#1075 - Roy Baumeister - Why Men Are at the Top of Society (and the bottom)

Summary

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Modern Wisdom #1075 — Roy Baumeister: Why Men Are At The Top Of Society (and the Bottom)

Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Roy Baumeister
Date: March 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features social psychologist Roy Baumeister discussing his research and theories on why men are overrepresented at both the top and bottom of society. Baumeister and Chris explore sex differences in social structure, competition, motivation, risk-taking, and the evolution of human cultures. The conversation also delves into contemporary gender discourse, sex and sexual novelty, ego depletion, and societal trade-offs. The tone is deeply curious, evidence-based, open to nuance, and often laced with Baumeister’s dry wit and Chris’s candid framing.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Culture, Gender, and Societal Structure

• Men as Builders and the Expendability Thesis
  • Societies have historically relied on the expendability of men for survival and progress:

    “Men are more expendable than women, probably for basic biological reasons... It risks men, puts men to work to produce things.” (Baumeister, [00:05])

    • Structures of society, both physical and institutional, largely created by men.
    • Women’s roles centered on one-to-one relationships; men’s on group cooperation and competition.
    • “Why didn’t women ever—50 women—build a boat and sail off into the unknown to explore things?... Men did things like this throughout history and all over the world.” ([04:42])
• Differences in Social Motivations
  • Men excel in forming large groups and group competition; women in one-to-one relational intimacy.
  • Biological roots seen across primates—male apes cooperate to hunt or fight, female apes rarely do.

2. Competition and Hierarchy

• Types of Competition
  • Female competition often covert—gossip, reputation-bashing, especially for desirable mates ([07:42]).
  • Male competition typically overt and hierarchical.
  • “Competition is about hierarchy, and so it's hard. The male want to do it. You want to be the number one.” ([13:25])
• Ambition and Achievement
  • Male ambition partly fueled by the evolutionary necessity to be chosen by women—more intense in men due to greater reproductive variance ([13:34], [14:09]).
  • Relatively few men passed their genes on ancestrally; drive to be at the top intertwined with status, success, and mate attraction.

3. Overrepresentation at Extremes

• Men at the Top and Bottom
  • Men overrepresented among CEOs, presidents, as well as among prisoners, homeless, and soldiers killed in battle.

    “...Look at the bottom of society. Who's in prison, who's homeless, who's cannon fodder, being killed in battle. You see mostly men there.” (Baumeister, [16:03])

  • Greater male variability in attributes like intelligence and height leads to this phenomenon ([16:03]–[17:45]).
  • Genetic speculation: Lack of "backup" on the Y chromosome allows for more variability in men ([19:03]).

4. Differences in Ability, Motivation, and Risk-taking

• Ability
  • Throwing and dodging: Evolutionary importance of coordinated throwing (hunting, defending) by men; supported by studies comparing male and female accuracy ([22:21]–[25:15]).
• Motivation & Endurance
  • Even in domains like chess and Scrabble, despite higher female participation, men occupy the upper echelons, likely due to higher motivation to excel ([27:06]).
• Risk-taking
  • Men evolved to take greater risks for potential high rewards (mates, resources, status); women evolved greater physical and social safety concern ([29:21]).
  • Women more averse to adversarial collaboration in research, less likely to seek out direct confrontation ([31:23]–[33:14]).

5. Cultural Discourse and Trade-offs

• The ‘Imaginary Feminist’
  • The notion of an internalized “feminist watchdog”, with societal norms policing what can be said about sex differences ([33:19]).
• Trade-offs in Gender Progress
  • Social attempts to “fix” inequality often create new problems, e.g., grade inflation pleasing students but lowering standards ([36:08]).
• The 'Soft Bigotry of Male Expectations'
  • Chris points out society tacitly privileges “male” domains (e.g., CEO, hunting)—even in attempts to promote equality, this prioritizes the male default ([37:57]).
  • Baumeister clarifies protein (hunted by men) had higher evolutionary value vs. calories from gathering ([40:38]).
• Modern Changes
  • Shift against workplace romance, male protector norms, and “encouraging women to turn into the sort of man they want to marry”—contributing to lack of polarity in relationships ([44:28]).

6. Contemporary Male Malaise

• Reduced Male Motivation
  • Societies that stop rewarding male sacrifice become vulnerable (e.g., less willingness of men to volunteer for wars) ([52:04]).
  • Increased male disengagement, as observed in educational and occupational underachievement.
• Incels and Sociosexuality
  • Discussion of modern involuntary celibacy, its causes, and possible resolutions ([49:18]–[51:19]).
  • Insight: “If a woman would take one of these incels and strike up a relationship with him...all these ‘women are bad’ would just evaporate.” ([49:18])

7. Ego Depletion and Willpower

• Contour of the Theory
  • Ego depletion: Willpower is a finite resource that can become exhausted but recovers ([54:06]).
  • Replication crisis: Findings difficult to reproduce, but overall evidence is strong. Compensation (rewards) can temporarily overcome depletion ([54:34]–[65:47]).
• Improving Self-Control
  • Monitoring behavior and “practicing” self-control increases capacity.
  • Changes in one domain (money management) transfer to others (diet, study habits) ([65:58]–[69:38]).
  • Self-control, like a muscle, can strengthen with exercise.

8. Sexual Novelty and Sociosexuality

• Pornography and Novelty
  • Ubiquity of sexual content diminishes the excitement of real sexual encounters.

    “...Her generation...was the last time a woman could have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes.” ([71:01])

  • Novel experiences within a monogamous relationship may be better for long-term satisfaction, but are now less available due to early exposure ([71:01]–[75:37]).
• The Coolidge Effect
  • Men are more sensitive to sexual novelty than women; early high “body counts” may reduce later relationship satisfaction ([75:37]–[76:36]).
  • Women, on average, report wanting fewer sexual partners (average “ideal” ~2.5 for women, 64 for men) ([81:20]).
• Sociosexual Outliers
  • Discussion of notorious “high partner count” women as outliers—Chris: “She is the most extreme sociosexual being that I've ever seen... she just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex.” ([83:09])

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Noteworthy Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On male expendability:

  “If a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size. Loses half its women—it'll be a long time.” (Baumeister, [00:05])

• On competition:

  “If you can't be better than the other people, what's the point if everybody gets an A?” (Baumeister, [12:22])

• On trade-offs:

  “You fix one problem, you create another and it isn't so easy just to solve problems.” (Baumeister, [36:08])

• On sexual novelty:

  “You can only do something the first time once. There's only one first time... It's a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them... some of the mystery is gone.” (Baumeister, [71:01])

• On society privileging male endeavors:

  “There’s a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff that whatever men do is implicitly preferred.” (Chris, [37:57])

• On male malaise:

