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

22:56Yeah, that's one. There's all kinds. There's coerced and non-consensual image sharing. So we share images. Kids share images. It's kind of normative in the context of a dating relationship or romantic relationship. But non-consensual sharing of those. When adult is asking kids for nude images, that's facilitated abuse and exploitation. When adults share child sexual abuse materials between themselves or upload them or create them, all of that is technology facilitated. abuse. There's grooming where an adult may reach out either pretending to be a child themselves or not. Kids want attention and they want attention from adults.

23:31And they're also kind of good at detecting. They have much better skills than I do for sure. So there's all of those things. And there's not bright lines between online and offline or in real life. They usually co-occur. I hate to point this out, but yeah, that is one of the saddest subtexts of all this is that the predators are really good at spotting who's vulnerable and the kids that are vulnerable already were dealt a shit hand. And this is kind of the reward for that shit hand. It's so true. You're kind of obviously vulnerable. We've got some data that we've just collected and just started analyzing about abuse in the context of K through 12 school settings and kids who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, kids who identify as LGBTQ, queer kids, experience far higher rates of abuse than kids who don't.

24:17So people are very good at identifying vulnerable kids. Kids are vulnerable just as being... Any kid can be abused. And then there are groups of kids that are, yeah. But there's one more percentage of what I think is useful to kind of draw out. The 70 % is at the hands of other kids, usually a few years older. But then like 90 % of child sex abuse is at the hands of known entities. I think we've moved past Stranger Danger, but there's still that kind of like echo hangover of stranger danger. And there are people who do, there are strangers, there are people who groom kids, there are kind of predators.

24:43But even online, which was even further shocking, even online, it mirrors a little bit more. It's not 70 %? I know the percentage. No, it's more like 60 % are unknown to the child and 40 % are known. And again, those numbers vary depending on the country. So there's a little more stranger danger, you know, the Australian accessing live images of a child in the Philippines. But it's still mostly the people in your life. So 90 % you know the person and then 70 % it's not an adult. The 70 % feels like something we could address successfully. Yeah, absolutely. More than the adult that this is a pattern of the behavior.

25:20Yeah, the person who wants to go out and find somebody like you said. Yes, and has probably got well-worn skill set for that and a lot of other things. Now, I'm really curious how we define it when it is both parties are under 18. What about the two nine-year-old boys showing each other their penises? Or what about these consensual, certainly sexual activity, but there's really no age gap or there's a one-year age gap? Like, where do we draw this line to call it abuse? Well, it's so funny you said two nine-year-olds because I got a call from a lawyer in Texas once saying, so I have a nine-year-old client who's been charged with child sexual abuse by the local prosecutor because he was skinny dipping with some other kids who were, you know, within one or two years, he was the oldest, but it was like a nine-year-old and an eight-year-old and a six-year-old who were all friends.

26:06So in our country, fairly uniquely, there are states that don't have lower ages for criminal culpability. And when we think about sex, we kind of automatically add years to a kid so they're no longer a kid. If a child does something sexual, they stop being a child and they become an adult and they are treated like an adult as if they should have known better. At the same time, we don't give kids education about sex ed. We often hide that on purpose. Kids who get sex education don't learn that touching a younger kid's penis is off limits. They learn not to hit or punch or kick a younger kid, but they don't learn that penises and vaginas are off limits.

26:42And they figure it out eventually. By about age 15, kids understand much younger kids are off limits. To come back to arrest data, you see this increase from 12 to 13 to 14-year-old of arrests for sexual behavior against younger kids. And then it drops and you're like, oh, the penny drops. They figure it out. But we don't tell them that. I mean, that's one of our prevention programs is to work with kids in schools before they've made any of these mistakes to give them the information, skills, tools, and knowledge to say, hey, by the way, younger kids, not okay ever, even if they're walking around naked or playing with you or seem to be doing something sexual with you.

27:17Absolutely not. They're not small adults. Kids don't have some kind of knowledge about a lot of things that are okay and not okay until they gain some life experience or we teach them that. But again, I'm wondering like the scenario where it's two 10-year-old boys, it's consensual. It's normative sex play. One parent finds out and is somehow shamed by it. We all have experienced being young and doing like silly things with your friends. And I think some people, yeah, it's so hard. Where do we differentiate? Children should be a protected class of people. They're vulnerable by definition and they're vulnerable no matter what they've done.

27:54So I would like to see more protections. Some kids are going to need help. They may need therapy, they and their family, for engaging in harmful and or illegal behaviors. But I think we also need to do a better job of recognizing that sex play between close-in-age peers is normative. When it is mutually desired, it's not harmful. And we have laws that criminalize that as well. And so kids get caught up in a justice system that treats them, again, as if they were a 35-year-old predator when they're not. Some kids do cause harm. I definitely don't want to minimize a 9-year-old who was sexually abused by a 17-year-old at all.

28:29I had lots of little boys showing me their penises, but that was something much, much different. No, that is very different. And that 17-year-old is not a 35-year-old and probably knew he was causing harm or what he was doing was wrong. I may not have known the degree, is unlikely to have known the real degree of harm that that kind of behavior causes. And there should be separate strategies. And there are. There's really good evidence-based treatment programs for kids who have caused harm where they're very unlikely to do it ever again. This blew my mind. This was in your TED Talk. So of the minors who are arrested and convicted of a sexual abuse case, what percentage of them do it again?

29:07Less than 3%. I can't say do it again. Less than 3 % are ever arrested or convicted again. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your gas gauge before hitting the road? You genuinely thought you could make it? You were wrong. That's a very long stretch of highway where you learned exactly how far fumes can take you. And it's not far enough. Yeah, checking first is an excellent plan. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today.

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30:27That's a 90 % discount off of the usual price. Grubhub Plus membership auto renews and terms apply. Sign up now in the app or at grubhub.com slash plus slash gold. Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of, and it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Peyronie's disease, or PD for short. Peroni's disease, or PD, can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve or a bump during an erection, or for some men, lead to pain during intimacy and may impact mental health. It may also lead to anger and frustration, depression, lowered self-esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy.

31:09Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about PD. The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases, it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk through your options, including non-surgical treatment. To learn more about Peyronie's disease, visit TalkAboutPD.com. That's TalkAboutPD.com. This episode is brought to you by Walden University. So here's something I've been thinking about.

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32:48That cannot be said for the adult. Well, so there's a lot to unpack there. Sexual recidivism rates for adults who have been convicted of sex crimes against children are less than 10%. Oh, so that's low too. It's still very low. That is not the narrative. It is not the narrative. But do we believe that? A lot of people don't. The kid numbers are based on research by my friend and colleague, Michael Caldwell, who looked at data across over 30 ,000 cases. So if it was 10 cases and one kid had reoffended, I would not be comfortable saying it's that, right? But when it's 30 ,000 cases and then I was involved in a research project that included, oh my gosh, I forget the exact number, but maybe like 120 ,000 adult cases.

33:31The data are, in my opinion, incontrovertible. When you get to hundreds of thousands of cases have been followed from first offense to 20 years later, 25 years later, and you're seeing a 10 percent recidivism among adults and less than a 3 percent recidivism. I think with kids, the consequences are really severe if you get adjudicated for this. And it's a pretty clear message. Don't ever do this again. I think we could give them that message before they do it. But it makes sense to me that with kids, they don't do it again because now it is indisputable. They get it. This was wrong. This was harmful to that person that I did it to.

34:07It was harmful to me. I don't ever want to be in prison again. I don't ever want to have this happen again. Yeah, so tell us about the current standard for what happens when a kid is convicted. So it varies, and it varies within state. It certainly varies between countries. A lot of times it never gets reported and nothing ever happens, and that's not helpful to either person. If they go through juvenile court, it's called an adjudication, but it's essentially the same thing as a conviction. It can vary. You could get probation. In some states, you can be given an opportunity to go through treatment and have your record wiped clean.

34:42You can get five years in prison. You can be put on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life and have that go up on the Internet, which 9 - and 8-year-olds have and so have 17-year-olds. It is highly variable. What we know is that prison is not a helpful consequence for kids. It's harmful. Registration and notification are very harmful for kids. It just ruins our lives. You have to confront the trade-offs. So it's like, okay, we send them to prison for five years. There was a 98 % chance they weren't ever going to do it again anyways. Exactly. But now their time in prison is going to up their chance of criminality outside of sexual abuse.

35:17Yeah, exactly. Maybe three standard deviations. So it's like we're trying to weigh these, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, prison generally makes kids worse. It's not a fertile environment for growth. It is not a safe, stable, nurturing environment for children. And they were often abused in prison, too. So the very thing we're hoarding to try and prevent, we're like, okay, throw them aside. They've done something bad. They're fucked. So it doesn't really matter what happens to them. And if you're the person who's victimized by that person, absolutely sure. But I don't know if you're worried about kids being abused and you're kind of putting often very young kids or like 17-year-olds in with much more sexually dangerous 35-year-olds.

35:50Yes. It's not going to end well. There's also this, I don't know if it's true or not or legend, but prisoners seem to deal with sexual abuse inmates in a certain way. Or at least that's the stereotype I've heard. Oh, they punish. They punish. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I got to do some research at Fort Leavenworth Military Complex in Kansas, and it's the oldest prison in the United States. So I was doing this research in 2000, and they still had skeleton keys for some of the doors. It's a maximum security military prison, and the cells go many levels down below ground, and a lot of the people that came in with sex crimes had to be put in protective solitary confinement.

36:27And again, not a lot of people are going to care or feel much empathy or may be glad, you know, you did this to somebody, so now it's being done to you. That's fair. Okay, so there's multiple different groups we need to address. So one, and I think this is the one we're currently on, which is there's going to be a big, big chunk of kids who may do this in their childhood, abuse another kid, who are not pedophiles. They were confused, frontal lobe issues. You can be impulsive. You can be around other delinquent kids doing all kinds of bad things. You can be bored. You can think you had consent because who teaches kids what consent is, how you get it, how you give it, How long does it last?

37:02Half the time the kid is in freeze mode. How are they to interpret that frozen state? Oh, exactly, right? We can't even go for adults. No, yeah. So this is a very difficult thing to talk about. So I want to preface this carefully. Most kids who survive child sexual abuse will never go on to cause harm to another child. They're at greater risk of doing so. So kids who have sexually abused other kids, cause sexual harm, harmful sexual behavior, are more likely to have experienced sexual abuse themselves. This is less true for adults. The further you get away from something that's happened to you, the less impact it has on you.

