Transcript of Justin Garcia (on the science of sex)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I am Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Today we have Justin Garcia on, who is a sex researcher, an evolutionary biologist, a scientific advisor to match. Com, and executive director of the Kinsey Institute, the famous Kinsey Institute. This was so fun because he knows all the data on sex. He really does.

Sex and pair bonds, relationships. He knows everything.

Yeah, Yeah, this was endlessly fascinating. I had a bazillion questions. The more we talked about, the more curious I got.

Yeah, it's really good.

He's epic. He has a book out now called The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love, which is a phenomenal read and very eye-opening. Please enjoy Justin Garcia.

He's an option expert. He's an option expert.

Justin, where are you in from? Indiana. It's in Indiana. Yeah. Counterintuitive. Yeah.

The Kinsey Institute's on the Bloomington campus about an hour south of Indianapolis, but it's a funny place for this hotbed of sex research. It is. Southern Indiana. You wouldn't expect it, but in some ways, that's the story of studying sex for 80 years at the Kinsey Institute was because we were in Southern Indiana in a pretty conservative state. It's the Bible Belt. Indiana is in the middle of a read similar to what happened in California by trying to have a- Jurymandering? Yeah. To have all Republican seats. So you think, how do we end up there, but it's what defines the institute.

Well, that was my very first question for you. I think the history of the Kinsey Institute would be really fascinating for all of us to hear because I think we have vague awareness of it. But first and foremost, you're a Newyorker.

I'm a Newyorker.

What did your parents do?

When I was young, I was raised by a single mom, and we're still very close. Talk every day. Actually, my parents semi-retired in Bloomington, so they're closer to me and my wife, Michelle Nauz. We have an infant, so they're helping with that, which is amazing.

Oh, what a blessing. Yeah. We raised two kids with no family around. Well, my sister, but no grandparents.

It's really tough. In some ways, what's been interesting for me is we had the baby after I finished the book, and you have these moments that you'll think, Well, this is why Mother Nature made these pair bonds so intense. How on earth do you get through this unless you deeply love the person you're doing it?

Absolutely.

When I was a tween, my stepfather and to the picture.

Did you get a good one?

They'll adore my stepdad. They're pretty rare. Yeah. I was lucky. My best friend growing up hated his stepdad. What's interesting, and I think now when I look at my work and understand the evolution of family relationships and how families connect, or as anthropologist will sometimes talk, it takes a couple to raise kids. It takes a family to raise a couple. It takes a village to raise a family. That we're nested in these social layers. That part of that is these degrees of relatedness. A stepparent, when When they enter the picture, there's this warming up period. You inherently have a genetic relationship to some people or aunts or uncles or genetic parents that you expect that, that feedback, that saying, Oh, you shouldn't feed them that. You should raise them this. When someone else enters, you have to really build that trust and connection before you start to tolerate. Then that changes. That's what's so remarkable about humans. It's not like you're suddenly changing your DNA, but they become an in-group member. They become a part of a family. That's what's so interesting about our social lives is that we respond to environment. We respond to context.

We respond to who's there and when and why and how. We're an adaptive critter. We are.

We'll get into it as we get into the weeds. How we're living currently versus how we lived 300,000 years ago as hunting and gathering societies, they almost bear no resemblance to one another. We get to watch our evolution butt up against our new culture, which is not without its casualties. As you got into the evolutionary biology track, where would you rank What was your interests in human evolution?

I went to a school at Binghamton University in New York, part of the Suni system, and we had this evolutionary studies institute. It was intended from the start to be thinking about evolution in all sorts of different disciplines. It was housed in biology, but including psychologists, anthropologists, people in English and literature and history. I was really fortunate. I had this institute that I trained in that we were thinking about evolution broadly. I started my graduate studies with a pretty narrow focus. I was interested in the brain. I was interested in the dopamine system and risk-taking, and then the genetics of it, and then the evolutionary genetics of it, and these different patterns, some risk-takers, some people who are neophobic. I was interested in DRD2 and DRD4. There were these dopamine receptor genes for our ancestors, they evolved, the thought is, they evolved for risk-taking so that there were some individuals in a population who would go see what was on the other side of that mountain. So you had some folks that really migrated, and they had to have a propensity for risk, but they might die sometimes. So that's the other That's the side of risk.

You could find mates and resources and new lands, but you could die.

So you're into this dopamine reward system, whole network and risk-taking, and then where do we go from there?

For me, these are big stories about social behavior, the evolution of sociality, the fact that we are a social species. Not all species are. Not only are we social, we're preferentially social. You like one individual more than another. We have friends. We have people that we rank. It's not just that we walk outside and we say hi to everyone, we groom everyone. We have preferential sociality. Then our romantic and sexual relationships fall within that. It's a type of social behavior, but it's a highly specialized one.

Now, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about the history of the Kinsey Institute. You are currently that you're currently the executive director of. You're bringing back an old theme, which is Kinsey himself was also... He was an evolutionary biologist? Yeah. You're only two, right? How many directors have there been? Five or six?

I think I'm six. Kinsey was a zoologist. He was a Harvard zoologist. He studied gallwasps. He also studied insects. He was renowned for that. He was renowned as this zoologist. He also, interestingly, used evolutionary theory in his work. So he wrote an introductory biology textbook. At the time, it was one of the first in the 1930s that used evolution as an overarching framework for the whole book, where before that, it was a chapter, it was a section. Today, we take that for granted. Every intro biology textbook uses evolution as a meta-theory. We call it as guiding principles. He was just He's an interesting guy. He hybridized over 200 species of iris. He collected thousands and thousands of specimens of gallwasps. Most of them are in the Museum of Natural History in New York City now.

Can I ask what personality type was he?

Yeah, I love that. You asked that every so often we'll do an event, we an award in his name, and we'll do events, and people are always like, Do you have any pictures of him smiling? Then we have a handful that we'll use, but there's not that many of them. He was very serious. He was a serious academic. I think because he understood the weight of the research he did when he transitioned to studying sexuality. But when you talk to people who were interviewed by Kinsey, so the initial Kinsey reports that emerged, and I'll get back to the whole story, but when the Kinsey reports emerged, there were 18,000 interviews in total. About 8,000 of them he did himself. Wow. It was an enormous amount of labor. And the interviews lasted between 3 and 18 hours. Some of them were several days long.

Oh, my God. I thought we were impressive for doing a thousand episodes. We needed to hear this. We needed to put in our plane.

You're doing great. But no, Dr. K. No kidding, man. He would do these interviews. When we look at reports from people who were interviewed, you hear that he was charming, that he was thoughtful, that he really focused on the person in front of him. For some people, they said, I shared things with him that I didn't share with anyone else, that I didn't feel safe to share with anyone else. What a remarkable legacy that people, their whole lives, couldn't talk about who they were or what they wanted until they were in a laboratory with this renowned scientist and this notion that it was secure and safe. There was that part of him, and then there was this serious scientist part of him. He first came to Indiana University in 1920 and was teaching biology. The story of Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute today, what was then called the Institute for Sex Research, was in 1938. He was asked to team teach a course on a sexual hygiene, a marriage course. A couple of universities around the country were starting to pop up these marriage courses in the late 1930s.

You point out in the book, a lot of people were married in college back then.

Right. Different from today. I could lecture 500 students and no one's married.

What's a marriage course course mean? Like, how to?

Yes. It was part like sexual hygiene, preventing venerial disease as part, what to do when you want to have kids. So it was a little bit reproduction, a little bit sexual health.

Like vocational training for marriage.

Because they'll tell you, There's no book on this. There's no course on how to be married. It turns out there is. There was.

There used to be, yeah. What was interesting was, so you had to be a married student. You had to be a certain age to be in these courses. You had to be an upperclassman to be in these courses, and people were signing up. The thought at the time was, well, have that guy in biology, have Kinsey, who's studying gallwasps and knows a little bit about sexual reproduction because he's an evolutionist and it's your bread and butter, have him do a section of the course, that'll be safe. I think this represents the very best of what a university should be, even to today, what a university, a research university should be. Students had so many questions that they brought to the faculty that they couldn't answer. They couldn't find the answers in the library or the other books because there wasn't a book or in the academic literature. What Dr. Kinsey said is we have to go out and find answers. That's our obligation as academics. Students have questions, let's go do research and answer them. From that curiosity from students and from the faculty, they started doing interviews in town in Bloomington and now we're outside Indianapolis.

We have so much shame around sex that we don't talk about. It's dirty and perverse.

Even sexual hygiene, that's shameful.

Yeah. Framing. Framing is a disease, preventing the disease. Earlier in my career, I used to write about hookup culture and casual sex, and I was interested in how people were negotiating, young people were negotiating casual sex with desires for relationships and commitment. We found 51% of college-age men and women, no gender difference, had a casual sex hookup because they wanted to initiate a romantic relationship with the person. They didn't necessarily know the scripts for dating, or they were trying a different avenue to get there. I remember giving lectures at the time, and so many students this idea was like, Well, it's a sexual revolution. Young people are hooking up now. This was maybe 10 years ago. I thought, Do you know what your parents did when they were in college? Do you know what your grandparents did in the '60s. There's this idea of, no, that every generation has a moment that they imagine that they are sexually- The firms. Yeah, and that no one before them was. But we have a long history and a deep evolutionary history. Sex was a part of our lives, and people knew about it, and they talked about it.

They had rituals about it. They sing for it. They dance for it. They celebrate it because it was a part of reproduction. In some societies, it's tied more or less to really celebrating reproduction and family formation. In others, what's so unique about humans is that we can celebrate it for pleasure. Not all species can do that. Even the fact that we can have sex any time of the year, that women can have sex across the menstrual cycle. A lot of species, females, can't engage in sexual activity and reproductive behaviors around their ovulation cycle. There's a species where the vaginal opening closes. Or take rats in a laboratory. The females engage in lourdosis. They arch their back. It's only during certain parts of the cycle that they can arch their back enough that a male could march them. There's all these physiological constraints on mating, humans are adaptively released from that because sex is so tied to our social behavior, to our relationships.

As Professor Kinsey started attempting to answer these questions, what were some of the things that immediately he wanted to answer?

Students were coming with questions. Some were about things that just no one was talking about, like pain with sexual activity. Some were talking about behaviors. He wasn't really interested in identity the way that we think about it today. But what he was interested in is that people's behaviors and fantasies didn't align. Over the 80 years since, we've got different methods where we think about that and we unpack that a little bit differently. Today, sex researchers talk about sexual behaviors, sexual preferences, and your sexual identities. Sometimes they could be different. Let's say you're a heterosexual male who's in prison for 20 years, we know that many have a boyfriend or a partner. There's all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's loneliness, sometimes it's safety. Does that fundamentally change your orientation? It's a behavior, but is it your preferred behavior if you weren't in that particular context? Now, that's a case of prison. We see things in military. We see things in populations where there's a huge sex ratio. Roman soldiers.

Greek soldiers, yeah.

Yeah, there's all sorts of different examples.

If you're not going to see a female for four years, you got to start considering other.

Humans are creative. What's interesting about that is it doesn't necessarily mean your identity is changing or what you think of as your orientation. It also doesn't mean that your preference isn't necessarily changing. So how we look at behaviors, and in fact, when we look at big data in the United States, if you look at how many men and women had a sexual event in the last year, and did they have heterosexual events, same-sex events, there's way more men that have had a sexual event with another man last year than who identify as gay and bisexual.

Consensual, I assume.

Yes. Okay. There were a study years ago by a colleague of mine, and the paper that they wrote was called Straight Girls Kissing. The idea was that two college women in a bar who kiss. And early on, people were saying, Well, they're doing that for the boys because the boys want this attention. All these young men, they're buying them drinks. They get the drinks, and that's why they kiss in the bar. It's hot. Yeah, it's right. This idea, it's sexy as a turning them on? But what these two sociologists argued was, what everyone is forgetting about that is maybe the women just wanted to kiss each other. And by doing it publicly in a bar as a show, you, in some ways, remove some of the stigma. This public display of it allows people to experiment with their sexualities in a way that it feels safer because it doesn't challenge this idea of who you are, what you really want. Today, researchers and the public are really interested in questions of identity, of sexual identity, of how do you identify. Even if you do a survey today, you would often be asked, what's your identity?

That's a different question from your behavior. That has all sorts of implications because people assume certain things about your behavior that if you're gay or lesbian, you're engaging in certain types of behavior. But we know that people are flexible. In fact, if you talk to gay and lesbian people, most have had an opposite gender experience at some point in their life, often when they're younger. But sometimes even later in life, you'll talk to lesbians or we'll say, We wanted to have kids, and we wanted to do it this particular way. It doesn't necessarily challenge your identity. Now, there's plenty of other ways you can reproduce, too, if you have the resources. A lot of what we think about when we talk about sex and family and reproduction, a lot of it is resource-bound. We can talk about Here in LA or in New York, if you're a lesbian and you want to have kids, you can do IVF. Well, there's a whole lot of people around the world who don't have the resources for that, and they find other ways. Sometimes that's just behavior. There's these realities of how flexible our sexual lives can look.

What's interesting when we think about the other apes, we're all a little bit different in our sexual behaviors. When we look just to humans and understand our diversity, I think part of what we can do is also look to the other apes and understand that diversity and say, There's a lot going on in how we respond to environments. So gorillas have a harem mating system. Chimpanzes are multi-male, multi-female, what we call promiscuous mating. Some people don't like that term.

I love it. Promiscuous sounds fun.

Yeah. Well, it was a technical term in the literature, and now it's loaded. And bonobos have a similar multi-male, multi-female. But then gibbons, what are called the lesser ape, the most distantly related of the apes, they engage in social monogamy. They engage in long-term bonds. Orangutans have a different system.

Well, there's the most fascinating, because the females get raped and somehow, biologically, I don't know that we know. We didn't know in 2000 when I graduated. They somehow select for who gets them pregnant, which is fascinating.

There's still a lot of debate. If researchers study orangutans, they're just really difficult to study. They're deep in the forest of Borneo. Way up high. It is. It's coercive mating. It's rape behavior, what we would call in humans. There's a little bit of evidence that they do have preferential partners sometimes, so that females might even stick around certain males, where they are, what part of the trees. The males are heavier, so the females try to escape by going higher up in the trees or further out in the branches. It's too far for the males to get to.

Yeah, once they're full adult males, they're just sitting on the ground. They're too big to get up there.

They're too big. Big cheeks.

I think they have the highest sexual dimorphism, maybe besides It's gorillas. They're like two and a half times the size of the females.

