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Do you know Steven who is the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life? Her husband. And the overwhelming number one reason is because of Dr. Gadsad is an evolutionary psychologist renowned for his thoughtprovoking and challenging insights into the underlining principles that shape decision-m 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 grotesqually dangerous principle. So, for example, the idea 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 desiraability score. Yes. So usually we end up assorting on our mating value, which is taking all of our attributes and then saying, "What do you score?" 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 stressor on our relationship. But here's the good news. There are effective strategies that could improve my score. And let's break them down very simply. First, Dr. God, what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble? I'm going to get hate mail for this. Buckle 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 D of a CEO that worked 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 that subscribed 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 a,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the D of SEO. 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 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 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 3-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 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 in 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 respiratory 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 scientist 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 Marggo 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 decision-m 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 to 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, when I'm teaching an evolution psychology course, I'll ask this question. 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 hundfold 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 a 100fold 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 astronomically greater effect than anything we would typically publish in science. Well the number one reasons Stephen I've kept you in suspense long enough is if there is a steparent in the family. So there's a 100fold 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 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 that 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 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 by parental 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 estrus, meaning they become sexually receptive to the new males. So, I joke with my students in the human context, you put on Barry White music to get the ladies interested. You buy a beautiful gift, you pay attention. You want to get the lady's attention in p in lion price 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 ch not in other children than 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 pro- cancer. 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 Yanomo tribe in the Amazon, whether it's the Hata tribe in Central Africa, whether it's in ancient Greece 2,000 years ago, or whether it's in Detroit, Michigan 2,000 years from now, who is the most dangerous person 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 I think it's 70% of the time when a woman is goes missing was murdered it's the husband. Exactly. Something crazy like that. 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 notwithstanding that potential effect, usually when I go into 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. So then the question becomes, why have human males evolved 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 by parental species. Human dads are extraordinary dads in the mamleian 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 mine 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 go 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. Mhm. So when I read that book with such complicated phenomena that are explained so elegantly, so parsimmoniously, 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 it 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 pulling me in different directions. Right? I've evolved a desire to gorge on fatty foods. But if I do that in an unrestrained manner, I become a sumo wrestler and I die of heart disease at 42. So, I've also evolved the mechanism of self-control. So, the fact that I explain why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it. Yeah. No. 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 two 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. But but we'll try and just hope that from here on out people understand that. When I ask 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. 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 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 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. Men. 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 suggests 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 variet. So, that's one. Here's another one. If you map out, this is from studies. I think it was in the early8s. I don't have the exact reference, but it's easy to find. Sorry. 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 smart? So, yes. So the intelligence element is
yes. Maybe the drive element is yes. But the phenotype is a no. I mean 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 recesses of my mind fantasized about being ravished by Bill Gates. Do I? Are those physical features just pointing at the fact that this person can provide for me? Absolutely. I mean, and you're saying, "But Bill Gates already provides." Yeah. But it's this also what's called the sexy son 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 Bronn and brains but that's a rare kind compliment thank you now imagine if I were 4 in taller then I mean that's it I would be crowned emperor no but in all seriousness both men and women are very duplicitous in their sexual behior behavior. So the idea that monogamy is natural is 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 polygamy 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 polyandri is called Tibetan uh fraternal polyandri. 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 are R is.5. Me and my identical twin our R is one. Me and a random stranger are R0. Me and my nephews and 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 evolutionary 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 rel, by the way, you see across countless animal species. the likelihood of you coming out of your borro to protect people who are in the borro increases if whoever is in the borro 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 whether 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 relatedness 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's 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 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 presence. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that long rant. 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 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. Yeah. Because 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 with 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 lbs some of the most majestic males. They have a territorial they they have a polygenous 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 can have small testes. Yes. Because there isn't sperm war 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, postfight 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 developing 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 others 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. Oh, 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 72-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 sexually ver voracious as men and that they've evolved a 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. Buazi. Buazi. Okay. I mean people are coming around now because the beauty of science is that it's autocorrective right I mean some of the biggest works you you now know that they're the biggest work by how much they were originally rejected so many Nobel prizes the story is always the same scientist proposes an idea that is completely unorthodox contrary to the prevailing whims of accepted science and is constantly reed 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 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, Steve. So, uh it's Seml Weiss who was a doctor who said, "What's happening here? Why are these women getting this post uh natal 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 cadaavvers. What's a cadaavver? 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 it and people laughed him out of town. He died in a sanitarium in a mental institution. He he was completely like 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 bush is this? This is not a biology department. Get a grip. You should have you should you should not be in the business school.
