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

what is the Friendship Paradox the Friendship Paradox is this phenomenon in which uh your friends have more friends than you do uh your sex partners have more sex partners than you do your Twitter followers have or ex your ex followers have more uh followers than you do and it's a it's a paradox because it seemingly doesn't make sense you how can your friends have more friends than you on average and many uh many of your listeners especially I think will be familiar with this sort of Paro phenomena that you know a disproportionate uh number of of awards go to a small number of people a disproportionate uh uh 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 uh three of your friends are kind of like you you know just kind of an average person with an average social life uh you have three friends who are shut inss who maybe don't go out that much but you have another friend who is a super connector and has 100 or 150 or maybe even a thousand friends I mean some people who 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 uh they they may have you know on average 20 plus friends while you have 10 and so it sort of at first class 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 100 plus and so when you average that out your sex partners have had more sex partners than you and then same with Twitter followers right like you know maybe uh one of your followers has you know a million plus while you have 10,000 or something average that out the math still um shaks out in the same way the example that I I also gave in that essay is uh 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 and what's the implication psychologically for people with that is that felt sense at all cuz obviously it's uh 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 post code that they've just become an honorary millionaire for the most Judah mathematics is there some sort of sense by which people are are conscious of this sort of thing I know that Gad sad in his most recent book talks about uh 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 I remember that I remember that from from his book well yeah so so I think that we we we fall prey to um so so in that the classic psychology book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel conman coined this term what you see is all there is uh and we pay attention to what's visible what's right in front of us the the know knowns but we don't necessarily pay much attention to the the known unknowns the things that that aren't in our immediate uh 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 they update their social media Pages a lot uh when you they're they're more likely to uh text you and then be responsive to your texts and more likely to to to meet up with you and then tell you about their uh uh Adventures hiking in the Himalayas or how they just got back from this country or uh just got done speaking at at this event and so forth and so you're listening to this person and and for many people they may hear this and think like wow everyone out there is doing all of these great things and you know here I am sort of working my 95 or just you know sort of living a normal ordinary life and uh and many people uh will report feeling sort of um uh diminished socially uh 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 uh and the better than average effect or the elusory superiority effect as it's sometimes called essentially that we tend to uh uh believe ourselves to be better than others there's this sort of self-enhancement that goes on so when you ask um people 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 ex yeah exactly uh uh you know there's there's in Academia to you 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 perent say they're better than the average person uh in all these domains um and yet um there's fascinating work on related to the Friendship Paradox that we tend to have a sort of uncared characteristically dismal view of our social lives so there have been a couple of studies now in which you they ask participants uh 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 a fewer friends than others do you eat alone more or less than others and generally speaking people think that they are uh 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 super superiority complex right we sort of have at least in the social realm a lesser than average effect rather than the better than average effect and and this is related to that friendship Paradox and that um that sort of what you see as all there is uh the way the researchers explain this is that um again so so you you when you think to yourself well do I go to more a fewer parties than others well you know when I see other people at parties and I'm not at a party and uh you know I see my family you know x amount of times a year but then when I pull up social media and I see people you know taking selfies with their dad or whatever um or their mom or their sister 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 uh 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 um and you're not and you're not paying attention to the people who aren't with their families uh you know one of the lines I use in that post sort of summarizing This research is no one is taking uh 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 uh you know uploading a video or taking photos of themselves we tend to take photos when we're being social when we're being expen exactly the peak experiences and and uh I know you you you've talked about this before about uh what is it comparing uh uh you know your blooper real to everyone else's highlight re something like that and so we do that and then we tend to think like everyone else is sort of at the party without you uh there's a nice line uh in one of the papers that I site the researchers you know sort of sort of um painting a picture of what this might look like of a student in in a college dorm room uh 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 doing my homework but you're not you know of course you're not hearing all of the other students uh in that dorm room as well doing their homework they AR 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 um it's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party not the people who aren't so there's uh 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 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 Shand way of understanding how uh how social media Works how the internet works now uh and the basic idea is that uh online 1% of Internet users uh are creators they're the ones out there producing the videos and the podcasts and the 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 uh are commenters they're engaging with the content in some way maybe they're uh reposting or retweeting or liking or commenting they're the ones who sort of uh want to engage with the content in some way maybe they're not uh uh original content uh producers but they do like to sort of uh make themselves visible by by uh 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 uh uh you know looking at your looking at your stuff listening to it reading it but they're not um they're not engaging with it in the same way and I think a lot of you know so I'm I'm a substack or you're a podcaster I think a lot of content producers 1% they yeah ex the 1% but we pay a lot of attention to that 9% uh and and of course course because of the uh the negativity bias you know you may have 100 nice comments and then there's three people who are like wow this sucks and you're like you know you'll beat yourself up that day like man why do those people not like this um 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 allow and based on that breakdown right if if 97 comments are positive and three or 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 um yeah I read this this uh this essay uh recently about about a TV show uh in which the executives were threatening to cancel it uh because they had received and this was I think in the 1980s it was a sitcom and uh the executives were threatening to cancel it because they received some some angry emails or not or angry angry snail mail from from the viewers so this was the ' 80s and uh and the the the showrunners were basically they drew this analogy of like you know 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 and you got a couple of hundred mean letters whereas the other million plus people didn't write anything or maybe they're writing positive things and so I think yeah we that that that 1% R can sort of helped us to contextualize um 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 uh and I remember seeing stormy or Bugsy Malone and that year's winner of Love Island and someone else like like Daniel Radcliffe or someone uh 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 it's like oh my my God look at this it's going to be a total Landslide you know like they've got Bugsy Malone has tweeted about it and um then it was the as far in the opposite direction as it's ever been in 50 years 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 yeah right right so not only you're not thinking about all of the silent lurkers you're not thinking about all of the people who aren't on Twitter that don't even know that this is going on looking at it did you hear the episode I did with Sam Harris uh I I listened to clips of it yeah cool so he comes up with this idea called digital leprosy H this is just awesome by him so he says um because he's no longer online mhm he's not exposed to the potential cancellation 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 cancelled right now but because he's not online he's unaware of the cancellation that's occurring or the whatever like he's somehow is is trending again he's like 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 man that's good yeah yeah well 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 uh he's an intellectual he has his podcast and he probably it it wouldn't help him to see all of the the nasty comments but if you're I think it may be a little bit more than uh like two out of 100,000 or whatever at the moment as well he's kind of popular to hate on the internet yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's a good point but but I 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 uh your constituents um there is a there is a uh one of the one of the chapters in in Robert Green's 40 Laws of Power where and the book is about the attainment of power of course so he writes that in in those kinds of