Modern Wisdom - #556 - Rob Henderson - How Men Compete For Status

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force Veteran. Men fight. Sometimes they look silly when they fight. But they also collaborate and team up to take on common enemies. Women fight in very different ways that are less obvious, but no less vicious, and they sometimes try to even scupper their own teammates. Expect to learn how men's judgements of formidability are better at predicting future sexual partners than women's judgements of attractiveness, why male intrasexual competition is so much more obvious, my theory around why men hate to hear that women like dad bods, why there are rules in a "no rules" street fight, what happens if you get kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe and much more... Sponsors: Access Craftd London's Black Friday at https://bit.ly/fridaywisdom  Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all of MASA’s Chips at www.masachips.com/modernwisdom use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out Rob's Substack - https://robkhenderson.substack.com/ Follow Rob on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robkhenderson  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Henderson. He's a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force veteran. Men fight. Sometimes they look silly when they fight, but also they collaborate and team up to take on common enemies. Women fight in different ways that are less obvious, but no less vicious, and sometimes try to even scoop up their own teammates.

Expect to learn how men's judgments of formidable ability are better at predicting future sexual partners than women's judgments of attractiveness. Why male intersexual competition is so much more obvious. My theory around why men hate to hear that women like dadbods, why there are rules in a no rules street fight, what happens if you get kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe, and much more? Don't forget that if you are listening you should have also got a copy of the modern wisdom reading list, it is 100 books that you should read before you die, a hundred of my favorite fiction and nonfiction, with a little summary from me and an explanation of why I like them,

they're grouped and categorized, plus there are links to go and get them straight away. So if you need some new reading suggestions, go there. chriswillx.com slash books. Has it right now? For free and you can download it immediately chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rob Henderson. You just defended your PhD thesis. What does that mean? That's right. So PhD thesis, it's called a dissertation in the US.

They call it a thesis here in the UK. It's just a, it's a culmination of the work you do throughout your years of study in a doctoral program. So, at least within the field of psychology, typically you write a handful of papers, maybe three or four papers. And it's also posted a build toward some overarching hypothesis and kind of framework. And you run a series of empirical studies. And hopefully you get the results you're looking for.

And then it sort of builds towards, you know, here's what all of this means, here's how it contributes to the research, to the literature more broadly. And it's supposed to be this sort of original piece of scholarship. It doesn't necessarily have to be empirical either. Sometimes it can be theoretical. And I'm sure there's a whole other set of criteria for the humanities. But yeah, it's a huge relief. I mean, people say, oh, when you're finished with PhD,

these are gonna be so happy, you're gonna be so thrilled. And I was just like relieved. After I was just like, oh, thank God it's over. It's done. It's, even though it went well, I got the outcome I wanted. It was still just, it was still more just like, this burden is lifted rather than just feeling elated or something.

What's the thesis? The title of my PhD thesis is Physical and Social Threats, Fortify, Moral Judgments. I got really interested in this when I was in undergrad. I was taking classes by this experimental philosopher, Josh Noeb, who, that's where basically I learned that you can use the tools of empirical psychology and social science to test people's moral intuitions. And morality generally has been kind of the wheelhouse of philosophy, you know, armchair philosophers, you know, pondering what is morality, you know, what does it mean to be a moral

person, what is moral character. And with, you know, some of the of the instruments in psychology, you can come along and say, well, what do people actually think about morality? What does the average person think about it? And maybe some of your listeners will know about administering the trolley problem to people. Would people flip the switch? Would they not? That kind of thing. And I was taking classes with Paul Bloom, too, when I was in undergrad and learned about the developmental origins of morality. And while I was there undergrad and learned about the sort of developmental origins of morality. And while I was there, I learned about this interesting link between disgust and morality.

And many people think of disgust as this emotion that people experience in response to contamination, illness, infection. But there's a lot of interesting work indicating that it overlaps with our moral judgments as well, that people who are very sensitive to disgust also tend to condemn wrongdoers more harshly. If you induce disgust in people, show them some disgusting images or get them to smell some repulsive odors,

subsequently their moral judgments become intensified. And so I thought to myself, you know, when I was reading all of this and when I came to Cambridge, I was wondering, is there, you know, are there other forms of threat beyond contamination? You know, contamination is a threat to your survival. It's an evolutionary threat. Are there other kinds of evolutionary threats, challenges to your survival and potentially your reproduction? That could also intensify your moral judgment. So I did some stuff on people who were worried about COVID in 2020. We're also strict during their moral judgments for a variety of different kinds of moral violations,

not just things like some of the items I used were using a stranger's toothbrush. How wrong do you think that is? And of course, people who are worried about COVID will also say using a toothbrush that doesn't belong to you is that's horrible. But it was also things like betraying a family member or stealing from a store, you know, a kind of deception, betrayals, subversion, things that are unrelated to contamination, people who are worried about COVID were, a stricter with those kinds of violations, similar to social threat as well, similar to age.

The age one was the most interesting to me. I'm working on this paper trying to get it published. I think you and I might have talked about this offline before too. That essentially, there's a direct association between as people grow older, their moral judgments become stricter, and this is controlling for political orientation, controlling for income, for education. So these kind of definite graphic variables that you would assume, you know, oh, when older people, as they age, they become more politically conservative. And that's why they adopt these sort of moralistic attitudes.

But even when you control for that, there's something going on here about the aging process. And I suggest it has something to do with vulnerability, risk perception, as you grow older, the threats around you appear to be especially formidable. And I suggest this is also potentially why there are these interesting moral judgment differences between men and women such that women are more strict in their moral judgments relative to men.

And some of that can be explained with just the reproductive differences between men and women. Women have historically been more at risk for when they're pregnant, when they're carrying young children, they should just be extra alert to potential dangers. But I also suggest that if you control for certain things like muscularity, height, VMI, all of these other kinds of things, I would bet that the moral judgment differences and discuss sensitivity would actually shrink.

I just think that if you're a sort of a strong, young, robust, and healthy person, the world just looks less dangerous to you, and this includes moral wrongdoers. You think, like, ah, that guy's doing something bad, but I can take him. This is sort of the punchline of what my thesis is about. Very interesting. So I think we spoke about this last week that a lot of evolutionary research is think that morality is basically just adaptive rules for human survival given more fluffy and philosophical language. Oh, interesting. I mean, I wouldn't call them even even rules really. I mean, these are at least, you know, the best versions of, I think, evolutionary psychology

and social science, which is supposed to be descriptive, right? It's sort of, here's how things are, evolutionary psychology. It's about, here's how things were in the ancestral environment. A lot of people get those confused, right, where they think, oh, we evolved to do X because that's, you know, evolutionarily advantageous, but it's actually evolutionary advantageous in the ancestral environment, right? We're, what is it? We're Stone Age beings and in the sort of space age or something along, you know, we're in the modern environment. We didn't evolve to live in a world with, you

know, limitless calories, endless entertainment, drugs that can stimulate the dopaminergic system in your brain, like all of this stuff, right? But 100,000 years ago, there are certain mental adaptations that help us survive in that kind of environment. And so they're not really rules necessarily. And in fact, there's a lot of the psychological mechanisms that we have, they actually evolved to counteract other people's psychological mechanisms as well. There's debate right now, I think, about age differences in relationships, for example,

where women might shame men for being interested in younger women. And some men will, you know, say something like, well, we evolved to be attracted to young women. And that's true. Men did evolve to be attracted to younger women because, you know, in the evolutionary environment, younger women were more fertile and so on. However, women evolved to use, and what people in general,

but in this context, women evolved to use moral norms to shame men so that they, in turn, can be exploited and advantage there as well, right, such that they can sort of shame high status men into not dating younger women and date them instead. And that in itself is an evolutionary mechanism. So you have all of these sort of competing modules and mechanisms and processes, and each person is trying to obtain an advantage at the level of the genes. We can lob evolutionary mechanisms at each other. I evolve to do this, you evolve to do that, you know what I mean? So I think that's also important to keep in mind

when people use evolutionary explanations as an excuse for this or that behavior. People are going to use their own evolutionary prerogative to undercut that as well. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, intracexual competition has been one of the most fascinating things that I've learned about this year. I had Christina Duranteon talking about it, and then I've got Joyce Beninson toward the end of this year.