  “Society, you know, we teach our kids that America and the UK and so on are bad places who've done bad things and don't stress the positive accomplishments. So that would be a vulnerability as long as there's no war.” (Baumeister, [52:04])

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Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Topic | |----------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:05 – 01:45 | Culture flourishes by exploiting men; expendability thesis | | 01:45 – 07:27 | Why men are builders, group vs. relational orientation | | 07:27 – 12:22 | Male vs. female competition; ambition; school systems | | 13:25 – 15:53 | Hierarchy; male achievement and female mate choice | | 16:03 – 20:35 | Men at both extremes; genetics and variability | | 22:21 – 25:27 | Male ability (throwing, dodging); evolutionary perspective | | 27:06 – 33:14 | Chess, Scrabble, competitive motivation; risk taking; collaboration | | 33:19 – 36:08 | The imaginary feminist; internalized social policing | | 36:08 – 44:28 | Trade-offs; workplace romance, gender roles, protector norms | | 47:10 – 51:56 | Polarity in relationships; rise of subcultures (incels, incel theory) | | 52:04 – 54:06 | Decline of rewarding male sacrifice; vulnerability to crisis | | 54:06 – 69:38 | Ego depletion, willpower, self-control research | | 71:01 – 84:59 | Sexual novelty, pornography, The Coolidge Effect, sociosexuality | | 87:09 – 88:26 | Distribution of sexual opportunity among men/women |

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Final Thoughts

Roy Baumeister’s perspective, drawing on decades of research, frames many modern gender issues as evolutions of deep-seated biological, psychological, and social facts—with society often ignoring trade-offs in a rush to achieve perceived equality. The episode navigates controversial topics with curiosity and respect for complexity. Baumeister’s exploration of ego depletion and sexual novelty links individual psychology with wide-reaching societal implications, all while grounded in empirical research.

Chris Williamson’s closing words:

“Every opportunity to read what you do and to talk to you is a real treat.” ([89:10])

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For more from Roy, check out his Substack: The Existential Contrarian.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Well, there are multiple aspects to it, but first of all, men are more expendable than women, probably for basic biological reasons. If a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size, loses half its women. It'll be a long time to. So it takes, it risks men, puts men to work to produce things. Most of the structures of society are really created by men. I was talking to Carol Hooven at Harvard and she said there was a feminist who had an epiphany. One point she was looking out the window and said, the whole world is built by men. Look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and all those things. And that's just the physical world, the institutions too. The banks and the schools and the armies and the governments and the marketplaces. Women do plenty of wonderful things, and they're important partners in the flourishing of our species. But creating large social systems, that seems always to be the men's job. And so our cultures compete against other cultures, which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men. Now, women have joined the groups in many places, but still the institutional structures are created by men.

[A]

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

[B]

Oh, why is it? It's because men do those things and, and, and women don't. What I realized fairly early on, and I have some publications of this, and it was an early part of my thinking, is that the way people are being social, there are a couple ways. There's interacting one to one, or there's doing things in large groups. Now I noticed this because in my field, social psychology, people were starting to say women are more social than men because they're really invested in the relationships, the one to one relationships, which is a big area of study in my field. But if you start looking at things that people do in groups, men do those much more than women. And I think probably again, it's an innate tendency. The most important relationship in biology is the mother to child one. And so that's a one to one relationship. In humans, women got particular men to form a one to one relationship with them, to protect and provide and do all those things, which really enabled the larger brain to grow and made everything else possible. Whereas men do things more in larger groups. And so competition between groups is men against men. Whether it's on the battlefield or in the business marketplace, or scientifically, men compete in groups. It's not Something that women naturally do and form large groups. There are even experiments when I was researching this, they would do with children and they'd have two boys playing together, and then the experimenter would bring in a third boy and the boys would say, okay, sure, come on, join the game. But if it's two girls, they don't really want the third girl. They exclude her and reject her. Suggests there's this mental focus on the one to one relationship. Again, it's better for intimacy. A lot of the differences, psychological differences between men and women can be understood this way. For example, most data show that women are more emotionally expressive than men. They share their feelings directly and so on. Well, in a one to one relationship, that's what you want to do, so the other person understands you, so you can share your feelings and the other person can take care of you and respond to you and so on. In a large group, showing your feelings all the time is not so useful. Obviously, in the economic marketplace, if you go, oh, this is wonderful, I got to have it, well, the price is going to be higher than if you say, I'm not sure, maybe not today. Wait a minute, come back, I'll give you a better deal. And you may have. In a large group, you have rivals and competitors. So again, you don't want to give away too much. So the emotional reserve of men is more suited to the large group, where the expressiveness of the woman is suited to the one to one relationship. And that's why love and family and all those things. Women are sometimes considered, they are the natural experts at these things. And some of the researchers tell the man, well, listen to your wife on this. But it also explains why women haven't ever organized themselves in large groups to get things done. I mean, why didn't women ever 50 women build a boat and sail off into the unknown to explore things? You know, men did things like this throughout history and all over the world. But you don't do that as one or two people. You do it in a larger group. So again, the men in groups seems to be a natural pattern. There's even some evidence about this in the other great apes. I was reading, like Michael Tomasello's work on there, and he says groups of male chimpanzees will go out and get in a battle with others, or sometimes they'll go hunting together. It's not real cooperation. He says each one's really out for itself. But you have more opportunities if you go out in the group. But the females don't do that. He Said about the only thing you see cooperation among adult female chimpanzees is sometimes if one of them has a cute little baby, a couple of the other adult females will join together and, and come and go over to that woman and that, that ape and beat her up and steal her baby and kill it and eat it. Which is fortunate. We don't seem to see much of that in our species. We left that behind evolutionarily. But that's one of the only things Jane Goodall, in her observations, had that with gorillas. I think also that a couple adult females would kill and eat all the babies. Um, this was a nice tasty snack for them. And with the two of them, they could overpower the, the mother. But it's obviously not productive cooperation. That's just taking someone's baby and eating it.

