1375: Alphas | Skeptical Sunday

25:23Anyway, it doesn't stay there or else we wouldn't be talking about it, right? This stuff bleeds out into YouTube podcast bro stuff and generalized self-help all over the place. Well, yeah. What's sadder than a 45-year-old man at the club? Yeah. Jeez. God, I can't. I'm tired thinking of just even getting dressed to go to a place like that. It's loud and there's lots of people. Yeah. It's like way past my bedtime before anything even pops off at a place like that. I'm in bed by like nine, dude. Amen, man. I used to think that was pathetic. Now I'm like, the real cheat code is going to bed before 9 p.m.

25:59It's pathetic. Yeah, it doesn't stay confined to the manosphere, and it doesn't stay totally gendered either. There's this hustle culture, girl boss thing, all these kinds of corporate expressions of culture. I call them LinkedIn Americans. they pick up this alpha beta dynamic yeah and from their perspective it makes sense like there's a certain type of person in the corporate world who doesn't think that the key to success is innovation or intelligence or people skills or business smarts it's just be vicious and doing everything you can to keep others underfoot geez that's a pretty extreme take on it you're not denying that drive has something to do with success in the business world though right it's just all the other baggage that goes along with it?

26:46Sure. Yeah. Drive is, I'm sure drive has a lot to do with it, but the act like an alpha thing isn't how strong, confident people act. It's this weird caricature of how they act formulated by people who are in my estimation, deeply insecure. They think that the golden ticket in business or your social life or whatever is dominance. It's not, it's competence. to be good. And much like, you know, the actual wild wolves that were studied, people will follow you if you demonstrate that you're a competent person and that hitching your ship to their star is going to take them places. I'd imagine there's a lot of turnover at places where the only thing the boss has to offer is acting like the villain from The Devil Wears Prada.

27:40The other thing to note is that in the business world, everything is done by a team, basically. The guy at the top could be compared to the conductor making all the parts work together, but the conductor needs the orchestra to get anything done. I couldn't produce this podcast alone, for example. I don't have the writing and the research skills and the show editing skills that other people do. And on Feedback Friday, those questions, they require a thoughtful, compassionate answer to qualities I've basically only read about in magazines. So I need Gabriel to help me out with that stuff. So how does the dynamic change when it moves into the corporate world and when it loses its gendered nature.

28:13How does this all leak into that stuff? Even in the version of Alpha Beta outside of the manosphere, for men at least, there's a big narrative about how men are feminized and this needs to be undone. You know, you're too nice. Nice guys finish last. And you're too nice because the world is giving men a raw deal because they're men. And the men are supposed to deal with this using frame control. All right. So we know what frame control means, but basically nobody listening to this does. Frame control comes out of pickup artist culture, but it's one of the parts that fits very neatly into hustle culture or startup culture or corporate culture.

28:51So yeah, grind culture generally. Cultures that share the same kind of dog eat dog framework. The idea is that all social interactions involve a frame, which I guess you could just say is like a framework or a set of terms or established power dynamic. In the male version of alpha, these supposedly alpha set of behaviors, you maintain frame by always being stoic, refusing to ever get emotional. If someone introduces a competing frame, again, I'm going with the logic of this terminology and this ideology. I don't actually believe it.

29:30I'm just respond, one of which is ridiculing the person. So if somebody is being overly emotional at work, even if they have every right to be, you can say something like, well, somebody didn't have their coffee yet. I got to get out of here. I think I'm going to lose it. Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays. Right. It's childish, as is all of this, because it reduces social interactions to this bizarre dick measuring contest rather than good faith efforts at communication. But this comes from guys who think that if you cry in front of your wife when your mother dies, that you've just ruined your marriage.

30:11Right. Yes. It's incredibly juvenile and stupid and just lacks all sort of understanding of how relationships actually work. So what's the female version of this? Because I'm very familiar with the male version. I think people kind of get it. It doesn't surprise me that there's a female analog, but I know absolutely nothing about it because that's not really a world I was ever part of. Sure. So for dating, you've got Sheriff Seven, Mina Irfan and the website Female Dating Strategy, which is all this is kind of about finding high value men is what they call it. That doesn't mean they're good men.

