Why Is Everyone Acting Like A Victim? - Rob Henderson (4K)

What is the friendship paradox?

The friendship paradox is this phenomenon in which your friends have more friends than you do. Your sex partners have more sex partners than you do, your Twitter followers have or x your ex followers have more followers than you do. And it's, it's a paradox because it seemingly doesn't make sense. How can your friends have more friends than you on average? And many, many of your listeners especially I think will be familiar with this sort of Pareto phenomena that a disproportionate number of awards go to a small number of people, a disproportionate amount of money goes to a small percentage of people as well. But this also works in the social realm. So the example that I gave in a recent Substack post is to imagine you have, keep it easy. You have 10 friends and three of your friends are kind of like you, you know, just kind of an average person with an average social life. You have three friends who are shut ins, who maybe don't go out that much, but you have another who is a super connector and has 100 or 150 or maybe even a thousand friends. I mean some people who, who are just sort of very social, super extroverted in that 99th percentile. And so when you average this across all 10 of your friends, they, they may have, you know, on average 20 plus friends while you have 10. And so it's sort of, at first glance it doesn't make sense, but then, you know, when you, when you sort of break it down mathematically, it does. And this is why there's that, that paradox. And then same with sex partners, you know, Maybe you've had five or 10 or 20 sex partners, but one of those people may have had a hundred plus. And so when that out, your sex partners have had more sex partners than you. And then same with Twitter followers, right? Like, you know, maybe one of your followers has, you know, a million plus while you have 10,000 or something. Average that out. The math still shakes out in the same way. The example that I, that I also gave in that essay is, you know, when, when Warren Buffett walks into an auditorium, everyone becomes a millionaire on average, right? And it's the same kind of idea here.

So yeah, what's the implication psychologically for people with that? Is that a felt sense at all? Because obviously it's kind of anti typical to what you would expect. This is all a surprise to everyone to find out that if Warren Buffett's in the local postcode, that they've just become an honorary millionaire. For the most, due to mathematics. Is there some sort of sense by which people are conscious of this sort of thing? I know that Gad Saad in his most recent book talks about the best sort of people to be friends with. The people who are having a little bit less sex than you.

Right, yeah, yeah, I remember that, I remember that from his book. Well, yeah, so, so I think that we, we, we fall prey to. So, so in that, the classic psychology book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman coined this term. What you see is all there is. And we pay attention to what's visible, what's right in front of us, the, the known knowns. But we don't necessarily pay much attention to the, the known unknowns, the things that, that aren't in our immediate line of vision. And so with, with the friendship paradox, we will pay a lot of attention to the most extroverted people. They're very visible. They enjoy often being very visible. Extroverted people tend to be that way when you, they're more likely to text you and then be responsive to your texts and more likely to meet up with you and then tell you about their adventures hiking in the Himalayas or how they just got back from this country or just got done speaking at this event and so forth. And so you're listening to this person and for many people, they may hear this and think like, wow, everyone out there is doing all of these great things. And here I am sort of working my 9 to 5 or just sort of living a normal, ordinary life. And many people will report feeling sort of diminished socially. And this is an interesting phenomenon here because there's a ton of research in social psychology on this idea called the better than average effect. And the better than average effect, or the illusory superiority effect as it's sometimes called, essentially that we tend to believe ourselves to be better than others. There's this sort of self enhancement that goes on. So when you ask people, are, are you, you know, are you smarter than average? Are you a better driver than average?

It's like 75% of people believe that they're a better than average driver.

Yeah, exactly. You know, there's, there's research in academia too. You know, you ask students, are you a, you know, a better student than average? Ask professors, are you a better teacher than average? And yeah, exactly. 70, 80 plus percent say they're better than the average person in all these domains. And yet there's fascinating work on, related to the friendship paradox that we tend to have a sort of uncharacteristically dismal view of our social lives. So there have been a couple of studies now in which they asked participants, you know, do you, do you go to more or fewer parties than others? Do you see your family more or less than others? Do you have more, fewer friends than others? Do you eat alone more or less than others? And generally speaking, people think that they are sort of less socially connected, they have fewer friends, they eat alone more, they go to fewer parties.

And this is an inversion of the illusory superiority complex, right?

Sort of have, at least in the social realm, a lesser than average effect rather than the better than average effect. And this is related to that friendship paradox. And that's sort of what you see is all there is. The way the researchers explain this is that again, when you think to yourself, well, do I go to more, fewer parties than others? Well, when I see other people at parties and I'm not at a party, and I see my family X amount of times a year, but then when I pull up social media and I see people taking selfies with their dad or whatever or their mom or their sis, and so you see all of these, and then you start to think, well, you know, I'm not with my family right now when I saw that photo. And so you sort of easily sort of fall prey to this idea that, well, everyone out there is taking these selfies and having a good time and going home. And, and, and you're not. And you're not paying attention to the people who aren't with their families. You know, one of the lines I use in that poster of summarizing this research is no one is taking photos and posting them online when they're eating lunch alone or when they're binge watching a TV show, or when they're just having an off day and just need some time to decompress and be alone for a while. They're not, you know, uploading a video or taking photos of themselves. We tend to take photos when we're being social, when we're being extroverted.

Peak experiences.

Exactly, the peak experiences. And, and I know you've, you've talked about this before, about what is it? Comparing, you know, your blooper reel to everyone else's highlight reel. Something like that. And yeah, so we do that. And then we tend to think like everyone else is sort of at the party without you. There's a nice line in one of the papers that I cite. The researchers sort of painting a picture of what this might look like of a student in a college dorm room Maybe doing their homework, being a diligent student. And they hear a party going on upstairs, and you hear all the lights and all the music and everything, and it sounds like everyone's up there. And you're thinking, wow, I'm the only one here doing my homework. But of course, you're not hearing all of the other students in that dorm room as well doing that homework, doing their homework. They're not making any noise. Right. So this is what you see is all there is, or what you hear is all there is. And so that person is sitting there thinking, everyone is at the party without me. When this isn't the case. It's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party, not the people who aren't.

So there's a. This is very much due to the visibility of particular types of social experiences that is now facilitated by being online.

Right, right.

I Learned about the 1% rule.

Oh, yeah.

From you.

Okay.

Go through that. I feel like that's related here.

This is the 1% rule on the Internet. And it's, you know, it's. This isn't empirical research, but this is just a sort of shorthand way of understand how social media works, how the Internet works now. And the basic idea is that online, 1% of Internet users are creators. They're the ones out there producing the videos and the podcasts and the written content and all the things that we're sort of consuming when we pull up on our phones. And then 9% of Internet users are commenters. They're engaging with the content in some way. Maybe they're reposting or retweeting or liking or commenting. They're the ones who sort of want to engage with the content in some way. Maybe they're not original content producers, but they do like to sort of make themselves visible by. By. By being commenters and so on. And then 90% of people are just lurkers, the people that we aren't seeing, the people who are just sort of passively scrolling their phones or, you know, looking at your. Looking at your stuff, listening to it, reading it, but they're not. They're not engaging with it in the same way. And I think a lot of, you know, so I'm a. I'm a substacker. You're a podcaster. I think a lot of content producers.

1%. Could they be?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. 1%. But a lot of attention to that. 9%. And, and of course, because of the. The negativity bias, you know, you may have a hundred Nice comments. And then there's three people who are like, wow, this sucks.

Yeah.

And you're like, you know, you'll beat yourself up that day. Like, man, why did these people not like this? But you did. You know, you're. You're assigning less weight to those 97 comments that were positive, but you're also not thinking about the 90% of people who didn't comment at all. And based on that breakdown. Right. If. If 97 comments are positive and 3 are negative, you can probably estimate that that's probably roughly how those other 90.

970.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Silent, nice comments.

Yeah. I saw this. Yeah. I read this essay recently about a TV show in which the executives were threatening to cancel it because they had received. And this was, I think in the 1980s, it was a sitcom and the executives were threatening to cancel it because they received some angry emails or not. Or angry, angry snail mail from the viewers. So this was the 80s. And, and the showrunners were basically, they drew this analogy of like, you know, this is like, you know, going. Going to a stadium of 100,000 people and two of them write a nasty letter to you. Right. That's the equivalent. Right. Because we have X number of million viewers and you got a couple of hundred mean letters.

Yeah.

Whereas the other million plus people didn't write anything. Or maybe they're writing positive things. And so I think, yeah, we, that, that 1% rule can sort of help us to contextualize sort of all of the social phenomena that are going on online.

I remember the general election a few years ago where the Tory party won by the biggest landslide in a very long time and the. The Red Wall fell and all the rest of this stuff. And I remember seeing Stormzy or Bugsy Malone and that year's winner of Love island and someone else like, like have Daniel Radcliffe or someone tweeting about how, you know, we need to make sure that we get the Labor Party in and I'll be voting Labor. And you see all of these replies and I was like, oh, my God, look at this. It's going to be a total landslide. You know, they've got. Bugsy Malone has tweeted about it. And then it was the. As far in the opposite direction as it's ever been in 50 years.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like, you know, the map is not the terrain.

Yeah.

And the Internet is not the real world. And here's another thing as well, you know, you've got the 1%, 9%, 90%. But I think it's only around about 10 to 15% of people in the UK have a Twitter account. Right, Right. So not only. You're not thinking about all of the silent lurkers.

Yeah.

You're not thinking about all of the people who aren't on Twitter that don't even know that they're not going on it. Did you hear the episode I did with some Harris?

I listened to clips of it, yeah.

Cool. So he comes up with this idea called digital leprosy. This is just awesome by him. So he says because he's no longer online, he's not exposed to the potential cancellations and online furor that he's a part of. So kind of in the same way as a leper may be losing limbs and digits and be unaware that it's happening.

Right.

He may be being canceled right now, but because he's not online, he's unaware of the cancellation that's occurring or the whatever. Like, he's. Sam Harris is trending again. He's like, well, I'm not on Twitter. And he's told his friends, look, don't send me screenshots of what people are saying about me on the Internet. So he is able to just, you know, blissfully move through his existence. He called it digital leprosy, which I just thought was like such a lovely idea.

Evocative term. And that's good. Yeah, yeah. Well, I. Yeah, I guess in that case it would depend on what your. What your aims are. I could imagine. So someone like Sam, you know, he's. He's an intellectual. He has his podcast and he probably. It wouldn't help him to see all of the nasty comments, but if you're.

I think it may be a little bit more than like two out of a hundred thousand or whatever at the moment as well. He's kind of popular to hate on the Internet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's a good point. But. But I suppose. Well, for other people, if you're. Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind would be like a politician, you would want to know what's going on, how people are reacting to you. Yeah, exactly. Sort of keep your. Keep your finger on the pulse of your constituents. There is a. There is a. One of the. One of the chapters in. In Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, where in the book is about the attainment of power, of course. So he writes that in those kinds of situations, you actually want to be more plugged in to the social scene. It actually isn't wise to withdraw because you'll end up losing power, you'll end up losing influence.

Interesting. He also has a rule about how aloofness is alluring, though.

Hmm.