37:36But for kids, it's still pretty true. I hate this statistic. I believe it, but I hate it. I know, and I hate saying it. An added benefit of having been molested is people are going to be more suspicious of you. You know, it's like insult to injury. We had this one time. Monica read this data years ago, and I'm like, oh, I hate that fucking statistic. I don't want someone to think because I'm very vocal about it. But that's what we're saying. It's not the majority. It's still a tiny. But I just sat in front of my computer today going, you don't have to say it. You don't have to say it. There's so much you could talk about.

38:02There's 300 pages. You could leave that out altogether. No, no, we must be honest. Well, it is because, again, you want to throw the book at a kid. Well, what if that kid was also victimized? So we're going to put him in prison for five years? How does that make sense? And they're often, like, repeating the behavior that they were abused themselves. Or just exposed to developmentally inappropriate material, which now we have the World Wide Web and access to legal pornography. But that's not developmentally appropriate for kids. And we have no guardrails, no age verification. and then we're like, okay, have all this, but don't do anything stupid.

38:29So there's all kinds of pathways for a kid to go down that path. We use pseudonyms in the book for a lot of the people. Connor was a great example of this because he was young. He was 11 to when he first started and 13 when he was caught. And he was sexually abusing a younger relative. But first of all, it was just kind of play. It was like, show me your penis. It got more than that, certainly. I don't want to minimize it. But then he was put into some kind of residential facility for some other unrelated non-sexual behavior. and some kid in there tried to rape him, penetrative rape. When he got out of that residential facility, a weekend release, he tried to rape or did rape his younger relative.

39:02It doesn't minimize what the effect on the younger relative was, but there's a clear path between, and there's one instance, and there are things around this, but I think it does happen with relative frequency. And then he was sucked into the system, first of all juvenile prison, but then he was sucked into the adult system, where he was sexually assaulted in prisons. His story may seem like an outlier, But this happens to kids in the U.S. all the time. Yeah, it's terrible that the initial trauma begets more and more. But doesn't always and usually does not go on to increase risk for perpetration at all.

39:34So there's this group. Yeah. Now there is another group. We're not going to label those pedophiles, correct? You know, some kids hit puberty, 14, 15, and some of them are attracted to younger children. And so they have pedophilia. Yes. Yeah. But most kids who are offending don't. Right. I'm just saying of this number, which is 70%, which is huge. It's a little higher for hands-on than it is for online. So, you know, somewhere around 40, 50, 60, depends on the type of online offense. Like non-consensual image sharing. Good luck. Huge. Right? Like it's just huge. Exactly. Yes, but I just want to be clear when we're breaking apart.

40:08In my mind, from what I read, it seems to me that there is a group of kids that are impulsive. They're this or they're exploring and they make a mistake. But they're not going to go on into adulthood with an attraction to children. Right. They age out of it. Right. So they're not pedophiles in that sense, even if they have perhaps participated in something we would label pedophilia. And then there's another group that are pedophiles. They are attracted to children and they're going to remain attracted to children for their life, probably. Correct. OK, so that group, of course, on the compassion ladder, which is harder and harder to have.

40:42Now we're getting into something that's probably quite hard for people to have compassion for. Do we have any sense of that huge number, 70 percent? Which percentage of those are whatever we call on the DSM that condition? We're doing a ton of research on this. So we've just completed nationally representative prevalence surveys of perpetration behavior in five countries. And we're still analyzing, number crunching all those data. But somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of adult males, 18 and older, will either have sexual fantasies about children or engage sexually with a child with or without fantasies.

41:15So again, people engage sexually with children without having strong sexual attraction to children. So it's somewhere between 1 % and 4 % of adults. In terms of how many people actually have pedophilic disorder or pedophilia, we don't have a good sense of prevalence of that. Based on what we do know, it's probably maybe less than 1 % of the population. What I'm going for is the approach and modality to help deal with the huge number of youths that are doing this that are not pedophiles is not going to be the same approach we have to apply to the pedophiles. This is going to be a completely different approach.

41:45You need different approaches for sure. But teenagers who recognize that they have sexual attraction to children, like the group that Luke met and introduced me to, were kids who had sexual attraction to children who did not want to act on it. And for them, some of the similar things, like here's what would happen to the child if you did act on it. Here's the consequences. Getting that information out for both groups. I guess my point is you don't need a strategy for the kid who grows out of it at 17. No, for life. To your point, when they turn 15 and they start recognizing, oh, they're too young and blah, blah, blah.

42:15They don't need an ongoing life strategy. You're absolutely right. So now we got to talk about for these kids that are going to need an ongoing life strategy. First of all, just them identifying feels completely new. And I'm so grateful, like the kid that was in your doc, that they would admit that and that they would attempt to address it the same way I have to address my addiction to alcohol. is really new and novel. And I'm just wondering how this wave has even started. It almost seems unimaginable and quite brave of them, really. It's self-diagnosed and admit this. I agree, but I think they don't have much choice in a sense because in speaking with Adam and people over the years, so many kids probably commit suicide because they don't see a way out.

42:58They don't see a way to not harm a kid or they don't see a way to live in any way that's sexually fulfilling, certainly. And I don't want to break it down too much, but there is like a distinction. I mean, it's kind of like you can slice this pie down to like just fill it away. Now we're drawing arbitrary lines everywhere. I acknowledge that. But even with this group, people who are attracted to kids, the terminology they use is age of attraction. You have an age of attraction, if I'm attracted to kids age four to 12, four to eight, whatever the case may be. It can be gendered, it can be age, but also it can be a fixed attraction.

43:23I'm only attracted to kids. And even Adam, who's not, told me like, oh, those poor sons of bitches. So he's like a young self-described pedophile who's like, oh, those guys have no hope. Because he has other attractions. He's got that kind of weaker peer age attraction. There's one question I want to ask that is an ugly question, but I know many, many people have this thought. And I personally do have this thought. If you can admit that the only sexual cessation you'll ever experience is with a child, why don't those people take a medical approach to stopping hormonally their sexuality, period?

44:01If you can first admit, it'll never be something I can explore. Why wouldn't you shut it down hormonally? Chemical castration. Chemical castration, testosterone blockers, something to turn you off as a sexual being. People do. So there's a great study. The first, we call it a double-blind placebo, a randomized clinical trial. The gold standard. Thank you, the gold standard. A colleague of mine, Christopher Romm, led this. He's a psychiatrist at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. And he ran it. And some people who have that attraction can manage it. And so they can go through life without offending and can manage it.

44:37There are people who feel like they are going to offend and they want help. They had guys driving 500 kilometers to come get this month's shot or whatever it was. The chemical castration. Yeah, and it does. It dampens down everything. So if you have attraction to adults, that's going to go down as well. But there are people who do want that. And making that available through your general practitioner would be great. Yeah. A point worth making is that it is really hard to not have sex with your desired object. It's really, really, really hard. We have a lot of machinery to drive us. Exactly, right?

45:08And I think a lot of people could use help at least some of the time. And a lot of people are not going to need help all of the time. And we've had people tell us this who have sexual attraction in children who have used the interventions that we use and we get feedback from them. And they're like, if I could just have someone that I trusted to say, take my computer, I'm in a bad place right now. Can you just hang on to this for the next 24 hours and then I'll be okay? And you get over that urge because sexual urges do wax and wane. And to have strategies for folks who are at risk to be able to ask for help, but asking for that kind of help is just almost impossible.

45:41I think it's what you said, like about having it available. I think oftentimes when we talk about chemical castration, it's like, oh, can we identify who's a pedophile or going to be a pedophile and chemically castrate them as if it's kind of imposed upon them. Having chemical castration or kind of medications to like dampen sexual drive as an option that people can get somehow. Because no one's gonna sign up to be a chemical castration forcefully. No, I'm not in favor of the state identifying pedophiles. I'm asking the question of the people that are non-offending pedophiles who have a desire to never offend, don't they want the assistance or is that not appealing to them?

46:13Some of them do, yeah. But I think it's easier to get. Also to go to your GP. Yeah. I want some medication. Exactly. Even if he said I want zero sexual desire, most GPs are gonna be like, that's not a healthy. Can we speak to your therapist about that one? Because there is a hurdle to talk about this, even to your doctor, to a therapist. And that is a real hurdle because of, you know, mandated reporting, which is a very real but very good thing, but kind of can have these, I wouldn't say side effects, have these effects of people who do have these attractions, don't feel comfortable seeking therapeutic help.

46:40I would imagine anyone is afraid of being arrested just for acknowledging that's the desire, even if you've not acted on it. Absolutely. And some people are. And so it makes it very hard to seek out treatment. We have an online intervention that's free and anonymous, and there's no human. It's self-help entirely. And we've had 1.5 million people go visit that website since 2020. We launched it in 2020. 1.5 million people. 1.5 million. And 50 ,000 have gone into one of the sessions. There's like five modules. But there's no person, so there's no risk of mandatory reporting. And it's for people with sexual attraction to children who want help to not offend it or also who want help to live a healthy, happy life and be able to manage this.

47:23Do they function at all like a other 12-step program? Like, is there a group therapy dynamic? Well, this is a self-help intervention. So it's just fully, you go through the stuff all on your own. There's interventions where there's a therapist to work with you, usually with cognitive behavior therapy strategies. There are self-help groups like the group that Luke mentioned. There's many more options now than there ever were. And they're still available pretty much exclusively in high-income countries and not available in very many other places. I could not admire anyone more than admitting and self-reporting that.

47:57I mean, I truly, I can't imagine anything braver. Because, again, we know they're the most detested group, to your point. You'd rather hang out with a murderer. Yeah. And you know that going in. And you've seen the shows and the movies. And so I can't think of anything braver. And to just like, oh, I'm broke. broke, I mean like the mental hurdles you have to jump to be like, God, I'm like this. When that penny drops, it's a bad day. That's, I cannot, I can truly not imagine having to reconcile that. But when they're in therapy, is the goal of the therapy to have them become more attracted to adults?

48:37We've learned that that's not a winning. Gay conversion therapy. Exactly. Newly legal in the United States. But I remember like some of the research when I first reached out to you back in 2012, 2013, a lot of the research, and it's got to start somewhere, was just like, oh, we know that a lot of people who go on to offend sexually against kids are like left-handed, have a high IQ, have been hit in the head with a baseball at some stage. And I'm like, this sounds real suspect to me. but I think I brought that up to you and you're like yeah and also it was kind of about there's some previous studies and correct me if I get this wildly wrong but basically you do things like show people maybe CSAM like formerly known as child pornography and then kind of encourage them just before they orgasm to switch it to peer appropriate stuff which is very much hardcore conversion and that's true right?

