"80% Of Men Can't Get Sex!" - The Dangers Of Dating Apps, Porn & Masturbation | William Costello

I will start us with a Washington Post survey that shows that the rate of sexlessness among young men has tripled in the decade leading up to 2018 what in the hell is going on yeah so that that is a big kind of statistic that was flying around there there's some new statistics actually that show that that sexlessness uniquely being towards young men has actually reversed somewhat and part of that might be that during the pandemic young men might have been more risk-taking and they'd be more inclined to go out during the pandemic they were taking bigger risks I thought for sure that number was going to go the other way right yeah but young men would be less kind of uh disgust sensitive than women so they'd be willing to maybe take the risk especially for sex so that has reversed why would that's why would that go up during the pandemic like that felt like a time where everybody was becoming more and more risk averse so what what about being isolated or clamped down on or even just the risk of literal death made them more risk-taking so the sexlessness for men was going up up until 2018 but now the new statistics are showing that it's not uniquely men that are sexless with the women are virtually overtaken them and that's if what we're saying it might be a response to the pandemic that women would be staying in more risk adverse comparing to men men would actually go out and take the risk to have sex but uh so what I'm trying to wrap my head around is is that a response to women pulling back which then make men go harder is that what we're talking about yeah I think men typically will be more willing to take the risk women won't there'll be fewer women who will take the risk and more men would be willing to have sex with them that's just one Theory the other idea could be that it's just a naturally kind of cycling back and forth that this unique spike in sexlessness for young men wasn't any major artifact uh at all and it's kind of evening out so if it went up I think the stat was 28 percent what's it down to now I can't recall the exact statistic now but I know that it's reversed and that women have overtaken that it's there's more yeah are we talking 26 are we back down to like 10 12 I think it was around the 12 Mark 12 15. so it properly just completely reversed so mating crisis over we're good not necessarily so uh you know I've spoken about that statistic on podcasts before as one kind of data point in what we call the larger amazing crisis but to think about it as a made in crisis the evidence of a young men reporting having sex within the last year I don't think it's the best evidence of any phenomenon you can still have this made in crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mailing Market from both sexes for men and for women and there's still a lot of data points in that so for example new Pew research showed that upwards of 30 percent of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all even for casual sex they're just backing out completely so help me reconcile that we went from 20 seclessness before the pandemic to its drop back down we don't know the exact number but more or less reversed but guys are pursuing sex less how do I I don't know how to make that make sense yeah so it's kind of just pointing to this having sex one time within the last year isn't necessarily the greatest country sex ones yeah like they're not pursuing it yes just like does that you define the what is then if you think there is a mating crisis I I thought the mating crisis was people are not having sex so we're putting that on the Shelf so if it isn't that what is the mating crisis okay so the maiden crisis can be traced back to an essay my supervisor wrote in 2016. so my supervisor is Dr David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin an evolutionary psychologist and he wrote this this essay saying the amazing crisis among educated women you talk talks about this mismatch Between Women beginning to outpace men in educational settings so he used the University of Texas at Austin as an example where women are beginning to outpace men in education at rapid rates it's called the pink campus and I know you've had Richard Reeves on to talk to you in the podcast and he lays out all of those statistics in his book of boys and men now when you combine this socio-economic success of young women in recent decades with their evolved mate preference for an equal or higher status mate it just simply means that there's a skew in terms of the lack of eligible men that are out there and when you have a skew in a mating market like that so fewer eligible men for women to compete for the the market favors the scarcity so those few men at the top that women are interested in are less willing to commit to long-term mating because they're the scarcity and it becomes a problem so women have a double-edged sword because Highly Educated women are competing with Highly Educated women and lower educated women for the same increasingly small pool of men that they're deeming eligible and you know you see articles every week about this uh talking about how women are beginning to freeze their eggs at rapid rates in response to this lack of eligible man out there um you see can you so I know you've already said it but I think it it Bears when you say eligible men you mean women have a set of criteria on average and given the only thing you've listed so far is college but I'm guessing that there's going to be a broader set of things at play than that yes but given that the women are just demolishing men into educational realm and that's one of the criteria that they use to determine eligibility yes uh that their their narrowing the pool by being I don't I'm gonna I'm gonna say too selective you're gonna have a problem with that and understandably so but from their perspective just from a numbers game it's too selective if you want a broad pool yeah it is just literally making narrowing your pool that you can choose from and broadening willing to choose from yes that's the thing I don't want to get lost in this conversation just to make it nice and sticky yes absolutely but yeah when I think about it like that I wonder what advice would I give to a sister of mine if I had one I I don't have a sister the perfect follow-up question right what would I advise are oh just simply lower your standards marry a man less educated than yourself even though you're not really sure that's what you want I don't know if I could bring myself to give that advice and there is some evidence that um women are beginning to do this and I think that's somewhat inevitable so the phenomenon or the mating strategy that I described there of women tending to mate with higher status Partners is called hypergamy and you probably heard a lot about that on internet discourse all around the place but it's a very very real phenomenon and um there is some evidence that hypergamy is in Decline uh women are beginning to marry men less educated than a little in decline or a lot in Decline uh I can't remember the exact figures uh off my head but uh a little in Decline but it still tends to be the preference but they're beginning to to mate down so to speak but this comes with a whole host of other problems so in those mate trips where women beginning to mate down uh we see increased infidelity for both sexes increased use of insomnia anxiety and depression medication among both sexes you see a massive prevalence of intimate partner violence there was a huge study done on 27 EU countries with over 21 000 EU women and it showed that the woman earning more or being higher educated than her partner was a massive risk factor for all types of intimate partner violence Jesus which is kind of a really dark finding but it makes sense from another solutionary point of view because in evolutionary psychology we have something called mate retention strategies and you have two strategies to make retain to retain your mates you have the benefit provisioning strategy which means you can provision your partner with so many benefits that she doesn't want to leave she's happy to stay she gets a lot of benefits from you whereas if you don't have a lot of benefits to provide you choose the cost infliction mate retention strategy and that's the type of inflicting costs on your partner to lower her self-esteem so she doesn't feel like she can leave you in in the most extreme circumstances that even includes intimate partner violence so you might recognize that in the kind of abusive language of abusive men who might say who would ever have you except me you're lucky to have me no one will ever have you and you try and lower your partner's self-esteem or their sense of their own mate value so they don't leave you for someone else and that makes sense if you think about a man who's suddenly threatened that his wife is earning more than him or has begun to earn more than him or is higher educated she's spending her time around other high status men more High status than you she's away from you even just from a proximity point of view you are at risk a bigger risk of losing her so it is a threat to you so a lot of men do choose that that strategy which is a pretty dark uh dark finding but one we maybe need to reckon with as Richard Reeves points out women are beginning to outpace men so starkly so let's go back to your hypothetical sister what are we telling her yeah I mean it's just an artifact of the modern mating Market that the Sexes aren't really depending on each other as role mates in the same way if we think even ancestrally two of the main things that women used to rely on men for are protection The Bodyguard hypothesis protection from other men and protection from the Hostile forces of nature that's not really such a prescient Factor anymore and also it's a protection and provisioning resources if women are gathering their own resources the state is protecting them as The Bodyguard now for a large degree they might choose to you know to just go their own way kind of thing we hear about men going their own way but it actually might be the case that women are beginning to go their own way and um you know it's just not obvious what a woman might get out of settling down and it might just be a a bleak truth we have to reckon with that for the past number of decades maybe centuries women had been perhaps settling with men that they ordinarily wouldn't want out of strict economic necessity or strict monogamy Norms that I ask a really uncomfortable question go ahead were they settling for men that they didn't want or did that change the context enough that there was just a broader pool of men that they wanted yeah I think the latter is probably more true I don't think we had generations of women who were like oh my god what have I had to do I hate my husband I don't think that's the case I just think we had very strict kind of uh you know stricter lines around role mates and it was people were happy to kind of live in that world you know there's a really good book by a psychologist called Eli Finkel called The All or Nothing marriage and it talks about how in recent decades we've began to put such a high stakes on our marriages that we demand them to be all things their your partner must be sexually fulfilling to you your best friend help you fulfill your potential all of it all in one package whereas for most of our ancestral history or in recent decades or recent centuries your partner was a role mate that you chose to go through life with there wasn't so many options to choose from in your city you didn't have access to the whole world on a dating app to choose from so it's a very very evolutionary novel mating Market we're in now and one we really need to think about all right so your sister now better understands the problem but she still does not know what on Earth she is supposed to do and I know you don't have like a a preset answer but I think I my whole thing in life is one ought to have a method by which they think through a difficult problem so help her and all of the women listening right now and guys honestly for that matter uh that are listening how do they think through this problem like there is is a thing that they need to do and so when you talk to Richard Reeves it's you can't leave men behind you have to find a way to start supercharging them and that for sure is where I come at this problem is like look as some I am married to a woman that went from when we got married she was going to be a mother and she was going to raise the kids and then we end up pivoting into our marriage and she's now an entrepreneur doing her boss [ __ ] thing and all that that was like a whole thing like we had to figure out how to navigate that not easy but one of the things is and people are gonna hate this but I was like a word like I'm going to outperform you like I'm going to still be somebody that you look at with reverence and that meant that I also had to step up my game so it's like I I am both in need of encouraging her to become everything that she wants to be and then absolutely making it anathema to my entire existence that I would ever say slow down so I can lead yes so it's like okay cool if she's running faster and I want to lead and look I've got a whole thing you need to be able to both lead and follow I don't want people taking this out of context but setting that aside for a second we can talk about that in a minute but if I want her to still be able to say I have dated a cross or up uh I have to move faster as well right and I think that that that is something that is getting lost in society right now I think there is a massive um we are I've heard you refer to this as we're making the male way of moving through life like the default thing I don't think that's actually accurate I think we're telling women like go be aggressive go be dominant sort of abstracting that from male-ism or maleness uh and we're saying to men don't take up so much space don't be so aggressive that's icky that's toxic and so you're masculinizing women you're feminizing men and now you're asking them to come together all while an artificial womb it feels like it's six weeks away it's like dude this feels like a recipe for disaster um so what say you I think you hit on some real accurate uh cultural forces and the kind of cultural rhetoric that's happening with the the male default being what you were encouraging women to Aspire to every week you see this article about how much better life is for women not having been straddled with a family and things like this um and it's just not clear to me that that goal is what women will want forever and always it might be throughout their 20s but most women are equipped with evolved psychology to want to start a family so I'll give you some maybe folk wisdom from Mommy Costello my mother she raised three boys she didn't have any daughters but she told me that if she had a daughter and she was facing this problem she would advise her you can have it all but not at the same time so for women I think that's very important is that this boss pitch energy Paper Chasing throughout your 20s is running up against a ticking clock the people are kind of reluctant to talk about because it's seen as quite sexist to highlight that women have a narrow window or window to get their uh you know their biological kind of needs met in terms of starting a family that is a more time squeezed Mission for Women but I really liked your idea of the aspirational Viewpoint for men is that yes the women have had the breaks taken off them in education and the workplace and they're killing it in a brain-based economy rather than a broad-based economy and yes that makes for fewer eligible men and yes that sucks that makes it harder for you and in the 1950s you would have found it easy to get a job and easy to get a wife but so what that's where you are it's kind of you take the Jordan Peterson kind of maxim of pick yourself up by your bootstraps book oh you kind of have to you don't really have any other option you can complain about the world and say I wish it was different but you're not going to slow women down now that kind of train has run away and nor should we you know there's probably so much of an economic gain out of women's Liberation into the workplace that that's not gonna go back um and also just from a point of view of the amount of women that now have Financial Freedom to kind of not be dependent on perhaps abusive men that's a an undirect knowledge net good of women's Liberation and women I speak to talk to me about that they say oh it's a great relief to no longer have you know to be dependent and so that's one positive that's not often talked about but yeah so I think men need to be aspirational yes we need to have a cultural conversation about what we can do to support them kind of in a feminized education system so to speak um but yeah aspirational is the way to go for men and in terms of the conversation towards women I would say mother Costello had some good advice on think about your timing of all these things how does that play out so what is have it all let's start with defining that so if if we're saying have it all by today's maybe vision of success about having your own career having a great husband and a family to all of it in the one and women often talk about that there's a lot of pressure to have all of these and probably because they come up against each other at awkward times so just at the point when women are beginning to really thrive in their careers towards the end of their 20s that's the point where they really really want to start a family and you know the gender pay Gap is really a motherhood penalty kind of Gap and men if they took a break from you go go into that a little bit because I think this is super controversial yeah but makes as a as a CEO I'll just tell you this this makes so much sense to me so what why do you call it a motherhood penalty why isn't it rightly understood as just a gender pay Gap yeah because there's a lot of evidence I believe in 22 specific cities in the U.S is very apparent that women are actually even out earning men up until the age of 29 and then it flips because that's the precise age when women are kind of exiting the workforce necessarily if they want to have children if men had to take time off work to have children they would probably suffer a penalty as well so you know I'm all for doing all sorts of initiatives make Child Care easier more support there follow like a Scandinavian model to help people get back into work after having a family all for that but it's absolutely the case that women just when they're about to really thrive in their career and it baffles me when people speak about the gender pay gap on a very one-dimensional level and speaking to you with your CEO hat on you'll probably realize this you don't want to lose the female talent you have at that age right nobody does so it's a you know and you see these cultural kind of corporate drivers Morgan Stanley releasing this um you know report talking about how it's the rise of the Shi economy and how majority of working age women will be single and childless by the year 2040 and it's like you know is this the the vision is the dream I don't know if that's the case for most women who I so I will just tell you this is fun talking to somebody who knows evolutionary psychology so well from an evolutionary standpoint I promise you that is not the vision uh just because Evolution bifurcated the Sexes a very long time ago and said okay we have to make this an incentive that the Sexes will actually come together and you're far more likely to have a child that lives long enough to have a child if you've got two parents coming together and obviously making it and then taking care of it but I think that as you get into evolution narrowly novel environments when when the rate of change from a cultural standpoint outpaces The evolutionary ability to keep up with it like I don't know that there is a we get on the other side of this and all as well and I'm a hyper optimistic person but as I look at this stuff the only way that I can stay firmly like planted in the optimistic Camp is when I just go it'll work itself out somehow right in the what was it Stephen Pinker it's like you can't look at however many thousands of years of tomorrow is better than today over and over and of course there are blips and wars and things like that but I mean it's just the long Arc of History has tended towards things getting better and better and better but I don't actually see the path and so the I want to introduce an idea I've never talked about it out loud so I don't know how articulate I'm going to be on this but this this feels like a very important idea we have become aware of the relation between the