situations uh you actually want to be more plugged in to the Social Scene It it actually isn't wise to withdraw because you end up losing power you'll end up losing influence interesting he also has a rule about how aloofness is alluring though uh which I think is interesting and is definitely true I was with uh Dan Bilzerian last weekend and uh was talking to him and he's kind of been he 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 at the moment I think in in many regards um which was very interesting to see and I S of dug into his psychology a lot over dinner uh 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 you're uh slightly more chaotic than my upbringing but each uh 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 going to be the sporty kid or I'm going to be the cool kid or maybe that was just me um but I kind of get the sense that if you're going through a a a period of Rapid change or rapid reflection or whatever uh a little bit of um receding perhaps from being so uh publicly AA this is why monk mode I think for guys has become such an important meme that it's this Retreat to focus on the three eyes introspection isolation and um like inner work or something else and um 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 um yeah I think there's I think this something that yeah yeah I think yeah it sort of depends on what your aims are and especially when you're when you're young and you're still sort of uh uh trying to stabilize your identity and figure out who you are that having those moments of withdrawal and reflection can can be very helpful um yeah and and you know it's it's funny those those the The Laws of Power a lot of them do contradict each other and green openly I've seen him he acknowledges this but it is it's it's based on context it's based on sort of where you are in the life cycle and how um how power is acquired in your sort of local environment and and so on so so so basically you know this isn't like a one- siiz 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 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's 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 uh a certain period of time in young men's lives typically the teens in the early 20s uh you know heightened levels of risk-taking reduced self-control and inhibition uh if you look at rates of criminality for example uh they tend to Peak at around age 19 and this is is true regardless of uh culture and Society sort of all across the world in non-industrialized hund gather 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 it's inevitably going to be sort of man AG say roughly 15 to maybe 24 even things like uh like like so this is just in the US context likelihood of being hospitalized for punching walls uh there was a nice graph I saw uh and I and I posted it online um of you know the sort of the distribution of of of um young or or men just men in general being hospitalized for and it's all concentrated again 15 to 24 it's like you know 10-year-olds aren't being hospitalized for punching walls and neither are six-year-olds it's all that sort of young male group and you know I'll admit I've punched walls before yeah did you see uh Alexander dat posted 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 uh in that case I mean that yeah that that sounds like it would require some some serious intervention serious yeah intervention some serious treatment what I find interesting is uh especially for young men that's sort of that this this is I think an expression of the young male syndrome is when a young man uh experiencing some sort of uh usually like a minor injury and then their immediate respones to lash out so like I saw this with some of my friends friends where um you know like maybe uh I know something simple like like they accidentally uh 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 a misfiring of this kind of evolutionary impulse of of if a if an intentional agent hurts you it actually is uh advantageous uh to to fight back response right exactly so so if uh I don't know like the cactus plant stab 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 um 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 let me break my hand now makes no sense so uh so yeah so the young male syndrome yeah sort of reduce inhibition increased risk-taking criminality uh risky driving um you know if you look at uh who who's arrested for drinking and driving who uh gets into the most auto accidents who is the most likely to be killed simply crossing the street yeah so so it's yeah men are twice as likely to be killed simply crossing the street as women um so there are so many sort of different different factors here and there was actually one on on the seat belt point there was an interesting study which found that men are less likely to wear seat belts when there's when they're accompanied by a male passenger relative to when they're sitting by themselves or when they're sitting with a with a with a woman what do you think that's saying I think I think that is uh one possibility here is uh is essentially the attempt to Signal toughness uh that you know you of course like there's a lot of interesting work here and a lot of discussion and and debate around this um because of course men want to signal to women and we want to signal that we're you know strong and can acquire resources and all those kinds of um sort of Bedrock uh um findings in evolutionary psychology but then we also want to impress other men too you know you want to show that you would be a you know in in the ancestral context you want to show that you would be good in a in a violent conflict against a rival Coalition or if you're uh 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 we both became fans of that David put study oh yeah that was able to predict the uh 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 um men's Street crossing in the presence or without the presence of women H that was probably done bar right okay so this this this stud is so much fun so they got um crossing the street is really interesting because it's a relatively discret variable you have distance of vehicle from Street crossing and then you have uh like the presence or lack of presence of a female and Men the diff 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 going to cross the street while this car is only 15 yards away from me or whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah all the I think yeah the young male syndrome is yeah I think it 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 U men again so I don't think yeah it would I don't think it would necessarily impress young women uh you know that you're driving without a seat belt right and I think maybe on some level guys understand that but with with with it wouldn't necess it's not so much that you're impressing your friend when you put when you don't wear the seat belt is 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 seat belt for that kind of especially you know 19-year-old guys you know that kind of thing um 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 uh worsened amongst sexless dispossessed rambunctious young guys coalition together in small groups to go and set on fire and push over granny yeah yeah yeah and we yeah yeah that's uh it's you know when a 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 r the risk becomes exponentially greater sort of as that as as he sort of partners with other men and they collaborate and sort to plan and so yeah this is uh I mean so so you had this this interesting term about the the sedation male sedation hypothesis it's in a a study at the moment with bus and William they're testing it interesting interesting yeah I mean I'm just thinking about cuz I remember when you first told me about that something that had come to mind is um you know I had friends I mean this is you know sort of back in the I don't know if people still play this game World of Warcraft but I remember I had a couple of friends who like Lost Years of their life to this game and they were like and 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 1819 this was years ago but they would say like all right you know I got to I got to 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 SCH but in his mind he's like I'm going with my other internet friends and we're going to 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 uh and that's how they do it you know I saw this funny this funny post on Twitter um and this guy you know said something about you know back in the day if you were like a hyper curious young man uh you know you you'd basically start like uh trying to document the like visible differences between the mushrooms uh right around your house and today what they do is like try to collect all the Rings in a Sonic game you know like speedrun uh and so yeah I think the the virtual world is sucking in a lot of a lot of uh angry and aggressive man but it we may also be losing like that sort of the pattern matching sort of systematizing abely yeah well it's just it's managed to hijack an awful lot of the status seeking coalitional uh curiosity adventurous behavior that young men you know throughout all of history has been kind of a claimed for you know you look at um my favorite example of the solution for young male syndrome was Portugal in the 1800s what did they do there they the first son was allowed to there was a an imbalance in the sex ratio okay and they knew that if son one married because he was the oldest son but son two three and four perhaps uh 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 gallion ships and said go you know pine near 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 or political enemies or whatever it was and uh 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 blackpill ideology there was this period maybe about two years ago where uh they were even uh donate claimed to be a domestic Terror threat I think uh in cells uh they were a terrorist group right yeah I saw that um where's the like show me the violence show me the uptick in the violence now that's not to say that hasn't been an uptick in murders and stuff but I think a lot of that can be attributed to yeah exactly like the receding of police from inner cities right um 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 p 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 uh what young men like jobless young men do um and most of the time they're scrolling their phones playing computer games watching porn overeating junk food you see Nicholas stats work on that uh I haven't is this