Why Is Everyone Acting Like A Victim? - Rob Henderson (4K)

Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force Veteran. Humans are an odd species. We know truths on our own but choose to lie in groups. Our thinking gets hijacked by social norms, paths of least resistance, lies and half truths. It's a mess out there, but thankfully there's ideas we can discover to help us navigate. Expect to learn what the friendship paradox is, how we can fix the mate deprivation problem, what green flags most women look for in men, the relationship between social media and hostility, why people reason more wisely about others’ problems rather than their own, what Rob's thoughts are on the most recent wave of the body positivity movement and much more… Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on the best Colostrum from ARMRA at https://tryarmra.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom #men #masculinity #victimhood - 00:00 Do All Your Friends Have More Friends Than You? 07:15 The Internet Isn’t the Real World 15:43 Digging Deeper Into Young Male Syndrome 32:12 The Privilege of the Ideal Upbringing 40:20 How People Reacted to The Two-Parent Privilege 47:25 Chads Are More Misogynistic than Incels 54:20 How Social Cues Change with Higher Status 1:01:02 Is Listening to Joe Rogan a Turn-Off? 1:07:15 The Cause of Women’s Declining Happiness 1:16:39 The Rule of Surplus Mate Value 1:25:20 Rob’s New Book 1:27:24 Why Female Ovulation is Concealed 1:32:37 We Make Wiser Decisions For Others than For Ourselves 1:40:53 Why Men Can’t Talk Face to Face 1:48:13 Where to Find Rob - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rob Henderson?

  What is the friendship paradox? The friendship paradox is this phenomenon in which your friends have more friends than you do. Your sex partners have more sex partners than you do. Your Twitter followers have more, or X, your X followers have more followers than you do. And it's a paradox because it seemingly doesn't make sense. How can your friends have more friends than you on average? And many, many of your listeners especially, I think, will be familiar with this sort of Pareto phenomenon that a disproportionate number of awards go to a small number of people. A disproportionate amount of money goes to a small percentage of people as well. But this also works in the social realm.

• 0:42Rob Henderson?

  So the example that I gave in a recent Substack post is to imagine you have, keep it easy, you have 10 friends. And three of your friends are kind of like you, you know, just kind of an average person with an average social life. You have three friends who are shut-ins, who maybe don't go out that much. But you have another friend who is a super connector and has 100 or 150, or maybe even 1,000 friends. I mean, some people who are just sort of very social, super extroverted in that 99th percentile. And so when you average this across all 10 of your friends, they may have, you know, on average, 20 plus friends while you have 10. And so it's sort of, at first glance, it doesn't make sense. But then, you know, when you sort of break it down mathematically, it does. And this is why there's that paradox.

• 1:25Rob Henderson?

  And then same with sex partners, you know, maybe you've had five or 10 or 20 sex partners. But one of those people may have had 100 plus. And so when you average that out, your sex partners have had more sex partners than you. And then same with Twitter followers, right? Like, you know, maybe one of your followers has, you know, a million plus while you have 10,000 or something. Average that out, and that still shakes out in the same way. The example that I also gave in that essay is, you know, when Warren Buffett walks into an auditorium, everyone becomes a millionaire on average. And it's the same kind of idea here.

• 1:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's the implication psychologically for people with that? Is that a felt sense at all? Because obviously it's kind of antitypical to what you would expect. This is all a surprise to everyone to find out that if Warren Buffett's in the local postcode, that they've just become an honorary millionaire for the most, due to mathematics.

• 2:16Rob Henderson?

  Hmm.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  Is there some sort of sense by which people are conscious of this sort of thing? I know that Gad Saad in his most recent book talks about the best sort of people to be friends with the people who are having a little bit less sex than you.

• 2:29Rob Henderson?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. I remember that from his book. Well, yeah, so I think that we fall prey to, so in the classic psychology book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman coined this term, what you see is all there is. And we pay attention to what's visible, what's right in front of us, the known knowns. But we don't necessarily pay much attention to the known unknowns, the things that aren't in our immediate line of vision. And so with the friendship paradox, we will pay a lot of attention to the most extroverted people. They're very visible. They enjoy often being very visible. Extroverted people tend to be that way. They update their social media pages a lot. They're more likely to text you and then be responsive to your texts and more likely to meet up with you

• 3:12Rob Henderson?

  and then tell you about their adventures hiking in the Himalayas or how they just got back from this country or just got done speaking at this event and so forth. And so you're listening to this person and for many people, they may hear this and think like, wow, everyone out there is doing all of these great things. And, you know, here I am sort of working my nine to five or just, you know, sort of living a normal, ordinary life. And many people will report feeling sort of diminished socially. And this is an interesting phenomenon here because there's a ton of research in social psychology on this idea called the better than average effect. And the better than average effect or the illusory superiority effect, as it's sometimes called, essentially that we tend to believe ourselves to be better than others.

• 3:55Rob Henderson?

  There's this sort of self enhancement that goes on. So when you ask people, are you, you know, are you smarter than average? Are you a better driver than average?

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  It's like 75% of people believe that they're a better than average driver.

• 4:07Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, there's research in academia too. You know, you ask students, are you a better student than average? Ask professors, are you a better teacher than average? And yeah, exactly. 70, 80 plus percent say they're better than the average person in all these domains.

• 4:23Rob Henderson?

  And yet, there's fascinating work on, related to the friendship paradox, that we tend to have a sort of uncharacteristically dismal view of our social lives. So there've been a couple of studies now in which they ask participants, you know, do you go to more or fewer parties than others? Do you see your family more or less than others? Do you have more or fewer friends than others? Do you eat alone more or less than others? And generally speaking, people think that they are sort of less socially connected, they have fewer friends, they eat alone more, they go to fewer parties. This is an inversion of the illusory superiority complex. Right. We sort of have, at least in the social realm, a lesser-than-average effect, rather than a better-than-average effect. And this is related to that friendship paradox

• 5:04Rob Henderson?

  and that that's sort of what you see is all there is. The way the researchers explain this is that, again, when you think to yourself, well, do I go to more or fewer parties than others? Well, you know, when I see other people at parties, and I'm not at a party, and I see my family, you know, X amount of times a year, but then when I pull up social media and I see people taking selfies with their dad or whatever, or their mom, or their sister, and so you see all of these, and then you start to think, well, you know, I'm not with my family right now when I saw that photo. And so you sort of easily sort of fall prey to this idea that, well, everyone out there is taking these selfies and having a good time and going home, and you're not. And you're not paying attention to the people who aren't with their families. You know, one of the lines I use in that post sort

• 5:47Rob Henderson?

  of summarizing this research is, no one is taking photos and posting them online when they're eating lunch alone, or when they're binge-watching a TV show, or when they're just having an off day and just need some time to decompress and be alone for a while. They're not, you know, uploading a video or taking photos of themselves. We tend to take photos when we're being social, when we're being extroverted. Peak experiences. Exactly. The peak experiences. And I know you've talked about this before, about, what is it, comparing, you know, your blooper reel to everyone else's highlight reel. Correct. Something like that. And so we do that, and then we tend to think, like, everyone else is sort of at the party without you. There's a nice line in one of the papers that I cite, the researchers, you know, sort of painting a picture of what this might

• 6:28Rob Henderson?

  look like, of a student in a college dorm room, maybe doing their homework, being a diligent student, and they hear a party going on upstairs. And you hear all the lights and all the music and everything, and it sounds like everyone's up there. And you're thinking, wow, I'm the only one here doing my homework. But you're not, you know, of course, you're not hearing all of the other students in that dorm room as well.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Doing their homework.

• 6:48Rob Henderson?

  Doing their homework, not making any noise, right? So this is what you see is all there is, or what you hear is all there is. And so that person is sitting there thinking, everyone is at the party without me. Well, this isn't the case. It's just you happen to be hearing the people who are at the party, not the people who aren't.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  So there's a, this is very much due to the visibility of particular types of social experiences that is now facilitated by being online.

• 7:11Rob Henderson?

  Right, right.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  I learned about the one percent rule.

• 7:14Rob Henderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  From you.

• 7:15Rob Henderson?

  Okay.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Go through that. I feel like that's related here.

• 7:18Rob Henderson?

  This is the one percent rule on the internet. And it's, you know, it's, this isn't empirical research, but this is just a sort of shorthand way of understanding how, how social media works, how the internet works now. And the basic idea is that online, one percent of internet users are creators. They're the ones out there producing the videos and the podcasts and the written content and all the things that we're sort of consuming when we pull up on our phones. And then nine percent of internet users are, are commenters. They're engaging with the content in some way. Maybe they're reposting or retweeting or liking or commenting. They're the ones who sort of want to engage with the content in some way.

• 7:55Rob Henderson?

  Maybe they're not original content producers, but they do like to sort of make themselves visible by, by, by being commenters and so on. And then 90% of people are just lurkers, the people that we aren't seeing, the people who are just sort of passively scrolling their phones or, you know, looking at your, looking at your stuff, listening to it, reading it, but they're not, they're not engaging with it in the same way. And I think a lot of, you know, so I'm a, I'm a sub stacker, you're a podcaster. I think a lot of content producers.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  One percent, baby.

• 8:24Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, exactly. The one percent. But we pay a lot of attention to that nine percent. And, and of course, because of the negativity bias, you know, you may have a hundred nice comments and then there's three people who are like, wow, this sucks.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Rob Henderson?

  And you're like, you know, you'll beat yourself up that day like, man, why do these people not like this? But you're assigning less weight to those 97 comments that were positive, but you're also not thinking about the 90% of people who didn't comment at all.

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 8:50Rob Henderson?

  And based on that breakdown, right, if 97 comments are positive and three are negative, you can probably estimate that that's probably roughly how those other 90%.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  970.

• 8:59Rob Henderson?

  Exactly.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Silent, nice comments.

• 9:01Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I saw this, yeah, I read this essay recently about a TV show in which the executives were threatening to cancel it because they had received, and this was, I think, in the 1980s, it was a sitcom, and the executives were threatening to cancel it because they received some angry emails, or not, angry snail mail from the viewers, so this was the 80s. And the showrunners were, basically, they drew this analogy of like, you know, this is like going to a stadium of 100,000 people and two of them write a nasty letter to you. Right, that's the equivalent, right, because we have X number of million viewers and you got a couple of hundred mean letters.

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Rob Henderson?

  Whereas the other million plus people didn't write anything, or maybe they're writing positive things. And so I think, yeah, that 1% rule can sort of help us to contextualize sort of all of the social phenomena that are going on online.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  I remember the general election a few years ago where the Tory party won by the biggest landslide in a very long time and the red wall fell and all the rest of this stuff.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  And I remember seeing Stormzy or Bugsy Malone and that year's winner of Love Island and someone else, like Daniel Radcliffe or someone tweeting about how, you know, we need to make sure that we get the Labour Party in and I will be voting Labour. And you see all of these replies and I was like, oh my God, look at this, it's gonna be a total landslide. You know, Bugsy Malone has tweeted about it.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  And then it was as far in the opposite direction as it's ever been in 50 years.

• 10:43Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:43Chris Williamson?

  It's like, you know, the map is not the terrain.

• 10:45Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Chris Williamson?

  And the internet is not the real world. And here's another thing as well, you know, you've got the 1%, 9%, 90%, but I think it's only around about.

• 10:57Chris Williamson?

  10 to 15% of people in the UK have a Twitter account.

• 11:02Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, right.

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  Right. So not only you're not thinking about all of the silent lurkers.

• 11:06Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  You're not thinking about all of the people who aren't on Twitter that don't even know that this is going on.

• 11:09Rob Henderson?

  Looking at it.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  Did you hear the episode I did with Sam Harris?

• 11:13Rob Henderson?

  I listened to clips of it, yeah.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So he comes up with this idea called digital leprosy. This is just awesome by him. So he says, um, because he's no longer online. He's not exposed to the potential cancellations and online furor is that he's a part of. So kind of in the same way as a leper may be losing limbs and digits and be unaware that it's happening.

• 11:38Rob Henderson?

  Right.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  He may be being canceled right now, but because he's not online, he's unaware of the cancellation that's occurring or the whatever. Like he's, Sam Harris is trending again. And he's like, well, I'm not on Twitter. And he's told his friends, look, don't send me screenshots of what people are saying about me on the internet. So he is able to just, you know, blissfully move through his existence. He called it digital leprosy, which I just thought was like such a lovely idea.

• 12:03Rob Henderson?

  Iconic term.

• 12:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Rob Henderson?

  That's good. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess in that case, it would depend on what your, what your aims are, I could imagine. So someone like Sam, you know, he's, he's an intellectual, he has his podcast and he probably, it wouldn't help him to see all of the nasty comments. But if you're.

• 12:18Chris Williamson?

  I think it may be a little bit more than like two out of 100,000 or whatever at the moment as well. He's kind of popular to hate on the internet.