Oh, she's great. Yeah, who's just going to be such money. She's the one, I think, maybe the last episode of this year. Oh, she's great. Yeah, he's just going to be such money She's the one I think maybe the last episode of this year and I can't wait to have her on But you will use something an article that you've got that's just come out called the male warrior hypothesis What's that? Yeah, yeah, the male warrior hypothesis It's funny. So Joyce Beninson has written about this as have others and it's a hypothesis within the evolutionary psychology research, basically suggesting that men and women evolved different psychological mechanisms to deal with

within group and between group conflict. And so, you know, based on a series of different studies, as well as sort of combing through the anthropological and archeological record, researchers have suggested that essentially men are more hostile within their groups to one another, especially overt hostility. So there's research indicating early on, it was considered basically undisputable that men were more aggressive to one another. But then when researchers sort of expanded this definition of aggression, they actually found no differences,

no significant differences. Once they accounted for indirect aggression, things like rumors spreading, ostracism, either ending a friendship or threatening to end it, those are sort of these indirect aggressive acts. And so in those cases, there's no difference. But the overt hostility that men show on another is definitely more pronounced relative to women. However, researchers have also found that men are more likely to suppress their hostility toward one another when they

encounter another group of men, say a group of outsiders, and they hypothesized that this is because in the evolutionary environment, when men are especially young men, most of this is going to be in the context of young men, when they're within a group, say, an evolutionary band 50 or 100,000 years ago. It's in their interest to sort of one-up one another, mock one another,

tease one another, and look good in that community, especially because they're trying to impress young women. But then also evolved to band together and to either defend to their community from hostile outsiders and invaders, and they evolved to be those hostile invaders and go capture resources in women and territory from other groups as well. And so essentially men are simultaneously more hostile and more cooperative. Whereas women, their aggression is expressed indirectly and verbally and sort of in this roundabout way. And yet when they compete with other women, it appears that they're less likely to suppress

that hostility that they show one another. And there was a study that came out this year, Joyce Benison was an author of this paper and they were looking at high school and college athletes. And they basically found that, you know, they asked these athletes questions about how they interacted with one another when they're on the team and how they interacted when they were competing against other teams. And they found that, generally speaking, especially for active overt aggression, male athletes reported more from their own teammates, you know, name calling, fist fights, shoving each

other. Like, I think one of them was like spitting on me, you know, getting shoved in a locker, like all of the kinds of stuff that happens in male sports teams, right? And, you know, men reported more of that happening between one another. But then when they asked the male athletes about how they competed with one another against another sports team and how much hostility they showed their own teammates, it was very low. And essentially seemed like the hostility

they typically directed toward one another suddenly became hyper focused on defeating the other team. Whereas for the female athletes, they reported a relatively high amount of indirect aggression, rumors, ostracism. One of the items was, have you ever been left out when the other teammates went to dinner without you, things like that going out to you without you?

And they were relatively high levels of that, and then they asked these female athletes about their experiences playing with their teammates against another team. And again, like the rates of intro groups, so within group hostility, we're actually still relatively high. Women relative to men were less likely to pass the ball to one another or shun one another or like maybe whisper something to another girl, things like that. So the overall idea of this male warrior hypothesis is that guys are sort of extra hostile in basically every single context, but in a sense they're actually more cooperative

as well in that when they're up against another group, another team, perhaps another army or an invading force, they can sort of let those tensions go and come together with one another. And I think this distinction between indirect versus direct aggression is important and it's interesting because, you know, so I'm in that piece that I sent to you about the male warrior hypothesis. I discussed this excerpt from this book called Yanoama, and it was recommended on Twitter by the great David Buswin, or you've had on this show. And this is an amazing book.

So it's the Spanish girl, this European girl, in the 1930s gets kidnapped by these, these Amazonian, in the book. The book came out in the 1960s, so they refer to them as Amazonian Indians. And she's kidnapped as a young girl. And one of the, one of the stories she tells in her recounting of what happened to her throughout this experience, and she lived with them for decades, through, with various bands of, of Yanoama tribes. Yanoama is this sort of overarching name for a whole series of

foraging communities in South America. And they're constantly at war with one another in conflict. I mean, they're sort of like modern day hunter-gatherers, essentially. And so Helen Valero says that when she arrived in this new tribe, there was a girl there who didn't like her, you know, a girl who was roughly the same age as her, and gave her this packet of folded leaves and said like here, here's a snack for you, you must be hungry, and Helen takes this snack and she smells it and she's repulsed by the the odor and so she sets it down somewhere, and then a few hours later, a little boy in the tribe falls deathly ill. And he says, he got this little leaf packet from Helen Valergy. You say, you know, she gave it to me. And the whole entire tribe turns on her.

And they're like, why did you try to poison this boy? Like, who is this outsider girl who's trying to poison us? Like, why are you doing this to the children? And they ostracize her and banish her. And she, like, literally is running through the forest while several of the men are shooting arrows at her and banished her. And she literally is running through the forest while several of the men are shooting arrows at her trying to kill her. And they're, yeah.

So this was an interesting example of this indirect aggression, right? I mean, it's not like this girl went up to her and bashed her head with a rock or something. She gave her a snack knowing that two things could happen. Because by the way, when she gave her the snack, she said, if you don't like it, because she saw Helen smell it and say, I don't like the smell, and she said, well, if you don't like it, you can give it to someone else.

Because you do, two things could happen either. Helen eats this and dies, or she gives it to someone and is responsible for the death of someone else and gets ostracized. So that's a win-win situation, and this is an act of indirect aggression. But if Helen were to die in this situation, you know, this is girl Helen Bolero, the girl who gave her the snack would not be counted as her murderer, right? Like the sort of steps between the snack and the death of Helen Bolero, there are steps involved such that

the girl would not be blamed for this. And I think this is a sort of an extra interesting example of indirect aggression that is often more perpetrated by women relative to men. And I write it there that if this had been a situation among men where this new outsider male comes in and the other guys don't like him, they're not like, how can I kill this guy directly? It would be like basically stepping up on him

and be like, show me what you're made of. It just like shove him or they'd organize a way to kill him in his sleep. It would be a very direct and forceful attempt to put this newcomer in their place. And so this, to me, sort of gets at this difference between this sort of overt male aggression versus covert female aggression.

Why do you think it is that women don't seem to band together against an out group foe in the same way that men do? It's an interesting question. One possibility, and perhaps the most, the more, the more, the more sort of convincing possibility to me is, you know, sort of riffing on this, this quote from the evolutionary psychologist, John Tube, he was a sort of a pioneer of the field, and he had this line, it was something like, you know, cultural variation, I'll believe that cultural variation is responsible for, you know, the human nature, if you show me an example of a tribe in which women band together to capture men as husbands.

And you know, there's literally no example in the human record of women ever doing that. And there's another story from the anthropologist, Napoleon, I don't know if I'm getting his name, his last name, it's like Shagnon, C-H-A-G-N-O-N. And he talks about how, so he would spend time, he actually spent time with the Yanwama in South America. And his belief, as was the belief of many other anthropologists at the time, is that the reason why men in these small-scale tribal societies go to wars over resources, and especially over meat, capturing territory, finding good grounds for hunting and those kinds of things. And he floated this idea to these Yanohama tribes, and they laughed at him.