49:20Yeah You didn't do it People were doing what they thought might work and changing someone's sexual interests doesn't work so then figuring out skills, tools, and knowledge to manage Who can I reach out to who might be safe to talk to who I can go to in a moment of need? And again, letting people know, making sure they understand that if you do give into this, this causes real harm. Here is the damage. And also, here's what you can expect if you get caught. But then also, you know, not just avoiding harm, but then how do you give people goals to strive for? Living a healthy, happy life. And so on our online intervention, we interviewed people who have made it to their 30s, 40s, 50s without offending.

49:56We have these little snippets of real discussions with people. You don't have to offend. There's nothing that says you have to offend. You can get through this. Find whatever it takes. Here's what helped me. It's crazy the parallel between addiction treatment because you come to the program to quit drinking and only the first couple steps are about drinking. And then the rest of the program is teaching you how to live a sober life. Quitting is day one there. So now what's the rest of it? The rest of it is like learning to live a sober individual and conduct yourself in a way that will keep you sober.

50:29It's how to live life, not how to quit drinking. Yeah, not how to avoid alcohol, but how to find other things that are so appealing and attractive and wonderful that you want to do them. Yes. One of your main pushes is to have a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think of this and taking it out of the criminal sphere and putting it more into the public health crisis framing. What I think and what I would say my field believes is that we need prevention, healing and justice. You have to criminalize these behaviors. You don't have to treat children like criminals, but you have to criminalize sexual abuse.

51:04And for a long time, it wasn't. When I lived in South Carolina for 18 years, when I first got there, there was a state senator who was talking to a reporter. So on purpose and saying, well, you know, incest is something that happens in the family and should just be dealt with in the family. Now, hopefully today you wouldn't see that, but we see politicians. What was that Roy guy? Oh, my gosh, that's exactly who I was thinking about. And folks rose to his defense. Well, you know, she was 15. I know. He was in his 30s, and he was, you know, a prosecutor or whatever he was, and she had no power in this at all.

51:38I can't believe anyone voted for that. I know, and defended him. I think I heard the defense, well, Mary was 15 when she had Jesus. And you're like, ah, no. We're not saying don't have justice, don't have consequences. But I'd like to throw one figure in. We're spending$5.8 billion a year to incarcerate pedophiles. People who sexually offend. Sexual offenders. $5.8 billion being sent downriver at the end of the river. Right, exactly. And$3 million was spent to prevent it by the government at whatever time the statistic came up. That statistic is exactly right right now. That's it. Well, 5.4. Well, yeah, but it's probably 5.8 by now.

52:15We did the paper, so that's why I'm like... Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I remember. I was going to let it slide. I was going to let them have the.5 million. I was going to be the dick. Thank you. Thank you. Tariffs, et cetera. Yeah, and we fight tooth and nail for that$3 million. There's$3 million that the federal government gives for child sexual abuse prevention research. I was up on the hill on Thursday. Thankfully, we have bipartisan support to kind of keep that money in. But we're trying to grow it. We're like, this affects one in five children. And we're putting$3 million into the research on how to prevent it.

52:45Also, even if you're just fiscally minded. You don't give a fuck about victims. And you're fiscally minded. We should invest in reducing the$5.4 billion, not corrected for inflation, that we're spending to incarcerate sexual offenders. Like, why on earth wouldn't we try to prevent it? Because it'll save us money. And it's not just incarceration. We have an economics paper that shows that it's close to$9.3 billion that we can see in cost to the U.S. economy directly attributable to child sexual abuse. There's a moral argument. There's a child rights argument. And there's an economic argument to saying it's so much better if we prevent it.

53:22It's so much less expensive if we prevent this from happening in the first place. And then you don't need treatment. You don't need law enforcement as much as you once did. And it's still very, very difficult to squeeze those dollars out of the hands of politicians. It's just hard. What is Help Wanted? Help Wanted is a prevention intervention that we developed at Moore. It is for people who are attracted to children, who want help to not offend and to live a healthy life. It's online. We launched it in 2020. We developed it in collaboration with law enforcement, survivors and victims advocates, therapists, preventionists, and some other researchers.

53:59It is designed to be a tool that is safe and easy and free to access for people who want help and need help. 1.5 million people have visited the webpage. 50 ,000 people have gone into one or more of the modules we just completed, a randomized controlled trial evaluation. We're still crunching the numbers. I wish I could give them to you right now, but we just ended data collection in December and we're still working through all the numbers. Facebook, Meta, and Google send people there who appear to be searching online for CSAM. It is a resource. We've adapted it with support from Google for Spanish-speaking populations and adapted it specifically from Mexico, but we're hoping that it can serve most of Latin America and welcome the idea of adapting this intervention for other languages, other contexts, where there's really not anything else, especially.

54:45We haven't addressed gender. How does gender play into all these statistics? As far as both the group that perhaps committed a sexual assault and then grew out of that versus the group that is lifetime pedophiles, how are those gendered? Not purely, but it's a majority of men. Young men and men. That's true of all criminal behavior. There's very few crimes that are kind of women dominated. I've spoken to young women who are sexually attracted to kids, and it is a rarity and everyone's kind of like weirdly, not excited is not the right word, but just like, ooh. But in terms of why that is, it's kind of like a million-dollar question for criminologists.

55:21Maybe it's easier to describe in terms of extreme physical violence because men are socially conditioned to be more kind of aggressive and things like that. In terms of why that happens, in terms of being attracted to kids, I wouldn't even begin to know what the answer to that is. Well, there's a couple of things. For one, for people who are attracted to prepubescent children, you get much less gender because they are less gendered, right? Like a 10-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl look a lot alike. And the younger you go, the less gender. It really becomes more about age than gender and innocence or different things attract different people.

55:53And then there are certainly women who offend against boys, whether or not they have pedophilia. You see this a lot in schools. So where you see women getting convicted of sex crimes is their teachers. These are people, and there's also male teachers as well, who aren't attracted to children, didn't go into teaching in order to find victims. But when you spend your whole workday surrounded by kids, that's a risk factor. So educators, people that work with kids after school, people that are in charge of kids in different settings. Orgy people, youth counselors. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so you have stray sexual thoughts going across your brain all the time.

56:27And if you're working with the kids all the time, those are going to collide. Maybe you're particularly immature or maybe you're going through mental health or substance abuse issues or financial problems. And it's just more enjoyable to be in the company of a child who accepts you kind of unconditionally than adults do. And then you start to feel like you have a special relationship with this one child. And maybe this child is a little more mature. And maybe this will actually help this child. And you go down this pathway that no one saw coming, including you. And this does happen where people drift into good people engaging in bad behavior.

56:58And there's a lot of steps there that you could intervene. Yeah. Right? There's a lot of steps. Well, I would just imagine like 90 % of affairs don't start out with what's up. Let's go fuck in this hotel It's yeah, it's a lot of texts and then there's a picture like I think the boundary you've drawn keeps moving I wonder with female teachers specifically whether we see that over-represented in terms of your gender question is because we kind of Maybe miss the signs or don't read them If you have like a male teacher you can tell they're focusing on a student a young female student I think people have their little kind of antennas up, but if it's a female teacher I don't know we make jokes about female Oh, yeah, like you got lucky.

57:33My God, it makes me crazy. I do also just want to say that for boys that have been victimized, they're much more likely to have been victimized by a woman. So it's still a minority, but it's not nearly the same level of a minority. Like there's some studies that show like a 50-50 split. Oh, really? So I don't think there's a huge group of undetected women out there that are offending, but it is not zero. And we overlook boys who are victims and we overlook women who are offenders. And that doesn't serve us very well. No, it's not good. Is there anything, like, blame, an episode of Radiolab, where this guy had surgery on his brain, and basically then he became a pedophile?

58:13He didn't become a pedophile. He became somebody that was offending sexually. Yeah, so he had a corridor cut in his brain to stop the electrical storm that was causing the epilepsy, and they warned him he might have a shift in your personality, and what it did is it shut down the circuitry that's going between basically your frontal lobe. Dysinibition. Disinhibition and there's no correction for it. And so his started like you're saying it started with just he started watching pornography more And then he started watching more extreme pornography. The dosage was having to change and go up like an addiction There's a knock at the door and Homeland Security's there all of a sudden But he isn't a pedophile because he didn't why did you correct me on that?

58:49Yeah, and apologies. No, I want to be corrected. I just need to know so I'm doing this right Pedophilia is a strong sexual attraction to children And there are people who have, and I'm not this kind of doctor, so let me be clear about that too. But there are people that have medical conditions that are disinhibiting and it's sort of broadly disinhibiting. And so it's not that you have sexual attraction to children per se. You don't have the inhibitions to just not reach out and do something or see something. Yeah, he was eating more. He wanted to have sex with his wife more. It was all of the reward system just without any regulator on it.

59:24So that's a different thing. So pedophilia really looks like it's something that you're born with. You become aware of it when you hit puberty and start having sexual interests towards other people. There are a few conditions that seem to also drive illegal harmful behavior that are separate from what you're generally sexually attracted to. Okay. So you guys interviewed 30 non-acting adults who were sexually interested in children. And I'm curious, what kind of consistent themes did you keep seeing? That they were desperate for help. and they were desperate for help in their teens when they were most vulnerable because the only message you get is the Larry Nassar, the Jerry Sandusky, the Jeffrey Epstein that you are going to be a horrible person.

1:00:05You're going to offend. You're going to offend a hundred times and there's nothing you can do about it. That's the only message that they get. And it is so stigmatized and so horrible. Most can't go to your mom and talk. Adam did, but it took him years. One of the characters, real people in our book, they wish there had been something like Help Wanted. So we did that study in service of figuring out what we needed to do, what kind of interventions were needed to give people a place that they could go to learn more and to get some help, even if it's just reading and interacting with some video elements of the intervention, the help wanted intervention.

1:00:37They really wanted help. They wished that there were people they could talk to without being afraid of being outed or being arrested. Even if you didn't think you were going to get arrested, I would be afraid they're going to put me on a sex offender list or a watch list. Right, which is arguably worse than being arrested, or also just that you're going to have a therapist who's horrified by you. This awful fear of negative social reactions is a real thing also. So those were the things that came out again and again and again, that there was a real need and a desire. And one thing we haven't talked about is when Luke came and interviewed me, he had met these young people who were kind of white knuckling it on their own to not offend and to figure out how to get help between themselves that was safe.

