#282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences

David Buss is an evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin. He is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His current research is on sex differences in mate selection, mate attraction, infidelity, and the emotions of jealousy, lust, and love. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Notion: https://notion.com/startups – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod – Roka: https://roka.com/ and use code LEX – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex EPISODE LINKS: David’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/profdavidbuss David’s Website: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/ When Men Behave Badly (book): https://amzn.to/3y3bRVM The Evolution of Desire (book): https://amzn.to/3kyBdTt Evolutionary Psychology (textbook): https://amzn.to/3LExU9e Derogation of Competitors (research paper): https://bit.ly/38G4LMa PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:04) – Sex vs Violence (14:48) – Mating strategies (26:44) – Social construct of beauty (30:38) – Evolution of mating evaluation (34:40) – Mating selection desires (39:52) – Difficulties of monogamy (46:16) – Importance of male appearance (48:52) – Importance of wealth (52:08) – Penis and breasts (55:59) – Fashion (58:58) – Body objectification (1:06:33) – Wear sunscreen (1:13:29) – Gender (1:30:39) – What motivates humans (1:32:29) – Dominance and submissiveness (1:40:33) – Johnny Depp defamation trial (1:50:24) – Jealousy (1:58:45) – Mate poaching (2:02:58) – Polyamory (2:14:13) – Female vs Male sexuality (2:23:11) – Pornography (2:29:46) – Sex and Violence continued (2:38:55) – Cancel culture (2:50:38) – Elon Musk and Twitter (2:59:02) – Serial killers (3:04:55) – Advice for young people (3:16:57) – Love (3:22:57) – Mortality (3:27:40) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection. He's considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology and has authored many exciting and challenging books, including The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, Bad Men: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, and The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill. We talk a lot about sex, dating, relationships, and love. I take these, at times, controversial topics very seriously, but I also try to inject humor and ridiculousness

• 0:42Lex Fridman?

  throughout this conversation, and all conversations I do. Please do not mistake my silliness for a lack of seriousness, and my seriousness for a lack of silliness. And above all, do not mistake my suit and tie or my PhD as a sign of intelligence or wisdom. I barely know what I'm talking about on most days. I'm simply curious and hoping to understand, the way a child does, what the heck is going on in this weird and wonderful civilization of ours? If I say something stupid, as I often do, I promise to learn and to improve. As Mark Twain said, "I do not want my schooling to interfere with my education." Open-minded curiosity, I think,

• 1:27Lex Fridman?

  is the best guide for a proper and fun lifelong education. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for startups, ExpressVPN for privacy, Roka for style, Onnit for supplements, and Indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.

• 2:09Lex Fridman?

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• 2:53Lex Fridman?

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• 3:37Lex Fridman?

  One, ISPs still track your data even if you go to all kinds of shady websites using incognito mode, and I know you well. I know you do that kind of thing. You dirty dog, you. The second thing you should know about is you can change geographic locations for shows like Netflix and Hulu, all that kind of stuff. That's useful. My favorite thing is that the thing just works super fast, which is what you would want from a good VPN. It works fast, works on any device, any operating system. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. Did I mention it works on Linux? That's the best and the most important operating system.

• 4:23Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Roka, the makers of glasses and sunglasses that I love wearing for their design, feel, and innovation on material optics and grip. Roka was started by two All-American swimmers from Stanford and was born out of an obsession with performance. Two words that I love: obsession in all walks of life and performance in all walks of life. But when you're talking about sunglasses, what is that result in? It results in a classy, sexy, minimalist, functional design. They're good at what they do. It's extremely lightweight. The grip is comfortable but strong. I run in them all the time. You're talking about in the Austin heat, in the Boston cold.

• 5:08Lex Fridman?

  It works. It looks good. Check them out for both prescription glasses and sunglasses at roka.com and enter code Lex to save 20% off your first order. That's roka.com and enter code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company that make AlphaBrain. You may have heard of that, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I do deep work sessions. You should read Cal Newport's Deep Work book to understand what that means. It means focusing for prolonged periods of time on a single task and going to some

• 5:49Lex Fridman?

  deep, dark places of struggle because your mind wants to be distracted, your mind wants to switch to another task, and you don't let it. And that's what deep work is. So before especially difficult sessions of this kind, I will take an AlphaBrain. It helps boost my thinking through a problem, clears the mind, helps me maintain focus. It's just a nice super boost for the rocket that is the human mind. Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfriedman, my name, dot com slash onnit.

• 6:29Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led in the past and still use them and use them a lot. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately. There's very few things as important in life as the people you surround yourself with. And because most of us do most of the meaningful, most of the wild, hardworking pursuits of our lives at our work, it's important to surround yourself with great people there, too.

• 7:09Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps even more important, those are the brothers and sisters that stand by your side as you do some of the most difficult things in your life. So you should select that team well. The team is what makes or breaks a business, any kind of effort. Anyway, right now, get a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex. Get it at indeed.com/lex. Offer good for a limited time. Terms and conditions apply. Go to indeed.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with David Buss.

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

  What is more important in the history of the development of human civilization? Sex or violence? So mating strategies or military strategies?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Oh, well, both are important. I mean, first of all, we, humans are a sexually reproducing species, and so everything has to go through sex. You know, so in our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex because to succeed, for us to be here now, all of our ancestors in an unbroken chain have had to succeed. In selecting a fertile mate, attracting that mate, be mutually chosen by that mate,

• 8:46Speaker 01

  stay together long enough, do all the sexual things you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive, etc. So, everything has to go through mating. And in that sense, I think it's, I mean, survival was really only a means to an end, if you, if you will. So, so sex has got to be important and humans have a very rich, evolved sexual psychology or evolved mating psychology. Okay, but I wouldn't minimize the importance of violence either. There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved in the context of small groups and with a fair amount of small group warfare, so intertribal warfare,

• 9:30Speaker 01

  where, and this is a harsh realization, but there historically, this is part of our bad evolutionary history, it has been advantageous from a purely reproductive standpoint to conquer a neighboring group, kill the males, and get whatever resources they have, including females and, and sexual resources, tool, as well as tools, weapons, territory and so forth. And so, and so I think that we have, of course, it's, it's typically males who do that. I mean, yes, some females have participated in warfare, but as far as I know, there's never been a single case

• 10:15Speaker 01

  in all of human recorded history of women forming a war tribe with other women to attack another group of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands. But the, these, this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record and small group studies.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  It's part of our common thing. So, just one concrete example. Unfortunately, he's dead now. He passed away. Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yama Mamo for many, many years. When he first started interviewing them, he, he asked them, you know, why do you go to war? And they said, well, To capture women, of course, but it's the only sensible reason. And they said, you know, why do, why does your culture go to war? Or however they phrased it. And he said, well, we go to war for, to spread democracy and ideas and everything. They basically fell off their logs laughing at such a stupid reason. Because why risk your life for anything other than women?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Of course, it's more complex than that because some go to war for reputational reasons. They say if we, if we don't retaliate because we've been attacked and they've stolen three of our women, if we don't retaliate, then we will get a reputation as exploitable. And then other groups will start to attack us as well. And so they get into these cycles of, you know, like the Hatfields and McCoys of attacks, counter attacks, retribution. And part of it is, is reputation management. So that's, that's between groups. And, and I think that's been the, the primary source of violence, but not the only source.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  So there's also within group conflict. And so many ethnographies, many traditional societies have things. Some of them are ritualized, like wrestling matches or in the Anamamo, they have these, or used to, these chest pounding duels where, so if we're in this match, you challenge me and I have to, of course.

• 12:27Lex Fridman?

  Chest pounding duel. I like this.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:31Lex Fridman?

  So it's not, you're not hitting each other. You're just, it's like peacocking.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you're hitting each other.

• 12:35Lex Fridman?

  Oh, sorry.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they, they get 20 paces away and they, they run up and you punch the other guy in the chest and he has to basically stand there. And then he does the same to you.

• 12:48Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And then it's basically last man standing.

• 12:52Lex Fridman?

  That's, well, I suppose that's better than the face. That's an interesting decision with the chest.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:58Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I'm sure if you get good at that kind of thing, you could start breaking ribs.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:02Lex Fridman?

  And you can get loose about the rules of where exactly in the chest you can hit. What a. And there's that guy who's always known for hitting not exactly in the chat. Accidentally missing.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Right, right. The Mike Tyson of.

• 13:16Lex Fridman?

  Eating your ear off. So interesting. So there's like ritualized conflict, sort of purify the the competition that that that resolves some kind of issue.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's important to establish status hierarchies, you know, but but also, and here's here's just another one more concrete point on that. The Yanamam, we don't have this in our language. We just have one word for kill or murder. But Yanamamo have, you're either in if you're a male, you're an Unokai or a non Unokai. The non Unokai are men who have not killed. If you're an Unokai, that means you have killed someone. And the Unokai among the Yanamamo historically had higher status and more wives. So they're a polygynous society,

• 14:13Speaker 01

  which is which has been true of something like eighty three to eighty five percent of traditional societies. Or actually, I was just corrected by an anthropologist. He said, we no longer call them traditional societies. We call them small scale societies.

• 14:28Lex Fridman?

  So nothing can be called traditional?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 14:31Lex Fridman?

  Bacteria is the traditional society?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's just one of these things. The language, the word, the words that are deemed appropriate to use to describe things change over time. So.

• 14:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So words can hurt people. They can inspire people. Words are funny, powerful things. You authored the textbook titled Evolutionary Psychology, The New Science of Mind in its sixth edition.

• 14:59Lex Fridman?

  What is the magic ingredient that gave birth to Homo sapiens? Do you think is it fire, cooking, ability to collaborate? Share ideas, ability to contemplate our own mortality? All that kind of stuff?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate one factor. I know, I know you've had Richard Wrangham on this podcast. It was a wonderful, wonderful interview. And he used to be a colleague of mine when I was a professor at Michigan. And I've stayed in touch with him on and off. He's brilliant, brilliant guy. And he thinks fire and cooking have been one of the key things. But I think it's hard to isolate. I would trace at least part of our uniqueness to the uniqueness of our mating system. So we have in, in mating, unlike chimpanzees, who are our closest primate relative, and which Richard Wrangham is, is a world's expert.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  But they have basically no long-term pair bonded mating. Okay, they female comes into estrus, all the mating, all the sex happens. Most of the sex happens during that window. But humans have evolved long-term pair bonded mating. And it's, it's only one mating strategy, but it's a really important one. And then you have with that male parental care. So basically, again, you go back to chimps and chimps with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, males don't do anything. So they inseminate the females, but then when the kids are born, they basically don't do much of anything in terms of provisioning and so forth. But human males do.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  We invest in the modern environment, could be decades, you know, especially with the boomerang kids and everything. But we're, not all males do, but compared to the vast majority of mammals, we are very heavy male parental investment species.

• 16:59Lex Fridman?

  Could you, if it's okay, and I'll ask you a bunch of dumb, basic questions, because those are fun. Could you define mating here? Are we, is mating referred to the? The the series of sexual acts that lead to reproduction, is it include like dating and love and camaraderie, uh, loyalty, all those things?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I, you know.

• 17:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  When I first started studying, yeah, I don't, it's when I first started studying it, I looked for the right term and obviously it's much broader than sex. So by mating, I include things like mate selection, mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention, mate poaching, mate expulsion.

• 17:45Lex Fridman?

  Mate poaching, that sounds fun. So the early, the, uh, the game theoretic strategy mate selection is primary with mating, what mating is about, or do you include the long term, once you agree that you're gonna stick this on for a while and have multiple children? Is that also mating?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yes, I include that as well. So it's, it's, it's a broad.

• 18:07Lex Fridman?

  Category.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Broad definition and, and, and absolutely includes the emotion of love. Um, and of course, there are many different types of love, brotherly love, love parents for children. Uh, but love, I think, uh, and this is one of the shifts in the social sciences. So when I was an undergraduate, for example, I was taught that love is this, um, invention by some Caucasian European poets a couple hundred years ago. And, um, and it turns out that's not the case. So you, you, there's been extensive cross-cultural evidence now that, um, that people, not every person in all cultures, of course, but all, some people in all cultures experience this emotion that we call love.

• 18:52Lex Fridman?

  And for the word love, are we going to in this conversation try to stick to sort of romantic love for the, for, for the meaning of the word love?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Well, there, uh, that's, that's a great question, but, um, I mean, there, uh, it's pretty well established that there are these different phases of, of love. So there's this uh, infatuation phase where, uh, our psychology, we, we get obsessional thoughts, it's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person, we're thinking about the other person constantly. Uh, so there's kind of like ideational intrusion into our psychology, but you, you, you can't sustain that. I mean, it'd be, uh, and then of course, there's a.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Pardon the phrase, but what I describe is the fucking like bunnies phase of of this, you know, intense sexuality, but people have other adaptive problems they have to solve. And so you can't stay in that state for too long. And so that subsides over time and and develops into, at least in many cases, this warm attachment.

• 19:59Lex Fridman?

  Cuddling bunnies, long term cuddling bunnies.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:02Lex Fridman?

  Phase of the relationship, but still romantic, not like brotherly love or, you know, I guess I talk about a lot of love a lot. And for me, you know, love is a broader experience of just experiencing the joy and the beauty of life. So like just looking out at nature.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:25Lex Fridman?

  That's a kind of love, like whatever the chemicals that lead to a feeling that at least echoes the same kind of feeling that you get with romantic love, you can experience that with even inanimate objects. That sounds weird to say, but just gratitude and appreciation, not in some kind of weird Zen way, but just in a very human way. Just it feels good to be alive, kind of.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I would, I mean, that's an interesting thought. I hadn't thought about that. I guess there I would use other terms to describe that. So like the term awe, for example, when you see a beautiful sunset, you know, that's why I kind of started out by saying, I think there are different types of love and I'm focusing on the mating type.

• 21:10Lex Fridman?

  And we'll talk about that. But so yeah, there is a sense of beauty and there's a sense of sexual appeal. Maybe that's a good and those intersect in fascinating ways. We'll, we'll, we'll talk about that.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:22Lex Fridman?

  We'll talk about all of that. But you're saying mating strategies, not that we've kind of. Placed ourself what we mean by mating. Mating strategies is one of the cool features that made humans what they are. One of the initial inventions is is the weird, weird and wonderful ways that we mate.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, if you go to even things like how we compete for mates. And this is another kind of strange for some people angle on it. But mating is inherently a competitive process in that desirable mates are in scarce supply relative to the numbers of people who want them. And so even even post mating after that is after mate selection, mate attraction and mutual mate choice, desirable mate, that's why there's mate poaching. Mate poaching is one of the strategies that we in my lab with David Schmidt have studied.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  And so, okay, but one of the unique aspects of humans is that we compete using language. And that is we have reputations and humans devote a lot of effort to maintaining the reputations, to building the reputations, to trying to recover reputations after a loss of reputation for various reasons. But we we compete for mates using language and that includes sending signals to the person that we're trying to attract using language, verbal fluency and, you know, obviously some more recent things like poetry.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  But also we use language to derogate our competitors. So one of the papers I published very early on was a research project on derogation of competitors, the ways in which people impugn the status, character and reputations of their rivals with the goal of making them less desirable to. Other people and humans do that and women and men both do that. So it's an interesting thing that we're male competition. We were talking about the Yama Mamo earlier and some of these overt physical or what animal biologists call contest competition, where there's a physical battle. Males do that.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And so a lot of the early attention on mate competition was focused on these sort of ostentatious overt battles and contest competition. But we compete through language. And so there's this big overlooked domain of women, the ways in which women compete with each other using language. And one of the things that astonished me is how observant women are about the subtle imperfections in their rivals and take pains to point them out. So just as a random example, I went to a party, this is back in my youth, but went

• 24:35Speaker 01

  to a party with my girlfriend at the time. And I got into this conversation with another woman who happened to be very attractive. But then we leave the party and she said something just casually offhanded, like she said, did you notice that her thighs were heavy? And I hadn't, but next time I saw her, this other woman, I found my attention being drawn to check out her thigh. Well, and originally it puzzled me why women would dare get other women on appearance. Well, they do it, of course, because men prioritize appearance. But I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly with his own eyes.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Why would verbal input alter his perceptions of how attractive he was? And I think that part of it is, I think there are actually two quick answers to that. One is the attentional one. So our attentional field, when they draw attention to it, the, those, what could be very small deviations from perfect symmetry or whatever they are, become magnified in our attentional field. But the other is that.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Who we have as a mate is also a reflection of our own status. And you saw this in a kind of overt and way in the earlier, the last presidential, not the last, the 2016 presidential election where Donald Trump was saying, this was when he was in competition with Ted Cruz, I think, in the primaries, said, "Look at my wife, look at Ted Cruz's wife." And he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife.

• 26:23Lex Fridman?

  So using language, you can alter the dynamics of the social hierarchy, the status hierarchy, sorry. So like you can change the values subtly, or if you have a large platform, in big ways. You can move things around just with your words.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right, right.

• 26:42Lex Fridman?

