#713 - Rob Henderson - Why Is Everyone Acting Like A Victim?

26:11Now 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 the, yeah, exactly like the receding of police from inner cities. Right. Yeah. I wonder if the so on its face it seems silly, right? That the insoles 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 I mean maybe I'm giving them too much credit. I think so. 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.

26:47So let's just designate that label on them. But I think yeah, in the modern age, with technology, with video games, with porn, with scrolling phones, I mean, yeah, I've seen sort of research on what young men, like jobless young men do. And most of the time they're scrolling their phones, playing computer games, watching porn, overeating junk food. You see Nicholas Abestats work on that. I haven't. Is this related to the men with that? Men are working, or whatever it is. whatever it's called, just awesome. But yeah, it's like some insane percentage of men are needs not in education, employment or training, but also our prime working age, I think it's 22 to 50, and it's this unseen, because unemployment rates are relatively low in America, but hiding in that data is a very unusual cohort of men who are electing to be unemployed.

27:43They're living on social welfare in one form or another, or it's and or still living at home, spending an insane amount of hours per year playing video games, and while they're playing video games, 50 % of that time is either on prescription medication or whilst taking weed. So you just have a very, it's like, okay, here's the big data. Okay, well, what's that? 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 eight million or 14 million men, prime working age men electing to retreat from the employment market.

28:21Now, we put this episode up and a lot of guys that are maybe a part of this cohort are tangential to this cohort commented. And, you know, the sentiment very strongly was, why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me? Why am I going to work to get a five foot three, two hundred £10 woman who's already gone through two marriages and got four kids. You know, just very despondent. Evidently, guys who don't see much future for themselves. And it was really eye -opening because largely the comments on modern wisdom tend to be pretty personal growth, the agente, highly sovereign, upwardly mobile, etc.

29:07But this episode blasted out of the algorithm into the wider internet, or maybe you got shared on some forums or whatever. And it was very, very interesting. And I got to see a window into this world, and these guys didn't seem very happy. They were maybe comfortable in their nihilism, but I don't think that they were particularly fulfilled. I mean, they may be comfortable when they're young, but there is, you know, I'd be curious whether sort of as we move forward, you know, decade or two decades later. I mean, it's one thing to be a neat when you're 19 or 23, but when you're 43 or 51 and you're single, maybe you've never had a girlfriend and you've spent most of the last, you know, several decades just playing video games and and and and while the way you now have a misery on forums and stuff.

30:00I 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, you can collect sort of extended unemployment or maybe live with your parents or find ways to, I mean, you know, very few people now, very few young men are sort of literally starving or having to steal food to survive. And and now if you want to do something difficult, you have to make the choice to do it, rather than sort of be pressured sort of by external factors. I saw this, I saw this, this TikTok video.

30:34I'm not on TikTok, but people sometimes send these to me. I saw this one, this young guy, I think he was in the army, US Army, and he was just sort of walking through his barracks and he was asking these other young guys, these young recruits, If you could talk to your recruiter right now, what would you say? These other young guys were like, I told him to go fuck himself or like, God, this sucks. Or why did I do this? So on and so forth. And I'm watching this and I know exactly what he's talking about because I was there. I was, you know, I've enlisted. You have. And I was in the Air Force. And I remember, especially like the first two years are just awful.

31:08Once you get in a bit of rank and a bit of responsibility, once you go through the training per stop eating chip, yeah. Exactly. Then you're like, then you're okay. But the first couple of years are really suck. And so I knew, like these were all very young guys. they were still sleeping in bunk beds. And I would have said the same thing, you know, I'm glad that TikTok didn't exist back then. But I'm watching this and I'm thinking like these guys don't understand, right? In five years from now, they're gonna be glad that they ate shit for however many years and they did this, they went through this experience.

31:35And I think a lot of young guys won't even go that far. They won't even 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 it was a character -forming experience. It was good for me. I was an idiot when I was 19 and I probably needed a bit of that structure, a bit of that discipline, and needed to have my ass kicked a little bit. And I think, yeah, you don't, and those guys volunteer to do that, right?

32:05You have to choose to do, undergo that experience. So you've already pre -selected for someone who's got the agency to get moving. Yeah, I have this idea. I had this idea about 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 rampant fragility and this kind of like soy externalizing locus of control culture that's going on at the moment.

32:46It's so interesting though that you've got this barbell strategy where you know 50 % or maybe more percent of the people, young men are happy to lean into the, I've learned a bit of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology and taken the black pill in many regards because I'm a genetic dead end. But at the same time, you have the ascendancy of David Goggins, Jocka Willink, Alex Homozi, 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.

33:25And I think, like, you know, a sortative mating, which is people of a kind, mating with people of their kind, right? So Silicon Valley 135 IQ people with, you know, professional tennis level skills, having kids together. So you kind of have this genetic splitting apart, which also is going to have a psychological, like, heritable psychological echo, I suppose. So the conscientious people will have more conscientious kids and so on and so forth. and then Melissa Carnie'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.

34:03So I think that the Matthew effect of this, 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 that's a distinct possibility. And it seems like in the short term, that is what's occurring. I mean, I even read this, which book was this? It was a speculative hypothesis about why there's a, like sort of pronounced levels of kids being born on the spectrum in Silicon Valley. And it's because, it's not necessarily because the engineers and the programmers themselves are autistic, but they may be sort of sort of somewhere on the spectrum and then they partner with someone who also shares some of those genes and then tell more dignity.

34:42Exactly. And then they have children and then the child is sort of at a heightened risk of getting autism. But I think generally speaking, I mean, I don't know if this could be interpreted as a white pill or a black pill, but I just read this book, The Sun Also Rises by Gregory Clark, who's an economic historian, very well versed in the behavioral genetics as well. And essentially that book, he documents in various societies, essentially how social status sort of loosely defined as sort of wealth and influence and so on, is very sticky across generations. And essentially what he finds, he tracks surnames and finds that, you know, I got intro to this guy from Matt at Aporia.

35:23He's gonna come on. Oh, yeah, he's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and yeah, I spoke with I spoke with Matt about about Gregor, Gregor E. Clarke's work as well and essentially he he tracked status not through so you know there's there's there's there's this Fear especially in the modern era of a sort of 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 essentially he finds is that when you when you look at data from decades past centuries past before or women were sort of educationally and economically emancipated when they were still sort of stuck in these rigid gender roles.

35:56If you pair, or if you look at the status of a given man interested in a woman and then look at the status of the woman's father, there's like a very tight correlation there. So even though the woman herself isn't highly educated or isn't working in a prestigious occupation, often she comes from a family in which her father was. And so one of Clark's claims generally speaking in this book is that people are very good at sort of finding people who are similar to themselves, even if you don't have the sort of external visible badges of class or education or credential. How does that manifest if it's not the external badges?

36:32Yeah, well, basically people cluster together in the same clubs, family, friends, organizations. Right, right. So maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way that they would now, but maybe 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 the daughter of the... It's like a friend of the boss. It's like a social instantiation of the class disposition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is interesting to me. I mean, so Scott Alexander did a long piece on the sort of mating, I think earlier this year. And he talked about how there's surprisingly little sort of matching across sort of educational and class lines.