And they're like, that's not where we go to war now we go to war for women like that's the reason we like like we like me but we like women a lot more was actually a direct line that he put it as book and so that is probably the reason right I mean throughout this book that David Bus recommended on the Y there's just countless cases of men like getting into conflict, both within the groups to say like, who's going to marry this young woman or who's going to come together

to take out the other tribes around them. And there's just constant male-on-male violence in conflict and it's almost inevitably settle surrounds this surrounds this idea of, you know, who is going to marry, who, or who's going to have children with who, or who's going to have more, you know, more sexual partners, and men have a stronger sex drive, they have more interest in variety, they have a sort of a reputational concern to demonstrate how tough they are, whereas women don't necessarily have those same set of concerns, and also because women are the more valuable, sex biologically, so they don't want to get involved in physical conflict.

Right, okay. Yeah, that it is interesting to me that the tribalism that we see amongst everybody smeared across society seems to fall apart at least a little bit when men aren't in the picture. And it's like you're talking about basically women banding together against an outgroup less than men would on average. Right. Yeah, especially the sort of overt hostility, right? So a lot of the research supporting the male warrior

hypothesis now it indicates that that men show, you know, higher levels of preference for the in group, more like xenophobia and more sort of denigration of, you know, generally the out group. Whereas for women, it's less overly expressed, right? It's more sort of fear and avoidance, you know, like if there's this sort of strange force just avoid it, stay away from it and don't cause any trouble. Yeah, so that is, you know, there's this sex difference there. The interesting thing I suppose is that it suggests that human cooperation is a consequence

of human competition. Like, one of the main reasons that cooperation exists is simply because human competition was so high. Yeah. Yeah. There's some interesting research on the, you know, they've done some sort of mathematical modeling where they pit, you know, these sort of computerized simulations of, well, you know, what if one group cooperates all the time versus some of the time, and you know, what if one group always competes and so on. But basically they find that these two things tend to arise simultaneously that you can't

really get the kinds of high levels of cooperation that you see with humans without high levels of competition as well. I mean, humans are, like, by far the most cooperative species on the planet. I mean, we literally can coordinate millions or even billions of people across the globe, whereas we're also the most sort of deadly species as well, where we'll get into sort of mass scale, killings and conflict in genocide and all those things. But in order to pull off a genocide, you actually have to be an extremely cooperative species. This is the kind of irony of that, right?

Richard Rangham has written about this and others is like, you know, that sort of, there's that double-sided aspect of our nature is that cooperation can lead to sort of incredible levels of mass conflict and competition. Yeah, because the cooperation enables you to be able to deploy that competition at scale and leverage it in increasing the vicious ways. Didn't, as seem to remember, you wrote about people presumed that humans have got more aggression than other animals and that were totally undemesticated and that the wild is perfect without us, but chimps show a 100 to 150 times the amount of aggression than humans do, and the peace-loving bonobos show less aggression than the chimps, but still way more than any human society ever recorded. Yeah, yeah. I wrote about that when I

was discussing Richard Rangham's book. He's the Harvard Evolutionary Biologist. He wrote a great book called The Goodness Paradox. And yeah, some of the findings that he unearths and discusses in that book, one of them was this, yeah, there's this general belief, like if someone is behaving, you know, especially violently like a serial killer or something, we're like, oh, he's inhuman, you know, there's something wrong with him,

like where's his humanity? And yet Richard Rangham points out that, like, actually, the ability to kill, at scale, large numbers of people, that is uniquely a human ability. There's no chimpanzee who's committed like mass scale genocide against their own species the way that humans have. And the figures were stunning. So it was 150 to 500 times, so chimpanzees specifically, within their own groups. He's not even talking about intergroup conflict among chimpanzees, just among their fellow group members, their peers, they're 150 to 500 times more violent than human hunter gather coalitions.

And bonobos are roughly half that violent. So, you know, what is that? Something like 250 times more violent than human beings. So, yes, they're, they're half as violent as chimps, but still far, far more, more violent than human beings are. And so, yeah, there's, uh, the whole self-domestication idea was, was fascinating to me, this idea that, you know, and you actually see a small scale version of this among chimps, but human beings, even more so, where part of the reason why humans are relatively docile and cooperative and can follow norms and all of these kinds of things and built societies is because we care deeply about what other people think about us. We sort of

have this built-in social anxiety, you know, some researchers have called it the sociometer of where we sort of monitor how we appear in the eyes of others. And the reason why we have all this is because in the ancestral environment, this is actually before the ancestral environment. So Richard Rangam suggests this was maybe five or six hundred thousand years ago, this started occurring what he calls the execution hypothesis, which is that whenever an especially aggressive or hostile male appeared within a community and started monopolizing resources or taking the other men's wives and so on,

it was around this time that humans started to form the ability to speak. So language evolved, the ability to use tools and weapons had evolved, and the sort of weaker and less formidable men were able to form the sort of whispering consensus of like, hey, this guy is a problem. He took my wife, he took your wife, like, you know, what's going on? So how do we get rid of this guy?

And so they'd wait for him to fall asleep or they'd, there's one example that he points out in the book of this hunter gather group. There was a sort of bullying male that the others didn't like. And so I think they dared him to climb up this tree to get some particularly appealing fruit. And so the guy sets his weapons down. He's like, and I'll show you guys,

let me get this piece of fruit up at this tree and he climbs up the tree. And when it comes down, the guys just, they take his weapons that he had left and just starts stabbing him and problem solved. And so the guys who cared, who had no, or little to no sort of concern about their reputation or how they appeared of like, I'm just going to do what I want to just be this sort of bad boy alpha male. If they weren't able to cultivate allies

and to sort of develop a reputation as a useful person in that group, then the others would just kill them, right? And so we are the descendants of the humans who didn't die and who did sort of develop over time this concern about like any kind of ridicule criticism, any sort of stinging comment, that lingers with us because in the ancestral environment, every single negative comment could have potentially life threatening consequences.

Life is too difficult, ancestral for people to get through on their own, which means that inevitably you need cooperation. That means that you need to temper down the aggression, the dark try-had-trades that you've got, all of that stuff. You need to bring that down to a level which is perhaps sufficiently high that it means you are more effective than your competitors, but not so high that it crosses the threshold where you get your weapons taken away from you while you're up a tree and get stabbed on the way down. That's the balance. Yeah, that's the neat way to tie that in, what you're saying, with the mail warrior hypothesis, where you need a little bit of that sort of aggression and that callousness, because if you

had none of that, then you would just be overrun by a more aggressive community. But if you had too much of it, then the whole community would start to fall apart and people would be hostile and suspicious to one another. Yes. Also, I suppose the males, ancestrally, that would have been a little bit more aggressive, would have been seen as more useful. You know, they would have been formidable foes and useful allies for people to have. And again, it's pushing that too far. I've really, really enjoyed some of the conversations I've had about psychopaths recently. And Kevin Dutton, he's the head of the communication of science for Auckland University in Australia, or Adelaide, maybe. And he was talking about this saying,

it's adaptive to have a couple of psychopaths in your group because it means that if you've got to go and do some really messed up stuff You can just send them in there. They're the special forces. They're the berserkers. They're the Vikings going to raid Linda's van or whatever and it's useful to have them But as soon as you start to get too many it makes for a very unstable society. So you can't hold on to that speaking about some of the secondary sex characteristics and the male competition stuff, I had this idea about dadbods after I saw a competition online.