[A]

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

[B]

Yes. Well, there was the idea for a long time that women don't compete or don't like to compete as much. And then they gradually realize that this is wrong. It's just they don't want to acknowledge it that openly. They do compete often for, for love, specifically for the affection and attraction of the, of the most desirable men. But that often can't be acknowledged. It's done sometimes by blackening the reputation of the other woman, spreading negative stories about her, even some of those. My former PhD student Tanya Reynolds, who's really made a terrific career studying female competition in evolutionary context. In one of her experiments, she wanted to see, will there be gossip used? Will women just spontaneously gossip about someone else? So she had people come in, told two women to work on a project together. And so she leaves them alone and they're working. And then the one who's actually a research assistant, who's working, pretending to be a subject of an experiment, but. And she's actually following a script, and she says, oh, I just can't do this today. I don't feel good. I drank too much last night. I think I hooked up with two different guys last night. So she delivers this very juicy tidbit, and then they go on, and then that woman leaves. And then in comes another woman who is another real subject. And the question is, does the woman repeat this, this gossip about her? Well, it turned out what they also varied is the woman who made this disclosure, sometimes she was dressed really sexy and hot, looked very nice, and sometimes she just looked like a mess. It was not very attractive. Well, when, when she was attractive. So she was. Got energized the woman's competitive gears. Then they gossiped, then they said and so hooked up with two men last night. But Tanya also noticed and other research by her has borne this out. They don't do it in a seemingly malicious way. They say oh I was really concerned about so. So I wonder, there's a problem. She said she hooked up with two different men last night. That must be bad for her. I'm kind of worried about her. So the negative information gets spread. And remember, why would you only worry about the well dressed attractive woman? Why wouldn't you worry about the other woman? But you know, that shows the competitive edge to it. So anyway, there is, there is competition among women in the, in the romantic sphere. Most studies look in terms of curse stuff. Now I have to say when we talk about differences between men and women there we're talking overlapping distributions. So the difference between the average man and the average woman is real, but it might be fairly small compared to the variety within women. And I've known some extremely competitive women and some extremely not competitive women. And on average women are less and less ambitious too. Probably a good evolutionary people talk about it that were descended from men that really the top male got to do most of the reproducing. So in say the other great apes and even in polygamy, which has existed in the majority of cultures in the history of the world, one man with multiple wives, well that's the rich successful man. And he gets to have multiple wives and multiple children, which means a lot of men don't get any wife. So the drive to get to the top, you know, we're descended from the man who did it. A man may have been pretty smart, but he didn't care about outdoing all the others or might have been very physically strong and didn't care about that. Well then he didn't. Didn't rise to the top, didn't pass on. His genes were descended from the ones who really did try to compete. It's part people bringing this up. I've been thinking about the great inflation issues and problems recently and it disengages the young men. Because my wife explained this to me once. She said well the woman wants to get an A and she doesn't really mind if everybody else gets an A too. As for the man, if you can't be better than the other people, what's the point if everybody gets an A?

[A]

So interesting.

[B]

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

[A]

And this is because they're driven more hierarchically.

[B]

Yes, definitely more hierarchy. I remember reading too, back in the 80s, when women started really moving up in the businesses, in the organizations that men created, there was a lot of simplification. One estimate that stuck in my mind was the average male business hierarchy had seven different levels of authority. And once women became influential in it, they cut it to about four. So they don't like as much hierarchy. They favor more equality. And there are reasons for that too, that you can argue about. But competition is about hierarchy, and so it's hard. The male want to do it. You want to be the number one.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, a lot. The evolutionary people would say. I mean, that may not be the thing that's in their mind, but the evolution would say, well, that is what drives everything. I mean, maybe some men want to succeed because they want money, but the people would say, well, why does the man want money so much? It's because that's what attracts the women. So I'm not one of these people that evolution explains everything, but it certainly is the starting point and explains a lot.

[A]

I think. I'm interested in whether or not to what extent female mate choice sort of shapes male ambition. We're talking about this hierarchical sense. You've already mentioned that there's a relatively limited pool of men typically that reproduce and a bigger pool of women. I think it's about 40% of men ancestrally reproduce and about 80% of women. So you've got twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And if you've got that plus competition, plus big group coordination, plus a preference for hierarchy, you can begin to see how the pyramid becomes pretty pyramidy.

[B]

Yes. Yeah. I mean, there was an interesting interlude during the hunter gatherers in which there was equality and they really resisted the hierarchy. This was part of the transition away from the apes kind of society that they did it. But I've talked to a couple people who studied hunter gatherers and, well, is it true they're all equal? Well, yes, but she said, but the women all know who's the best hunter and they all want him for their. Their partner. Even though the food is shared, it does look like the best hunter. Everybody makes sure to be nice to him and his family. So they do get more food. And of course, if push came to shove. Having the best hunter as your, your partner would make sure you're, you're less likely to starve or go and go hungry. You and your children are less likely than if you have a third rate hunter as your partner.

[A]

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

[B]

All right, that was another thing I emphasized in the book, the complaints where the feminists look at the top and say, oh, well, the, the presidents and the governors and the executives are mostly men. Must be great to be a man. I said, well, but look at the bottom of society. Who's in prison, who's homeless, who's cannon fodder, being killed in battle. You see mostly men there. Now why that is, that's a, that's a more difficult question to answer. For one thing, though, there's more variability among men. Men are more different from other men than women are from other women. So it's even true with basic things like height. Obviously on average, men are taller than women, but there are a lot of pretty short men and the distribution is flatter. As we say, there's, there are more really tall and really short men than really tall and really short women. Even though the average is different. The difference in average is much smaller with intelligence, but the same thing. You see more males at both extremes. We have more data at the bottom end because people have done decades of studying research on mental retardation. And as you move from the mild to the moderate to the severely retarded, the sex ratio becomes more skewed. More and more boys at each level and there's less at the other end. But it's the same thing as you move from mildly genius to moderate genius to super genius.

[A]

Again, the idea of a super genius.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Speculative, bro. Science is very welcome. I'm very excited to hear this.

[B]

Well, you know, the man has the XY chromosome, the woman has xx. So producing something new. There's a mutation on the chromosome right there. Something goes wrong and produces a different variation. And there's a question, does that then show up in behavior? Do the genes show up in the physical properties? Well, for the woman with the X chromosome, there's always a backup. So even if something goes wrong on one of the little weirdnesses or one of the branches of the X, there's. There is only a 50, 50 chance that we'll get through. And maybe even less than that. Maybe the healthy one takes over or something. So there are less few. But nature can roll the dice more easily with men because if it happens on the bottom part of the Y, where there's no backup, then that will more likely come true. It's certainly adaptive in a way that evolutionarily successful for nature to gamble with men more than women, because a lot of men don't reproduce at all. And most mutations are bad. Most mutations are not an improvement. And so you want that flushed out of the gene pool right away if there's a bad mutation? Well, that's easy with the men since most men don't reproduce anyway.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, that's.

[A]

I hadn't realized. That's yours. Yeah, I love quoting someone to them when I didn't realize it was them.

