Modern Wisdom - #713 - Rob Henderson - Why Is Everyone Acting Like A Victim?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Rob Henderson is a psychologist, US Air Force veteran, and author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Humans are an odd species. We know truths on our own but choose to lie in groups. Our thinking gets hijacked by social norms, paths of least resistance, lies and half truths. It's a mess out there, but thankfully there's ideas we can discover to help us navigate. Expect to learn what the friendship paradox is, how we can fix the mate deprivation problem, what green flags most women look for in men, the relationship between social media and hostility, why people reason more wisely about others’ problems rather than their own, what Rob's thoughts are on the most recent wave of the body positivity movement and much more… Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on the best Colostrum from ARMRA at https://tryarmra.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.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 everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Henderson. He's a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, a US Air Force veteran, and an author. Humans are an odd species. We know truths on our own, but choose to lie in groups. Our thinking gets hijacked by social norms, pathosively resistant lies and half-trudes. It's a mess out there. But thankfully, there's ideas that we can discover to help us navigate. Expect to learn what the friendship paradox is, how we can fix the mate deprivation problem,

what green flags most women look for in men, the relationship between social media and hostility, why people reason more wisely about others' problems rather than their own, what Rob's thoughts are on the most recent wave of the body positivity movement. And much more. This episode is brought to you by Marik Health. I wanted to get my blood work done in America, and after doing some digging, I found that

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The brand they recommended was Amra. So, I actually decided to partner with them. I've started drinking it with a cold glass of water on a daily basis and it improves my gut health. That's really important for me. I'm kind of water on a daily basis and it improves my gut health. That's really important for me. I'm kind of focusing on gut health at the moment. And Amra's colostrum product is literally what my doctor suggested that I should get.

Unlike most colostrums, Amra leverages their proprietary process that guarantees the highest potency and bioavailability of any colostrum available on the market. They've got thousands upon thousands of five-star reviews offer a 30-day return policy and you can get 15% off your first order by going to try-a-r-m-r-a.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's try-a-r-m-r-a.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rob Henderson. What is the friendship paradox? The friendship paradox is this phenomenon in which your friends have more friends than you do.

Your sex partners have more sex partners than you do. Your Twitter followers have more X. Your X followers have more followers than you do. And it's a paradox because it seemingly doesn't make sense. How can your friends have more friends than you on average? And many of your listeners, especially I think, will be familiar with this sort of Pareto phenomena that a disproportionate number of awards go to a small number of people, a disproportionate amount of money goes to a small number of people, a disproportionate amount of money goes to a small percentage of people as well, but this also works in the social realm.

So, the example that I gave in a recent sub-stack post is to imagine you have, keep it easy, you have 10 friends, and three of your friends are kind of like you, just kind of an average person with an average social life. You have three friends who are shut-ins, who maybe don't go out that much, but you have another friend who is a super connector and has 100 or 150 or maybe even a thousand friends. I mean, some people who are just sort of very social, super extroverted in that 99th percentile.

And so when you average this across all 10 of your friends, they may have, you know, on average 20 plus friends while you have 10. And so it's sort of, at first class, it doesn't make sense, but then, you know, when you sort of break it down mathematically, it does. And this is why there's that paradox. And then same with sex partners, you know, maybe you've had five or 10 or 26 partners, but one of those people may have had 100 plus. And so when you average that out, your sex partners have had more sex partners than you.

And then same with Twitter followers, right? Like, you know, maybe one of your followers has, you know, a million plus while you have 10,000 or something, average that out, then that's still. Um, shakes out in the same way. The example that I also give, and that I say is, you know, when Warren Buffett walks into an auditorium, everyone becomes a millionaire on average, right? And it's the same kind of idea here. So, yeah.

What's the implication psychologically for people with that? Is that a felt sense at all? Because obviously it's kind of anti-typical to what you would expect. This is all a surprise to everyone to find out that if Warren Buffett's in the local postcode that they've just become an honorary millionaire for the most judomathematics, is there some sort of sense by which people are conscious of this sort I'm an honorary millionaire for the most, due to mathematics. Is there some sort of sense by which people are conscious of this sort of thing? I know that Gadsad in his most recent book talks about

the best sort of people to be friends with the people who are having a little bit less sex than you. Right. Yeah, yeah, I remember that from his book. Well, yeah, so I think that we fall prey to, so in that the classic psychology book, thinking fast and slow, Daniel Conman coined this term, what you see as all there is. And we pay attention to what's visible, what's right in front of us, the known knowns, but we don't necessarily pay much attention to the known unknowns, the things that aren't in our immediate line of vision. And so with the friendship paradox, we will pay a lot of attention to the most extroverted people.

They're very visible, they enjoy often. Being very visible, extroverted people tend to be that way. They update their social media pages a lot. When you, they're more likely to text you and then be responsive to your texts and more likely to meet up with you and then tell you about their adventures hiking in the Himalayas or how they just got back from this country

or just got done speaking at this event and so forth. And so you're listening to this person and for many people, they hear this and think like, wow, everyone out there is doing all of these great things. And here I am sort of working my nine to five or just sort of living in a normal ordinary life. And many people will report feeling sort of diminished socially. And this is an interesting phenomenon here because there's a ton of research in social psychology on this idea called the better-than-average effect, and the better-than-average effect or the illusory superiority effect, as it's sometimes called, essentially that we tend to believe ourselves to be better than others. There's this sort of self enhancement that goes on so when you ask, people, are you smarter than average?

Are you a better driver than average? It's like 75% of people believe that they're better than average drive. Yeah, exactly. There's an academia to you. You ask students, are you a better student than average? As professors, are you a better teacher than average? And yeah, exactly, 70, 80 plus per percent say they're better than the average person in

all of these domains. And yet, there's fascinating work on related to the French or paradox that we tend to have a sort of uncharacteristically dismovie of our social lives. So there have been a couple of studies now in which they as participants, do you go to more if you were parties than others? Do you see your family more or less than others? Do you have more if you were friends than others? Do you eat alone more or less than others? And generally speaking, people think that they are sort of less socially connected.

They have fewer friends that eat alone more. They go to fewer parties. And so this is an inversion of the illusory super-explanatory. Periodic complex. Right. We sort of have at least in the social realm a lesser than average, a factor rather than a better than average effect. And this is related to that friendship paradox and that sort of what you see as all there is.

The way the researchers explain this is that, again, so you, so you, when you think to yourself, well, do I go to more of your parties than others? Well, you know, when I see other people at parties and I'm not out of party, and I see my family X amount of times a year, but then when I pull up social media and I see people taking selfies with their dad or whatever, or the mom or their sister. So you see all of these,

and then you start to think, well, I'm not with my family right now when I saw that photo. And so you sort of easily sort of fall prey to this idea that well, everyone out there is taking these selfies and having good time and going home and you're not. And you're not paying attention to the people who aren't with their families. You know, one of the lines I use in that post sort of summarizing this research is no

one is taking photos and posting them online when they're eating lunch alone or when they're binge watching a TV show or when they're just having an off day and just need some time to decompress and be alone for a while, they're not uploading a video or taking photos of themselves. We tend to take photos when we're being social, when we're being experience. Exactly, the peak experiences. And I know you've talked about this before about what is it comparing your blooper reel

to everyone else's highlight reel. Correct, like that. So we do that and then we tend to think like everyone else is sort of at the party without you. There's a nice line in one of the papers that I cite, the researchers, you know, sort of sort of painting a picture of what this might look like of a student in a college dorm room, maybe during their homework, being a diligent student, and they hear a party going on upstairs. And you hear all the lights and all the music and everything,

and it sounds like everyone's up there, and you're thinking, wow, I'm the only one here doing my homework. But you're not, you know, of course you're not hearing all of the other students in that dorm room as well. Doing their homework, not making any noise, right? So this is what you see as all there is, or what you hear as all there is. And so that person is sitting there thinking,

everyone is at the party without me, when this isn't the case. It's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party without me, when this isn't the case. It's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party, now that people who aren't. So there's a, this is very much due to the visibility of particular types of social experiences that is now facilitated by being online.

Right, right. I learned about the 1% rule from you. Go through that. I feel like that's related here. This is the 1% rule on the internet. And this isn't empirical research, but this is just a sort of shorthand way of understanding how social media works,

how the internet works now. And the basic idea is that online, 1% of internet users are creators. They're the ones out there producing the videos and the podcasts and the written content and all the things that we're sort of consuming when we pull up on our phones. And then 9% of internet users are commenters. They're engaging with the content in some way. Maybe they're reposting or retweeting or liking or commenting.

They're the ones who sort of want to engage with the content in some way. We've been not original content producers, but they do like to sort of make themselves visible by being commenters and so on. And then 90% of people are just lurkers, the people that we aren't seeing, the people who are just sort of passively scrolling their phones or looking at your stuff, listening to it, reading it, but they're not engaging with it in the same way. And I think a lot of, so I'm a sub-stacker, your podcast,

or I think a lot of content producers. 1% maybe. Yeah, exactly. And the 1%. But we pay a lot of attention to that 9%. And of course, because of the negativity bias, you may have 100 nice comments. And then there's three people who are like, wow, this sucks.

And you're like, you'll beat yourself up that day like, man, why do those people not like this? But you did, you know, you're assigning less weight to those 97 comments that were positive, but you're also not thinking about the 90% of people who didn't comment at all. Wow. And based on that breakdown, right, if 97 comments are positive and three are negative, you can probably estimate that that's probably roughly how those other 90, 70. 970.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Silent, nice comments. Yeah, I read this essay recently about a TV show in which the executives were threatening to cancel it because they had received, and this was, I think in the 1980s, it was a sitcom, and the executives were threatening to cancel it because they received some angry emails, or angry, angry snail mail from the viewers of the 80s. And the showrunners were basically,

they drew this analogy of like, this is like going to a stadium of 100,000 people and two of them write a nasty letter to you. That's the equivalent, right? Because we have X number of million viewers and you got a couple of hundred mean letters. Whereas the other million plus people didn't write anything or maybe they're writing positive things. And so I think yeah, we, that 1% rule can sort of help us to contextualize, sort of all of the social phenomena that are going on online.

I remember the general election a few years ago where the Tory party won by the biggest landslide in a very long time and the red wall fell and all the rest of this stuff. And I remember seeing Stormzy or Bugsy Malone and that year's winner of Love Island and someone else, like Daniel Radcliffe or someone tweeting about how, you know, we need to make sure that we get the Labour Party in and I'll be voting Labour and you see all of these replies and I say, oh my god, look at this, it's going to be a total landslide, you know, like they've got bugsy Malone has tweeted about about. And then it was the, as far in the opposite direction as it's ever been in 50 years. It's like, you know, the map is not the terrain. And the internet is not the real world.

And here's another thing as well. You know, you've got the 1%, 9%, 90%. But I think it's only around about 10 to 15% of people in the UK have a Twitter account. Right. Right. Right. So not only you're not thinking about all of the silent lurkers, you're not thinking about all of the people who aren't on Twitter that don't even know that this is going on. Did you hear the episode that did you do some Harris? I wasn't a clip of it. Yeah. Cool. So he comes up with this idea called digital leprosy. This is just awesome by him.

