1375: Alphas | Skeptical Sunday

0:03 Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, researcher, and fellow alpha male, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you, and our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays though, it's Skeptical Sunday, a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as internet porn, chemtrails, bann foods, toothpaste, crystal healing, diet pills. bottled water and more. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, crime and cults, and more to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan Harbinger dot com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

1:09 Alright, today on the show, somewhere online, you may have been yelled at by a guy in a fitted polo shirt telling you how to be an alpha male. It's the ultimate online shorthand, this idea that human society is a rigid hierarchy where you're either the silver back leading the troop or a beta waiting for scraps. It's moved from dark corn of pickup artist forums, which I am unfortunately quite familiar with, straight into mainstream corporate leadership seminars and girl boss TikTok. promising that if you just fix your posture and you project, you assert dominance, the world will finally hand you the keys to the kingdom. The problem is that Alpha has become essentially the astrology of the insecure. It's a seductive, simple story that we use to explain away why we didn't get the promotion or why a second date didn't happen. We're told it's biological, which makes it feel like some kind of unchangeable law of nature. It's flattering if you think you got it, and a convenient excuse if you don't. But the moment you poke at the actual science, the whole thing starts to look Less like a nature documentary and more like a house of cards built on a total misunderstanding of how animals, including humans, actually function. Here today to help us separate the leaders from the loudmouths is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Nick

2:22 You're not an alpha, is that right? I don't know, man. You got a lot of tattoos and a beard, so just saying. It's after March, so I I just have sideburns, but As I think we're about to find out, no one is an alpha. But no, despite being a gravely voiced bodybuilder. This is not a term I have ever identified with. That's so Sigma, bro. Yeah. If we have to categorize it, sure. I'm I'm a Sigma. I think before we get into this, it's important to note

2:50 Categories can be great to the extent that they increase understanding. The problem begins when categories are used as a substitute. For understanding. And we're gonna encounter a lot of that today. Yeah, that makes sense. So for anyone who has mercifully missed out on the entire alpha beta Sigma, whatever discourse. Can you run it down a little bit? The idea is that there are alphas who are the leaders and betas who are the followers.

3:16 Everyone is in one of these two categories. Alphas get ninety percent of everything good in life. And betas are left with the crumbs. So to circle back to the Sigma thing, there's a slightly more nuanced slash ridiculous version of this, right? Yeah, a Manosphere blog back in the day called Alpha Game Plan. had a whole elaborate set of categories That recognized at the very least that it's not quite that simple. To be clear, this is total broscience. Not actual science, but we're gonna humor it because well, that's what we're debunking here on this episode of Skeptical Sunday. I trust bro science more than actual science. So Okay, well fine. Trust the bro science. It really adds to your credibility here, but keep going.

4:00 Yeah. The thing about this other more nuanced scale is yeah, it it adds more nuance. So Beta's in this framework are also confident. And good looking guys.

4:12 They're just to a lesser degree than the alphas. Deltas. Are The normal, average, everyday guy. Gamma's

4:21 Are weird in like an off putting way? Sigma's are weird in an attractive way. And basically ignore or flout all social rules. All right. So is that us? Sigmas, right? Yeah. That sounds good to me. I feel like you're lying to yourself, man. I feel like you're a total alpha on this spectrum. Well. Continue. There's like a whole thing now where younger guys wanna identify as Sigma.

4:46 Who doesn't wanna be the cool, mysterious outsider Maverick, who just kinda floats above all these social dominance games. Like who doesn't want to be Han Solo? I see. Yeah. But back to our more nuanced spectrum. The omegas in this version are like Completely hopeless. And lambda's

5:06 Just don't care. Uh uh because they're gay, I think is like the the implication in this hierarchy. This fake pretend blog hierarchy. Sure, sure. I'm not I'm not I'm I'm not endorsing this by any means at all. I'm just explaining it. I get why people use this because for example, I've I've said many times on the show I was an exchange student. And when I was an exchange student in Germany You're outside of the structure of it all. One, you're new, but two, you're like such an alien presence in this place. you know, I was in a former communist country, so I show up and I remember The kids were like

5:40 Dude, you're wearing sandals. That's like so lame and dumb. And it was like It doesn't matter because Tevas are cool in the in nineteen ninety seven where I'm from. So I'm rocking these things. And I remember people just were like Oh, and then suddenly other people are starting to wear These sandals, but it was also like I don't have to be a good skier even though that was or a good footballer, even though that was what made cool kids at the school. I was friends with all those guys'cause I was the only American that anybody had ever met and I could start to speak German. So like I had my own status uh hierarchy or I I we I had like this weird asterisk place

6:14 in the hierarchy, right? The status hierarchy where it was like this guy's not an athlete, wears lamo clothes, doesn't speak German that well, but is friends with all of the quote unquote. Cool and uncool kids from the three grades around him because he's stands out in this way where everybody talks to him. And that's sort of Sigma ish, I guess, right? But it's really hard to build that if you're just like a normal dude in a high school somewhere, I think. I always tell people about my high school. Like I went to a pretty large high school. And like

6:42 We had multiple groups of Weird kids? And My group of weird kids was like the alpha weirdos, the skateboarder. Hardcore punk rock.

6:54 kind of like guys like we were and then like the Marilyn Manson kids were further down the totem pole and the heavy metal kids were even Further down the totem pole'cause like nothing was less cool in nineteen ninety six than than being into heavy metal. You know what though? Like this is nonsense science. It's not science, right? But there's something to be said for like, yeah, you're like the bro punk rock kid that's not traditionally cool. But your brother works at a store where they can get beer and you can get beer for everyone and it's like, Well, you're automatically elevated to a tier where nobody messes with you because when all the jocks and Stacy's or whatever they're called want to have a party on the weekend, you're the first phone call. You're the guy who can actually get the beer. So it's like, Yeah, you're kinda weird. You wear these weird shirts and you got tattoos in ninth grade, but like nobody really messes with you because you're the hookup. The second Openly gay kid in

7:44 my school's history that anyone was aware of. H sister's boyfriend was the beer guy. Yeah. And as you can imagine He didn't get a lot of stick for being gay. No, that's a funny Well, no pun intended. But the here's the thing. Do you think the nuance I'm gonna get canceled. Some one of these jokes does uh is inevitably gonna get me canceled at some point. But do you think the nuance adds anything to the conversation? Because we just made a mess of that, but it's not scientific or anything. It's basically a weird overlay that we kinda the people kind of made up to go over normal social

8:14 hierarchy, but it's not really It almost kind of proves that it's not a thing, right? Oh yeah, well, you can apply these labels to anybody in all these different ways. So like It's not that useful. I think that the one that we just talked about, the more nuanced one, does add some kind of like deeper insight and I think that people can kind of like see like

8:34 that your school there was whatever, like the high school quarterback And the captain of the basketball team or whatever. And then there was just like the rest of the guys who were jocks of whatever. Here's the thing though, we're adults now. And we have to use high school examples to apply all of this because none of it works outside of this weird artificial scenario where you're in a school trapped with people of of different kinds and you have to be there. Like it just doesn't it doesn't work elsewhere, in my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong. Again, I think that like You can use it as a way to kind of like Increase understanding or you can use it as a substitute for understanding.

9:09 I think that there're social hierarchies in in every situation. Uh but that's the thing is that they're fluid. They're fluid. Yeah. You can be the alpha In one situ or what how whatever you want with the top dog. Yeah, you can be the top dog at work and you go home and you know Your wife's the boss and your kids make fun of you and too close to home. You're hitting too close to home right now, Nick. And then you go play racquetball and you're like kinda somewhere in the middle. You know, it could change around the day.

