1375: Alphas | Skeptical Sunday

1375: Alphas | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] 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.

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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 [00:01:00] more to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, 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 silverback leading the troop or a beta waiting for scraps.

It's moved from dark corners 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 [00:02:00] 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, 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.

Nick Pell: 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 gravelly-voiced bodybuilder, this is not a term I have ever identified with.

Jordan Harbinger: That's so sigma, bro.

Nick Pell: 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 categories can be great to the extent that they increase understanding.

The problem begins when categories are used as a substitute for [00:03:00] understanding, and we're going to encounter a lot of that today.

Jordan Harbinger: 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?

Nick Pell: The idea is that there are alphas, who are the leaders, and betas, who are the followers.

Everyone is in one of these two categories. Alphas get 90% of everything good in life and betas are left with the crumbs.

Jordan Harbinger: So to circle back to the sigma thing, there's a slightly more nuanced/ridiculous version of this, right?

Nick Pell: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: To be clear, this is total bro science, not actual science, but we're going to humor it because, well, that's what we're debunking here on this episode of Skeptical Sunday.

Nick Pell: I trust bro science more than actual science, so-

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Well, fine.

Nick Pell: Trust the bro science.

Jordan Harbinger: It re- really adds to your credibility here, but keep going.[00:04:00]

Nick Pell: Well, the thing about this other more nuanced scale is, yeah, it, it adds more nuance. So betas in this framework are also confident and good-looking guys. They're just to a lesser degree than the alphas. Deltas are the normal, average, everyday guy. Gammas are weird in, like, an off-putting way. Sigmas are weird in an attractive way and basically ignore or flout all social rules.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. So is that us sigmas, right? Yeah, that sounds good to me.

Nick Pell: I feel like you're lying to yourself, man. I feel like you're a total alpha on this spectrum.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, continue.

Nick Pell: There's, like, a whole thing now where younger guys want to identify as sigma. Who doesn't want to be the cool, mysterious outsider maverick who just kind of floats above all these social dominance games?

Like, who doesn't want to be Han Solo?

Jordan Harbinger: I see, yeah.

Nick Pell: But back to our more nuanced [00:05:00] spectrum, the omegas in this version are, like, completely hopeless, and lambdas just don't care. I, I... Because they're gay, I think- Okay ... is, like, the, the implication in this hierarchy.

Jordan Harbinger: This fake pretend blog hierarchy.

Nick Pell: Sure. Yeah. Sure.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm, I'm not endorsing this by any means at all. I'm just explaining it.

Jordan Harbinger: I get why people use this because, for example, I've t- I've said many times on this 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, "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 1997 where I'm from, so I'm rocking these things. And I remember people just were like, "Oh."

And then suddenly other people were starting to wear these sandals. But it was also like I don't have to be a good skier even though that w- [00:06:00] or a good footballer even though that was what made cool kids at the school. I was friends with all those guys because 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 w- I had, like, this weird asterisk place in the hierarchy, right? The status hierarchy where it was like this guy's not an athlete, wears lame-o 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.

Nick Pell: I always tell people about my high school. Like, I went to a pretty large high school. And like we had multiple groups of weird kids and my group of weird kids was like the alpha weirdos, the skateboarder, hardcore punk rock kind of like guys like we were...

And then like the Marilyn Manson kids were [00:07:00] further down the totem pole and the heavy metal kids were even further down the totem pole because like nothing was less cool in 1996 than, than being into heavy metal.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 Stacys 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 kind of weird and you wear these weird shirts, and you got tattoos in ninth grade, but, like, nobody really messes with you because you're the hookup.

Nick Pell: The second openly gay kid in my school's history that anyone was aware of, his sister's boyfriend was the beer guy.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: And as you can imagine, he didn't get a lot of stick for being gay.

Jordan Harbinger: No, that's a funny... Well, no, no pun intended. But the, here's the thing. Do you think the nuance ... I'm going to get canceled.

So, so [00:08:00] one of these jokes is, is inevitably going to 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 kind of, the people kind of made up to go over normal social 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.

Nick Pell: 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, at 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 and whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:09:00] wrong.

Nick Pell: 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. I think that there are social hierarchies in, in every situation. Uh, but that's the thing is that they're fluid.

Jordan Harbinger: They're fluid, yeah.

Nick Pell: You can be the alpha in one situ- or what- howe- whatever you want, the top dog.

