making sure that I say things in the right manner anymore.
Well, I think that very thing causes a lot of men to, you know, they're tiptoeing around in the university.
Now, I work in a university environment, so, you know, I see that aspect of the world.
Maybe my aspect is different, but I see men, you know, almost cowering on university campuses because of fear.
or they might say the wrong thing, or get canceled, or whatever else goes on.
all right everybody welcome back to another episode of the space tomatoes podcast
I'm Havoc, and we've got your other host.
Alex, hello. Welcome.
And today we have a special guest, Dr. Mark J. Defont.
He is a professor of geology and geochemistry at the University of South Florida.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
Well, good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Awesome, awesome.
So, found each other on Podmatch, and you have a new paper you've published.
You want to give us a little overview?
Sure.
You mean about the paper?
Yes, sir.
Okay.
Well, I got interested in evolution of psychology a long time ago, and of reason, I've just
been reading an immense amount on it and started to feel like I had the background to publish
papers in it. As you alluded to when you introduced me, I'm not really by training an evolutionary
psychologist. My expertise is in geochemistry and I studied volcanoes for years. But evolutionary
psychology got me so interested, I kind of now dabble in it. One of the things that
struck me was that feminists were attacking a whole field of evolutionary psychology. And I
started delving into it in the feminist literature and realized that it was really because evolutionary
psychology was not agreeing with their ideology. It wasn't a matter that they were finding
evidence to suggest that evolutionary psychology was wrong. In fact, I've seen in the feminist
literature where they're saying, hey, you know, I can see why people are interested in this.
It does ring true, but we've got to stop this messaging right away because,
you know, it doesn't go along with what we want. And that's, in my opinion, that's the wrong way
to take science. I'm really science first kind of world. So I make all my decisions based on,
you know, what science tells me and what the data tells me. And coming from, you know,
a research background in science, I feel like maybe I bring a fairly unique set of tools,
you know, to the table about evolutionary psychology and social constructionism. I got
of fly flying around here. Anyway, we're in Florida, so that's what you expect. So,
ultimately, feminists are promoting this idea of social constructionism. Do you or your audience,
you think they know anything about this? Or is that something I should go into?
Yeah, let's go into it.
Go ahead and go into that a bit.
Social constructionism is this idea that we're born with a blank slate.
We have no instincts.
We learn everything through culture.
And it's actually, you know, the complete opposite of what evolutionary psychology is saying,
that, you know, we come into the world with a lot of instincts and behaviors,
primarily masculinity and femininity are actually behaviors, so to speak, that we've inherited from
thousands and thousands of years, hundreds of thousands really, of evolution in hunter-gatherer
society. So civilization has just been too short for evolution to have impact us, the 10,000 years
of civilization from an evolutionary perspective has not had time to select for different behaviors.
So we kind of bring into civilization a caveman kind of mentality, if you will, and those are
left over from what was needed to survive in hunter-gatherer society. And that ultimately
seems to fly in the face of what feminists want society to be. And I think that one thing is doing
an immense amount of harm to young men in particular, but also I think to young women,
because it misunderstands what evolutionary psychology is about. We're not trying to say
we need to behave the way hunter-gatherers did. It's just that we have to recognize that we have
some of the characteristics that evolved in hunter-gatherer society that we bring in today
that forms our opinions and our ideas on society. And I'd like to eventually get into some of that
if you agree. But ultimately, I think that's the bugaboo with the feminists. And when I started
looking at the feminist literature, I really saw a lack of rigor in their approach. Social
construction doesn't offer, or at least what they're saying social construction is, doesn't
offer any alternatives data-wise. I never hear when I'm talking to a social constructionist,
I never hear from them, oh, well, here's the evidence that suggests that social constructionism
is correct. They simply argue against evolutionary psychology. And a lot of the ways they argue
against evolutionary psychology is simply that it doesn't agree with their ideology and that
sometimes they'll even say that it's trying to take us backwards. It's not. It's just trying to
tell us that we may have been selected in the past for behaving this way, and we have to deal
with that in society. Whether we want to act in that way or not is up to us, but we should know
about it. So when you say, I guess one thing I would like to clarify and have some clarification
on, right? I think you've got the more classical feminist, which I think there is a good deal of
rigor in those studies, which is, you know, what brought about the civil rights movements,
et cetera, right? And I think there's a good amount of information in those that are in the
classical that I see there could be benefit to.
So when you're talking about this particular field,
you're talking about more of the, I guess I would try and use the term
neo-feminists, right?
I'm not sure I would separate them because this attitude towards evolutionary
psychology has really been around since almost the second wave of feminism
back in the 60s. So, no, I don't think I would separate my criticism. I think that
what the feminists have done in giving a great deal of freedom to women is an outstanding
thing. And I think that you will find that I'm in favor of all the good things that have happened
to women because of equal rights. But from a scientific perspective, I'm worried about what
we're teaching our students or what feminist studies is teaching our students. And it doesn't
seem to be related much to the truth. And we can go into the specifics if you'd like. And I appreciate
you bringing that up because I don't want people to think that I'm against women. I'm certainly not.
