Why Men Are At The Top Of Society (and the bottom) - Roy Baumeister

You say that cultures flourish by exploiting men. What's that mean? >> Well, um there are multiples multiple aspects to it, but uh first of all, men are more expendable uh than women. Uh probably for basic biological reasons. If a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size, loses half its women, it'll be a long time to uh to recover. So it takes it risks men uh puts men to work um to to produce things. Most of uh um you know the structures of society are really created by men. Um I was talking to Carol Huven at Harvard and she said uh there was a feminist who had an epiphany one point. She was looking out the window and said the whole world was built by men. [laughter] uh you look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and the uh all those things and and that's that's just the physical world, the institutions too, the uh the banks and the uh schools and the armies and the governments and the marketplaces. Um I women do plenty of wonderful things and they're important partners in the flourishing of our species. uh but uh creating large social systems that seems always to be the men's job. Um and so uh cultures compete against other cultures which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men and now women have joined the groups in many places but still the institutional structures are created created by men. Why is it the case that men have been over represented as the builders in that case both cognitively systemically physically? Oh why is it um it's cuz men do those things and and and women don't. Um what I realized fairly early on and I have some publications of this and and it was in an early part of my thinking um is that the way people are being social there are a couple ways. There's interacting onetoone or there's doing things in large groups. Now, I noticed this because in my field, social psychology, people were starting to say women are more social than men. Um, because they're really invested in the relationships, the one-to-one relationships, uh, which is a big area of study in my field. But if you start looking at things that people do in groups, um, men do those much more than, uh, than women. And I think probably again, it's a innate tendency. Uh the most important relationship in biology is the mother to child uh one and so that's a onetoone relationship. Uh in humans uh women got particular men to uh form a onetoone relationship with them uh to protect and provide and do all those things which uh really enabled the larger brain to grow and you made everything else possible. um whereas men do things more in in larger groups and so competition between groups is is is men against men whether it's on the battlefield or in the business marketplace or scientifically um men compete uh uh in groups. It's it's it's not something that uh women naturally do and form large groups. There even experiments when I was researching this they would do with children and they'd have two boys playing together and then the experimenttor would bring in a third boy uh and the boys would say okay sure come on join the game but if it's two girls they don't really want the third girl they they exclude her and reject her suggests there's this mental focus on the onetoone relationship again it's better for intimacy a lot of the differences psychological differences between men and women uh can be understood this way. For example, most data show that women are more emotionally expressive uh than men. They share their feelings directly and and so on. Um well, in a one-to-one relationship, that's what you want to do. So the other person understands you so you can share your feelings and the other person can take care of you and respond to you and so on. In a large group, showing your feelings all the time is not so useful. Obviously, in the economic marketplace, if you go, "Oh, this is wonderful. I got to have it." Well, the price is going to be higher than if you say, "I'm not sure." Uh, maybe not today. Wait a minute. Come back. I'll give you a better deal. Um, and uh you may have in a large group, you have rivals and uh competitors. So, again, you don't want to give away too much. So the the emotional reserve of men is more suited to the large group where the expressiveness of the woman uh is suited to the the onetoone relationship and uh um that's why love and family and all those things women are are sometimes considered they are the natural experts at these things and uh some of the researchers tell the men well listen to your your wife on this but it also explains why women haven't ever organize themselves in large groups to uh to to get things done. I mean, why didn't women ever 50 women build a boat and sail off into the unknown to explore things? You know, men did things like this throughout history and all over the world. Um but, uh you don't do that as one or two people. You do it in a larger group. Um so again uh the the men in groups seems to be a natural pattern. There's even some evidence about this in in the other great apes. Uh I was reading like Michael Thomas's work on there and he says groups of male chimpanzees will go out and get in a battle with others or sometimes they'll go hunting together. It's not real cooperation. And he says each one's really out for itself, but you have more opportunities if you if you go out in the group. But the females don't do that. He said about the only thing you see cooperation among adult female chimpanzees is sometimes if if one of them has a a cute little baby, a couple of the other adult females will join together and and come and go over to that woman and that that ape and beat her up and steal her baby and kill it and eat it. Uh which is fortunate. We don't seem to see much of that in our species that we left that behind evolutionarily. Uh but that's one of the only things Jane Goodall in her observations had had that with with gorillas I think also that a couple adult females would kill and eat all the babies. Um this was a nice tasty snack for them. Um and with the two of them they could overpower the uh the mother. Um, but uh, yeah, it's obviously not productive cooperation. That's just taking someone's baby and eating it. >> What about the the ways that males compete and females compete? I have to assume that that uh level of competition drives different kinds of outcomes for each sex. >> Yes. Well, um there was the idea for a long time that women don't compete or don't like to compete as much. Uh and then they gradually realized that that this is wrong. It's just they don't want to acknowledge it that openly. Uh they do compete often for for love, specifically for the uh affection and attraction of the the most desirable men. Um but that often can't be acknowledged. is done sometimes by blackening the reputation of the other woman, spreading negative uh uh stories about her. Um even some of those my uh my former PhD student Tanya Reynolds who's uh really made a a terrific career studying female competition and and evolutionary context. um in one of her experiments uh they she wanted to see will there be gossip used uh will women just spontaneously gossip about someone else. So she had people come in, told two women to work on a project together. And so she leaves them alone and they're working. And then the one who's actually a research assistant who's working pretending to be a subject and experiment, but she's actually following a script. And she says, "Uh, oh, I just can't do this today. I don't feel good. Uh, I drank too much last night. I think I hooked up with two different guys last night." So she delivers this very juicy tidbit and then then they go on and then that woman leaves and then in comes another woman who is another real subject and the question is does the woman repeat this uh this gossip about her. Well, it turned out what they also varied is is the woman who made this disclosure. Sometimes she was dressed really sexy and hot and looked very nice and sometimes she just looked like a mess. Was not very attractive. Well, when when she was attractive, so she was got energized the woman's competitive gears, then they gossiped. Then they said, um, so and so hooked up with two men last night. Um, but but Tanya also noticed and and other research by her has has borne this out. They don't do it in a seemingly malicious way. They say, "Oh, I was really concerned about so I I I wonder there's a problem." She said she hooked up with two different men last night. That must be bad for her. I'm kind of worried about her. So, the negative information gets spread. And remember, why would you only worry about the well-dressed, attractive woman? Why would you worry about >> uh the other woman? Uh but you know, that shows the the competitive uh edge to it. So um anyway there is there is competition uh among women in in the in the romantic sphere. Um most studies look in in terms of cur stuff. Now I have to say when we talk about differences between men and women there we're talking overlapping distributions. So the difference between the average man and the average woman is real but it might be fairly small compared to the variety within women. I've known some extremely competitive women and some extremely not competitive women. And on average, women are are less and less ambitious, too. Um, probably a good evolutionary people talk about it that uh we're descended from men that really the top male got to do most of the reproducing. So in in say the the other great apes and even