Which I think is interesting and is definitely true. I was with Dan Bilzerian last weekend and was talking to him, and he's kind of been. He's sort of absconded from the permanently online Instagram, you know, like, tits and psychedelics existence that people. He kind of got famous for. And I was asking him about that and he said, well, you know, like, he's kind of going through a bit of a metamorphosis at the moment, I think, in. In many regards, which was very interesting to see. And I sort of dug into his psychology a lot over dinner. But also he was like, from a tactical perspective, just not being chronically online sucks in speculation, which is actually good for Brand in some ways. People are like, what is happening? And I think you remember this may have been different for you, given your. Slightly more chaotic than my upbringing, but each. Each summer when you would leave school and come back, you'd always think, oh, here's my opportunity to reinvent myself. Like, I'm gonna be the sporty kid or I'm gonna be the cool kid, or maybe that was. But I kind of get the sense that if you're going through a period of rapid change or rapid reflection or whatever, a little bit of receding, perhaps, from being so publicly. This is why monk mode, I think, for guys has become such an important meme. Right. That it's this retreat to focus on the three eyes. Introspection, isolation, and, like, inner work or something else. And the reason that it's so good, I think, is that it allows people to, like, go away, do the chrysalis thing, and then try and emerge as something new, whilst not trying to bring along all of the existing. Like, I'm trying to update one step at a time, all of the different changes. It's like, no, no, no. I get to go away and then come back with a relatively blank slate or more blank than it was. And yeah, I think there's. I think there's something there.

Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah. It sort of depends on what your aims are. And I. Especially when you're. When you're young and you're still sort of trying to stabilize your identity and figure out who you are, that having those moments of withdrawal and reflection can be very helpful. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny, the laws of power, a lot of them do contradict each other and green openly. I'VE seen him, he acknowledges this, but it's based on context, it's based on sort of where you are in the life cycle and how, how power is acquired in your sort of local environment and, and so on. So, so basically, you know, it's. This isn't like a one size fits all sort of checklist. It's more of a sort of holistic.

At all times in all places. It's in specific times, at specific places.

Right, right.

Well, you've been looking at a lot of young male syndrome recently. I think this is going to be one of the most important memes of the coming decade. And both of us have been talking about it at least in part for maybe like three or four years, I think online, but it's picking up steam. What have you learned? Digging deeper into the modern conception of young male syndrome and how it sort of manifested. What have you learned?

Yeah, yeah, well, so, so yeah, the young male syndrome, this constellation of traits that are associated with a certain period of time in young men's lives, typically the teens in the early 20s, you know, heightened levels of risk taking, reduced self control and inhibition. If you look at rates of criminality, for example, they tend to peak at around age 19. And this is true regardless of culture and society. Sort of all across the world in non industrialized hunter gatherer communities and all the way up to sort of wealthy and rich societies that it's the young men. If you look at who's committing the crime in that society, it's inevitably going to be sort of men aged say roughly 15 to maybe 24 even things like. So this is just in the US context, likelihood of being hospitalized for punching walls. There was a nice graph I saw and I posted it online of the distribution of young or men, just men in general being hospitalized for. And it's all concentrated again, 15 to 24. It's like 10 year olds aren't being hospitalized for punching walls and neither are 60 year olds. It's all that sort of young male group. And I'll admit I've punched walls before.

Yeah. Did you see Alexander Datesych posted a quote, tweeted an image this morning that was a mother asking how she could help her son. And it was just a photo of his bedroom wall. And this bedroom wall was just hole after hole after hole and then the door had a hole in it and it's like, I mean, it looked like a sufficiently flimsy American house that the hospitalization risk was quite low, but that the decorating risk might be quite high.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's in that case. I mean. Yeah, that sounds like it would require some, some serious intervention. Serious. Yeah, intervention. Some serious treatment. What I find interesting is especially for young men, that's sort of, that, this, this is I think an expression of young male syndrome is when a young man experiences some sort of, usually like a minor injury and then their immediate response is to lash out. So like I saw this with some of my friends where, you know, like, maybe I know something simple like, like they accidentally poke themselves in the hand or something and then their immediate response is to punch something. So they hurt themselves and they're pissed and then they punch something. And, and I think that this is basically a misfiring of this kind of evolutionary impulse of, of if, if an intentional agent hurts you, it actually is advantageous to, to fight back your response. Right, exactly. So, so if, I don't know, like the cactus plant stabs me, you know, maybe punching the wall is unwise, but if you do something to upset me and then I immediately respond physically, that can actually be an adaptive strategy. So I think like that is, you know, this is, this is speculation, but this is what I think is going on there because otherwise it doesn't make sense. Right. You're injured. Let me injure my, let me break my hand now. Right. It makes no sense. So, so yeah, so the young male syndrome. Yeah, sort of reduced inhibition, increased risk taking, criminality, risky driving. You know, if you look at who, who's arrested for drinking and driving, who gets into the most auto accidents, who is the most likely to be killed simply crossing the street? So, so I think it's, it's. Yeah, men are twice as likely to be killed simply crossing the street as women. So there are so many sort of different, different factors here. And there was actually one on the seatbelt point. There was an interesting study which found that men are less likely to wear seatbelts when they're accompanied by a male passenger relative to when they're sitting by themselves or when they're sitting with a woman.

What do you think that's saying?

I think that is one possibility here is essentially the attempt to signal toughness. That of course there's a lot of interesting work here and a lot of discussion and debate around this because of course, men want to signal to women and we want to signal that we're strong and can acquire resources and all those kinds of sort of bedrock findings in evolutionary psychology. But then we also want to impress other men too. You want to show that you would be in the ancestral context you want to show that you would be good in a violent conflict against a rival patriot, or if you're big game hunting, you want to show that you're strong. And so I think the way that it might manifest itself in the modern age is I don't need to wear a seat belt. You know, I'm going to show my friends and my mates like, I don't need to wear this.

That two ton rocket ship going towards me hasn't got shit. Yeah, yeah. We both became fans of that David Putz study.

Oh yeah.

That was able to predict the number of sexual partners based on not female ratings of attractiveness of male faces, but other male ratings of toughness of the same male faces.

Super cool study.

That the women's attractiveness rating had basically zero predictive power, but that the man's toughness rating had like quite a good bit of predictive power.

Yeah.

Was it you that taught me or was it Dunbar that taught me about men's street crossing in the presence or without the presence of women?

That was probably Dunbar.

Right, okay. So this, this, this study is so much fun. So they got. Crossing the street is really interesting because it's a relatively discrete variable. You have distance of vehicle from street crossing and then you have like the presence or lack of presence of a female and men. The difference in how close the vehicles would get and men were prepared to cross the street in the presence of a woman was like a third of what it was when there was no women around. Like, look at all of this, you know, surplus fitness that I have. I'm gonna cross the street while this car is only 15 yards away from me or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, the young male syndrome is. Yeah, I think it sort of depends on the context, but yeah, it is most likely to sort of be expressed when you're trying to impress women or when you're trying to impress men again. So I don't think, yeah, it would, I don't think it would necessarily impress young women. You know that you're driving without a seatbelt. Right. And I think maybe on some level guys understand that. But with, with, with. It wouldn't necessarily. It's not so much that you're impressing your friend when you put it when you don't wear the seatbelt, it's that if you do, you might be mocked or made fun of or that. What's, you know, are, you know, what are you wearing a seatbelt for? That kind of. Especially like 19 year old guys, you know, that kind of thing. And so it's not so much trying to look tough, but just not to look weak.

Very interesting. Okay, so. But young male syndrome specifically seems to be worsened amongst sexless, dispossessed, rambunctious young guys.

Yeah.

Coalitioning together in small groups to go and set shit on fire and push over granny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we. Yeah, yeah, that's. It's, you know, when, when a young man is isolated sort of by himself, there's only so much damage he can do, but it's sort of the, the right. The risk becomes exponentially greater sort of as that as. As he sort of partners with other men and they collaborate and start to plan. And so, yeah, this is, I mean, so. So you had this, this interesting term.

About the, the sedation, male sedation hypothesis. Yeah, it's in a. It's in a study at the moment with Buss and William. They're testing.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about. Because I remember when you first told me about that something that had come to mind is, you know, I had friends. I mean, this is, you know, sort of back in the day. I don't know if people still play this game World of Warcraft, but I remember I had a couple of friends who like lost years of their life to this game. And they were like. And they, the way that they spoke, you know, as, you know, when you told me about this, I thought like, yeah, these young guys, you know, this is, you know, 18, 19, this was years ago, but they would. All right, you know, I gotta, I gotta hop off the phone. I'm going on a raid. You know, I got a raid scheduled. You know, like, well, you don't have a raid scheduled. You have, you know, seven hours of sitting in your laptop chair. Computer games. But in his mind, he's like, I'm going with my other Internet friends and we're gonna go, you know, raid this castle or whatever they do in this game. And I could see that, yeah, this is a sort of an expression of that or an example of that, of, you know, just young guys who ordinarily might be out causing trouble and instead they're just online and that's how they do it. I saw this funny post on Twitter and this guy, he said something about back in the day, if you were a hyper curious young man, you'd basically start trying to document the visible differences between the mushrooms right around your house. And today what they do is try to collect all the rings in a Sonic game, like speedrun a sequence. And so, yeah, I think the virtual world is sucking in a lot of angry and aggressive man, but we may also be losing. That's sort of the pattern matching sort of systematizing. Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, it's just, it's managed to hijack an awful lot of the status seeking, coalitional curiosity, adventurous behavior that young men, you know, throughout all of history has been kind of acclaimed for. You know, you look at my favorite example of the solution for young male syndrome was Portugal in the 1800s.

What do they do there?

They, the first son was allowed to. There was an imbalance in the sex ratio and they knew that if son one married because he was the oldest son, but son two, three and four perhaps weren't permitted to marry and there weren't enough women to marry, that this was going to cause problems. So they just put them on galleon ships and said, go, you know, pioneer the new world. Away you go. So they just, they literally exported the young male problem by putting the men on ships and giving them this sense of adventure, you know, channeling their aggression outward against either a new world or political enemies or whatever it was. And yeah, I think that there is still a question. Vincent came on the show, mutual friend came on and he's been researching and he says, you know, every single time that we have high rates of sexlessness and blah, blah, blah, we have an increase in associated violence. And it's just at the moment, and someone may tell me that I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be there in the data. Right. We have incel black pill ideology. There was this period maybe about two years ago where they were even donated, claimed to be a domestic terror threat. I think incels. They were a terrorist group.

Right, Yeah, I saw that.

Where's the like, show me the violence. Show me the uptick in the violence. Now that's not to say there hasn't been an uptick in murders and stuff, but I think a lot of that can be attributed to something else. Yeah, exactly. Like the receding of police from inner cities.

