Dr. Jeffrey Miller is a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and a frequent guest on The Sad Truth. In this episode, Dr. Miller talks with Dr. Saad about the evolution of evolutionary psychology in the past, present, and future, and what he thinks about evolutionary psychology today.
00:00:00.000I 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.
00:00:10.280The center offers educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi community.
00:00:18.220It 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.
00:00:37.560Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles, the center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom.
00:00:48.860It will sponsor a speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research team.
00:00:54.240If 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.
00:01:04.500Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad for another episode of The Sad Truth.
00:01:09.640Today, I have a repeat guest. I went back and checked.
00:01:13.260He 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.
00:01:35.400So what I thought we'd do is start sort of go down memory lane.
00:01:39.900Some of this you may remember, some of it you may not.
00:01:42.660In 2006, you and the rest of the great folks at the University of New Mexico had invited me down.
00:01:48.980At the time, I was finishing my first book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, which was an academic book, a very technical book.
00:01:56.000And, you know, you guys had had, I'm saying had because I think some people have either moved on or passed away.
00:02:03.140Yourself, of course, Steve Gengestad, Jane Lancaster, Randy Thornhill.
00:02:09.700How many of that, you know, legendary group of folks still remains at University of New Mexico?
00:02:15.180I mean, those guys are mostly retired.
00:02:18.480So we had an outstanding, actually, evolutionary anthropology department that had some real heavy hitters like Jane Lancaster and Hilly Kaplan and so forth,
00:02:28.220who, you know, applied kind of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology insights to studying small-scale tribal societies, mostly in South America.
00:02:37.380And then distinguished professor Steve Gengestad, he's still around.
00:02:42.940I'm actually having dinner with him tonight.
00:02:45.220And he's still actually publishing, and he's doing some collaborations with one of my PhD students, Ryan Dobson.
00:02:53.040And 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.
00:03:05.720Recently, he's moved back to University of Trieste in Italy, but he happens to be visiting for a couple of weeks here.
00:03:12.280And we do have a wonderful younger faculty member, Tanya Reynolds.
00:03:17.120And 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.
00:03:28.880And I think she has some really insightful views on all of that.
00:03:32.660So we still have quite an active group here.
00:04:40.100So can we hope that it ever gets much higher, or is this the best that we can hope for?
00:04:47.920I certainly hope it gets higher, but, you know, we face a lot of very difficult political headwinds and opposition, ideological opposition.
00:04:56.820And so with the rise of DEI and wokeness and, you know, toxic memes and suicidal empathy and all the things that you talk about,
00:05:06.560oh, my gosh, that's implacably hostile to evolutionary psychology, because we challenge the core beliefs that they advocate,
00:05:12.820which is, you know, the blank slate, and everyone's born with exactly the same traits,
00:05:17.080and all cultural differences are due to kind of random cultural effects and not anything heritable.
00:05:23.960Now, as wokeism has, you know, been challenged a bit, have the fortunes of evolutionary psychology improved?
00:05:36.400It'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,
00:05:48.260and woke was against it, and we were against woke, so now that's before this.
00:05:52.220It's not like billions of dollars of funding are pouring into this.
00:05:55.820Well, 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,
00:06:03.540but I feel as though many of the obstacles, cognitive and emotional obstacles, that stop people from accepting evolutionary psychology are eternal and immortal,
00:06:16.020in that as a new generation of academics comes in, they raise the exact same issues that we have shot down in previous generations.
00:06:26.340It really is sort of the, the phoenix that rises from the ashes, and I can't remember what the reference is,
00:06:33.000but 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.
00:06:50.340We certainly have real challenges in terms of people being what we call adaptively self-deceived about their motives and their values and their preferences
00:06:59.920and how their social interactions and their courtships and relationships work, right?
00:07:05.260I mean, as just one example, like, there's obviously massive strategic self-deception in courtship and mating and sex,
00:07:14.960but even for parents, there's massive, maybe adaptive self-deception about the influence that parents have on kids.
