1375: Alphas | Skeptical Sunday

Think you need to be an "alpha" to win? Nick Pell debunks the wolf-pack myth and reveals what actually earns respect here on Skeptical Sunday! Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/author/nicholas-pell! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1375 https://jordanharbinger.com/1375 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: An "alpha" is supposedly the dominant top dog — the leader who takes 90% of life's spoils while the lesser "betas" scrap for crumbs. But the whole pecking order traces back to a 1940s study of captive wolves crammed into a pen — the "wolf prison yard," not real pack life. The biologist who made "alpha" famous, L. David Mech, spent decades disavowing his own bestseller. The so-called alpha wolves aren't the toughest fighters who clawed their way up — they're just the parents. The pack defers to them because they bring the food. Humans didn't conquer the planet by bullying — we did it by cooperating. We're "obligate cooperators," self-domesticated apes who arguably bred aggression out of ourselves. Nobody builds a pencil, let alone a moon rocket, alone. Dominance is a liability, not a cheat code. Real influence runs on prestige, not dominance (a distinction from anthropologist Joseph Henrich). Fear makes people hide problems — think D-Day, when nobody dared wake Hitler, or Vietnam-era "fragging." Domineering bosses get avoided; competent ones get followed. Want to actually lead? Drop the dominance act and build competence instead. Lead by example, stay approachable so small problems reach you while they're still small, and treat people as collaborators rather than rivals. Prestige is freely given — and it's what makes people want to follow you. Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: Zenni: 15% off your first order: zenni.com/podcast, code PODCAST15 https://zenni.com/podcastXero: Learn more: xero.com https://www.xero.com/NOBL: Up to 46% off: nobltravel.com, tell them we sent you https://nobltravel.com/Castbox: Find, organize, and subscribe to the world's best podcasts: castbox.fm https://castbox.fm/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:29Speaker 00

  Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, researcher and fellow alpha male, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. And our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. On Sundays, though, it's Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as internet porn, chemtrails, banned foods, toothpaste, crystal healing, diet pills, bottled water and more.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, crime and cults and more, to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, today on the show, somewhere online, you may have been yelled at by a guy in a fitted polo shirt telling you how to be an alpha male. It's the ultimate online shorthand, this idea that human society is a rigid hierarchy where you're either the silverback leading the troop or a beta waiting for scraps. It's moved from dark corners of pickup artist forums, which I am unfortunately quite familiar with,

• 2:57Speaker 00

  straight into mainstream corporate leadership seminars and girl boss TikTok, promising that if you just fix your posture and you project, you assert dominance, the world will finally hand you the keys to the kingdom. The problem is that alpha has become essentially the astrology of the insecure. It's a seductive, simple story that we use to explain away why we didn't get the promotion or why a second date didn't happen. We're told it's biological, which makes it feel like some kind of unchangeable law of nature. It's flattering if you think you got it and a convenient excuse if you don't. But the moment you poke at the actual science, the whole thing starts to look less like a nature documentary and more like a house of cards built on a total misunderstanding of how animals, including humans, actually function.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Here today to help us separate the leaders from the loud mouths is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Nick, you're not an alpha, is that right? I don't know, man. You got a lot of tattoos and a beard, so just saying.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  It's after March, so I just have sideburns. But as I think we're about to find out, no one is an alpha. But no, despite being a gravelly-voiced bodybuilder, this is not a term I have ever identified with.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  That's so sigma, bro.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, if we have to categorize it, sure, I'm a sigma. I think before we get into this, it's important to note, categories can be great to the extent that they increase understanding. The problem begins when categories are used as a substitute for understanding. And we're going to encounter a lot of that today.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes sense. So for anyone who has mercifully missed out on the entire alpha, beta, sigma, whatever discourse, can you run it down a little bit?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  The idea is that there are alphas, who are the leaders, and betas, who are the followers. Everyone is in one of these two categories. Alphas get 90% of everything good in life and betas are left with the crumbs.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  So to circle back to the sigma thing, there's a slightly more nuanced slash ridiculous version of this, right?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, a Manosphere blog back in the day called Alpha Game Plan had a whole elaborate set of categories that recognized at the very least that it's not quite that simple.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  To be clear, this is total bro-science, not actual science, but we're going to humor it because, well, that's what we're debunking here on this episode of Skeptical Sunday.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I trust bro-science more than actual science, so.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Okay, well, fine.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Trust the bro-science.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  It really adds to your credibility here, but keep going.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Well, the thing about this other more nuanced scale is, yeah, it adds more nuance. So betas in this framework are also confident and good-looking guys. They're just to a lesser degree than the alphas. Deltas are the normal, average, everyday guy. Gamas are weird in like an off-putting way. Sigmas are weird in an attractive way and basically ignore or flout all social rules.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  All right, so is that us, sigmas, right? Yeah, that sounds good to me.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I feel like you're lying to yourself, man. I feel like you're a total alpha on this spectrum.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Well, continue.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  There's like a whole thing now where younger guys want to identify as sigma. Who doesn't want to be the cool, mysterious outsider maverick who just kind of floats above all these social dominance games? Like, who doesn't want to be Han Solo?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  I see, yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  But back to our more nuanced spectrum, the omegas in this version are like completely hopeless. And lambdas just don't care because they're gay, I think is like the implication in this hierarchy.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  This fake pretend blog hierarchy.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not endorsing this by any means at all. I'm just explaining it.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  I get why people use this because, for example, I've said many times on the show, I was an exchange student. And when I was an exchange student in Germany, you're outside of the structure of it all. One, you're new, but two, you're like such an alien presence in this place. You know, I was in a former communist country. So I show up and I remember the kids were like, dude, you're wearing sandals. That's like so lame and dumb. And it was like, it doesn't matter because Tevas are cool in 1997 where I'm from. So I'm rocking these things. And I remember people just were like, oh. And then suddenly other people were starting to wear these sandals. But it was also like, I don't have to be a good skier, even though that, or a good footballer, even though that was what made cool kids at the school.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  I was friends with all those guys because I was the only American that anybody had ever met and I could start to speak German. So like, I had my own status hierarchy or I had like this weird asterisk place in the hierarchy, right? The status hierarchy where it was like, this guy's not an athlete, wears lame-o clothes, doesn't speak German that well, but is friends with all of the quote-unquote "cool" and "uncool" kids from the three grades around him because he stands out in this way where everybody talks to him. And that's sort of sigma-ish, I guess, right? But it's really hard to build that if you're just like a normal dude in a high school somewhere, I think.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  I always tell people about my high school, like I went to a pretty large high school. And like, we had multiple groups of weird kids. And my group of weird kids was like the alpha weirdos, the skateboarder hardcore punk rock kind of like guys. Like we were, and then like the Marilyn Manson kids were further down the totem pole and the heavy metal kids were even further down the totem pole because like nothing was less cool in 1996 than, than being into heavy metal.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  You know what, though? Like, this is nonsense science. It's not science, right? But there's something to be said for like, yeah, you're like the bro punk rock kid that's not traditionally cool, but your brother works at a store where they can get beer and you can get beer for everyone. And it's like, well, you're automatically elevated to a tier where nobody messes with you. Because when all the jocks and Stacy's or whatever they're called want to have a party on the weekend, you're the first phone call. You're the guy who can actually get the beer. So it's like, yeah, you're kind of weird, you wear these weird shirts and you got tattoos in ninth grade. But like, nobody really messes with you because you're the hookup.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  The second openly gay kid in my school's history that anyone was aware of, his sister's boyfriend was the beer guy.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  And as you can imagine, he didn't get a lot of stick for being gay.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  No, that's a funny, well, no, no pun intended. But here's the thing, do you think the nuance, I'm going to get canceled. So one of these jokes is inevitably going to get me canceled at some point. But do you think the nuance adds anything to the conversation? Because we just made a mess of that, but it's not scientific or anything. It's basically a weird overlay that we kind of, the people kind of made up to go over a normal social hierarchy. But it's not really, it almost kind of proves that it's not a thing, right? Oh yeah, well, you can apply these labels to anybody in all these different ways. So like, it's not that useful.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I think that the one that we just talked about, the more nuanced one, does add some kind of like deeper insight. And I think that people can kind of like see like. At your school, there was whatever, like the high school quarterback and the captain of the basketball team or whatever. And then there was just like the rest of the guys who were jocks and whatever.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Here's the thing, though, we're adults now and we have to use high school examples to apply all of this because none of it works outside of this weird artificial scenario where you're in a school trapped with people of different kinds and you have to be there. Like, it just doesn't, it doesn't work elsewhere, in my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Again, I think that, like, you can use it as a way to kind of, like, increase understanding, or you can use it as a substitute for understanding. I think that there are social hierarchies in, in every situation. Uh, but that's the thing is that they're fluid.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  They're fluid, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  You can be the alpha in one situ- or wha- how- whatever you want. It's a top dog. You know, you can be the top dog at work and you go home and, you know, your wife's the boss and your kids make fun of you and-

