How Men Compete For Status - Rob Henderson

There was one study. They showed a series of women videos of men, and then at the end, they asked these women, how sexually attractive is this man? Then they showed a group of men the same videos of these same guys and asked them, how likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man? Then the researchers tracked those men in those videos and had them return 18 months later and ask them a bunch of questions, including, how many sexual partners have you had over the last 18 months? The correlation between how sexually attractive the women found these men and how many partners they had was zero. But there was a strong and significant correlation between how intimidating or formidable men rated them and how many sexual partners they recounted over the last 18 months. And so essentially, how tough a guy looks to men is a stronger predictor of his sexual success than how attractive he looks to women.

You just defended your PhD thesis. What's that mean?

That's right. So, PhD thesis, it's called a dissertation in the U.S. they call it a thesis here in the UK. It's a culmination of the work you do throughout your years of study in a doctoral program. So at least within the field of psychology, typically you write a handful of papers, maybe three or four papers, and it's all supposed to build toward some overarching hypothesis, some kind of framework, and you run a series of empirical studies, and hopefully you get the results you're looking for. And then that sort of, you know, it sort of builds towards, you know, here's. Here's what all of this means. Here's how it contributes to the research, to the literature more broadly. And it's supposed to be this sort of original piece of scholarship. It doesn't necessarily have to be empirical either. Sometimes it can be theoretical. And I'm sure there's like a whole other set of criteria for the humanities. But, yeah, it's a huge relief. I mean, people say, oh, when you finish your PhD, you're going to be so happy. You're going to be so thrilled. And I was just, like, relieved, you know, afterwards. I was just like, oh, thank God it's over. Like, it's done. And it's, you know, even though it went well, you know, I got the outcome I wanted. It was still just, you know, it was still more just like this burden is lifted, rather than just feeling elated or something, you know, what's the thesis? So the title of my PhD thesis is Physical and Social Threats Fortify Moral Judgments. And I got really interested in this when I was in undergrad, so I was Taking classes by this experimental philosopher, Josh Knobe, who. That's where basically I learned that you can use the tools of empirical psychology and social science to test people's moral intuitions. And morality generally has been kind of the wheelhouse of philosophy. You know, armchair philosophers pondering, what is morality? What does it mean to be a moral person? What is moral character? And with some of the instruments in psychology, you can come along and say, well, what do people actually think about morality? What does the average person think about it? And maybe some of your listeners will know about administering the trolley problem to people. Would people flip the switch? Would they not that kind of thing. And I was taking classes with Paul Bloom, too, when I was in undergrad and learned about the sort of developmental origins of morality. And while I was there, I learned about this interesting link between disgust and morality. And many people think of disgust as this emotion that people experience in response to, you know, contamination, illness, infection. But there's a lot of interesting work indicating that it overlaps with our moral judgments as well, that people who are very sensitive to disgust also tend to condemn wrongdoers more harshly. If you induce disgust in people, show them some disgusting images or get them to smell some repulsive odors, subsequently their moral judgments become intensified. And so I was. I thought to myself, you know, when I was reading all of this and when I came to Cambridge, I was wondering, is there. Are there other forms of threat beyond contamination? Contamination is a threat to your survival. It's an evolutionary threat. Are there other kinds of evolutionary threats, challenges to your survival and potentially your reproduction that could also intensify your moral judgment? So I did some stuff on. People who were worried about COVID in 2020 were also stricter in their moral judgments for a variety of different kinds of moral violations, not just things like, you know, some of the items I used were, you know, using a stranger's toothbrush. How wrong do you think that is? And of course, like. Of course people who are worried about COVID will also say, like using a toothbrush that doesn't belong to you is, you know, that's. That's horrible. But it was also things like, you know, betraying a family member or stealing from a store, you know, kind of deception, betrayal, subversion, things that are unrelated to contamination. People who were worried about COVID were stricter with those kinds of violations. Similar to social threat as well, similar to age. The age one was the most interesting to me. I'm working on this paper, trying to get it published. I think you and I might have talked about this offline before too, that essentially there's a direct association between, as people grow older, their moral judgments become stricter. And this is controlling for political orientation, it's controlling for income, for education. So these kind of demographic variables that you would assume, oh, when older people, as they age, they become more politically conservative, and that's why they adopt these sort of moralistic attitudes. But even when you control for that, there's something going on here about the aging process. And I suggest it has something to do with vulnerability, risk perception. As you grow older, the threats around you appear to be especially formidable. And I suggest this is also potentially why there are these interesting moral judgment differences between men and women, such that women are more strict in their moral judgments relative to men. And some of that can be explained with just the reproductive differences between men and women. Women have historically been more at risk, more at risk for when they're pregnant, when they're carrying young children, they should just be extra alert to potential dangers. But I also suggest that if you control for certain things like muscularity, height, bmi, all of these other kinds of things, I would bet that the moral judgment differences in disgust sensitivity would actually shrink. I just think that if you're sort of a strong, young, robust and healthy person, the world just looks less dangerous to you. And this includes moral wrongdoers. You think, like, ah, that guy's doing something bad, but I can take him. This is sort of the punchline of what my thesis is about.

Very interesting. So I think we spoke about this last week, that a lot of evolutionary researchers think that morality is basically just adaptive rules for human survival given more fluffy and philosophical language.

Oh, interesting. I mean, I wouldn't call them even rules, really. I mean, these are at least the best versions of. I think evolutionary psychology and social science are supposed to be descriptive, right? It's sort of here's how things are, evolutionary psychology. It's about here's how things were in the ancestral environment. A lot of people get those confused, right, where they think, oh, we evolved to do X because that's evolutionarily advantageous, but it's actually evolutionary advantageous in the ancestral environment, right? We are, what is it? We're Stone Age beings in the sort of space age or something along. We're in the modern environment. We didn't evolve to live in a world with limitless calories, endless entertainment, drugs that can stimulate the dopaminergic system in your brain, like all of this stuff, right? But 100,000 years ago, there are certain mental adaptations that helped Us survive in that kind of environment. And so they're not really rules necessarily. And in fact, a lot of the psychological mechanisms that we have, they actually sort of evolved to counteract other people's psychological mechanisms as well. There's debate right now, I think about, you know, age differences in relationships, for example, where women might shame men for being interested in younger women. And some men will, you know, they'll say something like, well, we evolved to be attracted to young women. And that's true. Men did evolve to be attracted to younger women because, you know, in the evolutionary environment, younger women were more fertile and so on. However, women evolved to use, well, people in general. But in this context, women evolved to use moral norms to shame men so that they in turn can be exploit an advantage there as well. Right. Such that they can sort of shame high status men into not dating younger women and date them instead. And that in itself is an evolutionary mechanism. So you have all of these sort of competing modules and mechanisms and processes and each person is trying to obtain an advantage sort of at the level of the genes. Right. And so, you know, we can, we can lob evolutionary mechanisms at each other. Well, I evolved to do this and you evolved to do that, and you know what I mean? So I think that's also important to keep in mind. When people sort of use evolutionary explanations as an excuse for this or that behavior, people are going to use their own sort of evolutionary prerogative to undercut that as well. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, intrasexual competition has been one of the most fascinating things that I've learned about this year. I had Christina Durante on talking about it, and then I've got Joyce Benenson toward the end of this year.

Oh, she's great.

Yeah. Who's just going to be such money. She's one, I think maybe the last episode of this year and I can't wait to have her on. But you, you sent me an article that you've got that's just come out called the Male Warrior Hypothesis. What's that?