in polygamy which is uh existed in the majority of cultures in the history of the world one man with multiple wives um well that's the rich successful man and uh um he gets to have multiple wives and multiple children which means a lot of men don't get any wife. Um so the drive to get to the top uh you were descended from the men who did it. A man may have been pretty smart, but he didn't care about outdoing all the others or might have been very physically strong and didn't care about that. Well, then he didn't didn't rise to the top, didn't pass on his genes, were descended from the ones who really did uh try to uh to compete. It's it's part people bringing this up. I've been thinking about the great inflation issues uh and problems recently and uh it disengages the young men cuz my wife explained this to me once. She said, "Well, the woman wants to get an A and she doesn't really mind if everybody else gets an A, too." Uh, as for the man, if you can't be better than the other people, what's the point if everybody gets an A? >> So, interesting. >> Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't engage them in the same way. And and so our schools, which are now run mainly by women, are are failing failing all students, but they're especially failing the boys. Uh, that seems to be and this is why >> because they're they're driven more hierarchically. And yes, definitely more hierarchy. I remember reading too back in the 80s when women started um really moving up in in the businesses in the in the organizations that men created there was a lot of simplification. [clears throat] One estimate that stuck in my mind was the average male business hierarchy had seven different levels of authority and once women became influential in it, they cut it to about four. Uh so they they don't like as much hierarchy. they they they favor more equality. Uh and um and there are reasons for that too that that you can argue about. But uh but competition is about hierarchy. And so it's it's hard to the male want to do it. You want to be the number one. >> Historically, how much of male achievement do you think was driven by the desire to attract women? [gasps] >> Um well, a lot. The evolutionary people would say I mean that may not be the thing that's in their mind but the evolution say well that is what drives everything. I mean maybe some men want to succeed because they want money but the people say well why does the man want money so much? It's because that's what attracts the women. Um so uh it's it's I'm not one of these people that evolution explains everything. uh but it certainly is the starting point and explains a lot. >> Uh so >> I think I'm interested in whether or not >> to what extent female mate choice sort of shapes male ambition. You know, we're talking about this hierarchical uh sense. You've already mentioned that there's a a a relatively limited pool of men typically that reproduce and a bigger pool of women. I think it's about 40% of men ancestrally reproduce and about 80% of women. So you got twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And um if you've got that plus competition that plus big group coordination plus a preference for hierarchy, you can begin to see how the pyramid becomes >> pretty pyramidy. >> Yes. Yeah. I mean there was an interesting interlude during the hunter gathers in which there was equality and they really resisted the hierarchy. This was part of the transition away from the the ape kind of society uh that uh that they did it. But I've talked to a couple people who who studied hunter gatherers and well is it true they're all equal? Well, yes, but she said, "But the women all know who's the best hunter and they all want him >> uh for their their partner even though the food is shared. Uh it does look like the best hunter. Um everybody makes sure to be nice to him and his family. So uh they do get more food. And of course if push came to shove, uh having the best hunter as your uh your partner would make sure you're you're less likely to starve or go go hungry. You and your children are less likely uh than if you have a a third rate hunter as your partner. >> Yeah. I guess why is it the case that men are over represented at both the top and the bottom of society? >> All right, that was another thing I I emphasized in in the book. Uh, you know, the complaints or the feminists look at the top and say, "Oh, well, the the presidents and the governors and the executives are mostly men. Must be great to be a man." Uh, but I said, "Well, but look at the bottom of society. Who's in prison? Who's homeless? who's uh cannon fodder uh being killed in in battle that you see mostly men men there. Um now why that is uh that's a that's a more difficult question to answer. Um for one thing though there's more variability among men. Men are more different from other men than than women are from other women. So it's even true with basic things like height. Uh obviously on average men are taller than women. Uh but uh there are a lot of pretty short men and and and the the distribution is flatter as we say they're they're more really tall and really short men than really tall and really short women even though the average is different. Uh the average is the difference in average is much smaller with intelligence but the same thing. you see more males at both extremes. We have uh more data at the bottom end because people have done decades of studying research on mental retardation. Uh and as you move from the mild to the moderate to the severely [ __ ] the sex ratio becomes more skewed, more boys >> uh at each level and there's less at the other end. But it's the same thing as you move from mildly genius to moderate genius to to super genius. Again, [laughter] >> the idea of a super genius. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Um um the the super high IQ. This is Lawrence Summers at that Harvard meeting. He he you know they asked how come there aren't a lot of math and physics professors at Harvard who are women and uh he said and he was he was right. if if you have to be just super intelligent uh to be able to work at that kind of level, there are more men there. And uh people got all upset and it led to his his downfall. Um they thought he was saying men are smarter than women, which is not what he was saying. He was just saying there's more variability. Uh so again, if you look at the the bottom end of the intelligence distribution, uh men predominate more. [snorts] So it wouldn't have it wouldn't have got the uh rankled groups in the same way if he'd said there's more stupid men than there are stupid women. >> Yeah. Nobody nobody minds minds that it's this this this feminist control. Now why that is why men are more variable. I have a pet theory. I've talked to some biologists. They said it's plausible. We don't know that it's uh that >> speculative speculative bro science is very welcome. I'm I'm very excited to hear this. >> Um well, you know, the the man has the XY chromosome, the woman has XX. Um so producing something new, there's a mutation on on the chromosome, right? Something goes wrong and produces a different uh variation. Um and there's a question, does that then show up in behavior? You know, do the genes show up in the in the physical properties? Well, for the woman with the X chromosome, there's always a backup. So, even if something goes wrong on one of the little uh weirdnesses or one of the branches of the X, >> there is a there's only a 50/50 chance that will get through and maybe even less than that, maybe the the healthy one takes over or something. So there are there are le less few but nature can roll the dice more easily with men cuz if it happens on the the bottom part of the Y where there's no backup then that will more likely come true. It's certainly adaptive in a way that evolutionarily successful for nature to gamble with men more than women uh because >> uh a lot of men don't reproduce at all and most mutations are bad. Most mutations are not an improvement. And so you want that flushed out of the gene pool right away. Uh if there's a bad mutation, well, that's easy with the men since most men don't reproduce anyway. Uh >> such a good Yeah, I totally What's that line about uh men and nature's play things? >> I hadn't realized that's yours. >> Yeah. >> Uh I love quoting someone to them when I didn't realize it was them. Um I >> and it works the other way too at the other end because a woman you know can't really have more than about a dozen children but there are men who have hundreds. Um and so if you have a good mutation then you want it to spread through the gene pool right that's how the uh that's how evolution makes progress and so so the bad mutations are gone in one generation and the good ones >> uh spread more. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, focus, and performance, but most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over a 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. 