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Too close to home. You're hitting too close to home right now, Nick.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And then you go play racquetball and you're like, kinda somewhere in the middle. You know, it could change throughout the day. The, anyone who's spent any kinda time in alternative subcultures or the art world knows that, for example, conventional attractiveness does not count for a lot. You're the alpha Chad chiseled chin, perfect haircut guy and you go to like a goth club, you're not probably gonna be most girls' first pick.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  That's a fun example, actually. I remember when I was in my late twenties or mid twenties, I got in killer shape. But I moved to New York and I remember being like, you'd go in one bar where they had a bunch of like, kind of fratty looking people and I was like the older guy that was still clean cut but had a job as a lawyer and it was like, oh, you gotta meet Jordan. But then I'd go out with my friend who, who's a DJ. She was a DJ, she's quite alt and all, and every, I was one of the only white guys, but I was like, an athletic looking white guy for that period of my life and I couldn't have been less interesting to these people. They were just like, I was invisible to these people.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  So, I was like, oh, I wonder what it is. It must be, they must not like white guys or whatever. And that was maybe sorta kinda part of it, but really like, a white dude like you with tats and a beard or whatever would walk in and just own that place. They just thought I was boring as hell, cuz I was very vanilla, really. I just, I was just so predictable. Oh, a, a white guy works out. Uh, where do we find one of those, right? Everywhere. Get outta here. This is an artsy fartsy place where people are spinning records at 2:00 PM. All these different scenarios make this even less scientific because it's actually just, all of this stuff gets shook up. And to be clear here, we're just talking about men, right? The idea seems to have permeated out of the manosphere and into a lot of corporate speak, dating advice for sure, and general discourse that really transcends

• 12:47Speaker 00

  gender. I mean, yes, you're talking about dudes here, but you could read something pretty similar to this on a, a LinkedIn blog with different technical terminology and it would be there.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so I think that the more nuanced version we talk about, first of all, I think it's, it's at least fairer because it doesn't assume that like, if you're not the grown up equivalent of the quarterback of the football team, just a hopeless loser, and you need to like, learn all these stupid human tricks to like, have any shot in life. But, we could talk about the more nuanced version all day, but-

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I do think that it immediately shows how silly it is to divide people into hyper competent, insanely charismatic leaders and just this mob of feckless followers who just have no hope.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Right, I agree with that. So, what's the origin of the alpha beta discourse? Because it has this kind of scientific or pseudo-scientific anthropological quality to it, and I think that kind of disarmed some people when they first encounter it.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  So, it's based on a study of wolves from the 1940s by a guy named Rudolph Schenker?

• 13:52Speaker 00

  I see. So, not only is the concept not based on humans, it's not even based on non-human primates, it's based on basically wild dogs.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  This is actually interesting. The dogs in the study were not even wild dogs. They were dogs in captivity.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  There's a red flag here off the bat because don't animals really change their behavior quite a bit when they're in captivity? I'm pretty sure that's one of the most obvious sort of problems with this. And so, when you're studying wolves and they're in a cage, it's gonna be way different than a pack of wolves out in some Siberian forest somewhere.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you were actually gonna study wolves, you would just follow wolves around.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  At a distance so that they can't see you.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Because they're gonna act differently because they see a human around. But it gets worse. These wolves weren't related to each other. So, in the wild, wolves that in packs, everybody knows a wolf pack. Wolf pack's just a family of wolves. They're not like random wolves that you pick up. They're genetically tied to one another, biologically tied to one another. And the study looked at wolves that were just randomly thrown together.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  This guy's studying the Truman Show version of wolves?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, this is a particularly good analogy because the wolves are also confined to a small area that's like 10 by 20 meters, which is 30 to 60 feet for people in a country that has back-to-back world championship belts.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Okay, world war champions. Yeah, the, the, that study sounds like it examined the wolf equivalent of a prison yard. So, if we take that analogy to humans, prison yards maybe not a great model for a normal human society. I mean, there's a lot of insight there, but maybe not something we wanna model everything after.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you could get tons of insight into human behavior by studying a prison yard, sure. But it's not gonna give you the same insight that you would get from studying a bunch of families just doing normal stuff. This is not the normal way that human beings live, and this is not the normal way that wolves live. So, Schenker separates the wolves into a lead wolf and a bitch wolf. That's his term, not mine.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Thank you for clearing that up because, yeah, so presumably the bitch is the lead wolf's mate, and this is a scientific term before people trip out on us.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  That's correct. They, so the lead wolf and the bitch wolf, which is, it's actually, it's a little funnier when you consider that the bitch wolf is the, one of the wolves on top. They maintain their position in the herd, cuz it's not a pack, it's just a herd. They do this, they maintain their position by constant aggression towards other wolves designed to suppress them. Schenker documented ritualized fighting and submission as the mechanisms by which this group of wolves socially regulated itself.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  When does the concept of alpha come in and how is that different from Schenker's work?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  A biologist named L. David Mech published the bestselling book, The Wolf, in 1970. It was the origin point of the alpha ideology in mainstream discourse. Meck was not a blogger or a crank printing pamphlets in his basement. This was science at the time. It was a best seller and in the book, Meck codifies a linear dominance hierarchy. He argues that wolf packs are structured like a military unit. The alpha pair were the top male and female who won their status through physical contests and maintained it through dominance displays