30:43It just means they're rich. I see. For the more corporate side of things, there's Liza Jabrylova, Cody Sanchez, Tonya Lay and Nikita Malik. I did not look a ton into these. I'm friends with Cody. I don't know all of her work, but she's not like, if you don't beat up your co-worker. like she just tells you how to run a laundromat and make money. Sure. Sure. And so if I'm like, um, you know, it's not the topic of the show. The topic of the show is not the female side of things, but we do. I did want to kind of address like the ways in which this maybe is trickled down and permeated into other areas.

31:17So like, you know, I don't know, go to the comments and tell me what a, what a dick I am for calling these people. Sure. Femosphere pickup artists or whatever. Cody's going to kill me, but all right. So it's sort of weird because the women are sometimes told that they have to like out alpha men to survive in the allegedly patriarchal world. And it goes beyond leadership into this kind of idea of total perfectionism. Isn't the men's version doing that as well, though? Oh, yeah. I think that's totally fair for the men. You have to be optimized at work. You got to have your little drop shipping side hustle or startup and hit the gym until you have the physique of a Greek statue.

31:58and picking up a new woman at the bar every night or being the world's most dominant husband and father. For women, it's kind of the same. You'd be a CEO, fitness model after work, high value partner by night. You're supposed to be highly assertive and have girl boss energy and look perfect and reject vulnerability and be untouchable. That sounds exhausting. But yeah, honestly, it sounds like the male and female version of the alpha. They're not really that different, but I can see how they manifest in subtly different ways. Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think the key difference is that alpha men frame other men as the enemy or at least as competition, like every other man is competition at the very least.

32:40And women are an obstacle or a resource. And I think, again, from what I understand, because it was not the topic that we addressed, but I did want to kind of touch on it. The alpha woman thing more frames like everyone as an enemy because for them, it's like you're competing against men and women. So you've got to do kind of like double duty. And the men are framed as like high value partners in crime more than just objects of acquisition. So I think that there's like, again, there seems to be subtle differences to it. But it does seem like it leans on different aspects of insecurity, people's insecurities, right?

33:20So for men, they're selling power and a sense of significance. And for women, it seems like they're selling autonomy kind of you know the standalone woman who doesn't just not need a man she doesn't need anybody you don't need friends you know you don't need a man and you don't need friends and you don't need you you know you got your hashtag girl boss you're running your own thing and it's i don't know the whole thing sounds like a recipe for loneliness for men and women yeah with men it's almost like they want you to think of yourself as the protagonist of entourage or something yes exactly like you just like you got all these awesome cool dudes but they're not as cool as you and you guys just own every, you know, mog everything everywhere you go.

33:59I think that it's pretty gross in general to view all human interactions as transactional. And it's not just gross. It's like, it's sad. I genuinely feel bad for people who, who feel that, well, this is just what life is and you have to get used to it. It's not. And if you view people in this framework, you can't really ever have a peer. Right, because that's a threat. Yeah, they're a threat. Yeah. You never get to rest. Everyone is competition or they're a resource that you need to acquire. And I think that this mindset could really lead to having adversarial relationships with your intimate partner, your romantic partner, your friends, your coworkers.

34:44Again, it sounds exhausting. The whole thing sounds so exhausting. Yeah, it does. again, for the record, we're really just focusing on guys. I did just want to touch on the women. I did not do a deep dive into the research on it. So if I unfairly maligned any of these people as anything, I apologize. I was kind of just like - I think it's probably fine. I mean, the business instructive stuff, it does have notes of this, whether it's intentional or not, but the guy's stuff explicitly plays on, you're going to die alone yeah with no friends and no girl if you don't get a dan bilzerian haircut and start doing steroids or whatever right so for the guys it's particularly damaging yeah and it's like it's such a weird thing too because it assumes that like like i don't want to be dan bilzerian you know what i mean like i don't like i don't want my life to be like that no you're 40 years old and it's like i don't know that he does this anymore because it's been at least 10 years since I've looked at anything that that man does other than whining about Jews, which is kind of his.

35:46Yes, that's his new thing. His new way to get attention is he's an anti-Semitic Jew hitting guy who's like, I don't know, still shooting machine guns on Instagram videos. It's pathetic, really. But it's like, I don't want to be on a yacht with 16 women 20 years younger than me. I like my wife and my little house and my spending time with my kids. Like, I don't want this life. and I think that there's a certain type of guy who doesn't want it either but he's like oh man I'm such a loser because like I'm content living family life you know I'm gonna leave my wife and go off and chase after this dream of being a millionaire dropshipper or like whatever and it's just like maybe it's cope on my part but like I just I don't.