The sexual dimorphisms, they depend on certain traits. What's interesting, one of the ones that researchers have studied, for instance, are genitals. Gorillas have actually really small testies for body mass because they don't have a lot of sperm competition. Interesting.

Have you ever seen the balls on a chimp? Yeah, exactly. They're enormous. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Enormément humongous.

Because there's a lot of mating and the sperm of one male is competing with the sperm of another male inside the reproductive tract of a female. Interesting.

So they're producing. You better really hose it down.

Those poor female chimps. It turns out when we look around the animal kingdom, there's all sorts of adaptations of ways that organisms are responding to this mating.

Hyenas, fascinatingly, right? A matriarchy with a clitoris that looks like a penis.

And they birth through the clitoris. If you see wolves or if you have a large dog, you'll sometimes know they mate and the penis continues to swell and mating and the males can get stuck. And that prevents another male from mating in a short period. Sometimes we see things that look so wild. And there's actually this evolutionary adaptive story.

I think that's what drew me. When I try to get deeper and deeper and deeper what draws me to it, it's that there is reason to all this. Nothing is accidental.

I remember being a first year graduate student, and so I did my master's in Anthepology, then my PhD in evolutionary biology. One of the cultural anthropologists, I asked a question about evolution and behavior. One of the cultural anthropologists looked at me and said, Do you think we're just like magpies and attracted to shiny things? I thought, Yes, I do. Because we do have these evolutionary tendencies of liking shiny things. In fact, when you look at cultures around the world, why do we have so much shiny art and jewelry and decorate ourselves with shiny things? There's patterns to our behavior that are rooted in a legacy. Undeniable. Yeah, undeniable in this legacy of social behavior, but also trying to signal certain types of information. I think what's interesting for me is that when we understand that, we can also try to biohack parts of it. We can try and improve our relationships if we understand where some of those tensions and touch points are, but also the things that we're really craving that we might sometimes forget.

Just to speed through, Kinsey, I think the part that was really breakthrough, or at least my limited understanding of it, is women prior to his work weren't even a part of the equation. They were not sexual creatures. They really had no sexual desires. They were mothers. He challenged all of that. Is that accurate?

Kinsey was teaching, team teaching this course in 1938. Two years in, the university president said, You can either do this massive study or go back to teaching, but you can't do both because you're interviewing everyone in town about their sex life. And so he decided to go do this study. And then in 1947, the Kinsey Institute was formed. It was then called the Institute for Sex Research, and it was formed to protect the data. Kinsey was very much aware that there were actors, including government actors, who might want to know who were in these studies. It was a time you could be put in a mental institution for being gay.

Wow. Because we had sodomy laws on the book.

Yeah, homosexuality was still in the DSM as a mental illness. It's 1940s. He was aware of that. He felt that we had to protect. He had to protect the participants. I say we because it's still so fundamental to what we do as researchers, of protecting the people who share a piece of their life with us in a study.

They're putting so much trust in you.

Yeah, and we have to honor that at all costs. We try in all sorts of different ways. Some are illegal, some are how we code data. Actually, they had a coding system that if you walked in today, you couldn't decipher this coding system, which is a great reminder of the obligation of a researcher. So '47, they formed the Institute of Sex Research as a separate, non-for-profit 501(C)(3) on the IU campus. 1948, the first book comes out, Sexual behavior of a Human Male. Huge bestseller. Kinsey is lecturing all over the world. I have a picture outside my office of him lecturing at UC Berkeley in the Men's Gymnasium, and it's packed. At the time, the joke was, Kinsey filled the Berkeley gym more than any sporting event ever did. People were craving this information. Then to your point, five years later, Sexual behavior of a Human Female came out. It's actually a much more theoretical book. It was interesting because they had to change how they were measuring sexual outlet. In the male volume, they associated climax with a sexual event, which we wouldn't do today either. If there are things that change in 80 years from research as it should.

It's iterative. We get better. But they knew instantly they couldn't do that with females because orgasm rates were so variable. They had to change how they were laying out all the data in the book. Did you engage in sexual behavior? But then did you also have this climax separate? Interesting. The female book was also a best seller, but what was interesting is there were book burnings all over the country, but you had to buy it to burn it, so it was best seller. This idea that he could talk about men's sexuality and society was okay with it. Most of society, there were still a lot of people who are not okay with asking anything and still are not okay with asking anything about sex and relationships and gender and reproduction. But the second volume, when he started showing data about people's wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, this idea that women had sexual lives, that they wanted sex, that they craved pleasure, but only a quarter were regularly having an orgasm.

It was not a symptom of hysteria.

Yes, exactly. It wasn't this mental illness. Then people had a very different reaction. He lost funding. He lost funding from the Rockefeller Foundation at the time. Then there was a big court case that they had tried to ship 31 photographs in the mail. It still is used today as an example of academic freedom laws and censorship laws. It was a very influential case. It was called US versus 31 photographs. Because when the government, in particular, when something is seized by customs, the The item is named in the court case. It was like US versus candle, US versus... Oh, wow. So these funny cases. Sounds so stupid. I know, right? They were nude photos, and the government sees them because they said this violated obsenity laws. The case, ultimately, over seven years, determined that researchers had the right to have materials that some people might find objectionable for the sake of research. It was settled in 1957. It's still really important for all sorts of researchers of all stripes. Kinsey did so much for us to be able to ask questions our sex life. Even the fact that we could sit here and talk openly about love and sex, that we had to have people before us.

We had to fight for that.

Start that ball rolling.

For the book burnings, do you know was it equally shunned by men and women, or was it mainly like, men don't want to hear about women? Do you know?

Thinking of pictures that I've seen, I don't know any numbers on it. It was a mix. There were a lot of men. I'm almost thinking of today's abortion debates where you see all these men. Maybe that's where you're going.

Yeah. I just imagine who's... I I assume it's both.

It was both.

I was just going to say it's always counterintuitive, though, how many women participate in things that might not benefit them, but they're benefiting from the larger structure of the patriarchy.

We're all in a patriarchy, so there's trickledowns.

For some people, this idea that if you talk about your sex life, some don't want to talk about it for religious reasons, but then they maybe have to confront something. One of the things that came up, my colleague, Judith Allen, is a historian who studied Dr. Kinsey's work, but was a leading authority on the history of sexology as a field. She argued one of the things that happened in the books was that when Kinsey would talk to couples and the researchers would talk to couples, and he brought in other researchers. He realized he was a biologist. He brought in anthropologist and sociologist, and the You had to have this team he assembled. It was hours and hours of training because you had to be able to ask questions and not make someone feel judged. You wouldn't say, When was your last affair? He would say, How old were you the first time you had sex outside your marriage? It was really this focus of not invoking that shame. This behavior is happening all over the world. For some folks, there were religious views or particular cultural views that shaped and shaded how they thought about their sexualities.

Then for others, it was because I have pain with sex. I don't know who to go to for a resource. I just don't want to talk about it. But what Judith Allen found in her historical work was that when he talked to couples, and it's been turned into a comedy bit since then, you would talk to a couple and women would say, Oh, my gosh, my husband wants to have sex all It's all the time. It's all the time. He's scratching at the door. He wants to have sex. It's three times a week. Then you talk to the husband and say, Well, my wife doesn't want to ever have sex. She's not interested. We barely have sex. We only have sex three times a week. Sometimes the same activity, the interpretation of it could be different. I think what's challenging is we often don't have the tools or the comfort to talk about that. We see these people showing up in the therapist chair, which is great. You're getting help, you're getting resources, you have a guide to talk through those, but they're not necessarily having conversations with their partners about, Is our sex life working for you?

Is it working for me? We did a study at the start of COVID on people's romantic and sexual lives, and most of it was good news. Actually, we did several studies at the Kinsey Institute. We did one that showed that close to 85% of married people, their marriage got better during the pandemic.

Because we only heard about the uptick in divorce rate.

That was early on. Then it actually didn't increase all that much. But most marriages did better. There were some that really struggled. Or if you were in a relationship characterized by violence, for instance, you were really in trouble because you couldn't get out that easily. Than typical. Yeah, you're trapped. But most marriages, because you looked at your partner and you thought, This is the whole reason we did this, to weather uncertainty, to respond to storms. You have this moment that you could look at each other and go, my gosh.

We might die, but we're going to die together. We're going to die together. Yeah, you have this fear of death. We'll stick together.

Most marriages did well, but sexual frequencies decreased. We also found in another study. Also, the frequency of masturbation decreased, which suggested that the desire had decreased. It wasn't just you were afraid of getting COVID from kissing your partner. The one other piece I want to add on this is the frequency decreased, but what we found was an increase in new behaviors. So when we looked, the variety was increasing. So about one in five people, it was the first time. It took being locked up in the pandemic. It was the first time they ever turned to their partner and said, Is there anything we've never tried? Do you have any fantasies we've not talked about? Is it sexting? Is it a new behavior? I remember interviewing one couple, and the woman said, My husband and I started having shower sex during the pandemic, and it was fun. And then as we were talking, she said, Well, we really did it because it was the only place we got away from the kids for five minutes.

Oh, yeah, out of necessity.

Out of necessity. But it was this idea that the pandemic was this horrible time for the whole world. But relationships, our romantic lives, were this place that we were weathering that storm. For most people, their relationships, even though if you were just bean counting and say, How much sex did you have in the last six months? As the world was on fire, you would say, Oh, maybe couples don't look so good. But actually, they were doing well. They were responding in all sorts of other ways. The relationship was doing well.

Do you think part of that could almost be comparison? People in relationships had the wherewithal to know, I guess I'm glad I'm in a relationship. If I were alone, I'd be literally all alone in my house or apartment right now. Maybe there was some level of gratitude of understanding like, Oh, I have people, and that's good.

I think it was. Gratitude.

Yeah. Also this tension, which your book confronts primarily, is this tension between your sexual desire desires versus your intimacy desires. So when you're out in the real world, you're, A, observing your single buddy who just had a wild night and he's telling you about it. All these things that get pulled off of the table, I think, helps you focus on why you give up all that stuff. It's not even in your face as much.

Speaking of being in your face, on the pandemic piece, we do a big study called Singles in America with Match every year. And what we found in that is a survey of 5,000 singles, one in four who had non-romantic roommates started a sexual relationship with them during the pandemic. Wow. One in- That's a pretty high number, right? A quarter of people were. It's boredom, it's safety. Companionship. Yeah, companionship. You're head of options. At least you're in your little pod. But it also was a moment that I think for a lot of people, we were looking around and seeing things we didn't see before. And it could be that you're trapped in the house and you have this roommate and say, I really enjoy living with you. There's all these things I like about you. I've never thought of you as a romantic or a sexual partner, but now that we're trapped here, Yeah, it's the answer to...

We used to debate about this. If you're on an island- I was thinking the exact same thing. If you're on an island and there's one other person there, Dax is always saying, you will fall in love with them. It doesn't matter who they are. I'm like, no, I don't think necessarily. But maybe.

We could turn to some of the work on arranged marriage. I think that gives us some insights on that, that there has been some work that couples in arranged marriage long term can have just as high relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction, even if you're the only two on the island or the only two that your families decide you can marry. Now, the big myth about arranged marriage in the anthropological literature is most people can reject it. So there is this sense that... I mean, I think that's why some of the reality shows of arranged marriage is the challenge is in the real world, people could say, Hey, Mom and Dad, I'm not marrying that guy. Typically, families want to do what's best for you, and there's some flexibility there.

Yeah. My parents have a half-arranged marriage in that same way, where it was two family members saying, Hey, I have this brother. Oh, I have this daughter. Let's get them together.

We'd like to see this happen.

Yeah, exactly. We'd love to see it happen, but I think it's more that than what people think. Exactly.

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That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out.

Yeah, or paying for a coffee that's one-fifth full.

Yuck.

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There's been a lot of studies trying to understand how people are making sense of all this data in our dating lives. More people meet on dating apps and websites than through any other venues. If We ask Americans, we've asked them for the last 15 years in an annual survey, where did you meet your most recent first date? The internet and apps is the most common way, more than church and school and family and friends and a bar. Last time I looked, it was 4 or 6% met in a bar, whereas over 30% are meeting from apps and websites. You go on and there's so many options. What happens is the human brain, our mating mechanisms didn't evolve in that context to have that much data. It's different kinds of data. Our ancestors, not only would they have a smaller pool to choose from, you knew family network.

You had reputational.

The true social network, the ancestral social network. You had all this other information. We're dealing with different information in today's environment. One of the challenges we know is sometimes some psychologists call it cognitive overload, some call it paradox of choice. There's different ways that researchers have talked about it. But the challenge is you go on the app and you start swiping and looking for partners, and there's so many. What happens is even if you start a chat with someone, you're quick to move on to the next one because Did you say, Well, I didn't like... I used two exclamation points. Who does that?

Yeah, it wasn't perfect right out of the gates.

We're discounting perfectly reasonable partners because we have a sense of an unlimited resource. Then we're playing these psychological games of saying, Oh, he has a picture of the puppy. I'll like him, it's caretaking. We found in one of our studies that people are looking at teeth as a way to assess your health and well-being because they're picking little things from photos, shine and hair.

Skin, I'm sure.

We're trying to pick information. But when we think we have so many options, and particularly it's this idea when we think it's unlimited, the brain just can't turn the lever to say, We have to start making some decisions. We know this from studies on foraging, how animals look for food in a food patch. If they have a sense that the patch is ending, that they could see the end of the bush of where there's fruit, then they might early on just look for the best thing, but then they start making some decisions. They realize it's running out. When you have a real sense of an unlimited resource, when the brain can't say, We're running out, you never switch to this making decision mode.

This is Leonardo DiCaprio.

Yeah. He's got a limited resource.

He's got literally unlimited resources.

It's not his fault. I mean, he has resources himself, but unlimited options. No people. Yeah. Yeah.

Virtually every option. Yeah. Three and a half billion.

We struggle. The challenge for so many of us is we have to grab the brain and just say, Okay, I'm going to make a choice. We have to do things if we want to have more fun and more satisfaction with how we use these apps. I think we really have to do things and say, I'm going to start a conversation today. I'm going to swipe X a number of people.

You need a game plan. If you think it's just going to present itself to you, it's not.