this is related to the men without men not working or whatever it is whatever it's called just awesome but yeah it's like some insane percentage of men are neats not in education employment or training uh but also are Prime working age like I think it's 22 to 50 um 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 uh social welfare in one form or another or Andor still living at home spending an insane amount of hours per your playing uh video games and while they're playing video games 50% of that time is either on prescription medic 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 uh a lot of guys that are maybe a part of this cohort are tangential to this cohort commenting and you know the sentiment very strongly was why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me uh why am I going to work to get a a 5 fo3 210b uh woman who's already gone through two marriages and got four kids uh you know just very despondent evidently guys who don't see much future for themselves and uh it was it was really eye opening cuz largely the comments on Modern wisdom tend to be you pretty personal growthy agentic highly Sovereign upwardly mobile Etc um but this episode like blasted out of the algorithm into the wider internet or maybe it got shared on some forums or whatever uh and it was very very interesting uh 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 um they were maybe uh comfortable in their nihilism uh 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 as we move forward um you know decade or two decades later I mean it's one thing to be a 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 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 if you live in a modern Rich Society um you can collect sort of extended unemployment or maybe live with your parents or um 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 uh and now if you want to do something difficult you have to make the choice to do it rather than um sort of uh uh be be pressured sort of by by external factors I saw this I saw this this Tik Tok video I'm not on Tik Tok but people sometimes send these to me I saw this one this this this uh this young guy I think he was in the Army US Army and he was just sort of walking through his barracks and uh and he was asking these these other these other young young guys these young recruits uh you know if you could talk to your recruiter right now what would you say and uh you know these you know these other young guys were like I told him to go 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 had 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 Pur stop eating 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 Tik Tok didn't exist back then but I'm watching this and I'm thinking like these guys don't understand right in in 5 years from now they're going to be glad that they ate for however many years and they did this they went through this experience um and and I think a lot of young a lot of young guys won't even go that far like they won't even the list which is fine you know everyone has their own sort of make your own choices but in that moment I understood that like this sucks why did I do this like this is awful and then you go through it and you can sort of in hindsight go back and say like it was it was a character forming experience it was good for me like I was an idiot when I was 19 and I probably needed a bit of that structure a bit of that discipline I needed to have my ass kicked a little bit and uh and I think yeah like you don't but and and those guys volunteer to do that right you have to choose to do undergo that experience you've already pre-selected for someone who's got the agency to get moving yeah I had this idea I had this idea about um uh the the reason that victimhood culture has become so widespread is because the human systems demand for challenges has outstripped our modern reality's ability to deliver that right that we want we just want something to push up against and if we don't have real challenge we will create imagined challenge for ourselves and um 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 perc of the people are young men happy to lean into the uh I've learned a bit of Behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology and 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 jocker willink Alex hosi 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 uh 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 uh like heritable psychological Echo I suppose so the conscientious people will have more conscientious kids and so on and so forth and then Melissa carne'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 uh it was a speculative hypothesis about why there's a like sort of pronounced levels of uh kids being born on the Spectrum in Silicon Valley and it's because it's not necessarily because the engineers and the program MERS 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 comorbidity exactly and then they have well they have children and then and then the child is sort of at a at an heightened risk of of getting autism uh but I think generally speaking I mean I don't know if this is if this is this could be interpreted as a white pill or a black pill but I just read uh this book The Sun Also Rises by Gregory Clark who's an economic historian uh very well versed in the behavioral genetics as well and essentially that book he documents uh in various societies essentially how uh social status sort of loosely defined as sort of wealth and influence and so on is very sticky uh across generations and essentially what he finds you know he he he tracks surnames uh and finds that you know I got intro to this guy from Mata to Poria he's going to come on oh yeah yeah he's great yeah yeah um and yeah I spoke with I spoke with about about um 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 assortive mating that more and more women are going getting educated and men are are dating educated women and they're having children who are educated and so on but what essentially he finds is that when you when you look at data from decades past centuries past before uh 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 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 um 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 of class or education or credential how does that manifest if it's not the external badges yeah well basically people people cluster together in the same clubs family friends organizations um so so maybe uh you know maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way they would now but maybe um 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 uh disposition yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean this is uh yeah this is interesting to me I mean so so Scott Alexander did a a long piece on on the sorda of meeting I think earlier this year and he talked about how there's surprisingly little um uh sort of sort of matching across uh sort of educational and class lines on the things that you would expect on things like like attractiveness for example I think there's this especially in the sort of like the red pill um online spaces of you know men don't really care about education they really care about you know how attractive a woman is um and yet uh at least the the data that I saw sort of uh curated by by Scott Alexander is that you know it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the you know the the The College Dropout who uh the Barista Starbucks exactly yeah or 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 would say actually they they they had a 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 uh uh levels of curiosity and intellect and all the sort of psychological attributes uh they they matched along those lines so you know even though she maybe Works uh uh uh somewhere that doesn't require a college degree she has one and she's the kind of person who would get a college degreed and then they sort of match along those lines the sort of mating still holds I think yeah there's there's so so so again like is a white pill or a black pill it could be a black pill because you know status is sticking and it almost doesn't matter what you do but on the other hand it's a white pill and 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 uses more stable yeah than we might think I think there yeah I think it might I mean you're look at you as like the post a child for what was it uh 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 the stat so so the stat is it was on foster kids specifically um so I did you know some of this research as I was writing writing my book that'll be out next year and then um I I wrote this essay that's uh that was in the Free Press A couple of years ago which basically um so in the US kids who are uh raised in families in the bottom uh socioeconomic quintile so the bottom 20% essentially kids raised in poor families uh roughly 11% of them graduate from college which is pretty low because the the the average rate in the US is around 35% so it's pretty low 11% versus 35% but the amount the number uh or the percentage of 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 uh and so I used you know this is sort of essentially to me sort of evidence that instability and uh sort of disorderly environment is uh is OB is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to it obviously has an effect but it may be something that that deserves more attention than we're giving it relative to sort of the material factors did you dig into Melissa Connie's new one have you read that yeah I 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 Rees you know like she's just there to do help do policy and do the DC thing and 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 going on from a psychological perspective and I thought wow that's really uh 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 uh like hard right Christian talking points uh 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 onor would probably be like just left of center uh 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 asshle 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 uh you know allowing their themselves and their child to have a good step parent and blah blah blah like just all Straw Men house arguments and I saw the exact path that many many people are taking which is causing them to bend toward the right because you go hang on a second I've put this piece of work out which is relatively dispassionate which is actually it's the two parent privilege M this is a championing of how we can fix