403. Attraction, Beauty, Growth, and Sex | Dr. Sarah Hill

[0] Hello everyone watching and listening.

[1] Today I'm speaking with researcher, professor, and author, Dr. Sarah Hill.

[2] We discuss her new landmark book.

[3] This is your brain on birth control.

[4] The surprising science of women, hormones, and the law of unintended consequences.

[5] We break down and analyze.

[6] sex -based differences in regret, competition, and academic striving, the balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child, the practice of mate choice copying among women and why our hormones are a foundational part not just of our physical makeup, but of who we are most deeply and who we have the potential to become.

[7] So, Sarah, I thought for years that the 20th century would basically be remembered for three things.

[8] The hydrogen bomb, the transistor, the microchip, and the pill.

[9] And that the pill was perhaps the most revolutionary of the three, and that it was also equivalent to a speciation mutation, that that's how profound it is.

[10] Now, the first chapter of your book, This is Your Brain on Birth Control, is What is a Woman?

[11] And that's become a trope and a satirical cliché.

[12] And people laugh at the fact that it's even being posed, but I actually don't think it's that funny because I think that with the advent of hypothetically 100 % reliable birth control, the question of what is a woman actually becomes a real question.

[13] because a woman who has voluntary control over her reproductive function is not the same creature as a woman who doesn't and not even a little bit.

[14] And so then the question, so it's imagine, imagine this, and then we can talk through the book.

[15] If sex is no longer tied to reproduction, then in principle, women's sexual behavior can become equivalent to men's sexual behavior because the risk is now the same.

[16] If women are acting like men sexually, then why aren't they men?

[17] Like, how are they different?

[18] And then if women, if sex is no longer tied to reproduction tightly, and women are free from involuntary child rearing and bearing, then how are they different from men in the broader labor market and with regards to general productivity?

[19] And the answer is, we have absolutely no idea.

[20] that's why the question comes up.

[21] So I'd like to know, why did you start the book with this question?

[22] What is a woman?

[23] What, the way you open something is obviously to some degree the way you frame it.

[24] So why did that phrase, why did that phrase jump out at you?

[25] Well, for me, it was really important because, so my background is in evolutionary biology.

[26] And so I spent most of my career trying to understand behavior using the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution by selection.

[27] And one of the big, you know, sort of paramounts of that theory and something that's really a cornerstone to it is the differences between the sexes, right?

[28] And that you have biological males and biological females.

[29] And how do we define them?

[30] You know, how do we define what is a male?

[31] What is a female?

[32] And what a male is is the, it's the sex that has the smaller mobile gametes that has less investment in offspring.

[33] And females have the metabolically expensive immobile gametes.

[34] and they have a relatively large minimum investment.

[35] And so one of the big ways and sort of the foundation of all reliably occurring sex differences in all sexually reproducing species are these small differences.

[36] And this doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal.

[37] Like, wow, like your sex cells are smaller than my sex cells.

[38] Like, who cares?

[39] But that actually turns out to be completely foundational in terms of setting the stage for different minimum levels of investment in offspring, which then sets the same.

[40] stage for the evolution of sex differences.

[41] Okay, okay.

[42] So let's dive into that a little bit because people are, people need to understand exactly what this means.

[43] So you relate sex differences when you're trying to define a woman to the difference in size between the sperm and the egg.

[44] And an egg is pretty small and it doesn't look like much of an investment, but a sperm is way smaller.

[45] But the thing that's so interesting about that is that that, you could say that that difference is fractal in nature, is that it's echoed at every single biological level all the way up the chain to overt behavior, right?

[46] And so the definition of a woman, the definition of female, maybe even more broadly, female is the sex that invests more, is compelled to invest more in sex and sex and reproduction.

[47] And reproduction wouldn't be just sex.

[48] This is another thing that the narrower evolutionary biologists get wrong.

[49] I think it's one of the flaws in Dawkins' thinking, for example, is that you can reduce reproduction to sex, but that's foolish because human beings have a high investment strategy in relationship to the propagation of their children.

[50] And so reproduction for human beings doesn't end with sex.

[51] For mosquitoes, it ends with sex.

[52] For human beings, it just starts with sex.

[53] And we have an 18 -year investment.

[54] And at least the first three years of that falls, I would say, by necessity, more heavily on women, and really heavily on women.

[55] Right.

[56] I think they say among chimpanzee females, the chimpanzee mother carries its infant something like 500 miles clasped to its chest in the first year, right?

[57] And so a woman, another issue maybe too, is that is a woman a single organism, or is a woman a part of the mother infant dyad?

[58] Right.

[59] Right.

[60] Right.

[61] Well, so that's a whole, that's a can of worms that we can open.

[62] I mean, there's this whole theory.

[63] It's Hamilton's Theory of Inclusive Fitness, which is just this idea that your own fitness, just in terms of what your genetic representation and future generations is likely to be, is something that depends both on your own genes, but then also the genes of your relatives.

[64] And for women in particular, who have all of that, you know, invested in their offspring, that this, I mean, it is an extension of yourself and our relatives are an extension of ourself and there's no relationship that is like that evolution has shaped in a way that favor is just unmitigated investment than the relationship between mother to child because there's a certain 100 or certain 50 % relatedness so mothers always know that this is their child you have mother's reproductive value meaning the possibility that she could translate her energy into a reproduction, that is decreasing, while that if her infant is increasing.

[65] And so it's essentially like passing the evolutionary baton from one generation to the next between these two individuals who have the highest levels of relatedness as possible in nature outside of identical twins.

[66] So I've wondered about this with regard to the transformation at puberty in female emotional response.

[67] So the personality data indicates that boys and girls, are approximately equivalent in terms of their sensitivity to negative emotion.

[68] But that changes at puberty.

[69] And so, and the change seems permanent, and it seems like it's hormonally mediated.

[70] And so I've been trying to understand, and so what happens at puberty is that women become more sensitive to the entire panoply of negative emotions because they clumped together.

[71] And so, and you might say, well, that's cultural, but it's not because if you look at these societies that have advanced the farthest in terms of gender equality at the social and economic levels, the differences in trait neuroticism, so that's that sensitivity to negative emotion, between men and women are larger than they are in less egalitarian, in less egalitarian societies.

[72] So when the society becomes egalitarian, the genetic difference is maximized rather than minimizing.

[73] Okay, so then the question is, well, why would women be more sensitive to negative emotion?

[74] because that comes at a cost, and the cost is at minimum higher levels of depression and anxiety, but also higher general levels of unhappiness.

[75] So then you think, okay, they're more sensitive to threat.

[76] Why is that useful?

[77] Well, they're smaller than men at puberty, and so they should be more sensitive to physical combat threat.

[78] But they're sexually vulnerable, and that's a huge deal, and not to be underestimated.

[79] And, I mean, in most societies, for most of human history, an unaccompanied woman was a target of attack.

[80] Right, right, right.

[81] But then the third thing that's most important, I think, I want to know what you think about this, is that, well, women are more attuned to threat because they're proxies for the vulnerability of their infant.

[82] And so women may pay a psychological cost for being more sensitive to threat, which is that they're more unhappy and that they're more anxious.

[83] but the benefit of that is that they're more alert to any signs of danger or predation or threat in the environment, and they can alert, well, they're going to alert their husband, generally speaking, or the rest of the community to that.

[84] Now, that also means they're going to be more susceptible to false positives, right?

[85] They're going to respond to threat when there's none there.

[86] But if you're taking care of a dependent infant and you're over -responsive to threat, that's probably the right place to tune your errors.

[87] So, and that seems to me also a reflection of this increased investment by women.

[88] So they have an increased emotional investment in their offspring as well as an increased physiological investment.

[89] Right.

[90] Right.

[91] So, so I'll start with the woman piece, but there's also some interesting things that happened with testosterone during puberty to men.

[92] Right, right.

[93] Turn that off.

[94] Right.

[95] And so I want to be able to return to that as well.

[96] But with women, I mean, absolutely.

[97] the thing that we need to remember is that the process of evolution by selection didn't wire us to be happy or satisfied or any it's like it has designed us to survive and to reproduce and part of that means that we're going to feel kind of terrible some of the time and part of women's design you know sort of the design of our psychology is such that it does it's like a smoke detector it's tuned to picking up on even subtle cues of possible danger just because the potential costs associated with with what would happen if that danger is real, is much greater for women, for a lot of different reasons, some of which you've touched upon.

[98] I mean, there's one is that women are mothers.

[99] So it's like, you know, it's like you're eating for two, you're feeling danger for two.

[100] You're having to protect yourself and your offspring.

[101] You're more physically vulnerable because of course you're physically, you know, women are smaller and have less upper body strength, sexual vulnerability for the reasons you talked about.

[102] I mean, unfortunately, sexual violence has been something that's been present as long as we've been around.

[103] And it certainly is something we see in all species with choosy females.

[104] You'll have males who want to override that choice.

[105] And so there's a lot of reasons that women need.

[106] Manipulation, too.

[107] It's not merely that women are overpowered physically.

[108] It's that they're also susceptible to very devious manipulation on the part of Machiavellian and psychopathic men.

[109] And they need to be alert to that form of deception as a threat as well.

[110] Right, as well.

[111] Yes, and even also with other females.

[112] And the reason for this is that, you know, when you think about the cost, for a woman, if she's duped, so let's just talk about sexual deception, right?

[113] If a woman is duped, she could end up pregnant.

[114] There's a nine -month investment there, right?

[115] And if you look, especially at historical, you know, types of populations, like modern hunter -gatherer groups, if you have a woman who doesn't have a father investing in the child, the risk of infant, mortality.

[116] It's like 80%.

[117] I mean, it's very high.

[118] And the risk of death during childbirth even is very high.

[119] So women are putting their lives at risk every time they get pregnant.

[120] And then to get pregnant and have a really high risk infant that's not getting invested in, she's not getting a reputation too.

[121] Yeah, and the reputation.

[122] I mean, there's so many costs to that.

[123] And the costs just aren't that, you know, it's not symmetrical for men.

[124] The cost of those things aren't the same.

[125] And so our brains are wired to be differently sensitive to those kinds of cues because the consequences are so much more dire if you have a female body compared to if you have a male body, which is...

[126] Do you know it?

[127] Is there a literature on...

[128] Okay.

[129] What to tell me if I've got this wrong.

[130] Okay.

[131] All right.

[132] So we talked about the different reproductive strategies, say, of mosquitoes and human beings.

[133] Mosquitoes have like a zero investment strategy.

[134] You have a million offspring.

[135] All of them die but like one, but that's okay because that's replacement.

[136] Whereas human beings, it's unbelievably heavy investment.

[137] And then you look within human beings, women invest more than men.

[138] Then you could look within men and you could say, there are men who invest less and men who invest more.

[139] Okay, so the men who invest less, they're the short -term maiter types.

[140] Now, I've been looking into the personality predictors of short -term mating strategies, and they're not that positive.

[141] So the personality theorists who've been investigating the so -called dark tetrad, which is a group of, you might say, undesirable descriptors, psychopathy, narcissism, maccauvelianism, which is manipulativeness, and sadism, because they had to add that to it.

[142] Those traits are much more pronounced among men and women, but particularly among men who adopt a short -term mating strategy.

[143] And so now, so one of the things I'm wondering about is it's related to that.

[144] So that men who adopt that short -term mate, mating strategy.

[145] They love them and leave them, right?

[146] There's no, let's say, there's little post -coital regret.

[147] There's no guilt or shame associated with short -term mating opportunities.

[148] Do you know if there's a literature detailing the difference in response to short -term mating episodes between men and women?

[149] Are women more likely to events regret in the aftermath of short -term mating episodes?

[150] One -night stand.

[151] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[152] There's a rich literature in sexual regret, and exactly as you would expect, when you look at what people regret sexually, women regret more these short -term mating opportunities that they, you know, participated in.

[153] Men more often regret those that they didn't participate in.

[154] So men...

[155] Mist opportunities.

[156] Yes, missed opportunities.

[157] So men's sexual regret tends to sort of cluster around things that they wish they would have taken advantage of and they did not.

[158] Whereas women's tends to cluster more and I really wish I wouldn't have had sex with that idiot.

[159] Right, right.

[160] Now, do you know, is there a personality literature that's looked at individual differences in post -short -term sex regret?

[161] So, like, are the women less likely to show regret also more likely to have dark tetraud personality traits?

[162] Like, there's got to be predictors of regret, right?

[163] Now, you'd expect neuroticism would be one, because that would just predict negative emotion in general.

[164] I suspect agreeableness is another predictor, is that the women who are more agreeable, right, polite, more inclined to caretake and bond.

[165] So I would suspect that it's the more feminine women who are most more likely to show post -coital regret.

[166] I suspect the same thing would be true.

[167] Man, I bet you the more feminine men are also more likely to manifest that pattern of regret.

[168] Yeah, that's really interesting.

