2240: Science of Free Will and Why Relationships Matter with Roy Baumeister

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

Welcome empowered investors. This is episode 2240 and you know what that means. It is a 10th episode show where we talk about a topic of general interest. And today this will be a fantastic episode for you. If you want to develop more willpower, if you want to understand the concept of free will and how much free will any of us really have, Listen in, this is going to be a great episode. Our guest today will be Roy Baumeister and he is a New York Times best selling author. He has, has written, I think over 40 books. It's amazing. Just a huge, huge body of work. So Roy is an expert on a variety of subjects. He's a professor. He's got just phenomenal, phenomenal information. One of his books, Willpower. New York Times bestseller. It's got over 2,300 reviews. Very high, like four and a half stars. Evil Inside. Human Violence and Cruelty. And is there anything good about Men? How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Unbelievable. Anyway, we're going to explore these topics and many more with him today. But first I want to share with you a video that one of our great clients Michelle did for us many years ago and it is on the refi till you die topic. And I just thought it was a great review. It's a very short video. I Want to talk about one property? And then we will bring on our guest and do our 10th episode show today. So let's take a look at this short lesson on refi till you die. Let's talk about one of the game plans that we have talked about for many years, which is the concept of refi till you die. Okay, you've heard of the rule of 72s, right? And that just means that things double, okay? And we'll see how they double at different rates. So in this example, let's talk about a property portfolio where you purchase 10 properties in diverse markets and say the properties were $100,000 each. So you've got 10 $100,000 properties to buy them. 20. I've got to make a comment. $100,000 each. You can tell this video is a little old, right? And that should be part of your urgency as to why you should be always investing. Because, I mean, we used to have lots of properties for $100,000. That was a common thing years ago. 8% down is $200,000. And then you've got closing costs, that's about 35,000. And then you've Got reserves. Remember, I did say 4%. 4% of a million is $40,000. So $275,000 total. And here's how it works. You started with this $1 million portfolio. 10 properties, diverse markets. And so the way it looks is like this. You've got your $235,000 initial investment. You've got loans for $800,000 or 80% of the value, and your equity is $200,000. When 12 years go by at that 6% appreciation rate, your portfolio is going to double by the rule of 72. So now you've gone from 1 million to 2 million in 12 years. Say you're 40, 40 is the new 25. So now your property is double, you're 52, and you've got a million dollar gain already. And you stopped, you just did the 10 and you quit. And then you just let it ride. You go to the bank and you say, hey, I've got equity in here, so I want to pull my equity out. I want to engage in something I call equity stripping. You have the properties, you own the assets, but you strip the equity out of them. You still own the asset, but you got all the money out. So then the bank says, okay, your 2 million dollar portfolio, 80% of that, we will loan you that. So we're going to give you loans totaling $1.6 million. And now your equity has doubled to 4, $400,000 difference between 2 million and 1.6 million in financing. So $400,000 in equity and you've got $800,000 in cash that you can now stuff under your mattress. You can go to Las Vegas and gamble it away. You can, you know, do whatever for the next 12 years. If you just take this $800,000 and divide it by 12 and you don't invest it, you stick it under your mattress, it earns zero return. You have $67,000 a year, tax free. Why? Because there's no tax on borrowed money. This 67,000 tax free is equivalent to, well, it depends on your tax bracket. 100,000 is fair. That's about $100,000 taxable equivalent. So let's go to the next cycle. Let's go another 12 years. Now remember, you're only 52 and you're now living on this tax free money every year, another 12 years. Now you're 64 years young and 64 is the new 40. Now your property portfolio has doubled again. It's worth $4 million. And you've got a $3 million gain from your original $1 million investment. And you go to the bank and say, hey, refinance me 80% loan to value. Okay, we'll give you $3.2 million in loans. Your equity has now doubled again to $800,000 and you've got $1.6 million in cash. Now you've got 1.6 million. And for the next 12 years, just divide it, don't invest it, don't earn anything on it. Stick it under your Mattress. You have $133,000 a year to spend tax free. That's probably equivalent to about, you know, nearly 200,000 a year in taxable. So you're 64 now. Let's go 12 more years. And now how old are we? We're 76 years young. 76 is the new 55. And now our portfolio is worth $7 million. We refi, we get 6.4 million in loans. We have 1.6 million in equity. Our equity has quadrupled. So now we've got $1.6 million in equity. We've got an asset worth $8 million, a 7 million dollar gain. And we've got $3.2 million cash out, tax free. Divide by 12. We got a quarter million dollars a year tax free to live off until we're 88. And 88 will be the new 68. This is a projection. You should always check with your tax advisor about tax benefits. And if you'd like to learn more, listen to my podcast and visit my website@jason hartman.com and that is one reason that you should get very excited. So that was just 2016, right? Not that many years ago. And we're giving an example of ten one hundred thousand dollar properties versus today. You know, you, you'd get three properties for that million dollar portfolio maximum, right? And we're talking about good quality properties in, in nice areas, you know, that have good appreciation potential. Of course you can always buy bottom of the barrel terrible properties. You can go on ebay and buy these super cheap properties in blighted areas. We all know that that hasn't changed that much. Although the prices of all those have gone up too, right? But this is one reason you should be very, very excited. So I just wanted to share that review example for you before we get into our 10th episod. One property to take a look at. This property is in Birmingham. It's a duplex, a renovated duplex. So this is a resale property, renovation property. Almost 2100 square feet for $260,000. That's only $126 per square foot, arguably well, well below the cost of new construction. So if you had to replace that house today, you could never do it for that price. Which is great news for you because you are buying below cost of construction and $2,200 a month projected. Re we've got our very conservative assumptions in here. Always vacancy rate, management fees, maintenance fees, vacancy and conservative appreciation here. You need about $76,000 with closing costs to acquire this asset. And here's how it looks. After all your expenses, your net operating income here is about $1,400 per month. And your projected cash flow is about 309 per month or just over $3,700 per year. And your overall return on investment here is projected at annually. You've got a nice debt coverage ratio here of 1.28. So if you're looking for DSCR loans, debt coverage ratio loans here, you've got good property that should qualify for that. No problem. A cap rate. Even though I don't love cap rate as a metric, I call it the crap rate. But a lot of people still use it. So I'm going to say it. 6.5% and overall return on investment projected at 25% annually. Remember what I always say, if it only goes half as well as projected, that's 12.5% annually. And just a few notes about this property. If you're Looking on video, you see all of these numbers. If you're listening, I've highlighted kind of the main numbers for you. But always reference the performer in the video and understand that of course, this is a projection. Sometimes it works out better, sometimes it's worse. But like I say, even if it's only half as good as expected, you're not going to be too bad. With 12.5% very reliable asset class, the most historically proven asset class in the entire world.