sexes and we're aware of how much things can be malleable and once you have that level of self-awareness in a world where you have the internet and ideas can spread at the speed of light there be there there comes this um everything is like self-referential it's all Pastiche it's all um it's so self-aware wink wink that I I don't know that that goes anywhere other than the the cynicism of the eternally visible God I'm trying to put words at something so uh I grew up in the 80s and I fell in love with filmmaking in the 80s and the action genre of the 80s was very unself-aware and so you could have Arnold Schwarzenegger throw a knife into a guy and it would pin him to uh a beam behind him and stick around right and you just laughed it was so great and so unexpected now if you say that line you're saying it like with a wink because we've heard that line and and that created a a downfall of Cinema from my perspective once everything became we're so aware we we already know how a movie's gonna begin we know that what happened because you you have so many books on like how screenplays were structured that in the middle I'm going to ruin it for people that haven't become aware of this yet in the middle of a story it's called the midpoint you're going to be as far away from how you're going to be at the end as possible so if they have completely failed at the midpoint guaranteed they succeed in the end and vice versa and so once all of that stuff is so known you have a real problem of like having a fresh story so once men and women both know like uh oh women uh hypergamy is a real thing uh women use their sexuality to attract men uh no matter how old the guy gets he finds a 22 year old attractive uh women look for status money access resource like it's just so known that you get what I'll call the Obama effect which actually learn from you okay and this is uh this is a really interesting idea so he writes his book his Memoir and says oh I read these books in order to be attractive to these different women and then people went nuts on them like oh my God they're so misogynistic and so manipulative it's like but that is life that is evolution but now that we're all aware of it it feels icky yeah it's almost too on the nose to do something like that you know get the goal get the girl but that feels like such an intuitive idea for young men you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today that's what I'm saying it's because we're now aware of it it's like when it was you just sort of figured it out like I figured it out along the way I was very bad with women in the beginning I learn how to play the game of um seduction of becoming sexually attractive all of that but I didn't think of it as a game and so it wasn't icky I was just like oh okay this is what I have to do wow I'm really beginning to understand it but now once there's like websites memes it's so obvious now it's like am I being manipulated because somebody's making themselves more attractive to me it's just the tactics are so visible that cynicism seems the only outcome and I don't know how we step back from the precipice of cynicism where it's like even as I say guys go get [ __ ] tough go make money go figure out making money as a proxy for you know how to control your environment you know how to create something of value uh you know how to organize people there's a whole list of things that go along with your ability to make money but go make money it's super valuable it is not an end in itself it is a uh it's the great facilitator as I call it anyway make money Master your emotions get physically strong educate the [ __ ] out of yourself like do all of these things gain confidence but now that it's like a known thing it's like you get oh it's toxic masculinity you shouldn't do it like how do we step back from that yeah it's strange and even like as benign self-development advice as Jordan Peterson gets framed as misogynistic it's as if to develop yourself particularly with the goal of achieving romantic success that that gets framed as misogynistic but you touched on a very interesting point there earlier as well about how you had to learn the game or you had to go through the trial and error and I was talking with my friend Chris Williamson about this and we talked about how the mating market and The Mating Game is the only game in town that you don't get to practice for it's a real baptism of fire you have to go in there clumsily develop yourself figure out what works get your heart broken get rejected get all of that anxiety and people being very anxious and risk adverse know are not willing to do that and even to do that is also kind of seen as to make those mistakes along the way in the mating Market it comes with a lot of costs and you mentioned like the metoo era there's potentially a lot of real costs associated with making a lot of mistakes along the way there so I mentioned that before we started rolling so for people that um don't know so I married my student it was a school for adults um but yeah we in another timeline I often say that we're a metoo story but the reason I had brought that up and this goes back to the same idea is I was 24 when I met my now wife and I was dumb I was um undereducated in life I did not make much money at all and yet I was able to attract her because she saw me teaching so it was me teaching something that I knew and loved and was passionate about she saw me at the front of a classroom so it's like forget what the name for that is where where when other women are paying attention to you or when people are paying attention to you it's a status thing so she me everyone in the room is paying attention to me I know more about anybody in the class about this thing and so it was like a very artificial environment but the perfect environment for a woman to find me attractive and it's like yeah of course like one I want to be very clear I made a move on exactly one student and I ended up marrying her so this was not like a thing but I was very aware that that was um going to put me in my best light yeah and you know throughout recent decades and recent history a lot of people met their partner at work uh you know both my brothers are married to or engaged to women they met at work as well so you know it's not like this absolute Fringe phenomenon that should be always frowned upon and if you close that door for people to you know you're no longer allowed to me he's a romantic partner at work we spend all our time at work it's like you're in proximity to people kind of with similar interests they're gonna see you who fully shine in a industry that you belong in and should be thriving in of course romance is going to Blossom there so that seems a bit of a misguided cultural idea to just completely shut down a workplace romances and yeah I think that's uh it would be a shame if that was a complete I mean I believe even like Facebook or Netflix have a policy whereby it's just not allowed at work for employees to get together which seems very strange it doesn't seem strange to me again putting my CEO hat back on it seems stupid to me but it is not strange in a world where it's lawsuits this that and the other like look and this is easier for me because I'm married but when I step into the work realm I turn my sexuality off because I am so paranoid about somebody misreading it and feeling like a power play or whatever and um again this is one of those where I I don't know how we step back from this but you can't expect anyone guys or girls because you could easily what I mean is guys typically make the first move but even if you flipped it and said women are going to make the first move you are still going to run into a problem where an unwanted Advance is made yeah and to your point about this is the one thing where you don't get to practice even if you could practice it it's also the one thing that when you make the move for real like we're living in a time right now we're that an unwanted Advance is like seen as violence like literally said that is violence yeah and so it's like whoa like what play that one out where do you think that goes for sure I think the idea of flipping it flipping the Sexes there would have more legs than perhaps we might think because although it is still making a move uh men would perceive a move being made on them as much less harmful even sexual harassment men perceive it as way less harmful when it's uh towards a man um men perceive sexual harassment as less harmful generally towards men or women but specifically towards men so flipping it would be I think would have some legs I think the worst most men would probably be flattered and say so why don't we flip it uh I think that the desire is not there for women I think most women want to be pursued rather than pursue men themselves uh it's just that they want to be pursued by men they deem eligible or competent and they've got this kind of Avenue to repel um or to kind of punitively punish men they don't deem eligible who are giving them the ick for coming on to them um which is a shame you know it it's a there's a funny phenomenon because men have this sexual over perception bias whereby we perceive a smile from a woman as giving us sexual interest and this is there's good evolutionary reasons for this is because our ancestors weren't the ones who missed a queue of sexual interest it's actually like the smoke detector principle it's better to be overly sensitive to these cues than to miss them so we've got this over perception bias but meanwhile women have got uh for a whole host of reasons they've got a strategy to kind of give soft rejection or to misrepresent romantic interest for a whole variety of interests one of which could be wanting to feel safe not feeling safe enough to forthrightly reject someone so you've got these two mechanisms running into each other where women are giving this kind of ambiguous no or token resistance to romantic Pursuit and men are kind of learning from that combine this with their over perception bias and you've got a recipe kind of for a disaster there it's a strength I think both sexes could do better to understand engage in better cross-sex mind reading which is something our lab is studying right now try to see things from the other's point of view learn about these biases that exist and be more maybe forthright and clear I do have sympathy with women who say that they're reluctant to give firm rejections to men because I've seen some men get very aggressive even in response to to rejection um which isn't very nice for a woman to have to deliver but there's a whole host of other reasons women misrepresent romantic interest 33 of women report to have engaged in a foodie call which is misrepresenting romantic interest in order to dine at a man's expense whoa yeah so it's pretty high you'd think and fruity calls are a real thing yeah and you imagine this drives a frustrated young man on the dating scene crazy because I heard that the average cost of a first date in New York was ninety dollars and it's like wow if you a young man and you don't have a lot of money and you get burned with a few foodie calls what a Tinder keg for resentment towards the other sex you know so it's not good you know I don't know I'm not saying that's very typical that's 33 of women have engaged in a foodie call at some point I don't know how typical it is or how often the frequency they engage with it but uh more common than maybe we thought that is shockingly uh High by what I would have guessed but um I bet you're real happy you're married now yeah it's well so I'm real happy that I'm married for a lot of reasons like when I think about uh I just missed online dating so that wasn't even a possibility I'm trying to make sure that's true as far as I remember it was not a possibility when I met my wife shortly after we got married it started to be like a real Fringe like oh God can you believe cringe cringe um but it wasn't an option and so I'm very glad about that now that I hear more and more sort of what that ends up becoming uh in terms of um creating this very interesting thing where you talked about this at the beginning where a very small percentage of men that are quote unquote eligible which I want to keep saying is self-defined this is what women find attractive but uh this super narrow pool and then they become the scarce resource I'm literally parroting back what you said at the beginning but this is one of those things that really took me a while to understand this so women crush the not not Crush they have a natural bias to want a certain subset of things and as they move up the sort of hierarchy of performance that the raw number of men in that begin to get smaller smaller smaller small smaller but now because the dating apps they can find those guys but those guys still are a small relative number they become the thing that are pursued which then clicks over into we should probably get more into evolve preferences on on the sexes because they are very very different robust repeatable in study after study but uh guys when they're the ones that are the the coveted thing um they're not going to commit and so now you get another brick in this wall of the mating crisis absolutely yeah so the sociosexuality is either restricted or unrestricted and it begins to mirror the one that's in the scarcity so if women are in the scarcity men are more uh Keen to commit long-term and that's just as a crude sex ratio kind of balance but because they have to commit to get the girl right exactly it's like oh I need to I'll give you anything you want there's not that many women around I need to make sure I get one so you mirror the the sociosexuality of the other sex but yeah exactly right and what online dating does as well is it exacerbates this problem because it reduces uh the person down to a set of static data points so your height your income or your educational level and that really is what's weighted stronger than your personality even which doesn't really shine through in a dating app despite what a lot of people say the the example I always give is that dating apps don't allow a nice Charming Irish accent to compensate for being five foot seven which leads me to believe I wouldn't get on so great on dating apps and and that's true I mean you know the dating app hinge I heard the relationship science director talking with my friend Chris that if women set their height preferences to six foot or over in America they're reducing their mating pool down to just 18 percent of women men if they set it to six foot three and over they're reducing it down to just three percent of men so when you're skewing the sex ratio against you like that and encouraging men to see themselves as this eligible men to see themselves as the scarcity that's uh setting the deck against yourself for women which is and that's so interesting because one this whole arms race begins with height is a an easy one to talk about but looking at the I have ladies you have to forgive me this is what it's called uh it's like the female delusional calculator or female delusion calculator something like that so and we we did a test here at the office and we said all right ladies uh give me a guess six foot or higher a hundred thousand or dollars or above uh not obese and any ethnicity what do you think the percentage ends up being it's 0.35 and they were all guessing like 15 20 30 were like you are so far off and those like the the sort of Meme and culture is like well that's what I should get and that doesn't seem that crazy but in reality it's a ridiculously small ridiculously small less than half a percent yeah and in terms of like coming at it from an evolved made preference of point of view the selection pressures that would have acted on female chooziness for height and formidability are that the idea of protection and ability to provision resources it's an example of evolutionary mismatch and it's obviously a very convenient one for me being five foot seven to talk about but it maybe it's time we let that one go you know that's hilarious yeah so when we going back to like what what is it that we can do about this so what advice do you have for young people anybody male female either like how do we navigate this so guys we know like you can push yourself you can make yourself better but for real for real like what do we do with women is it paint a new picture motherhood is rad and is it just beating that drum is it um uh we need to socially Champion people that are far more feminine and aren't stepping into a more masculine role like what do we do for real so I'm optimistic that the pendulum for women and their drives might sling back towards the middle right now it's what they want or what Society reinforces both kind of things because they'll kind of work in tandem to some extent so it's not that long ago it's only a number of decades that women have really had the breaks taken off them in education in the workplace and they're beginning to kind of really shine so it's a very novel kind of thing and it's like the thing to do of oh you know make your feminist ancestors really proud you know what would they think if you went to be a Trad wife stay-at-home mom you know it's kind of repellent right the nightmare scenario can't do that but that pendulum might swing and it might become a bit more loose that people can choose from a variety of different options which is good right now the the main option seems to be boss pitch energy but that might cool as it becomes a little less novel that women can do this um one thing I would like to see happen but I'm not I'm less optimistic about is that made preferences are very very sensitive to what we assign status to so you can assign status to any number of things so it's not outside the realm of possibility that you mean for men or for men and women for men and for women what makes it there is some sex difference that physical Beauty results in high status for women in a way that it doesn't necessarily for men and kind of resources reduces in status and strength results and status for men in a way that it doesn't for women um but status is to some degree arbitrary so there's a really good book by an author called will store called the status game really good book and it talks about how there's this tribe and they assign status to whichever farmer in their tribe can grow the biggest yams and that is the high status thing to do so it kind of shows you this flexibility of status so what I'm optimistic I don't know that I agree with that okay so uh for instance are women going to ever be prized by men for the ability to grow big yam less likely but what I mean is the male status what we assign status to for men could be a bit more malleable yep so but on that so one we've already now slashed it now it's about men's status can be malleable but if there was no Fitness to the yam thing do you think it would ever catch on like for instance I've heard you talk um not I don't mean this word in a bad way but I've heard you talk disparagingly about guys if you're trying to make video games your status thing women just do not care and so I wouldn't pursue that angle uh and I yeah I probably agree it's like I think I agree with uh honorable exception I think the really high status Gamers I've come to learn uh can actually be kind of very successful in the mission I I think that that has to do with money and fame I don't think it has to do with gaming right and it's a very narrow pool of those Gamers that are going to reach those at those Heights and but yeah so the the white pill I was trying to get at is that maybe we could see a world where we assign status to being a really involved stay-at-home father but like I say I'm less optimistic about it um why are you you can give me either the why you have enough optimism that you say that or why you're pessimistic that you want it to work but you probably because I think that will never work I'm less optimistic because none of the data shows that that's what women want there's one study that showed that just five percent of young women desire a partnership where they work full-time and their partner works part-time or not at all so that's very kind of Bleak and that was the study of young women so you'd think that those younger women would be more primed to say yeah I'm very egalitarian I could work and my mates could be the stay at home dad so there doesn't seem to be any uh made preference shift for women there and I'm optimistic or hopeful because I think involved fathers are really beneficial to families and to children and that's something really important that we need to as well as lionizing motherhood we need to lionize fatherhood too and involvement yes but so uh men as mothers does not strike me as a winning thing and I I trust me I hear the comments Lighting on fire as I say those words but what you're