• 17:24Speaker 02

  such as pinning other wolves, growling, or standing over them. And life in this framework is depicted as this constant low-level war for resources and mating rights.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Which we see in the alpha beta discourse. There's a man or woman at the top and the alpha needs to constantly be asserting dominance, or they're gonna fall out of leadership of the pack and you can't ever rest, you can't ever, you gotta have eyes in the back of your head, all that.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the thing is, Meck eventually disavowed everything significant about the wolf. In 1999, he wrote a paper called, Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs. There's a link to it in the, in the show notes if you wanna, if you're into reading scientific papers. He completely rejects this idea that wolves are in charge because they won a, a wolf wrestling match.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  They're not the toughest wolves necessarily, or at least that's not why they're in charge. It sounds like the alpha wolf pair are literally just the parents.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yes, that is exactly right. The other wolves defer to them because they're older and they provide food and because they're the parents.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  So, if they're not constantly asserting dominance, how do the junior wolves move up in rank, or do they?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  They do, when they move out of the house.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Okay, so the parent wolves are training them for the day that they go out on their own, and when they do, they become, what, leaders of their own packs? Is that how it works?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  That's basically it. A lot of the submission behaviors weren't like, rolling over and displaying weakness, they're food begging behaviors. So, wolves viewed the parent how your dog views you. They lick you because they want food, because you have it and they want some.

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• 21:12Speaker 00

  So if Meck, if he then disavows everything he wrote in The Wolf, why are people still clinging to the ideas expressed in it? Because once from 1970 and then in 1999, much more recently, he's like, that was all nonsense. And it's like, you have to deliberately skip over that to cling to his old ideas.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Well, the book had a very big social footprint. It got adopted by Cesar Millan in the world of dog training.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  As well as the Manosphere types. And the correction comes almost 30 years later. By then, there's a lot of cultural weight to undo.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  That's true. I feel like it's also just frankly, a lot sexier to portray the leader of the pack as a dictator who fought his way to the top and maintains dominance through constant conflict. It's just a lot more attention grabbing than like, well, he's their dad. So how does Meck's work begin to trickle down into mainstream discourse? Like, how do we end up with influencers using this crap?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I wouldn't totally discount Cesar Millan and dog training.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Oh, right.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  It doesn't explain everything, but it's there. But for our purposes, it kind of enters the discourse through the Manosphere wing of the internet.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Okay, which for those who don't know, I probably should have defined this earlier. But the Manosphere started as this very heterogeneous group of bloggers focused on men's issues, ranging from, I don't know, family court stuff to general self-improvement, to fitness, to dating. Now, it's basically a place for men to talk about how much they hate women, kinda, right? Isn't that, is that fair?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, that's totally fair. Where we see the alpha beta discourse enter the Manosphere is through the dating sector of it. And this is the pickup artist subculture, which, you know, was one part of the Manosphere. And it just took this Wolf prison yard study and just ran with it.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Not just ran with it, but they assume all this applies to the average big city nightclub, which is weird.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. They say that women are genetically hardwired to gravitate toward alpha traits, which they define in the narrowest terms possible.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Height, good looks, money, acting like a total dick to everyone for no reason.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Negging, giving backhanded compliments on purpose that's designed to make someone feel small.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, guys, wolves do not do that. They do not do that.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wolves are not nagging. When the whole act like an alpha thing dropped, guys thought this was some kinda cheat code when it came to picking up women.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  There's also this whole framing around this, that it was like, you know, red pill. You accept this harsh truth and you escape the matrix and now the world is your oyster. You stay a beta and you just go along with what society wants you to do. And it's like, dot, dot, dot. We end up with Dan Bilzerian telling people how to date, which is insane.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is insane. And boy, do I know some fun things about that guy, as you know, that I can't say in the public.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  I know, publicly. Yeah, exactly.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, it's not even, it's not, they don't even apply it to like, the world. It's just girls at the club. And, you know, that was kind of initially where it sat, was setting these, these sites super low. It was like, picking up women for the sake of taking them home and having sex with them. But as anyone who's actually, you know, done this can tell you, it gets old quick.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure does, or so I've been told.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Jordan knows nothing about this topic.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. Exactly. If that gets old so quick and is not good for you, and no surprise, guys who ended up really sticking with a lot of the pickup stuff and didn't kind of graduate from it are a mess. Anyway, it doesn't stay there, or else we wouldn't be talking about it, right? This stuff bleeds out into YouTube, podcast bro stuff and generalized self-help all over the place.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. What's sadder than a 45-year-old man at the club?

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, jeez. I can't, I'm tired thinking of just even getting dressed to go to a place like that.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  It's loud and there's lots of people.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like way past my bedtime before anything even pops off at a place like that.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I'm in bed by like 9, dude, like.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Amen, man. I used to think that was pathetic. Now I'm like, the real cheat code is going to bed before 9pm.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Ah, it's pathetic, but whatever.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't stay confined to the Manosphere and it doesn't stay totally gendered either. There's this hustle culture, you know, girl boss thing, all these kinds of corporate expressions of culture. I call them LinkedIn Americans. They pick up this alpha beta dynamic.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  And from their perspective, it makes sense. Like, there's a certain type of person in the corporate world who doesn't think that the key to success is innovation, or intelligence, or people skills, or business smarts. It's just be vicious and doing everything you can to keep others underfoot.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Jeez, that's a pretty extreme take on it. You're not denying that drive has something to do with success in the business world, though, right? It's just all the other baggage that goes along with it?

