Geoffrey Miller critiques justice’s health-based leniency toward aging abusers like Bill Cosby (81) and Dennis Hastert, exposing media’s psychological speculation without evidence while debunking myths—e.g., Victorian-era vibrators for "hysteria" or "killer sperm." He warns academia’s tribal bias stifles science, from invalid IAT tests to censorship in gender studies, contrasting universities’ stagnation with VR’s potential to revolutionize education within 15–20 years. Ethical dilemmas like lab-grown meat (even hypothetical "Brian Gosling steaks") or robot sex brothels ($60/hour in Texas) highlight unaddressed moral and legal gaps, while Miller’s centrist libertarian views clash with ideological labels. Evolutionary psychology reveals tribal instincts but struggles to reconcile modern debates—polyamory, porn, or AI-driven intimacy—suggesting future learning may thrive on tech and open discourse, leaving rigid institutions behind. [Automatically generated summary]
Didn't they do that with that guy who was Speaker, Hassert, who was Speaker of the House, who was convicted for molesting a large number of boys when he was a wrestling coach?
Well, there's no way if he was a 25-year-old able-bodied man who had done the exact same thing, he would have gone to jail for 15 months for admitting to molest a large number of kids who were under his care when he was a wrestling coach, right?
I mean, it's weird because the media will have a certain narrative they want to promote and they'll sort of find the psychologist who will say the thing that fits that.
So I think most clinical psychologists would say, I've never talked to the guy.
I'm not going to try to diagnose him from a distance.
I have no idea what his condition is or what his issue is.
But then there's a handful who are willing to kind of stick their necks out and say something.
And, man, it's embarrassing to be a psych professor for that reason because you're always kind of being represented publicly by the people who are kind of being least professional about those kind of diagnoses.
Well, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this up to you as an evolutionary psych professor, looking at the human mind and looking at behavior patterns and what's clearly some sort of, I hesitate to call crime an addiction, but it seems like an addictive pattern that he has, that there's a compulsion.
To doing this to people.
It's not as simple as he wants women to have sex with him.
They don't want to have sex with him, so he drugs them.
I don't think it's that simple.
I think there's some getting away with it thing.
There's got to be some he's better than everyone thing because he's royalty in terms of Hollywood, in terms of show business, in terms of stand-up comedy.
He's always been treated as royalty.
I mean, he's been allowed to...
Essentially criticize anyone who wants.
Rarely is there a rebuttal to the things that he says.
And, you know, he's been criticizing the black community for its use of bad words and for its use of sexually explicit language and depictions.
And meanwhile, the entire time he's raping people.
I think one thing that might happen is if you've got this public image as being like squeaky clean family values and you've got the burden of kind of being a moral exemplar like that, you know?
Just like televangelists, right?
Or anybody who has a big religious following.
Like the pressure to be good all the time, I think, can kind of tip people into this.
The thrill of transgression, I imagine, could be quite kind of addictive.
And I think that's a real danger.
And I think that kind of hypocrisy is why we should be really careful about kind of idolizing anybody to that degree kind of morally and putting that burden on them.
Yeah, I mean, I could only imagine, like, being an evangelist, being someone who preached about the Word of God, but meanwhile having this weird hooker thing.
Like, do you remember, what was his name, Ted?
He ran a giant church in, I believe it was Colorado, and the entire time, I used to have a bit about him, the entire time he was smoking meth and having sex with gay prostitutes.
And all the while he was going on about...
It's always the guys who go on about how awful gay people are that are secretly gay.
The conflicted thoughts of the human being who has this ideal of who they'd like to project and what they'd like people to think they are, who meanwhile has this thing below the surface that is literally everything they despise and everything they rally against, and that is their true nature.
God, it's got to be the awfulest feeling.
I mean, I've known several guys who are closeted gay men, and it's an awful existence.
They just live in this perpetual state of just angst and unease.
And meanwhile...
God, I just think, for the most part, especially if you live in an urban environment, most part people don't give a shit anymore.
It's almost a self-imposed prison.
And the people that do give a shit, they're the real problem.
You know, the people who are not gay, who really care if someone's gay, unless they're trying to do a Cosby on you, like, why do you care?
Look, if somebody wants to be in the closet about their sexuality, like they want to be discreet for professional reasons or because investors would panic or whatever, like that's totally cool.
But I think it is so hard to be authentic to yourself.
Like it's okay to sort of acknowledge I have this sexuality or these predilections and it's up to me to kind of harness them and deal with them and manage them.
And if you want to do that privately, that's cool.
But if you don't work out those little demons and if you can't acknowledge what's authentic, I think that's where you get these problems like the Cosby case.
Yeah, and I believe there's a difference between discretion, not wanting to discuss your sexuality, and out-and-out hypocrisy.
These are completely different things.
It's one thing, like you said, like say if a guy's a CEO of some major corporation and he happens to be gay and he's just not interested in all the political nonsense and all the social nonsense that goes along with discussing that.
Like, I don't do research on whatever, the psychology of porn, but I know people who do.
And the fact that you can study it and everyone watches it, but you can't even show clips at a scientific conference of what people are watching is kind of bizarre.
A second thing that's bizarre is if you'd asked people, 70 years ago, you know, in the 50s or whatever.
What do you think will happen if there's unlimited free online pornography that is every possible genre of humans of all sexes interacting with each other, including cartoon dragons and whatever?
They would go, civilization will have fallen.
Like, it would be chaos.
That sounds post-apocalyptic.
And yet, we're living in that era.
People are still driving their kids to school and being morally judgmental about politics.
And our ability to compartmentalize is kind of awe-inspiring, actually.
Our ability to adjust to the times is kind of awe-inspiring, too.
I've often talked about, when I was in high school, I was in high school in 1981, my freshman year of high school, and that was literally around the time the VH1 tape was introduced into modern America.
What was the exact year VH1 tapes were invented?
We got them in my house, I think, in 82. Maybe I was a sophomore.
Which is right when you're about the horniest.
And that's when porn made it into people's houses.
And you had to go through those beads in the video store to get to the porn section.
And everybody was like, everybody had blinders on and nobody looked at anybody else.
Yeah, people always overestimate how much is going to change in the next 20 years compared to the last 20. Yeah.
But, you know, if you'd asked a bunch of, let's say, psychology researchers who study, like, marriages and long-term relationships, ask them in 1980, what's going to happen when you have unlimited VHS porn?
Some of them might have said, that'll save American marriages.
Well, I mean, one issue is people differ in their conscientiousness, right?
Their degree of self-control and their ability to kind of resist temptations and keep their eyes on the target, like career, family, kids, you know, do the right stuff.
Other people, like, I just can't control myself in any domain of life, whatever it is.
Video games, porn, doing my homework, whatever.
But I think we also have to cut people some slack, because remember, If you're a teenager and you're really into video games, Call of Duty, whatever it is, there are literally thousands of people designing that game to be as addictive as possible and beta testing it and refining it and doing the level design so it gives you just the right reinforcers at the right pace.
And of course we're not going to be very good at resisting that because the power of Capitalism and tech and innovation to kind of exploit our brains is pretty awesome.
But are they doing it consciously or are they just trying to make the best possible game that's so entertaining and then it just, as a side effect, it becomes addictive?
If you're running a video game company, the folks actually doing the programming, right?
Character design, level design, whatever.
They want it to be awesome.
They want it to just be the best game ever that is just so fun to play.
But the management knows...
We have to sell it.
We have to make it compelling.
We have to make people excited about the next version and the add-ons.
So I think there's kind of like a super ego and id issue going on even within companies where the designers just want it to be cool and management just wants a viable commercial product.
Secrets and lies and and but I think the way they're handling it is amazing because the kid doesn't have that kind of conflict the kid has like in my opinion a typical sort of Relationship with his father where he admires his father and his father's abilities And you know and he seems to be it's I just think that shows fucking great It's just so well read written rather.
It's just so it's so twisted.
There's so much going on so many different levels and It's like, I get anxiety.