underprivileged kids which is fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon right it's class trying to fix the class problem the only people that were accepting of her or weren't like accusing her of doing awful things were the people that were center right and further right yeah so what you see is how somebody that has a left leaning uh predisposition perhaps or just a Centrist disposition gets nudged by their treatment toward the right go okay well you guys like if 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 cuz I'd would love to have asked her about this but yeah like that's not I I can completely see how the tribalism of both sides and I'm sure that there's an equivalent Dynamic on the right pushing people toward the left that I don't see um but the tribalism of the left and the Purity spiral of the left and it it's rapidity at judging people m to see bigotry where there may not be some yeah I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean yeah in a different direction yeah yeah I mean yeah I saw I saw a lot of that uh sort of the ad homonyms online and a lot of the uh 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 is very dense but it's also um 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 educated and curious person can understand uh and it seems like yeah most people just didn't even bother flipping through it and and having a look because she caveats multiple times that this isn't a this isn't a book about sort of s judging people or about values it really is about um sort of looking just sort of from a dispa dispassionate point of view what did the data say about outcomes for kids and various sort of family uh arrangements so yeah I thought that was so strange I mean yeah and she does stick close to the 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 um you're going to be held to a higher standard when you say something that's that's unpopular um there's that sort of can versus must distinction uh sort of a classic finding in Psychology about how when people are uh predisposed to uh support a certain point of view essentially they implicitly ask themselves can I and and then they come across a piece of information 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 uh 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 any flaws in that argument or any any reason whatsoever why they can discount it then they say oh I I don't have to right doesn't 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 um is this thing true you're looking for arguments that support your side yeah so you're looking for a good bar uh rather than an honest judge yes right right right yeah you want um you want some uh well you're looking for arguments of course that sort of you know the classic confirmation bias idea you're looking for information you're monitoring and then you're sort of overlook anything that 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 9s um sort of along this vein I mean it's it's a it's it's a neat example because it's sort of disconnected from politics like I think anyone can appreciate this which is essentially what these researchers did was they brought these participants into the lab um and you know they they told these participants you know they showed them um this this jar and it was really just water but they told them it was this sort of chemical solution and if you drop a strip of water into it so in one condition they told the participants you drop the sturup of water into it um and it and it doesn't change color just sort of Remains the Same white or whatever it was uh then that means that you don't have this sort of rare unique uh congenital disease if 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 you know basically they found you know parti ji it in didn't change color they'd walk right out in another condition they told the participants um you know 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 dip 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 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 to sort of you know shuffle through and and and uh and try to try to find ways to confirm that that that belief we both came across the same research that shows that Chads rather than incels are the extreme misogynists right dude I love this yeah yeah yeah I think I saw uh William retweet that word and that's got on my of course of course he does of course he does anything that's Pro Insel yeah uh 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 partner on this 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 um David bus's evolutionary psychology textbook cover to cover and one of the things he points out there uh is is uh that you know there's there's not much if any research supporting what uh what's referred to as the mate deprivation hypothesis you know this idea so the mate deprivation hypothesis is essentially that you know young men who are who are deprived of mates are more likely to develop these sort of uh uh uh misogynistic attitudes they're more likely to uh coers women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault and essentially uh all of the research that I've seen indicates almost the reverse of that and including the study here uh 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 uh to have consensual sex partners as well wow um and yeah all of these things sort of come together and correlate with status-seeking dominance or orientation extraversion um the probably I would imagine narcissism as well and maybe some of the other dark Triad traits of being being particularly attractive uh to women and I you know this is now you know I'm I'm I'm more comfortable speculating uh you're not even part the academy anymore say what well you know I have a foot in but but but I'm 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 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 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 uh again the sort of prototypic I'm not saying all incels are like that but that sort of archetypal image of of an incel whereas um probably just just sort of you know uh uh I think this this pretty intuitive that that women would be more willing to sort of be alone and 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 alone and exposure alone that um that that assault would be more likely to happen in one context than the other um and so I think that may partially explain some of those differences that if women were alone with actual inels as much as they Al with you know status-seeking dominance Orient or orientated uh uh 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 well that I spend yeah yeah that I feel ad yeah um but the guys that I know who are particularly you know at least numerically successful I know you what 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 um preoccupied with well what does she think of me or you know or or or um 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 jokey or playful but then on the other it can sort of dip into you know the example that I so so I I posted uh one of these studies online and sort of commented that um you know I think this is easy to understand understand when you reverse the genders you know if you think about like like a woman who spends a lot of time um 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 uh 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 a little bit more sort of I know maybe slightly more optimistic views or at least um less less cynical views about Sadia Khan psychology psychology lady she does like couples counseling and stuff uh she gave me this really interesting answer to the question uh are hot girls more crazy right so the classic the classic question like finally Aristotle's got an answer um and she said that the experience that hot girls have of most men Jades their View of all men because the men that she spends her time around are unbelievably pliable they cheat on their partners with her they try to shower her with gifts they say things that they think she wants to hear they're duplicitous so the reality Distortion field of the beautiful woman causes all of the men or many of the male interactions on average to uh group together to Clump together in a way which doesn't show men in a particularly good light right yeah how 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 this this interview I watched years ago of uh Chris Rock and he said basically being well I don't know if he 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 um try to give you free things or try to try to court you or you know they're looking for something from you and uh 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 go up to the hot girl in the first place yeah I saw this with strippers uh and I would imagine it maybe the same with only fans 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 off one of the strippers that are in there right like men at their worst selected for at their worst around the women that are able to you know cajo or coers or encourage them to do a thing that's or whatever uh and oh that's how old men are there's this really great segment uh on Rogan's show years and years ago Tim one of Tim Dylan's first appearances and Joe's I think Tim's talking about how the LA comedy scene is very ruthless and Joe has just moved to Austin and is saying don't know what you're talking about fantastic over there uh every time that I go into a room everyone treats me really great 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 going to treat you like right like the biggest podcaster in the world just walked in and um I spoke to tuck Max about this over dinner a couple of months ago it so interesting um and I was talking about how I I I've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years is status and and Renown and wealth and whatever has 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 noticed that like the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way maybe I'm just super like charismatic or whatever I've changed my confidence that totally could be it too but my more um like highly skeptical uh cynical view of it is like people want something or whatever anyway and um I was talking to Tucker about this and he said uh to become rich or famous as a man is to accept being uh a resource to be extracted for from or an object to be desired he said that um women become objectified as soon as they become uh 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 uh women are born with value men have to create it um and it is unless you're Brad Pit or you know somebody who is is super good-looking