1:01:19I wanted to do prevention, but I really thought it was going to be to go out and find people and convince them to come get help. It had not ever occurred to me at this point in my career that there were people seeking help so that they wouldn't offend. That was a complete game changer for me. Thanks. But yeah, and something else is kind of the theme that are kind of interesting to me is that because there were 30, 39 people for the help wanted? Some number of people, yeah. But through my reporting, which was separate, I've spoken to like 100, 200 men and women who have a sexual interest towards kids and in addition to all this is just how uniform it is maybe there's like two or three outliers who don't follow this theme but across the board everybody kind of they reach puberty they start becoming sexual beings they're kind of like i'm sexually interested in that 10 year old or eight year old they start kind of growing up that age kind of stays the same or maybe goes down a little bit and then when they hit like 15 16 17 they're like oh shit what the fuck yeah my software is not updating yeah exactly i'm a pedophile and then And they kind of fall into like depression and comorbid things like alcohol and drug abuse before they kind of even get to the stage where Adam and co are trying to look for help.

1:02:20And they're doing that all by themselves. They got to go through the whole journey of basically bottoming out before they're going to ask for help. Yeah, yeah. You have to be so desperate to ask for help. I was so wary at the beginning to make sure we weren't going to conflate pedophilia with homosexuality or even heterosexuality. It's a different category, certainly. But it seems to follow the same thing. It happens at the same ages. They kind of come to the same realization more or less at the same time. And it's innate. Many people who offend, and we can get to that in a little bit, I don't know how much time we have, but who offend who aren't pedophiles, like situational offenders.

1:02:49And that's something you should put a pin in because that's really interesting. For this category of people who have pedophilic disorder, it's an innate thing that I have no control over. And that's why I'm like, ugh, I don't want to always talk about pedophiles when we talk about child sexual abuse because there's many other facets to it, but it's the one that's kind of maybe the most interesting and novel, like an audience, because it's the most demonized and, frankly, the grossest. And the scariest. And the scariest. Because there's no control. How would you stop it? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:03:24But if you accept that this is 1 % of the population, you have to acknowledge there's 3 million people out there. So your options are either to hate and vilify them and have no understanding and watch them continue to have the amount of victims that they have. or you can go, wow, this is a real thing that we're going to have to, as uncomfortable as it is, have some treatment for and some safety in acknowledging that they have it. That's incumbent upon us to kind of evolve into that. If we want there to be less child sexual victims, that's the only thing we can do. Yeah, 100 % agree. We wrote a book kind of on a similar topic, but it's worth stating there are many people who have a block who just can't get there because they have lived experience.

1:04:09But in my experience, and it's all anecdotal, of course, but some of the people have been most supportive of my work, and I work specifically on this, people who have a sexual attraction to kids who don't want to offend, the people who support the most are survivors. They've written to me independently, kind of like DM'd or email saying like, oh, you know, I don't hate my abuser. I am still very troubled by what he or she did, but at least gives me some kind of context to feel like it wasn't my fault or the circumstances coming a bit broader than just me and even my abuser. and I think sometimes a lot of people with very good intentions assume what survivors want or need any talk about kind of empathy for what's people's attraction is just like how dare you you're kind of minimizing the experience of survivors and that comes from people maybe who don't have lived experience they're advocating I've been in this situation I'll make pedophile jokes and I've been yelled at and I'm like you don't get to tell me how I feel about it it happened to me and I do think that joke's funny and you who didn't experience don't get to tell me what's right or wrong for me to find funny.

1:05:03But I weirdly was just in this situation. I have to tread delicately, but a family situation. And my children are aware of it because we talk about this stuff really openly. My kids know I was molested. They knew who else in the family was. And my daughter asked, would you beat him up if you saw him? This person who did it to a family member. And I said, I'm so grateful I've never seen him because I would. And it would be gruesome. and I know it wouldn't help anything. And I also know something happened to him. And so that's how I feel. And I'm both the survivor of it and have loved ones who have survived.

1:05:40So yeah, I know my instincts aren't the right ones. Like I have both those feelings. I would both want to hurt him and I know it would not do anything good and he would not learn a lesson. And I don't think I know fully what happened to him that led him to that. That's my position on it. I think it's pretty human. I mean, we discussed this even briefly yesterday. like I am very much against the death penalty. Ideologically. Yes. I don't need to get too far into it, but someone I went to grad school with was murdered horrifically. I believe in the death penalty for that guy. Exactly. I would want to see him in like the most horrific of ways.

1:06:13I imagine there's people listening thinking like, oh, who are these two people defending pedophiles? Sure, maybe to some degree, but like I get it because I want this guy to be ripped to shreds. But for the person asking that, you're not defending them for the joy of defending them. You're defending them in hopes of reducing the amount of victims there are. You really need to understand that point. 38 years, what I want to do is end child sexual abuse. And it is uncomfortable. And you don't only have to focus, and we don't only focus on providing solutions for people at risk of offending. You can provide solutions to a lot of things, to technology, to the way schools are built, the situational prevention strategies.

1:06:47You can work with parents and other guardians to make them more capable guardians to reduce risk. And these things work. You don't only have to focus on people with sexual attraction to children with pedophilia or people who are at risk of offending because they're surrounded by kids all day and we need to do more about reducing those risks or focusing on kids who are at risk because they're young and dumb and they don't know the rules yet. There are dozens and dozens of ways that we can prevent child sexual abuse. Yeah, so I love that that was in the book. It's like the onus of all this was put on the shoulders of kids in the 80s with these videos, which is like you need to identify, report.

1:07:23It was all up to the nine-year-old to recognize the behavior of the kid in the car or the man in the car. What is it? Resist? Recognize, resist, and report. Yeah, that's the kid's responsibility. What the fuck are all the adults doing? There we are still. We may be beyond stranger danger kind of, but we are not beyond that. That is still what most kids get exposed to in schools. Yeah, okay, so let's do the pinned thing, and then I want to do the child sexual abuse prevention matrix. I just want to touch on what this is. So we put a pin in situational. You have kids who kind of have problems with sexual behavior and harmful sexual behavior, pedophilic disorder, adults with pedophilic disorder, and then you have a barely big proportion.

1:07:59Half or more. Yeah, we imagine half or more who are situational offenders. And these are people who have no preexisting attraction towards kids, but if you drop them into a situation and maybe they have drug and alcohol problems, compulsivity problems, immaturity, similar to the teachers. And think of like a stepdad or a boyfriend who moves into the house, the mom's working, there's like the 13-year-old daughter, he may sexually offend against that kid, causes the same amount of harm regardless of where it all comes from, obviously. But you take him out of that situation, he's not attracted to kids.

1:08:28He's not going to go out of his way to find that or reproduce that situation. So I think we focus on pedophilia for a very good reason, but there's this maybe majority of people who are sexually offending who just have nothing to do with that side of things. That's weirdly more scary than all of them. But maybe there's actually the interventions, and maybe you can speak to this. Interventions are maybe a little bit kind of clearer. Just to go back a little bit about kids, a lot of kids offend, I'm thinking of the shifting boundaries thing that Ernstine did in 2012. Kids are abusing kids often at school because that's when they're hanging out together, right?

1:08:56And so they did this study where they went into schools and asked the kids, like, what does this happen? And they're like, oh, it happens in dark stairwells, between classes, locker rooms, in the playgrounds when there's no parental or teacher supervision. and they're like, okay, well, how about we post teachers in the darkened stairwells? We put posters in the locker rooms. We cut down the hedges. And they saw like an insane decline, like 50 % decline in this kind of behavior. Something that really kind of drives me crazy about all of this is that that program also had randomized controlled trials.

1:09:21Beautifully done. Great success. And then it was, as far as I'm aware, just kind of parked. So we have things that currently exist. That work. That work and have been proven to work and that everyone would kind of get behind because it's about kids victimizing kids and it's easy enough to do because it's in school. And cheap. They found out if they did that curriculum about consent and stuff like that, and it kind of was as effective. It was just the curriculum or just the situational interventions, like putting in some light bulbs. But we just don't do it. That's confounding. Yeah, we underestimate what context creatures we are.

1:09:51That's such a good way to put it. I love that. We all behave in different ways in all the contexts as we are. This is like Buddhism. All roads, all roads lead back to Buddhism. They do. I mean, I think people are just like, ah, it's too big of a problem. Just put them away. or kill them or put them away. With the foster care system, too, we've talked about that. Like, oh, it's just too hard. It's like there are things, there's little things, but everyone just is overwhelmed by the bigness of the topic. Well, I think the more complicated, obviously, the problem is, the more inclined you are for a very quick and easy solution.

1:10:26You're incentivized in some way, right? Okay, so talk about the child sexual abuse prevention matrix. This is where we talk all about the solutions. We're the first generation to have dozens of solutions. One thing maybe quickly goes into your point before about the complexity. And it's true that it's complex, but there's been certain public health problems that are as complex that we've addressed pretty well. And we look at like road and vehicle safety, and this relates directly to the matrix. William Haddon Jr. was a public health physician. It was tasked with when they first had the U.S. Highway Whatever Act.

1:10:54He was like, OK, let's do a little matrix and figure out. We know all these fecal accidents happen. People die. People get maimed. Let's look at what happens before, during and after a crash. and whether it's like human focused or situational focused and do like a little grid, a little matrix and be like, oh, having super shiny chrome dashboards of blind people and the sun hits it, maybe we should address that. People careening through their windshields, let's put in a little seatbelt. Safety glass. It's so multifaceted. And then there's kind of things at a higher social level in terms of laws and stuff around speeding and drinking and driving.

1:11:22It took a little while, but again, we saw huge declines on something that people previously thought was inevitable. We got to get around. This is the cost of doing business. People were resistant. Like when they put in seatbelts, People were cutting them out of their cars. Child safety car seats. Folks hate those things. I used them. My mom used them. She hated them. We never used them. I'm teasing that. It would be such a headlong. Here's where I say I'm a mandated reporter. Exactly. So you can apply a similar public health approach. It's worked for other things to child sex abuse. And that's where the matrix kind of comes into play.

1:11:54We didn't invent this idea. A lot of people have taken it from roadway safety to child injury, to child abuse and neglect writ large to even child sexual abuse. But I think what makes ours unique is that we really applied it to child sexual abuse specifically and looking at, all right, well, before abuses happen, what can you do? Well, you can go into schools and teach kids to recognize resistance and report. That does not hurt kids. It's just not going to really move the needle. But you can also then teach kids, hey, how about not doing these behaviors? Here's how we avoid engaging in these behaviors.