[B]

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

[A]

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[B]

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

[A]

It also includes on that I'm sure that you've seen this, but it also includes dodging things. It's not just throwing things, it's also dodging things. So there's a study done. One of the problems you have when you're looking at throwing accuracy, you have different articulations of the shoulder capsule, you have different lengths of. Of the forearm. You have. It's very difficult to not have young boys spend the entire first decade of their life picking up stones and throwing them. Girls don't do it in quite the same way. So how are you gonna control for physiological differences, structural differences, biomechanics, just conditioning of. I threw lots of stones when I was five, so one of the ways that they tried to control for this was instead of it being about throwing, it was about dodging. And this was. I don't know how this got past an ethics board. They took one of tennis ball serving cannons that gets used so that they can fire tennis balls across a court. And they had males and females try to get out of the way. And in the male cohorts, they didn't get hit once. And in the female cohorts they got hit. They were peppered quite a few times. And I think that is the same thing. Spatial rotation, like the ability to understand

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It's clearly something we don't use anymore as a strategy to get food.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Okay, what about risk taking? Because that has to be a big. In fact, forget even the risk taking thing. The differences in the motivations, when we're talking about something that controls for physical ability is maybe heavily influenced by cognitive variance. So something like chess playing. There was a study that came out again recently looking at the total ELO scores over time of the best chess players in the world. And I think there was only one female player that ranked in the top something, maybe the top hundred, maybe the top 50. There's only one. And you think, well, this might be due to some cognitive differences in ability that, you know, if you've just got all of these outliers, you know, the 50 men in that 50 are just the tail of the tail of the tail at the very top processing power. But that's not just what chess ability measures. It also measures your stubbornness and your motivation to compete with other people for hours and hours and hours obsessively. So that is that I like the idea of the Chess thing because it controls for pretty much every variable except for one type of ability or like a smaller bucket of abilities that are typically kind of denied. I guess when you look at denial of sex difference stuff. And motivations, like motivations to me seem to play a much bigger role in that than you would be able to excuse if it was something that was biomechanical.

[B]

Well, two points to that. One is I remember being surprised that men and women have separate chess tournaments. I mean, I can understand in basketball that the girls team won't be able to play against the boys team. Men are taller and so on. But why in chess? But, you know, it could be this kind of distribution in, in terms of ability. There also may be more competitive motivation. My friend John Tierney has this. He's a super good writer. He wrote for the New York Times for many years and he likes Scrabble. He said nationwide in the US There are more women than men on the Scrabble clubs playing Scrabble and so on. And, you know, goes with women are highly verbal and so on. And many say their verbal skills are superior to men's. But when they have tournaments, all the top winners are men. It's very rare. You know, there may be one or two occasional women to get in there, but in the competition, the men do it. And so it could be an ability difference that really at the super high level, to win a large Scrabble tournament, you have to be really good. But he said also the men are more motivated, more ambitious, so they'll spend the time doing the drills and memorizing the words, doing that. The women go to the Scrabble club and they want to play Scrabble and have fun. They don't care about memorizing lists of words so that they could possibly do better in the future. But, you know, putting in that training effort and that would go to motivation that the, that that's higher among the men and you know, motivation and ability, they, they probably go together. And especially with something as important as men and women being slightly differently crafted for slightly different tasks in the biological past, you want to be motivated to do the things you're good at.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, risk taking, first of all, going back to the twice as many of our ancestors were women than men, and women are much more likely to reproduce than men, which means odds are in your favor if your biological goal is to produce a child or several and produce grandchildren. For a woman, playing it safe was going to get there. Most Women reproduced, but most men didn't. So if you just go along with everybody else and play along, you'll end up left out. So we're descended from the ones who were ambitious and rose to the top. And some of that means taking chances, said in the book, sailing off into the unknown to explore. All kinds of bad things can happen to you. It's not surprising women didn't want to risk that. But you might come back rich. We're descended from the men who took the chances and did succeed. Lots of men took chances and drowned or were killed or got nowhere. But that's life as a man. In fact, it's true, I think, in many other species. So the male is a riskier one because. Because you had to succeed in order to be attractive and to have children. Now, there are other aspects of this. Joyce Bennett and her colleagues at Harvard did this terrific paper a year or two ago about safety concerns, which are much higher in women than men.

[A]

Physical safety, cultural safety.

[B]

I think social, too. I mean, the article dwelt on physical and medical things, but I think it applies in the social realm too. Don't like to take chances. I have a colleague who is arranging getting researchers together to do what she called adversarial collaborations, where, say you and I are both working on some area and we have a theoretical disagreement. You think your theory is right and I think my theory is right. So one thing we could do is get together and do an experiment together that will agree. This will be the critical test. Okay. And people don't usually do this because they don't reach out to their rivals who they often don't like or whatever. But this woman, Corey Clark, was at Penn, and she had a big grant and could encourage people to do it. And she said, yeah, people often once she said, why don't you do a collaboration with them? I thought, yeah, that's a great idea. But that was the men's reaction. I just couldn't get the women to do it. She had something like 30 or 40 of these things going. And I talked to her one point. She said, I finally got a woman to agree to be part of one of these things, but it was only on the condition that she would be the neutral third party so she could not be proven wrong. And so taking that chance, as she elaborates, that's why women want to exclude someone they disagree with rather than confront them. And you bring your data, I'll bring mine, and we'll duke it out. That's more a male strategy. So in a way, science has become much more about excluding and silencing, which to the detriment of the scientific enterprise.

[A]

What's your concept of the imaginary feminist?

[B]

Oh, all right, that was in that book I did 15 years ago. There's this conventional wisdom that we all have and when I start to say something about gender, you can immediately imagine, oh, but a feminist will object to this. So they taught people very well to have a kind of automatic internalized representation of a feminist. You can't say this or you can't say that. It's mostly silencing and disallowing things. So the problem, if you try to deal with feminists on a scholarly basis, well, there are multiple problems, but they disagree to some extent amongst themselves about various things. So they can easily say, well, that's not what what feminists believe, or at least not what all feminists believe. But I wanted to address this sort of internalized feminist watchdog that pretty much everybody is brought up right now. And you know, you can't say this and you can't say that that's misogynistic or that's, that's unfair or sexist or whatever. Like you were saying earlier, to say that there are more stupid men than women, well that's fine. But to say there are more brilliant men than women, oh, oh, you can't say that. So that's what I was trying to get at with the imaginary feminist.

[A]

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[B]

Absolutely. I was convinced of trade offs fairly early in my career. And I think social science in general, they want to say this is good and that's bad and not all of them. There are lots of people who believe in trade offs, but the dominant view is, well, this is a problem and we have to do this to fix it. And I started saying, well, you fix one problem, you create another and it isn't so easy just to solve problems. So I have this view. Some social scientists see it as our work as a way of making society better. And so they have a clear idea of what's going to be better and don't want to acknowledge that if we make a change to bring about this better state, well, maybe it'll make some other things worse. So students are happier with grade inflation where everybody gets an A, but then they learn less, there's less incentive to study and less punishment. Or schools get rated on how many of your students graduate and graduate on time and things like that. Well, but that puts pressure on the institution to put out, you know, to make sure everybody passes whether they deserve, deserve it or not. And then they're more uneducated or poorly educated people out there. I was just reading something in this morning's paper, I think about the Chicago schools, which a number of them, they don't have a single pupil who is reading or doing math at grade level. So it's nicer for the teachers to give everybody a positive grade. The students like it too, but there's a clear trade off that you don't have to work as hard.

