THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.112 - DR DIANA FLEISCHMAN

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

Adam talks with the American evolutionary biologist Dr Diana Fleischman about gender roles, animal suffering, nature vs nurture, incest, cannibalism, plane crashes, and cryogenics.The conversation was recorded in London in May 2019.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for conversation editing. RELATED LINKSADAM BUXTON 2020 BOOK TOURADAM BUXTON PODCAST MERCHDR DIANA FLEISCHMAN ON TWITTEREVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION - DR DIANA FLEISCHMAN (YOUTUBE)THE YUCK FACTOR: THE POWERFUL ROLE DISGUST PLAYS IN HUMANITY - DR DIANA FLEISCHMAN (YOUTUBE)WHO WOULD KILL A LION? (GUARDIAN ARTICLE by ELLE HUNT)ARE LIONS ENDANGERED? (AFRICAN IMPACT WEBSITE)A TRIBUTE TO VICTORIA BRAITHWAITE AND SENTIENT FISHES (PSYCHOLOGY TODAY)COMPASSION BY THE POUND - THE ECONOMICS OF FARM ANIMAL WELFARE by F. BAILEY NORWOOD and JAYSON L. LUSK (SUMMARY - OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE)AN EVOLUTIONARY BEHAVIORIST PERSPECTIVE ON ORGASM (ARTICLE by DR DIANA FLEISCHMAN)DR DIANA FLEISCHMAN ON EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, MEN AND WOMEN & EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (YOUTUBE)THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS (DOCUMENTARY CLIP, YOUTUBE)THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE by DANIEL ELLSBERG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan. Rosie's doing a big poo.

That's got to feel good. Hey, how are you doing listeners adam buxton here sorry to start the podcast off in a scatological way like that but uh hey you know that's nature and that's what i'm out in right now. Not exactly that part of nature, but in the beautiful British countryside. Rosie! Come on, let's go! Yeah, man. on a very beautiful, cold, crisp autumn morning at the very end of November 2019. There was a frost overnight, but the sun is shining so brightly now that much of it is melted away, except in the shady patches. Oh, it's fresh, fresh, exciting.

It's so exciting and new. It's fresh, it's so fresh anyway. The sun is ahead of me, over to my right, shining down through the hedgerows as I walk up this farm track. And it's backlighting all the spider's webs that have been woven across bushes and plants and things. Oh, it looks good.

Anyway, look, let me tell you about podcast number 112, which features a rambling conversation with the American evolutionary biologist and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, Dr. Diana Santos Fleischmann. Fleischmann facts, Diana, currently aged 38, was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, hormones and behaviour. She is involved in the effective altruism and animal welfare movements and she identifies as a sentientist.

Sentientism is an ethical philosophy according to which all sentient beings, whether they're human, animal, artificially intelligent robot, or alien, deserve moral consideration. Diana also identifies as a feminist, though some of what she says about traditional gender roles and the extent to which men and women are the product of innate physiological differences is certainly controversial in some feminist circles, I would say. But as you'll probably pick up if you listen to the whole of my conversation with Diana, who you can tell is intelligent because she has a croaky voice, she does seem to have a slightly

because she has a croaky voice, she does seem to have a slightly provocateurish side to her. And if she thinks that certain currently fashionable progressive ideas about human behaviour are at odds with the science, then she's happy to say so. She often talks fast, hits you with a lot of information, and even fact-checking Santa wasn't able to do the research necessary to corroborate every claim that Diana makes in this podcast but I've put a few links in the description for further reading on some of what we spoke about. As well as gender roles we talked about the suffering of animals and the moral quandaries and hypocrisies inherent in the way we treat them. There was some nature versus nurture chat. You know, do we turn out to be the people we are because of stuff that's in our DNA? Or is it down to the way we grew up and the environment in which

we grew up? Always fun to chat about that. And we also touched on such fun topics as incest, cannibalism, plane crashes, and cryogenics. Warning, we talked about all those things. Also, this conversation contains spoilers for the final series of Game of Thrones. You see, I'm really doing my best to try and be more spoiler aware. But we began our conversation, which was recorded in London back in May this year, 2019, by picking up on a couple of things that I was talking about with the writer and data expert Mona Chalabi last year on podcast number 86. That conversation with Mona was really the way that I actually encountered Dr. Diana Fleischman's work in the first place. I read a paper of hers

about orgasms, which I've linked to in this podcast. Anyway, I think I explained a little bit about the way that I came across Diana's work and the connection to Mona in the conversation. So let's hear that now, shall we? Back at the end with a bit more waffle, but right now with Dr. Diana Fleischman. Here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the bat and have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat La, la, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la You're not in Glass's world yet, are you? Well, I actually had LASIK like 10 years ago. Did you? And I don't know, because I'm descended from Wolverine or something.

I went back to my old prescription almost within a year. Was it frightening? It wasn't frightening. You can smell your corneas, but I'm pretty chill about stuff. I've also donated eggs like five times. So I'm kind of, I kind of like surgeries just generally. Well, you've lent people eggs. Yeah.

So we'll lent them to you. You can get them back. Going around with a punnet of eggs now these are your eggs yeah so i only have as far as i know i only have one child out in the world but yeah oh really that was like that was one of the reasons that i messaged mona is because i know quite a lot about eggs and fertility because what happens is i've donated my young eggs and i'm 38 now so i donated last two years ago to women who are older whose eggs no longer implant so that's what happens is ago to women who are older whose eggs no longer implant

so that's what happens is the egg quality decreases and then your eggs no longer implant anymore so remind listeners about why you got in touch with me initially I had are we already on yeah we're on we're recording so I met you on Twitter Diana because someone told you about the conversation I had with Mona Chalabi. Yeah, yeah. So somebody said to me, oh, you know, you were mentioned on this Adam Buxton podcast, your orgasm paper was mentioned. And so then I listened to that whole podcast. And I sent a message to Mona. And I said, Mona, you're a beautiful, smart woman. I hope you don't wait too long if you do intend to have children to have them. Because if you're 40 40 and a man is 25, you're going to have about the same chances as otherwise.

But you guys also talked about, yeah, my orgasm paper a bit. And about, yeah, vulvas quite a lot, which was great. Vulva chat. People love vulva chat. And Mona especially, very vulva-centric. Or at least was for a period of her life. But I was talking with Mona about why the ideal for what heterosexual men find attractive in women is based on youth a lot of the time. We were talking in the context of pornography and the fact that there's a lot of shaving of hair that goes on.