37:16On the things that you would expect on things like attractiveness, for example, I think there's this, especially in the sort of like the red pill, online spaces of, you know, Mendo really care about education, they really care about how attractive a woman is, and yet at least the data that I saw sort of curated by Scott Alexander is that, it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the college dropout who the barista at the barista. Or if they do date the barista at Starbucks, she has a college degree. And I think a mistake that we might make, I'm sort of channeling Gregor Clark here, is that like, oh, he knew that she had a college degree.

37:55And that's why he was open to dating her. Whereas I think Clark would say, actually, they had some conversations together. And through that, he could sort of tell that they were maybe roughly in the same class, the same space, her sort of levels of curiosity and intellect and all of those sort of psychological attributes, they matched along those lines. And so even though she maybe works somewhere that doesn't require a college degree, she has one and she's the kind of person who would get a college degree. Great to boast. Yeah. And then they sort of match along those lines to be sort of mating still holds.

38:25I think yeah, there's, so again, like is this a white pill or a black pill? It could be a black pill because status is sticking. It almost doesn't matter what you do. And then on the other hand, it's a white pill in that like, you know, even though we have all of these educational and occupational trends in the modern world, it doesn't actually, it may not actually change the sort of underlying social and romantic dynamics that have sort of. Right. Yeah. With us for centuries. Stable. Yeah. Don't be my thing. I think they're, yeah, I think it might. I mean, you're like it, look at you as like the post a child for what was it?

38:55Kids 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 status? So the status, it was on foster kids specifically. So I did some of this research as I was writing my book that will be out next year and then I wrote this essay that was in the free pass a couple of years ago, which basically. So in the US, kids who are raised in families in the bottom socioeconomic quintile. So the bottom 20 % essentially kids raised in poor families. Roughly 11 % of them graduate from college. which is pretty low because the average rate in the US is around 35%.

39:35So it's pretty low, 11 % versus 35%, but the number or the percentage of foster kids in the US who graduate from college is 3%. And so in other words, a kid raised in a poor family is four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid. And so I use this essentially to me sort of evidence that instability and sort of disorderly environment is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to. It obviously has an effect, but maybe something that deserves more attention than we're giving it relative to sort of the material factors. Did you dig into Melissa Coney's new one?

40:13Have you read that? 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. Like, she's like the female Richard Reeves, you know? Like, she's just there to do, help do policy and do the DC thing. And she's a statistician, demographer, lady. Right? I tried to push her on the episode. And was like, so why is this occurring?

40:48Like, give me the implications here. Infer for me, what you think is the underlying mechanism. and she was very reticent about trying to work out what's going on from a psychological perspective. And I thought, wow, that's a good signal that she's not prepared to get out over what she sees as her domain of expertise. I have this, this is what I do, and she did it a little bit, but she didn't go too far. And I was like, that's a really good signal. But what I saw on the internet, before her book came out, tons and tons and tons of articles saying, you know, this is like hard right, Christian talking points being legitimated by cherry pick data.

41:29You haven't read the data, the book's not out yet. And what I saw was her as far as I could see that if you were to do political compass I would probably be like just left of center. And again, very not prepared to say things that she didn't understand and didn't have data to back up and so on and so forth. But on the internet, the only people that weren't lambasting her as being some sort of, you know, like, big, judgmental asshole that's telling people that come from single -parent households that they shouldn't. And what's so you're saying that women should stay in an abusive relationship instead of, you know, allowing themselves and their child to have a good step -parent and blah, blah, blah, blah.

42:09Like just all strawmen shithouse arguments. And I saw the exact path that many, many people are taking, which is causing them to bend toward the right. Because you go, hang in a second, I've put this piece of workout, which is relatively dispassionate, which is actually, it's the two parent privilege. This is a championing of how we can fix under -privileged kids, which is fundamentally a left -wing phenomenon, right? It's class. We try 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 sent to write and further write.

42:45So what you see is how somebody that has a left leaning predisposition, perhaps or just a centrist disposition, gets nudged by their treatment toward the right. We go, okay, well, fuck you guys. Like, if you're not going to accept me, I'll happily, and she, I wish that I'd noticed this before I spoke to her, because I would have loved to have asked her about this. But yeah, like, that's not, 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. But the tribalism of the left and the purity spiral of the left and it's rapidity at judging people to see bigotry where there may not be some.

43:31I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean in a different direction. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I saw a lot of that, sort of the ad hominins online and a lot of the insults and derogatory comments that were directed at her. And I thought, yeah, they were completely unfair. The book, I mean, the other thing is like the book is very dense, but it's also, you can read it in and after noon. 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. And it seems like, yeah, most people just didn't even bother flipping through it and having a look because she caveats multiple times.

44:08That this isn't a book about sort of sort of judging people or about values, it really is about looking just sort of from a dispassionate point of view, what did the data say about outcomes for kids and various sort of family arrangements? So yeah, that was so strange. I mean, yeah, and she just took close to the day. I think generally speaking, that's a good idea when you're making arguments that are unpopular, that you should stick very closely to the data and not go too far ahead of your skis there just because you're going to be held to a higher standard when you say something that's unpopular.

44:39There's that sort of can versus must distinction, sort of the classic finding in psychology about how when people are predisposed to support a certain point of view, essentially they implicitly ask themselves, and then they come across a piece of information that supports that point of view. They implicitly ask themselves, can I believe it? And generally speaking, yes, I can believe that. And when they encounter something that is at odds with that point of view, They implicitly ask themselves, must I believe it? And if they find a reason, if there are any flaws in that argument or any reason whatsoever, why they can discount it, then they say, oh, I don't have to, right?

45:18Doesn't this show up? Was it you that taught me about how the shows up in Twitter arguments were? 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 why such and such a thing is true. and it's like, you know, asking for, is this thing true? You're looking for arguments that support your side. Yeah. So you're looking for a good barrister rather than an honest judge. Yes, right, right. Yeah, you want to, you want to, well, you're looking for arguments, of course, that sort of, the classic confirmation bias idea, you're looking for information, your monitoring, and then you're sort of overlooking anything that might make you feel uncomfortable or that might call your beliefs into question.

46:00There was a really cool study. I want to say this was in the 90s, sort of along this vein. I mean, it's a neat example because it's sort of disconnected from politics. Like, I think anyone can appreciate this, which is essentially what these researchers did was they brought these participants into the lab. And they told these participants, they showed them this jar and it was really just water, but they told 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 So you drop the strip of water into it, and it doesn't change color.

46:33It just sort of remains the same white or whatever it was. Then that means that you don't have this sort of rare, unique congenital disease. You 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 basically they found you're a participant to dip it in, didn't change color, they'd walk right out. In another condition, they told the participants, you dip the strip into the piece of paper, and if it changes color, then that means you're good to go. So if it stays the same, that means you may potentially have this congenital illness.

47:01And in this case, what did the participants do? They dipped the strip into the water, waited, dipped it back in, waited, took another strip, dipped it back in, waited, and then they started to get nervous. And essentially, they were going for that confirmation because what did they want to believe? They wanted to believe that they were healthy. And when they did not receive information that supported that, then they started to sort of shuffle through and try to find ways to confirm that belief. We both came across the same research that shows that chads rather than in cells are the extreme misogynist.