[169] Yeah, so I think with women, a lot of it, so in the personality literature, and I'm aware of that, because I'd only know that there was a dark triad.

[170] Yeah, I know, it's expanded.

[171] It had sadism.

[172] That's real fun, eh?

[173] Yeah, yeah, no. Positive delight in the suffering of others.

[174] Yeah, wow.

[175] Wow, I wonder if he's got a brother.

[176] Like, that's just a terrible, it's a terrible quality.

[177] That's for sure.

[178] So, no, so I'm not terrible.

[179] I'm familiar with that, but I'm, when I think about things, I tend to think about, just because personality isn't really my area, it's more of the evolutionary area.

[180] I tend to think about the, like, you know, My prediction would be, from an evolutionary perspective, would be that we would see women experiencing more sexual regret when the costs are higher.

[181] So, like, what are the costs associated with having made that decision that you made, right?

[182] So whether it's reputational costs.

[183] So, for example, a woman who has more to lose reputationally from having capitalized on that short -term mating strategy, I think that she would experience stronger sexual regret.

[184] I bet you could predict that by looking at the relative.

[185] So imagine there's a continuum of men.

[186] with regards to the socioeconomic status markers of their potential as providers.

[187] I suspect that this might seem obvious, but it would be nice to see it demonstrated, that the larger the gap between the woman and the man in terms of status, the more regret.

[188] Yes, no, I would think so.

[189] Because she sold herself short, and the risk of that is too high.

[190] Right, yes, no, absolutely, absolutely.

[191] And also, I mean, you know, even the things that would influence her biological costs, right?

[192] So, for example, if we're talking about short, like immediate regret, a woman who's near high fertility in her cycle where pregnancy is possible.

[193] I'm assuming that into her hormonal thing would be predicting, would be telling her like, oh, shit.

[194] Like, that was terrible.

[195] Like, why did you do that?

[196] Or, and I would also expect you'd see more sexual regret at peak fertility across the lifespan.

[197] See, now we have a perfect study design.

[198] Yeah, I know.

[199] look at personality, dark tetrad traits, and number of days deviation from maximum fertility as predictors of short -term, coital regret.

[200] Yes, and across the lifetime, too.

[201] And we could spend three years getting that through an ethics committee and not do the study.

[202] And then another three years trying to get it published.

[203] Right, right, right, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[204] So, all right, so back to what is a woman.

[205] Yeah, yeah.

[206] Okay, so what we've talked about so far.

[207] is that what is the definition of female.

[208] Okay, and the female is the member of sexually reproducing species who invests more at least at, see, that's the question, at least at the level of the gamete.

[209] Do you want to explain to everybody what a gamete is just so they know?

[210] Yeah, so, hey, so a gamete is a sex cell, and it's, it's your egg or it's your sperm.

[211] So it's like 50%, it has 50 % your genetic material in it.

[212] And it is fused with a gamete of the other kinds.

[213] If you make eggs, it fuses with sperm.

[214] And that is how we produce life.

[215] And, yes, you know, the initial greater investment that women make is just the starting point.

[216] As you said, it's like fractal.

[217] It's exponential increased investment because a selection continues to reinforce greater investment because of that large initial investment.

[218] It's like a hand of poker.

[219] Right, if you put in 500 crystal that makes a diamond around it.

[220] Right, exactly.

[221] So if you put in $500 in the first round of betting and we're playing poker and I put in a buck, you have more to lose if that hand goes sideways than I do.

[222] Right, and that echoes all the way up the chain.

[223] Okay, so that's very interesting too because the people who claim that sexual identity is merely culturally constructed fail to take into account the fact that that difference in investment echoes at every single level of the biological ladder.

[224] It's not merely something, it's certainly not something that's reducible to chromosomal difference, which is another way of defining the difference between men and women.

[225] You didn't pick that.

[226] You picked investment.

[227] Okay, so why did you pick, it's not just you, I know that that tends to be the biological stance.

[228] Right.

[229] But would you say that the chromosomal difference, X, X, X, versus X, Y, is of lesser significance than the investment issue, or does it matter because they're so tightly linked?

[230] Well, they are so tightly linked, but I mean, honestly, if evolution by selection doesn't see it, it doesn't matter.

[231] Like, in a lot of ways, the gears and sprockets that create us, those pieces, like if you're trying to make predictions about behavior and sort of like the, you know, what types of things have been reinforced by this process of inheriting traits that work, meaning that they promote survival and reproduction and those that don't, it's only what selection sees that matters.

[232] And it never sees our chromosomes.

[233] What it sees is investment, right?

[234] And those individuals who have this really large, you know, minimum investment, and they're only able to produce X number of offspring, instead of X prime number of offspring, that those individuals, the best way that they can increase the probability of continuing their genetic lineage is through a heavy investment strategy.

[235] And that's less true for this other sex.

[236] And so sex, you know, biological sex, and again, you know, it starts off with these small differences in the size of our sex cells, but then sort of recapitulates at every, all these different levels of investment.

[237] Well, we could imagine just for the sake of argument how that would recapitulate even cognitively.

[238] Yes.

[239] Right.

[240] Now, men, for example, men understand that there's a relationship between how successful they are and how attractive they are to women.

[241] And part of what they motivates them is the game of that competition.

[242] So I worked with high -end lawyers for about 15 years, both men and women, and found some very interesting differences in that.

[243] But the men even regarded the money they made in bonuses at the end of the year for outstanding performance.

[244] They weren't so interested in the money.

[245] They were interested in the money as a means of keeping score.

[246] It was a means of winning the competition.

[247] And you might say, well, competition for what?

[248] And the answer to that is, well, let's call it competition, not for status exactly, but for reputation.

[249] But the consequence of a stellar reputation is that, and men who have that are much more attractive to women.

[250] And you might say, well, women go after wealth, but I think that's nonsense.

[251] And I think that's also belied by the relevant evolutionary biology theory, because what it shows and tell me if I've got this wrong, is that women use wealth as a marker for attractive, because they use wealth as a marker for competence.

[252] And what they're after is the ability to generate wealth and to share it and to be generous with it.

[253] It has to be both, productivity and generosity.

[254] And a decent marker for the capacity to generate wealth is wealth, although it's not the only criteria.

[255] So women are looking for competence.

[256] And men, it's a very strange thing about men.

[257] You know, they compete among themselves for competence -based, reputation.

[258] And now, I've been trying to figure out why, because you can imagine like a movie scenario where, you know, the quarterback of the football team wins a major championship and all the other men put him on his shoulders and, you know, bring him out of the stadium and he sleeps with the cheerleader that night.

[259] And you might ask yourself, well, why in the world would the men group together to elevate a given man to that sort of status if it means that he's going to be the one that successfully reproduces?

[260] And my suspicion is that men learned to value competence probably as a consequence of hunting.

[261] So any given hunter, no matter how good he is at hunting, is going to fail in most hunts.

[262] So now if men band together to hunt, then the collective success is much larger.

[263] And so what that means is that if you're going to be a hunter that provides across hunting bouts, your skill as a hunter is one determinant, but your interpersonal skill in negotiating and establishing relationships with the rest of the hunters is even more important.

[264] So among hunter -gatherers, for example, if you're the one who brings down the animal, it's incumbent on you to downplay your contribution and to distribute the best parts of the animal to other people.

[265] And you're doing that to foster your reputation as a generous person, and you're doing that in part to ensure that there's reciprocity, and food distribution across multiple hunts.

[266] Now, the men are going to be willing to elevate the highest hunter to the highest position, because I think it's in their collective interest, it's in their collective interest and in their individual interest to be the followers of the best man. And I think that's so important in terms of their own reproductive fitness, which would be tied to the provision of food across hunts, that they're willing to take the reproductive hit that's, what would you say, implicit in elevating any given man among all other men.

[267] You could think about that in terms of hunting, and you could think about that in terms of combat, too.

[268] You know, if you put the most heroic warrior on your shoulders, you give him an evolutionary edge.

[269] But if you're in his group, well, then you've got the benefits of being with the greatest warrior and the greatest hunter.

[270] And so I don't know if the evolutionary biology, have been able to calculate out the relationship between establishing a reciprocal relationship with a great hunter or a great warrior versus the costs of men competing to elevate a given man to the highest possible position.

[271] It's a very weird thing that men do.

[272] No, I think that you're, I think you hit the nail in the head, though.

[273] I mean, I think that the benefits of aligning yourself with somebody who's very powerful, that, I mean, think about it, if there's somebody, and like, let's say that he's, you know, 1 .0 and you're sort of 1 .1, And so there's somebody who's a better performer than you.

[274] You could hear ass kicked if you keep trying to have to fight with this guy.

[275] So there's a big cost to you to try and to overturn this person.

[276] And there's a lot of benefits of aligning with the person who's also really competent.

[277] That's especially true if it's a Pareto distribution in terms of competence, right?

[278] Because the really competent person might be like a hundred times more competent.

[279] Well, right, exactly.

[280] And so it's like I think that there's a lot of benefits that come, especially to men, because of the hunting context of aligning with another man in that context.

[281] And there's also this tendency in other, so this has been very well studied in non -human animals, but we see a very similar version of this in humans.

[282] But have you ever heard of lecking behavior?

[283] So a leck is a place where males within a species will gather to attract mates.

[284] It's almost like a club.

[285] It's like the frogs, like frogs, for example, are lecking species.

[286] And the males will all go to this display.

[287] play area and they croak, right?

[288] And this is what attracts the females.

[289] And so the females will go toward where they hear the loudest, most impressive croak because that male generally is larger in body size and it has higher levels of testosterone.

[290] So the louder male attracts all the females.

[291] And so the males all want to hang out with this guy because he's attracting all the women.

[292] And it's the same is true.

[293] If men align themselves with somebody who's really high performer, I mean, if you go out for drinks with Tom Brady.

[294] Right.

[295] It's not too bad to be Tom Brady 2 .0.

[296] Right, right, right.

[297] You're going to be able to bask in the reflected glory.

[298] Yeah, you're basking the reflected glory.

[299] Right.

[300] Well, and then women would also assume that if the extraordinarily high status male is hanging around with some character who looks like a dweeb on the surface, that there might be hidden depths and utility to his character or advantages in the mere fact that he's proximal.

[301] Absolutely.

[302] So women use said a lot.

[303] In fact, some of my very early research, this is going deep.

[304] This is when I was in graduate school.

[305] I studied this phenomenon in humans, mate choice copying, because this is another thing that you see in females of other species, but you also see it in us.

[306] And this is, males tend to be a somewhat ambiguous stimulus package, because most males, a lot of the qualities that women are looking for aren't immediately available just based on physical appearance.

[307] Right, right.

[308] So women have to kind of suss out, like, what is there about this guy?

[309] And so when women see, a beautiful woman with kind of an average -looking guy.

[310] The first thing that I think is what?

[311] He must be rich, or he must have some really amazing personality, or he must be really high in status.

[312] I wonder, is that magnified if he's unattractive?

[313] Because one of the things you might suspect is that if a very beautiful woman is with a man who's very nondescript, that there must be something about him that's absolutely stellar.

[314] Absolutely stellar, yes.

[315] And so the magnitude of the gap between the woman, how beautiful the woman is, and then the appearance of the man sort of is linked with the degree to which women perceive that he has these amazing hidden qualities that make him a desirable partner.

[316] The bigger the gap, the more amazing the qualities, the smaller the gap, the less amazing the qualities.

[317] Oh, that's very funny.

[318] So the proper mating strategy is if you're spectacularly under endowed male, is to hire a beautiful woman to go to clubs with you.

[319] Absolutely.

[320] Right, right.

[321] Absolutely.

[322] And you would actually probably do better than a more attractive man with the same woman because people would think that you must really have something going on to have attracted her and look like that.

[323] Right, right.

[324] Oh, that's insanely complicated.

[325] That's insanely comical.

[326] That's insanely comical.

[327] All right, all right.

[328] So, okay, so what is a woman?

[329] So we've defined that as the sex that invests more.

[330] and we pointed out that across all the way, echoing all the way up the biological ladder from the cellular to the cognitive women, females are the sex that invests more.

[331] Oh yeah, the other thing about that was that, well, women are going to invest more too because, and you already pointed this out, but it's worth making it clearer because they have to.

[332] So I think, I looked at one point, I looked up the world's reference.

[333] for most children, a woman ever had.

[334] And I think it was in the hundreds, actually.

[335] Maybe not.

[336] Maybe I've got that wrong.

[337] Maybe I've got that wrong.

[338] It doesn't matter exactly, because you could imagine if a woman had a set of triplets every year for 10 years, then that would give her 30 infants.

[339] So we could say the upper bound on female fertility with regards specifically to her children is going to be no more than 50.

[340] Right.

[341] And that's a generous estimate.

[342] Whereas with men, it's like 10 ,000, 100 ,000, there's no limit.

[343] There's none.

