The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 193. Sex and Dating Apps ｜ Rob Henderson

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to be able to speak with Rob Henderson.

00:01:17.040 He's a PhD student in Evolutionary and Social Psychology and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge.

00:01:24.060 He received his bachelor's degree in science in psychology from Yale and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

00:01:30.900 His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Quillette, among other outlets.

00:01:37.340 He is currently writing a memoir tentatively titled Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class,

00:01:44.800 to be published in late 2022 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.

00:01:49.680 He is possibly best known for the idea of luxury beliefs, which is where I first came across him.

00:01:57.040 First published in the New York Post in short form, and then in longer form in Quillette.

00:02:02.780 Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Rob. It's a pleasure to have you here.

00:02:08.200 It's great to be here, Dr. Peterson. Thank you.

00:02:09.700 No problem. So let's talk, first of all, about luxury beliefs and exactly what that means and how you came up with the idea and what the consequence of disseminating it has been.

00:02:22.460 Yes. So the luxury beliefs idea I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower social classes.

00:02:33.280 And, I mean, there are multiple strands to this idea, but it originally started with my observations in undergrad at Yale.

00:02:41.420 So as you said, you know, currently I'm a grad student at Cambridge. Before this, I was a student at Yale.

00:02:46.280 But before that, my life was a lot different. I grew up in foster homes in L.A.

00:02:51.100 Later, I was adopted into a working class town in Northern California, served in the military.

00:02:56.520 So I just had a completely different set of life experiences and background than many of my peers at this Ivy League university.

00:03:04.580 And in that New York Post essay, the original luxury beliefs essay, I opened with this story of this conversation I had with a classmate of mine in undergrad.

00:03:13.760 And we were sort of talking about relationships and career. And she said to me, you know, I just think monogamy is outdated.

00:03:20.540 I just think it's not really good for society. I think it's just this sort of old patriarchal way of thinking.

00:03:26.680 And I'd heard things like this before, but this time I asked her, well, what do you plan to do?

00:03:32.140 You know, what do you want to do with your own life and with your own relationship situation and so on in the future?

00:03:37.280 And she herself said, well, I'd like to get married and settle down and have a family at some point, you know, sort of after my career takes off.

00:03:44.680 And I asked her, well, what was your life like before that? You know, how did you grow up?

00:03:48.960 And essentially she had come from a very stable, intact two-parent family.

00:03:53.440 And so this puzzled me because this was emblematic of so many of the opinions I'd heard of my, in undergrad from my peers.

00:04:02.920 They would say one thing, they would believe this one set of interesting or unusual beliefs that I'd never heard before from anyone else.

00:04:10.920 But then they themselves had come from sort of more conventional upbringings.

00:04:17.200 And they themselves planned to have that kind of life, that sort of more stable, traditional family.

00:04:23.160 I'd once heard someone put this way that, you know, a lot of sort of affluent people, they, what is it?

00:04:29.860 They walk the 50s and talk the 60s.

00:04:31.620 And I wondered, you know, what's going on here?

00:04:35.800 And so while I was an undergrad, I came across a series of papers, a series of ideas, both from psychology and sociology.

00:04:42.380 So these sort of sociological aspects, I drew this from Thorsten Veblen.

00:04:48.080 And Veblen's idea, you know, he wrote the theory of the leisure class in the late 19th century.

00:04:51.420 And he basically said that, you know, the elites of his day, they broadcast their status with their material goods, with, you know, expensive clothes, tuxedos, evening gowns.

00:05:02.080 They take up these very expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling.

00:05:06.560 And all of this is to basically indicate their high social position.

00:05:11.380 And, you know, some people say this book was written sort of tongue-in-cheek.

00:05:13.840 But I think there's a lot of truth to this.

00:05:16.200 Now, if we fast forward to the modern day, I think it's, there are two things going on with why it's not actually fashionable anymore to display your status with luxury goods, with material goods.

00:05:27.600 Number one, I think it's become viewed as kind of gauche.

00:05:31.480 If you walk around an Ivy League campus today, the students don't look like, they don't have the Ivy look of like the 1950s or the 1960s.

00:05:38.280 They kind of just look like regular college students, number one.

00:05:41.920 And, I mean, this is true pretty much anywhere.

00:05:44.160 If you look at very wealthy people, and the famous example of this would be Mark Zuckerberg wearing cargo shorts and a hoodie.

00:05:51.100 It's just not that cool anymore to wear clothes that indicate that you're high social status.

00:05:55.920 The other thing is material goods have become more affordable.

00:06:01.140 You know, even my sort of poor and working class friends back home, all of them have iPhones.

00:06:06.120 You know, maybe, of course, like their life aren't as comfortable as my peers in college.

00:06:10.640 But a lot of material goods have become so affordable that it's become harder to stand out in that way.

00:06:15.500 Yeah, you see that reflected, I think, to some degree in the decline in burglary.

00:06:20.920 All right.

00:06:21.960 Material objects just aren't as worth as much as they were.

00:06:24.380 And so they don't distinguish between people anymore.

00:06:27.480 It's not worth it anymore to steal things.

00:06:31.180 And so that's the aspect of it that led me to think, okay, well, first of all, you know, luxury goods are not being displayed as much by the upper class.

00:06:41.640 But I still think, it still seems to me, they care very much about social status.

00:06:45.460 And this is where the psychology aspect of it comes in from a researcher named Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley.

00:06:50.980 He's a psychologist who found, he and his colleagues found that basically the upper class cares the most about social status.

00:06:57.660 They care the most about obtaining it, and they care the most about preserving it, which at first I thought was a bit counterintuitive.

00:07:04.700 I thought that perhaps the most downtrodden, the kind of people who are on the lowest rungs of society would care the most about obtaining money and wealth and status.

00:07:13.060 But that's actually not true.

00:07:14.100 It's the people who are already at the top who care the most about it.

00:07:16.700 And that's really what I saw at Yale, too.

00:07:18.520 Do you suppose that's a partial consequence of the fact that failure is perhaps more painful than success is rewarding?

00:07:34.620 So once you have it, let's say you have high social status, you're very much inclined to keep it, because the alternative would be so, I suppose in some sense, unthinkable, so catastrophic for you?

00:07:48.520 Right. So this is the idea of almost like this prospect theory idea that when you have it, it hurts twice as much as obtaining it.

00:07:56.980 I think there is something to this idea.

00:07:59.320 I noticed there was a lot of anxiety among many of my peers, this feeling that they have to keep up, they have to constantly strive, they have to get on to the next goal.

00:08:11.440 And I think what exacerbates this feeling is that they're surrounded by people just like them.

00:08:17.060 It was a bit unlike my own experience.

00:08:24.480 When I had got into undergrad, I thought like, okay, so I'm okay, I got into college, like that was my goal.

00:08:31.300 I never thought I was ever going to get into college.

00:08:33.060 And so when I got there, I thought like, oh, I'm okay.

00:08:35.220 And then I saw that these people didn't feel okay, that they had to get the next internship, they had to get into law school, they had to do this, they had to do that.

00:08:41.280 And I think a lot of it is because they're around people, they've grown up around those kinds of people their entire life.

00:08:47.540 And so there's this belief, like it was inevitable, like they always had to do this, there was never a question of their success.

00:08:54.920 Right, right.

00:08:55.240 Whereas for me, it wasn't like that.

00:08:57.180 Yeah, well, when I taught in Boston at Harvard, I mean, one of the things I noticed was that the students there were, you know, they were pleased to be at Harvard.

00:09:07.080 There was no doubt about that, but they, it was extremely competitive implicitly.

00:09:13.340 And I suppose that's part of the consequence of it being essentially based as much as it could be on, on competitive merit.

00:09:22.360 And so it was also the case that many of these students had been outstanding where they had come from.

00:09:27.700 They were class valedictorians and usually had at least one or two other major accomplishments under their belt.

00:09:33.240 But then when they got to these intensely selected institutes, they were also, in some sense, average instantly, and below average in many ways, because, you know, no matter how smart you are, the probability that you're the smartest person in your class at Harvard is pretty damn low.

00:09:50.040 And so the implicit level of competition was extremely high.

00:09:54.500 And so that might also exacerbate the sort of tendencies that you're describing.

00:09:58.440 And people tend to compare themselves to their immediate peers, not to the broader world.

00:10:04.480 Right.

00:10:05.560 And, and I, and this is part of why I think is, is, is driving this.

00:10:09.740 You know, I make this, this point in the essay that they're, they're Dunbar's number, you know, they're the 150 closest people to them are 150 baby millionaires. 0.87

00:10:18.420 And so if that's your social circle, then you feel this constant underlying tension to display your status in some way.

00:10:27.040 And so my claim is that the affluent in large part have reattached, or they sort of detached status to goods and reattached it to beliefs.

00:10:35.500 And this was driven by my, you know, sort of what I saw where I heard opinions and ideas that I had never heard anywhere else.

00:10:43.160 I mean, probably the most, you know, contentious recent example of what, of a luxury belief is this idea of abolishing the police.

00:10:52.580 To me, this is so emblematic of, you know, very comfortable, highly affluent, educated people who would never have to bear the cost of, of what that policy would entail.

00:11:05.000 And yet they're propounding it, they're, you know, they're, they're broadcasting it and promoting it, with the knowledge that this is going to make them look good to their peers, it's going to make them look progressive and interesting and provocative, and win them all these social points from their social circle, without really giving much thought to what would happen to the poorest among us.

00:11:24.960 Yeah, well, one of the things that always struck me about beliefs in progressive, so-called progressive causes among high status individuals, or those who are about to be high status individuals, which would typify everyone in an Ivy League university.

00:11:44.820 I mean, if they're not high economic status at the present time, they certainly will be by all likelihood by the time they're 30 or 40.

00:11:51.680 So they're already part of the upper class, regardless of their claims, they seem to want to have it both ways, they want to be members of the most privileged class, and then also be rewarded for their allyship, let's say, with the oppressed, and so they get to be rich and privileged and friend to the oppressed at the same time, which always seemed to me to be a form of, of, of greed, rather than sympathy, rather than genuine sympathy.

00:12:20.920 There's not much self-sacrifice involved in the adoption of the beliefs that you just described, and what, I don't remember who said it, when the upper class catches a cold, the lower class gets pneumonia, and so these destabilizing beliefs are a lot harder on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure than they are for people at the top, who, as you said, tend to get married disproportionately often, compared to people who are lower down on the socioeconomic structure.

00:12:50.920 Yeah, there's sort of this sinister theme that I saw sometimes, where I would see students, for example, say that investment banks are emblematic of capitalist oppression.

00:13:05.280 And then I would see those same exact students attending recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs.

00:13:11.280 And my interpretation of what they were doing here is basically they were trying to undercut their rivals, they were trying to undercut their competition.

00:13:19.740 So if you and I are students, and I can convince you that investment banks are evil, don't work there.

00:13:25.160 That's one less competitor that I have in my quest to the top.

00:13:28.960 Some people have told me that this is too cynical.

00:13:30.720 I used to think that, as time goes on, I'm most likely.

00:13:34.880 Yeah, well, I was struck too at Harvard by the disproportionate movement of Harvard undergraduates into financial services.

00:13:45.300 So I didn't understand until I went to the United States and worked at that extraordinarily powerful university, what a staggering proportion of the students end up in jobs exactly like that.

00:13:56.660 And they are considered very broadly, I would say, among the undergraduates, as the highest status jobs.

00:14:03.420 They certainly have tremendously high starting salaries.

00:14:06.580 And I mean, Harvard produced comparatively few scientists, let's say.

00:14:11.720 Yeah, I noticed this.

00:14:15.660 I mean, I've seen the data on this, something like 30% of undergrads at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, at least 30%, it might be closer to 40%, end up working in either investment, banking, finance, or I think tech is the third most popular.

00:14:30.760 Right.

00:14:31.060 And they end up being, often being consultants and so forth.

00:14:34.560 So, and fair enough, I mean, they're high cognitive ability individuals generally.

00:14:39.160 And so it's not surprising that they vie and they're competitive for the reasons that you described and other reasons.

00:14:44.560 There's powerful socialization at work too.

00:14:47.640 So it's not surprising that they gravitate towards those jobs.

00:14:50.800 But then I suppose, to what degree do you think beliefs of this sort are also motivated by guilt?

00:14:57.440 I mean, I've often seen, you know, in the United States in particular, more well-to-do people tend to put their children in private schools.

00:15:05.880 And I think there's a tremendous amount of guilt about that because they are, well, they are racially segregated, comparatively speaking, at least along some dimensions.

00:15:15.000 And that's really not an egalitarian thing to do, even though you may be motivated to provide whatever advantage you can for your children.

00:15:24.740 So is it guilt as well as the broadcasting of status, in your opinion?

00:15:30.080 I don't know.

