I don't value you as much as I value me. Like, it's just very backwards in my head.

[1926] Yeah, yeah.

[1927] And even with the awareness, even with the intellectual awareness, I feel bad forcing other people to help me just exist.

[1928] It's hard for me. Even though they might derive some pleasure from it.

[1929] Yeah, and also it's not forcing.

[1930] No one's doing it if they don't want to do it.

[1931] True.

[1932] So, oh, so the record of how many kids a woman had, he said 60, and it's 69.

[1933] Oh, 69.

[1934] Yeah.

[1935] And this is disgusting.

[1936] Okay.

[1937] Her name is, like, nowhere to be found.

[1938] She's referred to as the wife of.

[1939] Fyodor Vesileev.

[1940] What year is this?

[1941] 1707.

[1942] Okay.

[1943] So I'm sure that's why.

[1944] I mean, I'm sure her name is maybe somewhere I could find, but definitely not on the first page.

[1945] The environment that she's raising these 69 kids in, there's no indoor plumbing, electricity, how are you even washing these diapers, their cloth?

[1946] You know, the whole thing sounds like this person probably had a pretty torch.

[1947] Existence unless they just loved creating babies and caring for them, which may be the case.

[1948] Who am I to judge?

[1949] But boy, does that sound like a rough existence?

[1950] Oh, she was a peasant.

[1951] How many sets of twins?

[1952] She was a peasant.

[1953] I just saw that.

[1954] What?

[1955] What, uh, how many twins were in there?

[1956] Okay.

[1957] It says in 27 confinements.

[1958] I don't know what that means.

[1959] I mean either.

[1960] She gave birth to 16 pairs of twins.

[1961] Oh, my gosh.

[1962] Seven sets of triplets.

[1963] Oh, my God.

[1964] And four sets of quadruplets.

[1965] No!

[1966] Yes.

[1967] And her name isn't even on here.

[1968] That's an injustice.

[1969] Yeah.

[1970] If you have however many sets of quintuplets, you just said.

[1971] Quadruplets.

[1972] Quadruplets.

[1973] She had septuplets.

[1974] Seven sets of triplets.

[1975] Oh, my God.

[1976] That's 21.

[1977] Oh, my gosh.

[1978] I mean, also in the 1700s, I can't imagine more than half these kids lived.

[1979] I know.

[1980] Oh, no. No way, right?

[1981] No way.

[1982] She was a peasant, as I just learned.

[1983] So I don't think they had good care for them.

[1984] No. If what I know about peasants holds true, it was a rough go.

[1985] Wow, what a life.

[1986] Yeah.

[1987] It is sad.

[1988] I mean, just imagine having quadruplets.

[1989] and agreeing to have sex ever again.

[1990] I just can't imagine that once you deliver four kids, again, they're not going in surgically in 1700.

[1991] She is delivering four kids in a row at one sitting.

[1992] I know.

[1993] And then she did that three more times, two more times.

[1994] Three more times.

[1995] Oh, my God.

[1996] Oh, my God.

[1997] Can you imagine state of affairs in her private parts?

[1998] Yeah, you're right.

[1999] They probably were coming out easier and easier as time went on.

[2000] But so if you take all that away, you take away the quadruplets and the triplets and the twins, you start looking at a more realistic number of someone's having one at a time.

[2001] Do you want to do math on it?

[2002] Well, I was just going to say it would be like probably, she probably only had, how many pregnancies she, maybe like, 13?

[2003] Well, 69 total.

[2004] Okay.

[2005] Okay, so 16 pairs of twins.

[2006] 32.

[2007] Uh -huh.

[2008] Seven sets of triplets.

[2009] Right.

[2010] So, let's go 16 and 7.

[2011] So that's 23.

[2012] We're talking pregnancies now.

[2013] So she's at 23 pregnancies.

[2014] So 16 and 7 is 23.

[2015] And then four for the quadruits.

[2016] It's still preposterous.

[2017] Yeah.

[2018] 27 times.

[2019] Aye, aye, aye.

[2020] God bless this nameless peasant.

[2021] Maybe 20.

[2022] 27 confinements means 27 pregnancies.

[2023] Oh, okay.

[2024] Sure.

[2025] Well, we figured out the least efficient way possible to figure out what the word confinement means.

[2026] Well, I'm just trying to figure out.

[2027] We had to have some that were regular, right?

[2028] Apparently not.

[2029] Apparently not.

[2030] All right, let's add up the kids.

[2031] All right, let's start over.

[2032] So the first one was 16 twins?

[2033] Yeah, so 32.

[2034] 22 twins, 21 triplets.