So he says, because he's no longer online, he's not exposed to the potential cancellations and online furors that he's a part of. So kind of in the same way as a leper may be losing limbs and digits and be unaware that it's happening. He may be being cancelled right now, but because he's not online, he's unaware of the cancellation that's occurring or that whatever, like he's somehow is trending again. He's like, well, I'm not on Twitter. And he's told his friends, like, don't send me screenshots of what people are saying

about me on the internet. So he's able to just, you know, blissfully move through his existence. He called it digital leprosy, which I just thought was like such a lovely idea. It's an active term. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess in that case, it would depend on what your, what your aims are, I could imagine. So someone like Sam, you know, he's, he's an intellectual, he has his podcast, and he probably, it wouldn't help him to see all of the nasty comments, but if you're, I think it may be a little bit more than like two out of a hundred thousand or whatever moment as well, he's kind of popular to hate on the internet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. But I suppose, well, for other people, if you're, well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, we like a politician, you would want to know what's going on, how people are reacting to you, yeah, exactly, sort of keep your finger on the pulse of your constituents. There is one of the chapters in Robert Green's 48 Laws of Power, where in the book is about the attainment of power, of course. So he writes that in those kinds of situations,

you actually want to be more plugged in to the social scene. It actually isn't wise to withdraw, because you'll end up losing power, you'll end up losing influence. Interesting. He also has a rule about how aloofness is alluring, though, which I think is interesting and is definitely true. I was with Dan Bilsarian last weekend and was talking to, and he's kind of been sort of absconded from the permanently online Instagram, you know, like tits and psychedelics existence that people he kind of got famous for.

And I was asking him about that, and he said, well, you know, like he's kind of going through a bit of a metamorphosis at the moment, I think, in many regards, which was very interesting to see, and I dug into his psychology a lot over dinner. But also, he was like, from a tactical perspective, just not being chronically online, succinct speculation, which is actually good for brand in some ways. People are like, what is happening?

And I think, you remember, this may have been different for you, given your slightly more chaotic than my upbringing, but each each summer When you would leave school and come back you'd always think here's my opportunity to reinvent myself Like I'm gonna be the sporty kid or I'm gonna be the cool kid or maybe that was just me but

I kind of get the sense that if you're going through a period of rapid change or rapid reflection or whatever, a little bit of receding perhaps from being so publicly... This is why monk mode, I think, for guys has become such an important meme, right? That it's this retreat to focus on the three eyes, introspection, isolation, and, like, inner work or something else. And the reason that it's so good, I think, is that it allows people to go away, do the

chrysalis thing, and then try and emerge as something new, whilst not trying to bring along all of the existence, like I'm trying to update one step at a time, all of the different changes. It's like, no, no, no, I get to go away and then come back with a relatively blank slate or more blank than it was. And I think there's something there. Yeah, I think it depends on when your aims are, especially when you're young and you're still trying to stabilize your identity and figure out who you are that having those

moments of withdrawal and reflection can be very helpful. Yeah, and it's funny, those laws of power, a lot of them do contradict each other and green openly. I've seen him, he acknowledges this, but it's based on context, it's based on sort of where you are in the life cycle and how power is acquired in your sort of local environment and so on and so on.

So basically, this isn't like a one size fits all checklist. It's more of a sort of holistic. At all times, in all places. It's specific times. It's specific places. Right. Well, you've been looking at a lot of your male syndrome recently. I think this is going to be one of the most important memes of the coming decade. And both of us have been talking about it at least in part for maybe like three or four years, I think online, but it's picking up steam. What have you learned digging deeper into the modern conception of young male syndrome and how it sort of manifested? What have you learned? Yeah, well, so, so, yeah, the young male syndrome, this constellation of

traits that are associated with a certain period of time in young men's lives, typically the teens in the early 20s, heightened levels of risk-caking, reduced self-control and inhibition. If you look at rates of criminality, for example, they tend to peak at around age 19, and this is true regardless of culture and society, sort of all across the world, in non-industrialized hunter-gatherer communities,

all the way up to sort of wealthy and rich societies, that it's the young men, if you look at who's committing to crime in that society, it's inevitably going to be sort of men age, say, roughly 15 to maybe 24, even things like, so this is just in the US context, likelihood of being hospitalized for punching walls. There was a nice graph I saw, and I posted it online of the distribution of young or men, just men in general, being hospitalized.

And it's all concentrated. Again, 15 to 24. It's like, 10 year olds aren't being hospitalized for punching walls. And either are six year olds. It's all that sort of young male group, and I'll admit, I've punched walls before. Yeah. Did you see Alexander Datescike, quote, tweeted an image this morning that was a mother asking how she could help her son

and it was just a photo of his bedroom wall and this bedroom wall was just whole after whole, after whole and then the door had a hole in it and it's like, I mean, it looked like a sufficiently flimsy American house that the hospitalization risk was quite low but that the decorating risk might be quite high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, in that case, I mean, that sounds like it requires some serious...

Intervant. ...in our mentions, some serious treatment. What I find interesting is, especially for young men, that this is, I think, an expression of the young male syndrome, is when a young man experiencing some sort of, usually, like, a minor injury, and then there are immediate responses to lash out. So like I saw this with some of my friends where, you know, like maybe I don't know something simple, like the accidentally poke themselves in the hand or something, and then there are immediate responses to punch something. So they hurt themselves, and they're pissed, and then they punch something. And I think that this is basically a misfiring of this kind of evolutionary impulse of if an

intentional agent hurts you, it actually is advantageous to fight back. Right, to respond. Right, exactly. So if I don't know, the cactus plant stabs me, maybe punching the wall is unwise, but if you do something to upset me, and then I immediately respond physically, that can actually be an adaptive strategy. So I think like that is, you know, this is speculation, but this is what I think is going on there,

because otherwise it doesn't make sense, right? You're injured, let me injure my hand now, right? It makes no sense. So yeah, so the young male syndrome, yeah, you sort of reduced inhibition, increased risk taking, criminality, risky driving. You know, if you look at who's arrested for drinking and driving, who gets into the most auto accidents, who is the most likely to be killed simply crossing the street.

So I think it's yeah, men are twice as likely to be killed simply crossing the street as women. So there are so many different different factors here. And there was actually one on the seatbelt point, there was an interesting study which found that men are less likely to wear seatbelts when they're accompanied by a male passenger relative to when they're sitting by themselves or when they're sitting with a woman. What do you think that's saying? I think that is one possibility here is essentially the attempt to signal toughness that you, of course, like, there's a lot of interesting

work here and a lot of discussion and debate around this because, of course, men want to signal to women and we want to signal that we're strong and, you know, quiet resources and all those kinds of sort of bedrock findings and evolutionary psychology. But then we also want to impress other men too. You want to show that you would be in the ancestral context, you want to show that you would be good in a violent conflict against a rival coalition or if you're a big game hunting, you want to show that you're strong. And so I think the way that it might manifest itself in the modern ages, I don't need to

wear seat belts. I'm going to show my friends and my mates, like I don't need to wear that. That's like that. That's too tough. Rocket ship going to show my friends and my mates. I don't need to wear that. That's like that two-toned rocket ship going towards me hasn't got shit. We both became fans of that David Putt study that was able to predict the number of sexual partners based on not female ratings of attractiveness

of male faces, but other male ratings of toughness of the same male faces. Super cool study. That the women's attractiveness rating had basically zero predictive power, but the man's toughness rating had quite a good bit of predictive power. Was it you that taught me, or was it Dunbar that taught me about men's street crossing in the presence or without the presence of women? That was probably Dunbar, right?

Okay, so this study is so much fun. So they got, crossing the street is really interesting because it's a relatively discreet variable. You have distance of vehicle from street crossing. And then you have like the presence or lack of presence of a female. And men, the difference in how close the vehicles would get here and men were prepared to cross the street in the presence of a woman was like a third of what it was when there was no women around. Like look at all of this surplus fitness that I have.

I'm gonna cross the street while this car's only 15 yards away from me or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I think the young male syndrome is, yeah, I think it sort of depends on the context, but yeah, it is most likely to sort of be expressed when you're trying to impress women or when you're trying to impress men. Yeah, so I don't think, yeah, I don't think it would necessarily impress young women that you're driving without a seatbelt, right? And I think maybe some of the guys understand that, but with, with, with, it wouldn't

necessarily, it's not so much that you're impressing your friend when you put it when you don't wear the seatbelt is that if you do you might be mocked or made fun of or that what's you know are you know when you're wearing a seatbelt for that kind of especially you know I 19 year old guys and that kind of thing. And so it's not so much trying to look tough but just not to look weak. Very interesting. Okay, so but males in them specifically seems to be worsened amongst sexless, dispossessed, rambunctious young guys, co-elishening together in small groups to go and set shit on fire and push over Granny. Yeah, and we, yeah, yeah, that's, you know, when a young man is isolated sort of by himself. There's only so much damage

He can do but it's sort of the the right the risk becomes exponentially greater sort of as that as as he sort of partners with other men and They collaborate and sort of to plan and so yeah, this is I mean, so so you had this this interesting term about the sedation Male sedation hypothesis. Yeah, it's in a study at the moment with Buss and William. That's interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about, because I remember when you first told me about that, something that had come to mind is, you know, I had friends, I mean, this is, you know, sort of back in the, I don't know if people still play this game world of warcraft.

But I remember, I had a couple of friends who, like, lost years of their life to this game, and they were like, and the way that they spoke, you know, when you told me about this, I thought, like, yeah, these young guys, you know, this is, you know, 18, 19, this was years ago, but they would say, like, all right, you know, I got a, I got a hop off the phone, I'm going on a raid, you know, I got a raid schedule. You know, like, well, you don't have a raid schedule. Do you have, you know, seven hours of sitting in your laptop chair. Compute to get schedules.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in his mind, he's like, I'm going with my other internet friends and we're gonna go raid this castle or whatever they do in this game. And I could see that, yeah, this is a sort of an expression of that, or an example of that of just young guys who ordinarily might be out causing trouble and instead they're just online. And that's how they do. I saw this funny post on Twitter and this guy,

he said something about it. Back in the day, if you were a hyper curious young man, you basically start trying to document the visible differences between the mushrooms right around your house. And today, what they do is try to collect all the rings in a Sonic game. Like speedrunners.

See you. And so yeah, I think the virtual world is sucking in a lot of anger and aggressive, man. But we may also be losing like that sort of the pattern matching sort of systematizing a loop to. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it's just, it's managed to hijack an awful lot of the status co-olitional, curiosity, adventurous behavior that young men, you know, throughout all of history has been kind of acclaimed for. You know, you look at my favorite example of the

solution for young male syndrome was Portugal in the 1800s. What did they do there? They, the first son was allowed to, there was an imbalance in the sex ratio. And they knew that if sun won married, because he was the oldest sun, but sun two, three, and four perhaps weren't permitted to marry, and the weren't enough women to marry, that this was going to cause problems. So they just put them on galleon ships and said go, you know, pioneer the new world or where you go. So they just So they literally exported the young male problem by putting the men on ships and giving them this sense of adventure,

channeling their aggression outward against either a new world or political enemies or whatever it was. And yeah, I think that there is still a question. Vincent came on the show, mutual friend came on. And he's been researching, and he says, you know, every single time that we have high rates of sex, and there's some blah, blah, blah, we have an increase in associated violence. And it's just at the moment, and someone may tell me that I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem

to be there in the data, right? We have, in cell, black pill ideology, there was this period, maybe about two years ago, where they were even, claimed to be a domestic terror threat, I think in cells, they were a terrorist group, right? Yeah, I saw that. Was that like, show me the violence, show me the uptick in the violence.

