Wokeism, Advice to Teens and the Dangers of Casual Relationships | Jordan Peterson

Intro

A couple weeks ago, you tweeted something out that Yeah, I'm I'm bringing it up that got a crazy amount of attention. Which Did it Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, I believe you're referring to. Yes. Mhm. I tweeted out, "Sorry. Not beautiful." Hello and welcome to episode 150 of my podcast.

I'm Michaela Peterson. Like I said, this is my 150th episode and I had the pleasure of having my dad on to discuss all sorts of fun things. The first time in over a year he's been on my podcast. We discussed the Twitter drama over his comments on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, connections between personality types and gender and romantic relationships. We covered a lot that would make some people angry. I really hope you enjoy this episode. I certainly did.

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Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Jordan’s Sports Illustrated Tweet

Welcome to my podcast ad. Hi, Nick. I haven't done a podcast with you in a very long time. How long? Do you know? Year? Yeah.

I over a year. Yeah. Over a year. Still in Toronto. Yeah. In my podcast studio, and now I just have a studio in a different hotel all the time. Right.

Yeah. Hopefully, one day that will be more organized. Um I'm nearing my 150th episode. Oh. Are we going to do this for your 150th episode? Oh, I guess we have to now. I guess you have to.

Yeah, you put your foot in it there. Uh before we get started, um how have you been? Much better. Yeah? Yeah. I'm doing better than I have been for 5 years, probably. 5 years? That's good.

I think the last time we did a podcast, we was Yeah. It was pretty rough. It was pretty rough. But we're out of it. Seem to be out of it. We'll see. You're looking pretty sharp. good.

Thank you. Yeah. I don't think I've seen this suit before. Not on your podcast. Never on my podcast. It looks good. been a tourist suit. Yeah. non-wrinkly, so it's a good travel suit.

And you can stuff it anywhere and it works? That's This is exactly it. Stuffable. Yes. I was on the beach with it this morning for a photo shoot. All the absurd things. With it hiked up to my knees in the water.

It's my three-piece suit. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. Joe model. Okay, you say that, but we went to We were at a black-tie event, I think, and I was just standing there and you're like, "No, you got to put your foot forward." So, don't act like you don't know how to pose cuz you are very good at posing. Oh, thank you.

Yeah. My whole life is a pose, or so my enemies say. What's he doing? What's his game? What role is he playing? It's like I'm saying what I think. That's a role.

Yeah, it's like, that's what you think. Saying what you thinking modeling three-piece suits in the ocean. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was the destiny I always presumed would would make itself manifest. That's great. Okay, so I thought what people might find useful for this episode, I'm going to ask you for advice on a number of topics I think people will find helpful.

Yeah. And maybe delve a little bit into gender differences, just to keep things spicy, keep some people out there angry. Yeah, yeah, cuz I don't think I've irritated like a million people for at least a week. Exactly. So, let's let's do it. time to say something, you know, outrageous or {slash} true. Outrageous {slash} true. Yeah, how did you feel?

Let's start with this actually. A couple weeks ago, you tweeted something out that Yeah, I'm I'm bring it up that got a crazy amount of attention, which Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, I believe you're referring to. Yes. I tweeted out, "Sorry. Not beautiful." Yeah, people were very happy with that. everyone got upset. Yes, they did.

And then I left Twitter again more or less right after that and everyone assumed that that was why and it actually it wasn't. No. It was It was I suppose in some sense it was because what happened was an indication of the problem with Twitter, but I had been not reading Twitter comments for about 3 weeks, although I had been tweeting through an intermediary, one of my staff members. So, I'd email him a tweet, but not reading comments because I found that quite um burdensome that you're associating with the devil? Sure. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. like sort of like standing in a public park where anybody, no matter who they were, could come up and yell at you to any size audience about anything they wanted day or night.

And so uh I've been thinking that through. I'm going to write an article about what's wrong with Twitter and social media in general. But um no, I looked at the Sports Illustrated cover and they had a uh a rather overweight young woman, quite symmetrical. And so nice facial features and so forth. Um with a very revealing swimsuit on the cover. And I thought, "No." Yeah. like and not not in a personal way, but it's unbelievably manipulative for about three different reasons.

The first is it's a very tawdry attempt to capitalize on cheap sales. That's and I mean cheap in a specific way. Sports Illustrated hit the gold mine with their swimsuit cover, I suppose 20 years ago, whenever they established that. Because it was a obviously it's a sports magazine, so it's about athletics. It's about athletic people. It's about athletic bodies and they had a swimsuit issue and it really was a big hit and then it became kind of a cultural icon and it's a very specific kind of cultural icon because it focuses on a very exceptional kind of high-end beauty. And so that beauty would involve symmetry and signals of youth because that's part of uh beauty, sexual beauty.

Physical beauty. Um waist-to-hip ratio for women. But with Sports Illustrated, it's also highlighting a kind of athleticism in body type. And that's a very specific form of beauty. You have to be young, you have to be female, generally. You have to be extremely athletic, you have to be shapely in a very particular way and that would be with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.68 because that's what's been established cross-culturally as ideal from the perspective of male uh sexual interest, let's say, but that's also associated with fertility. Yeah.

Um and so it's a marker that has a biological basis. And so even if you're a very beautiful woman, you're you're hard-pressed to be beautiful enough to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated for the swimsuit issue. And so it's a very it's a pinnacle achievement of sorts and it's focused on a very idealized and specific form of beauty. And that's obviously exclusionary. It's obviously exclusionary. It excludes Everyone. Everyone.

Right. And and it does that to highlight a kind of ideal and that's a particular ideal of beauty. And there are some cultural boundaries around that. So, you could say, "Well, it's a westernized form of beauty." It's like, "Yeah." And you can point to Rubens paintings of more plump women and say, "Well, there's an exception." It's like, "Great.

You think you're a genius for finding that exception. Good for you. You know the Rubens painting." Like, more power to you. But that doesn't mean anything at all about the universality of images of beauty. And so the co- the cover bothered me a lot because it was a cheap manipulation of something that had been working very well for Sports Illustrated. It was also an insistence that all of a sudden this non-athletic body type is as beautiful as the standard swimsuit model for Sports Illustrated.

And it's not. It's not as athletic and it's not as healthy. And that's that. And it's also not arbitrary. And so, the whole thing is a lie. And then it's a lie that's a manipulation of that young woman. Now, she partakes in that because she participates in it.