I start sweating, and I feel like I'm burning bodies.
But, I mean, one thing that makes me optimistic about America is that the same adults who are being completely insane to each other about politics on Twitter, whatever, are watching this really sophisticated, emotionally insightful Netflix stuff.
And I can't connect those two things.
It's like when people aren't talking about certain issues, they're capable of Really appreciating, really insightful drama that's about the subtleties of human relationships and morally ambiguous situations.
And then they go into the voting booth or get on Twitter and it's like there's black and there's white and that's it.
And I hate those people and I love these people.
And I can't connect the dots between the entertainment media that we appreciate versus the kind of ideologies that we...
Yeah, I think Twitter and I think, well, Twitter in particular, but blogs as well, I think it is a horrible way to communicate when you are saying something that's in dispute.
Because you're not challenged.
And I think there's also, whether it's 140 characters or 280 characters, I just think this limited way of writing in text without talking to someone, without being in front of them and communicating with them and the subtleties of human interaction and social cues and recognizing people's feelings.
It's a piss-poor way of getting your thoughts out, and it's very non-human.
It tends to gravitate towards cruelty because there's no consequences for saying cruel things.
It's almost like you're throwing a bomb over a wall and you don't know who's over there.
You're not there seeing it.
There's something about that that I just think is alien to the human condition and I think it's having a real effect On our civilization and our culture and how we communicate with each other and I think it's galvanizing the polar opposites and it's making people go towards these extreme lefts and extreme rights,
especially people that are easily led or maybe not so thoughtful about the objective way that they're interpreting these events and not Not being introspective, not looking at themselves with a critical eye, and just engaging in this sort of back-and-forth tribal shit with people that I just think is so strange to watch.
And particularly when you read something and it's really well-written.
Like you could tell this is an intelligent person that's written a bunch of nonsense and called people alt-right and Nazis and what's the most recent one?
People do have a hunger for this more primal, engaged, kind of long-form discussion, which is why podcasts like this are really popular and why people are willing to listen to two reasonably smart people talking for an hour or three about cool topics.
Yeah.
That's the natural condition.
You know, imagine our ancestors 100,000 years ago around the campfire having a discussion about some fraught issue.
Well, they would talk it through until it was more or less resolved or unless they at least identified, here's the things we can agree on and here's the things we can agree to disagree on.
But with Twitter, it's just the exact opposite.
It's not sitting around the campfire.
It's lobbing these hand grenades over the campfire.
Well, I think, you know, the human social psychology is it's very hard to reach any agreement without a certain amount of back and forth, preferably face to face, in person, with as much time as you need.
Yeah, I hope we get to a future where people are allowed to be epistemically humble, like, here's what I don't know, and I don't know a lot about most things.
And even if politicians or scientists or media figures were able to take that attitude.
And just, it kind of gets back to the hypocrisy point, right?
Everybody inwardly knows...
About most topics, I know virtually nothing or I've heard a few things third hand that I can kind of regurgitate at a party.
But we're all kind of expected to have an informed view about everything.
And this is something I try to model for my students.
Like if they ask a question, I really don't know the answer.
Say if you're involved in something, computer coding, electronics, something that's 10, 12 hours a day, you're engrossed.
You don't have a lot of time to focus on other areas.
You don't really have a lot of time to expand your understanding of whether it's biology, mathematics, whatever it is that doesn't apply to what you do for a living.
You really have very little time.
So this notion that people are embarrassed about things they don't know.
And I think that's really unfortunate.
It's one of the main stumbling points when it comes to open and honest discourse.
One of the most beautiful things about podcasts that was completely unexpected for me is that it gives me this very unusual opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody without any interruptions for three hours.
Which I could never ask someone to do in real life.
It never came up before.
Like, if I have dinner, if you and I went out to dinner, we'd be talking, you know, maybe someone else would be with us, different conversations, you'd be eating.
Oh, this is amazing.
Did you try that?
Oh, this is good.
What are you up to?
It's like little simple conversations.
It's fun and everything, but it's not completely locked in like this with the headphones on, Through a microphone, the knowledge that other people are listening, and that these subjects that you're discussing, you're allowing these ideas to play themselves out, and you're sort of moving them around, and asking questions, and looking at them from different angles.
And to have that liberty and freedom to do that is a very rare thing, and for people that get to listen, and I enjoy Sam Harris's podcast in particular, Radio Lab's one of my favorites, but one of the There's so many good ones out there, but what's really good about them is that you get a chance to listen to discourse uninterrupted, uncensored, undirected.
And this is something that I think is sorely missing from the rest of our culture, and it's one of the reasons why these things have caught on so well.
I mean, if you respect the ideas that you're talking about, you should be willing to give time and attention and let them kind of breathe, like opening a bottle of wine and just letting it do the aeration thing before you pour it.
It's funny how much of a thirst there is for that.
I mean, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, would anybody ever spend three hours listening to a podcast, I would have said, no, there's just this one-way acceleration of culture that's going to be faster and faster.
Nobody will watch more than a 90-second clip on YouTube.
I think even leaning towards things that are like tech reviews, things along those lines, those are getting longer and longer.
There was never a television show where someone would discuss cell phones in depth with no interruption for over an hour.
That's very common now.
Where someone will go over all the different details of a phone and let you know, like, here's what's new about the Galaxy Note 9. And they get fucking hundreds of thousands of views.
This is what my anthropologist colleagues tell me is, you know, your status, if you're in a tribal society, a small-scale society, is heavily dependent on not just how good a hunter you are, how many kids you have, it's how entertaining are you in the evenings.
And I think that all the chaos that we're going through right now, politically and socially in particular, I feel like this is just an adolescent period of communication.
That we are experiencing this open flood, like we've opened up the barriers for communication.
Anybody can communicate now.
And it's going to take a while before The discourse levels out and you've got a lot of loud noises on all sides and there's a lot of people fighting for power and fighting for virtue, fighting for whatever social brownie points they get by Pointing out their position being correct and your position being foolish and silly and this is the future and this is done.
And there's this cruel aspect to it which is interesting.
Like if someone missteps and someone says something that they regret and then they delete it, there's this cancel culture.
Get rid of him!
Off with his head!
Because people realize the immediacy of all this and they're terrified of it happening to them.
So it's like they're just throwing rocks at whoever might be the accused.
I mean, we're going to need a whole new set of social norms where people just calm the fuck down about this stuff.
And I think it's kind of analogous.
One of my favorite books about social history is called The Bourgeois Virtues by Deidre McCloskey, an economic historian.
She points out when you switch from the Middle Ages, where everyone's a peasant, to this urbanized commercial culture where people are mostly...
Traders and they have little shops and whatever.
They needed to learn how to interact with strangers to provide value for money.
And they needed a whole new set of virtues that had to do with reliability and thinking, what am I making or what goods or services am I providing that actually are useful?
And it took a couple generations For people to enter that kind of capitalist mode of what can I do that's helpful to others that can support my family?
And I think now we have a cultural shift where we realize, given social media, how do we cope with the fact that everybody virtue signals, everybody sometimes says things that are mean and stupid, and everyone's fallible, and anything you say will be on a permanent record, basically.
How do we cope with that?
We're used to a sort of public culture where everything is very polished and edited and curated.
And that time is gone.
So we need a new set of kind of social and moral norms that cut each other a lot more slack, I think.
And I would say that the inclination towards kindness and communication and understanding should be rewarded.
And that we need to reward that and, I don't want to say ostracize people that are inclined to go towards this cancel culture idea, but we need to let people be aware of it.
You know, we were talking before the podcast that I have like All these emails that I can't catch up on because I was gone.
I was in the mountains for six days with no cell phone service at all.
I felt better when I was there.
I just did.
I feel like there's a certain amount of anxiety that comes with being connected to all these people all the time and constantly checking your mentions and constantly looking at Google News to find out what chaos is coming our way.
It's just...
I just don't think that that's healthy.
I think I do my very best to mitigate the negative effects of it, but my very best is not good.
