Sex and Dating Apps ｜ Rob Henderson ｜ EP 193 (-6ZyQKiwMQw)

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I wonder if this has something to do with just sort of socio-sexual orientation of, you know, whoever happens to be expounding the belief. So if you tend to be a person who’s had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions, maybe you had the expectation of monogamy and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences, then you may start to be very preoccupied with the issue of consent. I think that’s exactly what happens. I think that… so, you know, we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs and they’re shielded to some degree. But my suspicions are is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable. It’s just not the case emotionally. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased today to be able to speak with Rob Henderson. He’s a PhD student in evolutionary and social psychology and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor’s degree in science in psychology from Yale and is a veteran of the US Air Force. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Quillette, among other outlets. He is currently writing a memoir tentatively titled Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class to be published in late 2022 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. He is possibly best known for the idea of luxury beliefs, which is where I first came across him first published in the New York Post in short form and then in longer form in Quillette. Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Rob. It’s a pleasure to have you here. It’s great to be here, Dr. Peterson. Thank you. No problem. So let’s talk first of all about luxury beliefs and exactly what that means and how you came up with the idea and what the consequence of disseminating it has been. Yes. So the luxury beliefs idea I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower social classes. And I mean, there are multiple strands to this idea, but it originally started with my observations in undergrad at Yale. So as you said, you know, currently I’m a grad student at Cambridge. Before this, I was a student at Yale. Before that, my life was a lot different. I grew up in foster homes in L.A. Later I was adopted into working class town in Northern California, served in the military. So I just had a completely different set of life experiences and background than many of my peers at this Ivy League University. And in that New York Post essay, the original luxury beliefs essay, I opened with this story of this conversation I had with a classmate of mine in undergrad. We’re sort of talking about relationships and career. And she said to me, you know, I just think monogamy is outdated. I just think it’s not really good for society. I think it’s just this sort of old patriarchal way of thinking. And I’d heard things like this before, but this time I asked her, well, what do you plan to do? You know, what do you want to do with your own life and with your own relationship situation and so on in the future? And she herself said, well, I’d like to get married and settle down and have a family at some point, you know, sort of after my career takes off. And I asked her, well, what was your life like before that? How did you grow up? And essentially she had come from a very stable, intact two-parent family. And so this puzzled me because this was emblematic of so many of the opinions I’d heard of my in undergrad from my peers. They would say one thing, they would believe this one set of interesting or unusual beliefs that I’d never heard before from anyone else. But then they themselves had come from sort of more conventional upbringings and they themselves planned to have that kind of life, that sort of more stable traditional family. I’d once heard someone put this way that, you know, a lot of sort of affluent people, they, what is it? They walk the fifties and talk the sixties. And I wondered, you know, what’s going on here? And so while I was an undergrad, I came across a series of papers, a series of ideas, both from psychology and sociology. So these sort of sociological aspects, I drew this from Thorsten Veblen and Veblen’s idea, you know, he wrote the theory of the leisure class in the late 19th century. And he basically said that, you know, the elites of his day, they broadcast their status with their material goods, with, you know, expensive clothes, tuxedos, evening gowns. They take up these very expensive and time consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. And all of this is to basically indicate their high social position. And, you know, some people say this book was written sort of tongue in cheek, but I think there’s a lot of truth to this. Now, if we fast forward to the modern day, I think it’s, there are two things going on with why it’s not actually fashionable anymore to display your status with luxury goods, with material goods. Number one, I think it’s become viewed as kind of gauche. If you walk around an Ivy League campus today, the students don’t look like, they don’t have the Ivy look of like the 1950s or the 1960s. They kind of just look like regular college students, number one. And I mean, this is true pretty much anywhere. If you look at very wealthy people and the famous example of this would be Mark Zuckerberg wearing cargo shorts and a hoodie. It’s just not that cool anymore to wear clothes that indicate that you’re high social status. The other thing is material goods have become more affordable. You know, even my sort of poor and working class friends back home, all of them have iPhones, you know, maybe, of course, like their life aren’t as comfortable as my peers in college. But a lot of material goods have become so affordable that it’s become harder to stand out in that way. Yeah, you see that reflected, I think, to some degree in the decline in burglary. Material objects just aren’t as worth as much as they were. And so they don’t distinguish between people anymore. It’s not worth it anymore to steal things. And so that’s the aspect of it that led me to think, OK, well, first of all, you know, luxury goods are not being displayed as much by the upper class. But I still think it still seems to me they care very much about social status. And this is where the psychology aspect of it comes in from a researcher named Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley. He’s a psychologist who found he and his colleagues found that basically the upper class cares the most about social status. They care the most about obtaining it and they care the most about preserving it, which at first I thought was a bit counterintuitive. I thought that perhaps the most downtrodden kind of people who are in the lowest rungs of society, we care the most about obtaining money and wealth and status. But that’s actually not true. It’s the people who are already at the top who care the most about it. And that’s really what I saw at Yale, too, where these people were very much they were strivers. They were very interested in pursuing status. Do you suppose that’s a partial consequence of the fact that failure is perhaps more painful than success is rewarding? So once you have it, let’s say you have high social status, you’re very much inclined to keep it because the alternative would be so, I suppose, in some sense, unthinkable, so catastrophic for you. Right. So so this is the idea of almost like this prospect theory idea that when you have it, it hurts twice as much as obtaining it. I think there is something to this idea. I noticed there was a lot of anxiety among many of my peers, this feeling that they have to keep up, they have to constantly strive, they have to get onto the next goal. And I think what exacerbates this feeling is that they are surrounded by people just like them. It was it was a bit unlike my own experience. When I had gotten to undergrad, I I thought like, OK, so I’m OK. I got into college like that was my goal. I never thought I was ever going to get into college. And so when I got there, I thought like, oh, I’m OK. And then I saw that these people didn’t feel OK, that they had to get the next internship. They had to get into law school. They had to do this. They had to do that. And I think a lot of it is because they’re around people. They’ve grown up around those kinds of people their entire life. And so there’s this belief like it was inevitable, like they always had to do this. There was never a question of their success. Right. Right. As for me, it wasn’t like that. Yeah. Well, when I was pressure, when I taught in Boston at Harvard, I mean, one of the things I noticed was that the students there were, you know, they were pleased to be at Harvard. There was no doubt about that. But they it was extremely competitive implicitly. And I suppose that’s part of the consequence of it being essentially based as much as it could be on on competitive merit. And so it was also the case that many of these students had been outstanding where they had come from. They were class fellow Victorians and usually had at least one or two other major accomplishments under their belt. But then when they got to these intensely selected institutes, they were also in some sense average instantly and below average in many ways, because, you know, no matter how smart you are, the probability that you’re the smartest person in your class at Harvard is pretty damn low. And so the implicit level of competition was extremely high. And so that might also exacerbate the sort of tendencies that you’re describing. And people tend to compare themselves to their immediate peers, not to the broader world. Right. And and this is part of why I think is driving this. You know, I make this this point in the essay that they’re they’re Dunbar’s number, you know, the 150 closest people to them are 150 baby millionaires. And so if that’s your social circle, then you feel this constant underlying tension to display your status in some way. And so my claim is that the affluent in large part have reattached or they sort of detached status to goods and reattached it to beliefs. And this was driven by my sort of what I saw where I heard opinions and ideas that I had never heard anywhere else. I mean, probably the most contentious recent example of what luxury belief is this idea of abolishing the police. To me, this is so emblematic of very comfortable, highly affluent, educated people who would never have to bear the cost of what that policy would entail. And yet they are propounding it there. You know, they’re they’re broadcasting it and promoting it with the knowledge that this is going to make them look good to their peers. It’s going to make them look progressive and interesting and provocative and win them all these social points from their social circle without really giving much thought to what would happen to the poorest among us. And one of the things that always struck me about. Beliefs in progressive, so-called progressive causes among high status individuals or those who are about to be high status individuals, which would typify everyone in an Ivy League university. I mean, if they’re not high economic status at the present time, they certainly will be by all likelihood by the time they’re 30 or 40. So they’re already part of the upper class, regardless of their claims. They seem to want to have it both ways. They want to be members of the most privileged class and then also be rewarded for their allyship, let’s say, with the oppressed. And so they get to be rich and privileged and friend to the oppressed at the same time, which always seemed to me to be a form of of of greed rather than sympathy, rather than genuine sympathy. There’s not much self-sacrifice involved in the adoption of the beliefs that you just described. And what I don’t remember who said it when the upper class catches a cold, the lower class gets pneumonia. And so these destabilizing beliefs are a lot harder on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure than they are for people at the top who, as you said, tend to get married disproportionately often compared to people who are lower down on the socioeconomic structure. Yeah, there’s there’s sort of this sinister theme that I saw sometimes where I would see students, for example, say that investment banks are emblematic of capitalist oppression. And then I would see those same exact students attending recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs. And my interpretation of what they were doing here is basically they were trying to undercut their rivals. They were trying to undercut their competition. So if you and I are students and I can convince you that investment banks are evil, don’t work there. That’s one less competitor that I have in my quest to the top. Some people have told me that this is too cynical. I used to think that as time goes