The Cancelled Professor: Husbands Are More Dangerous Than You Think! Men Are Hardwired To Cheat!

do you know Steven who is the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life her husband and overwhelming number one reason is because of Dr gadad is an evolutionary psychologist renowned for his thought-provoking and challenging insights into the underlining principles that shape decision-making relationships and societal Trends if you think that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued because it doesn't support your ideology that's a grotesquely dangerous principle so for example the aide that monogamy is natural is not true men are much more likely to want more sexual partners that's

what's been found in many studies across many cultures but the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it but now here's the interesting part women too have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety you know when a woman is most likely to cheat it's when they in your book you talk about a mate desirability score yes so usually we end up assorting on our mating value which is taking all of our attributes and then saying what are you scoring so for example the number one attribute

that women seek is anything that's related to social status now it wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36 that's going to put a huge stresser on our relationship but here's the good news there are effective strategies that could improve my scort and let's break them down very simply first Dr Gad what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble I'm going to get me for this [ __ ] up this is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7

million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the dire of a CEO that work to put this together so from all of us thank you so much um we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people subscribe to the show up until 7 million subscribers and

you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it so every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes including meetings with me invites to our events and ,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the DI Co there's now more than 7 million of you so if you make the decision to subscribe today you can be one of those lucky people thank you from the bottom of my heart let's get to the [Music] conversation Dr Gad sad what have you devoted your life to uh The Pursuit Of Truth and the

defense of freedoms and what does what does that mean so truth is uh what we hopefully can achieve uh through the scientific method of course truth is provisional in that whatever we might have thought was true 300 years ago we have the epistemological humility to say oh we were wrong there's a new truth but I do wake up every morning thinking that there are wonderful things to the discover about human nature given that I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist and so truth in that sense uh Liberty and freedom in that there should be nothing that is

off limits for people to do research on to speak out on so for example you now hear a growing intrusion of the concept of forbidden knowledge the idea that there's some research that because it might offend someone it might marginalize a group it shouldn't be pursued I don't I don't believe in that 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 so example one of the ways that you can end your career very quickly as a social

scientist if you do any research looking at group differences certainly racial differences don't you dare do any research on that even sex differences is not a good idea 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 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 forever more because we don't want to be promulgating sexist patriarchal stereotypes and so as someone

who is an evolutionary psychologist who understands that humans are made up of two phenotypes called male and female uh it is expected that there are many things on which men and women are the same some things that men do better than women some things that women do better than men it's called Evolution it's called biology well one of the things where I first began seeing how idiotic otherwise very intelligent people can be called professors is in the negation of what I said right now which is just admitting that there are innate and evolved sex differences

is a Dreadful thing to say in the social sciences and so that's how I first had a kind of Eureka moment Houston we have a problem how could it be that these educated sophisticated professors could negate something that on average a three-day old newborn pigeon should be able to recognize and so that's what that's what sent me on my journey to eventually write the parasitic mind 30 plus years ago so what is an evolutionary Behavior scientist right great question so you can study behavior in many ways so for example behaviorism which was something that was

developed in the 1930s argued that everything that we do is as a result of stimulus and response so for example pavlovian conditioning is a form of behaviorism right you associate a unconditioned response something that you already innately have the dog salivates when he sees food and now you condition him to if they hear the Bell to associate that with the food and and now when I just ring the bell he will salivate and so the behaviorists of you know 70 80 100 years ago argued that all learning was due to behaviorism so there are many

different schools of thought when it comes to what is the best framework for studying human behavior 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 and an understanding of how evolution would have shaped the human mind now this should sound as blatantly obvious but again for social scientists that's Nazi talk because social scientists believe that Evolution applies to every single species on earth except one called human beings or if they believe that Evolution applies to humans it applies to explain why

we have opposable thumbs it applies to explain why we've evolved the rest spiratory system that we have but don't you dare explain something above the neck called the human mind using Evolution I'm speaking now as those folks they argue that we are cultural animals we transcend our biology so all that an evolutionary behavioral scientists does is whatever he or she is studying they try to look for the ultimate darwinian signatures I'm going to give you two examples this is from uh a book called homicide by uh Martin Daly and marot Margot Wilson a husband and

wife team who are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology I first read that book as a first semester doctoral student at Cornell where it it was an advanced social psychology course about halfway through the semester the professor his name was Professor Dennis Regan assigned this book to us what they did in the book is apply an evolutionary framework to study patterns of criminality and in a second now I'll I'll unpack what that means so there are certain patterns of crime that happen in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons irrespective of which

culture it happens in and irrespective of time period so it certainly can't be due to cultural factors it can't be to era factors because it transcends all those things so let me give you two examples from the book and that was actually my Eureka moment where I decided ah I will now take this evolutionary framework and apply it to Consumer psychology to psychology of this Deion making which eventually is the field that I founded so two examples example one and forgive me if I put you on the spot it's it's it's worthwhile for that what

do you think is the number one predictor of there being child abuse in a home an absent parent okay very very reasonable answer and so usually in lecture one of when I'm teaching an evolution psychology course I'll ask this question and I'll start putting all the students answers and they're all reasonable answers if there is alcoholism in the home if one of the parents had been abused in their past so that they they they mimic that behavior onto their children then all reasonable well what if I and by the way no one guesses what the

real answer is so then I say well guess what guys you just listed 25 reasonable predictors the number one predictor is a h hundredfold more predictive than anything that's on that board I've lectured this a million times I'm getting Goosebumps telling it to you right now so let me explain what 100-fold means in science when let's say you have I want to check the efficacy of a drug and I want to compare it to a placebo a sugar pill well if it has a 1.2 odds ratio meaning it's 20% more effective so it's 1 to

1.2 that would be a big Effect 1 to 1.2 what I'm saying is 1 to 100 so it is astronom ically greater effect than anything we would typically publish in science well the number one reason Stephen I've kept you in suspense long enough is if there is a stepparent and the family so there's a hundredfold increase in child abuse if the home is not made up of two biological parents this is why the Fable of Cinderella is such a universal Fable because it speaks to an evolutionary principle the nasty uh stepmother is only differentially nasty

to her stepdaughter she's actually very very nice to her two biological daughters so now you would say well what would be the evolutionary explanation for that well we know in many many species where you have very high parental investment say for example in Lion Prides lions are the only feline group where they're a social group most other uh felines are solitary the only thing that the male does is the copulatory act and then there's not then he's off well in lion pride the males do invest heavily in their children what ends up happening is there's

two or three dominant males within a pride and they kick out all the young males that are now coming up so that there's all these frustrated young males in the savannah that are now looking to take over a pride they will challenge the two three dominant males and for a very long time those older males will rebuff the attacks but Father Time eventually catch up to you and you're left with two choices as the dominant male you either leave and you end up you know having a slow death out alone in the wilderness or they

will kill you now when the new incoming lions come in do you know what's the first thing they do first on the agenda list first thing they do is what they attack the kids exactly they kill off in a complete systematic infanticide genocide side every single Cub who by definition could not have been sired by them why because I'm going to spend a lot of energy and resources investing because we are a biparental species as a lion pride I don't want I don't want to be investing in another male's Cubs therefore I now paradoxically incredibly

after the females put up a big fight to try to stop those new incoming males they end up losing the fight first thing that happens after is the females go into estris meaning they become sexually receptive to the new males so I joke with my students in the human context you put on Berry White music to get the ladies interested you buy a beautiful gift you pay attention you want to get the lady's attention in Pride in lion pride Society kill her children so that's one example of how we've evolved the calculus in our brains

to not feel as happy investing in other children not in other children in our own now the next thing that ends up happening is some student will say oh but does that mean you are justifying through science child abuse and of course the answer is no right an oncologist studies cancer that doesn't mean he or she is for cancer that doesn't mean they are procancer it means that if you want to understand cancer you have to study it honestly so if you want to tackle child abuse and you now know that that step Parenthood is

the biggest predictor that's that's a valuable tidbit to have so that's example one example two do you know Stephen who is by far the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life whether it's the yanoo tribe in the Amazon whether it's the hatah tribe in central Africa whether it's in ancient Greece 2000 years ago or whether it's in Detroit Michigan 2,000 years from now who is the most dangerous person by by far that you will ever meet um let me think about this who's the most dangerous person she will ever meet

by orders of magnitude more than anybody else and the minute that I'll say it you'll go oh no kidding but the fact that you don't exactly demonstrates my point and that's why evolution is so important I think the most dangerous person she will ever meet is a another you're already off okay I don't know her husband I was going to say there you go I was very close cuz my brain went her my brain went her future husband right because I was thinking in the in the courtship process that's quite dangerous so whether it be

her long-term partner or prospective long-term partner right so to your point a husband is the most dangerous and then the overwhelming number one reason that might drive him to domestic violence all the way to homicide is suspected or realized infidelity okay I'm a true crime addict and SE the stat is always in these True Crime shows that about SE I think it's 70% of the time when a woman is goes missing or murdered it's the husband exactly something crazy exactly now sometimes in those shows it's because I want to get rid of my current wife

so I can run off with another one yeah but not withstanding that potential effect usually when I go into a homicidal rage it's because I I'm concerned that either you have cheated on me or you actually I I have proof that you have cheated on me yeah so then the question becomes why have human males evolve the cognitive emotional and behavioral repertoire to respond in this way again you're not justifying it you're not saying oh if I give you the scientific explanation that means it's okay to beat women but the reason is because we are

a biparental species human dads are extraordinary dads in the mamalian context we're by far one of the most vested dads well now we don't invest as much as human females but we are really super dads so therefore your ancestors and M Stephen male ancestors don't come from a line where they said hey don't worry ladies have have at it with the sexy Gardener as much as you'd like because I'd be happy to then spend the next 18 years raising genos kids and therefore we've evolved that system to try to thwart a fundamental danger to our

genetic interest which is paternity uncertainty there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty right MH so when I read that book with such complicated phenomena that are explained so elegantly so parsimoniously so simply so that you go yeah that makes perfect sense that was my Eureka moment and so evolutionary Behavioral Science is exactly what I just described the last 5 10 minutes which is taking the evolutionary biological and evolutionary psychological lens to study human phenomena before we get back to talking more broadly just came to mind that with that context in mind then cheating is

justifiable cheating in a romantic relationship so I depends what you when you say justifiable you're falling into the Trap of if you explain it scientifically it's okay we also have a moral compass that's due to an evolutionary mechanism so one of the difficulties of life is how to navigate through the darwinian strings that are ping in different directions right I've evolved a desire to gorge on fatty foods but if I do that in an unin manner I become a sumo wrestler and I die of heart disease at 42 so I've also evolved the mechanis M

of self-control so the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it yeah I know and I I think this is really important because we have to give people a toolkit to think about this conversation so that they don't assume that everything that's being said is an endorsement of the thing it's just an explanation of the thing through the lens of evolution and they too very and you know what some people can't do that some people get so triggered by most people are called my colleagues oh really

yeah that's right so I just hope everyone listening now knows that everything here isn't an endorsement of a thing it's an evolutionary explanation for a thing and you know I'm sure we're both full of biases so nothing is ever that pure exactly but but we'll try and just hope that from here on out people understand that when I asked that question about cheating what I'm trying to understand is through an evolutionary perspective is monogamy a normal thing I'm off and running for the next 10 minutes you ready I'm I'm ready let me let me give

a little bit of context here so I've got a lot of male friends and I see in all honesty the full spectrum of relationships I've got and this is kind of how I'll describe it I've got a cohort of male friends that are absolutely faithful in great relationships um committed to their partners and have exercised what I I assume is a form of discipline to not go after any temptations that they might have love that group of friends great have this middle group of friends that are struggling with all kinds of forces everything from pornography

to um to to to maybe dabbling and then I have this other group of friends who I would categorize as the cheaters who cheat almost uncontrollably on their Partners uncontrollably and this is um the spectrum of friends here is about 20 people now I look at that group of friends and I go who is right because morally I can say the ones over here are hurting people the cheaters are hurting people you know especially if they're they're found in what they're doing but who is right from an evolutionary perspective well they all are in a

sense in that we all have the desire to stray but we don't necessarily instantiate that desire through overt Behavior men and women yeah so that's very good so usually if I were to say oh men have evolved a desire for sexual variety most people even if they know nothing about Evolution would say yeah that that makes sense but now here's the interesting part women too have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety now not to the same degree as men so there have been studies that have been conducted across a bewildering number of cultures

and in every culture that's been documented men are much more likely to want more sexual partners and so on but that doesn't mean that women are Victorian chased prudes so now let me give you multiple lines of evidence that suggest that women are hardly the Victorian prudes that we might otherwise wish they were in a Victorian novel you know when a woman is most likely to cheat situationally I know cuz I've read your work so okay F okay so so I'll say it or do you want to say it well it's when they're maximally fertile

isn't it very good you've done your homework so when they are maximally fertile is when they're most likely to stray now that strategy by the way and and they're less likely to insist on contraception you would think that if I'm cheating outside my marriage I'm I'm speaking as a woman now if I'm cheating outside my marriage I would want to increase the likelihood of wearing I mean using protection because I don't want to be pregnant but if the strategy for why I'm cheating is because I'm shopping for Superior jeans then it becomes incumbent that I

don't use protection right so you seldom have a woman who will cheat with a guy who has who is of lower phenotypic quality genetic quality so I I would love to have Bill Gates as home as my long-term partner but then I want the male Olympic swimmer as the guy behind the bushes now if I can convince Bill Gates that the Olympic male swimmer actually looks a lot like Bill Gates and it's really your sweetie it's you Billy you're the one who then I I won the as a woman I've won the genetic uh Lottery

game okay so it's not that women are not interested in sexual variety so that's one here's another one if you map out this is from studies I think it was in the early 80s I don't have the exact reference but it's easy to find Sor just in your work you say that women are more likely to cheat with someone who has good genetic stock yeah is Bill Gates not got good genetic stock cuz he's rich and small so yes so the intelligence element is yes maybe the drive element is yes but the phenotype is a

no what's the phenotype phenotype is your physical manifestation right so if I say I want a guy who is tall who has a v uh who's got testosterone jawline right I mean I don't usually if I'm a woman I don't in my uh uh deep recess of my mind fantasized about being ravished by Bill Gates are those physical features just pointing at the fact this person can provide for me absolutely I mean and you're saying but Bill Gates already provide yeah but it's there also what's called the sexy sun hypothesis Bill Gates will not produce

