Kind: captions
Language: en
what do women want
tell me what all the things women want
in a long-term mate
and so i would start at one end of the
blackboard there were like five
blackboards and they said well i want a
mate who's
who's kind who's understanding who's
intelligent who's healthy who's got a
good sense of humor who shares my values
and and i just go and fill five
blackboards and then run out of space so
then i turn to the men and i say well
what do men want and then i i run out of
space after about a blackboard and a
half because they they can't think of
anything else
so the women i think there's a lot of
explanations for that
the following is a conversation with
david buss evolutionary psychologist at
ut austin researching human sex
differences in mate selection
he's considered one of the founders of
evolutionary psychology and has authored
many exciting and challenging books
including the evolution of desire
strategies of human mating
bad men the hidden roots of sexual
deception harassment and assault
and the murderer next door why the mind
is designed to kill
we talk a lot about sex dating
relationships and love
i take these at times controversial
topics very seriously
but
i also try to inject humor and
ridiculousness throughout this
conversation and all conversations i do
please do not mistake my silliness for
lack of seriousness
and my seriousness for a lack of
silliness
and above all do not mistake my suit and
tie or my
phd
as a sign of intelligence or wisdom
i barely know what i'm talking about on
most days i'm simply curious and hoping
to understand the way a child does what
the heck is going on in this weird and
wonderful civilization of ours
if i say something stupid as i often do
i promise to learn and to improve
as mark twain said
i do not want my schooling to interfere
with my education
open-minded curiosity i think is the
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in the description and now dear friends
here's david bus
what is more important in the history of
the development of human civilization
sex or violence
so mating strategies or military
strategies
oh well both are important i mean uh
first of all
humans are sexually reproducing species
and so everything has to go through sex
you know so in
our our mating psychology has to be very
rich and complex
because uh to succeed
for us to be here now
all of our ancestors in an unbroken
chain
have had to succeed in selecting a
fertile mate attracting that mate
be mutually chosen by that mate
stay together long enough do all the
sexual things you need to do to
reproduce have the kids survive etc so
everything has to go through mating and
in that sense i think it's uh i mean
survival is really only
a means to an end if you if you will
uh so uh so sex has got to be important
and humans have a very rich
evol sexual psychology or an evolved
mating psychology okay but
uh i wouldn't minimize the importance of
violence either there's a ton of
evidence that humans evolved in the
context of small groups
and with a fair amount of small group
warfare
so intertribal warfare
uh where uh and this is a harsh
realization but
there historically um this is part of
our bad evolutionary history it has been
advantageous from a purely reproductive
standpoint to
conquer
a neighboring group kill the males
and
get whatever resources they have
including
females and and sexual resources to as
well as tools weapons territory and so
forth and so
um and so i think that we have uh of
course it's it's typically males
um
who do that i mean yes some females have
participated in warfare but
as far as i know there's never been a
single case in all of human recorded
history of women forming a war tribe
with other women to attack another group
of women and kill them and capture the
men
as husbands
but the these uh this phenomenon is
common um in the ethnographic record
and small group uh studies
um it's part of our common thing so just
one concrete example unfortunately he's
dead now he passed away napoleon chagnon
who studied the yanamamo for many many
years
um when he first started interviewing
them he he asked them
you know why do you go to war um and
they said well
to to capture women of course what it's
the only sensible
reason and they said you know why do why
does your culture go to war or however
they phrased it and he said well you
know we could work for to spread
democracy and ideas and everything they
basically fell off their logs laughing
at such a stupid reason because why risk
your life for anything
um other than women of course it's more
complex than that because
some
go to war for
reputational reasons they say if we if
we don't
retaliate because we've been attacked
and they've stolen three of our women if
we don't retaliate then we will get a
reputation as exploitable and then other
groups will start to attack us as well
and so they get into these cycles of um
you know like the hatfields and mccoys
of attacks counter-attacks retribution
and part of it is is um
reputation management
um so that's that's between groups and
and i think that's been the the primary
source of
violence but not the only source so
there's also within group conflict and
so many
ethnographies many traditional societies
have
things some of them are ritualized like
wrestling matches or
in diana mama they have uh these uh
we're used to these uh chest pounding
duels where so if we're in this match
you challenge me and
i have to of course chest pounding duel
like this yeah yeah so it's not you're
not hitting each other you're just it's
like peacocking you oh no you're hitting
each other oh sorry yeah so they they
get 20 paces away and they they run up
and
you punch the other guy in the chest and
he has to basically stand there
and then he does the same and everything
oh wow uh and then
it's basically last man standing that's
well i suppose that's better than the
face
that's an interesting decision with the
chest yeah i mean i'm sure if you get
good at that kind of thing you could
start breaking ribs yeah and you can get
loose about the rules of where exactly
in the chest you can hit whatever
and there's that guy who's always known
for hitting not exactly in the chat
right where is it only missing right
right the the mike tyson of
eating your ear off so interesting so
there's like ritualized uh conflict sort
of uh
you purify the
um the competition
that that that resolves some kind of
issue well yeah it's important to
establish status hierarchies you know um
but um
but also and here's here's just another
one more concrete point on on that the
yanaman we don't have this in our
language we just have one word for
kill or murder but
mama have um you're either an una if
you're a male you're an unokai or a
non-unokai
the non-unokai are men who have not
killed
if you're an unokai that means you have
killed someone and the unokai
among the anamomo historically had
higher status and more wives said
they're a uh poliginous
uh society which is which has been true
of um something like 83 to 85 percent of
uh traditional societies
were actually i was just corrected by a
anthropologist she said we no longer
call them traditional societies we call
them small-scale societies so nothing
can be called traditional
i i don't know bacteria the traditional
society yeah yeah i think it's just uh
one of these things the language the
word the the words that are deemed
appropriate to use to describe things
change over time
so
yeah so words can hurt people they can
inspire people words are funny powerful
things
you authored the textbook titled
evolutionary psychology the new science
of mind in its uh sixth edition
what is the magic ingredient that gave
birth to homo sapiens
do you think is it fire cooking
ability to collaborate
share ideas ability to contemplate our
own mortality
all that kind of stuff yeah well i think
it's hard to isolate one factor i know
uh i know you've had richard wrangham on
this podcast it was a wonderful
wonderful interview and
uh he used to be a colleague of mine
when i was a professor at michigan and
um i've stayed in touch with him uh on
off he's a brilliant brilliant guy and
he thinks
fire and cooking have been one of the
key things but i think it's hard to
isolate
i would trace at least part of our
uniqueness to uh the uniqueness of our
mating system so we have in in mating uh
unlike chimpanzees who are our closest
primate relative and of which richard
wrangham is is a world's expert but they
have basically no long-term pure bonded
mating okay they female comes into
estrus
all the mating all the sex happens most
of the sex happens during that window
but humans have evolved long-term pure
bonded mating
uh and it's it's only one mating
strategy but it's a really important one
and then you have with that
male parental care so basically again we
go back to chimps and chimps
with whom we share more than 98 of our
dna
males don't do anything so they
inseminate the females but then when the
kids are born they basically don't do
much of anything in terms of
provisioning and so forth but human
males do we invest in the modern
environment could be decades you know
especially with the boomerang kids and
everything but
we're
not all males do
but compared to
the vast majority of mammals we are a
very heavy
male parental
investment species could you uh if it's
okay and i'll ask you a bunch of dumb
basic questions
because those are fun uh could you
define mating here how we is mating
refer to the
the the series of sexual acts that lead
to reproduction is it include like
dating and love and camaraderie
uh
loyalty all those things yes uh i you
know yes yeah when i first started
studying yeah i don't respect it's when
i first started studying it i looked for
the right
term and
obviously it's much broader than sex so
by mating i include
things like mate selection
mate preferences made attraction mate
retention mate poaching um made
expulsions i mean poaching that sounds
fun so the early the uh the game
theoretics strategy made selection is
primary with mating what meeting is
about or do you include
the long term
once uh you agree
that you're gonna stick this out for a
while and have multiple children is that
also amazing yes i include that as well
so it's it's a broad category broad
definition and and absolutely includes
the emotion of love um and
of course there are many different types
of brotherly love love parents for
children
uh but love i think uh and this is one
of the shifts in the social sciences so
when i was an undergraduate for example
i was taught that love is this um
invention by some caucasian european
poets a couple hundred years ago and um
and it turns out that's not the case so
you you there's been extensive
cross-cultural
evidence now that um that people not
every person in all cultures of course
but all some people in all cultures
experience this emotion that we call
love and for the word love
are we going to in this conversation try
to stick to sort of romantic love for
the the
for the meaning of the word love well
they're uh that's that's a great
question but um i mean they're uh it's
pretty well established that there are
these different phases of love so
there's this uh infatuation phase where
uh our psychology we we get obsessional
thoughts it's hard to focus on work when
we're not with the person we're thinking
about the other person constantly uh so
there's kind of like ideolog
ideational intrusion
into our psychology but you you can't
sustain that i mean it would be
uh and then of course
there's a uh
pardon the phrase but what i describe is
the fucking like bunnies phase of of
this you know intense sexuality but
people have other adaptive problems they
have to solve
and so you can't stay in that state for
too long and so that subsides over time
and um
and develops into uh at least in many
cases this warm attachment cuddling
bunnies long-term cuddling bunnies yes
the face of the relationship but still
romantic not like brotherly love or
you know because i i talk about a lot of
love a lot and for me
you know love is a broader
experience of just um
experiencing the joy
and the beauty of life so like just
looking out in nature yeah that's the
kind of love like whatever the chemicals
that lead to a feeling that at least
echoes the same kind of feeling that you
get with romantic love you can
experience that with even inanimate
objects that sounds weird to say but
just
a gratitude and appreciation
um not in some kind of uh weird zen way
but just in a very human way just it
feels good to be alive kind of yeah yeah
yeah i guess i i would i mean that's an
interesting thought i hadn't thought
about
that i guess there i would use other
terms to describe that so like the term
ah
for example when you see a beautiful
sunset you know that's why i kind of
started out by saying i think there are
different types of love and i'm focusing
on the mating type and we'll talk about
that but so yeah there is a sense of
beauty
and there's a sense of
sexual appeal maybe that's a good and
those intersect in fascinating ways
we'll we'll talk about that okay we'll
talk about all that but you're saying
mating
strategies not that we've kind of
uh placed ourselves what we mean by
mating mating strategies
is one of the cool features
that made humans what they are one of
the initial inventions is is the weird
uh weird and wonderful ways that we mate
yeah and
i mean if you go to
even things like um
how we compete for mates and this is
another kind of strange for some people
angle on it but
mating is inherently a competitive
process
in that desirable mates are in
secure supply relative to the numbers of
people who want them
and so even
even post mating after that is after
mate selection made attraction a mutual
mate choice
uh desirable that's why there's mate
poaching mate poaching is one of the
strategies that
we in my lab with david schmidt
have studied
and so
okay but one of the unique aspects of
humans is that we compete using language
and that is we have reputations and
humans devote a lot of effort to
maintaining their reputations to
building their reputations to
trying to recover uh
reputations after uh a loss of
reputation for various reasons but we we
compete for mates um using
language and that includes
sending signals to the person that we're
trying to attract using language
um
verbal fluency and you know obviously
some more recent things like poetry
but also we use language to derogate our
competitors
so
one of the papers i published very early
on it was a research project on
derogation of competitors
the the ways in which people impugn the
status character and reputations of
their rivals
with the goal of making them less
desirable
to
other people and humans do that and
uh women and men both do that so
it's an interesting thing that were male
competitions we were talking about the
yanamamo earlier and some of these
overt physical or what what animal
biologists call contest competition
where there's a physical battle
uh males do that and so a lot of the
early attention on
mate competition was focused on these
sort of ostentatious
overt battles in contest competition
but we compete through language
um and uh and so there's this big
overlooked domain of women the ways in
which women compete with each other
using language and one of the things
that astonished me is how
observant
women are about the
subtle
imperfections in their rivals and take
pains to point them out so
just just this is uh two random examples
i went to a party
this is back in in my youth but went to
a party with uh
my girlfriend at the time
and uh and i got into this conversation
with another woman who happened to be
very attractive
but um but then we leave the party and
she said something just casually
off-handed like said did you notice that
um her thighs were heavy and
i hadn't but next time i saw her this
other woman i
found my attention being drawn to check
out her thigh well
and originally it puzzled me
why women would deregulate other women
on appearance well they do it of course
because men prioritize
appearance but i thought well the man
can see
the woman directly with his own eyes why
would verbal input
alter his perceptions of how attractive
he was and i think that
part of it is i think there are actually
a couple two quick answers to that one
is the attentional one so our
attentional field sure when they draw
attention to it the
those what could be very small
deviations from perfect symmetry or
whatever they are become magnified in
our attentional field
but the other is that
um
who we have as a mate is also a
reflection of our own status
um and and we you saw this in a kind of
um overt and uh
way in the uh
the earlier the last presidential not
the last part of the the
uh 2016 presidential election where uh
donald trump was saying
this was when he was in competition with
ted cruz i think in the primary he said
look look at my wife look at ted cruz's
life and
wife and he really impugned the
appearance of ted cruz's
wife so using language you can
alter the um the dynamics of the social
hierarchy the status hierarchy sorry so
like you can change the values subtly or
if you have a large platform in big ways
you can move things around just with
your words yeah yeah that's right right
and fascinating
because it's all socially constructed
anyway so this uh i mean the question i
have is you said there's the interesting
thing about mating strategies is there's
a small
pool of desirable mates
and what the word desirable means is
socially defined almost by on purpose to
make sure the pool always stays small i
would have a couple thoughts on that now
it's an interesting issue set of issues
you raise okay one is that
we i think we have evolved adaptations
part of our psychology is to detect
differences
um and so this is why
um like a i don't know a a martian or an
alien coming down
they might look at humans and say boy
they all look alike
as one just like we look at i don't know
zebras or whatever we think they all
look look alike
um but
what's important in decision making
especially in the mating domain or even
friendship domain or or coalitional
selection domain is the differences
and and so i i noticed this just a
concrete example of this
uh i was sitting around this is again
ages ago uh
watching a um
something like a miss america beauty
contest and people in there with a bunch
of other people and they were saying boy
did you see miss north carolina what a
dog and and so yeah this is astonishing
so here are like a 50 contestants who
are selected as the most attractive in
their state presumably um although they
claim it's based on talent um but um
but we noticed the differences um
and and
uh and this is why i would push back a
little bit on the term socially
constructed because i think it's
um
there are many different
meanings of that of that phrase and
one meaning
that some people have one connotation is
that it's arbitrary and i don't think
it's arbitrary so
uh this has been another shift in
understanding
standards of beauty where it used to be
believed in the in the social sciences
you can't judge a book by its cover
beauty is only
the skin deep
uh you know don't judge people on the
superficial characteristics
but in fact
physical appearance provides a wealth of
information
about the health status of someone their
in the case of males their physical
formidability
and we have formidability assessment
adaptations and then fertility as well
so there are a very predictable set of
cues to fertility that have evolved to
be part of our
standards of attractiveness and and
they're not arbitrary there are some
culturally arbitrary ones so like
you go to the the maori in new zealand
for example and they find tattoos on
their lips to be very attractive
so there are some culturally arbitrary
things um but standards of beauty like
uh cues to youth cues to health
uh in women clear skin uh full lips
clear eyes lustrous hair
um a small waist hip ratio that is
circumference of the waist relative to
the hips
uh is a cue to youth infertility and and
acute health symmetrical features so we
are a bilaterally bilaterally
symmetrical species but we all have
we all have uh deviations from perfect
symmetry that are due to
different things so mutation load
uh environmental insults diseases during
development and so forth
all right but that that's kind of deeply
biological like there's cues that
indicate something
that is biologically true about a
particular human so if we we'll talk
about both men and women
uh so we're now talking about what
men want
in the mating strategies when they look
at women
so you're saying small waist
to hip ratio right
is
how much of that is our deep biological
past on top of which we can build all
kinds of different standards of beauty
so you know we have many
things going on in our brain
our value of other
humans in selecting a mate
might uh incorporate a lot more
variables
as we get into the 21st century so how
quickly does
our
valuation of a mate
uh evolve relative to the evolution of
um
the human species
they're using evolving the sense of
culturally culturally evolved and then
relative to biologically evolve yeah uh
well i think that there are um
there are some things that are
biologically evolved some standards
standards of attractiveness
um and there are some of the things that
i mentioned so in male evaluation of
females let me back up and just say what
is the underlying logic why would we
have standards of attractiveness so
um
here's the interesting thing and this
gets back to your earlier question about