• 12:26Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's a good point. But, but I suppose, well, for other people, if you're, well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind would be like a politician. You would want to know what's going on, how people are reacting to you. Yeah, exactly. Sort of keep your, keep your finger on the pulse of your constituents. There is a, there's a, one of the, one of the chapters in, in Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power where, and the book is about the attainment of power, of course. So he writes that in those kinds of situations, you actually want to be more plugged in to the social scene. It actually isn't wise to withdraw because you'll end up losing power, you'll end up losing influence.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. He also has a rule about how aloofness is alluring though. Which I think is interesting and is definitely true. I was with Dan Bilzerian last weekend and was talking to him and he's kind of been, he's sort of absconded from the permanently online Instagram. You know, like tits and. Psychedelic's existence that people he kind of got famous for. And I was asking him about that and he said, well, you know, like he's kind of going through a bit of a metamorphosis at the moment, I think, in in many regards. Which was very interesting to see. And I sort of dug into his psychology a lot over dinner.

• 13:37Chris Williamson?

  But also, he was like, from a tactical perspective, just not being chronically online sucks in speculation, which is actually good for brand. In some ways, and people are like, what is happening? And I think you remember, this may have been different for you, given your slightly more chaotic than my upbringing, but each each summer. When you would leave school and come back, you'd always think, oh, here's my opportunity to reinvent myself. Like, I'm going to be the sporty kid, or I'm going to be the cool kid. Or maybe that was just me. But I kind of get the sense that if you're going through a a period of rapid change or rapid reflection or whatever.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of um receding, perhaps, from being so publicly about. This is why monk mode, I think, for guys has become such an important meme, right? That it's this retreat to focus on the three I's introspection, isolation, and like inner work or something else. And um the reason that it's so good, I think, is that it allows people to like, go away, do the chrysalis thing, and then try and emerge as something new. Whilst not trying to bring along all of the existing, like I'm trying to update one step at a time, all of the different changes. It's like, no, no, no, I get to go away and then come back with a relatively blank slate or more blank than it was. And um, yeah, I think there's, I think there's something there.

• 15:00Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, it it sort of depends on what your aims are, and especially when you're when you're young and you're still sort of uh. Trying to stabilize your identity and figure out who you are, that having those moments of withdrawal and reflection can can be very helpful. Yeah, and you know, it's funny, those those the the laws of power, a lot of them do contradict each other in green openly. I've seen him, he acknowledges this, but it's it's it's based on context, it's based on sort of where you are in the life cycle and how. How power is acquired in your sort of local environment and so on. So basically, you know, this isn't like a one size fits all sort of checklist. It's more of a sort of holistic.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  At all times, in all places. It's in specific times at specific places.

• 15:42Rob Henderson?

  Right, right.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've been looking at a lot of young male syndrome recently. I think this is going to be one of the most important memes of the coming decade. And both of us have been talking about it, at least in part for maybe like three or four years, I think, online. But it's picking up steam. What have you learned digging deeper into the modern conception of young male syndrome and how it's sort of manifested? What have you learned?

• 16:06Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so yeah, the young male syndrome, this constellation of traits that are associated with a certain period of time in young men's lives, typically the teens in the early twenties, heightened levels of risk-taking, reduced self-control and inhibition. If you look at rates of criminality, for example, they tend to peak at around age nineteen. And this is true regardless of culture and society, sort of all across the world, in non-industrialized hunter-gatherer communities, and all the way up to sort of wealthy and rich societies, that it's the young men. If you look at who's committing the crime in that society, it's inevitably going to be sort of men aged, say, roughly fifteen to maybe twenty-four. Even things like, like, like, so this is just in the

• 16:49Rob Henderson?

  US context, likelihood of being hospitalized for punching walls. There was a nice graph I saw, and I posted it online, of the, you know, the sort of the distribution of young or men, just men in general, being hospitalized. And it's all concentrated. Again, fifteen to twenty-four, it's like, you know, ten-year-olds aren't being hospitalized for punching walls, and neither are sixty-year-olds. It's all that sort of young male group. And I'll admit, I've punched walls before.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Did you see Alexander Date Psych posted a quote tweeted an image this morning that was a mother asking how she could help her son. And it was just a photo of his bedroom wall. And this bedroom wall was just hole after hole after hole. And then the door had a hole in it. And it's like, I mean, it looked like a sufficiently flimsy American house that the hospitalization risk was quite low, but that the decorating risk might be quite high.

• 17:37Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's in that case. I mean, that, yeah, that that sounds like it would require some some serious.

• 17:42Chris Williamson?

  Intervention.

• 17:43Rob Henderson?

  Serious, yeah, intervention, some serious treatment. What I find interesting is, especially for young men, that's sort of that this is, I think, an expression of the young male syndrome, is when a young man experiences some sort of usually like a minor injury and then their immediate response is to lash out. So like I saw this with some of my friends where, you know, like maybe I know something simple, like like they accidentally poke themselves in the hand or something and then their immediate response is to punch something. So they hurt themselves and they're pissed and then they punch something. And and I think that this is basically a misfiring of this kind of evolutionary impulse of if if an intentional agent hurts you, it actually is advantageous to to fight back.

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  And your response.

• 18:24Rob Henderson?

  Right, exactly. So so if, I don't know, like the cactus plant stabs me, you know, maybe punching the wall is unwise, but if you do something to upset me and then I immediately respond physically, that can actually be an adaptive strategy. So I think like that is, you know, this is this is speculation, but this is what I think is going on there because otherwise it doesn't make sense, right? You're injured, let me injure my, let me break my hand now. Right? It makes no sense. So.

• 18:47Rob Henderson?

  So, yeah, so the young male syndrome, yeah, you sort of in reduced inhibition, increased risk taking, criminality, risky driving. And if you look at who who's arrested for drinking and driving, who gets into the most auto accidents, who is the most likely to be killed simply crossing the street. So so I think it's, yeah, men are twice as likely to be killed simply crossing the street as women. So there are so many sort of different different factors here. And there was actually one on the on the seatbelt point, there was an interesting study which found that men are less likely to wear seatbelts when there's when they're accompanied by a male passenger relative to when they're sitting by themselves or when they're sitting with a with a with a woman.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that's saying?

• 19:28Rob Henderson?

  I think that is, uh, one possibility here is, uh, is essentially the attempt to signal toughness. That, you know, you, of course, like, there's a lot of interesting work here and a lot of discussion and, and debate around this. Because of course, men want to signal to women and we want to signal that we're, you know, strong and can acquire resources and all those kinds of, sort of bedrock, uh, uh, findings in evolutionary psychology. But then we also want to impress other men too, you know, you want to show that you would be, you know, in, in the ancestral context, you want to show that you would be good in a, in a violent conflict against a rival coalition. Or if you're, uh, uh, big game hunting, you want to show that you're strong. And so I think the way that it might manifest itself in the modern age is,

• 20:13Rob Henderson?

  I don't need to wear a seatbelt, you know, I'm going to show my friends and my mates, like, I don't need to wear this.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  That two-ton rocket ship going towards me hasn't got shit.

• 20:19Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, we both became fans of that David Putt study.

• 20:23Rob Henderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  That was able to predict the, uh, number of sexual partners based on not female ratings of attractiveness of male faces, but other male ratings of toughness of the same male faces.

• 20:36Rob Henderson?

  Super cool study.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  That the women's attractiveness rating had basically zero predictive power, but that the man's toughness rating had like quite a good bit of predictive power.

• 20:45Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  Was it you that taught me or was it Dunbar that taught me about, um, men's street crossing in the presence or without the presence of women?

• 20:53Rob Henderson?

  Hmm. That was probably Dunbar.

• 20:55Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So this, this, this study is so much fun. So they got, um, crossing the street is really interesting because it's a relatively discreet variable. You have distance of vehicle from street crossing. And then you have, uh, like, the presence or lack of presence of a female. And men, the difference in how close the vehicles would get.

• 21:19Rob Henderson?

  Sure.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  And men were prepared to cross the street in the presence of a woman was like a third of what it was when there was no women around. Like, look at all of this, you know, surplus fitness that I have. I'm going to cross the street while this car is only 15 yards away from me or whatever.

• 21:34Rob Henderson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, the young male syndrome is. Yeah, I think it sort of depends on the context, but yeah, it is most likely to sort of be expressed when you're trying to impress women or when you're trying to impress men again. So I don't think, yeah, it would, I don't think it would necessarily impress young women, you know, that you're driving without a seatbelt, right? And I think maybe some of the guys understand that, but with, with, with, it wouldn't, it's not so much that you're impressing your friend when you put, when you don't wear the seatbelt. It's that if you do, you might be mocked or made fun of or that what's, you know, are, you know, what are you wearing a seatbelt for that kind of, especially like 19 year old guys, you know, that kind of thing. And so it's not so much trying to look tough, but just not to look weak.

• 22:14Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. Okay. So, but young male syndrome specifically seems to be worsened amongst sexless, dispossessed, rambunctious young guys, coalitioning together in small groups to go and set shit on fire and push over granny.

• 22:32Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we, yeah, yeah, that's a, it's, you know, when, when a young man is isolated sort of by himself, there's only so much damage he can do, but it's sort of the, the risk becomes exponentially greater sort of as that, as, as he sort of partners with other men and they collaborate and start to plan. And so, yeah, this is a, I mean, so, so you had this, this interesting term about the, the sedation.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  Male sedation hypothesis. Yeah, it's in a, it's in a study at the moment with Buss and William, they're testing it.

• 23:01Rob Henderson?

  Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about, cause I remember when you first told me about that, something that had come to mind is, um, you know, I had friends, I mean, this is, you know, sort of back in the, I don't know if people still play this game, World of Warcraft, but I remember I had a couple of friends who like lost years of their life to this game and they were like, and, and they, the way that they spoke, you know, as, you know, when you told me about this, I thought like, yeah, these young guys, you know, this is 18, 19, this was years ago, but they would say like, all right, you know, I gotta, I gotta hop off the phone, I'm going on a raid. You know, I got a raid scheduled, you know, like, well, you don't have a raid scheduled. You have, you know, seven hours of sitting in your laptop chair.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  Computer game scheduled.

• 23:36Rob Henderson?

  Exactly. But in his mind, he's like, I'm going with my other internet friends and we're gonna go, you know, raid this castle or whatever they do in this game. And I could see that, yeah, this is a sort of an expression of that or an example of that of, you know, just young guys who ordinarily might be out causing trouble and instead they're just online. And that's how they do it. You know, I saw this funny, this funny post on Twitter. And this guy, you know, he said something about, you know, back in the day, if you were like a hyper curious young man, you know, you'd basically start like trying to document the like visible differences between the mushrooms right around your house. And today what they do is like, try to collect all the rings in a Sonic game, you know, like speedrun a Sonic game.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:17Rob Henderson?

  And so, yeah, I think the, the virtual world is sucking in a lot of, a lot of angry and aggressive men, but we may also be losing like that sort of the pattern matching, sort of systematizing them too.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah. Well, it's just, it's managed to hijack an awful lot of the status seeking, coalitional, curiosity, adventurous behavior that young men, you know, throughout all of history has been kind of acclaimed for. You know, you look at, um, my favorite example of the solution for young male syndrome was Portugal in the 1800s.

• 24:51Rob Henderson?

  What did they do there?

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  They, the first son was allowed to, there was a, an imbalance in the sex ratio.

• 24:57Rob Henderson?

  Okay.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  And they knew that if son one married, because he was the oldest son, but son two, three and four perhaps, uh, weren't permitted to marry and there weren't enough women to marry, that this was gonna cause problems. So they just put them on galleon ships and said, go, you know, pioneer the new world. Away you go. So they just, they literally exported the young male problem by putting the men on ships and giving them this sense of adventure, you know, channeling their aggression outward against either a new world or, or political enemies or whatever it was. And, uh, yeah, I think that there is still a question. Vincent came on the show, mutual friend came on and he's been researching and he says, you know, every single time that we have high rates of sexlessness and blah, blah, blah,

• 25:42Chris Williamson?

  we have an increase in associated violence. And it's just at the moment, and someone may tell me that I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be there in the data, right? We have incel, black pill ideology. There was this period, maybe about two years ago where, uh, they were even donated. Claimed to be a domestic terror threat, I think, incels. They were a terrorist group, right?

• 26:05Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 26:08Chris Williamson?

  Where's the like, show me the violence, show me the uptick in the violence. Now, that's not to say there hasn't been an uptick in murders and stuff, but I think a lot of that can be attributed to the

• 26:16Rob Henderson?

  Something else.

• 26:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly, like the receding of police from inner cities.

• 26:19Rob Henderson?

  Right. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if the, so on its face, it seems silly, right? That there's incels, this is a domestic terror threat, but I wonder if they were just sort of, if they were actually familiar with the research on the young male syndrome and the sort of historical, I mean, maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  I think you are.

