Why Men Are At The Top Of Society (and the bottom) - Roy Baumeister

Roy Baumeister is a psychologist, professor, and researcher. Are men inherently more expendable from an evolutionary standpoint—and if so, has that dynamic helped drive innovation? If risk-taking outliers are often responsible for progress, what does that say about the role men play in shaping civilisation? And does this tradeoff come at the cost of higher failure, instability, and sacrifice along the way? Expect to learn why cultures flourish when they exploit men and what that actually means, why men have ended up in higher positions in society and if civilisation runs on male competition, why men are so much more likely to take physical, financial, and social risks, if risk-taking men are necessary for progress, what people do not understand about self-destructive male behaviours and much more… - 0:00 Why Men Are Seen as More Expendable 7:27 The Hidden Power of Intrasexual Competition 13:25 How Female Choice Shapes Male Ambition 15:55 Why Are Men More Variable Than Women? 22:12 The Real Driver of Differences Between the Sexes 29:21 Why Men Take More Risks Than Women 33:14 What is the Imaginary Feminist? 35:56 What’s Broken in Modern Gender Discourse 45:36 Has Feminism Changed How We Protect Women? 51:55 What Happens When Male Sacrifice Isn’t Rewarded? 54:07 Why Ego Depletion is So Heavily Attacked 59:15 The Strongest Critiques of Willpower 01:05:47 How to Actually Improve Willpower and Self-Control 01:10:53 Porn is Damaging Sexual Novelty 01:21:11 How Sexual Novelty Affects Female Desire 01:29:00 Where to Find Roy - New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You say that cultures flourish by exploiting men. What's that mean?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Well, um, there are multiples, multiple aspects to it, but uh, first of all, men are more expendable than women, probably for basic biological reasons. If a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size. Loses half its women, it'll be a long time to uh, to recover. So it takes, it risks men. Uh, puts men to work, um, to, to produce things. Most of uh,

• 0:38Speaker 01

  you know, the structures of society are really created by men. I was talking to Carol Hoven at Harvard and she said, there was a feminist who had an epiphany. One point she was looking out the window and said, the whole world is built by men. Uh, you look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and the uh, all those things and, and that's, that's just the physical world, the institutions too, the uh, the banks and the uh, schools and the armies and the governments and the marketplaces.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Women do plenty of wonderful things and they're important partners in the flourishing of our species. But creating our social systems, that seems always to be the men's job.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  And so our cultures compete against other cultures, which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men. And now women have joined the groups in many places, but it's still the institutional structures are created, created by men.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case that men have been overrepresented as the builders in that case, both cognitively, systemically, physically?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Oh, why is it?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It's because men do those things and women don't.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  What I realized fairly early on, and I have some publications of this, and it was an early part of my thinking, is that the way people are being social, there are a couple of ways. There's interacting one to one, or there's doing things in large groups. Now, I noticed this because in my field, social psychology, people were starting to say women are more social than men, because they're really invested in the relationships, the one-to-one relationships, which is a big area of study in my field. But if you start looking at things that people do in groups,

• 2:42Speaker 01

  men do those much more than women. And I think probably, again, it's an innate tendency.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  The most important relationship in biology is the mother-to-child one. And so that's a one-to-one relationship. In humans, women got particular men to form a one-to-one relationship with them, to protect and provide and do all those things, which really enabled the larger brain to grow and made everything else possible.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Whereas men do things more in larger groups. And so competition between groups is men against men, whether it's on the battlefield or in the business marketplace or scientifically.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Men compete in groups. It's not something that women naturally do and form large groups. There are even experiments, when I was researching this, they would do with children. And they'd have two boys playing together, and then the experimenter would bring in a third boy. Uh, and the boys would say, okay, sure, come on, join the game. But if it's two girls, they don't really want the third girl. They they exclude her and reject her. This suggests there's this mental focus on the one to one relationship. Again, it's better for intimacy. A lot of the differences, psychological differences between men and women uh can be understood this way.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  For example, most data show that women are more emotionally expressive than men, they share their feelings directly and so on. Um, well, in a one to one relationship, that's what you want to do. So the other person understands you. So you can share your feelings and the other person can take care of you and respond to you and so on. In a large group, showing your feelings all the time is not so useful. Obviously, in the economic marketplace, uh, if you go, oh, this is wonderful. I gotta have it. Well, the price is going to be higher than if you say, I'm not sure. Uh, maybe not today. Wait a minute, come back, I'll give you a better deal. Um, and you may have in a large group, you have rivals and competitors.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  So again, you don't want to give away too much. So the emotional reserve of men is more suited to the large group where the expressiveness of the woman is suited to the the one to one relationship. And, uh, um, that's why love and family and all those things. Women are are sometimes considered they are the natural experts at these things. And, uh, you know, some of the researchers tell the man, well, listen to your your wife on this. But it also explains why women haven't ever organized themselves in large groups to uh to to get things done. I mean, why didn't women ever, fifty women, build a boat and sail off into the unknown

• 5:49Speaker 01

  to explore things? You know, men did things like this throughout history and all over the world. Um. But you don't do that as one or two people, you do it in a larger group.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So again, the men in groups seems to be a natural pattern. There's even some evidence about this in in the other great apes. I was reading like Michael Thomasello's work on there and he says groups of male chimpanzees will go out and get in a battle with others. Or sometimes they'll go hunting together. It's not real cooperation, he says, each one's really out for itself. But you have more opportunities if you if you go out in the group. But the females don't do that. He said about the only thing you see cooperation among adult female chimpanzees is sometimes if if one of them has a cute little baby.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  A couple of the other adult females will join together and and come and go over to that woman and that that ape and beat her up. And steal her baby and kill it and eat it. Uh, which is fortunate. We don't seem to see much of that in our species. We left that behind evolution early. Uh, but that's one of the only things Jane Goodall and her observations had had that with gorillas. I think also that a couple of adult females would kill and eat all the babies. Um, this was a nice tasty snack for them. Um, and with the two of them, they could overpower the the mother. Um, but uh, it's obviously not productive cooperation. That's just taking someone's baby and eating it.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  What about the the ways that males compete and females compete? I have to assume that that uh level of competition drives different kinds of outcomes for each sex.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yes, well, um, there was the idea for a long time that women don't compete or don't like to compete as much. Uh, and then they gradually realized that that this is wrong. It's just they don't want to acknowledge it that openly. Uh, they do compete often for for love, specifically for the affection and attraction of the of the most desirable men.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  But that often can't be acknowledged. It's done sometimes by blackening the reputation of the other woman, misspreading negative stories about her. Even some of those, my former PhD student Tanya Reynolds, who's really made a terrific career studying female competition in evolutionary context.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  In one of her experiments, they wanted to see, will there be gossip used? Will women just spontaneously gossip about someone else? So she had people come in, told two women to work on a project together. And so she leaves them alone and they're working. And then the one, who's actually a research assistant who's working, pretending to be a subject in experiment, but she acted following a script. And she says, "Oh, I just can't do this today. I don't feel good. I drank too much last night. I think I hooked up with two different guys last night." So she delivers this very juicy tidbit and then they go on.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And then that woman leaves and then in comes another woman, who is another real subject. And the question is, does the woman repeat this, this gossip about her? Well, it turned out, what they also varied is the woman who made this disclosure. Sometimes she was dressed really sexy and hot, looked very nice. And sometimes she just looked like a mess. It's not very attractive. Well, when, when she was attractive, so she was, got energized the woman's competitive gears, then they gossiped. Then they said, so and so hooked up with two men last night. But Tanya also noticed, and another research by her has borne this out.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  They don't do it in a seemingly malicious way. They say, "Oh, I was really concerned about so-so. I wonder..." There's a problem. She said she hooked up with two different men last night. That must be bad for her. I'm kind of worried about her. So the negative information gets spread. And remember, why would you only worry about the well-dressed, attractive woman? Why would you worry about the other woman? But, you know, that shows the competitive edge to it. So, anyway, there is, there is competition among women in, in the, in the romantic sphere. Most studies look in, in terms of curse stuff.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Now, I have to say, when we talk about differences between men and women, they're, we're talking overlapping distributions. So the difference between the average man and the average woman is real, but it might be fairly small compared to the variety within women. And I've known some extremely competitive women and some extremely not competitive women. And on average, women are, are, are less and are less ambitious, too. Probably a good, evolutionary people talk about it, that we're descended from men that really the top male got to do most of the reproducing. So in, in, say, the, the other great apes, and even in polygamy, which is, existed in the majority of cultures in the history of the world, one man with multiple