00:15:31.360 I think that there's a lot of performative guilt.

00:15:35.100 It seems like they talk a lot about guilt.

00:15:36.840 But when it comes to actually paying any kind of personal cost, I really don't see their behaviors aligning with their luxury beliefs.

00:15:46.900 Like you said, they're willing to shell out all this money for private schools.

00:15:50.240 They're willing to pay money to live in secure neighborhoods.

00:15:53.140 There was a story last year sort of at the height of the pandemic.

00:15:57.540 In addition to a lot of the protests and the riots that were going on in Manhattan, a lot of rich New Yorkers fled to the Hamptons and they had hired private security.

00:16:04.620 And, you know, that's perfectly sensible.

00:16:09.400 I mean, I understand why they would do that.

00:16:10.940 But this is sort of the actions of the affluent, that they take, they'll broadcast one set of beliefs, but then privately they'll do everything they can to secure their safety and the future of their children.

00:16:24.800 So maybe it's guilt, but I'm not sure how genuine it is.

00:16:28.880 I mean, I just saw like, I mean, there's so many examples of these luxury beliefs that I saw, you know, from, like I said, the police issue to the open borders to decriminalization of drugs.

00:16:42.880 I mean, all of these issues, I think, are disproportionately harmful to working class, lower class people.

00:16:53.640 And there's no cost, no actual, maybe there's guilt, but there's no actual sort of costly benefit or costly extraction.

00:17:05.100 Yeah, well, it also may be that when you're relatively, have been relatively protected, but implicitly, let's say, okay, so you live in a gated community, you live among wealthy people, you live in a neighborhood where crime is essentially non-existent, where privation is essentially non-existent, all of these things.

00:17:26.840 Then the cost of order provision seems disproportionately high, because you have no idea what it's good for.

00:17:38.140 And so you can imagine that you might also be inclined to only look at the negative side of, well, drug criminalization and police funding and all of that, because it doesn't appear in your world that there's a necessity for those things.

00:17:55.100 So if you've lived your whole life so comfortably, and you've never experienced any kind of hardship or any serious hardship, then a lot of this is taken for granted.

00:18:06.260 Well, at least not the kind of hardship.

00:18:08.440 I mean, it's not like people who are well off don't still have hardship, because their families get sick, and there's still all sorts of, but they're protected very well from social unrest, let's say.

00:18:18.980 And so the means necessary to ensure that society remains at peace, the enforcement reasons, for example, and that would include border protection, seem exclusionary and unnecessary when they've never been a threat of any sort at all.

00:18:37.200 Yes. I mean, even beyond the physical safety issue, one other interesting example of this phenomenon, I think, is a lot of people in tech, these sort of tech tycoons will sort of promote the benefits of addictive technology, while privately, they go on these sort of dopamine fasts, they don't use this technology.

00:19:02.320 Steve Jobs famously would not let his kids use an iPad. A lot of other people in tech reportedly tell their nannies to carefully monitor how much their children use smartphones and so on.

00:19:15.120 There are TV personalities who own television networks, but they don't have a TV at home.

00:19:21.600 And a lot of this, I think, is sort of like, you know, don't get high on your own supply.

00:19:26.120 You know, addictive technology is okay for the masses, all of you can sort of get sucked into these screens, but I'm going to be very careful with how me and my children and my family interact with this technology that I'm getting rich off of.

00:19:37.220 So it goes even beyond the sort of physical security. I think it's more, even more so about, you know, you're taking care of yourself, while not so much thinking about the harmful effects on others.

00:19:52.940 Yeah, so it's a matter of wanting to have it both ways. And so what would you consider? What is the universe of luxury beliefs?

00:20:01.300 Well, I would say that luxury beliefs are primarily situated, of course, among highly educated, affluent people.

00:20:11.300 And essentially, I mean, there's, I suppose, you know, I'm not keeping this compendium, at least not yet, of every luxury belief that exists.

00:20:19.400 But essentially, if someone of a high social position expresses a belief, I think it's important for anyone who holds any kind of influential position in society to think about, well, what are the consequences of if that belief were to be implemented?

00:20:33.720 And especially when it trickles down, one of the effects, for example.

00:20:38.220 Spoken like a conservative.

00:20:38.540 Yeah, well, I mean, conservatives are always concerned with unintended consequences, right?

00:20:44.640 And so they don't presume that hypothetically benevolent social policies are going to produce a positive result.

00:20:51.980 Sure. And I think there are social patterns that give reason for concern.

00:20:58.140 So, for example, this idea of sexual promiscuity, I think the latest manifestation of this is polyamory.

00:21:06.320 I had this conversation with a friend of mine, you know, a couple of years ago.

00:21:11.400 He told me, you know, Rob, when I open up my Tinder app, you know, this dating app, and I put the radius to just a couple of miles around, you know, he also attends, you know, a university.

00:21:22.620 When I put it just to a couple of miles around, you know, it's pretty much all of my matches, all of the other profiles I see are other women students at the university. 0.98

00:21:31.920 And when I look at their bios, half of them say that they're polyamorous, or they're interested in an open relationship, or they're not looking for anything too serious.

00:21:41.040 And then he told me when he extended the radius to match with women outside of the university into the town, which is, you know, sort of this working class town.

00:21:53.200 He said that about half of the women that he saw on his app were single moms.

00:21:58.400 And so, and it's the same age group, right, like 18 to say 23 years old.

00:22:04.140 So in the university, they're interested in having fun.

00:22:07.120 And then the 18 to 23 year old working class women are having a much different experience of life. 0.94

00:22:12.320 And my claim is that the luxury beliefs of the former have basically trickled down and wreaked havoc among the latter.

00:22:21.240 So starting in the 1960s, there's data from Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and others, which you may have seen showing, for example, that in 1960,

00:22:30.720 working class, children born to working class families and children born to affluent families, 95% of them were born and raised by both of their birth parents.

00:22:39.680 And if you fast forward from 1960 to 2005, the affluent families, the children of the affluent had dipped slightly.

00:22:49.740 So it was 95% in 1960.

00:22:51.440 And by 2005, it had dropped to 85%.

00:22:53.520 So it was a slight drop, but by and large, still overwhelmingly intact families.

00:22:57.720 And for the working class, again, in 1960, it was 95%.

00:23:00.820 And by 2005, it had dropped to 30%.

00:23:03.360 So a completely different world, essentially.

00:23:05.420 There too, because there's an interesting progression between different ethnicities and races along that curve.

00:23:13.580 So the first, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this to be the case.

00:23:17.520 The first population that really affected was the black population.

00:23:22.220 Then it was the Hispanic population.

00:23:24.760 Then it was the white population.

00:23:27.060 But the curves match, they're just like 10 years apart, if you look at the same socioeconomic level.

00:23:36.760 And so, yeah, that's a good example of policies that are hypothetically liberal at the high end having a devastating effect farther down.

00:23:46.120 And, you know, it's people who claim that marriage, for example, is a patriarchal institution.

00:23:51.140 And, well, the best rejoinder to that I know of is then, well, why do the rich get married and the poor don't?

00:23:57.600 Are they choosing to oppress themselves, given their options?

00:24:00.740 It doesn't make any sense. 0.97

00:24:02.320 I mean, I think it's an absolutely foolish theory to begin with.

00:24:05.460 But that seems to me to be a piece of data that indicates quite clearly that if you have a choice, that's what you pick.

00:24:14.360 Or if you have the widest possible level of choices, that's what you choose.

00:24:17.680 And so, yeah, it's a catastrophe, although, you know, the fact that it's a catastrophe is also hidden by a whole other set of luxury beliefs, like all families are of equal value, which in some sense is true, right?

00:24:34.660 Because if you're thinking about how each person should be valued and whether or not the child of a single mother should be valued, well, obviously the answer to that is yes. 0.97

00:24:46.220 But that doesn't mean that all family configurations are equally functional on average.

00:24:54.300 And I think the data is absolutely clear that children with intact two-parent families do far better.

00:24:59.900 Now, if you get divorced, there are things you can do that moderate the effect of the divorce.

00:25:06.500 What's his name?

00:25:11.180 He wrote, The Boy Crisis.

00:25:13.280 Warren Farrell has documented, Farrell has documented a number of ways that people who get divorced can ensure that their children do about as well as they would in an intact family.

00:25:23.640 And some of that involves approximately 50% contact with each parent.

00:25:28.260 I think the parents also need to attend counseling, third-party counseling, so that they can maintain a reasonable relationship and they have to live within something approximating a 20-minute drive from one another, something like that.

00:25:42.660 But, I mean, that takes a lot of balancing and dancing to replicate that environment.

00:25:46.460 And it seems impossible in our society to have a discussion about the fact that some forms of families are better for children than others.

00:25:57.380 And because we think of any imposition of a value analysis of that sort as discriminatory.

00:26:03.160 And, you know, in some sense it is discriminatory because when you say that one thing is better, you're also saying at the same time that the opposite of that is worse.

00:26:12.540 Well, then it depends on who you're trying to focus on.

00:26:16.160 And, well, I go by the data fundamentally.

00:26:19.380 And, you know, children born to young single mothers, especially if the young single mothers are troubled and therefore also easy targets for predatory males, they don't do well.

00:26:30.340 And there's multi-generational effects of that.

00:26:32.620 And we're too bloody naive and, I don't know, immature, I guess, to have a serious conversation about such things.

00:26:46.340 And we also don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle.

00:26:49.340 But there's no tax break, for example, for stable married couples.

00:26:54.280 So there's no economic policy that supports it.

00:26:57.200 Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely sure that that would even change much.

00:27:04.580 I mean, I think this is much more of a cultural issue than an economic issue.

00:27:08.400 I mean, you know, a lot of people say, well, the reason, well, it's kind of interesting how many different excuses are produced for this.

00:27:14.040 I mean, like you said, a lot of people say that it's this patriarchal institution, but then why are the rich getting married more than the poor?

00:27:19.800 Well, I don't even know what that means.

00:27:21.880 Let's talk about that for a minute.

00:27:23.440 I mean, I suppose that claim is grounded in the historical interpretation that in the past, women were treated in some sense as the equivalent of property.

00:27:41.600 And now, whether or not that's a reasonable interpretation of the past is entirely up for debate.

00:27:48.700 Although we could say that it was more true 150 years ago than it is now.

00:27:52.900 But we could also point out that birth control was a lot less reliable.

00:28:00.680 And so the relationships between men and women didn't have the freedom they have today for all sorts of reasons, hygienic reasons for that matter.

00:28:07.480 I mean, one of the things that freed women was the easy access to technology that dealt with menstrual cycle and public toilets and all of that. 1.00

00:28:18.060 I mean, we just don't understand how much sanitary technology, for example, is built into the infrastructure, as well as safety, because women can walk down the street unaccompanied without any problem, comparatively speaking. 0.99

00:28:32.620 We don't understand how much of that has changed the relationship between the sexes. 0.95

00:28:36.320 And so there may have been property-like associations with marriage 150 years ago.

00:28:44.100 But first of all, that doesn't necessarily mean that that was a patriarchal institution.

00:28:49.060 I mean, it was still the case that the idea was that the men would stick around and provide economic support and care for the children.

00:28:57.240 And that's a long-term binding contract.

00:28:59.340 And it seems to me the opposite in some sense of libertine freedom.

00:29:05.520 So where's the patriarchy in that precisely?

00:29:08.980 I mean, women weren't equal in some sense, but there are reasons for that. 1.00

00:29:13.240 I mean, many people have made the argument that by loosening the norms around marriage, it's actually been to the benefit of men, in some sense, you know, to be able to have lots of promiscuous partners with many different women and perhaps impregnate some of them and not have to stick around.

00:29:32.060 There's no obligation to them beyond maybe producing child support payment.

00:29:35.520 So that means that it's advantageous to psychopathic men.

00:29:40.740 Right, dark triad types.

00:29:41.940 Well, exactly, because, you know, the hallmark of psychopathy is short-term advantage taken by a given individual without care for anyone else.

00:29:51.720 And it certainly seems to me like dating apps like Tinder.

00:29:56.060 Now, I don't want to call every male who's successful on Tinder a psychopath.

00:30:00.360 I'm not saying that.

00:30:01.280 But I would say that it isn't obvious to me at all that if you're a successful polyamorous male on Tinder, and so that's going to be a very tiny subset of men that are hyper-selected by women, a tiny subset of men who receive almost no rejection.

00:30:19.800 They're set up to learn to be psychopathic because all their interactions with other people can be devoted to short-term sexual gratification with no emotional intimacy or long-term commitment.

00:30:33.700 And that's a hell of a training ground as far as I'm concerned.

