Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / The Next Sexual Revolution: The 306th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

The Next Sexual Revolution: The 306th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream number 306.
• 0:11
  It is the 244th non-prime live stream, interestingly enough.
• 0:18
  And I'm Dr.
• 0:19
  Bret Weinstein.
• 0:20
  You are Dr.
• 0:20
  Heather Heying.
• 0:22
  No way that's the right number.
• 0:23
  I think it is.
• 0:24
  You looked, you, you.
• 0:25
  I did a little work.
• 0:26
  I did not check the math, but yes, I did some preliminaries and...
• 0:31
  You asked the AI and you trusted its answer.
• 0:33
  Well, I didn't exactly.
• 0:34
  I prompted the AI to feed me some evidence and...
• 0:39
  Number 306, you're claiming under the auspices of the AI that claimed to you that it's the 244th, you said?
• 0:48
  244th non-prime live stream that we've done, yes.
• 0:51
  72 primes between... that seems high.
• 0:57
  Maybe, I don't know.
• 0:58
  I've done the math and I'm not, I'm not one of those, those savants, so I can't do it in my head.
• 1:04
  But as I have frequently said, when you get something wrong, as embarrassing as it is to admit it, the best thing to do is to correct it as quick as possible, as you can get back to being right, and I will issue a correction on the next live stream if I've got it wrong.
• 1:16
  But you're not going to pursue it.
• 1:18
  I am going to pursue it.
• 1:19
  No, you're not.
• 1:19
  As soon as we're finished here, I will be pursuing it because...
• 1:22
  Oh, but I think this is actually perfect, because what are we going to talk about today?
• 1:25
  We're going to talk about mating, dating, sex...
• 1:29
  Male, female dynamics.
• 1:30
  Dynamics, yes.
• 1:30
  And how insane everyone is now.
• 1:35
  Who, pray tell, are you talking about?
• 1:36
  Everyone, I said, everyone.
• 1:38
  Well, all right.
• 1:38
  What's that?
• 1:41
  He said this is the 244th, so Zach is back as our guest producer this week, our first-born he is, your father said that it is the 244th non-prime episode of the evolutionary lands, and it is the 306th.
• 1:59
  That's correct.
• 2:01
  All right.
• 2:01
  All right, see?
• 2:03
  Pretty good.
• 2:04
  Listen.
• 2:07
  No, I'm going to make it easier for you.
• 2:08
  You don't have to list the 244 that aren't prime.
• 2:11
  Just the 72, whatever, that are.
• 2:14
  Wow, I should never have, never have gone down this road.
• 2:18
  It's going to be, no, because it's 36.
• 2:22
  Oh, you're right.
• 2:23
  62.
• 2:24
  Yeah.
• 2:25
  See?
• 2:25
  It just got easier by 10.
• 2:27
  Wow.
• 2:28
  All right.
• 2:30
  Shall we move on to paying the rent and then the substance of the podcast?
• 2:35
  Yeah.
• 2:36
  Yes, yes, we shall.
• 2:37
  There's a Locals Watch Party going on, as usual.
• 2:40
  This is going to be our last live stream before Christmas.
• 2:43
  We are going to be back on New Year's Eve, a Wednesday, our usual time and place.
• 2:49
  We're doing the special Saturday live stream so as to not have to be here on Christmas Eve.
• 2:54
  And as always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour, sponsors who make products or offer services that we really, truly, absolutely vouch for.
• 3:03
  And because I am still wrestling with the remnants of this frickin' death, gloom, pneumonia garbage that I got more than four weeks ago at this point, Bret is going to do us the honors by reading two of the three ads, whereas usually that is my purview.
• 3:19
  He has been doing this for the last several episodes.
• 3:22
  I have the props though.
• 3:24
  And I will give you the props.
• 3:25
  For the first, no, I'm giving you the props.
• 3:28
  That's how that goes.
• 3:28
  That is a preliminary for the discussion of gender roles.
• 3:33
  Yeah, those are the props.
• 3:35
  That's the props.
• 3:35
  That's the props.
• 3:36
  That's the first one.
• 3:36
  I'm going to struggle through these ads.
• 3:38
  You're going to do it.
• 3:38
  And it might be easier if you were sucking down some Ramanuka honey, which these are the travel sticks.
• 3:44
  It's too late.
• 3:45
  I'm just, I'm locking in, as the kids say.
• 3:48
  All right.
• 3:48
  Our first sponsor this week, Heather, is Manukora Honey.
• 3:52
  Manukora is rich and creamy, as you can see, is rich and creamy and is likely to be the most delicious honey you've ever had.
• 4:01
  Wow.
• 4:01
  English.
• 4:03
  Ethically produced by Master Beekeepers in remote forests of New Zealand, Mauna Korah honey contains powerful nutrients to support immunity and gut health.
• 4:11
  All honey is excellent for you.
• 4:13
  Good scientific research has indicated that honey has antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-mutagenic properties as well.
• 4:24
  But it's not opposed to everything.
• 4:26
  No, it's not.
• 4:28
  Yeah.
• 4:29
  What would that be?
• 4:30
  Universal antagonism.
• 4:32
  No, it doesn't.
• 4:33
  It doesn't have that.
• 4:34
  It'd be cynicism.
• 4:35
  This honey is not cynical.
• 4:36
  Not cynical.
• 4:37
  Exactly.
• 4:38
  It is skeptical, but not cynical honey.
• 4:40
  So if that's what you need, listen on.
• 4:42
  It's creamy and delicious.
• 4:45
  It's what?
• 4:46
  Creamy and delicious.
• 4:47
  Well, exactly.
• 4:48
  That wasn't just...
• 4:50
  It is also known to expedite wound healing.
• 4:52
  Used topically, honey softens the skin, evens out tone, and reduces acne.
• 4:56
  All of that is true for regular honey, but Manuka honey is even better.
• 5:00
  All of the health benefits attributed to regular honey appear to be even stronger in Manuka honey.
• 5:05
  From fungal infections to diabetes to gastrointestinal tract infect...
• 5:10
  All right, this is going swimmingly.
• 5:13
  I'm sure no one is noticing the errors.
• 5:15
  Manuka honey can be useful in treating the problem.
• 5:19
  Bees that collect nectar from leptospermum scaparium.
• 5:23
  I've read that many times.
• 5:25
  Why am I struggling over it?
• 5:26
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• 5:34
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• 5:40
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• 5:43
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• 5:44
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• 5:48
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• 5:50
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• 5:56
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• 6:02
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• 6:04
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• 6:10
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• 6:17
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• 6:19
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• 6:20
  Mmm.
• 6:21
  No, no.
• 6:22
  Head to, that's metaphorically, you don't have to go anywhere, but head over.
• 6:26
  You can back in.
• 6:28
  I am locked in.
• 6:29
  You can back in.
• 6:30
  That's between you and your God.
• 6:33
  Head over to Manukora.com slash dark horse to save up to 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts with the starter kit, which comes with Mg0850 plus Manuka honey, a Manuka honey jar, five travel sticks, C display.
• 6:52
  This is only three of them.
• 6:53
  We already had two of them.
• 6:55
  Quite true.
• 6:56
  A wooden spoon and a guidebook.
• 6:58
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• 7:05
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• 7:08
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• 7:08
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• 7:09
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• 7:10
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• 7:12
  All right.
• 7:15
  You're a terrible salesman.
• 7:17
  No, I just, it's, both of us hate the idea of sales and are so grateful to our awesome ad broker, Matt, uh, for bringing us amazing sponsors and for being super, super understanding when we, as often the case say, no, that one's not for us.
• 7:35
  So, um, the fact that we are reading ads here tells you that we are actually really inspired by these things, but at the very end there, I like just do it today.
• 7:43
  Yeah.
• 7:43
  You just seem to just not apparently approve your improve your reading.
• 7:48
  That is what it does not do.
• 7:50
  All right.
• 7:50
  Our second sponsor for this episode is Prima, which makes remarkable ancestral protein bars.
• 7:56
  We eat, we've been doing so for hundreds of millions.
• 8:01
  What that says is we eat M dash.
• 8:04
  We've been doing so for hundreds of millions of years.
• 8:06
  Our diets have changed a lot since those early days for better and for worse.
• 8:10
  Real food, M dash food that your grandmother would recognize as food, food that she would have served to you from her own kitchen is best, but often our lives and lifestyles mean that we need something faster, something packaged, something that will nourish us and keep us going until the next time we can sit down to another one of grandma's home cooked meals.
• 8:29
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• 8:32
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• 8:37
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• 8:44
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• 8:45
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• 8:56
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• 9:05
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• 9:15
  Prima bars come in four flavors, mocha, salted caramel, cacao, and their newest flavor, cookie dough.
• 9:22
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• 9:24
  There are 16 grams of protein in every bar, from a special blend of grass fed collagen peptides and grass fed whey protein concentrate.
• 9:32
  Toby, our 19 year old, worked long days on several farms last summer, often leaving the house well before 6am and not returning until 9 o'clock at night, farming his hard work and he needed to keep up his energy with our box of Prima bars when our box of Prima bars arrived Heather.
• 9:48
  He took them and he told us, quote, "I found Prima bars very useful while working on the farm because I often don't have an appetite while I'm working, but I knew that I needed to eat.
• 9:58
  I like these bars, especially the cocoa flavor." Cacao.
• 10:04
  "You know, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna study up on which thing is what soon, as they are very high in protein, relatively high calorie, and easy to eat." You apparently got chest ice last time for saying you're wrong, which is why I was so quick on the draw.
• 10:19
  It is cacao.
• 10:20
  You're right.
• 10:21
  Okay.
• 10:22
  If you know what you're going to want...
• 10:25
  Hold on just a second.
• 10:26
  And I will say the only reason that Zach isn't also enthusiastic about these bars is that he can't do dairy and there's whey protein in them.
• 10:35
  So, which, you know, as they say, as you just listen to the ingredients.
• 10:39
  So they're a fantastic choice.
• 10:41
  And, you know, as long as you don't have a dairy sensitivity.
• 10:45
  Right.
• 10:45
  And if you do, you need a no whey, no how kind of a bar.
• 10:49
  But you totally do.
• 10:50
  Yeah.
• 10:50
  If you know that you're going to want food on the go and need something easy and transportable, but highly nutritious and delicious as well, try Prima bars.
• 10:58
  And now for our DarkHorse audience, Prima is offering 20% off their fantastic bars.
• 11:03
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• 11:07
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• 11:12
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• 11:16
  All right.
• 11:17
  Our final sponsor this week is CrowdHealth.
• 11:20
  CrowdHealth is not health insurance.
• 11:22
  It's better.
• 11:23
  This time of year, health insurance companies hope that you will once again blindly sign up for another year of overpriced premiums and confusing fine print.
• 11:30
  We used to do that.
• 11:31
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• 11:32
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• 11:33
  Not anymore and never again.
• 11:36
  CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly.
• 11:38
  No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense.
• 11:42
  After we left our salaried jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace.
• 11:47
  It was dysfunctional, confusing, and very expensive.
• 11:50
  As a family of four who had health insurance for emergencies only, we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work.
• 12:01
  Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
• 12:04
  You may recognize this.
• 12:06
  Many people have had similar experiences in the health insurance world of the United States.
• 12:12
  I went looking for alternatives and I found CrowdHealth.
• 12:15
  We have now had two sets of great experiences with them.
• 12:17
  When Toby broke his foot in the summer of 2024 and when I slipped on wet concrete and split up on my scalp last summer, both times we went to the ER and got good, but expensive, treatment from the medical staff there.
• 12:28
  In both cases, CrowdHealth paid our bills with no hassle.
• 12:30
  Their app was simple and straightforward to use and the real people who work CrowdHealth were easy to reach, clear, and communicative.
• 12:37
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• 12:41
  You get access to a team of health bar...
• 12:43
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• 12:44
  I don't know.
• 12:45
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• 12:46
  It's contagious.
