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Do you know Steven who is the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life? Her husband. And
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the overwhelming number one reason is because of Dr. Gadsad is an evolutionary psychologist
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renowned for his thoughtprovoking and challenging insights into the underlining principles that shape decision-m relationships and
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societal trends. If you think that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued because it doesn't support your
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ideology, that's a grotesqually dangerous principle. So, for example, the idea that monogamy is natural is not
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true. Men are much more likely to want more sexual partners. That's what's been found in many studies across many
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cultures. But the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it.
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But now, here's the interesting part. Women too have evolved a very strong
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desire for sexual variety. You know, when a woman is most likely to cheat, it's when they
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In your book, you talk about a mate desiraability score. Yes. So usually we end up assorting on
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our mating value, which is taking all of our attributes and then saying, "What do you score?" So for example, the number
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one attribute that women seek is anything that's related to social status. Now, it wouldn't be good for an
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87 to go with a 36. That's going to put a huge stressor on our relationship. But
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here's the good news. There are effective strategies that could improve my score. And let's break them down very
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simply. First, Dr. God, what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most
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trouble? I'm going to get hate mail for this. Buckle up.
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This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube, and I
00:01:39
want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um,
00:01:46
from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet. There's almost 50 people
00:01:51
now behind the D of a CEO that worked to put this together. So, from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle
00:01:57
last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers. And you
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the D of SEO. There's now more than 7 million of you. So, if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you
00:02:21
from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation.
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Dr. Gad Sad, what have you devoted your life to? Uh the pursuit of truth and the
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defense of freedoms. And what does what does that mean? So truth is uh what we hopefully can
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achieve uh through the scientific method. Of course, truth is provisional
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in that whatever we might have thought was true 300 years ago, we have the epistemological humility to say, "Oh, we
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were wrong. There's a new truth." But I do wake up every morning thinking that there are wonderful things to discover
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about human nature given that I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist. And so truth in that sense,
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uh, liberty and freedom in that there should be nothing that is off limits for
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people to do research on, to speak out on. So for example, you now hear a
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growing intrusion of the concept of forbidden knowledge. The idea that there's some research that because it
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might offend someone, it might marginalize a group, it shouldn't be pursued. I don't I don't believe in
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that. So there is no research that is off limits. As long as the research that
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you're doing is pursued in an unbiased manner pursuant to the scientific
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method. So example, one of the ways that you can end your career very quickly as a social scientist, if you do any
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research looking at group differences, certainly racial differences, don't you
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dare do any research on that. Even sex differences is not a good idea. So if you do research on sex differences and
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it demonstrates that women are superior to men on some task, go ahead, you're a hero. Publish it. But if you do research
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that shows that men are superior to women on a task, you better file that in
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the drawer and keep your mouth shut forever more because we don't want to be promulgating sexist patriarchal
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stereotypes. And so as someone who is an evolutionary psychologist who understands that humans are made up of
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two phenotypes called male and female, uh it is expected that there are many
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things on which men and women are the same. some things that men do better than women, some things that women do
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better than men. It's called evolution. It's called biology. Well, one of the things where I first began seeing how
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idiotic otherwise very intelligent people can be called professors is in the negation of what I said right now,
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which is just admitting that there are innate and evolved sex differences is a
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dreadful thing to say in the social sciences. And so that's how I first had a kind of Eureka moment. Houston, we
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have a problem. How could it be that these educated, sophisticated professors could negate something that on average a
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3-day old newborn pigeon should be able to recognize? And so that's what that's what sent me on my journey to eventually
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write the parasitic mind 30 plus years ago. So what is an evolutionary behavior
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scientist? Right. Great question. So you can study behavior in many ways. So
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for example, behaviorism which was something that was developed in the 1930s argued that everything that we do
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is as a result of stimulus and response. So for example, Pavlovian conditioning is a form of behaviorism. Right? You
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associate a unconditioned response, something that you already innately have. The dog salivates when he sees
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food. And now you condition him to if they hear the bell to associate that
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with the food. And now when I just ring the bell, he will salivate. And so the
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behaviorists of you know 70, 80, 100 years ago argued that all learning was
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due to behaviorism. So there are many different schools of thought when it comes to what is the best framework for
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studying human behavior. An evolutionary behavioral scientist argues that you
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can't study human behavior if you don't root the framework of how you're going
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to tackle this in an understanding of how evolution would have shaped the human mind. Now, this should sound as
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blatantly obvious, but again, for social scientists, that's Nazi talk because
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social scientists believe that evolution applies to every single species on Earth
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except one called human beings. Or if they believe that evolution applies to humans, it applies to explain
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why we have opposable thumbs. It applies to explain why we've evolved the respiratory system that we have. But
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don't you dare explain something above the neck called the human mind using
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evolution. I'm speaking now as those folks. They argue that we are cultural animals. We transcend our biology. So
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all that an evolutionary behavioral scientist does is whatever he or she is studying, they try to look for the
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ultimate Darwinian signatures. I'm going to give you two examples. This is from uh a book called Homicide by uh Martin
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Daly and Marggo Margot Wilson. a husband and wife team who are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. I
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first read that book as a first semester doctoral student at Cornell where it it
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was an advanced social psychology course. About halfway through the semester, the professor, his name was Professor Dennis Regan, assigned this
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book to us. What they did in the book is apply an evolutionary framework to study
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patterns of criminality. And in a second now, I'll I'll unpack what that means.
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So there are certain patterns of crime that happen in exactly the same way for
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the exact same reasons irrespective of which culture it happens in and
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irrespective of time period. So it certainly can't be due to cultural factors. It can't be to era factors
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because it transcends all those things. So let me give you two examples from the book and that was actually my Eureka
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moment where I decided ah I will now take this evolutionary framework and apply it to consumer psychology to
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psychology of decision-m which eventually is the field that I founded. So, two examples. Example one, and
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forgive me if I put you on the spot. It's it's it's worthwhile to what do you think is the number one
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predictor of there being child abuse in a home?
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An absent parent. Okay. Very, very reasonable answer. And
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so, usually in lecture one, when I'm teaching an evolution psychology course, I'll ask this question. I'll start putting all the students answers. And
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they're all reasonable answers. If there is alcoholism in the home, if one of the
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parents had been abused in their past so that they they they mimic that behavior onto their children. Then all
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reasonable. Well, what if I and by the way, no one guesses what the real answer is. So then I say, well, guess what
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guys, you just listed 25 reasonable predictors. The number one predictor is
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hundfold more predictive than anything that's on that board. I've lectured this
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a million times. I'm getting goosebumps telling it to you right now. So, let me explain what a 100fold means. In
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science, when let's say you have I want to check the efficacy of a drug, and I
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want to compare it to a placebo, a sugar pill. Well, if it has a 1.2 odds ratio,
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meaning it's 20% more effective. So, it's 1 to 1.2, that would be a big effect. 1 to 1.2. What I'm saying is 1
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to 100. So it is astronomically greater effect than anything we would typically
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publish in science. Well the number one reasons Stephen I've kept you in suspense long enough is if there is a
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steparent in the family. So there's a 100fold increase in child abuse if the
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home is not made up of two biological parents. This is why the fable of
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Cinderella is such a universal fable because it speaks to an evolutionary principle. the nasty uh uh stepmother is
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only differentially nasty to her stepdaughter. She's actually very very nice to her two biological daughters. So
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now you would say, well, what would be the evolutionary explanation for that? Well, we know in many many species where
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you have very high parental investment, say for example in lion prides, lions
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are the only feline group where they're a social group. Most other uh felines
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are solitary that the only thing that the male does is the copulatory act and then there's not then he's off. Well, in
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lion pride, the males do invest heavily in their children. What ends up happening is there's two or three
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dominant males within a pride and they kick out all the young males that are
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now coming up so that there's all these frustrated young males in the savannah
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that are now looking to take over a pride. They will challenge the two three dominant males and for a very long time
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those older males will rebuff the attacks. But father time eventually
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catch up to you and you're left with two choices as the dominant male. You either leave and you end up, you know, having a
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slow death out alone in the wilderness or they will kill you. Now when the new
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incoming lions come in, do you know what's the first thing they do? First on the agenda list, first thing they do is
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what? They attack the kids. Exactly. They kill off in a complete
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systematic infanticide, genocide every single cub who by definition could not
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have been sired by them. Why? Because I'm going to spend a lot of energy and
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resources investing because we are a by parental species as a lion pride. I
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don't want I don't want to be investing in another male's cubs. Therefore, I now paradoxically, incredibly,
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after the females put up a big fight to try to stop those new incoming males, they end up losing the fight. First
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thing that happens after is the females go into estrus, meaning they become
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sexually receptive to the new males. So, I joke with my students in the human context, you put on Barry White music to
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get the ladies interested. You buy a beautiful gift, you pay attention. You want to get the lady's attention in p in
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lion price society, kill her children. So that's one example of how we've
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evolved the calculus in our brains to not feel as happy investing in other ch
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not in other children than our own. Now the next thing that ends up happening is some student will say, "Oh, but does
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that mean you are justifying through science child abuse?" And of course the answer
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is no. Right? An oncologist studies cancer. That doesn't mean he or she is
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for cancer. That doesn't mean they are pro- cancer. It means that if you want to understand cancer, you have to study
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it honestly. So if you want to tackle child abuse and you now know that that
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step parenthood is the biggest predictor. That's that's a valuable tidbit to have. So that's example one.
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Example two. Do you know Stephen who is by far the
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most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life? Whether it's
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the Yanomo tribe in the Amazon, whether it's the Hata tribe in Central Africa, whether it's in ancient Greece 2,000
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years ago, or whether it's in Detroit, Michigan 2,000 years from now, who is the most dangerous person by far that
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you will ever meet? Um,
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let me think about this. who's the most dangerous person she will ever meet
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by orders of magnitude more than anybody else. And the minute that I'll say it, you'll go, "Oh, no kidding." But the
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fact that you don't exactly demonstrates my point. And that's why evolution is so
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important. I think the most dangerous person she will ever meet is
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a another
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You're already off. Okay. I don't know. Her husband. I was going to say
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there you go. I was very close cuz my brain went her my brain went her future husband, right?
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Because I was thinking in the in the courtship process, that's quite dangerous. So whether it be her long-term partner
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or prospective long-term partner, right? So to your point, a husband is the most dangerous. And
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then the overwhelming number one reason that might drive him to domestic
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violence all the way to homicide is suspected or realized infidelity.
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Okay. I'm a true crime addict and se the stat
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is always in these true crime shows that about I think it's 70% of the time when a woman is goes missing was murdered
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it's the husband. Exactly. Something crazy like that. Exactly. Now, sometimes in those shows,
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it's because I want to get rid of my current wife so I can run off with another one. Yeah. But notwithstanding
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that potential effect, usually when I go into homicidal rage, it's because I I'm
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concerned that either you have cheated on me or you actually I I have proof that you have cheated on me. So then the
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question becomes, why have human males evolved the cognitive, emotional, and
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behavioral repertoire to respond in this way? Again, you're not justifying it. You're not saying, "Oh, if I give you
00:16:01
the scientific explanation, that means it's okay to beat women." But the reason is because we are a by parental species.
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Human dads are extraordinary dads in the mamleian context. We're by far one of
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the most vested dads. Well, now we don't invest as much as human females, but we are really super dads. So therefore your
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ancestors and mine Stephen male ancestors don't come from a line where they said hey don't worry ladies have
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have at it with the sexy gardener as much as you'd like because I'd be happy to then spend the next 18 years raising
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go kids. And therefore we've evolved that system to try to thwart a
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fundamental danger to our genetic interest which is paternity uncertainty. There is no such thing as maternity
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uncertainty. Right. Mhm. So when I read that book with such complicated phenomena that are
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explained so elegantly, so parsimmoniously, so simply so that you
00:17:02
go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. That was my Eureka moment. And so evolutionary behavioral science is
00:17:07
exactly what I just described the last 5 10 minutes, which is taking the evolutionary biological and evolutionary
00:17:13
psychological lens to study human phenomena. Before we get back to talking more broadly, just came to mind that
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with that context in mind then cheating is justifiable. Cheating in a romantic relationship.
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So it depends what you when you say justifiable, you're falling into the trap of if you explain it
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scientifically, it's okay. We also have a moral compass that's due to an evolutionary mechanism. So, one of the
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difficulties of life is how to navigate through the Darwinian strings that are pulling me in different directions.
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Right? I've evolved a desire to gorge on fatty foods. But if I do that in an
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unrestrained manner, I become a sumo wrestler and I die of heart disease at 42. So, I've also evolved the mechanism
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of self-control. So, the fact that I explain why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm
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justifying it. Yeah. No. And I I think this is really important because we have to give people a toolkit to think about this
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conversation so that they don't assume that everything that's being said is an endorsement of the thing. It's just an
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explanation of the thing through the lens of evolution. And two very And you know what? Some people can't do that.
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Some people get so triggered by Most people are called my colleagues. Oh, really? Yeah. That's right.
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So, I just hope everyone listening now knows that everything here isn't an endorsement of a thing. It's an evolutionary explanation for a thing.
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And you know, I'm sure we're both full of biases, so nothing is ever that pure. But but we'll try and just hope that
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from here on out people understand that. When I ask that question about cheating, what I'm trying to understand is through an evolutionary perspective, is monogamy
00:18:47
a normal thing? I'm off and running for the next 10 minutes. You ready? I'm I'm ready. Let me let me give a
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little bit of context. So, I've got a lot of male friends and I see in all
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honesty the full spectrum of relationships. I've got and this is kind
00:19:05
of how I'll describe it. I've got a cohort of male friends that are absolutely faithful, in great relationships, um committed to their
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partners, and have exercised what I I assume is a form of discipline to not go
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after any temptations that they might have. Love that group of friends. Great. Have this middle group of friends that are struggling with all kinds of forces.
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everything from pornography to um to to to maybe dabbling. And then I have this
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other group of friends who I would categorize as the cheaters who cheat almost uncontrollably
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on their partners uncontrollably. And this is the spectrum of friends here is about 20 people. Now I look at that
00:19:43
group of friends and I go who is right? Because morally I can say the ones over
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here are hurting people. The cheaters are hurting people you know especially if they they're found in what they're doing. But who is right from an
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evolutionary perspective? Well, they all are in a sense in that we all have the desire to stray, but we
00:20:01
don't necessarily instantiate that desire through overt behavior. Men and women. Men. Yeah. So, that's very good. So,
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usually if I were to say, oh, men have evolved a desire for sexual variety,
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most people, even if they know nothing about evolution, would say, yeah, that that makes sense. But now, here's the
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interesting part. Women too have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety.
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Now, not to the same degree as men. So, there have been studies that have been conducted across a bewildering number of
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cultures. And in every culture that's been documented, men are much more likely to want more sexual partners and
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so on. But that doesn't mean that women are Victorian chased prudes. So now let
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me give you multiple lines of evidence that suggests that women are hardly the
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Victorian prudes that we might otherwise wish they were in a Victorian novel.
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You know when a woman is most likely to cheat situationally. I know cuz I've read your work. So
00:21:03
Okay. F. Okay. So So I'll say it or do you want to say it? Well, it's when they're maximally fertile, isn't it? Very good. You've done your homework. So
00:21:09
when they are maximally fertile is when they're most likely to stray. Now, that strategy, by the way, and and they're
00:21:15
less likely to insist on contraception. You would think that if I'm cheating outside my marriage, I'm I'm speaking as
00:21:21
a woman now. If I'm cheating outside my marriage, I would want to increase the likelihood of wearing I mean using
00:21:29
protection because I don't want to be pregnant. But if the strategy for why I'm cheating is because I'm shopping for
00:21:35
superior jeans, then it becomes incumbent that I don't use protection. Right? So you seldom have a woman who
00:21:43
will cheat with a guy who has who is of lower phenotypic quality, genetic
00:21:50
quality. So I I would love to have Bill Gates as home as my long-term partner,
00:21:55
but then I want the male Olympic swimmer as the guy behind the bushes. Now, if I
00:22:01
can convince Bill Gates that the Olympic male swimmer actually looks a lot like
00:22:06
Bill Gates and it's really your sweetie. It's you, Billy. you're the one who then I I won the as a woman I've won the
00:22:12
genetic uh lottery game. Okay. So, it's not that women are not interested in
00:22:18
sexual variet. So, that's one. Here's another one. If you map out, this is from studies. I
00:22:24
think it was in the early8s. I don't have the exact reference, but it's easy to find. Sorry. Just in your work, you say that women are more likely to cheat with
00:22:30
someone who has good genetic stock. Yeah. Is Bill Gates not got good genetic stock cuz he's rich and smart?
00:22:37
So, yes. So the intelligence element is yes. Maybe the drive element is yes. But
00:22:42
the phenotype is a no. I mean what's the phenotype? Phenotype is your physical
00:22:47
manifestation. Right? So if I say I want a guy who is tall, who has a V, uh who's
00:22:55
got testosterone jawline, right? I mean, I don't usually, if I'm a woman, I don't
00:23:01
in my uh uh deep recesses of my mind fantasized about being ravished by Bill
00:23:07
Gates. Do I? Are those physical features just pointing at the fact that this person can provide for me?
00:23:13
Absolutely. I mean, and you're saying, "But Bill Gates already provides." Yeah. But it's this also what's called
00:23:18
the sexy son hypothesis. Bill Gates will not produce I mean he'll produce kids
00:23:24
who potentially to the extent that intelligence is heritable will give me intelligent kids but he won't give me uh
00:23:30
the kids that are Bronny right and of course some of us are lucky to have both Bronn and brains but that's a rare kind
00:23:38
compliment thank you now imagine if I were 4 in taller then I
00:23:43
mean that's it I would be crowned emperor no but in all seriousness both men and women are very duplicitous in
00:23:49
their sexual behior behavior. So the idea that monogamy is natural is not true. Now it is natural in that about
00:23:56
85% of documented cultures have monogamy as an institutional mechanism because
00:24:02
we're a biparental species and almost all the other ones are have what's called polygyny which is a term not to
00:24:10
be confused with polygamy. So I'm going to do a little parenthesis and I'm going to come back to the lines of evidence
00:24:15
that proves that women like sexual variety as well. So polygamy just means
00:24:20
one to many. People use it as synonymous with one man, multiple women. But that's
00:24:27
not what polygamy is. Polygamy is one to many, which can take two forms. It could be one man, multiple women, which is
00:24:34
called polygyny. Or it could be one woman, multiple men, which is called
00:24:40
polyandry. There are almost no societies where institutionally we have polyandry
00:24:49
because it wouldn't make evolutionary sense for that mating system to arise. The only famous case of polyandri is
00:24:57
called Tibetan uh fraternal polyandri. So the word fraternal means that to the extent that
00:25:04
there are ecological reasons why we have to tolerate one woman going with multiple guys, it'll be brothers. And
00:25:11
the reason for that is because of a mechanism called inclusive fitness which is that I can increase my reproductive
00:25:18
fitness through direct reproduction. I have children and therefore they will
00:25:24
share half my genes but I can also invest in the children of my siblings who share also genes with me and I could
00:25:32
still be increasing my inclusive fitness. So therefore, polyandry need not be a Darwinian dead end because I'm
00:25:39
still extending my genes even in in such a system. So is this why I take care of my
00:25:44
brother's kids in part because that my nieces and nephews are 100%. As a matter of fact, I've done
00:25:50
several scientific studies where I exactly do these kinds of tests where I look at
00:25:58
what is the pattern of investment in different family members as a function
00:26:03
of their genetic relatedness to me. So R is something called the coefficient of
00:26:09
genetic relatedness. So me and my brother are R is.5. Me and my identical
00:26:16
twin our R is one. Me and a random stranger are R0. Me and my nephews and
00:26:22
nieces 0.25. Me and my parents 0.5. Me and my grandparents 0.25. Okay.