I mean he'll produce kids who potentially to the extent that intelligence is heritable will give me intelligent kids but he won't give me uh the kids that are bronny right and of course some of us are lucky to have both Bron and brains but but that's the RAR that's very kind compliment thank you now imagine if I were 4 Ines taller then I mean that's it I would be Crown Emperor no but in all seriousness both men and women are very duplicitous in their sexual behavior so the idea that monogamy is natural it's not true

now it is natural in that about 85% of documented cultures have monogamy as an Institutional mechanism because we're a biparental species and almost all the other ones are have what's called polygyny which is a term not to be confused with polygamy so I'm going to do a little parenthesis and I'm going to come back to the lines of evidence that proves that women like sexual variety as well so polygamy just means one to many people use it as synonymous with one man multiple women but that's not what PO is polygamy is one to many which

can take two forms it could be one man multiple women which is called polygyny or it could be one woman multiple men which is called polyandry there are almost no societies where institutionally we have polyandry because it wouldn't make evolutionary sense for that mating system to arise the only famous case of polyandry is called Tibetan FR uh fraternal polyandry so the word fraternal means that to the extent that there are ecological reasons why we have to tolerate one woman going with multiple guys it'll be brothers and the reason for that is because of a mechanism

called Inclusive fitness which is that I can increase my reproductive Fitness through direct reproduction I have children and therefore they will share half my genes but I can also invest in the children of my siblings who share also genes with me and I could still be increasing my Inclusive fitness so therefore polyandry need not be a darwinian dead end because I'm still extending my genes even in in such a system so is this why I take care of my brother's kids in part because that my nieces and nephews are 100% as a matter of fact

I've done several scientific studies where I exactly do these kinds of tests where I look at what is the pattern of investment in different family members as a function of their genetic relatedness to me so R is something called the coefficient of genetic relatedness so me and my brother our R is05 me and my identical twin are rs one me and a random stranger are rs zero me and my nephews a nieces 0.25 me and my parents 0.5 me and my grandparents 0.25 okay so we wanted to test whether the pattern of investments in this

case through gift giving whether they correlate to the genetic relatedness between the giver and recipient and as you might expect intuitively even if you're not a fancy Evolution psychologist the greater the genetic relatedness the larger the size of gift I'm much more likely to give a bigger gift at my brother's wedding than I am to my second cousin okay and so we've evolved this calculus that allows us to met out these investments in line with our genetic reless which by the way you see across countless animal species the likelihood of you coming out of your

borrow to protect people who are in the borrow increases if whoever is in the borrow has greater genetic relatedness to you so the other part in the 2018 paper that's going to blow your mind because that one you wouldn't intuitively have expected it the the first finding you say yeah it makes sense I give more gifts to my brother than to my third cousin so we wanted to check weather at an actual Israeli wedding because they had data from actual 30 I think it was 30 weddings so they had field data they had the data

of all of the uh attendees and the gifts that they gave uh uncle morai gave $180 rafika gave okay so what we wanted to test is whether the mother's side or the father's side of the bride and groom across all genetic related coefficients which side would give more now in the Middle East it's a patriarchal society but evolutionary theory would predict something differently and let me explain why so take for example your four grandparents okay there is maternal grandmother maternal grandfather paternal grandmother paternal grandfather in terms of the genetic relatedness they're each equally genetically related

to you 0.25 quarter of their genes they share with you but here's the second part genetic assuredness is not not the same across the four your paternal grandfather has two layers of paternity uncertainty your maternal grandmother has zero generational paternal paternity uncertainty because there is no maternity uncertainty so therefore you would predict that the paternal grandfather would invest the least in his grandchildren the maternal grandmother would invest the most and the two other grandparents in the middle that's what's been found in many studies across many cultures you might have to explain paternity uncertainty paternity uncertainty

means that when a child is born you never know that he is your child right uh you the mother always know that it's her child she had the child right so we wanted to test whether the mother's side of both the bride and groom would give greater gifts than the Father's Side precisely because there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty but there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty and that's exactly what we found so the women's family gave more presents exactly okay yeah thank you for summarizing that long rent but and why why

again just to clarify why that is because they're trying to make sure that the male is invested no there're because the mother's side is simply more vested in investing in the in either the bride or groom because they know that that is their infant CU there's no uncertainty there's no uncertainty you got it okay so now can we close the loop on the sexual variety so so far I said that uh there's definitely evidence that women also have a sexual variety pension by virtue of them cheating more when they are maximally fertile where they and

not insisting on uh contraception and all that here's another one you do a mapping of across primates so here come the bonobos here come mountain gorillas here come chimpanzees Here Comes humans so you put all the primates and you do a uh calculation of the size of the testes of the males in that species as a function of female sexual promiscuity in that species are you with me yes so mountain gorillas phenomenal beasts 450 lounds some of the most majestic males they have a territorial they they have a polygynous Arrangement there is one male dominant

male that controls control to sexual access to many females So based on what I just said can you predict what the size of their testes are they're going to have small testes yes because there isn't sperm or competition therefore imagine how unbelievable it is that a fundamental male morphological attribute the size of your testes is an Adaptive response to a female behavior in that species greater female promiscuity in that species bigger testicles so mountain gorillas very small testicles okay chimpanzees are just walking testicles their bodies just exist to support massive testes why because in chimp

Society we say hello sex we say goodbye sex we fight sex post fight sex so there is constant sex happening so that the same female is being impregnated by multiple males so the way that I fight against that is by devel Ving bigger testes because then there are mechanisms where having bigger testes solves that problem so now here comes Robin Baker actually a British scientist who wrote a book called sperm Wars where he argued in his book some have said it's contentious other said that it's tight that the morphology of human sperm the makeup of

it the makeup of it is not simply the standard one that we're all used to seeing which is there is a head with a tail and they're all rushing to that mythical egg those are called fertilizers he demonstrated in his research that there are two other types of sperm phenotypes within a man's ejaculate there are the blockers that don't look like the fertilizer and defense defense very good and then there are The Killers o that go around hunting other men's sperm now let's put it all together sperm is viable within the reproductive a woman's reproductive

tract for about 72 hours therefore for men to have evolved the chemical Weaponry to have blockers and Killers means that in our ancestral past the likelihood of women having been with more than one man within a 7 2 hour period whether willfully or through aggression would have been high therefore that's why you evolve that response now here is where you can see what happens with ideology and therefore how why I wrote parasitic mind when I lecture this in front of radical feminists they'll come up Dr sad you're such a brilliant scientist why because the research

that I just described demonstrates that women could be just as sexual voracious as men and that they've evolved the desire also for you know a sexual appetite that corresponds with my women's studies and radical feminism classes therefore when from this side of my mouth I say something that supports their ideology I become a hero if from this side of my mouth I say oh but incidentally across cultures it's been studied across many many cultures men do have much greater desire for sexual variety boo so I can either go from hero to zero depending on whether

what I just said supports your ideology or not that's not how you adjudicate science science truth exists independently of whether it supports your ideology or not hence eventually the parasitic mind because you're parasitized by bad ideologies what are what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble so in my scientific work humans are biological beings shaped by the Dual forces of sexual and natural selection buo Nazi bu Nazi okay I mean people are coming around now because the beauty of science is that it's autoc corrective right I mean some

of the biggest works you you now know that they the biggest work by how much they were originally rejected so many Nobel prizes the story is always the same the scientist proposes an idea that is completely unorthodox contrary to the prevailing whims of accepted science and is constantly rejected until it's not very simple example probably the thing that has saved human beings the most from death over the past 100 years well it's stuff related to hygiene issues because a lot of lot of times you'd have childhood mortality because of exposure to different pathogens well the

gentleman who came up with the idea of why so often women die during childbirth do do you know what the answer is um because the doctor's not cleaned his hands or yes beautiful well done see so it's semil wise who was a doctor who said what's happening here why are these women getting this post uh Nal very devastating uh fever and then within an a day or two they're gone and so he said oh wait a second so the the surgeons have just worked on cadavers what's the kadaba uh like a dead dead body okay

so like let's say they're they're doing forensic pathology stuff okay and then they move straight to a gynecological intervention with the woman so when he said and he did the studies that that showed hey here are women who we we asked the guys to clean or didn't ask the guys to clean and people laughed him out of town he died in a sanitarium in a mental institution he he was complete right today we we erect statues of him right so so to answer your first point when I first started my career when I said oh

by the way you can't study consumers without understanding their physiology their hormones what kind of [ __ ] is this this is not a biology Department get a grip you should have you should you should not be in the business school what do you mean you think that you can you think that when a consumer eats they transcend their biology it's outside of their biology well now a lot of them are coming around so that when I first promulgated this idea 30 years ago I was a Nazi today it's dear Dr sad would be an

honor if you come and give the plary lecture at our University oh but what happened 30 years ago when I was a bullshitter well apparently they caught on so so in my academic work the fact of saying that we're biological beings was the most triggering thing in my public engagement work that's not directly related to my science well it's a very long list hence the parasitic mind but certainly when I talk about things related say to Islam that doesn't get me a lot of Islamic friends unfortunately you're Jewish aren't you I'm jewi yes I'm Jewish

but but what I say would be true whether I was Jewish or whether I was uh anything else so how as an evolutionary behavioral scientist how much of what we do is driven by sex and relationships uh I mean so in in my earlier books so I'm going to answer it again in a bro in a big way uh in my first book which is the evolutionary basis of consumption and then in the consuming Instinct I argue that there are four key darwinian mechanisms that drive much of our purpose of behavior so that's speaks to

your point uh there is behaviors that are related to natural selection or our survival Instinct so for example the fact that I'm almost certain that you and I have a preference for some instantiation of a fatty food more than raw celery is almost a guarantee am I right yes I agree yeah okay and I'm I'm willing to bet that everybody who's in this studio will will also agree okay now we may have a different preference so I I pref I may prefer fatty steak you prefer uh chocolate mousse but we both prefer chocolate mousse and

steak over raw celery and so there are many consumatory acts and preferences that I can easily ultimately map to that drive the most obvious of which would be our food preferences okay to your direct question then the next module so that first module I call it the survival module the next module called the productive module sex to your question are all the things that we do because they're very much driven by sex related issues so the types of products that men and women use as sexual signals are astonishingly the same across cultures so for example

owners of Ferrari are 99% male even though there are a million women who have the resources to certainly buy a Ferrari yet they don't Oprah Winfrey is not stopped from buying a Ferrari because she can't afford it and yet she's not doing it in the human context fancy cars take on the morphological feature of the peacock taale so all animals that are sexually reproducing use sexual signals humans given that they're also a consumatory animal will use specific products to Signal look at me I'm better that than Steven the way that I do that is by

hopefully demonstrating cues that I have higher status than you okay now women will also engage in vigorous sexual signaling but it'll be related to things that are beautification right so cosmetic surgeries around the world are almost excl not that men don't do it hair plugs but it's very very much of a female domain and so there are many many behaviors whether consumer related or not that could be then mapped onto the reproductive module to your question then there are two other modules that I hinted at earlier when I talked about gift giving so there's the

kin selection module these are behaviors that are related to the fact of I increase my Inclusive fitness by investing in my kin okay and then there is reciprocal altruism module which is why would I ever jump into the river so if I jump into the river to save my three children that's skin selection because each of my three children on average shares 50% of their genes with me so if in the service of saving those three kids I end up dying The evolutionary calculus is totally in favor of me dying who cares okay on the

other hand why would I jump into the river to save Stephen first of all until we met today you're a stranger why would I ever save a stranger if you're not a stranger and you're a friend you but you're still zero genetic relatedness so there the argument is is that it's due to reciprocal altruism and that human beings have evolved the mechanism of reciprocity to oil our social bonds to return of favor to return of favor so so literally the I scratch your back you scratch mine literally comes from our primate cousin species where you

engage in reciprocal grooming so what happens there are a bunch of parasites that are all over my fur that I can't get to and so what I do is I come stand and I give you my back and you will sit there and pick at all of it of course the expectation is you'll now return the favor so I literally scratch your back and you scratch mine now where did that signature come from originally one argument is that imagine we are walking around in the Savanah where the most common threat that we Face life is

basically two things I mean other than sex get dinner and make sure you don't become somebody's dinner mic drop that's it that's life okay so one of the problems that we've all faced hence why we've evolved gustatory preferences for high calorie foods is caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity we don't have a neighborhood store to go buy our food so I might actually die of starvation well what if we mitigate that risk whereby we set up an insurance policy with nonkin another group of folks that are also walking around the Savannah hey next time that we

bring down the big prey that's 1,000 pounds of meat we will share with you but hey you do the right thing and reciprocate back to us so now you might say okay well that's all nice fancy science but how does that manifest itself in in human consumer Behavior well there are so many behaviors that you and I engage in if we're friends that are completely rooted in that reciprocal module so for example when it's your birthday I call you and I invite you out to dinner I expect unless you're a social cheat that when it's

my birthday you will reciprocate now from a strict economic perspective why don't we skip this whole charade I'm going to pay $70 for your meal you're going to pay $70 for mine we're going to end up at the same spot let's not do it the reason why we have to do it is because that reciprocal ritual is what oils our bonds of affinity and so there are many many behaviors that we engage in that are exactly tailoring that so to summarize much of our behaviors I argue in my earlier books could be mapped onto one

of these four modules and in that earlier book The consuming Instinct you talk about a mate desirability score right what is a mate desirability score so imagine a car a car is made up of many attributes right so the car could be what's its gas efficiency what's the strength of its uh uh engine how well does it hug the the the road what's its green is it a green car or does it have bad exhaust so so a car is a multi-attribute product it's made up of many attributes and then it could be that the

way that I choose which car I pick is the one that scores the best on the totality of those attributes okay that's called the multi-attribute choice well human beings are also products made up of many attributes so in the mating Market you and I let's say we do men now but of course it applies to women too there's a bunch of attributes that we know that women are going to either like about us or not like about us overwhelmingly by the way the number one universal attribute that women seek is anything that's related to Social

