2210: Unlocking Primate Secrets: Exploring Emotions, Gender, and Human Evolution with Frans de Waal

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This is Jason Hartman, your host. And every 10th episode we do something kind of special, kind of different. What we do is we go off topic. So regardless of which show it is on the Hartman Media Network, whether it be one of the financial shows, economics, real estate, investing, travel, longevity, all of the other topics that we have, every 10th episode we, we go off topic and we explore something of general interest, something of general life, success, value. And so many of our listeners around the world in 164 countries have absolutely loved our 10th episode shows. So that's what we're going to do today and let's go ahead and get to our guest with a special 10th episode show. And of course on the next episode we'll, we'll be back to our regular programming. Here we go.

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome empowered investors.

This is episode 2210 and you know what that means. It is a 10th episode show where we discuss a topic of general interest and today will be a very interesting topic. Our guest will be Franz de Wall, who found the origins of morality and apes and he unfortunately passed away.

Since we recorded this interview, we lost.

A brilliant man, an unusually popular primatologist. He drew attention of Newt Gingrich, Isabella Rossellini and Philosopher Peter Singer and the reading public. He's the author of many, many books.

And I think you'll really enjoy this.

Interview and learn about how animals have morality and how our closest genetic relatives compare to our version of morality.

So I think.

I think you'll really enjoy this interview. We'll get to it in just a moment. Got a few things for you before we start. First of all, renting renters. Well, this Wall Street Journal article recently was pretty interesting. It says, these millionaires, which by the.

Way, a millionaire ain't no big deal anymore.

Thanks to inflation, these millionaires can afford their dream home, but they're renting instead. How expensive is the housing market? A growing number of millionaires are choosing to rent instead of buy, reflecting major shifts in the math of homeownership for even the wealthiest Americans. And folks, of course, this makes a lot of sense. Maybe they've been listening to my show.

I know a lot of them have.

Because you know how I teach you about rent to value ratio or RV ratio? Well, the RV ratio of a low priced entry level home is very favorable to the owner, the landlord, the investor. Whereas a high priced home, that rent to value ratio becomes very favorable to the tenant. Yes, to the tenant. And the best plan financially. Of course, not every decision is a financial decision in life, but the best plan financially is to own a lot of entry level homes you can rent to other people and to rent a beautiful home for yourself. That is the way you will definitely get the best financial deal. So consider that. I mean, it's very much worth considering. You know, I was in Austin, Texas last week and I visited a friend's home that's worth about $1 million. And he and his wife have been living there for five years. And I said, don't tell me, I know what you're paying in rent. And I said, $3,700. And he said, well, they actually raised our rent. They jacked us up to $3,900, but their house is worth, you know, 950, a million dollars. And that is a much better deal to be a renter. And so I educated my friend on this fact and explained RV ratios to him. Unfortunately, he at the time did not listen to the podcast or watch the.

YouTube channel, but he's probably watching it.

Now and hearing this and think, why are you talking about me? Okay, the article goes on to say, between 2018 and 2022, the share of households with annual incomes of more than 750,000, that's not bad. That's more than 10 times the median income, obviously, way more than 10 times that. Rented, okay? So incomes with 750,000 a year annual income, these people, the number of them renting rose by 10.5% according to census data. I Pooms, it says, at the University of Minnesota.

And they were. This was analyzed all by the Wall Street Journal.