I don't think I'm doing a great job, because when it's taken away from me, and I've had this happen twice over the last few months.
I was in Lanai, the small island off of Hawaii, one of the Hawaiian islands, and I broke my phone, and it took a few days for them to send me a new one, and I was like, God, why do I feel so good?
I think there's a funny thing even that happened with Burning Man culture where like when it got started in the early 90s, it was, let's all come together and have this excitement of interacting more.
And now, since Burning Man is one of the few places where you don't get cell phone service and you can't really be online, It's like, oh man, this is such a relief because we literally can't stay connected.
And the community we're in is only 70,000 people instead of 330 million.
Well, there is kind of behind the scenes leadership, of course.
I mean, that's another fascinating thing, is depending on the political lenses that you wear when you go there, it's either like a libertarian paradise, or it's a communist paradise, or it's spontaneous self-organization of some sort.
But there certainly are people who are kind of coordinating it.
How quickly it went from not being a thing at all to being its own subculture with its own moral norms and dress styles and systems of virtue signaling and sort of political expectations about what beliefs are the right ones to have even though it didn't start out political at all.
Yeah, you don't typically hear people like, well, I went to Burning Man and I dropped acid and I realized, like, Mormon monogamy is really the proper way to live.
I know, if I had to say, if like there's one religion where I had to say like What are your expectations of friendliness and niceness?
Where's the highest expectation?
For me, it's Mormons.
That's one religion.
I think it's nonsense.
I think Joseph Smith was a little con man in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic rock and all that crazy shit.
It is absolutely ridiculous.
But the end result is a bunch of really nice folks.
They have a wonderful community.
They're really nice to each other.
Once they got rid of all that polygamy shit, once they got rid of the 90 wives and dressing up like a pilgrim, they became a really nice community of people.
So my granddad, who was a business school professor, back in the 40s he moved his little family to Salt Lake City and they lived there for a while.
And he was really inspired by the kind of family values.
And I think that's one reason he sort of went on to have 12 kids of his own.
And not that he turned Mormon, but he thought they're on to something in terms of how seriously they take the future, both on Earth and in the afterlife they believe in.
And I thought, of course, of course, it's going to be a religion that has a farsighted approach and that's kind of pronatalist and that's all about family values and...
Like, increasing their numbers, and yeah, of course it's going to be them, not...
What?
Social justice warriors putting together a starship?
I mean, it's strange the blinders that people go on, that people put on, and that they would put those blinders on.
Like, it's almost like if you just can go, hey, look, let's just all admit Joseph Smith was full of shit.
But we got a good thing going on here, folks.
We're all real nice to each other and there seems to be some real positive energy involved in believing in this higher power and this greater good and this overwhelming sense of community that we all have.
I think having that humility and that sense of humor about what you're doing, I wish we saw more of that in academia, because there's a lot of fields that are very bad and don't do good work, but that are terribly, terribly serious about it.
I think it's very hard to do good work in a field where you have to every day systematically deny common sense and deny the evidence of your own eyes and ears about what's right in front of you, like how sex differences work.
I think that creates a habit of interacting with the world in a way that says, what I study is going to be completely divorced from every aspect of day-to-day life and everybody else I encounter who's not in my field.
Because if you allow any crosstalk between You sort of blank slate gender ideology and the real world, the ideology crumbles.
So you can only maintain it behind this wall of insulation.
And that's a terrible position to be in.
I don't envy the people who live their lives that way.
Where they go, no, you're not a freak, you're okay.
You know, there was some silly article on fat acceptance the other day, and it was talking, and then they got, which is fine.
I accept people who drink.
I accept all kinds of unhealthy choices.
But listen, don't lie to me.
Just don't lie about the physical reality of what you've done to your body if you reach 400 pounds.
That's not healthy.
You're saying it's healthy.
You're saying it's okay.
No, you're just not dead yet.
If you lost 200 pounds, you would feel wonderful.
That would be healthier.
If you smoke every day and you're like, look, no cancer.
Smoking's healthy.
No, no.
Your body is dealing with it.
Your body's processing it.
It won't be able to forever.
That is exactly what's going on if you're morbidly obese and for you to pretend any differently and to just go on about this fat acceptance movement and you know the big beautiful this and that and like no you're obese you've eaten too much food if you see a fat guy how come he doesn't get the same sort of treatment if you see a morbidly obese man in his underwear no one's saying he's beautiful Because he's disgusting and he's fat and he's lazy and he's addicted to food.
We all know it.
But if it's a woman, we're so inclined to, like, just let her go.
She's fine.
You're wonderful.
You're beautiful.
You're amazing.
Like, give her her space.
We treat them as if they're incapable of recognizing the absolute reality of their physical being.
I think it's important, you know, to address both the kind of individual choice level and also the kind of systemic level like the food industry and what is being promoted and what the federal government promoted for ages.
It was this terrible situation where you could have followed exactly what the FDA recommended and it would have been bad for you for decades.
And because of lobbying and because of the powers that be and influence and I think that's the level to criticize, right?
If you have a systemic problem like promotion of tobacco products and you want a safer alternative, then yeah, you've got to address the tobacco industry.
We have this bizarre situation, for example, where like a lot of people in my department work on alcoholism treatment research.
How do you get people to drink less?
Or they work on how do you get people to stop taking opiates?
How do you deal with opiate addiction?
And if you make a suggestion like, oh, here's some awesome new research showing that if people switch from opiates to cannabis, it dramatically lowers their risk of death.
Or if they switch from alcohol to cannabis, it has all these health benefits relatively to being an alcoholic.
But it's kind of considered taboo to raise that.
and psychology and so forth.
Well, it's like, oh, you're giving in to people being self-indulgent if you say they should switch from one thing to another in a kind of harm reduction mode.
Yeah, and a lot of them come out of a kind of 12-step program mentality where it's like you have a disease.
If you ever do anything that is bad for you, then you've relapsed and that's feeding your disease.
I think that's idiotic.
The evidence shows that's not the way to treat any of these physical addictions.
Something like cannabis as an alternative is, it's totally marginalized in academia.
Like you really can't talk about it as a valid alternative where people could come home and they can drink or they could come home and they could get high and maybe getting high for a lot of people might be better.
Who gives you the research funding to look into this, right?
National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism or National Institute of Drug Abuse.
If you do a grant proposal that says, here's an alternative that might work.
They will shut it down because the federal government does not – those agencies don't want the blowback of some senator saying, how dare you fund this research that says this is a valid alternative.
So everyone who works in these areas is kind of locked into a system of grant funding that's subject to kind of political censorship.
This is just insanity that this is allowed to take place.
Is that drugs that kill enormous numbers of people are allowed to demonize drugs that kill no one ever in the history of use.
If you looked at that rationally, if you were something from some other planet that was studying the human race and you saw the way we program people and the way we spend enormous sums of money to project a certain idea and get it into people's heads through these very influential short memorable videos you'd be like this is a culture and a civilization an organ an organism that is
mad this is madness Yeah, I often ask myself, how is this going to look in 50 or 100 years to whatever my great grandkids or future people who stumble upon my books or this podcast or whatever?
And I think if this would make zero sense and would be totally embarrassing both Intellectually and ethically, then don't take it seriously.
And this particular issue, I think it's really important for citizens to understand how much of science is constrained by what can be funded by the federal government.
And that we are not actually supported to do certain kinds of research that might be really helpful to people.
It's the same thing with sex research, right?
It is virtually impossible to get federal funding to do any kind of sex research in America these days.
So what do you do?
You write a grant to do something else and then you kind of do the sex research on the side using like some of the resources.
I don't do this, but everybody I know who does sex research does it.
Like, if you want to research how do you make a monogamous relationship less full of stress and argument, you can get some money to do that.
But even there, the kind of suggestions you could make are quite restrictive in terms of what What kind of therapy you're allowed to research or talk about.