9:34 The anyone who spent any Kinda time in alternative subcultures or the artworld. knows that for example conventional attractiveness

9:46 Does not Count for a lot. You're the Alpha Chad Chiseled Chin. perfect haircut guy and you go to like a goth club.

9:56 You're not probably gonna be most Girls first. Pick. I remember when I was in my late twenties or mid twenties I got in killer shape.

10:07 But I moved to New York. And I remember being like, You'd go in one bar where they had a bunch of like kind of Fratty looking. people and I was like the older guy that was still clean cut, but had a job as a lawyer and it was like, Oh You gotta meet Jordan.

10:21 But then I go out with my friend who who is a DJ She was a DJ, she's quite alt and all in ever I was one of the only white guys, but I was like an athletic looking white guy for that period of my life. And I couldn't have been less interesting to these people. They were just like I was invisible to these people. Yeah. So I was like, Oh, I wonder what it is. It must be they must not like white guys or whatever. And that was maybe sort of kinda part of it, but really like y a white dude like you with tat and a beard or whatever would walk in and just own that place. They just thought I was boring as hell because I was very Vanilla, really. I just it was just so predictable. Oh a a white guy works out. Uh where do we find one of those, right? Everywhere. Get out of here. This is an artsy fartsy place where people are spinning records at two PM. All these different scenarios make this even less scientific because it's actually just

11:07 All of this stuff gets shook up. And to be clear here, we're just talking about men, right? The idea seems to have permeated Out of the manosphere. And into a lot of corporate speak, dating advice for sure, and general discourse that really transcends gender. I mean Yes, you're talking about dudes here, but you could read something pretty similar to this on a a LinkedIn blog with different technical terminology and it would be there. Yeah, and uh so I think that the more nuanced version we talk about, first of all, I think it's

11:35 It's at least fairer because it doesn't assume that like If you're not the grown up equivalent of the quarterback of the football team, just a hopeless loser. And you need to like learn all these stupid human tricks to like have any shot in life. But

11:51 We could talk about the more nuanced version all day, but I do think that it immediately shows How silly it is to divide people. into hyper competent Insanely charismatic leaders.

12:03 And just this mob of feckless followers who just have no hope. Right. I agree with that. So what's the origin of the alpha beta discourse? Because it has this kind of scientific or pseudoscientific anthropological quality to it. And I think that kind of disarmed some people when they first encounter it. So it's based on a study of wolves. From the nineteen forties by a guy named Rudolph Schenker. I see so that not only is the concept not based on humans.

12:30 It's not even based on non human primates. It's based on basically wild dogs. This is actually interesting. The dogs in the study were not even wild dogs. They were Dogs in captivity. There's a red flag here off the bat because don't animals really change their behavior quite a bit when they're in captivity? I'm pretty sure that's one of the Most obvious sort of problems with this. And so when you're studying wolves and they're in a cage, it's gonna be way different than a pack of wolves out in some Siberian forest somewhere. Yeah, I mean if you were actually gonna study wolves, you would just follow wolves around. Yes. At a distance so that they can't see you. Yes, yes, because they're gonna act differently because they see a human around.

13:09 But it gets worse. These wolves Weren't related to each other. So in the wild wolves of impact, everybody knows a wolf pack.

13:18 Wolfpack's just a family of wolves. They're not like random wolves that you pick up. They're genetically tied to one another, biologically tied to one another. And the study Look at волз. That were just randomly thrown together. This guy's studying the Truman show version of wolves. Yeah, yeah. This is a particularly good analogy. Because the wolves are also

13:40 confined to a small area that's like ten by twenty meters, which is thirty to sixty feet for people in a country that has back to back World championship belts. Okay. World War Champions. Yeah, the the that study sounds like it examined the wolf equivalent of a prison yard. So if we take that analogy to humans Prison yards. maybe not a great model for a normal human society. I mean there's a lot of insight there, but maybe not something we want to model everything after. Yeah, I think you could get tons of insight into human behavior by studying a prison yard. Sure. But it's not

14:13 gonna give you The same insight that you would get from studying a bunch of families just Doing normal stuff. This is not the normal Way that human beings

14:23 live. And this is not the normal way that wolves live. So Schenker separates the wolves into a lead wolf And a bitch wolf. That's his term, not mine. Thank you for clearing that up because Yeah, so presumably the bitch is the lead wolf's mate, and this is a scientific term before people trip out on us. That's correct. They so the lead wolf And the bitch wolf, which is it's actually gets a little funnier when you consider that the bitch wolf is the one of the wolves on top.

14:51 They maintain their position in the herd. 'Cause it's not a pack. It's just a herd. They do this, they maintain their position by constant aggression. towards other wolves designed to suppress them.

15:03 Schenker documente ritualized fighting and submission. as the mechanisms by which this group of wolves socially regulated itself. When does the concept of alpha come in and how is that different from Schenker's work? A biologist named L. David Mech published the best selling book, The Wolf, in nineteen seventy. It was the origin point of the alpha ideology in mainstream discourse. Mech was not a blogger or a crank printing pamphlet in his basement. This was science.

15:35 At the time. It was a best seller and in the book Mech codifies A linear dominance hierarchy he argues that Wolf packs are structured like a military unit.

15:48 The alpha pair. were the top male and female who won their status. through physical contests and maintained it through dominance displays such as pinning other wolves. Growling. Or standing over them.

16:04 And life in this framework is depicted as this constant low level war for resources and mating rights. Which we see in the alpha beta discourse. There's a man or woman at the top and the alpha needs to constantly be asserting dominance or they're gonna fall out of leadership of the pack and you can't ever rest. You can't ever you gotta have eyes in the back of your head. All that. Yeah. And the thing is Mech eventually disavowed everything significant about The wolf in nineteen ninety nine

16:32 He wrote a paper called Alpha status dominance and division of labor in Wolfpacks. There's a link to it in the In the show notes if you want to if you're into reading scientific papers. He completely rejects this idea that wolves are in charge because they want a a wolf

16:49 wrestling match. They're not the toughest wolves necessarily, or at least that's not why they're in charge. It sounds like the Alpha Wolf pair are literally just the parents. Yes. That is exactly right. The other wolves defer to them because they're older. And they provide food.

17:05 And because they're the parents. So if they're not constantly asserting dominance How do the junior wolves move up in rank or do they? They do, when they move out of the house. Okay. So the parent wolves are training them for the day that they go out on their own. And when they do. they become what leaders of their own packs. Is that how it works? That's basically it. A lot of the submission behaviors weren't l like rolling over and displaying weakness. They're food begging behaviors.

17:31 So wolves viewed the parent. How your dog views you. They lick you. Because they want food.

17:38 is you have it and they want some. If your self improvement plan involves ditching your friends, suppressing your emotions, and buying a bunch of ebooks from a guy named Alpha King 69, buddy, you're not evolving. You're getting scam. Speaking of scams, let's hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Zenny. What makes Zenny so great is that glasses don't have to be an expensive once every few years purchase. There are so many affordable options. You can choose something practical, something fun, or just both. Jen ordered prescription heart shaped, yes, heart shaped sunglasses. With transition lenses. They are uh distinctive. They arrive quickly. She loves them. You'd normally expect something that customized to cost a small fortune, but Zenny makes unique eyewear much more accessible. The selection feels endless. There are classic everyday frames if you want something simple, bold styles when you want a little personality, see above uh heart shaped sunglasses. They even have great options for kids, including frames that glow in the dark, which is super, super stinking cool.