[2035] 21 times three is 63, 63, wait.

[2036] Wait, 21 times three is 60s.

[2037] This is all wrong.

[2038] Not 21 times three.

[2039] 21 triplets.

[2040] 21 triplets.

[2041] Two twins and 16 quadruplets.

[2042] Okay.

[2043] We are in the ditch here.

[2044] 16 plus 32 plus.

[2045] All right.

[2046] 42, 48.

[2047] Okay, plus 21.

[2048] 48 plus 21 is 69.

[2049] Oh my God.

[2050] She didn't have any single children.

[2051] No single children.

[2052] I just want to just to get, just climb on my soapbox for six seconds.

[2053] When you think this world is as bad as it's ever been, I just want you to think about this.

[2054] The 17 -some peasants were forced to have 69 kids.

[2055] That's a shitty existence.

[2056] We've gotten a little better.

[2057] Um, okay.

[2058] So, Bickram, does Bickram claim to have offered people a million dollars for his seaman?

[2059] Uh, yeah.

[2060] He said, he denied sexually assaulting over a dozen different women who took his class.

[2061] And in an interview in which he explained why there's no way he ever needed to assault a woman, he said people pay one million dollar for one drop of my sperm.

[2062] Yeah.

[2063] He did not pluralize that.

[2064] I didn't either.

[2065] Yeah, good.

[2066] Anyway, yikes.

[2067] Oh, he said, I can make...

[2068] This is like when we did, what's her name?

[2069] Yeah, Ma nod.

[2070] No. Sarah?

[2071] No. The dancer.

[2072] The dancer who was not sexual but was appearing to be sexual.

[2073] Remember?

[2074] Don't get mad at me. I'm trying to figure out.

[2075] The Spanish dancer who was also...

[2076] Oh, cha -cha.

[2077] A Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi Chi No Yeah and she would say my coo my coochie Yeah she would say coochy coochy cooci yeah yeah Wait how is it like her because you had to yes you almost couldn't say her sentence without doing an accent I couldn't it was horrible um charro charro um So he said I can make million dollar a day.

[2078] I can make million dollars a days.

[2079] What would be pluralized?

[2080] I can make million dollar a days.

[2081] Do you think it's even possible that somehow in India you don't pluralize dollars?

[2082] No, he just can't.

[2083] He just does not that well -versed in English, I think.

[2084] Well, he's been in fucking L .A. for like 40 years.

[2085] but it takes a long time for accents to change.

[2086] Sure, but pluralizing things isn't really like...

[2087] Well, kind of.

[2088] If I'm speaking Spanish, that's the first thing I'm letting go.

[2089] Sure.

[2090] Or, you know, you know, the he, she, Ustead, all that.

[2091] I can't deal with that.

[2092] So I'm just going to say the most basic thing.

[2093] Right.

[2094] Yours is going to be like yo for everything.

[2095] Oh, yeah.

[2096] Tango, yo, como, yo.

[2097] Definitely.

[2098] Yeah.

[2099] Anyway, I can make a million dollar a day every day.

[2100] Every days.

[2101] Okay.

[2102] By the way, what a great, like, defense for being a predator.

[2103] Yeah.

[2104] Is that you wouldn't have to, as if that's the only motivation for being a predator.

[2105] That's not like a power trip, that it's just a sexual necessity.

[2106] But he didn't have any sexual necessity because he could charge $1 million a day for his semen.

[2107] Exactly.

[2108] Is, yeah.

[2109] You see, man. So you mentioned that orangutans, I know you call them orangutans.

[2110] No, I respect that you're never going to say orangutan.

[2111] I'm never going to say it, but I respect that you say it correctly.

[2112] And then they choose who to get pregnant by.

[2113] Yeah.

[2114] That is so crazy.

[2115] And I did find some corroboration on that that said adult females.

[2116] are highly unwilling to mate with young males.

[2117] Undeterred, a young male will often follow a female and even form a short courtship with her.

[2118] If the female continues to refuse his advances, his superior size and strength are used to overpower and raper.

[2119] Such relationships are either terminated by the arrival of an adult male who displaces the youngster or else by the female finally managing to get away.

[2120] Interestingly, there is some evidence that such rapes rarely result in pregnancy.

[2121] Possibly because at the peak period of fertility, the female is most likely to be found with her preferred fully adult male.

[2122] Hmm.

[2123] Some mystery there.

[2124] And you know these adult male orangutans are such assholes and they're too big to go up into the canopy.

[2125] So the women and all the babies and adolescents, they all live in the canopy.

[2126] They are never down on the ground because they don't want to be around these males.