36:29Now we're tired. That seems exhausting to me. It is exhausting and also for the only guys who really fell into that were the guys that didn't realize he was just paying for that to happen. I mean, he was hiring the models to be there. Yeah. He wasn't attracting them with his alpha male-ism. You know, you have to be a special kind of stupid slash 11 years old to fall for that kind of shtick. And so, yeah, I mean, it's quite sad. And it's not like he even made his own money. His dad did something to get a bunch of that money, and then he went to prison for that, right? And so it's like this guy, the whole thing, everything about him is a caricature and a joke.

37:03But yeah, you really have to be like a kid to fall into this stuff most of the time. So let's say I see this stuff and I decide, wah, I'm a beta. And I decide I want to make changes. I want to become an alpha. What am I going to start doing according to the people who think that this is an important shift to make? There's like four basic components. The first is body language. You need to be like expansive as possible. You can't ever cross your legs. Don't they call that like penis shame or something? There's a term for this. yes it's penis shame and like this is like clue what how weird this is yes that there's some like subliminal signal that you're sending to the world based on your deep subconscious if you cross your legs like you're ashamed of having a penis it's like oh maybe you're just a little more comfortable sitting that way like that's totally fine go home freud you're drunk yeah yeah it's absolutely bizarre so then they're gonna teach you about eye contact dominance which according to alpha coaches like if you look away that's a sign of submission so you have to like stare at people like a serial killer because you're terrified of losing this secret staring contest that only you are participating in because nobody else is doing this you have to speak slowly I guess I fail there as a hyper caffeinated Rhode Islander I'm always going to fail the speaking slowly test and you have to speak from your chest you can't ever use up speak yeah up speak is the that's for girls or something that's the idea right is that is where everything sounds like a question like that valley girl kind of thing everything sounds like a question yeah so the communication stuff is where it starts getting really toxic disagreement is not a place to find common ground you don't argue you don't negotiate you don't try and convince people you just assert your side and that's it we talked about negging which is these like backhanded compliments that are supposedly going to have everyone groveling for your approval, which no, it's not.

39:05You're also encouraged to constantly interrupt people and talk over them. Yes. So this is all terrible advice for social interaction for anybody who needs to be told that. And people who do this, they find themselves at the bottom of the food chain. Once again, the social hierarchy, and they probably can't figure out why. So it causes the damage this does is it causes them to do this more, right? Because they go like, oh, all these people don't seem to want to be around me and they're cutting me. I need to talk over them more. I need to neg them more. I need to be a contrarian more often about every little thing because this isn't working.

39:42I need to do it harder. And it's like, eventually you just go, gosh, this person's so annoying. I don't even want to be around them anymore. I'm done giving them a chance. And so, yeah, if you're doing any of this, just knock it off. Everyone hates you. and they're just, they haven't told you yet. It's because you're, they're just jealous of your alpha lone wolf status. Right, exactly. You're coached to have the same facial expression, whether you're like winning the lottery or just found out somebody died. It's called being unreactive. Yes, it's emotional constipation, really. You're supposed to be completely out of touch with your feelings and emotions.

40:16Like many aspects of this, it's based on an idiot's understanding of what stoicism was. Right. You become a wall. Walls are indeed famous for their ability to form meaningful and enriching relationships. So, yeah, I can see why. Yeah. Great model. Yeah. Finally, you have to curate an alpha mindset, which mostly means ditching your old friends who are keeping you down. And you also have to buy a lot of books from alpha influencers. Isn't that a convenient behavior? Yes. They encourage. Books and courses. Yes. Your hobby should only be posting inspirational quotes with pictures of wolves or the Joker or what.

40:53Right. Guns and explosions. Yeah. Skulls. On social media, you know, you get in and going to the gym and building your dropshipping side hustle. I don't think they dropship anymore, but maybe it may be a date. I was going to explain the jokes, the reference here. So dropshipping. This is like where you pick a product and you sell it on Amazon. I don't think the side hustle essentially exists anymore, but all of these sort of internet hucksters like Tai Lopez and all that, you know, here in my garage, like that guy, you'd get some self-help book and it would be like, dot, dot, dot, you need to be rich.

41:24And by the way, here's how you do it. It was like Forex trading, side hustles would be like Forex trading, dropshipping where you're selling a product, something along those lines. Crypto became, dropshipping kind of went out when crypto came up because then it was like, I'll teach you how to pick crypto and day trade crypto or whatever. And that's what's funny is you can actually do that, but none of those guys actually have a clue how that's done. You actually did or do some of that day trading stuff, but none of it. I assume you've learned none of it from Tai Lopez or whatever. No, I learned it from like old men who traded stocks in the 80s.

