Transcript of Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau & Luke Malone (on child sexual abuse prevention) New

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepherd. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

Today we have Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone on. Uh, if ever there were a cause for a trigger warning, this would be the episode. We are going to get deep into what could only be described as an epidemic of child sexual abuse. Uh, 1 in 5 kids, hence the title of their book that they collaborated on called One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis and What We Can Do to Stop It. Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau is the director of MOORE, M-O-O-R-E, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which is a center focused on child sexual abuse prevention. So we have, like, one of the most foremost experts imaginable, incredible origin story, how these two ended up working together. She was going to get interviewed by Luke and was reluctant to do so, and it's turned into a long collaboration for both of them. And Luke is an Emmy-nominated journalist who has reported on sexual abuse for 15 years. So he is so dedicated to this topic. And there's so much stuff you would not have imagined otherwise. It's a very revealing episode. I learned so much in this episode.

But also, just so people aren't like, I would— I just would never listen to it. There's like good— they're trying to make a lot of progress, and the goal is to end this, and it can be done.

Yeah, yeah, they have a lot, a lot of solutions and a lot of understanding of, uh, all the different ways this expresses itself. So please enjoy Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone.

It's a little chilly out today. It's not very LA. Uh-uh, I know. I don't like it.

Where do y'all live?

Baltimore.

Baltimore.

Oh, so you get a lot of Johns Hopkins.

You got to be there.

Yeah, Johns Hopkins, your favorite.

I hate that name. Do other people express their frustration with the double plural?

It was his grandmother's last name, so, you know.

It's been explained to me.

People do that to their kids. Yeah.

Yeah, they do.

But two plurals is hard. I know, it's terrible.

It's not alliterative, it's awful, it's terrible to say.

But that's a tiny grievance. So much good work has been done.

Maybe.

You could pick at some other things as well. Yeah. If you're looking at blemish history.

Sure, antitrust issues, but the amount of—

I mean, you know, look, no one's perfect.

No one's perfect.

Yeah, when you have that kind of wealth, there's original sin somewhere.

Yeah.

But if you can do something good with it, we'll take it.

So Elizabeth, where are you from originally?

I grew up in Ohio.

What part of Ohio? Sandusky?

Mentor.

Oh, I did a movie in Mentor, Ohio.

Oh, did you really?

Yeah.

Home of Garfield? No, who?

Oh yeah, Garfield. That sounds right. If there's quizzes, I'm not gonna pass.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

You should always clarify if you're talking about Garfield the cat.

The cat.

I thought the cat.

And I was like, oh, it has a very Ohio vibe to the cat. But yeah, I think you're right about that. But yeah, no, I grew up there.

Love Cedar Point.

Went to Cedar Point a billion times. Did you ever go in a matching outfit with a boyfriend or girlfriend? I have never done that, nor will I. But my mother, there were 5 of us, 3 boys, she made the boys wear matching outfits in all of our pictures. And at one point, bought all of us tracksuits that matched.

Oh, okay.

Also something I have not repeated.

With heels from entirely?

Well, there's that.

We're getting into the really big wounds early.

I feel like I have a kind of a good sense of who mom is already just from that tiny little nugget.

She loves her family.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I have a great family. I got lucky.

And then Luke, where are you from?

Sydney, Australia.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Never heard of it. Where is that at?

Just around the corner, down the road, you know? Yeah.

How did you end up here?

I came to New York specifically in 2012 to do my master's in journalism at Columbia.

And am I right in that you guys formed this kind of partnership in that you wanted to interview Elizabeth and you did not really want to be interviewed by him?

That's wrong.

I had no problem being interviewed by you.

Don't lie on the record right now.

I was sick when he was coming down. I had the flu. I literally went and found a colleague who had a couch, who was like my one psychiatrist colleague, so of course he had a couch in his office, to lay down. But he was coming from New York to Baltimore and I didn't want to disappoint. But I was legit ill. It had nothing to do personally.

Thank God you didn't.

In what position did you hold at that time in 2000— what year would this have been?

2012, 2013.

Yeah, associate professor.

In the School of Medicine?

Department of Mental Health in the School of Public Health in the University of Johns Hopkins.

Okay. What's your PhD in?

Clinical psychology. But I've been a grant-funded researcher my entire career.

But you're a professor too, or no?

Yeah, yeah, you can do it all.

Yeah.

Okay. So when you were reaching out to Elizabeth, what topic were you hoping to interview her on?

Well, I was kind of doing a story about a group of young, self-identified, non-offending pedophiles.

Let's really take a minute.

Yeah, let's slow that down.

Young, self-identifying, non—

offending— offending pedophiles.

Pedophiles.

And the kind of non-offending part was important to them and still is, because I feel like people assume the pedophile, it means you've abused a child, you're about to abuse a child. And this was a bunch of kids who— and they were very young, they were kind of like 17, 18, 19, 20— who realized this about themselves, didn't want to act. At the time, there was no support for them, and so they'd formed this kind of hodgepodge support group for themselves to figure out, how do we reckon with this, like, now and going forward?

Really quick, how did you stumble upon that group of guys?

Part of Columbia was doing like a thesis. It was literally my grad thesis. I've been a journalist in Australia for 6, 7 years. I'm terrible with years, but for a while, and I wanted to become a serious journalist. So I came here, went to Columbia. Literally, it was just a thesis idea. It kind of came to me one day. I was reading about the Jerry Sandusky sentencing and I was like, huh, Jerry wasn't born like a 7-year-old child molester. I wonder what happened before then to get here.

Yeah.

And then I started interviewing a bunch of guys who were in their 50s, 60s, 70s, who were attracted to kids, didn't want to sexually offend against kids.

But again, how do you even find those people? That could be your interests, but where does one start finding—

Yeah, well, I mean, online in a very official channel, like nothing too shady, but there's a group called Virtuous Pedophiles, which I think is a terrible name.

It needs a rebrand.

Rebrand.

Yeah, rebrand. I've brought it up a couple times and like I haven't spoken to them for a while, but I was like, guys, they're like, oh, but we want to communicate that we're like— I'm like, it doesn't matter.

Talk about an oxymoron. We can add that to the list.

It's just no one wants to see that word. That's why this topic is tough.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Branding's 80% of it. So the Virtuous Pedophile, for very good reason, they couldn't have members who were below the age of 18. So it was 18 and above. And again, most of the guys were like 40, 50, 60, 70. So I spoke to a bunch of them, interviewed them, and I was like, no matter how virtuous you are, if you're like a 50-year-old who says, I'm sexually attracted to 8-year-old children, it is so icky. For understandable reasons, it's too much of a hurdle for a reader to get over.

Yes.

But then also, I think intellectually, they've had decades to figure it out, like what this means for them and their lives. And so I want to speak to younger kids who are kind of, A, that people might have a tiny bit more possibility for empathy toward, and also kids who are going through it right now.

What was the podcast, Monica?

Tartan Feathered. That's him.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, the one who did that.

So this was like a thesis project, and it became a print piece, and This American Life podcast out of that.

Really incredible episode.

That was—

thanks. Everyone's done a bunch of stuff in this room, but it's wild to think— came out in 2014. I used to kind of resist. I was like, oh God, this is defining my life. But it's kind of lovely to do something that people are still talking about 12 years later, which is sweet.

Yeah, I will say this is going to be one of the most challenging episodes for people to listen to and to find compassion for, and I hope we do a fair and good job. We have a history a little bit. We had a clinically diagnosed sociopath that came on, Patrick Gagne. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have long said on here, and I'm a victim of sexual abuse, but I have long said on here, I do feel bad if you are afflicted with pedophilia. I didn't pick not being attracted to kids. I just am not. And I don't think anyone would pick this. So just out of the gates, I'm so grateful that's not something I have to fight the urge of. What kind of work were you doing that Luke would reach out to you on this topic?

So I've been working on child sexual abuse prevention policy and practice since grad school. So I'm at the 38-year mark. It's what I've spent my entire career doing.

That's a daunting endeavor. I guess I feel like I need a tiny bit of explanation how you could have been pulled to that.

And stayed.

Staying was super easy. I don't have an origin story that involves surviving child sexual abuse. I went to grad school for clinical psychology, doctoral program. Definitely didn't feel like I belonged there. And I had a teacher I wanted to impress, and she handed out paper topics, and I got pedophilia. Her husband was also there, and that was his area, and also sex offending. Those are two different things. People who have sexual attraction to children and people who offend against children are often two separate groups. But anyway, so I just— I just killed myself writing the best term paper I possibly could to prove to this faculty member and to me that I belonged in this doctoral program.

Yeah.

And she saw and she liked it and she said, "Hey, do you mind if I share this with my husband?" And she did. And then I started working in his lab. And early on he invited me to kind of co-lead a group that was for men who had already offended. They'd served time in prison and they'd come back into their communities. This was in Maine, by the way. And they were refusing to acknowledge what they had done. And part of treatment for people who sexually offend, particularly for adults, and at that time in particular, you had to stand up and say what you did, what you did wrong. It was very much modeled on AA meetings, actually.

Meaning they were mandated to some kind of self-help group?

Not self-help. This was treatment with a therapist. Oh, okay. But the therapist said, "You have to stand up and say what you did wrong," and all of the different things. They were not doing that, so they were in another group for deniers, and that's the group that my professor led. And so I got to be in this group, and it was in a smallish room with like 6 or 7 guys, and I learned a couple of things. And one thing I learned is that these were not 3-headed monsters from some other planet. These were people, and some of them felt deep remorse for the harm they had caused to children, and others were assholes that you would never want to know, period. But they were people first. And I also learned that I could hear these stories and work with them and leave it at the office and go home and have my life. And there are not a lot of people that can do that with this particular population. So I got into it really literally almost by accident. But staying— it's a small group of clinicians and researchers that focus on perpetration, whether it's working with people who have already offended or in my case now really shifting to preventing both victimization and perpetration and just prevention writ large, which is a lot of different ways you can prevent child sexual abuse.

But the field is populated with really wonderful people, and they just kind of wrapped their arms around me and kept me in.

Yeah, I can't imagine it attracts a ton of candidates.

No.

Okay, so back to you, Luke. When you reached out to Elizabeth, you were hoping to, what, find out what kind of treatment was in existence or what kind of modalities existed?

Yeah, pretty much. So these were kids kids who— and they were kids, very young adults— who wanted help and there was just no help available. And Elizabeth had just founded the Mother Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, now called MOORE. And it's fascinating. And also they gave me some backbone as a journalist. I'm like, I got this group of kids, I need to give it some kind of context. And I was very wary about being seen as some kind of pedophile advocate.

Yeah.

Um, which has followed me through over the years. I wouldn't call myself that, but I'm more comfortable with it now. But I was very wary because it was the first time I'd kind of done this dance. I think if you both discussed— every time the kind of pedophilia has come up on the show, there is this idea, and you've mentioned it yourselves, like murder is more palatable. Oh yeah, pedophiles— you could murder a child, not great, but obviously not recommend. Somehow that's more palatable than sexually engaging with a kid. There's something so icky. And also I think, luckily, I myself am in this group, people who aren't attracted to kids. And thank God I'm not, that'd be like you said such a horrible thing to deal with. It's such a huge jump for anybody to think like, oh, I could see myself doing that. I don't have kids, but I have friends with kids. And sometimes they're little shits and you're like, oh my God, I could strangle you. I got quote marks here. I think the jump to hitting a kid— we were hit as kids. I was born in '81.

Yeah, violence seems more— we've all lost our temper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can have empathy for parents who do that, who snap, in the same way that you don't have empathy for someone who sexually abuses a kid.

Yeah, that's hard for you to say because you don't want to kind of excuse behavior or minimize behavior. No, I know, but you want empathy. I mean, not even for the person, but the situation. You stand back and look about how could this have been prevented or changed?

Well, I think we would apply the Sapolsky kind of lens, which is like, to feel morally superior is not really worthwhile. Taking dangerous people out of our community is essential and has to be done, but to do it without the moral high ground and the judgment and the punitive desire to make people suffer because of it, I think is the highest road we could probably take.

Yeah, but it's very human. And just to step back for a second, I'm sorry that happened to you.

Oh, okay, thank you. I feel weird receiving sympathy for it.

Let's talk about that. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know, maybe that's common or maybe that's uncommon.

I bet that's common.

I don't know, but I feel like it's worth acknowledging that this is painful, that a lot of people, a lot of your listeners are gonna have experienced themselves. And I would never say to empathize with the behavior at all or with somebody who has caused harm, but there's people out there who haven't caused harm that I think we really need to focus a lot more attention on.

Yes, yes. Well, I did learn some stuff in researching your work, was a little bit illuminating. I mean, I guess I've had this fear that this person that molested me maybe had gone on and victimized a bunch of people, and I never prevented that, right? That's maybe a bit of guilt I've had. But then in reading some stuff today from you, I'm like, maybe he never did that again. He was probably 17, I was probably 9-ish, somewhere in there.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, that had never even occurred to me. So we should lay out what the kind of numbers are because it's really important, and Your book, "One in Five," really tells us right outta the gates.