Status right so in other words it could be my ambition it could be my assertiveness it could be my social dominance it could be literally the the big diplomas I have behind my back it could be the number of zeros behind in my bank it could be how many cattle heads I have if I'm hadza tribe but in no culture has a woman ever said the following give me a non-assertive beta Meek man who has pear-shaped hips and a nasal voice and I'm turning into a sexual frenzied animal that those words have never been uttered

in the history of humanity okay but what women will say by the way not it's not that they only look for Rich guys right because many women will be madly in love with the starving artist but the starving artist is showing what ambition ambition assertiveness there is a trajectory of creation that's coming around the corner I'm going to become a big rock star but no that's why by the way if you do uh I think that study has been done where you and actually some of my students in one of my classes did a similar

study for their project just show a guy exact same guy in a personal ad he's got a guitar he doesn't have a guitar nothing changed it's the exact same guy it's Steven but give me a guitar no oh with the guitar step's gorgeous without the guitar he's less gorgeous what's the other explanation for that that people might jump to they might say well I like music so that's why I prefer Stephen with a guitar and he's going to play some songs and I'm going to feel good and then I'm GNA have sex with him so

so that's a very good question so that is the difference between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations much of science operates at the proximate level it explains the how and the what of a phenomenon how does diabetes work what are the fact factors that increase the likelihood of you having diabetes that's perfectly fine the ultimate explanation is the darwinian why why would the phenomenon have evolved to be of that type so you could say I'm just drawn to a guy who knows how to play music you've just explained proximate it's like saying why have we evolved

to have sex because it feels good that's approximate the ultimate explanation is that a sexually reproducing species has to have a mechanism by which you're drawn to engage in the behavior that results in procreation so it's not that ultimate explanations are superior to proximate ones it's that you need both levels of analyses to fully explain a phenomenon so what is going on there with the guitar from an evolutionary perspective why is the guitar attractive he's creative yeah H he's got the assiduousness to have the discipline to pra why is a violin virtuoso attractive all other

or or Picasso Picasso is a short little guy he's frumpy he's yet he's got a very very long line of very attractive women saying can can I have sex with you Picasso tonight how is that possible is it because at some level we're associating that Talent with status absolutely I the person that can play the piano at the party probably has a lot of status they're going to have a lot of options 100 as a matter I mean just listen to famous rock stars and what they say as to why they became musicians I mean

l literally almost to the word it's as if they plagiarized each other oh I quickly realized that that's how I can get the girls right they never said it's because in my childhood I grew up listening to bak and mozard and it tickled my auditory reflex right they usually said oh I go to a party and I break out the thing and the lineup begins and then Jean Simmons sleeps with 5,000 girls and the lead singer of simple red who's a rather forgive me whatever your name is he's Ginger guy he's not exactly the model

of my sexual dreams if I'm a woman but yet he was you know with tons of women right but to finish the point about M desirability scale so now imagine all of those attributes that I can C so okay God side well I'm not tall that goes against me but I'm not very hard to look at that goes for me I play soccer really well I learned very quickly when I was 15 that the best way that you won't get bullied by anybody is when you're the big Soccer Star okay uh I've done pretty well

in my life so there are some traits that I score badly on and some traits that I can compensate on and so we can put them all into a basket and say okay well what on a scale of Z to 100 what would God score on his M desirability scale and so that's what that scale is it's basically taking all of our attributes and then saying what do you score is is stepen a 78 or 92 now here's what's very interesting to to that question which you didn't ask humans engage in what's called assortative mating

assortative mating is the idea that birds of a feather flock together so there are two maxims there's the birds of a feather flock together and there's the Opposites Attract Opposites Attract only works well for short-term mating I am sexually koi and chai and I'm an introvert you're sexually daring and extroverted that complimentarity might actually result in a nice trist behind the bushes but for long-term mating if you want to assure success of a long-term marriage then it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock together and usually here what we mean is we share similar values we

share similar goals similar mindsets we really have to assort on these if I'm an aurbic atheist and you're a committed Catholic who views everything through Jesus it doesn't take a fancy Professor to know we're not starting on the right foot okay but here's the other part about associative assortative mating this is actually something that I first um proposed as an open question many years ago on one of my appearances of Joe Rogan and I received like a hundred emails saying oh I want to do that research with you which I still haven't done so maybe

it'll happen now so let me repeat it so I argue that people assort based on their overall mate desirability score which is is the question you asked meaning if I'm an 87 I'm unlikely because the mating Market is is literally a market it's a market okay if I'm an 87 I can command a girl or expect a girl in the 80s it wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36 we all want to get the 100 both men and women want to get the 100 but what stops US is that I don't

score 100 so I want to get the gorgeous supermodel and so on but maybe I'm not good enough to get her and and and all women want to get the highly accomplished gorgeous male Olympic swimmer who's both bronny and a neurosurgeon but they can't get him because he's got the pick of the litter so usually we end up assorting on our mate value but now here's the part where I proposed as a hypothesis and it it it's it's never been tested although I discuss it in the happiness book 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 is whether their mating overall mating scores stay in line or they begin to diverge so I'm the high school quarterback so all the girls think I'm hot I get to go to the prom whatever it's called uh with the cheer the head cheerer she's the hot girl I'm the king of the high school that's great at that point when we're both 18 we assort on our mating value now let's fast forward 10 years later the hot cheerleader is now

finishing her third year in neurosurgery yes there's a lot of hot pretty smart looking male doctors the the hot quarterback when I was 18 has become fat he's lost his hair and he's uh consistently unemployed and shows no interest other than playing video games so what's happened when we first met when we were 18 our mating values were the same but now hot cheerleader has become neurosurgeon her score has gone really up hot quarterback is now a degenerate now there's a huge difference in our mating scores that's going to put a huge stressor on our

marriage 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 and work hard at making sure that you stay at the right M value once we get that Divergence I'm predicting divorce okay the it's super interesting the question that Springs to mind is as men and women age who tends to drop in their desirability score what do you think I don't know you want me to answer it because then I can get the hate mail no no no but I I

ask that as well because there's clearly some data on who's asking for the divorces who's initiating the divorces Who's Cheating the most that would so women are overwhelming the ones to instigate a divorce yeah that's true although from a strict evolutionary perspective the mate Val all other things equal mate value of men goes up with age mate value of women goes down with age now here is how you reduce your chances in The Mating Market if you're a woman you ready of course just aging yes number one number two if you're tall that's a death

blow why because wh it's not that women want only tall guys because then we all the other guys would we would have been twiddling our thumbs in frustrated celibacy but women want a guy who's taller than them that's what's guaranteed there was actually a study done a few years well many years ago now where they looked at 720 actual couples guess how many violated that Norm women taller than men out of 720 I don't know one one out of 720 one right so women it it's a it's a non-starter that a woman doesn't want a

shorter guy than her she might I mean lonel Messi is my height but he's Leonel Messi and he found the gorgeous woman who's shorter than him right but what you don't want now if I'm a 6'1 woman men now of course they are still 6'2 and taller men but just statistically speaking we've just Shrunk the possible pool there's a gorgeous guy super handsome very funny very educated who's 5'8 but I'm 61 I Tower over him if I wear heels and I add another four inches he becomes my son well this all brings to light something

else which has been discussed a few times on this show which is if we said there that men's mate desirability score stays pretty consistent unless all goes up unless they do something very bad but the kind of inverse conversation there is that women's desirability scores are now higher than ever when they're younger than ever yeah so you've got and I believe from what I've been told that the Mal's desirability score is now lower than ever if we think about income acoss stage groups um in the lower age groups so if you think about income um

differences if you think about educational differences who's graduating from college who's smarter and all these kinds of things because of the very important changes that happen in society um men and women are getting closer and closer to parity here yeah which means that the I mean someone on the podcast described it to me as the tall woman problem but it can also be described as the small man problem well and it's small it's small and Tall not I was going to finish yeah it's not just the height so I said death blow would be you

get older you're tall and you're very educated so if you are a 38-year-old 6 foot2 PhD from Stanford and you're a woman good luck why because number one I've got an older so there's a smaller pool right uh number two I'm tall I want a taller guy number three when I'm a PhD I'm a woman now when I'm a PhD I want a guy who is as a educated and accomplished as me or more so now I need to find a 6'4 guy who's also a PhD right here's the Paradox by the way that people

don't realize people think that oh the reason why women always desire High status guys this is [ __ ] it's not true is because historically they have been dominated by the patriarchy so they sought that which they didn't have and that's completely falsified by the fact that very high status women actually insist more on the guy being higher status so if it were so for example if I am a neurosurgeon and a diplomat and I'm a woman I don't say oh well now that I have all that I need let me look for the illiterate

17-year-old Cabana boy who can't read three words because that's what I want no she even wants she insists more on the guy being meeting her or higher in status so if I'm if I'm older tall and super educated it's a death blow what does this all say about what's going on with masculinity at the moment because um one said this a few times on the show but when you look at the stats around suicidality amongst men um when you look at mental health issues amongst men when you look at some of the influencers that men

are now drawn to more than ever that are offering a new vision of masculinity there's clearly some kind of transition something going on in society at the moment as it relates to what it is to be a man you said this thing about beta male on no one wants a beta male well you know it feels like there has been a narrative that has encouraged a bit more beta maless in society and we're seeing a bit of like a counter movement I've had so many women some of which have been on the show say to

me that they've got a young son um and they are confused about the advice they should be giving their young son in such a world I get tons of women who write to me and and ask me sort of the F I'm paraphrasing where where are the Bold men right I I I go to a place I'm looking super you know ready to meet people I'm easy to look at and no one approaches me well if you inculcate over many generations that if I approach you and say my God my name is God you look

lovely what a beautiful dress that's a compliment becomes a form of compliment rape then is it surprising that I may be a bit ambivalent in approaching you I mean I I often joke that given some of the what is now considered hashme too Italy should cease to exist because the whole country is hashtag me too right what do I mean by that Italians stereotypically of course are seducers they pursue women I mean women will say I love Italian Guys how they approach now we're not talking about you know being persistent to the point that they're

harassing you that they're pinning you down physically but there is a dynamic of courtship whereby men who are bold men who approach men who take chances who are confident are going to get the pretty girl well now imagine if you create a dynamic in for all sorts of reasons one of which is radical feminism the other one of which is to pathologize half of humanity called men through the label of toxic masculinity no it's called sexiness a guy who jumps into uh a a building to save a puppy and he's called the fireman that's what

we fantasize about that's not toxic masculinity that's masculinity right and so a lot of women will write to me and say where are those men Professor well those men are too afraid to come out I I'll give you a couple of examples okay at my University we now have a mandatory sexual training module that we have to take otherwise we can't continue right it it's part of like you you know you have to October 15th to get the refresher because until my benevolent kind employer taught me how to speak to women I was clueless so

the first 57 years of my life I walked around as a middle eastern Savage not knowing how to interact with women of course I'm being sarcastic right but then the my benevolent employer came along and through very very cute condescending and patronizing cartoon vignettes they teach me how to act so you know a compliment that is in the wrong context could be a form of sexual violence so for example uh you're walking down the street and you see a guy complimenting an a woman and it appears that she's not uh welcoming that compliment is that

sexual violence and so I will first just to test the algorithm say no and then it comes back o I understand why you might be but that is a form are you with me yes so now I'm 59 with a big personality this kind of [ __ ] doesn't get to me that's why I speak openly publicly to the Chagrin of all of Academia but the 21-year-old who doesn't have that same strength of personhood do you think he's going to think twice before at the next party walking up to a girl mustering up all his

courage to ask her if she wants a coffee of course he is so I think that's where that problem of dynamic comes from and I'm now going to share a personal story with one one of my brothers which is also in the happiness book which speaks to when you're the opposite of the non-bold timid guy one of my brothers uh has been in Southern California since 1984 he became very very successful and Wealthy uh was in Olympian uh judoka he he represented Lebanon in the 1976 Olympics the reason why that's relevant is because physically he's

very dominant but my brother is two feet tall obviously not but he's he's shorter than me he's okay how I'm like 5'6 5'7 okay he's maybe five3 okay but but a bulldog yeah right I always like to say just because then it makes it easier I say I'm mess's height so that makes it easier okay so uh he's not Messi's height he's shorter than Messi's height he's shorter than meridana right so but he walks like he's 7 feet tall okay so we used to in the early 90s I would come visit him he he used

to live in in Newport Beach where we are now and we'd go to clubs I'm I'm single at that point and my brother would say all right God we're going to play the game I'm like oh his name is DAV I no David not in the mood find the most beautiful and unattainable girl here oh come on man I don't want to do this do it okay all right so I look around so now I want to find not only the prettiest girl I want to find an impediment to you getting her what's an impediment

a really domineering looking man that she's with therefore that makes it even less likely that you can get her yes mhm okay David I found her the the girl over there with the high heels in the middle of the dance floor that's the one you sure God yes that's the one okay he stands there dominant tattooed guy goes to the bathroom David in great white shark mode goes up to the girl she with her high heels he's coming up to here I justest okay haah I hear them smiling he comes back to me complete cold

says she'll call me tomorrow [ __ ] David no way zero chance it's not happening next day come come this is kind of an Arabic thing come hi David it's candy we met yesterday the thing I'm looking forward to meeting you how did he do it Stephen he did it because testicle is this big he's 7 foot2 in his Aura now you might say well yeah boy doesn't add a lot of inches metaphorically when you have Ferraris and so on but there's a more General story here he only owns the world he walks like he