describing I will say is traditionally the feminine role and the reason that I think Evolution will get behind that is from a physiological standpoint only a mother can breastfeed and give birth PS and so once your Evolution you have to optimize one of the sects to carry the baby to term and then breastfeed it and I don't think it's a mistake that Evolution optimized just like I'm gonna put all of those things in one bucket so I'm going to optimize the the female hip design for child bearing I'm going to optimize the breast design for breastfeeding and by the way I'm going to optimize the brain design to care enough about this infant to be able to pick up on cues and maybe a guy doesn't pick up on also P.S 15 of women have a fourth photoreceptor could that be tied to raising infants as they can see different colors in their cheeks and so they can really understand I don't know I'm just saying that from from a biological perspective evolution is honed each of us to be good at something and so when I think about um evolved preferences a hundred percent culture plays into this but again I've heard you say that culture is Downstream of biology which I agree very much and I don't think that an alien civilization their culture would look anything like ours uh presuming that they evolved in some different way so if culture is Downstream of biology and evolution has optimized one of us for the the very tactile early uh nurturing of an infant and the other for something else which we can get into what that is in a minute but I don't think that culturally you could try to reinforce something that goes against the biology so to be very pointed I don't think you can ever get culture to say a man staying at home and taking care of an infant is of course one-offs 100 but I don't think that will ever take over the the the physical preference uh it's a terrible way to say it but the on mass preference of women because it doesn't have an evolutionary correlate yeah absolutely yeah so the way we describe it is that genes hold culture on a leash and the culture is a biological output and uh yeah ultimately I do think you're right we'll neither the mate preference won't shift or it won't shift very fast anyway or in great numbers uh and also just the personality inclination of males to be interested in being that involved in the home uh humans are a remarkable ape and that's the male invests as much as it does but you're right to point out that males invest far less than women do so yeah it's a Perhaps it is as Bleak as we might think yeah yeah I mean uh I won't give myself over to bleakness just yet but this does feel like something that for us to get to a winning solution people have to be able to confront the truth the reality of how things actually are and then we can build things that work okay so uh this was me responding to your idea of um involved fathers and I think that's critically important so now from an evolutionary lens what does a um an involved father look like if it's different than the picture that not to get you in trouble that I just painted of um a more feminine role so the main role of fathers outside of Just The Bodyguard hypothesis of protecting is a teaching and teaching by action so men are very good at kind of the Rough and Tumble and learning that way and kind of making children feel safe kind of thing and encouraging them to take risks and go out and learn about the world whereas women would be more risky risk averse and be like oh don't take a risk don't cycle your bike out in the street come on you know just very much keep safe safety conscious whereas men are kind of like encouraging the child it fortifies the child with an ability to navigate the world in a way that the safetyism of a female typical parenting doesn't so I think that's a huge one and if we look at the kind of the current malaise of teenagers or young people they're exactly this problem they're safety conscious safety is the Paramount value of all values and they just don't take risks uh so that could be lacking that could be just would you call that the feminization of culture perhaps yeah that's kind of perhaps yeah does it make you uneasy to say that a little but um just because there's such variability among men and women but no I think uh female typical parenting certainly looks like more safety oriented than uh than male parenting when you say that there's so much variability what do you mean uh it's just that you know a lot of women will actually have more male typical psychology or male typical Behavior you know I just hear the uh the complaints of people saying well I know 10 women who are not safety oriented at all so you always got to kind of give yourself a bit of ass Comfort there yeah so I mean well let's address that head on so um one I want to be very clear and I'm sure I speak for both of us women should be able to be whatever they want yes uh I'm married to a woman that has chosen not to have kids word I'm married to a woman that is trying to be the best entrepreneur that she can be word I love it the most like I'm still with this woman I'm in awe of her she's unbelievable but at the same time I'm very honest that that transition was difficult it wasn't like oh okay cool like we had to really think about what that means and like how do we um you know process through that how do we position ourselves because I will say that I think that um not having kids is a way higher risk strategy for especially women but I think it's even a high risk strategy for men in terms of being fulfilled at the end of your life and I think if you go into it with your eyes wide open then you can mitigate those risks by how you structure your life how you frame your life intellectually how you think about it but if you just go into a blind lead there's going to be a real problem anyway I say all of that in response to um for a long time I was very hesitant to even form a thought about how I actually thought this all should be because I was worried about the backlash and uh when covid kicked off for a whole host of reasons I realized that I needed to start figuring out how I think through these problems because I don't I don't have wisdom on everything that I talk about so sometimes I'm just like okay how would I process through that problem but when I get to something like looking at what's happening in culture right now it this does seem to be like the feminization of culture and I I think that the way we should all be looking at this and I think this is true for a lot of things not just the male female dichotomy I think there's a lot of dichotomies in life's own business there's one between a Visionary and an operator and the solution to all of these is the thing that makes it work is the tension between the two and you should never want for the conversion of the other so for instance I don't if my wife and I had kids I would not want for her to convert to a masculine way because oh my God like you're going to make them scared to take risks no it's going to be the tension between the two of us where you're trying to keep them safe I'm trying to encourage them to take risks and so between those two things they will find their path if it's just all masculine energy you're going to have certain pathology on that side if it's all feminine energy you're gonna have pathology on that side so it's like maybe for all of human history we've seen the pathology of too much masculine energy cool I'm just saying the second you swing to the other side and it's all feminine energy you you will now get new pathology and until we can be honest like if guys can't admit hey cost inflicting strategies on your woman is evil dude don't do that that's so gross you should be mortified if you ever find yourself saying the words like you could never find somebody as good as me right you're the [ __ ] yeah and it's like if we can't look at that and be like that's grotesque don't do that but at the same time over here it's like there is going to be things that are equally problematic like telling a guy not to be aggressive or telling guys that they need to shut up and sit down no no if a woman wants to beat me at anything she is going to have to outperform me period yeah facts simple as and like that doesn't mean that I'm going to try to compete with everybody at every point it's like I'm going to have my areas but if I'm trying to like be the best at something I'm trying to be the best yeah yeah and you touched on a point that Jordan Peterson talks about about how this kind of new experiment of sharing the work domain uh actually is pretty novel um you know for most of our ancestral history we're different roles different work roles for the family and now you hear of all sorts of arguments where men complain that they're getting in trouble for debating or arguing with their female colleagues the exact same way they would with a male colleague and it's seen as being aggressive or adversarial but it's just male typical engagement it is aggressive and it is adversary right and step up and that's preferred by men but it's no longer allowed it's kind of framed as being aggressive or bullying if it's bullying now now we've gone into judgment about whether it's good or bad the reality is so in in a work environment like this is something I've thought a lot about companies got a business way more than they stay in business and if you can't have a meritocracy where the best idea wins you're done you will go out of business people's livelihoods will be destroyed uh any Equity the person has built has destroyed the money that they invested in the company or other people invested in the company it's gone yeah and so in the same way that legally companies are treated like a a human I would say that the it is it is a life and death situation and the only way forward is the best idea wins and I don't care if that comes from a female intern I don't care if it comes from a male CEO it's like what what is the best idea and if you're a [ __ ] as a CEO if you're a [ __ ] and you think because you're a guy you have better ideas the market will slap you into Oblivion yeah and if you're a woman that thinks your ideas are better because you are handling it in a more emotionally Deft way also false it's like the reality is you need to be able to get ideas out on the table you need to be able to debate them openly without shutting the other person down because as as much as I'm saying yes it is aggressive and adversarial if you shut down amazing people amazing thinkers because you're you're so dominant you're so aggressive that you don't know how to elicit the idea and how to elicit the feedback and how to get people to challenge your ideas you're also dead so it's like you can't pretend that that some women maybe on balance the the majority of women they have a different way of moving through the world you need to be aware of that and all that but at the same time you can't soft shoe it so much that you're afraid to say this is what I think is right I'm going to fight for this idea I need you to fight back because if you can't present a compelling argument yeah yeah I agree um and yeah but it is good to hear that kind of refreshing meritocracy kind of uh idea coming from you is good something you said got me thinking about uh also like the prioritizing of uh almost like a Libertarian freedom of choice for what you want for your own life as the master value in recent decades I only have one master value so I'm not sure where you're headed my master value is fulfillment right okay but yeah what I mean is that there used to be kind of these macro systems or the the Fulfillment of having a family would find you whether you wanted it or not kind of thing uh because it's not it's pretty recent that we've had the emancipatory pill right so that's actually causing two our status driving mechanisms for women wanting status in the workplace and the freedom to not be reliant on a man and they're able to kind of control their fertility and they're running into that time window so it's like this idea of you know this individualism has is almost run rampant that it's like oh yeah whatever you want for your own life but if so many people want that uh the boss pitch career focused energy suddenly you've got a macro problem of society is a you know a fertility crisis because of the individual choices in the market so it's a it's almost like before the pill which was massively emancipatory for sure uh you would organically find your way into kind of an equilibrium uh you'd stumble into it whereas now with complete control over fertility uh almost complete control it means you're kind of the individual choices that might be better in some way for the individual or they might think it's better for themselves as an individual is leading to a massive societal problem so it's a yeah and here we are yeah I mean this is the thing this is why I feel like this is so important is you know again just a plan to flag I want to find the way back from the precipice and I suppose I should Define what that is in a second I want to find the way back but in a hyper self-aware world where everything feels manipulative I don't know what the way back is yeah so here's the precipice uh the more you educate women the fewer kids they have if you stop having too many kids Society collapses now you'll build back it'll be a pendulum and I hear people say all the time that no society's ever recovered from a declining birth rate that's just patently false look at what happened to London during the black plague it was like the population cut in half still way bigger now than they were but that is cold comfort to any one of us that only get you know an 80 to 120 year life span and the Pendulum ain't gonna swing that far in that life so it's like you get what you get while you're alive and the fact that ah it'll bounce back in 150 200 years like Jesus right that's not not coming the opportunity cost for and you know when I talk about this fertility crisis sometimes incur incur a little bit of flack of people saying oh are you telling women what to do with their bodies and things like that but I'd refer to statistics that 80 of childless women are involuntarily childless that's by their own desires so this is not me and any other culture Warrior online talking about this fertility crisis and women need to fix it and do their handmaid's tale kind of role this is saying women by your own desires this is uh what you're saying is lacking so it's not it's not a crisis that I'm saying I'm unhappy about it's even if we only look at Women's own desires they're having fewer children than they want what's your North Star like if you're coming up with a solution to a problem what's your North Star I really don't know um I don't know the way back when especially we're met with such resistance from oh you know is this even a thing there are some people who are saying oh ridiculous it's not even a problem it's racist to say it's a problem it's all sorts of things how you know apparently it's racist to say it's a problem because it's only certain demographic facilities yeah so they're saying oh there's plenty of people being born in Africa which I think is actually a quite a racist idea because it implies oh the people being born in Africa we can just import them in and they'll be our labor force and that seems a bit kind of icky to me actually from the other side of things um but yes it's kind of like until the problem is acknowledged I can't see I'm still stuck there to be honest I'm trying to move the needle uh on that front at first get people to acknowledge in the mainstream and we're beginning to get there but it's still kind of framed as this nefarious kind of idea to bang that drum and so yeah I'm still kind of there trying to move the needle for it towards acknowledgment first okay so I think with any of these things whenever you're trying to think through a problem this is certainly what I put on myself you have to know what your North Stars where are you trying to go what are you trying to get to so in business I call this the physics of progress so the first rule of making progress is you have to know what you're trying to achieve what is your goal like hyper hyper specific so for me my very specific very aggressive goal is human flourishing which I will round to fulfillment okay so fulfillment has a recipe as far as I can tell which is evolutionarily derived so from what evolution has had to do to ensure that you had kids that had kids um you end up with the following recipe you have to work really hard that that's important you have to work hard if you don't work hard none of this you just won't feel what you want if you won't feel fulfilled even if you do all the following things that I'm about to say if you don't work hard to get there it just doesn't work psychologically so you have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you and the group that are exciting to you it's got to be fun and enjoyable that allow you to serve not only yourself but the group and if you do that if you're working your ass off to gain a set of skills that you care about towards a goal that is exciting and honorable exciting is self-evident Honorable means that it uplifts a group as well as yourself you will be fulfilled now I think that the thing that does that that hides in that is meaning and purpose so like I'm doing the saying I'm killing myself I'm working so hard but it gives my life meaning I matter to the group and the thing that historically gave you that that made you feel like well I'm sacrificing myself doing something that I love but I'm sacrificing myself to a greater good is having kids and the second you don't have kids you don't have built-in flourishing now that doesn't mean that having kids works for everybody because some people can't wrap their heads around it they have the wrong frame of reference it ends up being a nightmare and having kids is unrelentingly difficult and will challenge you at every conceivable turn and I think it was either Plato Plato or Aristotle that said the only impossible job is raising children you're going to break them to some degree it is what it is and so man when I think like I when I meet parents and I'm not kidding I will say thank you for your service I'm not trying to be funny I mean it as somebody that hasn't decided not to have kids I am very grateful to people that have decided to have kids but what I know that my wife and I have to contend with is especially as we get older finding meaning and purpose in our lives without children without being able to point to them and saying okay what I did mattered because they will live on Beyond me we have to really work to make sure that we're thinking about our lives in the right way so that we don't while we're working feel like I matter and then as we stop working go I don't matter anymore and what did I Really Leave Behind it's like so my wife and I have sat down okay we're not having kids cool we have to think through these things like how are we going to address this and like think about that and so if that's our North Star then it's like hey all the stuff that I'm saying about women like hey you need to be thoughtful about like what what does it look like to define success as a woman and if it's going to be boss [ __ ] it's like cool I'm totally here for that but think through what are the trade-offs right yeah same thing with guys if you're not going to better yourself if you're not going to push yourself to chase status and be better or you're not gonna have kids and and bring a masculine influence cool fair enough what's the trade-off and it seems like a hasty uh move to kind of disavow this evolutionary uh present meaning making mechanism that we've had you know that you know it obviously didn't work for every parent ever and always every parent didn't feel a great sense of meaning but probably most did you know and it probably found them you hear lots of stories about uh when um young parents have children and they step up and they suddenly men in particular when they're about to have a child that can step up and really make something of themselves very motivational so it seems a very Hasty thing to kind of disavow that culturally on mass say oh no that's no longer going to be the greatest source of meaning for young people um yeah that's a scary thing to just let go of without a ready-made answer in response it's like what are you going to do instead have people got a good answer I don't know if traveling the world and you know that there's a real absence of that meaning making I think yeah okay so I want to have on my Tombstone one simple phrase you're having a biological experience and I'm obsessed with that because if you understand yourself and you understand the way your brain works and you understand the way the Body Works then you can optimize towards fulfillment