18:33 That might actually convince my kid to keep track of his glasses. I guess T B D on that. Zenny offers stylish prescription lenses, sunglasses, customizable lens options with frames starting at under thirty bucks. Just choose your frames online, enter your prescription, customize the lenses. They ship directly to your door. Their virtual try on also shows you how the frames will look on you before you order. We ordered from Zenny, Jen loves the glasses, will absolutely use them again. That scratched up hair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenny. Go to Zenny.com slash podcast and use code podcast fifteen for a fifteen pressin' off your first order. Plus free shipping on all US orders over sixty five dollars. The style sell out, so don't sit on it. That's Z-E-N-N-I. Promo code podcast fifteen.

19:15 This episode is brought to you by Zero. That's Zero with an X. Running a small business means there's always something competing for your attention. Managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Zero brings accounting, payments, payroll, analytics, and more together in one connected platform. So you spend less time piecing together the numbers and more time actually building your business. We've been using zero for nearly a decade now. Some small business owner friends of ours recommended it years ago and honestly

19:40 We don't even know what we'd do without it at this point. For us, that's meant clear reports, dashboards we can actually read, forecasts and AI powered insights that help us understand our own cash flow and see how the business is really doing. It was simple and easy to use from day one and it still is. In fact, ninety one percent of customers surveyed agree that zero is easy to use. And when you choose zero, you're joining five million customers, including us. Try zero for free for one month at zero.com. Terms apply. That's zero with an X at zero.com. The ninety one percent claim is based on a twenty twenty four zero survey conducted in the US, UK, and Australia. Networking course at six minute networking dot com, newsletter at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news. Now back to the show. If Mec

20:24 If he then disavows everything he wrote in The Wolf, why are people still clinging to the ideas expressed in it? Because one's from nineteen seventy and then in nineteen ninety nine, much more recently, he's like, That was all nonsense. And it's like you have to deliberately skip over that to cling to his old ideas. Well, the book had a very big social footprint. It got adopted by Cesar Milan in the world of dog training. Yeah. As well as the Manosphere types. And The correction comes almost thirty years later. By then.

20:53 There's a lot of cultural weight to undo. That's true. I feel like it's also just frankly, a lot sexier to portray the leader of the pack as a dictator who fought his way to the top and maintains dominance through Constant conflict. It's just a lot more attention grabbing than like, well, he's their dad. So how does Mech's work begin to trickle down into mainstream discourse? Like how do we end up with

21:15 influencers using this crap. Totally discounts Caesar Milan and dog training. Oh, right. It doesn't explain everything, but it it's there. Uh but for our purposes It kind of Enters the discourse through the manosphere wing of the Internet. Okay, which for those who don't know, I probably should have defined this earlier, but the manosphere started this very as this very heterogeneous group of bloggers focused on men's issues ranging from I don't know family court stuff to

21:42 general self improvement to fitness to dating now It's basically a place for men to talk about how much they hate women, kinda, right? Isn't that is that fair? Yeah. Oh, that's totally fair. Where we see the alphabet. Beta discourse enter the manosphere is through the dating. Sector of it.

22:00 And this is the pick up artist subculture. Which w you know. was one part of the manosphere. And it just took this wolf prison yard. study and just ran with it. Not just ran with it, but they assume all this applies to the average big city nightclub, which is weird. Yeah. They say that women are genetically hardwired to gravitate toward alpha traits, which they define in the narrowest terms possible.

22:26 Height. Good looks, money. Acting like a total dick to everyone for no reason. Yeah. Negging, giving backhanded compliments on purpose that's designed to make someone feel small. Yeah. And by the way, guys, wolves do not do that. They do not do that. Yeah. The wolves are not negging.

22:43 When the whole act like an alpha thing dropped, guys thought this was some kinda Cheat code. When it came to picking up women. There's also this whole framing around this that it was like, you know, red pill. You accept this harsh truth and you escape the matrix and and now the world is your oyster, or you stay a beta and you just go along with what society wants you to do. And it's like dot dot dot. We end up with Dan Belzarian telling people how to date, which is insane. Yeah, it is insane. And Boy, do I know some fun things about that guy, as you know that I can't say I'm about to know publicly. Yeah, exactly.

23:16 You know, yeah, it's not even It's not they don't even apply it to like the world. It's just Girls at the club. And

23:24 You know, that was kind of initially where it sat was setting these These sites super low was like Picking up women for the sake of taking them home and having sex with them. But As anyone who's actually, you know, done this

23:36 Can tell it gets old. Quick. Yeah, sure does, or so I've been told. Jordan knows nothing about this topic. Right, right, right, exactly. Not good for you and no surprise, guys who ended up really sticking with a lot of the pickup stuff. And didn't kinda graduate from it. Ar a mess.

23:57 Anyway, it doesn't Stay there. Or else we wouldn't be talking about it, right? This stuff bleeds out into YouTube podcast bro stuff and generalized self help all over the place. Well, yeah, what's sadder than a forty five year old man at the club? Yeah. Jeez. I can't I'm I'm tired thinking of just even getting dressed to go to a place like that. It's loud and there's lots of people. Yeah. It's like p way past my bedtime before anything even pops off in a place like that. I'm in bed by like nine, dude. Like Amen, man. I used to think that was pathetic. Now I'm like the real cheat code is going to bed before nine PM. Yeah. It's pathetic.

24:34 But it doesn't stay confined in the manosphere and it doesn't stay totally gendered either. There's this hustle culture. you know, girl boss thing, all these kinds of corporate expressions of culture. I call them LinkedIn Americans. They pick up this alpha beta dynamic. Yeah. And from their perspective it makes sense. Like there's a certain type of person in the corporate world who doesn't think that the key to success is innovation or intelligence or People skills or business smarts.

25:06 It's just be vicious. And doing everything you can to keep others under foot. That's a pretty extreme take on it. You're not denying that drive has something to do with success in the business world, though, right? It's just all the other baggage that goes along with it. Sure. Yeah, drive is I'm sure drive has a lot to do with it, but the act like an alpha thing. Isn't how strong confident people act. It's this weird caricature of how they act.

25:33 formulated by people who are in my estimation Deeply insecure. They think that the golden ticket In business or your social life or whatever.

25:44 is dominance. It's not, it's competent. Being good. And much like you know, the actual wild wolves that were study. People will follow you.

25:56 If you demonstrate That you're a competent person. And that hitching your ship to their star Is going to take them places. I'd imagine there's a lot of turnover at places where the only thing the boss has to offer is acting like the villain from the devil wears product. It the other thing to note is that in the business world, everything is done by a team, basically. The guy at the top could be compared to the conductor making all the parts work together, but the conductor needs the orchestra to get anything done.

26:24 I couldn't produce this podcast alone, for example. I don't have the writing and the research skills and the show editing skills that other people do. And on feedback Friday those questions They require a thoughtful, compassionate answer. Two qualities I've basically only read about in magazines, so I need Gabriel to help me out with that stuff. So how does the dynamic change? when it moves into the corporate world and when it loses its gendered nature.

26:47 How does this all leak into that stuff? Even in the version of Alpha Beta outside of the manosphere for men at least. There's a big narrative about how men are feminized and this needs to be undone. You know, you're too nice. Nice guys finish last. And you're too nice because the world is giving

27:05 Men a raw deal because they're men. And the men are supposed to deal with this. Using frame control. All right. So we know what frame control means, but basically nobody listening to this does. Frame control comes out of pickup artist culture. But it's one of the parts that fits very neatly into hustle culture or startup culture or corporate culture. So gr yeah, grind culture generally cultures that share the same kind of dog eat dog framework. The idea is that all social interactions involve a frame.