[344] Right.

[345] So women are going to invest more in their children, too, because every child, and you already pointed this out, is comparatively more valuable.

[346] Then you also said something interesting, which is that as a woman ages, her children actually become comparatively more valuable than she.

[347] So does this mean, this is a strange thing, though.

[348] is there evidence that women's love for their children increases as their children age?

[349] I mean, because women are so invested in infants, it's hard to, maybe it's like this.

[350] I don't.

[351] So I've not seen anything specifically that has addressed that very question, but they have done studies where they look at the difference between, for example, older mothers and younger mothers, it's a world of difference.

[352] I mean, when you look at the amount of investment that goes on, like if you're an older mother compared to a younger mother, older mothers invest more.

[353] they spend more time investing and all of these things that you would expect given that their reproductive window is closing.

[354] So it's like the opportunity costs of investing in that child are less than it would be if you're a 20 -year -old woman.

[355] So if you're a 20 -year -old woman and investing in an existing child, there's an opportunity cost that comes to you for not using that energy to have another child.

[356] Right, right.

[357] And so you're not making that trade -off when you're an older mother.

[358] And so...

[359] Do you think there's an optimum there that we don't know.

[360] Because, you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote the coddling of the American mind.

[361] Okay, and I've been very interested in this rise of what I like to think of as the devouring mother, is that the over -invested parent.

[362] Yes.

[363] Okay, so instead of putting that on the shoulders of the given parent, I've been trying to understand the cultural context that might make over -investment more likely.

[364] So you can imagine, well, fewer children.

[365] Yes.

[366] So if you have 10 children, you're obviously not going to invest in, you're not going to attend to each of them as much.

[367] They're going to attend to each other more.

[368] So more one -child families, okay, older parents.

[369] Yes.

[370] Right.

[371] So they're going to be more conservative to begin with because you get more conservative as you get older, but they're also going to invest more in their children.

[372] Right.

[373] And so older and then also richer parents, because if you're older, you're richer.

[374] And so part of the reason that children are coddled as far as I can.

[375] to the degree that they are and overprotected is because mothers are now old enough to be grandmothers, they're rich, and they only have one child.

[376] Right, and too much time on their hands.

[377] Too much time on their hands also, because it's like, historically, women would have been out gathering food all the time, and now if you have women, and there's plenty of women who work and are still overindulging in their children, but a lot of times when you see this, it tends to happen more frequently and more sort of exaggeratedly.

[378] in homes where women aren't working outside.

[379] Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I've talked to my daughter and my daughter -in -law about when they're trying to figure out how to optimally care for their young children is how they, and I talk to a lot of my clients too, because they face the same problem, is how do you balance as a woman, how do you balance the need of your children, especially under the age of three for continuous, intense maternal presence with the pursuit of your own interests.

[380] And my sense is that there's an optimized balance there because one of the things that children should see is that adults, including women, have good things to do with their adult time.

[381] And so that's a good thing to model.

[382] Absolutely.

[383] But then also, if you have your own pursuits as a woman, then you're not going to interfere too much in your child's life because you actually have a life.

[384] And one of the things I think that protects children against that proclivity of maybe excessively neurotic women to over -invest is that they have their own things to do that are important.

[385] Yeah, I mean, having nothing else to do but just shine love on your child and over -invest them and make sure they never fall down, this is not, this is historically unprecedented.

[386] You know, most of human history.

[387] No one was that rich.

[388] Well, I mean, yeah, women never, I mean, it was like we always played a role in subsistence, you know, even though women were also mothering, they were also finding food.

[389] And they were also, you know, tending to whatever the dwelling was and having to maintain relationships and having to go and get water.

[390] And the children were having to go to work and help with these things.

[391] And so it was a very different situation where now nobody is actually having to do anything to run the household because there's staff and, and you have children that aren't, you know, having to work.

[392] You have parents who don't have anything, you know, or mothers in particular, who don't have something else that's sort of pulling their time away from just spending all their time thinking about, you know, Johnny and his nanderine lessons.

[393] It's also not diluting their insanity.

[394] You know, if you're in a tribal group, I mean, one of the advantages to having two parents is that the average of two parents is on average more sane than either of the individuals.

[395] Right.

[396] I think that's absolutely correct.

[397] Right, right, right.

[398] Right, and partly what you do in a marriage is you keep each other sane.

[399] You see where your partner has a tendency towards excess, and you rein that in, right?

[400] And you do that for each other, and hopefully you do that with each other's best interests and the quality of the relationship firmly in mind.

[401] And you do that for the children as well.

[402] In a more communal child -rearing environment, a child is going to have, in some real way, multiple mothers, like aunts, for sure.

[403] And in a tribal group, most people are kin anyways.

[404] And so the role of mother is going to be distributed enough so that even if any given mother is a bit addled in her preoccupations, there's going to be other people to whom the child can turn.

[405] In a narrow nuclear family where there's an over -indulgent mother, let's say, who has far too much time on her hands, the child can be shielded from all other potential influences, which is also something that the more narcissistically over -indulgent mother is likely to arrange.

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

[407] Right, no, absolutely.

[408] Absolutely.

[409] I mean, you can't, if you don't teach, if your children don't have to have the opportunity to learn how to navigate the environment on their own, they have no navigation skills.

[410] And I think that that's essentially what we're seeing.

[411] Why did you use the word navigation there?

[412] I used the word navigation because life is a journey, right?

[413] I mean, we have to navigate our environment.

[414] And that means that we have to learn how to acquire resources.

[415] We have to learn how to manage other people.

[416] We have to learn how to get along with other people that we don't like.

[417] We have to, I mean, there's a lot of things that we...

[418] We have to navigate through storms?

[419] Yes.

[420] And so if your response to your child is there'll be no storms in your life.

[421] Right, or I'll clear all of your storms.

[422] Don't worry.

[423] And then all of a sudden you put children out in the world and they have no coping skills.

[424] Yeah, they don't have any coping skills.

[425] And we see this a lot.

[426] You know, as a college professor, I see a lot of this.

[427] and at a private school with a very high price tag, where we'll have students who come in and it's really a wake -up call about what life is like because they've had parents who are very well -meaning.

[428] I think that the parents who do this, they have the...

[429] God preserve us from well -meaning.

[430] Yeah, I know.

[431] I think that they think they're doing the right thing, but it's not...

[432] If you carry somebody too long, they're muscles atrophy.

[433] And you can't do that.

[434] I heard a good rule from a, I think it was my brother -in -law who told me this, and he had spent a lot of time caring for very elderly people.

[435] And he said that the appropriate rule of thumb for elder care is never do anything for your client that they can do themselves.

[436] And the reason for that is that you facilitate, you devour their independence.

[437] Yeah.

[438] And so there's an interesting paradox here with regards to love, right?

[439] because there's the love that eradicates emotional distress in the moment, okay?

[440] And then there's the love that is devoted to fostering adaptive behavior over the medium to long run, right?

[441] And that's a love that's much more allied with judgment.

[442] So, for example, if you call your child out on their misbehavior, you cause them short -term emotional distress.

[443] But the long -term benefit of that is that if they integrate, the impulses that are making them, let's say, unduly aggressive or reactive, then they're going to be more acceptable to their peers and to the broader social community.

[444] So you'll allow them to be hurt in the short term for a long -term gain.

[445] Now, do you know if there are sex differences in that temporal focus?

[446] Because, see, here's the paradox as far as I'm concerned, and I watch women try to negotiate this with their children at about 12 months of age.

[447] The thing about infants, because they're so dependent, is that the proper response of a mother to the distress of an infant nine months and younger is fix that now regardless, right?

[448] So you could say in a sense that the emotional distress of an infant is an omniscient signal that care has to be administered.

[449] But once the child starts to become somewhat autonomous, and that starts to occur when they can start to crawl, then the mother has to make a transition from immediate reaction to emotional distress to allowing the child to dwell in that emotional distress or even sometimes causing it herself.

[450] And that's a very tricky transformation because the woman has become so attuned to the infant and so bonded to that infant and so responsive to its signals of distress that to pull back from, I think most of the way women pulled back from that historically, was they just had another child.

[451] I was just about to say that exact thing.

[452] I think that our interbirth ratios and like sort of lengthening the spacing between children has probably made that conflict.

[453] And we call it weaning conflict and that much of the science has made that more difficult.

[454] Excerated it.

[455] Yeah, because I think you didn't have a choice.

[456] Well, also, also, if you have a 13 -month -old and no other children around, the 13 -month -old is an infant.

[457] But if you have a 13 -month -old and then you have a infant, the 13 -month -old is now a child.

[458] Yes.

[459] Clearly, right?

[460] And so, yeah, well, I saw this when we had our second child, Julian, Michaela was 18 months old.

[461] I think that's about right.

[462] And, you know, she's still pretty little, but compared to a newborn, she was an adult, right?

[463] And that was also the point where she turned more to me. And, you know, there seems to be something that's, apart from the interbirth interval, let's say, there seems to be something that's crucial about the role that men play, in the facilitation of that longer -term orientation because men are less susceptible to the emotional distress of both infants and toddlers.

[464] And along with that, I think it gives men the opportunity to be less affected by the emotional distress of children and therefore to prioritize medium -to -long -term adaptive strategies over short -term gratification of emotional demand.

[465] And I think that's part of the cardinal role that men play.

[466] Well, they are agents of the patriarchy, right?

[467] They're going to be socializing agents.

[468] Well, but seriously, they're going to be, they seem to me to be, right, the women are oriented very strongly towards the primary care of infantile emotional distress, but that's not a good long -term strategy.

[469] Okay, so I have a vicious question to ask about.

[470] Okay, all right.

[471] We talked a little bit before we started this podcast about the corruption of the universities.

[472] Yes.

[473] Okay, now you write in your book a fair bit about what, being the interpersonal and social consequences of women moving en masse into the workforce.

[474] So I have a proposition for you.

[475] All right, let's hear this.

[476] The default moral ethos of women does not scale.

[477] It doesn't scale beyond the family.

[478] So if you, now, I'm perfectly willing to debate this because I'm horrified by the fact that it might be true.

[479] I've watched the universities transform themselves into holding pens for infants.

[480] Yeah, no, that's a fact.

[481] Okay, and I've watched them transform themselves into holding pens for infants as they've become dominated by women who don't have children.

[482] So let me say this, because I was actually just having this very similar conversation with a colleague of mine.

[483] And actually, here's what I've noticed.

[484] And so now here's the part where I'm going to say something that's a little bit awful.

[485] Okay, okay.

[486] steal yourself.

[487] I'm like, well, no, I'm just thinking like, oh, Lord, I'm going to get myself in trouble with this.

[488] Okay, if you are...

[489] That's how you know it's probably true.

[490] Yeah, I know, I know.

[491] So what I am seeing at universities is that there is a real bifurcation in the performers and the not performers.

[492] And the people who are the performers are the women, and the people who aren't the performers are men, and I'm going to tell you why.

[493] If you are a man who wants all the things that men want, status and power, you're achievement oriented and you're bright and you're a go -getter.

[494] Are you going to go into a job where you go to Oxford and make $60 ,000 a year?

[495] No, definitely not.

[496] No, you're not.

[497] What types of men do you think are attract to university jobs?

[498] You mean now?

[499] I mean, ever.

[500] You make $60 ,000 a year.

[501] Yeah, but I think it's changed.

[502] And so women who go into university jobs are generally women, and this isn't en masse true, but it's, in my experience, more true than it's not, are people who are very competent, driven, motivated, but also want flexibility because they have children.

[503] I work 60 to 70 hours a week, and I get to pick the 60 and 70 hours a week I work.

[504] I love my job.

[505] I have two kids.

[506] I spend a lot of time doing things with them, and I like the flexibility, and most of the really competent academics that I know who are just kicking ass and doing a really good job, in terms of, like, discovery, are women.

[507] Okay, okay.

[508] And so I think the university is, like, falling apart because there's a lot of people who are mediocre and they're generally old men who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity, and then you have performers coming in, and there's a lot of fission that's being created.

[509] Okay, okay.

[510] So there's two elements at play there.

[511] There's an element of sex and there's an element of performance.

[512] Okay, so let's take this apart a bit and see if we can get to the bottom of it.

[513] Well, first of all, you can't pathologize the behavior of one sex without pathologizing the behavior of both.

[514] Right, right.

[515] Okay, so we'll use that as an axiom.

[516] And then you asked me what sort of men were attracted to university jobs.

[517] When I started my career, the answer to that was men in the universities that were really working.

[518] I think my supervisor was a good example of that.

[519] He was a football player.

[520] he's a tough guy.

[521] He was extremely, extremely curious.

[522] Yeah.

[523] So he went into a university position because he wanted to do research.

[524] And I was fortunate when I did my graduate training at McGill.

[525] I was surrounded mostly by professors who actually were oriented towards discovering the truth in the course of the research.