because what I'm saying is evolution has created that recipe not me I'm just trying to point out what has happened I'm not trying to say this is what ought to have happened just it is and so um given that you have an evolutionary you have a background in evolutionary psychology that's a better way to say that uh what are the differences between the sexes differences between the Sexes so one of the biggest personality differences is the people versus things um personality difference women tend to be more interested in people and social relationships and Men seem to be more interested in things objects tinkering with how they work in terms of sexual psychology massive differences between the Sexes there and the way we describe it is that where the Sexes faced similar selection pressures throughout our ancestral environment so then we would expect them to be the same so we both faced the problem of getting food into our body to fuel our body in the exact same way so guess what men and women treat food psychologically pretty much the same same problems no major asymmetry of difference between the Sexes there sexual psychology is a radically different ball game for women versus for men women have far greater obligatory parental investment so sex is a farm more risky Endeavor for women or has been ancestrally for sure they may get pregnant they may have to be stuck with the child have to breastfeed that child infant mortality with massive throughout our ancestral history it's a huge success story of recent decades how much we've improved that but it was a risky endeavor the minimum parental investment of a man is one successful sex act which I'm reliably told can be accomplished in a number of seconds but uh you know so it's a massive different ball game and where you have massive biological differences between the Sexes we should expect some psychological differences underpinning them and we do find that you find men have a massive greater desire for sexual variety and sexual frequency um my supervisor calls that the most boring replication in all of psychology now because it's just one of the biggest effect sizes so to put that into perspective the effect size of the difference between men and women in terms of desire for sexual variety is about as big as a as big in magnitude as the sex difference in upper body strengths between men and women so that's a huge psychological effect and in Psychology if we have an effect size that's small to medium we're happy with that we'll say okay we'll take that as a psychological finding so the sex psychology differences being so huge so robust repeatedly replicated over and over again we just did it actually the other week again uh yeah it's just a a stark phenomenon but it makes sense in the light of evolution when you think of the different selection pressures that would have shaped that psychology to underpin the biological differences okay so if culture is Downstream of that biology and all those things you just said are true um how do we end up with I think it's 83 percent of all historically studied societies have been polygamous um is that what you just told us would that have predicted that finding yeah so you see a large amount of societies being preferentially meaning one man with multiple wives now even within those societies most mate trips would have been monogamous um but it makes sense because a woman can only benefit so much she can't benefit that much from having multiple husbands she can only get pregnant so many times uh once it wouldn't be more resources like if I can get multiple guys like word perhaps yeah but it's a harder to kind of control those men but men can really benefit from multiple wives uh so they really go to town and you see whenever a man has this uh Power so Genghis Khan is the ultimate example so the most amount of Offspring born to one woman is 69 to just Russian peasants startling right seems impossible but it seems nothing compared to someone like Genghis Khan where it's estimated that one in 12 people are related to Genghis Khan because they've desired so many offspring yeah you have a similar effect in Ireland with King Nile of the nine hostages he apparently had so many concubines that all of us in Ireland are related to him somewhere apparently he's a very very handsome dude we're all kind of related to him in some way but yeah so there's very few polyandrous um Societies in the world that would be multiple males right single wife and where you find those are predictable areas too of really really harsh environments so in the high mountains in Nepal and the way that works is a family might say that they have two or three brothers and instead of each brother finding a wife of their own and dividing up the Farmland which is quite limited amongst three different families they would say hey let's have fewer families some same land all live together and two brothers invariably it's two brothers to promote genetic relatedness and more peace there really fast before you move on that seems insane when you talk about men want more sex than women and just that alone a woman having to please two men that both one already wants more sex than she wants yeah sounds like a recipe for disaster disaster yeah well polygeny is no picnic either so I'll tell a funny story about the Anthropologist uh Helen Fisher she was walking along and I always forget which tribe it was with the himba maybe but with this polygenous um farmer and he had currently had three wives and she was walking with him and she said in an Ideal World how many wives would you want and he stopped and he thought and he leaned in and said none he would like none because apparently in these poligenous marriages the Sister Wives poison each other's children they're constantly fighting it's no picnic so not easy but yeah our ancestral history of polygyny is very interesting and that got really really Bleak uh about 8 000 years ago where it's estimated that at that time 17 women reproduced for every one man and what's thought to have happened there oh yeah really like if you look at the graphs and maybe you can put them on screen but you see an absolute nosedive for male um effective population so men just so many men dying before getting to reproduce so let me say this another way for uh one guy was getting 17 women pregnant on average right then guys were getting zero our our men were dying before getting a chance to reproduce yes so uh remember this is a time of a lot of mortality so a lot of money wouldn't it have to be what I said is true one guy on average was getting 17 yes different women pregnant yes and what happened or what is postulated to happened is that this coincides with the onset of Agriculture which for the very first time allowed the most high status male in a society to stockpile resources to such a degree that it created such massive inner quality that it was better to be the fourth or fifth wife of the 17th I want to perhaps either I'm misunderstanding this or you're hedging against something that is just mathematically true is what I'm saying accurate yes and the other theory is that it's coincided with either uh agriculture or Chieftains uh where you had this really really high status guide now what happened in response to that is the cultural norm of monogamy evolved and cultures that practice monogamy as a cultural norm created a more egalitarian distribution of mates it meant that even the most high status man could only have he couldn't monopolize the mates and this gave your kind of disgruntled young men your in cells in a society a fighting chance and rather than being focused on causing trouble out there status seeking trying to find mates competing with each other they were focused on their family unit and then like you said moving beyond the family units to their society and those cultures flourished so you and you do see that in the ethnographic record that cultures that practice monogamy began to flourish and certainly Peterson gets in trouble for this because he says oh socially enforced monogamy but that's a well-established finding in the literature that that calls cultures to flourish okay so two questions one uh how do we end up getting to monogamy so is it societally they recognize this is a problem is it is it top down or bottom up that was really my question and then I actually don't I haven't paid close enough attention why does Jordan get in trouble for saying that like what do they actually push back on okay so the first question is that yes in any society where you have this Surplus population of unpartnered young men you're in cells it's called young male syndrome and they cause a lot of trouble and cultures throughout history had all sorts of cultural institutions to try and deal with Surplus population before even monogamy took hold as a like a cultural norm you might send your Surplus population of young men often exploring Adventures you might send them off raiding War because you just want to kill them off well you want not necessarily kill them off you might find something more useful to do with them if they're exploring they could actually find something useful or if they're raiding other Villages as Vikings or Warriors it's more useful to you than them just dying but yeah primarily it's better than them causing trouble at home so I mean look I'm definitely leading the witness because I know the punchline to this this joke but um when you're sending what what is the reason that people go to war yeah so the main reason throughout our ancestral history is to get mates to get brides and uh there's the yanamamo tribe in I think Bolivia and Venezuela and there is a anthropologist called Napoleon shagnon and he was studying them and they got into a conversation and he asked system why do you go to war and they all said to get mates to get brides and they asked the same question in return what does your civilization what does your Society go to war for and he said things like democracy freedom and they all just laughed their head off at them they couldn't believe that people would go to war for such a reason so there's two reasons to gain Brides like that so you're unmarried young men would go to war for that reason are also just out of a kind of a like a an arms race of we can't be seen to be seen as weak if we don't go to war with the others they might think we're easy pickings and they'll come to war with us and they probably would so it's kind of this constant tension and but those are the two main drives yeah so that that is by far the most horrifying reality I think that we have to face which is that over evolution uh you start some person in fact gosh I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are over what period of evolution because if this is only the last like 8 000 years or whatever um that's pretty short time period so would that be evolved anyway in your answer please hit me with that but the real question being that we have to face that at least for the last eight ish Thousand Years the number one reason that people went to war was to steal women which is I mean that's that's rough yeah to look at and it's still used as a motivation for Modern War like even Jihad they will motivate young men that's the precise demographic they want is young unpartnered men and what do they promise them 72 virgins in the afterlife even are the promise of brides in this life uh for sure even then at a more micro level with gang culture a lot of young men probably get into a gang with the opportunity to get some status and get a girl you know they don't have many options so it's still a very big motivating factor um for what for men but one of the kind of the white pill about it is that it was this cultural device for occupying your Surplus population of young men and we also had the monastery more peaceful kind of way to occupy them things like that but we've run out of those devices really war and uh you know the monastery and things aren't the same cultural institutions they once were but we do have the internet and that seems to be what's uh pacifying modern young men from being out causing young male syndrome problems uh they seem to be spending their time in front of screens and video games or online and there's a lot of problems with the online hostility that incels engage in or that but you know the other alternative might be worth if they weren't uh being occupied in those Virtual Worlds they might actually be causing more trouble yeah that is uh it's again standing at the precipice a very Bleak picture of how we end up walking backwards so to understand how we end up extracting ourselves from this problem I need to understand why Jordan Peterson is attacked for talking about culturally enforced monogamy if it is the thing that helps stabilize a society what are people actually pushing back like what are the words they say to him yeah so he wrote a really good essay in response to this to his criticism where he cites a lot of the literature where culturally enforced monogamy or socially enforced monogamy is absolutely a common uh reference people saying you're enslaving women like what what is the actual criticism so typical with Jordan Peterson kind of critique it gets hyperbolic the most extreme version of what he's saying no sense of charitable interpretation at all and they're kind of suggesting yes that he's saying we need to you know really punitively enforce and the word and forth is doing a lot of heavy lifting there what he's referring to is just a cultural norm and we absolutely have had and still have a strong cultural norm for monogamy you can only book a hotel room as a couple you can't book as a truffles now we live in a strongly culturally enforced monogamy it's absolutely the main cultural script currently and have been certainly for the past number of centuries so he's saying an uncontroversial thing but just people are completely unchargeable as we've seen many cases with Jordan Peterson okay let me see if I can construct the argument so from a steel man perspective I'm not trying to give a cheap version of this um we have fought very long and hard as women I assume this is the perspective it's coming from we've fought very long and hard as women to come out from under the Yoke of men and if you're trying to put this culturally enforced monogamy back on us you're saying that we have to be tied again to men like you're coming up with another reason like before it was I couldn't control my reproduction and I couldn't get a job and so I finally fight back against all of that and now you're coming back with okay well if we couldn't do it because it was impossible to survive without a husband now I'm gonna repress you culturally and just make it the norm that you're stuck to one one guy yeah that's absolutely the steel man version of the argument and fair enough if you want to say that but it's this idea that a kind of free reign libertarian sexual Marketplace would return to this kind of effective polygyny and that might not be any picnic for women either because recent Studies have shown that one in three UK men would be open to a polygenous mate chip but guess what women are not so keen on it they don't really want this Arrangement so it on the one hand it sounds like monogamy is a cultural device to curtail women's sexual freedom but you could look at it that it actually is a way to curtail the most high status males sexual monopolizing and so you know it's uh yeah you can't just look at it in one-dimensional analysis but uh yeah it's a that polygeny was no picnic for anyone involved and this idea that monogamy is just Why isn't it dope for the high status males like I get so I'm with your farmer yeah in that um I love my wife and you can't imagine how much and even if she was just like that would hurt my feelings I wouldn't do it for that reason alone but the reality is bro the thought of having another one of my wife like because that you get pulled in a direction which I think is amazing I got a whole diatribe about how important I think it is that you and your spouse shape each other but the thought of being pulled in multiple directions because there are times where my wife believes I should be doing XYZ thing to stand up for her honor whatever and I'm like but you're wrong like you are acting like this is nuts I don't think you should be acting like that and so if I had two women pulling or three oh my God but if your gang is Khan and it's just like look I have a wife I don't know just making this up I have a wife and then I have 8 000 concubines my wife is cool if I go sleep with any of them I have no emotional obligation you don't get to tell me I need to stand up for this out of the other uh and like that horrible for the 18 000 women I understand that but what I'm trying to figure out if you're a sociopath and you're that guy why is that bad for you I don't even think it needs to be a sociopath I mean if we're we're doing a cross-sex mind reading study now uh where we're looking at men's and women's desired number of sex partners at various points throughout their lifetime over the next month over the next year six months 30 years the whole lifetime and some of the men their desires are just crazy high they're all saying like a hundred Partners a month some of them boot them out of the study they're too high and even remember sometimes if it's ridiculous or maybe kidding or Messing or it's just a really like you have Wilt Chamberlain ten thousand women in his life uh running the math I'm like bro when do you eat this is the point I was making so you mentioned that oh these sociopathic men I don't necessarily even think it needs to be the sociopathic men like look at any man that finds himself in a position where he can Mick Jagger Annie top level rock star will kind of act on that desire for sexual variety if that's socially sanctioned so you need a socially sanctioned Norm or a cultural norm to kind of buffer against that being the the a fine thing to do you know it's not just a curtailing women's Freedom it's actually as much curtailing High status men's freedom interesting okay so I'm definitely not a Libertarian but um this this is where things get tricky for me because I don't want to see people hemmed in I don't want to see people told that they can or can't do it uh the tragedy of the commons is real people are going to if they know somebody's gonna go take that resource they're gonna take it uh it just it is what it is you're not going to get around that so my question becomes um it seems like wherever we end up as a society we end up because it is human nature married to that contextual moment and you either have to change human nature or the context nothing else will work and that's why you're going to get into very weird moments because as the context becomes novel and it disrupts the fitness of our evolutionary strategies now that we are going to do what evolution has programmed us to do period end of story and so as you create a weird context you're going to get weird ass results yeah that's I think you're exactly right and that's where I focus so much of my time thinking about evolutionary mismatch is this idea that our modern world just looks radically different from the world in response to which our psychology evolved and yeah that's the primary mission is to understand how that what's happening with that interaction how does our evolved psychology for mating work in an online setting evolutionary novel um but yeah you're not going to change human nature we're rapidly changing cultures uh faster than we can keep up and it's just the best we can do is try and keep up and understand uh never mind figure out what the best way to integrate the and to live our life using it but yeah certainly denying our evolved nature is going to get us nowhere okay so let's talk about some of the mismatch uh I'm very grateful that I dodged the Tinder bullet um because I would have used the life out of that yeah uh and when I was in my early 20s while I was very um I I am a big believer in love but when I met my wife I didn't think I was going to ever get married I was very much on the train of like cool let's have a lot of short-term Partners now that I understand women I understand the game I know how to get laid I want to get laid as much as I can yes bad news is I'm really bad at not catching feels when I meet somebody extraordinary uh and so Phil end up falling head over heels but when you look at the graph that shows sexlessness and I know that that maybe that's on the reverse and it seems like something interesting is happening there and I'm not sure I fully understand even though we talked about at the beginning but anyway on on the graph I think this same thing leading up to 2018 and then I need to update my data but you can see where Tinder hits and then sexlessness goes up because I'm guessing we're getting into the