47:31Dude, I love this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I saw William retweet that word. Of course he does. Of course he does. If you have anything that's pro -in cell. Men with higher levels of sex partners are more likely to hold extreme misogynist views, which contradicts the in cell narrative. Extreme misogyny correlates with state of seeking and dominance orientation, both of which which also correlate with high levels of sex pannas. Yeah, I thought that was an absolutely fascinating study. It links up very nicely. When I was in grad school, I read David Buses' Evolutionary Psychology textbook, Cover to Cover, and one of the things he points out there is that there's not much, if any, research, supporting what's referred to as the meat deprivation hypothesis.

48:18The meat deprivation hypothesis is essentially that young men who are deprived of the of the Mates are more likely to develop these sort of misogynistic attitudes. They're more likely to coerce women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault. And essentially, all the issues that I've seen indicates almost the reverse of that. And including the study here, which points in the same direction, which is that the men who are the most likely to commit sexual coercion or assault are also men who are the most likely to have consensual sex partners as well. Well, and yeah, all of these things sort of come together and correlate with status seeking, dominance orientation, extraversion.

48:59Oh, probably I would imagine narcissism as well and maybe some of the other dark triad traits of being particularly attractive to women. And you know, this is, now, you know, I'm more comfortable speculating than you actually. Get out of there. You know, even part of the character. But I have a foot in, but I'm comfortable sort of making this, this is just a hypothesis, but I think that most, many, maybe most women would be pretty reluctant to actually be sort of alone in, like, be in a situation in which they could potentially be alone and assaulted by the sort of prototypical in cell, like, you know, you know, you're the sort of lonely, unattractive, isolated, angry male.

49:43Warning problems. Right. Exactly. Like, they would know in advance, like, I don't need to be alone with this guy. There's something off about him. Again, the sort of prototypical, I'm not saying all insoles are like that, but that sort of archetypal image of an insol, whereas probably just sort of, I think this is pretty intuitive that women would be more willing to sort of be alone and potentially be in a risky situation with a man who is attractive. And so just through the sort of differentiating levels or different levels of like losing alone and exposure alone, that assault would be more likely to happen in one context than and the other.

50:19And so I think that may partially explain some of those differences that if women were alone with actual themselves, as much as they're alone with, you know, status seeking dominance oriented or orientated extroverts, that maybe the numbers would be different. But generally speaking, I think that finding is suggestive. And then in my own personal life, I mean, when I think about the guy who spent your time alone with you, that I spent, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that I feel at root. Yeah. But the guys that I know who are particularly, you know, at least numerically successful, I don't know if you would be successful in this context, but just have had a lot of sex partners.

50:55They do tend to be a little bit more glib, a little bit less preoccupied with, well, what does she think of me or sort of what traditional or conventional or hold sort of benevolent sexist attitudes, right? It's usually a little bit more, I guess, on the positive, I mean, moot jockey or playful, but then on the other, it can sort of dip into the example that I... So I posted one of these studies online and sort of commented that, I think this is easy to understand when you reverse the genders. If you think about a woman who spends a lot of time attracting men, I'm thinking about someone like a stripper, for example, I'm sure they have extremely cynical attitudes about men, right?

51:39Whereas 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 them, they probably have a little bit more sort of maybe slightly more optimistic views or at least less less cynical views about. So Saudi Akhan, psychology, psychology lady, she does like couples counseling and stuff. She gave me this really interesting answer to the question, are hot girls more crazy? So the classic question, like finally Aristotle's got an answer. And she said that the experience that hot girls have of most men jades their view of all men.

52:28Because 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 group together to clump together in a way which doesn't show men in a particularly good light. Right. Yeah. How fucking cool is that as an idea? Like the reality distortion field of the hot girl or something? Yeah, that is, it reminds me of this interview I watched years ago of Chris Rock.

53:08And he said, basically, well, I don't know if he said something long 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 is often obnoxious or, you know, try to give you free things or try to court you, or they're looking for something from you. And yeah, that is 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.

53:38And pre -selecting for the only sorts of people who are prepared to go up to the hot girl in the first place. I saw this with strippers. And I would imagine it may be the same with the 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 blowjob off one of the strippers that are in there. Right? Like men at their worst selected for it, their worst around the women that are able to, you know, cajole or coerce or encourage them to do a thing that's a whatever.

54:16and oh, that's how all men are. This is this really great segment on Rogan's show years and years ago, 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, ah, I don't know what you're talking about. It's fantastic over there. Every time I go into a room, everyone treats me really great. And Tim cuts in, he goes, hold on a second, like you do know that you are Joe Rogan. Yeah, right. Like do you like you bend reality or rather this sphere that follows you where like who the fuck's gonna treat you like shit?

54:54Right? Like the biggest podcaster in the world's just walked in. And I spoke to Tucker Maxx about this over dinner a couple of months ago. It's so interesting. And I was talking about how I've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years as a status and renown and wealth and whatever has changed. And there is a reason now to be nice, perhaps, or maybe there's not a reason to be nice, they don't even know it, but something happens, they've heard that's the guy with the podcast or whatever. So you just notice that like the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way.

55:29Maybe I'm just super like charismatic or whatever, I've changed my confidence. That totally could be it too, but my more like highly skeptical cynical view of it is like people want something or whatever. Anyway, and I was talking to Tukra about this and he said, to become rich, your famous as a man is to accept being a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. He said that women become objectified as soon as they become womanly. You're 13 years old and the boys in the class and I'll start to see that you've got boobs and then you become 17, 18 and the whole world objectifies you for a while because your value is immediate and upfront, whereas this is a red pill, take away, I guess, that women are born with value men have to create it.

56:13And it is, unless you're Brad Pitt or somebody who is super good looking and has that upfront, you have to achieve some degree of self -generated value in order for people to treat you and to objectify you. 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. What's he got? Let me tell you. Let me ask you about blah, blah. Yeah, to become a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. That was very interesting. Yeah. There's sort of a positive feedback loop that happens there too. I think with the Bugatti example, so you have this prestigious material good, and then you step out of it, and then suddenly, you have increased social capital because people are drawn to you.

57:03But I think this happens even within just the realm of social capital itself. I mean, I obviously used this personal example of, I was walking through an airport with some friends and then recognized a couple of different times. I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know, they kind of know that I write and stuff, and then I got recognized. Suddenly they became more interested in talking to me and like, oh, what exactly tell me more about it? I think it's like you get recognized once and then other people become interested and then suddenly you can't. Did you know that?

57:31David tell you that story when I walked down Broadway with Peterson in Nashville. So we went for dinner. It was about two years ago from now. I went for dinner with him. And there was that famous video of him dancing with his wife and Ben Shapiro was there in Nashville. It was a few years ago. Oh, I saw it. It was the night after that. So he loved this bar. We were going to go back to this bar. And he didn't have any of his security with him. So it was me, Michaela. Michaela's now husband and Jordan. And Micheal has been six foot four, kind of dude. So he's like a tall guy or whatever. But no security.