Now, that's not to say that hasn't been an uptick in murders and stuff, but I think a lot of that can be attributed to the... Yeah, exactly, like the receding of can be attributed to the... Something else. Yeah, exactly. Like the receding of police from inner cities. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if the...

So on its face, it seems silly, right? That the insoles is a domestic terror threat, but I wonder if they were just sort of... If they were actually familiar with the research on the young male syndrome and the sort of historical pattern, I mean, maybe I'm giving them too much credit. I think so. But they essentially were sort of anticipating the possibility and they're just sort of getting out ahead of it and saying, well, you have a lot of young, sexless, angry young men.

And historically, that's been a group that's been dangerous. So let's just designate that label on them. But I think yeah, in the modern age with technology, with video games, with porn, with scrolling phones, I mean, yeah, I've seen sort of research on what young men, like jobless young men do. And most of the time they're scrolling their phones, playing computer games, watching porn, overeating junk food. You see Nicholas, that's work on that. I haven't.

Is this, this is related to the men with that? Men are working, or whatever it is. You have a Facebook with it's just awesome. But yeah, it's like some insane percentage of men are needs not in education, employment or training, but also our prime working age, I think it's 22 to 50 and it's this unseen because unemployment rates are relatively low in America, but hiding in that data is a very unusual cohort of men who are electing to be unemployed. They're living on social welfare in one form or another, or it's and or still living at home, spending an insane amount of hours per year playing video games,

and while they're playing video games, 50% of that time is either on prescription medication or whilst taking weed. So you just have a very, it's like, okay, here's the big data. Okay, well, what's that? Like, how's this constituted? Who are the component people that make up this data? And you go, hang on a second, like, what's this chunk? It's like, I think it's like 8 million or 14 million men, prime working working age men electing to retreat from the employment market now we put this episode up and a lot of guys that maybe a part of this cohort are tangential to this cohort commented and you know the sentiment very strongly was why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me. Why am I going to work to get a five-foot three, two hundred and ten-pound woman who's already gone through two marriages and got four kids? You know, just very despondent. Evidently, guys who don't see much future for themselves. And it was really eye-opening because largely the comments on modern wisdom tend to be

pretty personal growth, the agente, highly sovereign, openly mobile, etc. But this episode blasted out of the algorithm into the wider internet or maybe you got shared on some forums or whatever. And it was very, very interesting. And I got to see a, you know, I got a window into this world and these guys didn't seem very happy. Yeah.

They were maybe comfortable in the nihilism, but I don't think that they were particularly a fulfilled. I mean, they may be comfortable when they're young, but there is, I'd be curious whether, sort of as we move forward, decade or two decades later, I mean, it's one thing to be a neat when you're 19 or 23, but when you're 43 or 51 and you're single,

maybe you've never had a girlfriend and you've spent most of the last several decades just playing video games and- Wollowing in now. Collective misery on forums and stuff. spent most of the last several decades just playing video games and- Well-loving and now- Collective misery on forums and stuff. I think there's, I mean, now in the modern age, we have so much freedom. You don't have to work anymore.

You don't have, I mean, if you don't want to, if you live in a modern rich society, you can collect sort of extended unemployment or maybe live with your parents or find ways to, I mean, you're very few people now, very few young men are sort of literally starving or having to steal food to survive. And now if you want to do something difficult, you have to make the choice to do it, rather than sort of be pressured sort of by external factors.

I saw this, I saw this, this TikTok video. I'm not on TikTok, but people sometimes send these to me. I saw this one, this, this, this TikTok video. I'm not on TikTok, but people sometimes send these to me. I saw this one, this young guy. I think he was in the US Army and he was just sort of walking through his barracks and he was asking these other young guys, these younger recruits. If you could talk to your recruiter right now, what would you say? These other young guys were like, I told him to go fuck himself or like, God, this sucks or why did I do this? So on and so forth. And I'm watching this and I'm like,

I know exactly what he's talking about because I was there. I was, you know, I've been listed. You were F's right. I was in the Air Force. And I remember, especially like the first two years are just awful. Like once you get in a bit of rank

and a bit of responsibility, like once you go through the training per- Stop eating shit. Yeah, exactly. Then you're like, you know, then you're okay, but the first couple of years really suck. And so I knew like these were all very young guys. They were still sleeping in bunk beds. And I would have said the same thing, you know, then you're okay, but the first couple of years really suck. And so I knew like these were all very young guys. They were still sleeping in bunk beds.

And I would have said the same thing, you know, and I'm glad that TikTok didn't exist back then. But I'm watching this. And I'm thinking like these guys don't understand, right? In five years from now, they're gonna be glad that they ate shit for however many years and they did this. They went through this experience. And I think a lot of young guys

won't even go that far. They won't even list, which is fine. Everyone has their own sort of, make your own choices. But in that moment, I understood that this sucks. Why did I do this? Like, this is awful. And then you go through it,

and you can sort of, in hindsight, go back and say it. Like, it was a character-forming experience. It was good for me. Like, I was an idiot when I was 19, and I probably needed a bit of that structure, a bit of that discipline, and I needed to have my ass kicked a little bit. And I think, yeah, like you don't, but and those guys volunteer to do that, right? You have to choose to do yeah, undergo that experience. You've already pre-selected for someone who's got the agency to get moving.

Yeah, I have this idea. I have this idea about the reason that victimhood culture has become so widespread is because the human systems demand for challenges has outstripped our modern reality's ability to deliver that, right? That we want, we just want something to push up against and if we don't have real challenge we will create imagined challenge for ourselves. And yeah, you know, rampant fragility and this kind of like soy externalizing locus of control culture that's going on at the moment. It's so interesting though that you've got this barbell strategy where, you know, 50% or maybe more percent of the people are young men are happy to lean into the, I've learned a bit of behavioral genetics

and evolutionary psychology and taken the black pill in many regards because I'm a genetic dead end. But at the same time, you have the ascendancy of David Goggins, Jocka Willink, Alex Homozi, you know, these guys who are all about doing the hard thing, overcoming the suck, like no one's coming to save you, it's only you that's going to get you, etc., etc. So you have this increasing sort of divergence between the two. And I think, you know, a sortative mating, which is people of a kind, mating

with people of their kind, right? So Silicon Valley 135 IQ people with professional tennis level skills, having kids together. So you kind of have this genetic splitting apart, which also is going to have a psychological, heritable psychological echo, I suppose. So the conscientious people will have more conscientious kids and so on and so forth. And then Melissa Carnie's new book, The Two Parent Privilege, is talking about how those college educated people who've got that predisposition again getting even bigger advantage. So I think that the Matthew effect of this, right?

To those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken. It's just gonna continue to spread and spread and spread. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a distinct possibility. And it seems like in the short term, that is what's occurring. I mean, I even read this, which book was this, it was a speculative hypothesis about why there's a sort of pronounced levels of kids being born on the spectrum in Silicon Valley. And it's because it's not necessarily because the engineers and the programmers themselves are autistic, but they may be sort of somewhere on

the spectrum. And then they partner with someone who also shares some of those genes and then And then we'll be did it exactly and then they have well they have children and then and then the child is sort of at a heightened Risk of getting autism But I think generally speaking. I mean, I don't know if this is this could be interpreted as a white pill or a black pill But I just read this book the Sun also rises by Gregory Clark, who's an economic historian, a very well-versed in the behavioral genetics as well. And essentially that book, he documents in various societies, essentially how social status sort of loosely defined as sort of wealth and influence and so on, is very sticky across

generations. And essentially what he finds, he tracks surnames and finds finds, you know, he tracks surnames and finds that you know, I got into this guy from Mattadaporia. He's going to come on. Oh, yeah, he's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I spoke with, I spoke with Matt about about Gregor, Gregor he clerks work as well. And essentially, you know, he, he tracked status, not through, so, you know, there's, there's, there's this fear, especially in the modern era of a sort of mating, that more and more women are getting educated and men are dating, educated women, and they're having children who are educated and so on.

But what essentially he finds is that when you look at data from decades past, centuries past before, women were sort of educationally and economically emancipated when they were still sort of stuck in these rigid gender roles, If you pair, or if you look at the status of a given man interested in a woman, and then look at the status of the woman's father, there's like a very tight correlation there. So even though the woman herself isn't highly educated or isn't working in a prestigious occupation, often she comes from a family in which her father was.

And so one of Clark's claims generally speaking in this book is that people are very good at sort of finding people who are similar to themselves, even if you don't have the sort of external visible badges of class or education or credential. How does that manifest if it's not the external badges? Yeah, well, basically people cluster together in the same clubs, family friends, organizations. Right, right.

So maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way that they would now, but maybe his boss's friend says, hey, I have a daughter who you might get along with. And even though she isn't working, she's the daughter of the- So it's like a friend of the boss. It's like a social instantiation of the class disposition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, yeah, this is interesting to me. I mean, so, so Scott Alexander did a long piece on, on the sort of mating, I think earlier this year. And he talked about how there's surprisingly little sort of sort of matching across,

sort of educational and class lines on the things that you would expect on things like, like attractiveness, for example. I think there's this, especially in the sort of like across sort of educational and class lines, on the things that you would expect on things like attractiveness, for example, I think there's this, especially in the sort of like the red pill, online spaces of, you know, I mean don't really care about education, they really care about how attractive a woman is. And yet, at least the data that I saw sort of curated

by Scott Alexander is that, you know, it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the, you know, the college dropout who- The barista at the book, exactly. Yeah, or if they do date the barista at Starbucks, she has a college degree, and I think a mistake that we might make, you know, I'm sort of channeling Gregor Clark here, is that like, oh, he knew that she had a college degree, and that's why he was open to dating her. Whereas I think Clark would say, actually, they had some conversations together. And through that, he could tell that they were maybe roughly in the same class,

the same space, her levels of curiosity and intellect, and all those sort of psychological attributes, they matched along those lines. So even though she maybe works somewhere that doesn't require a college degree, she has one and she's the kind of person who would get a college degree. Pretty disposed, yeah. And then they sort of match along those lines to be sort of mating still holds. I think, yeah, there's, so again, like is this a white pill or a black pill? It could be a black pill because status is sticking.

It almost doesn't matter what you do. But then on the other hand, it's a white pill in that, like, even though we have all of these educational and occupational trends in the modern world, it may not actually change the underlying social and romantic dynamics that have sort of... Right. Yeah, and with us for centuries. Stable. Yeah, don't be my thing.

I think it might... I mean, you're... Look at you as the post-a child for... What was it? Kids that grow up in... is it single parent homes, like 10 times more likely to go to college than adopted kids? What was the status? So the status, it was on foster kids specifically.