Yeah, because the apps are really introducing sites. They're not necessarily going to say, Here's your person you're going to have a wonderful relationship with. There's too much dynamic that happens in the real world. And there's timeliness. It could introduce you to someone and say, Well, you're great, but you're about to move to Paris for three years. I don't know if this is going to work. That's the real world for people. There's all these timeliness factors. There's geography, there's family, there's careers. So all of that stuff happens that the apps can't pick up, but they can connect with people that you may Maybe you can have a relationship with. But then you have to make this decision. One of my favorite studies, an experimental design looking at app dating, online dating, and they gave people profiles, and the one group saw a smaller number than the other. I think the larger group saw 24 profiles, and then the other group, I think, saw six. When they followed up with the participants in this experimental study, the people who saw fewer profiles were happier. Those that had more were in this, was the grass greener on the other side idea, this idea that, well, there was someone else I thought was attractive, and maybe I should have talked to some of those others.

That's just in an experimental design where you have all things considered, a relatively small number of more options. But we get stuck in this idea that maybe there's someone else out there that I should have interacted. We forget the golden rule of relationship science. The grass isn't necessarily greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it. That's the rule for relationship science.

What a beautiful sentence.

For a date, invest in that If you go on a date with someone, don't think about the hundred other options you have on your app. Get to know the person, have a conversation, ask about their childhood, about their lives, about their experiences. Invest in human connection. That's why one of the things we've been looking at in some of our studies are second dates and how important they are. I'm a huge advocate of second. Everyone's nervous on a first date. Go on a second date. Unless your gut really says, really try to invest. Water the grass.

I was just going to say, I think of the knee-jerk reaction to that. Scenario is that it's like there's some greed driving it. But I would imagine there's just as much of this loss bias we have. I deserve this great thing. It's like, what if I picked something that was less? It's this weird loss bias.

We're just starting to collect some new data that's not in the book on this idea of self-actualization. One of the things I think we're seeing is tied to this. More and more people are saying, I need to be perfect to enter a relationship. I need to bring this perfect self to a relationship. You have to be perfect in a relationship. I'm going to be perfect, you're going to The relationship is going to be perfect. We focus so much on working on ourselves. As a biologist, now, all the therapists out there are going to say, Yes, that's important. Not all of them. But I actually think we're working too much on ourselves. We're focusing so much on this idea. Now, sometimes it's a real issue. Sometimes people are dealing with depression, addictions, exhaustion. Did you clean those up. Yeah. But this idea that we need to work through all of our traumas or our wants and our needs before we engage in relationships.

Yeah, we got to come in perfect.

The relationship should be the vessel with which we make mistakes, which we explore the world, we try new things with someone else, with the safety and comfort and partnership of another person. This idea that you have to enter your relationship and say, I know fully who I am. I want you to know fully who you are. How boring.

Yeah, I was just going to say how boring. Where are you guys going together? Nowhere. There's nothing to be improved upon. I can't learn anything from you because I'm perfect and you're perfect.

You're not going to learn anything from me. Yeah, and the more we wait. So more and more people are waiting and waiting and waiting. So we're delaying We have over 100 million singles in the United States today. So we've got over a third of the adult population. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some people are very happy.

It's 40% in the book, you say.

Yeah. So we have a lot of people who are happy, single and enjoying singlehood. But so many that we study and hear from are struggling with moving in and out of relationships. Well, if you're waiting for everything to be perfect, that's a losing game. It's not going to happen.

The last thing I want to talk about in the Kinsey is the Kinsey Scale. That's the other thing I think we will- We got to address it. Because I think prior to this work, we thought there were three brackets, basically.

Yeah. So one of the great interventions from Dr. Kinsey in the first book was the Kinsey Scale, and that was thinking about sexual orientation on a continuum. I think he thought about it that way because he was a biologist, because in the natural world, everything's on a continuum. There's always variation. It's the ingredient that an evolution needs to do their work, that there's variation of trait. It selects then on that variation. This idea that sexual orientation was a continuum, at the time, they argued zero to six, exclusively heterosexual, predominantly heterosexual, incidentally heterosexual.

What's incidentally mean? Every now and then.

That would be every now and then. Young people today would say, heteroflexible. This idea that you're primarily heterosexual or the reverse, primarily homosexual, but then you have moments of maybe fantasy or a behavior, or maybe it's kissing in a bar.

Like bisexual?

Sort of. B bisexual is an interesting concept and term. Sometimes people think bisexual people have to equally be attracted to men and women. That's not true. In fact, studies show that very people are equally attracted to both men and women. Whether we use bisexual or some folks prefer other terms is so much new terminology on how we think about our sexual orientations. Some people use pansexual. They all have somewhat different definitions. B bisexual is this idea that you're attracted to men and women. Both. Yeah. Pansexual is you're attracted to people, not with regard to a particular gender or sex. It's like bisexuality.

Sound very similar, but- That's an easy distinction for me to make.

It's like, I'm attracted to guys in this I'm attracted to women in this way, versus the female-female thing isn't even a part of the attraction.

Yeah, it's more like compassionate people. Yeah. Fun people, smart people.

It's not like I'm in the mood for this or that. Yeah.

Although If it's really smart people, then we say you're a sapiosexual. There's all sorts of people. Sapiosexual.

Is that what you are, Monica? Sapiosexual?

I love smart people.

We got it. This is the next year. Kinsey started this idea that we could think about sexual orientation. Again, he wasn't thinking about identity. In the initial studies, they were looking at behavior. That continuum was based on how many male partners you had, how many female partners you had, how many male fantasies, female fantasies. The researchers assigned people zero through six. Today, we would do a study. We might use the zero to six scale and you pick what you are. But at the time, it was a texanomy.

Can I dare ask, what did that average out to?

When you look at the distributions, a majority would fall in the exclusively heterosexual. What we saw then and what we see even more now is some great work from Rich Seven, Williams at Cornell University, was looking at the mostly heterosexuals. We're seeing more and more people who are falling in that category. It's why you'll see reports for young people. Today's youth is queerer than ever. What we're seeing is young people, more and more of them are identifying as bisexual, pansexual, queer, LGBTQ in this broad sense. Part of that is this flexibility piece. They might primarily be heterosexual in their behavior and in the aspects of their identity, but we're seeing more flexibility, more open this to testing the boundaries of who they are and what they want.

Yeah. Maybe even they haven't engaged in any behavior that's heterosexual, but they're just like, But I don't want to say I'm exclusively this because I don't know.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. In fact, when you look at the data, a vast majority who identify as queer haven't engaged in any same sex behaviors.

Right. It's interesting.

I feel compelled to repeat my favorite joke I've heard recently on the show, English Teacher. Our lead identifies as gay. He goes to meet his female friend's new fiance, and he immediately is He's like, This guy is gay. She's about to marry a gay guy, and it's driving him nuts, and they're at a party, and finally, he confronts the guy. The guy goes, No, I'm 80% gay and 20% bi. He goes, So you're 10% straight? Yeah.

I know. But there's 10% there. Well, that was the interview Barry Diller did not long ago, right? They said he's attracted to his wife, but if it weren't for her, that he's attracted to men, right? But there was something about his attraction to his wife. It was targeted to a particular person. Yeah, that's That's the beauty and I think the messiness of our romantic and sexual lives. As soon as it's a particular person at a time and a place.

There's an incredible comedian named Rob McFelhenny, and his mother ended up marrying another woman. He was talking to his mom about it, and she said about her partner, Oh, she's gay as hell, but I'm not. She's like, She's gay. I'm not. She's the only one. I like her, but that's the only one I've ever been. But she's gay as hell.

She said, I'm not a lesbian.

I'm just in love with Mary or whatever.

It's so interesting.

Interesting.

I have a colleague, not at the institute, who is trans. What's interesting is she's been with her spouse since before the transition. Initially, she was a man married to a woman. She transitioned, now she's a woman. We often talk about the experience of trans people and how their relationships change and their sexualities often as a part of that change. We don't often talk about their partners if they're in long term relationships. So her partner, is she a lesbian now? Exactly.

These are the questions.

In that case, there's all sorts of arguments about sexual orientation is actually a little bit less stable than gender identities. There's some flexibility, and it could be targeted to that person. You might say, Well, I'm not attracted to women, but I'm attracted to you, and I love you. I think for me, that's a story of how pair bonds of love relationships can have this incredible power of dictating our sexual lives.

I hate to say I'm curious about this, but I am. I am curious how more frequently a trans woman's partner is fine with that transition versus a trans man's partner.

Interesting. I don't know.

I think the social pressure and homophobia towards men is stronger. I just wonder if that would be... I'm just curious.

That's couched in a lot of different things, particularly in our society. It's the history of HIV and AIDS. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that cultural pressure. Yes. But it is there. That's true for lesbian women, too. But there have been quite a few studies from folks who study gender and sexuality that look at that, that look at there. There's some unique stigma that gay men face and in their relationships. And then how those relationships are supposed to look, this pressure of, are there supposed to be roles? That's different. Sometimes in heterosexual couples, we fall into gender roles. Now, they change in all sorts of ways. As many of us know in our home lives, the gender roles are not often what you necessarily think they should be in all sorts of ways.

Right. Okay, let's get into it. I mean, we haven't even got. I had some pre questions before we- There's so much to talk about.

It's so fascinating. I'm having too much fun.

We got into the intimate animal. But I do want to address one thing, and I'm going to speed through to, and you really have to only answer the last, which is I imagine that this field in general probably struggled to be taken seriously. I wonder how hard it was to attract great researchers because it seemed like a perverted pursuit. Did we lose a bunch? But mostly, I wanted to go into why we're so uncomfortable. I mean, there's religion, of course. Do you have any other theory on why this topic? It's like tied with money is something that is so impossible for everyone to talk about. I have my armchair theories, but I'm curious if If you know data-wise why this is the impossible topic for people.

I'm curious what your theories are because I think they're as good as all of them.

I think our deepest insecurity is sex, that we will not be enough for our partner who we love and that we'll be incomplete in that way. I guess because Because, again, we don't know how good everyone... I can watch someone play basketball and I can rank myself. If I see my wife's ex-boyfriend and I look at him, I have no way to understand. His competency is still a guess of mine. It's like, A, we don't know where and we're social creatures who are obsessed with status and hierarchy. Where am I in this group? It's impossible for me to know. I'm scared. I'm terrible. I just don't even want to fucking talk about it. That's one of my theories.

We put this pressure of an outcome on our sexual activity. You engage in sex with your spouse and you're saying, Well, did I have pleasure? Did you have pleasure? Was this reproductive sex? Was it conceptive sex? Did we make a baby this time? How was the pleasure? Did you get the pleasure you wanted? Was there any pain? Was that what you wanted? Maybe you want all of it. Was that what you wanted yesterday? Is it what you wanted today? We put all this pressure on ourselves in terms of, are we having the sex that we want to be having? Esther Pareil, she's been talking recently, it is these reductions in sexual frequencies. Maybe part of the issue is our Americans, in particular, having the sex that they want to be having right now. That happens all the time. That's not necessarily a new problem, but it does mean that there's a lot of pressure in terms of how we think about our sex. That pressure is a little bit different in a hookup or a casual sex encounter or sex with a sex worker because there's something else going on. We did a study on hookups and your expected outcomes, and we found that women in particular, had very low expectations of orgasm and pleasure in an uncommitted sex.

Because they don't necessarily have the ingredients that we know are associated with. Communication. Communication. Often there's a lot of alcohol and drugs and casual sex, particularly for young people on college campuses. Don't necessarily know the person that well. There's not a lot of communication. There's often not a lot of foreplay. But it was the experience. So it wasn't that they didn't want the sex. It's just that their expected outcome from it wasn't necessarily what we think. Now, in a relationship, you look at your partner and you go, Is that what you want? Is that what I want? Is that what we want? Where are we going with this? Is this about building our relationship? Is this just about having fun because it's a rainy Sunday? Is it because we're trying to reproduce? So there's a lot of pressure that goes into it. And some of that pressure comes from sometimes religious sources or cultural sources, because in the back of our mind, we're thinking about, Okay, let's say you do want to start a family. You're thinking, Okay, sex is for reproduction. I have this biblical thing I'm supposed to be able to do. What if we can't do it?

What if it doesn't work the first time, the first month, the first six months? Well, welcome to many people today who are trying to conceive this weight that sits on our sexual lives. Then this other question of, is it better than a former partner? Is it better than what you watched on your TV binge? There's a lot of expectations that we have about our intimate lives. Now, I think that's true both for the sex part and for the love part. We have a lot of expectations about what is What is an argument supposed to look like? What is saying I love you supposed to look like? What is a kiss supposed to look like? What is cuddling supposed to look like? Some of it is from movies, pornography, or I just looked at some data yesterday that looking at the behaviors, for instance, in typical pornography, that you see high rates of women experiencing pleasure, but from behaviors that we know actually very few women associate with pleasure. Then you go and try it in your real life and you go, Oh, that didn't work. You didn't like that? But I just watched 100 clips of people really liked it.

This woman could not stop orgasming with the same, you're broken.

Yeah. We forget that part of sex for most people in our lives is it can be passionate, it could be fun, it could be funny, it could be silly, it could be smelly, it could be noisy, it could hurt your back, it could hurt your hips, you pull your hair out. There's all sorts of fumbling that happens in our sexual lives that we don't talk about that. We talk about all this stuff. We talk about orgasm rates, and we talk about all these particular positions. We can go on social media and find hundreds of things. Some of it is advice, but so A little of that advice gets into the real nitty-gritty. When we study people's intimate lives, what's the real nitty-gritty of the kids are sleeping and you've got the half hour, and you can't make too much noise, or you want to have sex with your partner, but the apartment is just so hot, and you got to let it cool down?

Yeah. If you already have a hard time reaching orgasm, add footsteps in your household to the mix in the vague threat that someone's coming through the door. Or even if you've locked it, why is the door like? Just add that.

I love that because a little bit of stress, a little bit of risk, it can be exciting. People like It's exciting. That's why I remember the first time I taught a sexuality course, a student in my class said, Professor, why is sex in a car feel so much better? I thought, well, that's a loaded question. I also thought, I'm over 6 foot tall. Don't speak for yourself. This idea that a little bit of risk or being caught can be exciting. But too much risk, too much stress, you actually get a different reaction. The nervous system responds differently. One of the things I've said, and I mentioned it in the book and other places, is when we look at the natural world, we don't see two gazelles mating in front of a lion. When our stress response is so ramped up, but you're in a burning building, you're probably going to not stop and make out with your partner. But a little bit of stress. Someone could walk in, the elevator door could open, a parkie could find you in your car. That can be arousing, but too much the nervous system then goes into a different response.

You go into the flight response.

Now you're in the amygdala. This isn't arousing. You can't do it from there.