Right, yeah, yeah. I wonder if the. So. So on its face it seems silly, right, that the incels. This is a domestic terror threat, but I wonder if they were just sort of. If they were actually familiar with the research on the young male syndrome and the sort of historical path. I mean, maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but. But they essentially, they were sort of anticipating the possibility and they're just sort of getting out ahead of it and saying, well, you have a lot of young, sexless, angry young men and historically that's been the, you know, a group that's been dangerous. So let's just designate that label on them. But I think, yeah, in the modern age with, with technology, with video games, with porn, with scrolling phones, I mean, yeah, I've seen sort of research on what young men, like jobless young men do and most of the time they're scrolling their phones, playing computer games, watching porn, overeating junk food.

You see Nicholas Abstats work on that.

I haven't. Is this, this is related to the.

Men with like men not working or whatever it is, whatever it's called, just awes. But yeah, it's like some insane percentage of men are neets. Not in education, employment or training, but also our prime working age. Like I think it's 22 to 50. And it's this unseen because unemployment rates are relatively low in America. But hiding in that data is a very unusual cohort of men who are electing to be unemployed. They're living on social welfare in one form or another or, and, or still living at home, spending an insane amount of hours per year playing video games. And while they're playing video games, 50% of that time is either on prescription medication or whilst taking weed. So you just have a very, it's like, okay, here's the big data. Okay, well what's that like, how's this constituted? Who are the component people that make up this data? And you go, hang on a second, like what's this chunk? It's like, I think it's like 8 million or 14 million men, prime working age men electing to retreat from the employment market. Now we put this episode up and a lot of guys that are maybe a part of this cohort are tangential to this cohort commented and you know, the sentiment very strongly was why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me? Why am I going to work to get a five foot three, 210 pound woman who's already gone through two marriages and got four kids. You know, just very despondent evidently guys who don't see much future for themselves. And it was, it was really eye opening because largely the comments on modern wisdom tend to be pretty personal, growthy, agentic, highly sovereign, openly mobile, etc, but this episode like blasted out of the algorithm into the wider Internet or maybe it got shared on some forums or whatever and it was very, very interesting and I got to see a, you know, I got a window into, into this world and it didn't seem, these guys didn't seem very happy. Yeah, they were maybe comfortable in their nihilism, but I don't think that they were particularly fulfilled.

I mean, they may be comfortable when they're young, but there's. I. You know, I'd be curious whether sort of, as we move forward, you know, decade or two decades later. I mean, it's one thing to be a neat when you're 19 or 23, but when you're 43 or 51 and you're single, maybe you've never had a girlfriend, and you've spent most of the last, you know, several decades just playing video games and. And.

And wallowing in collective misery on forums and stuff.

Yeah, I think there's. I mean, now in the modern age, we have so much freedom. You don't have to work anymore. You don't have. I mean, if you don't want to, or if you live in a modern, rich society, you can collect sort of extended unemployment or maybe live with your parents or find ways to. I mean, you know, very few people now, very few young men are sort of literally starving or having to steal food to survive. And. And now if you want to do something difficult, you have to make the choice to do it rather than sort of be. Be pressured sort of by. By external factors. I saw this. I saw this TikTok video. I'm not on TikTok, but people sometimes send these to me. And I saw this one, this young guy, I think he was in the Army, US army, and he was just sort of walking through his barracks, and he was asking these other young guys, these young recruits, if you could talk to your recruiter right now, what would you say? And these other young guys were like, I told him to go fuck himself, or like, God, this sucks, or, why did I do this? So on and so forth. And I'm watching this, I'm like, I know exactly what he's talking about. Because I was there. I was. You know, I'd enlisted. I was in the Air Force. And I remember especially, like, the first two years are just awful. Like, once you get a bit of rank and a bit of responsibility, like, once you go through the training.

Stop eating chip.

Yeah, exactly. Then you're like, you know, then you're okay. But the first couple of years really suck. And so I knew, like, these were all very young guys. They were still sleeping in bunk beds. And I would have said the same thing. You know, I'm glad that TikTok didn't exist back then, but I'm watching this, and I'm thinking, like, these guys don't understand Right. In five years from now they're going to be glad that they ate shit for however many years and they did this, they went through this experience and I think a lot of young guys won't even go that far. They won't even enlist, which is fine. Everyone has their own sort of make your own choices. But in that moment I understood that this sucks. Why did I do this? This is awful. And then you go through it and you can sort of in hindsight go back and say it was a character forming experience. It was good for me. I was an idiot when I was 19 and I probably needed a bit of that struct, bit of that discipline. I needed to have my ass kicked a little bit. And, and I think yeah, like you don't but, and, and those guys volunteer to do that. Right. You have to choose to do. Yeah. Undergo that experience.

So you've already pre selected for someone who's got the agency to get moving. Yeah, yeah. I had this idea, I had this idea about the. The reason that victimhood culture has become so widespread is because the human system's demand for challenges has outstripped our modern reality's ability to deliver that right that we want. We just want something to push up against. And if we don we don't have real challenge, we will create imagined challenge for ourselves. And yeah, you know, rampant fragility and this kind of like soy externalizing locus of control culture that's going on at the moment. It's so interesting though that you've got this barbell strategy where you know, 50 or maybe more percent of the people are young men are happy to lean into the. I've learned a bit of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology and taken the black pill in many regards because I'm a genetic dead end. But at the same time you have the ascendancy of David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Alex Hormozi, you know, these guys who are all about doing the hard thing, overcoming the suck, like no one's coming to save you, it's only you that's going to get you, etc. Etc. So you have this increasing sort of divergence between the two and I think, you know, assortative mating, which is people of a kind mating with people of their kind. Right. So Silicon Valley, 135 IQ, people with you know, professional tennis level skills, having kids together. So you kind of have this genetic splitting apart which also is going to have a psychological like heritable psychological echo I suppose. So the conscientious people will have more Conscientious kids and so on and so forth. And then Melissa Carney's new book, the Two Parent Privilege, is talking about how those college educated people who've got that predisposition again get an even bigger advantage. So I think that the Matthew effect of this right, to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken, is just going to continue to spread and spread and spread.

Yeah, I think, I mean that's, that's a distinct possibility and it seems like in the short term that is what's occurring. I mean, I even read this. Oh man. Which book was this? It was a speculative hypothesis about why there's a like sort of pronounced levels of kids being born on the spectrum in Silicon Valley. And it's because, it's not necessarily because the engineers and the program neurons themselves are autistic, but they may be sort of, sort of somewhere on the spectrum and then they partner with someone who also shares some of those genes and then comorbidity. Exactly. And then they have, well, they have children and then, and then the child is sort of at a, at a heightened risk of getting autism. But I think generally speaking, I mean, I don't know if this is, this could be interpreted as a white pill or a black pill, but I just read this book, the Sun Also Rises by Gregory Clark, who's an economic historian, very well versed in the behavioral genetics as well. And essentially that book he documents in various societies essentially how social status, sort of loosely defined as sort of wealth and influence and so on is very sticky across generations. And essentially what he finds, you know, he tracks surnames and finds that, you.

Know, I got intro to this guy from Mat at Aporia. He's going to come on.

Oh yeah, yeah, he's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I spoke with, I spoke with Matt about, about Gregory, Gregory Clark's work as well. And essentially, you know, he, he tracked status not through. So, you know, there's, there's, there's this fear, especially in the modern era of assorted mating, that more and more women are going, getting educated and men are dating educated women and they're having children who are educated. But what essentially he finds is that when you look at data from decades past, centuries past, before women were sort of educationally and economically emancipated, when they were still sort of stuck in these rigid gender roles. If you pair or if you look at the status of a given man interested in a woman and then look at the status of the woman's father. There's like a very tight correlation there. So even though the woman herself isn't highly educated or isn't working in a prestigious occupation, often she comes from a family in which her father was. And so one of Clark's claims, generally speaking, in this book, is that people are very good at sort of finding people who are similar to themselves. Even if you don't have the sort of external visible badges of class or education or credential, how does that manifest.

If it's not the external badges?

Yeah, well, basically, people cluster together in the same clubs, family, friends, organizations. So maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way that they would now. But maybe, you know, his boss's friend says, hey, I have a daughter who you might get along with, and even though she isn't working, she's, you know, the daughter of the friend of the boss.

It's like a social instantiation of the class disposition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is. Yeah, this is interesting to me. I mean, so. So Scott Alexander did a long piece on. On assortative mating, I think, earlier this year, and he talked about how there's surprisingly little sort of, sort of matching across sort of educational and class lines on the things that you would expect on things like attractiveness, for example. I think there's this especially in the sort of, like, the red pill online spaces of, you know, men don't really care about education. They really care about how attractive a woman is. And yet, at least the data that I saw sort of curated by Scott Alexander, is that, you know, it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the, you know, the college dropout. Who, the barista at Starbucks? Exactly. Yeah. Or if they do date the barista at Starbucks, she has a college degree. And I think a mistake that we might make, you know, I'm sort of channeling Gregory Clark here, is that, like, oh, he knew that she had a college degree and that's why he was open to dating her. Whereas I think Clark would say, actually they had some conversations together, and through that he could sort of tell that they were maybe roughly in the same class, the same space. Her sort of levels of curiosity and intellect and all the sort of psychological attributes, they matched along those lines. So, you know, even though she maybe works somewhere that doesn't require a college degree, she has one. And she's the kind of person who would get a college degree.

Predisposed. Predisposed.

And then they sort of match along those lines, these sort of mating still holds, I think. Yeah, there's, there's so, so again, like, is this a white pill or a black pill? It could be a black pill because, you know, status is sticking, it almost doesn't matter what you do. But then on the other hand, it's a white pill in that, like, you know, even though we have all of these educational and occupational trends in the modern world, it doesn't actually, it may not actually change the sort of underlying social and romantic dynamics that have sort.

Of been with us for centuries. More stable.

Yeah.

Than we might think.

I think they're. Yeah, I think it might.

I mean, you're look at you as like the poster child for. What was it kids that grow up in. Is it single parent homes are like 10 times more likely to go to college than adopted kids? What was that? Oh, no.

So the stat is it was on foster kids specifically. So I did, you know, some of this research as I was writing, writing my book that'll be out next year. And then I wrote this essay that was in the Free Press a couple of years ago, which basically. So in the US kids who are raised in families in the bottom socioeconomic quintile, so the bottom 20%, essentially kids raised in poor families, roughly 11% of them graduate from college, which is pretty low because the average rate in the US is around 35%. So it's pretty low, 11% versus 35%. But the number or the percentage of foster kids in the US who graduate from college is 3%. And so in other words, a kid raised in a poor family is four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid. And so I used. This is sort of essentially to me, sort of evidence that instability and sort of disorderly environment is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to. It obviously has an effect, but it may be something that deserves more attention than we're giving it relative to sort of the material factors.

Did you dig into Melissa Carney's new one? Have you read that yet?

I just read it. I finished it a couple of weeks ago. Excellent book. Excellent book. Yeah. The two parent privilege, dude.