So I did, yeah, some of this research as I was writing my book, that'll be out next year. And then I wrote this essay that was in the free pass a couple of years ago, which basically, so in the US, kids who are raised in families in the bottom socioeconomic quintile, so the bottom 20% essentially kids raised in poor families, roughly 11% of them graduate from college, which is pretty low because the average rate in the US is around 35%. So it's pretty low, 11% versus 35%, but the number or the percentage of foster kids in the US who graduate from college is 3%. And so in other words, a kid raised in a poor family is four times more likely to graduate from college

than a foster kid. And so I use, this is sort of essentially to me sort of evidence that instability and sort of disorderly environment is is is is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to. It's obviously has an effect, but maybe something that that deserves more attention that we're giving it relative to sort of the material factors. Did you dig into Melissa Connie's new one? Have you read that? Yeah, I just read it. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, excellent book, excellent book, yeah, the two parent privilege. So I watched, she's been on the show, anyone that hasn't seen that can go back and listen to the episode I did with Melissa, she was great, but I mean, she is, you know, as straight

down the line, policy wonk DC Pilled as you're going to get, right? Like she's like the female Richard Reaves, you know, like she's just there to do, help do policy and do the DC thing. And she's a statistician, demographer, lady. I tried to push her on the episode. And was like, so why is this occurring? Give me the implications here. Infer for me, what you think is the underlying mechanism.

And she was very reticent about trying to work out what's going on from a psychological perspective. And I thought, wow, that's a good signal that she's not prepared to get out over what she sees is her domain of expertise. I have this, this is what I do, and she did it a little bit, but she didn't go too far and I was like, that's a really good signal.

But what I saw on the internet, before her book came out, tons and tons and tons of articles saying, you know, this is like hard right, Christian talking points, being legitimated by cherry pick data, you haven't read the data, the book's not out yet. And what I saw was her, as far as I could see, that if you were to do political compass on it would probably be like just left of center.

And again, very not prepared to say things that she didn't understand and didn't have data to back up and so on and so forth. But on the internet, the only people that weren't lambasting her as being some sort of like bigger judgmental asshole that's telling people that come from single-parent households that they shouldn't. And what, so you're saying that women should stay in an abusive relationship instead of, you know, allowing themselves and their child

to have a good step-parent and blah, blah, blah. Like, just all strong men, shit house arguments. And I saw the exact path that many, many people are taking, which is causing them to bend toward the right. Because you go, hang in a second, I've put this piece of workout, which is relatively dispassionate, which is actually, it's the two-parent privilege. This is a championing of how we can fix under-privileged kids, which is fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon, right? It's class, we try to fix the class problem.

The only people that were accepting of her or weren't like accusing her of doing awful things, were the people that were sent to write and further write. So what you see is how somebody that has a left leaning predisposition, perhaps or just a centrist disposition gets nudged by their treatment toward the right. We go, okay, well, fuck you guys. Like, if you're not gonna accept me, I'll happily, and she, I wish that I'd noticed this before I spoke to it, so I'd love to have asked her about this. But yeah, like, that's not, I can completely see

how the tribalism of both sides, and I'm sure that there's an equivalent dynamic on the right, pushing people towards the left, I don't see. But the tribalism of the left and the purity spiral of the left and it's rapidity at judging people to see bigotry where there may not be some. Yeah. I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean in a different direction. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I saw a lot of that, sort of the ad hominemes online

and a lot of the insults and derogatory comments that were directed at her. And I thought, yeah, they were completely unfair. The book, I mean, the other thing is like, the book is very dense, but it's also, you can read it in afternoon. I mean, she presents the data in a beautiful way, a very sort of straightforward way that any sort of

Educated and curious person can understand And it seems like yeah most people just didn't even bother flipping through it and having a look because she Kaviots multiple times that this isn't a this isn't a book about sort of sort of judging people or about values It really is about sort of looking just sort of from a dispassionate point of view What did the data say about outcomes for kids and various sort of family arrangements? So yeah, that was so strange. I mean, yeah, and she just took close to the day. I think generally speaking, that's a good idea when you're making arguments that are unpopular,

that you should stick very closely to the data and not go too far ahead of your skis there just because you're going to be held to a higher standard when you say something that's that's unpopular. There's that sort of can versus must distinction, sort of the classic finding and psychology about how when people are predisposed to support a certain point of view, essentially, they implicitly ask themselves, can I and then they come across a piece of information that supports that point of view. They implicitly ask themselves, and then they come across a piece of information that supports that point of view. They implicitly ask themselves, can I believe it?

And generally speaking, yes, I can believe that. And when they encounter something that is at odds with that point of view, they implicitly ask themselves, must I believe it? And if they find a reason, if there are any flaws in that argument or any reason whatsoever, why they can discount it, then they say, oh, I don't have to, right?

Doesn't this show up? Was it you that taught me about how the shows have been Twitter arguments where when people are wanting, somebody puts a point on the internet that goes against something that they believe, and then they go on Google and search for why such and such a thing is true. And it's like, you're not asking for, is this thing true? You're looking

for arguments that support your side. So you're looking for a good barrister rather than an honest judge. Yes, right, right. Well, you're looking for arguments, of course, that sort of, you know, the classic confirmation bias idea. You're looking for information, you're monitoring, and then you're sort of overlooking anything that might make you feel uncomfortable or that might call your beliefs into question. There was a really cool study. I want to say this was in the 90s, sort of along this vein, I mean, it's a neat example because it's sort of disconnected from politics.

I think anyone can appreciate this, which is essentially what these researchers did was they brought these participants into the lab. And they told these participants, they showed them this jar and it was really just water, but they told them it was this sort of chemical solution. And if you drop a strip of water into it, so in one condition, they told the participants he dropped the strip of water into it. And it doesn't change color, it just sort of remains the same white or whatever it was. Then that means that you don't have this sort of rare, unique congenital disease.

You dip it in, leave it in for a few seconds, pull it out, stays the same, you're good to go. And so they brought some participants in and basically they found you have a participant dip it in, didn't change color, they'd walk right out. In another condition, they told the participants, you dip the strip into the piece of paper, and if it changes color, then that means you're good to go. If it stays the same, that means you may potentially have this congenital illness.

And in this case, what did the participants do? They dipped the strip into the water, waited, dipped it back in, waited, took another strip, dipped it back in, waited, and then they started to get nervous. And essentially, they were going for that confirmation because what did they want to believe? They wanted to believe that they were healthy.

And when they did not receive information that supported that, then they started to sort of, shuffle through and try to find ways to confirm that, that belief. We both came across the same research that shows that chads rather than in cells are the extreme misogynists. Right, dude, I love this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think I saw William retweet that word. And that's what I've got on my wrist. Of course he does. Of course he does. Of course he does. Anything that's pro-insel. Yeah. Men with higher levels of sex partners are more likely to hold extreme misogynist views, which contradicts the in-sell narrative. Extreme misogyny correlates with state-to-seeking and dominance orientation, both of which also correlate with high levels of sex partners. Yeah, I thought that was an absolutely fascinating study.

And it links up very nicely. When I was in grad school, I read David Buses, Evolutionary Psychology textbook, Cover to Cover, and one of the things he points out there is that there's not much if any research supporting what's referred to as the meat deprivation hypothesis. The meat deprivation hypothesis is essentially that young men who are deprived of mates are more likely to develop these sort of misogynistic attitudes. They're more likely to coerce women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault.

Essentially all the research that I've seen indicates almost the reverse of that. And including the study here, which points in the same direction, which is that the men who are the most likely to commit sexual coercion or assault are also men who are the most likely to have consensual sex partners as well. And yeah, all of these things sort of come together and correlate with status-eaking, dominance orientation, extraversion. Probably I would imagine narcissism as well, and maybe some of the other dark triad traits of being particularly attractive to women. And you know, this is, now, I'm more comfortable speculating than you actually.

Get out of there, you know, even part of the cat or me anymore. So, we want, well, you know, I have a foot in, but I'm comfortable sort of making this, this is just a hypothesis, but I think that most, maybe most women would be pretty reluctant to actually be sort of alone in, like, be in a situation in which they could potentially be alone and assaulted by the sort of prototypical in cell. Like, you know, you're the sort of lonely, unattractive, isolated, angry male. Warning thumbs. Right.

Exactly. Like, they would know in advance, like, I don't need to be alone with this guy. There's something off about him. Again, the sort of prototypical, I'm not saying all in cells are like that, but that sort of archetypal image of an in cell. Whereas, probably, just sort of,

you know, I think this is pretty intuitive that women would be more willing to sort of be alone and potentially be in a risky situation with a man who is attractive, right? And so just through the sort of differentiating levels or different levels of like losing alone and exposure alone, that assault would be more likely

to happen in one context than the other. And so I think that may partially explain some of those differences that if women were alone with actual assaults, as much as they're alone with, you know, status seeking dominance oriented extroverts, that maybe the numbers would be different. But generally speaking, I think that finding is suggestive. And then in my own personal life, I mean, when I think about the guy who spend your time alone with you, that I feel at risk. But the guys that I know who are particularly, you know, at least numerically successful, I don't know if you would success me in this context, but just have had a lot of sex partners. They do tend to be a little bit more glib, a little bit less preoccupied with, well, what does she think of me or sort of what

traditional or conventional or hold benevolent sexist attitudes, right? It's usually a little bit more, I guess, on the positive, I mean,ot joky or playful, but then on the other, it can sort of dip into, you know, the example that I, so I posted one of these studies online and sort of commented that, you know, I think this is easy to understand when you reverse the genders, you know, if you think about like a woman who spends a lot of time

attracting men, I'm thinking about someone like a stripper, for example, like I'm sure they have extremely cynical attitudes about men, right? Whereas women, like if you think about a woman who doesn't really, maybe isn't very attractive or hasn't had a boyfriend or hasn't had that much experience around men, they probably have a little bit more sort of maybe slightly more optimistic views or at least less cynical views about men. So Saudi Sadiya Khan, psychology lady, she does couples counseling and stuff. She gave me this really interesting answer to the question, are hot girls more crazy? Right? So, the classic question, like finally Aristotle's got an answer. And she said that the experience that

hot girls have of most men, jades their view of all men, because the men that she spends her time around are unbelievably pliable. They cheat on their partners with her. They try to shower her with gifts. They say things that they think she wants to hear, they're duplicitous. So the reality distortion field of the beautiful woman causes all of the men or many of the male interactions on average to group together to clump together in a way which doesn't show men in a particularly good light. Right. How fucking cool is that as an idea? Like the reality distortion field of the hot girl or something? Yeah, that is, it reminds me of this interview I watched years ago of Chris Rock. And he said, basically, well, I don't know if he said something along lines of being an

attractive woman is like being a celebrity or being a celebrity is like being a attractive woman, where once you reach a certain level of fame or notoriety or recognition that people react to you in a predictable way, in a way that is often obnoxious or try to give you free things or try to court you or they're looking for something from you. And yeah, that is, where you're only seeing a sort of, you're only seeing sort of one version

of that person, whereas everyone else might see another version. And pre-selecting for the only sorts of people who are prepared to go up to the hot girl in the first place. I saw this with strippers, and I would imagine it may be the same with only fans' girls as well. A lot of the strippers that I was friends with throughout my twenties when I was working in nightlife had very, very jaded views of men, because they were seeing the stag on his bachelor party out in

Newcastle, you know, trying to get a blowjob off one of the strippers that are in that, right? Like men that were selected for it, that were around the women that are able to, you know, cajole or coerce or encourage them to do a thing that's or whatever. And oh, that's how all men are. There's this really great segment on Rogan's show years and years ago, one of Tim Dylan's first appearances. And Joe's, I think Tim's talking about how the LA comedy scene is very ruthless. And Joe has just moved to Austin and is saying,

ah, I don't know what you're talking about. It's fantastic over there. Every time that I go into a room, everyone treats me really great. And Tim cuts in and he goes, hold on a second, like you do know that you are Joe Rogan, right? Like you bend reality around this sphere that follows you where like who the fuck's gonna treat you like shit, right?