Yeah.

So one in five kids will experience some sexual abuse.

Some form of sexual abuse or attempted sexual abuse online or offline. So this is kind of the first, what we call prevalence statistic that combines both online and offline victimization.

And these are reported.

No, we would never rely on reporting.

Okay, I was gonna say like, that would make sense.

Because so few get reported.

Yeah, yeah, as you know, that's why I got, that's why I got confused.

80% is unreported.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's huge.

Subsequent editions are 1 and 2.

So my colleague and friend David Finkelhor has done several prevalence surveys across the years where you get a nationally representative sample, a large sample of adults reporting back on what happened to them. He's also surveyed kids, 10 to 17, large samples. And you ask them questions about things that have happened to them, and you can develop a much more accurate sense of how prevalent is this than if you rely on reports to law enforcement or to child protective services, which are usually the more extreme versions.

But it's still someone is saying verbally that it happened to them.

Self-report. Yeah. So these are self-report surveys.

Still, I would say probably there's more than that. I bet a lot of people— yeah, probably.

But self-report surveys can give you a pretty good sense. So certainly there will be people who are never going to admit. One thing that's remarkable to me about self-report surveys, and we do these as well, these prevalence surveys where we're asking people, have you engaged in these behaviors against a child?

Yeah. Yeah.

Is how many people will acknowledge illegal and stigmatized behaviors. And ridiculously, but it's true, being a survivor can carry some stigma still.

Oh yeah.

But people, if they feel safe, if they feel like you're not gonna report them because it's anonymous and confidential, folks will reveal things if you ask it in the right way also. Like if I asked you, "Have you raped somebody today or in the past?" They won't say it. But if you use behaviorally specific language, you get really good data on all kinds of behaviors.

So 1 in 5 currently, what historically, do we have any sense, did anyone do that caliber of work in the '80s to know what it was then. It's on the decline.

Yeah.

Yeah?

It is in many ways. So again, David Finkelhor, he's been in the field since the '70s.

Oh, great.

He's just brilliant and wonderful and someone I very much love and respect. He was doing surveys— the US was actually doing surveys back in the '80s and '90s. And one thing that was really surprising with the earliest surveys was how common it was. It did seem to be increasing over time, but then starting around early 1990s, 1992, we saw real declines. In sexual abuse against children, like on the order of 60% decline. So really, really, really good news. Too many children still being sexually abused, but really good news.

What do we attribute that to? I can just guess anecdotally what the '80s spike was. Well, what would you guess?

Yeah.

Total lack of supervision. You had both parents now in the workforce and/or increasing divorce rates. My case, single mother working her ass off, and we were just free to roam.

Less supervision.

Yeah. There was really not a lot of supervision.

Yeah. And stigma was was probably higher, maybe, than—

Or just ignorance. I mean, I think a lot of people didn't really know how bad it was for kids, honestly.

Right.

I think one thing that we talk about in the book that really helped start the decline was bringing it out of the shadows. So having more people talk about it, and we're grateful for this opportunity along the same way. But second-wave feminists, when they were working on really to bring rape out of the shadows, they brought child sexual abuse with it. Child sexual abuse is not the same thing as adult rape. It's not solely, or perhaps even mostly, a gender-based violence kind of thing. But lots of people who are raped as adults were sexually abused as children. It's a risk factor for future sexual victimization to have been sexually victimized as a child. And that helped. And then self-help groups for survivors, for parents, started being kind of a separate force, and that also further brought it out of the shadows. So just talking about it, then the research showing the kind of damage that can occur, it does not. You are not destined to a miserable life if you have survived child sexual abuse. And I want to be careful to say that.

Although the statistics are terrible.

Well, it's a risk factor for almost every bad thing you can experience.

You have like a 70% chance of addiction. I mean, there's some startling—

It is absolutely a risk factor, but I just would never want to suggest that someone is doomed.

Yeah.

Because that also is not true. But we do want to know what are the real sequela, the consequences, and they're terrible. And they don't stop with addiction. There's mental health consequences like PTSD. There's physical health like cancer. We've done economic analyzes and shown that survivors earn less over the course of their lives.

Should they drop out of school more?

Less academic achievement, less employment, and then higher risk of future victimization, both physical and sexual.

And if they have mental health problems and physical health problems, they can't hold down jobs, you know what I mean? So it sounds like something crazy, but even though I was kind of shocked in this book about the idea that cancer and hypertension and heart attacks would all be kind of linked back to cardiovascular problems, all linked back to CSA, which is— even as someone who's been kind of like working from a different perspective in this for many years, still shocked that that's the case.

Yeah, so we'll be using CSA. It's worth noting right now, we'll be using CSA a lot, and that's child sexual abuse.

There's also childhood sexual violence, which is another term that folks use as well.

Okay, so of this 1 in 5, again, I think this will be shocking for a lot of people. What percentage is happening adults to children versus children to children?

It's a good question, and it is shocking. So in the United States, when you ask people on these surveys, did this happen to you, and then follow up with who did it, what David Finkelhor's research has shown, and others in other countries, but this is a US-specific statistic, so I want to be precise, it's about 70% are other kids under the age of 18, usually a few years older. When you shift to online, and I do want to back up for one second, we've seen dramatic declines and they've kind of stabilized, and so we need to figure out how do we get further down reducing child sexual abuse. That's mostly hands-on. So, of course, before 2010, you didn't even have tech-facilitated abuse, so it could only go up, 'cause it launched roughly with the internet. Although there are some data that suggests that tech-facilitated abuse is also starting to level out. We can start getting some declines there too.

Can I ask, to get nitty-gritty, what constitutes online sexual abuse? Is that, like, coercing a child to share nude photos or something?

Yeah, that's one. There's all kinds. There's coerced and non-consensual image sharing. Image sharing. So we share images, kids share images. It's kind of normative in the context of a dating relationship or romantic relationship. But non-consensual sharing of those, when adult is asking kids for nude images, that's facilitated abuse and exploitation. When adults share child sexual abuse materials between themselves or upload them or create them, all of that is technology-facilitated abuse. There's grooming, where an adult may reach out, either pretending to be a child themselves or not. Kids want attention and they want attention from adults. And they're also kind of good at detecting. They have much better skills than I do, for sure. So there's all of those things and there's not bright lines between online and offline or in real life. They usually co-occur.

I hate to point this out, but yeah, that is one of the saddest subtexts of all this is that the predators are really good at spotting who's vulnerable and the kids that are vulnerable already were dealt a shit hand.

Yeah.

This is kind of the reward for that shit hand. Hand.

It's so true.

You're kind of obviously vulnerable.

We've got some data that we've just collected and just started analyzing about abuse in the context of K-12 school settings, and kids who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, kids who identify as LGBTQ, queer kids, experience far higher rates of abuse than kids who don't. So people are very good at identifying vulnerable kids. Kids are vulnerable just as any kid can be abused, and then there are groups of kids that are—

yeah, but there's one more percentage as well I think it's useful to kind of draw out. The 70% is at the hands of other kids, usually a few years older. But then like 90% of child sex abuse is at the hands of known entities. Yeah, I think we've moved past stranger danger, but there's still that kind of like echo hangover of stranger danger. And there are people who do— there are strangers, there are people who groom kids, there are kind of predators. But even online, what was even further shocking, on even online, it mirrors a little bit more. It's not 70%— I know the percentage—

no, it's more like 60% are unknown to the child and 40% are known. And again, those numbers vary depending on the country. So there's a little more stranger danger, you know, the Australian accessing live images of a child in the Philippines. But it's still mostly the people in your life.

So 90%, you know the person, and then 70%, it's not an adult. The 70% feels like something we could address successfully.

Yeah, absolutely.

More than the adult that this is a pattern of the behavior.

Yeah, the person who wants to go out and find somebody like this.

Yes, and has probably got well-worn skill set for that and a lot of other things. Things.

Yeah.

Now I'm really curious how we define it when it is both parties are under 18. What about the two 9-year-old boys showing each other their penises? Or what about these consensual, certainly sexual activity, but there's really no age gap, or there's a 1-year age gap? Like, where do we draw this line to call it abuse?

Well, it's so funny you said two 9-year-olds because I got a call from a lawyer in Texas once saying, so I have a 9-year-old client who's been charged with child sexual abuse by the local prosecutor because he He was skinny dipping with some other kids who were, you know, within 1 or 2 years. He was the oldest, but it was like a 9-year-old and an 8-year-old and a 6-year-old who were all friends. So in our country, fairly uniquely, there are states that don't have lower ages for criminal culpability. And when we think about sex, we kind of automatically add years to a kid so they're no longer a kid. If a child does something sexual, they stop being a child and they become an adult and they are treated like an adult. As if they should have known better. At the same time, we don't give kids education about sex ed. We often hide that on purpose. Kids who get sex education don't learn that touching a younger kid's penis is off limits. They learn not to hit or punch or kick a younger kid, but they don't learn that penises and vaginas are off limits.

And they figure it out eventually. By about age 15, kids understand much younger kids are off limits. To come back to arrest, last data, you see this increase from 12 to 13 to 14-year-old of arrests for sexual behavior against younger kids, and then it drops. And you're like, oh, the penny drops, they figure it out. But we don't tell them that. I mean, that's one of our prevention programs, is to work with kids in schools before they've made any of these mistakes, to give them the information, skills, tools, and knowledge to say, hey, by the way, younger kids, not okay ever, even if they're walking around naked or playing with you or seem to be doing something sexual with you. Absolutely not. They're not small adults. Kids don't have some kind knowledge about a lot of things that are okay and not okay until they gain some life experience, or we teach them that.

But again, I'm wondering, like, the scenario where it's two 10-year-old boys, it's consensual, one parent finds out and is somehow shamed by it.

We all have experienced being young and wanting to do, like, silly things with your friends. And I think some people—

yeah, so where do we differentiate?

Children should be a protected class of people. They're vulnerable by definition, and they're vulnerable no matter what they've done. So I would like to see more protections. Some kids are going to need help. They may need therapy, they and their family, for engaging in harmful and/or illegal behaviors. But I think we also need to do a better job of recognizing that sex play between close-in-age peers is normative. When it is mutually desired, it's not harmful, and we have laws that criminalize that as well. And so kids get caught up in a justice system that treats them again as if they were a 35-year-old predator when they're not. Some kids do cause harm. I definitely don't want to minimize a 9-year-old who was sexually abused by a 17-year-old.

Yeah, yeah. I had lots of little boys show me their penises, but that was something much, much different.

No, that is very different. And that 17-year-old is not a 35-year-old and probably knew he was causing harm or what he was doing was wrong and may not have known the degree— is unlikely to have known the real degree of harm that that kind of behavior causes. And there should be separate appropriate strategies. And there are, there's really good evidence-based treatment programs for kids who have caused harm where they're very unlikely to do it ever again.

This blew my mind. This was in your TED Talk. So of the minors who are arrested and convicted of a sexual abuse case, what percentage of them do it again?

Less than 3%. I can't say do it again. Less than 3% are ever arrested or convicted again.

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Well, so there's a lot to unpack there. Sexual recidivism rates for adults who have been convicted of sex crimes reoffense children are less than 10%.

Oh, so that's low too?

It's still very low.

That is not the narrative.

It is not the narrative.

But do we believe that?

A lot of people don't. The kid numbers are based on research by my friend and colleague Michael Caldwell, who looked at data across over 30,000 cases. So if it was 10 cases and 1 kid had reoffended, I would not be comfortable saying it's that, right? But when it's 30,000 cases— and then I was involved in a research project that included— oh my gosh, I forget the exact number, but maybe like 120,000 adult cases. The data are, in my opinion, incontrovertible. When you get to hundreds of thousands of cases that have been followed from first offense to 20 years later, 25 years later, and you're seeing a 10% recidivism rate among adults and a less than a 3% recidivism— I think with kids, the consequences are really severe if you get adjudicated for this. And it's a pretty clear message. Don't ever do this again. I think we could give them that message before they do it. But it makes sense to me that with kids, they don't do it again because now it is indisputable. They get it. This was wrong. This was harmful to that person that I did it to.

Uh-huh.

It was harmful to me. I don't ever wanna be in prison again. I don't ever wanna have this happen again.

Yeah. So tell us about the current standard for what happens when a kid is convicted.

So, it varies. And it varies within state. It certainly varies between countries. A lot of times, it never gets reported and nothing ever happens. And that's not helpful to either person. If they go through juvenile court, it's called an adjudication, but it's essentially the same thing as a conviction. It can vary. You could get probation. In some states, you can be given an opportunity to go through treatment and have your record wiped clean. You can get 5 years in prison. You can be put on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life and have that go up on the internet. Which 9- and 8-year-olds have, and so have 17-year-olds. It is highly variable. What we know is that prison is not a helpful consequence for kids. It's harmful. Registration and notification are very harmful for kids. It just ruins their lives.