Yeah. Well, that's not necessarily to do with the youth cues. Yeah. What is that then? I just think it makes, you know, if you're interested in very overt stimuli of what's going on, then the hair occludes that. But it also is a fashion. So I would definitely say that if you look around the world, various things are considered attractive cross-culturally, you know, smooth skin, youth, large eyes, the waist-hip ratio, which is a smaller waist and larger hips on women,

a wider shoulder-to-waist ratio on men. But then there are other things that are not considered universally cross-culturally attractive. So breast size, what's considered beautiful, varies a lot from place to place. But in terms of, yeah, younger women, there's this idea, which is called reproductive potential. And in our species, the idea is that men try to get together with women when they're younger, and then they have the longest period of time with which to reproduce with them. There's various ideas about this, though. For some people, they say people are actually only really meant to stay together until the child is three to five years old, and then you can move on and have children with other people. So in hunter-gatherers,

children are only weaned. They only stop breastfeeding at three years old. And in some cultures, children can actually forage a lot of calories for themselves at five years old, so they don't need as much investment. But it also depends on the context. You know, there's some tribes in which if there's not an investing father, there's a huge difference in how often the children get killed or, you know, what kind of variance they have in their health, for example. So I was talking to Mona about these kinds of things. And I was also saying, you know, that I'm aware that when you get into these areas, sometimes you'd start talking in terms of evolutionary imperatives, especially in the context of men and their sexuality and their

urges and impulses and needs. Then you get into trouble because sometimes it is a question of men just sort of going, that's when I did my caveman voice and said, well, you know, I have to, I'm a randy caveman. And this is what I have to do because this is, I'm a caveman guy. I can't help it. I have to go and sleep with all the people and I'm a randy man. So don't blame me. I'm caveman. And then obviously that's

not acceptable, you know, in modern society, or at least it shouldn't be. And I think most men appreciate that it's not a worthwhile defense for bad behavior within a relationship or in a lot of other ways. Well, just because you say, so people say that alcoholism is a disease, right? And it's genetic, for example. And nobody would say, it's not my fault that I drink because I have alcoholism. So people talk about evolutionary psychology as if it's condoning pretty wild, where if you take a sugar pill, it can change your behavior. People believe in magic, you know, for example, so we're incredibly malleable. So it's difficult for people to get on board if I say men actually do have a higher appetite for sexual variety than we do. I knew it. Then you say like, oh, you know, well, that's just an excuse or that is actually going to make that phenomenon happen.

This is why people get very touchy about all kinds of different things is because they think if you say this is true, then it's going to manifest it because so much is culturally variable. That's right. But in my view, you actually have to know what the baseline is. You have to know what human nature is like if you are going to change it. And if you just say, you know, sex differences don't exist or any number of other kind of difficult ideas, then that actually doesn't help because you have to accept that these things exist before you can actually do anything about them. Yeah, but it's so hard to unpick them from cultural and societal influence though, isn't it? I mean mean not to say impossible yeah it's especially difficult because you know for example somebody could do a bunch of research on different sex

differences and then someone who's ideologically opposed to the idea that there are sex differences does their own science and defines things in their own way so i'll just talk about one area that i know pretty well if you look at any particular sex difference so there's this thing in personality called the big five which is openness conscient, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So this is the various different things that, you know, that define people's personalities very well. And there are sex differences in those personality variables. But if you look at them specifically, like individually, there's not huge differences. But if you look at them more granularly, there is. So for example, in terms of extroversion,

extroversion is two things. It's like warmth and ease at which you deal with other people. But it's also some degree of like social risk taking. Showy offy loudness. Showing offy, yeah. Men are more showy offy loud. Women are more warm and cuddly, right? If you take those two things apart. But there's a really great paper called The Distance Between Mars and Venus. And it says, you know, if you look at somebody's face, 95% of the time or something, you can tell if that's a male or a female's face, right? But if you look at the individual components, if I just looked at the

eye shape, the eyebrow shape, the nose shape, the mouth shape, there's only very small differences between men and women on each of those characteristics, but it's the whole face that you can tell is male or female. And in the same way, our personality characteristics, each individual one, there might not be a huge sex difference in, but there is a masculine personality and feminine personality, and there's a big difference between them. You can tell by just looking at like like 20 different personality characteristics you would be able to guess if somebody was male or female about 90 95 percent of the time yeah but the thing is that viewed within the framework of a patriarchy for example that stretches back as far as anyone can remember it's so hard to negate that and just say oh well these are intrinsic differences it's so hard to negate that and just say oh well these are intrinsic differences it's so

hard to imagine how things would be different if there wasn't that patriarchal structure and that's whether you're a feminist or not it's hard to ignore it depends on what you it depends on what domains you're talking about so if you're talking about just about power or about making decisions like governmental decisions yes men do control these kinds of high status. They make a lot of government decisions. But women live six or seven years longer than men do. Women are much less likely to have almost all different mental illnesses except for depression.

So in terms of schizophrenia, autism, pretty much everything you can think of. They're less likely to commit suicide. So there's all these different ways in which if you were to define success or prominence differently, then you would say women are on top. Have you read a book called The Power? No. Is it by Snap? No, it's by, I think, Naomi Alderman. It's very much kind of in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, which I loved that book when I was a teenager. And it's about basically women get this power that causes them to be physically dominant over everyone.

Oh, right. Yes, I've read about it. Yeah. And what she postulates is that if women had physical dominance, then they would become like men. dominance then they would become like men and i think it's a cool book because it doesn't say if women had physical power over men then kumbaya everything would be much better if women actually had the power she actually talks about this kind of whatever you might call the female shadow or the dark side of femininity because you could argue that the things you were just describing before the advantages of being a woman are just sort of incidental perks of a an unfair situation that is overall weighted against women i would rather live seven years longer than have any power otherwise come on sister i just don't understand and also okay

well you could also say that about men, right? Testosterone leads to status seeking, it leads to, you know, I talk about the study a lot where there was a study done of men and women who were very highly quantitatively gifted. So you can kind of hold that constant, because it's the quantitative areas like math and science and engineering that those people tend to make the most money, right? So in those areas, what they found was they were looking at people who were very quantitatively gifted, who made like whatever 800 on the SAT in those areas, men and women, and they followed them throughout their lives and they found out what they did. And they asked the women and the men, how many hours a week would you work at your ideal

job? And 30% of men said they would work more than 40 hours a week at their ideal job. And 9% of women said that they would work more than 40 hours a week at their ideal job. And 9% of women said that they would work more than 40 hours a week at their ideal job. So people have said like, oh, this is also socialization. Women know that they have so much more work to do at home. But if you ask men and women, would you rather spend time with your children or would you rather spend time at work? On average, women say that they would prefer to spend time with their families than at work. And of course, everybody knows exceptions to this rule.

But if you're just talking about kind of like averages, and in countries like in Scandinavia and places where they've given women more opportunities to do what they want, women choose to take maternity leave in a way that's different than men. And that is what one might expect, given that for a woman, for example, throughout evolutionary history, if a baby comes out of you, it's yours. If you're a man, you don't know if that baby is yours. so that's just one of many many reasons why you would expect men to be less invested in their kids there are some groups of people like hunter-gatherer groups where men spend a lot of time with their children so there is some cultural malleability about that but it's unclear to me if the most important thing is equality rather than people freely choosing whatever they want to choose.

But at the very least, it's got to be a bit of nature, a bit of nurture, doesn't it? Oh, obviously, yeah. The reasons that men perhaps overall are prepared to work longer hours is almost certainly linked in some ways to the expectations placed on men and their own perception of themselves and what they ought to do in the world and a structure that is bigger than just their some innate propensity for working harder in those situations. Yeah men seek status and so from from culture to culture the trappings of status are different so like what means high status what kind of work involves high status and our culture you know making a lot of money and having certain kinds of following and things like that. Those are all things that are high status, but men seek status.

However, status is defined from culture to culture. at home dad is the highest status thing that you can do. You know, this kind of new feminist thing that people talk about is, oh, you know, why should men be rewarded for doing stuff that women are doing just naturally without any accolades. And it's because they're doing much more than I think is in their nature. So you have to actually, you know, from a behaviorist perspective, you have to shape the behavior that you want. Yeah, you're doing the dishes and the dog's not doing the dishes. If you want the dog to do the dishes, you're going to have to give them treats for doing the tiniest fraction of a thing that's close to what you want. And in the same way with men, I think with status, you have to consider how are you going to bestow status for the things that you want,

or how you want to change the different kind of sex roles. But I mean, I know lesbian couples and gay couples. I know a lesbian couple and they said, actually of sex roles. But I mean, I know lesbian couples and gay couples. I know a lesbian couple and they said, actually, sex roles are a real time saver. Like it took us ages to hash out who was going to do what, especially when we had children. And you guys kind of just know what's going to happen. You know, there's a lot less negotiating.