So there's a video, I saw a video go up about dadbods and I noticed in the comments a lot of male accounts really, really upset. They seem to be very triggered, very discounting. It was a woman that was talking about why she likes dadboards and why dadboards are superior to guys that think that they're in shape. And a lot of guys in the comments telling this woman that she doesn't know what she's talking about, which is the internet for you. And you don't know, I don't know how much this woman was posturing how much she was doing as a massive

troll, whatever. And it got me thinking about why it is that guys seem to have such an aversion to women specifically praising and the press and the media, sort of upholding dadbods as some sort of pedestal that men should try and attain. And I think that there's a lot of things going on here. The first most obvious one is that guys that train don't want their efforts that they've put into their own physique to be in vain, right? That makes a lot of sense. They have decided that this is something which is worthy of getting. There is almost no guy on the planet who would be able to say with a straight face that they're going to the German training hard without it, including in that I'm doing this to make myself more attractive to women or whoever it is that they're trying to be

attractive to. So that's a first one, but I don't think that that really accounts for anywhere near the kind of effect that we're seeing here. I think another element is that most men, even if they're not the sort of ones who go to the gym and train, would look at the body of a man that does go to the German train and respect it. And I think that one of the concerns that they see there is that they value something, which is now being undermined by someone that they presume their model of the world is supposed to be able to understand.

Hang on a second, I thought I understood what it was that women wanted. I kind of want this thing, I don't want it sexually, but I want it in a way of, I think it's something that's admirable. And, you know, the secondary sex characteristics that suggest that men actually get bigger and go to the gym, more for verminability, than for attraction, that plays into this pretty perfectly. Another element, I think, is if you roll the clock forward one more step from there, it might be a little bit of internalized homophobia from men, that they look at another guy who is in good condition and they say, I bet that guy slays pus, I bet that all of the women

want him, I value his body, I like that body in a way that makes me think why am I looking at this guy's body? So well, it's because I want to model it for myself and you know, it's a it's me doing it for women But then to be told hang on a second all of this that you're doing from a woman doesn't make any sense at all We're not I'm not concerned about that Might make you think oh holy shit. This might mean I'm gay And then there's a lack of vile. Do you understand what I mean? I do. That one seems, the other ones I can, those make sense.

This one's a little too. I'm rolling the dice. I'm rolling the dice here, okay? But what I like it, I think it's, I like that this sort of the creativity of it. It's, yeah, there's like a Freudian element to it. I think it's, you know, it's interesting. Maybe, I don't know. But he's the final thing. So I heard this story, I know, it's interesting. Maybe. I don't know. But he's the final thing. So I heard this story.

I told my friend about this idea yesterday. And he told me a story about one of his ex-girlfriends that mentioned she was happier with him, the fatter that he got. And she was more unhappy with him as he got leaner. And I think that a big part of this is the level of comfort that is associated with having a partner that you know is not going to go anywhere else.

I learned this from Sarah Hill. She taught me that men who have gut fat are perceived to be better fathers. And the reason that men who have gut fat, this is compared with the guy that's in good shape. And you think, hang in a second, how is the guy that isn't able to protect his family because he's less physically formidable, going to be perceived as a better father? And the reason is that the guy who has more good fat is seen to be less potentially attractive to other mates, which means that if he is given one calorie, there is less likelihood of him spending that calorie on trying to acquire a new mate,

because more doors have been closed to him than the guy that is in good shape and may potentially have more doors open to him. Basically, this guy's physique has shut off a number of different avenues down which he could invest his resources. Therefore, the guy that doesn't have as many avenues open must be the better father. So basically, there is like a, when it comes back to the woman that was in a relationship who was happy when her partner got fatter, I think that being less uncertain about your partner's strain contributes massively to a woman

who might have anxious attachment or maybe there's a disparity, mate value there that she is going to feel a lot more comfortable with that. But the wild thing when you think about this is that comfort contributes quite a lot to woman's arousal. A woman's arousal is predicated at least in part on feeling comfortable.

Now, there's ways that you can gain this in the bedroom, but for the most part, it appears that women have a high degree of comfort that they need to reach the men do. So there has to be, on a a spectrum from this guy's peeled out of his mind with the best physique on the planet and looks like a superhero and everyone wants to have sex with him to this guy is super, super fat and completely disgusting.

There is a spectrum between that upon which different women with their different levels of comfort both for a relationship and for attraction are going to feel more or less comfortable and there is a situation in which someone who was less in good shape would be more arousing and more attractive to a woman because her degree of comfort would be increased so that's my thesis around dadboards homophobia and comfort in relationships for you. Good, no, no, no, no, no. I think, well, okay, so, well, the first thing you said about, how men and women react differently

to the whole dad-bought phenomenon and men sort of get angry about it, you've probably seen this meme, right? Of like, the guy's sort of thinking, like, how I think it'll be when I get in really good shape. And it's like, you know, a bunch of girls and bikinis, and how it actually is, and it's like all these boys saying, yeah, bad, you look jack, this is awesome. And I think there is something truth to that, right? Even if you get really muscular, unless you're celebrity or something,

the dream is not necessarily the reality there. I think that the whole phenomenon around dadbods is maybe a little bit overblown. I know it's this trend online and people pay attention to it and talk about it. Probably in part because it's kind of controversial, it gets people talking. But if you actually look at the research, you know, well, what do women actually find attractive? And you know, you showed them a series of bodies. And like, you know, the fatherhood won't not withstanding, like that makes sense to me.

But in terms of just like, you know, which one of these guys do you find the most attractive, just upfront, like how sexually attractive do you find this kind of man? And generally speaking, its guys who are in pretty good shape. Very unfit guys, like really skinny and really fat guys are always at the bottom of the list in terms of who women find sexually attractive.

But there are some interesting things I think going on with mate retention versus sort of obtaining a mate versus retaining a mate. And for women, that makes sense that, especially for older women or women who are looking to settle down, they don't want a guy who's sort of teed up and full of testosterone and energy and looks really good

because in all likelihood, he probably has other interests besides just the one woman. And so they know that if a man is spending maybe more time at home or spending more time on other things besides his physical appearance, he has different priorities. But I wonder if like if there was any way to control for that, if they would still, they could just like, I don't know, take a really good looking guy, he's not allowed to leave your house, right? Like, He's not allowed to leave your house, right?

Like he's not allowed to go anywhere. He's not allowed to post thirst traps on Instagram. He's yours. He's gonna raise your kids. Now do you like him? And I think a lot of women would be like, okay, you know, in that case, he'd all take him over to the dad bod guy. I don't know, I still think like there's something

innately attractive just on a sort of a visceral level guys who isn't really good shape, but of course like like in the real world, in reality, women's priorities change. They also change based on short-term versus long-term mating, which I know you're familiar with too, is for a one-night stand, a really good-looking guy is those are the kinds of guys that we find appealing versus someone for a more long-term relationship. Women do play some importance on how a guy looks, but they start to play more importance

on other things like kindness and personality and sense of humor and income and all of these other sort of extraneous things too. So, yeah, the research on the body track of this thing is like, muscularity is like by far the strongest predictor of how sexually successful a man is. And there's an interesting disparity here based on what actually leads to sexual success

among men. Is it actually how sexy women find you or is it sort of how much sort of admiration and prestige and esteem you obtain from men. And I think this may also be what's going on with the whole dad bod phenomenon too, is like, men, even if you can't verbalize it, right? Like, even if you don't explicitly know, I mean, this is one of the sort of the key tenets of evolutionary psychology, is like, you don't have to know the reasons behind your behavior in order for them to be effective Or even to know that like that's what they're doing, right? You know, there's this there's this great example that Dan Danit gives the philosopher in one of his books where you know a single-celled

Organism swims towards a nutrients without having any understanding of what it's doing or why and yet It still does the thing that it needs to do to survive and and to replicate And so so humans are the same right like we do things, we don't know why we have these feelings, we have these desires and emotions. And I think guys may know at a sort of implicit, intuitive level that, you know, yes, it's important what women think, but it's at least as important what men think too.

And so when men say, you know, this is the body that you want, this is the body that's desirable and so on They're thinking like that's probably I should probably place some importance on that too in terms of like getting jacking Swole those things and this is born out by some interesting research for example There was there was one study This is like this is one of my like my favorite studies like this is a study that actually got me interested in like mating psychology and it's kind of thing, which is that they showed a series of women videos of men.