So, 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, it would be an honor if you come and give the plenary 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 mere 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 Jewish context. 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 broad 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 the 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 reproductive 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 cuz 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's tail. 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 than than Stephen. 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 beautifification, right? So cosmetic surgeries around the world are almost exclus 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 a favor to return a 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 savannah 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 there. 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 non-kin, another group of folks that are also walking around 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 desiraability score right? What is a mate desiraability 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 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 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 or he doesn't have a guitar. Nothing changed. It's the exact same guy. It's Stephen. But give me a guitar. No. Oh, with the guitar, Steven'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 Steven with a guitar and he's going to play some songs and I'm going to feel good and then I'm going to 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 approximate level. It explains the how and the what of a phenomenon. How does diabetes work? What are the 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 approximate ones. is 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. Uh he's got the assiduousness to have the discipline to pi virtuoso attractive all other or Picasso. Picasso is a short little guy. He's frumpy. He's bald. 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, 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 Bach and Mozart 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 mate desiraability scale. So now imagine all of those attributes that I can cook. So okay, God sad. 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 0 to 100, what would God score on his mate desiraability 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 Stephen a 78 or a 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 shy and I'm an introvert. You're sexually daring and extroverted. That complimentarity might actually result in a nice tric 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 asserbic 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 desiraability score, which 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 cheerleader, the head cheerleader. 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 mating 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 desiraability score? What do you think? I don't know. You want me to answer it because then I can get the hate mail? No problem. No, no, but I I asked 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 overwhelmingly the ones to instigate a divorce. Yeah, that's true. Although from a strict evolutionary perspective, the mate val all other things equal maid 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 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, Lionel Messi is my height, but he's Lionel Messi, and he found a gorgeous woman who's shorter than him, right? But what you don't want now, if I'm a 6'1 woman, 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 6'1. 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 desiraability 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 desiraability 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 male's desiraability score is now lower than ever if we think about income age groups 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 have happened in society, um men and women are getting closer and closer to par 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 6'2 PhD from Stanford and you're a woman, good luck. Why? Because number one, I've gotten 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 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 guy that 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 cuz 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 when I've 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 you said this thing about beta male earlier 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 maleness 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 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 hashtagme too Italy should cease to exist because the whole country is hashtagme too right what do I mean by that Italians stereotypically of course are seducers they pursue women I mean women will say you I love Italian guys how they approach now we're not talking about uh 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 pathize half of humanity called men through the label of toxic masculinity. No, it's called sexiness. a guy who jumps into a a building to save a puppy and he's called a 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's 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 out, ooh, 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 and 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 an 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 2 feet tall. Obviously not, but he's he's shorter than me. He's Okay. I'm like 5'6, 5'7. I mean, he's maybe five three. Okay. But but a bulldog, right? I always like to say just because then it makes it easy. I say I mess his height. So that makes it easy. 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 seven 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 Dave." No, David. I'm 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 doineering looking man that she's with. Therefore,
that makes it even less likely that you can get her. Yes. 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 got? 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 just Okay. Haha. 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 testicles this big. He's 7 foot2 in his aura. Now, you might say, well, yeah, boy does it add a lot of inches metaphorically when you have Ferraris and so on. But there's a more general story here. He 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 6'2 and very meek and very tepid and very beta. Or I could be 5'7 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 desiraability, 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 goods, 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 thoughtfulness of your answers. I can very quickly judge where you are where I could 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 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 se I think seven days ago I saw it on on X or Twitter um which showed what it's like to be a a beautiful woman walking down the Um, this was only 7 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? I'm filming undercover alone in Cardiff, where police recently announced a decrease in violence against women. Within seconds, a group of men approached me. I play tennis. Yeah. This guy didn't respect my personal space. I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I saw you. I had to say hello. You look nice. That's kind of 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 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 woman 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 a ready 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 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 U. Uh does that ring a bell? Do you know what that is? The inverted U. I can imagine on a graph. On a graph, but not not this way. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the other way. Like a hill, right? 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 takingaking 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 cha chapter whereby 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 demonstrate it through 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 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 0.001, why not? I'll take it. They're probably thinking that. Well, by the way, 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. 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? Oh, 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 perfect mine. 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 phauas 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 lost 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 cues well. So, for example, if I'm sitting with you for 25 minutes while you lecture me about why Camala 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 instances. So the ones that have the self-awareness in the theory of mine, saw you walk past with your family and went 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 what 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 [ __ ] they 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 fiverr.com where you have global access to reviewed, tried and tested, world-class talent at your fingertips that you can access in a flexible and affordable way. Fiverr 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. Fiverr.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 to learn more. And here's the great