00:26:28
So we wanted to test whether the pattern of investments in this case through gift
00:26:34
giving whether they correlate to the genetic relatedness between the giver
00:26:39
and recipient. And as you might expect intuitively, even if you're not a fancy evolutionary psychologist, the greater
00:26:46
the genetic relatedness, the larger the size of gift. I'm much more likely to give a bigger gift at my brother's
00:26:52
wedding than I am to my second cousin. Okay? And so we've evolved this calculus
00:26:57
that allows us to met out these investments in line with our genetic rel, by the way, you see across
00:27:03
countless animal species. the likelihood of you coming out of your borro to protect people who are in the borro
00:27:09
increases if whoever is in the borro has greater genetic relatedness to you. So the other part in the 2018 paper that's
00:27:16
going to blow your mind because that one you wouldn't intuitively have expected it. The the first finding you say yeah
00:27:22
it makes sense I give more gifts to my brother than to my third cousin. So we wanted to check whether at an actual
00:27:29
Israeli wedding because they had data from actual 30 I think it was 30
00:27:34
weddings. So they had field data. They had the data of all of the uh attendees
00:27:41
and the gifts that they gave. Uh Uncle Morai gave $180. Rafika gave. Okay. So
00:27:48
what we wanted to test is whether the mother's side or the father's side of
00:27:54
the bride and groom across all genetic relatedness coefficients which side
00:27:59
would give more. Now in the Middle East it's a patriarchal society but evolutionary theory would predict
00:28:05
something differently and let me explain why. So take for example your four grandparents. Okay there's maternal
00:28:11
grandmother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather. In terms of the genetic
00:28:17
relatedness, they're each equally genetically related to you. 0.25 quarter of their genes they share with you. But
00:28:24
here's the second part. Genetic assuredness is not the same across the four. Your paternal grandfather has two
00:28:32
layers of paternity uncertainty. Your maternal grandmother has zero
00:28:39
generational paternal paternity uncertainty because there is no maternity uncertainty. So therefore, you
00:28:46
would predict that the paternal grandfather would invest the least in his grandchildren, the maternal
00:28:51
grandmother would invest the most, and the two other grandparents in the middle. That's what's been found in many studies across many cultures.
00:28:57
You might have to explain paternity uncertainty. Paternity uncertainty means that when a child is born, you never know that he is
00:29:04
your child, right? Uh you the mother always know that it's her child. She had the child, right? So we wanted to test
00:29:11
whether the mother's side of both the bride and groom would give greater gifts
00:29:16
than the father's side precisely because there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty but there is such a thing as
00:29:22
paternity uncertainty and that's exactly what we found. So the women's family gave more presence. Exactly. Okay.
00:29:27
Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that long rant. But and why why again just to clarify why that is because they're trying to
00:29:33
make sure that the male is invested. No, there because the mother's side is
00:29:38
simply more vested in investing in the in either the bride or groom because
00:29:44
they know that that is their infant. Yeah. Because there's no uncertainty. There's no uncertainty. You got it.
00:29:50
Okay. So, now can we close the loop on the sexual variety? So, so far I said that uh there's definitely evidence that
00:29:57
women also have a sexual variety pension by virtue of them cheating more when they are maximally fertile with they and
00:30:04
not insisting on uh contraception and all that. Here's another one. You do a
00:30:09
mapping of across primates. So, here come the bonobos, here come mountain
00:30:15
gorillas, here come chimpanzees, here comes humans. So you put all the primates and you do a uh calculation of
00:30:23
the size of the testes of the males in that species as a function of female
00:30:31
sexual promiscuity in that species. Are you with me? Yes. So mountain gorillas
00:30:38
phenomenal beasts 450 lbs some of the most majestic males. They have a
00:30:45
territorial they they have a polygenous arrangement. There is one male dominant male that controls control to sexual
00:30:53
access to many females. So based on what I just said, can you predict what the size of their testes are?
00:30:59
They can have small testes. Yes. Because there isn't sperm war competition. Therefore, imagine how
00:31:07
unbelievable it is that a fundamental male morphological attribute, the size
00:31:15
of your testes, is an adaptive response to a female behavior in that species.
00:31:21
Greater female promiscuity in that species, bigger testicles. So, mountain
00:31:26
gorillas, very small testicles. Okay? Chimpanzees are just walking testicles.
00:31:33
Their bodies just exist to support massive testes. Why? Because in chimp
00:31:40
society, we say hello sex. We say goodbye sex. We fight sex, postfight
00:31:46
sex. So there is constant sex happening so that the same female
00:31:52
is being impregnated by multiple males. So the way that I fight against that is
00:31:57
by developing bigger testes because then there are mechanisms where having bigger
00:32:02
testes solves that problem. So now here comes Robin Baker actually a British
00:32:09
scientist who wrote a book called Sperm Wars where he argued in his book some have said it's contentious others said
00:32:16
that it's tight that the morphology of human sperm
00:32:21
the makeup of it the makeup of it is not simply the standard one that we're all used to
00:32:28
seeing which is there is a head with a tail and they're all rushing to that
00:32:33
mythical egg. Those are called fertilizers. He demonstrated in his research that there are two other types
00:32:40
of sperm phenotypes within a man's ejaculate. There are the blockers that
00:32:48
don't look like the fertilizer and defense. Defense. Very good. And then there are
00:32:53
the killers. Oh, that go around hunting other men's
00:32:58
sperm. Now, let's put it all together. sperm is viable within the reproductive
00:33:06
a woman's reproductive tract for about 72 hours. Therefore,
00:33:11
for men to have evolved, the chemical weaponry to have blockers and killers
00:33:18
means that in our ancestral past, the likelihood of women having been with
00:33:25
more than one man within a 72-hour period, whether willfully or through
00:33:30
aggression, would have been high. Therefore, that's why you evolve that response. Now, here is where you can see
00:33:37
what happens with ideology and therefore how why I wrote parasitic mind. When I
00:33:43
lecture this in front of radical feminists, they'll come up, Dr. Sad,
00:33:49
you're such a brilliant scientist. Why? Because the research that I just described demonstrates that women could
00:33:56
be just as sexually ver voracious as men and that they've evolved a desire also
00:34:02
for, you know, a sexual appetite that corresponds with my women's studies and
00:34:08
radical feminism classes. Therefore, when from this side of my mouth I say something that supports their ideology,
00:34:16
I become a hero. If from this side of my mouth I say, "Oh, but incidentally
00:34:21
across cultures, it's been studied across many many cultures. Men do have
00:34:26
much greater desire for sexual variety." Boo. So I can either go from hero to
00:34:33
zero depending on whether what I just said supports your ideology or not.
00:34:40
That's not how you adjudicate science. Science truth exists independently of
00:34:46
whether it supports your ideology or not. Hence eventually the parasitic mind because you're parasitized by bad
00:34:52
ideologies. What are what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most
00:34:57
trouble? So in my scientific work, humans are
00:35:03
biological beings shaped by the dual forces of sexual and natural selection.
00:35:09
Buazi. Buazi. Okay. I mean people are coming around now because the beauty of
00:35:15
science is that it's autocorrective right I mean some of the biggest works
00:35:20
you you now know that they're the biggest work by how much they were originally rejected so many Nobel prizes
00:35:28
the story is always the same scientist proposes an idea that is completely
00:35:34
unorthodox contrary to the prevailing whims of accepted science and is
00:35:40
constantly reed rejected until it's not very simple example. Probably the thing that
00:35:48
has saved human beings the most from death over the past 100 years. Well,
00:35:54
it's stuff related to hygiene issues because a lot of times you'd have childhood mortality because of exposure
00:36:01
to different pathogens. Well, the gentleman who came up with the idea of
00:36:06
why so often women die during childbirth. Do do you know what the
00:36:12
answer is? Um because the doctor's not cleaned his hands or
00:36:17
Yes. Beautiful. Well done, Steve. So, uh it's Seml Weiss who was a doctor who
00:36:23
said, "What's happening here? Why are these women getting this post uh natal
00:36:29
very devastating uh fever and then within an a day or two they're gone? And
00:36:35
so he said, "Oh, wait a second." So the the surgeons have just worked on
00:36:41
cadaavvers. What's a cadaavver? Uh like a dead dead body. Okay. So like let's say they're they're doing forensic
00:36:47
pathology stuff. Okay. and then they move straight to a gynecological
00:36:53
intervention with the woman. So when he said and he did the studies that that
00:37:00
showed, hey, here are women who we we asked the guys to clean or didn't ask the guys to clean it and people laughed
00:37:07
him out of town. He died in a sanitarium in a mental institution. He he was completely like today we we erect
00:37:13
statues of him. Right. So, so to answer your first point, when I first started my career, when I said, "Oh, by the way,
00:37:20
you can't study consumers without understanding their physiology, their hormones." What kind of bush is this?
00:37:25
This is not a biology department. Get a grip. You should have you should you should not be in the business school. So, what do you mean? You think that you
00:37:31
can you think that when a consumer eats, they transcend their biology? It's
00:37:37
outside of their biology. Well, now a lot of them are coming around. So that when I first promulgated this idea 30
00:37:44
years ago, I was a Nazi. Today it's dear Dr. Sad, it would be an honor if you come and give the plenary lecture at our
00:37:50
university. Oh, but what happened 30 years ago when I was a bullshitter? Well, apparently they caught on. So, so
00:37:55
in my academic work, the mere fact of saying that we're biological beings was the most triggering thing. In my public
00:38:03
engagement work, that's not directly related to my science. Well, it's a very long list, hence the parasitic mind. But
00:38:10
certainly when I talk about things related, say, to Islam, that doesn't get
00:38:16
me a lot of Islamic friends, unfortunately. You're Jewish, aren't you? I'm Jewish context. Yes, I'm Jewish.
00:38:22
But but what I say would be true whether I was Jewish or whether I was uh anything else.
00:38:28
So, how as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, how much of what we do is
00:38:33
driven by sex and relationships? uh I mean so in in my earlier books so
00:38:40
I'm going to answer it again in a broad in a big way uh in my first book which
00:38:45
is the evolutionary basis of consumption and then in the consuming instinct I argue that there are four key Darwinian
00:38:52
mechanisms that drive much of our purpose of behavior so that's speaks to
00:38:57
your point uh there is behaviors that are related to natural
00:39:04
selection or our survival instinct. So, for example, the fact that I'm almost
00:39:09
certain that you and I have a preference for some instantiation of a fatty food
00:39:16
more than raw celery is almost a guarantee. Am I right? Yes, I agree. Yeah. Okay. And I'm I'm willing to bet that
00:39:23
everybody who's in the studio will will also agree. Okay. Now, we may have a different preference. So, I I pref I may
00:39:30
prefer fatty steak. you prefer uh chocolate mousse, but we both prefer chocolate mousse and steak over raw
00:39:36
celery. And so there are many consumatory acts and preferences that I
00:39:42
can easily ultimately map to that drive. The most obvious of which would be our
00:39:48
food preferences. Okay. To your direct question, then the next module. So that first module I call it the survival
00:39:54
module. The next module called the reproductive module. sex to your
00:40:00
question are all the things that we do because they're very much driven by sex related issues. So the types of products
00:40:08
that men and women use as sexual signals are astonishingly the same across
00:40:15
cultures. So for example, owners of Ferrari are 99% male. Even
00:40:22
though there are a million women who have the resources to certainly buy a
00:40:27
Ferrari, yet they don't. Oprah Winfrey is not stopped from buying a Ferrari cuz she can't afford it. And yet she's not
00:40:34
doing it. In the human context, fancy cars take on the morphological feature
00:40:40
of the peacock's tail. So all animals that are sexually reproducing use sexual
00:40:46
signals. Humans, given that they're also a consumatory animal, will use specific
00:40:51
products to signal, look at me, I'm better than than Stephen. The way that I
00:40:57
do that is by hopefully demonstrating cues that I have higher status than you. Okay?
00:41:02
Now, women will also engage in vigorous sexual signaling, but it'll be related
00:41:07
to things that are beautifification, right? So cosmetic surgeries around the
00:41:13
world are almost exclus but it's very very much of a female
00:41:20
domain and so there are many many behaviors whether consumer related or
00:41:25
not that could be then mapped onto the reproductive module to your question. Then there are two other modules that I
00:41:32
hinted at earlier when I talked about gift giving. So there's the kin selection module. These
00:41:39
are behaviors that are related to the fact of I increase my inclusive fitness
00:41:47
by investing in my kin. Okay. And then there is reciprocal altruism module
00:41:53
which is why would I ever jump into the river? So if I jump into the river to
00:41:58
save my three children that's skin selection because each of my three children on average shares 50% of their
00:42:05
genes with me. So if in the service of saving those three kids, I end up dying, the evolutionary calculus is totally in
00:42:11
favor of me dying. Who cares? Okay. On the other hand, why would I jump into the river to save Stephen?
00:42:17
First of all, until we met today, you're a stranger. Why would I ever save a stranger? If you're not a stranger and
00:42:22
you're a friend, you but you're still zero genetic relatedness. So there the argument is is that it's due to
00:42:28
reciprocal altruism and that human beings have evolved the mechanism of reciprocity to oil our social bonds
00:42:35
to return a favor to return a favor. So so literally the I scratch your back, you scratch mine
00:42:41
literally comes from our primate cousin species where you engage in reciprocal
00:42:47
grooming. So what happens? There are a bunch of parasites that are all over my fur that I can't get to. And so what I
00:42:54
do is I come stand and I give you my back and you will sit there and pick at all of it. Of course the expectation is
00:43:00
you'll now return the favor. So I literally scratch your back and you scratch mine. Now where did that
00:43:06
signature come from originally? One argument is that imagine we are walking
00:43:11
around in the savannah where the most common threat that we face life is
00:43:17
basically two things. I mean other than sex, get dinner and make sure you don't become somebody's there.
00:43:24
Mic drop. That's it. That's life. Okay. So, one of the problems that we've all
00:43:29
faced, hence why we've evolved gustatory preferences for high calorie foods is caloric uncertainty and caloric
00:43:34
scarcity. We don't have a neighborhood store to go buy our food. So, I might
00:43:40
actually die of starvation. Well, what if we mitigate that risk whereby we set up an insurance policy with non-kin,
00:43:48
another group of folks that are also walking around Savannah? Hey, next time that we bring down the big prey, that's
00:43:55
1,000 pounds of meat, we will share with you, but hey, you do the right thing and reciprocate back to us. So, now you
00:44:02
might say, okay, well, that's all nice, fancy science, but how does that manifest itself in in human consumer
00:44:07
behavior? Well, there are so many behaviors that you and I engage in if we're friends that are completely rooted
00:44:13
in that reciprocal module. So, for example, when it's your birthday, I call you and I invite you out to dinner. I
00:44:21
expect, unless you're a social cheat, that when it's my birthday, you will reciprocate. Now, from a strict economic
00:44:28
perspective, why don't we skip this whole charade? I'm going to pay $70 for your meal, you're going to pay $70 for
00:44:34
mine. We're going to end up at the same spot. Let's not do it. The reason why we have to do it is because that reciprocal
00:44:39
ritual is what oils our bonds of affinity. And so there are many many
00:44:44
behaviors that we engage in that are exactly tailoring that. So to summarize
00:44:50
much of our behaviors I argue in my earlier books could be mapped onto one of these four modules.
00:44:55
And in that earlier book the consuming instinct you talk about a mate desiraability score
00:45:01
right? What is a mate desiraability score? So imagine a car. A car is made up of
00:45:07
many attributes, right? So the car could be what's its gas efficiency? What's the
00:45:13
strength of its uh uh engine? How well does it hug the the the road? What's its
00:45:21
green? Is it a green car? Or does it have bad exhaust? So So a car is a multi-attribute product. It's made up of
00:45:27
many attributes. And then it could be that the way that I choose which car I pick is the one that scores the best on
00:45:34
the totality of those attributes. Okay, that's called the multi-attribute choice. Well, human beings are also
00:45:41
products made up of many attributes. So, in the mating market, you and I, let's
00:45:47
say we do men now, but of course it applies to women, too. There's a bunch of attributes that we know that women
00:45:53
are going to either like about us or not like about us. Overwhelmingly, by the way, the number
00:45:59
one universal attribute that women seek is anything that's related to social
00:46:05
status. Right? So, in other words, it could be my ambition. It could be my assertiveness. It could be my social
00:46:12
dominance. It could be literally the the big diplomas I have behind my back. It could be the number of zeros behind in
00:46:19
my bank. It could be how many cattle heads I have if I'm Hadza tribe. But in
00:46:25
no culture has a woman ever said the following. Give me a non assertive beta
00:46:32
meek man who has pear-shaped hips and a nasal voice and I'm turning into a
00:46:38
sexual frenzied animal. That those words have never been uttered in the history of humanity. Okay. But what women will
00:46:46
say by the way it's not that they only look for rich guys, right? Because many women will be madly in love with the
00:46:53
starving artist. But the starving artist is showing what? Ambition. Ambition. Assertiveness. There is a
00:47:01
trajectory of creation that's coming around the corner. I'm going to become a big rock star. But no, that's why by the
00:47:08
way if you do uh I I think that study has been done where you and actually some of my students in one of my classes
00:47:14
did a similar study for their project. Just show a guy, exact same guy in a personal ad. He's got a guitar or he
00:47:20
doesn't have a guitar. Nothing changed. It's the exact same guy. It's Stephen. But give me a guitar. No. Oh, with the
00:47:26
guitar, Steven's gorgeous. Without the guitar, he's less gorgeous. What's the other explanation for that that people might jump to? They might
00:47:32
say, "Well, I like music, so that's why I prefer Steven with a guitar and he's going to play some songs and I'm going to feel good and then I'm going to have
00:47:38
sex with him." So, so that's a very good question. So that is the difference between proximate
00:47:44
explanations and ultimate explanations. Much of science operates at the
00:47:50
approximate level. It explains the how and the what of a phenomenon. How does diabetes work? What are the factors that
00:47:57
increase the likelihood of you having diabetes? That's perfectly fine. The ultimate explanation is the Darwinian
00:48:03
why. Why would the phenomenon have evolved to be of that type? So you could
00:48:09
say, "I'm just drawn to a guy who knows how to play music." You've just
00:48:14
explained proximate. It's like saying, "Why have we evolved to have sex?" Because it feels good. That's
00:48:19
approximate. The ultimate explanation is that a sexually reproducing species has
00:48:24
to have a mechanism by which you're drawn to engage in the behavior that results in procreation. So it's not that
00:48:31
ultimate explanations are superior to approximate ones. is that you need both levels of analyses to fully explain a
00:48:38
phenomenon. So what is going on there with the guitar from an evolutionary perspective? Why is the guitar attractive? He's creative.