Like the biggest podcaster in the world's just walked in. And I spoke to Tucker Maxx about this over dinner a couple of months ago. It's so interesting. And I was talking about how I've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years as status and renowned and wealth and whatever has changed. And there is a reason now to be nice, perhaps, or maybe there's not a reason to be nice they don't even know it but something happens they've heard that's the guy with the podcast or whatever. So you just notice that like the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way. Maybe I'm just super like charismatic or whatever I've changed my confidence that totally could be it too but my more

like highly skeptical cynical view of it is people want something or whatever. Anyway, and I was talking to Tokra about this and he said to become rich, your famous as a man is to accept being a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. He said that women become objectified as soon as they become womanly.

You're 13 years old and the boys in the class and I'll start to see that you've got boobs and then you become like 17, 18 and the whole world objectifies you for a while because your value is immediate and upfront. Whereas, you know, this is a red pill, take away, I guess, like women are born with value men have to create it.

And it is, unless you're Brad Pitt or, you know, somebody who is super good looking and has that upfront, you have to achieve some degree of self-generated value in order for people to treat you and to objectify you. Like, no one's just objectifying the random dude in the street, but if the random dude in the street gets out of a baguette, maybe they are.

What's he got? Oh, dude, let me tell you, let me ask you about blah, blah. Yeah, to become a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. That was very interesting. Yeah, there's sort of a positive feedback loop that happens there too. I think with the Bugatti example,

so you have this prestigious material good, and then you step out of it, and then suddenly, you have increased social capital because people are drawn to you. But I think this happens even within just the realm of social capital itself. I mean, I obviously use this personal example of I was walking through an airport with some friends,

and then yeah, it was recognized a couple of different times, but I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know, like they kind of know that I write and stuff, but they don't really, and then I, it was recognized a couple of different times. I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know, they kind of know that I write and stuff, and then I got recognized. And suddenly they became more interested in talking to me, and like, oh, what do you, yeah, what exactly tell me more about? And so I think it's like, you get recognized once, and then other people become interested,

and then suddenly you can't, you know. I'm going to tell you that story when I walked down Broadway with Peterson in Nashville. I don't think so. We went for dinner. It was about two years ago from now, I went for Broadway with Peterson in Nashville. So we went for dinner. It was about two years ago from now. I went for dinner with him. And there was that famous video of him dancing with his wife and Ben Shapiro was there in Nashville. It was a few years ago.

Oh, I did see. It was the night after that. So he loved this bar. We were going to go back to this bar. And he didn't have any of his security with him. So it was me, Michaela. Michaela's now husband and Jordan. And Michaela's husband's like six foot four,

kind of dude, so he's like a tall guy or whatever, but no security. And Jordan starts walking down a Broadway, like the street in Nashville, right? It's where Kid Rock's bar is and Whiskey Row and all this stuff, and they on a weekend, close it off, I think they close it off at both ends, or maybe they don't, but anyway, it's stacked.

Someone notices Jordan Peterson, and then goes over to get a photo with him and shake his hand and hello, how are you? And then other people notice that other people are standing talking to someone. So a queue forms to speak to Jordan Peterson. He's accumulating a tale of humans as he walked like a fucking comet, right?

Walking down that... You were a comet. Yeah, honestly. And I remember thinking like, oh my God, we were at the young delegates dinner, drinks thing last night at Ark here in London. And sure enough, there was a queue of people, like this is a conference of people selected

for a very like particular set of interests. And then we went to 150 person drinks thing which is selected from within that group for people that were invited to go to this thing. And even within that selected group of a selected group, the people in commentale thing existed again. So, yeah, that's almost like a physical manifestation of what you're talking about that's going on socially. People see, they don't see a physical queue, but they see a social queue, like a CUE, and they

go, oh, okay, right. And I would be curious. I mean, maybe in the example of the 150 or smaller group of selected people, they probably are familiar with Jordan, it sounds like. But in the example of him walking down, is it Broadway, the student Nashville? When that tale formed, what I would be curious to know is probably many of those people, maybe most of them did know who Jordan was, but what I'm curious about

are the people who didn't know who he was, but just out of tail. Let's get a, let's's get everyone's following that guy. I guess he's famous. Let's go check this out. And now they're falling. And so what percentage of those people were familiar with him too? There are these classic studies from Milgram.

So most people know Milgram through the obedience studies. He essentially tricked people into shocking and believing that they were injuring someone or perhaps killing them. But there were these other studies that Milgram did and other social psychologists, this sort of classic work back in the day of, he just have people on like a Manhattan street and just have like four or five research assistants

look up at the sky, just like me, you, and a couple of people just look up at the sky like this. And then gradually what happened is people would be walking by and they'd see four people looking at something and they'd stop and look up to like, what are they looking at? And then suddenly this massive crowd reformed, suddenly you have 40 people looking up at the sky and no one is looking at, right? Everyone's trying to figure out what those original four people, right? So there is that sort of imitative quality that, which is, you know, it's adaptive,

but it's also, you know, can kind of miss something. It'll be funny situations. Yeah. Being moderate is a green flag. You see this new one about extremist views. William shared the graph of it. I haven't seen this one, but let me get your take on this. This is awesome. Research has pulled over a thousand registered US voters aged 18 to 34. A majority of both men and women consider far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. 76% of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a mega-republican to be a major turn off. 64% of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist.

So that was high number of women, 76% for MAGA, 64% of men for communist. 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. Thirty five, yeah, that wasn't on that. Thirty five percent of men. Forty-one percent of men said the same for a woman being into astrology. Okay. 20 percent of women, 33 percent of men said red flagged for they say black lives matter, 14 percent of women, 53 percent of women for they refuse to see the Barbie movie, 58 percent

of women for they say there are only two genders. So more women concerned about the two genders thing than the Barbie movie, interesting, what that is. But yeah, just overall, it seems like far right is in far left is in being moderate is a green flag, basically, like having, but that being said, how is saying that there are only two genders, like an extreme position? I would have thought that that would have been the moderate position. I guess it depends. Yeah, but the bar stores being turned upside down. But yeah, overall, when it comes to dating, it seems like a majority of both men and women consider far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags in a potential partner.

What age group was this? Are these young? 18 to 34. 18 to 33. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you've probably seen some of these data to about the political divergence of young men and young women, which is really interesting because a lot of the press, media will concentrate on the supposed right-wing radicalization of young men when actually most of the sort of political psychology survey data indicates the reverse. Where men are, young men, are slightly turning to the right. There's sort of a slight turn, whereas for young women,

there's a sharp, like a sharp rise, and young women identifying as left or far left. So it's actually the women who are being sort of radicalized or turning to a more extreme direction. Yeah, but we don't mind about that one. Yeah, we do, we don't need to care about that. Well, I mean, well, so I think in terms of violence and so forth, there's no young female syndrome.

Ah. Or if there is one, it would manifest itself differently and the female longhouse. The female, they had the longhouse. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the sort of the classic threats of terrorism and so forth, but yeah, that's interesting. I mean, so some of those, like yeah, the two genders one, that's interesting.

58% of women, I found like the, yeah, there's sort of a neat reversal there of like MAGA Republicans versus Communists, where most men, seemingly okay with dating a, a mega identifying woman, but women are more okay with dating, a communist identifying man. But here's the thing, right? That it's not apples for apples, right? Like, 35% of men said that a woman listening

to Joe Rogan was a red flag, but a man listening to Joe Rogan and a woman listening to Joe Rogan is not the same thing. a man listening to Joe Rogan and a woman listening to Joe Rogan is not the same thing. That's true too. You know what I mean? There was one about owning a gun that some quite high percentage of women said that owning a gun was a red flag in America. But a woman owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun, right? And the same for listening to Joe Rogan and so on and so forth. So it makes for very interesting reading, but I actually think that like if a woman does listen

to Joe Rogan, there'll be some non-zero number of men in there that's a boy's show. Like why, why, like, oh, maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's like, gonna try and arm wrestle me in bed or something, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've heard this, just speaking with young guys, that they are to some extent,

sort of bothered by these gender differences in politics and how like more and more young women are sort of identifying in a more sort of sharp left wing direction. But then they also sort of lament that that a lot of young, because you have to be, to some degree, psychologically peculiar, if you're a young woman who is a sort of right-wing person or identifying openly as a conservative, because you're sort of going against the grain, right?

Like you are an outlier in that sense, and that often coincides with other things that young men are kind of annoyed by. So it's like it's the astrology. Well, 41% of men said that the woman being into astrology is a reference. How and how was confusing to be? I think like that's fine. That's like a very small feminine way of thinking. You know, like I think it's, you know, I can't remember who, what who is it that said was it they said the big five is astrology for men. I've heard that for evolutionary psychology too. Evolutionary psychology is like,

is astrology for men. Yeah, but I mean, well, that's fine, but they're like, you know, a lot of, well, a lot of men, but, but at least in Mike's, me is more women are interested in the MBTI, the Myers-Briggs. And that is, I mean, it's, you know, it's not, it's not completely astrology,

but it's more like astrology than the big five. I had, yeah, it is. I had I had a Spencer Greenberg on the show. Do you know Spencer? Really interesting, dude. I think I've seen some of his intro to him from William McCaskill, to super interesting guy, mathematician, but just does science.

Like I don't know what he's funded by, maybe himself, but, and he did a huge breakdown of like, predictive power of Myers-Briggs versus Big Five versus other stuff versus other stuff. And Myers-Briggs is like, I think it's like 18% accurate, basically, on actual predisposition of things. But yeah, that's astrology for astrology, I think. What was that study about higher female status and gender equality being associated with

the lower female relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that? Yeah, this is a study I came across. I think it was published in 2015, which yeah, essentially found that higher levels of wealth and and sociopolitical equality among the genders is associated with lower levels of relative happiness for women compared to men. And the researchers speculate this may have something to do with increasing levels of employment,

the pressure to obtain higher levels of education, among women in particular, and that this is actually sort of dampening women's levels of happiness. And to me, this connects with another, and this one is this classic finding of the paradox of declining female happiness, which is essentially that sense of the 1970s, women's happiness relative to men's has declined. So to be clear, everyone's, so relative to the 1970s, everyone is less happy today compared to the 1970s, but in the 1970s,

men were actually happier. No, no, sorry, women were happier than men. So women had higher rates of happiness relative to men in the 1970s, and people generally were happier overall, fast forward to the present, and things have reversed, men are not happier than women, although overall people report being less happy. And so yeah, that study that I pointed out,

that was an interesting one to me because, yeah, I mean, the message that a lot of young people receive today is, what are the keys to happiness? You work hard, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a high paying job, you sort of follow that cookie cutter track. And what is the purpose of all of this and it's you know I suppose you don't most people say well they want to be happy and so you go

through the education and employment route maybe you go to law school after college you sort of get the credentials you go through the whatever the fellowships and all these different programs and at the end of the tunnel you're hoping that you'll be happy and actually for both men and women doesn't seem to be working but for women in particular because they've had the sharpest decline, right? Because they were happier, and now they're, you know, so they're in the cost of them. Exactly. And so their diminishing happiness has actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men. The men's happiness being sort of higher than women is interesting as well. And I wonder if

that is almost sort of the reversal in some ways. Of course, they're less happy overall, but why would they be happier than women? I wonder if that's some degree because they don't feel as much pressure anymore. The back in the day, men were pressured more to be earners and providers and so on. There was a economic pressure associated with that.