• 12:47
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• 12:49
  Actually, Health Bear Negotiators.
• 12:51
  If you had a bear right here.
• 12:52
  The fun people at CrowdHealth are Health Bear Negotiators.
• 12:54
  There are very few people ready to stand up to a bear.
• 12:56
  Yeah.
• 12:57
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• 12:59
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• 13:07
  With CrowdHealth, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, like a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or in the case of our family, a couple of accidents, you pay the first $500 and they pay the rest.
• 13:20
  Seriously.
• 13:20
  It's easy, it's affordable, and it is so much harder than health insurance.
• 13:24
  We can still hardly believe it.
• 13:25
  The health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in the same overpriced, overcomplicated mess.
• 13:30
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• 13:37
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• 13:46
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• 13:48
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• 13:55
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• 13:58
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• 14:01
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• 14:05
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• 14:08
  All right.
• 14:10
  Maybe before we launch into this, I wanted to say something about why we're talking about this and what the implications are.
• 14:20
  And I would just say I have some trepidation about talking about this topic here because- We're talking about the topic, isn't it?
• 14:27
  Well, we said at the beginning that the topic is male-female dynamics, mating, dating, romance, all of that stuff.
• 14:34
  And here's something that I think the audience just needs to know.
• 14:38
  I at least think that our relationship is fantastic.
• 14:44
  You're in mine.
• 14:44
  Yes.
• 14:45
  You're in my relationship with each other is fantastic.
• 14:48
  That is true, not because it was set in motion that way, but because you and I are very good at pattern recognition, I think we both believed that something excellent was possible and it is some place that we have discovered.
• 15:04
  That said- I'm not interested in going into details, but it was kind of rough at the start and it's had a number of rough patches, but we figured it out.
• 15:13
  I think they all do.
• 15:15
  But basic point is that place that we have arrived at is something incredibly precious to me.
• 15:24
  I hope it is to you.
• 15:25
  You know it is.
• 15:26
  I think I do know that.
• 15:28
  The problem is that it is not a conscious construction.
• 15:33
  It is a pattern of interaction that works and fixes itself and all of that.
• 15:39
  And the process of discussing what it is may reveal disagreements over how it works.
• 15:49
  And anyway, that is perilous and I wouldn't do it because the value of the relationship is so profound.
• 15:55
  I wouldn't do it, a, if I didn't think we could fix whatever disagreement we might have.
• 16:00
  And b, if I didn't think it was very important at this moment above all others to let people know that there is somewhere to arrive at.
• 16:11
  And this is one of the places that I feel I was misled by the culture you and I were born into.
• 16:16
  That it did not provide a good model of that there was anywhere really good to end up and therefore I think a lot of people failed to pursue that.
• 16:25
  You know if you knew that you just hadn't arrived yet you might keep pursuing it, but if you thought there was nowhere to get to you might quit early.
• 16:31
  And so in any case I think it is worth the risk to talk about these things, but it's not a zero risk activity and I don't engage in it lightly.
• 16:41
  I'm sure you don't either.
• 16:43
  Yeah, I mean that's an interesting preamble because I didn't assume that we were going to be talking about our relationship and I'm happy for us to do so.
• 16:52
  I had some other places I wanted to go and maybe I think it might be more useful to start in those other places first.
• 16:58
  I just think it's going to inevitably.
• 17:00
  Yeah, but I mean it might also be a more standalone topic that we don't want to integrate with some of the other stuff.
• 17:07
  So I think maybe actually what got me thinking about let's talk about this is that you know that you've been talking to a bunch of men about some of these issues.
• 17:17
  You had a talk with Ben Davidson on Inside Rail, you had a talk with Carl Benjamin on Inside Rail, and you recently on your most recent Joe Rogan which just came out on Wednesday last December 17th I think, there's a bit of discussion in there.
• 17:34
  And I have listened to your talk with Ben Davidson and with Rogan.
• 17:40
  I have not listened to most of what's in your Carl Benjamin talk except for a clip that Jen, our usual producer, clipped of you and that I saw on Twitter.
• 17:51
  And I think maybe Zach if you would just show that clip of Bret talking, of you talking on your own podcast, but this is just you in conversation with Carl Benjamin.
• 18:02
  I don't like saying this at all, but I nonetheless it's ever clearer to me.
• 18:07
  I see signs of life amongst young men.
• 18:14
  I see them beginning to recognize what they lost and trying to find their way back.
• 18:22
  I'm not sure back is where they want to go, but trying to find their way back because it was better.
• 18:29
  And I do not see this amongst young women.
• 18:34
  I see a lot of doubling down on these notions that turn out to have been devastating.
• 18:44
  And there's a sense that those notions are entitled to be right, that these ideas are so beautiful that surely if we just put our foot on the accelerator sooner or later, we will get to that utopian place.
• 18:58
  And I'm frustrated that women are not recognizing the predicament that has been created.
• 19:07
  I'm not looking for fault finding.
• 19:10
  What I want is for people to stand up for themselves.
• 19:13
  And to the extent that they've been sold a bill of goods that has led them into self-harm, I would like them to reject it, return to sender, and figure out what I suspect are not going to be old rules.
• 19:24
  They're going to have some traditional aspects to them.
• 19:26
  They're going to have some novel aspects to them, but to essentially renegotiate the agreement between the sexes in light of the fact that the notions that followed from the sexual revolution turned out to be a disaster.
• 19:43
  Okay.
• 19:43
  There's a number of things I wanted to respond to there.
• 19:46
  Maybe most interestingly is this right to be right.
• 19:50
  But before we go there, I wanted to say that I came across this clip because there are some online commenters who tagged me in their response.
• 20:01
  Give me a compliment.
• 20:02
  Your wife is brilliant, therefore you're not seeing the problem.
• 20:05
  I don't think that's exactly responsive.
• 20:07
  I appreciate the compliment, but I don't think that's exactly responsive.
• 20:10
  Other people said, you guys only have sons, therefore you're not seeing the problem.
• 20:15
  I think that gets closer to it actually.
• 20:17
  Even though there's a little bit of truth in, well there's certainly a lot of truth in, I was pretty much always gender non-conforming and that points to some female atypical ways of understanding the world that because you've been with me for a very long time may make you less, you may just run into or understand less what a lot of men are interacting with in relationships.
• 20:49
  That said, we use, I think there's a sampling bias in your claim.
• 20:56
  We used to have until a little over seven years ago, regular access to the minds of young people of both sexes.
• 21:02
  It really did give us insight into, and by chance we actually basically taught the millennials that we started teaching right as the millennials were going to college and we ended teaching just as Gen Z was rising up.
• 21:15
  We had a lot of non-traditional age students, so we had some Gen X, we even had some boomers, and we're Gen X.
• 21:22
  What we saw when we had regular access to young people of both sexes, and because of the unique pedagogical model of Evergreen, we really got to know at least some and often many students very well every single quarter that we taught, was that you in particular had a number of friendships, professional relationships, faculty, student, but also that became friendships because we did know these people so well and we were in the field with them for a long time, specifically with young women who were saying, "I'm interested in good, honest relationships and I cannot find it.
• 21:59
  I am not interacting with men who are interested in anything like that.
• 22:04
  They're just interested in doing what we have called and what you call on Rogan, the strategy that is the least honorable among men." So I don't know that those women don't still exist.
• 22:17
  I suspect that they do.
• 22:18
  I suspect that just as it was true when we were seeing such women in our classes, when we were professors, they are less likely to get online and talk about their predicament than are men who are fed up and frankly now overgeneralizing about an entire population of people.
• 22:39
  And those are the people, you're more likely to run into men because you're male and you're also more likely to run into the people who are being active and a little bit crass and fed up and embittered by the situation.
• 22:51
  So I do think there's a sampling bias.
• 22:52
  Well, hold on.
• 22:53
  But I also see that there's a problem.
• 22:54
  So maybe I'm not saying exactly what came across in that clip.
• 22:58
  I'm not saying that women, young women don't see the problem.
• 23:04
  A lot of young women do and part of what I'm responding to is there's a genre and the sample that I see is filtered by the fact that it's being propagated mostly on Twitter where I see it.
• 23:17
  But there is a genre of women reflecting on the fact that they do want a relationship and can't find it in spite of, and then they list the characteristics that should make it happen.
• 23:29
  So I am seeing that.
• 23:30
  It's not that I think women are, believe that what they're doing is working.
• 23:35
  What I don't see is a willingness to self reflect on their contribution to the problem.
• 23:45
  And I certainly see many, many men who are also not self reflective.
• 23:50
  And in fact, there are two threads about how each, you know, sees the problem that is being caused by the other.
• 24:00
  In fact, they may actually see the problem that's being caused by the other, but very much like a dysfunctional relationship.
• 24:06
  It's very easy to see what the other person is doing wrong and to imagine that that is the problem and not see your own role in the dynamic.
• 24:14
  And if you do, I mean, if you have self reflected and see how you are behaving or haven't behaved in a way that is destructive of the goals that you claim to have and actually do have and are working to change them, you are a either not going to be able to honestly put online, this is the problem that I have because it's me and this is what I'm doing because you're actively trying to change it or you can't see it.
• 24:36
  So I'm not going to be able to so like the lack of self reflection isn't itself evidence that it doesn't exist.
• 24:41
  The lack of self the lack of self reflection on social media is not itself evidence.
• 24:47
  Well, what I do see a lot of and have seen probably for the last 10 years is women who held similar beliefs to what what I'm calling young women are currently believing who then age out of this and they realize somewhere in their 30s that actually I'm on a trajectory that doesn't go to any of the places I thought I would end up.
• 25:14
  And so I've seen, you know, I've had some friends radically alter their lifestyle, you know, become religious to join a community of people that has a set of rules that actually results in something.
• 25:26
  So that clip is dependent on the word young with respect to women.
• 25:32
  I don't see many young women figuring out what their role in this dynamic is.
• 25:36
  I see more young men willing to do it, but I also see a pervasive pattern that I would describe as the behavior of men and women in this dysfunctional dynamic is causing men to become unsympathetic to women and women to become unsympathetic to men.
• 25:55
  And that is very hard to recover from.
• 25:58
  Well, one of actually this is not something that I wanted to go, but one of the issues that will be perhaps universal, perhaps unresolvable at one level is that because of what humans are and because of what in general mammals are, but especially Primates, especially humans, traditional routes to power within relationships accrue early for women and later early in life for women and later in life for men.
• 26:31
  And wisdom takes time.
• 26:33
  And so the moment that women are most powerful traditionally, simply with regard to reproductive power, is at a moment when they are inherently less wise, because they are younger than the moment when men tend to be acquiring the power that they will tend to have, simply because of the amount of time that they will have had. 18 to 25 year old men may be at their prime with regard to their physical attractiveness and their strength, but they don't have the kind of power in relationships, their ability to wield stuff in the world with regard to relationships that older men do and the inverse is true for women.
• 27:15
  And so that is something that is just, there's not going to be any getting around it.
• 27:20
  And so when you have commenters, male commenters in their thirties and forties who are now finding themselves with the ability to attract younger women being disgusted or embittered by younger women's lack of similar view on the world, like, well, you know what, there's value in being age matched, not just because you have all the same cultural checkpoints, but because you actually have similar amounts of wisdom in the world.
• 27:49
  And yes, that is not going to be as appealing for some older men who aren't already pair bonded, but you're going, you're going to have to accept some real sacrifices if you insist on chasing women who are inherently not wise because they are so young.
• 28:05
  Yeah, I think this is true.
• 28:07
  And it is, you know, it's basically a train wreck in slow motion that becomes as I think we've seen this in many of the dysfunctional features of civilization of late, where the pattern in question creates, it creates a reality to the accusation that was leveled when it wasn't true.
• 28:29
  Right.
• 28:29
  Right.
• 28:30
  And so actually, could you show that tweet I sent you, Zach?
• 28:33
  There's a tweet that represents a comment that I again and again hear from different men when I post about this topic.