  Which is fascinating with humans. Because it's all socially constructed, anyway. So this, I mean, the question I have is, you said, there's the interesting thing about mating strategies is there's a small pool of desirable mates. And what the word desirable means is socially defined almost by on purpose to make sure the pool always stays small.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  I would have a couple of thoughts on that. It's an interesting issue, set of issues you raise. Okay, one is that we, I think we have evolved adaptations. Part of our psychology is to detect differences. And so this is why, like a, I don't know, a Martian or an alien coming down, they might look at humans and say, "Boy, they all look alike." Just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever, and we think they all look alike. But what's important in decision making, especially in the mating domain, or even friendship domain, or coalitional selection domain, is the differences.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  And so I noticed this just a concrete example of this. I was sitting around, this is again ages ago, watching a something like a Miss America beauty contest and people in there with a bunch of other people and they were saying, "Boy, did you see Miss North Carolina? What a dog." And so this is astonishing. And so here are like a 50 contestants who were selected as the most attractive in their state presumably, although they claim it's based on talent. But we noticed the differences. And this is why I would push back a little bit on the term socially constructed because

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I think it's, there are many different meanings of that phrase. And one meaning that some people have one connotation is that it's arbitrary. And I don't think it's arbitrary. So this has been another shift in understanding standards of beauty where it used to be believed in the in the social sciences. You can't judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. Don't judge people on the superficial characteristics. But in fact, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the health status of someone. There, in the case of males, there are physical formability.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And we have formability assessment adaptations. And then fertility as well. So there are a very predictable set of cues to fertility that have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And they're not arbitrary. There are some culturally arbitrary ones. So like you go to the Maori in New Zealand, for example, and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive. So there are some culturally arbitrary things. But standards of beauty like.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Cues to youth, cues to health. In women, clear skin, full lips, clear eyes, lustrous hair, a small waist-to-hip ratio that is circumference of the waist relative to the hips is acute to youth and fertility and acute to health. Symmetrical features, so we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry that are due to different things, mutation, load, environmental insults, diseases during development and so forth.

• 30:28Lex Fridman?

  All right. But that's kind of deeply biological, like there's cues that indicate something that is biologically true about a particular human. So we'll talk about both men and women. So we're now talking about what men want in the mating strategies when they look at women. So you're saying small waist to hip ratio.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:55Lex Fridman?

  Is, how much of that is our deep biological past, on top of which we can build all kinds of different standards of beauty? So, you know, we have many things going on in our brain. Our value of other humans in selecting a mate might incorporate a lot more variables as we get into the 21st century. So how quickly does our valuation of a mate evolve relative to the evolution of the human species?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  You're using evolve in the sense of culturally evolve?

• 31:36Lex Fridman?

  Culturally evolve and then relative to biologically evolve.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think that there are.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  There are some things that are biologically evolved, some standards, standards of attractiveness. And there are some of the things that I mentioned. So in male evaluation of females, let me back up and just say, what is the underlying logic? Why would we have standards of attractiveness? So here's the interesting thing, and this gets back to your earlier question about what is unique to humans, or what distinguishes us, or what set us off on the path that we did, is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty figuring out when a female is fertile.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  She signals that like crazy with the bright red genital swell, swelling, olfactory cues. She goes into estrus. In humans, we have, and this was actually a third thing that I wanted to add earlier, we have concealed ovulation, okay, relatively concealed ovulation, which is remarkable, given how close we are primatologically to chimpanzees. And so there is, there's a little bit of evidence that there are subtle changes that occur when women ovulate, non-women not on hormonal contraceptives.

• 33:00Lex Fridman?

  But it's mostly concealed.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  But it is, it is largely concealed.

• 33:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that's a feature or bug in, like, do we evolve that? Is that, is that a cool, a powerful invention for the human species?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's an adaptation in women, that women have evolved concealed ovulation. And I think it's a feature, not a bug.

• 33:21Lex Fridman?

  It gives more, would it give more power for women to select a mate?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  There are a couple of different hypotheses about it, but the one that I think is most plausible is that, you know, if, again, comparing it to chimps.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  FEMA goes into estrus. The male just has to try to monopolize her while she's in that estrus phase. And then they basically ignore the females after that. If you can't know when a woman is fertile, then you have to stick around a lot longer. And so I think long-term pair bonding co-evolved with concealed ovulation. And with that, also a very different form of sexuality, which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle. And chimps don't. You know, there's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex toward the edges of the estrus cycle, but very little.

• 34:25Lex Fridman?

  So that actually makes mating a more fundamental part of interaction between humans than it does for chimps. So meaning like year round, every day, constantly selecting mates in terms of biologically speaking. So what else, what else do men want today in the 21st century versus in the caveman days?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  A wonderful question. To answer it, though, I have to distinguish between long-term mating and short-term mating. And in long-term mating, it gets very complicated. So as a-

• 35:02Lex Fridman?

  That's one way to put it, yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Well, so I teach a course in human sexuality at University of Texas at Austin. And one of the things, this is back in the days when there were chalkboards and you taught with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board. And what I would do is I would ask the class, I teach this large class, 1 to 200, I'd say, what do women want? Tell me what all the things women want in a long-term mate. And so I would start at one end of the blackboard. There were like five blackboards. And I'd say, well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values. And I'd just go and fill out five blackboards and then run out of space.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And so first, this large number of characteristics that people want. And then- Specific magnitudes of those characteristics or amounts. So I say, you want a maid who's, say, generous with their resources. And they say, yes, I want maids generous with their resources. So I said, so like a guy who, this is in women's maid selection, a guy who at the end of every month gets his paycheck and gives it to the local wino on the drag. I said, well, no, not that generous.

• 36:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Generous toward me, not indiscriminately generous. And so you want a maid who's ambitious, you know, who's a hard worker. Yes, but not a workaholic, you know? And so, and so then you get to interactions among different characteristics.

• 36:39Lex Fridman?

  So there's a lot of characteristics, a lot of variables in this very complex optimization problem for women.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And more so for women than for men. So then I turned to the men and I say, well, what do men want? And then I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half because they can't think of anything else. So women.

• 36:58Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a lot of explanations for that. Besides the lack of the number of variables, it's also, you know. I mean, that's interesting. So what's the difference between the variables? So on the men's side, what are the variables?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Well, there, in long-term maid selection, there's a lot of overlap.

• 37:16Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Okay. So things like intelligence, good health, sense of humor, an agreeable personality, someone who's not too neurotic or moody or emotionally volatile. But there are key differences as well. And the differences stem from, they basically fall in a delimited number of domains. So for men, it's physical attractiveness, physical appearance, and youth are the two real big ones. Okay, men prioritize those more than women do. And so that's why you have phenomena such as this quote, love at first sight,

• 38:00Speaker 01

  where sometimes men can walk into a party and they see a woman across the room and they say that, I'm going to marry that woman. That's the woman for me. Women very rarely do that. And most men don't do that either, but men are much more inclined to fall in love at first sight. That's because they prioritize physical appearance. Why? Because physical appearance provides that this wealth of information.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  About a woman's fertility status. And this is from, from an evolutionary perspective, from a purely reproductive perspective. In, in business school, they would call it job one. Job one is you have to select a fertile mate. So those who in our evolutionary past, who selected infertile mates, so post-menopausal women, for example, did not become our ancestors. So we are all the descendants of this long and unbroken chain of ancestors who, all of whom succeeded in selecting a fertile mate. But fertility cannot be observed directly.

• 39:03Lex Fridman?

  It can use some cues.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and there are cues that are probabilistically related to this underlying quality of fertility that we can't observe directly.

• 39:14Lex Fridman?

  And we're doing that computation in our heads. What about men? What do men want for short-term mating?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Well, so for short-term mating, for both sexes, physical appearance looms very large. So, so, so women are, no, physical attractiveness and appearance, they're important for women in long-term mate selection. So I don't want to mislead anyone on that. They're just not as important as they are for men. And so a lot of characteristics come for women before physical appearance, physical attractiveness.

• 39:53Lex Fridman?

  So women, so if we switch to women, what do women want? They want also physical appearance for short-term mating.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:02Lex Fridman?

  Physical attractiveness. What else?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Well.

• 40:06Lex Fridman?

  Some cues that represent physical attractiveness that maybe represent health.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Well, here's, this is your.

• 40:13Lex Fridman?

  I'm learning a lot here.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so, but you're, you're also asking a very interesting question about what is controversial within the evolutionary psychology field, right? Right? And not totally resolved. So.

• 40:28Lex Fridman?

  That's why you're in the sixth edition of the book and there could be a lot more editions coming.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I revise it every four years or so because there's four years of new, interesting work. And so it deserves updating. But the traditional, I should say.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Answer to your question is that women go for good genes, cues to good genes in the short term and cues to resources in the long term. And this has been a hypothesis that advocated, I didn't come up with this, this one by Steve Gangstedt, a former student of mine, Marty Halif, and Randy Thornhill, and some other very smart players in the field. And, and what they used as markers of good genes are things like symmetrical features and masculine features. So, strong jawline, high shoulder to hip ratio, you know, other, other sorts of masculine

• 41:31Speaker 01

  features. But I started to doubt this explanation for what women want in the short term because of some other findings. So, for, for women, a lot of short-term mating is not one-night-stand mating, so, but rather it's affair mating. So, so if you ask the question, why do women have affairs? So, let's restrict the question for the moment. My colleagues would argue, well, women have affairs because they're trying to get good genes from one guy while they're getting investment from the regular partner, the husband. Okay.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  But the problem is that when women have affairs, 70-plus percent tend to fall in love with or become attached to their affair partner. Oh, so what percentage, 70? Yeah, 70. Some large majority. Yeah, 70% or more. In contrast to men, where it's more like 30% of men who have affairs fall in love with or become attached to their affair partner. So, but from a design perspective, an engineering perspective, if you will, that's a disastrous thing if you're just trying to get good genes. So, you're trying to retain the investment of one guy. Yeah. While getting good genes surreptitiously from this, you know, guy who presumably

• 42:59Speaker 01

  has more. Falling in love with them, becoming attached, that's not a feature you want.

• 43:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's bad engineering.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's bad engineering. And so I developed an alternative hypothesis that I call the mate switching hypothesis, which is that affairs are one way in which women divest themselves of a cost-inflicting partner or a partner who things aren't working out well with. And it's a way to either transition back into the mating market or to trade up in the mating market. And so, anyway, so these are probably the two leading hypotheses about why women have affairs. And I am putting my money on the mate switching hypothesis.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  My esteemed colleagues are putting their money on the good genes hypothesis. But I think the evidence for the good genes hypothesis is starting to look shakier than initially.

• 44:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is a heated debate. I mean, mate switching sounds like a... So from a game theory perspective, from an engineering perspective, it seems to make a lot more sense. Unless you put a lot of value in lifelong, sort of in the long-term mating, some kind of value in the lifelong singular relationship, like monogamy.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  And maybe we do psychologically. Maybe there's a big evolutionary advantage to that.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  And we do, but we also know that divorce is, you know, and breakups are also common and occur in all cultures. So...

• 44:40Lex Fridman?

  We're just not very good at this thing. Well, either we're not good at the mate selection such that

• 44:48Lex Fridman?

  maybe we're not incorporating all the variables well, or we're just not good at monogamy, period, from an evolutionary perspective.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's... No, that raises an interesting set of questions. So I think that... I mean, one issue is longevity. So I mean, we didn't live to be 70, 80 years old in over 99% of human evolutionary history. And so we didn't necessarily evolve to be mated monogamously with one person for decades and decades and decades. But I also think that long-term peer bonding is a critical strategy, but mate switching is also a critical

• 45:36Speaker 01

  strategy. So if you have a mate, for example, who becomes cost-inflicting, or becomes sufficiently debilitated, or who suffers an injury such that like in hunter-gather societies where the mate can no longer hunt, can no longer provide resources for their kids and the woman, this becomes a problem. And so I think that we have adaptations to mate switch and to divest ourselves from some partners and trade up in the mating market under certain conditions.

• 46:15Lex Fridman?

  So, okay.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And those conditions will differ for men and women.

• 46:18Lex Fridman?

  What are some of the cues in terms of what women want? You know, I go to the gym. It's a hotly contested debate. You said evolutionary psychology, and this is in the bro psychology forums that I visit multiple times a day. No, I'm just kidding. What's the most important cue of appearance for guys? What muscle group is the most important to work on? Do women care about biceps is what I'm asking.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  In terms of physical appearance, a good shoulder to hip ratio, so relatively wide shoulders relative to hips is one. Women tend to prefer men who are physically fit and well-toned, but not

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Muscle bound. So like if you go to, oh, I don't know, some like those early, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing the Mr. Whatever it was contest, you see, women don't find those attractive, the extremely muscle bound guys, but they like a guy who's physically fit, high shoulder to hip ratio. They like guys who are physically taller than they are. And guys who are a bit above average in in height. So if the average, so if, you know, the average is, I don't know, five nine, five 10 and out there for humans, depending on the culture,

• 47:53Speaker 01

  women prefer an inch or two taller than that. So.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  So shoulders, height, dad bod. What's that about? Why don't, why, why do you want a dad bod? Why, why do you? Why, why not? How do I define?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  What is a dad bod?

• 48:12Lex Fridman?

  Dad bod is not muscle bound.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Okay. So out of shape.

• 48:15Lex Fridman?

  A little, no, no, just a little bit, a little bit of a cushion for the pushing. I don't know what the kids call it these days, but just a little bit, a little bit of fat. So what's, why do they not want guys to be obsessed with their body? Is that, or is that some evolutionary thing?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that women might interpret a guy who is so obsessed with his body that he's, they might view that as a sign of narcissism.

• 48:46Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And that's not a good trait.

• 48:52Lex Fridman?

  What about like cultures where large sort of overweight men are valued? Is that, how do you explain? Like, how much can we override the evolutionary desires with our sort of? Cultural fashions of the day that maybe represent other desirable aspects like wealth.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Well, wealth is, resources have always been important, especially to women. So is a man able to acquire resources and is he willing to dispense them to her and her kids? So that's always important in traditional cultures that boils down to hunting skills. So if, so I asked a colleague friend, Kim Hill, who's probably the world's leading expert on the Oche of Paraguay. And, and you ask him like, what, what leads to high status in the Oche in males? Hunting skills. That's, that's the one, the one thing, the big variable.

• 49:52Lex Fridman?

  And that's resources.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And that's resources. Now, what's, what's interesting about modern culture is we have cash economies. But cash economies are relatively recent. And, you know, historically, there's over the vast, 99% of human evolutionary history. You weren't able to stockpile resources in the way that you are today. Although there are interestingly certain ways you can do it. So, so like you, you, you kill a large game animal, okay? You bring it back, you get some status points because you give some to your family. You can share it more widely with the group, et cetera. But, but it's going to go bad, right?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  You can't just say, I'm going to keep this carcass around for the next several months. Okay, but, and, and I think, I think it's Steve Pinker who might have used, coined this phrase that they, they store the meat in the bodies of other people. And so, for example, they store it in their friends. So, you know, hunting success is, you know, it's, it's a hit or miss kind of thing. So you might come back empty handed four times out of five. But, and, but when you do, you share your meat with others. And then when. You know, and then they reciprocate by sharing their meat with you. And so, and so you can store resources in the bodies of other people, which is, I think, an interesting

• 51:17Speaker 01

  way to think about it. But that can only go so far. And when you have cash economies, you have both the ability to stockpile resources, but also this kind of explosion and inequality of resources. And that's evolutionarily recent.

• 51:34Lex Fridman?

  What about, now, this is the difference between the Huberman, the excellent Huberman Lab podcast that you did, that people should listen to. He is a brilliant scientist, a sort of a rigorous analyst of what is true in the scientific community, also helps you with great advice on how to live. Now, in contrast to that, I am a terrible, almost idiotic level journalist. So this is what you have to deal with. Another thing that people talk about, that women care about, is penis size. Does penis size matter for women in sexual selection?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Well, there's controversy about that.

• 52:19Lex Fridman?

  In the evolutionary psychology community?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Well,

• 52:22Lex Fridman?

  Is there papers on penis size?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say scientific papers, so speculations about.

• 52:29Lex Fridman?

  Sure. Not in nature or in science?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, nothing, nothing that I've seen there. You know, I think that there's individual variability. So this is something that comes up, again, you know, when I ask women in the class, my classes, you know, what do women want? Some will say, you know, a large penis. But I think there's variability in, in that preference. And it also might depend in part on the variability in the woman's anatomy. So.

• 53:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's something fundamental in terms of evolutionary psychology, in terms of evolution? Or is this a quirk of culture that's current? That's maybe somehow connected to pornography or something like that?

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. My, my guess is it's, it's something that's perhaps a quirk of culture or, or something that is evolutionarily recent. But, but, but I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a topic that hasn't been explored much. I've never done work on it. And.

• 53:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, somebody should do a PhD, sort of, some archaeologist should do a PhD on the history of.

• 53:39Lex Fridman?

  Human civilization and its valuation of penis size and the correlation of penis size to the value of the male. Okay, moving on, another absurd question in terms of what men want. Again, definitely not a Huberman Lab podcast question. Why do men, let's say a large fraction of men, love boobs?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think that

• 54:09Lex Fridman?

  You're one of the most cited evolutionary psychologists, and this is what you signed up for, this, these kinds of questions.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Questions like this, yeah. Well, so again, this is something I haven't studied directly, but scientifically.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes, yes.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  But yeah, there's been some work on that. And it's

• 54:29Lex Fridman?

  Another cultural quirk, perhaps?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it's a cultural quirk, because I think it's the, the shape that matters a lot, because shape is going to be a cue to fertility. And so one of the things that humans are attracted to in the opposite sex is sexually dimorphic features, and breasts are a sexually dimorphic feature.

• 54:54Lex Fridman?

  What's dimorphic mean?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Difference between, difference in morphology between males and females.

• 55:00Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Dim meaning to morphic morphology. So, and women don't develop breasts until puberty or post puberty. And, and so as a sexually dimorphic characteristic, we tend to be attracted to that. Same is true, by the way, with the waist to hip ratio that we mentioned earlier. Prior to puberty, males and females have very similar waist to hip ratios. But at puberty, there's a differential hip development and fat deposition that creates a sexual dimorphism with respect to waist to hip ratio. And so again, that's, men are attracted to this waist

• 55:45Speaker 01

  to hip ratio. No man consciously says that. They find this woman more attractive than that woman. They don't think, ah, she has a waist to hip ratio of 0.70.

• 55:54Lex Fridman?

