Modern Wisdom - #1031 - Macken Murphy - 18 Harsh Realities of Modern Dating

Starting point is 00:00:00 Your area of expertise, penis size preferences, what's happening? Are we talking about women's penis size preferences? Yeah, sure. Okay, so slightly far afield of my expertise. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so women's penis size preferences are a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, I think, for the men listening. Because when I have the experience of presenting on this topic,

Starting point is 00:00:27 what I see is kind of a crescendo of oh that sounds really good to realizing it's not as good as it sounds so the best study on this subject comes from prowess and colleagues and what they looked at was what they looked at was women interacting with real 3D models of various penis-shaped objects cylinders essentially and had them pick and choose which one they actually favored. And the reason that this study design is more powerful than just

Starting point is 00:01:01 asking women, you know, what size do you prefer? The reason that this is powerful is because it gets around issues of misreporting due to not knowing how big or small a given size is. How many times has someone said I think that's about six inches

Starting point is 00:01:17 from the left, isn't it? You know, when you're trying to put a picture up or something, you have no idea how big Exactly. And when we're dealing with things that, you know, are all things considered on the scale of like couches and cars and things relatively small, you know, an inch off, that's 20 to 15%. Also, they're not judging their penis preference based on how big it is to look at, which is what you would be doing, or in terms of memory, you would be doing it based on feel. Right, exactly. So that's a really good point. So in terms of you can ask women on a pen and paper survey, you know, like what size? do you prefer? But even if you get like a really consistent answer of like seven inches, you still don't know that they know what seven inches actually is, right? And there's actually good reason to suspect because men, you know, overreport their own penis size and that

Starting point is 00:02:06 likely causes some kind of mass confusion as to what size would. You think we've got penis inflation effect. Yeah, exactly, where it's like men are saying that there are a certain size and so women are maybe learning about sizes through that. Oh, it was seven inches. Yeah, exactly. And then that's coded. So unlabeled 3D models, I would say that's the gold standard if you actually want to learn what size is preferred. And the size... What are they doing with them? Just interacting with them, just going in and picking. And in terms of length, it was 6.3 inches for a long-term relationship, 6.4 inches for a short-term relationship. So that's, if I'm correct, maybe 16 to 16.25 centimeters. And then in terms of circumference, 4.8 inches for long term,

Starting point is 00:02:57 five inches around for short term, which is somewhere on the order of 12.2 to 12.7 centimeters. And so when men hear that, they typically think, oh, that sounds pretty good, right? Like that doesn't sound that big because of, you know, what socially said about size. And so this is kind of the peak of the emotional roller coaster where it's like, oh, things are really good, things are really great, you know, the view's fantastic from here. But then you look at men's perception, or at least their statement of their own size versus their actual size. And you see that men overestimate their own size by about 20%, right, which is a lot. So rule of thumb, men are usually about an inch smaller than they think, or at least an inch smaller than they say. Again, that's quite a bit.

Starting point is 00:03:43 21% was the figure from the study I'm quoting. So where does that leave us? Well, in actual fact, the average man's penis, according to a meta-analysis of 17 studies, is about 5.16 inches when erect, right? And that would leave 6.3 inches as about 95th percentile, right? Now, 95th percentile, what is that? That's about as common as a man being 6'2. So it's not like really, really rare, right? If you walk into a lecture hall or an airplane there's probably going to be at least one guy yeah exactly there's going to be at least one guy who's at least that tall so it's not like we're talking about some like freaky preference but in terms of the frequency

Starting point is 00:04:32 with which it's encountered that that is that is big right like a six guys out of a hundred yeah a six foot two man is is a big right in the same way as 6.3 actually is quite big what about what about circumference so average circumference is in the same meta-analysis, 4.59 inches. So what was the 4.59 and what was the, but the top was only 4.5 something. 4.8. Right, okay, so you're much closer in terms of relatively close, but each unit with circumference,

Starting point is 00:05:02 it makes like more of a difference. Like that's like a bigger increase in total volume. Squaring the net or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the volume is getting bigger for an inch of circumference versus length. So then it's five inches for short term. So the difference between, I wish I'd measured this in Newtonics in advance, but the difference here is, in fact, pretty big. And more interesting, and I think this is actually the most interesting part of the study, is that they also asked women to pick out the biggest and smallest from the array of models.

Starting point is 00:05:35 So you can imagine that they, for the study design, they have an array of models that they can choose from that basically look like sex toys. and they say, you know, what's ideal, what's the biggest you'd seen ever, and what's the smallest you've seen ever. And very interestingly, most women had never seen a penis that big. And so they were exhibiting a preference for a penis size that was bigger than they had ever experienced, right? So that's the kind of, I would say that that's now the trough of the roller coaster where things are as not fun as they could be. Yeah, I mean, it's also not fun if you're a woman too. You cursed to almost never encounter the ideal penis that you want.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Well, yeah, I mean, it's very similar to women's height preferences. So the 6'2 analogy, I think, is very good. If you asked women, you know, what's the ideal height of a boyfriend? Maybe they'd say 6'2, right? A lot of them would say somewhere between, you know, as we discussed in the last episode, somewhere between, you know, maybe 6 foot 3 and 6 foot 5 would come up a lot, but maybe it would be 6 foot 2. But then you ask them, have you ever dated a guy that tall? And most of them will say, no, never, right?

Starting point is 00:06:38 It's the same thing with penis size. Now, these are ideal mate preferences, and ideal mate preferences can be a little silly, right? Like, what's your ideal mate preference for a woman's salary, right? It could be as rich as possible that doesn't occasion security concerns, right? But then in actual practice, you might not mind if it was even, you know, 20 grand a year, as long as everything else was lined up. So this is an ideal preference. And so ideally, most women probably would like to date a guy who's taller than six, six foot two, who's, you know, 6.3 inches. But because it's an ideal preference, they're likely flexible as to their minimum preference, which was not collected in this study. One insight, though, they did ask a very good behavioral outcome question. I really like behavioral outcomes as opposed to just statements, right, as to like hypotheticals. They said, have you ever broken up with a man over his size?

Starting point is 00:07:37 I think that's a very good question because that's where it's like behavioral deal breaker and they said at least partially over his size so there was no wiggle room in the question for you know

Starting point is 00:07:48 well there was a list of five things and I'll focus I'll just focus on the most socially appropriate one it's like was it an influence as to why you broke up and about 27% said they had so most women don't break up over this most women this doesn't appear

Starting point is 00:08:01 as a deal breaker but about a third have had the experience of saying you know what I'm going to call it quits the size is not working for me. Yeah, the size was one of the contributing factors, and I'm willing to say that to a researcher as well, right, which is probably an underestimate.

Starting point is 00:08:18 And in most cases of that 27% subset, the vast majority of cases, it was because the guy was too small. There were some women who said that part of the contributing factor was too big, but it wasn't common. A couple of things come to mind. I would be interested to see the bell curve of how satisfied would you be

Starting point is 00:08:39 as in I guess that the talking about fat tales when we're guessing this as a fraught I'm going to guess that being a little bit under or even like a maybe a standard deviation under versus a standard deviation over it. There is an upper bound.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Like on one you're talking about less pleasure and the other you're talking about pain. Any woman who's ever had her cervix hit knows like that's not fun yeah uh and that i would imagine actually you probably have more latitude on the small side than you do on the big side because there's no hard and fast rule about small like being literally impractical or dangerous no hard threshold whereas the length of the yes actually does exactly yeah yeah because if you've got that hit then that's it's kind of it's going to be very comfortable that's a really interesting point

Starting point is 00:09:36 I was imagining that it would be, in the abstract, before you said that, I would have assumed in the absence of data that it would function similarly to women's height preferences, where it's, you know, tons and tons of benefit up to some reasonable point, like being way too short and then a decline that doesn't ever really bottom out. But given that fact that there is, there is a size. There's only so much room at the end. Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I know of a friend of a friend who actually did get rejected from a sexual encounter for being too large, like flat out. That's not going inside of me. Yeah, exactly. So that can happen. And maybe that's something that can't be worked around in the same way. That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:10:27 Yeah. The other thing that I think about is presumably these women were handling it. But the reason to have a penis of any shape and size is not to handle it. It's partly to handle it, but mostly for other things. I think if you were going to go full, whatever, ethnographic with this, it would have to be, okay, away you go in a quiet, dark room, come back and tell us which one you preferred. Yeah, I mean, well, that's, I mean, I don't know how you'd get ethics approval,

Starting point is 00:10:59 but it is interesting. A lot of people did say, when I first made a, video on this study a lot of people in the comments did make that point like you know it's it's it's it's interesting that they picked bigger than they'd seen on average because maybe that actually isn't their preference if they had experience right like maybe if they have say this is your preference if you've never preferred it yeah exactly like it's it's with full testing maybe you'd end up with a lower or higher number wow that's fucking actually a lot bigger than I thought it was yeah

Starting point is 00:11:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, interesting, just to round out the ideal thing, not fantastic news for 95% of men. Right. But on the flip side, I'm going to guess that there are preferences men have for women that 95% of women don't meet if you're to ask for ideal mate preferences. Yeah, I mean, ideal mate preferences always have this,

Starting point is 00:11:55 I won't say cartoonish, but kind of fanciful angle to them, where they often can't be met in any reasonable way when you consider all of them at once. Like one really good example of this is if you were to ask men, like a group of men, okay, what's your ideal BMI preference in Western men? Then what's your ideal braw size preference, right? Those are going to conflict with each other

Starting point is 00:12:18 in a way that is very unlikely to be satisfied in naturally varying population because one comes at the directionality of one comes at the expense of another, right? It's kind of like... Bill's the skinny waste stuff. don't have big tits. Yeah, in general. Right. And then it's also like if you looked at someone's preferences for good looks and loyalty, right? Or good looks and attention from, maybe loyalty's a bad

Starting point is 00:12:44 one. Good looks and attention from attractive alternatives. Like attention from attractive alternative, surely your ideal would be zero, right? I don't want to have to compete. And then how attractive they are, your ideal would probably be quite high, right? I don't say you specifically. I just mean a person in general. So ideal mate preferences. They're often they're often not as informative as bare minimum make preferences

Starting point is 00:13:08 which is where you actually see rejection where you actually see cutoffs I would have loved to see more data from the Proust study about you know like 40 27% what was the deal breaker

Starting point is 00:13:20 right what would be the deal breaker going forward I think it's interesting cool study you mentioned there about tall man good looking man and infidelity and stuff do tall men cheat more

Starting point is 00:13:30 well I thought in the abstract I answered this question recently and at the time I answered it I was thinking I hadn't seen data on it and then some online social scientists who does these analyses kind of DIY style replied and basically said I checked this in a large data set there wasn't an association I would have expected that tall men would cheat more because they'd have more opportunity not saying that you know all men who can cheat would but just definitionally men who can't cheat don't And maybe it's very difficult to cheat if you're five foot four, right? Maybe that's a real challenge. Not saying it's impossible. You have to assume that the pool is smaller. Yeah, the pool is smaller. Most women want a taller guy. Yeah, so I was surprised that there was no, that I take his word for it,

Starting point is 00:14:18 that there was no association, but I was surprised by that. I would think that there would be an association between, in the abstract, I would think that any attractive trait in males would be associated with infidelity to something. Mm-hmm. Head of hair, whiter eyes, wider teeth, better skin, because you're just opening up the pool of opportunity. Yeah, exactly. Can we recap the fallout from the Oli-Murz transformation? It's a little old now, but I never talked about it at the time.

Starting point is 00:14:45 So William Costello puts this Twitter poll out that for some reason goes absolutely fucking ballistic. It goes completely interstellar, and there's basically thousands of women. It's kind of saying, if you read the study, that they didn't like, leanness and muscularity. This guy did a big transformation and went from kind of standard dude physique with a tiny little bit of definition to probably around 10% body fat with an okay amount of muscularity. And women were asked, do they prefer the dad bod version or the lean and rip version and tons of them steaming in and saying, no, I prefer that. So give me a post-mortem on Olly Merse's body transformation.

Starting point is 00:15:29 I remember as soon as William posted it, I thought, oh, that's a really good one. I think I replied at the time, and he, like, when it was, like, really early days, and he was like, I can spot a sex difference from miles away. He's, like, I can manufacture one of these easily. Because he obviously is very interested in sex differences or studies them as part of, you know, the bus lab and whatnot. And so he's going to have really good intuitions for, like, how to pick good examples that will draw them out. Something that women will, women and men will disagree about. Yes, exactly, exactly.

Starting point is 00:15:57 That's what I should have said. So to clarify with sex difference, he asked men, do you think he looks better before or after? Meaning after this incredible physical transformation where he's lost copious amounts of body fat and goes from essentially, yeah, as you say, like muscular guy at the pub, but not much more than that to, you know, like stage ready, basically, except, you know, not, not, he's not roided up or anything, but, you know, he looks incredibly lean. And so William posts this and says, you know, men versus women, you know, what do you guys think? And as you say, yeah, the women strongly preferred the before and the men strongly preferred the after. And there was an insinuation by men, a widespread insinuation that women were basically being coy about their actual preference or lying about their preference and that this is kind of like, oh, it's known that women lie about these things. I'm going to, the reason that I don't think that is because when you ask women about, their height preferences. They're very open about saying it's tall in surveys. Right. So I look at this

Starting point is 00:16:58 this sort of study and this sort of data, these sort of data all the time. Women are very open about preferring taller men. They're also very open about prefering more muscular men, right? So women say they prefer taller men, and then you look at height and mating success and generally taller men are more popular on the dating market. So that seems true and stated, true and revealed. Yep. Muscularity, same deal. You ask women, do you like muscles? Right? They say, yes, we like muscles. And then you survey muscular men, and it turns out they also have more positive romantic experiences. So stated versus revealed, it's all on track. With leanness, it's a little more complicated.

Starting point is 00:17:32 It does seem that women don't prefer too lean. And when you look at the Oli Mers transformation, I would say that the main difference before and after, if we were to look at it, like he does look more muscular in the after, but I would say that very likely he just lost fat, right? Like, I've seen those sorts of transformations before. Usually it's just fat loss rather than any actual muscle gain. And so I think that what happened here is partially that men looked at the photos and said, wow, that guy got jacked. And then women said, oh, you know, I don't really like that. And they're like, oh, what?

Starting point is 00:18:05 So you don't like jacked guys, right? But women were seeing that and saying, oh, this guy just like lost a lot of body fat. And I don't like men who are too lean. So women's body fat percentage preferences from the research we have are a little heavier than what The gym bros think well it's heavier than 10% it's like 15 right yeah it's closer to that so in the most recent study from zia and colleagues they use dxa images now dxa images is actually there's a there's a big pro and a big con the big pro is that we know the body fat of the men we know the body fat percentage right we actually it's not a guesstimate the con is that like a dxa image doesn't look like a real man, so I think that's a real limitation of the study.

Starting point is 00:18:47 But in that study, it was between 13 and 14.1% body fat. So that's still pretty lean, by the way. Like, you've definitely got the kind of four-pack up top. Visible upper abs. But it is not as lean. Look, this is where two different worlds collide. If you're a bro listening to this, and you hear 14%, dude, I can walk around it.

Starting point is 00:19:06 14%'s a piece of piss. Yeah. Oh, my God, I can have some bread. Thank fuck for that. But if you're a normal person... That's pretty lean. 14% is a hard cut away. You've got a hard cut to do to get down to that.