You know, you can be the top dog at work and you go home and y- you know, your wife's the boss- ... and your kids make fun of you and-

Jordan Harbinger: Too close to home. You're hitting too close to home right now, Nick ... and

Nick Pell: then you go play racquetball and you're like kind of somewhere in the middle. You know, it could change throughout the day.

The, anyone who's spent any kind of time in alternative subcultures or the art world knows that, for example, conventional attractiveness does not count for a lot. You're the alpha Chad chiseled chin perfect haircut guy and you go to like a goth club. You're not probably going to be most girls' first [00:10:00] pick.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a fun example, actually. I remember when I was in my late 20s or mid-20s, I got in killer shape, 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've got to meet Jordan."

But then I'd go out with my friend who, who is a DJ. She was a DJ. She's quite alt and al- and every- 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.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 sorta kind of part of it, but really, like, y- a white dude like you with tats 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, I was just so predictable. "Oh, a, a white guy who works out. Uh, where do we find one of those," right? Everywhere. Get outta here. This is an artsy-fartsy place where [00:11:00] people are spinning records at 2:00 PM. All these different scenarios make this even less scientific because it's actually just 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.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and, uh, so I think that the more nuanced version we talk about, first of all, I think it's, it's at least fair because it doesn't assume that, like, if you're not the grown-up equivalent of the quarterback of the football team and just a hopeless loser, and you need to, like, learn all these stupid human tricks to, like, have any shot in life- But we could talk about the more nuanced version all day.

Sure. But I do think that it immediately shows how silly it is to divide people into [00:12:00] hyper-competent, insanely charismatic leaders, and just this mob of feckless followers who just have no hope.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, I agree with that. So what's the origin of the alpha/beta discourse? Because it has this kind of scientific or pseudo-scientific anthropological quality to it, and I think that kind of disarms some people when they first encounter it.

Nick Pell: So it's based on a study of wolves from the 1940s by a guy named Rudolph Schenker.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So not only is the concept not based on humans, it's not even based on non-human primates. It's based on basically wild dogs.

Nick Pell: This is actually interesting. The dogs in the study were not even wild dogs. They were dogs in captivity.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 going to be way different than a pack of wolves out in some Siberian forest somewhere.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, if you were actually [00:13:00] going to study wolves, you would just follow wolves around.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: At a distance so that they can't see you.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Nick Pell: Because they're going to act differently because they see a human around. But it gets worse. These wolves weren't related to each other. So in the wild, wolves live in packs.

Everybody knows a wolf pack. Wolf pack'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 looked at wolves that were just randomly thrown together.

Jordan Harbinger: This guy's studying the Truman Show version of wolves.

Nick Pell: Yeah, yeah. This is a particularly good analogy because the wolves are also confined to a small area that's, like, 10 by 20 meters, which is 30 to 60 feet for people in a country that has back-to-back world championship belts.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. World war champions. Yeah, th- th- that study sounds like it examined the wolf equivalent of a prison yard.

So if we take that analogy to humans, [00:14:00] prison yard's 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,

Nick Pell: I think you could get tons of insight into human behavior by studying a prison yard, sure, but it's not going to 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 live, and this is not the normal way that wolves live. So Schanker separates the wolves into a lead wolf and a bitch wolf. That's his term, not mine.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Nick Pell: 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, they maintain their position in the herd, because it's not a pack. It's just a herd. They do this, they maintain their position by constant [00:15:00] aggression towards other wolves designed to suppress them.

Schanker documented ritualized fighting and submission as the mechanisms by which this group of wolves socially regulated itself.

Jordan Harbinger: When does the concept of alpha come in, and how is that different from Schanker's work?

Nick Pell: A biologist named L. David Mech published the bestselling book The Wolf in 1970. It was the origin point of the alpha ideology in mainstream discourse.

Mech was not a blogger or a crank printing pamphlets in his basement. This was science at the time. It, it was a bestseller, and in the book, Mech codifies a linear dominance hierarchy. He argues that wolf packs are structured like a military unit. 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 [00:16:00] other wolves, growling, or standing over them.

And life in this framework is depicted as this constant low-level war for resources and mating rights.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 going to fall out of leadership of the pack, and you can't ever rest.

You can't ever, you've got to have eyes in the back of your head, all that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And the thing is- Mech eventually disavowed everything significant about the wolf. In 1999, he wrote a paper called Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs. 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 won a, a wolf wrestling match.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Nick Pell: Yes. That is exactly right. [00:17:00] The other wolves defer to them because they're older, and they provide food, and because they're the parents.

Jordan Harbinger: So if they're not constantly asserting dominance, how do the junior wolves move up in rank, or do they?

