#713 - Rob Henderson - Why Is Everyone Acting Like A Victim?
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is rob Anderson is A P H. D candidate at the university of cambridge, A U.

S. F force veteran and an author. Humans are in odd species. We know truths on our own, but choose to lie in groups, are thinking, gets hijacked by social norms, paths of least resistance, lies and half truth. It's a mess out there, but thankful ly, there's ideas that we can discover to help us navigate. Expect to learn what the friendship paradox is, how we can fix the mate deprivation problem, what Green flags most women look, foreign men, the relationship between social media and hostility, why people reason more wisely about others problems rather than their own, what rob thoughts are on the most recent wave of the body positivity movement, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome rob henderson.

What is the friendship paradox?

The friendship paradox is this phenomenon in which, uh, your friends have more friends than you do, uh, your sex partners have more sex partners than you do, your twitter followers have more or x, your x followers have more followers than you do. And it's it's a paradox because this seemingly doesn't make sense.

How can your friends have more friends than you on average? And many, many visuals and are especially think you will be familiar with this sort of parade phenomena that a disproportionate uh number of of awards go to a small number of people. A disproportionate a uh amount of money goes to a small percentage of people as well.

But this also works in the social realm. So into the example that I gave in a recent substate post is imagine you have keep IT easy of ten friends and, uh, three of your friends are kind of like you just have an average person with an average social life. You have three friends who are shot tins who maybe don't go out that much, but you have another friend who is a super connector and has one hundred or hundred and fifty or maybe even in a thousand friends.

I mean, are some people who who are just sort of a very social super extra version in that ninety percent. And so when you average this across all ten of your friends, uh, they may have, you know on average twenty plus friends while you have ten. And so IT sort of at at first classes, does that make sense? But then you want to break IT down mathematically.

IT does. And this is why there's that that paradox. And the same with sex partners. Me maybe you ve had five or ten or twenty sex partners, but one of those people may have had one hundred plus. And so when you average that out your sex partners, i've had more sex partners than you.

And then seeing with twitter followers, right? Like no maybe no one of your followers has you know a million plus where you have ten thousand or something average that out that's still um shakes out in the same way. The example that I also give that as is know when warn buffet walks into auditorium, everyone becomes a millionaire on average and it's the same kind of idea here yeah.

And what's the implication psychologically for people with that? Is that a felt sense at all because of you see IT uh, kind of anti typical to what you would expect. This is all a surprise to everyone to find out that if warm buffets in the local post code, that they've just become a an honorary millionaire for the most due to mathematics, is there some sort of sense by which people are a conscious of this sort of thing? Another that sad in his most recent book talks about the best sort of people to be friends with, the people who are having a little bit less sex than you right?

Yeah yeah I remember I remember that from from his book. Well yeah so so I think that we fall pray to um so so in that the classic psychology book thinking fast and slow down economic point this term, what you see is all there is and we pay attention to what's visible, what's right in front of us, the the known known but we don't necessarily pay much attention to the the known unknown, the things that that aren't in our immediate uh wine of vision.

And so with with the friendship paradox, we will pay a lot of attention to the most extroverted people. They're very visible. They enjoy often being very visible. Extravert people tend to be that way. They after their social media pages a lot, uh, when you there are, they are more likely to text you and then be responsive to your text, send more likely to meet up with you and then tell you about their a adventures hiking in the himalayas, how they just got back from this country or just got done speaking at at this event and so forth. And so you are listening to this person and and for many people, they may hear this and think like, wow, everyone out there is doing all of these great things.

And you know, here I am sort of working my night five or just to of living a Normal ordinary life and and many people uh will report feeling sort of uh diminished socially a and this is an interesting phenomenon here because there's a ton of researching and social psychology on this idea called the Better than average effect, uh, and the Better than average effect or the illusory superiority effect, as is sometimes called essentially that we tend to a believe ourselves to be Better than others. This is sort of self enhancement that goes on when you ask, um people are are you are you smarter than average? Are you a Better driver .

than average? Seventy five percent .

of people believe that there are Better than drive, Better students than average, just professors or your Better teacher than averaged and would be exactly seventy eighty plus percent say they are Better than the average person. And all these domains um and yet um there's fascinating work on related to the french of paradox that we tend to have a sort of uncharacteristic ally this move of our social lives.

So there have been a couple of studies now in which you know that they ask participants, uh, you know, do you do you go to more, fewer parties than others? Do you see your family more or less than others? Do you have more if you were friends than others? Do you eat alone more less than others? And generally speaking, people think that they are a sort of less socially connected.

They have fewer friends. They eat alone more. They go if fewer parties.

This is an inversion of the elusive.

surely coming right? We should have least a social, a less than average effect, rather than Better than average effect and and this is related to that french of paradox and that that's sort of what you see is all there is, uh, the rate the researchers explain this is that um again you so you you when you think to yourself, well, do I go to move for your parties and others well, you know, when I see other people at parties and i'm not at a party and uh I see my family, you know x amount of times a year.

But then when I pop social media and ic people taking cells with their data, whatever, mom, this and so you see all of these and then you started to think, well, you know, i'm not with my family right now when I saw that photo. And so you, uh, sort of easily sort of ferry to this idea that, well, everyone out there is taking itself and having good time and going home and and um and you're not and you're not paying attention to the people who aren't with their families. Uh you know one of the lines are in poster of summarizing this research is no one is taking photos and posting them online when they eating lunch alone or when their inch watching A T V show or when they're just having an off day and just need some time to decompressing be alone for a while.

They're not uh, uploading a video or taking photos of themselves. We tend to take photos when are being social, being exactly the peak experiences. And and I know you've talked about this before about what is a comparing a you know your blue or real, everyone else is highlight real like that? yes. So we do that. And then we tend to think like everyone else is sort of at the party without you.

Ah there's a nice line uh in one of the papers that I sight the researchers sort of painting a picture of what this might look like of a student in in a college dorm uh during their homework being diligent student and they hear a party going on upstairs and you hear all the lights and all the music and everything and that sounds like everyone's up there and you're thinking, oh, i'm the only one here doing my doing my homework but you're not you of course you're not hearing all of the other students in that dorma m as well in their home work there making any noise, right? So this is what you see is all there is, or what you hear is all there is. And so that person is sitting there, are taking, everyone is at the party without me when this isn't the case um it's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party now the people who aren't.

So this is very much due to the visibility of particular types of social experiences that is now facilitated by being online. I learned about the one percent rule from you OK go through that. I feel like that related here.

the one percent rule on the internet. And this isn't empirical research, but this is just the sort of short hand way of understanding how how social media works, how the internet works now, uh, and the basic idea is that online, one percent of internet users, uh, our creators, that the ones out there producing the videos in the podcast and the written content and all of the things that we're sort of consuming when we pull up on our phones and the nine percent of internet users are are our commenters.

They're engaging with the content in some way. Maybe they're reposting or retweet or liking or commenting on the ones who sort I want to engage with the content and we will, uh uh, original content, uh, producers, but they do like to sort of uh make themselves visible by uh by being commenters and so on. And then ninety percent people are just workers, the people that we aren't seeing, the people who are just sort of passively throwing their phones or looking at your looking at your stuff, listening to IT reading IT, but they're not they are not engaging with that in the same way. And I think a lot of so I I mia substate of your podcast, I think a lot of .

content producers.

one percent say, yeah, one percent but we pay a lot of attention to that nine percent ah and and of course, because of the the negativity bias, you may have hundred nice comments and then there's three people who are like, well, this sucks and you're like you will beat yourself up that day like why do these people not like this? Um but you didn't know you're assigning less weight to those ninety seven commons that were positive. But you are also not thinking about the ninety percent of people who didn't comment at all and based on that breakdown, right if if ninety seven comments are positive and three or negative.

you can probably estimate that that's probably roughly comments.

Yeah, I saw this um yeah read this this uh this S A uh uh recently about about A T V show uh in which the executives were threatened to cancelled in IT uh because they had received and this was I think of the one hundred and eighty IT was a com and h the executives were thring to cancelled because they received some some angry emails or not angry, angry snail mail from from the viewers of eighties.

And the and the the show runners were basically they do this analogy of like, you know, this is like going going to a stadium of one hundred thousand people in two of them write a nasty letter to you, right? Best the equivalent, right? Because we have x number of million viewers and and you got a couple of hundred mean letters, whether the other million plus people didn't write anything or maybe they are writing positive things. And so I think yeah we that one percent rock and sort of helps us to contextualize um all of the social phenomenon line.

I remember the general election a few years ago. The tory party won by the biggest landslide in a very long time and the the red wall fell and all the rest this stuff ah and I remember seeing storms y or boozy alone, and that is winner of love island. And someone else like like have the Daniel radCliff or someone tweet about how, you know, we need to make sure that we get the labor party in.

And I will be voting labor. And you see all of these replies and I oh my god, look at this can be a total landslide you know you've got boy alone has tweet about and then IT was the as far in the opposite direction as it's ever been in fifty years. And I was like, you know, the map is not the terrain, yes, and the is not the real world.

And he's another thing as well. You know, you ve got the one percent, nine percent, ninety percent, but I think it's only around about ten to fifteen percent of people in the U. K. Have a twitter account. So not only you're not thinking about all of the silent lockers, ah you're not thinking about all of the people who aren't on twitter that don't even know that this is doing on hear .

the episode ris I eclipse over.

So he comes up with this idea called digital exactly and this is just awesome by him. So he says um because he is no longer online, he's not exposed to the potential cancellations and online few is that is a part of so kind of in the same way as a lepper may be losing limbs and digits and be unaware that it's happening, right?

He may be being cancelled right now but because he's not online, he's unaware of the cancellation that's occuring all the whatever like sometimes trending again and are not on twitter and he's told his friends like to send me screen shots of what people are saying about me on the internet. So he is able to just, you know, blissfully move through his existence. He LED IT digital opportunity, which I thought was like.

such a lovely a motive term. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Because in that case, I would depend on what what your aims are. I could imagine so someone like sam, you know he's he's an intellectual as a podcast and he probably IT wouldn't help him to see all of the nasty comments.