  That's exactly what I do, but anyway, most men, most men, yes. So isn't that fascinating that we just build these entire industries of fashion and what we find beautiful around these kinds of ideas? And we just, and then not just, not just fashion, and then we build, we have sociological tensions about whether we should care about this kind of thing or not. There's, there's battles in that space. It's, it's like, they seem so simple. It's just the human body and we wear clothes. First of all, that's, that's a funny thing. What's the, why are we wearing clothes? What's the shame aspect?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Lex Fridman?

  Of covering up the body? Is that another feature or is that, what is that?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's an interesting question and I, I don't know.

• 56:43Lex Fridman?

  It's just like hiding ovulation, maybe that's another hiding, like maybe hiding is a great game theoretic thing to play with because it can give you, it can give the powerless more power by covering.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Well, well, well, I think there are a few things. So one is the sort of arbitrary features of fashion and then the other is the aspects of fashion that attempt to magnify our, what is inherent in our evolved standards of beauty. So for example, women tend to wear things that accentuate their waist-to-brace ratio. So I mean, historically those, in the old days, corsets, for example, cinch the woman's waist.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  And you wouldn't see fashion develop in a way that made a woman seem old, unhealthy, pockmarked, signs of open sores or lesion. There, there are certain domains, design spaces that you wouldn't, that no culture would develop. So but there are arbitrary features, but sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary, or they're arbitrary at one level of description, but not at another. So for example, fashion tends to be linked with status. And that's why it constantly changes. It's the high status people start wearing a certain type of clothing.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  And then when the lower status people imitate them, then they have to shift to signal their status. And so I think the fashion and clothing is in part linked to status.

• 58:25Lex Fridman?

  So this is not you talking. This is me. I just want to make a statement, a profound statement, that I think yoga pants, now this is broadly speaking, but yoga pants is one of the greatest inventions in human history. There's fire and yoga, and I'm just gonna leave it there. I'm a fan and I have female friends that talk about how comfortable yoga pants are, which is what I'm referring to when I say it's one of the greatest inventions, because comfort in fashion is really, really important to me. Let me ask about sort of the sociological aspect of this.

• 59:02Lex Fridman?

  So I've, I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg, who, Meta, who's the CEO, founder of Facebook and now Meta and owns Instagram.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  I've heard of him.

• 59:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. He's a, yeah. He holds the American flag and likes the water. Anyway. So there's been criticisms of social networks and so on. And I just want to ask you about the broader question here, that there's a objectification of the human body in the media. And that creates standards for young women, for young men perhaps, but more young women.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:44Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned to the cruelty that women can have towards each other in terms of, well, let's, you know, cruelty is already a moral judgment. Just you've, you've made a statement about the fact that women seem to point out imperfections in other women.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:00Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's a problem in our modern society that we objectify each other in this way? Do you think this is, this is a fundamental aspect of our biology that we need to?

• 1:00:18Lex Fridman?

  Suppress versus celebrate. Just like we might suppress our natural desire for violence if such exists in modern society.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Well, a couple, couple of thoughts on that. I, I think it is damaging. The, the fact that so many images are displayed in, in social media. And so what I would say is that there's what's called in, in the field, an evolutionary mismatch. So we evolved in the context of small group living where there was made competition, but your competitors were a small number of other potential individuals. And so people do comparisons.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Okay, but now what we have is this bombardment, bombardment of our visual system and our sexual psychology and our mating psychology with, with thousands and thousands of images that are not at all representative of who our actual competition is in, in, in the mating domain. And so I think that, and, and there, there's actually evidence on this that Baz Luhrmann actually said something like this in his sunscreen song. I don't know if you ever heard that, but it's like a set of, it's wonderful, like string of advice, song about advice, but he says.

• 1:01:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he says, don't read beauty magazines that will only make you feel ugly. You know, and I think that there's truth to that, that is especially with, with women, they look at all these images and, you know, of course they're photographed, they're photoshopped, they're, they're highly selected and, and not at all representative. And so women compare themselves to that. So I think this social comparison is an evolved feature of humans. I mean, males do it, females do it, but it's exacerbated in the modern environment and wildly.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Evolutionarily mismatched ways. And so I think, I think that it is, it is destructive. It's harmful. There's evidence that it hurts women's self-esteem. So here's just another factoid, or fact, if you will, that at least in Western cultures, males and females have roughly the same overall average levels of self-esteem. But once puberty hits, all of a sudden, women's self-esteem starts to drop. And I think it's because when they enter, make competition, then they start elevating the importance they attach to physical appearance. And then, as you point out, the, the tremendous objectification that it

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  saturates social media and media in general is, is damaging and harmful. I don't know how to undo it, though. I don't know how to design a society that, that undoes that.

• 1:03:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, one of the ways we undo things, just like you pointed out, is we use words. When we manipulate society, we manipulate social and status hierarchies using our words for ill, and we can do the same for good. And that's why there's a lot of clickbait articles about, you know, Instagram, hit, you know, leading to a lot of suffering amongst teenage girls and all those kinds of things. I'm criticizing the clickbait nature and not the contents of the articles. But, you know, and those articles hopefully become viral in a way that makes us rethink about how we build social networks that kind of

• 1:04:02Lex Fridman?

  allow us to too easily misrepresent how we look when we are quote unquote influencers, and what mental effect it has on the. On young people that look up to those influencers. But I guess it's not the objectification fundamentally that's the problem. It's the inaccurate. It's the fake news. It's the

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Lex Fridman?

  Fake news, misrepresentation. You still objectify the male body, the female body, but you do so while misrepresenting the actual truth. And so you're moving the average, you're moving the standard representation of what a male should look like, what a woman should look like. And the dishonesty is the problem, not the objectification.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Here's just one other interesting empirical finding on that. And it has to do with another dimension that I think is harmful. And that's the thinness dimension. And so if you, and these are studies originally done by Paul Rosin, but they've been replicated, where if you ask men, okay, what is your ideal figure in a woman? And so they have these, say, nine figures that vary from very, very thin to average to plump. Men give it the midpoint. They say the midpoint is in relative thinness or plumpness is what I value. And you ask women, what is your ideal body type for you? They give it, they say thinner.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  But then if you ask them, what do you think males' ideal body type is? They put it in exactly the same spot that they put their own ideal, which is thin. And so there's actually an inaccurate perception of how thin men desire women to be. And I think that's partly exacerbated by the fashion industry where the models are often rail thin and, you know, they're the lore is that clothes hang better on thin models. And then on TV, they say you gain 15 pounds over what you really are or whatever. But for whatever reason, women misperceive how thin men want them to be.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And so you have, this is another huge sex difference, is eating disorders. Anorexia, for example, bulimia, binging, purging, where these eating disorders are nine to 10 times more common in women than men.

• 1:06:34Lex Fridman?

  Can I just take a small tangent? Because it was such a beautiful, the sunscreen song, such a beautiful one. If I can read some of the words from it.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Lex Fridman?

  I really enjoy it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great, it's a great song.

• 1:06:46Lex Fridman?

  For people, you should check it out. It's called Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen. I guess it's actually a speech to a class. I don't know if that's artificial or real, but it's a speech that gives advice. And it goes, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 97. I just remember even now, those words. Where's sunscreen? If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists. Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they're faded.

• 1:07:30Lex Fridman?

  But trust me, in 20 years, you look back at the photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now, how much possibility laid before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be the things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindsides you at 4:00 PM on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing every day that scares you. Saying, don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with the people who are reckless with yours.

• 1:08:14Lex Fridman?

  Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

• 1:08:33Lex Fridman?

  Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't. For me, that's true for 50, 60 and 70 year olds, honestly. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40. Maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either.

• 1:09:18Lex Fridman?

  Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

• 1:09:24Lex Fridman?

  Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it, but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but a precious few who should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle.

• 1:10:08Lex Fridman?

  For as older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once. I actually took this advice. This is fascinating advice. I remember this advice well. It's broadly applied. Live in New York City once, but leave before makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before makes you soft. Travel, accept certain inalienable truths. Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders.

• 1:10:51Lex Fridman?

  Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse, but you never know when either one might run out. Never mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. So this is a, so thank you for allowing me to read it. It's almost sentimental for me. I don't know when I first heard it.

• 1:11:35Lex Fridman?

  But there's a few pieces of advice in that, you know, similar to like the poem If by Richard Kipling. There's some deep truths when you step back and look at it all. And also the, the places where you live. Cause I, I, I lived for a time in, I guess, Northern California with Google and so on. And one of the reasons I had to leave is I was becoming, I felt I was becoming soft. This, this is my own personal experience. And the same is true for the, um, the cities of the east. They can, if you're not careful, make you hard because everybody's super busy and rushing

• 1:12:17Lex Fridman?

  around and, and there's just a buzz to the city, which is exciting. It's empowering, but it can, it can, it can change you in ways. And so it's one of the reasons I'm here in Austin and fell in love with the city.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great move. And yeah, I've, I've lived on both coasts as well. Boston area and Berkeley, California. So, um, so I'm familiar with both.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  How'd you end up in Austin? As a small side.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Well, uh, well, I got, I got my undergraduate degree here, uh, and then left for 20 years and migrated around, uh, so went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley for my PhD, Harvard for my first job, University of Michigan, and then a job opened up, um, at University of Texas, uh, for an evolutionary psychologist. And so, um, they wanted me, fortunately. So I was very happy to, so I've always loved Austin. I mean, so.

• 1:13:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the love never died. It was there.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's a great town. I was glad that I left, so, and experienced, well, both coasts and also the Midwest, but I'm happy to be back in Austin.

• 1:13:28Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a difficult question. Now, we did pretty good with some difficult questions already, but there are people in this world today who believe that gender is purely a social construct. You, I think, are not one of those people. To you, what are the differences between men and women? How much of those differences are nature and how much is nurture?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  I guess if you're asking the question morphologically or psychologically, I assume you're asking psychologically.

• 1:13:59Lex Fridman?

  The question is what it is, and the answer, sometimes the questions don't contain with them the trajectory you take with the answer, right? So I think I was asking both, and the fact that both are a thing is an interesting thing.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:19Lex Fridman?

  So you wrote a book, textbook, I should say, evolutionary psychology, right?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Lex Fridman?

  Both of those words are in the book title, psychology. That's the human mind.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:14:32Lex Fridman?

  How much of gender, how much of sex is the human mind, and how much of it is the biology?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  The way that I phrase it, so if I, I don't like, um, sort of dividing the world into two categories, things that are biological versus things that are not biological. Um, uh, so the biology is actually defined as the study of life and life processes. And so at that sort of abstract level, everything we do is biological, including culture and our capacity for culture, which I think is an evolved capacity that humans have.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  When you get to the issue of sex and gender, I mean, one cut at your question is, are there universal psychological sex differences? And the answer to that question is, yes, there are some. So, for example, well, and this is in one of your areas of specialty, engineering. One of the interesting things is that it's called the people's thing dimension. So, do you want an occupation? You want a job that involves people, social interaction? Or are you happy with a job that just involves things?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Mechanical objects, or computer code, or whatever? And this is one of the largest psychological sex differences that exists. And it's true in every culture. So, in terms of, I don't know, magnitude of effects, it's an effect size of more than a standard deviation difference between the means on this psychological sex difference. And so, one of the interesting things is, so if you go to places like, go to the most gender egalitarian cultures in the world, so places like Sweden or Norway, which are

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  explicitly gender egalitarian and are truly in many, many ways, but you allow people freedom of choice, some of these sex differences actually get larger. The psychological sex differences and also assortment into different occupational choices. But this is not something that I study. I study mating. And the sex differences, if you ask, what are the, where, in what domains are the sex differences the largest? It turns out they occur within the domain of mating and sexuality. So, our evolved sexual psychology, our evolved mating psychology is, to some degree, sexually

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  dimorphic. Okay? With the... Very important asterisk that we're talking about overlapping distributions. So there are some things that, so if you look at human morphology, we talked about breasts earlier, women have evolved functional breasts that's functional for lactation, men don't. So there's no amount of culture or social coercion can cause men to have lactating breasts. Psychologically, we don't see dimorphism that extreme where something is literally present in one sex and totally absent in the other. So there's overlap in the distributions.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  So I mentioned earlier that in the mating domain, men, more than women, on average, prioritize physical appearance, physical attractiveness, relative youth. Women, on average, prioritize resources, resource acquisition, qualities that lead to resource acquisition, like status, ambition, industriousness, and so forth. But there's overlap in the distributions. So some women place a total priority on how physically attractive the guy is, and some men view that as irrelevant. And, and, and so the, the point that I'm making is that there are, there are psychological sex differences that make some people uncomfortable. But, you

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  know, it's one of these things where I'm a scientist, I'm not a political advocate, and so I'm, I adhere to the empirical data. Empirical data are very strong in these domains. So with respect to sex differences in the mating domain and sexuality and things we haven't even talked about, like desire for sexual variety and sex differences in the whole desire for short-term mating, huge sex differences there. And these have been documented universally in all cultures. So, okay, now, are there, are there things

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  that are culture-specific or social-cultural overlays onto these fundamental psychological sex differences? Absolutely. But there's also an issue of...

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Levels of analysis, levels of abstraction, and how closely you look at the phenomenon. So, quick analogy, language. So you say, well, in China, they speak Chinese, in Korea, they speak Korean, in Brazil, they speak Portuguese. So, look how culturally infinitely variable languages are, which they are at that level. But do humans have a universal human innate grammar? And I think the evidence points to the answer yes to that, at least that's what Steve Pink or Paul Blum and some other others argue. So, at one level of abstraction, things are infinitely culturally variable, or at least

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  highly culturally variable. At another level of abstraction, there's universality. So, here's one example in the mating domain of this. So, Margaret Mead, who is a famous anthropologist, studied the Samoan islanders, and she tried to argue basically for the infinite malleability of things like gender and gender roles and so forth. And she said, "Look at this culture. In this culture, it's the men who paint their face, whereas, you know, in Western cultures, it's the women who wear makeup and so forth." Well, it turns out, if you look carefully at the culture where men paint their face, they're painting war paint on their face.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  They're not putting on makeup to enhance their cues to youth and cues to health. They're putting on war paint to make themselves more ferocious, or to demarcate what tribe they're in, what coalition they're in. And so, at sort of one level of abstraction, you could say, "Well, there's high cultural variability in application of face paint, but at another level, there's really a fundamental functional difference in the purpose to which the paint is applied."

• 1:21:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and then you can abstract the paint away and fashion in general is magnify the characteristics that are appealing to the opposite sex because what paint is probably, you know, it is you're magnifying the characteristics that are appealing to the other sex. So ability to gain resources, maintain resources is status, status in the hierarchy, all those kinds of things.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's part of it, but I think another part has to do with, in that case, male coalitions. So we were in an intense, this is another unique characteristic. I don't know if you got into this with Richard Wrangham. I don't remember you talking about this, but he's written a lot about male coalitionary psychology and humans cooperate to an extraordinary degree in forming coalitions for the purpose of competing with rival coalitions. And so you even see this with, well, you see it in the sports, sports arenas with, with team sports, you know, where this team wears a different uniform than that team. They

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  have different mascot, et cetera. And so part of that is male coalitionary psychology.

• 1:22:55Lex Fridman?

  Well, you, so you write, again, returning to the textbook. Now, people should know you wrote a lot of incredible book that is maybe more accessible than the evolutionary psychology textbook, but.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  The evolutionary psychology textbook is very accessible.

• 1:23:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it is extremely accessible, but that's not your thing. And on Amazon, you can't, you know, it's a pain. It's a textbook. It's not, you know, it's a little bit more of a pain to purchase, which I did. I bought all your books. They're amazing. We'll talk about a bunch of them. But in terms of coalitions, in chapter 12 of your evolutionary psychology textbook, you write about status, prestige and social dominance. So how do hierarchies of status and social dominance emerge in human society? And what's the value of status and sexual selection? We talked about cues of individual health and all that kind of stuff, but what the heck's the purpose of status? Why, why does it matter if I'm the

• 1:23:56Lex Fridman?

  big boss?

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Well, it matters because status is, influences your access to resources and your ability to influence other people within your, within your group. And so this is part of the reason why women prioritize a man's social status, how he is viewed in the eyes of others, because high status men have access to, to more resources. It's interesting that you ask about that because I've just published, this is with Patrick Durkey, a former graduate student of mine, we published a couple of papers on precisely this issue

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  where we looked at what we call human status criteria, is what are the things that lead to increases or decreases in status. And we did this in 14 different cultures. And we found some things that are universal, but also some things that are sex differentiated. And so, universal things like people value trustworthiness, they value intelligence, wisdom, knowledge. So even if you go across cultures, even to the small scale cultures that we alluded to earlier, there are these wise, wise people, wise men, wise women in

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  the culture who have people go to for advice, for wisdom. And so, having a wide range of knowledge is, is a universal status criterion. And there's some things that are sex differentiated, and they often fall into the mating domain as well. This is where mating and status are interestingly related to each other in that successful mating increases your status, but having high status also gives you access to more desirable mates. And so, the game gets harder and harder, always. So, wait.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  So are we talking about what are the characteristics? What's the role of power and wealth? Those kinds of things. So you said wisdom is universal. Yeah. What about wealth and power? Yeah, well, uh, well, I guess it depends on what you mean by power. So I think of power as the ability to, to influence. A large number of people. Yeah, so, um, and this is one of the interesting things about the fact that cash economies are so, are evolutionarily very recent in that we're, people are like, so, so I guess recently or it's about to happen uh, that Elon Musk is gonna buy Twitter. Yeah, it happened. Is it happened already? Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so they say like the, the wealthiest or one of the wealthiest men on earth has now purchased the most influential media platform uh, on earth. And so obviously you or I couldn't um, compete with Elon Musk and uh, for the purchase of Twitter. And so uh, the fact that cash economies allow the stockpiling of unprecedented amounts of wealth produces these tremendous power differentials that, that didn't exist in, in over most of human evolutionary history. So their wealth is power, but you can also be, um, power can be attained through other ways.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but, but I would say that the interesting thing about wealth is that it's an infinitely fungible resource. So you can use it and translate it into many, many other things like buying, uh, buying Twitter or buying a big house or, or even getting mates or in artificial, um, in the, I don't know if you want to get into that at all, but I mean, they have these sex dolls or virtual, virtual reality sex that some people are, are, are developing. If you have enough resources, you can purchase things like that. So you can trans, you can translate wealth into a variety of other.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  Tangible things in ways that you couldn't ancestrally. So.