00:07:22.560And Steve Pinker made this point beautifully in his old book, The Blank Slate,
00:07:27.700that if you really believe in the heritability of traits and behavior genetics and twin studies and adoption studies,
00:07:33.560then as a parent, that's wonderful in the sense that you can relax and you can go,
00:07:38.620ah, I made a good mate choice, I have a good spouse, we're having kids, we have pretty good genes,
00:07:43.860we can trust that our kids will probably grow up okay, we feed them, we protect them,
00:07:48.800they'll grow up into whatever they grow up into.
00:07:51.660But even in the parenting realm, it's almost as if parents have to believe
00:07:57.120that they can create and craft and mold their children, right,
00:08:01.620in order to justify all this massive parental effort and the food and the diapers and the school fees and all of that.
00:08:09.380So, it's very, very difficult if you try to teach behavior genetics to parents.
00:08:15.840At one level, they go, absolutely, genes matter, we get it.
00:08:19.920Like, in this kid, I see this trait is from the mom and this trait is from me.
00:08:25.980But at the day-to-day level, they really want to believe that they're having a decisive impact
00:08:31.280on shaping their kids' cognitive abilities and personality traits and moral virtues.
00:08:36.920And, I mean, to add to what you said, I mean, one of the arguments I make for, you know,
00:08:42.260all of the, you know, parasitic ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind is that they provide us with hope.
00:08:49.460So, to your point, social constructivism and the tabula rasa is very hopeful to a parent
00:08:55.280because if I can find the exact schedule of reinforcement for my child,
00:09:01.360then he can be the next Lionel Messi or Isaac Newton or Michael Jordan.
00:09:06.740He truly is unbounded in his potential.
00:09:09.800That feels a lot nicer for me to hear than to say,
00:15:44.200I have found that, and at least anecdotally, the practitioners are much more open, at least
00:15:52.300in my experience to evolutionary psychology, because if I go in front of a group of advertisers,
00:15:57.440and I say, hey, if you want to develop a highly effective advertising message, you need to understand
00:16:03.760the evolutionary levers that you need to, you know, pull, right? And then I give examples, and then people
00:16:09.920go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's a lot more difficult to convince academics who are wedded to
00:16:17.540opposing ideologies, right? If, if Jeffrey Miller is right with his biology stuff, that means I wasted
00:16:24.94035 years in my social constructivism stuff. And so there's this reflex to be hostile, of course, not
00:16:31.680knowing that in many cases, the social constructivist view and the biological view can go hand in hand
00:16:37.100together, right? Because socialization forces exist in their form because of biology, not in lieu of
00:16:42.160biology. And so, so for me, at least, and I wonder, I know that you've done some, some consulting,
00:16:48.260have you found a similar pattern where most practitioners just care about what works? And
00:16:52.900therefore, if you give me an evolutionarily informed prescription, I go, yeah, sure, no problem.
00:16:59.360Yeah, generally speaking, that's right. I've done quite a bit of, of consulting work for, you know,
00:17:04.660fortune 500 companies and market researchers, ad agencies, startups, et cetera. And the smart ones
00:17:13.020understand anything that gives me a competitive advantage over my, my rivals is valuable, right?
00:17:19.400And in particular, if they are aware of the kind of political biases that dominate marketing,
00:17:29.640right? It's very female dominated. It's very leftist. It's very high openness people. It's a
00:17:36.700lot about empathy signaling, right? If you can get them to understand that actually your customers,
00:17:44.600oh, and also your workers and investors aren't necessarily the same distribution of personality
00:17:49.760traits that you guys in marketing are, that can help enormously. It could have helped, for example,
00:17:54.940Cracker Barrel, right? The restaurant chain, which got into huge trouble recently by completely
00:18:02.880misunderstanding their customer base, right? Which is white, rural and suburban and ex-urban families
00:18:10.600who are traditionalist, religious, and just want a nice, happy, reliable, nostalgic place to take
00:18:19.300their families to eat, right? And instead, Cracker Barrel goes off in this insane DEI,
00:18:24.740wokey direction and they get rid of the white male and their logo and like they've backpedaled a bit,
00:18:30.580but all of that nonsense could have been avoided and they could have preserved billions of dollars of
00:18:35.540their company equity if they had just understood, oh, the kinds of traits that our current leadership
00:18:43.380and our marketing team has are not the traits that our customers have or want.