[A]

It's such a strange kind of sort of toxic compassion. I had this idea in my head, you remember the study that was done where some feminist scholars had tried to reanalyze the big game hunting data of hunter gatherer tribes. And they basically said women not only did just as much big game hunting as men, but sometimes they did even more. And this was their reanalysis of existing data. It was about five years ago and it sort of broke through. And I remember looking at it at the time and I thought this, this doesn't seem to make sense to me. I, I, I don't really Understand why. But I, I, you know, I'm not a scholar, I can't read the data. Someone analyzed their reanalysis and there was so much fuckery with the data. It was one contribution to a single hunt was counted the same as an entire lifetime as hunting from the men. There was no difference made for the size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what I realized was there's a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff that whatever men do is implicitly preferred. That's seen as the desirable thing. That women did just as much big game hunting as men implies that big game hunting and the male default is somehow more desirable. In the same way as there are just as many female CEOs are on the rise. And this is something that should be celebrated, is it? Well, because that's a position that's been typically held by men. Now it's the prestigious ones you wouldn't see this for. There are just as many female addicts and homeless people as men. There are just as many women in jail for violent crimes as men. You wouldn't get that in the same way. But I realized for a society that's increasingly obsessed with talking about equality, which is not equality, it's trying to make men and women the same, not to make them equal. It really is. It slips so much low key misogyny in by just tacitly derogating whatever it is that women tend to do naturally that, oh, alloparenting, gathering. Gathering's not as important as hunting. Raising children is not as important as war. Staying at building the HR department is not as important as being the CEO. The, There is always this sort of implicit prioritization, this soft bigotry of male expectations. And I, I saw it happen with that hunter gatherer big game hunting thing and I just, I, once I've seen it, I can't unsee it really.

[B]

Okay, a couple things. First, in terms of hunting and gathering, they're both important. And gathering sometimes yields more calories. It certainly does, much more reliably. But from what I'm told, protein has this particular higher value. And so men gather too, for sure, especially the modern ones, because I don't think there's as much big game to hunt anymore for the remaining hunter gatherers anyhow. But protein is a particular need. So if you want to make women look good, you just count the calories and then the difference is smaller. But protein, which you need to grow the brain and the muscles and everything else, that is a higher prestige food, it's a more valuable kind of food. And so there is a genuine superiority in getting food or getting protein food, which would come from mainly from hunting. Now women do, I understand, sometimes hunt small game, so there's some degree of overlap, as you would expect. But it's not that the men made up that hunting is better than gathering. Being the good hunter again is what made the man attractive to women so that he could get his choice of mates and have a tassel of children and we'd be descended from him. And the women knew this too. So Joyce said they all know who's the best hunter and they all want him. So there is some benefit to protein. And in terms of what makes a corporation succeed, the HR department just manages things internally, but it doesn't improve the bottom line. You gotta work on the manufacturing technology and the sales opportunities. And those are the things where the corporations make money so that they can afford a human relations thing which will, you know, make sure there are no office romances and things like that. Which incidentally is something of a recent issue I've been been thinking about. I wonder if the, you know, young people aren't marrying and mating nearly as much as they used to. And I wonder if the prohibition on workplace romance drew out a lot of real babies with, with the bathwater. I mean, it was done to protect women from a few abusive guys who would take advantage of their position to, you know, and I sympathize with that, but I think I like most men, our guests, like you two, we hate those guys who abuse their positions because they discredit the rest of us.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

And when again, I was visiting at Harvard and a woman there said, you know, our friends are all these long happily married couples, but none of those marriages would be allowed today. A lot of them started off with professors and students and things like that and so pushed more and more to prohibit that. But often the woman initiated that herself. And women like to marry somebody like that. And again, there's a lot of long, happy marriages are being prevented and the dating apps aren't doing an adequate job.

[A]

Yeah, I think another interesting element here is modern feminism has encouraged women to turn into the sort of man that they want to marry very much. Encouraging dominance, assertiveness, independence, derogating, nurturing, soft, sensitive skills. Unless they're in a man, obviously. And the lack of polarity, you just can't sort of re engineer this out. And it's interesting to see how many of the cultural commentators online that will endorse a view that they don't Embody how many of the people that are writing about this stuff, if you were to look at the inner dynamic of their relationship, it probably looks quite traditional, but from the outside, saying, you don't need to be. You don't need to have a family, you don't need to be a mother, you don't need to be in any way submissive or follow or be led by the partner, all the rest. And you look internally at what a lot of these commentators online do, especially as they grow up a little bit more, and you realize that those positions, those positions aren't held. There was a really interesting situation. I don't know if you saw it. It went viral about six months ago. There was a man and a woman, young pair, traveling in Thailand, some sort of East Asian country. And it was CCTV footage. And the woman was attacked by a man with a knife. And he was trying to steal her bag off her, some of her possessions. And the man that she was with hid around the side of a pillar. So there was a sort of a bollard or something. And this guy hid over there as the woman was fighting, trying to sort of hold onto a bag. And this guy's got a knife. And the. I don't really remember how. How it finished. All of the comments were basically saying, girl, just leave him. He's trash, this guy. Absolutely no respect at all. And I don't. I wish that he had protected her. I wish that it hadn't happened. I don't think that she should have had to go through it. But it is difficult to diminish the protector provider elements that men typically take value from. And in the same breath say, yeah, but if it happens, you should stand up for the woman. Because if you've been trained for your entire life, well, women don't need the doors holding open for them. Women don't need you to make sure that they get home safe at night. They can do everything that Amanda's sometimes even better, just as much. Big game hunting. What is the truth, tra? Where are the training wheels for men to learn to step up in those sorts of situations?

[B]

Right, right. Yes, yes, yes, very much. Yeah. My generation, we were told we got to take care of the girls and the women and hold the doors for them and protect them. And if there's danger, you put yourself into it. There's a funny story by Warren Farrell, who I guess initially was one of the main male feminists. He was, but he kind of woke up to that. But he talked about being at a conference on feminism and he was out for a walk with one of the top women feminists, and they're walking down in a park or something, and a man jumped out from behind a tree. It turned out it wasn't dangerous, but it suddenly was. And immediately the woman ducked behind him and he stepped forward and he said, oh. We had such a long, awkward conversation after that. How could.

[A]

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

[B]

Okay, I'm not sure I believe in either misogyny or patriarchy, but those are common terms, which, yeah, maybe that's what she blamed or something like that. But I certainly don't know any men who hate women. No, I know men who hate specific women, ex wives and whatnot, and often for understandable reasons. But a man who hated women in general, I don't do it. I mean, if there's any gender hatred, it's feminists hating men in general.