Nick Pell: They do, when they move out of the house.

Jordan Harbinger: 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?

Nick Pell: That's basically it. A lot of the submission behaviors weren't l- like rolling over and displaying weakness. They're food begging behaviors. So wolves view the parent how your dog views you. They lick you because they want food, because you have it, and they want some.

Jordan Harbinger: If your self-improvement plan involves ditching your friends, suppressing your emotions, and buying a bunch of e-books from a guy named AlphaKing69, buddy, you're not evolving.

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So if Mech, 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 1970, and then in 1999, 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.

Nick Pell: Well, the book had a very big social footprint. It got adopted by C- Cesar Millan in the world of dog training. Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah.

Nick Pell: As well as the manosphere types, and the correction comes almost 30 years later. By then, there's a lot of cultural weight to undo.

Jordan Harbinger: That's true. I feel like it's also just, frankly, a lot sexier to [00:21:00] 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 influencers using this crap?

Nick Pell: I wouldn't totally discount Cesar Millan and dog training.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, right.

Nick Pell: It doesn't explain everything, but it's there. Uh, but for our purposes, it kind of enters the discourse through the manosphere wing of the internet.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, which for those who don't know, I probably should have defined this earlier, but the manosphere started this ve- as this very heterogeneous group of bloggers focused on men's issues, ranging from, I don't know, family court stuff to general self-improvement to fitness to dating.

Now, it's basically a place for men to talk about how much they hate women, kind of, right? Isn't that, is that fair?

Nick Pell: Yeah. Oh, that's totally fair. Where we see the alpha-beta discourse enter the manosphere is through the dating sector of [00:22:00] it. And this is the pickup 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Not just ran with it, but they assume all this applies to the average big city nightclub, which is weird.

Nick Pell: Yeah. They say that women are genetically hardwired to gravitate toward alpha traits, which they define in the narrowest terms possible.

Jordan Harbinger: Height, good looks, money, acting like a total dick to everyone for no reason.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Negging, giving backhanded compliments on purpose that's designed to make someone feel small.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and by the way, guys, wolves do not do that. They do not do that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Wolves are not negging. When the whole act like an alpha thing dropped, guys thought this was some kind of cheat code when it came to picking up women.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:23:00] 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 Bilzerian telling people how to date, which is insane.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it is insane, and boy, do I know some fun things about that guy, as you know, that I, that I can't say on the podcast. I know, publicly. Yeah, exactly. Um, 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, you know, that was kind of initially where it sat, was setting these, these sights super low.

It 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 can tell you, it gets old quick.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, sure does, or so I've been told.

Nick Pell: Jordan knows nothing about this topic.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, right, right, exactly. I- if that gets old so quick and is not good for you, and no surprise, guys who ended up really sticking with a lot of the pickup stuff and didn't kind of graduate from it are a mess.

Anyway, it doesn't stay there or [00:24:00] 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.

Nick Pell: Well, yeah, what's sadder than a 45-year-old man at the club?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, geez. I can't... I, I, I'm tired thinking of just even getting dressed to go to a place like that.

Nick Pell: It's loud and there's lots of people, and-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's like pa- way past my bedtime before anything even pops off at a place like that.

Nick Pell: I'm in bed by, like, 9:00, dude. Like, on a, on a good night.

Jordan Harbinger: Amen, man. I used to think that was pathetic. Now I'm like the real cheat code is going to bed before 9:00 PM.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, it's pathetic.

But

Nick Pell: whatever. Yeah, it doesn't stay confined to 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 [00:25:00] think that the key to success is innovation or intelligence or people skills or business smarts. It's just be vicious and doing everything you can to keep others underfoot.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, 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?

Nick Pell: 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 formulated by people who are, in my estimation, deeply insecure. They think that the golden ticket in business or your social life or whatever is dominance.

It's not. It's competence. It's be good. And much like, you know, the actual wild wolves that we're studying, people will follow you if you demonstrate that you're a competent person [00:26:00] and that hitching your ship to their star is going to take them places.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 Prada.

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. I couldn't produce this podcast alone, for example. I don't have the writing and the research skills and the f- 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?

How does this all leak into that stuff?

Nick Pell: 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 [00:27:00] nice. Nice guys finish last." And you're too nice because the world is giving men a raw deal because they're men, and the men are supposed to deal with this using frame control.

Jordan Harbinger: All right, so we know what frame control means, but basically nobody listening to this does.

Nick Pell: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So gr- yeah, grind culture generally. Cultures that share the same kind of dog-eat-dog framework.