But it's still they're not on her side they're exploiting her as far as I'm concerned. And she may be participating in that exploitation, but they're still exploiting her. So, don't pull any moral stunts on me because you're irritated about my opinion about the Sports Illustrated cover when it's bloody clear to anybody with eyes that that was manipulative in 20 different ways. And so, and I'm also not willing to sacrifice these ideals for inclusiveness. It's like, "No. Not everyone's a genius. No.

Not everyone's Picasso. No. Not everyone's young and healthy. And no. Not everyone is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Period. And fuck you if you don't like it.

So, that's basically what I thought about that. I certainly didn't think it would cause as much trouble as it did. You know, when people are on my case for being mean, it's like, "Yeah, I know. I'm always mean because you know, that's Well, also, like life is hard and like life is mean, right? And it's hard for people First First of all, I have great sympathy for anybody overweight cuz of the health struggles I went through. And you lost a whole bunch of weight. Yeah.

It's not like being overweight's fun, right? That's a whole other problem to get into with I I think people have such an issue losing weight Yeah. that society has said, "You know what? It's It's fine because because you've had so much trouble that it's probably your genetics. So, you might truth in that. Like, when I look at someone who's obese on the street, I think, "Oh, that's too bad. Like, that's too bad." I I don't think, you know, "Obese pig eats too much, has no self-control."

I don't think that. I think, uh bad mismatch between genetic proclivity and appalling diet. And the appalling diet is basically We're not going to get into this, but basically carbohydrate-heavy and sugar-loaded. And fair enough, you know, we tried it hard, the whole world, to make calories cheap. And we did that. So, no one's starving, and great. But now we have an obesity problem, and it's a major problem, and I'm not going to pretend that it's okay.

It's not okay. That doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for it. And I'm not willing to sacrifice any ideals for this idiot inclusiveness. I'm done with that. And so should everyone else be. And most I think most people are. And they look at that cover, and they know it's manipulative and and a lie in a deep sense.

But then if you point that out, and this is where we're at in the culture, there's all sorts of things now if you point to it and you say, "You know, that's a lie." People get upset. It's like, "No, that's a lie. You're just That's It's a lie. You're just being mean. We're just being nice. It's like, yeah, yeah, you bet.

No, no, it's a lie. It's like, here's another lie. Every 10-year-old knows what gender they are, and that's so fixed that surgical intervention may well be necessary, and it's illegal for you to suggest otherwise. However, your gender identity is so fluid that you can change it every hour if you want, and it's not fixed at all, and it's and it's infinitely variable at your whim. Okay, I'm supposed to accept all of that, am I? Every single bit of that set of propositions, even though they're entirely internally contradictory. Which means it's actually impossible for me to accept all of those propositions and to stay sane.

Well, yeah, but if you don't, you're mean. It's like, you're a predator. Well, that brings something else I want to talk to you about. I've been thinking about this a fair bit.

Frans de Waal’s Discoveries with Primates

I talked to Frans de Waal, primatologist, genius primatologist in my estimation. Yeah, and I don't know if there's a Nobel Prize that would be specifically appropriate for Frans de Waal, but he if there was a Nobel Prize for the sort of science he's doing, he would deserve it because he's discovered things that are really they're unbelievably fundamental. For example, he's discovered that um sometimes in chimp troops, the smallest male is the alpha. Really? Yeah, that it's not dependent on power. A small a smaller chimp can be alpha, for example, if he has the support of one of the older females who has strong kin connections within the troop, but also is a sophisticated social actor. And I don't mean manipulator, and I don't mean dominator, because de Waal has established very, very clearly, and this is signally important work, that status and authority in a chimp troop, and that is associated with reproductive success is much more dependent on the ability to reconcile and the ability to maintain reciprocal positive relationships with multiple individuals, far more dependent on that than on the expression of physical power.

So this is crucially important and De Waal just wrote a new book, I think it's called Differences, where he outlined sex differences in toy preference, behavioral preference, differences between male and female chimps, especially juveniles. So the females, for example, if you give a female chimp a block of wood, you know, a reason of the appropriate size, she will carry it around like a infant. So she makes a block of wood into a doll. If you give her a doll, a teddy bear, or something like that, that's definitely instantly an infant and she will take care of it and she'll share it with the other chimps that she trusts and she'll get hyper upset if they do anything to it that you wouldn't do to an infant. Whereas if you give a doll to a male juvenile or a group of males, yeah, you make a face. They tear it apart to see what's inside of it. Yeah, and that's and that's funny because that's you know that that's kind of the stereotype for what a young boy might do.

So let's take this apart and see what's inside of it. It's like, well, there's a hunting, devouring element of that, but there's also a gadget-like curiosity and there's good work on chimps showing that oddly enough, the male juveniles, if you give them cars or like toy cars or dolls, they'll take the cars, which is pretty damn weird because it's not like chimps have cars. They have infants, but they don't have cars. they roll. So it's just more fun. Well, it probably has something to do with tool use preferences that they're more gadget oriented, even chimps, cuz they do use tools to some degree. Um or maybe it's just that they're not maternal. Yeah.

Right. So just the other thing. It's yeah, it might be that and I don't think the work on on that preference is developed enough to be sure, but we do know that likewise in human beings, the biggest difference that we know of between men and women um is their interest in people versus things.

Infants, Caregivers, & Predators

And so, but I was really struck by the the carrying around of the wood block, the infantilization of the wood block, and it made me think cuz I had been reading putting two weird ideas together. I'd been reading this guide to a faculty retreat that Mount Royal University in Calgary had published and I had read and it was just it was such an appalling document. So, there's very few things in life that are less dangerous than going to a faculty retreat at a college. Like the the faculty don't bring axes and pitchforks and they're not Vikings and they're not cannibals and they don't devour each other and the probability of getting in a fistfight is like zero or lower and they're just not dangerous in any they're no they're as safe as any social event could possibly be made with like 250,000 years of civilized effort. And yet the guide that the college published indicated quite clearly that trained counselors would be on hand Just in case. just in case the discussion got too intense and I thought this is written by edible mothers for kindergarteners and I was thinking about that in relation to the walls work and and into the broader culture war that we're knee-deep in neck-deep in forehead deep in maybe. Um so here's a hypothesis. Imagine that there's a default ethos that governs what constitutes the basis for an appropriate social relationship.