You have to confront the trade-off. So it's like, okay, we send them to prison for 5 years. There was a 98% chance they weren't ever gonna do it again anyways.

Exactly.

But now their time in prison is going to up their chance of criminality outside of sexual abuse.

In general. Yeah, exactly.

Maybe 3 standard deviations. So it's like we're trying to—

—did do all the research. —way these, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, prison generally makes kids worse. It's not a fertile environment. It is not a safe, stable, nurturing environment for children. And they're often abused in prison too.

So the very thing we're courting to try and prevent, we're like, okay, throw them aside. They've done something bad. They're fucked. So it doesn't really matter what happens to them. And if you're the person who's victimized by that person, absolutely sure. But I don't know if you're worried about kids being abused and you're kind of putting often very young kids or like 17-year-olds in with much more sexually dangerous 35-year-olds. It's not gonna end well. There's also this—

I don't know if it's true or not, or a legend, but prisoners seem to deal with sexual abuse inmates in a certain way. Or at least that's the stereotype I've heard. That they're often— Oh, they punish. They punish.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. I got to do some research at Fort Leavenworth military complex in Kansas, and it's the oldest prison in the United States. So I was doing this research in 2000, and they still had skeleton keys for some of the doors. It's a maximum security military prison, and the cells go many years. Levels down below ground, and a lot of the people that came in with sex crimes had to be put in protective solitary confinement. And again, not a lot of people are gonna care, or feel much empathy, or may be glad. You know, "You did this to somebody, so now it's being done to you.

That's fair." Okay, so there's multiple different groups we need to address. So, one, and I think this is the one we're currently on, which is there's going to be a big, big chunk of kids who may do this in their childhood, abuse another kid. Who are not pedophiles. They were confused, frontal lobe issues.

You can be impulsive, you can be around other delinquent kids doing all kinds of bad things, you can be bored. You can think you had consent because who teaches kids what consent is, how do you get it, how do you give it, how long does it last?

Half the time the kid is in freeze mode. How are they to interpret that frozen state?

It's hard for adults. Oh, exactly, right?

You're doing it for adults. No, yeah.

So this is a very difficult thing to talk about. So I want to preface this carefully. Most kids who survive child sexual abuse will never go on to cause harm to another child. They're at greater risk of doing so. So kids who have sexually abused other kids, uh, caused sexual harm, harmful sexual behavior, are more likely to have experienced sexual abuse themselves. This is less true for adults. The further you get away from something that's happened to you, the less impact it has on you. But for kids, it's still pretty true. I hate this statistic.

I believe it, but I hate it.

I know, and I hate saying it.

An added benefit of having it molested is, people are gonna be more suspicious of you. You know, it's like insult to injury. We had this one time, Monica read this data years ago, and I'm like, oh, I hate that fucking statistic. I don't want someone to think, 'cause I'm very vocal about it.

But that's what we're saying. It's not the majority. It's still low.

Tiny. But I did— I sat in front of my computer today going, you don't have to say it. You don't have to say that. There's so much you could talk about. There's 300 pages. You could leave that out altogether. But it's so important. Well, it is, because again, you want throw the book at a kid. Well, what if that kid was also victimized? So we're gonna put him in prison for 5 years? How does that make sense? And they're often like repeating the behavior that they were abused themselves, exposed to developmentally inappropriate material, which now we have the World Wide Web and access to legal pornography, but that's not developmentally appropriate for kids. And we have no guardrails, no age verification. And then we're like, okay, have all this, but don't do anything stupid. So there's all kinds of pathways for a kid to go down that path.

We use pseudonyms in the book for a lot of the people Connor was a great example of this because he was young. He was 11, 12 when he first started, and 13 when he was caught. And he was sexually abusing a younger relative. But first of all, it was just kind of play. It was like, show me your penis. It got more than that, certainly. I don't want to minimize it. But then he was put into some kind of residential facility for some other unrelated non-sexual behavior, and some kid in there tried to rape him—penetrative rape. When he got out of that residential facility, a weekend release, he tried to rape, or did rape, his younger relative. It doesn't minimize what the effect on the younger relative was, but like, there's a clear path between— in this one instance, and that there are things around this, but I think it does happen with relative frequency. And then he was sucked into the system, first of all juvenile prison, but then he was sucked into the adult system where he was sexually assaulted within prisons. His story may seem like an outlier, but this happens to kids in the US all the time.

Yeah, it's terrible that the initial trauma begets more and more, but doesn't always, and usually does not go on to increase risk for perpetration at all. So there's this group.

Yeah. Now there is another group. We're not going to label those pedophiles, correct?

You know, some kids hit puberty, 14, 15, and some of them are attracted to younger children, and so they have pedophilia. Yes. Yeah, but most kids who are offending don't, right?

I'm just saying, of this number, which is 70%, which is huge, it's a little higher for hands-on than it is for online.

So, you know, somewhere around 40, 50, 60, depends on the type of online offense, like non-consensual image sharing Good luck. Huge, right? Like, it's just huge.

Exactly. Yes. But I just want to be clear when we're breaking apart— in my mind, from what I read, it seems to me that there is a group of kids that are impulsive, or they're this, or they're exploring and they make a mistake, but they're not going to go on into adulthood with an attraction to children.

Right.

They age out of it. Right.

So they're not pedophiles in that sense, even if they have perhaps participated in something we would label pedophilia. And then there's another group that are pedophiles. They are attracted to children, and they're going to remain attracted to children for their life, probably. Correct. Okay, so that group, of course, on the compassion ladder, which is harder and harder to have— now we're getting into something that's probably quite hard for people to have compassion for. Do we have any sense of that huge number, 70%? Which percentage of those are whatever we call on the DSM that condition?

We're doing a ton of research on this. So we've just completed nationally representative prevalence surveys of perpetration behavior in 5 countries, and we're still analyzing number crunching all those data, but somewhere between 1 and 4% of adult males 18 and older will either have sexual fantasies about children or engage sexually with a child with or without fantasies. So again, people engage sexually with children without having strong sexual attraction to children. So it's somewhere between 1 and 4% of adults. In terms of how many people actually have pedophilic disorder or pedophilia, we don't have a good sense of prevalence of that. Based on what we do know, it's probably maybe less than 1% of the population.

Yeah, what I'm going for is the approach and modality to help deal with the huge number of youths that are doing this that are not pedophiles is not going to be the same approach we have to apply to the pedophiles. This is going to be a completely different approach.

You need different approaches for sure. But teenagers who recognize that they have sexual attraction to children, like the group that Luke met and introduced me to, were kids who had sexual attraction to children who did not want to act on it. And for them, some of the similar things like Here's what would happen to the child if you did act on it. Here's the consequences. Getting that information out for both groups.

I guess my point is you don't need a strategy for the kid who grows out of it at 17.

No, for life.

To your point, when they turn 15 and they start recognizing, oh, they're too young and blah, blah, blah, they don't need an ongoing life strategy. You're absolutely right. So now we got to talk about for these kids that are going to need an ongoing life strategy. First of all, just them identifying feels completely new. And I'm so grateful, like the kid that was in your doc, that they would admit that and that they would attempt to address it the same way I have to address my addiction to alcohol. It's really new and novel, and I'm just wondering how this wave has even started. It almost seems unimaginable and quite brave of them, really, to self-diagnose and admit this.

I agree, but I think they don't have much choice in a sense, because in speaking with Adam and people over the years, so many kids have probably committed suicide suicide because they don't see a way out. They don't see a way to not harm a kid, or they don't see a way to live in any way that's sexually fulfilling, certainly. And I want to break it down too much, but there is like a distinction. I mean, it's kind of— you can slice this pie down to like just filet it away.

Now we're drawing arbitrary lines. Yeah, I acknowledge that.

But even with this group, people attracted to kids, the terminology they use is age of attraction. You have an age of attraction, attracted to kids aged 4 to 12, 4 to 8, whatever the case may be. It can be gendered, it can be age, but also can be a fixed attraction. I'm only attracted to kids. And even Adam, who's not, told me like, oh, those poor sons of bitches. So he's like a young self-described pedophile who's like, oh, those guys have no hope because he has other attractions. He's got that kind of weaker peer-age attraction.

There's one question I want to ask that is an ugly question, but I know many, many people have this thought, and, and I personally do have this thought. If you can admit that the only sexual sensation you'll ever experience is with a Why don't those people take a medical approach to stopping hormonally their sexuality, period? If you can first admit it'll never be something I can explore, why wouldn't you shut it down hormonally? A chemical castration. Chemical castration, testosterone blockers, something to turn you off as a sexual being.

People do. So there's a great study. The first— we call it a double-blind placebo randomized clinical trial. The gold standard. Thank you. The gold standard. A colleague of mine, Christopher Rahm, led this. He's a psychiatrist at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and he ran it. And some people who have that attraction can manage it, and so they can go through life without offending and can manage it. There are people who feel like they are gonna offend and they want help. They had guys driving 500 kilometers to come get this munch shot or whatever it was.

The chemical castration.

Yeah. And it does— it dampens down everything. So if you have attraction to adults, that's gonna go down as well. But there are people who do want that, and making that available through your general practitioner would be great. Yeah. A point worth making is that it is really hard to not have sex with your desired object. It's really, really, really hard.

We have a lot of machinery to drive us.

Exactly right. And I think a lot of people could use help at least some of the time, and a lot of people are not going to need help all of the time. And we've had people tell us this who have sexual attraction to children, who have who have used the interventions that we use, and we get feedback from them, and they're like, if I could just have someone that I trusted to say, take my computer, I'm in a bad place right now, right? Can you just hang on to this for the next 24 hours and then I'll be okay? And you get over that urge because sexual urges do wax and wane. And to have strategies for folks who are at risk to be able to ask for help— but asking for that kind of help is just almost impossible.

I think it's what you said, like, about having it available. I think oftentimes we talk about chemical castration, it's like, oh, can we identify identify who is a pedophile, going to be a pedophile, and chemically castrate them as if it's kind of imposed upon them. Having chemical castration, all kind of medications to like dampen sexual drive, as an option that people can get somehow, because no one's going to sign up to be a chemical castration forcefully.

No, I'm not in favor of the state identifying pedophiles. I'm asking the question of the people that are non-offending pedophiles who have a desire to never offend. Don't they want the assistance, or is that not appealing to them?

Yeah, but I think it's easy to get. Also, to go to your GP. Yeah, I want some medication. Exactly.

Even if you said, I want zero sexual desire, most GPs are gonna be like, that's not healthy.

Can we speak to your therapist about that one? Because there is a hurdle to talk about this, even to your doctor, to a therapist. And that is a real hurdle because of, you know, mandated reporting, which is a very real but very good thing, but kind of can have these— wouldn't say side effects— have these effects of people who do have these attractions don't feel comfortable seeking therapeutic help.

I would imagine anyone is afraid of being arrested just for acknowledging that's the desire, even if you've acted on it.

Absolutely. And some people are. And so it makes it very hard to seek out treatment. We have an online intervention that's free and anonymous, and there's no human. It's self-help entirely. And we've had 1.5 million people go visit that website since 2020. We launched it in 2020. 1.5 million. 1.5 million. And 50,000 have gone into one of the sessions. There's like 5 modules, but there's no person, so there's no risk of mandatory reporting. And it's for people with sexual attraction to children who want help to not offend it, or also who want help to live a healthy, happy life and be able to manage this.

Do they function at all like a other 12-step program? Like, is there a group therapy dynamic?

Well, this is a self-help intervention, so it's just fully— you go through the stuff all on your own. There's interventions where there's a therapist to work with you, usually with cognitive behavior therapy strategies. There are self-help groups like the group that Luke mentioned And there's many more options now than there ever were. And they're still available pretty much exclusively in high-income countries and not available in very many other places.

I could not admire anyone more than admitting and self-reporting that. I mean, I truly, I can't imagine anything braver because again, we know they're the most detested group. To your point, you'd rather hang out with a murderer. Yeah. And you know that going in and you've seen the shows and the movies. And so I can't think of anything braver.

And to just reckon, like, "Oh, I'm broke." I mean, like, the mental hurdles you have to jump to be like, "God, I'm like this." When that penny drops, it's a bad one.

That's—

I cannot— I can truly not imagine having to reconcile that. But when they're in therapy, is the goal of the therapy to have them become more attracted to adults? We've learned that that's not a winning—

A gay conversion therapy.

Exactly. Exactly. Newly legal in the United States.

But I remember like some of the research when I first reached out to you back in 2012, 2013, a lot of the research— and it's got to start somewhere— was just like, oh, we know a lot of people who go on to offend sexually against kids are like left-handed, have a high IQ, have been hit in the head with a baseball at some stage. And I'm like, this sounds real suspect to me. Um, but I remember I think brought that up to you and you're like, yeah. And also it was kind of about— there's some previous studies, and correct me if I get this wildly wrong, but basically you do things like show people maybe CSAM, like formerly known as child pornography, and then kind of encourage them just before they orgasm to switch it to peer-appropriate stuff, which is very much hardcore conversion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's true, right? Yeah.