So people are getting it. And this makes sense. And like I've said lately on the show, you know, we have real political risk finally in this country, unfortunately, we have real political risk. And you know, I think you're just better off renting a nice home for yourself where you can move on a moment's notice. I mean, what if communist Kamala Harris drops 20,000 Haitian refugees into your neighborhood tomorrow? I mean, what are you going to do if you own your house, the value is obviously going to go down because they're eating everybody's cats and dogs and, you know, causing litter and vandalism and crime and all this stuff, right? So you could just move, you could just up and move really easily if you're a renter. You can't do that so easily if you're an owner, okay? You have a lot more flexibility and it's a much better financial deal to rent an expensive house for yourself, as I have explained ad nauseam. So really consider this. And I know it's not just a financial decision, but it could be an important political and safety decision and quality of life decision, right? So think about it from that perspective, not just the financial windfall that you get by renting a high end home for yourself. Okay? Moving on. Here, look at this. So Trump on the campaign trail says he would ban mortgages to undocumented immigrants. And just in the title itself, look at the political correctness. You mean criminals entering the country illegally, Right? That's what they are. They're not workers without papers. Hillary Clinton. They're not even undocumented immigrants. They're illegal aliens. Okay, stop with this. Woke speak. Right? Can you imagine? Can you believe they can even get mortgages? I mean, that is, on its face, it's absurd. Why would any country, I bet we're the only one stupid enough to do it. Why would any country ever give mortgages especially sponsored by government sponsored entities that you're paying for? Everybody, you're paying for this. Why would they be allowed to get mortgages? And how do they do it? I mean, how do they have a credit score? You know, are the lenders so afraid probably that they're going to get a discrimination claim against them or something that they just Break all the rules, but they won't break them for you. You know, you as an honest, taxpaying citizen, you have to follow all the rules. And the rules are becoming more and more burdensome on you. I mean, just think of the way life was 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, it was just much lighter. Now we are being buried in paperwork, in laws and rules, and only the good tax paying citizens have to follow them because everybody else gets a pass. It's just absolutely sick. I mean, in California, not only will they give you a mortgage, but they will literally buy a house for you if you're an illegal, give you a driver's license, let you vote without id. I mean, you can't write fiction like this. It's so. It's so stupid what we've come to. It is just pathetic. And there's only one person in the spotlight that's going to change that and that's Trump. Okay, love him or hate him. And if you hate him, maybe it's because you think, oh, he slept with side girls, right? You think he's an infidel. Compared to what? Compared to the side girl herself, Kamala Anderson, who slept with a man who was more than 30 years older than her. And not just that he was 30 years older. He looked way more than 30 years older. Look, I met Willie Brown in person, okay? My uncle was friends with him, my aunt is friends with him. In fact, my aunt and my cousin visited with Willie Brown in their living room about three weeks ago. Okay, so you know, they know him. All right, I've met him and let me tell you, he had, I think he had three kids at the time, a wife and. Kamala Harris. Yes, the candidate, the party girl, the side girl, okay? She was sleeping with him and he bought her a brand new BMW because that's what every boss does, who appreciates their employees, right? Yeah, sure. It's just sickening, right? It really is. Okay, 5 to 6,000. The article says the estimated number of home loans made to undocumented people. Oh, now they're undocumented people Living in the United States last year according to the Urban Institute. So you're paying for that, folks. And I bet the default rate is through the roof on these loans. So you're paying for that too. You're not only paying for the whole operation of the ngo, the secondary mortgage market. Right, sorry, the government sponsored entity, not non governmental organization. You're paying for the default rate. You're paying for all kinds of stuff, okay? You're paying for all of that now a lot of people want to spin. Everything is right and left, and I do that at times. But here's a new thought for you. And I published this on Facebook and Instagram today before the thought police come and take it down. There is no such thing as left or right anymore. There is only the overlord class and the surf class. Which one are you in? Yeah, I think most of us are in the surf class. Even if we have money, you know, we're still basically serfs.

Okay.

It's better to have money than not have money as a serf, for sure. But, you know, without big time political influence and being in the elite, elite class, we're pretty much serfs. And the overlords are the people we have to, we have to vote them out, we have to get them out of office. It is absolutely unbelievable that we are in this situation. This has got to be the just the craziest, craziest political environment ever. And we have legitimate political risk. So let's hope things work out in a very short time for the better. All right, that's all I've got for today in the intro portion. Let's get to Frans de Waal for a very fascinating 10th episode show interview. And remember, we will have our Empowered Investor Pro meeting coming up here in just a couple of weeks. And then in about three weeks, we'll have our monthly masterclass meeting coming up as well. So we'll get that information out to you soon.