Whether it's an intimate relationship, a friendship a relationship with your family members, a relationship with people in the broader community. Imagine that there's an ethos, a way of interacting that would characterize optimality across all those domains simultaneously. One female default is you're either an infant or you're a caregiver or you're a predator. And I think a lot of that's playing out in the world now. Now But what where does that come from? Well, I think it comes from the the fundamental ethos that governs mother-infant bonding. I mean, look.

One of the one of the issues that women and female chimps, for that matter, struggle with terribly is the lengthy period of dependency that highly intelligent primate infants are characterized by. And so female chimp will carry her infant 500 miles in in the first 3 years. She has to carry the infant. They can cling to, but she has to carry the infant everywhere. It's an unbelievable burden. It's an unbelievable burden. And so and it's partly because it's we're worse even in human in humans because human infants are born even less able than chimpanzee infants.

And there's a reason for that. It's like a noodle. Yeah, well, they're like a fetus. They're actually they're actually fetal in in in a very real sense. So the human cortex is so large that there's an arms race between the size of the infant's head and the the the width of the pelvic opening through which birth must take place. And it's an it's a very difficult balance to optimize. If women's hips were any wider, which would make the pelvic hole larger, they couldn't run well.

So it interfere with the running, which obviously isn't so good if you're running away from a predator. If it was smaller, then the baby would have to be born with a smaller brain or more immature. The the gestation period for a mammal of our size should be if you compared us to other animals be 2 years. Yeah. So our infants are born a year and 3 months premature. And so they're they're just absolutely 100% helpless. And so then there's an ethos that has to govern your interaction with the infant, let's say up till about 9 months when they start to become somewhat ambulatory.

So pre-ambulatory infant is a different creature than an infant who has the capacity to move around in the world. By the way, the fear circuitry in an infant doesn't really kick in until they're ambulatory. So they're quite different from a motivational perspective, too, before they're uh before they can move. Well, why be afraid if you can't move? Fears freezes you. If you can't move you don't need fear cuz you can't move. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so that's also Yeah, that's also when they first show the signs of stranger aversion and some beginning fear of of the dark. Although they do freak out if they're little and you put them in somebody else's arms. Yeah, but but it doesn't look like it's fear. Often that's pain, a pain-like response, or anger. It's commonly anger. look like anger. Well, it's if they turn red it's like when you watch someone who cries in an argument. It's like, "I'm hurt."

It's like, "No, you're red. You're mad. You're using you just say you're hurt because that's a guilt weapon that angry people use." That doesn't happen all the time. No, it doesn't. that women also get blamed for that sometimes when it doesn't happen. It's like especially by men cuz they don't understand it. Which is why are you crying and are you trying to manipulate me?

Yeah. And what I learned about was women's tears actually um the smell of women's tears give off a pain response in men. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. There's a chemical in women's tears that give off a pain response in men. manipulative they are. It's not Sometimes I think I'll show you. Here's some pain.

I think sometimes when I So, I know this I don't cry very easily, but if I'm stressed already, and then I get into an argument, sometimes it'll happen. I have to be pretty stressed, and I know some people who will cry a lot easier. They'll just cry right away. A lot of that had to do with being ill. Yeah, a lot of that did have to do with it. And I cry easier when I'm ill, too. So, that's understandable.

But, um I think women get blamed a lot of the time, and I don't think it's always manipulative. No, I don't think it's always I don't think it's always manipulative, either. Not like It might be a evolutionary response, too, to when things get to a certain point, and you're getting some danger vibes as a woman. Danger vibes, that's what I'm going to call them. Danger vibes, that you're more likely to cry, so that it's like, "Don't hurt me." kind of thing. Yes, it's an appeal to That's right. It's an appeal to the latent maternal instinct within whoever you might be interacting with.

But, also that crying is also it's a signal that the situation has gone beyond your control. Well, that's what children do. They cry. Well, why? Cuz the cry attracts attention. I mean, a child's cry We had a cat at one point um when I was a college student, and uh my roommate used to bring his little niece over now and then. And if she cried, the cat, who was a female cat, would immediately come running over and investigating.

So, that that cry is a mammalian constant, and it means something what It means something like there may be a predator in the environment. an alarm, especially when they're really little. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, okay. So, back to the female ethos. Well, I think that women I think women's temperaments are optimized at least in part for the mother dependent infant dyad. And the reason I think that is because boys and girls don't seem to be different in trait neuroticism.

And then Little boys and girls. Right, before puberty. Mhm. The difference kicks in at puberty. And so and so then women are more sensitive to negative emotion and they stay that way permanently. And it's quite a difference, half a standard deviation, which is quite a large difference. It's It's enough so that if you drew two random people from the population, one man man and one woman, and you had to guess who experienced more negative emotion on average, if you guessed the woman you'd be right 60% of the time.

So, it's not a huge difference, but it's not nothing. And it does kick in at puberty. And so then the question would be, well, why at puberty? And some answers are, well, males and females become dimorphic at at puberty. The boys get bigger and stronger, especially in terms of upper body strength, so they can start to win physical combats, physical combat competition. though. Well, but but generally, it doesn't take much of a size advantage to prevail in a physical fight. And so So, that means physical fighting starts to become more dangerous for women when they hit puberty, especially in relationship to men.

But then they also become sexually vulnerable, which is a huge risk. And so, why wouldn't you be more threat sensitive because of that? And then also, well, who says it's about you? Why isn't it about you and your infant? And so, your Imagine your nervous system is tuned for the average level of danger you face if you have a dependent infant. And that kind of sucks for you because you're more nervous and sensitive to pain and grief and all of that and frustration than would be optimal for you as an adult, but, you know, it's not all about you. That changed for me, too, when I had Scarlett.

Uh I mean, I was also quite ill at the time, so that's But there were the hormones involved. I think I was pretty stress intolerant, especially in regards to Scarlett. Um until she started to be less needy, right? Right. first year, it was any sound she made that's the thing. elicited a pain response to me. It was horrible. She'd go like I'd be like, "Oh!" Yeah, your mom was Your mom was like that when when you were an infant.

We had built a I built a bunk bed out of wood in the small room I had in Montreal we had and we built a crib for you right under the bed. And so, the room was only about, I don't know, 8 by 10. It was a very small room. So, we built this bunk bed. We only had about 3 ft between the top of it and the ceiling. And then, we built a crib for you underneath and a change table. It was quite nice and it was very solid.

Earthquake wouldn't have taken it down. It was all built out of 2 by 4s. And we built a wall. It was in what was the dining room. We built a half wall and then built this underneath and was that apartment? They called it a four and a half in in Montreal and it had a a living room. Um really one bedroom.