Nick Pell: The idea is that all social interactions involve a frame, 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 behaviors, 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 terminology and this ideology. [00:28:00] I don't actually believe it. I'm just going with it. So if somebody introduces a competing frame, you have a number of ways to respond, one of which is ridiculing the person.

Jordan Harbinger: So if somebody's being overly emotional at work, even if they have every right to be, you can say something like, "Well, somebody didn't have their coffee yet."

I've got to get out of here. I think I'm going to lose it.

Office Space Clip: Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.

Nick Pell: Right. It's childish, as is all of this, because it reduces social interactions to this bizarre dick-measuring contest 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, that you've just ruined your marriage.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 kind of get it. It doesn't surprise me that there's a [00:29:00] female analog, but I know absolutely nothing about it because that's not really a world I was ever part of.

Nick Pell: Sure. So for dating, you've got Shara 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. That doesn't mean they're good men; it just means they're rich.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Nick Pell: For the more corporate side of things, there's Liza Jabrailoava, Codie Sanchez, Tonya Leigh, and Nikita Malik.

I did not look a ton into these.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm friends with Codie. She, I don't know all of her work, but she's not like, "If you don't beat up your coworker..." Like, she just tells you how to run a laundromat and make money.

Nick Pell: Sure. Sure. And so if I'm like, um, you know- Th- it's not the topic of the show. The topic of the show is not the female side of things, but we do. I did want to kind of address, like, the ways in which this maybe has trickled down and permeated into other areas. 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-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Nick Pell: femosphere pickup artists or whatever. [00:30:00]

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, God, Cody's going to kill me.

Nick Pell: But-

Jordan Harbinger: All right.

Nick Pell: So it's sorta weird because the women are sometimes 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Isn't the men's version doing that as well, though?

Nick Pell: Oh, yeah. I think that's totally fair.

For the men, you have to be optimized at work, you've got to have your little drop-shipping side hustle or startup, and you've got to hit the gym until you have the physique of a Greek statue, and 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 reject vulnerability and be untouchable.

Jordan Harbinger: That sounds exhausting. Um, but yeah, it's ... I, honestly, it sounds like the male and female version of the alpha, they're [00:31:00] not really that different.

But I can see how they manifest in subtly different ways.

Nick Pell: 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 as competi- 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, because it was, was not the topic that we addressed, but I did want to kind of touch on it.

The alpha woman thing more frames, like, 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. And the men are framed 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 differences to it.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:32:00] 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 #girlboss. You're running your own thing. And it's a, I don't know. The whole thing sounds like a recipe for loneliness for men and women.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And with men it's almost like they want you to think of yourself as the protagonist of Entourage or something.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, exactly.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Like, you just, like, you got all these awesome, cool dudes, but they're not as cool as you. And you guys just own every... Y- you know, mog everything everywhere you go. I think that it's pretty gross in general to view all human interactions as 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. It's not. And if you view people in this framework, you can't really ever have a peer.

Right, because that's a threat.

Nick Pell: [00:33:00] Yeah, they're a threat. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: You never get to rest. Everyone is competition or they're a resource that you need to acquire.

And I think that this mindset can really lead to having adversarial relationships with your intimate partner, your romantic partner, your friends, your coworkers.

Jordan Harbinger: It's... Again, it sounds exhausting. The whole thing sounds so exhausting.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it does. Again, for the record, we're, we're really just focusing on guys.

I did just want to 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 a- as anything, you know, I apologize. I was kind of just like-

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Yeah. But the guy stuff explicitly plays on you're going to die alone-

Nick Pell: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: with, uh, no friends and no girl if you don't get a Dan Bilzerian haircut and start doing steroids or whatever, right? So for the guys, it's particularly damaging.

Nick Pell: [00:34:00] Yeah, and it's like, it's such a weird thing too, because it assumes that like, like I don't want to be Dan Bilzerian, you know what I mean?

Like- No, he can't. He's

Jordan Harbinger: a loser ...

Nick Pell: I don't, like I don't want my life to be like that.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Nick Pell: You're 40 years old, and it's like I don't know that he does the same work, because it's been at least 10 years since I've s- looked at anything that that man does other than whining about Jews, which is kind of his-

Jordan Harbinger: Yes ...

Nick Pell: his-

Jordan Harbinger: That's his new thing

yeah. His new way to get attention is he's an antisemitic Jew-hating guy who's like, I don't know, still shooting machine guns on Instagram videos. It's pathetic really.

