Modern Wisdom - #432 - Geoffrey Miller - An Evolutionary Psychologist's Dating Advice

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, Associate Professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and an author. Geoffrey has been writing about sexual selection and dating dynamics for over 30 years. His work has provided the foundation which much of the modern Red Pill, Pink Pill and Manosphere dating advice has been based on. I wanted to find out how much of this guidance is accurate and how much has been lost in translation. Expect to learn how evolutionary psychology can help marriages to be much happier, what Geoffrey thinks about the modern Manosphere, my hypothesis around the game theory of slut shaming, the fundamentals that everyone needs to know about how sexual selection works, how women can hack their own hypergamy, why me and Geoffrey are going to dedicate our lives to existential risk and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Mate - https://amzn.to/3gh88JZ Follow Geoffrey on Twitter - https://twitter.com/primalpoly  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jeffrey Miller. He's an evolutionary psychologist, associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, and an author. Jeffrey has been writing about sexual selection and dating dynamics for over 30 years. His work has provided much of the foundation, which the modern red pill, pink pill, and manosphere dating advice has been based on. I wanted to find out how much of this guidance is accurate and how much has been lost in translation.

Expect to learn how evolutionary psychology can help marriages to be much happier. What Jeffrey thinks about the modern Manusphere, my hypothesis around the game theory of slutshaming, the fundamentals that everyone needs to know about how sexual selection works, how women can hack their own hypogamy, why me and Jeffrey are going to dedicate our lives to existential risk, and much more. Before I get on to other news, me and video guideine are departing the UK for America tomorrow. On Tuesday we are flying out, recording with Dr Jordan B. Peterson later this week on 6K Cinema Cameras in some beautiful location in San Antonio, Texas.

So, if you want to know when that episode is ready to be listened to, you need to have hit the subscribe button and you might be listening but not subscribed. So, just open whatever your podcast app is and press subscribe. It makes me happy, it supports the show and it ensures that you never miss an episode. So go and do it. I thank you. But now please welcome Jeffrey Miller, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris. Really excited. I just saw an article from Metro UK

that's trending on Twitter today. Half of women aged 30 don't have children for the first time since records began. 50.1% of women aged 30 don't have children for the first time since records began. 50.1% of women born in 1990 haven't had children by 30 according to ONS stats. In comparison, 57% of women born in 1970, 76% born in 1950, and 86% of women born in 1941 all had at least one child by the time that they turned 30. That is crazy. It's a pretty big difference compared to what's, you know, ancestral and normal for humans. I mean, bear in mind, you know, if people are reaching puberty to ages 12 to 14 and they're not, you know,

reproducing for another, like, 16 to 18 years, that's like a hell of a delay. And my mom had me when she was 19 and that was pretty normal in the mid 60s. So on the one hand, if you compare age 30 to a modern career track for women, like if you're an academic female, trying to get tenure, you might have like grad school till age 26 or 28 postdocs till age 30, get your first assistant professor

job 36 years till tenure, you know, you don't even feel financially secure till you're late 30s, right? But biologically, you're like, I've been capable of having a kid, you know, for years and years and years. So it's a crazy mismatch. Do. Dismatch is what we call it. Dismatch. Dig into that, what do I mean?

Dismatch between what was ancestrally normal, like in prehistory versus what the modern world has. So you know, a simple mismatch would be like what we eat in terms of modern American diet versus like paleo diet. Or how much sunshine we get if we're indoors most of the day versus outdoors. But I think the mating market mismatch is a particularly interesting and frustrating. That's what I've been fascinated by for the last couple of months. It's so endlessly interesting. I learned, I can been fascinated by for the last couple of months. It's so endlessly

interesting. I learned, I can't remember what book it was, I want to say maybe Steve Stewart Williams book, the April understood universe, about the effect of a couple who have been together for quite a while, elected not to have children, they chose not to, but find each other becoming increasingly unattractive and can't really explain why. Is this an effect that you're familiar with as well? This has not been very well studied, but I suspect there is maybe some kind of instinctive thing where, look, if you're a human and you're in like a long-term committed loving parabond, and you've been having sex with someone week after