It's also not conducive to social behavior. We were talking earlier about how mating and love and sex are a part of sociality, you're also not stopping to have a conversation in front of a lion or in front of a burning building. Part of what Steve Porges, my colleague at the Kinsey Institute, calls neuroception. For the brain to be able to engage in social activity, you need some degree of safety. And that's true for love and sex, too. So part of all this messiness of sexual experience, the sounds and the smells and the feelings, is do you feel safe with the person you're having it with to explore all that together, to laugh through that together, to cry through that together?

That's why it's so intimate because it is messy.

Okay, so we start your book, Finally, Ding, Ding, Ding, the Intimate Animal, the Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love. You start by going with some colleagues to Perum, Nevada, to visit some brothels. I think you're probably intending to study one thing, and then the menu of options gets your attention.

Yeah. I was in Las Vegas because we were collecting hormone samples in a legal sex club in Vegas, as one does when you're a scientist on the road.

I mean, hormone samples is quite a sentence.

I know.

Well, because there had been studies on the hormonal responses to sexual activity, but you get these laboratory effects. We were in a non-laboratory setting.

Can you just draw blood after?

We did saliva. We did salivary, testosterone and estradiogen. That's what first brought us to Vegas. Then we decided to take the trip an hour out to Perump in the middle of the desert. There's quite literally a menu. A woman who is giving us a tour takes us through. I was so drawn to the last item, which was the most It's an expensive item. They call it the white whale. $20,000. You instantly think, Well, what is that? What does it involve?

I'm thinking a murder.

Yeah. What time? I'm like, Oh, are the handcuffs made of silver?

Do you get to take that to go, the handcuffs?

Yeah. Is it longer? Like multiple people? It turned out that the most expensive thing that people could purchase at a legal brothel was intimacy. The Girlfriend Experience. The Girlfriend Experience. Oh, my God. The most money you could spend was couch Couching your sexual event in terms of pretend intimacy. You would sit down, you'd get dinner. There was champagne. You had a table. You would be at the cabana on the other side of the pool. You would go on a date. Typically, sex would also be involved, but you were couching all of it in terms of this relationship. Oh, my God. It was this idea that if you hit it big in Vegas, you go out here, not just for an hour of something wild. Now, that was on the menu, too. People were doing that. But the most expensive thing, the thing that was really desired was couching that sex in this relationship activity.

Oh, my gosh. Are you pretending like you already know each other, or is it like first date? Like they're getting to... I don't understand. You know what I mean?

You're going to have to pony up the 20K and find out. That should have been your Christmas present.

First dates are bad enough. Having to pay $20,000. Wow.

Yeah. You say, I mean, if we could just define quickly, so now we're talking about the intimacy is in a nutshell, the experience of closeness, of feeling and being seen, heard and known. The other thing I wanted to read that I wrote down is we might not even recognize the need for intimacy as a biological drive, perhaps because it lives in the shadow of our other primal urge, our sex drive. These are distinct compartments of us, both essential and evolutionary. And so through this, you introduced this term an intimacy crisis, that we're in an intimacy crisis. So how do we come to that conclusion? Other than the $20,000 price tag, which is That's a good clue. Other than the $20,000, yeah.

Yeah.

And in places like, I think Japan maybe or some places, you just go and you pay to cuddle. Yeah.

What's that like?

I don't know. It makes me so sad. But I also get it.

Yeah. I almost did a study A few years ago at cuddle parties, and I was also going to collect hormone samples.

You fucking weird. You're a hormone kid everywhere you go.

It's great. Whenever I hear something funny, Can I get a cheek swab for some saliva? Now my friends have to tell me, Leave your kid in the trunk of the next cocktail There's these different things popping up all over the world. There's cuddle parties, there's surrogates. I mean, there's sex surrogacy, which are often trained professionals, often work with people with disabilities on sexual activity. But then there's also these cuddle surrogates, where people are just cuddling. When we start to look around, there's all these little pieces of evidence that I think are telling us. We talk a lot about this loneliness epidemic, and a lot of studies showing psychological loneliness in studies. One researcher suggests that psychological loneliness is as for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. There's that. But for me, that wasn't enough because I thought, well, how is it that we're talking about the psychological loneliness? But so many people, we have a lot of connections. We have a lot of people around. How can you be lonely in a crowd? The answer for me was about it was the type of relationships we had, so the depth of the connections we had.

So the depth of the connections we had. And that's where intimacy comes in, that people weren't feeling heard and seen and loved.

Known to me is the most operative word. God, do we want to be known Sometimes psychiatrists talk about being witnessed, and it's this idea that we want someone to know. We know we exist. That's the evidence that we existed.

Yeah, and vice versa. We want to know someone. I think one of the things in relationships is we want someone to know us, and we want to know them.

One of the deepest prides you can have, or at least speaking for myself, is to even know someone better than they know themselves sometimes is a very rewarding feeling. I think a lot of partners know each other better than they know themselves.

Yeah, but for When I was traveling, I put out my wife's vitamins, and I texted her this morning. I said, Don't forget to take your vitamins. She started laughing. She said, I saw them. Thank you. Because I just know she'll forget, which is okay. I do things that she fills in.

Yeah, it's copiloting, man.

But do we feel like that can happen in not sexual or romantic relationships?

Yeah. I think that's where things get complicated and where we struggle to make sense of these relationships, that we can have close parents and children or best friends or siblings. We can have really close relationships with people we trust. Trust is a a key component. It's a key component of romantic relationships, too, that we often don't talk enough about how important trust is. We know we can have trust in relationships and that we crave that trust and that connection Those are in our social, maybe what we call friendships, these social friend relationships, attachment, bonding types of relationships. Then we can have these sexual relationships where we're attracted to someone and the lust systems are going on. Then we have these attraction, passionate love systems, and it's really both. If you talk to people who are passionately in love, yes, they have this sexual desire for their partner, but they also have a deep friendship with their partner. They can exist in isolation. But the special sauce that I think so many people are looking for that they desire in their relationships is that combination. Can I have someone that I'm both attracted to and feel this sense of lust and someone I feel I can really trust?

Sometimes those two systems are in conflict with each other.

Right. As you say, we We are socially monogamous creatures in general, and we are not necessarily sexually monogamous. There's quite a bit of tension there. So, yeah, break down the difference between those two.

When we compare ourselves to the other primates we were talking about or other organisms, only about 3% of mammals engage in this so-called social monogamy, form intense pair bonds. If we're talking about mammals in general, we would use expressions like mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, dual parental care. We engage in those behaviors, about 15% of primates. In humans, we would call that romantic love, this bonded relationship. Now, often we talk about monogamy. People just talk about monogamy. But for biologists, there's two different mechanisms when we talk about monogamy. There's social monogamy, which is the relationship structure, that territory defense, nest building, caretaking, support of each other.

That is shared identity. There's something about that shared identity.

Yeah, there's one psychological study called the Inclusion of the Other and Self. You can actually take these two circles and you can ask couples as they get closer together where they start to overlap more. Often in long term loving relationships, you have a shared sense of self. You have the we. I also think it's why it's so important when we think about relationships, when we think about the science of relationships and also just functionally, how we have healthy and satisfying relationships. One of the things that's really helpful for me is to recognize there's three entities in every relationship. There's me, there's you, there's us. Sometimes they all have different things. Sometimes Sometimes the us needs something that I don't really want right now. Maybe you don't even really want right now. But for our relationship, our life, to be what we want, we're thinking about that. And there's always at any given time, there's you, there's me, there's us in our relationship.

For me, it's crazy pronounced in a very rare way, which is I am me, I'm an actor, I go do things, I might be in commercials by myself, and then my wife is that thing. And then there's the us in a commercial, which is a very specific thing, and it's not either of us independently. But I I think rarely does someone experience something so dramatic and obviously a shared identity, which is like there's this other category. If you call to hire us, it's like, what do you want? Do you want Kristen? Do you want tags? Or do you want them? I don't know. It's unique.

Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

For biologists, when we talk about monogamy, we talk about social monogamy, the pair bond, and then sexual monogamy, which is fidelity. And few species that engage in social monogamy are always sexually monogamous. Because there is often an evolutionary advantage to having some diversity among your offspring. But if you're socially monogamous, attaining that diversity often comes at the cost of damaging your relationship and your pair bond. There's this tension between a desire for sexual novelty and sexual variation and excitement, and at the same time, the safety and comfort of the long term relationship bond. I think that when we think of everything from being single and first dating and starting a relationship, maintaining a relationship, finding love again, if you fall out of a relationship, that the tension between those two forces, that desire for a long term bond and that desire for novelty, that explains a lot of the ups and downs of our relationships, a lot of the challenges. It's rooted in something fundamental for biologists who study the social behavior and mating. It's that when we talk about these issues of monogamy, there's two different things. What are we talking about? Yeah. Are you talking about sexual fidelity or are you talking about a relationship structure?

Yeah. Now, the relationship, one tries to impose the other, which is interesting. If you're in sexual relationship with someone. We see this in the Friends with Benefits studies that often people want it to turn into a long term relationship. You're in a relationship with someone you often expect there to be. Not always. We've done studies on consensual non-monogamy.

I'd argue it's gotten only blurrier over the last seven in the years where marriages were primarily a social structure to create children and support a woman and the man worked and all these dynamics. Whereas now you are more and more two independent people choosing to be together that don't need one another. I just feel like that complicates it even further.

There's two things that are going on that are wild. On the one hand, we don't need resources from partners in the same way. So not as many women are marrying because they need male breadwinner providers.

Which, again, this is brand new for humans. We went from we needed a whole extended family to not die to, oh, we could get this done with five people. So now you can get it done individually. It's all so radical.

It could be different from how we were designed. Our species has been pairbonding for over 4 million years. Now suddenly this idea that how this looks is so different that on the one hand, we're saying, okay, you might be forming these pairbonds, but what you want to get out, what you need to get out of them is different. On the other hand, we also We also see what Eli Finkel calls the all or nothing marriage or the suffocation model of marriage, the academic term, is that you can turn to your partner and you say, I want everything in this one person.

Esther talks about this a lot.

Yeah. Take care of me when I'm sick and then want to have sex with me the next morning and then make me laugh and make me intellectually stimulated. I'm doing this triangle on my lap because I'm thinking about the Maslow's hierarchy. You want your partner to fill up that whole pyramid. That's not realistic because you just set yourself up for constant disappointment. As opposed to having the village, as opposed to having friends and family and the community. We have expectations of partners that are often unrealistic today. But that includes in these domains of when we think about this tension between social and sexual monogamy, that tension looks a little bit different in the modern world where we're saying, Okay, I want to have this person. I want to have this intense love bond with this person, and I don't want to share it with anyone else. You're saying about your partner, but then your partner is saying, I want to have everything. I want to have this intense love bond with you, too, but I want to go experience the world.

Yeah, so I will never be able to ask someone that would better be able to answer this question, but I'm so curious, and we got, of course, define better. I know this is a very tricky word, but I'm always so curious, what is better for long term outcome for it to be in private and secret or to try to attempt to have some arrangement? This thing exists. We know statistically, many people are not faithful, I guess, or whatever term you want to use. I just wonder which one's supposed to work better. When I see people attempt the latter, which is like, we're going to open it up. I mean, I definitely see some pretty predictable outcomes of that. Then you go like, I wonder if it's better in France, or it's just like it's a secret and it's this. Do we know which approach is better?

Those outcomes are also clear. People find out and they get divorced.

Yeah. Well, no. Was it Mitterrand's mistress came to the funeral? There's these famous cases in France where it's like, the mistress is at the funeral, no one gives a shit, and it's like, oh, that's culturally different.

When we look at those cases, they don't necessarily represent most of a population. Sometimes we're looking at cases of people with a lot of resources or celebrity status or who occupy a different role in the social scene that things are tolerated differently. Often I'll have historians say to me, well, you talk about the biology of love, but in the Middle Ages, people got married for land, except peasants. Peasants always married for love because their families didn't have land to swap. You're talking about a certain sect of society.

And trying to blanket statement the entire group.

But let's see the goal. Yeah. He just wants an answer. He's like, give me.

Well, let's say the goal was to stay in the pair bonding for life. And then you know there's going to be infidelity. What approach yields a better result?

One is question of life. Should your relationship be for life? One of the things I'm curious about is a lot of people set that as their metric for success. I remember I ended a relationship with someone years ago and I said it was a great run. He looked at me like, What? What? I was like, No, I mean, it was a great run.

I'm not pie out poker. What do you mean you're on a good run?

We were both crying, but it was like, That's a good run. Yeah. Okay, so let's unpack this. There's a question of better. I don't think infidelity is inevitable for all couples. I think there's some couples that experience it, struggle with it. There's two ways we can think of sexual encounters outside of a relationship. I pause on saying sexual encounters because sometimes it's emotional, sometimes there's other kinds of infidelity. One is this case of infidelity when that's where it's not allowed. We have an expectation in our relationship or our marriage that it's us, that we're socially and sexually monogamous. Someone steps outside that. That's a transgression. It's a violation of the relationship. There's all sorts of stuff that ends up happening. There's shame, family gets involved, sometimes lawyers get involved because what's happened is there's been betrayal for the contract that you had. I don't mean a legal marriage. In some cases, yes. It's really about that's not what we were doing. That's not what we agreed to. That can be really hard to overcome in a relationship because it's viewed as how many rules do we have for our relationship? If this is one of the few and you've broken it.

The issue with infidelity is really about trust often. Some couples will work through to try and get over that and work through it. That could be a challenge. I remember talking to one couple who he had cheated on his wife 20 years ago. They were dating at the time. They were in college at the time, actually. When they got in a really bad argument, she would still say, You're a cheater. He said it was 20 years. I want to get back to Monica's point, but also you said you encapsulated an enormous amount of literature on infidelity and everything you just explained. That's that there are dozens of studies that look at sex differences in responses to infidelity. We know that on average, men are more upset by sexual infidelity. They're more concerned with this idea that in heterosexual cases, men are upset that their female partners are having sex with other people. The evolutionary argument is, what if they have a kid that's not theirs, that's genetically not theirs, that infidelity results in siring offspring? Women, on average, are more upset by their husbands having sex with other women, and this idea that the husbands will end the relationship.

