The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Geoffrey Miller - Evolutionary Psychology, Mating, and Academic Life (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_868)

00:00:00.000 I am delighted to report that I have joined, as a visiting scholar, the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

00:00:10.280 The center offers educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi community.

00:00:18.220 It is named in honor of the United States founding document, which constitutes the nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom, including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American exceptionalism.

00:00:37.560 Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles, the center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom.

00:00:48.860 It will sponsor a speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research team.

00:00:54.240 If you'd like to learn more about the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S, dot E-D-U slash independence slash.

00:01:04.500 Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad for another episode of The Sad Truth.

00:01:09.640 Today, I have a repeat guest. I went back and checked.

00:01:13.260 He was one of the early guests on The Sad Truth 10 years ago, Professor Jeffrey Miller, Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico and a good friend of mine.

00:01:22.840 How are you doing, sir?

00:01:24.280 Great. It's great to be back, Gad, after so many years.

00:01:27.540 And, you know, congratulations on the massive influence and success that you're having and all the public outreach that you're doing.

00:01:33.840 Oh, you're very kind.

00:01:35.400 So what I thought we'd do is start sort of go down memory lane.

00:01:39.900 Some of this you may remember, some of it you may not.

00:01:42.660 In 2006, you and the rest of the great folks at the University of New Mexico had invited me down.

00:01:48.980 At the time, I was finishing my first book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, which was an academic book, a very technical book.

00:01:56.000 And, you know, you guys had had, I'm saying had because I think some people have either moved on or passed away.

00:02:03.140 Yourself, of course, Steve Gengestad, Jane Lancaster, Randy Thornhill.

00:02:09.700 How many of that, you know, legendary group of folks still remains at University of New Mexico?

00:02:15.180 I mean, those guys are mostly retired.

00:02:18.480 So we had an outstanding, actually, evolutionary anthropology department that had some real heavy hitters like Jane Lancaster and Hilly Kaplan and so forth,

00:02:28.220 who, you know, applied kind of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology insights to studying small-scale tribal societies, mostly in South America.

00:02:37.380 And then distinguished professor Steve Gengestad, he's still around.

00:02:42.940 I'm actually having dinner with him tonight.

00:02:45.220 And he's still actually publishing, and he's doing some collaborations with one of my PhD students, Ryan Dobson.

00:02:53.040 And our friend Marco Del Giaducci was here for about 10 years, and he does amazing work on mental health and mental illness from an evolutionary psych perspective.

00:03:05.720 Recently, he's moved back to University of Trieste in Italy, but he happens to be visiting for a couple of weeks here.

00:03:12.280 And we do have a wonderful younger faculty member, Tanya Reynolds.

00:03:17.120 And Tanya works on mostly female versus female competition and the ways that women kind of influence and manipulate and signal to each other and the way that all that works. 1.00

00:03:28.880 And I think she has some really insightful views on all of that.

00:03:32.660 So we still have quite an active group here.

00:03:34.620 Amazing.

00:03:35.860 So when you were on the show last time, so that would have been 2015, I believe.

00:03:43.180 If we were to score on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 evolutionary psychology has not in the least bit infiltrated the behavioral sciences.

00:03:54.040 100, it is the defining framework for anybody doing social sciences.

00:03:58.560 What would the score have been in 2015, and where is it today?

00:04:04.880 And please tell me that it's higher.

00:04:07.920 It was really quite low.

00:04:10.480 Okay.

00:04:10.620 I'd say, numerically, I'd say 15 out of 100 10 years ago, and now maybe 20 out of 100.

00:04:17.420 Yeah.

00:04:17.900 You know, I hate to say it, but that's probably what I would say.

00:04:21.380 Maybe I might be a bit more optimistic and start off at 15 and go 25, 30, because I do see that there is a growing number of people who,

00:04:30.980 while they may not immerse their research in evolutionary psychology, are not nearly as viscerally hostile to it.

00:04:38.260 So maybe that would move me a bit up.

00:04:40.100 So can we hope that it ever gets much higher, or is this the best that we can hope for?

00:04:47.920 I certainly hope it gets higher, but, you know, we face a lot of very difficult political headwinds and opposition, ideological opposition.

00:04:56.820 And so with the rise of DEI and wokeness and, you know, toxic memes and suicidal empathy and all the things that you talk about,

00:05:06.560 oh, my gosh, that's implacably hostile to evolutionary psychology, because we challenge the core beliefs that they advocate,

00:05:12.820 which is, you know, the blank slate, and everyone's born with exactly the same traits,

00:05:17.080 and all cultural differences are due to kind of random cultural effects and not anything heritable.

00:05:23.960 Now, as wokeism has, you know, been challenged a bit, have the fortunes of evolutionary psychology improved?

00:05:34.360 Not really, not yet, right?

00:05:36.400 It's not as if Trump administration 2.0 is really embracing, like, okay, we need a Darwinian framework for the social and behavioral sciences now,

00:05:48.260 and woke was against it, and we were against woke, so now that's before this.

00:05:52.220 It's not like billions of dollars of funding are pouring into this.

00:05:55.820 Well, I also think another, I mean, yes, the wokeism stuff and the parasitic stuff and all that, it, you know, is a malaise of today,

00:06:03.540 but I feel as though many of the obstacles, cognitive and emotional obstacles, that stop people from accepting evolutionary psychology are eternal and immortal,

00:06:16.020 in that as a new generation of academics comes in, they raise the exact same issues that we have shot down in previous generations.

00:06:26.340 It really is sort of the, the phoenix that rises from the ashes, and I can't remember what the reference is,

00:06:33.000 but someone had, and I have cited this work, someone had argued that it's as if we've evolved the capacity to resist evolutionary psychology.

00:06:45.140 So, is it a losing battle?

00:06:50.340 We certainly have real challenges in terms of people being what we call adaptively self-deceived about their motives and their values and their preferences

00:06:59.920 and how their social interactions and their courtships and relationships work, right?

00:07:05.260 I mean, as just one example, like, there's obviously massive strategic self-deception in courtship and mating and sex,

00:07:14.960 but even for parents, there's massive, maybe adaptive self-deception about the influence that parents have on kids.

00:07:22.560 And Steve Pinker made this point beautifully in his old book, The Blank Slate,

00:07:27.700 that if you really believe in the heritability of traits and behavior genetics and twin studies and adoption studies,

00:07:33.560 then as a parent, that's wonderful in the sense that you can relax and you can go,

00:07:38.620 ah, I made a good mate choice, I have a good spouse, we're having kids, we have pretty good genes,

00:07:43.860 we can trust that our kids will probably grow up okay, we feed them, we protect them,

00:07:48.800 they'll grow up into whatever they grow up into.

00:07:51.660 But even in the parenting realm, it's almost as if parents have to believe

00:07:57.120 that they can create and craft and mold their children, right,

00:08:01.620 in order to justify all this massive parental effort and the food and the diapers and the school fees and all of that.

00:08:09.380 So, it's very, very difficult if you try to teach behavior genetics to parents.

00:08:15.840 At one level, they go, absolutely, genes matter, we get it.

00:08:19.920 Like, in this kid, I see this trait is from the mom and this trait is from me.

00:08:25.980 But at the day-to-day level, they really want to believe that they're having a decisive impact

00:08:31.280 on shaping their kids' cognitive abilities and personality traits and moral virtues.

00:08:36.920 And, I mean, to add to what you said, I mean, one of the arguments I make for, you know,

00:08:42.260 all of the, you know, parasitic ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind is that they provide us with hope.