[526] But I saw that over time deteriorate in favor of careerists.

[527] Yes.

[528] And I would put most university administrators in the bin of careerists.

[529] And careerists are interested in the secondary benefits of their career, maybe that's security and maybe its status, and not interested in the pursuit.

[530] The only people I saw who pursued a university career who had justification for it, who were men, their justification was, I'm so interested in pursuing, let's say, scientific truth and the expansion of knowledge, that I can find my status, my interest there.

[531] and if I have enough money to allow that to occur, that will be fine.

[532] And I thought that was a perfectly reasonable game.

[533] Now, you brought up a couple of things there.

[534] And let me say that there's a lot of people who go into science.

[535] I went into science because I love research and I love discovery and I'm creative.

[536] And it's a perfect venue for a creative person to just think about things and then go test them.

[537] It's like so fun.

[538] And I don't think that what I was saying is characterizing all people and all the motivation.

[539] And we're saying, on the whole, it seems like when we look at who are these career risks that go into this field and, you know, and essentially because it's low risk and, you know, and you have this stability, when you have men who are making that choice, it's a very different, it's a very different phenotype than a woman making that choice.

[540] Okay, so maybe we have a feedback loop.

[541] Okay, so imagine this.

[542] Imagine that as the universities become comparatively lower paying, and more maternal in their orientation towards the students, they attract a larger and larger proportion of relatively dependent men who aren't adventurous enough to make it outside of that sheltered environment.

[543] And what that does in turn, because the men act out that pattern of dependency, is it reinforces the idea that the inappropriately maternally oriented women have, what would you say, insufficient charge.

[544] that they need to take care of.

[545] You know, like, things really do tend to spiral out of control when a positive feedback loop emerges.

[546] Right, right.

[547] So if you want to become alcoholic, the best way to do that is start to drink to cure your hangover.

[548] Right.

[549] Because it works.

[550] Right.

[551] But it produces a worse hangover.

[552] Right.

[553] And if you want to develop agoraphobia, have a panic attack, and then avoid.

[554] Right.

[555] Right, right.

[556] So most forms of serious psychopathology, if you want to become depressed, get sad and then isolate, right?

[557] So many forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops.

[558] So we can imagine that when a social institution starts to spiral, that there's multiple causal forces at work that are reinforcing each other because that would also produce a rapid transformation.

[559] But, okay, so you countered my proposition that the universities are deteriorating because they're being invaded by inappropriately, maternally oriented women by saying, yes, but they're also inhabited by, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, by men who are looking for a dependent and less competitive niche.

[560] Yes.

[561] Is that a fair summary?

[562] Yes.

[563] Do you think that's in keeping with what you're observing?

[564] Yes, maybe.

[565] The maternal side of it thing, I don't see, but I'm, you know, I'm a woman.

[566] And so it might be harder for me to, like, I don't, I don't see that.

[567] Well, I see it in the concern with microaggressions, with the concern with equity, with, like, all these, okay.

[568] But look, we have that.

[569] I mean, we have so much of that.

[570] And I was just telling one of my colleagues, for the very first time in my entire life, and I've been teaching for 15 years, this semester was the first time I didn't just have, like, unfettered enjoyment teaching my evolutionary psychology class.

[571] And it's because I'm terrified.

[572] Every day I go into my class.

[573] I started to notice that in 2016 when I was teaching.

[574] Yeah, that I go into my class feeling terrified.

[575] Like, I'm talking about biological sex, and I have to spend a lot of time, you know, talking about what biological sex is, what gender is, and talking about it.

[576] Because the two things play into each, in really interesting ways, actually.

[577] And so I spend time talking about that.

[578] But I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to get totally destroyed.

[579] Because everything, you know, ultimately.

[580] and evolutionary biology comes down to sex.

[581] And the reason I started my book off with a chapter, What is a Woman, is that it's so foundational, this idea that as a biological female, that you invest more in offspring.

[582] And what this means for you as a woman is it means that the costs of sex are higher, right?

[583] And this creates a completely, like a mating market where women essentially get to call the shots with sex, right?

[584] And men sort of do the things that they need to do in order to get chosen.

[585] But then what happens when there's no consequences for women's sexual behavior?

[586] I mean, you know, because the fact that women have consequential sexual behavior has set the stage for things like women being choosier about sex, men being more competitive to be able to get access to the things that women want in partners.

[587] And when all of a sudden we make sex non -costly for women, which has been a huge achievement for women, but it has these huge consequences on everything.

[588] because so much of who we are and our social behaviors and the types of things that motivate us are sort of built around the system of sex being costly for women.

[589] Do you think has, okay, obviously, the consequences of sex are extremely high for women and then secondarily for men, clearly.

[590] And it is because we're a high investment species, and our children have an incredibly lengthy and costly dependency period.

[591] Yes.

[592] Okay, okay.

[593] So we're not going to eradicate that.

[594] Now, you could say, because you entitled your book, interestingly, the subtitle, we should just point this out, is that this is your brain of birth control, the surprising science of women hormones, and the law of unintended consequences.

[595] Okay, let's concentrate on that last part bit, that law of unintended consequences, because it isn't obvious to be.

[596] And I think this is implicit in your book.

[597] If the birth control pill is a biological mutation that exceeds the development of the hydrogen bomb in terms of its explosive consequences, it could easily be that the unintended consequences will swamp the benefits.

[598] Now, the benefit, let's investigate this as thoroughly as we can.

[599] The benefit is that women are no longer prey to the terrifying consequences of, sexual interaction.

[600] Right.

[601] But also more, so that sounds small, right?

[602] Now, in some ways it doesn't sound small because the idea of, you know, women not being prey to, you know, sexual behavior is obviously a big problem and that that's great that women don't have to worry about that.

[603] But more than anything, in my view, the thing that's been most important and sort of groundbreaking about the birth control pill and having relationships.

[604] liable contraception, is that it's allowed women to plan.

[605] Well, okay, that, okay, so let me ask you about that, because I'm not so sure about that.

[606] Okay.

[607] So, well, it's not something I want to toss away, because obviously the problem of birth control is a walloping problem.

[608] Yes.

[609] Okay, so we're not going to underestimate the complexity of that problem.

[610] It's the complexity of reproduction.

[611] And so, but, so here's a statistic.

[612] Now, half of all 30 -year -old women in the West are without children.

[613] Half of them will never have a child.

[614] So that's 25 % of women.

[615] 90 % of them will regret it.

[616] So now we have a situation now, imagine this propagating across the decades.

[617] We have a situation now where one in five women will be involuntarily childless.

[618] And that means, that means from the time, from 30 onward, for 60 years, alone.

[619] Right.

[620] Okay, now that's a walloping cost for 20 % of women.

[621] And they're just the women who have it the worst.

[622] Now, we could set that against the fact that women are much more educated and they're much more autonomous and the whole human race has now access to the intellectual capacity of women in a way that just wasn't possible, say, before the 1960s.

[623] We know that women's educational attainment is the best predictor of their children's educational attainment after you factor in IQ.

[624] We know that the countries that prioritize women's rights are the countries that are most likely to develop economically.

[625] So there seems to be a huge benefit in the general emancipation of women, but the costs are overwhelming, and it looks to me like they're mounting, you know, because you also see, I think it's now 30 % of Japanese people under the age of 30 are virginal.

[626] And the amount of sex, that young people in the West are having, at least actual sex, is plummeting.

[627] And it's harder and harder for women to find a long -term relationship.

[628] And so do you believe that, why do you believe overall that, or do you even believe, that the benefits of the pill have outweighed the costs?

[629] I don't know that I believe that.

[630] I mean, honestly, I think that this is one of those things where we can't make, I don't think that I can make a blanket statement about that for everyone.

[631] Do you know what I mean?

[632] Yeah, yeah.

[633] To me, that's a blank, that's an individual level decision.

[634] Yes, exactly.

[635] So for me, right, using birth control for the number of years that I did, absolutely the benefits outweighed the cost because of how I played things.

[636] I mean, it allowed me to get my degrees and, you know, start my research lab, and I had my kids when I wanted to.

[637] How many kids do you have?

[638] I have a daughter.

[639] Was that enough?

[640] In a son.

[641] Yeah, I was done.

[642] Okay, okay.

[643] So that was good for you.

[644] I was comfortable with that.

[645] I felt good about that.

[646] Right, so you managed all that.

[647] I did, and I think that there are many women who do.

[648] There are some women who don't.

[649] And so I think that the question of whether or not the cost outweigh the benefits, something that's best answered at the individual basis, which is why I think the best thing that we can do for people is to educate them about what the tradeoffs are that you're making and what the risks and benefits are.

[650] Because like you said, I mean, I think that there is, you know, women are taught almost nothing about their fertility, like nothing.

[651] Well, they're talking lies.

[652] Well, yeah, I mean, I have women coming into my class talking about how so -and -so had a baby at 40.

[653] I'm saying to my, I'm saying, like, no, like, here's the fertility curve.

[654] Tell me, describe the fertility.

[655] The fertility curve peaks at 25, and then it begins to decline.

[656] So women are at their most fertile at 25 years of age, and then it begins to decline.

[657] It declines very precipitously after 35, and the probability of getting pregnant from, and general act of sex is much, much lower than it is when you're in your 20s.

[658] And this is really hard thing for women to have a wrestle with because, of course, I mean, you know, I look at myself and I had to, you know, I was in graduate school when I had my first child.

[659] And I had to make the decision, am I going to, you know, incur the cost in my career to go ahead and try to have a baby now?

[660] And I know that it'll be relatively easy for me in biology.

[661] 28.

[662] Right, right.

[663] So you were already, by historical standards.

[664] Old, yeah, but I wanted to go ahead and get.

[665] Why did you take the risk?

[666] I took the risk because I study women's fertility.

[667] Okay, so you knew.

[668] And it's like, so I know, I know exactly what's going to happen if I wait.

[669] And I wasn't a chance that I wanted to take.

[670] And I think that if we do things like educate women on what the costs are that they're, you know, sort of facing, if they choose to restrict their fertility for all of these years, like what is the outcome of that?

[671] Okay, so first of all, they should at least know what the facts are.

[672] Yeah, I don't think that we're educating women about these things.

[673] There's no one who's lied to more than 19 -year -old women.

[674] They're lied to in all sorts of ways.

[675] The first lie is there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career.

[676] I think that's a lie because I know almost no one for whom that is true, whether they're male or female.

[677] Like I think on average, for men, career is more important than that.

[678] it is on average for women.

[679] But having said that, men who have a successful family and a successful career are much more likely to value their family over their career.

[680] And I think that's even more true for women.

[681] And part of the reason I think that, you can tell me what you think about this, these lawyers I worked with as part of my clinical practice, so I worked with partners of law firms in big law firms in Toronto.

[682] And so we have Bay Street in Toronto, which is kind of the equivalent of Wall Street on a Canadian scale.

[683] And there are large law firms there that are internationally competitive, especially in the world of finance because Canada bats above its weight on the financial side, partly because of our banks.

[684] So I worked with these, so the deal we put forward to the law firms, this little company I was working with, was you send us your best people, and we will endeavor to make them even more productive than they are.

[685] Now, in any law firm, there's a small proportion of lawyers who are hyper -competent at law, but also hyper -competent at generating business.

[686] And they're unbelievably valuable because they feed all the lawyers in the law firm who can do law but can't generate business.

[687] Right.

[688] Now, some of them are men and some of them are women, and the law firms are hyper -motivated to keep those women, and they can't.

[689] All the women, all the women quit.

[690] You bet between 2832.

[691] So what happens is they're hyper -conscientious and brilliant.

[692] They're usually attractive as well.

[693] And so they do extremely well in high school.

[694] They do extremely well in college and university.

[695] They do extremely well in law school.

[696] Like they're on a track, high -achieving track.

[697] They climb all the way up this track until they're senior partners and they're working like 70 hours a week.

[698] And often by this time, but not always they're married and usually to someone who has a high income.

[699] And they look around having hit the pinnacle and they're 30 and they think, why the hell am I working 70 hours a week?

[700] Now, the male answer to that is to win the contest.

[701] Right.

[702] And we know that winning the contest makes men sexually attractive.

[703] But that isn't the case at all for women.

[704] And so what the women do, invariably, is bail out and take a job that gives them more flexibility in shorter hours.

[705] And part of these because they want to have a family.

[706] Right.

[707] Well, no, absolutely.

[708] I mean, this is something that's, and people don't talk about it very frequently, But, I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

[709] That's exactly what happens.

[710] I mean, women generally want to have more work -life balance than men do.

[711] And it's just because the reward structure is very different for male and female brain of winning the contest, as you say.

[712] And for men, there's a real reward that comes from that.

[713] And historically, evolutionarily.

[714] You know, there isn't anything more important than getting the concerts.

[715] And for women, it's about when, you know, it's like we like to win the competition, but we also value investing in our family and in our relationships and that sort of things.

