Joe Rogan Experience #1959 - David Buss

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The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) All right, Dave. Well, thank you very much for being here, man. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Uh, to ... I'm delighted to be here, and it's a great honor to, uh, be here talking to you, man.

Well, it was very nice to meet you, uh, with Jordan. Uh, he speaks so highly of you and we had such a fun conversation at dinner that I said, "Well, we, uh, we definitely should do this publicly."

Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, terrific. And I've been catching up on your podcast, so it ... you have so many that it's im- ... nearly impossible. But, um, I watched the recent one you did with Jordan when he was here in Austin, and, uh, also the one that you did with, uh, Russell Brand. Um, and I was on ... I was on his, his podcast, and I was just saying, "Man, he talks so fast-"

I know.

"... that it's like, uh ... uh, glad you were kind of a calming influence-"

(laughs)

"... to slow him down a little bit."

And he's sober. The guy's completely clean and sober. You would imagine that he was definitely on Adderall or something.

Yeah.

Just rounding off.

That's what I was thinking that maybe when he was on heroin, maybe it s- ... calming him down a little bit or slowed him down.

Mm. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe that's why he was interested in that stuff. So, uh, what we started talking about was your life's work, which was ... y- your life's work is human mating strategies.

Yes.

As a psychologist, like why ... wha- ... first of all, why was that, uh, so appealing to you? Why did you choose that as a field of study?

Yeah. Well, it wasn't ... it wasn't a field of study when I, when I did choose it, and I, I wasn't like I had a plan going in. But, um, a little bit of backstory on this is, um, uh, I'm a, a psychologist by training. So, trained at UC Berkeley, PhD, uh, and, um, and there was nothing of this sort going on there or no research. But I started reading because I have fairly broad interests. I started reading in different areas, like evolutionary biology, and I was reading evolutionary biology, I came across these amazing theories of evolution like Hamilton's Theory of Inclusive Fitness, uh, Trivers' Theory of Parental Investment, uh, of course, Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection. That was really ... that's really the one that blew me away, Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection. Um, and then I realized, man, these, these theories have so much applicability to humans, but nobody is studying them. And they lead to, uh, at least the then-theories lead to some pretty clear predictions that could be tested. And so I was trained as an empirical scientist where, you know, you, you take the hypotheses, generate predictions, do the studies, and if the studies ... if the empirical findings support the predictions, then you say, "Okay, this looks promising. You know, we'll go further." And so I did some initial studies of, uh, human mate preferences. So one of the, the core things, maybe to back up just a second, uh, if I could, Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection, so this is Darwin, 1871. Um, and it's, it's, it's one of the most brilliant and then unrecognized theory, evolutionary theories in existence. So, most people when they think about evolution, they think about survival of the fittest, you know, nature red in tooth and claw. Um, you know, and of course, that's really what Darwin's first book, On the Origin of Species was all about, um, survival, adaptations to survival, and he came up with this, uh, brilliant phrase, uh, called the hostile forces of nature. And that h- ... and that organisms have these adaptations to deal with these hostile forces of nature in order to survive. So, uh, they were basically threats from the environment, uh, things like you've ... you know, fall off a cliff, you, you drowned in the ocean, uh, uh, food shortages, threats from predators, you know, the lions and tigers and bears, threats from parasites that can eat you from within. Um, and so that's really what his first book was all about. And so people equated natural selection with survival selection. But there were, in fact, phenomena that Darwin could not explain on this theory. Uh, and he was very troubled by them. He has ... uh, he noticed that, uh, (laughs) something that all scientists do, uh, scientists develop, uh, fawns for their pet hypotheses, right, their pet theories. And so ... but he noticed that he had a tendency to forget facts that were inconsistent with his theory of natural selection.