00:08:49.460 So, to your point, social constructivism and the tabula rasa is very hopeful to a parent

00:08:55.280 because if I can find the exact schedule of reinforcement for my child,

00:09:01.360 then he can be the next Lionel Messi or Isaac Newton or Michael Jordan.

00:09:06.740 He truly is unbounded in his potential.

00:09:09.800 That feels a lot nicer for me to hear than to say,

00:09:13.240 sorry, God, you're not very tall.

00:09:15.340 The likelihood of your son ever becoming Michael Jordan is next to nil.

00:09:19.920 That doesn't feel right.

00:09:21.780 And so, it kind of goes back to the old behaviorist quote,

00:09:25.840 you know, give me 12 children and I can make them.

00:09:28.100 So, that really is what you're talking about, right?

00:09:31.640 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:32.880 It's what, you know, conservative political theorist Thomas Sowell called the unconstrained vision, right?

00:09:39.020 The idea that everybody has basically infinite potential

00:09:42.280 and as long as you give them the right environment and the right parenting,

00:09:45.260 then they can become whatever they want.

00:09:47.840 That's also kind of a distinctly American conceit in a way.

00:09:52.140 But on the other hand, I would counsel against thinking that giving young people false hope

00:09:59.140 is somehow a kindness, right?

00:10:03.420 I think it's actually very, very toxic to say to young people,

00:10:10.480 oh, IQ isn't a thing.

00:10:12.920 You can do anything.

00:10:14.060 You can learn anything.

00:10:15.100 You could become a physicist, astronaut, whatever.

00:10:17.280 And then what happens is the young people may, like, massively overinvest in trying to achieve certain positions

00:10:26.180 that they're basically not going to achieve, right?

00:10:29.720 They're not going to make it.

00:10:30.880 And one of my favorite economists, Robert Frank, did this great book about almost 30 years ago

00:10:38.180 called The Winner Take All Society, right?

00:10:40.980 Which analyzes the enormous individual costs of pursuing these false hopes, right?

00:10:48.660 Of every high school basketballer thinking, I'm going to be an NBA superstar.

00:10:53.220 I'm going to be the next Michael Jordan.

00:10:55.580 And then hugely overinvesting in, let's say, basketball skills at the neglect of everything else in life.

00:11:03.080 Likewise, I mean, you know, a lot of our undergrads who think, I want to go, being a professor looks like a great life.

00:11:12.000 I'm going to go to grad school, get a PhD, become a professor.

00:11:14.440 And you and I both know, like, the odds of that happening, of actually getting a tenure-track job,

00:11:19.400 are very, very, very low, especially in our field.

00:11:24.120 So I don't think false hope is nearly as good a thing as a lot of kind of social observers think it is.

00:11:33.820 Yeah.

00:11:34.100 Well, I'm glad you mentioned Bob Frank, as you probably haven't made the connection.

00:11:38.400 He was, when I was a doctoral student at Cornell, he was part of the group of behavioral decision-making folks

00:11:45.080 with Dick Thaler, with my doctoral supervisor, and so on.

00:11:48.540 And I've had him on the show.

00:11:49.920 So for people who want to look at someone who is an economist and uses certain Darwinian insights,

00:11:56.060 then certainly, as Jeffrey said, Bob Frank would be the guy.

00:11:59.300 Okay, I want to talk a bit more about a few things in evolutionary psychology,

00:12:02.000 and then we'll segue into what I think everybody's interested in,

00:12:05.340 which is mating behavior and the evolutionary mechanisms associated with mating.

00:12:10.600 A few years ago, someone had asked me, and I might have written, you know, some passage somewhere

00:12:15.840 about what is the future of evolutionary psychology?

00:12:19.640 What are the most promising areas?

00:12:21.040 And my answer, which I'll give first, and then I'll ask for your answer,

00:12:25.140 I thought that some of the areas where evolutionary psychology could make the greatest amount of impact,

00:12:31.660 sort of bank for the buck, is an applied discipline, hence, you know, applying it in economics,

00:12:37.240 or in law, or in medicine, or in the business school, and so on.

00:12:41.740 In other words, the 7,800th paper on universal mating preferences,

00:12:49.140 while very interesting to demonstrate that it has been replicated into some other new tribe

00:12:55.020 that we hadn't thought of, is something that we sort of know now.

00:12:58.000 Menstrual cycle effects, areas that we've both explored, you know, we sort of have a pretty good

00:13:03.800 understanding of that.

00:13:05.760 Do you agree that maybe the application of EP in applied fields might be where some of the biggest

00:13:12.540 advances happen, or are there other things that you think the future of EP lies?

00:13:17.900 Yeah, I mean, the really weird thing about evolutionary psychology is that already by about

00:13:26.120 the early 90s, within just a few years of the field being founded by people like

00:13:31.820 Lee Cosmides, and John Tooby, and Steve Pinker, and David Buss, we had a really strong

00:13:36.860 metatheoretical framework for understanding human nature.

00:13:40.200 Like, it happened incredibly quickly.

00:13:42.360 Why?

00:13:42.600 Because we borrowed huge numbers of ideas and concepts and insights from evolutionary biology

00:13:47.960 and animal behavior, right?

00:13:50.960 And then the question is, what do you do with that framework?

00:13:54.280 Well, the most interesting things, you know, in society are often these applied issues.

00:14:00.340 Okay, like, how does this cash out in consumer behavior, marketing, advertising?

00:14:04.640 How does it cash out in the mating market? 0.97

00:14:07.720 And how does it cash out into contemporary politics, you know, a huge focus that you've

00:14:13.240 emphasized?

00:14:14.580 So, and then there's feedback loops where you can go, oh, we think we understand human

00:14:21.320 values and preferences.

00:14:22.840 But let's see, is our understanding actually good enough to shape the advice that we give

00:14:28.740 to ad agencies and market researchers?

00:14:31.420 Is it really, so you get very valuable feedback once you start actually trying to apply this

00:14:38.620 where the rubber hits the road.

00:14:40.900 And likewise, with regard to, let's say, insights into society and politics, right?

00:14:48.120 So my colleague, Tanya Reynolds, for example, is now teaching a new course on evolutionary psychology

00:14:53.640 applied to contemporary social issues, right?

00:14:56.760 So it's, it's about free speech, it's about viewpoint diversity, it's about how do we

00:15:02.060 understand political polarization, given this evolutionary psychology framework, and I think

00:15:07.340 that's, that's super valuable.

00:15:11.260 So where is the progress going to come?

00:15:13.960 I mean, it's partly going to be, can evolutionary psychology prove its value in these applied areas

00:15:22.620 where, you know, it ends up getting maybe most of its scientific funding, not from National

00:15:28.920 Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health or the Canadian equivalents, but rather

00:15:34.540 from corporations, nonprofits, think tanks, foundations, etc. that are interested in these

00:15:43.120 applied issues.

00:15:44.200 I have found that, and at least anecdotally, the practitioners are much more open, at least

00:15:52.300 in my experience to evolutionary psychology, because if I go in front of a group of advertisers,

00:15:57.440 and I say, hey, if you want to develop a highly effective advertising message, you need to understand

00:16:03.760 the evolutionary levers that you need to, you know, pull, right? And then I give examples, and then people

00:16:09.920 go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's a lot more difficult to convince academics who are wedded to

00:16:17.540 opposing ideologies, right? If, if Jeffrey Miller is right with his biology stuff, that means I wasted

00:16:24.940 35 years in my social constructivism stuff. And so there's this reflex to be hostile, of course, not

00:16:31.680 knowing that in many cases, the social constructivist view and the biological view can go hand in hand

00:16:37.100 together, right? Because socialization forces exist in their form because of biology, not in lieu of

00:16:42.160 biology. And so, so for me, at least, and I wonder, I know that you've done some, some consulting,

00:16:48.260 have you found a similar pattern where most practitioners just care about what works? And

00:16:52.900 therefore, if you give me an evolutionarily informed prescription, I go, yeah, sure, no problem.