00:30:37.180 I mean, it depends on what you want for a society. 0.96

00:30:40.300 But as you said, even the affluent women who profess a desire for polyamory, which is complete bloody rubbish in my estimation, and completely underestimates the economic consequences of sex, 1.00

00:30:51.820 they still dream of the fairy tale princess who meets the prince who, you know, wakes her up with a kiss and are married happily ever after. 0.99

00:31:00.740 So it's such bloody nonsense. 0.95

00:31:02.500 We allow our culture to be run by the pathetic fantasies of immature adolescent delusion, fundamentally, as far as I can tell. 0.98

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00:37:09.980 There was a study I saw, I think it was last year,

00:37:17.960 on this very question of who uses dating apps and sort of their personality traits and so on,

00:37:22.840 and they did indeed find, and these were just university students,

00:37:25.820 which, you know, take it for what it's worth,

00:37:27.760 but the people who were using the dating apps,

00:37:31.020 which is about one-third of the students in the sample pool,

00:37:35.020 the, they were sort of more likely to be interested in short-term sexual conquest,

00:37:40.560 not really surprised, more, more interested and more likely to use drugs and alcohol,

00:37:45.980 more likely to have sort of callous sexual attitudes.

00:37:49.160 I can't remember the exact term they used for this, for this construct,

00:37:51.860 but basically they were more likely to agree with statements like,

00:37:55.400 sex is like a game where one person wins and the other person loses. 0.71

00:37:59.220 So if you're using a dating app, you're more likely to say yes to that kind of question.

00:38:03.080 So in a way, I think you're right.

00:38:05.260 Well, you know the status element to that.

00:38:07.220 I mean, there's the old trope of notches in the bed frame,

00:38:10.540 and among adolescent, competitive adolescent males,

00:38:13.860 there's no reason, there's every reason to be competitive about how much you can drink

00:38:18.780 and how many people you can lure into bed.

00:38:21.180 I mean, even if you don't necessarily believe that personally,

00:38:24.200 you know, at a deep level,

00:38:25.680 and maybe you suffer for it emotionally to some degree,

00:38:28.200 even though you might obscure that from yourself,

00:38:30.220 it's certainly something to score points with with your peers.

00:38:33.620 And there's plenty of that kind of, you know,

00:38:36.060 that competitive bantering in adolescent, especially adolescent male culture.

00:38:41.960 And I mean, it's not surprising to some degree,

00:38:44.040 because adolescent males have to figure out how to navigate the sexual landscape,

00:38:48.940 and they're going to do that in all sorts of awkward and finally unproductive ways.

00:38:54.140 It's not an easy thing to bind or to regulate properly,

00:38:56.740 but I mean, these technologies like Tinder,

00:39:00.420 Tinder is a transformative technology,

00:39:03.340 and it's radically underestimated in terms of its potency,

00:39:06.160 because it produces hyper-successful predatory males,

00:39:11.420 and reduces rejection.

00:39:13.520 It eliminates rejection,

00:39:14.780 because, I mean, you can be totally rejected,

00:39:16.740 in which case you're a failure on Tinder,

00:39:18.200 but in normal pre-mating interaction, let's say,

00:39:23.320 there's a high probability of rejection,

00:39:25.060 especially on the part of males.

00:39:27.180 And that technology...

00:39:27.660 Well, there's actually research on this.

00:39:28.940 Yes.

00:39:29.580 On Tinder.

00:39:30.800 Yes.

00:39:31.060 So there's research basically showing that.

00:39:34.280 So on Tinder, women, they like, you know, swipe right, 1.00

00:39:39.220 they like the profiles of only 4% of the men that they see on the app,

00:39:44.140 whereas for men, when they see female profiles,

00:39:47.840 they swipe right or like more than 60%.

00:39:50.880 That's 6-0, 60% of the profiles they see.

00:39:53.760 So that's really worth concentrating on,

00:39:55.720 because that's a great example of hypergamy, right?

00:39:59.960 So women mate across and up success hierarchies, 1.00

00:40:05.920 and men mate across and down, right? 0.58

00:40:11.660 So women like men who are about four years older, cross-culturally. 0.89

00:40:16.340 They like men who manifest signs of success,

00:40:19.740 as well as being handsome and personable and all of that.

00:40:23.100 And the reason for that, as far as I can tell,

00:40:25.360 is that they're looking to equalize the economic disparity that exists

00:40:31.100 because women take a harder hit from sex and pregnancy than men.

00:40:36.000 So they're looking to equalize that.

00:40:37.980 And no wonder they're looking for someone who's competent.

00:40:41.880 This is for long-term media, who's competent and generous, right?

00:40:45.940 You want both of those.

00:40:46.860 So competence would be intelligence, general cognitive ability,

00:40:50.280 and the markers that go along with that.

00:40:51.860 They want conscientiousness or openness,

00:40:53.840 as well as other desirable personality traits.

00:40:56.820 And they want generosity, honesty, all of those.

00:40:59.800 But so they're looking for someone who can provide.

00:41:02.040 Well, it's not because they're greedy, precisely.

00:41:04.080 It's because, well, they're going to put themselves

00:41:06.140 in a more vulnerable position if they have a child.

00:41:08.280 And we know this because even affluent women who have a child by themselves

00:41:12.480 or who get divorced tend to drop down the socioeconomic hierarchy a fair bit,

00:41:19.060 which is, of course, why alimony payments and all of that are necessary.

00:41:22.260 So this hypergamy means women are much more selective in their mating than men are. 1.00

00:41:27.140 And that's true cross-culturally.

00:41:28.480 And it's not surprising because they pay a bigger price for sex.

00:41:31.320 It's more dangerous for women because they can get pregnant. 1.00

00:41:33.960 And it might be more dangerous emotionally as well.

00:41:36.600 And I believe that would be a reflection of their higher levels of agreeableness

00:41:40.260 and higher levels of negative emotionality.

00:41:42.820 So women do put themselves at risk more. 1.00

00:41:44.960 And that might be why there's such an intense debate about what constitutes consent

00:41:49.800 on campuses despite these beliefs in polyamory and all of these things.

00:41:53.880 But so anyways, on Tinder, as you said, women select 4% of the men.

00:41:59.440 Yeah.

00:42:00.260 So that means that...

00:42:01.200 I would imagine that 4% is very high up on what you're calling the success hierarchy.

00:42:05.660 I have a friend, a good-looking guy.

00:42:09.160 He was very active on Tinder for a while.

00:42:11.700 And he accumulated more than 20,000 matches on the app.

00:42:15.600 20,000?

00:42:16.880 20,000.

00:42:17.920 And he was so successful that Tinder pinpointed him early on

00:42:22.620 and gave him all kinds of free perks and bonuses

00:42:25.460 and lifted his radius restrictions,

00:42:27.840 gave him the Tinder Gold app or whatever version of it,

00:42:31.720 basically trying to entice him to continue to use the app.

00:42:34.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:35.100 They wanted to entice him.

00:42:36.800 This is so amazing.

00:42:37.640 They never want you to leave.

00:42:39.000 These are unbelievably pernicious and vicious broad-scale social experiments

00:42:44.040 that are far more potent than anything like government policy.

00:42:47.980 You know, I mean, he's in Genghis Khan territory with 20,000.

00:42:53.840 I don't know if he slept with all 20,000.

00:42:56.220 Yeah, well, my suspicions are he tried.

00:43:00.180 And I know that records for athletes, for example, and movie stars,

00:43:06.680 some of the men have reportedly slept with thousands of women.

00:43:11.140 Yes, Will Chamberlain.

00:43:12.200 And there's others who are in the same category.

00:43:15.320 But there are people, there are men who have women throwing themselves at them all the time,

00:43:19.360 lining up for them.

00:43:20.480 And I've read biographies of people who had that sort of thing happen as well.

00:43:24.160 But that's not the typical male experience.

00:43:26.340 No, the typical male experience is all rejection.

00:43:29.480 Exactly.

00:43:30.000 Right.

00:43:30.220 They might get a couple matches a week.

00:43:32.720 Right, right.

00:43:33.300 So, well, so you see what's happening is that Tinder is one of the forces

00:43:37.660 that's transforming monogamy into polygamy. 1.00

00:43:40.520 And the problem with polygamy is that it follows a Pareto distribution like the distribution of wealth 0.73

00:43:46.500 is that some tiny minority of men get all the sexual opportunity and all the rest get virtually none.

00:43:54.460 And that is a recipe for social instability.

00:43:57.740 I mean, that's sort of deregulation of romantic relationships, you know,

00:44:02.900 whereas in the past it was expected for you to have one partner and over time settle down,

00:44:06.760 whereas now it's a total free for all.

00:44:08.900 So, I mean, there are aspects to this that a lot of people don't think about.

00:44:12.280 I mean, I talk to young people.

00:44:13.100 So, I have younger friends who I talk to who are sort of very active on the apps and in sort of the dating scene.

00:44:19.080 And they'll tell me things like it's even easier to cheat.

00:44:22.020 So, in the past, if you wanted to be unfaithful to your partner, it was risky because, you know,

00:44:27.420 essentially like you had the same social circle, you had the same friends, everyone knew everyone else.

00:44:31.880 But now with the apps, you can match with someone who is completely outside of your social reality,

00:44:37.200 outside of your partner's social reality.

00:44:38.500 You can have a very discreet rendezvous.

00:44:41.020 No one will ever know about this.

00:44:43.360 Ghosting has become more common.

00:44:45.100 I don't know if you know about ghosting, but it's basically where you're in a relationship with someone.

00:44:49.720 And after you have sex, you know, once or however many times, then you just vanish.

00:44:54.560 You never see that person again.

00:44:56.620 Delete, you know, delete them from your phone, block them on social media.

00:45:00.100 You never have to see them again.

00:45:01.280 And there's no social cost to this.

00:45:02.680 That's a real psychopathic conquest strategy.

00:45:05.780 Yes.

00:45:06.580 Right.

00:45:06.960 Because the psychopaths, they tend to form relationships that are very predatory and then disappear.

00:45:14.300 Because that way their reputations stay intact as long as they can continue to disappear.

00:45:18.680 But I'm interested in what you had said before about whether this is actually sort of cultivating psychopathy in young people and young men, where, you know, in the past, you know, typically a psychopath would do that on their own.

00:45:30.720 But now with the apps and the technology, removing all of the friction from, you know, breaking up with someone or having to communicate with someone that you no longer want to see them.

00:45:40.740 I think a lot of people who ghost others, they're not even thinking in those terms.

00:45:44.760 They're not thinking, I want to maliciously hurt this person or I don't care about this person.

00:45:48.660 It's just, it's like, it's easy.

00:45:50.460 You know, you press a few buttons on your smartphone and you can move on to the next conquest.

00:45:55.320 And I think a lot of people wouldn't act that way otherwise.

00:45:57.140 Well, the question would be, what happens to you after you do that four or five times?

00:46:02.140 You know, let's say you're not particularly psychopathic to begin with.

00:46:05.520 It's like you learn what you practice.

00:46:09.100 And I would say, look, if you're using people continually as a means to an end, and I think sex is probably the most effective way of doing that, 0.51

00:46:18.240 then you're establishing a pattern of interaction between you and other people at perhaps the deepest possible level.

00:46:25.240 And so if you do that repeatedly, first of all, you're not, you're certainly not engaging in anything that might be regarded as a, as a meaningful or deep relationship.

00:46:35.860 Quite the contrary, you regard that as excess baggage.

00:46:39.440 That's an impediment to your next conquest, so to speak.

00:46:43.600 So how would that not?

00:46:46.380 I mean, it'd be, now you said there was research on Tinder.

00:46:49.440 Has there been research on the relationship between the dark triad and these hyper-successful men?

00:46:56.120 Well, I've seen research on dark triad and Tinder use.

00:46:59.880 And, you know, people who are high on dark triad do tend to be more successful, accumulate more partners.

00:47:05.880 Specifically, whether, you know, this is related to gender and whether men are more successful or more likely to hurt others using these apps.

00:47:13.460 I haven't seen anything on that.

00:47:15.300 I have interestingly seen, I think this was from Pew, where they broke down the data by education level.

00:47:25.720 And they ask people questions like, have you ever been harassed on this dating app?

00:47:29.640 Have you ever met someone on a dating app who inflicted physical harm on you?

00:47:33.440 Basically, the wide variety of negative experiences through using dating apps.

00:47:37.680 And they found that people who are not college graduates were far more likely, the women, were far more likely to report negative experiences on the dating apps compared to college-educated women.

00:47:48.540 And to me, this is also indicative of this, you know, this sort of social class divide, another manifestation of the luxury belief of sexual promiscuity where, you know, you introduce these dating apps.

00:47:59.420 You have no idea what's going to happen or how this is going to warp society and how people are going to interact in romantic relationships.

00:48:06.560 And it's disproportionately harming lower-educated, lower-income women who are, like you're saying, they're probably more likely to meet psychopaths.