So, yeah, I wish citizens understood this because their tax dollars are not being allocated in the best way to deliver the benefits in their real lives to their families and their relationships that they could do.
So to bring it all back to obesity, What I would like, and I bet I could say the same about you, is we'd like to take some of these sort of influential videos that we've seen done that demonize innocuous drugs like marijuana and put those on sugar.
People are addicted to sugar.
People are addicted to so many things that are causing obesity, so many things that are causing us to have this epidemic of I mean, if you go to Disneyland, it's one of the saddest things in the world.
You see how many people are on scooters because they've eaten themselves out of their ability to be mobile on their own.
They're just overflowing off the side of these scooters.
It's very depressing.
And then you see them, what they're eating.
They're drinking slushies and, you know...
Eating fucking nonsense.
And again, it's another addiction, and the availability of it is...
I mean, imagine if you were a heroin addict, and everywhere you went has heroin.
That's what it's like to be a sugar addict.
If you're a sugar addict, every store you go into is filled with your drug.
Every 7-Eleven, right when you go to pay for your gas or whatever you're doing, it's filled with your drug right there in front of you.
And, you know, if you want to do something alternative, like, I've been involved in the paleo movement for a few years, and, like, my girlfriend's vegan, and if you want to find good paleo or vegan food, it's, like, getting a little easier, but it's not mainstream enough that there's, like, a whole aisle in Walmart devoted to it.
It's going to be strange to see headless meat slabs with no central nervous system and trying to figure out how do they get it to have, like, a muscle consistency, like a...
Filet mignon or something.
I mean, you've got to realize an animal, like different cuts of meat have a different texture to them because there's a different muscle density because the animals use their body.
That it would be really good on balance because there's a lot of guys who need like a sexual release.
And if it kind of takes them away from doing some like exploited Bill Cosby style behavior into just doing something like this, which is kind of weird and gross but innocuous.
But the thing about robots and sex is they're gonna get so good.
That it's gonna be like a person and then we're gonna be in this weird ex machina sort of situation where How would you feel like what if you were dancing around that really hot Japanese girl and ex machina She starts taking off your clothes like what do we do here?
Like she feels warm.
She's beautiful.
She smells good Like this my all my senses are telling me this is a person and she's a good listener Yeah, she's great.
Well, when it comes to gender studies, we circle back to this, this denial of reality.
And we know that there's this sort of really broad spectrum of sexuality in terms of male-female, in terms of the obvious, you know, the rock on one side and Kate Upton on the other, right?
Yeah, well, he's not really androgynous, but in terms of, like, you compare him to, you know, fill in the blank, Herschel Walker.
He's not that manly.
And then there's women that don't feel represented by these standard views of female sexuality as well.
But this just speaks to the variability of the human genome, just DNA in general.
There's different people that breed with different people and different shapes come out.
Until we figure out how to manipulate those shapes, which seems to be...
Right around the corner with the robot fuck dolls.
It seems like they're both going to arrive probably at the same time, where you're going to be able to choose from having sex with a robot or having sex with the Hulk.
There's going to be real possibilities that everyone's going to look like Thor.
This seems like it's not too far away.
One, two, three generations, maybe possibly inside of our lifetime, will have mastered the human form to the point where the world's going to be preposterous.
It's going to be like the Star Wars cantina scene everywhere you go.
Well, this is what happens whenever you have a biological innovation that opens up new possibilities in terms of the evolution of bodies or behaviors as you get this adaptive radiation, this explosion of possibilities, like the Cambrian explosion, right, 530 million years ago.
Animals finally figured out how do you program a multicellular body with a nervous system.
And as soon as they got that, boom, you've got all these bizarre new forms and then you get, you know, dinosaurs and mammals and us.
I think once we can program the human genome, And you have parents who are like, I want to select for kids who are really tall and really religious.
And other parents are like, I want cute little hobbit babies who are hardcore atheists.
Imagine if your parents decided to make you a hobbit.
They could have done anything they want.
Remember the first early adopters I imagine it's gonna be about fetal transformation about taking something that's in the womb and Manipulating it and then as it emerges and then evolving and grows then you're gonna see what it is if your fucking parents were just gigantic J.R. Tolkien fans and And you have her furry feet and you're two feet tall.
It can have better memory for all your preferences and your desires.
It'll also be more trainable in terms of...
It'll kind of register, oh, the last time I asked this question, you didn't respond much, but this other question, you talked for five minutes, so I'll ask more of that.
Sometimes people are nice when you're nice to them, Jeffrey.
How about you be nice first?
Instead of expecting this fucking robot to just take care of your dick and balls and just be nice to you all the time and remember all the stuff you like.
What about it?
We would develop into total narcissist sociopaths with robots that we could just get to do whatever we want.
Like if there's a woman I'm interested in, let's say, and she has access to a male sex bot who's like really funny because it's like its little neural network has learned like all of your stand-up routines or how to riff on today's news.
And it's a great listener and it remembers everything about her back story.
I can either be like, I can't compete with that.
I'll have to diss it.
I'll have to say, you're not allowed to see him anymore.
Yeah, so, I mean, people do, like, celebrity deepfake sex bots, and there will be people wandering around with their Jordan Peterson sex bot on a leash in the store.
Hilarious stand-up comedian who has the funniest Instagram page of all time and his Instagram page is about 80% of him doing face swap videos of the Kardashians and President Trump and Kanye West and they're just so fucking ridiculous because you know that they're fake because it's real obvious they're fake but it's essentially like a new art form if you think of like sketch comedy and here play one for him see what we got here this is a good one I haven't seen this one Yeah, big job.
unidentified
What do I do now?
When I was at your tiny white house, I put a recorder in the chair.
But see, what I love about this is it's so obvious.
You know, this is essentially, I mean, he has a lot of the little sketches that he does on his Instagram page, but most of his stuff is this face swap thing, which is, I mean, relatively new technology.
And it's become this new form of comedy, of sketch comedy.
And with a guy like him, who's such a good impressionist, But this is crude and obvious.
How long is it going to be before someone can actually...
I mean, they already have that machine, the technology that allows you to take, especially someone like me, who's talked for countless hours, you take your voice, you take all of the recordings that I've ever done, more than a thousand podcasts, you throw them into this machine,
and you basically have all my various inflections, Anger, sadness, laughter, giddiness, perplexed, all the different words that I have in my vernacular, and you put them all into this thing, and you can kind of morph it around.
It's Photoshop for voice.
So you have the video where you can face swap and manipulate people's images, and it's getting better and better all the time.
Then you have Photoshop for voice.
You can essentially make movies with people where they just do whatever you want them to do.
So someone like Kyle Dunnigan, but an evil version, could take David Attenborough and, you know, you could do whatever you want.
Almost like what we're saying about communication, that this open floodgate of communication, we're learning how to manage all the implications of this.
And I think with human relationships, you know, we'll have to figure out kind of ethically once, let's say, once somebody can make like a deep fake video porn of their ex-lover.
This is something my friend David Lay points out in his book, Ethical Porn for Dicks, which is about responsible porn viewership for men.
That if you're in a relationship with a woman and you're a straight guy, you need to have the talk about what does your girlfriend consider cheating in terms of porn watching.
Most guys don't have the guts to have that conversation.
Yeah, so people have to talk about this stuff like grown-ups.
And as the technology keeps advancing, right, and becomes more and more, you know, the line between, like, Porn and real life gets fuzzier and fuzzier.
And then the other question is like, What happens with that technology in terms of education and college and how people acquire skills and knowledge and insight?
It's really, really hard to imagine that people still think in 15 years, okay, going to a physical classroom and sitting, listening to the average community college adjunct professor talking about Human sexuality or gender feminism or political science.
That they'll think that's the state of the art.
That's the way we should do that.
And then what happens?
I mean, it seems kind of unlikely that universities as we know them will keep existing in anything close to their current form.
And yet no one's talking about this.
I wouldn't be that surprised if half the universities in America go bankrupt within 15, 20 years.
