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Making More Humans is a physician-led curriculum covering reproduction, relationships, consent, puberty, and sex education for families — clinically accurate, shame-free, and designed for every age.
So your kids grow up with the knowledge to stay safe, make informed decisions, and understand the body they’ll live in their whole life.
[MUSIC] I am Dr. Robin Dickinson, and we are discussing myth versus clinical truth. I think most of us have pretty cringy memories about sex ed. And if you're a parent who wants your kids to have accurate, shame-free information, but you don't want a big awkward talk, and you definitely don't want the internet raising them, this series is for you.
I'm going to teach you the clinical truth in a way you can actually use at home. Whether it was at school or at home, it always comes down to these very awkward conversations from very anxious adults. In my health class in high school, it was this overly perky, enthusiastic person who didn't actually know the real science and didn't have any real clinical experience. She couldn't actually tell us the truth of anything.
She just had one goal in mind, as far as I could tell, which was to scare us out of getting pregnant or having an STD. And that's just not a great way of approaching sex. My mom had similar fears about me and not having sex, and that's still not a great way of approaching sex. We know that people who actually have good information are less likely to have sex, less likely to get STIs, and less likely to get pregnant.
But getting them that good information in a good way, that is not something people are really good at. As a physician, I saw this all the time. Parents would actually bring their kids into my office for the talk. The talk.
Because they wanted to get clear, accurate information for their kids and teens. And then a funny thing would happen. The parents ended up learning a lot, too. They'd start asking lots of questions about all these things that they didn't know, which kind of weirded out their kids.
But it made for this really interesting learning experience, where both of them were having these breakthrough moments. The kids were actually able to see how important and interesting this information was because they saw me having these conversations with their parents that were very natural and in-depth and interesting. Because I'm a doctor, I have clinical experience. Not just with teaching, but with what goes wrong when it isn't taught.
So I'll add little tidbits from the clinic as we go. But also, I have things in the back of my head, in my mind's eye, things I can't unsee. Stories I'll never forget about people who didn't have the information they needed. I've taken care of teens who believed it when someone told them, "That doesn't count!" And they ended up in situations they didn't understand and weren't prepared for.
I've also met kids who couldn't name that a boundary had been crossed or explain what happened to them because no one ever taught them what consent is or gave them the language to talk about it. That's why I teach clinical truth. Not to scare kids, but to protect them. And I want to tell you how I got here.
Today I want to show you why most sex ed fails and how I ended up teaching this so this doesn't have to be awkward in your house. I was a precocious child. I picked up a lot of details about how sex works just from listening carefully and from reading the Old Testament of the Bible. There's a lot of graphic information there, when someone is willing to wade through a lot of other stuff.
Reading it as a human document was hilarious to me. I would be laughing and people wouldn't understand why. I was like, "Well, this guy was peeing against the wall and the other guy cut the corner of his clothes off him. What a crazy story!" The pastor never talks about this in church.
When I asked my mom questions about human reproduction, she would always answer them accurately, if a bit awkwardly, and with a little bit of anxiety. But I know she wanted me to actually have the information. She also had a lot of really interesting anthropology and other college textbooks in the basement of my house that I had free access to, including a really interesting one that went to all sorts of details I probably did not need to know about the sexual practices of different cultures throughout human history. But even with all those anthropology books, I felt completely unprepared for puberty.
None of that was written about in any of the resources that I was working with. And my mom kind of treated it like the cross that women have to bear, which was pretty typical of the time. Overall, I was way better off than many of my friends and way better off than my half-brothers. My sister and I have one dad and my brothers have another dad.
My sister and I were handled by my mom, anxious but determined to give us accurate information. But for my brothers, she herded them in with their dad to get the talk. And that was a disaster. When my first brother said something so completely naive that my mom decided he really needed the talk, she herded him into his bedroom with his dad and was basically like, "There, talk about it." I think she'd heard him say something about a baby coming out of a mom's belly button.
I think they were in there for maybe like a minute before my stepdad went bolting out. So I went in and I was like, "So Jim, do you understand where babies come from now?" And he was like, "Yeah, I know where babies come from." And I was like, "So you know about..." And I just started outlining a few details I thought maybe should have been covered. And he was like, "What? No, that's disgusting.
