Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Boom. And we're live,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:08

      Boom. And we're live, ladies and gentlemen. Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein. I didn't screw it up this time.

   2. BWBret Weinstein0:15

      Nope, you got it right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Gotta get that Steen, Stein thing messed up with you.

   4. BWBret Weinstein0:18

      Got to get it right.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:18

      I apologize. It's a bad time to get those messed up.

   6. HHHeather Heying0:21

      It is.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      So-

   8. HHHeather Heying0:22

      Thanks for having us.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:22

      Thank you for being here, both of you. I'm very excited about this conversation.

   10. BWBret Weinstein0:25

       Really excited about it too. A little bit nervous in one way, but, but pretty, pretty jazzed.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:30

       T- well, I think it's good to be nervous about it, you know? I mean, uh, what we're talking about folks, uh, what we would like to talk about is... Well, why don't you explain it?

   12. BWBret Weinstein0:38

       Well, uh, I think Heather and I have been on, uh, an interesting adventure. We are evolutionary biologists. We trained with some of the, the finest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, and we have been teaching... We taught for, Heather taught for 15 years, I taught for 14 years at Evergreen, and we spent a lot of time, uh, dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function and how we interact. And that was very, uh, enjoyable to us and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a, a person. And we're now watching the conversation out in civilization about, uh, sex and gender devolve into an absurdity. And, on the one hand, that's kind of frightening. I mean, for, for, for us, it's not, uh, uh, directly an issue. We're happily married, and so w- we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days, and our kids are too young to be navigating it yet. Maybe this will all be, uh, clarified by the time they're involved in dating. But we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends, former students who are trying to navigate this stuff and finding it, uh, difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that, frankly, there's a, a much better alternative if one can stand to think in evolutionary terms. If we can really look at ourselves as we are, as we came to be through evolutionary, uh, forces, then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating, uh, a great deal. But we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right.

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:33

       What is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now?

   14. HHHeather Heying2:39

       Well, I think... We'd love to see a third way. So there are the pre-moderns, as it were, who have very traditionalist, conservative approach-

   15. JRJoe Rogan2:47

       Let me try to get this sucker up close to you. Sorry. Right there.

   16. HHHeather Heying2:50

       Sorry about that.

   17. JRJoe Rogan2:51

       No worries.

   18. HHHeather Heying2:51

       Better?

   19. JRJoe Rogan2:51

       Yeah, perfect.

   20. HHHeather Heying2:52

       The, the pre-moderns who have a very traditional, conservative approach to gender roles, to sex, to relationship, and, uh, there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that. And then there, there are the post-moderns, who want to throw out everything, want to throw out everything that evolution handed us, and in the meantime, pretend that it didn't happen, right? Pretend that it's not even based on reality. And there's a, there's a third way, and, you know, maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre or post-modern. But, uh, there's, there's a third way to navigate what evolutionary has, what evolution has given us, what we can change, what we can't change, and how to actually recover some of, you know, the sexiness in sex and the love in love and the romance in romance and, you know, understand that human beings are what we are from not just 100 years back, but 1,000 and 10,000 and 100,000,000 years back, we've had sex.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:48

       Since y- you both taught at a university level, you, you've been around these students and you s- you've seen this sort of post-modernist movement gain steam. What, what do you think is the cause of it? Like, what, what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women, and that all the differences in the genders are all, it's all propaganda or cultural or...

   22. BWBret Weinstein4:16

       So I, I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause, that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught. We detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured. We can tell that there's nobody really at the helm. And you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that, to them, is incredibly glaring, something that just absolutely needs to be solved. And so what they do is they look at that issue and they say, "What would we have to, what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed?" And the problem is that we're dealing with a complex system, and if you optimize for any one solution, you cause a catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to. And if you're not focused on those unintended consequences, you tend not to understand why people are resistant to your solution. So for example, let's deal with the transgender issue. For the transgender community, and I don't, you know, this is not a monolithic community, I actually know quite a number of people within it who have a heterodox position. But in general, there is a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize anybody who has decided to transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved. That seems right. And if you are focused on, uh, the humanitarian side of the question, maybe it even is right. But the problem is, if you say, "A person..."... who identifies as a particular sex is that sex, suddenly you've actually caused a whole bunch of consequences that you weren't thinking of over in a biology class, over, uh, in the prison system. I mean, is it true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison? Do we wanna put, um, violent sex offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be female? So not tracking the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular solution is the reason that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions. And part of what I hope we will get to today is that there is a, a principle at the core of understanding all complex adaptive systems, and it is diminishing returns. And diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane. Um, it has too close an association with economics, where it was first outlined. Um, but the message of diminishing returns is that you can very often get 90% of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly. But if you say, "I want 100% of the solution to this problem," you'll cause a catastrophe. So getting people to realize, don't shoot for the utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100% solved. If you can accept a 90% solution, then you can have a whole bunch of other things that you don't even realize you're using.