what is
unique to humans or what distinguishes
us or what set us off on the path that
we did
is
chimpanzee males
do not have any difficulty
figuring out when a female is fertile
she signals that like crazy with the
bright red genital
swelling uh olfactory cues she goes into
estrus
in humans we have and this was actually
a third thing that i wanted to add
earlier we have concealed ovulation okay
relatively concealed ovulation which is
remarkable given how close we are
primatologically to to chimpanzees
and so um uh there's there's a little
bit of evidence that
there are subtle changes that occur when
women ovulate non
women not on hormonal contraceptives but
it's mostly concealed but it is it is
largely concealed i think that's a
feature of bug in uh like do we evolve
that is that is that a
cool and a powerful invention for the
human species i think it's it's an
adaptation in women that women have
evolved concealed ovulation
and i think it's a feature not a bug
it gives more would it give more power
for women
to select
a mate there are a couple different
hypotheses about it but the one that i
think is
most plausible uh is that
you know if again comparing it to chimps
fema goes into estrus the male just has
to try to monopolize her while she's in
that estrus phase and then they
basically ignore the females after that
if you can't know when if when a woman
is fertile
then you have to stick around a lot
longer and so i think long-term pair
bonding
co-evolved with concealed ovulation
and with that also a very different form
of sexuality which is that we have sex
throughout the
ovulatory cycle
um and uh chimps don't you know there's
there's a little bit of mating a little
bit of sex toward the edges of the um
ester cycle but but very little so that
that actually makes mating
a more fundamental part of um
interaction between humans than it does
for chimps so meaning like
year-round every day i'm constantly
selecting amazing in terms of
biologically speaking so what else what
else do men want
today in the 21st century versus
in the caveman days a wonderful question
to answer it though i have to
distinguish between
long-term mating and short-term mating
uh and in long-term mating it gets very
complicated
so as as a uh that's one way to put it
yeah
uh well well so i teach a course in in
human sexuality at university of texas
at austin and
um one of the things this was back in
the days when there were chalkboards and
you and you taught with a piece of chalk
and wrote things on the board
and what i would do is i would ask the
class i'd teach this the large class one
to 200. i'd say what do women want
tell me what all the things women want
in a long-term mate
and so i would start at one end of the
blackboard there were like five
blackboards and they said well i want a
mate who's who's kind who's
understanding who's intelligent who's
healthy who's got a good sense of humor
who shares my values and and i just go
and fill five blackboards and then run
out of space
and and so you the first this large
number of characteristics that people
want and then
specific magnitudes of those
characteristics or or amounts so i say
you you want a mate who's say generous
with their resources and they say yes i
what makes jennifer the research so i
said so like a guy who this is a women's
mate selection the guy who at the end of
every month gets his paycheck and gives
it to the uh local wino um on on the
dragon i said well no not that generous
okay generous toward me
not not indiscriminately generous and so
you want a mate who's um
ambitious you know who's a hard worker
yes but but not a workaholic you know
and so uh
and so then you get to interactions
among different characteristics so
there's a lot of characteristics a lot
of variables in this very complex
optimization problem for women yes
that's right and more so for women than
for men so and then i turned it to men
and i say well what do men want and then
i i run out of space after about a
blackboard and a half because they they
can't think of anything else
so the women i think there's a lot of
explanations for that
besides
the lack of the number of variables it's
also you know um
i mean that's interesting so what what's
the difference between the variables so
on the men's side what are the variables
well they're in long-term base flexion
there there's a lot of overlap sure okay
um so
things like intelligence
um good health
sense of humor um
an agreeable personality someone who's
not too
neurotic or moody or or
emotionally volatile
but there are key differences as well
and the differences stem from they
basically fall on the delimited number
of domains so for men it's physical
attractiveness physical appearance and
youth are the two real big ones okay men
prioritize those
more than women do and so that's why you
have phenomena such as uh this quote
love at first sight where sometimes men
can walk into a party and they see a
woman across the room and say that i'm
going to marry that woman that's the
woman for me women very rarely do that
now most men do don't do that either but
men are much more inclined to fall in
love at first sight that's because they
prioritize physical appearance
why because physical appearance provides
that this wealth of information
about a woman's fertility status and
this is from from an evolutionary
perspective from a purely reproductive
perspective
in in a business school they would call
it job one
job one is you have to select a fertile
mate
so those who in our evolutionary past
who selected infertile mates so
post-menopausal women for example
um did not become our ancestors so we
are all the descendants of this long and
unbroken chain of ancestors who all of
whom success succeeded in selecting a
fertile mate but fertility cannot be
observed directly
uh it can't use some cues
exactly and and there are cues that are
probabilistically related to this
underlying quality of fertility that we
can't observe directly and we're doing
that computation in our heads what about
men
what do men want for short-term mating
well so for short-term mating um
for both sexes uh physical appearance uh
looms very large so so inc so women are
no physical attractiveness and
appearance they're important for women
in long-term mate selection so i don't
want to
um mislead anyone on that they're just
not as important as they are for men
um and so a lot of characteristics come
for women before physical appearance
physical attractiveness
um
so women
so if we switch to women what do women
want they want
also physical appearance for short-term
mating yeah phys physical attractiveness
what else uh well some cues that
represent physical attractiveness that
maybe represent health well here's this
is your
i'm learning a lot here yeah well so but
you're also asking a very interesting
question about uh what is a
controversial within the evolutionary
psychology
field right right and not totally
resolved so that's why you're on the
sixth edition of the book and there
could be a lot more additions coming
yeah i revised it every four years or so
because there's four years of um new
interesting work and so it deserves
updating but
the
traditional i should say uh
answer to your question is that women go
for good genes cues to good genes in the
short term
and
cues to resources in the long term and
this has been a hypothesis that
advocated i didn't come up with this
this one um
by um
steve gangstad a former student of mine
marty hales and randy thornhill and some
other um
very smart players in the field
and um and what they used as uh
markers of good genes are things like
symmetrical features
uh and masculine features so
strong jawline high shoulder to hip
ratio
you know other other sorts of masculine
features
but i started to doubt this
explanation for what women want in the
short term
because of some other
findings so for for women a lot of
short-term mating is not
one-night stand mating so
but rather it's uh a fair mating
so uh so if you ask the question why do
women have affairs
so let's restrict the question for a
moment
my colleagues would argue well women
have affairs because they're trying to
get good genes from one guy
while they're getting an investment from
the regular partner the the husband
okay but the problem is that when women
have affairs
uh 70 plus percent tend to fall in love
with or become attached to their a fair
partner
now outside what percentage 70 yeah 70
some large majority yeah 70 percent
or more
in contrast to men where it's more like
30 percent of men who have affairs
fall in love with or become attached to
their fair partner
so but from a design perspective um an
engineering perspective if you will uh
that's a disastrous thing if you're just
trying to get good genes so you're
trying to retain the investment of one
guy yeah while getting good genes
surreptitiously from this you know guy
who presumably has more
falling in love with them becoming
attached that's that's not a feature you
want yeah it's bad engineering yeah
exactly it's bad engineering and so and
so i developed a an alternative uh
hypothesis that i call the
mate-switching hypothesis
which is that um
affairs are one way in which women
divest themselves of a
a cost inflicting partner or a partner
who
things aren't working out well with and
it's a way to either transition back
into the mating market or to or to trade
up in in the mating market
uh and and so and anyway so these are
these are probably the two leading
hypotheses about why why women have
affairs and i
am putting my money on the mate
switching hypothesis um
my
esteemed colleagues are putting their
money on the good genes hypothesis but i
think
the evidence for the good genes
hypothesis is starting to um
look shakier than initially
but this is a heated debate i mean made
squishing sounds like a so from a game
theory perspective from an engineering
perspective seems to make a lot more
sense unless you put a lot of value
in lifelong sort of in the long term
mating
uh some kind of
value in the um lifelong singular
relationship like monogamy yeah
and maybe we do psychologically maybe
there's a big
evolutionary advantage to that and we we
do but we also know that divorce is you
know um and breakups are are also common
that occur in all cultures so yeah um
we're just not very good at this thing
well either we're not good at the mate
selection
such that
uh maybe we're
we're not incorporating
all the variables well or we're just not
good at monogamy period
from an evolutionary perspective well i
think they're
that's
a debate no that's raises an interesting
set of questions so i think that
i mean one issue is is longevity so i
mean we didn't live
to be 70 80
years old
and over 99 of human evolutionary
history and so we didn't necessarily
evolve to be
mated monogamously with one person for
decades and decades and decades
but i also think that
long-term peer bonding is a critical
strategy but mate switching is also a
critical strategy so if you have a mate
for example who
becomes cost inflicting or becomes
sufficiently debilitated or who
suffers
an injury such that like in
hunter-gatherer societies where the mate
can no longer
hunt can no longer provide resources for
their kids and and and the woman
this becomes this becomes a problem and
so uh and so i think that we have
adaptations to mate switch and to divest
ourselves from
some partners and trade up in the mating
market under certain conditions
so okay and those conditions will differ
from men and women what are some of the
cues
in terms of what women want um you know
i'll go to the gym
so a hotly contested debate you said
evolutionary psychology and this is uh
in the uh bro psychology forums that i
visit uh multiple times a day and no i'm
just kidding uh what what what's the
most important cue of appearance
for guys
um
what muscle group is the most important
to work on do women care about biceps is
what i'm asking in terms of physical
appearance um
uh
a a good um
shoulder to hip ratio
so
relatively wide shoulders relative to
hips um
is is one
women tend to prefer men who are uh
physically fit and
well
toned but not
muscle bound so like if you go to oh i
don't know someone like
those early when arnold schwarzenegger
was
doing the
mis mr whatever it was contest you see
the women don't find those attractive
the extremely muscle-bound guys but they
like
a guy who's physically fit high shoulder
to hip ratio
they like guys who are physically taller
than they are
and guys who are a bit above average in
in height so
if the average so if uh
you know the average is i don't know
five nine five ten and out there for
humans depending on the culture women
prefer uh an inch or two taller than
that
um so um so shoulders
height
dad bod
wha what's that about why don't why why
do you want a dad by what why do you
why why not how do i define
wait what is a dad bod dad bot is not
muscle-bound okay so out of shape a
little no no no just a little bit
a little bit of uh
uh cushion for the pushing i don't know
what the kids call it these days uh but
just a little bit a little bit of fat so
what's why do they not want guys to be
obsessed with their body is that or is
that some evolutionary thing
yeah i think that um
women
might interpret a guy who is so obsessed
with his body that he's uh they might
view that as a sign of narcissism yes
um and that's not a good trait
uh
what about like cultures where
large sort of overweight men are valued
is that how do you explain
like how much can we override the
evolutionary desires with our sort of
cultural
fashions of the day that maybe represent
other
desirable aspects like wealth well
wealth is
resources have always been important
um especially to women so is a man
able to acquire resources and is he
willing to dispense them to her and her
kids so that's always important in
traditional cultures that boils down to
hunting skills so
if so i have to
call a friend kim hill who's uh probably
the world's leading expert on the aceh
of paraguay
and uh and you ask him like what what
leads to high status in the aceh in
males hunting skills that's that's nice
one the one thing the big variable and
that's resources and that's resources
now what's what's interesting about
modern culture is we have cash economies
but cash economies are relatively recent
and
you know historically there's over the
vast uh 99 of human evolutionary history
you weren't able to stockpile resources
in the way that you are today
um
although there are interestingly certain
ways you can do it so so like you you
kill a large game animal okay you bring
it back you get some status points
because you
give some to your family you can share
it more widely with the group etc
um but um but it's going to go bad right
you can't just say i'm going to keep
this carcass around for the next several
months okay but
and and i think i think it's a steve
pinker who might have used coin this
phrase that they they store the meat in
the bodies of other people and so for
example they store it in their friends
so
you know um
hunting success is uh
you know it's it's a hit or miss kind of
thing so you might come back
empty-handed
four times out of five
but and but when you do you share your
meat with others and then when
you know and then they reciprocate by
sharing their meat with you and so and
so you can store resources in the bodies
of other people which is i think an
interesting way to think about it but
that can only go so far and when you
have cash economies you have both the
ability to stockpile resources but also
this kind of explosion and
inequality of resources
and that's evolutionarily recent what
about now this is the difference between
the hubermann the excellent huberman lab
podcast that you did that people should
listen to
he is a brilliant scientist a um
sort of
uh
a rigorous analyst of what is true in
the scientific community also helps you
with great advice on how to live now in
contrast to that i am a um
a terrible
uh
uh almost idiotic level journalist so
this is what you have to deal with
another thing that people talk about
that women care about is penis size does
penis size matter for women in sexual
selection
well um there's controversy about that
in the evolutionary psychology community
well
is there papers on penis size i wouldn't
say
a scientific paper so speculations
about
in nature or in science yeah yeah no
nothing nothing that i've seen there
um
you know i i think that there's
individual variability um so uh this is
something that comes up again you know
when i ask women in the class my classes
you know what do women want some will
say you know a large penis
but i think there's variability um in in
that preference and it also might depend
in part on the variability in
the woman's anatomy
so
um do you think there's something
fundamental in terms of evolutionary
psychology in terms of evolution or is
this a quark of culture that's current
that's maybe somehow connected to
pornography or something like that yeah
my my guess is it's it's something
that's uh
perhaps a quirk of culture or or
something that is
evolutionarily recent
um but um but but i don't know i mean
it's it's a topic that hasn't been
explored much i've never done work on it
and well somebody should do a phd uh
sort of some archaeologist should do a
phd on the history of
human civilization
and its
evaluation of penis size and the
correlation of penis size to the value
of the male
okay moving on another absurd question
in terms of what men want
again definitely not a huberman lab
podcast question
why do men
let's say a large fraction of men love
boobs
well uh i think that uh
you're one of the uh most cited
evolutionary psychologists
and this is what you signed up for this
is these kinds of questions questions
like this yeah well so again this is
something i haven't studied directly but
um
uh
scientifically yes yes uh but um but
yeah there's been some work on that and
and it's uh another cultural quirk
perhaps no i don't think it's a cultural
quirk because i think it's the uh
the shape
that matters a lot because
shape is going to be a cue to fertility
and
so one of the things that humans are
attracted to in the opposite sex is
sexually dimorphic features and breasts
are a sexually dimorphic feature and
dymorphic mean
difference between
difference in morphology between males
and females got it
um
diamond to morphic morphology
uh so um
and women don't develop uh
breasts until um
puberty or post-puberty
uh and and so uh as a sexually demorphic
characteristic we tend to be attracted
that same is true by the way with the
waist-to-hip ratio that we mentioned
earlier
uh prior to puberty males and females
have very similar ways to ratios but at
puberty um there's a differential
uh
hip development and fat deposition that
creates a sexual dimorphism uh with
respect to waist-hip ratio and so again
that's
men are attracted to this wasted ratio
that no man consciously says that they
find this woman more attractive than
that woman they don't think ah she has a
waist up ratio 0.70 that's exactly what
i do but most men most men yes
so
isn't that fascinating that we just
build these entire industries the
fashion and what we find beautiful
around
these kinds of ideas and we just
and then not just not just fashion and
then we build
uh we have
uh sociological tensions about whether
we should care about this kind of thing
or not
there's there's battles in that space
it's it's like
they seem so simple it's just the human
body and we wear clothes first of all
that's that's a funny thing what what's
the why are we wearing clothes what's
the shame aspect yeah of covering up the
body is that another feature or is that
what is that yeah that's a that's a
that's an interesting question and i i
don't know it's just like hiding uh
ovulation maybe that's another hiding
like uh maybe hiding is a great game
theoretic thing to play with because it
can give you it can give the powerless
more power
by covering well well maybe well i think
there are a few things so one is
the sort of arbitrary features of
fashion and then the other is the
aspects of fashion that attempt to um
magnify are what is inherent in our
evolved standards of beauty so for
example um women tend to wear things
that accentuate their waist hip ratio
so i mean
historically those
in the old days corsets for example
cinch the woman's waist
and you wouldn't see fashion develop in
a way that made a woman seem
old unhealthy
pock marked
signs of
open sores or lesions
there are certain domains um design
spaces that you wouldn't that no culture
would develop
um
so but there are arbitrary features but
sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary
or they're arbitrary at one level of
description but not another so for
example
fashion tends to be linked with status
and that's why it constantly changes
the high status people start wearing a
certain type of
clothing
and then when the lower status people
imitate them then they have to shift to
signal their status and so i think the
fashion and clothing is important linked
to
status
so this is not you talking this is me i
just want to make a
a statement a profound statement that i
think yoga pants now this is broadly
speaking but yoga pants is one of the
greatest inventions in human history
there's fire
and
i'm just going to leave it there i'm a
fan
um and i have uh female friends that
talk about how comfortable yoga pants
are which is what i'm referring to when
i say it's one of the greatest
inventions because comfort and fashion
is really um really important to me let