But if you I think IT may be a little bit more than a like two out of one .

hundred thousand eleven and but I think for other people here, well, I mean, the first thing that comes to be like a politician, you would want to know what's going on, how people are reacting to you. Yeah exactly. Sort of keep your keep your finger on the pulse of, uh, your constituents um there is there is a one of the one of the chapters in in robbert Greens forty a power where in in the book is about the attainment of power, of course. So he writes that in in those kinds of situations, uh, you actually want to be more plugged in to the social scene IT actually isn't wise to withdraw because you're losing power you and losing influence interest.

He also says a rule about how uh alef ness is allowing no uh which I think is interesting and is definitely true. I was with dan balz arian last weekend and was talking to him and he's kind of been his sort of absurd from the permanently online instagram, you know, like tits and psychodeviant s existence that people he kind of got famous for.

And I asking me about that, I know like he's kindly go through a bit of medium offices at the moment, I think in in many regards, which is very interesting to see. And I dog into a psychology a lot over dinner. Also, he was like from a tactical perspective, just not being chronically online sucks in speculation, which is actually good for brand in some ways, and people like what is happening.

And I think, remember, this may be different for you, giving you a lightly, more chaotic, my upbringing each other. Each summer, when you would leave school and come back, you always think he is my opportunity to reinvent myself like i'm gonna be the sport kid or i'm gonna be the cool kid. Maybe this.

but I kind of get the .

sense that if you're going through A A period of rapid change or rapid reflection or whatever, a little bit of um receding perhaps from being so publicly about this is why monkey de, I think for guys has become such an important mean right that it's this retreat to focus on the three eyes introspection, isolation and like inner work or something else and at the reason that is so good, I think is that IT allows people to like go away, do the Christless thing and then trying to merge something new whilst not trying to bring along all the existence. Like i'm trying to update one step at a time all of the different changes as I know I get to go away and then come back with a relatively blank slate or more black than IT was. And yeah I think I think is something .

yeah yeah I think yeah, that depends on what your aims are. And I especially when you when you're Young and you're still of a trying to stabilize your identity and figure out who you are, that having those moments of withdraw and reflection can can be very helpful. Um yeah it's funning the laws of power. A lot of them do contradict each other and Green openly and my knowledge this it's it's it's based on context. It's place in sort of where you are in the life cycle and how um help power is acquired in your sort of local environment and and so so it's so basically if this isn't like a one size fits all sort of checking st.

it's more of a sort of at the play specific times, specific plans. You've been looking Young male syndrome recently. I think this is going to be one of the most important means of the coming decade.

And I think both of us have been talking about, at least in part from maybe like three or four years, I think, online, but it's picking up steam. What if you learned digging deeper into the modern conception of Young male sandstrom? And how is manifested?

What have you load? Yeah, yeah. Well, so so yeah. The Young males injury, the conStellation of trades that are associated with A A certain period of time in Young men s lives, typically beatings in the early twenties. A heightened levels of risk caking reduce self control and inhibition. If you look at rates of criminality, for example, they tend to peak at around age and nineteen.

And this is true regardless of, uh, culture and society sort all across the world in non industrialized hundred gather communities, only up to sort of wealthy and rich societies, that it's the Young men you look at who's committing the crime in that society. It's it's inevitably going to sort of manage, say, roughly fifteen to may be twenty four, even things like like. So this is just in the U.

S. context. Like I had had been hospitalized for punching walls.

There was a nice .

graph I saw and and I posted IT online this sort of the distribution of of Young or or men, just men in general being host and it's all concentrated again to twenty four. It's like, know ten years olds aren't in hospital for punching walls and either or six year olds is all that sort of Young male grip on I M, I punched walls before.

yeah. Did you see alex s on the date site posted, quote, tweet, an image this morning that was a mother asking how he could help her son. And he was just a photo of his bedroom wall. And this bedroom wall was just hole after hole after a hole and then the door had a hole in IT and it's like I think IT looked like a sufficiently flimsy american house that the hospitalization risk was quite low but that the decorating rest might be quite high.

Ah yeah yeah that in that case I mean out that yeah that that sounds like going to require some serious intervention, serious and interventions in serious treatment. What I find interesting is uh especially for Young men that so this is I think an expression of Young malsin drome is when a Young man uh experiencing some sort of a usually like a minor injury and then the immediate responses to lash.

So like I saw this with some of my friends where um like maybe um and are something simple, like like the accidentally poke themselves in the hand or something and then the immediate responses to punch something. So they hurt themselves and they're pissed and they punched something. And and I think that this is basically A A misfiring of this kind of evolutionary impulse of of if an intentional agent hurts you, IT actually is a advantages to fight back, like to respond, right? exactly.

so. So if I don't know the cats plant stabs me, you know, maybe punching the wall is unwise, but if you do something to upset me, then immediately respond physically, that can actually be an adapt to strategy. So I think like that is this is this is speculation, but this is what I think is going on there because others SE IT doesn't make sense, right? You're injured, but I injured my self.

Me break my hand. Now that makes no that so, uh, so yeah. So the Young male injure me. I sort of reduce invention, creed, risk taking, criminality, uh, risky driving.

I know if you look at who, who's arrested for drinking, driving, who gets into the most auto accidents, who is the most likely to be killed. Simply, the crossing the street has society to see a men or twice as is likely to be killed, simply crossing the street as women. Um so there are so many of different, different factors here. And there was actually one on on on the see pell point. There was an interesting study which found that men are less likely to wear seatbelts when there is when they accompany ed by a male passenger relative to when they're sitting by themselves or when they sitting with the with the woman.

What you think that's saying.

I think that is uh, one possibility here is is essentially the attempt to signal toughness that you you of course, like there's a lot of interesting we are curing a lot of discussion and in debate around this. Um because of course, we want to a signal to women and we want to signal that strong and quire resources and all those kinds of um sort of bedrock findings and evolutionary psychology, but then we also want to impress other men too.

You know, you want to show that you would be in in the ancestral context. You want to show that you would be good in a in a violent conflict against the rival. And or if you're a big game hunting, you want to show that you're stronger. So I think the way that you might manifest itself the modern ages, I don't need to wear seatbelts and i'm going to show my friends and .

my mates like or two time rocket ship going towards me hasn't got shit. We both became fans of that. David puts study that was able to predict the number of sexual partners based on not female ratings of attractiveness of male faces, but other male ratings of toughness of the same male face, that the women's attractiveness ating had basically zero predictive power, but that the man's toughness rating had like quite a good bit of predictive power.

Yeah, was that you taught me? Was that done? But taught me about men's street crossing in the presence or without the presence of women? Hm, that was probably done.

Bar, right? okay. So this studies so much fun. So they got crossing the street is really interesting. Is that a relatively discrete variable, you have distance of vehicle from street crossing, and then you have, like the presence, or lack of presence of a female and men, the difference in how close the vehicles would get here. And men were prepared to across the street in the presence of a woman, was like a third of what IT was when there was no women around. I look at all of this, you surplus fitness that I have, i'm going to cross the street while these cars on the fifteen yards away from me.

What ah ah yeah yeah I think you have the Young male syndrome is yes, I think IT is sort of depends on context, but yet that is most likely to sort of be expressed when you're trying to impress women or when you're trying to impress man, I get so I don't think that I would I don't think I would necessarily impress Young women.

Uh, you know that you're driving without a seat belt and I think we want some old of guys understand that with with IT, wouldn't us? It's not so much that you're impressing your friend when you put when you don't work. This is that if you do, you might be mocked or make fun of or that when you wearing in A C pelt that kind of especially nineteen year old guys even like anything. Um and so it's not so much trying to look tough, but just not to look a week .

very interesting okay. So but Young melson specifically seems to be worsened among st sexless dispossess rebound tious .

Young .

guys coalition's together in small groups to go in such shit on fire and .

push over grani. Ah that's know when a Young man is isolated sort of by himself, there's only so much damage you can do but it's sort of the right the risk becomes expendable ally greater sort of as that as as he sort of partners with other man and the collaborate and sort of plan. So yeah this is I be so so you had this this interesting term about .

the station male sedation hypothetic. It's study at the moment with us. And William, yeah, I mean, I am just .

thinking about because I, member, when you first told me about that, something come to mind. You know, I had friends, I think this is sort of back, and they, I don't know, people still play this game, world of warcraft. But I remember I had a couple of friends who, like, lost years of their life to this game.

And they were like the weather. They spoke. You know, I know when you told me about like ah these Young guys, this was eight thousand, this was years ago but they would say, like, alright, know I got I got a hop off the phone. I'm going on a RAID know I got a RAID scheduled like you don't ever ready, scheduled you you know, seven hours of sitting in your laptop chair but in his mind is like, i'm going with my other internet, were going to go, you know, read this castle at whatever they do in this game and I could see that, yeah, this is a sort of an expression of that during example of know just Young guys who ordinary might be out causing trouble and instead they are just online and that's how they do you I saw this funny anny post on twitter um in this guy know he said something about you back in the day if you were like a hyper curious Young man um you you basically start like uh trying to document the like visible differences between the mushrooms are right around your house and today what they do is like try to collect all the rings and ison ic game you know like speed run a yeah yeah ah .

yeah yeah yeah .

so yeah I think the virtual world is sucking in a lot of a lot of anger. Aggressive and but we may also be losing like that sort of the pattern natchally sort .

of systematized yeah well, it's just it's managed to hijack and off for a lot of the status seeking coalition. A curiosity, adventurous behavior that Young man you know throughout all of history has been kind of claimed for you know you look at um favorite example of the solution for Young male syddall was portugal in the eighteen hundreds would have been there. They the first sun was allowed to.

That was an imbaLance in the sex ratio. And they knew that if someone married because the older son, but son two, three and four perhaps won't permitted to marry under one of women to marry, that this was gna cause problem. So they just put them on gallian ships and said, go, you know, pie near the new world the way you go.