and has that upfront um you have to achieve some degree of of of self-generated value in order for people to treat you and to objectify you right like no one's 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 uh yeah to to become an ex a resource to be extracted from uh or an object to be desired that was very interesting yeah yeah there's a sort of a a positive feedback loop that happens there too I think with with the Bugatti example um so so you have this uh PR just material good and then you step out of it and then suddenly you know you have increased Social Capital because people are drawn to you but I think this happens even even within just the real of Social Capital itself I mean you know I I'll just use this this personal example of you know I was I was walking through an airport with some friends and uh and then yeah it was recognized a couple of different times but you know so I I was with friends but then they had friends who didn't really know like they oh they kind of know that I write and stuff but they don't really and then I got recognized and suddenly they became more interested in talking to me and like oh what do you yeah what exact tell me more about and so I think it's like um you know you get recognized once and then other people become interested and then suddenly you can't did I tell you that story when I walk down Broadway with Peterson M uh in Nashville I don't think so uh 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 in Ben Shapiro was there in Nashville this a few years ago oh I did see I saw it was the night after that so he loved this bar and we were going to go back to this bar and he didn't have any of his security with him uh so it was me Michaela Michaela's husband and Jordan uh and milla's husband's like 6'4 kind kind of dude so like he was like he's like a tall guy or whatever uh but no security and Jordan starts walking down uh Broadway like the street in Nashville right it's where Kid Rocks Bar is and Whiskey Row and all this stuff and they on a weekend close it off I think they close it off at both ends 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 are Q forms to speak to Jordan Peterson he's accumulating a tale of humans as he walked like a Comet right walking down that Comet yeah honestly and uh I I remember thinking like oh my God we were at the Young uh delegates uh dinner drinks thing last night at ARK here in London uh and sure enough there was a a queue of people like this is a Conference of people selected for a very like particular set of interests and then we went to 150 person drinks thing which is selected from within that group for people that were invited to go to this thing and even within that selected group of a selected group the comic tale thing existed again so um yeah 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 CU but they see uh like a social CU right like a CU they go oh okay right and it's I would I would be curious I mean maybe in the the example of the 150 or or smaller group of of selected people they probably are familiar with Jordan it sounds like but uh in the example of him walking down is it Broadway the street of 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 everyone's following that guy I guess I'll get like I guess he's famous let's go check this out and now they're fall and sudden you know so what percentage of those people were were familiar with him too you know there's these there are these classic studies from uh from mgrm uh so most people know mgram through the um The Obedience studies of you know the uh uh he essentially tricked people into shocking and and believing that they were injuring someone or perhaps killing them but there were these other studies that mgram did and 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 and a couple other people just look up at the sky like this and then gradually what happen 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 there suddenly this massive crow 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 you know quality that you know which is which is you know it's it's adaptive uh but it's also you know can kind of misfire 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 uh let me get your take on this this is awesome researchers pulled over a thousand registered us voters aged 18 to 34 a majority of both men and women consider far rightism and Far leftism to be red flags in a potential partner 76% of women and 59% % of men consider identifying as a 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 communist 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag thir about modern wisdom 35 that wasn't on there 35% of men uh 41% of men said the same for a woman being into astrology okay uh 20% of women uh 33% of men said red flag for they say black lives matter 14% of women 53% of women for they refuse to see the Barbie movie uh 53% of women uh 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 yet just overall it seems like um far rightism far leftism uh 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 how like I would have thought that that would have been the moderate position right like I guess it depends yeah but the the bol'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 potential partner what what what age group was this are these young young 18 to 18 to okay yeah that makes a lot yeah that makes sense I mean yeah I mean you you've probably seen some of these data too about sort of the political Divergence of young men and young women um which is really I mean it's really interesting because uh a lot of the the Press media will concentrate on you know the supposed uh 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 sort of a 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 the women uh who are being sort of uh uh radicalized or or turning to a more extreme Direction um yeah but we don't mind about that one we we don't need to care about that yeah well I mean well so I think like in in terms of like violence and so forth right there's no there's no young female syndrome you know or or if there is one it would be it would manifest itself differently the female L house the female yeah the long house yeah um but yeah I mean in terms of the sort of the classic threats of terrorism and so forth I mean but but uh yeah that's that's interesting I mean so so some of those like yeah the the two genders one that's interesting 58% of women I found like the yeah there's there's a sort of a a neat reversal there of like Maga Republicans versus Communists where most men I seemingly okay with dating a a Maga identifying wom but women uh are more okay with dating a communist identifying man but here's the thing right that it's not for right like uh 35% of men said that a woman listening to Jo 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 uh owning a gun that like some quite high percentage of women said that owning a gun was a red flag right in America but a woman owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun right and the same for listening to Joe Rogan and so on and so forth so I it's it makes for very interesting reading but I actually think that like if a woman does listen to Joe ran there'll be some non-zero number of men in there that are like that's a like that's a boys show like why why like oh maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's like going to try and arm wrestle me in bed or something like yeah yeah yeah yeah I have I've heard this um you know just just speaking with young guys that uh you know 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 in a more sort of sharp left-wing Direction um 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 or 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 of often sort of Co with other things that young men are kind of annoyed by and so it's like it's the astrology one dude 41% of men said that a woman being into astrology is 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 what who was it that said was it they said uh um uh the big five is astrology for men I've heard that for evolutionary psychology evolutionary psychology evolutionary psychology it's astrology for men yeah but I mean well that's fine but 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 had yeah it is I had uh uh 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 mcll um super interesting guy mathematician but just does science like I don't know what he's funded by maybe himself but uh and he did a a huge breakdown of like predictive power of uh Myers Briggs versus Big Five versus other stuff versus other stuff and uh Myers Briggs is like I think it's like 18% accurate basically on actual predisposition uh of things but uh yeah it is that that's astrology for astrology I think uh what was that study about higher female status and gender equality being associated with lower female uh relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that yeah this was a study came across I think it was published in 2015 uh which yeah essentially found that that higher levels of wealth and and sociopolitical equality among the genders is associated with lower levels of of relative happiness for women compared to men and the researchers speculate this may have something to do with increasing levels of employment uh the the pressure to obtain higher levels of Education uh among women in particular and that this is actually sort of uh uh uh dampening women's levels of happiness and to me this this connects with another uh this one is you know this this classic finding of the the Paradox of declining female happiness which is essentially that since the 1970s uh women's happiness relative to to men's has declined so to be clear everyone's so so relative to the 1970s um everyone is less happy today compared to the 1970s but in the 1970s men were actually happier uh 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 uh things have reversed men are now happier than women although overall people report being less happy um and so yeah that that study that I pointed out that was an interesting one to me because yeah I mean the the message that a lot of young people receive today is what are the keys to happiness you know you you you work hard you go you get a 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 the purpose of all of this um and it's you know I I I suppose you know most people say well they want to be happy and so you go through the education and employment route maybe you go to law school after college you sort of get the credentials you go through the whatever the fellowships and all these different programs