Yeah, yeah, the Male warrior hypothesis. It's funny. So Joyce Benenson has written about this, as have others, and it's a hypothesis within the evolutionary psychology research, basically suggesting that men and women evolved different psychological mechanisms to deal with within group and between group conflict. And so based on a series of different studies, as well as sort of combing through the anthropological and archaeological record, researchers have suggested that essentially men are more hostile within their groups to one another, especially overt hostility. So there's research indicating early on, it was considered basically undisputable that men were more aggressive to one another. But then when researchers sort of expanded this definition of aggression, they actually found no differences, no significant differences. Once they accounted for indirect aggression, things like rumor spreading, ostracism, either ending a friendship or threatening to end it, those are sort of these indirect aggressive acts. And so in those cases, there's no difference. But the overt hostility that men show one another is definitely more pronounced relative to women. However, researchers have also found that men are more likely to suppress their hostility toward one another when they encounter another group of men, say, a group of outsiders. And they hypothesized that this is because in the evolutionary environment, when men are especially young men, most of this is going to be in the context of young men. When they're within a group, say, an evolutionary band 50 or 100,000 years ago, it's in their interest to sort of one up one another, mock one another, tease one another, and look good in that community, especially because they're trying to impress young women. But men also evolved to band together and to either defend their community from hostile outsiders and invaders, and they evolve to be those hostile invaders and go capture resources and women and territory from other groups as well. And so, essentially, men are simultaneously more hostile and more cooperative, Whereas women, their aggression is expressed indirectly and verbally and sort of in this roundabout way. And yet, when they compete with other women, it appears that they're less likely to suppress that hostility that they show one another. And there was a study that came out this year. Joyce Benenson was an author of this paper, and they were looking at high school and college athletes, and they basically found that they asked these athletes questions about how they interacted with one another when they're on the team and how they interacted when they were competing against other teams. And they found that, generally speaking, especially for acts of overt aggression, male athletes reported more from their own teammates. You know, name calling, fist fights, shoving each other. Like, I think one of them was, like, spitting on me, you know, getting shoved in a locker, like all of the kinds of stuff that happens in male sports teams, right? And, you know, men reported more of that happening between one another. But then when they asked the male athletes about how they competed with one another against another sports team and how much hostility they showed their own teammates, it was very low. And essentially, it seemed like the hostility they typically directed toward one another suddenly became hyper focused on defeating the other team. Whereas for the female athletes, they reported a Relatively high amount of indirect aggression, rumors, ostracism. One of the items was, have you ever been left out when the other teammates went to dinner without you? Things like that, going out to you without you. And there were relatively high levels of that. And then they asked these female athletes about their experiences playing with their teammates against another team. And again, the rates of intra group, so within group hostility were actually still relatively high. Women, relative to men, were less likely to pass the ball to one another or shun one another or maybe whisper something to another girl, things like that. And so, so the overall idea of this male warrior hypothesis is that, yeah, guys are sort of extra hostile in basically every single context, but in a sense, they're actually more cooperative as well in that, you know, when they're up against another group, another team, perhaps another army or an invading force, they can sort of let those tensions go and, you know, come together with one another. And I think this distinction between indirect versus direct aggression is important. And it's interesting because in that piece that I sent you about the male warrior hypothesis, I discussed this excerpt from this book called Yanoama. And it was recommended on Twitter by the great David Buss, who I know you've had on this show. And this is an amazing book. So it's the Spanish girl, this European girl in the 1930s gets kidnapped by these Amazonian in the book. The book came out in the 1960s, so they refer to them as Amazonian Indians. And she's kidnapped as a young girl. And one of the stories she tells in her recounting of what happened to her throughout this experience, and she lived with them for decades with various bands of Yanuama tribes. Yanuama is the sort of overarching name for a whole series of foraging communities in South America. And they're constantly at war with one another in conflict. I mean, they're sort of like modern day hunter gatherers, essentially. And so Helen Valero says that when she arrived in this new tribe, there was a girl there who didn't like her. You know, a girl who was roughly the same age as her and gave her this packet of folded leaves and said, like, here, here's a snack for you. You must be hungry. And Helen takes this snack and she smells it and she's repulsed by the odor. And so she sets it down somewhere. And then a few hours later, a little boy in the tribe falls deathly ill. And he says he got this little leaf packet from Helen. Valerie, you say, she gave it to me. And the whole entire tribe turns on Her. And they're like, why did you try to poison this boy? Who is this outsider girl who's trying to poison us? Why are you doing this to the children? They ostracize her and banish her. And she literally is running through the forest while several of the men are shooting arrows at her, trying to kill her. And yeah, so this was an interesting example of kind of this indirect aggression, right? I mean, it's not like this girl went up to her and bashed her head with a rock or something. She gave her a snack knowing that two things could happen, right? Because, by the way, when she gave her the snack, she said, if you don't like it, because she saw Helen smell it and say, I don't like this. And she said, well, if you don't like it, you can give it to someone else. Because you do, two things could happen. Either Helen eats this and dies, or she gives it to someone and is responsible for the death of someone else and gets ostracized. So that's a win win situation. And this is an act of indirect aggression. But if Helen were to die in this situation, this girl, Helen Bolero, the girl who gave her the snack, would not be counted as her murderer, right? Like the sort of steps between the snack and the death of Helen Valero, there are steps involved such that the girl would not be blamed for this. And I think this is a sort of an extra interesting example of indirect aggression that is often more perpetrated by women relative to men. And I write it there that if this had been a situation among men where this new outsider male comes in and the other guys don't like him. They're not like, how can I kill this guy directly? It would be basically stepping up on him and be like, show me what you're made of and just shove him. Or they'd organize a way to kill him in his sleep. It would be a very sort of direct and forceful attempt to put this newcomer in their place. And so this, to me, sort of gets at this difference between this sort of overt male aggression versus covert female aggression.

Why do you think it is that women don't seem to band together against an out group foe in the same way that men do?

It's an interesting question. One possibility, and perhaps the more sort.

Of.

Convincing possibility to me is sort of riffing on this quote from the evolutionary psychologist John Toobey. He was a sort of a pioneer of the field, and he had this line. It was something like cultural vary. I'll believe that cultural variation is responsible for human nature. If you show me an example of a tribe in which women band together to capture men as husbands, and there's literally no example in the human record of women ever doing that. And there's another story from the, the anthropologist Napoleon. I don't know if I'm getting his name, his last name, it's like Chagnon, C H A G, N O N. And he talks about how. So he would spend time, he actually spent time with the Yanuama in South America. And his belief, as was the belief of many other anthropologists at the time, is that the reason why men in these small scale tribal societies go to war is over resources and especially over meat, capturing territory, finding good grounds for hunting and those kinds of things. And he floated this idea to these Yanauama tribes and they laughed at him. And they're like, that's not where we go to war, man. We go to war over women. That's the reason we like meat, but we like women a lot more. Was actually a direct line that he put in his book. And so that is probably the reason. Right. I mean, throughout this book that David Buss recommended on the auto, there are just countless cases of men getting into conflict both within the groups to say who's going to marry this young woman or who's going to come together to take out the other tribes around them. And there's just constant male on male violence and conflict. And it's almost inevitably surrounds this idea of, you know, who is going to marry who or who's going to have children with who or who's going to have more, you know, more sexual partners. And men have a stronger sex drive, they have more interest in variety, they have a sort of a reputational concern to demonstrate how tough they are. Whereas women don't necessarily have those same set of concerns. And also because women are the more valuable sex biologically, so they don't want to get involved in physical conflict.