42:01Yes. And it's stuff that like only works in crypto because, you know, market caps are much smaller. The liquidity is much lower. And I'm trading against a bunch of other morons who learned how to trade out of books written in the 80s. Or you're trading against people who don't know what they're doing because they're learning from somebody on Instagram. So they're just getting their asses handed to them. The best guys are like one, two steps above me. They're not like, I have a finance degree, master's in finance from Yale. So the talent pool is limited. You're competing against 20-somethings who are throwing their money away, which is a good market to be in if you want to take candy from some babies.

42:40If your self-improvement plan involves ditching your friends, suppressing your emotions, and buying a bunch of e-books from a guy named AlphaKing69, buddy, you're not evolving. You're getting scammed. Speaking of scams, let's hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Zenni. What makes Zenni so great is that glasses don't have to be inexpensive once every few years. Purchase, there are so many affordable options. You can choose something practical, something fun, or just both. Jen ordered prescription heart-shaped, yes, heart-shaped sunglasses with transition lenses.

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45:28Your friends think you're a jerk who's changed in bad ways only. And the only people who are going to date you are going to be traumatized or super insecure or just don't know you well enough yet. Yeah, there's also like the internal experience of being this guy. Like you just you have to be hyper vigilant and constantly scan every room to see if you're losing status. This is the exact opposite of confidence. It's just this prison of social anxiety that people think is some measure of strength. so I very unfortunately got wrapped up in this for a few years not the whole alpha stuff because that we weren't even using those terms back in 2008 or whatever when I sort of got interested in all this like dating and confidence and body language stuff but you're right you get hyper vigilant right so every time you're in a group of people you're like oh I don't want to be seen talking to other guys because then it looks like I'm hiding and then you're like oh I'm nervous about how I look because I've been talking to my friends.

46:25I need to only talk to girls. And it's like, oh gosh, I'm not talking to a girl right now. What? Everyone's going to, I'm losing status every minute that I'm not doing that. I need to be loud, but I don't really want to be loud. I'm kind of enjoying this other person's story. No, I have to cut them off and tell one of my own that's better. And then you're like, but that's kind of douchey. So you're constantly doing that. And it really has the opposite effect of looking confident because you're monitoring yourself and constantly in your head. So you're not present at all. You're basically acting like a weirdo and trying to engineer everything.

46:57And I remember going out on dates with girls and they'd be like, why are you only staring at the same place on my face? And I was like, oh, I'm trying an experiment where I'm only looking into your right eye because I read on some stupid blog that like the right eye is where how you generate rapport with people. And I just remember, like I had cool friends that tolerated me. And they were like, Hey man, why are you being weird now? And I'm like, I'm doing this thing. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if that works, it's weirder than just being normal. So just try to be normal. And some of my female friends are like, you don't have to do any of that stuff.

47:31And I was like, Oh, you're just saying that because we're friends. And they're like, no, no, no, it's actually hurting you. Trust me. You trying to do this and like be loud. Like it's none of it's congruent with who you actually are. And that's the problem. And I was like, yeah, but that's because who I actually am is not like this, you know, whatever you'd call it now, like alpha. And they're like, no, it's because you're, you're pretending to be someone. And it's like the most obvious thing ever. So just stop doing it. And I remember as soon as I was like, yeah, I kind of give up. This isn't working for me.

47:59That's when stuff started to fall into place. You know, I'd go somewhere and somebody be like, yeah, man, you're not even six feet tall. And I'd be like, no, yeah, I don't care. And then it was like, they're like, what? And it was like, yeah, no, I'm five 10. That's a perfectly normal above average height. I don't really don't care. You you think about your height all the time and then it would be like that that's when we were like oh you're like a normal secure person who's not a weirdo then i stood out because all the other 29 year old guys are being weirdos because everybody was into this crap for a minute right it was so weird so yeah it really has the opposite effect the best thing to do is just to leave it all alone yeah so i um i took uh the course at jordan's old company that shall not be named and my biggest takeaway from it was like learning how to get people to stop talking to me i like hacked the system to reverse engineer it if you're like one of the listeners out there who's heavily tattooed you know that when you're heavily tattooed the weirdest people on earth just desperately want to talk to you wherever you go and so i was like constantly fielding like just these bizarre people coming up to me out of nowhere and talking to me my biggest takeaway from it was like, oh, I just start like slowly angling my body away from them and like giving terse short responses and then they'll just go away.