Well, I was saying to Mona that I don't think that's true. I think everyone I know finds it very difficult to establish who's going to do stuff and have fun and they don't want to necessarily be the one that always has to stay home so you take it in turns and you negotiate yeah and it's an ongoing often very fraught negotiation about who does what and sometimes you do feel like you know it it should be obvious that I have certain attributes that make my ability to go out and have fun much more important than yours. So I'm... This is why I think it's important for people to, you know, I get accused, I have like these artists and poet friends or whatever, and they talk about how I like over quantify things. But if you're really honest about what

you like, you say like, what is your preference on a scale of one to 10 for eating falafel tonight or going out to a nightclub or looking after the kids or whatever? How much on a scale of negative five to positive five do you like this? This is how I negotiate things with people all the time. And if you're just trying to maximize happiness, it makes it much, much easier. But obviously, people lie about what they really want. And I do think that, you know, what you're talking about, which is this negotiation that you're making, these are among people that you know, if you were with some woman who is like, very traditional, then these conversations would obviously be different. And I think what happens is the kind of upper middle class careerist people, which I'm one of them, I'm not knocking that at all, they underestimate the

extent to which other people are actually just slotting very neatly into the sex roles that are traditional. Thank you. Bye. um i've never been particularly agile when it comes to arguing difficult subjects, and I have very kind of emotional positions on things. Everybody does. And I feel quite easily confused. I've changed my mind about so many things in the last few years because I started hanging around with effective altruists and people who have quite, they basically take

these principles and they take them to their kind of logical end so there was so many yeah utilitarians a lot of them utilitarians so i have changed my mind about a lot of things i used to i used to have very strong ideas about various things and um now i have way more repugnant ideas than i used to actually because these are things that are very, very emotive. For example, I noticed that if I'm watching a Pride of Lions tearing apart a gazella, you know, piece by piece, it's kind of exciting and enjoyable, like I'm having a good time. torturing a goat or a dog or a cow or something, then I would feel very angry and profoundly upset, right? But to the animal, if a gazelle is being torn apart by a human being or torn apart by lions, it doesn't matter to the gazelle. It's the same in terms of actually what's happening to the animal. But we perceive these things totally differently because of the moral agency of lions versus kind of people. And so now I know a lot of people who talk about,

do animals suffer in the wild? Is nature really entirely good? Because animals out in the wild, I mean, large animals are sometimes doing okay, but the vast majority of animals are like insects, mice, you know, things that are just picked off, riddled with disease, cannibalized, whatever. Nature is really horrible.

Well, that's an argument that some meat eaters make, isn't it? That they say, if you provide an alternative to cruel factory farming conditions and actually rear animals kindly and then provide a, quotes, quick, humane death for them, then that's a better outcome for them than they would experience alternatively either in the factory farming system or out in the wild yeah uh well certainly out in the wild i have actually been vegan or vegan-ish for a really long time and i talk a lot about animals and it used to make me really angry like i used to be really anti-hunters like pretty much everybody else is and now i realize that a hunter is giving an animal almost certainly a much better death than they would have starving

to death or being killed by a tapeworm or being torn apart by some other animal or being hit by a car or whatever the case may be yes but that but you're not talking about sort of trophy hunters though well even trophy hunters are probably here we go here we go. No, I mean – Let's not get into this. So if an animal – no, people – I think it's incredibly hypocritical how agitated people get about trophy hunters when – so if you are eating fried chicken, so a chicken – like if you eat a meal of fried chicken, that is at least half a chicken death, if not a whole chicken death. If you eat a burger, that's like one two hundredth of a cow, whatever. Why do people eat meat and why do they eat the meat that they do? Well, in part for nourishment, you can make that case. Although pretty much everyone agrees that we all need to be eating less meat than we are eating. Like, you don't need to nutritionally eat as much meat as you are. I mean, paleo people don't don't at me. What is a paleo person? Oh, paleo person. There

are people who try to eat in the same way that people ate ancestrally. So they often eat lots and lots of meat. And they don't eat things like bread, pulses, anything to do with grains. They don't eat any of that stuff. Right. They just eat dinosaurs. They eat organ meat and things like that. Yeah.

So where was I? Meat. So in some sense, if you're eating fried chicken, aren't you eating fried chicken for fun? Isn't it like entertainment to you to eat fried chicken yeah aren't you eating fried chicken for fun isn't it like entertainment to you to eat fried chicken and in terms of a chicken so like let's say you kill a lion because you're you're trophy hunting or you kill a chicken a lion doesn't know and also lions are not endangered people keep getting agitated about that lions are not endangered so let's just take an animal that's not endangered you know to, to make the argument much, much simpler.

If you kill a lion versus you kill a chicken or 200 chickens, whatever you think is the similar degree of sentience, then the lion has no idea if it's the last member of its species or the five millionth member of its species. The chicken only understands its own life. five millionth member of its species. The chicken only understands its own life. And if you're killing them to mount their head on your wall, or if you're killing them to eat them, it actually doesn't matter to the subjective experience of suffering and death of the animal itself. So people do get agitated about trophy hunting. But in essence, they're also being entertained by eating. It just seems more natural to us. In the same way with like, people get really upset about animals used in animal experimentation. And actually, you might argue that animal experimentation is the only, this is one philosopher calls it, the only non-frivolous use of animals that we engage in, because it's the only one that actually

could save, potentially, if you do the right kinds of experiments, hundreds or thousands of lives, or could actually make groundbreaking discoveries that would improve the right kinds of experiments hundreds or thousands of lives or could actually make groundbreaking discoveries that would improve the flourishing of the planet or the human species or whatever but people are really against it because it's gross right what they do to animals and the animals don't have a say yeah well do the animals have a say when you eat them no indeed that's right um how is it possible to measure the suffering of a living creature that can't speak? That's a very good question. And obviously with the larger creatures, with dogs and certain mammals, larger mammals, with Rosie, it feels much easier.

But then, you know, there are people now talking about the potential suffering of insects and things like that. Yeah. And fish and creatures like that that don't have sort of expressive faces. That's right. How are their levels of suffering measured? So one way of looking at whether or not an animal can suffer is whether or not they have the kind of hardware that you need. So one idea is like the sensory cortex. There's a woman called Victoria Braithwaite who does research and who did a book called Do Fish Feel Pain? And she found that the sensory cortex of fish is not where it is

in other vertebrates. So people thought for a long time that fish actually didn't have the neural ability to experience pain. So that's one way that you can look at it. With insects, it's a bit more complicated. There's some really great blogs by this guy named Brian Tomasik on reducing suffering, which are about, you know, can insects experience pain? And they make a neurotransmitter hormone-like thing that could actually be a way for them to signal pain, for example. With Victoria Braithwaite looking at fish, she also said that the definition of suffering, as she defines it, is the ability to subjectively experience pain. So she did an experiment with trout, where she injected their lips with capsicum, which is like hot chili pepper