on, I’m most likely. Yeah, well, I was struck, too, at Harvard by the disproportionate movement of Harvard undergraduates into financial services. So I didn’t understand until I went to the United States and worked at that extraordinarily powerful university what a staggering proportion of the students end up in jobs exactly like that. And they are considered very broadly, I would say, among the undergraduates as the highest status jobs. They certainly have tremendously high starting salaries and mean Harvard produced comparatively few scientists, let’s say. So, yeah, I noticed this. I mean, I’ve seen the data on this, something like 30 percent of undergrads at places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, at least 30 percent, it might be closer to 40 percent, end up working in either investment, banking, finance or I think tech is the third most popular. Right. And they end up being often being consultants and so forth. So and fair enough, I mean, they’re high cognitive ability individuals generally. And so it’s not surprising that they vie and they’re competitive for the reasons that you described and other reasons. There’s powerful socialization at work, too. So it’s not surprising that they gravitate towards those jobs. But then I suppose to what degree do you think beliefs of this sort are also motivated by guilt? I mean, I’ve often I’ve often seen, you know, in the United States in particular, more well to do people tend to put their children in private schools. And I think there’s a tremendous amount of guilt about that because they are, well, they are racially segregated, comparatively speaking, at least along some dimensions. And that’s a really not an egalitarian thing to do, even though you may be motivated to provide whatever advantage you can for your children. So is it guilt as well as the broadcasting of status, in your opinion? I don’t know. I think that there’s a lot of performative guilt. It seems like they talk a lot about guilt. But when it comes to actually paying any kind of personal cost, I really don’t see their their behavior is aligning with their luxury beliefs. Like you said, they’re willing to shell out all this money for private schools. They’re willing to pay money to live in secure neighborhoods. There was a story last year sort of at the height of the the pandemic. In addition to a lot of the protests and the riots that were going on in Manhattan, a lot of rich New Yorkers fled to the Hamptons and they had hired private security. And, you know, that’s that’s perfectly sensible. I mean, I understand why they would do that. But this is sort of the the actions of the affluent that they take, the broadcast one set of beliefs, but then privately, they’ll do everything they can to secure the their safety and the future of their their children. So maybe it’s guilt, but I’m not sure how how genuine it is. I mean, I just saw like, I mean, there’s so many examples of these luxury beliefs that I saw from, like I said, the the police issue to the open borders, to decriminalization of drugs. I mean, all of these these issues, I think, are, I think, these issues, I think, are disproportionately harmful to working class, lower class people. And there’s there’s no cost, no actual maybe there’s guilt, but there’s no actual sort of costly benefit or costly extraction. Well, it also may be that when you’re relatively have been relatively protected, but implicitly, let’s say, OK, so you live in a gated community, you live among wealthy people, you live in a neighborhood where crime is essentially non-existent, where privation is essentially non-existent, all of these things. Then the cost of. Order provision seems disproportionately high because you have no idea what it’s good for. And so you can imagine that you might also be inclined to only look at the negative side of, well, drug criminalization and police funding and all of that, because. It doesn’t appear in your world that there’s a necessity for those things. So if you’ve lived your whole life so comfortably and you’ve never experienced any kind of hardship or any serious hardship, then a lot of this is taken for granted. Well, at least not of the not the kind of hardship. I mean, it’s not like people who are well off don’t still have hardship because their families get sick and there’s still all sorts of but they’re protected very well from social unrest, let’s say. And so the means necessary to ensure that society remains at peace, the enforcement reasons, for example, and that would include border protection, seem exclusionary and unnecessary when they’ve never been a threat of any sort at all. Yes, I mean, even beyond the physical safety issue. One other interesting example of this phenomenon, I think, is a lot of people in tech, these sort of tech tycoons, will sort of promote the benefits of addictive technology while privately they go on these sort of dopamine fasts. They don’t use this technology. Steve Jobs famously would not let his kids use an iPad. A lot of other people in tech reportedly tell their nannies to carefully monitor how much their children use smartphones and so on. There are TV personalities who own television networks, but they don’t have a TV at home. And a lot of this, I think, is sort of like, you know, don’t get high on your own supply. You know, addictive technology is OK for the masses. All of you can sort of get sucked into these screens, but I’m going to be very careful with how me and my children and my family interact with this technology that I’m getting rich off of. So it goes even beyond the sort of physical security. I think it’s more even more so about, you know, you’re taking care of yourself while not so much thinking about the harmful effects on on others. Yeah, so it’s a matter of wanting to have it both ways. And so what would you consider? What is the universe of luxury beliefs? Well, I would say that luxury beliefs are primarily situated, of course, among highly educated, affluent people. And essentially, I mean, there’s I suppose, you know, I’m not keeping this compendium, at least not yet, of every luxury belief that exists. But essentially, if someone of a high social position expresses a belief, I think it’s important for anyone who holds any kind of influential position in society to think about, well, what are the consequences of if that belief were to be implemented and especially when it trickles down? Spoken like a conservative. Yeah, well, I mean, conservatives are always concerned with unintended consequences. Right. And so they don’t presume that hypothetically benevolent social policies are going to produce a positive result. Sure. And I think there’s there are social patterns that that give reason for concern. So, for example, the this idea of sexual promiscuity, I think the latest manifestation of this is polyamory. I had this conversation with a friend of mine a couple of years ago. He told me, you know, Rob, when I when I open up my my Tinder app, the dating app, and I put the radius to just a couple of miles around. He also attends a university. When I when I put it just to a couple of miles around, it’s pretty much all of my matches, all of the other profiles I see are other other women students at the university. And when I look at their bios, half of them say that they’re polyamorous or they’re interested in an open relationship or they’re not looking for anything too serious. And then he told me when he extended the radius to match with women outside of the university into the town, which is sort of this working class town, he said that about half of the women that he saw on his app were single moms. And so and it’s the same age group, right, like 18 to, say, 23 years old. So in the university, they’re interested in having fun. And then the 18 to 23 year old working class women are having a much different experience of life. And my claim is that the luxury beliefs of the former have basically trickled down and wrecked havoc among the latter. So starting in the 1960s, there’s data from Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and others, which you may have seen showing, for example, that in 1960 children born to working class families and children born to affluent families, 95 percent of them were born and raised by both of their birth parents. And if you fast forward from 1960 to 2005, the affluent families, the children of the affluent had dipped slightly. So it was 95 percent in 1960 and by 2005 it had dropped to 85 percent. So it was a slight drop, but by and large, still overwhelmingly intact families. And for the working class, again, in 1960 was 95 percent. And by 2005, it had dropped to 30 percent. So a completely different world out there, too, because there’s an interesting progression between different ethnicities and races along that curve. So the first correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this to be the case. The first population that really affected was the black population. Then it was the Hispanic population. Then it was the white population. But the curves match. They’re just they’re just like 10 years apart. If you if you look at the same socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, that’s a good example of policies that are hypothetically liberal at the high end, having a devastating effect farther down. And, you know, these people who it’s people who claim that marriage, for example, is a patriarchal institution. Well, the best rejoinder to that I know of is then, well, why did the rich get married and the poor don’t? They choosing to oppress themselves, given their options. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I think it’s an absolutely foolish theory to begin with. But but that seems to me to be a piece of data that indicates quite clearly that if you have a choice, that’s what you pick. Or if you have the widest possible level of choices, that’s what you choose. And so, yeah, it’s a it’s a catastrophe, although, you know, that’s that the fact that it’s a catastrophe is also hidden by a whole other set of luxury beliefs like all families are of equal value, which in some sense is true. Right. Because if you’re thinking about how each person should be valued and whether or not the child of a single mother should be valued, well, obviously, the answer to that is yes. But that doesn’t mean that all family configurations are equally functional on average. And I think the data is absolutely clear that children with intact two parent families do far better. Now, if you get divorced, there are things you can do that moderate the effect of the divorce. What’s his name? He wrote The Boy Crisis. Warren Farrell has documented Farrell has documented a number of ways that people who get divorced can ensure that their children do about as well as they would in an intact family. And some of that involves approximately 50 percent contact with each parent. I think the parents also need to attend counseling. Third party counseling so that they can maintain a reasonable relationship and they have to live within something approximating a 20 minute drive from one another, something like that. But I mean, that takes a lot of balancing and dancing to replicate that environment. And it seems impossible in our society to have a discussion about the fact that some forms of families. Are better for children than others. And because we think of any imposition of a value analysis of that sort, as discriminatory and, you know, in some sense, it is discriminatory because when you say that one thing is better, you’re also saying at the same time that the opposite of that is worse. Well, then it depends on who you’re trying to focus on. And while I I go by the data fundamentally and, you know, children born to young single mothers, especially if the young single mothers are troubled and therefore also easy targets for predatory males, they don’t do well. And there’s multi generational effects of that. And we’re too bloody naive and and. I don’t know. Immature, I guess, to have a serious conversation about such things. And we also don’t know how to put the genie back in the bottle. But there’s no tax break, for example, for stable married couples. So there’s no economic policy that supports it. Yeah, I mean, I’m not entirely sure that that would even change much. I mean, I think this is much more of a cultural issue than an economic issue. I mean, you know, a lot of people say, well, the reason well, it’s kind of interesting how how many different excuses are produced for this. I mean, like you said, a lot of people say that it’s this patriarchal institution. But then why are the rich getting married more than the poor? Well, I don’t know what that means. Let’s talk about that for a minute. I mean, sure. I suppose that claim is grounded in the historical. Interpretation that. In the past, women were treated in some sense as the equivalent of property. And. Now, whether