Starting point is 00:19:18 So, yeah, I tweeted about, sorry, I put in my newsletter, the ideal body fat percentage is higher than Jimbrose thing. And I think that's true as an anchor. I think most guys would assume that optimal body fat for women would be 10, 10, 9 maybe even. I do think that most guys would just guess so that you can get too lean, that your face is going to look gaunt. But it wouldn't actually be to do with the body that are the optimal body fat percentage. But then that being said, you know, somebody like Mike Thurston, for instance, who at quite

Starting point is 00:19:53 lean levels of body fat still looks quite full, still doesn't look very dry. One of the problems that Olly Mears had was he had like what I would call as opposed to skinny fat, he had skinny lean, which is not quite the right amount of mass to carry. that level of leanness, and if you have a little bit more mass underneath it, I think it can actually make you look more healthy in that way. And some people just don't carry leanness that well. Some people don't carry fatness that well. I'm somebody who doesn't look great fat. I'm someone who looks all right, lean. I can keep going. I think the leanest I've ever been in my life is maybe eight, eight and a half. That's extremely lean. And I look fine. Everything got pretty much

Starting point is 00:20:37 better from that. And it doesn't look, but Ollie struggled a bit more with that. I mean, you're making really good points. I think that it is, I think that there, I think that a lot of Jim Bros would be surprised at how lean 13% can look. Yes. It really depends on how much muscle you have to some. And also, where do you carry it? And where do you carry it in different places? If you're carrying it in your legs and your ass as a dude, you're laughing.

Starting point is 00:21:03 You're carrying it around the midsection. If you've got the classic tire, you can get down to 12% and you still have really have visible abs. Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, when I read this, when I read this result and was reviewing other results, I was spending a lot of time looking at, okay, can I see a DXA verified guy? Like, this is the number and this is him shirtless and comparing it. And you can look a lot of different ways at 13 to 14% body fat. There are some guys who look all right up to 20%, right? They still have, you know, visible chest separation, that kind of thing. I would say, though, that most guys at 13 to 14%, they've got the upper abs. very clear, maybe some forearm veins, right? Maybe like a little bit of upper chest definition. But it's not stage ready bodybuilder by any means. I think that your point about OLLI not necessarily looking like fully healthy at that weight,

Starting point is 00:21:58 that's the key kind of evocyc interpretation of all of this. Yeah, why is it that women didn't like the leaner guy? What's the explanation for that? well the there's the health angle where if there's a famine he's not going to starve anytime soon but the angle that I take for women's bodily preferences generally that I think is very I think it has really good predictive power is if you just say like between two guys which of these guys physique looks like it would win in a fight usually the one that looks like it would win is going to be preferred. And if you look at those two photos, you know, like who are

Starting point is 00:22:42 who are you betting on, you're probably going to take the guy who's a little softer. You look at heavyweight boxers, heavyweight UFC fighters. They're generally quite lean, but they're not insanely lean. Like in non-weight class, just fighting optimized sport, it doesn't seem that being shredded is good for kicking ass, essentially. And I think that if you think about women's evolved psychology, it came about in a context where men were often fighting, usually with weapons, right? And where it would be good to have as a long-term pair bond a mate who could disincentivize your own and your children's harassment. And hopefully it isn't. I'm talking about formidable. Right. That's exactly right. And so it's like when you think about women's bodily mate

Starting point is 00:23:29 preferences. And when you think about bodily predictors of fighting ability, it's like, you know, there's sorts of things that women talk about, like strong, vainy hands, big arms, broad shoulders, height, not too lean, all of these things gear towards being formidable. Being formidable. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated?

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Starting point is 00:24:59 slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt dot com slash modern wisdom do you do you think that the guys didn't account for the lack of formidability why did the guys not pick up on that when they said i think that he looks better in the second one because they're they're looking at it uh separated from formidability they weren't thinking how much can this guy protect me and my kids. Yeah. What was the reason for the guys preferring the other one?

Starting point is 00:25:31 I don't know. I didn't find it particularly surprising and I think that there's... Me neither. Yeah, there's always going to be, you know, most men were surprised, but I think that the most vocally surprised men were obviously, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:44 more surprised than the average man, if that makes sense. I saw it and just saw, oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense. Why didn't they pick up on the formidability aspect? I think it is bodybuilding culture, to some extent, proliferated.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Yeah, where bodybuilding culture has proliferated throughout the Anglosphere such that basically every young man is now, or not every young man, but a plural, a slight majority of all young men in the Anglosphere are basically recreational bodybuilders at this point. And there's a real status competition that is occurring between these men where they have their own, yeah, where they have their own beauty standard that is. is it probably started out as a competition for the female gays, essentially. But then it became a competition between each other such that more difficult is more impressive and therefore better to some extent. So, you know, winning a bodybuilding competition is very hard because it involves putting on lots of mass and removing lots of fat.

Starting point is 00:26:44 And those two activities are difficult to do alone, but even more difficult to do together. So it's a good competition between males. And it reminds me of women's fashion modeling to some extent where women's fashion modeling incentivizes a degree of thinness that we know from the literature, men do not prefer. It's past the optimum. And you can say, like, why is it that this beauty competition has passed the optimum of the beauty standards set by the opposite sex? And it seems to be downstream of difficulty, downstream of status, and downstream of these

Starting point is 00:27:18 standards set within the group. So I think that, you know, that's a rambling answer. but no that's great difficulty status and the value set within the group so for guys every guy understands he's had to work really hard yeah he looks like a reliable ally yeah it looks like the sort of guy could go into battle with um i know how hard that is to do uh the status thing while imbued in that is allow me to elevate you that's really impressive that's something that i would maybe desire for myself um i did see do you see sasha barren cohen also did a transformation he's in a superhero movie. Oh, interesting.

Starting point is 00:27:51 This stinks of your TikTok. Have a look at Sasha Baron Cohen and have a look at the, there was a few articles that came up where basically he recently got divorced and got this role as a superhero type character in some movie and just goes through basically the same, but he's 20 years older than Olimas, same transformation. Lean, look, for a 50-year-old dude, looks great. Like, very stringy, very flat, but like, oh, okay. visible abs, separation, delta, arms, all the rest of it.

Starting point is 00:28:24 Like, congratulations, well done, Sasha. And there's a bunch of scathing articles basically saying this breakup body thing is cheesy and like shallow sort of gossam a thin desire for attention for men. But then there was some other stuff that I did think was quite interesting, which is I looked at it with a lot of respect. Some women looked at it with almost like revulsion that, why are you? spending so much attention on your body in your 50s? Like what's going on there? Oh, well, you're probably trying to signal availability and attraction for a new mate. That means that

Starting point is 00:28:59 you're probably not going to be a particularly good family guy. You were in the era of guy that is supposed to be family guy. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. I remember a friend of mine's a fitness athlete throughout pretty much every different discipline. He does a power lifter, he's a weightlifter. He did bodybuilding. He did everything. It's been with the same girlfriend throughout all of these and she said I felt the most comfortable with you when you were powerlifting

Starting point is 00:29:24 oh that goes with my formidability anecdote now if you were to pick the fattest of the strength sports after strong man it would be powerlifting yeah it wouldn't be weight lifting there's a bit more athleticism required there

Starting point is 00:29:38 it wouldn't be high rocks or crossfit or bodybuilding like in this spectrum of leanness and um I had this insight that basically if you see as a woman, if you see a guy that is very lean, even very muscular, even very beautified, even very preened in a way that's evidently trying to attract the opposite sex as opposed to like some weird. Yeah, exactly. What that suggests is for every calorie that you have to spend in the world, quite a big portion of that is going to go to trying to attract the opposite sex through this sort of beautification thing. Even if you're getting it wrong, even if you don't know what the other sex likes. And actually, if you don't know what the other sex likes, you fucked it even harder,

Starting point is 00:30:22 because that suggests that you don't understand us and you're trying to do it. So this idea of, it really made me rethink dad bods. Like, what is a dad bod? Is a dad bod the body of somebody who is a father, or is it the body of somebody who would make a good father? Do you understand the distinction here? I do.

Starting point is 00:30:42 And what's funny, what you're getting at is actually the result of a, you're anticipating the result of a study that's already been done on dad bodds where they essentially, this was back when the term dad bod, which isn't as hot as it once was. I mean, that term was like very viral in the, I believe it was 2020. And what the researchers did when this term was peaking was they investigated personality perceptions as a result of body type. And what they, found was what you're describing, which is that they were ascribing more positive fatherly qualities to men who were less lean. And I think that there is a tension among animals in general that pair bond and expect paternal investment that, look, you can engage in paternal investment or you can engage in mating effort, right? And you can't do both those things at the exact same time. I mean, maybe to an extent paternal investment can be mating effort in some cases. But for the most part, it's like he's either the sort of guy who's going to spend a lot of time doing that or he's going to spend a lot of time doing this, right?

Starting point is 00:31:53 And so if you're, you know, a guy who's like hyper obsessed with looks, I think that that does strongly signal mating effort orientation. And that might be, even if they're better looking, it might give a personality cue that ends up being the turnoff. I really do think that with a lot of this, like, I don't want him to be too muscular. I don't want him to be too lean. I don't want him to be, you know, too taking care of his hair, that kind of thing. I do think that a lot of it is personality inferences. It's like if he just genetically looked like that and never went to the gym, then that probably would be preferred.

Starting point is 00:32:27 But that's the sort of noble savage lumberjack build, right? I don't think women have got a problem with the dude that happens to walk around at 10% body fat. Yeah. But the dude that happens to have massive hands or great hair. Yeah. But the guy that spends tons of time on that was sort of narcissistic. cystic, it's self-centered, he doesn't care about me in this sort of a way. So here's an interesting one for you. I've always been fascinated by the fact that women in marriages and men in marriages

Starting point is 00:32:55 tend to spend their discretionary additional income on things that are typically signals that only the other sex would notice. But you can do this in different ways. So, for instance, women spend a lot more money on beautification, guys spend more money on watches and cars and stuff like that. Seda's signals of wealth, et cetera. But by doing it that way, by doing it in really sort of subtle and highly finessed ways, if women do the beautification right, maybe other men would notice, but their partner might not fully, like wearing an expensive set of heels. That makes you look good, but is as much a signal to women as it is to the men.

Starting point is 00:33:36 And your husband might not fully pick up on that. And the guy is the same thing. Well, you know, this new car. it's fast and does whatever, but it's primarily an intracultural, not an intersexual competition device, as opposed to an intersexual, intersexual advertisement device. So I always think that's interesting. One of the bit on the Olly Mers, Sasha Baron Cohen thing, I do think it's a little bit of a

Starting point is 00:33:58 failure of cross-sex mind reading that guys looked at something that they confused for formidability, that famous David Putts study. This looks like formidability to me, but didn't realize, like women assumed that what they find attractive in a partner is what they will sleep with. Will they? Because if other men found him more formidable, which they might have done, maybe women say that they wouldn't have gone for that guy, but perhaps that version of Oli Meuse would end up being more successful after 12 months because he's been pre-selected. The David Putz study suggests women don't actually know what they want to have sex with fully. So I wonder if you had a hundred Oli-Mers

Starting point is 00:34:37 and you put them at different loves of body fat percentage and sent them out into the world, which one actually would have performed better because we know that male pre-selection and male, he's okay, he's all right with me, I hold him in high esteem, is something that women do use as a cue for attractiveness, and maybe that is even more powerful than,

Starting point is 00:34:58 well, he looks a little bit lean, and I'm not too sure if he could survive a famine. So perhaps the guys were right all along. Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. You're reminding me of a, of a, concept from behavioral ecology, where basically you, these researchers, the kind of anthropological site studies types, will, you know, make an assumption about like, oh, well, based on our calculations, this is the, you know, optimal foraging party size or something. And then when they find a discrepancy,

Starting point is 00:35:28 instead of saying, oh, I guess they're making a mistake, they think, oh, we must be making a mistake. Like, they must know something we don't know. So then they investigate more. And with something like that where when you look at bodybuilders, there's a really kind of simple surface level where you say, oh, they're wrong about what women want. But in a way, they might be even more right about what they want because they're optimizing not just for women's preferences, but also for men's preferences that will give them the social status that will be more valuable than looking better. I'm telling you. I mean, that's something that we see, I mean, that's something that we see quite a bit of, right? I mean, it's something that we see quite a bit of that people will

Starting point is 00:36:11 modify themselves and compete in such a way that the mates don't directly care about, but they do care about the status consequences of that competition. Like, you can imagine that playing video games isn't attractive, but if you're like ninja, I believe his name is, he's like really rich, very successful. If you told your head blue, you could look a little bit like ninja. Okay, well, I'll keep that one of the most fucking rich, famous dudes on the planet. I'll keep that in mind as an option if I ever want to go for that look. And, you know, I'm sure that the video games component, like you could look at that from an outsider, like at his mating strategy, let's say. I hope he doesn't watch this because it is going to be uncomfortable, but you could look at like his quote-unquote mating strategy and say, oh, well, he's spending a lot of time doing something women don't like, how foolish, right?

Starting point is 00:37:02 but then he's acquiring limitless money and status and renown through other men. So I think with the Oli Mers thing, look, I looked at it and I didn't care that women didn't like it. I thought he looked cooler in the after and that was that. I was like, I respect it. Yes. So my reaction, my reaction was not like from a social status perspective. I thought that's cool. And if you walk into a bar and all of the dudes think that that dude's cool because he's just got lean, then maybe you are going to be more attractive.

Starting point is 00:37:30 That's much better than being, you know, slagely. I think more optimized for a body fat percentage. It feels like this is related to what you learned about formidability from the female rapper Glorilla. Yeah, well, I mean, I do a lot of these on TikTok. It's a very TikToky thing to do. They do tend to go viral where I'll just play, generally a woman's rap song and just listen to it and react,

Starting point is 00:37:56 you know, from an EvoSyke perspective. And it's a really useful teaching tool, frankly. and it's a very useful teaching tool for my area of specific interest and expertise it's really good for mate preferences because you see that in a lot of types of music people are very coy about their mate preferences right like they don't necessarily state them

Starting point is 00:38:20 and if they do state them they don't state them accurately but then you listen to rap music and you just get very accurate stated preferences where it's like yeah I know the study Like, I'm listening to it. I'm hyped. I'm like, I know the studies. I know that that's accurate.

Starting point is 00:38:34 Like, that's true. Like, um, so you'll hear, you know, and you also see more blatant intracultural competition where it's not, where it's not beating, yeah, it's not beating around the bush. It's saying like straight up, I actually have, like, like, I was listening to, um, the rapper Lotto. And she was, um, she was bragging about the fact that, you know, her body count is so low that she might say that she's a virgin right she's mocking her rivals for like giving it up too easily quote unquote um she's flexing the fact that she has tons of resources um that her boyfriends don't mind if she cheats essentially right um so she's paradoxically signal she's signaling some

Starting point is 00:39:14 things that are conflicting there but she's basically saying like i'm the ultimate like female i'm the fucking omega female here i'm the highest yeah exactly i have the highest mate value on all these variables um i have the highest reproductive value value value on all these variables. And I'm also, I've also got more resources for my future offspring than you could ever dream of

Starting point is 00:39:35 and I'm acquiring more from males constantly who don't care if I'm going out and getting, you know, I can't lose. Yeah, more genetic heterogeneity from multiple mates, right? Like, so it's,

Starting point is 00:39:45 so it's, it's incredible to listen to, just the blatant, um, discussing of it. And I, you know, I have a great appreciation for it. And it's been,

Starting point is 00:39:53 it's been good for, it's been good as a teaching tool. I feel like I've been able to teach a lot of, of people who would never take an F-Site class about mate preference. Well, it's just as well that you're using rap music, because if you're using metal, like if you're listening to a bad omen song to try and work out what Noah Sebastian thinks about like his mate preferences, it's all couched in fluffy fucking language. It's too whimsical. No, Noah, tell me about hitting it from the back. That's what I need.

Starting point is 00:40:22 There is a study on metal guitarists where they were like, is this intracial competition or is this intersexual attraction? Because it's pretty clear with other forms of guitar playing that the guy who gets the guitar out to play Wonderwall, right, at the party, all the other guys are thinking, this guy is the worst. Like, we don't like this. But a lot of women

Starting point is 00:40:42 actually are like, oh, you know, if he can do it well. Okay, this is cool. Yeah, this is cool, right? Yeah, exactly. If it's a, if it's a handsome... So fucking Tim from Polyphia, do you know what Polyphia is? No. Okay, it's like very mathy fucking super, maybe one of the best guitarists on the planet plays in it.