and at the end of the tunnel you're hoping that you'll be happy uh and actually uh for both men and women doesn't seem to be working but for women in particular um because they've had the sharpest decline right cuz remember they were happier and now they're you know so exactly and and so they're uh uh diminishing happiness has actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men um the men H the men's happiness being sort of higher than women's is is interesting as well and I wonder if that is almost sort of uh 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 um 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 we 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 yeah I wonder whether um like the male dissatisfaction with the uh gameful employment state of seeking providing thing was just baked in already it's like oh okay like we we we already knew this like Granddad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and dad was spit and swust and he was unhappy and I'm spit and swust and I'm unhappy but there is a little bit less pressure to do this uh was that Candice Blake that did that one uh the the the female happiness study I don't recall the the authors of that one 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 um 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 um I don't know if if kace was a study on this or a different different uh but they found that when when women in marriages earn more than men that this predicts higher rates of of of arguments of verbal aggression on behalf of the woman of just general relationship higher rates of domestic violence infidelity on the part of the man as well men are more likely to cheat when they ear less uh 50% increase in the use of erectile dysfunction medication when the woman's the primary bread winner I've heard that too yeah that's uh yeah that's pretty it's pretty I mean it's Grim but then you know I I uh you know here's an anecdote I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation it was uh you know it was me and like this this group of of 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 like 50% of women uh 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 uh 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 to jump in and I said like you know speaking to to this this this young feminist woman I said yeah can like 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 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 um wow I I got like I think I just felt A tingle when you said High powerered attorneys like I got really excited when you said that that was basically her reaction wow and it was half joking but half serious and all of the women laughed I laughed too it it was you know it was a good response but like I think you know that there was an element of seriousness there right that like when you you know when she's sort of fantasizing about like yeah rubbing shoulders with all of these you know 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 uh the potential pressure that uh 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 um that's something I the not just the going to work not just the getting up early and 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 grid and your resilience and your desire for all 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 Schoo up to the boss and all that sort of stuff and uh no one really talks about that because that's part of work right like that comes along for the ride as 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 deafness and all this St that being said uh given uh women's sort of predisposition and and ability to be a little bit more like uh subtle with with their cues and their emotional intelligence and stuff I actually imagine that on that side they might be predisposed to it well but as it seems uh their well-being may suffer more than men's despite their capacity for doing it being uh as good or greater yeah I mean I almost wonder if it's uh it's sort of the reversal of what we were speaking about earlier about you know young men who 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 in this context you know maybe maybe some women think oh if I follow this this track and get get a lot of education and go to you know it'll make me happy and then once you get there it's actually not it's not as satisfying as you would have hoped um it's actually worse than you expected and I think a lot of I know people like this as I as I'm speaking and thinking about it I know of people who you know they think that once they get there um it's they have the certain image of what it's going to be like and actually yeah working 70 80 90 hours a week um and even you know they are doing well financially they are making money they are buying all the material Goods that they thought they wanted um wearing you know amazing clothes nice apartment in the right parts of the city and so on um 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 um you know but there I think there is an element of the sort of social signaling where you know the almost at some point the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and and their job and how prestigious it is I was teaching you last night about my theory of uh Surplus mate value uh 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 uh 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 260s presumably just holds the top of his head uh in his arm in her arms and says like it's okay and blah blah blah uh but this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the gigachad meme right like he is the dude that is over the pey blinders quote like the Killian Murphy quote from pey blinders as he speaks over the top and it's just Chris bumpster just looking like mean and stoic like he's the sigma male meme that's been used on Tik Tok right like he's Mr Sigma male and I brought up to him this kind of odd uh irony that the guy that is the face of the sigma male meme the stoic you know emotionalist 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 you know trajectory right uh and one of the things that interestingly got brought up in the comments was well yeah he can do that because he is Mr Olympia and it got me thinking about Surplus mate value so if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value uh not to say that Chris is Chris's m 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're going and be world champion in anything and basically that Chris had so much Surplus mate value in his relationship uh that he could get away with withdrawing from this bank account he's allowed to cry but if the uh if you're not the world champion right like maybe the guy that comes 20th maybe he's unable to do that um and if he if he did cry on the floor that would dip him below and the girlfriend would see him for the vulnerable cook that he is and leave uh but yeah just kind of an unfalsifiable uh well I mean I mean it's it's seems like an illustration of counter signaling essentially right like when you're I mean the the whole idea of counter signaling is like once you reach a certain point uh in in a status domain you uh you can you 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 uh and so example I like to use is uh this classic word from from Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues about uh self-deprecating humor that if you're very 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 um people actually it it ingratiates you it sort of uh 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 this guy who uh doesn't like himself very much or just it just it hits people the wrong way um and then yeah our mutual friend Rory Sutherland likes to use the riding the bicycle on the way to work example which we we mentioned this last night too about how if the uh you know if the 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 uh you know he's just a conscientious guy or you know there's there we we and it makes us like him more that he's just you know he's riding his bike he doesn't you know he doesn't have to drive the fancy car uh it makes us like him even more and I think yeah there's something there about that that sort of the counter signaling element here and I think you can see it in in in a lot of different walks of life um just like how how much self-promote people do there was a um a classic paper called too good for school um one of the early papers in the counter signaling um uh sort of research area and this was about so this was I want to say in the early 2000s where they asked uh or what they did was they gathered um Sy syllabi from college professors and found syi the the syllabus is that plural plural of syllabus dear God okay um and so they gathered these from various institutions and rank order them and essentially found that the the more prestigious the institution uh the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus so if you're you know if you're at some fancy IV League school they would just say I'm whatever Bob Smith but if you're sort of mid-tier or lower down it's you know uh doctor so and so or Professor so and so whatever yeah all the degrees everything and then they also called the so this was back when people still had answering machines and so they called the offices of these professors and found that uh Rob Henderson PhD MC canab so whereas at um at the the the higher ranked universities right so it's exactly the same 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 this department and just all of their credentials and I I think we're now seeing this to some degree in like the uh the social media space now or in like how 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 and but there's a reversal of this where if you um so so there was there was another paper when it was something like uh when 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 uh and or or if you do a lot of sort of um uh uh counter signaling people don't like it uh and so uh an example that I've given is uh so like a first-time author uh if your book does very well and you write this long post on social media you know I want to thank all of you for following me on this journey blah blah blah blah blah but if a super famous wellestablished author does the same thing it comes across as a little bit go as a little bit like we already knew you were going to do well like you don't have to play this like mock humility so I've thought about this from a like a a storytelling perspective especially over the last six years that um 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 we we had the FaceTime and I'm like is that