[2127] Yeah.

[2128] And the males are solitary.

[2129] They're on their own.

[2130] But the rest of the group's social.

[2131] Yeah.

[2132] Do you see that um Julia Roberts did a documentary on orangutans oh and she like was inching up to this adult male this older adult male that of course lived on the ground too big to get up in the trees and it was like looking peaceful looking peaceful and all of a sudden he just grabbed her by the neck and pulled her in and all the people around started freaking out and of course she's freaked out and he just held her in position for this what felt like an eternity and then they got her away from him but it was very dicey and it went from like oh look at this majestical creature to like boom he was just his orangutan self yeah and do they kill no so what they're not like chimps that create chimp aside homicide but yeah they say chimps are the only primate that uh other than us that they've observed killing for fun really yeah like uh in their own species too so there there are some totally unexplained chimp homicides that seem to have no advantage to the perpetrator of the murder.

[2133] Yeah.

[2134] We have that too.

[2135] Yeah, we're dark.

[2136] It makes you think that with it, with, uh, I'm not like gorillas.

[2137] Yeah, it's, it does suggest that with intelligence comes some darkness, some darkness.

[2138] Yeah.

[2139] I think that's what it's a proof of.

[2140] Oof, Maron.

[2141] I wonder if killer whales doing any of that weird shit like that because they're hyper -intelligent as well.

[2142] And dolphins, right?

[2143] Mm -hmm.

[2144] But I remember learning that intelligence is supposed to really be about neocortex size versus body mass. So capuchins are really, really smart too.

[2145] The little animals you see in outbreak, the little monkeys with the skin face.

[2146] Yeah.

[2147] They're crazy smart, although they have a small brain because they're tiny, but they're neocortex mass. relationship is quite high, which is why they're so smart.

[2148] And crows, too, have a really high neocortex mass. And apparently, orcas have the highest compared to us.

[2149] So I wonder if they do any trippy homicidal, unexplatable, weird shit.

[2150] I guess it wouldn't be called homicide with them because they're not hominids.

[2151] There was some really interesting statistic.

[2152] I'll have to go back and find it that Kristen told me that she read in some popular science magazine about crows and how they can like recognize people from above they'll like see you know they're like flying around and they're like oh there's dax yeah like they know us they can also do like a nine step problem to get a treat which is nuts if you YouTube this like I went down a rabbit hole of I just googled what's the smartest bird and then immediately crow comes up and then immediately these videos of them solving these multi -step problems to get a prize.

[2153] It's bonkers.

[2154] They like open boxes and turn switches and do all this stuff.

[2155] It's crazy.

[2156] It is.

[2157] Yeah, it's cool.

[2158] It is.

[2159] Okay, so you said 50 % of all pregnancies in human self -terminate.

[2160] Research has found that more than half of successful fertilizations will end in miscarriage.

[2161] The research, which has yet to be peer -reviewed, was penned by evolutionary geneticist.

[2162] William Richard Rice of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and draws upon many previously conducted studies.

[2163] And I think quite often women don't even realize that they were pregnant and that they self -terminated.

[2164] They just think they have like a heavy period one month.

[2165] Exactly.

[2166] Because I think previous to this, there was like 10 to 20 percent.

[2167] And I think they were accounting for people who knew.

[2168] Right.

[2169] So then he is not.

[2170] And he's saying, like, a lot of times, yeah, you don't even know.

[2171] Yeah.

[2172] I think it's cool.

[2173] I think it's so cool because what your body has detected is that there's a mutation or a disjunction where you're going to have 47 chromosomes instead of 46.

[2174] I mean, it's good that our bodies can do that.

[2175] I think it's really cool that our body can read that.

[2176] I know, but it's sad.

[2177] Fertilize ovum and go, oh, no, that's not going to make a. healthy animal.

[2178] Curious about the abortion.

[2179] Yeah, I don't think pro -life people would want to acknowledge that our own bodies aborting half of all pregnancies.

[2180] Because once you start thinking about it in that way, if you're calling it murder, then you have to say half of all pregnant people are murderers because their bodies are self -terminating.

[2181] Right.

[2182] So that's where to me, but again, I went, I'm never going to convince anyone and nor am I going to try.

[2183] but it just, it is food for thought that we're designed to self -terminate half of them.

[2184] But, you know, they would probably say the distinction is you aren't choosing.

[2185] So it wouldn't be murder.

[2186] It would be death.

[2187] I wonder, though, if they think God is doing it or their body's doing it.

[2188] Yeah.

[2189] They might, I don't know.

[2190] So.