week, month after month, year after year, and you're still not pregnant. Under ancestral conditions, that would have been a pretty strong cue that either you're infertile or they're infertile, but whatever the case is, this might not be a viable long-term relationship reproductably. And so, you know, maybe there's some emotional reaction to that that basically means I'm going to divest from this relationship. So that's another example of mismatch. Once you have effective contraception, and you can have sex for years and years and years, and no baby, what's the emotional

impact of that? We don't know. I don't think it's been very well studied, but I suspect it's often not good for relationships, and people might find themselves sort of questioning their commitment or falling out of love a little bit or being a little less attracted to the partner and they might think like there's no rational reason for this i love them uncommitted maybe were married we have a mortgage together why am i not into them anymore and might be their

body telling them okay if you love them, where's the baby? Yeah, well, I mean, it's because it doesn't know that you've elected to have this, the fact that we have now been able to decouple having sex from making children because of effective contraception, there's a, isn't there an equivalent

that women have either just before giving birth or just after giving birth, that they can find, is it the smell of their partner particularly off putting in it's something to do with the protectionist strategy and then perhaps the smell of their own family, family members are increasingly attractive? Yeah, I've seen some stuff on that. I don't know how well replicated it is, but it would certainly make adaptive sense that, look, if you're heavily pregnant or you've just like where you might even be dilated and there might even be like an infection risk if you had sex, might be bad for the baby.

Or in the first few weeks after giving birth, like you don't want a woman to be super horny then. So she might down-regulate how kind of biochemically attracted to husband she is. But on the other hand, she might be more attracted to her husband and other family members in terms of like, I want cuddling, I want support, I want emotional closeness and intimacy. You know, because that's what you need when you've got a young baby. Did you see this Wall Street Journal article that got shared by Rob Henderson the other day, a gender split over sniffing a baby's scalp. Mothers get more aggressive and father's less so when they inhale a chemical found in abundance on infant's heads.

Did you see this? I didn't see it, but it kind of makes sense because, like look, when you're a new dad and you're used to having a lot of testosterone and being kind of aggressive, you really wanna go very, very gentle, you know, you really wanna tamp down to tamp everything down. And this is one reason testosterone levels drop when men have kids is to like, basically

reduce the risk of frustration driven and fantasied, you know. But on the other hand, women might need to get a little more protective about the baby and have a kind of a mom of a very syndrome where, you know, they might actually need to get a little more vigilant for threats and a little more assertive about dealing with threats. And so many primate species in phanicide is a big, big problem. From the father? From the father and from other females often. How would it be adaptive to having fantasied from the father? It depends on how confident he is, he's really the father.

If he's highly confident, you do not want to kill your baby. But if you have a lot of doubt, But if you have a lot of doubt, then this is like the grizzly logic of evolution. And it's not pretty. But if you're pretty sure it's not your kid, then you'd really prefer that woman to start cycling again and get fertile again so you can have a kid with her. Lions do this all the time. Kill lion cubs that aren't theirs. And a lot of primates do this also.

So yeah, evolution's incredibly smart about managing niceness versus aggression and who do you seek bonds and support with all throughout the reproductive cycle. That's fascinating. Is it right to say that you're one of the OGs of applying evolutionary psychology to sexual dynamics, do you think? You're the mating mind book is 22 years old now. Yeah. I mean, it depends on how you count it, right? The real OG was Darwin. The real OG was Darwin. Darwin 1871, sexual selection, book, amazing book. It had a huge impact on me.

And then you get a kind of long law. And then in the 70s, 1970s, you get sociobiology, and E.O. Bolson, who recently died and then got post-agency, post-agency, post-agency, post-agency, post-cancel. Post-cancel. And then you had people like anthropologist Don Simon who wrote this amazing book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality 1979. And that had a big impact on my little field. Evolutionary psychology, which really only got started in kind of the mid to late 80s.