or not that’s a reasonable interpretation of the past is entirely up for debate, although we could say that it was more true 150 years ago than it is now, but we could also point out that birth control was a lot less. Reliable. Yeah. And so the relationships between men and well, and women didn’t have the freedom they have today for all sorts of reasons, hygienic reasons for that matter. I mean, one of the things that freed women was the easy access to technology that dealt with menstrual cycle and public toilets and all of that. I mean, we just don’t understand how much sanitary technology, for example, is built into the infrastructure as well as safety because women can walk down the street unaccompanied without any problem. Comparatively speaking, we don’t understand how much of that has changed the relationship between the sexes. And so there may have been property like associations with marriage 150 years ago. But first of all, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that was a patriarchal institution. I mean, it was still the case that the idea was that the men would stick around and provide economic support and care for the children. And that’s a long term binding contract. And it seems to me the opposite opposite in some sense of libertine freedom. So where’s the patriarchy in that precisely? I mean, women weren’t equal in some sense, but there are reasons for that. I mean, many people have made the argument that by loosening the norms around marriage, it’s actually been to the benefit of of men. In some sense, you know, to be able to have lots of promiscuous partners with many different women and perhaps impregnate some of them and not have to stick around. There’s no obligation to them beyond producing child support. That means that it’s advantageous to psychopathic men. Right, dark triad types. Well, exactly, because, you know, the hallmark of psychopathy is short term advantage taken by a given individual without care for anyone else. And it certainly seems to me like dating apps like Tinder. Now, I don’t I don’t want to call every male who’s successful on Tinder a psychopath. I’m not saying that, but I would say that it isn’t obvious to me at all that. If you’re a successful polyamorous male on Tinder, and so that’s going to be a very tiny subset of men that are hyper selected by women, a tiny subset of men who who receive almost no rejection. They’re set up to learn to be psychopathic because all their interactions with other people can be devoted to short term sexual gratification with no emotional intimacy or long term commitment. And that’s a hell of a training ground as far as I’m concerned. That’s that I mean, it depends on what you want for society. But as you said, even the affluent women who profess a desire for polyamory, which is complete bloody rubbish in my estimation and completely underestimates the economic consequences of sex, they still dream of. The fairy tale princess who meets the prince, who, you know, wakes her up with a kiss and and are married happily ever after. So it’s it’s such bloody nonsense. We allow our culture to be run by the pathetic fantasies of immature adolescent. Delusion, fundamentally, as far as I can tell. There was a study I saw I think it was last year on this very question of who uses dating apps and sort of their personality traits and so on. And they did indeed find and these were just university students, which, you know, take it for what it’s worth. But the the people who are using the dating apps, which is about one third of the the students in the sample pool, the they were sort of more likely to be interested in short term sexual conquest, not really surprised, more more interested and more likely to use drugs and alcohol, more likely to have sort of callous sexual attitudes. I can’t remember the exact term they use for this for this construct. But basically, they were more likely to agree with statements like sex is like a game where one person wins and the other person loses. So if you’re using a dating app, you’re more likely to say yes to that kind of question. So in a way, you know, the status element to that, I mean, there’s the old trope of notches in the bed frame. And among adolescent, competitive adolescent males, there’s no reason. There’s every reason to be competitive about how much you can drink and how many people you can lure into bed. I mean, even if you don’t necessarily believe that personally, you know, at a deep level, and maybe you suffer for it emotionally to some degree, even though you might obscure that from yourself, it’s certainly something to score points with with your peers. And there’s plenty of that kind of, you know, that that competitive bantering in adolescent, especially adolescent male culture. And I mean, it’s not surprising to some degree, because adolescent males have to figure out how to navigate the sexual landscape. And they’re going to do that in all sorts of awkward and finally unproductive ways. It’s not an easy thing to bind or to regulate properly. But I mean, these technologies like Tinder, Tinder is a transformative technology. And it’s radically underestimated in terms of its potency, because it produces hyper successful predatory males and reduces rejection. It eliminates rejection, because I mean, you can be totally rejected, in which case you’re a failure on Tinder. But in normal pre mating interaction, let’s say there’s a high probability of rejection, especially on the part of males. And that there’s actually research on this. Yes. On Tinder. Yes. So there’s there’s research basically showing that. So on Tinder, women are they they like, you know, swipe right. They like the profiles of only 4% of the men that they see on the app. Whereas for for men, when they see female profiles, they swipe right or like more than 60%. That’s 60, 60% of the profiles they see. So that’s really what concentrating on, because that’s a great example of hypergamy. Right. So women mate across and up. Success hierarchies. And men mate across and down. Right. So and women like men who are about four years older, cross culturally. They like men who manifest signs of success, as well as being handsome and personable and all of that. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that they’re looking to equalize the economic disparity that exists because women take a harder hit from sex and pregnancy than men. So they’re looking to equalize that. And no wonder they’re looking for someone who’s competent. This is for long term mating, who’s competent and generous. Right. You want both of those. So competence would be intelligence, general cognitive ability and the markers that go along with that. They want conscientiousness or openness as well as other desirable personality traits. And they want generosity, honesty, all of those. But so they’re looking for someone who can provide. Well, it’s not because they’re greedy, precisely. It’s because, well, they’re going to put themselves in a more vulnerable position if they have a child. And we know this because even affluent women who have a child by themselves or who get divorced tend to drop down the socioeconomic hierarchy a fair bit, which is, of course, why alimony payments and all of that are necessary. So this hypergamy means women are much more selective in their mating than men are. And that’s true cross culturally. And it’s not surprising because they pay a bigger price for sex. It’s more dangerous for women because they can get pregnant and it might be more dangerous emotionally as well. And I believe that would be a reflection of their higher levels of agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotionality. So women do put themselves at risk more. And that might be why there’s such a intense debate about what constitutes consent on campuses, despite these beliefs in polyamory and all of these things. But so anyways, on Tinder, as you said, women select four percent of the men. Yes. So that means I would imagine that four percent is very high up on what you’re calling the success hierarchy. I have a friend, a good looking guy. He was very active on Tinder for a while and he accumulated more than twenty thousand matches on the app. Twenty thousand. Twenty thousand. And he was so successful that Tinder pinpointed him early on and gave him all kinds of free perks and bonuses and lifted his radius restrictions, gave him the Tinder gold app or whatever version of it, basically trying to entice him to continue to use the app. Yeah, they wanted to entice him. This is so amazing. They never want you to leave. These are unbelievably pernicious and vicious broad scale social experiments that are far more potent than anything like government policy. Well, I mean, he’s in he’s in Genghis Khan territory with twenty thousand. I don’t know. I mean, it’s really it’s really. Twenty thousand. Yeah. Well, my suspicions are he tried. And I know he’ll get a kick out of that. That records for for like athletes, for example, and movie stars, there’s some of the men have reportedly slept with thousands of women. Yes, Will Chamberlain and there’s others who are in the same category, but there are people there are men who have women throwing themselves at them all the time, lining up for them. And I’ve read biographies of people who had that sort of thing happen as well. But that’s not the typical male experience. I know the typical male experience is all rejection. Exactly. Right. They might get a couple of matches a week. Right. Right. So while so you see what’s happening is that Tinder is one of the forces that’s transforming monogamy into polygamy. And the problem with polygamy is that it follows a Pareto distribution like the distribution of wealth is that some tiny minority of men get all the sexual opportunity and all the rest get virtually none. And that is a recipe for social instability. I mean, that that sort of deregulation of romantic relationships, you know, whereas in the past, it was expected for you to have one partner and over time settle down, whereas now it’s a total free for all. I mean, there are aspects to this that a lot of people don’t think about. I mean, I talk to young people, so I have younger friends who I talk to who are sort of very active on on the apps and sort of the dating scene. And they’ll tell me things like it’s even easier to cheat. So in the past, if you wanted to be unfaithful to your partner, it was risky because, you know, essentially like you had the same social circle, you had the same friends, everyone knew everyone else. But now with the apps, you can match with someone who is completely outside of your social reality, outside of your partner’s social reality. You can have a very discreet rendezvous. No one will ever know about this. Ghosting has become more common. I don’t know if you about ghosting, but it’s basically where you’re in a relationship with someone. And after you have sex once or however many times, then you just vanish. You never see that person again. Delete, delete them from your phone, block them on social media. You never have to see them again. And there’s no social cost to this. That’s a real psychopathic conquest strategy. Yes. Right. Yes. Because psychopaths, they tend to form relationships that are very predatory and then disappear because that way their reputations stay intact as long as they can continue to disappear. But I’m interested in what you said before about whether this is actually sort of cultivating psychopathy in young people and young men where, you know, in the in the past, you know, typically a psychopath would do that on their own. But now with the apps and the technology removing all of the friction from, you know, breaking up with someone or having to communicate with someone that you no longer want to see them. I think a lot of people who ghost others, they’re not even thinking in those terms. They’re not thinking I want to maliciously hurt this person or I don’t care about this person. It’s just like it’s easy. You know, you press a few buttons on your smartphone and you can move on to the next conquest. And I think a lot of people wouldn’t act that way otherwise. Well, the question would be what happens to you after you do that four or five times? You know, let’s say you’re not particularly psychopathic to begin with. It’s like you you you learn what you practice. And I would say, look, if if you’re using people continually as a means to an end, and I think sex is probably the most effective way of doing that, then you’re establishing a pattern of interaction between you and other people at perhaps the deepest possible level. And so if you do that repeatedly, first of all, you’re not you’re certainly not engaging in anything that might be regarded as a as a meaningful or deep relationship. Quite the contrary, you regard that as excess baggage. That’s an impediment to your next conquest, so to speak. So how would that not? I mean, it’d be now you said there was research on Tinder. Has there been research on the relationship between the dark triad and these hyper successful men? Well, I’ve seen research on dark triad and Tinder use and people who are high on dark triad do tend to be more successful, accumulate more partners, specifically whether this is related to gender and whether men are more successful or more likely to hurt others using these apps. I haven’t seen anything on that. I have interestingly seen, I think this was from Pew, where they broke down the data by education level and they asked people questions like, have you ever been harassed on this dating app? Have you ever met someone on a dating app who inflicted physical harm on you? So basically the wide variety of negative experiences through using dating apps, and they found that people who are not college graduates were far more likely, the women were far more likely to report negative experiences on the dating apps compared to college educated women. And to me, this is also indicative of this sort of social class divide. Another manifestation of the luxury belief of sexual promiscuity, where you introduce these dating apps, you have no idea what’s going to happen or how this is going to warp society and how people are going to interact in romantic relationships. And it’s disproportionately harming lower educated, lower income women who are, like you’re saying, they’re probably more likely to meet psychopaths, they’re probably perhaps less adept in some ways at screening for certain kinds of guys. The other thing is, and I only connect to these… Well, it’s basically if they’re single mothers. Right. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, they’re a lot easier to prey upon. I mean, their straights are a lot more desperate and they’ve knocked themselves out of the single girl dating market and lowered their market value, so to speak. I hate to speak of it in terms like that, but it’s clearly the case because to initiate a relationship with a woman who has a child already is to initiate a relationship that has a lot higher upfront cost, the complexity of negotiating the relationship with the child, the additional responsibility that has to be taken on instantly. And none of that’s the least bit trivial. So that means, and we know that in general, if you do a triangular, imagine a triangular representation of a social hierarchy on any valued dimension, the people who are at the lowest level are those who are most susceptible to any sort of destructive tendency that comes whistling through. They don’t have as much social support. They’re a lot closer to abject poverty. They don’t have the broad social network or the opportunities. So everything affects them disproportionately, including epidemic illnesses. It’s the case throughout the kingdom of life that low status confers vulnerability. That’s why people go for higher status, at least in part. Yeah, so the Tinder, I mean, I don’t know how widespread Tinder use is. I don’t know that much about Tinder, but when I first found out about it, I thought this is a technology that while they certainly named it properly because Tinder starts fires and it’s a fire starter and not just sexually. Something like 40% last I saw something like 40% of people under 30 are using the apps, I would imagine it’s probably higher now, especially in the wake of COVID. So the data that I saw collected, I think in 2019 but after COVID and the pandemic and the lockdowns. There’s no other way to meet people. So I’d imagine a lot more people download those apps, and we’ll see if they wean themselves off or if they’re hooked. I mean these tech companies use very manipulative strategies I talked to an executive I won’t say which dating app this was, but he told me that some dating apps. Some dating apps will basically what they call, I think they’re called seeding, where they’ll put fake profiles of very attractive usually women right because men are actually more likely to use dating apps and are sort of more likely to pay for the premium profiles, compared to women who don’t have to because they’re going to get matches anyway. So anyway the the dating app companies they’ll see them with fake attractive women profiles and intentionally match with men who have recently downloaded a new profile basically newly created one. And the idea here is that if they if they download the app, and they immediately match with an attractive woman. And then they usually have a couple of conversational exchanges like hey how’s it going good how are you. And then that’s it, the, the robot no longer response to the user. But the reason why this is done is basically to give them a little hit right it gives them it’s like drugs. Give them a little hit, and now they’re major hit. You bet. It’s a major hit. Yeah, yeah. And so basically they called it chasing the dragon, which is basically a term from from from drug usage right from heroin you give them a little hit and then they’re going to be chasing that high for the rest of their lives. So, you know, I think that there’s so many complexities to this. Yeah, it is and and then yeah, they are creating a lot of I think a lot of heartbreak and a lot of frustration. I mean, until the AI people get all over that. Well, I mean, by then. Imagine if you’re interacting with someone fake. I mean, that can be tailored to your desire. Be people I’d have all you’d have to do is look at the pictures that someone was looking at produce a composite. That’s an amalgam of those attractive women, let’s say and mean that the possibility for manipulation is almost infinite and you won’t say much dating app that’s too bad because they deserve the exposure but you know I understand your reticence. That’s really unbelievably appalling and malevolent. Well, I will say that if if one app is doing it then that means more than likely all are. So it almost doesn’t even matter. Yeah, they’re probably all doing some version of that because that’s how they get users. Right. Yeah, well, it’s not that clever an idea, you know, it’s a pretty obvious idea in a very crooked and horrible sort of way. So, it’s not like it would take a genius to think it up. Yeah, and so, so this idea of, oh and I wanted to go back so so this idea of differently educated women, different social classes having different experiences on the dating apps. Well they’re also having entirely different experiences in in the real world too in terms of their dating and romantic relationships after the erosion of marriage. After the sort of deteriorating norms around dating and romance. You know, I talked to some people from my hometown for example, and I think about, you know, the kinds of guys who stayed behind who didn’t go off to college who didn’t join the military, who just sort of languished and hung around there. These are not, you know, just to put it bluntly these are not. It’s not Prince charming. And so when women are dating these men, and there’s no social norms no no forces constraining them many of them act very poorly. There’s alcoholism a lot of drug use, you know verbal and sometimes physical abuse emotional abuse. A lot of these guys who sort of are not not so educated, don’t have a lot of money and not a lot of life prospects, when they get involved with a woman they don’t necessarily treat her very well. You know, in the past I think that there were stronger norms around how you’re supposed to treat the opposite sex and how you’re supposed to interact with them date them what’s expected of you and so on I think with the sort of dissolution of expectations has come a lot more trouble for lower income young women. Yeah, hypothetically the ones that the progressives are trying to do something for. Removing this constraints of patriarchal relationships for example, the question always is what flows in when you remove the dikes right I mean that’s another problem I suppose in some sense that’s analogous to the protection of social classes. Many of these institutions that are so casually criticized, we don’t know what forces shape them. So you know I’ve been pilloried in the press repeatedly for pointing out that normative monogamy controls male aggression. Now that it’s amazing to me that I’ve been slashed to ribbons for making that case because I thought that was like anthropology 101. So, you know there’s two things that every society needs to control and one is female fecundity because of its high cost and the other is male aggression, it’s like well I thought everyone knew that if they were even moderately educated and well how do you control that regulate it for everyone’s interest, particularly for the interest of children, the answer seems to be the imposition of monogamous norms. Now people object well are people truly monogamous and the answer is not if you set up the environment to differentially award hyper successful polyamorous males, which is exactly what Tinder does and there are societies where that’s the case where one man has a thousand wives so to speak and 999 men have none. But those aren’t societies that are stable and those young men who have nothing to do, find things to do and they aren’t necessarily the sorts of things that you want them to be doing because what the hell do they have to lose? Fundamentally, and it’s not a good idea to generate a society full of young men who have very little to lose. So, I and it is an appalling thing that the privileged classes are more likely to disparage marriage, let’s say. And these ideas trickle down over time they sort of permeate throughout society because elites affluent educated people wield disproportionate influence whether it’s through media, pop culture, fashion. Do you know, here’s something cool. So, do you know that names drift down the social hierarchy? Well, so influential upper class people will produce a name for their child. And then that name gets popularized all the way down the social hierarchy until it becomes passe. And so and becomes more and more common as it drifts down. So, this influence that you’re describing you can measure it everywhere. They’re the fashion leaders, they’re on the cutting edge and everyone imitates. Yes. And I think that so you know, of course, like actual fashion clothing, of course, the sort of trendsetters, and then it trickles down to everyone else. I didn’t I didn’t know this about names, which is really interesting. But I think it is also for sort of moral beliefs as well. So, one idea that I’ve sort of been playing with maybe this is, you know, a little bit dangerous for me to say but I’ve been thinking about this you know who was championing sort of color blindness integration, this idea that you know we should treat everyone on their merits and so on I mean, whatever 50 or 60 years ago, this was a very progressive idea and it was mostly championed by highly educated people were affluent people. And so, you know, it’s not a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s a new idea. It’s not an important thing in their lives. And so now that the elites have spread this belief, how do they once again distinguish themselves from the Hoi P樦 from those middle and working class people? They once again, have to make race and important feature of our social reality. I got a comment about your theories there for a sec, if you don’t mind. When Francis Galton, 150 years ago, started studying, he thought about it as excellence, something like that. I mean, some of the IQ research came out of that. He started to measure people on a whole variety of different dimensions. But his conception of excellence, of superiority, let’s say, wasn’t so much cognitive capacity. The more differentiated sorts of things that we might measure today and associate with some degree of value, conscientiousness, creativity, intelligence. Galton, who was an English aristocrat, which is the reason I’m bringing this up, was at the forefront of that movement. And he believed, like most English aristocrats of his time, that England was a superior culture and that English aristocrats were the hallmark of English superiority. But that superiority was fundamentally, I would say, moral. That the superiority that was being searched for wasn’t economic, exactly. That the economic superiority was an indicator of the moral superiority. And that would be associated with something like moral purity and associated with disgust. Now George Orwell talked about, because he was from relatively higher social status. I think he was upper middle class. But he said he had a visceral distaste of the working class and he had to overcome that. And he did. He worked in restaurants and he worked in all sorts of jobs. He went to war. I mean, Orwell strove to overcome that visceral disgust. And disgust is the opposite of disgust is purity. And that’s associated with a kind of moral superiority. And so one of the things that your idea, one of