[2191] But don't you agree.

[2192] Don't you think that that frames the debate much differently when you acknowledge half of all pregnancies are terminated?

[2193] I do.

[2194] But like I said, I think that.

[2195] Their problem is the choice.

[2196] Us playing God.

[2197] Deciding, deciding to terminate.

[2198] But what's so weird is your body's deciding to terminate that pregnancy.

[2199] So it's like, okay, it wasn't a decision that you, that happened in the subconscious or the conscious.

[2200] But your body chose to terminate that pregnancy.

[2201] But it would be the difference between murder and cancer.

[2202] Oh, good one.

[2203] There's a big difference.

[2204] A big, big difference.

[2205] But if cancer was a person, we'd throw him in jail.

[2206] Oh, sure, sure.

[2207] I'd love to throw him in jail.

[2208] Oh, can you imagine the cop who apprehended cancer?

[2209] He'd be on dollar bills.

[2210] Yeah, that'd be cool.

[2211] Yeah.

[2212] I hope someone catches cancer.

[2213] No, I don't want anyone to catch cancer.

[2214] I want someone to apprehend cancer.

[2215] Oh, boy.

[2216] All right, that's all.

[2217] That was all?

[2218] Yes.

[2219] Okay.

[2220] You know, there's a saying in the 12 -step proposal.

[2221] I'm a member of that expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

[2222] So I try to avoid expectations, but I also fall victim to expectations.

[2223] Okay.

[2224] And I had an expectation about Brett Weinstein.

[2225] Uh -huh.

[2226] Fucking A was it met.

[2227] It was met and then some.

[2228] Yeah.

[2229] That feels good when you actually allow yourself to have an expectation and that's fully met.

[2230] Yeah.

[2231] Rare and special.

[2232] Yeah.

[2233] And we want to have them on now for everything, right?

[2234] because we were talking about poop and what a weird thing, poop is.

[2235] And I can't wait to have him explain to us the evolution of finding the smell of poop repugnant.

[2236] Right.

[2237] Because other animals don't.

[2238] They're eating their poop.

[2239] Other animals.

[2240] They're chowing down on it.

[2241] So you can't just objectively say poop stinks.

[2242] It's something in us that has identified that as stinky.

[2243] It's an evolution.

[2244] And it's weird how our own is not so repulsive to us that we can't.

[2245] We can deal with it.

[2246] Yeah.

[2247] That's right.

[2248] That's right.

[2249] Yeah, it's so weird.

[2250] And that makes sense.

[2251] I can handle other people's.

[2252] People I like, yeah.

[2253] Yeah, it's all about if you love the person.

[2254] But which makes sense too because, again, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I have to assume that we find that smell repulsive so that we will stay away from other people's poop because other people's poop carries lots of germs and disease that we could then get.

[2255] So it's a great trait if we live in multi -member groups.

[2256] We're all pooping around each other.

[2257] it's good to be driven away from that waste.

[2258] Right.

[2259] But if it's your own, you already have all the diseases and everything.

[2260] So there's no imperative that you avoid your own poop.

[2261] Yeah.

[2262] And then you could even extend that a little bit to the immediate family, which is you're all sharing the same germs anyways.

[2263] Like you have the cold I had three weeks ago.

[2264] And I'll have the one you have.

[2265] You know, like, so I think I'm safe to be around your excrement.

[2266] But probably not.

[2267] you know, someone down the road.

[2268] I mean, I also think it all the smell has to do with moving through your entire body and there's all this bile and chemicals that it meets before it comes out.

[2269] But again, because we have so many examples of other animals not finding it.

[2270] I know.

[2271] Bad smelling, it's not objectively bad smelling across the animal kingdom.

[2272] So it's something unique to us that we find it.

[2273] I mean, you watch these elephants.

[2274] at the zoo they will the one elephant will poop the other one just picks it right up and chowes down on it there's videos galore there's even this horrendous video i encourage everyone to find it where an elephant sticks his trunk up another elephant's butt at the zoo and then just pulls out this gigantic clump of excrement and then eats it have you seen that rob no in the other elephant there's a lot going on in this video because your initial thought is like how gross who would want to go grab that out of the other elephant but then you start thinking that other elephant's very casual about having a trunk up its butt and its buddy written around in there it's fine with that that's even more shocking than wanting to be in someone's butt anyways we need brett's eyes on this yeah we need him to explain to us exactly what's happening with duty well i love you um feel better mini mouse thanks we're all pulling for you we're going to send a click collective wave of love and good mojo towards you.

[2275] Thanks.

[2276] Okay.

[2277] And bless you.

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