58:06And Jordan starts walking down a Broadway, like the street in Nashville, right? So our 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, or maybe they don't, but anyway, it's stacked. Someone notices Jordan Peterson and then goes over to get a photo with him and shake his hand and hello, how are you? and then other people notice that other people are standing talking to someone. So a queue forms to speak to Jordan Peterson. He's accumulating a tale of humans as he walked like a fucking comet, right? Walking down the National Commit.

58:41Yeah, honestly. And I remember thinking like, oh my god, we were at the young delegates dinner, drinks thing last night at Arc here in London. And sure enough, there was a queue of people. But 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 people in commentale thing existed again. So, yeah, that's almost like a physical manifestation of what you're talking about that's going on socially, right?

59:26People see, they don't see a physical queue, but they see, like a social queue, right? Like a CUE. They go, okay, right? And I would be curious. I mean, maybe in the example of the 150 or smaller group of selected people, they probably are familiar with Jordan. It sounds like, but in the example of him walking down, is it Broadway, the student 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 on the tail. Let's get everyone's following that guy.

59:58I guess he's famous. Let's go check this out. And now they're falling. So what percentage of those people were familiar with him, too? There are these classic studies from Milgram. So most people know Milgram through the obedience studies. Essentially, trick people into shocking and believing that they were injuring someone or perhaps killing them. But there were these other studies that Milgram did. And other social psychologists, this sort of classic work back in the day of, you know, he just have people on like a Manhattan street and just have like four or five research assistants look up at the sky, just like me, you, a couple of people just look up at the sky like this.

1:00:34And then gradually what happened is people would be walking by and they'd see, you know, four people looking at something and they'd stop and look up to like, what are they looking at? And then suddenly this massive crowd reform of like suddenly you have 40 people looking up at the sky and no one is looking at, right? Everyone's trying to figure out what those original four people, right? So there is that sort of imitative quality that you know, which is you know, it's it's adaptive But it's also you know can kind of miss it. It'll be funny situations. Yeah Being moderate is a green flag. You see this new one about extremist views William shared the graph of it I haven't seen this one, but let me get your take on this.

1:01:11This is awesome Research is 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 mega -republican to be a major turn off. 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 mega, 64 % of men for communist. 55 % of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. My modern wisdom. Thirty five, yeah, that wasn't on that. Thirty five percent of men.

1:01:54Forty one percent of men said the same for a woman being into astrology. Okay. Twenty percent of women. Thirty three percent of men said red flag for they say black lives matter. Fourteen percent of women. Fifty three percent of women for they refuse to see the Barbie movie. Fifty three percent of women, fifty eight percent 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 far right is in far leftism, being moderate is a green flag, basically, like having. But that being said, how is saying that there are only two genders, like an extreme position?

1:02:42I would have thought that that would have been the moderate position. I guess it depends. Yeah, but the bar stores being turned upside down. But yeah, overall, when it comes to dating, it seems like a majority of both men and women consider far -rightism and far -leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. What age group was this? Are these young? 18 to 34. 18 to 34. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, yeah, you've probably seen some of these data too about the political divergence of young men and young women, which is really interesting because a lot of the press media will concentrate on, you know, the supposed right -wing radicalization of young men when actually most of the sort of political psychology survey data indicates the reverse where men are young men are slightly turning to the right.

1:03:24There's sort of a slight turn, whereas for young women, there's a sharp, like a sharp rise in young women identifying as left or far left. So it's actually the women who are being sort of radicalized or turning to a more extreme direction. Yeah, but we don't mind about that one. Yeah, we don't need to care about that. Yeah, well, I mean, well, so I think like in terms of like violence and so forth, right? There's no there's no young female syndrome or if there is one, it would be it would manifest itself differently and the female longhouse

1:03:57But yeah, I mean in terms of the sort of the classic threats of terrorism and so forth I mean, but yeah, that's that's interesting. I mean, so so some of those like yeah, the two genders one That's interesting. 58 % of women. I found like that. Yeah, there's a sort of a neat reversal there of like Maga Republicans versus Communists, where most men are seemingly okay with dating a Maga identifying woman but women are more okay with dating a communist identifying man. But here's the thing right that it's not Apples for apples right like a 35 % of men said that a woman listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag But a man listening to Joe Rogan and a woman listening to Joe Rogan is not the same thing.

1:04:39That's true too. You know what I mean? There was one about owning a gun that some quite high percentage of women said that owning a gun was a red flag in America. But a woman owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun. And the same for listening to Joe Rogan and so on and so So it makes for very interesting reading, but I actually think that if a woman does listen to Joe Rogan, there'll be some non -zero number of men in that. I like that's a boy's show. Like, why, why, like, oh, maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's like, gonna try and arm wrestle me in bed or something? Like, yeah, yeah.

1:05:18Yeah, I have heard this, just speaking with young guys that they are to some extent sort of bothered by these gender differences in politics and how like more and more young women are sort of identifying in a more sort of sharp left -wing direction But then they also sort of lament that you know a lot of young because you have to be 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 often sort of coincides with other things that young men are kind of annoyed by.

1:05:58So it's like, it's the astrology one, 41 % of men said that a woman being into astrology is a reference. How and how was confusing to be? I think like, that's fine. 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, who was it that said, was it that they said, the big five is astrology for men. I've heard that for every wish and every psychology too. Yeah, at least he's like, all of you. And what's your psychology? It's astrology for men. Yeah, but I mean, well, that's fine, but they're like, you know, a lot of, well, a lot of men, but at least it makes me more women are interested in the MBTI, the Myers -Briggs.

1:06:32And that is, I mean, it's, you know, it's not completely astrology, but it's more like astrology than the big five. I had a Spencer Greenberg on the show. Do you know Spencer? Really interesting, dude. I think I've seen some of his intro to him from William McCaskill, to super interesting guy, mathematician, but just does science. Like I don't know what he's funded by, maybe himself, but and he did a huge breakdown of like predictive power of Myers -Briggs versus Big Five versus other stuff, versus other stuff. And Myers -Briggs is like, I think it's like 18 % accurate, basically, on actual predisposition of things.

1:07:08But yeah, that's astrology for astrology, I think. What was that study about higher female status engender equality being associated with lower female relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that. Yeah, this is a study I came across. I think it was published in 2015, which yeah, essentially found that higher levels of wealth and socio -political equality among the genders is associated with lower levels of relative happiness for women compared to men. and the researchers speculate this may have something to do with increasing levels of employment, the pressure to obtain higher levels of education, among women in particular, and that this is actually sort of dampening women's levels of happiness.

1:07:57And to me, this connects with another, and this one is this classic finding of the paradox of declining female happiness, which is essentially that that since the 1970s, women's happiness relative to men's has declined. So to be clear, so relative to the 1970s, everyone is less happy today compared to the 1970s, but in the 1970s men were actually happier. No, no, sorry, women were happier than men. So women had higher rates of happiness relative to men in the 1970s, and people generally were happier overall, fast forward to the present, and things have reversed, men are now happier than women, although overall people report being less happy.

1:08:35And so yeah, that study that I pointed out, that was an interesting one to me because, yeah, I mean, the message that a lot of young people receive today is, what are the keys to happiness? You work hard, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a high -paying job, you sort of follow that cookie cutter track. And what is the purpose of all of this? And it's, I suppose, most people say, well, they want to be happy. And so you go through the education and employment route, maybe you go to law school after college, you sort of get the credentials, you go through whatever the fellowships and all these different programs, and at the end of the tunnel, you're hoping that you'll be happy.