I'm married to a woman.
I have a daughter.
I have a sister.
Had a mother at one time, so, you know.
No way.
I don't think I'm well.
Yeah.
You too?
I'm weird that way.
All right.
Well, I guess one of the other things that I was, man, it'll come back to me.
I think I just blew a few bits off the hard drive there.
LX?
No, I'm just trying to get my head wrapped around what the social constructionism whole concept is.
So you can tell me if I'm wrong.
So basically what they're saying is that gender roles are basically just how you're raised and nothing biological component to that at all?
Is that what that is?
Completely.
Okay.
You can see where I'm kind of going crazy here.
I think because typically since the beginning of time, and I'm not saying that there are definitely outliers in that, especially at this point in time, but women have basically raised children.
And that's what they were biologically kind of designed for and the men protected and provided for the women.
If I'm wrong.
No, I don't think you're wrong.
I think you're right on.
And I, you know, well, I interrupted you, did I?
No, no.
It's fine.
No, I meant Havoc.
No, it's fine.
Okay.
I guess one thing I was, okay, since you opened it up.
One thing I was going to say is I definitely agree, right?
I mean, there's definitely instinct.
There are patterns that come from thousands of years of evolution of existence, I guess, that kind of predefine some traits and characteristics.
Right. And I think, you know, society at large, modern society at large does quite a lot to soften those instincts to use that social constructionism, etc. to modify some of the innate behaviors, etc.
right and and i think that's not always a bad thing if you look at it uh i think we were far
more predisposed to violence uh back in the hunter gatherer days if you encroach on my territory
you're a threat that needs to be eliminated uh whereas now we you know have more tolerance for
that and we use a system that is more i i guess you know kind i don't know that's debatable there's
still quite a few violent people out there 100 true but i guess the point i'm making is is that
that has to also be considered in part as part of this right i mean even evolutionary psychologists
would have to admit that, yes, those traits exist.
However, as we grow up, even just a homeschooled child,
their parents are going to influence some of that instinctual behavior
to become more positively channeled for children, right?
So that it's not this, you know, I guess tribal, you know,
type of, you know, warring clans, if you will?
Well, you know, I'm not sure I know how to respond to that.
First of all, no one would ever say, I think, no evolutionary psychologists anyway, would
say that culture is not important.
It is.
The very fact that we have things like money means that there's social construction going
on.
money has no value unless we give it value in society. However, I find it kind of strange
that people would say, okay, if you're masculine, culture made you that way,
when in fact masculinity is strongly tied to testosterone. And testosterone is 10 times
higher in males than females. And there's no question that testosterone tends to make men
more violent. But for the feminists and those that agree with the feminists to say that men
are toxic because some men are violent is simply wrong, in my opinion. And yes, a gentler world is
better than a violent world, but we also should give some breath here to our instincts and be
careful because there are some good things about masculinity, you know, being that you need to get
violent sometimes to protect your family if they're attacked or, you know, anyone that wants to take
freedom away from us, for example. We may want to think twice about not being violent. So I would
say ultimately, I would agree with you, but I would caution that sometimes these things seem
too good to be true. For example, and Alex, I think you mentioned it, you know,
So culture is important, but if you turn out to be gay, I've failed to see how culture kind of impacted you to be gay.
And yet that's basically what the feminists are saying, because if you talk to gays, for example, they would say, oh, I'm that way because I was born that way.
And I think that there's probably a lot of truth in that.
the wiring may get screwed up somewhere, or some of it might be, you know, there's been some evidence
that suggests that there's a role played by genetics in this. So, it's hard then to see
how society could make someone gay when, in fact, everybody's reinforced for being, or used to be
anyway, everybody was reinforced for being straight, and there was a lot of anti-reinforcement
for those that weren't straight. I mean, look at Turing. He basically killed himself because
society was so cruel to him. So, yeah, I think we can say most definitely that a lot of the way we
are is due to genetics and to the processes that come from genetics, like being bathed in
testosterone when we're infants. Before we're even born, we get bathed, I think it's in the
sixth week, in testosterone if we're males and we don't if we're females. And then again, we get
bathed in testosterone once we hit puberty. And this is something that I've never been able to
understand from the feminists when they start talking about social constructionism. It seems
like these kinds of things are ignored.
And I'll just kind of leave it there.
Yeah, that's absolutely.
And no disagreement here, right?
I think there's some truth in both sides,
and I think that it would be counter to ignore
our biology, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you know, as you said, right? Testosterone.
And I think it is, I remember it's in that, I think, yeah, first trimester that you get that
big wash of testosterone. And like you said, at puberty as well, that's biology, right? The male
physiology is doing this to prepare the body as it grows and changes.
Well our brains are literally different too than females.
Yeah and a lot of our drives and desires and obviously these are all generalizations There are outliers everywhere right Always So I want to make sure that we acknowledge that that is the case
Well, that's why I was talking about gay men.