[716] to a greater extent than men.

[717] And most women that I know, even women who are really high achievers and have, you know, high performing jobs, also value their family time.

[718] And a lot of them aren't willing to make those costs.

[719] I know more people that are women who foregone, you know, really big promotions and opportunities to sit on this board or that board and saying no to it, even though it's an amazing opportunity, just because they don't want to compromise their time with their children and their families.

[720] And this is, yeah, so it's a real thing for women.

[721] It's a real thing for women.

[722] Okay, so let me ask you a question about that, too.

[723] Tell me what you think about this.

[724] So my observation of people who practice as scientists is that one in a hundred is an actual scientist.

[725] Right.

[726] I agree with that.

[727] Okay, okay.

[728] So then if one in a hundred is an actual scientist and all the scientific progress depends on that one in a hundred, which is also what you'd conclude if you looked at both publication rates and impact of publications, same Pareto distribution problem.

[729] And men are more likely to hyper -focus on their careers.

[730] What happens if we take the men out of those positions and we substitute in women?

[731] Because are we going to attenuate the productivity of the highest performers at the highest level of performance?

[732] Well, so I don't think that, you know, I think that when you look at the distributions, of like super, like, let's just say like super geniuses.

[733] Let's assume that scientists are super geniuses, okay?

[734] And when we look at things like IQ, and we look at the, you know, the distribution of IQ between men and women, we know that women have a more clustered around the mean type of a distribution.

[735] There's less variability.

[736] And for men, there's more variability, which means that with men's IQ distribution, you have fatter tails, meaning you have more men.

[737] There's no wonder you're terrified about getting into trouble.

[738] That's pretty much what killed.

[739] Larry Summers.

[740] I know.

[741] I know.

[742] And I talk about this in my class.

[743] And this is something that nobody has problems with the fact that, you know, if you go to an institution, like an institution for people who are profoundly cognitively, you know, challenged, that you, the sex ratio there is like two to one male, three to one male.

[744] And we know that more males have profound cognitive disabilities relative to women.

[745] But on the side of supergenieces, it's the same thing.

[746] And we see more male supergenius than we do female supergenieces.

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

[748] And what this means is that when you get to the upper echelons of any type of a career that requires a lot of G or a lot of intellectual power, you do tend to see that there is a little bit of a sex ratio with men to women.

[749] This being said, there's a lot of really valuable jobs that don't require as much G that play to some of women's intellectual strengths.

[750] So, for example, things like science and medicine are becoming more female.

[751] And that's because those are things that women are really good at.

[752] Yeah.

[753] Well, at those, well, okay, so at those very high levels of achievement, you're going to require the intersection of rare trades.

[754] So imagine in engineering.

[755] Okay, so first of all, you have to be more interested in things than people.

[756] Yes.

[757] Okay, so that's going to skew at male right away.

[758] Yeah.

[759] Then you have to be super bright.

[760] Yeah.

[761] Okay.

[762] Now, at the highest echelons, there's also going to be a bit of a male skew there.

[763] And then you might also hypothesize that you also have to be either hyper -dedicated, so that would be conscientious, or hyper -competitive, or both.

[764] Right.

[765] And so we could be in a perverse situation where, well, let's play out the extreme case, on average women will make better scientists than men, but the best scientists will be men.

[766] We could be in a situation where we'd have to balance those probabilities.

[767] So I wouldn't say the best scientists are men, because to me that's like making predictions about individual cases based on a pattern.

[768] So I will say on average, right, we should expect to see that in the pool of best scientists that is a male -bias sex ratio, I would agree with that statement.

[769] Okay.

[770] Okay, so let's clarify that a little bit.

[771] Because the absolute best scientist could actually be a woman, and that wouldn't violate the patterns of it.

[772] And I'm not saying that I don't know.

[773] So you said it more precisely.

[774] But yes, no, which is, but I think that that matters when you're talking about something like this.

[775] It does matter.

[776] It does matter.

[777] It matters a lot.

[778] Yeah, exactly.

[779] And so I think that we, yeah, so precision support.

[780] Yeah, yeah.

[781] Now, okay, so let's, all right.

[782] So let's move on to another issue.

[783] We talked about what is a woman, and that took a long time, and you wouldn't think so because you would think that would be obvious.

[784] And it is because people can perceive the difference between male and female at a second.

[785] You are your hormones and you in the time of fertility.

[786] Those are the two of the first three chapters.

[787] So what do you mean you are your hormones?

[788] What I mean is a lot of times, especially culturally in the U .S., and I don't know whether or not this is true elsewhere, I just know my experience is here, we have a tendency to talk about our hormones, like there's something external to us.

[789] Like there's us, our sort of hormone -free, rational self, and then there's us under the control of hormones.

[790] And that's just simply not the way that it works.

[791] Our hormones are part of the signaling machinery that our brain uses to create the experience of being the person we are.

[792] Right?

[793] So they're like neurotransmitters or anything else.

[794] When we consider the fact that there's a bunch of gears and sprockets that all work together to make us the sort of person that we are with our restaurant preferences and personalities and, you know, likes and dislikes, our hormones play a role in that.

[795] That's like part of the machinery.

[796] Right.

[797] So that shouldn't be segregated off.

[798] Right.

[799] As this thing that happens to us.

[800] Right.

[801] Yeah.

[802] And so I think that this is something that on the one hand is really obvious because it's like, I don't think if you tell that to somebody, they would say, well, yeah.

[803] course it is.

[804] But then what happens when we change people's hormones?

[805] Yeah, right.

[806] Well, testosterone is another great test case where, you know, here we have a testosterone clinic on every corner these days.

[807] And so people are changing their hormonal profile thinking about what it's going to do to this thing or that thing.

[808] So, for example, if a man is taking testosterone thinking, like, oh, I'll get my upper body strength back or maybe it'll improve my libido or women go on birth control pills thinking, oh, I won't have to get my, you know, I won't ovulate and I won't get pregnant without thinking about the fact that you're actually shutting down your body's ability to produce its own hormones.

[809] You're taking a daily dose of this synthetic hormone.

[810] And when you change hormones, because hormones are literally a part of what your brain uses to create you, it changes you.

[811] And so that whole chapter is just really trying to orient people.

[812] Okay, okay.

[813] So you're trying to bring people back into their body in some ways.

[814] Bring them back into their body.

[815] Yeah, well, you can understand why people have a problem with this because imagine you get angry.

[816] You know, and then later you regret it.

[817] You're going to feel like the anger overtook you, like it was an alien force in some ways, you know?

[818] And it seems to me that the part of us that we identify with is something like the integrated self, right?

[819] And then that integrated self can fall under the sway of impulses that are more neurologically primordial.

[820] And we do feel that as a defeat.

[821] We do feel that as a subordination or even as a possession.

[822] And so you can see why people have that hesitancy to identify with their hormone -driven impulses.

[823] Right.

[824] But by the same token, those elements of you that might be excessive when isolated are a part of you and have to be integrated.

[825] And they also have benefits that in all likelihood far outweigh their costs.

[826] Okay, so what do you think the costs are?

[827] Now, you talked about hormonal substitution in women with the birth control pill.

[828] Now, maybe there's two aspects to that.

[829] One is that the consequence of the suppression per se, and we definitely need to talk about that.

[830] And then there's also the fact that what the normal hormonal regimen is being, what the substitution for that is isn't the same hormonal profile, right?

[831] Because it's not the same chemical.

[832] Okay, so let's start with the consequences of the hormonal.

[833] transformation.

[834] What is that done to women?

[835] And what does it do to the relationship between men and women?

[836] Yeah, no, really great questions.

[837] I mean, our hormones, we have them for a reason.

[838] Like evolution by selection doesn't select for costly traits.

[839] And hormones are expensive.

[840] You know, they're metabolically expensive.

[841] They make our brain reorganize themselves every month.

[842] None of that stuff would go on if it wasn't doing something to promote survival or reproduction.

[843] And so by eliminating that, by decreasing or sort of minimizing women's exposure to cyclicity in their hormonal profiles, you're essentially changing a lot of the things that are fundamental to being a woman.

[844] So just to give some examples of this, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, which is what we'll call a woman who's not on the pill, right, because she's naturally cycling between her two hormones, hormones go through two different states across the state of a cycle.

[845] It starts off and with hormone levels are really low when a woman gets her period, which is the first day of her cycle, and then estrogen levels begin to increase as her egg follicles are being stimulated.

[846] And as they're beginning to mature, that releases high levels of estrogen.

[847] And when estrogen increases, because it's nearing the time when women are able to conceive in the cycle, it causes a lot of biological, physiological, and psychological changes that make women primed for sex.

[848] So it makes women smell better to men.

[849] It makes women look more attractive to men because their skin becomes more vascularized.

[850] Their cheeks become rosier.

[851] They just look more, they just look sexier.

[852] They smell sexier.

[853] They move sexier.

[854] Their voices are sexier.

[855] There's all of this research that's been showing that when estrogen levels are rising in the cycle that it's associated with.

[856] Strippers get more tips.

[857] Yeah, they earn more tip money.

[858] I mean, it's a real phenomenon.

[859] And this, you know, this happens right as women are Why not flatten that?

[860] Why isn't that just annoying for women?

[861] So they can replace that with a more regulated emotional life and one that's less unpredictable?

[862] Right.

[863] But yeah, but that's like equating normal and predictable with the male pattern.

[864] Yeah, right.

[865] And that's not true.

[866] It's like that's normal for males and predictable for males, but that's not true for women.

[867] That's not predictable for women.

[868] We're different entities.

[869] And I think that we've been in this cultural paradigm that equates normal with male for so long that we're even afraid to ask the question of what if both of our hormonal states matter?

[870] Like what if there's two halves to a woman's goals?

[871] Don't you think it's, okay, it seems to me that, and maybe this is unfair, but it seems to me remarkably perverse that at least some of this can be laid at the feet of the feminists.

[872] Let's look at a couple of the strange things that we have as a consequence of, of the feminist world.

[873] We have the insistence that career is going to be the most important part of a woman's life.

[874] Now, the leftist feminists, and they're generally leftist, are anti -corporate, but they're pro -career.

[875] Okay, so that's very weird.

[876] A career is, to have a career is to be embedded in what the feminists object to as the patriarchy.

[877] Right.

[878] To subordinate your cyclicity to the hormonal rhythms of a man, you can't imagine something that would be more like subordination to the demands of the oppressive patriarchy, right?

[879] That kind of like sums it out.

[880] You're going to suppress the biological manifestations of femininity in favor of a persona that makes you optimally functional in the corporate patriarchy.

[881] Right.

[882] So all of that, I mean, there's so many contradictions at the heart of that, right?

[883] Because another one is, you know, we need to hire women in equal numbers as men because of the diversity that they bring to the workforce.

[884] but women are just like men.

[885] Right, right.

[886] And we do everything we can to suppress their hormonal variation that would, in fact, make them different.

[887] Yeah, no. Yeah, no. And you're right.

[888] I mean, a lot of the people who really get nervous about talking about cyclicity and talking about hormonal changes are sort of the old guard feminist, where they, and where they, you know, I understand where all of that originated.

[889] I mean, women, as we've had a very bad history of being treated.

[890] pretty poorly because of the fact that our hormones change.

[891] But it's like, I think that it's time that we need to move past that and say, you know, all of this, this idea that there's something problematic about cycling hormones is assuming that there's only one way to be that's correct and that way is male.

[892] And that's wrong.

[893] I mean, to me, it's like I reject that.

[894] And yes, our hormones change.

[895] And you can say that they make us unpredictable, but it's actually incredibly predictable.

[896] Like if you would throw, give me any woman, you bring her in off the street and put her here and I ask her how old she is and when was the first day of her last menstrual cycle, I can tell you with pretty good certainty what her hormones are doing at that moment, right?

[897] If I bring a man in off the street, I have absolutely no idea what his primary sex hormone is doing because testosterone is reactive.

[898] It increases when there's a beautiful woman around.

[899] It decreases if your sports team loses.

[900] It increases if your sports team wins, your political candidate loses, it decreases.

[901] So testosterone is incredibly reactive.

[902] So that's also relevant to why the men would be hanging around the high status men, because if your sports team wins, then your testosterone levels.

[903] Yeah, you increase your testosterone.

[904] Right, right, right, right.

[905] Yeah, no, so I mean, so I, a lot of these, um, these ideas that people have been using to, uh, reject the idea or object to the fact that, um, that women are, are, they have cycles and that there's something problematic about that are all very much steeped in the idea that the male way of being, is optimal, normal, and correct, and that the women, you know, the female way of being is problematic, and I absolutely reject that.

[906] And so when we take the birth control pill, what it does is instead of allowing you to cycle between these two hormones, because you start with this big increase in estrogen, which is coordinating all the activities related to sex and conception, because this is the period in the cycle in which sex can lead to conception.