00:48:15.240 They're probably perhaps less adept in some ways at screening for certain kinds of guys.

00:48:20.680 The other thing is...

00:48:21.660 Well, it's basically if they're single mothers. 0.81

00:48:25.000 Right.

00:48:25.520 Well, yeah, yeah.

00:48:25.960 Because, well, they're a lot more, they're a lot easier to prey upon.

00:48:30.300 I mean, their straights are a lot more desperate.

00:48:32.100 And they've knocked themselves out of the single-girl dating market and lowered their market value, so to speak. 0.81

00:48:38.320 I hate to speak of it in terms like that, but it's clearly the case.

00:48:41.840 Because to initiate a relationship with a woman who has a child already is to initiate a relationship that has a lot higher upfront cost. 0.60

00:48:49.900 The complexity of negotiating the relationship with a child, the additional responsibility that has to be taken on instantly.

00:48:56.680 And none of that's the least bit trivial.

00:48:59.740 So that means, and we know that in general, if you do a triangular, imagine a triangular representation of a social hierarchy on any valued dimension,

00:49:10.440 the people who are at the lowest level are those who are most susceptible to any sort of destructive tendency that comes whistling through.

00:49:19.160 They don't have as much social support.

00:49:20.980 They're a lot closer to abject poverty.

00:49:23.640 They don't have the broad social network or the opportunities.

00:49:27.400 So everything affects them disproportionately, including epidemic illnesses.

00:49:32.580 And it's the case throughout the kingdom of life that low status confers vulnerability.

00:49:39.960 That's why people go for higher status, at least in part.

00:49:43.400 Yeah, so that Tinder, I mean, I don't know how widespread Tinder use is.

00:49:50.520 I don't know that much about Tinder.

00:49:52.000 But when I first found out about it, I thought this is a technology that, well, they certainly named it properly.

00:49:56.620 Because Tinder starts fires, and it's a fire starter, and not just sexually.

00:50:03.000 Something like 40%, last I saw, something like 40% of people under 30 are using the apps.

00:50:08.760 I would imagine it's probably higher now, especially in the wake of COVID.

00:50:12.320 So the data that I saw collected, I think, in 2019.

00:50:15.180 But after COVID and the pandemic and the lockdowns, there's no other way to meet people.

00:50:20.140 So I'd imagine a lot more people download those apps, and we'll see if they wean themselves off or if they're hooked.

00:50:25.340 I mean, these tech companies use very manipulative strategies.

00:50:30.720 I talked to an executive.

00:50:32.120 I won't say which dating app this was, but he told me that some dating apps will basically what they call, I think they're called seeding,

00:50:42.560 where they'll put fake profiles of very attractive, usually women, right?

00:50:46.260 Because men are actually more likely to use dating apps, and they're sort of more likely to pay for the premium profiles compared to women who don't have to because they're going to get matches anyway.

00:50:56.400 Anyway, so anyway, the dating app companies, they'll seed them with fake attractive women profiles and intentionally match with men who have recently downloaded a new profile, basically newly created one. 1.00

00:51:10.680 And the idea here is that if they download the app, and they immediately match with an attractive woman,

00:51:15.600 and then they usually have a couple of conversational exchanges like, hey, how's it going? Good. How are you?

00:51:21.540 And then that's it. The robot no longer responds to the user.

00:51:26.600 But the reason why this is done is basically to give them a little hit, right?

00:51:30.540 It gives them, it's like drugs, you know, give them a little boost, and now they're hooked.

00:51:33.700 It's a major hit. You bet. It's a major hit. Yeah, yeah.

00:51:37.400 And so basically, they called it chasing the dragon, which is basically a term from drug usage, right, from heroin.

00:51:43.380 You give them a little hit, and then they're going to be chasing that high for the rest of their lives.

00:51:47.040 So, you know, I think that there's so many complexities to this.

00:51:52.220 Yeah, it is. And yeah, they are creating a lot of, I think, a lot of heartbreak and a lot of frustration for both women and men.

00:52:02.400 People get all over that.

00:52:05.440 Well, I mean, by then.

00:52:06.600 Yeah, because you can imagine. If you're interacting with someone fake, I mean, that can be tailored to your desire.

00:52:13.980 All you'd have to do is look at the pictures that someone was looking at and produce a composite that's an amalgam of those attractive women, let's say. 1.00

00:52:24.460 And I mean, that the possibility for manipulation is almost infinite.

00:52:28.020 And you won't say which dating app, that's too bad, because they deserve the exposure.

00:52:33.020 But, you know, I understand your reticence. That's really unbelievably appalling and malevolent.

00:52:38.680 Well, I will say that if one app is doing it, then that means more than likely they all are.

00:52:43.980 So it almost doesn't even matter. They're probably all doing some version of that, because that's how they get users, right?

00:52:49.980 Yeah, well, it's not that clever an idea. You know, it's a pretty obvious idea in a very crooked and horrible sort of way.

00:52:57.200 So it's not like it would take a genius to think it up.

00:53:00.400 Yeah. Yeah. And so so this idea of oh, and I wanted to go back.

00:53:06.180 So so this idea of differently educated women, different social classes, having different experiences on the dating apps. 1.00

00:53:12.860 Well, they're also having entirely different experiences in in the real world, too, in terms of their dating and romantic relationships after the erosion of marriage,

00:53:21.000 after the sort of deteriorating norms around dating and romance, if, you know, I talked to some people from my hometown, for example,

00:53:32.360 and I think about, you know, the kinds of guys who stayed behind, who didn't go off to college, who didn't join the military,

00:53:37.600 who just sort of languished and hung around there. These are not, you know, just to put it bluntly, these are not it's not Prince Charming.

00:53:45.300 And so when women are dating these men, and there's no social norms, no, no forces constraining them, many of them act very poorly.

00:53:55.200 You know, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of drug use, you know, verbal and sometimes physical abuse, emotional abuse.

00:54:02.920 A lot of these guys who sort of are not not so educated, don't have a lot of money, not a lot of life prospects,

00:54:09.120 when they get involved with a woman, they don't necessarily treat her very well.

00:54:12.280 Whereas, you know, in the past, I think that there were stronger norms around how you're supposed to treat the opposite sex,

00:54:18.620 and how you're supposed to interact with them, date them, what's expected of you, and so on.

00:54:22.220 I think with the sort of dissolution of expectations has come a lot more trouble for lower income young women. 1.00

00:54:31.560 Yeah, hypothetically, the ones that the progressives are trying to do something for.

00:54:35.660 Removing the constraints of patriarchal relationships, for example, the question always is, what flows in when you remove the dykes, right? 1.00

00:54:44.880 I mean, that's another problem, I suppose, in some sense, that's analogous to the protection of social classes.

00:54:52.800 Many of these institutions that are so casually criticized, we don't know what forces shape them.

00:55:00.120 So, you know, I've been pilloried in the press repeatedly for pointing out that normative monogamy controls male aggression.

00:55:11.280 Now, it's amazing to me that I've been slashed to ribbons for making that case, because I thought that was like anthropology 101.

00:55:18.900 So, you know, there's two things that every society needs to control, and one is female fecundity, because of its high cost, and the other is male aggression. 0.98

00:55:28.420 It's like, well, I thought everyone knew that, if they were even moderately educated, and, well, how do you control that, regulate it?

00:55:35.380 For everyone's interest, particularly for the interest of children, the answer seems to be the imposition of monogamous norms.

00:55:42.240 Now, people object, well, are people truly monogamous, and the answer is not if you set up the environment to differentially award hyper-successful polyamorous males, which is exactly what Tinder does.

00:55:55.000 And there are societies where that's the case, where one man has a thousand wives, so to speak, and 999 men have none.

00:56:03.420 But those aren't societies that are stable, and those young men who have nothing to do, find things to do, and they aren't necessarily the sorts of things that you want them to be doing.

00:56:15.080 Because what the hell do they have to lose, fundamentally?

00:56:19.360 And it's not a good idea to generate a society full of young men who have very little to lose. 1.00

00:56:25.000 So, I, and it is an appalling thing that the privileged classes are more likely to disparage marriage, let's say.

00:56:38.780 And these ideas trickle down over time, they sort of permeate throughout society, because elites, affluent, educated people wield disproportionate influence, whether it's through media, pop culture, fashion.

00:56:52.760 Do you know, here's something cool.

00:56:54.200 So, do you know that names drift down the social hierarchy?

00:57:00.460 Huh, I haven't heard this before.

00:57:02.520 Well, so, influential, upper-class people will produce a name for their child, and then that name gets popularized all the way down the social hierarchy until it becomes passé, and becomes more and more common as it drifts down.

00:57:19.280 So, this influence that you're describing, you can measure it everywhere.

00:57:22.600 They're the fashion leaders, they're on the cutting edge, and everyone imitates.

00:57:26.820 And so.

00:57:27.680 Yes.

00:57:27.980 And I think that, so, you know, of course, like actual fashion clothing, of course, the sort of trendsetters, and then it trickles down to everyone else.

00:57:36.760 I didn't know this about names, which is really interesting.

00:57:38.820 But I think it is also for sort of moral beliefs as well.

00:57:44.240 One idea that I've sort of been playing with, maybe this is, you know, a little bit dangerous for me to say.

00:57:48.700 But I've been thinking about this, you know, who was championing sort of colorblindness, integration, this idea that, you know, we should treat everyone on their merits, and so on.

00:58:00.700 I mean, whatever, 50 or 60 years ago, this was a very progressive idea.

00:58:04.860 And it was mostly championed by highly educated people, more affluent people.

00:58:09.040 They also tended to be the abolitionist movement in the U.S. and so on.

00:58:12.940 But more recently, things have changed.

00:58:16.720 So, my idea here is that in the past, the elites had this idea of colorblindness.

00:58:20.860 Over time, that idea trickled throughout society, such that now today, if you talk to a typical middle class or working class Western person, they do tend to basically believe in colorblindness.

00:58:33.940 Their racial attitudes are basically like, who cares? 0.76

00:58:38.960 And it's not an important thing in their lives.

00:58:41.440 And so, now that the elites have spread this belief, how do they once again distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi, from those middle and working class people?

00:58:51.620 They once again have to make race an important feature of our social reality. 0.95

00:58:57.460 So, I've got to comment about your theories there for a sec, if you don't mind.

00:59:01.400 Sure.

00:59:01.540 When Francis Galton, 150 years ago, started studying, he thought about it as excellence, something like that.

00:59:15.380 I mean, some of the IQ research came out of that.

00:59:17.840 He started to measure people on a whole variety of different dimensions.

00:59:20.780 But his conception of excellence, of superiority, let's say, wasn't so much cognitive capacity, the more differentiated sorts of things that we might measure today and associate with some degree of value, conscientiousness, creativity, intelligence.

00:59:37.840 Galton, who was an English aristocrat, which is the reason I'm bringing this up, was at the forefront of that movement.

00:59:43.960 And he believed, like most English aristocrats of his time, that England was a superior culture and that English aristocrats were the hallmark of English superiority, right?

00:59:54.220 And so, but that superiority was fundamentally, I would say, moral.

01:00:00.580 That the superiority that was being searched for wasn't economic, exactly.

01:00:05.820 That the economic superiority was an indicator of the moral superiority.

01:00:10.300 And so, and that would be associated, yes, yes, so that would be associated with something like moral purity, and associated with disgust.

01:00:21.640 Now, George Orwell talked about, because he was from relatively higher social status, I think he was upper middle class, but he said he had a visceral distaste of the working class.

01:00:34.300 And he had to overcome that, and he did.

01:00:36.480 He worked in restaurants, and he worked in all sorts of jobs.

01:00:38.740 He went to war.

01:00:39.820 I mean, Orwell strove to overcome that visceral disgust.

01:00:44.380 And disgust is, the opposite of disgust is purity.

01:00:47.560 And that's associated with a kind of moral superiority.

01:00:51.000 And so, one of the things that your idea, one of the ideas that your concept brings up is the notion that the central axis of social hierarchy is something like assumed moral superiority.

01:01:02.240 And everything else is a marker of that, including economic wealth, you know, I have this economic wealth, because I deserve it.

01:01:09.160 That's an indicator that I'm superior, morally.

01:01:12.380 And that would go along with the idea of, I think that would go along with the idea of luxury belief.

01:01:17.720 You need to distinguish yourself from the contaminated lower classes constantly. 1.00

01:01:22.280 And there were reasons for that in the past, too.

01:01:24.240 Which is, I think, what's going on here.

01:01:25.880 Mm-hmm.

01:01:27.000 You think that is what's going on?

01:01:28.500 Yeah, well, I do.

01:01:30.240 I think that drives, in large part, the motivation to broadcast these beliefs, is to basically tell the world, I'm not one of the hoi polloi, one of the little people.

01:01:42.520 The unwashed masses.