27:34 Which I guess you could just say is like a framework or a set of terms or Established power dynamic. In the male version of Alpha these supposedly alpha set of

27:47 You maintain frame by always being stoic. refusing to ever get emotional. If someone introduces a competing frame. Again. I'm going with the logic of this

27:58 terminology in this ideology. I don't actually Going with it. So if somebody introduces a competing frame You have a number of ways to respond.

28:07 One of which is ridiculing the person. So if somebody is being overly emotional at work, even if they have every right to be You can say something like, Wow, somebody didn't have their coffee yet. I gotta get out of here. I think I'm gonna lose it. Uh oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mundus. Right, it's childish, as is all of this, because it reduces social interactions. To this. bizarre dick measuring contest.

28:33 Rather than good faith efforts at communication. But This comes from guys who think that if you Cry in front of your wife when your mother dies.

28:43 That you've just ruined your marriage. Right. Yes. It's incredibly juvenile and stupid and just lacks all sort of understanding of how relationships actually work. So what's the female version of this? Because I'm very familiar with the male version. I think people kinda get it. It doesn't surprise me that there's a female analog, but I know absolutely nothing about it because that's not really a world I was ever part of. Sure. So for dating, you've got Sherid Seven, uh Mina Irfan, and the website Female Dating Strategy, which is All this is kind of about Finding high value men is what they call it.

29:15 That doesn't mean they're good men. It just means they're rich. I see. For the more corporate side of things, there's Liza Jabrilova, Cody Sanchez, Tonya Lay, and Nikita Malik. I did not look a ton into these. I'm friends with Cody. She I don't know all of her work, but she's not like If you don't beat up your co worker like she just tells you how to run a laundromat and make money. Sure, sure. And so if I'm like I'm you know Th it's not the topic of the show. The topic of the show is not the female side of things.

29:44 But we do I did want to kind of address like The ways in which this maybe has trickled down and permeated Into other area. So like, you know, I don't know, go to the comments and tell me what a what a dick I am for Calling these people. Themosphere pickup.

29:59 Artists or whatever. So It's sort of weird. Because the women Or sometimes

30:08 Told that they have to like out alpha men. to survive in the allegedly patriarchal world and it goes beyond leadership into this kind of idea of total perfectionism. Isn't the men's version doing that as well, though? Oh yeah. I think that's totally fair. For the men, you have to be optimized at work. You gotta have your little drop shipping side hustle or start up and you hit the gym until you have the physique of a Greek statue and

30:33 Picking up a new woman at the bar every night or being the world's most dominant Husband and father. For women it's kind of the same, you know, be a CEO, fitness model after work. high value partner by night. You're supposed to be highly assertive and have girl boss energy and look perfect and

30:51 Reject vulnerability and be untouchable. That sounds exhausting. Um, but yeah, it's uh honestly, it sounds like the male and female version of the alpha. They're not really that different, but I can see how they manifest in subtly different ways. Yeah, I think I think that's accurate. I think the the key difference is that. Alpha men frame other men as the enemy, or at least his competition like every other man is competition at the very least. And women are an obstacle or a resource. And I think Again, from what I understand, it was not the topic that we addressed, but I did want to kinda touch on it.

31:25 The Alpha Woman Everyone. As an enemy because th for them it's like you're competing against men and women. So you've got to do kind of like double duty

31:36 And The manner frames as like high value Partners in crime. More than just objects of acquisition. So I think that there's like th again, there's there seems to be subtle

31:49 differences to it. But it does seem like it leans on different aspects of insecurity, people's insecurities, right? So for men They're selling power and a sense of significance. And for women it seems like they're selling autonomy kind of. You know, the standalone woman who doesn't just not need a man, she doesn't need anybody. You don't need friends. You don't you don't need a man and you don't need friends and you don't need a you you know, you got your hashtag Girlballs, you're running your own thing. And it's I don't know, the whole thing sounds like a recipe for loneliness for men and women. Yeah, and with men it's almost like They want you to Think of yourself as the protagonist of Entourage or something. Yes, exactly. Like you're just like you got all these awesome cool dudes, but they're not as cool as you.

32:28 And you guys just own every you know, mug everything everywhere you go. I think that It's pretty gross in general to view all human interactions as

32:39 transactional and it's not just gross, it's like it's sad. I genuinely feel bad for people who Who feel that Well, this is just what life is and you have to get Used to it.

32:51 It's not. And if you view people In this framework. You can't really ever have a peer. Right, because it's a threat. Yeah. They're a threat. Yeah. Yeah you never get to rest. Everyone is competition or they're a resource that you need to acquire.

33:06 And I think that This mindset could really lead to having adversarial relationships with

33:13 Your Intimate partner, erantic partner. Your friends, your co workers. It's again, it sounds exhausting. The whole thing sounds so exhausting. Yeah, it does. Again, for the record, we're we're really just focusing on guys. I did just wanna

33:28 touch on on the women. I did not do a deep dive into the research on it. So if I if I unfairly maligned any of these people as anything, you know. I apologize. I was kinda just I think it's probably fine. I mean the the business instructive stuff. It does have notes of this, whether it's intentional or not. But the guy stuff explicitly plays on you're gonna die alone. Yeah. With uh no friends and no girl if you don't get a Dan Bilzarian haircut and start doing steroids or whatever. Right. So For the guys it's particularly damaging. Yeah, and it's like it's such a weird thing too,'cause it assumes that like

34:03 Like I don't wanna be damn Lazarian. You know what I mean? I don't lose I don't want my life to be like that. No. You're forty years old. And it's like I don't know that he does this anymore'cause it's been at least ten years since I've s looked at Anything that that man does other than whining about Jews, which is kinda his new thing. His new way to get attention is he's an anti Semitic Jew hating guy who's like, I don't know, still shooting machine guns on Instagram videos. It's pathetic, really. But it's like I don't want to be on a yacht with sixteen women twenty years younger than me. I like my wife and it'd my little house and my spending time with my kids. Like I don't want this life. And I think that there's a certain type of guy who g who doesn't want it either, but he's like, Oh man, I'm such a loser'cause like

34:48 I'm content living family life. You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna leave my wife and and go off and and chase after this dream of being a millionaire dropshipper or like whatever it's just like Maybe it's cope on my part, but like I just I don't now we're tired. That seems exhausting to me. It is exhausting and also for the only guys who who really fell into that were the guys that didn't realize he was just pay for that to happen. I mean he was hiring the models to be there. He wasn't attracting them with his alpha maleism. You know, you have to be a special kind of stupid slash eleven years old to fall for that kind of shtick. And so yeah, I mean it's quite sad. And it's not like he even made his own money. His dad uh did something to get a bunch of that money and then he went to prison for that, right? And so it's like this guy, the whole thing everything about him is a caricature and a j and a joke.

35:37 But yeah, there you you really have to be like a kid to fall into this stuff most of the time. So let's say I see this stuff and I decide, Wham, I'm a beta and I decide I want to make changes. I want to become an alpha. What am I gonna start doing according to the people who think that this is an important shift to make? There's like four basic components. The first is body language. You need to be like expansive as possible. You can't ever cross your legs. Don't they call that like penis shame or something? There's a term for this. Yes, it's penis shame. And like the the this is like clue one how weird this is. Yes. That there's some like subliminal signal that you're sending to the world based on your deep subconscious. If you cross your legs like you're ashamed of having a penis. And it's like no maybe you're just a little more comfortable sitting that way. Like that's totally fine. Go home, Freud. You're drunk.