top percentage of men now monopolize and so you get a huge number of guys that are having no sex and a small number of guys are having a ton of sex and that feels like a mismatch to me yeah um one I'd love to get you take on that but are there others yeah certainly and like that could be seen as mismatch or almost a return to this effective polygyny so I've talked earlier about how we have this ancestral history of uh exactly that that polygyny and if you're to look at that data of the top 20 and the top five percent of men really having a lot of sexual partners but a lot of other men appearing to be disenfranchised that does look like an effective polygyny um so it could be a return rather than a mismatch but yeah it's facilitated by the online dating uh other aspects of mismatch huge one is the control over our birth control the pill is probably the most Paradigm shifting technology for amazing psychology or uh to impact our mating how's that not only good because if we think back to those statistics about women the involuntary childless women eighty percent of childless women were involuntarily so that's a massively High number so what must be happening for a lot of them and I'd refer your viewers to the documentary called birth Gap by Stephen Shaw it's fantastic it explores the population crisis and he talks to women who report over and over again that they just simply left it too late to find a partner and when you talk about this idea of women leaving it too late you're not just talking about their fertility their biological fertility it just you don't find a partner find a partner you're happy with convince them to marry you it doesn't all wrap itself up in a neat little bow in a handful of years if you start trying only at the age of 30. it's like a really really squeezed time window that you're imposing on yourself so that's um for many of those women I would wager it's inadvertent you know they didn't see it panning out that way and they just left it too late or couldn't find the right partner so that's evolutionary novel dating apps are a huge one they expose us to more potential mates in a lifetime or in a few minutes than we would be exposed to in a lifetime throughout our ancestral history now the way that works in so many different ways one could be romantic rejection so I'm asked all the time I research in cells and one thing people say to me all the time is why do they care about the rejection so much why not just go on there's plenty more fish in the sea and Ultra rationalist logical person could say yes that's right there are plenty of more fish in the sea just move on but if you think about what rejection meant for most of our ancestral history it was really costly because there was only a couple of dozen potential mates that you might meet in your lifetime they all kind of knew each other so if they saw you getting rejected your reputation takes a spike so we're you know we're designed to be very anxious it's meant to be very anxiety-inducing to engage in The Mating Market because it going wrong could be very costly so if we also think about dating apps and even just in terms of big cities and University settings exposing us to so many potential mates messes with our commitment devices so why would we be inclined to commit to one partner when we're getting the impression that there is a limitless supply of other potential mates around and we've got this fomo of fear of missing out is there someone better should I keep swiping then you got on top of that just the business model of the dating apps is to designed to keep you in the dating room in the swiping room to keep you single why would their business model be anything else you know it's gnarly and they they talk about oh design to be deleted but you know if you really think about this they're they want swipers they want people playing the dating game and the kind of even transparently move to this some of their advertisement campaigns are like it's great to be single you know single and swiping that's good for them you know that one I had not thought of I should have that's very self-evident as you get into it um okay so we have these incredible mismatches um how do we like when you think about so this is something I have to think about a lot so we're creating a metaverse I hate calling it that but that'll get you close enough uh and so I have to think about this a lot like this people are now going to be able to build their identity um their detached from The Real World they are um able to get some of the faux cues and things that they might have to deal with in uh sorry they're getting faux cues of Fitness that if they were in the real world they would not be able to mistake it so one of those would be like pornography um where you're getting some sort of subconscious cue that everything is well um where does porn sit in your stack of problems yeah that's one idea that it could be this kind of pseudo relationships in terms of porn it's there's two ways of looking at it so the people who use porn most most men are quite sexually active men who also simultaneously want to go out mate seeking to um but we have data on that yeah they're still they're still it doesn't seem to interfere with their mate seeking now I'm a bit less optimistic about virtual reality and as that gets more sophisticated and more embodied cognition of will people and it becomes more costly to engage in the real mating Market will men just increasingly Retreat so it doesn't appear to be that it's just pornography per se because that gets tied up with oh well very sexually unrestricted men use most pornography but the idea of retreating into Virtual Worlds virtual status games like video games and just online on the internet instead of mate seeking that seems to have a bit more attraction I think but just pornography on its own gets a bit caught up with yes but the problem is that also the most sexually active sexually people with the highest sexual desires use a lot of porn too so it kind of loses that dulling effect does that make sense it does I'm not yet clear if people that are very unsuccessful are they also using porn yeah I would say that they are as like a coping kind of mechanism um but it's not clear to me that just stopping porn in isolation would encourage the mate seeking that's uh clear that is surprising to me so I don't know if there's data or if that's your hunch but so what you're putting forth is that um if I'm not masturbating that doesn't mean so I I'm having pent-up desire that doesn't mean that I will go seek a natural human relationship to sort that out yeah and that's the surprising thing we're seeing this this data on these data on men just not being motivated to seek mates and it just could be what the [ __ ] yeah right you're tipping over I'm realizing now I had a base assumption that was uh these guys are all masturbating furiously and that is what placates them enough to not go out um are you saying that's not true so these guys have do they have low so okay let's get into in cells do in cells have as just an extreme sort of end of this just so we can cut to the chase uh for people that don't know Intel involuntary celibate they want a partner but they believe rightly or wrongly that they cannot get a partner uh one of my pieces of advice to them would be stop masturbating because that's gonna apply massive amounts of biological pressure on you to go out yeah so now I need you to help me understand how that is not true infos are a tricky one uh when we measured them on porn use against our non-intel single men it was kind of virtually the same so it's very hard to kind of find control groups for porn users because everyone every young man is pretty much using porn it's hard to do those studies but I just wrote a recent article um for aporia called the Allure of inseldom why in cells resist essential and a lot of intels um you might it's intuitive to think oh yes they really want a mate they really want a partner and they do anything to go out and get it but that's not the case and all sorts of people talk about how incels are simply aiming too high they need to lower their standards but my idea is they're actually not aiming at all and there's actually unique appeal to the incel identity that gets them hunkered down into that life and that victimhood mentality rather than engaging with the anxiety-inducing mating market so to be romantically successful you need to go through a lot of anxiety you need to go out put yourself out there get rejected a lot uh get your heart broken all those things are there any data on people taking anti-anxiety medication and and thinking success yeah I'm not familiar there but we have data certainly that anxiety levels are very very high among in cells and increasingly just among young men and women more anxiety everyone we look um but yeah and that could be feeding into this reluctance to engage in The Mating Market which is like we say one of the most anxiety-inducing things you can do it's a it's scary to put yourself out there in the most success successful uh romantic people are ones who are able to take rejection to go through it and you could say to incels I promise you it's worth it it's worth it to go through the other side go through all the rejection but that has become less obvious to me uh for incels as as I've come on so it's not obvious that going through the rejection will yield anything or that getting in a relationship is worth the anxiety I think I think it's worth it me personally but it's it's not very easy for me to say to every incel who has faced just a lifetime of being rejected to say yes it's worth it keep rolling the dice keep rolling the dice it might because they may actually not end up with a partner are the costs may come it may be so anxiety inducing to them that it's who am I to to say push yourself through that pain you know interesting I don't have the neuron for who am I to say right my audience either finds very entertaining or I'm sure in the comments is shut the [ __ ] up um but unfortunately I don't have that neuron so uh who am I to say yeah I I am going to say this because I really want to see people thrive and I am a big believer that the only difference between me and the level of success that I've had whether it's in my relationships or money no no is that um I really believe that you can get better and that at anything and that on the other side of in in the dating Market is um you nothing will ever give you more not money not success not accolades nothing then sharing your life with somebody that that you you're able to have a a very high thriving relationship with because yes you could be in a marriage with somebody and sharing your life with somebody you you hate yeah and that would be a nightmare I use I literally used to have a recurring nightmare about being in a Loveless marriage so I get that side so I I want to um the the thing that I'm grappling with and what you're saying is that if I knew that they could have a relationship on the other side of that I'd be like bro it is worth it yeah like just from a biological standpoint I'm guaranteeing you that it's worth it because the the pair bonding um and look there are realities to be faced about how many receptors do you have for vasopressin and oxytocin if you don't have enough then you just you may not experience the kind of thing that I experienced but if you have a sufficient level of that which I would just assume most people do nothing will give you more ever than being somebody's number one and sharing that life together yeah what scares me is that some of these guys may be for real for real of such low mate value that you aren't going to end up with somebody on the other side of that and so if you're saying that that there are some people that don't meet what I'll call minimum requirements you this really does suck and you you are going to have to find another path to fulfillment but my thing is I think most people Miss yes understand where they fall on that Spectrum yeah I agree with what you're saying so let me rephrase what I I was trying to say is yes I think it's worth it and I think what's on the other side is flourishment or flourishing and fulfillment uh that is worth all that pain but I guess what I was trying to say when I said oh who am I to say is that I'm trying to understand the mindset of why that wouldn't be obvious to someone why that wouldn't be obvious to an insult and I began to realize that in cells get a lot out of their social identity of the victimhood identity the common enemy of women old thirk and Chad socks they get a rich lexicon of humorous trolling terminology they have their sense of fraternity with their other fellow incels a black and white rubric through which to view the world they actually get a lot out of that identity that I'm beginning to see um compared with engaging in an anxiety-inducing mating Market that like you said may not actually yield some positive results at all we think it would and it's intuitive to think oh yeah just roll the dice enough times and just from a sheer number saying that's probably right but it may be so costly to do that uh that it they just say it's not worth all that pain to go through um what's another Bleak idea is that encouraging incels to re-engage with the mating Market the socially anxious young men who aren't very experienced with women very insecure it it we might be careful what we wish for if they find girlfriends because people always talk about how dangerous these sexless young men are these in cells are so dangerous but what is really dangerous is an insecure jealous boyfriend that they engage in way more intimate partner violence and things like that than any sexless young man so that's a bit of a dark kind of Truth to reckon with as well is that this might be no picnic and like we talked about earlier they're engaging with the mating Market it's a baptism of fire there's no training ground for it there's just go out there into the world make a bunch of mistakes learn on your feet um so yeah so I guess what I was trying to say is rather than who am I to say is it worth it is that I can understand why an individual Intel might elect to hunker down into victimhood identity and online worlds rather than engaging with the mating Market they don't have much faith in that's what I mean I think you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today whoa that was dark I know dark uh I love it because I think people have to face whatever is true okay so that brought up a couple things for me one of them is frame of reference so I am obsessed with the idea of frame of reference so we all believe certain things about ourselves and the world and that is your frame of reference now anybody that thinks that their frame of reference just reflects objective reality that person is a danger to themselves and others and I really really really want people to distrust their emotions and I mean that was so much aggression man I want people to distrust their emotions nobody distrusts their emotions more than me and so I'm saying that my success is because I distrust my emotions so I learned a long time ago that I was only going to allow myself to do and believe that which moved me towards my goals and so if my goal is to find love Etc et cetera then I can't allow myself to believe that I'm unlovable that I'm so low on the totem pole nobody could ever find me um attractive worth being partnered with while I believe that we're having a biological experience while I believe that you know uh mate preferences and all that stuff like there there's a lot of constraints but I think there's also some malleability and I would be looking at what is everything that I can tweak what are the things that I can max out on what are the things I have to let go of uh and I mean look if if I I am perfectly happy and I've seen this countless times where you get a really short guy with a super tall woman word I'm all for it I'm just saying like I want people to distrust that you don't think that you could be of value there are ways that you could look at different pools of people that are going to find you attractive yeah uh and I think that that would be a wise way to approach that problem but you have to pierce people's frame of reference if they are just convinced that they are unlovable then that's the problem the problem isn't uh that you can't actually find somebody the problem is you believe you can't find somebody and now you're not doing any of the things you would need to do to get on the other side of that yeah you touched on a lot of areas of Intel typical psychology there actually and so one is that they have a very strong external locus of control they don't believe they can affect change in their own life at all it's just things happen to them the it's outside forces whether it's dating apps feminism whatever it is I'm too short external world has made it so that they're going to be a victim so that's one thing so trying to when we think about maybe any interventions cultivating that internal locus of control that there's something you could do to affect change in your own life and that's very important but in cells lack that a lot they do have a terminology for what you described of like that self-development of maxing everything is looks maxing uh what is a Jester maxing to be very funny everything Mac thing right so that's one kind of uh way some infos look at it and they have a very Bleak terminology for the levels at which you can be an Intel so you can be at the stage of Hope cope or rope so hope describes feeling like oh there's still hope out there I could maybe engage in looks maxing I'll go to the gym I'll become self-developed I'll read a lot of books hoping some of them will say it's a delusional hope but to be romantically successful you need to be some have some level of self-delusion too yes so we talk about it in in terms of mating intelligence which describes mating relevant other deception but also mating relevant to self-deception to not pay attention to the rejection so much and to just keep looking out for the green flags I don't believe that which music towards your goals right so that's a important part of mating intelligence so that's hope that incels might engage in the the looks maxing then there's cope which is uh you know problematic coping mechanisms like drug taking pornography use drugs and we have evidence selling cells engage in a lot of problematic um coping mechanisms and then finally the most Bleak of all is the idea of rope which is suicide as an outlet and some of our data shows that suicidality is just so high among incels that it's really it's really Bleak to look at that data because I'm asked all the time about incels from an extremism point of view and it's my opinion following the data that extreme in seldom more typically looks like suicide rather than an act of violence towards others and even the acts of violence toward others have been suicide by cop or something like this it's an act of self-destruction uh so yeah so incels do have this external locus of control they don't believe they can affect change they encourage each other to lay down and rot uh Jesus yeah it's pretty bleak Gallows humor type language they have so lay down and rot and take the black pill which I'm hurt I'm sure you've heard of the black pill yes it's that derivative of the red pill from the movie The Matrix and describes a particularly Bleak Truth for incels to swallow the belief that there's nothing they could do to affect change um so yeah so that's where they're kind of stuck and even in my interviews with incels when I talk to them the last question I ask in every interview is how would you no longer how would you know you're no longer an insult and they talk about it invariably they all talk about it like as if it's like alcoholism that they could relapse and I say would you how would you know you're no longer an insult would you need to get one girlfriend two girlfriends have sex one time what would have to happen and they talk about it like oh no matter what you could it could go back you could go back and you know you get the sense that there's almost nothing is ever good enough for them in some to some degree so they talk about having missed out irretrievably on developmental experiences like young romantic love early 20s or late teens there was something so pure about that type of romantic love that I'll never have access to again or women once they've had Chads they're always going to want him in a way that they'll never want you even if you do get to marry her and it's like at what stage does it become what will ever be good enough for you one example I have is yeah I put up some statistic about how difficult short men find it on the mating market and tons of data out there on that unfortunately um but one guy waded into my Twitter