And these are just like very brief video clips, and then at the end they asked these women, how sexually attractive is this man? Scale from one to seven, not at all attractive to very sexually attractive. And then they showed a group of men the same videos of the same guys and asked them a different question. And the question was, how likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man? And it was the same kind of scale, like very unlikely to, very likely.

And then the researchers tracked those men in those videos and had them return 18 months later and asked them a bunch of questions including, you know, basically how many sexual partners have you had over the last 18 months. And the correlation between how sexually attractive the women found these men and how many partners they had was zero. There was no correlation at all between how hot they were to women and how many partners they had later. But there was a strong and significant correlation between how intimidating or formidable men

rated them and how many sexual partners they recounted over the last 18 months. And so essentially how tough a guy looks to men is a stronger predictor of his sexual success than how attractive he looks to women. And I think you can kind of like, at first I found this study hard to believe, this was replicated in a different study by the way. So this does seem to be a real phenomenon. And I know when I think about, like even in my own personal life, guys I know and stuff,

they kind of like really good looking, like kind of pretty boyish kind of guys, like they do, they don't do badly with women, but when I think about the guys who are like athletes, or guys who are just like really, like obviously physically fit, they do like much better, you know, if you were to compare the two. And I saw, so at first I was a little skeptical, but when I really started thinking about it, I think it makes sense. And so, so there, there have been other

studies like this too, like hand grip strength correlates with number of sexual partners over the course of a lifetime and over the course of the past year. There's other research indicating that if you ask women about their most recent short-term sexual partner, they say that he was more muscular than most of their other sexual partners. So, in the researchers in that paper, they basically suggested that if a man is very physically fit and muscular, he doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate other kinds of qualities that meant to be really fine attractive because just sort of being physically fit

is enough for a short-term fling. And in those cases, maybe when we don't care quite as much about how kind he is or what a sense of humor is and all those kinds of things. So yeah, I think there's this sort of distinction here between formability versus sexual attractiveness really gets that sort of what what men are responding to and they understand that like maybe women find the dad bought attractive but guys aren't going to be impressed by that and and that's actually what's

more important right. Physically muscular guy walks around like you know he's going to be the one that's intimidating and in the end like that's going to be the the person who probably attracts more sexual partners versus a you know the sort of dad bot kind of guy. And like more generally I think this ties into the evolution of secondary sex characteristics among men and and why they evolved right I mean so David Puts he's an evolutionary I think he's an evolutionary anthropologist, and he's basically outlined, why do we have these secondary sex traits as men? Because it's actually it's calorically and energetically costly to have large muscles, to grow extra hair out of your face, to your voice changes and modulates too. And that also takes like extra energy to create that.

Thicker brows, our skulls are thicker, thicker bones, like all of these things. Like what's the point of all of this? And he's hypothesized that this is actually, you know, all of our secondary sex characteristics, or many of them anyway, are actually with Steve Stewart-Williamson. He says their dear antlers rather than peacocks tails, right? So the peacocks tail is a direct advertisement to women of like, look how beautiful and pretty I am and come made with me.

Whereas the deer's antlers, like female deer's don't care about how big a male deer ant, deer's antlers are actually to be used in competition with other males and once they prevail, then they're the ones who actually get more mating opportunities. And so when David putz analyzed a whole series of, conducted a whole series of studies, basically asking men, how intimidating do you find deep voices versus not

so deep voices, muscular men versus not-so-muscular men, guys with beards versus without beards. The beard one is interesting too. If you, you know, women will debate endlessly about whether they find beards attractive or cute or not, but there's clear and straightforward evidence that men find men with beards more physically intimidating than men without beards. And so all of these things more than likely evolved, not necessarily to impress women, but actually to impress men.

And this is also why puberty is delayed, why there are all of these peculiarities around the way that the male body changes versus the way that the female body changes. Why puberty is delayed? Basically, because it takes longer to develop these sex characteristics for voice change, for muscularity, and even things for height, right? Like, if you take two 10-year-old or rather like on average, 10-year-old girls are taller

than 10-year-old boys, and this changes throughout puberty, but there's just this sort of delay, this delayed process among boys because their body undergoes such a massive and rapid change in girls due to, but it's interesting. Girls, it just seems like it's less awkward, less overt. There's something else about like when a boy's voice changes and they're just sort of more ungainly the way that they move and everything because their body's just, you know, it's just a, it's a, you get this massive dose of, of this hardcore drug, right? testosterone and androgens and all these other things. So it's really interesting. I think this, this idea of, like masculinity, these sort of masculine features and traits, evolving as a competitive secondary sex characteristics rather than appeal to others. And sometimes I wonder, can these things, can other traits

that humans might evolve that could push us too far and actually become detrimental? So there's research on the Irish elk went extinct because their antlers grew too large and they could no longer hold their heads up and eventually die. Right? Because there was this sort of runaway selection process and this pressure of like the biggest antlers were usually the ones to prevail in contest, but eventually they got so big that they could no longer mate and they couldn't reproduce themselves anymore. So maybe you guys, muscles will get too big and eventually we can't even take care of ourselves. That fishery and runaway stuff is so funny. What does it mean to say that masculine traits amongst men seem and secondary sex characteristics seem to be more about

femininity than attraction. They are antlers rather than peacocks' tails because it seems like men judging other men's formidable is more accurate at estimating the number of sexual partners that a man has. So how successful he is with women than his attractiveness is. How, given the fact that women say they're not attracted to it and yet the men that have these things are the ones that are the most successful, does that not just mean that women don't know

what they're attracted to? Revealed versus stated preferences? Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm inclined to say that like they, I think they, they would acknowledge that those things are like more attractive than, than the average or maybe not having those things, but they would state, you know, this other kind of preference of like, yeah, I want a guy who's muscular, but not too muscular or something like that. But yeah, there, there is this, I mean, for human behavior in general, right, there's often this mismatch

between what people say and what people do. And yes, state versus revealed preference. And I think there is something like that going on here too, where, like, for men, what is like the, you know, more so than for women, a strong predictor of your sexual success, your romantic success is your status, right? And status is this sort of amorphous, like you can't, you can't look at status under a microscope or something, right?

It's something that exists in the minds of other people and people have to agree that you have it, right? Like you don't get to decide if you have it other people do. And in this instance, throughout evolutionary history, it seems that men have been the ones to confer status on other men, more so than women. And I know that Jordan Peterson has made this point too about like how, you know, there are sort of these dominance or competence hierarchies and women sort of use those, you know, they sort of use this as a sort of cognitively outsource, this burdensome task of picking an attractive partner. They just fill sort of what they got to find out.

The hierarchy. Exactly. And they don't like, oftentimes women don't even know or care what the contest is. Right? I make this point in that article about how, like women, a lot of women don't even, like they don't like sports or they don't watch sports, but they still find athletes attractive. I don't know what you're doing out in that field, but I love how fucking good. How good would it be to create some sort of competition between men where the outcome

was completely arbitrary? Let's say that it was correctly picking the tosses of a coin, right? And you have this huge pool of men, a hundred men over time, and it's like a round-robbing type scenario, and then it's knockout stages all the way to the top, and then get the women to rate the attractiveness of the men over time, and maybe run that a bunch of different times and run different women through, and see if the guys that won a competition which was completely based in luck other ones that are given more attractiveness and if you can have someone you'd have to control it somehow where you had attractiveness before and attractiveness after how much does winning a completely arbitrary game

improve your attractiveness to women It's a it's a good question I think that so if you were to carry out that experiment, you would need to have, you would need to introduce an additional element, which would be other men, respecting the winner. I think that's a key component here. It's like, it's not just winning the contest. It's winning a contest that matters to men in particular, right?