That's horrible. There's no way people do that." And I was like, "Yeah, that's what your dad should have told you about actually." So I took him to my bedroom, pulled out my biology textbook. Now mind you, I had never so much as held hands with a guy before. I had no experience at all.
But I did have a biology textbook and I had learned about this in school. So I felt like I was better qualified than pretty much anyone else in the house to at least explain things clearly. So I sat down and explained step by step how the whole thing worked. It was a really interesting process because I had no preconceived notions about any of this.
I went into it explaining the biology first and then answering each question as it came up. So instead of it being scare tactics or how you should or shouldn't do things or focusing on the act itself, since I didn't really know anything about that anyway, it was really focused on the reason why we do this. I explained that we need genetic diversity. We need to be able to get two people's genetics together.
He was totally on board with that. That made sense. So then I was like, "Okay. So in order to get two people's genetics together, we need a way to get genetics from one person to another.
And the way we do that is with sex." And here's how that works. But it wasn't like the main thing. It was just part of the story of how you make another human. And then I explained that people did things they wouldn't get pregnant every time.
And he was like, "What? People don't just do that to make babies? Why would they do that other times?" So then I got to explain how contraception worked as far as I knew, which was purely theoretical. And I also got to explain that people had sex for other reasons like connection and bonding.
Also purely theoretical for me at that point. But it was very non-emotional, non-bizarre conversation. My little sister sat in on some of those conversations too, and she learned a lot more than she knew before. So even before we had any personal experience, we had science experience.
And I ended up doing the same things for my other brothers over time. Meanwhile, I did eventually get married. I did end up with personal experience. And I went to medical school and had significantly more medical knowledge.
And I discovered that this was a topic I really enjoy teaching about because it really impacts people's personal lives. I went into medicine for a few reasons. One of my major drivers was realizing that doctors know what's going on in people's personal lives and are able to be there with them through it. Even if they can't fix it, they can understand it and help.
I absolutely love teaching and I love humans and being there with them. So this was a way to take my love of science and humans and teaching and put it all together. So I ended up sitting with a lot of people through a lot of challenging experiences. And I never made decisions for people.
That has my style. My goal is for them to understand the information, the science pros and cons, not the moral pros and cons, the science ones, and then let them make their own decision. Some doctors feel that they have to be God and some patients think that doctors should be God and make everything perfect, but that's not how it works. We're merely humans.
I had a colleague I loved working with because we were both equally conscientious, but he had one very big difference for me. He felt personally responsible for everything. If he was on call and patients would call overnight, he literally couldn't sleep because he was afraid he would sleep through a call and somebody would die. And I was like, no, that's not your job.
If they're not smart enough to call 911 and they die, that's not on you. You are not personally standing there between a patient and the brink of death. They live in modern times, they can call an ambulance. So I didn't go into situations with opinions about what people should do.
I went in with science. I went in with a very confident belief that my job was to teach and to listen. I started medical school at 20 years old. And when you're 20, it's pretty easy to have a lot of opinions.
When you don't have much life experience yet, you tend to think you know the answers. And then life beats you up a bit and you realize you don't know everything. A really critical turning point for me came during my first outpatient internal medicine rotation. I was a third year medical student and I got to sent in to see this man, an older gentleman with a long list of problems in his chart.
And I was asked to talk to him about quitting smoking, and I was asked to do a pretty standard job for medical students. The attending smirked slightly as he sent me in and I didn't understand why, yet. I said, Mr. Simpson with a sneering smile, leaning back and settling himself comfortably in the exam room's metal arm chair.
A medical student, he chuckled unkindly. Gave me a little taste of what was coming. Yes, sir, I replied. Your doctor wanted me to come and chat with you for a few minutes.
So you're here to tell me how bad smoking is for me and it convinced me to stop. Um, yes, I hesitated. It felt like a trap. I was asked to chat with you about your smoking.
Well, go ahead then. I've smoked for twice as long as you've been alive and you think you're so smart coming in here, you don't know anything about it. Have you ever smoked? No, I've never smoked.
Mr. Simpson snorted and glared at me. Then what gives you the right to come in here and tell me what to do? My stomach churned and my hands felt hot and damp.
I didn't want to face Mr. Simpson, but I also didn't want to face my attending. So I knew there was no right answer. There was nothing to do.
And he sat glaring at me. So I went ahead and said exactly how I felt in that moment. You're right. I told him, I don't have any right to come in here and tell you what to do.