• 26:35Rob Henderson?

  But they, essentially, they were sort of anticipating the possibility and they're just sort of getting out ahead of it and saying, well, you have a lot of young, sexless, angry young men. And historically, that's been the, you know, a group that's been dangerous, so let's just designate that label on them. But I think, yeah, in the modern age, with, with technology, with video games, with porn, with scrolling phones, I mean, yeah, I've seen sort of research on what young men, like jobless young men do.

• 27:04Rob Henderson?

  And most of the time, they're scrolling their phones, playing computer games, watching porn, overeating junk food.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  You see Nicholas Eberstadt's work on that?

• 27:12Rob Henderson?

  I haven't. Is this, this is related to the men without

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  It's like men not working or whatever it is, whatever his book is called, just awesome. But yeah, it's like some insane percentage of men are, not in education, employment or training, but also are prime working age, like, I think it's 22 to 50. And it's this unseen, because unemployment rates are relatively low in America, but hiding in that data is a very unusual cohort of men who are electing to be unemployed. They're living on social welfare in one form or another, or, and or still living at home, spending an insane amount of hours per year playing video games. And while they're playing video games, 50% of that time is either on prescription medication or whilst taking weed.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  So you just have a very, it's like, okay, here's the big data. Okay. Well, what's that? Like, how's this constituted? Who are the component people that make up this data? And you go, hang on a second, like, what's this chunk? It's like, I think it's like eight million or 14 million men, prime working age men, electing to retreat from the employment market. Now, we put this episode up and a lot of guys that are maybe a part of this cohort are tangential to this cohort commented and, you know, the sentiment very strongly was, why should I contribute to a world which doesn't value me? Why am I going to work to get a five foot three, 210 pound woman who's already gone through

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  two marriages and got four kids, you know, just very despondent, evidently guys who don't see much future for themselves. And it was, it was really eye opening because largely the comments on modern wisdom tend to be pretty personal growthy, agentic, highly sovereign, upwardly mobile, et cetera. But this episode like blasted out of the algorithm into the wider internet, or maybe it got shared on some forums or whatever. And it was very, very interesting and I got to see a, you know, I got a window into, into this world and it didn't seem, these guys didn't seem very happy. They were maybe comfortable in their nihilism, but I don't think that they were particularly fulfilled.

• 29:30Rob Henderson?

  I mean, they may be comfortable when they're young, but there's, I, you know, I'd be curious whether sort of as, as we move forward, you know, decade or two decades later, I mean, it's one thing to be a neat when you're 19 or 23, but when you're 43 or 51 and you're single, maybe you've never had a girlfriend and you've spent most of the last, you know, several decades just playing video games and, and, and.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  Wallowing in collective misery on forums and stuff.

• 30:00Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I think there's. I mean, now in the modern age, we have so much freedom. You don't have to work anymore. You don't have, I mean, if you don't want to, if you live in a modern, rich society, um, you can collect sort of extended unemployment, or maybe live with your parents, or um, find ways to, I mean, you know, very few people now, very few young men are sort of literally starving or having to steal food to survive. And uh, and now if you want to do something difficult, you have to make the choice to do it rather than um, sort of uh, be be pressured sort of by by external factors. I saw this, I saw this, this TikTok video. I'm not on TikTok, but people sometimes send these to me. I saw this one, this, this, uh, this young guy, I think he was in the army, US Army,

• 30:41Rob Henderson?

  and he was just sort of walking through his barracks and uh, and he was asking these, these other, these other young, young guys, these young recruits, uh, you know, if you could talk to your recruiter right now, what would you say? And uh, you know, these, you know, these other young guys were like, I tell him to go fuck himself, or like, God, this sucks, or why did I do this? So on and so forth. And I'm watching this, I'm like, I know exactly what he's talking about, because I was there. I was, you know, I, I, I'd enlisted.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  You were Air Force, right?

• 31:05Rob Henderson?

  I was in the Air Force. And I remember, especially like the first two years are just awful. Like, once you get a bit of rank and a bit of responsibility, like, once you go through the training.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  Stop eating shit.

• 31:12Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, exactly. Then you're like, you know, then you're okay. But the first couple of years really suck. And so I knew, like, these were all very young guys. They were still sleeping in bunk beds. And I would have said the same thing, you know, and God, that TikTok didn't exist back then. But I'm watching this, and I'm thinking like, these guys don't understand, right? In, in five years from now, they're gonna be glad that they ate shit for however many years, and they did this, they went through this experience. And, and I think a lot of young, a lot of young guys won't even go that far, like, they won't even enlist, which is fine. You know, everyone has their own sort of, make your own choices. But in that moment, I understood that like, this sucks, why did I do this? Like, this is awful. And then you go through it, and you can sort of, in hindsight, go back and say, like, it was, it was a character-forming experience. It was good for me. Like, I was an idiot when I was nineteen,

• 31:55Rob Henderson?

  and I probably needed a bit of that structure, a bit of that discipline. I needed to have my ass kicked a little bit. And uh, and I think, yeah, like, you don't, but, and, and those guys volunteered to do that, right? You have to choose to do, undergo that experience.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  So you've already pre-selected for someone who's got the agency to get moving.

• 32:11Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I had this idea, I had this idea about um, The reason that victimhood culture has become so widespread is because the human system's demand for challenges has outstripped our modern reality's ability to deliver that, right? That we want, we just want something to push up against. And if we don't have real challenge, we will create imagined challenge for ourselves. And yeah, you know, rampant fragility and this kind of like soy externalizing locus of control culture that's going on at the moment. It's so interesting, though, that you've got this barbell strategy where, you know, 50% or maybe more percent of the people are, young men are happy to

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  lean into the, I've learned a bit of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology and taken the black pill in many regards because I'm a genetic dead end. But at the same time, you have the ascendancy of David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Alex Hormozi, you know, these guys who are all about doing the hard thing, overcoming the suck, like no one's coming to save you, it's only you that's going to get you, et cetera, et cetera. So you have this increasing sort of divergence between the two. And I think, you know, assortative mating, which is people of a kind mating with people of their kind, right? So Silicon

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  Valley, 135 IQ, people with, you know, professional tennis level skills, having kids together. So you kind of have this genetic splitting apart, which also is going to have a psychological, like, heritable psychological echo, I suppose. So the conscientious people will have more conscientious kids and so on and so forth. And then Melissa Carney's new book, The Two-Parent Privilege, is talking about how those college-educated people who've got that predisposition, again, get an even bigger advantage. So I think that the Matthew effect of this, right, to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken, is just going to continue to spread and spread and spread.

• 34:11Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, that's, that's a distinct possibility. And it seems like in the short term, that is what's occurring. I mean, I even read this, oh, man, which book was this? It was a speculative hypothesis about why there's a, like, sort of pronounced levels of kids being born on the spectrum in Silicon Valley. And it's because...

• 34:32Rob Henderson?

  It's not necessarily because the engineers and the programmers themselves are autistic, but they may be sort of, sort of somewhere on the spectrum and then they partner with someone who also shares some of those genes.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Like a co-morbidity.

• 34:41Rob Henderson?

  Exactly. And then they have, well, they have children and then, and then the child is sort of at a, at a heightened risk of, of getting autism. But I think generally speaking, I mean, I don't know if this is, if this is, this could be interpreted as a white pill or a black pill, but I just read this book, The Sun Also Rises by Gregory Clark, who's an economic historian, very well versed in the behavioral genetics as well. And essentially that book, he documents in various societies essentially how social status sort of loosely defined as sort of wealth and influence and so on is very sticky across generations. And essentially what he finds, you know, he, he tracks surnames and finds that.

• 35:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck. I got intro'd to this guy from Matt at Aporia. He's gonna come on.

• 35:23Rob Henderson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. He's great. Yeah.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:26Rob Henderson?

  And yeah, I spoke with, I spoke with Matt about, about Gregory Clark's work as well. And essentially, you know, he, he tracked status not through, so, you know, there's, there's, there's this fear, especially in the modern era of assortative mating, that more and more women are going, getting educated and men are, are dating educated women and they're having children who are educated and so on. But what essentially he finds is that when you, when you look at data from decades past, centuries past before women were sort of educationally and economically emancipated, when they were still sort of stuck in these rigid gender roles, if you pair, or if you look at the status of, of a given man interested in a woman, and then look at the status of the woman's father, there's like a very tight correlation there. So even though the woman herself isn't highly

• 36:07Rob Henderson?

  educated or isn't working in a prestigious occupation, often she comes from a family in which her father was. And so one of Clark's claims, generally speaking in this book, is that people are very good at sort of finding people who are similar to themselves, even if you don't have the sort of external visible badges of, of class or education or credential.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  How does that manifest if it's not the external badges?

• 36:32Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, well. Basically, people, people clustered together in the same clubs, family, friends, organizations.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  Right, right, right.

• 36:38Rob Henderson?

  Um, so, so maybe, uh, you know, maybe the man didn't meet the woman in the workplace the way that they would now. But maybe, um, you know, his boss's friend says, hey, I have a daughter who you might get along with. And even though she isn't working, she's, you know, the daughter of the friend of the boss.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  It's like a social instantiation of the class disposition.

• 36:58Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is, uh, yeah, this is interesting to me. I mean, so, so Scott Alexander did a, a long piece on, on assortative mating, I think, earlier this year. And he talked about how there's surprisingly little, um, uh, sort of, sort of matching across, uh, sort of educational and class lines on the things that you would expect on things like, like attractiveness, for example. I think there's this, especially in the sort of like the red pill, um, online spaces of, you know, men don't really care about education. They really care about, you know, how attractive a woman is. Um, and yet, uh, at least the, the data that I saw sort of curated by, by Scott Alexander is that, you know, it's very rare for a highly educated man to actually date the, you know, the, the, the college dropout who, uh,

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  The barista at Starbucks.

• 37:45Rob Henderson?

  Exactly. Yeah. Or, or if they do date the barista at Starbucks, she has a college degree. And I think a mistake that we might make, you know, I'm sort of channeling Gregory Clark here is that like, oh, he knew that she had a college degree and that's why he was open to dating her. Whereas I think Clark would say, actually, they, they, they had a, they had some conversations together. And through that, he could sort of tell that they were maybe roughly in the same class, the same space, her sort of, uh, uh, levels of curiosity and intellect and all the sort of psychological attributes. Uh, they, they matched along those lines. So, you know, even though she maybe works, uh, uh, somewhere that doesn't require a college degree, she has one. And she's the kind of person who would get a college degree.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Pre-disposed, yeah.

• 38:22Rob Henderson?

  And then they, they sort of match along those lines. The sort of mating still holds. I think, yeah, there's, there's so, so again, like, is this a white pill or a black pill? It could be a black pill because, you know, status is sticking. It almost doesn't matter what you do. But then on the other hand, it's a white pill in that like, you know, even though we have all of these educational and occupational trends in the modern world, it doesn't actually, it may not actually change the sort of underlying social and romantic dynamics that have sort of been with us for centuries.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Stable, yeah, than we might think.

• 38:47Rob Henderson?

  I think there, yeah, I think it might be.

• 38:49Chris Williamson?

  Look at you as like the poster child for, what was it?

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  Uh, kids that grow up in, is it single parent homes are like 10 times more likely to go to college than adopted kids? What was the stat?

• 39:03Rob Henderson?

  So, so the stat is it was on foster kids specifically. So I did, you know, some of this research as I was writing, writing my book that'll be out next year. And then, um, I, I wrote this essay that's, uh, that was in the Free Press a couple of years ago, which basically, um, so in the U S, kids who are, uh, raised in families in the bottom, uh, socioeconomic quintile, so the bottom 20%, essentially kids raised in poor families, uh, roughly 11% of them graduate from college, which is pretty low because the, the, the average rate in the U S is around 35%. So it's pretty low, 11% versus 35%. But the, um, the number, uh, or the percentage of, of foster kids in the U S who graduate from college is 3%.

• 39:45Rob Henderson?

  And so in other words, a kid raised in a poor family is four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid. And so I used, you know, this is sort of essentially to me, sort of evidence that instability and, uh, sort of disorderly environment is, uh, is obvious, is perhaps something that we should be paying more attention to. It's obviously has an effect, but it may be something that, that deserves more attention than we're giving it relative to sort of the material factors.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  Did you dig into Melissa Carney's new one? Have you read that yet?

• 40:14Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I just read it. I finished it a couple of weeks ago. Excellent book, excellent book. Yeah, the two parent privilege.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so I watched, she's been on the show. Anyone that hasn't seen that can go back and listen to the episode I did with Melissa. She was great, but I mean, she is, you know, as straight down the line, policy wonk, DC pilled as you're going to get, right? Like she's like the female Richard Reeves, you know? Like she's just there to do, help do policy and do the DC thing. And, and she's a statistician, demographer lady, right? She's, I, I tried to push her on the episode and was like, so why is this occurring? Like, give me the implications here. Infer for me what you think is the underlying mechanism. And she was very reticent about trying to work out what's going on from a psychological perspective.