00:16:59.360 Yeah, generally speaking, that's right. I've done quite a bit of, of consulting work for, you know,

00:17:04.660 fortune 500 companies and market researchers, ad agencies, startups, et cetera. And the smart ones

00:17:13.020 understand anything that gives me a competitive advantage over my, my rivals is valuable, right?

00:17:19.400 And in particular, if they are aware of the kind of political biases that dominate marketing,

00:17:29.640 right? It's very female dominated. It's very leftist. It's very high openness people. It's a

00:17:36.700 lot about empathy signaling, right? If you can get them to understand that actually your customers,

00:17:44.600 oh, and also your workers and investors aren't necessarily the same distribution of personality

00:17:49.760 traits that you guys in marketing are, that can help enormously. It could have helped, for example,

00:17:54.940 Cracker Barrel, right? The restaurant chain, which got into huge trouble recently by completely

00:18:02.880 misunderstanding their customer base, right? Which is white, rural and suburban and ex-urban families

00:18:10.600 who are traditionalist, religious, and just want a nice, happy, reliable, nostalgic place to take

00:18:19.300 their families to eat, right? And instead, Cracker Barrel goes off in this insane DEI,

00:18:24.740 wokey direction and they get rid of the white male and their logo and like they've backpedaled a bit,

00:18:30.580 but all of that nonsense could have been avoided and they could have preserved billions of dollars of

00:18:35.540 their company equity if they had just understood, oh, the kinds of traits that our current leadership

00:18:43.380 and our marketing team has are not the traits that our customers have or want.

00:18:50.040 Well, I mean, earlier you, I think you mentioned Thomas Sowell's, what was the term, unrestrained

00:18:58.740 potentiality? The unconstrained division.

00:19:01.940 Unconstrained. Okay, well, I'm going to call it, I'm going to slightly change it and call it

00:19:05.440 infinite malleability or to borrow from E.O. Wilson, culture holds, or biology holds cultures on the

00:19:13.320 leash, the leash might be long, right? But there is an arrogance to the social constructivist whereby

00:19:19.120 he or she thinks that I can develop the product that I want the consumer to have and I just need to

00:19:28.040 explain to them why that is a superior product and since they are empty slates, they will just fall into

00:19:34.020 line and the great, the best example of that phenomenon, and I haven't been able to track where I first

00:19:40.540 heard it. And maybe you'll know it. So there's a, apparently there was a progressive romance novel

00:19:48.140 company that wanted to sort of extricate itself from the, you know, the toxic masculine hero, right? 0.83

00:19:54.420 He's tall, he's got a six pack, he's aggressive, he's socially dominant. They wanted someone who was

00:20:00.320 kinder and cries and is super empathetic and so on. Well, when you then produce that line of products,

00:20:06.760 because you think I can teach women what is the proper model of masculinity because they are empty 1.00

00:20:13.120 slaves. Well, there's this thing called reality and there's a thing called market feedback and they

00:20:19.180 said, sorry, I don't fantasize about those guys. I fantasize about the toxic masculine guy. So they're

00:20:25.140 in, so that would be a, so when I walk into an MBA class, I literally tell the students that the lesson

00:20:31.780 that I just gave you through that romance novel example, you've already gotten the worth of your

00:20:37.020 tuition fee, meaning that you can't create economic policies, political systems, products that violate

00:20:45.200 the most fundamental precepts of human nature. Hence, those who produce those things are evolutionary

00:20:51.580 psychologists in their practice, even though they might not be trained as evolutionary psychologists.

00:20:56.760 Yeah. And I mean, also dealing in applied areas can also be extremely valuable because we as

00:21:04.880 psychologists get insights into all sorts of things about human nature that actually would have been a

00:21:09.360 bit hidden and a bit hard to research if we weren't tuned into this, right? So for example, our friend

00:21:15.720 Catherine Salmon at University of Redlands, California has done lots of work on romance novels.

00:21:20.200 If romance novels didn't exist, right, we wouldn't have nearly as good a window into female mate choice, 1.00

00:21:28.840 right? Because the thing about romance novels is they don't have to make any concessions to the reality

00:21:37.800 of how mating and dating actually work, right? You can be a sort of not super attractive woman who somehow inspires 1.00

00:21:48.280 a grand uncontrollable passion in like a world-class alpha male who wants to sweep you off your feet and

00:21:55.160 take you away to his kingdom and blah, blah, blah. And like, that's not really going to happen and you don't observe it.

00:22:01.160 But in the realm of fantasy as manifest in these cultural artifacts, right, you can get insight into that.

00:22:07.720 Likewise, you know, porn, love it or hate it, is an extremely rich set of insights into the sexual psychology of both men and women.

00:22:19.480 And we've learned an awful lot about human nature from social media in the last 20 years in terms of how people argue,

00:22:28.600 what people are influenced by, the extreme importance of social validation as part of the human motivational system.

00:22:36.920 So that to me is kind of cool. Like the more consumerist capitalism we get, the more we can kind of triangulate on what really is human nature and how does it work.

00:22:48.520 Beautiful. Okay, well, we're talking about romance novels, we're talking about porn, hence sort of the mating drive.

00:22:55.720 You told me before we came on the show that you're involved in a new exciting endeavor with a mating app.

00:23:04.520 It's called Keeper. Tell us about it. I'm excited to hear that.

00:23:08.880 Yeah, so I've been chief science advisor to this new startup matchmaking app.

00:23:13.800 We don't really call it a dating app because it's really oriented towards long-term relationships and marriage and people who want family and kids.

00:23:23.880 So it's kind of like the anti-Tinder, right?

00:23:26.840 And what you see among young people is widespread frustration and dissatisfaction with many of the existing dating apps, right?

00:23:35.920 So everything that the match.com, that the match group has, like Tinder and Hinge and match.com and OkCupid, right?

00:23:45.420 They don't really deliver what people want.

00:23:49.400 You can swipe right on Tinder all you want.

00:23:52.720 And if you're a male, you'll typically get zero matches in any given month, right?

00:23:58.300 Nobody cares.

00:23:59.480 And this leads some young people, like the young men of the manosphere, to throw up their hands and say,

00:24:07.500 women are fickle and they only care about height and money and it's hopeless and we might as well just go our own way and become incels and spend all our time in our goon caves and give up on mating, right? 1.00

00:24:19.440 And it leads the young women who are reasonably attractive to get absolutely overwhelmed, right? 0.96

00:24:27.240 By matches and texts and requests for dates and it's extremely frustrating.

00:24:32.740 So Keeper, this new matchmaking company, is trying to do something different, not just in terms of welcoming people who are already mature enough to go,

00:24:44.140 So I'm done with casual dating, I've sowed my wild oats, now I want to settle down, find a spouse, have kids, get a life, and sort out this mate choice thing.

00:24:58.300 But also the amazing thing about the Keeper team is they've read all the evolutionary psychology.

00:25:04.060 They know your work, they know my work, they've read my books, they're really into human nature, and they're into individual differences.

00:25:11.220 They understand IQ, they understand the big five personality traits, and they actually want to measure these in their clients as accurately and objectively as possible.

00:25:21.940 Because they know, like it's one thing to claim, I'm smart, I'm looking for a smart person.

00:25:28.020 But their clientele is often quite highly educated, quite high income, and they want to be confident, right?

00:25:36.760 Does this person really have the educational credentials and the intelligence that they claim?