World.

Contact our investment counselors about these properties. They can help you look at this property, analyze this property, and analyze many other properties in many other markets all around the country. That's what we've been doing for many, many years. So this property is in Birmingham, Alabama, recently renovated, located in a good up and coming neighborhood. Strong diversified economy ranks fourth nationally in job growth after Las Vegas, Raleigh and Jacksonville, and tying with, believe it or not, Miami. Wow. You know how much more expensive a property like this would be in Miami? Incredible. And that's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, second lowest unemployment rate. By the way, that's a typo. It says employment rate should be unemployment rate in the U.S. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So reach out to our investment counselors. They can help you with these properties. It's totally free. Have a free consultation. Ask your investment counselor for a portfolio makeover that can help you determine the highest and best use for your assets. And it is a 10th episode show today. So let's go ahead and check out the interview with Roy. Let's talk about free will. Let's talk about willpower and a whole bunch of other topics. This is a fascinating interview. So here we go. It is my pleasure to welcome Roy Baumeister to the show. He's the author of over 40 books, just a huge body of work on free will. His most recent book, the Science of Free Will, Bridging Theory and Positive Psychology, willpower, exploitation, all kinds of really interesting topics. And it's just great to have him coming to us from Harvard University in Boston. Welcome, Roy. How are you?

Oh, I'm pretty good.

Good. It's good to have you on. And if you can, we kind of joked about it before starting. We said, I'd like to give an overview of your entire body of work. And then you said in 20 minutes. Are you kidding? But do give us an overview about you and your studies and your books.

All right. Well, I came into Experimental Psychology from Philosophy and I retained the taste for the big questions. Most scientists are specialists and you pick one or two problems and spend your career on those. But I'm a generalist. I have wanting the big picture. I've been trying to figure out what human life is all about. A joke. I was raised by wolves. I was given a weird background by my parents, and then I rebelled against that. I don't really have any emotional allegiance to any particular view. I said, well, why don't I just try to figure it out? And as a literature reviewer, I go around and read different areas and try to figure out what's going on. And so my goal is to come up with a big picture of understanding the human condition piece by piece, before I drop dead.