And there's no reason for you to listen to me. Mr. Simpson looked surprised, but that didn't stop him. Well, you're the first one to realize just how pathetic you are.
You medical people are always telling me to quit. While I've been smoking since I was 10 years old, you realize how hard it'd be for me to quit. I know some people who've done some really hard things and I've heard from them that quitting smoking is the hardest thing they've ever done. So I guess it would probably be harder than anything I've ever done.
Yeah, he agreed angley. So who are you to come in here and tell me to do something harder than anything you've ever done? You're too young to tell anyone to do anything. He stabbed directly at my weak point.
I already felt too young and inexperienced to tell anyone to do anything. My cheeks flushed. I just wanted to go home, but I kept a calm expression and took a quick grasp of my self-respect. All I can do is learn from people like you.
I replied, "And someday I'll know more." Well, you go on out there and tell my doctor that you couldn't do anything about me. I went. A few days later, Mr. Simpson was back.
This time with shortness of breath, he leaned forward onto his knees like someone who had just finished a marathon, breathing heavily. "You're gonna use this," he said. Pausing to suck an air, "to say that you were right." "Well, that wouldn't be kind," I said. "You don't feel good." "Huh, well, I'm not gonna quit smoking." He reminded me, hanging onto his point, even as he struggled to breathe.
"Well, obviously, if you were gonna quit, you would have by now, you look pretty miserable." After a nebulizer treatment, Mr. Simpson was back to his old fighting form. "Well, I've been through more than you can ever imagine," he said, "and I've had a hard life. If I want to smoke, if smoking helps me, who are you to tell me to quit?" "Well, I can see that," I replied.
"Smoking has helped you a lot." "Are you trying to reverse psychology me?" "No, there's just nothing for me to say." "That's right," he agreed. "You're learning. You're the first one to admit that smoking has helped me." "Your life must have been really hard," I said. "To smart smoking, when you were 10 years old, you were just a kid." "I was never a kid," he corrected me.
"Of course not," I agreed. On the last day of my rotation, a nurse found me. "Mr. Simpson is scheduled with one of the other doctors," she said, "but he wants to see you." I felt my chest tighten and my hands start sweating.
I went over, took a deep breath, tapped on the door, few more brief deep breaths before I went in. "I wanted to tell you something," Mr. Simpson said. "He looked like an ordinary old man, not the terror I imagined was waiting for me." "Tell me," Mr.
Simpson smiled. I quit. He quit smoking not because I told him what to do, but because I didn't tell him what to do. I didn't tell him what he already knew.
I didn't scold him, I didn't show him. He didn't need another person explaining how bad smoking was. He needed someone to just sit with him and acknowledge that it was hard. That was a turning point for me.
I realized that hitting people over the head with what they should do doesn't actually work. Everyone already knows the stuff that's out there. They don't need to be told again. They don't need a scolding.
They know their own lives better than I do. I ended up having a personal rule. If I didn't understand a person's decision, then I was missing some key information because everyone is internally consistent. If I couldn't see the logic in what they were doing, that was my problem, not theirs.
I needed to keep asking questions and keep listening until it made sense. The priority was never that they do what I tell them. The priority was them to know that I cared about them and that I wanted to work with them to find what was best for them so they could make that choice for themselves. And that approach, listening, not scolding, trusting the person with the truth is why I design curriculum the way I do.
I want to provide learners with exactly what they need to be able to understand and make their best choices. That's not something where I just throw information at them. It's where I carefully craft every aspect of the lesson to make sure I'm completely scientifically accurate, that I'm not leading them astray. Because so often we teach a simplified version of things that then has to be untaught in order to learn the real version.
And I didn't want to do that. I trust my learners with the truth from the beginning. Instead, teaching sex ed starts with clinical truth and takes what feels like confusing topics and makes them clear and logical because we don't have to start at people yelling at each other. We can start somewhere where everyone agrees.
We all start as a single cell. Everyone agrees on that. It's an actual truth, not an opinion, an actual fact that everyone can agree on because we know exactly what happens. From there, we can move on to something that gets people all worked up, like differences of sexual development.
Growing up, I learned that everyone was a boy or a girl and that's it. But as I learned embryology, I realized like, oh, this is actually really easy to understand. Instead of starting from a point where people are arguing about whether they're just men or just women or not, we're looking at actual reality. Early in development, all embryos start from the same basic template.