49:15That was what I learned from my alpha boot camp. That's so Sigma of you. So I feel like I feel like most people just instantly reject the animal kingdom framing that's implicit in the alpha beta discourse. But why doesn't it hold water? I mean, we know that the wolf study that initiated everything was based on kind of manufactured situations, right? that they were in captivity, yada, yada. But in what way do animal kingdom rules not apply to people? Well, animal kingdom rules do apply to people. People are animals. And we're primates. We're highly sophisticated primates, but we are primates nonetheless.

49:52So if you were going to start looking for parallels, you would look there. You would look at bonobos or gorillas or something like that. But where you really see human sophistication, this is one of the things that makes us very very different is in our social organization right other primates have social organization so do ants but human beings have it on just a completely whole other level obviously yeah it's one of our evolutionary hacks there's this old libertarian way of like teaching people how important commerce is and you think of something like a pencil they're so plentiful that you can just take one like pencils are free yeah basically essentially but no one human being can build a pencil you've got to get the materials you need the equipment to process the raw materials you need to manufacture construct the actual pencil i could go get a free pencil from the bank break it in half and they're going to give me another one like they're just it's like salt they're just everywhere but it requires this insanely complex social organization to make something as simple as a pencil and just like ordering people to make pencils is not the thing that gets pencils made.

51:07Yeah. And we throw that social organization at building cities or putting people on the moon. And it's quite incredible. Yeah. There's no insects. Colony has yet. They've yet to put anybody on the moon or any any ants on the moon. Yeah. Other animals just don't have the level of sophistication that our social organization does. Like, this is not just a brain size issue. It goes back to the Stone Age. good luck hunting a mammoth all by yourself. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So this is all cool and interesting, but hey, how does this apply to the alpha beta dynamic that we're talking about? Human beings evolve for cooperation.

51:42It's not that we're not competitive at all. Clearly human beings are competitive. We're both competitive and cooperative at the same time, but simple dominance is not enough to get much done. In fact, if you study human history, you will quickly see that the less kind of naked gross dominance we have the greater our accomplishments become huh really i don't know is is that the case yes absolutely and demonstrably the egyptians never put anybody on the moon oh well there's the technological issue in play here but like in the classical world technology doesn't advance very much because like how do you get things done you beat somebody until they do it ah i see what you mean that's it that's how you get i mean we talk about this on the on the slavery episode for almost all of human history how you get things done is you grab somebody and beat them until they do it right okay and like you take the technological advancements that you and i take very much for granted and they've almost all happened over the last 300 years when we decided that trading was a better way of getting things done than just like beating somebody until they complied.

52:54But we still have leaders. We still have hierarchies. No, that's absolutely true. But leadership among humans is context dependent. We talked about this earlier with the social hierarchy. Like you can be a leader in some situations and not in others. I'm not the head of marketing at my job, but I know a lot about the market we sell to. So people defer to my experience on that topic. That's context dependent leadership. I think in a lot of companies, too, the title doesn't mean as much as what you're getting done or what you bring to the table. And that's that's just the workplace. But it kind of undercuts the idea of an alpha needing to take and maintain control at all times.

53:33Yeah. A boss who can't step aside and let people do their job is a bad boss. Right. And when you transfer that from the world of business to the world of dating, some people probably find aggression and rude dominance attractive. Sure. But they're probably not really the kind of partners most people would want to have long term. So is there any evolutionary reason that brutish dominance isn't to our advantage? Do we know anything about this? The main theory right now is that human beings self-domesticated. We domesticated ourselves because we have three things that give us a massive advantage.

54:09Number one, massive brains come with massive cognitive power. Number two, we have endurance, physical endurance. Like cheetahs can run really fast for like 30 seconds. to the best of my knowledge, there is not another species that can run a marathon. And if there is, they are not the norm. They are also a massive outlier. You know, cheetahs don't run for 26 miles. Third, we have just next level amounts of social cohesion. So you just cannot get that if some guy is constantly flipping out and challenging people to a fight every time someone challenges his dominance. So the theory is that we bred this aggression out of ourselves.