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So, there's a there was [clears throat] a study done. >> Um, one of the problems you have when you're looking at um throwing accuracy, you have different articulations of the shoulder capsule. You have different lengths of the forearm. You have it's very difficult to not have young boys spend the entire first decade of their life picking up stones and throwing them. Girls don't do it in quite the same way. So how are you going to control for physiological differences, structural differences, biomechanics, just conditioning of I threw lots of stones when I was five. Um so one of the ways that they tried to control for this was instead of it being about throwing, it was about dodging. And this was I don't know how this got past an ethics board. Um they took one of those tennis ball serving cannons that gets used so that they can fire tennis balls across a court and they had uh males and females try to get out of the way and in the male cohorts they didn't get hit once and in the female cohorts they got hit they were peppered quite a few times and I think that is the same uh spatial rotation like the ability to understand things in space >> that that could Uh my friend von Hipple has made a big emphasis that uh coordinated stone throwing was one of the key early human uh group traits >> because you know if you're in the wild and and there's a lion you and your stone are are not likely to get very far. But if there are 10 of you, you all throw stones and some of them will hit enough of them will get home that the lion goes away. What they what they suggest is that instead of hunting, we could we could scavenge. If the lions killed something, then a bunch of humans could come on, throw stones, >> scare away the lion, >> which would uh driven them crazy, but >> yeah, it's super annoying. Not only to have chased this thing down, finally got some food, and then a bunch of stones hit you. >> Uh, Bill taught me about that. I think it was him that said to me as well, that thing about kids. If you just put boys in a a field, a playground, and there's stones, there's something so primal about just picking it up and throwing it. It's almost like when you see dogs uh kicking their back feet to uh after they've been to the toilet and they're sort of pushing up the the dirt in order to like who who taught you to do that? No one taught me that I should pick up a stone. I just see it on the ground. Even now? Even now? >> Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah, it's clearly something we don't use anymore as a a strategy to get food. Uh >> I don't go into Chipotle and make a habit of flicking pebbles at people until they get me their food. No, that's correct. >> Yes. But uh it could well have some some impulse there and probably more in the boys than in the in the girls >> cuz uh [clears throat] taking on dangerous animals is usually the men's job. >> Okay. What about risk-taking? because that has to be a big in fact forget even the risk-taking thing the differences in the motivations when we're talking about um something that controls for physical ability is maybe um heavily influenced by cognitive variance so something like chess playing there was a study that came out again recently looking at the total ELO scores over time of the best chess players in the world and I think there was only one female player that ranked in the top something maybe the top 100 maybe the top 50. Uh there's only one. And you think, well, this might be due to some cognitive differences in ability that you know, if you've just got all of these outliers, the you know, the 50 men in that 50 are just the tail of the tail of the tail at the very top >> processing power. But it that's not just what chess ability measures. It also measures your stubbornness and your motivation to compete with other people for hours and hours and hours obsessively. So that is that I like the idea of the chest thing because it controls for pretty much every variable except for one type of ability or like a smaller bucket of abilities uh that are typically kind of denied I guess when you look at denial of sex difference stuff and motivations like motivations to me seem to play a much bigger role in that than you would be able to excuse if it was something that that was biomechanical. Well, well, two points to that. One is I I remember being surprised that men and women have separate chess tournaments. I mean, I can understand in basketball, uh, that the girls team won't be able to play against the boys team >> uh as the men are taller and so on, but why in chess? But, you know, it could be this kind of distribution um uh in in terms of ability. Uh there also may be more competitive uh motivation. Uh my friend John Tierney has this he he's a super good writer. He wrote for the New York Times for many years. Um and he likes Scrabble. He said nationwide in the US there are more women than men on the Scrabble clubs playing Scrabble uh and so on. Um and you know goes with women are highly verbal and and so on. And many say their verbal skills are superior uh to men's. But when they have tournaments, all the top winners are men. >> Uh it's very rare. You know, there may be one or two occasional women to get in there, but um in the competition, the men uh do it. And so it could be an ability difference that really at the super high level to win a a large scrabble tournament you have to be really good. But he said also the men are more motivated, more ambitious, so they'll spend the time doing the drills and memorizing the words, doing that. The women go to the Scrabble Club and they want to play Scrabble and have fun. Uh they don't care about uh memorizing uh lists of words so that uh um they could uh they could possibly do better in the future. But uh you know putting in that training effort uh and that would go to motivation uh that the that that's higher among the men and you know motivation and ability they they probably go together and especially with something uh as important as men and women being slightly differently crafted for slightly different tasks >> in the biological past. um you want to be motivated to do the things you're good at. >> What about risk-taking then? What's the difference in risk? >> Well, risk-taking um first of all going back to the uh twice as many of our ancestors were women than men and women are much more likely to reproduce uh than men. which means odds are in your favor in ter if if your biological goal is to produce a child or several and and produce grandchildren. Um for a woman, playing it safe was going to get there. Most women reproduced. Um but most men didn't. So if you just go along with everybody else and uh play along, you'll end up left out. So, we're descended from the ones uh who were ambitious and rose to the top. And some of that means taking chances. Um said in the book, you sailing off into the unknown uh to explore. All kinds of bad things can happen to you. Is not surprising women didn't want to risk that. >> Uh but uh uh but you might come back rich. They were descended from the men who took the chances and did succeed. Lots of men took chances and uh drowned or were killed or got nowhere. Um but uh that's that's life. Uh as a as a man, in fact, it's true, I think, in many other species. Um so uh the male is is is a riskier a riskier one because um because you had to succeed in order to to be attractive and and to have children. >> Now there are other aspects of this. Joyce Benninsson and her her colleagues at Hyra did this terrific paper a year or two ago about uh safety concerns which are much higher in women uh than men and >> physical safety >> physical safety I think I think social too I mean the the article dwelt on physical and medical things uh but uh I think it applies in the social realm too and don't like to uh to take chances um I I have a colleague who is uh arranging getting researchers together to do what she called adversarial collaborations where say you and I are both working on some area and we have a a theoretical disagreement. You think your theory is right and I think my theory is right. Um so one thing we could do is get together and do an experiment together that will will agree this will be the critical test. Okay. Um, and and people don't usually do this because they don't reach out to their rivals who they often don't like or whatever, but uh this woman Kari Clark was at at Penn and she had a big grant and could encourage people to do it. And she said, yeah, people often once she said, "Why don't you do a collaboration with them?" I think, "Yeah, that's a great idea." But that was the men's reaction. She said, "I just couldn't get the women to do it." She had something like 30 or 40 of these things going. And I talked to her one point. said, "I finally got a woman to agree to be part of one of these things, but it was only on the condition that she would be the neutral third party, so she could not be proven wrong." Um, and so, uh, taking that chance, you elaborates, it's why women want to exclude someone they disagree with rather than confront them. And, uh, you bring your data, I'll bring mine, and we'll we'll duke it out. uh that's more a male strategy. So um in a way science has become much more about excluding and silencing and >> which to the detriment of the scientific enterprise. >> What's your concept of the imaginary feminist? >> Oh, all right. That was uh in that book I did uh 15 years ago. Um there's this conventional wisdom that we all have and uh you know when I start to say something about gender you can immediately imagine oh but a feminist will object uh to this you know so they taught people very well to have an kind of automatic internalized uh representation of a feminist that is well you can't say this or you can't say that. It's mostly uh um silencing and and disallowing things. So uh the the problem if you try to deal with feminists on a scholarly basis, well there are multiple problems. Um but they disagree to some extent amongst themselves about various things. So they can easily say, well that's not what what feminists believe or at least not what all feminists believe. Um, but I wanted to address this sort of internalized um, feminist watchdog that uh, pretty much everybody is is brought up right now and you know, you can't say this and you can't say that, that's misogynistic or that's that's unfair or sexist or whatever. Um, like you you're saying earlier to say that they're more stupid men than women. Well, that's fine. >> But to say they're more brilliant men than women. Oh. Oh. Oh. You can't say that. >> Um, so that's what I was trying to get at with the uh the imaginary feminist. >> If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. Eight. Sleep just released their brand new Pod 5, which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet. 