   23. JRJoe Rogan7:25

       In defense of people that would try to go for 100% though, isn't it one of those things where, like you, if you would negotiate, you would... if you want $100, you ask for $150?

   24. BWBret Weinstein7:36

       Unfortunately, I mean, I think you're identifying something correct, that in part, the positions that we hear, um, being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the people who are espousing them. They are a negotiating tactic. But we can't do that with biology.

   25. JRJoe Rogan7:55

       Right.

   26. BWBret Weinstein7:55

       You can't negotiate with biology. Biology is what it is, and then we can talk about which parts of it are amenable to being changed. And, uh, as Heather pointed out, we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of interacting between the sexes. We're advocating for, uh, an enlightened way that, uh, takes advantage of the freedoms we have that our ancestors didn't and, um, tries to navigate the hazards that we're stuck with. Um, so you can't, you can't, uh, negotiate with biology. You really ought to listen to what it is that nature is telling you and then say, "All right, what does that leave open? Where can we shift things?" But if you're gonna require that we lie about what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution, I guarantee you it will be unstable in the end.

   27. JRJoe Rogan8:43

       Well-

   28. HHHeather Heying8:43

       Yeah, the z- the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a continuum. You know, there are X chromosomes and there are Y chromosomes.

   29. JRJoe Rogan8:52

       I haven't heard that one.

   30. HHHeather Heying8:53

       Um, one of our children just heard that at his school.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   So you also get,…

   1. HHHeather Heying15:00

      the data, you, you know, do the analysis. But, uh, is it right or is it not? Let's see if I can prove it's not even though I really think it is. It's a really good test.

   2. BWBret Weinstein15:08

      So you also get, you get something, uh, there's a bonus that comes with it, which is... I don't know what else to say. It's super awesome. Which is, if you've tried to take your cherished idea, some hypothesis that you've come up with, and you've tried 16 different ways to show that it's wrong and you keep failing, well, every one of those things you did to see whether what you thought was true is actually false now prepares you when somebody now challenges you and they say, "Oh, but you haven't thought of this." Well, you have. You've been through it 16 different ways. And that gives you the ability to navigate almost anything that's thrown at you because, uh, you have taken on the role of being your own harshest critic in order to make sure that what's left at the end of that process is really robust. The other thing, um, that I, I want to insert here is that I think, A, I don't want to be put in the position of defending everything that's been published in the scientific literature as true because it looks like science. A lot of it isn't. A lot of what's published in the scientific literature is not valid. The methodology does not establish what people claim it does. And that's a big hazard for, for people like Heather and myself, because you have to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about. Um, but I do think those of us who more or less get the story of what, let's say, human sexuality is about at a scientific level, and there's still a lot of mystery, but there's an awful lot that those of us who have studied it are in agreement about. And civilization is not yet on the same page with those of us who have looked at it scientifically. One thing we have failed to do, I think, is to articulate what you will get in exchange for signing up for a scientific worldview on this topic. People do not realize that a scientific worldview is actually the thing that empowers you to navigate your own love life in an intelligent way. It will let you ha-

   3. HHHeather Heying17:09

      And it's a lot more fun than it sounds when you say it that way. (laughs)

   4. BWBret Weinstein17:11

      Yeah. It, it's... Well, you know, there, there are all of these famous arguments about unweaving the rainbow or, you know, somebody challenged Feynman that, um, he, he was the kind of guy who would take apart a flower and destroy its beauty in order to figure out how it worked. And Feynman-

   5. HHHeather Heying17:27

      This, this is the trope. Science will destroy beauty.

   6. BWBret Weinstein17:29

      Right. And it's not true.