54:55Yeah, I've actually heard about this, I think on this show. The theory is that we got together in bands and if there were aggressive, violent people, they basically got murdered, right? So that they wouldn't mess with the success of the tribe. Because if you've got somebody who's like, oh, I didn't help hunt, but I'm gonna go kill the guy who is coming back with the hunt and take it for myself. It's like, no, no, no, no. We're gonna kill you for doing that because now you're killing off the hunters and you're stealing from people. You're basically a net drain on the entire tribe. So yes, we needed violent people who were going to murder and hunt food and share it.

55:30But if you were going to murder and hunt food and not share it, well, you're dead weight. We're just going to kill you. So we kind of like took the people who couldn't behave or like who would fire off impulsively and hurt someone else. And now you've got to carry that guy to the next hunter gatherer location because some idiot broke his leg. those people didn't last long. They were kind of bred out of society. And that's one theory. And it makes sense. But it also kind of says the opposite of what the whole alpha wolf theory says. It's basically the best cooperators are the ones that made it, not the ones that were all rogue and maverick and did things on their own.

56:03Those people were mercilessly culled. Yeah, no, it says a lot. I mean, there's a period in British history that's called the Bloody Code era. In 18th century and early 19th century, England, and there's like 220 crimes that carry the death penalty, stealing sheep, pickpocketing, cutting down a young tree, being in the company of gypsies for more than a month. there's like all these things that they'll just put you to death for and after 200 years of killing people for minor transgressions england becomes a very polite place possibly because all of the rabble rousers dare i say alpha wolves were prevented from breeding dang yeah so it's a small and limited example of how you can breed aggression out of human beings interesting yeah but i've also heard of, there's a theory called survival of the friendliest, which I kind of touched on this earlier, but it's the idea that humans are obligate cooperators in the same sense that other species are obligate carnivores, right?

57:09Your cat can't be vegan. No matter how much you want it to be, it cannot. You can't live without cooperating with other people. Like your example about the pencil. There's like the homesteaders and stuff, right? But it's like, when it comes down to it, you're still, well, that's interesting. You've got solar panels. Did you make those? You know? No, it's like, no, right. Yeah, no. I mean, your cat can be vegan, but not for very long. Just for a few days. Yeah, a few days only. No, I mean, the whole sort of thing, like the point is to beat up on them. Like, cool. It's a cool thing, but I don't think anybody but the most insane of them would think that they're completely self-sufficient and never needed anything from outside.

57:46I mean, they have a hot water heater in there somewhere. Probably. They have roads that deliver goods. Right. Yes. You know, Trump have an international supply chain. Yes. Are there people who can live completely alone without help from other people? Sure. I think most of them can only do this in a parasitic way by being predatory upon people who are being cooperative, which I'm not applying the homesteaders. But yes, I can go live out on my own and steal from people who are actually connected to the social fabric, I guess. The vast overwhelming majority of human beings cannot survive in a war of all against all and without cooperation.

58:27Nothing says I'm secure and thriving like constantly scanning the room to make sure nobody outranks you in an imaginary wolf prison yard. That's not confidence. That's anxiety with slightly better branding. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Noble. I travel a lot. I've been through a lot of different suitcases, but my favorite is the award-winning Noble all-in-one carry-on. Noble got rid of the zipper entirely. It uses secure latch locks and the two halves close with a very satisfying click. They've also solved several airport annoyances. There's a convenient front laptop pocket that pops open for easy access, and its unbreakable polycarbonate shell protects everything inside.

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1:00:35That's the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now, back to the show. When I ran the dating company, we definitely leaned more into being friendly and personable than we did on being a jerk and telling guys, you know, women are going to be attracted to you if you're a jerk. That was just only true in limited circumstances and you didn't get the kind of women that you wanted. Yeah, there's a social cost to being a jerk. Yes. Again, to go back to this, like, hunter-gatherer society thing, which for whatever reason people take to be man's natural state, which that's whatever that means, whether or not that's for the whole other episodes.

1:01:09Yeah. Yeah. Does natural state mean anything, et cetera. And alpha who hoards all the food is not an asset. He is a liability. And if he then rubs people's noses in the fact that he's got all the food to show dominance, he is not going to survive for very long because people will kill him. We actually have a really good example of this from recent human history about just how bad incompetently asserting dominance can be. During the Vietnam War, there was a practice called fragging. I think I remember this from the movie Platoon. Yeah. Basically, if your squad leader was a dick, you'd kill him with a grenade.