So do you think that people are going to be getting their education in some sort of an online form, some sort of virtual classroom form, or some maybe new, not yet created version?
If I understand correctly, having watched, like, you interview Elon, etc., he's just concerned that the bandwidth that connects the brain to the world or the brain to the internet is quite narrow.
Like, you can get a lot of information quickly through your eyes and ears, but your speed of, like, typing and controlling things or speaking is kind of limited.
So I think...
There's a push to kind of open up that bandwidth and the speed of communication between the human brain and digital reality and other people.
If they figure out a way to do that it's a total game changer in terms of how people Interact with, not just social media, but in general with each other.
I mean, it means basically you have a global telepathy system, if you want.
And then everything changes.
Because it means the ease with which one part of my brain communicates with another part isn't that much higher than the ease with which that part communicates with somebody else's other brain part.
What I've been thinking about is some sort of universal language and that if they bridge the gap between cultures and civilizations and the way people communicate and doing so do it through some sort of a digital interface and instead of like very simple characters that equal words that you put into your linguistic dictionary and you have an understanding of what this person's talking about instead of that you get like real clear concepts maybe even like An emoji form or hieroglyphic
form or some sort of form where we figure out over X amount of years how to communicate through Agreed-upon imagery or agreed upon data in some sort of a way that lets people express emotions and and perhaps even more Engrossing and more complicated than the actual language that we're enjoying right now.
I mean, the evolutionary backstory to this, right, is you basically have the whole history of life on Earth, you know, before humans invent language, where animal communication is pretty primitive.
Like, all you really have at the most complicated is like nightingales producing complicated bird song to attract mates.
They have like a maximum of maybe a dozen different sounds.
But with human language, compared to that, it really is suddenly like having telepathy, where you can communicate so much, so quickly, so efficiently.
And yet, you know, if Neuralink works, it would be as far in advance of language as languages of kind of animal signaling.
And it's hard to imagine what that world looks like because, you know, imagine a form of Twitter where it's not just through your, you know, your thumbs on a keypad, but it's a direct brain interface.
And then when people, it's not just saying something mean or stupid, it's even thinking something mean or stupid that could immediately get posted.
And once you kind of start sharing your whole subconscious with people through Neuralink, then we'll have to level up with some new social norms about what that means and sort of how much radical honesty we can take from each other.
That seems to be where the future is, the complete dissolving of all boundaries between people and information, people and their lives, and that some sort of a way of recording your actual experiences Or letting people share them in real time.
Like, imagine if people decided to let people, through some virtual reality scenario, put on headsets and experience you having sex with your girlfriend.
You say, hey, we're gonna fuck on Periscope.
Come on, join in.
And everybody just puts on their Neuralink and their augmented reality headset and they put on their haptic feedback suit which is you know now and you know like iPhone 10 level you know you go back to iPhone once piece of shit haptic feedback 10 it's gonna be incredible it's gonna be silky smooth it's gonna feel like real touch and they're gonna be able to have sex along with you you can have a digital orgy Yeah,
Because everybody thinks, oh, well, I saw it on Black Mirror, but I know that it's not even my, like, so I don't have to worry about it in my generation yet, because it's only science fiction.
Right, but it happens constantly all throughout the universe.
There was a documentary I watched once that freaked me the fuck out.
It was all about hypernovas and they were talking about when they first started discovering them that they were really actually concerned that there was a war going on in space.
And then they recognized that all these explosions were happening all day long, and they thought there was a war going on in the cosmos.
Which is really fascinating, because I think this is like...
I want to say it was the 60s when they discovered this.
In a way, it's kind of surprising that we haven't seen evidence of that happening already.
Right.
I mean, when I wrote my piece about the Fermi paradox, which is why don't we have evidence of aliens already, my solution was basically, well, most species that are intelligent that invent technology get wrapped up in video games and virtual reality and sex technology, and it just distracts them, and they kind of drop the ball on...
Staying alive and exploring anything.
I think it's still quite likely that that happens to most intelligent species.
That they just kind of disappear up their own buttholes.
Yeah, or they create some sort of an artificial life form that's far more advanced than anything that's biological.
And it has no desire, need, or no instincts to reproduce.
I've said this too many times.
I think that we are essentially some sort of a...
Some sort of a electronic caterpillar that gives birth to a technological butterfly.
And we're making a cocoon right now.
We don't know what we're doing.
And we're about to create artificial life.
And then we're doing it through our intense desire for innovation.
Constantly want newer, better things, whether it's televisions or cars or phones.
We're never like, yeah, this one's perfect.
Let's just stop here.
Never.
The desire is always towards every, you know, fill in the time period, we want a new version, a better version with improvements, and we keep getting those.
And this is what fuels, in many ways, it fuels our desire for materialism.
Materialism is embodied by technological innovation.
I mean, what you're always wanting, when you get past jewels, you always want the newest, greatest innovations.
I think at a certain point, humanity is going to have to bite the bullet and say, we should plan which innovations come first, what happens next.
And we might even have to have regulation or social taboos that say, we really shouldn't go down that path until we do this other thing first that makes us ready to do that thing in a safer, more rational, more ethical way.
And of course, it's a lovely system if Huawei phones have backdoors that allow the Chinese to learn a lot about Americans and our culture and our communication.
That's the concern.
It's...
That's actually more of a concern to me than like military spying in the strict sense.
Because I think China has so many people working on cyber warfare that we probably don't even have any idea what their capabilities are.
But I think if they have insight into like, here's the American psyche and here's how their political thinking works, it will be quite a bit easier to kind of manipulate...
In terms of our geopolitics.
Because we don't have anything analogous, I think, where, like, is the Pentagon trying to figure out how could we nudge Chinese social media use?
Well, what's fascinating is Google's take on China is that they're willing to censor video or internet searches because they feel like if they don't, China's just going to copy their technology and do it anyway.
And so this way, at least they're in there.
I'm like, boy, that's a sketchy way of sort of...
Absolving yourself of any bad feelings about censorship.
You're contributing to censorship.
Government-issued censorship.
Because you want to control the market.
And we're going, oh yeah, well, you know, you can't Google Tiananmen Square.
And in fact, like if I was starting my career again at this point, I wouldn't go into academia.
If I wanted to understand human behavior, I would go work for Facebook or Google because they have much more data about human behavior than I could ever get as a scientist.
We've played many times a video of him drinking water.
I don't know a dude who drinks water like that.
Creepy little fuck.
I'm just kidding, Mark.
Don't delete my account.
I think that we're looking at, in terms of Google and Facebook and Twitter and even YouTube, we're looking at these enormous organizations that I don't think they had any idea what they were going to be.
And I really particularly feel that way about Twitter.
When Twitter first started out, do you remember how it used to be?
Like, you would use your at, like, at Jeffrey Miller is enjoying a cup of coffee.
Honestly, there wasn't even YouTube when I went to school, so a lot of the, if anyone has questions now, you can learn almost everything I learned in the year program I had in a week, if you needed to.
You just don't get the hands-on application touching the stuff, but yeah.
I mean the amount of financial strain that getting into traditional education puts on people and they get out of school and they're saddled with this debt that is also you can't even absolve it if you declare bankruptcy which is kind of hilarious when you think of the dirty shit that banks do and Wall Street does and all the risks they take and all the chaos that they have created from their shitty decisions that have affected the entire economy and they're absolved but yet some kid Who wanted to get a gender studies degree
and now owes a quarter million dollars to some fucking half-assed Michigan University.
We serve 40,000 students and we charge very, very little tuition money compared to most places because it's state subsidized.
And if you keep up a certain grade point average, it's about as close to free as you can get in America.
So I don't feel like we're as economically exploitative as if I was like teaching at Middlebury College or Yale or whatever.
But still...
If undergrads come to me and they go, what should I learn?
What should I major in?
What classes should I take?
The only real advice I can give is take stuff that's going to be useful in your life, your personal life, no matter what career you do.
So you should take my human sexuality class because you'll probably be a sexual being for the rest of your life and you'll be in relationships of some sort or another.