So they just, they literally exported the Young mile problem by putting the man on ships and giving them this sense of an adventure, you know, channeling their regression outward against either a new world or or political academies or whatever IT was yeah, I think that there is still a question. Vince ent came on the show. Mutual friend came on. He's been researching and he says, you know, every single time that we have high rates of sex and baba, we have an increase in associated violence and it's just at the moment and someone may i'm wrong, but IT doesn't seem to be there in the data, right? We have install black pillow ideology that was this period maybe about two years ago where uh, they're even a donate claimed to be a domestic terror threat I think um in .

sells uh there .

were a .

terrorist .

group yeah I was like, show me the violence. Show me the uptake in the violence. Now that's not to say that doesn't up taking murders and stuff, but I think a lot of that can be attributed to else, yeah, exactly like the receding of police criminal cities.

right? yeah. I wonder if so on its face, IT seems silly, right, that this install, this is a domestic terror threat. But I wonder if they were just sort of if they were actually familiar with the research on the Young male syndrome and the sort of historical park. Maybe i'm giving them too much credit, I think, but they essentially they were of anticipating the possibility they're sort of getting out ahead of bit and saying, well, you have a lot of Young, sexless, angry Young men and historically that's been the uh you are a group that's been dangerous so let's just designate that label on them. But I think yeah in the modern age with with technology, with video games, with pouring, with calling phones, I mean i've seen sort of research, john uh what Young men like jobless Young men do um and most of the time scrolling their phones, playing computer games, watching porn, over reading junk food.

Na stats work on .

that I have. Is this related to .

men not working or whatever is but yet it's like some insane percentage of men are needs not in education, employment or training but also a prime working age. I think it's twenty two to fifty um and it's this unseen because unemployment rates are relatively low in america. But hiding in that data is a very unusual cohort of men who are electing to be unemployed that living on social welfare in one former another or understand living at home spending an insane amount of hours per year playing video games and while they are playing video games, fifty percent of that time is either on prescription medication or once taking weed. So you just have a very it's like, okay, here's the big data.

Okay, well, what's that? How this constituted? Who is the component people that make up this data? You go, how are in a second that what's this chunk? E, I like, I think it's like eight million or fall million men, prime working age men, electing to retreat from the employment market.

Now we put this episode up, and a lot of guys that may be a part of this cold T A tangential to this cold hot commented, and, you know, the sentiment very strongly was, why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me? Uh, why am I going to work to get A A five foot three, two hundred and ten pound a woman who's already gone through two marriages and got four kids? Uh, you know, just very despondent, evidently, guys who don't see much future for themselves.

And IT IT was really ee opening because IT, largely, the comments on modern wisdom tend to be in pretty personal growth. Y agented, highly sovereign, openly mobile eta, but this episode, like, blasted out of the algorithm into the wider internet, or maybe I got shared on some forum or whatever. And IT was very, very interesting. And I got to see a, you know, I got a window into into this world and IT didn't seem these guys didn't seem very happy. They were maybe a comfortable in the animalism, but I don't think that they were particularly a .

fulfilled I mean, they may be comfortable when they're Young, but there is you might be curious whether or of as as we forward um no decade or two decades later. I mean, it's one thing to be uh a need when you're nineteen or twenty three but when you're forty three, fifty one and your single maybe you've never had a girlfriend and you've spent most of the last to know several .

decades just playing .

video games. And 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 know, if you live in a modern rich society, you can collect sort of extended unemployment, or maybe leave your parents or find ways to, I mean, very few people now, very few Young men are sort of literally starving or having to steal food to survive.

And um and now if you want to do something difficult, you have to make the choice to do IT rather than um sort of uh uh be pressure sort of by by external factors. I saw I saw this this tiktok video, not on tiktok, but people sometimes send to me, I saw this one, this, this, this Young guy, I think he was in the army, U. S.

Army, and he was just sort of walking there was barac. And and he was asking these, these other, other Young, Young guys, Young g recruits, you know, if you could talk to your recruiter right now, what would you say? And these other Young guys, like, I told me to go fuck himself for, I got the socks, or why did I do this? So on and so forth.

And i'm watching this. And like I know exactly he's talking about because I was there, I was I rested, I was in the air force and I remember especially like the first two years are just awful. Like when you get a bit of rank in a bit of responsibility, you go through the training yeah exactly.

Then you're like, you know then you're okay. But the first couple of years really, really suck. And so I knew like these all very Young ys, they are still sleeping in bunk beds and I won't said the same thing.

You know, i'm guy that take talk to exist back then but i'm watching this and i'm thinking like these guys do not understand right in five years from now, they're to be glad that they shit for however many years and did this they went to this experience um and and I think a lot of a lot Young won't even go that far. They won't even less, which is fine if everyone has their own make your own choices. But in that moment I understood that like, this sucks.

Why did I do this? Like, this is off. And then you go through IT and you can sort of, in hindsight, go back. And I like that I was a character forming experience. IT was good for me, like I was an idiot when I was nineteen. And I probably needed a bit of that structure, a bit of that disciplines I needed have my asked a little bit and and I think you had, like you don't but those guys volunteer to do that, right? You have to choose to do and that experience elected .

for someone who's got the agency to get moving. Yeah yeah I had this idea. I had this idea about um the reason that victim hod culture is becomes a widespread is because the human systems demand for chAllenges has outstripped our modern reality.

Y'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 yeah rampant, fragile ity and this kind of like so externalizing locus of control culture that's going on at the moment.

So interesting though that you've got this barbell strategy where you know fifty percent of maybe more percent of the people are Young men of happy to lean into the, uh, I ve had a bit of behavior genetics and evolutionary psychology and and taken the black pill in many regards, because I A genetic that end. But at the same time you have the ascendency of David dogons, jacka willink, alex homos, 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, it's going to get you at sea, sea.

So you have this increasing sort of divergence between the two. And I think you know, assaulted tive meeting, which is people of kind meeting with people of their kind, Wright of silicon valley, hundred and thirty five IQ people with, you know, professional tennis level skills, having kids together. So you have kind of have this genetic spreading apart, which also is going to have a psychological a like heritable psychological echo, I suppose.

So the conscientious ous people will have more conscientious kids and son. And so and then millican ies, new back to two parent privilege, is talking about how those college educated people who've got that predisposition again, get an even bigger advantage. So I think that the Matthew effect of this right to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken. It's just going to continue to spread and spread and spread.

Yeah, I think I mean, that's that's a distinct possibility. And IT seems like in the short term, that is what's occurring. I mean, I even read this which book was this uh, who was a speculative hypotheses about why there's a like sort of pronounced levels of a kids being born on the spectrum in silicon valley.

And it's because it's not necessarily because the engineers and the programme earns themselves are autistic, but they may be of somewhere on the spectrum and then they partner with someone who also shares some of those genes and that exactly. And then they what they have, children and and the child is sort heightened risk of getting autism. But I think generally speak I know I don't know this is if this is this could be contributed as a White pillow, a black pill.

But I just read of this book, the sun also rises by a greg Clark cause, uh, an economic historian, uh, very well versed in the behavior genetics as well and essentially bad book. He documents h in various societies, essentially how uh social status is sort of fluosol defined as sort of wealth and influence. And someone is very sticky across generations. And essentially what he finds, you know he tracks .

her names uh and finds that know I got injured .

to this guy from matter aora he and yeah I spoke with I spoke with mad about about um gargery clerks work as well and essentially he he tracked status, not there. So there there's this fear, especially in the modern era, is sorted of mating, that more and more women are going getting educated. And men are are dating educated women. They're having children who educated so on.

But IT, essentially he finds that when you when you look at data from decades past, centuries past, before a women were sort of educationally, economically emancipated, when they were still sort of stuck in these ridge gender roles, if you pair, if you look at the status of of a given man interested in a woman, and then look at the status of the woman's father, there is like a very tight correlation there. So even though the woman herself isn't highly educated or isn't working in a procedure, occupation often SHE comes from her family in which her father was. And so one of Clarks claims, generally speaking, this book is that people are very good at sort of finding people who are similar to themselves even if you don't have this sort of external visible badgers of of class or education or credential.

Does that manifest if it's not the external badgers?

Yeah well, specially people people closed together in the same clubs, family, friends or organization um so so maybe you know maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way that they would now but maybe um you know his boss's friend says, hey, I have a daughter who you might get along with and even though SHE isn't working.

she's you know the daughter of of the boss is a social instantiation of the class a disposition yeah.

yeah, yeah, yeah I mean, this is, yeah, this is interesting to me, I think so. So Scott Alexander did a long peace on on the sort ative meeting, I think, earlier this year, and he talked about how there is surprisingly little uh, sort of sort of matching across uh sort of educational and class lines on the things that you would expect on things like like attractiveness example. I think there's this, especially in the sort of like the red pill um online spaces of you know when you really care about education, they really care about and how attractive woman is um and yet at least the the data that I saw sort of uh created by by scot xander is that it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the you know the the the college drop out to the yeah or or if they .

do did the breast that starbucks SHE .

has a college degree and I think a mistake that we might make up on sort of channeling prog Clark is that like, oh, he knew that he had a college degree and that's why he was open to dating her where they think Clark would say, actually they they had had some conversations together and through that he sort of tell that they were maybe roughly in the same class, the same space sort of uh uh levels of curiosity and intersect and all of the sort of a psychological attributes they matched along those line.

So you know, even though SHE maybe works A A A somewhere that doesn't require a college degree, SHE has one and she's the kind of person who would get a along those lines, meeting still holds. Are you think others there? So again, because this, a White pillow or black pill could be a black pill, because that is is sticking IT almost doesn't matter what you. The other hand is a White pill in that like even though we have all of these educational, occupational transit modern world that doesn't IT may not actually change the sort of underlying social and romantic dynamics .

that right yeah it's more stable. Yeah do you might think I think yes, I think you look at you is like the poster child for what was IT kids that grow up in is its single parent homes are like ten times more likely to go to college than adopted kids.