1:12:25And that does shift the needle. You introduced this idea and the idea is the only thing that could happen to you in this scenario is that you would be a victim. You're not even suggesting like, guess what? You might also victimize someone. Yeah, exactly. That's a completely different thought. No kid probably has prior to when they do it. No one walks around thinking I'm an offender. And no parent thinks my kid's at risk of engaging in harmful sexual behaviors. And so we're just blind to the people that we love that they would do these things. But kids do and they're at risk for a lot of reasons that we've already talked about.

1:12:53You can go way upstream with school-based and camp-based and sports-based programs that give kids information, but that also give adults information like, hey, when you're surrounded by kids, you might have some sexual thoughts. Here's why we don't act on those thoughts. Here's what we could do instead. And also all the situational prevention programming. So policies and codes of conduct, you know, for educators, for scout leaders. These things work. They've implemented them in, like, Boys and Girls Club? Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and the Boy Scouts, now Scouting America, I think they're called, have been implementing these for decades.

1:13:25And we have a study led by my friend and colleague, Luciana Sidney Maiten, that shows a 31 % decline of sexual abuse victimization in the context of participating in one of the big six U.S. youth-serving organizations, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the Y and 4H. Wow. 31 % decline in a recent decade compared to the decade before it because they have been doing these things and honing these strategies. Boys and Girls Clubs of America hired an architect, Les Nichols, to help them figure out how do we make space safer? So this space is super dangerous.

1:14:02There's no windows. There's hidden cameras everywhere. So we're all being victimized. There's a large male across. There's a large male. But put windows in interior doors so that if I'm going to be alone with a kid, I'm observable and interruptible. Or make them open the door or improve line of sight, cut back on the hedges, but inside maybe don't have a bookcase in between where the security staff is or the entry staff is and where the kids and other adults are congregating. These kinds of strategies really work. It's really, really exciting. And online, we could be doing the same damn thing as making it safe by design and really reducing the risk to kids, both of experiencing harm and of engaging in harm.

1:14:43And lots of organizations are being thoughtful about how to help kids think through, do you really want to send that nude picture? Do you really want to open that nude picture? Let's take a beat, figure this out. There's some creative stuff happening and a lot more needs to happen to make sure kids are safe online and we have good age verification. And then there's norms, you know, like that norm of, well, incest happens in the the family, so it should stay in the family. That's not a norm anymore. That is a shift that has happened. Not sexualizing kids in advertising would probably be a good thing.

1:15:12Just fun fact, Noah Hawley, the incredible writer of Fargo and so many other shows, his mother started this whole bringing incest into the light in the 70s. Yeah. Her publisher was like, we'll put it out, but how many people have been a victim of incest? Like, who's going to read this book? And then all All of a sudden it was hugely successful. And that's when people started going like, oh, this is a significant chunk of the population. Well, and when you think about teaching kids to recognize, resist, and report, report their dad. Are you kidding me? So my friend Michael Cito is really working on, because that's a big gap.

1:15:46We don't have enough youth-focused prevention programs. We have some, which is great, but we don't have enough. We couldn't find any programs that really focused on how to keep kids safe in families. And again, you don't do it by saying, hey, stepdad, you might be a sex offender in waiting that you don't even know. How do you reach out to families? Blended families are at increased risk for sexual and physical abusive kids. I do know most blended families don't engage in sexual abuse against their unrelated minors. But we see in blended families where the male has biological or adoptive children and stepchildren, the stepchildren are at much higher risk.

1:16:19So there's something very protective about being a dad. It's especially protective if you're involved in your kids' lives early on. And often, so when you are really involved in caregiving as a father, that reduces the likelihood that you're going to engage in any kind of sexual or physical harm. So another kind of societal level lever that we could press and reduce child sexual abuse at scale is to encourage caretaking by dads. Like to really encourage that, to make that normative. Right? People think of the tattoo guy in the room as dangerous. Keep him wide. No, we need dads involved in kids.

1:16:54And of course, kids need them as well. But it is protective against offending against your own child. And my guess is it's also protective against offending against children, period. You change enough diapers and bandage enough knees and put kids to bed. I can't tell you how many men have heard around say like, oh, yeah, I used to be able to go to strip clubs. And now I have a daughter that age. And I realize, oh, my God, I'm disgusted by that someone's daughter. Like it took that experience. Yeah. We all develop empathy when we're kind of there. The Matrix. There's a lot of different known things.

1:17:23The matrix, there's so many things. And you can do it well before any offending is happening. We could have made the internet impossible to share naked pictures of adults with kids. We could have made that. We didn't. That was a choice. We need to retrofit it now, which is just so asinine. It just makes me crazy. Then there's what can you do at the point where abuse is more imminent? And this is where people have risk factors, like people who work with kids day in, day out, people who have sexual attraction to children, people who have started looking at more and more extreme pornography, People who are online a lot and who are online with pornography a lot, that's a risk group.

1:17:54We need strategies that can work with them that they feel safe going to, right? So if you say, hey, you're a potential sex offender, let me help you. You're going to get no takers. But if you say, hey, you've got to figure out a way to make this safe and appealing and to give hope to people. People want to think that there's hope. And so to say, you know what? We're going to help you. You got this. Here's some strategies for doing this. You point out something so obvious on the surface but could get missed is if the only approach to it is with the criminal justice system, what you're acknowledging is you're only going to get involved once the abuse has happened.

1:18:29It's too late. That's what you're funding. $5.4 billion just on the incarceration. God knows the investigation, the different police departments, the different task force. You're acknowledging you're only getting involved after abuse has happened. Why would we wait to that point? So much of it is just going to have to change the public's opinion on this because I do think so many people think like, well, why would we put money towards those people, those monsters? It's just reshaping like we're not. We're trying to stop. We can end it. Exactly. We could end it. This is a behavior. It does not have to happen.

1:19:04And you were reminding me of a stat earlier about policies that focus on people who have already offended, like registration and notification. you have to have a conviction usually to even have those apply to you. And that only covers like 5 % of all detected crimes. And so even if public notification, civil commitment, registration, excuse me, as well, were 100 % successful, which they're not, but that's kind of very complex, you're still any kind of addressing 5 % of the issue. So again, it's so tricky because I remember being in a room doing some talk years ago and it was full of law enforcement and I could tell they were like, who is this motherfucker to tell us what is going on here?

1:19:39And I could tell. I was like, oh, I'm not surrounded by friendly researchers. I'm like a lowly journalist. They're not always friendly. Yeah. But I remember just kind of realizing it. I'm like, oh, this is going to be a really long hour talk. And so I just said, look, I can tell there's some weird tension in the room, a bunch of law enforcement. I'm a journalist. Kind of what I said to you guys. Like, at the end of the day, we all want to prevent child sex abuse. We may have like quite a different ideas of how to get there, but we all want to kind of land on the same spot. Same goal. Yeah. And also to be fair to those people, it's too much to ask those people to be the ones to be compassionate because they're the ones dealing with the downriver end result.

1:20:10So it's like you're asking a cop to be compassionate to addiction. Fuck that. Half the stuff he deals with is from addicts. That's not even the right person. Like the least likely person that's going to find empathy is the person cleaning up the mess. Yeah, but we do see people. So Simon Bailey was the head of, I can't remember his exact title. He's from the UK and he was high up the food chain in law enforcement. He's the first person that said we cannot arrest our way out of this. And when you have someone from that group who says we have to do prevention, That is a powerful ally. We have to have criminal justice.

1:20:41But if 95 % of sex crimes are committed by somebody with no prior conviction. That was one prior conviction, excuse me. Yeah. Yeah. Then criminal justice is handling 5 % of this. And that's not enough. Like we can do more. So we need criminal justice. We need services for people who do survive, for children and for adults who survive child sexual abuse. And we've got to invest in prevention. Early, pre-abuse, when abuse might be more imminent. There's some really cool stuff where people who are putting in search terms that seem like they're looking for child sexual abuse materials. Now there's these great interventions that he, with a warning, that say, hey, this is illegal, harmful, but that also include a get help.

1:21:19And here's where you can go to get help. This is Kitchers who does a program, Ashton, that helps redirect. Thorne. They do amazing work. So they're great partners of Moore. And we really love Thorne. They started out where if somebody was searching online for CCM or appeared to be through some algorithm of search terms, the thing that would pop up would be a map. And the map had a pin in it and the pin was where you were. And they said, we know where you are. And this terrified people. Right. And terror is a good deterrent for about five minutes. Yeah. And then it goes away and you can't keep terrorizing people.

1:21:51So then they and others, our friends at Lucy Faithful and Internet Watch Foundation, have done some really creative things where it's like, this is harmful and you can get caught. Also, here's where to go to help. And two things happen. One, people who are just starting down the road to search for this more extreme content that involves children stop searching for. A large group of them go, whoa, I was at the abyss. I'm not anonymous. Back to the hedges. Yeah, well, or like this could have caused some harm to me and them, and I don't want to do that. and they go back to looking at legal adult pornography.

1:22:22And then some smaller percentage of people click on that. Here's where you go get help or interact with the little chat bot that's like, how can I help you not do this? So there are some creative strategies. And then there's post-abuse, which is another place you can and should act. And we have treatments for kids who have been victimized, trauma-focused, cognitive behavior therapy, validated across dozens of randomized controlled trials, really helps kids and their parents navigate the fallout. There's great interventions for kids who have already caused harm, really excellent randomized control trial evaluations.

1:22:51I led one of those. There's another one that I would say is even better because it's a lot less expensive. And then there's even interventions for adults who have offended. The best intervention really seems to be for a guy coming out of prison is surrounding them, you know, with a parole officer who knows what he did and other people who knew what he did, but are going to help him find stable housing, employment, and pro-social relationships. And those are the three keys to staying on the straight and narrow. Yeah. Not all of it will work. There will be people who re-offend. Whether they have pedophilia or not, there will be people who re-offend.

1:23:21There are psychopaths who just take what they want and they don't care. Yeah. But most people are not going to re-offend and most of them could use some support. Yeah, well, one in five in this country equals 60 million Americans. So that's an enormous group. Even if you go down 30%, that's 9 million people. If you could prevent 9 million people with any strategy, God, it's worth pursuing. We would put more than$3 million into it. Well, you guys, Luke, Elizabeth, this has been very, very illuminating, and I'm going to be more grateful. I mean, I got to applaud you, Luke. You at least have the force field of academia and research, so you can pursue this without a terrible risk to your own professional life.