So I watched she's been on the show. Anyone that hasn't seen that can go back and listen to the episode I did with Melissa. She was great. But I mean, she is, you know, as straight down the line policy wonk, DC pilled as you're going to get, right? Like she's like the female Richard Reeves, you know, like she's just there to do help do policy and do the D.C. thing. And she's a statistician, demographer lady. Right. She's, I, I tried to push her on the episode and was like, so why is this occurring? Like, give me the implications here, Infer for me what you think is the underlying mechanism. And she was very reticent about trying to work out what's going on from a psychological perspective. And I thought, wow, that's really, that's a good signal that she's not prepared to get out over what she sees is her domain of expertise. Yeah, yeah, I have this, this is what I do. And she did it a little bit, but she didn't go too far. And I was like, that's a really good signal. But what I saw on the Internet before her book came out, tons and tons and tons of articles saying, you know, this is like hard right, Christian talking points being legitimated by cherry pick data. You haven't read the data, the book's not out yet.

Yeah, yeah.

And what I saw was her as someone as far as I could see that if you were to do political compass on her would probably be like just left of center. And again, very not prepared to say things that she didn't understand and didn't have data to back up and so on and so forth. But on the Internet, the only people that weren't lambasting her as being some sort of, you know, like bigot judgmental, that's telling people that come from single parent households that they shouldn't. And what, so you're saying that women should stay in an abusive relationship instead of, you know, allowing the themselves and their child to have a good stepparent and blah blah, blah, like just all straw men shithouse arguments. And I saw the exact path that many, many people are taking which is causing them to bend toward the right. Because you go, hang on a second, I've put this piece of work out which is relatively dispassionate, which is actually, it's the two parent privilege. This is a championing of how we can fix underprivileged kids, which is fundamentally a left wing phenomenon. Right. It's class. We're trying to fix the class. The only people that were accepting of her or weren't like accusing her of doing awful things were the people that were sent to right and further right.

Yeah.

So what you see is how somebody that has a left leaning predisposition perhaps or just a centrist disposition gets nudged by their treatment toward the right. We go, okay, well you guys, yeah, like if, if you're not going to accept me, I'LL happily like. And she. I wish that I'd noticed this before I spoke to her because I'd have loved to have asked her about this. But yeah, like, that's not. I, I can completely see how the tribalism of, of both sides and I'm sure that there's an equivalent dynamic on the right pushing people toward the left that I don't see. Yeah, but the tribalism of the left and the purity spiral of the left and it, it's rapidity at judging people to see bigotry where there may not be some. I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean in a different direction.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I saw a lot of that sort of the ad hominems online and a lot of the insults and derogatory comments that were directed at her. And I thought, yeah, they were completely unfair. The book, I mean, the other thing is like, the book is very dense, but it's also, you can read it in an afternoon. I mean, she presents the data in a beautiful way, a very sort of straightforward way that any sort of. Of educated and curious person can understand. And it seems like, yeah, most people just didn't even bother flipping through it and having a look because she caveats multiple times that this isn't a book about sort of judging people or about values. It really is about sort of looking just sort of from a dispassionate point of view. What did the data say about outcomes for kids in various sort of family arrangements? So, yeah, I thought that was so strange. I mean, yeah, and she does stick close to the data. I think generally speaking that's a good idea. When you're making arguments that are unpopular, that you should stick very closely to the data and not go too far ahead of your skis there just because you're going to be held to a higher standard. When you say something that's unpopular, there's that sort of can versus must distinction. Sort of a classic finding in psychology about how when people are predisposed to support a certain point of view, essentially they implicitly ask themselves, can I? And then they come across a piece of information that supports that point of view. They implicitly ask themselves, can I believe it? And generally speaking, the answer will be, yes, I can believe that. And when they encounter something that is at odds with that point of view, they implicitly ask themselves, must I believe it? And if they find a reason, if there are any flaws in that argument or any reason whatsoever why they can discount it, then they say, oh, I don't have to. Right.

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

Yeah.

So you're looking for a good barrister rather than an honest judge.

Yes. Right, right, right. Yeah. You want. You want. Well, you're looking for arguments. Of course, that's sort of, you know, the classic confirmation bias idea. You're looking for information, you're monitoring, and then you're sort of overlooking anything that might make you feel uncomfortable or that might call your beliefs into question. There was a really cool study, I want to say this was in the 90s, sort of along this vein. I mean, it's a neat example because it's sort of disconnected from politics. I think anyone can appreciate this. Which is essentially what these researchers did was they brought these participants into the lab and they told these participants, they showed them this jar and it was really just water, but they told him it was this sort of chemical solution, and if you drop a strip of water into it. So in one condition, they told the participants, you drop the strip of water into it and it doesn't change color, it just sort of remains the same white or whatever it was, then that means that you don't have this sort of rare, unique congenital disease. You know, you dip it in, leave it in for a few seconds, pull it out, stays the same, you're good to go. And so they brought some participants in and. And basically they found a participant would dip it in, didn't change color, they'd walk right out. In another condition, they told the participants, you dip the strip into the piece of paper, and if it changes color, then that means you're good to go. If it stays the same, that means you may potentially have this congenital illness. And in this case, what did the participants do? They dipped the strip into the water, waited, dipped it back in, waited, took another strip, dipped it back in, waited, and then they started to get nervous. And essentially they were going for that confirmation because what did they want to believe? They wanted to believe that they were healthy. And when they did not receive information that supported that, then they started to sort of, you know, shuffle through and try to find ways to confirm that belief.

We both came across the same research that shows that chads rather than incels are the extreme misogynists. Dude, I love this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I saw William retweet that one and of course he got on my radar.

Of course he does. Of course he does. Anything that's pro. Incel. Yeah. Men with higher levels of sex partners are more likely to hold extreme misogynist views, which contradicts the incel narrative. Extreme misogyny correlates with status seeking and dominance orientation, both of which also correlate with high levels of sex partners.

Yeah, I thought that was an absolutely fascinating study and it, it links up very nicely. You know, I, I, When I was in, in grad school, I read David Buss evolutionary psychology text book cover to cover. And one of the things he points out there is that there's not much if any research supporting what's referred to as the mate deprivation hypothesis. So the mate deprivation hypothesis is essentially that young men who are deprived of mates are more likely to develop these sort of misogynistic attitudes. They're more likely to coerce women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault. And essentially all the research that I've seen indicates almost the reverse of that and including the study here, which points in the same direction, which is that the men who are the most likely to commit sexual coercion or assault are also men who are the most likely to, to have consensual sex partners as well.

Wow.

And yeah, all of these things sort of come together and correlate with status seeking, dominance orientation, extroversion, the probably, I would imagine, narcissism as well, and maybe some of the other dark triad traits of being particularly attractive to women. And you know, this is. Now, you know, I'm more comfortable speculating than maybe get it out there.

You're not even part of the academy anymore.

Well, you know, I have a foot in. But I'm comfortable sort of making this, this is just a hypothesis, but I think that most, many, maybe most women would be pretty reluctant to actually be sort of alone in like, like be in a situation in, in, in. In which they could potentially be alone and assaulted by the sort of prototypical incel. Like, you know, the sort of lonely, unattractive, isolated, angry male warning flags. Right, exactly. Like they would know in advance, like, I don't need to be alone with this guy. There's something off about him. Again, the sort of prototypical. I'm not saying all incels are like that, but that sort of archetypal image of an incel. Whereas probably Just, just sort of, you know, I think this is this pretty intuitive that, that women would be more willing to sort of be alone and potentially be in a risky situation with a man who is attractive. Right. And so just through the sort of differentiating levels or different differing levels of exposure alone and exposure alone that, yeah, that that assault would be more likely to happen in one context than the other. And so I think that may partially explain some of those differences that if women were alone with actual incels as much as they're alone with, you know, status seeking, dominance orient orientated extroverts, that maybe those, the numbers would be different. But, but generally speaking, I think that finding is suggestive. And then in my own personal life, I mean when I think about the.

Guys, the men that you spend your time alone with.

Yeah, well, that I spent. Yeah, yeah. And that I feel at. Yeah but the guys that I know who are particularly, you know, at least numerically successful, I know people, what does success mean in this context? But just have had a lot of sex partners. They do tend to be a little bit more glib, a little bit less preoccupied with well, what does she think of me? Or you know, or, or, or, or sort of what traditional or conventional or, or hold sort of benevolent sexist attitudes. Right. It's usually, usually a little bit more, you know, I guess on the positive it may be jokey or playful but then on the other it can sort of dip into, you know, the example that I so, so I posted one of these studies online and sort of commented that, you know, I think this is easy to understand when you reverse the genders. You know, if you think about like, like a woman who spends a lot of time attracting men, I'm thinking about someone like, like a stripper for example. Like I'm sure they have extremely cynical attitudes about men. Right. Whereas women, like if you think about a woman who doesn't really, you know, maybe isn't very attractive or hasn't had a boyfriend or hasn't had that much experience around men, they probably have, have a little bit more sort of maybe slightly more optimistic views or at least less, less cynical views.

So Sadia Khan, psychology lady, she does like couples counseling and stuff. She gave me this really interesting answer to the question are hot girls more crazy? Right. So the classic question like finally Aristotle's got an answer that, and she said that the experience that hot girls have of most men jades their view of all men because the men that she spends her time around are unbelievably pliable. They cheat on their partners with her. They try to shower her with gifts. They say things that they think she wants to hear. They're duplicitous. So. So the reality distortion field of the beautiful woman causes all of the men, or many of the male interactions on average to group together, to clump together in a way which doesn't show men in a particularly good light.

Right. Yeah.

How fucking cool is that as an idea like the reality distortion field of the hot girl or something?

Yeah, that is. It reminds me of this interview I watched years ago of Chris Rock and he said that basically being. Well, well, I don't know if he said something along the lines of being an attractive woman is like being a celebrity or being a celebrity is like being an attractive woman. Where once you reach a certain level of fame or notoriety or recognition, that people react to you in a predictable way, in a way that. That is often obnoxious or, you know, try to give you free things or try to try to court you or, you know, they're looking for something from you. And yeah, that is. Yeah, where you're only seeing a sort of. You're only seeing sort of one version of that person, whereas everyone else might.

See another version and pre selecting for the only sorts of people who are prepared to up to the hot girl in the first place.

Yeah.

I saw this with strippers and I would imagine it may be the same with onlyfans girls as well. A lot of the strippers that I was friends with throughout my 20s when I was working in nightlife had very, very jaded views of men because they were seeing the stag on his bachelor party out in Newcastle, you know, trying to get a blowjob off one of the strippers that are in that.

Right.

Like men at their worst, selected for at their worst, around the women that are able to, you know, cajole or coerce or encourage them to do a thing that's a whatever and. Oh, that's how all men are. There's this really great segment on Rogan's show years and years ago, one of Tim Dillon's first appearances and Joe's. I think Tim's talking about how the LA comedy scene is very ruthless and Joe has just moved to Austin and is saying, ah, I don't know what you're talking about. Fantastic over there. Every time that I go into a room, everyone treats me really great.

Yeah.

And blah. And Tim cuts in, he goes, hold on one second. Like, you do know that you are Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Right. Like, do you like, you bend Reality around. There's this sphere that follows you where like, who the fuck's gonna treat you like shit?

Yeah, right.