me ask about sort of the sociological
aspect of this
so i've um
i've talked to mark zuckerberg who
uh
the meta who's the ceo
founder of facebook and now meta and
owns i've heard of him yeah he's a yeah
he uh he uh holds the american flag and
likes the water
anyway um
so there's been criticisms of social
networks and so on
and i just want to ask you about the
broader question here that there's uh
object objectification of the human body
in the media and that creates standards
for young women
for young men perhaps but more
young women yeah um you mentioned to the
cruelty that women can have towards each
other in terms of well let's
you know cruelty is already a moral
judgment just you've made a statement
about the fact that women
uh
seem to point out imperfections in other
women
um
do you think it's a problem
in our modern society that
we
objectify each other in this way do you
think this is this is a
fundamental aspect of our biology that
we need
to um
suppress
versus celebrate
just like we might suppress our natural
desire for violence if such exists
um in modern society well a couple
couple thoughts on that i i think it is
um damaging um the uh the fact that uh
so many images are displayed in in
social media and so
um what i would say is that there's
what's called in in the field uh an
evolutionary mismatch
so we evolved in the context of small
group living
where there was make competition but
your competitors were a small number of
other potential
individuals and so people do comparisons
um
okay but now what we have is
uh this bombardment bombardment of our
visual
system and our sexual psychology and our
mating psychology with with
thousands and thousands of images uh
that are not at all representative of
who our actual competition
is in in in the mating domain
and so i think that um
and there's actually evidence on this
that um uh
baz luhrmann actually said something
like this in his uh sunscreen song i
don't know if you've ever heard that but
it's like i said it's a wonderful
like string of advice song about advice
but he says uh oh yeah yeah okay yeah he
says don't
read beauty magazines that will only
make you feel ugly you know i think that
there's
truth to that that is especially with
with women they look at all these images
and
you know of course they're
photographed they're photoshopped uh
they're they're highly selected and and
not at all representative
and so women compare themselves to that
so i think this social comparison is an
evolved
feature of humans i mean males do it
females do it
but it's exacerbated in the modern
environment in wildly
evolutionarily mismatched ways and so i
think i think that it is it is
destructive it's harmful
there's evidence that um it hurts
women's self-esteem
so
here's just another uh
factoid or fact if you will that at
least in western cultures
uh males and females have roughly the
same overall average levels of
self-esteem
but once
uh puberty hits all of a sudden women's
self-esteem starts to drop and i think
it's because when they enter
make competition then they start
elevating the importance they attach to
physical appearance and then as you
point out the the tremendous
objectification
that saturates social media and media in
general is um it's damaging and harmful
i don't know how to undo it though i
don't know how to design a society that
um that undoes that well one of the ways
we undo things just like you pointed out
is we use words when we manipulate
society we manipulate social and status
hierarchies using our words for ill
and we can do the same for good and
that's why there's
a lot of click-bait articles about uh
you know instagram
um
hit you know
leading to a lot of suffering amongst uh
teenage girls and all those kinds of
things
um
i'm criticizing the clickbait bait
nature and not the contents of the
articles but you know and those articles
hopefully become viral in a way that
makes us rethink about how we
build social networks that kind of allow
us to to easily misrepresent how we look
when we are quote-unquote influencers
and what a mental effect it has on the
um
on young people that look up to those
influencers but i guess you're it's not
the objectification fundamentally that's
the problem it's the
inaccurate it's the fake news
it's the yeah that's
misrepresentation
you still objectify
uh the male body the female body but you
do so uh while misrepresenting the
actual truth and and so you're moving
the average you're moving the standard
representation of what a male should
look like what a woman should look like
and uh
the dishonesty is the problem not the
objectification here's just one other
interesting empirical finding on that
and it has to do with another dimension
that i think is harmful and and that's
the thinness dimension
uh and so if you
and these are studies originally done by
paul rosen but they've been replicated
where if you ask men okay what is your
ideal figure in a woman and so they have
these say nine figures that vary from
very very thin to average to to plump
men
give it the midpoint they say the the
the midpoint is in
relative thinness or plumpness is what i
value and you ask women
what is your ideal body type for you
they give it they say thinner but then
if you ask them what do you think males
ideal body type is they put it in
exactly the same spot that they put
their own idea which is
thin and so there's actually an
inaccurate perception of how thin
men desire women to be
uh and i think that's partly
exacerbated by the the fashion industry
where the the models are often real thin
and you know they're
the lure is that clothes hang better on
thin models and then on tv they say you
gain 15 pounds over what you really are
or whatever but for whatever reason
women misperceive how thin men want them
to be and so you have this is another
huge sex difference
is eating disorders
anorexia
for example bulimia
binging purging where these these
disorder eating disorders are nine to
ten times more common in women
than men
can i just take a small tangent because
it is such a beautiful uh the sunscreen
song such a beautiful one if i can read
some of the words from it yeah i i
really enjoy it yeah it's great it's a
great song for people you should check
it out it's called everybody's free to
wear sunscreen i guess it's actually a
speech
to a class i don't know if that's
artificial or real but it's it's a
speech that gives advice and it goes
ladies and gentlemen of the class of 97.
i just remember it even now those those
words where's sunscreen
if i could offer you only one tip for
the future sunscreen would be it a
long-term benefits of sunscreen have
been proven by scientists whereas the
rest of my advice has no basis more
reliable than my own meandering
experience i will dispense this advice
now
enjoy the power and beauty of your youth
oh never mind you will not understand
the power and beauty of your youth until
they're faded but trust me in 20 years
you look back at the photos yourself and
recall in a way you can't grasp now how
much possibility laid before you and how
fabulous you really looked
you are not as fat as you imagined
don't worry about the future or worry
but know that worrying is as effective
as trying to solve an algebra equation
by chewing bubble gum the real troubles
in your life are apt to be the things
that never cost your worried mind
the kind that blindsides you at 4 pm on
some idol tuesday
do one thing every day that scares you
saying don't be reckless with other
people's hearts
don't put up with the people who are
reckless with yours
floss
don't waste your time on jealousy
sometimes you're ahead sometimes you're
behind the race is long and in the end
it's only with yourself
remember compliments you receive forget
the insults
if you succeed in doing this tell me how
keep your old love letters throw away
your old bang statements
stretch
don't feel guilty if you don't know what
you want to do with your life the most
interesting people i know didn't know at
22 what they wanted to do with their
lives
some of the most interesting 40 year
olds i know still don't
for me that's true for 50 60 and 70 year
year olds honestly get plenty of calcium
be kind to your knees you'll miss them
when they're gone
maybe you'll marry maybe you won't maybe
you'll have children maybe you won't
maybe you'll divorce a 40 maybe you'll
dance the funky chicken on your 75th
wedding anniversary whatever you do
don't congratulate yourself too much or
berate yourself either
your choices are half chance so are
everybody else's
enjoy your body
use it every way you can
don't be afraid of it or what other
people think of it it's the greatest
instrument you'll ever own
dance even if you have nowhere to do it
but in your own living room read the
directions even if you don't follow them
do not read beauty magazines they will
only make you feel ugly
get to know your parents you never know
when they'll be gone for good
be nice to your siblings
they're your best link to your past
and the people most likely to stick with
you in the future
understand that friends come and go
but a precious few
who should hold on
work hard to bridge the gaps in
geography and lifestyle for as older you
get the more you need the people he knew
when you were young live in new york
city once i actually took this advice
this is fascinating advice i remember
this advice
well
uh it's broadly applied live in new york
city once but leave before makes you
hard
live in northern california once but
leave before makes you soft
travel
accept certain inalienable truths prices
will rise
politicians will philander you too will
get old and when you do you'll fantasize
that when you were young prices were
reasonable politicians were noble and
children respected their elders
respect your elders don't expect anyone
else to support you maybe you have a
trust fund maybe you'll have a wealthy
spouse but you never know
when either one might run out
never mess too much with your hair or by
the time you're 40 it will look 85
be careful whose advice you buy
but be patient with those who supply it
advice is a form of nostalgia dispensing
it is a way of
fishing the past from the disposal
wiping it off painting over the ugly
parts and recycling it for more than
it's worth but trust me on the sunscreen
so this is uh
thank you for allowing me to read it
it's almost sentimental for me i don't
know when i first heard it um
but there's a few pieces of advice in
that
you know similar to like the poem if by
roger kipling
um there's some deep truths when you
step back and look at it all and also
the
the places where you live
because i i i
lived for time in i guess northern
california with google
and so on
and one of the reasons i had to leave is
i was becoming i felt i was becoming
soft
this this is my own personal experience
and the same is true for the uh uh
the cities of the east
they can if you're not careful make it
hard because everybody's super busy and
rushing around and
and uh there's just a buzz to the city
which is exciting it's empowering but it
can
it can it can change you in ways and so
it's one of the reasons i'm here in
austin i fell in love with the city
because yeah it's been a great move and
yeah i've lived on both coasts as well
um boston
area and then uh berkeley california
so um so i'm familiar with both you end
up in
austin as a small side well uh well i
got i got my undergraduate degree here
uh and then left for 20 years and
migrated around
so went to berkeley uc berkeley for my
phd
harvard for my first job university of
michigan and then a job opened up
at university of texas
for an evolutionary psychologist and so
um
they
wanted me fortunately so i was very
happy to so i've always loved austin i
mean it's uh yeah the love never died it
was there yeah yeah it's a great time i
was glad that i left so and experienced
well both coasts and also the midwest
but um happy to be back in austin
let me ask a difficult question now we
did pretty good with some difficult
questions already but
there are people in this world today who
believe that gender is purely a social
construct
you i think are not one of those people
to you what are the difference between
men and women
how much of those differences are in
nature and how much is nurture
i guess if we you're asking the question
morphologically or psychologically i
assume you're asking psychologically the
question is what it is
and the answer
sometimes the questions
don't contain with them the trajectory
you take with the answer right so
i think i was asking both
and the fact that both our thing is an
interesting thing
yeah so you wrote a book
textbook i should say evolutionary
psychology
right yes those both of those words are
in the book title
psychology that's the human mind yes
yeah how much of gender how much of sex
is the human mind
and how much of it is the biology the
way that i phrase it so i i don't like
um
sort of dividing the world into two
categories things that are biological
versus things that are not biological
um
so the biology is actually defined as
the study of life and life processes and
so at that sort of abstract level
everything we do is biological including
culture and our capacity for culture
which i think is an evolved capacity
that humans have
um
when you get to the issue of sex and
gender i mean one cut at your question
is
are there universal psychological sex
differences
um and the answer to that question is
yes there are some
so for example
well and this is in in one of your areas
of specialty uh engineering
um one of the interesting things is that
uh it's called the people's thing
dimension so
do you want an occupation you want a job
that involves
people social interaction
or are you happy with a job that just
involves things mechanical objects or
computer code or whatever
and this is one of the largest
psychological sex differences that that
exists and it's true in every culture
so uh in terms of i don't know um
magnitude of effects it's a an effect
size of
more than a standard deviation
difference between the means
um on this psychological sex difference
and so one of the interesting things is
so if you go to places like go to the
most
gender egalitarian cultures in the world
so places like sweden
uh or norway
uh
which are explicitly
gender egalitarian and and are truly in
many many ways
and but you allow people freedom of
choice the the some of these sex
differences actually get larger the
psychological sex differences and also
assortment into different occupational
uh choices
um now but this this is not something
that i study i study
mating and
the sex differences if you ask what are
the where in what domains are the sex
differences the largest it turns out
they occur within the domain of mating
and sexuality so our evolved sexual
psychology our evolved mating psychology
is to some degree
sexually dimorphic okay with the
uh very important asterisk that we're
talking about overlapping distributions
so there are some things that so if you
look at human morphology um
we talked about breasts earlier women
have evolved
functional breasts that's functional for
lactation
men don't so there's not no amount of
culture or social coercion can cause men
to have lactating breasts
uh psychologically we don't see
dimorphism that extreme where something
is
literally present in one sex and totally
absent in the other so there's overlap
in the distributions
so i mentioned earlier that
in the mating domain men men more than
women on average prioritize physical
appearance physical attractiveness
relative youth women on average
prioritize resources resource
acquisition qualities that lead to
resource acquisition like status
ambition industriousness and so forth
but there's overlap in the distribution
so some women place the
total priority on how physically
attractive the guy is and
uh some men
view that as
irrelevant and and and uh so the the
point that i'm making is that there are
there are psychological sex differences
that um make some people uncomfortable
um but you know it's one of these things
where
i'm
a scientist uh i'm not a
political advocate uh um and so i'm i
adhere to the empirical data on
empirical data are very strong in these
domains so with respect to sex
differences in the mating domain and
sexuality
and things we haven't talked about like
desire for sexual variety and sex
differences in the whole uh
desire for short-term mating
huge sex differences there
and these have been documented
universally in all cultures so
okay now are there uh are there things
that are culture specific or social
cultural overlays onto these fundamental
psychological sex differences absolutely
but
there's also an issue of um
levels of analysis levels of abstraction
and how closely you look at the
phenomenon so
quick analogy language so you say well
um in china they speak chinese and korea
they speak korean in brazil they speak
portuguese
they look how culturally infinitely
variable languages are which they are at
that level
but do humans have a universal human
innate grammar and i think the evidence
points to the answer yes to that at
least
that's what steve pink or paul bloom and
some other
uh others argue so at one level of
abstraction things are infinitely
culturally variable or at least highly
culturally variable and another level of
abstraction there's universality so
here's one example in the mating domain
of this so
margaret mead who is a famous um
anthropologist
studied the samoan islanders and she
tried to argue basically for the
infinite malleability of things like
gender and gender roles and so forth
she's and she said look at this culture
the in this culture it's the men who
paint their face
whereas you know in western cultures
it's the women who wear makeup and so
forth well it turns out if you if you
look carefully at the culture where men
paint their face they're painting a
war paint on their face they're not
they're not
putting on makeup to enhance their cues
to youth and cues to health they're
putting on war paint to make themselves
more ferocious or to demarcate what
tribe they're in what coalition they're
in and so at sort of one level have a
abstraction you could say well there's
high cultural variability and
application of face paint but on another
level there's really a fundamental
functional difference in the purpose to
which the paint is applied
yeah and then you can abstract the paint
away and
i mean fashion in general just magnify
the characteristics that are appealing
to the opposite sex because war pain is
probably
you know it is you're magnifying the
characteristics that are appealing to
you
the other sex so ability to gain
resources maintain resources is um
status
status and the hierarchy all those kinds
of things well but well that's that's
part of it but i think another part has
to do with in in that case male
coalitions so we we were
intense this is another unique
characteristic i don't know if you got
into this with richard rang i don't
remember you talking about this but
he's written a lot about male
coalitionary psychology and humans
cooperate
uh to an extraordinary
degree forming coalitions
for the purpose of competing with rival
coalitions and so you even see this with
um well you see it in the sports sports
arenas with with team sports you know
where this team wears a different
uniform than that team
uh they have different mascot etc and so
part of that is um
male coalitionary psychology
well you so you write again
returning to the textbook now people
should know you wrote a lot of
incredible book that is maybe more
accessible than the evolutionary
psychology textbook but
uh oh so the the evolutionary psychology
textbook is very accessible yes it is
extremely accessible but that's not your
thing and on amazon you can't
you know
it's a pain it's a textbook it's not you
know it's it's a little bit more of a
pain to purchase which i did i bought
all your books
they're amazing uh we'll talk about a
bunch of them but
in terms of coalitions in chapter 12 of
your evolutionary psychology textbook
you write about status prestige and
social dominance
so how do hierarchies of status and
social dominance emerge in human society
and what's the value of status and
sexual selection we talked about
uh cues of individual health and all
that kind of stuff but what the heck's
the purpose of status why why does it
matter if i'm the big boss
well uh it matters because
status is
influences your access to resources and
your ability to influence other people
within your within your group
and so um this is part of the reason why
women
prioritize a man's social status uh how
he is viewed in the eyes of others
because high status men have access to
to more resources
it's interesting that you ask about that
because um i've
just published this is with patrick
durkee a former graduate student of mine
we published a couple papers on
precisely this issue where we looked at
what we call human status criteria that
is what are the things that lead to
increases or decreases in status and we
did this in 14 different cultures
and we found some things that are
universal
but also some things that are sex
differentiated
and so universal things like people
value
trustworthiness they value um
intelligence wisdom knowledge
so it's even if you go across cultures
uh even to the small-scale cultures that
we alluded to earlier
uh there are these wise wise people wise
men and wise women in the culture who
have
uh people go to for advice for wisdom
and so having
a wide range of knowledge is is a
universal status criterion