1:24:00There's actually pretty significant risks. But I'd imagine as a journalist, you are not going to get tenure, and you're not going to be free. So I do think you're taking on a lot of risks to make this your pursuit, and I'm grateful for it. Thank you, yeah. I feel lucky, especially working with Elizabeth for the past five to six years on this book. It's been a wild ride. Well, I'm so glad you agreed to get interviewed by him in 2012. Me too. It's been nothing but joy since then. It really has. And we're so glad that you agreed to interview us. Of course. And the book is one in five, why child sexual abuse is our biggest public health crisis.

1:24:37And what we can do to stop it. I'm reading upside down and I'm dyslexic. You did it. I really got through it. You guys, this has been a delight. It's not a fun topic, but somehow you guys made it. It's meaningful. Yeah, enjoyable. So good luck with everything and keep at it, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing. He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here. She's got to let him have the facts. Okay, I was supposed to tell us. Oh, sorry. Just one bite. No, take your time. We don't have time. Time is of the essence. No, time is on our side.

1:25:16Explain time is of the essence to me. Okay. Okay. Time is of the essence. I mean, it is of the essence of life. It's basically the kernel for which life. It's literally the essence of life. Okay. But I don't understand it in terms of like. Now. Yeah. The immediacy. But maybe it's because time, it's gone. We just lost, it's going. It's, we already lost. It's one of many sayings that I, of course, know what the meaning is. But if I really think of it literally, I don't know why it means what it means. Yeah, time is now. That's actually true. But essence is like when something has the essence of.

1:26:03Right. This is probably old timey. I think essence might have meant something different. I think so. Speaking of time is of the essence. Yeah, I have a lot to say on time of the essence, but you start. Okay, well, I was just going to tell a story about last week or last fact check that I didn't get to, but I don't have to, but it is a poop. Tell me. It is poopy. Oh, yeah, I want to hear. Yeah, I almost talk it again. I got so close. Paint the picture. Pretend you're on Armchair Anonymous. Listen. What backstory do I need? So this is really why I'm bringing it up because I was at a friend's house.

1:26:43Okay. What time of day? Evening. Like I guess I got to the friend's house around five. I was fine. Uh-huh. You know, everything was fine. Did you eat at the friend's house? Uh-huh. But pizza, cheese pizza. Cheese pizza, no problem. No problem. Yeah. It wasn't that. Ate that, started playing Mahjong. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. You know, you play multiple games of Mahjong. I don't know, but now I do. Okay, yeah. So I'm teaching you that when you go to play Mahjong, you'll play like multiple games. Like sometimes they're just 20 minutes or whatever. Mm-hmm. So you play the first game and it's fine. Everything's great.

1:27:23Yeah. We start the second game and I'm like, hmm, I feel, as Jess would say, skiddly-doo. Okay. Okay? And out of 10, we're at a 2.5? Yeah, it's fine. And I was also like, I think this will pass. Like, this is fine. Sometimes it passes. Sure. And then it was just like it would pop, you know, would pop. It would pop back up. The cramping. Okay, not like a turtle. No, not a turtle. The cramp would come into play. Like a little joke. Yeah, and I was like, okay. Okay, so it's not really passing yet. Yeah. Yeah. And then I was like, okay. And each round of pops, a little more intense? Yeah. But holding steady.

1:28:08But it was okay. Okay. Now, at this point, I was like, okay, I am going to need to evacuate soon-ish. Mm-hmm. Right? Are you trying to hurry the game along at all at this point? I mean, you can't really because you're like waiting on other people, but sort of. I'm like, your turn. Yes, sir. Get a little bossy. And we're playing with a kid, too. Oh, fuck. I know. You're like, fucking go under and shit my pants. I know. Tommy. This is where I feel like I have made no growth in life, right? Because there are, they live in a house, there are bathrooms. Yeah, you could have just. I could have. Yeah, yeah.

1:28:49But I, not only could I not do it, I couldn't even say. These are close friends. Yeah. I couldn't even say like, oh my God. I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. Intestinally speaking. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also they're like fun and funny. They have a kid too. So they're dealing with pooty all the time. They themselves have evacs. Sure, sure. They're in a safe space. I know, but like my brain goes into like a different mode. Also like I was just evaluating where the bathrooms were and I was like, I can't. They're too close to the. Yes. Yeah. The options were a guest bath. Did it crush your mind to go like, I'm going to run to Starbucks real quick.

1:29:32Does anybody want anything? I just really need a coffee right. Yeah. I just got to go to Starbucks right this second. That is something like that is something crazy I would do. A solution you would entertain. Yeah. I think there's a bathroom in the master, in the primary bedroom. Okay. Okay. And a one in the kind of like living room, basically. Oh, fuck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I couldn't be like, can I use restroom in your room? That feels a little strange without giving all the information. Yeah. Also, I'd imagine because when I've been in this situation, you're not talking about also just taking a normal customary.

1:30:17I mean, I knew. I was like, this is not going to be good. It's going to be bad. You're going to have to open windows and light things on fire. And I don't know about the volume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the noise maybe even. That's what I mean. Oh, the volume. Not – that could mean two things. You're right. Like the payload and the auditory. I meant the noise, but yes. Okay. So anywho, I'm like, it's starting to ramp up. We're still playing. We're still playing. Thank God my friend wins. It's like I've never been so happy to not win. Yeah, I was like, just let this be over, you know? And then she was like, do we have another game in us?

1:30:57And you're sweating, Bullshit. Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah, I said, I think I'm tired. Oh, you lied. Yeah, I lied. I said, I think I'm tired. And everyone was like, oh, no, that's totally fine. And I was like, we're recording tomorrow. I want to play again. Please, Miss Monica. That's all I want to do. Do I live for this? I get bullied at school. This is the only. Oh, my God. And then I immediately just shit everywhere. No, I said, yeah, you know, we're recording tomorrow. Lie? No, we were. At noon? Yeah. Because then they said, oh, what time? And I was like, oh, fuck. There's a problem with lying.

1:31:37It immediately begets more lies. I know, but I did say it was like 10. Oh, fuck. Which is, I think maybe was, or we had something at 10 or something. A pitch, probably. Yeah. So I was like, which I know isn't early. Like I did. But also we're talking. I was like, I got to go. Like enough of this chit chat. So then I was like, yeah, bye. You know, just getting up, not really helping put anything away. Now really quick, do any of these people listen to the show? I mean, I have a sense this is going to get back. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay. So. I know what they're going to say. I know. I can tell you right now.

1:32:13Okay. You're going to get a call. Yeah. And so I say hello. Hello? Hey. Oh, my gosh. I just heard Sally told me to listen to the fact check that you told the Mahjong story. And I went, you know, Monica, you can totally go in our bathroom in our primary bedroom. I just, I felt like I was so embarrassed. I just couldn't. But you should know. We would be honored. I know. If you. It was not because you didn't create an environment that I couldn't do. It was, it's me. It's a me issue. Okay. Well, just so you know. Thank you. Yeah, you have full access. Thanks. I probably still won't. All right. Okay.

1:32:50And you're right. That's exactly how it would go. So you get in the car. Get in the car. How far away do they live? 20 minutes. Oh. Yeah. Okay. And I'm like, I can do it. Like, I can do it. I have no option. I can do it. But then I did think like, you know, as I'm driving, I was like, oh my, I don't know. I don't know. And you weren't wearing a skirt this time either. No, I was wearing jeans. New jeans. Oh, boy. So I was like, okay. And I had a sweatshirt in the back of my car. Uh-huh. I was like, okay. Maybe I like pull over, pull down my pants. Yeah, yeah. Put the sweatshirt on the seat. Okay.

1:33:25Poop in the sweatshirt. Oh, wow. You were considering that? Yeah. Oh, wow. As a barrier. I don't want the sweatshirt, so it was fine. Okay, okay. So I was like, poop in the sweatshirt. That'll be a barrier, you know, and kind of a dipe, sort of. Oh, yeah. I had to make the decision. I'm either going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm just going to keep going. And stopping at a gas station. No. Going straight to a gas station is not an option. Nope. Okay. I didn't feel like I knew where they were. I'd be driving. It was not going to happen. Okay. That was just like, but the sweatshirt was kind of in the back and I was like kind of leaning like, oh, okay.

1:33:58No, whatever. I'm going full force. So I was speeding. Oh, wow. Good. And I made it. I made it. I made it. How? It was so close. It was so close. And as you're running in your house, do you use that toilet right at your doorway? Or do you need to go upstairs because it's going to be emotional? Yeah. Yeah. Because you're going to take clothes off and stuff. So that is what was crazy is I knew it was like, it's right there. There's a bathroom right by my door. I can just do that. Yeah. And of course, I get in there and I go all the way upstairs. I'm like a glutton for punishment. I go all the way upstairs to my bathroom.

1:34:34Muscle memory. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. And then I evacuated. Oh, wonderful. You must have loved that moment, though. Because you had gone through so much. It was such a trial. Yeah. So the relief was euphoric. The relief of making it was. So it was, but it was also like, it was a little painful. Like, I didn't feel good, I guess. Right. As it turns out. Yeah. Yeah. And then not to be so graphic, I mean, whatever. We're already here. I had there was a tiny, tiny bit of blood. OK, sure. Which then I realized I was like, oh, I'm starting my period. OK, which sometimes gurgles your. Yes. It's like this is all making sense.

1:35:25And why like the cramps? I don't know. But like sometimes you can't tell what cramp is what. It's all affecting everything. It's a mess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. Let's go. So it was annoying because I was like, I don't, like after I didn't feel sprightly, like I still felt kind of crampy and bad. Because of the period. I think, yeah. Yeah. I would love an internist to explain to us why the period all of a sudden fucks up your GI. Those things are very separate. I agree. Systems, but this is consistent. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that happened. So yeah, well congrats that you got home. I know. I was like, this is going to happen to me again.

1:36:10But then I had to take responsibility. I was like, look, in this case. You could have handled it better. I could have prevented this. I also think now that this is twice. Well. In two years. No, don't finish that sentence. Don't. I don't think you know where I'm going with this. But so we're averaging once a year now. It is time to have the trash bag in your car. No. That's nothing. You keep it in the back pocket of the seat. Well, how do you poop in that? You can get a little toilet seat that has a trash bag attached to it. No, I'm not doing this. Also an option, but I think people would see that in her back seat if she ever gave someone a ride.

1:36:50Vinny's got one. I'm going to say it's for a kid. Why don't you use Vinny's? It's for my friend's kid. Vinny's outgrowing his. Yeah, I can give you one. Listen, no. This is what I was afraid you'd say. Trash bag. A big guy. A 55-gallon trash bag. Because then that's your sweatshirt idea, but way more protection. There's no seepage. And then it's already in a trash bag. So great. You throw it in the trash bag. No, but you'd have to lay it down, right? Or, no, open it up. But then how? That feels hard to do. No, not those 50. Think about the mouth of a 55-gallon trash can. It's this big around. So you're saying I pull over to do this.

