Ask A Genius 209 – Hope for the Unpopular
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
June 25, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That sounds fantastically optimistic.
Rick Rosner: It is among the things you tell the unpopular kid who plays the tuba in the band. You say, “They are jealous and don’t like you.” It is a thing to make the unpopular kid feel better. In fact, that tuba thing came from something called The Hollywood Nights. It was about nerds trying to get laid.
But the entire culture has gone nerdy, where bros try to get laid. You’ve got guido culture, which can involve hair mousse and lifting and hitting club at night, and getting with women.
Jacobsen: There’s two aspects to that. One is traditional masculine with men as the head of the household. The other is bro culture which is drinking, smoking, don’t wear sunscreen, ride dirt bikes and motorcycles, and this is your life trying to hit on and pick up women aggressively.
It is attempts to appear dominant in ways that appear more awkward and less functional and less cool than before.
Rosner: There is fragmentation. I think there are—I never read John Nash book, but I saw the movie called A Beautiful Mind. He says that if you’re trying to hook up or mate successfully, then one strategy is to eliminate the most desirable females from consideration and then choose from among the best remaining females.
That you look for the best deal with reduced competition. You find the females that have the most competition for them, and then you ignore them and you look for the best deals based on what standards you have among the relatively ignored females.
There is a scene in the bar with the blonde being ignored. Then there is a brunette, the stereotypically less attractive female becomes more attractive because there is less competition for her.
So, I would guess that it comes to trying to hook up, in a species where you’re not competing directly against nature, but that in a super successful species that there is going to be the potential for niche forming.
Where people will aggregate themselves to maximize reproductive potential by forming groups where their attributes can be manifest to the best advantage; so, people will form bro culture, which gives an advantage to people who are best at being bros and broettes.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
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- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 