your foot yeah not attached to my the rest of my leg um 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 uh 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 times one of Alex mosi's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the 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 right 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 uh so I think that tracking tracking your journey is 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 a useful tool for yourself to remind yourself to go back and read or 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 life has been at 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 uh or you just sort of whatever like like uh embellishing this to to make the journey more interesting and yeah I think there is there is value to sort of tracking it along the way and to yeah to to sort of reflect and and I think it's it's also just like an inspiring message too to other people who are also struggling very early in their in their careers or in their in their lives um I think your I think your book's going to do this I'm really superc excited I'm aware that it wasn't supposed to be like you know you too dispossessed human can become go through the US Air Force and Yale and you know all that stuff uh 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- blackpill 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 that wasn't the intention but I but I have yeah heard heard similar sort of feedback a friend of mine who who joined the Navy um and he was yeah he had just gotten out of basic training and he was still eating sort of early in in in his his military career and yeah he read an early manuscript and he was like yeah this was this was great like this is exactly what I needed in this moment CU I was just feeling so so awful and like realizing go just put one foot in front of the other just keep trying keep taking shots and uh and yeah it'll it'll you know hopefully you know work out as as long as you sort of have your mindset right and your priorities in order um yeah man it's uh can people pre-order that yet it listed it's it's up so so yeah I mean you know we can talk about it it's fine it's it's a back you're coming back on for the book so don't we will do it's up for it's up for pre-order um 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 um yeah and it has a bit of both I think there's something for everyone I mean there's a lot of sort of first person narrative driven stuff but then there's also sort of sociological analysis and a lot of sort of there stuff on on status on um how we evaluate other people and those kinds of things sort of work their way and especially uh in the later chapters of the book I I do this thing where I sort of write each chapter from the perspective of myself at that age um but yeah as I sort of enter adulthood and become a sort of more Curious and reflective person I sort you know 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 yeah man yeah I'm I'm excited for it too and uh yeah I'm pumped for it to come out and the cover's cool it's you as a kid riding a a bike down the street uh so you taught me about this idea about why ovulation might be concealed in women and I've got a counter like hypothesis as well so what what was the what's that idea that you learned from bow Meister about ovulation all right so this was a a chapter um this it was a speculative chapter from from Roy Bal Meister this eminent psychologist um where essentially the idea here is that so women have concealed ovulation right you can't necessarily tell when they're ovulating the way that you you know you you you Vis very visibly can with other great apes with chimpanzees and so forth and so the speculative idea is that uh it so so a lot of evolutionary researchers have suggested that this is you know maybe concealed ovulation is to conceal from men right like so that men don't necessarily know when the woman's ovulating or you know whether whether to sort of reduce the risk of sexual coercion or to um sort of obscure paternity uncertainty or all of those kinds of things whereas this speculative chapter um posits that it's actually uh to conceal uh ovulation from themselves so that women don't know because back you know you know this is you vastly oversimplifying but back when women started to be or human beings in general started to become sort of self-reflective and introspective and 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 um to essentially sidestep the burdens of pregnancy because pregnancy was extremely risky and uh you would become aware you would as a woman you would become aware of your own menstrual cycle avoid particular periods appropriately and so the idea here is that eventually uh only the women who uh had concealed ovulation were the ones to reproduce and then gradually over time all women uh had had obscured uh ovulation and and this was essentially uh a way to to sort of prevent women from from uh sidestepping their their own possibility of pregnancy and then uh yeah and some of the some of those uh those those um excerpts that I sent you there was a nice line from Leslie Nome 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 you know what she writes she and her her co-author they write that um you know historically there may have been women who avoided the burdens of pregnancy but those women are not our ancestors right it was the the the women who did under undergo this this very difficult challenging and dangerous experience and those those were the ones so I thought those two those two findings are neatly Dov tailed 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 Candace Blake that um other women are if 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 uh so women who are under real significant stress it messes up the menstrual cycle many women that are listening to this may know that the menstrual cycle kind of if they're super stressed at work or they're studying for exams or whatever like the stuff gets squirrly right like guys might struggle to get an erection if they're super stressed women might their menstrual cycle can go all over uh and one of the arguments is that concealed ovulation stops other women in your tribe from with you while they know that you're potentially yeah yeah okay well so I I think like that so 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 there yeah so so and it may require all of those different um external phenomena to to produce that outcome right like one of those alone might not be enough where you know if if it had only been the the concealing ovulation from themselves maybe we would still have you know some some percentage of women who were visibly uh ovulating and others who aren't but it may require all of those different um Trends working together to produce the situation in which uh uh women are no longer sort of visible when they're when or the ovulation is no longer visible uh among women so so yeah I mean this is uh I think yeah this is this is sort of a a a often this this obstacle people kind of run into or this trap that we we think like it can only be one or the other but this yeah I don't think this is NE many many things right I mean evolution is complicated and intricate and so many things are going on I think um concealed ovulation given that it's super rare in the animal kingdom I think as well so yeah uh concealed ovulation is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of doesn't matter which of these hypotheses are correct uh there are so many benefits right from an evolutionary perspective just trigger all of these different thing you take 10% of them you're like it's a pretty good deal it's pretty works pretty well yeah uh what's that um Solomon's Paradox that you you were teaching me about what's that yeah so Solomon's Paradox is so it's a finding in in Psychology but it's named after the the biblical King Solomon who had a reputation for being the wise King and there was this this adage that arose uh uh that if you have any issues you should ask King Solomon and famously most people know the King Solomon story of the the two women who claimed uh uh that they were the mother of the baby and then he um so you know kind of kind of uh sneakily said okay well we're just going to cut the baby in half and he knew that if we you know he knew that if he did this that the that the actual mother would step forth and say The other woman can have it and that that and that's how he you know so so that's how he sort of resolved this issue but it's a parad or they they they 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 um you know he he he made a lot of mistakes as a king he um he uh was was not a particularly good father to his son and his son actually grew up to be a tyrant and an actually very bad King because he had sort of uh uh mismanaged his own 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 uh various studies looking at the Solomon Paradox are people sort of wiser when reasoning about you know so they you know they bring people in people who had recently gone through a breakup for example and sort of ask them what do you plan to do and so on and so forth and then they would bring in um 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 and found and they found various ways to sort of uh uh measure this of of how to how to sort of um measure wise decision-making and found that uh you know that social distance actually 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 uh 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 um you that that that will benefit both you and and maybe the other party as well and so as I was reading this I think you know it's it's a really interesting finding in and of itself but then I also I also wonder so so I'll actually give an example of this uh so there was a there was an interesting study on on economic games and so there's this game called um uh the the ultimatum game uh in behavioral economics and uh 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 uh and if he accepts the amount then both of you walk away with the money and so I'm under this you know I I I I have to deliberate and think okay so how much do I have to offer Chris of my 10 he knows I you you know I have 10 uh 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% um I I would have said 30% that felt about right yeah and same yeah when I first like oh 30 yeah that sounds fair um any any more it would feel like unrealistic but any less would feel unfair um and so that's what they consistently find is around 30% um but they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else