It It was a small two bedroom is maybe if you pushed it, that's what it would be. It had a tiny living room, maybe 10 by 10. Another room adjoining the living room that was maybe 10 by 10. Then this dining room that was maybe 8 by 10. And then a kitchen that was somewhat bigger, L-shaped. And that was the apartment. And it was a long kind of train car like apartment um in a poor area in Montreal.

And anyways, that's where you were you were uh that's where we lived when you were born. And I'd be sleeping up on top and you would just go You'd just make a tiny peep and Tummy would be up instantly, down the ladder instantly. And then she would feed you or rock you to sleep. And she was unbelievably good at that. Unbelievably responsive. And as a consequence of her instantaneous responses, you almost never got upset enough at night when you woke up to actually wake up. And so, she was amazingly responsive to to those tiny signs of distress.

And so, okay, so and and to flesh this out. So, imagine that that's a that's a pretty cardinal set of wiring. Yeah. Because everyone's survival depends on it. Um because infants are so dependent in the first 6 months. And so, then you think, well, what does the world look like if the safety of a dependent infant is your primary concern? And the answer to that is, well, your nervous system is attuned to optimize that relationship because survival itself depends on it.

And so, then, well, is everything an infant? So, I think the world is divided for women whose maternal instinct is hyperdominant, the world is divided into three categories. Infants, caretakers of infants, and predators. And that's it. And God help you if you're a predator. Because there is if you are a mother of an infant, there is nothing about a predator that doesn't deserve to be destroyed. Mhm.

And you forget about presumption of innocence cuz the the the uh the hypothesis going to be prove to me you're not a predator. And you know, fair enough. But it isn't obvious at all that that ethos scales. It's not a good rule of thumb. It's not a good heuristic for picking a husband. Although, no predators, fair enough, you know, but it's not a good heuristic for picking a husband. It is not a good heuristic for establishing social communities because everyone isn't an infant.

Everyone isn't a caregiver. And those that are neither of those aren't all predators. And so, when I looked at this Mount Royal College thing and I was talking to De Waal, I thought, "Oh well, we can just see this. It's like all these faculty members are infants except for those of them who are predators and they all need to be nurtured." It's like, "Well, that's Freud. That's Freud's Oedipal mother. That's the devouring mother."

It's like you infants should be treated like infants. But people who aren't infants are not infants. And that doesn't mean they're predators and they shouldn't all be treated like they're infants. It's not helpful and it is and the thing about it that bothers me in particular, I would say, or the danger in it in particular is that there's an intense moralizing that goes with it because well, there's nothing more important than taking care of an infant. Fair enough. There's no job more admirable than being a caretaker of an infant. Well, that's a bit trickier claim because there's lots of ways of taking care of people and even if you're taking care of an infant, well, that requires the provision of food, for example, the provision of shelter and all sorts of other activities that aren't so hyper-focused on the infant but that are equally necessary, especially in complex social environments.

And then well, everyone who isn't one of those two things is a predator. That's a just blood That's just a bloody disaster. How do we How do we know that this isn't Okay, so this is my experience being being female.

Feminine Temperament, PC Studies, & Personality

And I think we've had discussions about this before cuz I've got um I've got a lot of masculine personality traits that just skew towards and then there are other women like me, right? But we're talking about the average female here. So, I've had a hard time understanding some talking about the feminine temperament, you know. The Okay, feminine temperament. That makes sense. Um Even more than the average female. It's more like it's like the the typical feminine temperament.

Okay, okay, okay. I can Cuz men can have this Men can have this this this tilt to their thinking as well. It's less common because the combination of personality traits that would produce that ethos, which is likely high neuroticism and high agreeableness, is less common in men. Okay. So, do you think it's not absent. Do you think it's just those, really? High agreeableness and high neuroticism?

Um I think low intelligence helps. When And I I think this for a reason. as well? No. No. No, specifically my graduate student, Christine Brophy, and I studied political correctness. And political correctness, I think, is an outgrowth, in part, of this hyper um feminine ethos. And I think that well, we First of all, we tried to find out if there was a set of beliefs that cohered as politically correct or woke.

Yeah. Cuz that's the first question. Is this just something that you know, right-wing conservatives are hypothesizing. It's like, well, you can test that. Statistically, you can see if you have one belief, if you're more likely to have another, and then you can see which sets of beliefs are likely to associate with one another. We found clear evidence for the existence of what was obviously identifiable as a politically correct set of beliefs. And what we did was take a very broad set of beliefs and ask people about that, and then use statistics to group those beliefs.

We found a group that I believe anyone in our current culture would regard as politically correct. Then we looked at what predicted it. Well, being female predicted it. Over and above agreeableness and neuroticism, which was very interesting cuz we found very few phenomena in our studies that where you couldn't eradicate the sex difference by controlling for personality. That's weird. Yeah, so agreeableness being female, but the biggest predictor was low verbal IQ. And so you imagine that So you're saying woke people are stupid.

No, I'm saying that people who are less verbally sophisticated are more likely to gravitate towards all-encompassing simple theories because of course they are. So like kind of like woke people maybe weren't as bright. I think you might be able to say the same thing about people who hold a very low-resolution schematically conservative viewpoint. You know, where they don't deviate from tradition at all. Yeah. And where they're they're not particularly sophisticated in defending their beliefs. That's not associated with openness?

That's mostly low. We didn't We That's a complicated question because openness is associated with verbal IQ. So if you have a low verbal IQ, you're likely to be lower in openness, but it's it was complicated because generally speaking, openness predicts liberal viewpoint. Yeah. But political correctness is is not exactly It's not exactly merely an extension of liberal belief. But the correlation between politically correct belief and verbal IQ was negative .45, which is a whopping correlation. It's It was one of the biggest correlations we ever saw in any study.

It's It's higher than the correlation between IQ and grades, which is really something cuz those measures are kind of the same thing. Yeah, it was it Yeah, so Wow. So And you know, there is evidence in the university setting, too, that the most politically correct disciplines are those who are simultaneously most dominated by females and that have the least bright students. Are those also the ones that don't actually lead to jobs? They just Well, they lead to jobs now. Oh, yeah, they've created this entire ecosystem so that your humanities degree matters. Yeah, well, your your your women's studies degree, let's say, or Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, well, sorry. in humanities together. Yeah, I know, you don't want to do that.