• 11:24Speaker 01

  wives. Well, that's the rich, successful man. And he gets to have multiple wives and multiple children, which means a lot of men don't get any wives. So the drive to get to the top, we're descended from the man who did it. A man may have been pretty smart, but he didn't care about outdoing all the others, or might have been very physically strong, he didn't care about that. Well, then he didn't, didn't rise to the top, didn't pass on his genes. We're descended from the ones who really did try to, to compete. It's, it's part, people bringing this up, I've been thinking about the great inflation issues and problems recently.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And it disengages the young men, because my wife explained this to me once, she said, well, the woman wants to get an A, and she doesn't really mind if everybody else gets an A, too. Uh, as for the man, if he can't be better than the other people, what's the point? If everybody gets an A.

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  So interesting.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't engage them in the same way. And so our schools, which are now run mainly by women, are failing. They're failing all students, but they're especially failing the boys. Uh, that seems to be, and this is.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  Because they're driven more hierarchically.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely more hierarchy. I remember reading too, back in the eighties, when women started, um, really moving up in, in the businesses, in the, in the organizations that men created, there was a lot of simplification. Uh, one estimate that stuck in my mind was their average male business hierarchy had seven different levels of authority. And once women became influential, then they cut it to about four. Uh, so they don't like as much hier- hierarchy. They, they favor more equality. Uh, and, um, there are reasons for that too, that you can argue about, but, uh, but competition is about hierarchy. And so it's, it's hard to, the male want to do it. You want to be the number one.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  Historically, how much of male achievement do you think was driven by the desire to attract women?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, a lot. The evolutionary people would say, I mean, that may not be the thing that's in their mind. But the evolution say, well, that is what drives everything. I mean, maybe some men want to succeed because they want money. But the people say, well, why does the man want money so much? It's because that's what attracts the women.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  So, uh, it's, it's, uh, I, I'm not one of these people that evolution explains everything. Uh, but it certainly is the starting point and explains a lot. Uh, so.

• 14:09Chris Williamson?

  I think I'm, I'm, I'm interested in whether or not, but to what extent female mate choice sort of shapes male ambition? You know, we're talking about this hierarchical, uh, sense. You've already mentioned that there's a, a relatively limited pool of men typically that reproduce and a bigger pool of women. I think it's about forty percent of men ancestrally reproduce and about eighty percent of women. So you've got twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And, um, If you've got that, plus competition, the plus big group coordination, plus a preference for hierarchy, you can begin to see how the pyramid becomes pretty pyramid-y.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, there was an interesting interlude during the hunter-gatherers in which there was equality. They really resisted the hierarchy. This was part of the transition away from the apes kind of society that that they did it. But I've talked to a couple of people who who studied hunter-gatherers. And well, is it true they're all equal? Well, yes, but she said, but the women all know who's the best hunter. And they all want him for their their partner. Even though the food is shared, it does look like the best hunter. Everybody makes sure to be nice to him and his family. So they do get more

• 15:35Speaker 01

  food. And of course, if push came to shove, having the best hunter as your your partner would make sure you're you're less likely to starve or go hungry. You and your children are less likely than if you have a third-rate hunter as your partner.

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I guess. Why is it the case that men are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom of society?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  All right. Well, that was another thing I emphasized in the book. You know, the complaints where the feminists looked at the top and say, oh, well, the the presidents and the governors and the executives are mostly men. Must be great to be a man. But I said, well, but look at the bottom of society. Who's in prison? Who's homeless? Who's cannon fodder? Being killed in battle, that you see mostly men, men there. Now, why that is?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  That's a that's a more difficult question to answer. For one thing, though, there's more variability among men. Men are more different from other men than than women are from other women. So it's even true with basic things like height. Obviously, on average, men are taller than women.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  But there are a lot of pretty short men and and the the distribution is flatter. As we say, they're they're more really tall and really short men than really tall and really short women, even though the average is different. The average is the difference in average is much smaller with intelligence. But the same thing, you see more males at both extremes. We have more data at the bottom end because people have done decades of studying research on mental retardation. And as you move from the mild to the moderate to the severely retarded, the sex ratio becomes more skewed, more and more boys at each level.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And there's less at the other end, but it's the same thing as you move from mildly genius to moderate genius to to super genius.

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of a super genius.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  The super high IQ, this is Lawrence Summers at the Harvard meeting. You know, they asked, how come there aren't a lot of math and physics professors at Harvard who are women? And he said, and he was, he was right. If you have to be just super intelligent to be able to work at that kind of level, there are more men there. And people got all upset and it led to his downfall. They thought he was saying men are smarter than women, which is not what he was saying. He was just saying there's more variability. So again, if you look at the the bottom end of the intelligence distribution, men predominate more.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  So it wouldn't have got the rankled groups in the same way if he'd said there's more stupid men than there are stupid women.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, nobody, nobody minds minds that, but it's this this feminist control. Now, why that is why men are more variable. I have a pet theory. I've talked to some biologists. They said it's plausible. We don't know that it's uh

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  speculative speculative bro science is very welcome. I'm I'm very excited to hear this.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the the man has the XY chromosome. The woman has XX.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  So producing something new, there's a mutation on on the chromosome, right? So something goes wrong and produces a different

• 19:20Speaker 01

  variation.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And there's a question that does that then show up in behavior? And you know, do the genes that show up in the in the physical properties? Well, for the woman with X chromosome, there's always a backup.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So even if something goes wrong on one of the little

• 19:39Speaker 01

  weirdnesses, you know, one of the branches of the X, there is a there's only a 50 50 chance that will get through and maybe even less than that. Maybe the the healthy one takes over or something. So there there are less few, but nature can roll the dice more easily with men because if it happens on the the bottom part of the Y where there's no backup, then that will more likely come true. It's certainly adaptive in a way that evolutionarily successful for nature to gamble with men more than women. Uh because a lot of men don't reproduce at all and most mutations are bad. Most mutations are not an improvement. And so you want that flushed out of the gene pool right away.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Uh if there's a bad mutation, well, that's easy with the men since most men don't reproduce anyway.

• 20:30Chris Williamson?

  Such a good, yeah, I totally. What's that line about uh men and nature's playthings?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  I hadn't realized. That's yours?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:38Chris Williamson?