owns it right but he's not of great so if you ask women yeah it' be great if I'm 6'2 and I walk big but I could be 6' two and very Meek and very tepid and very beta or I could be 5 foot7 and I'm messy most are going to go for messy so that's what I mean by the way when I say that mating is a compensatory Choice compensatory means that it to your earlier point about made desirability we are judged on a basket of goods if it were that we're only judged in a

non-compensatory way meaning so for example if it were that women say I always go out with the tallest guy then there's no way for me to compensate for that my humor won't get me higher score my looks won't get me my education my accomplishment I'm dead because there's there are a lot of taller guys but if the way you choose me is as a function of how I score on a basket of good then I might have a shot so that's why I tell people by the way that even though we all score poorly on

some things but there's a whole bunch of other things that we that is within our possibility to improve I guarantee you for all that you are if you improve on assertiveness ambition if your vocabulary changes so that when you sit at a party people can judge you by the way within the first few sentences that you say just your elocution the vocabulary that you use the the the thoughtfulness of your answers I can very quickly judge where you are where I can put you in the in the in the pigeon hole so there are way

you know what why don't you crack a book and read a bit right why don't you stop playing video games on this point of masculinity where the just further Upstream a little bit we talked about men approaching women now I have to present the counter narrative to this because I don't think most men understand what it is to be a beautiful woman and and what they go through on a daily basis this um ITV made a piece I think seven days ago I saw it on on X or Twitter um which showed what it's like

to be a beautiful woman walking down the street yeah um this was only seven days ago there's been a variety of different videos like this but I'll just play it for you so you can see what's going on here I'm fing undercover alone in Cardiff where police recently announced a decrease in violence against women within seconds a group of men approach me you play tennis this guy didn't respect my personal space I don't mean to be readd or anything but I saw you I had to say hello you look nice about my friend that's fine

the guy in the black T-shirt sees me up ahead and speeds up to get next to me and like many others he overstays his welcome I think I'll be okay 20 people approach me in Just 2 hours now I don't think men realize that that that's the nature of what a woman goes through so in the context of of this conversation about no we do have to be on the front foot if we are going to find a mate when you understand that that's what that beautiful women that you're thinking about going up to has

already gone through it does change your you know I got you but I I've got an sure already deployed answer for that life is about modulation right saying the right thing in the right way at the right time right I'm sort of paraphrasing a quote of Aristotle which in in the per and not the person in the happiness book I have a whole chapter that is going to address your beautiful woman story so I talk about the inverted you uh does that ring a bell do you know what that is the inverted you I can

imagine on a graph on a graph but not not this way that way oh sorry yeah the other way like a hill right yeah so the inverted U is basically the the mathematical representation of something that certainly the ancient Greeks taught us long ago but they weren't the only ones to say this you know everything in moderation right so Aristotle in his golden mean argument said look if you have let's say a uh Soldier who's very cowardly Meek lacking courage that's not good if you have a soldier who is so bold rash reckless in his

risk-taking that's not good either so too little is not good too much is not good and The Sweet Spot is in the middle so in the happiness book I have an entire chapter where by I argue that everything in life the number one universal rule of optimal flourishing is to find The Sweet Spot irrespective of any context that you're talking about and then I demonstrated through a a bewildering number of examples at the neuronal level at the individual level at the societal level okay so now let's apply that principle to here right those guys are

at the other end of the curve right knowing when to act in the right way at the right time in the right measure that they're not doing that because the likelihood of that beautiful girl when you come up and act like a rather harassing buffoon in that context of her saying you know what I'm sold let's have massive sex behind that tree right now right therefore we know that statistically speaking that approach is never going to work it's done for no other purpose than to harass whereas when I'm at a party where we are supposed

to be mingling and I come up to you and I say forgive me I hope you don't mind I just want to say gorgeous dress does that seem like what I just said is similar to how they're acting so life is about modulation and those guys are certainly not modulated obviously there's a bunch of things that are clearly violations there um of everything you've just said about the right place the right time they they look drunk uh it's very late she's alone so she's in a position of vulnerability in many respects so rolling up to

her in such a way is but the from the from the male perspective you said the probability of getting a good outcome there is so low but from the male perspective there they're probably thinking listen if the probability is 0.00001 why not I'll take it they're probably thinking that well by the way yeah perhaps but if you were an empathetic person you'd say the fact that she may feel threatened is enough reason not to yeah not to do it yeah therefore to me they're all [ __ ] I agree and I I at the heart

of this though is this idea of self-awareness exactly because the men that rolled up there they might in their own heads think they have a chance they might like have a distorted view of their probability I mean one of them rolled up and said hey uh do you want some tennis lessons I'm a tennis coach and from what I saw in the video he was a good 30 40 years older than her yeah and in his head he must have thought that the effort he's exerting there is worth the probability that he's assumed because there's

just like no self-awareness and I think at the heart of this is like how do you build that that self-awareness to know I I love that you're asking this because one of the things that frustrates me the most in social interactions is when so I'm not a beautiful woman so I don't get that violation but I get a million other violations for all sorts of reasons one of which is that people do recognize me a lot and they do come up so they don't do it because they're trying to get me behind the bushes but

then they'll stop me and lecture for the next 25 minutes about whatever idea they're having in their head now I'm polite I'm thankful that people appreciate my work and will come up but I didn't sign up while I'm walking with my children and wife for you to lecture me for 25 minutes uninterrupted without me saying a word if you come up and say oh I read the perect Mind Professor loved it do you mind if I take a picture with you I'm always gracious I'm always but so all of those social FAS almost all of

them could be linked to what you said which is a complete lack of self-awareness which let's break it down even more there is a concept in uh psychology uh called theory of Mind are are you familiar with it no theory of mind is a ability that you must have in order to have meaningful social interaction what does theory of mind mean when I'm chatting with you I have to be able to put myself in your mind so for example if I'm talking to an audience that knows nothing about evolutionary psychology I might alter the specific

words I use because I have theory of mind that makes me say they don't know what domain specific computational systems would be if I use those words I just Lo not because they're dumb but because they don't know that jargon so I already exhibited a good communicator skill which is I put myself in the theory of Mind of my audience and I modulate my message depending on who I'm speaking to well autistic children by the way fail on theory of mind so one of the ways that you are able to diagnose because autism you can't

give a blood test that shows oh there's a marker of autism so the way that you typically uh diagnose autism early is through various tasks that they go through so there is a task for children that you suspect might be autistic where they will fail on such a test which makes sense intuitively because you know that autistic children don't have very good social skills are emotionally withdrawn don't read CU well so for example if I'm sitting with you for 25 minutes while you lecture me about why Kamala Harris is a great president I didn't sign

up for that you want to shake my hand that's great now you can tell if you're not if you are self-aware that I'm getting impatient you should be able to tell that my children are starting to shuffle uncomfortably because they're getting impatient but you're just as oblivious as those [ __ ] so so many of social interactions are because of people's lack of self-awareness and I am shocked by the extent to which most people lack self-awareness so it's not that 95% of the people that I meet are unbelievably socially gracious and it's only the 5%

degenerates that are bad it's the opposite but then there's a there's an explanation for that okay go because the ones that did have the self-awareness never came up right okay oh so therefore I'm only exposed to the bad instan so the ones that have the selfawareness in the theory of Mind saw you walk past with your family when he's with his family love his work but I'm not going to roll upon him with his family you're exactly right by the way that's the exact same mechanism that explains something called the overconfidence bias which is a

cognitive bias whereby we overestimate something in an over so for example if you ask most professors so do you think that you your uh your teaching uh ability is it below average average or above average 90% of professors say above average well statistically that can be well why does that happen it's exactly for why you said the the students who thought I was great took the time to come up to me and say professor love the course the ones who thought I was an [ __ ] didn't come up to me so what did my

brain code only the great ones and therefore I must be great when you're trying to build something the problem that we all face is we need talent and skills that we don't have ourselves and we can waste so much time trying to learn a new skill when really what we should be doing is using a platform like fiver.com where you have Global access to reviewed tried and tested worldclass Talent at your fingertips that you can access in a flexible and affordable way fiver for me when I was starting out in business was a real unlock

it was a bit of a hack because I used to think that the only way for me to add skills to my project was by hiring full-time staff and bringing them into the office fiver.com changes that and if you're in that position now where there's a skill you're missing for a project that matters to you here's what you have to do visit fiverr.com diary tolearn more and here's the great thing if it doesn't go well Fiverr offer a prettyy amazing money back guarantee so what are you waiting for what if the way you present yourself

isn't appealing to the world and again this brings us back to this idea of like being a beta male and when you say beta male what we're saying that what is the definition of beta male it's so yes it's used colloquially beta male would be none of the markers that uh exhibit the types of qualities that women would find attractive you possess so it could be social dominance it could be physical dominance it could be high status it could be assertiveness could be ambition it could be look uh one of the reasons why women say

I I love I'm very attracted to a funny man a funny guy what what they effectively saying is I want an intelligent man because it's very very unlikely that you could be a very funny satius if you're not intelligent Dave Chappelle is probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues but they have a lot of degrees but he wouldn't be able to stand up in front of an audience keep their attention for an hour and a half on really powerful social commentary where they pay $150 to come if he wasn't if he weren't incredibly intelligent

right so so beta and and Alpha doesn't just mean tall and dominant and I have a club and I beat you with it it means do you exude the types of cues that on average in The Mating Market people would say godamn that's an attractive guy whatever that means that's that's how I Define it so if you had to give advice then to men and women who were intent on being higher value and higher status how what would that advice be and how would it differ some of the advice will be exactly the same for

both sexes but some of the advice would be sex specific in recognition that not of not all of the mating attributes are equally desired by the opposite sex right so for example no man has ever uttered the following words Linda you have a gorgeous body I'm unbelievably sexually drawn to you but you're not exhibiting the type of alacrity to improve your GPA score and your lack of assertiveness in your studies suggests that I'm not going to have sex with you tonight no man has ever uttered those words but a lot of women meet a super

hot guy at a club he opens his mouth and what comes out is [ __ ] imbecility and suddenly the sex opportunity has just shut down so why am I saying all this there are some traits that if men were to work on that's going to bring them more bank for the buck than if women worked on other ones both so for example kindness and intelligence are Universal traits equally desired by both men and women so that's that's true for both men and women across cultures but social status is preferred by women in Men in

every known culture physical beauty and youth is preferred by men over women in every culture so so some traits the advice would be the same some traits it will be sex specific I wonder because I'm trying to give I'm trying to figure out how to give advice to that bottom 50% of men that are basic basically having no sex right which I'm told about over and over again that are at risk of becoming incels or playing video games in their room that are turning to pornography as a medicine I guess and an antidote to their

lives what kind of advice would you offer to those those sort of disillusioned men is that guy also 90 PBS overweight and pearshaped probably not in shape okay so you know what hit the treadmill looks matter they don't matter to women as much as they do to men but you know I my my wife often jokes with me I don't I don't know if you've ever seen this on on the internet I will often post you know in a joking manner a photo of me from 1985 in actually in Southern California in in in San

Diego where I'm in my soccer physique days where I have the eight pack and the V and the whole thing right and my wife would joke with me she said how come I never got that version of God right now that doesn't mean she obviously stayed with me when I was you know 80 six pounds heavier so it's not the only thing but boy is it better to have this six or eight pack than not have it so uh my height I can't change right so I can't tell those guys that are potentially going to

be in sales you know please try to grow four inches right but again crack a book so for example even with my own children right you would think having the father that they have they're born they come out of the womb and they're reading you know how hard it is for me to get them to get away from this damn thing right it's it's it's it's one of the biggest frustrations I have as a parent and and as I said earlier they're they're very graceful they're very po probably compared to other children they're a lot

more knowledgeable but it's not a reflex for them to say of all things that I could do right now I want to go to a room and read whereas it is a reflex that I still have today with complete full dedication so read more learn how to speak better there there again mating is a compensatory process there are things that I can't change about me I can't change my height I can't change the Symmetry or lack thereof in my face but if I'm thinner all other things equal I'm probably going to be better so it's

never a lost cause wherever I am in my mating desirability score there are always effective intervention strategies that could improve my score so I'm I'm currently at a 42 I think that if I do strategies ABC I could probably get up to 60 and 60 is going to open me up to a lot more desirable women than when I was 42 we we talked a little bit earlier about um pornography I think I I said the word once but I found it quite interesting you know we talked a little bit about sexual variety that you

make a case that porn in some ways might be good for us not quite I say so I say that porn it makes perfect evolutionary sense that porn is a behavioral trap that can lead to addiction so I'm not saying it's good for you I'm not saying that we've evolved to specifically consume porn but here's what porn is doing so in in evolutionary theory there is a distinction between an adaptation and an exaptation an adaptation is something that has evolved because it confers either survival or uh reproductive benefits so my preference for fat Foods is

an adaptation that's linked to survival my uh desire to use high status products to impress the ladies is a behavioral trait that helps me in the mating Market okay an exaptation not to be confused with an adaptation is when there is a phenomenon that piggybacks on an adaptation itself it serves no purpose you follow what I mean so for example the color of our skeletal system is not an adaptation there were already path dependent engineering solution that led to the fact that our skeletal color is the way that it is it's it's not itself an

adaptation how would you use this and and I'm going to come to porography in a second for example you could say religion is an adaptation if you want to say that this is what you'd have to argue groups that are religious by virtue of their religion ity exhibit greater communality greater cohesion greater ingroup outgroup demarcation so groups that are religious tend to outlive groups that are a irreligious so that would be an Adaptive argument for why religion evolved an exaptation argument for why religion evolved is that religion solves no adaptive function but rather it piggybacks

on systems that already exist in my brain so for example I already come with the brain that's coalitional I view the world as blue team red team there's us there's them that's already a mechanism that's built into my brain for other reasons and now religion comes along and piggybacks on that right the Jews have the Jews and the Gentiles the Christians have the Believers who are going to be with Jesus in in heaven and the rest of you [ __ ] who are going to burn in hell the the Muslims have the Believers and the