00:25:42.000 Even do they really have, like, the openness or extroversion or agreeableness or the other personality traits that they claim?

00:25:49.480 So that's really their goal is to merge good psychometric measurement of these traits that people care about with serious long-term relationship interest and really help the people who are, you know, young but still looking for a serious mate find each other effectively.

00:26:10.420 Are the psychometric measurements done via the service, or I just enter what my extroversion score is?

00:26:21.100 Because then, of course, it is open to being gamed.

00:26:24.720 Well, what we're working on is actually good, valid, interactive IQ tests, right, to measure intelligence.

00:26:33.700 Don't tell that to Nassim Talib.

00:26:35.180 I know, I know.

00:26:36.620 You're like, well, that's a terrible idea for a commercial matchmaking company because IQ is nonsense.

00:26:43.120 And then for the big five, we think there are actually ways that we can probably get valid representations of a lot of these if people are willing to, like, share their social media feeds with us.

00:26:56.300 Oh, so you indirectly measure it.

00:26:58.000 So you can indirectly, like, if someone's reasonably active on TikTok, Reddit, X, whatever, and if they say, yeah, I'm willing to allow you to make some inferences about my traits, right?

00:27:11.160 Can you get the team to check my X feed and tell me what my scores are?

00:27:15.860 Once we get this up and running properly, yeah, we could probably do that.

00:27:22.980 I mean, it's funny because I think you and I are both probably, like, come across with our X personas as, you know, a little bit more disagreeable than we actually are in real life. 0.61

00:27:34.080 Oh, true.

00:27:34.880 Perhaps.

00:27:35.280 Because I always meet someone, it always happens, and then they say, oh, my God, you're such an affable, warm guy.

00:27:44.400 I was scared to come and talk to you because you seem like such a, you know, cantankerous guy on X.

00:27:49.760 Well, but on X, many of the things that they're seeing is me entering the MMA ring to fight with someone, right?

00:27:58.140 So I can tuck my children to bed in a very loving way and also be an MMA fighter, but they don't do that attribution. 0.93

00:28:08.220 They think that you're always battling and fighting and calling someone imbecile or castrato, so you're exactly right. 1.00

00:28:15.580 Yeah. 0.78

00:28:16.100 And, you know, it's interesting that we do get a little bit of, like, a personality trait whiplash.

00:28:21.900 If I'm, like, being super ornery on X and then my two-year-old toddler, like, falls over and needs comforting, oh, I have to get out of my X mindset and be empathic.

00:28:33.540 So, anyway, what, you know, one thing I like about Keeper is that we're really trying to take seriously how do you measure these traits that people care about so that when clients are putting up their profiles, we can have confidence that they are honest, accurate, reliable.

00:28:53.620 Because we take this seriously, like, Keeper isn't going to give people hundreds of matches a day.

00:29:01.040 They're very, very selective, and the notion is you get a suggested match, and then you're supposed to treat it as if your parents have put a lot of thought into who you might want to marry, and they're introducing you to the treasured daughter or son of one of their social or business contacts, right?

00:29:22.760 And you're going to treat them as an individual, a real person, rather than just as a kind of abstract profile.

00:29:30.860 Do you use, I mean, the principles of assortative mating and birds of a feather flock together in terms of calculating the match via a compatibility score?

00:29:40.120 Yeah, absolutely.

00:29:41.240 Okay.

00:29:41.460 So, we're getting a lot of the preferences of what are you guys looking for and what are you offering, and then you get a complicated machine learning-based training that kind of matches them as best we can.

00:29:55.520 And we also pay a lot of attention to political and religious compatibility.

00:30:01.360 So, whereas your traditional dating apps, like, OkCupid is a truly tragic example.

00:30:10.220 Like, I was dating, you know, 10, 15 years ago on OkCupid, and it was wonderful, and they ask hundreds of questions, and you get a match score percentage about how well all of your answers on these match what somebody else is looking for.

00:30:24.180 And then, oh, they ruined it.

00:30:27.480 Circa 2016, with the Trump election, right, the OkCupid leadership basically purged all the Trump supporters.

00:30:36.060 Oh, yes, yes.

00:30:37.280 Right.

00:30:37.880 They included a bunch of questions that allowed particularly the liberal young women to just ignore all of the guys who were centrist, libertarian, right-wing, whatever.

00:30:50.040 And basically, you couldn't function on OkCupid after that if you were in any way conservative, Republican, or religious.

00:30:57.980 So, you know, Keeper is trying to do it differently because they want to be maximally welcoming to people of all, genuinely all different, you know, religions and political persuasions and help them find people who are like-minded.

00:31:18.080 Do you feel, though, I mean, I think I might know the answer to this, but in the same way that people assort on height and that women don't want to date guys who are shorter, or we want to assort on, you know, fundamental life values, do you think that on average people will try to engage in assortative mating on political orientation?

00:31:41.760 Yeah, very much so.

00:31:44.160 And, I mean, there is a question about, like, if you're a young woman, do you want a guy who actually matches exactly your political beliefs or who's an optimal amount more conservative than you are?

00:31:57.420 Because we know there's a sex difference in conservatism and in openness and agreeableness and social attitudes and all of that.

00:32:06.400 But my hunch is that actually women are comfortable with a husband being a bit more conservative than they are, right?

00:32:18.260 This is certainly the case for my own parents, right?

00:32:20.660 My mom was Democrat.

00:32:21.800 My dad was a Republican.

00:32:23.040 They agreed on many, many things.

00:32:25.340 They both went to vote in every single election.

00:32:28.580 They perfectly canceled out each other's votes in most elections, and yet it was their civic duty.

00:32:36.400 So that might be happening.

00:32:39.040 But, I mean, one worry that I have is that a lot of women under age 30 will say or will convince themselves that I want a guy who absolutely perfectly matches my political values. 0.74

00:32:53.200 And if he doesn't, he can't be reformed, I'm never going to change my political beliefs, we won't grow out of it, our views won't change even after we have kids, right?

00:33:07.380 And none of that is true.

00:33:09.700 But you see a lot of mating fails, I think, from people overemphasizing politics in the early stages of courtship.

00:33:21.960 Well, and interestingly, and actually I mentioned this yesterday, I was on a television show where I raised this issue, you know, the Mamdani bench press film.

00:33:31.820 And so I brought in the research that shows, and of course you're very familiar with that research because it's evolutionary minded, that shows that physical formidability in a man is correlated to their political and socioeconomic orientation.

00:33:47.480 The more physically formidable I am, the less likely I am to be egalitarian because I recognize that life is an inherent competition.

00:33:58.600 And given my stature, literally my morphological stature, I'm more than happy to step into the ring and duke it out.

00:34:07.120 Whereas the guy who's kind of soft spoken and cries at Bridget Jones diary, that's the guy who might match the liberal girl's political orientation, but that's not the guy who she's sexually fantasizing over.

00:34:21.520 So, there is a disconnect between the archetype of the guy that she fantasizes over and the guy that she wants to be with, politically speaking.

00:34:30.100 Does that make sense?

00:34:31.620 Yeah, absolutely.

00:34:32.220 And I mean, the hilarious thing is like if you look at Fifty Shades of Grey, right, the books or the movies, young, kind of probably liberally woman falls in love with this self-made billionaire, right?

00:34:45.800 And the fascinating thing isn't the BDSM, the fascinating thing is they never talk politics, as far as I know.

00:34:53.940 So, what are this guy's, Christian Grey's politics likely to be?

00:34:58.820 He's going to be a conservative Republican or a libertarian, right?

00:35:05.180 A lot of young women, if they read Fifty Shades of Grey and they go, oh, he's hot and he's tall and he's handsome and he's a billionaire, everything I want.