00:48:43
Yeah. Uh he's got the assiduousness to have the discipline to pi
00:48:50
virtuoso attractive all other or Picasso. Picasso is a short little guy. He's frumpy. He's bald. Yet he's got a
00:48:58
very very long line of very attractive women saying, "Can can I have sex with
00:49:03
you, Picasso, tonight? How is that possible?" Is it because at some level we're associating that talent with status?
00:49:10
Absolutely. I the person that can play the piano at the party probably has a lot of status. They're going to have a lot of options.
00:49:16
100 as a matter I mean just listen to famous rock stars and what they say as
00:49:23
to why they became musicians. I mean, literally almost to the word. It's as if
00:49:29
they plagiarized each other. Oh, I quickly realized that that's how I can get the girls, right? They never said
00:49:35
it's because in my childhood, I grew up listening to Bach and Mozart and it tickled my auditory reflex, right? They
00:49:42
usually said, "Oh, I go to a party and I break out the thing and the lineup begins." And then Jean Simmons sleeps
00:49:49
with 5,000 girls and the lead singer of Simple Red, who's a rather forgive me, whatever your name is, He's ginger guy.
00:49:57
He's not exactly the model of my sexual dreams if I'm a woman. But yet he was,
00:50:02
you know, with tons of women, right? But to finish the point about mate desiraability scale. So now imagine all
00:50:08
of those attributes that I can cook. So okay, God sad. Well, I'm not tall. That
00:50:14
goes against me. But I'm not very hard to look at. That goes for me. I play
00:50:22
soccer really well. I learned very quickly when I was 15 that the best way
00:50:27
that you won't get bullied by anybody is when you're the big soccer star. Okay.
00:50:32
Uh I've done pretty well in my life. So there are some traits that I score badly
00:50:37
on and some traits that I can compensate on. And so we can put them all into a basket and say, okay, well, what on a
00:50:44
scale of 0 to 100, what would God score on his mate desiraability scale? And so that's what that scale is. It's
00:50:50
basically taking all of our attributes and then saying what do you score is is
00:50:55
Stephen a 78 or a 92. Now here's what's very interesting to to that question which you didn't ask.
00:51:01
Humans engage in what's called assortative mating. Assortative mating is the idea that birds of a feather
00:51:09
flock together. So there are two maxims. There's the birds of a feather flock together and there's the opposites attract. Opposites attract only works
00:51:17
well for short-term mating. I am sexually koi and shy and I'm an
00:51:22
introvert. You're sexually daring and extroverted. That complimentarity might
00:51:28
actually result in a nice tric behind the bushes. But for long-term mating, if
00:51:33
you want to assure success of a long-term marriage, then it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock
00:51:38
together. And usually here what we mean is we share similar values. We share
00:51:44
similar goals, similar mindsets. We really have to assort on these. If I'm an asserbic atheist and you're a
00:51:50
committed Catholic who views everything through Jesus, it doesn't take a fancy professor to know we're not starting on
00:51:56
the right foot. Okay. But here's the other part about associative assortative mating. This is actually something that
00:52:02
I first um proposed as an open question many years ago on one of my appearances
00:52:08
of Joe Rogan and I received like a hundred emails saying, "Oh, I want to do that research with you." Which I still
00:52:14
haven't done, so maybe it'll happen now. So, let me repeat it. So, I argue that people assort based on
00:52:22
their overall mate desiraability score, which is the question you asked. Meaning
00:52:28
if I'm an 87, I'm unlikely because the mating market is is literally a market. It's a market.
00:52:36
Okay? If I'm an 87, I can command a girl or
00:52:43
expect a girl in the 80s. It wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36. We all
00:52:49
want to get the 100. Both men and women want to get the 100. But what stops us is that I don't score 100. So, I want to
00:52:56
get the gorgeous supermodel and so on, but maybe I'm not good enough to get her. And and and all women want to get
00:53:02
the highly accomplished gorgeous male Olympic swimmer who's both Bronny and a
00:53:08
neurosurgeon, but they can't get him because he's got the pick of the litter. So, usually we end up assorting on our
00:53:16
mate value. But now here's the part where I proposed as a hypothesis and it
00:53:21
it it's it's never been tested although I discuss it in the happiness book. So I argue I predict although I haven't
00:53:27
tested it that what will predict the likelihood of a couple staying together
00:53:34
into the future is whether their mating overall mating scores stay in line or
00:53:42
they begin to diverge. So, I'm the high school quarterback, so all the girls
00:53:49
think I'm hot. I get to go to the prom, whatever it's called, uh, with the
00:53:56
cheerleader, the head cheerleader. She's the hot girl. I'm the king of the high school. That's great. At that point,
00:54:02
when we're both 18, we assort on our mating value. Now, let's fast forward 10
00:54:08
years later. The hot cheerleader is now finishing her third year in
00:54:13
neurosurgery. Yes, there's a lot of hot pretty smart looking male doctors. The
00:54:20
the hot quarterback when I was 18 has become fat. He's lost his hair and he's
00:54:27
uh consistently unemployed and shows no interest other than playing video games.
00:54:33
So, what's happened? When we first met when we were 18, our mating values were the same. But now hot cheerleader has
00:54:40
become neurosurgeon. Her score has gone really up. Hot quarterback is now a
00:54:46
degenerate. Now there's a huge difference in our mating scores. That's going to put a huge stressor on our
00:54:53
marriage. So one of the things I argue in the happiness book is yes, make sure to meet someone who matches you in your
00:55:00
mating value and work hard at making sure that you stay at the right mating value. Once we get that divergence, I'm
00:55:06
predicting divorce. Okay. The It's super interesting. The
00:55:12
question that springs to mind is as men and women age, who tends to drop
00:55:18
in their desiraability score? What do you think? I don't know. You want me to answer it because then I
00:55:25
can get the hate mail? No problem. No, no, but I I asked that as well because there's clearly some data on who's asking for the divorces, who's
00:55:30
initiating the divorces, who's cheating the most. That would so women are overwhelmingly the ones to instigate a divorce.
00:55:36
Yeah, that's true. Although from a strict evolutionary perspective,
00:55:42
the mate val all other things equal maid value of men goes up with age. Mate
00:55:49
value of women goes down with age. Now, here is how you reduce your chances in
00:55:55
the mating market if you're a woman. You ready? Of course, just aging. Yes.
00:56:01
Number one. Number two, if you're tall, that's a death blow. Why? Because wh
00:56:08
it's not that women want only tall guys because then we all the other guys would we would
00:56:15
have been twiddling our thumbs in frustrated celibacy. But women want a guy who's taller than them. That's
00:56:22
what's guaranteed. There was actually a study done a few years ago now where
00:56:27
they looked at 720 actual couples. Guess how many violated
00:56:33
that norm? Women taller than men out of 720. I don't know. One.
00:56:38
One out of 720. One. Right. So, women, it it's a it's a non-starter that a woman doesn't want a
00:56:45
shorter guy than her. She might I mean, Lionel Messi is my height, but he's Lionel Messi, and he found a gorgeous
00:56:50
woman who's shorter than him, right? But what you don't want now, if I'm a 6'1
00:56:56
woman, now of course they are still 6'2 and taller men, but just statistically speaking, we've just shrunk the possible
00:57:03
pool. There's a gorgeous guy, super handsome, very funny, very educated,
00:57:09
who's 5'8, but I'm 6'1. I tower over him. If I wear heels and I add another
00:57:15
four inches, he becomes my son. Well, this all brings to light something else which has been discussed a few times on
00:57:21
this show, which is if we said there that men's mate desiraability score
00:57:27
stays pretty consistent unless all goes up unless they do something very bad. But the kind of
00:57:34
inverse conversation there is that women's desiraability scores are now higher than ever when they're younger
00:57:40
than ever. Yeah. So you've got and I believe from what I've been told that the male's desiraability score is now lower than
00:57:46
ever if we think about income age groups in the lower age groups. So if you think
00:57:53
about income um differences, if you think about educational differences, who's graduating from college, who's
00:57:59
smarter and all these kinds of things because of the very important changes that have happened in society, um men
00:58:06
and women are getting closer and closer to par here. Yeah. Which means that the I mean someone on the podcast described it to
00:58:12
me as the tall woman problem, but it can also be described as the small man problem.
00:58:17
Well, and it's small. It's small and tall. Not I was going to finish. Yeah. It's not just the height. So I said
00:58:24
death blow would be you get older, you're tall and you're very educated.
00:58:30
So, if you are a 38-year-old 6'2
00:58:35
PhD from Stanford and you're a woman, good luck. Why? Because number one, I've
00:58:43
gotten older, so there's a smaller pool, right? Uh, number two, I'm tall. I want
00:58:48
a taller guy. Number three, when I'm a PhD, I'm a woman now. When I'm a PhD, I
00:58:54
want a guy who is as educated and accomplished as me or more. So now I
00:58:59
need to find a 6'4 guy who's also a PhD. Right? Here's the paradox by the way
00:59:04
that people don't realize. People think that oh the reason why women always desire high status guy that this is
00:59:10
[ __ ] It's not true. Is because historically they have been dominated by
00:59:16
the patriarchy. So they sought that which they didn't have. And that's completely falsified by the fact that
00:59:22
very high status women actually insist more on the guy being higher status. So
00:59:28
if it were, so for example, if I am a neurosurgeon and a diplomat and I'm a woman, I don't say, "Oh, well, now that
00:59:36
I have all that I need, let me look for the illiterate 17-year-old Cabana boy
00:59:41
who can't read three words cuz that's what I want." No, she even wants She
00:59:46
insists more on the guy being meeting her or higher in status. So if I'm if
00:59:52
I'm older, tall, and super educated, it's a death blow.
00:59:58
What does this all say about what's going on with masculinity at the moment? Because um when I've said this a few
01:00:03
times on the show, but when you look at the stats around suicidality amongst men, um when you look at mental health
01:00:08
issues amongst men, when you look at some of the influencers that men are now
01:00:13
drawn to more than ever that are offering a new vision of masculinity, there's clearly some kind of transition,
01:00:19
something going on in society at the moment as it relates to what it is to be a man. You you said this thing about
01:00:25
beta male earlier on. No one wants a beta male. Well, you know, it feels like there has been a
01:00:30
narrative that has encouraged a bit more beta maleness in society and we're seeing a bit of like a counter movement.
01:00:36
I've had so many women, some of which have been on the show, say to me that they've got a young son, um, and they
01:00:42
are confused about the advice they should be giving their young son in such a world. I get tons of women who write
01:00:48
to me and and ask me sort of the f I'm paraphrasing
01:00:53
where where are the bold men, right? I I I go to a place I'm looking super,
01:01:01
you know, ready to meet people. I'm easy to look at and no one approaches me.
01:01:07
Well, if you inculcate over many generations that if I approach you and
01:01:14
say, "My god, my name is God, you you look lovely. What a beautiful dress." That's a compliment becomes a form of
01:01:22
compliment rape. Then is it surprising that I may be a bit ambivalent in
01:01:28
approaching you? I mean I I often joke that given some of the what is now considered hashtagme too Italy should
01:01:35
cease to exist because the whole country is hashtagme too right what do I mean by that Italians stereotypically of course
01:01:43
are seducers they pursue women I mean women will say you I love Italian guys
01:01:48
how they approach now we're not talking about uh you know being persistent to the point that they're harassing you
01:01:54
that they're pinning you down physically but there is a dynamic of courtship whereby men who are bold, men who
01:02:01
approach, men who take chances, who are confident are going to get the pretty
01:02:07
girl. Well, now imagine if you create a dynamic in for all sorts of reasons, one of
01:02:14
which is radical feminism, the other one of which is to pathize half of humanity called men through the label of toxic
01:02:21
masculinity. No, it's called sexiness. a guy who jumps into a a building to save
01:02:27
a puppy and he's called a fireman. That's what we fantasize about. That's not toxic masculinity. That's
01:02:32
masculinity, right? And so, a lot of women will write to me and say, "Where are those men, professor?" Well, those
01:02:39
men are too afraid to come out. I I'll give you a couple of examples. Okay? At my university, we now have a
01:02:46
mandatory sexual training module that we have to take otherwise we can't
01:02:54
continue, right? It's it's part of like you you know you have to October 15th to
01:02:59
get the refresher because until my benevolent kind employer taught me how to speak to
01:03:07
women, I was clueless. So the first 57 years of my life, I walked around as a
01:03:13
Middle Eastern savage, not knowing how to interact with women. Of course, I'm being sarcastic, right? But then the my
01:03:19
benevolent employer came along and through very very cute, condescending,
01:03:25
and patronizing cartoon vignettes, they teach me how to act. So, you know,
01:03:33
a compliment that is in the wrong context could be a form of sexual violence. So, for example, uh you're
01:03:40
walking down the street and you see a guy complimenting an a woman and it
01:03:46
appears that she's not uh welcoming that compliment. Is that sexual violence? And
01:03:52
so, I will first just to test the algorithm say no. And then it comes out,
01:03:57
ooh, I understand why you might be but that is a form. Are you with me?
01:04:02
Yes. So now I'm 59 with a big personality. This kind of [ __ ]
01:04:09
doesn't get to me. That's why I speak openly and publicly to the chagrin of all of academia. But the 21-year-old who
01:04:17
doesn't have that same strength of personhood. Do you think he's going to think twice before at the next party
01:04:23
walking up to a girl mustering up all his courage to ask her if she wants a coffee? Of course he is. So I think
01:04:30
that's where that problem of dynamic comes from. And I'm now going to share a personal story with one one of my
01:04:37
brothers which is also in the happiness book which speaks to when you're the
01:04:42
opposite of the non-bold timid guy. One of my brothers uh has been in
01:04:49
Southern California since 1984. He became very very successful and wealthy.
01:04:54
Uh was an Olympian uh judoka. He he represented Lebanon in the 1976
01:05:01
Olympics. The reason why that's relevant is because physically he's very dominant, but my brother is 2 feet tall.
01:05:09
Obviously not, but he's he's shorter than me. He's Okay. I'm like 5'6, 5'7. I
01:05:14
mean, he's maybe five three. Okay. But but a bulldog, right? I always like
01:05:21
to say just because then it makes it easy. I say I mess his height. So that makes it easy. Okay. So, uh, he's not Messi's height.
01:05:28
He's shorter than Messi's height. He's shorter than Meridana, right? So, but he walks like he's seven feet tall. Okay.
01:05:37
So, we used to in the early 90s, I would come visit him. He he used to live in in Newport Beach where we are now. And we'd
01:05:44
go to clubs. I'm I'm single at that point. And my brother would say, "All right, God. We're going to play the
01:05:50
game." I'm like, "Oh, his name is Dave." No, David. I'm not in the mood. Find the
01:05:55
most beautiful and unattainable girl here. Oh, come on, man. I don't want to do this. Do it. Okay. All right. So, I
01:06:03
look around. So, now I want to find not only the prettiest girl. I want to find an impediment to you getting her. What's
01:06:10
an impediment? A really doineering looking man that she's with. Therefore,
01:06:16
that makes it even less likely that you can get her. Yes. Okay, David. I found her. The the girl
01:06:22
over there with the high heels in the middle of the dance floor. That's the one. You sure got? Yes. That's the one.
01:06:27
Okay. He stands there. Dominant tattooed guy goes to the
01:06:32
bathroom. David in great white shark mode goes up to the girl. She with her high heels.
01:06:40
He's coming up to here. I just Okay. Haha. I hear them smiling. He comes back
01:06:46
to me complete cold. Says she'll call me tomorrow. [ __ ] David. No way. Zero
01:06:52
chance. It's not happening. Next day. Come. Come. This is kind of an Arabic thing. Come.
01:07:00
Hi, David. It's Candy. We met yesterday. The thing I'm looking forward to meeting you. How did he do it, Stephen? He did
01:07:07
it because testicles this big. He's 7 foot2
01:07:13
in his aura. Now, you might say, well, yeah, boy does it add a lot of inches metaphorically
01:07:19
when you have Ferraris and so on. But there's a more general story here. He
01:07:25
owns the world. He walks like he owns it, right? But he's not of great. So, if
01:07:30
you ask women, yeah, it' be great if I'm 6'2 and I walk big, but I could be 6'2
01:07:35
and very meek and very tepid and very beta. Or I could be 5'7 and I'm messy.
01:07:44
most are going to go for messy. So that's what I mean by the way when I say that mating is a compensatory choice.
01:07:50
Compensatory means that it to your earlier point about made desiraability, we are judged on a basket of goods. If
01:07:59
it were that we're only judged in a non-compensatory way, meaning so for example, if it were that women say, "I
01:08:06
always go out with the tallest guy," then there's no way for me to compensate for that. my humor won't get me higher
01:08:13
score, my looks won't get me, my education, my accomplishment, I'm dead because there's there are a lot of
01:08:19
taller guys. But if the way you choose me is as a function of how I score on a
01:08:24
basket of goods, then I might have a shot. So that's why I tell people, by the way, that even though we all score
01:08:31
poorly on some things, but there's a whole bunch of other things that we that is within our possibility to improve. I
01:08:38
guarantee you for all that you are, if you improve on assertiveness, ambition,
01:08:43
if your vocabulary changes so that when you sit at a party, people can judge you by the way within the first few
01:08:50
sentences that you say. Just your elocution, the vocabulary that you use, the the thoughtfulness of your answers.