Remember, in a context, like we were saying earlier, in a historical context, where women were more dependent on resources. We used to say that men were more upset by sexual infidelity, women more upset by emotional infidelity, and in fact, they were more concerned with those suites of issues. But then there were a series of studies that started to question those findings. They said, Well, what about if we gave people a third option in all these studies? And said, I'm equally upset by both. What you find is that underneath that, that men are asking questions about sex, women are asking questions about emotional connection, that they were actually upset about the same thing. And that's that each assumed when women were saying, Well, I'm concerned about this emotional infidelity and the connection, but then came, Because you're having all this sex with this person you're connected to. And when men said, I'm concerned about this sex, and how good were they? How big were they? Because you're in love with that guy that you're having sex with because he's delivering all these things.

I guess it's like they both have fear of being left. And then what mechanism are they focusing on that will drive them away?

The rationale for it. We know that infidelity can be really devastating for couples. Some get over it, many do. We did a study on motivations for infidelity, though, and I think this was really helpful for us to better understand what was going on. There's what's called the deficit model of infidelity. That's that people think that you engage in infidelity because your relationship, there's a deficit. It's not enough. We did a new study fairly recently. We found eight different reasons, and almost none of them had to do with deficit issues. A lot of it situational. I often think about how people will sometimes say, Well, how do I prevent infidelity in my relationship? What do I do to protect my relationship? I travel a lot for work. You guys travel a lot for work. I think if you know that you don't want to engage in infidelity, don't put yourself in situations that are challenging to your relationship.

If you're trying to stay off crack, don't swing by a crack house.

Exactly. You want to think we have the capacity with these big prefrontal cortexes to think about our relationships and think about how do we protect them. How do we- Safeguard it all. Safeguard. It's a perfect way to say it. That could be, don't go out dancing to 3: 00 in the morning. You want to try to preserve your marriage. It doesn't mean you can't. I'm sure people are going to say, Oh, I'm entitled to go out with my friends. You are. Everyone is entitled to do whatever you want. But when we think about what are maybe the unexpected challenges to our relationships, we know that a lot of infidelity is situational and unexpected. One study of men who committed infidelity, more than half of them said, I wasn't this guy. I think it was two-thirds said, If you would ask me a year ago, I would say, I'd never commit infidelity. I'm not that guy. Well, what It's often not the relationship. More often than not, in our studies, it was something about situations people were putting themselves.

Yeah, context. Again, we have this illusion of being an immovable self that doesn't change. We are who we are everywhere we're at. We know for certain we're completely different people everywhere we're at. It's like, yeah, the person that made that declaration sitting in that environment was truthful. Then the other person was in this situation. All of a sudden, we've got a little different shade of the self.

Exactly. I still haven't answered your question. I'm sorry. That's the part of infidelity. Then the other part of this story is what we would call consensual non-monogamy or open relationships. I use the term cautiously. I'm picturing my friend Dr. Wednesday Martin saying right now, Don't use consensual non-monogamy because she'll argue who's consenting to it, really. But the term CNM is the contemporary term for open relationship, an umbrella for everything from swinging to an open marriage. Consensual non-monogamy is a term in the academic literature a lot. Some people will use negotiated non-monogamy. Bunch of different terms that we could use. But I think it's a good point that Wednesday brings up of, are both partners really consenting to this? It makes an assumption about open marriages.

Is the third person consenting?

Yeah. Sometimes they don't even know. We found in one of our studies in a national sample, and we replicated, it was about 20 40% of Americans have at some point had an open relationship. No kidding.

That much. That is a lot. Because I've been very public about having been in an open relationship for nine years. I think I'm the only person I've ever heard say that out loud. That's insane. I would have I guess I was one of 300.

A lot experience it very short term and often when they're young.

It doesn't bode well for how well they work. Well, that's the other part of it.

We know that about a quarter, you nailed it. We know that about 21% of them, being exact, in our studies, found that they have tried this, but how many are actively in it? And that number is less than 5%, which suggests for most people it doesn't work. I'd love to hear how you frame it, too. It takes a different work. It does.

I think the structure so incredibly important with how successful it will be. Ours was very successful. I mean, nine years, we lived together, we slept in the same bed every night together, we had a wonderful life together. I don't think that was necessarily the big reason we broke up. But what I can admit to immediately is for me, the sexual relationship in a long term relationship is so challenging and requires so much vulnerability and so much communication that if you can be satiated in the much easier way, It's going to be hard to not pursue that and lax on the servicing of your primary relationship. If I had to say the biggest downside of it all was we probably did not work on our own sexual relationship the way we would have had we been monogamous.

Because there were these other outlets.

It's easier. I don't have to be vulnerable. I don't have to say this doesn't work for me. I don't have to worry about hurting your feelings. Those are all hard things. If I have an easier option, I'm a lazy human, I'm going to do that.

I would actually argue that it's I think that there's a lot that goes into trying to do that in a society that that's not the typical way we structure our relationships. There's a lot of emotional, mental work. We can look at different pieces of folks who have open relationships, but also cultures where people have multiple marriages and multiple spouses. It takes a lot of negotiation. Even in those cases, when we look at societies, now, there's certain religious groups that have polygamous marriage. But when you look at societies where, let's say, men can have multiple wives or the few that women can have multiple husbands, there's often a lot of rules about how you think about, okay, I got a gift for this spouse. I have to get a gift for that spouse. I had sex with this one. I have to have sex with that one. When we look at open relationships, there's something called compersion that can happen is that you have new partners that enter the picture and you focus so much on that one. Sometimes you can forget about cultivating the relationship. But for me, what's so insightful about when we look at open relationships, for me, it reconfirms this argument about social and sexual monogamy, because at its core, what we see more often than not, not for everyone, more often than that, is trying to negotiate around a primary relationship.

Now, some people, like people who are polyamorous, would argue that they have multiple love bonds. What I see in practice when we look at the data is that people are often negotiating around primary relationships. I think that those people that are really able to do it differently, I'm convinced that their brains work a little bit differently. Not broken, just different.

So you're saying you think in poly relationships, for the most part, even though it's stated, these are all equal relationships, mostly they're not.

Yeah. So I think when people talk about poly in the broad sense... Now, when you actually go to a poly community, they'll often say, no, that's not really how it works. But when we talk about it, probably there's this sense that it's equal love for everyone. In some ways, that's hard for the human brain. So when psychologists define romantic love, they use expressions like obsessive thought, intrusive thinking, focused attention. It's pretty darn hard to have that for multiple people. Right. Not just going from day to day to have it, but just try to carry that at any time. So what we really see when we look under the hood a little bit in these relationships is there's often a primary. Or you'll see people will say, Well, I have three spouses, or I have three relationships, but it's Veronica, who I'm with for 20 years. She's the one I really go to when I'm in trouble. Or It's Bill, who he really understands. If I'm sad, it's only Bill that can get me out of that. There's something unique about a pair bond. I think in cases of polyamory and less so in sexually open relationships where it's just you having other sex partners.

But in poly, It's not that there's not pair bonding. It's that there's a series of pair bonds. But there's often one, I would argue there's a hierarchy. There are some people who disagree with me, but that's what we're seeing in a lot of our research.

I think that's a question they ask it on The Bachelor all the time. Can you be in love with two people at once? A lot of people have different answers on that. But I think maybe research suggests no.

There are people who can. I think for the vast majority of people, it's pretty darn hard to be romantically in love with more than one person at a time.

Again, it's all about context. Are all three of you living together? Yeah, that would be very expressed, in my opinion, that hierarchy. Are you in China half the year and in Russia half the year, and you have a partner in China and you have a partner in Russia? I do think that might be equal. It's like you're in two different monogamous relationships.

Functionally, essentially, you said this don't ask, don't tell. Some of that we see are when couples are physically separated. Also, if you're on the road a lot for work, because part of what we also know is that our vermilion ancestry desires is physical touch and connection. When you can't get that from your primary partner, you might say, Well, you're the one I go to with all my secrets. You're the one who I have this deep bond with. You're the one who I love, but I also have this other stuff that I need.

Yeah, I want to eat at Houston's, but if there's not one in the town, I'm in, I'll go to the next best steakhouse.

But again, next best. I think that's the whole point is like, that's next best. Then if it's like push comes to shove, your jobs in China and Russia, they all go away. You have to pick a place. You're going to pick that primary relationship.

Where are you going to eat? Where are you going to put your head down at night? Yeah, exactly. People are trying to navigate this. Now, when you're in certain cultural systems that permit it, that's different. But what's interesting is even in cultures where people can have multiple spouses, a vast majority, some of the anthropological evidence suggests about 85% of people still partner off socially monogamously. Wow. Even if it's permissible, it's not something that's done by everyone. Yeah.

If you look at hunting and gathering societies, you are generally probably pair bonded with someone of the same status. Then you might have had multiple wives that were lower status. There would be a social status hierarchy among the wives, which is fascinating.

Yeah. It's interesting you bring up this point of status because we also know that that goes a lot into both trying to choosing partners and trying to maintain partnerships. And does your status change over time? There was a study at the University of Michigan that when people are on dating platforms, that they often look for a partner that's 25% higher in mate value. Researchers assign mate value, too. So we punch above our weight, as it were. Sure.

Why not? Shoot for the stars.

Exactly. This is a context we all should be aspirational. But there comes a point when you want to say, Okay, you've been aspirational. You also have to get realistic about mating is a market. You bring a bunch of different things to the table. It could be your physical traits, your intellectual traits. It could be financial resources. I think that's fine. I've often had people ask me, Well, how I know that they love me and it's not my money? Or what if it's just the sex?

Or if they're a fan of the show?

Yeah, exactly. They watch it all the time.

So you've wandered into an argument. She has a rule, she would never date a fan of the show.

It's not a rule? I'm just not attracted to that.

My two points are like, A, you're not a character on a TV show. They're actually seeing you, which is already... I can see where you're the lead of a karate film and someone falls in and you're like...

Yeah, you're not that.

There's some fraudulence feeling. But in this case, it's you. And then Then my other point is like, and maybe they come for that, but you can't stay for that. What do you think about that?

Well, I think there's two elements. Is it like a fan who tracks you down and says, I've watched every episode? No.

It's not a nut. It's like a normal person who likes this show when he's attracted to Monica.

That's a hard line.

It's not a hard line. He made it a hard... No. If they lead with, I'm such a fan, that is a harder thing for me to overcome. But it doesn't mean it can't It's just like, okay, because it really is like, yes, you know me. You don't. You think you do. You know a lot about me. You know a lot of things about me. But as we talked about earlier, knowing someone, really, really knowing someone is not-Is that maybe part of the trigger?

Is they come in with the familiarity that they know you, but you're like, I haven't allowed you to know me.

Not to mention, I don't know you. So immediately it's like there's a weird imbalance. And yeah, there's an over-familiality The familiarity that comes from them.

You feel vulnerable. They know all these things that you don't even.

They're talking to me like, We've been on 84 dates. I'm like, I don't know anything about you. Are you a murderer? I'm not ready to talk to you about. I don't know.

It's complicated. I have a thought exercise. So what if not, I'm a fan of the show, but what if... That episode three weeks ago, I heard what you said, and it was really thoughtful, and I thought you brought up some points that I'd never heard anyone else bring up.

That's much better.

Tip to listeners.

Yeah, the part. One of the things we're going to send Monica's information as a result. This idea that one of the things we know, we tend to be attracted to people that we think are attracted to us. So it's actually one of the strongest things.

That is not how I am.

But in long term relationships, that's why it's really important to let your partner know. Sometimes we can get in a routine and we just say, of course, I'm attracted to you. I live with you. But to really wake up and say, whatever that attraction is, if it's physical, you look beautiful, you look handsome, you're so smart. Affirmation. But in dating, yeah, those affirmations in early dating can be important of letting someone know why you like them. Yes. I think that there's a difference. I followed you. I'm a fan, and I don't know that we want fans in our relationship. Exactly.

Well, we don't.

Did they hear you? Back to what you said earlier, did they witness what you were saying?

I agree with you. You shouldn't be a fan of your partner. I get asked this all the time in interviews. You must be so blown away. I'm like, No, I don't look at my wife like you do. I don't think that would be healthy. But I admire her and respect her. Okay, I generally do a much better a job at servicing people's book, and your book is phenomenal. But I think the easiest way for me to lay this out is I think the way you design the chapter says a lot because it goes in progression, in my estimation, of a relationship. So it's need, which we talked a lot about. We've talked a lot about evolution and biology. Crave, search, date, mate, nest, stray, break, care, and love again. This is like the full gamut of what we could expect when exploring intimacy. I guess, is there, of any of those topics, one that we haven't hit that you would hope that people would know is in there.

I think for me, the reason I was so excited to write this book was when we look at all this literature, all this evidence that we have in my lab, at the Kinsey Institute, in the field of sex research and relationship science, and how does it all come together? Using this evolutionary lens, how does it all come together to understand that we are this intimate animal, that our romantic lives, some of the most consequential decisions we make in our life is the partners we're with and how long we stay with them, the things we do with them, the experiences we have with them, that there is a science behind it. If we know that science, we can enjoy it a little bit more. It could be more satisfying. We also know what to look out for. We also know the breakup chapter. For me, understanding this idea, the pain that comes with romantic dissolution and to understand there's a science behind it.

Yeah, tell us what that science is.

We'll have to end on a happier note, but I think this is an important part.

Well, you're dispelling these stereotypes right out of the gates, which is like women mourn longer and they take it harder and they- Men mourn longer.

Men are much more likely to commit suicide after a breakup than women.

And women are more likely to end the relationship than men?

So there are predictable patterns that we see in the academic literature and the evidence that we see. But breakups are so intense. Actually, colleagues of mine put people who had just gone through a romantic dissolution into an fMRI brain scanner. When they look at the brain, first they see pain. When people tell you that they're experiencing heartache and they feel pain, they have physical pain. It's in the nervous system, it's in the brain. But it also looks like someone, when you show them pictures of their beloved, It looks remarkably like someone going through cocaine withdrawal. Wow. So this idea that when you take away a partner, even if they're the one who did the breaking up, this idea that when you separate a parapod, Mother Nature helped us evolve these intense paraponds. And they're so intense that when you try to break them, she takes her pound of flesh. It hurts. That is a testament to what people go through when they go through breakups. And so often we'll say, Oh, just get back on that horse, or Stop talking about him or her or them. That's not necessarily good advice. And one of the things I write about in the book is I wish that we gave ourselves more grace to mourn the end of a relationship.

We do if someone dies, right? It seems to be culturally acceptable. Someone dies, you can mourn them, you can have their picture up for a couple of years. But if you just go through a hard breakup, this this idea that you're not supposed to talk about them as if you didn't have this love relationship that influenced so many things in your life.