   7. HHHeather Heying17:30

      It won't. No.

   8. BWBret Weinstein17:31

      It's not true. You will get a lot of value. You will waste less of your time on people that you shouldn't be interested in if you understand what game they're playing, even if they don't understand.

   9. JRJoe Rogan17:41

      Where do you think that argument's coming from, the argument that science would destroy beauty?

   10. BWBret Weinstein17:46

       Well, I think there's a way in which the... I hate to borrow a chemical analogy here, but there's something called the activation energy of a chemical reaction, which is the energy necessary to get it to happen. And the activation energy for understanding your own self, your sexual self even, as a product of evolution that is wired in a particular way for particular objectives that may or not be relevant to your conscious person's objective, that that-... takes a little bit. It doesn't take forever. But you know, uh, if we were teaching a class, it might take three or four weeks full-time with one set of students before people who had walked through the door not thinking in those terms at all about, uh, their own love life could begin to spot how this actually maps onto what they have experienced and what it suggests they might do differently. So I think the answer to your question is, it's not cheap to get through the door. In the end, it's an absolute bargain. What it buys you is so valuable compared to what it costs you to, to learn it. But it doesn't come immediately. It's not like, you know, an aphorism that you can adopt and suddenly your life functions.

   11. JVJamie Vernon19:07

       So-

   12. HHHeather Heying19:08

       But, but-

   13. JVJamie Vernon19:09

       Oh, s- sorry, go ahead.

   14. HHHeather Heying19:09

       But, but it begins to do as people start to realize the power of an evolutionary take on sex and gender or whatever it is we're talking about is it opens up doors to inquiry and it makes, it allows people to make sense of their lives. And then it becomes more beautiful and more powerful. And once people have seen how you can use these evolutionary tools and, and the knowledge that evolution, that the study of evolution has given us, like male and female are universals. Like male and female have existed for over a hundred million years and everywhere it shows up, it looks really similar. And yes, there are exceptions all over the place. There's amazing ways that, you know, like this crayfish that you have, you know, a, a sexually reproducing ancestor that's gone asexual or you have sexual reversal in some species, you have hyenas which have a, you know, a very strange system going on. Lots and lots of these exceptions, but the, the truth underlying them is always the same and that's freeing.

   15. BWBret Weinstein20:07

       So actually-

   16. HHHeather Heying20:07

       And to me, that's beautiful.

   17. BWBret Weinstein20:08

       Can we try it with the crayfish here?

   18. JVJamie Vernon20:09

       Sure.

   19. BWBret Weinstein20:10

       Um, so looking at this system, you've got a creature that is capable of going asexual and then spreading very rapidly. We have lots of examples of creatures that do that, right? Like so for example, dandelions. Dandelions look like a regular old flower, but they're not. Uh, dandelions are what's called apomictic. And apomictic means that they go through, um, mitosis instead of meiosis and they produce a seed that isn't the product of sex, and that seed disperses as if it was the product of sex. And so this does something for dandelions. It allows them to take over a landscape from one individual because it can just spread and spread and spread without having to, to find mates. It's very effective. But what we see in systems like, well, Heather mentioned whiptail lizards. Whiptail lizards, uh, some populations are asexual and it's, it's a really cool system actually. I don't know if Jamie wants to bring up a picture of, uh, whiptail lizards. But in the asexual populations, females can, I believe they clone themselves, right?

   20. HHHeather Heying21:13

       Uh, it's more or less, yeah.

   21. BWBret Weinstein21:15

       Um, so they, so the, the reason we're talking about that is there are two different ways they could go about it. They could make two gametes and fuse them or they can clone themselves.

   22. HHHeather Heying21:23

       They're effectively cloned.

   23. BWBret Weinstein21:24

       Um, but the, uh, you look at that system and you say, well, wh- how can a population abandon sex and be able to tolerate change? Well, it has to do one thing, which is it has to have some place to borrow genetic variation from. So we see some very curious behaviors in these whiptails. Females mount each other.

   24. JVJamie Vernon21:45

       Oh.

   25. BWBret Weinstein21:45

       So they, basically you have, um, you have females who stimulate each other to produce eggs that are not the product of sex, right? So they retain sexual behavior and then-

   26. HHHeather Heying22:00

       So they do the pseudo-copulation and whether they're playing the female role or the male role in the pseudo-copulation depends on their status in the ovulatory cycle.