That's fantastic. I love it. I love it. So a lot of people have debated the subject of free will and whether or not we really have free will. I'd just like you to kind of touch on that for us, if you would. You know, when you look at our chemistry, you know, the electrical impulses in our brain are up. Upbringing, our environment, our genetics, our epigenetics. Do we really have free will?

Well, yes, it turns out I'm trying to reframe the. The problem in scientific terms. I mean, philosophers have been debating it and theologians in one context. But I talked to a lot of scientists who believe in free will and some who don't, and they're not talking about the same thing. So what I came to realize is everybody seems to agree that the human mind evolved this new way of controlling action that's qualitatively different from anything else in nature. And so, to me, that's the scientific problem. They're mainly arguing about whether that deserves to be called free will. The people who are opposed to it often define free will as being independent of any external cause or anything like that. And why would that even evolve? My sense is the human mind basically was created by evolution for culture, for participating in culture. All species have to solve the problems of survival and reproduction and organizing society with culture is the way our species does that. And it's very successful. But for that, you need advanced mental powers for understanding possibilities and contingencies and accepting moral responsibility, participating in economic marketplaces. All these things, which are largely, if not entirely unknown in the animal world, are almost second nature to us in humans. So that's. That's the interesting challenge is can we understand this new mental capability that evolution blessed us with and arguing about whether it deserves to be called free will? I mean, for me, the free part is pretty solid, especially if you understand that in psychology, everything's on a continuum. So instead of these all or nothing arguments, some actions are freer than others, and that's clear. Everybody can relate to that. I think the will part is a little more of a problem for me. We don't have a psychology of will. I mean, if you buy an Introduction to Psychology textbook, there's no chapter on the will. It's not a thing. So the will part is a metaphor. But the free, I think, is legitimate. And clearly we make choices with much greater awareness of multiple possibilities and contingencies and outcomes and so on than other animals are capable of. And so in that sense, yes, we're definitely freer than the animals from whom we evolved.

It's interesting that you say that, because that's exactly what I was going to ask you next, is to make any comparisons to the animal kingdom. Contrast that with humans. Does my dog have any degree of free will, or is she just entirely acting on survival instincts or play instincts or prey drive? What comparisons can we make there?

All right. Well, evolution works step by step, as you probably know, in terms of your dog. Well, they wouldn't usually say the dog has free will, but it probably is in some sense freer and a more complicated way of choosing action than, say, an even simpler animal. We think of free will as basically flexibility in behavior. That's something scientists can relate to. And flexibility is what biologists would say is adaptive. It helps you adjust to the environment, survive under difficult conditions and so forth. So some flexibility evolved over time. I mean, you can even look at the difference between plants and animals. And in a sense, animals are freer than plants, right, because the animal can leave the situation. A plant cannot plant stuck there. The plants stand still while animals eat them. Animals don't do that. And then learning is a big step in flexibility. Also very early in evolution, that you can adjust your current behavior based on lessons stored from past behavior and outcomes. So those are steps along the continuum. I think the full blown free will is, as far as we can tell, pretty limited to our species. If you look at our closest relatives, which are the chimpanzees, they do a lot of things that we do, but they don't begin to have, again, as I said, things like understanding moral principles and using them to guide behavior or economic marketplaces or even what we do. What we're doing right now is sharing information. A lot of human life is sharing information, passing along information, learn from others, telling people what you discover. It's a book, the Gap by Thomas Sudendorf, looking at the difference between humans and animals. And one of the Big differences, he concluded, is that when we figure something out, we have this urge to tell somebody else.

Right.

Other animals don't. And that's already a big step toward culture, which is building shared information and shared shared structures of knowledge as well as organizing society. So that impulse to tell someone, that's a big evolutionary leap. But we do that all the time. Oh, oh, oh, this is cool. I've got to tell somebody about this and pass it along. And then you tell somebody, and if it's cool, they pass it on to other people. And that way knowledge circulates through the group in a way that it just doesn't in other species. The preliminary forms of culture you see in monkeys and in some other creatures are mostly because people will copy or not people, but animals will copy what others do. But there's nothing that really clearly qualifies as intentional teaching, which again, happens in all human societies. They communicate, but they don't have anything that linguists call a real language, whereas again, all human societies have language. So again, these are important advances. So, you know, for your dog. I have a little dog, too. They're interesting steps, but not free in the human sense.