And I got into it in grad school at Stanford circa 1988, 89. And I've been writing about sexual selection and human evolution all throughout the 90s. And then finally, the mating mind book came out in the year 2000. Five years later than I meant to publish it. But you know, that's Bob writes book. That came out what, 93, 94, 93 or four, yeah. Fuck dude, that is so good. To go back and read, to go back and read that now, I did a reading list, a free reading list last year, and I had 10 books that were like, you just have to, before you read anything

else, these are the ones you have to read. And Bob writes was in there that it's fucking phenomenal man Yeah, huge respect to him. I did a great podcast interview with him a couple of years ago. He's still active That books a moral animal big impact Stephen Pinkers books throughout the late 90s big impact and there was kind of a golden age of like popular science based on evolution psychology and kind of the 90s through early 2000s. Before everything got super politically correct in a woke. I was going to say, why do you think that's were lacking some of those discussions now.

It's just extremely difficult now to teach, even to teach undergraduates, most universities about basic sex differences. I've taught a class on psychology of human sexuality for about 20 years, and you increasingly get blowback from the undergrads, like complaining. I can't believe the professor Miller is reinforcing the gender binary. And he's comparing male humans to males

of other species, how dare he. And it's gotten like viciously and oppressively political, particularly the last five years. And that's sad because undergrads really want to understand mating and sex and romance, and they're kind of being denied that by a tiny percentage of people who have a really strong political agenda. Such a shame, man. Like, if, I don't know, I think a lot, I know that you're big into existential risk, which is my other pet obsession. And that really does feel like fucking being on the cusp

of something absolutely terrible and awful happening. That's just completely getting in the way. There's a quote someone put on a YouTube video a while ago. It's the loudest minority who act like they're steering the ship. And fuck if that's not true. Yeah. And so where do undergrads go if they're curious to understand this, right? Hopefully they're listening to like your podcast. Hopefully they're reading Jordan Peterson. There's this whole parallel, you know, intellectual ecosystem that's grown up that is much more honest

about these things than anything you get in most American universities. Let's say that someone hasn't looked at dating and sexual selection through through evolutionary lens before. How do you introduce it to them? I think one important thing to point out is neither sex is at fault for what's going on. Both sexes, men and women, both evolved to do the best they can given the reproductive incentives that they faced. And so neither sex is like the norm that you have to compare the other sex to. You often have men saying, oh my god, women are so neurotic, they're so anxious, they're

so fearful, like that's weird, I don't get it. Well, if you take a woman's point of view, you know, ancestral if you're spending a significant amount of your adult life pregnant or with baby or with young kids, you're the objective risk that you face from predators and pathogens and diseases and starvation is just higher than what men face. So of course, evolution shifts your kind of, you know, your risk tolerance in a different direction. And conversely, if women are like, oh my god, I can't believe men are so into status and aggression and dominance and why do they do that?

It doesn't make any sense to me. Well, if you think who managed to reproduce which kind of men attracted women and had the status and social support and the influence to be attractive, like given female hypergamy, given female mate choice. Of course, we're all descended from males who played that game avidly. So I think one crucial kind of emotional insight from an evolutionary perspective is just to accept men and women and their natures as they are, and then to figure out, okay, given that. Plus like modern culture and technology how do you do the best you can. Do you not find it fascinating to see how those predispositions that we have towards certain things.