or with saline. And trout are usually very afraid of a novel stimuli. So they have this like block of colorful Legos they put in their tank. And the ones that had been injected with the painful injection were less avoidant of the big colorful tower, which means that they were distracted by their pain, basically. Whereas the ones who were injected with saline were normally avoidant. They are avoidant generally of these kinds of stimuli. So that's the kind of case that she made for it. I mean, one could say that morally you should kind of err on the side of being careful. Yeah, traditionally it's been about, well, when I say traditionally, I suppose 100, 200 years ago, it was about what creatures have souls. Yeah. And the idea was that mankind was unusual in having a soul. Yeah. And so that was something that other animals didn't obviously that was just a bit of convenient thinking yeah by human beings about human beings it's really horrible to think that insects can suffer that is like one of the most you know

the kind of thing that could keep me up at night it's like just there's so many billions of them it's like so much of the biomass right it's really scary yeah and then people some people would say well you know those animals they're out there being cruel to each other all the time yeah they are absolutely so we're just animals and and obviously it's different i mean we don't base our moral decisions generally on what's acceptable in the animal kingdom yeah we are able as a species to rise above and do things differently and so so we ought to. But I suppose from a practical point of view, sometimes you think, well, how far do we take that? You know,

there are all sorts of things that we do that are examples of cognitive dissonance in our lives, and ways that we are in denial to manage the strangeness and the unfairness and the cruelty of being alive in some situations, you know. So how far do you take it with animals and with fish and insects? It's difficult. Yeah, so in terms of non-human animals, what I generally tell people is that you should try to kind of reduce your suffering footprint. So everybody eats, everybody has to eat.

And even if you eat vegetables or fruits you are killing animals in that process and there are people who harvest them and there's unfair kind of practices and they're suffering in the labor market why are you killing animals if you just eat vegetables because in the process of sowing the fields and using pesticide and then harvesting the crops there are animals killed like field mice and like insects right so even vegetables and other kinds of crops involve animal death right and animal suffering so there's no way not if it's organically grown not if you're being nice if you've been in a nice farm uh so that's one issue but another one is to consider the size of the animal that you're

killing and the kind of life that experiences so So there's a book called Compassion by the Pound, where they look at like the lives of different animals and chickens that you eat for food and fish that are farmed and egg laying hens have incredibly shitty lives. Their lives are probably not worth living. Their lives are terrible, especially egg laying hens, right? Are we talking factory farmed hens even if you have whatever quote-unquote free-range hens the eggs come out of a chicken every day like a chicken lays about an egg a day for example and then they uh they get killed at the end of that period of time i know people who have uh chickens that they rescued what happens is the it's the actual genetics of the hen. So their bones become brittle because the calcium that comes into the eggs is being leached from their bones. So after a year and a half or something like that, they're kind of falling apart. And they're also unaccustomed, like their species in its ancestral form did not lay an egg every day.

So it's probably not entirely pleasant for them to lay an egg every day. How have they been encouraged to lay eggs every day i don't know anything about chickens well they ask them very nicely would you mind no um it's they've been selectively bred to lay an egg every day but they've been selectively bred to lay an egg every day at the expense of their own bodies so nobody cares like if the chicken is healthy long term so like you care that they get lay an egg every day a wild chicken yeah living in a little hut at the end of our garden, for example. This hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will do one day. And it's living a great, great life and we don't hassle it for eggs.

Hey, look, if you want to give us an egg, that's fine. If you're cool with us scrambling up that egg and having it on some yummy toast, great. But if not, that's totally cool. Would they be, they wouldn't be laying eggs totally cool would they be they wouldn't be laying eggs every day no they wouldn't be and eventually that you know when they when somebody says i'm no spring chicken it means that like you're not you're no longer laying an egg every day right chickens lay eggs every day for the first year in the united states they do something which i won't go into uh which convinces them it's spring and summer again so they like lower the temperature

and then they increase the temperature and then they're forced into another laying cycle. Whereas here in the UK, they don't do that. They kill them after their first laying cycle. So in the States, the egg laying hens lay eggs for longer because of the ways that they manipulate their environment. So anyway, long story short, eggs, it's actually very ironic to me that vegetarians are considered more moral than people who would eat, for example, beef every day. Because if you eat three eggs a day, you're causing more suffering than if you eat beef. Although I'm not going to get into the kind of environmental impacts of that. So a beef cow is generally raised – it's pretty hard to treat them badly.

They just go out, they eat for years, and then eventually they're slaughtered. They're sent to like a finishing – Finishing school that's right they they learn how to belch and fart less so that they won't damage the environment no they they're fed they're fed usually grain to fatten them up before um before slaughter and you know one could argue this people who cattle cattlemen and people have argued this that like a beef cow has one bad day the day that they're slaughtered but otherwise their lives are pretty good they're kind of socializing they're either on grass or eating grain they're kind of doing their thing good that's yeah i mean i mean they're they're they're not worried about predators they're they're having a better life

than like a lot of wild animals are and also if you ate beef every day it would take like i don't know two years for you to cause one cow death. Whereas every time you eat a chicken meal, you're causing at least half a chicken death or a whole chicken death. So what I've argued with people is like, if you think, for example, that you need to eat meat to live, like it's important for you nutritionally, I would argue that you should stop eating eggs and fish and chicken and instead eat animals like either wild, like venison, like hunted animals, which also have lives that are perfectly fine until the day they die, or beef, animals that are bigger, whose lives have been less bad overall. If a person was confronted with a nightmare Sophie's Choice scenario like this one, you have to kill one of these two creatures. Yeah.

A cow with lovely cowy soft eyes and a smile. Cows are really cute. Or a little turdy fish that's probably only going to live about two weeks anyway. Which one are you going to kill oh obviously the the fish yeah like so cows also have bigger brains this is it's unclear to me like who suffers more like if it was between one cow and one fish but you know how many fish does it take to make the same amount of meals as a full cow would make probably hundreds of them so if it's between one cow and like 300 fish that's that's like a pretty

hard choice to make well i pray that you never have to make that choice I suppose the reason that people get upset sometimes about these kinds of conversations is that it seems unhelpful to the ultimate goal of a fairer, more equal society. You know, you're talking about, well, it's more helpful to have a base of knowledge of scientific appreciation for what's actually true, what human nature is like and what evolutionary impulses lead to or represent. But, you know, there are certain areas of scientific exploration and inquiry that actually it's hard to see how they're going to help anyone. And ultimately, you sort of want to gravitate. I'm thinking specifically of race differences.

Ultimately, most people probably would agree that you want to gravitate towards a society where those are secondary considerations, would agree that you want to gravitate towards a society where those are secondary considerations where they're not even you know primarily you're interacting with another person as another human being and you're treating them with the respect that they deserve and any talk about like scientific differences in that area is just going to play into pretty grim agendas. Do you know what I mean? If people are bigots themselves, then they will be delighted when they are presented with some bit of scientific evidence

which will support their cause, and it'll deepen divisions. So I suppose it's a kind of willful, idealistic ignorance that takes place. But I don't think that it's... And for some people, I know on't think that it's and for some people i know on the right it's like what do you do you're burying your heads in the sands a lot of the time when you're having these conversations you don't want to know the facts and it's like well

yeah there's some facts that are worth knowing and then there's some facts that just are not going to be helpful to anyone in the long run okay there's so much so much, so much there to unpack, as Sam Harris always says, unpack things. All right, so I'll say a few things. One thing is that what you're saying is like what we're trying to get to is a fairer society, right? I think that's an interesting thing. So if you're talking about kind of equality, I don't actually know why that is a fundamental good. To me, it's a more fundamental good that people are doing what they want to do. And oftentimes what people want to do is an extension of their, obviously it's an