For both of those, let's get to our guest, Franz de Waalt.

It is my pleasure to welcome Franz de Wall to the show.

He is a retired professor in psychology from Emory University. With a wide body of work, many books, interesting topics on primatology, and we are going to learn today about how our closest relatives are very similar to us and how they're different. What are their emotions like, what are their gender ideologies like? Yes, ideologies. Animals we're going to talk about. So I really look forward to diving into this. Franz, welcome. How are you?

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

It's good to have you.

So, first of all, you've got such.

A big body of work. So many books. How many books total, by the way?

At least a dozen, I would say. Okay.

It's hard to keep track when you've got that many.

I don't count so much, but I'd.

Like you to just, if you would, sort of touch on the broad body of work that you've been engaged in, because these books have really fascinating titles. And they are rather varied in the rabbit holes, if you will, that you go down.

Well, they always deal with social behavior. So social intelligence, emotions, cognition, behavior of. But especially barbers and chimpanzees, which are our two closest relatives. And humans. I compare easily with humans. I started out with power relations like chimpanzee politics. I introduced the term alpha male that you probably sometimes encounter. So I started out with that kind of thing and then later I got more interested in the intelligence of animals and the emotions of animals and empathy. I do a lot of studies of empathy, morality, because morality is related to empathy. The last book is on gender, so it's on the sex differences in the primates and in humans. And so, yeah, it's quite a range of things, but it's always related to social behavior.

It really is fascinating. So maybe we'll start with that first thing that you mentioned. There's certainly no shortage of use of the term alpha male. Is that a real thing or is that just sort of a mythology that we've all created? Tell us about the alpha male ideal.

Well, the alpha male term comes out of both research and just refer to the top ranking male. And in the primates too, we use the term alpha male and alpha female for the top ranking individuals in the male hierarchy or in the female hierarchy. They don't need to be nice, they don't need to be nasty. So some people think that alpha male means a certain personality type. I don't think that's the case. I would say in chimpanzees, for example, the alpha male, four out of five cases, is a very responsible leader. He breaks up fights in the group, he protects the underdog, he keeps order and he can become extremely popular as a result. One out of five is a sort of tyrant, is a dictator. And the humans, we have those two, of course, and the chimpanzees are not always happy with those and they try to get rid of them and so they don't last as long.

Yeah. And you know, that's an interesting distinction.

Because I think most people would have the perception that the alpha male is this kind of tyrannical bad boy, if you will. But really the alpha male, if they're a good one, they're a good leader, they break up fights, they keep the tribe or the group as a cohesive unit. Right, yeah, yeah.

And so as a result, they become very popular and loved by the group. And they don't. They will defend them if there's a challenger, a younger male who wants to take their position. The whole group is going to defend the older male because they, they prefer this male. And so if he's a good leader, they, he becomes. It's like almost like a democratic process. If he's not a good leader, they will support the challenger. And if he's not, if he's good, he will keep trying to keep him.

Yeah, very interesting.

Okay, take us through some of the.

Other work and some of your other theses. I mean, you know, the titles of your books are just great. You know, animal emotions and tell us about empathy in animals.

Well, empathy, I started studying with the chimpanzees because I noticed that after fights, if one of them loses, the others will come over and try to calm them down because they are screaming or getting away from the situation, and others will embrace them and kiss them and try to calm them down. And one time I attended a lecture by a psychologist on child behavior, and she said, we study empathy in children because the word empathy was never used for animals. People didn't think animals would have that. And she said, we studied in children by asking a family member to cry and then see how they respond. And if they go over to the person and they touch them and stroke them, we call that empathy. So if that's empathy, I have tons of it in my animals because they do that the whole day. Basically, that's how I got involved in empathy studies. And now empathy is being studied even in rodents and in dogs and all sorts of animals. And we use the term now freely for animals.

So do humans have a greater level.