You didn't do it. People were doing what they thought might work, and changing someone's sexual interests doesn't work. So then figuring out skills, tools, and knowledge to manage— who can I reach out to, who might be safe to talk to, who I can go to in a moment of need? And again, letting people know, making sure they understand that if you do give into this, this causes real harm. Here is the damage, and also here's what you can expect if you get caught. But then also, you know, not just avoiding harm, but then how do you give people goals to strive for? Living a healthy, happy life. And so on our online intervention, we interviewed people who have made it to their 30s, 40s, 50s without offending. We have these little snippets of real discussions with people. You don't have to offend. There's nothing that says you have to offend. You can get through this. Find whatever it takes. Here's what helped me.

It's crazy, the parallel between addiction treatment because— is you come to the program to quit drinking, and only the first couple steps are about drinking. And then the rest of the program is teaching you how to live a sober life. Quitting's day one there. So now what's the rest of it? The rest of it is like learning to live a sober individual and conduct yourself in a way that'll keep you sober. It's how to live life, not how to quit drinking.

Yeah, not how to avoid alcohol, but how to find other things that are so appealing and attractive and wonderful careful that, that you want to do them.

Yes. One of your main pushes is to have a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think of this and taking it out of the criminal sphere and putting it more into the public health crisis framing.

What I think, and what I would say my field believes, is that we need prevention, healing, and justice. You have to criminalize these behaviors. Yes. You don't have to treat children like criminals, but you have to criminalize normalize sexual abuse. And for a long time, it wasn't. When I lived in South Carolina for 18 years, when I first got there, there was a state senator who was talking to a reporter, so on purpose, and saying, "Well, you know, incest is something that happens in the family and should just be dealt with in the family." Now, hopefully today you wouldn't see that, but we see politicians—

What was that Roy guy?

Oh my gosh, that's exactly who I was thinking about. And folks rose to his defense. Well, you know, she was was 15. And like, he was in his 30s and he was, you know, a prosecutor or whatever he was, and she had no power in this at all.

No, I can't believe anyone voted for him. I know.

And defended him. I think I heard the defense, well, Mary was 15 when she had Jesus. And you're like, ah, oh no. We're not saying don't have justice, don't have consequences, but I'd like to throw one figure in.

We're spending $5.8 billion a year to incarcerate pedophiles, people who sexually offend, sexual offenders. $5.8 $8 billion being sent downriver at the end of the river. Right, exactly. And $3 million was spent to prevent it by the government at whatever time the statistic came out.

That statistic is exactly right right now. Well, $5.4. Well, yeah, but it's probably $5.8 by now.

You know, we did the paper, so that's why I'm like flipping it.

Yeah, that's our number, right? We did. I was gonna let it slide. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna be the dick. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, tariffs, etc. Yeah. And fight tooth and nail for that $3 million. There's $3 million that the federal government gives for child sexual abuse prevention research. I was up on the Hill on Thursday. Thankfully, we have bipartisan support to kind of keep that money in, but we're trying to grow it. We're like, this affects 1 in 5 children, and we're putting $3 million into the research on how to prevent it.

Also, even if you're just fiscally minded— oh, you don't give a fuck about victims and you're fiscally minded— we should invest in than reducing the $5.4 billion, not corrected for inflation, that we're spending to incarcerate sexual offenders? Like, why on earth wouldn't we try to prevent it? Because it'll save us money. And it's not just incarceration.

We have an economics paper that shows that it's close to $9.3 billion that we can see in cost to the U.S. economy directly attributable to child sexual abuse. There's a moral argument, there's a child rights argument, and there's an economic argument. To saying it's so much better if we prevent it, it's so much less expensive if we prevent this from happening in the first place. And then you don't need treatment, you don't need law enforcement as much as you once did. And it's still very, very difficult to squeeze those dollars out of the hands of politicians. It's just hard. What is Help Wanted? Help Wanted is a prevention intervention that we developed at MOHR. It is for people who are attracted to children, who want help to not offend and to live a healthy life. It's online. We launched it in 2020. We developed it in collaboration with law enforcement, survivors and victims advocates, therapists, preventionists, and some other researchers. It is designed to be a tool that is safe and easy and free to access for people who want help and need help. 1.5 million people have visited the webpage. 50,000 people have gone into one or more of the modules.

We just completed We did a randomized controlled trial evaluation. We're still crunching the numbers. I wish I could give them to you right now, but we just ended data collection in December, and we're still working through all the numbers. Facebook, Meta, and Google send people there who appear to be searching online for CSAM. It is a resource. We've adapted it with support from Google for Spanish-speaking populations and adapted it specifically for Mexico, but we're hoping that it can serve most of Latin America and welcome the idea of adapting this intervention for other languages, other contexts where there's really not anything else.

Especially. We haven't addressed gender. How does gender play into all these statistics? As far as both the group that perhaps committed a sexual assault and then grew out of that versus the group that is lifetime pedophiles, how are those gendered?

Not purely, but it's a majority men. Yeah. Young men and men. That's true of all criminal behavior. There's very few crimes that are kind of women-dominated. I've spoken to young women who are sexually attracted to kids, and it is a rarity, and everyone's kind of like weirdly— not excited is not the right word, but just like, oh, but in terms of why that is, it's kind of like a million-dollar question for criminologists. You know, maybe it's easier to describe in terms of extreme physical violence because men are socially conditioned to be more kind of aggressive and things like that. In terms of why that happens, in terms of being attracted to kids, I wouldn't even begin to know what the answer to that is. Well, there's a couple of things.

For one, um, for people who are attracted to prepubescent children, you get much less gender because they are less gendered, right? Like, a 10-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl look a lot alike, and the younger you go the less gender. It really becomes more about age than gender and innocence, or different things attract different people. And then there are certainly women who offend against boys, whether or not they have pedophilia. You see this a lot in schools. So where you see women getting convicted of sex crimes is their teachers. Yeah. Um, these are people— and there's also male teachers as well— who aren't attracted to children, didn't go into teaching in order to find victims. But when you spend your whole workday surrounded by kids, kids, that's a risk factor. So educators, people that work with kids after school, people that are in charge of kids in different settings, youth counselors. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so you have stray sexual thoughts going across your brain all the time, and if you're working with the kids all the time, those are going to collide. Maybe you're particularly immature, or maybe you're going through mental health or substance abuse issues or financial problems, and it's just more enjoyable to be in the company of a child who accepts you kind of unconditionally than adults do.

And then you start to feel like you have a special relationship with this child, and maybe this child's a little more mature, and maybe this will actually help this child. And you go down this pathway that no one saw coming, including you. And this does happen where people drift into good people engaging in bad behavior. And there's a lot of steps there that you could intervene. Yeah, right. There's a lot of steps.

Well, I would just imagine like 90% of affairs don't start out with, what's up, let's go fuck in this hotel. It's text. Yeah, it's a lot of texts, and then there's a picture. Like, I think the boundary you've drawn keeps moving. It keeps moving.

I wonder with female teachers specifically, whether we see that overrepresented in terms of your gender question, is because we kind of maybe miss the signs or don't read them. If you have like a male teacher, you can tell they're focusing on a student, a young male student. I think people have their little kind of antennas up. But if it's a female teacher, I don't know, we make jokes about female—

oh yeah, like, you got lucky. My God, it makes me crazy. I do also just want to say that for boys that have been victimized, they're much more likely to have been victimized by a woman. So it's still a minority, but it's not nearly the same level of a minority. Like, there's some studies that show like a 50-50 50 split. Oh, really? So I don't think there's a huge group of undetected women out there that are offending, but it is not zero. And we overlook boys who are victims, and we overlook women who are offenders, and that doesn't serve us very well.

No, it's not good.

Is there anything like Blame, an episode of Radio Lab, where this guy had surgery on his brain and basically then he became a pedophile?

He didn't become a pedophile, he became somebody that was offending sexually.

Yeah, so he had a corridor cut in his brain to stop the electrical storm that was causing the epilepsy. And they warned him, you might have a shift in your personality. And what it did is it shut down the circuitry that's going between basically your frontal lobe— disinhibition— disinhibition. And there's no correction for it. And so his started, like you're saying, it started with just— he started watching pornography more, and then he started watching more extreme pornography. The dosage was having to change and go up like an addiction. There's a knock at the door and Homeland Security's there all of a sudden.

But he isn't a pedophile because he I didn't— why did you correct me on that? Yeah, and apologies. No, I want to be corrected. I just need to know, so I'm doing this right.

Pedophilia is a strong sexual attraction to children, and there are people who have— and I'm not this kind of doctor, so let me be clear about that too— but there are people that have medical conditions that are disinhibiting, and it's sort of broadly disinhibiting. And so it's not that you have sexual attraction to children per se, you don't have the inhibitions to just not reach out and do something or see something. Yeah, he was eating more.

Yeah. He wanted to have sex with his wife more. It was all of the reward system just without any regulator on it.

Yeah. So, where—

that's a different thing.

So, pedophilia really looks like it's something that you're born with. You become aware of it when you hit puberty and start having sexual interests towards other people. There are a few conditions that seem to also drive illegal harmful behavior that are separate from what you're generally sexually attracted to.

Okay. So, you guys interviewed 30 non-acting adults who were sexually interested in children, and I'm curious what kind of consen— What consistent themes did you keep seeing?

That they were desperate for help. Mm-hmm. And they were desperate for help in their teens when they were most vulnerable. Because the only message you get is the Larry Nassar, the Jerry Sandusky, the Jeffrey Epstein, that you are gonna be a horrible person, you're gonna offend, you're gonna offend 100 times, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's the only message that they get. And it is so stigmatized and so horrible. Most can't go to your mom and talk. Adam did, but it took him years. One of the characters, real people in our book, they wish there had been something like Help Wanted. So we did that study in service of figuring out what we needed to do, what kind of interventions were needed to give people a place that they could go to learn more and to get some help, even if it's just reading and interacting with some video elements of the intervention, the Help Wanted intervention. They really wanted help. They wished that there were people they could talk to without being afraid of being outed or being arrested.

Even if you didn't think you were gonna get arrested, I would be afraid they're gonna put me on a sex offender list.

"or a watch list." Right, which is arguably worse than being arrested. Or also just that you're gonna have a therapist who's horrified by you. This awful fear of negative social reactions is a real thing also. So those were the things that came out again and again and again, that there was a real need and a desire. And one thing we haven't talked about is when Luke came and interviewed me, he had met these young people who were kind of white-knuckling it on their own to not offend and to figure out how to get out get help between themselves that was safe. I wanted to do prevention, but I really thought it was going to be to go out and find people and convince them to come get help. It had not ever occurred to me at this point in my career that there were people seeking help so that they wouldn't offend. That was a complete game changer for me.

Thanks. But yeah, and something else is kind of the theme that are kind of interesting to me is that because there were 30, 39 people for the Help Wanted, uh, some number. Yeah, that's true. My reporting, which was separate, I've spoken to like 100, 200 men and women who have a sexual interest towards kids. And in addition to all this is just how uniform it is. Maybe there's like 2 or 3 outliers who don't follow this theme, but across the board, everybody kind of— they reach puberty, they start becoming sexual beings, they're kind of like, I'm sexually interested in that 10-year-old or 8-year-old. They start kind of growing up, that age kind of stays the same or maybe goes down a little bit, and then when they hit like 15, 16, 17, they're like, oh shit, what the fuck?

Yeah, my software is not updating.

Yeah, exactly, I'm a pedophile. And then they kind of fall into like depression and comorbid things like alcohol and drug abuse before they kind of even get to the stage or Adam and Co are trying to look for help, and they're doing that all by themselves.

They got to go through the whole journey of basically bottoming out before they're going to ask for help. Yeah, yeah, you have to be so desperate to ask for help.

I was so wary at the beginning to make sure we weren't going to conflate pedophilia with homosexuality or even heterosexuality. It's a different category, certainly, but it seems to follow the same thing. It happens at the same ages. They kind of come to the same realization more or less at the same time, and it's innate. Many people who are fandom— we can get to that in a little bit. I don't know how much time have, but who offend, who aren't pedophiles, like situational offenders. And that's something she put a pin in because that's really interesting. For this category of people who have pedophilic disorder, it's an innate thing that they have no control over. And that's why I'm like, ugh, I don't want to always talk about pedophiles when we talk about child sexual abuse because there's many other facets to it. But it's the one that's kind of maybe the most interesting and novel, like, an audience, because it's the most demonized and frankly the grossest and the scariest. And the scariest is how do we stop it?

How would you stop it?