The Feminine Ethos in Society

You don't want to do that, but um And so, you know, this is part of a broader discussion that we can't have in our culture, which is what's the evidence that the feminine ethos scales to regulate families or broader communities? Cuz we've introduced women into the broad political discussion, and we've introduced women to every level of social organization, but we have no evidence that women can produce those sorts of organizations. Now, maybe they can, and maybe it's also of great positive that they are, and I think there's lots of evidence for that. I mean, so, for example, it's clearly the case that countries where women are more educated and when where women are granted more rights seem to do far better economically. Now, whether that's because the women are free, which might be the reason, or because the cultures that tend to be more open to female participation are also more open to innovative ideas of all sorts, right? Cuz it's very difficult to distinguish between those two. We don't know, but we also know that if you educate women, their children are more motivated to pursue higher levels of education, which isn't doesn't seem to be the case.

So, if you try to predict how far a child will go in terms of their education, you can use mother IQ, father IQ, child IQ, and then you can use mother education and father education, and the IQ measures are relevant, and mother's education is relevant, but father's education isn't. So, and it isn't obvious why that is. Maybe women are pushy on behalf of their children. Right? So, they're like, "Oh, well, I got an education, you need an education more than your dad." may be that women who are educated are better at acting out the implicit valuation of education in it like at very early ages. Maybe they read more to their children. We don't know.

But but what So but what I'm saying is that I'm not making a blanket case that the introduction of women into more sophisticated forms of social No, larger scale forms of social organization was like a non-starter and hopefully it isn't because half the brainpower in the world is in the hands of women. We don't want to just leave that lying on the table. That would be a mistake for everyone. But we also don't we have no evidence whatsoever that the maternal ethos scales and I think I don't think it does.

Agreeableness & Manipulation by Dark Triad Types

I think that large-scale organizations have to run on on conscientiousness, not on agreeableness. Like there's evidence for that, too. So if you actually be negatively correlated with agreeableness. Well, we've looked at what predicts success in complex functional organizations and the two biggest predictors are IQ because IQ is general cognitive ability and that's just how fast and well you can solve any problem that requires abstraction and solving it faster is obviously better if it's an important problem cuz it's more efficient. The other predictor is conscientiousness, not agreeableness. In fact, in the managerial domain, there's some evidence that agreeableness is negatively correlated with success and I think that's because agreeable managers get taken advantage of. They can't discipline their employees properly and they get resentful.

And they feel bad, right? Like what happens if you have to fire somebody who is having a really hard time, right? And then it's like, "Oh, I'll let them stay in the company." And Well, worse than that even, I think they're prone and I think this is the fundamental problem with agreeableness in in in some regard as an ethos is you're completely susceptible to manipulation by narcissists and psychopaths and we know this technically, we know this biologically. So imagine that you set up a game, a simulation where everyone is cooperating. You could cheat, but everyone cooperates. Well, you can set up a pretty stable game that's composed of nothing but cooperators.

But if you introduce one cheater, one shark, the cheater takes everything. And so that And this is This is a chronic problem for societies. It's like as soon as you set up cooperation as the norm, the desirable norm, the iterable norm, the sustainable norm, the productive norm, that means those who mimic cooperation, so narcissists, Machiavellians, psychopaths, who pretend to be cooperative and competent, can steal. And then you're faced with the problem of, "Okay, what do you do with the free riders and the crooks?" And the answer is, "Well, you change society so that they're not victimized." It's like, "You are naive beyond belief." You know, it's like the I think it was the mayor of Seattle when Antifa established its, you know, zone of of utopia downtown.

It's like, "Well, it'll be just like the summer of love." Which, by the way, ended very badly. And that was fine till the lights went off at night and the criminals came to play. And you think, "Well, they're just victims of an oppressive social organization." It's like, that'll be a real good thing to tell them when they break into your house. And so that sort of naivety, which is a an outgrowth of a kind of immature agreeableness, is seriously not helpful when it comes to solving complex social problems. Well, and one of I suppose is the regulation of the relationship between men and women.

Because women actually don't like agreeable men that much. Now, it's tough for women, eh, because if you have a disagreeable man, he's blunt, he's not very compassionate, he's not very polite. He's competitive. And so and that can degenerate into a kind of selfish meanness. And so the best personality predictor of criminal behavior is low agreeableness. So and then And low conscientiousness? you add those two together, you get something approximating psychopathy. So that's someone he doesn't care about you at all.

Plus, he follows zero rules. So like stay away from that guy. And it isn't just that he's misunderstood. He's a guy to stay away from. And you could add extraversion to that, then you'd get a narcissistic psychopath. And then maybe you could add emotional stability to that and then you get a fearless narcissistic self-centered psychopath. And then then you have that's a movie psychopath, right?

Yeah. But if you up the conscientiousness, then you get a CEO. Well, well, well, yeah, well, that's that's the Okay, so what a woman needs is someone who's disagreeable enough to keep the psychopaths away and the criminals, but agreeable enough to share and be reasonable. And that's an unbelievable That's a knife edge, right? Cuz it's Or do they have to be agreeable enough though? Or could they just be conscientious? Would they like, "Okay, this is fair.

Like I can't start with of degree.

Ideal Personality Combinations for Relationships

No, no, no, no, you want some No, I've seen disagreeable conscientious men try to have relationships with agreeable women. Yeah. And it's very difficult for them to bridge the gap because the the guy is so masculine and the woman is so feminine that they don't really exist in the same worlds. And so it's it's you want that you know, you don't you want a man who it's tough. It also depends to some degree on the dangerousness of the environment, right? So the more dangerous the environment, yeah, maybe the more disagreeable a man you need. So, it's a really thin needle for women to thread.

And that's basically the beauty Beauty and the Beast mythology, right? Because the woman, Beauty in in that story, wants a beast. Well, why? To keep the real beasts at bay. And who are the real beasts? Gaston. Well, and what is he?

He's a narcissist, right? He's a narcissistic He borders on psychopathy. Very dangerous. Very dangerous. Arrogant, egotistical, self-centered, and he's a He's a parody of masculinity in some sense. And so, Mhm. Beauty wants the beast because he's a beast and he can keep Gaston at bay.

But, he's tameable. And her job, and and this is I I think part of the central female myth of adaptation, like the hero myth is for men. The hero myth is also relevant for women. But, it's it's a it's an a mixture for women because they have the Beauty and the Beast thing that has to be done, which I think is primary. But, the hero myth, which is go confront that which frightens you and stands in your way and thereby prevail. That's sort of like Mary with her foot on the serpent. Right?

