The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - February 01, 2023


Evolutionary Psychologist's Advice on Relationships ｜ Dr. Geoffrey Miller EP 179


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58 minutes

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145.66

Word count

8,528

Sentence count

184

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Men don't care about IQ. 1.00
00:00:02.000 I really strongly disagree with that because, look, you don't want a low-intelligence woman as a life partner, 0.99
00:00:09.120 sharing a house with, who's incapable of understanding finances, who doesn't succeed in her career, 0.98
00:00:15.800 who's not a smart, devoted mom to your kids, who's socially embarrassing.
00:00:20.980 You think humor is more of a factor, I guess, in mate selection than height?
00:00:24.480 Look, try rationally to focus on, out of the traits I think I want, which of them actually matter in the modern world?
00:00:37.280 Jeffrey Miller, welcome to my podcast.
00:00:39.780 Great to be here. Really excited.
00:00:41.900 Yeah, this should be a very interesting conversation.
00:00:44.780 I have a bunch of questions, mostly about men and women.
00:00:47.740 But before we get started, can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do?
00:00:52.300 I'm an evolutionary psychology professor, so I study human nature and I work at University of New Mexico. I did a BA at Columbia, my PhD at Stanford. I worked in England for 10 years and lots of other places. And I've mostly studied human sexuality and mate choice and how we fall in love and what traits we fall in love with.
00:01:14.860 and then more recently i've gotten a lot more engaged in kind of political twitter
00:01:19.820 and a movement called effective altruism and i'm currently working on
00:01:24.300 um how to make artificial intelligence behave better with with humans wow okay that's cool
00:01:32.620 well that's okay i'm going to add a couple questions in there then ai and then you said
00:01:37.180 effective altruism yeah yeah the ea movement we can talk about that too if you want yeah no i
00:01:44.540 definitely do. Effective altruism. Okay, cool. Wow. Well, I just have a whole bunch of questions
00:01:51.840 to throw at you about sexuality, I think, and the dynamics between men and women. So first off,
00:01:59.140 this is something I've been wondering for a while. Do females compete with each other? Because we
00:02:03.880 know men compete with each other to get women. Do females compete with each other? Oh yeah, 0.69
00:02:07.860 very much so. I mean, the methods of what we call female versus female competition, 0.97
00:02:12.420 a very technical term. One thing I love about evolutionary biology is actually the technical
00:02:18.640 terms are pretty intuitive and pretty easy to understand. Like my colleague Tanya Reynolds
00:02:24.680 here at University of New Mexico specializes in studying female-female competition.
00:02:30.320 Now, the typical forms that that takes tend to be more verbal and reputational rather than
00:02:37.080 direct violent conflict. So women might derogate each other behind each other's backs. They might 0.63
00:02:43.980 try to manipulate each other's self-esteem if they feel like they're sexual rivals competing
00:02:49.800 for the same guys or for the same social status. So it's not like women getting into 0.65
00:02:57.260 prehistoric MMA fights that much. It's more about using the weapons of verbal creativity
00:03:05.400 and theory of mind and social sensitivity
00:03:08.480 to just get subtle but sustained advantages
00:03:12.620 over your female rivals.
00:03:16.700 So high school, basically. 0.85
00:03:18.940 Yeah, high school, but forever and in prehistory.
00:03:22.780 Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible.
00:03:25.260 It does seem to get, at least I know that my relationship 1.00
00:03:27.900 with other women has gotten a lot better since high school.
00:03:30.780 So is that because the competition tones down
00:03:34.260 or is that because we're all stuck together in a classroom or do people get smarter and sneakier?
00:03:40.420 What happens there?
00:03:41.840 Yeah, good insights.
00:03:43.560 I think it's a combination of all of that, smarter and sneakier,
00:03:46.420 so you're using less obvious competitive tactics.
00:03:50.480 So, for example, one thing that can happen is women can be in a friendship circle
00:03:57.700 and you want to sort of derogate or ostracize or marginalize one particular woman in the group so
00:04:05.800 she has lower status instead of women saying okay um jane over there she's a bad person we should
00:04:14.060 avoid her you could say something like you know i'm really worried about jane because it just
00:04:19.320 seems like she's um she has really bad taste in men and she's you know i'm worried about her
00:04:26.340 drinking you know whatever and so there will be the the implanting of negative information
00:04:34.580 about some rival within her friend group or her colleagues or co-workers and then the other women
00:04:40.660 will will think oh well this person derogating her is expressing what sounds like genuine empathic
00:04:48.660 interest like they're concerned about jane's drinking and and her being too slutty and stealing
00:04:53.940 other men or whatever right but the information itself is enough to lead
00:05:00.240 other women to kind of marginalize that that target if you guys haven't heard I
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00:06:54.420 mp i hope you enjoy it enjoy the rest of this episode have have you done work on personality
00:07:00.420 like because i know that there are some women who are really good at that and that's what they do
00:07:06.020 and i feel like some people are less interested in that is that from personality differences yeah
00:07:11.940 i'm a big i'm a big fan of the big five personality traits system and i've i've often used it in my
00:07:17.460 of research, it's a, man, it's a great thing to measure. When in doubt, if you're running a psych
00:07:22.800 study, try to get some measure of general cognitive ability or intelligence if you can,
00:07:27.640 and try to measure the big five, because they're almost always predictive. In this particular case,
00:07:34.100 female versus female competition, it'll probably be a combination of low agreeableness,
00:07:40.020 which is kind of associated with, you know, assertiveness and a little Machiavellianism
00:07:45.980 and manipulativeness. There will be a little bit of extroversion mixed in in terms of being
00:07:52.900 socially assertive enough to try to manipulate other people rather than just kind of withdrawn
00:07:58.220 and introverted. And I think it also takes maybe a relatively high degree of emotional stability
00:08:08.160 or low neuroticism to do these tactics right because they can't they're risky and they can
00:08:15.400 backfire so if a woman's very um neurotic worried anxious depressed she's not as likely i think to
00:08:23.960 use these kinds of uh tactics but that's pretty speculative it's pretty speculative but that's
00:08:30.820 where I'd put a bet. Okay, I hope it's speculative. You've just described exactly my personality.