Starting point is 00:40:58 And he looks like an anime. He looks like someone out of Final Fantasy. So he's got coolest fuck luck. And like all over the place. So that's a great question. Is it, what did you? Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for as long as I can remember now because it is the simplest way I've found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition.

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Starting point is 00:41:49 Plus, it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit. Right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 welcome kit, plus bonus AG1 travel packs, and for a limited time, U.S. customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of omega-3s. Just go to the link in the description below, or head to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What did they decide? Is it introsexual competition or intersexual advertisement? Well, that's exactly what they were investigating, and they were interested, because again, guitar is one where it's literally, it seems so straight up and down like this is to attract women. But metal is something where it's like, you know, I've

Starting point is 00:42:30 been to, um, I'm actually going to Metallica next year with my dad. I'm stoked. Um, so I, so I don't mind metal by any means, but at these concerts, I mean, I haven't done a poll, but I'm assuming it's going to be like 90% males, right? Very male heavy. Yep. Especially as you get into the more hardcore, like heavy metal. It's going to be, and even the environment, it's kind of hostile to women in the sense that it's like the moss pit is not a place where like, lots of black. Yeah, where like a 120-pound woman is going to have it like an awesome time on average. I'm sure there's one listening who's like, no, I love it. Um, so it's interesting. It's like, what are these guys doing? And it seems to be that it is essentially a proxy for violence where it's like it's not something

Starting point is 00:43:11 that's necessarily in the sense that it's, um, it's a competition between the males against each other, not something that is attractive to women necessarily. And the reason I use violence as, as an analogy there and even used the word proxy, which I probably shouldn't have. The reason that I use violence as an analogy is that there's evidence from some animal species, for example, that even though winning fights makes you more likely to mate, right, the fight itself is something that the females do not appreciate and do not like, right? So it's not the case in some bird species, for example, that the female birds are standing around watching the male birds have at it and thinking, ooh, you know, I love the way he's, you know, completely pecking the shit out of this guy, right? That's not what seems to be happening. Instead, it's like, oh, my gosh, there's violence. Let me get out of here.

Starting point is 00:43:59 And then the fact that he won later gives him, you know, the, the formidableity. You're saying that all guitar players are too pussy to fight? No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm sure that a lot of them could kick my ass. What I am saying, though, is that it functions similarly to that, where it's like a massive status competition between the males out of view. This is fucking Oli Mears. Yeah, where it's like we're not playing heavy metal.

Starting point is 00:44:25 guitar to impress women directly. We're doing this to settle the status hierarchy amongst ourselves using this alternative to that. And then, yeah, exactly. And then once we've all agreed on that, then we can move on. So what you're saying is, becoming a metal guitarist is a high risk strategy because if you become the best, great. But if you suck, you double lose. Not only do you do something that I find unattractive, but everybody else seems to think you're really uncool because you're no good at it. Yeah, I think that learning. in terms of like low risk, high reward strategy

Starting point is 00:44:58 learning like four chords rhythm guitar. Rhythm guitar. Yeah, exactly. I want to be the rhythm guitarist. Yeah, learning like four chords on the guitar and buying an acoustic guitar and, you know, learning a few good songs. It's aspiring male metal guitar players that have the entire future is just forked in front of

Starting point is 00:45:17 them. Which way do you want to go? Gothic man. Well, they can do both, but the metal aspect, it's it's very likely that the returns to mating won't come in until you've appreciated quite a bit. Well, also, as well, you're going to be playing to audiences

Starting point is 00:45:32 that are 90% men. Yeah. You know, whereas if you're fucking Benson Boone or whatever, like, you know, Lewis Capaldi or some shit, like, it's just, it's all checked. So, okay, I remember reading forever ago

Starting point is 00:45:46 and I've not been able to find it again, I'm gutted. A study that was looking at, maybe it was had this happened or maybe it was women being asked to envision it happening an altercation occurring where their male partner was unable to protect them and that the question was how much does your attraction drop pre and post this interaction or pre and post infidelity and that the pre and post he couldn't protect me was greater than infidelity yeah and i haven't been able to find it again Is there, have you come across this?

Starting point is 00:46:23 You're like the fucking chat GPT of EP's studies. I haven't. Well, I hallucinate quite a bit less, I would hope. But I think that I actually did see this. And I think that it was actually an online poll rather than, so that's probably why you weren't able to find it. I think I'll take the results kind of face valid that. I mean, attraction is a funny word, right? Because it's like, I wouldn't be surprised if you even found that a breakup was

Starting point is 00:46:50 more likely to be precipitated. Infidelity has a very high breakup consequence rate. It's one of, if not the most common causes of divorce. And it's a very common cause of relationship dissolution. You don't really hear about, you know, men losing fights in it leading to breakups as often, although, you know, maybe it's just such a low frequency event that it doesn't have the same influence on human relationships. But I think it could even be the case. What I'm getting at is that the attraction component is taking a bigger hit, but the actual relationship stability, maybe it goes the other way. I'm not sure. It doesn't surprise me, though. I mean, it's a huge negative signal. So, on the mind. Beauty matters way more than chastity, and it's not even close.

Starting point is 00:47:37 Explain that to me. Well, you see these studies on the importance of, so we have these cross-cultural studies going back to the going back to 1989 with David Buss, where you look at, you know, men's stated preference for chastity versus good looks. And you also look at these more recent kind of individual level studies that are a little more modern and take different methods. And I would say yes, that men on average care more about looks than a woman being chased or pure. For example, there was one study where men perceived one group of women as more physically attractive and likely more promiscuous. That was their inference, which is commonly the case with attractiveness, where when people perceive attractiveness, they tend to also perceive promiscuity. And they still chose that group.

Starting point is 00:48:37 I mean, there's this, I think it's actually, I think it's actually apocryphal. I think it's, I hate to ruin this, but I do think it's a fake advertisement, but I think that the advertisement, and look, it's a rather objectifying ad. I don't think it's the way we'd speak on modern wisdom, let's say. But the fact that this advertisement is so viral shows that it's tapping into something that is appreciated to some degree or reflect something trueish, where it's, it was a used Porsche dealership ad where it was, you know you're not the first, but do you really care? right and it's a beautiful woman right is the idea and i think that the fact that that's something that's very clickable very viral um shows that it it is something that a lot of men find intuitive but it's also something we see in these studies that does you know signals to low sociosexuality are those attractive of course right but is it a high priority not really no men put looks over chastity in most cases. Well, that's interesting.

Starting point is 00:49:44 I think that's a question that I'll have to think about and circle back to you because it's a really good one. But the first thing that's coming to mind is that especially in a modern environmental context where we have contraception and where a lack of sexual history might signal some kind of religious commitments or strange or I won't say strange atypical social development it may be the case that the strategic salience of chastity or

Starting point is 00:50:23 virginity actually flips to an extent like you've seen the studies from I know spoken yeah yeah exactly yeah so Thomas and Stuart Williams and these guys they've done their kind of ideal body count studies and it's an ideal mate preference right so you should get you know you should get even if it's a ridiculous result you should see it if that makes sense like the ideal mate preference for penises we discussed earlier was bigger than they'd ever seen right so these do tend to these do tend to be quite fanciful and it was you know I believe it was peaking at you know one two and three right not zero in terms of number was as attractive as Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, that's well remembered. I think that's exactly right. So men were as, quote, unquote, put off by virginity as several past partners, like an above average number of past partners.

Starting point is 00:51:18 What's the average for men and women? Okay, so the average body count based on CDC data median and excluding virgins from the data set, they put out four. for women and six for men about. Now, the reason for the discrepancy could be due to the, it could be due to a variety of factors. It could be as simple. There are so many statistical potential explanations for it, but it could just be as simple as men overreport and women underreport, right? It's both five. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:52:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's both five. I would say that from that, you can safely say that the average body count in the U.S. probably isn't over six, because why would men lie and say it's lower than it is? I think that for us in kind of, you know, an urban, college-educated background, secular, relatively secular at least, I think that given our backgrounds, our kind of social circles might find that surprising. but you also have to think about the fact that there are, you know, very conservative religious people there are people who are, you know, incredibly asocial. I mean, this is a CDC gen population census, right?

Starting point is 00:52:48 You can't overestimate how normal the normies are. Yeah, exactly. So it's like we're hitting all types. We're hitting people who are, you know, conservative, you know, devoutly Muslim, right? we're hitting people who are playing video games all day and haven't spoken to a woman in two years and they don't care that they haven't spoken to them

Starting point is 00:53:08 so yeah I think when you run those numbers it's going to be between four and six and six is probably that it's probably fair it's like yeah it's not higher than that for a median mean is higher is higher is higher is it's surprising that most people even men don't want virgins even female virgins are discriminated against

Starting point is 00:53:24 I think that it is interesting right I think that the, I think that contraception has changed the strategic valence of past sexual partners such that disease risk and the risk of a covert pregnancy that you're not aware of that's existing from the previous relationship. Those sorts of risks are very reduced. And as a result of them being very reduced, now body count is, and I'm using that term because it's, it's what everyone uses number of past sexual partners would be the technical term i suppose it's mainly used as a proxy for personality yeah and so i think that what men and what women are we haven't spoken about women's preferences here they're they're pretty interesting too i think that what is

Starting point is 00:54:14 being scanned for is primarily cues to personality and so we that's why i can't get over the fucking chastity thing. That's why I can't get over the beauty of a chastity thing. Yeah. Like it's, it is lower, I think, than most people would assume. And I would guess for any normal person with a normal amount of looks and social exposure throughout their life and is 30, this is, especially if you're a woman who's at three or four or below, you have either had to be in long term committed relationships for most of that time. or actively turning down suitors.

Starting point is 00:54:57 Like, you're going to have to be saying no, quite a bit. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to revise something about the beauty over chastity statement. It's not like an absolute, in all cases, on the tail end. I'm imagining I would be confident saying that if we're talking about normal variation, like, do men care more about a woman's sexual history or the way she looks? It depends on how much she looks and how much sex she says. normal variation then I would say that yeah beauty is winning but then when you get in like

Starting point is 00:55:31 when you get into abnormal outlier cases things are going to change a lot but in terms of the I do want to circle back to the personality indicator body count quote unquote body count as a personality indicator it's an indicator of sociosexuality sexuality to some degree and then it's also an indicator of normal social adjustment and i and i say normal is typical in the sense that if someone has like i remember speaking to a man who was very you know classic kind of bro type you know very muscular lots of tattoos and not you know i'm not talking about some like very um like kind of hippie polyamory type person like he's like kind of a bro type right and he was talking about how

Starting point is 00:56:31 weird it was that one of his friends preferred virgins right and I said well would you date someone if they were because I was I was kind of putting my researcher hat on I wanted to double click on this I was like oh what you know this is pretty interesting he's saying that this other mate preference is really weird so what's his mate preference and he said oh I'd be so freaked out I'd feel like I was doing something illegal right and I think that that might get it to an extent where it's like it's so uncommon in his social circles and in many men's you know in america these surveys are america uk that sort of thing yeah it's so common uh it's so uncommon to encounter that when you do it might be a signal of like some kind of some kind of maladjustment

Starting point is 00:57:16 yeah why is this happen whereas so it's it's a balance between like is this person you know normal functioning well adjusted sexually active individual you know, a person who has sex, right? Just my type. That kind of mentality. And then on the other end, is it someone who is going to cheat on me, who is not going to be able to hold a stable, committed relationship down, that sort of thing. And so I think that that's what explains the, I guess when you think about it, I know that from like a first principles evo perspective, you might think that no sexual history is always better. But when you take it in our current ecological context, I think that men's preferences make some strategic sense.

Starting point is 00:57:54 Yeah, and not even necessarily are current, although I guess when you start to fold religion in previously, that gets a bit squirrely, there is something sacred about the first time. Everybody remembers the first time, unless you were drunk, I think. And do you want that to be you? If you're a fully fledged adult that, you know, has done it five times before, number six is going to be someone's first? Yeah, really? That's, oh, I have a friend who dated a pretty public-facing girl, and she made, it was, you can still go on the internet and search these stories.

Starting point is 00:58:33 And he was the one that took a virginity. And I think he was 30 and she was sort of early 20s, like 22 or something like that. And fair play, but yeah, there's a bit of, like, like, I don't even know what to say. say about it. The facial expression you're making is, I think, what explains the, I think that... Well, that's a good one. Let's just, for the guys that are listening, you know, and this is, the

Starting point is 00:58:59 reason that it's interesting and the reason that me and you took an interest in this is that a lot of the talk in kind of the Red Pillbrough sphere would be around, you know, virgins is what you want, this is why you've got to get your passports, bro, et cetera, et cetera. And then you see men, like normal men's preferences and they don't... We don't want that. And if you just

Starting point is 00:59:15 think, you're... Everybody listening to this is going to be of age and a little bit older, just think about what that would be like. And you would know maybe beforehand or certainly afterward, would that be like super sick, bro? Or would that be something else? And I don't know what it is. And you're like, what the fuck just happened? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:59:39 Like that feels. And there's also, here's another thing to fold into that. I wonder whether there's a sense of obligation. Yeah. From guys to girls that, oh, first. she's going to expect dot dot dot which kind of pushes out the casual sex angle here that if this is your first that's going to be special maybe she's going to expect more she i'm not just one number which means that a particular type of sex casual sex yeah it's less accepted i'm more obliged to stick about perhaps yeah i mean you hear you hear from i think i think that honestly it's just it's just it's just It's a, it's a very, the takes that you're describing are very online and kind of only work online. They don't really map on to the modern mating market in a way that a lot of people find relatable.

Starting point is 01:00:34 I think that the facial expression you made and reacting to your friend's story is, I think that that explains the thing is that it's not, it's just that it kind of, it feels a little weird. I think that past a certain age, it's a little odd. And I think that that's where these mate preferences come. I think it's worth noting here I'm conscious of the fact that we might switch topics that women's mate preferences are surprisingly very similar here. If you ask about women's ideal preferences, I think that there's this concept among men that like, oh, get away with way more. Yeah, yeah, that women love playboys, that sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:01:11 But there does seem to be a similar effect where it's true that women discriminate much harsher against virgins than men. This is again... Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, this is the Stuart Williams and Thomas paper where there was a gap where women's kind of ick at the whole virgin thing was strong. Men also exhibited it, but women's, it was a bigger one. Oh, that's so interesting.

Starting point is 01:01:35 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I find that very intuitive. But then their optimum was very similar. We're again talking like a one past partner, two past partners, three past partners, four. that all looks pretty swell the decline starts after above average where we're talking 7, 8, 9 So it's a slightly longer tail

Starting point is 01:01:54 Yeah, and then as you pass that like this male has slept with, it's kind of funny how well maps onto the averages He's slept with more women than most men will sleep with in their lives That's when it starts to light That's when we get the plummet And it's like the willingness to date a man

Starting point is 01:02:09 Who is slept with like 20 women, 30 women, that's what... And you're saying personality cues again? Yeah, it's like is this guy really gonna be like just be realistic like odds on how likely is this guy going to be to never cheat on you and never want to cheat on you that kind of thing at very low probability then also like how likely is he to take you seriously and be interested in you so i think that it makes sense but when i first heard about those data i was surprised by them the intuition again going back to the 80s in the kind of evocyc literature has been like oh chastity is going to be much more important to men than women but then the actual research has showed surprisingly less consistent sex differences. And then, you know, if you're talking about modern anglosphere populations, basically no difference. Well, I mean, if you were in Victorian era England, the judgment on tattoos, dyed hair, choker necklaces, piercings would be significantly harsher,

Starting point is 01:03:07 because all of those are cues of sociosexuality, I think. Everybody interprets tattoos, dyed hair, piercings, choker necklaces. The choker necklace thing is fucking fascinating. You've seen that, right? Like, about, yeah, that it's fewer dates before sex, like, more likely to give oral sex, a bunch of others. And it seems to be, like, borne out in the data a little bit, too. Well, this is the thing is that with, with appearance enhancement, that has stereotypes associated with it. There's going to be a self-enforcing effect, right?