Or women, sure, yeah.
Or gay women, yeah.
Yeah, it's, you know, but to be able to identify things that are, you know, very much the nature of our physiology as a human, right? And that's not changeable.
So so I guess. So what do you think? What do you think is a workable a workable solution to this that? So, OK, higher higher learning. Right.
There are, without question, elective classes out there that I always question. There are courses and minors that are out there that I'm not certain why, but hey, it's an interesting subject or topic.
So given that, what do you think is a reasonable way to kind of, you know, take this super tanker because education operates a lot like government does. And once it starts down a direction, it doesn't just, you know, flip a U-turn and go the other way.
So what do you think are reasonable ways to start to steer that tanker so that it starts going more towards something that has scientific rigor?
And I hesitate to even use scientific as well because I think a lot of these are arts, right?
What would be an art? I'm sorry. Maybe I'm missing.
Aren't like some of the more, you know, what are we, fourth or fifth way of feminism?
Aren't they more, you know, like art studies?
They're not grounded in science, right?
Like psychology.
If they are grounded in science, I mean, if they're in the arts, I can't speak to it.
Okay.
So my take on that, right?
It is like psychology as a degree is an art major, right?
It's a Bachelor of Arts or a Master's of Arts.
No, it is science.
Well, it's in the social sciences.
Okay, social sciences.
But evolutionary psychology is beginning to have an impact on it.
It's becoming much more rigorous with time.
There will be a lot of psychologists that would be irritated by that statement.
Well, that's all right.
I hope they're impacting it.
So I know this would be a horrible experiment to do.
I don't know if it's ever been done before,
but are there any cases of like children being reared by not being in a social construct?
And what would result from that, like a feral child or something like that?
Well, feral children are good examples of why we want to pay attention to culture.
Because, you know, if you lock a kid up in a closet and come back in 18 years,
you're going to basically have an animal.
And it's happened, by the way.
There have been some children that have had terrible things happen to them like that.
And they were totally unsociable after, or inability to socialize them after those impacts.
And so culture does play an important role.
I was going to get back to your, I guess it was your comment about change.
change. When we did some terrible things, I think, back in the 60s and 70s, we tried to change
gay men to straight, you know, either through reinforcement learning or those kinds of things.
And it didn't work. In fact, it turned out to be a bad experiment, if you can look at them as
experiments. So it just goes to show you, I think, how strong the biology aspect of all of this is
rather than the cultural. And I know I haven't gotten to your question in an answer, but I'm not
sure how to answer it because what I focused on in my paper with the feminists wasn't anything to
do with what may be an art, a profession like, you know, art. I was sticking mainly to things
that could be documented with data. And certainly there's been a lot of research on
this. And people write this off as nurture versus nature, but I don't even think that
hits it on the head. Social constructionism, the way I see it anyway, and you can disagree with me
if you want. I see it as feminism trying to change our society so that men and women will behave
similarly. And from my perspective, I don't think that's as easy as they think it is.
And yet these experiments and trying to get men and women to behave the same
or to do the same jobs even is complex,
and it's not easy to change our society in the way that they think it should be changed.
And I think a lot of, particularly young men,
have been hurt by some of the changes that have been going on in our society
due to woke and various other things.
Yeah, I think there's, without question, a lot of, again, ingrained tendencies in male or female individuals, risk-taking being a huge one, right?
You just don't see female line workers.
Yes. Women are very risk averse, not just in physical construction things, but also in jobs that require 80 hour weeks. Women steer away from those like mad. So if you're wondering why we don't get a lot of women competing in STEM or computer science or those, they don't want the hassle.
they want the flexibility to be able to have off time and they don't understand why men don't you
know so and being a man i understand why because you know i think um i i think a lot of my self-worth
is wrapped up in how i do my job i can't put it any other way although i'm not sure i have the
answer to that yeah i always describe it as a desire to win is just i i don't know why but
it's competitive it is and it can be the most inane thing yeah and i just i have to win like i i have
to make this this has to work it's going to this will happen yes yeah and and then success becomes
a very important part of your life. And so I think that we're trying to make men more like women
to the loss of a lot of men and being hurt by this, I think, to some extent.
Do you have any idea what the rationale is for that?
I understand the idea, you know, the ideas that are espoused.
I don't necessarily agree with them because I think that there is data to show that a number of these things are, you know, something you could easily call out, but you can't put numbers to or drive real data and real, you know, Socratic method against, right?
things like you know
the you know toxic masculinity
the you know patriarchy
as you know the
oppressor right
and I think you know
yeah
it's an interesting one
to me right this is a very
very interesting topic and
part of
you know part of the hesitation here is
is you know
uh
Thank you.
...for males do.
And so this male parental investment is basically a kind of a contract.
is you help me raise the kid and I'll give you access sexually.
And that's kind of agreed on even though we don't realize it maybe.
And in today's society, of course, we lose a lot of that because we have the pill.
So women can be much more free.
But I think anybody that's dated realizes that women are a lot less willing to have indiscriminate sex than men are.