and there's some things that are sex
differentiated and they often fall into
the mating domain as well this is where
mating and status are
interestingly related to each other
in that
um successful mating increases your
status but having high status also gives
you access to more desirable mates
um and so
the game gets harder and harder always
so wait uh
so are we talking about what are the
characters what what's the role of power
and wealth
those kinds of things
so you said wisdom is universal yeah
what about wealth and power yeah well uh
well um i guess it depends on what you
mean by power so i think of power as the
ability to to influence a large number
of people yeah so um
and this is one of the interesting
things about
the fact that cash economies are so
are evolutionarily very recent
in that we're people are like so so i
guess recently or it's about to happen
uh that um elon musk is gonna
buy a
okay where to say it happen
is it happening already yeah okay so
they said like the the
wealthiest or one of the wealthiest men
on earth has now purchased the most
influential media platform
uh
on earth and so obviously you or i
couldn't um
compete with elon musk and uh
for the purchase of twitter and so
uh the fact that that cash economies
allow the stockpiling of unprecedented
amounts of wealth
produces these tremendous power
differentials that that didn't exist in
in over most of human evolutionary
history
so their wealth is power but you can
also be
um
the power can be attained through other
ways yeah but but but i would say that
the interesting thing about
wealth
is that it's
an infinitely fungible resource
so you can
use it and translate it into
many many other things like buying a
buying twitter or
buying a big house or
or even getting mates or
an artificial um in the i don't know if
you don't want to get into that at all
but i need to have these
sex dolls or
virtual virtual reality sex that some
people are are developing
if you have enough resources you can
purchase things like that so
you can trans you can translate wealth
into a variety of other
tangible things in ways that that you
couldn't ancestrally
so
that's one really powerful thing but
there is still power
that's correlated but not
intricately connected to what wealth
which is like being leaders of nations
like technically the president of the
united states salary is not very high
right
presidents and and then you look you go
outside of that into the half of the
world that's living under authoritarian
regimes you have dictators
and there's uh
those those are very powerful usually
men
uh
and
presumably there's some
value there in the meeting selection
aspect yeah yeah absolutely and and it's
not by chance that um
most of them are men
um and this is
gonna sound
strange or and hopefully not offensive
to people but
um
if you ask the question why are why is
it the case that men are in positions of
power
so much more so than than women well in
part it can be traced to women's mate
preferences so it's one of the sex
differences that women have over
revolutionary time preferred men who had
power status resources
etc and what that has done is it's
created selection pressure on men to
attach a high motivational priority to
clawing their way up the status
hierarchy um and and uh studies of uh
time allocation distribution show this
where men
are they're more willing to sacrifice
their their friends their grandmother
their kin or whatever to claw their way
up to the top of status hierarchies
women much less women
spend more effort maintaining
relationships with their kin through
their friends their friend networks and
so forth and so
um and and so in a way uh so
you could say not only are you uh not
only are men in positions of power more
than women now you're blaming women for
why they are and it's not it's not a
matter of blame but i think that that
what i just outlined is is an essential
part of the causal process the
co-evolution of women's mate preferences
with men's motivational priorities
how much do you think these mating
strategies underlie all of human
civilization like what motivates us
uh you know there's uh
uh becker with the denial of death like
what
why do we build castles and bridges and
rockets and
the internet and all of this is it some
complex mush or is it underneath at all
are we all just trying to get laid
uh well i wouldn't reduce it to
something
quite as trying to get laid um but i
think i think mating is is is certainly
part of it
um i wonder how big of a part because
also with with uh ernest becker the idea
is that we're all trying to achieve an
illusion of immortality yeah so we're
trying to create something that outlasts
us and therefore we create bigger and
bigger things in societies and bridges
and yeah well i think what's what's
missing from becker's analysis is uh you
know i mean it's it's it's a fascinating
book to read denial of death but what's
missing is that i think that the reason
that
and and again i think it's more men than
women i think there's a sex difference
on this that men
want to build a a lasting legacy because
that will in turn affect
their lineage
and uh although i i do now woody allen
is out of favor but i remember this
quote from him he said he said he didn't
want to achieve immortality through his
work he wanted to achieve immortality by
not dying
oh boy the
the funny ones are also
uh deeply flawed often
staying on the topic of sex differences
in a very different way perhaps so
dominance
and submissiveness
something you've also written about
what's the role of that inside
relationships about this human dynamic
of dominance and submissiveness
is that a feature or a bug
so the the stable state that these
dynamical systems arrive at
uh is it good
to have an
equality within a relationship
or is it good to have differences in a
relationship uh are you talking about
romantic relationships or just in human
relationships romantic probably because
unless it could be generalized to human
relationships perhaps it could be
generalized to human relationships i
wasn't thinking that but perhaps it
could be but let's start with romantic i
guess one-on-one i'm personally in favor
of uh equality uh on that dimension
within romantic relationships and
um in the
in
i don't talk about my personal life uh
but um but i've been in relationships uh
and the best ones tend to be those where
where there's uh equality and
one person does not uh dominate the
other um but
i guess what i was the reason i asked
you is in what type of relationships
because there are some
things like coalitions where
hierarchy is very important to the
function of the coalition
so it's like you if you're like a war
coalition or something in small group
warfare
you can't just have equality you have to
have um
leaders that are
determining the um
the battle plan so to speak
um and so if you have uh
you you're you're attacking a
neighboring group or something and
everyone gets an equal say it's not
gonna work that way and so we tend to
appoint as leaders those who are
just not always work out well but those
who are presumably wise or good
effective leaders and even talk about
and i'm sure you're
familiar with this and i'm not an expert
on this but you know wartime leaders
versus peacetime leaders and so again it
depends on
you know what the goal is of the group
that you are a part of
um and so and so i think there is
functionality and utility
to a lot of our evol psychology of
status and dominance and submissiveness
so for example
and you have to look at the individual
psychology and this is actually
something i'm currently studying um
again with with patrick durkee
where
one advantage of these status
hierarchies is that you're not always
battling
you know so you determine um
and that's why
here's another sexually dimorphic
aspect of our psychology
formidability assessment so there's
there's evidence that males engage in
this you know can i take this guy or can
he take me like and it's like it's the
entirety of my life yes it's like a
spontaneous assessment of of
formidability
and
and it also the that information is
critical because that means like who you
should not
challenge or or who you can challenge
with impunity impunity so
um and and there's functionality to
submitting uh as well you know because
you you defer to someone
so that you don't get vanquished and you
live to see another day
uh
so i think we actually have a very rich
psychology of status hierarchies and
dominance and submissiveness so
especially sort of uh
violent
conflict
yes
but back to relationships
so maybe phrased another way
what is masculinity what is femininity
is there value inside of a relationship
for den for differences
you talked about meetings meeting
strategies with the dating stage where
you're selecting the mate but also
within
you know
mating broadly defined as the entirety
of the process are should those
differences
be magnified and celebrated
or
um
sort of suppressed
i've seen enough different relationships
work and i've seen enough relationships
implode to
say there's no there's not one size fits
all on on these things so even with
respect to masculinity and femininity
some reduce it psychologically to two
other terms which are agency and
communion so where agency is you know
are you
instrumental goal oriented um get tasks
done et cetera communion is you know
more the the love and forming
connections with other people and so
forth
um and i published a study a while back
on uh on what's called unmitigated
agency and unmitigated communion so you
there are like good and bad aspects of
agency and communion so they can go so
there's toxic as they say masculinity
toxic femininity
you can just rephrase that saying there
could be toxic agency and toxic
communion yeah yeah and so and so some
elements of masculinity uh the
unmitigated masculinity is uh i think
terrible i was actually walking around
downtown austin earlier today there's
this example and
this guy um was um i guess stuck and
wanted the car ahead of him to move
and all of a sudden he screamed out of
who's gonna
move your fucking car like
and and then
jumped out of his car and to a push
to me that's that's um
toxic masculinity if you will we don't
need that you know
yeah so in this by the way as somebody
who worked with cars quite a long time
in terms of human interaction with
semi-autonomous vehicles it's so
fascinating
how the car
and traffic
brings out like the worst
in human nature
in a sense or maybe to rephrase that
it maybe
challenges you to explore something that
uh in terms of temper in terms of anger
in terms of anxiety that you have been
bottling it up there's something that
where the car
is like a vessel for a psychological
experiment of how much stress you can
take and some people
that stress is like heating
uh it's making the water boil and it's
fascinating to see what that results in
i think
if you are the kind of person that
explodes
emotionally
in traffic that means there's deeper
issues to sort of confront and it seems
like the traffic and the car
is a place where you
get to confront your
the shadow
call young shadow
there's something deep within that that
we don't often fish we're alone with
ourselves and we get to see who we truly
are
yeah well we're
yeah it can bring out road rage and
also there's this um i don't know when
you're in the vehicle there's you have
this shell around you and so there's
this feeling that you are protected from
yes
so you could be yourself you could be
your true self in this moment and
sometimes that true self in this moment
is an angry screaming person which means
you have you have to introspect that
shadow shine a light
let me ask you about something that's
ongoing currently it'd be fascinating to
get your opinion on so um
something i've been watching
some of the world has been watching
is the
defamation trial brought by johnny depp
against amber hurt
have you gotten a chance to watch any of
it um i haven't watched it but i've read
some reports of it
what's your
analysis on this particular
dynamic we talked about toxicity
in the space of agency and communion
what do you make of this
this relationship
that's presented to the world in its raw
form
you know i don't have strong opinions on
it i think in the this stage in the
trial we've heard from
him primarily we have not and we should
say for people listening in case this is
published a little bit later we have not
heard from
amber heard right uh in the world
if we heard from heard we're doing that
that's going to be happening this week i
i don't know i think that
i've seen
and this is another topic that i have
studied is intimate partner violence and
some of the nastier
um stuff that goes on within
relationships and i think that
um
when this nasty stuff happens sometimes
sometimes it's asymmetrical but
sometimes it's symmetrical in the sense
that they get into these downward
spirals where one is insulting the other
or even with physical violence one
starts pushing the other showing how
they're hitting the other and then the
other hits back as you get into these um
cycles and so
uh coming at one point in time
you know in this case of uh johnny depp
and amber heard
you know uh years later and trying to
disentangle what actually went on in
their relationship
um i i don't i don't feel qualified even
to do that
well it's fascinating to see so first i
mean i have a lot of opinions um
particularly because i'm just a
um
a fan of johnny depp as a person a fan
of giant depth the actor and the kind of
characters he created the person because
maybe this is fiction maybe this is
reality but they tend to rhyme
and uh mirror each other but
his fascination with hunter s thompson
and there's some aspect of him taking on
the hunters thompson personality
there's just layers upon layers of wit
and humor and it's
and also anxiety and darkness with the
drug use and all that kind of stuff it's
very human very real person
and so you get to one of the beautiful
things about this trial is you get to
basically have a long-form podcast
and you get to reveal the complexity of
this human the humor
under pressure under
uh under stress
but also just the rawness of love the
things that love makes you do or
whatever that is what
you know
whatever the things that keeps us in
relationships that are toxic
in that turmoil
the hope
the um
the self-delusion
the the the push and pull
of
longing and
um fights yeah and that the ups and
downs whatever yeah the roller coaster
the roller coaster the the the makeup
sex yeah exactly you know yeah is it in
the questions arise whether that's the
feature or a bug like why do we why are
we drawn to that you mentioned
in mate selection for long-term made
selection um i think you said women but
i think maybe both
uh
don't want a kind of
you had
scientific and eloquent words to use but
basically basically crazy people
you did
yeah so um
uh but here it seems like
maybe maybe we're drawn to that still
yeah rise to the light right well it can
be addictive but um it's not good for
long-term relationships i mean that
characteristic and it and there there is
a stable personality characteristic it
goes under different names anxiety
neuroticism emotional lability
et cetera but that's the single
personality characteristic that's that
is most predictive of breakups and
divorces
um and and in studies that i've done
predictive of conflict in couples
people who are emotionally unstable they
just get into a lot of conflict with
their partner they create create havoc
um so um and they now they can be
exciting
but bad for long-term happiness
they seek conflict in order to uh
to attain intimacy so conflict creates
a creates attention
yeah
and
like like
if you take intimacy broadly it it's
it's intimate
well you're like raw fragile you're
right there
yeah well
and i mean there's one hypothesis that
was put forward by um
an israeli biologist named amos amos
zahavi
called uh the the testing of a bond and
so he asked the question like why do
people inflict costs on their part even
like kissing you're you're
introducing you know it's a disease
vector you know why do people do these
weird things
um
inflicting costs
or emotional liability is a way of
inflicting costs
and what he argues is it's the testing
of a bond if the person's willing to
tolerate
you know this level of stress this level
of cost imposition
then that means they must be very
committed to me
and so and i think that's something
people do in romantic
relationships is they they do test the
strength of the bond they they test the
the commitment of the person
and i think it's
i think that's a feature not a bug in
the in the sense that
um
you especially in the early stages of
love romantic love we tend to overly
romanticize and i idealize our partner
so when there's an absence of evidence
we we impute positive values
and
what you this is one of
my recommendations to peop friends that
i know is is if you're really
considering a good
long-term commitment to this person go
on vacation with them ideally too
ideally to a a foreign country where
both of you are unfamiliar oh i love it
road trip or something like that yeah so
where where you you experience
unexpected things stresses
you get a flat tire or whatever and you
encounter and you see how the person
deals with stress and you see how you
deal with each other under stress and i
think that that's um
unless you have put stress tests on
relationships you really don't know
where things stand yeah that's a
beautiful way to put it i'm a huge fan
of that like road trip and not just
late in a relationship like
day one yeah
road trip
not day one day negative one before it
even happens to see stress test
uh because it makes everybody better it
creates intimacy or creates it it it
creates or destroys
but you know on on the johnny dep so
they they also they both suffered
childhood abuse the one one of the
things that i i took away from the trial
for me it was just
educational i don't get to
see
uh inside as most of us maybe don't
like toxic relationships or fights and
so on a lot of things that people maybe
do inside relationships and we don't get
to see it present in such a raw way
so well one of the things i learned is
that
you know in terms of partner violence
a woman
too can be violent yeah absolutely that
to me so emotionally and physically
violent
that um
[Music]
yeah i almost don't want to uh you know
amber heard i mean
there's there's no limit to my dislike
for that that person in particular uh
because um
because clearly to me at least i stand
with johnny depp to me that guy is full
of love
and
uh but full of demons because he's drawn
to whatever the chaos that's created
there but also it's just an education
for me that
i i tend to associate sort of men with
violence and
toxicity and destruction inside
relationships but
it was interesting to see that women too
can be like directly
violent yeah and men too
which was also surprising to me
have the capacity
to stay in such a relationship and to
not walk away which is what i thought as
my in terms of toxic violent
relationships i thought
there's a male figure who will do
emotional and physical mostly physical
violence and then
kind of manipulate the mind
of the female to stay in the
relationship but that dynamic goes but
it can go both ways yeah it does go both
ways and and i think even the
emotional
abuse is sometimes even worse than the
physical abuse i mean you see that in in
studies of uh even like childhood abuse
where it's the emotional abuse that is
the most damaging
what about
the role of jealousy something you also
written about in a relationship
is uh
is that a feature a bug
you cut you started to speak about it
but is
is it good to be
uh jealous of your partner inside of a
relationship how does it go wrong
the pros and cons so uh so i've written
a whole book on this uh called the
dangerous passion um why jealousy is as
necessary as sex and love
um and
i think that
one
cut at your question is that um a
moderate so first of all i think it's
it's a feature not a bug in in most
cases so
in the in the sense that
you you have to have an adaptation that
is sensitive to threats to a valued
relationship
okay because
and i think i alluded to this earlier
that just because you're in a
relationship and you're in a
relationship with a desirable partner
doesn't mean that
you know you've finished solving the
problems of mating that you need to
solve because there are threats from the
outside so mate poachers people who try
to lure your partner away for either a
sexual encounter or a more committed
romantic relationship
and then there's also dissatisfaction
within the relationship so your partner
might become
tempted to be sexually unfaithful or
romantically unfaithful or emotionally
unfaithful
and so and so we need humans
with the evolution of long-term pair
bonding we need adaptations to guard
the relationship and be sensitive to
threats to the relationship
and i think jealousy is one of those i
think that's it's a key one
and now
um
that i think that uh there are a variety
of benefits to it but also a variety of
costs or downsides to jealousy because
we know that jealousy
male sexual jealousy is the leading
cause of spousal abuse and spousal
violence physical physical violence
probably emotional violence as well or
psychological
violence uh and so that's why i call it
the dangerous passion it's it's it's a
necessary emotion
but it is also a dangerous emotion
um leads to homicide um you know leads
to uh and
i've studied also homicidal ideation uh
which is intersects with this topic in