• 40:59Chris Williamson?

  And I thought, wow, that's really, uh, that's a good signal that she's not prepared to get out over what she sees is her domain of expertise.

• 41:07Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  I have this, this is what I do. And she did it a little bit, but she didn't go too far. And I was like, that's a really good signal. But what I saw on the internet before her book came out. Tons and tons and tons of articles saying, you know, this is like hard right Christian talking points being legitimated by cherry pick data. You haven't read the data. The book's not out yet. Yeah, yeah. And what I saw was her as someone, as far as I could see, that if you were to do political compass on her, would probably be like just left of center. And again, very not prepared to say things that she didn't understand and didn't have data to back up and so on and so forth. But on the internet, the only people that weren't lambasting her

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  as being some sort of, you know, like bigot, judgmental asshole that's telling people that come from single parent households that they shouldn't. And what? So you're saying that women should stay in an abusive relationship instead of, you know, allowing themselves and their child to have a good stepparent and blah, blah, blah. Like just all straw men shit house arguments. And I saw the exact path that many, many people are taking, which is causing them to bend toward the right. Because you go, hang in a second. I've put this piece of work out, which is relatively dispassionate, which is actually, it's the two parent privilege. This is a championing of how we can fix underprivileged kids, which is fundamentally a left wing phenomenon, right? It's class. We're trying to fix the

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  class problem. The only people that were accepting of her or weren't like accusing her of doing awful things were the people that were center right and further right. Yeah. So what you see is how somebody that has a left leaning predisposition, perhaps or just a centrist disposition, gets nudged by their treatment toward the right. You go, okay, well, fuck you guys. Yeah. Like, if you're not going to accept me, I'll happily like, and she, I wish that I'd noticed this before I spoke to her, because I'd have loved to have asked her about this.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, like, that's not, I can completely see how. The tribalism of both sides, and I'm sure that there's an equivalent dynamic on the right pushing people toward the left, I don't see. But the tribalism of the left and the purity spiral of the left and its rapidity at judging people to see bigotry where there may not be some.

• 43:30Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Chris Williamson?

  I can absolutely see how this is causing more and more people to lean in a different direction.

• 43:38Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I saw, I saw a lot of that, the sort of the ad hominem online and a lot of the insults and derogatory comments that were directed at her. And I thought, yeah, they were completely unfair. The book, I mean, the other thing is like the book is very dense, but it's also, you can read it in an afternoon. I mean, she presents the data in a beautiful way, a very sort of straightforward way that any sort of educated and curious person can understand. And it seems like, yeah, most people just didn't even bother flipping through it and having a look because she caveats multiple times that this isn't, this isn't a book about sort of judging people or about values. It really is about sort of looking just sort of from a dispassionate point of view, what did the data say about outcomes for kids and various sort of family arrangements? So,

• 44:23Rob Henderson?

  yeah, that was so strange. I mean, yeah, and she does stick close to the data. I think generally speaking, that's a good idea when you're making arguments that are unpopular, that you should stick very closely to the data and not go too far ahead of your skis there just because you're going to be held to a higher standard when you say something that's, that's unpopular. There's that sort of can versus must distinction, sort of a classic finding in psychology about how when people are predisposed to support a certain point of view, essentially they implicitly ask themselves, can I, and then they come across a piece of information that supports that point of view, they implicitly ask themselves, can I believe it? And generally speaking, the answer will be yes, I can believe that. And when they encounter something that is at odds with that point of view, they implicitly

• 45:08Rob Henderson?

  ask themselves, must I believe it? And if they find a reason, if there are any, any flaws in that argument or any, any reason whatsoever why they can discount it, then they say, oh, I don't have to.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't that, doesn't this show up? Was it you that taught me about how this shows up in Twitter arguments where when people are wanting, somebody puts a point on the internet that goes against something that they believe. And then they go on Google and search for like, why such and such a thing is true. And it's like, you're not asking for, is this thing true? You're looking for arguments that support your side.

• 45:41Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  So you're looking for a good barrister rather than an honest judge.

• 45:45Rob Henderson?

  Yes, right, right, right. Yeah, you want, you want, well, you're looking for arguments, of course, that's sort of, the classic confirmation bias idea, you're looking for information, you're monitoring, and then you're sort of overlooking anything that that might make you feel uncomfortable or that might call your beliefs into question. There was a really cool study, I want to say this was in the 90s, sort of along this vein. I mean, it's, it's, it's a neat example because it's sort of disconnected from politics. Like, I think anyone can appreciate this, which is essentially what these researchers did was they brought these participants into a lab. And they told these participants, you know, they showed them this jar, and it was really just water, but they told them it was this sort of chemical solution. And if you drop a strip of water into it, so in one condition, they told the participants, you drop this strip of water into it,

• 46:31Rob Henderson?

  and it, and it doesn't change color, it just sort of remains the same white or whatever it was. Then that means that you don't have this sort of rare, unique congenital disease. You know, you dip it in, leave it in for a few seconds, pull it out, stays the same, you're good to go. And so they brought some participants in and, you know, basically they found, you know, participants dip it in, didn't change color, they'd walk right out. In another condition, they told the participants, you know, you dip the strip into the piece of paper, and if it changes color, then that means you're good to go. If it stays the same, that means you may potentially have this congenital illness. And in this case, what did the participants do? They dipped the strip into the water, waited, dipped it back in, waited, took another strip, dipped it back in, waited. And then they started to get nervous. And essentially, they were going for that confirmation because what, what did they want to believe? They wanted to believe that they were healthy.

• 47:15Rob Henderson?

  And when they did not receive information that supported that, then they started to sort of shuffle through and, and, and, and try to, try to find ways to confirm that, that, that belief.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  We both came across the same research that shows that chads rather than incels are the extreme. Misogynists. Dude, I love this.

• 47:32Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I saw William retweet that one.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  Of course he does. Of course he does. Anything that's pro incel. Yeah. Men with higher levels of sex partners are more likely to hold extreme misogynist views, which contradicts the incel narrative. Extreme misogyny correlates with status seeking and dominance orientation, both of which also correlate with high levels of sex partners.

• 47:57Rob Henderson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I thought that was an absolutely fascinating study and it it links up very nicely. You know, I, when I was in grad school, I read David Buss's evolutionary psychology textbook cover to cover. And one of the things he points out there is that there's not much, if any, research supporting what's referred to as the mate deprivation hypothesis. You know, this idea. So the mate deprivation hypothesis is essentially that, you know, young men who are who are deprived of mates are more likely to develop these sort of misogynistic attitudes. They're more likely to coerce women into sex or more likely to commit sexual assault. And essentially, all the research that I've seen indicates almost the reverse of

• 48:39Rob Henderson?

  that, including the study here, which points in the same direction, which is that the men who are the most likely to commit sexual coercion or assault are also men who are the most likely to to have consensual sex partners as well.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 48:52Rob Henderson?

  And yeah, all of these things sort of come together and correlate with status seeking, dominance orientation, extraversion.

• 49:00Rob Henderson?

  Probably I would imagine narcissism as well, and maybe some of the other dark triad traits of being being particularly attractive to women. And you know, this is now, you know, I'm more comfortable speculating than.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  Get it out there. You're not even part of the academy anymore. Say what you want.

• 49:16Rob Henderson?

  Well, you know, I have a foot in, but but I'm comfortable sort of making this. This is just a hypothesis, but I think that. Most, many, maybe most, women would be pretty reluctant to actually be sort of alone in, like, be in a situation in which they could potentially be alone and assaulted by the sort of prototypical incel, like, you know, the sort of lonely, unattractive, isolated, angry male. Warning flags. Right, exactly, like, they would know in advance, like, I don't need to be alone with this guy, there's something off about him. Again, the sort of prototypical, I'm not saying all incels are like that, but that's sort of archetypal image of an incel. Whereas, probably, just, just sort of, you know, I think this is pretty intuitive, that

• 50:01Rob Henderson?

  women would be more willing to sort of be alone and potentially be in a risky situation with a man who is attractive, right? And so, just through the sort of differentiating levels, or differing levels of likelihood of being alone, and exposure alone, that assault would be more likely to happen in one context than the other. And so I think that may partially explain some of those differences, that if women were alone with actual incels, as much as they're alone with, you know, status-seeking, dominance-oriented, or orientated extroverts, that maybe those, the numbers would be different. But, but generally speaking, I think that finding is suggestive. And then in my own personal life, I mean, when I think about the guys who- All the men that you spend your time alone with. Well, that I spend, yeah, yeah, and that I feel, yeah.

• 50:46Rob Henderson?

  But the guys that I know who are particularly, you know, at least numerically successful, I know people already would success me in this context, but just have had a lot of sex partners, they do tend to be a little bit more glib, a little bit less preoccupied with, well, what does she think of me, or, you know, or, or, or, or sort of, what, traditional or conventional, or, or hold sort of benevolent sexist attitudes, right? It's usually, usually a little bit more, you know, I guess on the positive, I mean, you're jokey or playful, but then on the other, it can sort of dip into, you know, the example that I, so, so I posted one of these studies online and sort of commented that-

• 51:25Rob Henderson?

  You know, I think this is easy to understand when you reverse the genders. You know, if you think about like, like a woman who spends a lot of time attracting men. I'm thinking about someone like a stripper, for example. Like, I'm sure they have extremely cynical attitudes about men, right? Whereas women, like, if you think about a woman who doesn't really, you know, maybe isn't very attractive or hasn't had a boyfriend or hasn't had that much experience around men, they probably have a little bit more sort of, maybe slightly more optimistic views, or at least less cynical views.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so Sadiya Khan, psychology lady, she does like couples counselling and stuff. She gave me this really interesting answer to the question, are hot girls more crazy? Right? So the classic, the classic question, like, finally Aristotle's got an answer. And she said that the experience that hot girls have of most men

• 52:25Chris Williamson?

  jades their view of all men. Because the men that she spends her time around are unbelievably pliable. They cheat on their partners with her. They try to shower her with gifts. They say things that they think she wants to hear. They're duplicitous. So the reality distortion field of the beautiful woman causes all of the men or many of the male interactions on average to group together, to clump together in a way which doesn't show men in a particularly good light.

• 52:55Rob Henderson?

  Right, yeah.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  How fucking cool is that as an idea?

• 52:59Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  Like, the reality distortion field of the hot girl or something?

• 53:03Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, that is, it reminds me of this, this, this interview I watched years ago of Chris Rock. And he said, basically being, well, I don't know if he said something along the lines of being an attractive woman is like being a celebrity, or being a celebrity is like being an attractive woman. Where, once you reach a certain level of fame or notoriety or recognition that People react to you in a predictable way, in a way that that is often obnoxious, or you know, try to give you free things, or try to try to court you, or you know, they're looking for something from you. And yeah, that is where you're only seeing a sort of, you're only seeing sort of one version of that person, whereas everyone else might see another version.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  And pre-selecting for the only sorts of people who are prepared to go up to the hot girl in the first place.

• 53:43Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  I saw this with strippers, and I would imagine it may be the same with OnlyFans girls as well. A lot of the strippers that I was friends with, throughout my twenties, when I was working in nightlife, had very, very jaded views of men.

• 53:54Rob Henderson?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  Because they were seeing the stag on his bachelor party out in Newcastle, you know, trying to get a blowjob off one of the strippers that are in there.

• 54:05Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Right? Like, men at their worst, selected for at their worst, around the women that are able to, you know, cajole, or coerce, or encourage them to do a thing that's a whatever. And oh, that's how all men are. There's this really great segment on Rogan's show years and years ago, Tim, one of Tim Dillon's first appearances. And Joe's, I think Tim's talking about how the LA comedy scene is very ruthless, and Joe has just moved to Austin and is saying, ah, I don't know what you're talking about. Fantastic over there. Every time that I go into a room, everyone treats me really great. And Tim cuts in, he goes, hold on one second. Like, you do know that you are Joe Rogan.

• 54:46Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  Right? Like, do you, like, you bend reality, or rather, there's this sphere that follows you, where, like, who the fuck's gonna treat you like shit?

• 54:54Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Chris Williamson?

  Right? Like, the biggest podcaster in the world's just walked in. And I spoke to Tucker Maxx about this over dinner a couple of months ago. It's so interesting. And I was talking about how I've noticed certain groups of people treating me differently over the last couple of years. His status and renown and wealth and whatever has changed. And there is a reason now to be nice, perhaps. Or maybe there's not a reason to be nice, they don't even know it, but something happens, they've heard that's the guy with the podcast or whatever. So you just notice that, like, the average stranger interaction has adjusted in some way. Maybe I'm Just super charismatic or whatever. I've changed my confidence. That totally could be it too.