You should learn about politics.
You should learn about the history of civilization.
You should learn about animal behavior and biology.
and all that stuff but don't expect that like you can major in pharmacy and then get a job as a pharmacist that makes a hundred K out of the gate because that might be automated don't assume you can go to law school and you'll make bank like your dad did because a lot of that like document discovery is being automated Don't assume you're going to be a surgeon because that
might be roboticized.
So I just say you should try to get a classical liberal arts education that equips you as a citizen and as a person and as an ethical being.
And even then, there's a distinct possibility that this education or a superior version of it will be available through some new, unfound, or soon-to-be-discovered form.
And just expect that you will, if you stay curious throughout your life, you'll be able to learn about as much in every four to six years going forward as you learned in this four to six years of college.
That's what's interesting is that no one really thinks of university education as being something that equips you for life.
That you're learning so that you can just, you're just educating yourself and to sort of make your mind more available of possibilities and options and causes and effects and just for your own edification.
This is not a consideration.
People think, I need a career.
I'm going to go to college for four years.
When I get out, I want a kick-ass job because I want to buy a Lexus or whatever it is.
Well, I'd also imagine they're not as filled with angst as an 18-year-old first escape from the family nest and not understanding what to do with their freedom and so many distractions.
Okay, Okay, so there was a book back in '99 called, I think, The Technology of Orgasm that made the claim that vibrators were first invented in the Victorian era, the late 1800s, to help doctors bring their the late 1800s, to help doctors bring their female patients to orgasm to cure, quote, "hysteria." Right.
And for 20 years, that was sort of accepted as, oh, yeah, that's a good historical analysis of that situation.
And then that got totally debunked in the last few months by other historians.
So, is this sort of like that killer sperm theory that people still to this day recite, even though there's no evidence whatsoever that sperm has any other...
The conventional story was people think we evolved to be in monogamous long-term pair bonds.
But here's some evidence that humans do extra pair copulations that they sometimes go outside the relationship.
If that happens, then there's occasional sperm competition where a woman mates with more than one guy during one ovulatory cycle.
Ejaculates from two different guys could be in a reproductive tract competing to fertilize the same egg.
If that happens, the sperm would be under selection to be good at Being fast, fighting off the other sperm, making the reproductive tract more hostile to any guy who comes after you, etc., etc.
So it's kind of like a way of challenging the assumption of monogamous mating and pointing out women have this sexual freedom and agency that was not fully recognized, and the result is men have to compete more Not just physically, and not just for status, but even at this kind of biochemical level.
And it all made sense, right?
We could have been that species, but as it turned out, the rates of extra pair copulation or infidelity are actually pretty low in a lot of societies.
Like, it's not like 20% of kids are sired by some guy other than their dad.
So there's a lot of these little things in psychology, these little urban myths that get, you know, learned by professors in grad school and never really tested and then passed on.
And now that whole house of cards has been tumbling down the last couple of years where, like, almost everything that was taught in a social psychology course now turns out to be kind of bullshit and not...
The idea that you can use an implicit association test or IAT to sort of register how sexist or racist somebody is, right?
That was a big exciting thing that social psychologists thought that they had discovered that you can give someone this kind of computer test that measures word associations and that kind of determine, like, how secretly sexist are you?
And that turned into a whole industry Of giving these tests to everybody in corporations to sort of assess, are you secretly sexist?
And to sort of wag fingers at them and say, see, you scored positive on this test.
That means you really are secretly sexist and therefore you need training.
And this is what happened with Starbucks, right, a few months ago, when they had that issue with the black guys in the Starbucks, and Starbucks didn't handle that well.
And then there was public blowback, and Starbucks went, okay, we're going to do implicit association training for all of our staff nationwide.
And all of us in psychology were like, wait, but you guys know that that was all debunked a couple years ago.
I don't really know what they do in implicit bias training.
I know that they typically will give everybody one of these implicit association tests that purports to show that you have issues and you do have hidden bias.
You're pushing, you're seeing words flash on screens and you're pushing buttons and the subtle differences in reaction speed to like the good versus the bad associations are supposed to map like your attitude towards the group in question.
And It's a reliable effect.
The problem is it doesn't actually predict real sexist behavior in real life or racist behavior.
I think it's partly that, but I think it's also like there is pretty overt hostility to centrists, conservatives, libertarians, where you just kind of get these signals, like if you start grad school, that...
Whatever.
If you ask other students, hey, do you want to go to the shooting range?
Or do you want to go hunting?
Or let's talk about politics.
And if you're on the wrong side of what's considered normal, then you're made to feel pretty uncomfortable.
And you'll probably just leave grad school and go, the hell with that.
If you're going to do real social experimental work, if you're really going to try to understand human behavior, it's really got to be done objectively.
To really get the actual raw data, to really be able to do scientific work where you're explaining things and trying to gauge cause and effect and origins of thought and behavior patterns, you'd have to do it really objectively.
The same way you would do mathematics.
You'd have to really look at it cautiously and get your data points in order.
And if you're doing real good work, you would think that there would be more of an inclination to do good work than it would be to appease whatever tribe you belong to.
You would hope so, but take political psychology, for example, where the whole point is to understand how people think about politics and moral issues.
There's a huge liberal bias in political psychology, and you would think they would have corrected that and said, You know what?
Maybe we're missing something by not, like, we have a conference of 500 people and there's not a single libertarian here, or whatever.
And they never self-corrected like that.
They just assumed, well, we're all well-intentioned and we're all smart, so we're going to be able to check our own biases.
And they completely failed to do that.
So...
You have all these measures of like political attitudes invented by leftists that kind of demonize conservatives or centrists as basically being mentally ill or stupid or whatever.
I don't want a big expensive state that has high tax burdens.
I'm in complicated ways kind of pro-family values and pro-natalist and like I think long-term relationships are good, not necessarily conventional ones, but I'm pretty concerned about society figuring out a way to make it possible for ordinary folks to have long-term relationships and raise families.
Isn't it fascinating that that's a right-wing thing?
Wouldn't you think that something that would encourage families would be universal?
It wouldn't be tribal?
I mean, you would think that something that would encourage long-term relationships and monogamous pair bonding and people getting together and working out long-term solutions to keep a family together?
When you try to reach a conclusion about a particular political issue based on what you think of the facts and the evidence and the good arguments, and then you do that for each issue, Separately, rather than doing kind of tribal affiliation signaling.
It's very, very confusing to people.
Because they're like, how can you be pro-cannabis legalization if you're also pro-guns?
Or how can you be...
Open to polyamory if you're also concerned about long-term family stability or whatever.
It's like that's just because the issues I looked into that's the end I ended up supporting.
Does this go back to what we were talking about earlier that most people really don't have the time to form these opinions or become informed on these opinions and instead they just sort of adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior That seems to be the tribe that they most affiliate with.
So this way, there's a conglomeration of opinions.
It's not like everyone just sort of chooses one side or the other.
Right.
And then they go, well, I guess it makes sense that if you believe the left about issue A, you should also believe the left about issues B, C through Z. Yeah.
I mean, it's weird because if you're in a literal tribe, you have your territory and your resources and your mates that you're defending.
And the other tribe on the other side of the hill has their territory, resources, mates, and kids.
And you actually, there is a little bit of a zero-sum conflict.
But if you're all in the same effing country together...
And you're all paying taxes to the same authority, and you're all partaking in the same economy, and you're all wrestling in the same public sphere of the Netflix that you watch and the Twitter you're engaged with.
Well, this is why I wanted to ask you this as an evolutionary psychologist.
You're obviously far more aware of this than the average person.
Does this just go back to the way the human brain developed when we were living in small tribes and that there's this inherent need for an us-versus-them mentality that keeps us moving?
You know, people have thought the most deeply about this.
Like, I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt's work and The Righteous Mind and the way he kind of analyzes this stuff.
I think it'll be quite hard to escape the tribal thinking, but we have escaped it with respect to a lot of issues, right?