1:37:26This isn't while I'm driving, like, the first time. Right. No, you would probably want to pull to the shoulder of the road. Okay. Listen, no. This is what I was afraid you were going to say. I don't want to manifest. This isn't a new thing of mine. I think it's your new thing. No, it is not. Do not say that. It's never happening to me again. Do you hear Monica's got a new thing? This is my hubris because I was too embarrassed to go number two in my friend's house. Yeah, yeah. Like, that's my issue that I need to work through. Yeah. No, but I don't. It costs you nothing to throw it in there. That's all I'm saying.

1:38:01You know, I don't think you're, I don't think you're. I'm telling the universe. No, I am. I'm telling the universe like, okay, well. I'm making a different argument. So often when you prepare for something, then it won't ever happen because you've wasted the time. And then you're like, oh my God, there's all this stuff. And then it never happened again. That's more, to me, that's the more common pattern. It's like, I bought this thing to deal with this thing and then it never happened again. Okay. Okay. Now, would you have gone to the bathroom in your friend's house? I would have gone at their house.

1:38:33Then I would have gone at a gas station. I would have gone to Starbucks. Sincerely, and I have history to prove this, I would have pulled over and went on the shoulder of the road before I went in my car. I'm not going to use it as a porta potty. I would rather do it in the grass or weeds on the side of the road. We're different in that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would, I feel at least, there's something about me being alone that is the highest priority in those moments for some reason. Yeah, you want your privacy. Yeah. So the car, it is just me in there. Yeah, but also it was dark out. Yeah. Inside of the road in some woods.

1:39:12No, what if someone pulls up or something? No. Okay. All right. Plus I could get murdered like that. No one wants to fuck with a girl spraying. I don't know. There's some kinky murders out there. The weirdest murder is like, fuck this. I think they might like it. Well, now you've really gotten to the most niche murderer imaginable. They're out there looking for girls like me. The Dookie killer. Exactly. Yeah. Has a great ring to it. Someone's definitely taken that. He waits around porta-potties and he waits till he hears Hannes happening. Probably for real. And then he gets overcome with the hunger.

1:39:48You like when people poop. Yeah, a lot. But I'm also not a killer. I know, but. Yeah, nothing could possibly make me happier. If I was driving down the road and I looked to my right, I was like, oh, there's Monica's car. And then I was like, oh, there's Monica in the bushes. Oh, my God. I mean, the amount of joy that would give me, you really can't imagine. I can't do it. Couldn't be measured. Anyway, so I just wanted to be vulnerable. I appreciate it. I would say that that time is of the essence. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:40:27I no longer want to say my thing because there's no way to top that. Wait, of course. No. Just time. We're talking about time. Someone, one of our guests, I wish I could remember. I have a hunch it was Angela Duckworth. Okay. Because she has such phenomenal taste. Yeah. Someone told me to buy this book, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, a physicist. Oh. And it's been sitting in my nightstand for a few years. Oh. And then I moved nightstands. I got a different nightstand against my will. But I got one. And then so it reemerged. And then I was like, I'm going to leave through this. I find it mind-blowing.

1:41:05Okay. It's so mind-blowing. Ooh. I just want to set up the two concepts that they start the book with, which is our understanding of time is as flawed as our understanding of the earth being flat at one point. Whoa. And if you think about like, it's just kind of unimaginable we're on a sphere. Yeah, I know. The fact that anyone ever, and he points this out, both of these discoveries happen before we could ever test or measure this realization. But yes, the earth being round is like, you can't conceive of that. Yeah. And then second was that the sun doesn't revolve around us. I know. You can't figure that out from our perspective.

1:41:46But both were figured out before we could actually test that. So time, we have as flawed of a sense of what time is. So just, there's three elements. I'm just going to say the first one that I find to be so fascinating. So time is moving faster on a mountaintop. Okay. Than it is at sea level. What? How? Yeah. So if you are in Denver, the time is moving faster than it is at the ski hill 20 miles away at elevation. What? Yes. Like the perception of time or actual time? No, period. If you have two atomically paired clocks, you know, that measure to the bazillionth of a second and you sync those here in L.A.

1:42:32And then I send you to Mount Wilson with one of those watches and you're up there for a while. When you return, your time will be further along than mine. And also to the degree that your head is living in a faster time than your feet. Oh, my God. And this has all been measured. We have the technology. What's incredible is that Einstein figured this out at like 23 years old without any way to know that this was the case. And so what it says is, well, what's true time? Is it the time that was happening at elevation or was it at sea level? And the truth is there is no real time. Yeah, exactly. You only have two times that are relative to one another.

1:43:18The example is to say like what's a true statement? 0.8 British pounds equals$1 versus$1 equals point. Those, neither of them have an intrinsic value. They're only related to each other. That's their value. And that there is no same time happening anywhere in the universe. Every single location has its own time. That's only relative to other locations. I hate it here. And then it gets into, so our first premise is like, oh, there's such thing as time that we can measure. Well, no, you can only measure it at your location in space. So the number one definition we have of time is like, well, we know that's not true.

1:43:59And then the next one is that it's sequential or that there's an order, but there's a past and a present. Oh, I know. Is this like time is stacked? Well, yeah. So the example is like cause and effect. And it said in the universe, and they do really good dumb analogies. It's like if you could imagine something was filmed, anything was really filmed. You can't tell depending on which direction, whether we watch it forward or backward. But what do you mean? Sorry, explain a little. Like if you filmed, it's got to be something without heat. Like if I filmed a ball rolling and stopping. Okay. It's just you can view anything backwards and your mind will tell you that was the beginning.

1:44:50When really it was the end of the video. Oh, you're saying like, okay, if you like rewind. You can watch it backwards or forward. Right, but because you're starting it, you're saying. An objective outsider can't tell what was first. the only thing that the only thing in the universe that we can observe that we know definitively had a beginning and an end is heat can warm cold okay but cold can never create heat warm cold so you have like this body of water it's 100 degrees you have this body of water It's 50 degrees. If we film those interacting and this temperature goes up, we can establish the order of events.

1:45:38Because you'll never inject cold water into hot water and make it hotter. Oh, make it hotter. That's a law of thermodynamics. But you make it colder, you are affecting it. If you add cold water into something hot, it does cool it. Yes, but you can't make anything hotter with cold water. Right. It only has one direction. You can make cold water warmer with hot water. You cannot make hot water hotter with cold water. Right. That can't happen. That's like a immovable law of the universe. So unless something has a heat transfer, there's no order. There's no way to know the order. Okay. I'm in that chapter right now.

1:46:19They're going to land the plane. I'm going to be able to say more about it. But I just was that whole that your head's experiencing time differently than your feet is bonkers. God. And so what's happening is mass, the earth, is warping time. You can think of it as a body going into a tub and displacing water. So earth itself is warping time. So the closer you get to that mass, the center of that mass, which is why sea level, you're closer to the center of the mass than you are on a mountaintop. The closer you get to the center of the mass, the slower time is going. This is why I finally now understand why there's no time in a black hole.

1:46:59It's just like infinite mass. So time just slows down. What is the dead center of the earth? Like what's it made of? No, like on this planet, what is the dead center? What would be inside the sphere? So it's up. No, like here's earth. Yeah. In the dead middle of it. Let's say we drilled 5 ,000 miles into the earth. we'd be at the center of the earth. Right. That's where time's moving the slowest. Well, the equator is going around the center. Well, we've arbitrarily drawn that line. Oh. Based on it's where the sun is most directly hitting. That's how we pick that line as the equator. I thought it was the center.

1:47:41Look, it's a ball, right? Yeah. And we decided to go here and make this zero and make the prime meridian zero. Right. And then that way we can graph everything out. But imagine those lines stay still and we just rotate earth. we could have picked zero is going through antarctica right that's just how we've constructed our maps and our our yeah but i guess i'm asking like in the ball yeah right yeah so the center of the earth is here uh-huh so where is that where is that on in earth where is it kind of everywhere if you're talking about the center you could draw a straight line out from the center to any spot on the outside sphere.

1:48:21There's a direct line from you and I right now to the center of the earth. And any point on the earth, there's a direct line to the center of the earth. Yeah. Yeah. It's scrambly. It's so. Anyways, I have a weird hunch that at the end of this book, should I fully understand it? Mm-hmm. Which I might not be able to. It's a dense book. Mm-hmm. Like I said to Eric, you should read this book. And he's like, are you listening to it? And I'm like, no, I don't think this book can be listened to. I think you need to reread some paragraphs over and over again. But I have a bizarre hunch or optimism that at the end of this, I'm going to have a new grasp on spirituality.

1:48:59Oh, I like that. Yeah. Like I think if I think if if I can really deconstruct or understand how time is not the thing I think it is, that might open the door to a lot of new possibilities and thoughts. Yeah. I started Project Hail Mary. I rented it. And I was watching, you know, 45 minutes. And I was like, yeah, I don't believe in any of this. This is fully made up. This life is made up. This is made up. How can it be? How can this be? Like planet Earth and what's happening here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys. It's a miracle. It is not real. We are not real. We're not real. None of this is real. I really started to feel like kind of crazy.

1:49:53Like, oh, oh my God. Well, yeah. In the same sense, I'd imagine if you're like the first person to have the concept of the earth not being flat explained to you, it's very destabilizing. You're like, wow, my perspective can be that flawed. Right. Or they go, oh, guess what? But no, no, we're just spinning this, you know, sun's over there and we're just we're going around it in a year and we're just spinning all day. Yeah. That's destabilizing. Like, well, everything I know is wrong. And that's a scary thought. I know. But when you think when you like really, really think about the story, the story of the world.

1:50:33You mean Earth or the universe? The world, I'm not sure. I mean, well, one begets the other, I guess. But like even just the earth, okay? And the evolution of all of us, everything. From single cell to us. Exactly. It's like, no. Yeah, I am. That is not real. I feel you. I have a healthy, I think that's why it's very easy for people to believe in religion because. Yes, because at least it's an explanation. It's preposterous that all this happened by chance. I really was getting in my head and I was like, this is not like, I'm going to vaporize. Like, this is not. Yeah, you felt untethered, maybe.