[907] How long a period is that?

[908] It's about four.

[909] So that period of time is about five to seven days.

[910] So about five days prior to ovulation, and then within 24 hours of ovulation, during that window, which we call the fertile window, sex can lead to conception.

[911] And that's how many days a month?

[912] It's about five to seven.

[913] Yeah, right.

[914] Okay.

[915] And then after ovulation, a little temporary endocrine structure forms from the empty egg follicle, and it begins releasing women's other primary sex hormone, which is progesterone.

[916] And when that hormone is being released, it tends to make us sleepier, it makes us hungrier, it lowers our testosterone levels, it does a bunch of things physiologically that are helping prepare women's bodies for pregnancy, right, and prepare ourselves for the possibility that an egg might implant.

[917] And so women generally are less likely to be going out and doing risky things, and we're likely to avoid contaminants.

[918] So women's disgust sensitivity increases.

[919] There's all of these things that go on that are essentially preparing our body.

[920] And they'd have maximal post -cordal regret that.

[921] I bet that you're, yeah, that's so funny.

[922] And so you get this waxing and waning between these two hormones that are organizing our bodies for two different activities, implantation and conception, or pardon me, sex and conception, and then implantation and pregnancy.

[923] And we go in between these two states, and each of these hormonal states is associated with different types of psychological patterns and physiological patterns.

[924] I mean, even they've done studies where they scan women's brains every day across the cycle, take hormone measures and it's like you see things like white matter density increasing it when estrogen is high spinal you get new um dendritic spines in the hippocampus when estrogen is present and then these things retreat when you're under the control of that progesterone and so we experience all these changes and that's a very normal part of of being a woman and when you take the birth control pill what it does is you get a daily dose of a relatively low level of synthetic estrogenial so estrogen, and a relatively high level of synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin because it's not biologically identical.

[925] And this mimics the state that a woman's body is in during that second half of the menstrual cycle when conception isn't possible.

[926] And what this does is it sends a signal to the hypothalamus not to stimulate the ovaries to produce a new egg because it's essentially waiting to see what happens with the one that was just ovulated.

[927] And so when you're taking the pill, you get the same daily dose every day of this synthetic hormonal state that's kind of keeping you.

[928] So in principle, in principle, the body's reacting as if the woman has been sexually satiated in the most fundamental way.

[929] She might be pregnant.

[930] Yes, she might be pregnant, essentially, is what that is saying.

[931] And so one of the logical consequences of that would, correct me if I'm wrong, she should be less interested in sex.

[932] But then this also ties into the change in her preference for men.

[933] Yes.

[934] So let's talk about that a little bit.

[935] Okay, sure.

[936] Well, one of the things that really shocked me when I came across this probably 10, 15 years ago was that there was pronounced variability in the facial, in the faces that women found attractive across the menstrual cycle.

[937] And so if you take photographs of the same man and you widen or narrow the jaw, widen jaw is a sign of more classically dominant.

[938] It's the wrong way of thinking about it.

[939] Competent, confident, masculine faces, you can do it with the same man. And the women who are in their most fertile periods prefer the wider -jawed men.

[940] Yes.

[941] And so, okay, so then I thought, oh, this is a problem because it means that women who are on the pill prefer feminine men.

[942] Then I thought, that's a real problem because it might be that women on the pill really don't like masculine men.

[943] Oh, oh, that's probably a problem because we have a lot of tension between women and men in our society, and we have no idea how much that's driven by the fact that the pill is transforming the manner in which females perceive the most masculine men.

[944] I mean, it's terrifying if that's the case.

[945] Right.

[946] No, I mean, it's very provocative.

[947] Right.

[948] That's the word I would use.

[949] It's incredibly provocative because research has been showing now for about 20 years that when women are in the point in the cycle, when estrogen is high, that that's associated with an increased preference for testosterone cues, like you said.

[950] vocal, facial, and behavioral masculinity are things that women are really zeroing in on right near high fertility in the cycle.

[951] And this, of course, begs the question, well, then what happens if a woman is on hormonal birth control and is never in the estrogen -dominant phase of her cycle?

[952] Then what happens?

[953] And researchers have since asked that question and what they tend to find is that women who are on hormonal birth control desire a somewhat less masculine male face and male voice.

[954] And there's been some research even showing that if women chose their partners when they're on hormonal birth control and then discontinue it, that this can lead to changes and how they perceive and how attracted they are to their partner.

[955] Yeah, I read that tell me if this is right, that if they picked an attractive partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even more attractive.

[956] But if they picked a less desirable partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even less desirable.

[957] So it seems to, okay, so that's right.

[958] It's magnified.

[959] the consequence of their choices.

[960] Yeah, it's like all of a sudden the blinders were off.

[961] And so now they can, if they chose somebody that they found attractive because they weren't really paying that much attention to that or weren't prioritizing that when they were on the pill, all of a sudden the blinders are off, they see it, they love it, they're attracted to it, their relationship satisfaction goes up, their sexual desire and their relationship goes up.

[962] And if the opposite happens, it's the opposite.

[963] And we just...

[964] So do women on the pill pick friends as mates?

[965] Oh, interesting.

[966] I've never seen a study looking at it.

[967] that, but I mean, it wouldn't be a far stretch to make that prediction just because it does seem like women who are choosing their partners on the pill.

[968] If there's a pattern that's found, the pattern is that women are generally zeroing in on qualities that have less to do with sexiness and sexual desire and masculinity and more zeroing in on things like safety and is this like...

[969] Nurturance, companionship.

[970] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[971] And so...

[972] Yeah, well, you can see that women have a very, very difficult choice to make, right?

[973] Because they They want to pick a guy who can win a competition with other guys.

[974] They want to pick a guy who can keep the psychopaths at bay.

[975] They want to pick a guy who's productive.

[976] But they also need to pick someone who's generous and capable of forming responsible relationships.

[977] Well, you know, talk about a play of offices.

[978] And you can imagine that any shift in hormonal balance is going to skew that in one direction or another.

[979] Right.

[980] Yeah, I mean, partner choice, I always tell my women in my class and also the men, the few men that are in my class, because it's a university and it's all women now.

[981] But what I tell them is it's all about making tradeoffs.

[982] Yeah.

[983] And sort of which side of the, you know, table you're stacking your coins.

[984] Are you stacking your coins more on the sort of sexiness, yeah, keeping the psychopaths at bay, kind of masculinity types of qualities?

[985] Are you stacking your chips all the way over here of good caregiver provider going to help, you know, with the children?

[986] Are you putting them more toward the middle?

[987] everybody makes a trade -off and essentially what we do, what our hormones do, is it kind of nudge where we put our stack.

[988] And what we can see when this happens en -mast, as you can see, en -mast changes in partner preferences, potentially, which is pretty provocative.

[989] Well, we have no idea what the political consequences of that are.

[990] Because you could also imagine, this is like the worst -case scenario, imagine that there's a distribution of women who are affected by hormonal transformation.

[991] And some women are relatively unaffected and some women are tremendously affected.

[992] Well, you can imagine that the tremendously affected women would have more impetus to engage politically.

[993] Right?

[994] So the ones, right, so imagine that there's a subset of women for whom the birth control pill makes masculine men particularly undesirable.

[995] Right.

[996] Right.

[997] Now, imagine that that transforms itself into political motivation because it might.

[998] I don't, not saying we know this, we don't know it, because we don't know anything about the relationship between hormonal transformation and political activism.

[999] But the probability that there's no relationship is zero.

[1000] Right.

[1001] So we've thrown this new monkey wrench into the works in 1960 that's transformed the relationship between men and women.

[1002] And we have no idea, we really have no idea what the consequences of that are.

[1003] No, you know, I was just talking to my class about this because I think it's really fascinating because I think culturally we're, I mean, we've been feeling the tensions that are created by this for a very long time now.

[1004] And again, you know, I'm somebody, I feel very much like I benefited from the pillow.

[1005] I was on it for a decade.

[1006] It was a great time of my life to be on it.

[1007] You know, it didn't cause me any problems that I'm aware of.

[1008] I got to have my kids and I wanted to get to invest and so on and so forth.

[1009] But at the same time, you know, having this, having women have the opportunity to invest really heavily in their careers, essentially sets up these expectations where women are supposed to be both women and men.

[1010] Yeah, right.

[1011] And so women now, it's like, because it's not either or, you know, it's not like, oh, are you going to go to work or are you going to stay home and take care of your kids?

[1012] It's like, no, I'm doing both things.

[1013] Yeah.

[1014] So we've set up this expectation where women are supposed to be women and men, and I think women's mental health is suffering hugely as a consequence of this.

[1015] I think it's been very hard for women trying to balance everything and with the expectation that they're supposed to be doing all of it.

[1016] Yeah.

[1017] It also begs the question of what's left over for the men.

[1018] Well, and this is what I think is really interesting.

[1019] So this was the revelation I just had a couple days ago.

[1020] I actually had it when I was teaching, and I told my students about it.

[1021] And I'm like, I think I'm on to something with this.

[1022] But, you know, testosterone levels are an absolute nadir right now.

[1023] I mean, they're at an all -time low, and there's a lot of reasons.

[1024] Could that be a consequence of excess masturbation, just out of curiosity?

[1025] I don't think so, no. You don't, okay, why not?

[1026] Because I thought, it matches the increase in pornography, you say.

[1027] Yeah, no, I completely, yes.

[1028] And that goes on concurrently, but testosterone levels, no, you don't think so.

[1029] No, because usually when men are seeing a lot of attractive women, it makes their testosterone increase.

[1030] And then that's not something that takes a major fit after masturbation.

[1031] So you think that's being put to rest.

[1032] All right, so testosterone levels are the low.

[1033] So testosterone levels are super low.

[1034] And, you know, and there's a lot of reasons for this.

[1035] You know, we know there's a lot of xenoestrogens and the, you know, in the water and that might be messing with their hormones.

[1036] And men are heavier than they used to be.

[1037] And fat aromatizes testosterone and makes it turns it in.

[1038] to estrogen, which also lowers testosterone levels.

[1039] Another advantage of an all -carb diet.

[1040] Yeah, but so here's another, here's another interesting thing.

[1041] And I don't know if you know about this research, but it's really fascinating.

[1042] So, you know, culturally, we tend to think about testosterone as being this thing that, like, is always good to have super high, right?

[1043] We think it's masculinity and virility and protection.

[1044] But testosterone is, among other things, it's a hormone of mating effort, right?

[1045] It's like effort that you're directing toward winning and doing things that are going to attract partners.

[1046] It also, it's linked with men's interest in extra pair partners and all these other types of sort of counterproductive behaviors within the context of a long -term pair bond.

[1047] And so what research finds is that when men get married or are in a long -term committed relationship, their testosterone levels decrease a little bit.

[1048] And this happens absolutely functionally because it's essentially taking, easing the foot off the gas pedal because it's keeping men from doing counterproductive things within the context of a pair bond.

[1049] When men have young children.

[1050] Well, it tilts the more to the, oh, okay, go ahead.

[1051] Men have children.

[1052] Their testosterone levels decrease again.

[1053] And the more caregiving that men do, the more their testosterone lowers.

[1054] And this isn't permanent, right?

[1055] This is a shift that men's bodies make in response to the environmental cues that's very adaptive and makes a whole lot of sense with our, well, they shouldn't be sexually attracted to the children.

[1056] Well, right.

[1057] Well, exactly.

[1058] It shouldn't be attracted to the children.

[1059] And they also, like, if you've got young children at home who survival is dependent on you, you need to keep your eyes.

[1060] eye on the ball and not on the next door neighbor.

[1061] Right, right.

[1062] And, um, and be raising your children.

[1063] And so I started to think about this and I was thinking about this idea that, you know, women are being expected to be both women and men.

[1064] Men are being expected to be both men and women.

[1065] Because what men are now doing more household work and more child care than they ever have before.

[1066] I think women also tend to find no, not attractive.

[1067] Well, no, they do.

[1068] Like, I mean, it creates problems within the relationship because yeah, women lose sexual attraction in that context.

[1069] But then men also, Men's testosterone levels could be decreasing in response to that, and that could be one of the factors that's contributing to men's low testosterone currently, is that we've created this case where women are having to be women and men and men are having to be men and women.

[1070] Right.

[1071] And so what it does perversely for the men is that the men who are adopting the caregiver role more explicitly also put themselves in the terrible position where they're less sexually desirable.

[1072] I saw a very funny study at one point.

[1073] It might have been David Buss.

[1074] because he does funny studies all the time because he's still allowed to.

[1075] I think what they showed, they showed university age women, the same men engaging in male stereotyped activities and female stereotyped activities, like vacuuming, for example.

[1076] God only knows why that's female stereotype, but has something to do with nesting, I suppose.

[1077] And reliably, the women rated the men who were engaged in the more feminine activities as less sexually attractive.

[1078] Right.