So is IT was on Foster kids specifically? So I did some of this research, right right my book gotta be out next year and then um I wrote this. I say that a that was in the free Price a couple of years ago, which basically um so in the U S.

Kids who are uh raised in families in the bottom, so economic quintile, so the bottom twenty percent, essentially kids raised in poor families, uh, roughly eleven percent of them graduate from college, which is pretty low because the the the average rate in the U. S. Is around thirty five percent.

So it's pretty low. Eleven percent, which is thirty five percent, but the the number uh or the percentage of of Foster kids in the U. S. Who graduate from colleges, three percent. And so in other words, a kid raised in a poor family is four times more likely to graduate from colors and a Foster kid. And so I used you know, this sort of essentially to me, sort of evidence that instability and sort of disorderly vironment is is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to obviously has an effect, but something that that deserves more attention than we're giving a relative to sort of the material factors.

Did you take into millican ies?

New one, have you? I just read IT. I finished at a couple of weeks ago. ExcEllent work, excEllent. The two parent privilege.

So I watched she's been on the show. Hasn't seen that can go back and listen to the episode they did with Melissa SHE was great but I mean, he is you know as straight down the line policy wonk D C. Pilled as you're going to get right like she's like the female Richard reads, you know like she's just dad to do how do policy and do the D C.

Thing and and she's a statistic lady, right he is I I tried to push her on the episode and music so why is this occurring? Like give me the implications here in fer for me, what you think is the underlying mechanism. And SHE was very redcat about trying to work out what's going on from a psychological perspective.

And I thought, wow, that's really a it's a good signal that she's not prepared to get out over what he sees is her domestic expertise yeah, I this this is what I do and SHE didn't a little bit, but he didn't go too far as I. That's a really good signal. But what I saw on the internet before her book came out turns in, turns in tons of articles saying, you know, this is like hard, right Christian talking points being legitimated by Cherry pick data.

You haven't read the data. The books not out yet. And what I saw was her as someone, as far as I could see, if you were to do political compass on IT would probably be like just left of santa ah and again, very not prepared to say things that he didn't understand and didn't have da to back up and so and but on the internet, the only people that weren't lambasting her as being some sort of interlake bigger judgemental arsehole that's telling people that come from single parent households that they shouldn't.

What you're saying, women should stay in an abusive relationship instead of, you know, allowing the themselves and their child to have a good step parent ba blood like just old straw and shit house arguments. And I saw the exact path that many, many people are taking, which is causing them to bend to what the right, because you go hang in a second. I've put this piece of worker, which is relatively dispositioned, 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 trying to fix the class problem. The only people that were accepting of her, or won't like accusing her of doing awful things with the people that were santa, right and further right.

So what you see is how somebody hazard left leaning, uh, predisposition, perhaps not just a centrist disposition, gets nudged by the treatment toward the right go. Okay, i'll fuck you guys like if if if you're not going to accept me, i'll happily like and SHE, I wish you that i'd noticed this before I spoke to X. I would love to have ask about this.

But yeah, like that's not. I can completely see how the tribal sm of both sides, and i'm sure that is an equivalent. The dynamic on the right pushing people towards left I don't see but the tribal ism of the left and the purity spiral of the left and IT it's rapidity at judging people to see bigorre where there may not be some I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean um in a different direction.

Yeah I mean ah I W I saw a lot of that the ad homs online and a lot of the uh insults and derogatory ory commons that were directed at her and I thought yeah that we're completely unfair. The book I mean the thing is like the book is is very dense but it's also um you can read IT IT in afternoon I mean he presents the data in a beautiful way, very sort straight forward way that any sort of educated and curious person can understand uh and IT seems like B M most people just didn't even bother flipping through IT and and having a look because SHE cabyle s multiple times that this isn't h this isn't a book about sort of a judging people about values really is about um so of looking just sort of from a display ate point of view what did the day to say about outcomes for kids and very a sort of family uh, arrangements so yeah, that was so excited. I mean, yeah and he does close to the day.

I think generally speaking, that's a good idea when you're making arguments that are unpopular that you should figure IT 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 that's unpopular. Um there's that sort of can versus must distinction of classic finding and psychology about how when people are uh predisposed to uh support a certain point of view essentially they implicated ask themselves, can I and then they come across a piece information that supports that point of view. They implicated ask themselves can I believe IT and generally speaking will be, yes, I can believe that uh and when they encounter something that is at odds with that point of view and possibly as themselves must I believe IT. And if they find a reason, if there are any any flaws in that argument or any any reason whatsoever why they can discount IT, then they.

I don't doesn't show up, was IT you that taught me about how the shows have 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 like why such and such a thing is true and just it's like you not asking for um is this thing true? You're looking for arguments to support your side. Yeah so you're looking for a good barrister rather than an honest judge .

yes right right, right. yeah. You want you want some. You're looking for arguments, of course, that sort of the classic confirmation by the idea you're looking for information, you're monitoring and then you're sort of overlooking anything that that might make you feel uncomfortable, that might call your the question. There was a really cool study.

I want to say this was in the nineties, uh, so of along this way. And I mean, it's a need example because it's sort of disconnected from politics, like I think anyone can appreciate this, which is essentially what these researchers that was. They rought this part into the lab um and they they told these participants, you know they showed them um this this jar and IT was really just water, but they told them that was this sort of chemical solution.

And if you drop a strip of water into IT, so in one condition they told the participants, cy drop the drop of water into IT um and IT and IT doesn't change color this sort of remains the same White whatever IT was um then that means that you don't have this sort of rare, unique uh congenital disease know you died in leave in for a few seconds, put out out these the same way to go and so rosson participants and I basically they found your and you and didn't change color they walk right out in another condition they told the participants um you know you dip the strip into the ece of paper and if IT changes color then that means you're good to go IT stays the same that means you may potentially have this congenital illness and in this case, what did the participants ants do? They did the stript of the water, waited, dip IT back in, waited, took another strip, did the back wait. And then they started to get nervous.

And essentially they were going for the confirmation, because what? What did they want to believe? They wanted to believe they were. And when they did not receive information that supported that, then they started to sort shufu through and and and try to try to find ways to confirm that. That belief.

We both came across the same research that shows that cards, rather than in cells, are the extreme methodius. Do I love this?

Yeah, yeah. yes. I think I saw a William retweet that, of .

course, does he does anything that's pro. And so men with higher levels of sex partners are more likely to hold extreme massage ist views, which contradicts the insel narrative extremely. Gene correlates with status seeking and dominance orientation, both of which also correlated with high levels. Sex ponders.

I thought that was an absolutely fascinating study. Ended the links S A very nicely. I I when I was in in grad school I read um David buses evolutionary psychology text book covered to cover and one of the things he points out there uh is is uh that no there's there's not much, if any research supporting what uh was refer to as the mate deprivation hypothesis.

This idea so that made the prevision hypothesis is essentially that you know Young men who are who are deprivations of mates are more likely to develop the sort of uh mythologised attitudes that are more likely to uh covers women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault and essentially, uh all the issues that i've seen indicates almost at the reverse of that and including the study here, uh, which points in the same direction which is that the men who are the most likely to commit sexual question on our assault, also men who are the most likely to uh to have consensual sex partners as well um and yet all of these things so come together in create with status seeking domination. Env extra version. Uh uh probably I would imagine narcisso as well and maybe some the other dark triad traits of being being particularly attractive to women.

And you know, this is now i'm more comfortable speculating. I have a more comfortable making this. This is just a hypothesis, but I think that most many, maybe most women would be pretty reluctant to actually be sort of alone in like like be in a situation in in, in, in which they could potentially be alone and assaulted by the sort of prototypical and so you know, sort of lonely, unattractive, isolated, angry male warning for him, right, exactly like they would know in advances like I don't need to be alone with this guy there's something off about him again out of protected but nothing all in cells are like that but that sort of architecture image of where's um probably just just sort of no uh uh I think this is pretty thieve of that that women would be more willing to sort of be alone and potentially be in a risky situation with a man who is attractive, right?

And so just through the sort of differentiating levels are different, different, different levels of life alone and exposure alone, that you have Better that that assault would be more like what happened one context than the other um and so I think that may partially explain some of those differences that if women were alone with actual help you as much as there alone with status seeking domination or oriented extroverts, that maybe those the numbers would be different. But but generally speaking, I think that finding is. suggestive.

And then in my own personal life, I mean, when I think about the guys, men, that you spend your time alone, well, that I spent, yeah yeah, that I feel a but the guys that I know who are particularly, you know, well, at least numerically successful if you IT was success me in this context, but just had a lot of sex partners. They do tend to be a little bit more glib, a little bit less um preoccupied with what what does he think of me or you know or or or or sort of what traditional or conventional or or holds sort of but leveller sexy attitudes, right? It's used usually a little bit more I guess on the positive, I mean jokey, you're playful but then on the other cancer of dip into you know the example that I so I posted one of these studies online and sort of commented that um yeah I think this is easy to understand when you reverse the genders. You know if you think about like like a woman who spends a lot of time um attracting men, i'm thinking of someone like like a stripper for example. Like i'm sure they have extremely signal attitudes about men right uh whether women like if you think about a woman who doesn't really know, maybe isn't very track, if hasn't had a boyfriend or hasn't had that much experience and then they probably have a little bit more sort of maybe slight more optimistic views or at least um less less than interviews.

So sadi a con psychological cholos lady. He does like couples counseling and stuff. Uh SHE gave me this really interesting answer to the question. Are our hot girls more crazy? right?

So the classic, the classic question, like, finally, aristotles got on answer, and he said that the experience that hot girls have of most men jades their view of all men, because the men SHE spends a time around are unbelievably liable. They cheat on their partners with her. They tried to shower her with gifts.

They say things that they think he wanted to hear, that duplicitous us. So the reality distortion field of the beautiful woman 口， all of the men are 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 is an idea. Yeah, like the reality distortion of of the hot goal or something.