Yeah. You know what's interesting about that is humans, I think, more than any other animal, of course, have evolved this incredible ability to cooperate with each other. It's interesting when you talk about, when humans discover something, they want to share it with others. Right, Right. You know, this is a cool new thing. I want to tell everybody about it. Right. And you look at social media and how it has just, you know, that's gone through the roof. But what's particularly interesting about that, Roy, is that people will share things, share discoveries, share inventions with others, seemingly to their immediate detriment. Right. Whereas if they discover a new source of food or water, for example, if you look at the primitive days, they might share that with other people, even out of their own family or tribe or offspring, and you would think, well, that's to their short term detriment. But somehow humans seem to have the foresight that that's to their long term advantage. And one example I'll give is on social media, for example, if I'm scrolling around Facebook, I'll see my own competitors, or I'll go to conferences where my competitors will get up in front of an audience and share an idea that will help me. And it's to their disadvantage, like, they'd be better off keeping that secret. Why is it that humans do that? Why wouldn't they want to protect it and keep it secret?

One important point you made is that even if in the short run it's detrimental, in the long term it's beneficial.

Because it makes the pie bigger. Right?

It makes the pie bigger. We're also able to think about the future in ways that other animals can't. Experts suggest most animals live in the immediate present. They can have expectancies that go for a few seconds into the future. The smartest ones occasionally do things that extend maybe 20 minutes in the future. They talk like a chimpanzee picking up a stick to carry it to another place where it'll use it to dig for, for bugs to eat. But projecting to a future when you have a different set of wants and needs from what you have right now, that seems to be beyond them. But we can do that. We can prepare for things in the distant future. Safer buying a house or kids, education or retirement, all sorts of things.

So I mean, people have a five year plan that's like easy for people to visualize five years into the future, maybe 10, 20, 30 years. So it's truly unique. Right? Yeah.

Yes. You mentioned cooperation. I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, but everything starts with evolution. So I learn as much as I can from them in my reading of their literature. The two big human innovations in evolution, communication and cooperation. There's a little bit of that in other animals, but it's so central to everything we do. And you can look at culture as a giant system of based on cooperation and communication. It took me a while to realize it, but even an economic marketplace is an exercise in cooperation based on communication because you negotiate the price and so on. But you know, we think of it as antagonistic. But the buyer wants to buy and the seller wants to sell.

Right.

They can find a price that's satisfactory to both of them. They're both better off. And that's something again, no other species has mastered but all human societies. Matt Ridley Sundays trade is 10 times older than farming. You know, over 100,000 years, humans were engaged in trade. And it's a form of cooperation that enriches both parties. So that kind of thing is crucial. And again, a step toward, toward culture.

Yeah. Truly amazing. It really is. But it sort of leads me to kind of want to talk about another of your works. Your book, the Self explained why and how we become who we are. I don't know if there's many things more important to us than understanding why we are the way we are. Right. Just talk to us a little bit about this because it very much ties in with what we've been discussing about free will and cooperation.

Well, that book was a labor of love. And I worked on it on and off for probably 10 years. In a sense, much of my career was about it. Back when I was working on my PhD, people were studying the self. And it was back in the hippie days and the hippies were taking LSD to explore the inner self or whatever. But researchers were also saying, oh, this is something we should figure out. And so I've worked in many different areas and I've read what a lot of what other people do. And so I thought, finally, I should try to pull it together and figure out what it is and where it comes from and how it works. Again, it's quite unusual in nature. There's limited forms of selfhood that other animals have. I think it's partly the creation of unity. And given our time extension, the time dimension is much more central to the human self than others. So we see ourselves in a sense, as a. As an actor in a story. We understand even the conversation we're having now is linked to things we did in the past and projecting toward other things in the future. And that's a common feature that seems to be largely absent, if not entirely, in most other animals. They're just living in the present. So the basis of my thinking is that the human mind evolved by nature for culture to help us use culture. And so the self is a big, big part of that. Having responsibility over time, again, it makes you behave more morally, which makes the. The culture work better if people are honest with each other, respect each other's property, don't kill each other, and so forth. So the self in a sense, connects. I mean, we're animals. We have an animal body that eats and sleeps and gets sick and all that stuff. The self connects the animal body to the culture. And in. In our society, the self comes into being as the brain figures out how to perform a role in society. So you look around at what society offers and what the opportunities are. I mean, nowadays there are so many different jobs and occupations one can have. In the past, choices were fewer, but still you look for it and you try to make your way in that and operate a role as best as you can. By which that means cooperating with others, sometimes competing with others, certainly communicating with others, establishing we have different views of ourself. You know, when researchers have talked about self esteem and the self concept and self deception, and there's a lot of interesting work on that, and I think we have multiple concepts of ourselves, but the most Important one is the desired reputation. It's how do you want other people to see you? Because that's what's important. I mean, how you think of yourself. Well, that might be nice and feel good or feel bad or whatever, but it doesn't have a lot of practical impact for you. Whereas what other people think of you, that's what determines all your social and professional outcomes. Whether you're somebody's going to sleep with you or marry you or hire you or fire you. All those other things are tremendously important and lead directly into the biological outcomes of surviving and flourishing and reproducing and all that.