  Ah, I love quoting someone to them when I didn't realize it was them.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  And it works the other way too, at the other end, because a woman, you know, can't really have more than about a dozen children. But there are men who have hundreds. And so if you have a good mutation, then you want it to spread through the gene pool, right? That's how the, that's how evolution makes progress. And so, so the bad mutations are gone in one generation and the good ones spread more.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

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• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  Function, it's just 499 bucks. And now you can get an additional hundred dollars off, bringing it down to 399 dollars. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save a hundred bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Are the biggest differences between men and women, do you think, in terms of motivations or ability?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Motivations, I tend to favor. Ability, throwing things is the biggest thing, I guess. And ability is superior.

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It also includes on that, I'm sure that you've seen this, but it also includes dodging things. It's not just throwing things, it's also dodging things. So there was a study done, one of the problems you have when you're looking at. Throwing accuracy, you have different articulations of the shoulder capsule, you have different lengths of the forearm, you have, it's very difficult to not have young boys spend the entire first decade of their life picking up stones and throwing them, girls don't do it in quite the same way. So how are you going to control for physiological differences, structural differences, biomechanics, just conditioning of, I threw lots of stones when I was five. So one of the ways that they tried to control for this was instead

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  of it being about throwing, it was about dodging. And this was, I don't know how this got past an ethics board. They took one of those tennis ball serving cannons that gets used so that they can fire tennis balls across a court. And they had males and females try to get out of the way. And in the male cohorts, they didn't get hit once. And in the female cohorts, they got hit, they were peppered quite a few times. And I think that is the same, spatial rotation, like the ability to understand things in space.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  That could be. My friend Ron Hippel has made a big emphasis that coordinated strong throwing was one of their key early human group traits. Because if you're in the wild and there's a lion, you and your stone are not likely to get very far. But if there are 10 of you, you all throw stones and some of them will hit and enough of them will get home, that the lion goes away. What they suggest is that instead of hunting, we could scavenge if the lions killed something, then a bunch of humans could come on, throw stones.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  Scare away the lion. Yes.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Which would must have driven them crazy, but.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's super annoying, not only to have chased this thing down, finally got some food, and then a bunch of stones hit you. Bill taught me about that. I think it was him that said to me as well, that thing about kids, if you just put boys in a field, a playground, and there's stones, there's something so primal about just picking it up and throwing it. It's almost like when you see dogs kicking their back feet to, after they've been to the toilet and they're sort of pushing up the dirt in order to, like, who, who taught you to do that? No one taught me that I should pick up a stone. I just see it on the ground, even now, even now.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, okay. Yeah, it's clearly something we don't use anymore as a strategy to get food.

• 25:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't go into Chipotle and make a habit of flicking pebbles at people until they get me their food. No, that's correct.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes, but it could well have some some impulse there and probably more in the boys than in the in the girls. Because taking on dangerous animals is usually the men's job.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what about risk taking? Because that has to be a big, in fact, forget even the risk taking thing. The differences in the motivations, when we're talking about something that controls for physical ability is maybe

• 25:54Chris Williamson?

  heavily influenced by cognitive variance. So something like chess playing, there was a study that came out again recently, looking at the total Elo scores over time of the best chess players in the world. And I think there was only one female player that ranked in the top something, maybe the top hundred, maybe the top fifty. There's only one and you think, well, this might be due to some cognitive differences in ability that, you know, if you've just got all of these outliers, that, you know, the fifty men in that fifty are just the tail of the tail of the tail at the very top. Processing power, but that's not just what chess ability measures. It also measures your

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  stubbornness and your motivation to compete with other people for hours and hours and hours obsessively. So that is, I like the idea of the chess thing because it controls for pretty much every variable except for one type of ability or like a smaller bucket of abilities that are typically kind of denied, I guess, when you look at the denial of sex difference stuff and motivations. But motivations to me seem to play a much bigger role in that than you would be able to excuse if it was something that was biomechanical.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Well, two points to that. One is I remember being surprised that men and women have separate chess tournaments. I mean, I can understand in basketball that the girls team won't be able to play against the boys team. As the men are taller and so on, but. Why in chess? But, you know, it could be this kind of distribution.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Uh, in terms of ability, uh, there also may be more competitive motivation. Uh, my friend John Tierney has this, he is a super good writer. He wrote for the New York Times for many years. Um, and he likes Scrabble. He said, nationwide in the U.S. There are more women than men on the Scrabble clubs, playing Scrabble, uh, and so on. Um, and, you know, it goes with women are highly verbal and so on. And many say their verbal skills are superior, uh, to men's. But when they have tournaments, all the top winners are men. Uh, it's very rare, or, you know, there may be one or two occasional women to get in there.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  But, um, in the competition, the men, uh, do it. And so it could be an ability difference that really at the super high level to win a a large Scrabble tournament, you have to be really good. But he said also, the men are more motivated, more ambitious. So they'll spend the time doing the drills and memorizing the words, doing that. The women go to the Scrabble club and they want to play Scrabble and have fun. Uh, they don't care about, uh, memorizing, uh, lists of words so that, uh, um, they could, uh, they could possibly do better in the future. But, uh, you know, putting in that training effort, uh, and that would go to motivation,

• 28:55Speaker 01

  uh, that, uh, that that's higher among the men. And, you know, motivation and ability, they, they're, they probably go together. And especially with something, uh, as important as men and women being slightly differently crafted for slightly different tasks in the biological past. Um, you want to be motivated to do the things you're good at.

• 29:21Chris Williamson?

  What about risk taking then? What's the difference?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Okay, well, risk taking. First of all, going back to the twice as many of our ancestors were women than men and women are much more likely to reproduce than men, which means odds are in your favor. And if your biological goal is to produce a child or several and produce grandchildren. For a woman, playing it safe was going to get there. Most women reproduced. But most men didn't. So if you just go along with everybody else and play along, you'll end up left out. So we're descended from the ones

• 30:07Speaker 01

  who were ambitious and rose to the top. And some of that means taking chances. Said in the book, sailing off into the unknown to explore. All kinds of bad things can happen to you. It's not surprising women didn't want to risk that. But but you might come back rich. We're descended from the men who took the chances and did succeed. Lots of men took chances and drowned or were killed or got nowhere. But that's that's life. As a man, in fact, it's true. I think in many other species.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So if the male is is a riskier, a riskier one because because you had to succeed in order to be attractive and have children. Now, there are other aspects of this. Joyce Bennison and her colleagues at Harvard did this terrific paper a year or two ago about safety concerns, which are much higher in women than men.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Physical safety.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Physical safety, I think, I think social too. I mean, the article dwelt on physical and medical things. But I think it applies in the social realm too. We don't like to to take chances.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  I have a colleague who is arranging getting researchers together to do what she called adversarial collaborations, where say you and I are both working in some area and we have a theoretical disagreement. You think your theory is right and I think my theory is right. So one thing we could do is get together and do an experiment together that will will agree this will be the critical test, okay?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  And and people don't usually do this because they don't reach out to their rivals who they often don't like or whatever. But this woman, Carrie Clark, was a pen and she had a big grant and could encourage people to do it. And she said, yeah, people often wants to say, why don't you do a collaboration with them? I think, yeah, that's a great idea, but that was the men's reaction. She said, I just couldn't get the women to do it. She had something like thirty or forty of these things going. And I talked to her one point, she said, I finally got a woman to agree to be part of one of these things. But it was only on the condition that she would be the neutral third party. So she could not be proven wrong.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And so taking that chance, she elaborates that's why women want to exclude someone they disagree with rather than confront them. And you bring your data, I'll bring mine and we'll duke it out. That's more a male strategy. So in a way, science has become much more about excluding and silencing and

• 33:11Speaker 01

  which to the detriment of the scientific enterprise.