Of these emotions or do we just give ourselves more credit for having emotions? I've long been an animal lover, especially dogs, maybe our closest companion. But I've also been just incredibly dismayed at treatment of animals in the industrial meat production industries and so forth. I mean, these animals have emotions, they have feelings. They need to be treated reasonably well. And I just want to say I'm not a vegetarian.

Okay.

You know, I'm not coming from that perspective, but I do think that, you know, even if we are king of the jungle, right, and we're going to have our prey too, you know, we're going to be predators. Should we really believe that animals have the level of emotions that humans do?

Well, I think for the other primates, like the apes, yes, I think social, emotionally we are extremely similar to them. And intellectually we can have a discussion about where the differences are, but socially and emotionally, we are extremely different. We also have the same facial expressions, of course, as many of the primates. But I Think in general. We have now discussions about pain in fish, pain in eating, even invertebrates like octopus and animals like that. And so once we start accepting that animals are not machines, you know, 100 years ago, we thought they were machines. Once we accept they're not machines and they have sensations, positive and negative ones, that brings moral obligations, I think, and you're right on that, is that we cannot just treat them like rocks. They are not rocks. They are sensitive beings. And this applies across the board to all sorts of them. And so, yes, that brings moral obligations to us.

On the emotion element, we got that.

Do animals exhibit humor?

I think so.

They certainly laugh and they certainly play.

Yeah. So chimpanzees, for example, they have a laughing sound which goes a little bit like kind of sound, and they have a facial expression that looks like laughing. And they do that especially when they tickle each other and they play with each other. But we've also seen situations that I think betray a sense of humor. So, for example, one time we had a guy who. Who on our team, who put on a gorilla mask and hit himself. And then he showed himself to the chimpanzees to scare them, and he did that a few times, and the chimpanzees got very angry and they threw a lot of stuff at him. And at some point he took off the mask and all of a sudden all these chimpanzees had laugh faces, which I'd never seen, just like spontaneous like that coming. Coming up before. And it's almost as if they thought this was a funny thing that he had done, you know.

Very interesting.

So, broadly speaking, you know, in your.

Book, our inner ape leading primatologist explains why we are. Tell us broadly about that. Why are we, who we are?

Well, we are primates, and our whole psychology is primate psychology in my mind. Our intellectual abilities may be different, although not as different as people think. But, yes, we have language and we have abstract thought. And so, yeah, there are a few differences, but the way we deal with each other, like the power relationships, the friendships, the love, the children, the way we handle each other, I think is very primate like, and I don't see fundamental differences there. So I'm interested in. In that side of the human species, not necessarily the most intellectual accomplishments, but more like your regular social life. And I think in that sense, we're very much primates still.

What about the element of abstract thought, though? Chimpanzees, apes, et cetera, bonobos, do they.

Have abstract thought like we do?

Well, to some degree, because we have More and more research now, for example, on planning can they plan ahead, which McGregor sought. And so people do experiments on that. They give them tools, for example, that they cannot immediately use, but they can only use them tomorrow. Or in the wild. We see situations where chimpanzees bring tools from long distances to certain, certain, let's say termite hills, which means that they must have been planning to go there, otherwise they wouldn't have done that. So we're interested in planning and looking back in time and looking forward in time and yes, that requires some abstract thoughts.

Yeah, no question about it.

Okay, good.

Well, the topic du jour nowadays is definitely a huge topic we keep hearing all about. It's just a non stop discussion. It seems lately I'm frankly rather worn out on the topic because it's just all over the media. But it is the topic of gender. And your most recent book is entitled Different.

Okay, I brought it just a subtitle.

All right, great. So give us the subtitle of different.

If you would then Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

Okay, so what can we learn about human gender and primate gender here?

Yeah, so initially I thought when I started writing that book that it was going to be on sex differences in the primates and sex differences in humans and comparing the two. And yes, there's many comparisons that you can make. And that's what the book is partly about. I got interested in gender diversity. So in, in the primates I know many individuals who deviate from the typical pattern. So first of all, you have qu. A bit of homosexual behavior that's present in all the primates. And in bonobos, which are also very close to us, I would say it's to rule. I call them bisexual because they have a lot of that kind of behavior. And also you find quite a few individuals who don't fit the mold of their gender. So for example, I describe a female named Donna who acted like a male and started to look like a male and associated with the males. And if I would have asked her gender identity, which I didn't and I couldn't, she would have probably said that she, she identified as a male because that's how she looked and how she acted.