01:08:58
I can very quickly judge where you are where I could put you in the in the in the pigeon hole. So there are way you
01:09:04
know what why don't you crack a book and read a bit right why don't you stop playing video games
01:09:09
on this point of masculinity the just further upstream a little bit we talked about men approaching women now I have
01:09:15
to present the counter narrative to this because I don't think most men understand what it is to be a beautiful
01:09:20
woman and and what they go through on a daily basis this um ITV made a piece se I think seven days ago I saw it on on X
01:09:28
or Twitter um which showed what it's like to be a a beautiful woman walking down the
01:09:33
Um, this was only 7 days ago. There's been a variety of different videos like this, but I'll just play it for you so you can see.
01:09:40
What's going on? I'm filming undercover alone in Cardiff, where police recently announced a
01:09:45
decrease in violence against women. Within seconds, a group of men approached me.
01:09:51
I play tennis. Yeah. This guy didn't respect my personal
01:09:57
space. I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I saw you. I had to say hello. You look
01:10:02
nice. That's kind of my friend. That's fine. The guy in the black t-shirt sees me up
01:10:09
ahead and speeds up to get next to me. And like many others, he overstays his
01:10:14
welcome. I think I'll be okay. 20 people approach me in just 2 hours.
01:10:20
Now, I don't think men realize that that that's the nature of what a woman goes through. So, in the context of this
01:10:25
conversation about, no, we do have to be on the front foot if we are going to find a mate. When you
01:10:31
understand that that's what that beautiful woman that you're thinking about going up to has already gone
01:10:36
through it does change your you know I got you but I I've got an a ready
01:10:42
deployed answer for that life is about modulation right saying the right thing
01:10:48
in the right way at the right time right I'm sort of paraphrasing a quote of Aristotle which in in the per not the
01:10:56
person in the happiness book I have a whole chapter that is going to address
01:11:01
your beautiful woman story. So I talk about the inverted U. Uh does that ring
01:11:08
a bell? Do you know what that is? The inverted U. I can imagine on a graph. On a graph, but not not this way. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the other way. Like a
01:11:14
hill, right? So the inverted U is basically the the mathematical representation of
01:11:20
something that certainly the ancient Greeks taught us long ago, but they weren't the only ones to say this. You know, everything in moderation, right?
01:11:27
So Aristotle in his golden mean argument said look if you have let's say a uh
01:11:32
soldier who's very cowardly meek lacking courage that's not good. If you have a
01:11:39
soldier who is so bold rash reckless in his risk takingaking that's not good
01:11:45
either. So too little is not good too much is not good and the sweet spot is
01:11:50
in the middle. So in the happiness book I have an entire cha chapter whereby I
01:11:55
argue that everything in life the number one universal rule of optimal
01:12:02
flourishing is to find the sweet spot irrespective of any context that you're talking about and then I demonstrate it
01:12:08
through a bewildering number of examples at the neuronal level at the individual level at the societal level okay so now
01:12:16
let's apply that principle to here right those guys are at the other end of the
01:12:22
curve, right? Knowing when to act in the right way, at the right time, in the right measure, that they're not doing
01:12:30
that because the likelihood of that beautiful girl when you come up and act like a rather harassing buffoon in that
01:12:37
context of her saying, "You know what? I'm sold. Let's have massive sex behind that tree right now." Right? Therefore,
01:12:44
we know that statistically speaking, that approach is never going to work.
01:12:49
It's done for no other purpose than to harass. Whereas when I'm at a party
01:12:54
where we are supposed to be mingling and I come up to you and I say, "Forgive me.
01:13:00
I hope you don't mind. I just want to say gorgeous dress." Does that seem like what I just said is similar to how
01:13:07
they're acting? So life is about modulation and those guys are certainly
01:13:13
not modulated. Obviously, there's a bunch of things that are clearly violations there. Um, of everything
01:13:18
you've just said about the right place, the right time, they they look drunk. Uh, it's very late. She's alone, so
01:13:25
she's in a position of vulnerability in many respects. So, rolling up to her in such a way is But from the from the male
01:13:31
perspective, you said the probability of getting a good outcome there is so low. But from the male perspective there,
01:13:36
they're probably thinking, listen, if the probability is 0.001, why not?
01:13:41
I'll take it. They're probably thinking that. Well, by the way, perhaps, but if
01:13:47
you were an empathetic person, you'd say the fact that she may feel threatened is
01:13:53
enough reason not to. Yeah. Not to do it. Therefore, to me, they're all [ __ ]
01:13:58
I agree. And I I at the heart of this though is this idea of self-awareness. Exactly. Because the men that rolled up there,
01:14:05
they might in their own heads think they have a chance. They might like have a distorted view of their probability. I
01:14:11
mean, one of them rolled up and said, "Hey, uh, do you want some tennis lessons? I'm a tennis coach." And from what I saw in the video, he was a good
01:14:17
30, 40 years older than her. Yeah. And in his head, he must have thought that the effort he's exerting there is
01:14:25
worth the probability that he's assumed because there's just like no self-awareness. And I think at the heart of this is like, how do you build that
01:14:31
that self-awareness to know? Oh, I I love that you're asking this because one of the things that frustrates me the
01:14:36
most in social interactions is when so I'm not a beautiful woman, so I don't
01:14:43
get that violation, but I get a million other violations for all sorts of
01:14:48
reasons. One of which is that people do recognize me a lot and they do come up. So they don't do it because they're
01:14:54
trying to get me behind the bushes. But then they'll stop me and lecture for the
01:14:59
next 25 minutes about whatever idea they're having in their head. Now, I'm
01:15:05
polite. I'm thankful that people appreciate my work and will come up. But I didn't sign up while I'm walking with
01:15:11
my children and wife for you to lecture me for 25 minutes uninterrupted without me saying a word. If you come up and
01:15:18
say, "Oh, I read the perfect mine. Professor, loved it. Do you mind if I take a picture with you?" I'm always
01:15:23
gracious. I'm always but so all of those social phauas almost all of them could
01:15:30
be linked to what you said which is a complete lack of self-awareness which let's break it down even more.
01:15:37
There is a concept in uh psychology uh called theory of mind. Are are you
01:15:42
familiar with it? No. Theory of mind is a ability that you must have in order to
01:15:51
have meaningful social interaction. What does theory of mind mean? When I'm chatting with you, I have to be able to
01:15:58
put myself in your mind. So, for example, if I'm talking to an audience that knows nothing about evolutionary
01:16:04
psychology, I might alter the specific words I use because I have theory of
01:16:10
mind that makes me say they don't know what domain specific computational systems would be. If I use those words,
01:16:17
I just lost not because they're dumb, but because they don't know that jargon. So, I already exhibited a good
01:16:24
communicator skill, which is I put myself in the theory of mind of my audience and I modulate my message
01:16:30
depending on who I'm speaking to. Well, autistic children, by the way, fail on
01:16:36
theory of mind. So, one of the ways that you are able to diagnose because autism,
01:16:42
you can't give a blood test that shows, oh, there's a marker of autism. So the
01:16:47
way that you typically uh diagnose autism early is through various tasks
01:16:53
that they go through. So there is a task for children that you suspect might be
01:16:58
autistic where they will fail on such a test which makes sense intuitively because you know that autistic children
01:17:05
don't have very good social skills are emotionally withdrawn don't read cues
01:17:11
well. So, for example, if I'm sitting with you for 25 minutes while you lecture me about why Camala Harris is a
01:17:18
great president. I didn't sign up for that. You want to shake my hand? That's great. Now, you can tell if you're not
01:17:25
if you are self-aware that I'm getting impatient. You should be able to tell that my children are starting to shuffle
01:17:33
uncomfortably because they're getting impatient. But you're just as oblivious as those [ __ ] So so many of social
01:17:41
interactions are because of people's lack of self-awareness. And I am shocked
01:17:46
by the extent to which most people lack self-awareness. So it's not that 95% of
01:17:54
the people that I meet are unbelievably socially gracious and it's only the 5%
01:18:00
degenerates that are bad. It's the opposite. But then there's a there's an explanation for that. Okay, go. Because the ones that did have
01:18:06
the self-awareness never came up. Right. Okay. Oh, so therefore I'm only
01:18:12
exposed to the bad instances. So the ones that have the self-awareness in the theory of mine, saw you walk past with your family and
01:18:17
went he's with his family, love his work, but I'm not going to roll upon him with his family. You're exactly right. By the way, that's
01:18:23
the exact same mechanism that explains something called the overconfidence bias, which is a cognitive bias whereby
01:18:30
we overestimate something in an over. So for example, if you ask most professors, so do you think that you your uh your
01:18:38
teaching uh ability is it below average, average or above average? 90% of
01:18:44
professors say above average. Well, statistically that can be. Well, why does that happen? It's exactly for what you said. The the students who thought I
01:18:51
was great took the time to come up to me and say, "Professor, love the course." The ones who thought I was an [ __ ]
01:18:57
they didn't come up to me. So what did my brain code? Only the great ones. and therefore I must be great.
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01:20:01
What if the way you present yourself isn't appealing to the world? And again, this brings us back to this idea of like
01:20:07
being a beta male. And when you say beta male, what we're saying that what is the definition of beta male? It's
01:20:12
so yes, it's used colloially. Beta male would be none of the markers that uh
01:20:18
exhibit the types of qualities that women would find attractive you possess.
01:20:24
So it could be social dominance, it could be physical dominance, it could be high status, it could be assertiveness,
01:20:30
could be ambition, it could be look uh one of the reasons why women say I I
01:20:36
love I'm very attracted to a funny man, a funny guy. What what they're effectively saying is I want an
01:20:43
intelligent man. Because it's very very unlikely that you could be a very funny satist if you're not intelligent. Dave
01:20:50
Chappelle is probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues, but they have a lot of degrees. But he wouldn't be able to
01:20:55
stand up in front of an audience, keep their attention for an hour and a half on really powerful social commentary
01:21:03
where they pay $150 to come if he wasn't if he weren't incredibly intelligent.
01:21:08
Right? So, so beta and and alpha doesn't just mean tall and dominant and I have a
01:21:14
club and I beat you with it. It means, do you exude the types of cues that on
01:21:20
average in the mating market people would say, "God damn, that's an attractive guy." Whatever that means.
01:21:25
That's that's how I define it. So, if you had to give advice then to men and women who were intent on being
01:21:33
higher value and higher status, how what would that advice be and how would it differ? Some of the advice will be
01:21:39
exactly the same for both sexes. Yeah. But some of the advice would be sex specific in recognition that not of not
01:21:46
all of the mating attributes are equally desired by the opposite sex. Right? So for example,
01:21:52
no man has ever uttered the following words. Linda,
01:21:57
you have a gorgeous body. I'm unbelievably sexually drawn to you, but
01:22:03
you're not exhibiting the type of elacrity to improve your GPA score, and
01:22:09
your lack of assertiveness in your studies suggests that I'm not going to have sex with you tonight. No man has
01:22:16
ever uttered those words. But a lot of women meet a super hot guy at a club. He
01:22:22
opens his mouth and what comes out is [ __ ] imbecility and suddenly the sex
01:22:30
opportunity has just shut down. So why am I saying all this? There are some
01:22:36
traits that if men were to work on that's going to bring them more bang for
01:22:42
the buck than if women worked on other ones both. So for example, kindness and
01:22:48
intelligence are universal traits equally desired by both men and women.
01:22:55
So that's that's true for both men and women across cultures. But social status
01:23:01
is preferred by women in men in every known culture. Physical beauty and youth
01:23:07
is preferred by men over women in every culture. So So some traits the advice
01:23:13
would be the same. some traits it'll be sex specific. I wonder because I'm trying to give I'm
01:23:19
trying to figure out how to give advice to that bottom 50% of men that are basically having no sex,
01:23:26
right? Which I'm told about over and over again that are at risk of becoming incelss or playing video games in their room that
01:23:33
are turning to pornography as a medicine, I guess, and an antidote to their lives. What kind of advice would
01:23:39
you offer to those those sort of disillusioned men? Is that guy also 90
01:23:45
pounds overweight and pear-shaped? Probably not in shape. Okay. So, you know what? Hit the
01:23:51
treadmill. Looks matter. They don't matter to women as much as they do to men, but you know, I my my wife often
01:23:58
jokes with me. I don't I don't know if you've ever seen this on on the internet. I will often post, you know, in a joking manner, a photo of me from
01:24:05
1985 in actually in Southern California in in in San Diego where I'm in my
01:24:10
soccer physique days where I have the eight pack and the V and the whole thing. Right? And my wife would joke
01:24:16
with me. She said, "How come I never got that version of Gad?" Right? Now, that doesn't mean she obviously stayed with
01:24:23
me when I was, you know, 86 pounds heavier. So, it's not the only thing, but boy is it better to have this six or
01:24:29
eight pack than not have it. So, uh my height I can't change, right? So, I can't tell those guys that are
01:24:36
potentially going to be in sales, you know, please try to grow 4 in, right? But again, crack a book. So, for
01:24:42
example, even with my own children, right? You would think having the father
01:24:47
that they have, they're born, they come out of the womb, and they're reading. You know how hard it is for me to get
01:24:52
them to get away from this damn thing? Right. It's it's it's it's one of the
01:24:57
biggest frustrations I have as a parent. And and as I said earlier, they're they're very graceful. They're very poised. Probably compared to other
01:25:02
children, they're a lot more knowledgeable. But it's not a reflex for them to say of all things that I could
01:25:08
do right now, I want to go to a room and read. Whereas it is a reflex that I still have today with complete full
01:25:14
dedication. So read more, learn how to speak better. There there again mating
01:25:21
is a compensatory process. There are things that I can't change about me. I can't change my height. I can't change
01:25:28
the symmetry or lack thereof in my face. But if I'm thinner, all other things
01:25:34
equal. I'm probably going to be better. So, it's never a lost cause. Wherever I am in my mating desiraability score,
01:25:41
there are always effective intervention strategies that could improve my score. So, I'm I'm currently at a 42. I think
01:25:48
that if I do strategies ABC, I could probably get up to 60. and 60 is going
01:25:53
to open me up to a lot more desirable women than when I was 42. We we talked a little bit earlier about
01:26:00
um pornography. I think I I said the word once, but I found it quite interesting. You know, we talked a
01:26:06
little bit about sexual variety that you make a case that porn in some ways
01:26:13
might be good for us. Not quite. I say, so I say that porn, it
01:26:20
makes perfect evolutionary sense that porn is a behavioral trap that can lead
01:26:26
to addiction. So, I'm not saying it's good for you. I'm not saying that we've evolved to specifically consume porn,
01:26:33
but here's what porn is doing. So, in in evolutionary theory, there is a distinction between an adaptation and an
01:26:41
exaptation. And adaptation is something that has evolved because it confers
01:26:47
either survival or uh reproductive benefits. So my preference for fatty
01:26:54
foods is an adaptation that's linked to survival. My uh desire to use high
01:27:00
status products to impress the ladies is a behavioral trait that helps me in the
01:27:06
mating market. Okay. An exaptation, not to be confused with an adaptation, is
01:27:12
when there is a phenomenon that piggybacks on an adaptation itself. It
01:27:17
serves no purpose. Do you follow what I mean? So for example, the color of our skeletal system is not an adaptation.
01:27:25
There were already path dependent engineering solution that led to the
01:27:31
fact that our skeletal color is the way that it is. It's it's not itself an
01:27:36
adaptation. How would you use this in and I'm going to come to pornography in a second. For example, you could say
01:27:44
religion is an adaptation. If you want to say that, this is what
01:27:49
you'd have to argue. Groups that are religious by virtue of their religiosity
01:27:55
exhibit greater communality, greater cohesion, greater in-group outgroup
01:28:00
demarcation. So groups that are religious tend to outlive groups that are irrel irreligious. So that would be
01:28:08
an adaptive argument for why religion evolved. An exaptation argument for why
01:28:13
religion evolved is that religion solves no adaptive function, but rather it
01:28:19
piggybacks on systems that already exist in my brain. So for example, I already
01:28:24
come with the brain that's coalitional. I view the world as blue team, red team. There's us, there's them. That's already
01:28:31
a mechanism that's built into my brain for other reasons. And now religion comes along and piggybacks on that,
01:28:37
right? The Jews have the Jews and the Gentiles. The Christians have the believers who are going to be with Jesus
01:28:44
in in heaven and the rest of you [ __ ] who are going to burn in hell. The the Muslims have the believers and
01:28:50
the kufur, which is a derogatory term for non-Muslims. So all of those religions have at least Abrahamic
01:28:57
religions have the same structure of us versus them. So with that background,
01:29:03
pornography is not something that specifically evolved in us because there there was no pornography in in the
01:29:10
ancestral savannah. But we for example men have evolved a preference for visual
01:29:17
stimuli. Men have evolved a greater pension for sexual variety.
01:29:23
Now, there's a product that piggybacks on those innate preferences that says, "Hey, guess what? There's a screen where
01:29:30
I'm going to take you where you could shop for as many new mobile, fertile,
01:29:37
ready young women, and you never have to see the same woman twice if you serve for the next 600 years. My brain has
01:29:44
been hijacked." So, pornography is not something that we've evolved a gene for.
01:29:49
But pornography utilizes existing systems to trap us. That's why, by the
01:29:54
way, in two of my earlier books, I talk about the evolutionary roots of dark side consumption. Dark side consumption
01:30:01
are maladaptive behaviors like pornographic addictions, pathological gambling, eating disorders, compulsive
01:30:08
buying. So I explain how these maladaptive behaviors have a biological signature. I was reading Psychology
01:30:15
Today with the the study with 688 young Danish adults who were surveyed
01:30:22
and respondents viewed the viewing of porn um hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives, their
01:30:28
attitudes um towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex and toward life in general.