00:08:39.460 Almost, actually not entirely, no. The agreeableness, my, do you, have you ever split it up into like
00:08:46.440 subdomains? Yeah, the facets. So agreeableness splits into, yeah, yeah, the facets, sorry. I scored
00:08:52.060 almost zero in politeness, but compassion was like 89. So I guess that doesn't make me like
00:08:56.940 unreasonably disagreeable on average yeah i think those so the the facet level traits are really
00:09:03.980 important because a lot of people are kind of vaguely heard of the big five like from you or
00:09:08.380 from jordan peterson or or whoever but each of them has these sub components right just like
00:09:14.700 intelligence has components like spatial intelligence verbal intelligence uh social
00:09:19.580 intelligence any given big five trait like agreeableness will have these little components
00:09:25.340 like compassion politeness i'm i'm kind of like you like online on twitter i'm not super polite
00:09:34.300 in person i'm highly polite and i i like to think i'm pretty compassionate in terms of
00:09:39.260 like actually caring about people and animals and so forth
00:09:44.620 yeah interesting okay very cool uh well i guess we might as well talk about what effective altruism
00:09:53.180 is this is a movement launched about 10 or 12 years ago by a couple of oxford moral philosophers
00:09:59.180 will mcaskill and toby ord and it's grown into this kind of global movement of tens of thousands
00:10:05.180 of people mostly young people mostly highly compassionate maybe a little bit aspergery
00:10:12.300 on average like um highly rational highly systematizing people and the concept is try
00:10:20.220 to do the most good that you can in the world but using reason and evidence and open-minded
00:10:26.860 kind of rational debate rather than just virtue signaling or rather than just going with your
00:10:33.020 your gut feeling or your empathy right so what the effect of altruists tend to talk about a lot is
00:10:41.340 look if you're going to give to charity um try to find charities that actually have
00:10:45.820 good empirical evidence that what they're spending money on actually does some good actually works.
00:10:53.340 So they like recommending charities that have actually run like randomized clinical trials
00:10:59.340 for their interventions. So for example one thing that really seems to help to reduce global poverty
00:11:06.380 is a thing called direct cash transfers. So there's an organization called GiveDirectly
00:11:11.660 or you can donate money to them and they'll simply like wire the money to poor people who
00:11:16.940 could use it and who have the wisdom to spend it on whatever they think they need instead of us
00:11:22.460 telling them what we think they need and randomized controlled trials show that's actually very
00:11:27.740 effective at reducing poverty and improving lives so the basic idea is you try to have
00:11:33.980 kind of a scientific mindset rather than just a virtue signaling mindset when you're doing
00:11:39.500 beneficence when you're trying to do good in the world. And I've taught several courses on the
00:11:46.540 psychology of effective altruism, and some of the ways that our kind of intuitive moral psychology
00:11:53.100 fits with that viewpoint, but also really struggles with it. Because I think a lot of
00:12:00.960 our moral intuitions basically come from hundreds of thousands of years of virtue signaling,
00:12:08.680 right to get credibility at an ethical level within our little clan or tribe
00:12:15.400 who are not very well adapted to thinking about large-scale problems that like affect
00:12:21.640 eight billion people in the world or that affect maybe billions or trillions of animals
00:12:27.240 so ea is is basically an attempt to like fill the gap between our evolved moral intuitions
00:12:35.960 versus what actually works in the modern world.
00:12:39.700 I hope that makes some sense.
00:12:42.440 That definitely makes sense.
00:12:44.060 It's a pretty weird movement, but I think it's exciting.
00:12:47.520 Well, it sounds like intelligent people trying to do good.
00:12:51.420 That sounds good.
00:12:52.140 Yeah.
00:12:52.440 That sounds good to me.
00:12:54.540 So you said we've all evolved through virtue signaling
00:12:58.820 and kind of smaller groups of people and tribes.
00:13:01.680 um do you think that goes for kind of everybody back then across the board because i always assumed
00:13:07.440 virtue signaling was well basically lying yeah i have more of a kind of neutral take like i i
00:13:14.960 published this little book called virtue signaling in 2019 and i tried to emphasize like
00:13:22.480 virtue signaling as a term became very common around 2016 with the trump versus clinton election
00:13:28.960 And it was often used by conservatives to make fun of leftist people preaching at everybody, but not actually doing very much good.
00:13:40.420 Right. So there's a negative kind of cheap talk version of virtue signaling where you're just running around on social media saying, you guys should do this.
00:13:50.800 Don't do that. You're good. You're bad. Blah, blah, blah.
00:13:53.540 my view is virtue signaling can be extremely positive for example if you got two single
00:14:03.960 people and they're searching for mates and they meet up and they have a date they're trying to
00:14:09.660 evaluate each other's kind of ethical compass and their personality traits like how agreeable how
00:14:16.860 compassionate is this person and they'll talk about all kinds of things that basically boil
00:14:23.120 down to virtue signals but some of those might actually be reliable indicators right so if they
00:14:29.600 say look i i volunteer in a soup kitchen six hours a week it's hard to do that if you're a psychopath
00:14:36.960 right somebody with no empathy couldn't stand to do that week after week so it is actually
00:14:44.640 some kind of good signal of underlying values and personality traits
00:14:49.600 I just wish that more people were selective about what they actually do
00:14:55.680 and maybe do things that deliver real benefits to others
00:15:01.380 rather than just working as really good signals of who you are.