the ideas that your concept brings up is the notion that the central axis of social hierarchy is something like assumed moral superiority. And everything else is a marker of that, including economic wealth. You know, I have this economic wealth because I deserve it. That’s an indicator that I’m superior morally. And that would go along with the idea of, I think that would go along with the idea of luxury belief. You need to distinguish yourself from the contaminated lower classes constantly. And there were reasons for that in the past too. You think that is what’s going on? I do. I think that drives in large part the motivation to broadcast these beliefs is to basically tell the world I’m not one of the, you know, the hoi polloi, one of the little people. The unwashed masses. The unwashed masses. And so they’re telling this to society at large and in particular they’re telling their peers don’t mistake me for one of those people there. And so this is sort of what I’m getting at with this idea that now that the masses believe that race should no longer be treated as a big deal in society, if you’re a member of the elite, if you say that, you may be at risk of being mistaken for one of the masses. And so now you have to sort of reintroduce the importance of race and ethnicity and so on and say that we, you know, you don’t want to be colorblind. You want to sort of highlight our differences and so on. But this here is a luxury belief because, you know, you may be able to sort of promote this sort of racial divisions among highly educated, highly affluent people. And in all likelihood, it’s probably not going to hurt you very much. But if that belief is reintroduced into society where we should once again pay very close attention to what skin color we are or what race we are, that could create a lot of problems for ordinary people who don’t have the wealth of resources. Well, I think it is creating problems already because, well, because look, I think one of the factors, and I’m certainly not alone in this, although maybe I can differentiate it a bit better, I think a big part of the reason that Trump was so attractive. I saw this hat in Florida. I’ve told this story before. It said Trump 2021, Trump 2020. Yeah, because fuck you twice. And I thought, yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s because there’s this perception on the part of the working class, perhaps particularly among working class males and maybe even more particularly among working class white males that the progressive types that hypothetically stand for the oppressed have nothing but contempt for them. And the attraction to Trump was, yeah, well, here, have some of this. I feel that every once in a while I’ll go back to my hometown, Red Bluff, California, and I’ll talk to people and I can feel this. I’ll tell them I grew up here. I’m sort of this is my hometown. And whenever it comes up, so what do you end up doing? I’m honest. And I say, I ended up going to Yale or Cambridge or whatever, but I’m always very quick to follow it up with. But I enlisted in the military. This is sort of my protection. Like I was in the military before I did all this other stuff. Because I can sense like when I say I go to Yale, there’s this sort of moment of awkward silence and I can tell they’re sort of updating their view of me and probably not in a good direction either. And so then when I follow it up with but I enlisted and then sort of things come back down, I had this experience a couple of years ago. I was in a casino playing cards in Corning, which is an even more poor and small town in Northern California. And my sister had let it slip to the dealer that I was a student at Yale. And the dealer looked at me for a second. He’s like, what are you doing in here? You know, in a sense that like, number one, why would you be gambling in here if you were to a school like that? And then number two, like it sort of sounded like I’m not really sure I want you to be in here. And I told him, like, you know, hey, I served in the military. I just want to play some cards. Let’s you know, let’s just have a good time. And and he sort of let his guard down at that point. But I think there is this feeling among more blue collar working class people that, you know, the elites over there are they look down on us, they view us in a certain way, they treat us like we’re stupid or backwards or evil or racist or whatever. And really, it’s I mean, it’s just not true. That kind of disdain also just sort of amplifies the divisions. And that is something that I’m also trying to highlight to elites as well. I think that there’s been a lot of emphasis in psychology on the role of fear in promoting belief. But I think that disdain, contempt and disgust have been underappreciated as separating motivational factors. Yes. And it’s one thing if someone’s afraid of you, that’s not exactly offensive. I mean, you might regard it as unfortunate, but there’s also a kind of. Implicit respect, we have a little bit of dominance. Exactly, exactly. But if they’re disgusted by you or disdainful of you, that means that you’re in the contemptible and rotting category, essentially. And that’s a lot bigger dagger aimed at your heart than fear. I mean, would you rather be shied away from or sneered at? Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is part of what’s driving these sort of class divisions. That the sort of working class and lower class, they feel this, they feel that there’s this disdain for them on the part of the upper class. And this is part of what I’m trying to highlight, too, with this idea is to basically say that there are these divisions, social class exists in America. And this is something that we need to be thinking about whenever we broadcast these silly beliefs that no one believes in. And what blows my mind is that the data are freely available. You can see what the majority of Americans believe about the police or voter ID laws or drugs or what have you. And the affluent just don’t care very much. They’re still going to broadcast their very silly beliefs. I guess. Well, it could even be, you know, to take your hypothesis perhaps a step further, but perhaps you’ve already thought this up. It’s a real marker of my status that I can afford insane beliefs. Look, look how crazy I can be and still survive. Well, it’s yes. Right. Exactly. It’s a signal. Exactly. It’s exactly that. It’s that it’s like a peacock’s tail. I can laden myself down with this palpable absurdity. It has no material effect whatsoever on my continued existence. So the peacock is dragging around this very heavy, colorful set of tail feathers and can still survive and the sort of highly educated affluent members of society can drag around these very expensive, costly, luxury beliefs. They clearly have no correspondence to reality and they can still survive. Well, and they have some correspondence to reality for them because they can afford to experiment with the beliefs without immediately perishing or without, you know, fatally compromising their lives in most cases, not all, but in most cases. Whereas if you’re farther down the chain and have less protection, you toy around with polyamory and you end up as a single mother when you’re 18. That’s the end of that. That’s the end of that. And so then you have the rest of your life to think about. Well, perhaps that wasn’t very wise, but, you know, it’s a little late then. Yeah. Well, you can believe whatever you want. If you are a graduate of a top university and you are economically comfortable, you can have whatever set of beliefs you want. And in all likelihood, you’ll be just fine. But, you know, I want to underline that because you are the, you know, you are the most sort of sealed from the consequences of your beliefs, you actually. And at the same time, you wield the most influence in society. It’s very important to understand if you have a belief and you’re trying to implement it into policy or to sort of erode or create new norms or whatever, just be very careful with what it is that you’re doing. You know, you can treat it as a game and gain status, but in the longer term, this is going to hurt. You know, it’s going to hurt a lot of people. It’s going to hurt the very people that supposedly we care the most about. So what have been the consequences for you of being known for this kind of theory? You’re a student at Cambridge. You’re in psychology. You were an undergraduate at Yale. I believe you were an undergraduate at Yale. Were you an undergraduate when you wrote your essay on luxury beliefs? No, that was during my first year here at Cambridge in 2019. You know, it’s been and it’s been an interesting experience. I was a little bit nervous when I first wrote it simply because of the way things are going in universities. I had a very sort of turbulent introduction to university life, to campus life when I first entered undergrad. So this was in the fall of 2015. It’s kind of funny. So in 2015, so I had just gotten out of the military in August. I started class in September and a couple of weeks later, I saw that Jonathan Haidt was giving a talk on campus. And I had just read his book, The Righteous Mind about moral psychology, which is an interest of mine. And I thought that that’s what his talk was going to be about. But the entire talk was basically about, you know, are universities meant to equip students with the ability to seek truth or is it meant to keep them safe and protect them and shelter them and so on? I went to this talk totally confused because that is not what I expected him to talk about. That’s not what I knew Haidt for. I knew him for his research, his psychology research. Right. So I didn’t really… He wrote The Cartling of the American Mind as well. And that hadn’t come out until I think the next year, the year after. OK, OK. So I only knew Haidt as the author of The Righteous Mind. And I didn’t have the context for what that talk was about, because I was basically an outsider to this kind of world of, you know, free speech debates and, you know, what is the purpose of a campus and all of this stuff? I was basically just like a dude who felt lucky to get into this great university. And then about, what, three weeks after that, Erica Christakis, who was a faculty member at Yale, wrote this infamous email about basically defending freedom of expression. The Yale University administration basically sent this email to students. Oh, on Halloween, yes. Yes. So they basically told students, the administration told students, you know, be careful what you wear and all this stuff. And Erica Christakis wrote a follow up email saying, you know, if you have a problem with what people are wearing, you should talk to them. You know, it’s important to uphold freedom of expression and so on. And there was this entire campus eruption. My first experience, you know, having seen any kind of campus protests like this before students coming together, there was this very sort of dark undercurrent around campus. People were very afraid to speak out against what was happening. And so that basically was my introduction to what college is like. And that has basically stayed with me ever since. It was very formative experience for me to see what had happened there. The other thing is, I mean, I met with Erica Christakis later. I was interested in taking a class with her. She taught a class at Yale called The Concept of the Problem Child, which is basically, you know, this idea of, of, you know, sort of orphan children, children who get into trouble and mischief and so on in the sort of history and psychology of all of that. And, you know, naturally to me, given my background is very interesting idea. I was waitlisted for that class and I was very disappointed to learn that she down from teaching. She said that Yale is not a good climate for for teaching anymore because. Yeah, well, it’s no picnic to be mobbed. Right. Exactly. It doesn’t take very many mobbing experiences to do you in. Yeah. Well, I mean, I had met with her and I’d met with Nicholas, her husband later, who was also targeted by the mob. And to see like the way that the students treated them, called them every name in the book, demanded that they be fired and so on. And then to like, you know, discover that they were very good people in their personal lives. They had taken in foster kids of their own and helped them and so on. And so like to see this this clash between like what the students were saying about them and who they actually were. I mean, it, you know, sort of formed this this cynical perspective that I still have about what kind of people go to these universities and what their intentions are. Hey, I have something to talk to you about, too, in terms of your luxury beliefs. So, you know, we were talking we’ve talked about two things in some sense. We’ve talked about luxury beliefs and we’ve talked about sexual politics, I