01:01:43.940 The unwashed masses.

01:01:45.500 And so, they're telling us, you know, to society at large, and in particular, they're telling their peers, you know, don't mistake me for one of those people there.

01:01:54.040 And so, this is sort of what I'm getting at with this idea that, you know, now that the masses believe that race should no longer be treated as a big deal in society, if you're a member of the elite, if you say that, you may be at risk of being mistaken for one of the masses.

01:02:10.560 And so, now you have to sort of reintroduce the importance of race and ethnicity and so on, and say that we, you know, you don't want to be colorblind.

01:02:19.040 You want to sort of highlight our differences and so on.

01:02:22.760 But this here is a luxury belief because, you know, you may be able to sort of promote this sort of racial divisions among highly educated, highly affluent people.

01:02:35.420 And in all likelihood, it's probably not going to hurt you very much.

01:02:38.120 But if that belief is reintroduced into society where we should once again pay very close attention to what skin color we are or what race we are, that could create a lot of problems for ordinary people who don't have the wealth and resources and so on.

01:02:50.860 Well, I think it is creating problems already because, well, because, look, I think one of the factors, and I'm certainly not alone in this, although maybe I can differentiate it a bit better.

01:03:01.080 I think a big part of the reason that Trump was so attractive, I saw this hat in Florida.

01:03:07.780 I've told this story before.

01:03:09.880 It said, Trump 2021.

01:03:13.240 Trump 2020.

01:03:15.020 Yeah. 1.00

01:03:15.540 Because fuck you twice. 1.00

01:03:17.040 And I thought, yeah, that's exactly right. 1.00

01:03:20.000 It's because there's this perception on the part of the working class, perhaps particularly among working class males, and maybe even more particularly among working class white males, that the progressive types that hypothetically stand for the oppressed have nothing but contempt for them.

01:03:37.240 And the attraction to Trump was, yeah, well, here, have some of this.

01:03:42.180 I feel that every once in a while, I'll go back to my hometown, Red Bluff, California, and I'll talk to people, and I can feel this, you know, like, I'll tell them I grew up here.

01:03:54.580 I'm, you know, I'm sort of, this is my hometown.

01:03:57.220 And whenever it comes up, so what did you end up doing?

01:04:00.420 I'm honest, and I say, you know, I ended up going to Yale or Cambridge or whatever, but I'm always very quick to follow it up with.

01:04:07.580 But I enlisted in the military.

01:04:09.720 This is sort of my protection.

01:04:10.760 Like, I was in the military before I did all this other stuff, because I can sense, like, when I say I go to Yale, there's this sort of moment of awkward silence, and I can tell they're sort of updating their view of me, and probably not in a good direction either.

01:04:23.760 And so then when I follow it up with, but I enlisted, and then sort of things calm back down.

01:04:28.140 I had this experience a couple years ago.

01:04:30.720 I was in a casino playing cards in Corning, which is an even more poor and small town in Northern California.

01:04:36.280 And my sister had, you know, let it slip to the dealer that I was a student at Yale.

01:04:41.980 And the dealer looked at me for a second, and he's like, what are you even doing in here?

01:04:45.660 You know, in a sense that, like, number one, why would you be gambling in here if you go to a school like that?

01:04:50.260 And then number two, like, it sort of sounded like, I'm not really sure I want you to be in here.

01:04:54.400 And I told him, like, you know, hey, I serve in the military, I just want to play some cards, let's, you know, let's just have a good time.

01:05:00.880 And, and he sort of let his guard down at that point.

01:05:03.800 But I think there is this feeling among more blue collar working class people that, you know, the elites over there are, they look down on us, they view us in a certain way. 0.99

01:05:15.660 They treat us like we're stupid or backwards, or evil or racist or whatever. 0.84

01:05:22.200 And really, it's, I mean, it's just not true. 0.99

01:05:25.340 That kind of disdain also just sort of amplifies the divisions.

01:05:29.600 And that is something that I'm also trying to highlight to elites as well.

01:05:33.380 I think that there's been a lot of emphasis in psychology on the role of fear in promoting belief.

01:05:41.600 But I think that disdain, contempt, and disgust have been underappreciated as separating motivational factors.

01:05:56.440 Yes.

01:05:57.020 And it's one thing, if someone's afraid of you, that's not exactly offensive.

01:06:03.500 I mean, you might regard it as unfortunate, but there's also a kind of implicit respect for your power.

01:06:13.000 We have a little bit of dominance.

01:06:14.600 Exactly, exactly.

01:06:16.640 But if they're disgusted by you or disdainful of you, that means that you're in the contemptible and rotting category, essentially.

01:06:27.000 And that's a lot bigger dagger aimed at your heart than, than fear.

01:06:32.580 I mean, would you rather be shied away from or sneered at?

01:06:38.260 Right.

01:06:39.180 Right.

01:06:39.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:06:40.860 I think this is, this is part of what's, what's driving these, these sort of class divisions.

01:06:47.780 That, that the sort of working class and lower class, they feel this, they feel that there's this disdain for them on the part of the upper class.

01:06:54.220 And this is part of what I'm trying to highlight, too, with this idea, is to, to basically say that, like, there are these divisions, social class exists in America.

01:07:02.100 And this is something that we need to be thinking about whenever we broadcast these silly beliefs that no one believes in.

01:07:07.260 And what blows my mind is that, you know, the data are freely available.

01:07:10.840 You can see what the majority of Americans believe about the police or voter ID laws or drugs or what have you.

01:07:18.300 And the affluent just don't care very much. 0.97

01:07:23.300 They're still going to broadcast their very silly beliefs, I guess.

01:07:28.500 Well, it could even be, you know, to take your hypothesis, perhaps a step further, but perhaps you've already thought this up. 0.95

01:07:35.300 It's a real marker of my status that I can afford insane beliefs.

01:07:42.060 Look, look how crazy I can be and still survive.

01:07:46.400 Well, it's, yes.

01:07:48.340 Right, exactly.

01:07:49.560 It's like I can take, exactly.

01:07:51.280 It's exactly that.

01:07:52.340 It's that it's like a peacock's tail.

01:07:54.100 I can laden myself down with this palpable absurdity.

01:07:58.320 It has no material effect whatsoever on my continued existence.

01:08:02.200 So the peacock is dragging around this very heavy, colorful set of tail feathers and can still survive.

01:08:08.900 And the sort of highly educated affluent members of society can drag around these very expensive, costly luxury beliefs that clearly have no correspondence to reality and they can still survive.

01:08:19.900 Well, and they have some correspondence to reality for them because they can afford to experiment with the beliefs without immediately perishing or without, you know, fatally compromising their lives.

01:08:30.800 In most cases, not all, but in most cases, whereas if you're farther down the chain and have less protection, you toy around with polyamory and you end up as a single mother when you're 18.

01:08:41.640 That's the end of that.

01:08:43.380 And so then you have the rest of your life to think about, well, perhaps that wasn't very wise, but, you know, it's a little late then.

01:08:50.020 Yeah, well, you can believe whatever you want.

01:08:53.140 If you are a graduate of a top university and you are economically comfortable, you can have whatever set of beliefs you want.

01:09:00.280 And in all likelihood, you'll be just fine.

01:09:03.500 But, you know, I want to underline that because you are the, you know, you are the most sort of sealed from the consequences of your beliefs.

01:09:13.580 You actually, and at the same time, you wield the most influence in society.

01:09:17.340 It's very important to understand if you have a belief and you're trying to implement it into policy or to sort of erode or create new norms or whatever, just be very careful with what it is that you're doing.

01:09:30.320 You know, you can treat it as a game and gain status, but in the longer term, this is going to hurt.

01:09:35.020 You know, it's going to hurt a lot of people.

01:09:36.840 It's going to hurt the very people that supposedly we care the most about.

01:09:39.380 So what have been the consequences for you of being known for this kind of theory?

01:09:47.940 You're a student at Cambridge.

01:09:49.380 You're in psychology.

01:09:51.700 You were an undergraduate at Yale.

01:09:53.780 I believe you were an undergraduate at Yale.

01:09:55.680 Were you an undergraduate when you wrote your essay on luxury beliefs?

01:10:01.460 No, that was during my first year here at Cambridge in 2019.

01:10:05.780 You know, it's been an interesting experience.

01:10:11.120 I was a little bit nervous when I first wrote it simply because of the way things are going in universities.

01:10:16.140 I had a very sort of turbulent introduction to university life, to campus life when I first entered undergrad.

01:10:25.780 So this was in the fall of 2015.

01:10:28.020 It's kind of funny.

01:10:28.540 So in 2015, so I had just gotten out of the military in August.

01:10:33.480 I started class in September.

01:10:34.940 And a couple weeks later, I saw that Jonathan Haidt was giving a talk on campus.

01:10:40.320 And I had just read his book, The Righteous Mind, about moral psychology, which is an interest of mine.

01:10:45.400 And I thought that that's what his talk was going to be about.

01:10:47.600 But the entire talk was basically about, you know, are universities meant to equip students with the ability to seek truth?

01:10:54.800 Or is it meant to keep them safe and protect them and shelter them and so on?

01:10:58.640 I went to this talk totally confused, because that is not what I expected him to talk about.

01:11:02.860 That's not what I knew Haidt for.

01:11:04.080 I knew him for his research, his psychology research.

01:11:07.800 Right, but he wrote The Coddling of the American Mind as well.

01:11:11.660 That hadn't come out until I think the next year or the year after.

01:11:14.900 Okay, okay.

01:11:15.160 Um, so I only knew Haidt as the author of The Righteous Mind.

01:11:19.300 And I, I didn't have the context for what that talk was about, because I was basically an outsider to this kind of world of, you know, free speech debates.

01:11:31.040 And, you know, what is the purpose of a campus and all of this stuff.

01:11:34.360 I was basically just like a dude who felt lucky to get into this great university.

01:11:38.640 Um, and then about, what, three weeks after that, uh, Erica Christakis, uh, who was a faculty member at Yale, wrote this infamous email about, uh, basically defending freedom of expression.

01:11:51.940 Uh, the Yale University administration basically sent this email to students.

01:11:56.280 Oh, on Halloween, yes.

01:11:57.960 Yeah, so they basically told students, the administration told students, you know, be careful what you wear and all this stuff.

01:12:03.340 And Erica Christakis wrote a follow-up email saying, you know, if you have a problem with what people are wearing, you should talk to them.

01:12:08.720 You know, it's important to uphold freedom of expression and so on.

01:12:12.000 And there was this entire campus eruption.

01:12:14.920 My first experience, you know, having seen any kind of, uh, campus, uh, protests like this before, students coming together, there was this, uh, very sort of dark undercurrent around campus.

01:12:26.200 People were very afraid to, to speak out against what was happening.

01:12:29.260 Um, and so that basically, uh, was my introduction to what, uh, college is like, uh, and that has basically stayed with me ever since.

01:12:40.520 It was a very formative experience for me to see what had happened there.

01:12:43.180 The other thing is, I mean, I, I met with Erica Christakis later.

01:12:46.880 I was interested in taking a class with her.

01:12:48.680 She taught a class at Yale called the concept of the problem child, uh, which is basically, you know, this idea of, of, um, you know, sort of orphan children, children who get into trouble and mischief and so on.

01:12:58.820 And this sort of history and psychology of all of that.

01:13:01.380 And, you know, naturally to me, given my background is a very interesting idea.

01:13:04.920 I was wait-listed for that class and I was very disappointed to learn that she stepped down from teaching.

01:13:10.280 She said that Yale is not a good climate for, for teaching anymore because.

01:13:14.260 Yeah.

01:13:14.460 Well, it's no picnic to be mobbed.

01:13:17.060 Right.

01:13:17.400 Exactly.

01:13:17.920 It doesn't take very many mobbing experiences to do you in.

01:13:21.700 Yeah.

01:13:22.240 Well, I mean, I, I had met with her and I'd met with Nicholas, her husband later, who was also targeted by the mob and to see like, like the way that the students treated them, called them every name in the book, demanded that they be fired and so on.

01:13:33.760 And then to like, you know, discover that they were very good people, uh, in, in their personal lives.

01:13:39.940 Um, they had taken in foster kids of their own and, and helped them and so on.

01:13:43.700 And so like to see this, this clash between like what the students were saying about them and who they actually were.

01:13:48.520 Um, I mean, it, uh, you know, sort of formed this, this cynical perspective that I still have about what kind of people go to these universities and what their intentions are.

01:13:59.320 Um, but in any case.

01:14:01.000 Hey, I've got something to talk to you about too, in terms of your luxury beliefs.

01:14:04.380 So, you know, we were talking, we've, we've talked about two things in some sense.

01:14:09.000 We've talked about luxury beliefs and we've talked about sexual politics, I suppose.

01:14:14.840 Right.