• 28:41
  Do you have it, Zach?
• 28:46
  Wow.
• 28:46
  Can you embiggen it?
• 28:52
  So maybe we should read both.
• 28:54
  I said lots of women are asking other women what they are doing wrong with respect to men.
• 29:00
  But the problem is the current state of female culture, which misled them in the first place.
• 29:06
  Men would tell them what they need to know, but the answers are too jarring and womankind is in freefall.
• 29:11
  The response.
• 29:13
  I had not seen that.
• 29:14
  I don't think I agree with you.
• 29:16
  I figured you might not, but the response comes back.
• 29:20
  Female culture, in quotes, really, we find here one of the flaws of all of our elite.
• 29:27
  You want me to read it?
• 29:28
  Yeah.
• 29:28
  Would you do that?
• 29:29
  I've not seen this before, so I'm reading it blind.
• 29:31
  We find here one of the flaws of all of our elite, an inversion of cause and effect and a main reason for our downfall.
• 29:36
  Our actual culture reveals women's nature.
• 29:39
  Women are returning to their basic settings.
• 29:41
  Women are civilized only through men's reading of reality, not through their own reading, which is primitive.
• 29:46
  Get resources, control men to get resources and use kids as a currency.
• 29:49
  Well, I certainly agree with that guy, less than I agree with you.
• 29:53
  Right.
• 29:53
  Well, but my point is that theme, which I've now heard again and again, I heard it from Ben Davidson.
• 29:59
  I've heard it from home math.
• 30:01
  I've heard it from many.
• 30:02
  So the 19th Amendment was a mistake.
• 30:04
  No, no, slow down.
• 30:07
  You don't get it.
• 30:09
  What is happening is the revelation of the reality of women is emerging and that you are responding to a creature that does not exist and you're not understanding that the actual creature has simply been brought to the surface.
• 30:25
  And so by that same logic is the apparent epidemic of men trying to choke their partners in bed, a reveal of man's true nature.
• 30:35
  I don't think so.
• 30:36
  Precisely.
• 30:36
  Like, you know, does it exist?
• 30:38
  Yeah.
• 30:38
  Are there gross and disgusting men out there?
• 30:40
  Of course.
• 30:41
  Are there gross and disgusting women out there?
• 30:43
  Of course.
• 30:44
  Do they manifest in almost entirely different ways in most cases?
• 30:47
  Of course.
• 30:48
  So it's this overgeneralization again.
• 30:51
  Well, okay.
• 30:52
  It's overgeneralization, but part of what's happening here is that generations are short and the culture changes.
• 31:01
  And then you grow up in the context of whatever particular slice you exist in.
• 31:07
  And so you have only this to draw on and it creates an impression.
• 31:12
  So I don't remember, I sent you a couple clips Zach.
• 31:16
  One of them reflects this, but the, the idea, let's just take the effect of pornography as a market good.
• 31:27
  Okay.
• 31:28
  The market feeds people porn because it makes money.
• 31:31
  In order to compete in that market, there is a tendency to go into every taboo, especially violence, because it's the only way to distinguish your product from everybody else's, which creates a developmental environment in which violence is rampant with respect to sex, which means that people are interacting with each other out in society.
• 31:55
  And then they take each other home and they find, women especially are going to find men violent in bed because it's their developmental environment is heavily influenced by porn.
• 32:07
  And it suggests to them that the civilization, the civilized nature of men that they encounter out in the world is an act.
• 32:15
  And what's being revealed when you close the bedroom door is the reality of men.
• 32:19
  It's not true, or at least it hasn't been true, but it has been made true by a mundane dynamic, which then just gives them the sense that, you know, the reality just happens not to be in view, but we can see it.
• 32:34
  Yeah.
• 32:34
  And you see that, on your recent Rogan as well.
• 32:38
  I guess, me too, which is what, like 2018, something like this, after, after our lives blew up on us, but before COVID happened.
• 32:48
  So 2018, 2019, 2017, maybe even, was reprehensible, even though the idea behind it should have, I have no idea how it actually started, but it had the potential to be an honorable way to reveal to men that even though most men don't behave badly to women, almost all women have been, have had bad interactions with men because a small subset of men do like pretty gross things and sometimes criminal things a lot.
• 33:18
  Like most young women have had bad experiences with men.
• 33:22
  And that's not apparent that, that's not, that shouldn't be apparent to most good men because most good men don't engage in that sort of behavior and they don't have friends who do either.
• 33:30
  So the Me Too movement went off the rails, or it started off the rails and it had this honorable idea that was never actually meant to be what it was supposed to be, which was that, you know, all men basically, like, so Me Too, which was, should have been an acknowledgement of like, yeah, pretty much all women have had some bad interactions.
• 33:50
  And that is a universal that should be understood.
• 33:53
  Then made this like statistical error that became an emotional cadence that was inflicted on society of, if it happened to most women, then most men or all, you know, if it happened to all women, then all men are guilty of doing this, which is, you know, just a basic misunderstanding of how populations work.
• 34:12
  Like, you know, a few, a few bad actors can have an effect on a vast majority and it doesn't tend to be evenly distributed.
• 34:18
  Bad behavior does not tend to be evenly distributed.
• 34:21
  The thing that in that tweet response to you that I'm hearing in some of these sort of Manosphere online commenters feels like the same thing in reverse.
• 34:31
  It feels like, oh my god, I'm having these interactions with women and they're just insane.
• 34:36
  So this is what women are.
• 34:37
  And the fact that you're seeing this in women now, that's just the reveal of what women kind is.
• 34:43
  Okay.
• 34:43
  That sounds exactly to me like the error that was being made about men, egregiously, completely unacceptably, unfairly about men during Me Too.
• 34:53
  And now we see this happening about women.
• 34:56
  And, you know, I don't, how do we, how do we fix it?
• 34:59
  We need, just like there were a number of women during Me Too who were like, Hey, hold up.
• 35:03
  No, wrong.
• 35:04
  Most men are not doing this, but that doesn't mean that most women have an experienced garbage from men.
• 35:10
  We need men to be standing up and saying, actually, just as you are saying, actually, wait a minute.
• 35:17
  This is, this is not my experience.
• 35:19
  The problem is like, you can't really say that because you've been in a monogamous relationship for a very long time.
• 35:24
  So is it possible that there really are no men who have been on the dating scene for a while and aren't running into this?
• 35:33
  Well, maybe, maybe it is precisely because they ended up partnered up.
• 35:38
  All right.
• 35:38
  Right.
• 35:38
  So like there may be a missing set of people who can't stand up to defend sort of woman kind against the atmosphere because every time some man finds a good woman and ends up with her, the manosphere is like, well, okay, you found a unicorn.
• 35:54
  Oh, geez, that's a lot of unicorns, guys.
• 35:56
  A lot of unicorns.
• 35:57
  This is exactly what I'm saying about the problem of generations is that I think you've got a generation that is deducing what reality must be from the only context that it has and suggests a universality that is not right.
• 36:11
  And so you're going to have to pay attention to some people who've seen something else.
• 36:15
  Yeah.
• 36:15
  And then those people you tend to discount because it's like, well, of course you don't know.
• 36:19
  Yeah.
• 36:19
  It's like, it's the same statistical game played by scientists.
• 36:22
  Oh, here's our data set.
• 36:23
  But look, there's all this stuff up.
• 36:24
  Well, those are outliers.
• 36:26
  We'll just get rid of the outliers.
• 36:27
  Like you're not allowed to do that except it's done all the time in science.
• 36:31
  And of course it's done all the time in science where it shouldn't be done in part because it's a human tendency.
• 36:36
  I've got an idea.
• 36:38
  Call it a hypothesis.
• 36:39
  Call it an ideology.
• 36:40
  I've got an idea because our cherished ideas become ideologies in our own heads and we throw out all the disconfirming evidence as not real evidence.
• 36:49
  We all do it, but we have to be aware.
• 36:52
  Well, I want to requires a detour.
• 36:55
  There are good reasons to throw out outliers and there are bad reasons to throw out outliers.
• 36:59
  Most of the outliers that get thrown out are thrown out for the wrong reasons because somebody is protecting an idea where in fact they've got disconfirming evidence.
• 37:06
  But anyway, just so that that's been said.
• 37:10
  But again, to the idea that what we're looking at is a dysfunctional relationship between modern young men and modern young women that has caused each to become unsympathetic in the other's eyes.
• 37:29
  That crass women and predatory men are causing...
• 37:35
  Game on.
• 37:36
  Right.
• 37:37
  They're causing the other.
• 37:39
  And at some level, I think this seems like it should be obvious, but it is, I think, truly not to many people.
• 37:49
  You and I often say men have two reproductive modes.
• 37:53
  One of these...
• 37:55
  I'm trying to remove the complexity.
• 37:58
  We've got two major branches of the tree and one of them has a sub branch, but men have two reproductive modes.
• 38:05
  One of those modes is impregnate and don't invest.
• 38:08
  The other mode is build a relationship and invest heavily.
• 38:15
  The mode in which men invest heavily in women and their offspring makes them not identical to, but symmetrical to women in terms of their view on those relationships because it is fundamentally a collaborative process.
• 38:30
  It matches their investment level without matching the type of investment or the way that it manifests.
• 38:36
  Right.
• 38:36
  But there's equal investment in a relationship.
• 38:39
  Right.
• 38:40
  Now the point that people bristle at is that when birth control and abortion make sex low stakes, so people are now having sex without an expectation for investment, they are defaulting into something that is in the neighborhood of what men in the past before the invention of those things did when they were trying to inflict a pregnancy on a woman where she would raise the child.
• 39:09
  That is evolutionarily a valid strategy.
• 39:13
  It is morally indefensible, but the point is, okay, technology comes along and it allows women to let down their guard because they are no longer in danger of raising a child they didn't intend to produce.
• 39:27
  And so now people are engaging in behavior that puts them effectively in the mode of men trying to parasitize women.
• 39:37
  It is antagonistic, fundamentally antagonistic.
• 39:41
  And so, okay, is it surprising that when every generation is now filled with people basically playing house in a parasitic mode against each other, that it results in the breakdown of the collaborative mode, the inability to develop in the collaborative direction because all of your playtime is spent doing the exact opposite.
• 40:10
  And so- And in part, and you get to this a little bit in your recent conversation with Joe Rogan, we talk about it a fair bit in I think the sex and relationship chapter in Hunter Gathers' Guide, but if you have your developmental environment informed by perfection that can't respond to you, by porn, by robots, by stories that have been like by, you know, fleek, gross artificial romance stories, or by porn, or by robots, right, that don't respond to you, then you have this view of what a healthy relationship is that has nothing to do with the messiness of what humans actually are.
• 40:53
  And they're, you know, everyone from the transhumanists to I don't even like, almost everyone has their own take on like, how can we get rid of the gross icky disagreeable parts of humans and just make our lives super easy in every regard?
• 41:06
  Like, well, you can't, like, that's that that's the answer.
• 41:10
  And frankly, you're not going to be satisfied.
• 41:12
  You're not going to be satisfied with something that just says yes to you all the time.
• 41:16
  It's not going to be it's not going to be providing even even pleasure after a little while, much less meaning, or purpose, or drive, or passion.
• 41:26
  But it's not even going to make you happy in the moment for very long, because it just gets super boring and tedious.
• 41:32
  The thing that just says, yes, I'm sure I can give you an orgasm, I can clean your floor, I can like, it's just not that interesting.
• 41:37
  Oh, it's not interesting at all.
• 41:39
  And it's it's the exact analog of the hyper concentrated, you know, sweet, salty, fatty, you know, thing that you pop in your mouth.
• 41:51
  Right.
• 41:51
  And so, you know, we do keep buying chips, we do keep eating cookies, like they're, you know, like, it's, you know, as again, we say, hunter gatherers guide, it's, you know, it's fast culture, it's fast food, it's fast sex, it's, it's, you know, it's junk everything.
• 42:06
  It's yeah.