36:28 Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre. So Then they're gonna teach you about eye contact dominance, which According to alpha coaches, like if you look away, that's a sign of submission. So you have to like stare at people like a serial killer.

36:44 Because you're terrified of losing this secret staring contest that only you are participating in. 'Cause nobody else is doing this. You have to speak slowly. I guess I fail there. As a hyper caffeinated Rhode Islander, I'm always gonna fail the speaking slowly test.

37:02 And you have to speak from your chest, you can't ever use up speak. Yeah, up speak is the That's for girls or something? That's the idea. Right? Is that where everything sounds like a question? Yeah, like that valley girl kind of thing. Everything sounds like a question. Yeah. So The communication stuff is where it starts getting really toxic. Disagreement. is not a place to find common ground.

37:24 You don't argue, you don't negotiate, you don't try and convince people, you just assert your side and that's it. We talked about neging. Which is these like backhanded compliments that are supposedly gonna have everyone groveling. for your approval, which you no it's not. You're also encouraged to constantly interrupt people and talk over them. Yes. So this is all terrible advice for social interaction for anybody who needs to be told that. And people who do this, they find themselves at the bottom of the the food chain once again.

37:55 the social hierarchy and they probably can't figure out why. So it causes the damage this does is it causes them to do this more. Right,'cause they go like, Oh. All these people don't seem to want to be around me and they're cutting me I need to talk over them more. I need to neg them more, I need to be a contrarian more often about every little thing because this isn't working. I need to do it harder. And it's like eventually you just go, Gosh, this person's so annoying. I don't even want to be around them anymore. I'm done giving them a a chance.

38:24 And so yeah, if you're doing any of this, just knock it off. Everyone hates you and they're just they haven't told you yet. It's because you're they're just jealous of your alpha lone wolf status. Right, exactly. Sheesh you're coached to have the same Facial expression. Whether you're like winning the lottery or Just Found out somebody died.

38:43 It's called being unreactive. Yes, it's emotional constipation, really. You're supposed to be completely out of touch with your feelings and emotions. Like many aspects of this, it's based on an idiot's understanding of what Stoicism was just y yo, you become a wall. Walls are indeed famous for their ability to form meaningful and enriching relationships. So yeah, I can see why. Yeah. Great model. Yeah. Finally, you have to curate an alpha mindset, which mostly means ditching your old friends who are keeping you down. And you also have to buy a lot of books from alpha influencers is not is not a convenient to encourage. Books and courses. Yes. Your hobby should only be posting inspirational quotes with pictures of wolves or

39:26 The Joker or what I guns and explosions and skulls. On social media, you know, you get a And and going to the gym and building your drop shipping side hustle. I don't think they drop ship anymore, but I maybe it may be a dated. I'm just gonna explain the jokes uh the reference here. So sh drop shipping This is like where you pick a product and you sell it on Amazon.

39:47 I don't think the side hustle essentially exists anymore, but all of these sort of Internet hucksters like Ty Lopez and all the you know, here in my garage, like the that guy. You'd get some self help book and it would be like dot dot dot you need to be rich. And by the way, here's how you do it. It was like four X trading uh side hustles would be like forex trading, drop shipping, where you're selling a product, something along those lines. Crypto bec if drop shipping kind of went out when crypto, because then it was like I'll teach you how to pick crypto and day trade crypto or whatever. And that's what's funny is you can actually do that, but none of those guys actually have a clue how that's done. You actually did you or do some of that ch day trading stuff, but it none of it y I assume you've learned none of it from uh w d Ty Lopez or whatever. No, I learned it from like Old men who traded stocks in the eighties. Yes. And it's stuff that like only works in crypto.

40:39 Because you know, market caps are much smaller. The liquidity is much lower. And I'm trading against a bunch of other morons who learned how to trade out of books written in the eighties. Or you're you're trading against people who don't know what they're doing because they're learning from somebody on Instagram. So they're just getting their asses handed to them. The best guys are like one, two steps above me. They're not like I have a finance degree, masters in finance from Yale. So the talent pool is limited. You're you're competing against twenty something sort of throwing their money away. Which is a good market to be in. If you want to take candy from some babies

41:14 If your self improvement plan involves ditching your friends, suppressing your emotions, and buying a bunch of ebooks from a guy named Alpha King sixty nine, buddy, you're not evolving. You're getting scammed. Speaking of scams, let's hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Zenny. What makes Zenny so great is that glasses don't have to be an expensive once every few years purchase. There are so many affordable options. You can choose something practical, something fun, or just both. Jen ordered prescription heart shaped, yes, heart shaped sunglasses. With transition lenses. They are uh distinctive. They arrive quickly. She loves them. You'd normally expect something that customized to cost a small fortune, but Zenny makes unique eyewear much more accessible. The selection feels endless. There are classic everyday frames if you want something simple, bold styles when you want a little personality, see above uh heart shaped sunglasses. They even have great options for kids, including frames that glow in the dark, which is super, super stinking cool. That might actually convince my kid to keep track of his glasses. I guess T B D on that.

42:10 Zenny offers stylish prescription lenses, sunglasses, customizable lens options with frames starting at under thirty bucks. Just choose your frames online, enter your prescription, customize the lenses. They ship directly to your door. Their virtual try on also shows you how the frames will look on you before you order. We ordered from Zenny. Jen loves the glasses. We'll absolutely use them again. That scratched up hair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenny. Go to Zenny.com slash podcast and use code podcast fifteen for a fifteen person off your first order. Plus free shipping on all US orders over sixty five dollars. The style sellout, so don't sit on it. That's z-e-n i dot com slash podcast. Promo code podcast fifteen. This episode is brought to you by Zero. That's Zero with an X.

42:52 Running a small business means there's always something competing for your attention. Managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Zero brings accounting, payments, payroll, analytics, and more together in one connected platform, so you spend less time piecing together the numbers and more time actually building your business. We've been using Zero for nearly a decade now. Some small business owner friends of ours recommended it years ago, and honestly. We don't even know what we'd do without it at this point. For us, that's meant clear reports, dashboards we can actually read. Forecasts and AI powered insights that help us understand our own cash flow and see how the business is really doing. It was simple and easy to use from day one and it still is. In fact, ninety one percent of customers surveyed agree that zero is easy to use. And when you choose zero, you're joining five million customers, including us.

43:37 Try zero for free for one month at zero.com. Terms apply. That's zero with an X at zero.com. The ninety one percent claim is based on a twenty twenty four zero survey conducted in the US, UK, and Australia. Networking course at sixminute networking dot com, newsletter at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news. Now back to the show. The actual impact of all this stuff is likely to be that your co workers think you're difficult to work with, your friends think you're a jerk who's changed in bad ways only, and the only people who are gonna date you are gonna be traumatized or super insecure or just don't know you well enough yet. Yeah, there's also like

44:14 the internal experience of being this guy Like you just you have to be hyper vigilant and constantly scan every room to see if you're losing status. This is the exact opposite of confidence. It's just this prison of social anxiety. that people think is some measure of strength. So I very unfortunately got wrapped up in this for a few years. Not the whole alpha stuff'cause it w that we weren't even using those terms back in two thousand and eight or whatever when I sort of got

44:42 Interested in all this like dating and confidence and body language stuff. But You're right. You get v hyper vigilant, right? So every time you're in a group of people, you're like, Oh I don't want to be seen talking to other guys because then it looks like I'm hiding and then you're like, Oh, I'm nervous about how I look.