kufar which is a a derogatory term for for non-muslims so all of those religions have at least abrahamic religions have the same structure of US versus them so with that background pornography is not something that specifically evolved in us because there there was no pornography in in the ancestral Savannah but we've for example men have evolved a preference for visual stimuli men have evolved a greater pension for sexual variety now there's a product that piggybacks on those innate preferences that says hey guess what there's a screen where I'm going to take you where you could

shop for as many new newbile fertile ready young women and you never have to see the same woman twice if you surf for the next 600 years my brain has been hijacked so pornography is not something that we've evolved a gene for but pornography utilizes existing systems to trap us that's why by the way in two of my earlier books I talk about the evolutionary roots of dark side consumption Dark Side consumption are maladaptive behaviors like pornographic addictions pathological gambling Eating Disorders compulsive buying so I explain how these maladaptive behaviors have a biological signature I

was reading Psychology today with the the study with 688 young Danish adults who were surveyed and respondents viewed the viewing of porn um hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives their attitudes um towards sex their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex and toward life in general so I guess the question here is is pornography when we think about our Evolution and the implications of us consuming pornography and the behavior that it then turns into is it a net good or a net that's a good one and well the research is unclear

on this so I've seen studies that have exactly to your point have said hey you know what it spices things up as long as you do it openly you know uh again it's a question of modulation remember I said doing it at the right time right amount the right context and so on right if once in a while for whatever reason whether it be alone or in the context of a couple you decide to incorporate pornography to spice things up good for you if you can't get to work on time because you're spending six hours

uh feverishly uh m mastbating to pornography and then you don't have the sexual Vigor to then be intimate with your partner then we have a problem right so many psychiatric conditions that are rooted in in behavioral dysfunction if they're done at the right amount they're not a problem it's when they go on the bad side of the curve let me give you a again a a big uh a big view of this problem OCD obsessive compulsive disorder is a psychiatric condition and it can manifest itself in different obsessions or different compulsions so Obsession could be

uh I'm engaging what's called ruminative thinking right did did I say something at yesterday's party that was stupid and now everybody thinks I'm a [ __ ] now I will start to try to speak to everybody at the party in a ruminative obsessive way to make sure that I didn't say anything now compare that to germ contamination fear as a form of OCD I will now wash my hands repetitively 600 times to make sure that I didn't get uh infected by anything when I shook somebody's hand right now there is an evolutionary adaptive version of

that which is scanning the environment for environmental threats once is at the right level of Behavioral regulation right check the back door that it's locked wash your hands once when you shook many hands at the party but then what happens to the person who doesn't suffer from OCD there's a warning flag that goes up in your head then you tend to that flag and what happens to the flag it goes down and it's finished the OCD person the flag is hyperactive in an infinite loop I wash my hands flag goes down as I walk away

from the sink flag goes back up I wash my hands again I am stuck in a repetitive ritual for eight hours in scolding hot water where the skin is coming off me I didn't go to work because I've been washing my hands since 7 in the morning that's what happens with pornographic addiction right I'm sitting and surfing the internet six hours for porn so it is at the disregulation part of that behavior so it's not that there's anything innately evil or diabolical or bad with surfing porn once in a while but it's once in a

while six hours a day we have a problem a lot of men that watch pornography and I've had this said to me a few times um feel an immense amount of Shame um about the behavior they they wish they didn't if they could if they could press the button or write down they want to be they probably be someone that wasn't watching pornography I think that's probably a safe assumption to make as a general rule and the other thing that I've heard is that because of the dopamine receptors in our brain it's going to kind

of um dampen our in real life sexual attraction and performance and caus to lead in erectile dysfunction all those things are certainly uh plausible right I mean uh and also motivation made the motivation argument to me if you start messing with your dopamine in such way that's the same dopamine and same sort of I guess chemical set you need to go and pursue exactly right and are those people that that you're talking about are they are they ones that we would classify as being in a dysfunction or even if they watch porn once every four

weeks they're feeling great shame and they're self flatulating I don't know it was actually I got told this by a I do get DMS from guys that are continually asking me to have more conversations about pornography because there's shame associated with it when I looked at the Google Search terms the most frequent search term in the category that I search was how do I quit pornography and it was by in by in a way it was it was the astoundingly the most searched thing as it related to pornography which is how do I quit right

and the question itself is quite desperate right so that makes me think that they are in the wrong side of that curve right they're already in disregulation mode because if it were something that I'm it's kind of like I I eat one bad thing a month that doesn't seem to be a bad issue if I eat three bad things every single day I will wake up 86 pounds overweight right so again Aristotle taught us right thing the right place and the right amount so I don't think that there's a deontological rule and we can if

you want explain what that means there is no deontological rule that says under all circumstances any porn consumption is diabolical and evil I don't think that's true now maybe also I'm not a religious Puritan maybe if you're a religious Puritan you say not not even watching One segment of porn you're the devil but from a from a non sort of judgmental non puritanical thing Hey listen uh you've been outside of a I mean forgive me I'm going to be very direct you're not in a relationship it's been uh six months since your last sexual encounter

you have certain libidinal drives you decide to sit and watch some porn that one time I don't think that makes you Lucifer but if you spend six hours a day every day while your wife is saying hey are we going to get some sexy time tonight and you go my refractory period is such refractory is what happens when is the time between your last ejaculation and when you can get hard again well if I just masturbated five times today I'm probably not going to be up for it at night and so again it's a question

of is it a dysfunction or is it part of the regular Norm of behavior so I don't think people have to feel so guilty about watching porn once in a while what do you think I I should say to my future son about the worlds that he's growing up in in terms of the mismatch between our Evolution and his natural hardwiring wow what a great question so there is a there is something called the mismatch hypoth hypthesis an evolutionary theory which basically says that many problems that we face today arise out of a mismatch of

a phenomenon that was adaptive in our ancestral past but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world classic example to stick to food we've evolved the gustatory preferences to as a response to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty therefore being attracted to fatty foods gorging on a lot of food makes perfect evolutionary sense when we don't know when our next meal is cominging from when we live in an environment of plentitude then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive so if you look at for example I think the top eight or nine killers on in the World

Health Organization thing they can all be attributed to a mismatch hypothesis so I would tell your son knowledge is power to our earlier point of view getting that degree you never lose and knowing more you being aware of the mismatch hypothesis dear son will allow you to hopefully not fall as easily into behavioral traps and what are the most important because you have a book here called Happiness eight secrets for leading the good life if I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life what are the most important things that I

should be aiming at so I I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets so let me maybe discuss a few of each so so by far the two choices that will either impart upon me the greatest happiness or the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession okay and let's break it down very simply if I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go oh God damn not this one again I'm not off to a good start if I wake up next to this to

to that person and I go oh my God how did I pull that off what a delight to wake up next to this person well that's good have they L measured this have they not not in the way I'm explaining the anecdote uh now if I go off after I woke up to this lovely person I go off and do things in my day-to-day activities that make me do existential Glee oh boy what a great day I have lined up I'm going to be working on my next book I've got uh I've got a Diary

of a CEO that's going to be super fun a lot of new people are going to hear about some of my ideas then I'm going to maybe have a chat with a graduate soon on some really exciting research I'm doing so wow yeah I mean there's a lot of stress but it's all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning and then at night I return to that lovely person I've cracked the the the happiness code right now of course the question is if the devil is in the details what what can I do to

maximize my chances that I make those right choices I explain in the book contrary to 99.9% of the quote self-help prescriptive books where they tell you exactly would guarantee here are the eight steps I explained that life is a statistical game right there are statistical vagaries so all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness I can't guarantee anything right you could never smoke and get lung cancer but not smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly so earlier I mentioned birds of a feather flock together versus Opposites Attract overwhelmingly if you

want to increase increase your chances of a happy marriage remember the Max and birds of a feather flock together complimentarity works really nicely in the shortterm it doesn't sustain a long-term marriage the butterflies the hormones don't last when you've been in a marriage that doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later but that's not going to carry the train okay so but just to give a little bit more I guess spe specificity and Nuance to this you're not because my partner she's really into like spiritual stuff yes really into like

crystals and lots of things that I'm not into I think we have a great relationship we've been together a long time and she like I'm into Manchester United and soccer she's not into that well we might have to have you revisit that because I'm a Manchester City guy but go okay well that's the end of the podcast so that's yeah my apologies no uh look I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences in a but if I were to distill if I were to to use statistical term ter if I were to factor analyze your

most fundamental life principles between you and your partner do you think you're more alike or more different we're more alike we're we're aligned that's my point yeah and this is why I say it because when people hear it they might think of it as like tastes no it's not about tastes it's not about the the most fundamental deontological right I mean what you know my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller my love my wife loves the fact that I have Purity in my right she she appreciates the fact that you know and

similar with her like for example we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other many people will will will say oh you know if when you trigger jealousy that spices things up right my wife has never a single time done a single thing right but that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated well can I ask you as well in there just are there things about your wife that you don't have as much but are fundamental values but you're drawn to because she's kind of giving

you them I call her mcgyver do you know do you remember who mcgyver was MacGyver was a show in the 1980s I think where he was reputed to be able to put things together he he he's in a pickle he's in a Cell so he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar he right my wife at a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female you give my wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball she'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to Mars She is unbelievably in

French you say deu she knows how to put things together and so on and I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do for me for all my fancy academic stuff uh take a light bulb probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works she's already built a rocket she's basically Elon Musk of the sad household I greatly admire that and her and it's something that I possess very little I wanted to ask one of the things you said a second ago was about this the EV evolutionary basis of we're talking about happiness and

what it is to be happy you talked about the partner part what is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose why do we need that right so we've got a very big frontal lobe right so for remember earlier I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation one argument for why we love literature so much is that it our brains need nourishment via storytelling and therefore that's an exaptation my brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me engaged and therefore literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment to use the food analogy right so

I suspect that because we are sent in beings right we we we're not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction right I mean oh all animals have to solve two problems survive and reproduce right that's it that's the entire game of life but because we have Consciousness because we have metan knowledge because we are sentient there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing and therefore the way that you elevate that Consciousness is through purpose and meaning so I'm a very happy I mean I should mention though

that happiness about 50% of individual differences and happiness scores comes from our genes but the good news is is that it leaves 50% up for grabs right so I may be born with innately a more Sunny disposition than you so I'm now winning at the race but if I don't have make good choices if I don't adopt good mindsets then even though you started lower than me in an innate sense you might surpass me and so it really is an interaction of Nature and nurture uh purpose and meaning So to that I may be answering

it in an oblique way I argue when remember I said having a a good partner and having a good job are the two ways that you can maximize happiness I argue that the best way to achieve occupational happiness is two metrics one of of which is going to relate to purpose and meaning having temporal Freedom all other things equal is better than not having temporal Freedom let me explain what I mean by that a an airplane pilot once the door shuts the next 16 hours from LA to Singapore it's set right I mean literally temporarily

in terms of time physically I'm stuck right that to me is Unthinkable I float through life I I work harder than most people but I do it in my own way right now I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book prospectus then I'm going to go train for an hour then I'm going to go read for three hours and that temporal I don't have what I call Scheduling asfixia right that helps me I do you do try to resolve that if you can number two which is going to speak to purpose

and meaning I argue that all other things equal any job that allows you to in substantiate your creative impulse is a direct path to purpose and Happ happiness uh purpose and meaning what do I mean by that a stand-up comic is creating a routine that until he came along we didn't have a chef is creating a dish out of nothing an architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before an author Remember earlier we were talking I think I think it was off air and you were saying how long did it take you or what

was the process I said you know there's something magical about writing writing a book right because there literally is a day where you open the laptop you open a Word document that word document which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind save doesn't have a single letter typed it's blank and then through the magic of creation creative impulse a year later I press the send button a year later you're consuming that book that has to be a direct path to purpose and meaning now that doesn't mean the Actuarial scientist your brother doesn't have a

worthy life but surely a person who wakes up who's an artist who's an author by the nature of him creating says oh I can't wait to get to the studio I doubt that maybe not your brother I doubt that most Actuarial scientists go I'm going to get into that Actuarial Table today like there's no tomorrow I'm going to spank that Actuarial Table okay so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work then to arrive at a conclusion that I haven't heard you say I read in the consuming Instinct your your other book chapter 4

that younger siblings like me yes youngest of four are more likely to be creative oh you you you pulled that one out okay so does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative and creativity is associated with happiness and the in the way that you just described that I am happier than all of my siblings do you want to guess what Dr sadd's sibling order is you're the youngest by far so let me let me explain let me step before I answer that and the way you frame the question let me explain what

the mechanism is okay I also just want to add one later to that as well I was s with dinner the other day with my um with about 10 of our directors really their founders of companies essentially and I I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them because I've started to form a bit of a picture about this and I went around the table and asked every single one of them where did you rank in order of siblings and eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling I love it that was

so crazy yeah is that yeah that's psychology so let me tell you the background to that theory okay which I've done my own research on and published work on it but the original Theory comes from Frank suway who's a historian of science who wrote a book which I highly recommend to all your viewers uh it's a it's a bit technical but you can get through it it's called Born to reell it's a book that explores historically the the the the people who've generated the biggest breakthrough radical scientific Innovations and what was their birth order and

it turns out not unlike how you did it with the 10 and eight of them were last born out of the 28 most radical scientific Innovations ever posited 23 out of the 28 were the the last born later borns now so then the question is okay well fine that that's just a phenomenon but what explains it now the explanation is mind-blowing you ready so Frank suway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order it's from the perspective of the parents Behavior to the child as a function of their birth order first

child I'm very strict second child I'm getting re tired fifth child run the streets I don't give a [ __ ] okay so that's the causal causality of the birth order effect he flipped the whole thing he said no no no much of the impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the child and let me explain how he said that one of the fundamental survival problems it's an evolutionary theory one of the fundamental uh survival problems that a child faces is to differentiate itself from all other siblings to to etch maximal investment from

the parents how do I do that so that's called The darwinian Niche partitioning hypothesis when you start off your firstborn all of the niches are unoccupied there is the I'm a good boy Niche I'm a rebel Niche I'm a right there there are many many there's a penalty of niches that are unoccupied so I'm firstborn I'm going to pick whichever one the second born is born there is n minus one niches one is taken so the I'm a good boy Niche I got to differentiate myself I'm second I'm an [ __ ] Niche I'm a