[A]

I think there's subcultures now, unfortunately, there are subcultures of men who hate women. You know, you look at sort of some of the darker corners of the Internet now. Guys that are. They're upset entire sex that they think has rejected them or their friends or is meant made a society where they're no longer wanted. I do think that the more militant edges of feminism have been mirrored now on the. On the men's side.

[B]

Yeah, that could be. I wouldn't be surprised. And you know, if a woman who'd been raped a couple times hated men in general, we wouldn't be that surprised. And yeah, I kind of see those involuntarily celibate incels, somewhat in the the same category. I'm less sympathetic, but. But I mean, the experiment would be if a woman would take one of these incels and strike up a relationship with him and start having sex with him, he might come around very rapidly and all these women are bad would just evaporate.

[A]

That's a spicy theory that we can fix inceldom by just getting women to have sex with men more. But I do agree that. I mean, it's even discouraged in the world of incels. I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, but one of my best friends is the number one researcher on the planet, William, and they have this term called ascending. And ascending is, um, no longer becoming an incel by being attractive to a woman and getting her attention, getting her into bed, being found to be attractive in this way. And it's actively discouraged. And I think the reason it's Actively discouraged is if somebody else that you saw as an equal is able to ascend, is no longer involuntarily celibate. That means that maybe you're not doomed. And if that's the case, your sort of fatalistic view of why things are happening this way might not actually be so fatalistic. It might be more self imposed and maybe there's something you can do. And as soon as you have hope, you also have the opportunity for disappointment. And without the hope, there can't be disappointment. So removing the hope and saying I'm a genetic dead end, there's nothing that I can do. Women are X, Y and Z and that's not gonna change that. It's misery inducing but predictable, consistent and reassuring in some ways.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it's so true that the reason that we're able to sort of play around in this kiddie pool with roles and switching of sacrifice and who's supposed to do what is literally because there aren't any intense selection pressures going on. If there was something more extreme happening and imposing itself on us from the outside, shit would get real really quick. I mean, look at the Ukraine war, right? The Ukraine war kicks off and men were being turned away at the border, including trans men were being turned away at the border because hey, no, sorry buddy, we women and children get to go, but you, you got to stay all thought. I don't know how progressive thinking Ukraine was prior to the war kicking off. I'm unsure about the cultural landscape there, but yeah, it seems to me like we might be entering a period where male motivation collapses. And obviously you wrote this book in 2010 and 16 years later, the male motivation collapse, which you could have seen, it just would have been a natural byproduct of you rolling the clock forward from what you'd scene has completely come to fruition. So I guess I can congratulate you on being Cassandra in that way.

[B]

All right.

[A]

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

[B]

I don't know. People do like to tear down other things and there's a lot of petty jealousy and so forth. But evidence in favor is overwhelming. I mean, there must be a thousand successful findings in the research literature, which hardly any point has that much support. I heard somebody was recently saying, well, it must just been all been by chance that maybe by accident the statistics turned out this way. Well, chance works equally both ways. Half the findings should be in the opposite direction. There are essentially none in the opposite direction. I mean, saying that it's a chance where there's that much. There was the one initially big multi lab replication which was reported as a failure. And so that got a lot of publicity because people like negative publicity and they never correct it when the positive comes around. Even those data were reanalyzed a couple years later and somebody said, oh no, actually they didn't get people depleted enough to really show any effects. But to the slight extent that they did deplete people, they did what the theory predicted. So that was confirmed.

[A]

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[B]

interesting idea that some people at Stanford published some work on that and we were intrigued by that and so we tried to copy their experiment and we did find that if you give people a really strong sales pitch that your willpower is unlimited, then at least when they first get depleted they don't show the effect we did show. When you get seriously depleted, then you show an even worse effect. So that belief that you have unlimited willpower is helpful. Think of the analogy of physical energy. If you somehow could be convinced that you have unlimited physical energy today and then you go out for running a race, but first when you start to get tired it'll probably help you continue to do it, but at some point it may backfire. My thought in the big picture is if it were true that believing in unlimited willpower would give you unlimited willpower, you'd think most societies in the world would have that belief because they would

[A]

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

[B]

So much benefit to society to having people with better self control and yet most societies don't. Now there was some argument that some people in India have the opposite belief and I wish to see more there, but it's very rare. Most people seem to know and I think you know, they just have the experience that Trying to exert control over a long period of time, you just can't keep it up.

[A]

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

[B]

Okay, well, at first we thought. First we were thinking that willpower is kind of a metaphorical thing, but, okay, the brain has a limited amount of fuel and it used it up, so it has to recover. But then people started showing you get people depleted and then you offer them a big financial reward if they can still perform well. Well, they can. They're extra depleted afterwards. But it's not that the brain is out of fuel. It just goes into a conservation mode. It turns out physical muscles are the same way. They're lab studies where you come into the lab and do physical exertions or you have to press and after a while your muscles get tired and. And then the researchers will say, well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you $10 if you can do it once pressing as hard as you did when you first walk in. Well, they can. It's still that there is a point at which your muscles can't work anymore. There's probably a point like that which your willpower is so badly depleted that you can't do it. But in the laboratory would never get people to that extreme situation. So one big switch early was to shift from being out of fuel to conserving remaining fuel. And it makes sense. We evolved under conditions of uncertain food supply. And then people started linking it to the glucose, the chemical in your body that carries the energy from your stomach to your brain and muscles and so on. And found this was kind of a surprise to me when this worked. But if people would eat something after they were depleted, that would get them back to perform well again. So that was intriguing, wasn't there?

[A]

There was a great study done around the. Length of time of somebody being sent to jail by jurors or judges, and how long it had been since they had their breakfast. Basically, if you end up in court, you probably want to go in at about 1:45pm just after the lunch break, or at 9am just after they've come in for breakfast.

[B]

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And some people argue about that. It's hard to get a perfect study done with real life data, but the curve was quite striking. And just about every experiment we've used where we give people some glucose in the middle, it does restore their performance. And then they often don't know we started doing it with Giving people lemonade. It was a Florida state and it was hot and so people were glad to have a glass of lemonade. And you can mix it with Splenda or sugar.