• 33:14Chris Williamson?

  What's your concept of the imaginary feminist?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Oh, all right, that was in that book I did fifteen years ago.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  There's this conventional wisdom that we all have. And when I start to say things about gender, you can immediately imagine, oh, but a feminist will object to this. So they taught people very well to have a kind of automatic internalized representation of a feminist that is, oh, you can't say this, you can't say that. It's mostly silencing and disallowing things. So the problem, if you try to

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Deal with feminists on a scholarly basis. Well, there are multiple problems. Um, but they disagree to some extent amongst themselves about various things. So they can easily say, well, that's not what what feminists believe, or at least not what all feminists believe. Um, but I wanted to address this sort of internalized um feminist watchdog that uh pretty much everybody is is brought up right now. And you know, you can't say this and you can't say that. That's misogynistic, or that's that's unfair sexist or whatever.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Um, like you you're saying earlier, to say that they're more stupid men than women. Well, that's fine. But to say they're more brilliant men than women. Oh, oh, you can't say that. Um, so that's what I was trying to get at with the uh the imaginary feminist.

• 34:52Chris Williamson?

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• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod Five by going to the link in the description below, heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep dot com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. Do you think monder, modern gender discourse is missing the concept of trade offs? What what is it that's going wrong when it comes to talking about men and women?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Uh, absolutely. I I was convinced of trade offs fairly early in my career. And I think social science in general, they want to say this is good and that's bad. And not, not all of them. There are lots of people who believe in trade offs. But sort of the dominant view is, well, this is a problem and we have to do this to fix it. And I started seeing, well, you fix one problem, you create another. And it isn't so easy just to solve problems. Um, so they have this view, some social scientists see it as our work is a way of making society better. And so they have a clear idea of what's going to be better. Um, and don't want to acknowledge that if we make a change to bring about this better state.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Well, maybe it'll make some other things worse.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So students are happier with grade inflation where everybody gets an A. But then they learn less. There's less incentive to study and uh, less, less punishment or um. Schools get rated on how many of your students graduate and graduate on time and things like that. Well, but that puts pressure on the institution to put out, you know, to, to make sure everybody passes, whether they deserve. Deserve it or not. And then they're more uneducated or poorly educated people. Uh, I was just reading something in this morning's paper, I think about the Chicago schools, which. A number of them, they, they don't have a single pupil who is reading or doing math at grade level.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Um, so, um. It's, it's nicer for the teachers to give everybody a positive grade. The students like it too. Uh, but there's a clear trade off that you don't have to, to, to work as hard.

• 37:57Chris Williamson?

  It's such a strange. Kind of sort of toxic compassion. There's a, I had this idea in my head. You remember the study that was done where some feminist scholars had tried to reanalyze the big game hunting data of hunter gatherer tribes. And they basically said, women not only did just as much big game hunting as men, but sometimes they did even more. And this was their reanalysis of existing data. It was about five years ago and it sort of broke through. And I remember looking at it at the time and I thought, this, this doesn't seem to make sense to me. I, I don't really understand why, but I, you know, I'm not a scholar. I can't read

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  the data. Someone analyzed their reanalysis and there was so much fuckery with the data. It was one contribution to a single hunt was counted the same as an entire lifetime as hunting from the men. There was no difference made for the size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what I realized was there's a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff, that whatever men do is implicitly preferred. That's seen as the desirable thing. That women did just as much big game hunting as men implies that big game

• 39:15Chris Williamson?

  hunting and the male default is somehow more desirable. In the same way as there are just as many, female CEOs are on the rise and this is something that should be celebrated. Is it well, because that's a position that's been typically held by men. Now, it's the prestigious ones. It's, you wouldn't see this for, there are just as many female addicts and homeless people as men. There are just as many women in jail for violent crimes as men. You wouldn't get that in the same way. But I realized for a society that's increasingly obsessed with talking about equality, which is not equality, it's trying to make men and women the same, not to make them equal.

• 39:57Chris Williamson?

  It really is, it slips so much low-key misogyny in by just tacitly derogating whatever it is that women tend to do naturally, that, oh, allo parenting, gathering, gathering's not as important as hunting, raising children is not as important as war, staying at, building the HR department is not as important as being the CEO. There is always this sort of implicit prioritization, this soft bigotry of male expectations. And I saw it happen with that hunter-gatherer, big game hunting thing. And I just, once I've seen it, I can't unsee it, really.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Okay, a couple of things. First, in terms of hunting and gathering, they're both important. And gathering sometimes yields more calories. It certainly does much more reliably. But from what I'm told, protein has this particular higher value. And so, and men gather too, for sure, especially the modern ones, because I don't think there's as much big game to hunt anymore for the remaining hunter-gatherers anyhow. But, but protein is a particular need. So if you want to make women look good, you just count the calories, and then the difference

• 41:22Speaker 01

  is smaller. But protein, which you need to grow the brain and the muscles and everything else, that is a higher prestige food. It's a more valuable kind of food. And so, there is a genuine superiority in getting food, or getting protein food, which would come from, mainly from hunting. And our women do, I understand, sometimes hunt the small game.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  So there is some degree of overlap as you would expect. Uh, but uh, um, it's not that the man made up that uh, hunting is better. Uh, than gathering. Um, being the good hunter again is what made the man attractive to women. So that he could get his choice of mates and have a tassel of children and we'd be descended from him. Um, and the women knew this too. I'm sorry, Joyce said, uh, they all know who's the best hunter. And they all, they all want him. Um, so there is some benefit uh, to, to protein.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And in terms of what makes a corporation succeed, uh, the HR department. It just, you know, manages things internally, but it doesn't improve the bottom line. You gotta work on the manufacturing technology and the uh, uh, the sales. Opportunities and, and those are the things where the corporations make money so that they can afford. A human relations thing which will, uh, you know, make sure there are no office or romances and things like that. Which incidentally is something of a recent issue I've been, been thinking about.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  I wonder if the, you know, young people aren't marrying and mating nearly as much as they used to. And I wonder if the prohibition on, on workplace romance. Uh huh. Drew out a lot of real babies with, with the bathwater. I mean, it was done to protect women from a few abusive, uh, guys who would take advantage of their position to. You know, and I sympathize with that, but I think I, like most men, I guess, like you too. We hate those guys who abuse their positions because they discredit the rest of us. Absolutely. And uh, when, again, I was visiting at Harvard and the women there said, uh. You know, our, our friends are all this long happily married couples, but none of those marriages would be allowed today.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  A lot of them started off with professors and students and things like that. And so they pushed more and more to prohibit that. But often the woman initiated that herself and women like to marry somebody like that. And again, there's a lot of long, happy marriages are being prevented. And the dating apps aren't doing an adequate job.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think another interesting element here is modern feminism has encouraged women to turn into the sort of man that they want to marry.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  Very much encouraging dominance, assertiveness, independence, derogating, nurturing, soft, sensitive skills, unless they're in a man, obviously. And the lack of polarity, you just can't sort of re-engineer this out. And it's interesting to see how many of the cultural commentators online that will endorse a view that they don't embody. How many of the people that are writing about this stuff? If you were to look at the inner dynamic of their relationship, it probably looks quite traditional. But from the outside saying, you don't need to be, you don't need to have a family. You don't need to be a mother.