Right, okay. Yeah. It is interesting to me that the tribalism that we see amongst everybody smeared across society seems to fall apart at least a little bit when men aren't in the picture. And it's like you're talking about basically women banding together against an out group less than men would on average. Right?

Yeah. Especially the sort of overt hostility. Right. So a lot of the research supporting the male warrior hypothesis, it indicates that men show higher levels of preference for the in group, more like xenophobia and more sort of denigration of generally the out group. Whereas for women it's Less overtly expressed. Right. It's more sort of fear and avoidance, you know, like if there's this sort of strange force, just avoid it, stay away from it and don't cause any trouble. Yeah, so that is, you know, there's a sex difference there.

The interesting thing I suppose is that it suggests that human cooperation is a consequence of human competition. Like one of the main reasons that cooperation exists is simply because human competition was so high.

Yeah, yeah. There's some interesting research on the, you know, they've done some sort of mathematical modeling where they pit these sort of computerized simulations of well, what if one group cooperates all the time versus some of the time and what if one group always competes and so on. But basically they find that these two things tend to arise simultaneously. That you can't really get the kinds of high levels of cooperation that you see with humans without high levels of competition as well. I mean humans are by far the most cooperative species on the planet. I mean we literally can coordinate millions or even billions of people across the globe. Globe. Whereas we're also the most sort of deadly species as well. Where we'll get into sort of mass scale killings and conflict and genocide and all those things. But in order to pull off a genocide you actually have to be an extremely cooperative species is the kind of irony of that. Right. Richard Wrangham has written about this and others is like, you know, that sort of, there's that double sided aspect of our nature is that cooperation can lead to sort of incredible levels of mass conflict and competition.

Yeah. Because the cooperation enables you to be able to deploy that competition at scale and leverage it in increasingly vicious ways. Didn't I seem to remember you wrote about people presume that humans have got more aggression than other animals and that we're totally undomesticated and that the wild is perfect without us. But chimps show a 100 to 150 times the amount of aggression than humans do. And the peace loving bonobos show less aggression than the chimps, but still way more than any human society ever recorded.

Yeah, yeah, I wrote about that when I was discussing Richard Wrangham's book. He's the Harvard evolutionary biologist. He wrote a great book called the Goodness Paradox. And yeah, some of the findings that he unearths and discusses in that book, one of them was this. There's this general belief like if someone is behaving especially violently like a serial killer or something, we're like, oh, he's inhuman, there's something wrong with him. Where's his humanity? And yet Richard Wrangham points out that actually the ability to kill at scale large numbers of people, that is uniquely a human ability. Right. Like there's no chimpanzee who's committed mass scale genocide against their own species the way that humans have. And yeah, the figures were stunning. So it was 150 to 500 times. So chimpanzees specifically within their own groups. Right. He's not even talking about intergroup conflict among chimpanzees, just among their fellow group members, their peers. They're 150 to 500 times more violent than human hunter gatherer coalitions. And bonobos are roughly half that violent. So what is that? Something like 250 times more violent than human beings. So yes, they're half as violent as chimps, but still far, far more violent than human beings are. And so yeah, the whole self domestication idea was fascinating to me. This idea that. And you actually see a small scale version of this among chimps, but human beings even more so where part of the reason why humans are relatively docile and cooperative and can follow norms and all of these kinds of things and build societies is because we care deeply about what other people think about us. We sort of have this built in social anxiety. You know, some researchers have called it the sociometer, where we sort of monitor how we appear in the eyes of others. And the reason why we have all this is because in the ancestral environment, this is actually before the ancestral environment. So Richard Wrangham suggests this was maybe five or six hundred thousand years ago. This started occurring what he calls the execution hypothesis, which is that whenever an especially aggressive or hostile male appeared within a community and started monopolizing resources or taking the other men's wives and so on, it was around this time that humans started to form the ability to speak. So language evolved, the ability to use tools and weapons had evolved, and the sort of weaker and less formidable men were able to form the sort of whispering consensus of like, hey, this guy's a problem. Like he took my wife. He took your wife. So how do we get rid of this guy? And so they'd wait for him to fall asleep or they'd. There's one example that he points out in the book of this hunter gatherer group. There was this sort of bullying male that the others didn't like. And so I think they dared him to climb up this tree to get some particularly appealing fruit. And, and so the guy sets his weapons down, he's like, I'll show you guys, let me get this piece of fruit up at this tree and he climbs up the tree and when he comes down, the guys just, they take his weapons that he had left and just start stabbing him and problem solved. And so the guys who cared, who had no, or little to no sort of concern about their reputation or how they appeared of like, I'm just going to do what I want and just be this sort of bad boy alpha male. If they weren't able to cultivate allies and to sort of develop a reputation as a useful person in that group, then the others would just kill them. Right. And so we are the descendants of the humans who didn't die and who did sort of develop over time this concern about like, you know, any kind of ridicule, criticism, any sort of stinging comment that, that lingers with us because you know, in the ancestral environment, you know, every single negative comment could have potentially life threatening consequences.

Life is too difficult ancestrally for people to get through on their own. Which means that inevitably you need cooperation. That means that you need to temper down the aggression, the dark trihad traits that you've got, all of that stuff, you need to bring that down to a level which is perhaps sufficiently high that it means you are more effective than your competitors, but not so high that it crosses the threshold where you get your weapons taken away from you while you're up a tree and get stabbed on the way down. That's the balance.

Yeah, that's, that's. People are trying kind of. Yeah, that's, that's like, it's a sort of a, it's a neat way to tie that in what you're saying with you, with the male warrior hypothesis where you need a little bit of that sort of aggression and that callousness. Because you know, if you had none of that, then you would just be overrun by a more aggressive community. But if you had too much of it, then the whole community would start to fall apart and people would be hostile and suspicious to one another.

Yes. Also I suppose the males ancestrally that would have been a little bit more aggressive would have been seen as more useful. You know, they would have been formidable foes and useful allies for people to have. And again, it's pushing that too far. It's, it's. I've really, really enjoyed some of the conversations I've had about psychopaths recently. And Kevin Dutton, he's the head of the Communication of Science for Auckland University in Australia or Adelaide maybe, and he was talking about this saying it's adaptive to have a couple of psychopaths in your group because it means that if you've got to go and do some really messed up stuff, you can just send them in there. They're the special forces, they're the Berserkers, they're the Vikings going to raid Lindisfarne or whatever. And it's useful to have them, but as soon as you start to get too many, it makes for a very unstable society, so you can't hold on to that. Speaking about some of the secondary sex characteristics and the male competition stuff, I had this idea about dad bods after I saw a competition online. So there's a video. I saw a video go up about dad bods and I noticed in the comments a lot of male accounts really, really upset. They seem to be very triggered, very discounting. It was a woman that was talking about why she likes dad bods and why dad bods are superior to guys that think that they're in shape. And a lot of guys in the comments telling this woman that she doesn't know what she's talking about, which, you know, it's just. Is the Internet for you? And you don't know. I don't know how much this woman was posturing, how much she was doing it as a massive troll, whatever. And it got me thinking about why it is that guys seem to have such an aversion to women, specifically praising and the press and the media sort of upholding dad bods as some sort of pedestal that men should try and attain. And I think that there's a lot of things going on here. The first, most obvious one is that guys that train don't want their efforts that they've put into their own physique to be in vain. Right. That makes. That makes a lot of sense. They have decided that this is something which is worthy of getting they. There is almost no guy on the planet who would be able to say with a straight face that they're going to the gym and training hard without it, including in that I'm doing this to make myself more attractive to women or whoever it is that they're trying to be attractive to. So that's. That's the first one. But I don't think that that really accounts for anywhere near the kind of effect that we're seeing here. I think another element is that most men, even if they're not the sort of ones who go to the gym and train, would look at the body of a man that does go to the gym and train and respect it. And I think that one of the concerns that they see there is that they value something which is now being undermined by someone that they presume their model of the world is supposed to be able to understand. Hang on a second. I thought I understood what it was that women wanted. I kind of want this thing. I don't want it sexually, but I want it in a way of. I think it's something that's admirable. And you know, the secondary sex characteristics that suggest that men actually get bigger and go to the gym more for forgetability than for attraction, that, that plays into this pretty perfectly. Another element I think is if you roll the clock forward one more step from there, it might be a little bit of internalized homophobia from men that they look at another guy who is in good condition and they say, I bet that guy slays puss. I bet that all of the women want him. I value his body. I like that body in a way that makes me, why am I looking at this guy's body so well? It's because I want to model it for myself. And you know, it's a, it's me doing it for women. But then to be told, hang on a second, all of this that you're doing from a woman doesn't make any sense at all. We're not, I'm not concerned about that might make you think, oh holy shit, this might mean I'm gay. And then there's a let off valve. Do you understand what I mean?