Nick Pell: But it's like I don't want to be on a yacht with 16 women 20 years younger than me. I like my wife and a- 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 because like, I'm content living family life. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to leave my wife and, and go off and, and chase after this dream of being a millionaire drop shipper," or like whatever.

And it's [00:35:00] just like, maybe it's cope on my part, but like I just, I don't-

Jordan Harbinger: No, we're tired ...

Nick Pell: that seems exhausting to me.

Jordan Harbinger: It is exhausting. And also for th- the only guys who, who really fell into that were the guys that didn't realize he was just paying for that to happen. I mean, he was hiring the models to be there.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: He wasn't attracting them with his alpha male-ism. You know, you have to be a special kind of stupid/11 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 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 j- and a joke. 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, wah, I'm a beta, and I decide I want to make changes. I want to become an alpha.

What am I going to start doing according to the people who think that this is an important shift to make?

Nick Pell: There's like four basic components. The first is body language. You need to be, like, [00:36:00] expansive as possible. You can't ever cross your legs.

Jordan Harbinger: Don't they, they call that, like, penis shame or something?

There's a term for this.

Nick Pell: Yes, it's penis shame, and, like, th- th- 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, oh, dude, maybe you're just a little more comfortable sitting that way.

Like, that's totally fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Go home, Freud, you're drunk. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre. So then they're going to 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 because you're terrified of losing this secret staring contest that only you are participating in, because nobody else is doing this.

You have to speak slowly. I guess I fail there. As a hyper-caffeinated Rhode Islander, I'm always going to [00:37:00] fail the speaking slowly test. And you have to speak from your chest, and you can't ever use upspeak.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, upspeak is the, that's for girls or something. That's the idea, right? Is that, where everything sounds like a question?

Nick Pell: Yeah, like that valley girl kind of thing. Yeah. Everything sounds like a question.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: So the communication stuff is where it starts getting really toxic. Disagreement is not a place to find common ground. 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 negging, the, which is these, like, backhanded compliments that are supposedly going to have everyone groveling for your approval, which you know it's not. You're also encouraged to constantly interrupt people and talk over them.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 th- the food chain, once again, the social hierarchy, and they probably can't figure out why. So it causes, [00:38:00] the damage this does is it causes them to do this more, right? Because they go like, "Oh, I- 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."

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.

Nick Pell: It's because you're- they're just jealous of your alpha lone wolf status.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, exactly. Sheesh.

Nick Pell: You're coached to have the same facial expression whether you're, like, winning the lottery or just found out somebody died.

It's called being unreactive.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, it's emotional constipation, really. You're supposed to be completely out of touch with your feelings and emotions.

Nick Pell: Like many aspects of this, it's based on an idiot's understanding of what stoicism was.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: You s- you, you become a wall.

Jordan Harbinger: Walls are indeed [00:39:00] famous for their ability to form meaningful and enriching relationships, so yeah, I can see why.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Great model.

Nick Pell: 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. Isn't that, isn't that a convenient behavior- Yes ... that they encourage?

Jordan Harbinger: Books and courses.

Nick Pell: Yes. Your hobbies should only be posting inspirational quotes with pictures of wolves or The Joker or what?

I don't know. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Guns and explosions,

Nick Pell: yeah. Skulls. On social media, you know, you've got to... And, and going to the gym and building your drop shipping side hustle. I don't think they drop ship anymore, but, uh, may- it may be a dated-

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I'm just going to explain the jokes, the, the reference here. So sh- drop shipping, this is, like, where you pick a product and you sell it on Amazon.

I- I don't think the side hustle essentially exists anymore, but all of these sort of internet hucksters, like Tai 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 [00:40:00] you do it." It was like Forex trading.

Uh, side hustles would be like Forex trading, drop shipping, where you're selling a product, something along those lines. Crypto bec- it... Drop shipping kind of went out when crypto came up 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 y- 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, d- Tai Lopez or whatever.

Nick Pell: No, I learned it from, like, old men who traded stocks in the '80s.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And it's stuff that, like, only works in crypto 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 '80s.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Nick Pell: The [00:41:00] best guys are, like, one, two steps above me. They're not like, "I have a finance degree, a master's in finance from Yale."

Jordan Harbinger: So the talent pool is limited.

You're, you're g- competing against 20-somethings who are throwing their money away, which is a good market to be in if you want to take candy from some babies. If your self-improvement plan involves ditching your friends, suppressing your emotions, and buying a bunch of e-books from a guy named AlphaKing69, buddy, you're not evolving.