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  But my more like highly skeptical cynical view of it is like people want something or whatever. Anyway. And I was talking to Tucker about this and he said, to become rich or famous as a man is to accept being a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. He said that women become objectified as soon as they become, you know, like womanly. You know, you're 13 years old and the boy's in the class and I'll start to see that you've got boobs and then you become like 17, 18 and the whole world objectifies you for a while because your value is immediate and upfront. Whereas, you know, this is a red pill takeaway, I guess, that like women are born with value, men have to create it. And it is, unless you're Brad Pitt or, you know, somebody who is super good looking and has that upfront.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  You have to achieve some degree of self-generated value in order for people to treat you and to objectify you, right? Like no one's, no one's just objectifying the random dude in the street. But if a random dude in the street gets out of a Bugatti, maybe they are, right? Oh, what's he got? Oh, dude, let me tell you, let me ask you about blah, blah. Yeah, to become a resource to be extracted from or an object to be desired. That was very interesting.

• 56:48Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, there's a sort of a positive feedback loop that happens there too. I think with the Bugatti example. So you have this prestigious material good and then you step out of it and then suddenly, you know, you have increased social capital because people are drawn to you. But I think this happens even, even within just the realm of social capital itself. I mean, you know, I'll just use this, this personal example of, you know, I was, I was walking through an airport with some friends. And, and then, yeah, I was recognized a couple of different times, but, you know, so I, I was with friends, but then they had friends who didn't really know. Like they, oh, they kind of know that I write and stuff, but they don't really. And then I got recognized and suddenly they became more interested in talking to me. Like, oh, what do you, yeah, what exactly? Tell me more about it. And so I think it's like, you know, you get recognized once and then other people become interested. And then suddenly you can't, you know.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Did I ever tell you that story when I walked down Broadway with Peterson in Nashville?

• 57:37Rob Henderson?

  I don't think so.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  So we went for dinner, it was about two years ago from now and I went for dinner with him. And there was that famous video of him dancing with his wife and Ben Shapiro was there in Nashville. It was a few years ago.

• 57:46Rob Henderson?

  Oh, I did see, I saw.

• 57:47Chris Williamson?

  It was the night after that. So he loved this bar. I mean, we're going to go back to this bar and he didn't have any of his security with him. So it was me, Michaela. Michaela's now husband and Jordan and Michaela's husband's like six foot four.

• 58:01Rob Henderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  Kind of dude. So like, he was like, he's like a tall guy or whatever. But no security and Jordan starts walking down Broadway, like the street in Nashville, right? It's where Kid Rock's bar is and Whiskey Row and all this stuff. And they, on a weekend, close it off. I think they close it off at both ends. Maybe they don't. But anyway, it's stacked.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  Someone notices Jordan Peterson and then goes over to like, get a photo with him and shake his hand and hello, how are you? And then other people notice that other people are standing, talking to someone. So a queue forms to speak to Jordan Peterson. He's accumulating a tail of humans as he walked like a fucking comet, right? Walking down Nashville.

• 58:41Rob Henderson?

  Human comet.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, honestly. And I, I remember thinking like, oh my God, we were the young delegates dinner drinks thing last night at Ark here in London. And sure enough, there was a queue of people, like this is a conference of people selected for a very like particular set of interests. And then we went to 150 person drinks thing, which is selected from within that group. The people that were invited to go to this thing. And even within that selected group of a selected group, the Peterson comet tail thing existed again. So, um, yeah, that's almost like a, like a physical manifestation of what you're talking about that's going on socially.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  Right? People see, they don't see a physical queue, but they see a, like a social queue, right? Like a CUE and they go, oh, okay, right.

• 59:35Rob Henderson?

  And I would, I would be curious, I mean, maybe in the, the example of the 150 or smaller group of, of selected people. They probably are familiar with Jordan, it sounds like, but in the example of him walking down, is it Broadway, the street in Nashville? When that tale formed, what I would be curious to know is probably many of those people, maybe most of them did know who Jordan was. But what I'm curious about are the people who didn't know who he was, but just saw the tale.

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  Let's get a.

• 59:56Rob Henderson?

  Like everyone's following that guy. I guess I'll get him a line. Like, I guess he's famous. Let's go check this out. And now they're following, you know, so what percentage of those people were, were familiar with him too? You know, there's these, there are these classic studies from, from Milgram. So most people know Milgram through the, um, the obedience studies of, you know, the, uh, he essentially. Tricked people into shocking and believing that they were injuring someone or perhaps killing them. But there were these other studies that Milgram did and other social psychologists, you know, this sort of classic work back in the day of, you know, he'd just have people on like a Manhattan street and just have like four or five research assistants look up at the sky, just like me, you and a couple of other people just look up at the sky like this. And then gradually what happened is people would be walking by and they'd see, you know, four people looking at something and they'd stop and look up too. Like, what

• 1:00:40Rob Henderson?

  are they looking at? And then, and then there's suddenly this massive crowd would form of like, suddenly you have 40 people looking up at the sky and no one knows what they're looking at, right? Everyone's trying to figure out what those original four people, right? So there's that sort of imitative, you know, quality that, you know, which is, which is, you know, it's adaptive, but it's also, you know, can kind of misfire in these funny situations. Yeah.

• 1:01:00Chris Williamson?

  Being moderate is a green flag. You see this new one about extremist views? William shared the graph of it.

• 1:01:08Rob Henderson?

  I haven't seen this one, but.

• 1:01:09Chris Williamson?

  Let me get your take on this. This is awesome. Researchers polled over a thousand registered US voters aged 18 to 34. A majority of both men and women consider far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. Seventy-six percent of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a MAGA Republican to be a major turnoff. Sixty-four percent of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. So that was a high number of women, 76% for MAGA, 64% of men for communist. 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag.

• 1:01:49Rob Henderson?

  About modern wisdom.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Thirty-five, yeah, that wasn't on there. Thirty-five percent of men. Forty-one percent of men said the same for a woman being into astrology.

• 1:01:58Rob Henderson?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Twenty percent of women. Thirty-three percent of men said red flag for they say Black Lives Matter.

• 1:02:06Rob Henderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  Fourteen percent of women. Fifty-three percent of women for they refuse to see the Barbie movie.

• 1:02:11Rob Henderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Fifty-three percent of women, 58% of women for they say there are only two genders. So more women concerned about the two genders thing than the Barbie movie. Interesting what that is. But yeah, just.

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  Overall, it seems like far rightism, far leftism, being moderate is a green flag, basically, like having. But that being said, how is saying that there are only two genders like an extreme position? How like, I would have thought that that would have been the moderate position, right? Like, I guess it depends. Yeah, but the bar stool's been turned upside down. But yeah, overall, when it comes to dating, it seems like a majority of both men and women consider far rightism and far leftism to be red flags in a potential partner.

• 1:02:56Rob Henderson?

  What age group is this? Are these young?

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  Eighteen to thirty four.

• 1:02:59Rob Henderson?

  Eighteen to thirty. Okay, yeah, that makes a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, yeah, I mean, you've probably seen some of these data too about sort of the political divergence of young men and young women, which is really, I mean, it's really interesting because a lot of the the press, media will concentrate on, you know, the supposed right wing radicalization of young men, when actually, most of the sort of political psychology survey data indicates the reverse, where men are, young men are slightly turning to the right. There's sort of a slight turn, whereas for young women, there's a sharp, like a sharp rise in young women identifying as left or far left. So it's actually the women who are being sort of radicalized or turning to a more extreme direction.

• 1:03:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but we don't mind about that one. We don't need to care about that.

• 1:03:42Rob Henderson?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, well, so I think like in terms of like violence and so forth, right? There's no, there's no young female syndrome. Or if there is one, it would be, it would manifest itself differently.

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  The female longhouse.

• 1:03:53Rob Henderson?

  The longhouse. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the sort of the classic threats of terrorism and so forth. But, but, yeah, that's, that's interesting. I mean, so, so some of those, like, yeah, the two genders one, that's interesting. Fifty eight percent of women. I found like the, yeah, there's, there's a sort of a neat reversal there of like MAGA Republicans versus communists, where most men are seemingly okay with dating a MAGA identifying woman, but women are more okay with dating a communist identifying man.

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  But here's the thing, right? That it's not apples for apples, right? Like, thirty five percent of men said that a woman listening to Joe Rogan is a red flag. But A man listening to Joe Rogan and a woman listening to Joe Rogan is not the same thing.

• 1:04:39Rob Henderson?

  That's true too.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:04:41Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  Like, there was one about owning a gun. That like some quite high percentage of women said that owning a gun was a red flag, right? In America.

• 1:04:49Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  But a woman owning a gun is not the same as a man owning a gun. Right?

• 1:04:55Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  And the same for listening to Joe Rogan and so on and so forth. So it's, it makes for very interesting reading, but I actually think that like if a woman does listen to Joe Rogan, there'll be some non-zero number of men in that, like, that's a, like, that's a boys' show. Like, why, why, like, oh, maybe she's super disagreeable or maybe she's like gonna try and arm wrestle me in bed or something like.

• 1:05:17Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have, I've heard this, um, you know, just, just speaking with young guys that, uh, you know, they are to some extent sort of bothered by these gender differences in politics and how like more and more young women are sort of identifying in, in a more sort of sharp left-wing direction. But then they're, they also sort of lament that, you know, a lot of young, because you have to be, you know, to some degree psychologically peculiar if you're a young woman who is a sort of right-wing person or are, or identifying openly as a conservative, because you're sort of going against the grain, right? Like, you are an outlier in that sense. And that often sort of coincides with other things that young men are kind of annoyed by. So it's like, it's.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  The astrology one, dude. Forty-one percent of men said that a woman being into astrology is a red.

• 1:06:03Rob Henderson?

  That one was confusing to me. I think like, that's fine. You know, that's like a very, to me, like a feminine way of thinking, you know? Like, I think it's, you know, I.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember who, what, who was it that said, was it, they said, uh, um, the big five is astrology for men.

• 1:06:19Rob Henderson?

  I've heard that for evolutionary psychology too.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  Evolutionary psychology is astrology for men.

• 1:06:23Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, but I mean, well, that's fine, but they're like, you know, a lot of, well, a lot of men, but, but. At least in my experience, more women are interested in the MBTI, the Myers-Briggs. And that is, I mean, it's, you know, it's not, it's not completely astrology, but it's more like astrology than the big five.

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  I had, yeah, it is. I had Spencer Greenberg on the show. Do you know Spencer? Real interesting dude.

• 1:06:43Rob Henderson?

  I think I've seen some of his.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  I got intro to him from William McCaskill, a super interesting guy, mathematician, but just does science. Like, I don't know what he's funded by, maybe himself, but, and he did a huge breakdown of like predictive power of Myers-Briggs versus big five versus other stuff versus other stuff. And Myers-Briggs is like, I think it's like 18% accurate, basically on actual predisposition of things. But, yeah, it is, that's astrology for astrology, I think. What was that study about higher female status and gender equality being associated with the lower female relative to male happiness and relationship satisfaction and stuff like that?

• 1:07:24Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, this was a study I came across, I think it was published in 2015, which essentially found that, that higher levels of wealth and socio-political equality among the genders is associated with lower levels of relative happiness for women compared to men. And the researchers speculate this may have something to do with increasing levels of employment, the pressure to obtain higher levels of education among women in particular, and that this is actually sort of dampening women's levels of happiness. And to me, this, this connects with another, and this one is, you know, this, this classic finding of the paradox of declining female happiness,

• 1:08:05Rob Henderson?

  which is essentially that since the 1970s, women's happiness relative to men's has declined. So to be clear, everyone's, so, so relative to the 1970s, everyone is less happy today compared to the 1970s. But in the 1970s, men were actually happier, no, no, no, sorry, women were happier than men.

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Rob Henderson?

  So women had higher rates of happiness relative to men in the 1970s, and people generally were happier overall. Fast forward to the present and things have reversed. Men are now happier than women, although overall people report being less happy. Um, and so, yeah, that that study that I pointed out, that was an interesting one to me because, yeah, I mean, the the message that a lot of young people receive today is what are the keys to happiness? You know, you, you, you work hard, you go, you get a, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a high paying job. You sort of follow that cookie cutter track. And what is the the purpose of all of this? And it's, you know, I suppose, you know, most people say, well, they want to be happy. And so you go through the education and employment route.

• 1:09:06Rob Henderson?

  Maybe you go to law school after college, you sort of get the credentials, you go through the whatever the fellowships and all these different programs. And at the end of the tunnel, you're hoping that you'll be happy. And actually, uh, for both men and women, doesn't seem to be working, but for women in particular, because they've had the sharpest decline, right? Because remember, they were happier and now they're, you know, so, so they're

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  Crust over.

• 1:09:23Rob Henderson?