that
um men sometimes women to a lesser
degree develop homicidal ideation about
people who are trying to poach their
mates or who do poach their mates
successfully poach their mates so what
jealousy does is it is it alerts you to
a threat to the relationship and it
motivates um
checking out the source of the threat
how threatening is this so i think
people tend to increase vigilance
of their partner in the modern world
that includes you know hacking into
their cell phone or computer monitoring
them um
uh
sometimes stalking them
but also can include
positive things so it might be that so
one trigger of jealousy is is is a
direct threat to the relation but
there's another more subtle
trigger of jealousy which is a mate
value discrepancy
so usually when people
mate there's they they assort or pair up
on overall mate values so the in the
american
10 point scale the eights tend to pair
up with the eighths the sixes with the
sixes
the tens with the tens and the ones with
the ones american is their other out of
the scales
uh i i wonder if the miracle systems
well there's a binary i just find it
zero one
sorry but okay i know yeah the eighth
pair is where they age seven yeah yeah
so in general but there are errors in
mate selection you kind of alluded to
the that issue earlier that sometimes
people make errors errors in mate
selection which they do so sometimes you
think this person is well matched on
mate value but they're not but then
things change
so a let's say uh they're the same you
have two sixes and then all of a sudden
the woman's career takes off
all of a sudden she's
you know uh getting promotion she's uh
uh acquiring wealth she's
attracting men who are of a different
mate value than she previously did well
that triggers jealousy in the guy even
if she swears she's going to be totally
loyal and she has no signs of leaving or
no signs of infidelity
a mate value discrepancy is going to
trigger jealousy
now what can it do well it can do
in the broadest sense people can do two
classes of things they can do cost
inflecting things or benefit providing
things so the the man in that situation
might
say okay i need to devote more attention
to my partner i need to up my game when
it comes to resource acquisition i need
to
lavish more
attention and gifts on her and so
there's a whole suite of benefit
provisioning things that can help to
reduce that mate value discrepancy
and then there's al also cost inflicting
things that and and and humans
unfortunately do both both sets of
things
yeah i there's also this uh maybe that's
love i notice um
the people i especially
love or have a connection to
romantically or otherwise there's a
feeling like i don't deserve you
so
with friends with so on like i mean i
tend to think that about almost
everything which is why it's a strong
signal when i don't feel it that way
which is like i can't i'm how lucky am i
to have this
uh and that's a good that's a that's a
weird illusion of inflation of value or
something like uh i think that the
positive effect of that is makes what
motivates me to be better
i guess on this 110 skill to be higher
and you sort of kind of
have to either
like
it's a nice feature that your mind sees
others that you have affection towards
as
higher value and it forces you to have
that like i i'm a person that
experiences jealousy and that forces me
to be better yeah i get my shit together
yeah well and i think that the the um
sometimes the best relationships are
when both people feel lucky to be with
the other person yes exactly it's
balanced that way and then that's when
you in terms of jobs in terms of going
to the gym all those kinds of things
and um yeah so a little bit of jealousy
i have discussion with those people i
always wonder
there's people in relationships where
like no no they're there's no they never
experience jealousy i wonder what that's
like because they're very successful
relationships but
and i always wonder you know i'm
currently single so i always doubt that
i know what the hell i'm doing at all
uh but i i'm definitely somebody that
experiences jealousy and kind of enjoys
jealousy
um like
a little bit
of like missing to me that's like you're
missing the other person yeah well
longing for the other person and here's
another uh interesting wrinkle that i
also talk about in the book is
sometimes people intentionally evoke
jealousy in their partner
and i think that's also a kind of
testing of a bond uh kind of issue yeah
so and
especially women but i think both sexes
interpret a total absence of jealousy as
a sign that their partner is not
sufficiently committed to them or
sufficiently in love with them
so if you like to say i don't know if
you you go to a party with your partner
and then you
leave the room for some reason you come
back and your partner is passionately
kissing someone else and doesn't bother
you at all
that might be a cue to the partner that
well maybe you're not very in love with
that person or not very committed to
them and so
it's a good way to it's a good way to
test that said i mean i love the term
mate poaching by the way i believe here
in texas mate poaching is officially
illegal so
one of my favorite songs by hendrix says
hey joe um
hey joe where you going with that gun in
your hand yeah
and
yeah i actually i always wanted to play
that song but i get uh
i start to think about guns and so on i
think it's supposed to capture a feeling
it's not actual violence it's saying i'm
going to shoot my old lady i caught her
messing around with another man
that's uh
that's a blues type of feeling like of
anger
of um i guess from mate poaching
for uh mate switching performed by the
partner and then the uh the frustration
and the anger that's resulting that i
always wondered why the violence
is directed towards the partner versus
the person who did the yeah it's
the other male tends to be evenly split
um so
sometimes and that's i mean
men especially uh when someone poaches
on their mate they have homicidal
fantasies
which
well equally specific towards the mate
poacher yeah but but he but equally
split so so it's uh
um
i think the the non-lethal violence
uh tends to be more directed toward the
mate because it's it's and this is a
horrible thing of male sexual psychology
but i think part of the violence is
functional
in the sense that it's designed to
keep a mate and prevent her from
engaging in anything with um
with other with other potential mate
poachers
but um
but people do uh it's so even it says it
goes back uh
like to the french law where they had
the uh so-called crime of passion so if
the husband walked in and found uh his
wife
having sex with some other guy in bed
and shot him
that was viewed as a crime of passion
it's still not legal but you get kind of
get a discount yeah
for it whereas if he if he goes home
thinks about it for a while then gets
the gun comes back then that's
premeditated murder yeah
see to me
i guess everybody's different to me i
have zero
anger towards the partner on that
situation
to me because that's definitive proof
of disability so like why what's the
what's the function of the anger there
yeah to me
uh
all of my anger is towards the the guy
the poacher right because
some of it has to do probably with the
status establishing like it's uh what
was the term you use the
formidability yeah formidability
assessment assessment and i'm like wait
wait wait did you just say you're more
formidable than me
in this situation i want to reestablish
at least in my own mind the
formidability
and
and that seems to be
i guess we're all different but maybe
because i roll around with guys a lot
like grappling wrestling all that kind
of stuff to me to establish status it's
competing with other males not with the
female because that that's a break of
loyalty
like why do what's this what's the point
of anger at this point that's just
betrayal well except that a lot of it
uh a lot of the mate poaching is is
discovered or accused to make pushings
are discovered before
the consummation of the act so it might
be just like the emotional cheating
leader or of
mild flirtation
sure you know things like that and so
the violence is is um
designed to head off the threat before
it becomes real
boy aren't human relations especially
romantic ones complicated
so uh but that's what makes them so
fascinating to study and so fun yes
exactly from a science perspective and
to study from within sort of uh
uh was like richard rangham with the
champs like um you know
be in it
study from the end of one perspective uh
what do you make of polyamory
um so what what the heck is what do you
make of marriage what are your thoughts
about marriage what are your thoughts
about lifelong monogamy and what's your
thoughts about polyamory given that
we've been talking about ideas of mate
switching and poaching and all that kind
of stuff yeah i think that we evolved to
be i prefer the term a
pair bonded
species so pair bonding is one of the
strategies purebond long-term mating is
one of the strategies but that doesn't
necessarily mean for decades and decades
or life long because we often pair bond
serially so get into a relationship
that might last a year or five years and
then break up and then form another
relationship so we engage in serial
mating
we engage in
infidelity we engaged in we engage in
some short-term
mating
and
so we have a what i describe as a menu
of mating strategies and which
particular
mating strategy an individual adopts
depends on a wide variety of factors it
i think some are just kind of personal
proclivities some depend on your mate
value so if you are
an eight to nine or a ten you have more
options for what mating strategy you
want to pursue
if you're a one or a two you're not
going to be able to
be polyamorous uh in in all likelihood
um there's a lot of attention to
polyamory now
uh and uh it's unclear whether this
whether there's an increase in it or
whether people are just talking about it
more
it is the case and i know
i know several people who are in
polyamorous relationships and i've
talked
with them in detail about them and
jealousy is often a factor in that and
they describe it as kind of like um
uh an emotion that has to be somehow
tamed or dealt with in in some way
and so and so in polyamory there are
many different types of polyamory so in
like one type for example is you have a
primary
love partner and then
some others on the side that are
permitted
usually within in consensual terms
within
a an explicit contract that the cup that
the primary partners work out so it's
okay if you
you know i know as one couple it's okay
if you do it outside the city limits of
los angeles but not within
some say it's okay for thursday but i
want the weekend friday and saturday
nights to me
it's okay if there's
sexual involvement but no emotional
involvement so there are different type
different strategies that people work
out and some of them are designed to try
to keep jealousy at bay so i think it's
an evolved emotion there's a natural
emotion that that people experience
um now interestingly there's there's a
while we're on this topic there's a sex
difference therein um uh namely if you
contrast sexual
jealousy with emotional jealousy or
sexual infidelity with emotional
infidelity and so we we
in one set of studies i put my
participants or we used to call them
subjects
um into this what i call the sophie's
choice of the jealousy dilemmas i said
imagine your partner became interested
in someone else
and you discover that they have had
passionate sexual intercourse with this
person
and
they've gotten emotionally involved with
them they've fallen in love with them
which aspect of the infidelity upsets
you more
and when you
and that's why it's called the sophie's
shirts both terrible choices
yeah uh but men much more likely to say
the sexual
infidelity is what upsets me more women
it's like why even ask me it's a
no-brainer 85 percent of women say the
emotional infidelity is what bothers me
more
former student of mine uh barry cooley
did a really interesting study of uh
analysis of this
reality show called cheaters i've
actually never seen it but
where where if you suspect your partner
of cheating then the detective from the
tv team will follow the person
uh and then they'll call up and say
we've just seen you found your husband
here in the no-tell motel do you want to
come down and talk to him and so the and
so what he analyzed though was the
verbal interrogations that people had
when they confronted their partner and
women wanted to know
are you in love with her
men wanted to know
did you fuck him
or did you have sex with them and so is
it's this sex difference in sensitivity
to these
different cues of infidelity and and of
course there's there's an evolutionary
logic to this to this sex difference and
it's been replicated not not the cheater
study but um
the hypothetical
sophie's choice studies been replicated
now in sweden and china and you know
it's a universal sex difference
so given that sex difference and you
mentioned another one that just returned
to which is uh
in the engineering disciplines
yeah person thing or presentation so
until i started to see
writing about in the sort of psychology
literature
i observed this anecdotally a lot and
the reason i observed it is i was
confused so i care a lot about robots
i'm a robotics person and so a lot of
males in the robotics community really
didn't care about the what's called the
human robot interaction problem which is
like robots when they interact with
humans
and then a lot of females all brilliant
in in the robotics community cared about
the human robot interaction they cared
about the human the what the robot
colleague communicates with the human in
the picture human in the loop
and i was really confused like because
the difference to me in my anecdotal
interactions
but the the n is quite large there like
i you know i'm in the robotics community
i know a lot of people yeah and i was
confused because for me
i really care about human robot
interaction i i see i care about both a
lot
and
in the same thing here in terms of
emotional cheating versus physical
cheating
i care a lot about both and i have like
this oscillating brain so i wonder what
that says about
my brain so i often wonder this because
there's specific sex differences that
are represented in the data in the
literature and i seem to oscillate
depending on mood
yeah and i wonder what that says about
me
why do i care so much about that robot
on the floor
i care not
uh half i care about how it works
and the other half how makes other
people feel yeah what is that yeah so so
i guess what i would say this gets back
to our earlier discussion of agency and
communion where
i actually think that
it's a sign of being
well balanced to have both capacities
uh within use and so
you get
people who are um
unimodal or do they just have one mode
of operating let's say it's the thing
mode which which engineers tend to be
good at you know you have to be good at
it to be a good engineer because things
have to actually work yes you know it's
not in some you know dream or
hypothetical state things have to have
to actually work
but with the agency and communion i
think it's good to have a balance and
that's why i think some of the best
romantic relationships are those where
people are
they're high on what they used to call
androgyny where they have both the
positive
features of agency and communion the
positive features of masculinity and
femininity
uh within the same mix but also with the
footnote of not the unmitigated agency
or unmitigated communion both of which
can be
negative and so i view these as um
capacities and
some people are out of balance some
people have a good balance between the
two it sounds like you have a good
balance between the two well but also
the allocation i feel like it's a very
dynamic thing
it's like uh
um
um at least that where
for me personally
of the beauty between humans
of the dance of the push and pull
of the different moods
it's like a dynamical system it's not
two static entities fully represented
and consistent through every interaction
sometimes you know um
people might confuse the fact that i
often talk about love and i
i love humans that i don't have a temper
that i don't have like
i lose my shit all the time
especially like on things i really am
passionate about like people i work with
and so on yeah i'm all over the place
and there's but underneath it there's a
deep love and respect for humans but
like i lose my shit all the time um
and
that that chaos that roller coaster
i think that's what makes human
relations awesome i mean that the the
push and pull of it of course it can
oscillate too far which is when it
becomes
a herd type of situation when it turns
to emotional or physical violence when
it turns to jealousy crosses a a line
where it's hurtful and there's like
that it crosses that
vast gray landscape of what is abuse
uh versus what is
just a
beautiful term of human nature right
yes
yeah and it's it's complicated it's uh
yeah yeah it's complicated and it's it's
dynamic and
i would just add i thought you phrased
that brilliantly um
but i would just add to that it also
depends on sort of what you're trying to
do and so i think some of the
oscillation
can be what
task what problem you're trying to solve
and so if you're i don't know trying to
you know build a bridge or something you
need to be very thin oriented and
uh
you know make sure the damn thing
actually
works and doesn't collapse when a car
goes over it um
uh if you're trying to
form a relationship um you know and
you're entirely thing-oriented it's not
going to work you know
and that's that's one of the people one
of the things that with and males tend
to be more
on this on the so-called spectrum
uh side of things where
one of the hallmarks is a deficit in
social mind reading
just to add to your point about i guess
i've already made it that of the dynamic
properties of the roller coaster is
depending on what problem you're trying
to solve you might want to toggle back
and forth to one pole or the other
you wrote a book called why women have
sex
understanding sexual motivations from
adventure
to revenge that sounds fun and
everything in between
so why do women have sex well i co-wrote
it with the female this who's cindy
meston
a wonderful
friend and colleague and coco author and
co-collaborator um i wouldn't be
presumptuous enough to write a book
called why women have sex by myself as
as as you can contribute anything to
this book i'm just kidding i i did but i
have to tell you a story about the um
the origins of this idea
uh which i give credit to cindy meston
for um
and we were we would she's a colleague
in in the psychology department with me
and we would go out to dinner once a
week or so and and we were just talking
about that she raised this issue and so
we started to brainstorm
originally it was why humans have sex
that's the the scientific article we
published was why humans because we're
interested in males and females and so i
said um i would come well uh they have
sex because of x and then
cindy maestrom would come up she'd say
oh here are seven other reasons and that
i'd come up with one more she came up
with another seventh so it was like you
know so so she's in in some sense
importantly the um
you know originator or fountain of this
of this idea but
oh so she's able there's something about
the way she thinks about sexuality
that's able to deeply introspect about
reasons for sex yeah and probably
especially about female sexuality and
this is one of the interesting things
and why it's so fun for me to
collaborate with with in this case
female
because they do have a different sexual
psychology than males and so and i've
noticed this that's why in my graduate
society like i've had 30 or so phd
students about half of them male half of
them female
and the the the women come up with
different questions different scientific
questions that i wouldn't have thought
of necessarily
um and so um and so anyway so it turned
out to be the collaboration i will i
will say that we we co-wrote it and that
i did contribute to it
and uh especially the the um the
evolutionary insights
so is there a good few words you can say
uh
to why women have sex what are some
primary motivations well we we
originally came up with a list of 237
reasons uh for why uh why humans have
sex and they range
from you know some of the obvious ones
because it feels good uh
because i wanted to relieve stress uh
be to relieve menstrual cramps to get
rid of a headache uh to
get my boyfriend off my back so i could
get some work done yep um so things like
that too to
others
like um
there's another one uh so that he'd take
out the damn garbage yeah
but another one it was kind of
interesting that uh someone one
nomination was uh to get closer to god
so this there were some that were kind
of spiritual spiritual motivations for
having sex
and then some of the nastier ones like
to get revenge
on my you know on my partner or to get
revenge on arrival so that's sleeping
with my
you know rivals boyfriend you know so
there's some nasty stuff and some good
stuff in there
it's so fascinating because yeah sex has
such a
powerful role in our psychology but also
in our culture
so you can make
significant statements
about the in the status hierarchy
uh
about
your sex
the selection of your sexual partner
it's interesting so it's not just
because you're horny it's all those
other kinds of things yeah mornings is
one
but there are there are other reasons