Then the body follows a sequence of signals that usually leads to a typically male or typically female anatomy. And if any step in that sequence varies, genes, hormones, receptors, timing, you can get differences in sexual development. It's understandable, it's observable, and it's clinical reality. And just like there can be natural variations in how any body system forms, there can be natural variations in reproductive development too.
It's logical and not a reason to panic. So now it's not a matter of opinion, it's science, it's real. It's something we can see and test and know is true. Once we move away from the hysteria of the news cycle and into actual human stories and actual science, actual humans living and having actual lives, then the whole fuss about whether someone is exactly a man or exactly a woman starts to feel a little bit silly because it exists on a spectrum.
Maybe you're at one end, maybe you're at the other, maybe you aren't. Truth is a loaded word and it makes people uncomfortable. But there is some truth we can rely on. It is true that we all start as one cell.
We can't get around that. It is true that our chromosomes carry recipes for certain things that dictate how our bodies are made. It is true that differences in development happen. We know this because the people exist and we can see them.
There are some things that people believe and all it takes is one example to prove them wrong. Imagine I told you there are absolutely no black swans. People used to believe that. Let's say that I insisted on it.
I could use lots of different ways to try to prove that there's no black swans. But all it takes is one black swan to prove they exist. And people can do the same thing with differences in development. They can try to convince us that that doesn't exist.
We can go around saying, I'm right and you're wrong and I'm smart and you're dumb and there is nothing you can do about it. That's a quote from Matilda, by the way. I love that movie. But that doesn't change the truth.
The truth is what's actually real. And if we show them a black swan, then yes, there are black swans and that's it. And if we can see that there are people who end up somewhere between male and female and that's just the reality, well, we know it's a clinical truth. And instead of shame and fear and misinformation is that people not getting the healthcare they need, not understanding what's happening to their own bodies, denying even that some people exist.
We can replace that with the truth, with information, with the clinical reality of how humans are actually built. One of my first video editors texted me a photo of her grocery cart. She said, look what you made me do. You made me buy all this healthy food.
I texted back, but I haven't even done a single lesson on nutrition. She'd been editing anatomy and physiology lessons and she'd gotten through like the heart, the lungs, maybe the digestive system. And she replied, well, now I understand my organs and they feel like pets that I need to take good care of. So I want to get my organs the food they need.
And that was a really eye-opening moment for me. Here was someone who was just getting paid to edit video and it still impacted her on that level because when we understand why something is the way it is, when we understand how it actually works, instead of feeling like we should do something, which is not very motivating, we feel compelled to behave in a way that is consistent with what we know and understand. That's what teaching clinical truth does. It's not about telling people what to do.
It's about helping them understand how incredible they actually are. Because once people understand how their body works and how other people's bodies work, and the fact that this is just a biological truth, not something society invented, not something anyone chose, not something to be ashamed of, then we can move away from judgment and hate and bickering and we can move into helping and caring, into self-acceptance, and instead of self-hatred, we can take care of ourselves the way we actually deserve and we can look out for each other. From a purely physiological standpoint, humans are not great at surviving. We're squishy and soft, we can't run very fast, we don't have claws, we can't fly, we can't tear things up with our teeth very well.
We aren't really predators in the traditional sense. We took away things like tools and weapons and teamwork. But humans have a few things going for us. We don't give up, we keep trying, we work together, we work with people who we may have some differences from, but we're all in it together because we're all humans and we have compassion.
One of the things they look for in archeology is whether humans cared for each other, and sure enough, they did. You go back far, far through time and you find people with horrible injuries who survived, who survived for years after those injuries, and they certainly wouldn't have if they weren't being fed and carried and cared for by other people. This is who we are. We're a species that watches out for each other.
That is how we've done so well together. It isn't just better for one person being helped, it's better for all of us because we all need each other. And that is why I'm teaching clinical truth. Because when we understand how incredible every person is from that very first single cell, it changes how we view and treat ourselves and each other.
In making more humans, this is why we start at the very beginning with a single cell and the full blueprint. If you want to learn and teach all this information in a way that's clinically accurate and shame-free, go to docrobschool.com slash truth. I'll see you next time. Take good care.
(gentle music)