44:58 Because I've been talking to my friends, I need to only talk to girls, and it's like, oh gosh, I'm not talking to a girl right now. What everyone's gonna I'm losing status every minute that I'm not doing that. I need to be loud, but I don't really want to be loud. I'm kind of enjoying this other person's story. No, I have to cut them off and tell one of my own that's better, and then you're like, But that's kinda douchey. So you're constantly doing that. It really has the opposite effect of looking confident because you're monitoring yourself and constantly in your head. So you're not present. At all.

45:27 You're basically acting like a weirdo and trying to engineer everything. And I remember going out on on dates with girls and they'd be like, Why are you only staring at the same place on my face? And I was like, Oh I'm trying an experiment where I'm only looking into your right eye,'cause I read on some stupid blog that like the right eye is where how you generate rapport with people. And I just remember Like I had cool friends that tolerated me and they were like, Hey man, why are you being weird now? And I'm like I'm doing this thing. And they're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if that works, it's weirder than just being normal. So just try to be normal.

46:01 And some of my female friends are like You don't have to do any of that stuff. And I was like, Oh, you're just saying that'cause we're friends and they're like No, it's actually hurting you, trust me. you trying to do this and like be loud. Like it's none of it's congruent with who you actually are. And that's the problem. And I was like, Yeah, but I that's'cause who I actually am is not like this, you know, whatever you'd call it now, like Alpha and they're like, No, it's because you're you're pretending to be someone and it's like the most obvious thing ever

46:28 So just stop doing it. And I remember as soon as I was like Yeah, I kinda give up. This isn't working for me. That's when stuff started to fall into place. You know, I'd go somewhere and somebody'd be like, Yeah, man You're not even six feet tall. And I'd be like, No, yeah, yeah, but I don't care. And then it was like they were like, What? And it was like yeah, no, I'm five ten. That's like perfectly normal, above average height. I don't really don't care. Uh, you think about your height all the time and then it would be li like that that's when women were like

46:50 Oh, you're like a normal secure person who's not a weirdo. Then I stood out because all the other twenty nine year old guys are being weirdos. 'Cause everybody was into this crap for a minute, right? It was so weird. So yeah, it really has the opposite effect. The the best thing to do is just to leave it all alone. Yeah. So I um I took uh the course at Jordan's old company that shall not be named and My biggest takeaway from it was

47:16 Like learning how to get people to stop talking to me. I like hacked the system to reverse engineer it. If you're like one of the listeners out there who's heavily tattooed, you know that when you're heavily tattooed, the weirdest people on earth just desperately want to talk to you wherever you go. And so I was like constantly fielding like Just th these bizarre people coming up to me out of nowhere and talking to me.

47:40 My biggest takeaway from it was like, Oh, I just start like slowly angling my body away from them and like giving ter short responses and then they'll just go away. That was what I learned from my alpha boot camp. That's so Sigma of you. So I feel like I feel like most people just instantly reject the animal kingdom framing that's implicit. in the alpha beta discourse. But why doesn't it hold water? I mean, we know that the wolf study that initiated everything was based on kind of manufactured situations, right? They were in captivity, yada yada. But in what way

48:14 Do animal kingdom rules. Not apply. Well animal kingdom rules do apply to people. People are animals, and we're primates. We're highly sophisticated primates, but we are primates nonetheless. So if you were gonna start looking for parallels. You would look

48:30 There you would look at Bonobos or Sure. You know, something like that. But where you really see Human sophistication.

48:40 This is one of the things that makes us very, very different is in our social organization. Right. Other primates have social organization. So do ants, but human beings have it on just a completely Whole other level, obviously. Yeah, it's one of our evolutionary hacks. There's this old libertarian way of like teaching people how important commerce is. And you think of something like a pencil. There's so plentiful that you can just take one.

49:06 Like Pencils are free. Yeah. Basically. Essentially. But no one human being can build a pencil. You've got to get the materials. You need the equipment to process the raw materials. You need to manufacture, construct the actual pencil.

49:20 I could go get a free pencil from the bank, break it in half, and they're gonna give me another one. Like they're just at it's like salt. They're just everywhere. But it requires this. Insely complex social organization to make something as simple as a Pencil. And just like ordering people to make pencils.

49:39 is not the thing that gets pencils made. Yeah, and we throw that social organization at building cities on the moon and it's quite incredible. Yeah, there's no insects They've yet to put anybody on the moon, or any any ants on the moon. Yeah. Other animals just don't have the level of sophistication that our social organization does. Like this is not just a brain size issue. It goes back to the stone age.

50:04 Good luck hunting a mammoth all by yourself. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So this is all cool and interesting, but hey, how does this apply? To the alpha beta dynamic that we're talking about. Human beings evolve for cooperation. It's not that we're not competitive at all. Clearly human beings are competitive. We're both competitive and cooperative. Same time.

50:24 But simple dominance. is not enough to get much done. In fact if you study human history You will quickly see But the less Kind of naked.

50:33 gross dominance we have, the greater our accomplishments become. Huh. Really? I I don't know. Is Is that The case? Yes. Absolutely indemonstrably. The Egyptians never put anybody on the moon. No, there's the technological issue in play here. But like in the classical world, technology doesn't advance very much.

50:52 Because like how do you get things done? You beat somebody until they do it. Ah, I see what you mean. That's it. That's how you get I mean we can talk about this on the On the slavery episode. For almost all of human history, how you get things done is you grab somebody and beat them until they do it. Right. Okay. And like You take the technological

51:12 Advancements. that you and I take very much for granted. And they've almost all happened. over the last three hundred years When we decided that trading was a better way of getting things done than just like beating somebody until they complied. But we still have leaders, we still have hierarchies. No, that's absolutely true.

51:32 But leadership among humans is contact dependent. We talked about this earlier with the social hierarchy. Like You can be a leader in some situations and not in others. I'm not the head of marketing at my job, but I know a lot about the market we sell to. So people defer to my experience on that topic.

51:52 That's context dependent leadership. I think in a lot of companies too the title doesn't mean as much as what you're getting done or what you bring to the table and that's That's just the workplace. But it kind of undercuts the idea of an alpha needing to take and maintain control at all times. Yeah, a boss who can't step aside and let people do their job is a bad boss. Right. And when you transfer that from the world of business to the world of dating, some people probably find aggression and rude dominance attractive, sure, but they're probably not really the kind of partners most people would want to have long term. So is there any evolutionary reason

52:27 that brutish dominance. Isn't to our advantage. Do we know anything about this? The main theory right now is that Human beings self domesticated. We domesticat ourselves because we have three things.

52:41 That give us a massive advantage. Number one. Massive brains. Come with massive cognitive power. Number two, we have endurance.

52:50 physical endurance. Like cheetahs can run really fast for like thirty seconds. To the best of my knowledge, there is not another species. That can run a marathon. And if there is, they are not. The norm.

53:03 They are also a massive outlier. You know, cheetahs don't run for twenty six miles. Third, we have Just next level'em. amount of of social cohesion.

53:13 So You just cannot get that. If some guy is constantly flipping out And challenging people to a fight every time someone Challenges his dominance. So the thirty.

53:26 Is that we bred this aggression out of ourselves. Yeah. I've actually heard about this, I think, on this show. The theory is that we got together in bands and if there were aggressive, violent people, they basically got murdered. Right, so that they wouldn't mess with the success of the tribe.'Cause if you've got somebody who's like Oh I didn't help Hunt, but I'm gonna go kill the guy who is coming back with the hunt and take it for myself. It's like no no, we're gonna kill you for doing that because now you're killing off the hunters and you're stealing from people. You're basically A net drain.