00:15:08.800 Well said.
00:15:10.060 Thanks.
00:15:11.240 Okay.
00:15:12.240 Daya, slightly changing topics then.
00:15:14.920 Why, what's the evolutionary benefit of psychopathy?
00:15:19.300 Why is that still around?
00:15:22.140 There's a lot of discussion about this, and there are, I think, very good insights going all the way back to the 1980s, right?
00:15:29.400 People have been discussing this.
00:15:32.620 If humans evolved in small clans and tribes where you know everybody and you gather huge amounts of social information about people you interact with regularly, you might think there's just no room to be a psychopath.
00:15:47.100 path. If you're regularly exploiting, deceiving, manipulating people, aren't people going to
00:15:52.800 find out and push you out of the clan? And that's basically a death sentence, right? Exile equals
00:15:58.700 death if you're in a prehistoric situation where you cannot survive by yourself out in the
00:16:04.660 wilderness. Well, my personal hunch, actually, is that the rates of psychopathy in small hunter
00:16:13.740 gatherer societies are quite low i think it's correct you can't survive as a psychopath in a
00:16:19.980 small plan where everybody knows you however once you get civilization and agriculture and city
00:16:28.780 states and big populations and you can move from group to group sequentially then suddenly there's
00:16:36.140 a niche. There's a niche for the psychopath. So my hunch actually is psychopathy, sociopathy
00:16:45.720 more generally, might be a fairly recent development and just kind of post civilization development.
00:16:53.460 If you look at like the American West, like my ancestors were roaming around in the 1800s
00:16:59.840 and you could you know if your reputation was shattered in one place you could move to a new
00:17:06.560 town adopt a new identity build up a new reputation get people to trust you um and it it can work
00:17:16.320 and um you know nowadays psychopathy seems to positively predict like number of babies
00:17:23.280 especially for men ah yeah okay that makes sense because it's associated with um sexually
00:17:30.400 exploitative tactics with seduction manipulation um not just like physical sexual coercion but also
00:17:41.840 you know i've been a little bit peripherally involved in the pickup artist movement for
00:17:45.680 like 15 years and i've talked to the puas and i know some of them and it's a weird movement because
00:17:53.280 there are a significant number of like, actual hardcore psychopaths in it.
00:17:58.680 We're trying to figure out, okay, how do I, you know, seduce, manipulate, deceive women?
00:18:05.720 And then there's a bunch of normies and normal people with normal personalities in it, who
00:18:11.280 legitimately just are confused by modern dating and want to learn good, honorable, you know,
00:18:16.840 methods for finding a girlfriend.
00:18:18.960 but there's certainly a niche for the psychopaths in the modern dating market
00:18:23.920 that's very interesting do you think social media too has like increased i guess how
00:18:33.920 how often you see psychopaths because i feel like if you're an extroverted person and you're
00:18:38.860 disagreeable oh actually but before we get into like that question can you describe what
00:18:44.040 personality traits compose a psychopath i mean the usual ways of recognizing like a hardcore
00:18:52.440 kind of criminal psychopath as opposed to like a white collar sociopath okay hardcore criminal
00:18:59.540 psychopath would be lack of empathy lack of remorse um they're uh very comfortable lying if
00:19:07.100 you catch them out in a lie they're not embarrassed they just keep lying some more to cover it up
00:19:11.860 they tend to have an unstable lifestyle they move locations they move jobs a lot
00:19:17.380 they have a kind of complicated checkered sexual history with lots of ex-girlfriends
00:19:24.440 don't want to talk about why why the breakups happened
00:19:27.720 they tend to be impulsive sensation seeking drink a lot do a lot of drugs drive fast
00:19:35.220 often have a criminal record um and so uh you know if you're a woman and you're kind of on the
00:19:44.040 lookout for you really want to avoid avoid legit bad guys i highly recommend reading a couple books
00:19:51.880 about psychopaths so you can know these um these traits and kind of recognize them when you see them
00:19:57.240 what about conscientiousness is that what plays a role in guilt
00:20:03.220 yeah totally um i think conscientiousness is is associated with self-control and forward planning
00:20:11.280 and and willpower and resisting temptation but also i think in a social context
00:20:17.320 susceptibility to guilt and shame is part of conscientiousness right like when i was planning
00:20:24.440 this podcast it's like okay i'm going to put it in my google calendar make sure i'm there on time
00:20:29.440 feeling anticipatory like guilt and shame if i fail to show up you know that's conscientiousness
00:20:38.260 and uh the psychopaths tend not to have a whole lot of that like they'll just flake
00:20:43.300 out on things and not care and not feel bad about it wow i know that that's not good it
00:20:51.920 sounds kind of relaxing though but i don't know how far you'd get in life without destroying
00:20:58.180 all of your relationships and maybe being miserable but yeah it's it's it's an easy way
00:21:03.860 to live until you end up in federal prison and then it's not so great yeah okay what about um
00:21:10.900 white-collared sociopaths what do they look like um blue-collared well you didn't correct me but 0.56
00:21:18.340 did i do that wrong yeah so you white-collar blue-collar white-collar sociopaths who um
00:21:23.460 don't typically get involved in violent fights, and they don't typically end up in jail, but
00:21:30.500 they're willing to do the lying, deceiving, manipulating in order to get higher status,
00:21:37.040 wealth, and prestige. So you might expect them to end up in professions like sales, marketing,
00:21:44.640 politics, running crypto exchanges that don't actually have the crypto that they promised to
00:21:53.040 have, et cetera.