That's that's very much like St. George and the dragon. So, there's that element of predator defense that's definitely part of women's makeup and the desire to explore and intellectually and and the desire and to and the the the ethos of courage and voluntary exposure. That's all relevant. That's partly why Christ in Christianity is regarded as a universal savior. He's an archetypal hero. So, he's sort of like St.

George and the dragon magnified up into a whole 'nother dimension of significance. But, he's regarded as a figure that's redemptive both for men and women. Then you have the figure of Mary. It's like, well, is Christ redemptive or is Mary? And the answer for women is, well, for the answer for both sexes is both. But Christ is regarded still as primary for both sexes, which is quite interesting. But the female situation is more complex, and so it's Beauty and the Beast.

You want to find a guy that's tough and brave. And there's problems associated with that. He's going to He's going to be somewhat uncivilized and wild. And then you bring him into a relationship and tame him.

Sexuality, According to Google

And like this is the Google engineers who make great social scientists when they're sort of let loose on the data, did a wonderful analysis in a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, where they looked at female pornographic fantasies. And so men look at look at pornography, and women read pornography. And so, which is quite interesting. Um Yeah, that is that is interesting. Yeah, well, it also ties back to the swimsuit or the Sports Illustrated issue idea. Yeah, men are men are very visual in their in their sexual preference, extraordinarily so. But I mean, you'd have to be visual, but you'd be getting it through different medium, right?

Like for a for a book, it's not like they just read it. They read it and visualize it. Right, but they're visualizing different things. Men are visualizing physical features associated fundamentally with fecundity and health. Yeah. Youth, fecundity, and health. And that would be clear skin, plump lips, uh reddish-hued skin, cuz that's also youthly toned, lack of wrinkles, uh 0.68 waist-to-hip ratio, um uh clear eyes.

There's a variety of other uh cardinal attributes. Symmetry is an interesting one. I read that butterflies can detect departures from symmetry of one part in a million in potential mates, butterflies. Well, but you look at a butterfly and you think, "Man, that's pretty beautiful." It's like, "Yeah, that's sexual selection, boys and girls." Pretty good for the butterflies. They have that level of aesthetic capability, and they're insects.

Right? One part in a million. Symmetry really matters. So, on the pornographic front, women It was very comical to read this because and I had read a fair number of Harlequin Romances when I was a kid. My mom used to take them camping, so I read like 200 of them because they were always lying around. I'd just pick one up and read it. And then I had a client whose sister read the more pornographic versions of Harlequin Romances cuz they have a more spicy lines.

So, I read like 10 of those cuz I was curious. And then I um Uh at least that was my excuse. And then cuz I was dreaming about pirates and surgeons and vampires. Anyways, the Google guys showed quite clearly the pattern of female pornographic fantasy preference and it was basically Beauty and the Beast. It was like tough surgeon, pirate, vampire, billionaire. There was one other category I can't remember. Uh maybe it was corporate and No, that's billionaire.

Now, billionaires covers that. But like hyper-successful male trumping around, you know, arrogant kind of guy. But also someone ideally who will take care of you even when you're feeling sorry for something you shouldn't feel sorry for. Yeah, well the the fantasy mounts, they have a couple of interactions. There's a fair bit of rejection. There's some underlying sexual tension. He realizes how beautiful she is.

She kind of entices him into establishing a relationship with him and tames her. And then, you know, there's some fiery sex that goes along with that. And And then so, she's got herself She's got herself her own monster. And then he serves her purposes in some sense, defense, and then generosity, and and competence, and production, and so, and that's all unbelievably deeply embedded. And it's rude to talk about it, but like how about Fifty Shades of Grey, folks? You know, that was I think read that? I read some of it.

Oh. I I didn't read much of it because once I painful. Yeah, well And everybody read it. Yeah, yeah. Like I had like everyone I knew read it secretly, yeah, or not so secretly. Yeah, well, it was a funny thing to see happen because it was happening, if I remember correctly, right at the same time as the Me Too movement. It's like, and that's very that makes perfect sense psychologically because if you get a reaction that's too far in one direction, then it calls for a fantasy in the other direction.

It's like, well, sex only can take place between people of equal power, whatever the hell that means. Well, that's that's That sounds like a fun sexual experience. Well, that's part of the reason why, you know, relationships between, say, undergraduates and graduate students or undergraduates and professors in universities are hypothetically verboten, which I think, by the way, is a mistake because are you an adult or not? Now, that doesn't mean it can't be manipulated, and it doesn't mean that there are reasons to step forward with propriety, and I'm not a fan of promiscuity or one-night stands or any casual sexual relationships for that matter, but it isn't obvious to me at all who has the upper hand in those sorts of relationships because feminine youth and beauty and charm, especially allied with personality and intelligence, is a vicious and deadly combination. There's not That's not nothing by any stretch of the imagination. It might be the highest status What would you say? Set of manifestations that there is because I would say, generally speaking, cultures value young women like ideal young women more than they value anyone else.

They certainly value them more than they value, well, certainly the typical young men, but maybe even the atypical young men. What exactly is the problem with casual relationships, and how are you supposed to find the person you need to be with without having them? Well, I think How about abortion? That's a problem. And so it's a minefield, obviously, any discussion of abortion, but one thing I can say about abortion that I think would generate no objection is you wouldn't give one to your sister for a present. Right. So, whatever it is, it's not desirable.

And how not desirable it is is at minimum open to question.

Casual Relationships

So, I don't think there's any such thing as a casual sexual relationship. I don't believe that. I've never seen any evidence that that's the case. I think that there are people rationalize that constantly because they want to believe Well, they want to believe that short-term hedonistic gratification is ethically acceptable. And I don't think it is. I think that it trains you to treat yourself and other people as instrumental objects of short-term pleasure. Obviously.

Well, is that is that how you want train yourself? How's that going to work in your You're going to have a long-term relationship at some point? How are you going to train yourself for that? Okay. So, having said that, and then I you know, how carefully how carefully should we conduct ourselves in sexual matters, I would say, well, as carefully as you conduct yourself in any matter of importance. And that might be that stretches all the way up to the top. Whatever the top is.

You know, you're going to treat the other person as if they're a divine locus of consciousness or a disposable pornographic entity. Well, you know, those are the those are the borders. Okay, but then you say, well, you have to practice. And there's truth in that. And how do you practice? And the answer is, well, that's one of the central complications of life. Right?