thing. If it doesn't go well, Fiverr offer a pretty 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 colloially. 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're effectively saying is I want an intelligent man. Because it's very very unlikely that you could be a very funny satist 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, "God damn, 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. Yeah. 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 elacrity 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 bang 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'll 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 basically having no sex, right? Which I'm told about over and over again that are at risk of becoming incelss 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 pounds overweight and pear-shaped? 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 Gad?" Right? Now, that doesn't mean she obviously stayed with me when I was, you know, 86 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 4 in, 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 poised. 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 desiraability 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. And adaptation is something that has evolved because it confers either survival or uh reproductive benefits. So my preference for fatty 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. Do 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 in and I'm going to come to pornography 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 religiosity exhibit greater communality, greater cohesion, greater in-group outgroup demarcation. So groups that are religious tend to outlive groups that are irrel 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 kufur, which is a derogatory term 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 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 mobile, fertile, ready young women, and you never have to see the same woman twice if you serve
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 cuz you're spending 6 hours uh feverishly uh masturbating 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, obsessivecompulsive 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 8 hours in scolding hot water where the skin is coming off me. I didn't go to work cuz I've been washing my hands since 7:00 in the morning. That's what happens with pornographic addiction, right? I'm sitting and surfing the internet 6 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. 6 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 a button or write down who they want to be, they probably would 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 cause 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 a 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 flagagillating. I don't know. It was actually was 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 searched was how do I quit pornography? And it was by by a way it was it was the astoundingly the most searched thing as it related to pornography, which is how do I quit? 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 even watching one second 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 6 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 world that he's growing up in in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and his natural hard wiring? Wow, what a great question. So there is a there is something called the mismatch hypothesis in 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 coming 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 the World Health Organization thing they can all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis. So I would tell your son knowledge is power to our earlier point of view getting that degree you never lose in 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 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 empirically 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 uh 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 student on some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow. Oh, 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's in the details 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 with guarantee here are the eight steps. I explained that life is a statistical game, right? It there are statistical vagory. 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 your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maximum birds of a feather flock together. Complimentarity works really nicely in the short term. 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. Okay. So, but just to give a
little bit more, I guess spec specificity and nuance to this. You're not cuz my partner, she's really into like spiritual stuff. Yes. She's 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's 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 ahead. Okay. Well, that's the end of the podcast. So, yeah. Um, 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, 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 taste. It's not about the most fundamental deontolog, right? I mean what you know my wife loves the fact that I'm a trutht teller. My love my wife loves the fact that I have purity in my right 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 MacGyver. Do you know do you remember who Macgyver 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 de bruya. Uh 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. It'll probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. is basically Elon Musk of the sad household. I greatly admire that in 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 evol 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 adaptation 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 sentient beings, right? We we we're not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right? I mean, 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 metaan 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 and 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 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 3 hours and that temporal I don't have what I call scheduling esphixia 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 instantiate your creative impulse is a direct path to purpose and happening happiness uh purpose and meaning what do I mean by that a standup A 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 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 that the actuarial scientist your brother doesn't have a worthy life but surely literally 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 gonna spank that actuarial table." Okay. 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 in the in the way that you just described that I am happier than all of my siblings? Do you want to guess what Dr. Sad'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 layer to that as well. I was sat with at a 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 do you rank in order of siblings and eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling. Oh, 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 Sulloway 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 Rebel. 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. 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 Sulloway 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 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 panel 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 siph 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 the box thinkers not being stuck on conformity on orthodoxy. Hence in the context of scientific innovations the lastborns are the ones who say no this
is [ __ ] I'm going this way. Okay. And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that lastborns 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. Mhm. So, so all that to say that based on that one could surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness, then the latterborns would score happier. I I really wonder which one it is cuz 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 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 2 to 3 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. started 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 started 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 you. Well, yeah, it's a incredible. We have a
lot of great researchers. So, and by the way, both my wife and I are lastorns. 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 a sort of mating on birth or ownership. Interesting. Boom. There's there's your thesis for your undergraduate psychology degree, which you will pursue and send me an email that I deserve the credit for having forced. Why don't I just run this as a advert 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 do 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 mTurk? No. So mturk 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. Mhm. 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, 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 10fold. So, so you can certainly do that.