00:21:55.920 And then I know some forensic accountants
00:21:59.700 who work on white-collar crime and figuring out
00:22:03.240 what actually happened in this company.
00:22:04.800 Where did it go wrong?
00:22:06.480 And they say there's also something called a pink-collar
00:22:09.960 psychopath, which is they start out white-collar, right?
00:22:13.860 They're not violent.
00:22:15.100 But if they get audited, if there's
00:22:18.940 a legit threat that could destroy their career,
00:22:21.720 then they can actually turn violent
00:22:24.620 and get some blood on the white collar, right? 0.87
00:22:26.560 So that's the pink collar.
00:22:28.960 So auditors, people who do taxes, 0.88
00:22:34.380 white collar crime investigators,
00:22:36.100 they do have to be a little cautious
00:22:38.860 that just because somebody has an MBA
00:22:42.920 doesn't mean they're never gonna turn violent
00:22:45.760 if you're probing deeply into the finances
00:22:49.880 their their shady startup company yeah yeah fair enough I bet you could get
00:22:58.520 some people who weren't even really on the sociopathic spectrum and still if
00:23:04.460 they do something wrong and then get probed into can turn violent yeah
00:23:08.000 totally and you know there's there's certain kinds of professions and social
00:23:12.880 situations that can kind of nudge people either in the compassionate direction or
00:23:17.960 for the kind of sociopathic direction,
00:23:21.100 just because the norms in their profession.
00:23:24.540 So think about if you go to med school
00:23:26.220 to become a surgeon, right?
00:23:27.940 You actually have to become a bit
00:23:29.640 of a situational sociopath to do surgery at all,
00:23:34.520 because we have, most of us have an innate aversion
00:23:37.760 to like cutting into people and messing with their organs.
00:23:42.180 So thank God that humans can suppress
00:23:46.880 that kind of compassion under certain circumstances where it's adaptive to do that why did lying
00:23:53.360 develop is that an evolutionary tool like why is it that i mean i guess we just talked about
00:23:58.120 psychopathy a little bit and socio and sociopathy but why is it that some people lie so much that
00:24:06.300 that tells stories constantly can that be um due to you know childhood issues and can that develop
00:24:13.200 because of that or why why do some people tell stories constantly i think you know if you ask like
00:24:24.880 take a step back and ask why did language evolve in the first place like why can we communicate
00:24:29.760 complex thoughts and feelings to each other in a way that no other animal species can do
00:24:34.080 with as much finesse people like richard dawkins have argued complex animal communication like
00:24:42.240 human language did not evolve to convey truth it did not evolve to reach some group consensus about
00:24:50.880 how the world is it evolved to influence or manipulate other animals or people to do things
00:24:59.200 in your interest okay so the classic example of animal communication is a male trying to seduce
00:25:06.800 as a female animal, displaying some big courtship plumage
00:25:11.880 or like a bird song or a whale song, a gibbon call, whatever.
00:25:19.020 And the point is not to convey reliable information
00:25:23.320 about the state of the world, right?
00:25:25.100 The point is to convey information about,
00:25:27.480 I'm a cool guy, I have good genes, my brain works well,
00:25:30.300 mate with me and you'll have good babies, okay?
00:25:33.500 So that's the foundation of a lot of animal communication.
00:25:37.720 Then when it comes to humans,
00:25:40.780 you know, a lot of chit chat that we do
00:25:43.180 is sort of subtle bragging
00:25:48.140 or it's entertaining other people
00:25:51.140 so that they will kind of reward us
00:25:52.880 with more status or prestige or mating opportunities
00:25:57.220 or jobs or whatever.
00:26:01.020 So if you take that animal communication view
00:26:03.060 of human language, then lying, but also kind of humor
00:26:11.680 and telling benign fictions like stories and myths
00:26:15.420 and entertainment, that should come as no surprise.
00:26:21.300 It's only if you have this model of language
00:26:23.400 that says language should work, like two objective computers
00:26:29.580 communicating with each other to do a hard-to-hack bank
00:26:34.260 transfer.
00:26:36.140 That's the wrong model of language.
00:26:40.680 So I've got a 10-month-old baby daughter.
00:26:43.680 And I see her just learning the beginnings of babbling.
00:26:47.940 And she can say mama and dada and so forth.
00:26:51.400 And she will use those tools to the best of her ability
00:26:57.100 to kind of manipulate us to get stuff she wants, right?
00:27:00.960 Attention, food, playing with a certain toy.
00:27:07.280 And so as soon as communication capacities develop,
00:27:12.460 we start to use them to influence other people.
00:27:14.600 And I think that's fine.
00:27:16.120 It's just there's good ways to try to influence other people.
00:27:21.320 And then there's super deceptive manipulative ways
00:27:25.800 do it that don't actually yield like mutual benefits at all congratulations thanks you've
00:27:34.520 got our daughter too right that's cool yeah yeah she's five congratulations thank you hey guys this
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00:28:53.440 So you said you kind of you're worked with or new people in the pickup artist
00:28:59.880 group, like whatever that is.
00:29:02.680 Are there tactics you could tell men
00:29:06.180 that aren't sociopathic but can work to help them get women? 0.79
00:29:12.600 Yeah.
00:29:13.100 So Tucker Max and I did a whole book on this called
00:29:16.940 the hardback was called Mate, the paperback was called What Women Want.
00:29:20.240 And this came out 2015, 2016.
00:29:23.440 We took a very different approach.