00:35:13.360 But if they realize, oh, my God, he's going to have political views that would lead me to absolutely reject him on most dating apps, right, that would be kind of a tragic failure.

00:35:28.480 Right.

00:35:28.560 So, you know, I hope young people just think this through a little bit more and ask themselves, well, if I met somebody with the kinds of personality traits and moral virtues and interest in marriage and kids that I might have if I'm looking for a serious long-term life partner, what are their politics likely to be, right?

00:35:54.680 What's their religion likely to be, and where can I truly find them?

00:36:00.140 And often the answer might be, yeah, probably more likely to find them in a local church than a local university, right?

00:36:09.220 Or at least you're more likely to find them in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym, right, than a yoga class.

00:36:19.340 That's right.

00:36:20.060 So, yeah, I worry that a lot of young people are just vastly overestimating both the importance and the stability of their own ideologies when it comes to mating.

00:36:32.780 So where is Keeper now in terms of, is it fully operational?

00:36:38.300 Are you still?

00:36:39.440 Oh, okay, it is.

00:36:40.160 Okay.

00:36:40.680 Yeah, they just launched a couple weeks ago.

00:36:44.240 You can sign up.

00:36:45.040 You can start developing a profile.

00:36:46.700 Just go to Keeper.ai.

00:36:47.860 And, you know, we're still in kind of a learning phase, but you can find matches and you can get dates and you can, I mean, one of the key things we're trying to do is make the incentives of the clients perfectly aligned with the incentives of the company.

00:37:06.360 Right.

00:37:06.800 So if you go on Tinder or Hinge or Match.com, their economic model is you pay us a monthly subscription fee and we give you a lot of, you know, feedback and kind of fake sexual validation.

00:37:22.160 Like, hopefully you get some likes.

00:37:24.880 But by the way, only one in five million swipes is going to result in a marriage. 1.00

00:37:30.020 Is that literally the number?

00:37:32.240 Yeah.

00:37:32.480 It's one in five million.

00:37:34.220 Holy moly.

00:37:35.080 I would have thought one in 10,000.

00:37:37.780 Yeah.

00:37:38.060 No, it's a very inefficient way to find a spouse. 0.94

00:37:42.400 But anyway, you know, their incentives are to keep you on the app as long as possible and for you to fail to find a mate.

00:37:49.020 Because if you find a monogamous mate, you're going to leave the app and your monthly subscription fee goes away.

00:37:53.980 So Keeper is trying to do something where there's a couple different models, but one is a marriage bounty, right, where you sign a contract and you're like, if Keeper can find me a mate, I will pay them a certain amount of money as a bounty, right?

00:38:07.720 So that means you're perfectly aligned with the company.

00:38:12.220 Like, they want to find you a mate, you want to find a mate, you want to get married.

00:38:16.940 You know, if you go down the path towards that, you start cohabiting, you get married, you have kids, you can specify in a contract.

00:38:25.520 We pay Keeper for that. 0.83

00:38:27.200 So in that sense, it's much more like traditional matchmaking.

00:38:30.480 Or like, I mean, head hunting in the labor market.

00:38:33.720 Yes, it's exactly the same model.

00:38:35.000 Exactly, yeah.

00:38:36.820 So we try to take seriously the kind of game theory of, like, how do you get, you know, the clients as happy as possible, given their preferences and their traits?

00:38:48.520 And how do you make that also work for the company?

00:38:51.840 Beautiful.

00:38:52.520 Well, I hope people will check it out.

00:38:54.260 Next, I wanted to talk a bit about the trajectory of your career, which I highly respect because I'm a polymath, as you well know.

00:39:04.200 And you certainly are not a stay-in-your-lane professor in several ways, certainly in the topics that you pick.

00:39:11.740 You know, you're not just a menstrual cycle guy.

00:39:14.980 You're not just a mating guy.

00:39:16.740 You go where problems interest you.

00:39:19.020 And I love that.

00:39:19.820 You certainly are someone who's done consulting, as per what you just talked about.

00:39:24.340 But as you said, you've done many other consulting.

00:39:26.400 You've written popular books, which few professors write, because, you know, who would want to talk to the great unwashed? 1.00

00:39:33.700 I should only be publishing papers in academic journals that are only read by seven other of my close academic friends.

00:39:39.980 And so, in that sense, we're roughly the same age, very similar kind of trajectories, both out-of-the-box people.

00:39:49.460 At this stage of your career, are there elements of your multiple hats that you no longer appreciate as much as you did?

00:39:57.420 And even before you answer, just so that maybe I can build your trust in sharing your part, I'll share my part.

00:40:04.500 While I love when I go up in front of the class and I perform, the pedagogic performance is something that I love to do.

00:40:12.040 I no longer enjoy being in the classroom and explaining to Timmy why he got a B- in his participation grade.

00:40:21.900 It's a suboptimal use of my time at this stage of my career.

00:40:25.700 So, there are many elements of being a professor that I'm no longer interested in, notwithstanding the fact that being a professor is deeply inscribed in my DNA.

00:40:35.100 So, talk us through your trajectory.

00:40:37.780 What are the things that you remain passionate about?

00:40:39.840 What are the things you're less passionate about?

00:40:41.420 And so on.

00:40:42.040 I'm still very passionate about public outreach and trying to get some key ideas out to the general public.

00:40:52.320 So, you know, I'm reasonably active on podcasting and interviews.

00:40:57.400 I'm very active on X, you know, like you are.

00:41:00.580 I think it's a fabulous platform, and particularly since Elon Musk took it over a few years ago.

00:41:05.260 It is the central public discourse for ideas.

00:41:09.040 And, you know, discussing science and policy and everything.

00:41:17.400 Like you, I'm sort of increasingly skeptical about, like, I also love teaching and I like interacting with the students.

00:41:25.580 But I do try to structure my courses so that I kind of minimize the amount of, you know, tedious complaining that certain students can do if they're like, oh, I missed a test because I couldn't find parking.

00:41:38.360 Or my dog has cancer and so I wasn't able to study for the last six weeks and blah, blah, blah.

00:41:44.920 Like, that's annoying.

00:41:46.680 But I do also kind of use the classrooms a little bit as a little test lab for how do I communicate certain ideas effectively.

00:41:58.980 And, you know, I teach at a medium-sized, fairly humble state university, University of New Mexico.

00:42:07.320 You know, it's about 20,000, 25,000 undergrad students.

00:42:11.200 We have grad students.

00:42:12.160 And it's a very broad range, honestly, of IQ and academic ability and conscientiousness levels and political orientations.

00:42:25.000 And even, you know, ages, like we get military veterans coming back in their late 20s to get a degree.

00:42:32.060 We get parents.

00:42:33.300 We get, I've even had some grandparents in my human sexuality classes.

00:42:37.020 So, if I'm working on some topic like, oh, whatever, we've just done a huge factor analysis of BDSM kinks based on a massive data set that one of my friends has collected. 0.84

00:42:50.960 So, how do you communicate the results of that?

00:42:54.460 It's great to be able to stand up in front of a class and sort of test it and see, like, what do the students get or not get?

00:43:00.820 And then when you go on somebody's podcast and you're trying to explain it to their listeners, that I think is very, very helpful.

00:43:09.360 How about peer review publisher?

00:43:12.760 I'm just honestly not very interested in, you know, adding another 10 or 20 peer-reviewed papers to my CV.

00:43:21.360 It's just not, it's not really a priority.

00:43:24.400 I think there are actually more effective ways to share one's research, like Substack or giving certain kinds of, you know, conference talks.

00:43:40.440 I'm also a kind of academic who's unusual in that I've never sought out big grants.