  Exactly. And and so their, uh, diminishing happiness has actually been sort of more pronounced relative to men. The men have, the men's happiness being sort of higher than women's is is interesting as well. And I wonder if that is almost sort of, uh, the the reversal in some ways. Of course, they're less happy overall, but why would they be happier than women? And I wonder if that's to some degree because they don't feel as much pressure anymore. The sort of, um, you know, back in the day, men were sort of pressured more to be earners and providers and so on. And there was a sort of a economic pressure associated with that. And now that you don't really have to work, I mean, we're seeing young men are sort of dropping out of college. They're dropping out of higher education and employment.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:10:03Rob Henderson?

  And at least in the short term, depending on how the survey questions are presented, if it's just, you know, how do you feel generally or how do you feel today or what have you? I think a lot of you guys might be like, I don't, I don't, I didn't have to go to class.

• 1:10:12Chris Williamson?

  Also, given the fact that men were previously less happy and relative to then are now less happy. Also, it's just that really the the change, the big change here is the women, right? That's flipped.

• 1:10:24Rob Henderson?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, um, like the male dissatisfaction with the, uh, gameful employment, status seeking, providing thing was just baked in already. It's like, oh, okay, like we, we, we already knew this, like granddad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy. And dad was spit and sawdust and he was unhappy and I'm spit and sawdust and I'm unhappy. But there is a little bit less pressure to do this. Was that Candace Blake that did that one?

• 1:10:52Rob Henderson?

  Uh, the, the, the female happiness study? I don't recall the, the, the authors of that one. Uh, but it was in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

• 1:10:58Chris Williamson?

  She definitely taught me about either that or something similar, which is, yeah, that, you know, the gender pay gap positively predicts relationship satisfaction.

• 1:11:07Rob Henderson?

  Oh, I have seen that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, I read that paper. Which is, you know, it's,

• 1:11:14Rob Henderson?

  and it's, it's funny because it, so it predicts relationship satisfaction if men earn more than women. And then it also, there was, there was a reversal of this. I don't know if, if Candace was a study on this or different, different authors, but they found that when, when women in marriages earn more than men, that this predicts higher rates of, of, of arguments, of verbal aggression on behalf of the woman, of just general relationship dysfunction.

• 1:11:38Chris Williamson?

  Higher rates of domestic violence.

• 1:11:40Rob Henderson?

  Infidelity on the part of the man.

• 1:11:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Rob Henderson?

  As well. Men are more likely to cheat when they earn less.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  A 50% increase in the use of erectile dysfunction medication when a woman's the primary breadwinner.

• 1:11:49Rob Henderson?

  That too. Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's pretty, it's pretty, I mean, it's grim, but then, you know, I, I, uh, you know, here's an anecdote. I remember when I was in undergrad and I had this conversation. It was, uh, you know, it was me and then like this, this group of, of, of women, these female students. And one of them, you know, she was a pretty hardcore feminist and she said that it should be 50/50. Like 50% of women, uh, should be working, you know, 50% of women. Like if it's the case that 50% of women are working, 50% of women should be at home and same for men. You know, if 50% of men should be working, 50% of men at home. And, uh, and then, you know, so then I was basically just sitting back, like I was not going to get entangled in this.

• 1:12:29Rob Henderson?

  But then some of the other women were saying, you know, okay, so, you know, but like, would you actually be like, okay with that? Like your husband's staying at home? I don't really know, whatever. And then, and then finally I decided to, to jump in and I said, like, you know, it's speaking to, to this, this, this young feminist woman. I said, yeah, can you like, so I know that you plan on going to law school. You're very smart. You're going to be very successful. How would you feel like your husband is at home, I don't know, changing diapers and taking care of the kids and you're at, you know, you're at a prestigious law firm with a bunch of high powered attorneys, like how would that, you know, you think you'd be happy in that situation? And her response was, um, wow, I, I like, I think I just felt a tingle when you said high powered attorneys. Like, I got really excited when you said that. That was basically her reaction.

• 1:13:09Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:13:10Rob Henderson?

  And it was half joking, but half serious. And they, all of the women laughed, I laughed too. I mean, it was, it was, you know, it was a good response, but like, I think, you know, that there was an element of seriousness there, right? That like, when you, you know, when she's sort of fantasizing about like, yeah, rubbing shoulders with all of these, you know, high powered, successful, at the top of their game, and then you got your husband at home. And I think it's just, it's different, right? Like, it's, men and women are different. We're attracted to different things.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's interesting to think about, uh, the potential pressure that, uh, may come along for the ride with you are supposed to be gainfully employed and have your education and be able to sort this sort of stuff. That's something I, the, not just the going to work, not just the getting up early and the hours of sleep and all the rest of it, but kind of the psychosocial interpretation of being a person that is status striving and playing the game of the water cooler and all of that stuff, kind of doesn't really factor into the discussion about, you know, is it inconscientiousness? Is it a part of your hard work?

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  Like your grit and your resilience and your desire for all this stuff? But there's just a, like a soup that comes along for the ride as a part of being a person who's playing the employment and the education game and having to go out for drinks on an evening and schmooze up to the boss and all that sort of stuff. And, uh, no one really talks about that because that's part of work, right? Like that comes along for the ride as a part of work, but no one ever talks about that. And it's like, okay, like it's the classic, do you want to be a CEO woman? Do you really want to do 80 hour weeks? And do you really want to do that? And it's like, do you really want to play this game for 20 years of fucking sucking up to people and, and having to do the social network?

• 1:14:59Chris Williamson?

  Manipulation and deftness and all this. So that being said, given women's sort of predisposition and ability to be a little bit more like subtle with their cues and their emotional intelligence and stuff, I actually imagine that on that side, they might be predisposed to it well. But as it seems, their well being may suffer more than men's despite their capacity for doing it being as good or greater.

• 1:15:27Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, I mean, I always wonder if it's it's sort of the reversal of what we were speaking about earlier about, you know, young men who who don't want to do hard things, but then once they do them, they find that they enjoy them and they appreciate it. Whereas in this in this context, you know, maybe maybe some women think, oh, if I follow this this track and get a lot of education and go to, you know, it'll make me happy. And then once you get there, it's actually not, it's not as satisfying as you would have hoped. It's actually worse than you expected. And I think a lot of, I know people like this, as I'm speaking and thinking about it, I know a lot of people who, you know, they think that once they get there, it's they have this certain image of what it's going to be like. And actually, yeah, working 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And even, you know, they are doing well financially, they are making money, they are buying all of the material goods

• 1:16:09Rob Henderson?

  that they thought they wanted, wearing, you know, amazing clothes, nice apartment in the right parts of the city and so on. But they just don't have time to enjoy it because they're always on the clock, nonstop, working weekends, no time to appreciate. You know, but there I think there is an element of this sort of social signaling where, you know, the almost at some point, the only satisfaction they really have is the fact that they can tell people about these goods and their job and how prestigious it is.

• 1:16:36Chris Williamson?

  I was teaching you last night about my theory of surplus mate value. So Chris Bumstead, Mr. Olympia classic physique champion, three or four times, comes on the podcast and tells this story about how he cries on the bathroom floor a few weeks before he's about to win the Mr. Olympia, because he's super stressed with all stuff going on in his life and the pressure of having to win and all the rest of it. And his like girlfriend sort of holds this dude that's like 260 pounds, presumably just holds the top of his head in his arm, in her arms and says like, it's okay and blah, blah, blah. But this was the guy that is the living instantiation of the Giga Chat meme, right? Like, he is the dude that is over the.

• 1:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Peaky Blinders quote, like the Killian Murphy quote from Peaky Blinders as he speaks over the top and it's just Chris Bumstead just looking like mean and stoic, like he's the sigma male meme that's been used on TikTok, right? Like he's Mr. Sigma Male. And I brought up to him this kind of odd irony that the guy that is the face of the sigma male meme, the stoic, you know, emotionless, just grit and grind and go through it thing was heavily dependent on his girlfriend in order to be able to go and achieve the next part of his, you know, trajectory.

• 1:17:55Rob Henderson?

  Right.

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  And one of the things that interestingly got brought up in the comments was, well, yeah, he can do that because he is Mr. Olympia. And it got me thinking about surplus mate value. So if there's a sufficient disparity in mate value, not to say that Chris is, Chris's mistress is like a smoke show, super smart. I'm pretty sure she went to like, like multiple college degrees plus like world fitness competitor herself in her own rights. But it's like, there is just a ladder that you can continue to climb if you go and be world champion in anything. And basically that Chris had so much surplus mate value in his relationship that he could get away with withdrawing from this bank account. He's

• 1:18:37Chris Williamson?

  allowed to cry. But if the, if you're not the world champion, right? Like, maybe the guy that comes 20th, maybe he's unable to do that. And if he, if he did cry on the floor, that would dip him below and the girlfriend would see him for the vulnerable cuck that he is and leave. But yeah, I just, it's kind of an unfalsifiable.

• 1:18:58Rob Henderson?

  Well, I mean, I mean, it's, it's, it seems like an illustration of counter signaling, essentially, right? Like when you're, I mean, the, the whole idea of counter signaling is like, once you reach a certain point in, in a status domain, you, you can, you know, you can actually behave the same way as someone very low on the status domain would behave. And it actually increases your status even more. And so example I like to use is, it's a classic work from, from Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues about self-deprecating humor, that if you're a very high status person and you're holding a meeting or you're just in a social setting and you make fun of yourself a little bit, people actually, it ingratiates you. It sort of increases their admiration of you. But, oh, he's just a humble guy. He's making fun of himself. But if you're a low man on the totem pole and you start making self-deprecating jokes, people don't want to be around you. They're like, oh, who's

• 1:19:42Rob Henderson?

  this? You know, this, this guy who doesn't like himself very much, or it's just, it just, it hits people the wrong way. And then, yeah, our mutual friend Rory Sutherland likes to use the riding the bicycle on the way to work example, which we mentioned this last night too about how if the, you know, if the guy who works at Pizza Hut rides his bike to work is because he can't afford a car, but if the CEO rides the bike to work, it's because he cares about his health or he cares about the environment, or he's just, you know, he's just a conscientious guy, or you know, there's, there's, we, and it makes us like him more that he's just, you know, he's riding his bike. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't have to drive the fancy car. It makes us like him even more. And I think, yeah, there's something there about that, that sort of the counter signaling element here. And I think you can see it in a lot of different walks of life. Just like how, how much self-promotion people do. There

• 1:20:25Rob Henderson?

  was a classic paper called Too Good For School, one of the early papers in the counter signaling sort of research area. And this was about, so this was, I want to say in the early 2000s where they asked, or what they did was they gathered syllabi from college professors and found- What's syllabi? The syllabus. Is that what the plural of- The plural of syllabus. Dear God, okay. And so they gathered these from various institutions and ranked ordered them and essentially found that the more prestigious the institution, the less likely the professor was to use their title on the syllabus. So if you're, you know, if you're at some fancy Ivy League school, they would just say, I am whatever, Bob Smith. But if you're sort

• 1:21:08Rob Henderson?

  of mid-tier or lower down, it's, you know, Doctor So-and-so, or Professor So-and-so. MSc, PhD. Yeah, all the degrees, everything. And then they also called the, so this was back when people still had answering machines. And so they called the offices of these professors and found that the higher- This is Doctor Rob Henderson, PhD, MSc. Right, right. Can't tab, so, whereas at, at the higher ranked universities, right? So it's exactly the same. This is Bob. Yeah, yeah, they say, yeah, yeah, Bob, call me later, whatever. Whereas, yeah, the lower tier, it's, yeah, Doctor So-and-so, you know, this office, this department, and just all of their credentials. And I think we're now seeing this to some degree in like the, the social media space now, or in like how, how much self-promotion people do. If

• 1:21:51Rob Henderson?

  you're an established author, you can maybe make one or two announcements, but if you're still sort of struggling and still trying to make it, you have to do a lot more self-promotion. But there's a reversal of this where if you um so so there was there was another paper when it was something like when when disclosing good news goes wrong, something along these lines where if you're a very high status person doing very well in your life and you do a lot of self promo uh and or if you do a lot of sort of um uh counter signaling, people don't like it. Uh and so uh an example that I've given is uh so like a first time author. Uh if your book does very well and you write this long post on social media, you know, I want to thank all of you for following me on this journey,

• 1:22:35Rob Henderson?

  blah, blah, blah, blah. But if a super famous, well established author does the same thing, it comes across as a little bit gauche, as a little bit like, we already knew you were gonna do well. Like, you don't have to play this like mock humility.

• 1:22:46Chris Williamson?

  So I've thought about this from a like a storytelling perspective, especially of the last six years, that um going back and talking about when I ruptured my Achilles and set up a special kind of stand so that I could do it with my foot elevated in a boot.

• 1:23:03Rob Henderson?

  I remember those days.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure you were on the.

• 1:23:05Rob Henderson?

  We had the FaceTime and I'm like, is that your foot?