[1079] Yeah, no, absolutely.

[1080] Absolutely.

[1081] I mean, that is such a, it creates this cruel, bind.

[1082] But I also think, you know, it's funny.

[1083] I was having, I teach a class called evolution, sex, and the brain.

[1084] And we ask big questions.

[1085] So this is a class I really enjoy teaching because they encourage us to ask difficult questions that nobody really knows the answers to.

[1086] And one of the questions I always ask them is about seduction.

[1087] Because seduction is such an important part of women's sexuality.

[1088] The idea of a man who has some sort of status and dominance, sort of, like, you know, being masculine, and women find that attractive and they find that sexual, you know, like, that's sexually arousing, and there's this whole literature about the idea of, like, one of the things that men do is sort of awaken women's sexuality.

[1089] Right.

[1090] That's the kiss of the prince.

[1091] Well, yeah, and so then the idea that, that now we're in this environment where we say that we can't do that, right?

[1092] Yeah, right.

[1093] And, and, but it's, like, also at the same time, you know, it is important that that women have exercised choice, right?

[1094] And obviously, like, we don't want women getting sexually assaulted.

[1095] Right, yeah.

[1096] And so it's like, like, how do we create a space, like, culturally?

[1097] Like, what is the conversation that we need to be having where it's like seduction is okay except that it's not?

[1098] Yeah.

[1099] You know, I mean, it's really tricky.

[1100] You're definitely going to get fired.

[1101] You're absolutely 100 % going to.

[1102] Well, I see one of the things that's so perverse about the modern university campus is on the one hand, there's this absolute insistence that every possible form of sexual behavior is, not only to be tolerated, but celebrated or even worshipped.

[1103] And on the other hand, every single interaction between a young man and a young woman is so rife with danger that it has to be formulated into a contract before it can be undertaken.

[1104] Right.

[1105] Well, you get, with that sort of absolute licentiousness, you're going to get a call for, like, tyrannical regulation of sexual behavior because you can't have that much looseness without a demand for tightness, but it does beg the question that you're putting forward.

[1106] And while one of the answers to that, I would say, this is sort of a sideways answer, is that alcohol is a very bad thing to pour into the mix.

[1107] Right, yes.

[1108] Because it's the case that almost all sexual assault, especially the date rate types, but even the more violent types, almost all spousal abuse, all of that would disappear if alcohol disappeared.

[1109] This is a conversation nobody will have about campuses, because part of the problem on campuses is that young men and young women who don't have that much experience with each other and who are also anxious as a consequence generally meet each other in alcohol -fueled bounce.

[1110] And that's, like, you would, you can't say that alcohol causes violent crime, but you can damn near say it.

[1111] You know, 50 % of people who are murdered are drunk.

[1112] 50 % of the murderers are drunk.

[1113] The stats are even worse with regards to sexual assault.

[1114] I believe that.

[1115] Yeah, yeah.

[1116] Without alcohol, it would almost never happen.

[1117] So that's something that could be, started as a topic of reasonable discussion on university campuses, like, are there places where young men and young women can congregate and meet that aren't fueled by alcohol -induced stupidity and recklessness?

[1118] Now it's complicated because part of the reason that people drink is so that they can engage in alcohol -fueled stupidity.

[1119] Right.

[1120] Because it's fun.

[1121] And one of the problems with the pill is that it actually allows that to occur without it being utterly catastrophic.

[1122] Now, it's catastrophic in that the rate of sexual assault skyrockets, and that's, you know, not trivial, but...

[1123] Right.

[1124] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1125] Okay, so you wrote a letter to your daughter at the end of your book, eh?

[1126] I did.

[1127] Yeah, and so, oh, I want to ask you about a couple of other things here.

[1128] The curious case of the missing cortisol.

[1129] Let's do two things.

[1130] The curious case of the missing cortisol?

[1131] Yes.

[1132] That's very interesting.

[1133] And also a letter to my daughter.

[1134] Sure.

[1135] Okay.

[1136] So cortisol.

[1137] Yeah.

[1138] This actually is the reason I wrote the book.

[1139] And I'll say that it's the reason I wrote the book because I was sitting in a research talk about the effects of early life trauma on the stress response in adulthood.

[1140] And I'm sure you're very familiar with all of this work because one of the things that I do research on is early life adversity and how that affects developmental outcomes.

[1141] And I was in a research talk on that.

[1142] And the researcher was just like mentioning, you know, oh, we collected data on X number of men and women.

[1143] We only analyze the data of the men in our sample because the majority of the women in our sample happened to be on hormonal birth control and everybody knows that women on hormonal birth control don't have a cortisol response to stress.

[1144] And then, yeah, that was me. I was like, no cortisol.

[1145] Who knows?

[1146] Who knows that?

[1147] Like, everybody knows that?

[1148] And so I went up and I didn't hear anything else because it was just like, I was just absolutely stunned because that's like what you see with PTSD, and that's what you see with people who've experienced severe trauma is no cortisol response to stress.

[1149] It's not good.

[1150] And so I waited until after the talk, and I went and I talked to me. You see that in depression, too, if it's long term.

[1151] Yeah, I know.

[1152] I mean, it's really, really bad and so it's bad.

[1153] It means no play in response to stress.

[1154] No, no, no, no, no adaptation in response to stress.

[1155] No, I know.

[1156] And it's funny because everybody always thinks that, like, cortisol is this bad guy and, like, whoa, it's got to be great.

[1157] And it's like, no, like stress is the bad guy.

[1158] Cortisol helps you adapt to stress.

[1159] Like, cortisol is a good guy.

[1160] who comes in to help sort of restore homeostasis after your body's gotten all screwed up from whatever's stressing it out.

[1161] And so I went and I talked to my colleague afterward and I said, did you say that women on hormonal birth control don't have a stress response?

[1162] And he's like, yeah, they don't.

[1163] I was really surprised by it too, but then I went to the literature.

[1164] They don't have an adaptive stress response.

[1165] Yes, yeah, they don't.

[1166] Because they report experiencing stress.

[1167] Right.

[1168] And they haven't, their sympathetic stress response is still going off.

[1169] Yeah.

[1170] But they don't have any cortisol.

[1171] release.

[1172] And so I went to the literature, and he was right.

[1173] People had been publishing on this since the 90s.

[1174] And I had never heard anything about it.

[1175] And I was on the pill and I'm a woman and I study women's hormones.

[1176] And anyway, after that, I was like, what else don't I know about hormonal birth control?

[1177] And that was what led me in the rabbit hole that essentially led me to write the book.

[1178] Because there were so many things that the pill does in terms of, you know, neurobiologically, like what it does in terms of the brain.

[1179] And then psychologically, proximally, like in terms of, of mood, sexual desire, partner choice, which we talked about, an attraction.

[1180] And what's the consequence of the attention?

[1181] Okay, so women get stressed.

[1182] So women get stressed, but they don't have a cortisol response.

[1183] Okay, so what's the consequence of that?

[1184] So here's the really great answer.

[1185] Nobody knows.

[1186] I'll tell you what we know from research that hasn't directly linked the things together.

[1187] We just did a study where we found that you get changes in the inflammatory response to stress.

[1188] in hormonal birth control pill users in ways that's consistent with the type of inflammatory response that tends to lead to things like autoimmunity, which we know women are at a much greater risk for than men.

[1189] Does it need to depression?

[1190] Because there's lots of evidence that depression is an inflammatory condition.

[1191] Yes, depression and anxiety are also some things that we know that being on hormonal birth control puts you at a significant greater risk for.

[1192] And all of these things are what you would expect in the case when you have a blunted cortisol response to stress.

[1193] So what does the normal cortisol response do if you're stressed?

[1194] Right.

[1195] So normally, if you and I are, you know, if I'm being filmed, let's say, to be on a podcast, a lot of people listen to, what would generally start happening about five minutes after I arrived here is my cortisol would start to increase.

[1196] And it's doing this because it knows that I am in a high -pressure situation, right?

[1197] It could be high -pressure good or high pressure bad because stress is something that we get when we're being chased by a pack of hungry wolverines.

[1198] But it's also something that we get on like our wedding day or Christmas morning for children is a time when cortisol is really high.

[1199] Opportunity and threat.

[1200] Opportunity and threats.

[1201] It's essentially flagging your brain.

[1202] Something important is happening.

[1203] Right.

[1204] So should heighten attention.

[1205] So our brain is aware.

[1206] It's on its game.

[1207] We start creating new neurons in our hippocampus are being birthed in response to cortisol.

[1208] That's because you should learn when then there is maximum opportunity and maximum threat, right?

[1209] The hippocampus is crucial for that.

[1210] Absolutely, and that's exactly what's going on.

[1211] So that's an important thing that our bodies do, is grabbing on.

[1212] It's helping us absorb these important experiences, so that way we can have them for later.

[1213] It dumps fat and sugar.

[1214] To change, to change.

[1215] Yeah, to change.

[1216] It dumps fat and sugar into our bloodstream, so that way our brain has access to glucose, but also so our muscles do so we can make a quick get away if we need to get away quickly, if we're being chased.

[1217] So it should mean that blunted cortisol response should mean that women on birth control don't update their navigational maps as effectively because the hippocampus is also the fundamental place of the origin of hippocampal maps.

[1218] Yeah, for hippocampal maps.

[1219] Yeah, and I've never seen any research on that in particular, but I have seen it with emotional memories.

[1220] And what they find is that women who are on hormonal birth control have a harder time encoding emotionally valence events when you stress them out, which is exactly what you would expect when you don't know.

[1221] That means you're not adapting to the, that's awesome.

[1222] That's really not good.

[1223] No, it's not.

[1224] And I've actually heard from a woman who was a practicing therapist because I had gotten several emails and finally somebody called me and I answered the phone, which I don't usually do and I don't know the number, but it was one of these therapists asking about PTSD and therapy when women are on hormonal birth control because they all have the same theory that women don't respond as well to therapy for PTSD.

[1225] Yeah, when they're on the pill.

[1226] Oh, my God, that's also, that's terrible because there's no difference between exposure therapy and learning.

[1227] Right, yeah.

[1228] Exposure therapy is just the technical use of the learning situation in the therapy of the context.

[1229] Right, exactly.

[1230] Yeah, and she said we don't get the kinds of outcomes that we need when we have women or on the pill.

[1231] Okay, so what that implies is women don't, women on the pill can't update as well.

[1232] Yeah, exactly.

[1233] That's brutal.

[1234] Yeah, and so this is, I mean, obviously, and here's this thing that we're taking just not to obviate.

[1235] And in some cases, women are being put on this teenagers for their skin.

[1236] Yeah.

[1237] And it's like we know nothing about the long -term consequences of brain development of blunting a woman's hormonal own hormone production and then replacing it with these synthetics.

[1238] Yeah, so talk about that.

[1239] There's no way it doesn't affect brain development.

[1240] I mean, it's like post -pubertal brain development is coordinated by our sex hormones.

[1241] Right.

[1242] And if you blunt that, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, you go through this period of estrogen and then progesterone and estrogen and progesterone.

[1243] And when you shut that down and then just put in this daily synthetic dose, the idea that that's going to lead to the same brain development outcomes is getting a cycling.

[1244] Is that an extension of pre -pubertal hormonal balance?

[1245] Yeah.

[1246] I mean, yeah, pre -pubertal hormones are such a disaster because women's HPG axes are still regulating themselves.

[1247] I mean, their brains and ovaries are still learning how to communicate, everything.

[1248] And so women's cycles tend to be messed up, little bit, you know, screwy at that time, because everything is learning itself.

[1249] So does putting women on the pill when they're very young interfere with the full manifestation of puberty?

[1250] That's a really great question, and it's not one that anybody knows the answer to you.

[1251] Well, it seems like a logical conclusion for what you've described.

[1252] Well, exactly.

[1253] I mean, it's not something that I know.

[1254] And the thing is, we've been putting women on these drugs forever.

[1255] I've only seen three studies that have looked at long -term consequences of hormonal birth control use during adolescence on development.

[1256] The research is pointing in the direction of the fact that using hormonal birth control during adolescence puts you at a greater risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of your lifetime even after you've discontinued it.

[1257] Not good stuff.

[1258] Not something that you want your daughter to be suffering, so that way she doesn't have acne.

[1259] And I don't think that this is being very well communicated to the parents of girls.

[1260] and I think it's a travesty.

[1261] I really do.

[1262] Okay, two more things.

[1263] The hormones that women are put on aren't the bioidentical hormone.

[1264] Okay, so let's talk about that.

[1265] Len, let's talk about your...

[1266] My daughter.

[1267] Okay.

[1268] So the synthetic hormones that are in hormonal birth control, you'd think that they would be sort of biologically identical to our body's hormones.

[1269] And for the most part, the synthetic estrogen that is in hormonal birth control is.

[1270] It has nice binding affinity and nice binding specificity to estrogen receptors.