I did that one seems the other ones I can, I don't think says, this one's a little too.

I'm rolling the dice, I'm rolling the dice here.

Okay, but what, I like it, I think it's, it's, I like that this sort of the creativity of it, it's, there's like a Freudian element to it. I think it's, you know, it's interesting.

Maybe, I don't know. But here's the final thing. So I heard this story, I told my friend about this idea yesterday and he told me a story about one of his ex girlfriends that mentioned she was happier with him the fatter that he got and she was more unhappy with him as he got leaner. And I think that a big part of this is the level of comfort that is associated with having a partner that you know is not going to go anywhere else. I learned this from Sarah Hill. She taught me that men who have gut fat are perceived to be better fathers. And the reason that men who have gut fat, this is compared with a guy that's in good shape. And you think, hang on a second. How is the guy that isn't able to protect his family because he's less physically formidable going to be perceived as a better father? And the reason is that the guy who has more gut fat is seen to be less potentially attractive to other mates, which means that if he is given one calorie, there is less likelihood of him spending that calorie on trying to acquire a new mate because more doors have been closed to him than the guy that is in good sh. Men who have gut fat are perceived to be better fathers. And the reason that men who have gut fat this is compared with the guy that's in good shape and you think, hang on a second. How is the guy that isn't able to protect his family because he's less physically formidable going to be perceived as a better father? And the reason is that the guy who has more gut fat is seen to be less potentially attractive to other mates, which means that if he is given one calorie, there is less likelihood of him spending that calorie on trying to acquire a new mate because more doors have been closed to him than the guy that is in good shape and may potentially have more doors open to him. Basically, this guy's physique has shut off a number of different avenues down which he could invest his resources. Therefore, the guy that doesn't have as many avenues open must be the better father. So basically there is like a. When it comes back to the woman that was in a relationship who was happier when her partner got fatter, I think that being less uncertain about your partner straying contributes massively to a woman who might have anxious attachment, or maybe there's a disparity in mate value there, that she is going to feel a lot more comfortable with that. But the wild thing when you think about this is that comfort contributes quite a lot to woman's arousal, right? A woman's arousal is predicated at least in part on feeling comfortable. Now, yeah, there's like ways that you can game this in the bedroom, but for the most part, it appears that women have a high degree of comfort that they need to reach than men do. So there has to be on a spectrum from this guy is peeled out of his mind with the best physique on the planet and looks like a superhero and every woman wants to have sex with him. To this guy is super, super fat and completely disgusting. There is a spectrum between that upon which different women with their different levels of comfort, both for a relationship and for attraction are going to feel more or less comfortable. And there is a situation in which someone who was less in good shape would be more arousing and more attractive to a woman because her degree of comfort would be increased. So that's my thesis around dad bods, homophobia, and comfort in relationships for you.