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That's ei.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Do you think ma modern gender discourse is missing the concept of trade-offs? What what is it that's going wrong when it comes to talking about men and women? Uh absolutely. I I was convinced of trade-offs fairly early in my career and I think social science in general they want to say this is good and that's bad and not not all of them. There are lots of people who believe in trade-offs but sort of the dominant view is well this is a problem and we have to do this to fix it. And I started seeing well you fix one problem you create another and uh it isn't so easy just to solve problems. Um, so they have this view, some social scientists as our work is a way of making society better. And so they have a clear idea of what's going to be better. Um, and uh, don't want to acknowledge that if we make a change to bring about this better state, well, maybe it'll make some other things worse. So students are happier with grade inflation where everybody gets an A, >> but then they learn less. there's less incentive to study and uh less less punishment or um schools get rated on how many of your students graduate and graduate on time and things like that. Well, but that puts pressure on the institution to put out, you know, to to make sure everybody passes whether they deserve deserve it or not. And then they're more uneducated or poorly educated people. uh out there I was just reading something in this morning's paper I think about the Chicago schools which a number of them they they don't have a single pupil who is reading or doing math at grade level. Um so um it's it's nicer for the teachers to give everybody a positive grade. The students like it too. Uh but there's a clear tradeoff that you don't have to to uh to work as hard. It's such a strange kind of sort of toxic compassion. There's a I had this idea in my head. You remember the study that was done uh where some feminist scholars had tried to reanalyze the big game hunting data of uh huntergatherer tribes. And they basically said uh women not only did just as much big game hunting as men, but sometimes they did even more. And this was their reanalysis of existing data. It was about 5 years ago and it sort of broke through. I remember looking at it at the time and I thought this this doesn't seem to make sense to me. I I I don't really understand why, but I I you know I'm not a scholar. I can't read the data. Someone analyzed their reanalysis and there was so much [ __ ] with the data. It was uh one >> contribution to a single hunt was counted the same as an entire lifetime as hunting from the men. there was no difference made for the size etc etc etc and what I realized was there's a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff that >> whatever men do is implicitly preferred that's seen as the desirable thing that uh women did just as much big game hunting as men implies that big game hunting and the male default is somehow more desirable in the same way as uh There are just as many female CEOs are on the rise and this is something that should be celebrated. Well, because that's a position that's being typically held by men. Now, it's the prestigious ones. It's you wouldn't see this for there are just as many female addicts and homeless people as men. There are just as many women in jail for violent crimes as men. You wouldn't get that in the same way. But I realized for a society that's increasingly obsessed with talking about equality, which is not equality. It's trying to make men and women the same, not to make them equal. Um, it really is, it slips so much low-key misogyny in by just tacitly deraggating whatever it is that women tend to do naturally that oh, alo parenting, gathering, gathering is not as important as hunting, raising children is not as important as war. uh staying at uh building the HR department is not as important as being the CEO. There is always this sort of implicit prioritization, this soft bigotry of male expectations and I I saw it happen with that hunter gatherer uh big game hunting thing and I just I once I've seen it, I can't unsee it really. Okay, a couple things. Uh first, uh in terms of hunting and gathering, um they're both important and gathering sometimes yields more calories. It certainly does much more reliably, but from what I'm told, protein has this particular higher value. And so men gather too for sure, especially the modern ones cuz I don't think there's as much big game to hunt anymore for the remaining hunter gatherers anyhow. But um but protein is a particular need. So if you want to make women look good, you just count the calories and then the difference is smaller. uh but protein which you need to grow the brain and the muscles and everything else uh that is a higher uh prestige uh food. It's a more valuable kind of food. Um and so there is a genuine superiority in getting food or getting protein food which would come from uh mainly from hunting. Uh now women do I understand sometimes hunt the small game. Um so there there's some degree of overlap as as you would expect. Uh but uh um it's not that the men made up that uh hunting is better uh than gathering. Um, being the good hunter again is what made the man attractive to women so that he could get his choice of mates and have a tassel of children and we'd be descended from him. Um, and the women knew this too. So Joyce said, uh, they all know who's the best hunter. They all they all want him. Um, so there is some benefit uh to to protein. And in terms of what makes a corporation succeed, uh the HR department just you know manages things internally but it it doesn't improve the bottom line. You got to work on the manufacturing technology and the uh uh the sales opportunities and and those are the things where the corporations make money so that they can afford a human relations thing which will uh you know make sure there no office romances and things like that which incidentally is something of a recent uh issue I've been been thinking about. I wonder if the, you know, young people aren't marrying and mating nearly as much as they used to. And I wonder if the prohibition on on workplace romance >> Mhm. >> drew out a lot of real babies with with the bathwater. I mean, it was done to protect women from a few abusive uh guys who would take advantage of their position to, you know, and I sympathize with that, but I think I like most men and I guess like you too, we hate those guys who abuse their positions cuz they discredit the rest of us. >> Absolutely. And uh when again I was visiting at Harvard and the woman there said uh you know our friends are all these long happily married couples but none of those marriages would be allowed today. >> A lot of them started off with professors and students and things like that >> and so they pushed more and more uh to prohibit that but often the woman initiated that uh herself and and women like to um marry somebody like that. And again, there's a lot of long happy marriages are being prevented. Uh, and the dating apps aren't doing an adequate job. Yeah. I think another interesting element here is modern feminism has encouraged women to turn into the sort of man that they want to marry. very much encouraging dominance, assertiveness, independence, uh dergating, nurturing, soft, sensitive skills unless they're in a man obviously. And um I the lack of polarity. You just can't sort of re-engineer this out. And it's interesting to see how many of the um cultural commentators online that will endorse a view that they don't embody. Uh how many of the the people that are writing about this stuff, if you were to look at the inner dynamic of their relationship, it probably looks quite traditional, but from the outside saying you don't need to be you don't need to have a family, you don't need to be a mother, you don't need to be in any way submissive or follow or be led by the partner, all the rest. And you look internally at what a lot of these commentators online do, especially as they grow up a little bit more, and you realize that those positions those positions aren't held. There was a really interesting uh situation. I don't know if you saw it. It went viral about six months ago. There was a man and a woman, young pair, traveling in Thailand, some sort of East Asian country, and it was CCTV footage. And the woman was attacked by a man with a knife, and he was trying to steal her bag off her, some of her possessions, and the man that she was with hid around the side of a pillar. So, there was a sort of a bolard or something, and this guy hid over there as the woman was fighting, trying to sort of hold onto a bag. this guy's got a knife and that I don't really remember how how it finished. All of the comments were basically saying, "Girl, just leave him. He's trash. This guy absolutely no respect at all." And I don't I I I wish that he had protected her. I wish that it hadn't happened. I don't think that she should have had to go through it. But it is difficult to diminish the protector provider elements that men typically take value from and in the same breath say, "Yeah, but if it happens, you should stand up for the woman." Because if you've been trained for your entire life, well, women don't need the doors holding open for them. Women don't need you to make sure that they get home safe at night. They can do everything that a man does. sometimes even better just as much big game hunting. What is the tra where are the training wheels for men to learn to step up in those sorts of situations? >> Right. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Very much. Um Yeah. My generation we were told we got to take care of the girls and the women and hold the doors for them and protect them and if there's danger you put yourself into it. There's a funny story by Warren Ferrell who I guess initially was one of the main male feminists. >> He was but he kind of woke up to that. But he talked about being at a conference on feminism and he was out for a walk with one of the top women feminists and they're walking down you in in a park or something and a man jumped out from behind a tree. It turned out it wasn't dangerous but it suddenly was and immediately the woman ducked behind him and he's [laughter] and he said, "Oh, we had such a long awkward conversation after that. [laughter] How could we >> Oh my my embodied misogyny just pouring out of me." The patriarchy came and pulled her back behind me. >> Okay. I'm not sure I believe in either misogyny or patriarchy. Um, but those are are common terms which uh um yeah, maybe that's what she blamed or or something like that. But uh I certainly I don't know any men who hate women. >> No. >> Uh I know men who hate specific women, [laughter] >> ex-wives and whatnot, and often for understandable reasons. But a man who hated women in general, I I don't do it. If there's any gender hatred, it's the feminist hating men in general. Uh, and >> I think there's I think there's I think there's subcultures now. Unfortunately, there are subcultures of men who hate women. You know, you look at sort of some of the darker corners of the internet now, guys that are um they're upset at a a entire sex that they think has rejected them or their friends or is meant made a society where they're no longer wanted. Um, I do think that the more militant edges of feminism have been mirrored now, uh, on the on the men's side. >> Yeah, that could be. I wouldn't be surprised. And and you know, if a woman who'd been raped a couple times hated men in general, we wouldn't be that surprised. And yeah, >> I I kind of see those involuntarily celibate in cells somewhat in the the same category. I'm less sympathetic. Uh but uh uh but uh I mean the experiment would be if a woman would take one of these insults and strike up a relationship with him uh and start having sex with him uh he might come around very [laughter] rapidly and all this women are bad would would just evaporate. I >> that's a a spicy theory that we can fix in seldom by just getting women to have sex with men more. But uh I do I do agree that um I mean it's even discouraged in in the the world of incels. I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, but one of my best friends is the the number one researcher on the planet, William. And um they have this term called ascending. And ascending is um no longer becoming an incel by being attractive to a woman and uh getting her attention, getting her into bed, being found to be attractive in this way. And it's actively discouraged. And I think the reason it's actively discouraged is if somebody else that you saw as an equal is able to ascend is no longer involuntarily celibate, that means that maybe you're not doomed. And if that's the case, your sort of fatalistic view of why things are happening this way might not actually be so fatalistic. It might be more self-imposed. And maybe there's something you can do. And as soon as you have hope, you also have the opportunity for disappointment. And without the hope, there can't be disappointment. So removing the hope and saying, "I'm a genetic dead end. There's nothing that I can do. Uh women are X, Y, and Zed." And and and that's not going to change. That it's >> misery inducing, but predictable, consistent, and reassuring in some ways. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would like to know more about uh the incels. It's an odd corner of the world and I don't don't know people and I don't know much about them. >> But uh we can't take them as typical of men. They are usually they are not the the power powerful people. Uh they are not running society. Powerful men usually uh have no shortage of uh interested women. M >> it's the ones who lack resources and successes and status and so on. >> If if [clears throat] your theory is correct, what do you think happens when societies stop rewarding male sacrifice? >> Well, uh that would be a weakness. Um, I remember my uh my professors remembering World War II when it was declared and uh the American men rushed to uh sign up and volunteer uh to go uh fight the war and I don't think that would happen today. uh the men have been brought up to think uh you know they're bad and the women are just as good and uh and society you know we teach our kids that America and the UK and so on are bad places who've done bad things don't uh stress the positive accomplishments um so I uh that would be a vulnerability as long as there's no war ironic to say this now war going Yeah, I mean it's it's so true that the reason that we're able to sort of play around in this kiddie pool with roles and switching of sacrifice and who's supposed to do what is literally because there aren't any intense selection pressures going on. If there was something more extreme happening and imposing itself on us from the outside, [ __ ] would get real really quick. I mean, look at the Ukraine war, right? The Ukraine war kicks off and men were being turned away at the border, including trans men were being turned away at the border because, hey, no, sorry buddy, women and children get to go, but you you got to stay. All thought I don't know how uh progressive thinking Ukraine was prior to the war kicking off. I'm I'm unsure about the uh the cultural landscape there. Um but yeah, it's uh it seems to me like we might be entering a period where male motivation collapses. is and obviously you wrote this book in 2010 and 16 years later the male motivation collapse which you could have seen it just would have been a natural byproduct of you rolling the clock forward from what you'd already seen >> uh has completely come to fruition so I guess I can congratulate you on being Cassandra in that way [gasps] >> if it's true that ego depletion is one of the most successful findings in social psychology ology that uh willpower is a uh limited resource which when used can be sapped and takes time to come back online. If it's true that it's one of the most successful findings in social psychology, how come it keeps on being attacked? This is replication crisis. It doesn't repeat. Uh why is that the case? What are people getting wrong? >> I don't know. People do like to tear down other things and there's a lot of petty jealousy and and and so forth. Um but uh um but evidence in favor is overwhelming. I mean there must be a thousand uh successful um findings in the research literature which hardly any any any uh point has that me that much support. Um, I heard somebody was recently saying, "Well, it must just been all been by chance that uh um maybe by accident uh the statistics turned out this way." Well, chance works equally both ways. Half the findings should be in the opposite direction and they're essentially none in the opposite direction. I mean think saying that it's a a chance or there's that much. Um there was the uh uh the one initially big multilab replication which uh was reported as a failure and [clears throat] so that got a lot of publicity cuz people like negative publicity and they never correct it when the positive comes around. Even those data were reanalyzed a couple years later and somebody said uh oh no actually it it did they didn't get people depleted enough uh to really show any effects but to the slight extent that they did deplete people. They did what what the theory predicted. So that was that was confirmed. >> A quick aside. If your sleep's been off, you're taking ages to fall asleep. Waking up at random times feeling groggy in the morning. Momentous's sleep hacks are here to help. They are not your typical knock you out supplement just overloaded with melatonin. It only has the most evidence-based ingredients, perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. These things are an absolute game changer. I take them every single night and when I'm on the road. Uh they're unbelievable cuz they're predosed. You just take this and your sleep will improve. 