• 42:07
  And yes, we do keep grabbing for it.
• 42:12
  What, you know, whatever it is, that we have become accustomed to grabbing for junk food, junk sex.
• 42:19
  We recognize with every, you know, just go with junk food for them with every additional chip, I can't, doesn't even please me as much as the last one.
• 42:27
  Yeah, but I don't even think it's, I think you're being, you're simplifying too much, because wise people, all of them have a carefully controlled relationship with those concentrated goods, right.
• 42:43
  And, you know, you know, there's lots of stuff that would taste good, that you don't even look at in the market when you go in there, because you understand that that's not good for you.
• 42:54
  It doesn't enhance life that it gives you a burst of some reward.
• 42:59
  And ultimately, it robs you of more reward than it gives you.
• 43:02
  Well, that's true for you.
• 43:03
  And that's true for me.
• 43:04
  And I believe that's true for our children, but I don't know if that's generally true.
• 43:07
  Well, I said it's true of all wise people.
• 43:10
  And I just I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know that's widespread.
• 43:16
  I don't know, I'm not saying it isn't.
• 43:18
  I'm just saying I have no idea.
• 43:19
  I have no information on this front.
• 43:21
  Let's put it this way.
• 43:21
  A lot of people don't have it under control, but everybody is aware of the hazard of junk food.
• 43:29
  And so anyway, we don't have to detain ourselves there.
• 43:35
  But the point is, wisdom is, I would argue, effectively synonymous with delayed gratification.
• 43:46
  There is something much better that you can attain if you're willing to put in work now, suffer now, whatever it is.
• 43:52
  And this landscape is no different than that.
• 43:55
  But the just as a couple involved in a dysfunctional relationship where they have become antagonistic to each other has a very hard time getting out of it because the game theory doesn't support it.
• 44:11
  If you're each trying to extract something from the other because the other is an irritant to you, then the impulse to be nice to the other person is a vulnerability.
• 44:25
  So it's very easy for people to fall into a relationship from which they cannot escape, even if those same two people could, if they started from scratch, get to a relationship that wouldn't be producing that dynamic.
• 44:38
  And I don't think it's terribly surprising to find out that an entire generation is caught in this codependent, broken relationship and can't escape because of what happens to the individuals who opt out.
• 44:56
  If you have a generation of young women behaving in this way, a young woman who doesn't behave in this way has a hard time getting the attention of men because men's attention is preoccupied with the women who are behaving as if they're willing to raise offspring without investment.
• 45:13
  Now, of course, that's not what they're doing, but the point is that captures men's attention.
• 45:18
  It means that a woman who opts out does not find herself wildly successful.
• 45:22
  She finds the opposite.
• 45:23
  She finds it hard to get attention.
• 45:26
  And because the game theory makes this happen, it seems to me that you would need a movement to establish rules that everybody within the movement was held to so that there were enough people opting out together that something functional became possible.
• 45:47
  And I am surprised, but I don't think I've seen that.
• 45:50
  I've seen people embracing religious modalities because it at least, you know, has some connection to some system that worked in some way.
• 45:59
  I don't think they will work because the fundamental dynamics have changed.
• 46:04
  But having something that has existing rules is adopting something with existing rules that's prefab is a lot more likely to work than creating something from scratch where you haven't even met most of the people who you want to be joining the group.
• 46:20
  And so when are the rules being created and who's deciding what?
• 46:24
  I don't even know how the agreement that you're talking about could possibly come into being.
• 46:33
  So, you know, it doesn't surprise me at all.
• 46:35
  I think it is clearly one of the reasons that people are finding religion now.
• 46:41
  And if we were to, so I don't think because religions are ancient, and I don't consider things that were just founded religions, I think their cults, they may evolve into a religion.
• 46:54
  But because religions are ancient and therefore the rules were written for a world we don't live in, I don't think those rules will just simply work.
• 47:05
  However, I could see them working as a kind of trailhead, right?
• 47:10
  Just as you and I found a relationship that works, despite the fact that neither of us are standard versions of men and women.
• 47:19
  The point is you need someplace to start from, and then you need a mechanism for navigating based on what improves things and what doesn't so that you can sort of find your way to some place.
• 47:31
  So I could imagine a, you know, the religious set of rules being like a signal, like, hey, I'm up for actually not a free for all.
• 47:40
  I'm up for instituting rules on ourselves in the interest of making things better.
• 47:46
  And then, you know, person A and person B sign up for a relationship in that context, and then they are free to actually modify it and, you know, depart from the ancient rules, discover new ones.
• 47:58
  But I agree with you.
• 47:59
  It's hard to imagine how a new movement could get started.
• 48:08
  But I don't think it's impossible.
• 48:10
  And if I was a young person facing this, I would be thinking exactly along those lines.
• 48:15
  Yeah.
• 48:15
  But as you know, as is the case, when we think about traits that spread in evolutionary space, maintenance, spread and maintenance is much easier to imagine the conditions which favor it than are the way that it gets started.
• 48:31
  And this is even trickier because a trait starts with one, and then it has to be adaptive enough in that environment for those offspring that have it to be experiencing a similar enough environment.
• 48:41
  Whereas group rules inherently, like how do you initiate a mass thing?
• 48:48
  And obviously, you know, as obviously mass movements have been initiated over and over and over again, but how do you do it with intentionality without, without diktats, without authoritarianism?
• 48:57
  And I think that's actually, that's one of the places I want to go that doesn't have to do with the relationship stuff, but has to do with differences between men and women, not with regard to how we interact in relationships, necessarily.
• 49:09
  Before we do that, I want to suggest one answer, which I think goes back to maybe why we disagree about that tweet of mine.
• 49:16
  Actually, can you show that again, Zach, the tweet that you put up of the ads earlier?
• 49:22
  Because I want to be able to respond to it.
• 49:24
  Okay.
• 49:25
  So one of the things I talked about with Jill Rogan was, oh, maybe we should read this tweet first.
• 49:33
  Okay.
• 49:34
  I can barely see it.
• 49:36
  Okay.
• 49:38
  I'll read it, but that's weird.
• 49:41
  So this is Bret writing.
• 49:44
  Lots of women are asking other women what they're doing wrong with respect to men.
• 49:47
  But the problem is the current state of female culture, which misled them in the first place.
• 49:51
  Men would tell them what they need to know, but the answers are too jarring.
• 49:53
  Women kind isn't a free fall.
• 49:55
  Okay.
• 49:56
  So what I talked about with Joe was the fact that I think even just mathematically, our culture does not have a close relationship with the yin-yang symbol or any analog of it.
• 50:13
  And the yin-yang is powerful because it is perfectly symmetrical.
• 50:21
  And while being perfectly symmetrical, it's not symmetrical in any of the simple modes that we are used to, an identity across a line or something like that.
• 50:30
  It is a description of complementarity.
• 50:35
  And the fundamental nature of male and female is complementary.
• 50:42
  And the revision that is going to have to happen because we don't live in the prior world will also have this nature.
• 50:54
  It will have a complementary nature.
• 50:58
  The fact is in the old world where we didn't have reproductive control through technology, women for reasons that are thoroughly well understood in our discipline were the gatekeepers of reproduction.
• 51:13
  They were choosy and they were choosy for a reason because inherently female investment in offspring is greater and forcing men into symmetrical offspring investment was part of the deal.
• 51:26
  And so the answer to your question, I think, is that for such a movement to get started, women would have to set a standard that they adhered to.
• 51:40
  That the reason that I tweeted what I did about young women is that I don't think that if you are female, I don't think you're born with an understanding of the power to shape that landscape game theoretically by not rewarding men for behaving in a parasitic way.
• 51:59
  Well, but okay, a couple things.
• 52:01
  I feel like I played a little bit of that role for my female friends when I was young, who were like, "Why am I not attracting men?" It was like, "Because you're being ridiculous." Because you talk about your clothes when the one you're interested in walks by, instead of being your interesting, creative, analytically fascinating self that I know you to be, you become a shell of yourself.
• 52:27
  I'm like, "Oh, well, that's what men want." No, it's not.
• 52:29
  And if it is, then you don't want those men.
• 52:31
  So yes, women forever, just like men forever, been confused about what the other thing wants.
• 52:38
  But also, I feel like that's a strangely naive position game theoretically.
• 52:44
  Women just need to set different rules.
• 52:46
  Well, when they do, some young women always will simply have options no matter what.
• 52:53
  I think that's still true.
• 52:54
  That was certainly true when we were young.
• 52:57
  My problem was not that I couldn't get men attracted to me.
• 52:59
  My problem was I would just like to be friends with some of these people and it's different.
• 53:04
  It's harder to hold them off.
• 53:07
  So there are always going to be some women in that position, I think, in culture.
• 53:13
  That said, the idea that some women can simply opt out of the current game and get men in general to change what they're doing, they'll just go to the women who aren't opting out, which is what we're seeing.
• 53:30
  That is exactly what I remember you hearing, because you had more of these conversations with female students than I did.
• 53:36
  We were talking about different stuff with the students.
• 53:38
  You had to know where these conversations with female students back eight, 10, 12, 14 years ago.
• 53:43
  Granted, different population, millennials mostly, but many of these young women at the time were frustrated that they were doing that.
• 53:51
  They were refusing to sleep with guys on the first, second, third date, and they were finding men going like, "Well, fine.
• 53:56
  I'll find it elsewhere." Right.
• 53:58
  That's what I said before about an individual woman that cannot opt out.
• 54:02
  However, I do believe it is possible that women, if young women were to recognize that they are involved in a self-defeating pattern that will result in them in their 30s discovering that the thing that they thought would someday emerge won't, that they could say, "Look, here is the set of minimum requirements that dictate whether or not you will get any interest from us." Those requirements would not look like the stuff that I see them posting about,"Oh, he needs to be at least six feet.
• 54:36
  He needs to make X, Y, and Z." The point is setting a standard that has to be met actually does work if a group of people do it together, because many ...
• 54:50
  This is what I was saying before about many young men are receptive to the idea that they are involved in doing something wrong.
• 54:57
  Many young men are recognizing, for example, that porn is harming them.
• 55:03
  Were there some group of women who established, who ...
• 55:08
  You think all young women know each other?
• 55:11
  How is this fictional group of strangers going to agree on rules?
• 55:17
  Through the internet.
• 55:20
  For one thing, you could have ...
• 55:22
  It's not a terrible answer.
• 55:23
  It's not a terrible answer.
• 55:24
  You could have, for example, a dating app that wasn't like the current ones in which communities could establish, "Hey, here are the rules for this community, and you can either agree to these rules and enter this community, and then this group of people is potentially accessible as mates, or here's another group that has a different idea about what the rules ought to be," but at least some sort of experimentation in which you could discover that you don't have to enter into this dysfunctional relationship where you're going to view your partners as despicable or disgusting or dangerous or whatever.
• 56:05
  I'm not saying it's simple, but I do think it's plausible.
• 56:12
  I do want to get to the stuff that I find most interesting here is differences between the sexes that are earlier than the stuff we're talking about.
• 56:21
  But before we get there, because something you just reminded me of, you and some of the guys you've been talking to and what you're seeing and what you're calling, and other people call the Manosphere, feels to me like maybe not inadvertent, but what else are you going to do cherry picking of what some women are posting?
• 56:43
  You've been on some of this drum beat for a while, like, "Great.
• 56:50
  Now all these young women are enforcing minimum height requirements." I've never seen any of those.
• 56:55
  Now, you and I have very different online presences, and I mostly try not to pee online at all, but I don't see that.
• 57:02
  I see some of the things that you say that you're not seeing, but I think that it may be impossible to correct for the sampling bias.
• 57:14
  But, Zach, could you show that clip?
• 57:16
  No, the tweet that I sent you just before we started, which is a response to the clip of you talking to Carl Benjamin that we started with.
• 57:28
  This is this guy.
• 57:33
  Yeah, so this is hard to remember.
• 57:36
  Let's make it a little bit bigger.