extension of culture, but it's also extension of their biology. So what I see going on is that people want to make women want to work more. And what if there's just no way of culturally engineering women beyond a certain point so it just seems like they're trying to culturally engineer women by saying working is really good and getting status and prestige as a woman is really laudable so women who get status are afforded even more kind of accolades than men are because it's it's rarer right so you could say that that's the kind of outcome you want is more equality between men and women well equality of opportunity as well that's not to say that all women should aspire to some ideal of like all women should be out doing

jobs and all women should be oil rig workers or traditionally male pursuits you know what i mean that's not the thing it's not like women should conform to some progressive ideal necessarily, but they should have the opportunity to pursue any kind of life that they would like in a way that has been traditionally denied to women. And they can say, okay, you ticked all these boxes at the front end when you looked at resumes or when you interviewed people or whatever it is that you did, right? You did that. And so we know that even if the outcome is that you only have hired East Asian women or whatever, right, then we still know that what you did at the front end means that you had an unbiased sample. But what people look at is the outcome. For example, there was this big hullabaloo about manels, which is panels that are all men. And this woman anthropologist in London called Rebecca Sear made a spreadsheet of women who say, I'm happy to be contacted to be on panels about various different topics. Right.

And you still see, quote unquote, manels, whereas like all men talking about a given issue. Well, there's a variety of reasons for that. Men, as I said, are like not as interested in staying at home, and they're more interested in going out, pursuing status, being in front of people. But also men are on average more disagreeable than women are. And so if there's some kind of public debate that's going to happen, and I know this because I get contacted a lot for debates because I am more disagreeable than the average woman, right? I think that that's why you see that kind of outcome. And so if you go, I've seen people skewered online, like look at this panel full of men, and they've never asked the organizer, how many women did you ask? And how

many women said no. And I've even heard, you know, the feminist position on this, like, you should ask women until you have the right percentage of women, you should ask and ask and ask. And what's going to happen if you do that, you're going to go lower and lower and lower in terms of people who are experts on the topic, or who know anything about it. And you're going to dig deeper through that. Whereas what I want is if I want to see a panel of people talking about something, I want to see the people who most want to be there when have the most expertise, not the people who best represent the male and female sides of our species. can see themselves represented in social groups where traditionally they haven't been, then that's going to encourage more people to become expert in those fields and to one day fill those panels with people who are, you know, just as expert as any of those top men would be.

I'm not sure how much role models matter. I really am not. Who knows? But there's not really great evidence that the role model thing matters. That's the thing though, isn't it? Who knows? And because it is so hard to unpick it, I think a lot of people would feel, well, aim for an ideal and work towards that. You're not really thinking, I mean, I don't think people are really considering the kind of opportunity costs, right?

So if you choose a panel of people, because you want to pick a panel of people who were you representing men and women, right? And then you ask 10 women to be on the panel. And some of them say no, they have other things to do the people who are the most, you have the highest expertise on that particular issue, then nobody wants to talk about this trade off, which is the trade off is that you're getting people who know less about the topic. There was some terrible study that was done that said that women who watch the X-Files were more likely to get involved in science and technology. And they basically were saying that Scully from the X-Files was making these young women interested in science. And obviously, they weren't thinking of like, the kind of nerdy girls who like sci-fi are already more interested in science.

They didn't actually think about the in science. Right, right. They didn't actually think about the basic difference. Yeah, so people really very rarely think about the opportunity costs of these kinds of things if there is no evidence for them. So you're like, okay, why not have people of color be on panels and doing talks and being on television as much as possible about science? Well, A, because they're not necessarily, you know, if they're being picked for one criterion versus another,

they're not necessarily going to be as expert on that topic, but also because they have their own things to be getting on with, and if it makes no difference. But then there are so many people, though, that do feel these things are important and that do feel traditionally marginalized and that they haven't had access to these fields for all sorts of reasons yeah manifestly there has been racism and discrimination of all kinds yeah absolutely so i mean do you do you regularly get into hot water when you're talking about these things or um no surprisingly i heard you talking about the fact that it's not

an environment currently that encourages nuance when you're talking about these sort of things. Yeah. Which is why you get people like Jordan Peterson becoming hugely successful. I mean, he has very traditionalist views. And, you know, on the one hand, like, I'm tired of talking about him. Obviously, now we're talking about him in kind of a meta way, which is fine. But I have been asked to talk about him and I don't know his stuff well enough to talk about him very much. But I am really grateful that he exists and that he's out there because I can start a YouTube, I can start a podcast.

There's a much greater hunger for just listening to people blather on, intellectuals, experts, whatever, about whatever their topic is, or experts in conversation with each other than there ever used to be because of the whole podcast YouTube enterprise. And that's awesome, right? I mean, it might be an indication that people are reading fewer books, and instead, they're listening to more kind of conversations, but I think it's all great. And so from the perspective of trying to encourage intellectual debate,'s doing really great stuff i think i also think that where there's a sort of crisis of masculinity that i don't quite understand and he is definitely like a paternal figure for many people yeah but this is the thing you know it's like these debates are taking place in the context of a rise in kind of far-right politics across the world and evidently groups of men who feel disenfranchised

and who are sort of retreating more and more into their little man caves and feeling that they are represented by people like Jordan Peterson. And that's not to say that he himself espouses far-right views. People talk about him like as a gateway, whatever, a gateway to the far-right. Yeah, exactly. But sometimes it is possible to feel like they're being nurtured by him and his attitude. The problem is that I'm not used to talking about these things, really. I'm not really equipped to argue my case very much.

I'm a sort of... No, you were very good. Of course, I'm saying that because you were very good yeah you i mean of course i'm saying that because you were very like reasonable with me you weren't like no this is totally wrong you're you're you're full of shit with identity politics and with the climate of identity politics it's so difficult because end of the day i'm a privileged cishet white male yeah i've got a very nice life thank you very much i don't experience a fraction of the things that most people have to struggle against and deal with and never have done so fuck me

and it's very hard to argue against that you know and i do sympathize with that well i mean i think the greatest privilege that people don't talk about is you know genetic privilege so recently i know a guy who had done some sperm donation. He's like a very kind of high powered intellectual guy. And the son that he sired through sperm donation got in touch with him. You know, they discovered each other through genetic testing. And this guy had never been told that his father was not his real father. And all his cousins were like, never did well in school. And he had basically the exact same upbringing as the rest of his family.

But he did incredibly well. He went to university, had full scholarship, et cetera, et cetera. And then he didn't know why until he actually met his like sperm donor. And he's like, okay, now I know. Like I basically – he had actually become kind of a hard nurturist because he thought, well, because it's because my parents are so wonderful that I've been able to rise above my genetic basis so, so well. It's because my parents have tried their very best to nurture my intellect. you know become basically a pretty hard genetic determinist because he sees how similar he is to his dna dad even though they had only met when he was in his 20s did you see the film three identical strangers no i haven't seen that yet but yeah it sounds amazing it is amazing it is

amazing i mean i think broadly speaking most of those kind of nature nurture conversations fail to conclude one way or another. Yeah. Because how could you with all the variables? Well, you can't conclude one way or another, but we do know that, for example. Well, it's a bit of both, isn't it? I mean, that's really what it comes down to. A bit of both.