[A]

Oh, good.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

The glucose is. The energy is also you use for your immune system, but it uses very uneven amounts. So when you're fighting off a cold, that's often why you want to go to bed and just sleep it off and let your immune system have all the energy in there. Well, in our evolutionary history, you didn't have antibiotics or anything like that. If you got a cut on your foot and got infected, your body needed to fight that off. If you didn't get a cut, then you don't need extra immune system activity, but you'd need extra fuel for it to fight an infection or to survive a fever or anything like that. So it made sense to err on the side of conserving as much as possible. There is an interesting alternative theory here which most people don't talk about. But I read it, I thought it's really quite good. Nothing quite fits everything. But this is the best alternative theory, which is that the sections in the brain that do self control are really important because that's, you know, self control is really valuable for success in life in many different ways. And if you have high glucose around some nerve cells for a long period of time, it starts to kill them. It's best known diabetics in the past, they would lose all feeling in their feet, their blood sugar would run high and so you would start to kill the nerve cells and you wouldn't feel it. So you hurt your foot and infections would happen and you wouldn't notice them. So it could be that after you exert self control, the depletion effect is the brain letting itself cool off, as it were. You say, okay, we've been exerting self control using willpower. That means those nerve cells in the front of the brain have been exposed to a high level of glucose. Well, we don't want to burn them out, so let's not use self control for a While let them cool off and then I can use them again. That really fits a lot of,

[A]

a

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Can you distinguish for me the difference

[B]

between okay, so willpower be the energy that you exert, but self control also depends on keeping track of the behavior. So the easiest way to improve your self control is to keep a record of what you're doing. Even my grandmother told me a long time ago, well, when you're poor student, you don't have money. You just write down everything you spend and then, then you know how much you're spending and what you're spending it on. Or if you're trying to lose weight and keep it off, well, you've got to weigh yourself more carefully. Or if you're trying to have take up an exercise program, tell your friends you're going to do it and tell them you're going to tell them each day, did I exercise today? So improving the monitoring will improve self control without needing any more willpower because it gives you more feedback. And I was going to try to jog three times a week and I haven't jogged all week, so you better do it. It's easier to fool yourself if you don't keep track and certainly if you don't know. It's very hard to regulate something that you don't know in terms of improving the willpower. It seems to work like a muscle and a lot of people have produced findings like this that if you exercise self control on a regular basis then you do you get better at it. I didn't know if that would work. We had an early study where it did work and then done a fair number of others and other people have too. There are a couple meta analyses combining results of a great many and saying a great many studies and saying yes, it does practice self control. And to design the study properly, you have to exercise self control on one sphere and then measure self control on something else to show that It's a general improvement, but it does seem to work. Some of the biggest effects I've seen were this Australian group, they did several studies. One was they took students who had money trouble and they trained them to manage their money better and they met, met with them, you know, once a month for several months or something and taught them how to manage their money. And so they did get better at that. But their measure, one key was they came to the laboratory and had to do self control tasks that had nothing to do with money. It was just like maintaining focus on this while you're being distracted by that. They were better at that. They also reported on the questionnaire that they started studying better just because they're working on managing their money better. But they also study their study habits improved. After they finished dinner, they would clean up rather than just stack the dishes in the sink. They even said they ate healthier, which again is a sign of self control. But as they point out, healthy food is more expensive than junk food. So it kind of went against what they were training self control for, which is to manage their money better, but that also improved their diet. So they saw a whole variety of positive changes in there that came from it. Fitting the idea that self control is sort of one central resource that's used for many different things.

[A]

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[B]

I was intrigued with the idea that especially with thinking about pornography. It's so widely available, and I've seen over the course of my life that become more and more available and, you know, for better and for worse. But the novelty of might have been Naomi Wolf or one of those who remarked that her generation, which I think was about the same as mine, was the last time a woman could have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes and letting him see her naked body. But it was such a thrill to see it. You know, when I was a kid, we didn't see pictures of naked women. You know, one of my buddies would find a playboy that somebody had thrown away or something, but they didn't even show the full nudity. So you really didn't quite know what a woman entirely looked like. And even if you could find an occasional picture or something, it's not like endless amounts of pornography and lots of women and ads where they're showing everything. So some of the mystery is gone. And it made me think maybe there's some loss there, that novelty is arousing. But as. But it's a limited amount of novelty, you can only do something the first time once. There's only one first time. So in a way, it's a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them. And if it had been available when I was young, I doubt I would have resisted. I probably would have been curious enough to look at it all and so on. But in a way, I think I'm lucky that it wasn't available. But that way there was still novelty as I got into my 30s and 40s, which I hadn't explored yet. But if you've seen everything by the time you're 25 or even by the time you're 20, there isn't as much novelty available on the different sex partners. And that seems to be what people are shifting. That's kind of what I came to after writing those columns, that people are blazing through all the novelty and pornography. They're not doing as much of capitalizing on novelty within the relationship. The second base plan, you know, that you just sort of gradually go from one step to other. One of my young friends said, yeah, today I just did it again from first contact on the dating app to having lots of sex under a week, just a few days. Whereas, you know, back in the day, the earlier day, you had to practically be engaged before you could go all the way. And certainly when I grew up in the 70s, you had to have a series of interactions and you know, you have the relationship and then so the step by step, the novelty, you know, you could appreciate. So the. The first time you undo her brassiere or whatever. Wow, that's. That's really exciting. But if you've had sex, you know, and done it all right away, that doesn't, I think, strengthen the relationship in the way that shared novel experiences, a series of them will do. I can't prove it on that, but that's a speculation. But going for novelty in terms of lots of different partners rather than novelty within one relationship, of gradually exploring many different activities, that seems much less well designed to produce healthy families, which is what society needs. And I also have to think for those fortunate young men who have sex with lots and lots of different women, is this really good preparation for marriage? I think it would you cycle through women rapidly and get tired of them. Do you think that settle down with one woman for 40 years?

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

All right. Yes, I remember reading that. I think it was in the everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask book, which is one of the first best sellers, the public about sex. And she'd written to the physician and said they'd had a good sex life with her husband and then gradually couldn't perform as well. It got weaker and weaker and it stopped altogether. And it was kind of sad. And she felt bad for him. And then she thought, morals, women didn't do sexual things. But she said, well, I love my husband and we've been married a long time. I'm not going to worry about morality. She went and bought a book about sex, which, you know, back in those days, there weren't that many things available. And it said if you put your hand on the man's genitals, it is exciting to them. So I tried that and he got harder than he had for years. And so it was a very nice kind of sweet story. So that was the opposite extreme of novelty. They'd hardly done anything. And we forget, if we go back a century, the amount of female flesh a man would see in his lifetime is less, probably than you can see in an hour of.