suppose. Right. So I there’s a way of bringing those together. So. Do you think there’s have you look at gender differences in luxury beliefs? So, for example, I the universities, especially the liberal arts, are now dominated by women. And that’s not a trivial transformation. It’s a fundamental transformation. And it I mean, Heights coddling idea is easily associated with, you know, an excessive amount of dependence, let’s say. And so if the maternal role is fundamentally the sheltering of infants, which I think is a reasonable way of looking at it, then well, then what happens when that becomes political? I mean, because we don’t know anything about women’s large scale political behavior, because this is all new. And so when you have an institution that’s essentially oriented to young people, who could be regarded as children, but wouldn’t have to be, but could be regarded as children, is the maternal expression that their safety and security and emotional well-being is paramount. And then let’s take this a step further just to be annoying and horrible. These are all women who are at their peak age of fecundity. And you might say, well, what’s happening with all those maternal instincts? They’re just gone all of a sudden. I mean, many 19 year old girls, I’ve talked to many of them, believe that their career is going to be the most important thing in their life. Very few 30 year old women believe that even if they have high powered careers, because they tend to discover that high powered careers come at a substantial cost, like 60, 70 hour work weeks, et cetera. And so that life might be best spent in the bosom of family and friends and with children, et cetera. That’s where much of the true value is. And most women figure that out by the time they’re in their 30s, which is why high powered law firms, for example, have a hell of a time retaining their extremely competent and highly valuable women. No one likes to talk about this. They wouldn’t talk about it in the law firms that I consulted for many, many of them. All the women would talk about it privately, but never publicly. The discussion was always about how the law firms weren’t doing enough to support women with their children. And all the women knew that wasn’t true. That wasn’t what was going on. And the law firms were bending over backwards to try to accommodate them because they wanted to keep their high performing women for obvious economic reasons. And so we have all these young women in who dominate institutions now, like, well, especially the humanities and liberal arts and universities. It’s like, well, is that the reason that security and safety and the sanctity of the home? This is a community. This is a home. It’s like, no, that’s not what a university is, actually. But but that’s what it could be. So what do you think of that? And these are discussions that no one will have, obviously. Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry to put you on the spot. And you can tell me to go to hell if you want, because you’re probably already in enough trouble. But. No, I mean, I think it’s an interesting idea. I’m just not entirely sure if that’s what’s happening here. I mean, maybe I guess maybe it would depend on the level of analysis we’re talking about here. I mean, I think at a more proximate level. So maybe at that approximate level, it’s about sort of gaining social status in your local environment. But perhaps there’s sort of this ultimate evolutionary level, like, why is it that these are the steps now that one must take to obtain social status? Yeah, yes. And maybe underlying that as the evolutionary reason. Well, that’s exactly the question. Well, you also might wonder what messages do women at the peak of their fertility want to broadcast to the community? To the men. Well, yes. Well, to the men and to the women, for that matter. And it might be I’m a caring person. Well, why? Why would you broadcast that specifically? Because we’re looking at all sorts of potential values you could broadcast, right? The luxury values that are selected appear to be ones that are putatively associated with compassion. I mean, it tilts hard in that direction. And Haidt has shown that because liberal types and the luxury values that you’re describing seem to be associated with progressive liberalism, tremendous amount of that is driven by compassion and lack of harm rather than more conservative values, let’s say. Well, I did see this study fairly recently. I think Mitch Brown is a grad student. He was an author on this basically showing that broadcasting moral values does sort of increase attractiveness. To others. And I can’t exactly remember what the specifics were, but they were sort of involved around social justice, about caring for the oppressed and the downtrodden and so on. And I think the effect was was most pronounced for men broadcasting these views. And women found this to be particularly attractive. But I could imagine like it would go the other way, too, although a lot of the sort of evolutionary psych papers I’ve seen on sort of mating psychology, it doesn’t I mean, men seem, especially young men, seem most interested in appearance, like far, far more than any other sort of personality or behavioral dimension among the women. But it’s possible. I mean, what you’re saying that maybe it’s not so much about, you know, trying to trying to impress the men, but maybe just community as a whole or their fellow peers. It also might not be a matter of impressing. It might be a matter of a particular form of orientation taking a new target. I mean, for most of human history, women who were in between 19 and 25 had infants. Right. OK, so now they don’t. OK, so that that’s not like that’s not a trivial transformation. That’s a fundamental earthshaking, traumatic, dramatic transformation. And so we would expect that to have no political impact whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, it’s it does seem to me that it it’s unlikely that it would have zero effect. I guess my question would be, why now then? Why would it? I mean, because women have been going to university now for 50 plus years. I think they’ve been the majority. They didn’t dominate. Well, they’ve they’ve dominated. I mean, I think they’ve tipped past 50 percent since I think the early 90s. So why is it now that, you know, this I mean, perhaps, you know, that’s that’s one ingredient is sort of the the dominance of women on universities, in addition to maybe social media and a few other sort of more recent inventions that have that have spread this on. Yeah, well, there was definitely a spike in politically correct beliefs of the sort that you’ve described in the 90s. Oh, interesting. Right. Right. I mean, but what seemed to happen then, I think that was when I was teaching in Boston. It bubbled up. But then the economy boomed so madly that people seemed to be preoccupied by other things for a long period of time. So and then it went kind of back underground. And I thought, well, maybe we’re done with that nonsense to some degree. But it certainly popped back up more recently. And also, 30 years isn’t very long. I mean, we’re looking at massive demographic transformations in the structure of society. We don’t understand. I mean, we already talked about the effect of technology, of computer technology on on mating. But we certainly haven’t talked about the effect of of relatively accessible and effective birth control technology and all of that. We touched on that. But I mean, these are changes that we don’t know anything about. I mean, even the sort of birth control issue. I mean, it’s really interesting to see just like how the how the the discussion around dating has changed so much. I mean, I remember reading things from the sort of early 2010s, like 2012, 2013, about how hookup culture was this great thing that was liberating. And I think more recently, people are now starting to question that about whether that’s I mean, educated people questioning whether this is good for society. And, yeah, I mean, I’ve read this very interesting article, a long form article in Brookings. I can’t remember the author specifically about reproduction technology and how essentially this has given rise to in some ways to to more broken homes. And the reasoning was that once once reproduction became a biological choice for the mother, then fatherhood became a social choice for the man simply because in the past, if a woman got pregnant, there were all of these norms in place for the man to basically marry the woman, you know, these sort of shotgun marriages, the community shamed the men into marrying the women. If you skipped out on the woman, then you were seen as a deadbeat and so on. There was a lot of taboo and shame around that. But we don’t we don’t even know what effect there is socially, for example, with the presumption that, well, if you get pregnant, it’s your own fault because the reliable reproductive prevention technology is at hand. You know, and many women who get pregnant have not taken the pill properly, for example. And so I’m not saying that they should be blamed for that. I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that it opens the door for attribution of responsibility to the women. And we don’t know what that effect, what effect there is of that on social institutions. That is actually the argument, if I recall from this Brookings article, which was that, you know, not necessarily on a societal level, it wasn’t like society suddenly said, well, now if you get pregnant, it’s your fault because of the pill. It was more on a local level. Couples started to believe this. Men started to believe it. The neighborhood, the community started to accept that, you know, if a man has sex with a woman and she gets pregnant, the man can say to himself, well, that’s not my problem. That’s kind of your fault because, you know, you have this magical pill that can whatever. So I don’t have to get involved anymore. And I think the local community and the social environment sort of tacitly, if not, if not sort of openly, but at least tacitly, started to accept this kind of logic, this kind of reasoning. And this basically allowed men to skip out on their responsibility. Well, it’s almost inevitable to accept it if you accept the proposition that women now have control over the reproductive function. And we don’t want to de-empt, like I thought the 20th century would be remembered for three things. Hydrogen bomb. Computer chip. The pill. Three bombs, right? Because, I mean, there hasn’t been a time in human history where females had control over the reproductive function. It’s the equivalent of almost the equivalent of a new species in terms of dramatic biological transformation. Someone’s going to edit that part out and turn it into something else. Well, yeah, good luck to them. It’s not like I don’t feel bad for the women who are put in this position. I certainly do. They have a tremendous amount to contend with. But, you know, the other thing that’s quite interesting is all of the debates about consent that have emerged on campus and exactly what constitutes consent. I mean, because the the 60s hypothesis in the wake of the pill was, well, sex doesn’t really matter. So, you know, any consent will do because it’s now become a trivial endeavor. I mean, that was the theory, right? It’s just sex. Well, and AIDS put the blocks to that theory very, very rapidly. And, you know, no one likes to talk about this because there’s many things we don’t like to talk about. But the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of promiscuity in a major way. And so promiscuity distributed AIDS and contributed to the manner in which it manifested itself. And so sex turned out to be. As a dangerous force in multiple dimensions, apart from mere reproductive. You know, danger, the other sexually transmitted disease were reasonably controlled with antibiotics. So I find it interesting that people are so just reluctant to talk about the importance of sex as an incentive. I mean, there’s a lot of discussion in society, for example, about economic incentives, about jobs, professions, economic inequality and so on. But there’s not much talk about the the role that sex plays. I mean, you know, from the sort of evolutionary perspective, sex has been around since before we were human. Sex is still going to be around long after humans have gone extinct. Like sex is universal. It’s it’s what drives every single species. But we I’m just surprised at how often we overlook it as as an incentive for behavior and how fast things are changing in the realm of sex. I just saw this statistic from The Washington Post showing that from 2008 to 2018, the number of sex, the amount of sexlessness among men under the age of 30 has doubled. So in 2008, 15 percent of men under age 30 reported not having sex in the past year. And by 2018, it had doubled to about 30 