A funny research done on that. A woman took her class. She was a research professor and she had her class of graduate students go out and ask people in the libraries on campus, both men and women. Women would ask men and men would ask women if they would go home and have sex with them that night.
And I think, yeah, 100% of the women, not surprisingly, said no.
And 75% of the men said yes.
The other 25% gave reasons why they couldn't, feeling guilty almost that they couldn't,
like I'm married or whatever excuse they gave.
I think that kind of sums it up pretty well, that men are much more willing to have indiscriminate sex.
And there's a good reason for it, because women might end up pregnant and having to raise a child in a hunter-gatherer society.
That's a pretty devastating situation if you're faced with raising a child alone on the savannah.
Now, I know it's not completely alone.
There's families there and all that, but it's still, it's a burden on the family if you end up in that situation.
And yet, how do we carry this over into modern day society?
Well, we carry this over in seeing it happen.
You know, even though women are able to have, you know, indiscriminate sex if they want, for the most part, they choose, you know, not to most of the time.
Now, I know there are exceptions to that rule, but in general, they are more reluctant than men.
So another thing, women started choosing men also that could protect the family, and they started choosing men that could bring home the resources.
So remember, out on a savanna where you're hunting big game, you know, it's quite dangerous.
Big game is hard to bring down, and it takes a lot of work and takes a lot of coordination, usually among men, because women were raising children.
So although women could do gathering of seeds and things like that, it was mainly the men that went out and did big game hunting.
And it's dangerous.
And so you need brave men to go out there and do that.
You also need brave men to protect the family.
Think about tribes.
Almost all tribes faced adversaries from other tribes.
And so if a tribe won, it was bad news for the guys.
All of them got killed, and it was bad news for the women because they basically took them home with them, and they became their wives.
So as brutal as that may sound, that was the way nature was for millions of years of our evolution.
And so we see some of that left over today in our society.
And I know for me, when I started reading about evolutionary psychology in the 90s, they answered a lot of questions for me.
It's like, well, you know, why am I attracted to beautiful women rather than, you know, what we would consider homely women?
I thought that's nearly not fair.
You know, I shouldn't be that way.
Well, I should be that way because beauty is associated with health.
And so men are really looking for healthy women when we try to find attractive women and also youth.
Men want young women because there's more chance of having children over a lifetime with women that are young.
So I know my work in Panama on volcanoes down there, the tribes I ran into, I was seeing 12-year-old girls in the process of getting married.
And that's something you wouldn't see in our society today.
so you know they're reaching puberty and they're like okay time to get married and
and so yes 12 years old you can have a lot of children from 12 to 40 or whenever you know you
you hit the point where you can't have children anymore if you're a woman so so that's good for
men and women to to you know produce offspring more offspring today of course it's all bets are
off, you know, men and women don't choose to have as many babies as they can.
But up until recently, that was true pretty much all over the world, except perhaps a
Western world, where people had a lot of children, even in the Western world.
Yeah, I was going to say, even men have a lot of children.
Up until the, you know, early 1900s, that was kind of how we operated.
You look at, like, you know, start looking at your own family tree.
Victorian England.
Yeah, look at your own family tree.
And it wasn't more than like, you know, great grandfather or grandfather at this point that had, you know, maybe, you know, nine, 10, 11 children.
Right.
And nowadays it's one, maybe two, if any.
Yeah.
I had a lot of great, great grandparents that had 12 kids, you know, not a lot, but I had a number of them.
My grandmother was one of 13, I think.
Just a thought of raising 13 kids.
In a one-room house in a coal mining town.
What were they thinking?
I've heard comments like people asking,
what did people do back then?
They must have been bored before the internet,
but I'm pretty sure I knew what they were doing.
Well, they didn't have television.
There wasn't much to do except read.
And then you could do that at night if you didn't have a lamp.
So the thing that I was getting back to was this choice by women.
So think about that.
They're choosing high testosterone men, basically.
We find in these cultural studies where people have gone out and asked 60 There been huge studies like this where they asked 60 people across all cultures they can get their hands on
And one of the things they find is that women across all cultures, that is,
it suggests biology and not social construction, across all cultures,
women are looking for men that have a high ability to bring home resources.
And on the other hand, men are looking for women that are attractive.
So right away, you've got this huge dichotomy in the way men and women choose their long-term spouses or boyfriends, if you want to look at it, or girlfriends, if you want to look at it that way.
And this choice becomes very important.
Women are choosing men that are protectors, are people that can go out and earn the bacon.
and also can defend them.
So they're looking towards somewhat masculine men,
at least not feminized men in general for those kinds of things.
And so you can see where extrapolating this to modern-day civilization,
where men might be in charge of society.
Women in hunter-gatherer society gave up leadership roles to men because they really didn't have time to be in leadership.
They didn't want leadership.
They wanted to raise children.
They were maternal.
They had high contents of estrogen in their bloods.
Men had testosterone.
They were, in general, making decisions for the tribes and leadership roles.