[A]

I was. I mean, I was fascinated by that. What a. Weirdly, I guess it would be impossible to do that study now because sexual culture is so permissive and so sort of widely promoted that. That no one would have gone their entire life without what is sort of termed as second base. Right. Actually, I lied. I lied. Apparently you can get to fourth base without going around second base. That is, you just go from home base to first and then you go straight back again, apparently. And there's other bits that you can miss off. But I loved, I loved that story that you told about a series of experiments that were done showing pornography, normal pornography, BDSM pornography, and then educational sexual videos. And the increase in sexual frequency happened when everybody saw the porn for the first time. Because, again, this was in the 60s or the 70s, I think, where porn was basically not available.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But if you went from the extreme stuff to the more vanilla stuff, you didn't see the concordant increase in sexual desire, but if you escalated it and this, this, you know, kind of goes to. To prove your theory that ever, ever increasing but steady escalation of sexual novelty over time, doing new things, exposure to that, not only within partners, but presumably across your lifetime, it seems to make sense. This isn't just a, like, dyadic situation. It's going to be stuff that you've done. If you have an explosive 20s where you're just on, you know, the career run of your life and then you settle down and you begin to start to titrate again, I have to assume that you need to almost treat yourself like you're someone whose sexual novelty needs to be shepherded with at least a little bit of care because you want to still be excited to do things over time. And unfortunately, as much as you can say you should love me so much, it should just be the excitement, the raw attraction and the romance and the rest of it. You need to respect the psychology, you need to respect Coolidge effect. You need to respect the way that we look at variety as being a stimulus. And yeah, I think it's.

[B]

It's just ration it. Yeah.

[A]

And what, what? And ration it over time. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you've done, you've. I loved the disclaimer and I'm going to start to use it when I'm talking about spicy stuff too. You say at the top of pretty much all of all of the posts, this is a treatment on men. A separate treatment will be needed for women, but we can save that for another time. It's such a nice way to not have to caveat through. And we must remember that this would be important for.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have you got any inclination? Because we're talking about men. The Coolidge effect. What's the refractory period from partner to partner? And for men, if they go from one partner to. To a different partner, they're able to perform more quickly as opposed to if it's the same one and they've got to go again. Have you got any idea what sexual novelty does to female sex drive?

[B]

It's much harder to get convincing data, anything on that. And so I can write what we do know about female sexuality and so on, but the role of novelty, I mean, it's not nothing, but it doesn't seem to be as powerful a driving force. I recall some years ago someone reported a survey, I think it was first year college students at Southern Cal or one of the California universities. And they asked, how many people would you like to have sex with for the rest of your life, assuming no constraints of marriage or laws or disease or anything like that? If it were up to you. And the women's response average was two and a half. So they wanted to have a fling or two and then settle down. The average for the men was 64,

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

But so Both men and women. There were a lot saying, I would like to have one. But a lot of the men wanted to have a really high number. And not very many women were saying, I want to go have sex with 100 men. Some are doing it now. There was that woman in the UK who did it all in one day, right?

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

No, it was. You're talking about Lily Phillips, who did 100 and then Bonnie Blue had sex with a thousand men in one day, which even if you just run the numbers, is insane. But the whole thing was recorded. It's. Yeah, it's. It's a real. I mean, more than anything, it's a. It's an endurance feat more than it is a one of sexual novelty. But, I mean, what you're looking at there is basically someone who's kind of the. The Michael Jordan or the LeBron James or the Tiger woods of sociosexuality. It's just somebody that's. So far, she is the tail of the tail. She's the Elon Musk of. Of having sex. And I had a conversation with her. I sat down. I sat across from her. She was perfectly cordial. She had her defenses up at the start, but when she realized it wasn't going to be a cantankerous takedown conversation, it was really nice. And I was looking. I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. And I was looking for, is there some deception going on here? Is there some secret trauma that's leaking out? Is there whatever. And by the end of it, my summary is just, she is the most extreme sociosexual being that I've ever seen. She just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex. It's not alchemizing some childhood wound in a way that I think a lot of BDSM and kink actually is. There seems to be a good amount of data coming out that a good bit of BDSM and kink is. Preferences for that are predisposed by some situations people have been through in childhood. That was Catherine Page Harden from ut. She was teaching me about that a couple of weeks ago and a couple of other conversations I've had. It's. It's. It's definitely unique. But, I mean, yeah, maybe there'll be studies done on her at some point in future. Who knows?

[B]

The one who did 100 said she wouldn't Recommend it.

[A]

The one who did a thousand said that she'd do it again. So again, the people at the extremes, the people who are at the tail

[B]

of the tale, they'll okay, well that's what she wants. Good for her. And must have been fun for the thousand men too. I wonder, does she want to get married at some date?

[A]

That would be. Actually, that could be a fix for your incel problem. That could be. We could just put a thousand of the men who was struggling with the inseldom thing in there and then that's a thousand fewer men who are maybe thinking that sex is inaccessible.

[B]

Who knows? Yes, my wife thinks they're just caught up by the publicity that this great sex is going on all over the place. And she says they probably just want the really attractive women which are is unrealistic for them. She wonders, have these incels made a serious effort to date say the fat girls or others who aren't nearly as much in demand? Traditionally, historically, that's what people sometimes did. They found someone at about the same level. But that was before there was the assumption that lots of people are having lots of great sex all the time, which I'm told by the researchers are studying this is that it's not nearly as, as wild as that the Hollywood version of what young person's sex life is, is not realistic. And maybe realistic even in Hollywood, but. But you know, those are beautiful people with lots of money and status and so on. So I don't know, I don't have data. You said you know an expert on this and well, have you tried to date the less attractive girls who are wishing for more attention and action or if you insist you have to have the gorgeous one, well, you may be disappointed unless you're a big, rich, rich handsome man.

[A]

There was a really interesting article that was posted by my friend Rob Henderson a couple of days ago and he was talking about people assume that it's this small number of men that are capturing sex from a large number of women, but it's not. It's a sociosexual few at the top. And yeah, there is, there is a little bit of a skew within there, but most people aren't having that much sex. Many people aren't having any sex at all. And there is a small number of people having loads of sex with each other. And that's just a really interesting wrinkle I think in the sort of 8020 discourse that's been going on for a while. And I knew that this had been, this had got turned Upside down three or four years ago by a friend, Alex Datesych. And then Rob re reported on it the other day and basically found out the same thing. You've just got this group of people who want to have sex with lots of people and yeah, everybody else is, I don't know, looking at it, maybe thinking it was good. I guess one interesting thing is probably more men would want to be in that group of highly sociosexual people, whereas fewer women desire to be in. Most women who want to be in it are in it, presumably, whereas most men who want to be in it can't be in it.

[B]

Right, yeah. There's a big difference there. Again, with the men wanting much more of it. The average man wanting much more in terms of variety. Yeah. I was talking to another expert, Eli Finkel, and he said, yeah, the one night stand thing, that's. It's not entirely a myth, but it's way overstated. It's quite rare for people to get together and have sex just one time. I don't know the basis for that, but he knows much more than I do about that sort of thing.

[A]

Roy Baumeister, ladies and gentlemen. Roy, you rule. I love your stuff. Everyone needs to go and check out your substack. Go and subscribe. The existential contrarian, right?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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