00:29:25.320 We were kind of reacting against pickup artist culture
00:29:28.740 a little bit.
00:29:32.180 The strategy we took is to try to help young single men
00:29:36.940 understand what women want, what traits and skills
00:29:41.460 they're looking for.
00:29:43.380 And then to try to convince young men, actually,
00:29:46.580 there aren't really very good cheat codes.
00:29:50.940 the way to attract a good girlfriend is actually become a better man and build the traits that are
00:29:57.260 legit attractive and so the whole book was basically about like if you just allocate a
00:30:04.720 little bit of time and energy you can actually get dramatic improvements in many of these traits
00:30:09.820 like it's not actually that hard to get in better physical shape whatever your body type whatever
00:30:16.400 your height like you can build muscle you can lose fat you can get more energy here's how to do it
00:30:23.360 right and we talked about everything from kettlebells to jujitsu and so forth or if you want
00:30:29.680 to improve your mental health be less depressed and anxious and and and introverted and scared
00:30:36.080 like there's reliably effective ways to do that also and you like your dad has talked about some
00:30:42.960 of these get enough sleep eat right so your blood sugar is not going up and down all the time
00:30:48.480 um do your exercise meditate be mindful blah blah blah and then there's a bunch of other traits that
00:30:57.120 matter to women sense of humor you can work on that you know a lot of young men will devote
00:31:05.440 like 10 times as much effort to studying for one particular class in college
00:31:11.520 as they'll devote to building their their active sense of humor um like taking an improv comedy
00:31:18.000 class or whatever so that works you can improve that i figured some people are just i don't know
00:31:25.440 that you'd had to develop it like below the age of 10 or something i don't know what i was thinking
00:31:29.840 but that that some people are naturally so funny and some people aren't but there are ways to fix
00:31:35.600 that yeah i mean look i'm a pretty hardcore hereditarian about a lot of things and i think
00:31:44.320 you know evolution and genes are really really important but we have these big brains
00:31:50.480 in order to be able to learn useful skills and i think um just a lot of young men are
00:31:57.520 are like misallocating their learning time
00:32:02.700 to like getting really good at Call of Duty
00:32:05.140 or Elder Ring or some video game.
00:32:09.920 And they could like take the hundreds of hours
00:32:12.140 that they're doing that and allocate it to stuff 0.77
00:32:15.240 that like women actually care about
00:32:19.580 and improve it dramatically. 0.99
00:32:22.280 It's just that like the existing educational system
00:32:24.560 really geared up to encourage young men or young women to do that kind of thing
00:32:31.920 yeah that's for sure so what kind of traits i mean you named a few but
00:32:36.560 what kind of traits are women attracted to we talk a lot about confidence and that um
00:32:44.640 you know unless you're a psychopath confidence confidence is actually pretty hard to fake
00:32:50.080 like if a young man is getting reliable cues that they are respected and valued by other people
00:32:57.280 by other men by other women by their mentors by their their classmates
00:33:02.560 confidence naturally comes from that if you're not getting those cues that people value and
00:33:08.400 support you it's really hard to fake it till you make it it's really hard to sort of fake
00:33:16.080 that kind of confidence so there again our our counsel to young men is like find groups
00:33:26.800 where you are valued and you do get along with people and you've got your your little posse
00:33:34.000 your little friendship circle and try to get your confidence from there to start
00:33:40.720 it also as you build up more sexual experience and you date more and you just interact more
00:33:47.440 with women and get more comfortable with women um that also builds kind of sexual and romantic
00:33:52.720 confidence which again is very hard to fake a lot of young men have this experience right that no
00:34:00.960 women pay attention to them for a long time until they get a girlfriend they get a girlfriend
00:34:08.880 suddenly they're getting sexual validation romantic validation and suddenly other women are paying
00:34:13.920 attention to them and they don't even know what changed but um in biology that's called mate
00:34:23.280 choice copying when females are more attracted to a male that's valued by other females right
00:34:30.480 and i think that's kind of mediated by sexual self-confidence
00:34:33.600 that if a man has a girlfriend already he knows at least at least there's one
00:34:39.600 woman out there who values me and he kind of internalizes that validation and
00:34:45.120 then like radiates it outwards somehow in body language or how he carries
00:34:51.360 himself and then other women pay attention to that oh that's interesting
00:34:56.100 so you think women would be more attracted to a man in a relationship even
00:35:00.360 if they didn't know that they were in a relationship yeah i think so that's cool i haven't
00:35:06.840 heard that before that's cool i don't know if there's any good like empirical psychology
00:35:13.960 research on that but i'd be extremely surprised if that didn't happen and like there's so many
00:35:21.320 anecdotal reports from guys talking about this that like there's long dry spells nobody wants
00:35:28.200 me and then when it rains it pours get a girlfriend and suddenly everybody else wants me yeah
00:35:35.400 interesting okay well i like that theory uh okay do you think humans
00:35:41.720 are naturally monogamous do you think some are naturally polygamous
00:35:48.360 the line i take on this is i do think uh humans evolved to form long-term pair bonds
00:35:54.200 um i think that's pretty clear i think look like five million years ago our ancestors had huge
00:36:02.520 um sex differences in body size the males were about twice as big and heavy and strong as the
00:36:07.640 females right oh wow and that is what you see when there's a highly um polygamous system meaning the
00:36:15.560 top few males to mate with most of the women and then most of the males don't get any mates
00:36:19.960 So you get intense competition between the males to be big, strong, aggressive, dominant, right?
00:36:27.880 And to sort of monopolize the females.
00:36:30.580 But then what happens is the males evolve to be a little taller and a little stronger, but the females start to catch up, right?
00:36:40.160 The females rapidly increase.