1:01:53Is that a real thing or is that something is just from Vietnam movies? Oh, it's very real. In fact, as many as a thousand American military commanders were targeted for fragging by their own soldiers between 1969 and 1972 alone. There were at least 86 deaths, over 700 injuries. The number is actually probably a lot higher because you didn't have to chuck a grenade under his bunk. You could just be like, oh, lieutenant, I need you to go look over there. And over there is like where Viet Cong snipers have been clapping people. or go over there and we shoot you from far away and blame it on the vietcong you know like it's not difficult to kill somebody on your own side in a time of war if you want to get rid of them and grunts would do this to their their commanding officers it's like we don't get rid of this guy he's gonna get us all killed you know it's not just that he's he's rubbing people the wrong way he's a direct threat to the survival of these men and you can kind of like extrapolate how this would play out in a number of scenarios.

1:02:59People who constantly assert dominance are bad news. People are less likely to help them out because they don't like them. Which is a big deal if you're an obligate cooperative. It's a big deal if you, you know, which take it out of war. It's like you work in an office. I'm just not going to help you because you're kind of a jerk. So this is a good pivot to the notion of reverse dominance hierarchy. There are societies, uh existing human societies such as the and i'm going to do my level best to pronounce this correctly kong san and the inuit where if one person gets too big for their britches they will take him down a peg because he's gotten too powerful they're not chucking hand grenades at the guy they're just ridiculing him shaming him ostracizing him but for many periods of human history, having a sort of domineering alpha mindset could be a death sentence.

1:03:56To tie the reverse dominance idea back to the theory of hunter-gatherers, ostracism, that was a super big deal in these societies where resources were limited, right? So if you're eating last because no one likes you, or you can't sleep in the cold, you're sleeping out in the cold, that's not a good situation to be in. Right. There's also the concept of dominance versus prestige. This is a concept taken from the work of Joseph Henrik. Prestige is a lot more accurate way of describing how humans get to the top in the modern world than anything we have from the animal kingdom. So take the alpha wolf model where fear and intimidation are used to take status and force followers to submit.

1:04:34That just makes people want to avoid leaders wherever possible. Like if you have some super short tempered boss, you're going to run whenever they're around. And if you make a mistake, You're going to hide it until it becomes a bigger issue because you don't want to deal with that person. Compare the concept of dominance and leadership with the idea of prestige. Leadership is established on the basis of merit, shared knowledge. The status is granted by others to the leader freely because of his merit. Followers mimic his behavior because the leader mostly leads by example. And people want to be near the leader so that they can pick up on his merit.

1:05:11Yeah, they want mentorship time. They're not ducking under their desk every time that the leader walks through. Yeah. And like super briefly, there's a concept in parenting of like authoritative parenting versus authoritarian parenting. And authoritarian parenting is like constantly bossing your kids around. There's all these draconian rules with severe consequences. And authoritative is just like there's rules, there's expectations, there's consequences for failing to follow rules or live up to expectations. But the parent is guiding the child and leading by example and showing the child how to behave.

1:05:47And it's the difference between a child who like cowers and fears their parent and a child who admires their parent and looks up to them and doesn't want to disappoint them. Which child do you think is going to grow up to be forget well behaved, better adjusted? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I do see that difference in parents. One thing I think that's a big takeaway is that the alpha people are confusing or maybe even conflating prestige and dominance. Like they think good posture and talking over people is going to earn them prestige when in reality people recognize unearned dominance, if you will, pretty quickly.

1:06:30I mean, it's very fleeting. And, you know, there's totally situations where like a guy just needs to come in, bark orders and people just need to do what he says. These are crises and emergencies, right? Like if your house is burning down and you will accept the leadership, you know, like if your house is burning down and a firefighter comes in and yells at you to get out of the house, you are going to immediately do what he says. But this is so situational. And this is not how human societies elevate their leaders, especially not in the modern world. No, if that same guy yells at me to get out of his way in line at Starbucks, I'm just going to ignore him and possibly have them call the police if he keeps going.

1:07:09Right. Situational. Yes. Situational. Exactly. No, that makes perfect sense. I think even if we go back in time, the person with the most leadership qualities is going to be the one with the highest social intelligence a lot of the time. Because in caveman times, two guys getting into a fight, again, as we spoke about before, this is a huge liability, right? Now you've got to take care of injured people. Like, no, thank you. Yeah, so this is especially true in Ice Age cultures during the population bottleneck. This is in Northern Europe during the last glacial maximum. I see. Which is exactly what it sounds like.