• 1:23:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, not attached to my the rest of my leg. Um that that's that's kind of cool to to track that journey. So you know, for the people that are on any kind of uh trajectory with whether it be content creation or a business or something like that, I think that there's an awful lot of value of saying the things as they happen, of kind of showing the shit times. One of Alex Solomozzi's biggest regrets in life is that he didn't track the shit times more because he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he lives in this nice penthouse and he can retrospectively tell people about the shit times, but it's not the same as showing them.

• 1:23:43Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 1:23:44Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:45Chris Williamson?

  And when you get presuming that all of your plans go well and you end up in the place that you want to end up in, when you get there, it's gonna be way more difficult for you to try and tell people about the non ivory tower that you used to live in.

• 1:23:58Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh so I think that tracking tracking your journey as best you can and, you know, getting the posts out there or uh writing about the times that have been rough or or things like that, writing about the challenges. Not only is it, I think, a useful tool for yourself to remind yourself to go back and read or or watch or whatever. And see, oh, I went through a period that I had to be resilient. That means that if I face a similar challenge in future, I can also be resilient. But also, it's a good like way marker in the ground of like, here, here I was. This is kind of evidence, skin in the game of how shit life has been, at least at some points.

• 1:24:36Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, I mean, yeah, I like, I like that example there. And if you, especially like, I've seen these cases of people who are very successful and they, they don't really talk about the struggle until they're already very successful. And then once they start talking about the journey, people don't really take it as seriously. It's like, well, why are we just now hearing about this? Or why haven't you talked about this before? I'm not sure I believe this. Or you just sort of whatever, like, like embellishing this to, to make the journey more interesting. And yeah, I think there is, there is value to sort of tracking it along the way and to, yeah, to, to sort of reflect. And, and I think it's, it's also just like an inspiring message too, to other people who are also struggling very early in their, in their careers or in their, in their lives.

• 1:25:20Chris Williamson?

  I think your, I think your book's going to do this. I'm really super excited. I'm aware that it wasn't supposed to be a like, you know, you too dispossessed human can become, go through the US Air Force and fucking Yale and, you know, all that stuff. But I, I really think, you know, like, reading it, reading early versions of the, of the manuscript, I was like, fucking hell, like, this is, you know, it's kind of like the anti-black pill message. Like, the guy who kept on just getting kicked in the face by life ends up kind of succeeding at the end of it. I'm super excited for it to come out.

• 1:25:54Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, that wasn't the intention, but I, but I have, yeah, heard, heard similar sort of feedback. A friend of mine who joined the Navy, and he was, yeah, he had just gotten out of basic training and he was still eating shit sort of early in, in, in his, his military career. And yeah, he read an early manuscript and he was like, yeah, this was, this was great. Like, this is exactly what I needed in this moment. Cause I was just feeling so, so awful and like realizing, God, just put one foot in front of the other, just keep trying, keep taking shots. And, and yeah, it'll, it'll, you know, hopefully, you know, work, work out as, as long as you sort of have your mindset right and your priorities in order. Yeah, man, it's.

• 1:26:26Chris Williamson?

  Can people preorder that yet?

• 1:26:28Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, it's, it's up. So, so yeah, I mean, you know, we can talk about it. It's fine.

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're coming back on, you're coming back on for the book. So don't, we will do

• 1:26:34Rob Henderson?

  It's up for, it's up for preorder.

• 1:26:36Chris Williamson?

  Everyone needs to go and preorder Rob's book right now. I want to shove this down the throat of the culture.

• 1:26:41Rob Henderson?

  Thanks, man. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, and it has a bit of both. I think there's something for everyone. I mean, there's a lot of sort of first-person narrative-driven stuff, but then there's also a sort of sociological analysis and a lot of sort of there's stuff on on status, on how we evaluate other people and those kinds of things sort of work their way. And especially in the later chapters of the book, I do this thing where I sort of write each chapter from the perspective of myself at that age. But yeah, as I sort of enter adulthood and become a sort of more curious and reflective person, I sort of, you know, you can sort of see the way that my mind, I guess, sort of develops and the way I start to think about things. So. Yeah, man. Yeah, I'm excited for it too. And yeah.

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  I'm pumped for it to come out. And the cover's cool. It's you as a kid riding a bike down the street. So you taught me about this Baumeister idea about why ovulation might be concealed in women. And I've got a counter like bullshit hypothesis as well. So what was the, what's that idea that you learned from Baumeister about ovulation?

• 1:27:38Rob Henderson?

  Right. So this was a chapter, it was a speculative chapter from Robert Baumeister, this eminent psychologist. Where essentially the idea here is that so women have concealed ovulation, right? You can't necessarily tell when they're ovulating at the way that you, you know, you, you, you very visibly can with other great apes with chimpanzees and so forth. And so the speculative idea is that it so, so a lot of evolutionary researchers have suggested that this is, you know, maybe concealed ovulation is to conceal from men. Right? Like so that men don't necessarily know when the woman's ovulating or, you know, whether, whether to sort of reduce the risk of sexual coercion or to

• 1:28:18Rob Henderson?

  sort of obscure paternity uncertainty or all of those kinds of things. Whereas this speculative chapter posits that it's actually to conceal ovulation from themselves so that women don't know because back, you know, you know, this is vastly oversimplifying, but back when women started to be or human beings in general started to become sort of self-reflective and introspective and fully conscious and women could suddenly to, oh, when, when I'm ovulating, I'm more likely to get pregnant, they could visibly see it. Then they would be less likely to have sex. And in order to to essentially sidestep the burdens of pregnancy, because pregnancy was extremely risky and

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  You would become aware, as a woman, you'd become aware of your own menstrual cycle and avoid particular periods appropriately.

• 1:29:04Rob Henderson?

  And so the idea here is that eventually only the women who had concealed ovulation were the ones to reproduce. And then gradually over time, all women had obscured ovulation. And and this was essentially a way to to sort of prevent women from from sidestepping their own possibility of pregnancy. And then, yeah, and some of the some of those those excerpts that I sent you, there was a nice line from Leslie Newsome in this book that just came out a couple of years ago called The Story of Us, which is a nice sort of sweeping, updated overview of human evolution. And essentially, you know, what she writes, she and her her co author, they write that, you know, historically, there may have been women who avoided the

• 1:29:46Rob Henderson?

  burdens of pregnancy, but those women are not our ancestors, right? It was the the women who did undergo this this very difficult, challenging and dangerous experience. And those those were the ones. So I thought those two, those two findings neatly dovetail. But I'm curious to hear what's your sort of

• 1:30:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure that it was Roy that taught me about this one as well. No, it might. It might have been Candace Blake, that other women are, if if a woman, while she's ovulating or about to ovulate, is put under intense social and physical stress, it can cause the ovulation to misfire. So women who are under real significant stress, it messes up their menstrual cycle. But many women that are listening to this may know that their menstrual cycle kind of, if they're super stressed at work, or they're studying for exams or whatever, like, the stuff gets squarely, right? Like, guys might struggle to get an erection if they're super stressed, women might, their menstrual cycle can go all over. And one of the arguments is that concealed ovulation

• 1:30:46Chris Williamson?

  Stops other women in your tribe from fucking with you. While they know that you're potentially fertile.

• 1:30:54Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, so I think like that. So, so these hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

• 1:31:01Chris Williamson?

  They all work together.

• 1:31:02Rob Henderson?

  They all sort of.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  The pair bonding thing, like if you don't know when you're ovulating, if you don't know when you're fertile, it means you need to have sex more frequently with your partner, which increases the pair bond, which actually means that husband is going to stick around or that father is going to stick around with woman in order to be able to raise child.

• 1:31:19Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that, yeah, so, so it may require all of those different external phenomena to produce that outcome, right? Like, one of those alone might not be enough where, you know, if it had only been the concealing ovulation from themselves, maybe we would still have, you know, some, some percentage of women who were visibly ovulating and others who aren't, but it may require all of those different trends working together to produce the situation in which women are no longer sort of visible when they're, or the ovulation is no longer visible among women. So, so, yeah, I mean, this is, I think, yeah, this is, this is sort of a often this, this obstacle people kind of run into or this trap that we, we think like it can only be one or the other. But this, yeah, I don't think this is necessarily a reason.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  Many, many, many things.

• 1:32:03Rob Henderson?

  Right. I mean, evolution is complicated and intricate and so many things are going on.

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  I think concealed ovulation, given that it's super rare in the animal kingdom, I think, as well.

• 1:32:12Rob Henderson?

  So, yeah.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  Concealed ovulation is one of these things that appears to just trigger a whole host of, it doesn't matter which of these hypotheses are correct. There are so many benefits, right, from an evolutionary perspective. It just trigger all of these different things. You take 10% of them, you're like, it's a pretty good deal. That's pretty, works pretty well. What's that? Solomon's paradox that you, you were teaching me about, what's that?

• 1:32:42Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, so Solomon's paradox is, so it's a finding in, in psychology, but it's named after the biblical King Solomon, who had a reputation for being the wise king. And there was this, this adage that arose that if you have any issues, you should ask King Solomon. And famously, most people know the King Solomon story of the, the two women who claimed that they were the mother of the baby. And then he. So you know, kind of, kind of sneakily said, okay, well, we're just gonna cut the baby in half. And he knew that if we, you know, he knew that if he did this, that the, that the actual mother would step forth and say, the other woman can have it. And that, and that's how he, you know, so that's how he sort of resolved this issue. But it's a paradox, or they, they, they assigned this label, the Solomon paradox, because King Solomon

• 1:33:27Rob Henderson?

  himself, in his personal life, was actually not very wise. So he was wise for other people, but in his personal life, um, you know, he, he, he made a lot of mistakes as a king. He, um, he, uh, was, was not a particularly good father to his son. And his son actually grew up to be a tyrant, and, and actually very bad king, because he had sort of, uh, uh, mismatched his own parenting. And so in psychology, the Solomon's paradox is that, that people can be very wise for other people's social problems, but are often less than wise for their own. And so there was a recent meta-analysis that just came out, uh, various studies looking at the Solomon paradox, are people sort of wiser when reasoning about, you know, so they, you know, they bring people in, people who had recently gone through a breakup, for example, and sort of ask them, well, what do you plan to do? And so

• 1:34:11Rob Henderson?

  on and so forth. And then they would bring in, um, other people, either strangers, or the participants' friends, or people, you know, peers of theirs, and say, well, what do you think this person should do in that situation? And found, and they found various ways to sort of, uh, uh, measure this of, of how to, how to sort of, um, measure wise decision-making, and found that, uh, you know, that social distance actually, actually helps. It's the peer or the stranger who can say, okay, so this person has just been betrayed by their friend, or they're just going through a breakup, or they're having some difficulty in their social lives. Well, here's probably the best way to go. And the idea here seems to be, yeah, when you're sort of emotionally entangled, it's hard to sort of act rationally. It's hard, hard to act in a way that, um, you know, that, that, that will benefit both you and, and maybe the other party as well. And so as

• 1:34:56Rob Henderson?

  I was reading this, I think, you know, it's, it's a really interesting finding in and of itself. But then I also, I also wonder, so, so I'll actually give an example of this. Uh, so there was a, there was an interesting study on, on economic games. And so there's this game called, um, uh, the, the ultimatum game, uh, in behavioral economics. And, uh,

• 1:35:16Rob Henderson?

  The simple version of the game is that, so imagine you and I are playing the ultimatum game and the researcher gives me $10 and says you can give some amount to Chris and if he accepts the amount, then both of you walk away with the money. And so I'm under this, I have to deliberate and think, okay, so how much do I have to offer Chris of my 10? He knows I, you know, I have 10. So you know, I have 10. How much do I have to offer you to say that was a fair deal and we both walk away? And what the researchers find consistently is you have to offer at least 30%.

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  I would have said 30%, that felt about right.

• 1:35:46Rob Henderson?

  Yeah. And same, yeah. When I first, I'm like, oh, 30, that sounds fair. Any more, it would feel like unrealistic, but any less would feel unfair. And so that's what they consistently find is around 30%. But they've done different versions of this game where you're playing on behalf of someone else. So it's actually, it's economically irrational to take anything, to decline any amount greater than zero, essentially. Yeah. You should take anything, right? Because, you know, one is better than zero. So what they find is that when you have someone play on behalf of someone else in the ultimatum game, so I'm playing for a friend, whatever, or you're playing on behalf of a friend, that people will accept any amount greater than zero because they can step back and not get so, okay, well, is it fair? Is it not fair? It's okay. So my friend either walks away with

• 1:36:29Rob Henderson?

  nothing, or they walk away with $1 or $2, whatever it happens to be. And so I found that finding the Solomon's Paradox interesting because I wonder if there's something, if this can be applied more broadly to what's going on with young people. You've seen some of these data about young people having fewer friends, fewer social contacts, less likely to be in relationships, less time in actual, physical, social spaces. And this Solomon's Paradox indicates that it's actually helpful to have social contacts and to have friends to talk your problems through with. So if I'm having an issue, and I've done this before, I'm like, you know, someone, you know, I'm thinking about making a decision in my career or something, I'll call you, I'll call someone and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this?