Now that we're seeing young men are sort of dropping out of college, they're dropping out of higher education and employment. And at least in the short term, depending on how the survey questions are presented, if it's just, you know, how do you feel generally or how do you feel today or what have you, I think a lot of you guys might be like, I don't, I didn't have to go to class. I mean, given the fact that men were previously less happy and relative to them are now less happy also, it's just that really the big change here is the women that's fled. I wonder whether the male dissatisfaction with the gameful employment state of seeking

providing thing was just baked in already. It's like, okay, we already knew this. Granddad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and dad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and I'm spit and sawdust and I'm unhappy. But there is a little bit less pressure to do this. Was that Candice Blake that did that one? The female happiness study. Yeah, I don't recall the authors of that one.

She definitely taught me about either that or something similar, which is... The the the female happiness study. I don't recall the the authors of that one. She did all happiness studies She definitely told me about either that or something similar which is yeah, that you know the gender pay gap Positively predicts relationships. I'm just fine. Oh, I have seen that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They read that paper Which is you know, it's It's funny because so it predicts relationships satisfaction if men earn more than women. And then it also, there was a reversal of this. I don't know if canis was a study on this or different authors, but they found that when women in marriages earn more than men, that this predicts higher rates of arguments,

of verbal aggression on behalf of the woman, of just general relationship. Higher rates of domestic violence. of arguments, of verbal aggression on behalf of the woman, of just general relationship, high rates of domestic violence, infidelity on the part of the man as well. Men were likely to cheat when they were in less. 50% increase in the use of erectile dysfunction medication while women's the primary breadwinner. That too.

Yeah, that's pretty, it's pretty, I mean, it's grim, but then, you know, here's an anecdote, I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation, it was, you know, it was me and then like this group of women, these female students and one of them, you know, she was a pretty hardcore feminist and she said that it should be 50, 50, like 50% of women should be working, you know, 50% of women, like if it's the case, the 50% of women should be working, you know, 50% of women, like if it's the case that 50% of women are working 50% of a women should be at home

and same for men, you know, if 50% of men should be working 50% of men at home. And then, you know, so then I was basically just sitting back like I was not gonna get entangled in this, but then some of the other women were saying, you know, okay, so, you know, but like, would you actually be like, okay with that, like your husband's staying at home?

I don't really know, whatever. And then finally actually be like, okay with that? Like your husband's staying at home. I don't really know whatever. And then finally I decided to jump in. And I said, like, you know, it's speaking to this young feminist woman. I said, yeah, so I know that you plan on going to law school. You're very smart. You're going to be very successful. Like, how would you feel like your husband is at home? I don't know, changing diapers and taking care of the kids.

And you're at a prestigious law firm with a bunch of high-powered attorneys. Like, how would that, you know, you think you'd be happy in that situation? And her response was, wow, I think I just felt a tingle when you said high-powered attorneys. Like, I got really excited when you said that.

That was basically her reaction. Wow. And it was half joking, but half serious. And all of the women laughed, I laughed too. It was a good response. But like, I think that there was an element of seriousness there, that when she's fantasizing about rubbing shoulders with all of these high-powered, successful,

at the top of their game, and then you got your husband at home, and I think it's just different. It's men and women are different. We're attracted to different things. Yeah, it's interesting to think about the potential pressure that may come along for the ride with you are supposed to be gainfully employed and have your education and be able to sort this sort of stuff.

That's something I, the, not just the going to work, not just the getting up early and the hours of sleep and all the rest of it, but kind of the psychosocial interpretation of being a person that is status-striving and playing the game of the water cooler and all of that stuff. Kind of doesn't really factor into the discussion about, you know, is it inconscientiousness? Is it a part of your hard work, like you're gritting your resilience and your desire for all this stuff? But there's just a, like a soup that comes along for the ride is a part of being a person who's playing the employment in the education game and having to go out for drinks on an evening and it shmues up to the boss and all that sort of stuff. And no one really talks about that, because that's part of work. Right. Like that comes along for the ride is a sort of stuff. And no one really talks about that because that's part of work. Like that comes along for the ride,

it's a part of work. But no one ever talks about that. And it's like, okay, like, it's the classic. Do you want to be a CEO, woman? Do you really want to do 80-hour weeks and do you really want to do that? And it's like, do you really want to play this game for 20 years of fucking sucking up to people

and having to do the social network manipulation and deafness and all this. That being said, given women's sort of predisposition and ability to be a little bit more like subtle with their cues and their emotional intelligence and stuff, I actually imagined that on that side, they might be predisposed to it well, but as it seems, their wellbeing may suffer more than men's, despite their capacity for doing it being as good or greater. Yeah, I mean, I always wonder if it's sort of the reversal of what we were speaking about earlier about young men who don't want to do hard things, but then once they do, then they find that they enjoy them and they appreciate it. Whereas in this context, maybe maybe some women think,

oh, if I follow this track and get a lot of education and go, you know, it'll make me happy, and then once you get there, it's actually not. It's not as satisfying as you would have hoped. It's actually worse than you expected. And I think a lot of, actually, I know people like this, as I'm speaking, thinking about it, I know a lot of people who, you know, they think that once they get there, they have this certain image of what it's going to be like and

actually, yeah, working 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And even, you know, they are doing well financially, they are making money, they are buying all of the material that they thought they wanted, wearing, you know, amazing clothes, nice apartment and the right parts of the city and so on. But they just don't have time to enjoy it because they're always on the clock non-stop working weekends. Yeah. No time to appreciate. You know, but there I think there is an element of the sort of social signaling where you know, the almost at some point the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and their job and how prestigious it is.

I was teaching you last night about my theory of surplus mate value. So Chris Bumstead, Mr Olympia classic physique champion three or four times comes on the podcast and tells this story about how he cries on the bathroom floor a few weeks before he's about to win the Mr Olympia because he's super stressed with all stuff going on in his life and the pressure of having to win and all the rest of it. And it's like girlfriend sort of holds this dude to sink 260 pounds, presumably just holds the top of his head in his arm and inner arms and says like it's okay and blah blah blah. But this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the giga-chad meme, right? Like he is the dude that is over the

peaky blinders quote, like the Killian Murphy quote from peaky blinders, as he speaks over the top, and it's just Chris Bumstead just looking like mean and stoic, like he's the Sigma male meme that's been used on TikTok, right? Like he's missed a Sigma male. And I brought up to him this kind of odd irony that the guy that is the face of the Sigma Mail meme, the stoic, you know, emotionalists, just grit and grind and go through it thing,

was heavily dependent on his girlfriend in order to be able to go and achieve the next part of his, you know, trajectory. And one of the things that interestingly got brought up in the comments was, well, yeah, he can do that because he is Mr. Olympia. And it got me thinking about surplus mate value. So if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value, not to say that Chris is, Chris is Mrs. is like a

smoke show, super smart, I'm pretty sure she went to like, multiple college degrees, plus like world fitness competitor herself in her own rights. But it's like, there is just a ladder that you can continue to climb if you're going to be world champion in anything. And basically, Chris had so much surplus mate value in his relationship that he could get away with drawing from this bank account. He's allowed to

cry. But if the, if you're not the world champion, right? Like maybe the guy that comes 20th, maybe he's unable to do that. And if he did cry on the floor, that would dip in below. And the girlfriend would see him for the vulnerable cook that he is and leave. But yeah, just it's kind of an unfalsifiable. Well, I mean, it seems like an illustration of counter signaling, essentially, right? Like when you're, I mean, the whole idea of counter-signal is like once you reach a certain point

in a status domain, you can actually behave the same way as someone very low on the status domain would behave and it actually increases your status even more. And so example I like to use is a classic word from Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues about self deprecating humor that if you're a very high status person and you're holding a meeting or you're just in a social setting and you make fun of yourself a little bit, people actually it it ingratiates you it sort of increases their

admiration of you that no he's just a humble guy is making fun of himself. But if you're a low man on the totem pole and you start making self-deprecating jokes, people don't want to be around you. They're like, oh, who's this guy who doesn't like himself very much or it hits people the wrong way. And then our mutual friend, or his other one,

likes to use the writing the bicycle on the way to work example, which we mentioned this last night too, about how if the guy who works at Pizza Hut writes his bike to work is because he can't afford a car. But if the CEO writes the bike to work example, which we mentioned this last night too about how if the guy who works at Pizza Hut writes his bike to work is because he can't afford a car, but if the CEO writes the bike to work, it's because he cares about his health or he cares about the environment or he's just a conscientious guy. It makes us like him more that he's just writing his bike. He doesn't have to drive the fancy car and makes us like him even more.

I think there's something there about that, that's sort of the counter signaling element here. And I think you can see it in a lot of different walks of life, just like how much self-promotion people do. There was a classic paper called Too Good for School, one of the early papers in the counter signaling, sort of a research area. And this was about, so this was, I wanna say in the early 2000s where they asked, or what they did was they gathered syllabi from college professors and found the syllabus.

Is that the plural of syllabus? Yeah, it's called. And so they gathered these from various institutions and rank ordered them and essentially found that the more prestigious the institution, the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus. So if you're at some fancy Ivy League school, they would just say, I'm whatever Bob Smith,

but if you're sort of mid-tier or lower down, it's, you know, a doctor, so and so, or a professor, so and so, and then say whatever, yeah. All the degrees, everything. And then they also called the, so this was back when people still had answering machines. And so they called the offices of these professors and found that the higher doctors, the HD, MSE, can't have so, whereas at the higher ranked universities,

right? So it's exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, Bob, call you later, whatever, whereas you have a lower tier, it's, yeah, Dr. So it's so, you know, this office, this department, and just all of their credentials. And I think we're now seeing this to some degree, and like the social media space now, or in like how much self-promotion people do. If you're an established author, you can maybe make one or two announcements, but if you're still sort of struggling and still trying to make it, you have to do a lot more self-promotion. But there's a reversal of this where if you... So there was another paper, it was something like when disclosing good news goes wrong, something along these lines where if you're a very high status person doing very well in your life and you do a lot of self-promote, or if you do a lot of counter-signaling,

people don't like it. And so, an example that I've given is, so like a first-time author. If your book does very well, and you write this long, post on social media, you know, I wanna thank all of you for following me on this journey, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if a super famous, well-established author does the same thing.

It comes across as a little bit gosh as a little bit. Like we already knew you were going to do well. You don't have to play this mock humility. So I've thought about this from a storytelling perspective, especially over the last six years, that going back and talking about when I ruptured my Achilles and set up a special kind of stand so that I could do it with my foot elevated in a boot. I remember those days.