Do you think some of this is driven by the timetable we feel like we're on? I'm in so much pain, this relationship ended, but also I'm 29, and I got to meet the next person within the next year so that I know I'm with them so I can start having kids. Do you think there's this pressure that makes that seem like a pragmatic and smart decision to just keep it moving?

Yeah. So we do know that there are patterns depending on age. So when you're in your A doctor of yours, sometimes researchers will say there's more pressure to move on. On average, there's more pressure to move on quicker.

My biggest panic at the end of that nine-year relationship is we were going to start having kids when she hit 30, and I was 31, and that was the plan for nine years. And we broke up virtually right then. And I went, Oh, my God, my whole plan for having children, which I know I want more than anything, it just went away. Oh, no.

I love that you bring this up because I think the mistake is that that is a pressure that women alone have, and we know that's not true. Women have different pressures. There's realities of biological clocks. Now, with technology, there's different ways to work around that. If you have the resources, again, to work around them. But we know that men have it, too. I'm really interested in this idea. I remember a bunch of my guy friends all around the same time all had this baby fever in our mid-30s, and everyone's like, I want kids. I haven't heard about this. I haven't watched this movie. But there was this desire to find the right relationship. And men saying to each other, Well, I don't want to be too old at graduation. I want to still be able to run around a park. Now, we had a long runway. In some ways, it brings some benefits often of wisdom, sometimes financial resources. And you have the maturity, the patience. And we're seeing more and more of that, of pushing back reproduction. So when we think about the consequences of these relationships, of the different points in our lives, so sometimes we're reproductive years, we might try to move really quickly, but we're seeing more and more evidence of people who are dating and having sex late in life, after 55 and 60.

There was one study of a retirement community of men in a retirement community, and it was one guy for every four women. The village? Yeah. Then When you see high rates of sexual activity. High rates of sexually transmitted in Ochoa.

Oh, yeah. That plays the village in Ochoa, Florida, or whatever. At the highest rate of STD.

These are myths. People are fumbling through just like teenagers, right? Yeah. Which I think in some ways there's something-Oh, it's adorable. Charming. It's adorable. It's adorable. How at every part of our life, the pull of love and sex, the pull of intimacy, really, and whether there's more or less sex involved, but the pull of this connection, of this intimate connection with another person is with us all through these different stages, through the pain of breaking up, through the excitement of first love, late in life, where we're sometimes doing it again. Doing it again comes with different challenges. Often, by definition of doing it again, we tend to be older, so we're often looking at people who are sometimes in 30, but often we're looking at 50, 60, 70, 80, different challenges in relationships and how the body ages, including sex is different, and what happens after menopause, a lot of attention to that now. Same for men with erectile functions as we get older. So all sorts of stuff going on on that front. My colleagues, the The late anthropologist Helen Fisher and Amanda Gensler, at the Kinsey Institute, we had been looking at different age patterns, both for dating and sexual activity.

What we found, as people got older, they were least likely to settle. They were a bit more sure of what they wanted and needed in their relationship partners if they were dating again. But also what we found is when we looked at orgasm, actually, and sexual activity, that although sexual activity decreased as we aged, for women in particular, for both men and women, if you control for sexual dysfunctions and medication use, medications that often have sexual side effects, you don't get this precipitous decline in sexual satisfaction. And women in particular, when they hit menopause, there was actually a slight uptick in orgasm. So that's paradoxical, maybe, if you're thinking, that's not what we think about, what happens to the body. But what was also happening was people were changing their behaviors. They were engaging in more foreplay. They were maybe using lubricants, maybe using hormonal replacement therapy. So on average, they were doing things that had they done 40 years ago, more foreplay, probably would have had higher orgasm. But now they had to because the bodies were changing. It's a mixture of experience and how our bodies change. I think later life, love and sex has a lot to teach us.

When I used to teach in the fall semester, I tell my students, When you go home for Thanksgiving, ask your grandparents about their advice on love and sex. And they'll be like, Are you crazy? They used to say the dean was a friend of mine. I said, One day, I know I'm going to get called in your office for this. Yeah, exactly.

Some alumni, big donor. You want to explain to me why my grandkid just came home from your university that I'm funding and asked about my love life with their grandma?

That was the director. I'm not in the classroom anymore. You can do whatever you want.

Well, Justin, my gosh. This was like a wind in the sales. This was such a fun episode. It makes me want to keep doing this job until I'm dead. The book is The Intimate Animal, The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love. I hope everyone reads it. It's beautiful. You're wonderful. What a delight to meet you.

Yeah, thanks for coming. That's so much fun.

That's great.

All right.

Be Stay tuned for the Fact Check.

It's where the party's at.

Happy anniversary.

Oh, it's the anniversary? This is too much stuff is happening today.

No, it's for our anniversary.

Oh, this is for our anniversary.

Well, it's like one of those you make it work.

Happy crossover? Yeah. Happy accident. But we are going to be joined live. I feel like we're doing a telecast, like we're going to talk to someone on a mountain reporting on a snowstorm. Winalou is going to be joining us.

The creator of Connections, our favorite game.

She's a cross puzzler. She does it all. She does it all. We're going to find out, as you guys know, we have a theory that perhaps she winked at us. You have a theory. I have a theory. I'll stand by it, and then I will not share the glory if I'm right, because you'll have been on the other side of the fence. Yeah, that's fair. Okay. I was excited to share the glory.

Oh, no. We're on opposite sides of the spectrum here. We're going to find out. Okay, great. But also we're just so excited to talk to her on our anniversary.

How does she do this? Happy anniversary. Let's talk to Wynna. Okay.

Here comes Wynna.

I'm nervous. Me too.

Hello?

Hi.

Can you hear us?

Hi. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes.

Oh my God. It's Wynna, right? Not Wina. We messed that up. It's Wynna.

We messed that up a lot. I'm so sorry.

No, not at all. You want to see? Oh, there's a puppy. She is... This is Polo. Polo.

Does Polo help you write your puzzles?

Polo is my news. Yeah, for sure.

Oh, my God. I'm star struck.

I am, too. I am, too. I feel like we've crossed, we've entered a different dimension. When it exists in another dimension where the New York Times exists, but now we're here in the same dimension-ish.

It's our eight-year anniversary, so we're really happy to have you.

And it's also your thousandth. You just had your thousandth episode, right? Congratulations.

We're bordering on too self- congratulatory because we had a thousand and now we have eight. And so we'll just let everyone know we're going to cap it at celebrating after today.

Well, it's not our fault. There's just so many good things happening. So many milestones.

So, Wynna, would I be right to assume you're living in New York? Yes, that's right. And how long have you lived there?

I actually grew up here.

Really? What part of town?

Always on the east side of Manhattan. So I grew up on 23rd and second, and just moved around.

And what did mom and dad do?

My parents are in the radio business. They're in mostly Chinese radio.

Chinese radio.

That's cool. The original podcast.

Yeah. Can they get us big in China? I feel like that would really move the needle. It would.

I think the stations are here, so no.

Okay.

Well, can you get us big in New York? Because that would also be good.

Yeah. Well, I think she's trying. I think she's trying. Okay, Now, of course, I want to find out how you've come to be a puzzle creator. And then, of course, we have a billion dollar question at the end. But yeah, what is the route one takes to where you're at? And also explain all your duties as a puzzle Yeah. Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's a niche job being a puzzle editor. I think I came into it through crosswords. I joined the Times in 2020 as a crossword editor, which is something that I still do. And so all of the puzzle editors at the Times, in addition to managing their own games and projects, also we all work on editing the big crossword together. And so it's a very small, sweet community of just puzzle enthusiasts, of crossword enthusiasts. And so everyone knows everyone and everyone is a fan of everyone's work. And so I think that when you start submitting your puzzles to different venues, then You get a sense of the puzzles that people make and the clues they write and things like that. And so I feel like that played a big part of it because being a puzzle editor, a lot of it is just like writing clues. And so, yeah, I feel like the puzzles you make are like your resume. So I feel like that really helped.

Yeah. And do you think that... Are you like a somewhere where you can look at a crossword puzzle in any random newspaper in America and have a pretty good sense of who wrote it? Can you identify the authors through their different patterns I would say that there's definitely some styles.

Yeah. I don't know if I would be like, exceptionally good at it, but I bet that there are people who would. And they're definitely constructors with their own flair. And I feel like their work is.

I feel like you have a real fingerprint because I was doing, I think maybe minis. You sometimes do minis, right?

Occasionally, yeah. Yeah.

I think I was doing a mini, and I was like, I wonder if Wynna did this. You thought it was- And then I went, and you had.

Can you remember Remember the give away?

We're on the same wavelength.

Yeah, but I think it's fun. It's cheeky.

Okay, cheeky is her brand. Wimsical.

Enchanted? Enchanted, yeah. Enchanted is the word.

But I did. I could have. Nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. Thank you.

But would you major in art? You majored in art?

Yeah. From where? From Overland College. Okay. My mom was always like... My mom, who I'm very close with and who's an amazing, lovely person was always just like, you're not going to be an artist. That's good of feel. And so I feel like it was... And she was right. But I feel like the art thing was always... Yeah, it's always been an interest of mine.

How did you start making your own cross? I assume you started making your own crossword puzzles for your own amusement. And then what do you submit them to the New York Times? How does one gain employment in this field?

Yeah, no, that's exactly it. You just realized. So for me, I started going to crossword tournaments, and that's where you meet other crossword freaks. And it's just really fun. And what becomes intimidating, it's like, even the idea of going to a crossword tournament, it's like, oh, I'm not that good a solver. I'm not smart enough. I'm not fast enough, whatever. And it's like, do you think it's fun to sit in a room for two days solving puzzles? If you do, then you belong. No one actually cares how good you are at solving puzzles. And so it's just a lot of like minded people who love puzzles getting together. And And that's where you meet the luminaries in the field. And you're like, oh, my God, I love their work. I love their work. And then you realize, just because everyone's so sweet, that it's like, oh, it's just normal people that make these puzzles. And I am normal. It occurs to you that maybe it could be you.

Right. And you've already said a couple of adjectives, but if you had to say there was some through line of the puzzlers, do you think there is a personality type?

It's interesting because it's not a full-time thing. I feel like it's cool that people come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but there are a lot of computer science people. There are a lot of musicians, and I feel like there is a certain maybe brain that also overlaps puzzle, wordplay, things like that, and maybe something computational as well.

It is your full-time job, though, right? Yes. Okay.

How are you calibrating, as people may or may not know, but the New York Times crossword puzzle gets increasingly hard throughout the week. I'm wondering how you know what level Thursday is. It's sitting down to do Tuesday versus Saturday. What's the criteria that makes it harder?

Yeah. No, that's a great question. I think that Monday through Thursday, and also Sunday, are the themed puzzles. And so the nature of the theme will actually tell you a lot about the day of the week that it'll be the most appropriate for. Thursday is the day that's the most known for tricks. So if you have a rebus, which is when more than one letter is in that box, or when you have something funny, the words are turning directions, or going backwards, or flipping, or something weird is happening, then that's going to almost always run on a Thursday. And if it's a more... Sorry, go ahead.

No, it's just good info. She was just. I'm amazed.

But there are other things that are a little bit more straightforward, and those might be good for an early week. And also there's stuff about the grid. This is It's a little interrupting. This is too weedsy or whatever. No, I love it.

Get esoteric.

There's like, on an early week puzzle, they're actually really hard to make because you have to make the grid super clean, which means when you're constructing the grid, you might want to include all these fun entries, but then you might get these weird little four-letter words that no one knows that are obscure. And those don't really fly on a Monday or Tuesday. You really want that vocabulary to be super familiar and not crossword insider-y.

When you're in your creative mode where you're coming up with, are you prone to think of a great clue for a great word? You're eating breakfast, and do you have a note section in your phone where you're going to like, Oh, this is a word I want to use, or do you more visualize the full grid and how it's going to work together?

Ideally, it changed for me. I think that you're identifying what a really smart person would do, which is like, yeah, sometimes if you think of a really amazing clue-answer combo, you write it down, then you can build your puzzle around it. I think that for a long time, when I started making puzzles, especially, I would just make a grid with the most fun words that I could, and then I would clue it.

Reverse engineer it. Right.

And then sometimes you don't actually want to do that because sometimes you can't write quite the clue that you thought you could. It might be a fun answer, but it's really the clue, answer, combo that makes it a good puzzle. So I think that you're thinking about it in a more holistic stick away, which I believe is the ideal way.

How are you handling your new Fame? Also because people have a lot of ire towards you because they can't... If the puzzle is too hard or you do the one with the pictures, and then people are mad, and then they're sending you bad vibes. I admit, I once sent a few vibes that are bad.

Yeah, we were on a connections chain, and sometimes, yeah, she would be like, That bitch winna.

I know, but I didn't mean it for real. But I was mad.

If she couldn't solve it, it was your fault, not hers.

Yeah, that's right.

I take responsibility, and I welcome the bad vibes. I think that's fair. I think it's great. I think it's really fun even when people are mad. It's like, I love being mad at stuff, so I get it. I think it's very... I'm in a very lucky position where the thing that making games is something that we love doing. It's so fun to do, and people love solving them, but it's super low stakes. There's zero stakes, but high passion. So it doesn't really matter, as opposed to other jobs, like the journalist or whatever. Like news, it's extremely high stakes and extremely high passion.

When you screw up, there's lawsuits. I doubt you've ever been sued over the crossword puzzle.

Yes.

Okay, now let's move to Connections. Did you Did you think of that concept? Who thought of the concept?

I did not think of Connections. Connections was pitched internally by some of my amazing colleagues. Basically, what happened was in 2021, the time to acquire Wurtl, and then there was this pivot towards new games. And so they brought on this amazing new games team, and then they created these pipelines for pitching and developing new games and a Green light process and all that. Connections was pitched and developed internally. And then when it got to the stage where they wanted to release a 60-day public beta trial, they needed an editor to write those 60 boards. And so at the time, I was the only editor that didn't have a game. And they were like, we're not Do you want to try writing this game? And I was like, Yeah, that sounds amazing. So I was assigned Connections after it had already been developed and stuff. So I got really, really lucky.

Okay. I think of sometimes how daunting your job is. I compare it to back when I was in this sketch Comedy Theater, and we had a new show every single Sunday, and there had to be 25 sketches in it. It just like it never ended. And you run out of inspiration. And anyone that was around me in that period, I would be at lunch and someone would put a napkin down weird on the table as a waiter, and I'd be like, Oh, there's a sketch. What if the person always puts things down? So are you crazy? To be around you, are you looking around you constantly trying to feed that inferno? I don't know what's your process for it?