Starting point is 01:03:32 Because you know that this is going to be the way that it's, so you are expecting people to interpret you in that way and are prepared to play up to it. Even if the, even if the, and I'm talking about appearance modification, even if the appearance-based stereotype is at first completely meaningless and inaccurate, and it's a joke about like the location of the necklace being related to oral somehow, like it's a black belt or whatever. Even if it starts as like a silly meme among high schoolers, once it's there, now there's the social expectations associated with it. And so when you're waking up in the morning and be like,

Starting point is 01:04:09 oh, I want to wear this type of necklace, you know that that association is there. And so there's, there's going to be some effects found. And we see the same thing with tattoos, where it's like, people think the tattoos are associated with associative of aso-sexuality. And then when you test it, it actually is, right? People think this is. Yeah. You think about facial piercings. You think about choker necklaces, all these things.

Starting point is 01:04:30 Yep. It's like, maybe at first it was nonsense. But once there's the association, you've just made everyone who's not that way reconsider. And just that alone is going to have a small effect. Yeah. And these are small effects, but they're still. trust. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Ronda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They reduce, hello, omega-3s, there they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't.

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Starting point is 01:05:34 If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription. that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-O-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. What is the impact of body count on long-term relationship success? I mean, it's very intuitive. I'm always surprised by how controversial this is because I say it quite a bit. And I say it not even kind of bracing for impact, if that makes sense. I'm like,

Starting point is 01:06:15 this will, this seems intuitive, right? But people who love to have casual sex and sleep with lots of people and hop from relationship to relationship and as a result of all those behaviors end up with a higher number for their age than you would otherwise expect, those people are less likely to succeed in long-term monogamous pair bonds, than people who do not like doing that and do not have that sort of track record. And that, and when I say succeed,

Starting point is 01:06:48 I mean, in terms of every outcome measure. I mean, you know, more likely to get divorced, less likely to be satisfied in their relationships, more likely to cheat. There was one analysis, I believe was by the IFS, where if an individual,

Starting point is 01:07:05 and this is all true for men and women, by the way. I know that on the internet, there's a huge focus on women, but all these effects, there's no sex difference, and sometimes the effect is even larger in men than women. So that aside, right, we're talking about everybody here, if you subdivided the data neatly and said, people with a body count below five, people with a body count above five, what's their infidelity rate?

Starting point is 01:07:28 The infidelity rate of the above five group was double that of the below five group. No way. Yeah. So this is not a nothing burger, right? This is a thing. And the reason it's a thing is very intuitive, right? It's like, what is an affair, for example? Like, an affair is a form of casual sex. And so if someone has had lots of casual sex, they're telling you to some extent, oh, I'm more likely than someone who has not done this. I probably enjoy this, right? Because I keep doing it over and over. I mean, I'm sure there's some cases where that's not true and people change, obviously, but it's a huge, you know, past behavior. is a predictor of future behavior. So you're basically saying, oh, I've got, like when people are surprised by this, I'm surprised. Because it's like you've got two groups of people,

Starting point is 01:08:11 let's say, people who have slept with lots of people and people who haven't. And you're trying to predict who's going to sleep with more people in the future going forward. Like, why would you, why would you predict anything other than that? The only explanation that I could come up with is that somebody has closed the loops. Oh, they've gotten it out of their system.

Starting point is 01:08:28 Yeah, the classic, I imagine if I said that with alcohol. Right. I'm going to get it out of my system. I'm going to, so I can drink less in the future, I'm going to drink more during my undergrad, right? Imagine if I said this with drug use. Imagine if I said it with positive things. Imagine if I said, I'm going to get the gym out of my system, right? That doesn't happen, that it's like, oh, I'm going to go to the gym every day.

Starting point is 01:08:49 I'm going to work on my muscles. And then in the future, I am not going to want to do it as much because I used to do it. Like, you build healthy habits, you build unhealthy habits? Do you think that there's ever the potential for somebody to stray because they, They had unfulfilled variation early on in their sexual career. I mean, it's a really good point. And I think that what we're talking about here is average population level trends, which is the sort of thing this data is good for.

Starting point is 01:09:18 I think that there probably is some causal relationship, but the data don't speak to that yet. And you actually can't ethically design the sort of experiment that would tell us. Fucking ethics boards, dude. They suck so hard. So many interesting questions that we could answer. I think it's an interesting one around how people interpret sociosexuality. Buss had in the evolution of desire, I swear one of the lines that's still in my read-wise,

Starting point is 01:09:46 is the single biggest predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sex. Yeah. Is that true? Well, it's sex predicting sex, right? But is that true? Is the single biggest predictor of extramarital sex pre-marital sex? single biggest predictor. Well, it's David Buss saying it, so I'm very tempted to just...

Starting point is 01:10:06 Slightly older buck, though, right? Like, has evolution of desire as what? How old now? Yeah, that's true. It's like 1999, I believe. So, I mean, in my data and looking at other people's data, I would say relationship dissatisfaction, but that is... Could that be due to...

Starting point is 01:10:22 Think about that. Think about relationship satisfaction is like the dam lifting up and, like, all the other causes being allowed to run roughshod. Relationship dissatisfaction is not... one of the predictors that you could be able to say in advance exactly exactly it's like obviously when things get bad they get bad right it's kind of it's predicting itself and maybe it's because they've got wandering eyes maybe it's because they're not paying as much attention to you exactly and then it's it's also it's not a like it's it's kind of an all-cause thing because as soon as you don't

Starting point is 01:10:51 care about the relationship any other motivator becomes much more pertinent like maybe you were the sort of guy who never had a wandering eye and you know couldn't be swayed dissatisfaction has now The first thing to the surface is now what burst out, and the most salient personality trait you have is your high sociosexuality because you slept with 25 women before you go to this relationship. So I think that the best predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sex. Maybe that's true. I mean, I do know that if you look at people who do go the very religious route and they just have one person and that sort of thing, I mean, they do tend to have and they don't live together before marriage. The habitation effect. Yeah. I mean, they seem to do, they seem to do pretty well. I do think, though, that this is correlational.

Starting point is 01:11:38 And so there are going to be individuals who don't fit that pattern. And one thing that we cannot test, this is a huge caveat, is that we can't know, like, if you take that person who had a high body count, let's say, and cheated, we can't rewind the clock and say, oh, if you hadn't built that habit, you would have, like, maybe. Maybe it would have been even, like, I can't recommend from this, like, I can't, I can't, like, tentatively, I would say it's probably not a good idea. If you want to marry for life, it's probably not a good idea to sow your wild oats. It's probably not a good idea to try and get it out of your system. With the caveat that it's hard to know from the data with great confidence that there aren't individual cases where, that actually is protected. But also, I really wanted to get into this. The causal effect, somebody is,

Starting point is 01:12:36 somebody's just lost their virginity yesterday. And they're going to get into a relationship, which is going to be their lifelong relationship in eight years' time. They want to have sex with lots of people. They want to. They really, really want to. And as me saying, hold it back, is that going to make them less likely to cheat?

Starting point is 01:12:51 Yeah, it's a good point. It's a good point. And does it change? Does you sleeping around? Because one of the questions would be, well, you know what it's life? You've developed some sort of habit, some sort of lifestyle. You've maybe gotten rid of some of the stigma that's a part of it.

Starting point is 01:13:07 Inculcated some kind of fucking sexual rhythm with new partners, whatever it might be. You know what's out there. Yeah. Right? You actually know the mechanics. I mean, people who have never had a one-night stand, they actually don't know. They don't know how that works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:13:21 That's such an interesting point. I think one-night stands are, apart from in modern, modern media, often romanticized by people that have maybe only been in long-term relationships. Like, the taxi home, the fucking cleaning up of the clothes in the morning. It's not the beginning of a Love Actually movie. It's not. It's just steeped in awkwardness and stories that you tell your friends in WhatsApp chats the next day. Yeah, I think there's some cases probably, I mean, I think there's some case probably where people have that experience, don't like it, and it actually solidifies their commitment to monogamy.

Starting point is 01:13:55 Fuck, I'm not doing that again. I think that when we're talking about, I made it, I made kind of, a glib analogy to i was feeling quite cheeky made an analogy to alcohol that kind of thing and i think that to to walk that back to some degree i would say that it's probably true if we're talking about like very high cases um but there probably are some cases within normal normal range where like if you came to me and said look mac and i really really want to drink and party and all that sort of stuff like would my advice really be going into undergrad well don't do it because you'll become an alcoholic later?

Starting point is 01:14:30 Or would it be like, well, have a little bit of fun, try not to go too far. And then after, check back in and maybe don't, maybe you could make similar advice about, like, how to navigate sexuality. If you are someone who's, you know, sociosexually. This is the problem with these sort of like big population level data, these big surveys.

Starting point is 01:14:47 We don't know what the underlying motivation is. But there are lots of different ways. Robert Plowman, I always think about Robert Plummer when I think about this stuff. I always think about casual sex. I think about Robert Plumman. Yeah. And he said to me that there's lots of ways to get fat.

Starting point is 01:15:01 He's talking about behavioral genetics. You're saying there's lots of different ways to get fat. Some people have a high agrelin release. Some people have got a bigger stomach. Some people just don't like exercise. Some people have got a lower BMR. A million of the ways that I haven't thought about. Okay.

Starting point is 01:15:18 What that means is when you look at fat people, you are looking at many different routes up the top of the same mountain. when you look at high body count people, many different routes up that. Maybe it's because of social approval. Maybe it's because of a need for connection. Maybe it's because of a difficulty with commitment. Maybe it's because of high sociosexuality. Maybe it's because of a high sex drive.

Starting point is 01:15:39 Maybe it's because of whatever's going on. Maybe it's because of your job. You're a stripper or whatever, like, or a fucking metal guitar player. I think in that case, the negative predictive outcomes might be maintained. But I completely take your point. And we don't know how people are getting up because we're just taking. in these big aggregate pieces of data. I also think that another

Starting point is 01:15:59 thing to keep in mind, the reason that body count means anything is likely because it's a proxy for sociosexuality. And so when we're looking at an aggregate, as you say, sure, there's some predictive benefit. But if we were to look at any individual

Starting point is 01:16:15 case, you could assess it and say, like, okay, well, how predictive is this of sociosexuality? And we even see this in the recent research from again it's it's it's it's Thomas's team and I believe Stuart Williams is on it as well again where they looked at this across nations and they took a more fine grains nuanced approach than they did in 2019 yep and what they did was they looked at essentially the effects of recency

Starting point is 01:16:41 right yeah and it's like if someone let the number can be the same but if it's like all of them and you can really think about this like what's a better cue to sociosexuality if you're 38 and you meet a woman who's 34 and she's slept with 10 people but they were all in undergrad and since then it's been like one boyfriend right that's very different to meeting the same 34 year old woman who's like you know actually it's been 10 but they were all this past month right and you're number 11 like what's what's the cue right in terms of personality and what they found was that people were sensitive to that and I think they're sensitive to a lot of things like I think that if you're talking about like a body count of seven being quote unquote high it's not really

Starting point is 01:17:28 high for like a 35 year old right and it's certainly not a 35 year old for someone who's only slept with one person in the last 10 years yeah exactly but it actually is insanely high for like a 19 year old right like that's a shock right so i think that for people listening to this i would say that if you're trying to i mean i talk about this stuff first and foremost because i find it interesting not necessarily like it's kind of a second order effect if anything happens to be useful that's wonderful right and we want to extract that as much as possible but that's not my primary motivation for

Starting point is 01:17:59 here as a life coach are you yeah like in terms of looking yeah in terms of looking into it it's um but I would say that if you were trying to glean something practical from this don't I wouldn't take the kind of caveman like oh high body count bad low body count good approach or you know a cave woman as well because these preferences are apparently very similar and these outcomes as well I would say okay well I've got this piece of information

Starting point is 01:18:25 but what's the context of that number like is this a person like if you want long term healthy monogamy is this a person who has had five long term relationships because that might even be like a green flag if you're like 30 and they've had a few relationships that sounds pretty good if you're an undergrad and you met someone

Starting point is 01:18:43 in the number is five and it's all one night I mean, let's add, yeah, that's such a good point. If you were to do a third iteration of Thomas's study and say were these in a committed relationship, that lasted for longer than six months, or were these one-offs? Yeah, well, the completely different story. Totally different. Yeah, that's so great. Okay, 7.1 million views, quote tweeting, men do not care about your career, ladies.

Starting point is 01:19:06 I'm sorry they just don't. They will date a waitress at Applebee's over a corporate executive if they treat them right and make their lives easier. What does the signs say about this? Well, the men don't care about your career. It kind of depends on what men you're talking about. If you're talking about successful men, they clearly do. I mean, there's no, like this whole meme of successful men will date, what did she, a waitress? Applebee's waitress, okay.

Starting point is 01:19:34 So the successful men will date an Applebee's waitress. It doesn't line up with the data that richer men tend to select richer women, more educated men tend to select more educated women. Richer women appear basically immune to the decline in marriage that has transpired since the 1970s. So when you look at this data holistically, it doesn't seem to be the case that there is a effect of men selecting downward for youth and beauty and whatnot at the expense. Trading wealth for lugs.

Starting point is 01:20:14 Yeah, at the expense of career in education. When you look at the most successful men, they tend to pair up with the most successful women. This whole like Men Will Data, Denny's waitress, kind of fantasy. Be careful with what you say about Denny's. I'm a huge Denny's. No, no, nothing. Well, there's nothing wrong with being a Denny's waitress,

Starting point is 01:20:32 but I'm just saying. No, no, no, I don't care about the waitresses. I care about the restaurant. Okay. So Applebee's then. Applebee's you can talk shit on as much as much more. I'm not fucking shit. I'm not talking shit.

Starting point is 01:20:40 Just be careful with Denny's, dude. I will. Tiptoeing around it. We're proud fucking Denny's attendee. One point that I do want to bring up, a friend of mine has an Applebee's theory of attractiveness, which is if you see some chick that's super famous, like Sidney Sweeney, for instance, so he uses this example of Jennifer Aniston versus Megan Fox. Jennifer Aniston, you could see working in Applebee's.

Starting point is 01:21:10 Like you just saw her, you'd be like, fuck, that's a hot Applebee's waitress. but you can see it working in Applebee's. There's no way Megan Fox works in Applebees. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus, and your performance.