percent. And for women, it had it increased slightly. It was something like 10 percent in 2008 to like 15 percent in 2018. So there was an increase, a slight increase. But for men, it has doubled to the point where about one in three young men are reporting that they haven’t had sex in the past year, which is a very new thing. Despite the despite the mating apps. Right. Despite the apps, despite even more support, supposedly for sexual freedom and for polyamory and novel relationship arrangements and the further sort of devaluing of of the importance of sex, more people are having less of it, men and women, but especially young men. You know, my understanding is that’s damn near epidemic in Japan. So that’s happening now. A tremendous number of young men in Japan are falling into that category. And in fact, this society has become increasingly sexless, even among young people. I mean, that’s reflected to some degree in the declining birth rate. But now, it’s been a long time since I looked looked at the statistics, but that’s my understanding. And so if it happened there, it’s not surprising that it might happen here. That might be a consequence, too, of this emergent polygamy that we were describing is that all the spoils are going to a very few, few men. Of course, there’s also the the also the effect of pornography, which is a substitute. And, you know, that’s also I don’t know much about the literature on pornography use and the relationship between it and an actual sexual activity. I have read some ominous things about the increase in failure to achieve erections among young men that at least in principle is a consequence of pornography use. But I don’t know how reliable that is. Data that that married men are more likely to experience divorce if they watch any amount of pornography. And it’s sort of, you know, the more the more pornography they use, the more likely they are to experience it. The more pornography they use, the more likely they are to to get divorced. I think that, yeah, this this is another I mean, this is a very recent invention to sort of streaming digital pornography. I’ve heard that researchers are having difficulty even studying this simply because they can’t really find a control group. They know there’s no young men who don’t watch porn, at least at least have never not been exposed to it. And so this is a very difficult thing for them to even even study. Well, it’s it’s another. Indication of the emergence of polygamy because it’s a virtual polygamy. You can have an unlimited number of attractive sexual partners now, it’s all virtual. Right, but but that as that is a transformative technology. I mean, there’s even more pictures of of nude women in one day than anybody in history would have ever seen in their entire life. Yeah, and I and I see this, you know, the consequences of this, how young people interact now where there’s even these contests to see how long they can go without watching it, almost like it’s a game. You know, these sort of communities on Reddit or on social media where they’ll sort of tried to go for a month or go for 90 days or whatever without watching it. At first, I think it starts as a game, no fap. And they’re trying to, I think, you know, on the one hand, it’s it’s sort of a game for them. It’s a contest. But on the other hand, I think there is this underlying beneath the sort of joking around about it. I think there is this view that like this probably isn’t good for us. And let’s see if we can get off of it. Let’s see if we can stop. And I don’t I don’t see like how this isn’t changing people. I mean, I was I feel very fortunate because I came of age just before, you know, sort of fast Internet and all of this stuff that started taking off like right before YouTube, all of this stuff. And I can imagine that if I was a I don’t know if I was 13 and all of this stuff had existed today, like, I’m sure it would be warping my brain in one way or another. I mean, between between the Internet, between social media and then, of course, the digital porn and the endless images. I don’t know how like very young boys are are dealing with this this new this new technology. Well, these are all it’s very difficult for society to structure itself around monogamous norms that took a lot of work. And when that’s taken apart, it’s not at all obvious how to put it back together. So and it does appear that we’re seeing the consequences of that. The consent issue on campus, I think, is extraordinarily interesting because it isn’t what you would would have expected. It isn’t what anybody predicted. Right. We thought with the relaxation of sexual norms that there would be this possibility that sex could become casual. And there is an insistence. It’s so strange to watch. And this is associated with your luxury belief item, our idea. On the one hand, we have this absolute insistence by the progressive types, essentially, especially that any and all form of sexual expression is not only acceptable, but to be celebrated no matter what the form is. And on the other hand, we have this insistence that sex is so dangerous that the culture is best conceptualized as a rape culture and that every step of sexual interaction between a young man and a young woman needs to be documented like formally and perhaps even in writing, because that has been proposed at some universities. And so there’s this perversity about the twin insistence. Right. It’s all forms of sexual expression are laudable and freeing, yet it’s so dangerous that every bit of it has to be documented. And the fundamental orienting structure is something like rape. I wonder if this has something to do with just sort of socio sexual orientation of whoever happens to be expanding the belief. So if you tend to be a person who’s had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions, maybe you have the expectation of monogamy and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences, then you may start to be very preoccupied with the issue of consent. I think that’s exactly what happens. I think that so we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs and they’re shielded to some degree. But my suspicions are is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable. It’s just not the case emotionally. And those people, the ones who are supporting or promoting the complete sexual freedom, they may just be sort of less sensitive to having negative sexual experiences because like you’re saying all of it is fun, all of it is free, all of it is laudable. And so for them, if they have experience that someone else might view as negative, for them it’s just not a big deal. And so this is why they’re promoting more of an open sexual culture. Could easily be. Difference. They could be high in openness, say so exploratory and low in agreeableness. So, you know, they’re not as they’re not as associated. They’re not as likely to form immediate empathetic. This itself may be connected to your earlier question about sort of the growth in the number of female students on campus. I mean, there’s been interesting research from so John Berger, I think I’m getting his name right, wrote a book called Datonomics where he goes. He discusses at length the role that sex ratios play for social interactions, for romantic interactions. And basically he found that on campuses where there’s more women than there are men, there’s much more hookup culture. Women expect less of the men. They report that, like, basically feeling despondent about their chances of getting a boyfriend. Men, on the other hand, seem to have a much more enjoyable time. They report having more sexual partners, feeling more upbeat, feeling more hopeful, having more hookups and so on. Whereas on university campuses like Caltech, where there tend to be more men than women, it’s actually the reverse where women are more likely to have a boyfriend to be more satisfied with their romantic situation and so on. And basically the I mean, and this has been documented in cross cultures in different cities, different societies and so on. And basically the idea is that when there’s a large number of women and a scarcity of men, women have to compete for that small pool of men. And they’re more willing to basically modify their behavior in ways that men find appealing, which oftentimes is sort of short term casual sex, hookups, sort of very casual situations. Whereas when the reverse is the case and there’s a scarcity of women and a large number of men, then men tend to modify their behaviors to be more oriented toward long term relationships, towards commitment and emotional connection and so on. And so as universities become more dominated by women and the sort of sexual satisfaction with the sexual landscape declines, then maybe this is related to some of what we’re seeing, of course, maybe with consent and some of these other social justice issues that we’re seeing. And I’m assuming that a lot of it may be sort of driven by sort of dissatisfaction with the romantic landscape and the way that men are behaving. A sense of being exploited. But then I would be interested to know if in those universities where there’s a relatively smaller proportion of men and the men report being more satisfied, I wonder if that’s the median or the average. Right, because I would bet it’s the average. You think so? Because I was thinking that in those situations it would still be a relatively small minority of men who are getting all the sexual attention. Now it might be better for the mean. But wouldn’t that mean that the mean satisfaction would be high, whereas the median might be lower? Yes, that is, sorry, yes, you’re exactly right. That’s exactly right. Okay. So there’d be a fair bit of variation around the mean as well. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, there’s a lot of sort of interesting findings. I think this was a study from MIT which showed that something like half of the male graduates of MIT graduate as virgins. And I think that this pattern has also been found in other top universities as well. And so this probably goes to this idea that a small number of the men at universities are accumulating more sexual partners. Well, that would go along with the 4% rating, the 4% description of Tinder. And so what happens is that where there’s a relatively small number of men, that competition between women becomes incredibly intense, but for a very small fraction of the men. And because those men have endless short-term options, there’s no satisfaction on the female side with regard to anything past, you know, a short-term casual relationship. I saw this really kind of amusing study. It was in PNAS of this idea of sexy selfies and which countries in which countries are women most likely to post sort of sexually provocative images of themselves on the internet and on social media. And so the researchers, you know, they put forth their hypotheses. One of them was maybe it’s maybe it’s patriarchy, maybe in cultures where women are treated very poorly. They feel like they have to present themselves in a certain way, very sexually provocative poses and so on. But that’s not what the researchers found. What they found was that in countries where income inequality tends to be high, that’s when women are most likely to post sexy selfies. And their conclusion here was that when women are competing for a shrinking number of highly successful men, they’re more likely to pose in provocative ways on the internet in the hopes of capturing their attention, which is maybe what we’re seeing on Instagram and on various other social media apps where I think there is this sort of, I don’t know, tilting towards more and more sort of pornographic adjacent content in the hopes of capturing more attention. And so I think that a lot of what we’re seeing may be due to sort of this overlooked topic of the sexual dynamics in society. So what’s been the consequence for you of having pursued this line of thought? We started to touch on that, but we didn’t touch on it that much. It hasn’t been too bad. You know, some people have questioned me on this. I’ve had some somewhat nasty comments from other graduate students here at Cambridge, social media stuff, but it really hasn’t been that bad. Yeah, I’ve actually met quite a number of people who agree with me and who are glad that someone is speaking out about this issue. I actually met a lot of friends by talking about this openly. I think that this is just one of those things where people are silent because they’re afraid of the reputational cause. But when someone else starts speaking out, they feel more comfortable sort of coming out of their shell more and more and discussing it. I, on the other hand, I, you know, I’m sort of reluctant to continue along a career in academia simply because of everything that I’ve seen. So I’d mentioned before what I saw at Yale with the Christachises. Part of the reason why