Good. No, no, no. That was. No, I think. Well, okay. So. Well, the first thing you said about, you know, how men and women react differently to the whole dad bod phenomenon and men sort of get angry about it. It reminds me, you've probably seen this meme, right, of like, you know, the guys sort of thinking, like, how I think it'll be when I get in really good shape. And it's like, you know, a bunch of girls in bikinis and how it actually is. And it's like all these boys say, yeah, bad. You look, Jack, this is awesome. And, you know, I think, like, there is. I think there is something. There's some. Some truth to that, right? I mean, that's like, you know, even if you get really muscular, I mean, unless you're a celebrity or something like that, the dream is not necessarily the reality there. I think that, like, the whole. The whole phenomenon around dad bods is maybe a little bit overblown. Like, I know it's sort of, you know, it's this trend online, and people pay attention to it and talk about it, and probably in part because it's, like, kind of controversial, it gets people talking. But if you actually look at the research on, well, what do women actually find attractive? And you show them a series of bodies and the fatherhood one notwithstanding, that makes sense to me. But in terms of just which one of these guys do you find the most attractive? Just up front, how sexually attractive do you find this kind of man? And generally speaking, it's guys who are in pretty good shape, very unfit guys, really skinny and really fat guys are always at the bottom of the list in terms of who women find sexually attractive. But there are some interesting things, I think, going on with mate retention versus sort of obtaining a mate versus retaining a mate. And for women, that makes sense. That especially for older women or women who are looking to settle down, they don't want a guy who's sort of teed up and full of testosterone and energy and looks really good, because in all likelihood, he probably has other interests besides just the one woman. And so they know that if a man is spending maybe more time at home or spending more time on other things besides his physical appearance, he has different priorities. But I wonder if There was any way to control for that if they would still, they could just, I don't know, take a really good looking guy, he's not allowed to leave your house, right? Like, he's not allowed to go anywhere. He's not allowed to post thirst traps on Instagram. He's yours. He's gonna raise your kids. Now do you like him? And I think a lot of women would be like, okay, in that case, I'll take him over the dad bod guy. I don't know. I still think there's something innately attractive just on a sort of a visceral level, a guy who's in really good shape. But of course, in the real world, in reality, women's priorities change. They also change based on short term versus long term mating, which I know you're familiar with too. You know, for a one night stand, a really good looking guy is, you know, those are the kinds of guys that women find appealing versus someone for a more long term relationship. You know, women do place some importance on how a guy looks, but they start to place more importance on other things like kindness and personality and sense of humor and income and all these other sort of extraneous things too. So yeah, like the, I mean the research on the body attractiveness thing is like, you know, muscularity is like by far the strongest predictor of like how sexually successful a man is. And you know, there's an interesting disparity here based on sort of like what, what actually leads to sexual success among men? Is it actually how sexy women find you? Or is it sort of how much sort of admiration and prestige and esteem you obtain from men? And I think this may also be what's going on with the whole dad bod phenomenon too is like men, even if you can't verbalize it, right? Even if you don't explicitly know. I mean, this is one of the sort of, the key tenets of evolutionary psychology is like you don't have to know the reasons behind your behavior in order for them to be effective or even to know that that's what they're doing, right? There's this great example that Dan Dennett gives the philosopher in one of his books where a single celled organism swims towards nutrients without having any understanding of what it's doing or why. And yet it still does the thing that it needs to do to sur and to replicate. So humans are the same, right? We do things, we don't know why, we have these feelings, we have these desires and emotions. And I think guys may know At a sort of implicit, intuitive level that, yes, it's important what women think, but it's at least as important what men think too. And so when men say, this is the body that you want, this is the body that's desirable, and so on, they're thinking like, that's probably. I should probably place some importance on that too, in terms of getting jack, getting swole, all those things. And this is borne out by some interesting research. For example, there was one study, this is one of my favorite studies. This is a study that actually got me interested in mating psychology, this kind of thing, which is that they showed a series of women videos of men, and these are just very brief video clips. And then at the end, they asked these women, how sexually attractive is this man? Scale from 1 to 7, not at all attractive, very sexually attractive. And then they showed a group of men the same videos of these same guys and asked them a different question. And the question was, how likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man? And it was same kind of scale, like, very unlikely to very likely. And then the researchers tracked those men in those videos and had them return 18 months later and ask them a bunch of questions, including, basically, how many sexual partners have you had over the last 18 months? And the correlation between how sexually attractive the women found these men and how many partners they had was zero. There was no correlation at all between how hot they were to women and how many partners they had later. But there was a strong and significant correlation between how intimidating or formidable men rated them and how many sexual partners they recounted over the last 18 months. And so essentially, how tough a guy looks to men is a stronger predictor of his sexual success than how attractive he looks to women. And I think you can kind of like, at first, I found this study hard to believe. This was replicated in a different study, by the way. So this does seem to be a real phenomenon. And when I think about, even in my own personal life, guys I know and stuff, the kind of like really good looking, like, kind of pretty, boyish kind of guys, like, they do, they do, you know, they don't do badly with women. But when I think about the guys who are like, like athletes or guys who are just like, really, like, obviously physically fit, they do, like, much better, you know, if you were to compare the two. And I. So I. So at first I was a little skeptical, but when I really started thinking about it, I think it makes sense. And so there have been other studies like this too, like hand grip strength correlates with number of sexual partners over the course of a lifetime and over the course of the past year. You know, there's, there's other research indicating that if you ask women about their most recent short term sexual partner, they say that like, you know, that he was more muscular than most of their other sexual partners. So in the researchers in that paper, they basically suggested that if a man is very physically fit and muscular, he doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate other kinds of qualities that men typically find attractive because just sort of being physically fit is enough for a short term fling. And in those cases, maybe women don't care quite as much about how kind he is or what his sense of humor is and all those kinds of things. So yeah, I think this sort of distinction here between formidability versus sexual attractiveness really gets at sort of what men are responding to. And they understand that maybe women find the dad bot attractive, but guys aren't going to be impressed by that. And that's actually what's more important, right? Physically muscular guy walks around, he's going to be the one that's intimidating. And in the end that's going to be the person who probably attracts more sexual partners versus this sort of dad bod kind of guy more generally. I think this ties into the evolution of secondary sex characteristics among men and why they evolved. Right? I mean, so David Putz, he's an evolutionary, I think he's an evolutionary anthropologist and he's basically outlined why do we have these secondary sex traits as men? Because it's actually calorically and energetically costly to have large muscles to grow extra hair out of your face. And your voice changes and modulates too. And that also takes extra energy to create that thicker brows, our skulls are thicker, thicker bones, all of these things. What's the point of all of this? And he's hypothesized that this is actually all of our secondary sex characteristics, or many of them anyway, are actually Steve Stewart Williams. He says they're deer's antlers rather than peacock's tails. So the peacock's tail is a direct advertisement to women of like, look how beautiful and pretty I am and come mate with me. Whereas the deer's antlers, like female deers, don't care about how big a male deer antler, deer's antlers, those antlers are actually to be used in competition with other males. And once they prevail, then they're the ones who actually get more mating opportunities. And so when David Putz analyzed a whole series of conducted A whole series of studies basically asking men, how intimidating do you find deep voices versus not so deep voices, muscular men versus not so muscular men, guys with beards versus without beards. The beard one is interesting too. Women will debate endlessly about whether they find beards attractive or cute or not. But there's clear and straightforward evidence that men find men with beards more physically intimidating than men without beards. And so all of these things more than likely evolved not necessarily to impress women, but actually to sort of impress men. And this is also why sort of puberty is delayed, why there are all of these sort of peculiarities around the way that the male body changes versus the way the body changes.

What's the language changes, why puberty's delayed.

Basically because it takes longer, it takes longer to develop these sex characteristics for voice change, for muscularity, and even things for height, right? Like if you take two 10 year old, or rather like on average 10 year old girls are taller than 10 year old boys. And this changes throughout puberty. But there's just this sort of delay, this delayed process among boys because their body undergoes such a massive and rapid change. And girls do too. But it's interesting. Like girls, it just seems, it seems like it's less awkward, less overt. There's something else about when a boy's voice changes and they're just sort of more ungainly the way that they move and everything because their body's just. You get this massive dose of this hardcore drug, right? Testosterone and androgens and all these other things. So it's really interesting, I think, this idea of like masculinity, these sort of masculine features and traits evolving as sort of competitive secondary sex characteristics rather than to appeal to others. And you know, sometimes I wonder, like, can these things, like, are there traits that humans might evolve that could sort of push us too far and actually become detrimental? So there's research on like the Irish. The Irish elk went extinct because their antlers grew too large and they could no longer hold their heads up. And eventually they died, right? Because like there was this sort of runaway selection process and this pressure of like the biggest antlers were usually the ones to prevail in contests. But eventually they got so big that they could no longer mate and they couldn't reproduce themselves anymore. So maybe you guys will just like muscles will get too big and you know, eventually we can't even take care of ourselves.

That Fisherian runaway stuff is so funny. What does it mean to say that masculine traits amongst men seem. And secondary sex Characteristics seem to be more about formidability than attraction. They are antlers rather than peacock's tails. Because it seems like men judging other men's formidability is more accurate at estimating the number of sexual partners that a man has. So how successful he is with women than his attractiveness is how, given the fact that women say they're not attracted to it and yet the men that have these things are the ones that are the most successful, does that not just mean that women don't know what they're attracted to?

Hmm.

Revealed versus stated preferences.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a good point. And I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm inclined to say that, like they, I think they, they would acknowledge that those things are like more attractive than the average or maybe not having those things, but they would state, you know, this other kind of preference of like, yeah, I want a guy who's muscular but not too muscular or something like that. But yeah, there is this, I mean, for human behavior in general, right. There's often this mismatch between what people say and what people do. And yes, stated versus revealed preference. And I think there's something like that going on here too, where for men, what is like the more so than for women, a strong predictor of your sexual success, your romantic success, is your status. Right. And status is this sort of amorphous. You can't look at status under a microscope or something. It's something that exists in the minds of other people and people have to agree that you have it. Right. You don't get to decide if you have it. Other people do. And in this instance, throughout evolutionary history, it seems that men have been the ones to confer status on other men, more so than women. And I know that Jordan Peterson's made this point too, about how there is sort of these dominance or competence hierarchies and women sort of use those. They sort of use this as a sort of cognitively outsourced this burdensome task of picking an attractive partner.

They just filter the guys out the hierarchy.

Exactly. And they don't, like, oftentimes women don't even know or care what the contest is. Right. I make this point in, in, in that article about how like, women, a lot of women don't even like, they don't like sports or they don't watch sports, but they still find athletes attractive. Right. They're like, I don't know what you're doing out in that field, but I love athletes.