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The actual impact of all this stuff is likely to [00:44:00] be that your coworkers 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 going to date you are going to be traumatized or super insecure or just don't know you well enough yet.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's also, like, the internal experience of being this guy. Like, you just, you have to be hypervigilant 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So I very unfortunately got wrapped up in this for a few years, not the whole alpha stuff, because it, that, we weren't even using those terms back in 2008 or whatever when I sorta got interested in all this, like, dating and confidence and body language stuff.

But you're right, you get v- hypervigilant, 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 because I've been talking to my friends. [00:45:00] 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 going to... 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 kind of douchey."

So you're constantly doing that, and 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. 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 because 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 [00:46:00] just try to be normal." 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 because we're friends." And they're like, "No, no, 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 because who I actually am is not, like, this, uh, 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. So just stop doing it.

And I remember as soon as I was like, "Yeah, I kind of 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, I, I don't care." And then it was like, they're like, "What?" And it was like, "Yeah, no, I'm 5'10".

That's a perfectly normal above average height. I don't really don't care." You think about your height all the time, and then it would be like, like... That, that's when women were like, "Oh, you're like a normal, secure person who's not a weirdo." Then I stood out because all the other 29-year-old guys were being weirdos, because everybody was into this crap for a minute, right?[00:47:00]

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.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So I, um, I took, uh, the course at Jordan's old company that shall not be named. Yeah. And my biggest takeaway from it was, 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 these bizarre people coming up to me out of nowhere and talking to me.

My biggest takeaway from it was like, oh, I just start, like, slowly angling my body away from them and, like, giving terse, short responses, and then they'll just go away. That was what I learned from my alpha boot camp.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's so sigma of you. So I feel like- I feel like most people just instantly reject [00:48:00] 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 do animal kingdom rules not apply to people?

Nick Pell: Well, animal kingdom rules do apply to people. People are animals, and-

Jordan Harbinger: Okay

Nick Pell: we're primates. We're highly sophisticated primates, but we are primates nonetheless. So if you were going to start looking for parallels, you would look there. You would look at bonobos or-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Nick Pell: gorillas or, you know, something like that. But where you really see human sophistication, this is one of the m- things that makes us very, very different, is in our social organization.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Other primates have social organization, so do ants, but human beings have it on just a completely whole other level, obviously.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's one of our evolutionary hacks. There's this old libertarian way of, like, teaching people how [00:49:00] important commerce is, and y- you think of something like a pencil.

They're so plentiful that you can just take one. Like, pencils are free-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah ...

Nick Pell: basically.

Jordan Harbinger: Essentially.

Nick Pell: But no one human being can build a pencil. You've got to get- I see what you mean ... the raw materials. You need the equipment to process the raw materials. You need to manufacture or construct the actual pencil.

I could go get a free pencil from the bank, break it in half, and they're going to give me another one. Like, they're just e- it's like salt, they're just everywhere. But it requires this insanely complex social organization to make something as simple as a pencil, and just, like, ordering people to make pencils is not the thing that gets pencils made.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and we throw that social organization at building cities or putting people on the moon, and it's quite incredible. Yeah, there's no insect colony has yet, they've yet to put anybody on the moon, or any, any ants on the moon.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Other animals just don't have the level of sophistication that our social [00:50:00] organization does.

Like, this is not just a brain size issue. It goes back to the Stone Age. Good luck hunting a mammoth all by yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: 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?

Nick Pell: Human beings evolved for cooperation. It's not that we're not competitive at all.

Clearly, human beings are competitive. We're both competitive and cooperative at the same time. But simple dominance is not enough to get much done. In fact, if you study human history, you will quickly see that the less kind of naked, gross dominance we have, the greater our accomplishments become.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh, really?

I, I don't know. Is, is that the case?

Nick Pell: Yes. Absolutely and demonstrably. The Egyptians never put anybody on the moon. Oh, as well, yeah. There's the technological issue in play here, but, like, in the classical world, technology doesn't advance very much. Because, like, how do you get things done? You beat somebody until they do it.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, I see what you mean.

Nick Pell: That's it. That's how you get... I [00:51:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, okay.

Nick Pell: And, like, you take the technological advancements that you and I take very much for granted, and they've almost all happened over the last 300 years, when we decided that trading was a better way of getting things done than just, like, beating somebody until they complied.

Jordan Harbinger: But we still have leaders, we still have hierarchies.

Nick Pell: No, that's absolutely true. But leadership among humans is context-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.