00:43:46.080 I've never had the ambition to run a big lab that just kind of employs a bunch of grad students and postdocs and staff kind of for its own sake, just to have my little economic empire.

00:43:57.780 I've had no interest in that.

00:43:59.440 And I'm proud of the fact that, you know, if you take, like, the total amount of money that I've gotten from taxpayers versus the total academic impact that I've had in terms of, like, citations, I've been a very, very cheap researcher, right?

00:44:16.080 And other people who are getting multi-million dollar grants a year, like, they might be highly productive.

00:44:21.580 But to me, the return on investment for the taxpayer for those kinds of massive labs is often very low.

00:44:32.460 Yeah, I mean, Jeffrey is being very humble because I went before we started our chat just to look at what are some of the latest papers you might have been working on.

00:44:41.660 Maybe it might serve as a jumping ground, a jump board to talk about things.

00:44:46.480 And, I mean, you've got, I don't know, I can't remember, but, like, 20,000 citations and very high H-index.

00:44:51.860 So you're certainly no slouch.

00:44:54.720 And so I think it's very interesting to link these bibliometric metrics to taxpayer money.

00:45:01.380 I've never thought about doing that thing.

00:45:03.940 Do you know of anybody who's actually tried to make that link?

00:45:07.020 No, I don't, but I think it's important from the viewpoint of kind of civilizational support for academia, right?

00:45:20.980 If we can make a case that certain fields, like, I think evolutionary psychology, right, is relatively underfunded, but punches way above its weight in terms of impact relative to the number of people working on it.

00:45:34.300 And I think that's, to me, that's a good thing.

00:45:40.560 But honestly, we have a lot of academic researchers whose view basically is, like, here's a thing I want to study.

00:45:48.600 I want to get the most grant money I possibly can, right, that can go into this paper and that will serve to justify it.

00:45:59.780 And I think that's, as a taxpayer and as a citizen, I think that's exactly the backwards way to think about this.

00:46:10.580 Well, and I also wonder, so, you know, before we had all these bibliometrics, we hadn't even, you know, cruder, you know, set of metric, which was just how many publications you had and maybe how many citations you had.

00:46:24.040 Now we've got H indexed, there are other indices we can use, but I would argue that we should sort of come up with a better set of quantification tools.

00:46:34.500 And I think there are a couple of companies that try to do that, where they measure the outreach score of academic papers.

00:46:42.420 But I mean, if I appear on a show that has 10 million, you know, listeners or viewers, and I receive, you know, 2,000 emails after that show, specifically telling me, you know what, I've decided to go back and then fill in the blank, to go back to study evolutionary psychology, to study consumer behavior, just to go back to finish my degree.

00:47:05.240 What's the influence of that?

00:47:06.880 So I think when I first began my public outreach program, a lot of the universities really looked down at that, right?

00:47:16.140 And I tell of a famous story in The Parasitic Mind where I was speaking actually at your alma mater at Stanford Business School, and the host who was hosting me prior to my talk, you know, looked down with great derision at the fact that I would go on Joe Rogan.

00:47:32.560 Well, now the same people who used to do that are now calling me and saying, please, please, please, how can I get on Joe Rogan, right?

00:47:40.520 So do you think that there will ever be a day, I'm asking you here to be, you know, a future teller, but where academia will recognize in a much more appropriate manner, how you and I engage in this public outreach?

00:47:57.720 That's a great question.

00:48:01.600 It's one I've thought about for many years, and I haven't seen attitudes budge even a little bit, right?

00:48:09.060 Oh, whoa.

00:48:09.520 So not even a little, it's so bizarre, and I'm going to preach to the choir here, but, you know, every year professors, including tenured people like us, are assessed in terms of research, teaching, and service, right?

00:48:22.740 So what counts as service?

00:48:25.100 Okay, reviewing journal papers counts as very valuable service from the viewpoint of academia.

00:48:32.200 And what you're doing is spending hours and hours giving feedback to someone who may or may not accept the feedback, who will publish a paper that will be read, like, the modal amount of readings it will get is zero, and the median will be like five to ten, right?

00:48:46.540 And many papers don't get cited at all.

00:48:49.660 So that's considered valuable service.

00:48:51.480 If you give a talk to a local charity group, that's considered valuable service.

00:48:56.540 If you are a judge for a local science fair, that's valuable service.

00:49:00.260 If you have 150,000 or whatever, a million followers on X, and you regularly post good science and policy insights, that counts for literally nothing.

00:49:14.000 Maybe even less than nothing.

00:49:16.500 Or less than nothing.

00:49:17.480 It counts against you, because you are, again, mixing with the riffraff. 1.00

00:49:20.980 Yeah, you're mixing with the riffraff.

00:49:22.660 I mean, a lot of academics seem to have the view that the five- to ten-page peer-reviewed journal article is the natural unit of communication, and you couldn't possibly get across your research in a one-minute elevator pitch or a three-minute summary on a podcast or a three-page Psychology Today blog.

00:49:52.660 Right.

00:49:53.140 Right.

00:49:54.600 So that, to me, is bizarre.

00:49:57.980 I think academics should be thinking in terms of, like, what's the one-minute, the five-minute, the one-hour version of my research and its implications and why you should trust it?

00:50:07.940 And then be locked and loaded and ready to communicate that in any medium, right?

00:50:15.440 And the fact that – here's one thing that struck me, right?

00:50:21.240 You teach an undergraduate class.

00:50:23.240 What are the students doing in the five minutes before class?

00:50:26.700 They're on their phone, right?

00:50:28.960 They're scrolling social media.

00:50:30.620 They're looking at X or TikTok or Instagram, and they are engaged with the Joe Rogans of the world or the Gadsads of the world, right?

00:50:39.660 And then they come into class, and they're learning from a teacher who typically has nothing but contempt for the social media that occupies many hours of their day every day, right?

00:50:53.040 So the disconnect currently in 2025 between what academics do versus where students are actually getting their information, it's a massive chasm.

00:51:06.880 So two points.

00:51:07.720 Number one, I think the driving factor behind the reality that you just said, I would argue, and you'll tell me if you agree, stems from an ego-defensive perspective, right?

00:51:22.600 If I know that I've mastered the template of the peer review process, but I'm probably not charismatic enough, nor interesting enough, nor funny enough, nor captivating enough to pull it off on Joe Rogan, well, there are two things I can do.

00:51:43.920 I can either say, oh, I better work on myself so I can aspire to get there, or I could denigrate that which I suck at so that only that which I'm good at is elevated in terms of the pecking order.

00:51:57.160 So I really think it's largely that.

00:51:59.080 I mean, is that what you think it is, or is there anything else at play here?

00:52:02.940 I think that's a lot of it.

00:52:04.340 And the weird irony here is that academia is full of professors who were introverted and ASPE researchers by nature, right?

00:52:14.660 Not extroverted, effective teachers, right?

00:52:18.360 And then they learn to be largely effective teachers as they go, and they have to pick up all these skills about how do I give lectures and engage the students and all of this.

00:52:28.340 And then they think, oh, but I couldn't possibly do effective podcasting or interviewing or get the lighting right in my home set up, or I couldn't possibly learn those skills.

00:52:40.820 And they don't even realize, like, if you've already mastered teaching, which was a very counterintuitive skill to them, like, it's only a little bit of extra effort, honestly, to be, you know, pretty decent at social media.

00:52:55.960 And you don't even have to be gorgeous or that charismatic.

00:53:01.040 You just have to be reasonably articulate and warm and show up on time and do it.

00:53:08.780 You're right.