01:14:15.220 And so I, there's a way of bringing those together.

01:14:18.640 So do you think there's, have you look at gender differences in luxury beliefs?

01:14:24.840 So for example, I, the universities, especially the liberal arts are now dominated by women and that's not a trivial transformation. 0.90

01:14:34.320 It's a fundamental transformation and it, I mean, Heights coddling idea is easily associated with, you know, an excessive amount of dependence, let's say.

01:14:47.700 And so if the maternal role is fundamentally the sheltering of infants, which I think is a reasonable way of looking at it, then, well, then what happens when that becomes political?

01:14:58.880 I mean, because we don't know anything about women's large scale political behavior, because this is all new. 1.00

01:15:06.380 And so when you have an institution that's essentially oriented to young people who could be regarded as children, but wouldn't have to be, but could be regarded as children, is the maternal expression that their safety and security and emotional well-being is paramount.

01:15:22.080 And then let's take this a step further, just to be annoying and horrible, these are all women who are at their peak age of fecundity. 1.00

01:15:30.180 And you might say, well, what's happening with all those maternal instincts?

01:15:33.780 They're just gone all of a sudden?

01:15:35.800 I mean, many 19-year-old girls, I've talked to many of them, believe that their career is going to be the most important thing in their life.

01:15:43.540 Very few 30-year-old women believe that, even if they have high-powered careers, because they tend to discover that high-powered careers come at a substantial cost, like 60, 70-hour work weeks, etc. 0.98

01:15:58.820 And so that life might be best spent in the bosom of family and friends and with children, etc.

01:16:05.720 That's where much of the true value is, and most women figure that out by the time they're in their 30s, 1.00

01:16:10.680 which is why high-powered law firms, for example, have a hell of a time retaining their extremely competent and highly valuable women. 1.00

01:16:19.120 No one likes to talk about this.

01:16:20.360 They wouldn't talk about it in the law firms that I consulted for, many, many of them.

01:16:24.560 All the women would talk about it privately, but never publicly.

01:16:28.100 The discussion was always about how the law firms weren't doing enough to support women with their children,

01:16:33.540 and all the women knew that wasn't true.

01:16:35.820 That wasn't what was going on, and the law firms were bending over backwards to try to accommodate them,

01:16:40.180 because they wanted to keep their high-performing women, for obvious economic reasons. 1.00

01:16:45.000 And so we have all these young women who dominate institutions now, 1.00

01:16:50.220 like, well, especially the humanities and liberal arts in universities.

01:16:53.920 It's like, well, is that the reason that security and safety and the sanctity of the home?

01:17:00.520 This is a community. This is a home.

01:17:02.540 It's like, no, that's not what a university is, actually.

01:17:06.280 But that's what it could be.

01:17:08.320 So what do you think of that?

01:17:10.600 And these are discussions that no one will have, obviously.

01:17:14.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:15.260 I'm sorry to put you on the spot. 0.99

01:17:16.700 You can tell me to go to hell if you want, because you're probably already in enough trouble. 0.98

01:17:22.540 No, I mean, I think it's an interesting idea. 0.97

01:17:24.960 I'm just not entirely sure if that's what's happening here.

01:17:30.380 I mean, maybe.

01:17:31.240 I guess maybe it would depend on the level of analysis we're talking about here.

01:17:34.880 I mean, I think at a more proximate level.

01:17:37.240 So maybe at that approximate level, it's about sort of gaining social status in your local environment.

01:17:41.720 But perhaps there's sort of this ultimate evolutionary level.

01:17:44.160 Like, why is it that these are the steps now that one must take to obtain social status?

01:17:49.460 And maybe underlying that are the evolutionary reasons.

01:17:52.080 Well, that's exactly the question.

01:17:53.400 What you're describing here.

01:17:54.100 Well, you also might wonder, what messages do women at the peak of their fertility want to broadcast to the community? 0.85

01:18:04.520 To the men.

01:18:05.160 Well, to the men and to the women, for that matter. 0.66

01:18:08.660 And it might be, I'm a caring person.

01:18:11.460 Well, why?

01:18:14.500 Why would you broadcast that?

01:18:16.360 That specifically?

01:18:17.480 Because we're looking at all sorts of potential values you could broadcast, right?

01:18:20.980 The luxury values that are selected appear to be ones that are putatively associated with compassion.

01:18:28.560 I mean, it tilts hard in that direction.

01:18:30.600 And Haidt has shown that because liberal types and the luxury values that you're describing seem to be associated with progressive liberalism.

01:18:37.960 Tremendous amount of that is driven by compassion and lack of harm rather than more conservative values, let's say.

01:18:48.040 Well, I did see this study fairly recently.

01:18:51.080 I think Mitch Brown, he's a grad student.

01:18:52.720 He was an author on this, basically showing that broadcasting moral values does sort of increase attractiveness to others.

01:19:03.620 And I can't exactly remember what the specifics were, but they were sort of involved around social justice, about caring for the oppressed and the downtrodden and so on.

01:19:13.220 And I think the effect was most pronounced for men broadcasting these views.

01:19:19.540 And women found this to be particularly attractive. 0.98

01:19:21.820 But I could imagine like it would go the other way too, although a lot of the sort of evolutionary psych papers I've seen on sort of mating psychology, it doesn't, I mean, men seem, especially young men, seem most interested in appearance, like far, far more than any other sort of personality or behavioral dimension among the women.

01:19:41.620 But it's possible.

01:19:42.540 I mean, what you're saying that maybe it's not so much about, you know, trying to impress the men, but maybe just community as a whole or their fellow peers.

01:19:52.600 It also might not be a matter of impressing.

01:19:55.760 It might be a matter of a particular form of orientation, taking a new target.

01:20:01.980 I mean, for most of human history, women who were in between 19 and 25 had infants.

01:20:10.860 Right.

01:20:11.900 Okay, so now they don't.

01:20:14.400 Okay, so that's not like, that's not a trivial transformation.

01:20:17.740 That's a fundamental earth-shaking, traumatic, dramatic transformation.

01:20:23.620 And so we would expect that to have no political impact whatsoever?

01:20:27.880 Yeah, I mean, it does seem to me that it's unlikely that it would have zero effect.

01:20:37.400 I guess my question would be, why now, then?

01:20:41.980 Why would it, I mean, because women have been going to university now for 50 plus years. 1.00

01:20:46.380 I think they've been the majority.

01:20:47.300 Right, but they didn't dominate.

01:20:49.320 Well, they've dominated.

01:20:50.560 I mean, I think they've tipped past 50% since I think the early 90s.

01:20:53.780 So why is it now that, you know, this, I mean, perhaps, you know, that's one ingredient is sort of the dominance of women on universities, 1.00

01:21:04.420 in addition to maybe social media, and a few other sort of more recent inventions that have spurred this on.

01:21:11.980 Yeah, well, there was definitely a spike in politically correct beliefs of the sort that you've described in the 90s.

01:21:18.120 Oh, interesting.

01:21:18.680 Right, right.

01:21:19.760 I mean, but what seemed to happen then, I think, and that was when I was teaching in Boston,

01:21:25.400 it bubbled up, but then the economy boomed so madly that people seemed to be preoccupied by other things for a long period of time.

01:21:33.340 Okay.

01:21:34.740 And then it went kind of back underground, and I thought, well, maybe we're done with that nonsense to some degree,

01:21:39.280 but it certainly popped back up more recently.

01:21:41.700 And also, 30 years isn't very long.

01:21:44.160 I mean, we're looking at massive demographic transformations in the structure of a society.

01:21:49.320 We don't understand.

01:21:50.140 I mean, we already talked about the effect of technology, of computer technology on mating,

01:21:56.360 but we certainly haven't talked about the effect of relatively accessible and effective birth control technology and all of that.

01:22:05.700 We touched on that.

01:22:06.900 But, I mean, these are huge changes that we don't know anything about.

01:22:10.060 I mean, even the sort of birth control issue, I mean, it's really interesting to see just like how the discussion around dating has changed so much.

01:22:21.120 I mean, I remember, you know, reading things from the sort of early 2010s, like 2012, 2013,

01:22:27.100 about how hookup culture was this great thing that was liberating.

01:22:30.880 And I think more recently, people are now starting to question that, about whether that's, I mean, you know, educated people questioning whether this is good for society.

01:22:41.140 And, yeah, I mean, I've read this very interesting article, long-form article in Brookings.

01:22:47.600 I can't remember the author, specifically about reproduction technology and how, essentially, this has given rise to, in some ways, to more broken homes.

01:23:00.040 And their reasoning was that once reproduction became a biological choice for the mother, then fatherhood became a social choice for the man.

01:23:11.280 Simply because in the past, if a woman got pregnant, there were all of these norms in place for the man to basically marry the woman.

01:23:18.340 You know, these sort of shotgun marriages, the community shamed the men into marrying the women.

01:23:22.060 If you skipped out on the woman, then you were seen as a deadbeat and so on.

01:23:25.080 There was a lot of taboo and shame around that.

01:23:27.560 Yeah, well, we don't even know what effect there is socially, for example, with the presumption that, well, if you get pregnant, it's your own fault.

01:23:37.740 Because the reliable reproductive prevention technology is at hand.

01:23:42.980 You know, and many women who get pregnant have not taken the pill properly, for example.

01:23:47.920 And so I'm not saying that they should be blamed for that.

01:23:50.220 I'm not saying that what I am saying is that it opens the door for attribution of responsibility to the women.

01:23:56.920 And we don't know what that effect, what effect there is of that on social institutions.

01:24:01.960 That is actually the argument, if I recall, from this Brookings article, which was that, you know, not necessarily on a societal level.

01:24:09.740 It wasn't like society suddenly said, well, now if you get pregnant, it's your fault because of the pill.

01:24:13.060 It was more on a local level.

01:24:15.020 Couples started to believe this.

01:24:16.300 Men started to believe it.

01:24:17.420 The neighborhood, the community started to accept that, you know, if a man has sex with a woman and she gets pregnant, the man can say to himself, well, that's not my problem.

01:24:25.500 And that's kind of your fault because, you know, you have this magical pill that can whatever, so I don't have to get involved anymore.

01:24:31.340 And I think the local community and the social environment sort of tacitly, if not sort of openly, but at least tacitly, started to accept this kind of logic, this kind of reasoning.

01:24:41.780 And this basically allowed men to skip out on their responsibility.

01:24:45.240 Well, it's almost inevitable to accept it if you accept the proposition that women now have control over the reproductive function. 1.00

01:24:51.000 And we don't want to de-emphasize, like I thought, the 20th century would be remembered for three things.

01:24:57.340 Hydrogen bomb, computer chip, the pill.

01:25:03.420 Three bombs, right?

01:25:05.100 Because, I mean, there hasn't been a time in human history where females had control over the reproductive function. 0.90

01:25:10.520 It's the equivalent of, almost the equivalent of a new species in terms of dramatic biological transformation.

01:25:17.720 Someone's going to edit that part out and turn it into something.

01:25:22.420 Yeah, well, good luck to them.

01:25:24.460 It's not like I don't feel bad for the women who are put in this position. 0.73

01:25:27.800 I certainly do.

01:25:28.540 They have a tremendous amount to contend with.

01:25:30.280 But, you know, the other thing that's quite interesting is all of the debates about consent that have emerged on campus and exactly what constitutes consent.

01:25:40.620 I mean, because the 60s hypothesis in the wake of the pill was, well, sex doesn't really matter.

01:25:47.760 So, you know, any consent will do because it's now become a trivial endeavor.

01:25:53.980 I mean, that was the theory, right?

01:25:55.360 It's just sex.

01:25:56.400 Well, and AIDS put the blocks to that theory very, very rapidly.

01:26:00.140 And, you know, no one likes to talk about this because there's many things we don't like to talk about.

01:26:05.660 But the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of promiscuity in a major way.

01:26:10.720 And so promiscuity distributed AIDS and contributed to the manner in which it manifested itself.

01:26:18.520 And so sex turned out to be a dangerous force in multiple dimensions apart from mere reproductive, you know, danger.

01:26:28.520 The other sexually transmitted disease were reasonably controlled with antibiotics.

01:26:34.000 So I find it interesting that people are so just reluctant to talk about the importance of sex as an incentive.

01:26:41.280 I mean, there's a lot of discussion in society, for example, about economic incentives, about jobs, professions, economic inequality, and so on.

01:26:48.540 But there's not much talk about the role that sex plays.

01:26:52.760 I mean, you know, from the sort of evolutionary perspective, sex has been around since before we were human.

01:26:58.520 Sex is still going to be around long after humans have gone extinct.

01:27:01.740 Like, sex is universal.

01:27:03.140 It's what drives every single species.

01:27:04.980 But I'm just surprised at how often we overlook it as an incentive for behavior and how fast things are changing in the realm of sex.