We'll do it. So, we will I set this as a challenge for 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 gender, 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 because we want to check these marriages are legit. Absolutely. And I'll put it on the screen. That'd be so cool. And please share with the 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 1,00 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? Mhm. 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 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 I 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 you're 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 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 AC 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 parasettology, which is just the 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 neuroparasites. 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, toxopplasma Gandhi is a parasite that can infect human minds, but it most famously infects the minds of mice. When they are parasetized in their brains by this parasite, they become sexually attracted to cats and their sex and their urine, which is not a good. Yeah. So let let me give you a few examples. There's a wood cricket, an actual cricket that abhores water. Okay. it it doesn't like it stays clear of water when it is paracetized by a hairmworm needs to get the wood cricket to jump in water because it could only complete its reproductive cycle in water. So a wood cricket that doesn't have the brain worm looks at the water and says I'm staying
away. A wood cricket that is paracetized by this hairworm jumps into the water merely to its death because it has altered its neurosircuitry to suit its interest. Okay. So when I saw that field neuroparictology I had my Euroka Eureka moment just like I did when I first discovered evolutionary psychology. I said, I will now use the neuroparacettological model to argue that human beings can not only be paracetized by actual physical brainworms, they could be parasetized by ideological brainworms. And so continuing the metaphor, I said, so what are these parasites? Postmodernism is a parasitic idea. So, 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 in 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 the 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 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 and 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 of 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 Abd Naser, who was the president of Egypt, who was a very popular figure in the Arab world because he was what's called a panarabist, 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 five 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 turned to my mother and 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 teacher, this is pre-Ivil 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 had known through all the years of elementary school who knew I was Jewish said, "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 in full-fledged brutal massive war. On one of their return trips in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah, 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 them inside captivity. I mean you can imagine they were tortured. Yeah. Uh my mother said and I' 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 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, you know, it's shame and so on. But I remember that if she had said yes, my thinking as a 15year-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, imbeiles, [ __ ] 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 of 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 were 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 Niger and 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 for me, Joe Rogan, Lex Freedman, 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 arises. Okay. So then let me let me let me test your belief. 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 I've heard. 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 import an important data point to understand the causation of a of a thing. Okay, let me give you another example. Um, American prisons are predominantly occupied by black men or at least it overindexes with black men versus the population ratios. So, are black men therefore 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 what you're going to suffer are the social consequences and stigma 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 positive agents that if we are caring decent people, maybe we should
talk about openly? Well, in today's world, I couldn't even I say 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 going to result in negative downstream effects. I argue that that's a grotesqually 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 contient imperatives. It is never okay to lie. That would be a deontological statement. A consequentialist 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 deontological. Presumption of innocence in the justice system has to be deenthological. Right? Journalistic integrity if you truly are a truth reporter has to be deontological. 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 antlogical 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 h then Joe Biden loses to Orange Himmler 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 Kavanaaugh because, you know, he's a gang rapist going up and down the eastern seabboard 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 in 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 Brad Kavanaaugh was a serial rapist. So no, there is no forbidden knowledge in science. I 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 personaliz 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 is like this real electricity and I'm and I'm not a very nervous public speaker thinking what's going on here why is there such tension well I found out I had 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 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 1,425
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, 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 Rushton, that's his name. Philip Rushton, 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 because 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. 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 that'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 guys that have Nigerian heritage and their father's from Coventry are statistically dumber and and it was robust, I would believe it and I would be okay with it. 0% of me would would suffer any offense. 0%. of 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 cuz they scan 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. 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 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 parasitic 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 table 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 lit. 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 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 is 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 jawline 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 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 costbenefit 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 costbenefit 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 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 electronics 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 the tyranny of the minor of the minority. It's the ten 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 phenotype, 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 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 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 again, I guess this is this is goes back to the sort 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 ex war, but their lives have been made worse because of all of this stuff. That's sad. 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 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 transerson to the detriment of all biological women, that's a misfire, right? 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 I guess I am. I was born in Botswana, but you're an immigrant, but you hopefully came in legally. That doesn't mean No comment. Sorry. No comment. No. Uh but opening the door to 10 million 12 million because it's not fair for Guatemalans and Al Salvador and not to come in and share the experience. No, that's not right. uh life you know who Thomas Soil is the the famous economist he's a yeah you mentioned I think you mentioned I mentioned before right Thomas soil uh