Isn't it? Like you can't discount either one. No, you can't discount either one. No, you can't discount either one. Diana is putting her hands over her face in what appears to be a gesture of exasperation. All right. So there's three different components to any determination of any characteristic that people use in behavioral genetics. And I'm not 100% an expert on this topic, but I will do my best. So there is genetics, right? And there's something called shared environment. And then there's something called non-shared environment, right?

So if you take identical twins, you know, raised together, or if you take fraternal twins who are only 50% related to each other, and they're raised in the same household, what you get is like, you can look at their genes, and you can look at their shared environment that is their household, and you can look at their quote unquote, non non-shared environment which is stuff that they have experienced separately and if you partial out all these things shared environment which is the household that you are raised in accounts for very very little of your personality for example there was a texas adoption study there's been a bunch of different adoption studies that have looked at women who give their children up for adoption the correlation between personality of the adoptive mother and the kid is 0.55.

The correlation in personality between the kid and the adoptive parents is 0.05. Children who are adopted from different places, who are all raised together in the same household, are no more similar in personality than two strangers off the street. So yes, it is a bit of both. Their personalities have also been influenced by outside forces, environmental forces, for example. But when you're talking about environmental forces, you're also talking about things that happen potentially in the womb. Women who get influenza when they're pregnant are much more likely to have a kid who is schizophrenic, for example. And that is actually not a genetic thing. That's a nurture thing. That's an environmental influence. But that's not what usually people mean. People usually mean something like, you know, did your gym coach yell at you? Or did your first girlfriend

laugh at your penis or like whatever? Yes. I'm just trying to look up the description of three identical strangers so i can give you a quick overview it's really worth seeing i saw another uh documentary about i can't remember it's like seven or nine children who all have the same sperm donor and they have like a summer camp that they because their moms are all lesbians and they all chose the same sperm donor and their moms get them all together every summer for summer camp which you know is actually very important that they meet each other when they're children because there's this really creepy thing called genetic sexual attraction if you don't meet your siblings when you're young then you want to have sex with them when you're older right like denaris targaryen and john snow well so there's this guy named razib khan a geneticist spoiler sorry

by the way in case you're not caught up there um so razib khan a geneticist spoiler sorry spoiler by the way in case you're not caught up there um so razib khan did a genetic analysis of how related john snow and denaris are oh yeah and she's his auntie she's his aunt so on average an aunt would be 25 genetically related to somebody you can read this blog but because of the inbreeding etc they're actually 33 genetically related so that's worse they're like between full siblings and half siblings in terms of how related they are they're more related than half siblings or an aunt and a nephew it's worse or better or is it sexier i don't think it is sexy just to be clear i mean obviously there's really interesting literature on this.

Like, how do we avoid sleeping with close or having sex with close relatives? This is a fun topic. Yeah, yeah. Our family is more comfortable than what we were talking about. This is better than race differences. So there's a woman called Deborah Lieberman who's done some really, really cool research on this. And she was interested in incest avoidance. And obviously, like, for one generation, having a baby with your, you know, full sibling is actually, it's actually not that dangerous. It's not that much more dangerous than, you know, for example, in Germany. example, in Germany. There's a really interesting Peter Singer utilitarian essay about this. But in Germany, they had full siblings that met when they were adults, and they wanted to get married. I

think Germany did allow them to get married. So let's say you don't allow full siblings to have children because of the likelihood of genetic problems in those children. Well, if you're anti-eugenics, that's kind of a slippery slope to eugenics, right? Because if two full siblings have a high chance of having a child who has whatever kind of disability, physical or psychological, then what was to say that you shouldn't tell two people with schizophrenia that they can't have a child together because that child is going to be whatever 40 or 50% likely to also have schizophrenia, for example, right? I'm sure there's a good answer to that. I'm sure people are going to message you about that but incest has actually been a very very old problem that we've had to deal with throughout our ancestral history and so what deborah lieberman says is that people use two different cues to figure out who are their siblings one is co-residency so how long you've

lived together when you're small children yeah and another one is have you seen this person nursing at your mother's breast that's a pretty a pretty good indication that you guys are related. And so, it explains a lot of things. So, there's this guy called Westermark who studied this. And these kids, for example, in Israel, who were raised together on a kibbutz since they were young children, they were not interested when they got older in having anything to do with one another sexually. There's another cultural custom, I think in the Philippines or somewhere else in Southeast Asia, where the bride as a very young child, I don't know, six or seven, goes to live with her future husband's family. And obviously, if you've known somebody since you're six or seven,

you are very unlikely to want to have sex with them when you get to be an adult. So in these cases, what's happening is the incest avoidance mechanism is saying, ding, ding, ding, this person is related to you when they're actually not related. Because we didn't have DNA tests throughout our evolutionary history. And because there's this thing called inbreeding depression, which means that people who are closely related are more likely to have children with certain kinds of problems. You get this kind of avoidance.

And you can even see it in non-human animals. You know, I've heard some story from somebody saying that these two chimps, they started kind of fooling around. And then they got to the point where they were going to have sex. And they're, I think they're brother and sister. And they just stopped and they were like, looking at each other. This isn't cool. This is not cool. So, headline, avoid incest avoid incest i just bumped

into you at the supermarket i was backing out of a parking space and i hit your car i'm sorry i didn't mean to but you're angry now Very angry now And that's making me very angry too No, fuck you And your mother too Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film directed by Tim Wardle. Wardle? It examines... Wardle. Wardle.

And it examines a set of American triplets born in 1961 and adopted as six-month-old infants by separate families, unaware that each child had brothers. So they were totally, yeah, they had. I don't want to spoil it because it is this reveal after reveal after reveal in this documentary. Wow. And it is quite an extraordinary story. this documentary and it is quite an extraordinary story but it's not too much of a spoiler to say that they find each other and are aware of each other and they became a media sensation you know the story was well known for a time when it happened in the 70s when they sort of discovered each other maybe it was the 80s and their lives turned out very differently, you know, despite the fact that they were these genetically identical brothers.

So, you know, it's hard to resist the conclusion that actually your environment is a hugely important contributing factor. Yeah. Well, there's definitely luck. definitely luck. And one thing that people tend to get confounded is what I'm talking about when I talk about environment is an environment where you are fairly safe, where you're not like there's no war zone around you, where you're getting adequate nutrition, and where you're not being like routinely like abused, right? So it's very unlikely that a child who's, you know, if you're locked in a cage for 20 years, you're not going to turn out the same as somebody genetically identical who's not locked in a cage, you know, because you need certain kinds of stimulus, you need certain kinds of nutrition, and things like that to unlock your

true potential. You would never argue because one person is not fed at all throughout childhood, and another person is fed all the time, that the difference in their height, the one who wasn't fed and the one who was fed, that height is not genetically determined because two people turned out very different heights because they were given very, very different nutrition. What I'm saying is that if you're given a certain kind of adequate, some of the behavioral geneticists call this a good enough mother or a good enough environment, then you will expect outcomes within kind of certain parameters. I did a debate once with Oliver James, who has a book called Not in Our Genes, who thinks genes matter not at all, that it's entirely nurture that matters.

And even though siblings turn out sometimes incredibly differently, it's because of the subtle differences in how their parents treated them. And luckily, when we had this debate, there was a dog on stage. And everybody knows that different dog breeds have different kind of personality characteristics. Oh, that's very doggist. It's very offensive to dogs. So my friend, for example, she bought what she thought was a Labrador.