comments and said I'm five foot two I'm married with kids and a load of incels just piled into the comment saying oh your wife is probably cocking you and using you for your resources and it's like this guy is married with kids and that's not good enough for you you know it's like it's just hunkered down into this victim mentality all the time all the way down yeah frame of reference exactly frame of reference when you can't Pierce somebody's frame of reference like you're really in trouble uh and but I think people struggle to understand incel's frame of reference of really seeing the world and believing that they never stand a chance that's the genuine belief of many insults it's not just this LARP and uh obviously they hunker down into that victimhood identity but they do you know if you and all your social networks were reinforcing this belief and you were it's what we call self-verification Theory so whether you see a cat or a lion in the mirror you tend to want to surround yourself with people who see the same thing it's actually frightening and more disturbing to have someone not see you the way you see yourself so in cells actually prefer if you say to them yes you really would struggle on the mating market and the worst thing you could say is oh you could do better come on you could develop yourself you could find a girlfriend surely there's still hope they don't like that at all they because the little bit of Hope is more scary to them than uh no hope no hope means you don't enough to try you never stood a chance it was over it's not your fault it's someone else's fault you're just lost out on the genetic Lottery whatever it is but at least the game is over you don't have to go through the anxiety of trying and that's why they're so resistant to other incels ascending so ascending is the word they have for when an insult is no longer an incel and they're very resistant to this idea because it just dispels their idea that they never stood a chance so they'll even kick an inside out of the forums if he's trying to find romantic success or they'll call him a fake cell if he does so it's this coalitional psychology of forming a group that's very valuable we're social creatures that is a very valuable evolved need too um you know there there would have to trade all of that coalitional psychology off in order to take their place in The Mating Market that like you said they're not confident they're going to do well in they're exhausted with it they're anxiety induced with it and it's expensive and they're invariably very poor they're highly likely to be neat not engaged in employment and education or training and you know if we talked about the cost of dating if they don't have the money you know and I don't want to use the term who am I to insist but uh you can understand how they would come to conclusion I'm out I'm no longer trying and it must be that they're no longer trying because it's objectively impossible to prove someone is inside like incapable of forming romantic relationships that's objectively impossible to prove but so that means it must be embraced the identity must be embraced by the individual but uh having researched it I can kind of I have a bit more sympathy or kind of understanding of how they would arrive at that conclusion and the incentive structure just stay in that identity rather than compete in The Mating Market yeah identity that that is the other thing that this brings up for me it again just you can't allow yourself if you want to flourish remember my North Star if you want to flourish if you want to find fulfillment you cannot allow yourself to take on an identity that holds you back slows you down whatever yes um even if you're gonna remove yourself from the dating market and say you know that's not a game that I want to play like even that I would rather see people go you know what like uh I don't find it worth the the anxiety and so not that I couldn't do it it's that the amount of anxiety that I would have to face given my genetic hand whatever I'm not interested in playing it okay cool like at least now you're closer to the truth meaning when I think about truth I think we are all prediction machines and the closer you get to the truth the more able you are to accurately predict the outcome of your behaviors so if you're saying look it is true for me to go confront that it's a ton of anxiety for me to try to get better you know I'm five two uh my IQs and 89 whatever like you've got all these things working against you all right the amount of anxiety that I would have to go through in order to maximize things that are going to matter it's just far too exhausting okay at least you're not adding a layer of falsity to all of this um cool we're closer now you can find a path to fulfillment in a different direction like hey I'm taking that one off the table because the anxiety is too high but I know I need to find a path to fulfillment so what what is that going to be what infos might say in response to that is that's exactly what I'm doing and I'm just uh commiserating with my fellow incels about that predicament and why shouldn't I do that don't we all deserve social allies you know and so the loneliness is off the charts too and it's interesting when we looked at our data compared I don't want that to be a rhetorical question so why why should I not do that my first question then is going to be what is your North Star if your North Star is to have other people reinforce your negative view of yourself then you're doing the right thing yes but I need to hear you say my North Star is not human flourishing it is not fulfillment it is not having it contributed anything meaningfully to this world it is I want to optimize for other people telling me that I'm as busy big of a loser as I think I am cool now I'm done there's nothing okay cool you you've been honest about what your North Star is I don't think it's neurochemically advantageous but you're not lying to yourself so I don't have any like there's nowhere for me to go Okay cool so you've opted I think that is exactly what a lot of incels would say is that's where I'm at that's all I think I can get out of life now they've started bullshitting yeah the second they say it's all I think I can get it's like okay that's your problem if you're being honest that that's what you're optimizing for cool the second you [ __ ] and say I I I'm like in this small group of people that cannot get better at anything that would lead to fulfillment yeah I'm perfectly fine with you taking off the table that I'm not going to pursue mating which is devastating full acknowledgment of how devastating that is but I'm just saying don't optimize if that really is off the table let's say that you're horribly scarred over uh 95 of your body and your per your penis was burned off yeah cool mating is out for you get it I'm not even gonna waste time on that but I would not spend time thinking to yourself that you cannot optimize for fulfillment you still don't need to optimize for having people tell you all day that it really is as bad as you think don't optimize for that I get it why because Tom Billy's Northstar is human flourishing as far as I can tell Evolution has given you the only recipe that's ever going to matter which is that you have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter not only to you but to the group cool now mating is a rad way to be on that path to matter and to fight and and do things for this other this a much smaller microcosm of your your significant other and your kids but it's still the same idea I'm contributing to this micro group so you're gonna have to pick a different micro group to go contribute to I'm very sad that you didn't get the most obvious one that nature gives us which is the family microcosmith but it didn't so anyway I'm just saying that the second they say oh I couldn't optimize for something else I can't get better at anything false yeah yeah I think I tend to personally kind of agree with you but I'm glad to I hear you're not demean how painful it is to to lose out on feeling like you can even participate in that mating Arena because one thing that infuriates me when a lay listener or someone who doesn't know much about this topic at all starts talking about incels and they say something like why do they care so much about mating and I'm like well that's crazy because we're all the result of an unbroken chain of ancestors who've solved that problem for long enough to reproduce it's a very important we build billion dollar Industries around it in the form of dating apps cosmetic surgery it's big business it's what people care about and it is the route to a lot of human flourishing so it really bugs me when people say why don't they just simply care about other things and it's like it's not that easy um but yeah I think I tend to agree with you and in our paper we talk about the two roots to responding to inseldom so you can engage with the mating Market again and can do maybe interventions to try and help in cells re-engage with the mating Market but recognizing that that not might that might not be the route that's best for every incel at that given time maybe eventually but as an alternative to that you have to direct them towards better coping patterns or better forms of human flourishing um without the mating Market which is a hard sell but not impossible like you say you need to find a different North Star or find a different vision for human flourishing but um but yeah it just bugs me when people kind of demean and that psychic pain and it's like oh yeah oh you can't get a mate why don't you simply care about other things it's like that's hard well so the great irony is you're 100 correct about the just the devastating reality that would be uh this thing is off the table that evolution is giving me a screaming desire for uh and so I'm gonna have to find a way to shut that off not shut it off but I'm gonna have to find a way to make other things matter more but I can think of no tragedy greater than not trying like and and this goes back to my once once we developed this sort of cynical self-awareness hope cope rope is is already run in the opposite direction like you even having that horrendously over simplified thing it gives you a cool linguistic thing to hold on to and it's clever and it's funny in gallows humor and all that I get it but like I would personally like so in my marriage we don't say the word divorce we call it the d word and the reason we do that is we just have to reinforce in each other that that just isn't an option it's not a path that we take and so we take that off the table and so we address issues if you go cool I'll do hope I'll do cope I don't do rope like rope is off the table for me and so it's like okay once cope starts slipping if rope isn't an option then it's like what are you gonna do what's the path around this my wife and I play this game in our relationship and our business everything no [ __ ] what would it take and when you start saying I am going to find a path to this thing now I may not be willing to do it but it puts you in a solution oriented mindset uh to that end I want to give you a question I beg of you to ask this of of everybody in your Intel study would your emotional Agony be diminished if you had an AI robot that felt like a real person in every way could pass the touring test meaning having a conversation with them about the deepest most intimate parts of your life is indistinguishable from somebody else but you knew that that robot was programmed to preferentially find you attractive even if you're burned to a crisp uh penis got burned off whatever but that robot just Loves You by programming are you good with it or do you still need to think of yourself as a loser I think that what you described uh would scratch one itch for in cells the kind of the loneliness need the sexual need potentially as well but it wouldn't scratch the feeling like a loser itch because there's no status afforded to men who have the best artificially intelligent girlfriend there's no status afforded to that and so it'll scratch one itch for in cells but it won't scratch the other um it reminds me of that movie Her have you seen that one with the AI girlfriend and it's just devastating to think but that could be a dystopian kind of future but it's devastating for what reason why is her the movie for those that haven't seen it maybe your answer will explain uh but why is her deficiting because for me it's only devastating for one reason yeah and it just it reminds me a lot of people say why can't incels just use sex workers there's plenty of sex workers out there but again it'll only scratch that one itch it won't scratch the itch of being sexually selected being sexually selected means you're seen as high status you how do you describe it um you've done you've shown competence in your Arena you've shown value you've created something that you've been chosen and achieving romantic success is tied up with status for men in a loop and that's just not going to be um achievable by getting the best AI girlfriend that's interesting so being selected as a proxy for I'm impressing other people just in general that I'm high status yeah there's an interesting I don't know if you're familiar with Ayla on on Twitter she's like this kind of uh public intellectual runs these massive surveys of like sex surveys with 50 000 Twitter respondents um but she has this kind of pet Theory I think it's Ayla I heard it from if it's not I heard it somewhere else and that a lot of men aren't don't crave having sex with really attractive women all that much but they love the status it kind of affords them the actual sex they could kind of go without they'd be happy having sex with their looks much more um but the actual status that comes with being seen as having been able to attract an attractive woman is so seductive I think there's something to that that is for me yeah not for me because I'm super rich so like I could in theory get very attractive women just based on that status alone and man in my narrow little piece of the universe I'm also well known so it's like recognizable to a narrow band of humanity and very wealthy uh that is not interesting to me at all um for insecurity reasons so it's like I would much rather be with somebody I think is in my sexual market value on a lot of different dimensions including age if I'm honest like the Leonardo DiCaprio thing I'm like bro do you just look way better naked than I do which I doubt uh what the [ __ ] like I want to be and my wife God bless her cotton socks is definitely in better shape than I am uh but there's it has a pretty narrow band like I wouldn't let myself go farther because then I would feel like out of her League that would just I would not like that feeling at all so again not that doesn't resonate with me not because I think I'm cool the exact opposite I have insecurities around it and just the thought of like being with a 20 something no way no way like that's crazy town even though like from a porn perspective word but like from a reality perspective no thanks yeah it's interesting because it obviously comes through quite strongly how much you admire and love your wife but I'm looking forward to hearing about how you make that one sell tonight when you tell her about it I'd rather not oh no no my wife dude when I say that we have talked about everything yeah my wife were in her 20s that would not I thoroughly enjoyed my wife in her 20s when I was in my 20s too yeah uh but no I'm very glad that we are both aging even though I'm held to a different standard that's still I don't know like I feel like whatever that thing is that lets old guys be with super young women be with I get the find them attractive yeah I find them attractive but be with triggers that's a very mature way of looking at it very refreshing to hear but uh yeah my supervisor describes it as men are cursed as they get older to be attracted to women that are never going to desire them yeah so it's like oh man when I think about the most brutal this will be interesting saying to if we have any insults listening now but the they say that the worst moment for a man and this resonates with me is the moment that a woman finds you harmless um it's like oh God like I would rather be intimidating than harmless like interesting that's brutal yeah a brutal black pill as the infos would say yeah that that one is rough okay so you so going back to her uh the reason that I found that movie rough is that in the end he gets rejected even by the AI who's just like look humans are just too boring uh we can all think it like so much faster and talk to so many more people at one time we're just gonna peace out so that's why that's rough but I when I think about Ai and look I I'm paranoid I don't think AI is some Utopia I don't think there are Utopias I think there are only trade-offs but if I were an incel I'd be like AI oh word sex or robots word yeah and I would be I would be at least like it doesn't scratch all the itch yeah I hear you but having some of the at scratch like look my dog is not a child I'm aware of that I think it's as cringe when people like Post Yeah like my wife does it I even think of myself like my wife will refer to me in front of our dog as Dad so look I buy into it like I get it um I just wouldn't post about it but uh it does scratch part of that itch and it it does it enough that I'm like this is actually a part of my strategy yeah in terms of not having kids is having a pet and being like hey this is a thing and also this is really controversial I'm surprised at how negatively people respond to this I'm not necessarily proud of the following statement okay but it's real man it represents a real thought that I have when AI kids become a thing and you can speed up their development because the reason I don't want to have kids is I can't fathom like 20 plus years my wife becoming my number two or number three or number four depending on how many kids we have it's like uh I didn't strike me as a good idea for my marriage so but if I could have a kid where I'm like the first two years I want to go by over a weekend because this is a non-biological entity I can speed up its development as much as I want uh so for a weekend we'll have a a zero to two year old fine uh then I want the terrible twos you know maybe we spend a week with that just to feel like we earned it right uh then three to seven maybe I want to slow that down because those are some pretty magical years where they want to be around you they've got a real personality uh and then the teenage years oh God I can't even deal with that so again we reduce the entire Teenage Band to a week or two weeks or you know however much suffering we want to do uh and then when they hit you know 25 and they're like oh my parents aren't as dumb as I thought we slow that back down right so I could see that being a part of my strategy if I'm really honest uh especially if they're in learning mode and so they really start to reflect your values and stuff so you're like oh my God like this is so cool to see my ideas reflected like in a quote-unquote living thing so anyway I I would man I just cannot because of my frame of reference I cannot adopt the lay down and rot mentality and just feel like there are a lot of paths to fulfillment not necessarily getting laid Yeah so I hear you about they're still not being sexually selected yeah there are other paths I like your kind of white pill uh pushback against the dystopia that this technological future might bring and Chris Williamson brought me on to talk about this very thing with him we talked about this dystopian future of AI girlfriends and things like that and one white pill that we thought about might be that incels or sexless young men might use a very sophisticated artificially intelligent girlfriend yes they might Retreat from The Mating Market altogether and you know this AI girlfriend might leap out of The Uncanny Valley and even surpass a flesh and blood girlfriend but it wouldn't come with the status so what they might do instead is use this AI girlfriend as a training ground I've said a few times on the podcast now there's no training ground for the mating Market except if you actually have a virtual reality AI uh artificially intelligent girlfriend that you can practice on and improve your prospect for the real world mating Market that would come with status so maybe then now the pushback I get on that is people say oh well yeah people don't use pornography to learn about how to be good lovers in bed do they and it's like no that's not true but this isn't quite the same thing it's it's a little bit different I like to think but yeah the the future of I didn't even think about the idea of artificially intelligent kids and why that might be preferable especially if you talk about when