Where we really did reach a moral common ground.
Like we all kind of said, oh shit, slavery was bad.
Women should be able to vote.
We should try to reduce the risk of nuclear war, right?
So on some really big issues, we have succeeded pretty well in kind of setting aside the tribalism.
I think the problem now is there's just so many issues that are coming at us so fast that we don't have time to reach that Social equilibrium on on enough of them quickly enough.
Well, this is what fascinates me by augmented reality and things like neural link something that's gonna Accentuate the the ability and the power of the human mind where we're gonna be able to take into consideration all of these things In a much like with Elon's term will have more bandwidth to work on them Yeah, that just I think the more I think about it.
I think that this Just quagmire of civilization.
There's so many different things that we're conflicted about that really a lot of it boils down to a lack of time.
A lack of time and a lack of also training in how to think.
One of the things that's most disturbing about education, particularly lower education, is that no one ever tells you how to think.
They give you information, but they don't tell you, now here's the tricks your brain is playing on you.
This is why you think certain ways.
If you're lucky, if you're really lucky, someone teaches you about discipline.
They teach you about resistance and about apathy and about procrastination and all these different games that your mind will play on you.
And just that alone will give you the ability to work through things and get more stuff done.
But very rarely does that even get discussed.
So most of the time, you're just getting boring information stuffed into your fucking face, and you barely pay attention to it enough to pass the test.
And as soon as the test is over, you forget everything you learned.
And I wouldn't take that long to learn sort of the top dozen rationality hacks that like the rationalist community or the effective altruism community are very, very good at using and teaching.
Like just the idea of steel manning an argument where you develop the ability to state the strongest possible version of your opponent's argument in a way that they would go...
You've said that even better than I could say.
Awesome.
That means you really understand me, even if you disagree with it.
And if we just taught, you know, kids in high school how to do that, I think that would go a long way towards being able to have these tribal dialogues.
Or just being able to think quantitatively about political and policy issues.
Like, how many people are affected?
How are they affected?
How much would it cost to fix?
How do we know what the best way to do it is?
Rather than just diving straight for the emotional argument.
I think that would help a lot.
But is it really in anyone's vested interest to teach that?
And do the current stock of members of the public school teachers unions really have the ability or interest to teach that?
So ideally you'd have like a virtual reality system where a kid could go into it and argue about some issue like gun rights or abortion or immigration.
And some AI would sort of argue against them or pick up out their arguments or go convince me of your position.
That is a one of the big issues with learning things is making things fun making things somehow or another enthralling and captivating something something that you actually want to absorb and it's one of the great arguments about video games and One of the more interesting things about the previous generation's sort of dismissal of video games is that the dismissal
was at one point in time, oh, you're just wasting your time.
And now that dismissal doesn't necessarily hold water because just like professional golfers, professional video game players now make enormous sums of money.
So it's gotten to this place where, oh, no, this is a viable career, and perhaps you should even be taking your kid to coaching and learning strategy and learning all these various applications that allow you to get better at these things.
Because there's a real career in this.
And try telling that to your grandpa.
Hey, I'm going to play...
What's the game they play for the most money today?
It's like Ancient Egypt, I believe, is what they do here.
And it's like deep detail.
Really?
Recreation of it.
You go through it, and for this mode, they kind of take all the shooting, not shooting, but stabbing and killing the people, and just walk you through Ancient Egypt, Cairo.
Education is the kind of tech that we use is several steps behind the state of the art in Hollywood special effects or documentaries or this kind of game.
So students are kind of disappointed when they come to class.
Right.
And it's like...
College is really expensive and it's really retrograde in terms of the tech quality.
So why?
Why are we here?
We should be on the forefront, right?
It should be possible to go to your state university and see awesome, gamified, interactive stuff that you don't have access to at home.
I think you need a totally different kind of university and credential that's backed by a significant amount of capital and that's technologically innovative and that's very un-PC in terms of what it teaches and how it teaches.
He's doing it through video lectures and then physical lectures.
It's really fascinating to see the reaction to him and now to Sam Harris who's doing this as well.
Not the videos, but he's definitely doing the live sort of performances.
And who would have ever thought that there would be a place where public intellectuals would go and 5,000 people would sell out like that and go to see them like they would go to see fucking Kevin Hart or something.
Well, you know, when Alfred Kinsey first started doing his sex surveys, and he would go around the country giving lectures, like, he filled up a 4,000-person stadium in UC Berkeley just presenting the first real data on human sexuality back in late 40s, I think.
And so there was—why?
Because there's a real hunger for that, because it was something the students couldn't get anywhere else.
And the same was true back in the 1800s when you had famous authors touring America, like Mark Twain or...
He's a funny guy, but that makes it more palatable.
Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
You know, this fascinating technology in terms of video games is going to help you absorb information about ancient Egypt, and humor is going to help just make the time go by better and make the whole experience less flat.
And I think within 10 years, a lot of young people are just going to realize, if I can actually learn more from some alternative system, some franchise of really good gamified instruction, plus great presenters who have a sense of humor and are smart and and kind of like heterodox and edgy they're gonna flock to that.
The main thing is that Business, that franchise would have to provide a credential that actually separates them from people who don't have it and that predicts performance in companies or in the future, right?
Because that's the main function of the university right now is it's this credential signaling system.
And if somebody figures out a way to Make it so that if you've got a degree from this, whatever, Sam Harris University, that that is really a better predictor of doing well in a job or a marriage than a Yale degree.
Then suddenly the whole business model changes for universities.
Well, what's really fascinating when you think about the history of education is that our ideas about these gigantic institutions, whether it's Yale or Harvard, is that they've been long established and long proven.
But no.
I mean, a few hundred years.
In terms of people being alive, that ain't shit.
You know, you go back before that, you only have a certain amount of years where these things were even a real thing.
Yeah, and I mean the idea that you have a teaching institution that's also a major research institution really only goes back to post-World War II. Like before World War II, Harvard was basically an elite finishing school.
It wasn't a research power.
So that whole system that we think of as being ancient is actually just several decades.
Well, it's almost like they're setting themselves up.
I mean, with some of the more ridiculous and preposterous protests that go on, where they're...
are just trying to silence discussion and even with people like Christina Hoff Summers who's very reasonable and calls herself a factual feminist and they want to call her a Nazi it's like there's no there's no wiggle room you are a one or a zero you are black or white you are evil or good and that's it and this inclination towards silencing people de-platforming screaming them down Halting them and getting them out.
And who decides?
Who decides who's correct and wrong?
Well, the only way for people to get an accurate assessment of who's giving the right information is to have a debate, but to have a real debate, like a real debate where people are allowed to express themselves without people in the audience shaking jars of coins and bullhorns and all the nonsense and setting off fire alarms and all these things that these children, and I call them children because they're behaving like children, are celebrating.
You know, I'm sure you're aware of what happened at Evergreen and now Evergreen State University where Brett Weinstein had, you know, his horrible experience with, if you don't know the story, I'll give you the brief synopsis.
They had a day of absence where it used to be that people of color would stay home so that you would miss them.
And then he decided to turn around and make white people stay home.
Make them.
Force them.
If you didn't do it, you're a racist.
He said that's crazy.
Like, you guys are being racist.
And they shouted him down.
And they shut the school down.
He won a half a million dollars in a lawsuit, and now the school's most recent enrollment from the freshman class was only 300 people, which is crazy.
It's stunning how little resistance there is to it.
Everyone knows that the only way to find out whose ideas are more More well thought out, more valid, more factual.
The only way to find that out is to have people discuss things together.
And for you to be able to make an assessment based on the facts, do it in real time, and based on who forms a more compelling argument, who's more reasonable, who's addressing all the flaws and the problems with both sides of this and coming up with a reasonable conclusion.
I mean, the way I think of it is like, Stand-up comedy, I love, and, you know, you do, and the stuff you can say when you're on stage doing stand-up comedy, university should be at least that open.