00:36:41.860 And so now, although it seems like males are much bigger and stronger than females, we're actually about as evenly matched in body size as any primate, as any mammal gets.
00:36:56.980 That's an indicator of pair bonding.
00:36:58.900 That's an indicator that males and females were matching up, that they were forming long-term relationships that were at least socially monogamous, which means they hang out together, live together, sleep together, raise kids together, share a lot of food with each other, share care and compassion with each other, and so forth.
00:37:24.540 So I think pair bonding is pretty central to human evolution, and it's what allowed
00:37:34.680 things like the evolution of fatherhood, right?
00:37:37.840 If you look at most mammal species, the dads don't do anything.
00:37:41.660 The dads just contribute genes.
00:37:43.080 They don't help raise kids.
00:37:44.260 They don't teach kids anything.
00:37:45.540 They don't even protect kids that well.
00:37:49.640 with humans males have evolved to do all of that um now that still leaves some room for like high
00:38:00.920 status high prestige males to sort of go outside the pair bond right and to attract additional
00:38:08.280 women and in most complex societies that the highest ranked wealthiest males do have multiple
00:38:16.600 wives or concubines or mistresses or whatever so there's a kind of complicated system of like
00:38:25.160 high status male polygamy on top of most people forming pair bonds
00:38:35.400 plus some women also being kind of getting resources from multiple males like sex workers
00:38:43.640 prostitutes etc so are we naturally monogamous it's complicated but like i do think pair bonds
00:38:52.520 are pretty pretty central to human experience and particularly um i would bet
00:39:01.400 that most babies that are that have been born
00:39:04.760 over the last few million years have been raised by pair bonded parents
00:39:09.400 okay that answers that question um do do you think because you hear about this or i've heard
00:39:18.660 about this that men and probably from kind of the red-pilled community that men don't care about
00:39:23.980 iq and i think even from my dad i haven't heard men don't care about iq but i've heard that
00:39:29.440 the reason iq developed was because of female mate choice what do you think i really strongly
00:39:37.500 disagree with that view um when i wrote my first book the mating mind way back in uh 2000 i said
00:39:46.140 look if if it was the case that women care about male intelligence but men don't care about female
00:39:52.940 intelligence you'd get a huge sex difference in intelligence right males would be a lot higher
00:39:59.260 on iq than females if females were driving but we're driving it wouldn't the genes like wouldn't
00:40:07.100 if you have a smart dad then wouldn't the daughters inherit that anyway so then right
00:40:12.380 yeah i do talk about that but brains have costs right big metabolic costs to to grow a big brain
00:40:19.980 and run it and think and and and talk and all that so if the benefits of having the big brain 0.99
00:40:28.700 were much more limited in women than they were in men you know women wouldn't bother just like
00:40:33.980 women don't bother growing big upper body muscles for competition um but in fact if you look at
00:40:42.300 intelligence research um it seems like the sexes are extremely close in terms of general intelligence
00:40:49.420 like either there's no sex difference or it's very very minimal and some sexes are better at
00:40:55.340 some things than than than the other but it's pretty even so i think what's going on is when
00:41:03.340 When men are looking for a short-term mate, like an opportunistic copulation, like a hookup, then, of course, they're not going to care.
00:41:13.240 Opportunistic copulation.
00:41:14.920 That's good.
00:41:15.400 Some biology.
00:41:16.220 I'm never using the word.
00:41:18.640 Yeah, I'm never using the word hookup again.
00:41:20.640 Opportunistic copulation.
00:41:21.840 Okay.
00:41:22.120 Anyway, continue.
00:41:22.760 Then, yeah, you don't care about the woman's intelligence because if it's just about, like, the guy getting a notch on his belt, what does it matter how smart she is?
00:41:32.300 however there's good evidence that when men are getting more serious about choosing a long-term
00:41:37.820 mate like who do i want to live with who do i want to marry men get much more selective
00:41:44.060 about intelligence than they are for hookups right why because look you don't want 0.81
00:41:52.140 a low intelligence woman as a life partner sharing a house with who's incapable of understanding
00:41:59.740 finances who who doesn't succeed in her career who's not a smart devoted mom to your kids 0.51
00:42:09.660 who's socially embarrassing if you're like trying to be a power couple in your local environment
00:42:15.900 so uh and and we see this in the data on assorted mating like people of uh when people pair up they
00:42:25.500 tend to match with someone with similar iq and that's typically a result of both the men and
00:42:31.260 the women being pretty choosy about intelligence so for women out there who go yeah but i've gone
00:42:38.220 on a bunch of first dates the men talk a lot they don't take any interest in me they don't seem to 0.88
00:42:43.500 care whether i'm smart or dumb they they don't probe like what do i know about the world yeah
00:42:49.740 but that's a first date let the relationship develop what might often happen is after three
00:42:57.580 months six months two years if you're wondering why why hasn't he proposed to me why hasn't he
00:43:06.540 taken this to the next level well that's where the men are getting choosy right that's where