Extremely relatable. We said about the napkin. I'm taking notes now. It's like napkin funny. I feel like, yeah, in the beginning, I feel like people are like, oh, is it like ideas come to you? And maybe in the beginning, a little bit, but not for a while. I feel like after it's been a couple of years and I feel like now- You couldn't rely on to be inspired from the clouds- Inspired.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, I wish. So it is a little bit more of a grind. So it's like, you sit down, you go, I'm going to just look at some words. I'm going to look at Google a list of flowers or a list of parts of a ship or, I don't know, how about some fish or whatever. And then you look at words. Or sometimes you have a seed of an idea. I was thinking about the other day, there's a lot of free associating. So I was thinking of a computer stuff and there was storage drives. So there's thumb drive, a zip drive, a flash drive. I was like, oh, those words are interesting. Thumb, zip, flash together. And so I work in a spreadsheet as a digital sketch pad, so I can click and drag words around. And so I was trying to make a category of that. But then I was like, oh, like thumb drive and zip and flash driver are the same thing. So maybe it's better. It's like a fake category. And you click them around and you try to see if there are other- The fake categories really pissed me off.

Well, that's the fun of the game.

God, you get me. Sometimes you really get me.

Yeah, congrats. The times I've been mad at you, to be honest, have been solely when we got obsessed with solving the- Yes. Purple first.

The colors.

Yes. We had to go purple, blue, green, yellow. That's how you get an A on it in our thread. Yeah. And so often I'd be like, well, definitely that's the hardest. And I would do it and it would be fucking green. I'm like, no way. This Purple is way easier than this green. Those are the times I've been upset. How are you delineating what's harder in your mind? I guess it's just arbitrarily.

It's whatever you think. Can I guess something? I want to guess. Yes, please. I feel like the purple is almost always a wordplay.

That's exactly what I would say.

Okay. Yes, that's exactly right.

Yes, it is. It's always like they're joined by a word that we're missing or there's- Or a letter is missing off of a word or something.

It's always a wordplay. Purple is my favorite. Purple is.

But then sometimes purple isn't always that, though, right? Purple is not always wordplay.

There's not always a wordplay category in the board. Sometimes if there's a... Do you want to hear my very loose rubric for assigning colors? Yeah. Okay. Yes. Monica, you're exactly right with the purple. If there's wordplay, which I guess I'm defining as the group of four words, the category is not based on the meaning of those four words. So maybe those are all words that go with another word. So the fill in the blank categories, blank tape, right? All the words that go with tape. Those words in it have anything to do with each other. That's where it play. Or the change of letter, the homophones or things like that. So that'll basically always be purple. Blue is for if there's like, trivia. So if it's more like, know it or you don't, if it's a reference to like, maybe like a movie.

Yeah. Actors, been in all four of these movies.

Exactly. That'll be blue. And then red and green is a little bit more, maybe a little bit more ambiguous. It's awesome. More of a toss up. More subjective. It's extremely subjective. And I feel like the way I do it is if I see a word that is pretty unambiguous in terms of its part of speech or it squarely… It identifies the category. If it's ambiguously a definition of something and it can't really mean other stuff, whatever that category is might be yellow, and the green one might be a group of synonyms or something that's a little harder to see. Maybe their part of speech is more ambiguous. There's the words have multiple meanings, stuff like that.

Yes.

But it's very vibes-based. It's understandably, I think it's subjective.

What is harder for you to create? Connections or the crosswords? Are you wearing golden handcuffs with this You got to sign this. It's like it's a hit. You've cracked it, you're known for it, and you're like, Wait, though, I'd rather be doing crossword over my phone.

No. Actually, Connections has this free association, like structural freedom. You can take liberties with thinking. It's fun to think about all the different things a category could be. So there's a flexibility in it that I think is really lovely, whereas crosswords are in some ways, at least grid making, it's quite formal. It's hard to make a good grid and to not have too many crappy words and things like that. So I appreciate the looseness of connections.

Do you get a bang out of thinking of how many people play the game? I would.

I think, yeah. I think it's very cool. I feel very fortunate that something I really love doing is something that people like playing.

Now, given the pace of how it comes out, how can you take a vacation? How are you getting time off? Can you do multiple a day and build a little war chest as we do?

Right now, yeah. We're about four weeks ahead. So the boards that I'll write this week will run in about a month. So there's a little bit of a buffer, But I think it's hard to get... If I'm going to be gone for a week, it's hard to get a week ahead. So I don't mind working whenever I'm on vacation.

I have an idea. I have an I have an idea for a purple based on napkin.

Okay. Great. You got a pitch is what you got.

Because you said napkin earlier. Yes. I've been thinking that a good purple would be napkin and then fair child, something son. The end of the word is family, kid, child, son. Probably not daughter. That seems hard, but you need a fourth.

If that shows up, Oh, you'll spray. Okay, I'm going to get to my million dollar question. Thank you. And I guess first I would ask, have you listened to Armchair Expert? Yes. Okay. Wow, that's so flattering. That's a great start. That's a great That's a great start. Okay. Now, I'm sure it got to you, but I was very suspicious, as were the armcherries that you were winking to us.

I want you to be honest, though. I really want you to be honest. Yes.

With armchair and expert being in the same thing the day after the Golden Globes. And I'm wondering if it was a wink or not.

I can confirm that this was definitely intentional. It was a wink.

Oh, my God. That is so... Wow.

I know. That's better than a Golden Globe. It is. I'd rather have that than us having won the Golden Globe.

Yes, which we had lost the day before. So it was a really big moment, but I couldn't receive it.

Your self-esteem was too low to even consider that that had happened.

I was like, Look, it's It's also a phrase. It doesn't mean us.

Yeah, yeah. But it did.

Next time, I'll put Dax and Monica. It'll be like, Star Trek characters and Santa Blank or something.

Or you could be using Ax from Dax Yeah. I don't know what we're doing.

Monica's tricky.

Yeah. It's going to be rough.

There you go. Friends, characters. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. Oh, Winna, this really made my whole year.

I'm so grateful because if had said no, then that would have immediately confirmed I was a narcissistic megalomaniac. Which is my word. And now I'm just observant. That was like the stakes were very high for your answer for me.

Oh, wow. That's so kind.

So I guess my curiosity is, A, you're still doing a ton of art, right? You're still a very active artist. And so are you at the pinnacle of puzzling? I'd imagine it would be New York Times. So are you at the place you set out to be? And then what do you desire next?

I feel really happy about being able to make this game and be able to work with these people and we were able to work at the times and stuff. It's really amazing. And in terms of, I just want to keep making stuff. I've always just loved just taking classes or just tinkering with different tools and different mediums. So I You're such a catch.

I was just about to say. Whoever's caught you is so lucky. You're such a fun catch.

I know. How fun. Also, you're doing games in bed. Oh, the dream.

I like that.

It's a mix of approval and discussion. You're like, You're also annoyed that she's so productive.

I know.

Impressed and annoyed.

I'm embarrassed for myself. Wow. This is so fun. I love this.

Me too. Me too.

Really happy you chatted with us.

Thank you so much.

Are you ever thinking of new games? Do you think of full new concepts? Do you think of?

I don't have a lot of experience doing that. Maybe some little puzzles here and there, but No. I mean, do you have new games? Do you want to talk about new games?

I'm a person who thinks of a lot of things. None of them would really bear out in practice. Yeah, you don't really want to hear about his riddles. Yeah, my riddles that Monica hates, but I stand by. Well, they're not riddles. They're very good riddles. Oh. They're Well, one of them is, you are in a eight by eight by eight foot cage, and there is an adult male lion asleep in the corner, and he's going to be asleep for 30 seconds. What do you do? And this is what Monica hates is, I have decided what the perfect thing to do is. And so if you don't answer that- It's not a riddle.

It's just like, what would you do in this scenario? And it has to be what Dax thinks you should do.

Which is the correct thing. I guess my question is, what would you do with that 30 seconds?

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I would Naked.

You only have your body. You only have your body, right? You don't have any tools or anything. In fact, you're nude, but don't worry, no one's looking.

You're wearing shoes.

No, you're nude. Because if you were wearing shoes, you could make a lace, news, and strangle it somehow. But no, you're naked. It's beast on beast.

I feel like the chances of me going against a lion would go extremely poorly for me. I don't think that I would have a chance. So maybe trying to be friends with the lion would be a better attack. To maybe go up to the lion and just be extremely non-threatening, which I don't think I need that much help. Maybe it'd be like, this would be a waste of time for the lion in the lion's mind to go after me.

You're introduced I've seen a new concept I hadn't considered, which is maybe you could do reverse psychology, which is put yourself in its mouth. Then it wakes up and it's like, what's in my mouth? I didn't pick this. Oh, I like that. That's interesting. I know what you're suggesting.

What were your answers? Were they different?

Well, here's the answer, the correct answer. Sure. Is you pluck its eyeballs out immediately. Pop them out, okay? Then, you're not going to like this part. You do have to put your fingers in your butt and you have to rub it on his nose. So he wakes up, and now he's so disoriented because his eyes are looking down at the ground, and his sense of smell, which is very keen, is all fucked up because you've put your butt on it. Then you climb up on the cage as high as you can. So as he's walking around, he can't find you. But he's not going to be leaping at you because he can't see and he can't smell. So that is the correct answer to how to survive the eight by eight by eight.

Isn't that a great riddle? Isn't that the best riddle you've ever heard?

What do you think of that game plan?

It sounds hard to execute.

Yeah, it does.

What part? The popping the eyes out? Yeah.

I think starting with that is like, that's a...

I think you'd be surprised at what you'd be capable of doing if you knew you were about to get eaten in 30 seconds. I think you get your thumbs in there and pop them right out. Pop, pop, pop.

He's already so close and I don't know.

What if it turns out it's really hard just to get their eyelids open? You're like, Oh, my God, I got to get this eyelid so huge.

You haven't even done research on it.

What If I like David Blaine, because I got so hell-bent on this was the right answer that I set up this performative stunt to test whether this was the right answer? Forget the Humane Society would be all over me for doing this. But I don't know. I think that's the best solution we have. Okay.

Or make friends. But, Monica, what was your... Did you have a thought?

Well, no, I thought it was a riddle. So I thought there was a tricky answer or like...

Like lions don't sleep. Right.

That's what a riddle is. And then It was that. So I hated that. Hated that.

Oh, well, Wena, this was a blast. We're so delighted that we got to talk to you on our anniversary. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

I sure hope I see you in New York and we can eat Emily burger.

Yeah.

That would be- I love that. Okay, wonderful.

Have a great rest of your day. Nice chatting. You too.

Yeah, thanks so much. It was great. Take care. See you later.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. That was just a dream come true. It was better than I thought, and I thought it was going to be great.

All right, well, I have to give it up. I have to give it up to you, Dax Sheppard.

Big wink from Wynna. A Wina wink.

I can't believe she winked at us.

Wink for the Wina. It doesn't work.

We'll get there. That is so I knew it. I can't even handle it.

I knew it. The armcherries knew it. Let's be honest. They knew it before I knew it.

They alerted me. They're allowed to know it, but I also maintain that I'm glad that I didn't assume it. I want to be a person that doesn't assume compliments.

I don't know if that's something you should be defending.

I think that's the real blue line in my life.

I was just going to say, it perfectly mirrors us as daters. I'm like, Yeah, I don't know. That girl might say no. Well, big deal. I'll go ask.

Yeah, and I'm like, Well, they hate me. Right. They obviously hate me.

And I'm like, I don't know. There's not a ton of better options here. Oh, God. Even if I'm not It's a dream option, I think I'm better than this turkey I've been talking to next to me.

Yeah, I can't do that. I can't do that. Well, that was just so fun. What an anniversary surprise.

It was a blessing.

It was not a curse, and it was And she didn't pass the riddle, which is a little bit of a shocker because she was so intelligent.

So intelligent. Although she did lead me to maybe another great. I do like the putting yourself in its mouth. That's at least more of a riddle.

No, none of it's a riddle.

Well, here's the thing. I think if I'm you guys and I have given up, you can't do anything, then at that point, I want to get eaten as fast as possible. I don't want to delay this- Agony. Agony of So at that point, I would just get in its mouth, get it over with. I'd put my neck. It would wake up with my neck between its jaws if I thought I had no chance. But there is something interesting about him going like, What the fuck? Even if you're My favorite thing is, let's say it's Domino's Pizza, but you're dead asleep and you wake up and there's a mouthful of Domino's Pizza. You're like, What the why is there pizza in my mouth? You immediately hate it.

I know, but then where do you go? You're still in there. You're still in the cage.

Yeah, but then he's like, Get away from me. And then you just go sit in the corner.

For a minute. And then it's like, Oh, actually, oh my God, it's Domino's Pizza.

Now that I'm awake, that tastes pretty good. Now that I'm looking at my chops.

I don't think that's good. A real answer to the riddle is like, well, it's actually an impossibility to outwit a lion, so the answer is to die. That's more of a riddle where you're thinking and you're thinking, and actually, there's no answer.

There's a famous, and I've said this before when we've had this debate, but there is a famous story of a very old man. I want to say he was in his 70s in Africa. He was a farmer, and he got attacked by a leopard. And he survived by putting his hand in its mouth and pulling its tongue. And then it bled and choked to death because their tongues have those needles on them that go backwards so that they can lick the skin off things. They have needley tongues. So you could get the ultimate grip of your life on its tongue. And I guess if you put your feet on its shoulder, maybe you could rip the lion's tongue out. That might be a better solution.

But if it has needley tongues, then aren't your hands just fully ripped up?

They're going to be cut when you're done, but you'll be alive. You'll heal from cut hands. You won't heal from a neck bite from a lion.

Watch me. I liked Wina's idea, like befriended. And then it's like you're in a storybook, and it's like, This lion is my friend, and he eats people, but not me because I'm his buddy. I think I'll pitch that. I'll say, Hey, how about we try-Let's call the truth. A storybook ending.

We could sit here and hurt each other.

Yeah, we could. Or we could be friends. We could go against Our Nature and become friends. It's a beautiful story.

Then you hop on its back and it trots around the cage.

I would like that.

It's going to get hungry, though.

We could just die together and not eat each other. That's the nice ending.

That's the Romeo and Juliet. It is. You would pick Romeo and Juliet. I would always. And I'd go gladiator.

Yeah. Well, that's the difference between Romeo and that.

Very male of me.

Speaking of, I saw an article that there's only 5,600 tigers left or maybe a specific type of tiger. And they're in India. They're all in India.