53:57 on the entire tribe. So yes, we needed violent people who were gonna murder and hunt food and share it, but if you were gonna murder and hunt food and not share it, well you're dead weight. We're just gonna kill you. So we kind of like took the people who couldn't behave or like who would fire off impulsively and hurt someone else. And now you've got to carry that guy. to the next hunter gatherer location because some idiot broke his leg. Those people didn't last long. They were kind of bred out. of society. And and that's one theory. And it makes sense. But it also kinda says the opposite of what the whole alpha wolf theory says. It's basically the best cooperators are the ones that made it, not the ones that were all rogue and maverick and did things on their own. Those people were mercilessly culled. Yeah. No, it says a lot. I mean there's a

54:42 period in British history that's called the bloody code era. in eighteenth century And early nineteenth century England and There's like two hundred and twenty

54:54 Crimes that carry the death penalty. Stealing sheep. Pickpocketing. Cutting down a young tree. Being in the company of gypsies for more than a month?

55:06 There's like all these things that they'll just put you to death for. And After two hundred years of killing people for minor transgressions. England becomes a very polite place. Possibly because all of the rabble rousers dare I say alpha wolves

55:22 were prevented from breeding. Dang. Yeah. So it's a small and limited example of how you could breed aggression out of human beings. Interesting. Yeah, but I I've also heard of uh there's a theory called survival of the friendliest. Which I I kind of touched on this earlier, but it's the idea that humans are obligate cooperators. in the same sense that other species are obligate carnivores, right? Your cat can't be vegan. No matter how much you want it to be, it cannot.

55:47 You can't live without cooperating with other people. Like your example about the pencil. There's like the homesteaders and stuff, right? But it's like When it comes down to it, you're still well, that's interesting. You but got solar panels. Did you make those? You know? No. Right. Yeah. No. I mean y yeah, your cat can be vegan, but not for very long. Right. Just for a few days. Yeah. A few days only. I and no, I mean the whole the home star thing, like I the point isn't to beat up on them, like Cool. Anybody but the most insane of them would think that they're

56:17 completely self sufficient and never needed anything from outside. I mean they have a hot water heater in there somewhere, probably. They have roads that deliver goods. Right. Yes. You know Trump car an international supply chain. Yes. Are there people who can live completely alone without help from other people? Sure. I think most of them can only do this. And a Parasitic way.

56:40 by being predatory upon people who are being cooperative. Which I'm not applying to the home steaders, but Yes, I can go live out on my own and steal from people who are actually connected to the social fabric, I guess. The vast overwhelming majority of human beings cannot survive in a war of all against all and without cooperation.

57:01 Nothing says I'm secure and thriving, like constantly scanning the room to make sure nobody outranks you in an imaginary wolf prison yard. That's not confidence. That's anxiety with slightly better branding. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Noble. I travel a lot, I've been through a lot of different suitcases, but my favorite is the award winning Noble all in one carry on.

57:23 Noble got rid of the zipper entirely. It uses secure latch locks and the two halves close with a very satisfying click. They've also solved several airport annoyances. There's a convenient front laptop pocket that pops open for easy access. And its unbreakable polycarbonate shell protects everything inside. There's even a built in charging port. Smooth 360 degree wheels and a flip-out cup holder. So now your coffee can ride on the suitcase instead of splashing onto the only clean shirt you actually brought. There's even a phone holder on the handle. They thought of everything. There's a ton of color options too. Noble has sold more than 500,000 suitcases, including to over 12,000 pilots and flight attendants. You also get free three day express shipping. a hundred day money back guarantee and a lifetime warranty.

58:03 Head to NobleTravel.com for up to forty six percent off your entire order. That's NOBLTravel.com after you buy, tell them the Jordan Harbinger show sent you. Quick break to tell you about a free podcast app worth checking out, available on both iOS and Android. If you're still using one of the built-in podcast apps, it might be time to upgrade to something better like Castbox. It's got a clear, easy navigation, features that actually make listening easier. More than a hundred thousand of our listeners already subscribe to the show there on Castbox. So a lot of you might already know how good it is. One thing I really care about in a podcast app is strong search. And Castbox does that really well. It makes it easy to find exactly the shows and episodes you want. I routinely use it for show prep to find specific episodes. Whether you're searching for a specific guest, a topic you're into, or an episode you want to revisit. You can also personalize your listening experience by creating playlists without downloading the episodes, organize your subscriptions, save episodes for later. Best of all, it's completely free and ad free, which makes the whole experience a lot more enjoyable.

58:58 Download Castbox today, subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger show, of course, and leave us a comment while you're there. Join us over on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit if you want to argue about this with strangers on the internet who may or may not be robots until you're blue in the face. That's the Jordan Harbinger Subreddit. Now back to the show. When I ran the dating company, we definitely leaned more into being friendly and personable. than we did on being a jerk and telling guys, you know, women are gonna be attracted to you if you're a jerk. Like that that was just

59:26 Only true in limited circumstances and you didn't get the kind of women that You want it. Yeah, there's a social cost to being a jerk. Yes. Again, to go back to this like Hunter gatherer society thing, which for whatever reason people take to be man's natural state, which that's a whatever that means. Whether or not that's for the whole other episodes. Yeah. Yeah. Does natural state mean anything, et cetera. An alpha who hoards all the food is not an asset.

59:50 He is a liability. And if he then rubs people's noses in the fact that he's got all the food To show dominance. He is not going to survive for very long. Because

1:00:03 People will kill him. We actually have a really good example of this. From recent human history. About just how bad In competently asserting dominance.

1:00:15 Can be During the Vietnam War. There was a Practice called fragging. I think I remember this from the movie Platoon. Yeah. Basically, if your squad leader was a dick, you'd kill him with a grenade. Is that a real thing, or is that something is just from Vietnam movies? Oh, it's very real. In fact, as many as a thousand American military commanders

1:00:35 were targeted for fragging by their own soldiers between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy two alone. There were at least eighty six deaths over seven hundred injuries. The number is actually probably a lot higher. Because you didn't have to chuck a grenade under his Bunk. You could just be like Oh, Lieutenant, I need you to go look over there. And over there is like where Viet Cong snipers have been clapping people.

1:01:02 Or go over there and we shoot you from far away and blame it on the Viet Cong. You know, like it's not difficult to kill somebody on your own side in a time of war if you want to get rid of them. And grunts would do this to their their commanding officers. It's like we don't get rid of this guy, he's gonna get us all killed. You know, it's not just that he's he's rubbing people the wrong way. He's a direct Threat.

1:01:26 to the survival of these men. And you can kind of like extrapolate how this would play out in a number of scenarios. People who constantly assert dominance. are bad news. People are less likely to help them out. Because they don't like them. Which is a big deal if you're an obligate cooperative. It's a big deal if you you know, which

1:01:48 Take it out of war. It's like you work in an office. I'm just not gonna help you because you're kind of a jerk. So this is a good pivot to the notion of Reverse dominance hierarchy there are societies Uh existing human societies such as the and I'm gonna do my level best to pronounce this correctly.

1:02:06 Kong Sun And the Inuit. Where if one person gets too big for their britches. They will take him down a peg because he's gotten too powerful.