00:43:12.380 the men are now evaluating not just physical attractiveness but the woman's intelligence
00:43:17.420 and character and the way that men get choosy right is they fail to escalate the commitment
00:43:28.140 right that's how they reject women oh so they'll just stay in it they'll just stay in it without
00:43:34.540 moving in with you without proposing etc because look if you're if you're a guy and you've got a
00:43:42.060 a girlfriend, and you're happy and you're having sex together, why would you suddenly
00:43:47.160 just give that up for no reason? If you're happy in the relationship, but she's just
00:43:53.700 not quite smart enough or stable enough or promising enough to marry, then you'll just
00:44:02.080 kind of drift along indefinitely. And that's often, sadly, what male mate choice looks
00:44:09.760 like huh and women don't do that right if they they'll they'll break it off faster i think and
00:44:17.280 is that because of like child rearing and bearing age yeah because women's time is much more limited
00:44:23.920 in terms of fertility so the men can kind of drift along and if if a guy's like uh yeah i had this
00:44:30.080 girlfriend we got together i was 25 and we broke up when i was 32 no big deal i'm still going to
00:44:35.680 be fertile for another 30 40 years but for the woman right he's he's burned through like seven
00:44:43.040 years of her precious fertility window and so women women ain't got time for that they're going 0.96
00:44:48.400 to probably break it off earlier if they think he's not he's not the best hair bond mate
00:44:56.400 and they should yeah absolutely probably yeah huge risk to them
00:45:01.200 okay um what what body parts do you think are women attracted to like what um we don't have
00:45:10.800 to just say body parts but like what traits are women attracted to the the classic male body type
00:45:19.040 um we talk about shoulder to waist ratio a kind of b-shaped torso where there's broad shoulders
00:45:24.960 there's a relatively narrow waist that indicates like you probably got some muscle and you're not
00:45:29.840 too too plump and you're capable of doing stuff you're capable of um running and hunting and
00:45:36.480 fighting and taking care of kids and doing all that stuff so the kind of like olympic swimmer
00:45:42.480 physique um or the the mma fighter physique you know there's different varieties of this
00:45:50.640 basically having muscle not having too much fat and being physically capable of doing a wide
00:45:55.600 variety of things that's good and then in terms of psychological traits i've spent like 30 years
00:46:03.920 studying this intelligence is important all those big five personality traits are important
00:46:11.920 sense of humor which i've written quite a bit about which is both an indicator of intelligence
00:46:19.520 right particularly verbal intelligence but also it's an indicator of social intelligence can you
00:46:24.560 understand other people's minds enough to kind of tickle their brains with a funny story
00:46:31.920 and also a good sense of humor is a good indicator of mental health because people who have depression
00:46:39.760 or schizophrenia or severe autism tend not to be very funny in terms of like if they're trying to
00:46:46.800 make a joke it typically doesn't work or they don't even bother making jokes so if someone is
00:46:52.400 reliably um funny particularly in one-on-one interactions not just doing stand-up comedy
00:47:00.640 then they're probably relatively mentally healthy in terms of like not having the major
00:47:07.920 mental disorders that are that are big red flags
00:47:13.440 and do you think humor plays do you think humor is more of a factor i guess in mate selection than 0.56
00:47:19.440 height i think they're both important i think you know women seem to have this this kind of
00:47:26.960 heuristic or rule of thumb that i i want a guy who's at least as tall as me and preferably at
00:47:31.760 least a couple inches taller than me so if you're a very short woman that's that's pretty easy right
00:47:38.240 because there's about a three or four inch difference on average between the sexes so
00:47:42.720 So if you're five foot tall as a woman, almost any man will do.
00:47:49.360 I have some cousins, female cousins who are like 6'1", 6'2".
00:47:53.860 If they're looking for men who are even taller than them,
00:47:57.800 suddenly only 1% of men will do.
00:48:00.600 And that's a very restricted mating range.
00:48:04.600 So and I've talked a lot about this
00:48:08.120 with my 26-year-old daughter also who's
00:48:10.800 in the dating market in New York.
00:48:15.320 And like one kind of rational strategy you can do
00:48:17.840 if you're a woman is if, particularly if you're tall, 1.00
00:48:22.660 if you can kind of convince yourself
00:48:24.520 to relax this height standard, this height obsession,
00:48:28.640 it really broadens your mating pool.
00:48:31.380 And then you can focus on all these other traits
00:48:33.600 that you care about.
00:48:36.140 But man, if you go on Tinder and you say,
00:48:37.660 okay, I need somebody at least six feet tall
00:48:42.540 who's making at least six-figure income.
00:48:46.080 A lot of men won't fit that
00:48:47.640 who might have made great boyfriends or husbands.
00:48:52.400 And so if you're just using like this one criterion
00:48:54.420 to eliminate 80% of men,
00:48:57.160 I think that's pretty dumb. 1.00
00:49:03.380 That seems fair.
00:49:04.860 I think that isn't that one of the most common search terms on dating apps, too, is must be above six feet.
00:49:11.340 Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of women aren't even very well calibrated to like, well, what is the actual average?
00:49:17.920 I think in America, the current male height average is about 510.