1:07:44Okay. So yeah, if your tribe is 17 guys and two of them can't go hunting the next day because they're all banged up, it's just a massive liability. It's the difference between catching the mammoth and not catching the mammoth. So the guy who prevents two of them from getting into a fight and helps them work together again is the one who naturally rises to the top as the leader. You see this in the military, too. Generals are not just the top officers. They're not just the toughest guys, right, in the military. That's not how any of this works. Nope. Toughest guys top out about colonel. Yeah, that makes sense.

1:08:13There's elite training schools that you go to. But my understanding is somebody who's never been in the military that some of these you go into and it's like lieutenant colonel, that's your ceiling. It's not like who can withstand the most pain and deal out the most death. That is not who gets leadership. It's who's good at getting people to cooperate. In human evolution, the leader is often, even in ancient history and pre-story times, is often the person with the best social intelligence who can manage people. In its best form, leadership is a form of service. Alpha managers are super toxic, not just for the people who deal with them, but for the whole organization, because they're using dominance tactics in a prestige and competence world.

1:08:55So super specific example. There are a lot of historians who argue that D-Day was such a disaster for the Germans because nobody wanted to wake Hitler up in the middle of the night and tell him that the Allied forces were landing in Normandy. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's what you get when you rely only on dominance. Make it smaller. There's a little IT problem at work. You don't want to tell your boss about it, but it's going to be a gigantic one if you leave it for 48 hours. You're not going to get blamed for not telling him, so who cares? You don't have to work in two days. It's somebody else's problem then, right?

1:09:32Yeah, somebody else's problem and you're not going to hear about it. And you know, your boss is going to have a meltdown if you tell him there's a problem. You don't want to be the guy who gets shot by the messenger. You don't want to be the messenger who gets shot by the alpha boss. And if you flip it around the manager who's easy to talk to and is more interested in problem solving than assigning blame and looking like the tough guy, he's going to know about small problems before they become big ones. And therefore, the whole organization becomes more successful. Yeah. And these are like all theoretical, but people can apply these to like everybody's seen something like this.

1:10:02work or in their family life or whatever. In turn, what all of this means is that prestige oriented groups to get back to this concept of prestige versus dominance, prestige oriented groups are generally going to outcompete dominance oriented ones. You know, a little bit of evolutionary psychology is a very dangerous thing. A bunch of stuff is hard coded into our brains for millions of years of evolution. But the human experience is just not as simplistic as you have to club a guy over the head before he clubs you. And that's how you get to be king. Yeah. And that's really it, man. I think human beings are animals, but we're animals who are so very different from other animals.

1:10:46There's no science backing up any of the alpha stuff. Quite the opposite. Anthropology, social biology and evolutionary psychology mostly tell us that the whole alpha structure is just a dead end. It's a seductive story because it promises us that the world is simple. It's the simple tiered pyramid where you can just hack your way to the top. But as we've seen, that pyramid is built on a foundation of both bad biology and mostly deep-seated insecurity. The bottom line is that when you see somebody who's obsessed with alpha status, you are not looking at a leader. You're looking at somebody who is fundamentally afraid of the messiness of real human connection.

1:11:23Humans didn't conquer the planet by being bullies. We did it by being the most sophisticated collaborators in history. So if we were bullies, we did it together. If somebody's trying to sell you an alpha mindset, they're usually betting on your own status anxiety to make a buck. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us separate the apex predators from the internet pretenders. And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Actually, send it to alpha male at jordanharbinger.com. It'll still reach me, obviously.

1:11:55Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sedlowskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's been fact-checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything like Dan Bilzerian, before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being.

1:12:31Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. What if we're not just close to building matrix-level simulations? We may already be inside one. You're about to hear a preview of our episode with Rizwan Virk on clues we're living in a rendered world. The simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of as the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all the physical reality is actually part of a virtual world.

1:13:09The simulation hypothesis, the subtitle is, An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics agree we're in a video game. There have been a number of physicists who are looking at the world as information now. So there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. Instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be whatever computational substrate is being used around the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today.

1:13:46I use the metaphor of video games, that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game because that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley. Now, there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film The Matrix. Because, you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but it turns out he was actually in a virtual world. But now AI is moving so fast that I think we'll get to that point much more quickly, and certainly within the next 50 years, 100 years at the max.

1:14:25For the full conversation that will make you question every assumption you've ever held, check out episode 1239 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Rizwan Virk.