1:02:18 Chucking hand grenades at the guy. They're just ridiculing him, shaming him, ostracising him. But for many periods of human history. having a sort of domineering alpha Mindset could be a death sentence. To tie the reverse dominance idea back to the theory of hunter gatherers

1:02:33 Ostracism, that was a super big deal in these societies where resources were limited, right? So if you're eating last because no one likes you or you can't sleep in the cold you sleeping out in the cold, that's not a good situation to be in. Right. There's also the concept of dominance versus prestige. This is a concept taken from the work of Joseph Henrik. Prestige. is a lot more accurate way of describing how humans get to the top. in the modern world than anything we have from the animal kingdom. So

1:03:01 take the Alpha Wolf model where fear and intimidation are used to take status and force followers to submit. That is makes people want to avoid leaders wherever possible. Like if you have some super short tempered boss. You're gonna run whenever they're around. And if you make a mistake, you're gonna hide it until it becomes a bigger issue because you don't wanna deal with that person. Compare the concept of dominance and leadership with the idea of prestige. Leadership is established on the basis of merit. Share knowledge.

1:03:29 the the status is granted by others to the leader freely because of his Merit. Followers mimic his behavior. Because the leader mostly leads by example. And people want to be near the leader.

1:03:43 So that they can pick up on his merit. Yeah, they want mentorship time. They're not ducking under their desk every time that the leader walks through. Yeah. And like super briefly, there's a concept in parenting of like authoritative parenting versus authoritarian parenting. And authoritarian parenting is like constantly bossing your kids around. There's all these draconian rules with severe consequences. And authoritative is just like there's rules, there's expectations, there's consequences for failing to follow rules or live up to expectations, but the parrot is Guiding the child.

1:04:17 And leading by example and showing the child How to behave. And it's the difference between A child who like Cows.

1:04:27 And fears their parents. And a child who admires their parent and looks up to them and doesn't want to disappoint them. Which child do you think is gonna grow up to be forget well behaved, better adjusted? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I do see that difference in parents. One thing I think that's a big takeaway is that the alpha people are confusing or maybe even conflating prestige and dominance. Like they think good posture and talking over people is gonna earn them prestige when in reality People recognize unearned

1:05:01 dominance, if you will, pretty quickly. I mean, it's very fleeting. And you know, there's totally situations where like A guy just needs to come in, bark orders, and people just need to do what he says. These are crises and emergencies. Right. Like if your house is burning down. And you will accept the leadership.

1:05:18 You know, like if if your house is burning down And a firefighter comes in and yells at you to get out of the house. You are going to immediately do what he says. But this is so situational. And this is not how human societies elevate their leaders, especially not in the modern world. No. If that same guy yells at me to get out of his way and line at Starbucks, I'm just going to ignore him and uh possibly have them call the police if he keeps going. Right. Situational. Situational. Exactly. No, that makes perfect sense. I think even if we go back in time The person with the most leadership qualities is gonna be the one with the highest social intelligence a lot of the time. Because in caveman times, two guys getting into a fight again, as we spoke about before, that's just a huge liability, right? You now you've got to take care of injured people. Like no thank you. Yeah, there's so

1:06:05 This is especially true in Ice Age cultures during the population bottleneck. This is in Northern Europe. During the last glacial maximum. Which is exactly what it sounds like. Okay. So yeah, if your tribe is seventeen guys and two of them can't go hunting the next day because they're all banged up, it's just a massive liability. It's the difference between Catching the mammoth and not catching the mammoth. So the guy who prevents two of them from getting into a fight and helps them work together again as the one who naturally rises to the top as the leader. You see this in the military too.

1:06:36 Generals are not just the and and top officers, they're not just the toughest guys, right, in the military. That's not how any of this works. Nope. Toughest guys top out and about Colonel. Yeah, that makes sense. There's elite training schools that you go to. The but my understanding is somebody who's never been in the military. That some of these you go into and it's like Lieutenant Colonel, that's your ceiling.

1:06:56 It's not like Who can withstand the most pain and and deal out the most death. That is not who g who gets leadership. It's who's good at getting people to cooperate. In human evolution The leader is often

1:07:08 even in ancient history and in prehistoric times. is often the person with the best social intelligence. Who can manage people. In its best form, leadership is a form of service. Alpha managers are super toxic, not just for the people who deal with them, but for the whole organization. Because they're using dominance tactics in a prestige and competence world. So super specific example, there are a lot of historians who argue that D Day Was such a disaster for the German.

1:07:37 because nobody wanted to wake Hitler up in the middle of the night. And tell him that the Allied forces were landing in Normandy. Oh wow. Yeah, that's what you get when you Rely only on dominance. Make it Smaller.

1:07:51 There's a little IT problem at work. You don't want to tell your boss about it. But it's gonna be a gigantic one. If you leave it for forty eight hours. you know, you're not gonna get blamed for not telling him, so who cares? You don't have to work in two days. It's somebody else's problem then, right? Yeah.

1:08:07 Somebody else's problem and you're not gonna hear about it and you know your boss is gonna have a meltdown if you tell him there's a problem. You don't want to be the guy who gets shot by the messenger. You don't wanna be the messenger who gets shot by the alpha boss. And if you flip it around the manager who's easy to talk to and is more interested in problem solving than assigning blame and looking like the tough guy. He's gonna know about small problems before they become big ones and therefore the whole organization becomes more successful. Yeah, and these are like all theoretical, but people can apply these to like everybody's seen something like this for sure in there. Family life or whatever.

1:08:38 In turn what all this means is that prestige oriented groups to get back to this constant prestige versus dominance. Prestige oriented groups are generally going to outcompete dominance oriented ones. Yeah, a little bit of evolutionary psychology

1:08:56 Is a very dangerous thing. A bunch of stuff is hard-coded into our brains from millions of years of evolution, but the human experience is just not as simplistic as you have to club a guy over the head. Before he clubs you and how you get to be king. Yeah. And that's really it, man. I think human beings are animals, but we're animals who are so very different from other animals. There's no science backing up any of the alpha stuff. Quite the opposite. Anthropology, social biology, and evolutionary psychology mostly tell us that the whole alpha structure is just a dead end. It's a seductive story.

1:09:32 Because it promises us that the world is simple. It's this simple tiered pyramid where you can just hack your way to the top. But as we've seen, That pyramid is built on a foundation of both bad biology And mostly deep seated insecurity. The bottom line is that when you see somebody who's obsessed with alpha status, you are not looking at a leader. You are looking at somebody who is fundamentally afraid of the messiness of real human connection. Humans didn't conquer the planet by being bullies. We did it by being the most sophisticated collaborators in history. So if we were bullies, we did it together. If somebody's trying to sell you an alpha mindset, they're usually betting on your own status anxiety.

1:10:11 To make a buck. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us separate the Apex predators from the Internet pretenders. And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. Actually send it to alpha mail at JordanHarbinger.com. It'll still reach me, obviously. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tadas Adlauskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:10:47 Our advice and opinions are our own. And I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's been fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything like Dan Billsarian, before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well being. Remember We rise by lifting others, share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. What if we're not just close to building matrix level simulations, we may already be inside one? You're about to hear a preview of our episode with Rizwan Verk on clues we're living in a rendered world.

1:11:32 The simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of is the physical world You know, like this table, this chair. that all the physical reality is actually part of a virtual world. The simulation hypothesis the subtitle is And M IG computer scientists shows why AI Quantum physics and eastern mystics agree we're in a video game.

1:11:51 There have been a number of physicists who are looking at the world as information now. So there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. And instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be whatever computational substrate is being used to run the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. I use the metaphor of video games that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game because that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley. Now there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film The Matrix. Because you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but turns out.

1:12:45 He was actually in a virtual world. But now AI is moving so fast that I think we'll get to that point. Much more quickly, and certainly within the next fifty years. Hundred years at the max.

1:13:00 For the full conversation that will make you question every assumption you've ever held, check out episode twelve thirty nine of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Rizwan Virk.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.