00:18:50.040Well, I mean, earlier you, I think you mentioned Thomas Sowell's, what was the term, unrestrained
00:18:58.740potentiality? The unconstrained division.
00:19:01.940Unconstrained. Okay, well, I'm going to call it, I'm going to slightly change it and call it
00:19:05.440infinite malleability or to borrow from E.O. Wilson, culture holds, or biology holds cultures on the
00:19:13.320leash, the leash might be long, right? But there is an arrogance to the social constructivist whereby
00:19:19.120he or she thinks that I can develop the product that I want the consumer to have and I just need to
00:19:28.040explain to them why that is a superior product and since they are empty slates, they will just fall into
00:19:34.020line and the great, the best example of that phenomenon, and I haven't been able to track where I first
00:19:40.540heard it. And maybe you'll know it. So there's a, apparently there was a progressive romance novel
00:19:48.140company that wanted to sort of extricate itself from the, you know, the toxic masculine hero, right?
00:19:54.420He's tall, he's got a six pack, he's aggressive, he's socially dominant. They wanted someone who was
00:20:00.320kinder and cries and is super empathetic and so on. Well, when you then produce that line of products,
00:20:06.760because you think I can teach women what is the proper model of masculinity because they are empty
00:20:13.120slaves. Well, there's this thing called reality and there's a thing called market feedback and they
00:20:19.180said, sorry, I don't fantasize about those guys. I fantasize about the toxic masculine guy. So they're
00:20:25.140in, so that would be a, so when I walk into an MBA class, I literally tell the students that the lesson
00:20:31.780that I just gave you through that romance novel example, you've already gotten the worth of your
00:20:37.020tuition fee, meaning that you can't create economic policies, political systems, products that violate
00:20:45.200the most fundamental precepts of human nature. Hence, those who produce those things are evolutionary
00:20:51.580psychologists in their practice, even though they might not be trained as evolutionary psychologists.
00:20:56.760Yeah. And I mean, also dealing in applied areas can also be extremely valuable because we as
00:21:04.880psychologists get insights into all sorts of things about human nature that actually would have been a
00:21:09.360bit hidden and a bit hard to research if we weren't tuned into this, right? So for example, our friend
00:21:15.720Catherine Salmon at University of Redlands, California has done lots of work on romance novels.
00:21:20.200If romance novels didn't exist, right, we wouldn't have nearly as good a window into female mate choice,
00:21:28.840right? Because the thing about romance novels is they don't have to make any concessions to the reality
00:21:37.800of how mating and dating actually work, right? You can be a sort of not super attractive woman who somehow inspires
00:21:48.280a grand uncontrollable passion in like a world-class alpha male who wants to sweep you off your feet and
00:21:55.160take you away to his kingdom and blah, blah, blah. And like, that's not really going to happen and you don't observe it.
00:22:01.160But in the realm of fantasy as manifest in these cultural artifacts, right, you can get insight into that.
00:22:07.720Likewise, you know, porn, love it or hate it, is an extremely rich set of insights into the sexual psychology of both men and women.
00:22:19.480And we've learned an awful lot about human nature from social media in the last 20 years in terms of how people argue,
00:22:28.600what people are influenced by, the extreme importance of social validation as part of the human motivational system.
00:22:36.920So 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.
00:22:48.520Beautiful. Okay, well, we're talking about romance novels, we're talking about porn, hence sort of the mating drive.
00:22:55.720You told me before we came on the show that you're involved in a new exciting endeavor with a mating app.
00:23:04.520It's called Keeper. Tell us about it. I'm excited to hear that.
00:23:08.880Yeah, so I've been chief science advisor to this new startup matchmaking app.
00:23:13.800We 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.
00:23:23.880So it's kind of like the anti-Tinder, right?
00:23:26.840And what you see among young people is widespread frustration and dissatisfaction with many of the existing dating apps, right?
00:23:35.920So everything that the match.com, that the match group has, like Tinder and Hinge and match.com and OkCupid, right?
00:23:45.420They don't really deliver what people want.
00:23:49.400You can swipe right on Tinder all you want.
00:23:52.720And if you're a male, you'll typically get zero matches in any given month, right?
00:23:59.480And this leads some young people, like the young men of the manosphere, to throw up their hands and say,
00:24:07.500women 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?
00:24:19.440And it leads the young women who are reasonably attractive to get absolutely overwhelmed, right?
00:24:27.240By matches and texts and requests for dates and it's extremely frustrating.
00:24:32.740So 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,
00:24:44.140So 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.
00:24:58.300But also the amazing thing about the Keeper team is they've read all the evolutionary psychology.
00:25:04.060They know your work, they know my work, they've read my books, they're really into human nature, and they're into individual differences.
00:25:11.220They 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.
00:25:21.940Because they know, like it's one thing to claim, I'm smart, I'm looking for a smart person.
00:25:28.020But their clientele is often quite highly educated, quite high income, and they want to be confident, right?
00:25:36.760Does this person really have the educational credentials and the intelligence that they claim?
00:25:42.000Even do they really have, like, the openness or extroversion or agreeableness or the other personality traits that they claim?
00:25:49.480So 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.
00:26:10.420Are the psychometric measurements done via the service, or I just enter what my extroversion score is?
00:26:21.100Because then, of course, it is open to being gamed.
00:26:24.720Well, what we're working on is actually good, valid, interactive IQ tests, right, to measure intelligence.
00:26:36.620You're like, well, that's a terrible idea for a commercial matchmaking company because IQ is nonsense.
00:26:43.120And 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.
00:26:58.000So 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?
00:27:11.160Can you get the team to check my X feed and tell me what my scores are?
00:27:15.860Once we get this up and running properly, yeah, we could probably do that.
00:27:22.980I 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.
00:28:16.100And, you know, it's interesting that we do get a little bit of, like, a personality trait whiplash.
00:28:21.900If 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.
00:28:33.540So, 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.
00:28:53.620Because we take this seriously, like, Keeper isn't going to give people hundreds of matches a day.
00:29:01.040They'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?
00:29:22.760And you're going to treat them as an individual, a real person, rather than just as a kind of abstract profile.
00:29:30.860Do 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?
00:29:41.460So, 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.
00:29:55.520And we also pay a lot of attention to political and religious compatibility.
00:30:01.360So, whereas your traditional dating apps, like, OkCupid is a truly tragic example.
00:30:10.220Like, 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.
00:30:37.880They 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.
00:30:50.040And basically, you couldn't function on OkCupid after that if you were in any way conservative, Republican, or religious.
00:30:57.980So, 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.
00:31:18.080Do 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?
00:31:44.160And, 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?
00:31:57.420Because we know there's a sex difference in conservatism and in openness and agreeableness and social attitudes and all of that.
00:32:06.400But my hunch is that actually women are comfortable with a husband being a bit more conservative than they are, right?
00:32:18.260This is certainly the case for my own parents, right?
00:32:39.040But, 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.
00:32:53.200And 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?
00:33:09.700But you see a lot of mating fails, I think, from people overemphasizing politics in the early stages of courtship.
00:33:21.960Well, 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.
00:33:31.820And 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.
00:33:47.480The more physically formidable I am, the less likely I am to be egalitarian because I recognize that life is an inherent competition.
00:33:58.600And given my stature, literally my morphological stature, I'm more than happy to step into the ring and duke it out.
00:34:07.120Whereas 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.
00:34:21.520So, 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.
00:34:32.220And 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?
00:34:45.800And the fascinating thing isn't the BDSM, the fascinating thing is they never talk politics, as far as I know.
00:34:53.940So, what are this guy's, Christian Grey's politics likely to be?
00:34:58.820He's going to be a conservative Republican or a libertarian, right?
00:35:05.180A 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.
00:35:13.360But 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.
00:35:28.560So, 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?
00:35:54.680What's their religion likely to be, and where can I truly find them?
00:36:00.140And often the answer might be, yeah, probably more likely to find them in a local church than a local university, right?
00:36:09.220Or at least you're more likely to find them in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym, right, than a yoga class.
00:36:20.060So, 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.
00:36:32.780So where is Keeper now in terms of, is it fully operational?
00:36:47.860And, 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.
00:37:06.800So 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.
00:37:38.060No, it's a very inefficient way to find a spouse.
00:37:42.400But 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.
00:37:49.020Because if you find a monogamous mate, you're going to leave the app and your monthly subscription fee goes away.
00:37:53.980So 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?
00:38:07.720So that means you're perfectly aligned with the company.
00:38:12.220Like, they want to find you a mate, you want to find a mate, you want to get married.
00:38:16.940You know, if you go down the path towards that, you start cohabiting, you get married, you have kids, you can specify in a contract.
00:38:36.820So 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?
00:38:48.520And how do you make that also work for the company?
00:39:19.820You certainly are someone who's done consulting, as per what you just talked about.
00:39:24.340But as you said, you've done many other consulting.
00:39:26.400You've written popular books, which few professors write, because, you know, who would want to talk to the great unwashed?
00:39:33.700I should only be publishing papers in academic journals that are only read by seven other of my close academic friends.
00:39:39.980And so, in that sense, we're roughly the same age, very similar kind of trajectories, both out-of-the-box people.
00:39:49.460At this stage of your career, are there elements of your multiple hats that you no longer appreciate as much as you did?
00:39:57.420And even before you answer, just so that maybe I can build your trust in sharing your part, I'll share my part.
00:40:04.500While I love when I go up in front of the class and I perform, the pedagogic performance is something that I love to do.
00:40:12.040I no longer enjoy being in the classroom and explaining to Timmy why he got a B- in his participation grade.
00:40:21.900It's a suboptimal use of my time at this stage of my career.
00:40:25.700So, 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.
00:40:42.040I'm still very passionate about public outreach and trying to get some key ideas out to the general public.
00:40:52.320So, you know, I'm reasonably active on podcasting and interviews.
00:40:57.400I'm very active on X, you know, like you are.
00:41:00.580I think it's a fabulous platform, and particularly since Elon Musk took it over a few years ago.
00:41:05.260It is the central public discourse for ideas.
00:41:09.040And, you know, discussing science and policy and everything.
00:41:17.400Like you, I'm sort of increasingly skeptical about, like, I also love teaching and I like interacting with the students.
00:41:25.580But 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.
00:41:38.360Or my dog has cancer and so I wasn't able to study for the last six weeks and blah, blah, blah.
00:42:33.300We get, I've even had some grandparents in my human sexuality classes.
00:42:37.020So, 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.
00:42:50.960So, how do you communicate the results of that?
00:42:54.460It'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?
00:43:00.820And 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.
00:43:12.760I'm just honestly not very interested in, you know, adding another 10 or 20 peer-reviewed papers to my CV.
00:43:21.360It's just not, it's not really a priority.
00:43:24.400I think there are actually more effective ways to share one's research, like Substack or giving certain kinds of, you know, conference talks.
00:43:40.440I'm also a kind of academic who's unusual in that I've never sought out big grants.
00:43:46.080I'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.
00:43:59.440And 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?
00:44:16.080And other people who are getting multi-million dollar grants a year, like, they might be highly productive.
00:44:21.580But to me, the return on investment for the taxpayer for those kinds of massive labs is often very low.
00:44:32.460Yeah, 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.
00:44:41.660Maybe it might serve as a jumping ground, a jump board to talk about things.
00:44:46.480And, I mean, you've got, I don't know, I can't remember, but, like, 20,000 citations and very high H-index.
00:44:54.720And so I think it's very interesting to link these bibliometric metrics to taxpayer money.
00:45:01.380I've never thought about doing that thing.
00:45:03.940Do you know of anybody who's actually tried to make that link?
00:45:07.020No, I don't, but I think it's important from the viewpoint of kind of civilizational support for academia, right?
00:45:20.980If 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.
00:45:34.300And I think that's, to me, that's a good thing.