01:30:35
So I guess the question here is is pornography when we think about our evolution and the implications of us
01:30:42
consuming pornography and the behavior that it then turns into is it a net good
01:30:48
or a net that's a good one and well the research is unclear on this so I've seen studies
01:30:53
that have exactly to your point have said hey you know what it spices things up as long as you do it openly you know
01:30:59
uh again it's a question of modulation remember I said doing it at the right time right amount the right context and
01:31:06
so on, right? If once in a while, for whatever reason, whether it be alone or
01:31:12
in the context of a couple, you decide to incorporate pornography to spice things up, good for you. If you can't
01:31:19
get to work on time cuz you're spending 6 hours uh feverishly uh masturbating to
01:31:24
pornography and then you don't have the sexual vigor to then be intimate with your partner, then we have a problem,
01:31:30
right? So many psychiatric conditions that are rooted in in behavioral dysfunction,
01:31:36
if they're done at the right amount, they're not a problem. It's when they go
01:31:41
on the bad side of the curve. Let me give you a again a a big uh a big view
01:31:47
of this problem. OCD, obsessivecompulsive disorder, is a psychiatric condition and it can
01:31:53
manifest itself in different obsessions or different compulsions. So obsession
01:31:59
could be uh I'm engaging what's called ruminative thinking, right? Did did I
01:32:04
say something at yesterday's party that was stupid and now everybody thinks I'm a [ __ ] Now I will start to try to
01:32:12
speak to everybody at the party in a ruminative obsessive way to make sure that I didn't say anything. Now compare
01:32:18
that to germ contamination fear as a form of OCD. I will now wash my hands
01:32:23
repetitively 600 times to make sure that I didn't get uh infected by anything when I shook somebody's hand. Right now,
01:32:31
there is an evolutionary adaptive version of that which is scanning the environment for environmental threats
01:32:38
once is at the right level of behavioral regulation. Right? Check the back door
01:32:44
that it's locked. Wash your hands once when you shook many hands at the party. But then what happens to the person who
01:32:50
doesn't suffer from OCD? There's a warning flag that goes up in your head. Then you tend to that flag. And what
01:32:56
happens to the flag? It goes down and it's finished. The OCD person, the flag
01:33:01
is hyperactive in an infinite loop. I wash my hands, flag goes down. As I walk
01:33:07
away from the sink, flag goes back up. I wash my hands again. I am stuck in a repetitive ritual for 8 hours in
01:33:14
scolding hot water where the skin is coming off me. I didn't go to work cuz I've been washing my hands since 7:00 in
01:33:20
the morning. That's what happens with pornographic addiction, right? I'm sitting and surfing the internet 6 hours
01:33:27
for porn. So, it is at the disregulation part of that behavior. So, it's not that there's anything innately evil or
01:33:35
diabolical or bad with surfing porn once in a while, but it's once in a while. 6
01:33:41
hours a day, we have a problem. A lot of men that watch pornography, and I've had this said to me a few times, um feel an
01:33:46
immense amount of shame um about the behavior. They they wish they didn't. If they could if they could
01:33:52
press a button or write down who they want to be, they probably would be someone that wasn't watching pornography. I think that's probably a
01:33:58
safe assumption to make as a general rule. And the other thing that I've heard is that because of the dopamine
01:34:04
receptors in our brain, it's going to kind of um dampen our in real life
01:34:12
sexual attraction and performance and cause to lead in erectile dysfunction.
01:34:20
All those things are certainly uh plausible, right? I mean uh and also motivation. made the motivation
01:34:27
argument to me if you start messing with your dopamine in such a way that's the same dopamine and same sort of I guess chemical set you need to go and pursue.
01:34:34
Exactly right. And are those people that that you're talking about are they are they ones that we would classify as
01:34:40
being in a dysfunction or even if they watch porn once every four weeks they're feeling great shame and they're self
01:34:46
flagagillating. I don't know. It was actually was I got told this by a I do get DMs from guys that are continually asking me to have
01:34:52
more conversations about pornography because there's shame associated with it. When I looked at the Google search
01:34:58
terms, the most frequent search term in the category that I searched was how do I quit pornography?
01:35:03
And it was by by a way it was it was the astoundingly the most searched thing as
01:35:09
it related to pornography, which is how do I quit? And the question itself is quite desperate, right? So that makes me think that they
01:35:16
are in the wrong side of that curve, right? They're already in disregulation mode because if it were something that
01:35:22
I'm It's kind of like I I eat one bad thing a month. That doesn't seem to be a
01:35:29
bad issue. If I eat three bad things every single day, I will wake up 86
01:35:35
pounds overweight. Right? So again, Aristotle taught us right thing, the
01:35:40
right place, and the right amount. So I don't think that there's a deontological rule and we can if you want explain what
01:35:47
that means. There is no deontological rule that says under all circumstances any porn consumption is diabolical and
01:35:55
evil. I don't think that's true. Now maybe also I'm not a religious Puritan. Maybe if you're a religious Puritan you
01:36:01
say not even watching one second of porn you're the devil. But from a from a non
01:36:07
sort of judgmental, non-puritanical thing. Hey, listen. Uh you've been
01:36:12
outside of a I mean, forgive me. I'm going to be very direct. You're not in a relationship. It's been uh 6 months
01:36:19
since your last sexual encounter. You have certain libidinal drives. You decide to sit and watch some porn that
01:36:26
one time. I don't think that makes you Lucifer. But if you spend six hours a day every day while your wife is saying,
01:36:33
"Hey, are we going to get some sexy time tonight?" And you go, "My refractory period is such refractory is what
01:36:40
happens when is the time between your last ejaculation and when you can get hard again." Well, if I just masturbated
01:36:47
five times today, I'm probably not going to be up for it at night. And so again,
01:36:53
it's a question of is it a dysfunction or is it part of the regular norm of
01:36:58
behavior. So I don't think people have to feel so guilty about watching porn once in a while.
01:37:03
What do you think I I should say to my future son about the world that he's
01:37:10
growing up in in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and
01:37:17
his natural hard wiring? Wow, what a great question. So there is a there is something called the mismatch
01:37:23
hypothesis in evolutionary theory which basically says that many problems that
01:37:29
we face today arise out of a mismatch of a phenomenon that was adaptive in our
01:37:37
ancestral past but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world. Classic example to stick to food. We've
01:37:45
evolved the gustatory preferences to as a response to caloric scarcity and
01:37:51
caloric uncertainty. Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods, gorging on a
01:37:56
lot of food makes perfect evolutionary sense when we don't know when our next meal is coming from. When we live in an
01:38:02
environment of plentitude, then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive. So
01:38:07
if you look at for example I think the top eight or nine killers on the World Health Organization thing they can all
01:38:13
be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis. So I would tell your son knowledge is power to our earlier point
01:38:21
of view getting that degree you never lose in knowing more you being aware of
01:38:27
the mismatch hypothesis dear son will allow you to hopefully not fall as
01:38:32
easily into behavioral traps. And what are the most important because you have a book here called happiness, eight
01:38:38
secrets for leading the good life. If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life, what are the most important things that
01:38:44
I should be aiming at? So I I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets. So
01:38:51
let me maybe discuss a few of each. So by far the two choices that will either
01:38:57
impart upon me the greatest happiness or the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession. Okay.
01:39:04
And let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, "Oh, god damn, not this one
01:39:10
again." I'm not off to a good start. If I wake up next to this to to that person
01:39:16
and I go, "Oh my god, how did I pull that off? What a delight to wake up next
01:39:21
to this person?" Well, that's good. Have they empirically measured this? Have they Not not in the way I'm explaining the
01:39:28
anecdote. Uh, now if I go off after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off
01:39:34
and do things in my day-to-day activities that make me do existential
01:39:39
glee. Oh boy, what a great day I have lined up. I'm going to be working on my next book. I've got uh I've got uh diary
01:39:47
of a CEO that's going to be super fun. A lot of new people are going to hear about some of my ideas. Then I'm going
01:39:52
to maybe have a chat with a graduate student on some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow. Oh, yeah. I mean there's a lot of stress but it's all
01:39:58
gives me a lot of purpose and meaning and then at night I return to that lovely person. I've cracked the the the
01:40:03
happiness code right now. Of course the question is if the devil's in the details what can I do to maximize my
01:40:11
chances that I make those right choices. I explain in the book contrary to 99.9%
01:40:17
of the quote self-help prescriptive books where they tell you exactly with
01:40:23
guarantee here are the eight steps. I explained that life is a statistical game, right? It there are statistical
01:40:30
vagory. So all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness. I can't
01:40:35
guarantee anything, right? You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not
01:40:41
smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly. So earlier I
01:40:47
mentioned birds of a feather flock together versus opposites attract. Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase
01:40:53
your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maximum birds of a feather flock together. Complimentarity works
01:41:00
really nicely in the short term. It doesn't sustain a long-term marriage. The butterflies, the hormones don't last
01:41:07
when you've been in a marriage. That doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later, but that's not going to carry the
01:41:14
train. Okay. Okay. So, but just to give a little bit more, I guess spec specificity and nuance to this. You're
01:41:20
not cuz my partner, she's really into like spiritual stuff. Yes. She's really into like crystals and lots
01:41:25
of things that I'm not into. I think we have a great relationship. We've been together a long time.
01:41:30
And she's like I'm into Manchester United and soccer. She's not into that. Well, we might have to have you revisit
01:41:36
that because I'm a Manchester City guy, but go ahead. Okay. Well, that's the end of the podcast. So, yeah. Um, my apologies. No. Uh, look, I'm not
01:41:45
suggesting that there aren't clear differences in a but if I were to
01:41:51
distill, if I were to to use statistical term, if I were to factor analyze your
01:41:56
most fundamental life principles between you and your partner, do you think
01:42:02
you're more alike or more different? We're more alike. We're we're aligned. That's my point.
01:42:08
Yeah. And this is why I say it because when people hear it, they might think of it as like tastes. No, it's not about taste. It's not about the most
01:42:14
fundamental deontolog, right? I mean what you know my wife loves the fact
01:42:19
that I'm a trutht teller. My love my wife loves the fact that I have purity
01:42:24
in my right she appreciates the fact that you know and similar with her like
01:42:31
for example we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the
01:42:37
other. Many people will will will say, "Oh, you know, if when you trigger jealousy, that spices things up, right?
01:42:43
My wife has never a single time done a single thing, right?" But that's because
01:42:49
she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated. Well, can I ask you as well in there, just are
01:42:55
there things about your wife that you don't have as much, but are fundamental
01:43:01
values, but you're drawn to because she's kind of giving you them? I call
01:43:06
her MacGyver. Do you know do you remember who Macgyver was? Macgyver was a show in the 1980s, I
01:43:12
think, where he was reputed to be able to put things together. He he he's in a
01:43:18
pickle. He's in a cell. So he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar. He right
01:43:25
my wife at a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female.
01:43:31
You give my wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball, she'll make a rocket
01:43:37
and she'll fly you to Mars. She is unbelievably in French you say de bruya. Uh she knows how to put things together
01:43:44
and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do for me for all my fancy academic stuff. Uh take a light
01:43:52
bulb. It'll probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. is basically
01:43:58
Elon Musk of the sad household. I greatly admire that in her and it's
01:44:03
something that I possess very little. I wanted to ask one of the things you said a second ago was about this the
01:44:08
evol evolutionary basis of we're talking about happiness and what it is to be happy. You talked about the partner
01:44:13
part. What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose? Why do we need
01:44:19
that? Right? So we've got a very big frontal lobe. Right? So for remember earlier I
01:44:25
was talking about adaptation versus adaptation. One argument for why we love
01:44:30
literature so much is that it our brains need nourishment via storytelling and
01:44:38
therefore that's an exaptation. My brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me
01:44:43
engaged and therefore literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment to use the food analogy. Right? So I
01:44:51
suspect that because we are sentient beings, right? We we we're not beings
01:44:56
that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right? I
01:45:01
mean, all animals have to solve two problems. Survive and reproduce, right?
01:45:08
That's it. That's the entire game of life. But because we have consciousness,
01:45:13
because we have metaan knowledge, because we are sentient, there needs to be more to life than simply having sex
01:45:20
and reproducing. And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning. So, I'm a
01:45:27
very happy I mean, I should mention though that happiness about 50% of individual differences and happiness
01:45:34
scores comes from our genes. But the good news is is that it leaves 50% up
01:45:39
for grabs, right? So I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than
01:45:45
you. So I'm now winning at the race. But if I don't
01:45:50
have make good choices, if I don't adopt good mindsets, then even though you
01:45:55
started lower than me in an innate sense, you might surpass me. And so it really is an interaction of nature and
01:46:01
nurture uh purpose and meaning. So to that I may be answering it in an oblique
01:46:07
way. I argue and remember I said having a a good partner and having a
01:46:13
good job are the two ways that you can maximize happiness. I argue that the best way to achieve occupational
01:46:20
happiness is two metrics. One of which is going to relate to purpose and meaning.
01:46:26
Having temporal freedom all other things equal is better than not having temporal freedom. Let me
01:46:31
explain what I mean by that. a an airplane pilot once the door shuts the next 16 hours
01:46:40
from LA to Singapore it's set right I mean literally temporarily in terms of time physically I'm stuck right that to
01:46:48
me is unthinkable I float through life I I work harder than most people but I do
01:46:54
it in my own way right now I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book prospectus then I'm going to go train
01:47:00
for an hour then I'm going to go read for 3 hours and that temporal I don't
01:47:06
have what I call scheduling esphixia right that helps me I do
01:47:11
you do try to resolve that if you can number two which is going to speak to purpose and meaning I argue that all
01:47:18
other things equal any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse
01:47:25
is a direct path to purpose and happening happiness uh purpose and meaning what do I mean by that a standup
01:47:32
A comic is creating a routine that until he came along we didn't have. A chef is
01:47:38
creating a dish out of nothing. An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before. An author remember
01:47:45
earlier we were talking I think I think it was off air and you were saying how long did it take you or what was the process? I said you know there's
01:47:51
something magical about writing a book right because there literally is a day where you open the laptop you open a
01:47:57
word document. that word document which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind save doesn't have a
01:48:05
single letter typed it's blank and then through the magic of creation creative
01:48:12
impulse a year later I press the send button a year later you're consuming
01:48:17
that book that has to be a direct path to purpose and meaning now that doesn't mean that the actuarial scientist your
01:48:24
brother doesn't have a worthy life but surely literally a person who wakes up
01:48:30
who's an artist, who's an author, by the nature of him creating says, "Oh,
01:48:37
I can't wait to get to the studio." I doubt that. Maybe not your brother. I doubt that most actuarial scientists go,
01:48:44
"I'm going to get into that actuarial table today like there's no tomorrow. I'm gonna spank that actuarial table."
01:48:50
Okay. Okay. So, putting a bunch of ideas together from your work then to arrive at a conclusion that I haven't heard you say. I read in the consuming instinct
01:49:00
your your other book chapter 4 that younger siblings like me Yes.
01:49:05
youngest of four are more likely to be creative. Oh, you you you pulled that one out.
01:49:11
Okay. So, does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative and creativity is associated with happiness
01:49:16
in the in the way that you just described that I am happier than all of my siblings?
01:49:21
Do you want to guess what Dr. Sad's sibling order is?
01:49:26
You're the youngest by far. So, let me let me explain let me step before I answer that and the way
01:49:32
you frame the question, let me explain what the mechanism is. Okay. I also just want to add one layer to
01:49:37
that as well. I was sat with at a dinner the other day with my um with about 10 of our directors really their founders
01:49:43
of companies essentially and I I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them because I've started to form a bit of a picture about this and I went
01:49:49
around the table and asked every single one of them where do you rank in order of siblings and eight of them ranked as
01:49:55
the youngest sibling. Oh, I love it. That was so crazy. Yeah. Is that Yeah, that's psychology. So, let me tell you
01:50:00
the background to that theory. Okay. Which I've done my own research on and
01:50:05
published work on it. But the original theory comes from Frank Sulloway who's a
01:50:11
historian of science who wrote a book which I highly recommend to all your viewers. Uh it's a
01:50:18
it's a bit technical but you can get through it. It's called Born to Rebel.
01:50:24
It's a book that explores historically the the the the people who've generated
01:50:31
the biggest breakthrough radical scientific innovations and what
01:50:36
was their birth order. And it turns out not unlike how you did it with the 10
01:50:41
and eight of them were last born. Out of the 28 most radical scientific
01:50:47
innovations ever posited, 23 out of the 28 were the the last born
01:50:55
later. Now, so then the question is, okay, well fine, that that's just a phenomenon, but what explains it? Now,
01:51:02
the explanation is mind-blowing. You ready? So Frank Sulloway argued that
01:51:08
typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order, it's from the perspective of the parents
01:51:15
behavior to the child as a function of their birth order. First child, I'm very
01:51:21
strict. Second child, I'm getting tired. Fifth child, run the streets. I don't give a [ __ ] Okay, so that's the causal
01:51:28
causality of the birth order effect. He flipped the whole thing. He said, "No, no, no. much of the impetus of the birth
01:51:35
order effect is coming from the child. And let me explain how he said that one of the fundamental survival problems,
01:51:42
it's an evolutionary theory. One of the fundamental uh survival problems that a
01:51:47
child faces is to differentiate itself from all other siblings to to etch
01:51:57
maximal investment from the parents. How do I do that? So that's called the
01:52:02
Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis. When you start off your firstborn, all
01:52:09
of the niches are unoccupied. There is the I'm a good boy niche. I'm a rebel
01:52:15
niche. I'm a right there. There are many many there's a panel of niches that are unoccupied. So I'm firstborn. I'm going
01:52:23
to pick whichever one. The second born is born. There is n minus one niches. one is
01:52:31
taken. So the I'm a good boy niche. I got to differentiate myself. I'm second.
01:52:36
I'm an [ __ ] niche. I'm a I'm a contrarian niche. Let's keep going down the birth order. There are fewer and
01:52:43
fewer unoccupied niches left for later borns, especially if the siph
01:52:51
argued that that forces the last born to
01:52:56
score differently on key personality traits. one of which is open to
01:53:02
experience. So he argued that later borns up to last borns by virtue of
01:53:08
having to solve that original problem will end up being much bigger out of the box thinkers not being stuck on
01:53:16
conformity on orthodoxy. Hence in the context of scientific innovations the lastborns are the ones who say no this
01:53:22
is [ __ ] I'm going this way. Okay. And so I tested that theory in a
01:53:27
consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that lastborns were much
01:53:33
more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters. So I I took the
01:53:39
exact framework but instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations, I applied it to radical product
01:53:45
innovations and adoptions. Mhm. So, so all that to say that based on
01:53:51
that one could surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to
01:53:57
happiness, then the latterborns would score happier. I I really wonder which
01:54:03
one it is cuz I can attest to kind of both being true. I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but
01:54:09
also by the time I was 10, the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said, "How many are you?"