Well, so how do you know that?

What, what about, I mean, with human mannerisms and dress?

Right.

That's how you're gonna know the gender preference, gender identity. Right. How would you know that with a primate? I mean, how can you know?

So, so that female Donna when she was three years old, which is just a little baby she already wanted to wrestle with me, and she wanted to wrestle with the alpha male of the group, which is something that young females really, really don't do much. That's a young male behavior. They do a lot of wrestling and roughhousing. That's what they love to do.

Just like male children, like young boys.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. That is a difference that we see in all the primates, is that the females are interested in infants and dolls, if you give them dolls. And the males, they like to rough house with each other. And so Donna, from a very early age, she wanted to wrestle. And then when she GRE stronger and older, she developed the shoulders and the hair and the big head of the males. And she started to show what we call display behavior, is that the males put their hair up and they like to intimidate others as they started to do that kind of stuff also when she got older and so she started to act like a male and associated with the males. She was not an aggressive character. She was completely accepted to the group. That's the big difference, I think that I see was the gender diversity in the primates versus humans. Is that in the primates, I've never noticed that they make a big deal about it. They accept these individuals as they are. Yeah, humans are very normative. So if you. If you were to eat with your hands, people would probably comment on that and say that you shouldn't be doing that, even though there's a billion people in India who eat with their hands. But you. You're not allowed to do that, because in our culture, we don't do that. So we are very normative species, and we apply that also to sexual behavior. And the primates, I've never noticed that they do that.

So the primates do not ostracize someone who isn't identifying with their biological gender, is what you're saying, Right?

Yeah.

And humans obviously do that, although, you know, maybe that's changing.

But is it an issue of nature or nurture?

This primate that you talked about, Donna, was the name that I identified as male, even though it was a female, Biological female.

Was that something that developed from the environment? Possibly, or was it something that just.

That's the way she or he. I guess I'll call. I'll use the pronouns.

No, it's a she. It's a she. It's a she. She was born as a she. And. And her identity, I cannot know, even though I suspect that she. She. She was very much like a male.

Right, but do you think that's nature or nurture?

And what I'm really getting at with that question is when we look at the way U.S. law and law around many countries, you know, many countries around the world, more advanced countries, I think we could all agree, you know, they generally protect immutable characteristics.

Right.

But they do not protect characteristics that are chosen characteristics.

Right.

From, you know. So I guess that's where I may be going with it. But first, let's take the first cut at that.

Yeah. So in the case of Donna, I think there were hormones involved, so she was hormonally probably different from other females. I think with transgender people in humans, we know that most of the time, it starts very early in life, like 3, 4, 5 years old, and it's irreversible. Even though the environment tries to reverse it, the children don't want to reverse it. And so if it starts early in life and it's irreversible, I would think there's a lot of biology involved, and there's actually some theories by neuroscientists of what happens biologically and why certain people have a different identity from the body that they're born in.

About those theories, if you would, before.

You go, there's a scientist named Dick Schwab who has done a lot of brain research on transgender people, and he thinks that what happens is that during pregnancy, in the first half of pregnancy, the fetus differentiates its genitals in male and female, and in the second half of the pregnancy, it differentiates its brain in male and female brain, and that in some individuals, less than 1%, some individuals, these two processes diverge, and the brain goes this way and the genitals go that way, and that's how you end up with people who identify differently from their body. And so. So there are some theories about it, I think transgender people, maybe not all of them, but the vast majority, there's some biology involved in it.

Is there maybe a percentage you can.

Apply to this, the nature versus nurture? How much percent is nature? How much is nurture?

I would say based on gender identity, probably 3/4, at least, is biological. That's my guess.