00:53:09.120 Well, the second point I was going to mention is, and I mean, I've got, as you might imagine, a million of these stories, but this happened very recently.

00:53:16.760 So, my family and I were vacationing in Bermuda a couple of weeks ago.

00:53:22.800 And so, we were in an area of Bermuda.

00:53:25.980 I now, I'm hoping that the gentleman that I'm about to talk about will watch this and will reach out to me.

00:53:32.140 So, we're in this area in Bermuda called The Flats, beautiful little village, gorgeous little bay.

00:53:37.880 So, we go to, we're thirsty, we're dehydrated, and so we go into this little convenience store that's attached to this really picturesque gas station.

00:53:50.920 The gas station attendant, who's a local Bermudan, says hello, but then he notices what, and I now kind of realize what someone has recognized me because I see how their face changes.

00:54:04.100 He goes, he stops like this, and he says, you're the scientist that's got that show?

00:54:11.540 I said, yes.

00:54:12.340 He goes, aren't you the guy who brought down Neil deGrasse Tyson, my mock?

00:54:18.880 Now, Jeffrey, this happened in a little village in Bermuda, and the gas attendant, a local Bermudan, was referring to my takedown of gender ideology as postulated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

00:54:37.220 I said, you know what?

00:54:38.480 I think I can retire now.

00:54:40.420 But that's the power.

00:54:42.920 And I don't mean it in a power-hungry.

00:54:45.600 I mean, that's the game that we should be in, which is create knowledge and spread knowledge precisely to the gas attendant in the flats in Bermuda.

00:54:55.460 And so, yeah, I mean, I really get it.

00:54:58.840 I mean, you talk about a dopamine hit.

00:55:00.840 And again, it's not for the fame.

00:55:03.080 It's the guy coming up to me and saying, you know, I'm a trucker, and I do the whatever, Tacoma to wherever, and I just put your podcast, and I learn so much.

00:55:12.740 But I feel a lot more satisfaction from that feedback than some smarmy Columbia professor telling me, oh, I really liked your paper on so-and-so.

00:55:22.640 Do you feel the same way?

00:55:25.320 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:26.060 It's about having effective impact on people, often who wouldn't have the time or money to go to a university at all, right?

00:55:34.660 Or who didn't discover their intellectual curiosity until a bit later in life, right?

00:55:39.840 And there are an awful lot of people out there who are smart and curious, and maybe they didn't follow an academic path, but are still very curious about ideas and science and policy and so forth.

00:55:52.400 And reaching them is enormously rewarding.

00:55:55.440 I mean, honestly, some of the biggest kind of dopamine hits I've had, in terms of people recognizing me, came after the MateBook, right?

00:56:05.260 And several times, young men have come up and said, the MateBook helped me so much.

00:56:11.560 This is my wife.

00:56:13.280 Wow.

00:56:13.880 Here she is.

00:56:14.740 I wouldn't have met her if I hadn't taken seriously your advice.

00:56:19.120 This, and he's happy, she's happy.

00:56:22.420 Maybe he would have ended up being a frustrated incel if he hadn't read the book.

00:56:25.920 That, to me, is a much better impact than, you know, somebody like doing a great term paper and getting an A-plus in some seminar I've taught.

00:56:34.860 Indeed.

00:56:35.540 What are some projects that you're currently working on?

00:56:39.220 I mean, it could be papers.

00:56:40.780 It could be, oh, I'm thinking about the next book that I'm going to work on.

00:56:44.320 Whatever.

00:56:45.080 Tell us some of the stuff that's going to keep the great Jeffrey Miller busy for the next couple of years.

00:56:50.940 Well, one thing I love to do is when I've got a PhD student, I kind of work with them to find, like, what are the points of overlap?

00:56:59.900 I don't really tell them, you must work on this, or this is what my grant says you must work on.

00:57:04.980 So, my current PhD student, Ryan Dobson, has broad interests.

00:57:08.920 He did a great master's thesis on the so-called love languages, right?

00:57:13.600 The five love languages that supposedly are what people want in relationships.

00:57:18.560 And we actually tried to measure, are they real?

00:57:21.740 Are there just five?

00:57:22.980 Do they overlap?

00:57:24.180 Are they, you know, statistically independent of each other?

00:57:28.000 How do we best measure them?

00:57:29.180 So, that's an example where you can take a very popular construct that millions of people know about that maybe is considered pseudoscience by a lot of academics, but you can go, is there a grain of truth to this, right?

00:57:48.200 Are there different things that people value in relationships in terms of expressions of affection and attention and so forth?

00:57:56.040 And let's map this out in a better way.

00:57:59.760 So, that's the kind of thing I love doing.

00:58:02.000 And then we are, oh yeah, well, we've got a huge project that's, the revision is currently under review at a big sexuality journal.

00:58:14.100 This is a project with Justin McGilsky, right, on consensual non-monogamy and polyamory and open relationships.

00:58:22.220 And what we're trying to do in that project, which I hope will be published soon, is try to figure out, are there overlapping ways to maintain happy relationships that are shared between monogamous couples and polyamorous or open couples?

00:58:40.120 And surprisingly, there are, there are actually things that they have in common that they could learn from each other.

00:58:46.260 And I love that kind of project because what we're doing is empirically mapping out with a global sample of thousands of people, what actually predicts relationship happiness and success?

00:58:58.960 And are there some hacks or some tips that monogamous people can learn from polyamorous people, right, without necessarily becoming poly?

00:59:13.560 And are there some tips that poly people can learn from the monogamous people?

00:59:17.700 Can you give us some hints or you don't want to give away the punchline?

00:59:21.720 One surprising thing seems to be almost everybody, regardless of their relationship type, seems to benefit from sharing which other people do they find sexually and romantically attractive, right?

00:59:36.500 And that's not necessarily, oh, I find this particular neighbor or coworker hot.

00:59:41.020 It can even just be which actor or actresses or musicians or whoever do you find attractive?

00:59:49.180 And the reason why that seems to work often in building rapport and trust is that each person in the relationship is often kind of surprised at who the other person finds most attractive, right?

01:00:04.040 Because it often comes down to little quirks of personality rather than just raw physical hotness, right?

01:00:11.360 And so, a husband who hears a wife say, actually, there's something about Willem Dafoe as an actor that I find really compelling and intense.

01:00:22.640 You might go, what? 0.88

01:00:24.180 Like, not Henry Cavill, like the traditionally hyper handsome Willem fucking Dafoe? 0.59

01:00:30.420 Like, really?

01:00:31.520 And then, like, you can get into it.

01:00:33.680 And then the husband might realize, oh, wow, I've actually got a lot of traits in common with that guy that she finds attractive and maybe I can cultivate those traits.

01:00:43.540 And conversely, if a wife asks the husband, like, which actress or which musician do you find, you know, romantically attractive or fantasize about, he's likely to give her an answer where she might be happily surprised.

01:01:00.640 Like, it might be an actress who's quite a bit, like, heavier or fatter than she thinks he wants her to be, right?

01:01:09.160 Or it might be she's got some little personality quirk that the wife also happens to share. 0.99

01:01:17.260 And so, that's an example where there's usually a wall of silence between married people where they never share their sexual fantasies about others.

01:01:26.920 But where if they did, in a kind of, you know, gradually escalated and respectful way, right, they might actually bond over that.

01:01:41.600 And the edgier version of this is actually share the porn that you watch with your spouse. 0.84

01:01:47.200 Yikes! 1.00

01:01:47.380 Some are ready for that, some aren't, but that's also a predictor of relationship satisfaction.

01:01:53.720 Well, it's so incredible that you would mention this idea of sharing fantasies, because I just started reading a novella by Arthur Schnitzler.