That's context-dependent leadership.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:52:00] 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.

Nick Pell: Yeah. A boss who can't step aside and let people do their job is a bad boss.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 that brutish dominance isn't to our advantage?

Do we know anything about this?

Nick Pell: The main theory right now is that- Human beings self-domesticated. We domesticated ourselves because we have three things that give us a massive advantage. Number one, massive brains come with massive cognitive power. Number two, we have endurance, physical endurance. Like cheetahs can run really fast for like 30 seconds.

To the best of my knowledge, there is not another species that can run a [00:53:00] marathon, and if there is, they are not the norm. They are also a massive outlier. You know, cheetahs don't run for 26 miles. Third, we have just next level am- amounts of, of social cohesion. 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 theory is that we bred this aggression out of ourselves.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Because if you've got somebody who's like, "Oh, I didn't help hunt, but I'm going to go kill the guy who is coming back with the hunt and take it for myself," it's like, "No, no, no. We're going to 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 on the entire tribe."

So yes, we needed [00:54:00] violent people who were going to murder and hunt food and share it, but if you were going to murder and hunt food and not share it, well, you're dead weight. We're just going to 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, and it makes sense. But it also kind of 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.

Nick Pell: Yeah. No, it says a lot. I mean, there's a period in British history that's called the Bloody Code era in 18th century and early 19th century England, and there's like 220 crimes that carry the death penalty: stealing sheep, pickpocketing, [00:55:00] cutting down a young tree, being in the company of gypsies for more than a month. There's like all these things that they'll just put you to death for, and after 200 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, were prevented from breeding.

Jordan Harbinger: Dang. Yeah,

Nick Pell: it's- So it's a small and limited example of- Yeah ... how you can breed aggression out of human beings.

Jordan Harbinger: 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. You can't live without cooperating with other people. Uh, 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 b- got solar panels.

Did you make those?" You know? It's like...

Nick Pell: No. [00:56:00] Right. Yeah, no. I mean, y- y- your cat can be vegan, but not for very long-

Jordan Harbinger: Right ... if you know what I'm saying. Just for a few days. Yeah, a few days only.

Nick Pell: I, and, uh, no, I mean, the ho- the homesteader thing, like I, I, the point isn't to beat up on them. Like, cool.

Jordan Harbinger: It's a cool thing, but th- I don't think anybody but the most insane of them would think that they're completely self-sufficient and never needed anything from outside.

I mean, they have a hot water heater in there somewhere probably.

Nick Pell: They have roads that deliver goods.

Jordan Harbinger: Ri- right. Yes.

Nick Pell: You know? Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: Trump

Nick Pell: card. They have an international supply chain.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: Are there people who can live completely alone without help from other people? Sure. I think most of them can only do this in a parasitic way by being predatory upon people who are being cooperative, uh, which I'm not applying to the homesteaders.

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 [00:57:00] cooperation.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

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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 going to be attracted to you if you're a jerk. Like that, that was just only true in limited circumstances and you didn't get the kind of women that you wanted.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's a social cost to being a jerk.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: 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

Jordan Harbinger: that means ...

Nick Pell: whether or not that's for the whole other episodes. Y- yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: Does natural state mean anything, et cetera?

An alpha who hoards all the food is not an asset. 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 [01:00:00] is not going to survive for very long because people will kill him. We actually have a really good example of this from recent human history about just how bad incompetently asserting dominance can be. During the Vietnam War, there was a practice called fragging.

Jordan Harbinger: I think I remember this from the movie Platoon.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Basically, if your squad leader was a dick, you'd kill him with a grenade. Is that a real thing, or is that something, it's just from Vietnam movies?

Nick Pell: Oh, it's very real. In fact, as many as 1,000 American military commanders were targeted for fragging by their own soldiers between 1969 and 1972 alone.

There were at least 86 deaths, over 700 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 [01:01:00] snipers have been clapping people. 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, 'because it's We've got to get rid of this guy. He's going to 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 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is a big deal if you're an obligate cooperative.

Nick Pell: It's a big deal if you... You know, which, take it out of war. It's like if you work in an office. I'm just not going to 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, [01:02:00] uh, ex- existing human societies such as the, and I'm going to do my level best to pronounce this correctly, !Xun, 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.

They're not chucking hand grenades at the guy. They're just ridiculing him, shaming him, ostracizing him. But for many periods of human history, having a sort of domineering alpha mindset could be a death sentence.

Jordan Harbinger: To tie the reverse dominance idea back to the theory of hunter-gatherers, 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 col- you're sleeping out in the cold, that's not a good situation to be in.