what about different kinds of sex
so you know what's uh again this is not
the human lab podcast
rough sex versus quote making love
what's the explanation between all of
that all the various king now that's
just a basic sort of split
but all the different kinks that humans
establish all the different fantasies
and all those kind of yeah yeah well
that's a complicated question um
for for which i don't think we have uh
sufficient time to get into that you
know in detail and and it is complicated
because there are some
sexual fantasies that uh sexual
fantasies by the way i think a really
fascinating window into our sexual
psychology because in a way they're
they're unconstrained by
you know things like rules and norms in
society and
cultural presses that you're kind of
free to
fantasize about whatever you want to
fantasize about so i think it's it
provides an interesting window into
human sexuality
uh and there are some predictable ones
and then there are some also
individual or idiosyncratic ones and
and um
the
again the there's a fundamental sex
difference in in this in that
uh when you talk about like fetishes or
like shoe fetishes leather fetishes
different types of um things males are
much more prone to those than females
you've had as you said
almost all fetishes
males are overrepresented and i think
it's partly because
there's some evidence that they're
classically conditioned so i think that
first or early sexual experiences that
people have kind of condition them to
the cues that are present during those
early
ones and so if your first sexual
experience happened to be
you know um involve visual images of
shoes or you're having to look in your
shoes when you first had sex
it's just an example or leather or
zippers or whatever the case is
that people develop these very
individualistic um
sexual turn-ons based on these early
sexual experiences
uh so it could also be you said have sex
but it could also be sexual feelings
early sexual feelings like because it
yeah
um
so i wonder what that is about men
that they have a more when they first
start experiencing sexual feelings that
they're more sensitive to the cues and
those cues somehow have a deep
psychological effect on their
development of their sexuality so if
they have kinks that means they're
somehow
more q sensitive
and maybe
does it matter if society like slaps
them on the wrist for it does that help
solidify
the kinks yeah i don't know about the
society's slack on the wrist but i think
what it is is this i think this is the
evolutionary uh hypothesis anyway about
why there's this sex difference and that
is that men are
conditioned to anything that's going to
lead to sex because uh
whereas women don't have to be uh
from male perspective because of women's
greater investment because the
nine-month pregnancy
etc
in order to reproduce women have to
invest this tremendous amount
uh men don't one act of sex can produce
an offspring and so
uh for men but not for women and so this
huge asymmetry and investment means that
the
payoff
matrix of different sexual strategies
differs for the sexes
in that context
women become the valuable and scarce
resource over which men compete so
anything that leads to successful sex
is going to be selected for and so
men are very sensitive to being sexually
conditioned that's what's called sexual
conditioning to whatever cues are
associated with sex happening
um from a woman's perspective sex is not
a um
a scarce resource so a woman could go
out here in austin
any night or probably any day on sixth
street and have no problem having sex uh
with a guy
within 10 minutes
okay
guy
would have more difficulty um
he's not gonna go out you know unless
he's unless he's johnny depper really
really charming
yeah
yeah that's a fascinating dimorphism or
asymmetry in in our um
made selection what do you think is the
effect
on this young male brain a female 2 of
pornography so one of the fascinating
things that the digital world
brought us
now
i i grew up at a time
when like a magazine like a victoria's
secret magazine was like
my source of um
sexual inspiration
uh
but that was so that was before the
internet and now the internet with
pornography makes it extremely
accessible
all kinds of kinks all kinds of wild
variety
i mean
variety and quantity
is
immense so what do you think that has
how that affects
mate selection
mating
and just the human psychology of the of
the of the two
sexes of the species yeah great question
a big question
uh so i mean we could have a whole
podcast just
on that or at least talk for a while
about it so i'll just say a couple of
things
uh about that one is
again there's a sex difference then i
feel like i'm a broken record here
hammering on this but uh it is a lot of
just to actually echo the thing please
be a broken record because it's it's
interesting the more we get to the
mating
the more there's sex differences
represent themselves they serve yes yeah
that's right and in many psychological
domains there are no sex differences or
the sexes are very similar
but pornography is consumed about 80
percent of the consumers are men
so it is very heavily a male consumer
industry
if you will and
i think that
it can have positive and negative
effects depending on the circumstances
so
one um
potential negative effect is that
men
might develop unrealistic expectations
about what sex will be like or should be
like in in real life
uh and so and so i remember actually
this i just heard about this one case of
um i don't mention any names where um
a man got married and he
had been accustomed to seeing
very large breasts in his pornography
consumption
and
discovered that his
wife had
what he perceived to be very small
breasts
in fact they were actually just
medium size
but because he had been so
heavily exposed to pornography and the
artificially enhanced
breast size that is often depicted in
pornography that um
he had
come to expect something that was that
was unrealistic in this case
um
not leading that's not not the way to
lead off to a great sex life with your
wife by being disappointed in her breast
size
so i think that people can develop
in this case men unrealistic
expectations also about the kind of
sexual acrobatics that porn stars engage
in and when they get in real life
situations can put pressure on women to
become
you know uh to fulfill those those kinds
of images
um but the other thing the other kind of
detrimental effect that it has is and
this is something that is emerging
culturally
is i think it has a dampening effect on
men's pursuit of
real-life relationships
because in some sense it kind of
bleeds off some of that sex drive or
sexual desire sexual energy
um and so they're
and some men get addicted to it so
they're spending hours and hours and
hours a day consuming pornography
uh and so i think can have a detrimental
effect
on even on men's ambition yeah that
there's something really powerful about
that sexual energy
not to be all like
spiritual about it but
it seems like that's somehow correlated
with ambition
so like uh one of the things that
pornography can take away is like
exactly as you said is your pursuit of
love out there
including women but also love of things
meaning like building awesome epic
things
the love of both bridges and women yeah
uh bridge building and and uh and
relationship building yeah there's
something about that energy and um and
also
uh
yeah there's a sort of a vicious
downward spiral because it somehow
staunch your development because it
limits social interaction that
the push and pull of
of uh
romantic social interaction it
cuts the edge off of that and it forces
you to be
to spend way too much time with yourself
without the development of that social
interaction
yeah i don't know but there so outside
of the um the expectations on all those
kinds of things it seems to have a
detrimental effect on the development of
the of the human mind yeah what is that
i don't i don't because some of that is
echoed and you know people talk about
the metaverse that some of our life will
be in the digital space
and it's like on one hand well if it
brings you happiness it brings you joy
short term and long term
why is the metaverse not
the same or better than the real world
but there is something still missing and
what is that
um
something of the pleasure you feel with
porn
is
still missing it's really not
representing some of the fundamental
pleasure you feel
when you interact with real people and
that could be just the growth you
experience like real people can reject
you
the challenge the the again the push and
pull all of that the dance of human
relations yeah yeah and the
exploration of your sexuality so um on
porn you can
kind of passively explore because you
can see you know as as you mentioned uh
a wide variety of things and and and
people people do that but
in terms of exploring your your own
sexuality i think there's no replacement
for a real human being
so you've written about violence and
here we're talking about porn and sex i
don't know if you have thoughts on this
but i'd love to ask your opinion on
quote in cells
so here i would like to quote wikipedia
that define incels as members of an
online subculture of people who define
themselves as unable to get a romantic
or sexual partner despite desiring one
they also write
now i don't know if wikipedia is the
accurate source of bot in cells but here
it is
there i quote at least eight mass
murders resulting in a total of 61
deaths have been committed since 2014 by
men who have either self-identified as
as themselves or who had mentioned incel
related names and writings in their
private writings or internet postings
insult communities have been criticized
by researchers and the media for being
misogynistic encouraging violence
spreading extremist views and
radicalizing their members
is there some insight that you draw from
this connection of sex and lack of sex
to violence
well uh i think sex and violence
are
linked in in various ways
and uh it's
it's it's not just it's not just incell
so uh
uh
if you look at um
serial killers for example uh and this
is another thing that i've i'm true
crime is
kind of a avocation of mine i just enjoy
reading about true crime and following
true crime stories application
of
hobby a hobby side
subside interest super fancy word for
hobby i got it yeah
uh that like ted bundy
um he was actually very charming and and
didn't have any trouble attracting women
but
his killing spree
started shortly after he was rejected by
a very
high status
attractive woman
and he felt a rage
about being rejected by her
uh now who knows that's an n of one and
we don't know if you know
you know being rejected um causes serial
killing per se but sex and violence are
related in in different ways
i
argue and and i haven't studied the
insult community in detail i actually
have an incoming graduate student who's
going to start in the fall who who has
been studying the insults and so he'll
have a more
informed picture but
my attitude is
there are ways to improve your mate
value if you're having trouble
attracting a mate there are ways to
improve your mate value because a lot of
things
that women want in a mate are improvable
you know they women want guys who are
um compassionate who are understanding
who uh are
ambitious who who acquire resources etc
they're who are physically fit there are
things you can do to improve your mate
value and so i would say rather than
i would encourage in cells or the
insulin communities rather than being
hostile toward women or being angry at
women
um
just do things to improve your mate
value and then you will be more
successful at attracting women yeah i
mean some of it that's so fascinating so
um your student will be studying that
there's a
um listen i love the internet
the internet always wins and there's a
fascinating aspect too which is just
humor
and i um
i'm fascinated by seeing the humor
whether it's 4chan or reddit and all
that kind of stuff
or where people maybe will self-identify
as in-cells as a joke is it kind of
basically representing the fact that you
know it's hard to get women
this this the struggle the struggle and
for women it's hard to get a mate that
they you know
they're basically jokingly representing
the the the challenges the difficulty of
the mate selection process that the
desirable group is smaller than the
entire group that's it and they're
joking about it but then it's
interesting how quickly humor
uh again a dynamical system it can
turn into anger
and that on the internet is so
interesting to watch like how trolling
light trolling is humor
but it can turn into aggression
and i i've just
seen
it's weird
it's weird how
this is true on the internet but you
also just look at the dark aspects of
the 20th century that i've been reading
a lot about
how kind of
light-hearted things
turn dark quickly
and it's interesting i i don't know what
to make of it because uh it's basically
sexual frustration that
all humans feel it's you know dating in
general
can turn into
anger
uh can turn into sophisticated
philosophical constructs like uh about
how the world works
of who really is pulling the strings
right
and
that turns some of the worst crimes
committed uh by the nazis for example
were by extremely intelligent people
that constructed
models of how the world works
and there's there's something about
sexual frustration
is one of the really powerful forces
that could be a catalyst for
constructing such models and once you've
done that
shit gets a lot more serious
and it's no longer joke it's serious but
at the same time when you just look from
the surface it's kind of jokes yeah it's
weird that's interesting
points that you're making i i think that
there's this is one way in which
evolution has built into us um
a
a feature which is really bad for our
overall happiness uh and and that is
that it's created desires that can never
be fully met
you know and that includes in the mating
domain so even with people who
are successful in attracting
you know
somewhat desirable mates maybe they want
you know giselle bunchen or some you
know they desire
things that are there women that are
higher and may value or
uh
or a larger number of partners than they
can successfully attract and and in a
way i mean these serve as
evolutions built into these because
they're motivational devices they
motivate us to try to get what we want
but it also makes us miserable or at
least unhappy or dissatisfied because
there are desires that can never be
fulfilled and this is and this is
mentioned one more sex difference this
desire for sexual variety meaning a
variety of different partners is much
much greater in men than women
um and so that's why even like in in
pornography consumption men will like
you know go through
multiple multiple multiple
um images and sex scenes and so forth uh
compared compared to what women
who consume pornography go through
but this desire for sexual variety is is
something that makes men miserable
because it's something that they can't
most men unless you're a a king or a
despot or
um
you know
have have a harem it's something that
can never be fulfilled
in everyday life and so i even think
that
you know you talk to men who are walking
down the city block in austin or new
york city or san francisco or wherever
and they pass by they could pass by six
women
and feel a sexual attraction to six
different women in one city block
you know
now and so this is again where evolution
has
created in this desires that can never
be fully met and an evolution well it's
useful right and the the hilarious thing
that this always up my own mind
by just observing people once you get
that 10
or that uh
beautiful woman that you've been lost
you take her for granted move on to the
next thing there are classic cases like
um
i don't know if you you remember this
this case but the hugh grant um was with
elizabeth hurley who is a gorgeous model
and he was caught having sex with a
prostitute i think it was in la or
whatever he's he's got elizabeth hurley
why are you having sex with a prostitute
but it's the
male desire for sexual variety
uh well let me uh do
a little bit of a tangent here and ask
you about
just your work in general
in terms of its interaction
with the scientific community and with
the world at large so many of the ideas
you do research on are pretty
controversial or at least
the topic is controversial
somehow maybe you can speak to that but
what are your thoughts in the current
climate of cancer culture
or maybe there's a better term for it
that word is like loaded now
uh about you doing research in this
space that is so sort of uh
essential so crucial to understanding
human nature how what are the
difficulties what are the concerns for
you to be able to freely explore yeah
i've been doing
um
research on these things so
when you when you combine
um sex or sexuality
with
sex differences
with
evolution each of these topics are
controversial
by themselves and you bring them
together the intersection becomes
especially controversial
uh but i
uh i guess
view myself as a scientist and so
um and so i would rather be
uh scientifically correct than
politically correct uh if you will so
i don't i have no interest in i don't
have a an agenda i don't have a
political agenda i don't have any
agenda other than discovering human
nature that's what i've devoted my
scientific career
toward and i'm
and that's why i do the studies in
responsive to empirical data and
and the best theories that we have
available the best conceptual tools
so
do some of these things upset people
yeah yeah they do as a matter of fact
even
early in my career before i started
publishing on
some of these things i gave a talk in
the sociology department this was at
university of michigan and a female
professor came up to me afterwards
and said
you know you really shouldn't publish
the results of your studies
um and i said why not and she said that
it would
that people women have it hard enough as
it is without
you know knowing about these things
and my view is um
my view is that's naive i i think
suppression of scientific knowledge is
is a bad thing and suppression of
scientific knowledge about sex
differences is is a bad thing
uh men and women are not psychological
clones
uh especially when it comes to the
mating domain and sexuality domain the
only the only other domain that shows
massive sex differences that we haven't
touched on is aggression and violence so
the the leading cause of violence
is is being a male
uh males have a ma and the more extreme
the violence
the more males have a monopoly on us
when you get to homicide
warfare
may also have a monopoly on it and we
need to understand
human nature and we need to understand
sex differences therein
in order to
be in a position to effectively
solve some of the social problems that
these sex differences create um so um
you know so i've been
uh gotten some flack uh uh no one's
tried to cancel me uh in my work so far
so i'm i'm i'm just wait yeah just uh
yeah but does it hurt you personally
just is it is it psychologically
difficult you know to do this work
because uh what is research is thinking
deeply through things and uh
um
like
doing studies but also interpreting them
and thinking through what is the right
questions to ask
what does this mean
and for that you have to have a clear
mind a um
an optimistic mind a free mind and all
that so it's you're just a human so
psychologically is it difficult
does it wear on you
yeah um yeah i would say not not really
but um i've been i think fortunate so
even
say my latest book i published a book
recently on conflict between the sexes
and um and it deals with very
controversial topics including intimate
partner violence like with the johnny
depp amber heard thing
and i don't talk about that in the book
but
um
and uh and it's been largely well
received you know and i think partly
it's because i
am careful in my publications not to
endorse it so one of the common
conflations that people make is they
think that
uh it's something that you think is good
you know that you know um if you find a
sex difference that there should be a
sex currencies the is odd confusion um
and so i try to make it very clear
uh
that i'm studying what is not what ought
to be and a lot of things that i
discover about what is the case i would
prefer
them not to be and i think you kind of
alluded to this earlier by saying that
we
um
have to override some of our violent uh
inclinations or impulses or
uh the way i would phrase it is we have
to
um control them control or keep
quiescent or suppress uh some of the
nastier sides of of human nature and and
we've successfully done that in some
domains so
um you can talk about like one group
that fascinates me is uh the vikings and
the whole that whole um
uh uh era
and so you have you have in in sweden
norway for example uh these are these
have
like the lowest homicide rates on earth
um but you go back
400 years ago 600 years ago
people were killing each other right and
left you know and so and so
finding
that uh so this is let leads me to be
optimistic that we can
um
change conditions to suppress
our evolved proclivities just like the
one one physical example that i
sometimes use is
callous producing mechanisms we have
evolved callus producing mechanisms that
are very valuable we develop thickness
in the areas of our skin that have
experienced repeated friction
but
we can in principle design environments
where we don't experience repeated
friction
and so we won't grow calluses and so you
design an environment that
basically prevents the activation of our