Like, if you win the coin tossing contest or whatever, and you have a bunch of other guys being like, oh, that was incredible, man, that was all you know, I find pictures. Yeah, you need to observe them being competitive, put it, pedestalizing the person that won. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that is the, that that would actually be the key here for women sort of what, like, their, the variability of their attractiveness ratings would shift somewhat based on that. And I think, like, basically, there's just, like, interesting papers on this about, like, how, you know, so the sports competition is one where maybe women aren't particularly interested in sports, but yet they fight athletes attractive. Historically, you know, a lot of women, even educated women were illiterate and yet they still found well-known authors to be attractive.

They find painters and artists attractive, even if they may not necessarily understand what's going on with the art, but they see that the respect and prestige that the artist accrues from the art community or from the class of people that they're around, those kinds of things. And so, you can see this with, to me, one of the more amusing examples of this is guys who play video games on YouTube get groupies. You're just like this guy playing games and uploading a live stream and commenting on it, and they have a million subscribers or whatever.

And I've seen news coverage and media articles about like, yeah, he's a 19 year old kid who plays video games all day, and he's getting love letters, and you know, girls messaging on Instagram and all this stuff, and it's like, if he was just a dude sitting at home playing video games,

he wouldn't get a single love letter, right? But the fact that he has a million other nerds out there like saying like, oh, I love you, bad. You're, you know, you're probably selected this as the king of our group. Well, yeah, it's so funny because the king of the gamers, yeah, the same accusation that's thrown at men as them retreating from society and not being a viable mate for women, video games in the basement, spending too much time on screens. If you just tune that up to high performance and everybody else says yeah, I know that he's doing the thing that people say is the antithesis of being attractive to women but he's the best at it you go oh yeah well now he's super attractive

yeah there's a i think that like those like there's something about There's something about winning the contest, but then also accruing respect and esteem and prestige of other people. If you look at the research on the happiness psychology research, sociometric status is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. And sociometric status is respect and admiration from your peers.

That is the thing that is actually a stronger predictor happiness than how much money you have or your sort of occupational status or something like that. And oftentimes, I mean, the reason why people work so hard to obtain so much money is to actually obtain the sort of affections of other people, right? Like that's sort of ultimately what people are striving for, both men and women as well. So that aspect of mating psychology about how, yes, it matters how you're viewed by the opposite sex. But to me, the interesting part of the male mating psychology aspect or what females ultimately choose is, it matters at least as much what other guys think of you.

You know, that sort of is a more strong predictor than what the women think of you. Yes, and downstream from what the men think of you is what the women are going to do with you, even if it isn't what they think of you. Do you think that this pre-selection for mates works in reverse? Do you think that men are more attracted to women that other women

think are impressive or high status or whatever? Hmm, I think that it would probably, the answer is probably yes, but the effect would be much smaller than the effect of being, you know, high status or prestigious or something in terms of how a man would appear to a woman. There was a fascinating study indicating that women are, it was like women are a thousand times more sensitive to a man's income or socioeconomic status than men are to women. And so in a positive direction, basically the more, you know, high socioeconomically, you're doing in life, the more attractive you are to women. And so, you know, that indicates that,

yes, there's a positive effect for that, but it's 1,000, the size of the effect. So there's something there, but it's not a lot. There was, you know, there was, there was, there was some research on on Tinder, you know, indicating that if you're a man with a master's degree, you get twice as many matches as a man with a bachelor's degree and a woman with a master's degree gets, I think it's 8% or 10% more matches than a woman with a... There's these small effects, like, yeah, you'll get a little more. Your status can help, but not to the same extent. It's interesting, even with your friends and your peer groups, what men choose as far as like... This may tie into the warrior hypothesis to the male warrior hypothesis, is that men friends in your peer groups, you know, like what what men choose as far as like, and this may sort

of tie into the warrior hypothesis to the male warrior hypothesis is that like men, if you ask men what kind of friends they like, you know, what what what characteristics would you desire in a male friend. Men are much more likely than women, young men are much more likely than young women to say they want a friend who's creative, intelligent, ambitious, socially connected, all of the sort of qualities that are proxies for status, right? And I think the reason for this is that because status lo and so large and male romantic prospects, and basically some of that status can actually rub off, right? We're like, the trickle down.

The trickle down. Exactly. It's like trickle down, like the answer're like the trickle down. The trickle down. If you are, uh, exactly what is the like trickle down to like the answer, I was trickle down effect or something. We're like, if you're just friends or like a, like a, a, a, a, a, a hanger, hanger on of like some rock star, you're going to get probably more attention than if you're just a random dude, right? Whereas for women, it doesn't quite work in the same way. We're like status, you know, it's, it's probably being friends with like a female rock star celebrity.

You do get some benefits, but in terms of being friends with them and attracting more men or higher quality made or something like that, the effect is probably much weaker. Yeah, absolutely. So it's just different, right? Think about the sort of changes in lifestyle that you would have. Yeah, you can fly around the world with your bestie, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be surrounded by good potential mates, whereas if you manage to befriend Dan Balsarian, then you can expect the kind of life that you're in for. So speaking of this, I'm thinking about the reversal again of this where

thinking about the reversal again of this, where women who pre-select men, Pete Davidson, that was in a relationship with Kim Kardashian, and now appears to be slowly running through every hot chick in Hollywood. Dan Bills' Arian as well, it's just, you know, the epitome of pre-selection. Other women find this man attractive, therefore, other women downstream from that woman will think they've outsourced again their state of seeking radar to other women and gone. Ah, that is a man that's potentially of high status. I mean, it's like commonly held wisdom when it comes to your dating profile online that at least one of the photos should have you with other women in it. And the other women should be quite attractive because it suggests that you are the kind of man that spends time around attractive women, which is pre-selection, I wonder whether the reverse would be negatively correlated for women.

If you were to see a woman regularly around different good-looking guys, that that would be disincentivising to other high-status males that may be considering pursuing it. So, I've seen research on this. This was before the Tinder error. I think these papers were probably like around 2010. David Bus might have actually been an author on one of them where they basically did this sort of pre-selection studies where they'll show women participants, a guy alone,

a guy with a group of guys, and a guy with a group of women, and invariably the guy with a group of women, they found him more attractive. And they did the study with men, where they showed a woman alone, women with female friends, and women with male friends, and they showed the woman surrounded by males, they found her, I think she was the least attractive. So it does sort of, you know, your prediction here was right. But I have seen research on dating apps where the effect, it's more complicated where women will at least, they'll say that if they see a man with lots of women, they rate him as less attractive or less desirable. The reasoning there was that they basically think that this guy is not serious. If this is the kind of picture you're going to put on your dating profile of you surrounded

by a bunch of hot chicks, it's like this guy is not a serious person, he's just going to use me, something like that. That, you know, and that's sort of the finding was they find most attractive. As far as like what kind of, like the actual success of such a guy, that's a different kind of story, right? But I think like probably the safe bet for that would be like having a mixed, mixed sex group, right? But make sure that like the women in the mixed sex group are attractive and maybe close to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think like the the pre-selection

thing is is key here, but yeah, the dating apps have kind of thrown things into disarray because like now people are just hyper scrutinizing of like, why did you put this picture up? What does it mean? You know, what kind of person are you? All of those things, whereas like, you know, if they randomly find a picture of you like that, it's, it's kind of a different story. Talk to me about the male monkey dance. This is probably my favorite article from your sub stack that you've written this year. It was my, I've shared it to way too many friends. So break down what the male monkey dance is for me. Yeah. So the male monkey dance was written by this guy, Rory Miller, in a book called Meditations on Violence, and in that book. So he worked in law enforcement, and he compiled interesting

research, and shared his observations and his findings in this book. And basically, the male monkey dance is, it's a sort of a ritualistic conflict between two males. Typically, two males who don't know each other. And it's a set of steps that gradually escalate. And so it's like, step one, it's the sort of hard stair, step two, this sort of verbal conflict of, what are you looking at? Or do you got a problem, bro, or like, what's going on?