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Well, that was a really interesting idea that uh some people at at Stanford uh published some work on that and uh we were intrigued by that and so uh we we tried to copy their experiment and and we did find that work if you give people a really strong sales pitch that uh your willpower is unlimited. Um then at least when they first get depleted they don't show the effect. We did show when you get seriously depleted then you show an even worse effect. So that belief that you have unlimited willpower is helpful. Make the think of the analogy of of physical uh energy. Uh if you somehow could be convinced that you have unlimited physical energy today and then you go out for running a race. But first when you start to get fired tired um it'll probably help you uh continue to do it. But at some point it may backfire. You know my thought in the the big picture is uh if it were true that believing in unlimited willpower would give you unlimited willpower, you'd think most societies in the world would have that belief >> uh because >> they would have created some sort of cultural meme around it because it would have conferred such an improvement for everyone. >> So much benefit to society to having people with better self-control. Um and yet most societies don't. There was some argument that some people in India have the opposite belief and I I wish to see more there. Uh but uh but it's very rare. Most people seem to know and I think you know they just have the experience that uh trying to exert control over a long period of time you just can't can't keep it up. What if anything has been accurate in some of the critiques around the original research or what's been most accurate or has given you most uh most recent? >> Okay. Well, at first we thought uh at first we were thinking that willpower is kind of a metaphorical thing. Um but uh well okay the brain has a limited amount of fuel and it used it up so it has to recover. But then people started showing you get people depleted and then you offer them a big financial reward if they can still perform well. Well, they can. They're extra depleted afterwards. But it's not that the brain is out of fuel, it just goes into a conservation mode. It turns out physical muscles are the same way. uh their lab studies where you come into the lab and do physical exertions or you have to press and after a while your muscles get tired and and then the the researchers will say, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll give you $10 if you can do it once pressing as hard as you did when you first walk in." Well, they can. Uh it's it's still there. There is a point at which your muscles can't work anymore. There's probably a point like that at which your willpower is so badly depleted that you can't do it. But in the laboratory would never get people to that uh that that extreme uh a situation. So the the so one big switch early was to shift from um being out of fuel to conserving remaining fuel. And it makes sense. We evolved under conditions of uncertain food supply. And um um then people started linking it to the uh the glucose the physio the chemical in your body that carries the muscle the energy from your stomach to your brain and muscles and so on. Um and found uh this was kind of a surprise to me when this worked, but if if people would eat something after they were depleted that would get them back to perform well again. Um so u that that was intriguing >> wasn't there was a a great study done around the uh the length of time of somebody being sent to jail by jurors or judges and how long it had been since they had their breakfast. Basically, if you if you end up in court, you probably want to go in at about 1:45 p.m. just after the lunch break or at 9:00 a.m. just after they've come in for breakfast. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And some people argue about that. It's it's hard to get a perfect study done with with um real life data. Uh but the the the curve was quite striking and and just about every experiment we've used where we give people some glucose in the middle uh it does restore their their performance and then they often don't know we said we started doing it with giving people lemonade. I was at Florida State and it was hot and so people were glad to have a glass of lemonade and you can mix it with Splenda or sugar. >> Oh >> and it tastes so good >> and it can be double blind. So the experimentter just pulls one out of the refrigerator and says this for you. The experimentter doesn't know if it's got glucose in it. Is in sugar or just a sweetener. It tastes the same. People can't tell the difference. They're glad either way. But the Splenda had no effect on the data whereas the sugar wiped out the >> so good. >> That's so good. the the glucose is the energy is also used for your immune system and uh um and but it uses very uneven amounts. So when you're fighting off a cold, that's often why you want to go to bed uh and just sleep it off and let your your immune system have all the energy uh in there. Well, in our evolutionary history, they didn't have antibiotics or anything like that. If you got a cut on your foot and got infected, your body needed to fight that off. Um, if you didn't get a cut, then you don't need extra immune system activity, but you'd need extra fuel for it to fight an infection or to survive a fever or anything like that. So, it made sense to air on the side of conserving um, as much as possible. There is an interesting alternative theory here um which uh most people don't talk about but I I I read it and I thought it's it's really quite good. nothing quite fits everything. But this is the best alternative theory, which is that [clears throat] um the sections in the brain that do self-control are really important because that's you know self-control is really uh valuable for success in life in many different ways. And if you have high glucose around some nerve cells for a long period of time, it starts to kill them. It's uh is best known uh diabetics uh in the past they would lose all feeling in their feet as you know their their blood sugar would would run high uh and so you would start to kill the nerve cells and you wouldn't feel it so you hurt your foot and you infections would happen and you wouldn't notice them. Um, so, uh, it could be that after you exert self-control, the depletion effect is the brain letting itself cool off, as it were. You say, "Okay, we've been exerting self-control, using willpower. That means those nerve cells in the front of the brain have been exposed to a high level of glucose. Well, we don't want to burn them out. So, not let's not use self-control for a while. Let them cool off and then then I can use them again. Um, that really fits a lot of uh a lot of a lot of the evidence. It's the most plausible alternative uh theory and and it would still mean most of the the glucose most of the depletion phenomena are real. it would just have a different interior mechanism that the brain automatically conserves its energy. Uh but rather it needs to um use different parts of the brain so that the the nerve cells don't get wear and tear from a long extended period of high high glucose. >> Beyond having more glucose across all of the work that you've done, what are the best most evidence-based ways for people to improve their willpower? >> Okay. [snorts] Okay. Well, improving uh self-control, which is the real goal, um you can do that without improving willpower. >> Can you distinguish for me the difference between self-control? >> Okay. So, willpower be the energy uh that you exert. Um but self-control also depends on keeping track uh of the behavior. So, the easiest way to improve your self-control uh is to keep a record of what you're doing. Even even my grandmother told me uh a long time ago, well, when you're poor students, you don't have money, you just write down everything you spend, and then then you know how much you're spending and what you're spending it on. Uh or uh if you're trying to lose weight and keep it off, well, you got to weigh yourself more carefully. Or if you're trying to have take up an exercise program, tell your friends you're going to do it and tell them you're going to tell them each day, did I exercise today? Uh so improving the the monitoring will improve self-control without needing any more uh willpower because you know it gives you more feedback and I was going to try to jog three times a week and I haven't joged all week. Uh so you better do it. It's easier to fool yourself if you don't keep track and and certainly if you don't know it's very hard to regulate something that you that you don't know. uh in terms of improving the willpower, it uh it seems to work like a muscle and a lot of people have produced findings like this that if you exercise self-control uh on a regular basis, then you do you get better at it. Um I didn't know if that would work. Uh we had an early study where it it did it did work and then done a fair number of others and other people have too. There a couple meta analyses combining results of a great many and saying a great many studies and saying yes it it it does uh practice self-control and to design the study properly you have to exercise self-control on one sphere and then measure self-control in something else to show that it's a general improvement. Um but it does seem to work or some of the biggest effects I've seen were the this Australian group um they did several studies. One was they took students who had money trouble and they trained them to manage their money better and they met met with them, you know, once a month for several months or something and taught them how to manage their money. And so they did get better at that. But uh the measure one key was they came to the laboratory and had to do