It's really interesting that you say that because I'm curious, does that fly in the face of all of the people and psychologists and sort of shamans and gurus that say, oh, you need to be, you know, focus inward, focus on the self, love yourself, have self esteem. I mean, I think the whole self esteem movement has been way overblown and led to a lot of selfishness, I guess. Tell us about that. Like just.

Yes, I did my undergraduate thesis on self esteem, so I was early excited about self esteem and I was liking the movement. And then I started noticing the critics. So I looked around and followed the data. So I was one of the early, we call it apostates who defected and said, the self esteem movement is not the right thing to do and became critical. And the effect it had has made a lot of parents think, oh, I should never criticize my child or hold them up to standards or expect things of them because it might damage their self esteem. No, no, that's.

So that's how we got millennials, right?

It's so counterproductive. So what I've been saying since then is to parents and teachers and coaches and others is forget about self esteem, concentrate on self control, because that, that's the ability to change yourself. And that pays off throughout life, the self esteem. It was an honest mistake because self esteem is correlated with a lot of good things. People who are successful in life have higher self esteem. But, you know, as we know, correlation is not causation. And when they started following people over time, the success came first and the self esteem later. There's much weaker evidence that self esteem actually leads to more success. Sometimes it can lead to more failure. You overestimate yourself and things like that. Whereas self control, abundant evidence that even measured when you're still a kid, it predicts as an adult whether you're going to be thrown in jail, whether you're going to make a Higher salary, whether you're going to have a happy marriage. All sorts of things follow from good self control. So that became the major focus. I downplayed the self self esteem research. It's interesting. I mean, yeah, people who score high and low on self esteem, they act differently in the lab. And so you can do research and make publications there, but it's not really one of the keys to human functioning the way self control is. And I'm not the first person to say that.

Yeah. I mean, we've heard so much from so many that say, stop worrying about what others think of you. What others think of you is none of your business. Just go on and do your thing. Say that type of thing. I mean, I remember listening to Wayne Dyer years ago saying, you have thousands of reputations. Right. You can't control them. Right. Your reputation is not your decision. But what you're saying flies in the face of that idea. That's the most important thing. And I kind of agree with you.

Because people spend a lot of time. Yeah. Managing their reputations and trying to make a good impression and so on. I mean, why are there mirrors all over the place?

Yeah. So you would say that, you know, Narcissus had a point.

Yeah. Well, Narcissus, I think, comes as an excess of the self esteem movement. Narcissism is essentially overvaluing yourself and feeling like you're entitled to preferential special treatment. And that comes from parents not criticizing their kids and telling them they're perfect, even. Even when they're not. So if you want to build healthy self esteem in your children, set the rules. Criticize them when they fall short and reward them when they measure up. That way, if you earn success, then you earn self esteem. And it's much more solidly founded than the narcissistic where you've gotten all this praise, which you don't really let people know that the praise they get is not really valid.

You know, stop giving out the stupid participation trophies.

Yeah, the 12 trophy.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, so, you know, there's so much to talk about in your work, but that was a really interesting few points that you just made. One of your other book titles. That fascinates me. Is there anything good about men? How cultures flourish by exploiting men. Tell us about that. And. And when you say men, do you really mean the male sex or using men in the generic way?

I didn't know what the difference. We're talking about the male sex. Right.

Okay. I just wanted to make sure.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, rather Than saying mankind. That's what I mean.

Oh, I see what you're saying. No, it's the male sex. Yeah, I noticing in, in the news and in research and everything, research about differences between men and women often gets publicity, but if you start to follow them, it's, it's either there's no difference or women are better. Yeah, you never see. I mean, when's the last time you heard a news story saying, oh look, men are much better than women at this?