01:02:06.400 Do you know where I'm going with this?

01:02:08.280 So, it's a, I mean, it's, you know, sometimes you think that there's, you know, cosmic synchronicity, because what you just said, the only difference is that in the story that I'm about to tell you, it wasn't a good idea to share your sexual fantasies.

01:02:25.580 And let me, so let me set it up.

01:02:26.920 So, this is, the author is a Austrian psychiatrist, I mean, the real author, not, not, not, not the protagonist in the story, who wrote a novella called Rhapsody, A Dream Story, which is the novella that Stanley Kubrick purchased the rights to then do Eyes Wide Shut.

01:02:54.120 The late 19, and what the, what the movie is about, and then, of course, now that I'm reading the novella, I'd always wanted to read the novella, and I just got it two days ago, I started it.

01:03:07.720 They start chatting, they, meaning the husband and wife, he's a, he's a physician, she's a respectable, this is like in the 1920s, they start sharing their fantasies.

01:03:19.020 And, of course, as we know from evolutionary psychology, it could be a dark abyss when a man starts imagining his wife being ravished by the gorgeous guy in the navy uniform.

01:03:35.360 And so, in that novella, at least, your prescription of it might be good and fun to share is not their experience, because they now go down a well of, of jealousy and obsessiveness and so on.

01:03:47.520 So, are there any, is there a framework by which we could say, here are the conditions where your sharing will prove beneficial, versus here are the manifestations of sharing, which are going to cause me to want to kill you because you fantasize over the gorgeous neighbor?

01:04:06.160 Well, another big thing that Justin Magilsky and I and our team of, I think there's 30 people, co-authors on this paper, found is that jealousy management tactics are also crucial to relationship satisfaction and success.

01:04:20.120 So, the sad thing here is a lot of people in long-term relationships basically invest zero thought or energy into jealousy management.

01:04:28.880 And how do I handle situations where, oh, no, my wife's going off on a business trip and I think she may or may not be attracted to this other guy and she's going to be at this conference with him and how do I handle that?

01:04:42.180 And they have no capacity for, you know, introspection about this or communication about it or the communication skills to sort of set clear boundaries, right?

01:04:56.280 To actually say, here's what I would not be comfortable with, like, yes, you can have one or two drinks with them.

01:05:07.180 No, you can't go up to his room for a foot massage, right?

01:05:10.200 So, like, being crystal clear about expectations seems like it would benefit a lot of relationships, but a lot of people have this sort of weird, don't ask, don't tell, let's keep it vague.

01:05:27.200 Vagueness is romantic.

01:05:29.860 What could possibly go wrong if I have no clear expectations about what's allowed or not allowed in our marriage, right?

01:05:37.240 So, and it's such a weird double standard because for every other human emotion, right, we grow up and we learn we have to manage emotions.

01:05:47.760 You have to manage jealousy.

01:05:50.680 Well, you have to manage anger and frustration and sadness and disgust and every other emotion out there.

01:05:58.140 But jealousy is like the one emotion that people think, oh, I don't have to exert any effort as an adult in my primary relationship to figure out how to effectively manage this.

01:06:12.080 It's a very weird little glitch, I think, in our culture.

01:06:17.500 Very interesting.

01:06:18.320 So, let me share something personal.

01:06:20.240 So, one of the, so my wife and I have been together for 25 years, going on 26.

01:06:24.580 I think you've met her maybe at University of New Mexico.

01:06:27.460 At the time, we didn't have children when we visited you in Albuquerque.

01:06:32.420 One of the things that I can, I mean, she has many, many wonderful qualities, one of which, and I think I'd like to, I'd like to believe that I offer her that, is that we're not folks who induce jealousy in the other, right?

01:06:52.360 Many people will even use jealousy as a tactic to demonstrate the commitment of the other person.

01:07:01.380 You know, if I go speak to this gorgeous guy over there, and if my husband then comes and exhibits jealousy, then at least this shows he cares.

01:07:10.400 I could literally say I've never experienced, maybe I'm just fortunate, and I'd like to think that I don't do that to her.

01:07:17.200 Or we've never had to necessarily learn the jealousy management tactics that you're speaking about, because we never induce that in the other.

01:07:27.440 So, that's story one.

01:07:28.780 Story two, and then I'll ask you to respond, or you could share stuff from your personal life.

01:07:32.220 The greatest instance of jealousy that I've ever felt, and I'm being literal, was when we got our first Belgian Shepherd, and I was very, very keen on our first Belgian to be more, you know, imprinted on me.

01:07:51.860 And whenever she would get up to go to the kitchen, and he, as a puppy, would follow her, that pissed me off.

01:08:01.540 And so, my wife would joke with me. 1.00

01:08:03.400 She said, I can't get you to be pissed off at me talking to some other guy at a cafe, but the dog got you super jealous? 0.95

01:08:10.400 So, that's the extent of my jealousy.

01:08:12.180 Maybe I should consider myself fortunate.

01:08:13.940 What are your thoughts, Dr. Miller?

01:08:15.180 Yeah, I mean, you can have a very, you know, high-functioning, happy, long-term marriage without doing this jealousy induction on each other.

01:08:24.460 And I know some people find it helpful or even hot to do it, and they get kind of like a thrill of thinking, oh, I really made my husband, you know, feel threatened and insecure and jealous by doing this.

01:08:40.500 I think there's a more benevolent form of jealousy induction, which I would call, let's call it reminders of mate value, right?

01:08:52.060 Where you create a situation in which you remind a husband or wife of, like, why they thought you were charismatic and interesting to begin with.

01:09:01.900 So, for me and my wife, Diana, that might be as simple as, like, she comes and watches me give a conference talk, right?

01:09:09.820 And then she's reminded of, like, when she was a student and she saw me giving talks at, you know, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and, like, she had the fangirl vibes.

01:09:22.140 And then she's like, oh, he can still do that, that's cool.

01:09:26.740 And especially if she can see, you know, other women sort of responding more or less positively.

01:09:33.020 And the same thing works on me.

01:09:34.560 When I see her giving a really good talk or an interview or whatever, then it just helps me not take her for granted.

01:09:47.120 Right.

01:09:47.400 And so, reminders of mate value, I think, are very important.

01:09:52.400 And it's, I think it's a difficulty of modern two-career couples that they're often not seeing each other at their best, right?

01:10:01.360 They're not seeing the fully competent professional face of their spouse.

01:10:06.660 They're only seeing the exhausted, bedraggled parent version of the spouse, right?

01:10:13.320 So, I think there's ways to, I wouldn't say elicit jealousy, but, like, create situations where you're just reminded of, like, why did you fall in love with this person in the first place?

01:10:27.260 Right.

01:10:27.920 And also, why would other people find them attractive still?

01:10:31.420 Very interesting.

01:10:32.740 All right.

01:10:33.100 Well, listen, an hour and 15 minutes has gone by very, very quickly.

01:10:37.320 I could keep you here for three hours.

01:10:39.200 Let's make the following promise.

01:10:41.240 Let's not wait another 10 years where we'll both be in our early 70s to have the next conversation.

01:10:48.080 Deal?

01:10:48.920 Yeah.

01:10:49.300 I'd like that very much.

01:10:50.480 Wonderful.

01:10:51.320 Jeffrey, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.

01:10:53.400 Please stay on so that we could say goodbye offline and look forward to seeing you, hopefully, in person soon.

01:10:58.460 Thank you so much, Jeffrey.

01:10:59.100 Okay.

01:10:59.660 Take care.

01:11:00.160 Cheers.

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The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 02, 2025

Dr. Geoffrey Miller - Evolutionary Psychology, Mating, and Academic Life (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_868)

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