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Starting point is 01:22:14 functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. And what is this test meant to deduce? Whether or not you can, whether or not you're actually able to sleep with super famous celebrity women. It's total pulled out of his ass bro signs. But he basically says, like, if you can imagine I'm working in Applebee's, you've probably got a shot. Like, it's, is she sort of God's tear? Yeah, you don't have a, nobody's got a chance. I need to see your friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would not fuck Jennifer Anderson or Sydney Sweeney or fucking Megan Fox

Starting point is 01:22:43 They were all rejected Applebee's coming up a good bit So how much truth is there in men don't care about your career because it seems to me like guys would

Starting point is 01:22:57 be happy to sacrifice more in terms of socioeconomic status from a woman than women would be in a guy Oh yeah that's pretty uncontromotion I mean that is like one of the most well-supported findings in psychology. Okay. So is this just doing reduct you out absurdum on that? Man, do not care about your career. I'm sorry they don't. They'll date a waitress at Applebee's over a corporate

Starting point is 01:23:19 executive if they treat them right and make their lives easier. It's we care more about, interesting there that they said treat them right and make their lives easier, not is hot. Yeah, actually that's a good point. So it's disposition. I heard that, but it landed on my ears as a previous meme. They're talking about disposition. Agreeableness. conscientiousness. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that the caveat that is chucked in there probably makes it true in the sense that, yes, people will select for personality and beauty over career. Highly disagreeable woman in masculine energy, not soft or sensitive, not treating you right, making your life more difficult versus less educated, less wealthy. Yeah, yeah. Like we don't

Starting point is 01:24:10 see, like if you look at the biggest studies on stated and revealed preferences, career comes in as a low, moderate priority, right? So the men on women or for both? For both. Well, in revealed preferences for both, for men especially in stated preferences. So the sex differences in revealed preferences are less consistent. I think that my initial reaction of, oh, that's nonsense comes from knowing that successful men tend to pair up with successful women. And that suggests some, caring there and then when you ask men there does seem to be some stated preference for career it's not like don't care and then when you look at revealed preferences again it's a low priority i i do think that with the personality caveat or with a beauty caveat it kind of becomes

Starting point is 01:24:57 true but to say like don't care is is quite misleading well it's interesting that you uh and i actually uh misread even as i was saying it didn't realize that it said treat them right and make their yeah exactly right which is my brain immediately went to looks and youth it was a meme zone 35 year old corporate executive versus 21 year old Applebee's and then one of the reaction the reaction that actually got me onto it was from a woman being critical smart men don't marry bimbos because that would be a very very stupid thing to do the men claiming they don't care about intelligence education or status are just revealing where they're at on the hierarchy more than anything else there's a lot that's been pulled out of this but the first

Starting point is 01:25:40 on. Smart men don't marry bimbos. Catherine D. Boyle or some shit, I think. That is very accurate, actually, to the data. Smart men don't marry bimbos, because that would be a very, very stupid thing to do. The men claiming they don't care about intelligence, education, or status are just revealing where they're at on the hierarchy more than anything else. How's that accurate to the data? Well, they've put some linguistic top spin on it in order to make it a tweet.

Starting point is 01:26:07 So it's not precise, but it is accurate direction. in the sense that higher status men marry higher status women, more educated men, marry more educated women, richer men marry richer women, men with higher income, marry higher income women, even though oftentimes those women stop working after marriage. At the initial point of contact, they tend to both be in similar stratospheres. And they also tends to marry similarly in terms of their own age. The richer man is, the smaller in age gap he is likely to have, which a lot of people The richer a man is, the smaller the age gap. The less likely, the precise phrasing would be that the less likely is to have a large age gap.

Starting point is 01:26:49 So you see with these 10-year downward age gaps, as well as these five-year downward age gaps, they're less common among the male economic elite than they are among poor men. Explain me that. Well, I think that it's that these men are very successful and they're crushing it everything they're doing. Like it's kind of the Jeff Bezos archetype where it's like Jeff Bezos could, if he wanted to marry a 21-year-old, but he probably doesn't want to. He wants to marry someone he can actually relate to,

Starting point is 01:27:15 who's a fellow, you know, multi-millionaire and successful in her own right. And that's who he gets along with and who appeals to him. And I think that that's probably just the case with these, I think it's just probably the case with these elite males that they also covet eliteness in their part. Okay, so it's kind of a refined taste born out of a refined lifestyle In order to be able to achieve high socioeconomic success as a man,

Starting point is 01:27:41 you've had to become discerning and you probably have non-typical challenges that you're facing and you want somebody that can keep up with you. The great line from David Senra, he says, he's read 500 biographies of greatest founders from history. Everyone should go and listen to founders. And he says, the rule that I've learned about choosing a partner is that as a high-performing CEO or founder,

Starting point is 01:28:06 you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all. Yeah. And I feel like it's playing into that. It is. I was speaking to a very successful businessman, you know, one of these absolute crushers. And he, you know, he's dating someone who is in a non, just a not highly cognitive role. And he's like, look, they're great. But I miss when I was dating women who were in my space because at least they understood, you know, what the FHO was talking.

Starting point is 01:28:36 about when I came home from work. Like the sort of deals I'm working on, the mechanics of it. I feel like I have a partner in this. Yeah. One thing that I, one thing that I love about about my girlfriend, frankly, not to be not to be cheesy, is just that she's also a researcher. And so when I'm, you know, explaining something or presenting a paper or talking to a conference, like all aspects of my work are fully understood by her. It's not laborious. You don't need to overly explain. And to the point where I can actually acquire assistance on, and offer assistance on research matters. So it's a huge, it's a huge hack.

Starting point is 01:29:12 And a lot of these successful men, they wouldn't have anything to talk to with, you know, the Applebee's waitress, Tons of things to talk to because Denny's is incredible. Thank you. Applebee's specifically. Fuck Applebee's do. I mean, Denny's supremacist.

Starting point is 01:29:26 Yeah, look, I've been in relationships in the past. And this is an interesting pivot that guys in the mid to late 20s will see. and I certainly saw as well that what I was selecting for in my 20s was not what served me in my 30s and that was largely due to kind of growing up not being so much of an adult infant but that as I started to grow as a person

Starting point is 01:29:47 and have, I think what really happened was my true interests came to the surface that I was less embarrassed about what it was that I was interested in, I felt less shame about being nerdy or sensitive despite presenting like the school bully like inside a mill house as Finn Taylor said And what that meant was what I wanted in a partner changed.

Starting point is 01:30:09 I couldn't get away with somebody who was simply pleasant and attractive. I needed to be able to have a little bit more of a conversation because what it made me feel like was I was sort of Batman by day, but Bruce Wayne by night. And I couldn't bring my work home. It's obvious that these conversations are important to me. It's obvious that thinking about this stuff fires me up and I'm interested in it. And if I can't bring that into my relationship, for instance, if you needed to re-explain what a sex difference is, or what introssexual competition is, every time that you needed to talk about. So how was today, honey?

Starting point is 01:30:43 What are you working on at the moment? That would be tough. And I think the desire that people have to be able to really resonate with their partner on the surface, especially again, online Red Pill Broosphere, doesn't necessarily. sort of hit. But when you get into the nuts and bolts of how this long-term relationship is actually going to work, a relationship is essentially one long fucking podcast. That's what it is. It's one big conversation for the rest of time. And you want to, the theory is basically that you should try and have the most generative conversation that you can. You want to be able to speak to someone for 20,000 hours without getting bored. And if you've got that, plus the basics sorted, I think,

Starting point is 01:31:31 think you're probably going to get through. Like, they're pretty good with loyalty. They're pretty good in terms of attractiveness on your level, et cetera, et cetera. Like, that functionally is a big, is carrying a big part of long-term relationship success, I think. Can you talk to this person and not get bored? I mean, I think, I mean, what you said there, I hope somebody clips it because it's a really good point that I think people should hear. And I think the analogy is funny. Well, I mean, I'm always going to pedestalize my own industry. Yeah, well, one thing that was coming to mind was that it must be quite difficult for you to find someone who you can actually explain your work in a way that is coherent. With me, I'm wearing a few hats, and so...

Starting point is 01:32:21 But you can niche down, right? You need to find somebody that's in the niche. Yeah, like, I don't need someone who understands, like, all elements. Like, they don't need to understand, like, TikTok and that kind of thing, right? Like, understanding one or the other is probably fine. But with you, your career genuinely is, like, very, very strange. Yeah, thank you. I was thinking about what it would be like if you were a UFC fighter.

Starting point is 01:32:47 Do you need to date another UFC fighter? Well, a lot of them do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan, I believe, he's not a UFC fighter, but I believe his is also an excellent. And, like, who, like, when you kind of hear that guy interviewed and stuff, it's like, yeah, that track. yeah of course um but the more niche that your pursuit is especially if it's sort of sex coded right if it's male coded or female coded i understand what you're saying well fuck like you're a teacher well okay you're going to date another male teacher well you know you can probably i think

Starting point is 01:33:19 a lot of teaching especially of primary school secondary school kids most competent people can hold a conversation there yeah but if you're talking about oh i teach pure mathematics at postgrad, like, oh, fucking hell. I think it, yeah, I think it's understanding the kind of elements in nature. Obviously, you don't need to have, like, dating within your career isn't necessarily necessary, but dating, like, within your, your kind of stratospheric ballpark of, like, like a doctor and a lawyer both understand long hours and cognitive labor and, you know, trading, you know, lots of education.

Starting point is 01:33:54 Even if one's a pediatric surgeon and the other one does sports rehab or some shit, yeah, exactly. yeah yeah yeah it could be even it could be even closer such as this um i think that where this where this whole kind of appleby's waitress fantasy falls apart and the reason that you just don't see it right again like you can this is so fact checkable like you can see like many times is that yeah you can see like is this something that happens and when you actually look at the data educated men marry educated women richer men you know i've said this all before so it's like it doesn't seem to happen very often not as a norm and I think that

Starting point is 01:34:30 in terms of explaining it part of it is just a part of it is just proximity effects of course but then I think part of it also is selection for

Starting point is 01:34:38 genuine selection for similarity like someone you can talk to I think that a corporate lawyer could totally date you know a sick business woman or a surgeon or whatever

Starting point is 01:34:48 but I think that yeah I think that most of them if they were dating someone who's it doesn't need to be within the same niche one other interesting a fucking appendage

Starting point is 01:34:59 to add on to the work that I do unfortunately there is basically no moat around podcasting because everybody has conversations and what you're basically doing is chatting shit for a living and the issue of that

Starting point is 01:35:12 is that everybody partakes in what you do in one form or another and what I do and the particular skill set that I have built up permeates the rest of my life in a way that if I was a surgeon or a UFC fighter it wouldn't

Starting point is 01:35:27 unless you're a very bad fighter you're not randomly getting into punch-ups on the street or over dinner or with your partner and presumably you're not just like spontaneously doing improv surgery when you're out at a bar but everybody partakes in what I do which means that at least in my experience

Starting point is 01:35:45 it's been sometimes a little bit of a challenge to make girls feel comfortable not being not having a self-assessment of their boring. Oh, yes, I completely understand what you're is that you're like a professional conversationalist whose job is to talk to him about.

Starting point is 01:36:04 Yeah. What have I got to talk? He's just spent the afternoon with Jordan Peterson or Mac and Murphy talking about, God, like, you know, it would be like being a professional porn star and going home to your amateur, amateur sex. But apart from the fact that you have sex everywhere,

Starting point is 01:36:20 you have it over dinner, you have it as the kids are at the table, you have it, you know, as you're doing the dishes. It would be like that. And this is what I mean. to everything. So it's an interesting chat. What I'm saying is it incredibly unique? Podcasters need more sympathy is what I'm saying. Jesus fucking Christ.

Starting point is 01:36:35 Well, it's, yeah, I mean, that is, that is absolutely fascinating. I'm glad I double-clicked there because I was expecting just the kind of mechanics of the work being hard to understand, but the porn star analogy really drove it home for me. You know. But I know the language. Do you feel, yeah, do you feel when you get home so to, to say that there is a, so I was speaking to a guy who was a professional guitarist in his early 20s and he said it ruined guitar for him. No, not metal. He was playing wonderful. So he was, you know,

Starting point is 01:37:10 working for these cover bands and things like that. He was a pro guitarist, right? But not, not like a huge success. And he said that it killed guitar for him where it was like he got paid to do it so much that it was like there was a period where it took a while to get back into it. And I've even found this with social media to some extent that it's like when I was doing it and there was no money involved and it was kind of just for fun there was a lot more it was a lot there was so much more like creative passion at that time and i kind of have to get myself i force myself in that headspace do you leave like like like does talking become kind of like look i talk i talk i talk professionally let me rest does that uh yeah like the pawns start coming home and

Starting point is 01:37:47 going honey not tonight yeah exactly like i've been doing this all day yeah i've done nine to five yeah come on yeah uh i i could talk about this for a long time i wrote um a little note to myself, probably about five years ago, just as I started to turn pro with the show, which was during COVID. And I've come to sort of think about turning anything that you love into a labor as a very dangerous pursuit.

Starting point is 01:38:10 Very dangerous. You need to pick it very carefully. If you play pickleball, you love pickleball, you play a couple of nights a week and on a weekend with your friends, you're really into it, and you watch, maybe you've even taking classes

Starting point is 01:38:19 and you're becoming a bit better or whatever. You don't need to cross every tea and dot every eye. You don't need to put that much work. in. But as soon as you decide to turn pro, as soon as you make it your thing, all of that shit goes out the window. You need to be getting agility coaching and you need to be working on your sleep and your hydration and your nutrition and you're going to miss weddings and your girlfriend's going to get mad at you and you're going to need to work on, you're going

Starting point is 01:38:41 to get injuries and you're going to have to rehab them and your sense of identity is going to be wrapped up and you're going to be on this roller coaster. Well, in some ways you're going to love it more because you've committed to this thing, but in other ways it's going to feel like a labor. And the way that I've come to see it is Paul Graham's got this great, how to do great work. Wonderful essay. And there's a few different dynamics going on. You need like a 3D graph to explain it. At the very beginning, you have the most enthusiasm, typically, because everything's freshest, you're doing it just for the love of it. Isn't this amazing? But your experience is the lowest it'll ever be. And the returns per unit of effort are also

Starting point is 01:39:18 the lowest that there ever be. And as you go over time, typically I've found passion, the free, liberated passion does wane a little bit. If I look at my day, I did 11 hours of calls back to back on Wednesday this week. I started at 9 and I finished at 8 and there was no, there was zero break in between. Now, I'm front-loading

Starting point is 01:39:39 a lot of this because I'm about to go away on tour and I've got to eat a lot of shit and there's like tons of big episodes that I've told you about that are coming up and I'm like trying to negotiate all of this bullshit and like 90 minutes wrong, just on flights, just 90 minutes on my flights for the next two months. Yeah. Right, trying to move. I've got to go from fucking Portland, Maine to L.A. to this, to that.

Starting point is 01:39:58 Two and a half hours on copywriting for the channel, titles and thumbnails. But I extended that because I want to get out ahead, so I don't need to do these calls when I'm away. I had a call with my doctor team for half an hour on the morning. I had a call with my GM and my business development guy for a half an hour. And I look at my day. I'm like, that's 11 hours of calls back to back. I didn't need to do that when I started because the obligation, it was just doing it for love. It's just doing it for fun. So when you start, to turn pro with things, typically a lot of this comes along for the ride, but I'm at the stage now where every word that I say, every episode that I record, everything that I put out,

Starting point is 01:40:34 there has never been a point before now where it's had as much impact, where it can move the world in a better direction, where it generates more revenue, where it grows the platform more, and I've never had more expertise than I do now. So you have these three dials that are all moving, and there's probably more, but you have these three dials that are all moving at the same time. And I think what the goal is, at least in my experience, doing anything for a really, really long amount of time. I've been doing this show for nearly eight years now. That's a long amount of time to do anything, right? Even to be in one job now in the modern world for eight years is pretty long. You're managing your passion by tolerating how hard you work,

Starting point is 01:41:13 by putting your foot on and off the gas. There's a couple of little hacks that you can do to keep it going. Working with other people, huge hack. Like celebrating wins as well. Huge hack. If you've outsource your motivation to a group around you, little goals, having side quests that you do that don't distract from the main thing, but just keep it sufficiently varied. That's why the live shows are so important to me, because if I can get out there and get on stage and get some positive reinforcement from 10,000 people, sick. Like, I ride off that for a while. But I'd be lying if I said that I had the same motivation that I did when I started the show. But the reason that you start doing a thing is not the reason that you keep doing it after a long time. You know,

Starting point is 01:41:52 The reason that you started your post-grad studies will not quite be the same as it is now, and it won't be the same as when you've got your doctorate, and it won't be the same as when you start writing books, and it won't be the same as when you're substackling. You know what I mean? It's not going to be the same throughout time. So an interesting question is, how do I keep the main thing, the main thing, when the fuel source driving the main thing changes,

Starting point is 01:42:13 and the direction the main thing's going in is altered as well. And I talked about this with Chris Bumstead. The Chris Bumstead episode, people can go and listen to that. And he says the same thing. He's like, the reason I started doing bodybuilding, it's not the same as when I was partway through my career, was not the same as when I thought I was going to retire, and wasn't the same as when I did retire.