they begin to mirror you and you see yourself in them because all our data show that parents invest more heavily in kids that look and behave like them like to a massive degree so that would be the AI might be able to parastatize uh that parenting mechanism for a lot of people and there could be advantages to it above and beyond the investment in an actual Offspring yeah new world yeah I get how this is a Brave New World and probably dystopia and it's super weird that humans Rush towards it and if this were an AI conversation I would I would lean into that but for now full caveat for all of the like propensity for dystopia just setting that aside for this conversation I do find it very interesting what will happen when that comes online from from an Ever everybody perspective for sure but certainly from an Intel perspective like because that the status problem that you're talking about much like it was considered just so cringe to do online dating in the beginning and now it's just like what 70 percent of people meet online first yeah so it's like the fact that your girlfriend is AI like it will be super gross for 10 years or whatever and then it will just be like wait you're dating a real person that's so weird yeah again I understand the dystopian elements but it's like when computers have human level intelligence and there is only when you cut into them from a surgical perspective they're different but from the outside like you don't notice they will feel the same they'll find a way to make them the same weight I love the same intellect they'll effectively program them to be human-like but you'll be able to pick the traits that match you and then adjust them as you go like dude for instance if my wife could make Minor Adjustments to me she would a hundred percent like the fact that I it drives me crazy when things are inefficient so I will leave things out because it's far more efficient for it to be sitting out I know right where it is right but it drives my wife crazy she wants everything hidden so she would adjust me tweak tweak if she could I'd do the same to her like the stop hiding things for the love of God and I know it sounds funny but like that actually is a source of real tension in our marriage and has been for 22 years so it's like yes I would make that go away as would she and so you get into these people would just start making tweaks until it was awesome and here's one thing you think you want to tweak all the friction away and then you do that and you're like actually I need a little friction yeah and so you tweak the friction back in and then you find look seven percent friction 93 get along is perfect and then it's awesome yeah yeah no I tend to agree with you definitely agree with you on the leaving things out for easy access if they're hidden away I forget that they're there I thought I had the exact time fights with girlfriends in my past for sure so I'm with you on that one um but yeah definitely this idea of but humans have also this biophilia this kind of innate love of the natural and one example I'll use to illustrate that is the resistance to artificial wombs and to in vitro meat both of which are kind of peculiar because women in particular are resistant to the idea of an artificial womb and that's crazy to me when I think of how many women uh lose their lives in childbirth how dangerous how costly it is for women to engage in natural childbirth they should be the ones banging the drum for artificial wounds so emancipatory but they're not because it strips them of some sort of essence and I've ran the polls on my Twitter actually and I'd love to see these studies done in Greater depth but it was women in particular that was very resistant to this idea of artificial wombs a completely safe uh technology hypothetical technology very peculiar to me just this biophilia that you're in love with this natural so maybe we'll put up more of a resistance to it than we think the other one is in vitro meat people find it kind of icky to eat lab meat that's cultivated in a Petri dish but they don't find it icky to actually kill and eat an animal remarkable just this you think either of those will fall as they become more prevalent I do I do think they'll fall but with one or both I would say the in vitro meat will fall faster I mean people are even already running towards like artificial meats and stuff like that but there is some people who still are initially when they came on the market people were like would you really eat fake meats and it's like yes I personally have no pushback on that one as long as they can figure out how you get the micronutrients of like uh rich soil into it because my feeling is that will be non-trivial and that if we're not but you the meat that you eat is a product of what that meat ate even the same is true of vegetables like it's eating something from the soil and the air presumably so it's like what is it in taking and so we'd have to be thoughtful about that but if we can solve that problem the meat thing I don't have a problem with but the the womb thing that one I get like that one feels like for ah this actually isn't true this is interesting I'm peering into my own soul right now I was going to say that I would have a problem with artificial insemination and then I thought well wait a second do you would I like if I knew I could pick like they they show me up on a screen which by the way this is going to happen they're going to be able to show you this exact sperm with this exact egg will yield this exact child and so pick and they give you like the option of 50 kids with different uh height uh looks intelligence like personality traits all of it and I would do that in a heartbeat embryo selection is just around the corner for sure and but yeah and you know you mentioned about the artificial insemination like you know test tube babies now they're completely considered normal you know I remember at the time the Catholic church had big problems with them they won't ever sold they'll be all Psychopathic and all this stuff it's like wow what a ridiculous thing to think they're obviously claimed to be normal human beings um will the same be said about artificial womb babies down the line it could be that we just embraced the technology pretty without much friction but it's that idea that it strips women of this natural role I don't think I'm going to get over the the womb one fast this is obviously my bias is speaking here but when I think about that one it does feel like because I I reacted some kind of way when God would this have been in the 90s when women started going like oh man what do we need men for like we can take artificial insemination we don't need guys and I was like oh like I don't like the way that feels yeah and if there's an artificial womb yeah yeah it's who is it freeing women or is it making them irrelevant making them redundant it's a yeah but this is the very evolutionary novel time we live in while it's very emancipatory to free ourselves of the Hostile forces of nature it actually means we're not relying on each other in the ways we have for hundreds of thousands of years it's a very strange time you know it's a very strange time talk to me about how we rely on each other because one thing that I see happening in the dating Market that makes me really sad and as somebody who's just a huge fan of love if you look at the other sex is your adversary you are already in trouble yes I'm glad to hear you say that because that's my optimistic response to when I see this kind of discourse culture of very adversarial men versus women type thing I get very annoyed at that because we are each other's best ally but ultimately I just laugh in the face of it because all those concerted efforts to get men and women to hate each other are pushing up against so many selection pressures throughout our ancestral history that are causing men and women to be equipped to love each other you know we'll rebound I've heard you say this before we'll rebound but there there is a trifecta of books that I think should be mandatory and I mean this I'm not a big fan of everybody should do something but this one we should teach these in school and they are the gulag archipelago okay Mal the unknown story and the rise and fall of the Third Reich and when you realize that will rebound I'm with you there but that that when a hundred million people are dying that doesn't help like that is not like oh don't worry uh 100 years from now everybody's gonna be fine uh right now though people are dying by the millions and I really don't want to see this happen and so I feel like yes there is all this evolutionary pressure of like no no when you cooperate things are better and so there'll be all these sort of neurochemical cues that will eventually get somebody to say hey guys I think we're approaching this wrong way look at this this will feel a lot better people try it out and they're like yeah this is better then those people grow up and they teach their kids hey do this but that's that's a long slow cycle and in the interim things can go very very wrong yeah and it's not a non-trivial harm these concerted efforts to get men and women to hate each other and be adversarial even if it doesn't have the Mass Effect if I'm the you know um yeah more optimistic about our evolved psychology being more powerful but yeah you're right it's it's not nice to see and we should challenge it in the cultural conversation for sure so how do we begin to challenge that how do we get people to stop seeing each other as adversaries I think uh my friend Chris Williamson talks about it this kind of idea of the third wave of the red pill kind of thing this idea that we need to move towards a very accurate cross-sex mind reading psychology so to try and educate the Sexes about how the other side sees it genuinely really grapple with that because you know we I think we kind of only pay lip service to that mission really of trying to see it as the other side sees it and one example I'll use there to show a real failure of cross-sex mind reading is in cells when they're asked are men in particular are asked is there any such thing as a female in cell why is there no such thing as a female in cell and incels would usually say well most women can go out and get some sex or some love or some relationship if they want it might not be the sex or love that they want but they can get some and for incels or for men in particular some is always better than none but that's not the case for women for women sex or relationships is very costly or potentially very costly cost inflicting so it's not like for men sex is like pizza there's good pizza and there's Pizza there's no bad pizza but for women there really is bad pizza because it's a costly thing and they'd rather go without so in cells are using their male typical psychology to try to empathize or not empathize with their female counterparts and say oh no you have some rather than none that's better but that's only using male typical psychology for women that's not the case so is there a female version of Intel it won't be tied to maybe mate selection but what's the thing where they want it so badly and they can't have it and to them it's hope cope rope maybe I don't think it'll be an exact analog but there will be the case of so many women who say they're struggling to find and it I I know the term is a bit of a grating one for many in cells but eligible men or men that they want to be with so when you're left with the choice of either made down or don't mate at all that doesn't seem like a great luxury incels think that's a great luxury they would say I'd mate down in a minute that would solve my problem but that's not a a solution to the problem for women so it amounts to the same thing and when I'm asked about where is the female in cell Community there is a growing femcel community of kind of similar to incels hanging out in online forums and all that stuff and they're saying my problem is that I can't get sexually selected yes it's similar enough but the more analogous femcel situation is kind of hidden in plain sight it's these mainstream media articles about women being unable to find eligible men they're more likely the involuntary single rather it's um not the exact same thing but um the difference is you have mainstream media support and sympathy for these women and it's oh men are not economically attractive enough or not eligible enough for these women there's no such kind of Sympathy for the Intel situation uh so the female inside Community is kind of hidden in plain sight it's these women who can't find men to meet their standards very interesting taking your own hypothesis though I'm wondering if that's the one so you said that extreme incel Behavior probably looks like suicidality so they hate themselves that's like their primary thing it actually isn't misogyny their primary uh I forget toxic language I think is what yes that's right is is self-hatred yes okay so what is the thing that makes women have a primary language of self-hatred is it uh I can't find eligible men is it I'm unlovable is it I'm not led by my parents I don't know I'm trying to because women women are more likely if I'm not mistaken they're more likely to be suicidal to attempt they're less likely to complete by a lot yes but they're more likely to be suicidal yes and more neurotic just generally yeah so is it that they just feel negative about any slight and so it isn't specified to something like sex and that just is where men sort of hyper respond yeah I mean you could frame the insult problem as we could argue that there's too much of a hyper fixation on the sexual component these are just lonely young men who've retreated from society more broadly they lack friendships they're like jobs education they're not engaging with Society so you're not going to find in cells that are great at something very few right and you I hear some in cells screaming now watching this saying no everything is correct in my life I have a great life and that's true for a minority but for the most part they seem these very disenfranchised young men like the hikikimori in Japan are you familiar with the hiki kimori yeah most people won't be so please tell so the hikikimori if we look at Japan over the recent decades it describes the last generation of young men who've just completely retreated and barely even leave their leave their homes and they just get food delivered play video games all day and don't engage with society that could be a glimp why it happened to Japanese the Japanese I'm not sure exactly why but they're very technologically advanced right and uh with a kind of online culture so it might be a glimpse into the future there of people the idea of men hanging out in online worlds all day 20 years ago would have seemed very very strange to us now it doesn't seem that strange now you can very much imagine it um so maybe Japan is just like a glimpse into the future there uh with the hiki kimori and I haven't studied it too deeply but I believe there's a massive absence of fathers in those homes so just kind of uh Jordan Peterson talks about it about the devouring mother who just wants to keep their sons safe and get them their food don't need to leave the house son and the Sun is going to walk all over them in terms of dominating the mother from Rules uh I didn't understand that say that again so if you have a father figure I don't think there's many fathers who are going to tolerate their son staying inside getting food delivered to the house getting their mom to clean up after them is going to say get up and go out and do something but if you have an absence of that the sun might feel able to kind of maybe push over the single mother who wants to keep him safe as the Paramount value and safe and comfortable and get the food delivered clean up after them play your games and it's very pacifying and that's kind of what you see as typical with the hikomori yeah this is why I really think the the friction between male and female temperaments is so necessary so I read this book a long time ago called The Power of myth by Joseph Campbell and he talked about how hey I think a big problem in society is that there are no more rituals and because there are no coming-of-age rituals you get this interminable youth where there is no moment where you take the kid out of the woods you kick his teeth in you circumcise him with no anesthetic uh you make them kill a lion I mean they there are some crazy coming-of-age rituals that have existed and when I read that I was like whoa because that very much my journey was I grew up ultimately soft my dad just got frustrated when I would be weak but he didn't know how to say Hey kid you need to toughen up or you didn't know how to say it in a way that I could hear he would just give up and and go do something else and what I needed was to be around people that just did not tolerate that and so my wife certainly began that process and then getting in business was the market does not care forgiving and it's like you know you either figure it out or you don't and so in in pursuit of getting good at that I gave myself over to reality I guess the right way to say it and so um the idea of the devouring mother who feeds into that into that into that is really played out in these rituals and so in the book The Power myth I think anyway I've read about this so many times I can't remember which one let's say it was the power of myth uh he talked about how what would happen is the the night or the day whatever whenever this ritual happened the sun would be in with the women and they would come in ritualistically tear him away from the mother who either performatively or for real is like no no don't take them and so they would rip him away from the mother to be like okay that world is done that door is closed and then they would go do whatever uh and the one that my audience will have heard me say many times is what Nelson Mandela went through which his book long walk to Freedom is absolutely extraordinary and in it he talks about his Coming of Age ritual I think he was 14 and they get you in like three or four other boys uh they sit you down Buck Naked they have you in front of the whole village they have you sit there uh leg spread and uh I don't know or whatever comes with a really sharp Rock grabs your foreskin and just lops it off and then you have to yell A Warrior's Credo I forget what it was he says in the book and and I just thought yo like as terrifying as that is having a moment like that where you have to go through something where you are ritualistically removed from the world of the feminine and it's it's not a coincidence that they have you yell this Warrior Credo um to shift you into you are now different and and I need to go back and reread this but I'm pretty sure that then what they do is they cover your entire body in mud and then as it dries that night or the next day I can't remember a young woman comes in and washes it off your naked body and I thought whoa like it's so like it's such a thing like you pass through this moment and if I'm not conflating that and it really is a young woman comes and wipes it off there's really something that indoctrinates you into like that whole world I don't know man like I find that really interesting and and as I try to Think Through the problem of societal context has changed we've become hyper aware I don't like the way that hyper awareness makes you cynical but I also like the way that we can refine some of these rituals and now I'm sort of answering my own question from the very beginning of this like how do we back off that precipice when we're so aware of this stuff and I know that there are guys out there now creating these groups where they do take boys and like these hard Retreats and they talk to them [ __ ] hard in a way they probably never even talked about like stop [ __ ] crying I don't want to hear it I know trust me comments freaking out but I'm telling you as a boy that needed to learn I was way in touch with my emotions that was not the lesson I needed to learn and so it was like I had to also learn to have a gear of being tough as [ __ ] and like you have to have that gear if you don't have that gear I don't care how in touch with your emotions are life is going to be brutal in a way it does not need to be brutal if you figure out the other gear now my marriage is a result of me being in touch with my emotions being highly articulate understanding my insecurities all that very useful but if I didn't also have this other gear yeah no bueno that's so interesting to see and to hear about those kind of archetypal motifs come through with those rituals you've described like the devouring mother it's even echoed in the way they do the ritual that's so interesting um but yeah the lack of ritual at least whatever about the