• 57:39
  Yeah, open up the image.
• 57:41
  So, when I went in fact, it's still a little bit hard to read, so I'm going to try to interpret it here.
• 57:46
  Actually, maybe if I can go to it.
• 57:50
  Yeah, I went looking for this paper that is being cited here, "Fellwall 2017." And I find a few "Fellwall 2017" papers, and I don't find this image in any of them, so I'm not totally sure that this is a legitimate representation of the guy's work.
• 58:14
  I didn't spend a ton of time, but I did spend some time looking.
• 58:18
  You could actually just show my screen maybe.
• 58:23
  Oh, of course not.
• 58:26
  And it's not because I'm female either.
• 58:28
  It's because my computer is...
• 58:30
  Apparently, it's the capture card, and the capture card isn't female either.
• 58:34
  Okay, so someone posted in response to this clip of yours,"What men like to read versus what women like to read." And again, so this is apparently data from a "Fellwall 2017" paper.
• 58:49
  I find data like this in his work, but I don't find exactly this image again, so I just want to caveat that.
• 58:56
  "Goodreads Reviewers by Genre and Sex," in which the blue bars are men, and the orange bars are women.
• 59:03
  See if we can make it bigger.
• 59:05
  It's not in the beginning.
• 59:06
  Oh, I made it smaller.
• 59:07
  That's why.
• 59:10
  And it's probably still too small for people to see, but basically at the bottom, you see the most female biased reviews are romance, historical romance, romance, contemporary romance, women's fiction, chick lit, romance, paranormal romance, romance, erotica, picture books, contemporary, fantasy, paranormal.
• 59:27
  Okay, so it goes up and up and up and up.
• 59:29
  And then only in the top few topics, and that's just because of how it's been ranked, do you have male reviewers actually outnumbering female reviewers among philosophy, sequential art, comics, politics, sequential art, graphic novels, science fiction.
• 59:51
  Actually, science fiction, you then have slightly more female than male, and then history, religion, science, more female than male reviewers.
• 59:58
  That right there shows you what the error is in imagining that what we're looking at is differences in reading preferences.
• 1:00:06
  I think that there's some truth here.
• 1:00:08
  Do women read more romance than men?
• 1:00:10
  Yeah.
• 1:00:11
  Do men read more philosophy than women?
• 1:00:14
  Wouldn't have occurred to me, but sure.
• 1:00:16
  I believe that.
• 1:00:17
  I think that there's a trend here that is probably right, but what we're seeing here is not this is what women read versus what men read.
• 1:00:25
  This is women reviewing stuff versus men reviewing stuff on Goodreads.
• 1:00:32
  And if you've spent any time on Goodreads versus say Amazon, and I hadn't really until our book came out, and I was looking at our Goodreads reviews versus our Amazon reviews, they're pretty different.
• 1:00:43
  They're pretty different in the Goodreads reviews, and this is anecdotal.
• 1:00:46
  But the Goodreads reviews were much snarkier, much nastier, much more female, much more woke, much more entitled because they found stuff that they disagreed with, and therefore the whole book sucked.
• 1:00:59
  Amazon reviewers were much less likely to do that.
• 1:01:01
  I don't know what's true about Goodreads in particular, but I do think just looking at, if you would just show the screen, the image one more time, Zach, just looking at these numbers as again put up by someone on Twitter in an image that I do not find in the guy's original papers, this suggests that there are many fewer male readers than female just by the lengths of these bars.
• 1:01:26
  I suspect that women read more books than men.
• 1:01:29
  I don't know if that's for sure, but I don't think it's at this level.
• 1:01:32
  So I think that women are more interested in reviewing things online than men are, which is consistent, and we'll get here in a moment actually, with the robust psychological finding that in general men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and relationships.
• 1:01:49
  So women are more interested in having read something, being like, "I want to talk to the world about it." Men do that plenty, but this doesn't necessarily say that women are more interested in horror than men are, because that's what that would appear to show here.
• 1:02:08
  Again, I think that the broad thing is true.
• 1:02:11
  Anyway, there's a sampling error in all of what we think we know and pretty much.
• 1:02:17
  So when you say, "I see these women saying these things online," the women who aren't setting up these crazy min-qual, minimum qualifications for being allowed to date me are not putting that crap online.
• 1:02:33
  And if they do, it's probably not being promoted in your feed because it's not getting a lot of play.
• 1:02:38
  I'm sure, look, who knows what the sampling bias is and who knows even how to get a sample that is less biased, let alone unbiased.
• 1:02:47
  I agree.
• 1:02:48
  However- I didn't say I know how to get there.
• 1:02:49
  I'm saying I think your sample is biased.
• 1:02:51
  What I see is two things.
• 1:02:53
  One, I see women appearing to talk to each other about their minimum qualifications who appear to be divorced from reality, setting a set of qualifications.
• 1:03:06
  This is one of the topics that Homath explores ad nauseam, is if you were to take one of these women's set of qualifications and then you were to compare it to the percentage of the population that actually has each of the sub-characteristics, you get essentially a tiny population.
• 1:03:23
  And she's not going to find one- There's a failure of statistical understanding.
• 1:03:27
  Well, there's a failure of statistical understanding.
• 1:03:29
  There's a failure of arbitrage.
• 1:03:31
  This drives me crazy.
• 1:03:33
  I get that there's some list of things that you want.
• 1:03:37
  You're not going to get them all.
• 1:03:39
  However, you could find somebody who is undervalued because they don't meet this qualification, who is very high value in some other qualification, and you could get something wonderful because every other person is ignoring this potential mate.
• 1:03:54
  So anyway, failure of arbitrage, failure of statistical reasoning, this stuff is rampant.
• 1:03:58
  But the other thing I see, the flip side, which again is going to be biased because I'm seeing it, but there are a bunch of women who are putting out what appear to be sort of wiser,"Hey honey, let me tell you what men actually want and then describing how you should behave if you really want to get a man committed to you, blah, blah, blah." Sometimes there's some insight in these things.
• 1:04:24
  And sometimes it's, I mean, it's actually the reason I wrote that tweet, is that I find that even the women who appear to be trying to pass on some kind of insight about men basically are defaulting into some extremely subservient modality that I don't think is going to, it's not going to work.
• 1:04:48
  And so part of the reason that I think it's important for you and me to have this conversation is that there's no component of this in our relationship and yet it works.
• 1:04:56
  And that was something I was going to say earlier is that division of labor is valuable.
• 1:05:01
  Division of labor, it just makes good sense for in a partnership or in a larger team, but let's stick to talking about a partnership.
• 1:05:09
  If everyone does every job equally, like we're going to split everything 50-50, you're going to be less efficient at the stuff that actually matters to you.
• 1:05:17
  So in any relationship, there's going to be stuff that needs to get done that is no one's favorite work.
• 1:05:21
  No one wants to be the one picking up the dog poop and unlearning the dishwasher and cleaning the toilets.
• 1:05:27
  And there's just a lot of work to be done.
• 1:05:31
  And that shouldn't inherently default to one member of the team, but it also shouldn't be split 50-50.
• 1:05:39
  And there was a lot of stuff, I think, even in the 70s and 80s, which seemed like this very promising time, both for women and for relationships, in which there was beginning to be a lot of nitpicking precision level, like, well, if you do this, then like, if I do this and you have to do this and I'm keeping track of minutes, and it's bullshit, right?
• 1:06:02
  Like, you can't do it that way.
• 1:06:04
  And if you're looking for parody at that level, you're going to get a gross relationship or no relationship at all.
• 1:06:10
  It's just not going to work.
• 1:06:11
  But does it make sense for like, okay, whenever relationship, probably some people mind, I don't even know what, like drying the dishes and putting them away less than the other person minds vacuuming.
• 1:06:25
  And both things need to be done.
• 1:06:27
  And it's not cool if one person is like, well, I actually mind all of it more than you do, therefore you do it all.
• 1:06:34
  And that sort of thing where there were traditional roles at the point that women mostly weren't in the workforce, is some of what the manosphere is harkening back to.
• 1:06:45
  And like, well, see, that's just like traditionally, this is what women did and it was all great.
• 1:06:51
  And we are not saying the division of labor isn't important.
• 1:06:54
  But the way that labor has been divided in the past is not the only way to divide it.
• 1:06:59
  It's not the only way it's been divided across cultures.
• 1:07:02
  I've talked, I mean, I've talked about this, like a provost and Murdoch paper from the early 70s, a lot.
• 1:07:08
  It's this anthropological review of from 1973 back to a whole bunch of pre-industrial cultures that were looked at by anthropologists across like 50 activities that people engage in, and the gendered nature of them.
• 1:07:24
  And what's most fascinating in this work that I find, I've talked about over and over and over again, is there are a lot of activities that in some cultures are highly gendered and as only women who can do them.
• 1:07:37
  And in other cultures, it's highly gendered and only men can do them.
• 1:07:40
  Weaving, net making, ceramics, you know, things that are actually important for those cultures in order to live their lives as they are living them.
• 1:07:48
  And it makes sense not to have everyone just kind of doing them.
• 1:07:51
  It makes sense to have it be a gendered activity, but it's not inherently like men aren't inherently better at it, or women aren't inherently better at it, or it's not just stupid to risk women on the whale hunt and so women never are engaged in big mammal hunting.
• 1:08:04
  It's just useful to have a division of labor without that saying anything about the inherent differences in ability or quality or interest even of those people.
• 1:08:13
  Division of labor is valuable and that doesn't mean we have to go back to a particular moment in time when frankly, one sex was getting a lot more of the charismatic fun jobs than the other.
• 1:08:24
  Right.
• 1:08:25
  Let me ask you something with respect to division of labor.
• 1:08:29
  One of the tropes that is being circulated amongst women who I actually suspect that these accounts who are giving this Hold on.
• 1:08:37
  Hey, Zach, your dad's talking now.
• 1:08:40
  Thank you, honey.
• 1:08:43
  One of the tropes, I suspect many of these accounts that appear to be giving advice to women about men are really trying to appeal to men that you can get clicked by doing that.
• 1:08:52
  But let me just ask you a question.
• 1:08:54
  There's no wrong answers here.
• 1:08:57
  One of them was suggesting.
• 1:09:01
  This is a parent email.
• 1:09:03
  This is an attractive woman.
• 1:09:05
  As far as you know, you don't know who this person is.
• 1:09:07
  I don't know who this person is, but you just never know.
• 1:09:10
  I can tell she's attractive.
• 1:09:11
  She's giving advice.
• 1:09:12
  I don't know who she is.
• 1:09:13
  She says, how can you tell she's attractive?
• 1:09:16
  Because the picture she put up as an attractive woman?
• 1:09:19
  It's a video, so it could be AI, but I don't think it's not.
• 1:09:21
  Okay.
• 1:09:22
  That's a video.
• 1:09:22
  Okay.
• 1:09:22
  Yeah.
• 1:09:23
  So she's giving advice and the advice she gives includes, look, if you're my man, I don't want to see you doing dishes.
• 1:09:32
  I don't want to see you operating the vacuum.
• 1:09:34
  I don't want to see you doing laundry.
• 1:09:36
  Right.
• 1:09:37
  Yeah.
• 1:09:37
  That's not to women.
• 1:09:37
  These things give women the ick.
• 1:09:41
  Right.
• 1:09:42
  And my sense is I just don't think this is true.
• 1:09:47
  And I'm not saying there aren't things on that list.
• 1:09:51
  I think if I was coming home and bursting into tears, it would have an effect on, you would view me as pitiful and not manly and that would be bad.
• 1:09:58
  Right.
• 1:09:59
  But doing the dishes isn't in that category.
• 1:10:05
  Right.
• 1:10:05
  And yet it sounds like a piece of, it sounds like good advice and I know why it resonates with men.
• 1:10:12
  It's obvious why it resonates with men.
• 1:10:15
  I mean, it's, it's two men.
• 1:10:16
  Right.