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, drive is, I'm sure drive has a lot to do with it. But the act like an alpha thing isn't how strong, confident people act. It's this weird caricature of how they act formulated by people who are, in my estimation, deeply insecure. They think that the golden ticket in business, or your social life, or whatever, is dominance. It's not. It's competence. It's be good. And much like, you know, the actual wild wolves that were studied, people will follow you if you demonstrate that you're a competent person and that hitching your ship to their star is going to take them places.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  I'd imagine there's a lot of turnover at places where the only thing the boss has to offer is acting like the villain from The Devil Wears Prada. The other thing to note is that in the business world, everything is done by a team, basically. The guy at the top could be compared to the conductor, making all the parts work together. But the conductor needs the orchestra to get anything done. I couldn't produce this podcast alone, for example. I don't have the writing and the research skills and the show editing skills that other people do. And on Feedback Friday, those questions, they require a thoughtful, compassionate answer, two qualities I've basically only read about in magazines. So I need Gabriel to help me out with that stuff. So how does the dynamic change when it moves into the corporate world and when it loses its gendered nature? How does this all leak into that stuff?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Even in the version of alpha beta outside of the Manosphere, for men at least, there's a big narrative about how men are feminized and this needs to be undone. You know, you're too nice. Nice guys finish last. And you're too nice because the world is giving men a raw deal because they're men. And the men are supposed to deal with this using frame control.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  All right. So we know what frame control means, but basically, nobody listening to this does.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Frame control comes out of pickup artist culture, but it's one of the parts that fits very neatly into hustle culture, startup culture, corporate culture.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  So, yeah, grind culture generally, cultures that share the same kind of dog eat dog framework.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  The idea is that all social interactions involve a frame, which I guess you could just say is like a framework, or a set of terms, or established power dynamic. In the male version of alpha, these supposedly alpha set of behaviors, you maintain frame by always being stoic, refusing to ever get emotional. If someone introduces a competing frame, again, I'm going with the logic of this terminology and this ideology. I don't actually believe it. I'm just going with it. So if somebody introduces a competing frame, you have a number of ways to respond, one of which is ridiculing the person.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  So if somebody is being overly emotional at work, even if they have every right to be, you can say something like, wow, somebody didn't have their coffee yet.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  I gotta get out of here. I think I'm gonna lose it.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the mundus.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Right. It's childish, as is all of this, because it reduces social interactions to this bizarre dick measuring contest, rather than good faith efforts at communication. But this comes from guys who think that if you cry in front of your wife when your mother dies, that you've just ruined your marriage.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Right. Yes. It's incredibly juvenile and stupid and just lacks all sort of understanding of how relationships actually work. So what's the female version of this? Because I'm very familiar with the male version. I think people kind of get it. It doesn't surprise me that there's a female analog, but I know absolutely nothing about it because that's not really a world I was ever part of.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Sure. So for dating, you've got Sheriff 7, Mina Airfon, and the website Female Dating Strategy, which is, all this is kind of about finding high value men, is what they call it. That doesn't mean they're good men. It just means they're rich.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  I see.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  For the more corporate side of things, there's Eliza Jabrilova, Cody Sanchez, Tonya Lay, and Nikita Malik. I did not look a ton into these.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  I'm friends with Cody. She, I don't know all of her work, but she's not like, if you don't beat up your coworker, like, she just tells you how to run a laundromat and make money.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. And so if I'm like, um, you know, it's not the topic of the show. The topic of the show is not the female side of things. But we do, I did want to kind of address like, the ways in which this maybe has trickled down and permeated into other areas. So like, you know, I don't know, go to the comments and tell me what a, what a dick I am for calling these people.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Femosphere pickup artists or whatever.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  God, Cody's gonna kill me.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  But.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  All right.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  So it's sort of weird because the women are sometimes told that they have to like out alpha men to survive in the allegedly patriarchal world. And it goes beyond leadership into this kind of idea of total perfectionism.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Isn't the men's version doing that as well, though?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I think that's totally fair for the men. You have to be optimized at work. You gotta have your little drop shipping side hustle or startup. And you gotta hit the gym until you have the physique of a Greek statue and picking up a new woman at the bar every night or being the world's most dominant husband and father. For women, it's kind of the same. You're be a CEO, fitness model after work, high value partner by night. You're supposed to be highly assertive and have girl boss energy and look perfect and reject vulnerability and be untouchable.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  That sounds exhausting. But yeah, it's honestly, it sounds like the male and female version of the alpha, they're not really that different, but I can see how they manifest in subtly different ways.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think that's accurate. I think the key difference is that alpha men frame other men as the enemy, or at least as competitive, like every other man is competition at the very least. And women are an obstacle or a resource. And I think, again, from what I understand, because it was not the topic that we addressed, but I did want to kind of touch on it. The alpha woman thing more frames like everyone as an enemy, because for them, it's like you're competing against men and women. So you've got to do kind of like double duty. And the men are framed as like high value partners in crime, more than just objects of acquisition.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  So I think that there's like, again, there's, there seems to be subtle differences to it.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  But it does seem like it leans on different aspects of insecurity, people's insecurities, right? So for men, they're selling power and a sense of significance. And for women, it seems like they're selling autonomy, kind of, you know, the standalone woman who doesn't just not need a man, she doesn't need anybody. You don't need friends. You don't, you don't need a man and you don't need friends and you don't need, you know, you got your hashtag girl boss, you're running your own thing. And it's, I don't know, the whole thing sounds like a recipe for loneliness for men and women.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, with men, it's almost like they want you to think of yourself as the protagonist of Entourage or something.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Like, you just like, you got all these awesome, cool dudes, but they're not as cool as you. And you guys just own every, you know, mog everything everywhere you go. I think that it's pretty gross in general to view all human interactions as transactional. And it's not just gross, it's like, it's sad. I genuinely feel bad for people who, who feel that, well, this is just what life is and you have to get used to it. It's not. And if you view people in this framework, you can't really ever have a peer.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Right, because that's a threat.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're a threat. Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  You never get to rest. Everyone is competition or they're a resource that you need to acquire. And I think that this mindset could really lead to having adversarial relationships with your intimate partner, your romantic partner, your friends, your coworkers.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  It's again, it sounds exhausting. The whole thing sounds so exhausting.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does. Again, for the record, we're, we're really just focusing on guys. I did just want to touch on, on the women. I did not do a deep dive into the research on it. So if I, if I unfairly maligned any of these people as anything, you know, I apologize. I was kind of just like.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I think it's probably fine. I mean, the, the business instructive stuff, it does have notes of this, whether it's intentional or not. But the guy's stuff explicitly plays on, you're going to die alone.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  With no friends and no girl, if you don't get a Dan Bilzerian haircut and start doing steroids or whatever, right? So for the guys, it's particularly damaging.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's like, it's such a weird thing too, because it assumes that like, like, I don't want to be Dan Bilzerian, you know what I mean? Like, I don't, like, I don't want my life to be like that.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  No.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  You're 40 years old and it's like, I don't know that he does this anymore, because it's been at least 10 years since I've looked at anything that that man does other than whining about Jews, which is kind of his.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Yes, that's his new thing. His new way to get attention is he's an anti Semitic, Jew hating guy who's like, I don't know, still shooting machine guns on Instagram videos. It's pathetic, really.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  But it's like, I don't want to be on a yacht with 16 women 20 years younger than me. I like my wife and my little house and my spending time with my kids. Like, I don't want this life. And I think that there's a certain type of guy who, who doesn't want it either. But he's like, oh, man, I'm such a loser because like, I'm content living family life, you know? I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave my wife and, and go off and, and chase after this dream of being a millionaire drop shipper or like whatever. And it's just like, maybe it's cope on my part, but like, I just, I don't.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  No, we're tired.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  That seems exhausting to me.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  It is exhausting. And also for, the only guys who, who really fell into that were the guys that didn't realize he was just paying for that to happen. I mean, he was hiring the models to be there.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  He wasn't attracting them with his alpha maleism. You know, you have to be a special kind of stupid slash 11 years old to fall for that kind of shtick. And so, yeah, I mean, it's quite sad. And it's not like he even made his own money. His dad did something to get a bunch of that money and then he went to prison for that, right? And so it's like, this guy, the whole thing, everything about him is a caricature and a joke. But yeah, there, you, you really have to be like a kid to fall into this stuff most of the time. So let's say I see this stuff and I decide, wah, I'm a beta and I decide I want to make changes. I want to become an alpha. What am I going to start doing according to the people who think that this is an important shift to make?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  There's like four basic components. The first is body language. You need to be like expansive as possible. You can't ever cross your legs.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Don't they, they call that like penis shame or something? There's a term for this.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yes, it's penis shame. And like, this is like clue what, how weird this is.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  That there's some like subliminal signal that you're sending to the world based on your deep subconscious. If you cross your legs, like you're ashamed of having a penis. And it's like, oh dude, maybe you're just a little more comfortable sitting that way. Like, that's totally fine.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Go home, Freud, you're drunk.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre. So then they're going to teach you about eye contact dominance, which according to alpha coaches, like if you look away, that's a sign of submission. So you have to like stare at people like a serial killer because you're terrified of losing this secret staring contest that only you are participating in, because nobody else is doing this. You have to speak slowly. I guess I fail there as a hyper caffeinated Rhode Islander. I'm always going to fail the speaking slowly test. And you have to speak from your chest. You can't ever use up speak.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, up speak is the, that's for girls or something? That's the idea, right? Is that where everything sounds like a question?