character of the ritual itself the the marker of having achieved a certain stage in life there's a complete absence of that now there's just a delayed adolescence and kind of a when do you do a certain thing it's kind of uh and even like the mailing Market the way it works there's no clear-cut blueprint it's very atomized there's no one helping you you know for most of our ancestral history you would have had your friends or your family helping you form your mate trips now it's just you and the app very isolating very atomized and uh yeah it's not there's no ritual about it do people even set each other up on dates anymore but I don't think that's a done thing anymore it's just very isolating what do you think about arranged marriages uh it's interesting when you look at them uh they have like a success rate of people who fall in love more uh because the idea is that well when you didn't have that much choice and you weren't thinking how what's my way out when you think well I have no way out it's kind of like you heard described with your wife the d word is not an option that's really not an option in an arranged marriage so they tend to make the best out of it so that's probably what we find is there data that they're more successful there's some data I believe that shows they're more successful because it's just that when you reduce the other options it's like we might as well make the most out of this and I'm not going to second guess my husband's annoying habits of leaving everything out on the counter because this is my husband and that's it you know so that's really interesting so this was this was something that my wife and I came to very early and I'm very grateful for it was when we got together we said okay the experiment we're running is what does it look like when somebody shares a life forever and they're going to be certain constraints that we have to put on our relationship to make sure that works and one of them is we can't what we call let dust settle so you can't just let something go that bothers you you have to address it and you have to come up with Rules of Engagement so around the me liking things to be efficient or liking things to be tidy we've had to come up with Rules of Engagement of how we navigate that thing also coming to understand the difference between a collision and base assumptions which is I think the world works like this and difference in values I think the world ought to work like this and when you have a difference in base assumptions like oh I never considered a different angle I didn't realize I had that base assumption thank you for pointing that out now I can adjust and one of us is right about you know it it I had just never considered another thing and we're moving from base assumption to value system going from well this is how it is but it's not necessarily how it ought to be it ought to be like this and can we change it and so realizing when you have a conflict of values you have a problem and when you have a conflict of values I understand your position you understand my position I can articulate your position so well that you will say the words you understand my position perfectly and vice versa and I still think you're wrong yeah and so now we have to have a rule of how we deal with that thing but if you don't say there's no and look my wife and I have always said there there are three things that we will not tolerate for a second beating and cheating and a Loveless marriage okay so you beat you cheat done uh and then if this becomes a Loveless marriage if we can't unwind that then of course we would exit so but we're doing everything that we can like I promise my wife I guarantee it I will never cheat on you ever I may break up with you but I'm never going to cheat on you because that's in my control but if I've become someone happy or you know whatever then I would address that first um but if you don't put those confines because as I really again just thinking through the initial question that we asked like how how do you back away from all this I think you you have to have confidence you have to have self-imposed limitations and yes I understand that some of the argument is like oh my God are you telling people what to do yes [ __ ] I am telling you what to do and the question I'm all 10 fingers appointed to me I'm telling myself what to do because why I have a North star and that North Star is very definable and it is human flourishing and I think the way to human flourish is through the recipe of fulfillment the recipe of fulfillment just has limitations and I forget where I first heard this but your goal makes demands and once you decide my goal is human flourishing it makes demands yeah and one of those demands as far as I can see is there are going to be limitations put on something somewhere yeah probably a lot of things that's kind of what I was getting at earlier about this uh the maybe the corrosive nature of the primary value for people doing freedom and no nothing being imposed upon me you seem like the type of guy that you and your wife and your relationship for the service of that higher goal uh you're happy to accept kind of um impositions on yourself and like rules and things like that and that seems quite healthily integrated and there seems to be a kind of a cultural resistance against that type of thing and it's like no nobody should control you except you the individual hyper individualism is a I can actually like I don't Hackle at nobody should be able to control you but you uh at the edges I am not a Libertarian I we need some government but I think governments become very pathological so you have to be have a very big distrust for that uh so I don't Hackle at that statement a lot but what I think gets thrown out in the baby in the bathwater is that I think people think that means you shouldn't have constraints I'm just saying you should be able to choose your constraints yes a new team to choose them yeah and you're you in my estimation should be choosing your constraints based on what is the outcome of this situation without these constraints yeah and that's where I feel like we've gotten into some weird politically correct Quagmire where people don't want to talk about what is true and that and look I asked my audience for a lot of Grace on this and and I guess in the macro I get it because people still watch my content if you read the comments not always in the micro um but I need to be able to think through these topics and the way that we think I mean literally these conversations are my way of thinking through these problems I get to say things out loud that could be horrendously terrible ideas but if I can't say them out loud I can't find the edges of where they work and where they stop working exactly yeah that and that's like your audience has to be kind of like a family in charitable to you in terms of yeah latitude to think things through out loud yeah so I don't need my audience to be a family hey I just don't think that's realistic but uh what I do want is for them to recognize at a societal level forget me as an individual even forget themselves as an individual at the societal level if you can't talk about ideas and work through them and all collectively go that's a terrible idea uh and that's a great idea as evidenced by the result that we get not what sounds good but actually yields the right result then we won't be able to make progress towards human flourishing as a society yeah I agree yeah but you kind of get that organically with your family members they can give you that Latitude to talk they don't forget everything they knew about you when you say something wrong it's like oh they said something wrong but I know it's not exactly what he means there's this very uncharitable kind of dynamic towards people now the minute they make a slip up with saying something particularly online it's like gotcha that's it that's you forever and always it's not yeah we look at people in just isolation like that how do you deal with that because you're somebody who's on a um an academic track the academy has become very uh feminized and The Feminine mode of fighting is reputation uh dismantling and so you're somebody out here popping off on a podcast with a guy that's saying some crazy [ __ ] you might say some crazy [ __ ] uh how do you think about that as an academic um luckily I haven't been burned by it so far fingers crossed but uh yeah I'm kind of lucky enough to have financial support that I don't need to kind of be so worried about oh I have to get any academic job I kind of want an academic job where I'll feel happy and secure and free to think and research the topics I want to research talk about things the way I want to talk about them I don't know if you heard my supervisor he did an episode with Joe Rogan um and he said that this year we was one of the first times in like a 30-year career where he went to the dean of the university to say I want to be able to teach sex and gender and sexuality the way I know I need to make sure I have your backing or I'm not going to teach it in case if there's any complaints I need to make sure I have your backing before I do and he got that guarantee and that was the first time he had ever done anything like that that's a very odd thing to for me to learn because he's someone who's an absolute Legend in our field and I'm like if he needs to get those assurances maybe I ought to be a bit more wary but yeah I kind of only want to work in an academic job that I would want and I'd never want to be one in one that I'm going to be completely hamstrung and not able to think about the things I want to think about or talk about the things I want to talk about man long may that continue in speaking the pendulum swinging back I do feel some momentum now in the opposite direction you know for a long time that was why I didn't even really want to formulate thoughts around the stuff because I I didn't want to be incongruous so I didn't want to believe something privately that I was unwilling to say publicly but at the same time it just seemed so [ __ ] dangerous I was like I don't love that idea and honestly while I love doing the podcast I love doing the podcast my wife asked me the other day I'm trying to build the next Disney like that's my identity my identity is not as Tony Robbins or Joe Rogan my identity is Walt Disney um that is what I want to build and so I've always been a little worried that I'll damage the brand because the brand becomes a visual representation of my thoughts and feelings which may or may not work we are very much a mission-driven company which is um I want to empower people to live by a set of ideas that will actually lead them to human flourishing um but yeah I've always been a little bit worried about that but I've for better or were sort of thrown that to the wind anyway my wife asked me if um if that side of the business were to take off would I stop doing the podcast and I was like yes I would um so it's interesting but anyway I for better or worse I've decided that um to think through these problems well myself to be a useful conduit to society and I think podcasts have really become this incredible mechanism by which the culture thinks through problems forget any one of us individually the culture thinks through problems via podcasts where we can get I mean think about how weird this is that a doctoral student uh I get to bring him in and like okay you're studying this thing like tell me all about it and then the world gets to hear yeah you do that it's crazy and there is an appetite for people to watch long-form conversations just between two guys like that's pretty cool like who could have saw that coming you know they talked about like HBO Max the the public audience has an attention span you got to keep it who could have ever predicted you could fill out Arenas with guys having a debate and things like that it's remarkable it's great it re-engaged a whole generation with intellectual life it's brilliant no it's been cool and I'm look I'll give a shout out to Jordan Peterson who I've had on the show a couple times would love to have him back again uh I don't want his life I can't fath them how many slings and arrows he's taken at one point he said that he was in the middle of like 10 lawsuits I was just like Jesus man like that would be exhausting at a level that I just can't fathom yeah um strangely enough I heard you bring up free speech somebody like asked you for the closing question we're like what's a thing you would leave people and you said free speech yeah I was shocked by that what are your thoughts on Free Speech yeah it's just something that I think people don't appreciate as a master value enough it's the only way mechanism through which you can kind of self-correct yourself as a society I'd rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question oh you need to um who said that I don't remember but that's a good one but that's exactly the way I feel but I think Free Speech as a value like kind of people give lip service to it but they really don't mean it and I think we really need to re-engage that uh part of ourselves like as a core value in the social fabric it's a huge Master value needs to be uh respected I agree speaking of things you can't question evolutionary psychology comes under attack a lot I don't understand why it seems so self-evident to me um why does it what what is people's beef with evolutionary psychology uh I think a lot of that can be described with the naturalistic fallacy so that's where the belief that because some of our findings grapple with finding dark aspects of human nature that what we're saying is natural is seen as to say that that's good you're justifying it justifying it and that's precisely the opposite the only way you can overcome some of the dark aspects of your nature so like Darwin talked about the Hostile forces of nature there's a lot of hostile forces of our own human nature that we need to overcome and we do it all the time like physical violence we have instincts for those that we overcome all the time you need to be able to understand them and there's no point in burying your head in the sand so I think that a lot of people have that criticism uh I think also people don't are becoming increasingly resistant to sex differences because they say some as being demeaning to others I I don't really know why I can't fully explain everything that's going on in the full resistance to sex differences but there is this cultural drive to pretend that men and women are the same and treat them the same but do you think they're pretending do they really believe it so it was very interesting my supervisor wrote a book called when men behave badly the hidden roots of sexual deception harassment and assault and in one of the chapters where he talks about sex differences he tops the chapter with a quote from the intersectional feminist Kimberly kremshaw and says when you treat different things the same and you get that's not a recipe for equality you need that's to say that's the same as oppression it's treating uh different things the exact same so if you treat men and women the exact same and pretend there are no differences between them that's actually oppressive and often to women so one example I'll use is the reasonable person standard for sexual crimes so I mentioned earlier in the episode that men perceive sexual harassment and stalking and crimes of this nature as far less harmful than women do so when we have a legal system that relies on reasonable person standard it very much matters whether that reasonable person is a reasonable woman or a reasonable man so that's just a very kind of a thought experiment to think whoa actually sex differences could have a huge function here we maybe shouldn't consider things as the same you know we're not just completely exactly the same so that's a an interesting way it's really powerful this is something that I come around to in my marriage all the time and I'm telling my wife constantly you're judging my behavior based on what it would mean if you did it it isn't what it means when I do it and so you have to be really careful to your earlier point about theory of mind and like trying to get into the other person's mind and figure out okay what what does it mean when a guy does it or a girl does it and so yeah I'll go back to this idea of boys and girls yeah we're all prediction engines and you're closer to the truth when you can more accurately predict the outcome of your behaviors when I view my wife as thinking the way that I think she confuses the life out of me and I'm like why are you responding like that that doesn't make any sense when I think of her as a more typical woman then it's like oh I get it okay from your frame of reference you're gonna respond like that very predictably got it understood and that like in just trying to alleviate the suffering of other people I'm like you will do yourself a great service if you come to understand at the individual level you're there's always going to be surprises a hundred percent where these are bell curves the difference between men and women bell curves we have more in common than we have different but if you don't understand where the bell curves begin to diverge you will be very confused especially on any metric where you're towards the end of the bell curve so if you're towards the one end of the bell curve on on a trait let's say sexual desire so you're towards the high end of male sexual desire just massive drive and you're a significant other is on the low end of the female Spectrum for sexual desire now it's like she's so far lower than the lowest man that it's like bro yeah you're so much farther High than the highest woman she's so much farther low than the lowest man that that is you better understand the differences otherwise you will take it personally yeah if nothing else that's literally what our lab is focusing on researching now is this cross-sex theory of mind and how accurate or inaccurate is each sex about these massive sexual psychology differences in sexual desires and perception of the cost of sexual harm things like that and a more accurate cross-sex theory of mind is the first step to reducing sexual conflict because you know there are so many examples it's why men send dick pics and think because they would love to receive such a picture themselves they think maybe I would wish I baby if you're listening I would love it if you took pictures of your your lovely bits and just sent them to me in a Non-Stop barrage uh there's a funny articulous some BuzzFeed journalists actually tried to do this experiment she said she was going to have revenge on all the men who sent her dick pics and just send them [ __ ] pics in return talk about a failure to cross sex mind read exactly like bring it on yes but there are also some other dark examples of failures of cross-sex mind reading so do you remember Brock Turner the the swimmer the swimmer athlete that raped this girl behind a dumpster and you guys stopped him and uh his father said oh but he only uh why should he have to sacrifice his whole future the whole thing only lasted about 20 seconds oh God it's like oh wow what a failure of cross effects mind reading there's other examples of a Texas governor I believe or some politician where he said if a woman is getting raped and she can't get out of her she might as well just lay back and enjoy it and all of these things are like extreme examples of massive failures of cross-sex mind reading that if you understood how bad that is for the woman you would never be able that's that's bad that's pretty bad even number man right because if I'm getting raped and the guy's like well you can't get out of it bro you might as well lay back what the [ __ ] are you talking about exactly yeah so these are extreme examples but there is some level of this at play of the ineffability or inaccessibility of the others exact sexual psychology but we can educate ourselves about that and try to bridge that Gap Jesus all right how can people follow you and Bridge more of these gaps great well like most academics I spend far too much time on Twitter so my handle is at Costello William and that's where you'll be able to keep track of most of the stuff I've got going on I'll I'll post about it plenty I love it all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to know what it means to be a real man be sure to watch this episode with Chris Williamson masculinity has a very difficult place to stand in 2023 to be able to find a place which is both aspirational for young men to look up to and also acceptable publicly that seems to be

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 168,075

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: Gxmq9rWggqw

Length: 174min 14sec (10454 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023