Like the biggest podcaster in the world's just walked in and I spoke to Tucker Max about this over dinner a couple of months ago. It's so interesting. And I was talking about how I've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years. Status and renown and wealth and whatever has changed and there is a reason now to be nice, perhaps, or maybe there's not a reason to be nice. They don't even know it, but something happens. They've heard that's the guy with the podcast or whatever. So you just notice that the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way. Way. Maybe I'm just super like charismatic or whatever. I've changed my confidence. That totally could be it too. But my more like highly skeptical, cynical view of it is like, people want something or whatever. Anyway, and I was talking to Tucker about this and he said to become rich or famous as a man is to accept being a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. He said that women become objectified as soon as they become, you know, like womanly. You know, you're 13 years old and the boys in the class now start to see that you've got boobs and. And then you become like 17, 18, and the whole world objectifies you for a while because your value is immediate and upfront. Whereas, you know, this is a red pill takeaway, I guess that like women are born with value, men have to create it. And it is, unless you're Brad Pitt or, you know, somebody who is, is super good looking and has that upfront. You have to achieve some degree of self generated value in order for people to treat you and to objectify you. Right. Like no one's just objectifying the random dude in the street, but if the random dude in the street gets out of a Bugatti, maybe they are right. Oh, what's he got? Oh, dude, let me tell you. Let me ask you about. Blah, blah. Yeah, to become a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. So it was very interesting.

Yeah, yeah, There's a sort of a positive feedback loop that happens there too, I think with the Bugatti example. So you have this prestigious material good and then you step out of it and then suddenly you have increased social capital because people are drawn to you. But I think this happens even within just the realm of social capital itself. I mean, I'll just use this Personal example of I was walking through an airport with some friends and then. Yeah, it was recognized a couple of different times. So I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know. Like, oh, they kind of know that write and stuff, but they don't really. And then I got recognized and suddenly they became more interested in talking to me. Like, oh, what do you. Yeah, what exactly? Tell me more about it. And so I think it's like, you know, you get recognized once and then other people become interested and then suddenly you can't die. Yeah.

Did I ever tell you that story when I walked down Broadway with Peterson in Nashville? I don't think so. We went for dinner, it was about two years ago from now, and I went for dinner with him and there was that famous video of him dancing with his wife. And Ben Shapiro was there in Nashville just a few years ago.

Oh, I did see. I saw.

Yeah, it was the night after that. So he loved this bar and we were gonna go back to this bar and he didn't have any of his security with him, so it was me, Mikayla, Mikaela's now husband, and Jordan. And Mikaela's husband's like 6 foot 4 kind of dude. So, like, he was like. He's like a tall guy or whatever, but no security. And Jordan starts walking down Broadway, like the street in Nashville, right? It's where Kid Rock's bar is and Whiskey Row and all this stuff. And they, on a weekend, close it off. I think they close it off. Both ends. Maybe they don't. But anyway, it's. It's stacked. Someone notices Jordan Peterson and then goes over to, like, get a photo with him and shake his hand and, hello, how are you? And then other people notice that other people are standing talking to someone. So a queue forms to speak to Jordan Peterson. He's accumulating a tail of humans as he walked like a comet. Right. Walking down Nashville.

Comet.

Yeah. Honestly. And I. I remember thinking like, oh, my God. We were at the Young Delegates Dinner drinks thing last night at ARK here in London, and sure enough, there was a queue of people. Like, this is a conference of people selected for a very particular set of interests. And then we went to 150 person drinks thing, which is selected from within that group for people that were invited to go to this thing. And even within that selected group of a selected group group, the people cometail thing existed again. So. Yeah, and that's almost like a. Like a physical manifestation of what you're talking about that's going on Socially, right. People see. They don't see a physical cue, but they see, like a social cue.

Right?

Like a cue. And they go, oh, okay. Right.

And I would be curious. I mean, maybe in the. The example of the 150 or smaller group of selected people, they probably are familiar with Jordan, it sounds like. But in the example of him walking down. Is it Broadway, the street in Nashville, when that tale formed. What I would be curious to know is probably many of those people, maybe most of them did know who Jordan was. But what I'm curious about are the people who didn't know who he was but just saw the tail.

Let's get a.

Like, everyone's following that guy. I guess I'll get him a line like, I guess he's famous. Let's go check this out. And now their fault incident. You know, so what percentage of those people were familiar with him, too? You know, there are these classic studies from Milgram. So most people know Milgram through the obedience studies of, you know, he essentially tricked people into shocking and believing that they were injuring someone or perhaps killing them. But there were these other studies that Milgram did and other social psychologists. You know, this sort of classic work back in the day of, you know, he just have people on, like, a Manhattan street and just have, like four or five research assistants look up at the sky just like me, you, a couple other people just look up at the sky like this. And then gradually what happened is people would be walking by and they'd see, you know, four people looking at something, and they'd stop and look up too, like, what are they looking at? And then. And then this. Suddenly, this massive crowd would form of, like, suddenly you have 40 people looking up at the sky and no one knows what they're looking at. Right. Everyone's trying to figure out what those original four people. Right. So there is that sort of imitative quality that you know, which is. Which is, you know, it's adaptive, but it's also, you know, it can kind of misfire into these funny situations. Yeah.

Being moderate is a green flag. You see this new one about extremist views. William shared the graph of it.

I haven't seen this one, but let.

Me get your take on this. This is awesome. Researchers polled over A thousand registered US voters aged 18 to 34. A majority of both men and women consider far rightism and far leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. 76% of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a MAGA Republican to be a major turnoff. 64% of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. So that was high number of women. 76% for MAGA, 64% of men for communication communist. 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag.

Modern wisdom.

35. That wasn't on there. 35% of men, 41% of men said the same for a woman being into astrology.

Okay.

20% of women, 33% of men said red flag for they say Black Lives Matter. 14% of women, 53% of women for they refused to see the barbie move movie. 53 of women, 58 of women for they say there are only two genders. So more women concerned about the two genders thing than the Barbie movie. Interesting what that is. But yeah, just overall it seems like far right isn't far leftism. Being moderate is a green flag, basically like having. But that being said, how is saying that there are only two genders like an extreme position? I would have thought that that would have been the moderate position. Right, Like, I guess it depends. Yeah, but the bar stool's been turned upside down. But yeah, overall, when it comes to dating, it seems like a majority of both men and women consider far rightism and far leftism to be red flags in a potential partner.

What age group is this? Are these young?

18 to 34.

18 to 30. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean. Yeah, I mean, you've probably seen some of these data too about sort of the political divergence of young men and young women, which is really, I mean, it's really interesting because a lot of the press, the media will concentrate on, you know, the supposed right wing radicalization of young men, when actually most of the sort of political psychology survey data indicates the reverse. Where men are young men are slightly turning to the right, there's sort of a slight turn. Whereas for young women there's a sharp, like a sharp rise in young women identifying as left or far left. So it's actually the women who are being sort of radicalized or turning to a more extreme direction.

Yeah, but we don't mind about that one. We don't need to care about that.

Yeah, well, I mean, well, so I think like, in terms of like violence and so forth. Right. There's no, there's no young female syndrome. Or if there is one, it would be, it would manifest itself differently.

The female longhouse.

Yeah, the longhouse. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the sort of the Classic threats of terrorism and so forth. But yeah, that's interesting. I mean, so. So some of those, like. Yeah, the two genders, one. That's interesting. 58% of women, I found like the. Yeah, there's sort of a neat reversal there of like MAGA Republicans versus Communists, where most men seemingly okay with dating a MAGA identifying woman, but women are more okay with dating a communist identifying man.

But here's the thing, right, that it's not apples for apples, right? Like 35% of men said that. That a woman listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. But a man listening to Joe Rogan and a woman listening to Joe Rogan is not the same thing.

That's true too. Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like there was one about owning a gun that like some quite high percentage of women said that owning a gun was a red flag.

Right.

In America.

Yeah.

But a woman owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun.

Right? Yeah.

And. And the same for listening to Joe Rogan and so on and so forth. So it makes for very interesting reading. But I actually think that if a woman does listen to Joe Rogan, there'll be some non zero number of men in there that are like, that's a boys show. Maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's gonna try and arm wrestle me in bed or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard this just speaking with young guys that they are to some extent sort of bothered by these gender differences in politics and how more and more young women are sort of identifying in a more sort of sharp left wing direction. But then they also sort of lament that, you know, a lot of young because you have to be, you know, to some degree psychologically peculiar if you're a young woman who is a sort of right wing person or identifying openly as a conservative because you're sort of going against the grain, right. Like you are an outlier in that sense. And that often sort of coincides with other things that young men are kind of annoyed by. So it's like it's the astrology one, dude.

41% of men said that a woman being into astrology is a race.

That one was confusing to me. I think, like, that's fine. You know, that's like a very, to me, like a feminine way of thinking, you know, Like, I think it's, you.

Know, I can't remember who was it that said, was it. They said the big five is astrology for men.

I've heard that for evolutionary psychology.

Too Evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology.

It's astrology for men.

Yeah, but I mean, well, that's fine, but they're like, you know, a lot of, well, a lot of men. But. But at least in my experience, more women are interested in the mbti, the Myers Briggs and that is, I mean it's, you know, it's not, it's not completely astrology, but it's more like astrology than the big five.

I. Yeah, it is. I had Spencer Greenberg on the show. Do you know Spencer? Really interesting dude.

I think I've seen some of his.

I got intro to him from William McCaskill. Just super interesting guy, mathematician, but just does science. Like I don't know what he's funded by maybe himself but. And he did a huge breakdown of like predictive power of Myers Briggs versus Big five versus other stuff versus other stuff. And Myers Briggs is like, I think it's like 18% accurate basically on actual predisposition of things. But yeah, it is. That's astrology for astrology, I think. What was that study about higher female status and gender equality being associated with the lower female relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that?

Yeah, this was a study I came across, I think it was published in 2015, which, yeah, essentially found that higher levels of wealth and sociopolitical equality among the genders is associated with lower levels of relative happiness for women compared to men. And the researchers speculate this may have something to do with, with increasing levels of employment, the pressure to obtain higher levels of education among women in particular, and that this is actually sort of dampening women's levels of happiness. And to me this, this connects with another. And this one is, you know, this, this classic finding of the, the paradox of declining female happiness, which is essentially that since the 1970s, women's happiness relative to men's has declined, mind. So to be clear, everyone's. So relative to the 1970s, everyone is less happy today compared to the 1970s. But in the 1970s men were actually happier. No, no, no, sorry. Women were happier than men. So women had higher rates of happiness relative to men in the 1970s, and people generally were happier overall. Fast forward to the present and things have reversed. Men are now happier than women, although overall people report being less happy. And so yeah, that study that I pointed out, that was an interesting one to me because, yeah, I mean the message that a lot of young people receive today is what are the keys to happiness? You work hard, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a high paying job, you Sort of follow that cookie cutter track. And what is the purpose of all of this? And I suppose most people say, well, they want to be happy. And so you go through the education and employment route, maybe you go to law school after college, you sort of get the credentials, you go through, through whatever the fellowships and all these different programs. And at the end of the tunnel, you're hoping that you'll be happy. And actually for both men and women, doesn't seem to be working. But for women in particular, because they've had the sharpest decline. Right. Because, remember, they were happier and now they're crossed over. Exactly. And so their diminishing happiness has actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men. The men's happiness being sort of higher than women's is interesting as well. And I wonder if that is almost sort of the, the reversal in some ways. Of course they're less happy overall, but why would they be happier than women? And I wonder if that's to some degree because they don't feel as much pressure anymore. The sort of, you know, back in the day, men were sort of pressured more to be earners and providers and so on. And there was a sort of a economic pressure associated with that. And now that you don't really have to worry, I mean, we're seeing young men are sort of dropping out of college, they're dropping out of higher education and employment. And at least in the short term, depending on how the survey questions are presented, if it's just, you know, how do you feel generally or how do you feel today or what have you. I think a lot of you guys might be like, yeah, I don't, I don't. I didn't have to go to class.