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. But if you accept that this is 1% of the population, you have to acknowledge there's 3 million people out there. So your options are either to hate and vilify them and have no understanding and watch them continue to have the amount of victims that they have, or you can go, wow, this is a real thing that we're going to have to, as uncomfortable as it is, have some treatment for and some safety in acknowledging that they have it. That's incumbent upon us to kind of evolve into that. If we want there to be less child sexual victims, that's the only thing we can do.

Yeah, 100% agree. I mean, we wrote a book kind of on a similar topic, but it's worth stating there are many people who have a block, who just can't get there because they have lived experience. But in my experience, and it's all anecdotal of course, but some of the people have been most supportive of my work, and I work specifically on this, people who have a sexual attraction to kids who don't know what's defend, the people who support the most are survivors. They've written to me independently, kind of like DM'd or emailed, saying like, oh, you know, I don't hate my abuser, I am still very troubled by what he or she did, but at least gives me some kind of context to feel like it wasn't my fault, or the circumstances coming a bit broader than just me and even my abuser. And I think sometimes a lot of people with very good intentions assume what survivors want or need. Any talk about kind of empathy for what's people's attraction is just like, how dare you, you're kind of minimizing the experience of survivors. And that comes from people maybe who don't have lived experience, but they're I've been in this situation.

I'll make pedophile jokes, and I've been yelled at, and I'm like, you don't get to tell me how I feel about it. It happened to me, and I do think that joke's funny, and you who didn't experience don't get to tell me what's right or wrong for me to find funny. But I weirdly was just in this situation. I have to tread delicately, but a family situation, and my children are aware of it because we talk about this stuff really openly. My kids know I was molested. They knew who else in the family was, and my my daughter asked, would you beat him up if you saw him? This person who did it to a family member. And I said, I'm so grateful I've never seen him because I would, and it would be gruesome, and I know it wouldn't help anything. And I also know something happened to him. Yeah. And so that's how I feel. And I'm both a survivor of it and have loved ones who have survived. So, yeah, I know my instincts aren't the right ones. Like, I have both those those feelings. I would both want to hurt him, and I know it would not do anything good, and he would not learn a lesson.

And I don't think I know fully what happened to him that led him to that. That's my position on it.

I think it's pretty human. I mean, we discussed this even briefly yesterday. Like, I am very much against the death penalty ideologically. Yes. I don't need to get too far into it, but someone I went to grad school with was murdered horrifically. I believe in the death penalty for that guy. Exactly. I would want to see him in like the most horrific of ways. I imagine there's people listening thinking like, oh, who are these two people defending pedophiles? Well, maybe to some degree, but like, I get it because I want this guy to be ripped to shreds.

But for the person asking that, you're not defending them for the joy of defending them. Yeah, you're defending them in hopes of reducing the amount of victims there are. Yes. Yeah, you really need to understand that point.

38 years. What I want to do is end child sexual abuse, and it is uncomfortable. And you don't only have to focus— and we don't only focus on providing solutions for people at risk of offending. You can provide solutions to a lot of things, to technology, to the way schools are built, the situational prevention strategies. You can work with parents and other guardians to make them more capable guardians to reduce risk, and these things work. You don't only have to focus on people with sexual attraction to children, with pedophilia, or people who are at risk of offending because they're surrounded by kids all day, and we need to do more about reducing those risks, or focusing on kids who are at risk 'cause they're young and dumb and they don't know the rules yet, there are dozens and dozens of ways that we can prevent child sexual abuse.

Yeah, so I love that that was in the book. It's like the onus of all this was put on the shoulders of kids in the '80s with these videos, which is like, you need to identify, report. It was all up to the 9-year-old to recognize the behavior of the kid in the car, or the man in the car. What is it?

Resist? Recognize, resist, and report. Yeah.

That's the kid's responsibility? What the fuck are all the adults doing?

There we are still. We may be beyond stranger danger, kind of, but we are not beyond that. That is still what most kids get exposed to. Supposed to in schools.

Yeah, okay, so let's do the pinned thing, and then I want to do the child sexual abuse prevention matrix. I just want to touch on— yeah, yeah, yeah. So we put a pin in situational.

You have kids who kind of have problems, sexual behavior and harmful sexual behavior, pedophilic disorder, adults with pedophilic disorder, and then you have a fairly big proportion, half or more, yeah, we imagine half or more, who are situational offenders. And these are people who have no pre-existing attraction towards kids, but if you drop them into a situation and maybe they have drug and alcohol problems, compulsivity problems, immaturity, similar to the teachers. And think of like a stepdad or a boyfriend who moves into the house, the mom's working, there's like the 13-year-old daughter. He may sexually offend against that kid, causes the same amount of harm regardless of where it all comes from, obviously. But you take him out of that situation, he's not attracted to kids.

He's not going to go out of his way to find that or reproduce that situation.

So I think we focus on pedophilia for very good reason, but there's this maybe majority of people who are sexually offending who just have nothing to do with that side of That's weirdly more scary than all of them. But maybe there's actually the interventions, and maybe you can speak to this. Interventions are maybe a little bit kind of clearer. Just to go back a little bit about kids, a lot of kids offend. I'm thinking of the shifting boundaries thing that Nancy Stein did in 2012. Kids abusing kids often at school because that's when they're hanging out together, right? And so they did this study where they went into schools and asked the kids like, when does this happen? And they're like, oh, it happens in dark stairwells, between classes, locker rooms, in the playgrounds when there's no parental or teacher supervision. Supervision. And they're like, okay, well, how about we post teachers in the darkened stairwells, we put posters in the locker rooms, we cut down the hedges? And they saw like an insane decline, like 50% decline in this kind of behavior. Something that really kind of drives me crazy about all of this is that that program also had randomized controlled trials, beautifully done, great success.

And then it was, as far as I'm aware, just kind of parked. So we have things that currently exist that work, that work, and have been proven to work, and that everyone kind of gets behind because it's about kids victimizing kids, and it's easy enough to do because it's school. And cheap. And cheap, really. They found out if they did that curriculum about consent and stuff like that, and it kind of was as effective if it was just the curriculum or just the situational interventions, like putting in some light bulbs. But we just don't do it. That's confounding.

Yeah, we underestimate what context creatures we are.

That's such a good way to put it.

I love that. We all behave in different ways in all the contexts as we are. This is like Buddhism. All roads, all roads lead back to Buddhism.

They do. I mean, I think people are just like, ah, it's too big of a problem, just put them away.

Kill all them or put them away.

With the foster care system too, we've talked about that, like, oh, it's just too hard. It's like, there are things, there's little things, but everyone just is overwhelmed by the bigness of the topic.

Well, I think the more complicated, obviously, a problem is, the more inclined you are for a very quick and easy solution. You're incentivized in some way, right? Okay, so talk about the Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Matrix. This is where we talk all about the solutions.

We're the first generation to have dozens of solutions.

One thing maybe quickly goes into your point before about the complexity, and it's true, like it's complex, but there's been certain public health problems that are as complex that we've addressed pretty well. And we look at like road and vehicle safety, and this relates directly to the matrix. William Haddon Jr. was a public health physician and was tasked with when they first had the US Highway Whatever Act, he was like, okay, let's do a little matrix and figure out, we know all these vehicle accidents happen, people die, people get maimed. Let's look at what happens before, during, and after a crash. Crash, and whether it's like human-focused or situational-focused, and do like a little grid, a little matrix, and be like, oh, having super shiny chrome dashboards are blind people when the sun hits it. Maybe we should address that. People careening through their windshields, let's put in a little seatbelt. Safety glass. It's so multifaceted. And then there's kind of things at a higher social level in terms of laws and stuff around speeding and drinking and driving. It took a little while, but again, we saw huge declines in something that people previously thought was inevitable.

We got to get around.

This is the cost of doing business.

Yeah. People were resistant. Like when they put in seatbelts, people were cutting them out of their cars.

Child safety Safety car seats, folks hate those things. I used them, my mom used them, she hated them.

We never used them.

I'm teasing, that would be such a headline. Here's where I say I'm a mandated reporter. That's the rules.

Exactly.

So you can apply a similar public health approach, it's worked for other things, to child sex abuse. And that's where the Matrix kind of comes into play.

We didn't invent this idea, a lot of people have taken it from roadway safety to child injury to child abuse and neglect writ large to even child sexual abuse, but I think what makes ours unique is that we really and applied it to child sexual abuse specifically, and looking at, all right, well, before abuses happen, what can you do? Well, you can go into schools and teach kids to recognize, resist, and report. That does not hurt kids. It's just not gonna really move the needle. But you can also then teach kids, hey, how about not doing these behaviors? Here's how we avoid engaging in these behaviors. And that does shift the needle.

You introduce this idea, and the idea is the only thing that could happen to you in this scenario is that you would be a victim. You're not even suggesting, like, guess what, you might also victimize someone. That's like a— that's a completely different thought no kid probably has prior to when they do it.

No one walks around thinking, I'm an offender. And no parent thinks my kid's at risk of engaging in harmful sexual behaviors. And so we're just blind to the people that we love, that they would do these things. But kids do, and they're at risk for a lot of reasons that we've already talked about. You can go way upstream with school-based and camp-based and and sports-based programs that give kids information but that also give adults information like, "Hey, when you're surrounded by kids, you might have some sexual thoughts. Here's why we don't act on those thoughts. Here's what we could do instead." And also all the situational prevention programming, so policies and codes of conduct, you know, for educators, for scout leaders.

These things work. They've implemented them in, like, Boys and Girls Club.

Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and the Boy Scouts now—Scouting America, I think they're called—have been implementing these for decades. And we have a study led by my friend and colleague Luciana Cini-Maton shows a 31% decline of sexual abuse victimization in the context of participating in one of the big 6 US youth-serving organizations: Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the Y, and 4-H. Wow. 31% decline in a recent decade compared to the decade before it because they have been doing these things and honing these strategies. Boys and Girls Clubs of America hired an architect Les Nichols, to help them figure out how do we make space safer. So this space is super dangerous. There's no windows. There's hidden cameras everywhere. So we're all being victimized. There's a large male across the room. There's a large— there's a large male. But put windows in interior doors so that if I'm gonna be alone with a kid, I'm observable and interruptible. Or make them open the door or improve line of sight. Cut back on the hedges. But inside, maybe don't have a bookcase in between where the security staff is or the entry staff is and where the kids and other adults are congregating.

These kinds of strategies really work. It's really, really exciting. And online, we could be doing the same damn thing as making it safe by design and really reducing the risk to kids, both of experiencing harm and of engaging in harm. And lots of organizations are being thoughtful about how to help kids think through, do you really want to send that nude picture? Do you really want to open that nude picture? Let's take a beat, figure this out. There's some creative stuff happening, and a lot more needs to happen to make sure kids are safe online and we have good age And then there's norms, you know, like that norm of, "Well, incest happens in the family, so it should stay in the family." That's not a norm anymore. That is a shift that has happened. Not sexualizing kids in advertising would probably be a good thing.

Just fun fact, Noah Hawley, the incredible writer of Fargo and so many other shows, his mother started this whole bringing incest into the light. Oh, that's fantastic. In the '70s. Yeah. Her publisher was like, "We'll put it out, but how many people have been a victim of incest?" Like, who's gonna care? Who's gonna read this book? And then all of a sudden it was hugely successful, and that's when people started going like, oh, this is a significant chunk of the population.

Well, and when you think about teaching kids to recognize, resist, and report, what, report their dad? I know. Are you kidding me? So my friend Michael Seto is really working on, 'cause that's a big gap. We don't have enough youth-focused prevention programs. We have some, which is great, but we don't have enough. We couldn't find any programs that really focused on how to keep kids safe in families. And again, you don't do it out by saying, hey, stepdad, you might be a sex offender in waiting that you don't even know. How do you reach out to families? Blended families are at increased risk for sexual and physical abuse of kids. I do know most blended families don't engage in sexual abuse against their unrelated minors, but we see in blended families where the male has biological or adoptive children and stepchildren, the stepchildren are at much higher risk. So there's something very protective about being a dad. It's especially protective if you're involved in your kids' lives early on and often. So when you are really involved in caregiving as a father, that reduces the likelihood that you're gonna engage in any kind of sexual or physical harm.

So another kind of societal-level lever that we could press and reduce child sexual abuse at scale is to encourage caretaking by dads. Yeah, wow. Like to really encourage that, to make that normative. That's almost counterintuitive. Right, people think of the tattoo guy in the room as dangerous. No, we need dads involved in kids. And of course, kids need them as well. But it is protective against offending against your own child. And my guess is it's also protective against offending against children, period. You change enough diapers and bandage enough knees and put kids to bed, caregiving takes over.

I can't tell you how many I've heard around say, like, "Oh, yeah, I used to be able to go to strip clubs, and now I have a daughter that age, and I realize, oh my God, I'm disgusted by that. That's someone's daughter." Like, it took that experience to go like that.

Yeah, we all develop empathy when we're kind of there. The Matrix.

There's a lot of unknowns. The Matrix.