Interesting.

So how do we know that? You know, I'll call it an agenda that we have going on in society now to, you know, create basically a new industry for gender reassignment. That's an industry that's like the cancer industrial complex. Right. It's a whole new industry for the medical community.

Right.

It's. It's a small industry because.

Right.

Because transgender people, we estimate it's 0.6%, less than 1%. It's rare. And I think people make a much bigger deal about it than is necessary because I don't think it is such a big deal. I happen to be from the Netherlands, where, of course, we also had gay marriage for the first in the first country to have that. The Dutch are very liberal in this regard, and the Americans are pretty uptight about sexual.

See, America gets uptight from its sort of puritanical background.

Right.

So that's. Yeah, we. We are uptight over here about a lot of things. I agree with you.

So my attitude would be live and let live. And my message from the primates is that this kind of diversity we find in the primates, because I think variability is everywhere. I look at the moment at a forest here. There's no two trees in the forest who are the same. And in human society there is an enormous variability, and we just have to deal with that.

I don't disagree with you at all. I completely agree with you.

But the problem is, what do parents do?

You know, with this whole debate about. The problem is you have adolescence long before you have legal age and long before you have full brain development.

So this is an incredibly difficult situation with parents.

Or maybe the state wanting to assign genders before adolescence. I mean, devastating. We've heard the stories on both sides, right? On both sides there are stories that are just tragic, frankly.

What do we do?

You know, this is not a question.

Of live and let live.

Let's accept that. That's great. But when decisions have to be made with very definable timelines. Right.

What do we do?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that particular issue. You know, I'm a primatologist. You're asking a primatologist what you should be doing as parents. But my attitude would be leave it up to the children to tell you how they feel and. And what kind of pace they want to go. I generally feel that if someone wants to be called a woman or a man, just follow their advice.

That's my guess.

All right, so tell us more about.

The book, though, if you would, and the research that went into it. You talked about what you see in the primate kingdom, but other animals as well exhibit these behaviors.

Right.

Not just primates.

Yeah. So one thing that interested me is the play behavior of the primates. So as I mentioned, the young males, they like to rough house the whole day. That's what they do. And I myself am from a family of six boys, and so I know that kind of behavior. And the young females, they're very interested in infants. So as soon as the mother arrives with a newborn baby in a group of primates, it doesn't matter what kind of primate, she's going to be surrounded by young females who want to touch the baby, hold the baby, carry it. And when they become a little bit older, they become the babysitters because the mothers will trust them as the baby. So that's a typical pattern of play behavior. And I think in humans you see the same thing, even though people now try to go against it with gender neutral kind of upbringing. But I think you see the same tendencies in human behavior.

Why do males roughhouse? Are they just wanting to use their, their muscles? Is that what's behind it?

I think it's very important for young males. And that's why I'm a bit upset by the school system in the US that has now no touch policies and so is trying to prevent that kind of behavior. I think wrestling for young males is very important to test their strengths, to develop fighting techniques, to control their strengths, because very often their partner is weaker than themselves. When, for example, an adolescent boy plays with a young, young child, he needs to control his physical strength. And that controlling of your physical strength is very important for adult males. If you take a gorilla male, he can, with his hand like this, he can kill a baby. It's very easy for him to kill a baby, but he plays with babies and they survive. And so he has, in his long lifetime, he has learned to control his enormous physical strength. And I think that's a very important trait of males because they are stronger than females and children. They need to have full control and they need to be able to inhibit their aggression if necessary under certain circumstances. And so all that wrestling behavior helps the males to develop these skills, to.

Know when to stop, in other words.

When to stop, how to win, how to lose, how to keep it fun, if that's necessary, you know.

Right, yeah. Very interesting, very interesting. Okay, well, the book is huge. There must be a lot more here. I just would love to get a little more out of you for our audience. Please tell us more.