01:54:14
There's four. Okay. When you said run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood. My my oldest the oldest,
01:54:21
which is my sister Amanda, she if she wasn't home by 9:00 p.m., she was also a
01:54:27
woman, so the rules were slightly different for her. 9:00 p.m. it was it was hell to pay. If I didn't come home for 2 to 3 days, there was no one there
01:54:34
to ground me anyway. And I think that opens you up to experimentation. You
01:54:39
start fiddling with stuff. You start I I was doing all kinds of things in the house, like breaking things apart, looking inside them. started little
01:54:45
businesses selling the cigarettes from my mom's room. Sorry, mother. She really doesn't know that I ever did that, but all these kinds of things which started
01:54:51
to build this, you know, repository of information, but also it built my confidence. Yeah. In a way, which allowed me to be
01:54:57
entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risk. So, it's hard to figure out which one it is. Maybe it's both. It's probably both. I think it's a bit
01:55:03
of both. Uh but yeah, I you know, I haven't been I I know that your team had asked me what are some questions that we
01:55:09
could ask that no one else. Well, certainly pulling up that birth order one, you've succeeded on asking me a
01:55:15
question that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time. So, kudos to you. Well, yeah, it's a incredible. We have a
01:55:20
lot of great researchers. So, and by the way, both my wife and I are
01:55:25
lastorns. So, to to the assortative mating, and I'm not sure if that's been done, and if it hasn't been done, it' be
01:55:31
very easy to do, right? So, here's an experiment. If anybody steals it, I better get the credit. You just look at a thousand
01:55:39
marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then
01:55:44
see if there is a sort of mating on birth or ownership. Interesting. Boom. There's there's your thesis for
01:55:51
your undergraduate psychology degree, which you will pursue and send me an email that I deserve the credit for
01:55:57
having forced. Why don't I just run this as a advert on social media as a survey and and so I can get a link run it as a
01:56:04
Facebook meta ad at people and say um are you married? If they say they are I'll say how long have you been married
01:56:10
they'll say how long I said are you and your partner where do you rank in terms of birth order and then I can get the
01:56:15
stats. Absolutely. So many studies now scientific studies are conducted online
01:56:21
and they can be conducted online in exactly the way that you said you use existing social portals to have a big
01:56:26
wave of data collection. But there are other ways by the way you could have you have you heard of mTurk? No.
01:56:32
So mturk is a platform where people sign up to be participants. Right. Now, let's
01:56:40
say I'm a researcher and I say, I want men over 18 years old. Okay.
01:56:47
Mhm. Well, that's easier to get than if I were to say, I want men who are over 18
01:56:53
years old, shorter than 6 feet, and from Lithuania, and they're diabetic. Now depending on how I structure my criteria
01:57:02
of inclusion, the price that I have to pay for getting those participants will go up.
01:57:09
Yeah. Right. So if I'm running a study, I just need male and female adults to run a
01:57:15
study on this task. It ends up being a few cents. And so it has opened up the
01:57:21
velocity at which we can do research, scientific research, not just stuff I post on Twitter. scientific research it
01:57:28
has increased it 10fold. So, so you can certainly do that. We'll do it. So, we will I set this as a challenge for my research team and our
01:57:34
data science team which is to run a survey on social media using adverts.
01:57:39
So, digital adverts, Facebook ads, meta ads, X ads, whatever. And the survey should basically seek to answer first
01:57:45
their gender, their marital status, ask what birth order they fell in, and then ask what order their birth their marital
01:57:53
partner fell into. But then also understand how long they've been together because we want to check these marriages are legit. Absolutely. And I'll put it on the screen.
01:57:59
That'd be so cool. And please share with the result. Well, by the way, what we're doing right now is what I call So in the
01:58:07
in the happiness uh book, I have a chapter called life as a playground. And
01:58:12
I argue that science is the highest form of play because what when you're doing a
01:58:18
1,00 piece puzzle, you're putting which puzzle, which piece goes with what. Well, what's science? There's a bunch of variables floating around. Does this one
01:58:25
correlate with this one? Does this one cause this one or the other way? I'm just playing now and I'm getting paid
01:58:30
for it. How could I not be happy? Mhm. But the puzzle of life, unfortunately, it's the puzzle is
01:58:36
three-dimensional, which means sometimes you think you got it in the right place, but actually it was just 100 years
01:58:41
later, you find out that it was completely wokeness. Yes, sir.
01:58:47
It's it's really intriguing to me that the evolutionary scientists that I've spoken to have for some reason all found
01:58:54
themselves on the subject of wokeness in society and it and it's hard for the
01:58:59
average person to maybe understand the link between evolutionary science and wokeness and politics.
01:59:04
Right. So you want me try to tease those out? Yeah. And what well how did you find yourself talking about the idea of
01:59:10
wokeness? Right. So it it all began as we mentioned earlier in our chat when I saw
01:59:16
the rejection of biology in explaining human affairs which is something that I
01:59:22
called biophobia. The fear of using biology to explain human affairs and at the time it was in the service of the
01:59:28
scientific work that I was doing. I mean what do you mean you're desk rejecting my paper at a journal because you don't
01:59:34
think that biology is relevant to consumer behavior? How could it be otherwise? That's insane. So that's when I was
01:59:40
first exposed to the possibility of a human a human mind being parasitized
01:59:46
right. Uh now let me explain why I use the parasitic framework how I came up
01:59:52
with that. So one of the things that you do as an evolutionary scientist when you're trying to understand the
01:59:58
evolutionary signature of a behavior you often will compare it across species. Remember earlier I talked about testes
02:00:05
size and uh AC and across primates and female right? So it was many different
02:00:11
species and that allows you to then draw a final principle based on comparing all
02:00:17
those species. So I started looking through the animal literature to look for something that might explain why do
02:00:24
animals do insane things. And so that's when I fell on the field of
02:00:30
parasettology, which is just the study of parasites. But I wasn't looking for because a tapeworm is a parasite, but it
02:00:37
goes into your intestinal tract. I wanted the parasites that go into your brain, those are called neuroparasites.
02:00:44
And it turns out that there's a very I mean, it's almost like science fiction. There's a whole field of study that's
02:00:50
that explores this host parasite dynamic where the parasite is trying to enter
02:00:58
the host's brain alter its circuitry to suit its interests. What is a parasite?
02:01:03
So a parasite is usually I mean literally a brain worm. So for example,
02:01:09
toxopplasma Gandhi is a parasite that can infect human minds, but it most
02:01:14
famously infects the minds of mice. When they are parasetized in their brains by
02:01:20
this parasite, they become sexually attracted to cats and their sex and
02:01:25
their urine, which is not a good. Yeah. So let let me give you a few examples. There's a wood cricket, an
02:01:33
actual cricket that abhores water. Okay. it it doesn't like it stays clear of
02:01:38
water when it is paracetized by a hairmworm
02:01:44
needs to get the wood cricket to jump in water because it could only complete its
02:01:50
reproductive cycle in water. So a wood cricket that doesn't have the brain worm
02:01:55
looks at the water and says I'm staying away. A wood cricket that is paracetized by this hairworm jumps into the water
02:02:03
merely to its death because it has altered its neurosircuitry to suit its
02:02:08
interest. Okay. So when I saw that field neuroparictology I had my Euroka Eureka moment just like
02:02:15
I did when I first discovered evolutionary psychology. I said, I will now use the neuroparacettological model
02:02:23
to argue that human beings can not only be paracetized by actual physical
02:02:29
brainworms, they could be parasetized by ideological brainworms. And so
02:02:35
continuing the metaphor, I said, so what are these parasites? Postmodernism is a
02:02:41
parasitic idea. So, so postmodernism actually I argue that that is the
02:02:47
granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because postmodernism purports that there are no objective
02:02:53
truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths. So,
02:03:00
and the reason for that is everything is shackled by biases. Everything is
02:03:05
shackled by subjectivity. So, to speak of an objective truth with a capital T
02:03:10
is nonsense. Everything is subjective. And therefore, I argue in the book that
02:03:16
all of these parasitic ideas originally started with a noble goal. And in the
02:03:22
service of that goal, if there has to be a collateral damage called truth, so be it. It's a worthwhile collateral damage
02:03:29
in the service of that higher social justice goal. No, it's a deontological
02:03:35
principle. It's an absolute. Right? So you never pursue science in a biased
02:03:41
manner. Freedom of speech is available to all. It's not I believe in freedom of
02:03:46
speech but not for Donald Trump. Then you're being a consequentialist.
02:03:51
So that's what the book is about. It traces the history of all these parasitic ideas and then it offers a
02:03:58
mind vaccine against that stupidity. What if the freedom of speech causes
02:04:05
harm? Yes. to people and risks their lives. That's a great question. So, I am a free
02:04:12
speech absolutist. And so, let me explain what that means. We didn't get into my personal history. I'll just give
02:04:18
it for the relevance of what I'm about to say. I was born in Lebanon. I grew up
02:04:24
in Lebanon and we escaped Lebanon under imminent death because of being Jewish.
02:04:30
Okay? So my Jewish identity caused me to come
02:04:35
close to being eradicated. Give me some color and detail to that story.
02:04:40
So I was born in Lebanon in the 60s. Uh Lebanon was historically referred to as
02:04:45
the Paris of the Middle East. Progressive tolerant Lebanon. Progressive tolerant in the context of
02:04:51
the Middle East, which means something very different than progressive and tolerant in the West. And you'll see in a second why. When I was 5 years old,
02:05:00
uh, Gamal Abd Naser, who was the president of Egypt, who was a very
02:05:05
popular figure in the Arab world because he was what's called a panarabist, meaning he was trying to unify the Arab
02:05:10
people under one umbrella, right? To hopefully defeat the pesky Jews and so
02:05:17
on. He passed away. when he passed away when I was five years old, as so often happens in the Middle East, people take
02:05:25
to the streets to scream and shout and burn and lament and so on. And as they were proceeding down my street where I
02:05:32
lived as a 5-year-old child, the the screaming was death to Jews, death to
02:05:38
Jews. So I turned to my mother and say, "Why why are they screaming death? What
02:05:43
do we have to do with this?" Hi, don't don't put your head out. Okay, so that was my first time where I saw, wait a
02:05:49
minute, there there are people out there that want me dead because I'm Jewish. Fast forward a few years later, we're in
02:05:56
class and the teacher, this is pre-Ivil War, okay? The Civil War started in 75.
02:06:02
Uh, sitting in class, teacher says, every to everybody, please stand up and say what you want to be when you grow
02:06:08
up. I want to be a policeman. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a soccer player. One kid gets up who I had known
02:06:16
through all the years of elementary school who knew I was Jewish said, "When I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to
02:06:22
rockus applause and laughter and so on." Then the Lebanese war broke out. It
02:06:27
became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon. We left Lebanon under very,
02:06:32
very difficult conditions. Once we immigrated to Montreal, Canada, my parents,
02:06:39
maybe they regret it now, kept returning to Lebanon because we still had business interest in full-fledged brutal massive
02:06:47
war. On one of their return trips in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah,
02:06:53
which is one of the Palestinian factions. Some really bad things
02:06:59
happened to them. But then luckily through the connections that we had we
02:07:05
were able to get them out. Some bad things happened to them inside captivity.
02:07:10
I mean you can imagine they were tortured. Yeah. Uh my mother said and I' I've
02:07:18
seldom said this. I'm only saying it because you you're asking. My biggest fear when I found out the story after
02:07:25
the fact. I didn't even know they were I didn't know that they they they were kidnapped as it happened. I knew there
02:07:32
was a lot of mayhem in the house and I was asking what's going on. They said, "Oh, mom and dad have some business issues." They were lying to me to
02:07:37
protect me. I'm I'm 15 years old. Okay. Although there was a kid at school in my high school who whose parents were very
02:07:45
good friends of my parents, also Lebanese Jews. He knew that my parents were kidnapped. I didn't know they were
02:07:52
kidnapped. And later I found out that as he saw me in high school walking around
02:07:57
and laughing and joking, he thought, "Boy, this guy is made of ice. I mean, he's he's callous that he's taking it so
02:08:07
relaxed." But actually, I didn't know that this he knew, but I didn't know. Okay. So when they came out of captivity
02:08:14
and came back to Montreal, my biggest speak about evolutionary psychology and
02:08:19
the male mindset, my biggest fear was whether my mother had been raped.
02:08:26
Now she told me stories of whatever, but she said that she she says I never knew
02:08:31
if it was true and we only discussed it that one time and we never discussed it again. She said that no, she wasn't.
02:08:38
Now, I don't know if she lied about that. She She said some other really bad things. I mean, I'm not going
02:08:43
to get into all of it, but I've always wondered whether she said that just so
02:08:48
that, you know, it's not exactly, you know, it's shame and so on. But I
02:08:54
remember that if she had said yes, my thinking as a 15year-old boy was that I
02:09:00
would spend the rest of my life seeking vengeance on those [ __ ] Okay? So, it wasn't a pleasant upbringing. I could
02:09:06
tell you stories that you wouldn't believe. It would be much worse than Rambo. So now coming back to your uh
02:09:12
freedom of speech issue and if it causes harm. I am Jewish with my personal
02:09:18
history. I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew the most
02:09:25
offensive thing possible which is they are rejecting a documented historical
02:09:31
reality where 6 million people were exterminated. Nothing could be more offensive. No, it never happened. So you
02:09:38
want to talk about hurt and offense and insult, that's it. But in a free society, I have to tolerate racists,
02:09:46
imbeiles, [ __ ] falsehood spreaders. I beat them by speaking here by telling
02:09:52
better ideas. So the only context where I don't support freedom of speech, it's
02:09:58
already enshrined in the first amendment, direct incitement to violence. Okay. So, let me draw a thing.
02:10:06
I go I'm I'm a let's suppose I were a white supremacist or neo-Nazi. If I get
02:10:12
up on a show and say Judaism is a croc of [ __ ] it's useless. It's the most
02:10:19
disgusting religion. Totally okay. Freedom of speech. If I say later
02:10:25
tonight at the corner of Lens, Lexington and 6th Avenue there is a synagogue.
02:10:31
Let's go to when they come out of service and beat the hell out of those Jews, if not kill them. That's not okay.
02:10:38
Now, it has to be direct incitement of violence. So, you can't say criticizing
02:10:43
Judaism or Islam can create Islamophobia, [ __ ] No ideology is
02:10:50
above scrutiny. No belief system is above scrutiny. Your feelings are hurt,
02:10:56
f off. Grow a pair. Okay? So, as long as you don't say, "Let's kill the Jews,
02:11:03
spend all the rest of your life criticizing Judaism," that's your right. Some people will say that it's kind of
02:11:10
like I was thinking of it like a staircase. As you were speaking, I was drawing a staircase because if I sat here and I said I consider myself to be
02:11:17
a black man. I mean, I'm half black. I guess my my mother's Niger and my father's English. But if I was to sit
02:11:22
here and say all mixed ethnicity people like myself are evil, they are
02:11:29
disgusting, they are vultures, they are vermin, which is some of that sort of 1940s
02:11:35
narrative towards um the Jewish population. It's not long before if if
02:11:41
me as a podcaster and many more of us all got behind that narrative, you would see this inevitable rise in people going
02:11:47
out there and killing people that are mixed race. Yes. And this is this is where it becomes tricky, right? So for me, Joe Rogan, Lex
02:11:54
Freedman, Andrew Huberman, all of the, you know, podcasters who have who have a significant audience, Alex Cooper, you
02:12:00
name them, all started hitting a specific group of people with a narrative. I'm convinced there'd be a
02:12:06
rise in violence towards those people just walking down the street and living their lives. Right. And this is where the issue arises.
02:12:11
Okay. So then let me let me let me test your belief. Are you familiar with the grooming gangs in Britain?
02:12:18
I'm familiar with the notion of it. Yeah. I I know I think I know what you're going to say. I think I've heard. So up and down England, in every town
02:12:26
that you can think of, big or small, for the past 30 plus years, there's been an
02:12:31
industrial scale level grooming and raping of white British girls. The
02:12:37
perpetrators are 90% plus on the conservative estimate, 90%. Coming from
02:12:44
one background and one ideology. Is it marginalizing and insulting to identify
02:12:51
that ideology? I'd say it's not because it's probably import an important data point to understand the causation of a
02:12:58
of a thing. Okay, let me give you another example.
02:13:04
Um, American prisons are predominantly occupied by black men or at least it
02:13:10
overindexes with black men versus the population ratios. So, are black men
02:13:15
therefore criminals um at birth? Right. Well, that the way I
02:13:23
would address that is I would defeat that statement with science. So, I would
02:13:29
say, can you show me the data that suggests that dispositionally, meaning
02:13:34
innately? What would be the mechanism by which uh black men are higher than white
02:13:40
men? Now, if you show it, great. But I'm willing to bet you can't show it. Therefore, what you just stated is a
02:13:46
bunch of [ __ ] And you know how what you're going to suffer are the social consequences and stigma of being a racist [ __ ] But I I let you say it,
02:13:53
but I'll defeat your idea. On the other hand, if you said uh if we look at
02:13:59
patterns of criminality in the United States, are black men
02:14:05
exponentially uh over represented? Yes. Now, we can
02:14:10
say it's because it's white supremacy that causes black men to kill white
02:14:16
people. Or we could say, could there be any positive agents that if we are
02:14:22
caring decent people, maybe we should talk about openly? Well, in today's world, I couldn't even I say I don't
02:14:29
give a [ __ ] But most people would say, don't even say that that there's a greater incidence of black criminality.
02:14:35
That itself is racist and you're marginalizing people. So that's why I don't believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.
02:14:42
Forbidden knowledge is the idea that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued precisely because of your
02:14:49
scare staircase. It's going to result in negative downstream effects. I argue
02:14:55
that that's a grotesqually dangerous principle. Why? So here I'm going to introduce the term and explain it which
02:15:02
I've mentioned earlier. In ethics there are two ethical systems. There is what's called deontological ethics and
02:15:09
consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics is absolute statements like
02:15:14
contient imperatives. It is never okay to lie. That would be a deontological
02:15:20
statement. A consequentialist statement would be it is okay to lie to spare
02:15:25
someone's feelings. So I always joke if you want to have a long happy marriage
02:15:30
when you hear the following question. Do I look fat in those jeans? put on your
02:15:36
consequentialist hat really fast and say, "No, sweetie. You've never looked more beautiful. I might have just lied,
02:15:43
but I just spared my partner, my wife's feelings." So, for many, many things, it
02:15:49
makes perfect sense that we all wear our consequentialist hat. But there are
02:15:55
certain principles that are foundational that by the very definition of that
02:16:01
principle have to be deontological. Okay. Freedom of speech is
02:16:06
deontological. The pursuit of truth has to be deontological. Presumption of
02:16:11
innocence in the justice system has to be deenthological. Right? Journalistic
02:16:16
integrity if you truly are a truth reporter has to be deontological. But what have we seen throughout the last
02:16:22
four or five years? Let me show you violations of these. I believe in freedom of speech but not for Donald
02:16:30
Trump. the antlogical principle has become consequentialist. I believe in journalistic integrity, but
02:16:37
not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop because if we release that information, then h then Joe Biden loses
02:16:45
to Orange Himmler and then that's too bad. So, it's perfectly okay to suppress
02:16:51
what we now know is an absolutely true laptop where there is astronomical
02:16:57
political corruption, but it was okay to lie. I believe in presumption of
02:17:02
innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaaugh because, you know, he's a gang rapist
02:17:07
going up and down the eastern seabboard raping everybody. Now, of course, we have no data to support that, no
02:17:13
evidence. And the one who accused him one day before the confirmation said that she thinks it was 36 years later.