who's an economist said look I'm paraphrasing his words and I agree with it 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 rights 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 border into America and they go to Texas and it 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 I'm going to say this not because I'm uh 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 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 to go through a formal process. But if I'm an MS13 gang member with two tier tattoos on two tears 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 we understand why very dangerous 59year-old professor Gatsad 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 hiding. 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 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 going to be the richest economy in the world. It's going 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 deodorant. Do you see that you you know what happened? What? 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 c and I said to the guy why do 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 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 point 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 posting 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 created 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've got there's people with their fingers on the scales. No society is perfect. But as someone who is buffeted from the sample of societies outside of the west, no society is better than we 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 Hersy 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 Welssley College where it's rarified in Boston and then she can pontificate while she bought her kafia 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 law, 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 at. 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'd 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 you and your mom had a good brain. And they'll say to you, they'll say, "Gad, you know, if you weren't brought from the Middle East when you were younger, you wouldn't 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 incelss 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 mating, 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 we don't believe in equality of outcome. No, no one, I think, with a brain believes in equality of outcome. Oh, no. There is one with somewhat of a brain. Camela Harris 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 Lenon 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 satized 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's 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 in 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. Botswana. 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, Ithrea, 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 a deserve to deserve 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 professional 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 entomologist. 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 rebuttals 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 Gatsad 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 fervor believer in non-gravity, I don't think that they will drop. But then I'm astonished when out of a 100 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 about bigger issues. Is communism the ideal model for maximal flourishing? Nothing could be clearer, but we've got all these degenerates trying to implement it here. Would you vote for Trump if you could if I were American? Yeah, in a heartbeat over Camela Harris because that's so right now we let's assume that it does end up being Camela 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 snafuss where he triggered the eyeire of many people simply because of how he 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? Cuz 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 if your son grew up with a character, okay, so here are the some positive traits and some negative traits of him. Okay. I I don't uh 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 honeybadger 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 honeybger 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 mediumsized dog, right? And yet it can go into a hornest net, 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 foot two, 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? 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 Mike Pence who was his his vice president, 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 focity of the honey badger because someone that's that ferocious when they in faith can't accept defeat. 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 I'll 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. 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? Eeny meeny miny mo catch a tiger by the toe. Do you see what I'm doing? That unpred 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 in 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 in No, no, it's really interesting. No, it is really interesting and it's not just you I'm asking these questions through 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 Kla Harris. So, I'm trying to interrogate this this feeling of Donald Trump. Is there any character trait that you can point out in Donald Trump that is overtly I'm almost certain that he had remember you said you've got three groups of friends 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 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 No, no, no. Do you know it's funny because when I when I when I heard your opinion on um Donald Trump and Camala 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 or 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%. 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 Cackler. 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 have 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 page 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 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. Dad, 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. Uh, am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't? Unfortunately, no. No. Okay, perfect. Well, 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 oftentimes 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 duplicitus if I treat you well you should 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. It needs to be like a morning practice. True. Thank you so much for the work that you do. Um, Dr. God, 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 who 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 throughine 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. [Music] Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I ask 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 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 two updated conversation cards are out right now at thecon conversationcards.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]