Given the fact that men were previously less happy and relative to then are now less happy also. It's just that really the, the change, the big change here is the women.

Right.

That's fled. I wonder whether, like, the male dissatisfaction with the gainful employment status seeking, providing thing was just baked in already. It's like, oh, okay, like, we, we, we already knew this. Like, granddad was spitting sawdust and he was unhappy and dad was spitting sawdust and he was unhappy and I'm spitting sawdust and I'm unhappy, but there is a little bit less pressure to do this. Was that Candice Blake that did that.

One, the, the Female Happiness Study? I don't recall the, the authors of that one, but it was the Journal of Happiness Studies.

She definitely taught me about either that or something similar, which is, yeah, that you Know, the gender pay gap positively predicts relationship satisfaction.

Oh, I have seen that. Yeah. Yeah, I think, Yeah, I read that paper. Which is, you know, it's. And it's, it's funny because. So it predicts relationship satisfaction if men earn more than women. And then it also, there was, there was a reversal of this. I don't know if Candice was a study on this or different authors, but they found that when women in marriages earn more than men, that this predicts higher rates of arguments of verbal aggression on behalf of the woman, of just general relationship. Relationship.

Higher rates of domestic violence, infidelity on.

The part of the man. Yeah, as well. Men are more likely to cheat when.

They earn less.50% increase in the use of erectile dysfunction medication when a woman's the primary breadwinner.

I've heard that too. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's pretty. It's pretty. I mean, it's grim. But then, you know, I, you know, here's an anecdote. I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation. It was, you know, it was me. And then, like this group of women, these female students, and one of them, you know, she was a pretty hardcore feminist, and she said that it should be 50, 50, like 50% of women should be working. You know, 50% of women, like, if it's the case that 50% of women are working, 50% of women should be at home. And same for men, you know, if 50% of men should be working, 50% of men at home. And, and then, you know, so then I was basically just sitting back, like I was not going to get entangled in this. But then some of the other women were saying, you know, okay, so, you know, but like, would you actually be like, okay with that? Like, your husband's staying at home? I don't really know. Whatever. And then, and then finally I decided to jump in and I said, like, you know, speaking to this young feminist woman, I said, yeah, so I know that you plan on going to law school. You're very smart, you're going to be very successful. Like, how would you feel like your husband is at home, I don't know, changing diapers and taking care of the kids. And you're at, you know, you're at a prestigious law firm with a bunch of high powered attorneys. Like, how would that, you know, you think you'd be happy in that situation? And her response was, wow, I think I just felt a tingle when you said high powered attorneys. I got really excited when you said that. That was basically her reaction. Wow. And it was half joking but half serious. And all of the women laughed. I laughed too. It was a good response. But I think that there was an element of seriousness there that when she's sort of fantasizing about. Yeah. Rubbing shoulders with all of these high powered, successful at the top of their game and then you got your husband at home. And I think it's just. It's different. Right? Like it's. Men and women are different. We're attracted to different things.

Yeah. It's interesting to think about the potential pressure that may come along for the ride with. You are supposed to be gainfully employed and have your education and be able to sort this sort of stuff. That's something I the not just the going to work, not just the getting up early and the hours of sleep and all the rest of it, but kind of the psychosocial interpretation of being a person that is status striving and playing the game of the water cooler and all of that stuff kind of doesn't really factor into the discussion about, you know, is it in conscientiousness? Is it a part of your hard work? Like your grit and your resilience and your desire for all the. This stuff. But there's just a, like a soup that comes along for the ride as a part of being a person who's playing the employment and the education game and having to go out for drinks on an evening and schmooze up to the boss and all that sort of stuff. And no one really talks about that because that's part of work. Right. Like that comes along to the ride is a part of work, but no one ever talks about that. And it's like, okay, like it's the classic do you want to be a CEO woman? Do you really want to do 80 hour weeks and do you really want to do that? And it's like, do you really want to play this game for 20 years of sucking up to people and. And having to do the social network manipulation and deftness and all this stuff. That being said, given women's sort of predisposition and ability to be a little bit more like subtle with. With their cues and their emotional intelligence and stuff, I actually imagine that on that side they might be. Be predisposed to it. Well, but as it seems their wellbeing may suffer more than men's despite their capacity for doing it being as good or greater.

Yeah. I mean, I almost wonder if it's sort of the reversal of what we were speaking about earlier about young men. Who don't want to do hard things, but then once they do them, they find that they enjoy them and they appreciate it. Whereas in this context, maybe some women think, oh, if I follow this track and get a lot of education and go to, it'll make me happy. And then once you get there, it's actually not, it's not as satisfying as you would have hoped. It's actually worse than you expected. And I think a lot of actually, I know people like this as I'm speaking and thinking about it. I know a lot of people who, they think that once they get there, they have this certain image of what it's going to be like. And actually, yeah, working 70, 80, 90 hours a week and even they are doing well financially, they are making money, they are buying all of the material goods that they thought they wanted, wearing amazing clothes, nice apartment in the right parts of the city and so on, on. But they just don't have time to enjoy it because they're always on the clock, non stop working weekends, no time to appreciate. But I think there is an element of the sort of social signaling where almost at some point the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and their job and how prestigious it is.

I was teaching you last night about my theory of surplus Mate Valley you. So Chris Bumstead, Mr. Olympia classic physique champion three or four times, comes on the podcast and tells this story about how he cries on the bathroom floor a few weeks before he's about to win the Mr. Olympia because he's super stressed with all stuff going on in his life and the pressure of having to win and all the rest of it. And his like girlfriend sort of holds this dude that's like 260 pounds, presumably just holds the top of his head in his arm, in her arms and says like it's okay and blah, blah, blah, blah. But this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the Gigachad meme, right? Like he is the dude that is over the Peaky Blinders quote. Like the Killian Murphy quote from Peaky Blinders as he speaks over the top. And it's just Chris Bumstead just looking like mean and stoic, like he's the Sigma male meme that's been used on TikTok, right? Like he's Mr. Sigma male. And I brought up to him this kind of odd irony that the guy that is the face of the Sigma male meme, the stoic, you know, emotionless, just grit and grind and go through it thing was heavily dependent on his girlfriend in order to be able to go and achieve the next part of his, you know, trajectory, right? And one of the things that interestingly got brought up in the comments was, was well yeah, he can do that because he is Mr. Olympia. And it got me thinking about surplus mate value. So if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value not to say that Chris is. Chris's Mrs. Is like a smoke show, super smart. I'm pretty sure she went to like, like multiple college degrees plus like world fitness competitor herself in her own rights. But it's like there is just a ladder that you can continue to climb if you go and be world champion in anything. And basically that Chris had so much surplus mate value in his relationship that he could get away with withdrawing from this bank account. He's allowed to cry. But if the, if you're not the world champion, right, like maybe the guy that comes 20th, maybe he's unable to do that. And if he, if he did cry on the floor, that would dip him below and the girlfriend would see him for the vulnerable cuck that he is and leave believe. But yeah, just kind of an unfalsifiable.

Well, I mean this seems like an illustration of countersignaling essentially, right? I mean the whole idea of countersignaling is like once you reach a certain point in a status domain, you can actually behave the same way as someone very low on the status domain would behave and it actually increases your status even more. And so example I like to use is a classic work from Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues about self deprecating humans humor that if you're a very high status person and you're holding a meeting or you're just in a social setting and you make fun of yourself a little bit, people actually, it ingratiates you, it sort of increases their admiration of you that, oh, he's just a humble guy, he's making fun of himself. But if you're a low man on the totem pole and you start making self deprecating jokes, people don't want to be around you. They're like, oh, who's this, you know, this guy who doesn't like himself very much? Or it's just, it just, it hits people the wrong way. And then yeah, our mutual friend Rory Sutherland likes to use the riding the bicycle on the way to work example, which we mentioned this last night too, about how if the guy who works at Pizza Hut rides his bike to work, it's because he can't afford a car. But if the CEO rides the bike to work, it's because he cares about his health or he cares about the environment, or he's just a conscientious guy and it makes us like him more that he's riding his bike. He doesn't have to drive the fancy car and makes us like him even more. And I think, yeah, there's something there about that sort of the counter signaling element here. And I think you can see it in a lot of different walks of life, life. Just like how much self promotion people do. There was a classic paper called Too Good for School, one of the early papers on the counter signaling sort of research area. And this was about. So this was, I want to say in the early 2000s where they asked or what they did was they gathered syllabi from college professors and found the syllabus.

Is that what, the plural of syllabus?

The plural of syllabus, Dear God.

Okay.

And so they gathered these from various institutions and rank ordered them and essentially found that the more prestigious the institution, the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus. So if you're at some fancy Ivy League school they would just say I am whatever Bob Smith. But if you're sort of mid tier or lower down, it's Dr. So and so or professor so and so whatever. Yeah, all the degrees, everything thing. And then they also called the. So this was back when people still had answering machines and so they called the offices of these professors and found that this is Dr. Rob Henderson, PhD, MSc, can tab, so on. And so whereas at, at the higher ranked universities. Right. So it's exactly the same. This is Bob. Yeah, yeah, they say hey yeah, yeah Bob, call me later, whatever. Whereas yeah, the lower tier, it's. Yeah, Dr. So and so, you know, this office of this department and just all of their credentials and I think we're now seeing this to some degree in like the social media space now or in how much self promotion people do. If you're an established author you can maybe make one or two announcements, but if you're still sort of struggling and still trying to make it, you have to do a lot more self promotion. But there's a reversal of this where if you. So there was another paper, it was something like when disclosing good news goes wrong, something along these lines where if you're a very high status person doing very well in your life and you do a lot of self promo or if you do a lot of sort of counter signaling, people don't like it. And so an example that I've given is a first time author. If your book does very well and you write this long post on social media, I want to thank all of you for following me on this journey, blah, blah, blah. But if a super famous, well established author does the same thing, it comes across as a little bit gauche, as a little bit like, we already knew you were gonna do well, like you don't have to play this like mock humility.