Like, I should be able to lecture in a way that goes even a little bit edgier than most stand-up comedy could go.
So universities should be like the inner sanctum of intellectual freedom, compared to which everything else is more restrained.
And we're kind of the opposite.
I know a few academics who actually are like amateur stand-up comedians and it's so liberating to them to be able to get up on a stage and say what they really think.
No, but they're kind of protected by like the social norms of comedy, right?
You know you're not supposed to really take it very seriously.
But we're so far from that.
You know, in physics, it doesn't matter that much because it's not like there's any aspects of quantum mechanics that are that intellectually edgy.
But, man, in psychology, in the social sciences, in behavioral sciences, in political science, it's really important to be able to be provocative and authentic.
Well, which is really what's gonna set up whatever's coming next.
It's gonna offer some sort of a new New pathway, new avenue that's not restricted.
Much like what you're seeing with podcasts and blogs in comparison to, or YouTube videos in comparison to what you're getting on regular network television.
I mean, it was network television, and then cable was the more edgy alternative.
And then there was pay cable, like HBO. Like, oh my god, I saw Breast.
And then that got nuttier and nuttier.
But then it became Netflix, which is a total nutter level.
And then the internet's the Wild West.
And they want you to go back to NBC in the 1970s, and you're like, uh, no.
Yeah, good academics are like just ordinary humans with their curiosity turned up to 11 and who have a passion for discovering new ideas and then sharing them with people.
And we don't really care how we do that.
We will do it through lectures or writing books or writing articles or podcasts, whatever, whatever works the best.
Well, you know, I did a podcast with Tucker Max a couple years ago, The Mating Grounds, where it was sort of related to our mate book that was dating advice for young single guys.
What was the advice?
Well, it was figure out what women authentically actually want and then try to transform yourself in that direction so you're a better boyfriend.
Women want guys who are Well-informed and know about the world and ambitious and capable.
Capability is the main thing, like competency, just in as many domains as possible.
They want guys who are in, like, reasonably good physical shape and good mental health and who can strike the right balance between being kind of nice and agreeable and kind but also being dominant and assertive High status.
You know, when I teach human sexuality, I kind of emphasize this to students, that there's a lot you can do to make yourself more attractive to whoever you want to attract.
It's not all limited by what traits you're born with.
But it's fascinating that there are these two choices, and I never really thought about it until you brought it up, but they're essentially ways to distribute your DNA. There's pathways.
One of them is through long-term bonding, and you want a stable, reliable woman who has a lot of self-respect, who chooses you, makes you feel good, she chooses you, and the other one's a freak.
But the fact that all different kinds of people exist with all different mating strategies shows that each of those strategies historically and evolutionarily has worked.
There also wouldn't be long-term pair-bonded like You know, family, people, if that hadn't worked.
So I think it's silly when people are sort of dissing each other's mating strategies as if, well, there's one proper way and then all the other ways are sort of degenerate or reactionary or whatever.
I think a lot of that is just a way of kind of shaming these other mating strategies.
What do you mean?
Well, of course, you get a little bit of circular logic, for example, where you say, This mating strategy, for example, it's a high degree of promiscuity.
You say, that's bad.
Why?
Because it leads to offspring who in turn act promiscuous.
And then you call it the cycle of abuse or daddy issues or whatever.
Or is it just a longing for both a father and a mother and a loneliness and a vulnerability that seems to come with being the offspring of a single mother?
Most people agree that that's not the ideal situation.
But it does produce unique people, which is really interesting.
Almost all of my really cool friends came from a fucked up, broken childhood.
Which, I don't know what to think about that.
Because...
I want my children to be comforted and healthy and never worried about the future.
But all my friends that grew up in chaotic environments where everyone was poor and fucked up and there's crime and violence and nonsense and chaos, those are the interesting ones.
Yeah, I mean, so like as a scientist, you got to look at, you know, the whole spectrum of mating and parenting behavior and go, particularly as an evolutionary psychologist, you can say, I might have a moralistic reaction to that.
I might go, that's bad.
But you know what?
If what we consider bad is actually the way most of the other 4,000 species of mammals do it, then Who are really the weird families anyway, right?
Most mammal families, the dads aren't involved.
It's single moms raising offspring by themselves under harsh conditions.
And they're not doing parabons, right?
Hardly any mammals do parabons apart from like gibbons and a few prosimians, like really small primates.
It's just like if you look back historically, right?
Premarital sex used to be demonized, right?
And folks used to say, well, oh my god, you had one or two lovers before you settled down with your husband?
That's terrible.
And you could produce statistical correlations to say, oh, look, premarital sex is correlated with being lower class or criminal or drug use or whatever.
Like, that's all true.
But then society moved in a direction that said, premarital sex is okay.
Yeah, so the technology of contraception made a big difference.
It used to be thought, okay, if you're gay or lesbian, that is morally degenerate and terrible and invalid and you can't possibly have a long-term relationship or a family or whatever.
And then we kind of changed that pretty dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years.
So I just, you know, as a sex researcher, I want people to Be quite cautious about saying that lifestyle is wrong and degenerate and unhealthy and this other lifestyle is better.
Because in the era of sexbots, right, in virtual reality, deepfakes and whatever, who knows what's going to happen?
I really only kind of came out publicly as being interested in it on the Sam Harris show a few months ago.
But I'm thinking about writing a book on it next.
And it's a very popular thing.
I mean, the number of people who are in open relationships or poly relationships is larger than the number of people who are gay or lesbian, certainly.
Yeah, I think it's only in the 90s that you got a coherent subculture that said, if you're not going to be monogamous, here's the honest, ethical, open way to do it.
And it kind of developed a bunch of social norms about how you manage these relationships.
In a way that's different from cheating or different from swingers or different from hippie love communes or prostitutes.
I mean this is a longer discussion than we have time for probably today.
But as a researcher, it's a fascinating culture because it's people who are trying to find ways to kind of hack their jealousy and manage it better.
Yeah.
And it's also a new method of social networking, right?
Where you're not drawing a sharp line between who you're sexually connected to and who you're socially connected to.
So people who are into poly tend to have sort of sexual friendship professional networks that are much broader than a lot of people tend to have.
I think that's actually a little bit more similar to what Christopher Ryan was talking about with Sex at Dawn.
I think in most prehistoric tribes, anybody who wasn't a close relative, who was sort of mating age, you probably would have had sex with sooner or later, at least once.
This stuff is really hard to do for this and this and this reason and people really only succeed at it if they have certain kinds of traits and abilities and communication skills and If they don't, they crash and burn and it doesn't work.
So it wasn't just an advocacy class.
It was also like, here's the pros and cons, but also, as a social trend, this is a big deal.
And if you're going into one of the caring professions, like medicine, nursing, social work, clinical psych, you damn well better know about this because a lot of people do it.
And if you're giving advice to a couple, It's also sort of, in some ways, an ongoing experiment.
In terms of how people bond with each other, how people form communities.
And this is, in particular, in today's climate, in today's society, with the ability to distribute this information and discuss these things in groups.
It's a different world in terms of just collecting data and comparing experiences.
I mean, I think nobody who's polyamorous or in an open relationship can pretend that, yeah, we really know how to make this work very well, and here's the best practices, and here's all the hacks, and anybody can do it.
But I think we have a professional responsibility, you know, if you're a behavioral scientist, to understand what are people doing out there, what is working and what isn't, and how do you make it work better?
And the people who ignore it, I think it's kind of like if you were like a psychologist in the early 70s, right, when the gay and lesbian rights movement was starting.
If you'd sort of said, oh, God, I hope that'll blow over.
Like, that doesn't deserve research.
We should keep it as a mental disorder in, you know, the DSM, right?
I feel like poly is sort of at the same place where...
Yeah, there are reactionaries who go, that's just gross and disgusting, just like people in the early 70s would have said homosexuality is gross and disgusting.
But I don't think there's a good book yet that's actually savvy about evolutionary psychology and human sexuality and polyamory and how it's all going to play out in the next 10 years or so.