callus-producing mechanism i think we
can do the same thing with some of these
other inclinations
um and and have succeeded
in
you know reductions of homicide in even
in the last couple hundred years and
some of that has to do with the myths
and stories we tell ourselves like again
it's language because i i mean i love
the vikings
uh valhalla that idea yeah that's a myth
that's an idea
that's a promise
for the for the great land beyond over
there beyond the mountains it's like
animal farm sugar caney mountain
that is promised to you if you're a
great warrior
i believe valhalla is where
half the soldiers go
um as a reward for
for great soldiering for being great
warriors and the thing i just recently
have been reading quite a bit about
valhalla which is um
it's such a fascinating how the these
myths are constructed
the
i believe
i just
think this is such an awesome setup in
terms of
a kind of heaven which is they spend the
entire day fighting
so they for joy and if they die they're
reborn the next day so it's it's you're
basically
the passion the thing you're passionate
about without the consequences on top of
that
i think there's a pig or a boar
that
is they keep eating so it's regenerated
every single day so unlimited food and
there's unlimited beer i believe so it's
like it's like or mead
yes yes yes yes mead i don't know that's
that's fascinating that we construct
these myths and at the same time
uh
these myths can be used
to get humans to do some of the worst
atrocities
so some of the violence requires us to
have those myths of what is waiting for
us beyond death sort of beyond
over there in sugar candy mountain as uh
crow says that in animal farm and so
you know i think the more and more in
this modern society the positive of not
constructing so many myths is that we
get to live more in the moment and that
forces us to optimize and improve the
moment and we get to face
the irrational and the painful aspect of
violence maybe we should reduce that in
the here and now
yeah the downside is we may not if we
dispose of god or these kinds of
religious and spiritual ideas
we might
descend into a you know what nietzsche
worried about with nihilism
and it's a beautiful dance because
humans seem to tie themselves together
with narratives yes yeah and with myths
and stories that we all believe if you
completely dispose of them
a society i don't know we don't know we
don't know yeah it's going to happen if
it's going to collapse or if it's
actually going to rediscover better
myths better stories more scientifically
grounded ones uh ones that are driven in
data and all those kinds of things
um yeah i i don't know i mean it's an
interesting question i mean i don't have
any um brilliant insights into it other
than that you know
to agree with you that people
construct narratives uh well of their
own lives and sometimes the
the life after death um
but i guess i would add and this is
maybe a more cynical view but you
mentioned atrocities i think that
leaders can sometimes
exploit
those under them
to create
forms of uh violence or justification
for um
for warfare
like in you know the like the the group
that we are conquering they are uh
sub-human they're
they're insects they're an infectious
disease that is
you know and so these
these narratives can be used by leaders
to exploit and motivate um people under
them to commit these atrocities
so it's a nastier part of our psychology
both that leaders do that but also that
people are vulnerable to narratives of
that sort yeah it's fascinating to look
pre-internet you hope the internet makes
us more resistant to that which i do
have probably a question on that but if
you look at just the propaganda machines
during world war ii on the nazi side and
on the soviet side
on every side but
particularly in those two it's so
fascinating both how effective a simple
message can be
in
a leader being able to convince
the small inner circle around them
uh convince themselves which is
fascinating propaganda and you start to
believe the propaganda degenerate and
then how easily the the populace is
convincible again you hope that the
internet the distributed nature of the
internet makes it more difficult to run
a propaganda campaign at least of the
classical sort i do have uh a question
about this because you mentioned elon
musk when we're talking about status
hierarchies
like you and i can't buy twitter and
wealth accumulation yeah what do you
think about elon buying twitter
um in particular
in the reason
the state of reason
uh that he's doing so in um
emphasizing free speech that's an
interesting question but i don't really
have an informed opinion about it you
know i don't know
um uh it's not my area of expertise and
i don't um i don't know enough details
and i also don't know what his plans are
for twitter what what changes he plant
proposes to implement well the reason i
bring that up is because
and you you've kind of said you don't
necessarily feel a tremendous amount of
pressure but in doing controversial
research
and doing research on controversial
topics
you're also a communicator
and twitter is a platform which you
communicate and there's going to be if
you get canceled somewhere you get
cancelled on twitter yeah and so there's
pressure
so what does free speech look like
in these public platforms it's
communicating difficult ideas
it's changing your mind is exploring
ideas and not fearing
the mob
the mob that pressures the platform to
remove you from the platform or to ban
you shadow ban you from the platform
decrease your reach artificially on the
platform and those are really
fascinating questions that we get to
deal with in this new digital age so
there's a lot of ideas
what you said what elon is planning to
do
forget elon how do you do this well
that's the question
and uh there's sort of an absolutist
view of free speech let anyone say
anything and i tend to be a person that
believes
everybody should have the freedom to say
anything the question with a social
media platform is
well
uh
can you force anyone to hear what you
have to say
because the virality the viral nature of
communication
means that
you can
control who hears what you say yeah the
virality of that the search and
discovery aspect
and it's i think that's a fascinating
question from the algorithmic
perspective
the amount of data out there just like
papers there's a huge amount of papers
what you want is to find
best papers
the ones you agree with but also the
ones that challenge you
and you don't want to non-stop read the
papers that challenge you you're going
to be mentally exhausted there's a
bucket of attention
and focus and mental energy you can
allocate the ones that really challenge
you the ideas that really challenge you
are exhausting it's good just like going
to the gym is good but then you also
want to read um
things that are fun for you and those
are you know
um
if you spend your whole life in
arguments that's going to be exhausting
you want to hang out chill with your
friends
watch some netflix have fun whatever
easygoing and sometimes have difficult
academic arguments with people for
example people you disagree with but not
all the time you have to have a platform
what is free speech actually looks like
it's a platform where everybody can
challenge anybody
but not
destroy them by doing so mentally so you
have to balance
uh personal growth of each individual
person on the platform but definitely
removing people from a platform is a
terrible thing so on top of that
it's like how do you get measures
that the platform is doing good
what i really like what elon said and
i've talked to him about this is uh
pissing off
everybody equally the extremes of every
side equally in the political spectrum
you could say the left and the right
is uh measuring by pissing off the
extremes equally because currently there
seems to be an asymmetry in that so
that's one good measure that allows you
to maximize as he says
the area under the curve of human
happiness
uh
that's one thing the the other is repres
people representing themselves
honestly so removing the bots from the
platform it's such a weird world we live
in where you don't know who's real or
not
so anonymity is an awesome thing
the awesome
aspect of anonymity is it protects
people's privacy it actually gives them
freedom to think freedom to speak even
more so
but when anonymity is weaponized
it allows you to be cruel to others
without the repercussion of cruelty that
you would feel in the physical world
right so you want to use anonymity as a
shield versus as a as a sword
so to protect yourself from the attacks
of others but not as a way to hurt
others and those are all
really tricky things to figure out
and it's not you know not all of it's
going to be solved with an edit button
which i believe is the most requested
twitter feature
anyway i think i think it's really um
i think this is fascinating not just for
people
talking about politics which is what
everyone seems to care about but also
for science
for people
challenging each other in the scientific
domain because i i at least have hope
for scientific communication where
people can
start playing around with different
mediums of communication so not just
academic papers but just ideas playing
with those ideas yeah absolutely
especially when you have so evolution
psychology well no that even that it can
be super high turn
turnover rate of importance but you know
you have with kovid
it seems like the progress of science
and scientific debate
uh is most powerful in that context if
it's done really quickly and it feels
like twitter like most most of the best
things i've learned about covet and to
stay up to date
was uh was on twitter it's so exciting
to see
uh signs happening so so quickly and all
kinds of domains there and that
that was great but then you step in with
labels of what's misinformation
you have this kind of
conformity seeking
labels
of what is true and not which is a very
unscientific thing to me in the name of
protecting the populace the weird it's a
weird um
impulse that people have which is
well here's an organization here's an
institution that is a possessive of the
truth and everybody else is untrue now
a lot of the time maybe
majority of the time that institution is
going to be correct
this consensus consensus is the
consensus because it's usually correct
but the biggest ideas
are going to be against the consensus
and certainly that's true in
evolutionary psychology
where it seems like
are we even is the cake even baked yet
it feels like there's a lot of turmoil
in terms of figuring out human
psychology well there's a lot that we
don't know i mean if human psychology if
if it were a simple
thing and we only had
you know three or half a dozen
psychological adaptations we would have
discovered all of them by now it's it's
that it's so complex
multifaceted multi-mechanism
um
part that describes human nature that
it was what makes it exciting but also
the amount that we know is small
compared to the amount that we don't
know and so that's why you have to
approach these things with um with a
certain
humility and that's why even like in the
in the mating and sexuality domain which
i've been studying for a number of years
i i keep coming across things that i
don't know questions that are unanswered
um which which
is is um
makes it exciting from my perspective i
mean that's what the joy is of being
being a scientist
you mentioned i gotta return real quick
to uh ted bundy you mentioned you have
uh so you you you've written about
murder and violence right
in a long distant past but the thread
runs through your work today
who to you is the most fascinating
serial killer
of of the of the true crime
yeah uh things that you've explored i
think well ted bundy's way up there uh i
think uh charles manson um
uh
yeah and is another um have you seen on
ted bunny because i find him super
fascinating have you seen uh there's a
lot of movies on him
extremely
wicked shockingly even and vile
it's a retelling of his life from the
perspective of his girl long term
girlfriend no i have not seen that one
which ties together a lot of our
conversation
so i it's probably my favorite one a lot
of people say it's the best movie on ted
bondi you should definitely watch it i
will uh i recommend it to others but
it's from a perspective
uh of the relationship and it just
one of the really powerful
windows into a serial killer that i saw
there
is that from the perspective of the
relationship you can have just this
healthy looking relationship yeah
there's some fights and so on but the
usual dating and all that kind of stuff
was all there so all the murders he was
doing he had a long
term girlfriend throughout all of that
and also throughout all of that i'll try
not to give away in case you don't know
the story throughout all that she stood
by aside
she refused to believe everything that
was happening yeah until until
um
you know the very end of course it
shifts in the very end and that's a
fascinating shift of the
the breaking of the the illusion but
it's really fascinating that you can
have those two things that
you yeah well i think that
part of it is we
have these stereotypes that we expect
people like serial killers to be these
um
ugly um drooling creatures that are sort
of uh
evil all the time
uh and so um
that's why even like you had um i don't
know if this is
if i'm remembering this correctly but
like stalin who killed you know
millions of people apparently like
loved his kids and loved his family and
people so so we have this part of the
complication uh the complexity of human
nature and human psychology is we we
don't have just this one
you know this one property that
dictates how we behave in all
circumstances
yeah the devil
is going to be charismatic
that's why
that's one of the things i've learned
about just looking at evil people
looking at jeffrey epstein
who seemed to have hoodwinked quite a
lot of people yes yeah that's another
that's another fascinating case yeah i'm
not a he wasn't a serial killer but a
serial sexual predator
and a lot of people
i
know and respect
didn't
see
the evil yeah
and
so i never met the guy
but it's like
are you guys oblivious like what what
was there must have been something and
from everything i see is purely just
charisma
it's it's the it's the smoking mirrors
yeah that uh he was very charming
psychopath yeah but i i think every
psychopath to be effective has to be
charming yeah the successful ones yeah
yeah successful psychopaths
oh
yeah and that was i mean ted bundy was
one he was a good looking guy um
intelligent and
could turn on the charm
and and then had this evil
is there something interesting to be
said that i think a large percentage of
the fan base
like i've seen numbers like 80 plus of
the fan base for true crime shows is
women
is there is there some psychology behind
that i haven't seen that i'm not aware
if a sex difference that i'm not aware
of that you should
i mean i i've heard that in a lot of
places so i wonder if there's some um
there's something about troop crime
maybe because it's um
just just like sexual kinks for for men
develop early on for the
the cues
maybe for women there's the cues of the
threat of violence
the attentiveness to violence
it develops early on and so and
therefore fascination with violence well
well i think that i mean one thing is
that
well with serial killers specifically i
don't know if this is true of true crime
in general but
serial killers like you you find like um
a lot of people well a lot of women fall
in love with them
or you know even if they're they're
jailed for serial killing
and i think one of the features of it is
that
it it parasitizes or hijacks
status mechanisms in that a key cue to
status
is the attention structure that is the
high status people are the people to
whom the most people pay the most
attention and so serial killers garner a
lot of attention and
even though for
evil deeds um it's still attention
so i think that that hijacking of our
status allocation adaptations is partly
responsible for that
is there given the the trajectory of
your life you mentioned berkeley and the
east coast and michigan
you got you got everything is there
given the trajectory of your life
in geography and in science can you give
advice to young folks today
high school college thinking about how
to make their own trajectory how to make
their own way through life that they can
be proud of either career
or just
love life
or life yeah well not necessarily on on
careers but i can give advice on
on the mating you know and i i think
it's one of these things where
um you know we have requirements
in
for the courses that students have to
take in high school for example and i
think there should be a required course
on relationships on on mating
so not just sex
yeah not not not sex at all yeah because
i mean most of what's taught is that
they teach about sexual health and how
not to get an sti and so forth yeah my
my teacher uh put a condom on a banana
right right but
very excited but um how how to select a
maid um how do you know if you're in a
bad mating relationship uh how to how to
get out of a you know a bad mating
relationship um i think that
um that there's at this point in the
science even though there's a lot that
we don't know we know enough to at least
provide some heuristics or general guide
guidelines to
things to watch out for so just as a
concrete example
uh with intimate partner violence uh
and this is male to female
there are statistical predictors of is
this guy
does he have an increased probability of
beating you up
uh and there are things like if he
starts to insist on knowing where you
are at all times if he starts cutting
off your relationships with your friends
and your family
um
so there are these kind of early warning
signs and i think women should know
about those
uh or even things like um
that women are most in danger of being
killed by an ex during the first
three to six months after they've broken
up with him
you know that that sometimes they think
it's you know the guy will say
meet with me one one last time and then
i won't bother you again
um no this is a dangerous time so i
think there's some knowledge
that we do know that can be used to make
informed decisions about our mating
lives and i think that should be taught
so consider that
like take that the the ma the mating
strategies the main demanding life
seriously
yeah yeah absolutely and uh because um
you know aside from
a small number of people who are totally
uninterested in any kind of mating
or sexuality and there are a small
percentage that fall under that category
um we all confront problems of mating
how do you you know there's that uh um
called the mathematical model like
secretary problem marriage problem i
don't know if you're familiar but
basically you have a it's it's a silly
perhaps not
uh
it's a formalized simplified
cueing theory type of thing where it's
you have and and subjects and
you get to date some number of
um
people
and then there's a stopping condition i
believe it's n over e
beyond which you pick the next partner
which is better than anybody you've
dated before
so
uh yeah let's not over emphasize that
idea but
um
if i were to psychologize it i would say
that
some exploration is good
some dating is good but at a certain
point you pick somebody given the set of
people you've explored
you pick somebody
who is uh
pretty desirable within that group yeah
yeah but i would add that what you also
want to do is you want to
um
mate with someone who's equivalent in
mate value
or or has even what's more difficult is
has a
likely
equivalent future mate value trajectory
because nothing remains static yes uh as
beautiful
but it's also the case that there are
individual things we haven't talked
about these but things like um
religious uh orientation political
orientation
uh values these are extremely important
to be compatible on and so you do have
cases of let's say
a democrat marrying a republican
and that sometimes works but you're
going to get into a lot of conflict
other things being equal or someone
who's
deeply religious versus someone who is
not all religious this is gonna be a
problem or someone who's of a different
religious faith
um and and so
uh compatibility on those things
compatibility also on personality
dimensions i think there's some main
effects like so i would i would
recommend avoiding that dimension we
talked about of emotional instability
because
if you sign up for that you at least
should know you're going to be in for a
lot of conflict it may be exciting at
times but there's going to be a lot of
ups and downs know what you sign up for
what about how much to date
so there's a culture
i'm
speaking soon to a founder and
long-time ex-ceo of tinder
so there's that culture of
digitalized dating of swipe right swipe
left
uh
is it positive negative how much did you
date
yeah what's the number and also
what number of sexual partners should
you what's optimal asking for a friend i
don't know if there's a single uh
optimum there um let's hope
i think is it
is it single digits or double digits i
need answers well i don't know i get
some of my wisdom from lyrics from uh
songs so um
uh
this uh eagles song i think don henley
you know said something like a there are
too many lovers in one lifetime ain't
good for you or
something like that yeah but um
you know
i think there there is a uh take it easy
is a good one too
yeah basically don't don't get don't get
too attached don't take it don't take
heartbreak too seriously