01:27:13.740 I just saw this statistic from the Washington Post showing that from 2008 to 2018, the amount of sexlessness among men under the age of 30 has doubled.

01:27:27.220 So in 2008, 15% of men under age 30 reported not having sex in the past year.

01:27:33.520 And by 2018, it had doubled to about 30%.

01:27:36.140 And for women, it increased slightly.

01:27:39.780 It was something like 10% in 2008 to like 15% in 2018.

01:27:45.340 So there was an increase, a slight increase.

01:27:47.160 But for men, it has doubled to the point where about one in three young men are reporting that they haven't had sex in the past year, which is a very new thing.

01:27:56.040 Despite the mating apps.

01:27:58.080 Right, despite the apps, despite even more support supposedly for sexual freedom and for polyamory and novel relationship arrangements and the further sort of devaluing of the importance of sex, more people are having less of it, men and women, but especially young men.

01:28:19.600 Yeah, well, my understanding is that's damn near epidemic in Japan.

01:28:26.620 So what's happening?

01:28:28.760 A tremendous number of young men in Japan are falling into that category.

01:28:32.860 And in fact, this society has become increasingly sexless, even among young people.

01:28:38.380 I mean, that's reflected to some degree in the declining birth rate.

01:28:40.980 But now it's been a long time since I looked at the statistics, but that's my understanding.

01:28:45.880 And so if it happened there, it's not surprising that it, you know, might happen here.

01:28:50.720 And that might be a consequence, too, of this emergent polygamy that we were describing, is that all the spoils are going to a very few men.

01:28:59.060 Of course, there's also the effect of pornography, which is a substitute.

01:29:05.040 And, you know, that's also, I don't know much about the literature on pornography use and the relationship between it and actual sexual activity.

01:29:16.700 I have read some ominous things about the increase in failure to achieve erections among young men, that, at least in principle, is a consequence of pornography use.

01:29:27.100 But I don't know how reliable that is.

01:29:29.700 I mean, data that married men are more likely to experience divorce if they watch any amount of pornography.

01:29:37.720 And it's sort of, you know, the more pornography they use, the more likely they are to get divorced.

01:29:46.320 I think that, yeah, this is another, I mean, this is a very recent invention, too, sort of streaming digital pornography.

01:29:51.800 I've heard that researchers are having difficulty even studying this simply because they can't really find a control group.

01:29:58.340 They, you know, there's no young men who don't watch porn, at least have never not been exposed to it.

01:30:04.680 And so this is a very difficult thing for them to even study.

01:30:07.560 Well, it's another indication of the emergence of polygamy because it's virtual polygamy.

01:30:17.240 You can have an unlimited number of attractive sexual partners.

01:30:19.960 Now it's all virtual.

01:30:21.920 Right.

01:30:22.760 But that is a transformative technology.

01:30:27.420 I mean, you can see more pictures of nude women in one day than anybody in history would have ever seen in their entire life.

01:30:35.520 Yeah.

01:30:35.740 And I see this, you know, the consequences of this, how young people interact now, where there's even these contests to see how long they can go without watching it, almost like it's a game.

01:30:49.960 You know, these sort of communities on Reddit or on social media where they'll sort of try to go for a month or go for 90 days or whatever without watching it.

01:30:59.280 And at first, I think it starts as a game.

01:31:02.040 No fap.

01:31:02.380 And they're trying to, I think, you know, on the one hand, it's sort of a game for them.

01:31:07.160 It's a contest.

01:31:07.880 But on the other hand, I think there is this underlying, you know, beneath the sort of joking around about it, I think there is this view that, like, this probably isn't good for us.

01:31:14.680 And let's see if we can get off of it.

01:31:16.160 Let's see if we can stop.

01:31:17.100 And I don't see, like, how this isn't changing people.

01:31:23.100 I mean, I feel very fortunate because I came of age just before, you know, sort of fast internet and all of this stuff had started taking off, like, right before YouTube, all of this stuff.

01:31:33.560 And I can imagine that if I was, I don't know, if I was 13 and all of this stuff had existed today, like, I'm sure it would be warping my brain in one way or another.

01:31:42.060 I mean, between the internet, between social media, and then, of course, the digital porn and the endless images.

01:31:49.400 I don't know how, like, very young boys are dealing with this new technology.

01:31:56.680 Well, these are all, it's very difficult for society to structure itself around monogamous norms.

01:32:01.860 That took a lot of work.

01:32:04.580 And when that's taken apart, it's not at all obvious how to put it back together.

01:32:10.300 So, and it does appear that we're seeing the consequences of that.

01:32:15.820 The consent issue on campus, I think, is extraordinarily interesting.

01:32:19.980 Because it isn't what you would have expected.

01:32:23.520 It isn't what anybody predicted, right?

01:32:25.160 We thought with the relaxation of sexual norms that there would be this possibility that sex could become casual.

01:32:30.960 And there is an insistence.

01:32:33.280 It's so strange to watch.

01:32:34.820 And this is associated with your luxury belief idea.

01:32:40.240 On the one hand, we have this absolute insistence by the progressive types, essentially, especially,

01:32:48.420 that any and all form of sexual expression is not only acceptable, but to be celebrated.

01:32:54.780 No matter what the form is.

01:32:56.460 And on the other hand, we have this insistence that sex is so dangerous that the culture is best conceptualized as a rape culture.

01:33:07.240 And that every step of sexual interaction between a young man and a young woman needs to be documented, like formally, and perhaps even in writing, because that has been proposed at some universities.

01:33:18.440 And so there's this perversity about the twin insistence, right?

01:33:23.000 It's all forms of sexual expression are laudable and freeing, yet it's so dangerous that every bit of it has to be documented.

01:33:32.440 And the fundamental orienting structure is something like rape.

01:33:39.480 I wonder if this has something to do with just sort of socio-sexual orientation of whoever happens to be expanding the belief.

01:33:48.400 So if you tend to be a person who's had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions, maybe you had the expectation of monogamy, and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences, then you may start to be very preoccupied with the issue of consent.

01:34:02.760 Yeah, I think that's exactly what happens.

01:34:04.480 I think that, so, you know, we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs.

01:34:11.060 And they're shielded to some degree.

01:34:14.380 But my suspicions are is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable.

01:34:29.060 It's just not the case emotionally.

01:34:31.120 And those people, the ones who are supporting or promoting the complete sexual freedom, they may just be sort of less sensitive to having negative sexual experiences, because like you're saying, all of it is fun, all of it is free, all of it is laudable.

01:34:46.520 And so for them, if they have, you know, experience that someone else might view as negative, for them, it's just not a big deal.

01:34:51.520 And so this is why they're promoting more of an open sexual culture.

01:34:55.760 It could easily be that they could be high in openness, say, so exploratory and low in agreeableness.

01:35:02.440 So, you know, they're not as they're not as associated.

01:35:06.060 They're not as likely to form immediate empathetic bonds.

01:35:09.620 I mean, this itself may be connected to your earlier question about sort of the growth in the number of female students on campus.

01:35:18.540 I mean, there's been interesting research from, so John Berger, I think I'm getting his name right, wrote a book called Datonomics, where he goes, he discusses at length the role that sex ratios play for social interactions, for romantic interactions.

01:35:32.980 And basically, he found that on campuses, where there's more women than there are men, there's much more hookup culture, women expect less of the men, and they report that, like basically feeling despondent about their chances of getting a boyfriend.

01:35:50.020 Men, on the other hand, seem to have a much more enjoyable time.

01:35:54.720 They report having more sexual partners, feeling more upbeat, feeling more hopeful, having more hookups, and so on.

01:36:01.960 Whereas on university campuses like Caltech, where there tend to be more men than women, it's actually the reverse, where women are more likely to have a boyfriend, to be more satisfied with their romantic situation, and so on.

01:36:13.640 And basically, I mean, and this has been documented across cultures, in different cities, different societies, and so on.

01:36:20.040 And basically, the idea is that when there's a large number of women, and a scarcity of men, women have to compete for that small pool of men, and they're more willing to basically modify their behavior in ways that men find appealing, which, you know, oftentimes is sort of short-term casual sex, you know, hookups, sort of very casual situations.

01:36:42.980 Whereas when the reverse is the case, and there's a scarcity of women and a large number of men, then men tend to modify their behaviors to be more oriented toward long-term relationships, towards commitment, and emotional connection, and so on.

01:36:53.400 And so as universities become more dominated by women, and the sort of sexual, their satisfaction with the sexual landscape declines, then maybe this is related to some of what we're seeing, of course, maybe with consent, and some of these other social justice issues that we're seeing, that a lot of it may be sort of driven by sort of dissatisfaction with the romantic landscape, and the way that men are behaving.

01:37:20.960 A sense of being exploited.

01:37:23.580 But then I would be interested to know if in those universities where there's a relatively smaller proportion of men, and the men report being more satisfied, I wonder if that's the median or the average, right?

01:37:37.800 I would bet it's the average.

01:37:40.160 You think so?

01:37:40.760 No, because I was thinking that in those situations, it would still be a relatively small minority of men who are getting all the sexual attention.

01:37:49.720 Well, if that's the case, wouldn't it be the mean?

01:37:53.500 Well, wouldn't that mean that the mean satisfaction would be high, whereas the median might be lower?

01:37:57.460 Yes, that is, sorry.

01:37:58.500 Yes, you're exactly right.

01:37:59.620 That's exactly right.

01:38:00.520 Okay.

01:38:00.700 So there'd be a fair bit of variation around the mean as well.

01:38:04.380 Yeah.

01:38:05.060 Right?

01:38:05.480 Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:38:06.900 I mean, there's a lot of like sort of interesting findings.

01:38:10.000 I think this was a study from MIT, which showed that like, something like half of the graduates of MIT, male graduates of MIT graduate as virgins.

01:38:18.280 And I think that this pattern has also been found in other top universities as well.

01:38:23.560 And so this probably goes to this idea that a small number of the men at universities are accumulating more sexual partners.

01:38:30.780 Well, that would go along with the 4% rating, the 4% description of Tinder.

01:38:35.820 And so what happens is that where there's a relatively small number of men, that competition between women becomes incredibly intense, but for a very small fraction of the men.

01:38:44.960 And because those men have endless short-term options, there's no satisfaction on the female side with regard to anything past, you know, a short-term casual relationship. 1.00

01:38:55.720 I saw this really kind of amusing study.

01:38:58.440 It was in PNAS of this idea of sexy selfies and which countries, in which countries are women most likely to post sort of sexually provocative images of themselves on the internet and on social media. 1.00

01:39:10.860 And so the researchers, you know, they put forth various hypotheses.

01:39:13.980 One of them was maybe it's patriarchy.

01:39:16.680 Maybe in cultures where women are treated very poorly, they feel like they have to present themselves in a certain way, very sexually provocative poses and so on.

01:39:25.820 But that's not what the researchers found.

01:39:27.140 What they found was that in countries where income inequality tends to be high, that's when women are most likely to post sexy selfies. 0.97

01:39:34.920 And their conclusion here was that when women are competing for a shrinking number of highly successful men, they're more likely to pose in provocative ways on the internet in the hopes of capturing their attention, which is maybe what we're seeing on Instagram and on various other social media apps,

01:39:53.560 where I think there is this sort of, I don't know, tilting towards more and more sort of pornographic adjacent content in the hopes of capturing more attention.

01:40:06.100 And so I think that a lot of what we're seeing may be due to sort of this overlooked topic of the sexual dynamics in society.

01:40:17.480 So what's been the consequence for you of having pursued this line of thought?

01:40:21.640 We started to touch on that, but we didn't touch on it that much.

01:40:24.580 It hasn't been too bad.

01:40:29.660 You know, some people have questioned me on this.

01:40:31.620 I've had some somewhat nasty comments from other graduate students here at Cambridge, social media stuff, but it really hasn't been that bad.

01:40:43.900 Yeah, I've actually met quite a number of people who agree with me and who are glad that someone is speaking out about this issue.

01:40:51.840 I actually met, yeah, a lot of friends by talking about this openly.

01:40:57.980 I think that this is just one of those things where people are silent because they're afraid of the reputational cost,

01:41:03.720 but when someone else starts speaking out, they feel more comfortable sort of coming out of their shell more and more and discussing it.

01:41:10.180 On the other hand, I'm sort of reluctant to continue along a career in academia simply because of everything that I've seen.

01:41:19.060 So I'd mentioned before what I saw at Yale with the Christakis. 1.00

01:41:22.520 Part of the reason why I came to Cambridge, you know, there are many reasons, but one of the reasons why I came here was because I thought it would be different.

01:41:27.820 I thought that the sort of social mobbing and the sort of student protests, I thought that was maybe I hoped that it was an American thing.

01:41:37.440 And I thought that, well, maybe if I go to England, things will be calm.