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Like that valley girl kind of thing. Everything sounds like a question.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  So the communication stuff is where it starts getting really toxic. Disagreement is not a place to find common ground. You don't argue, you don't negotiate, you don't try and convince people. You just assert your side and that's it. We talked about nagging, which is these like backhanded compliments that are supposedly going to have everyone grovelling for your approval, which no, it's not. You're also encouraged to constantly interrupt people and talk over them.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yes, so this is all terrible advice for social interaction, for anybody who needs to be told that. And people who do this, they find themselves at the bottom of the food chain. Once again, the social hierarchy, and they probably can't figure out why. So it causes, the damage this does is it causes them to do this more, right? Because they go like, oh, all these people don't seem to want to be around me and they're cutting me. I need to talk over them more. I need to nag them more. I need to be a contrarian more often about every little thing, because this isn't working. I need to do it harder. And it's like, eventually you just go, gosh, this person's so annoying. I don't even want to be around them anymore. I'm done giving them a chance. And so, yeah, if you're doing any of this, just knock it off.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Everyone hates you and they're just, they haven't told you yet.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  It's because you're, they're just jealous of your alpha lone wolf status.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  You're coached to have the same facial expression, whether you're like winning the lottery or just found out somebody died. It's called being unreactive.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Yes, it's emotional constipation, really. You're supposed to be completely out of touch with your feelings and emotions.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Like many aspects of this, it's based on an idiot's understanding of what stoicism was.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  You just, you know, you become a wall.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Walls are indeed famous for their ability to form meaningful and enriching relationships. So, yeah, I can see why.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Great model.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Finally, you have to curate an alpha mindset, which mostly means ditching your old friends who are keeping you down. And you also have to buy a lot of books from alpha influencers. Isn't that, isn't that a convenient behavior?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Yes, books and courses.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yes, your hobby should only be posting inspirational quotes with pictures of wolves or the Joker or what, I don't know.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Guns and explosions, yeah.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Skulls. On social media, you know, you gotta, and go into the gym and building your drop shipping side hustle. I don't think they drop ship anymore, but maybe, maybe it did.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Well, I was going to explain the jokes, the reference here. So drop shipping, this is like where you pick a product and you sell it on Amazon. I don't think the side hustle essentially exists anymore, but all of these sort of internet hucksters, like Ty Lopez and all that, you know, here in my garage, like that guy. You'd get some self-help book and it would be like, dot, dot, dot, you need to be rich. And by the way, here's how you do it. It was like Forex trading, uh, side hustles would be like Forex trading, drop shipping where you're selling a product, something along those lines. Crypto, drop shipping kind of went out when crypto came up, because then it was like, I'll teach you how to pick crypto and day trade crypto or whatever. And that's, what's funny is you can actually do that, but none of those guys actually have a clue how that's done.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  You actually did, or do some of that day trading stuff, but none of it, I assume you've learned none of it from Ty Lopez or whatever.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  No, I learned it from like old men who traded stocks in the eighties.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  And it's stuff that like only works in crypto, because you know, market caps are much smaller, the liquidity is much lower, and I'm trading against a bunch of other morons who learned how to trade out of books written in the eighties.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Or you're, you're trading against people who don't know what they're doing, because they're learning from somebody on Instagram. So they're just getting their asses handed to them.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  The best guys are like one, two steps above me. They're not like, I have a finance degree, masters in finance from Yale.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  So the talent pool is limited. You're, you're competing against 20 somethings who are throwing their money away, which is a good market to be in if you want to take candy from some babies. Turns out the alpha wolf is just a dad trying to keep his kids from eating each other, which is disappointing if you've built your entire personality around being a divorced gym bro with a podcast. You know who you are. We'll be right back.