Starting point is 01:42:30 And it's not the same that I do it now, now that I have retired. Yeah. But it's the same thing. Yeah. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, you've got different fuel sources, different directions. And it's fascinating.

Starting point is 01:42:39 I really love that you went there. Fucking great question. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a challenging idea, this idea of going pro. I mean, I think one of the funniest things, and I'm sure you experienced this switch at some point, has been everyone in my life pivoting from, like,

Starting point is 01:43:03 you know, being, not open, you know, everyone's supportive, but maybe being a little bit irritated with how much time I'm spending on TikTok, to being like, please post more on TikTok. You know, like, please, like, you should post today. I remember when I used to play, I played violin between the ages of maybe 11 and 15, and I played in orchestras and stuff. I did notice over time my mom would ask me to play for her more.

Starting point is 01:43:25 Oh, that's interesting. Presumably just because it was less painful. It was less shit to listen to. So as somebody gets better at what they do, and this is what I mean, it is a vicious dynamic, this trade-off that you have, where motivation can dwindle over time. And there's other fuels that come in and, okay, how can I bolster this? Because habit as well, there's another one that I didn't account for.

Starting point is 01:43:49 like just at 2 p.m. central time, I'm supposed to speak to an academic with an unpronounceable surname. That's what I do, right? That's what I do. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. That's what I do. And you go, well, if I didn't do that, I'd feel, you know, all out of sorts. Yeah, it gets easier. But is that motivation? No, not really. It's more habit. And does that make it less pure? Well, I don't know. Like the outcome, the expertise is better, but how would it be even better if you could get the motor. It's a real, it's a real interesting sort of nebulous thing. And I think anybody that does anything for a long time should be aware of this. And I would say, use the fuel that you have would be a piece of advice. So if, if you are, someone came and asked me this in London a couple

Starting point is 01:44:34 of weeks ago, basically said, no, sorry, it was the first work in progress live show that I did here. It's like, dude, my life's going great. I'm like, okay, well, that's a first in terms of questions that I get asked at Q&As. You were at the Melbourne show, and it wasn't usually my life's going great. It's usually here's a challenge that I'm facing. My life's going great. I really, really want to crush it at the moment, and I've got tons of energy. But I feel that work-life balance kind of important. I sort of looked at the dude who's dark, I couldn't see because the light was a moment. So how old are you? He's up 23. So I, bro, fucking hell. Let's send it. You've got the freest motivation in history. It is never going to be easier for you

Starting point is 01:45:12 to do the shit that you need to do than right now. for me to have the energy that I had to when I was 23 doing club promo or 31 one year into the podcast that like pure unbridled blue sky vision fucking light sky ceiling thinking I it that fuel source is largely spent in many ways and it's been taken on by perhaps even more potent ones but that one's gone yeah it will never be easier to get you to do the shit that you need to do than when you are compelled to do it. So fucking send it. I'm like,

Starting point is 01:45:47 like, castigating this guy who's like, yeah, my life's going great, but I'm like, kind of taking it easy. But I really want to go harder, but I realize that work life balance, I'm like, dude,

Starting point is 01:45:55 you're 23. Worry about this in a decade. Yeah. Like, fucking take a flame throw to the middle of the candle and blow the shit out of it. Yeah. And it was like,

Starting point is 01:46:03 oh, yeah. Yeah, that feels like what I want to do. Okay, go forth and fucking end some worlds. Because honestly, the work life balance is going to be a lot easier when your wife and kids are begging you for balance. As opposed to inverting it, as opposed to inverting it.

Starting point is 01:46:16 Yeah, okay. The bottom 40% of men and top 20% of women are now hyperandrous. What's that mean? Well, I'm glad that you struggled with the pronunciation there because it actually highlights just how interesting this change is that hyper-hypergamy, hyper-gyny have been these prevent. prevailing norms, hypergamy, just meaning, you know, marrying up, essentially. And the default, when you say that term has been, oh, that's, that's women marrying up, right? That's, that's

Starting point is 01:46:51 almost always what it's, what it's meant to refer to. And over the last half century or so, women's economic and social gains have been tremendous, such that men and women are rather equal in terms of their economic productivity and social status. And this has occasioned a rebalancing of the mating market such that if any significant number of people pair up, there is going to be a number of people who are pairing up in the reverse of the normal, hyperandry, right, where the mail is mating up. That's a term that I actually believe was coined by one of my supervisors, Rob Brooks. who you yeah i love rob yeah so it's interesting um what do you want to discuss related to this

Starting point is 01:47:46 well first off explain explain what the bottom 40 percent of men and top 20 percent of women are now dating more socioeconomically successful woman to less socioeconomically successful man why is that why bottom and top what explain that if you were oh so i understand so the one real risk of confusion here potentially would be that thinking that they're pairing up with each other. So what seems, what that data reflect, this is from the IFS analysis, is that, and I believe it was 1.4 million was the sample size. So it's a representative. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of people. Is that the bottom two quintiles of men on average, right? If you were to take, if you were to separate, and it's just a way of, it's just a way of looking at the data. It's nothing more than that.

Starting point is 01:48:36 If you were to separate people into quintiles and say, okay, what are the bottom two quintiles of men doing? Like, on average. And on average, those men are marrying up. So if you were to take one of them at random and say, do you earn more or does your partner earn more? On average, they would say, my partner earns. And that's 0th percentile to 40th percentile of income. Yeah. And if you look at 80th percentile to 100th percentile of income in women, They're marrying down. And you were to just randomly say, you know, do you make more or does your husband make more on average? They would say, well, I make more.

Starting point is 01:49:15 And that's a real change. I think it's pretty interesting. And it's hard to know how much this reflects a re. This is a recalibration of behavior to the new landscape. Yeah, the new ecology. It remains to be seen how much it's a recalibration of preferences. I know that this is something that's very interesting to you, but as humans, I think what... Well, as a woman in the top 20% income bracket, it's unbelievably interesting to me.

Starting point is 01:49:42 Yeah, it is interesting, right? I think it's interesting, too. It's what I've been studying for the last year. It's a problem that I've been thinking about. We've got some new research under peer review right now on this exact subject. Can you say much about that, or is it too early to blow your load on it? It's... I wouldn't use that phrase, but... Premature publication. Yeah, premature publication. You know, I've gotten in trouble with this before where I've had, I've had Candace say, please stop talking, please stop doing a podcast tour. We love you, Candice.

Starting point is 01:50:10 Yeah, a podcast tour prior to peer review. And I suppose it could influence things in some way if it's already like a known fact. Yeah. But I think that I'll talk more about it in the future. Cool. For now, we'll just say that it's an interesting problem, right? because humans have a diverse array of variation-producing mechanisms that we can leverage towards adapting to the ecology, right? And it is possible to adapt to the prevailing ecology,

Starting point is 01:50:42 as you say, without adapting what you want internally. Like, you can make a strategic, so a really short-term, I'm talking about different behavioral adaptation mechanisms. We've got really short-term stuff, like thinking through your situation, like playing chess and saying, oh, it's going to suck. Like, I might want to get my queen out now, but the chess board is going to be all sorts of messed up if I do that. So I'm thinking about what I should do and I'm doing something different from what my impulses, right? Like, we can do stuff like that as people and we can adapt through that. We have longer term, medium-term adaptation, such as cultural adaptation. So that's where, like, for example, in the case of this, in the case of this precise example, it used to be humiliating and strange to at a dinner party say that your wife makes more money than you.

Starting point is 01:51:30 But already we have culturally adapted to the new markets, the new ecology, by making that kind of banal, right? It depends on what the audience is it's landing with. It may be results in one joke at your expense at worst. That doesn't really go much further than that. most people would be completely normal. As opposed to if it was 50 years ago. Exactly, exactly. So we've got some cultural adaptation.

Starting point is 01:51:52 And then there's the longest term, slowest, and most uncontrollable. I mean, it just is what it is, genetic adaptation. Preference, right? Yeah, so which could be the preference in this case. So if our mate preferences are hard influenced by our evolved psychology, right, then you're going to have a very long period of behavioral and cultural adjustment. But internal... Oh, this is so cool.

Starting point is 01:52:19 Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have conflict. So we have, we have, what this evidence is showing here is strategic adjustment, that chessboard level mechanism that we were talking about. And some cultural adjustment, maybe. Maybe. Yeah, but that's not shown in the data, but we know that there's some cultural adjustment.

Starting point is 01:52:37 We can see that there's some cultural adjustment. It's interesting, right? Because it's not clear from that data, but is it the case that the, you know, the These, let's say, bottom 40% of men are like, well, you know, I would like to be, I have the kind of cultural coding that I should be a provider that would give me a lot of self-esteem. I would quite like that. You know, I maybe have some mate preferences geared towards that as well that are evolved to some degree. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I have this intuition. But strategically, I know I'm going to be single if I don't mate up, right? And also I know that I'm not going to pay rent if I don't make it. And the same thing is in reverse too. Well, yeah, exactly. And that's even the more risky one because I would say that I would be quite confident that those bottom 40% probably, the bottom 40% of males, I'd be pretty confident based on what I've seen that they're probably just either ambivalent or kind of stoked to be mating up. Like they don't really much. You know what I mean? Like it's like, you know, she's paying off my car right. You know, like I've been that guy. I know, I know what that, I know that situation. It's like most of most of the rent, most of my rent is covered. My car is getting paid off. um it's not that stressful right even if at a dinner party it might be there's a joke of my expense what about the inverse but the other but the inverse is where the concern comes in that's where we see these new york times articles that's where we see these viral tweets that's where yeah exactly

Starting point is 01:54:02 that's where we see this kind of cultural tension that is happening where it's essentially like it's it's what you call the tall girl problem so to say where there is a wide widespread concern that the mate preferences of the most successful women won't adapt over a short-term time horizon. And so what we're really interested in investigating, and we're doing this completely neutrally, it's just interesting. Can they adapt, right? That's the current research question that I would suggest that they are adapting. Behaviorally, but emotionally, you know that there are, I know that you know this data. repeating it for the audience's sake, that these culturally incongruent pairings, these hyperandrous pairings, they're associated in some data from Europe, for example.

Starting point is 01:54:57 Domestic violence. Yeah, with worse relationship outcomes, which would suggest that it's like maybe there's a strategic situation where it's like, I'm going to adapt my behavior so I can make. Well, think about that, dude. Think about how ruthless it is. I can't be bothered doing the caveat, yet, but evidently this is only a hypothetical. Imagine how ruthless it would be, if you were to say to women, you have two choices in life, one is to pursue the career that you want and the other is to be beaten up by your husband.

Starting point is 01:55:24 I mean, that's all, obviously that's not the actual thing, but that is the, but that is, the data is in that trend where it's like there's this, these status reversed marriages have these, you know, horrible outcomes in some cases, like, or they have a higher probability of these whole. Or you have a more milk toast example. You have the choice between pursuing the career that you want and being in a happy relationship where you're attracted to your partner. Yeah. So what we're hoping, I guess, and also like optimistically investigating is like to what extent are these preferences for women mating up? To what extent are those malleable? And to what extent are they rigid? Oh, dude. You've always been so fucking white-pilled on this. Ever since

Starting point is 01:56:11 we started talking about this years ago. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the, the, I think that the question is, to what extent are made preferences flexible, to what extent are we flexible? And I'm, without getting too into, without getting too into recent research, I think that we have a lot of reason for optimism here. And I think that there is, so look, I think that there is some evidence of of really unfortunate cultural growing pain, so to say, where these relationships where the woman makes more have these negative outcomes for now.

Starting point is 01:56:52 But I feel confident that over a longer term, over a longer time horizon, humans will be able to adapt. Why? How long evolution takes fucking forever? When you look at the anthropological literature, there are many cases where female provisioning is greater than male provisioning, right? So, for example, among the Pallion of South India, they live in montane rainforests, and the primary food source yams are gathered rather than hunted, right? And gathering is more of a cross-called.

Starting point is 01:57:38 culturally, it's more of a female-coded activity and hunting much more done by males, right? And so the long and short of it is about 70% of food is produced by women, right? And there seems to be cultural adaptation to this. It seems totally fine, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble. What I would say is that we're in an uncomfortable state culturally because we are, yeah, we're pivoting from a culture where male provisioning is the norm to, a culture where bi-parental provisioning is the norm, right? So socioeconomically.

Starting point is 01:58:15 And so what I would say is this, is that in the short term, it is true that there are these horrible growing pains, but I feel confident if I'm going to bet on human adaptability

Starting point is 01:58:30 versus non-adaptability, I'm going to bet on human adaptability every time just because I've seen... There's evidence for so on. Do you see the study... Yeah, I see so much variety cross-culturally. But I don't want to downplay, though. The thing is, the thing is this, is that you don't want to, when we're talking about something as serious, when I'm, when I'm

Starting point is 01:58:46 talking about something as serious and awful as domestic violence or divorce or infidelity or even relationship dissatisfaction. Relationship to satisfaction is awful. Very painful. I don't want to come on here as the over-optimistic anthropologist, right? And just say, and just say, oh, everything's going to be all right, guys. You know, everything's going to be fine. I know that there are these, I know that there are these issues, but I'm confident that, like, to even, even my phrasing it as growing pains, maybe was, it was insufficiently sensitive to how bad some of these issues can be. A period of pain. Yeah. However, again, look, we'll have another conversation about it in the future.

Starting point is 01:59:25 It's a topic that I'm investigating. I think that, I think that humans are adaptable and that there's bound to be a period of tension when you're switching provisioning strategy. the sort of nuts and bolts of it, unless you're going to put the kibosh on the socioeconomic status of women or men and women are going to stop coupling up, this is going to happen. Thank you. Yes.

Starting point is 01:59:51 So this is the exact point I'm making is that there is no conceivable future, I think, where anyone is going to put the brakes on women's economic gains. Like that would seem, you know, morally insane. Especially in the current climate. Yeah, exactly. like it doesn't it doesn't it does it's complete non-starter right and so it's literally and also sorry

Starting point is 02:00:12 women wouldn't put it on themselves yeah don't think which would be another option yeah exactly for some way either externally or internally someone would put kind of ceiling socioeconomically on women so the options for the mating market and the options for successful women are adapt or don't pair up right it's like if you're a top 20% woman your choices actually are either accept the likely possibility that you probably won't date someone at or above your level or don't pair up, right? There is going to be some portion of them who still manage to action on dating up economically, but it's not the norm already. And soon, if trends continue, it's going to be, yeah, the top half of women don't pair up up, if that makes sense.

Starting point is 02:00:57 And so you can either, so for men and women, the option is the option that it has been for us and all of our male and female ancestors for time immemorial, adapt or die. Bro, this is so interesting. I fucking, especially having watched this, this is a wonderful thing about being in a niche for a while. You get to see things unfold. You know, I've been talking. Yeah, fascinating.

Starting point is 02:01:24 You know, I think I've first said tall girl problem 2021. Yeah. I'm seeing it unfold. You know, that top quintile are the tall girls. Yeah. And then you see even this year all these New York Times articles, these things, basically focusing, zeroing in on this subgroup and saying, hey, what's going wrong, you know? Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Starting point is 02:01:46 I voice noted you a while ago basically saying could birth rate and coupling rates be going down because everyone is just fatter now? Basically, my argument, it's a reductive way to put it. Basically, I said, can a civilization make itself too unattractive? I think I next this idea in the... You don't want to talk about it? No, I'm... No, I suggested it as something we're talking about. I think that in our initial interaction,

Starting point is 02:02:11 I said, I'm not sure, but I'm happy to talk about it more. Okay, so here's my perspective. I wondered whether or not humans can eat themselves out of being attractive sexual objects. Like, obviously with increasing weight, there's changes in vasculature, libido, like, fucking issues, like, et cetera, et cetera. But even though people typically mate with people of a similar level of attractiveness, presumably there is kind of a flaw below which people are just less attractive, no matter how unattractive you are.