That is, he reminds me of this, this interview I watched years ago of a Chris rock, and he said, basically being, well, I don't know, he said something along lines of being an attractive woman is like being a celebrity, or being a celebrity like being attractive woman, where once you reach a certain level of famous notoriety or recognition at, people react to you in a predictable way yet in a way that that is often obnoxious or um you know try to give you free things or try to try to court you or they're looking for something from you. And uh, that is where you're only seeing a sort of you're only seeing sort of one version of that person, whether everyone else might see another version.

Please selecting for the only sort of people who are prepared to go to the hot girl in the first place. Yeah, I saw this with strippers, and I would imagine that maybe the same with only fun skills as well. A lot of the strippers that I was friends with throughout my twenties, I was working in nightlife, had very, very J. D.

Views of men, because they were seeing the stag on his bachelor party out in newcastle, you know, trying to get a blow job of one of the strippers that are in that right, like men that was selected for IT that worst around the women that are able to, you know, casual or cos or encourage them to do a thing that a whatever and oh, that's how old manner that is. This really great segment on rogan show years and years ago, one of timbaland first appearances. And joe, I think tim talking about how the L A comedy seen is very ruthless.

And joe has just moved to every time I go into a room, everyone treats me really great blood. And tim cuts in the goes hold a months second. Like, you do know that you are joe rogan, right? Like do you? Like you bend reality.

Or rather this is fear that follows you. Where, like who? The fox gona treat you like shit, right? Like the biggest pod castle in the world just walked in and I spoke to talk a max about this over dinner a couple of month ago is so interesting.

And I was talking about how i've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years, status and and running and wealth and whatever has has changed. And there is a reason now to be nice, perhaps, or maybe does not a reason to be nice. They don't even know IT, but something happens. They heard that the guy with the podcast, whatever. So he just noticed that like the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way.

Maybe i'm just super like charissa tic whatever i've changed my confidence that told me could be IT too but my more um like highly skeptical h cynical view of IT is like people want something or whatever anyway and I was talking to talk about this and he said to become Rachel famous as a man is to accept being uh, a resource to be extracted from from or an object to be desired he said that women become objectified as soon as they become, uh, you know like womanly know you're thirteen years old and the boys in the class and I start to see that you've got boobs and then you become like seventy eight in the whole world objectifies you for a while because your value is immediate in up front know this is a red pill take away I guess like women, a bomb with the value may have to create and IT is unless you're bad pet or you know somebody who is is super good looking and has that up front um you have to achieve some degree of of of self generated value in order for people to treat you and to object. Fy, you just objectifying the random dude in the street, but if the random do in the street gets out of the bag, I maybe they are right. What let me tell you, let me ask you about a to become an an resource to be extracted from uh or an object to be yeah this is sort .

of A A positive feedback loop that happens there too, I think with with a bigod example um so so you have this a prestigious material good, then you stop bad of IT. And then suddenly you know you have increase social capital because people are drawn to you. But I think this happens even even within just the real social capital itself.

I mean, you know, I just use this this persons example. If you know I I was walking through an airport with some friends and and then recognized a couple of different times with you, I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know like they go, they kind of know that I write and stuff. But and then I got recognized and suddenly they became more interested in talking to me, like what do you what exactly to tell me more about? And so I think it's like you get recognized ones and then other people become interested.

And then suddenly, ly, you can ah I will tell that story. You want to walk down broadway with Peterson in nashville. And so, uh, we went for dinner. He was about two years ago from now.

I went to dinner with him, and there was that famous video of him dancing with his wife and venture peria was there in that will just a few years ago. I did see. I thought he 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's me. micelle.

Mica is now husband, and Jordan and mica husband like six, five, four and so he a told guy what uh but no security and Jordan starts walking down, uh a broadway like the street in nashville, rights by kid rocks, barriers and whisky row and all this and they on the weekend close IT off. I think they close IT off for both and may be they don't. But anyway, it's it's stack.

Someone noticed is Jordan Peterson and then goes over to, like, get a photo with him and shake his hand. And hello, how are you? And then other people noticed the other people are standing talking to someone.

So A Q forms to speak to Jordan Peterson. He's accumulating a tale of humans as he walked like a fucking comment, right? Walking down, yeah, honestly.

And I remember thinking like, oh my god, we were the Young delegates a dinner, a drinks thing last night at ark here in london. Uh, and sure enough, there was A A Q of people. Like this is a conference of people selected for a very like particular set of interests.

And then we went to hundred and fifty 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's comment tae thing existed again. So yeah, that's almost like like a physical manifestation of what you're talking about, that going on socially, right? People see they don't see a physical q, but they see uh like a social q right like A C E A, they go OK right.

And I would would be curious, I mean, maybe in the the example of the one hundred and fifty or or smaller group of selected people they probably are familiar with Jordan, that sounds like, but in the example of him walking down is a broadway. When that tale formed, what I would be curious to know is probably many of those people, maybe most of them didn't know who Jordan ones.

But what i'm curious about all the people who didn't know who he, what s and now they're fall and I know so what percentage of those people were were familiar with him too? Are these classic studies from from milk rim? Uh so most people know no grim through the um the obedience studies you know the uh he essentially trick people into shocking and and believing that they were injuring someone who perhaps killing him.

But there were these other study that milgram did and other source psychologists such of classic work back in the day of you know he just have people on on, like a manhattan street and just have like four, five research assistants look up at the sky, just like me, you, a couple of other people look at this kind of. And then gradually what happens, people will be walking by and they see, you know, four people looking at something, and they d stop and look up to be looking. And suddenly this massive IT, I like, suddenly, ly, you have forty people looking at the sky and.

You're looking at, right? Everyone's trying to figure out what there is original four people, right? So there's that sort of imitative quality which which is no it's adaptive um but is funny situations .

being moderate is a Green flag you see this new one about extremist views. William shared the graph.

I even see this one.

But let me get your take on this. This is a awesome researchers pulled over a thousand registered U. S. Voters aged eighteen thirty four.

A majority of both men and women consider far ride sm and far leftism to be red flags in the potential partner. Seventy six percent of women and fifty nine percent of men consider identifying as a maga republican to be a major turn off. Sixty four percent of men, fifty five percent of women, said they're also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. So that was a high number of women, seventy six percent for mega, sixty four percent of men for communist. Fifty five percent of women said that listening to joe rogan was a red flag.

Thirty five that .

wasn't on. Thirty five percent of men. Forty one percent of men said the same for a woman being into astrology OK. 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 refused to see the Barbie movie.

Fifty three percent of women, fifty percent of women, for they say there are only two genders, so more women concerned about the two gender thing in the Barbie movie. Interesting um what that is but yet just overall IT seems like far rioters and 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?

How like that would have thought that that would have been the moderate position, right? Like I guess he depends. Yeah but the boston being turned up upside down. But yet overall, when IT comes to dating IT seems like a majority of both men and women consider fy ritin m and file leftism to be red flags .

in the potential partner age group.

Is this are these Young make sense? I mean, if you've promising some of these data to about the political divergence of Young men and Young women um which is really I mean it's really interesting because um a lot of the the press media will concentrate on you know supposed uh rightwing radicalization of Young men when actually most of the sort of political psychology survey at indicated reverse where men are Young men are slightly turning to the right. This was a slight turn. Whereas for Young women there's a sharp like a sharp rise and Young women identifying as left, far left. So it's actually the women who are being sort of a uh radicalized or turning to a more extreme direction.

Yeah but we don't mind about that one. Well.

I well is so I think like in in terms of like violence and so there's no there's no Young females in drome or or if there is one IT would be IT would manifest .

itself differently the .

female long house the long um but yeah I be IT in terms of the sort of the classic threats of terrorism and so I me but but yeah that's that's interesting I mean so so some of those like the two gender one that's interesting, fifty eight percent of women I found, like there there's a sort of A A neat reversal thereof. Like mac republicans were, is communist where most men, I seemingly okay with dating maa identifying women, but women, or morok with eating a communist identifying .

but he's the thing, right? It's not apples for apples, right? Like thirty five percent of men said that a woman listening to joe rogan as a red flag, but a man listened to je ogan and a woman listening to je ogan is not the same thing, know? I mean, like there was one about owning a gun. The like some quite high percentage of women said in a gun was a red flag right in america.

But a woman .

owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun right list to. And so for so IT IT makes a very interesting reading. But I actually think that like if a woman does listen to jero, you'll be some non zero number of men and that like, like that a boys show.

Like why? why? Like, oh, maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's like going to try ARM wrestle me in bed something like.

yeah, I have I ve heard this um just just speaking with Young guys that um you know they are to some extent sort of bothered by these gender differences in politics and how like more more Young women are sort of identifying and a more sort of sharp left wing direction um but then they also sort of land that you know a lot of Young because you have to be to some degree psychologically peculiar if you're Young woman who is a sort of brightening person or or identifying opening is a conservative because sort of going against the grain, right. Like you are an outlier in that sense and that off often sort of coincides with other things that Young .

men are kind of annoyed by so it's like it's the astrology one .

forty one thousand of said that the woman being into this was confusing think that's ine way of thinking you know like I think it's I can't .

remember who was that that said was that they said, um the big five is a strategy for man and evolution .

ology psychology is strategy for man yeah but I A world that's fired but there are like, you know a lot, well, a lot of men but but at least I Smith more women are interested in the M, B, T. I. The Myers brags and that is I mean, it's you, it's it's not completely .

astrology, but it's more space Green. I know really interesting dude think I have some of his I got in charge to him from William aso to super interesting guy mathematic just does science like I don't know what is funded by maybe himself but and he did a huge breakdown of like predictive power of a mires brags very big five verses. Other stuff this is other and my brain is like, I think things like eighteen percent accurate basically on actual predisposition of things but yeah is that that's astrology for astrology I think um what was that study about higher female status and gender equality being associated with the lower female relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that?