I'm a contrarian Niche let's keep going down the birth order there are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches left for later borns especially if the Sip ship is Big suway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key personality traits one of which is open to experience so he argued that later borns up to last borns by virtue of having to solve that original problem will end up being much bigger out of- thebox thinkers not being stuck on Conformity on Orthodoxy hence in the context of scientific Innovations the last bornes are the ones

who say not this is [ __ ] I'm going this way okay and so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that last borns were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters so I I took the exact framework but instead of applying it to radical scientific Innovations I applied it to radical product Innovations and adoptions so so all that to say that based on that one could could surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness then the latter borns would score happier I I really

wonder which one it is because I can attest to kind of both being true I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention but also by the time I was 10 the same rules didn't apply to me when you said how many are you there's four okay when you said run the streets that's the perfect explanation of my childhood my my oldest the oldest which is my sister Amanda she if she wasn't at home by 9:00 p.m. she was also a woman so the rules were slightly different for her 9:00 p.m. it was it

was hell to pay if I didn't come home for two to three days there was no one there to ground me anyway and I think that opens you up to experimentation you start fiddling with stuff you start I I was doing all kinds of things in the house like breaking things apart looking inside them stting little businesses selling the cigarettes from my mom's room sorry mother she really doesn't know that I ever did that but all these kinds of things which start to build this you know repository of information but also it built my confidence

yeah in a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risk so it's hard to figure out which one it is maybe it's both it's probably both I think it's a bit of both uh but yeah I you know I haven't been I I know that your team had asked me what are some questions that we could ask that no one else well certainly pulling up that birth order one you've succeeded on asking me a question that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time so kudos to well yeah

it's incredible we have a lot of great researchers so and by the way way both my wife and I are last porns so to to The assortative Mating and I'm not sure if that's been done and if it hasn't been done it' be very easy to do right so here's an experiment if anybody steals it I better get the credit you just look at a thousand marriages calculate their satisfaction score their happiness score and then see if there is ass sort of mating on birth ership interesting boom there's there's your thesis for your undergraduate a

psychology degree which you will pursue and send me an email that I deserve the credit for having forced could I just run this as a adver on social media as a survey and and so I can get a link run it as a Facebook meta ad at people and say um are you married if they say they are I'll say how long have you been married they'll say how long I said are you and your partner where' you rank in terms of birth order and then I can get the stats absolutely so many studies now

scientific studies are conducted online and they can be conducted online in exactly the way that you said you use existing social portals to have a big wave of data collection but there are other ways by the way you could have you have you heard of MK no so murk is a platform where people sign up to be participants right now let's say I'm a researcher and I say I want men over 18 years old okay MH well that's easier to get than if I were to say I want men who are over 18 years old

shorter than 6 feet and from Lithuania and they're diabetic now depending on how I structure my criteria of inclusion M the price that I have to pay for getting those participants will go up yeah right so if I'm running a study I just need male and female adults to run a study on this task it ends up being a few cents and so it has opened up the velocity at which we can do research scientific research not just stuff I post on Twitter scientific research it has increased it tenfold so so you can certainly do

that we'll do it so we will I set this as a challenge to my research team and our data science team which is to run a survey on social media using adverts so digital adverts Facebook ads meta ads X ads whatever and the survey should basically seek to answer first their agender their marital status ask what birth order they fell in and then ask what order their birth their marital partner fell into but then also understand how long they've been together cuz we want to check these marriages are legit absolutely and I'll put it on

the screen that would be so cool and please share with result well by the way what we're doing right now is what I call so in the in the happiness uh book I have a chapter called Life as a playground and I argue that science is the highest form of play because what when you're doing a 1,000 piece puzzle you're putting which puzzle which piece goes with what well what's science there's a bunch of variables floating around does this one correlate with this one does this one cause this one or the other way I'm just

playing now and I'm getting paid for it how could I not be happy MH but the puzzle of life unfortunately it's the puzzle is three-dimensional which means sometimes you think you got it in the right place but actually it was just 100 years later you find out that it was completely wokeness yes sir it's it's really intriguing to me that the evolutionary scientists that I've spoken to have for some reason all found themselves on the subject of wokeness in society and it and it's hard for the average person to maybe understand the link between evolutionary

science and wokeness and politics right so you want me to try to tease those out yeah and what well how did you find yourself talking about the idea of wokeness right so it it all began as we mentioned earlier in our chat when I saw the rejection of biology in explaining human Affairs which is something that called biophobia the fear of using biology to explain human Affairs and at the time it was in the service of the scientific work that I was doing I mean what do you mean your desk rejecting my paper at a

journal because you don't think that biology is relevant to Consumer Behavior how could it be otherwise that's insane so that's when I was first exposed to the possibility of a human mind a human mind being parasitized right uh now let me explain why I use the parasitic framework how I came up with that so one of the things that you do as an evolutionary scientist when you're trying to understand the evolutionary signature of a behavior you often will compare it across species remember earlier I talked about testes size and uh and across primates and female

right so it was many different species and that allows you to then draw a final principle based on comparing all those species so I started looking through the animal literature to look for something that might explain why do animals do Insane things and so that's when I fell on the field of parasitology which is just a study of parasites but I wasn't looking for because a tapeworm is a parasite but it goes into your intestinal tract I wanted the parasites that go into your brain those are called neurop parasites and it turns out that there's

a very I mean it's almost like science fiction there's a whole field of study that's that explores this host parasite Dynamic where the parasite is trying to enter the host's brain alter its circuitry to suit its interests what is a parasite so a parasite is usually I mean literally a brain worm so for example Toxoplasma Gandhi is a parasite that can infect human minds but it most famously infects the minds of mice when they are parasitized in their brains by this parasite they become sexually attracted to cats and their sex and their urine which is

not a good what yeah so let let me give you a few examples there's a wood Cricket an actual Cricket that abhor water okay it it doesn't like it stays clear of water when it is parasitized by a hairworm this hairworm needs to get the wood Cricut to jump in water because it could only complete its reproductive cycle in water so a wood Cricket that doesn't have the brain warm looks at the water and says I'm staying away a wood Cricut that is parasitized by this hair warm jumps into the water merily to its death

because it has altered its neuros circuitry to suit its interest okay so when I saw that field neuroparasitology I had my urea Eureka moment just like I did when I first discovered evolutionary psychology I said I will now use the neurop paracet olcal model to argue that human beings can not only be parasitized by actual physical brain worms they could be parasitized by ideological brainworms and so continuing the metaphor I said so what are these parasites postmodernism is a parasitic idea so postmodernism actually I argue that that is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because

postmodernism purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths so and the reason for that is everything is Shackled by biases everything is Shackled by subjectivity so to speak of an objective truth with a capital t is nonsense everything is subjective and therefore I argue in the book that all of these parasitic ideas originally started with a noble goal and the service of that goal if there has to be a collateral damage called truth so be it it's a worthwhile collateral damage in this service of

that higher Social Justice goal no it's a deontological principle it's an absolute right so you never pursue science in a biased manner freedom of speech is available to all it's not I believe in freedom of speech but not for Donald Trump then you're being a consequentialist so that's what the book is about it traces the history of all these parasitic ideas and then it offers a mind vaccine against that stupidity what if the freedom of speech causes harm yes to people and and risks their lives that's a great question so I am a free speech

absolutist and so let me explain what that means we didn't get into my personal history I'll just give it for the relevance of what I'm about to say I was born in Lebanon I grew up in Lebanon and we escaped Lebanon under imminent death because of being Jewish okay so my Jewish identity caused me to come close to being eradicated give me some color in detail to that story so I was born in Lebanon in the 60s uh Lebanon was historically referred to as the Paris of the Middle East Progressive tolerant Lebanon Progressive tolerant in

the context to the Middle East which means something very different than Progressive and tolerant in the west and you'll see in a second why when I was 5 years old uh Gamal Abdul Naser who was the president of Egypt who was a very popular figure in the Arab world because he was What's called the pan arabist meaning he was trying to unify the Arab people under one umbrella right to hopefully defeat the pesky Jews and so on he passed away when he passed away when I was 5 years old as so often happens in the

Middle East people take to the streets to scream and shout and burn and lament and so on and as they were proceeding down my street where I lived as a 5-year-old child the the screaming was death to Jews death to Jews so I turn to my mother I say why why are they screaming death what do we have to do with this hi don't don't put your head out okay so that was my first time where I saw wait a minute there there are people out there that want me dead because I'm Jewish fast forward

a few years later we're in class and the teachers This Is privil War okay the Civil War started in 75 uh sitting in class teacher says every to everybody please stand up and say what you want to be when you grow up I want to be a policeman I want to be a doctor I want to be a soccer player one kid gets up who I've known through all the years of Elementary School who knew I was Jewish has when I grow up I want to be a Jew killer to rockus Applause and laughter and

so on then the Lebanese war broke out it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon we left Lebanon under very very difficult conditions once we immigrated to Montreal Canada my parents maybe they regret it now kept returning to Lebanon because we still had business interest and full-fledged brutal massive war on one of their return trips in 1980 they were kidnapped by fat which is one of the Palestinian factions some really bad things happened to them but then luckily through the connections that we had we were able to get them out some bad things happened to

inside captivity I mean you can imagine they were toed yeah uh M mother and I've I've seldom said this I'm only saying it because you you're asking my biggest fear when I found out the story after the fact I didn't even know they were I didn't know that they they they were kidnapped as it happened I knew there was a lot of Mayhem in the house and I was asking what's going on they said oh Mom and Dad have some business issues they were lying to me to protect me I'm I'm 15 years old okay

although there was a kid at school in my high school who whose parents were very good friends of my parents also Lebanese Jews he knew that my parents were kidnapped I didn't know they were kidnapped and later I found out that as he saw me in high school walking around and laughing and joking he thought boy this guy is made of ice I mean he's he's callous that he's taking it so relaxed but actually I didn't know that this he knew but I didn't know okay so when they came out of captivity and came back

to Montreal my biggest speak about evolutionary psychology and the male mindset my big biggest fear was whether my mother had been raped now she told me stories of whatever but she said that she she says I never knew if it was true and we only discussed it that one time and we never discussed it again she said that no she wasn't now I don't know if she lied about that she she said some other really bad things I mean I'm not going to get into all of it but I've always wondered whether she said that

just so that you know it's not exactly so you know it's shame and so on but I remember that if she had said yes my thinking as a 15-year-old boy was that I would spend the rest of my life seeking Vengeance on those [ __ ] okay so it wasn't a pleasant upbringing I could tell you stories that you wouldn't believe it would be much worse than Rambo so now coming back to your uh freedom of speech issue and if it causes harm I am Jewish with my personal history I support the right of Holocaust

deniers to spew the most offensive thing possible which is they are rejecting a documented historical reality where 6 million people were exterminated nothing could be more offensive no it never happened so you want to talk about hurt and offense and insult that's it but in a free Society I have to tolerate racists and missiles [ __ ] falsehood spreaders I beat them by speaking here by telling better ideas so the only context where I don't support freedom of speech it's already enshrined in the First Amendment direct incitement to violence okay so let me draw a

thing I go I'm I'm a let's suppose I were a white supremacist or Neo-Nazi if I get up on a show and say Judaism is a Croc of [ __ ] it's useless it's the most disgusting religion totally okay freedom of speech if I say later tonight at the corner of lens Lexington and 6th Avenue there is a synagogue let's go to when they come out of service and beat the hell out of those Jews if not kill them that's not okay now it has to be direct incitement to violence so you can't say criticizing

Judaism or Islam can create islamophobia [ __ ] no ideology is above scrutiny no belief system is above scrutiny your feelings are hurt F off grow a pair okay 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 some people will say that it's kind of like I was thinking of it like a staircase as you're speaking I was drawing a staircase because if I sat here and I said I consider myself to be a black man I mean I'm half black I

guess my my mother's Nigerian my father's English 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 um the Jewish population it's not long before if 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 yes and this is this is where it becomes tricky right so me Joe