• 42:21Speaker 07

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• 43:33Speaker 00

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• 43:50Speaker 00

  The actual impact of all this stuff is likely to be that your coworkers think you're difficult to work with. Your friends think you're a jerk who's changed in bad ways only. And the only people who are going to date you are going to be traumatized or super insecure or just don't know you well enough yet.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's also like the internal experience of being this guy. Like you just, you have to be hypervigilant and constantly scan every room to see if you're losing status. This is the exact opposite of confidence. It's just this prison of social anxiety that people think is some measure of strength.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  So I very unfortunately got wrapped up in this for a few years. Not the whole alpha stuff, because we weren't even using those terms back in 2008 or whatever, when I sort of got interested in all this like dating and confidence and body language stuff. But you're right, you get hypervigilant, right? So every time you're in a group of people, you're like, oh, I don't want to be seen talking to other guys because then it looks like I'm hiding. And then you're like, oh, I'm nervous about how I look because I've been talking to my friends. I need to only talk to girls. And it's like, oh, gosh, I'm not talking to a girl right now. What, everyone's gonna, I'm losing status every minute that I'm not doing that. I need to be loud, but I don't really want to be loud. I'm kind of enjoying this other person's story. No, I have to cut them off and tell one of my own that's better. And then you're like, but that's kind of douchey.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  So you're constantly doing that. And it really has the opposite effect of looking confident because you're monitoring yourself and constantly in your head. So you're not present at all. You're basically acting like a weirdo and trying to engineer everything. And I remember going out on dates with girls and they'd be like, why are you only staring at the same place on my face? And I was like, oh, I'm trying an experiment where I'm only looking into your right eye. Because I read on some stupid blog that like the right eye is where how you generate rapport with people. And I just remember like I had cool friends that tolerated me and they were like, hey, man, why are you being weird now? And I'm like, I'm doing this thing. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if that works, it's weirder than just being normal. So just try to be normal.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  And some of my female friends are like, you don't have to do any of that stuff. And I was like, oh, you're just saying that because we're friends. And they're like, no, no, no, it's actually hurting you. Trust me. You trying to do this and like be loud, like it's, none of it's congruent with who you actually are. And that's the problem. And I was like, yeah, but that's because who I actually am is not like this, you know, whatever you'd call it now, like alpha. And they're like, no, it's because you're pretending to be someone. And it's like the most obvious thing ever. So just stop doing it. And I remember as soon as I was like, yeah, I kind of give up. This isn't working for me. That's when stuff started to fall into place. You know, I'd go somewhere and somebody'd be like, yeah, man, you're not even six feet tall. And I'd be like, no, yeah, I don't care. And then it was like, they're like, what? And it was like, yeah, no, I'm 5'10". That's a perfectly normal, above-average height. I really don't care.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  You think about your height all the time? And then it would be like, that's when women were like, oh, you're like a normal, secure person who's not a weirdo. Then I stood out because all the other 29-year-old guys are being weirdos. Because everybody was into this crap for a minute, right? It was so weird. So yeah, it really has the opposite effect. The best thing to do is just to leave it all alone.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, um, I took the course at Jordan's old company that shall not be named. And my biggest takeaway from it was like learning how to get people to stop talking to me. I like hacked the system to reverse engineer it. If you're like one of the listeners out there who's heavily tattooed, you know that when you're heavily tattooed, the weirdest people on earth just desperately want to talk to you wherever you go. And so I was like constantly fielding like just these bizarre people coming up to me out of nowhere and talking to me. My biggest takeaway from it was like, oh, I just start like slowly angling my body away from them and like giving terse, short responses. And then they'll just go away.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  That was what I learned from my alpha bootcamp.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  That's so sigma of you. So I feel like, I feel like most people just instantly reject the animal kingdom framing that's implicit in the alpha beta discourse. But why doesn't it hold water? I mean, we know that the wolf study that initiated everything was based on kind of manufactured situations, right? They were in captivity, yada, yada. But in what way do animal kingdom rules not apply to people?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Well, animal kingdom rules do apply to people. People are animals and we're primates. We're highly sophisticated primates, but we are primates nonetheless. So if you were going to start looking for parallels, you would look there. You would look at bonobos or gorillas or, you know, something like that. But where you really see human sophistication, this is one of the things that makes us very, very different, is in our social organization.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Right. Other primates have social organization. So do ants. But human beings have it on just a completely whole other level, obviously.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one of our evolutionary hacks. There's this old libertarian way of like teaching people how important commerce is. And you think of something like a pencil. They're so plentiful that you can just take one. Like pencils are free, basically.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Essentially.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  But no one human being can build a pencil. You've got to get the materials. You need the equipment to process the raw materials. You need to manufacture, construct the actual pencil. I could go get a free pencil from the bank, break it in half, and they're going to give me another one. Like they're just, it's like salt. They're just everywhere. But it requires this insanely complex social organization to make something as simple as a pencil. And just like ordering people to make pencils is not the thing that gets pencils made.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we throw that social organization at building cities or putting people on the moon, and it's quite incredible. Yeah, there's no insects colony has yet, they've yet to put anybody on the moon or any ants on the moon.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, other animals just don't have the level of sophistication that our social organization does. Like this is not just a brain size issue. It goes back to the Stone Age. Good luck hunting a mammoth all by yourself.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. Okay. So this is all cool and interesting, but hey, how does this apply to the alpha beta dynamic that we're talking about?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Human beings evolved for cooperation. It's not that we're not competitive at all. Clearly, human beings are competitive. We're both competitive and cooperative at the same time. But simple dominance is not enough to get much done. In fact, if you study human history, you will quickly see that the less kind of naked gross dominance we have, the greater our accomplishments become.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Huh, really? I don't know. Is, is that the case?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely and demonstrably. The Egyptians never put anybody on the moon.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Oh, well.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  There's the technological issue in play here, but like in the classical world, technology doesn't advance very much. Because like, how do you get things done? You beat somebody until they do it.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Ah, I see what you mean.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  That's it. That's how you get, I mean, we talked about this on the slavery episode. For almost all of human history, how you get things done is you grab somebody and beat them until they do it.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  And like, you take the technological advancements that you and I take very much for granted. And they've almost all happened over the last 300 years when we decided that trading was a better way of getting things done than just like beating somebody until they complied.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  But we still have leaders. We still have hierarchies.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  No, that's absolutely true. But leadership among humans is context-dependent. We talked about this earlier with the social hierarchy. Like you can be a leader in some situations and not in others. I'm not the head of marketing at my job, but I know a lot about the market we sell to. So people defer to my experience on that topic. That's context-dependent leadership.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  I think in a lot of companies too, the title doesn't mean as much as what you're getting done or what you bring to the table. And that's, that's just the workplace. But it kind of undercuts the idea of an alpha needing to take and maintain control at all times.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, a boss who can't step aside and let people do their job is a bad boss.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Right. And when you transfer that from the world of business to the world of dating, some people probably find aggression and rude dominance attractive, sure. But they're probably not really the kind of partners most people would want to have long-term. So is there any evolutionary reason that brutish dominance isn't to our advantage? Do we know anything about this?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  The main theory right now is that... Human beings self domesticated. We domesticated ourselves because we have three things that give us a massive advantage. Number one, massive brains come with massive cognitive power. Number two, we have endurance, physical endurance. Like cheetahs can run really fast for like 30 seconds. To the best of my knowledge, there is not another species that can run a marathon. And if there is, they are not the norm. They are also a massive outlier. You know, cheetahs don't run for 26 miles. Third, we have just next level amounts of of social cohesion. So you just cannot get that.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  If some guy is constantly flipping out and challenging people to a fight every time someone challenges his dominance. So the theory is that we bred this aggression out of ourselves.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've actually heard about this, I think, on this show. The theory is that we got together in bands and if there were aggressive, violent people, they basically got murdered, right? So that they wouldn't mess with the success of the tribe. Because if you've got somebody who's like, oh, I didn't help hunt, but I'm gonna go kill the guy who is coming back with the hunt and take it for myself. It's like, no, no, no, we're gonna kill you for doing that because now you're killing off the hunters and you're stealing from people. You're basically a net drain on the entire tribe. So yes, we needed violent people who were gonna murder and hunt food and share it. But if you were gonna murder and hunt food and not share it, well, you're dead weight. We're just gonna kill you. So we kind of like took the people who couldn't behave or like who would fire off impulsively and hurt someone else.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  And now you've got to carry that guy to the next hunter gatherer location because some idiot broke his leg. Those people didn't last long. They were kind of bred out of society and that's one theory and it makes sense. But it also kind of says the opposite of what the whole alpha wolf theory says. It's basically the best cooperators are the ones that made it, not the ones that were all rogue and maverick and did things on their own. Those people were mercilessly culled.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it says a lot. I mean, there's a period in British history that's called the Bloody Code era in 18th century and early 19th century England. And there's like 220 crimes that carry the death penalty. Stealing sheep, pickpocketing, cutting down a young tree, being in the company of gypsies for more than a month. There's like all these things that they'll just put you to death for. And after 200 years of killing people for minor transgressions, England becomes a very polite place, possibly because all of the rabble rousers, dare I say, alpha wolves, were prevented from breeding.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Dang, yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  So it's a small and limited example of how you can breed aggression out of human beings.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Interesting, yeah. But I've also heard of, there's a theory called survival of the friendliest, which I kind of touched on this earlier, but it's the idea that humans are obligate cooperators in the same sense that other species are obligate carnivores, right? Your cat can't be vegan, no matter how much you want it to be, it cannot. You can't live without cooperating with other people. It's like your example about the pencil. There's like the homesteaders and stuff, right? But it's like, when it comes down to it, you're still, well, that's interesting. You've got solar panels. Did you make those, you know?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  No, right, yeah, no. I mean, your cat can be vegan, but not for very long.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Right, just for a few days. Yeah, a few days only.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And no, I mean, the whole sort of thing, like, the point isn't to beat up on them, like, cool.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  It's a cool thing, but I don't think anybody but the most insane of them would think that they're completely self sufficient and never needed anything from outside. I mean, they have a hot water heater in there somewhere, probably.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  They have roads that deliver goods.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Right, yes.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  You know, they have an international supply chain.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Are there people who can live completely alone without help from other people? Sure, I think most of them can only do this in a parasitic way by being predatory upon people who are being cooperative, which I'm not applying to the homesteaders. But yes, I can go live out on my own and steal from people who are actually connected to the social fabric, I guess. The vast overwhelming majority of human beings cannot survive in a war of all against all and without cooperation.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Nothing says I'm secure and thriving like constantly scanning the room to make sure nobody outranks you in an imaginary wolf prison yard. That's not confidence, that's anxiety with slightly better branding. We'll be right back.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. All the deals, discounts and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  When I ran the dating company, we definitely leaned more into being friendly and personable than we did on being a jerk and telling guys, you know, women are gonna be attracted to you if you're a jerk. Like that, that was just only true in limited circumstances and you didn't get the kind of women that you wanted.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a social cost to being a jerk.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Again, to go back to this like hunter gatherer society thing, which for whatever reason people take to be man's natural state, which that's