self-control tasks that had nothing to do with money. It was just like maintaining focus on this while you're being distracted by that. They were better at that. Um they also reported on the questionnaire that uh they started studying better just because they're working on managing their money better. But uh they also study their study habits improved. They after they finished dinner they would clean up rather than just stack the dishes in the sink. Uh they even said they ate healthier. Um which again is a sign of self-control. But as as they point out, healthy food is a more expensive than junk food. So it kind of went against what they were training self-control for uh which is to manage their money better uh but uh that also improved their their diet. So they saw a whole variety of positive uh changes in their uh that that came from it. fitting the idea that self-control is sort of one central um resource that's used for many different things. >> AG1 just released their nextgen formula which is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product I've been drinking every day for years delivering more than 75 vitamins including your multivitamin pre and probiotic superfood greens and more. And for the first time they've added new flavors tropical citrus and berry only available in the US and Canada. Sorry for that. But you do still get the same one scoop ritual now with an even more thoughtful formulation flavor and uh four clinical trials behind it. Designed with absorption and efficacy in mind. AG1 has been evolving continuously since 2010 alongside the latest research. And NextGen is clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health even in people who already eat well. In one study, it boosted healthy bacteria in the gut by 10 times. If you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it and try it every single day for 3 months. If you don't like it, they will just give you your money back. So, you've got nothing to lose. Right now, you can get a free supply of vitamin D3 K2 and AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkagg.com/modern wisdom. That's drinkagg.com/modern wisdom. I've been completely obsessed with this series that you've been doing on Substack about sexual novelty. What did you learn there? >> I was intrigued with the idea that it's partly with with thinking about pornography. It's so widely available. Um I've seen over the course of my life that that that become uh more and more available and you know for better and for worse. Um, but but the the novelty of it, it might have been Naomi Wolf or one of those who remarked that her generation, which I think was about the same as mine, was the last time a woman could have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes and letting him see your naked body. >> But it was such a thrill to to to see it. And, you know, when I was a kid, we didn't see pictures of naked women. uh if you know some one of my buddies would uh find a playboy that somebody had thrown away or something, but they didn't even show the full nudity. Um so you really didn't quite know [clears throat] what a woman entirely looked like and and and even if you could find an occasional picture or something, it it's not like endless amounts of pornography and lots of women and ads where they're showing showing everything. So, some of the mystery is gone. And it it made me think uh maybe there's some loss there. Um that novelty is arousing, but uh as but it's a limited amount of novelty. You can only do something the first time once. >> There's only one first time. So, uh, in a way it's a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them. And if it had been available when I was young, I doubt I would have resisted. I probably would have been curious enough to uh to look at it all and uh and so on. But in a way, I think I'm I'm lucky that it it wasn't available. Um, but that way there was still novelty as I got into my 30s and 40s, which I hadn't explored yet. But if you've you've seen everything by the time you're 25 or even by the time you're 20 um there isn't there isn't as much novelty available um on the different sex partners and that seems to be what people are shifting. And that's kind of what I came to after writing those columns that uh people are blazing through all the novelty and pornography. They're not doing as much of capitalizing on novelty within the relationship of the the second base plan, you know, that you just sort of gradually go from one step to other. One of my young friends said, "Uh, yeah, today I just did it again. From first contact on the dating app to having lots of sex under a week, just a few days." Um whereas, you know, back in the day, well, you know, the earlier day, you had to practically be engaged before you could go all the way. And uh um certainly when I grew up in the 70s uh you had to have a series of interactions and uh you know the relationship and then so the step by step the novelty uh yeah you could appreciate so the the first time you undo her breazier or whatever. Wow that's that's really exciting. But if you've had sex, you know, and done it all, uh, right away, that doesn't, I think, strengthen the relationship in the way that shared novel experiences, uh, a series of them will do. I can't prove it on that, but that's a that's a speculation. But going for novelty in terms of lots of different partners rather than novelty within one relationship of gradually exploring many different activities, that seems much less well designed to produce healthy families, which is what society needs. Um, and I also have to think uh for those fortunate young men who had sex with lots and lots of different women, is this really good preparation for marriage? Um, I think it would uh cycle through women rapidly and get get tired of them. >> Do you think that >> settle down with one woman for 40 years? >> Yeah. Do you think that that uh predisposes men who've had a high body count before getting into marriage that uh even trying to tight let's say that they've taken the red pill of your substax post series and they're going to slow you can only get to second base once and if you hit a home run first time then you've rounded all of them basically and we're going to slowly titrate the sexual novelty over time. we're going to get more experimental, but it's going to be over a much more protracted timeline. Uh, do you think that you can be sort of predisposed to not finding that as exciting? Is there a basically is there a lifetime coolage effect as well? >> Yeah, somebody commented that on one of my substacks that after you've had sex [clears throat] with a dozen different women, then to go slow and get to second base with the next one is probably not that that exciting. That is plausible. I'm not sure it's true. Mhm. >> Um it does it does seem likely. And uh >> what was that what was that story about the couple where the woman had never used her hand? >> All right. Yes, I remember reading that. I think it was in the everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask book which is one of the first best sellers of the public about sex. and uh and she'd written to the physician and uh said they'd had a good sex life with her husband and then gradually he couldn't uh you know perform as well. Well, it got weaker and weaker and it stopped alto together and it was kind of sad and she felt bad for him and you know and then she thought you know morals women didn't do sexual things but she said well I love my husband and you know we've been married a long time I'm not going to worry about morality and she went and bought a book about sex uh which you know back in those days there weren't that that many things available and um and it said if you put your hand on the man's uh genitals is exciting to them. So she so I tried that and [laughter] he got harder than he had for years. Um and so it was a very nice kind of sweet story. So that's the opposite extreme of of of novelty. They'd hardly done anything. Um, and uh, we forget if we go back a century, the amount of female flesh a man would see in his lifetime is less probably than you can see in an hour of >> I was I mean I was fascinated by that. What a weirdly I guess it it would be impossible to do that study now because sexual culture is so permissive and so sort of widely promoted that no one would have gone their entire life without what is sort of termed as second base. Right. Actually, I lied. I lied. Apparently, you can get to fourth base without going around second base. That is you just go from home base to first and then you go straight back again apparently. And there's other bits that you can miss off, but I loved um I loved that that story that you told about a series of experiments that were done showing pornography, normal pornography, uh BDSM pornography, and then educational sexual videos. And the increase in sexual frequency happened when everybody saw the porn for the first time because again this was in the 60s or the the 70s I think where porn was basically not available >> right >> but if you went from the extreme stuff to the more vanilla stuff you didn't see the concordant increase in uh sexual desire but if you escalated it >> and this this you know kind of goes to to prove your theory that uh ever ever ever increasing but steady escalation of sexual novelty over time, doing new things, exposure to that, not only within partners, but presumably across your lifetime. It seems to make sense. This isn't just a like diatic situation. It's going to be stuff that you've done. If you have an explosive 20s where you're just on, you know, the the career run of your life and then you settle down and you begin to start to titrate again, I I have to assume that you need to almost treat yourself like you're someone whose sexual novelty needs to be shepherded with at least a little bit of care because you want to still be excited to do things over time. And unfortunately, as much as you can say you should love me so much, it should just be the excitement, the raw attraction and the romance and the rest of it. You need to respect the psychology. You need to respect coolage effect. You need to respect the way that we look at at uh variety as being a stimulus and um >> yeah, I think it's it's just >> ration. >> Yeah. >> And what what and ration it over time. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you've done >> you've I loved the disclaimer and I'm going to start to use it. Uh when I'm talking about spicy stuff too, you say at the top of pretty much all of all of the posts, um this is a treatment on men. A separate treatment will be needed for women, but we can save that for another time. It's such a nice way to not have to caveat through and we must remember that this would be important for D. Yeah. >> Have you got any inclination because we're talking about men, the coolage effect, what's the refractory period from partner to partner? And for men, if they go from one partner to a different partner, they're able to uh perform more quickly as opposed to if it's the same one and they've got to go again. Um, have you got any idea what sexual novelty does to female sex drive? >> Uh, it's much harder to get uh uh convincing data, anything on that. And so um I can write what we do know about female sexuality uh and so on but uh the role of novelty I mean it's not nothing uh but it doesn't seem to be uh as as powerful a driving force. I recall some years ago someone reported a survey. I think it was first year college students at Southern Cal or you know one of the California universities and they asked how many people would you like to have sex with for the rest of your life assuming no constraints of marriage or laws or disease or anything like that if it were up to you. >> And the uh the women's response average was two and a half. So they wanted to have a fling or two and then settle down. The average for the men was 64. >> [laughter] [gasps] >> And that's the average. So you've got some you've got some impressive outliers there to bring that back down. >> Yeah, there definitely were cuz they said actually a lot of people just said one. Presumably these were people who were still virgins >> and they were just hoping to have the first one. >> Oh wow. Okay. >> But uh >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> But so both men and women there were a lot saying I would like to have one. Uh but a lot of the men wanted to have a a really high number and uh and not very many women were uh saying, "I want to go have sex with 100 men." Um somehow doing it now. There was that woman in the UK who did it all in one day, right? >> A thousand? Yeah. Bonnie Blue. I I had a debate with her on their show. I uh moderated a debate with her on the show. >> It wasn't a thousand in one day, right? >> No, it was. those. You're talking about Lily Phillips who did a hundred and then Bonnie Blue had sex with a thousand men in one day, which even if you just run the numbers is insane, but the whole thing was recorded. It's Yeah, it's it's >> a real I mean, more than anything, it's a it's an endurance feat u more than it is a one of sexual novelty. But I mean, what you're looking at there is basically someone who's kind of the the Michael Jordan or the LeBron James or the Tiger Woods of socioexuality. It's just somebody that's so far she is the tail of the tail. She's the Elon Musk of of of having sex. >> Yeah. >> And um I had a I had a conversation with her. I sat down. I sat across from her. She was perfectly cordial. Uh she had her defenses up at the start, but when she realized it wasn't going to be a no canankerous takedown conversation, it was it was really nice. And I was looking, I mean, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. And I was looking for is there some deception going on here? Is there some secret trauma that's leaking out? Is there whatever? And by the end of it, my summary is just >> she is the most extreme socioexual being that I've ever seen. She just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex. It's not alchemizing some childhood wound in a way that I think a lot of BDSM and kink actually is. There seems to be a good amount of data coming out that a a good bit of BDSM and kink is uh preferences for that are um predisposed by some situations people have been through in childhood. That was Katherine Paige Harden from UT. She was teaching me about that a couple of weeks ago in uh a couple of other conversations I've had. Um it's it's definitely unique, but I mean yeah, maybe there'll be studies done on her at some point in future. Who knows? The one who did a hundred said she wouldn't recommend it. >> Yeah. The one who did a thousand said that she'd do it again. So again, the the the guy the people at the extremes, the people who are at the tail of the tale, they'll >> Okay. Well, if that's a chance, good for her. And uh must have been fun for the the thousand men, too. I I wondered does she want to get married at some date? >> That would be actually >> that could be a that could be a fix for your incel problem. That could be we could just put a thousand of the men who were struggling with the inseldom thing in there and then that's a thousand fewer men who are maybe thinking that sex is inaccessible. Who knows? [laughter] Yes. Uh my wife thinks they're just caught up by the publicity that this great sex is going on all over the place and uh uh she says they they probably just want the really attractive women which are is unrealistic for them. She wonders, "Have these uh insults made a serious effort to date say the the fat girls or uh others who aren't nearly as much in demand?" Um, traditionally, historically, that's what what people sometimes did. you know, you found someone at about the same level. But uh um but that was before there was the assumption that lots of people are having lots of great sex all the time, >> which I'm told by the researchers who are studying this is that it's not nearly as as wild as that. And that uh the Hollywood version of what uh young person's sex life is uh is not realistic. And it may be realistic even in Hollywood but uh but you know those are beautiful people with lots of money and status and so on. Um so I don't know um I I don't have to you said you know an expert on this and you well have you tried to date the less attractive girls who are wishing for more attention and action or if you insist you have to have the the gorgeous one. Well, you may be disappointed unless you're a a big rich rich handsome man. >> There was a uh a really interesting uh article that was posted by my friend Rob Henderson a couple of days ago and he was talking about uh people assume that it's this small number of men that are capturing sex from a large number of women, but it's not. It's a socioexual few at the top. And yeah, there is there is a little bit of a skew within there, but most people aren't having that much sex. Many people aren't having any sex at all. And there is a small number of people having loads of sex with each other. And that's that that's just a really interesting wrinkle, I think, in the sort of 80/20 discourse that's been going on for a while. And I knew that this had been this had got turned upside down three or four years ago by a friend Alex dates and um and then Rob re-reported on it the other day and basically found out the same thing. You've just got this this group of people who want to have sex with lots of people and >> yeah, everybody else is I don't know looking at it maybe thinking it was good. I guess one interesting thing is probably more men would want to be in that group of highly socioexual people whereas fewer women desire to be in most women who want to be in it are in it presumably uh whereas most men who want to be in it can't be in it. >> Right. Yeah. There's a big difference there again with the uh the men wanting much more of it, the average man wanting much more uh in terms of variety. Um, yeah, I was talking to another expert, Eli Finkle, and he said, "Yeah, the one night stand thing, that's it's not entirely a myth, but it's way overstated that it's quite rare for people to get together and have sex just one time." >> I I don't know the the basis for that, but he knew he he knows much more than I do about that sort of thing. >> Roy Baster, ladies and gentlemen, Roy, you rule. I love your stuff. Everyone needs to go and check out your Substack. Go and subscribe. The Existential Contrarian, >> right? Yes. >> Yeah. The Existential Contrarian. It is a crime how I mean, you're new on Substack, but everyone needs to go and do it. Check out the series on sexual novelty. I'm a massive fan. I read everything that you put out. Uh I think you're great and uh I I look forward to whatever you're doing next because uh every opportunity to read what you do and to talk to you is is a real treat. >> Okay. Well, thank you, Chris. It's been a great interview and a total pleasure for me as well. >> Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed [music] by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.