so so it's actually it's it's um economically irrational to take anything um uh to to to to decline any amount greater than zero essentially yeah you should take anything right because you know one is better than zero um so what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the ultimatum game um so I'm playing for a friend whatever um or you're playing on behalf of a friend that people will accept Anya 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 um and so so I found that finding the Solomon's Paradox interesting because I wonder if there's something if 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 uh in actual physical social spaces and this the solon's Paradox indicates that it's actually helpful to have social contacts and to have friends to talk your problems through with so if I'm having an issue and I've done this before I'm like you know I someone you know I'm thinking about uh 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 um but if you're young person uh and you don't have many people around you that so 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 um in in in your life whether it's in your career or other other social domains romantic relationships and so forth you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions you know and so there's this sort of negative feedback cycle that may few people to show you your blind spots exactly and and to sort of list out the options that you could take that you aren't seeing Or List out the uh the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the the decision that you're leaning toward um 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 yeah yeah Chris did you ever watched this show who wants to a millionaire yeah yeah so I watched a I watched a couple of seasons of like the new one this was during the lockdown couple of Seasons a couple yeah lockdown man you know I got to do something yeah is that a World of Warcraft well I was playing in the background right so I'd put on you know cuz I used to watch the show as a kid I put on the back it was almost like a comfort thing you know down and one thing that I noticed was um 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 uh and if they wanted to use a Lifeline they'd turn around and ask their smart friend what phone a friend was one 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 right behind them they can't look up online what the answer is and I was watching this and I and I thought to myself like yeah if you like if you don't have any friends you know what I mean like what do you do like who you bring along and I think you can sort of 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 as well you're missing out potentially in a million dollars that's a million dollars that you could have had yeah I amum I think there's definitely something sort of recursive going on here and it's like the that in a citadel thing that you taught me about which just can't unsee that Isaiah bin 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 um 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 of for suckers and turn to a life of crime or if you struggle to make relationships work say you know monogamy is ancest Al unwise and I'm going to become a polyamorous like like polycule type person um and I do think that there's an equivalent here the like black pill Sigma male cope um 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 their social networks uh tend to be a little bit more sticky than men's uh yeah yeah yeah I mean Dunbar wrote this book on 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 and it's what is it the um I don't know if he uses this term but uh it's sort of face to face versus shoulder-to-shoulder that when men have friends they do things together can't unse it I've spoken about this on the show before but for the people that haven't heard it um next time that you're at a party or any sort of gathering look at the angle of the feat of women talking to women and of men talking to men women will talk to women 100 80° they'll be face to face whereas men the average is 120° so it's like blading slight angle yeah yeah yeah yeah um and I mean this shows up once you see that you can't not see it and it's a rule that works across so many different things the men's sheds initiative in Australia did you see that I have not seen this they uh men it was an initiative by the Australian government I think uh 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 knacked lawn mower 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 Tosh shoulder not face to face they're literally in a circle and everyone's like right you you've got the good drill and he's got the good spanner and I've got the hammer or whatever and let's fix this thing and god dude me and the misses were not getting on well and before you know it it's a therapy session mediated by this lawn mower right they had the the the pretense of repairing lawn but they need that right they're required if you just put them in the shed with no lawn mower and they're just standing in a circle it's yeah that's yeah so yeah that was yeah the face to face versus shoulder-to-shoulder about um 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 and then communicate and discuss their some of my best some of my best conversations are during pickle ball warm-ups oh yeah just dinking just gently dinking about everyone all of the pickle bow 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 especially if it's singles less time if it's doubles uh 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 uh me and my friend and there was some guy that was sat on the side uh and my friend I was talking to 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 a 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 s maybe sort of like 50s kind of guy uh like very typical pickle ball kind of player and I realized that we'd been just warming up for like 20 minutes again bad form um the game will maybe take around about 10 minutes or so something like that and uh I think I turned and said something like oh dude like I didn't realize that you were waiting I was kind of engrossed in this warmup and we'll we'll we'll get a game going and he's like to be honest that was a really compelling conversation uh and I remember thinking wow like the male requirement for distraction from emotional communication is so strong that I can play like a full warm-up for a sport yeah uh 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 those 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 uh it's hard to it's hard to keep that up um for a lot of men right because it doesn't come naturally for them the way that it does for women and they sort of Monitor and you know there's obviously like sort of evolutionarily adaptive reasons for this that uh you know men are you know more Expendable and sort of less preoccupied with saying plugged in and survival and all those kinds of things whereas women are pretty good at sort of mon tune up that Alo parenting pool exactly the same way that women do yeah and uh and so yeah we see this uh yeah a lot of the young people in general report having sh were friends but this is especially pronounced for for for a lot of young men um 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 tickle ball think about some of your friends you know we've got mutual friends that you've been to a university with to studies with and if you're both a part of a project for a brief amount of time the male friendship deepen so rapidly you know my ex business partner that I ran nightlife stuff with for 15 years decade and a half groomsman at his wedding uh you know like phenomenal guy very formative for me sat next to in my first ever seminar and became a business partner there and then and we're still great friends I catch up with them every time I go back to the UK but I'd be lying if I said the depth of our friendship hadn't diminished because we were no longer working toward a shared Mission whereas uh editor Dean uh per he's a perfect example so we brought on a new guy our YouTube strategist and um since he's got brought in the uh pace of friendship deepening oh yeah has it's just been so rapid because you're not just bonding with somebody that you like like you selected them to work for the company because you would get on with them and you think that you share your values but because I spend 5 hours a week grappling with titles and thumbnails and what 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 and genders it's more than it's like brothers more than friends right you know it's almost like for Warfare in a in a regard solving a problem together yep right you're solving a problem everyone needs a lawn mower yeah yeah everyone needs a lawn mowe to face yeah yeah that's what yeah that's what put I mean it's uh yeah having having that sh and so so one thing I'd be ious 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 path life where supposedly I mean I've seen different different stats different studies on this some some say seven years some say 10 years where roughly half of your friendship pool turns over every seven years or every 10 years you lose half and they get replaced by another group I wonder if this is more likely to be the case for men than women simply because of that sort of uh the the the way that problem solving facilit friendships and once you've solved the problem once you've written the book or once you've done the task or then you sort of move on you whatever in the case of academics you write you know you write your chapters in your papers together or you do your research studies and then it's like okay moving on and you sort of lose touch and so I wonder if there is that sort of gender divide in Friendship turnover as well yeah I don't know that though yeah Rob Henderson ladies and gentlemen Rob it's just so much fun to catch up with you I'm glad to get to to our first one in person I love it as well uh you'll be back on in February when's the St February 20th February 20th 3 days before my birthday what a lovely birthday treat uh so you'll be back on when you come through Austin where should people go they want to read more of the stuff that you write I love your substack I only subscrib to I think four or five and they're all EX modern wisdom guests uh where should people go substack Twitter all that stuff yeah uh substack robk henderson.com Twitter robk Henderson um 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 ation with one of the best behavioral economists on the planet Rory Sutherland go on give it a watch