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Whatever that means.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Whether or not that's for the whole other episodes.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Does natural state mean anything, et cetera? An alpha who hoards all the food is not an asset. He is a liability. And if he then rubs people's noses in the fact that he's got all the food to show dominance, he is not going to survive for very long because people will kill him. We actually have a really good example of this from recent human history about just how bad incompetently asserting dominance can be. During the Vietnam War, there was a practice called fragging.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  I think I remember this from the movie Platoon.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Basically, if your squad leader was a dick, you'd kill him with a grenade. Is that a real thing or is that something is just from Vietnam movies?

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Oh, it's very real. In fact, as many as 1,000 American military commanders were targeted for fragging by their own soldiers between 1969 and 1972 alone. There were at least 86 deaths, over 700 injuries. The number is actually probably a lot higher because you didn't have to chuck a grenade under his bunk. You could just be like, oh, lieutenant, I need you to go look over there. And over there is like where Viet Cong snipers have been clapping people. Or go over there and we shoot you from far away and blame it on the Viet Cong. You know, like, it's not difficult to kill somebody on your own side in a time of war if you want to get rid of them.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  And grunts would do this to their commanding officers. It's like, we don't get rid of this guy, he's gonna get us all killed. You know, it's not just that he's, he's rubbing people the wrong way. He's a direct threat to the survival of these men. And you can kind of like extrapolate how this would play out in a number of scenarios. People who constantly assert dominance are bad news. People are less likely to help them out because they don't like them.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Which is a big deal if you're an obligate cooperative.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  It's a big deal if you, you know, which, take it out of war. It's like if you work in an office, I'm just not gonna help you because you're kind of a jerk. So this is a good pivot to the notion of reverse dominance hierarchy. There are societies, existing human societies such as the, and I'm gonna do my level best to pronounce this correctly, Khong San and the Inuit, where if one person gets too big for their britches, they will take him down a peg because he's gotten too powerful. They're not chucking hand grenades at the guy, they're just ridiculing him, shaming him, ostracizing him. But for many periods of human history, having a sort of domineering alpha mindset could be a death sentence.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  To tie the reverse dominance idea back to the theory of hunter gatherers ostracism, that was a super big deal in these societies where resources were limited, right? So if you're eating last because no one likes you or you can't sleep in the cold, sleep in the cold, that's not a good situation to be in.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Right, there's also the concept of dominance versus prestige. This is a concept taken from the work of Joseph Henrich. Prestige is a lot more accurate way of describing how humans get to the top in the modern world than anything we have from the animal kingdom. So take the alpha wolf model where fear and intimidation are used to take status and force followers to submit. That just makes people want to avoid leaders wherever possible.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Like if you have some super short tempered boss, you're gonna run whenever they're around and if you make a mistake, you're gonna hide it until it becomes a bigger issue because you don't want to deal with that person.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Compare the concept of dominance and leadership with the idea of prestige. Leadership is established on the basis of merit, shared knowledge. The status is granted by others to the leader freely because of his merit. Followers mimic his behavior because the leader mostly leads by example and people want to be near the leader so that they can pick up on his merit.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, they want mentorship time. They're not ducking under their desk every time that the leader walks through.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like super briefly, there's a concept in parenting of like authoritative parenting versus authoritarian parenting. And authoritarian parenting is like constantly bossing against the crowd. There's all these draconian rules with severe consequences. And authoritative is just like, there's rules, there's expectations, there's consequences for failing to follow rules or live up to expectations. But the parent is guiding the child and leading by example and showing the child how to behave. And it's the difference between a child who like cowers and fears their parent and a child who admires their parent and looks up to them and doesn't want to disappoint them.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Which child do you think is going to grow up to be, forget well behaved, better adjusted?