Nick Pell: Right. There's also the concept of dominance versus prestige. This is a concept taken from the work of Joseph Henrich. 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 [01:03:00] animal kingdom.

So take the alpha wolf model where fear and intimidation are used to take status and force followers to submit, that just makes people want to avoid leaders wherever possible.

Jordan Harbinger: Like, if you have some super short-tempered boss, you're going to run whenever they're around, and if you make a mistake, you're going to hide it until it becomes a bigger issue because you don't want to deal with that person.

Nick Pell: Compare the concept of dominance in leadership with the idea of prestige. Leadership is established on the basis of merit, shared knowledge. 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 so that they can pick up on his merit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they want mentorship time. They're not ducking under their desk every time that the leader walks through.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and, like, super briefly, there's a concept in parenting of, like, authoritative parenting versus authoritarian parenting, and [01:04:00] 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 parent is guiding the child and leading by example and showing the child how to behave, and it's the difference between a child who, like, cowers and fears their parent 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 going to grow up to be, forget well-behaved, better adjusted?

Jordan Harbinger: 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 going to earn them prestige, when in reality, people [01:05:00] recognize unearned dominance, if you will, pretty quickly.

I mean, it's very fleeting.

Nick Pell: 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. You know, like if- if your house is burning down and a, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: No. If that same guy yells at me to get out of his way in line at Starbucks, I'm just going to ignore him and, uh, possibly have them call the police if he keeps going , right?

Nick Pell: So- Right, it's situational.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. It's

Nick Pell: situational.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. No, that makes perfect sense. I think even if we go back in time, the person with the most leadership qualities is going to 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 [01:06:00] huge liability, right?

You, now you've got to take care of injured people. Like, no thank you.

Nick Pell: Yeah, there's... So this is especially true in Ice Age cultures during the population bottleneck. This is in Northern Europe during the last glacial maximum-

Jordan Harbinger: I see ...

Nick Pell: which is exactly what it sounds like.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So yeah, if your tribe is 17 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 is the one who naturally rises to the top as the leader. Th- you see this in the military, too. Generals are not just the... And, and lo- top officers, they're not just the toughest guys, right, in the military.

That's not how any of this works.

Nick Pell: Nope. Toughest guys top out about colonel.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense.

Nick Pell: There's elite training schools that you go to. The, but my understanding as 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.

It's not like who can withstand the most pain and, and [01:07:00] 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, even in, in ancient history and, and prehistoric times, is often the person with the best social intelligence who can manage people.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 incompetence world.

Nick Pell: So super specific example, there are a lot of historians who argue that D-Day was such a disaster for the Germans because nobody wanted to wake Hitler up in the middle of the night and tell him that the Allied forces were landing in Normandy.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's what you get when you rely only on dominance. Make it smaller. There's a little IT problem at work. You don't want to tell your boss about it, but it's going to be a gigantic one if you leave it for 48 [01:08:00] hours. You know, you're not going to get blamed for not telling him, so who cares?

Jordan Harbinger: You don't have to work in two days.

It's somebody else's problem then, right?

Nick Pell: Yeah. Somebody else's problem, and you're not going to hear about it, and you know your boss is going to 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 want to be the messenger who gets shot by the alpha boss.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 going to know about small problems before they become big ones, and therefore, the whole organization becomes more successful.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and these are, like, all theoretical, but people can apply these to, like, everybody's seen something like this-

For sure.

At work or in their family life or whatever. In turn, what all of this means is that prestige-oriented groups, to get back to this concept of prestige versus dominance, prestige-oriented groups are generally going to out-compete dominance-oriented ones. You know, a little bit of evolutionary psychology is a very dangerous thing.

A bunch of stuff is [01:09:00] 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- Yeah ... and that's how you get to be king.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 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.

[01:10:00] 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 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@jordanharbinger.com. Actually, send it to alphamale@jordanharbinger.com. It'll still reach me, obviously. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. 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 [01:11:00] Dan Bilzerian, before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing. 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 Virk on clues we're living in a rendered world.

Rizwan Virk: The simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of as the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all of physical reality is actually part of a virtual world.

The simulation hypothesis, the subtitle is, An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics Agree We're in a Video Game. There have been a number of physicists who are looking at the world as information now. And so there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. And instead of looking at things [01:12:00] 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 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 50 years, 100 years at the max.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:00] For the full conversation that will make you question every assumption you've ever held, check out episode 1239 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Rizwan Virk.