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  You don't need to be in any way submissive or follow or be led by the partner or the rest. And you look internally at what a lot of these commentators online do, especially as they grow up a little bit more. And you realize that those positions, those positions aren't held. There was a really interesting situation. I don't know if you saw it, it went viral about six months ago. There was a man and a woman, young pair, traveling in Thailand, some sort of East Asian country. And it was CCTV footage. And the woman was attacked by a man with a knife. And he was trying to steal her bag off her, some of her possessions. And the man that she was with hid around the side of a pillar.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  So there was a sort of a bollard or something and this guy hid over there as the woman was fighting, trying to sort of hold on to a bag and this guy's got a knife and that, I don't really remember how it finished.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  All of the comments were basically saying, girl, just leave him. He's trash. This guy, absolutely no respect at all.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  I don't, I, I, I wish that he had protected her. I wish that it hadn't happened. I don't think that she should have had to go through it. But it is difficult to diminish the protector provider elements that men typically take value from and in the same breath, say, yeah, but if it happens, you should stand up for the woman. Because if you've been trained for your entire life, well, women don't need the doors holding open for them. Women don't need you to make sure that they get home safe at night. They can do everything that Amanda's sometimes even better, just as much big game hunting. What is the, where are the training wheels for men to learn to step up in those sorts of situations?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yes, yes, yes, very much. Um, yeah, my generation, we were told we've got to take care of the girls and the women and hold the doors for them and protect them. And if there's danger, you put yourself into it. There's a funny story by Warren Farrell, who I guess initially was one of the main male feminists.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  He was.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  But he kind of woke up to that. But he talked about being at a conference on feminism and he was out for a walk with one of the top women feminists and they're walking down in a, in a park or something. And a man jumped out from behind a tree. It turned out it wasn't dangerous, but it suddenly was. And immediately the woman ducked behind him and he stepped forward.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  And he said, oh, we had such a long awkward conversation after that.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my, my embodied misogyny just pouring out of me. The patriarchy came and pulled her back behind me.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm not sure I believe in either misogyny or patriarchy. Um, but those are our common terms, which, uh, Um, yeah, maybe that's what she blamed or something like that. But I certainly I don't know any men who hate women.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Uh, I know a man who hates specific women.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Ex-wives and whatnot, and often for understandable reasons. But a man who hated women in general, I don't do it. And if there's any gender hatred, it's feminists hating men in general.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and I think there's, I think there's, I think there's subcultures now. Unfortunately, there are subcultures of men who hate women. You know, you look at sort of some of the darker corners of the internet now, guys that are, um, they're upset. Uh, uh, uh, entire sex that they think has rejected them or their friends or is men made a society where they're no longer wanted. Um, I do think that the more militant edges of feminism have been mirrored now, uh, on the, on the men's side.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that could be. I wouldn't be surprised. And, and you know, if a woman who'd been raped a couple of times hated men in general, we wouldn't be that surprised.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  I kind of see those involuntarily celibate incels somewhat in the, the same category. I'm less sympathetic. Uh, but, uh, uh, but, uh, I mean, the experiment would be if a woman would take one of these incels and strike up a relationship with him. Uh, and start having sex with him. Uh, he might come around very rapidly. And all these women are bad would, would just evaporate.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  It's a spicy, a spicy theory that we can fix inceldom by just getting women to have sex with men more. But, uh, I do, I do agree that, um, I mean, it's even discouraged in, in the, the world of incels. I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, but one of my best friends is the, the number one researcher on the planet, William. And, um, they, they have this term called ascending. And ascending is, um,

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  No longer becoming an incel by being attractive to a woman and getting her attention, getting her in a bed, being found to be attractive in this way. And it's actively discouraged. And I think the reason it's actively discouraged is if somebody else that you saw as an equal is able to ascend, is no longer involuntarily celibate. That means that maybe you're not doomed. And if that's the case, your sort of fatalistic view of why things are happening this way might not actually be so fatalistic. It might be more self imposed and maybe there's something you could do. And as soon as you have hope, you also have the opportunity for disappointment. And without the hope, there can't be disappointment.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  So removing the hope and saying, I'm a genetic dead end. There's nothing that I can do. Women are X, Y, and Z, and that's not going to change. That it's misery inducing, but predictable, consistent and reassuring in some ways.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I would like to know more about the incels. It's an odd corner of the world and I don't, don't know people and I don't know much about them. But we can't take them as typical of men. They are usually, they are not the power, powerful people. They are not running society. Powerful men usually have no shortage of interested women. It's the ones who lack resources and successes and status and so on.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  If, if your theory is correct, what do you think happens when society stop rewarding male sacrifice?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Well, that would be a weakness. I remember my, my professors remembering World War Two and it was declared and all the American men rushed to sign up and volunteer to go fight the war. And I don't think that would happen today. The men have been brought up to think. You know, they're bad and the women are just as good and and society, you know, we teach our kids that America and the UK and so on are bad places who've done bad things and I don't stress the positive accomplishments. Um, so I, uh, that would be a vulnerability as long as there's no war.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Ironic to say this.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  It is.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  There's a war going on.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's so true that the reason that we're able to sort of play around in this kiddie pool with roles and switching of sacrifice and who's supposed to do what is literally because there aren't any intense selection pressures going on. If there was something more extreme happening and imposing itself on us from the outside, shit would get real really quick. I mean, look at the Ukraine war, right? The Ukraine war kicks off and men were being turned away at the border, including trans men were being turned away at the border because, hey, no, sorry, buddy. Women and children get to go, but you you got to stay all for I don't know how

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  progressive thinking Ukraine was prior to the war kicking off. I'm I'm unsure about the the cultural landscape there. But yeah, it's it seems to me like we might be entering a period where male motivation collapses. And obviously you wrote this book in twenty ten and sixteen years later, the male motivation collapse, which you could have seen, it just would have been a natural byproduct of you rolling the clock forward from what you'd already seen. Uh, has completely come to fruition. So I guess I can congratulate you on being Cassandra in that way.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  All right.

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  If it's true that ego depletion is one of the most successful findings in social psychology, that willpower is a limited resource, which when used can be sapped and takes time to come back online. If it's true that it's one of the most successful findings in social psychology, how come it keeps on being attacked? This is replication crisis. It doesn't repeat.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  Why is that the case? What are people getting wrong?