To to get the balance between individual action and the whole domain of sexuality and reproduction right is perhaps there's no more difficult question. Especially once you've solved the question of do you have enough to eat tomorrow? That'd be the next one that pops up. But I don't think there's I don't think there is such a thing as casual sex. I think that's indistinguishable from masturbation, which I also don't regard as a particularly heroic act. And so, well, T-shirts, masturbation, not a particularly Well, yeah, right. Right.

Right.

Meaning of Sexual Shame

And and I think people have that sense and I don't think that that's culturally instantiated because in some sense we've done everything we can to eradicate every last vestige of sexual shame, which I think in the final analysis is impossible because there are all sorts of reasons for the persistence of sexual shame that have nothing to do with cultural context. And still, you know, it's an a furtive and underground activity. And the reason for that is because it's sub-optimal for all sorts of reasons. Well, how much motivation does a young man need to overcome his fear of rejection and establish a relationship with a woman? And the answer to that is, we don't know. But sexual deprivation could easily be easily be part of it. Because you to do something difficult, you need a lot of motivation.

You need frustration working for you. You need fear working for you. You need lust working for you. You need loneliness working for you to bind a man and woman together, especially if they're going to produce children. This is very, very difficult thing to do successfully. And so anything that interferes with that is to be viewed with extreme skepticism, and that's undoubtedly part of the reason that shame around hedonistic sexual activities remains a constant despite our best attempts to eradicate it. I think I would also say, um, just from my experience growing up especially in university it's not like it's seen on the outside having casual sexual relationships as this fun thing.

Hook-up Culture

Mhm. It's not fun. No. And nobody thinks it's fun, especially women. So, if you're around other girls and they're like, oh yeah, I hooked up with this guy, none of you guys are actually enjoying that. Yeah. Right?

And I think that's a lie that women tell each other. Yeah. Why? I think because they think other people don't care. And because if you do it, it makes you feel bad enough that you're like, well, I don't want to look at that. Whatever's going on there, like maybe me feeling bad is not healthy. Right.

Like I'm not And there's something wrong with you. Yeah, or there's something wrong with you, right? And so, it's like, and it's unpleasant enough that you're like, well, I'll just, you know, keep going. It's already happened. There's nothing I can do about it. So, it might as well be okay because what am I going to do about what am I going to do about it if it's not okay? Yeah.

So, and then, you know, And I think this is pretty common for women in university to hook up with people, right? It's called hookup culture. There's Tinder, like it happens. But I like for anybody out there who's who's thinking maybe I don't want to do that it's not fun. It doesn't make you feel good. It's really makes you really lonely, right? It's not a good idea. you lonely?

I think because what you're looking for what you're looking for is connection with somebody. And you're you're getting the physical connection and you're not getting any emotional connection, and it's Right, and then there's the contradiction. Oh, it's a terrible contradiction. jux- jux- Well, here's here's an interesting thing I used to tell my clients is don't do anything with anyone sexually that you wouldn't talk to them about. Seems like well, I wouldn't talk to anybody about that. It's like but you act it out, eh? So, that's worth thinking about. It's you're not intimate enough with them to have a conscious discussion, but you're perfectly willing to blunder stupidly into it.

And then and then risk the aftermath. A lot of that's fueled by alcohol, too. Yeah, a lot of it is like all of it. You're not going to do that. ever had wanted to have a serious conversation about sexual impropriety on campuses, for example, the first thing we'd focus on is alcohol. But we don't want to have a serious conversation about that because, you know, we don't want to have Well, we don't want to have chaperoned parties like there were in the 1950s, you know. It's like well, you know, having some older people around to keep the or- the drunken orgy under control actually turns out not to be such a bad idea. Especially people who um are non-biased, right?

Are unbiased. We're just there saying, "Well, this doesn't look like it's going well. Maybe I'll help this person out." Instead of a group of friends are like, "No, do it." Like Yeah, right. Well, which is exactly what are running into each other. Well, that's what you get with alcohol, too, is that alcohol is really Alcohol is a drug that really radically decreases people's medium- to long-term orientation, right?

It really focuses you on the present, which makes it If it's a good drug for you, it makes it unbelievably fun because it decreases anxiety, and it increases likely opiate bonding and dopamine-mediated extroversion. And so, like it's cocaine, heroin, and a benzodiazepine rolled into one. And so, it makes you not care. And for for pure hedonism, there's nothing better than not caring. But alcohol is a catastrophe on many fronts because of that. And a huge proportion of violent crimes, exploitative crimes, rapes, a huge proportion of those are conducted between drunk people. And so, but I don't I don't believe that I don't believe that there is moral casual sex.

Because I don't think sex is casual. I don't think anything about it is casual. I don't think Well, that That's what I think. Yeah, fair. Okay, so kind of on that note, given that people just graduated, do you have advice for recent high school grads? I think it's very it's hard to overstate the importance when you're at a point of transition like that. So, you've you've you're done being someone that you were.

Advice for High School Grads

A school kid. You're done with that. And so, that's an achievement, but it's also the end of something. It's the end of an identity. And it's a new beginning. So, now you have a new beginning. You have a new beginning.

You don't get that many of those in your life. If you move, if you switch jobs, if you make a radical life transformation, you may have that. Sometimes that's accidental. It's thrust upon you, and that's that's different. That's harder. Sometimes it's because of opportunity. But maybe you get four or five opportunities like that in your life.

So, they're rare. You get to be someone new. Who? Who? Have a vision. So, when I started to puzzle this out, it was often because of talking to clients or uh students who didn't know what to do. What should I do with my life?

I don't know what to do with my life. Fair enough, and that's not a very good question. I What do I do with my life? It's like, "What's the answer to everything?" It's not a good question, right? It's too vague. So, I suppose I answered this to some degree, at least initially, like a conservative person.

I said, "Well, what other people do?" Well, they have an intimate relationship. They have a family. So, that could be your birth family, so you could fix that up, or it could be, you know, your new family, your kids, your wife. They have friends. They have a social community. That might involve civic responsibility, which is something we're direly lacking at the moment.

You need a job. You need to take care of yourself mentally and physically. You need to educate yourself. You need to regulate your reaction to temptation. There's eight things. Okay, so now, you get to be whoever you want. But you have to want it.