Do you not remember when we were in India, I looked up the list of all the known tigers in the world.

Yeah.

And yeah, India has like 80% of them. There's tigers in Russia. There's tigers in lots of parts of Asia, but they're mostly hanging in India.

There are estimated 5,500 to 5,600 tigers left in the wild, with numbers slowly increasing in some areas like India, Nepal, and Russia due to conservation efforts, but declining in parts of Southeast Asia. That's not a lot.

No, it's not. But I don't know that they were ever hugely populous. Really? I don't know what their original numbers. Okay, let's see. Their height. I don't want to include saber two tigers or anything.

Let's see what it says. Based on historical estimates, the highest number of tigers that existed at one time was approximately 100,000 wild tigers. That was in 1900, its peak.

What did it say?

A hundred? A hundred thousand.

Yeah, that's a terrible decline. That's a 94% drop. Yeah. 95%. But also there weren't a million of them.

Right, that's true. But still 5,000 That's not a lot.

You really get into a genetic diversity issue.

Yeah.

I did start- Although they brought the Buffalo back. I think the Buffalo is down to thousands, and now there's millions of Buffalo.

Well, yeah. It says the low point was 2010, record low of 3,200.

There we go. So they've doubled it.

Yeah, they're getting there.

The problem with tigers in having a ton of population is they're solitary and they have a territory. So lions are a pride. There's 15 of them in one group, and they have a territory. So it's like these solitary animals, they need so much space that you're never going to have tens of millions of them. Yeah.

There is a small part of me that understands wanting one of these baby tigers as my pet.

Oh, sure. They're gorgeous.

Look how cute that is.

Oh, yeah. They're beautiful.

I don't agree with it, but I viscerally understand- The desire. The desire to- What would you rather have, a baby tiger or a baby panda? Can I have both?

We love baby pandas.

Oh, my God. They're so rolling.

Yeah. I got to now tell this a lot whenever we talk about tigers, but I'll always think of it when I think of tigers is Mike Tyson on Howard Stern saying, How would I with so I was so crazy back then. I had these two tigers, and I slept in bed with them, and sometimes, how would I'd wake up in the middle of the night. They were fighting each other.

I know.

Talk about waking up with a piece of pizza in your mouth. You're waking up and you're in They're in bed with 900 pounds of tiger fighting each other. I mean, that is the apex of madness.

It's madness, and it's sad. Of course. It's really sad. It's like you want companionship so bad. You want to feel loved by something dangerous.

Yeah, I think I'm leaning more towards the latter. And, oh, baby. Oh, there's Mike with one of his tigers. Look how cute. He's in cute little white shorts. I feel that's upsetting. You're upset by this photo. We're looking at a photo of Mike Tyson in a tiny pair of white swim trunks, and he's got a white tiger on a leash in a little- I don't think so.

I feel bad. The tiger's on like, oh, my God.

He's wrestling in. See, I think it's more, personally, that Mike was severely bullied as a kid, and he got beat up nonstop in his rough neighborhood And I think he had to push through the fear of people picking on him. And this thing represents the scariest thing on Earth. And if he cannot be afraid of that, he'll not be afraid. And he finds himself in bed with you Ducker's because of that damage.

Howard. Oh, my God. That's so crazy. Fackies? Yeah. Well, no, one more thing for our anniversary. Okay. We have a special treat. We're not going to eat it on air because misophonia. But we have a special treat in the garage. It's already here? Yeah, they're right there.

Well, no, let's definitely take a bite in public. You want to take a bite in public? Yeah. You want to take a bite in public? Yes.

Okay, we're going to take a bite in public. We have a special lunch. Philly Cheese Steaks. Thank you.

Wagyu. Wagyu Philly Cheese Steaks. From?

It's from a place called Matoo. Matoo. It's in Beverly Hills, and it's amazing. They only serve them at certain times. It's a whole thing.

At the bar.

At the bar. They just opened one up in Pasadena.

No, it's incredible. I've had this one time in my life, and it was just And I'm going to eat bread right now.

You are.

I am.

Oh, my God.

Oh, baby.

Oh, baby. Guys, get yourself a Philly cheese steak tonight. Oh, my God.

Cheers. Cheers.

Oh. Happy anniversary.

All right. Love you. Let's do some facts. Let's do some facts.

Okay, just a few facts for Mr. Garcia. Yeah.

Had you looked up any of his facts, it would have brought you to the Kinsey Institute.

I know. That's why in full studies they did, I can't do a study that fast.

You're not well-funded enough.

I'm not.

You don't have access to college students.

Well, I- You got to have a- I do because go dogs. I think I could just- Are you interfacing along with the- I think I can put out an AP.

With the gang over at UGA?

I have some peeps over there still.

That's how temperamental social sciences are. If you study the kids at UGA, you're getting a specific outcome. You study the kids at Michigan State versus U of M versus Stanford. I mean, who are we kidding? I know. All these studies are really based on these very unique populations of who goes to what college.

Yeah. Even the The fact that it's even college kids is bad. Yes. And then within that- But I do trust this one more than most because it's in Indiana. Yeah. And they went around town.

Yeah, but the initial work of the kids. Sure.

Speaking of ding, ding, ding, go dogs, Georgia, football, Super Bowl's coming up, Ram's lost. First fact, Bible Belt. What constitutes, what is the Bible Belt It's not specifically.

Does it list the states?

Yes, that's what I wanted to know. Can I try? Sure, you can try.

Arkansas.

No. Hold on. Okay, this is AI. Maybe I should look at... Let me look at Wikipedia. The way this chart is doing it is by proportion of evangelical protestants per state in the American South.

Okay.

Yes, Arkansas is on here.

Arkansas, Oklahoma.

Oklahoma is on here.

Missouri. Yes. Kentucky.

Yeah, but this... Okay, this chart just has all the states in the South, and then it has percentages.

Although is Texas in that? Yeah.

It is. Why don't you try to do the top 10? Okay. Okay. Arkansas is one.

Arkansas, Oklahoma. No. Oh, wow. Missouri.

Is 10.

Kentucky.

Yes.

Tennessee.

No.

Really? Mississippi.

Yes.

South Carolina. No.

No, no, no. But close, but no. All right, hit me with the rest. Okay. I'll start from the top. Alabama.

Oh, fuck. God, I don't forget Alabama.

Arkansas. Delaware.

I reject that one. Continue.

This is science. Although it is weird. Ohio? No. Okay. No, this is not right.

This is Bunk.

This is not right. I don't like this at all. I'm going to go back to AI. The Bible Belt is a region in the Southeastern and South Central United States, characterized by a high concentration of Evangelical Protestant churchgoers and socially conservative political views. Coinied by journalist H. L. Mankin in 1925, the term generally covers states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and parts of Texas.

I should have included Georgia.

Yeah, it's in there.

But I associate Georgia with Black folks so much because of Atlanta.

I know. It's very interesting. And they're very Baptist. Even though I'm from the suburbs of Atlanta, I do not think of Georgia- As Atlanta. As Atlanta at all. Yeah. And it's not what I... I never went to Atlanta.

I only went to Atlanta when I went to Georgia.

On the drive from Calleys house to my house.

Which is how many miles?

Oh, great queue. Oh, not your strongest. Not my strength.

How long does it take you to drive there? Ten minutes. Okay, and you're probably averaging 35 miles an hour. Exactly. So let's say it's three miles.

Okay. I would maybe even less. Okay. You pass 26 churches.

It does boggle the mind when you're in the south. I see this in Tennessee where we're at, which is like, how many people are in these churches? Five, six? It doesn't seem like the population could support this many churches. And it does make me think that many of them are empty, but they're really not.

No, they're full. And there'd be days when my friends would invite me and I would go because it's like, you got to go. Yeah. And so I'm at my friend's church, which is the Methodist Church. But then across the street is the Presbyterian Church. And we see our friends there, too. They're just all- There's a Lutheran. There's a Catholic church, Santa Monica. Shout out Santa Monica.

Shout out for the Catholic.

Santa Monica Church. That's where Calleigh went.

The O'gees, the O'cees, the original Christians.

Yeah, I had friends. It was weird because it was like, I'm the only one not at any of these. Because even Calleigh and Christina, they weren't churchy, but they went to Santa Monica's or Saint Monica's.

Detroit was not like that, to be honest. I would go to my grandparents, and we drove a while to go to the Baptist Church because they were Southern Baptist.

Yeah, a lot of Baptist.

But in Highland, there was a Catholic Church by my neighborhood, and then there was maybe one or two others. And certainly, there was zero pressure to be at church. No kids in school were ever like, Why don't you go to church?

Oh, really?

Now, I had friends whose parents were quite religious. Those were the ones I felt judged by that we were living in sin in this broken marriage home. Those kids weren't allowed to sleep at your sleepovers at my house. So they were there, but it wasn't the cultural norm. It was more secular for sure.

No, it was like, What church do you go to?

Because you go.

You definitely are going. Which one do you go to? Okay, do chimps decide what sperm they're picking?

Not chimps, orangutans.

Okay. Well, I typed in chimps. Okay.

The claim in the episode, though, what has been theorized is that these- I thought he said chimps, but maybe not.

It does say chimpanzee females do not directly choose individual sperm, but they influence fertilization outcomes by preferring mates with different genetic backgrounds to avoid inbreeding. That just means regular. Mate selection. Okay, so I'm going to do orangutans.

Because they have a lot of non-consensual sex. Okay, this says- They gave it a scientific name, but it's rape.

Yeah, exactly. Female orangutans do not... Is it rape? If it's like...

If the male grabs and forces the female to stay still while it...

Now, yeah, in humans, it is rape. Yeah, In a species where that is how procreation happens, is it?

I just think the minimal definition of rape would be that the female is trying to get away from the male and doesn't want to have sex with the male, and the male forces it are to have sex. We must agree upon that definition. Yeah. You don't see that really in chimps much. You see it in orangutans, and they have the unique ability. They can class because their feet class. They can class every part of the female, right? They can get their feet around its ankles so that it can't run. Like a male human could still run or whatever. You understand. It's like they're uniquely set up.

The women, the female, don't want to. No. Do they want to with some?

Yeah, they have consensual sex. Oh, they do. Yeah. And then they have Then they try to not have sex, and then the male has sex with them anyways. And yet what the primatologist has observed is that their offspring is, more often than not, from the chosen mate, not the one that raped them. So how are they doing that?

Right. Okay. So this AI, I want to be clear.

A grain of AI.

Yes. Female orangutans do not consciously choose specific sperm cells, but they Exert significant control over paternity by selecting mates based on ovulatory timing and reducing the risk of infanticide. Near ovulation, females prefer mating with dominant flanged males while engaging in more forced or unflanged mating during less fertile periods. Interesting. Okay.

You got to have those flanges.

It was called flange-end?

Flanges.

I said flanged.

All of the orangutans stuff, and as you know, I say orangutans, all of it was done by Germans. So all these words.

Oh.

Yeah.

That makes sense. Flanges, which are distinct facial features.

They're the big plates that come off the sides of the big males. Yeah. Yeah. They're crazy looking. Do you ever see that doc where Julia Roberts did on orangutans and one of the males grabbed her? They all freaked out.

Yeah, that's so- That was very scary.

Very scary. Because they're like 350 pounds, and they can reach up and pull themselves. I mean, they're so strong. It's crazy. He looks grumpy, doesn't he?

Yeah.

No, What's this part? I was just going to say, I can't remember the name of the gobler. They have a big old lower flange, too. It's a big pancake.

Can you look up another one, Rob, and see if they all do it, if that was just this guy?

He's really well flanged. They grow as they get older.

Are they hair? Is that part have hair on it?

I do wonder because the silverbacks, the males don't all develop a silverback. They only develop the silverback if they have taken control of the troupe. And once they are the alpha male, then the silverback comes. And each troupe only has, oh, this guy's got a fucking 50 galon trash can hanging off of his bottom. Oh, he looks more fun. He's confused.

They do all have it.

I think the bigger the flange, the more they have that. Dominant they are.

Yeah.

It looks like a huge tongue coming out of their neck.

Or just like if a human lived to be 900, what their neck would look like. I don't want that gobbler.

I don't care. It's coming. I'm scared.

I know. I hate it. I just keep working out my neck and trapezius. Hopefully, I'll just keep making my neck wider. Hopefully, I'll upset that. Okay, I don't- Oh, my God. We go back to that. Did you see this one, Monica?

Holy fuck. That guy looks swylic.

He's like, drowning in his flanges. Oh, God. It looks like a big testicle set is what it looks like.

Yeah, I don't like the way that looks. One of the questions here is, how big is an orangutang pipi? Okay. Okay. Relatively small, around 3. 3 inches long. It says, and has a visible glands.

Well, a glance is the head of a penis.

Unlike the longer taper, glandsless penis of chimpanzees, with size varying between primate species and often linked to mating competition dynamics, with orangutans generally having smaller penises than chimps, but larger ones than gorillas. So how big are gorilla PPs? I'm going to look at it.

Well, gorillas have tiny PPs, and more importantly, tiny testicles because they're not competing with other males. Whereas chimps are competing with a ton of other males, so they have humongous testicles. Hey, look at this little guy. He's got a little tiny dinger. Look how tiny his balls are, too.

This is three centimeters.

He zoomed in on his big barrel belly. Yeah, look at that.

I don't actually watch it.

But you can see the glands or the metus is also the name of that. The head.

What the fuck is that? I don't like that. You think that's all?

What?

You said that all like it's cute.

Me? That was a cute little penis.

No, I hated that.

It looked like a mushroom.

I know. Yeah.

I didn't- That was on a gibbon, though. I think. What does it say? What's that animal?

It doesn't- I did not like that.

They are monogamous.

Oh, so they don't want to date me.

They can have those goopy-looking penises, and there's no competition.

Okay. Now, another fact I did look up was how big are the chimp testicles? They often weigh 150 to 170 grams, but I'm not good at that.

What's a human's way?

It says three times larger than human testicles.

Yeah, I'm so envious of their testicles. Really? Yeah, absolutely. It looks great. I'd love to have a 300-gram set of testicles. Why? I don't know why. I just would. Rob, would you like that?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Yeah, that sounds- It would make my bicycling hobby a little more challenging, I guess. Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, that's it.

Oh, wonderful. I I think a lot of primatologists are yelling at their radios right now, but I bet we got some of it right.

Feel free to write in. This is what the internet's saying. As I said, I didn't do any studies, so I don't... This is all I got, the world in front of me at my fingertips. I'll take it. Okay, doke. All right. Love you.

Love you.