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I don't know. People do like to tear down other things and there's a lot of petty jealousy and and so forth.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  But, uh.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  But evidence in favor is overwhelming. There must be a thousand successful findings in the research literature, which hardly any, any, any point has that much support. I heard somebody recently saying, well, it must just been all been by chance that

• 55:08Speaker 01

  maybe by accident, the statistics turned out this way. Well, chance works equally both ways. Half the findings should be in the opposite direction. There are essentially none in the opposite direction. I mean, saying that it's a chance where there's that much. There was the the one initially big multi lab replication, which was reported as a failure.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  And so that got a lot of publicity because people like negative publicity and they never correct it when the positive comes around. Even those data were reanalyzed a couple years later and somebody said, oh, no, actually, it, it did. They didn't get people depleted enough to really show any effects. But to the slight extent that they did deplete people, they did what, what the theory predicted. So that was, that was confirmed.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

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• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  give you your money back. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 35% discount on your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom using modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. Modern wisdom. A check out. How much is true of the fact that ego depletion works either only works or works more if you believe in it? That it's this self fulfilling thing. If you believe that you have a limited amount of willpower, then it it sort of manifests. But if you don't believe that, it's a protective mechanism.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really interesting idea that some people at Stanford published some work on that. And we were intrigued by that. And so we tried to copy their experiment and we did find that if you give people a really strong sales pitch that your willpower is unlimited, then at least when they first get depleted, they don't show the effect. And we did show when you get seriously depleted, then you show an even worse effect. So that belief that you have unlimited willpower is helpful. Make the think of the analogy of physical energy.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  If you somehow could be convinced that you have unlimited physical energy today, and then you go out for running a race. But first, when you start to get tired, it'll probably help you continue to do it. But at some point, it may backfire. My thought in the big picture is if it were true that believing in unlimited willpower would give you unlimited willpower, you'd think most societies in the world would have that belief because.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  They would have created some sort of cultural meme around it because it would have comforted such an improvement for everyone.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  So much benefit to society to having people with better self control.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  And yet, most societies don't. There was some argument that some people in India have the opposite belief and I wish to see more there. But but it's very rare. Most people seem to know, and I think, you know, they just have the experience that.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Trying to exert control over a long period of time, you just can't, can't, can't keep it up.

• 59:15Chris Williamson?

  What, if anything, has been accurate in some of the critiques around the original research? Or what's been most accurate or has given you most, uh, most reason?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Okay, well, at first we thought, uh, at first we were thinking the willpower is kind of a metaphorical thing. Um, but, uh, you know, okay, the brain has a limited amount of fuel and it used it up, so it has to recover. But then people started showing you get people depleted and then you offer them a big financial reward if they can still perform well. Well, they can, they're extra depleted afterwards, but it's not that the brain is out of fuel. It just goes into a conservation mode. It turns out physical muscles are the same way. Uh, there are lab studies where you come into the lab and do physical exertions or you have to press them.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  After a while, your muscles get tired and, uh, and then the researchers will say, well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you ten dollars if you can do it once pressing as hard as you did when you first walk in. Well, they can. Uh, it's, it's still that there is a point at which your muscles can't work anymore. There's probably a point at like that at which your willpower is so badly depleted that you can't do it. But in the laboratory, we never get people to that, uh, that, that extreme, uh, uh, situation. So the, the, so one big switch early was to shift from, um, being out of fuel to conserving remaining fuel.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  And it makes sense. We evolved under conditions of uncertain food supply and, um,

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  then people started linking it to the, uh, the glucose, the physio, the, the chemical in your body that carries the muscle, the energy uh, from your stomach to your brain and muscles and so on. Um, and found, uh, oh, this was kind of a surprise to me when this worked, but if, if people would eat something, you know, after they were depleted, that would get them back to perform well again.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Um, so, uh, that, uh, that was intriguing.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't there, there was a, a great study done around the, uh, the

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Length of time of somebody being sent to jail by jurors or judges? And how long it had been since they had their breakfast? Basically, if you if you end up in court, you probably want to go in about one forty five P M. Just after the lunch break or at nine A M. Just after they've come in for breakfast.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and some people argue about that. It's it's hard to get a perfect study done with

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  real life data. But

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  the curve was quite striking. And just about every experiment we've used where we give people some glucose in the middle. It does restore their their performance. And then they often don't know. We said we started doing it with giving people lemonade. It was at Florida State and it was hot. And so people are glad to have a glass of lemonade and you can mix it with Splenda or sugar.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so good.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And it can be double blind. So the experimenter just pulls one out of the refrigerator and says this for you. The experimenter doesn't know if it's got glucose in it, it isn't sugar or just a sweetener. They taste the same. People can't tell the difference. They're glad either way. But the Splenda had no effect on the data, whereas the sugar wiped out.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  That's so good. That's so good.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  The the glucose is the energy is also used for your immune system. And and but it uses very uneven amounts. So when you're fighting off a cold, that's often why you want to go to bed and just sleep it off and let your your immune system have all the energy in there. Well, in our evolutionary history, we didn't have antibiotics or anything like that. If you got a cut on your foot and got infected, your body needed to fight that off. If you didn't get a cut, then you don't need an extra immune system activity, but you'd need extra fuel for it to fight an infection or to survive a fever or anything like that. So it made sense to err on the side of conserving

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  as much as possible. There is an interesting alternative theory here. Which

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Most people don't talk about, but I read it and I thought it's really quite good. Nothing quite fits everything, but this is the best alternative theory, which is that

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  the sections in the brain that do self-control are really important because that's, you know, self-control is really valuable for success in life in many different ways. And if you have high glucose around some nerve cells for a long period of time, it starts to kill them. It's best known, uh, diabetics, uh, in the past, they would lose all feeling in their feet. It's, you know, their, their blood sugar would run high. Uh, and so you would start to kill the nerve cells and you wouldn't feel it. So you hurt your foot and, you know, infections

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  would happen and you wouldn't notice them. Um, so, uh, it could be that after you exert self-control, the depletion effect is the brain letting itself cool off, as it were. You say, okay, we've been exerting self-control, using willpower. That means those nerve cells in the front of the brain have been exposed to a high level of glucose. Well, we don't want to burn them out. So not, let's not use self-control for a while. Let them cool off and then that I can use them again. Um, that really fits a lot of, uh,

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  a lot of, a lot of the evidence. It's the most plausible alternative, uh, theory and it would still mean most of the glucose, uh, most of the depletion phenomena are real. It would just have a different interior mechanism that the brain automatically conserves its energy. Uh, but rather it needs to, um, use different parts of the brain so that the nerve cells don't get wear and tear from a long extended period of high, high glucose.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  Beyond having more glucose across all of the work that you've done, what are the best, most evidence-based ways for people to improve their willpower?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Okay, well, improving self-control, which is the real goal, you can do that without improving willpower.

• 1:06:05Chris Williamson?

  Can you distinguish for me the difference between a self-control?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Okay, so willpower would be the energy that you exert. But self-control also depends on keeping track of the behavior. So the easiest way to improve your self-control is to keep a record of what you're doing. Even my grandmother told me a long time ago, well, when you're a poor student, you don't have money, you just write down everything you spend and then you know how much you're spending and what you're spending it on. Or if you're trying to lose weight and keep it off, well, you've got to weigh yourself more carefully. Or if you're trying to have, take up an exercise program, tell your friends you're gonna do it and tell them, you're gonna tell them each day, did I exercise today?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  So improving the monitoring will improve self-control without needing any more willpower because it gives you more feedback. And I was gonna try to jog three times a week and I haven't jogged all week. So I better do it. It's easier to fool yourself if you don't keep track. And certainly if you don't know, it's very hard to regulate something that you don't know. In terms of improving the willpower, it seems to work like a muscle. And a lot of people have produced findings like this, that if you exercise self-control on a regular basis, then you do, you get better at it.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  I didn't know if that would work. We had an early study where it did, it did work and then done a fair number of others. And other people have too. There are a couple of meta-analyses combining the results of a great many and saying, a great many studies and saying, yes, it does practice self-control. To design the study properly, you have to exercise self-control on one sphere and then measure self-control in something else to show that it's a general improvement.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Um. But it does seem to work. Some of the biggest effects I've seen were the this Australian group, um, they did several studies. One was they took students who had money trouble and they trained them to manage their money better. And they met met with them, you know, once a month for several months or something and taught them how to manage their money. And so they did get better at that. But the measure one key was they came to the laboratory and had to do self-control tasks that had nothing to do with money. It was just like maintaining focus on this while you're being distracted by that. They were better at that. Um, they also reported on the questionnaire that they started studying better just because they're

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  working on managing their money better. But they also study their study habits improved. After they finished dinner, they would clean up rather than just stack the dishes in the sink. They even said they ate healthier, um, which again is a sign of self-control. But as they point out, healthy food is more expensive than junk food. So it kind of went against what they were training self-control for, uh, was just to manage their money better. Uh, but they also improved their their diet. So they saw a whole variety of positive uh, changes in there uh, that that came from fitting the idea that self-control is sort

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  of one central um, resource that's used for many different things.