• 1:28:23Lex Fridman?

  That's one really powerful thing, but there is still power that's correlated, but not integrally connected to wealth, which is like being leaders of nations. Like technically, the president of the United States salary is not very high.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:39Lex Fridman?

  Presidents and then you look, you go outside of that and to the half of the world that's living under authoritarian regimes, you have dictators. And there's, those are very powerful, usually men.

• 1:28:54Lex Fridman?

  And presumably there's some value there in the mating selection aspect.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's not by chance that most of them are men.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  And this is gonna sound strange or, and hopefully not offensive to people. But if you ask the question, why are, why is it the case that men are in positions of power so much more so than than women? Well, in part, it can be traced to women's mate preferences. So it's one of the sex differences that women have over evolutionary time preferred men who had power, status, resources, et cetera. And what that has done is it's created selection pressure on men to attach a high motivational priority to clawing their way up the status hierarchy.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  And, and studies of time allocation distribution show this where men are, they're more willing to sacrifice their friends, their grandmother, their kin or whatever, to claw their way up to the top of status hierarchy. Women, much less so. Women spend more effort maintaining relationships with their kin, with their friends, their friend networks and so forth. And so, and so in a way, so you could say, not only are you, not only are men in positions of power more than women, now you're blaming women for why they are. And it's not, it's not a matter of blame, but I think that, that what I just outlined

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  is, is an essential part of the causal process, the co-evolution of women's mate preferences with men's motivational priorities.

• 1:30:39Lex Fridman?

  How much do you think these mating strategies underlie all of human civilization? Like what motivates us?

• 1:30:48Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's a Becker with the denial of death. Like, what, why do we build castles and bridges and rockets and the internet and all of this? Is it some complex mush? Or is it underneath it all? Are we all just trying to get laid?

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't reduce it to something quite as trying to get laid. But I think, I think mating is certainly part of it.

• 1:31:17Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how big of a part, because so with, with Ernest Becker, the idea is that we're all trying to achieve an illusion of immortality.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Lex Fridman?

  So we're trying to create something that outlasts us. And therefore, we create bigger and bigger things and societies and bridges and.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think what's, what's missing from Becker's analysis is, you know, I mean, it's, it's a fascinating book to read, Denial of Death. But what's missing is that I think that the reason that, and again, I think it's more men than women, I think there's a sex difference on this, that men want to build a lasting legacy because that will in turn affect their lineage.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  And although I do, now, Woody Allen is out of favor, but I remember this quote from him, he said, he said, he didn't want to achieve immortality through his work, he wanted to achieve immortality by not dying.

• 1:32:21Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. The, the funny ones are also deeply flawed often.

• 1:32:29Lex Fridman?

  Staying on the topic of sex differences, in a very different way, perhaps. So dominance and submissiveness, something you've also written about. What's the role of that inside relationships about this human dynamic of dominance and submissiveness?

• 1:32:47Lex Fridman?

  Is that a feature or a bug? So the the stable state that these dynamical systems arrive at. Is it good to have an equality within a relationship? Or is it good to have differences in a relationship?

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Are you talking about romantic relationships or just in human relationships?

• 1:33:07Lex Fridman?

  Romantic, probably, because unless it could be generalized to human relationships, perhaps it could be generalized to human relationships. I wasn't thinking that, but perhaps it could be. But let's start with romantic. I guess, one on one.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  I'm personally in favor of equality on that dimension within romantic relationships. And in the, in, I don't talk about my personal life, but but I've been in relationships, and the best ones tend to be those where there's equality and one person does not dominate the other. But I guess what I was, the reason I ask you is in what type of relationships? Because there are some things like coalitions where hierarchy is very important to the function of the coalition. So it's like you, if you're like a war coalition or something in small group warfare, you

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  can't just have equality. You have to have leaders that are determining the the battle plan, so to speak. And so if you have, you're attacking a neighboring group or something, and everyone gets an equal say, it's not going to work that way. And so we tend to appoint as leaders those who are, it doesn't always work out well, but those who are presumably wise or good, effective leaders. And even talk about, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, and I'm not an expert on this, but, you know, wartime leaders versus peacetime leaders. And so, again, it depends on, you know, what the goal is of the group that you are a part

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  of. And so, and so I think there is functionality and utility to a lot of our evolved psychology of status and dominance and submissiveness. So, for example, and you have to look at the individual psychology, and this is actually something I'm currently studying, again, with Patrick Durkey, where

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  One advantage of these status hierarchies is that you're not always battling. You know, so you determine, and that's why, here's another sexually dimorphic aspect of our psychology, formability assessment. So there's, there's evidence that males engage in this, you know, can I take this guy? Or can he take me? Like, and it's like a

• 1:35:41Lex Fridman?

  The entirety of my life, yes.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  It's like a spontaneous assessment of, of formability. And, and it also, that information is critical because that means like who you should not challenge, or, or who you can challenge with impunity, impunity. So, and, and there's functionality to submitting as well, you know? Because you, you defer to someone so that you don't get vanquished and you live to see another day. So I think we actually have a very rich psychology of status hierarchies and dominance and submissiveness.

• 1:36:19Lex Fridman?

  So especially sort of violent conflict. Yes. But back to relationships. So maybe phrased another way. What is masculinity? What is femininity? Is there value inside a relationship for, for differences? You talked about mating, mating strategies with the dating stage where you're selecting the mate, but also within, you know, mating broadly defined as the entirety of the process. Are, should those differences be magnified and celebrated?

• 1:37:01Lex Fridman?

  Or sort of suppressed?

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  I've seen enough different relationships work and I've seen enough relationships implode to So there's no, there's not one size fits all on, on these things. So even with respect to masculinity and femininity, um, some reduce it psychologically to two other terms, which are agency and communion. So where agency is, you know, are you instrumental, goal oriented, um, get tasks done, et cetera. Communion is, you know, more the, the love and forming connections with other people and so forth. Um, and I, I published a study a while back on, uh, on what's, we're called unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  So you, there are like good and bad aspects of agency and communion. So.

• 1:37:56Lex Fridman?

  They can go, so there's toxic, as they say, masculinity, toxic femininity. You can just rephrase that saying there could be toxic agency and toxic communion.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so, and so some elements of masculinity, uh, the unmitigated masculinity is, uh, I think terrible. I was actually walking around downtown Austin earlier today and just give you this example. And this guy, um, was, um, I guess stuck and wanted the car ahead of him to move. And all of a sudden he screamed out of his, move your fucking car. Like, and, and then jumped out of his car and to a push. To me, that's, that's, um, toxic masculinity, if you will. We, we don't need that, you know?

• 1:38:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, and as, by the way, as somebody who worked with cars quite a long time in terms of human interaction with semi autonomous vehicles, it's so fascinating how the car and traffic brings out like the worst in human nature in a sense, or maybe to rephrase that.

• 1:39:08Lex Fridman?

  It maybe challenges you to explore something that in terms of temper, in terms of anger, in terms of anxiety that you have been bottling it up. There's something that where the car is like a vessel for psychological experiment of how much stress you can take. And some people, that stress is like heating, is making the water boil. And it's fascinating to see what that results in. I think if you are the kind of person that explodes emotionally in traffic, that means there's deeper issues to sort of confront. And it seems like the traffic and the car is a place where you get to confront your, the shadow, call young shadow.

• 1:39:54Lex Fridman?

  There's something deep within that that we don't often fish. We're alone with ourselves and we get to see who we truly are.

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're, yeah, it can bring out road rage. And also there's this, I don't know, when you're in the vehicle, there's you have this shell around you. And so there's this feeling that you are protected from.

• 1:40:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes. So you could be yourself, you could be your true self in this moment. And sometimes that true self in this moment is an angry screaming person, which means you have, you have to introspect that shadow, shine a light. Let me ask you about something that's ongoing currently. It'd be fascinating to get your opinion on. So something I've been watching, some of the world has been watching, is the defamation trial brought by Johnny Depp against Amber Heard. Have you gotten a chance to watch any of it?

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  I haven't watched it, but I've read some reports of it.

• 1:40:54Lex Fridman?

  What's your analysis on this particular?

• 1:40:59Lex Fridman?

  Dynamic. We talked about toxicity in the space of agency and communion. What do you make of this this relationship that's presented to the world in its raw form?

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  You know, I don't have strong opinions on it. I think in the this stage in the trial, we've heard from him primarily.

• 1:41:20Lex Fridman?

  We have not. And we should say for people listening, in case this is published a little bit later, we have not heard from Amber Heard.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:30Lex Fridman?

  Heard from Heard. We're doing that. That's going to be happening this week.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think that I've seen, and this is another topic that I have studied, is intimate partner violence and some of the nastier stuff that goes on within relationships. And I think that when this nasty stuff happens, sometimes, sometimes it's asymmetrical, but sometimes it's symmetrical in the sense that they get into these downward spirals where one is insulting the other, or even with physical violence, one starts pushing the other, showing how they're hitting the other, and then the other hits back. And so you get into these cycles. And so coming at one point in time, you know, in this case

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, you know, years later and trying to disentangle what actually went on in their relationship, I don't, I don't feel qualified even to do that.

• 1:42:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's fascinating to see. So first, I mean, I have a lot of opinions, particularly because I'm just a

• 1:42:42Lex Fridman?

  a fan of Johnny Depp as a person, a fan of Johnny Depp, the actor, and the kind of characters he created. The person, because Maybe this is fiction, maybe this is reality, but they tend to rhyme and mirror each other. But his fascination with Hunter S. Thompson and then some aspect of him taking on the Hunter S. Thompson personality, where there's this layers upon layers of wit and humor and it's and also anxiety and darkness with the drug use and all that kind of stuff. It's very human, very real person. And so you get to, one of the beautiful things about this trial is you get to basically have a long form podcast and you get to reveal the complexity of this human, the humor

• 1:43:26Lex Fridman?

  under pressure, under, under stress, but also just the rawness of love, the things that love makes you do, or whatever that is, what, you know, whatever the things that keeps us in relationships that are toxic in that turmoil, the hope, the self-delusion, the, the, the push and pull of longing and fights.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Lex Fridman?

  The, the ups and downs, whatever the.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the roller coaster.

• 1:44:01Lex Fridman?

  The roller coaster.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  The, the makeup sex.

• 1:44:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  You know, yeah.

• 1:44:05Lex Fridman?

  Is, and the questions arise, whether that's a feature or a bug, like, why do we, why are we drawn to that? You mentioned in mate selection, for long-term mate selection, I think you said women, but I think maybe both don't want a kind of, you had scientific and eloquent words to use, but basically, basically crazy people. You, you, you want somebody who's.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Emotionally unstable. Yeah, yeah. So.

• 1:44:33Lex Fridman?

  But here it seems like maybe, maybe we're drawn to that still.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37Lex Fridman?

  Lies to the light.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Right, well, it, it can be addictive, but it's not good for long-term relationships. I mean, that characteristic and it, and there, there is a stable personality characteristic. It goes under different names, anxiety, neuroticism, emotional relability, et cetera. But that's the single personality characteristic that's, that. Is most predictive of breakups and divorces. And, and in studies that I've done, predictive of conflict in couples. People who are emotionally unstable, they just get into a lot of conflict with their partner. They create, create havoc. So.

• 1:45:18Lex Fridman?

  And they.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Now, that can be exciting, but bad for long-term happiness.

• 1:45:25Lex Fridman?

  They seek conflict in order to, uh, to attain intimacy. So conflict creates, creates attention.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Lex Fridman?

  And it, and like, if you take intimacy broadly, it's, it's intimate. Cause you're like raw, fragile, you're right there.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and I mean, there's, there's one hypothesis that was put forward by, um, uh, an Israeli biologist named Amos, Amos Zahavi called, uh, the, the testing of a bond. And so he asked the question like, why do people inflict costs on their partner? Like even like kissing, you're, you're introducing, you know, it's a disease vector. You know, why do people do these weird things, um, inflicting costs or emotional liability is a way of inflicting costs. And what he argues is it's, it's the testing of a bond. If the person's willing to tolerate, you know, this level of stress, this level of cost imposition, then that means they must be very committed to me.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  And so, uh, and I think that's something people do in romantic relationships is they, they do test the strength of the bond. They, they test the, the commitment of the person. And I think it's, I think that's a feature, not a bug in, in the, in the sense that. Especially in the early stages of love, romantic love, we tend to overly romanticize and idealize our partner. So when there's an absence of evidence, we we impute positive values. And what you and this is one of my recommendations to people, friends that I know, is if you're really considering a good long term commitment to this person, go on

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  vacation with them, ideally to ideally to a foreign country where both of you are unfamiliar.

• 1:47:21Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I love it. Road trip or something like that.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So where where you you experience unexpected things, stresses, you get a flat tire or whatever you encounter, and you see how the person deals with stress and you see how you deal with each other under stress. And I think that that's unless you have put stress tests on relationships, you really don't know where things stand.

• 1:47:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it. I'm a huge fan of that, like road trip, and not just late in a relationship, like day one.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Road trip, not not day one, day negative one, before it even happens to see stress test, because it makes everybody better. It creates intimacy or creates it. It creates or destroys. But, you know, on the Johnny, so they also, they both suffered childhood abuse. The one of the things that I I took away from the trial for me was just educational. I don't get to see inside, as most of us maybe don't, like toxic relationships or fights and so on. A lot of things that people maybe do inside of relationships and we

• 1:48:33Lex Fridman?

  don't get to see it presented in such a raw way. So one of the things I learned is that, you know, in terms of partner violence, a woman too can be violent.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:48:49Lex Fridman?

  That to me, sort of emotionally and physically violent, that.

• 1:48:56Lex Fridman?

  I almost don't want to, you know, Amber Heard, I mean, there's, there's no limit to my dislike for that, that person in particular. Because, because clearly to me, at least I stand with Johnny Depp. To me, that guy is full of love and, but full of demons because he's drawn to whatever the chaos that's created there. But also, it's just an education for me that I tend to associate sort of men with violence and toxicity and destruction inside of relationships. But it was interesting to see that women too can be like directly violent.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37Lex Fridman?

  And men too, which was also surprising to me, have the capacity to stay in such a relationship and to not walk away, which is what I thought is my, in terms of toxic, violent relationships, I thought there's a male figure who will do emotional and physical, mostly physical violence and then kind of manipulate the mind of the female to stay in the relationship. But that dynamic goes, can go both ways.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does go both ways. And, and I think even the emotional abuse is sometimes even worse than the physical abuse. I mean, you see that in, in studies of even like childhood abuse where it's the emotional abuse that is the most damaging.

• 1:50:25Lex Fridman?

  What about the role of jealousy, something you also written about in a relationship? Is, is that a feature or a bug? You started to speak about it, but is, is it good to be jealous of your partner inside of a relationship? How does it go wrong? How, the pros and cons?

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  So, so I've written a whole book on this called The Dangerous Passion, Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Sex and Love. And I think that one cut at your question is that a moderate, so first of all, I think it's, it's a feature, not a bug in, in most cases. So in the, in the sense that. You have to have an adaptation that is sensitive to threats to a valued relationship. Okay, because, and I think I alluded to this earlier, that just because you're in a relationship and you're in a relationship with a desirable partner, doesn't mean that,

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  you know, you've finished solving the problems of mating that you need to solve. Because there are threats from the outside, so mate poachers, people who try to lure your partner away for either a sexual encounter or a more committed romantic relationship. And then there's also dissatisfaction within the relationship. So your partner might become tempted to be sexually unfaithful, or romantically unfaithful, or emotionally unfaithful. And so, and so we need, humans with the evolution of long-term pair bonding, we need adaptations to guard the relationship and be sensitive to threats to the relationship. And I think jealousy is one of those.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's a key one. And now, that, I think that there are a variety of benefits to it, but also a variety of costs or downsides to jealousy. Because we know that jealousy, male sexual jealousy, is the leading cause of spousal abuse and spousal violence, physical, physical violence, probably emotional violence as well, or psychological violence. And so, that's what I call the dangerous passion. It's, it's, it's a necessary emotion, but it is also a dangerous emotion. Leads to homicide. You know, leads to, and I've studied also homicidal ideation, which is, intersects with

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  this topic in that Men, sometimes women to a lesser degree, develop homicidal ideation about people who are trying to poach their mates, or who do poach their mates, successfully poach their mates. So what jealousy does is it alerts you to a threat to the relationship, and it motivates checking out the source of the threat. How threatening is this? So people tend to increase vigilance of their partner. In the modern world includes hacking into their cellphone or computer, monitoring them, sometimes stalking them, but also can include positive things.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  So it might be that... So one trigger of jealousy is a direct threat to the relationship. But there's another more subtle trigger of jealousy, which is a mate value discrepancy. So usually when people mate, they assort or pair up on overall mate value. So in the American 10-point scale, the eights tend to pair up with the eights, the sixes with the sixes, the tens with the tens, and the ones with the ones.

• 1:54:12Lex Fridman?

  But American, is there other scales? I wonder if the miracle systems... Well, there's a binary. I just go with binary, 01. Sorry, go ahead. The eighth pairs with the eighth, seventh.