Starting point is 02:02:45 And especially if it's becoming unattractive due to gaining a lot of weight. Like if you're morbidly obese, what you know inside is maybe a you that wasn't. And maybe your sense of your own mate value, you kind of have like alpha widow distortion of yourself. You have like mirror widow distortion of yourself where you think well look I know that I might be a bit fucking fat right now and maybe that's made me go from a five to a four to a three or whatever it might have been. But I know like deep down I know that I'm not and I really shouldn't be dating this sort of a people's I wonder if our own sense of our own mate value physically is able to be sufficiently malleable to wax and wane with the sizes of weight gain that we've seen

Starting point is 02:03:28 And I'm wondering whether the lack of coupling up and the increase in birth rates could just be due to the fact that everybody finds each other a bit less attractive because the number one source of malnutrition globally is obesity, not starvation. I think – Not saying all the starving people are having sex either. I think the – there's a few interesting threads that you've pulled out there. One is that there is the very broad correlation in the sense that over the same time period that we've seen significant. and sexlessness rise, there's been, there's been obviously increasing obesity over that same time period. And then also, we're going to get to run the experiment here with these GLP1 agonists. There's already been a massive reduction, and that reduction is going to continue. I think that

Starting point is 02:04:18 we're going to see obesity essentially disappear from America in our lifetime. And that's an incredible, from a health perspective, from a human flourishing perspective, that's an incredibly positive thing. As far as the causes of sexlessness and singleness, I actually think, this is something that I was speaking to Andrew Moore about rather recently, is that I think that the coincident timing within the case of singleness, declining marriage, et cetera, I think it is downstream of what we were discussing earlier more than anything. well it's a complex it's a complex issue right but because here's the thing is that people hear people hear reducing marriage and they think sorry to interrupt you no it's it's a habit of

Starting point is 02:05:08 mind it's terrible people here reducing marriage rates and they think reducing marriage rates bad but a lot of the people who aren't getting married shouldn't have gotten married right that's why divorce rates are going down divorce rates are also going down exactly like the people who get married today, no joke. The people of my generation, Gen Z, the people who are getting married from my generation, are currently on track to have a divorce rate similar, most similar, to people in the 1950s. And divorce rates overall are as low as they've been since 1970 among people who get married. So marriage among the people who participate in the institution is doing better than ever, right? It's good, right? So people hear like, oh,

Starting point is 02:05:54 marriage rates declining bad, and they've actually upticked a little bit since COVID as kind of a post-COVID bump, but overall, overall declining, people think that's bad. And I agree to an extent, but with the caveat that if the reason marriage rates are declining is because women who would have married due to having to be financial prisoners of men, I know that's a term you've used before, if that's the reason they're declining, well, that, I mean, that just seems like a writing. of a great wrong. So in terms of like explaining declining marriage rates, things like that, I would lean towards that explanation. The connection with obesity, though, I mean, it's interesting and what you're describing in terms of the kind of internal mate value. Like we see with, I know that there's one speed dating study on this, I can't remember the author's names, but essentially the long and short of it is, is that it's not that people are attracted to people who are their league is that they're attracted to the best looking person that reciprocates their interest. Yeah. So it's not that, it's not that like, because sometimes people ask this about like,

Starting point is 02:07:01 oh, do, you know, or do when unattractive people pair up, right, are they actually, you know, is that their preference or is, like, do unattractive people prefer the looks of unattractive people to super attractive people? That doesn't seem. But the three not date the eight? Well, if they were able to get reciprocal attention, probably. I wish it was true. that it was like, oh, twos are most attracted to twos, three's are most attracted to threes, or however you might slice it. But it doesn't seem to be true.

Starting point is 02:07:27 So is there any data suggesting that people who are less physically attractive have worse relationship outcomes? Yeah, yeah, there is. That's really unfortunate, and I've never heard of it before. Yeah, well, it's like even in, like it's uncomfortable to talk about, but even in my infidelity study, which we talked about, last time I was on, people tended to cheat up, not down, and attractiveness. And one implication of that would be that if you're more attractive, that's probably a protective factor against

Starting point is 02:08:05 infidelity. I think that it's interesting. So with the only negative outcome that I've seen... Sorry, just to interject there, keep the only negative outcome that you've seen pinned. That only works. Like, the more attractive you are, the more protective it is against infidelity. But that's only if the that you are dating is within that attractiveness band because if attractiveness was that would be true if attractiveness was evenly distributed but the but the more attractive you get that you get so rare right right like like you were a male oh so the opportunity for your partner to find another eight or above yes exactly yeah yeah yeah so so like you used to be a male model correct right so you might some would say still am yeah right um are are you do you work as a model no no no

Starting point is 02:08:51 So something would just say. I did a, I did a, my first editorial shoot that I organized myself. I did that with a photographer I've worked with for nearly 20 years now. I did that in Newcastle over Christmas. I haven't put any of the photos out from it. I did it kind of just for my own archive. Yeah. It was so much fun, but it also reminded me how much I fucking hated that industry for so long,

Starting point is 02:09:13 dude, being ordered around, being on set early, not being able to do it. I would much sooner wear crocs and socks and fucking turn up here. and speak to you. So I've pivoted. It was cool for the time, but yeah, as you, as you're saying, if you're an eight, there are way fewer nine and ten. Yeah, exactly. So the reason that you're dead right in terms of if it was perfectly even distributed,

Starting point is 02:09:33 it wouldn't have a protective factor. But let's say people have a tendency to cheat up and not cheat down in terms of physical attractiveness and that the vast majority of people who do cheat will only cheat up in terms of physical attractiveness. If you're, you know, a formal male model, even if you're dating someone who's a female supermodal, like how many male models is you running into, right? That's like one in a hundred thousand. Question on that. The people who are cheating up, we could call it. The people that are cheating up, presumably one of the reasons for that is that it's easier to get commitment from

Starting point is 02:10:08 somebody to short-term mating than it is to long-term mating. So you can get a little bit of a trade. But I must imagine this changes the sort of people that men cheat with and the women cheat with because women are, you can see where I'm going. No, no, no, but maybe the audience can't. Okay, I just like it. It's been, I haven't got to talk about this in depth for a long time, and it's fun when you see somebody's eyes light, which has happened throughout the conversation,

Starting point is 02:10:32 and you're like, oh, they know where I'm going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the good marriage coming home from work thing I was talking about. If you take us home, yeah. Basically, if you are, guys will, women will tend to have highest, standards for short-term mating than they will for long-term mating, at least in terms of physical attractiveness. The same is not true for men. Men will have the opposite. So it's one of the

Starting point is 02:10:59 sneaky surprises of that study, which we discussed last time I was on here, was that I understood so look, it's just easier for a woman to cheat up in terms of physical attractiveness because men will cheat, men will have these short-term flings that are so below. Yeah, like there are male rock stars who will... Just fuck a groupie. Yeah, who will have sex with completely random.

Starting point is 02:11:27 We'll have sex with completely random individuals who you would never expect, and you just don't see that with female rock stars in the same group. Slipped's not been slang in it. To like random guys, right? That's just not... That's what she wants to.

Starting point is 02:11:38 I mean, I'm choosing this very outlier example, but it's also shown, just in case some people are saying, well, that's not normal human mating. It's also shown a normal human mating that men will relax their mate preferences for short-term and uncommitted mating. So it was surprising in a way that men could, not that they wanted to, that they're wanting to was not unusual to me at all. It was surprising that they could effectively cheat up on average in terms of physical attractiveness. I found that surprising. The pin that I put in in terms of the only negative relationship outcome I've seen, if we were to go through, you know, associations between

Starting point is 02:12:16 attractiveness and mating, right? It's just win after win after win for the more attractive people, right? We're talking more mates, more desirable mates, more committed and doting partners in some studies. It's just... So I'm going to push back on that one. Mates who must be get, Mates once gained must be maintained, once said the philosopher, D, bus. And this point is basically the more attention that your partner gets, the greater the amount of competition is. And yet, it seems like most people would make, many people may make this utilitarian rational, well, how hot is my partner and how hot is the person that's pursuing me? And if they're a nine, how many more nines and tens are there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:13:04 But if you're also a nine, you're being pursued by a lot of people. And if you have relationship dissatisfaction, even if it's nine to nine, or let's say it's eight to nine, the nine is going to be like, oh, there's so many fucking potential suitors. So I do think that there's a challenge of, I don't think it's good all the way up in terms of attractiveness. You're right, but again, I have to bring back in the rarity phenomenon where if you're a true nine, you're just much more likely to be the more attractive party in the imbalance, hence the more committed and doting partners aspect. of it. But even within that, there's a suggestion that when you have attractiveness in balance, there's other tensions as well. Correct. Yes. You have higher rates of fucking, what is it, men who aren't the primary breadwin are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. When you're in relationships that have got too big of a mate value discrepancy, partners tend to switch from a benefit affording to a cost-inflicting mating strategy, which is where we see stuff like negging, excessive mate guarding, domestic violence,

Starting point is 02:14:07 and extreme circumstances. And you're subject to that heavy mate guarding. So that's actually, that's an interesting angle. I was going in a different direction. I'm going to 100% take your point and add that to my list of negative outcomes associated with being good luck. Yes. I fucking added it.

Starting point is 02:14:25 You're subject to more heavy mate guarding. Yep. Regardless of how attractive your partner is, right? But also in terms of the switch to a cost inflicting versus a benefit affording strategy. It's more like what the male can do than the absolute size of the gap. So it's associated with the size of the gap because of that indicates something about what they have options to. But a lot of it is just benefit provisioning. And in a modern context, there are lots of benefits that can be provided. There was a recent study from some Polish researchers. I texted you about

Starting point is 02:14:57 it, but I'll share it here for redundancy, where they found that the greater the gap was between a man and a woman in attractiveness. If they measured the gap, they could, effectively predict to some degree how often he would go down on her in bed right so there's a lot of benefit provisioning that can happen in relationships and attractive people are much more likely to be the beneficiary in that scenario yeah and and many other things right i just had a very poorly time of my own lips which i hope people do not zoom in on and make edits of so here here's here's where i'm going with this is that there are there is some suggestive evidence that people who are very good looking

Starting point is 02:15:39 might have slightly lower relationship satisfaction because they're more likely to be, you know, keenly aware of the fact that they could swap out their partner at any time and dating down. Oh, they have optionality distress. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, imagine what it's like to be, you know, like an incredibly beautiful woman, right?

Starting point is 02:15:59 You're just constantly being bombarded with your other choices at your work on the bus. Same would be true if you were a very high status man. Yeah, exactly. Being a male rock star. Imagine how difficult it is to be. I mean, you're kind of a podcasting rock star. It must be very difficult.

Starting point is 02:16:17 Unbelievably, unbelievably, all of the women who come up to me on the street and say, my boyfriend listens to your show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. That's funny. Point taken. But the long and short of it is that there is a, that there is, in fact, a cost there.

Starting point is 02:16:41 But for the most part, I would say, like, if I was rolling the dice to, like, start the game of human mating, and it's like, I want the best overall outcome, there's no world where I wouldn't want to be more attractive, right? There are costs, but the costs are almost, it's almost suffering from success. Like, there are problems in the same way

Starting point is 02:17:01 that, like, being too rich causes new problems. Like the problem of... Roll the dice and get a slightly bigger penis, you'll be fine. Yeah, right, exactly. Like, the problem of too many people wanting to date you is just so much better than the inverse problem. Yeah. Even if it caused a little bit of relationship to that.

Starting point is 02:17:20 I sent you a car voice note a few months ago talking about the asymmetry of costs and benefits of men and women for non-monogamy. And I've never heard anybody else talk about this, although I'm sure I'm not the first to talk about it. So I'm going to try and remind you of what it was that I said. So basically, I was thinking about the prospect of a man and a woman entering non-monogamy and what the benefits are and what the costs are. So the unique thing that I haven't heard anyone talk about before is that there are greater benefits for men because

Starting point is 02:17:55 on average men have more variety in their sexual fantasies across any single sexual fantasy. If you ask a man, how many partners he wants throughout his life, et cetera. etc. It tends to be higher. Do men have higher sociosexuality? Is that a way that you would be able to say? Yeah. Right. Okay. But that would be... It's one of the most replical findings in all of psychology. Okay. So men are more sociosexual than women. They want more sexual partners and they're more open to casual sex too, which is typically what non-monogamy has, at least in part. But they're also more subject to dissatisfaction at the thought that their partner is getting physically intimate with another person, specifically another man. So,

Starting point is 02:18:34 There are greater benefits, but there are greater costs, and both are paid by the man. If there was such a thing as emotional non-monogamy, not sexual non-monogamy, emotional non-monogamy, so for the guys that are listening, imagine the relationship that you're in, potentially, you get to sleep around, but you have to deal with your misses sleeping around. How much, hey, do you get from getting to sprayed about a bit versus how much, oh do you have by the thought that she's being sprayed at a bit now the inverse would be uh and it's typically different ways you can set up non-monogamy but a lot of them are physically you can be intimate emotionally we are monogamous like that's one relatively common setup imagine the

Starting point is 02:19:21 inverse imagine physically we can be monogamous but emotionally we are allowed to spray it about Now, I would suggest that in those situations, women would feel very uncomfortable with it. That's not for me to say that women don't already feel very uncomfortable with the non-monogamy thing, but I think that's because they don't derive the same benefits that men do, not because they pay higher costs. As in, they're not going to find it quite as painful. They're still going to find it very painful, especially if you're not agreeing to this, if you've been fucking con coerced, persuaded into doing this thing. But the pretty replicable study of, as a man, imagine your woman,

Starting point is 02:19:59 sleeping with another man but not being emotionally intimate or being emotionally intimate with another man and not sleeping with him and for the woman imagine the same and men typically say I'd rather that she said she loved him but didn't fuck him and for women they said why I'd rather that he fucked her but didn't say that he loved her at least that's one of the and when you combine these two worlds together I thought huh there seems to be something interesting that

Starting point is 02:20:21 so what do you reckon well I think I think there definitely is something interesting and I think what's interesting I'm going to agree with everything you've said and just add the ultimate lens. So this is all quite proximate. It's about the feelings. But the asymmetry in feelings is also reflecting an asymmetry in costs and benefits at the evolutionary level. So while a man can have multiple women who are pregnant by him at one time, a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time. And so there's a much more powerful evolutionary benefit to sexual variety, as you're well aware of. But then there's also

Starting point is 02:21:02 a greater risk of cuckoldry, right? There's no chance of a woman accidentally raising a child that is not hers, right? That's just not the sort of person. No woman has ever given birth to a child that wasn't hers. Exactly. And that's not something that's occasioned by, well, I mean, I guess technically with modern technology, but it's not something that's occasioned by infidelity. Oh yeah, that's true. The surrogate scenario, but that's but it's neither here nor there for the purposes of our discussion. So there's an asymmetry at the evolutionary level that buttresses this asymmetry at the proximate level.

Starting point is 02:21:36 And it's interesting. I mean, what I've been trying to get my head around since that voice note that I'd actually like to hear your opinion on is given both the proximate and the ultimate levels, what sort of man would we expect to benefit most from true non-monogamy and what sort of women would we expect to benefit most? My intuition on the women's side would be highly committed partner

Starting point is 02:22:02 who doesn't have the conventional cues to physical attractiveness that can get passed on. But I wanted to... Hang on. So explain that for me. You think that the woman would be in a relationship with a guy that is non-typical in terms of attractiveness? I would say that which women would benefit most from non-monogamy,

Starting point is 02:22:20 which men would benefit most from non-monogamy. I'm imagining that a woman who is dating a man who is very committed handles the kind of supportive side of things. Cinnamon Roll husband. Yeah, but isn't providing paternal benefits but not. Genetic. Yeah, conceptive benefits. Oh, that's interesting. That's one angle.