It was a very fluffy Labrador with a black tongue. And she had such trouble getting it to obey. It's like a really disobedient dog. And then, we know, 10 years later, she got one of these doggy DNA tests done. And she found out that it's a Chow Chow, like half Chow Chow. And Chow Chows are just like really, I don't know why like East Asians, like Shiba Inus, there's so many like really disobedient East Asian dogs. I don't know if you've ever interacted with a Shiba Inu.

They're these Japanese dogs, but they do not care about you. In any case, if you can breed a dog to have certain personality characteristics, not even just certain personality characteristics, breed a dog that automatically herds or automatically fetches or automatically chases small game, but not large game or large game, but not small game or whatever, then it doesn't make any sense that human genes for personality work totally differently. And there's some really interesting stuff going on with dogs, because the idea is that humans actually have domesticated themselves. If you live in a society or a civilization in which you have to get along with strangers, you can't behave aggressively.

And then, you know, one of the more kind of controversial claims, I think, by this guy, Wrangham, has been that people have jailed and put to death people who were homicidal or aggressive throughout history. And that's actually taken those genes out of the gene pool that humans actually have domesticated themselves and that we are much gentler, more malleable, more neotenous. It's like we have a longer period of learning and we're youthful for much longer in terms of our brain development than we were several thousand years ago before we were living in civilization. So, other domesticated species, like there's these foxes that have been domesticated and dogs that have been domesticated, are actually really interesting as a model for what's happened to human cognition and behavior. If you take a, I don't know, I can't remember if it's a six-week-old puppy, and you bring them into a room, you have food underneath one bowl and not another one, a puppy will be able to tell whether a human is pointing at one bowl or another, and which one to go to. They'll be able to tell the direction of the pointing right away and go to the right bowl a chimp is not going to be able to do that because

chimps haven't been bred to read our cues whereas dogs have so a dog you know when they're very young and they've hardly had any experience with humans is better able to read human intentionality i was watching a show called billions the other day which i enjoy and there was i tried to watch that show before did you not like it just seems like such a pissing contest it is yeah yeah yeah it is there's lots of ridiculous things about it but i do enjoy it anyway there was an episode about some guy who he shoots someone's dog and it's a really lovely dog and there's negotiations about what kind of reparations are going to be made and And one of the characters, played by Paul Giamatti, explains to this other guy, like basically saying, listen, don't get too sentimental about dogs.

We can replace the dog fairly easily. You may have thought that the dog loved you, but basically dogs are just responding to cues for whatever they can get. If you're going to give them food, they love you. That's all they care about. And if you die and you're on your own, your dog's going to eat your face. The dog's like, I don't know. And me and my wife were watching the thing and we had our dog on the sofa with us, Rosie.

And we looked at Rosie and we're like, you are not. Would you eat our face, Rosie? Would you eat mom's nose and rose said no i would never eat your face i love you are you sure it's also like the toughest part you have to say that you start off with you know softer thing yeah they wait for it to get like your knackers yeah they eat your nuts as a starter and And then for mains, she would nibble our noses, our delicious noses and cheeks. Mmm, I'm having cheeks today. Because I'm interested in disgust.

I don't know why. I got really fascinated with, my friend did this, there was this thing I think in 2016 or 2017, where people were hosting so-called death cafes, where people could get together and talk about death. Sounds like fun. Death positivity. Yeah. So I was asked to give a talk for my friend and I got really obsessed with cannibalism. So my main work scientifically has been about disgust and disgust sensitivity.

And cannibalism is really fascinating because even non-human animals like often don't cannibalize because it's quite dangerous. Even though another member of your own species has all the nutrients that you need what's the dangerous thing about perfect food yeah it's because you could get a disease if they died of disease then you could get that disease even rats won't eat other dead rats and you know rats will basically eat anything so there's a big difference between sort of magical cannibalism and like survival what's magical cannibalism cannibalism where you cannibalize somebody because you want to get their power oh okay right and so eating someone's

heart like the like the fellow in uh temple of doom so uh if you look at survival cannibal like i don't know let's say there's a plane crash and a bunch of people die people start off eating their like shoes and belts which sounds awful and then ultimately you start to move on you start eating other people but you eat the like less personable parts of them first right you eat they're like but you the last thing that people eat is eyes face hands and genitals but the first thing that you eat if you're trying to get somebody's power if you're trying to like take on their essence is their face or their heart or their hands. Yeah. Right. Okay.

Where would you start though? Where would I start? Bottom thighs. That seems to be. I mean, I think that like. A bit like cuts of meat. Pork belly.

Yeah. Like I think that that part is quite soft and it's, it's really, yeah, that part. Well, the belly. Not if you're absolutely ripped like I am.

That would be very difficult. The only part you'd have to with me because of my very hard physique you'd have to start with earlobes shoulders maybe earlobes is good did you watch the film about the people who crashed in the andes yes i think i did what was it called again? Alive. Alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's quite a film, isn't it? Yeah. It's in my top five plane crash movie scenes list.

Plane crash cannibalisms? Oh, plane crash scenes. No, just scenes. Along with Fearless with Jeff Bridges. I've never seen that. Oh, my lordy. That's quite a plane crash. They never really show films that have plane crashes in them on planes, which I think is a good idea.

Oh, really? Have you seen one? Well, no, I haven't seen one as traumatic as the kind of crash that's in Fearless or Alive. But I do remember watching, well, Get Shorty starts with, I think, John Travolta or whoever at an airport cafe. And they look out of the window and a huge jumbo just hurtles into the tarmac and explodes. That's scene one in Get Shorty, I think, if I'm remembering rightly. And I watched that on a plane. And it was, I remember it was a virgin plane and it was in the nineties. I remember thinking, what the shit is going on here?

That is not in any way cool. I was terrified of flying at that point as well. I got over it weirdly when I had children, me and my wife. Because you had to be brave for them? I don't know what it was. Maybe it was some sense of either, oh, well, my life's over now. Or, you know, or maybe I've got, if I was worried about a sense of mortality or legacy, or I don't know what, maybe some of those things were coming into play. I thought, well, now that I have children, some part of me will live on so I can die in a plane crash now and it'll be fine. You know what? Recently, I know a bunch of people who are going to be cryonically frozen.

And it's unclear. It's unclear really if you'll ever you know if anyone will ever bother to thaw you out that's one reason why it's important to do podcasts like this adam yeah so that maybe someday somebody will thaw you out and reanimate you and 200 years my face your face um so cryonics it's kind of like a raffle in immortality like it could be you know in 200 300 years that you could you know, thousands of years or hundreds of years or whatever more than you can now. And so I have been considering being cryonically preserved. And there's this philosopher friend of mine who's written a bunch of stuff about it.

And she says in the same way that IVF used to be considered weird and kind of grotesque. Now people think about cryonics that way, but you can have your whole body frozen. IE people now take cryonics more seriously. People are definitely going to take cryonics more seriously. Also, like if it looks like, you know,

immortality or even being reanimated looks like it's very, very possible that I think people, I mean, what is a better thing to buy a raffle ticket in than the possibility of immortality i mean if you like if you like living if you don't like living then yeah but the phrase reanimated i would say is a large clue to how attractive that proposition is especially if you've seen the film reanimator um there are so many opportunities for something to go wrong with being cryonically frozen.

But there's not there are many. And then reanimated. Yeah. But if you die and you're like burned or buried or used for medical experiments or whatever. That's it. That is it. Yeah. But that's that's the point, surely, isn't it?