I'm pretty sure you only have the face tie. I'm like, is that your foot? Yeah, yeah. Not attached to the rest of my leg. That's kind of cool to track that journey. So, you know, for the people that are on any kind of trajectory with whether it be content creation or a business or something like that,

I think that there's an awful lot of value of saying the things as they happen, of kind of showing the shit times. One of Alex Homo's, he's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the shit times more because he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he lives in this nice penthouse

and he can retrospectively tell people about the shit times but it's not the same as showing them, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you get, presuming that all of your plans go well and you end up in the place that you want to end up in, when you get there, it's gonna be way more difficult for you to try and tell people about the non-ivory tower that you use to live in. So I think that tracking your journey is best you can and getting the post out there

or writing about the times that have been rough or things like that, writing about the challenges, not only is it, I think, a useful tool for yourself to remind yourself to go back and read or watch or whatever and see, oh, I went through a period that I had to be resilient. That means that if I face a similar challenge in future, I can also be resilient. But also, it's a good way marker in the ground of here. Here I was. This is kind of evidence, skin in the game of how shit life has been at least at some points. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that example. And especially, I've seen these cases of people who are very successful and they don't really talk about the struggle until they're already very successful.

And then once they start talking about the journey, people don't really take it as seriously. It's like, well, why are we just now hearing about this or why haven't you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this. Or you just sort of as like, well, why are we just now hearing about this or why haven't you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this. Or you just sort of whatever like embellishing this to make the journey more interesting. And yeah, I think there is value to sort of tracking it along the way and to sort of reflect. And I think it's also just like an inspiring message to other people who are also struggling very early in their careers or in their lives. I think your book's going to do this.

I'm really super excited. I'm aware that it wasn't supposed to be like, you know, you two dispossessed human can become, you go through the US Air Force and fucking Yale and all that stuff. I really think, you know, like reading it, reading early versions of the manuscript, I was like, fuck, you know, like this is, you know, it's kind of like the anti-black pill message, like the guy who kept on just getting kicked

in the face by life ends up kind of succeeding at the end of it. Super excited for it to come out. Yeah, that wasn't the intention, but I have, yeah, heard similar sort of feedback, a friend of mine who joined the Navy. And he had just gotten out of basic training and he was still heating shit sort of early in his military career.

And yeah, he read an early manuscript and he's like, yeah, this was great. Like, this is exactly what I needed in this moment because I was just feeling so awful and like, really, I just put one foot in front of the other, just keep trying, keep taking shots. And yeah, it'll hopefully work out as long as you sort of have your mindset right in your priorities in order. Yeah, man. Yeah.

Some people pre-ordered that yet? Yeah, I list it. It's up. So yeah, I mean, we can talk about it. It's fine. Oh, you coming back on for the books. I don't know. But yeah, it's up for pre-order.

Everyone needs to go and pre-order. Rob's book right now. I want to shove this down the throat of the culture. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it has a bit of both. I think there's something for everyone. I mean, there's a lot of sort of first-person narrative-driven stuff, but then there's also

a sort of sociological analysis and a lot of sort of, there's stuff on status, on how we evaluate other people and those kinds of things sort of work their way. And especially in the later chapters of the book, I do this thing where I write each chapter from the perspective of myself at that age. But yeah, as I sort of enter adulthood and become a more curious and reflective person, you can see the way that my mind develops in the way I start to think about things. So, yeah, man, yeah, I'm excited for it too. Yeah. I'm pumped for it to come out and the covers cool It's you as a kid riding a bike down the street So you taught me about this Balmice that idea about why

Ovulation might be concealed in women, yeah, and I've got a counter Like bullshit hypothesis as well. So what was the what's that that idea that Elon from Balmice or Balmice are about ovulation? Right. So this was a chapter. It was a speculative chapter from Roy Balmice, or this eminence likeologist, where essentially the idea here is that so women have concealed ovulation, right? You can't necessarily tell when they're ovulating the way that you, you, you, you visit very visibly can with other great apes, with chimpanzees, and so forth. And so the speculative idea is that a lot of evolutionary researchers have suggested that

this is maybe concealed ovulation is to conceal from men, right? So that men don't necessarily know when the woman's ovulating or whether to reduce the risk of sexual coercion or to obscure paternity uncertainty or all of those kinds of things, whereas this speculative chapter posits that it's actually to conceal ovulation from themselves so that women don't know because vastly oversimplifying, but back when women started to be, or your human beings in general started to become sort of self-reflective and introspective and fully conscious

and women could suddenly, oh, when I'm ovulating, I'm more likely to get pregnant, they could visibly see it. Then they would be less likely to have sex and in order to essentially sidestep the burdens of pregnancy because pregnancy was extremely risky. And it would become a lot. And it'd be dangerous. You pregnancy was extremely risky, and it would become a lot... You would become a wife. As a woman, you would become a wife

if you were on menstrual cycle. And it would take a whole period, exactly. Exactly. And so the idea here is that eventually, only the women who had concealed ovulation were the ones to reproduce, and then gradually over time, all women had obscured ovulation,

and this was essentially a way to sort of prevent women from sidesteping time all women had obscured ovulation. And this was essentially a way to prevent women from side-sepping their own possibility of pregnancy. And then, yeah, in some of those excerpts that I sent you, there was a nice line from Leslie Newsom in this book that just came out a couple of years ago called The Story of Us, which is a nice sort of sweeping, updated overview of human evolution, and essentially, which she writes, she and her co-author, they write that, you know, historically,

there may have been women who avoided the burdens of pregnancy, but those women are not our ancestors. Right, it was the women who did undergo this, this very difficult, challenging, and dangerous experience, and those were the ones. So I thought those two findings are nearly dovetail, but I'm curious to hear what's the theory sort of can. I'm pretty sure that it was Roy

that taught me about this one as well. No, it might, it might have been Candace Blake that other women are, if a woman while she's ovulating or about to ovulate is put under intense social and physical stress, it can cause the ovulation to misfire. So women who are under real significant stress, it messes up the menstrual cycle. Many women that are listening to this may know that the menstrual cycle, kind of if they super stressed at work or they're studying for exams or whatever, like the stuff gets

squirrelly, right? Like, guys might struggle to get an erection if they're super stressed, women might, their menstrual cycle can go all over. And one of the arguments is that concealed ovulation stops other women in your tribe from fucking with you while they know that you're potentially fertile. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, so I think like that, so these hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

They all work together. Right, they all sort of, the pair bonding thing, like if you don't know when you're ovulating, if you don't know when you're fertile, it means you need to have sex more frequently with your partner, which increases the pair bond, which actually means that husband is going to stick around or that father is going to stick around with woman in order to be able to raise child. Yeah, I think there, yeah, so it may require all of those different external phenomena to produce that outcome. One of those alone might not be enough where if it had only been the concealing ovulation from themselves, maybe we would still have some percentage of women who were visibly ovulating

and others who aren't, but it may require all of those different trends working together to produce the situation in which women are no longer sort of visible when the ovulation is no longer visible among women. So yeah, I think this is sort of often this obstacle people kind of run into or this trap that we think like it can only be one or the other, but this, yeah, I don yeah, this is sort of a, often this obstacle, people kind of run into or this trap that we think like it can only be one or the other, but this, yeah, I don't think this

is necessarily any, many, many things. Right. I mean, evolution is complicated and intricate and so many things are going on. I think concealed ovulation, given that it's super rare in the animal kingdom, I think, as well. So, yeah. Concealed ovulation is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of, it doesn't matter which of these hypotheses are correct. There are so many benefits

right from an evolutionary perspective. Just trigger all of these different things. Take 10% of them. You're like, it's a pretty good deal. That's pretty works pretty well. What's that? Solomon's paradox that you were teaching me about? What's that? Yeah, so Solomon's paradox is so-so finding in psychology, but it's named after the biblical King Solomon who had a reputation for being the wise king. There was this adage that arose that if you have any issues, you should ask King Solomon. Famously, most people know the being the wise king. And there was this, this adage that arose, that if you have any issues, you should ask King Solomon. And famously, most people know the King Solomon's story

of the two women who claimed that they were the mother of the baby. And then he, so you know, kind of sneakily said, OK, well, we're just going to cut the baby in half. And he knew that if we, you know, he knew that if he did this, that the actual mother would step forth and say, the other one, he can have it. So that's how he sort of resolved this issue.

But it's a paradox, or they assigned this label, the Solomon paradox, because King Solomon himself and his personal life was actually not very wise. So he was wise for other people, but in his personal life, he made a lot of mistakes as a king. He was not a particularly good father to his son and his son actually grew up to be a tyrant and actually a very bad king because he had sort of mismanishes on parenting. And so in psychology, the Solomon's paradox is that people can be very wise for other people, social problems, but are often less than wise for

their own. There was a recent meta-analysis that just came out, various studies looking at the Solomon Paradox, are people wiser when reasoning about, so they'd bring people in, people who had recently gone through a breakup, for example, and sort of ask them, well, what do you plan to do, and so on and so forth. They would bring in other people, either strangers or the participants' friends or people' peers of theirs and say, well, what do you think this person should do in that situation?

And found, and they found various ways to sort of measure this of how to sort of measure wise decision-making and found that social distance actually helps. It's the peer or the stranger who can say, okay, so this person has just been betrayed by their friend or they're just going through a breakup or they're having some difficulty in their social lives. Well, here's probably the best way to go.

And the idea here seems to be, yeah, when you're sort of emotionally entangled, it's hard to sort of act rationally. It's hard to act in a way that will benefit both you and maybe the other party as well. And so as I was reading this, I think it's a really interesting finding in and of itself, but then I also wonder,

so I'll actually give an example of this. So there was an interesting setting on economic games, and so there's this game called the ultimatum game in behavioral economics. And the simple version of the game is that, so imagine you and I are playing the ultimatum game in behavioral economics. And the simple version of the game is that, so imagine you and I are playing the ultimatum game, and the researcher gives me $10 and says, you can give some amount to Chris, and if he accepts the amount, then both of you walk away with the money. And so I'm under this, you know, I have to deliberate and think, okay, so how much do I have to offer Chris of my 10,

he knows I, you know, I have 10. So you know I have 10, how much do I have to offer you to say that was a fair deal and we both walk away. And what the researchers find consistently is you have to offer at least 30%. I would have said 30% that felt about right. Yeah, and same. Yeah, when I first went like, oh, 30, that sounds fair. Any more, it would feel like unrealistic, but any less would feel unfair. And so that's what they like consistently find

is around 30%. But they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else. So it's actually, it's economically irrational to take anything, to decline any amount greater than zero. Essentially, you should take anything, right? Because one is better than zero. So what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the

ultimatum game, so I'm playing for a friend or whatever, or you're playing on behalf of a friend that people will accept any microdiving zero because they can step back and not get so, okay, well, is it fair? Is it not fair? It's okay, so my friend either walks away with nothing or they walk away with $1 or $2 or whatever it happens to be. And so I found that finding the Solomon's Paradox interesting because I wonder if there's something,

if this can be applied more broadly to what's going on with young people, you've seen some of these data about young people having fewer friends, fewer social contacts, less likely to be in relationships, less time in actual physical social spaces. And the Solomon's paradox indicates that it's actually helpful to have social contacts and to have friends to talk your problems through with.