02:17:20
It could have been 38. It could have been last week. I can't really remember, but I know that he sexually assault me
02:17:26
and we don't really care about this thing called evidence. A lot of my super fancy colleagues in friends said, "Oh, I
02:17:34
know that we should assume that someone is presumptively innocent, but it's too important in this case to apply that
02:17:40
deontological principle." They didn't use that word. They don't even know it. So in this case, let us just assume that
02:17:45
Brad Kavanaaugh was a serial rapist. So no, there is no forbidden knowledge in
02:17:51
science. I I'll give you a great example. There's a guy called, his name escapes me right now. He was a
02:17:57
psychologist at University of Western Ontario who spent his entire career
02:18:02
studying racial differences. And here's now the worst part in
02:18:08
intelligence. Okay. So, I remember one time this is I don't think I've ever mentioned this story personaliz so
02:18:15
you're getting an exclusive here. 1996 I'm speaking at the international congress of psychology.
02:18:21
I'm a young professor just out of my PhD. I'm talking about something very
02:18:27
non controversial about what are the types of strategies that people use when they're making decisions under time
02:18:33
pressure. And I'm in a room. So, there are four other speakers in that session.
02:18:39
Okay? and the room is filled with maybe 1500 people and there is like this real
02:18:45
electricity and I'm and I'm not a very nervous public speaker thinking what's
02:18:51
going on here why is there such tension well I found out I had I hadn't looked
02:18:56
at the program the guy who gets up to speak before me is that infamous psychologist who now starts putting up
02:19:04
graphs of the intelligence of white women black women black men And I said,
02:19:09
"Oh my god, I'm dead. I'm going to be lynched by proxy." Now, here's the good news. When he finished his talk and I'm
02:19:17
next, about 1,425 out of the 1500 people rushed out of the
02:19:24
room to follow him and badger him. And I was like, that was the only time in my life where I said, "Thank God that everybody's left." Usually, you want
02:19:30
more people in the audience. I was like, "Oh, thank God." And then I have got like, you know, 70 people there. I'm
02:19:36
right now. in his case. I've asked close colleagues of his uh and as I'm talking
02:19:43
I'm trying to remember his name. Philip Rushton, that's his name. Philip Rushton, they people could check him
02:19:48
out. I've asked some of his colleagues, do was this guy was he a racist? Because
02:19:54
he's always said, look, I just collected the data and I presented the data and I
02:20:00
offered possible explanations. Now, even something as contentious as
02:20:06
potentially incendiary as that, I would argue if you truly collected the data in
02:20:14
a completely unbiased manner, you should not be not publishing it because it's
02:20:21
going to appear racist. Well, what do you think? Do you think I care if something's true or not? And I think I have the,
02:20:28
you know, I have the what? I don't know. I don't know what the word is. Strength of character.
02:20:34
I don't want to I don't want to pretend like I'm some like hero that's pursuing truth at all costs because that's not
02:20:39
how I feel about myself. What I would rather know is what's true because then I can deal with the truth and the truth doesn't offend me in any
02:20:46
way. If you told me now that 31-year-old mixed race guys that have Nigerian
02:20:51
heritage and their father's from Coventry are statistically dumber and and it was robust, I would believe it
02:20:57
and I would be okay with it. 0% of me would would suffer any offense. 0%. of a
02:21:02
strong personhood. Maybe that's it. There's nothing that I'm so happy with who I am in myself.
02:21:08
I'm so content with my own life and the way that I found it that if you told me that my brain size means that I'm weak
02:21:14
in X, Y, and Zed, which literally a doctor told me cuz they scan my brain and said, "Oh, you've got ADHD, which means you're going to be bad at all these things. Your handwriting is going
02:21:20
to be bad." I go, "Cool." Yeah. There's no offense taken. But I can also imagine a world where a certain someone
02:21:27
with a certain disposition might just take offense to a lot of things. So then in that case we have we're at a
02:21:33
bifurcation at that point. We can either say to anyone who might be offended please
02:21:40
grow a pair because the world is requires anti-fragility and there are
02:21:45
stressors in life that are going to hurt you and you'll thank me later for me teaching you to have to grow a pair. Or
02:21:52
we can take the other road which says let's sanitize the world so that we maximize that no one is ever hurt
02:22:01
because we're kind and compassionate people. And if in that service of that sanitization process we have to murder
02:22:07
truth so be it. And that's by the way what leads to all those parasitic ideas because as I said I'm I'm trying to be
02:22:13
charitable to the to the promulgators of those [ __ ] ideas. They it starts off
02:22:19
with a noble cause right? They're trying to improve the world in their warped sense. And because that's the highest
02:22:26
goal, they end up if I have to murder truth, that's that's a collateral damage. It's okay, right? I don't want
02:22:33
to I don't want a 6'4 guy who's got a stronger jawline than me and a beard to
02:22:40
say, "Please address me as she and you better do so." And it's a governmental
02:22:45
edict, right? That that's what Jordan Peterson and I, we were both summit. I
02:22:51
mean separately by the Canadian government to appear in front of the Canadian Senate when we were offering
02:22:57
our warnings against it's now bill but at the time it was a table bill called
02:23:02
Bill C16 which was trying to incorporate gender identity and gender uh
02:23:08
orientation or whatever it's called into the hate law rubric. And my position was
02:23:14
yes, of course, we should seek to have a world where everybody lives dignified lives free of bigotry. But should I be
02:23:23
teaching in my evolutionary psychology courses that there is no such thing as male female that we clearly know that so
02:23:29
then sexual selection that Darwin taught us is no longer true. And they all started scoffing and mocking in a
02:23:35
theater of the absurd. Well, pretty much I hate to be the guy who says I told you so, but lit. I mean literally every
02:23:41
single thing that I predicted came out to be true because once you lose the reflex to have a deontological defense
02:23:49
of a deontological principle then all bets are off. An objective sense objective sense. No. Of course I fight
02:23:56
for the right of everybody to live lives free of dignity. But you can't play
02:24:02
sports with a girl. I mean in what world do we live in? I played sports with a girl last night.
02:24:08
I don't want to hear about it. co-ed football. We played soccer. Ah, is that right? Okay. But you know what I mean. You shouldn't run the 100
02:24:13
meters and call yourself I mean you know the Leah Thomas case, the the swimmer swimmer. Yeah.
02:24:19
I mean imagine the level of pathological narcissism that you must experience where you say the need for me to
02:24:25
reaffirm my identity even if he truly held that identity is supersedes the
02:24:31
rights of all those women. Yeah. Do you know what just to give my position on on this? I if someone asked
02:24:38
me if someone had the jawline you described and they asked me to refer to them as a woman and they were wearing a
02:24:43
dress. I've got no problem with that. Okay. I'm going to refer to if you if that's what you you want me to refer to you as
02:24:50
in the same way that if when I asked you before the start of this conversation, how do you want to be referred to? You told me your name, your title, etc. I
02:24:56
will because again, it's not hurting me, right to to refer to you as she, he, they,
02:25:01
whatever you want. And if that's going to make you feel um better about yourself then on a costbenefit analysis
02:25:08
in my head I go it's costing me nothing to refer to you as that. Yes. If it then has implications which shift
02:25:15
that costbenefit analysis i.e there's harm caused to another group of people
02:25:20
because of that or I'm I'm you know I might be thrown in prison if I accidentally make a mistake. That's
02:25:25
where I think I think that's a little I think I completely agree with that. Right. as long as you don't harm others
02:25:32
in that calculus in that dynamic and as long as it's not compelled right so and I've said it I said look if if I I I've
02:25:39
never had this in my classes but let's suppose a student came to me privately and said you know I'd like to do you think I'm going to say no way [ __ ]
02:25:46
I'm going to no I will I will go along as you said but if it's the government who says you better do it now we're
02:25:52
different if the government says you better start putting he him in uh in
02:25:57
your electronics signature. No. Right. I'll give you an example. I think in the
02:26:03
Canadian uh government has now issued for passports a thing whereby because
02:26:09
you want to be inclusive and kind to non-binary people, which basically makes
02:26:15
up one out of every 15,000 people. So, it's not even the tyranny of the minor
02:26:21
of the minority. It's the ten tyranny of the minority minority minority. I mean, it's really it's a unicorn. Non-binary.
02:26:29
Non-binary is I'm neither male, neither female. So, because historically, you
02:26:34
know, sexually reproducing species, male, female phenotype, that to put male and female marginalizes the non-binary.
02:26:43
Now, we lose that marker. No, no, no. I want to be referred as a biological
02:26:49
male. My wife is a biological female. my children also have. So all of our most
02:26:56
fundamental biological markers should be erased lest it might offend the one in
02:27:03
50,000 nonb No. So that speaks to your first point which is what about causing harm to other people. So yes, I will
02:27:09
never go out of my way to be frivolously mean to someone and my default value will be to be kind to you. But your need
02:27:17
to honor your identity doesn't mean that I get to go on the celebratory train with
02:27:24
you. Do you know who sometimes gets caught in the crossfire on these issues? And it's not just with the issue around gender,
02:27:29
it's around, you know, religion and race and these kinds of things are the people in that group, in that minority group
02:27:36
who agree. Yeah. But because they identify as maybe the the a sex that wasn't the sex they
02:27:42
were born as, they then get they get the abuse. You talked about it being
02:27:48
difficult now being a a Jewish person in Canada. Yeah. It's it's really difficult, I think, in
02:27:53
this current moment to be a trans person in this world because this macro debate is raging,
02:27:58
right? It's raging on if I go on Twitter, if I go on YouTube, it's it's passionately raging on both sides. And I want I got
02:28:05
friends that identify as they them um and they aren't participating in this
02:28:10
raging war, but I I imagine I would imagine that the probability of them experiencing abuse now walking down the
02:28:16
street has increased. And again, I guess this is this is goes back to the sort of consequential truth versus the objective
02:28:23
truth. But those are the people I feel sorry for because I know them. They're not in this like
02:28:29
screaming ex war, but their lives have been made worse because of all of this stuff.
02:28:34
That's sad. And they're just minding their own business, getting on with their lives, loving whoever they love, identifying however they want. And I feel that's
02:28:39
kind of I that's the group of people that I feel most emp most empathy towards in this current debate.
02:28:45
Yeah. No, I hear you. I hear you. By the way, only because you mentioned the word empathy. So my next book is titled
02:28:51
suicidal empathy. Because in the book what I'm arguing to our earlier point about to be properly modulated and
02:28:59
regulated I argue that the the emotion of empathy has clear evolutionary reasons right I mean there are adaptive
02:29:06
reasons why each of our emotions has have has evolved the problem is when it
02:29:12
misfires. Yeah. When not only it misfires in that for example it becomes hyperactive but when
02:29:18
it also misfires to the wrong target. So if I'm empathetic to the transerson to
02:29:25
the detriment of all biological women, that's a misfire, right? Yes, it would be great for immigrants to
02:29:32
come in legally to experience the beauty of the West. I am an immigrant. Elon Musk is an immigrant.
02:29:38
I I guess I am. I was born in Botswana, but you're an immigrant, but you hopefully came in legally. That doesn't mean
02:29:44
No comment. Sorry. No comment. No. Uh but opening the door to 10 million 12
02:29:52
million because it's not fair for Guatemalans and Al Salvador and not to come in and share the experience. No,
02:29:58
that's not right. uh life you know who Thomas Soil is the the famous economist
02:30:03
he's a yeah you mentioned I think you mentioned I mentioned before right Thomas soil uh who's an economist said look I'm
02:30:09
paraphrasing his words and I agree with it economics is this is the study of
02:30:15
tradeoffs of cost benefits right if we had infinite resources then yes let's
02:30:21
give free health care to every human who's ever lived and will ever live but that's not the world we live in so if I
02:30:28
am a paying uh taxpaying citizen who's paid into the
02:30:33
system for 40 years. Do I like the idea that someone can come across the southern border and have the exact same
02:30:40
rights as me? Does that seem like it's the proper directing of empathy? Maybe
02:30:45
not. If if you're homeless, it's a very bad thing. Does that mean that your rights to be shooting up uh the drugs in
02:30:54
the public park where my children play supersedes their rights? And so in the
02:30:59
next book, I'm going to be looking at a bunch of policy decisions that in my
02:31:04
view are disastrous and argue that they all stem from this reflex of suicidal
02:31:12
empathy. If one immigrant crosses the the border into America and they go to Texas and it
02:31:18
improves their quality of life, who does that hurt? Deontologically? Everybody.
02:31:24
Why? Because there are rules and laws, right? Is it is do you teach your future
02:31:31
children, God willing, don't steal, or do you live in San Francisco where it's
02:31:37
okay to steal if it's under 950? What are you going to teach your kids? Don't steal. That's it. You answer your question.
02:31:42
What are they stealing? They're stealing the money that should go to people who've paid taxes for 40
02:31:49
years. They're stealing my right to Okay, I I did my masters. I'm I'm going to say this not because I'm
02:31:57
uh signaling my CV because it's relevant to the story. I did my masters of
02:32:02
science and my PhD at Cornell. I was a professor at Cornell, professor at Dartmouth and a professor at UC Irvine.
02:32:10
I'm probably one of the best known professors around. If I want to come as a Canadian to the United States, do you
02:32:17
know what I have to do? I have to follow the law. I can't come and say I'm going
02:32:23
to live here and I'm going to work here and I'm going to take this job and I'm right I mean I I literally get stopped
02:32:31
and taken to another room where they say are you making money and many of the border recognize me will take pictures
02:32:38
with me because it's a country of laws and therefore I with whatever
02:32:46
attributes I might bring that are positive to the United States has to go through a formal process. But if I'm an
02:32:53
MS13 gang member with two tier tattoos on two tears tattoos that says that I've
02:32:59
killed two people in El Salvador and I walk in, do you think does is your reflex and intuition, Stephen saying,
02:33:06
but it's not fair to let him in. We we understand why very dangerous 59year-old
02:33:12
professor Gatsad should we should really vet him and he should go through the legal process before my biggest goal in
02:33:20
life is to live in Southern California. I haven't been able to because legally I can't I don't have a professorship here.
02:33:26
That's the thing that hurts me the most. I don't live in the luminosity of the sun. So that [ __ ] who comes in
02:33:32
illegally is hurting me because I'm freezing in Montreal. He's not hiding. He is hurting me.
02:33:38
Why? Because once the legal system breaks
02:33:43
down, then all bets are off. So what's happened in San Francisco where all of
02:33:50
the retail shops have closed? So crazy. I was talking to my friends about this this morning.
02:33:55
Oh, I sent a photo to my friends of a CVS and said, "Why is toothpaste and chewing gum locked in a glass cage in CVS in
02:34:01
America? America's going to be the richest economy in the world. It's going to be the, you know, the the apple of everyone's eye." And I went to a CVS yes
02:34:08
yesterday and I asked for um some deodorant and some mouthwash and then I
02:34:13
was like it's trapped behind a cage mouthwash deodorant. Do you see that you you know what happened?
02:34:19
What? I I so you press a button and someone comes over to you to open the cage to
02:34:25
give you the like toothbrush and they open the c and I said to the guy why do you trap it all behind glass
02:34:31
cages? and he tapped me on the shoulder and he pointed down an aisle and he says, "Look." And as I looked down the
02:34:38
aisle, there was a man stealing and putting putting stuff in his socks.
02:34:43
So, do you do you do you I hope you understand that you just answered that question, right? Because if I steal that
02:34:50
one toothpaste, am I really hurting you, Stephen? You live in England. How How is
02:34:56
saying to that guy in San Francisco, don't steal? No, it's deontological. You
02:35:01
are hurting me. You're hurting me deontologically. You're hurting the ability for society to have predictable
02:35:09
laws, predictable cause and effect relationships. If you steal, you'll be
02:35:15
punished. Does this rely on society being fair though? And your next point is going to be it's
02:35:20
not fair, therefore why should we have laws? Yeah. Well, just wondering because if if people see that and they go, well, I
02:35:26
don't know the answer here, so I'm just posting questions. I'm really intrigued by this train of thought. So I understand what you're saying. We do
02:35:32
need laws. And I accept that point because if we didn't have laws, then all systems kind of fall apart, things fail,
02:35:38
then people won't want to come here anyway. The reason they want to come here in part is because there's laws and that's created a society. But does it is
02:35:45
is that theory of sort of moral theory contingent on the fact that the society is fair and then obviously people would
02:35:51
then argue that this society isn't fair because they've got there's people with their fingers on the scales. No society is perfect. But as someone
02:35:58
who is buffeted from the sample of societies outside of the west, no
02:36:04
society is better than we you have here. Meaning that if you look at some of the
02:36:09
staunchest defenders of the western tradition, it may or may not surprise you, Stephen, to know that many of them
02:36:16
are immigrants, right? I often use the example of Ayan Hersy Ali, right? The
02:36:21
Somali immigrant who's one of the staunchest. She's she's Muslim herself. She's one of the strongest critics of
02:36:28
Islam. Why? Because she has sampled the buffet of that society. She didn't go to Welssley College where it's rarified in
02:36:35
Boston and then she can pontificate while she bought her kafia from Amazon. Right? She's lived that. I don't have to
02:36:43
pontificate about things that I know nothing about. I grew up in the Middle East. So therefore people who've lived
02:36:48
those experiences can come to the west and say hey guys in the west you think that this society is the default value
02:36:56
of societies. No no no this is a bleep. This is an anomaly. You should really work hard to defend what you have. You
02:37:03
crack the code of the values that you need to have foundationally for everything to flourish. This is not
02:37:09
normal. This is anomalous. But once you start having consequentialist intrusions
02:37:15
into those deontological systems, it breaks down very quickly. As you saw in San Francisco, as you saw in the rush of
02:37:22
millions of people to the border because the most fundamental law of law, I mean Newton talked about every reaction,
02:37:28
every action has a reaction. Let's put it in other terms, cause and effect. Once you break that law, you're breaking
02:37:35
the most fundamental laws of nature, right? So, should a felon have a 68th
02:37:42
chance? So, you've now been arrested again and then we go through your record
02:37:48
and we find that you've been arrested 67
02:37:53
previous times. How many times must you be arrested for you to have lost your
02:38:01
opportunity for another chance? Right? Because that 68th time, that suicidal
02:38:07
empathy, because I'm so progressive, led to that woman being killed, was her
02:38:14
life worthwhile that we might have wanted to be a bit harder on you. So that's what I mean at. So yes, of
02:38:20
course, I support the right of people to better their lives. And we're all coming
02:38:26
from a nation of immigrants legally, man. And also the other point I guess is that
02:38:32
people would rebuttal and say about their the privilege. They'd say, "Steve, you know, um you got tremendous
02:38:38
privilege because of the parents you had and they brought you to the UK when you were a baby from Africa." And
02:38:44
I'm stopping you. And they'll say you got they'll say you got genetic privilege. They'll say, you know, you your dad had a good brain and
02:38:50
he's passed some of that to you and your mom had a good brain. And they'll say to you, they'll say, "Gad, you know, if you weren't brought from the Middle East
02:38:57
when you were younger, you wouldn't have had these opportunities. So, you need to pay that forward to other people that don't have opportunities and privilege
02:39:03
by welcome welcoming them in, being highly empathetic towards them, even if they're in the in Mexico.