1:51:21Dangerous. Yeah, it was a little unsettling. Did you make it through or you did 45 and then you paused? Well, I had to leave, so I'm going to go back and finish it. He hasn't even met, but he's like just now meeting, I assume, The Rock. Yeah, it's such a cute movie. Yeah, I like it. It's right. He's, God, my God, is he so charming. It's just him. It's just him. Very few people can do that. He's just so fucking charming. He is. Anywho. Yeah, that's, yeah, interesting that you brought that up because I've been also in my head about, you know, life and reality and none of, it's like none of it, it's nothing.

1:51:57And then again, we come back to the same conclusion we always do, which is like, and who cares? So if we found out it was a simulation, then what? Well, I keep living this life that I'm living. I still have goals and hopes and I'm looking forward to things. It's like, okay, oh, it's all fake. Well, I'm going to continue on. I'm not going to. Like if I find out it was a simulation, well, I guess then I'm going to kill myself. No. Right. You're just like, oh, just keep enjoying the simulation. I know, but it's like. Does it matter? Even apart from it being a simulation, even that was getting like, even that can't be real.

1:52:30Nothing. Like what? But it's scary. Like, it is scary once you really start thinking about space and time. And it helps you see how easy it would be to go crazy. Yeah. I was starting. I was like, I could really, really go crazy if I really started delving into some of this stuff. This was maybe not healthy for me. That was my early 20s. I had like two or three years in my early 20s. That's how old I am, too. I get it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I had two years in my early 20s where I felt like I was on the path to becoming crazy. Going nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was kind of swirling with these kind of thoughts.

1:53:14My challenging nature, my openness to reject what is believed or known, which whatever, I trend high on that spectrum. I thought, oh, you're in danger. If you don't accept these things, you're in danger of floating off into an abyss of uncertainty. That's how people go nuts. Yeah. I think I was right on the precipice. Well, I'm going to try to stay away. I'd rather not go crazy. No, yeah. You know? I have this house. Yeah, you want to stay there for a minute. It might be because of it. I don't know. Okay, I want to stop talking about this, making me a little freaked out. Did I tell you I showed Lincoln Dances with Wolves last Sunday?

1:53:54Yeah, you said you guys had started it, and I was very impressed because it is, to me, although I was in high school, one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. But I would like to rewatch because maybe I just wasn't in the headspace. I love it. Yeah. It won Best Picture. Well, of course. I know. It's like a renowned film. Yes. But again, it's always nice to be reminded of what people lived like for so long. If they even did. Yeah, just out on the frontier with like a book of matches and a rifle and like, you know, it's just wild how what we dealt with. And Eric was going, fuck. I mean, how were they alive?

1:54:39Like, how did they just exist and not go, fuck this? And I said, and it's my theory on life, which is like, because whatever their situation was, it was incrementally better than the previous generation. So maybe they had tin cups now instead of no cups. Yeah, they felt lucky. They had some inventions that made them feel lucky. Yeah. Luckier than the previous group. And then you got to wonder what it does to like the group psychology when we do pinnacle. I know. We're not there yet, obviously. I don't know. But there is a pinnacle. I know. I'm getting, again, like we're maybe getting close, especially with AI.

1:55:20I, it's starting to feel like, oh my God, we might be at the end of, of this experiment. What a privilege to be there at the. No, I don't know. I even, I even, I was like, okay, so, well, cause obviously in the movie, the earth is not, it's about to, yeah, it's like not viable for much longer. And I was like, okay, so if that happens, like, but I guess just die, I guess. Like I would probably try to, I had to, I was like thinking this. like, okay, when would I die? Like at what point would I make the call? You're like someone with a terminal condition that has to decide when they take the solution.

1:55:59But I don't think it's healthy for me to be thinking like this. I just know me. Like, I don't think this is good for my brain anxiety wise. No, no, no. For you, it's not great. But I, I'm, it's, I'm too far. I'm such, that's what it is. I'm such a novelty addict. Oh my God. That I'm like, yeah, it could be, it could be bad it could be good it'll be new it'll and that that to me is exciting or to me what makes it worth it i'm like yeah i don't know what's about to happen but something's gonna happen and i'm gonna witness it well you that feels so dead well we don't we don't know which way it's gonna go so you i don't want to have to go to move to another planet and stuff and like take the spaceship.

1:56:43Like that's not, it looks so miserable. It could be fun. No, it looks really miserable. What if it's Delta One to, yeah, there we go, to Alpha Centauri. I feel like that. All right. And then they have on the plane, they have like cocktails. No, they don't. Their food is bad and their drink, they don't even have Hendrix gin. You could maybe bring your own Hendrix gin. Oh, anyway. Okay, well, this got really intense. Want to do some facts? Yeah, let's do some facts. This was an eye-opening episode, man. This was a serious episode. I have found myself repeating the two most jaw-dropping bits of data that came out in this.

1:57:22Have you been telling anybody about this stuff? Well, which are the two for you? Well, that's 70 % of the cases are from other children. That's wild. And then the other one that blew my mind is that like 50 % of them are situational and not someone who has like permanent pedophilia. Yeah, yeah. Which that is somehow scarier. Well, not to me. Because, again, and, like, I think this is sort of the point they were making. Like, those people, it's like the difference between a murderer and a psychopath. Mm-hmm. Like, a psychopath can't control it. Like, it is a real urge. It is driven in the brain somehow.

1:58:02and a murderer could not murder given a different circumstance or the right tools or, you know, whatever. Yeah, that was a part of a, I'm pretty sure a Gladwell episode. It was like, it was about first order thinking, second order thinking. All these things that happen, like some alarming percentage of murders are people reacting in situations. They're not premeditated. They're not like someone's going to off someone for money. It's like those are very low percentage. It's people interacting in life who become overwhelmed. And yeah. Yeah. So that's why I think it's not as scary because I guess that's like the whole point of what Elizabeth and Luke are doing is trying to like mainly avoid that.

1:58:46You can't imagine a future where it's like, oh, it becomes so fine to self-identify as this and that people know when they're pretty young, it's sounding like, and then get treatment for those people. So it would be like, oh, well, if you could take all those people out of, not take them out of the population, but identify them, get them help, the problem would be over. It wouldn't be over. I mean, let's just even ignore the adolescents that are doing it because theirs is mostly situational. Right. But the other people who it's like they've never had that urge before and then they don't have it again, you can't even really, they don't even know to be treating that.

1:59:21Well, yeah, but it's kind of like that's what we should all be doing. is just like reminding people of the consequences of these types of things. Yeah, like I think a lot of people who've been raped when they're young, they're not always pedophiles. They're rapists. You know what I mean? Like that's a power thing. There's a lot more to it. Then their victims would age up with them is what you're saying to some degree. Well, yeah. Well, I guess I just mean like it doesn't mean just because somebody's had. Yeah. Just obviously that's the whole point. But like I think of a race. Situational scares me more because you can't see it coming, I guess.

2:00:05You have no awareness that you're capable of that. Right. And that is like inherently less treatable or addressable. Well, sort of because it's like everyone's kind of capable of anything and you just like learn to not do bad shit. Yeah, I'm just saying all those people that did that knew that that jail time could await them. There's no one that's like these. She's talking about the teachers that are in these situations. Like no one's unaware of A, the social stigmatism and the legal issue with it. And yet they do it. So I don't think deterrence. Well, but I think they would argue that was the whole point kind of is like.

2:00:48And it's not like, yes, it's they know, but it's remind it's like, hey, this is about to happen to you. If you go down this path, this is like intervention and things like that. The kids. Yeah. Like the kids who's prefrontal cortex, they need to understand like there's really bad outcomes for the victims that you probably wouldn't even have seen as a victim until we explain it to you that they're a victim. And then they're going to have. Then it's like, oh, my God, it's that. I'm talking more of the adults that are in these situations where it happens once or it happens and they don't repeat it.

2:01:21Sure, I guess the solution for that would be people in jobs that interact with youth need to have some classes that say, hey, this could happen. This has happened to many people who are not pedophiles. Right, exactly. So you need to have – Like everyone's kind of in danger of this, so watch out. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It's easier to address a tiny percentage of the population that is identified with the condition than it is like every human being that deals with kids needs to be warned that other people weren't like that and did that. It feels more daunting. Yeah. It took a long time for me to articulate that.

2:01:57I mean, I think, yeah, I still personally am more afraid of the, like, condition, but I see what you mean. Okay. What are the chances of addiction if you've been sexually abused as a child? This is from PubMed. And so it's using some numbers that I don't really understand. It says, in multivariable analysis for men, first occurrence of physical and sexual abuse as a child was significantly associated with more substance use consequences. Adjusted mean increase in, and then this is what they're using, like some sort of system, in DUC. 2.5 for ages less than 13. 2.5 times more likely? That's what I'm not understanding.

2:02:40That's what I don't know. Okay, we don't know what the metric is. 3.3 for ages 13 to 17 compared to those with no abuse. Oh, 0.001 with no abuse. Oh, so many multiples. A lot more. A lot more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. More. Well, I can tell you that my mother, when she was in her CASA program, when she was taking state-sanctioned classes, they said you had an 80 % chance of becoming an addict if you had been sexually abused. Yeah. Horrible. And I went, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah. It is funny. We're, of course and understandably, we're so obsessed with finding out why things happen, right?

2:03:28We feel safer if we understand why things happen. but it's just like we have this endless desire to point to causality of say addiction it's like in my case is it that thing is it that i'm eighth generation through the honchals fucking full-blown addict is it some other bit of nurture you know and then who cares you know for me i mean at the end of the day it's like i guess who cares yeah well no the reason to care is is not really once it's happened it's like oh my god like if this happens to some like don't do this to people basically yeah points out the uh importance of preventing exactly for sure uh but just like when you when you're already an addict and you start looking back on why you might be an addict to some degree it's like you'll never know the percentage we won't i won't know what part was nurture and what part was nature and it doesn't really matter i've been left this way and yeah it's good to figure out what triggers the addiction surely but yeah this other stuff yeah it doesn't matter okay uh roy moore is the politician oh my god in alabama and there's so many offensive things about him it's not just the repeated child horrifying it's um him also like trotting to town on a horse in a like howdy doody costume i mean what a character okay the horse's name was sassy ugh yeah i bet he named his horse sassy exactly oh garfield the president is from or born in orange township now moreland hills ohio okay okay she was from mentor oh mentor yeah That's where the museum is.

2:05:17Are the Boy Scouts called Scouting America? Yes. Noah Hawley's mother came up. Louise Armstrong is her name. Yes, she had a book in 79 called Kiss Daddy Goodnight. Rough title. Regarding child abuse. Oof. Let me just make sure I got them all. That's it. That's it. Yeah. All right. Love you. Love you.

2:05:46Thank you.