Like, that's what makes life worth living is that it will end and that you give it your best and try not to be too much of a massive dick movie is that like logan's run where everybody gets killed when they're like 30 or 40 or whatever so if life's only worth living because it ends at some point wouldn't it be better to end it earlier for everybody no why because you're saying that you only have a certain amount of time on earth so is it better to not know when you're gonna die because if you did know when you're saying that you only have a certain amount of time on Earth. So is it better to not know when you're going to die? Because if you did know when you were going to die, then you would definitely have like a time limit. No, but that would make you lazy. Oh, is it?

Yeah, because that would make you just think, oh, well, I've got that amount of time so I can piss about and do what I want. You know, it's like having a deadline, literally a deadline. And you end up just doing everything you have to do five minutes before the deadline. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, if it was guaranteed that you would live exactly 100 years and you wouldn't succumb to ill health or accidents or anything like that. Yeah, that would be a weird way to live your life. But certainly you wouldn't want to live less of it. I think the idea that it is a bit of a lottery is what keeps people sparky isn't it really i could imagine

thinking i was going to live a hundred like for hundreds of years and i might not be as interested in like making achievements and doing important things but i would be more interested in you know going out and getting some sunshine or spending time with friends. And so from the perspective of the human life as, you know, generating immortal memes or, you know, making a difference in terms of people's minds or having children or whatever, I could see that but in terms of just the pure hedonistic enjoyment of eating sleeping sexing drinking being out in the sunshine yeah but 150 doing that i would do that no but you're imagining people would get old i'm imagining like you'll get fixed up yeah but there's gonna be bits hanging off you i mean look they can't even get the wi-fi right out where i live and you think they're going to reanimate you you'll be jumping around sexting and shagging and sunbathing having a great great time going biking and i don't know i mean maybe you're right i have heard that

argument actually about you know if people knew they were going to live longer they would take care of themselves better and they would take care of each other better and the planet better but that's the other thing especially these days there are so many catastrophic scenarios being presented to us that it's sometimes so overwhelming you you almost feel like fucking take me out of it now me and my daughter the other day watched dav Attenborough's Netflix show, Our Planet. Yeah, yeah. And there was a sequence with these birds out in the jungle somewhere and they were doing a mating dance. And there was a single lady bird, not a lady bird, but a female bird. And she was on the branch watching these four fucking wallies jumping around.

Doing this incredibly intricate dance where they each take it in turns to go to the front of the line. They shuffle up the branch and they go to the front of the line and do a quick little flourish. And then they jump to the back and then it's the next guy's turn. There's like rules for how you should show off. Yeah. Lecking, yeah. And they just do it over and over and over again. Incredibly fast. And then finally the head guy sort of goes ta-da finished

what do you think and the the bird's looking at them and she's like yeah whatever and buggers off or she goes yeah okay and turns around and sort of presents herself and the main guy gets to jump on her back and they don't have penises it's not nearly as much fun no it was very brief it wasn't um lurid that scene i'm glad to say it wasn't too embarrassing but it was extraordinary so many scenes and so many beautiful like tableau of like the these flamingos the way it's shot all this stuff it's like watching classical paintings come to life it's extraordinary anyway spoiler towards the end there's a lot of stuff about you know the planet falling apart yeah the warming and stuff yeah yeah and glaciers disintegrating and i looked over at my daughter and she had a blanket over her head she's 10

and so i peeked beneath the blanket and she was teary and suddenly i realized oh shit this is like for her what it was like for me when i was 10 watching programs about nuclear war and just thinking we're fucked why are the adults not freaking out why aren't they doing anything i mean if you look at the there's there's some people like there's um the center for existential risk or the study of existential risk there's bjorn lorg. There's a bunch of people who actually look at the likelihood of different existential risks. And right now we're so obsessed

with climate change as an existential risk. But actually nuclear war is still, if you look at the probability, a more likely way that we would destroy ourselves, our civilization, or the human species.

Great. Well, I'll tell my daughter this weekend. Yeah, tell her. I spoke to Diana Fleischman. Apparently, nuclear war is much more of a possibility. I've got a great program I want to show you. It's called Threads. And we'll sit down with mum and watch it tomorrow night.

After we watch QED's Guide to the Apocalypse, which is on YouTube. There's a great book by Daniel Ellsberg called The Doomsday Machine, which just talks about all of the ways that totally incompetent people basically had the fate of the world in their hands. And it will make you give up all hope. So it's pretty good. And yet you want to be reanimated. No, I would like to be, you know, there's a possibility.

There's always a possibility that someone will install your Wi-Fi when they say they are going to come and install your Wi-Fi. Indeed, yes. In the same way, there is a possibility. There's always a possibility that someone will install your Wi-Fi when they say they're going to come and install your Wi-Fi. Indeed, yes. In the same way, there is a possibility. And I really am so happy, kind of pathologically so, that I can't imagine wanting this to go on forever. I mean, not this podcast, but life. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success.

Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch,

use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. whoa rosie come here that is the sound of uh people are hunting out in these parts i suppose they're shooting partridges pheasants i don't know anyway rose let's not go over there let's stay away from those guys and head back dr diana fleischman there very grateful to her for making the time to talk to me a lot of links in the description of this podcast to various talks she's given papers she's written

bits and pieces that she mentioned further information on some of the subjects that arose there, especially the animal welfare and suffering questions that we touched on. So you can investigate further if you wish to. Now, I'm standing in front of a very beautiful, big old tree, resplendent in autumnal colours. And this tree has stood here for a long time, maybe hundreds of years. And it's probably seen many, many changes in the world. And, you know, with the election coming up, it seems like a big deal to us, but maybe not for this wise old tree that's probably seen many governments come and go.

Isn't that right, wise old tree? I don't know, really. Yeah, I suppose. And have you been keeping up with the campaigning and the run-up to the election, wise old tree? Oh, yeah, definitely. I watch Have I Got News For You every week? Stuff like that. Yes. And are you able to tell me who you are thinking of voting for? Look, this is how I see it. I just want someone to get on and win Brexit.

A majority of people voted for it, so why hasn't it been done? And why can't we have a second referendum? I didn't realise democracy meant you can just vote once and then that's it forever. You know, are we just going to keep on voting until we get the result the losers wanted? Or are we going to leave Brexit and sell off the NHS to Boris, who I'm sorry I don't trust him because he went to Easton, and he deliberately messes up his hair? And I don't care if he cheats on Donald Trump and does racist jokes about Joe Swansongs. I like the gap in her teeth, but I don't trust her because she's a woman and she gets things done. Unlike Jeremy Combines, who's so antiseptic,

but he actually wants to do something about climate change and sell off the NHS to the literal Democrats and get out of bed with big business and get into bed with the most vulnerable people who don't care if Trump cuts taxis because they can't afford to take taxis anyway after Nicola Spurgeon's made them all independent from the Eurostar. And why has everyone stopped talking about the backstop? That was my, I loved that. Rosie, stop that Alright Anyway, well thanks wise old tree Great to hear your views

And best of luck Yeah, whatever. Wise old tree. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support on this episode. Thank you very much to Matt Lamont for his edit whiz-bottory on today's conversation. Thank you very much indeed for listening.

Thanks to ACAST for hosting this and other great, great podcasts. on today's conversation thank you very much indeed for listening thanks to acast for hosting this and other great great podcasts appreciate their support as always until next time we meet take care i love you and i'm feeling a bit self-conscious because there's men with guns hiding in bushes, but screw it. Bye! Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pint with me, thumbs up. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pint with me, thumbs up.

Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pint with me, thumbs up. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pint with me, thumbs up. Bye. Thank you.