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I do see that difference in parents. One thing I think that's a big takeaway is that the alpha people are confusing or maybe even conflating prestige and dominance. Like they think good posture and talking over people is going to earn them prestige when in reality, people recognize unearned dominance, if you will, pretty quickly. I mean, it's very fleeting.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  And you know, there's totally situations where like a guy just needs to come in, bark orders, and people just need to do what he says. These are crises and emergencies, right? Like if your house is burning down and you will accept the leadership, you know, like if your house is burning down and a firefighter comes in and yells at you to get out of the house, you are going to immediately do what he says. But this is so situational and this is not how human societies elevate their leaders, especially not in the modern world.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  No, if that same guy yells at me to get out of his way in line at Starbucks, I'm just going to ignore him and possibly have them call the police if he keeps going, right?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  It's situational. It's situational.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Exactly. No, that makes perfect sense. I think even if we go back in time, the person with the most leadership qualities is going to be the one with the highest social intelligence a lot of the time because in caveman times, two guys getting into a fight, again, as we spoke about before, this is a huge liability, right? Now you've got to take care of injured people, like no, thank you.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is especially true in Ice Age cultures during the population bottleneck. This is in Northern Europe during the last glacial maximum.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  I see.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Which is exactly what it sounds like.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  Okay. So yeah, if your tribe is 17 guys and two of them can't go hunting the next day because they're all banged up, it's just a massive liability. It's the difference between catching the mammoth and not catching the mammoth. So the guy who prevents two of them from getting into a fight and helps them work together again is the one who naturally rises to the top as the leader. You see this in the military, too. Generals are not just the, and top officers, they're not just the toughest guys, right? In the military, that's not how any of this works.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Nope. Toughest guys top out about Colonel.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  There's elite training schools that you go to. But my understanding, somebody who's never been in the military, that some of these you go into and it's like lieutenant colonel, that's your ceiling. It's not like who can withstand the most pain and deal out the most death. That is not who gets leadership. It's who's good at getting people to cooperate. In human evolution, the leader is often, even in ancient history and prehistoric times, is often the person with the best social intelligence, who can manage people.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  In its best form, leadership is a form of service. Alpha managers are super toxic, not just for the people who deal with them, but for the whole organization, because they're using dominance tactics in a prestige and competence world.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  So super specific example, there are a lot of historians who argue that D-Day was such a disaster for the Germans because nobody wanted to wake Hitler up in the middle of the night and tell him that the Allied forces were landing in Normandy.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what you get when you rely only on dominance. Make it smaller. There's a little IT problem at work. You don't want to tell your boss about it, but it's going to be a gigantic one if you leave it for 48 hours. You know, you're not going to get blamed for not telling him, so who cares?

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  You don't have to work in two days. It's somebody else's problem then, right?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, somebody else's problem and you're not going to hear about it and you know your boss is going to have a meltdown if you tell him there's a problem. You don't want to be the guy who gets shot by the messenger. You don't want to be the messenger who gets shot by the alpha boss.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  And if you flip it around, the manager who's easy to talk to and is more interested in problem solving than assigning blame and looking like the tough guy, he's going to know about small problems before they become big ones and therefore the whole organization becomes more successful.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and these are like all theoretical, but people can apply these to like, everybody's seen something like this.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Work or in their family life or whatever. In turn, what all of this means is that prestige oriented groups, to get back to this constant prestige versus dominance, prestige oriented groups are generally going to outcompete dominance oriented ones. You know, a little bit of evolutionary psychology is a very dangerous thing. A bunch of stuff is hardcoded into our brains for millions of years of evolution, but the human experience is just not as simplistic as you have to club a guy over the head before he clubs you and that's how you get to be king.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's really it, man. I think human beings are animals, but we're animals who are so very different from other animals. There's no science backing up any of the alpha stuff, quite the opposite. Anthropology, social biology, and evolutionary psychology mostly tell us that the whole alpha structure is just a dead end. It's a seductive story because it promises us that the world is simple. It's the simple tiered pyramid where you can just hack your way to the top. But as we've seen, that pyramid is built on a foundation of both bad biology and mostly deep seated insecurity. The bottom line is that when you see somebody who's obsessed with alpha status, you are not looking at a leader. You're looking at somebody who is fundamentally afraid of the messiness of real human connection.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Humans didn't conquer the planet by being bullies. We did it by being the most sophisticated collaborators in history. So if we were bullies, we did it together. If somebody's trying to sell you an alpha mindset, they're usually betting on your own status anxiety to make a buck. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us separate the apex predators from the internet pretenders. And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Actually, send it to alpha mail at jordanharbinger.com. It'll still reach me, obviously. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tadisidlouskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's been fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything, like Dan Bilzerian, before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well being. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  What if we're not just close to building Matrix level simulations? We may already be inside one. You're about to hear a preview of our episode with Rizwan Verk on clues we're living in a rendered world.

• 1:09:41Speaker 06

  The simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of as the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all the physical reality is actually part of a virtual world. The simulation hypothesis, the subtitle is, an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and eastern mystics agree we're in a video game. There have been a number of physicists who aren't looking at the world as information now. So there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. And instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be, whatever computational substrate is being used to run the simulation

• 1:10:25Speaker 06

  would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. I use the metaphor of video games, that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game, because that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley. Now, there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film The Matrix, because you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but turns out he was actually in a virtual world. But now AI is moving so fast that I think we'll get to that point much more quickly and certainly within the next 50 years, 100 years at the max.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  For the full conversation that will make you question every assumption you've ever held, check out episode 1239 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Rizwan Verk.

• 1:11:25Speaker 07

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