• 1:37:11Rob Henderson?

  And that can sort of help me to contextualize and you'll see things that I don't see and so forth. But if you're a young person and you don't have many people around you, that, so you're already unhappy because you don't have very many friends, but then without the friends and people you can communicate with to talk your problems through with. In in in your life, whether it's in your career or other other social domains, romantic relationships and so forth, you become even less happy because now you're making unwise decisions, you know? And so there's this sort of negative feedback cycle that may be.

• 1:37:42Chris Williamson?

  Fewer people to show you your blind spots.

• 1:37:44Rob Henderson?

  Exactly. And and to sort of list out the options that you could take that you aren't seeing or list out the the negative outcomes that could occur if you make the the decision that you're leaning toward. And so, yeah, over time, this may actually be exacerbating. It's not just about loneliness. It's also about this sort of Solomon's paradox and making more unwise decisions in your life.

• 1:38:04Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, this sort of recursive isolationist decision making, which is suboptimal compared with if you were. So not only would you have the support network, I would feel better, but on top of that, I would also be making better decisions, which downstream from that would lead me to have a better life, presumably, including maybe a better life where I have more friends around me.

• 1:38:20Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris, have you ever watched this show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

• 1:38:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, so I watched a couple, I watched a couple of seasons of like the new one. This was during the lockdown.

• 1:38:28Chris Williamson?

  Couple of seasons?

• 1:38:29Rob Henderson?

  A couple, yeah, lockdown, man.

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  Right, I gotta do something. Is that a World of Warcraft?

• 1:38:33Rob Henderson?

  Well, it was playing in the background, right? So I put on, you know, because I used to watch the show as a kid, I like put on the back, it was almost like a comfort thing, you know, or lockdown. And one thing that I noticed was, I don't know, like, they changed, you know, they used to have these lifelines. One of the lifelines in this like updated version or the whatever, the COVID lockdown version, was that they would bring their smart friend along, and that was a lifeline. Like, they'd bring their smart friend, they'd be sitting in the back, and if they wanted to use a lifeline, they'd turn around and ask their smart friend.

• 1:38:57Chris Williamson?

  At least a phone a friend was wanting me.

• 1:38:59Rob Henderson?

  I wonder if they did that because of like Google or something, you know? So if you phone a friend, the friend can just look it up online, but now if they have it right behind them, they can't look up online what the answer is.

• 1:39:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:08Rob Henderson?

  And I was watching this and I and I thought to myself like, yeah, if you like, if you don't have any friends, you know what I mean? What do you do? Like, who do you bring along? And I think you can sort of apply that to your life more broadly, like it's, you know, you're in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire game, you bring your smart friend along, but, you know, life isn't Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but life is a series of making difficult decisions. And if you can't phone a friend and say, hey, what do you think? Like, the game becomes harder for you.

• 1:39:30Chris Williamson?

  And also, if you do get accepted to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

• 1:39:33Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  You're not going to have the friend to bring along with you specifically for that situation.

• 1:39:37Rob Henderson?

  Right.

• 1:39:38Chris Williamson?

  As well.

• 1:39:38Rob Henderson?

  You're you're missing out potentially on a million dollars.

• 1:39:40Chris Williamson?

  That's a million dollars that you could have had. Yeah, I am, I think there's definitely something sort of recursive going on here and. It's like the that inner citadel thing that you taught me about, which I just can't unsee. The Issey Berlin idea of if you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. You retreat from the fateful ills of the world into this inner citadel. Like, um, if you struggle to lose weight, just declare that weight has no bearing on health and that, you know, like body size doesn't impact attractiveness. Or if you struggle to hold down a job, say that all jobs are for suckers and turn to a life of crime. Or if you struggle to make relationships work, say, you know, monogamy is ancestrally unwise.

• 1:40:24Chris Williamson?

  And I'm going to become a polyamorous, like, like polycule type person. And I do think that there's an equivalent here, the like black pill, sigma male cope. And I don't think that there's an equivalent for women, right? There's not an isolationist, like, retreat from the world equivalent for women, which I guess suggests that their social networks tend to be a little bit more sticky than men's.

• 1:40:48Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, Dunbar wrote this book on on psychology of friendship. And that was one of the points that he made, that women are sort of better at staying in touch, reaching out and organizing gatherings. And and it's, what is it, the, I don't know if he uses this term, but it's sort of face to face versus shoulder to shoulder, that when men have friends, they can do things together.

• 1:41:08Chris Williamson?

  Can't fucking unsee it. I've spoken about this on the show before, but for the people that haven't heard it, next time that you're at a party or any sort of gathering, look at the angle of defeat of women talking to women and of men talking to men. Women will talk to women 180 degrees, they'll be face to face. Whereas men, the average is 120 degrees. So it's like blading.

• 1:41:29Rob Henderson?

  Slight angle.

• 1:41:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this shows up, once you see that, you can't not see it. And it's a rule that works across so many different things. The men's sheds initiative in Australia, did you see that?

• 1:41:40Rob Henderson?

  I have not seen this.

• 1:41:41Chris Williamson?

  They, uh, men, it was an initiative by the Australian government, I think, to try and improve men's mental health. They realized that getting men to sit down in a room and talk like this about their problems didn't work. So what they did is they built sheds that men came to. And then the men would bring like, I've got this knack. Lawnmower and everyone needs to help fix it. So how are men talking? They're talking whilst their front brain is focused on this thing that's in front and they are shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. And they're literally in a circle and everyone's like, right, you, you, you've got the good drill and he's got the good spanner and I've got the hammer or whatever. And let's fix this thing. And dude, me and the misses were not getting on well. And before you know it, it's a therapy session mediated by this fucking lawnmower.

• 1:42:20Rob Henderson?

  Right. They have the, the pretense of repairing lawnmower, but they need that, right? They're required. If you just put them in the shed with no lawnmower and they're just standing in a circle. It's, yeah, that's, yeah. So, yeah, then that was, yeah, the, the face to face versus shoulder to shoulder about, um. Yeah. Women will talk and communicate with one another, whereas men will sort of, they, they need a reason to sort of do an activity together and, and then communicate and discuss.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  Some of my best, some of my best conversations are during pickleball warmups.

• 1:42:44Rob Henderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:44Chris Williamson?

  Just dinking, just gently dinking about everyone, all of the pickleball pros out there know that you start off very close to the net. And you play the game within the kitchen and then you step back a little bit and you play sort of like a mid level game and then you step to the baseline. And sometimes that warm up, when you're close to the net and in the mid level game will go for thirty, forty five minutes with me and one of them, especially if it's singles, less time if it's doubles. But if it's singles, it's just you and your friend. He's like, dude, work's getting a bit stressful or this thing's happening. And before you know it, you're deep in conversation. In fact, we did this once at South Austin Recreation Centre. Me and my friend, and there was some guy that was sat on the side. And my friend that I was talking to is a podcaster as well. And I think he was going through some, going through some, something to do with his life.

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  And we were just talking and talking and talking. And I realized that we must have been doing this for like at least twenty minutes. And it's a kind of bad form to hog a court for a while, especially if you're not playing a game. Because when you're playing a game and somebody wins, the winner stays on and the next person cycles in. And I realized that this dude had been sat, maybe sort of like fifties kind of guy, uh, like very typical pickleball kind of player. And, uh, I realized that we'd been just warming up for like twenty minutes, getting bad form.

• 1:44:00Chris Williamson?

  Cause a game will maybe take around about ten minutes or so, something like that. And, uh, I think I turned and said something like, oh dude, like I didn't realize that you were waiting. I was kind of engrossed in this warm up and we'll, we'll, we'll get a game going. And he's like. To be honest, that was a really compelling conversation. And I remember thinking, wow, like, the male requirement for distraction from emotional communication is so strong that I can play like a full warm up for a sport.

• 1:44:27Rob Henderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Chris Williamson?

  Whilst doing it.

• 1:44:28Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, you sort of lose track of of time, I think. Yeah, I mean, the the sex differences in friendship, I think, are there's there's another sort of pattern that occurs where in breakups, men don't only lose their their female partner, but a lot of their friends too, because it's the woman who's sort of maintaining the or the sort of nudge the man to say like, hey, have you talked to your friend in a while? You should shoot him a text or see how he's doing or what have you. And it's hard to it's hard to keep that up for a lot of men, right? Because it doesn't come naturally for them the way that it does for women. And they sort of monitor. And, you know, there's obviously like sort of evolutionarily adapted reasons for this, that, you know, men are, you know, more expendable and sort of less preoccupied with staying plugged in and survival and all those kinds of things. Whereas women are pretty good at sort of monitoring.

• 1:45:12Chris Williamson?

  To tune up the allo parenting pool.

• 1:45:14Rob Henderson?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:15Chris Williamson?

  Same way that women do.

• 1:45:16Rob Henderson?

  Yeah. And and so, yeah, we see this. Yeah, a lot of the young people in general report having true friends, but this is especially pronounced for for for a lot of young men, which is, yeah, I mean, I've seen you and I've seen some others sort of recommend, you know, there are a lot of ways, like, if you're if you're a woman and you want to make friends, there's one way to do it. But I think if you're a man, like getting involved in sports or something, some kind of activity, like, that's the way to do it. It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna try to make this person into my friend. It's like, hey, do you want to like, go play catch? Or do you want to go play pickleball?

• 1:45:45Chris Williamson?

  Think about some of your friends, you know, we've got mutual friends that you've been to university with, to studies with. And if you're both a part of a project for a brief amount of time, the male friendship deepens so rapidly. You know, my ex business partner that I ran nightlife stuff with for 15 years, decade and a half, groomsmen at his wedding, you know, like phenomenal guy, very formative for me, sat next to him at my first ever seminar and became a business partner there and then. And we're still great friends. I catch up with him every time I go back to the UK. But I'd be lying if I said the depth of our friendship hadn't diminished because we were no longer working toward a shared mission. Whereas editor Dean, he's a perfect example. So we brought on a new guy, our YouTube strategist.

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  And since he's got brought in, the pace of friendship deepening has, it's just been so rapid because you're not just bonding with somebody that you like, like you selected them to work for the company because you would get on with them and you think that you share your values. But because I spend five hours a week grappling with titles and thumbnails and what, who, who, who should we book on the show and fuck, how am I going to sort this schedule out? And then he'll travel and we'll sleep in some shitty hotel and you know, all of that, moving toward a shared mission, I think for men just engenders, it's more than, it's like brothers more than friends, right? You know, it's almost like foe warfare in a, in a regard.

• 1:47:12Rob Henderson?

  Solving a problem together, right? You're solving a problem.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  Everyone needs a lawnmower.

• 1:47:16Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:17Chris Williamson?

  Everyone needs a lawnmower to fix.

• 1:47:18Rob Henderson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, that's well put. I mean, it's, yeah, having, having that shit. And so, so one thing I'd be curious about with, with men and women, because I know that there's, there's various studies sort of indicating that there is this sort of turnover rate, this sort of friendship half-life where supposedly, I mean, I've seen different, different stats, different studies on this. Some, some say seven years, some say 10 years, where roughly half of your friendship pool turns over every seven years or every 10 years. You lose half and they get replaced by another group. I wonder if this is more likely to be the case for men than women, simply because of that sort of, the, the, the way that problem solving facilitates friendships. And once you've solved the problem, once you've written the book, or once you've done the task.

• 1:47:56Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting.

• 1:47:57Rob Henderson?

  Then you sort of move on, you, whatever. In the case of academics, you write, you know, you write your chapters in your papers together, or you do your research studies, and then it's like, okay, moving on and you sort of lose touch. And so I wonder if there is that sort of gender divide in friendship turnover as well.

• 1:48:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Rob Henderson?

  I don't know that though.

• 1:48:13Chris Williamson?

  Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen. Rob, it's just so much fun to catch up with you. I'm glad to get to see our first one in person.

• 1:48:19Rob Henderson?

  I love it.

• 1:48:19Chris Williamson?

  As well. You'll be back on in February. When's the book out date?

• 1:48:23Rob Henderson?

  February 20th.

• 1:48:24Chris Williamson?

  February 20th, three days before my birthday. What a lovely birthday treat. So you'll be back on when you come through Austin. Where should people go? They want to read more of the stuff that you write. I love your Substack. I only subscribe to, I think, four or five, and they're all ex Modern Wisdom guests. Where should people go? Substack, Twitter, all that stuff?

• 1:48:38Rob Henderson?

  Yeah. Substack, robkenderson.com, Twitter, at robkenderson. Easy to find, so look me up and I'll be there.

• 1:48:45Chris Williamson?

  Hell, yeah. Thanks, Rob.

• 1:48:46Rob Henderson?

  Thanks, Chris.