• 1:10:16
  That's a message to men, but pretending to be a message to women as so much of what women do is.
• 1:10:20
  So are you telling me that the women for whom that would be true either don't exist or vanishingly rare?
• 1:10:31
  Do they not exist?
• 1:10:32
  No, I can't.
• 1:10:32
  I wouldn't claim that they don't exist.
• 1:10:34
  Yeah.
• 1:10:34
  And I think you may have some of those views depending on the household in which you grew up, where if you were informed that this is what real men do and this is what real women do, and you have never explored outside of the confines of those expectations, you may be certain that it's true, just like people who have never explored outside the confines of the particular religion that they grew up in, may be certain that it's true.
• 1:11:00
  That doesn't mean that that's what they sort of hold in their hearts if they explore it a little bit.
• 1:11:05
  But you know, this, you know, this of course is the risk of liberalism, right?
• 1:11:11
  Of not just sticking with what you've been handed and what you've been told is the right way to be, because this is what your needle home told you, or this is what you're, you know, the authorities and the religion or the school or whatever it is told you.
• 1:11:22
  Being exploratory, being open is, you know, are traits that are more likely to be found in people who then break with tradition?
• 1:11:32
  I mean, that's like, that's so obvious it's circular.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah.
• 1:11:35
  Right?
• 1:11:36
  So, are, you know, are there, are there women who would be creeped out by their men helping keep the house clean?
• 1:11:46
  I guess, I have a metony.
• 1:11:49
  Yep.
• 1:11:50
  But then, you know, that's, that's going to be a sampling bias.
• 1:11:53
  Yeah.
• 1:11:53
  Right?
• 1:11:53
  I mean, those aren't the women I hang out with, right?
• 1:11:56
  Yeah, that's what I thought.
• 1:11:58
  So, I mean, actually, this, that is a decent segue to talking about sort of some differences between men and women.
• 1:12:09
  Because, you know, I don't think, you know, I don't think things are all fine, right?
• 1:12:16
  And I do think that both you and I have a real deficit in terms of access to young women and how they're thinking and what they're doing in a way that we never did.
• 1:12:27
  Like throughout our adult lives until Evergreen blew up, we always had access to so many young people.
• 1:12:31
  Yeah.
• 1:12:32
  As our own boys were growing up, that we, you know, was it a, was it a weird subset, you know, people who chose to go to Evergreen?
• 1:12:38
  Of course.
• 1:12:39
  But it was really, it was actually a really diverse group of people.
• 1:12:42
  Yeah.
• 1:12:42
  In a lot of ways.
• 1:12:43
  And we just don't have that anymore.
• 1:12:45
  True.
• 1:12:45
  So, I know that I don't know a lot in this space.
• 1:12:49
  However, the thing that you said in that first clip we showed in your conversation with Carl Benjamin, the idea that women, you were saying, feel that they have a right to be right.
• 1:13:02
  And man, this resonates very strongly, as you know, because we've talked about it all.
• 1:13:07
  This, I think, is more likely among women than men.
• 1:13:11
  It's a hallmark of grievance thinking, of victim thinking, of DEI, of political correctness, all of which are sort of permutations of one another.
• 1:13:20
  You know, when we were in the 90s, when we were at the end of our college careers, it was political correctness, and now you call it DEI, and it's woke, and it's finding the victim, finding the ability to be a victim in any interaction is part of what that is.
• 1:13:37
  And, you know, that's, it's not exactly the same as the right to be right, but there's something very, very related there.
• 1:13:46
  And we ran into this just separately.
• 1:13:48
  This isn't just about sex differences.
• 1:13:51
  Like, we ran into this teaching evolutionary biology, right?
• 1:13:53
  Like, we'd have people who were offended in advance by what they knew evolutionary biology was going to say to them about sex and race and all this stuff.
• 1:14:01
  And, of course, evolutionary biology doesn't actually say most things that people think it does.
• 1:14:05
  But they were so upset in advance, and they felt that their being upset meant that that thing couldn't possibly be true.
• 1:14:16
  My level of antagonism to the idea can render the reality changed, right?
• 1:14:24
  It's a failure to believe in actual reality.
• 1:14:27
  It's post-modernism, right?
• 1:14:29
  It's my feelings can override facts, my social beliefs can change physical reality.
• 1:14:36
  This is much more likely to be present in women than men.
• 1:14:40
  And I think that this is related to another well-established, well-replicated result from social science, which is that among the big five personality tests, which is one of the more respected ones, maybe the most respected test, one of the personality traits is neuroticism.
• 1:14:59
  And the results that is robust and replicated often is that neuroticism, agreeableness too, but neuroticism is a trait that is routinely higher on average in women than men.
• 1:15:13
  There are certainly men that are higher in neuroticism, there are women that are low, all of the usual population level exceptions, for those of you who don't understand statistics, but women in general are more neurotic than men.
• 1:15:24
  And so what is neuroticism?
• 1:15:25
  It's basically the tendency to experience negative emotions, things like anxiety, sadness, irritability, what else do I have here, moodiness, emotional instability.
• 1:15:38
  I think that is related to this right to be right thing.
• 1:15:44
  If I can't have the thing, then everything is wrong with the world and that can't be the case.
• 1:15:51
  I will say that neuroticism uniquely among the big five personality traits, I don't understand it.
• 1:15:58
  I find it difficult to comprehend and I actually find it, it's one of the least attractive traits that I can imagine in people.
• 1:16:04
  I just find it incredibly hard to be around.
• 1:16:07
  It drags the person next to the neurotic person down.
• 1:16:11
  And this is the thing that I think many men won't recognize.
• 1:16:17
  When I start talking about neuroticism and I say it's a tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety and sadness and irritability and moodiness and emotional instability, every straight man out there is like,"Oh yeah, I've been there.
• 1:16:28
  Oh boy, it was my boss, it was my partner, it was my sister, like, oh my god, right?
• 1:16:32
  I've seen it." And boy, is that a pain in the ass.
• 1:16:37
  Women experience this a lot too, including women who really detested as a trait in which I am including myself.
• 1:16:46
  And of course, we all have our moments.
• 1:16:49
  Of course, we all have our moments.
• 1:16:51
  But many women in relationship with other women require that you jump into their neuroticism with you.
• 1:16:58
  And I know men have experienced this, but with women, the goalposts are different.
• 1:17:03
  And yes, they're always moving, but the stakes are incredibly high.
• 1:17:11
  If you don't take an invitation to be neurotic along with a female friend or acquaintance or whatever, the best response that you can get from another woman is bafflement.
• 1:17:22
  Like, what are you even doing here?
• 1:17:24
  What is happening?
• 1:17:25
  The more usual response is anger and competition.
• 1:17:29
  And men don't get competition with other women, with women the same way, right?
• 1:17:33
  Like, you'll get undermined, you'll get all sorts of game playing.
• 1:17:37
  But the competition that women will enact on other women, especially when they refuse to play the games, especially when they refuse to go down the neurotic road, is insane.
• 1:17:48
  Women are dealing with this too.
• 1:17:51
  Neuroticism, I think, is one of these things that if we could root out, and like a lot of it's developmental, we know this, but walking away from those scenes is often impossible if you were to retain any relationship with that person at all.
• 1:18:04
  They do not accept it.
• 1:18:05
  Women often do not accept other women refusing to go co-neurotic with them.
• 1:18:10
  And they're like, "Then we're enemies.
• 1:18:13
  Then we're sworn enemies.
• 1:18:14
  Enemies, game on and I will destroy you." And of course they won't if you're just like, "I'm just not playing.
• 1:18:19
  Can't we just do all of this thing that we were doing and not being neurotic together?" They don't put up with it.
• 1:18:26
  So, you know, that is a thing that I don't think I've ever experienced that with a man.
• 1:18:32
  And granted, male-female relationships, male-female non-sexual relationships, of which I have many, don't go that way, right?
• 1:18:41
  Male-female relationships, be they sexual or platonic, you will often find things going weird this way.
• 1:18:48
  But female-female relationships also do, and I think that men, as they're navigating the sexual landscape, assume that they're having these like unique views on the crazy that women can manifest.
• 1:18:58
  Like, "Oh no.
• 1:18:59
  Oh no, no." Like, most of us have seen this and would also like out.
• 1:19:06
  And I think I have some hint.
• 1:19:09
  I think I have a little bit of an idea as to how to help these women.
• 1:19:12
  It may be too late for some of them, but I think I have a little bit of an idea.
• 1:19:16
  And, well, here.
• 1:19:19
  Remember that meme from a while back where if you hand a guy a thing that does a thing, he does the thing, right?
• 1:19:28
  Right.
• 1:19:29
  And if you had a woman, a thing, well, I do.
• 1:19:31
  You did this to me and I immediately, of course you did it.
• 1:19:34
  Because like, why wouldn't you?
• 1:19:35
  You hand a guy a thing that does a thing like tongs or a drill or a top, and he does the thing with it that it does.
• 1:19:41
  And the meme is you hand a woman a thing and she's like, "I'm holding it now." Right.
• 1:19:46
  So it's true that on average men are more likely to be into things and women are more likely to be into people and feelings and relationships.
• 1:19:56
  Okay.
• 1:19:58
  For the last several decades, there's been this like authoritarian insanity trying to get men, trying to force boys and men into greater emotional openness and, you know, explore their feelings more because obviously what the world needs.
• 1:20:14
  And we used to hear this a lot.
• 1:20:15
  It's like, we just need, you know, men to act more like women.
• 1:20:18
  Well, like, no, we do not.
• 1:20:20
  But compared to say the dudes in Mad Men, like, you know, the men portrayed in Mad Men, would some of them have made better decisions for themselves and those around them if they had been a little bit more in touch with their feelings and a little bit less bottled up?
• 1:20:35
  Yeah.
• 1:20:36
  Yeah.
• 1:20:37
  But you can't get that way by enforcing language and behavior on people, right?
• 1:20:40
  Like enforcing language and behavior on people doesn't change personality.
• 1:20:43
  In fact, it trenches the very things that you were trying to change.
• 1:20:47
  However, by revealing that there are ways to be in touch with some of your, you know, fragility, some of your emotional side, and a desire to talk more about things that might be troubling you, you might actually have better outcomes.
• 1:21:00
  I think many men have discovered that this is a better way than being like, what's his name on Mad Men?
• 1:21:07
  Whatever the matter.
• 1:21:08
  Don Draper.
• 1:21:08
  Don Draper.
• 1:21:09
  Yeah.
• 1:21:11
  So if that's right, if there was a moment when men were so buttoned up that it was actually not as good for them, and by revealing that through opportunities has enabled men to be more in touch with some of those maybe traditionally female ways of being, I think the opposite is also going to be true.
• 1:21:33
  We haven't had a widespread movement to entice women into more physical activities.
• 1:21:41
  Title IX was all very well and good, although it's been completely bastardized now, right?
• 1:21:46
  Like encourage girls in sports.
• 1:21:48
  Great.
• 1:21:49
  But so many girls and women are totally happy, not having any physical relationship with the world, not when they see tongs, you know, wanting like, well, what does that do?
• 1:21:59
  How does that manifest in the world?
• 1:22:01
  And, you know, maybe it's as simple as doing a sport or playing an instrument, or, you know, even to some degree baking, although that's, you know, there is physical reality in that, but, you know, gardening, doing things with your hands where there's physical reality in the world and where you can discover that my desire to be right doesn't make me right.
• 1:22:23
  So if men can be better off with a little bit more emotional valence, women can definitely be better off as a population with more interaction with the physical world that will reveal to them that wanting to be right doesn't make you right.
• 1:22:38
  Um, I agree with you in this case.
• 1:22:41
  And I do think that this is, this is, yeah, in this one case, I agree with you.
• 1:22:45
  It's weird, but it happened.
• 1:22:47
  Um, I think it's part and parcel of the idea that what really needs to happen is a renegotiation that trad doesn't work because we can't go back, but a renegotiation makes sense.