So, yes, I think we did have what we would consider discriminatory behavior towards women in the 1800s and even in the 1900s.
But that's to be expected, and even a patriarchy.
But I would call that an evolutionary patriarchy, and I did it in this paper.
You can see where men evolved into something we would call a patriarchy because women were choosing them to be that way.
So is it the fault of men that we have this so-called patriarchy? No, not if we're not
discriminating against women, and we're not. So I think we have to kind of now give way to women.
That's very good because we want everyone to have equal opportunities in our society.
But do we really need to punish men to get women in equal abundances in every group? Well, we find
out from economists and a lot of women economists that women don't want to go into fields that have
this high competitive 80-hour work week or in fields like STEM or yeah some women do and those
women we should open our arms to them coming into fields but do we need to spend three million
dollars funding National Science Foundation to figure out how we can get more women into
stem how about just letting them do what they want to do and if they choose stem more power to
them if they don't well let's not discriminate against men so we can get women into those and
i think that's where we start seeing where men are being hurt by some of these dei initiatives so
that's controversial i know and maybe you get me in trouble but i gotta i don't you know i don't
see how right i mean there's data to back that up right it's it's if you want to refute data
I never stopped the feminists in my department or in my university.
If you want to refute it, go gather data and put together a paper and show how it's wrong.
And, hey, I support anyone in their efforts to do something like that.
Go for it, right?
I do too.
That's what the Socratic method is about, right?
That's what we should all be looking to do.
And I do think it's interesting, though, because, you know, STEM keeps coming up, and it is true, right?
And then you look at fields where, you know, you can, I mean, arguably the medical field is full of, you know, basic, you know, the STEM principles and properties.
However, at least last I looked, I think it's gotten to be a majority female dominated field.
Medical has to.
And I think one of the interesting things there, and it plays back to evolutionary psychology, is that that is a role with a high degree of care that goes into it.
It's not uncaring, cold, scientific, hard fact.
No, it's not.
It is a bit of that and a bit of caring and, you know, there's more to it.
And I think that right there is the thing that really, at least in my eyes, really kind of makes that, you know, those fields, the STEM fields, less attractive to women.
It's cold, it's calculating, and it's uncaring.
Data doesn't care if you like the numbers or not.
Data doesn't care if the numbers agree with you or not.
It's just data.
But this is where I take issue with feminists because they have this cancel culture where, if you don't agree, I don't know if you're familiar with Helen Andrews or not, but she's written this wonderful paper called The Great Feminization.
It just came out late last year.
And she is claiming that woke has been generated by women because they have now become dominant in these fields.
You know, they now, there are more lawyers that are women.
There are more judges that are women.
There are more educators that are women.
You know, more professors, for example.
More women get PhDs.
More women get master's degrees.
More women get undergraduate degrees.
So we might be seeing the birth of wokeism as something that has been generated because women are very hesitant to have free speech.
They don't like free speech as much as men do, and they tend to want to stifle any disagreement because they want to have no conflicts in the society.
They want everything to run smoothly.
This may be one of the reasons why they're trying to get men to behave more like women.
And that's where the great feminization comes from.
And, well, I could go into some other things that she goes into.
But I find that to be very, very telling and interesting.
It definitely is interesting.
And DEI.
DEI would be women are much more caring about other people.
And you can see how this plays in DEI.
They want to make sure that everyone's treated fairly.
It's a good idea, but when you start discriminating against the more meritorious, then you run into some bad things for society.
I can guarantee you that the Chinese are not trying to get everybody in high diversity in their society.
They're interested in getting the best doing it, and ultimately, that's who we're competing against.
and I find that feminists misunderstand how competitive the world is.
I mean, if you come from evolution, you know, it's almost basically
you understand how competitive it is all the time for both men and women.
I recall hearing someone, and I can't for the life of me remember where I heard this,
But I think it stuck with me, not because necessarily I agree or disagree with this, right? But, you know, the desire to mitigate conflict as a norm, right? And that right there, I could see some merit to that, right?
I mean, we've been around, we live in, you know, the supposed enlightened society that we live in, yet we still have a problem where we can't seem to stop killing people.
You know, okay, so maybe there's some room for, you know, a toning down of that in certain areas.
But at the same time, it is something I see as being innate in, you know, human nature in general.
So I guess it's, yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know.
For me, it becomes a conundrum where you can have a good idea, but the getting there part is destructive in its nature.
Well, certainly, how can I disagree with that?
I mean, anything, you know, that helps conflict, helps to avoid conflict is good.
Although I think men tend to want conflict at some extent.
Yeah, and I was going to say, I wouldn't say conflict in general.
I would say conflict when it escalates to violence, right?
Oh, yeah.
I think it's necessary.
Conflict in the world of business is necessary.