This study came across the thing was published in twenty fifteen uh which yeah essentially found that that higher levels of wealth in and sociopolitical equality among the genders was associated with lower levels of relative happiness for women compared to men and the researchers speculators may have something to do with increasing level of employment uh the the pressure to obtain higher level of education, uh, among women in particular, that this is actually sort of a dampening women's levels of happiness.

And to me, this this connects with a another, uh, this one is IT know this, this classic finding of the the paradox of declining female happiness, which is essentially that sense, the nineteen a women's happiness relative to to mans has declined. So to be clear, everyone's so so relative to the ninety seventies, everyone is less happy today compared to the ninety seven. But in the one thousand nine, seventeen men were actually happier.

Uh, no, no, no. Women were happier than men, yes. So women had higher rates of happiness relative to en in the thousand nine hundred and seventy.

And people generally were happier overall festival to the present. And uh, things have reversed. Men are not happier than women, although overall people report being less happy. And so yeah, that study that I pointed out, that was an interesting one to me because yeah, I mean, the the message that a lot of Young people receive today is what are the keys to happiness?

You know, you you you work hard, you go, you get a, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a hyping job, you sort of follow that cookie cutter track. And what is the the purpose of all of this um and suppose to be happy. And so you go to the education and employment around, maybe you go to law school after college, you sort of get the credentials, you go through the whatever the fellowships and all of these different programs and at the end of the tunnel, you're hoping that i'll be happy.

And actually, uh, for both men and women does not seem to be working, but for women particular because they're had the sharpest decline, right because they were beer, uh uh diminishing happiness is actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men. Um the the men's happiness being sort of higher than women is interesting as well. And I wonder if that is almost sort of uh, 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 sound degree because they don't feel as much pressure anymore. The sort of um you know back in the day and were sort of pressured more to be earners and providers and someone and there was a sort of a economic pressure associated with that. And now that you don't really have to warm in percent, Young men are of rock out of college, dropping out of highest cation unemployment. You 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 to field today or what have you think I might A T.

that men were previously less happy and relative to them, are now less happy also. It's just the really the change, the big change here is the women yeah that's like, right yeah. I wonder whether um like the male dissatisfaction with the uh gainful employment state of seeking providing thing was just baked in already.

It's like, oh okay like we already knew this. Like granddad was spit and sad and he was unhappy and dad was spit and sad and he was unhappy and i'm spit and sad and i'm unhappy, but there is a little bit less pressure to do this. Ah was that kind, Blake.

that did that one? The the female happiness? Yes, I don't recall the authors of that one. Internal happiness .

studies SHE definitely taught me about either that or something similar, which is yeah that the gender pag positively predicts relationship satisfaction.

Oh, I have seen that. yeah. I think that I read that paper.

What is? You know, it's it's, it's funy because 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 if if kenna was the city on this are different, different author is but found that when when women in marriages earn more than men, that this predicts higher rates of of arguments of verbal aggression on behalf of the women of just general relationship, high reaction, higher rates of domestic violence, infidelity on the part of the man as well to cheat when they're .

in last fifty percent increase in the use of A. This functional medication when women's the .

primary breadwinner I had to ah that's ah that's pretty pretty I mean it's it's Green but then you know know here's an animal. I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation was he was me, and then, like this, be the group of of women, these fema students and one of them, and know he was a pretty hard core feminist. And he said that I should be fifty, fifty, like fifty percent of women, uh, should be working.

You know, fifty percent of women, like, if it's the case that fifty person of women are working, fifty percent of a women should be at home. And same for the men. If fifty percent of men should be working, fifty percent of men at home and and then know.

So I was basically just sitting back, like, I was not going to get tangled in this within. Some of the other women were saying, you know, okay, so, you know, but like, would you actually be like, okay with that? Like your husband staying at home? I don't really know whatever.

And then I jup and speaking, N, G woman said, ah, I like, so I know you plan going 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 and you're at, you know you at a uh, prestigious law farm with a bunch of hypocrites tourneys.

Like how would that you know, you think could be happy in that situation? And her response was, wow, I like, think I just felt the tingle when you said hypocrites turney, like, I got really excited when you said that as basically her reaction and he was half joking but I have serious and all of the world I left to music was was a good response but like, I think you know that there was an element of seriousness there, right? That like when you know when you are financing about like yeah rubbing shoulders with all of these you know high powered successful at the top of their game and then you got your husband at home. And I think it's just it's different, right? Like it's men and women are different, were attracted to different things.

Yeah it's interesting to think about a the potential pressure that um 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 something I the not just the going to work, not just the getting up early in the hours of sleep in all the rest of IT but kind of the psychos social interpretation of being a person that is status striving and playing the game of the water cooler and all of that stuff kind of doesn't really factor into the discussion about, you know, is that in conscientiousness, is IT a part of your hard work like you, your grain, your resilience and your desire, all this stuff.

But this, just like a soup that comes along for the ride, is a part of being a person whose playing the employment and the education game and having to go out for drinks on the evening and IT moves up to the bus and all that side of stuff. And no one really talks about that because that's part of work, right? Like that comes along for the ride is very hard of work, but no one ever talks about that.

It's like, okay, like it's the classic, do you want to be A C E O woman? Do you really want to do eighty hour weeks? And you really want to do that? And I do you really want to play this game for twenty years of fucking sucking up to people and and having to do the social network manipulation and death ness and elisa. That being said, given women sort of previous position and and ability to be a little bit more like subtle with with their cues and their emotional intelligence and stuff, actually imagine that on that side they might be pretty disposed to IT well but as IT seems uh that well being may suffer more than mens despite the capacity for doing IT being a as good or greater .

yeah I mean, what what if sort of the reversal over speak about earlier about in a Young men who who don't want to do hard things. But then once they do, then they find that they enjoy them and they appreciated where, as in this context you may be, maybe some women think, if I follow this this track and get a lot of education and I will be happy, then once you get there is actually not it's not as satisfying as you would have hoped and it's actually worse than you expected.

And I think a lot of that I know people like this as as i'm speaking and think you about, I know a lot of people who you know they think that once they get there um they have a certain image of what it's going to be like and actually yet working seventy, eighty, ninety hours a week um and even if they are doing well financially, they are making money. They are buying all of the material because they thought they wanted um wearing an amazing close, nice apartment in the right parts of the city and so on. Um but they just don't have time to enjoy IT because they're always on the clock, non stop working weekends, no time to appreciate um you know but there I think there is an element of sort of social signal where you know the almost at some point the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and their job and how procedure is.

I was teaching you last night about my theory of a surplus make value. So Christmas, said mister olympic classic to seek champion three or four times, comes on the podcast and tells the story about how he cries on the bathroom floor a few weeks before, is about to win the mister olympia, uh, because is super stress with all stuff going on in his life in the pressure of having to win and all the rest of IT.

And this is like, girlfriend sort holds that this do the two hundred and sixty pounds presumably just holds the top of his head in his arms and in her arms and says, I could OK in ba ba. But this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the bigger child me, right? Like he is the dude that is over the peaky blinders quotes like the killing Murphy quote from Peggy blinders as he speaks over the top and it's just Christ that just looking like mean and stoic like he's the sigma e mean that be used on tiktok, right? He's mr.

Sigma ale. And I brought up to him this kind of odd irony. The the guy that is the face of the sigma male mean, the stoic, you know, emotionless, just written ground and go through that thing was heavily dependent on his girlfriend in order to be able to go to achieve the next part of his no trajectory right um and one of the things that interesting ly got brought up in the comments was, well yeah he can do that because he is mr.

Olympia and he got me thinking about surplus mate values. So if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value, not to say that crisis crisis message is like a smoke show, super smart. Pretty sure he went to like like multiple college degrees plus like world fitness competitor, her self in her own rights.

But it's like there is just a later that you can continue to climb if you can be world champion in anything. And basically that Chris had so much surplus mate value in his relationship that he could get away with withdrawing from this bank account. He's allowed to cry.

But the a if you not the world champion, right like maybe the guy that comes twenty years, maybe he is unable to do that. Um and if he did cry on the floor that would dip below and the girlfriend would seem for the vulnerable cook that he is and leave. But yeah, I just kind of an infallible able well.

I think that seems like an an illustration of counter signal essentially right like when you I mean the whole idea of counter certain, like when you reach a certain point uh in in a status don't mean you uh you you can actually behave the same way as someone very low on the status to main would behave and I actually because your state is even more uh and for example, I D like to use this uh classics from Jeffery Miller and his colleagues about uh self deprecating humor that if you're a very high status person and you're holding a meeting, are you just in a social settle and you make fun of yourself a little bit? Um people actually IT increase ates.

You IT IT sort of increases their admiration of you. But he's just a humble guys making fun of himself. But if you're low man on the total, paul, and you start making self deprecating joke, people don't want to be around you. They're like, who's this this guy who doesn't like himself very much, just I just IT hits way.

Um and then ah our mutual friends aries, so who likes to use the writing the bicycle on the way to work example, which we much in this last night two about how if you know if the guy who works at pizza t right, his bike to work is because he can't afford a car, but if the C E O rides the bike to work is because he cares about his healthy, cares about the environment or he's just know he's the conscientious guy or you know there there we end IT makes us like a more that he's just you know he's writing his bike, he doesn't 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 sort of the counter signaling element here. And I think you can see IT in a lot of different walks of life um just like how how much of promotion people do.

There was a um a classic paper called too good for school a one of the early papers on the counter signaling uh sort of research area and this was about so this I want to see any early two thousands where they asked what they did was they gathered um abi from couch professors and the syllabus is that the world of syllabus, god OK. And so they gathered these from various institutions and record them and essentially found that the more prestigious sly institution, the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus is so if you're you, i've got some fancy iv leake school, they would just say i'm whatever bob Smith but if you're sort of met here or lower down and it's doctor so and so or professor so and so americans, ever, you all, the degrees, everything and then they also called the so this is back when people still had answers machines. And so they called the offices of these professors, found that .

the high rob and H. D. M. S. C.