• 1:22:58
  And I, I wanted to, because before we move on from it, I agree with you that it is the lack of contact with physical environments that results in this right to be right phenomenon.
• 1:23:13
  That is, trad, I believe it has cultivated this within women, because if you think about what the relationship is of a woman in a household where the man is out doing the interfacing with the world, there is an ability to turn up pressure in the house to motivate the man to go out and do the interfacing with the world.
• 1:23:36
  And so part of what's happened, as we've talked about with respect to science is rules of science are the masculine rules.
• 1:23:42
  It's great for women to be doing science, but you got to do them by the rules that work.
• 1:23:46
  And you have to be making decisions overtly in science, not covertly science doesn't advance by gossip.
• 1:23:52
  Right.
• 1:23:53
  And the fact that somebody is pushing you around, you know, you get up to give your presentation and somebody is saying, Hey, here's a flaw in what you did.
• 1:24:01
  Here's a possibility you didn't think about that person is not your enemy.
• 1:24:05
  They're actually helping you do your work better.
• 1:24:07
  This is a masculine take.
• 1:24:09
  And if you're going to go into science, it's the only take friends and colleagues push you to become better by revealing where you're not getting it.
• 1:24:16
  100%.
• 1:24:17
  So it doesn't is not the standard in female land.
• 1:24:19
  So the idea that women have this, that women who see themselves as liberated hold on to this idea that they have a right to be right.
• 1:24:29
  That is actually a throwback to the environment where the woman is insulated in the home and she is getting things done in the world by motivating a man to do them.
• 1:24:38
  I don't, I don't, I don't think no, because the point is doubling down in that context works.
• 1:24:44
  It doesn't matter whether the guy believes that what you're saying is true.
• 1:24:47
  The point is you are in a position to motivate him to behave as if it's true.
• 1:24:51
  But most of what a woman is doing, if she is in the home is actually affecting real change in the physical world.
• 1:24:57
  Like, you know, especially before so many of the modern, you know, labor and time saving devices, there was a tremendous amount of real physical action taken by women that were changing things in the real world.
• 1:25:07
  Right, but not at the level of belief.
• 1:25:09
  And that's what I'm getting at is that it is strange to think you live in a universe where you where you can ratchet up the pressure and the universe will eventually allow you to be right.
• 1:25:22
  That is a relationship dynamic.
• 1:25:24
  That's not a contact with the physical world dynamic.
• 1:25:28
  Yeah, I guess I just don't, I don't know to what degree that really ever exists.
• 1:25:31
  And I mean, I think this is true of the of the trad fantasy in general, I think there was, you know, a larger than previous or since number of families in the United States in the 50s post war, who reflected the sort of Don Draper, you know, Mad Men lifestyle with regard to the family at home.
• 1:25:52
  But I don't, I don't know that it was even ever a majority, maybe it was.
• 1:25:57
  But it certainly wasn't super common right before then during the war, because war time changes everything.
• 1:26:02
  And it quickly became not the standard since.
• 1:26:05
  So, to some degree, and you know, this is the it's the same mistake over and over again, we see this with regard to like, you know, paleo diets.
• 1:26:15
  Oh, well, it's just like, there's a moment in history where we ate like this, like, well, I guess, but we've had all this history, why are you picking that moment?
• 1:26:23
  There's a moment in history, I mean, look like that, boy, was that good for us?
• 1:26:26
  Like, yeah, like, maybe it was good for people like you.
• 1:26:29
  And how do you know you would have been one of those people like you?
• 1:26:31
  It's like, it's like the dudes wanting to be in a collision of society is like, are you getting this going?
• 1:26:36
  Or are you one of the many people who don't get to meet at all?
• 1:26:38
  Right.
• 1:26:39
  Still, I'm not quite ready to let this go.
• 1:26:42
  Because I think that, you know, the child who throws a tantrum in the supermarket to get the thing, right, they level a kind of social pressure that the parent can't withstand, because it's embarrassing to have your child throwing a fit.
• 1:26:55
  And so they give in, there are relationship dynamics that look like that.
• 1:27:00
  And so the point is, it looks like somebody who is doubling down on something, because it results in a change in the universe, that is a human to human dynamic, it is not a human to world dynamic.
• 1:27:15
  And so my point is, what feels liberated, what we saw in woke ism, the threatening people into admitting things that weren't true, right?
• 1:27:26
  We live in a white supremacist society.
• 1:27:29
  No, we don't.
• 1:27:30
  Right.
• 1:27:30
  We elected a black president twice.
• 1:27:32
  It's not a white supremacist society.
• 1:27:34
  But if I say that, bad things are going to happen to me.
• 1:27:38
  So I'm going to admit that we do that same dynamic is a dysfunctional human relationship dynamic.
• 1:27:43
  And the fact that we are seeing it, which fits perfectly with how I described the response that don't hurt me, walls.
• 1:27:51
  Right.
• 1:27:51
  Don't hurt me.
• 1:27:52
  100%.
• 1:27:52
  So the point is human dynamics.
• 1:27:56
  And it's Vassalavavil's Green Grazer.
• 1:27:58
  Human dynamics are not like physically rigorous environments.
• 1:28:05
  And so your point, which I agree with exactly, is that women need contact with these physical things.
• 1:28:11
  I do think sport was a great one, but it was too isolated.
• 1:28:15
  Yeah.
• 1:28:15
  Right.
• 1:28:15
  You need.
• 1:28:16
  And it's never going to be the majority.
• 1:28:19
  I mean, it could be, you know, there's plenty of games for which there are pickup games and men are much more likely to engage in regular pickup games of various things.
• 1:28:26
  But like, you know, ultimate is fantastic.
• 1:28:29
  And ultimate is one of the few sports that really works co-ed.
• 1:28:31
  And like, there's lots of pickup ultimate.
• 1:28:34
  And, you know, that's just a great way to get out there.
• 1:28:37
  But what it isn't is played consciously.
• 1:28:41
  And I think what we're talking about is that these beliefs, these explicit beliefs that aren't true, but that women behave as if they have a right for them to be true, are conscious in nature.
• 1:28:52
  And what you need is engagement with an activity that upgrades your conscious understanding that, I mean, in fact, I'm trying to remember what the quote is from PB Medawar, who said something along the lines of. 20-situ biologist.
• 1:29:11
  Nobel prize winning, great biologist, British guy said something along the lines of you will be surprised just how little influence your belief has on what is true.
• 1:29:25
  Right.
• 1:29:26
  Yeah.
• 1:29:28
  You said just to go back to ultimate, because if I'm not playing it, at least I can talk about it.
• 1:29:34
  Yes, the game itself isn't conscious.
• 1:29:38
  But if you're playing man on defense, you're playing man on man defense, the lining up before the point is conscious.
• 1:29:46
  And that reveals, I like I played enough, as you know, that and you and mostly coed that it reveals who actually isn't living in the physical universe, isn't there?
• 1:30:00
  Because there were there were not always there would often be someone, a new player who who was not going to be able to match up with the best player on the other team.
• 1:30:10
  You'd be like, I'm fine.
• 1:30:11
  We're good.
• 1:30:11
  No, you'd like you.
• 1:30:13
  That's bad for everyone.
• 1:30:14
  That makes the entire game less fun for everyone.
• 1:30:17
  And he's going to score a point against you right away.
• 1:30:19
  And then like, so we're just going to lose like, that's not good.
• 1:30:23
  So there is a conscious moment in every single point where you have to sort of go like, okay, who am I?
• 1:30:29
  Yeah, I think I'm going to be a better match for her.
• 1:30:30
  Or actually, I would be better match for him, because I'm a strong player and he's new, like whatever it is.
• 1:30:35
  Right.
• 1:30:35
  Well, I would be remiss if I didn't point this out.
• 1:30:38
  This is actually one of, sorry to introduce him here, but this is one of home math's points, which is actually if you do take the population of men and the population of women and you line them up, right, in a more traditional scenario in which monogamous mating was expected, everybody finds somebody.
• 1:30:59
  What's happening now is you have almost all women targeting the same tiny number of men with extraordinary characteristics.
• 1:31:08
  Those men then don't have to commit to anybody.
• 1:31:11
  They take advantage of all of those women and then ultimately marry somebody younger.
• 1:31:15
  And the point is it creates this dysfunctional dynamic precisely because people fail the test that you're talking about in Ultimate, which is lining up across from the person that's actually a good match for you.
• 1:31:26
  And I mean, just if Ultimate is an allegory for life, you know, do you want to play a game in which you're constantly a little bit, you know, what, upside isn't the right term, but like, yeah, like you're constantly trying to get the disc, trying to score against the person that's defending you, or if they've got it, you're defending them.
• 1:31:50
  And it's kind of, you know, you and I wouldn't have been a perfect match when we were both at peak because we were both very good in your male.
• 1:32:03
  I was better than many of the men that I played.
• 1:32:06
  You were a lot better relative to the pool of women than I was relative to the pool of men playing Ultimate.
• 1:32:11
  Right.
• 1:32:12
  But if we were, so say we had been, we would have had a more fun time playing the game.
• 1:32:20
  And it also would have been better for all the other team, for us to be occasionally, occasionally I get one around you, or you get one around me, then, oh, well, there's that, there's that offensive defensive pair over there where one of them so, so patently outstrips the other, that it's just never any match.
• 1:32:40
  Like there's no, there's no sportsmanship in there.
• 1:32:43
  There's no fun of the game.
• 1:32:45
  There's no, there's no, there's no sense of play.
• 1:32:49
  I like, what's the point?
• 1:32:51
  Well, what's the point you want someone who is going to give you a run for your money in, in, in, in sport and in life?
• 1:32:57
  I think this actually weirdly makes my point about establishing a unique set of rules because this is exactly what created Ultimate.
• 1:33:06
  Yeah.
• 1:33:07
  That a group of people, I think at Brown, basically some people say it's Boulder.
• 1:33:12
  Maybe it was Boulder.
• 1:33:13
  I mean, they, I think, I think this is a long standing some group of people decided to lay out a set of rules that actually takes the basic dynamics of let's say soccer or some other ball sport and alters them in such a way that you can actually have a co-ed game or a game that includes people of a wide array of different abilities.
• 1:33:34
  Why?
• 1:33:35
  Because built into the game is a fundamentally collaborative element, even though the game is highly competitive.
• 1:33:42
  But the point is, yes, the rules of the game are explicitly collaborative in the sense that we all have an interest in there being a great game.
• 1:33:50
  Yes.
• 1:33:50
  And so it's a good model for this.
• 1:33:53
  And, you know, it works pretty well, even in that situation.
• 1:33:58
  Yeah.
• 1:33:58
  And I will say just as long as we're talking about Ultimate, I've said this before, that I played for the Michigan women's team and so, you know, we traveled and went to tournaments and I also played in and captained a lot of Summer League teams in Ann Arbor that were co-ed.
• 1:34:17
  And when traveling and going to other tournaments, I also was able to watch a lot of all male games.
• 1:34:23
  So played and watched a lot of co-ed, played some all female, watched some all female.
• 1:34:29
  And my sense was I liked playing all female games of Ultimate so much less, so much less than playing co-ed because it was so collaborative.
• 1:34:42
  So there's seven people on a team and you try to get the disc down the field into your end zone, you can't move when you're holding the disc.
• 1:34:50
  And there is often, especially in like a Summer League situation, a desire to make sure everyone gets some game, like everyone gets some play.
• 1:35:00
  But the sort of hope that, you know, everyone is going to get to handle the disc at some point is taken to an extreme.
• 1:35:07
  And even in a highly competitive all female situation, it's like, oh, make sure everyone handles the disc.
• 1:35:12
  Like, no, sometimes you got to huck it down the field because we get some fast people and like, you know, what are you doing?
• 1:35:18
  Why are we doing these short, dinky little non-risky passes that of course are super risky because as soon as someone knocks it down, the other team gets it and does huck it down the field.
• 1:35:27
  Okay.