Without it, we get terrible products that never get better.
you know it's necessary in medical and science and everywhere else because you have to you know
continuously test theories you have to continuously test is this actually accurate did i just find
something that makes this no longer true or relevant um you know uh you know even einstein's
theory of of relativity relativity is still under you know under pressure and there are areas where
it's cracked right and and that's not a bad thing and that is conflict not to my knowledge but i'll
go ahead and defer to you it was on it was on uh i think it was the black holes where some of his
theory has cracked on on some of those and i can't repeat it verbatim but if you look it up there
there are some some big question marks there yeah well not to get off the subject but yeah i think
science is always going to challenge
Einstein
or any ideas that are out there.
And it should.
That is conflict, right? And that's not a
bad thing. Conflict can
be great and the outcome of conflict
can be great.
So, you know,
it's a tough one because
on the flip side, yeah, sure, I'd love to
see less conflict. I'd like to see us not
have to make bombs anymore to drop on
people. I think that'd be cool.
you know well there are there's also game theory which comes into all of this and and um ultimately
in in game theory you've got to consider what your opponents are doing so for example i don't
think anybody wants to to have nuclear weapons running around but as long as your enemy has them
you need them and we may we may have experienced the immense amount of peace that we've had
since World War II on the fact that the atomic bomb was developed
because it's kept people perhaps from having world wars.
Knock on wood.
I hope we don't have any more world wars.
But throughout my life anyway, I haven't seen any world wars.
And looking back on the ones prior to my birth, it's a godsend that we haven't had them.
Yeah, without question.
But game theory becomes very important in the way you look at this too. So maybe we need some people that are willing to be violent, and I'm not making light of being violent, but are willing to be violent to protect us from those on the other side that are willing to be violent. And I think it's a kind of a tit for tat.
It's like that adage, right? Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
Oh, yeah. I think that's a pretty good saying.
Yeah.
But I was getting to, what was I getting to? This change.
I would argue, based on some of the things I've just told you, that because feminism is geared towards social constructionism, fat studies where, you know, they're saying that you can be healthy and fat and overweight, obese, for example, at the same time is doing a disservice.
We need people searching for the truth on university campuses.
And those that want to have ideologies or promote political ideas, those should probably be in think tanks, not on university campuses.
So I'm arguing that feminist studies be removed from campuses where they can function as whatever they function as, political entities, where they don't have to worry necessarily about getting the evidence and data to back up their ideas.
Whereas in the university campus, when you're talking to young students with young minds, I think you should be supporting your data and your information.
I know that's controversial, but it's certainly a scientist's view of the world.
Yeah, I guess I would struggle to find the controversy in education being based around solid, you know, data facts or fact finding, right?
There may be a lack of data somewhere, and that's a great place to write a thesis, right?
Right.
And that, again, furthers that data-driven approach to education.
Well, take fat studies, for example.
I was literally astounded to find that there were people saying health at any size.
And yeah, you can be healthy like a sumo wrestler and be very healthy, but almost obese.
But that's a whole different story than a sedentary person who's overweight and saying, oh, that person can be healthy too.
Or that the patriarchy makes us not to like overweight women and that culture is forcing us only to be attracted to attractive women.
That doesn't make any sense.
and I'll certainly be the first to say that we shouldn't discriminate against people that are overweight or obese.
But telling students that it's okay to be overweight is just not thinking about them.
It's not thinking about their health.
And yet it's just running rampant in the fat studies literature.
The whole idea is so.
That's actually a new one to me.
I didn't know that there was a track for that.
Oh, Fat Studies has been in Feminist Studies for quite some time.
Decade?
Oh, longer than that.
I was criticizing it way back in the 90s.
Hmm. Interesting.
In fact, it's almost gotten to a point where some feminists, I wouldn't say all of them, some overweight feminists are proud of the fact that they're overweight and that it's kind of a, well, we'll stick it to the man here.
That's the mentality that I see on campus sometimes.
Look, if you want to be overweight, that's fine with me.
I just don't – I would hate to see – I hate to see them teaching young women to – and that's mostly who they get in their feminist studies.
They don't allow men in for the most part.
So you get only women hearing this.
And that seems to be a bad situation.
I find irony in the celebrities that say it's okay to be obese and they sing about it and talk about it.
And then they disappear for a couple of months and they come back and they're thin as a pencil.
And you're like, hmm, I thought it was okay.
Well, don't get me wrong.
I want to make this point.
I don't, I'm not, I think there's some bad things that we have in society.
For example, it may be very bad that we tend to have supermodels out there and we're using those models to convey to women that this is the way you should look.
because that leads to things like bulimia.
And we don't want to hurt women like that.
So we've got to be careful, I think, as men to watch out on that.
I just kind of leave it there, I guess.
No, and I think that is important, right?
And it's also interesting to think what we see today as being beautiful.
Again let go back 100 years That wasn the standard of beauty You know people were you know were almost not almost but you know
often times the more
you know portly you were
the more well to do you were
right
and you know I think that
you know extended back
for you know millennia
right
but at the same
And at the same time, I think overall, you know, there's been a big shift.
And I agree with you on the supermodel part immensely.