So I've thought about this from a like a storytelling perspective, especially over the last six years that going back and talking about when I ruptured my Achilles and set up a special kind of stand so that I could do it with my foot elevated in a boot.

I remember those days. I'm pretty sure you were, we had the FaceTime and I'm like, is that your. Yeah, yeah.

Not attached to my, the rest of my leg. That, that's, that's kind of cool to, to track that journey. So you know, for the people that are on any kind of trajectory with whether it be content creation or a business or something like that, I think that there's an awful lot of value of saying the things as they happen, of kind of showing the shit times. One of Alex Hormozi's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the shit times more because he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he lives in this nice penthouse and he can retrospectively tell people about the times, but it's not the same as showing them. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah.

And when you get presuming that all of your plans go well and you end up in the place that you want to end up in when you get there, it's going to be way more difficult for you to try and tell people about the non ivory tower that you used to live in.

Yeah.

So I think that tracking, tracking your journey as best you can and you know, getting the posts out there or writing about the times that have been rough or things like that, writing about the challenges, not only is it, I think a useful tool for yourself to remind yourself to go back and read or watch or whatever and see, oh, I went through a period that I had to be resilient. That means that if I face a similar challenge in future, I can also be resilient, but also it's a good like way marker in the ground of like here, here I was. This is kind of evidence skin in the game of how shit life has been, at least at some points.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Yeah, I mean, yeah, I like, I like that example. And if you especially like, I've seen these cases of people who are very successful and they, they don't really talk about the struggle until they're already very successful. And then once they start talking about the journey, people don't really take it as seriously as like, well, why are we just now hearing about this? Or why haven't you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this. Or are you just sort of whatever, like embellishing this to make the journey more interesting and yeah, I think there is value to sort of tracking it along the way and to. Yeah. To sort of reflect and I think it's also just like an inspiring message too to other people who are also struggling very early in their careers or in their lives.

I think your book's going to do this. I'm really super excited. I'm aware that it wasn't supposed to be a like, you know, you too dispossessed human can become the go through the US Air Force and Yale and you know, all that stuff. But I, I really think, you know, like reading it, reading early versions of the, of the manuscript, I was like, hell, like this is, you know, it's kind of like the anti black pill message. Like the guy who kept on just getting kicked in the face by life ends up kind of succeeding at the end of it. I'm super excited for it to come out.

Yeah. That wasn't the intention, but I have heard similar sort of feedback. A friend of mine who joined the Navy and he had just gotten out of basic training and he was still eating shit sort of early in his military career. And yeah, he read an early manuscript and he was like, yeah, this was great. This is exactly what I needed in this moment because I was just feeling so awful and realizing, God, just put one foot in front of the other, just keep trying, keep taking shots and. And yeah, it'll hopefully work out as long as you sort of have your mindset right and your priorities in order. Yeah, man.

Can people pre order that yet?

It's up. So. Yeah, I mean we can talk about it. It's fine.

Oh, you're coming back on. You're coming back on for the book. So don't.

We will do it. It's up for pre order. I'll do.

Everyone needs to go and pre order Rob's book right now. I want to shove this down the throat of the culture.

Thanks, man. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah. And it has a bit of both. I Think there's something for everyone. I mean, there's a lot of, of sort of first person narrative driven stuff, but then there's also sort of sociological analysis and a lot of sort of. There's stuff on status, on how we evaluate other people and those kinds of things sort of work their way in. Especially in the later chapters of the book. I do this thing where I sort of write each chapter from the perspective of myself at that age. But yeah, as I sort of enter adulthood and become a sort of more curious and reflective person, you can sort of see the way that my mind, I guess, sort of develops in the way I start to think about things. So. So yeah, man, yeah, I'm excited for it too.

And yeah, I'm pumped for it to come out. And the cover's cool. It's you as a kid riding a bike down the street. So you taught me about this Baumeister idea about why ovulation might be concealed in women. And I've got a counter like bullshit hypothesis as well. So what's that idea that you learned from Baumeister about ovulation?

Right, so this was a chapter, it was a speculative chapter from Roy Baumeister, this eminent psychologist, where essentially the idea here is that, so women have concealed ovulation. You can't necessarily tell when they're ovulating the way that you very visibly can with other great apes, with chimpanzees and so forth. And so the speculative idea is that a lot of evolutionary researchers have suggested that this is maybe concealed ovulation is to conceal from men. Men. Right. Like, so that men don't necessarily know when the woman's ovulating or whether to sort of reduce the risk of sexual coercion or to sort of obscure paternity, uncertainty or all of those kinds of things. Whereas this speculative chapter posits that it's actually to conceal ovulation from themselves so that women don't know. Because back, you know, you know, this is vastly oversimplifying, but, but back when women started to be, or human beings in general started to become sort of self reflective and introspective and fully conscious and women could suddenly tell, oh, when, when I'm ovulating, I'm more likely to get pregnant, they could visibly see it, then they would be less likely to have sex and, and in order to, to essentially sidestep the burdens of pregnancy because pregnancy was extremely risky and you.

Would become aware of, you would, as a woman, you become aware of your own menstrual cycles and divide avoid particular periods appropriately.

And so the idea here is that eventually only the women who had concealed ovulation were the ones to reproduce. And then gradually, over time, all women had obscured ovulation. And this was essentially a way to sort of prevent women from sidestepping their own possibility of pregnancy. And then. Yeah, and some of those excerpts that I sent you. There was a nice line from, from Leslie Newsom in this book that just came out a couple of years ago called the Story of Us, which is a nice sort of sweeping, updated overview of human evolution. And essentially what she writes, she and her co author, they write that historically there may have been women who avoided the burdens of pregnancy, but those women are not our ancestors. It was the women who did undergo this very difficult, challenging and dangerous experience. And those were the ones. So I thought those two findings neatly dovetailed. But I'm curious to hear what's your sort of.

I'm pretty sure that it was Roy that taught me about this one as well. No, it might. It might have been Candice Blake that other women are. If a woman, while she's ovulating or about to ovulate, is put under intense social and physical stress, it can cause the ovulation to misfire. So women who are under real significant stress, it messes up their menstrual cycle. But many women that are listening to this may know that the menstrual cycle kind of, if they're super stressed at work or they're studying for exams or whatever, like, the stuff gets squirrely, right? Like, guys might struggle to get an erection. If they're super stressed, women might. Their menstrual cycle can go all over. And one of the arguments is that concealed ovulation stops other women in your tribe from fucking with you while they know that you're potentially fertile.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, so I think like that. So these hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

They all work together. The pair bonding thing, like, if you don't know when you're ovulating, if you don't know when you're fertile, it means you need to have sex more frequently with your partner, which increases the pair bond, which actually means that husband is going to stick around or that father is going to stick around with woman in order to be able to raise child.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that. Yeah, so. So. And it may require all of those different external phenomena to produce that outcome. Right. Like one of those alone might not be enough. Where. If it had only been the concealing ovulation from Themselves, maybe we would still have some percentage of women who were visibly ovulating and others who aren't. But it may require all of those different trends working together to produce the situation in which women are no longer sort of visible when they're. Or the ovulation is no longer visible among women. And so, yeah, I mean, this is, I think, yeah, this is sort of often this obstacle people kind of run into or this trap that we think, like it can only be one or the other. But, yeah, I don't think this is necessary.

Many, many, many things, right?

I mean, evolution is complicated and intricate and so many things are going on.

I think concealed ovulation, given that it's super rare in the animal kingdom, I think as well. So, yeah, concealed ovulation is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of. It doesn't matter which of these. These hypotheses are correct. There are so many benefits, right? From an evolutionary perspective. Just trigger all of these different things. Take 10% of them. You're like, it's a pretty good deal. That's pretty. Works pretty well. What's that Solomon's paradox that you were teaching me about? What's that?

Yeah, so Solomon's paradox is. So it's a finding in psychology, but it's named after the biblical King Solomon, who had a reputation for being the wise king. And there was this adage that arose that if you have any issues, you should ask King Solomon. And famously, most people know the King Solomon story of the two women who claimed that they were the mother of the baby. And then he kind of sneakily said, okay, well, we're just going to cut the baby in half. And he knew that if we. He knew that if he did this, that the actual mother would step forth and say, the other woman can have it. And that's how he. So that's how he sort of of resolve this issue. But it's a paradox. Or they assigned this label the Solomon paradox, because King Solomon himself in his personal life was actually not very wise. So he was wise for other people. But in his personal life, he made a lot of mistakes as a king. He was not a particularly good father to his son, and his son actually grew up to be a tyrant and actually a very bad king because he had sort of mismanaged his own parents parenting. And so in psychology, the Solomon's paradox is that that people can be very wise for other people's social problems, but are often less than wise for their own. And so there was a recent meta Analysis that just came out, various studies looking at the Solomon paradox. Are people sort of wiser when reasoning about. So they bring people in, people who had recently gone through a breakup, for example, and sort of ask them, well, what do you plan to do? And so on and so forth. And then they would bring in other people, either strangers or the participants, friends or people, you know, peers of theirs, and say, well, what do you think this person should do in that situation? And found. And they found various ways to sort of measure this, of how to sort of measure wise decision making, and found that, you know, that social distance actually helps. It's the peer or the stranger who can say, okay, so this person has just been betrayed by their friend, or they're just going through a breakup, or they're having some difficulty in their social lives. Well, here's probably the best way to go. And the idea here seems to be, yeah, when you're sort of emotionally entangled, it's hard to sort of act rationally. It's hard to act in a way that will benefit both you and maybe the other party as well. And so as I was reading this, I think it's a really interesting finding in and of itself. But then I also wonder. So I'll actually give an example of this. So there was an interesting study on economic games. And so there's this game called the ultimatum game in behavioral economics. And the simple version of the game is that. So imagine you and I are playing the ultimatum game, and the researcher gives me $10 and says, you can give some amount to Chris, and if he accepts the amount, then both of you walk away with the money. And so I'm under this. I have to deliberate and think, okay, so how much do I have to offer Chris of my 10? You know, I have 10, so, you know, I have 10. How much do I have to offer you to say that was a fair deal and we both walk away? And what the researchers find consistently is you have to offer at least 30%.

I would have said 30%. That felt about right.

Yeah. And same. Yeah. When I first went, oh, 30, yeah, that sounds fair. Any more it would feel unrealistic, but any less would feel unfair. And so that's what they consistently find, is around 30%. But they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else. So it's economically irrational to take anything, to decline any amount greater than zero. Essentially, you should take anything. Right. Because one is better than zero. So what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the ultimatum game. So I'm playing for a friend, whatever, or you're playing on behalf of a friend that people will accept any amount greater than zero because they can step back and not get. So, okay, well, is it fair? Is it not fair? It's okay. So my friend either walks away with nothing, or they walk away with $1 or $2 or whatever it happens to be. And so I found that finding the Solomon's Paradox interesting, because I wonder if there's something, if this can be applied more broadly to what's going on with young people. You've seen some of these data about young people having fewer friends, fewer social contacts, less likely to be in relationships, less time in actual physical social spaces. And the Solomons paradox indicates that it's actually helpful to have social contacts and to have friends to talk about, walk your problems through with. So if I'm having an issue and I've done this before, I'm like someone. I'm thinking about making a decision in my career or something. I'll call you. I'll call someone and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? And that can sort of help me to contextualize. And you'll see things that I don't see and so forth. But if you're a young person and you don't have many people around you, so you're already unhappy because you don't have very many friends, but then without the friends and people you can communicate with to talk your problems through with, if in your life, whether it's in your career or other social domains, romantic relationships and so forth, you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions. And so there's this sort of negative feedback cycle that may be fewer people.