Or like, what's your problem, that kind of thing? And then step three, if it escalates, is chest on chest, sort of chest bumping, and maybe like the arms extend, right? I remember you had Adam Hart on your podcast, the biologist, and he suggested that the reason why guys extend their arms out is to increase the perception of body size. And this is also likely the reason why during weigh-ins for boxing at MMA, you always see these guys sort of expand their arms and like, you know, flare out their traps and

their muscles and really they sort of brought in their shoulders and everything is to increase the perception of their size and look more intimidating. And so, guys, we'll do that, too. When they do the chest bump, step through the monkey dance chest bump, arbs go out, like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do about it? That kind of thing. And, yeah, that's step four, if it continues to escalate, is a dominant hand roundhouse punch.

And then it sort of escalates from there. And the observations that Miller makes in his book, I mean, they're fascinating. So, so he outlined this based on his experience as a police officer outside of bars and various values, especially when young guys are drunk, like these kinds of things are pervasive. And it wouldn't surprise me if maybe not every guy gets system four where a punch is actually thrown, but it wouldn't surprise me if more than half of guys have gotten to step three of that monkey dance. And so what's interesting about it is that it is sort of the commonality of it across

different kinds of people. And also who is involved in the monkey dance? Like who do we choose to get into the monkey dance with? It's always, or almost always, two young men who are roughly the same age and roughly similar in physicality. And it almost never occurs between a man and a woman. It doesn't occur between a man and a young child or between, you know, so a man wouldn't get involved in a monkey dance with someone who's obviously high on drugs or crazy. It typically only occurs when there's some question about who would

actually prevail in this physical contest. If these two guys were going to fight, we actually don't know who would win. And it's funny, I remember when I first read this at the book, a story came to mind where I was, you know, it was a story for when I was in college. I was walking through downtown with a couple of my college friends. And suddenly, this very short, it was young, but it was a short and very disheveled and very, just, you know, dirty, homeless guy comes up to my friend and grabs his hand and he's like, hey, do you have any money? And my friend pulls his hand back and he's like, oh, don't touch me. And this, this homeless guy, like starts reaching, like trying to like get into his pockets. And my friend is like running around. And he's like, I could tell he's extremely confused.

Because on the one hand, he could, I mean, it was pretty clear that he could take this guy in a, in like a physical fight. But in the other hand, this guy was so dirty looking that he just didn't want to get physically entangled with him. And so he's like running, but at the same time trying to demonstrate that he was willing to fight him. So he was like backwards running, his hands were up, but he was still like running. And then my other friend gets involved and like tries to like separate them. But then the homeless guy starts chasing him around. And my friend is, so it was like this comical scene and I'm watching all of this

and I'm just laughing at it because like, I didn't wanna get involved because I didn't want him to touch me. So I'm just watching this. And so that story came to mind of like, okay, so that was a case of like a monkey dance that was thwarted, right? Like something's going on here where like, they weren't afraid of running

because it was clear who would win the fight. And so they didn't feel like they had to stand their ground, but there was also this part of the male psychology of like, I don't wanna look like I'm weak. Like I'm gonna like turn my back and like start sprinting away from him. And so the monkey dance is like, you know, two guys, who would win, we don't know, usually between strangers.

Monkey dances very seldom rise between friends in a group in which the sort of relationships are established. Guys roughly know where they stand, those kinds of things. Whereas in environments in which people don't know who would actually prevail, oftentimes people will encourage fights, they'll encourage them to see. They want a rough and accurate estimate of what each person is made of and whether or not they can hold their ground.

When you see two guys fight and you see how they handle themselves, you yourself get a sense of like, could I take this guy too? Who would I do better against? And interestingly, some recent research, I wanna say from Aaron's cell, I hope I'm getting that right, about the evolutionary psychology of the concept

of a fair fight, and this appears to be an evolved psychological mechanism of like across different cultures and throughout the different societies, people have strong feelings about cheating in a fight, which is actually, I mean, it's kind of funny that you'd have that, because it's like two guys trying to beat each other up, and potentially inflict physical harm on one another,

and disfigure each other and whatever, and still, it's like certain things you shouldn't do, and if you do do, you'll be judged in some way, and the idea that they propose in their research is that the reason is because people want this estimate, not only do people want the estimate of the fighting bill, but people themselves involved in those kind of altercations want to signal their capacities, right?

Like if they rapidly escalate and suddenly, you know, kick the other guy in the balls and gouges eyes out and do all these things, you know, pull out a weapon, then they actually don't get to signal anything about their strength, their endurance, their speed, their capacity, all those things. They're really just signaling like they're a violent and crazy person, which can be useful to signal that in some instances. But if you really want to impress people and potentially impress men such that they will confer status on you and you can get women,

you know, pulling out a switchblade and using dirty tactics isn't going to get you that, right? It's going to be like slow escalation monkey dance, fair fight, you know, don't cheat, you know, don't cheat in a fight in a way that's fair and that's honorable. And I think you can see this with sporting contests, of course, boxing and MMA have very strict rules about what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. And you can even see this with young boys when they're rough housing and playing with each other. They can intuitively grasp that, maybe you can slap someone, but you shouldn't hit them

with a closed fist. So these kinds of things are built in and, you know, you built it and they're, I think in itself it's an interesting adaptation. And the monkey dance is a sort of a, it is a ritual around which people can display and also to observe, mens fermentability and willingness to prevail in a fair fight.

And if you don't continue to play fair, the effectiveness of that matchup at judging who is more physically formidable goes out of the window because it's no longer about you being more physically formidable, but it's about you being prepared to be more wild and more crazy. I wonder whether this would tie in, I'm thinking like, ancestrally with regards to maybe contests for leadership and stuff like that, that you would get prestige from winning in a fair fight, but you might get dominance from winning in a rapidly escalating fight,

that you would rule through fear if you were the guy that was completely crazy, but you might rule through respect if you were the guy that did things in a more fair manner. That's interesting. You might get, yeah, so yeah, the idea of prestige where people freely confer status on you versus dominance where you impose costs and instill intimidation, that would make sense to me. I mean, I think in that moment, it might actually work, right?

This sort of rapid escalation, using dirty tactics. In that moment, it's probably, yeah, people would fear you and be intimidated by you. But if the, you know, it depends on, yeah, what your sort of short-term long-term evolutionary goals are too. It's like, yeah, you may get dominance, but if you don't get the respect and the sort of admiration of those guys, then you're a consequence of where you're taking your weapons and the stabbing you on the way down. Well, there's that. Yeah, they don't, like, yeah, you don't have the status necessary to be attractive to

the winner. A good example of this, I suppose, to try and think about a situation in which a fight would happen and a man would choose to not play by the rules on purpose might be if he was outnumbered by a bunch of men. You often see this in movies, right? If you've got one protagonist versus a gang of five and he takes the first person that comes at him and curbs stumps him and totally fucks him up, why does he do that? Why does he decide to break those rules? It's because rapid escalation is a threat that shows I am prepared to go beyond the level that you guys are prepared to go to. And it's a scare tactic. And the reason that he does that is long-term respect

and prestige is not something that he's optimizing for in that fight. Right. He's optimizing for survival. Yes, right. So in that case, well, yeah, yeah, I've seen that too. I mean, in fights where one person is clearly bigger than the other, I've noticed that people are more lenient as far as how harshly they'll judge the smaller combatants. Oh, you're allowed to kick the big a guy in the bulls. Yeah, you're allowed to kick him in the balls, or maybe you're allowed to bite him, or something like that,

or if there's a weapon that isn't too dangerous, that you're allowed to use that too. And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, on the one hand, you're optimizing for survival over prestige or status. And yeah, you're also, at the same time, though, people are, perhaps, depending on the context, they are still willing to confer prestige on you if you're an especially small person who begins someone who's much larger than you, or if you're one guy up against five,