I spent a period of my life doing
you know
counseling if you will
for people that had various
disorders and eating disorders were one of them
honestly one of the most challenging things that you can
I mean drug addiction holds no
food addiction is really sugar addiction
Well, food addiction in general, drug addiction holds zero candles to it, right?
At the end of the day, you're literally, it would be like going to a heroin addict and say, okay, you have to take three of these a day, but you can't do more than this little teeny amount and only at these three times a day.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah, extremely challenging.
And like you said, that, you know, body dysmorphia that comes about in a soft pressure way, right?
It's not even that anyone's outwardly saying that this is what you should strive to look like.
It's that it's pervasive and known as the ultimate signal of beauty, right?
Yes, and to go back to what you're saying,
There have been all kinds of studies that have shown that men differ slightly within one culture.
They will choose a whole set of women beauty, and they will rank them.
And then men outside that culture will rank the same women, and they might rank them a little differently.
but the ones that they see beautiful are the ones that people outside the culture see beautiful
and vice versa. So people tend to think women in their own culture are the most beautiful,
but outside of their culture, they would say, okay, we agree on who's beautiful. And it also
turns out that weight plays a role. There are some cultures, no doubt, like you mentioned,
where overweight people are a sign of having great wealth.
And these come in cultures where there is shortages of food.
And so you can see why there would be a real emphasis on beauty
in a culture where there are problems getting food.
But other than that, I think we have pretty much the same standards
across cultures as to what is beautiful, even though we may think women in our own culture.
And this goes for women too. Women also like attractive men. Women are much more likely,
for example, to cheat with attractive men, but marry someone that isn't so attractive
because they're basing their long-term relationship on how much resource he can bring in as opposed to
his looks.
So kind of interesting, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
Alex?
No, I don't know.
Yeah, no.
I don't know.
Like you said, there's a lot of complexity to it because you think about what to say.
I don't know if I want to say that because it might offend the wrong person or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, we have to be careful.
I agree.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I think, you know, from my standpoint, it's more about making sure that the message is what I wanted to say than it is the content of it, right?
a lot of people misconstrue what what someone says as being something completely different
or take something out of context and and don't I know yeah right and so that I think is one of the
things for me at least that that you know causes me pause and and to kind of how do I want to word
this and and frame this that it doesn't come across as like aha I gotcha you know what I mean
someone else could say that, right?
Instead, it comes across as a statement that I meant to say
and with the meaning that I had behind it, you know,
which is sad because we didn't used to have to self-censor as much, you know?
And I think the free exchange of ideas needs a revival, honestly.
It sure does.
I agree 100% on that
So I was just kind of thinking about the relationship my wife and I have
and you know it's not like I'm above her or she's above me or whatever
I kind of think of it like a car and like someone's the engine
someone's the transmission but we can't do both the same job
but we both are necessary to make the car go somewhere
that's kind of how I think about it
Well I think my wife and I we've been married for 40 years
And I think one of the way we share ideas is that we both said, okay, it's pretty much everything for the kids.
You know, yeah, we can have our own lives.
But we were very focused on what would be best for our kids.
So she stayed home when she first had kids for, I don't know, I want to say six or seven years.
And then went back to work after that.
But she really wanted to stay home.
And I made sure that I married someone that wanted to stay home because I didn't want children raised, you know, outside of a, what do I want to say, where both parents worked.
So, and my wife really wanted that too.
I'm not saying that's best for everybody, but I think ultimately, though, it's good for the kids.
Well, I think there's a lot of value to that, right?
And, you know, I would say nowadays it's become exponentially more difficult to achieve that level of independence in being able to do that.
You know, we don't at least, you know, not in quite some time.
We haven't lived in a world where, you know, a single family or a single family with children can have a single person working.
and be able to do that and provide in a manner that is, you know.
Well, we went without a lot to do that.
I mean, we did, but it was consciously done.
Sure, sure.
And I mean, even more so today, right?
Yeah, I think so.
I look at the price of things, right?
Oh, yeah.
And especially, and this is going to be dependent on your age
and a number of other factors, but in general,
if you're under 30 and you're out there wanting to start a family,
I think it's going to be a really, really difficult thing to put yourself in a position where you can have a single working parent and one that stays home.
I think financially, it's just almost, you know, it's near impossible unless there was something set up, some form of generational wealth or something that allows you at least some breathing room.
Or you were really, really good with finances and managed to put together a solid nest egg, right?
Yeah, that's one of, I think, the bad outcomes of feminism was that, you know, we sort of forced a situation in our society now where both men and women have to work.
And I think, you know, it kind of hurts the kids.
You have a lot of locky kids now coming home, you know, or having to go when they're younger off to, you know, to.
I wouldn't say be raised by someone else, but certainly they don't get to be around their parents as much as they were.
You're certainly getting input from people that may or may not share the same values and ideas that you do.
Right.
Correct.
And yeah, I would also say, you know, understanding where you're coming from, I would say a large part of this is due almost directly to fiscal policy and some of the things that we have done with our system of economy at this point.
You know, the fact that, you know, we operate on debt and, you know, have essentially devalued our own currency by printing money and increasing the supply has a lot to do with that.