Well, you wanted to know about alpha males. The book also talks about leadership, the leadership of males and females. And people always think that primary groups are completely dominated by the male, one male. That's not the case. There's always an alpha female. Any alpha female is very important. Sometimes the alpha male cannot be alpha male without the support of the alpha female. And it's a very important character. And the Females are very hierarchical too. So some people sometimes think that only males have hierarchies. The females have them too. The word pecking order comes from hens and not from. From roosters. And so I think female leadership is underestimated, but we find it in the primates and male leadership is sometimes simplified in human societies, that we think if you're strong and a bully, you're a good male leader. But that's, for me, that's not a good leader.

How about female nature versus male nature in primates?

Is it. I mean, you know, you talk about.

Roughhousing and sort of this more outward stuff, but how do females have a pecking order, for example, with the males, it's probably more overt, right? It's just who wins the roughhousing, who's the strongest. They're sort of going to be probably put into the position of leadership even if they don't. They don't psychologically want it. Right.

The males in the males. It's a political process, so that sometimes the smallest male can be alpha male if he has the right support. So it's a political process of having buddies who support you and females who support you. The female hierarchy is a bit different because it's less physical, it's less decided by physical strengths. And as a result, older females have an advantage. So. So being older for the males is not a positive thing necessarily, but for a female, like, like I described in my book Mama's Last Hug, I des. Mama, an alpha female has been Alpha for 40 years and she died when she was 59. And. And when she died, you know, at that time, she was blind and she could barely walk, but she was still the alpha female. She was still extremely respected. So the female hierarchy is quite different. But an alpha female can be very important in a primate group, and so people sometimes underestimate that.

Does the alpha female get her power politically the way the male alpha gets it?

No, I think it's more a combination of age and personality. And don't ask me how to define that personality that.

I was just about to ask you.

That, actually, that other females look up to. So other females almost automatically, they say, well, that's our leader, and it's without a fight. And they just decided on the basis of, I think, age and personality.

You know, it's interesting that you talk.

About the age and how the age is actually a detriment for the alpha male, but an advantage for the alpha female. I would argue that in human culture it's the opposite. I mean, you know, Most women will say it's a man's world because the men become more socially valuable as they age and the women become less socially valuable. Now, largely that's because, you know, they're basing that on beauty, you know, and different ways the genders age.

But is that different than.

I think. I think beauty is not necessarily a good thing for leadership. But if you look at the leaders that we've had, female leaders in human society, Angela Merkel, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, they're all older women. And so I think. I think we have a tendency to look up to older women more than younger women. And I'm not sure that with men it's the same thing, because, yeah, you do have sometimes older male leaders. We have. At the moment, we have one, but that's not always the case.

Right, but in the male world, that would be the same. I mean, you know, look at the age of our presidents. I mean, they're very old.

Right.

You know, so.

So isn't that the same?

Yeah, I think in our society, of course, physical strength is not the rule anymore, so physical ability is not necessarily the rule anymore. Even though, just off topic, I would say we need some age limits on the presidents also.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree.

But it does need to change with longevity sciences and technology possibly maybe pushing it back over the years. What about violence?

You know, primates, are they simply becoming.

Violent when they do become violent over resource distribution and resource scarcity, or are there other factors?

Well, they can become very violent over territory, and humans do that too. Of course, our wars are basically territorial conflicts. So resources, females and territory drive aggression very often. Rape, on the other hand, is almost absent. So in bonobos, it's totally absent because the females dominate the males. In the Temple Sea, it's extremely rare. And actually rape is not very common in the primate world. It's more common in human society. And I wonder, in my book, I wonder about why that is. Why do we have more rape than other primates? And I think one of the reasons is that we live in separate houses. We have houses or huts or dwellings where each family is separated from the others, which allows a male to terrorize a female, which in the primate society is not so easy because there's all sorts of other individuals around who will interfere with that, especially other females. The females have a tendency to support females who are in trouble with males. And so in the bonobo, they have perfected that to an arc, because the females are collectively dominant over the males. They're not individually Stronger, but collectively. And so the bonobos have really a sort of me too society where the females have decided to put a stop to male dominance.