and you still manage to prevail, even if you bent the rules a little bit, it's still like, okay, that was still impressive regardless. And therefore, the status penalty isn't quite a severe. I liked the insight that he gave around, not the minority report, what's that fucking movie where there's like five of them? The Bourne series. Yes, the Bourne did. Jason Bourne, all of it, every single movie, he gets into a fight with some bastard in a Balaklava who's snuck into the apartment where he's staying

and this guy comes out of nowhere and they usually start a fight at... so it's kind of like an immediately escalated monkey dance, right? So there's no like what the fuck are you doing or whatever, they immediately go to step five, but from that step it further escalates from there. So they'll have a fight and then usually Jason Bournell accurately defend his attacks and like hit him and he'll fall through a table. Then when he falls through the table, he'll pull out a knife. And then you go, oh, he's not playing by the rules. And what always happens, Jason Bourne never pulls out a knife. Or if he does, it's a knife as he's been thrown across the kitchen counter and he picks up a peeler or something like

a potato peeler. Like it's, you know, it's always a weaker, shitter version. Or I think there's one I've definitely seen one of them where he uses a pen. I've seen another one where I think he uses a book, like beat like starts punching this book into this guy's throat. Point being, the, what you recognize in the imbalance of weaponry within that fight is that there is something more noble, more prestigious about Jason Bourne's conduct than about this other person's.

He didn't break the rules of the monkey dance up until this guy decided to escalate it. And then it's like, as a byproduct of Jason Bourne's pure lethality as a human, the guy ends up falling out of a window onto a passing car or something. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, there were cases where he, well, yeah, he's never the one to rapidly escalate, right?

Like he has killed people, but it always appears like he's a little bit reluctant to do it and like, you know, because that's sort of the honorable hero story. Yeah, I remember like the first movie, right? He uses the ballpoint pen, the second movie, the guy pulls out like this giant knife at Jason Bord's, just like reaching like just like behind him. He's not even looking for anything. He just grabs a magazine and rolls it up. And that's a side scene with the magazine.

Yeah. And he's able to hit the guy and the guy's missing. And so it's like, yeah, there's the violation. Well, immediately, I guess there's this kind of violation because every single time it's a CIA assassin who usually shows up with a gun and then, you know, born like somehow, you know, knows that he's cubbing and grabs his gun and disarms him

and then it becomes hand-to-hand combat. And yeah, there are like a lot of movies are like this where it's never the hero who behaves dishonorably or who cheats, it's always the sort of the adversary. Unless, and unless again, like you mentioned before, unless the protagonist has five or six guys all on him at once, and then he'll grab a weapon even if the other guys don't have one or something like that. I think there was a scene in, I think it was Spector, the James Bond movie, where he's on the train.

And there's this massive guy, like, two feet taller than him. And they're first like boxing. And James was actually doing pretty well where he's dodging the other guy's punches. But his blows aren't doing anything to the other guy. And I think at that point, he like grabs something and breaks it over the guy's head

and it actually doesn't do anything either. And so I did a kind of escalation from there. But in that case, it was totally understandable that this guy was literally twice Daniel Craig's height and weight or like, you know, they're about even grab something. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have you seen? It was like, how's it? Have you seen House of the Dragon? I haven't seen that one. It's the most recent Game of Thrones that everybody's talking about. I, yeah, I haven't seen it. Come on. Come on. I never got into Game of Thrones. everybody's talking about. I, yeah, I haven't seen it. Oh, come on.

Come on. I never got into Game of Thrones. Never. I couldn't get into it. Well, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you about it in any case. There's a scene in that. What's here? Well, one of the semi bad guys families, it's very complex, right?

The reason I say this has been complex is that you see in one scene, someone take dirt and throw it in the eyes of another child. It's a bunch of children that are all fighting for small amount of dominance and one of them takes dirt and throws it in his eyes because he is inferior in terms of a fight. And then later on, the one that's had the dirt

thrown in his eyes ends up losing an eye as one of the, these other children slice his face open and, and like cut his eye. He loses an entire eye due to this. But what it shows is, you don't really know who's the goodie and who's the baddie. And the reason that I bring it up is because it, it's endemic of the way that Game of Thrones is written

that hang on a second, there is no victor loss here. The kids that just got his, that just lost his eye, also 10 minutes before that acquired the largest and oldest dragon in all of Westeros. So it's like, what's going on? Who's the good person? Like, he called these children bastards and then they have been persecuted for a long time and you go, actually, who am I rooting for here? And that is why I think Game of Thrones is particularly enthralling because the typical roles of good guy, bad guy, protagonist enemy, the lines are nowhere near as clear cut.

And that means that everything is open to interpretation. And I may think that the kid that stabbed the other persons, I is totally within his rights. And the guy that I live with might say, no, no, no, there's completely out of order. And it allows people to take, no one is going to say Jason Bournem wasnt within his own rights to punch the guy in the throat with a ballpoint pen or whatever.

Like that's what the story leads you to believe. But yeah, it's, uh, you need to get in Game of Thrones is what I'm saying. Rob. There's a, there's a great, um, uh, I think it might have been in 48 laws or maybe it was one of Robert Green's books where he makes this point about how the same act can be construed completely differently based on the reputation of the actor. So if a good guy protagonist does something that's distasteful, people may not like it,

but at the same time, it's like, well, he's the protagonist. We've seen him do these other good things. So we'll let him slide on this one versus a villain. It does even a moderately unpleasant thing. We tend to be horrified by it. But it sounds interesting. This kind of storyline where like actually, you don't have enough information about the archetypal character roles where you can have that sort of mental shortcut of like he's doing this thing, but because he's the good guy, it's probably okay, or that

kind of thing, where like you have that, the knowledge of the character in advance. And so, maybe I'll have to give the show another try sometime. I think you'd be able to not have to invest seven seasons into the first game of Thrones and just watch the most recent HBO series. I reckon you can get away with that. And that's like a 10-hour, maybe less than a 10-hour investment. And then next time that someone brings it up, you know, I'm on about. My taste might be too conventional. I remember I watched that first season of Game of Thrones

way back when it was on the air, or maybe a year later, and I remember they killed, is it actually the Sean, Sean Bean character? I remember it. And I remember like, yeah, like, oh, okay. And then I got a little into the second season, I'm like, I don't know, I just,

I just couldn't get through it. So, so, you know, maybe, maybe I need to, you know, maybe, maybe my taste has evolved since then. But for the most sophisticated human, I think since then. All right, man, let's, let's, let's wind this one up. What are you working on at the moment or what cool stuff have you got coming up? Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm still still writing essays for my sub-stack. I have some interesting pieces in mind. I want to do a series on this book called Games People Play. It's this classic book on transactional analysis by this this guy Eric Bern. A lot of people are probably familiar with this book. It's still sometimes you'll

see it in like airports and bookstores and oh it's essentially this you know basically what are the most common interactions that people often have with each other and what are their underlying or hidden motives throughout the sort of social interactions and what you know what are the most common interactions that people often have with each other and what are their underlying or hidden motives throughout the sort of social interactions and what are the payoffs? And so I'll do a series on that. I'm still working on my book. My publisher continues to irritate me and to yet the nightmare industry. But the book will be out. I think Spring 2024. So it's a memoir, which I hope you'll have me will be out. I think Spring 2024. So it's a memoir, which I hope you'll have me back on. We can talk about that.

And more stuff on luxury beliefs and this idea I've been developing to. So yeah, I think that's enough for now. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you're writing online? Yeah, so you can go to my substack robkayhenderson.substack.com and you to my substack, robkayhenderson.substack.com and you can follow me on Twitter at robkayhenderson. All right, man, I appreciate you.

All right, thanks Chris. Thank you.