1:09:14And actually, for both men and women, doesn't seem to be working, but for women in particular, because they've had the sharpest decline, right? Because they were happier, and now they're, you know, so they're in the cost of them. Exactly. And so their diminishing happiness has actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men. And the men's happiness being sort of higher than women is interesting as well. And I wonder if that is almost sort of 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 some degree because they don't feel as much pressure anymore.

1:09:46The sort of, you know, back in the day, men were sort of pressured more to be earners and providers and so on. And there was a sort of economic pressure associated with that. And now that you don't really have to, we're, I mean, we're seeing young men are sort of dropping out of college They're dropping out of higher education and employment. Yep. 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 think a lot of this might be like? I don't I don't I didn't have to go to class.

1:10:13Given the fact that men were previously less happy and relative to then are now less happy Mm -hmm Also, it's just that really the the chain the big change here is the women. Yeah, that's fled. Yeah I wonder whether the male dissatisfaction with the gameful employment state of seeking, providing things was just baked in already. It's like, oh, okay, we already knew this. Grandad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and dad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and I'm a spit and sawdust and I'm unhappy. But there is a little bit less pressure to do this. Was that kind of this Blake that did that one?

1:10:52The female happiness. Yeah, I don't recall the the authors of that one. She did all happiness studies. She definitely taught me about either that or something similar, which is yeah, that you know the gender pay gap positively predicts relationships, science is function. Oh, I have seen that. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, they read that paper. Which is, you know, it's it's funny because it so it predicts relationships, satisfaction if men earn more than women. And then it also there was there was a reversal of this. I don't know if canis was a study on this or different, different authors, but they found that when, when women in marriages are in 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, higher rates of domestic violence, infidelity on the part of the man as well.

1:11:42Yeah. Men are likely to cheat when they're in less. 50 % increase in the use of erectile dysfunction medication. Well, women's the primary Marie Bredwina. That too. Yeah, that's pretty, it's grim, but then, you know, I, you know, here's an anecdote. I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation, it was me and the group of women, these female students, and one of them, she was a pretty hardcore feminist, and she said that it should be 50 -50. Like 50 % of women should be working, you know, 50 % of women, like if it's the case, the 50 % of women are working 50 % of a women should be at home and same for men.

1:12:22If 50 % of men should be working 50 % of men at home. And 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, okay, so, but would you actually be okay with that? Your husband staying at home? I don't really know, whatever. And then finally I decided to jump in and I said, speaking to this young feminist woman, I said, yeah, so I know that you plan on going to law school. you're very smart, you're going to be very successful. How would you feel like your husband is at home, I don't know, changing diapers and taking care of the kids.

1:12:54And you're at a prestigious law firm with a bunch of high -powered attorneys. Like how would that, you think you'd be happy in that situation? And her response was, wow, I think I just felt a tingle when you said high -powered attorneys. 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 was a good response, but I think that there was an element of seriousness there, right? That when she's fantasizing about rubbing shoulders with all of these high -powered, successful at the top of their game, and then you got your husband at home, and I think it's different.

1:13:31Men and women are different. We're attracted to different things. Yeah. It's interesting to think about the potential pressure that may come along for the ride with you are supposed to be gainfully employed and have your education and be able to sort this sort of stuff That's something I Not just the going to work not just the getting up early and the hours of sleep and all the rest of it but kind of the psychosocial interpretation of being a person that is status striving and 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 inconsecientiousness?

1:14:15Is it a part of your hard work, like you're gritting 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 it shmows up to the boss and all that sort of stuff. And no one really talks about that Because that's part of work. Right. Like that comes along for the ride is a part of work. But no one ever talks about that. And it's like, okay, like it's the classic. Do you want to be a CEO, woman? Do you really want to do 80 hour weeks and do you really want to do that?

1:14:48And it's like, do you really want to play this game for 20 years of fucking sucking up to people and having to do the social network manipulation and deafness and all this. So that being said, given women's sort of predisposition and ability to be a little bit more like subtle 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, their wellbeing may suffer more than men's despite their capacity for doing it being as good or greater. Yeah, I mean, I was wondering if it's sort of the reversal level we were speaking about earlier about young men who don't want to do hard things, but then once they do, then they find that they enjoy them and they appreciate it.

1:15:37Whereas in this context, maybe maybe some women think, oh, if I follow this track and get a lot of education and go to, you know, it'll make me happy. Then once you get there, it's actually not. It's not as satisfying as you would have hoped. It's actually worse than you expected. And I think a lot of, actually, a lot, I know people like this, as I'm speaking and thinking about it, I know a lot of people who, you know, they think that once they get there, they they have this certain image of what it's going to be like and actually yet working 7, 8, 90 hours a week. And even they are doing well financially, they are making money, they are buying all of the material that they thought they wanted, wearing amazing clothes, nice apartment in the right parts of the city and so on.

1:16:15But they just don't have time to enjoy it because they're always on the clock, nonstop working weekends, no time to appreciate. But I think there is an element of the sort of social signaling where at some point the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and their job and how prestigious it is. I was teaching you last night about my theory of surplus mate value. 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.

1:16:54Olympia 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 girlfriend sort of holds this dude, the same 260 pounds, presumably just holds the top of his head in his arm and inner arms and says like it's okay and blah blah blah. but this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the giga Chad meme, right? Like he is the dude that is over the Peaky Blinders quote, like the Killian Murphy quote from Peaky Blinders, as he speaks over the top and it's just Chris Bumstead, just like in like mean and stoic. Like he's the Sigma male meme that's been used on TikTok, right?

1:17:30Like he's missed a Sigma male. And I brought up to him this kind of odd irony that the guy that is the face of the Sigma male meme, the stoic, you know, emotionalists, just grit and grind and go through it thing, was heavily dependent on his girlfriend in order to be able to go and achieve the next part of his, you know, trajectory. Right. And one of the things that interestingly got brought up in the comments was, well, yeah, he can do that because he is Mr. Olympia. And it got me thinking about surplus So if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value, not to say that Chris is, Chris is Mrs.

1:18:12is like a smoke show, super smart and pretty sure she went to 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 to be world champion in anything. And basically that Chris had so much surplus mate value in his relationship that he could get away with drawing from this bank account, he's allowed to cry. But if the, if you not the world champion, right, like maybe the guy that comes 20th, maybe he's unable to do that. And if he did cry on the floor, that would dip in below.

1:18:50And the girlfriend would see him for the vulnerable cook that he is and leave. But yeah, just kind of an unfalsifiable, well, I mean, I mean, it's, it seems like an illustration of counter -signalling essentially, right? Like when you're, I mean, the whole idea of counter -signalism is like, once you reach a certain point in a status domain, you can actually behave the same way as someone very low on the status domain would behave and it actually increases your status even more. And so example I like to use is a classic word from Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues about self -deprecating humor.