02:39:10
Legally or illegally? Legally, I'm off. I'm let's do it. I'm all in. illegally. No, you don't get, you know, it's unfair
02:39:18
that all these incelss don't have access to sexual partners while some of us have
02:39:26
access. Maybe we need to set up a communist system where using an app they
02:39:31
get to share with our women. Let's have communist mating, right? Well, why is it that you're only getting access to your
02:39:37
partner? That's privilege. How about the homeless guy who doesn't have any sex for the past two years? Don't you think,
02:39:43
Stephen, that you owe him? So, equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Yes, sir.
02:39:48
We're saying we don't believe in equality of outcome. No, no one, I think, with a brain believes in equality of outcome. Oh, no. There is one with somewhat of a
02:39:55
brain. Camela Harris say that she doesn't have a brain. So, you're right. But she pretends that she has a
02:40:01
brain and she is Lenin. She is communism. It be it it completely
02:40:08
paralyzes me in befuddlement to be able to play a clip of this woman
02:40:15
where she's saying I'm a mixture of Stalin and Lenon and Marx and Marx in
02:40:22
everything that I believe in and the United says United States which is
02:40:27
technically a capitalist country says sign me up I think you'd be a good president. So if we define equality of
02:40:34
outcome is everybody deserves this the same chance to get the same outcome. Is that kind of how it's defined or
02:40:39
Well, it's it's it's equality of outcome says to the extent that we don't have
02:40:45
equality of outcome, it must be because of nefarious reasons. So, so for
02:40:51
example, and I've actually satized this, you know, one of the things I do is satire and I draw analogies to show how
02:40:57
stupid things are. I said, you know, there are 200 countries in the world. Do you know how many have won the World
02:41:03
Cup? I don't know. Any number. 200 countries. World Cup's
02:41:08
been going on since 1930. I'm going to say 12. Eight. Okay. That is so unfair. How come those
02:41:15
Japanese have never been given a chance? What about the Jews? Israel never winning once. Why is FIFA so
02:41:21
anti-Semitic? Never once in Islamic country. That sucks. It's those [ __ ]
02:41:26
Brits who've won. Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Uruguay.
02:41:35
That sucks. Laos never. What happened? Malaysia never.
02:41:41
Botswana. We've never won one. You've never won. That's racism. I looked at the uh results of uh the
02:41:49
Boston Marathon over the past 35 years. Do you want me to summarize it for you? I'm going to do it.
02:41:55
Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya.
02:42:00
Ethiopia, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Ithrea, Kenya, Kenya,
02:42:07
Kenya. What a bunch of [ __ ] The Boston Marathon. Only black guys from
02:42:13
Kenya get to win. What about short Jewish guys? Never. We don't get a deserve to deserve a chance. It's so
02:42:20
ludicrous that even morons like Kamala Harris will say, "No, no, but that's different." No, no, it's not different.
02:42:27
It's a deontological principle. Human beings are a hierarchical species. Some
02:42:32
are taller, some are shorter. Some are harder working, less harder working. Smarter, less smart. Funnier, less
02:42:39
funnier. Communism works well for some species. EO Wilson, who was a Harvard
02:42:46
biologist, recently passed away. One of my big professional regrets is that we were never able to have a conversation
02:42:52
on my show. He's one of my big intellectual heroes. His expertise, Stephen, was in the study of social
02:42:58
ants. He was an entomologist. Now, why is that relevant to the story? Because social ants are communists because there
02:43:05
is a reproductive queen and everybody else is indistinguishable. They're
02:43:11
worker ants or warrior ants. They're just a blob. Right? So when he was asked, I'm slightly paraphrasing, when
02:43:17
he was asked, "Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism socialism?" His rebuttal is one of my favorite
02:43:24
rebuttals in the history of humanity. So the answer to communism socialism, great
02:43:29
idea, wrong species, right? Humans come
02:43:35
with their own innate human nature. Our innate human nature is not communistic.
02:43:40
That's why communism has been tried in many countries for the past 100 years.
02:43:45
And what has been the result in every single place it's been tried? A grotesque abject failure. The reason for
02:43:53
that is because when you take a socioeconomic political system that is contrary to human nature, you don't need
02:44:01
Gatsad to predict for you that it will fail. That's like arguing. I would like
02:44:07
to create a new science law. It's called non-gravity.
02:44:12
So, I'm going to throw a bunch of people off big planes, but because I'm a fervor believer in non-gravity, I don't think
02:44:20
that they will drop. But then I'm astonished when out of a 100 people, all of their brains squash on the floor.
02:44:28
That's because they're we're constrained by this reality called gravity. By the same token, Kamala Harris is the
02:44:34
anti-gravity person. So, I'm Canadian, so I don't have a direct dog in this
02:44:40
fight. The reason why I speak out against it because again, my social commentary supersedes transcends whether
02:44:47
I'm American or Canadian. I'm talking about bigger issues. Is communism the ideal model for maximal flourishing?
02:44:55
Nothing could be clearer, but we've got all these degenerates trying to implement it here. Would you vote for Trump if you could
02:45:00
if I were American? Yeah, in a heartbeat over Camela Harris
02:45:06
because that's so right now we let's assume that it does end up being Camela Harris versus
02:45:12
Donald Trump. I would vote 10 times for Donald Trump. What's wrong with Donald Trump?
02:45:19
He he's his worst enemy in that cosmetically speaking I think he's
02:45:24
gotten better maybe by because of age, maybe by discipline. uh he's gotten into
02:45:29
a lot of snafuss where he triggered the eyeire of many people simply because of how he delivered messages where had he
02:45:37
been a bit more polished he would have avoided those things. So for example I think that the fact that he never returned on X has actually been a
02:45:45
blessing for him because he's the guy who at 2:00 in the morning the president of the United States at the time is
02:45:51
battling with some idiot because he can't have the discipline to stop himself. So I think what about his character though?
02:45:57
Cuz if you if your kid grew up with the character of Donald Trump, would you be proud? Probably more pride than Joe Biden.
02:46:04
But this is what happens on the other side. So you don't want me to ever compare to someone else? Well, this is what happens on the the
02:46:09
reason I'm asking these questions is because if I ask someone on the like far left, the first response they say they
02:46:14
their measurement of goodness seems to be a comparison of the other side. Right? So uh
02:46:20
if your son grew up with a character, okay, so here are the some positive traits and some negative traits of him. Okay. I I don't uh pretend to know him.
02:46:27
Uh he is an entrepreneur. I don't think there is a human being
02:46:33
who's been a better exemplar of what a honeybadger is. Now, let me explain what
02:46:39
I mean by that because you may or may not know that now. So, in in the last chapter of the parasitic mind where I
02:46:45
have a a set of call to action, okay, calls to action. One of them is I say activate your inner honey badger. Why?
02:46:53
The honeybger has been determined officially as the fiercest the most
02:46:58
ferocious animal in the animal kingdom. That's saying a lot. There's a lot of fierce animals. It's the size of a small
02:47:03
to mediumsized dog, right? And yet it can go into a hornest net, get attacked
02:47:10
by a million bees, and get the honey. It can withstand an attack of six adult
02:47:16
lions, and they back away. It's the size of a small dog. Why? because it is so
02:47:21
ferocious. It's my brother going to that beautiful girl not caring that he's 4 foot two, right? He's the man. He's the
02:47:28
top guy, right? So, when I say to people, activate your inner honey badger, I say be resilient, be tough,
02:47:33
not not be violent, be ideologically fierce in defending first principles.
02:47:39
Well, who has had more things thrown at this guy than Donald Trump? and he's got
02:47:46
more vigor and and stamina than you and I combined. Well,
02:47:52
let's take a very concrete example. Who has been shot in the head and then stood
02:48:00
up and went fight fight? Those are very those are qualities that I am going to teach my son. Now, is he polished? Is he
02:48:09
eloquent? Does he speak with proper elocution? Does he have a big vocabulary? No. No. No, no, but I'll
02:48:17
take a ferocious honey badger any day over. Those aren't character traits though, eloquence and stuff like that. When I'm
02:48:23
talking about character traits, I mean if someone said if someone seemingly
02:48:28
attempts to steal an election. You know, Mike Pence did a speech the other day where he basically said Donald Trump
02:48:33
asked me to at that moment when Mike Pence could have I think prevented the
02:48:38
electoral decision. He said Michael Mike Pence who was his his vice president,
02:48:43
Donald Trump asked me to go against the constitution and I couldn't do it. Right. So
02:48:49
that's a character thing. Uh so and maybe it's linked to the focity of the honey badger because someone that's
02:48:54
that ferocious when they in faith can't accept defeat. They can accept defeat. As an academic, I like to be I know what
02:49:01
I know and I know what I don't know. So here I would be speculative in saying that that behavioral trait is a
02:49:06
manifestation of a that that behavior is a manifestation of a character trait. I
02:49:11
don't know if that link is right or not. I could easily argue and I'd be speculating so I don't know for sure
02:49:18
that he was convinced that that election was absolutely unequivocally stolen. So
02:49:25
when he's doing those things, it's not he's saying I wish to be dictator for life. I mean he did leave office, right?
02:49:31
But he's saying find me the mechanism to ensure that those [ __ ] don't steal it from me. So I'm I'm neither here or
02:49:38
there on this one. No, he's not a dictator. No, he didn't incite a violent insurrection. He did. So, these are
02:49:45
things we can debate, but in term I I'll put it another way. Do you think that the world the world is
02:49:52
made up of some very very nasty bullies? Do do we agree on that? Very very nasty. Yes.
02:49:57
There's all the Islamic guys. There's North Korea. There's China. There's Putin. Who do you think when they sit at night
02:50:06
they fear more? Do they do you think that they feel the cackler, Camela
02:50:12
Harris, avocado brain, Joe Biden, or do you think crazy cowboy?
02:50:19
Here's the here's the uh nuclear button. You ready? Eeny meeny miny mo catch a tiger by the
02:50:29
toe. Do you see what I'm doing? That unpred unpredictability, that's very powerful. When you go into a
02:50:36
prison uh yard for the first time, everybody's looking at you. Is this guy
02:50:41
going to become a punk and my girlfriend or is this guy that I should fear? How you act that first hour or two is going
02:50:49
to determine how you do your time? Well, Donald Trump is the guy that I want to
02:50:54
be running my prison yard, not the cackler. I hope you understand what I'm doing here. I'm trying to in there's two
02:51:00
things I'm doing. The first thing is I'm trying to form my own opinion by interrogating. Am I successful at all in
02:51:05
No, no, it's really interesting. No, it is really interesting and it's not just you I'm asking these questions through because I ask a bunch of people that are
02:51:11
smart and have different perspectives and helps me form my own, but also I feel I feel an obligation to represent the other side. I understand how you
02:51:17
feel about Kla Harris. So, I'm trying to interrogate this this feeling of Donald Trump. Is there any character trait that you can point out in Donald Trump that
02:51:23
is overtly I'm almost certain that he had remember you said you've got three groups of
02:51:29
friends and one group pathologically cheats on their partners. I'm willing to
02:51:34
bet that Donald Trump is the head of that thing. So, as a moral person who wishes to be loyal and honor my wife, I
02:51:42
don't appreciate that trait because many high status men have access to a lot of beautiful women. And then what
02:51:48
determines your virtue and your character is to be able to have the self-control to not succumb to that. I
02:51:55
value that. I don't think Donald Trump has it. Happy. I said something negative about No, no, no. Do you know it's funny
02:52:00
because when I when I when I heard your opinion on um Donald Trump and Camala Harris, I was in my hotel room thinking
02:52:08
one of the things I observe in people that are political have a political opinion is they are like incapable of saying
02:52:15
anything critical about their own their own candidate or the person that they'd vote for. And it baffles me because it's
02:52:20
the same parasitic mind virus where you've lost objectivity that that you talk about in your work. So
02:52:26
no 100%. So, and I I wouldn't necessarily only stop there, right? I mean, we we could stop there, but but he
02:52:33
doesn't strike me as a man that is of the highest moral virtues, right? So, I
02:52:39
am very much driven by an exacting code of personal conduct. I'm willing to bet
02:52:45
that he doesn't come close to that. So, so, so, but again, you live in the real
02:52:51
world, right? So, in the real world, you don't have a perfect messianic character. That's Jesus, right? So given
02:52:57
those two choices, which one do I want? Well, I want the guy who's a bit scarier. And Donald Trump is a lot
02:53:03
scarier than the Cackler. I understand. And I I see flaws and I
02:53:09
see at least one upside or more in both options. So, but anyway, um what's the
02:53:17
most important thing we should have talked about that we didn't discuss? maybe the importance of social connections uh which is one of the
02:53:25
fundamental ways that you could lead a super happy life to to the point of the happiness book. It turns out that the
02:53:32
quality of your social relationships is a better predictor of your health in the long term than your cholesterol scores
02:53:38
at page 50. That's crazy. So having these meaningful dialogues, whether it be in a formal
02:53:44
setting like on a on a show or whether it be going to the pub and interacting with people about whether Manchester
02:53:49
City or Manchester United is better. We're a social species. Having meaningful connections with people is
02:53:55
crucially important. Get out there, read, get educated, build meaningful connections with people, and hopefully
02:54:01
you'll be happy. I have a closing tradition on this podcast, Dr. Dad, where the last guest
02:54:07
leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is tell me about a
02:54:13
time in which someone said something to you, positive or negative, which really
02:54:20
capital letters struck stuck with you and does still to this day.
02:54:25
Oh, what an amazing question. Uh, am I allowed to know who that guest was or
02:54:30
you don't? Unfortunately, no. No. Okay, perfect. Well, what a what a cool uh thing to do.
02:54:36
And as you were saying it, I was already answering it in my head. So remember
02:54:42
earlier we talked about purity and the exacting standard of uh exacting code of
02:54:47
personal conduct. About maybe 30 years ago, uh my mother
02:54:54
said, you know, God, you better learn that the world doesn't abide to your
02:55:00
purity bubble. And the quicker that you learn that, the happier you will be. And I think it's the by far the most
02:55:06
profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say because oftentimes what that
02:55:12
ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct this kind of
02:55:18
maladaptive perfectionism this moral scrupulosity this purity bubble the world should be you should never be
02:55:24
dishonest you should never be duplicitus if I treat you well you should so it's this like I live in this laal la land of
02:55:31
purity at least my expectations what ends up happening you you're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting
02:55:38
the world to abide to this beautiful purity bubble but the world is ugly and
02:55:43
messy and so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes you know taking your time
02:55:51
with your children then when they leave I'm pissed off to my wife for the next 10 minutes because I was imposing my
02:55:57
expectation which is I would never dare do that to someone else. So, I think if I were able to lower my expectations
02:56:06
and and internalize that message, I wouldn't be as disappointed in so many
02:56:12
people so often. Easier said than done. Easier said than done. Yes. It needs to be like a morning practice.
02:56:18
True. Thank you so much for the work that you do. Um, Dr. God, I found your books to
02:56:24
be really, really important because they are unapologetically challenging and for
02:56:32
anybody who cares about the pursuit of truth, whether they agree with you or not, but just the pursuit itself of truth, they care about ideas that are
02:56:39
unapologetic and are courageous and are immune from political correctness. And I
02:56:47
know that some people who I doubt any of them got to the end of the conversation, but um some people who do care about
02:56:54
such a thing, I think those people are the most important of our time and they
02:57:01
can find I think so many of the answers that they're searching for in the books that you write. I love the book about
02:57:06
happiness, happiness, eight secrets for leading the good life. And I I referenced your earlier book as well, but the parasitic mind book I think is
02:57:13
the most important of them all because it's so unbelievably relevant. And if you understand what's written in this
02:57:18
book, I think you have a different lens, a different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with and it
02:57:23
can make sense of the things that you're seeing. In fact, both of the books have this sort of throughine because if you
02:57:29
understand the world, as you said just then, you can be happier within it despite its imperfections. And so, thank
02:57:36
you for doing the work that you do. I know it comes at a tremendous cost, a personal cost. I don't know whether you see it as a cost, but it's just an
02:57:42
inevitability. Um, but it's incredibly important and I'm a big big fan of the work that you do. Not not to say that I
02:57:47
agree with everything you've ever said. Um, but I I care the most about hearing it nonetheless and it feeding into my
02:57:55
sort of big intellectual reservoir of information. So, I'm really really appreciative of you and I hope you continue to do the important work you're
02:58:01
doing. Thank you. Thank you so much. Can I end with a compliment? Of course you can. I've been on a million shows and I unhesitantly say
02:58:08
that this was one of the best conversations. So, thank you for that. Oh, that's a really remarkable honor. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
02:58:13
Cheers. [Music] Isn't this cool? Every single
02:58:20
conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I ask the guest to leave a question
02:58:27
in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO
02:58:34
into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every
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guest we've ever had their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR
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revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The
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brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at
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[Music]
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[Music]