Oh, I know, it's, it's just ridiculous. Yeah, you know, I, I've had Warren Farrell, Dr. Warren Farrell on the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He really influenced me. I cited him in the book. He's a, he's a great thinker, but it's outrageous. I mean, I see the world in terms of trade offs. The idea that nature would make one gender all around better than the other is preposterous. So if women are going to be better than men at one thing, they're probably worse at something else. Nature will preserve when there's a better way to be. Nature will just make everybody that way. Right. Evolution will gradually shape that. When there's a trade off that's good for different spheres or different kinds of things, then nature will preserve differences. But as I said, then it can't be that women are better at everything. And especially, you know, when you consider that the progress of civilization is almost entirely due to, to men, then the idea that somehow they're systematically inferior becomes preposterous. It is widely believed it's partly because of bias in the media and so on. Even in our own recent data, both men and women think women are more intelligent than men. That is not what the data show.

That's absurd. I mean, the geniuses of the world are mostly male. Okay. That's just a fact. And I think one of the reasons that males are getting a lot of the limelight is that they're propelled by the desire to attract women to achieve things. Right, Right.

That's true. I think the appetite.

Let me just give you a little more to chew on there for a second. Okay? So women come into this world and especially if they're attractive, all they have to do is show up, Right. They don't have to develop themselves, they don't have to do anything. Men have to earn everything. They have to earn the ability to attract women. They have to do things, they have to achieve, to conquer. They have to do all of this stuff. You're probably familiar with the work of Helen smith. She's a PhD who wrote the book Men on Strike and what. What I found really interesting. And she has this appreciation for men, which is so counter to today's culture. And the book is somewhat old. I think it's like 20 years old now. So it's sort of before, you know, a lot of this. This male bashing came up. But what she talks about at the end of the book is she said she was in New York City and she was in a car, I think, describing her journey to the airport or something like that. And she looked around out of the wind, and she realized that everything she was looking at was built by men.

Yeah, good point.

I mean, it's like you look out in any city and pretty much. I mean, yes, there's a little bit of female involvement there. Right. But everything you look at is built by men.

Right.

All the workers on all those construction projects are male. It's just amazing that they get bashed so much. It's really sad.

Yeah. About the geniuses. The evidence is that men go to both extremes more than women. We have actually better data at the mental retardation level, or whatever they call it now that as you go, and autism, moderately severe, you get more and more boys than girls at the extreme low end and the same.

And the boys have more dyslexia. They learn more slowly, you know, they develop more slowly, they mature more slowly. I think we'd all agree with that.

Well, that is. That was part of, you know, that's evolution. Slowed down the maturing process. So I know women like to brag about that, that they grow up faster, but it's really nothing to brag about. Our species slowed down the maturation process compared to all other animals.

Tell us about that. Like, I remember in, you know, grade school, sixth grade, about. Right. All the girls were passing the guys. Right. The boys, it seemed like. At least that's what I heard. And I went to school before a lot of this political correctness movement came, fortunately. But that is true. Do you agree that that's true? And. But it's not a benefit for women.

Yeah. My friend Tuney and some other people suggest that boys should start school six, six months later than the girls. They shouldn't use the same age age. It's. It would work socially because usually boys and girls socialize that the boys are a little older when they date. The boy is older anyway.

That's gonna be a few years older.

But, yeah, we'd give them. Yeah. Well, but at that age, it would be more fitting and expecting the boys to keep up with the girls. So, yeah, the girls go up faster at any given age in childhood. Then I guess the girls are a little smarter. And then the boys catch up in adolescence and forge very slightly ahead in adulthood. That's about the difference. But I think the biological point. Now this is outside my field, but nature seems to experiment more on the male than the female. So we get lots of outliers, extremes. It may be because the Y chromosome doesn't have a backup. So if there is a mutation on the woman, well, the X chromosome has a backup that might take care of it, a normal one. It's not a mutation.

That's just above my pay grade. What does that mean? Explain that to us.

Okay, so you have something weird happens with the genes, make it simple, just one genus, somehow different.

There's a mutation.

A mutation, yeah.

Right.

But with the X chromosome, there's one on each shaft of the X. And so if something weird happens, there's still a normal one as a backup, and that might take over. So it won't really show up. Whereas for the Y chromosome, at least on half of it, there's no backup. Again, I'm speculating, I'm not sure this is true, but this could be the mechanism. It is clear that men differ from each other even on things like height. There is an average difference. Men are taller than women. But the variants, as we say, they're really short men and really tall men, right? Extremely. Than women. And so on a lot of traits. It's like nature uses men to. To gamble on and experiment with. You said men are nature's playthings.