Good. How good would it be to create some sort of competition between men where the outcome was completely arbitrary. Let's say that it was correctly picking the tosses of a coin, right? And you have this huge pool of men, 100 men over time. And it's like a round robin type scenario and then it's knockout stages all the way to the top. And then get the women to rate the attractiveness of the men over time and maybe run the, run that a bunch of different times and run different women through and see if the guys that won a competition which was completely based in luck are the ones that are given more attractiveness. And if you can have someone have to control it somehow. Where you had attractiveness before and attractiveness after, how much does winning a completely arbitrary game improve your attractiveness to women?

It's a good question. I think that. So if you were to carry out that experiment, you would need to have. You need to introduce an additional element which would be other men respecting the winner. I think that's a key component here. It's like it's not just winning the contest, it's winning a contest that matters to men in particular. Right? Like if you win the coin tossing contest or whatever and you have a bunch of other guys being like, oh, that was incredible bad. That was all, you know, high fives.

You need to observe them being competitive, pedestalizing the person that won.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that is the, that would actually be the key here for women sort of what, like the variability of their attractiveness ratings would shift somewhat based on that. And I think basically there's just interesting papers on this about how so the sports competition is one where maybe women aren't particularly interested in sports, but yet they find athletes attractive. Historically, a lot of women, even educated women, were illiterate and yet they still found well known authors to be attractive. They find painters and artists attractive. Even if they may not necessarily understand what's going on with the art, but they see that the respect and prestige that the artist accrues from the art community or from the class of people that they're around, those kinds of things. And so you can see this with. To me, one of the more amusing examples of this is like guys who play video games on YouTube get groupies. You're just like this guy playing games and uploading a live stream and commenting on it. And they have a million subscribers or whatever. And I've seen like news coverage and media articles about like, yeah, he's a 19 year old kid who plays video games all day and he's getting love letters and you Know, girls messaging him on Instagram and all this stuff. And it's like, if he was just a dude sitting at home playing video games, he wouldn't get a single love letter, right? But the fact that he has a million other nerds out there, like, saying like, oh, I love you bad. You're, you know, you're pre selected.

This is the king of our group. Well, yeah, it's so funny because.

King of the gamers.

Yeah. The same accusation that's thrown at men as them retreating from society and not being a viable mate for women. Video games in the basement, spending too much time on screens. If you just tune that up to high performance and everybody else says, yeah, I know that he's doing the thing that people say is the antithesis of being attractive to women, but he's the best at it. You go, oh, yeah, well, now he's super attractive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that there's something about winning the contest, but then also accruing respect and esteem and prestige of other people. Right. I mean, if you look at the research on the happiness psychology research, sociometric status is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. And sociometric status is respect and admiration from your peers. That is the thing that is actually a stronger predictor of happiness than how much money you have or your sort of occupational status or something like that. And oftentimes the reason why people work so hard to obtain so much money is to actually obtain the sort of affections of other people. Right. Like, that's sort of ultimately what people are striving for, both men and women as well. And so that aspect of mating psychology about how, like, yes, it matters how you're viewed by the opposite sex. But to me, the interesting part of sort of, I guess the male mating psychology aspect or what females sort of ultimately choose is like, it matters at least as much what other guys think of you. You know, that sort of is a more strong predictor than what the women think of you.

Yes. And downstream from what the men think of you is what the women are going to do with you, even if. Even if it isn't what they think of you. Do you think that this pre selection for mates works in reverse? Do you think that men are more attractive, more attracted to women that other women think are impressive or high status or whatever?

Hmm. I think that it would. It would probably. The answer is probably yes, but the effect would be much smaller than the effect of being, you know, high status or prestigious or something in terms of how a man would appear to A woman. There was a fascinating study indicating that women are. It was like, women are 1000 times more sensitive to a man's income or socioeconomic status than men are to women. And so in a positive direction, basically, the more high socioeconomically you're doing in life, the more attractive you are to women. And so that indicates that, yes, there's a positive effect for men, but it's 1/1,000th the size of the effect. So there's something there, but it's not a lot. There was, you know, there was some research on Tinder, you know, indicating that if you're a man with a master's degree, you get twice as many matches as a man with a bachelor's degree. And a woman with a master's degree gets, I think it's 8 or 10% more matches than a woman. So there's like these small effects, like, yeah, you'll get a little more. Your status can help, but not to the same extent. I mean, it's interesting even with like your friends and your peer groups, you know, like what men choose as far as, like. And this may sort of tie into the warrior hypothesis too. The male warrior hypothesis is that men, if you ask men what kind of friends they like, what characteristics would you desire in a male friend? Men are much more likely than women. Young men are much more likely than young women to say they want a friend who's creative, intelligent, ambitious, socially connected. All of the sort of qualities that are proxies for status. Right? And I think the reason for this is that because status looms so large in male romantic prospects and basically some of that status can actually rub off, right?

Where like the trickle down effect.

Trickle down, the entourage, trickle down effect or something, where if you're just friends or a hanger on of some rock star, you're going to get probably more attention than if you're just a random dude, right? Whereas for women it doesn't quite work in the same way where, like, status, you know, it's probably being friends with like a female rock star or celebrity, you do get some benefits, but in terms of like being friends with them and attracting more men or higher, higher quality mate or something like that, the effect is probably much weaker for them.

Yeah, absolutely.

So it's just. Yeah, it's just different. Right.

Think about the sort of changes in lifestyle that you would have. Yeah, you can fly around the world with your bestie, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be surrounded by good potential mates. Whereas if you manage to befriend Dan Bilzerian, then you can expect the kind of life that you're in for. So speaking of this, I'm thinking about the reversal again of this where women who pre select men, Pete Davidson that was in a relationship with Kim Kardashian and now appears to be slowly running through every hot chick in Hollywood. Dan Bilzerian as well. It's just, you know, the epitome of pre selection, other women find this man attractive. Therefore other women downstream from that woman will think they've outsourced again their status seeking radar to other women and gone, ah, that is a man that's potentially of high status. I mean it's like commonly held wisdom when it comes to your dating profile online that at least one of the photos should have you with other women in it and the other women should be quite attractive because it suggests that you are the kind of man that spends time around attractive women, which is pre selection. I wonder whether the reverse would be negatively correlated for women. If you were to see a woman regularly around different good looking guys, that, that would be disincentivizing to other high status males that may be considering pursuing her.

So I've seen research on this. This was before the Tinder era. I think these papers were probably like around 2010. David Buss might have actually been an author on one of them where they basically did this sort of pre selection studies where they'll show women participants, a guy alone, a guy with a group of guys and a guy with a group of women. And invariably the guy with the group of women, they found him more attractive. And they did the study with men where they showed a woman alone, women with female friends and women with male friends and they showed the, surrounded by males, they found her, I think she was the least attractive to the men. So it does sort of, you know, your prediction here was right. But I have seen research on dating apps where the effect, it's more complicated where women will at least, you know, they'll say that if they see a man with lots of women, they rate him as less attractive or less desirable. And the reasoning there was that they basically think that this guy is not serious. Right? Like if this is the kind of picture you're gonna put on your dating profile, if you surrounded by a bunch of hot chicks, it's like, you know, this guy's, you know, he's, he's not, you know, he's not a serious person. He's just gonna use me, something like that. So, you know, and that's, that's the sort of, the, the finding was they find him most attractive. And as far as like, what kind of like the actual success of such a guy, that's a different kind of story. Right, But I think like probably the safe bet for that would be like having a mixed sex group. Right, but make sure that like the women in the mixed sex group are attractive and attractive and maybe closer to.