00:49:21.800 um but you know think about it objectively like in the modern world is there actually
00:49:31.260 any difference in terms of capability as a husband or father between a guy who's five nine
00:49:36.680 versus six one you know i'm i'm six foot zero so of course i i'm a little higher than average and
00:49:44.160 i think heights heights could heights worked for me um but if i was giving advice to young women
00:49:50.000 i'd be like look try rationally to focus on like out of the traits i think i want
00:49:57.600 which which of them actually modern matter in the modern world versus which are just kind of
00:50:02.880 these evolutionary vestiges that really aren't as relevant as you think right because the guy who's
00:50:11.680 like five eight who's in shape and confident and can fight and knows how to protect you and your
00:50:17.440 kids is actually more useful than some uh you know six foot two lazy dude who's never learned
00:50:26.880 any sports or or can't do anything physical and where you're just getting into like a height
00:50:32.500 worship for no for no reason i think uh focusing on mental stability and humor those are two pretty
00:50:45.520 good traits and like an iq but like you said that kind of goes along mostly with humor those are the
00:50:52.400 three that i'd focus on stability yeah humor and iq and that can get you so far and those are the
00:51:00.240 those are some of the key things you need if you're actually raising a kid with somebody
00:51:04.400 right sense of humor probably correlates pretty well with um ability and willingness to play with
00:51:10.400 the kid in a way that's kind of creative and where like you enjoy the kid's company and the stuff
00:51:16.720 they do you find amusing and you can amuse them and that's super important and you know the stresses
00:51:24.000 of parenting you man you really need emotional uh stability and resilience because in a sense of
00:51:32.080 humor if if some guy who's single is already depressed and anxious just wait till he's
00:51:37.680 like sleep deprived for the kid financially stressed feels torn between family duties and 0.70
00:51:44.480 career like it doesn't get easier right so i think a lot of what women are looking for is they're sort
00:51:52.240 of unconsciously anticipating what traits will be relevant once we settle down we have kids
00:51:59.200 we have a household together what's what's going to be important to me at that point
00:52:02.880 what about what about for men do they like similar traits or do things change again I
00:52:15.000 think men get a lot more choosy about these mental traits in longer-term relationships
00:52:19.320 and for deciding who do I really want to settle down with I think oh you know a lot of men myself
00:52:29.100 included tend to be attracted to certain kinds of instability in women when we're young right like
00:52:36.220 borderline personality disorder can be extremely compelling and enticing and attractive men
00:52:44.460 but that would make a terrible wife and mom so what does that look like in a women in a woman
00:52:53.100 borderline is basically um women who escalate romantic intimacy very very quickly they would
00:53:01.340 fall in love very quickly they can be extremely charismatic and um verbally fluent and and
00:53:09.180 attractive to men they can be sexually proceptive so they'll actually chase
00:53:13.740 men actively instead of just responding to them but then once the relationship develops
00:53:20.860 they'll be often very prone to anger they'll alternately idealize the boyfriend but sometimes
00:53:29.180 demonize him so they can switch from like you're the best thing ever i love you more than i've ever
00:53:35.100 loved anybody five minutes later they can be saying you're the worst thing ever i hate you
00:53:41.180 you've ruined my life blah blah blah so that's borderline behavior um and it
00:53:50.140 is kind of irresistible to a lot of guys but once you learn oh no that ends very badly
00:53:57.180 then you know that's not actually going to be a good uh wife and mother so guys have to learn
00:54:04.220 also to be um wary of that just like women have to learn to be wary of the bad boys who
00:54:10.780 are kind of on the the psychopathy dimension okay that makes sense and then and then what were the
00:54:19.580 other traits the men are looking for in women um yeah i think cheerfulness goes a long way baseline
00:54:29.500 happiness level like my wife diana is also an evolutionary psychologist we've been together a
00:54:34.140 number of years she's just kind of she's hyperthymic she's almost always happy no matter
00:54:40.700 what's happening she enjoys life she is very emotionally resilient um almost never gets
00:54:48.140 depressed and that's a very important quality um when you're dealing with you know life stressors
00:54:58.780 like parenting and career and moving houses and and so forth um so i think happiness and cheerfulness
00:55:07.980 are
00:55:09.100 my sense is that like gen z doesn't really advertise those things because in a way you
00:55:17.200 get more social credibility from being neurotic and depressed than from being happy and like
00:55:22.400 being happy isn't cool um but i think for attracting a long-term mate uh it actually
00:55:30.920 goes a long way because you know your your spouse's happiness is going to determine
00:55:36.940 a large portion of your own happiness over the the span of years and decades
00:55:42.840 yeah i think what's happening with gen z is there's so many people that are um mentally ill
00:55:52.320 like there's such a high percentage of the population is on some sort of psych med or
00:55:56.840 suffering from depression or anxiety that well i don't know how it turned into a good thing really
00:56:04.200 But I can understand how it had to be less of a bad thing if so many people are suffering.
00:56:09.120 It's a weird situation right now.
00:56:11.180 And, you know, there's nothing wrong with having depression, anxiety, being on meds, etc.
00:56:16.460 I just worry that if you have a dating situation that actually incentivizes that, right, that actively rewards it,
00:56:26.540 um then you get potentially a lot of a lot of people who aren't really they're not really
00:56:33.460 temperamentally depressed but they're kind of um they're doing whatever gets rewarded right
00:56:40.340 and so if acting depressed or talking about mental illness gets positively rewarded then
00:56:48.160 you will see an increase in it and and i think that can be quite dangerous
00:56:54.300 that makes sense um jeffrey okay two more questions one where can people go to find you
00:57:03.680 and two if you could recommend one of your books that would help people i guess find a mate which
00:57:11.520 one would it be or or understand themselves in order to find a mate which one would it be
00:57:15.480 yeah um i've got a personal website primalpoly.com and on twitter i'm primal poly uh my twitter
00:57:24.160 persona note is not my real persona it's kind of performative and it's very politically
00:57:32.000 uppity and uh edgelordy um if you're a young single person i do recommend uh the book mate
00:57:41.680 that i wrote with tucker maxx which is basically pure dating advice for how to navigate the modern
00:57:47.040 world if you wanted for men and women yeah actually a lot of the women a lot of the people
00:57:52.800 who read it are women and they say wow it it actually really helps me to understand the male
00:57:57.600 point of view and the challenges that men are facing so i can sort of navigate the the mating
00:58:03.840 market better and if people want more of a like a deeper scientific understanding of where all
00:58:08.960 this comes from then the mating mind book from uh year 2000 i think is good and i'm still very
00:58:16.000 proud of it and I still think it's about like at least 80 percent accurate scientifically.
00:58:22.480 That's pretty good. I'll link those below. Thank you very much for going on. That was interesting.
00:58:27.840 Thanks. Good to talk to you. Take care. Take care.