That's interesting. So in males, there tends to be just more variation in all things, the way they think, the way they look, the way they their height, than in women. Women are more in the middle of that kind of bell curve. Right. Whereas men have more outliers.

Absolutely. I first heard this actually from my mother, who was a school teacher. When I was in junior high, as kids do, I would ask my mother who's smarter, boys or girls. And she thought about it, she said, well, the girls tend to cluster in the middle. The boys are really the super smart and the super dumb ones. And you know, bless her heart, half a century later, with tons of data that was right. But it seems to be on other things too. Now, I've talked to biologists about this, whether this is plausible. And they say it is, although it's not a fact. But it makes sense to experiment on the male more than the female.

Because for nature to experiment more on the male.

If evolution is going for nature too, because if it's going to improve the species, what you want, most mutations are bad, and then you don't want them kept, you want them flushed out of the gene pool. But if it's good, you want it to spread. And in terms of how many children one has, for a woman, it's more limited. Most females do reproduce, so if you have a mutation on the female, it's not going to get out of the gene pool. She'll have at least a child or two. And if it's a really good one, though, it's very hard for a woman to have more than, say, a dozen children. Whereas men who've had hundreds of children.

Right. Or Genghis Khan, who's had maybe thousands.

Right, Thousands. Right, yes, yes. So it is, in a sense, more efficient system terms for to run these experiments on male by randomly combining genes. And then the males who don't have good genes will just be rejected and left out.

Because the women won't choose them.

Because the women won't choose them. Yeah.

Right. That's very interesting. I wanted to write a book 20 years ago called Darwin Reversed or Darwin Repealed. Maybe you should just write it. Okay. And it's about how, you know, it's sort of that movie Idiocracy, if you saw it.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

You know, the worst genes seem to be producing the most nowadays.

Yes. That movie was very, very funny. And it is a view that people have and worry about.

Yeah. Reproducing is like they used to. I mean, in theory, that used to be. That was natural selection. The bad stuff was getting weeded out, the good stuff. And that speaks to your argument as to why nature experiments more on males than females. And there's more variation in males. That's. Yeah.

There's a chapter in that book on the self they had just come out with. If you take all the people in the world today, what percent of our ancestors were women? And it's about 67%. The DNA researchers did this because people think it's 50, 50 because boys and girls were born. But to be an ancestor, you had to do more than be born. You had to reproduce in a line that leads down to the present. And so a few guys, like Genghis Khan, as you mentioned, who had lots of children, compensated for by lots of other men who had none, whereas for women, a lot fewer of them have none. So polygamy.

So in other words, the point is 2/3 of our ancestors are female.

Right.

I have to think about That a little bit. I'd like to see a chart on that or a diagram or something.

Okay. I cited in the book, the evidence is there. When I talk to biologists, they're sometimes surprised that it's that low. They think because in many species it would be 90% female of the animals. I mean, think of a group of wild horses. The alpha male. That summer, he has sex with all the females, and so all the babies are his. And of course, there are other males in the. In the herd, but too bad for them. And they don't. They don't reproduce. Whereas all the females have a baby every summer, just whoever the top male is. So, as I said, in many species, it would be 90% of the ancestors would be females.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, I see what you mean. I was trying to kind of work the math out of that in my mind, because like you said, most people think it's 50. 50, but it's not. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. All right, Good, good. What else do you want to tell us? Something I haven't asked you. Just something you want to share with the audience? I mean, your body of work is so large. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff we should know.

My most papers that have gotten the most impact scientifically. One is the drive to belong and connect with others. We called it the need to belong. That. That's really an important foundation. We have this drive to form and maintain relationships. And a lot of thinkers said, well, maybe that's two people like to be with other people. It was never a big thing. You know, Freud emphasized the sex drive and the aggressive drive, but. But this is probably more powerful than those, and it's tied into everything. So that's a big one.

Another important that actually speaks, speaks to what you talked about earlier, really, which is we are or maybe should be more focused on what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves. Right. That speaks to that external drive that you mentioned earlier. Right.

You can't really turn your back on the world. You can be content with a few close friends, but. But nobody who's alone in the world seems to be really happy. It's not a successful route. I knew a guy who said he'd been studying loneliness for 20 years, and he'd met a lot of people who said they had no friends, but he never met anybody who said they didn't want to have any friends. Everybody needs somebody, and that's. That's what we evolved to do. The hermits that we talk about, the religious Ones they usually had somebody who came and talked to them once a week. Even Thoreau had his wife and sister and his mother forget would come and visit him once a week.