There's so many things. And you can do it well before any offending has happened. We could have made the internet impossible to share naked pictures of adults with kids. We could have made that. We didn't. That was a choice. We need to retrofit it now, which is just so asinine. It just makes me crazy. Then there's what can you do at the point where abuse is more imminent? And this is where people have risk factors, like people who work with kids day in, day out, people who have sexual attraction to children, people who have started looking looking at more and more extreme pornography. People who are online a lot and who are online with pornography a lot, that's a risk group. We need strategies that can work with them that they feel safe going to, right? So if you say, "Hey, you're a potential sex offender, let me help you," you're gonna get no takers. But if you say, "Hey, you've gotta figure out a way to make this safe and appealing," and to give hope to people— people want to think that there's hope— and so to say, you know what, We're going to help you.

You got this. Here's some strategies for doing this.

You point out something so obvious on the surface but could get missed is if the only approach to it is with the criminal justice system, what you're acknowledging is you're only going to get involved once the abuse has happened. It's too late. That's what you're funding. $5.4 billion just on the incarceration. God knows the investigation, the different police departments, the different task force. You're acknowledging you're only getting involved after abuse has happened. Abuses happened. Why would we wait to that point?

So much of it is just gonna have to change the public's opinion on this, because I do think so many people think like, well, why would we put money towards those people, those monsters? It's just reshaping. Like, we're not— we're trying to stop. We can end it. Exactly.

We could end it. This is a behavior. It does not have to happen. And you were reminding me of a stat earlier. Oh yeah, about policies that focus people who have already offended, like registration and notification. You have to have a conviction usually to even have those apply to you.

And that only covers like 5% of all detected crimes. And so even if public notification, civil commitment, registration— excuse me— as well were 100% successful, which they're not, but that's kind of very complex, you're still only kind of addressing 5% of the issue. So again, it's so tricky because I remember being in a room doing some talk years ago and it was full of law enforcement and I could I could tell they were like, who is this motherfucker to tell us what is going on here? And I could tell I was like, oh, I'm not surrounded by friendly researchers. I'm like a lowly journalist.

They're not always friendly. Yeah.

But I remember just kind of realizing that I'm like, oh, this is going to be a really long hour talk. And so I just said, look, I can tell there's some like weird tension in the room, bunch of law enforcement. I'm sure it's kind of what I said to you guys. Like, at the end of the day, we all want to prevent child sex abuse. We may have like quite different ideas of how to get there, but we all want to kind of land on the same spot.

Same goal. Yeah. And also, to be fair to those people. It's too much to ask those people to be the ones to be compassionate because they're the ones dealing with the downriver end result. So it's like you're asking a cop to be compassionate to addiction? Fuck that. Half the stuff he deals with is from addicts. That's not even the right person. They're like the least likely person that's going to find empathy is the person cleaning up the mess.

Yeah, but we do see people— so Simon Bailey was the head of— I can't remember his exact title. He's from the UK and he was high up the food in law enforcement. He's the first person that said we cannot arrest our way out of this. And when you have someone from that group who says we have to do prevention, that is a powerful ally. We have to have criminal justice, but if 95% of sex crimes are committed by somebody with no prior conviction—

That was the one, prior conviction, excuse me, yeah.

Yeah, then criminal justice is handling 5% of this, and that's not enough. Like, we could do more. So we need criminal justice, we need services for people who do survive, for children and for adults who have survived child sexual abuse, and we've got to invest in prevention early, pre-abuse, when abuse might be more imminent. There's some really cool stuff where people who are putting in search terms that seem like they're looking for child sexual abuse materials, now there's these great interventions that he— with a warning that say, "Hey, this is illegal, harmful," but that also include a get help, and here's where you can go to get help.

This is Chris Hedges, who does a program Ashton that helps redirect—

Thorn! They do amazing work, so they're great partners of MOHR, and we really love Thorn. They started out where if somebody was searching online for CCM or appeared to be through some algorithm of search terms, the thing that would pop up would be a map, and the map had a pin in it, and the pin was where you were, and they said, "We know where you are," and this terrified people. Right. And terror is a good deterrent for about 5 minutes. Yeah. And then it goes away, and you can't keep terrorizing —people. So then they and others, our friends at Lucy Faithful and Internet Watch Foundation, have done some really creative things where it's like, this is harmful and you can get caught. Also, here's where to go to help. And two things happen. One, people who are just starting down the road to search for this more extreme content that involves children stop searching for it. A large group of them go, whoa, I was at the abyss.

I mean, I'm not Anonymous. Back to the hedges.

Yeah, well, or like, this could have caused some harm to me and them, and I don't want to do that. And they go back to looking at legal adult pornography, and then some smaller percentage of people click on that, here's where you go get help, or interact with the little chatbot that's like, "How can I help you not do this?" So there are some creative strategies, and then there's post-abuse, which is another place you can and should act, and we have treatments for kids who have been victimized, trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy, validated across dozens of randomized controlled trials, really helps kids and their parents navigate the after— yeah, the fallout. There's great interventions for kids who have already caused harm, really excellent randomized controlled trial evaluations. I led one of those. There's another one that I would say is even better 'cause it's a lot less expensive. And then there's even interventions for adults who have offended. The best intervention really seems to be for a guy coming out of prison is surrounding them, you know, with a parole officer who knows what he did and other people who knew what he did but are gonna help him find stable housing, employment, and pro-social relationships.

And those are the 3 keys to staying on the straight and narrow. Yeah. Not all of it will work. There will be people who reoffend. Yep. Whether they have pedophilia or not, there will be people who reoffend. There are psychopaths who just take what they want and they don't care. Yeah. But most people are not gonna reoffend and most of them could use some support.

Yeah, well, 1 in 5 in this country equals 60 million Americans, so that's an enormous group. Even if you go down 30%, that's 9 million people. If you could prevent 9 million people with any strategy, God, it's worth pursuing.

We would put more than $3 million into it.

Well, you guys, Luke, Elizabeth, this has been very, very illuminating and I'm— I couldn't be more grateful. I mean, I gotta applaud you, Luke. You at least have the force field of academia and research, so you can pursue this without a terrible risk to your own professional life. There's actually pretty significant risk.

Okay. Yeah.

But I'd imagine as a journalist, you are not gonna get tenure and you're not gonna be free. So I do think you're taking on a lot of risks to make this your pursuit, and I'm grateful for it.

Thank you. Yeah. I feel lucky, especially working with Elizabeth for the past 5 to 6 years on this book. It's been a wild ride.

Well, I'm so glad you agreed to get interviewed by him in 2012. Uh, me too.

Yeah. It's been nothing but joy since then. It really has. And we're so glad that you agreed to interview us.

Of course. And the book is One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis and What We Can Do to Stop It. I'm reading upside down and I'm dyslexic, so— You did it. You did great. I really got through it. You guys, this has been a delight. It's not a fun topic. Topic, but somehow you guys made it meaningful. Yeah, enjoyable. So good luck with everything and keep at it, please. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks so much. And thanks for sharing.

He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here. She's gonna let him have the facts.

Okay, I was supposed to tell— oh, sorry. Just one bite.

No, take your time. We don't have time. Time is of the essence.

No, time is on our side.

Explain time is of the essence to me. Okay, um, okay.

Time is of the essence. I mean, it is of the essence of life. It's basically the, the, the kernel for which life— it's the literally the essence of life. But I don't understand it in terms of like now. Yeah, the immediacy. But maybe it's because time, it's, it's gone. We just lost it. It's going. It's— we already I lost it.

It's one of many sayings that I of course know what the meaning is, but if I really think of it literally, I don't know why it means what it means.

Yeah, time is now.

That's actually true. But essence is like when something has the essence of—

right, this is probably old-timey. That's—

I think essence might have meant something different.

I think so.

Um, speaking of time is of the essence, yeah, I have a lot to say on time of the essence, but you start.

Okay, well, I was just gonna tell story about last week, or last Fact Check, that I didn't get to, but I don't have to. But it is a poop. Tell me.

It is poopy. Oh yeah, I want to hear.

Yeah, I almost tonked it again. I got so close. Paint the picture.

Pretend you're an armchair anonymous.

Listen, what backstory do I need? So this is really why I'm bringing it up, because I was at a friend's house. Okay. What time of day? Evening, like, I guess I got to the friend's house around 5. I was fine. Uh-huh. No, everything was fine.

Did you eat at the friend's house?

Uh-huh, but pizza, cheese pizza. Cheese pizza, no problem. No problem. Yeah. It wasn't that. Ate that, started playing mahjong. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Okay, you know, you play multiple games of mahjong. I don't know, but now I do.

Okay, yeah. So I'm teaching you that when you go to play mahjong, you'll play like multiple games. Sometimes they're just 20 minutes or whatever. So you play the first game and it's fine. Everything's great. We start the second game and I'm like, hmm, I feel, as Jess would say, skiddly-doo.

Okay. And out of 10, we're at a 2.5?

Yeah, it's fine. And I was also like, I think this will pass. Like, this is fine. Sometimes it passes. Sure. And then it was just, just like it would pop, you know, would pop, it would pop back up, the cramping.

Okay, not like a turtle.

No, no, not a turtle. Just the cramp would come into play. A little jerk. Yeah, and I was like, okay, okay, so it's not really passing yet. Yeah. And then I was like, okay.

And each round of pops, a little more intense? Yeah. But holding steady.

But it was okay. Okay, now at this point I did— I was like, okay, I am going to need to evacuate soon-ish, right?

Are you trying to hurry the game along at all at this point?

I mean, you can't really because you're like waiting on other people, but sort of. I'm like, your turn.

You know, get a little bossy.

And we're playing with a kid too. Oh fuck, I know. So, um, fucking go on there and shit my pants. I know. Tommy, this is where I feel like I have made no growth in life, right? Mhm. Cuz there are— they live in a house, there are bathrooms.

Yeah, you could have just— I could have.

Yeah, yeah. But I not only could I not do it, I couldn't even say— these are close friends. Yeah. I couldn't even say like, oh my God, like, I'm in trouble.

I'm in trouble, intestinally speaking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also Also, they're like fun and funny.

They have a kid too, so they're dealing with pootie all the time.

They themselves have evac'd. Sure, sure.

Um, but in a safe space.

I know, but like my brain goes into like a different mode. Also, like, I was just evaluating where the bathrooms were and I was like, I can't.

They're too close to the—

Yes. Yeah, the options were a guest bath.

Did it cross your mind to go like, I gotta run to Starbucks real quick, does anybody want anything? I just really—

I need a coffee, right?

Yeah, I just gotta go to Starbucks right Wait a second. That is something I— like, that is something crazy I would do.

A solution you would entertain? Yeah.

Um, I think there's a bathroom in the master— in the primary bedroom. Okay. Okay. And a one in the kind of like living room, basically.

Oh, fuck. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I couldn't be like, can I use the restroom in your room? That feels a little strange without giving all the information.

Yeah. Also, I'd imagine, because when I've been in this situation, you're not talking about also just taking a normal customary—

I mean, I knew, I was like, this is not gonna be bad.

You're gonna have to open windows and light things on fire.

And, and I don't know about the volume.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, or the noise maybe even. That's what I mean. Oh, oh, the volume. Not— oh, that could mean two things. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Payload. And I meant the whole way, but yes.

Okay, so anywho, I'm like, it's, you know, it's starting to ramp up. We're still playing, we're still playing. Thank God, you know, my friend wins. It's like, I've never been so happy for— to not win. Yeah, it's like, just let this be over, you know? And, um, and then, and then she was like, do we have another game in us?

And you're sweating bullets. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah.

I did. I said, I, I think I'm tired. Oh, you lied to your parents? Yeah, I lied. Said, I think I'm tired. And everyone was like, oh no, that's totally fine. And, and I was like, we're recording tomorrow.

I want to play again, please, Miss Monica. It's all I want to do. I live for— I get bullied at school. This is the only—

oh my God. And then I immediately just shit everywhere. Um, no, I said, yeah, I you know, we're recording tomorrow. Uh, lie? No, we were, but noon. Yeah, cuz then they— oh, what time? I was like, oh, fuck.

There's a problem with lying, it immediately begets more lies.

I know, but I did say I was like, like 10, which is— I think maybe was, or we had something at 10, probably. Yeah, so I was like, which I know isn't early, like I did have to—

but also we're talk—

I was like, I got to go, like enough of this chitchat. Chat. So then I was like, yeah, bye, you know, just getting up and not really helping put anything away.

Now really quick, do any of these people listen to the show?

I mean, I have a sense this is gonna get back.

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

So, um, I know what they're gonna say.

I know. I can tell you right now, you're gonna get a call. Yeah. And so I say, hello. Hello. Hey. Oh my gosh, I just heard Sally told me to listen to the Fact Check that you told the on the story. And I went, you know, Monica, you can totally go in our bathroom in our primary bedroom.