• 1:35:28
  So with all women's Ultimate wasn't as interesting because it was too cautious, too collaborative, too focused on not hurting people's feelings.
• 1:35:35
  Is that an exaggeration?
• 1:35:37
  A little bit, but I loved it.
• 1:35:39
  Watching the men's games was great athleticism.
• 1:35:43
  You know, fun to watch at that level, man, that guy's fast.
• 1:35:45
  Oh, man, he dove for that.
• 1:35:47
  I thought that was swilly caught and amazing.
• 1:35:48
  Right.
• 1:35:49
  But not that interesting at the strategy level, like most points were over like that.
• 1:35:55
  Okay.
• 1:35:55
  Someone catches it.
• 1:35:56
  You got, you run, got two people running.
• 1:35:58
  He's going to huck it to someone.
• 1:35:59
  They're going to catch it in the end zone and point over.
• 1:36:02
  Whereas the co-ed games have the best of both worlds.
• 1:36:08
  They've had the best of both worlds, right?
• 1:36:09
  You have, you have the long passes, the focus on athleticism, the speed, the, you know, diving for crap that you'd had no business diving for.
• 1:36:18
  And somehow you, you know, you from the mud, you, you're holding the desk and you have the interest in not having every point be, you know, the disc is touched by two and only two people.
• 1:36:27
  And as a result, the game was just fundamentally more interesting, less predictable.
• 1:36:32
  Uh, it lasts longer.
• 1:36:34
  Everything about it is just more fun.
• 1:36:36
  And like, what are you doing?
• 1:36:37
  Playing a sport.
• 1:36:38
  If you're not trying to have fun.
• 1:36:39
  Yeah.
• 1:36:40
  I mean, and I think the analogy just fits, right?
• 1:36:43
  And to relations, we are playing a, we in civilization are playing a very dumb romantic game that is not very rewarding for anybody.
• 1:36:50
  Obviously it's amazing how much dissatisfaction there is.
• 1:36:53
  The idea that there's an alternative game to be played.
• 1:36:56
  It's very clear.
• 1:36:58
  Um, and figuring out what the rules of it are ought to be a priority.
• 1:37:03
  Indeed.
• 1:37:04
  Do you have somewhere else you were headed?
• 1:37:07
  Uh, I want to mention a book before we sign off for today, but, uh, I think there's, there's a lot more to say here, but I don't have anything else that I need to talk about.
• 1:37:17
  I'm sure we will return to it.
• 1:37:18
  Okay.
• 1:37:19
  Did you?
• 1:37:19
  Nope.
• 1:37:20
  Not, not at the moment.
• 1:37:21
  All right.
• 1:37:22
  Um, all right.
• 1:37:23
  Well, um, you want some tongs?
• 1:37:26
  You know that I do.
• 1:37:27
  Yeah.
• 1:37:27
  Although longer ones are more satisfying.
• 1:37:29
  Yeah.
• 1:37:30
  I love these.
• 1:37:31
  I mean, this is just, this is a beautiful, this is a beautiful piece of design actually.
• 1:37:36
  Yeah.
• 1:37:37
  I made bacon this morning.
• 1:37:38
  I cleaned them though.
• 1:37:40
  Yeah.
• 1:37:40
  Yeah.
• 1:37:40
  I can tell.
• 1:37:40
  Yeah.
• 1:37:41
  I don't smell like bacon.
• 1:37:42
  I'm afraid.
• 1:37:43
  Um, okay.
• 1:37:45
  One last thing before we sign off until, uh, New Year's Eve, I finished this morning.
• 1:37:50
  I finished this book playground by Richard Powers.
• 1:37:53
  It's a novel.
• 1:37:53
  Uh, it has been, um, appreciated by our cat Fairfax as well.
• 1:37:57
  That's what the bite marks on the, uh, on the corner are about.
• 1:38:00
  Uh, and he published it in 2024.
• 1:38:03
  He's also written, um, a number of other books, including Overstory, which is also a great novel.
• 1:38:08
  I don't want to say too much about it.
• 1:38:10
  It is extraordinary, highly recommended novel broadly about, um, friendship, the oceans, AI.
• 1:38:20
  I mean, re really extraordinary, uh, takes place in part in, uh, in the mind of a, um, sort of AI tech overlord and in part in the minds of, uh, his friends who have come to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific where one of them grew up, uh, and, uh, has incredible biological descriptions of in fact, some organisms that I didn't, I didn't know about before.
• 1:38:45
  And, uh, just, just staggeringly good Richard Powers, uh, playground.
• 1:38:50
  Cool.
• 1:38:51
  Do you know if there's an audio version?
• 1:38:52
  Uh, probably there is, because he's, he's a, he's a big name in, uh, you know, he's, let's see, recipient of a MacArthur fellowship Pulitzer prize national book award.
• 1:38:59
  He's, you know, he's, he's not undiscovered.
• 1:39:02
  So I'm sure there's an audio version.
• 1:39:04
  Um, although, you know, everyone who listened to audio books knows this, uh, some audio books are better than others because some people should never have been chosen to voice particular books.
• 1:39:15
  Quite true.
• 1:39:16
  And some books don't work that way very well.
• 1:39:18
  Yeah.
• 1:39:19
  Although I will, I don't want to really, I don't want to get on anyone in particular cases, but, um, I, at the recommendation of our friend, Dave Stevens, I have been reading some of the books in the James Clavell show gun series.
• 1:39:31
  Uh, but I've been entirely, uh, doing them by, um, by audio book and show gun parts one and two and type pan were both, I think voiced by the same person.
• 1:39:43
  And it's wonderful.
• 1:39:44
  It's, it's tough.
• 1:39:45
  Like he's got different accents.
• 1:39:47
  He's got two sexes.
• 1:39:48
  Like it's, it's hard for one person.
• 1:39:50
  And in fact, some of the better audio books, uh, novels that I've heard voiced used at least to at least a man and a woman.
• 1:39:56
  Um, but he does it really well.
• 1:39:58
  And I'm listening to another book in that series now, the other one recommended, I'm just not going to mention it.
• 1:40:03
  Um, and I find the voicing really hard to listen to.
• 1:40:07
  Uh, and it's, it's, it's off putting, but anyway, um, I'll bet, I'll bet that whoever has done the voicing for playground, Richard Powers latest novel does a great job and highly recommended.
• 1:40:18
  Awesome.
• 1:40:19
  Um, can I, uh, this struck me at the beginning of the podcast and I think I will just introduce it here.
• 1:40:24
  Yeah.
• 1:40:25
  Much as I believe that we should not call that autumn and fall are not synonymous.
• 1:40:31
  Fall is whenever the leaves are falling off the trees where you live.
• 1:40:33
  Autumn is the season.
• 1:40:35
  I feel weird every time somebody describes new year's Eve as the day before new year's, cause it's not an Eve.
• 1:40:43
  Shouldn't we divide this and talk about the last day of the year and the new year's Eve is when evening starts on the last day of the year.
• 1:40:51
  I don't, I, I think that ship is sailed.
• 1:40:53
  I think linguistically, um, Eve evening.
• 1:40:57
  Yeah.
• 1:40:58
  Obviously Eve is a shortening of evening.
• 1:41:00
  Yeah.
• 1:41:01
  And I actually, I have no idea what the etymological history is.
• 1:41:03
  I don't know which meaning it started with, but I think at this point we use Eve to, to mean the day before.
• 1:41:12
  We just, we, we just do.
• 1:41:14
  I know we do.
• 1:41:16
  And you know, see earlier point about what, uh, the DEI movement and me too.
• 1:41:21
  And now I feel like Manosphere are trying to do like, Oh, we're just, you know, well, no, sorry, not Manosphere.
• 1:41:26
  That's different.
• 1:41:27
  Like we're gonna, we're gonna change things by diktat and we're gonna like, once we change your language, then to your personality will change.
• 1:41:34
  That's not how language works.
• 1:41:35
  That's not how change works.
• 1:41:36
  I know.
• 1:41:37
  It doesn't just strike you with wrong.
• 1:41:40
  No, I mean, I get your point.
• 1:41:43
  The sun is overhead.
• 1:41:44
  It's shining.
• 1:41:46
  It's new year's Eve.
• 1:41:48
  Well, you will, you may remember, um, and I, maybe I did it more around the kids than you, but I used to, um, talk to them when they were very young and we were anticipating often it was about school stuff.
• 1:42:00
  But you know, as summer was approaching, okay, Toby, it's the pen pen pen pen ultimate day of school.
• 1:42:05
  Right.
• 1:42:06
  And you know, he would, and I think it was act two, but I feel like I did that more with Toby.
• 1:42:10
  He'd count up the pens and be like, okay, yeah, we got this many more days.
• 1:42:13
  Um, so, you know, the pen ultimate day of school, the ultimate, you know, but you know, ultimate new year, you just, you need more construction in there to make it work.
• 1:42:23
  It's the last day of the year.
• 1:42:24
  And then new year's eve is when you're just, you're, you're closing in on it.
• 1:42:29
  We're going to be here on new year's eve, right in the middle of the day at night.
• 1:42:32
  We've never done one at night.
• 1:42:34
  I know.
• 1:42:35
  Um, all right.
• 1:42:36
  Well, now you know where I stand.
• 1:42:38
  Apparently Heather does not agree with me, but anyway, we will, we will work it out.
• 1:42:42
  This is not going to be sufficient for a divorce.
• 1:42:44
  No, this is not divorce worthy.
• 1:42:45
  This is 20% divorce worthy.
• 1:42:48
  This is not any 20%.
• 1:42:50
  No, we might be closer.
• 1:42:52
  A lot closer.
• 1:42:55
  No, it's really not worth by I would just surrender on this one.
• 1:42:59
  If I had to, which apparently I do because you and all of civilization agree on this.
• 1:43:03
  No, I mean, it's not, it's not mine to decide.
• 1:43:05
  I'm just, I'm telling you, it's not yours to decide by virtue of the fact that all of civilization agrees with you.
• 1:43:12
  And I'm the only person who holds this.
• 1:43:13
  No, by virtue of the fact that language change doesn't work that way.
• 1:43:16
  Okay.
• 1:43:17
  All right.
• 1:43:17
  Many, many before you have tried.
• 1:43:18
  I, let's put it this way.
• 1:43:20
  I will get over it.
• 1:43:22
  If not this year, then next year, I don't think you will.
• 1:43:27
  No, I will.
• 1:43:28
  Okay.
• 1:43:28
  Mostly.
• 1:43:29
  Okay.
• 1:43:30
  All right.
• 1:43:30
  Um, so we had three awesome sponsors, uh, at the top of the hour, they were, uh, Manukura honey.
• 1:43:36
  These are some travel sticks, Fremont awesome, Fremont protein bars.
• 1:43:41
  And I have no, uh, prop for CrowdHealth, but man, well, the fact that we are, we are sitting here.
• 1:43:48
  We are, um, not impoverished by the fact that we are paying thousands of dollars to insurance companies that are, um, that are practically criminal and their negligence of people's health.
• 1:43:58
  Um, so Manukura honey, Prima and crowd health are great sponsors this week and check them out.
• 1:44:05
  If you haven't.
• 1:44:06
  Check them out.
• 1:44:07
  Uh, check out this Rogan.
• 1:44:09
  I think there's a lot of good stuff in it that people, there's a lot of stuff in it.
• 1:44:13
  It's a big evolutionary section at the beginning where I deploy some new stuff that I think if you've ever worried that the Darwinian explanation isn't sufficient, you will be intrigued by it.
• 1:44:22
  And then there's a lot of other stuff, including a bunch of stuff about, uh, sex, gender relationship stuff.
• 1:44:29
  Um, anyway, check that out.
• 1:44:31
  Carl Benjamin episode.
• 1:44:32
  That's also worth checking out.
• 1:44:34
  And, um, and we'll be back on New Year's Eve right then all the day.
• 1:44:41
  If that was even a thing, but until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside.
• 1:44:48
  Be well, everyone.