Rogan Lex Friedman Andrew huberman all of the you know podcasters who have 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 right and this is where the issue around okay so then let me let me let me test your belief you are you familiar with the grooming gangs in Britain I'm familiar with the notion of it yeah I I know I think I know what

you're going to say I think so up and down England in every town that you can think of big or small for the past 30 plus years there's been an industrial scale level grooming and raping of white British girls the perpetrators are 90% Plus on the conservative estimate 90% coming from one background and one ideology is it marginalizing and insulting to identify that ideology I'd say it's not because it's probably an important data point to understand the causation of of a thing okay let me give you another example um American prisons are predominantly occupied by

black men or at least it over indexes with black men versus the population ratios so are black men there criminals um at Birth right well that the way I would address that is I would defeat that statement with science so I would say can you show me the data that suggests that dispositionally meaning innately what would be the mechanism by which uh black men are higher than white men now if you show it great but I'm willing to bet you can't show it therefore what you just stated is a bunch of [ __ ] and

you know how you're going to suffer are the social consequences and sigma of being a racist [ __ ] but I I let you say it but I'll defeat your idea on the other hand if you said uh if we look at patterns of criminality in the United States are black men exponentially uh over represented yes 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 causitive agent that if we are caring decent people maybe we should talk about openly well

in today's world I couldn't even I sake I don't give a [ __ ] but most people would say don't even say that that there's a greater incidence of black criminality that itself is racist and you're marginalizing people so that's why I don't believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge forbidden knowledge is the idea that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued precisely because of your scare staircase it's it's going to result in negative Downstream effects I argue that that's a grotesquely dangerous principle why so here I'm going to introduce the term and

explain it which I've mentioned earlier in ethics there are two ethical systems there is what's called deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics deontological ethics is absolute statements like content imperatives it is never okay to lie that would be a deontological statement a consequential statement would be it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings so I always joke if you want to have a long happy marriage when you hear the following question do I look fat in those jeans put on your consequentialist hat really fast and say no sweetie you've never looked more beautiful I might

have just lied but I just spared my partner my wife's feelings so for many many things it makes perfect sense that we all wear our consequentialist hat but there are certain principles that are foundational that by the very definition of that principle have to be deontological okay freedom of speech is deontological the pursuit of Truth has to be theological presumption of innocence in the justice system has to be theological right journalistic Integrity if you truly are a truth reporter has to be the enological but what have we seen throughout the last four or five years

let me show you violations of these I believe in freedom of speech but not for Donald Trump the enological principle has become consequentialist I believe in journalistic Integrity but not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop because if we release that information then hun then Joe Biden loses to Orange himler and then that's too bad so it's perfectly okay to suppress what we now know is an absolutely true laptop where there is astronomical political corruption but it was okay to lie 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 Seaborn raping everybody now of course we have no data to support that no evidence 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 I can't really remember but I know that he sexually assault me and we don't really care about this thing called evidence a lot of my super fancy colleagues and friends said oh I know that we should assume that someone is presumptively Innocent but

it's too important in this case to apply that deontological principle they didn't use that word they don't even know it so in this case let us just assume that BR Kavanaugh was a serial rapist so no there is no forbidden the knowledge and science I'll give you a great example there's a guy called His Name Escapes me right now he was a psychologist at University of Western Ontario who spent his entire career studying racial differences and here's now the worst part in intelligence okay so I remember one time this is I don't think I've ever

mentioned this story personal Island so you're getting an exclusive here 1996 I'm speaking at the international Congress of psychology I'm a young Professor just out of my PhD 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 and I'm in a room so there are four other speakers in that session okay and the room is filled with maybe 1500 people and there's like this real electricity and and I'm not a very nervous public speaker I'm thinking what's going on here why is

there such tension well I found out I I hadn't looked at the program 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 and I said oh my God I'm dead I'm going to be lynched by proxy now here's the good news when he finished his talk and I'm next about, 1425 five out of the 1500 people rushed out of the room to follow him and Badger him and I was like that was the only

time in my life where I said thank God that everybody's left usually you want more people in the audience I was like oh thank God and then I have got like TW you know 70 people there I'm right now in his case I've asked close colleagues of his uh and as I'm talking I'm trying to remember his name Philip rushon that's his name Philip rushon they people could check him out I've asked some of his colleagues do was this guy was he a racist because he's always said look I just collected the data and I

presented the data and I offered possible explanations 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 is it's going to appear racist well what do you think do you think I care if something's true or not and I think I have the you know I have the what I don't know I don't know what the word is the strength of character 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 it's not how I feel about myself what I would rather know is what's true because then I can deal with the truth and the truth doesn't offend me in any way if you told me now that 31-year-old mixed race guy that have Nigerian Heritage and their fathers from centry are statistically dumber and and it was robust I would believe it and I would be okay with it zero% of me would would suffer any offense zero% because you have a strong personhood maybe that's it 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 Zed which literally a doctor told me because they scammed my brain and said oh you've got ADHD which means you're going to be bad at all these things your handwriting is going to be bad I go cool yeah there's no offense taken right but I can also Imagine a world where a certain someone with a certain disposition might just

take offense to a lot of things so then in that case we have we're at a bifurcation at that point we can either say to anyone who might be offended please grow a pair because the world is a requires anti fragility and there are stressors in life that are going to hurt you and you'll thank me later for me teaching you to have to grow a pair 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 and

if in that service of that sanitization process we have to murder truth so be it and that's by the way what leads to all those parastic ideas because as I said I'm I'm trying to be charitable to the to the promulgators of those [ __ ] ideas they it starts off with a noble cause right they're trying to improve the world in their warped sense and because that's the highest goal they end up if I have to murder truth that's that's a collateral damage it's okay right I don't want to I don't want a 6'4

guy who's got a stronger jawline than me and a beard to say please address me as she and you better do so and it's a governmental edict right that 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 it's now bill but at the time it was a tabled bill called bill c16 which was trying to incorporate gender identity and gender uh orientation or whatever it's called into the hate law rubric and my position

was yes of course we should seek to have a world where everybody lives dignified lives free of bigotry but should I be teaching in my evolutionary psychology courses that there is no such thing as male female that we clearly know that 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 well pretty much I hate to be the guy who says I told you so but l i mean literally every single thing that I predicted came out to be true because

once you lose the reflex to have a deontological defense of a deontological principle then all bets are off an objective sense objective sense 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 I mean in what world do we live in I played sports with a girl last night I don't want to hear about it co-ed football we played soccer ah is that right okay but you know what I mean you shouldn't run the 100 meters and call yourself I mean you

know the Leah Thomas case the the swimmer yeah 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 yeah do you know what just to give my position on on this I if someone asked me if someone had the drawline you described and they asked me to refer to them as a woman and they were wearing a dress I've got no problem with that okay I'm going to refer

to if 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 you told me your name your title Etc I will because again it's not hurting me right to to refer to you as she he they whatever you want and if that's going to make you feel um 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

yes 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 that's where I think I think that's a little I I think I completely agree with that right as long as you don't harm others in that calculus in that Dynamic and as long as it's not compelled right so and I've said it I said look if if I 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 [ __ ] I'm going to no I will I will go along as you said 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 uh in your electronic signature no right I'll give you an example I think in the Canadian uh 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 so it's not even theer of the minor of the minority is the tin tyranny of the minority minority minority I mean it's really it's a unicorn non-binary non-binary is I'm neither male neither female so because historically you know sexually reproducing species male female fenotype that to put male and female marginalizes the non-binary now we lose that marker no no no I want to be referred as a biological male my wife is a biological female my children also have so all of our most

fundamental biological markers should be erased lest it might offend the one in 50,000 nonb no so that speaks to your first point which is what about causing harm to other people 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 but your need to honor your identity doesn't mean that I get to go on the celebratory train with you 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 yeah but because they identify as maybe the the a sex that wasn't the sex they were born as they then get they get the abuse you talked about it being difficult now being a a Jewish person in Canada yeah it's it's really difficult I think in this current moment to be a trans person in this world because this macro debate is Raging right it's raging on TW if I go on Twitter

if I go on YouTube it's it's passionately raging on both sides and I want I got friends that are identify as they them um and they aren't participating in this raging War but I I imagine I would imagine that the probability of them experiencing abuse now walking down the street has increased and I I guess this is this is goes back to sort of of consequential Truth versus the objective truth but those are the people I feel sorry for because I know them they're not in this like screaming X War but their lives have been

made worse because of all of this stuff that's and they're just minding their own business getting on with their lives loving whoever they love identifying however they want and I feel that's kind of I I that's the group of people that I feel most EMP most empathy towards in this current debate yeah no I hear you I hear you by the way only because you mentioned the word empathy 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 the emotion of empathy has clear evolutionary reasons right I mean there are adaptive reasons why each of our emotions has have has evolved the problem is when it misfires yeah when not only it misfires in that for example it becomes hyperactive but when it also misfires to the wrong Target so if I'm empathetic to the trans person to the detriment of all biological women that's a misfiring yes it would be great for immigrants to come in Legally to experience the beauty of the West I am an immigrant Elon Musk is an immigrant I

guess I am I was born in Botswana but you're an immigrant but you hopefully came in Legally that doesn't mean comment sorry no comment no com uh but opening the door to 10 million 12 million because it's not fair for Guatemalan and El Salvadorian not to come in and share the exper no that's not right uh life you know who Thomas so is the the famous economist he's a Yeah you mentioned I think you mentioned I mentioned before here Thomas soell uh who's an economist said look I'm paraphrasing his words and I agree with economics

is this is the study of tradeoffs of cost benefits right if we had infinite resources then yes let's give free health care to every human who's ever lived and will ever live but that's not the world we live in so if I am a paying uh taxpaying 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 does that seem like it's the proper directing of empathy maybe not if if you're homeless it's a very bad thing

does that mean that your right to be shooting up uh the drugs in the public park where my children play supersedes their rights 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 if one immigrant crosses the the B the Mexican border into America and they go to Texas and improves their quality of life who does that hurt deontologically everybody why because there are rules and laws right is it is do

you teach your future children God willing don't steal or do you live in San Francisco where it's okay to steal if it's under 950 what are you going to teach your kids don't steal that's it you answer your question what are they stealing they're stealing the money that should go to people who've paid taxes for 40 years they're stealing my right to okay I I did my masters I'm going to say this not because I'm signaling my CV because it's relevant to the story I did my Masters of Science and my PhD at Cornell I

was a professor at Cornell professor at Dartmouth and a professor at UC Irvine I'm probably one of the best known professors around if I want to come as a Canadian to the United States do you know what I have to do I have to follow the the law 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 and I'm right I mean I I literally get stopped and taken to another room where they say are you making money and many of the Border

recognize me will take pictures with me because it's a country of laws and therefore I with whatever attributes I might bring that are positive to the United States has has to go through a formal process but if I'm an MS13 gang member with two tier tattoos on two tiar tattoos that says that I've killed two people in El Salvador and I walk in do you think does is your reflex and intuition Stephen saying but it's not fair to let him in we understand why very dangerous 59-year-old Professor Gat sad should we should really vet him

and he should go through the legal process before my biggest goal in life is to live in Southern California I haven't been able to because legally I can't I don't have a professorship here that's the thing that hurts me the most I don't live in the Luminosity of the Sun so that [ __ ] who comes in illegally is hurting me because I'm freezing in Montreal he's not hurting you he is hurting me why because once the legal system breaks down then all bets are off so what's happened in San Francisco where all of the

retail shops have closed so crazy I was talking to my friends about this this this morning oh 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 America's meant to be the richest economy in the world it's me to be the you know the the apple of everyone's eye and I went to a CVS yes yesterday and I asked for um some deodorant and some mouthwash and then I was like it's trapped behind a cage mouthwash doodan do you

see that you know what happened what go I I so you press a button and someone comes over to you to open the cage to give you the like toothbrush and they open the and I said to the guy why did you trap it all behind glass cages and he tapped me on the shoulder and he pointed down an aisle and he says look and as I looked down the aisle there was a man stealing and putting putting stuff in his socks so do you do you do you I hope you understand that you just

answered that question right because if I steal that one toothpaste am I really hurting you Stephen you live in England how how is me saying to that guy in San Francisco don't steal no it's deontological you are hurting me you're hurting me deontologically you're hurting the ability for society to have predictable laws predictable cause and effect relationships if you steal you'll be punished does this rely on society being fair though and your next is going to be it's not fair therefore why should we have laws yeah well just wondering because if if people see that

and they go well I don't know the answer here so I'm just positing questions I'm really intrigued by this train of thought so I understand what you're saying 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 the reason they want to come here in part is because there's laws and that's create a society but does it is is that theory of sort of moral theory contingent on the fact that the society is fair

and then obviously people would then argue that this Society isn't fair because they' got there's people with their fingers on the scales no Society is perfect but as someone who has buffeted from the sample of societies outside of the West no Society is better than you have here 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 I often use the example of Ayan hery Ali right the Somali immigrant who's one of the staunchest

she's she's Muslim herself she's one of the strongest critics of Islam why because she has sampled the buffet of that Society she didn't go to Welsley College where it's rarified in Boston and then she can pontificate while she bought her cfia from Amazon right she's lived that I don't have to pontificate about things that I know nothing about I grew up in the Middle East so therefore people who've lived those experiences can come to the west and say hey guys in the west you think that this Society is the default value of societies no no

no this is a bleep this is an anomaly you should really work hard to defend what you have you crack the code of the values that you need to have foundationally for everything to flourish this is not normal this is anomalous 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 because the most fundamental law of I mean Newton talked about every reaction every action has a reaction let's put it in

other terms cause and effect once you break that law you're breaking the most fundamental laws of nature right so should a felon have a 68th chance so you've now been arrested again and then we go through your record and we find that you've been arrested 67 previous times how many times must you be arrested for you to have lost your opportunity for another chance right because that 68th time that suicidal empathy because I'm so Progressive led to that woman being killed was her life worthwhile that we might have wanted to be a bit harder on

you so that's what I mean so yes of course I support the right of people to better their lives and we're all coming from a nation of immigrants legally man and also the other point I guess is that people would rebuttal and say about their the privilege they' say Steve you know um you got tremendous privilege because of the parents you had and they brought you to the UK when you were a baby from Africa and I'm stopping you and they'll say you got they'll say you got genetic privilege they'll say you know you your

dad had a good brain and he's passed some of that to and your mom had a good brain and they'll say to you they'll say dad you know if you weren't brought from the Middle East when you younger you would have had these opportunities so you need to pay that forward to other people that don't have opportunities and privilege by welcome welcoming them in being highly empathetic towards them even if they're in the in Mexico legally or illegally legally I'm off I'm let's do it I'm all in illegally no you don't get you know it's

unfair that all these incels don't have access to sexual partners while some of us have access maybe we need to set up a communist system where using an app they get to share with our women let's have communist meeting right well why is it that you're only getting access to your partner that's privilege how about the homeless guy who doesn't have any sex for the past two years don't you think Stephen that you owe him so equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome yes sir we're saying you don't believe in a quality of outcome no

no one I think with a brain believes in a quality of outcome oh no there is one with somewhat of a brain her name is haris say that she doesn't have a brain so you're right but she pretends that she has a brain and she is Lenin she is communism it be it it completely paralyzes me in befuddlement to be able to play a clip of this woman where she's saying I'm a mixture of Stalin and Lenin and Marx and Marx in everything that I believe in and the United says United States which is technically

a capitalist country says sign me up I think you'd be a good president so if we Define equality of outcome is everybody deserves this the same chance to get the same outcome is that kind of How It's defined or well it's it's it's equality of outcome says to the extent that we don't have equality of outcome it must be because of Nefarious reasons so so for example and I've actually sazed this you know one of the things I do is satire and I draw analogies to show how stupid things are I said you know there