I came to Cambridge, you know, there are many reasons, but one of the reasons why I came here was because I thought it would be different. I thought that the sort of social mobbing and the sort of student protests, I thought that was maybe I hoped that it was an American thing. And I thought that, well, maybe if I go to England, things will be calm. Maybe things aren’t as political over there. And within a matter of months, two things happened. One was you were supposed to come here to be a research fellow and then you were disinvited because of the student protests. And then two, there was a young postdoc named Noah Carl, who was supposed to postdoc here and he was fired because of student protests as well. And so I thought, OK, well, I come over here hoping to get away from that. And it sort of followed me over here. So maybe this is a sign that I’m supposed to be doing something else other than than than remaining within within the Academy. So once I’m finished with my PhD, I may have to find the grapevine that, you know, hypothetically, I was disinvited from Cambridge because a photograph was taken with me in New Zealand of someone wearing a T-shirt that was critical of Islam. But I learned through the grapevine that the decision to disinvite me had been taken before that, and that was used as an excuse. I’m not at all surprised. Reliable source. Yeah, so stunning, stunning. So that all of that, it was very costly and painful for me to undergo that. And, you know, it’s so peculiar because I was going to Cambridge, hypothetically, to talk about biblical stories with, you know, people at the Divinity Centre there. The biblical story lectures that I’ve done have been very popular and reasonably influential and, you know, well received by atheists and religious people alike. So it was a serious academic endeavor and it was very difficult to bear the opprobrium, let’s say, that was associated with that. I understand that, you know, things have perhaps changed for the better with regards to such decisions more recently, but it was shocking to me to find out that it was based on a lie. And I’m not at all surprised. And they used that to smear my reputation. You know, it’s quite something. So where are you in your PhD program now? So finishing up my third year, I should have one more year and then I will be returning to the States. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing, but like I said, probably not in a university at that point. Yeah, things have changed so much over the last few years in terms of the political correctness and how reluctant people are to speak out. And I think, yeah, I started to experience that at the University of Toronto. I started to get nervous about talking about sex differences and personality. You know, when I was just I taught a personality course and I published papers on sex differences in personality. So it was actually an area of specialization of mine. And for years I would lay out the data, which was somewhat. Ethic less, I don’t mean laying it out, I mean, the data itself is like, well, there might be differences between men and women and there might not be, but the empirical evidence suggests that. If you add all the personality differences between men and women together, you can reliably discriminate between who’s a man and who’s a woman with about 75 percent accuracy, which is pretty accurate. But trait by trait, men and women are more alike than different. So, yeah, fair enough. And there are two dimensions where the differences particularly manifest themselves, sensitivity to negative emotion and agreeableness. And so that’s that. And then those differences are bigger in egalitarian countries than in non egalitarian countries, which is counterintuitive and surprising and shocking and interesting. Yes, I talked about that. Also holds true for dark triad characteristics, by the way. So psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism, the gender gap is larger in more egalitarian cultures. You may not be surprised to know that, but I found that pretty interesting. I mean, it sort of falls in line with all the other research you’re describing. Yeah, it’s very interesting that more egalitarian policies magnify some differences. They ameliorate in Scandinavia. The preferred age gap between women and men is somewhat smaller than in non egalitarian countries. So there are some there are some phenomena that do modify towards equality with egalitarian social policies. But lots don’t. Anyways, I started to get nervous about lecturing about those sorts of things. I thought, geez, I’m nervous about this. Isn’t that strange? And part of it was because I did have some female students who came up to me after lectures and who were offended. You know, they were snippy and sarcastic. And that very rarely happened to me. And so it was quite marked. You know, I’d have the odd hyper feminist type stomp out of my first class even a few years ago, just as a, you know, demonstration of sorts. But that that really meant nothing. But and then my graduate students started telling me that they were very nervous about discussing anything to do with sex differences and the women particularly. And so that’s that started to become worrisome. So what do you see happening in Cambridge? What’s it been like there for you? I mean, well, well, really, it’s been it’s been a very strict lockdown over the last 15 plus months or so. But before that, it wasn’t you know, it wasn’t bad. I was I was still fairly open with my views. You know, I wrote I defended you in an op-ed in the New York Times. I’ve written the luxury believes post. I’ve I’ve not been I’ve not necessarily withheld my views. Fortunately, within my department, I haven’t had much of an issue. I think the psych department here is very solid. But, you know, more broadly, the culture, the campus culture is, you know, about the same as it is anywhere else. Sort of people are people are afraid. I had a conversation with a professor here last year. I had lunch with him and he it was interesting what he told me. He said that it’s not necessarily that the faculty agree with a lot of the sort of extreme political movements that are going on, but they just want to be left alone. They just want to do their work. They just want to do the research. And if a bunch of social mobs come after them and say, you know, you better sign this petition or you better say this or you better post that they just want to do it and get get these people out of their lives, get it out of their hair. And so they’re not they’re not ideologues, many of them, probably most of them are not. But they just want to sort of get back to their lives and they’ll just do whatever they have to. They’re selected for that. I mean, to become an academic. A research academic, you have to be obsessive about some specialization and you have to wall yourself off from everything else and pursue that because otherwise you’re not publishing your three papers a year or whatever it requires to maintain your academic status. It takes a tremendous amount of specialization. And so we set up universities to put up walls around people who were willing to specialize so they could do exactly that. But it’s laid them open to invasion by people who have a political agenda. And that’s often failed researchers who become administrators, for example, and who are interested in power, which is pretty much what they talk about all the time as well. And so, I mean, I’ve seen faculty are in some sense powerless by choice in some ways against these kinds of demands that you’re describing. But it’s also a consequence of the selection methods that produce them to begin with and the purpose of the university. I had a friend here who was very active online on social media. So he was a graduate, a medical school graduate. He came here as a Gates Cambridge Scholar to do research in, I think, biochemistry or something. And he posted something online about his views on being a pro-life person. And his PhD supervisor and people in his department were getting all kinds of calls saying that they had to let him go, that they should fire him, they need to kick him out of Cambridge and so on. And they basically they didn’t kick him out, but they told him, like, you have to take on your social media account because we just can’t have people constantly calling and emailing and harassing and so on. The activists just make it so costly to have an opinion that people just sort of they sort of silence themselves. Why would you want to get involved? They just sort of acquiesce to it, not because they agree, but just because they don’t want to have to deal with the burden. It’s very it’s I mean, it’s a sort of clever strategy, I think, on the part of the activists. That’s something that I’m interested in, too, is just like who who tends to be attracted to those movements and how effective they are. I mean, I’ve seen academic papers retracted because the journal editor, you know, they posted something like, you know, we had to withdraw this paper because the journal editor received credible threats of physical violence. Like, you can literally threaten to kill the journal editor and then they’ll just take take out whatever paper you want them to take out. I mean, it’s very interesting to see that this is this is the world we’re living in. Yeah, well, it’s no it’s no joke to be targeted like that. And it’s not surprising it shuts people down. It’s really hard. I mean, it’s understandable. Yeah, I don’t begrudge anyone for for for doing it. A lot of people don’t. Yeah, they just don’t have the stomach to deal with with that level of notoriety or controversy the way that you and others have. Yeah, well, it isn’t obvious that I’ve dealt with it either. So I’m still here, but that’s about all I’d say about it. It certainly hasn’t been it’s been terrible. And so I took your personality test shortly after it came out when you still had the discount going and I scored in the ninth percentile in agreeableness. So I think that might have something to do with why I’m OK with with, you know, sort of taking on some of this heat. Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing about disagreeable people is that they will say what they think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So was that compassion or politeness? Do you remember? It was it was it was very low on politeness and a little higher on compassion, but still like pretty low on both. And it averaged out to the ninth percentile. So so at least I’m I’m, you know, a little more compassionate than I am polite. Well, one in ten isn’t, you know, isn’t that low, really, all things considered. So but but that would explain that would explain your willingness to take confrontational positions or adversarial positions, let’s say. Well, obviously, you also believe that there, you know, that you’re relating something that is true. So we don’t know how much moral courage it takes and what personality attributes are shaping the ability to voice unpopular truths. But I suspect disagreeableness has something to do with it. It’s strange in my case, because I’m very agreeable, as it turns out. But which is probably why I pay a high price for doing it, even though I do do it. Interesting. Yeah, I was. Yeah, I mean, I got into a lot of trouble in school as a kid. I yeah, I just always had this sort of disposition to to rebel and to question rules and so on. And fortunately, over time, I was able to get it under control to some extent. I also scored pretty high in conscientiousness, which may be part of why I was able to land where I where I’ve landed. But I, you know, it was a long secluded path to get here. Right. Yeah. Well, conscientiousness is a colder virtue, but it tends to pay off in the long run. So what do you think you’re going to do when you finish your degree? You know, you said you’re you’re not that interested in pursuing an academic path. Yeah, well, my book is supposed to come out later next year, so near the end of next year. And I’ll probably be spending a lot of time promoting that. And yeah, I I don’t know. I do enjoy research, writing, teaching all of those things. So in whatever capacity I can continue to do that, whether it’s working at a think tank or or even just going full independent and and sort of starting my own channel or something like that. And yeah, I’ll just be continuing writing and and sharing my views in one way or another, although I’m not exactly sure what form that will take. Well, it was really good talking with you today. I thought the discussion was moved along at a great clip, and I appreciated your viewpoints and your candor, all of that. And I learned a fair bit as a consequence of talking to you. And so much appreciated. Likewise. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. You bet. You bet. Good to meet you. Maybe we’ll meet up in Cambridge if I ever come there. Let’s do it.