I just, I felt like I was so embarrassed. I just couldn't.

But you should know we would be honored. I know. If you—

It was not because you didn't create an environment that I couldn't do it. It's me. It's a me issue.

Okay, well, just so you know. Thank you.

Yeah, you have full access. Thanks. I probably still won't.

All right. Okay.

And you're right. That's exactly how it would go. Yeah.

So you get in the car. Get in the car. How far away do they live?

20 minutes. Oh yeah. Okay. And I'm like, I can do it. Like, I can do it. I have no option. I can do it. But then I did think, like, you know, as I'm driving, I was like, oh my, I don't know. I don't know.

And you weren't wearing a skirt this time.

No, I was wearing jeans. New jeans. Oh boy. So I was like, okay. And I had a, I had a sweatshirt in the back of my car. Uh-huh. I was like, okay, maybe I like pull over, pull down my pants. Yeah, put the sweatshirt on the seat. Okay, poop in the sweatshirt.

Oh wow, you were considering that?

Yeah, as a barrier. I didn't— I don't want the sweatshirt, so it was fine. Okay, okay. So I was like, I'll poop in the sweatshirt, that'll be a barrier, you know, and kind of a dipe, sort of. Oh yeah, I had to make the decision. I'm either gonna do that. Yeah. Or I'm just gonna keep going, you know, stopping at a gas station.

No, going straight to a gas station is not an option. Nope. Okay.

I didn't feel like I knew where they were. I'd be driving. It was just not gonna happen. Okay. Okay. That was just like, but the sweatshirt was kind of in the back and I was like kind of leaning like, oh, okay. No, whatever. I'm going full force.

So I was speeding. Oh wow. Good.

Um, and I, I made it. I made it. I made it. How? It was so close.

It was so close. And as you're running in your house, do you use that toilet right at your doorway? Or do you need to go upstairs? Cause it's gonna be emotional.

Yeah.

So that's, cause you're gonna take clothes off and stuff.

So that is what You know what was crazy is I knew, I was like, it's right there. There's a bathroom right by my door. I can just do that. And of course I get in there and I go all the way upstairs. I'm like, like a glutton for punishment. I go all the way upstairs to my bathroom. Muscle memory. Yeah, I guess. And then I evacuated. Oh, wonderful.

You must have loved that moment though. 'Cause you had been so, you'd gone through so much. It was such a trial. The relief was euphoric?

The relief of making it was— so it was, but it was also like, it was a little painful. Like, I didn't feel good, I guess. Right. As it turns out. Yeah. And then, not to be so graphic, I mean, whatever, we're already here. Yeah. I had— there was a tiny, tiny bit of blood. Okay, sure. Which then I realized, I was like, oh, I'm starting my period.

Okay. Sometimes gurgles your—

Yes, it's like, so this is all making sense and why, like, the cramps. I don't know, like, sometimes you can't tell what cramp is what. It's all affecting everything. It's a mess, you know? Yeah. Anyway, um, let's go. So it was annoying because I was like, I, I don't— like, after, I didn't feel sprightly. Like, I still felt kind of crampy and bad because of the period, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. I would love an internist to explain to us why the period all of a sudden fucks up your GI. Those things are very separate.

I agree. Systems.

But this is consistent. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that happened. Yeah.

Well, congrats. Thank God I did. You got home.

Yeah. I know. I was like, this is going to happen to me again. But then I had to take responsibility. I was like, look, in this case, you could have handled it better. I could have prevented this.

I also think now Now that this is twice— well, in, in, in 2 years—

no, don't finish that sentence. Don't.

Well, I don't think you know where I'm going with this, but so we're averaging once a year now. It is time to have a trash bag in your car. That's nothing. You keep it in the back pocket of the seat.

Well, how do you poop in that?

You can get a little toilet seat that has a trash bag attached to it.

It's also an option, but I think people would see that in her back seat if she ever Vinnie's got one. I'm gonna say it's for a kid. Why don't you use Vinnie's? For my friend's kid. Vinnie's outgrowing his. Yeah, I can give you one.

Listen, no, this is a trash bag.

A big guy, a 55-gallon trash bag, because then that's your sweatshirt idea but way more protection. There's no seepage, and then it's already in a trash bag, so great, you throw it in the—

no, but you'd have to lay it down. Right? Or no, open it up. But then how? That feels hard to do.

No, not those 50— think about the mouth of a 55-gallon trash can. Yeah, it's this big around.

So you're saying I pull over to do this? This isn't while I'm driving like the first time, right?

No, you would probably want to pull to the shoulder of the road.

Okay, listen, now this is what I was afraid you were going to say. I don't want to manifest— this isn't a new thing of mine. This isn't a habit. No, it is not. Do not say say that. It's never happening to me again.

Do you hear? Monica's got a new thing.

This is my hubris, because I was too embarrassed to go number 2 in my friend's house. Yeah, yeah, like that's my issue that I need to work through. Yeah, but I don't—

it costs you nothing to throw it in there. That's all I'm saying. You know, I don't think you're— I don't think you're— I'm telling the universe.

No, I am. I'm telling the universe, like, okay, well, I'm making a different argument.

So often when you prepare for something, then it won't ever happen because you've wasted the time. Then you're like, oh my God, there's all this stuff, and then it never happened again. That's more— to me, that's the more common pattern. It's like, I bought this thing to deal with this thing, and then it never happened again.

Okay, okay. Now, would you have gone to the bathroom in your friend's house?

I'd have gone at their house, then I would have gone at a gas station, I'd have gone to $4, and sincerely, yeah, and I have history to prove this, I would have pulled over and went on the shoulder of the road before I went in my car. I'm not going to use it as a porta-potty. I would rather do it into the grass or weeds on the side of the road.

We're different in that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I would— I, I feel at least there's something about me being alone that, that is the highest priority in those moments for some reason.

Yeah, you want your privacy.

Yes. So the car, it is just me in there.

Yeah, but also it was dark out. Yeah, inside of the road. No. Okay. All right. Okay.

Plus I could get murdered like that.

Like, no one wants to fuck with a girl spraying. No, even a murder— even the weirdest, weirdest murder is like, fuck this. I think they might like it. Well, you're— now you've really gotten to the most niche murderer imaginable.

I mean, they're out there looking for girls.

They Dookie Killer. Exactly.

Yeah, has a great ring to it. That someone's definitely taken that.

He waits around porta-potties and he waits till he hears honus happening, and then he probably—

for real—

and then he, he gets overcome with the, the hunger.

You like when people poop? Yeah, a lot.

But I'm also not a killer. I know, but yeah, nothing could possibly make me happier. If I was driving down the road and I looked to my right, I was like, oh, there's Monica's car. And then I was like, oh, there's Monica in the bushes. Oh my God, that— I mean, the amount of joy that give me, you really can't imagine. I can't. Couldn't be measured.

Anyway, so I just wanted to be vulnerable.

I appreciate it.

And say that that time is of the essence.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I no longer wanna say my thing because that, there's no way to top that.

Wait, of course. No, I just— time.

We're talking about time. Yeah, someone, one of our guests, I wish I could remember. I have a hunch it was Angela Duckworth. Okay, because she has such phenomenal taste. Yeah. Um, someone told me to buy this book, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, a physicist. Oh, and it's been sitting in my nightstand for a few years. Oh, and then I moved nightstands. I got a different nightstand against my will, but I got one, and then so it reemerged, and then I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna We're going to leaf through this. I find it mind-blowing. It's so mind-blowing. Ooh. I just want to set up the two concepts that they start the book with, which is our understanding of time is as flawed as our understanding of the Earth being flat at one point. Whoa, Eve. And if you think about, like, it's just kind of unimaginable we're on a sphere. Yeah, I know. The fact that anyone ever— and he points this out— both of these discoveries happened before we could ever test or measure this realization. But yes, the Earth being round is like, you can't conceive of that. Yeah. And then second was that the sun doesn't revolve around us.

I know. You can't figure that out from our perspective. But both were figured out before we could actually test that. So time, we have as flawed of a sense of what time is. So just there's three elements. I'm just going to say the first one that I find to be so fascinating. So time is moving faster on a mountaintop than it is at sea level. What? How? Yeah. So if you are in Denver, the time is moving faster than it is at the ski hill 20 miles away at elevation.

What? Yes. Like the perception of time or actual time? No, period.

If you have two atomically paired clocks, you know, that measure to the bazillionth of a second and you sync We sync those here in LA, and then I send you to Mount Wilson with one of those watches, and you're up there for a while. When you return, your time will be further along than mine. And also to the degree that your head is living in a faster time than your feet. Oh my God. And this has all been measured. We can do— we have the technology. What's incredible is that Einstein figured this out at like 23 years old without any way to know that this was happening. The case. And so the— what it says is, well, what's true time? Is it the time that was happening at elevation, or was it at sea level? And the truth is, there is no real time. Yeah, exactly. You only have two times that are relative to one another. The example is to say, like, what's a true statement? 0.8 British pounds equals $1 versus $1 equals point— those neither of them have an intrinsic value. They're only related to each other. That's their value. And that there is no same time happening anywhere in the universe.

Every single location has its own time that's only relative to other locations. I hate it here. And then it gets into— so our first premise is like, oh, there's such thing as time that we can measure. Well, no, you can only measure it at your location in space. So the number one definition we have of time is like, well, that we know that's not true. And then the next The next one is that it's sequential or that there's an order, that there's a past and a present.

Oh, I know. Is this like time is stacked?

Well, yeah. So the example is like cause and effect. And it said in the universe— and they do really good dumb analogies. It's like if you could imagine something was filmed, anything was really filmed, you can't tell depending on which direction, whether we watched it forward or backward.

Um, but what do you mean?

Sorry, explain a little.

Like if you filmed—

it's got to be something without heat. Um, like if I filmed a ball rolling and stopping. Okay. Um, it's just you can view— you can view anything backwards, uh-huh, and your mind will tell you that was the beginning when really it was the end of the video.

Oh, oh, you're saying like, okay, if you like rewind, you can watch it backwards or forward, right?

But because you're starting it, you're saying an objective outsider can't tell what was first. The only thing that— the only thing in the universe that we can observe that we know definitively had a beginning and an end is death. Heat can warm cold. Okay. But cold can never create heat.

Heat can warm cold.

So you have like this body of water, it's 100 degrees. You have this body of water, it's 50 degrees. If we film those interacting and this, this temperature goes up, we can establish the order of events. Because you'll never inject cold water into hot water and make it hotter.

Oh, make it— that's a law of thermodynamics.

Second law of colder.

You are affecting it if you add cold water into something hot.

Yes. You can't make anything hotter with cold water, right? It only has one direction. You can make cold water warmer with hot water. You cannot make hot water hotter with cold water, right? That can't happen. That's like a— yeah, no, yeah, immovable law of the universe. So unless something has a heat transfer, there's no order. There's no way to know the order. Okay, I'm in that chapter right now. I'm gonna— they're gonna land the plane. I'm gonna be able to say more about it, but I just was— that whole— that your head's experiencing time differently than your feet is bonkers.

God. Uh, yeah.

So what's happening is mass— the Earth is warping time. You can think of it as a body going into a tub and displacing water. So Earth itself is warping time. So the closer you get to that mass, the center of that mass, which is why sea level— you're closer to the center of the mass than you are on a mountaintop. The closer you get to the center of the mass, the slower time is going. This is why I finally now understand why there's no time in a black hole. It's just like infinite mass, so time just slows down.

What is the dead center of the Earth? Like, what's it made of? No, like, on— or on this planet, what is the dead center?

Well, it would be inside the sphere.

So it's in the— it's up up.

No, like, here's Earth. Yeah, in the dead middle of it. We— let's say we drilled, um, 5,000 miles into the Earth, we'd be at the center of the Earth, right? That's where time's moving the slowest.

Well, the equator is going around the center.

Well, we've arbitrarily drawn that line. Oh, based on— it's where the sun is most directly hitting. That's how we picked that line as the equator.

I thought it was the center.

Look, it's a ball, right? Yeah, and we decided to go here and make this zero and make the prime meridian zero. Right. And then that way we can graph everything out. But imagine those lines stay still and we just rotate Earth. We could have picked zero as going through Antarctica. Right. That's just how we've constructed our maps and our—

Yeah, but I guess I'm asking, like, in the ball. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So the center of the Earth is here. Uh-huh. So where is that? Where is that? Is that in—

in Earth? Where is it?

Kind of everywhere. If you're talking about the center, you could draw a straight line out from the center to any spot on the outside sphere. There's a direct line from you and I right now to the center of the Earth. In any point on the Earth, there's a direct line to the center of the Earth. Yeah, yeah, it's scrambly. It's so— anyways, I have a weird hunch that at the end of this book, should I fully understand understand it, which I might not be able— it's a dense book. Like, I said to Eric, you should read this book, and he's like, are you listening to it? I'm like, no, I don't think this book can be listened to. I think you need to reread some paragraphs over and over again. Um, but I have a bizarre hunch or optimism that at the end of this, I'm gonna have a new grasp on spirituality. Oh, I like that. Yeah, like, I think if— I think if, if I can really I understand how time is not the thing I think it is. That might open the door to a lot of new possibilities and thoughts.