1:19:23that if you're a very high status person and you're holding a meeting or you're just in a social setting and you make fun of yourself a little bit, people actually, it ingratiates you. It sort of increases their admiration of you that, no, 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 guy who doesn't like himself very much or it just hits people the wrong way. And then our mutual friend, Rory Sutherland, likes to use the riding the bicycle on the way to work example, which we mentioned this last night too, about how if the guy who works at Pizza Hut rides his bike to work is because he can't afford a car.

1:20:00But if the CEO rides the bike to work, it's because he cares about his health or he cares about the environment or he's just a conscientious guy. And it makes us like him more that he's riding his bike. He doesn't have to drive the fancy car and makes us like him even more. And I think there's something there about that, that's sort of the counter -signalling element here. And I think you can see it in a lot of different walks of life. Just like how how much self -promotion people do. There was a classic paper called Too Good for School. One of the early papers in the counter -signalling sort of research area.

1:20:36And this was about, so this was, I want to say in the early 2000s where they asked, or what they did was they gathered syllabi from college professors and found the syllabus. Is that the plural of syllabus? Yeah, it's called. And so they gathered these from various institutions and rank ordered them and essentially found that the more prestigious the institution, the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus. So if you're at some fancy Ivy League school, they would just say, I'm whatever Bob Smith. but if you're sort of mid here or lower down, it's, you know, a doctor so and so, or a professor so and so, and then they say whatever, yeah.

1:21:15All the degrees, everything. And then they also called the, so this is back when people still had answering machines. And so they called the offices of these professors and found that the higher doctors are Rob had the CAHD, MFC, can't have so, whereas at the higher ranked universities, right? So it's exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bob, call you later or whatever, whereas you have a lower tier. It's, yeah, Dr. Sowood, so this office and this department and just all of their credentials. And I think we're now seeing this to some degree in the social media space now or in how much self -promotion people do.

1:21:51If you're an established author, you can maybe make one or two announcements, but if you're still struggling and still trying to make it, you have to do a lot more self -promotion. But there's a It was something like when disclosing good news goes wrong, something along these lines where if you're a very high status person doing very well in your life and you do a lot of self -promote or if you do a lot of counter -signaling people don't like it. And so an example that I've given is a first -time author. If your book does very well and you write this long post on social media, I want to thank all of you for following me on this journey.

1:22:35blah blah blah blah. But if a super famous, well -established author does the same thing, it comes across as a little bit gauche as a little bit like we already knew you were gonna do well. Like you don't have to play this like mock humility. So I've thought about this from a storytelling perspective, especially over the last six years, that going back and talking about when I ruptured my Achilles and set up a special kind of stand so that I could do it with my foot elevated in a boot. I remember those days. I'm pretty sure you only have the FaceTime and I'm like, is that your foot? Not attached to the rest of my leg.

1:23:12That's kind of cool to track that journey. So you know, for the people that are on any kind of trajectory with whether it be content creation or a business or something like that, I think that there's an awful lot of value of saying the things as they happen. I've kind of showing the shit times. One of Alex Homo's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the shit times more because he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he lives in this nice penthouse and he can retrospectively tell people about the shit times but it's not the same as showing them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you get, presuming that all of your plans go well and you end up in the place that you want to end up in, when you get there, it's gonna be way more difficult for you to try and tell people about the non -ivory tower that you used to live in.

1:23:58Yeah. Yeah. So I think that tracking your journey is best you can and getting the posts out there or writing about the times that have been rough or things like that, writing about the challenges. Not only is it, I think, a useful tool for yourself to remind yourself to go back and read or watch or whatever and see, oh, I went through a period that I had to be resilient. That means that if I face a similar challenge in future, I can also be resilient. but also it's a good way marker in the ground of like here, here I was, this is kind of evidence, skin in the game of how shit life has been at least at some points.

1:24:36Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, I mean, yeah, I like that example. And if you, especially like I've seen these cases of people who are very successful and 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 is like, well, why are we just now hearing about this or why haven't you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this or you just sort of whatever like like embellishing this 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 sort of reflect and I think it's it's also just like an inspiring message to other people who are also struggling very early in there and their careers or in their in their lives.

1:25:20I think you'll I think a book's going to do this. I'm really super excited. I'm aware that it wasn't supposed to be like, you know, you too dispossessed human can become, you go through the US Air Force and fucking Yale and you know, all that stuff. But I really think, you know, like reading it, reading early versions of the manuscript, I was like, fucking hell, like this is, you know, it's kind of like the anti -black pill message, like the guy who kept on just getting kicked in the face by life ends up kind of succeeding at the end of it. Yeah, super excited for it to come out. Yeah, that wasn't the intention, but I have, yeah, heard similar sort of feedback, a friend of mine who joined the Navy.

1:26:00And he was, yeah, he had just gotten out of basic training and he was still heating shit sort of early in his military career. And yeah, he read an early manuscript and he's like, yeah, this was great. Like this is exactly what I needed in this moment because I was just feeling so awful and like, really isn't God, just put one foot in front of the other, just keep trying, keep taking shots. and yeah, it'll hopefully work out as long as you have your mindset right in your priorities in order. Yeah, man. Some people pre -older that yet? Yeah, it listes. It's up. So, yeah, we can talk about it. It's fine.

1:26:31Oh, you coming back on for the books. Yeah, yeah. It's up for pre -order. 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. Yeah, yeah. 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's stuff on status, on how we evaluate other people and those kinds of things sort of work their way. And especially in the later chapters of the book, I do this thing where I sort of write each chapter from the perspective of myself at that age.

1:27:04But yeah, as I sort of enter adulthood and become a sort of more curious and reflective person, you know, you can sort of see the way that my mind, I guess, sort of develops in the way start to think about things. So, yeah, man, yeah, I'm excited for it too. and a pump for it to come out. And the cover's cool, it's you as a kid riding a bike down the street. So you taught me about this Balmyster idea about why ovulation might be concealed in women. And I've got a counter like bullshit hypothesis as well. So what was the, what's that idea that you learned from Balmyster about ovulation? Right. So this was a chapter.

1:27:41It was a speculative chapter from Roy Balmyster. This Eminence likeologist, 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, you, you, you, you visit very, visibly can with other great apes with chimpanzees and so forth. And so the speculative idea is that 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 whether to sort of reduce the risk of sexual coercion or to obscure paternity uncertainty or all of those kinds of things, whereas this speculative chapter posits that it's actually to conceal ovulation from themselves so that women don't know because vastly oversimplifying, but back when women started to be, or your human beings in general started to become sort of self -reflective and introspective and fully conscious and women could suddenly say, oh, when I'm ovulating, I'm more likely to get pregnant, they could visibly see it.

1:28:48Then they would be less likely to have sex and in order to essentially side -step the burdens of pregnancy because pregnancy was extremely risky and it would become a lot of, as a woman, you become aware of your menstrual cycle and avoid particular periods appropriately. And so the idea here is that eventually only the women who had concealed ovulation were the ones to reproduce and then gradually over time all women had obscured ovulation. And this was essentially a way to sort of prevent women from sightsepping their own possibility of pregnancy. And then, yeah, and some of those excerpts that I sent you, there was a nice line from Leslie Newsom in this book that just came out a couple of years ago called The Story of us, which is a nice sort of sweeping, updated overview of human evolution, and essentially, which she writes, she and her co -author, they write that, you know, historically there may have been women who avoided the burdens of pregnancy, but those women are not our ancestors, right?