So if I'm having an issue, and I've done this before, I'm like, you know, I'm thinking about making a decision in my career or something, I'll call you, I'll call someone and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? And that can sort of help me to contextualize and you'll see things that I don't see and so forth.

But if you're a young person, and you don't have many people around you, that so you're already unhappy because you don't have very many friends, but then without the friends and people you can communicate with to talk your problems through with in your life, whether it's in your career, other social domains,

or romantic relationships and so forth, you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions. And so there's this sort of negative feedback cycle that may be created. A few people to show you a blind spot. Exactly. And to sort of list out the options that you could take that you aren't seeing or list out the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the decision that you're leaning toward. And so, yeah, over time, this may actually be exacerbating. It's not just about loneliness,

it's also about the sort of Solomon's paradox in making more unwise decisions in your life. Right. Yeah, this sort of recursive isolationist decision making, which is suboptimal compared with if you were, so not only would you have the support network, I would feel better, but on top of that, I would also be making better decisions, which downstream from that would lead me to have a better life, presumably, including maybe a better life where I have more friends around me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris, you ever watched this show

who wants to be a millionaire? Yeah. Yeah, so I watched a couple of seasons of like the new one, this was during the lockdown. A couple of seasons? Yeah, lockdown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to do something.

So that a world of wallcraft. Well, I was playing in the background, right? So I'd put on, you know, because I used to watch this show as a kid, like I put on the back, it was almost like a comfort thing, you're not that bad. I gotta do something. Is that a world of wallcraft? Well, I was playing in the background, right? So I put on, you know, cause I used to watch the show as a kid, I like, I put on the back, it was almost like a comfort thing, you know, you're a little locked down. And one thing that I noticed was,

I don't know, like, they changed, you know, they used to have these lifelines. One of the lifelines in this, like, updated version or whatever the COVID lockdown version was that they would bring their smart friend along and that was a lifeline. Like, they'd bring their smart friend, they'd be sitting in the back.

And if they wanted to use a lifeline, they'd turn around and ask their smart friend, what do you think? We used to own a friend to his one. I wonder if they did that because of like Google or something, you know, so if you own a friend, their friend can just look it up online. But now if they have a friend,

they can't look up online with the answer is. And I was watching this and I thought to myself, like yeah, if you, like, if you don't have any friends, you know what I mean? Like what do you do? Like, you bring along, and I think you can sort of apply that to your life more broadly. You're in the, who wants to be a millionaire game,

you bring your smart friend along, but life isn't who wants to be a millionaire, but life is a series of making difficult decisions, and if you can't phone a friend and say, hey, what do you think? Like, the game becomes harder for you. And also, if you do get accepted to who wants to be a millionaire, you're not gonna have the friends to bring along with you,

specifically for that situation as well. You're missing out potentially an a million dollars. That's a million dollars that you could have had. Yeah, I think there's definitely something sort of recursive going on here. It's like the inner citadel thing that you taught me about, which I just can't unsee, that Iciabilline idea of, if you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

You retreat from the fateful ills of the world into this inner citadel. Like, if you struggle to lose weight, just declare that weight has no bearing on health and that, you know, like body size doesn't impact attractiveness. So if you struggle to hold down a job, say that all jobs are for suckers and turn to a life

of crime, or if you struggle to make relationships work, say, you know, monogamy is, ancestrally unwise and I'm going to become a polyamorous like polycule type person. And I do think that there's an equivalent here to like black pills, sigma male, cope. And I don't think that there's an equivalent here, the like black pill, sigma male cope. And I don't think that there's an equivalent for women, right? There's not an isolationist like retreat from the world equivalent for women, which I guess suggests that the social networks tend to be a little bit more sticky than men's. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Dunbar wrote this book on psychology of friendship. And that was one of the points that he made that women are sort of better at staying in touch, reaching out and organizing gatherings.

And it's what is it, the, I don't know if he uses this term, but it's sort of face to face versus shoulder to shoulder that when men have friends, we can't even say it. We can't do this together. We can't fucking unsee it. I've spoken about this on the show before, but for the people that haven't heard it.

Next time the Irrata party, any sort of gathering, look at the angle of the feet, of women talking to women, and of men talking to men. Women will talk to women 180 degrees. They'll be face to face. Whereas men, the average is 120 degrees. So it's like bleeding. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this shows up.

Once you see that, you can't not see it. And it's a rule that works across so many different things. The Men's Sheds Initiative in Australia, did you see that? I had not seen this. Men, it was an initiative by the Australian government, I think, to try and improve Men's Mental Health. They realized that getting men to sit down in a room and talk like this about their problems didn't work.

So what they did is they built sheds that men came to, and then the men would bring, like, I've got this knackered lawnmower and everyone needs to help fix it. So how are men talking? They're talking whilst the front rain is focused on this thing that's in front and they are shoulder to shoulder not face to face.

They're literally in a circle and everyone's like, right, you've got the good drill and he's got the good spanner and I've got the hammer or whatever and let's fix this thing and, God, dude, me and the misses were not getting on well and before you know it, it's a therapy session mediated by this fucking lawnmower. Right, they have the the pretense of repairing lawnmower but they need that, right? They're required. If you just put them in the shed with no lawnmower

and they're just standing in a circle. Yeah, that's yeah. So yeah, then that was yeah, the face-to-face versus shoulder to shoulder about, yeah, women will talk and communicate with one another, whereas men will sort of they need a reason to sort of do an activity together and then communicate and discuss their feelings. Some of my best conversations are during pickleball warm-ups. Just gently dink in about everyone, all of the pickleball pros out there. No, they can start off very close to the net and you play the game within the kitchen and then you step back a little bit and you pay sort of like a mid-level game and then you step to the baseline. And sometimes that warm-up when you're close to the net and then you step back a little bit and you pay sort of like a middle-level game and then you step to the baseline.

And sometimes that warm-up when you're close to the net and in the middle-level game will go for 30, 45 minutes with me and one of, especially if it's singles, less time if it's doubles. But if it's singles, it's just you and your friend, he's like, dude, works getting a bit stressful or this thing's happening. And before you know it, your deep in conversation, in fact, we did this once at South Austin Recreation Centre, me and my friend, and there was some guy that was sat on the side, and my friend that I was talking to, his podcast, for as well, and I think he was going through some, going through some something to do with his life. And we were just talking and talking and talking,

and I realized that we must have been doing this for like, at least 20 minutes. And it's kind of bad form to hog a court for a while, especially if you're not playing a game, because when you're playing a game and somebody wins, the winner stays on and the next person cycles in. And I realized that this dude had been sort of like 50s kind of guy, like very typical pickleball kind of player. And I realized that we'd been just warming up for like 20 minutes and get bad form, because the game will maybe take around about 10 minutes

or something like that. And I think I turned and said something like, oh dude, like I didn't realize that you were waiting, I was kind of engrossed in this warm up and we'll get a game going. And he's like, to be honest, that was a really compelling conversation. And I remember thinking, wow, like the male requirement for distraction,

from emotional communication is so strong that I can play like a full warm-up for a sport while doing it. Yeah, you sort of lose track of time. I think, yeah, I mean, the sex difference is in friendship. I think there's another sort of pattern that occurs where in breakups, men don't only lose their female partner, but a lot of their social because it's a woman who's sort of maintaining the, or those sort of nudge the man to say, like, hey, have you talked to your friend in a while? You should shoot him attacks or see how he's doing or what have you. And it's hard to keep that up for a lot of men, right?

Because it doesn't come naturally for them, the way that it does for women and these sort of monitor. And there's obviously like sort of evolution early adaptive reasons for this that men are more expendable and sort of let's be occupied with saying plugged in and survival and all those kinds of things. Whereas women are pretty good at sort of monitoring the aloe parenting pool.

Exactly the way the women do. Yeah. And so, yeah, we see this. Yeah, a lot of the young people in general report having fewer friends, but this is especially pronounced for a lot of young men, which is, yeah, I mean, I've seen you and I've seen some other sort of recommend, you know, there are a lot of ways, like if you're a woman and you want to make friends, there's one way to do it, but I think if you're a man, like getting involved in sports or some things, some kind of activity friends, there's one way to do it, but I think if you're a man, like getting involved in sports,

or something, some kind of activity, like that's the way to do it. It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna try to make this person into my friend, it's like, hey, do you wanna like go play catch or do you wanna go play football? Think about some of your friends, we've got mutual friends that you've been to a university with, to studies with.

And if you're both a part of a project for a brief amount of time, the male friendship deepened so rapidly. My ex-business partner that I ran nightlife stuff with for 15 years, decade and a half, groomsman it is wedding, phenomenal guy, very formative for me, sat next to him on my first ever seminar and became a business partner there and then, and we're still great friends, I catch up with them every time I go back to the UK, but I'd be lying if I said the depth of our friendship hadn't diminished because we were no longer working

towards a shared mission. Whereas, editor Dean, he's a perfect example. So we brought on a new guy, our YouTube strategist, and since he's got brought in the pace of friendship deepening. It's just been so rapid because you're not just bonding with somebody that you like, like you selected them to work

for the company because you would get on with them and you think that you share your values. But because I spend five hours a week grappling with titles and thumbnails and who should we book on the show and how am I gonna sort this schedule out? And then he'll travel and we'll sleep in some shitty hotel and you know, all of that moving toward a shared mission, I think for men, just engenders.

It's more than, it's like brothers, more than friends, right? You know, it's almost like for warfare in a regard, solving a problem together, right? You're solving a problem. Everyone needs a lawn mower. Yeah, problem. Everyone needs a lawn mower. Yeah, yeah, everyone needs a lawn mower to fix. Yeah, yeah, that's what, yeah, that's what put, I mean, it's, yeah, having that, sure. And so one thing I'd be curious about with men and women,

because I know that there's various studies sort of indicating that there is this sort of turnover rate, this sort of friendship half-life, where supposedly, I mean, I've seen different, different stats, different studies on this. Some say seven years, some say 10 years, where roughly half of your friendship pool turns over every seven years or every 10 years. You lose half and they get replaced by another group.

I wonder if this is more likely to be the case for men than women, simply because of that sort of the way that problem solving facilitates friendships. And once you've solved the problem, once you've written the book, or once you've done the task, or when you're interesting, then you sort of move on. You know, in the case of academics, you write, you know, you write your chapters in your papers together, or you do your research studies,

and then it's like, okay, moving on, and you sort of lose touch. And so I wonder if there is that sort of gender divide in friendship turnover as well. Yeah, I don't know that though. Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen, Rob is just so much fun to catch up with you. I'm glad to get to see you our first one in person.

I love it as well. You'll be back on in February once in a book out, February 20th. February 20th, three days before my birthday. What a lovely birthday treat. So you'll be back on when you come through Austin. Where should people go? They want to read more of the stuff that you write.

I love your substack. I only subscribe to I think four or five and they're all like modern wisdom guests. Where should people go? Sub-stack Twitter, all that stuff. Yeah, sub-stack, RobKHenderson.com, Twitter at RobKHenderson. Easy to find, so put me up and I'll be there. So, hell yeah.

Thanks Rob, thank Chris. Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah