The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - The Cancelled Professor： Men Are Hardwired To Cheat! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.000 Do you know, Stephen, who is the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life?

00:00:06.220 Her husband.

00:00:07.340 And the overwhelming number one reason is because of...

00:00:10.660 Dr. Gad Saad is an evolutionary psychologist.

00:00:13.040 Renowned for his thought-provoking and challenging insights into the underlining principles...

00:00:16.980 ...that shape decision-making, relationships, and societal trends.

00:00:20.420 If you think that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued because it doesn't support your ideology,

00:00:26.260 that's a grotesquely dangerous principle.

00:00:28.680 So, for example, the idea that monogamy is natural is not true.

00:00:32.540 Men are much more likely to want more sexual partners.

00:00:35.740 That's what's been found in many studies across many cultures.

00:00:38.460 But the fact that I explain why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it.

00:00:44.260 But now, here's the interesting part.

00:00:46.280 Women, too, have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety.

00:00:51.160 You know when a woman is most likely to cheat?

00:00:53.700 It's when they...

00:00:54.900 In your book, you talk about a mate desirability score.

00:00:57.740 Yes. So, usually we end up assorting on our mating time, which is taking all of our attributes and then saying, what do you score?

00:01:05.160 So, for example, the number one attribute that women seek is anything that's related to social status.

00:01:10.660 Now, it wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36.

00:01:14.020 That's going to put a huge stressor on our relationship.

00:01:17.580 But here's the good news.

00:01:18.600 There are effective strategies that could improve my score.

00:01:21.400 And let's break them down very simply.

00:01:23.480 First, Dr. Gad, what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble?

00:01:29.100 I'm going to get paid for this. Buckle up.

00:01:30.980 This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life.

00:01:37.260 We've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube.

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00:02:21.920 Let's get to the conversation.

00:02:24.100 Dr. Gad Saad, what have you devoted your life to?

00:02:32.340 The pursuit of truth and the defence of freedoms.

00:02:36.180 And what does that mean?

00:02:38.840 So truth is what we hopefully can achieve through the scientific method.

00:02:46.040 Of course, truth is provisional in that whatever we might have thought was true 300 years ago,

00:02:50.920 we have the epistemological humility to say, oh, we were wrong.

00:02:54.860 There's a new truth.

00:02:55.920 But I do wake up every morning thinking that there are wonderful things to discover about human nature,

00:03:01.380 given that I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist.

00:03:04.180 And so truth in that sense.

00:03:06.980 Liberty and freedom in that there should be nothing that is off limits for people to do research on, to speak out on.

00:03:15.460 So for example, you now hear a growing intrusion of the concept of forbidden knowledge.

00:03:21.420 The idea that there's some research that because it might offend someone, it might marginalize a group, it shouldn't be pursued.

00:03:29.820 I don't believe in that.

00:03:30.820 So there is no research that is off limits as long as the research that you're doing is pursued in an unbiased manner pursuant to the scientific method.

00:03:41.960 So example, one of the ways that you can end your career very quickly as a social scientist,

00:03:47.080 if you do any research looking at group differences, certainly racial differences, don't you dare do any research on that.

00:03:55.160 Even sex differences is not a good idea.

00:03:57.360 So if you do research on sex differences and it demonstrates that women are superior to men on some task, go ahead, you're a hero, publish it.

00:04:06.340 But if you do research that shows that men are superior to women on a task, you better file that in the drawer and keep your mouth shut forevermore

00:04:15.420 because we don't want to be promulgating sexist, patriarchal stereotypes.

00:04:19.660 And so as someone who is an evolutionary psychologist who understands that humans are made up of two phenotypes called male and female,

00:04:28.820 it is expected that there are many things on which men and women are the same.

00:04:33.180 Some things that men do better than women, some things that women do better than men.

00:04:36.560 It's called evolution.

00:04:37.480 It's called biology.

00:04:38.160 Well, one of the things where I first began seeing how idiotic, otherwise very intelligent people can be called professors

00:04:46.640 is in the negation of what I said right now, which is just admitting that there are innate and evolved sex differences

00:04:55.200 is a dreadful thing to say in the social sciences.

00:04:59.220 And so that's how I first had a kind of eureka moment.

00:05:04.260 Houston, we have a problem.

00:05:05.320 How could it be that these educated, sophisticated professors could negate something that on average

00:05:12.060 a three-day-old newborn pigeon should be able to recognize?

00:05:15.740 And so that's what sent me on my journey to eventually write The Parasitic Mind 30 plus years ago.

00:05:22.480 So what is an evolutionary behavior scientist?

00:05:25.780 Right.

00:05:26.100 Great question.

00:05:26.700 So you can study behavior in many ways.

00:05:30.620 So for example, behaviorism, which was something that was developed in the 1930s, argued that

00:05:36.220 everything that we do is as a result of stimulus and response.

00:05:40.440 So for example, Pavlovian conditioning is a form of behaviorism, right?

00:05:45.060 You associate a unconditioned response, something that you already innately have.

00:05:50.420 The dog salivates when he sees food.

00:05:52.720 And now you condition him to, if they hear the bell, to associate that with the food.

00:05:59.500 And now when I just ring the bell, he will salivate.

00:06:02.980 And so the behaviorists of 70, 80, 100 years ago argued that all learning was due to behaviorism.

00:06:10.440 So there are many different schools of thought when it comes to what is the best framework for studying human behavior.

00:06:17.000 An evolutionary behavioral scientist argues that you can't study human behavior if you don't root the framework of how you're going to tackle this in an understanding of how evolution would have shaped the human mind.

00:06:31.900 Now this should sound as blatantly obvious, but again, for social scientists, that's Nazi talk.

00:06:38.840 Because social scientists believe that evolution applies to every single species on Earth except one called human beings.

00:06:47.560 Or if they believe that evolution applies to humans, it applies to explain why we have opposable thumbs.

00:06:56.600 It applies to explain why we've evolved the respiratory system that we have.

00:07:01.020 But don't you dare explain something above the neck called the human mind using evolution.

00:07:07.280 I'm speaking now as those folks.

00:07:09.240 They argue that we are cultural animals.

00:07:11.800 We transcend our biology.

00:07:13.200 So all that an evolutionary behavioral scientist does is whatever he or she is studying, they try to look for the ultimate Darwinian signatures.

00:07:22.280 I'm going to give you two examples.

00:07:23.460 This is from a book called Homicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, a husband and wife team who are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology.

00:07:33.880 I first read that book as a first semester doctoral student at Cornell where it was an advanced social psychology course.

00:07:42.220 About halfway through the semester, the professor, his name was Professor Dennis Regan, assigned this book to us.

00:07:48.040 What they did in the book is apply an evolutionary framework to study patterns of criminality.

00:07:54.820 And in a second now, I'll unpack what that means.

00:07:58.380 So there are certain patterns of crime that happen in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons,

00:08:06.400 irrespective of which culture it happens in and irrespective of time period.

00:08:10.720 So it certainly can't be due to cultural factors.

00:08:14.660 It can't be to era factors because it transcends all those things.

00:08:18.460 So let me give you two examples from the book.

00:08:20.200 And that was actually my eureka moment where I decided, ah, I will now take this evolutionary framework

00:08:25.780 and apply it to consumer psychology, to psychology of decision making, which eventually is the field that I founded.

00:08:31.840 So two examples.

00:08:34.140 Example one.

00:08:35.880 And forgive me if I put you on the spot.

00:08:37.700 It's worthwhile for that.

00:08:39.520 What do you think is the number one predictor of there being child abuse in a home?

00:08:47.180 An absent parent.

00:08:50.380 Okay.

00:08:50.540 Very, very reasonable answer.

00:08:52.760 And so usually in lecture one, when I'm teaching an evolution psychology course, I'll ask this question

00:08:57.300 and I'll start putting all the students' answers.

00:08:59.880 And they're all reasonable answers.

00:09:02.300 If there is alcoholism in the home, if one of the parents had been abused in their past

00:09:06.720 so that they mimic that behavior onto their children then, all reasonable.

00:09:13.300 Well, what if I, and by the way, no one guesses what the real answer is.

00:09:16.560 So then I say, well, guess what, guys?

00:09:18.100 You just listed 25 reasonable predictors.

00:09:21.820 The number one predictor is a hundredfold more predictive than anything that's on that board.

00:09:29.180 I've lectured this a million times.

00:09:30.820 I'm getting goosebumps telling it to you right now.

00:09:33.500 So let me explain what a hundredfold means.

00:09:35.620 In science, when let's say you have, I want to check the efficacy of a drug and I want

00:09:41.680 to compare it to a placebo, a sugar pill.

00:09:44.920 Well, if it has a 1.2 odds ratio, meaning it's 20% more effective.

00:09:49.900 So it's 1 to 1.2.

00:09:51.580 That would be a big effect.

00:09:53.060 1 to 1.2.

00:09:54.480 What I'm saying is 1 to 100.

00:09:57.640 So it is astronomically greater effect than anything we would typically publish in science.

00:10:02.680 Well, the number one reason, Stephen, I've kept you in suspense long enough, is if there

00:10:07.200 is a step-parent in the family.

00:10:10.700 So there's a hundredfold increase in child abuse if the home is not made up of two biological

00:10:17.340 parents.

00:10:18.000 This is why the fable of Cinderella is such a universal fable, because it speaks to an evolutionary

00:10:25.460 principle.

00:10:26.460 The nasty stepmother is only differentially nasty to her stepdaughter.

00:10:34.540 She's actually very, very nice to her two biological daughters.

00:10:38.840 So now you would say, well, what would be the evolutionary explanation for that?

00:10:42.200 Well, we know in many, many species where you have very high parental investment, say, for

00:10:48.240 example, in lion prides.

00:10:51.100 Lions are the only feline group where they're a social group.

00:10:55.140 Most other felines are solitary.

00:10:57.840 The only thing that the male does is the copulatory act, and then he's off.

00:11:03.020 Well, in lion pride, the males do invest heavily in their children.

00:11:07.320 What ends up happening is there's two or three dominant males within a pride, and they kick

00:11:12.560 out all the young males that are now coming up, so that there's all these frustrated young

00:11:18.820 males in the savannah that are now looking to take over a pride.

00:11:22.440 They will challenge the two, three dominant males, and for a very long time, those older

00:11:28.300 males will rebuff the attacks.

00:11:30.040 But father time eventually catch up to you, and you're left with two choices as the dominant

00:11:35.100 male.

00:11:35.400 You either leave, and you end up having a slow death out alone in the wilderness, or

00:11:42.340 they will kill you.

00:11:43.560 Now, when the new incoming lions come in, do you know what's the first thing they do?

00:11:48.800 First, on the agenda list, first thing they do is what?

00:11:52.420 They attack the kids.

00:11:53.740 Exactly.

00:11:54.660 They kill off in a complete, systematic, infanticide, genocide, every single cub who, by definition,

00:12:02.520 could not have been sired by them.

00:12:04.100 Why?

00:12:05.020 Because I'm going to spend a lot of energy and resources investing, because we are a

00:12:10.920 bi-parental species as a lion pride.

00:12:13.220 I don't want to be investing in another male's cubs.

00:12:17.260 Therefore, now, paradoxically, incredibly, after the females put up a big fight to try to stop

00:12:24.540 those new incoming males, they end up losing the fight.

00:12:27.460 First thing that happens after is the females go into estrus, meaning they become sexually

00:12:34.600 receptive to the new males.

00:12:36.320 So I joke with my students, in the human context, you put on Barry White music to get the ladies

00:12:42.380 interested.

00:12:43.160 You buy a beautiful gift.

00:12:44.860 You pay attention.

00:12:45.920 You want to get the ladies' attention in lion pride society?

00:12:49.640 Kill her children.

00:12:50.460 So that's one example of how we've evolved the calculus in our brains to not feel as happy

00:12:57.800 investing in other children than our own.

00:13:01.540 Now, the next thing that ends up happening is some student will say,

00:13:04.940 oh, but does that mean you are justifying through science child abuse?

00:13:11.140 And of course, the answer is no, right?

00:13:13.000 An oncologist studies cancer.

00:13:15.340 That doesn't mean he or she is for cancer.

00:13:17.940 That doesn't mean they are pro-cancer.

00:13:19.900 It means that if you want to understand cancer, you have to study it honestly.

00:13:23.980 So if you want to tackle child abuse and you now know that step-parenthood is the biggest

00:13:31.320 predictor, that's a valuable tidbit to have.

00:13:34.340 So that's example one.

00:13:36.300 Example two, do you know, Stephen, who is by far the most dangerous individual that a

00:13:44.180 woman will ever meet in her life?

00:13:46.440 Whether it's the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, whether it's the Hadza tribe in Central Africa,

00:13:51.320 whether it's in ancient Greece 2,000 years ago, or whether it's in Detroit, Michigan 2,000

00:13:56.340 years from now, who is the most dangerous person by far that you will ever meet?

00:14:04.340 Let me think about this.

00:14:06.740 Who's the most dangerous person she will ever meet?

00:14:11.560 By orders of magnitude more than anybody else.

00:14:14.860 And the minute that I'll say it, you'll go, oh, no kidding.

00:14:18.340 But the fact that you don't exactly demonstrates my point.

00:14:23.300 And that's why evolution is so important.

00:14:26.300 I think the most dangerous person she will ever meet is another...

00:14:34.340 You're already off.

00:14:38.500 Okay.

00:14:38.900 I don't know.

00:14:39.720 Her husband.

00:14:40.500 I was going to say...

00:14:41.240 There you go.

00:14:43.780 I was very close because my brain went her future husband.

00:14:47.540 Right.

00:14:48.020 Because I was thinking in the courtship process, that's quite dangerous.

00:14:51.480 So whether it be her long-term partner or prospective long-term partner, right?

00:14:58.180 So to your point, a husband is the most dangerous.

00:15:01.900 And then the overwhelming number one reason that might drive him to domestic violence

00:15:09.440 all the way to homicide is suspected or realized infidelity.

00:15:15.460 Okay.

00:15:15.660 I'm a true crime addict.

00:15:19.080 And the stat is always in these true crime shows that I think it's 70% of the time when

00:15:24.600 a woman goes missing or is murdered, it's the husband.

00:15:27.860 Exactly.

00:15:28.460 Something crazy like that.

00:15:29.280 Exactly.

00:15:29.860 Now, sometimes in those shows, it's because I want to get rid of my current wife so I can

00:15:35.380 run off with another one.

00:15:36.600 Yeah.

00:15:36.740 But notwithstanding that potential effect, usually when I go into a homicidal rage, it's because

00:15:43.960 I am concerned that either you have cheated on me or you actually, I have proof that you

00:15:48.840 have cheated on me.

00:15:49.740 Yeah.

00:15:49.900 So then the question becomes, why have human males evolved the cognitive, emotional, and

00:15:56.160 behavioral repertoire to respond in this way?

00:15:59.180 Again, you're not justifying it.

00:16:00.680 You're not saying, oh, if I give you the scientific explanation, that means it's okay to beat women.

00:16:04.900 But the reason is because we are a biparental species, human dads are extraordinary dads in

00:16:11.420 the mammalian context, we're by far one of the most vested dads.

00:16:16.440 Now, we don't invest as much as human females, but we are really super dads.

00:16:21.060 So therefore, your ancestors and mine, Stephen, male ancestors, don't come from a line where

00:16:27.060 they said, hey, don't worry, ladies, have at it with the sexy gardener as much as you'd

00:16:32.300 like, because I'd be happy to then spend the next 18 years raising genus kids.

00:16:37.160 And therefore, we've evolved that system to try to thwart a fundamental danger to our

00:16:44.340 genetic interest, which is paternity uncertainty.

00:16:47.040 There is no such thing as maternity uncertainty, right?

00:16:49.740 So when I read that book, with such complicated phenomena that are explained so elegantly, so

00:16:59.220 parsimoniously, so simply, so that you go, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

00:17:04.400 That was my eureka moment.

00:17:05.500 And so evolutionary behavioral science is exactly what I just described the last five

00:17:09.680 ten minutes, which is taking the evolutionary biological and evolutionary psychological lens

00:17:14.520 to study human phenomena.

00:17:16.800 Before we get back to talking more broadly, just came to mind that with that context in

00:17:21.500 mind, then cheating is justifiable.

00:17:24.800 Cheating in a romantic relationship.

00:17:27.680 So it depends what you when you say justifiable, you're falling into the trap of if you explain

00:17:32.860 it scientifically, it's okay.

00:17:33.960 We also have a moral compass that's due to an evolutionary mechanism.

00:17:38.340 So one of the difficulties of life is how to navigate through the Darwinian strings that

00:17:44.200 are pulling me in different directions, right?

00:17:45.960 I've evolved a desire to gorge on fatty foods.

00:17:51.640 But if I do that in an understained manner, I become a sumo wrestler and I die of heart disease

00:17:56.220 at 42.

00:17:57.100 So I've also evolved the mechanism of self-control.

00:17:59.740 So the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean

00:18:05.200 I'm justifying it.

00:18:06.700 Yeah, no.

00:18:07.180 And I think this is really important because we have to give people a toolkit to think about

00:18:11.120 this conversation so that they don't assume that everything that's being said is an endorsement

00:18:16.200 of the thing.

00:18:17.520 It's just an explanation of the thing through the lens of evolution.

00:18:20.700 And you know what?

00:18:21.660 Some people can't do that.

00:18:23.780 Some people get so triggered by...

00:18:25.400 Most people are called my colleagues.

00:18:27.120 Oh, really?

00:18:27.720 Yeah.

00:18:28.320 That's right.

00:18:29.060 So I just hope everyone listening now knows that everything here isn't an endorsement of

00:18:32.140 a thing.

00:18:32.600 It's an evolutionary explanation for a thing.

00:18:34.600 Perfect.

00:18:35.240 You know, I'm sure we're both full of biases.

00:18:37.160 So nothing is ever that pure.

00:18:38.480 Exactly.

00:18:39.080 But we'll try and just hope that from here on out people understand that.

00:18:42.520 When I ask that question about cheating, what I'm trying to understand is through an evolutionary

00:18:45.460 perspective, is monogamy a normal thing?

00:18:49.640 I'm off and running for the next 10 minutes.

00:18:51.520 You ready?

00:18:52.280 I'm ready.

00:18:53.060 Let me give a little bit of context.

00:18:54.860 Sure, please.

00:18:55.400 I've got a lot of male friends and I see, in all honesty, the full spectrum of relationships.

00:19:04.280 I've got, and this is kind of how I'll describe it.

00:19:06.120 I've got a cohort of male friends that are absolutely faithful in great relationships,

00:19:10.840 committed to their partners and have exercised what I assume is a form of discipline to not

00:19:16.920 go after any temptations that they might have.

00:19:19.180 Love that group of friends.

00:19:20.160 Great.

00:19:20.640 Have this middle group of friends that are struggling with all kinds of forces, everything

00:19:23.720 from pornography to maybe dabbling.

00:19:28.580 And then I have this other group of friends who I would categorize as the cheaters, who

00:19:32.620 cheat almost uncontrollably on their partners, uncontrollably.

00:19:38.680 And this is, the spectrum of friends here is about 20 people.

00:19:42.320 Now, I look at that group of friends and I go, who is right?

00:19:45.920 Because morally, I can say that the ones over here are hurting people.

00:19:49.340 The cheaters are hurting people, you know, especially if they're found in what they're

00:19:52.540 doing.

00:19:52.940 But who is right from an evolutionary perspective?

00:19:55.220 Well, they all are in a sense in that we all have the desire to stray, but we don't necessarily

00:20:02.100 instantiate that desire through overt behavior.

00:20:05.260 Men and women?

00:20:05.900 Yeah.

00:20:06.480 So that's very good.

00:20:08.300 So usually if I were to say, oh, men have evolved a desire for sexual variety, most people,

00:20:15.360 even if they know nothing about evolution, would say, yeah, that makes sense.

00:20:18.220 But now here's the interesting part.

00:20:20.820 Women too have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety.

00:20:26.920 Now, not to the same degree as men.

00:20:29.140 So there have been studies that have been conducted across a bewildering number of cultures.

00:20:33.660 And in every culture that's been documented, men are much more likely to want more sexual

00:20:39.700 partners and so on.

00:20:40.880 But that doesn't mean that women are Victorian-chaste prudes.

00:20:45.400 So now let me give you multiple lines of evidence that suggest that women are hardly

00:20:51.360 the Victorian prudes that we might otherwise wish they were in a Victorian novel.

00:20:57.380 You know when a woman is most likely to cheat situationally?

00:21:01.880 I know because I've read your work, so...

00:21:03.300 Okay, fine.

00:21:03.860 Okay.

00:21:04.140 So I'll say it or do you want to say it?

00:21:06.040 Well, it's when they're maximally fertile, isn't it?

00:21:08.180 Very good.

00:21:08.660 You've done your homework.

00:21:09.500 So when they are maximally fertile is when they're most likely to stray.

00:21:12.720 Now, that strategy, by the way, and they're less likely to insist on contraception.

00:21:17.840 You would think that if I'm cheating outside my marriage, I'm speaking as a woman now.

00:21:22.320 If I'm cheating outside my marriage, I would want to increase the likelihood of wearing,

00:21:27.780 I mean, using protection because I don't want to be pregnant.

00:21:30.780 But if the strategy for why I'm cheating is because I'm shopping for superior genes, then

00:21:36.860 it becomes incumbent that I don't use protection, right?

00:21:39.760 So you seldom have a woman who will cheat with a guy who is of lower phenotypic quality,

00:21:50.160 genetic quality.

00:21:50.760 So I would love to have Bill Gates as home as my long-term partner, but then I want the

00:21:57.140 male Olympic swimmer as the guy behind the bushes.

00:22:00.520 Now, if I can convince Bill Gates that the Olympic male swimmer actually looks a lot like

00:22:06.160 Bill Gates and it's really yours, sweetie.

00:22:08.040 It's you, Billy.

00:22:08.720 You're the one who, then I won the, as a woman, I've won the genetic lottery game, okay?

00:22:15.640 So it's not that women are not interested in sexual variety.

00:22:18.520 So that's one.

00:22:19.200 Here's another one.

00:22:21.140 If you map out, this is from studies, I think it was in the early 80s.

00:22:26.260 I don't have the exact reference, but it's easy to find.

00:22:28.160 Sorry, just in your work, you say that women are more likely to cheat with someone who has

00:22:31.260 good genetic stock.

00:22:32.420 Yeah.

00:22:32.660 Is Bill Gates not got good genetic stock because he's rich and small?

00:22:36.880 So yes.

00:22:37.920 So the intelligence element is yes.

00:22:40.260 Maybe the drive element is yes.

00:22:42.400 But the phenotype is a no.

00:22:44.820 What's the phenotype?

00:22:45.560 Phenotype is your physical manifestation, right?

00:22:48.820 So if I say I want a guy who is tall, who has a V, who's got testosterone jawline, right?

00:22:58.500 I mean, I don't usually, if I'm a woman, I don't, in my deep recesses of my mind, fantasize

00:23:05.240 about being ravished by Bill Gates.

00:23:07.660 Do I?

00:23:08.400 Are those physical features just pointing out the fact this person can provide for me?

00:23:13.140 Absolutely.

00:23:14.120 I mean, and you're saying, but Bill Gates already provides.

00:23:17.280 Yeah.

00:23:17.580 But it's also what's called the sexy son hypothesis.

00:23:20.980 Bill Gates will not produce, I mean, he'll produce kids who potentially, to the extent

00:23:25.620 that intelligence is heritable, will give me intelligent kids, but he won't give me the

00:23:30.620 kids that are brawny, right?

00:23:32.540 And of course, some of us are lucky to have both brawn and brains, but that's a rarity.

00:23:37.380 That's a very kind compliment.

00:23:38.360 Thank you.

00:23:39.600 Now, imagine if I were four inches taller.

00:23:42.600 Then, I mean, that's it.

00:23:43.980 I would be crowned emperor.

00:23:45.460 No, but in all seriousness, both men and women are very duplicitous in their sexual behavior.

00:23:50.860 So the idea that monogamy is natural is not true.

00:23:53.500 Now, it is natural in that about 85% of documented cultures have monogamy as an institutional

00:24:01.160 mechanism because we're a bi-parental species.

00:24:03.580 And almost all the other ones have what's called polygyny, which is a term not to be confused

00:24:10.340 with polygamy.

00:24:11.360 So I'm going to do a little parenthesis and I'm going to come back to the lines of evidence

00:24:15.100 that proves that women like sexual variety as well.

00:24:18.380 So polygamy just means one to many.

00:24:21.740 People use it as synonymous with one man, multiple women, but that's not what polygamy is.

00:24:28.500 Polygamy is one to many, which can take two forms.

00:24:31.080 It could be one man, multiple women, which is called polygyny, or it could be one woman,

00:24:38.580 multiple men, which is called polyandry.

00:24:41.600 There are almost no societies where institutionally we have polyandry because it wouldn't make evolutionary

00:24:50.520 sense for that mating system to arise.

00:24:52.780 The only famous case of polyandry is called Tibetan fraternal polyandry.

00:25:01.260 So the word fraternal means that to the extent that there are ecological reasons why we have

00:25:06.200 to tolerate one woman going with multiple guys, it'll be brothers.

00:25:10.920 And the reason for that is because of a mechanism called inclusive fitness, which is that I can

00:25:16.620 increase my reproductive fitness through direct reproduction.

00:25:21.480 I have children and therefore they will share half my genes, but I can also invest in the

00:25:27.700 children of my siblings who share also genes with me and I could still be increasing my inclusive

00:25:33.540 fitness.

00:25:34.520 So therefore polyandry need not be a Darwinian dead end because I'm still extending my genes

00:25:40.740 even in such a system.

00:25:43.380 So is this why I take care of my brother's kids in part, because my nieces and nephews are?

00:25:48.680 100%.

00:25:49.200 As a matter of fact, I've done several scientific studies where I exactly do these kinds of tests,

00:25:54.200 where I look at what is the pattern of investment in different family members as a function of

00:26:03.940 their genetic relatedness to me.

00:26:06.140 So R is something called the coefficient of genetic relatedness.

00:26:10.740 So me and my brother, our R is 0.5.

00:26:15.000 Me and my identical twin, our R is 1.

00:26:18.260 Me and a random stranger, our R is 0.

00:26:21.260 Me and my nephews and nieces, 0.25.

00:26:23.880 Me and my parents, 0.5.

00:26:25.820 Me and my grandparents, 0.25.

00:26:27.840 Okay.

00:26:28.160 So we wanted to test whether the pattern of investments, in this case, through gift giving,

00:26:34.820 whether they correlate to the genetic relatedness between the giver and recipient.

00:26:40.760 And as you might expect intuitively, even if you're not a fancy evolutionary psychologist,

00:26:45.740 the greater the genetic relatedness, the larger the size of gift.

00:26:49.220 I'm much more likely to give a bigger gift at my brother's wedding than I am to my second cousin.

00:26:54.560 Okay.

00:26:55.200 And so we've evolved this calculus that allows us to met out these investments in line with

00:27:01.120 our genetic relatedness, which by the way, you see across countless animal species.

00:27:04.980 The likelihood of you coming out of your borough to protect people who are in the borough

00:27:09.040 increases if whoever's in the borough has greater genetic relatedness to you.

00:27:12.900 So the other part in the 2018 paper that's going to blow your mind, because that one,

00:27:18.540 you wouldn't intuitively have expected it.

00:27:20.580 The first finding, you say, yeah, it makes sense.

00:27:22.780 I give more gifts to my brother than to my third cousin.

00:27:25.260 So we wanted to check whether at an actual Israeli wedding, because they had data from actual 30,

00:27:33.600 I think it was 30 weddings.

00:27:35.280 So they had field data.

00:27:36.740 They had the data of all of the attendees and the gifts that they gave.

00:27:42.960 Uncle Mordechai gave $180.

00:27:45.900 Rafika gave, okay.

00:27:46.920 So what we wanted to test is whether the mother's side or the father's side of the bride and groom

00:27:55.720 across all genetic relatedness coefficients, which side would give more?

00:28:00.580 Now, in the Middle East, it's a patriarchal society, but evolutionary theory would predict

00:28:05.400 something differently.

00:28:06.420 And let me explain why.

00:28:07.820 So take, for example, your four grandparents, okay?

00:28:11.000 There's maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather.

00:28:15.040 In terms of the genetic relatedness, they're each equally genetically related to you, 0.25.

00:28:21.600 Quarter of their genes they share with you.

00:28:23.960 But here's the second part.

00:28:25.920 Genetic assuredness is not the same across the four.

00:28:29.760 Your paternal grandfather has two layers of paternity uncertainty.

00:28:35.720 Your maternal grandmother has zero generational paternity uncertainty,

00:28:42.880 because there is no maternity uncertainty.

00:28:44.320 So therefore, you would predict that the paternal grandfather would invest the least in his

00:28:49.640 grandchildren, the maternal grandmother would invest the most, and the two other grandparents

00:28:53.980 in the middle.

00:28:54.700 That's what's been found in many studies across many cultures.

00:28:57.600 You might have to explain paternity uncertainty.

00:28:59.840 Paternity uncertainty means that when a child is born, you never know that he is your child,

00:29:05.060 right?

00:29:05.840 The mother always know that it's her child.

00:29:08.300 She had the child, right?

00:29:09.300 So we wanted to test whether the mother's side of both the bride and groom would give

00:29:15.620 greater gifts than the father's side, precisely because there is no such thing as maternity

00:29:20.060 uncertainty, but there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty.

00:29:23.120 And that's exactly what we found.

00:29:24.640 So the women's family gave more presents?

00:29:26.500 Exactly.

00:29:27.020 Okay.

00:29:27.460 Yeah.

00:29:27.680 Thank you for summarizing that long rant.

00:29:30.000 But again, just to clarify why that is, because they're trying to make sure that the male

00:29:33.960 is invested?

00:29:34.940 No, because the mother's side is simply more vested in investing in either the bride or

00:29:43.360 groom because they know that that is their infant.

00:29:46.920 Ah, because there's no uncertainty.

00:29:48.260 There's no uncertainty.

00:29:49.160 You got it?

00:29:50.340 Yeah.

00:29:50.480 Okay.

00:29:50.980 So now can we close the loop on the sexual variety?

00:29:53.860 So, so far I said that there's definitely evidence that women also have a sexual variety

00:29:59.020 pension by virtue of them cheating more when they are maximally fertile with a, and not

00:30:04.480 insisting on contraception and all that.

00:30:07.380 Here's another one.

00:30:08.320 You do a mapping of across primates.

00:30:12.360 So here come the bonobos, here come mountain gorillas, here come chimpanzees, here comes humans.

00:30:17.960 So you put all the primates and you do a calculation of the size of the testes of the males in that

00:30:27.080 species as a function of female sexual promiscuity in that species.

00:30:34.040 Are you willing?

00:30:34.520 Yes.

00:30:34.920 So mountain gorillas, phenomenal beasts, 450 pounds, some of the most majestic males.

00:30:42.940 They have a territorial, they have a polygynous arrangement.

00:30:48.240 There is one male, dominant male that controls control to sexual access to many females.

00:30:54.900 So based on what I just said, can you predict what the size of their testes are?

00:30:59.840 They're going to have small testes?

00:31:00.960 Yes.

00:31:01.860 Because there isn't sperm war competition.

00:31:05.800 Therefore, imagine how unbelievable it is that a fundamental male morphological attribute,

00:31:14.640 the size of your testes, is an adaptive response to a female behavior in that species.

00:31:20.960 Greater female promiscuity in that species, bigger testicles.

00:31:25.780 So mountain gorillas, very small testicles.

00:31:30.420 Chimpanzees are just walking testicles.

00:31:33.920 Their bodies just exist to support massive testes.

00:31:37.840 Why?

00:31:38.620 Because in chimp society, we say hello, sex.

00:31:42.380 We say goodbye, sex.

00:31:44.020 We fight, sex.

00:31:45.880 Post fight, sex.

00:31:46.940 So there is constant sex happening so that the same female is being impregnated by multiple males.

00:31:55.220 So the way that I fight against that is by developing bigger testes because then there are mechanisms

00:32:01.340 where having bigger testes solves that problem.

00:32:05.320 So now here comes Robin Baker, actually a British scientist who wrote a book called Sperm Wars where

00:32:12.400 he argued in his book, some have said it's contentious, others said that it's tight,

00:32:17.420 that the morphology of human sperm...

00:32:21.680 The makeup of it.

00:32:22.680 The makeup of it is not simply the standard one that we're all used to seeing,

00:32:28.180 which is there is a head with a tail and they're all rushing to that mythical egg.

00:32:34.700 Those are called fertilizers.

00:32:35.980 He demonstrated in his research that there are two other types of sperm phenotypes within

00:32:43.880 a man's ejaculate.

00:32:45.800 There are the blockers that don't look like the fertilizer.

00:32:49.760 Defense.

00:32:50.620 Defense.

00:32:51.460 Very good.

00:32:52.260 And then there are the killers that go around hunting other men's sperm.

00:32:59.020 Now, let's put it all together.

00:33:01.460 Sperm is viable within a woman's reproductive tract for about 72 hours.

00:33:09.640 Therefore, for men to have evolved the chemical weaponry to have blockers and killers means

00:33:19.140 that in our ancestral past, the likelihood of women having been with more than one man within

00:33:27.040 a 72-hour period, whether willfully or through aggression, would have been high.

00:33:33.320 Therefore, that's why you evolve that response.

00:33:35.800 Now, here is where you can see what happens with ideology and therefore why I wrote Parasitic

00:33:42.080 Mind.

00:33:42.700 When I lecture this in front of radical feminists, they'll come up, Dr. Saad, you're such a brilliant

00:33:50.180 scientist.

00:33:50.740 Why?

00:33:50.980 Because the research that I just described demonstrates that women could be just as sexually

00:33:57.840 voracious as men and that they've evolved the desire also for a sexual appetite.

00:34:04.680 That corresponds with my women's studies and radical feminism classes.

00:34:10.100 Therefore, when from this side of my mouth I say something that supports their ideology,

00:34:15.520 I become a hero.

00:34:17.960 If from this side of my mouth I say, oh, but incidentally, across cultures, it's been studied

00:34:22.860 across many, many cultures, men do have much greater desire for sexual variety.

00:34:30.140 Boo!

00:34:30.580 So I can either go from hero to zero depending on whether what I just said supports your ideology

00:34:39.420 or not.

00:34:39.960 That's not how you adjudicate science.

00:34:41.860 Science, truth exists independently of whether it supports your ideology or not.

00:34:48.620 Hence, eventually, the Parasitic Mind because you're parasitized by bad ideologies.

00:34:53.520 What are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble?

00:34:59.400 So in my scientific work, humans are biological beings shaped by the dual forces of sexual and

00:35:07.880 natural selection.

00:35:09.240 Boo, Nazi.

00:35:10.060 Boo, Nazi.

00:35:10.580 I mean, people are coming around now because the beauty of science is that it's auto-corrective,

00:35:16.720 right?

00:35:17.000 I mean, some of the biggest works, you now know that they're the biggest work by how much

00:35:23.340 they were originally rejected.

00:35:25.120 So many Nobel Prizes, the story is always the same.

00:35:30.760 The scientist proposes an idea that is completely unorthodox, contrary to the prevailing whims of

00:35:37.900 accepted science and is constantly rejected until it's not.

00:35:44.160 Very simple example.

00:35:46.040 Probably the thing that has saved human beings the most from death over the past hundred years,

00:35:53.980 well, it's stuff related to hygiene issues.

00:35:56.880 Because a lot of times you'd have childhood mortality because of exposure to different pathogens.

00:36:01.940 Well, the gentleman who came up with the idea of why so often women die during childbirth.

00:36:11.240 Do you know what the answer is?

00:36:13.400 Because the doctor's not cleaned his hands?

00:36:17.120 Yes.

00:36:18.000 Beautiful.

00:36:18.620 Well done, Steve.

00:36:19.300 So it's Semmelweis, who was a doctor, who said, what's happening here?

00:36:25.220 Why are these women getting this postnatal, very devastating fever?

00:36:32.700 And then within a day or two, they're gone.

00:36:35.580 And so he said, oh, wait a second.

00:36:37.280 So the surgeons have just worked on cadavers.

00:36:42.360 What's the cadaver?

00:36:42.920 Like a dead body, okay?

00:36:45.280 So let's say they're doing forensic pathology stuff, okay?

00:36:48.640 And then they move straight to a gynecological intervention with the woman.

00:36:55.640 So when he said, and he did the studies that showed, hey, here are women who we asked the

00:37:03.180 guys to clean or didn't ask the guys to clean, and people laughed him out of town.

00:37:07.800 He died in a sanitarium, in a mental institution.

00:37:10.420 He was complete, like today, we erect statues of him, right?

00:37:15.260 So to answer your first point, when I first started my career, when I said, oh, by the

00:37:20.040 way, you can't study consumers without understanding their physiology, their hormones, I said, what

00:37:24.540 kind of bush is this?

00:37:25.280 This is not a biology department.

00:37:26.920 Get a grip.

00:37:27.840 You should not be in the business school.

00:37:29.840 I said, well, what do you mean?

00:37:30.820 You think that when a consumer eats, they transcend their biology?

00:37:37.100 It's outside of their biology?

00:37:38.440 Well, now, a lot of them are coming around.

00:37:41.480 So that when I first promulgated this idea 30 years ago, I was a Nazi.

00:37:45.820 Today, it's, dear Dr. Saad, it would be an honor if you come and give the plenary lecture

00:37:49.760 at our university.

00:37:50.780 Oh, but what happened 30 years ago when I was a bullshitter?

00:37:53.120 Well, apparently, they caught on.

00:37:55.100 So in my academic work, the mere fact of saying that we're biological beings was the most triggering

00:38:00.720 thing.

00:38:01.060 In my public engagement work that's not directly related to my science, well, it's a very long

00:38:08.460 list, hence the parasitic mind.

00:38:10.380 But certainly when I talk about things related, say, to Islam, that doesn't get me a lot of

00:38:17.120 Islamic friends, unfortunately.

00:38:19.220 You're Jewish, aren't you?

00:38:20.060 I'm Jewish.

00:38:20.780 Yes, I'm Jewish.

00:38:21.660 But what I say would be true, whether I was Jewish or whether I was anything else.

00:38:28.220 So as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, how much of what we do is driven by sex and

00:38:34.900 relationships?

00:38:35.380 I mean, so in my earlier books, so I'm going to answer it again in a broad kind of big way.

00:38:43.500 In my first book, which is The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, and then in The Consuming

00:38:48.160 Instinct, I argue that there are four key Darwinian mechanisms that drive much of our purpose of

00:38:56.300 behavior.

00:38:57.000 So that speaks to your point.

00:38:58.180 There is behaviors that are related to natural selection or our survival instinct.

00:39:07.340 So for example, the fact that I'm almost certain that you and I have a preference for some

00:39:14.160 instantiation of a fatty food more than raw celery is almost a guarantee.

00:39:19.640 Am I right?

00:39:20.440 Yes, I agree.

00:39:21.360 Okay.

00:39:21.720 And I'm willing to bet that everybody who's in the studio will also agree.

00:39:25.260 Now, we may have a different preference.

00:39:28.900 So I may prefer fatty steak, you prefer chocolate mousse, but we both prefer chocolate mousse and

00:39:35.500 steak over raw celery.

00:39:37.200 And so there are many consumatory acts and preferences that I can easily ultimately map to that drive.

00:39:46.000 The most obvious of which would be our food preferences.

00:39:49.380 To your direct question, then the next module, so that first module, I call it the survival module.

00:39:55.260 The next module, called the reproductive module, sex, to your question, are all the things

00:40:01.720 that we do because they're very much driven by sex-related issues.

00:40:05.620 So the types of products that men and women use as sexual signals are astonishingly the same

00:40:15.080 across cultures.

00:40:15.940 So for example, owners of Ferrari are 99% male, even though there are a million women who have

00:40:25.520 the resources to certainly buy a Ferrari, yet they don't.

00:40:29.480 Oprah Winfrey is not stopped from buying a Ferrari because she can't afford it, and yet she's not

00:40:34.520 doing it.

00:40:35.180 In the human context, fancy cars take on the morphological feature of the peacock's tail.

00:40:41.840 So all animals that are sexually reproducing use sexual signals.

00:40:47.700 Humans, given that they're also a consumatory animal, will use specific products to signal,

00:40:53.460 look at me, I'm better than Steven.

00:40:56.520 The way that I do that is by hopefully demonstrating cues that I have higher status than you.

00:41:01.260 Okay.

00:41:01.940 Now, women will also engage in vigorous sexual signaling, but it'll be related to things that

00:41:08.640 are beautification, right?

00:41:10.500 So cosmetic surgeries around the world are almost excluded.

00:41:14.360 Not that men don't do it, hair plugs, but it's very, very much of a female domain.

00:41:20.600 And so there are many, many behaviors, whether consumer-related or not, that could be then mapped

00:41:26.860 onto the reproductive module to your question.

00:41:30.080 Then there are two other modules that I hinted at earlier when I talked about gift giving.

00:41:35.860 So there's the kin selection module.

00:41:39.040 These are behaviors that are related to the fact of, I increase my inclusive fitness by

00:41:47.200 investing in my kin.

00:41:48.920 Okay.

00:41:49.180 And then there is reciprocal altruism module, which is why would I ever jump into the river?

00:41:57.080 So if I jump into the river to save my three children, that's kin selection.

00:42:01.140 Because each of my three children, on average, shares 50% of their genes with me.

00:42:06.640 So if in the service of saving those three kids, I end up dying, the evolutionary calculus

00:42:11.040 is totally in favor of me dying.

00:42:12.620 Who cares?

00:42:13.560 Okay.

00:42:13.880 On the other hand, why would I jump into the river to save Steven?

00:42:17.060 First of all, until we met today, you're a stranger.

00:42:19.660 Why would I ever save a stranger?

00:42:21.120 If you're not a stranger and you're a friend, but you're still zero genetic relatedness.

00:42:25.420 So there the argument is, is that it's due to reciprocal altruism and that human beings

00:42:30.740 have evolved the mechanism of reciprocity to oil our social bonds.

00:42:35.920 To return a favor.

00:42:36.680 To return a favor.

00:42:37.280 So literally the I scratch your back, you scratch mine literally comes from our primate cousin

00:42:44.020 species where you engage in reciprocal grooming.

00:42:47.700 So what happens?

00:42:48.820 There are a bunch of parasites that are all over my fur that I can't get to.

00:42:53.040 And so what I do is I come stand and I give you my back and you will sit there and pick

00:42:58.060 at all of it.

00:42:58.960 Of course, the expectation is you'll now return the favor.

00:43:01.800 So I literally scratch your back and you scratch mine.

00:43:05.040 Now, where did that signature come from originally?

00:43:08.280 One argument is that imagine we are walking around in the savannah where the most common threat

00:43:15.760 that we face, but life is basically two things.

00:43:18.340 I mean, other than sex, get dinner and make sure you don't become somebody's there.

00:43:23.800 Mic drop.

00:43:24.600 That's it.

00:43:25.020 That's life.

00:43:25.900 Okay.

00:43:26.280 So one of the problems that we've all faced, hence why we've evolved gustatory preferences

00:43:31.500 for high calorie foods is caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity.

00:43:35.260 We don't have a neighborhood store to go buy our food.

00:43:38.860 So I might actually die of starvation.

00:43:41.960 Well, what if we mitigate that risk whereby we set up an insurance policy with non-kin,

00:43:48.040 another group of folks that are also walking around the savannah.

00:43:51.840 Hey, next time that we bring down the big prey, that's a thousand pounds of meat, we will

00:43:57.040 share with you.

00:43:57.940 But hey, you do the right thing and reciprocate back to us.

00:44:01.660 So now you might say, okay, well, that's all nice, fancy science, but how does that manifest

00:44:04.960 itself in human consumer behavior?

00:44:07.420 Well, there are so many behaviors that you and I engage in if we're friends that are

00:44:12.500 completely rooted in that reciprocal module.

00:44:14.960 So for example, when it's your birthday, I call you and I invite you out to dinner.

00:44:20.560 I expect, unless you're a social cheat, that when it's my birthday, you will reciprocate.

00:44:26.960 Now, from a strict economic perspective, why don't we skip this whole charade?

00:44:30.580 I'm going to pay $70 for your meal.

00:44:32.740 You're going to pay $70 for mine.

00:44:34.340 We're going to end up at the same spot.

00:44:35.780 Let's not do it.

00:44:36.540 The reason why we have to do it is because that reciprocal ritual is what oils our bonds

00:44:42.360 of affinity.

00:44:43.740 And so there are many, many behaviors that we engage in that are exactly tailoring that.

00:44:48.480 So to summarize, much of our behaviors, I argue in my earlier books, could be mapped onto one

00:44:54.560 of these four modules.

00:44:56.040 And in that earlier book, The Consuming Instinct, you talk about a mate desirability score.

00:45:00.900 Right.

00:45:01.240 What is a mate desirability score?

00:45:03.060 So imagine a car.

00:45:05.600 A car is made up of many attributes, right?

00:45:08.900 So the car could be, what's its gas efficiency?

00:45:13.000 What's the strength of its engine?

00:45:16.720 How well does it hug the road?

00:45:20.360 What's its green?

00:45:21.640 Is it a green car or does it have bad exhaust?

00:45:24.020 So a car is a multi-attribute product.

00:45:27.300 It's made up of many attributes.

00:45:28.460 And then it could be that the way that I choose which car I pick is the one that scores the

00:45:33.760 best on the totality of those attributes.

00:45:36.580 Okay.

00:45:36.860 That's called the multi-attribute choice.

00:45:39.260 Well, human beings are also products made up of many attributes.

00:45:43.360 So in the mating market, you and I, let's say we do men now, but of course it applies to

00:45:49.220 women too.

00:45:50.340 There's a bunch of attributes that we know that women are going to either like about us

00:45:56.740 or not like about us.

00:45:58.460 Overwhelmingly, by the way, the number one universal attribute that women seek is anything

00:46:03.800 that's related to social status, right?

00:46:06.840 So in other words, it could be my ambition.

00:46:09.360 It could be my assertiveness.

00:46:11.040 It could be my social dominance.

00:46:12.440 It could be literally the big diplomas I have behind my back.

00:46:16.680 It could be the number of zeros behind in my bank.

00:46:20.000 It could be how many cattle heads I have if I'm Hadza tribe.

00:46:24.160 But in no culture has a woman ever said the following, give me a non-assertive beta meek

00:46:32.980 man who has pear-shaped hips and a nasal voice, and I'm turning into a sexual frenzied animal.

00:46:40.540 Those words have never been uttered.

00:46:42.260 In the history of humanity, okay?

00:46:44.800 But what women will say, by the way, it's not that they only look for rich guys, right?

00:46:49.220 Because many women will be madly in love with the starving artist.

00:46:55.100 But the starving artist is showing what?

00:46:57.740 Ambition.

00:46:58.500 Ambition.

00:46:58.980 Assertiveness.

00:46:59.460 There is a trajectory of creation that's coming around the corner.

00:47:04.500 I'm going to become a big rock star.

00:47:07.200 But no, that's why, by the way, if you do, I think that study has been done where you,

00:47:12.000 and actually some of my students in one of my classes did a similar study for their project.

00:47:16.460 Just show a guy, exact same guy in a personal ad.

00:47:19.700 He's got a guitar or he doesn't have a guitar.

00:47:21.560 Nothing changed.

00:47:22.720 It's the exact same guy.

00:47:23.620 It's Steven.

00:47:24.400 But give me a guitar.

00:47:25.700 Oh, with the guitar, Steven's gorgeous.

00:47:27.940 Without the guitar, he's less gorgeous.

00:47:30.120 What's the other explanation for that that people might jump to?

00:47:32.240 They might say, well, I like music.

00:47:33.760 So that's why I prefer Steven with a guitar.

00:47:35.960 And he's going to play some songs.

00:47:37.120 And I'm going to feel good.

00:47:37.960 And then I'm going to have sex with him.

00:47:39.240 So that's a very good question.

00:47:40.680 So that is the difference between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations.

00:47:47.820 Much of science operates at the proximate level.

00:47:50.880 It explains the how and the what of a phenomenon.

00:47:54.300 How does diabetes work?

00:47:56.060 What are the factors that increase the likelihood of you having diabetes?

00:47:59.280 That's perfectly fine.

00:48:00.560 The ultimate explanation is the Darwinian why.

00:48:04.520 Why would the phenomenon have evolved to be of that type?

00:48:08.100 So you could say, I'm just drawn to a guy who knows how to play music.

00:48:13.580 You've just explained proximate.

00:48:14.980 It's like saying, why have we evolved to have sex?

00:48:18.000 Because it feels good.

00:48:19.200 That's approximate.

00:48:20.400 The ultimate explanation is that a sexually reproducing species has to have a mechanism

00:48:25.680 by which you're drawn to engage in the behavior that results in procreation.

00:48:30.040 So it's not that ultimate explanations are superior to proximate ones.

00:48:34.260 It's that you need both levels of analyses to fully explain a phenomenon.

00:48:38.680 So what is going on there with the guitar from an evolutionary perspective?

00:48:41.200 Why is the guitar attractive?

00:48:42.300 He's creative.

00:48:43.400 Yeah.

00:48:44.000 He's got the assiduousness to have the discipline to practice.

00:48:48.940 Why is a violin virtuoso attractive?

00:48:52.320 Or Picasso.

00:48:53.760 Picasso is a short little guy.

00:48:55.120 He's frumpy.

00:48:56.260 He's bald.

00:48:57.440 Yet he's got a very, very long line of very attractive women saying,

00:49:01.780 can I have sex with you, Picasso, tonight?

00:49:04.220 How is that possible?

00:49:05.540 Is it because at some level we're associating that talent with status?

00:49:10.200 Absolutely.

00:49:10.940 The person that can play the piano at the party probably has a lot of status.

00:49:15.240 They're going to have a lot of options.

00:49:16.200 I mean, just listen to famous rock stars and what they say as to why they became musicians.

00:49:26.120 I mean, literally almost to the word.

00:49:28.520 It's as if they plagiarized each other.

00:49:30.580 Oh, I quickly realized that that's how I can get the girls.

00:49:34.120 Right?

00:49:34.320 They never said, it's because in my childhood, I grew up listening to Bach and Mozart,

00:49:39.000 and it tickled my auditory reflex.

00:49:41.500 They usually said, oh, I go to a party and I break out the thing and the lineup begins.

00:49:47.820 And then Gene Simmons sleeps with 5,000 girls.

00:49:50.880 And the lead singer of Simple Red, who's a rather, forgive me, whatever your name is,

00:49:55.440 he's ginger guy.

00:49:56.880 He's not exactly the model of my sexual dreams if I'm a woman, but yet he was with tons of women.

00:50:04.180 Right?

00:50:04.480 But to finish the point about mate desirability scale.

00:50:07.120 So now imagine all of those attributes that I can cook.

00:50:10.640 So, okay, God said, well, I'm not tall.

00:50:14.380 That goes against me.

00:50:16.300 But I'm not very hard to look at.

00:50:19.840 That goes for me.

00:50:21.600 I play soccer really well.

00:50:23.800 I learned very quickly when I was 15 that the best way that you won't get bullied by anybody

00:50:29.500 is when you're the big soccer star.

00:50:31.980 Okay?

00:50:32.820 I've done pretty well in my life.

00:50:34.520 So there are some traits that I score badly on and some traits that I can compensate on.

00:50:41.100 And so we can put them all into a basket and say, okay, well, what on a scale of 0 to 100,

00:50:45.580 what would God score on his mate desirability scale?

00:50:48.440 And so that's what that scale is.

00:50:49.680 It's basically taking all of our attributes and then saying, what do you score?

00:50:55.420 Is Stephen a 78 or a 92?

00:50:57.300 Now, here's what's very interesting to that question, which you didn't ask.

00:51:01.720 Humans engage in what's called assortative mating.

00:51:05.060 Assortative mating is the idea that birds of a feather flock together.

00:51:09.800 So there are two maxims.

00:51:11.180 There's the birds of a feather flock together and there's the opposites attract.

00:51:15.040 Opposites attract only works well for short-term mating.

00:51:18.460 I am sexually coy and shy and I'm an introvert.

00:51:23.420 You're sexually daring and extroverted.

00:51:26.320 That complementarity might actually result in a nice trice behind the bushes.

00:51:31.600 But for long-term mating, if you want to assure success of a long-term marriage,

00:51:36.580 then it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock together.

00:51:39.500 And usually here what we mean is we share similar values.

00:51:43.100 We share similar goals, similar mindsets.

00:51:46.220 We really have to assort on these.

00:51:47.600 If I'm an acerbic atheist and you're a committed Catholic who views everything through Jesus,

00:51:52.440 it doesn't take a fancy professor to know we're not starting on the right foot.

00:51:57.200 But here's the other part about assortative mating.

00:52:00.920 This is actually something that I first proposed as an open question many years ago

00:52:07.340 on one of my appearances of Joe Rogan.

00:52:09.540 And I received like a hundred emails saying,

00:52:11.860 oh, I want to do that research with you, which I still haven't done.

00:52:14.620 So maybe it'll happen now.

00:52:16.420 So let me repeat it.

00:52:17.600 So I argue that people assort based on their overall mate desirability score,

00:52:26.240 which is the question you asked.

00:52:27.460 Meaning if I'm an 87, I'm unlikely because the mating market is literally a market.

00:52:35.020 It's a market.

00:52:36.060 If I'm an 87, I can command a girl or expect a girl in the 80s.

00:52:44.980 It wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36.

00:52:48.780 We all want to get the 100.

00:52:50.820 Both men and women want to get the 100.

00:52:52.920 But what stops us is that I don't score 100.

00:52:55.500 So I want to get the gorgeous supermodel and so on.

00:52:58.300 But maybe I'm not good enough to get her.

00:53:00.500 And all women want to get the highly accomplished, gorgeous male Olympic swimmer who's both brawny and a neurosurgeon.

00:53:08.960 But they can't get him because he's got the pick of the litter.

00:53:12.800 So usually we end up assorting on our mate value.

00:53:16.620 But now here's the part where I propose as a hypothesis and it's never been tested, although I discuss it in the happiness book.

00:53:25.160 So I argue, I predict, although I haven't tested it, that what will predict the likelihood of a couple staying together into the future

00:53:35.800 is whether their mating, overall mating scores stay in line or they begin to diverge.

00:53:43.920 So I'm the high school quarterback.

00:53:48.300 So all the girls think I'm hot.

00:53:50.840 I get to go to the prom, whatever it's called, with the cheerleader, the head cheerleader.

00:53:57.560 She's the hot girl.

00:53:58.680 I'm the king of the high school.

00:54:00.680 That's great.

00:54:01.480 At that point, when we're both 18, we assort on our mating value.

00:54:06.040 Now let's fast forward.

00:54:07.120 Ten years later, the hot cheerleader is now finishing her third year in neurosurgery.

00:54:14.720 Yes?

00:54:15.160 There's a lot of hot, pretty smart looking male doctors.

00:54:19.740 The hot quarterback, when I was 18, has become fat.

00:54:24.220 He's lost his hair and he's consistently unemployed and shows no interest other than playing video games.

00:54:32.720 So what's happened?

00:54:33.880 When we first met, when we were 18, our mating values were the same.

00:54:37.840 But now hot cheerleader has become neurosurgeon.

00:54:41.840 Her score has gone really up.

00:54:44.260 Hot quarterback is now a degenerate.

00:54:47.120 Now there's a huge difference in our mating scores.

00:54:49.840 That's going to put a huge stressor on our marriage.

00:54:53.820 So one of the things I argue in the happiness book is, yes, make sure to meet someone who matches you in your mating value

00:55:00.680 and work hard at making sure that you stay at the right mating value.

00:55:05.020 Once we get that divergence, I'm predicting divorce.

00:55:09.080 Okay, it's super interesting.

00:55:12.000 The question that springs to mind is, as men and women age, who tends to drop in their desirability score?

00:55:20.360 What do you think?

00:55:21.320 I don't know.

00:55:23.260 You want me to answer it because then I can get the hate mail, no problem.

00:55:26.480 No, no, but I ask that as well, because there's clearly some data on who's asking for the divorces,

00:55:30.640 who's initiating the divorces, who's cheating the most.

00:55:32.940 So women are overwhelmingly the ones to instigate a divorce.

00:55:36.580 Yeah.

00:55:36.960 That's true.

00:55:38.360 Although from a strict evolutionary perspective, the mate value, all other things equal,

00:55:45.160 mate value of men goes up with age, mate value of women goes down with age.

00:55:51.140 Now, here's how you reduce your chances in the mating market if you're a woman.

00:55:57.680 You ready?

00:55:59.020 Of course, just aging.

00:56:00.720 Yes, number one.

00:56:02.120 Number two, if you're tall.

00:56:04.660 That's a death blow.

00:56:06.160 Why?

00:56:06.920 Because it's not that women want only tall guys, because then all the other guys,

00:56:14.720 we would have been twiddling our thumbs in frustrated celibacy.

00:56:17.740 But women want a guy who's taller than them.

00:56:21.680 That's what's guaranteed.

00:56:23.280 There was actually a study done a few years ago, many years ago now, where they looked at 720

00:56:29.120 actual couples.

00:56:31.460 Guess how many violated that norm?

00:56:34.840 Women taller than men out of 720.

00:56:37.300 I don't know.

00:56:38.060 One.

00:56:38.680 One out of 720.

00:56:39.800 One, right?

00:56:40.680 So women, it's a non-starter that a woman doesn't want a shorter guy than her.

00:56:46.120 I mean, Lionel Messi is my height, but he's Lionel Messi, and he found a gorgeous woman

00:56:51.080 who's shorter than him, right?

00:56:53.560 But what you don't want...

00:56:54.680 Now, if I'm a six foot one woman, now, of course, there are still six foot two and taller

00:56:58.960 men, but just statistically speaking, we've just shrunk the possible pool.

00:57:04.100 There is a gorgeous guy, super handsome, very funny, very educated, who's 5'8", but I'm

00:57:11.060 6'1", I tower over him.

00:57:13.080 If I wear heels, and I add another four inches, he becomes my son.

00:57:17.780 Well, this all brings to light something else, which has been discussed a few times on this

00:57:21.420 show, which is, if we said there that men's mate desirability score stays pretty consistent,

00:57:29.760 unless it all goes up, unless they do something very bad.

00:57:33.760 But the kind of inverse conversation there is that women's desirability scores are now

00:57:38.980 higher than ever when they're younger than ever.

00:57:41.040 So you've got...

00:57:42.120 And I believe, from what I've been told, that the male's desirability score is now lower

00:57:46.500 than ever, if we think about income.

00:57:49.500 Across age groups?

00:57:50.960 In the lower age groups.

00:57:52.380 Okay, I see.

00:57:52.740 So if you think about income differences, if you think about educational differences, who's

00:57:58.480 graduating from college, who's smarter, and all these kinds of things, because of the

00:58:03.080 very important changes that happen in society, men and women are getting closer and closer to

00:58:08.260 parity here, which means that the...

00:58:10.880 I mean, someone on the podcast described it to me as the tall woman problem, but it can

00:58:15.060 also be described as the small man problem.

00:58:17.180 Well, and it's small and tall.

00:58:20.660 I was going to finish that earlier.

00:58:21.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:22.220 It's not just the height.

00:58:23.800 So I said death blow would be you get older, you're tall, and you're very educated.

00:58:29.320 So if you are a 38-year-old, 6'2", PhD from Stanford, and you're a woman, good luck.

00:58:40.640 Why?

00:58:41.460 Because number one, I've gotten older, so there's a smaller pool, right?

00:58:46.560 Number two, I'm tall.

00:58:48.600 I want a taller guy.

00:58:50.100 Number three, when I'm a PhD, I'm a woman now.

00:58:53.040 When I'm a PhD, I want a guy who is as educated and accomplished as me or more.

00:58:58.740 So now I need to find a 6'4 guy who's also a PhD, right?

00:59:03.340 Here's the paradox, by the way, that people don't realize.

00:59:05.880 People think that, oh, the reason why women always desire high-status guy, this is bullshit,

00:59:11.180 it's not true, is because historically, they have been dominated by the patriarchy.

00:59:17.400 So they sought that which they didn't have.

00:59:19.540 And that's completely falsified by the fact that very high-status women actually insist

00:59:25.440 more on the guy being higher status.

00:59:28.020 So if it were, so for example, if I am a neurosurgeon and a diplomat and I'm a woman,

00:59:33.960 I don't say, oh, well, now that I have all that I need, let me look for the illiterate

00:59:39.480 17-year-old cabana boy who can't read three words because that's what I want.

00:59:43.860 No, she even wants, she insists more on the guy being, meeting her or higher in status.

00:59:50.380 So if I'm older, tall and super educated, it's a death blow.

00:59:58.120 What does this all say about what's going on with masculinity at the moment?

01:00:01.260 Because I've said this a few times on the show, but when you look at the stats around suicidality

01:00:06.000 amongst men, when you look at mental health issues amongst men, when you look at some

01:00:10.520 of the influencers that men are now drawn to more than ever that are offering a new

01:00:15.960 vision of masculinity, there's clearly some kind of transition, something going on in

01:00:20.960 society at the moment as it relates to what it is to be a man.

01:00:23.460 You said this thing about beta male earlier on, no one wants a beta male.

01:00:27.740 Well, you know, it feels like there has been a narrative that has encouraged a bit more

01:00:31.700 beta maleness in society.

01:00:33.720 And we're seeing a bit of like a counter movement.

01:00:36.200 I've had so many women, some of which have been on the show, say to me that they've got

01:00:39.780 a young son and they are confused about the advice they should be giving their young son

01:00:45.260 in such a world.

01:00:46.660 I get tons of women who write to me and ask me sort of, I'm paraphrasing.

01:00:53.460 Where are the bold men, right?

01:00:56.500 I go to a place, I'm looking super, you know, ready to meet people.

01:01:03.460 I'm easy to look at and no one approaches me.

01:01:07.280 Well, if you inculcate over many generations that if I approach you and say, my God, my name

01:01:15.940 is God, you look lovely, what a beautiful dress.

01:01:18.440 If that's a compliment becomes a form of compliment rape, then is it surprising that I may be a

01:01:27.260 bit ambivalent in approaching you?

01:01:28.780 I mean, I often joke that given some of the, what is now considered hashtag me too, Italy

01:01:35.220 should cease to exist because the whole country is hashtag me too, right?

01:01:39.220 What do I mean by that?

01:01:40.080 Italians, stereotypically, of course, are seducers.

01:01:44.620 They pursue women.

01:01:45.600 I mean, women will say, I love Italian guys, how they approach.

01:01:49.420 Now, we're not talking about, you know, being persistent to the point that they're harassing

01:01:54.140 you, that they're pinning you down physically.

01:01:56.340 But there is a dynamic of courtship whereby men who are bold, men who approach, men who take

01:02:03.540 chances who are confident are going to get the pretty girl.

01:02:07.800 Well, now, imagine if you create a dynamic for all sorts of reasons, one of which is radical

01:02:14.740 feminism, the other one of which is to pathologize half of humanity called men through the label

01:02:20.540 of toxic masculinity.

01:02:22.080 No, it's called sexiness.

01:02:23.700 A guy who jumps into a building to save a puppy and he's called a fireman, that's what we fantasize

01:02:30.000 about.

01:02:30.460 That's not toxic masculinity, that's masculinity.

01:02:33.540 Right?

01:02:34.240 And so, a lot of women will write to me and say, where are those men, professor?

01:02:38.900 Well, those men are too afraid to come out.

01:02:40.560 I'll give you a couple of examples, okay?

01:02:43.420 At my university, we now have a mandatory sexual training module that we have to take, otherwise

01:02:53.160 we can't continue, right?

01:02:55.760 It's part of like, you know, you have to October 15th to get the refresher.

01:03:00.200 Because until my benevolent, kind employer taught me how to speak to women, I was clueless.

01:03:08.900 So, the first 57 years of my life, I walked around as a Middle Eastern savage, not knowing

01:03:15.600 how to interact with women.

01:03:16.780 Of course, I'm being sarcastic, right?

01:03:17.980 But then my benevolent employer came along and through very, very cute, condescending and

01:03:25.860 patronizing cartoon vignettes, they teach me how to act.

01:03:31.620 So, you know, a compliment that is in the wrong context could be a form of sexual violence.

01:03:38.360 So, for example, you're walking down the street and you see a guy complimenting a woman and

01:03:45.660 it appears that she's not welcoming that compliment.

01:03:49.480 Is that sexual violence?

01:03:51.960 And so, I will first, just to test the algorithm, say no.

01:03:55.660 Oh, and then it comes out, ooh, I understand why you might be me, but that is a form.

01:04:01.940 Are you with me?

01:04:02.580 Yes.

01:04:02.900 So, now, I'm 59 with a big personality.

01:04:08.220 This kind of bullshit doesn't get to me.

01:04:10.620 That's why I speak openly and publicly to the chagrin of all of academia.

01:04:15.040 But the 21-year-old who doesn't have that same strength of personhood, do you think he's

01:04:21.260 going to think twice before at the next party, walking up to a girl, mustering up all his

01:04:26.340 courage to ask her if she wants a coffee?

01:04:29.260 Of course he is.

01:04:30.260 So, I think that's where that problem of dynamic comes from.

01:04:32.920 And I'm now going to share a personal story with one of my brothers, which is also in the

01:04:39.760 happiness book, which speaks to when you're the opposite of the non-bold, timid guy.

01:04:46.120 One of my brothers has been in Southern California since 1984.

01:04:51.760 He became very, very successful and wealthy.

01:04:55.060 Was an Olympian judoka.

01:04:58.040 He represented Lebanon in the 1976 Olympics.

01:05:01.560 The reason why that's relevant is because physically he's very dominant.

01:05:05.720 But my brother is two feet tall.

01:05:07.880 Obviously not.

01:05:09.980 But he's shorter than me.

01:05:11.980 How tall are you?

01:05:12.940 I'm like 5'6", 5'7".

01:05:14.620 And he's?

01:05:15.180 He's maybe 5'3", but a bulldog.

01:05:20.020 Yeah.

01:05:20.320 Right?

01:05:20.700 I always like to say, just because then it makes it easy, I say, I'm Messi's height.

01:05:24.420 So, that makes it easy.

01:05:26.020 Okay.

01:05:26.480 So, he's not Messi's height.

01:05:28.880 He's shorter than Messi's height.

01:05:30.200 He's shorter than Maradona.

01:05:31.620 Right?

01:05:32.320 So, but he walks like he's seven feet tall.

01:05:36.300 Okay.

01:05:36.500 So, we used to, in the early 90s, I would come visit him.

01:05:40.060 He used to live in Newport Beach, where we are now.

01:05:43.240 And we'd go to clubs.

01:05:45.380 I'm single at that point.

01:05:46.820 And my brother would say, all right, God, we're going to play the game.

01:05:50.600 I'm like, oh, his name is David.

01:05:52.040 No, David, I'm not in the mood.

01:05:54.200 Find the most beautiful and unattainable girl here.

01:05:58.720 Oh, come on, man.

01:05:59.640 I don't want to do this.

01:06:00.760 Do it.

01:06:01.920 Okay.

01:06:02.100 All right.

01:06:03.040 So, I look around.

01:06:03.980 So, now I want to find not only the prettiest girl, I want to find an impediment to you getting

01:06:09.800 her.

01:06:10.040 What's an impediment?

01:06:11.240 A really domineering looking man that she's with.

01:06:16.160 Therefore, that makes it even less likely that you can get her.

01:06:19.360 Yes?

01:06:19.660 Mm-hmm.

01:06:19.860 Okay, David, I found her, the girl over there with the high heels in the middle of the dance

01:06:24.100 floor.

01:06:24.540 That's the one you sure got?

01:06:26.180 Yes, that's the one.

01:06:27.540 Okay.

01:06:27.740 He stands there.

01:06:30.460 Dominant tattooed guy goes to the bathroom.

01:06:34.380 David, in great white shark mode, goes up to the girl.

01:06:38.700 With her high heels, he's coming up to here.

01:06:41.940 I just got, okay.

01:06:44.000 Ha, ha, ha.

01:06:44.540 I hear them smiling.

01:06:46.060 He comes back to me, complete cold.

01:06:48.840 Says, she'll call me tomorrow.

01:06:51.140 Bullshit, David.

01:06:51.920 No way.

01:06:52.620 Zero chance.

01:06:53.280 It's not happening.

01:06:54.660 Next day, come, come.

01:06:56.580 This is kind of an Arabic thing.

01:06:58.140 Come.

01:07:00.640 Hi, David.

01:07:01.560 It's Candy.

01:07:02.300 We met yesterday, the thing.

01:07:03.460 I'm looking forward to meeting you.

01:07:04.960 How did he do it, Stephen?

01:07:06.440 He did it because testicles this big.

01:07:10.580 He's seven foot two in his aura.

01:07:13.840 Now, you might say, well, yeah, boy, does it add a lot of inches, metaphorically, when

01:07:19.900 you have Ferraris and so on.

01:07:21.880 But there's a more general story here.

01:07:24.980 He owns the world.

01:07:26.280 He walks like he owns it, right?

01:07:28.100 But he's not of great.

01:07:29.460 So if you ask women, yeah, it'd be great if I'm six foot two and I walk big, but I could

01:07:34.840 be six foot two and very meek and very tepid and very beta, or I could be five foot seven

01:07:42.220 and I'm messy.

01:07:43.980 Most are going to go for messy.

01:07:45.660 So that's what I mean, by the way, when I say that mating is a compensatory choice.

01:07:51.060 Compensatory means that it, to your earlier point about mate desirability, we are judged

01:07:56.460 on a basket of goods.

01:07:58.060 If it were that we're only judged in a non-compensatory way, meaning, so for example, if it were that

01:08:04.560 women say, I always go out with the tallest guy, then there is no way for me to compensate

01:08:10.580 for that.

01:08:11.500 My humor won't get me higher score.

01:08:14.540 My looks won't get me, my education, my accomplishment.

01:08:17.600 I'm dead because there are a lot of taller guys.

01:08:20.820 But if the way you choose me is as a function of how I score on a basket of goods, then I might

01:08:26.360 have a shot.

01:08:26.860 So that's why I tell people, by the way, that even though we all score poorly on some

01:08:32.440 things, but there's a whole bunch of other things that is within our possibility to improve.

01:08:37.800 I guarantee you for all that you are, if you improve on assertiveness, ambition, if your

01:08:44.340 vocabulary changes so that when you sit at a party, people can judge you, by the way, within

01:08:49.500 the first few sentences that you say.

01:08:51.520 Just your elocution, the vocabulary that you use, the thoughtfulness of your answers, I

01:08:58.160 can very quickly judge where you are, where I can put you in the pigeonhole.

01:09:03.440 So there are ways.

01:09:04.600 You know what?

01:09:04.920 Why don't you crack a book and read a bit, right?

01:09:07.560 Why don't you stop playing video games?

01:09:09.060 But on this point of masculinity, just further upstream a little bit, we talked about men

01:09:13.820 approaching women.

01:09:15.060 Now, I have to present the counter narrative to this because I don't think most men understand

01:09:19.340 what it is to be a beautiful woman and what they go through on a daily basis.

01:09:23.580 This ITV made a piece, I think seven days ago, I saw it on X or Twitter, which showed what

01:09:30.500 it's like to be a beautiful woman walking down the street.

01:09:33.180 This was only seven days ago.

01:09:34.780 There's been a variety of different videos like this, but I'll just play it for you so

01:09:37.440 you can see.

01:09:40.920 I'm filming Undercover Alone in Cardiff, where police recently announced a decrease in violence

01:09:46.500 against women.

01:09:48.100 Within seconds, a group of men approached me.

01:09:54.660 This guy didn't respect my personal space.

01:09:57.340 The guy in the black t-shirt sees me up ahead and speeds up to get next to me.

01:10:12.180 And like many others, he overstays his welcome.

01:10:16.240 20 people approached me in just two hours.

01:10:20.080 Now, I don't think men realise that that's the nature of what a woman goes through.

01:10:24.440 So in the context of this conversation about, no, we do have to be on the front foot if

01:10:29.160 we are going to find a mate, when you understand that that's what that beautiful woman that

01:10:34.480 you're thinking about going up to has already gone through, it does change your, you know.

01:10:39.380 I got you, but I've got an already deployed answer for that.

01:10:43.500 Life is about modulation, right?

01:10:47.120 Saying the right thing in the right way at the right time, right?

01:10:51.140 I'm sort of paraphrasing a quote of Aristotle, which in the, not the person of mine, in the

01:10:57.560 happiness book, I have a whole chapter that is going to address your beautiful woman story.

01:11:04.400 So I talk about the inverted U.

01:11:07.660 Does that ring a bell?

01:11:08.540 Do you know what that is, the inverted U?

01:11:10.040 I can imagine on a graph.

01:11:11.400 On a graph, but not this way.

01:11:13.060 Oh, sorry.

01:11:13.560 Yeah, the other way, like a hill.

01:11:14.800 Right.

01:11:15.080 So the inverted U is basically the mathematical representation of something that certainly

01:11:21.720 the ancient Greeks taught us long ago, but they weren't the only ones to say this, you

01:11:25.460 know, everything in moderation, right?

01:11:27.200 So Aristotle in his golden mean argument said, look, if you have, let's say, a soldier who's

01:11:34.300 very cowardly, meek, lacking courage, that's not good.

01:11:38.800 If you have a soldier who is so bold, rash, reckless in his risk-taking, that's not good

01:11:45.060 either.

01:11:45.640 So too little is not good, too much is not good, and the sweet spot is in the middle.

01:11:51.140 So in the happiness book, I have an entire chapter whereby I argue that everything in

01:11:58.120 life, the number one universal rule of optimal flourishing is to find the sweet spot, irrespective

01:12:05.540 of any context that you're talking about.

01:12:07.240 And then I demonstrate it through a bewildering number of examples at the neuronal level,

01:12:12.540 at the individual level, at the societal level.

01:12:15.120 Okay.

01:12:15.760 So now let's apply that principle to here, right?

01:12:19.900 Those guys are at the other end of the curve, right?

01:12:23.940 Knowing when to act in the right way, at the right time, in the right measure, they're not

01:12:29.740 doing that.

01:12:30.380 Because the likelihood of that beautiful girl, when you come up and act like a rather harassing

01:12:36.020 buffoon in that context of her saying, you know what?

01:12:39.700 I'm sold.

01:12:40.560 Let's have massive sex behind that tree right now, right?

01:12:43.720 Therefore, we know that statistically speaking, that approach is never going to work.

01:12:49.540 It's done for no other purpose than to harass.

01:12:52.840 Whereas when I'm at a party where we are supposed to be mingling, and I come up to you and I say,

01:12:59.140 forgive me, I hope you don't mind.

01:13:01.300 I just want to say, gorgeous dress.

01:13:04.180 Does that seem like what I just said is similar to how they're acting?

01:13:08.460 So life is about modulation.

01:13:11.160 And those guys are certainly not modulated.

01:13:14.420 Obviously, there's a bunch of things that are clearly violations there.

01:13:17.220 Of everything you've just said about the right place, the right time, they look drunk.

01:13:23.000 It's very late.

01:13:24.140 She's alone.

01:13:25.160 So she's in a position of vulnerability in many respects.

01:13:27.300 So rolling up to her in such ways.

01:13:29.460 But from the male perspective, you said the probability of getting a good outcome there

01:13:33.240 is so low.

01:13:34.100 But from the male perspective there, they're probably thinking, listen, if the probability

01:13:37.880 is 0.0001, why not?

01:13:41.360 I'll take it.

01:13:42.260 They're probably thinking that.

01:13:43.400 Well, by the way, perhaps, but if you were an empathetic person, you'd say, the fact

01:13:50.660 that she may feel threatened is enough reason not to do it.

01:13:56.780 Therefore, to me, they're all assholes.

01:13:58.820 I agree.

01:13:59.520 And at the heart of this, though, is this idea of self-awareness.

01:14:03.080 Exactly.

01:14:03.580 Because the men that rolled up there, they might, in their own heads, think they have

01:14:07.480 a chance.

01:14:08.060 They might have a distorted view of their probability.

01:14:10.880 I mean, one of them rolled up and said, hey, do you want some tennis lessons?

01:14:14.180 I'm a tennis coach.

01:14:15.120 And from what I saw in the video, he was a good 30, 40 years older than her.

01:14:18.680 And in his head, he must have thought that the effort he's exerting there is worth the

01:14:25.500 probability that he's assumed.

01:14:27.240 Because there's just like no self-awareness.

01:14:28.980 And I think at the heart of this is like, how do you build that self-awareness to know?

01:14:32.540 Oh, I love that you're asking this because one of the things that frustrates me the most

01:14:36.900 in social interactions is when, so I'm not a beautiful woman, so I don't get that violation,

01:14:44.540 but I get a million other violations for all sorts of reasons.

01:14:49.020 One of which is that people do recognize me a lot and they do come up, so they don't

01:14:53.220 do it because they're trying to get me behind the bushes.

01:14:54.960 But then they'll stop me and lecture for the next 25 minutes about whatever idea they're

01:15:03.580 having in their head.

01:15:05.320 Now, I'm polite.

01:15:06.640 I'm thankful that people appreciate my work and will come up.

01:15:09.520 But I didn't sign up while I'm walking with my children and wife for you to lecture me

01:15:14.720 for 25 minutes uninterrupted without me saying a word.

01:15:17.380 If you come up and say, oh, I read The Persistic Mind, professor, loved it.

01:15:21.240 Do you mind if I take a picture with you?

01:15:22.740 I'm always gracious.

01:15:23.860 I'm always, but so all of those social faux pas, almost all of them could be linked to

01:15:31.580 what you said, which is a complete lack of self-awareness, which let's break it down even

01:15:36.580 more.

01:15:37.260 There is a concept in psychology called theory of mind.

01:15:42.500 Are you familiar with it?

01:15:43.440 No.

01:15:44.000 Theory of mind is a ability that you must have in order to have meaningful social interaction.

01:15:53.240 What does theory of mind mean?

01:15:55.200 When I'm chatting with you, I have to be able to put myself in your mind.

01:16:00.380 So for example, if I'm talking to an audience that knows nothing about evolutionary psychology,

01:16:05.660 I might alter the specific words I use because I have theory of mind that makes me say they

01:16:12.180 don't know what domain-specific computational systems would be.

01:16:16.260 If I use those words, not because they're dumb, but because they don't know that jargon.

01:16:21.580 So I already exhibited a good communicator skill, which is I put myself in the theory of mind

01:16:27.300 of my audience and I modulate my message depending on who I'm speaking to.

01:16:32.920 Well, autistic children, by the way, fail on theory of mind.

01:16:37.340 So one of the ways that you are able to diagnose, because autism, you can't give a blood test

01:16:44.120 that shows, oh, there's a marker of autism.

01:16:46.960 So the way that you typically diagnose autism early is through various tasks that they go

01:16:53.780 through.

01:16:54.360 So there is a task for children that you suspect might be autistic where they will fail on such

01:17:01.020 a test, which makes sense intuitively because you know that autistic children don't have very

01:17:05.980 good social skills, are emotionally withdrawn, don't read cues well.

01:17:11.560 So for example, if I'm sitting with you for 25 minutes while you lecture me about why Kamala

01:17:17.080 Harris is a great president, I didn't sign up for that.

01:17:21.060 You want to shake my hand?

01:17:22.160 That's great.

01:17:22.920 Now you can tell if you're not, if you are self-aware that I'm getting impatient.

01:17:29.040 You should be able to tell that my children are starting to shuffle uncomfortably because

01:17:34.680 they're getting impatient, but you're just as oblivious as those assholes.

01:17:39.020 So, so many of social interactions are because of people's lack of self-awareness.

01:17:44.200 And I am shocked by the extent to which most people lack self-awareness.

01:17:51.440 So it's not that 95% of the people that I meet are unbelievably socially gracious and it's

01:17:58.800 only the 5% degenerates that are bad.

01:18:01.360 It's the opposite.

01:18:02.040 But then there's a, there's an explanation for that.

01:18:04.800 Okay, go.

01:18:05.720 Because the ones that did have the self-awareness never came up.

01:18:09.580 Right.

01:18:10.080 Okay.

01:18:10.620 So I'm only exposed to the bad instances.

01:18:14.260 So the ones that have the self-awareness and the theory of mind saw you walk past with

01:18:17.240 your family and went, he's with his family, love his work, but I'm not going to roll

01:18:20.420 up on him with his family.

01:18:22.200 You're exactly right.

01:18:23.160 By the way, that's the exact same mechanism that explains something called the overconfidence

01:18:27.540 bias, which is a cognitive bias, whereby we overestimate something in an over.

01:18:32.980 So for example, if you ask most professors, so do you think that you, your, your teaching

01:18:38.660 ability, is it below average, average, or above average?

01:18:43.320 90% of professors say above average.

01:18:45.220 Well, statistically that can be.

01:18:46.260 Well, why does that happen?

01:18:47.520 It's exactly for what you said.

01:18:48.600 But the students who thought I was great took the time to come up to me and say, professor,

01:18:54.760 love the course.

01:18:55.540 The ones who thought I was an asshole, they didn't come up to me.

01:18:58.820 So what did my brain code?

01:19:00.280 Only the great ones.

01:19:01.520 And therefore I must be great.

01:19:03.320 When you're trying to build something, the problem that we all face is we need talent

01:19:07.740 and skills that we don't have ourselves.

01:19:10.180 And we can waste so much time trying to learn a new skill when really what we should be doing

01:19:15.940 is using a platform like Fiverr.com where you have global access to reviewed, tried and

01:19:22.940 tested world-class talent at your fingertips that you can access in a flexible and affordable

01:19:29.160 way.

01:19:30.000 Fiverr for me when I was starting out in business was a real unlock.

01:19:32.840 It was a bit of a hack because I used to think that the only way for me to add skills to my

01:19:37.500 project was by hiring full-time staff and bringing them into the office.

01:19:42.660 Fiverr.com changes that.

01:19:44.360 And if you're in that position now where there's a skill you're missing for a project that matters

01:19:47.960 to you, here's what you have to do.

01:19:49.840 Visit fiverr.com forward slash diary to learn more.

01:19:52.740 And here's the great thing.

01:19:54.080 If it doesn't go well, Fiverr offer a pretty amazing money back guarantee.

01:19:57.780 So what are you waiting for?

01:20:01.180 What if the way you present yourself isn't appealing to the world?

01:20:05.080 And again, this brings us back to this idea of like being a beta male.

01:20:08.500 And when you say beta male, what we're saying that, what is the definition of beta male?

01:20:12.240 So yes, it's used colloquially.

01:20:14.140 Beta male would be none of the markers that exhibit the types of qualities that women would

01:20:22.480 find attractive you possess.

01:20:24.080 So it could be social dominance.

01:20:26.100 It could be physical dominance.

01:20:27.620 It could be high status.

01:20:29.320 It could be assertiveness.

01:20:30.740 It could be ambition.

01:20:31.680 It could be, look, one of the reasons why women say, I love, I'm very attracted to a

01:20:38.040 funny man, a funny guy.

01:20:39.880 What they're effectively saying is, I want an intelligent man.

01:20:44.140 Because it's very, very unlikely that you could be a very funny satirist if you're not

01:20:49.440 intelligent.

01:20:50.380 Dave Chappelle is probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues, but they have a lot of degrees.

01:20:53.980 But he wouldn't be able to stand up in front of an audience, keep their attention for an

01:20:59.120 hour and a half on really powerful social commentary where they pay $150 to come if he

01:21:06.200 wasn't, if he weren't incredibly intelligent, right?

01:21:09.000 So beta and alpha doesn't just mean tall and dominant and I have a club and I beat you with

01:21:15.620 it.

01:21:15.760 It means, do you exude the types of cues that on average in the mating market, people will say,

01:21:22.460 God damn, that's an attractive guy.

01:21:23.960 Whatever that means.

01:21:25.160 That's how I define it.

01:21:26.900 So if you had to give advice then to men and women who were intent on being higher value and

01:21:34.100 higher status, what would that advice be and how would it differ?

01:21:37.560 Some of the advice will be exactly the same for both sexes.

01:21:40.980 But some of the advice would be sex specific in recognition that not all of the mating attributes

01:21:48.060 are equally desired by the opposite sex, right?

01:21:50.740 So for example, no man has ever uttered the following words, Linda, you have a gorgeous

01:21:58.620 body.

01:21:59.460 I'm unbelievably sexually drawn to you, but you're not exhibiting the type of alacrity to improve

01:22:07.360 your GPA score and your lack of assertiveness in your studies suggests that I'm not going

01:22:13.040 to have sex with you tonight.

01:22:14.900 No man has ever uttered those words.

01:22:17.920 But a lot of women meet a super hot guy at a club.

01:22:22.360 He opens his mouth and what comes out is retarded imbecility.

01:22:28.120 And suddenly the sex opportunity has just shut down.

01:22:32.620 So why am I saying all this?

01:22:34.480 There are some traits that if men were to work on, that's going to bring them more bang for

01:22:42.280 the buck than if women worked on.

01:22:44.340 Other ones, both.

01:22:45.640 So for example, kindness and intelligence are universal traits equally desired by both men

01:22:53.280 and women.

01:22:54.680 So that's true for both men and women across cultures.

01:22:58.560 But social status is preferred by women and men in every known culture.

01:23:05.180 Physical beauty and youth is preferred by men over women in every culture.

01:23:11.300 So some traits, the advice would be the same.

01:23:14.200 Some traits, it'll be sex specific.

01:23:16.860 I wonder, because I'm trying to figure out how to give advice to that bottom 50% of men

01:23:23.820 that are basically having no sex, which I'm told about over and over again, that are at

01:23:29.740 risk of becoming incels or playing video games in their room, that are turning to pornography

01:23:34.300 as a medicine, I guess, and an antidote to their lives.

01:23:38.620 What kind of advice would you offer to those sort of disillusioned men?

01:23:42.880 Is that guy also 90 pounds overweight and pear-shaped?

01:23:47.540 Probably not in shape.

01:23:48.400 Okay, so you know what?

01:23:50.780 Hit the treadmill.

01:23:52.620 Looks matter.

01:23:53.440 They don't matter to women as much as they do to men.

01:23:56.140 But my wife often jokes with me, I don't know if you've ever seen this on the internet,

01:24:00.660 I will often post, in a joking manner, a photo of me from 1985, actually in Southern

01:24:07.280 California, in San Diego, where I'm in my soccer physique days, where I have the eight

01:24:12.840 pack and the V and the whole thing, right?

01:24:14.960 And my wife would joke with me, she said, how come I never got that version of GAT, right?

01:24:20.480 Now, that doesn't mean, she obviously stayed with me when I was 86 pounds heavier, so it's

01:24:26.140 not the only thing, but boy, is it better to have the six or eight pack than not have

01:24:30.860 it.

01:24:31.080 So my height, I can't change, right?

01:24:34.020 So I can't tell those guys that are potentially going to be in sales, please try to grow four

01:24:38.400 inches, right?

01:24:39.580 But again, crack a book.

01:24:41.780 So for example, even with my own children, right?

01:24:45.080 You would think having the father that they have, they're born, they come out of the womb

01:24:49.420 and they're reading.

01:24:50.500 You know how hard it is for me to get them to get away from this damn thing, right?

01:24:56.400 It's one of the biggest frustrations I have as a parent.

01:24:58.940 And as I said earlier, they're very graceful, they're very poised, probably compared to other

01:25:02.880 children, they're a lot more knowledgeable.

01:25:04.220 But it's not a reflex for them to say, of all things that I could do right now, I want

01:25:09.340 to go to a room and read.

01:25:10.980 Whereas it is a reflex that I still have today with complete, full dedication.

01:25:15.560 So read more, learn how to speak better.

01:25:19.780 Again, mating is a compensatory process.

01:25:23.140 There are things that I can't change about me.

01:25:25.560 I can't change my height.

01:25:26.700 I can't change the symmetry or lack thereof in my face.

01:25:31.060 But if I'm thinner, all other things equal, I'm probably going to be better.

01:25:35.300 So it's never a lost cause.

01:25:37.820 Wherever I am in my mating desirability score, there are always effective intervention strategies

01:25:44.260 that could improve my score.

01:25:45.800 So I'm currently at a 42.

01:25:47.720 I think that if I do strategies ABC, I could probably get up to 60.

01:25:52.220 And 60 is going to open me up to a lot more desirable women than when I was 42.

01:25:56.920 We talked a little bit earlier about pornography.

01:26:02.340 I think I said the word once, but I found it quite interesting.

01:26:05.580 You know, we talked a little bit about sexual variety, that you make a case that porn in

01:26:12.900 some ways might be good for us.

01:26:14.380 Because not quite, so I say that porn, it makes perfect evolutionary sense that porn is a

01:26:24.620 behavioral trap that can lead to addiction.

01:26:27.460 So I'm not saying it's good for you.

01:26:29.320 I'm not saying that we've evolved to specifically consume porn.

01:26:33.720 But here's what porn is doing.

01:26:35.680 So in evolutionary theory, there is a distinction between an adaptation and an exaptation.

01:26:42.000 An adaptation is something that has evolved because it confers either survival or reproductive

01:26:50.800 benefits.

01:26:52.420 So my preference for fatty foods is an adaptation that's linked to survival.

01:26:57.900 My desire to use high status products to impress the ladies is a behavioral trait that helps me

01:27:06.140 in the mating market.

01:27:07.620 Okay.

01:27:07.680 An exaptation, not to be confused with an adaptation, is when there is a phenomenon that

01:27:14.340 piggybacks on an adaptation.

01:27:16.920 Itself, it serves no purpose.

01:27:18.920 Do you follow what I mean?

01:27:19.940 So for example, the color of our skeletal system is not an adaptation.

01:27:25.620 There were already path-dependent engineering solution that led to the fact that our skeletal

01:27:33.220 color is the way that it is.

01:27:34.600 It's not itself an adaptation.

01:27:37.280 How would you use this?

01:27:38.860 And I'm going to come to pornography inside it.

01:27:41.720 For example, you could say religion is an adaptation.

01:27:47.220 If you want to say that, this is what you'd have to argue.

01:27:50.840 Groups that are religious, by virtue of their religiosity, exhibit greater communality, greater

01:27:57.380 cohesion, greater in-group, out-group demarcation.

01:28:00.780 So groups that are religious tend to outlive groups that are irreligious.

01:28:07.220 So that would be an adaptive argument for why religion evolved.

01:28:11.520 An exaptation argument for why religion evolved is that religion solves no adaptive function,

01:28:17.960 but rather it piggybacks on systems that already exist in my brain.

01:28:22.440 So for example, I already come with the brain that's coalitional.

01:28:26.200 I view the world as blue team, red team.

01:28:29.080 There's us, there's them.

01:28:30.540 That's already a mechanism that's built into my brain for other reasons.

01:28:34.560 And now religion comes along and piggybacks on that, right?

01:28:37.680 The Jews have the Jews and the Gentiles.

01:28:40.620 The Christians have the believers who are going to be with Jesus in heaven, and the rest of

01:28:46.120 you assholes who are going to burn in hell.

01:28:48.140 The Muslims have the believers and the kuffar, which is a derogatory term for non-Muslims.

01:28:54.880 So all of those religions have, at least Abrahamic religions, have the same structure of us versus

01:29:00.180 them.

01:29:00.520 So with that background, pornography is not something that specifically evolved in us, because

01:29:08.260 there was no pornography in the ancestral savannah.

01:29:11.940 But we've, for example, men have evolved a preference for visual stimuli.

01:29:18.900 Men have evolved a greater penchant for sexual variety.

01:29:22.560 Now there's a product that piggybacks on those innate preferences that says, hey, guess what?

01:29:29.440 There's a screen where I'm going to take you, where you could shop for as many new, nubile,

01:29:36.520 fertile, ready young women.

01:29:38.340 And you never have to see the same woman twice.

01:29:40.500 If you serve for the next 600 years, my brain has been hijacked.

01:29:44.480 So pornography is not something that we've evolved a gene for, but pornography utilizes

01:29:51.120 existing systems to trap us.

01:29:53.780 That's why, by the way, in two of my earlier books, I talk about the evolutionary roots of

01:29:58.600 dark side consumption.

01:29:59.980 Dark side consumption are maladaptive behaviors like pornographic addictions, pathological

01:30:05.280 gambling, eating disorders, compulsive buying.

01:30:08.560 So I explain how these maladaptive behaviors have a biological signature.

01:30:14.340 I was reading psychology today with the study with 688 young Danish adults who were surveyed

01:30:21.800 and respondents viewed the viewing of hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives,

01:30:27.760 their attitudes towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite

01:30:32.880 sex and toward life in general.

01:30:34.880 So I guess the question here is, is pornography, when we think about our evolution and the

01:30:41.180 implications of us consuming pornography and the behavior that it then turns into, is

01:30:46.360 it a net good or a net negative?

01:30:48.760 That's a good one.

01:30:49.720 Well, the research is unclear on this.

01:30:52.000 So I've seen studies that have exactly to your point have said, hey, you know what?

01:30:55.560 It spices things up as long as you do it openly.

01:30:59.720 Again, it's a question of modulation.

01:31:01.460 Remember, I said doing it at the right time, right amount, the right context and so on,

01:31:06.240 right?

01:31:06.740 If once in a while, for whatever reason, whether it be alone or in the context of a couple,

01:31:13.600 you decide to incorporate pornography to spice things up, good for you.

01:31:18.220 If you can't get to work on time because you're spending six hours feverishly masturbating to

01:31:24.480 pornography and then you don't have the sexual vigor to then be intimate with your partner,

01:31:29.680 then we have a problem, right?

01:31:30.740 So many psychiatric conditions that are rooted in behavioral dysfunction, if they're done

01:31:37.300 at the right amount, they're not a problem.

01:31:40.040 It's when they go on the bad side of the curve.

01:31:43.260 Let me give you, again, a big view of this problem.

01:31:48.460 OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, is a psychiatric condition and it can manifest itself in different

01:31:55.300 obsessions or different compulsions.

01:31:57.440 So obsession could be, I'm engaging in what's called ruminative thinking, right?

01:32:04.220 Did I say something at yesterday's party that was stupid and now everybody thinks I'm a moron?

01:32:09.720 Now I will start to try to speak to everybody at the party in a ruminative, obsessive way to

01:32:15.960 make sure that I didn't say anything.

01:32:17.140 Now, compare that to germ contamination fear as a form of OCD.

01:32:22.360 I will now wash my hands repetitively 600 times to make sure that I didn't get infected by anything

01:32:28.860 when I shook somebody's hand, right?

01:32:30.600 Now there is an evolutionary adaptive version of that, which is scanning the environment for

01:32:36.480 environmental threats once, is at the right level of behavioral regulation, right?

01:32:43.280 Check the back door that it's locked.

01:32:45.760 Wash your hands once when you shook many hands at the party.

01:32:49.180 But then what happens to the person who doesn't suffer from OCD, there's a warning flag that

01:32:53.420 goes up in your head.

01:32:54.620 Then you tend to that flag.

01:32:56.300 And what happens to the flag?

01:32:57.320 It goes down and it's finished.

01:32:58.740 First, the OCD person, the flag is hyperactive in an infinite loop.

01:33:04.280 I wash my hands, flag goes down.

01:33:06.660 As I walk away from the sink, flag goes back up.

01:33:09.120 I wash my hands again.

01:33:10.120 I am stuck in a repetitive ritual for eight hours in scalding hot water where the skin is

01:33:16.520 coming off me.

01:33:17.240 I didn't go to work because I've been washing my hands since seven in the morning.

01:33:21.140 That's what happens with pornographic addiction, right?

01:33:23.780 I'm sitting and surfing the internet six hours for porn.

01:33:28.740 So it is at the dysregulation part of that behavior.

01:33:31.860 So it's not that there's anything innately evil or diabolical or bad with surfing porn

01:33:38.560 once in a while, but it's once in a while.

01:33:40.840 Six hours a day, we have a problem.

01:33:42.440 A lot of men that watch pornography, and I've had this said to me a few times, feel an immense

01:33:46.580 amount of shame about the behavior.

01:33:49.800 They wish they didn't.

01:33:51.880 If they could press the button or write down who they want to be, they'd probably be someone

01:33:55.280 that wasn't watching pornography.

01:33:56.320 I think that's probably a safe assumption to make as a general rule.

01:34:01.120 And the other thing that I've heard is that because of the dopamine receptors in our brain,

01:34:05.680 it's going to kind of dampen our in real life sexual attraction and performance and cause

01:34:17.260 to lead in erectile dysfunction.

01:34:18.740 All those things are certainly plausible, right?

01:34:22.800 I mean...

01:34:23.740 And also motivation.

01:34:26.180 Exactly.

01:34:26.560 A lot of people have made the motivation argument to me.

01:34:28.060 If you start messing with your dopamine in such a way, that's the same dopamine and same

01:34:31.300 sort of, I guess, chemical set you need to go and pursue.

01:34:34.400 Exactly right.

01:34:35.140 And are those people that you're talking about, are they ones that we would classify as being

01:34:40.820 in a dysfunction?

01:34:41.440 Or even if they watch porn once every four weeks, they're feeling great shame and they're

01:34:45.780 self-flagellating?

01:34:47.020 I don't know.

01:34:47.340 It was actually...

01:34:47.880 I got told this by a...

01:34:49.600 I do get DMs from guys that are continually asking me to have more conversations about

01:34:53.660 pornography because there's shame associated with it.

01:34:56.720 When I looked at the Google search terms, the most frequent search term in the category

01:35:01.280 that I searched was, how do I quit pornography?

01:35:02.980 And it was by a way...

01:35:06.000 It was astoundingly the most such thing as it related to pornography, which is, how do

01:35:11.340 I quit?

01:35:12.060 Right.

01:35:12.240 And the question itself is quite desperate.

01:35:14.120 Right.

01:35:14.520 So that makes me think that they are in the wrong side of that curve, right?

01:35:18.500 They're already in dysregulation mode because if it were something that I'm...

01:35:22.480 It's kind of like I eat one bad thing a month.

01:35:27.480 That doesn't seem to be a bad issue.

01:35:29.900 If I eat three bad things every single day, I will wake up 86 pounds overweight, right?

01:35:36.460 So again, Aristotle taught us right thing, the right place, and the right amount.

01:35:42.200 So I don't think that there's a deontological rule.

01:35:45.800 And we can, if you want, explain what that means.

01:35:48.320 There is no deontological rule that says under all circumstances, any porn consumption is

01:35:54.720 diabolical and evil.

01:35:56.040 I don't think that's true.

01:35:57.380 Now, maybe also, I'm not a religious Puritan.

01:35:59.600 Maybe if you're a religious Puritan, you say, not even watching one second of porn, you're

01:36:04.320 the devil.

01:36:05.120 But from a non-judgmental, non-Puritanical thing, hey, listen, you've been outside of

01:36:13.440 a...

01:36:13.840 I mean, forgive me, I'm going to be very direct.

01:36:15.780 You're not in a relationship.

01:36:17.600 It's been six months since your last sexual encounter.

01:36:21.300 You have certain libidinal drives.

01:36:23.660 You decide to sit and watch some porn that one time.

01:36:26.780 I don't think that makes you Lucifer.

01:36:28.120 But if you spend six hours a day, every day, while your wife is saying, hey, are we going

01:36:33.820 to get some sexy time tonight?

01:36:35.420 And you go, hmm, my refractory period is such...

01:36:38.900 Refractory is what happens when it's the time between your last ejaculation and when you

01:36:43.720 can get hard again.

01:36:45.220 Well, if I just masturbated five times today, I'm probably not going to be up for it at

01:36:51.620 night.

01:36:52.220 And so again, it's a question of, is it a dysfunction or is it part of the regular norm

01:36:58.160 of behavior?

01:36:58.820 So I don't think people have to feel so guilty about watching porn once in a while.

01:37:03.240 What do you think I should say to my future son about the world that he's growing up in,

01:37:11.840 in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and his natural hardwiring?

01:37:18.340 Wow, what a great question.

01:37:20.340 So there is something called the mismatch hypothesis in evolutionary theory, which basically says

01:37:27.400 that many problems that we face today arise out of a mismatch of a phenomenon that was

01:37:36.160 adaptive in our ancestral past, but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world.

01:37:41.980 Classic example to stick to food.

01:37:43.680 We've evolved the gustatory preferences as a response to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty.

01:37:52.380 Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods, gorging on a lot of food makes perfect evolutionary

01:37:58.320 sense when we don't know when our next meal is coming from.

01:38:01.040 When we live in an environment of plentitude, then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive.

01:38:07.280 So if you look at, for example, I think the top eight or nine killers on the World Health

01:38:12.040 Organization thing, they can all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis.

01:38:16.220 So I would tell your son, knowledge is power to our earlier point of you getting that degree.

01:38:22.740 You never lose in knowing more.

01:38:25.520 You being aware of the mismatch hypothesis, dear son, will allow you to hopefully not fall

01:38:32.280 as easily into behavioral traps.

01:38:34.620 And what are the most important, because you have a book here called Happiness, Eight Secrets

01:38:38.760 for Leading the Good Life?

01:38:40.260 If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life, what are the most important things

01:38:44.100 that I should be aiming at?

01:38:44.860 So I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets.

01:38:50.860 So let me maybe discuss a few of each.

01:38:53.280 So by far, the two choices that will either impart upon me the greatest happiness or the greatest

01:39:00.200 misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession.

01:39:03.920 Okay.

01:39:04.060 And let's break it down very simply.

01:39:06.520 If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, oh, God damn, not this one again.

01:39:11.440 I'm not off to a good start.

01:39:13.200 If I wake up next to this, to that person and I go, oh my God, how did I pull that off?

01:39:19.680 What a delight to wake up next to this person.

01:39:21.920 Well, that's good.

01:39:23.000 Have they empirically measured this?

01:39:24.260 Have they?

01:39:25.040 Not in the way I'm explaining the anecdote.

01:39:28.420 Now, if I go off, after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off and do things in my day-to-day

01:39:36.200 activities that make me do existential glee.

01:39:40.120 Oh boy, what a great day I have lined up.

01:39:42.240 I'm going to be working on my next book.

01:39:44.540 I've got a diary of a CEO.

01:39:48.020 That's going to be super fun.

01:39:49.320 A lot of new people are going to hear about some of my ideas.

01:39:51.940 Then I'm going to maybe have a chat with a graduate student on some really exciting research

01:39:55.300 I'm doing.

01:39:55.600 So, wow, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stress, but it all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning.

01:39:59.880 And then at night, I return to that lovely person.

01:40:02.180 I've cracked the happiness code, right?

01:40:04.760 Now, of course, the question is, the devil is in the details.

01:40:08.500 What can I do to maximize my chances that I make those right choices?

01:40:13.560 I explain in the book, contrary to 99.9% of the quote, self-help prescriptive books,

01:40:20.180 where they tell you exactly with guarantee, here are the eight steps.

01:40:25.600 I explain that life is a statistical game, right?

01:40:29.320 There are statistical vagaries.

01:40:30.980 So all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness.

01:40:35.400 I can't guarantee anything, right?

01:40:36.800 You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not smoking certainly reduces your chances

01:40:43.200 of lung cancer greatly.

01:40:45.800 So earlier, I mentioned birds of a feather flock together versus opposites attract.

01:40:50.360 Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maxim

01:40:56.540 birds of a feather flock together.

01:40:58.920 Complementarity works really nicely in the short term.

01:41:02.040 It doesn't sustain a long-term marriage.

01:41:04.160 The butterflies, the hormones don't last when you've been in a marriage.

01:41:08.780 That doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later,

01:41:11.980 but that's not going to carry the train.

01:41:14.180 Okay, so, but just to give a little bit more, I guess, specificity and nuance to this,

01:41:20.040 you're not, because my partner, she's really into like spiritual stuff.

01:41:22.980 Yes.

01:41:23.220 She's really into like crystals and lots of things that I'm not into.

01:41:26.920 I think we have a great relationship.

01:41:28.320 We've been together a long time.

01:41:30.280 And she's like, I'm into Manchester United and soccer.

01:41:32.880 She's not into that.

01:41:34.140 Well, we might have to have you revisit that because I'm a Manchester City guy, but go ahead.

01:41:37.860 Okay, well, that's the end of the podcast.

01:41:38.960 My apologies.

01:41:42.640 No, look, I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences, but if I were to distill,

01:41:51.740 if I were to use statistical term, if I were to factor analyze your most fundamental life

01:41:59.060 principles between you and your partner, do you think you're more alike or more different?

01:42:04.860 We're more alike.

01:42:05.700 We're aligned.

01:42:07.300 That's my point.

01:42:07.940 Yeah, and this is why I say it, because when people hear it, they might think of it as

01:42:11.040 like tastes.

01:42:12.120 No, no.

01:42:12.400 It's not about the taste.

01:42:13.280 It's not about the surface.

01:42:13.840 The most fundamental deontology, right?

01:42:16.220 I mean, what, you know, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller.

01:42:21.400 My love, my wife loves the fact that I have purity in my, right?

01:42:25.960 She appreciates the fact that, you know, and similar with her, like, for example, we both

01:42:32.300 have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other.

01:42:37.740 Many people will say, oh, you know, if when you trigger jealousy, that spices things up,

01:42:42.920 right?

01:42:43.220 My wife has never a single time done a single thing, right?

01:42:48.240 But that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated.

01:42:52.980 Well, can I ask you as well in there, just, are there things about your wife that you

01:42:59.000 don't have as much, but are fundamental values, but you're drawn to because she's kind of giving

01:43:05.580 you them?

01:43:06.400 I call her MacGyver.

01:43:08.040 Do you know, do you remember who MacGyver was?

01:43:09.860 MacGyver was a show in the 1980s, I think, where he was reputed to be able to put things

01:43:17.340 together, he's in a pickle, he's in a cell, so he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the

01:43:23.840 bar, right?

01:43:25.520 My wife, at a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female, you give my

01:43:31.680 wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball, she'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to

01:43:38.100 Mars.

01:43:38.860 She is unbelievably, in French you say, débrouillable.

01:43:42.420 She knows how to put things together and so on.

01:43:44.820 And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do it.

01:43:47.440 For me, for all my fancy academic stuff, take a light bulb, it'll probably take me four

01:43:53.800 weeks before I figure how it works.

01:43:55.980 She's already built a rocket.

01:43:57.340 She's basically Elon Musk of the sad household.

01:44:00.900 I greatly admire that in her and it's something that I possess very little.

01:44:05.540 I wanted to ask, one of the things you said a second ago was about the evolutionary basis

01:44:09.920 of, we're talking about happiness and what it is to be happy, you talked about the partner

01:44:13.740 part.

01:44:14.220 What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose?

01:44:18.260 Why do we need that?

01:44:19.460 Right.

01:44:20.000 So we've got a very big frontal lobe, right?

01:44:24.440 So remember earlier I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation?

01:44:27.360 One argument for why we love literature so much is that our brains need nourishment via storytelling

01:44:37.620 and therefore that's an exaptation.

01:44:40.460 My brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me engaged and therefore literature is one

01:44:45.980 way by which I eat that nourishment, to use the food analogy, right?

01:44:49.880 So I suspect that because we are sentient beings, right, we're not beings that are only driven

01:44:57.420 by instincts of survival and reproduction, right?

01:45:01.440 I mean, all animals have to solve two problems, survive and reproduce, right?

01:45:08.100 That's it.

01:45:08.520 That's the entire game of life.

01:45:10.040 But because we have consciousness, because we have meta-knowledge, because we are sentient,

01:45:17.540 there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing.

01:45:21.500 And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning.

01:45:26.620 So I'm a very happy...

01:45:28.460 I mean, I should mention though that happiness, about 50% of individual differences in happiness

01:45:34.220 scores comes from our genes.

01:45:35.800 But the good news is, is that it leaves 50% up for grabs, right?

01:45:40.480 So I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than you, so I'm now winning at

01:45:46.580 the race.

01:45:47.060 But if I don't make good choices, if I don't adopt good mindsets, then even though you started

01:45:56.040 lower than me in an innate sense, you might surpass me.

01:45:58.880 And so it really is an interaction of nature and nurture.

01:46:02.120 Purpose and meaning, so to that, I may be answering it in an oblique way.

01:46:07.800 I argue, and remember I said having a good partner and having a good job are the two ways

01:46:14.320 that you can maximize happiness.

01:46:15.940 I argue that the best way to achieve occupational happiness is two metrics, one of which is

01:46:23.320 going to relate to purpose and meaning.

01:46:24.400 Having temporal freedom, all other things equal, is better than not having temporal freedom.

01:46:31.700 Let me explain what I mean by that.

01:46:33.380 An airplane pilot, once the door shuts, the next 16 hours from LA to Singapore, it's set, right?

01:46:42.560 I mean, literally, temporally, in terms of time, physically, I'm stuck, right?

01:46:47.060 That, to me, is unthinkable.

01:46:50.380 I float through life.

01:46:52.020 I work harder than most people, but I do it in my own way.

01:46:56.040 Right now, I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book prospectus.

01:46:59.620 Then I'm going to go train for an hour.

01:47:01.680 Then I'm going to go read for three hours.

01:47:04.160 And that temporal, I don't have what I call scheduling asphyxia, right?

01:47:09.200 That helps me.

01:47:10.400 I do.

01:47:11.220 You do.

01:47:12.160 Try to resolve that if you can.

01:47:13.580 Number two, which is going to speak to purpose and meaning, I argue that all other things

01:47:18.980 equal, any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse is a direct path to purpose

01:47:27.260 and happiness, purpose and meaning.

01:47:29.780 What do I mean by that?

01:47:31.440 A stand-up comic is creating a routine that until he came along, we didn't have.

01:47:37.380 A chef is creating a dish out of nothing.

01:47:40.620 An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before.

01:47:44.320 An author, remember earlier we were talking, I think I was off air and you were saying,

01:47:48.300 how long did it take you or what was the process?

01:47:50.500 I said, you know, there's something magical about writing a book, right?

01:47:53.600 Because there literally is a day where you open the laptop, you open a Word document.

01:47:58.880 That Word document, which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind, save, doesn't

01:48:04.420 have a single letter typed.

01:48:07.400 It's blank.

01:48:08.040 And then through the magic of creation, creative impulse, a year later, I press the send button.

01:48:15.860 A year later, you're consuming that book.

01:48:18.700 That has to be a direct path to purpose and meaning.

01:48:21.820 Now, that doesn't mean that the actuarial scientist, your brother, doesn't have a worthy life.

01:48:27.600 But surely a person who wakes up, who's an artist, who's an author, by the nature of him creating,

01:48:36.340 says, oh, I can't wait to get to the studio.

01:48:39.060 I doubt that, maybe not your brother, I doubt that most actuarial scientists go,

01:48:44.020 I'm going to get into that actuarial table today like there's no tomorrow.

01:48:48.320 I'm going to spank that actuarial table.

01:48:50.500 Okay, so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work then to arrive at a conclusion

01:48:54.680 that I haven't heard you say, I read in the Consuming Instinct, your other book, chapter

01:49:01.540 four, that younger siblings like me, youngest of four, are more likely to be creative.

01:49:08.780 Oh, you pulled that one out.

01:49:11.020 Okay.

01:49:11.220 So does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative and creativity is associated

01:49:15.680 with happiness in the way that you just described, that I am happier than all of my siblings?

01:49:21.520 Do you want to guess what Dr. Saad's sibling order is?

01:49:26.820 You're the youngest.

01:49:27.840 By far.

01:49:29.060 So let me explain, let me stop, before I answer that and the way you frame the question,

01:49:33.420 let me explain what the mechanism is, okay?

01:49:36.500 I also just want to add one layer to that as well.

01:49:37.920 I was sat at dinner the other day with about 10 of our directors, really their founders

01:49:43.240 of companies, essentially.

01:49:44.880 And I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them because I've started to

01:49:47.760 perform a bit of a picture about this.

01:49:48.900 And I went around the table and asked every single one of them, where do you rank in order

01:49:52.180 of siblings?

01:49:53.220 And eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling.

01:49:55.780 Oh, I love it.

01:49:56.480 That was so crazy.

01:49:57.700 Yeah.

01:49:59.260 That's psychology.

01:50:00.060 So let me tell you the background to that theory, okay?

01:50:03.400 Which I've done my own research on and published work on it.

01:50:06.860 But the original theory comes from Frank Soloway, who's a historian of science, who wrote a

01:50:14.040 book, which I highly recommend to all your viewers.

01:50:17.960 It's a bit technical, but you can get through it.

01:50:20.980 It's called Born to Rebel.

01:50:22.820 It's a book that explores historically the people who've generated the biggest breakthrough, radical

01:50:34.240 scientific innovations, and what was their birth order.

01:50:37.940 And it turns out, not unlike how you did it with the 10 and eight of them were last born,

01:50:43.620 out of the 28 most radical scientific innovations ever posited, 23 out of the 28 were the last

01:50:55.080 born, later borns.

01:50:56.580 Now, so then the question is, okay, well, fine, that's just a phenomenon, but what explains

01:51:01.220 it?

01:51:01.760 Now, the explanation is mind-blowing.

01:51:03.800 You ready?

01:51:04.080 Okay, so Frank Soloway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth

01:51:11.420 order, it's from the perspective of the parent's behavior to the child as a function of their

01:51:18.540 birth order.

01:51:19.600 First child, I'm very strict.

01:51:21.460 Second child, I'm getting tired.

01:51:23.420 Fifth child, run the streets, I don't give a shit, okay?

01:51:26.920 So that's the causality of the birth order effect.

01:51:30.700 He flipped the whole thing.

01:51:31.800 He said, no, no, no, much of the impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the

01:51:37.980 child, and let me explain how.

01:51:39.780 He said that one of the fundamental survival problems, it's an evolutionary theory, one

01:51:44.840 of the fundamental survival problems that a child faces is to differentiate itself from

01:51:52.800 all other siblings to etch maximal investment from the parents.

01:51:59.760 How do I do that?

01:52:01.540 So that's called the Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis.

01:52:06.120 When you start off your firstborn, all of the niches are unoccupied.

01:52:11.780 There is the, I'm a good boy niche.

01:52:14.260 I'm a rebel niche.

01:52:16.320 I'm a, right?

01:52:16.980 There are many, many, there's a panoply of niches that are unoccupied.

01:52:21.020 So I'm firstborn, I'm going to pick whichever one.

01:52:24.000 The second born is born, there is N minus one niches.

01:52:30.500 One is taken.

01:52:32.260 So the, I'm a good boy niche, I got to differentiate myself.

01:52:35.440 I'm second, I'm an asshole niche.

01:52:37.880 I'm a, I'm a contrarian niche.

01:52:39.980 Let's keep going down the birth order.

01:52:42.280 There are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches left for later borns, especially if the sip ship

01:52:48.480 is big, Soloway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key personality

01:52:59.100 traits, one of which is open to experience.

01:53:03.020 So he argued that later borns up to last borns, by virtue of having to solve that original problem,

01:53:09.900 will end up being much bigger out of the box thinkers, not being stuck on conformity, on

01:53:17.120 orthodoxy.

01:53:18.380 Hence, in the context of scientific innovations, the last borns are the ones who say, no, this

01:53:22.640 is bullshit.

01:53:23.200 I'm going this way.

01:53:24.580 And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that

01:53:31.760 last borns were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters.

01:53:37.980 So I took the exact framework, but instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations,

01:53:43.440 I applied it to radical product innovations and adoptions.

01:53:47.900 So all that to say that based on that, one could surmise that if openness to experience

01:53:55.600 is correlated to happiness, then the latter borns would score happier.

01:54:02.240 I really wonder which one it is, because I can attest to kind of both being true.

01:54:06.160 I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also by the time I was 10,

01:54:12.280 the same rules didn't apply to me.

01:54:13.620 When you said-

01:54:14.160 How many are you?

01:54:14.760 There's four.

01:54:15.440 Okay.

01:54:15.840 When you said run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood.

01:54:19.820 My oldest, the oldest, which is my sister, Amanda, she, if she wasn't home by 9 p.m.,

01:54:26.480 she was also a woman, so the rules were slightly different for her, 9 p.m., it was hell to

01:54:30.300 pay.

01:54:30.460 If I didn't come home for two to three days, there was no one there to ground me anyway.

01:54:35.600 And I think that opens you up to experimentation.

01:54:39.460 You start fiddling with stuff.

01:54:40.820 You start, I was doing all kinds of things in the house, like breaking things apart, looking

01:54:44.300 inside them, starting little businesses, selling the cigarettes from my mom's room.

01:54:47.720 Sorry, mother.

01:54:48.160 She really doesn't know that I ever did that.

01:54:49.960 But all these kinds of things, which start to build this, you know, repository of information,

01:54:54.100 but also it built my confidence in a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop

01:54:58.220 this different relationship with risk.

01:54:59.580 So it's hard to figure out which one it is.

01:55:01.240 Maybe it's both.

01:55:02.100 Maybe it's probably both.

01:55:03.040 I think it's a bit of both.

01:55:04.820 But yeah, you know, I haven't been, I know that your team had asked me, what are some

01:55:09.240 questions that we could ask that no one else?

01:55:11.080 Well, certainly pulling up that birth order one, you've succeeded on asking me a question

01:55:15.580 that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time.

01:55:17.820 So kudos to your team.

01:55:19.020 Well, yeah, it's incredible.

01:55:20.200 We have a lot of great researchers.

01:55:21.280 And by the way, both my wife and I are last borns.

01:55:26.560 So to the assortative mating, and I'm not sure if that's been done.

01:55:30.560 And if it hasn't been done, it'd be very easy to do, right?

01:55:33.560 So here's an experiment.

01:55:34.760 If anybody steals it, I better get the credit.

01:55:37.280 You just look at a thousand marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score,

01:55:44.140 and then see if there is assortative mating on birth ownership.

01:55:48.920 Interesting.

01:55:49.400 Boom, there's your thesis for your undergraduate psychology degree, which you will pursue

01:55:54.380 and send me an email that I deserve the credit for having forced me to do.

01:55:57.980 Couldn't I just run this as an advert on social media, as a survey?

01:56:01.820 And so I can get a link, run it as a Facebook meta ad at people and say, are you married?

01:56:07.760 If they say they are, I'll say, how long have you been married?

01:56:10.060 They'll say, how long?

01:56:10.600 I said, are you and your partner, where do you rank in terms of birth order?

01:56:14.300 And then I can get the stats.

01:56:15.680 Absolutely.

01:56:16.040 So many studies now, scientific studies, are conducted online.

01:56:21.140 And they can be conducted online in exactly the way that you said.

01:56:24.060 You use existing social portals to have a big wave of data collection.

01:56:28.040 But there are other ways, by the way.

01:56:29.520 Have you heard of MTurk?

01:56:31.420 No.

01:56:31.600 So MTurk is a platform where people sign up to be participants, right?

01:56:39.940 Now, let's say I'm a researcher and I say, I want men over 18 years old, okay?

01:56:47.380 Well, that's easier to get than if I were to say, I want men who are over 18 years old,

01:56:53.620 shorter than six feet and from Lithuania and they're diabetic.

01:56:56.720 Now, depending on how I structure my criteria of inclusion, the price that I have to pay for

01:57:06.340 getting those participants will go up, right?

01:57:09.960 So if I'm running a study, I just need male and female adults to run a study on this task,

01:57:16.720 it ends up being a few cents.

01:57:18.420 And so it has opened up the velocity at which we can do research, scientific research, not

01:57:25.060 just stuff I post on Twitter, scientific research.

01:57:27.880 It has increased it tenfold.

01:57:30.020 So you can certainly do that.

01:57:31.100 We'll do it.

01:57:31.680 So I set this as a challenge to my research team and our data science team, which is to

01:57:36.120 run a survey on social media using adverts, so digital adverts, Facebook ads, meta ads,

01:57:41.860 X ads, whatever.

01:57:43.060 And the survey should basically seek to answer first their gender, their marital status, ask

01:57:47.740 what birth order they fell in and then ask what order their birth, their marital partner

01:57:53.900 fell into.

01:57:54.880 But then also understand how long they've been together because we want to check these

01:57:57.140 marriages are legit.

01:57:57.980 Absolutely.

01:57:58.580 And I'll put it on the screen.

01:57:59.760 That'd be so cool.

01:58:00.800 And please share with me the result.

01:58:02.400 Well, by the way, what we're doing right now is what I call, so in the happiness book,

01:58:09.040 I have a chapter called Life as a Playground.

01:58:11.780 And I argue that science is the highest form of play.

01:58:16.360 Because when you're doing a 1,000-piece puzzle, you're putting which piece goes with what?

01:58:21.380 Well, what's science?

01:58:22.300 There's a bunch of variables floating around.

01:58:24.540 Does this one correlate with this one?

01:58:26.000 Does this one cause this one?

01:58:27.180 Or the other way?

01:58:28.320 I'm just playing.

01:58:29.560 Now, and I'm getting paid for it.

01:58:31.220 How could I not be happy?

01:58:33.460 But the puzzle of life, unfortunately, the puzzle is three-dimensional, which means sometimes

01:58:37.960 you think you got it in the right place, but actually it was just 100 years later you find

01:58:42.120 out that it was completely wokeness.

01:58:44.640 Yes, sir.

01:58:47.240 It's really intriguing to me that the evolutionary scientists that I've spoken to have for some

01:58:53.120 reason all found themselves on the subject of wokeness in society.

01:58:56.680 And it's hard for the average person to maybe understand the link between evolutionary science

01:59:02.520 and wokeness and politics.

01:59:04.720 Right.

01:59:05.740 So you want me to try to tease those out?

01:59:07.620 Yeah.

01:59:07.820 And how did you find yourself talking about the idea of wokeness?

01:59:10.480 Right.

01:59:10.740 So it all began, as we mentioned earlier in our chat, when I saw the rejection of biology

01:59:19.140 in explaining human affairs, which is something that I call biophobia, the fear of using biology

01:59:24.900 to explain human affairs.

01:59:25.960 And at the time, it was in the service of the scientific work that I was doing.

01:59:29.940 I mean, what do you mean you're desk rejecting my paper at a journal because you don't think

01:59:34.240 that biology is relevant to consumer behavior?

01:59:36.080 How could it be otherwise?

01:59:37.760 That's insane.

01:59:38.980 So that's when I was first exposed to the possibility of a human mind being parasitized.

01:59:46.600 Right.

01:59:47.620 Now, let me explain why I use the parasitic framework, how I came up with that.

01:59:53.140 So one of the things that you do as an evolutionary scientist, when you're trying to understand

01:59:58.420 the evolutionary signature of a behavior, you often will compare it across species.

02:00:03.500 Remember earlier, I talked about testes size and across primates and females.

02:00:10.700 So it was many different species.

02:00:12.640 And that allows you to then draw a final principle based on comparing all those species.

02:00:18.020 So I started looking through the animal literature to look for something that might explain why

02:00:24.220 do animals do insane things.

02:00:27.520 And so that's when I fell on the field of parasitology, which is just the study of parasites.

02:00:33.260 But I wasn't looking for, because a tapeworm is a parasite, but it goes into your intestinal

02:00:38.560 tract.

02:00:39.300 I wanted the parasites that go into your brain.

02:00:42.600 Those are called neuroparasites.

02:00:44.760 And it turns out that there's a very, I mean, it's almost like science fiction.

02:00:48.300 It is a whole field of study that explores this host parasite dynamic where the parasite

02:00:56.420 is trying to enter the host's brain, alter its circuitry to suit its interests.

02:01:02.460 What is a parasite?

02:01:03.820 So a parasite is usually, I mean, literally a brain worm.

02:01:07.940 So for example, Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can infect human minds, but it most famously

02:01:14.780 infects the minds of mice.

02:01:17.340 When they are parasitized in their brains by this parasite, they become sexually attracted

02:01:23.460 to cats and their urine, which is not a good one.

02:01:28.900 Yeah.

02:01:29.240 So let me give you a few examples.

02:01:30.620 There's a wood cricket, an actual cricket, that abhors water.

02:01:36.400 It doesn't like, it stays clear of water.

02:01:39.080 When it is parasitized by a hair worm, this hair worm needs to get the wood cricket to jump

02:01:47.560 in water because it could only complete its reproductive cycle in water.

02:01:52.620 So a wood cricket that doesn't have the brain worm looks at the water and says, I'm staying

02:01:57.420 away.

02:01:58.020 A wood cricket that is parasitized by this hair worm jumps into the water merely to its

02:02:04.000 death because it has altered its neural circuitry to suit its interest.

02:02:08.900 So when I saw that field, neuroparasitology, I had my eureka moment, just like I did when

02:02:16.720 I first discovered evolutionary psychology.

02:02:18.760 I said, I will now use the neuroparasitological model to argue that human beings can not only

02:02:26.900 be parasitized by actual physical brain worms, they could be parasitized by ideological brain

02:02:33.700 worms.

02:02:34.000 And so continuing the metaphor, I said, so what are these parasites?

02:02:39.860 Postmodernism is a parasitic idea.

02:02:42.940 So postmodernism, actually, I argue that that is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas

02:02:49.320 because postmodernism purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective

02:02:56.140 truth that there are no objective truths.

02:02:57.860 So, and the reason for that is everything is shackled by biases.

02:03:04.460 Everything is shackled by subjectivity.

02:03:07.120 So to speak of an objective truth with a capital T is nonsense.

02:03:11.480 Everything is subjective.

02:03:13.360 And therefore, I argue in the book that all of these parasitic ideas originally started with

02:03:20.320 a noble goal.

02:03:21.480 And in the service of that goal, if there has to be a collateral damage called truth, so be

02:03:26.920 it, it's a worthwhile collateral damage in the service of that higher social justice goal.

02:03:33.460 No, it's a deontological principle.

02:03:35.960 It's an absolute, right?

02:03:37.800 So you never pursue science in a biased manner.

02:03:42.320 Freedom of speech is available to all.

02:03:44.940 It's not, I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump.

02:03:49.120 Then you're being a consequentialist.

02:03:51.520 So that's what the book is about.

02:03:52.960 It traces the history of all these parasitic ideas, and then it offers a mind vaccine against

02:03:59.720 that stupidity.

02:04:01.640 What if the freedom of speech causes harm to people and risks their lives?

02:04:09.620 That's a great question.

02:04:10.900 So I am a free speech absolutist.

02:04:13.680 And so let me explain what that means.

02:04:15.540 We didn't get into my personal history.

02:04:17.500 I'll just give it for the relevance of what I'm about to say.

02:04:22.300 I was born in Lebanon.

02:04:23.880 I grew up in Lebanon, and we escaped Lebanon under imminent death because of being Jewish.

02:04:30.420 Okay?

02:04:31.160 So my Jewish identity caused me to come close to being eradicated.

02:04:38.440 Give me some color and detail to that story.

02:04:40.080 So I was born in Lebanon in the 60s.

02:04:43.180 Lebanon was historically referred to as the Paris of the Middle East, progressive tolerant

02:04:48.580 Lebanon.

02:04:49.740 Progressive tolerant in the context of the Middle East, which means something very different

02:04:53.840 than progressive and tolerant in the West.

02:04:56.020 And you'll see in a second why.

02:04:57.960 When I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the president of Egypt, who was a very

02:05:05.180 popular figure in the Arab world because he was what's called a pan-Arabist, meaning he

02:05:09.040 was trying to unify the Arab people under one umbrella, right, to hopefully defeat the pesky

02:05:16.980 Jews and so on.

02:05:18.300 He passed away.

02:05:19.660 When he passed away, when I was five years old, as so often happens in the Middle East,

02:05:24.240 people take to the streets to scream and shout and burn and lament and so on.

02:05:28.820 And as they were proceeding down my street, where I lived as a five-year-old child, the

02:05:35.000 screaming was, death to Jews, death to Jews.

02:05:38.520 So I turned to my mother and I say, why are they screaming death?

02:05:42.760 What do we have to do with this?

02:05:44.360 Shh.

02:05:44.880 Hi.

02:05:45.220 Don't put your head out.

02:05:46.400 Okay.

02:05:46.820 So that was my first time where I saw, wait a minute, there are people out there that want

02:05:50.840 me dead because I'm Jewish.

02:05:53.600 Fast forward a few years later, we're in class and the teachers, this is pre-Civil War.

02:05:58.820 Okay.

02:05:59.480 The Civil War started in 75.

02:06:02.460 Sitting in class, teacher says to everybody, please stand up and say what you want to be

02:06:07.740 when you grow up.

02:06:08.880 I want to be a policeman.

02:06:10.480 I want to be a doctor.

02:06:12.320 I want to be a soccer player.

02:06:13.780 One kid gets up who I'd known through all the years of elementary school who knew I was

02:06:18.480 Jewish.

02:06:18.860 When I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to raucous applause and laughter and so on.

02:06:24.580 Then the Lebanese War broke out.

02:06:26.340 It became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon.

02:06:30.260 We left Lebanon under very, very difficult conditions.

02:06:34.620 Once we emigrated to Montreal, Canada, my parents, maybe they regret it now, kept returning

02:06:42.260 to Lebanon because we still had business interests and full-fledged, brutal, massive war.

02:06:47.280 On one of their return trips in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah, which is one of the Palestinian

02:06:55.380 factions.

02:06:57.040 Some really bad things happened to them.

02:07:00.200 But then, luckily, through the connections that we had, we were able to get them out.

02:07:06.620 Some bad things happened to them.

02:07:08.480 Inside captivity.

02:07:10.660 I mean, you can imagine.

02:07:12.180 They were tortured.

02:07:12.620 Yeah.

02:07:16.340 Mother said, and I've seldom said this.

02:07:19.180 I'm only saying it because you're asking.

02:07:21.620 My biggest fear when I found out the story after the fact, I didn't even know they were,

02:07:27.540 I didn't know that they were kidnapped as it happened.

02:07:31.820 I knew there was a lot of mayhem in the house.

02:07:33.680 And I was asking, what's going on?

02:07:35.100 They said, oh, mom and dad have some business issues.

02:07:37.000 They were lying to me to protect me.

02:07:38.200 I'm 15 years old.

02:07:39.460 Although there was a kid at school, in my high school, whose parents were very good

02:07:45.740 friends of my parents, also Lebanese Jews.

02:07:48.340 He knew that my parents were kidnapped.

02:07:50.860 I didn't know they were kidnapped.

02:07:52.820 And later, I found out that as he saw me in high school, walking around and laughing and

02:07:58.520 joking, he thought, boy, this guy is made of ice.

02:08:01.800 I mean, he's callous that he's taking it so relaxed.

02:08:08.080 But actually, I didn't know that he knew, but I didn't know.

02:08:11.580 So when they came out of captivity and came back to Montreal, my biggest, speak about evolutionary

02:08:18.780 psychology and the male mindset.

02:08:20.500 He said, my biggest fear was whether my mother had been raped.

02:08:26.000 Now, she told me stories of whatever, but she said that she says, I never knew if it was

02:08:32.280 true.

02:08:32.460 And we only discussed it that one time and we never discussed it again.

02:08:35.880 She said that, no, she wasn't.

02:08:38.060 Now, I don't know if she lied about that.

02:08:41.580 She said some other really bad things.

02:08:43.400 I mean, I'm not going to get into all of it.

02:08:44.420 But I've always wondered whether she said that just so that, you know, it's not exactly

02:08:52.140 something, you know, it's shame and so on.

02:08:53.900 But I remember that if she had said yes, my thinking as a 15-year-old boy was that I would

02:09:00.240 spend the rest of my life seeking vengeance on those assholes.

02:09:03.980 Okay?

02:09:04.620 So it wasn't a pleasant upbringing.

02:09:06.580 I could tell you stories that you wouldn't believe.

02:09:08.280 It would be much worse than Rambo.

02:09:10.040 So now coming back to your freedom of speech issue and if it causes harm, I am Jewish with

02:09:17.720 my personal history.

02:09:19.300 I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew the most offensive thing possible, which

02:09:27.120 is they are rejecting a documented historical reality where 6 million people were exterminated.

02:09:35.500 Nothing could be more offensive.

02:09:37.180 No, it never happened.

02:09:38.180 So you want to talk about hurt?

02:09:40.040 An offense, an insult, that's it.

02:09:42.940 But in a free society, I have to tolerate racists, imbyssels, assholes, falsehood spreaders.

02:09:49.500 I beat them by speaking here, by telling better ideas.

02:09:53.820 So the only context where I don't support freedom of speech, it's already enshrined in

02:09:59.500 the First Amendment, direct incitement to violence.

02:10:04.020 Okay.

02:10:04.180 So let me draw a thing.

02:10:07.400 Let's suppose I were a white supremacist or neo-Nazi.

02:10:11.600 If I get up on a show and say, Judaism is a crock of shit.

02:10:17.400 It's useless.

02:10:18.420 It's the most disgusting religion.

02:10:20.700 Totally okay.

02:10:21.780 Freedom of speech.

02:10:22.460 If I say, later tonight at the corner of Lexington and 6th Avenue, there is a synagogue.

02:10:30.620 Let's go to when they come out of service and beat the hell out of those Jews.

02:10:35.520 If not kill them, that's not okay.

02:10:37.460 Now, it has to be direct incitement to violence.

02:10:41.000 So you can't say criticizing Judaism or Islam can create Islamophobia.

02:10:47.800 Bullshit.

02:10:48.840 No ideology is above scrutiny.

02:10:51.780 No belief system is above scrutiny.

02:10:54.420 Your feelings are hurt.

02:10:56.660 F off.

02:10:57.760 Grow a pair.

02:10:59.080 Okay.

02:10:59.220 So as long as you don't say, let's kill the Jews, spend all the rest of your life criticizing Judaism, that's your right.

02:11:08.120 Some people will say that it's kind of like, I was thinking of it like a staircase.

02:11:11.400 As you were speaking, I was drawing a staircase.

02:11:13.060 Because if I sat here and I said, I consider myself to be a black man.

02:11:17.760 I mean, I'm half black, I guess.

02:11:19.520 My mother's Nigerian, my father's English.

02:11:21.580 But if I was to sit here and say, all mixed ethnicity people like myself are evil, they are disgusting, they are vultures, they are vermin, which is some of that sort of 1940s narrative towards the Jewish population.

02:11:38.060 It's not long before if me as a podcaster and many more of us all got behind that narrative, you would see this inevitable rise in people going out there and killing people that are mixed race.

02:11:49.600 Yes.

02:11:50.560 And this is where it becomes tricky, right?

02:11:52.840 So if me, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Andrew Huberman, all of the, you know, podcasters who have a significant audience, Alex Cooper, you name them, all started hitting a specific group of people with a narrative, I'm convinced there'd be a rise in violence towards those people just walking down the street and living their lives.

02:12:09.520 Right.

02:12:09.940 And this is where the issue arises.

02:12:11.580 Okay, so then let me test your belief.

02:12:15.180 Are you familiar with the grooming gangs in Britain?

02:12:17.260 I'm familiar with the notion of it, yeah.

02:12:19.880 I know, I think I know what you're going to say.

02:12:22.340 I think I've heard.

02:12:23.000 So up and down England, in every town that you can think of, big or small, for the past 30 plus years, there has been an industrial scale level grooming and raping of white British girls.

02:12:36.220 The perpetrators are 90% plus on the conservative estimate, 90%, coming from one background and one ideology.

02:12:46.980 Is it marginalizing and insulting to identify that ideology?

02:12:51.780 I'd say it's not, because it's probably an important data point to understand the causation of a thing.

02:12:59.940 Okay, let me give you another example.

02:13:04.400 American prisons are predominantly occupied by black men, or at least it over-indexes with black men versus the population ratios.

02:13:14.320 So are black men, therefore, criminals at birth?

02:13:20.660 Right, right.

02:13:22.260 Well, the way I would address that is I would defeat that statement with science.

02:13:28.660 So I would say, can you show me the data that suggests that dispositionally, meaning innately, what would be the mechanism by which black men are higher than white men?

02:13:40.700 Now, if you show it, great, but I'm willing to bet you can't show it.

02:13:44.600 Therefore, what you just stated is a bunch of bullshit, and you know how you're going to suffer?

02:13:48.080 Are the social consequences and stigma of being a racist asshole?

02:13:52.000 But I let you say it, but I'll defeat your idea.

02:13:54.980 On the other hand, if you said, if we look at patterns of criminality in the United States, are black men exponentially overrepresented?

02:14:08.800 Yes.

02:14:09.400 Now, we can say it's because it's white supremacy that causes black men to kill white people, or we could say, could there be any causative agents that if we are caring, decent people, maybe we should talk about openly?

02:14:25.600 Well, in today's world, I couldn't even, I say, I don't give a shit, but most people would say, don't even say that there's a greater incidence of black criminality.

02:14:35.280 That itself is racist, and you're marginalizing people.

02:14:38.160 So that's why I don't believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.

02:14:42.260 Forbidden knowledge is the idea that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued precisely because of your staircase.

02:14:50.700 It's going to result in negative downstream effects.

02:14:54.160 I argue that that's a grotesquely dangerous principle.

02:14:58.800 Why?

02:14:59.460 So here I'm going to introduce a term and explain it, which I mentioned earlier.

02:15:03.680 In ethics, there are two ethical systems.

02:15:06.460 There is what's called deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.

02:15:10.880 Deontological ethics is absolute statements, like Kantian imperatives.

02:15:16.540 It is never okay to lie.

02:15:18.560 That would be a deontological statement.

02:15:20.540 A consequentialist statement would be, it is okay to lie, to spare someone's feelings.

02:15:26.760 So I always joke, if you want to have a long, happy marriage, when you hear the following question,

02:15:32.800 do I look fat in those jeans, put on your consequentialist hat really fast and say,

02:15:39.520 no, sweetie, you've never looked more beautiful.

02:15:41.440 I might have just lied, but I just spared my partner, my wife's feelings.

02:15:47.280 So for many, many things, it makes perfect sense that we all wear our consequentialist hat.

02:15:54.300 But there are certain principles that are foundational that by the very definition of that principle have to be deontological.

02:16:04.580 Okay?

02:16:05.280 Freedom of speech is deontological.

02:16:07.120 The pursuit of truth has to be deontological.

02:16:11.040 Presumption of innocence in the justice system has to be deontological.

02:16:15.760 Right?

02:16:16.240 Journalistic integrity, if you truly are a truth reporter, has to be deontological.

02:16:20.880 But what have we seen throughout the last four or five years?

02:16:23.900 Let me show you violations of these.

02:16:26.100 I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump.

02:16:31.120 Deontological principle has become consequentialist.

02:16:33.540 I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop, because if we release that information, then Joe Biden loses to Orange Himmler, and then that's too bad.

02:16:48.020 So it's perfectly okay to suppress what we now know is an absolutely true laptop, where there is astronomical political corruption.

02:16:58.700 But it was okay to lie.

02:17:00.780 I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh, because you know he's a gang rapist going up and down the eastern seaboard, raping everybody.

02:17:10.360 Now, of course, we have no data to support that, no evidence.

02:17:14.000 And the one who accused him one day before the confirmation said that she thinks it was 36 years later, it could have been 38, it could have been last week.

02:17:23.280 I can't really remember, but I know that he sexually assaulted me.

02:17:26.660 And we don't really care about this thing called evidence.

02:17:29.520 A lot of my super fancy colleagues and friends said, oh, I know that we should assume that someone is presumptively innocent.

02:17:37.200 But it's too important in this case to apply that deontological principle.

02:17:41.560 They didn't use that word.

02:17:42.380 They don't even know it.

02:17:43.780 So in this case, let us just assume that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist.

02:17:48.600 So no, there is no forbidden knowledge in science.

02:17:52.100 I'll give you a great example.

02:17:53.660 There's a guy called, his name escapes me right now.

02:17:57.220 He was a psychologist at University of Western Ontario who spent his entire career studying racial differences.

02:18:04.660 And here's now the worst part, in intelligence, okay?

02:18:10.900 So I remember one time, this is, I don't think I've ever mentioned this story personally, so you're getting an exclusive here.

02:18:17.140 1996, I'm speaking at the International Congress of Psychology.

02:18:21.580 I'm a young professor just out of my PhD.

02:18:25.360 I'm talking about something very non-controversial about what are the types of strategies that people use when they're making decisions under time pressure.

02:18:33.980 And I'm in a room, so there are four other speakers in that session, okay?

02:18:39.740 And the room is filled with maybe 1,500 people.

02:18:43.580 And there's like this real electricity.

02:18:46.100 And I'm not a very nervous public speaker.

02:18:50.380 I'm thinking, what's going on here?

02:18:51.680 Why is there such tension?

02:18:54.140 Well, I found out.

02:18:56.100 I hadn't looked at the program.

02:18:57.540 The guy who gets up to speak before me is that infamous psychologist who now starts putting up graphs of the intelligence of white women, black women, white men, black men.

02:19:09.140 And I said, oh, my God, I'm dead.

02:19:11.000 I'm going to be lynched by proxy.

02:19:13.480 Now, here's the good news.

02:19:14.360 When he finished his talk, and I'm next, about 1,425 out of the 1,500 people rushed out of the room to follow him and badger him.

02:19:26.360 And I was like, that was the only time in my life where I said, thank God that everybody's left.

02:19:30.020 Usually, you want more people in the audience.

02:19:31.780 I was like, oh, thank God.

02:19:32.780 And then I have got like 70 people there.

02:19:36.000 Now, in his case, I've asked close colleagues of his, and as I'm talking, I'm trying to remember his name, Philip Rushton.

02:19:46.100 That's his name, Philip Rushton.

02:19:47.600 People could check him out.

02:19:49.140 I've asked some of his colleagues, was this guy, was he a racist?

02:19:54.060 Because he's always said, look, I just collected the data, and I presented the data, and I offered possible explanations.

02:20:02.320 Now, even something as contentious, as potentially incendiary as that, I would argue, if you truly collected the data in a completely unbiased manner, you should not be not publishing it, because it's going to appear racist.

02:20:22.500 Well, what do you think?

02:20:23.540 Do you think?

02:20:23.860 I care if something's true or not.

02:20:25.700 And I think I have the, you know, I have the, I don't know what the word is.

02:20:31.400 The strength of character?

02:20:33.040 Ah, I don't want to, I don't want to pretend like I'm some, like, hero that's pursuing truth at all costs, because that's not how I feel about myself.

02:20:40.840 What I would rather know is what's true, because then I can deal with the truth.

02:20:44.520 And the truth doesn't offend me in any way.

02:20:46.720 If you told me now that 31-year-old mixed-race guys that have Nigerian heritage and their fathers from Coventry are statistically dumber, and it was robust, I would believe it, and I would be okay with it.

02:20:58.280 Zero percent of me would suffer any offense.

02:21:01.240 Zero percent.

02:21:01.900 Because you have a strong personhood.

02:21:03.360 Maybe that's it.

02:21:04.520 There's nothing that, I'm so happy with who I am in myself, I'm so content with my own life and the way that I found it, that if you told me that my brain size means that I'm weak in X, Y, and Z, which literally a doctor told me, because they scanned my brain and said, oh, you've got ADHD, which means you're going to be bad at all these things.

02:21:19.340 Your handwriting is going to be bad.

02:21:20.560 I go, cool.

02:21:21.640 There's no offense taken.

02:21:24.020 But I can also imagine a world where someone with a certain disposition might just take offense to a lot of things.

02:21:29.940 So then in that case, we're at a bifurcation at that point.

02:21:34.460 We can either say to anyone who might be offended, please grow a pair because the world requires antifragility and there are stressors in life that are going to hurt you.

02:21:47.600 And you'll thank me later for me teaching you to have to grow a pair.

02:21:52.020 Or we can take the other road, which says, let's sanitize the world so that we maximize that no one is ever hurt because we're kind and compassionate people.

02:22:03.400 And if in that service of that sanitization process, we have to murder truth, so be it.

02:22:09.180 And that's, by the way, what leads to all those parasitic ideas.

02:22:12.200 Because as I said, I'm trying to be charitable to the promulgators of those bullshit ideas.

02:22:18.080 It starts off with a noble cause, right?

02:22:21.060 They're trying to improve the world in their warped sense.

02:22:24.600 And because that's the highest goal, they end up, if I have to murder truth, that's a collateral damage.

02:22:30.700 It's okay, right?

02:22:31.800 I don't want a six foot four guy who's got a stronger jawline than me and a beard to say, please address me as she and you better do so.

02:22:44.620 And it's a governmental edict, right?

02:22:46.860 That's what Jordan Peterson and I, we were both summit, I mean, separately by the Canadian government to appear in front of the Canadian Senate when we were offering our warnings against,

02:22:58.820 it's now bill, but at the time it was a table bill called Bill C-16, which was trying to incorporate gender identity and gender orientation or whatever it's called, into the hate law rubric.

02:23:12.940 And my position was, yes, of course, we should seek to have a world where everybody lives dignified lives, free of bigotry.

02:23:21.100 But should I be teaching in my evolutionary psychology courses that there is no such thing as male, female, that we clearly know?

02:23:28.980 So then sexual selection that Darwin taught us is no longer true, and they all started scoffing and mocking in a theater of the absurd.

02:23:36.620 Well, pretty much, I hate to be the guy who says, I told you so, but I mean, literally every single thing that I predicted came out to be true.

02:23:44.120 Because once you lose the reflex to have a deontological defense of a deontological principle, then all bets are off.

02:23:52.080 An objective sense.

02:23:53.140 An objective sense.

02:23:54.520 No, of course I fight for the right of everybody to live lives free of dignity, but you can't play sports with a girl.

02:24:04.280 I mean, in what world do we live in?

02:24:06.580 I played sports with a girl last night.

02:24:08.220 I don't want to hear about it.

02:24:09.460 Co-ed football, we played soccer.

02:24:10.760 Ah, is that right?

02:24:11.300 Okay, but you know what I mean.

02:24:12.300 You shouldn't run the 100 meters and call yourself, I mean, you know, the Leah Thomas case, the swimmer?

02:24:18.160 Swimmer, yeah.

02:24:18.980 I mean, imagine the level of pathological narcissism that you must experience where you say, the need for me to reaffirm my identity, even if he truly held that identity, it supersedes the rights of all those women.

02:24:33.800 Yeah, do you know what?

02:24:34.280 Just to give my position on this, if someone had the jawline you described and they asked me to refer to them as a woman,

02:24:42.620 and they were wearing a dress, I've got no problem with that.

02:24:45.460 Okay.

02:24:45.620 I'm going to refer to you, if that's what you want me to refer to you as, in the same way that if, when I asked you before the start of this conversation, how do you want to be referred to?

02:24:53.680 Sure.

02:24:53.940 You told me your name, your title, et cetera.

02:24:55.660 I will, because again, it's not hurting me to refer to you as she, he, they, whatever you want.

02:25:02.680 And if that's going to make you feel better about yourself, then on a cost-benefit analysis in my head, I go, it's costing me nothing to refer to you as that.

02:25:11.720 Yes.

02:25:12.080 If it then has implications which shift that cost-benefit analysis, i.e. there's harm caused to another group of people because of that, or I'm, I'm, you know, I might be thrown in prison if I accidentally make a mistake.

02:25:25.080 Exactly.

02:25:25.620 That's where I think, I think that's a little.

02:25:27.580 I think I completely agree with that, right?

02:25:29.500 As long as you don't harm others in that calculus and that dynamic, and as long as it's not compelled, right?

02:25:36.740 So, and I've said it, I said, look, if I, I've never had this in my classes, but let's suppose a student came to me privately and said, you know, I'd like to, do you think I'm going to say, no way, asshole, I'm going to, no, I will, I will go along as you said.

02:25:49.320 But if it's the government who says you better do it, now we're different, if the government says you better start putting he, him in, in your electronic signature, no, right?

02:26:00.880 I'll give you an example.

02:26:02.300 I think the Canadian government has now issued for passports a thing whereby, because you want to be inclusive and kind to non-binary people, which basically makes up one out of every 15,000 people.

02:26:18.980 So, it's not even the tyranny of the minority, it's the tyranny of the minority, minority, minority.

02:26:25.880 I mean, it's really, it's a unicorn, non-binary.

02:26:28.800 Non-binary is, I'm neither male, neither female.

02:26:31.820 So, because historically, you know, sexually reproducing species, male, female, phenotype, to put male and female marginalizes the non-binary, now we lose that marker.

02:26:45.360 No, no, no.

02:26:46.020 I want to be referred as a biological male.

02:26:50.440 My wife is a biological female.

02:26:53.400 My children also have.

02:26:55.020 So, all of our most fundamental biological markers should be erased, lest it might offend the one in 50,000 non-binary?

02:27:04.180 No.

02:27:04.760 So, that speaks to your first point, which is, what about causing harm to other people?

02:27:08.340 So, yes, I will never go out of my way to be frivolously mean to someone, and my default value will be to be kind to you.

02:27:15.520 But your need to honor your identity doesn't mean that I get to go on the celebratory train with you.

02:27:24.300 Do you know who sometimes gets caught in the crossfire on these issues, and it's not just with the issue around gender, it's around, you know, religion and race and these kinds of things, are the people in that group, in that minority group, who agree.

02:27:37.180 Yeah.

02:27:37.620 But because they identify as maybe a sex that wasn't the sex they were born as, they then get the abuse.

02:27:47.140 You talked about it being difficult now, being a Jewish person in Canada.

02:27:51.100 Yeah.

02:27:51.440 It's really difficult, I think, in this current moment, to be a trans person in this world, because this macro debate is raging.

02:27:58.440 Right.

02:27:58.700 If I go on Twitter, if I go on YouTube, it's passionately raging on both sides.

02:28:04.600 And I've got friends that identify as they them, and they aren't participating in this raging war.

02:28:11.540 But I imagine, I would imagine that the probability of them experiencing abuse now walking down the street has increased.

02:28:18.420 And I guess this goes back to the sort of consequential truth versus the objective truth.

02:28:23.420 But those are the people I feel sorry for, because I know them, they're not in this, like, screaming X wall, but their lives have been made worse because of all of this stuff.

02:28:34.420 And they're just minding their own business, getting on with their lives, loving whoever they love, identifying however they want.

02:28:38.760 And I feel that's kind of, that's the group of people that I feel most empathy towards in this current debate.

02:28:45.180 Yeah, no, I hear you.

02:28:46.240 I hear you.

02:28:46.540 By the way, it's only because you mentioned the word empathy.

02:28:48.800 So my next book is titled Suicidal Empathy, because in the book, what I'm arguing, to our earlier point about to be properly modulated and regulated, I argue that the emotion of empathy has clear evolutionary reasons, right?

02:29:04.720 I mean, there are adaptive reasons why each of our emotions has evolved.

02:29:10.880 The problem is when it misfires.

02:29:13.420 When not only it misfires in that, for example, it becomes hyperactive, but when it also misfires to the wrong target.

02:29:21.280 So if I'm empathetic to the trans person, to the detriment of all biological women, that's a misfire.

02:29:29.880 Yes, it would be great for immigrants to come in legally to experience the beauty of the West.

02:29:35.320 I am an immigrant.

02:29:36.700 Elon Musk is an immigrant.

02:29:38.100 I guess I am.

02:29:39.280 I was born in Botswana, but...

02:29:40.700 You're an immigrant, but you hopefully came in legally.

02:29:43.900 That doesn't mean...

02:29:44.560 No comment.

02:29:45.120 Sorry?

02:29:45.560 No comment.

02:29:46.200 No comment.

02:29:48.880 But opening the door to 10 million, 12 million, because it's not fair for Guatemalans in El Salvador and not to come in and share the experience.

02:29:57.960 No, that's not right.

02:30:00.600 Life...

02:30:01.240 You know who Thomas Sowell is?

02:30:02.560 The famous economist?

02:30:04.000 He's a...

02:30:04.300 Yeah, you mentioned...

02:30:05.080 I think you mentioned him earlier.

02:30:05.520 I mentioned him before.

02:30:06.060 Thomas Sowell, who's an economist, said, look, I'm paraphrasing his words, and I agree with you.

02:30:12.400 Economics is the study of trade-offs, of cost-benefits, right?

02:30:18.400 If we had infinite resources, then yes, let's give free healthcare to every human who's ever lived and will ever live.

02:30:25.820 But that's not the world we live in.

02:30:27.040 So if I am a paying, tax-paying citizen who's paid into the system for 40 years, do I like the idea that someone can come across the southern border and have the exact same rights as me?

02:30:40.840 Does that seem like it's the proper directing of empathy?

02:30:45.200 Maybe not.

02:30:45.900 If you're homeless, it's a very bad thing.

02:30:48.100 Does that mean that your rights to be shooting up the drugs in the public park where my children play supersedes their rights?

02:30:58.520 And so in the next book, I'm going to be looking at a bunch of policy decisions that, in my view, are disastrous, and argue that they all stem from this reflex of suicidal empathy.

02:31:12.740 If one immigrant crosses the Mexican border into America, and they go to Texas, and it improves their quality of life, who does that hurt?

02:31:22.800 Deontologically, everybody.

02:31:24.540 Why?

02:31:25.660 Because there are rules and laws, right?

02:31:28.980 Do you teach your future children, God willing, don't steal?

02:31:34.540 Or do you live in San Francisco where it's okay to steal if it's under 950?

02:31:39.420 What are you going to teach your kids?

02:31:40.760 Don't steal.

02:31:41.380 That's it.

02:31:41.960 What are they stealing?

02:31:45.080 They're stealing the money that should go to people who've paid taxes for 40 years.

02:31:50.400 They're stealing my right to...

02:31:52.020 Okay, I did my master's.

02:31:54.040 I'm going to say this not because I'm signaling my CV because it's relevant to the story.

02:32:01.720 I did my master's of science and my PhD at Cornell.

02:32:04.280 I was a professor at Cornell, professor at Dartmouth, and a professor at UC Irvine.

02:32:10.140 I'm probably one of the best known professors around.

02:32:13.220 If I want to come as a Canadian to the United States, do you know what I have to do?

02:32:17.960 I have to follow the law.

02:32:20.020 I can't come and say, I'm going to live here and I'm going to work here and I'm going to take this job.

02:32:28.440 I mean, I literally get stopped and taken to another room where they say, are you making money?

02:32:34.780 And many of the border recognize me, will take pictures with me because it's a country of laws.

02:32:42.160 And therefore, I, with whatever attributes I might bring that are positive to the United States, has to go through a formal process.

02:32:52.440 But if I'm an MS-13 gang member with two-tier tattoos that says that I've killed two people in El Salvador and I walk in,

02:33:03.160 do you think this is your reflex and intuition, Stephen, saying, but it's not fair to them.

02:33:08.020 I mean, we understand why very dangerous 59-year-old Professor Gat Saad, we should really vet him.

02:33:15.700 And he should go through the legal process before.

02:33:18.880 My biggest goal in life is to live in Southern California.

02:33:22.100 I haven't been able to because legally I can't.

02:33:24.840 I don't have a professorship here.

02:33:26.440 That's the thing that hurts me the most.

02:33:28.220 I don't live in the luminosity of the sun.

02:33:31.220 So that asshole who comes in illegally is hurting me because I'm freezing in Montreal.

02:33:36.720 He's not hiding.

02:33:37.440 He is hurting me.

02:33:38.720 Why?

02:33:39.660 Because once the legal system breaks down, then all bets are off.

02:33:46.540 So what's happened in San Francisco where all of the retail shops have closed?

02:33:52.160 So crazy.

02:33:52.900 I was talking to my friends about this this morning.

02:33:55.120 I sent a photo to my friends of a CVS and said, why is toothpaste and chewing gum locked in a glass cage in CVS in America?

02:34:01.780 America is meant to be the richest economy in the world.

02:34:04.000 It's meant to be the, you know, the apple of everyone's eye.

02:34:06.540 And I went to a CVS yesterday and I asked for some deodorant and some mouthwash.

02:34:13.260 And then I was like, it's trapped behind a cage.

02:34:16.160 Mouthwash?

02:34:16.760 The deodorant?

02:34:17.540 Do you see that?

02:34:18.380 Do you know what happened?

02:34:19.280 Why?

02:34:19.440 I said, you press a button and someone comes over to you to open the cage to give you the toothbrush.

02:34:27.640 And they opened the cage.

02:34:28.820 And I said to the guy, why do you trap it all behind glass cages?

02:34:32.080 And he tapped me on the shoulder and he pointed down an aisle.

02:34:36.140 And he says, look.

02:34:36.760 And as I looked down the aisle, there was a man stealing and putting stuff in his socks.

02:34:43.020 So do you, do you, do you, I hope you understand that you just answered that question, right?

02:34:48.800 Because if I steal that one toothpaste, am I really hurting you, Stephen?

02:34:53.200 You live in England.

02:34:54.720 How, how is me saying to that guy in San Francisco, don't steal?

02:34:59.760 No, it's deontological.

02:35:01.420 You are hurting me.

02:35:02.580 You're hurting me deontologically.

02:35:04.240 You're hurting the ability for society to have predictable laws, predictable cause and effect relationships.

02:35:13.020 If you steal, you'll be punished.

02:35:16.100 Does this rely on society being fair, though?

02:35:18.920 And your next point is going to be, it's not fair, therefore, why should we have laws?

02:35:22.640 Yeah, well, just wondering, because if people see that and they go, well, I don't know the answer here.

02:35:27.520 So I'm just posting questions.

02:35:28.860 I'm really intrigued by this train of thought.

02:35:30.740 So I understand what you're saying.

02:35:31.900 We do need laws, and I accept that point, because if we didn't have laws, then all systems kind of fall apart, things fail, then people won't want to come here anyway.

02:35:40.700 The reason they want to come here in part is because there's laws and that's creating a society.

02:35:44.240 But does it, is that theory of sort of moral theory contingent on the fact that the society is fair?

02:35:50.240 And then obviously people would then argue that this society isn't fair because there's people with their fingers on the scales.

02:35:55.380 No society is perfect, but as someone who is buffeted from the sample of societies outside of the West, no society is better than you have here.

02:36:06.200 Meaning that if you look at some of the staunchest defenders of the Western tradition, it may or may not surprise you, Stephen, to know that many of them are immigrants, right?

02:36:17.820 I often use the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right?

02:36:21.460 The Somali immigrant who's one of the staunchest, she's Muslim herself, she's one of the strongest critics of Islam.

02:36:28.700 Why?

02:36:29.200 Because she has sampled the buffet of that society.

02:36:31.940 She didn't go to Wellesley College where it's rarefied in Boston, and then she can pontificate while she bought her keffiyeh from Amazon, right?

02:36:40.580 She's lived that.

02:36:41.740 I don't have to pontificate about things that I know nothing about.

02:36:45.240 I grew up in the Middle East.

02:36:46.560 So therefore, people who've lived those experiences can come to the West and say,

02:36:51.500 hey, guys in the West, you think that this society is the default value of societies.

02:36:56.760 No, no, no.

02:36:57.580 This is a bleep.

02:36:58.600 This is an anomaly.

02:36:59.880 You should really work hard to defend what you have.

02:37:02.560 You cracked the code of the values that you need to have foundationally for everything to flourish.

02:37:08.820 This is not normal.

02:37:10.120 This is anomalous.

02:37:11.060 But once you start having consequentialist intrusions into those deontological systems, it breaks down very quickly, as you saw in San Francisco, as you saw in the rush of millions of people to the border.

02:37:23.620 Because the most fundamental law of law, I mean, Newton talked about every reaction, every action has a reaction.

02:37:30.140 Let's put it in other terms, cause and effect.

02:37:32.840 Once you break that law, you're breaking the most fundamental laws of nature, right?

02:37:37.840 So should a felon have a 68th chance?

02:37:43.280 So you've now been arrested again.

02:37:45.960 And then we go through your record and we find that you've been arrested 67 previous times.

02:37:54.660 How many times must you be arrested for you to have lost your opportunity for another chance, right?

02:38:03.680 Because that 68th time, that suicidal empathy, because I'm so progressive, led to that woman being killed.

02:38:12.960 Was her life worthwhile that we might have wanted to be a bit harder on you?

02:38:18.680 So that's what I mean.

02:38:19.620 So, yes, of course, I support the right of people to better their lives.

02:38:23.960 And we're all coming from a nation of immigrants, legally, man.

02:38:29.840 And also the other point, I guess, is that people would rebuttal and say about the privilege.

02:38:35.320 They'd say, Steve, you know, you got tremendous privilege because of the parents you had.

02:38:41.400 And they brought you to the UK when you were a baby from Africa.

02:38:44.340 No, I'm stopping you.

02:38:45.120 And they'll say you got genetic privilege.

02:38:47.820 They'll say, you know, your dad had a good brain and he's passed some of that to you.

02:38:51.680 And your mom had a good brain.

02:38:52.640 And they'll say to you, they'll say, God, you know, if you weren't brought from the Middle

02:38:56.380 East when you were younger, you wouldn't have had these opportunities.

02:38:59.120 So you need to pay that forward to other people that don't have opportunities and privilege

02:39:03.100 by welcoming them in, being highly empathetic towards them, even if they're in Mexico.

02:39:10.780 Legally or illegally?

02:39:12.000 Legally, I'm off.

02:39:13.240 Let's do it.

02:39:14.100 I'm all in.

02:39:15.100 Illegally, no, you don't get it.

02:39:16.660 You know, it's unfair that all these incels don't have access to sexual partners while

02:39:24.920 some of us have access.

02:39:27.260 Maybe we need to set up a communist system where using an app, they get to share with

02:39:32.300 our women.

02:39:33.140 Let's have communist meeting, right?

02:39:35.180 Why is it that you're only getting access to your partner?

02:39:38.500 That's privilege.

02:39:39.700 How about the homeless guy who doesn't have any sex for the past two years?

02:39:42.780 Don't you think, Stephen, that you owe him?

02:39:45.020 So equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.

02:39:48.440 Yes, sir.

02:39:48.940 We're saying we don't believe in equality of outcome.

02:39:50.880 No one, I think, with a brain believes in equality of outcome.

02:39:53.240 Oh, no, there is one with somewhat of a brain.

02:39:55.500 Her name is Kamala Harris.

02:39:56.940 I knew you were going to say that.

02:39:57.980 She doesn't have a brain, so you're right.

02:40:00.000 But she pretends that she has a brain.

02:40:01.760 Yeah.

02:40:02.080 And she is Lenin.

02:40:03.680 She is communism.

02:40:04.740 It completely paralyzes me in befuddlement to be able to play a clip of this woman where

02:40:15.980 she's saying, I'm a mixture of Stalin and Lenin and Marx and Marx in everything that

02:40:22.940 I believe in.

02:40:24.340 And the United States, which is technically a capitalist country, says, sign me up.

02:40:31.100 I think you'd be a good president.

02:40:32.580 So if we define equality of outcome is everybody deserves the same chance to get the same outcome.

02:40:38.660 Is that kind of how it's defined?

02:40:39.780 Well, equality of outcome says to the extent that we don't have equality of outcome, it

02:40:47.260 must be because of nefarious reasons.

02:40:51.220 So, for example, and I've actually satirized this.

02:40:54.240 You know, one of the things I do is satire and I draw analogies to show how stupid things

02:40:58.320 are.

02:40:58.720 I said, you know, there are 200 countries in the world.

02:41:01.480 Do you know how many have won the World Cup?

02:41:05.040 I don't know.

02:41:06.120 Any number.

02:41:06.740 200 countries.

02:41:07.980 World Cup's been going on since 1930.

02:41:09.700 I'm going to say 12.

02:41:11.120 Eight.

02:41:11.760 Okay.

02:41:12.720 That is so unfair.

02:41:14.520 How come those Japanese have never been given a chance?

02:41:17.500 What about the Jews?

02:41:18.780 Israel never winning once?

02:41:20.180 Why is FIFA so anti-Semitic?

02:41:22.400 Never once in Islamic country?

02:41:24.500 That sucks.

02:41:25.260 It's those asshole Brits who've won Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Uruguay.

02:41:34.860 That sucks.

02:41:36.360 Laos never?

02:41:38.740 What happened?

02:41:39.760 Malaysia never?

02:41:41.040 Botswana, we've never won one.

02:41:42.360 You've never won?

02:41:43.080 That's racism.

02:41:43.840 I looked at the results of the Boston Marathon over the past 35 years.

02:41:51.740 Do you want me to summarize it for you?

02:41:53.480 I'm going to do it.

02:41:55.340 Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya.

02:42:00.400 Ethiopia.

02:42:01.740 Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya.

02:42:05.320 Erythria.

02:42:06.740 Kenya, Kenya, Kenya.

02:42:08.140 Kenya, what a bunch of assholes, the Boston Marathon.

02:42:11.900 Only black guys from Kenya get to win?

02:42:15.040 What about short Jewish guys?

02:42:16.720 Never?

02:42:17.500 We don't deserve a chance?

02:42:19.980 It's so ludicrous that even morons like Kamala Harris will say, no, no, but that's different.

02:42:25.860 No, no, it's not different.

02:42:27.060 It's a deontological principle.

02:42:29.460 Human beings are a hierarchical species.

02:42:32.520 Some are taller, some are shorter.

02:42:34.740 Some are harder working, less harder working.

02:42:37.540 Smarter, less smart.

02:42:38.960 Funnier, less funnier.

02:42:41.240 Communism works well for some species.

02:42:43.860 E.O. Wilson, who was a Harvard biologist, recently passed away.

02:42:48.120 One of my big professional regrets is that we were never able to have a conversation on my show.

02:42:52.860 He's one of my big intellectual heroes.

02:42:55.460 His expertise, Stephen, was in the study of social ants.

02:42:59.300 He was an entomologist.

02:43:00.920 Now, why is that relevant to the story?

02:43:02.340 Because social ants are communists.

02:43:04.580 Because there is a reproductive queen and everybody else is indistinguishable.

02:43:10.860 They're worker ants or warrior ants.

02:43:13.140 They're just a blob, right?

02:43:15.080 So when he was asked, I'm slightly paraphrasing.

02:43:17.520 When he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism, socialism?

02:43:22.280 His rebuttal is one of my favorite rebuttals in the history of humanity.

02:43:25.940 So the answer to communism, socialism, great idea, wrong species, right?

02:43:33.300 Humans come with their own innate human nature.

02:43:37.360 Our innate human nature is not communistic.

02:43:40.860 That's why communism has been tried in many countries for the past hundred years.

02:43:45.260 And what has been the result in every single place it's been tried?

02:43:50.360 A grotesque, abject failure.

02:43:52.980 The reason for that is because when you take a socioeconomic political system that is contrary

02:43:59.000 to human nature, you don't need Gatsad to predict for you that it will fail.

02:44:04.240 That's like arguing, I would like to create a new science law.

02:44:09.840 It's called non-gravity.

02:44:12.520 So I'm going to throw a bunch of people off big planes, but because I'm a fervid believer

02:44:18.160 in non-gravity, I don't think that they will drop.

02:44:22.180 But then I'm astonished when out of a hundred people, all of their brains squash on the floor.

02:44:28.080 That's because we're constrained by this reality called gravity.

02:44:31.880 By the same token, Kamala Harris is the anti-gravity person.

02:44:36.020 So I'm Canadian, so I don't have a direct dog in this fight.

02:44:40.340 The reason why I speak out against it, because again, my social commentary supersedes, transcends

02:44:47.300 whether I'm American or Canadian.

02:44:48.820 I'm talking about bigger issues.

02:44:50.560 Is communism the ideal model for maximal flourishing?

02:44:54.940 Nothing could be clearer, but we've got all these degenerates trying to implement it here.

02:44:59.040 Would you vote for Trump if you could vote?

02:45:00.340 If I were American?

02:45:01.240 Yeah.

02:45:01.680 In a heartbeat.

02:45:03.260 Over Kamala Harris?

02:45:06.020 Yeah, in the upcoming election.

02:45:08.140 Yeah.

02:45:08.320 So right now, let's assume that it does end up being Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump.

02:45:13.940 I would vote 10 times for Donald Trump.

02:45:16.520 What's wrong with Donald Trump?

02:45:19.340 He's his worst enemy in that, cosmetically speaking, I think he's gotten better maybe because

02:45:26.060 of age, maybe by discipline.

02:45:28.700 He's gotten into a lot of snafus where he triggered the ire of many people simply because

02:45:34.020 of how he delivered messages, where had he been a bit more polished, he would have avoided

02:45:39.280 those things.

02:45:39.700 So for example, I think that the fact that he never returned on X has actually been a

02:45:45.060 blessing for him.

02:45:46.020 Because he's the guy who at two o'clock in the morning, the president of the United States

02:45:50.020 at the time is battling with some idiot because he can't have the discipline to stop

02:45:55.240 himself.

02:45:55.720 So I think-

02:45:56.020 What about his character though?

02:45:57.780 Because if your kid grew up with the character of Donald Trump, would you be proud?

02:46:01.920 Probably more proud than Joe Biden.

02:46:03.980 But this is what happens on the other side.

02:46:05.860 So you don't want me to ever compare to someone else.

02:46:07.920 Well, this is what happens on the- the reason I'm asking these questions is because if I

02:46:10.780 ask someone on the far left, the first response they say, their measurement of goodness seems

02:46:16.260 to be a comparison of the other side.

02:46:17.820 Right.

02:46:18.420 So if your son grew up with a character-

02:46:21.200 Okay, so here are some positive traits and some negative traits of him.

02:46:24.580 Okay.

02:46:24.740 I don't pretend to know him.

02:46:28.660 He is an entrepreneur.

02:46:30.940 I don't think there is a human being who's been a better exemplar of what a honey badger

02:46:37.240 is.

02:46:38.120 Now, let me explain what I mean by that because you may or may not know that now.

02:46:42.240 So in the last chapter of the parasitic mind, where I have a set of calls to action, okay,

02:46:48.120 calls to action.

02:46:48.720 One of them is, I say, activate your inner honey badger.

02:46:52.100 Why?

02:46:53.100 The honey badger has been determined officially as the fiercest, the most ferocious animal

02:46:59.060 in the animal kingdom.

02:46:59.940 That's saying a lot.

02:47:00.860 There's a lot of fierce animals.

02:47:02.360 It's the size of a small to medium-sized dog, right?

02:47:05.840 And yet, it can go into a hornet net, get attacked by a million bees and get the honey.

02:47:13.300 It can withstand an attack of six adult lions and they back away.

02:47:18.720 It's the size of a small dog.

02:47:19.920 Why?

02:47:20.460 Because it is so ferocious.

02:47:22.060 It's my brother going to that beautiful girl, not caring that he's four foot two, right?

02:47:27.280 He's the man.

02:47:28.180 He's the top guy, right?

02:47:29.660 So when I say to people, activate your inner honey badger, I say, be resilient, be tough,

02:47:33.780 not be violent.

02:47:34.740 Be ideologically fierce in defending first principles.

02:47:39.440 Well, who has had more things thrown at this guy than Donald Trump?

02:47:45.940 And he's got more vigor and stamina than you and I combined.

02:47:52.120 Well, let's take a very concrete example.

02:47:54.680 Who has been shot in the head and then stood up and went fight, fight, fight?

02:48:02.220 Those are qualities that I am going to teach my son.

02:48:06.480 Now, is he polished?

02:48:08.660 Is he eloquent?

02:48:10.240 Does he speak with proper elocution?

02:48:12.540 Does he have a big vocabulary?

02:48:14.400 No, no, no, no.

02:48:16.520 But I'll take a ferocious honey badger any day over.

02:48:19.740 Those aren't character traits, though, eloquence and stuff like that.

02:48:22.680 When I'm talking about character traits, I mean, if someone seemingly attempts to steal

02:48:28.780 an election, you know, Mike Pence did a speech the other day where he basically said, Donald

02:48:33.040 Trump asked me, at that moment when Mike Pence could have, I think, prevented the electoral

02:48:38.980 decision, he said, Mike Pence, who was his vice president, Donald Trump asked me to go

02:48:45.120 against the Constitution and I couldn't do it.

02:48:48.280 Right.

02:48:48.720 So that's a character thing.

02:48:51.020 And maybe it's linked to the ferocity of the honey badger because someone that's that

02:48:54.580 ferocious, when they can't accept defeat.

02:48:57.960 As an academic, I like to be, I know what I know and I know what I don't know.

02:49:02.680 So here I would be speculative and say that that behavioural trait is a manifestation of

02:49:07.360 a, that behaviour is a manifestation of a character trait.

02:49:11.440 I don't know if that link is right or not.

02:49:13.300 I could easily argue, and I'd be speculating, so I don't know for sure, that he was convinced

02:49:19.820 that that election was absolutely unequivocally stolen.

02:49:25.100 So when he's doing those things, it's not he's saying, I wish to be dictator for life.

02:49:29.880 I mean, he did leave office, right?

02:49:31.320 But he's saying, find me the mechanism to ensure that those assholes don't steal it from

02:49:36.560 me.

02:49:36.680 So I'm neither here or there on this one.

02:49:39.140 No, he's not a dictator.

02:49:40.740 No, he didn't incite a violent insurrection.

02:49:44.260 He did.

02:49:44.680 So these are things we can debate.

02:49:47.420 But in turn, I'll put it another way.

02:49:50.060 Do you think that the world is made up of some very, very nasty bullies?

02:49:54.480 Do we agree?

02:49:55.260 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:49:55.540 Very, very nasty.

02:49:56.880 Yes?

02:49:57.340 Yeah.

02:49:57.500 There's all the Islamic guys.

02:49:59.260 There's North Korea.

02:50:00.180 There's China.

02:50:00.880 There's Putin.

02:50:02.420 Who do you think, when they sit at night, they fear more?

02:50:08.420 Do you think that they feel the cackler, Kamala Harris, avocado brain Joe Biden?

02:50:14.800 Or do you think, crazy cowboy, here's the nuclear button.

02:50:22.080 You ready?

02:50:23.120 Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a tiger by the toe.

02:50:30.260 Do you see what I'm doing?

02:50:31.280 That unpredictability, that's very powerful.

02:50:35.080 When you go into a prison yard for the first time, everybody's looking at you.

02:50:41.100 Is this guy going to become a punk at my girlfriend?

02:50:43.540 Or is this guy that I should fear?

02:50:45.320 How you act that first hour or two is going to determine how you do your time.

02:50:51.180 Well, Donald Trump is the guy that I want to be running my prison yard, not the cackler.

02:50:58.120 I hope you understand what I'm doing here.

02:50:59.360 I'm trying to, there's two things I'm doing.

02:51:01.060 The first thing is I'm trying to form my own opinion by interrogating.

02:51:04.260 Am I successful at all?

02:51:05.600 No, no, it's really interesting.

02:51:07.100 No, it is really interesting.

02:51:07.900 And it's not just you I'm asking these questions to, because I ask a bunch of people.

02:51:10.640 People that are smart and have different perspectives and helps me form my own.

02:51:13.460 But also I feel I feel an obligation to represent the other side.

02:51:16.200 Of course.

02:51:16.460 I understand how you feel about Kamala Harris.

02:51:17.960 So I'm trying to interrogate this feeling of Donald Trump.

02:51:20.300 Is there any character trait that you can point out in Donald Trump that is overt?

02:51:24.020 I'm almost certain that he had, remember you said you've got three groups of friends

02:51:29.400 and one group pathologically cheats on their partners.

02:51:33.680 I'm willing to bet that Donald Trump is the head of that thing.

02:51:37.200 So as a moral person who wishes to be loyal and honor my wife, I don't appreciate that

02:51:43.220 trait because many high status men have access to a lot of beautiful women.

02:51:47.800 And then what determines your virtue and your character is to be able to have the self-control

02:51:52.920 to not succumb to that.

02:51:54.680 I value that.

02:51:55.960 I don't think Donald Trump has it.

02:51:57.640 Happy?

02:51:58.120 I said something negative about it.

02:51:59.220 No, no, no.

02:51:59.940 Do you know what's funny?

02:52:00.560 Because when I heard your opinion on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I was in my hotel

02:52:06.740 room thinking, one of the things I observe in people that are political, have a political

02:52:12.100 opinion, is they are like incapable of saying anything critical about their own candidate

02:52:18.240 or the person that they'd vote for.

02:52:19.520 And it baffles me because it's the same parasitic mind virus where you've lost objectivity that

02:52:24.380 you talk about in your work.

02:52:25.940 No, 100%.

02:52:27.340 And so, and I wouldn't necessarily only stop there, right?

02:52:30.520 I mean, we could stop there, but he doesn't strike me as a man that is of the highest moral

02:52:37.260 virtues, right?

02:52:38.060 So I am very much driven by an exacting code of personal conduct.

02:52:43.860 I'm willing to bet that he doesn't come close to that.

02:52:47.880 So, so, so, but again, you live in the real world, right?

02:52:51.860 So in the real world, you don't have a perfect messianic character that's Jesus, right?

02:52:56.540 So given those two choices, which one do I want?

02:53:00.540 Well, I want the guy who's a bit scarier and Donald Trump is a lot scarier than the cackler.

02:53:04.660 I understand.

02:53:06.400 And I, I see flaws and I see at least one upside or more in both options.

02:53:14.560 So, but anyway, what's the most important thing we should have talked about that we didn't

02:53:19.320 discuss?

02:53:20.460 Maybe the importance of social connections, which is one of the fundamental ways that you

02:53:26.480 could lead a super happy life to the point of the happiness book.

02:53:30.540 It turns out that the quality of your social relationships is a better predictor of your

02:53:36.180 health in the longterm than your cholesterol scores at age 50.

02:53:39.760 It's crazy.

02:53:40.420 So having these meaningful dialogues, whether it be in a formal setting, like on a, on a

02:53:45.360 show or whether it be going to the pub and interacting with people about whether Manchester

02:53:49.360 City or Manchester United is better.

02:53:51.500 We're a social species.

02:53:53.080 Having meaningful connections with people is crucially important.

02:53:56.280 Get out there, read, get educated, build meaningful connections with people.

02:54:00.540 And hopefully you'll be happy.

02:54:03.500 I have a closing tradition on this podcast, Dr. Gad, where the last guest leaves a question

02:54:08.180 for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

02:54:10.540 And the question that's been left for you is, tell me about a time in which someone said

02:54:15.580 something to you, positive or negative, which really, capital letters, stuck with you and

02:54:24.220 does still to this day.

02:54:25.240 Oh, what an amazing question.

02:54:28.140 Am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't?

02:54:31.260 Unfortunately, no.

02:54:31.860 No.

02:54:32.080 Okay.

02:54:32.460 Perfect.

02:54:32.740 Well, what a, what a cool thing to do.

02:54:35.960 And as you were saying it, I was already answering it in my head.

02:54:40.320 So remember earlier, we talked about purity and the exacting standard of, exacting code

02:54:47.620 of personal conduct.

02:54:49.820 About maybe 30 years ago, my mother said, you know, Gad, you better learn that the world

02:54:58.120 doesn't abide to your purity bubble.

02:55:00.700 And the quicker that you learn that, the happier you will be.

02:55:04.680 And I think it's the, by far the most profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say.

02:55:09.920 Because oftentimes what that ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct,

02:55:17.180 this kind of maladaptive perfectionism, this moral scrupulosity, this purity bubble, the

02:55:22.780 world should be, you should never be dishonest.

02:55:25.540 You should never be duplicitous.

02:55:26.900 If I treat you well, you should, so it's this, like I live in this la-la land of purity,

02:55:31.960 at least to my expectations.

02:55:33.260 What ends up happening?

02:55:34.720 You're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting the world to abide

02:55:39.640 to this beautiful purity bubble, but the world is ugly and messy.

02:55:44.360 And so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes, you

02:55:50.220 know, taking your time with your children.

02:55:51.680 Then when they leave, I'm pissed off to my wife for the next 10 minutes because I was imposing

02:55:56.860 my expectation, which is I would never dare do that to someone else.

02:56:01.280 So I think if I were able to lower my expectations and internalize that message, I wouldn't be

02:56:10.360 as disappointed in so many people so often.

02:56:13.680 Easier said than done.

02:56:14.660 Easier said than done, yes.

02:56:15.880 It needs to be like a morning practice.

02:56:17.960 True.

02:56:18.100 Thank you so much for the work that you do, Dr. Gad.

02:56:22.400 I found your books to be really, really important because they are unapologetically challenging.

02:56:31.800 And for anybody who cares about the pursuit of truth, whether they agree with you or not,

02:56:35.200 but just the pursuit itself of truth, they care about ideas that are unapologetic and are

02:56:41.400 courageous and are immune from political correctness.

02:56:46.280 And I know that some people, I doubt any of them got to the end of the conversation,

02:56:50.580 but some people who do care about such a thing, I think those people are the most important

02:56:58.860 of our time and they can find, I think, so many of the answers that they're searching

02:57:03.400 for in the books that you write.

02:57:05.040 I love the book about happiness, Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.

02:57:09.740 And I referenced your earlier book as well, but the Parasitic Mind book, I think, is the

02:57:13.440 most important of them all because it's so unbelievably relevant.

02:57:16.940 And if you understand what's written in this book, I think you have a different lens, a

02:57:20.480 different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with, and it can make

02:57:24.100 sense of the things that you're seeing.

02:57:25.640 In fact, both of the books have this sort of through line because if you understand the

02:57:29.600 world, as you said just then, you can be happier within it, despite its imperfections.

02:57:35.400 And so thank you for doing the work that you do.

02:57:37.160 I know it comes at a tremendous cost, a personal cost.

02:57:40.380 I don't know whether you see it as a cost, but it's just an inevitability, but it's incredibly

02:57:44.080 important.

02:57:44.560 And I'm a big, big fan of the work that you do.

02:57:46.620 Not to say that I agree with everything you've ever said, but I care the most about hearing

02:57:52.460 it nonetheless and it feeding into my sort of big intellectual reservoir of information.

02:57:57.980 So I'm really, really appreciative of you.

02:57:59.740 And I hope you continue to do the important work you're doing.

02:58:01.960 Thank you.

02:58:02.160 Thank you so much.

02:58:02.740 Can I end with a compliment?

02:58:03.800 Of course you can.

02:58:04.360 I've been on a million shows and I unhesitantly say that this is one of the best conversations.

02:58:10.180 So thank you for that.

02:58:10.820 Oh, that's a really remarkable honor.

02:58:12.440 Thank you so much.

02:58:13.180 I appreciate you.

02:58:13.760 Cheers.

02:58:18.160 Isn't this cool?

02:58:19.740 Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll

02:58:23.260 know, I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO.

02:58:28.880 And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in The Diary of a CEO into

02:58:34.160 these conversation cards that you can play at home.

02:58:38.160 So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you

02:58:43.680 scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question.

02:58:49.260 We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

02:58:55.200 The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com.

02:59:03.240 They've sold out twice instantaneously.

02:59:05.160 So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I

02:59:09.260 really, really recommend acting quickly.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - January 21, 2025

The Cancelled Professor： Men Are Hardwired To Cheat! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_787)

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