You than the thinking along the same lines.

So I think like the pre selection thing is key here. But yeah, the dating apps have kind of thrown things into disarray because like now people are just hyper scrutinizing of like, why did you put this picture up? What does it mean? What kind of person are you? All of those things. Whereas if they randomly find a picture of you like that, it's kind of a different story.

Talk to me about the male monkey dance. This is probably my favorite article from your substack that you've written this year. I've shared it to way too many friends, so break down what the male monkey dance is for me.

Yeah, so the male monkey dance was written by this guy, Rory Miller, in a book called Meditations on Violence. And in that book, so he worked in law enforcement and he compiled interesting research and shared his observations and his findings in this book. And basically the male monkey dance is it's a sort of a ritualistic conflict between two males, typically two males who don't know each other. And it's a sort of a set of steps that gradually escalate. And so it's like, you know, step one, it's the sort of hard stare step two, this sort of a verbal conflict of like, what are you looking at? Or do you got a problem, bro? Or what's going on or what's your problem? That kind of thing. And then step three, if it escalates, is chest on chest, sort of chest bumping and maybe the arms extend. Right. I remember you had Adam Hart on your podcast, the Biologist, and he suggested that the reason why guys extend their arms out is to increase the perception of body size. And this is also likely the reason why during weigh ins for boxing and mma, you always see these guys sort of expand their arms and flare out their traps and their muscles and really to sort of broaden their shoulders and everything is to increase the perception of their size and look more intimidating. And so guys will do that too when they do the chest bump and step through the monkey dance. Chest bump, arms go out. What are you going to do? What are you going to do about it? That kind of thing. And yeah, that step four, if it continues to escalate, is a dominant hand roundhouse punch. And then it sort of escalates from there. And the observations that Miller makes in his book, I mean, they're fascinating. So he outlined this based on his experience as a police officer outside of bars and various venues. Especially when young guys are drunk, these kinds of things are pervasive. And it wouldn't surprise me if maybe not every guy gets to step four where a punch is actually thrown. But it wouldn't surprise me if more than half of guys have gotten to step three of that monkey dance. And so what's interesting about it is that is the sort of the commonality of it across different kinds of people. And also, who is involved in the monkey dance? Like, who do we choose to get into the monkey dance with? It's always or almost always two young men who are roughly the same age and roughly similar in physicality. And it almost never occurs between a man and a woman. It doesn't occur between a man and a young child or between. So a man wouldn't get involved in a monkey dance with someone who's obviously high on drugs or crazy. It typically only occurs when there's some question about who would actually prevail in this physical contest. If these two guys were getting into a fight, we actually don't know who would win. And it's funny, I remember when I first read this in the book, a story came to mind where I was. It was a story from when I was in college. I was walking through downtown with a couple of my college friends and suddenly this very short and he was young, but he was a short and very disheveled and very just dirty homeless guy comes up to my friend and grabs his hand and he's like, hey, do you have any money? And my friend pulls his hand back and he's like, oh, don't touch me. And this, this homeless guy, like, starts reaching, like, trying to like, get into his pockets. And my friend is like running around and he's like. I could tell he's extremely confused because on the one hand he could. I mean, it was pretty clear that he could take this guy in like a physical fight. But on the other hand, this guy was so dirty looking that he just didn't want to get physically entangled with him. And so he's like running, but at the same time trying to demonstrate that he was willing to fight him. So he was like backwards running. His hands were up, but he was still, like, running. And then my other friend Gets involved and tries to separate them. But then the homeless guy starts chasing him around. And my friend is. So it was like this comical scene. And I'm watching all of this, and I'm just laughing at it because I didn't want to get involved because I didn't want him to touch me. So I'm just watching this. And so that story came to mind of like, okay, so that was a case of a monkey dance that was thwarted. Something here where they weren't afraid of running because it was clear who would win the fight. And so they didn't feel like they had to stand their ground. But there was also this part of the male psychology of, I don't want to look like I'm weak. I'm going to turn my back and start sprinting away from him. So the monkey dance is two guys. Who would win? We don't know. Usually between strangers. Monkey dances very seldom rise between friends. In a group in which the relationships are established. Guys roughly know where they stand, those kinds of things. Whereas in environments in which people don't know who would actually prevail, oftentimes people will encourage fights. They'll encourage them to see. They want a rough and accurate estimate of what each person is made of and whether or not they can hold their ground. When you see two guys fight and you see how they handle themselves, you yourself get a sense of, could I take this guy too? Who would I do better against? And interestingly, some recent research, I want to say from Aaron Sell. I hope I'm getting that right, about the evolutionary psychology of the concept of a fair fight. And this appears to be an evolved psychological mechanism of. Across different cultures and throughout different societies, people have strong feelings about cheating in a fight, which is actually. I mean, it's kind of funny that you'd have that, because it's like two guys trying to beat each other up and potentially inflict physical harm on one another and disfigure each other and whatever. And still, it's like, certain things you shouldn't do, and if you do do, you'll be judged in some way. And the idea that they propose in their research is that the reason is because people want this estimate. Not only do people want the estimate of the fighting ability, but people themselves involved in those kind of altercations want to signal their capacities, right? Like if they rapidly escalate and suddenly kick the other guy in the balls and gouge his eyes out and do all these things, pull out a weapon, then they actually don't get to signal anything. About their strength, their endurance, their speed, their capacity, all those things. They're really just signaling like they're a violent and crazy person, which can be useful to signal that in some instances. But if you really want to impress people and potentially impress men such that they will confer status on you, and you can get women pulling out a switchblade and using dirty tactics isn't going to get you that right. It's going to be like slow escalation, monkey dance, fair fight, don't cheat, don't cheat and fight in a way that's fair and that's honorable. And I think you can see this with sporting contests. Of course, boxing and MMA have very strict rules about, about what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. And you can even see this with young boys when they're roughhousing and playing with each other. They can sort of intuitively grasp that, yeah, maybe you can slap someone, but you shouldn't hit them with a closed fist. So these kinds of things are kind of like built in. And I think in itself it's an interesting adaptation. And the monkey dance is a sort of a. It is a ritual around which people can display and also to observe men's formidability and willingness to prevail in a fair fight.

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

That's interesting. So you might get, yeah, so, yeah, the idea of prestige, where people freely confer status on you, versus dom, where you impose costs and instill intimidation, that would make sense to me. I mean, I think in that moment it might actually work, right? This sort of rapid escalation, using dirty tactics. In that moment, it's probably, yeah, people would fear you and be intimidated by you, but it depends on what your sort of short term, long term, evolutionary goals are too. It's like, yeah, you may get dominance, but if you don't get the respect and the sort of admiration of those guys. Then you're a betrayed and everyone's taking.

Your weapons and they're stabbing you on the way down.

Well, there's that. Yeah, they don't like. Yeah, you don't have the status necessary to be attractive to.

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

Yeah, right. He's optimizing for survival.

Yes.

Right. So in that case. Well, yeah, yeah, I've seen that too. I mean, in fights where one person is clearly bigger than the other, I've noticed that people are more lenient as far as how harshly they'll judge the smaller combatants.

Oh, you're allowed to kick the bigger guy in the balls.

Yeah, you're allowed to kick him in the balls. Or maybe you're allowed to like bite him or something like that. Right. Or if there's a weapon that isn't too dangerous that you're allowed to use that too. And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, on the one hand you're optimizing for survival over prestige or status. And yeah, you're also, at the same time though people are perhaps depending on the context, they are still willing to confer prestige on you. If you're an especially small person up against someone who's much larger than you, or if you're one guy up against 5 and you still manage to prevail, even if you bent the rules a little bit, it's still like, okay, that was still impressive regardless. And therefore the status penalty isn't quite as severe.

