https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=g25BtxSlypo

Men understand that there’s a relationship between how successful they are and how attractive they are to women. And part of what motivates them is the game of that competition. So I worked with high-end lawyers for about 15 years, both men and women, and found some very interesting differences in that. But the men even regarded the money they made in bonuses at the end of the year for outstanding performance. They weren’t so interested in the money, they were interested in the money as a means of keeping score, it was a means of winning the competition. And you might say, well, competition for what? And the answer to that is, well, let’s call it competition, not for status exactly, but for reputation. But the consequence of a stellar reputation is that, and men who have that are much more attractive to women. And you might say, well, women go after wealth, but I think that’s nonsense. And I think that’s also belied by the relevant evolutionary biology theory, because what it shows, and tell me if I’ve got this wrong, is that women use wealth as a marker for attractiveness because they use wealth as a marker for competence. And what they’re after is the ability to generate wealth and to share it and to be generous with it, it has to be both, productivity and generosity. And a decent marker for the capacity to generate wealth is wealth, although it’s not the only criteria. So women are looking for competence, and men, it’s a very strange thing about men, they compete among themselves for competence-based reputation. And now I’ve been trying to figure out why, because you can imagine like a movie scenario where the quarterback of the football team wins a major championship, and all the other men put them on his shoulders and bring them out of the stadium, and he sleeps with the cheerleader that night. And you might ask yourself, well, why in the world would the men group together to elevate a given man to that sort of status if it means that he’s going to be the one that successfully reproduces? And my suspicion is that men learned to value competence probably as a consequence of hunting. So any given hunter, no matter how good he is at hunting, is going to fail in most hunts. So now if men band together to hunt, then the collective success is much larger. And so what that means is that if you’re going to be a hunter that provides a cross-hunting bouts, your skill as a hunter is one determinant, but your interpersonal skill in negotiating and establishing relationships with the rest of the hunters is even more important. So among hunter-gatherers, for example, if you’re the one who brings down the animal, it’s incumbent on you to downplay your contribution and to distribute the best parts of the animal to other people. And you’re doing that to foster your reputation as a generous person, and you’re doing that in part to ensure that there’s reciprocity in food distribution across multiple hunts. Now, the men are going to be willing to elevate the highest hunter to the highest position because I think it’s in their collective interest, it’s in their collective interest and in their individual interest to be the followers of the best man. And I think that’s so important in terms of their own reproductive fitness, which would be tied to the provision of food across hunts, that they’re willing to take the reproductive hit that’s, what would you say, implicit in elevating any given man among all other men. You could think about that in terms of hunting and you could think about that in terms of combat too. You know, if you put the most heroic warrior on your shoulders, you give him an evolutionary edge. But if you’re in his group, well then, you’ve got the benefits of being with the greatest warrior and the greatest hunter. And so I don’t know if the evolutionary biologists have been able to calculate out the relationship between establishing a reciprocal relationship with a great hunter or great warrior versus the costs of men competing to elevate a given man to the highest possible position. It’s a very weird thing that men do. No, I think you hit the nail on the head though. I mean, I think that the benefits of aligning yourself with somebody who’s very powerful, that I mean, think about it. If there’s somebody, and like, let’s say that he’s 1.0 and you’re sort of 1.1, and so there’s somebody who’s a better performer than you, you could get your ass kicked if you keep trying to have to fight with this guy. So there’s a big cost to you to trying to overturn this person and there’s a lot of benefits of aligning with the person who’s also really competent. And so I think- It would be true if it’s a Pareto distribution in terms of competence, right? Because the really competent person might be like 100 times more competent. Well, right, exactly. And so it’s like, I think that there’s a lot of benefits that come, especially to men, because of the hunting context of aligning with another man in that context. And there’s also this tendency in other, so this has been very well studied in non-human animals, but we see a very similar version of this in humans. But have you ever heard of lecking behavior? So a lek is a place where males within a species will gather to attract mates. It’s almost like a club. It’s like the frogs, like frogs, for example, are a lecking species. And the males will all go to this display area and they croak, right? And this is what attracts the females. And so the females will go toward where they hear the loudest, most impressive croak, because that male generally is larger in body size and it has higher levels of testosterone. And it will have a higher upstream. So the louder male attracts all the females. All the females. And so the males all wanna hang out with this guy because he’s attracting all the women. And the same is true if men align themselves with somebody who’s really high-performing. I mean, if you go out for drinks with Tom Brady, it’s not too bad to be Tom Brady 2.0. You know? You’re gonna be able to- To bask in the reflective glory. Yeah, bask in the reflective glory. Well, and the women would also assume that if the extraordinarily high-status male is hanging around with some character who looks like a dweeb on the surface, that there might be hidden depths and utility to his character or advantages in the mere fact that he’s proximal. Absolutely. So women, you said a lot. And in fact, some of my very early research, this is going deep. This is when I was in graduate school. I studied this phenomenon in humans, mate choice copying, because this is another thing that you see in females of other species, but you also see it in us. And this is males tend to be a somewhat ambiguous stimulus package. Because most males, a lot of the qualities that women are looking for aren’t immediately available just based on physical appearance. Right, so women have to kind of suss out, like what is there about this guy? And so when women see a beautiful woman with kind of an average looking guy, the first thing they think is what? He must be rich, or he must have some really amazing personality, or he must be really high in status. And it’s- Right, I wonder, is that magnified if he’s unattractive? Because one of the things you might suspect is that if a very beautiful woman is with a man who’s very nondescript, that there must be something about him that’s absolutely stellar. Absolutely stellar, yes. And so the magnitude of the gap between the woman, how beautiful the woman is, and then the appearance of the man sort of is linked with the degree to which women perceive that he has these amazing hidden qualities that make him a desirable partner. The bigger the gap, the more amazing the qualities, the smaller the gap, the less amazing the qualities. Oh, that’s very funny. So the proper mating strategy is if you’re a spectacularly under endowed male, is to hire a beautiful woman to go to clubs with you. Absolutely. Right, right. Absolutely, and you would actually probably do better than a more attractive man with the same woman, because people would think that you must really have something going on to have attracted her and look like that. Right, right. Yeah. Oh, that’s insanely complicated. That’s insanely comical. That’s insanely comical. Yeah. Yeah.