And you have to aim at it. And so, to do that, you have to have a vision. Part of the utility of literature is the provision of such visions. Negative, you know, in the case of anti-heroes, positive in the case of protagonists. Who could you be? Part of the advantage of being educated in the humanities is that you can draw your models from the best history has to offer. And that's really what an education in humanity should present you with.

It's like, here are the great people of history, and that's you in potential. And so, that means you can establish a new peer group. You know, in some sense, my peer group has always been the people whose books I most admired. You know, and that's a reach, right? Because who wants Who dares to compare himself, herself to the truly great of the past, Nietzsche for me, Dostoevsky, Jung, oh, and then the classic philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hume, all these stunning people that were brilliant beyond conception, you know? I mean, that's a high reach and presumptuous in some sense, but the point of a humanities education is in large part to surround yourself with peers of the highest quality. And so, you do that in the world of abstraction, which is and the teachers are there to guide you through that, if they only knew that.

And then, you also want to do that with your peers. So, one of the things you want to ask yourself if you're graduating from high school is, well, now I'm off to do something else. Might be a job, might be college, might be trade school. It's like, I'm going to make new friends. What's a friend? What do I want? I want someone to tell good news to, who will celebrate with me.

I want someone to tell bad news to, who'll be upset if something bad happened to me and not secretly happy. I want someone who's aiming up for me and for them. Or not. Or do you not want that? It's like, what do you want if you're taking care of yourself? What would you want in a relationship? You need a vision for this and we do an staggeringly appalling job of helping young people even understand that that's necessary.

And I I know partly why. I was very curious about this because I spent a lot of time with this future authoring program, self-authoring, part of the self-authoring suite, cuz we built a program to help people make a plan.

Self-Authoring Suite

And once we built the program, one of the things we found, for example, was that if you gave it to young men who were entering college, the few months before they went to college, they were 50% less likely to drop out in the first year. And then, it's crazy. For a 90-minute exercise, it's like that's just If the world had any sense, every single college would have immediately used that upon publication of our paper. But none of them did, and that says something. Is that mainly just goal setting? Like, what do you want? Envision that, and then goal setting's the wrong way to think about it.

I think it's too narrow a conceptualization. I think that you need literally to imagine it. It's like you get to be who you want. Well, you need to run the story like in detail, and if you're trying to predict whether someone's going to commit suicide, you ask them, "Well, you know, have you ever thought about harming yourself?" "Well, you know, sometimes." "Have you ever thought about killing yourself?" "Well, you know, the thought's crossed my mind." "Do you have a plan?" "Yeah, I have a plan." "Well, can you tell me about the plan?" "Well, you know, my dad has a .45 in the top shelf of his desk. I've seen it in there several times. The bullets are in the drawer next door. I thought, you know, I could probably put that in my mouth in the bathroom so I didn't make too much of a mess, and I'd probably do that in the morning."

That's right. That's not good. Yeah. Right. That person's in danger. Yeah, cuz they've the dream has entered their mind. They've visualized it.

And so, I don't It's not goal setting. It's It's more like It's much more like casting yourself in a fully fleshed out literary representation. It's like, "What is your future? Who are you?" And what you want to do is negotiate with yourself. It's like, "Just imagine." This is a gospel idea, right?

That if you knock, the door will open. If you ask, you will receive. If you seek, you will find." And no one believes that. But I believe it's true. But it depends on what you mean by knock, ask, and seek cuz it means if you mean it. Yeah, if your life depends on it.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. You're all in on it. It's like you want this? What do you mean want? want. You don't want for like 2 minutes of the day and then you get bored. Right.

Right. And your right hand wants it and your left hand doesn't. And no, no, it doesn't mean that at all. It means you're going to make the sacrifices necessary and you're all in on it. Okay, so then the question becomes well, what's worth going all in on? And the answer to that is ask yourself. You know, because we know that life has an unbearable element to it.

And so facing that forthrightly, say life's suffering, man, and plenty of it. And so what might make that worthwhile? Well, what if I had someone I really loved who I was really attracted to, that I was really in love with that I was sexually entranced by. It's like or what if I was that person for someone else? Cuz that's actually a better plan. You know, what would I have to do to myself to hypothetically be someone like that for someone else? Which is a much better way of thinking about it.

What if I had kids that I loved? What if I had friends like King Arthur had friends? You know, what if I was part of a enterprise that was fundamentally changing the world for the better? It's like, would that justify it? Well, you have to ask yourself. And if it isn't everything you need it to be then it's not a good vision. And you're in an impossible situation anyways.

So, why not try to do something impossible? It's not going to be in some sense, it's not going to be any more difficult in any real sense, although it's going to require more dedication. It's not going to be any more difficult than just slumping along to the grave. Yeah, not any less painful. Well, yeah, you have to forego stupid short-term hedonistic pleasure, which is God, anyone with any sense know like cocaine, it's like great for a week. You're going to like 15 minutes. Yeah, mhm, mhm.

Not so good iterated over 20 years. Alcohol is the same way. Casual sex is the same way. Any others We all know this. There isn't anyone who doesn't know these things. People pretend Oh, sex can just be for fun. It's like, yeah, right.

What is just for fun? Name one thing. Let alone something as complicated and as entangling as sex. You also see this in the public culture.

Violating the Non-Contradiction Principle

It's like cuz in the universities we have two things going, same thing, violation of the principle of non-contradiction. Any sexual orientation of any sort or any practice whatsoever is to be encouraged in every possible way with no holds barred and no limitations whatsoever. And every single sexual interaction between a young man and a young woman is so dangerous that you need a written contract before proceeding. Maybe cuz everyone's being encouraged to do anything. Well, you get one of those. Yeah. But not both.

Cuz both of them can't exist simultaneously. And so, and I'm much more prone to give credence to the danger side of it. It's like this is no joke. This is your life you're messing around with. Or someone else's life, the person you're with, the baby that you produce. This is no joke. So, you think that's that anything goes.

It's like anything doesn't go in a relationship, anything doesn't go in a friendship, anything doesn't go in a business. Anything doesn't go when you're alone in the woods trying to survive. There's nowhere that anything goes. And that's to to desire that is so narcissistic and so infantile that it's almost unexpressible. And that's our culture. Yeah. Okay.

So, what are you looking forward to in the future? This is the last question then I'm letting you go. What are you looking forward to?

Outro

Help being healthy. Yeah. Not being on fire. I'll settle for that. Any day I'm not on fire, that's a pretty good day. So, today is a pretty good day? Today's just fine.

Good. Thank you very much for joining me.