01:41:40.240 Maybe things aren't as political over there.

01:41:41.660 And within a matter of months, two things happened.

01:41:45.360 One was you were supposed to come here to be a research fellow, and then you were disinvited because of the student protests.

01:41:51.040 And then two, there was a young postdoc named Noah Carl who was supposed to, you know, he's a postdoc here, and he was fired because of student protests as well.

01:41:58.720 And so I thought, okay, well, I come over here hoping to get away from that, and it sort of followed me over here.

01:42:03.340 So maybe this is a sign that I'm supposed to be doing something else other than remaining within the academy.

01:42:12.500 So once I'm finished with my PhD, I may have to find...

01:42:15.420 Yeah, I heard through the grapevine that, you know, hypothetically, I was disinvited from Cambridge because a photograph was taken with me in New Zealand of someone wearing a T-shirt that was critical of Islam.

01:42:29.900 But I learned through the grapevine that the decision to disinvite me had been taken before that, and that was used as an excuse.

01:42:38.140 I am not at all surprised.

01:42:39.480 And this is a reliable source.

01:42:42.000 Yeah, so stunning, stunning, so that all of that, it was very costly and painful for me to undergo that.

01:42:49.020 And, you know, it's so peculiar because I was going to Cambridge, hypothetically, to talk about biblical stories with, you know, people at the Divinity Center there.

01:42:57.560 And the biblical story, the lectures that I've done have been very popular and reasonably influential and, you know, well-received by atheists and religious people alike.

01:43:08.560 So it was a serious academic endeavor, and it was very difficult to bear the opprobrium, let's say, that was associated with that.

01:43:17.600 But I understand that, you know, things have perhaps changed for the better with regards to such decisions more recently.

01:43:25.600 But it was shocking to me to find out that it was based on a lie.

01:43:32.020 Yeah, I'm not at all surprised.

01:43:33.060 And that they used that to smear my reputation.

01:43:34.680 You know, it's quite something.

01:43:38.020 So where are you in your PhD program now?

01:43:42.820 So finishing up my third year, I should have one more year, and then I will be returning to the States.

01:43:48.960 Don't know exactly what I'll be doing, but, yeah, like I said, probably not in a university at that point.

01:43:54.940 Yeah, things have changed, yeah, so much over the last few years in terms of the, you know, political correctness and how reluctant people are to speak out.

01:44:04.400 And I think, yeah, I started to experience that at the University of Toronto.

01:44:10.140 I started to get nervous about talking about sex differences in personality.

01:44:18.240 You know, and I was just, I taught a personality course, and I published papers on sex differences in personality.

01:44:25.260 So it was actually an area of specialization of mine.

01:44:28.240 And for years, I would lay out the data, which was somewhat ethicless.

01:44:36.480 I don't mean laying it out.

01:44:37.720 I mean the data itself.

01:44:38.700 It's like, well, there might be differences between men and women, and there might not be.

01:44:42.560 But the empirical evidence suggests that if you add all the personality differences between men and women together,

01:44:51.240 you can reliably discriminate between who's a man and who's a woman with about 75% accuracy, which is pretty accurate. 0.99

01:44:59.120 But trait by trait, men and women are more alike than different.

01:45:03.900 So, yeah, fair enough.

01:45:06.000 And there are two dimensions where the differences particularly manifest themselves.

01:45:11.180 Sensitivity to negative emotion and agreeableness.

01:45:13.520 And so that's that.

01:45:16.060 And then those differences are bigger in egalitarian countries than in non-egalitarian countries,

01:45:21.340 which is counterintuitive and surprising and shocking and interesting.

01:45:27.180 I talked about that.

01:45:28.060 It also holds true for dark triad characteristics, by the way.

01:45:30.600 So psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, the gender gap is larger in more egalitarian cultures.

01:45:36.800 You may not be surprised to know that, but I found that pretty interesting.

01:45:39.500 I mean, it sort of falls in line with all the other research you're describing.

01:45:41.560 Yeah, it's very interesting that more egalitarian policies magnify some differences.

01:45:48.240 They ameliorate in Scandinavia the preferred age gap between women and men is somewhat smaller than in non-egalitarian countries.

01:45:56.920 So there are some phenomena that do modify towards equality with egalitarian social policies, but lots don't.

01:46:08.100 Anyways, I started to get nervous about lecturing about those sorts of things.

01:46:11.400 I thought, geez, I'm nervous about this.

01:46:14.760 Isn't that strange?

01:46:16.400 And part of it was because I did have some female students who came up to me after lectures and who were offended. 1.00

01:46:24.080 You know, they were snippy and sarcastic.

01:46:26.680 And that very rarely happened to me.

01:46:28.460 And so it was quite marked.

01:46:31.240 You know, I'd have the odd hyper-feminist type stomp out of my first class, even a few years ago, just as a, you know, demonstration of sorts. 1.00

01:46:41.620 But that really meant nothing.

01:46:43.500 But, and then my graduate students started telling me that they were very nervous about discussing anything to do with sex differences and the women particularly.

01:46:52.220 And so that's, that started to become worrisome.

01:46:55.500 So, and what do you see happening in Cambridge?

01:46:59.800 What's it been like there for you?

01:47:01.940 I mean, well, well, really, it's been, it's been a very strict lockdown over the last 15 plus months or so.

01:47:09.340 But before that, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't bad.

01:47:11.240 I was, I was still fairly open with my views.

01:47:13.720 You know, I wrote, I defended you in an op-ed in the New York Times.

01:47:17.780 I've written, you know, the luxury beliefs posts.

01:47:19.720 I've, I've not been, I've not necessarily withheld my views.

01:47:24.560 Fortunately, within my department, I haven't had much of an issue.

01:47:26.840 I think the psych department here is very solid.

01:47:29.660 But, you know, more broadly, the culture, the campus culture is, you know, about the same as it is anywhere else.

01:47:36.680 Sort of, people are, people are afraid.

01:47:39.240 I had a conversation with a professor here last year, I had lunch with him, and he, it was interesting what he told me.

01:47:45.360 He said that it's not necessarily that the faculty agree with a lot of the sort of extreme political movements that are going on, but they just want to be left alone.

01:47:57.640 They just want to do their work.

01:47:58.940 They just want to do the research.

01:48:00.280 And if a bunch of social mobs come after them and say, you know, you better sign this petition, or you better say this, or you better post that.

01:48:07.100 But they just want to do it and, and get, get these people out of their lives, get it out of their hair.

01:48:11.900 And so they're not, they're not ideologues, many of them, probably most of them are not, but they just want to sort of get back to their lives, and they'll just do whatever they have to.

01:48:21.720 They're selected for that.

01:48:23.040 I mean, to become an academic, a research academic, you have to be obsessive about some specialization.

01:48:31.500 And you have to wall yourself off from everything else and pursue that, because otherwise you're not publishing your three papers a year or whatever it requires to maintain your academic status.

01:48:43.660 It takes a tremendous amount of specialization.

01:48:46.240 And so we set up universities to put up walls around people who were willing to specialize so they could do exactly that.

01:48:53.840 But it's laid them open to invasion by people who have a political agenda.

01:48:59.580 And that's often failed researchers who become administrators, for example, and who are interested in power, which is pretty much what they talk about all the time as well.

01:49:09.980 And so, I mean, I've seen faculty are, in some sense, powerless by choice in some ways, against the kinds of demands that you're describing.

01:49:21.640 But it's also a consequence of the selection methods that produced them to begin with, and the purpose of the university.

01:49:28.400 I had a friend here who was very active online on social media.

01:49:33.480 So he was a graduate, a medical school graduate.

01:49:35.980 He came here as a Gates-Cambridge scholar to do research in, I think, biochemistry or something.

01:49:39.740 And he posted something online about his views on being a pro-life person.

01:49:45.560 And, you know, his PhD supervisor and people in his department were getting all kinds of calls, you know, saying that they had to let him go, that they should fire him, they need to kick him out of Cambridge and so on.

01:49:58.120 And, you know, they basically, they didn't kick him out, but they told him, like, you have to take on your social media account because we just can't have people constantly calling and emailing and harassing and so on.

01:50:07.580 And the activists just make it so costly to have an opinion that people just sort of, you know, they sort of silence themselves.

01:50:15.100 You know, why would you want to get involved?

01:50:16.800 They just sort of acquiesce to it, not because they agree, but just because they don't want to have to deal with the burden.

01:50:21.420 It's very, I mean, it's a sort of clever strategy, I think, on the part of the activists.

01:50:25.040 That's something that I'm interested in, too, is just, like, who tends to be attracted to those movements and how effective they are.

01:50:33.240 I mean, I've seen academic papers retracted because the journal editor, you know, they posted something like, you know, we had to withdraw this paper because the journal editor received credible threats of physical violence.

01:50:43.740 Like, you can literally threaten to kill the journal editor and then they'll just take out whatever paper you want them to take out.

01:50:49.060 I mean, it's very interesting to see that this is the world we're living in.

01:50:55.040 Yeah, well, it's no joke to be targeted like that, and it's not surprising it shuts people down.

01:51:01.640 It's really hard on me.

01:51:02.340 I mean, it's understandable.

01:51:03.700 Yeah, I don't begrudge anyone for doing it.

01:51:07.600 A lot of people don't, yeah, they just don't have the stomach to deal with that level of notoriety or controversy the way that you and others have.

01:51:17.620 Yeah, well, it isn't obvious that I've dealt with it either, so I'm still here, but that's about all I'd say about it.

01:51:22.940 But it certainly hasn't been, it's been terrible.

01:51:26.760 I took your personality test shortly after it came out when you still had the discount going, and I scored in the ninth percentile in agreeableness.

01:51:36.540 So I think that might have something to do with why I'm okay with, you know, sort of taking on some of this heat.

01:51:42.400 Yeah, yeah, well, the thing about disagreeable people is that they will say what they think.

01:51:48.840 Yeah.

01:51:49.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:51:50.740 So was that compassion or politeness?

01:51:53.300 Do you remember?

01:51:53.620 It was very low on politeness and a little higher on compassion, but still, like, pretty low on both, and it averaged out to ninth percentile.

01:52:03.100 So at least I'm, you know, a little more compassionate than I am polite.

01:52:07.260 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

01:52:07.920 Well, one in ten isn't, you know, isn't that low, really, all things considered.

01:52:13.340 So, but that would explain, that would explain your willingness to take confrontational positions or adversarial positions, let's say.

01:52:21.620 Well, obviously, you also believe that they're, you know, that you're relating something that is true.

01:52:26.540 So we don't know how much moral courage it takes and what personality attributes are shaping the ability to voice unpopular truths, but I suspect disagreeableness has something to do with it.

01:52:38.520 It's strange in my case, because I'm very agreeable, as it turns out, but, which is probably why I pay a high price for doing it, even though I do do it.

01:52:47.920 Interesting.

01:52:49.240 Yeah, I was, yeah, I mean, I'd gotten into a lot of trouble in school as a kid.

01:52:54.520 I, yeah, I just always had this sort of disposition to rebel and to question rules and so on, and fortunately, over time, I was able to get it under control to some extent.

01:53:07.720 I also scored pretty high in conscientiousness, which may be part of why I was able to land where I've landed, but I, you know, it was a long circuitous path to get here.

01:53:17.980 Right, yeah.

01:53:18.760 Well, conscientiousness is a colder virtue, but it tends to pay off in the long run.

01:53:23.420 Mm-hmm.

01:53:24.860 So what do you think you're going to do when you finish your degree?

01:53:28.080 You know, you said you're not that interested in pursuing an academic path.

01:53:32.520 Yeah, I, well, my book is supposed to come out later next year, so near the end of next year, and I'll probably be spending a lot of time promoting that.

01:53:40.640 And, yeah, I don't know, I do enjoy research, writing, teaching, all of those things.

01:53:47.880 And so in whatever capacity I can continue to do that, whether it's working at a think tank or even just going full independent and sort of starting my own channel or something like that.

01:53:57.900 And, yeah, I'll just be continuing writing and sharing my views in one way or another, although I'm not exactly sure what form that'll take.

01:54:06.300 Well, it was really good talking with you today.

01:54:09.760 I thought the discussion was moved along at a great clip, and I appreciated your viewpoints and your candor, all of that.

01:54:17.080 And I learned a fair bit as a consequence of talking to you, and so much appreciated.

01:54:22.980 Likewise. Thank you, Dr. Peterson.

01:54:26.320 You bet. You bet. Good to meet you.

01:54:28.460 Maybe we'll meet up in Cambridge if I ever come there.

01:54:31.460 Let's do it.

01:54:52.980 Thank you.

01:54:55.380 Thank you.

01:55:02.340 Thank you.

01:55:03.240 Thank you.

01:55:05.260 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 20, 2021

193. Sex and Dating Apps ｜ Rob Henderson

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