Right. I certainly think that the civil rights movement was a good thing.
I really do. And I think, you know, women being, you know, I think it's, it's, you know, in my lifetime, women couldn't, you know, own a home or, or have a bank account. Let me take that back. They couldn't buy a home because they couldn't get a loan and they couldn't take a, you know, get a bank account or a credit card in my lifetime. Right. And, and I think that's, I mean, it's a wonderful thing that that doesn't exist, but, you know, there's also a big question mark on, on, you know, how much of a role.
that played in in kind of creating some of the economic conditions that caused you know more
more workforce came about almost overnight and you know obviously you know we increased the supply
yep i agree you're talking about the detriment of having both parents working i think it's even
worse uh you know these single parent homes where there's no father around for a lot of them
I don't think it does anybody any favors either.
I would agree with you.
And this, of course, is something that feminists do not like to talk about.
But I think eventually it has to be addressed.
You know, is it in the interest of your kids, best interest of your kids, to not have a parent around?
And if it isn't, is there a way to work around it?
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
I think there's a lot of room for improvement in that.
You're not, you know, obviously not going to get rid of the underlying, you know, reason for that.
But, you know, what happens afterwards?
I think there's a huge amount of room for improvement in the system and part of it being, you know, you know, barring, you know, the extreme circumstances for that being a complete and total.
In this case, I would say an equitable split.
Right.
Not big on equity in general, but in that one, I think there's merit to equity because it makes the most sense for the children and for the consistency of the family unit.
Right.
All right.
Well, I think we're probably at a fairly decent place for starting to wrap things up.
I really appreciate your time.
Thank you for having me.
I think this was a great conversation.
Yeah, it was.
So one question we always ask our guests is, you know, I think it's important for us to be able to recognize individuals or, you know, people that had a significant impact on our lives.
so one person you'd like to give a shout out to for having that positive impact in your life could
be sixth grade science teacher it could be a professor it could be an author it could be
a historical figure it could be anyone well it seems rather easy to me
you know short of being making my father the choice I think I because my father was a great
influence on me, but I would say Darwin. Charles Darwin has basically given us evolutionary
psychology. He was so great. I still have on my calendar when his birthday rolls around,
which was here in February just recently. And just that one man could see so much,
Not only did he come up with natural selection, but he came up with sexual selection, which is what I was talking about earlier, how women choose men.
That's sexual selection.
If we have a red cardinal flying around, Darwin said, that doesn't make much sense.
How does that work?
Because red cardinals seem to be obvious things that animals could eat over not being red.
Well, yes, there's competition there.
the red cardinal wants to be selected by females. That's why they're red, because for whatever
reason, females like red cardinals, but so do cats. So, you know, you're rolling the dice there,
and you get your genes passed on by being red. And by the way, we see that among humans to some
extent. Men are much bigger risk takers than women in general. I know we have a lot of risk
takers out there that are women, but men are generally more bigger risk takers. And it's one
of the reasons why men die so young. Men tend to die much younger than women. And by the way,
men kill men much more than they kill women. And that's all back to this competition thing. So
it all seems to make sense in a big picture kind of way. But yes, Darwin, I would go Darwin.
Awesome. That's an interesting choice. At least it wasn't Maslow.
Sorry.
All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. Do you want to take a little bit of time and tell people what you're working on, what you've got going on, anything pointing them in a direction?
Yeah, I've just gotten involved with the Comet Research Group.
This is a group that thinks that, and I agree with them,
that thinks that at the end of the Younger Dryas, which existed about 12,800 years ago,
something struck.
Comet might have been a meteorite, might have been many probably,
that struck Earth and caused perhaps the end of the megafauna.
You know, the mastodon, the woolly mammoths, the saber-toothed tigers, and maybe even Clovis culture here in North America.
So very interesting, finding a lot of evidence for it.
So yeah, that's what I'm working on.
If I could say so, if you want to see some of the papers I've written, you can check me out at markdefant.com.
It's M-E-R-C-D-E-F-A-N-T.
And if you want to contact me, you can find my email there too, if you'd like.
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, that's an interesting one and one I've been following for a bit of time as well.
Oh, you know about it?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I can't remember the gentleman's name at this point. I can see his face, but I was introduced to the theory of this a while back and I was like, eh, and then I started looking at what was being presented and I was like, okay, well, maybe this makes sense, you know?
so it's an interesting
thing so that's pretty cool
alright well thank you again
for joining us
it's good being with you guys thanks a lot
well thank you again
for watching us for another episode of the
Space Tomatoes podcast
you know where to find us we're everywhere
literally everywhere just go find
type in the Space Tomatoes podcast
and you'll find us YouTube
Spotify we're now on
fountain.fm so if you want to go check
us out there and support us through Fountain, you can.
And we also are now on Noster, which is a protocol and censorship
resistant because nobody owns your account
except you. So check that out too.
And remember, wherever
you are, whenever you're watching this, have an
amazing day. See you, everybody.
Thank you.