I liked the insight that you gave around, not the Minority Report. What's that fucking movie where there's like five of them?

The Bourne.

Bourne series, yes. Jason Bourne. Every single movie he gets into a fight with some bastard in a balaclava who snuck into the apartment where he's staying. And this guy comes out of nowhere. And they usually start a fight. So it's kind of like a. An immediately escalated monkey dance, right? So there's no, like, what the fuck are you doing? Or whatever. They immediately go to step five, but from that step, it further escalates from there. So they'll have a fight, and then usually Jason Bourne will accurately defend his attacks and, like, hit him and he'll fall through a table. Then when he falls through the table, he'll pull out a knife, and then you go, oh, he's not playing by the rules. And what always happens, Jason Bourne never pulls out a knife. Or if he does, it's. It's. It's a. It's a knife as he's been thrown across the kitchen counter. And he. He picks up a peeler or something like a potato peeler. Like, it's. You know, it's always a weaker, shitter version, or. I think there's one. I've definitely seen one of them where he uses a pen. I've seen another one where I think he uses a book. Like, beat, like, starts to punching this book into this guy's throat. Point being, the. What you recognize in the imbalance of weaponry within that fight is that there is something more noble, more prestigious about Jason Bourne's conduct than about this other person's. He didn't break the rules of the monkey dance up until this guy decided to escalate it. And then it's like, as a byproduct of Jason Bourne's pure lethality as a human, the guy ends up falling out of a window onto a passing car or something.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there were cases where he. Well, yeah, he's never the one to rapidly escalate, Right. Like, he has killed people, but it always appears like he's a little bit reluctant to do it. And, like, you know, because that's sort of the honorable hero story. Yeah. I remember, like, the first movie, right? He uses the ballpoint pen. The second movie, the guy pulls out, like, this giant knife, and Jason Bourne's just, like, reaching, like, just like behind him. He's not even looking for anything. He just grabs a magazine and rolls it up.

He fights him with the magazine. Yeah.

And he's able to hit the guy, and the guy's missing. And so it's like. Yeah, there's the violation. Right. Well, immediately, I guess there's this kind of violation, because every single time, it's a CIA assassin who usually shows up with a gun. And then you know, Bourne, like somehow knows that he's coming and grabs his gun and disarms him. And then it becomes hand to hand combat. And yeah, a lot of movies are like this where it's never the hero who behaves dishonorably or who cheats. It's always the sword of the adversary. Unless, again, like you mentioned before, unless the protagonist has five or six guys all on him at once and then he'll grab a weapon even if the other guys don't have one, or something like that. I think there was a scene in. I think it was Spectre, the James Bond movie, where he's on the train and there's this massive guy, like 2ft taller than him. And they're first like boxing. And James Bond is actually doing pretty well where he's dodging the other guy's punches, but his blows aren't doing anything to the other guy. And I think at that point he like grabs something and breaks it over the guy's head and it actually doesn't do anything either and. And so on, and it kind of escalates from there. But in that case, it was like, it was totally understandable that this guy was literally twice Daniel Craig's height and weight or like, you know, thereabouts.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you.

Have you seen House of the Dragon?

I haven't seen that one.

It's the most recent Game of Thrones that everybody's talking about.

I. Yeah, I haven't seen it.

Come on, come on.

I never got into Game of Thrones. Never. I couldn't get into it. Well, I'm the last guy on earth.

I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna tell you about it. In any case, there's a scene in that.

Let's hear it.

Where one of the semi bad guys, families. It's very complex, right? The reason I say this has been complex is that you see in one scene, someone take dirt and throw it in the eyes of another child. It's a bunch of children that are all fighting for small amount of dominance. And one of them takes dirt and throws it in his eyes because he is inferior in terms of a fight. And then later on, the one that's had the dirt thrown in his eyes ends up losing an eye as one of the. These other children slice his face open and like cut his eye. He loses an entire eye due to this. But what it shows is you don't really know who's the goody and who's the baddie. And the reason that I bring it up is because it's endemic of the way that Game of Thrones is written, that. Hang on a second, there is no victor loss here. The kid that just got his, that just lost his eye also 10 minutes before that, acquired the largest and oldest dragon in all of Westeros. So it's like, what's going on? Who's the good person? Like, he called these children bastards. And then they have been persecuted for a long time. And you go, actually, who am I rooting for here? And that. That is why I think Game of Thrones is particularly enthralling, because the typical roles of good guy, bad guy, protagonist, enemy, the lines are nowhere near as clear cut. And that means that everything is open to interpretation. And I may think that the kid that stabbed the other person's eye is totally within his rights. And the guy that I live with might say, no, no, no, it's completely, completely out of order. And it allows people to take. No one is going to say Jason Bourne wasn't within his own rights to punch the guy in the throat with a ballpoint pen or whatever like that. That's what the story leads you to believe. But, yeah, it's. You need to get in Game of Thrones, is what I'm saying.

There's a. There's a great. I think it might have been in 48 laws, or maybe it was one of Robert Greene's books where he makes this point about how the same act can be construed completely differently based on the reputation of actor. Right. And so if a good guy protagonist does something that's distasteful, people may not like it, but at the same time it's like, well, he's the protagonist. We've seen him do these other good things, and so we'll let him slide on this one versus, like, if a villain does even a moderately unpleasant thing, where we tend to be horrified by it. But it sounds interesting, like this kind of storyline where actually you don't have enough information about sort of the archetypal character roles where you can have that sort of mental shortcut of like, he's doing this thing, but because he's the good guy, it's probably okay. Or, you know, that kind of thing where, like, you have that, you know, the knowledge of the character in advance. And so, you know, yeah, maybe I'll have to. Maybe I'll have to give the show another try sometime.

I think you'd be able to not have to invest seven seasons into the first Game of Thrones and just watch the most recent HBO series. I reckon you can get away with that. And that's like a ten hour, maybe less than a ten hour investment. And then next time that someone brings it up, you know what I'm on about.

My tastes might be too conventional. I remember I watched that first season of Game of Thrones way back when it was on the air or maybe a year later. And I remember they killed. Is it the Sean Bean character? And I remember like, yeah, like, oh, okay. And then I got a little into the second season. I'm like, I don't know, I just couldn't get through it. So maybe I need to. Maybe my tastes have evolved since then.

You've become a more sophisticated human, I think, since then. All right, man, let's wind this one up. What are you working on at the moment? Or what cool stuff have you got coming up?

Yeah, I mean, I'm still writing essays for my substack. I have some interesting pieces in mind. I want to do a series on this book called Games People Play. It's this classic book on transactional analysis by this guy, Eric Byrne. A lot of people are probably familiar with this book. Sometimes you'll see it in airports and bookstores. And it's essentially this, basically, what are the most common interactions that people often have with each other and what are their underlying or hidden motives throughout the social interactions? And what are the payoffs? So I'll do a series on that. I'm still working on my book. My publisher continues to irritate me and to the nightmare industry. But the book will be out, I think, Spring 2024. It's a memoir, which I hope you'll have me back on. We can talk about that and more stuff on luxury beliefs and this idea I've been developing too. Yeah, I think that's enough for now.

Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you're writing online?

Yeah, so you can go to my substack robkhenderson.substack.com and you can follow me on Twitter obkhenderson.

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