1:29:49It was the women who did undergo this very difficult, challenging, and dangerous experience, and those were the ones. So I thought those two findings, I nearly dovetail, but I'm curious to hear what's the theory sort of counter. 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 other women are, if a woman while she's ovulating or about to ovulate is put under intense social and physical stress, it can cause the ovulation to misfire. So women who are under real significant stress, it messes up the menstrual cycle, but many many women that are listening to this may know that their menstrual cycle kind of, if they're super stressed at work or they're studying for exams or whatever, like the stuff gets squirrelly, right?

1:30:36Like guys might struggle to get an erection if they're super stressed, women might, their menstrual cycle can go all over. And one of the arguments is that concealed ovulation stops other women in your tribe from fucking with you while they know that you're potentially fertile. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so I think like that so these hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They all work together. The all sort of the pad 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 pad 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.

1:31:19Yeah. Yeah, I think they're, yeah, so it may require all of those different external phenomena to produce that outcome, right? Like one of those alone might not be enough where, you know, if it had only been the concealing ovulation from themselves, maybe we would still have, you know, some percentage of women who were visibly, you know, ovulating another's who aren't, but it may require all of those different trans working together to produce the situation in which women are no longer sort of visible when the ovulation is no longer visible among women. So yeah, I mean, this is, I think, yeah, this is this is sort of a often this obstacle people kind of run into or this trap that we think like it can only be one or the other, but this, yeah, I don't think this is really, really, really, really, really, right?

1:32:03I mean, evolution is complicated and intricate and so many things are going on. I think concealed ovulation, given that it's super rare in the animal kingdom, I think, as well. So yeah, concealed ovulation is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of it doesn't matter which of these hypotheses are correct There are so many benefits right from an evolutionary perspective Just trigger all of these different things take 10 % of them. You like it's pretty good deal. That's pretty works pretty well What's that um Solomon's paradox. Did you you were teaching me about what's that?

1:32:42Yeah, so Solomon's paradox is so it's a finding 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 that if you have any issues you should ask King Solomon and famously most people know the King Solomon's story of the the two women who claimed that they were the mother of the baby and then he So, you know, kind of 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 actual mother would step forth and say the other one we can have it and that's how he, you know, so that's how he sort of resolved this issue.

1:33:22But it's a paradox or they assigned this label, the Solomon paradox, because King Solomon himself in his personal life was actually not very wise. So, he was wise for other people, but in his personal life, you know, he made a lot of mistakes as a king, he was not a particularly good father to his son and his son actually grew up to be a tyrant and actually a very bad king because he had sort of mismanishes on parenting. And so in psychology, the Solomon's paradox is that that people can be very wise for other people, social problems, but are often less than wise for their own. And so there was a recent meta -analysis that just came out, various studies looking at the Solomon Paradox are people sort of wiser when reasoning about, you know, so they, you know, they'd bring people in, people who had recently gone through a breakup, for example, and sort of ask them, well, what do you plan to do and so on and so forth?

1:34:12And then they would bring in other people, either strangers or the participants' friends or people, you know, peers of theirs and say, well, what do you think this person should do in that situation? And found, and they found various ways to sort of measure this of how to sort of measure wise decision making and found that social distance actually helps. It's the peer or the stranger who can say, okay, so this person has just been betrayed by their friend or they're just going through a breakup or they're having some difficulty in their social lives. Well, here's probably the best way to go. And the idea here seems to be, yeah, when you're sort of emotionally entangled, it's hard to sort of act rationally.

1:34:48It's hard to act in a way that will benefit both you and maybe the other party as well. And so as I was reading this, I think it's a really interesting finding in and of itself, but then I also wonder. So I'll actually give an example of this. So there was an interesting setting on economic games. And so there's this game called the Ultimatum Game in Behavioral Economics. And the simple version of the game is that, so imagine you and I are playing the Ultimatum Game, and the researcher gives me $10 and says, you can give some amount to Chris. and if he accepts the amount, then both of you walk away with the money.

1:35:28And so I'm under this, you know, I have to deliberate and think, okay, so how much do I have to offer Chris of my ten? He knows I, you know I have ten. So you know I have ten, 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%. That would have said 30 % that fell about right. Yeah, and same. Yeah, when I first went, like, oh, 30, that sounds fair. Any more, it would feel like unrealistic, but any less would feel unfair. And so that's what they like consistently find is around 30%. But they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else.

1:36:02So it's actually it's it's economically irrational to take anything To decline any amount greater than zero. Essentially. Yeah. You should take anything right because you know one is better than zero So what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the ultimatum game So I'm playing for a friend or whatever or you're playing on behalf of a friend that people will accept any micro to the 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 one dollar or two dollars or whatever happens to be Yeah And so so I found that finding the Solomon's paradox interesting because I wonder if there's something If this can be applied more broadly to what's going on with young people you've seen some of these data about young people having fewer friends few social contacts less likely to be in relationships less time in actual physical social spaces.

1:36:54And this Solomon'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, someone, you know, I'm thinking about making a decision in my career, something I'll call you, I'll call someone and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? And that can sort of help me to contextualize and you'll see things that I don't see and so forth. But if you're a young person and you don't have many people around you, so you're already unhappy because you don't have very many friends.

1:37:25But then without the friends and people you can communicate with to talk your problems through with in your life, whether it's in your career or other social domains or romantic relationships and so forth, you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions. And so there's this sort of negative feedback cycle that made me afraid. A few of people to show you a blind spot. Exactly. And to sort of list out the options that you could take that you aren't seeing or list out the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the decision that you're leaning toward. And so, yeah, over time, this may actually be exacerbating.

1:37:59It's not just about loneliness. It's also about the sort of Solomon's paradox in 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, you ever watched this show who wants to be a millionaire? Yeah. Yeah.

1:38:25So I watched a couple of seasons of like the new one. This was during the lockdown. A couple of seasons? Yeah, lockdown, man. Yeah, that's the thing. You're about to do something. That's a world of wallcraft. Well, I was playing in the background, right? So I put on, you know, because I used to watch this show as a kid, I put on the back, it was almost like a comfort thing, you know, a little lockdown. And one thing that I noticed was, I don't know, they changed, they used to have these lifelines. One of the lifelines in this updated version or whatever the COVID lockdown version was that they would bring their smart friend along and that was a lifeline.

1:38:52Like they'd bring their smart friend, they'd be sitting in the back. And if they wanted to use a lifeline, they'd turn around and ask their smart friend. What do you think? What do you think? I wonder if they did that because of Google or something. So if you phone a friend, their friend can just look it up online. But now if they have a right to find them, they can't look up online with the answer is. And I was watching this and I thought to myself, like yeah, if you don't have any friends, what do you do? Like, if 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?

1:39:29Like, the game becomes harder for you. And also, if you do get accepted to who wants to be a millionaire, you're not gonna have the friends to bring along with you specifically for that situation. right as well. You're missing out potentially an $1 million. That's a million dollars that you could have had. Yeah, I think there's definitely something sort of recursive going on here and it's like the inner citadel thing that you taught me about which I just can't unsee, the isiabalin idea of if you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get. You retreat from the fateful ills of the world into this inner citadel like if you struggle to lose weight, just declare that weight has no bearing on health and that, you know, like body size doesn't impact attractiveness.