Starting point is 02:22:40 What a wonderful archetype. I love how you get, once I get you three hours into a podcast, you start to get much more spicy. That's much, the fucking academic hat comes off. Well, certainly the point of, um, often. setting the risk of cuckoldry by cuckolding other people, which is basically what men are doing in this situation. Yeah, exactly. It's like a very meritocratic approach. And that's what happens among some anthropological, in some anthropology studies, this is the mainstream explanation for what's going on, where you look at, you fuck my wife, I fuck yours, and her friend. Yeah, well, it's, yeah,

Starting point is 02:23:14 it's basically like, why, so you'll look at a given society, such as among like the himba of Namibia, and you'll say, you know, why is it that the men, I asked one of the leading researchers this, like, well, why is it that they're putting up with infidelity? Like, why are they putting up with their wives cheating so much? Like, surely this is just nightmare mode for them. And they're like, well, whatever paternity they, and why are they, this is the other thing, is that they're good fathers to children that they know are the results of cuckoldry, right? So they know that the child's not theirs, they know that it's conceived through an affair. And yet they're investing in the offspring and they're completely tolerant of it. It's like, why are they putting

Starting point is 02:23:55 up with that? And it's like the social benefit, because it's so widespread, they regain the paternity that they lose in their own nest, in other nests. But presumably this only works if you think that you're extracting more from the system. So if you were a high, so, okay, so on the guy's side, presumably it's high mate value males or high attractiveness males. I mean, that's what you'd think, but then you, like, I'm just going to be, you know, I don't, I, I don't want to get too spicy too deep into the podcast, but like, I have not had the experience of meeting polyamorous males and being like, these guys are super Chad, handsom. But I guess you're just selecting that you've got to account for the selection effect of just high sociosexuality and wants to do this.

Starting point is 02:24:38 Right. I mean, I'm agreeing with you in principle that you'd think, like, oh, the people who would be most enthusiastic about polyamory. Are the ones that can extract the most from the cul-dry system without paying them off. But you know what? Actually, I'm going to dial back here, actually. Because we're talking about polyamory capital P, flying the flag, wearing the label,

Starting point is 02:25:00 and saying, you know, I'm polyamory. Not just slinging it about. But if we think about like what polyamory actually is, it's just multiple mating and kind of this informal, hierarchy of some of some variety and when I think about it without the label it actually is situation

Starting point is 02:25:18 yeah it is very that is what very handsome men are doing yeah the so yeah I think that the people that were kind of thinking oh they'd extract the people who'd extract the most benefit from situation ships are probably hot guys as soon as you get outside of San Francisco yeah the rules of this change yeah and it's like those guys would extract the most benefit

Starting point is 02:25:36 then yeah those guys do seem to be situation shipping up I think it's so great. You had this lovely line in a WhatsApp chat. Getting cook-holded is true disaster mode for a male, whereas for a female technically your long-term mate could be out and about without too much going wrong for you. It's, yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, a, a bit of a glib summary, but I think, I think I can stand by it that it's, um, that the, it is in principle possible to quote unquote get away with it a lot more as, a female monogamous mammal than a male monogamous mammal. However, they're, especially in

Starting point is 02:26:16 humans, because humans do like mate switching quite a bit, it's a massive risk. Like you see how upset women get at the thought of sexual infidelity by males. And it's like, look, in our species, sexual infidelity often leads to mate switching. So it's like, it actually is very stressful. It's like you could lose your entire investment. You could lose your mate. You could lose your mate. So I think it's disaster mode for both, but yeah, in terms of like who is it, who is it, who is sexual infidelity more threatening too? Yeah, it's probably going to be male mammals. Yeah, so this is where I would love to get some data around how split, like if you were to have a distribution of how much men agree or disagree, I think it's going to be more extreme for the men because some men will hate the idea. of their partner sleeping with other men so much more than they would enjoy the freedom to be able to sleep around themselves. I think that's most men. I mean, I literally, like when I think about the imbalance here, every time I meet a polyamorous man, and I've met a couple actually,

Starting point is 02:27:26 I really just desperately want to pick their brain because I know myself, the benefits of the occasional fling are so small, like diminishing benefits. Like we're talking like next to nothing may as well not have happened level of low benefit. Compared with the emotional pain. I would put myself in the same time. I'm imagining something where it would like if it ever, if anything even on that spectrum happened years of mental recovery. Great.

Starting point is 02:27:55 Yeah. And also probably the end of your relationship. The inability to see your partner in the same way. Yeah. End of the relationship. End to my self-esteem for a period of months. Yeah, yeah. So when I speak to these men, I do find it very interesting.

Starting point is 02:28:09 like okay so you have just fucking zeroth percentile jealousy and mate guarding and 99th percentile external extra pair mating motivation i'm like there must be a story here where the extra pair mating motivation is either so high that it's intolerable yeah or the jealousy is so low that it's inconsequential imagine if you have the desire for extra pair mating being very high and the jealousy being moderately high well you have this this tension it's like one of those bridges and an earthquake that's being flexed and polled against itself. I'm going to, I'm going to say who this is because I heard them speak about this in a public interview, but there's a very famous, there's a very famous evolutionary psychologist who's

Starting point is 02:28:55 polyamorous, his name is, yeah, his name is Primal Poly on Twitter. And I remember listening to a podcast that he did on this, where he was talking about how it was a multi-year process to, or at least, at least, at least, a year process, I believe the word year is ringing in my ear, where it was trying to deal with the negative psychological ramification side of things. So there was the high motivation, right? For moderately high. And then the moderately high jealousy. And to me, I remember listening to it and thinking, I think it was a podcast with Sam Harris maybe. And I think Sam's response was, you know, is it really worth the hassle, you know?

Starting point is 02:29:39 So it's interesting. There's a lot about complexity. I'm not commenting on his, you know, it's not a personal thing at all. But because he's a public figure and I'm commenting on what he's spoken. Him and Diana have not been shy about talking about it. Yeah, so I feel like it's fair game. Normally I would never, you know, discuss someone else's sex life as like an object of interest. But in this case...

Starting point is 02:29:58 Well, we don't have enough publicly non-monogamous people in the world of mating research to be able to do that. But so the worst situation to be in, I imagine, would be... to not match the extra paired jealousy and extra paired desire with your partner. Like if those two things are out of whack, like you have high desire, any amount of jealousy, but potentially low jealousy, and your partner doesn't match that, that's when you're going to start. And if you've fucking spent too much time at SF parties or, you know, you've listened to too much Diana Fleischman or whatever. Like, you know, before you know it, you're like,

Starting point is 02:30:41 huh, maybe I could start a polycule with like, you know, John next door or whatever. And meanwhile, your partner's going, um, uh, you're going to poly build. Yeah, exactly, because that's going to, that's going to really twist it up. But I think that's a fucking, I think that's an interesting one. Um, I also want to learn about what the rich gay uncle hypothesis is for homosexuality. Well, I don't know if that's the, I don't know if that's the formal name, but it's the name that an evolutionary biology.

Starting point is 02:31:08 at Boston University who will remain unnamed it's what he informally called it in one of our lectures and it was pretty interesting so the idea here is that we have this powerful cultural stereotype

Starting point is 02:31:23 in the west of the rich gay uncle right it's like that it is known that gay men tend to have slightly higher incomes and the idea is that oh that you know there's some social investment that tends to happen diagonally from them to the offspring of their closest

Starting point is 02:31:44 kin, their siblings. They're also more likely to have older brothers, so they're more likely to be an uncle. They're more likely, they're probably, yeah, that's exactly right, they're more likely to have the, that's exactly right, they're more likely to have the opportunity to be, I did, look at me, I know, you're killing, throwing fucking shit into, that's Newtonic for you. I know, exactly. It's hitting me as well. I feel smarter than ever. So they tend to be quite successful and avuncular, and that's interesting, right? Now, they've tested this in the West,

Starting point is 02:32:12 and it has not borne the type of fruit that you might expect it to. There doesn't seem... The idea of it as a hypothesis is basically this. I should have explained this at the outset, is that it's hard to explain... We know that there is some heritable component

Starting point is 02:32:28 to homosexuality, but it is quite difficult to explain how that heritable... Yeah, how does that persist, right? Given that you can't reproduce if you're truly being gay. Yeah, you're truly, like, I know that a high percentage of homosexual people have some opposite sex encounters at some point. Unless you've thumbed it in enough times to be able to actually have a kid. Yeah, like this is, this is just not how, yeah.

Starting point is 02:32:54 So it's like, it's at the very least, even if in a state of nature, a lot of homosexual people would reproduce anyway, it's at the very least reducing their odds not to feel. Opposition. On the back foot. Yeah, right? So how does that persist? And so the idea was, is that maybe it would persist through kin selection. So one way to win the game of survive and reproduce is to get your genes into the next generation by reproducing yourself. But the other way is to piggyback off the reproduction of your kin. I mean, they share, a sibling shares 50% of your genes. So it's entirely possible that you can have this, you know, um offspring adjacent to you that shares 25% of your genes and you can essentially pass on your genes by supporting them surviving and reproducing and so the idea what was with with this hypothesis this rich gay uncle hypothesis that maybe the way homosexuality persists is by instead of having one kid right you support two kids right of your closest can could that be passed on genetically is there a lineage for this to be able to work? Yes, so that could work. That could work.

Starting point is 02:34:09 If you're asking, like, is this theoretically possible? Yes. Yeah, in terms of the mechanics. I don't understand how the lineage of the person who did the thing, but wasn't a part of the promulgation. Yeah, so it would be the case if the genes for homosexuality, and this is how most behavior genetics works, as you know, if it wasn't like, if it's more like genes that increase your probability of expressing homosexuality, rather than like an individual gene that causes it, then if you have some of those genes, if you have enough of those genes that you exhibit the behavior,

Starting point is 02:34:41 then your kin still have some of those genes as well and you're passing on your genes indirectly through them through their kids. Yeah, exactly. Right, okay. So that's the hypothesis. It is not well supported in the West. It hasn't borne out.

Starting point is 02:34:59 It is well supported among the Fafifinae. of independent Samoa. So this is a group where it's, it's, I don't want to analyze, because the culture is so different, I don't want to analogize it to American and Western homosexuals, which have their own kind of cultural phenomenon

Starting point is 02:35:22 that we can, we can talk about. This is different. It's considered a third gender in this space, and they are natal males, right? So they're biologically male. and they are attracted to males, and they are not transgender.

Starting point is 02:35:37 That's not what's going on. They present in a very feminine way, and they occupy their own space, and it's a similar percentage to what we see with Western homosexuals, right? So some might say that it is a cultural reinforcement of homosexuality, essentially. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:00 Like a cultural space to that homosexuals, people can fill. And in those groups, it does seem that they are statistically more evuncular, right? They invest more. They act more as uncles than straight uncles do. And so it seems to be that there's some support for this idea that they lose, we talked about losing paternity and regaining it elsewhere. They lose paternity, but they regain kin selection benefits by supporting their sisters and brothers in their reproduction. It feels to me like the male provisioning equivalent of alloparenting. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:36 It feels a little bit like the grandmother hypothesis, but actually outside. Yes, it's a very analogous to that. That's a great analogy. Yeah. It's a lot like the grandmother hypothesis, where it's at a certain point, if you have 20 brothers, maybe it's better to not, to stay off the pitch. If you've got fucking 20 brothers, you are gay. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:54 If you've got 20, if your brother 21 with 20 brothers. Your odds are so low because it is, it is a loading of. where one older brother, there's a slight increase. If you're two older brothers, there's a slightly bigger. By fucking brother 20, yeah. It's like, dude, there's no chance. You come back around and come straight, actually. Yeah, it's a horseshoe theory.

Starting point is 02:37:12 Well, that, that, uh... But you got what I'm saying is that it's like, imagine your brother, imagine your brother seven. Is it optimal for you to get on the same pitch as them and compete for the same women? Or is it better to step off the pitch and say, hey, you guys go get up. Is that the explanation for the birth order effect?

Starting point is 02:37:29 It's basically It's basically I'm going to The weather vein lick my finger and put it in the To be like How's the sex ratio Going to be in this local ecology

Starting point is 02:37:39 So that's what some people So I'm definitely not the first person To have said this Whether it's true or not It's kind of touchy Because it does seem to be downstream The birth order effect mechanistically Seems to be downstream

Starting point is 02:37:52 Of an immune system Because it works for Abortions and it works for miscarriages Yeah so now Yeah exactly So those things can be adaptive to be clear like you can have a mechanism like that and have it be adaptive it'd be weird that it would go through the immune system yeah it's a bit quirky um but it could go it could go like that

Starting point is 02:38:10 what are other explanations for birth order effect um why would the woman's immune system react in this way to having a male inside of it yeah well it could be a to be honest it could be more of an adaptation on the part of the mother rather than the rather than the gay son like maybe it's not the the It's not that the gay son gets a selective benefit from investing. It's that the mother's total reproductive pool is increased by not adding another competitor and instead adding another, instead of adding a helper. Again, this isn't a theory. Oh, so the mother could, the immune system thing could be the mother's way of ensuring the rich gay uncle.

Starting point is 02:38:49 Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So in terms of where the adaptation is actually happening, that's why it would be quirky. Like the reason that I had that gut reaction is that it would be strange for, For the gay son's adaptation to mechanistically occur as an immune system response in the mother, it would probably be more likely to be adaptive for the mother in terms of like the locust. However, I actually don't think we're talking about it, and it's very interesting. If you had to say, you know, Mackin, put your chips down, is this true or not? I'd say that the rich gay uncle hypothesis is probably not true. I would say that the Fafina are unique cultural case where they have a cultural scaffolding that makes it adapt. in their case, but if you looked at homosexuality writ large, I don't think that that's the explanation for its persistence, no. And I don't know what is. My honest answer is like, because

Starting point is 02:39:40 people, I do, I do AMAs occasionally. Every single AMA, people are asking explain homosexuality, and I understand it. It's like the first thing you'd want to ask an evolutionary sexual scientist, right? And my honest answer is I'm not sure what's going on, but this is a pretty cool explanation. Mac and Murphy, ladies and gentlemen So much fun Cheers Last time that we got to hang out was in Melbourne Yep

Starting point is 02:40:04 Are you going to come to Bali with me After my Australia and New Zealand tour in March I've already started my cut Let's fucking go So I'm going to take you this evening To Bill Perkins' Formula One party So Bill wrote Die with Zero

Starting point is 02:40:19 He's got a party over at his very large The most expensive house And Austin never sold Actually I think up until a few years ago and that if you want to do some ethnographic mating research the cohort of people that are going to be here at this party this evening is going to be good

Starting point is 02:40:38 so we need to get finished so that we can actually get turned around and go to that where should people go you've got great TikTok you've got great other stuff too they want to check out your shit well first my girlfriend's listening at home thrilled at the sound of me going to this party so I'm a girlfriend don't worry about it

Starting point is 02:40:53 I'll look after him And then, yeah, so in terms of where people go, I think that searching my name on any social media is a good place. I don't really, I don't really have anything to sell. Just more videos on topics like this. Fuck yeah. Oh, and go and check out Species, the podcast. Yeah, it's mostly retired, but occasionally I still do an interview. You've moonlit it, but there's good shit in that, dude.

Starting point is 02:41:11 I love going back and listening to those Species podcast, Maconofy on TikTok and Twitter and everything else. Until next time, man. Thanks for us. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best book. books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books

Starting point is 02:41:44 that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillex.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.

Modern Wisdom - #1031 - Macken Murphy - 18 Harsh Realities of Modern Dating

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