To show you your blind spots.

Exactly. And to sort of list out the options that you could take that you aren't seeing, or list out the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the decision that you're leaning towards. And so, yeah, over time, this may actually be exacerbating. It's not just about loneliness. It's also about the sort of Solomon's Paradox and making more unwise decisions in your life.

Right? Yeah. This sort of recursive, isolationist decision making, which is suboptimal compared with if you were. So, not only would you have the support network, I would feel better. But on top of that, I would also be making better decisions which downstream from that would lead me to have a better life, presumably including maybe a better life where I have More friends around me.

Yeah. Chris, did you ever watch this show, who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I watched a. I watched a couple of seasons of, like, the new one. This was during the lockdown.

A couple of seasons?

A couple, yeah. Lockdown bad.

You know, I gotta do something. Is that a World of Warcraft?

Well, it was playing in the background, right. So I put on, you know, because I used to watch the show as a kid, I, like, put on the back. It was almost like a comfort thing, you know, lockdown. And one thing that I noticed was, I don't know, like, they changed. You know, they used to have these lifelines. One of the lifelines in this, like, updated version or the. Whatever, the COVID lockdown version was that they would bring their smart friend along, and that was a lifeline. Like, they'd bring their smart friend. They'd be sitting in the back, and if they wanted to use a lifeline, they'd turn around and ask their smart friends.

Phone A friend was wanting to be.

I wonder if they did that because of, like, Google or something, you know? So if you phone a friend, the friend can just look it up online. But now if they have it right behind them, they can't look up online what the answer is. And I was watching this and I thought to myself, like, yeah, if you. Like, if you don't have any friends, you know what I mean? What do you do? Who do you bring along? And I think you can sort of apply. Apply that to your life more broadly. Like, it's, you know, you're in the who Wants to Be a Millionaire game. You bring your smart friend along, but, you know, life isn't who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But life is a series of making difficult decisions. And if you can't phone a friend and say, hey, what do you think? Like, the game becomes harder for you.

And also if you do get accepted to who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Yeah.

You're not going to have the friend to bring along with you specifically for that situation.

Right. As well, you're missing out potentially on a million dollars.

That's a million dollars that you could have had. Yeah, I. I think there's definitely something sort of recursive going on here.

And.

It'S like the. That inner citadel thing that you taught me about, which I just can't unsee. That Isaiah Berlin idea of, if you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. You retreat from the fateful ills of the world into this inner citadel. Like, if you struggle to lose weight, just declare that weight has no bearing on health and that, you know, like, body size doesn't impact attractiveness. Or if you struggle to hold down a job, say that all jobs are for suckers and turn to a life of crime. Or if you struggle to make relationships work, say, you know, monogamy is ancestrally unwise and I'm going to become a polyamorous, like, polycule type person. And I do think that there's an equivalent here that like, black pill sigma male cope. And I don't think that there's an equivalent for women. Right. There's not an isolationist, like, retreat from the world equivalent for women, which I guess suggests that the social networks tend to be a little bit more stiff, sticky than men's.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Dunbar wrote this book on psychology of friendship and that was one of the points that he made, that women are sort of better at staying in touch, reaching out and organizing gatherings. And it's. What is it? The. I don't know if he uses this term, but it's sort of face to face versus shoulder to shoulder. That when men have friends, do things.

Together, can't fucking unsee it.

Yeah.

I've spoken about this on the show before, but for the people that haven't heard it, next time that you're at a party or any sort of gathering, look at the angle of defeat of women talking to women and of men talking to men. Women will talk to women 180 degrees. They'll be face to face, whereas men, the average is 120°. So it's like blading, slight angle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this shows up. Once you see that, you can't not see it. And it's a rule that works across so many different things. The men's sheds initially initiative in Australia. Did you see that?

I had not seen this.

They men. It was an initiative by the Australian government, I think, to try and improve men's mental health. They realized that getting men to sit down in a room and talk like this about their problems didn't work. So what they did is they built sheds that men came to and then the men would bring like, I've got this knackered lawnmower and everyone needs to help fix it. So how are men talking? They're talking whilst their front brain is focused on this thing that's in front and they are shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. They're literally in a circle and everyone's like, right, you've got the good drill and he's got the good spanner and I've got the hammer or whatever and let's fix this thing. And dude, me and the missus were not getting on well. And before you know it, it's a therapy session mediated by this fucking lawnmower.

Right? They have the pretense of repairing lawnmower, but they need that, right? They're required. If you just put them in the shed with no lawnmower and they're just standing in a circle, it's. Yeah, that's. Yeah. So yeah, then that was the face to face versus shoulder to shoulder about. Yeah. Women will talk and communicate with one another, whereas men will sort of. They need a reason to sort of do an activity together and then communicate and discuss. The best.

Some of my best conversations are during pickleball warmups.

Oh yeah.

Just dinking. Just gently dinking a ball. Everyone know. All of the pickleball pros out there know that you start off very close to the net and you play the game within the kitchen. And then you step back a little bit and you pay sort of like a mid level game. And then you step to the baseline. And sometimes that warmup when you're close to the net and in the mid level game will go for 30, 45 minutes with me. And one of. Especially if it's singles, less time if it's doubles, but if it's singles, it's just you and your friend. He's like, dude, work's getting a bit stressful or this thing's happening and before you know it you're deep in conversation. In fact, we did this once at South Austin Recreation center, me and my friend, and there was some guy that was sat on the side and my friend that I was talking to is a podcaster as well. And I think he was going through some. Going through some. Something to do with his life. And we were just talking and talking and talking and I realized that we must have been doing this for like at least 20 minutes. And it's kind of bad form to hog a court for a while, especially if you're not playing a game. Because when you're playing a game and somebody wins, the winner stays on and the next person cycles in. And I realized that this dude had been sat. Maybe sort of like 50s kind of guy, like very typical pickleball kind of player. And I realized that we'd been just warming up for like 20 minutes, getting bad form because the game will maybe take around about 10 minutes or so, something like that. And I think I turned and said Something like, oh, dude, I didn't realize that you were waiting. I was kind of engrossed in this warmup and we'll get a game going. And he's like, to be honest, that was a really compelling conversation. And I remember thinking, wow, the male requirement for distraction from emotional communication is so strong that I can play like a full warmup for a spot sport.

Yeah.

Whilst doing it.

Yeah. You sort of lose track of, of time, I think. Yeah. I mean the, the, the sex differences in friendship, I think are there's, there's another sort of pattern that occurs where in breakups, men don't only lose their, their female partner, but a lot of their friends too, because it's the woman who's sort of maintaining the. Or they'll sort of nudge the man to say like, hey, have you talked to your friend in a while? You should shoot him a text or see how he's doing or what have you. And, and it's hard to keep that up for a lot of men because it doesn't come naturally for them the way that it does for women. And they sort of monitor and there's obviously sort of evolutionarily adaptive reasons for this, that men are more expendable and sort of less preoccupied with staying plugged in and survival and all those kinds of things. Whereas women are pretty good at sort of monitoring.

They need to tune up the alloparenting pool.

Exactly.

Same way that women do.

Yeah. And so, yeah, we see this. A lot of the young people in general report having true friends, but this is especially pronounced for a lot of young men, which is. Yeah, I mean, I've seen you and I've seen some others sort of recommend. You know, there are a lot of ways, like if you're, if you're a woman and you want to make friends, there's one way to do it. But I think if you're a man, like getting involved in sports or something, some kind of activity, like that's the way to do it. It's not just like, oh, I'm going to try to make this person into my friend. It's like, hey, do you want to like go play catch or do you want to go play pickleball?

Think about some of your friends. Friends, you know, we've got mutual friends that you've been to university with, to studies with. And if you're both a part of a project for a brief amount of time, the male friendship deepens so rapidly.

Yeah.

You know, my ex. Business partner that I ran nightlife stuff with for 15 years, decade and a half. Groomsman at his wedding, you know, like phenomenal guy. Very formative for me. Sat next to him in my first ever seminar and became a business partner there. And then, then. And we're still great friends. I catch up with them every time I go back to the uk. But I'd be lying if I said the depth of our friendship hadn't diminished because we were no longer working toward a shared mission. Whereas editor Dean Per, he's a perfect example. So we brought on a new guy, our YouTube strategist. And since he's got brought in, the pace of friendship deepening has. It's just been so rapid because you, you're not just bonding with somebody that you like. Like, you selected them to work for the company because you would get on with them and you think that you share your values, but because I spend five hours a week grappling with titles and thumbnails and what, who, who, who should we book on the show? And how am I going to sort this schedule out? And then he'll travel and we'll sleep in some shitty hotel and you know, all of that moving toward a shared mission, I think for men just engenders. It's more than. It's like brothers, more than friends.

Yeah, right.

You know, it's almost like faux warfare in a, in a regard.

Solving a problem together. Right. You're solving a problem.

Everyone needs a lawnmower.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone needs a lawnmower to fix.

Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's well put. I mean, it's. Yeah. Having, having that shirt. And so, so one thing I'd be curious about with, with men and women, because I know that there's, there's various studies sort of indicating that there is this sort of turnover rate, this sort of friendship half life where supposedly, I mean, I've seen different, different stats, different studies. I. On this. Some say seven years, some say 10 years, where roughly half of your friendship pool turns over every seven years or every ten years you lose half and they get replaced by another group. I wonder if this is more likely to be the case for men than women simply because of that sort of the way that problem solving facilitates friendships. And once you've solved the problem, once you've written the book or once you've done the task, or once you've done, then you sort of move on. In the case of academics, you write your chapters in your papers together or you do your research studies and then it's like, okay, moving on and you sort of lose touch and so I wonder if there is that sort of gender divide in friendship turnover as well. Yeah, I don't know that though.

Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen. Rob, it's just so much fun to catch up with you. I'm glad to get to see our first one in person. I love it as well. You'll be back on in February. When's the book out date?

February 20th.

February 20th. Three days before my birthday. What a lovely birthday treat. So you'll be back on when you come through our song. Where should people go? They want to read more of the stuff that you write. I love your substack. I only subscribe to I think four or five and they're all ex modern wisdom guests. Where should people go? Substack, Twitter, all that stuff.

Yeah, substack, robkhenderson.com, twitter obkhenderson. Easy to find. So look me up and I'll be there. Hell yeah.

Thanks, Rob.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with Rob, you will love my full length conversation with one of the best behavioral economists on the planet, Rory Sutherland. Go on, give it a watch.