are 200 countries in the world do you know how many have won the World Cup I don't know any number 200 countries World Cup has been going on since 1930 I'm going to say 12 eight okay that is so unfair how come those Japanese have never been given a chance what about the Jews Israel never winning once why is FIFA so anti-semitic never once an Islamic country that sucks it's those [ __ ] Brits who've won Brazil Argentina Germany Spain France Italy Uruguay that sucks Laos never what happened Malaysia never bwana we've never won one

you've never won that's racism I looked at the uh results of uh the Boston Marathon over the past 35 years do you want me to summarize it for you I'm going to do it Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Ethiopia Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya arthria Kenya Kenya Kenya what a bunch of [ __ ] the Boston Marathon only black guys from Kenya get to win what about short Jewish guys never we don't get to deserve to deserv a chance it's so ludicrous that even morons like Kamala Harris will say no no but

that's different no no it's not different it's a deontological principle human beings are a hierarchical species some are taller some are shorter some are harder working less harder working smarter less smart funnier less funnier Communism works well for some species EO Wilson who was a Harvard biologist recently passed away one of my big professor regrets is that we were never able to have a conversation on my show he's one of my big intellectual Heroes his expertise Stephen was in the study of social ants he was an enologist now why is that relevant to the story

because social ants are communists because there is a reproductive Queen and everybody else is indistinguishable they're worker ants or Warrior ants they're just a blob right so when he was asked I'm slightly paraphrasing when he was asked Professor Wilson what are your views on communism socialism his rebuttal is one of my favorite rebuttal in the history of humanity so the answer to Communism socialism great idea wrong species right humans come with their own innate human nature our innate human nature is not communistic that's why communism has been tried in many countries for the past 100

years and what has been the result in every single place it's been tried a grotesque abject failure the reason for that is because when you take a socioeconomic political system that is contrary to human nature you don't need gsad to predict for you that it will fail that's like arguing I would like to create a new science law it's called non-gravity so I'm going to throw a bunch of people off big planes but because I'm a fered Believer and not gravity I don't think that they will drop but then I'm astonished when out of a

hundred people all of their brains squash on the floor that's because they're we're constrained by this reality called Gravity by the same token Kamala Harris is the anti-gravity person so I'm Canadian so I don't have a direct dog in this fight the reason why I speak out against it because again my social commentary supersedes transcends whether I'm American or Canadian I'm talking talking about bigger issues is communism the ideal model for maximal flourishing nothing could be clearer but we've got all these degenerous trying to implement it here would you vote for Trump if you could

if I were American yeah in a heartbeat over Camala Harris because that's in theing election so right now we let's assume that it does end up being Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump I would vote 10 times for Donald Trump what's wrong with Donald Trump he he's his worst enemy in that cosmetically speaking I think he's gotten better maybe by because of age Maybe by discipline uh he's gotten into a lot of snafus where he triggered the ey of many people simply because of how he de delivered messages where had he been a bit more polished

he would have avoided those things so for example I think that the fact that he never returned on X has actually been a blessing for him because he's the guy who at 2:00 in the morning the president of the United States at the time is battling with some idiot because he can't have the discipline to stop himself so I think what about his character though because if you if your kid grew up with the character of Donald Trump would you be proud probably more Pride than Joe Biden but this is what happens on the other

side so you don't want me to ever compare to someone else well this is what happens on the the reason I'm asking these questions is because if I ask someone on the like far left the First Response they say they their measurement of goodness seems to be a comparison of the other side right so uh do if you Su grip with a character okay so here are the some positive traits and some negative traits of him okay I I don't pretend to know him uh he is an entrepreneur I don't think there is a human

being who's been a better Exemplar of what a honey badger is now let me explain what I mean by that because you may or may not know that now so in in the last chapter of the parasitic mind where I have a a set of call to action okay calls to action one of them is I say activate your inner honey badger why the honey badger has been determined officially as the fiercest the most ferocious animal in the animal kingdom that's saying a lot there's a lot of fierce animals it's the size of a small

to medium-sized dog right and yet it can go into a hornet nnet get attacked by a million bees and get the honey it can withstand an attack of six adult lions and they back away it's the size of a small dog why because it is so ferocious it's my brother going to that beautiful girl not caring that he's 4 fo2 right he's the man he's the top guy right so when I say to people activate your inner honey badger I say be resilient be tough not not be violent be ideologically fierce in defending first principles

well who has had more things thrown at this guy than Donald Trump and he's got more Vigor and and stamina than you and I combined well let's take a very concrete example who has been shot in the head and then stood up and went fight fight fight those are very those are qualities that I am going to teach my son now is he polished is he eloquent does he speak with proper elocution does he have a big vocabulary no no no no but I'll take a ferocious honey badger any day over those aren't character traits

though eloquence and stuff like that when I'm talking about character traits I mean if someone said if someone seemingly attempts to steal an election you know Mike Pence did a speech the other day where he basically said Donald Trump asked me to at that moment when Mike Pence could have I think prevented the Electoral decision he said Michael uh Mike Pence who is his his vice president right Donald Trump asked me to go against the Constitution and I couldn't do it right so that's a character thing uh so and maybe it's linked to the ferocity

of the honey badger because someone that's that ferocious when they in F can't accept the Fe they can accept defeat as an academic I like to be I know what I know and I know what I don't know so here I would be speculative in saying that that behavioral trait is a manifestation of a that that behavior is a manifestation of a character trait I don't know if that link is right or not I could easily argue and I'd be speculating so I don't know for sure that he was convinced that that election was absolutely

unequivocally stolen so when he's doing those things it's not he's saying I wish to be dictator for life I mean he did leave office right but he's saying find me the mechanism to ensure that those [ __ ] don't steal it from me so I'm I'm neither here or there on this one no he's not a dictator no he didn't incite a violent Insurrection he did so these are things we can debate but in term I put it another way do you think that the world the world is made up of some very very nasty

bullies do do we agree on that very very nasty yes yeah there's all the Islamic guys there's North Korea there's China there's Putin who do you think when they sit at night they fear more do they do you think that they feel the cackler camela Harris avocado brain Joe Biden or do you think crazy cowboy here's the here's the uh nuclear button you ready eenie meeny miny mo catch a tiger by the toe you see what I'm doing that unpr unpredictability that's very powerful when you go into a prison uh yard for the first time

everybody's looking at you is this guy going to become a punk and my girlfriend or is this guy that I should fear how you act that first hour or two is going to determine how you do your time well Donald Trump is the guy that I want to be running my prison yard not the cackler I hope you understand what I'm doing here I'm trying to there's two things I'm doing the first thing is I'm trying to form my own opinion by interrogating am I successful at all no no it's really interesting no it is

really interesting and it's not just you I'm asking these questions too because I ask a bunch of people that are smart and have different perspectives and helps me form my own but also I feel I feel an obligation to represent the other side I understand how you feel about KL Harris so I'm trying interrogate this this feeling of Donald Trump is there any character trait that you can point out in Donald Trump that is overt I'm almost certain that he had remember you said you've got three groups of friends yeah and one group pathologically cheats

on their Partners I'm willing to bet that Donald Trump is the head of that thing so as a moral person who wishes to be loyal and honor my wife I don't appreciate that trait because many high status men have access to a lot of beautiful women and then what the determines your virtue and your character is to be able to have the self-control to not succumb to that I value that I don't think Donald Trump has it happy I said something negative about it no no no I do you know what's funny because when I

when I when I heard your opinion on um Donald Trump and Kamal Harris I was in my hotel room thinking one of the things I observe in people that are political have a political opinion is they are like incapable of saying anything critical about their own their own candidate the person that they'd vote for and it baffles me because it's the same parasitic mind virus where you've lost objectivity that that you talk about in your work so no 100% And so and I I wouldn't necessarily only stop there right I mean we we could stop

there but but he doesn't strike me as a man that is of the highest moral virtues right so I am very much driven by an exacting code of personal conduct I'm willing to bet that he doesn't come close to that so so so but again you live in the real world right so in the real world you don't have a perfect Messianic character that's Jesus right so given those two choices which one do I want well I want the guy who's a bit scarier and Donald Trump is a lot scarier than the ca I understand

and I I see flaws and I see at least one upside or more in both options so but anyway um what's the most important thing we should talked about that we didn't discuss maybe the importance of social connections uh which is one of the fundamental ways that you could lead a super happy life to to the point of the happiness book it turns out that the quality of your Social relationships is a better predictor of your health in the long term than your cholesterol scores at age 50 that's crazy so having these meaningful dialogues whether

it be in a formal setting like on a on a show or whether it be going to the pub and interacting with people people about whether Manchester City or Manchester United is better we're a social species having meaningful connections with people is crucially important get out there read get educated build meaningful connections with people and hopefully you'll be happy I have a closing tradition on this podcast Dr Gad where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question that's been left for

you is tell me about a time in which someone said something to you positive or negative which really capital letters struck stuck with you and does still to this day oh what an amazing question am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't unfortunately no no okay perfect what a what a cool uh thing to do and as you were saying it I was already answering it in my head so remember earlier we talked about purity and the exacting standard of uh exacting code of personal conduct about maybe 30 years ago uh

my mother said you know God you better learn that the world doesn't abide to your Purity bubble and the quicker that you learn that the happier you will be and I think it's the by far the most profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say because often times what that ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct this kind of maladaptive perfectionism this moral scrupulosity this Purity bubble the world should be you should never be dishonest you should never be duplicitous if I treat you well you should re so it's this like

I live in this laal La Land of Purity at least my expectations what ends up happening you you're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting the world to abide to this beautiful Purity bubble but the world is ugly and messy and so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes you know taking your time with your children then when they leave I'm pissed off to my wife for the next 10 minutes because I was imposing my expectation which is I would never dare do that to

someone else so I think if I were able to lower my expectations and and internalize that message I wouldn't be as disappointed in so many people so often easier said than done easier said than done yes inde it needs to be like a morning practice true thank you so much for the work that you do um Dr Gad I found your books to be really really important because they are unapologetically challenging and for anybody who cares about the pursuit of Truth whether they agree with you or not but just the pursuit itself of Truth they

care about ideas that are Unapologetic and are courageous and are immune from political correctness and I know that some people people who I doubt any of them got to the endend of the conversation but um some people who do care about such a thing I think those people are the most important of our time and they can find I think so many of the answers that they're searching for in the books that you write I love the book about happiness happiness eight secrets for leading the good life and I I referenced your earlier book as

well but the parasitic mind book I think is the most important of them all because it's so unbelievably relevant and if you understand what's written in this book I think you have a different lens a different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with and it can make sense of the things that you're seeing in fact both of the books have this sort of through line because if you understand the world as you said just then you can be happier within it despite its imperfections and so thank you for doing the work

that you do I know it comes at a tremendous cost a personal cost I don't know whether you see it as a cost but it's just an inevitability um but it's incredibly important and I'm a big big fan of the work that you do not not just that I agree with everything you've ever said um but I I care the most about hearing it nonetheless and it feeding into my sort of big intellectual reservoir of information so I'm really really appreciative of you and I hope you continue to do the important work you're doing thank

you thank you so much can I end with a compliment of course you can I've been on a million shows and I unhesitantly say that this is one of the best conversations so thank you for that oh that's really remarkable honor thank you so much I appreciate you cheers I have a closing tradition on this podcast Dr where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is tell me about a time in which someone said something

to you positive or negative which really capital letters struck stuck with you and does still to this day oh what an amazing question H am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't unfortunately not no okay perfect well what a what a cool uh thing to do I you were saying it I was already answering it in my head so remember earlier we talked about purity and the exacting standard of uh exacting code of personal conduct about maybe 30 years ago uh my mother said you know God you better learn that the

world doesn't abide to your Purity bubble and the quicker that you learn that the happier you will be and I think it's the by far the most profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say because often times what that ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct this kind of maladaptive perfectionism this moral scrupulosity this Purity bubble the world should be you should never be dishonest you should never be duplicitous if I treat you well you should re so it's this like I live in this La La Land of Purity at least

my expectations what ends up happening you you're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting the world to abide to this beautiful Purity bubble but the world is ugly and messy and so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes you know taking your time with your children then when they leave I'm pissed off to my wife for the next 10 minutes because I was imposing my expectation which is I would never dare do that to someone else so I think if I were able to lower

my expectations and and and internalize that message I wouldn't be as disappointed in so many people so often easier said than done that it needs to be like a morning practice true thank you so much for the work that you do um Dr Gad I found your books to be really really important because they are unapologetically challenging and for anybody who cares about the pursuit of Truth whether they agree with you or not but just the pursuit itself of Truth truth they care about ideas that are Unapologetic and are courageous and are immune from political

correctness and I know that some people I doubt any of them got to the end of the conversation but um some people who do care about such a thing I think those people are the most important of our time and they can find I think so many of the answers that they're searching for in the books that you write I love the book about happiness happiness eight secrets for leading the good life and I I referenced your earlier book as well but the parasitic mind book I think is the most important of them all because

it's so unbelievably relevant and if you understand what's written in this book I think you have a different lens a different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with and it can make sense of the things that you're seeing in fact both of the books have this sort of through line because if you understand the world as you said just then you can be happier within it despite its imperfections and so thank you for doing the work that you do I know it comes at a tremendous cost a personal cost I don't

know whether you see it as a cost but it's just an inevitability um but it's incredibly important and I'm a big big fan of the work that you do not not to say that I agree with everything you've ever said um but I I care the most about hearing it nonetheless and it feeding into my sort of big intellectual reservoir of information so I'm really really appreciative of you and I hope you continue to do the important work you're doing thank you thank you so much can I end with a compliment of course you can

I've been on a million shows and I unhesitantly say that this was one of the best conversations so thank you for that oh that's a really remarkable honor thank you so much I appreciate you cheers isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the dire of SEO the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that that you can play at home

so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly [Music] [Music]