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in general, but there are errors in mate selection. You kind of alluded to that issue earlier, that sometimes people make errors in mate selection, which they do. So sometimes you think this person is well-matched on mate value, but they're not, but then things change. So let's say they're the same. You have two sixes, and then all of a sudden, the woman's career takes off. All of a sudden, she's getting promotion. She's acquiring wealth. She's attracting men who are of a different mate value than she previously did. Well, that triggers jealousy in the guy. Even if she swears she's going to be totally loyal, and she has no signs of leaving

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  or no signs of infidelity, a mate value discrepancy is going to trigger jealousy. Now, what can it do? Well, it can do, in the broadest sense, people can do two classes of things. They can do cost inflicting things or benefit providing things. So the the man in that situation might say, okay, I need to devote more attention to my partner. I need to up my game when it comes to resource acquisition. I need to lavish more attention and gifts on her. And so there's a whole suite of benefit provisioning things that can help to reduce that mate value discrepancy. And then there's also cost inflicting things

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  that and and and humans unfortunately do both, both sets of things.

• 1:55:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's also this, maybe that's love. I notice the people I especially love or have a connection to romantically or otherwise, there's a feeling like I don't deserve you. So with friends, with so on, like, I mean, I tend to think that about almost everything, which is why it's a strong signal when I don't feel that way, which is like, I can't, how lucky am I to have this? And that's a, that's a, that's a weird illusion of inflation of value or something. Like, I think that the positive effect of that is makes motivates me to be better, I guess, on this one to 10 scale to be higher. And you sort of kind

• 1:56:42Lex Fridman?

  of have to, like, it's a nice feature that your mind sees others that you have affection towards as higher value and it forces you to have that. Like, I'm a person that experiences jealousy and that forces me to be better.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Lex Fridman?

  I get my shit together.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and I, and I think that the, the, sometimes the best relationships are when both people feel lucky to be with the other person.

• 1:57:09Lex Fridman?

  Yes, exactly. It's balanced that way. And then that's when you, in terms of jobs, in terms of going to the gym, all those kinds of things. And yeah, so a little bit of jealousy. I have discussion with those people. I always wonder. There's people in relationships where like, no, no, there's no, they never experienced jealousy. I wonder what that's like, because they're very successful relationships, but, and I always wonder, you know, I'm currently single, so I'm always doubt that I know what the hell I'm doing at all. Uh, but I, I'm definitely somebody that experiences jealousy and kind of enjoys jealousy. Uh, like a little bit of like missing, to me, that's like, you're missing the other person.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:50Lex Fridman?

  You're longing for the other person.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  And here's another interesting wrinkle that I also talk about in the book is, uh, sometimes people intentionally evoke jealousy in their partner. Uh, and I think that's also a kind of testing of a bond, uh, kind of issue.

• 1:58:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  So, and especially women, but I think both sexes, uh, interpret a total absence of jealousy as a sign that their partner is not sufficiently committed to them or sufficiently in love with them. So if you like to say, I don't know, if you, you're, you're, you go to a party with your partner and then you leave the room, for some reason you come back and your partner is passionately kissing someone else and doesn't bother you at all.

• 1:58:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  Um, that might be a cue to the partner that, well, maybe you're not very in love with that person or not very committed to them. And so.

• 1:58:43Lex Fridman?

  So it's a good way to, it's a good way to test. That said, I mean, I love the term mate poaching, by the way. I believe here in Texas, mate poaching is officially legal, so we're allowed to. One of my favorite songs by Hendrix is Hey Joe. Um, hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Lex Fridman?

  And, yeah, I actually, I always wanted to play that song, but I get, um, I start to think about guns and so on. I think it's supposed to capture a feeling. It's not actual violence. It's saying, I'm gonna shoot my old lady. I caught her messing around with another man. That's, um, that's a blues type of feeling, like of anger.

• 1:59:22Lex Fridman?

  Of, I guess, for mate poaching, for mate switching, performed by the partner, and then the frustration and the anger that's resulting there. I always wondered why the violence is directed towards the partner versus the person who did the

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's

• 1:59:41Lex Fridman?

  The other male.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Tends to be evenly split. So sometimes, and that's, I mean, men especially, when someone poaches on their mate, they have homicidal fantasies.

• 1:59:54Lex Fridman?

  Towards which equally split?

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Toward the mate poacher, yeah, but equally split. So it's, I think the non-lethal violence tends to be more directed toward the mate, because it's, and this is a horrible thing of male sexual psychology, but I think part of the violence is functional in the sense that it's designed to keep a mate and prevent her from engaging in anything with other potential mate poachers. But, but people do. So even, it goes back to the French law, where they had the so-called crime of passion.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  So if a husband walked in and found his wife having sex with some other guy in bed, and shot him, that was viewed as a crime of passion. It's still not legal, but you kind of get a discount.

• 2:00:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  For it, whereas if he goes home, thinks about it for a while, then gets the gun, comes back, then that's premeditated murder.

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. See, to me, I guess everybody's different. To me, I have zero anger towards the partner in that situation. To me, because that's definitive proof of disloyalty. So like, why, what's the function of the anger there?

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Lex Fridman?

  To me, all of my anger is towards the guy, the poacher.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Because some of it has to do probably with the status establishing. Like, what was the term you used?

• 2:01:33Lex Fridman?

  Formability?

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, formability assessment.

• 2:01:36Lex Fridman?

  Assessment. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait. Did you just say you're more formidable than me? In this situation, I want to reestablish, at least in my own mind, the formability. And that seems to be, I guess, we're all different, but maybe because I roll around with guys a lot, like grapple and wrestling, all that kind of stuff. To me, to establish status is competing with other males, not with the female, because that's a break of loyalty. Like, why, what's the point of anger at this point? That's just betrayal.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  Well, except that a lot of it, a lot of the mate poaching is discovered, or accused to mate poaching are discovered before the consummation of the act. So it might be just-

• 2:02:17Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like the emotional cheating leading up to it?

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Or mild flirtation.

• 2:02:23Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  You know, things like that. And so the violence is designed to head off the threat before it becomes real.

• 2:02:34Lex Fridman?

  Boy, aren't human relations, especially romantic ones, complicated? So, uh-

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  Very. But that's what makes them so fascinating to study.

• 2:02:42Lex Fridman?

  And so, yes, exactly. From a science perspective, and to study from within, sort of,

• 2:02:49Lex Fridman?

  which like Richard Raham with the chimps, like, you know, be in it. Study from the N of one perspective. What do you make of polyamory?

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  So what the heck is, what do you make of marriage? What are your thoughts about marriage? What are your thoughts about lifelong monogamy? And what's your thoughts about polyamory, given that we've been talking about ideas of mate switching and poaching and all that kind of stuff?

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that we evolved to be, I prefer the term, a pair bonded species. So pair bonding is one of the strategies, pair bond, long-term mating is one of the strategies. But that doesn't necessarily mean for decades and decades or lifelong, because we often pair bond serially. So we get into a relationship that might last a year or five years and then break up, and then form another relationship. So we engage in serial mating. We engage in infidelity. We engage in, we engage in some short-term-

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Uh mating, um, and uh, so we have a, what I describe as a menu of mating strategies. And which particular mating strategy an individual adopts depends on a wide variety of factors. I think some are just kind of personal proclivities. Some depend on your mate value. So if you are an eight, a nine, or a 10, you have more options for what mating strategy you want to pursue. Um, if you're a one or a two, you're not going to be able to be polyamorous, um, in, in a likelihood. Um, there's a lot of attention to polyamory now. Uh, and uh, it's unclear whether this, whether there's an increase in it or whether people are just talking about it more.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Uh, it is the case, and I know, uh, I know several people who are in polyamorous relationships. And I've talked with them in detail about them. And jealousy is often a factor in that. And they, they describe it as kind of like, um, uh, an emotion that has to be somehow tamed or dealt with in, in some way. And so, and so in polyamory, there are many different types of polyamory. So in like one type, for example, is you have a primary love partner. And then some others on the side that are permitted, usually within, in consensual terms, within a, an explicit contract that the, that the primary partners work out.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  So it's okay if you, you know, I know there's one couple, it's okay if you do it outside the city limits of Los Angeles, but not within. Uh, some say it's okay for Thursday, but I want the weekend, Friday and Saturday nights to me. Um, uh, it's okay if there's sexual involvement, but no emotional involvement. So there are different type, different strategies that people work out. And some of them are designed to try to keep jealousy at bay. So I think it's an evolved emotion that is a natural emotion that, that people experience. Um, now interestingly, there's a, there's a, while we're on this topic, there's a sex difference therein.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Um, uh, namely if you contrast sexual jealousy with emotional jealousy or sexual infidelity with emotional infidelity. And so we, we, in one set of studies, I put my. Participants, or we used to call them subjects, into this, what I call the Sophie's Choice of the jealousy dilemmas. I said, imagine your partner became interested in someone else, and you discover that they have had passionate sexual intercourse with this person, and they've gotten emotionally involved with them. They've fallen in love with them. Which aspect of the infidelity upsets you more? And when you, and that's why I call it the Sophie's Choice.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  Both terrible choices.

• 2:06:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  But men much more likely to say the sexual infidelity is what upsets me. More women, it's like, why even ask me? It's a no-brainer. Eighty-five percent of the women say the emotional infidelity is what bothers me more. Former student of mine, Barry Cooley, did a really interesting study of analysis of this reality show called Cheaters. I've actually never seen it, but where if you suspect your partner of cheating, then a detective from the TV team will follow the person. And then they'll call up and say, we've just seen, found your husband here in the motel, motel. Do you want to come down and talk to him? And so, and so what he analyzed, though, was the verbal interrogations that people

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  had when they confronted their partner. And women wanted to know, are you in love with her? Men wanted to know, did you fuck him? Or did you have sex with him? And so, it's this sex difference in sensitivity to these different cues of infidelity. And, and of course, there's, there's an evolutionary logic to this, to this sex difference. And it's been replicated, not, not the cheater study, but the hypothetical Sophie's Choice study, it's been replicated now in Sweden and China and, you know, it's a universal sex difference.

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  So, given that sex difference, and you mentioned another one that you just returned to, which is a... In the engineering disciplines.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, person thing orientation.

• 2:08:25Lex Fridman?

  So until I started to see, writing about it in the sort of psychology literature, I observed this anecdotally a lot. And the reason I observed it is I was confused. So I care a lot about robots. I'm a robotics person. And so a lot of males in the robotics community really didn't care about the, what's called the human robot interaction problem, which is like robots when they interact with humans. And then a lot of females, all brilliant in, in the robotics community, cared about the human robot interaction. They cared about the human, the, what the robot communicates as a human, human in the picture, human in the loop. And I was really confused, like, because the difference to me in my anecdotal

• 2:09:07Lex Fridman?

  interactions, but the, the N is quite large there. Like I, you know, I'm in the robotics community. I know a lot of people.

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:15Lex Fridman?

  And I was confused because for me, I really care about human robot interaction. I, I see, I care about both a lot. And, and, and the same thing here in terms of emotional cheating versus physical cheating. I care a lot about both. And I have like this oscillating brain. So I wonder what that says about my brain. So I'll often wonder this because there's specific sex differences that are represented in the data and the literature. And I seem to oscillate depending on mood.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Lex Fridman?

  And I wonder what that says about me. Why do I care so much about that robot on the floor? I care not, uh, half I care about how it works and the other half how it makes other people feel.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Lex Fridman?

  What is that?

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so I guess what I would say, this gets back to our earlier discussion of agency and communion where I actually think that it's a sign of being well balanced to have both capacities within you. And so you get, um, people who are, um,

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  Unimodal, or do they just have one mode of operating? Let's say it's the thing mode, which which engineers tend to be good at. You have to be good at it to be a good engineer because things have to actually work.

• 2:10:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's not in some, you know, dream or hypothetical state, things have to have to actually work. But with the agency and communion, I think it's good to have a balance. And that's why I think some of the best romantic relationships are those where people are, they're high on what they used to call androgyny, where they have both the positive features of agency and communion, the positive features of masculinity and femininity within the same mix, but also with the footnote of not the unmitigated agency or unmitigated communion, both of which can be negative. And so I view these as

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  capacities and some people are out of balance. Some people have a good balance between the two. It sounds like you have a good balance between the two.

• 2:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, but also the allocation. I feel like it's a very dynamic thing. It's like,

• 2:11:33Lex Fridman?

  at least where for me personally, of the beauty between humans, of the dance, of the push and pull, of the different moods. It's like a dynamical system. It's not two static entities fully represented and consistent through every interaction. Sometimes, you know,

• 2:11:54Lex Fridman?

  people might confuse the fact that I often talk about love and I I love humans that I don't have a temper, that I don't have like, I lose my shit all the time, especially like on things I really am passionate about, like people I work with and so on. Yeah, I'm all over the place. There's but underneath it, there's a deep love and respect for humans. But like, I lose my shit all the time.

• 2:12:18Lex Fridman?

  And that that chaos, that roller coaster.

• 2:12:22Lex Fridman?

  I think that's what makes human relations awesome. I mean, the, the, the push and pull of it, of course, it can oscillate too far, which is when it becomes Amber Heard type of situation, when it turns to emotional or physical violence, when it turns to jealousy, crosses a, a line where it's hurtful. And there's like, it crosses that vast gray landscape of what is abuse versus what is just beautiful turmoil of human nature, right?

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And it's, it's complicated. It's, uh, yeah.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's complicated and it's, it's dynamic. And I would just add to, I, I thought you phrased that brilliantly. But I would just add to that, it also depends on sort of what you're trying to do. And so I think some of the oscillation can be what task, what problem you're trying to solve. And so if you're, I don't know, trying to, you know, build a bridge or something, you need to be very thing oriented and, uh, you know, make sure the damn thing actually works and doesn't collapse when a car goes over it. If you're trying to form a relationship, um, you know, and you're entirely thing oriented,

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  it's not going to work, you know? And that's, that's one of the people, uh, one of the things is with, and males tend to be more on the, on the so-called spectrum, uh, side of things where one of the hallmarks is a deficit in social mind reading. Just to add to your point about, I guess I've already made it, that of the dynamic properties of the roller coaster is depending on what problem you're trying to solve, you might want to toggle back and forth to one pole or the other.

• 2:14:14Lex Fridman?

  You wrote a book called Why Women Have Sex, Understanding Sexual Motivations From Adventure to Revenge. That sounds fun. And everything in between. So why do women have sex?

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  Well, I co-wrote it with a female who's Cindy Meston, a wonderful friend and colleague and co-author and co-collaborator. I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to write a book called Why Women Have Sex by myself as a male.

• 2:14:43Lex Fridman?

  Did you contribute anything to this book? I'm just kidding.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  I did, but I have to tell you a story about the origins of this idea, which I give credit to Cindy Meston for. And we were, she's a colleague in the psychology department with me. And we would go out to dinner once a week or so. And we were just talking about this. She raised this issue. And so we started to brainstorm. Originally, it was why humans have sex. And that's the scientific article we published was why humans, because we're interested in males and females. And so I said, I would come, well, they have sex because of X. And then Cindy Meston would come up. She'd say, oh, here are seven other reasons. And then I'd come up with one more. And she'd come up with another seven.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  So it was like, you know, so she's in some sense importantly, the, you know, originator or fountain of this, of this idea. But.

• 2:15:39Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so she's able, there's something about the way she thinks about sexuality that's able to deeply introspect about reasons for sex.

• 2:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and probably especially about female sexuality. And this is one of the interesting things and why it's so fun for me to collaborate with, with, in this case, female, because they do have a different sexual psychology than males. And so, and I've noticed this, that's why in my graduate society, I've like had 30 or so PhD students, about half of them male, half of them female. And the women come up with different questions, different scientific questions that I wouldn't have thought of necessarily. And so, and so anyway, so it turned out to be a good collaboration. I will, I will say that we co-wrote it and that I did contribute to it.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  And especially the evolutionary insights.

• 2:16:34Lex Fridman?

  So is there a good few words you can say? To why women have sex? What are some primary motivations?

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  Well, we originally came up with a list of 237 reasons for why, why humans have sex. And they range from, you know, some of the obvious ones, because it feels good, because I want it to relieve stress, to relieve menstrual cramps, to get rid of a headache, to get my boyfriend off my back so I could get some work done.

• 2:17:10Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  So things like that to, to others like, um, here's another one, so that he'd take out the damn garbage.

• 2:17:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  But another one, it was kind of interesting that someone, one nomination was to get closer to God. So there were some that were kind of spiritual motivations for having sex. And then some of the nastier ones, like to get revenge on my, you know, on my partner or to get revenge on a rival. So that's sleeping with my, you know, rival's boyfriend, you know? So there's some nasty stuff and some good stuff in there.

• 2:17:51Lex Fridman?

  It's so fascinating because yeah, sex has such a powerful role in our psychology, but also in our culture. So you can make significant statements about the, in the status hierarchy, about, about your sex, the selection of your sexual partner. It's interesting. So it's not just because you're horny. It's all those other kinds of things.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, hornyness is one, but there are, there are other reasons.

• 2:18:18Lex Fridman?

  What about different kinds of sex? So, you know, what's, again, this is not the Humor Man Lab podcast. Rough sex versus quote, making love. What's the explanation between all of that? All the various kink? Now, that's just a basic sort of split. But all the different kinks that humans establish, all the different fantasies and all those kinds of things.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's a complicated question for, for which I don't think we have sufficient time to get into that in, in detail. And, and it is complicated because there are some. Sexual fantasies that sexual fantasies, by the way, I think are really fascinating window into our sexual psychology, because in a way they're they're unconstrained by, you know, things like rules and norms in society and cultural presses that you're kind of free to fantasize about whatever you want to fantasize about. So I think it's it provides an interesting window into human sexuality. And there are some predictable

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  ones. And then there are some also individual or idiosyncratic ones. And and the again, there's a fundamental sex difference in in this in that when you talk about like fetishes, or like shoe fetishes, leather fetishes, different types of things, males are much more prone to those than females.

• 2:19:50Lex Fridman?

  Shoe fetish, you said?

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Shoe fetish.

• 2:19:52Lex Fridman?

  Foot fetishes?

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  Almost all fetishes. Males are overrepresented. And I think it's partly because there's some evidence that they're classically conditioned. So I think that first or early sexual experiences that people have kind of conditioned them to the cues that are present during those early ones. And so if your first sexual experience happened to be, you know, involved with visual images of shoes, or you're having to look in your shoes when you first had sex, that's just an example, or leather, or zippers, or whatever the case is, that people develop these very individualistic sexual turn ons based on these early sexual experiences.

• 2:20:38Lex Fridman?

  So it could also be, you said, have sex, but it could also be sexual feelings.

• 2:20:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:20:44Lex Fridman?

  Early sexual feelings, like, because it.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:47Lex Fridman?

  So I wonder what that is about men, that they have a more, when they first start experiencing sexual feelings, that.

• 2:20:56Lex Fridman?

  They're more sensitive to the cues and those cues somehow have a deep psychological effect on their development of their sexuality. So if they have kinks, that means they're somehow more cue sensitive and maybe, does it matter if society like slaps them on the wrist for it? Does that help solidify the kinks?

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I don't know about the society slapping them on the wrist, but I think what it is is this. I think this is the evolutionary hypothesis anyway about why there's this sex difference. And that is that men are conditioned to anything that's going to lead to sex. Because whereas women don't have to be.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  From male perspective, because of women's greater investment, because the nine month pregnancy, et cetera, in order to reproduce, women have to invest this tremendous amount. Men don't. One act of sex can produce an offspring. And so for men, but not for women. And so this huge asymmetry in investment means that the payoff matrix of different sexual strategies differs for the sexes. In that context, women become the valuable and scarce resource over which men compete. So anything that at least is successful sex is going to be selected for.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  And so men are very sensitive to being sexually conditioned. That's what's called sexual conditioning, to whatever cues are associated with sex happening. From a woman's perspective, sex is not a scarce resource. So a woman could go out here in Austin any night or probably any day on Sixth Street and have no problem having sex with a guy within 10 minutes. Okay, a guy would have more difficulty.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  He's not going to go out, you know, unless he's Johnny Depp or really, really charming.

• 2:23:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a fascinating dimorphism or asymmetry in our mate selection. What do you think is the effect on this young male brain, a female too, of pornography? So one of the fascinating things that the digital world brought us. Now, I grew up at a time when like a magazine, like a Victoria's Secret magazine, was like my source of sexual inspiration. But that was so that was before the internet. And now the internet with pornography makes it extremely accessible. All kinds of kinks, all kinds of wild variety.

• 2:23:47Lex Fridman?

  I mean, variety and quantity is immense. So what do you think that has, how that affects mate selection, mating, and just the human psychology of the, of the, of the two sexes of the species?

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question, a big question. So, I mean, we could have a whole podcast just on that, or at least talk for a while about it. So I'll just say a couple of things about that. One is, again, there's a sex difference, and I feel like I'm a broken record here, hammering on this, but it is-

• 2:24:25Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of, just to actually echo the thing, please be a broken record, because it's, it's interesting. The more we get to the mating, the more there's sex differences represent themselves, they surface.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And in many psychological domains, there are no sex differences, or the sexes are very similar. But pornography is consumed, about 80% of the consumers are men. So it is very heavily a male consumer industry, if you will. And I think that it can have positive and negative effects depending on the circumstances. So one potential negative effect is that men might develop unrealistic expectations about what sex will be like or should be like in, in real life.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  And so, and so I remember actually this, I just heard about this one case of, I won't mention any names, where a man got married and he had been accustomed to seeing very large breasts in his pornography consumption and discovered that his wife had what he perceived to be very small breasts. In fact, they were actually just medium size, but because he had been so heavily exposed to pornography and the artificially enhanced breast size that is often depicted in pornography, that he had come to expect something that

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  was, that was unrealistic. In this case, not leading, that's not, not the way to lead off to a great sex life with your wife by being disappointed in her breast size. So I think that people can develop, in this case, men, unrealistic expectations, also about the kind of sexual acrobatics that porn stars engage in. And when they get in real life situations, can put pressure on women to become, you know, to fulfill those, those kinds of images. But the other thing, the other kind of detrimental effect that it has is, and this is something that is emerging culturally, is I think it has a

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  dampening effect on men's pursuit of real life relationships. Because in some sense, it kind of bleeds off some of that sex drive or sexual desire, sexual energy. And so there, and some men get addicted to it. So they're spending hours and hours and hours a day consuming pornography. And so I think it can have a detrimental effect on, even on men's ambition.

• 2:27:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. There's something really powerful about that sexual energy, not to be all like spiritual about it, but.

• 2:27:23Lex Fridman?

  It seems like that somehow correlated with ambition. So like, uh, one of the things that pornography can take away is like, exactly as you said, is your pursuit of love out there, including women, but also love of things, meaning like building awesome epic things. So the love of both bridges and women. Yeah. Uh, bridge building and, and, uh, and relationship building. Yeah, there's something about that energy and, um, and also, um, yeah, there's a sort of a vicious downward spiral because it somehow staunch your development because it limits social interaction that, um,

• 2:28:08Lex Fridman?

  the push and pull of, of, uh, romantic social interaction. It cuts the edge off of that and it forces you to be, um, to spend way too much time with yourself without the development of that social interaction. Yeah, I don't, I don't know, but there, so outside of the, um, the expectations on all those kinds of things, it seems to have a detrimental effect on the development of the, of the human mind. Yeah. What, what is that? I don't, I don't, cause some of that is echoed and, you know, people talk about the metaverse, that some of our life will be in the digital space. And it's like, on one hand, well, if it brings you happiness, if it brings you joy,

• 2:28:47Lex Fridman?

  short term and long term, why is the metaverse not the same or better than the real world? But there is something still missing and what is that? Um, something of, of the pleasure you feel with porn is still missing. It's really not representing some of the fundamental pleasure you feel when you interact with real people. And that could be just the growth you experience, like real people can reject you. The challenge, the, again, the push and pull, all of that, the dance of human relationships.

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and the exploration of your sexuality. So on porn, you can kind of passively explore because you can see, you know, as you mentioned, a wide variety of things and people do that. But in terms of exploring your own sexuality, I think there's no replacement for a real human being.

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  So you've written about violence and here we're talking about porn and sex. I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but I'd love to ask your opinion on, quote, incels. So here I would like to quote Wikipedia. They define incels as members of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. They also write, now, I don't know if Wikipedia is the accurate source about incels, but here it is. They write, quote, "At least eight mass murders resulting in a total of 61 deaths have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self-identified as incels or who had mentioned

• 2:30:28Lex Fridman?

  incel-related names and writings in their private writings or internet postings. Incel communities have been criticized by researchers and the media for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views, and radicalizing their members." Is there some insight that you draw from this connection of sex and lack of sex to violence?

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think sex and violence are linked in various ways. And it's not just incels. So.

• 2:31:07Speaker 01

  If you look at serial killers, for example, and this is another thing that I've, true crime is a kind of a avocation of mine. I just enjoy reading about true crime and following true crime stories.

• 2:31:21Lex Fridman?

  Avocation.

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  Of hobby.

• 2:31:24Lex Fridman?

  A hobby.

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  Side, side, side interest.

• 2:31:27Lex Fridman?

  Super fancy word for hobby. I got it. Cool.

• 2:31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. That, like Ted Bundy, he was actually very charming and, and didn't have any trouble attracting women, but his killing spree started shortly after he was rejected by a very high status attractive woman. And he felt a rage about being rejected by her. Now, who knows? That's an N of one. And we don't know if, you know, you know, being rejected causes serial killing per se, but sex and violence are related in, in different ways. I argue,

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  and I haven't studied the incel community in detail. I actually have an incoming graduate student who's going to start in the fall, who, who has been studying the incels. And so he'll have a more informed picture. But my attitude is there are ways to improve your mate value. If you're having trouble attracting a mate, there are ways to improve your mate value. Because a lot of things that women want in a mate are improvable. You know, they, women want guys who are compassionate, who are understanding, who are ambitious, who, who acquire resources, et cetera. They're, who are physically fit. There are things

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  you can do to improve your mate value. And so I would say, rather than, I would encourage incels or the incel communities, rather than being hostile toward women or being angry at women, just do things to improve your mate value and then you will be more successful at attracting women.

• 2:33:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, some of it, that's fascinating. So your student will be studying that. There's a Listen, I love the internet. The internet always wins. And there's a fascinating aspect to it, which is just humor. And I, I'm fascinated by seeing the humor, whether it's 4chan or Reddit and all that kind of stuff, where, where people maybe will self-identify as incels as a joke, as a kind of, basically representing the fact that, you know, it's hard to get women. This, this, the struggle, the struggle, and for women, it's hard to get a mate that they, you know, they're basically jokingly representing the, the, the challenges, the difficulty of the mate selection process, that the desirable group is smaller than the entire group.

• 2:33:56Lex Fridman?

  That's it. And they're joking about it. But then it's interesting how quickly humor, again, a dynamical system, it can turn into anger. And that, on the internet, is so interesting to watch, like how trolling, light trolling, is humor, but it can turn into aggression. And I, I've just seen, it's weird. It's weird how, this is true on the internet, but you also just look at the dark aspects of the 20th century, that I've been reading a lot about, how kind of lighthearted things turn dark quickly. And it's interesting.

• 2:34:40Lex Fridman?

  I, I don't know what to make of it, because it's basically sexual frustration that all humans feel, it's, you know, dating in general, can turn into anger, can turn into sophisticated philosophical constructs, like, about how the world works, of who really is pulling the strings. Right. And that turns some of the worst crimes committed by the Nazis, for example, or by extremely intelligent people, that constructed models of how the world works. And there's, there's something about sexual frustration is one of the really powerful forces that could be a catalyst for constructing such models.

• 2:35:25Lex Fridman?

  And once you've done that...

• 2:35:28Lex Fridman?

  Shit gets a lot more serious and it's no longer joke, it's serious. But at the same time, when you just look from the surface, it's kind of jokes.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:37Lex Fridman?

  It's weird.

• 2:35:37Speaker 01

  That's interesting points that you're making. I, I think that this, this is one way in which evolution has built into us a, a feature which is really bad for our overall happiness. And, and that is that it's created desires that can never be fully met. You know, and that includes in the mating domain. So even with people who are successful in attracting, you know, somewhat desirable mates, maybe they want, you know, Giselle Bündchen or some, you know, they, they desire things that are, they're women that are higher in mate value or, or a larger number of partners

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  than they can successfully attract. And, and in a way, I mean, these, these serve as, evolution's built into these because they're motivational devices. They motivate us to try to get what we want, but it also makes us miserable or at least unhappy or dissatisfied because there are desires that can never be fulfilled. And this is, and this is to mention one more sex difference, this desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of different partners is much, much greater in men than in women. And so that's why even like in, in pornography consumption, men will like, you know, go through multiple, multiple, multiple images and sex scenes and so forth compared, compared

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  to what women who consume pornography go through. But this desire for sexual variety is, is something that makes men miserable because it's something that they can't, most men, unless you're a, a king or a despot or, you know, have, have a harem, it's something that can never be fulfilled in everyday life. And so I even think that. You know, you talk to men who are walking down a city block in Austin or New York City or San Francisco or wherever, and they pass by, they could pass by six women and feel a sexual attraction to six different women in one city block, you know.

• 2:37:50Speaker 01

  Now, and so this is again where evolution has created in this desires that can never be fully met.

• 2:37:58Lex Fridman?

  Stupid evolution. Well, it's useful, right? And the hilarious thing, this always pop up in my own mind, but just observing people. Once you get that 10 or that beautiful woman that you've been lost, you take her for granted and move on to the next thing.

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  There are classic cases like, I don't know if you remember this case, but Hugh Grant was with Elizabeth Hurley, who is a gorgeous model, and he was caught having sex with a prostitute. I think it was in LA or whatever. He's got Elizabeth Hurley, why are you having sex with a prostitute? But it's the male desire for sexual variety.

• 2:38:39Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me do a little bit of a tangent here and ask you about just your work in general in terms of its interaction with the scientific community and with the world at large. So many of the ideas you do research on are pretty controversial, or at least the topic is controversial somehow. Maybe you can speak to that. But what are your thoughts on the current climate of cancel culture? Or maybe there's a better term for it, that word is like loaded now, about you doing research in this space that is so sort of essential, so crucial to understanding human nature?

• 2:39:24Lex Fridman?

  How, what are the difficulties? What are the concerns for you to be able to freely explore?

• 2:39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been doing research on these things. So when you, when you combine. Sex or sexuality with sex differences with evolution. Each of these topics are controversial by themselves and you bring them together. The intersection becomes especially controversial. But I I guess view myself as a scientist. And so and so I would rather be scientifically correct than politically correct. If you will, so I don't I have no interest in I don't have an agenda.

• 2:40:13Speaker 01

  I don't have a political agenda. I don't have any agenda other than discovering human nature. That's what I've devoted my scientific career toward. And I'm and that's why I do the studies and responsive to empirical data. And and the best theories that we have available are best conceptual tools.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  So do some of these things upset people? Yeah, yeah, they do. As a matter of fact, even early in my career, before I started publishing on some of these things, I gave a talk in a sociology department. This was at University of Michigan. And a female professor came up to me afterwards and said, you know, you really shouldn't publish the results of your studies. And I said, why not? And she said that it would that that people women have it hard enough as it is without, you know, knowing about these things. And my view is my view is that's naive. I think suppression of scientific knowledge is is a bad thing.

• 2:41:16Speaker 01

  And suppression of scientific knowledge about sex differences is is a bad thing. Men and women are not psychological clones, especially when it comes to the mating domain and sexuality domain. The only other domain that shows massive sex differences that we haven't touched on is aggression and violence. So the the leading cause of violence. Is is being a male males have and the more extreme the violence, the more males have a monopoly on it. It's when you get to homicide, warfare, males have a monopoly on it. And we need to understand human nature and we need to understand sex differences

• 2:41:56Speaker 01

  therein in order to be in a position to effectively solve some of the social problems that these sex differences create. So, you know, so I've been gotten some flack. No one's tried to cancel me in my work so far. So I'm

• 2:42:17Lex Fridman?

  Just wait.

• 2:42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:19Lex Fridman?

  But does it hurt you personally? Just is it is it psychologically difficult, you know, to do this work? Because what is research is thinking deeply through things and like doing studies, but also interpreting them and thinking through what is the right questions to ask? What does this mean? And for that, you have to have a clear mind, a an optimistic mind, a free mind and all of that. So you're just a human. So psychologically, is it difficult? Does it wear on you?

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say not, not really. But I've been, I think, fortunate. So even say my latest book, I published a book recently on conflict between the sexes and and it deals with very controversial topics, including intimate partner violence, like with the Johnny Depp Amber Heard thing. And I don't talk about that in the book. But and and it's been largely well received, you know, and I think partly it's because I am careful in my publications not to endorse it. So one of the common conflagrations that people make is they think that it's something

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  that you think is good, you know, that, you know, if you find a sex difference that there should be a sex difference, this is the is ought confusion. And so I try to make it very clear that I'm studying what is not what ought to be. And a lot of things that I discover about what is the case, I would prefer them not to be. And I think you kind of alluded to this earlier by saying that we Have to override some of our violent inclinations or impulses, or the way I would phrase it is we have to.

• 2:44:12Lex Fridman?

  Control them?

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  Control or keep quiescent or suppress some of the nastier sides of of human nature. And and we've successfully done that in some domains. So you can talk about like one group that fascinates me is the Vikings and the whole that whole era. And so you have you have in in Sweden, Norway, for example, these are these have like the lowest homicide rates on earth. But you go back 400 years ago, 600 years ago, people were killing each other right and left, you know.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  And so and so finding that so this is let leaves me to be optimistic that we can change conditions to suppress our evolved proclivities, just like one one physical example that I sometimes use is callus producing mechanisms. We have evolved callus producing mechanisms that are very valuable. We develop thickness in the areas of our skin that have experienced repeated friction. But we can, in principle, design environments where we don't experience repeated friction. And so we won't grow calluses. And so you've designed an environment that basically prevents the activation of our callus producing mechanism.

• 2:45:36Speaker 01

  I think we can do the same thing with some of these other inclinations and and have succeeded in, you know, reductions of homicide in even in the last couple hundred years.

• 2:45:48Lex Fridman?

  And some of that has to do with the myths and stories we tell ourselves, like, again, it's language, because I mean, I love the Vikings.

• 2:45:56Lex Fridman?

  Valhalla, that idea.

• 2:45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:59Lex Fridman?

  That's a myth. That's an idea.

• 2:46:03Lex Fridman?

  That's a promise for the, for the great land beyond, over there beyond the mountains. It's like Animal Farm, Sugar Candy Mountain, that is promised to you if you're a great warrior. I believe Valhalla is where half the soldiers go as a reward for, for great soldiering, for being great warriors. And the thing I just recently have been reading quite a bit about Valhalla, which is, it's such a fascinating how these myths are constructed. I believe, I just think this is such an awesome setup in terms of a kind of heaven, which is they spend the entire day fighting.

• 2:46:48Lex Fridman?

  So they, for joy, and if they die, they're reborn the next day. So it's, it's, you're basically the passion, the thing you're passionate about without the consequences. On top of that, I think there's a pig or a boar that is, they keep eating. So it's regenerated every single day. So unlimited food and there's unlimited beer, I believe. So it's like, it's like- Or mead. Mead, mead, yes, yes, yes, it's mead. I don't know. That's, that's fascinating that we construct these myths. And at the same time, these myths can be used to get humans to do some of the worst atrocities.

• 2:47:32Lex Fridman?

  So some of the violence requires us to have those myths of what is waiting for us beyond death, sort of beyond, over there in Sugar Candy Mountain, as a crow says that in Animal Farm. And so, you know, I think the more and more in this modern society, the positive of not constructing so many myths is that we get to live more in the moment and that forces us to optimize and improve the moment and we get to face the irrational and the painful aspect of violence. Maybe we should reduce that in the here and now. Yeah, the downside is we may not, if we dispose of God or these kinds of religious and spiritual ideas, we might descend into, you know, what Nietzsche worried about with nihilism.

• 2:48:16Lex Fridman?

  And it's a beautiful dance because humans seem to tie themselves together with narratives.

• 2:48:20Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:48:21Lex Fridman?

  And with myths and stories that we all believe. If you completely dispose of them, society, I don't know, we don't know. We don't know what's going to happen, if it's going to collapse or if it's actually going to rediscover better myths, better stories, more scientifically grounded ones, ones that are driven in data and all those kinds of things.

• 2:48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't have any brilliant insights into it other than that, you know, to agree with you that people construct narratives, well, of their own lives and sometimes the life after death. But I guess I would add, and this is maybe a more cynical view, but you mentioned atrocities. I think that leaders can sometimes exploit those under them to create

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  forms of violence or justification for warfare. Like in, you know, like the group that we are conquering, they are subhuman. They're insects. They're an infectious disease that is, you know, and so these narratives can be used by leaders to exploit and motivate people under them to commit these atrocities. So it's a nastier part of our psychology, both that leaders do that, but also that people are vulnerable to narratives of that sort.

• 2:49:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to look pre-internet. You hope the internet makes us more resistant to that, which I do have probably a question on that. But if you look at just the propaganda machines during World War II, on the Nazi side and on the Soviet side, on every side, but particularly in those two. It's so fascinating, both how effective a simple message can be in a leader being able to convince the small inner circle around them. Convince themselves, which is fascinating propaganda. You start to believe the propaganda you generate. And then how easily the populace is convincible.

• 2:50:37Lex Fridman?

  Again, you hope that the internet, the distributed nature of the internet makes it more difficult to run a propaganda campaign, at least of the classical sort. I do have a question about this because you mentioned Elon Musk. When we're talking about status hierarchies, like you and I can't buy Twitter.

• 2:50:55Speaker 01

  And wealth accumulation, yeah.

• 2:50:57Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about Elon buying Twitter? In particular, in the reason, the state of reason that he's doing so in emphasizing free speech.

• 2:51:10Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question, but I don't really have an informed opinion about it. You know, I don't know.

• 2:51:17Speaker 01

  It's not my area of expertise and I don't, I don't know enough details. And I also don't know what his plans are for Twitter. What, what changes he plan proposes to implement.

• 2:51:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, the reason I bring that up is because, and you, you've kind of said you don't necessarily feel a tremendous amount of pressure, but in doing controversial research, in doing research on controversial topics, you're also a communicator. And Twitter is a platform in which you communicate and there's going to be, if you get canceled somewhere, you get canceled on Twitter. And so there's pressure. So what does free speech look like in these public platforms? It's communicating difficult ideas. It's changing your mind, is exploring ideas and not fearing the mob.

• 2:52:09Lex Fridman?

  The mob that pressures the platform to remove you from the platform or to ban you, shadow ban you from the platform, decrease your reach artificially on the platform. And those are really fascinating questions that we get to deal with in this new digital age. So there's a lot of ideas. We said what Elon was planning to do. Forget Elon, how do you do this? Well, that's the question. And there's sort of an absolutist view of free speech, let anyone say anything. And I tend to be a person that believes everybody should have the freedom to say anything. The question with a social media platform is, well.

• 2:52:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you force anyone to hear what you have to say? Because the virality, the viral nature of communication means that you can control who hears what you say. Yeah. The virality of that, the search and discovery aspect. And I think that's a fascinating question from the algorithmic perspective. The amount of data out there, just like papers, there's a huge amount of papers. What you want is to find the best papers, the ones you agree with, but also the ones that challenge you. And you don't want to nonstop read the papers that challenge you. You're going to be mentally exhausted. There's a bucket of attention and focus and mental energy you can allocate.

• 2:53:34Lex Fridman?

  The ones that really challenge you, the ideas that really challenge you are exhausting. It's good, just like going to the gym, it's good. But then you also want to read things that are fun for you. And those are, you know, if you're spending your whole life in arguments, that's going to be exhausting. You want to hang out, chill with your friends, watch some Netflix, have fun, whatever. Easygoing and sometimes have difficult academic arguments with people, for example, with people you disagree with, but not all the time. You have to have a platform. What does free speech actually looks like? It's a platform where everybody can challenge anybody, but not destroy them by doing so mentally.

• 2:54:15Lex Fridman?

  So you have to balance personal growth of each individual person on the platform. But definitely removing people from a platform is a terrible thing. So on top of that, it's like, how do you get measures that the platform is doing good? What I really like what Elon said, and I've talked to him about this, is pissing off everybody equally, the extremes of every side equally. In the political spectrum, we could say the left and the right, is measuring by pissing off the extremes equally, because currently there seems to be an asymmetry in that. So that's one good measure that allows you to maximize, as he says,

• 2:54:57Lex Fridman?

  the area under the curve of human happiness. That's one thing. The other is people representing themselves honestly. So removing the bots from the platform. It's such a weird world to live in where you don't know who's real or not. So anonymity is an awesome thing.

• 2:55:17Lex Fridman?

  The awesome aspect of anonymity is it protects people's privacy. It actually gives them freedom to think, freedom to speak even more so. But when anonymity is weaponized, it allows you to be cruel to others without the repercussion of cruelty that you would feel in the physical world. Right. So you want to use anonymity as a shield versus as a sword. So to protect yourself from the attacks of others, but not as a way to hurt others. And those are all really tricky things to figure out. And it not, you know, not all of it's going to be solved with an edit button, which I believe is the most requested Twitter feature.

• 2:55:57Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, I think, I think this is really, I think this is fascinating, not just for people talking about politics, which is what everyone seems to care about, but also for science, for people challenging each other in the scientific domain. Because I, I at least have hope for scientific communication where people can start playing around with different mediums of communication. So not just academic papers, but just ideas. Yeah. Playing with those ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you have, so evolutionary psychology, well, no, that even that, it can be super high turnover, uh, turnover rate of importance. But you know, you have with COVID, it seems like the progress of science and scientific debate

• 2:56:41Lex Fridman?

  is most powerful in that context if it's done really quickly. And it feels like Twitter, like most, most of the best things I've learned about COVID to stay up to date was, uh, was on Twitter. Yeah. It's so exciting to see, uh, science happening so, so, so quickly in all kinds of domains there. And that, that was great. But then you step in with labels of what's misinformation. You have this kind of, uh, conformity-seeking labels of what is true and not, which is a very unscientific thing to me in the name of protecting the populace. It's a weird, it's a weird, um, impulse that people have, which is,

• 2:57:24Lex Fridman?

  well, here's an organization, here's an institution that is a possessor of the truth and everybody else is untrue. Now, a lot of the time, maybe majority of the time, that institution is going to be correct. This consensus, consensus is the consensus because it's usually correct. But the biggest ideas are going to be against the consensus. And certainly that's true in evolutionary psychology where it seems like, are we even, is the cake even baked yet? It feels like there's a lot of turmoil in terms of figuring out human psychology.

• 2:57:58Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot that we don't know. I mean, if human psychology, if it were a simple thing and we only had, you know, three or half a dozen psychological adaptations, we would have discovered all of them by now. It's, it's that it's so complex, multifaceted, multi mechanism. Part that describes human nature that it was, what makes it exciting, but also the amount that we know is small compared to the amount that we don't know. And so that's why you have to approach these things with, with a certain humility.

• 2:58:40Speaker 01

  And that's why even like in the, in the mating and sexuality domain, which I've been studying for a number of years, I keep coming across things that I don't know, questions that are unanswered, which, which is, is makes it exciting from my perspective. I mean, that's what the joy is of being, being a scientist.

• 2:59:01Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned, I gotta return real quick to Ted Bundy. You mentioned you have, so you, you, you've written about murder and violence.

• 2:59:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:59:10Lex Fridman?

  In a long distant past, but the thread runs through your work today. Who to you is the most fascinating serial killer of, of the, of the true crime?

• 2:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:22Lex Fridman?

  Things that you've explored.

• 2:59:23Speaker 01

  I think, well, Ted Bundy's way up there. I think Charles Manson. Yeah. And is another.

• 2:59:34Lex Fridman?

  Have you seen on Ted Bundy, because I find him super fascinating. Have you seen, uh, there's a lot of movies on him. Extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile. It's a retelling of his life from the perspective of his girl, long term girlfriend.

• 2:59:49Speaker 01

  No, I have not seen that one.

• 2:59:50Lex Fridman?

  Which ties together a lot of our conversation. So I, it's probably my favorite one. A lot of people say it's the best movie on Ted Bundy's, she should definitely watch it.

• 2:59:58Speaker 01

  I will.

• 2:59:59Lex Fridman?

  I recommend it to others, but it's from a perspective. Uh, of the relationship and it just. One of the really powerful.

• 3:00:11Lex Fridman?

  Windows into a serial killer that I saw there is that from the perspective of the relationship, you can have just this healthy looking relationship. Yeah, there's some fights and so on. But the usual dating and all that kind of stuff is all there. So all the murders he was doing, he had a long term girlfriend throughout all of that. And also throughout all of that, I'll try not to give away in case you don't know the story. Throughout all of that, she stood by side. She refused to believe everything that was happening.

• 3:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Until, until, um, you know, the very end, of course, it shifts in the very end, and that's a fascinating shift of the, the breaking of the, the illusion. But it's really fascinating that you can have those two things that you.

• 3:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that part of it is we have these stereotypes that we expect people like serial killers to be these, um, ugly, um, drooling creatures that are sort of evil all the time. Uh, and so, um, that's why even like you had, um, I don't know if this is, if I'm remembering this correctly, but like Stalin, who killed, you know, millions of people, apparently like loved his kids and loved his family and people. So, so we have this part of the complication, uh, the, the complexity of human nature and human psychology is we,

• 3:01:36Speaker 01

  we don't have just this one, you know, this one property that dictates how we behave in all circumstances.

• 3:01:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the devil is going to be charismatic. That's why, um.

• 3:01:54Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the things I've learned.

• 3:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:57Lex Fridman?

  While just looking at evil people, looking at Jeffrey Epstein, who seemed to have hoodwinked quite a lot of people.

• 3:02:03Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, that's another, that's another fascinating case. Yeah, not of a, he wasn't a serial killer, but a serial sexual predator.

• 3:02:11Lex Fridman?

  And a lot of people I know and respect didn't see the evil.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:20Lex Fridman?

  And so I never met the guy, but it's like, are you guys oblivious? Like, what, what was, there must have been something, and from everything I see is purely just charisma. It's, it's, it's the smoke and mirrors.

• 3:02:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:35Lex Fridman?

  That.

• 3:02:35Speaker 01

  Well, he was a very charming psychopath.

• 3:02:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I, I think every psychopath, to be effective, has to be charming.

• 3:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, the successful ones, yeah. Yeah, successful psychopaths.

• 3:02:48Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:02:50Speaker 01

  And that was, I mean, Ted Bundy was one. He was a good looking guy, intelligent, and could turn on the charm. And, and then had this evil.

• 3:03:02Lex Fridman?

  Is there something interesting to be said that I think a large percentage of the fanbase, like I've seen numbers like 80% plus of the fanbase for true crime shows is women? Is there, is there some psychology behind that?

• 3:03:15Speaker 01

  I haven't seen that, I'm not aware of it. A sex difference that I'm not aware of.

• 3:03:20Lex Fridman?

  That you should, I mean, I, I've, I've heard that in a lot of places. So I wonder if there's some, uh, there's something about true crime, maybe because it's, um, just, just like sexual kinks for, for men develop early on for the, the cues. Maybe for women, there's the cues of the threat of violence. The attentiveness to violence develops early on and so, and therefore fascination with violence.

• 3:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, well, I think that, I mean, one thing is that. Well, with serial killers specifically, I don't know if this is true of true crime in general, but serial killers, like you find a lot of people, a lot of women fall in love with them, or even if they're jailed for serial killing. And I think one of the features of it is that it parasitizes or hijacks status mechanisms in that a key cue to status is the attention structure. That is, the high status people are the people to whom the most people pay the most attention.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  And so serial killers garner a lot of attention, and even though for evil deeds, it's still attention. So I think that that hijacking of our status allocation adaptations is partly responsible for that.

• 3:04:46Lex Fridman?

  Is there, given the trajectory of your life, you mentioned Berkeley and the East Coast, Michigan, you got everything. Is there, given the trajectory of your life, in geography and in science, can you give advice to young folks today, high school, college, thinking about how to make their own trajectory, how to make their own way through life that they can be proud of, either career, or just love life, or life?

• 3:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, not necessarily on careers, but I can give advice on mating, you know? And I think it's one of these things where, you know, we have requirements in, for the courses that students have to take in high school, for example. And I think there should be a required course on relationships, on mating.

• 3:05:40Lex Fridman?

  So not just sex?

• 3:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not, not, not sex at all. Yeah, because I mean, most of what's taught is they teach you about sexual health and how not to get an STI and so forth.

• 3:05:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, my, my teacher put a condom on a banana.

• 3:05:55Speaker 01

  Right, right, but, but.

• 3:05:57Lex Fridman?

  It's very exciting.

• 3:05:57Speaker 01

  But, um, how, how to select a mate? Um, how do you know if you're in a bad mating relationship? Uh, how to, how to get out of a, you know, a, a bad mating relationship? I think that, uh, that there's, at this point in the science, even though there's a lot that we don't know, we know enough to at least provide some heuristics or general guy, guidelines to things to watch out for. So just as, as a concrete example, uh, with intimate partner violence, uh, and this is male to female, there are statistical predictors of is this guy, does he have an increased probability of beating you up? Uh, and there are things

• 3:06:39Speaker 01

  like if he starts to insist on knowing where you are at all times, if he starts cutting off your relationships with your friends and your family. Um, so there are these kind of early warning signs, and I think women should know about those. Uh, or even things like, um, that women are most in danger of being killed by an ex during the first three to six months after they've broken up with him. You know, that, that sometimes they think it's, you know, the guy will say, oh, meet with me one, one last time and then I won't bother you again. Um, no, this is a dangerous time. So I think there's some knowledge that

• 3:07:20Speaker 01

  we do know that can be used to make informed decisions about our mating lives, and I think that should be taught.

• 3:07:26Lex Fridman?

  So consider that, like, take that, the, the mating strategies, the mating, the mating life seriously.

• 3:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, uh, because, um, you know, aside from a small number of people who are totally uninterested in any kind of mating or sexuality, and there are small percentage that fall into that category, um, we all confront problems of mating.

• 3:07:51Lex Fridman?

  How do you, you know, there's that, uh, called the mathematical model, like secretary problem, marriage problem. I don't know if you're familiar, but basically you have, it's, it's silly, perhaps not, uh, it's a formalized, simplified.

• 3:08:08Lex Fridman?

  Cueing theory type of thing where you have N subjects and you get to date some number of people and then there's a stopping condition, I believe it's N over E, beyond which you pick the next partner, which is better than anybody you've dated before. So let's not over emphasize that idea, but if I were to psychologize it, I would say that some exploration is good, some dating is good, but at a certain point you pick somebody, given the set of people you've explored, you pick somebody who is pretty

• 3:08:53Lex Fridman?

  desirable within that group.

• 3:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but I would add that what you also want to do is you want to mate with someone who's equivalent in mate value, or has even what's more difficult is has a likely equivalent future mate valued trajectory, because nothing remains static.

• 3:09:18Lex Fridman?

  Yes, that's beautiful.

• 3:09:20Speaker 01

  But it's also the case that there are individual things, we haven't talked about these, but things like religious orientation, political orientation, values, these are extremely important to be compatible on. And so you do have cases of, let's say, a Democrat marrying a Republican, and that sometimes works, but you're going to get into a lot of conflict, other things being equal, or someone who's deeply religious versus someone who is not at all religious, this is going to be a problem, or someone who's of a different religious faith. And so compatibility on those things, compatibility

• 3:10:03Speaker 01

  also on personality dimensions, I think there's some main effects, like so I would, I would recommend avoiding that dimension we talked about of emotional instability, because if you sign up for that, you at least should know you're going to be in for a lot of conflict. It may be exciting at times, but there's going to be a lot of ups and downs.

• 3:10:23Lex Fridman?

  Know what you sign up for. What about how much to date? So there's a culture, I'm speaking soon to a founder and longtime ex CEO of Tinder. So there's that culture of digitalized dating of swipe right, swipe left. Is it positive, negative? How much did you date? What's the number? And also, what number of sexual partners should you, what's optimal? Asking for a friend.

• 3:10:54Speaker 01

  I don't know if there's a single optimum there.

• 3:10:58Lex Fridman?

  I was hoping there was.

• 3:10:59Speaker 01

  I think.

• 3:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Is it, is it single digits or double digits? I need answers.

• 3:11:05Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I get some of my wisdom from lyrics from songs.

• 3:11:10Lex Fridman?

  So. Me too.

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  This Eagle song, I think Don Henley said something like, there are too many lovers in one lifetime. Ain't good for you, or something like that.

• 3:11:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, I think there is.

• 3:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Take it easy is a good one, too. Or basically, don't get, don't get too attached. Don't take it, don't take heartbreak too seriously.