00:45:40.560But honestly, we have a lot of academic researchers whose view basically is, like, here's a thing I want to study.
00:45:48.600I want to get the most grant money I possibly can, right, that can go into this paper and that will serve to justify it.
00:45:59.780And I think that's, as a taxpayer and as a citizen, I think that's exactly the backwards way to think about this.
00:46:10.580Well, 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.
00:46:24.040Now 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.
00:46:34.500And I think there are a couple of companies that try to do that, where they measure the outreach score of academic papers.
00:46:42.420But 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.
00:47:06.880So I think when I first began my public outreach program, a lot of the universities really looked down at that, right?
00:47:16.140And 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.
00:47:32.560Well, 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?
00:47:40.520So 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?
00:48:09.520So 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?
00:48:25.100Okay, reviewing journal papers counts as very valuable service from the viewpoint of academia.
00:48:32.200And 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?
00:48:46.540And many papers don't get cited at all.
00:48:49.660So that's considered valuable service.
00:48:51.480If you give a talk to a local charity group, that's considered valuable service.
00:48:56.540If you are a judge for a local science fair, that's valuable service.
00:49:00.260If 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.
00:49:17.480It counts against you, because you are, again, mixing with the riffraff.
00:49:20.980Yeah, you're mixing with the riffraff.
00:49:22.660I 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.
00:49:57.980I 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?
00:50:07.940And then be locked and loaded and ready to communicate that in any medium, right?
00:50:15.440And the fact that – here's one thing that struck me, right?
00:50:30.620They'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?
00:50:39.660And 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?
00:50:53.040So the disconnect currently in 2025 between what academics do versus where students are actually getting their information, it's a massive chasm.
00:51:07.720Number 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?
00:51:22.600If 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.
00:51:43.920I 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.
00:52:18.360And 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.
00:52:28.340And 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.
00:52:40.820And 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.
00:52:55.960And you don't even have to be gorgeous or that charismatic.
00:53:01.040You just have to be reasonably articulate and warm and show up on time and do it.
00:53:09.120Well, 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.
00:53:16.760So, my family and I were vacationing in Bermuda a couple of weeks ago.
00:53:22.800And so, we were in an area of Bermuda.
00:53:25.980I now, I'm hoping that the gentleman that I'm about to talk about will watch this and will reach out to me.
00:53:32.140So, we're in this area in Bermuda called The Flats, beautiful little village, gorgeous little bay.
00:53:37.880So, 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.
00:53:50.920The 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.
00:54:04.100He goes, he stops like this, and he says, you're the scientist that's got that show?
00:54:12.340He goes, aren't you the guy who brought down Neil deGrasse Tyson, my mock?
00:54:18.880Now, 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.
00:54:42.920And I don't mean it in a power-hungry.
00:54:45.600I 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.
00:54:55.460And so, yeah, I mean, I really get it.
00:54:58.840I mean, you talk about a dopamine hit.
00:55:03.080It'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.
00:55:12.740But 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.
00:55:26.060It's about having effective impact on people, often who wouldn't have the time or money to go to a university at all, right?
00:55:34.660Or who didn't discover their intellectual curiosity until a bit later in life, right?
00:55:39.840And 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.
00:55:52.400And reaching them is enormously rewarding.
00:55:55.440I mean, honestly, some of the biggest kind of dopamine hits I've had, in terms of people recognizing me, came after the MateBook, right?
00:56:05.260And several times, young men have come up and said, the MateBook helped me so much.
00:56:22.420Maybe he would have ended up being a frustrated incel if he hadn't read the book.
00:56:25.920That, 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.
00:57:29.180So, 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?
00:57:48.200Are there different things that people value in relationships in terms of expressions of affection and attention and so forth?
00:57:56.040And let's map this out in a better way.
00:57:59.760So, that's the kind of thing I love doing.
00:58:02.000And 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.
00:58:14.100This is a project with Justin McGilsky, right, on consensual non-monogamy and polyamory and open relationships.
00:58:22.220And 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?
00:58:40.120And surprisingly, there are, there are actually things that they have in common that they could learn from each other.
00:58:46.260And 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?