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  AG1 just released their next gen formula, which is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product I've been drinking every day for years, delivering more than seventy five vitamins, including your multivitamin, pre and probiotic, superfood, greens and more. And for the first time, they've added new flavors, tropical, citrus and berry, only available in the US and Canada. Sorry for that. But you do still get the same one scoop. Ritual. Now with an even more thoughtful formulation, flavour and four clinical trials behind it, designed with absorption and efficacy in mind. AG1 has been evolving continuously since 2010 alongside the latest research and Next Gen is clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health, even in people who already eat well. In one

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  study, it boosted healthy bacteria in the gut by 10 times. If you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will just give you your money back. So you've got nothing to lose. Right now, get a year's free supply of vitamin D3 K2 and AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. I've been completely obsessed with this series that you've been doing on Substack about sexual novelty. What did you learn there?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  I was intrigued with the idea that it's partly with thinking about pornography. It's so widely available. I've seen over the course of my life that that become more and more available and, you know, for better and for worse. But, but the novelty of it, it might have been Naomi Wolf or one of those who remarked that her generation, which I think was about the same as mine, was the last time a woman could have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes and letting him see your naked body. But it was

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  such a thrill to see it. And, you know, when I was a kid, we didn't see pictures of naked women. If, you know, some, one of my buddies would find a Playboy that somebody had thrown away or something. They didn't even show the full nudity. So you really didn't quite know what a woman entirely looked like and, and.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Even if you could find an occasional picture or something, it's not like endless amounts of pornography and lots of women and ads where they're showing, showing everything. So some of the mystery is gone. And it made me think, maybe there's some loss there. That novelty is arousing, but as, but it's a limited amount of novelty. You can only do something the first time, once.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  There's only one first time. So, uh, in a way, it's a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them. And if it had been available when I was young, I doubt I would have resisted. I probably would have been curious enough to, uh, to look at it all and, uh, and so on. But in a way, I think I'm, I'm lucky that it wasn't available. But that way, there's still novelty as I got into my thirties and forties, which I hadn't explored yet. But if you've, you've seen everything by the time you're 25 or even

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  by the time you're 20, um, there isn't, there isn't as much novelty available. Um, on the different sex partners, and that seems to be what people are shifting. That's kind of what I came to after writing those columns, that people are blazing through all the novelty and pornography. They're not doing as much of capitalizing on novelty within the relationship.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  This is the, the second base plan, you know, that you just sort of gradually go from one step to other. One of my young friends said, uh, yeah, uh, today I just did it again from first contact on the dating app to having lots of sex under a week.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Just a few days. Um, whereas, you know, back in the day, well, you know, the earlier day, you had to practically be engaged before you could go all the way. And, um, certainly, I grew up in the seventies. Uh, you had to have a series of interactions and, uh, you know, you got the relationship. And then so the step by step, the novelty, uh, you know, you could appreciate. So the, the first time you undo her brassiere, whatever, wow, that's, that's really exciting. But if you've had sex, you know, and done it all, uh, right away, that doesn't, I think, strengthen the relationship in the way that

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  shared novel experiences, a series of them will do. I can't prove it on that, but that's a, that's a speculation. But going for novelty in terms of lots of different partners, rather than novelty within one relationship of gradually exploring many different activities. That seems much less well designed to produce healthy families, which is what society needs. Um, and I started to think, uh, for those fortunate young men who have sex with lots and lots of different women, is this really good preparation for marriage? Um,

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  I think it would, uh, recycle through women rapidly and get tired of them.

• 1:15:34Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that's

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Settle down with one woman for forty years.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you think that that, uh, predisposes men who've had a high body count before getting into marriage that, uh, even trying to titrate, let's say that they've taken the red pill of your Substack's post series and they're gonna slow, you, you can only get to second base once. And if you hit a home run first time, then you've rounded all of them, basically. And we're gonna slowly titrate the sexual novelty over time. We're gonna get more experimental, but it's gonna be over a much more protracted timeline. Uh, do you think that you can be sort of predisposed to not finding that as exciting? Is there a, basically, is there a lifetime Coolidge effect as well?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody commented that on one of my Substacks that after you've had sex with a dozen different women, then to go slow and get to second base with the next one is probably not that. That exciting. That is plausible. I'm not sure it's true. Um, it does. It does seem likely and.

• 1:16:35Chris Williamson?

  What was that? What was that story about the couple where the woman had never used her hand?

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  All right. Yes, I remember reading that. I think it was in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But We're Afraid to Ask book, which is one of the first bestsellers to the public about sex. And, uh, and she'd written to the physician and said they'd had a good sex life with her husband. And then gradually couldn't, uh, you know, perform as well. It got weaker and weaker and it stopped altogether. And it was kind of sad. She felt bad for him and, you know, and then she thought, you know, morals, women didn't do sexual things. But she said, well, I love my husband and, you know, we've been married a long time. I'm not going to worry about morality. And she went and bought a book about sex,

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  uh, which, you know, back in those days, there weren't that many things available. Um, and it said, if you put your hand on the man's genitals, it is exciting to them. So she said, so I tried that and oh, he got harder than he had for years. Um, and so it was a very nice, kind of sweet story. So there's the opposite extreme of novelty. They'd hardly done anything.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  And, uh, if we go back a century, the amount of female flesh a man would see in his lifetime is, uh, less probably than you can see in an hour of.

• 1:18:07Chris Williamson?

  I was, I mean, I was fascinated by that. What a weirdly, I guess it would be impossible to do that study now because sexual culture is so permissive and so sort of widely promoted that no one would have gone their entire life without what is sort of termed a second base. Right. Actually, I lied. I lied. Apparently you can get to fourth base without going around second base. That is, you just go from home base to first and then you go straight back again, apparently. And there's other bits that you can miss off. But I loved, um, I loved that, that story that you told about. A series of experiments that were done showing pornography, normal pornography,

• 1:18:51Chris Williamson?