Count as so as well as at um at the the higher ranked universities, right? So it's exactly the same. Yeah yeah they say, ah bob calculator, whatever, where I have a lower tears, doctor so it's so you know this office is department and just all of their credential.

And I I think we're now seeing this to summer degree and like the the social media space now or in like how how much self promotion people do. If you're an establish author, you can maybe make one or two announcements, but you're still sort struggling and still trying to make IT. You have to do a lot more self promotion. But there's a reversal of this where if you um so so there was there was another paper when IT was something like when disclosing good news goes wrong, something along these lines where if you are very high status person doing very well in your life and you do a lot of self promo up and or or if you do a lot of sort of uh counter ging people don't like IT uh and so um an example that have given is, uh so like a first time author, if your book does very well and you write this long post on social media, you know, I want to thank all of you for following me on the journey. Bob aba, but if a super famous, well established author does the same thing I just across as a little bit, gosh, as a little bit like we already knew you were going to do well do to play like mark humility .

about this from like A A story telling perspective, especially of the last six years that going back and talking about when I rushed my kills and set up a special kind of stand so that I could do with my foot elevated in a boot.

I remember those days so you we have the face time. I like that your food not attach .

to my the rest of my leg. Um that's that's kind of cool to to track that journey. So 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 is an awful lot of value of saying the things as they happen of kind of showing the sheet times.

One of alex homo's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the shit times more, because he is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And he lived in this nice pen house, and he can rent, respect, care vely, tell people about the shit times. But it's not the same as showing them right. And when you presuming that all of your plans go well and you end up in the place that you want to end up in when you get there, it's going to be way more difficult for you to try and tell people about the non ivory tower that you use to live in. Yeah, so I think that tracking, tracking your journey is best you can.

And you know, getting the post out there or writing about the times that have been rough for 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 or watch or whatever, and see, oh, I went through a period that I had to be resilient. That means if I face a similar chAllenge in future, I can also be resilient. But also it's a good like way marker in the ground of like here, here I was. This is kind of evidence skin in the game of how shit life has been at, at least .

at some points. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I like example though. 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 and tell they're already very successful. And then once they start talking about the journey, people don't really take IT as seriously is like why we just now hearing about this or why you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this or you just sort of whatever like like embargo shing this to make the journey more interesting. And I think there is there is value to sort of tracking IT along the way and to yeah to sort of reflect and and I think it's it's also just like an inspiring message to the other people who are also struggling very early in there and their careers or in their in their lives.

I think I think your books gona do this. I'm really super excited. I'm aware that IT wasn't supposed to be like, you know, you too dispossessed human didn't become go through the s efforts and in yale and let's but I really think you like reading IT. Reading early versions of the of the manuscript was like, fucking how like this is 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 site for IT come .

out that win the intention but I I heard heard similar sort of feedback a friend of mine who joined the navy um and he was like he had just got out of basic training and he was stop eating shit sort of early in his military career ah he read an early manuscripts like, yeah this was this was great like, this is exactly what I needed in this moment because I was just feeling so so awful and like realizing god just put one foot in front the other just keep trying, keep taking shots and and yeah it'll hopefully you know work out long as sort of have your mindset ride in your priorities in order um yeah .

then I think people preorder that yet.

Yes so so yeah I mean, we can .

talk about .

it's fine.

It's it's but right now I wanted show this time the throat of the culture.

Thanks, mah. thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. IT IT has a bit of all. 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 they're stuff on status, on how we evaluate other people in those kinds of things sort of worth their way.

And especially um in the later chapters of the book, I I do this thing where I sort of redish chapter from the perspective of myself at that age. Um but yeah as I said, of entered ult and become a sort of more curious and reflective person. I know you can sort of see the way in my mind and I get sort of developed in the way start to think about things. So yeah yeah i'm excited for two. And yeah.

i'm pum for you to come out and the covers cool. It's you as a kid riding a bike down the street. So you taught me about this, about my idea about why violation might be concealing women. And i've got a counter like bullshit hypothesis as well. So what what was the what's that idea that elan from bali about ovl tion?

right? So this was uh chapter um IT was a specular of chapter from more about master, this eminent psychologist um where essentially the idea here is that so women have concealed ogula's, you can't necessarily tell when y're abul ating the way that very visibly can with other great apes with chimpanzees and so for and so the speculative idea is that so so a lot of evolutionary researchers have suggested that this is no maybe conceal the obvious tion is to conceal for men, right? Like so that men don't necessarily know when the woman is evil ating. Or whether whether he'd reduced the risk of sexual coercion or to sort of obscure importunity uncertainty or all of those kinds of things wherever specular chapter um posits, that is actually, uh to conceal uh abul tion from themselves so that women don't know because back this is vastly oversimplifying back when women started to be, or human beings in general started to become sort of self reflective and tropic tive and fully conscious, and women could suddenly to oh and when i'm obviating and more likely to get and they could visibly see IT, then they would be less likely to have sex. And and in order to um to essentially sidestep the burden of pregNancy because pregnant .

was extremely risky. Aware of your inventory cycles.

avoid and appropriately. And so the idea here is that eventually only the women who are had conceal population were the ones to reproduce and then gradually over time all women had had obscure uh abul tion and and this was essentially uh a way to to sort of prevent women from from uh side stepping on possibility of pregNancy and then yeah and some of some of those are those those um except that I sent you there was a nice line from a lesly 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 you know what he writes he and her her cover they write that um know historically there may have been women who voided the burdens of pregNancy but those women are not our ancestors right? IT was the the women who did undergo this, this very difficult, chAllenging and dangerous experience, and those those who were the one. So I thought those two, those two finals are early, tough to.

But i'm curious ly here what? Pretty sure that I was roy to taught me about this one as well. No, I might IT might have been kind of Blake that other women are. If if a woman, while she's evil, late or about to emulate, is put under intense social and physical stress, IT can cause the abolition to misfire. Uh, so women who are under real significant stress IT message up the menstrual cycle. But many women are listening to this may know the demons cycle kind if the super stress at work that studying for exams or whatever, like the stuff get squirrely right, like guys might struggle in direction if that super stressed women might mentally cycle goal of. And one of the arguments is that that concealed valuation stops other women in your tribe from fucking .

with you .

while they know that you're potentially fertile.

Yeah yeah OK. Well, so I think like that. So so these hypotheses are not necessarily mutual exclusion. All sort of abandon thing.

like if you don't know when you're ebulis, if you don't know when you're fertile IT means you who would need to have sex more frequently with your, which increases the pb ond, which actually means that husband is gona stick around or the father is gna stick around with women in order .

to be able to raise child yeah I think they are yeah so so may require all of those different um external fomented to to produce that outcome right? Like one of those alone might not be enough where you if if I had only been the the concealing eola's from themselves, maybe we would still have you know some some percentage of women who were visible uh emulating others who aren't. But IT may require all of those different um trends working together to produce the situation in which a women are no longer. Sort visible when they are the abilities is longer visible uh, among women so so yeah I mean this is um I think yeah this is this a sort of often this this obstacle people kind of run into this trap that we we think like I can only be one or the other， but ah I don't think this is not many people, I think .

conceal of lation, even that it's super, are in the animal kingdom.

I think as well.

So yeah IT conceal population is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of, 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 ten percent of them you like.

It's pretty good deal. It's pretty works pretty well. What's that Solomon man's paradox? Did you you are teaching me about what's that?

Yeah so Solomon man's paradox is so finding in in psychology, but named after the the biblical king Solomon, who had a reputation for being the wise king. And there was this this adage that arose, uh uh that if you have any issues you should asking Solomon and famously most people know the king's salmon story of the the two women who claimed that they were the mother of the baby.

And then he um kind of sneaky said, okay, we were just going to cut the baby in hand. He knew if you know he knew that if he did this that that the actual mother would fourth and say the other one you can have IT and that's how he so that's how to resolve this issue. But it's a paradox.

So they they assigned this label, the Solomon paradox because king Solomon himself in his personal life was actually not very wise, so is wise for other people but in his personal life um you know he made a lot of mistakes as a king. He um he uh was was not a particularly good father to his son and his son actually grouped to be a tiant and and actually very bad king because he had sort of uh h mismanaged his on parenting. And so in psychology, the solomin'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 metal analysis that just came out of various studies looking at the Solomon paradox. Are people sort of wiser when reasoning about you? So they bring people and people who had recently gone through a break up, for example, and sort of vast them, or what do you plan do and so on and so forth.

And then they would bring in um other people, either strangers or the participants friends, or peeping up peers of theirs and say, what what do you think this person should do in that situation and found only found various ways to sort of uh uh measure this of of how to how to sort of um measure wise decision making and found that a that social distance actually actually helps. It's the peer of the stranger, you can say OK. So this person has just been betrayed by their friend, or they just going to break up, or they are having some difficulty in their social lives.

Well, here is probably the best way to go. And the idea here seems to be when you're sort of emotionally, it's hard to sort of act rationally, it's hard to act in a way that um that that that will benefit both you and and maybe the other party as well. And so as I was reading this, I think yeah it's really interesting finding in enough itself but then I also um I also wondered so so I actually give an example of this.

Uh so there there was interesting city on on economic games and so there's this game called um uh the the automated game uh in behavioral economics and uh the simple version of the game is that so imagine you and I are playing the ultimate game and the researcher gives me ten dollars and says you can give some amount to Chris and if he accepts the amount and both of you walk away with the money and so I am under this, I have to deliberate anything. Okay, so how much do I have to offer crist of my ten? He knows you. You know I have ten, uh, 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 thirty percent thirty person i've felt .

about right yeah and then yeah when I first one thirty that sounds fair um any anymore I would feel like unrealistic but any less would feel unfair um and so that's what they consistently find is around thirty percent. Um but they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else. So so it's actually it's it's economically irrational to take anything a to decline any amount greater than zero.