yeah so but but i think i mean you know
internet dating and you know there's
there's been some work on them i think
has its pluses and minuses you know i
and one of the pluses is it gives you
access to potential pools of mates that
you could never possibly meet in real
life you know where mating and dating
used to be either people you knew or
friends of friends or you go out to bars
or parties but so that's the good thing
gives you access to those
extended pools but also it gives people
the um illusion that there's always
someone better out there for you someone
who's just a little more attractive a
little more compatible a little more and
so uh it produces what's sometimes
called decision paralysis
you know you have too many options and
you you can't choose i think one one
other
potential um
negative which i think could be
corrected by these internet dating sites
is that the
picture the photographs
uh the of the of the face and body tend
to overwhelm all other sources of
information
and so especially if you're if you're
just looking for a sex partner that's
one thing physical
appearance is it's fine for that to be
overwhelmingly important but if you're
looking for long-term mate there are so
many other things that are really really
important
and so
but but people tend to be
uh swamped by the
visual input which is natural because
that's where we evolved to respond to
visual input we're not
you've ought to respond to words
you know like uh oh i'm
i like to go fishing or something like
that uh so if there's some way for these
sites to
in long-term waiting for
these other characteristics to be made
more salient in people's information
processing i think that would be a
valuable uh improvement yeah because
even
forget long-term beauty even sex appeal
is is
um like even the word appearance
it feels like to me people that are
super sexy in real life
are a lot more than their picture yeah
yeah like
they're it's actually surprising like
they come to life in different ways yes
it could be either submissiveness of
shyness or ex extravagant
um wit and humor
or like uh super confident or super like
whatever they are the whatever the
weirdness that they are comes through
immediate so when people say well
that was just the case of the uh of sort
of proponents of dating apps it's like
when you meet somebody at a bar you're
getting the same experience as you do on
a dating site you have very little
information all you get is appearance
but i don't think
appearance on the screen is the same as
appearance in real life especially with
people that for some reason you find
super sexy because like and again the
objectification that we mentioned
earlier is the
um
it over optimizes for people who are
good at taking pictures of themselves
like they're representing themselves
inaccurately
they're
not just even in the physical features
but in the way those physical features
are used in physical reality
like in terms of body language in terms
of flirtation in terms of just
everything everything put together so i
just um there i i wonder if there's a
way to close that
uh to close that gap
and i don't know what that is exactly i
tend to believe more information is good
on dating i think i don't use actually
dating apps i just because they don't
make any sense to me because there's not
enough information
like what this like uh
to me
like whether you know dostoevsky you're
not as important
and i don't mean that because you've
read specifically a book by dostoevsky
but there's something about
have you suffered have you thought about
life deeply have you been shaken in some
way
and that's not sometimes books can
reveal that sometimes something else can
reveal that but this kind of
very shallow resume like i like to
travel
i have boobs all right it's like this
kind of thing is it loses the humanity
of it all yeah i want because listen as
a fan of technology i would love
dating to open up like you said the pool
of possibilities out there the soulmate
idea like
i believe that there's an incredible
people out there for you that is an
emotional connection not just a physical
connection and so that the promise of um
digital tech is that you can discover
those people and that's not just for
romantic relationship it's for
friendships it's for business partners
it's for all that kind of stuff like
your your friend groups
but yeah there's something seems broken
about dating sites yeah well that's why
i mean
when i'm asked for advice on this i say
if you feel like you have a connection
with someone
meet them in person you meet them in in
real life and because the road trip be
like you said yeah
stress test it yes yeah because there's
only i mean
so much you can learn through
messaging and so forth
amongst all of this we didn't really
we didn't really mention love which is
hilarious
so let me ask you as uh
in the last just a few questions what's
the role of love in all of this in in
the human condition
so if um
we talked about mating we talked about
made selection
we talked about all the things we find
attractive and inmates the status
hierarchies and all that kind of stuff
what about that deep connection with the
human being that's hard to explain
well we talked about it a little bit but
so we're talking about love like like
romantic love um
i think it's an evolved emotion
that evolved
in part to solidify long-term
pair bonds
uh and is it different from the love of
a parent for a child or or brotherly
love or sisterly love or
other friendship love i think these are
different phenomena but if we're talking
about roman romantic love i think it's
an evolved emotion
um
leading hypothesis is that it's a it's a
commitment device
uh so if i
say to a potential mate um
oh uh you exceed my minimum thresholds
on intelligence and and looks i think we
we make a good couple it's a good pickup
line yeah it wouldn't um it wouldn't do
much um emotionally but if but if you
say you know i i love you it's i i can't
i can't stop thinking about you i it's
this uncontrollable emotion that i feel
toward you it's it's a sign that you
know um that i'm committed to you
uh at least for a while
uh and i'm not gonna abandon you when
when you know if you're an aide and when
an 8.5 comes along i'm not going to drop
you and go with the 8.5 yeah
it's that's so interesting but that's
you know it's still
still the reality of the emotion is
there
however it evolved it's still there and
it's interesting it's one of the more
puzzling pieces
here
um even broader than romantic love but
in romantic love like what is that
uh how much of that is nature how much
of it is nurture because
even
i mean i ask that myself all the time
like i'm deeply romantic
how much is that is nature
how much of it is nurture how much is
the
the people i spent my childhood with
the ideas i mean
um
the soviet union sort of is known for
the literature and the movies and so on
that are
that are very over
they're heavily romanticized i don't
want to say over romanticized maybe
there's no such thing but so maybe what
is that is that my upbringing or is that
some somewhere in the genetics
um that i value that emotional
connection
yeah well
most
humans
have
the capacity
for love
you know whether it is um
activated in any individual person such
as you uh or anyone else
it is going to be
adjusted or suppressed
by different social and cultural and
upbringing factors you know i mean there
there are cultures where
parents basically walk away girls they
cloister them and so they can't ever
meet anyone else until they the parents
arrange to marry him so they they're
they override any possibility of um
of love
um but i i think i think it's an evolved
emotion
and
um i mean one
kind of test of this and this is just
slightly
circumstantial evidence but in
china historically there have been
arranged marriages and then
you know individual choice marriages
the arranged marriages tend to have
higher breakup rates and lower
child production
than the ones that are sort of
voluntarily chosen
you know so i've heard of me sort of
contrasting stuff from india
i wonder uh contrasting so that where
the arranged marriages
are longer lasting you know i
it's so interesting because you say
china yeah i would love to see the data
and the dance of that because
there's a lot of other interesting
factors like how the arranged marriage
is arranged yes um is it for the
families
is the interest of the families for some
kind of like in the monarchies
to make agreements to trade resources or
is the interest of the family to
maximize the success of the marriage so
compatibility is it are they looking for
maximized compatibility are they looking
to maximize resources well historically
it's often been an arrangement where
they're trying to maximize the
status and power of the ala of the
alliance with this other extended family
um
but but that also varies from culture to
culture like there's the uh the tiwi
culture where there's uh
you know the the the men basically
bestowed the dot their daughters on
other men and they they try to gauge
which men which of these young
up and coming men are really going to be
you know chiefs high status guys and
which ones are going to be losers and so
um you have this weird phenomenon they
have polygenic marriage
where uh a guy will get one
daughter bestowed on him and then other
men use that as information
uh that this guy must be rising in
status and so they give their daughters
to the guy as well as
have we go from like zero to seven wives
and very short stories richer that's
fascinating
uh the game of thrones
uh insects is a part of that game
let me ask you about yourself your own
self who mentioned richard rangham
think about mortality do you think about
your own mortality
are you afraid
of death
yeah interesting i'm not afraid of death
um i i agree with with richard wrangham
i i i'm not eager to leave the party i
don't want to leave the party soon
i enjoy life um in all of its
interesting complexities i enjoy
my scientific work i enjoy my
relationships with other people i enjoy
exploring the universe so i'm not eager
to to leave but i'm not afraid of it and
i think
um part of that is that
um i was married for a while and um my
wife died
uh prematurely uh of cancer and so i
spent basically eight months with her
watching her diet she after she was
diagnosed and there's some weird it's a
horrible time for me and for her
obviously but
there's some way in which it kind of um
made it more familiar so that it's
uh became a lot less frightening
you know um
but um
how did that experience change you just
as a scientist as a thinker about
humanity
um
as a as a human yourself well i guess so
you're saying you felt
like you felt a little bit more ready
for this whole
end of the party well yeah it's yeah
because
we tend to be
afraid of things that we're not familiar
with you know and so if you're familiar
with it
um
at least in my case that that caused a
lessening of um fear on that dimension
but
i don't know i it also kind of you know
there are these existential
thoughts that it brought about like how
ephemeral
life is and um and i remember this
richard dawkins quote he said something
like um
we are all going to die
and we're the lucky ones
you know
uh yeah that we got
we even got a chance yeah or or even uh
uh you mentioned russian writers one of
my favorite writers is uh nabakov
vladimir nabakov i don't know if you've
read
him but he he said once that um life is
a chink of light between two eternities
of darkness
and you're saying that's not terrifying
to you
well i i'd prefer i'm happy with the
prior the first eternity of darkness i
prefer the second um not to occur but um
but it's going to occur i mean it's um
we know that uh
um elon musk aside i i i'm
skeptical that we'll be
colonizing other planets in any
substantive way
uh and so our our star our sun will will
burn out
and so it might it's going to take a few
billion years or so but
um it will eventually the earth will
become a cold lump of um
dirt
floating around in the universe with no
life on it so it's not just
your light the light of your
consciousness
it's the light of
our human civilization that will
eventually go out yes everything
at least here
i do believe that there is life and
intelligent life in other
parts of the
universe on other planets
i sometimes wonder
if
the second eternal darkness
is the thing that makes the light
possible so in the other places out
there
i wonder how successfully can you truly
be without the deadline of death both at
the human scale
and at the civilizational scale
i feel like we in order in order to
create anything beautiful we have to
live at the on the edge of destruction
that seems to be
um you know some people would say that's
just the future of our past
that our future can be otherwise but
you know like you i'm uh somebody that
looks at the data
and currently the data says otherwise
but uh
of course we're constantly changing the
data because we're there's change
so we'll see what we see i wonder what
the future uh future holds for us
speaking of which as a
you know as somebody who wrote the
textbook on
evolutionary psychology
what do you think is the meaning of the
whole thing
what's the meaning of life
um you're very good at describing how
the human mind is the way it is
but why is it here at all
what's the purpose well i can give you
my answer to that but i would actually
love to hear your answer because i know
you've asked this question of dozens and
dozens of people on your podcast and
what what are what are your thoughts on
that well first of all my mind changes
on that at all a lot and i think the
process of answering the question is the
fun thing
not the actual final answer i think the
question itself is the most fun thing
but for me usually
is
two things
one is
love and we can talk a long time what i
mean by that is it's not just romantic
love
and two is to create and hopefully to
create beauty
so
and again i can talk forever what that
means for me personally
creating beauty means
engineering
and creating experiences like connection
with others
on the love side
it's just
the actual feeling the experience
of deep appreciation
of um
everything around you like the sensory
experiences of everything around you
just feeling it every single moment
saying
i'm damn glad to be alive
that light with the darkness on your
side just being appreciative like being
in the in the experience of
of truly
present and experiencing it
because um
because it's not going to be there for
long the whole thing ends and that that
to me is love and
the the reason romantic love is so
important is um
is that other people are just awesome
they're
fascinating black boxes that can
generate awesomeness
so can like other animals and objects
for me but uh humans in particular for
some reason are just generators of
awesomeness yes they surprise us
yeah
yeah and therefore a good target of love
well so that's a much more eloquent
answer than um than i could give but
i'll just say a thought or two um on
that and
uh i mean one of the things
that
you know what is the meaning of of life
i mean in some sense
um
if you're thinking about some eternal
purpose
meaning like if we
look five billion years hence you know
will any of this mean anything i think
the answer to that is probably no okay
but
and this is i think where my answer
would concur with yours is that i think
we have a rich
evolved psychology that contains
many complex
adaptations
and at any one moment in time
most are quiescent most are not
activated
but
for me part of the meaning of life is
experiencing
the activation of
a lot of these complicated evol
psychological mechanisms and they
include
romantic love they include friendship
they include being part of a group or
coalition because i think we're an
intensely coalitional
species so there's something about being
a group
member so like just even i don't know if
you're in in sports if your your team
wins you feel that somehow that's your
part of that
um
uh and but this goes for both the
positive and the and the uh darker sides
of things so
so for example
warfare
um you see these
men who have been through a war together
and who where their lives have depended
on each other and they're like
best friends for for life and have a
bond that is
stronger than most people form with a
friend ever in their life because
they've been through the these life or
death
experiences and so
you know i i wouldn't want to um
you know
doesn't cause me to want to charge off
and be in war but
uh but there are some
types of adaptations even like warfare
adaptations where in principle
i would like to experience them i would
like to experience and and never will
but
uh you know what is it like to be
in a
coalition where you are in combat with
another coalition and not not in modern
warfare because it's it's you know
horrible but where your life is in
danger where your life
you
depend for your life on other people and
they're depending for their life on you
and there's this kind of coalitional
solidarity that is
um is unique
now um
uh another thing that of course i'll
never be able to experience this is
murder because i'm never gonna murder
anybody okay but
he's young but studying homicidal
ideation really gave me a it wasn't it
was an eye-opener it was as interesting
as
studying sexual fantasies because
the if you ask what triggers homicidal
thoughts ideation most people have had
them
uh and uh and i because i asked this
question have you ever thought about
killing someone
and and i get that 91 percent of men say
yes about 84 percent of women say no and
even when i talk to people they say uh
one-on-one they'll say oh no i've never
thought of telling someone what kind of
person you think i am and then 10
minutes later i say actually there was
this one time when i got this guy
humiliated me in public and i
you know and and so
but i think um thoughts about
killing um homicide ideation and they're
very predictable from an evolutionary
perspective if you look like we
mentioned mate poachers earlier and
uh infidelity and there are other things
but
uh things like that being humiliated in
in public status loss you know do
trigger homicidal thoughts
so so anyway i don't go off too much on
that but i guess what i'm saying in
answer to your question is
is
experiencing the rich array of
complex psychology that we have within
us
most of which
remains unactivated and some of which
will never be experienced um
like you know there are some people who
never never experienced love for example
because of you know cultural
restrictions or or whatever and so
uh to me that that's part of the meaning
of life so that's that's so beautifully
put the saying that they're kind of
dormant inactivated aspects of the uh
so the psychological mechanism so we
have the capacity to experience a bunch
of stuff it's almost like in video games
you can unlock levels and so on and so
this is basically
there's all of these things that are
dormant in our mind that we have the
capacity to experience
and part of the meaning is to try to
experience
um as many of them
or uh as many new ones novel for the
particular society or maybe the entirety
of human civilization who knows
psychedelic drugs
like you said violence
uh experiences that might have to do
with brain computer interfaces the
interaction with all of those are
experiences and so the question is what
is the ceiling what are like
how uh
infinite or nearly infinite is the
capacity of the human mind to experience
all those things and we'll get to uh
we'll get to discover those things so um
i'm glad you never got a chance and
never will get a chance to murder but i
just want to put it on record that
you know that's definitely something on
my bucket list why do you think i dress
like this
anyway um
there is something appealing like one of
my favorite movies is leon the
professional oh i love that movie
what is that why is that so exciting
listen maybe it's the ocd thing
like killing other bad guys
no women no children
women no children
also loving that with uh uh natalie
porter natalie portman incredible
actress uh
also the complex whatever that is the
fatherly or romantic whatever that is
like lolita type of thing i don't know
what i i've never like
read a phd thesis on that interpretation
of that movie but
that's a fascinating one violence and
violence and love and sex that's what
makes uh
life worth living that's what makes it
fun david you're an incredible person
incredible scientist it's a huge honor
to share a city with you or i'm i'm the
visitor you own this place you run this
place oh i don't i we vote we both live
here now yeah and uh
it's been great talking to you it's a
great honor for me um i've mentioned
i've followed your podcast for a long
long time now and
tremendously enjoy your your interviews
and
you have a very
um
inquisitive
inviting style that brings out things in
your guests which i think is fantastic
activates all those dormant
psychological mechanisms that's what
that's a life that's what conversation
is all about thank you for talking today
thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with david buss to support
this podcast please check out our
sponsors in the description and now let
me leave you with some words from eb
white
if the world were merely seductive that
would be easy
if it were merely challenging that would
be no problem
but i rise in the morning torn between a
desire to improve the world and a desire
to enjoy the world
this makes it hard to plan the day
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you