  BDSM pornography, and then educational sexual videos. And the increase in sexual frequency happened when everybody saw the porn for the first time. Because again, this was in the sixties or the seventies, I think, where porn was basically not available. Right. But if you went from the extreme stuff to the more vanilla stuff, you didn't see the concordant increase in sexual desire. But if you escalated it, and this, this, you know, kind of goes to prove your theory that ever, ever increasing but steady escalation

• 1:19:31Chris Williamson?

  of sexual novelty over time, doing new things, exposure to that, not only within partners, but presumably across your lifetime, it seems to make sense. This isn't just a like dyadic situation, it's going to be stuff that you've done. If you have an explosive twenties, where you're just on, you know, the, the career run of your life, and then you settle down and you begin to start to titrate again. I, I have to assume that you need to almost treat yourself like you're someone whose sexual novelty needs to be shepherded with at least a little bit of care. Because you want to still be excited to do things over time. And unfortunately, as much as you can say, you should love me so much, it should just be the excitement, the raw attraction and the romance and the rest of it.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  You need to respect the psychology, you need to respect Coolidge effect, you need to respect the way that we look at, at variety as being a stimulus. And um, yeah, I think it's, it's just such a- And ration it. Yeah. And what, what, and ration it over time. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you've done, you've, I love the disclaimer and I'm going to start to use it when I'm talking about spicy stuff too. You say at the top of pretty much all of, all of the posts, this is a treatment on men, a separate treatment will be needed for women, but we can save that for another time. It's such a nice way to not have to caveat through. And we must remember that this would be important for the, the, the, the. Yeah. Have you got any inclination? Because we're talking about men, the Coolidge effect, what's the refractory period from partner to partner?

• 1:21:00Chris Williamson?

  And for men, if they go from one partner to a different partner, they're able to perform more quickly as opposed to if it's the same one and they've got to go again.

• 1:21:12Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea what sexual novelty does to female sex drive?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  It's much harder to get convincing data, anything on that. And so I can write what we do know about female sexuality and so on. But the role of novelty, I mean, it's not nothing.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  But it doesn't seem to be as powerful, a driving force. I recall some years ago, someone reported a survey, I think it was first year cod students at Southern Cal or, you know, one of the California universities. And they asked, how many people would you like to have sex with for the rest of your life? Assuming no constraints of marriage or laws or disease or anything like that, if it were up to you. And the, the women's response average was two and a half. So they wanted to have a fling or two and then settle down. The average for the men was 64.

• 1:22:23Chris Williamson?

  And that's the average. So you've got some, you've got some impressive outliers there to bring that back down.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they definitely were because they said, actually, a lot of people just said one. Presumably, these are people who are still virgins and they were just hoping to have the first one.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  But so both men and women, there were a lot saying, I would like to have one. But a lot of the men wanted to have a really high number. And, and not very many women were saying, I want to go have sex with 100 men.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Someone are doing it now. There was that woman in the UK who did it all in one day, right?

• 1:23:02Chris Williamson?

  A thousand. Yeah, Bonnie Blue. I had a debate with her on the show. I moderated a debate with her on the show.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  It wasn't a thousand in one day, right?

• 1:23:11Chris Williamson?

  No, it was. You're talking about Lily Phillips who did a hundred and then Bonnie Blue had sex with a thousand men in one day, which even if you just run the numbers is insane, but the whole thing was recorded. It's, yeah, it's, it's a real, I mean, more than anything, it's, it's an endurance feat. More than it is a one of sexual novelty, but I mean, what you're looking at there is basically someone who's kind of the Michael Jordan or the LeBron James or the Tiger Woods of socio sexuality. It's just somebody that's so far, she is the tale of the tale. She's the Elon Musk of, of, of having sex.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  And I had a, I had a conversation with her. I sat down, I sat across from her. She was perfectly cordial. She had her defenses up at the start, but when she realized it wasn't going to be a, you know, cantankerous takedown conversation, it was, it was really nice. And I was looking, I mean, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. And I was looking for, is there some deception going on here? Is there some secret trauma that's leaking out? Is there whatever? And by the end of it, my summary is just, she is the most extreme socio sexual being that I've ever seen. She just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex.

• 1:24:25Chris Williamson?

  It's not alchemizing some childhood wound in a way that I think a lot of BDSM and kink actually is. There seems to be a good amount of data coming out that a good bit of BDSM and kink is, preferences for that are predisposed by some situations people have been through in childhood. That was Catherine Page Harden from UT. She was teaching me about that a couple of weeks ago and a, a couple of other conversations I've had.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  It's, it, it's, it's definitely unique, but I mean, yeah, maybe there'll be studies done on her at some point in future. Who knows?

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  The one who did a hundred said she wouldn't recommend it.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The one who did a thousand said that she'd do it again. So there, again, the, the, the, the people at the extremes, the people who are at the tail of the tale, they'll.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that's, that's good for her and it must've been fun for the, the thousand men too. I, I wondered, does she want to get married at some date?

• 1:25:19Chris Williamson?

  That would be actually, that could be a fit, that could be a fix for your incel problem. That could be, we could just put a thousand of the men who were struggling with the incel thing in there. And then that's a thousand fewer men who are maybe thinking that sex is inaccessible. Who knows?

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Yes, my wife thinks they're just caught up by the publicity that that's great sex is going on all over the place. And she says they probably just want the really attractive women, which are is unrealistic for them. She wonders have these insults made a serious effort to date, say, the the fat girls or the others who aren't nearly as much in demand.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Traditionally, historically, that's what what people sometimes did, you know, they found someone at about the same level. But but that was before there was the assumption that lots of people are having lots of great sex all the time. Which I'm told by the researchers who are studying this is that it's not nearly as as wild as that.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  The Hollywood version of what a young person's sex life is is not realistic. And it may be realistic even in Hollywood.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  But, you know, those are beautiful people with lots of money and status and so on. So I don't know.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  I don't have to you, you said you know, an expert on this. Well, have you tried to date the less attractive girls who are wishing for more attention and action?

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Insist you have to have the the gorgeous one. Well, you may be disappointed unless you're a big, rich, rich handsome man.

• 1:27:09Chris Williamson?

  There was a a really interesting article that was posted by my friend, Rob Henderson, a couple of days ago. And he was talking about people assume that it's this small number of men that are capturing sex from a large number of women. But it's not, it's a socio sexual few at the top. And yeah, there is, there is a little bit of a skew within there. But most people aren't having that much sex. Many people aren't having any sex at all. And there is a small number of people having loads of sex with each other. And that's that that's just a really interesting wrinkle, I think, in the sort of eighty twenty discourse that's been going on for a while.

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  And I knew that this had been, this had got turned upside down three or four years ago by a friend, Alex Date Psych. And and then Rob re reported on it the other day and basically found out the same thing. You've just got this this group of people who want to have sex with lots of people and. Yeah, everybody else is, I don't know, looking at it, maybe thinking it was good. I guess one interesting thing is probably more men would want to be in that group of highly socio-sexual people, whereas fewer women desire to be in. Most women who want to be in it are in it, presumably, whereas most men who want to be in it can't be in it.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, there's a big difference there again with the, the men wanting much more of it. They have it to man wanting much more in terms of variety.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was talking to another expert, Eli Finkel, and he said, yeah, the one night stand thing, that's, it's not entirely a myth, but it's way overstated. It's quite rare for people to get together and have sex just one time. I, I don't know the, the basis for that, but he knew, he, he knows much more than I do about that sort of thing.

• 1:29:01Chris Williamson?

  Right, Baumeister, ladies and gentlemen, right, you rule. I love your stuff. Everyone needs to go and check out your Substack, go and subscribe. The Existential Contrarian.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 1:29:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, The Existential Contrarian. It is a crime how, I mean, you're new on Substack, but everyone needs to go and do it. Check out the series on sexual novelty. I'm a massive fan. I read everything that you put out. I think you're great and I, I look forward to whatever you're doing next because every opportunity to read what you do and to talk to you is, is a real treat.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Okay, well, thank you, Chris, and it's been a great interview and a total pleasure for me as well.

• 1:29:31Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch.

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  Go on.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:30:00Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.