And he wasn't just with the animals on Walden.

Right? Yes. And other things show the same thing. We really do need to connect with others. It's one of the biggest predictors of happiness, people who are alone in the world.

And sadly, we have a loneliness epidemic now, don't we?

Yes, yes. I think it is spreading in a variety of ways. Just ironic because we have more ways to connect than ever before to meet people and so on. But it's also more viable to live alone than it was. And. And sort of being in a bad marriage is worse than being alone. There is that really?

Wow. Now, is that true for both sexes?

Yeah. I haven't looked at the latest data or anything, but in general, a real bad one. It. It seems to hit women somewhat harder than men, but yes.

Being alone or being in a bad marriage.

Being in a bad marriage is worse.

For women than it is for men.

Yeah. Although it's bad for both.

Yeah. Okay.

A lot of men are sort of content. They seem to have less expectations about the marriage and so on. And so the fact of being. And there's some data that fit that and others that show, you know, if you're in a bad relationship, it's. It's really stressful and hard. And I've been through that and maybe you have too. I'm sure lots of people can relate to that. So a good relationship is really worth pursuing. And it's nice to get out of a bad one. And so people live alone for interim periods of time. But anyway, we are designed biologically to connect with others and have contacts and relationships. What I'm more interested in lately is this substitution of online interaction from interacting in person. And what are the effects?

I was going to ask you about that. Does that solve the loneliness problem? I think not. But what does your research say?

I think not. I'm just compiling all the research studies now to put that together. So ask me again in a couple of months. I'll have a clear answer for you. I like to read everything first and see what it is.

But what does your intuition say about that? You know?

Yeah, I rely on intuition. But the preliminary findings are.

You're a scientist, okay.

You don't respond as well. Your whole self doesn't seem to turn on as much with these. And so, like, what we're doing now is video conferencing. That's probably the closest. Whereas email, I mean, I spent an hour or two every day doing email. I'm sitting by myself, I'm interacting with other people, but it doesn't seem to produce the same range of feelings and so on. Joke. I use people text lol that says they laugh out loud. And I started asking people, well, did you really laugh out loud when you texted that?

Nobody did.

Yeah. And so. And so you're missing something. Right. Laughing out loud is probably good for body and soul. And that's just one thing you're missing. There's more arousal when you're in person. More. You know, these other things are good too, especially when you add them them, you know, to stay in touch when you know, you're away from home or whatever. You can stay in touch with your family, all those things. Long distance relationships are so much easier to carry on now than they used to be. I remember writing letters to my girlfriend in Germany when I was in college and you know, it took two weeks even if she answered on the same day she got the letter.

Sure.

But as a substitute, it's more something to worry about.

Yeah. So it should be additive, not substitution, right? Yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. Well, Roy, your work is fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing some of this with us today. Where can people find you? What website do you want to give out? The books are available with fantastic ratings, by the way, in all the usual places. But give out your website or whatever you want.

Thank you. I think the website roybaumeister.com that I don't maintain it, but some nice people do and they take care of it and they keep it pretty well updated with the latest things and so yeah, I'm easy to find.

One last thing I'd like you to just comment on really quickly because I know you've got to run. But willpower, is that something people can develop? Is it just inborn? What should we do or know about willpower?

Just quickly it really can be increased and improved even as adulthood. It's like a muscle that you can exercise. The book Willpower, we have a chapter talking about building that. To me that's part of the excitement of it. Psychology has really found only two traits. Traits that predict life is better in just about every sphere that they've looked. One is intelligence and one is self control and improving intelligence. We've been trying interventions for a long time without a lot of success. But self control we really can improve even in adulthood. Disciplining yourself, a lot of people I've been talking to Rob Henderson who had that book troubled. I had a very difficult childhood. And then he got into the military and that taught himself discipline. And you went on to become a successful Yale student and Rhodes scholar and all that. So you can get discipline to manage yourself effectively. And self control leads to so many benefits in life that's worth cultivating. So to me, that's one of the ways psychology can really improve life for a lot of people. Even if we can't make them smarter, we can make them make better decisions and have better self control.

Yeah, we certainly can. And that's great insight, Roy. Thank you so much for joining us.

Okay, thanks so much for having me on.

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