   27. JVJamie Vernon22:08

       Whoa.

   28. BWBret Weinstein22:10

       But the kicker is, and you know, uh, Heather and I were actually teaching from this and trying to figure out how the system could possibly be stable long term and what we predicted actually was that they had to be borrowing, um, genetic variation periodically and they, it turns out that this is true. They-

   29. JVJamie Vernon22:27

       How do they borrow genetic variation?

   30. BWBret Weinstein22:29

       Well, the populations at the edge of these clonal populations are sexual and so the point-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Hm. …

   1. HHHeather Heying30:00

      and if you are the most dominant female in a landscape and the male just died, it makes sense to turn into a male so that you can now fertilize all those females.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:11

      Hm.

   3. BWBret Weinstein30:11

      But there also ... So that's the sequential, you know, where one individual will transition, um, between sexes. But there are also cases like, uh, turtles where there's no chromosomal sex determination, and the sex is effectively chosen by the environmental conditions, by temperature in the nest. And so, one individual lives its entire life within a sex, but that sex was not dictated when the egg was laid. It was dictated by the environment the egg, uh, matured in.

   4. HHHeather Heying30:39

      And in fact, that's-

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:39

      Isn't that the case with crocodiles as well?

   6. HHHeather Heying30:41

      Crocodiles, and in fact most...... most every vertebrate that we know except for mammals and birds. And the mammals and birds is a different evolution of genetic sex determination. So most lizards, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, um, teleost fish, have some kind of environmental sex determination.

   7. BWBret Weinstein30:58

      And actually, as long as we're going down this road, I promise you there's some place cool to go with humans too.

   8. JVJamie Vernon31:02

      This is cool already. (laughs)

   9. BWBret Weinstein31:03

      Okay, good. I, I never know, I never know how, how interested people are on the-

   10. JVJamie Vernon31:07

       (laughs)

   11. BWBret Weinstein31:07

       ... on the animal side of things.

   12. HHHeather Heying31:07

       Biology geek, yeah.

   13. BWBret Weinstein31:08

       But, um, so in human beings and, and mammals, and not all mammals, the monotremes are exceptional in this regard, but there are only-

   14. HHHeather Heying31:18

       That's the echidnas and platypus.

   15. BWBret Weinstein31:20

       Yeah. There are only three species-

   16. HHHeather Heying31:21

       Three species.

   17. BWBret Weinstein31:21

       ... left on earth that's a remnant of an early, early branch on the mammal tree. But, um, in, in most mammals, like us, we have chromosomal sex determination, and males are XY and females are XX. In birds, the situation is exactly reversed, as it is in butterflies. So what that tells you is that to the extent that-

   18. HHHeather Heying31:43

       So by, by reverse, what Brett means is, and we just use different letters just so as not to be confused, males are so-called homogametic, or WW. Whereas in, in mammals, females are homogametic, XX. And in birds, males are homogametic, WW, and females are WZ. Which means that female birds can't clone themselves, um, as, the, the way that, say, a Komodo dragon could.

   19. JVJamie Vernon32:06

       Mm-hmm.

   20. BWBret Weinstein32:07

       But the reason I raise it is because we have a sense of male and female that I, I think is just wrong. That male and female are actually akin to a niche, that these are roles that the universe discovers periodically because they make sense, right? So, um, it's a convergence on a set of behaviors that fit well together. Once you have a small mobile gamete, you tend to acquire the traits that go along with maleness. And this is true when an animal switches sex in the middle of its life, the behavior switches, um, a- along with the gametes. Um, this is true between birds and mammals. So the, which one has two different, uh, sex chromosomes does not predict the behavior, but which one lays the egg does predict the behavior. And it gets even weirder than that. So, uh, Jamie, do you have that image of the flower?

   21. JVJamie Vernon33:10

       The image-

   22. BWBret Weinstein33:10

       The image.

   23. JVJamie Vernon33:11

       ... of the flower.

   24. BWBret Weinstein33:11

       Of the f-

   25. JVJamie Vernon33:12

       For those of you listening-

   26. HHHeather Heying33:13

       Who've never seen a flower- (laughs)

   27. JVJamie Vernon33:14

       ... you can look at this flower on the YouTube version. What, what kind of flower is it?

   28. BWBret Weinstein33:18

       Uh, it's actually just a diagram of a-

   29. JVJamie Vernon33:21

       There we go.

   30. BWBret Weinstein33:21

       ... flower, a just standard flower.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   But so would all…

   1. BWBret Weinstein45:00

      female human-

   2. HHHeather Heying45:00

      But so would all the baboon boys-

   3. BWBret Weinstein45:02

      Right.

   4. HHHeather Heying45:02

      ... know when she was fertile.

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:03

      Do you think that's because over time people have discerned, I mean, over the course of evolution, people have discerned that having a child also is partially a burden? And so maybe more intelligent creatures, as humans got more and more intelligent they said, "Well, it seems like a little inconvenient to have a child." Whereas a baboon would not think that way and not contemplate the future. So there was some sort of an evolutionary advantage for it to be concealed in humans and for outright displays of sexuality to be prominent-

   6. BWBret Weinstein45:38

      I-

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:38

      ... throughout their entire life.

   8. BWBret Weinstein45:40

      I suspect the answer is a whole lot more horrible than that.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:43

      Really?

   10. BWBret Weinstein45:43

       Yeah. Um, I suspect-

   11. JRJoe Rogan45:45

       Horrible?

   12. BWBret Weinstein45:46

       Yeah. Absolutely horrible.

   13. JRJoe Rogan45:47

       Oh.

   14. BWBret Weinstein45:47

       Which is that to the extent that a woman knows when she is fertile, she actually may be vulnerable. In other words, to the extent that sexual-

   15. HHHeather Heying46:00

       Vulnerable to coercive sex.

   16. BWBret Weinstein46:02

       Yeah. That-

   17. JRJoe Rogan46:02

       Oh, so vulnerable to rape?

   18. HHHeather Heying46:04

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan46:04

       So that if a woman was outright signaling that she was ovulating, that she would be more likely to be raped by other humans?

   20. BWBret Weinstein46:12

       Oh, I think there's no question about that. Um ...

   21. JRJoe Rogan46:16

       Hmm.

   22. BWBret Weinstein46:16

       So in, in a sense, um, hiding this information from everybody appears to be an evolutionary solution to a problem. I don't think we can name it exactly because so much is obscure about our recent ancestors. You know, we only have bones. Nothing else fossilizes, and that doesn't, you know ... The behavior doesn't fossilize. So there's a lot we can't say. Um, but it is interesting arriving at the present, we have modern women and we can say it is interesting that evolution has robbed women themselves of a piece of information that one would initially think would be so valuable, that it would be prominent. For it to be obscure at all is fascinating. So the other thing that Heather mentioned, which I think belongs f- front and center in this conversation, is having sex for pleasure rather than reproductive purposes. So-

   23. HHHeather Heying47:10

       And we're not the only ones to do that.

   24. BWBret Weinstein47:11

       There are-

   25. HHHeather Heying47:11

       Bonobos, dolphins, others.

   26. BWBret Weinstein47:14

       There are a few.

   27. HHHeather Heying47:15

       Um, but it's rare.

   28. BWBret Weinstein47:15

       It's very rare. There are a few other species that appear to do this, and they don't appear to do it the way humans do. I'm not ... Uh, is the dolphin example, is it year round? Do you know?

   29. HHHeather Heying47:27

       I don't remember.

   30. BWBret Weinstein47:28

       So anyway, the idea that sex in human beings has taken on these other important roles in pair bonding, for example, um, is very special. And the fact that it continues after menopause, I mean, menopause itself is special. Menopause, the idea that that's not your reproductive apparatus failing due to age, that is your reproductive apparatus deciding to shut down because you've moved into a new phase. Basically you've moved into the grandma phase, and the grandma phase is essential in humans where it is not essential in almost any other creature. I think-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Um- …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      So the software is still wired the same way to look at a woman who, uh, you believe would be a, a good carrier of babies, someone who would be very maternal, someone who's attractive, they have good features. This would be someone who you'd wanna breed with. Whereas the second option would be someone who you could sneak it in on.

   2. BWBret Weinstein1:00:24

      Um-

   3. HHHeather Heying1:00:24

      Well, I would say with regard to the first strategy it's, it's more than that.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:27

      More than that.

   5. HHHeather Heying1:00:27

      All right, so that the first strategy, as you just described it, sounds very traditional female role.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:33

      Right.

   7. HHHeather Heying1:00:33

      Right? And mostly especially when, uh, populations were moving across frontiers and actually like expanding the scope of where humans were, um, what you needed in a partner, both male and female, was someone with whom you could share all of life's challenges. Right? It wasn't just about taking care of baby, uh, because, you know, dad was A, also doing parental care, but mothers and fathers were in it together and it was their division of labor, of course. And was there specialization? Of course. Did that specialization always look the same? No, it didn't. And in fact cross-culturally this is- it's fascinating. Like some tasks end up highly gendered across cultures but which gender does it is different. Like weaving turns out to be a pretty highly gendered task in different cultures but sometimes it's only women who do it and sometimes it's only men. And there- you know, there are some things that-Really only men do in most cultures and this is, this is great review, uh, an anthropology paper from the early '70s, so this is mostly pre-industrial cultures they're looking at, but the jobs that across cultures where it happens, only men do include the hunting of large marine mammals and iron smelting.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:01:40

      Those two things?

   9. HHHeather Heying1:01:41

      Those two, and there's a few others, (laughs) but those are the top of the list.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:01:43

       Large marine mammals? That's interesting.

   11. BWBret Weinstein1:01:45

       And you should never do them at the same time.

   12. HHHeather Heying1:01:46

       It's whale hunting and smelting of ores.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:01:49

       Wow. Yeah, definitely don't do those two together.

   14. BWBret Weinstein1:01:51

       Yeah, no, it's ... If it doesn't-

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:01:52

       Burn a hole through your boat.

   16. BWBret Weinstein1:01:53

       Yeah. (laughs)

   17. HHHeather Heying1:01:54

       (laughs)

   18. BWBret Weinstein1:01:54

       You, you keep quenching the thing by accident, and um, yeah, so I think, you know, the answer to the question you asked is that the whole system has been hijacked by the novelty of our current circumstances.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:09

       Mm.

   20. BWBret Weinstein1:02:10

       And what I was trying to get at before is that the size of the win of an ancestral male who reproduced with a female that didn't require investment from them, the size of that win is so great that it causes men to default to thinking about that when, um, it appears to be available. And so in a world where there's birth control, and therefore the stakes for women for having sex have been greatly reduced, and therefore more women are interested in having sex without commitment, the problem is men don't really know what they're looking for because there is this, uh, this level of triggering that they cannot overcome. And so the other point I, I wanna make on this front is yes, men are interested in sexual pleasure, as are women. Men and women are overlapping, but distinct in what that means. But I think if we were to say, "Hey, sexual pleasure is awesome and you should live your life so as to maybe not maximize it, but come close to maximizing it, that sexual pleasure is so desirable that you should live your life in a way that you get as much of that thing as you can," that would not necessarily say that the way to do it was to go around banging strangers, right? Because there, this is a multifaceted, uh, phenomenon. And there is one thing that gets left out of this discussion almost every time I hear people talk about it, which is that the sex that one has when the stakes are really high, right, when you're really into somebody, that's, that's a very pleasurable kind of sex that is not reproduced by low stakes situation. And so we are comparing things and it sounds like, well, if sexual pleasure is what you're after, then more sex is certainly the way to get there. But, you know, um-

   21. HHHeather Heying1:04:11

       And that tends to look like ... The argument tends to be more sex with more people, more varied sex partners is the obvious way to optimize sexual pleasure. And actually, that assumption hasn't been investigated and what-

   22. BWBret Weinstein1:04:24

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:04:24

       Wasn't it difficult to accomplish?

   24. BWBret Weinstein1:04:26

       What?

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:04:26

       Isn't that why it's not, it's, uh, hasn't really been investigated? I mean, how many people are having sex with multiple partners and taking notes and being studied?

   26. BWBret Weinstein1:04:34

       Well, I don't know. I mean, college students, you know-

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:04:37

       Right, but they're-

   28. BWBret Weinstein1:04:37

       ... tell you anything for 50 bucks.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:04:38

       (laughs)

   30. BWBret Weinstein1:04:38

       So there are lots of these studies that, (laughs) you know, do involve asking a lot of college students, which is not, you know-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:23:44

   Yeah, but... Okay, so…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:15:00

      time in history, but if you had a look at the numbers it'd probably be pretty staggeringly low.

   2. BWBret Weinstein1:15:04

      Yeah, but... Okay, so I mean as, as long as we're in this territory. Yes, it must have happened in history, but so many things that were very remote, uh, contingencies in history have apparently produced offspring. Like, um, you know, the, uh, apparent tendency of people being hung to orgasm, right? What is that? That is likely to be the body taking one last shot. There's no point, there's no way-

   3. HHHeather Heying1:15:34

      This is a new one on me. You, you think-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:15:35

      You're talking about autoerotic asphyxiation? Is that what you're talking about?

   5. BWBret Weinstein1:15:39

      Well, actually I wasn't talking about that, but it's a better example. It shows you that there's some part-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:15:43

      Being hung? What do you mean then?

   7. BWBret Weinstein1:15:45

      I mean being-

   8. HHHeather Heying1:15:46

      He's talking about actual execution.

   9. BWBret Weinstein1:15:47

      Actually I think grammatically I mean being hanged.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:15:49

       Right, being hanged, yeah. I'm so- s- so confused. So they, they get orgasms?

   11. BWBret Weinstein1:15:52

       So I gotta be a little careful because I, I...

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:15:55

       When they die?

   13. BWBret Weinstein1:15:55

       I, I'm working from anecdote here. I have read that I, but I don't know of any-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:15:59

       How many people are checking the underwear of people who just got hung? Geez.

   15. BWBret Weinstein1:16:02

       But my point would be, what has to be true in order for such a pattern to evolve? So let's take autoerotic asphyxiation as-

   16. HHHeather Heying1:16:10

       Well, it's, it's, it's dandelion strategy, I mean, is, is what you're arguing basically. This is, um, you know, dandelions who go to seed as, after you pick them and spread their seeds, right? Like, is that gonna work?

   17. BWBret Weinstein1:16:22

       Last ditch efforts at reproduction.

   18. HHHeather Heying1:16:24

       Last ditch efforts at reproduction.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:16:25

       Hail Mary.

   20. BWBret Weinstein1:16:25

       Hail Marys. And so the point is, I think this is probably not obvious unless you're used to thinking evolutionarily. But in order for a pattern to occur where some entity releases sexual propagules on death, in order for that to evolve it has to have worked enough times for that pattern to have accumulated. And so if autoerotic asphyxiation is the result of people tapping into that thing and, you know, traversing a landscape near death in order to increase sexual pleasure, what that suggests is that that landscape near death has actually had a certain amount of reproduction happen in it that has resulted in this circuitry being present.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:17:08

       Can you imagine a scenario? And can you imagine a scenario where that trait would be passed down to the offspring?

   22. BWBret Weinstein1:17:13

       Uh, I can imagine that... I mean, let's, let's do it the other way. Um, people have had a lot of sex over evolutionary history. A lot of bad things have happened to people over evolutionary history. Every so often those two things intersect, right? Um, in other words, every so often the catastrophe, the enemy spills over the wall, whatever it is. And so I, I don't know, um, I, I don't know what the pattern would be. It may simply be that jeopardy is the key factor, and actually jeopardy would be expected to happen an awful lot. Um, so for example, to the extent that, um... And in fact we see a lot of this stuff in primates, where there's a question about how public, um, the sexual interaction between two individuals amongst chimps is, for example. So, uh, when two chimps are having sex, if the male chimp is not the dominant male, he has everything to lose in being discovered, and so-

   23. HHHeather Heying1:18:19

       They hide in the bushes.

   24. BWBret Weinstein1:18:20

       Right, they hide. And so then the question is, is the female advertising that they are having sex by making noises that make it visible? In which case that creates jeopardy. So there's a whole landscape of, uh, stuff that has happened in evolutionary history both with humans, with pre-humans, with, um, apes. Uh, you know-

   25. HHHeather Heying1:18:41

       Other non-human animals.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:18:42

       I've heard that argued as well about women with very loud moaning of pleasure, that they're really trying to attract other males.

   27. BWBret Weinstein1:18:50

       Uh, I think that-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:18:52

       That was in Sex at Dawn, um-

   29. BWBret Weinstein1:18:54

       Well, I would-

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:18:54

       ... Chris Ryan's book.

Episode duration: 2:52:47