And so with the bonobos, tell us.

About the matriarchy versus the patriarchy and how bonobo culture is so different and maybe theories on why it evolved that way.

Yeah, bonobos are more peaceful, so deadly violence is basically absent. I don't think I know any case in the chimpanzees. We know many cases. So bonobos are more peaceful. The females are collectively dominant. The alpha female has a clique of all older females around her who support her position. And the males accept that situation. There's an enormous amount of sex going on. They resolve conflicts with sexual activity. And the females, they have a lot of sex with each other because they.

Well, now I know why the females are running the show.

They have sex with each other to, to. To reinforce their bonds. And so the bonobo society is very different from chimpanzees. And, and one thing that's really different is that they're not territorial. So when groups of bonobos meet, they mingle, they groom each other, they have sex with each other, the females hang out with each other, the children play together. It's totally different from what happens between chimps, where they actually kill each other, sometimes between groups. And so humans could learn something from that, maybe is that territorial aggression is really something that is more typical for us and for chimpanzees, but it's totally absent in the production.

So the bonobos are more of a collectivist society than it sounds like.

Right.

Sort of hippies, we call them hippies. Yeah, they're living in communes, the bonobos. Maybe we'll end with this topic, but it has been long debated, the forever debate that probably will never end. Monogamy, is that natural? What can we learn from primates about monogamy? Or is that a social construct, you know, or religious construct, I guess?

Yeah, yeah. I'm not a big fan of saying that monogamy is natural. I think, like, it's a social arrangement that we often prefer. If you want to see real monogamy, you go to the bird world, you will find monogamous pairs, even though we now know from the genetic data that not all offspring of a pair is silent by the male. And so also there things happen, you know, but monogamy in the primates is very unusual and most primates, they don't have it. And I would say in humans, it's something that we have probably culturally imposed. I do think falling in love, which humans do very easily at a certain age for sure, indicates that we are a pair bonding species. We like to live in pairs or small families. I think pair bonding between male and female is quite natural to us, but that's all I would say. I wouldn't say monogamy is natural to us.

So would you differentiate pair bonding from monogamy? Are those different?

Pair bonding means that you have a preference and an attachment to a certain person, which I think we do naturally. But to make it an exclusive relationship, which is what monogamy would mean, is something else. I'm not sure we do that naturally.

Yeah. So you can pair bond but still not be monogamous. That's the point you're making right now. When you look at the genders, though, is one more monogamous than the other?

No, that's the interesting thing. People always think that the males are less monogamous than the females.

That's a total myth, by the way.

Yeah, I think that's totally total nonsense because for every man who has an affair, there's going to be a woman who has an affair. So it's not. You cannot divide it that way.

I couldn't agree more. By the way, that, that old image, at least in modern times, it's just simply not true. The idea of the, you know, alpha male James Bond type who's sleeping with all these women.

Well, who's he sleeping with?

I mean, the woman. Right, so exactly. As you pointed out, and in the primate world, human females exhibit a strong degree of hypergamy, right, where they're looking to level up always and, and get the highest value male they can.

Is that true with primates?

No, because they, they don't form the families that we do. And so the, the resources of the male are not relevant to the female. So. So females may be sometimes attracted to dominant males, but there's a lot of exceptions to that. When we started measuring DNA of the offspring and so we started measuring paternity, we found that actually the alpha male is not as successful as we think. We saw that the alpha male was siring maybe 90% of the kids, but we don't believe that anymore. He has a small advantage, but not a huge advantage.

So the alpha male has more sexual partners, but not as many as one might think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, great, Franz, anything else you'd like to share?

Question, I think. I didn't ask you. Just whatever.

No, I think this is fine.

Okay, great.

Give out your website.

Tell people where they can learn more. The books are available in all the usual places, of course, with fantastic reviews, by the way. So congratulations on your books. But do you have a website you'd like to share?

I have a Facebook site. It's called Franz de Waal Public Page. And yeah, it's a big Facebook site.

Okay, fantastic.

Franz de Waal. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

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