1:40:13So if you struggle to hold down a job, say that all jobs are for suckers and turn to a life of crime, or if you struggle to make relationships work, say, you know, monogamy is ancestrally unwise and I'm going to become a polyamorous, like, like polycule type person. And I do think that there's an equivalent here, the, like, black pill sigma male cope. And I don't think that there's an equivalent for women, right? There's not an isolationist like retreat from the world equivalent for women, which I guess suggests that the social networks tend to be a little bit more sticky than men's. Yeah, yeah.

1:40:49I mean, Dunbar wrote this book on psychology of friendship, and that was one of the points that he made that women are sort of better at staying in touch, reaching out and organizing gatherings. and it's what is it the, I don't know if he uses this term, but it's sort of face to face versus shoulder to shoulder that when men have friends, they can't do this together. Can't fucking unsee it. I've spoken about this on the show before, but for the people that haven't heard it. Next time the Irrata party, any sort of gathering, look at the angle of defeat of women talking to women and of men talking to men.

1:41:21Women will talk to women 180 degrees. They'll be face to face. Whereas men, the average is 120 degrees. So it's like bleeding. It's like bleeding or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this shows up. Once you see that, you can't not see it. And it's a rule that works across so many different things. The Men's Sheds Initiative in Australia. Did you see that? I had not seen this. The Men, it was an initiative by the Australian government, I think, to try and improve Men's mental health. They realized they're getting men to sit down in a room and talk like this about their problems, didn't work.

1:41:52So what they did is they built Sheds that men came to. and then the men would bring like, I've got this knackered lawnmower and everyone needs to help fix it. So how are men talking? They're talking whilst the front brain is focused on this thing that's in front and they are shoulder to shoulder not face to face. They're literally in a circle and everyone's like, right, you've got the good drill and he's got the good spanner and I've got the hammer or whatever and let's fix this thing and, God, dude, me and the misses were not getting on well and before you know it, it's a therapy session mediated by this fucking lawnmower.

1:42:21Right, they have the pretence of repairing lawnmower but they need that, right? They're required. If you just put them in the shed with no lawnmower and they're just standing in a circle, it's yeah, that's yeah. So yeah, that was the face -to -face versus shoulder -to -shoulder about, yeah, women will talk and communicate with one another, whereas men will sort of, they need a reason to sort of do an activity together and then communicate and discuss their feelings. Some of my best conversations are during pickleball warmups. Oh, yeah. Just gently dink in about everyone, all of the pickleball pros out there know they can start off very close to the net.

1:42:50And you play the game within the kitchen, and then you step back a little bit, in your pace sort of like a middle -level game and then you step to the baseline. And sometimes that warm up when you're close to the net and in the middle -level game will go for 30, 45 minutes with me in one of, especially if it's singles, less time if it's doubles. But if it's singles, it's just you and your friend, he's like, dude, works getting a bit stressful or this thing's happening. And before you know it, you're deep in conversation. In fact, we did this once at South Austin Recreation Center, me and my friend.

1:43:19And there was some guy that was sat on the side And my friend that I was talking to is a podcast as well. And I think he was going through some, going through some something to do with his life. And we were just talking and talking and talking. And I realized that we must have been doing this for like, at least 20 minutes. And it's kind of bad form to hog a court for a while, especially if you're not playing a game. Because when you're playing a game and somebody wins, the winner stays on and the next person cycles in. And I realized that this dude had been sat maybe sort of like, like 50s kind of guy, like very typical pickleball kind of player.

1:43:52And I realized that we'd been just warming up for like 20 minutes and get bad form, because the game will maybe take around about 10 minutes or something like that. And 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 warm up and we'll get a game going. And he's like, to be honest, that was a really compelling conversation. And I remember thinking, wow, like the male requirement for distraction from emotional communication is so strong that I can play like a full warm up for a sport while it's doing it. You sort of lose track of time.

1:44:31I think, yeah, I mean, the sex difference is in friendship. I think there's another sort of pattern that occurs where in breakups, men don't only lose their female partner, but a lot of their social because it's a woman who's 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 attacks or see how he's doing or what have you. And it's hard to keep that up for a lot of men, right? Because it doesn't come naturally for them the way that it does for women and these sort of monitor. And there's obviously like sort of evolutionarily adapted reasons for this that men are more expendable and sort of let's be occupied with saying plugged in and survival and all those those kinds of things, whereas women are pretty good at sort of wanting to tune up the aloe parenting pool.

1:45:14Exactly. Exactly the way the women do. And so yeah, we see this. Yeah, a lot of the young people in general report having fewer friends, but this is especially pronounced for a lot of young men, which is, yeah, I mean, I've seen you and I've seen some others sort of recommend, you know, there are a lot of ways, like if you're 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 some things, kind of activity, like that's the way to do it. It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna try to make this person into my friend. It's like, hey, do you wanna go play catch or do you wanna go play catch?

1:45:45Well, think about some of your friends. 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 deep and so rapidly, my ex -business partner that I run Nightlife's stuff with for 15 years, decade and a half, groom's minute is wedding, You know, like a phenomenal guy, very formative for me. Sat next to him, my first ever seminar and became a business partner there and then, and we're still great friends. I catch up with him 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 to what a shared mission.

1:46:22Whereas, editor, Dean, he's a perfect example. So we brought on a new guy, our YouTube strategist, and since he's got brought in the pace of friendship deepening has 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 five hours a week grappling with titles and thumbnails and who should we book on the show and I'm like, how am I going to sort this schedule out? And then he'll travel and we'll sleep in some shitty hotel and all of that moving toward a admission, I think for men, just engenders.

1:47:05It's more than, it's like brothers, more than friends, right? You know, it's almost like the warfare in a regard, solving a problem together. Right. You're solving a problem. Everyone needs a lawn mower. Yeah, yeah. Everyone needs a lawn mower to face. Yeah, yeah, that's what, yeah, that's what put, I mean, it's, yeah, having, having that shirt. And so, so one thing I'd be curious about with men and women, because I know that there's, there's various studies sort of indicating that there is this sort of turnover rate, this sort of friendship half -life, where supposedly, I mean, I've seen different stats, different studies on this.

1:47:35Some 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 the way that problem solving facilitates friendships. And once you've solved the problem, once you've written the book or once you've done the task or when you're interesting, then you sort of move on. you know, 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, I'm 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.

1:48:11Yeah, I don't know that though. Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen, Rob is just so much fun to catch up with you. I'm glad to get to see you our first one in person. I love it as well. You'll be back on in February once in a book out, February 20th. February 20th, three days before my birthday. What a lovely birthday treat. So you'll be back on when you come through Austin. Why should people go? They want to read more of the stuff that you write. I love your substack. I only subscribe to I think four or five in the Rolex Modern Wisdom guests. Why should people go? Substack Twitter all that stuff.

1:48:39Yeah. Substack Rob K Henderson .com, Twitter at Rob K Henderson. Easy to find. So put me up and I'll be there. Thanks Rob. Thank Chris.