00:58:58.960And are there some hacks or some tips that monogamous people can learn from polyamorous people, right, without necessarily becoming poly?
00:59:13.560And are there some tips that poly people can learn from the monogamous people?
00:59:17.700Can you give us some hints or you don't want to give away the punchline?
00:59:21.720One 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?
00:59:36.500And that's not necessarily, oh, I find this particular neighbor or coworker hot.
00:59:41.020It can even just be which actor or actresses or musicians or whoever do you find attractive?
00:59:49.180And 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?
01:00:04.040Because it often comes down to little quirks of personality rather than just raw physical hotness, right?
01:00:11.360And 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.
01:00:33.680And 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.
01:00:43.540And 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.
01:01:00.640Like, it might be an actress who's quite a bit, like, heavier or fatter than she thinks he wants her to be, right?
01:01:09.160Or it might be she's got some little personality quirk that the wife also happens to share.
01:01:17.260And 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.
01:01:26.920But where if they did, in a kind of, you know, gradually escalated and respectful way, right, they might actually bond over that.
01:01:41.600And the edgier version of this is actually share the porn that you watch with your spouse.
01:01:47.380Some are ready for that, some aren't, but that's also a predictor of relationship satisfaction.
01:01:53.720Well, it's so incredible that you would mention this idea of sharing fantasies, because I just started reading a novella by Arthur Schnitzler.
01:02:06.400Do you know where I'm going with this?
01:02:08.280So, 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.
01:02:26.920So, 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.
01:02:54.120The 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.
01:03:07.720They 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.
01:03:19.020And, 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.
01:03:35.360And 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.
01:03:47.520So, 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?
01:04:06.160Well, 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.
01:04:20.120So, the sad thing here is a lot of people in long-term relationships basically invest zero thought or energy into jealousy management.
01:04:28.880And 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?
01:04:42.180And 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?
01:04:56.280To actually say, here's what I would not be comfortable with, like, yes, you can have one or two drinks with them.
01:05:07.180No, you can't go up to his room for a foot massage, right?
01:05:10.200So, 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.
01:05:29.860What could possibly go wrong if I have no clear expectations about what's allowed or not allowed in our marriage, right?
01:05:37.240So, 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.
01:05:50.680Well, you have to manage anger and frustration and sadness and disgust and every other emotion out there.
01:05:58.140But 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.
01:06:12.080It's a very weird little glitch, I think, in our culture.
01:06:20.240So, one of the, so my wife and I have been together for 25 years, going on 26.
01:06:24.580I think you've met her maybe at University of New Mexico.
01:06:27.460At the time, we didn't have children when we visited you in Albuquerque.
01:06:32.420One 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?
01:06:52.360Many people will even use jealousy as a tactic to demonstrate the commitment of the other person.
01:07:01.380You 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.
01:07:10.400I 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.
01:07:17.200Or we've never had to necessarily learn the jealousy management tactics that you're speaking about, because we never induce that in the other.
01:07:28.780Story two, and then I'll ask you to respond, or you could share stuff from your personal life.
01:07:32.220The 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.
01:07:51.860And whenever she would get up to go to the kitchen, and he, as a puppy, would follow her, that pissed me off.
01:08:15.180Yeah, I mean, you can have a very, you know, high-functioning, happy, long-term marriage without doing this jealousy induction on each other.
01:08:24.460And 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.
01:08:40.500I think there's a more benevolent form of jealousy induction, which I would call, let's call it reminders of mate value, right?
01:08:52.060Where 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.
01:09:01.900So, for me and my wife, Diana, that might be as simple as, like, she comes and watches me give a conference talk, right?
01:09:09.820And 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.
01:09:22.140And then she's like, oh, he can still do that, that's cool.
01:09:26.740And especially if she can see, you know, other women sort of responding more or less positively.
01:09:47.400And so, reminders of mate value, I think, are very important.
01:09:52.400And 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?
01:10:01.360They're not seeing the fully competent professional face of their spouse.
01:10:06.660They're only seeing the exhausted, bedraggled parent version of the spouse, right?
01:10:13.320So, 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?