Yeah. I started Project Hail Mary. I rented it and I was watching, you know, 45 minutes and I was like, yeah, I don't believe in any of this. This is fully made up. This life is made up. This is— This is made up. How can it be? How can this be?

Like planet Earth and what's happening here? Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, it's a miracle.

It is not real. We are not real. We're not real. None of this is real. I, I really started to feel like kind of crazy, like, oh, oh my God.

Well, yeah, in the same sense, I'd imagine if you're like the first person to have the concept of the Earth not being flat explained to you, it's very destabilizing. You're like, wow, my perspective can be that flawed, right? Or they go, oh, guess what? No, no, we're just spinning this, you know, sun's over there and we're just— we're going around it in a year and we're just spinning all day. Yeah, that's destabilizing. Like, well, everything I know is, is wrong. And that's a scary thought, I know. But when you think—

when you like really, really think about the story, the story of the world. Mhm.

Do you mean Earth or the universe? Um, the world, I'm not sure.

I mean, well, one begets the other, I guess, but like even just the Earth, okay? And the evolution of all of us, everything, from single cell to us.

Exactly.

It's like, no. Yeah, I am. That is not real.

I feel you. I have, I have a, I have a a healthy— I think that's why it's very easy for people to believe in religion, because—

yes, because at least it's an explanation.

Preposterous that all this happened by chance.

I really was getting in my head and I was like, this is not— like, I'm gonna vaporize. Like, this is not— it's— yeah, you felt untethered, maybe dangerous.

Yeah, it was a little—

it was a little unsettling.

Um, did you make it through, or you did 45 and then you—

well, I had to leave, so I'm gonna go back, finish it. He hasn't even met— he's like just now Meeting, I assume. The Rock.

Yeah, yeah, it's such a cute movie.

Yeah, I like it. He's— God, my God, is he so charming. It's just him. It's just him.

Very few people can do that.

He's just so fucking charming. He is.

Anywho, um, yeah, that's— yeah, interesting that you brought that up because I've been also in my head about, you know, life and reality, and none of it's like— none of it, it's nothing.

And then again, we come back to the same conclusion we always do, which is like, and who cares? So if we find out it was a simulation, then what? Well, I keep living this life that I'm living. I still have goals and hopes, and I'm looking forward to things. And it's like, okay, oh, it's all fake. Well, I'm going to continue on. I'm not going to— like, if I find out it was a simulation, well, I guess then I'm going to kill myself. No, right? You're just like, oh, just keep enjoying the simulation.

I know, but it's like, does it matter? Even apart from it being a simulation, Constellation, even that was getting like, even that can't be real. Nothing. Like what? It's scare— like it is scary once you really start thinking about space and time and it, it helps you see how easy it would be to go crazy. Yeah. I was starting, I was like, I could, I could really, really go crazy if I really started delving into some of this stuff. It's just maybe not healthy for me.

That was my early 20s. I had like 2 or 3 years in my early 20s where I really— yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I had, um, 2 years in my early 20s where I, I was— I felt like I was on the path to, to becoming crazy.

Going nuts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was kind of swirling with these kind of thoughts. My challenging nature, my openness to reject what is believed or known, which whatever, I, I, I, I, I trend high on that spectrum, I thought, oh, you're in danger if you don't accept these things. You're in danger of floating off into an abyss of uncertainty. Yeah, that's how people go nuts. Yeah, I think I was right on the precipice.

Well, I'm, I'm gonna try to stay away. I'd rather not go crazy. No. Yeah, you know, I have this house.

Yeah, you want to stay.

It might be because of it, I don't know. Okay, I want to stop talking about this, making me a little freaked out.

I showed— did I tell you I showed Lincoln Dances with Wolves? The Wolves last Sunday. Oh, I—

yeah, you said you guys had started it, and I was very impressed because it is, to me, although I was in high school, one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. But I would like to rewatch because maybe I just wasn't in the headspace.

I love it. It won Best Picture. Well, of course. Yeah, it's like a renowned film. Yes, but again, it's always nice to be reminded of what people live lived like for so long, if they even did. Yeah, just out on the frontier with like a book of matches and a rifle. And like, you know, it's just wild how what we dealt with. And Eric was going, fuck, I mean, how were they alive? Like, how did they just exist and not go, fuck this? And I said, and it's my theory on life, which is like, because whatever their situation was, it was incrementally better than the previous generation. So maybe they had tin cups now instead of no cups. They felt lucky. They had some inventions that made them feel lucky. Yeah. Luckier than the previous group. And then you got to wonder what it does to like the group psychology when we do pinnacle. I know we're not there yet, honestly, but there is a pinnacle. I know.

I'm getting— Again, like, we're maybe getting close, especially with AI. It's starting to feel like, oh my God, we might be at the end of, of this experiment.

What a privilege to be there at the—

no, I don't know. I even, I was like, okay, so, well, because obviously in the movie the Earth is not— yeah, it's like not viable for much longer. And I was like, okay, so if that happens, like, what, I guess just die? I guess, like, I would probably try to— I had to— I was like thinking this, you're like, okay, when would I die? Like, at what point would I make the call?

You're like someone with a terminal condition that has to decide when they take the solution.

Healthy for me to be thinking like this. I just know me. Like, I don't think this is good for my brain anxiety-wise. No, no, no.

For you, it's not great, but I, I'm—

it's— I'm too far gone.

I'm such— that's what it is. I'm such a novelty addict.

Oh my God.

That I'm like, yeah, it could be, it could be bad, it could be good, it'll be new. It'll— and that, that to me is exciting, or to me what makes it worth it. I'm like, yeah, I don't know what's about to happen, but something's going to happen and I'm going to witness it. Well, you— that feels so dead. Well, we don't— we don't know which way it's gonna go.

So you— I don't want to have to go to move to another planet and stuff and like take the spaceship. Like, that's— it looks so miserable. It could be fun. No, it looks really miserable.

What if it's Delta One to— yeah, there we go— to Alpha Centauri? All right. And then they have on the plane, they have like cocktails. No, they don't.

Their food is bad and their drink— they don't We don't even have Hendrick's gin. You could maybe bring your own Hendrick's gin. Uh, anyway, okay, well, this got really intense. Want to do some facts? Yeah, let's do some facts. This was an eye-opening episode, man.

This was a serious episode. I have found myself repeating the two most jaw-dropping bits of data that came out in this. Have you been telling anybody about this stuff?

Well, which, which are the two for you?

Well, that's 70% of the cases are from other children. That's wild. And then the other one that blew my mind is that like 50% of them are situational and not someone who has like permanent pedophilia. Yeah, yeah.

Which, that is somehow scarier. Well, not to me, because again, and like, I think this is sort of the point they were making, like those people, it's like the difference between a murderer and a psychopath. Like, a psychopath can't control it. Like, it is a real urge. It is driven in the brain somehow. And a murderer could not murder given a different circumstance or the right tools or, you know, whatever.

Yeah, that was a part of a— I'm pretty sure a Gladwell episode. It was like, it was about first-order thinking, second-order thinking, whatever. All these things that happen, like, some alarming percentage of murders are people reacting in situations. They're not premeditated. They're not like someone's gonna off someone for money. It's like, those are very low percentage. It's people interacting in life who become overwhelmed. Yeah.

And yeah, yeah. So that's why I think it's not as scary, because I guess that's like the whole point of what Elizabeth and Luke are doing is trying to like mainly avoid that.

You can't imagine a future where it's like, oh, it becomes so fine to self-identify as this, and that people know when they're pretty young, it's sounding like, and then get treatment for those people. So it'd be like, oh, well, if you could take all those people out of— not take them out of the population, but identify them, get them help, the problem would be over. It wouldn't be over. I mean, let's just even ignore the adolescents that are doing it because theirs is mostly situational, right? But the other people who it's like they've never had that urge before and then they don't have it again, you can't even really— they don't even know to be treating that well.

Yeah, but it's kind of like, that's what we should all be doing, is just like reminding people of the consequences of these types of things. Um, yeah, like, I, I think a lot of people who've been raped when they're young, they're not a pet— they're not always pedophiles, they're rapists. You know what I mean? Like, that's a power thing. That's a— there's, there's a lot more—

victims would age up with them is what you're saying, to some degree? Well, yeah.

Well, I guess I just mean like, it doesn't mean just because somebody's had— yeah, just obviously that's the whole point. But like, I think if a rape—

situational scares me more because you can't see it coming. I guess you have no awareness that you're capable of that, right? And that is like inherently less treatable or addressable.

Well, sort of, because it's like everyone's kind of capable of anything and you just like learn to not do bad shit. Yeah, I'm just saying all the—

all those people that did that know— knew that that jail time could await them. Like, there's no one that's like these— he's talk— she's talking about the teachers that are in these situations. Like, no one's unaware of, A, the social stigmatism and the legal issue with it, and And yet they do it. So I don't think deterrence.

Well, but I think it, I think they would argue that was the whole point kind of is like, it's not like, yes, it's, they know, but it's remind, it's like, hey, this is about to happen to you if you go down this path. This is like intervention and things like that.

Well, the kids. Yeah. Like the kids whose prefrontal cortex, they need to understand like there's really bad outcomes for the, the victims that you probably wouldn't even have seen as a victim until we explain it to you that they're a victim, and then they're gonna have these— yeah, then it's like, oh my God, it's that. I'm talking more the adults that are in these situations where it happens once or it happens and they don't repeat it. Um, sure, I guess the solution for that would be people in jobs that interact with youth need to have some classes that say, hey, this could happen, or, you know, this has happened to many people who are not pedophiles. Right, exactly. So you need —everyone's kind of in danger of this.

So watch out.

That's what I'm saying. It's easier to address a tiny percentage of the population that is identified with the condition than it is like every human being that deals with kids needs to be warned that other people weren't like that and did that. It feels more daunting. Took a long time for me to articulate that.

I mean, I think, yeah, I still personally am more afraid of the condition addiction, but, but I see what you mean. Okay, what are the chances of addiction if you've been sexually abused as a child? Uh, this is from PubMed, and so it's using, it's using some numbers that I don't really understand. It says, in multivariable analysis for men, first occurrence of physical and sexual abuse as a child was significantly associated with more substance use consequences, adjusted mean increase in— and then this is what they're using, like some sort of system— in BUC. Um, 2.5 for ages less than 13. 2.5 times more likely? That's what I'm not under—

that's what I don't know.

We don't know what the metric is. 3.3 for ages 13 to 17 compared to those with no abuse. Oh, 0.001 with no abuse.

Oh, so many multiples. A lot more— A lot? Yeah, yeah, well I can tell you that my mother when she was in her casa program which she's getting taking state sanctioned classes they said you had an 80% chance of becoming an addict if you'd been sexually abused horrible! And then ding-ding-ding... It is funny we're all course understandably worse off than most people who have experienced it but at least there were some things to do about this stuff before now so what would be your advice for someone right after their abuse experience or during recovery from addiction like how does one deal better because obviously our culture has not helped us much here especially men just don't We're so obsessed with finding out why things happen, right? We feel safer if we understand why things happen. But it's just like we have this endless desire to point to causality of, say, addiction. It's like, in my case, is it that thing? Is it that I'm 8th generation through the honchels fucking full-blown addict? Is it some other bit of nurture? And then who cares? For me, I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, I guess who cares?

Yeah.

Well, no, the reason to care is not really once it's happened, it's like, oh my God, if this happens to some, don't do this to people, basically. Yeah.

Points out the importance of preventing that. Exactly. For sure. But just like when you're already an addict and you start looking back on why you might be an addict to some degree, it's like you'll never know the percentage. We won't— I won't know what part was nurture and what part was nature, and it doesn't really matter. I've been left this way.

And yeah, it's good to figure out what triggers the addiction, surely, but yeah, this other stuff, yeah, it doesn't matter. Okay, uh, Roy Moore is the politician in Alabama.

I mean, there's so many offensive things about him. It's not just the Repeated child. Horrifying. It's, um, him also like trotting to town on a horse in a like Howdy Doody costume.

I mean, what a character.

The horse's name was Sassy. Yeah, I bet he named his horse Sassy.

Exactly. Oh, Garfield the president is from, or born in, Orange Township, now Moreland Hills, Ohio. Okay, okay.

She was from Mentor, Mentor. Yeah, that's where the museum is.

Are the Boy Scouts called Scouting America. Yes. Um, Noah Hawley's mother came up. Louise Armstrong is her name. Yes, she had a book in '97— in '79 called Kiss Daddy Goodnight. Rough title regarding child abuse. Um, let me just make sure I got them all. That's it. That's it. Yeah.

All right, love you. Love you.