• 3:11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, but I think, I mean, you know, internet dating and, you know, there's, there's been some work on them. I think has its pluses and minuses, you know. And one of the pluses is it gives you access to potential pools of mates that you could never possibly meet in real life. You know, where mating, dating used to be either people you knew, or friends of friends, or you go out to bars or parties, but so that's the good thing. Gives you access to those extended pools. But also, it gives people the illusion that there's always someone better out there for you. Someone who's just a little more attractive, a little more compatible, a little more.

• 3:12:16Speaker 01

  And so it produces what's sometimes called decision paralysis. You know, you have too many options and you can't choose. I think one, one other potential negative, which I think could be corrected by these internet dating sites, is that the picture, the photographs, the, of the, of the face and body tend to overwhelm all other sources of information. And so especially if you're, if you're just looking for a sex partner, that's one thing. Physical appearances, it's fine for that to be overwhelmingly important. But if you're looking for a long-term mate, there's so many other things that are really, really important.

• 3:12:57Speaker 01

  And so, but, but people tend to be swamped by the visual input, which is natural, because that's where we evolved to respond to visual input. We're not evolved to respond to words, you know, like, oh, I'm, I like to go fishing or something like that. So if there's some way for these sites to, in long-term, meaning for these other characteristics to be made more salient in people's information processing, I think that would be a valuable improvement.

• 3:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because even, forget long-term beauty, even sex appeal is, is, like, given the word appearance, it feels like, to me, people that are super sexy in real life are a lot more than their picture.

• 3:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:49Lex Fridman?

  Like, it's actually surprising, like, they come to life in different ways.

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:13:54Lex Fridman?

  It could be either submissiveness as shyness, or extravagant wit and humor, or like, super confident, or super, like, whatever they are, whatever the weirdness that they are comes through, you meet, so when people say, well, which is the case of the, of sort of proponents of dating apps, it's like, well, when you meet somebody at a bar, you're getting the same experience as you do on a dating site, you have very little information, all you get is appearance. But I don't think appearance on the screen is the same as appearance in real life.

• 3:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:14:29Lex Fridman?

  Especially with people that, for some reason, you find super sexy. Because like, and, again, the objectification that we mentioned earlier is the, it over-optimizes for people who are good at taking pictures of themselves. Like, they're representing themselves inaccurately. They're not just even in the physical features, but in the way those physical features are used in physical reality. Like, in terms of body language, in terms of flirtation, in terms of just everything, everything put together. So I just, I wonder if there's a way to close that, to close that gap. And I don't know what that is exactly. I tend to believe more information is good on dating. I don't use, actually, dating apps, I just,

• 3:15:13Lex Fridman?

  because they don't make any sense to me, because there's not enough information. Like, what this, like, to me...

• 3:15:22Lex Fridman?

  Like whether you know Dostoevsky or not is important. And I don't mean that because you've read specifically a book by Dostoevsky, but there's something about have you suffered? Have you thought about life deeply? Have you been shaken in some way? And that's not, sometimes books can reveal that. Sometimes something else can reveal that. But this kind of very shallow resume like, I like to travel. I have boobs.

• 3:15:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:15:49Lex Fridman?

  It's like this kind of thing is, it loses the humanity of it all.

• 3:15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:53Lex Fridman?

  I want, because, listen, as a fan of technology, I would love dating to open up, like you said, the pool of possibilities out there. The soulmate idea, like, I believe that there's incredible people out there for you that is an emotional connection, not just a physical connection. And so that the promise of

• 3:16:15Lex Fridman?

  digital tech is that you can discover those people. And that's not just for romantic relationship, it's for friendships, it's for business partners, it's for all that kind of stuff, like your, your friend groups. But yeah, there's something, seems broken about dating sites.

• 3:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's why, I mean, when I'm asked for advice on this, I say, if you feel like you have a connection with someone, meet them in person, meet them in, in real life.

• 3:16:41Lex Fridman?

  And take a road trip, like you said.

• 3:16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:43Lex Fridman?

  Stress test it.

• 3:16:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Cause there's only, I mean, so much you can learn through messaging and so forth.

• 3:16:54Lex Fridman?

  Amongst all of this, we didn't really, we didn't really mention love, which is hilarious. So let me ask you, in the last just few questions, what's the role of love in all of this, in the, in the human condition? So if we talked about mating, we talked about mate selection, we talked about all the things we find attractive in a mate, the status hierarchies and all that kind of stuff. What about that deep connection with a human being that's hard to explain?

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about it a little bit, but so if we're talking about love, like, like romantic love, I think it's an evolved emotion that evolved in part to solidify long-term pair bonds. And is it different from the love of a parent for a child, or brotherly love, or sisterly love, or other friendship love? I think it's, these are different phenomena. But if we're talking about romantic love, I think it's an evolved emotion. Leading hypothesis is that it's a, it's a commitment device. So if I say to a potential mate, "Oh, you

• 3:18:09Speaker 01

  exceed my minimum thresholds on intelligence and, and looks, I think we, we make a good couple."

• 3:18:16Lex Fridman?

  It's a good pick-up line.

• 3:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wouldn't, it wouldn't do much emotionally. But if, but if you say, you know, "I, I love you, it's, I can't, I can't stop thinking about you, it's this uncontrollable emotion that I feel toward you." It's, it's a sign that, you know, that I'm committed to you, at least for a while. And I'm not going to abandon you when, when, you know, if you're an eight, and when an eight point five comes along, I'm not going to drop you and go with the eight point five.

• 3:18:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's, that's so interesting, but that's, you know, it's still, it's still the reality of the emotion is there. However it evolved, it's still there. And it's interesting. It's one of the more puzzling pieces here. Even broader than romantic love, but in romantic love, like, what is that? How much of that is nature? How much of it is nurture? Because even, I mean, I ask that myself all the time. Like, I'm deeply romantic. How much is that is nature? How much of it is nurture? How much is the, the people I spent my childhood with? The ideas, I mean, um, the Soviet Union sort of is known for the literature and the

• 3:19:33Lex Fridman?

  movies and so on that are, that are very over, that are heavily romanticized. I don't want to say over romanticized. Maybe there's no such thing, but so maybe, what is that? Is that my upbringing or is that some, somewhere in the genetics? That I value that emotional connection?

• 3:19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, most humans have the capacity for love. You know, whether it is activated in any individual person such as you or anyone else, it is going to be adjusted or suppressed by different social and cultural and upbringing factors. You know, I mean, there, there are cultures where parents basically lock away girls, they cloister them and so they can't ever meet anyone else until they, the parents arrange to marry them. So they, they're, they override any possibility of, of love.

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  But I, I think, I think it's an evolved emotion. And, um, I mean, one kind of test of this, and this is just slightly circumstantial evidence, but in China, historically, there have been arranged marriages and then, you know, individual choice marriages. The arranged marriages tend to have higher breakup rates and lower child production than the ones that are sort of voluntarily chosen, you know, so-called.

• 3:21:08Lex Fridman?

  I've heard sort of contrasting stuff from India. I, I wonder, contrasting, so with where the arranged marriages are longer lasting.

• 3:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:18Lex Fridman?

  It's so interesting because you said China.

• 3:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:21Lex Fridman?

  I would love to see the data and the dance of that because maybe there's a lot of other interesting factors, like how the arranged marriage is arranged.

• 3:21:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:21:29Lex Fridman?

  Is it for the families? Is the interest of the families for some kind of like in the monarchies to make agreements, to trade resources, or is the interest of the family to maximize the success of the marriage? So compatibility, is it, are they looking for maximize compatibility, or are they looking to maximize resources?

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  Well, historically, it's often been an arrangement where they're trying to maximize the status and power of the alliance with this other extended family. But that also varies from culture to culture. Like there's the Tiwi culture where there's, you know, the men basically bestow their daughters on other men, and they try to gauge which men, which of these young up and coming men are really going to be, you know, chiefs, high status guys, and which ones are going to be losers. And so you have this weird phenomenon, they have polygynous marriage, where a guy will

• 3:22:33Speaker 01

  get one daughter bestowed on him, and then other men use that as information that this guy must be rising in status, and so they give their daughters to the guy as well. This guy might go from like zero to seven wives in very short.

• 3:22:48Lex Fridman?

  The rich get richer. That's fascinating. The Game of Thrones and sex is a part of that game. Let me ask you about yourself, your own self. We mentioned Richard Wrangham. Think about mortality. Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?

• 3:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting. I'm not afraid of death. I agree with Richard Wrangham. I'm not eager to leave the party. I don't want to leave the party soon. I enjoy life in all of its interesting complexities. I enjoy my scientific work. I enjoy my relationships with other people. I enjoy exploring the universe, so I'm not eager to leave, but I'm not afraid of it. And I think. Part of that is that I was married for a while and my wife died prematurely of cancer.

• 3:23:51Speaker 01

  And so I spent basically eight months with her watching her die after she was diagnosed. And there's some weird, it was a horrible time for me and for her, obviously, but there's some way in which it kind of made it more familiar so that it's became a lot less frightening. You know, but.

• 3:24:17Lex Fridman?

  How did that experience change you just as a scientist, as a thinker about humanity? As a, as a human yourself?

• 3:24:28Speaker 01

  Well, I.

• 3:24:29Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying you felt like you felt a little bit more ready for this whole end of the party?

• 3:24:36Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's, I mean, because we tend to be afraid of things that we're not familiar with, you know, and so if you're familiar with it, I don't know, at least in my case, that, that caused a lessening of fear on that dimension. But I don't know, it also kind of, you know, there are these existential thoughts that it brought about, like how ephemeral life is. And, and I remember this Richard Dawkins quote, he said something like, we are all gonna die and we're the lucky ones.

• 3:25:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that we got, we even got a chance.

• 3:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, or even, you mentioned Russian writers, one of my favorite writers is Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, I don't know if you've read him, but he, he said once that life is a chink of light between two eternities of darkness.

• 3:25:38Lex Fridman?

  And you're saying that's not terrifying to you?

• 3:25:41Speaker 01

  Well, I prefer, I'm happy with the prior, the first eternity of darkness. I prefer the second not to occur, but, but it's going to occur. I mean, it's, we know that Elon Musk aside, I, I'm skeptical that we'll be colonizing other planets in any substantive way. And so our, our star, our sun will, will burn out. And so it's going to take a few billion years or so, but it will, eventually the earth will become a cold lump of dirt floating around in the universe with no life on it.

• 3:26:22Lex Fridman?

  So it's not just your light, the light of your consciousness. It's the light of our human civilization that will eventually go out.

• 3:26:31Speaker 01

  Yes, everything. At least here, I do believe that there is life and intelligent life in other parts of the universe on other planets.

• 3:26:43Lex Fridman?

  I sometimes wonder if the second eternal darkness is the thing that makes the light possible. So in the other places out there, I wonder how successfully can you truly be without the deadline of death, both at the human scale and at the civilizational scale. I feel like we, in order, in order to create anything beautiful, we have to live on the edge of destruction.

• 3:27:13Lex Fridman?

  That seems to be, you know, some people would say that's just a feature of our past, that our future can be otherwise. But, you know, like you, I'm somebody that looks at the data and currently the data says otherwise. But of course, we're constantly changing the data because we're, there's change. So we'll see what we see. I wonder what the future, future holds for us. Speaking of which, as a, you know, as somebody who has a textbook on evolutionary psychology.

• 3:27:46Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the meaning of the whole thing? What's the meaning of life? You're very good at describing how the human mind is the way it is. But why is it here at all? What's the purpose?

• 3:28:00Speaker 01

  Well, I can give you my answer to that, but I would actually love to hear your answer, because I know you've asked this question of dozens and dozens of people on your podcast. And what are your thoughts on that?

• 3:28:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, first of all, my mind changes on that a lot. And I think the process of answering the question is the fun thing, not the actual final answer. I think the question itself is the most fun thing. But for me, usually is two things. One is love. And we can talk a long time. What I mean by that is it's not just romantic love. And two is to create, and hopefully to create beauty. So, and again, I can talk forever what that means. For me personally, creating beauty means engineering and creating experiences, like connection with others.

• 3:28:54Lex Fridman?

  On the love side, it's just the actual feeling, the experience of deep appreciation of everything around you, like the sensory experiences of everything around you, just feeling it every single moment, saying, I'm damn glad to be alive. That light with the darkness on your side, just being appreciative, like being in the experience of truly present and experiencing it. Because it's not going to be there for long, the whole thing ends. And that, to me, is love.

• 3:29:38Lex Fridman?

  And the reason romantic love is so important is that other people are just awesome. They're fascinating black boxes that can generate awesomeness. So can like other animals and objects for me, but humans in particular, for some reason, are just generators of awesomeness.

• 3:30:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:30:01Lex Fridman?

  They surprise us.

• 3:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:30:04Lex Fridman?

  And therefore a good target of love.

• 3:30:08Speaker 01

  Well, so that's a much more eloquent answer than than I could give, but I'll just say a thought or two on that. And I mean, one of the things, the, you know, what is the meaning of of life? I mean, in some sense, if you're thinking about some eternal purpose, meaning like if we look five billion years hence, you know, will any of this mean anything? I think the answer to that is probably no. Okay. But and this is, I think, where my answer would concur with yours is that I think we have a rich, evolved psychology

• 3:30:49Speaker 01

  that contains many complex adaptations. And at any one moment in time, most are quiescent, most are not activated. But for me, part of the meaning of life is experiencing the activation of a lot of these complicated, evolved psychological mechanisms. And they include romantic love, they include friendship, they include being part of a group or coalition, because I think we're an intensely coalitional species. So there's something about being a group member. So like, just even, I don't know if you're in in sports, if your your

• 3:31:34Speaker 01

  team wins, you feel that somehow that's you're part of that. And but this goes for both the positive and the and the darker sides of things. So, so, for example, warfare, you see these men who have been through a war together and who where their lives have depended on each other, and they're like, best friends for for life, and have a bond that is stronger than most people form with a friend ever in their life, because they've been through the these life or death experiences. And so, you know, I wouldn't want to, you know,

• 3:32:19Speaker 01

  Doesn't cause me to want to charge off and be in war, but, but there are some types of adaptations, even like warfare adaptations, where in principle, I would like to experience them. I would like to experience and never will, but you know, what is it like to be in a coalition where you are in combat with another coalition? And not, not modern warfare, because it's, it's, you know, horrible, but where your life is in danger, where your life, you depend for your life on other people and they're depending for their life on you.

• 3:32:55Speaker 01

  And there's this kind of coalitional solidarity that is, is unique. Now, another thing that of course I'll never be able to experience is, is murder, because I'm never going to murder anybody. Okay. But The night is young. But studying homicidal ideation really gave me a, was an, it was an eye opener. It was as interesting as studying sexual fantasies, because the, if you ask what triggers homicidal thoughts, ideation, most people have had them. And, and I, because I asked this question, have you ever thought about killing someone? And, and I get that 91% of

• 3:33:38Speaker 01

  the men say yes, and about 84% of women say no. And even when I talk to people, they say, one on one, they'll say, oh no, I've never thought of killing someone. What kind of person do you think I am? And then 10 minutes later, I say, actually, there was this one time when I got, this guy humiliated me in public and I, you know, and, and so, but I think thoughts about killing, homicidal ideation, and they're very predictable from an evolutionary perspective. If you, like we mentioned mate poachers earlier and Infidelity and there are other things, but things like that, being humiliated in in public, status loss, you know,

• 3:34:19Speaker 01

  do trigger homicidal thoughts. So, so anyway, I don't go off too much on that. But I guess what I'm saying in answer to your question is, is experiencing the rich array of complex psychology that we have within us, most of which remains unactivated and some of which will never be experienced. Like, you know, there are some people who will never never experience love, for example, because of, you know, cultural restrictions or or whatever. And so to me, that that's part of the meaning of life.

• 3:34:57Lex Fridman?

  So that's so beautifully put, the saying that they're kind of dormant, inactivated aspects of the, so the psychological mechanisms. So we have the capacity to experience a bunch of stuff. It's almost like in video games, you can unlock levels and so on. And so this is basically, there's all of these things that are dormant in our mind that we have the capacity to experience. And part of the meaning is to try to experience as many of them, or as many new ones novel for the particular society, or maybe the entirety

• 3:35:37Lex Fridman?

  of human civilization, who knows psychedelic drugs, like you said, violence, experiences that might have to do with brain-computer interfaces, the interaction with all of those are experiences. And so the question is, what is the ceiling? What are like, how infinite or nearly infinite is the capacity of the human mind to experience all those things? And we'll get to, we'll get to discover those things. So I'm glad you never got a chance and never will get a chance to murder. But I just want to put it on record that, you know, that's definitely something on my bucket list. Why do you think I dress like this? Anyway. There is something appealing. Like, one of my favorite movies is Leon the Professional.

• 3:36:21Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that movie.

• 3:36:22Lex Fridman?

  What is that? Why is that so exciting? Listen, maybe it's the OCD thing.

• 3:36:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, killing other bad guys.

• 3:36:30Speaker 01

  Right. No women, no children.

• 3:36:33Lex Fridman?

  No children. Also loving that with Natalie Portman, incredible actress. Also, the complex, whatever that is, the fatherly or romantic, whatever that is, like Lolita type of thing. I don't know what. I've never, like, read a PhD thesis on that interpretation of that movie. But that's a fascinating one. Violence and violence and love and sex. That's what makes life worth living. That's what makes it fun. David, you're an incredible person, incredible scientist. It's a huge honor to share a city with you. Or I'm the visitor. You own this place. You run this place.

• 3:37:12Speaker 01

  Well, I don't. We both live here now.

• 3:37:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:15Speaker 01

  And it's been great talking to you. It's a great honor for me. I've followed your podcast for a long, long time now and tremendously enjoy your interviews. And you have a very inquisitive, inviting style that brings out things in your guests, which I think is fantastic. Activates all those dormant psychological mechanisms.

• 3:37:40Lex Fridman?

  That's what life, that's what conversation is all about. Thank you for talking today.

• 3:37:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Buss. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from E.B. White. "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, there would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.