[1271] The synthetic progesterone or the progestins that are in hormonal birth control are not, and most of them aren't even synthesized from progesterone.

[1272] They're actually synthesized from most of them from testosterone.

[1273] And so chemists modify testosterone molecules in ways that make them able to stimulate progesterone receptors, but they don't always have perfect.

[1274] binding specificity, meaning that they also bind to other receptors for other hormones, and they don't necessarily have good...

[1275] They're messy.

[1276] They're messy, and they don't have good binding affinity, where they'll stimulate the receptor and then fall off.

[1277] And then what that means is you need higher dose of...

[1278] Yeah, is you need to take higher doses to make sure that you're getting enough progesterone action.

[1279] Which increases the degree to which they're activating things.

[1280] They shouldn't be activated.

[1281] Be activating.

[1282] Okay.

[1283] And that's actually reason to be the explanation for why women experience the blunt cortisol response in response to stress is that the progestins in hormonal birth control, some of them will stimulate glucocorticoid receptors, essentially making women's bodies believe that they're in a state of chronic stress.

[1284] And so women's bodies are then shutting down the stress response.

[1285] I mean, depression is a consequence of being in constant stress.

[1286] Well, absolutely.

[1287] And when you look at the patterns, I mean, the thing about this is that when you look at the, it's all pointing in this direction where when you look at the risk of depression and even the suicide risk for women who are on hormonal birth control, especially in adolescence, so 19 and younger, is really high during the first three months of use.

[1288] And think about it.

[1289] This is when their glucocorticoid receptors are probably just being flooded with these nonspecific progestins that are stimulating those, making their body think that it's World War II.

[1290] Oh, that's just what you need at puberty.

[1291] Well, I know.

[1292] Because it's already World War II.

[1293] Yeah, I know.

[1294] And so they're feeling terrible until their body, it finally shuts down the stress response.

[1295] And then you don't get any stress response to stress.

[1296] But women actually end up feeling a little bit better because they're no longer, you know, sort of psychologically being put into the state of trauma, like constant trauma.

[1297] I think that it's crazy to me that this is the best we can do.

[1298] You know, I feel like I think about how important.

[1299] Why aren't we doing better than this?

[1300] You know, I think that the reason that we, it's because...

[1301] Because like there's nothing more important than this.

[1302] No, fertility regulation is so important for women in terms of being able to meet their goals that most women are willing to put up with all the bullshit that goes along with it because they don't feel like they have any other choices.

[1303] Well, they also don't know.

[1304] Well, right, and they don't know.

[1305] And then the drug companies are like, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[1306] Yeah, yeah.

[1307] And so it's like, well, the women are taking it, you know, so who cares?

[1308] and women are like, you know, we're just having to deal with it.

[1309] Yeah, men too.

[1310] I know, we need to do better.

[1311] And I look at what they're doing now.

[1312] They're investing in male birth control, but all that they're doing is shifting the problem that we have for women and shifting it on to men.

[1313] So currently what they're looking at, and you tell me how many men you know that would take this, they're looking at a gel that men rub on themselves, that will lower their testosterone to such a degree that they'll no longer produce sperm.

[1314] Oh, yeah.

[1315] I mean, don't you think that's going to take off like gangbusters.

[1316] Yeah, sure.

[1317] Yeah, yeah.

[1318] Antistosterosterone.

[1319] There's a bunch of guys in the room here lined up to take it.

[1320] Yeah, yeah.

[1321] I mean, and it's like nobody's going to, it's just a dumb idea.

[1322] And all it's going to, and it causes the same side effects in men that our hormonal birth control does in women because it's shutting down their sex hormones.

[1323] And the men that they try it on are like, these side effects are terrible.

[1324] I'm not taking this.

[1325] And these are the side effects that we put up with because we don't have.

[1326] have another choice.

[1327] It's like because we're the ones who have the baby if we end up with a slip up.

[1328] And so I, you know, I really, my whole push with all of this is not that, you know, the birth control pill is terrible and that it's, you know, done all these awful things.

[1329] I mean, it's a trade -off and it's definitely going to have societal consequences that we haven't even begun to begin to put our fingers on.

[1330] But it's all about like educating yourself, what are the trade -offs that are being made when you go on hormonal birth control?

[1331] And then also putting pressure on, you know, people like drug makers and policymakers who are investing in companies and invest in drug companies and other types of technology to do something better because we need to be able to do better.

[1332] We need to be able to do better for women.

[1333] You need to go to Washington and talk to the Republican Study Committee.

[1334] I mean, seriously.

[1335] Seriously, yes.

[1336] You need to do that.

[1337] Yeah.

[1338] Yeah.

[1339] I mean, we can do better for women.

[1340] We can do better for men.

[1341] We can do better for the people that love them.

[1342] And so my last chapter in my book, the letter to my daughter, I wrote, because I have a daughter.

[1343] I have a 16 -year -old daughter.

[1344] And, you know, one of the things that I've thought about just as soon as I was writing this book was, what does this mean for her?

[1345] You know, do I, would I recommend for her if she's sexually active when she's especially a teenager, would I recommend for her to go on hormonal birth control, which I know works, right?

[1346] And it's effective and it's easy to use and it's easy for a teenager to use or would I tell her to use something else?

[1347] And, you know, ultimately my conclusion to that is that, that the answer to that question is going to be unique to every single woman.

[1348] And so I included that chapter in the book because I wanted all women to hear what I will say to my daughter when we're having to make that decision in terms of what are some of the things that you need to think about.

[1349] That's how you made it personally.

[1350] Right, yeah, because, I mean, these are, this is a personal choice and I think that it's really important that we think about, like, so for example, how old are you, right?

[1351] So we've been talking about brain development.

[1352] You know, if my daughter wanted to start hormonal birth control before the age of 19, I would want her not to be on it if there's any other thing that we can do that I know would prevent her from getting pregnant if she was sexually active just because what I know about brain development.

[1353] After 19, the effects seem to be more or less reversible.

[1354] Like, I mean, so even if you go on it and something bad happens, if you discontinue it, no harm, no foul, right?

[1355] But before that time...

[1356] So the earlier, the onset, the earlier the onset, though...

[1357] Yeah, well, you know, that's also the case with sexual behavior.

[1358] So the biggest correlate, one of the biggest correlates of early sexual behavior is antisocial personality.

[1359] So when it goes back to that dark tetra issue.

[1360] Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[1361] So.

[1362] And so, you know, so, you know, thinking about that and then thinking about what are your life goals.

[1363] Why do you want to be on it?

[1364] You know, because some things, you know, preventing pregnancy when you're, especially if you're like a teen girl, for example, I mean, what an important, that's like the most important thing you can do really because, you know, there's no bigger predictor of poverty for women than single motherhood, nothing.

[1365] Right.

[1366] especially when you're a young, single mother, that's just, like, putting you on the wrong path in terms of, like, what your aspirational hopes are.

[1367] And so, you know, it's like considering where you are in your life, considering age, considering the product that you're on, and then sort of going through the different types of things that are out there, considering non -hormonal options and, like, what the costs and benefits of those things are.

[1368] Well, we need to be mature enough as a society to actually have a serious conversation with young people about sexual behavior as such.

[1369] Because one of the things, you know, One of your chapters, I can't remember exactly the title of it, is, why didn't I know this?

[1370] Yeah.

[1371] Well, we're not very good in our sex education at schools of walking people through the dangerous of short -term sexual mating strategies either.

[1372] Because you might say, well, I want to be on the pill.

[1373] I'm 16 because I want to have casual sex because that's really the issue.

[1374] It's like, well, do you really want to have casual sex?

[1375] It's like, what does that mean exactly?

[1376] Right.

[1377] What are you sacrificing of yourself?

[1378] Who is that going to make you attracted to?

[1379] Who are the males that are most likely to accept that invitation?

[1380] Because we had this idea, and the pill produced this in large part, that we could divorce sex from its broader context.

[1381] It's broader relational context, let's say.

[1382] It's political and social context.

[1383] And I don't think any of that's true.

[1384] And so for a comprehensive sex education, not only would people have to be educated in relationship to the sort of biological realities that you're describing, They'd also have to be educated in relationship to the psychological realities, the difference between short -term and long -term mating strategies, how that's associated with personality.

[1385] It's very complicated.

[1386] Yeah, and, you know, I think that there's a lot of, especially in, because we tend to think about, you know, high school students or college students and short -term sexual behavior, but a lot of the people seeking birth control are people who are in long -term relationships that are, you know, just trying to not get pregnant in the context of their long -term committed relationship.

[1387] And even just having honest, yes, I love the idea of having honest conversations about, you know, sex, sexual development and sexual relationships.

[1388] Those long -term relationships, tell me what you think about this.

[1389] You know, my sense is that you get to try out about four people in your life, and that's it, right?

[1390] Well, because if you think that fertility window, let's say it's in trouble by the age of 30.

[1391] So you've really got, by the time you have a bit of a brain, so let's say 19, you've got 11 years.

[1392] Right.

[1393] Okay, so how many people can you get to know to evaluate for long -term mating suitability in 11 years?

[1394] Well, five's a lot, I would say.

[1395] Yeah, right, right.

[1396] Yeah, no, I think that's funny.

[1397] I love that you landed on four.

[1398] I mean, it seems reasonable, right?

[1399] Like, I don't know.

[1400] Yeah, well, but the thing is, it's reasonable.

[1401] It's very finite.

[1402] Yeah.

[1403] And so that means the importance of your choice of a committed.

[1404] dating partner is likely far more important than you think, right?

[1405] Because maybe when you're 17, you think, I have lots of time.

[1406] It's like, well, you're 17 and you've only been alive for 17 years, and 10 years might seem like a long time, but it's not.

[1407] Right.

[1408] Right.

[1409] Especially when you have to push, leaving home, adopting the responsibilities of an adult, becoming educated, establishing a career, finding a long -term partner.

[1410] You've got 10 years to do that.

[1411] You're going to be running.

[1412] Especially if you're female.

[1413] Right.

[1414] All right.

[1415] Well, any parting words for the young women who are...

[1416] How has this changed your...

[1417] Let's close with this.

[1418] Yeah.

[1419] What has learning all this done to your...

[1420] To your views on birth control?

[1421] Yeah, that's good enough.

[1422] Okay.

[1423] Let me think about this for a moment.

[1424] Well, I mean, to me...

[1425] I had the same blind spot everybody else had.

[1426] I was on hormonal birth control for more than a decade of my life.

[1427] All the while, I was studying the effects of women's hormones on the brain.

[1428] I was studying psychology and behavior and the way that women's motivational shifts change in response to hormones.

[1429] And I never spent one second thinking about what the hormones in my birth control were doing to me psychologically.

[1430] Like I have that thing about, I mean, it was, yes, I had an absolute blind spot.

[1431] And so for me, this whole process really removed that blind spot.

[1432] And, I mean, it was embarrassing.

[1433] It was really embarrassing to be a psychologist.

[1434] And I'd like to think I'm a pretty good one.

[1435] And that I know a lot about a lot.

[1436] And never have to made that connection really felt like I was like, this is the most embarrassing thing ever.

[1437] Right, right.

[1438] But that's how sort of blind we all are to it.

[1439] I mean, it's also one of the things I talk about in the book is like, anabolic steroids are illegal.

[1440] because of the impact they can have on men's health because they're sex hormones and they have these nonspecific effects all throughout the body.

[1441] Hormonal birth control has all these, you know, non -specific effects throughout the body, and it's available over the counter.

[1442] So, you know, we've got...

[1443] We've got some thinking to you.

[1444] It's just a total blind spot on the way that we treat these two things.

[1445] Well, we've only had three or four generations to adapt to the biggest biological transformation in our species history.

[1446] Yeah.

[1447] I agree.

[1448] I agree.

[1449] We're in the early days of this, but it is insanely complicated and rife with unintended consequences, which you're doing a stellar job of pointing out.

[1450] And hopefully that will help spark a conversation that's a bit more productive, mature, and focused on the fact that everything has a price.

[1451] Everything has a price.

[1452] Right.

[1453] Thank you.

[1454] You bet.

[1455] Right.

[1456] Right.

[1457] To everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your attention.

[1458] to the Daily Wire people, plus people for facilitating this live conversation, which we're going to be doing a bunch of in the next couple of months.

[1459] Thank you for the time and effort expended on that.

[1460] I'm going to talk to Dr. Hill for another half an hour behind the Daily Wire Plus platform, and that's usually where I delve into more autobiographical issues.

[1461] I'm very interested in how people's interests, how their calling makes itself manifest in their life often from an early age, so we're going to find that out.

[1462] These are very useful conversations to attend to if you're interested in, well, hearing from people who've had, a stellar career and often done a good job of balancing that with their life, how they managed it, you know, and you can't hear too much about that as far as I'm concerned.

[1463] So thank you, everyone, for your attention.

[1464] Talk to you, Sue.