Essentially you should yeah you should take anything right because you one is Better than zero. Um so what what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the ultimate game, i'm playing for a friend, whatever um or you're playing on behalf a friend, that people will accept any migrated than zero because they can step back and not it's so okay well as IT fair and not fair, it's okay. So my friendly, they walks away with nothing or they walk away with one dollar or two dollars whatever happens to be um and so so I found that finding the solvents paradox interesting because I wonder there's something if if this can be applied more broadly to what's going on with Young people.

You've seen some these data about Young people having fewer friends, fewer social contacts, less likely to be in relationships, less time, uh, in actual physical social spaces and the salman's paradox indicates that is actually helpful to have social contacts and they have friends to talk your problems through with so if I am having an issue and i've done this before, i'm like, you know someone you know i'm thinking about making a decision my clear something I call you call someone and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this and that didn't sort of help me to contextualize and you'll see things that I don't see and so forth. Um but if you're Young person uh and you don't have many people around you, that so so you're already unhappy because you don't have very many friends, but then without the friends and people you can communicate with, to talk your problems through with um in in in your life, whether s in your career, other other social domains, romantic relationships and so forth, you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions. And so there is this sort of negative feedback cycle, people to show you a blind spot exactly and and a sort of list out the options that you could take a you aren't seeing or list out the uh the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the the decision that you're leaning toward.

Um and so yeah, over time, this may actually be exacerbating. It's not just about lonely. This is also about the sort of Solomon's paradox and making more unwise decisions in your life.

right? Ah this cursive isolation is decision making which is sub optimal compared with if you not only would you have to support network, I would feel Better. But on top of that, I would also be making Better decisions which done stream from that would leave me to have a Better life, presume, but including maybe a Better life where I have more friends around me.

because you ever watched the show, who wants to be a millionaire? Yeah, yeah. So I watched A, I watch a couple of seasons of, like the new one. This is during the lockdown.

couple of something.

a world of that. I was playing in the background, right? Put on you because you have to watch the show as a kid, like, put on the back was almost like a comfort day down and one thing that I noticed was um I don't know like they changed you these to have these life life one of the life lines in this like updated version or whatever the covet locked down version was that they would bring their smart friend along and that was a lifeline. And like they bring their smart friend the'd be sitting in the back. And if they wanted to use a lifetime, they turned out and .

ask their smart for a friend was wanted.

I wonder if they did that because of like google or something. So if you phone a friend, the Frank can just look at up online.

But now they have them, they can look up line with the answer is, and I was watching this and and I thought to myself like, yeah, if you like, if you don't have any know what I feel, what do you do like you bring along and I think you can sort of apply that to your life more broadly like it's you're the who wants to a million game. You bring you a smart friend along. But you know, life isn't who wants to be a millionaire. Life is a series of making difficult decisions. And if you can't phone a friend and say, hey, what you think like game becomes part of.

And also, if you do get accepted to who wants to be a millionaire, are not going to have the friend to bring along with you specifically for that .

situation as well in potential in a dolla.

Lars could yeah, I am. I think this definitely something sort of recursive going on here. And it's like the that innocent deal thing that you told me about, which I just can't, and see that I say a bin idea of if you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. You retreat from the fateful ills of the world into this inner set dial. Like, um if you strugling to lose weight, just declare that weight has no barring on health and that you know, like body size doesn't impact attractive. Nurse, if you strugling to hold down the jobs, say, the old jobs of suckers and turn to a life of crime, or if you struggle, make relationships work, say, you know, manoj amy is ancel unwise and going to become a polya like like polygon type person um and I do think that is an equivalent here to like black pale sigma a cope um and I don't think that is an equivalent for women, right? There's not an isolationist like retreat from the world equivalent for women, which I guess suggest that the social networks tend to be a little bit more sticky than man's uh, yeah.

yeah. I mean, dumba wrote this book on on psychology of friendship. And that was one of the points he made that women are sort of Better at stay in touch, reaching out and organizing gatherings. And and and it's what is that the I don't have uses this term. But sort of face to face versus shoulder to shoulder that when men have friends .

can even do together, can't cking. Yes, I spoken about this on the show before. The people haven't been heard.

Um next time the at a party, any sort of gathering, look at the angle of defeat of women talking to women and of man talking to men. Women will talk to women hundred eighty degrees. They'll be face to face.

Where is men? The average is one hundred and twenty degrees. So it's like blading ah ah ah and I mean this shows up once you see that you can not see IT and it's that works across so many different things.

The men's shed initiative in australia, did you see that? I have not the man. I was an initiative by the australian government, I think, to try and improve men's mental health. They realized that getting men to sit down in room and talk like this about their problems didn't work. So what they did is they built shed that men came to and then the men would bring, like, i've got this knocked lan mower, and everyone needs to help fix IT.

So how a men talking, the talking while the front rain is focused on this thing that's in front, and they are shoulder to shoulder, are not face to face and literally in a circle, and everyone's like, right, you ve got a good drill and he's got a good spanner and i've got the hammer, whatever, and let's fix this thing. And att mean the misses will not getting on well. And before you know, if it's a therapy session, me the by this fucking .

long more right? They but the pretender appear on more, but they need that. They required if you just put them in the ship with no long and just stand a circle yeah so yeah then that was the face to face, british shoulder to shoulder about um yeah women will talk in community with one another words men will sort. They need a reason to sort of do an activity together.

And unica, my best questions during pick ball warmups are just in gently thinkin. Everyone know, all of the pick boll proves out, I know, start very close to the net. Then you play the game within the kitchen, and then you step back a little bit and you pay sort of like a midlevel game.

Then you step to the baseline, and sometimes that warm up when you're close to the net and in the middle l game will go for thirty, forty five minutes with me in one. Especially if it's singles less time if it's doubles um but if it's singles it's just union friend. He like did works getting IT stressful these things happening and before you know IT you're deep in conversation.

In fact, we did this ones at south astern recreation center mean, my friend, and there was some guy that was SAT on the side and my friend that I was talking to, his podcasting as well. And I think he was going through some through, 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 twenty minutes.

And it's kind of bad form to hog a court for one, especially if you're not playing a game. Because when you're playing a game and somebody wins, the wedding stays on and the next person cycles in. And I realized that this do had been set.

Maybe it's sort of like fifties kinder guy, like very typical pick ball kinder play. And I realized that we'd been just warming up for twenty minutes. Get bad form. The game maybe take around about ten minutes.

I saw something like that, and I think I turned and said something like I do like, I didn't realize that you are waiting as kind of gross in this warm up and get a game going. You like to be onest. That was a really compelling conversation and I remember thinking, wow, like the male requirement for distraction from emotional communication is so strong I can play like a full warm up for a spot. What is doing ah you .

sort of lose track of of time I think yeah I mean the the sex differences in friendship I think are there's there's another sort of pattern that occurs where in break ups men don't only lose their their female partner but a lot of social the woman who sort of maintaining the or those sort of nudge the man to say, OK, have you talk to your friend in a while you should shoot attacks or see how he's doing or what have you and it's hard to it's hard to keep that up um for a lot of men but because IT doesn't come naturally for them the way that I just for women and this sort of monitor and obviously a sort of evolution early adopted reasons for this that you know manner you know more expendable and sort of us women .

are pretty at we do yeah and and so yeah we see this uh yeah .

a lot of the Young people in general report having your friends but this is especially pronounce a lot of Young man um which is yeah I mean if i've seen you and see some mother sort of recommend you know there are lot of ways like if you're if you're a woman and you want to make friends, there's one way to do. But I think if you're man, like getting involved in sports or some things kind of activity, like best the way to do is not just like or i'm gna try to make this person into my friend. It's like, kid, you want to like go play catch and you want .

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

My x business, part of that I run nightlife stuff with for fifty years, decade in a half. Grimm, that is wedding you like phenomenal guy, very formative for me. So next time when my first ever seminar and became a business partner there and then and IT, we're still great friends I catch up with every time I go back to the U.

K. But i'd be lying if I said the depth of our friendship hadn't diminished because we were no longer working toward a shared mission. Where is a editor? dean? He's a perfect example. So we brought a new guy, a youtube strategies. And since he's got brought in the uh, pace of friendship deepening has it's just been so rapid because you're not just bonding with somebody that you like, like you selected them to work for the company because you would get on, madam, and you think that you share your values.

But because I spent five hours a week grapple and with titles and thune, ils and what who who, who should we book on the show? And i'm gonna sort this schedule out and then you'll travel and will sleep in some shitty hotel and you know all of that moving toward a shared mission. I think for men just and gender, it's more than it's like brothers more than friends ah right you know it's almost like for welfare ah in in a regard solving a problem together you're .

solving a problem.

Everyone need a long more yeah yeah everyone needs a long .

more yeah yeah that's yeah that's what what I mean it's yeah having having this in so so one thing i'll be curious about with with man and women because I know that there's very a study sort of indicating that there is the sort of turn over rate, this sort of french path life where supposedly, I mean, i've seen different, different stats, different studies on this.

Some say seven years, some say ten years, where roughly half of your friendship pull turns over every seven years, every ten years you lose half and they get replaced by another group. I wonder if this is more likely to be the case for men than women, simply because of that sort of, uh, the the the way that problem solving facilitate friendships. And once you ve solved the problem, once you've written the book, or once you ve done the task, you interesting, then you sort of move on you.

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, move on and you sort of lose touching. So I wonder if there is that sort of gender divide in friendship turn over as well. Yeah, I know that. Rob .

Anderson, ladies and gentleman, rob is just so much fun to catch op. Dy, i'm glad get to see our first one in person as well. Uh, you'll be back on in february once to book out state february twenty of february twenty three days before my birthday.

What a lovely birthday treat. So you'll be back on when you come through western. Why should people go? They want to read more of the stuff that are, I love your substate, I only subscribed, so I think four or five in the old x modernism guests, uh, why should people go sub stack twitter or all that stuff?

Yeah ah sub stack rock k henders son dot com twitter at rob k henderson um easy defined. So look me up and will be there a thick ris.