That's the common thread that runs through everything and then it gets repackaged into. Memes that we see in fucking sitcoms and products. It's so... When you start to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of why people like the things that they like and don't like the things they don't like, it is kind of like seeing the code instead of seeing the game. Yeah, I actually still like the Red Pill metaphor and there's like so many things that have read pill made but probably evolution psychology was the biggest red pill for me. Just thinking human nature and human culture as it is is the outcome of an extremely long story, a really long story way back into deep time. And the better you understand that story,

the less puzzling modern life is. And it's gotten to the point where like, if there's a married couple and they don't have evolutionary insights into their relationship and their values and preferences and what drives their reactions. I think like why would you handicap yourself that way? Like it's really sad. It would be much better to go back to like read the more animal by Robert Wright rather than go to marital therapy. Like do both but Jesus read something about human nature if you really care about your

relationship. What do you wish more married couples knew? I wish more married couples knew that you don't have to take your emotional reactions nearly as seriously as you typically do. For example, a lot of people think, okay, I know I'm not supposed to like hit my spouse. I'm not supposed to do physical violence to my spouse. And so if I have an impulse to do that, I have to control that. That's not civilized. That's bad. However, there's a lot of other reactions we have that are basically what economists call

punishment routines. Like somebody else does something that pisses you off, right? And you have a reaction to punish them, to give some negative reinforcement. This can range from, I want to hit them to I want to cuss at them to I don't want to talk to them for a day to I want to complain about them to my friends or God forbid on social media. Those are all punishment routines. The instinct to want to punish them Even over something that's maybe objectively trivial can be very strong, but we have this

double standard where like we go, okay, physical punishment, that's super bad. We don't do that in a civilized marriage. But all these other things, right, are still considered kind of fair game, considered kind of fair game, even if they're objectively like a massive overreaction to what actually happened. I think conversely if you understand like why we want to punish our mate for certain like transgressions, then you can actually play with that like you can make it funny. You can kind of playfully exaggerate it. Give me my wife. My wife, Diane and I do this all the time. Like, if she's pissed off at me for whatever failing to do something in the kitchen, instead

of taking it seriously and going, oh my god, Jeffrey, you suck you such a bad husband, she'll start like malthing nonsense syllables, but in an angry way, in kind of a self mocking way, and so she'll be like, and then I'll start arguing back using like my defensive like nonsense syllables like, why can we do that? Because we're both evolutionist psychologists and we both know at some level the desire to over punish retrieval stuff is just ridiculous. And if you understand how ridiculous it can be, then you can make fun of your own reactions. And then you're actually closer to each other.

Because I have the faith that she has enough self insight. The chicken mock her own feminine response. Programming. And she has confidence I have enough insight into my masculine nature and programming that I can make fun of it. And by contrast you can a marital therapy. Most therapists will be like, you all have to be 100% earnest all the time about your feelings and you have to take your feelings seriously and like express them. have to take your feelings seriously and like express them and work through them and talk it out. So Diana, if you were angry that Jeffrey had used the source and not put it away and you felt upset about it, then this is justified. We do not have any unjustified feelings

in this. That's fucking interesting. I've never been to counseling. But I imagine in movies where I've seen it, that's what they do. Yeah, and there's very few good role models in movies or TV about how to manage these things. Like you'll almost never see somebody in a serious adult drama actually make fun of their own reactions in a kind of wise and insightful way. The only time that you would ever see it is kind of the Ditsy female classic American Ditsy suburbs early 30s, still not married, like wine and type, lovable, like always the bridesmaid, never the bride type one. Like, oh, here I go again, losing my shit about something that doesn't really matter,

which is kind of touching the reason that people laugh at it is the fact that they know there is a compulsion that is a part of her programming that had if she had all of her rational capabilities she might dial that back she might tamp that down a little bit. It's just that you tried to turn that up to 11. Yeah so those are two big takeaways like try to have some insight into yourself and then try to be playful with it. Before we started recording, we talked for example a little bit about female hypergamy, which is women tend to be attracted to guys who have relatively high dominance or status or prestige or fame or whatever.

That's another thing where you can kind of role play that stuff up in a relationship. So you can kind of create hypergamy even when it doesn't really exist at some objective level. And you know people in like the BDSM and King communities do this all the time with what they call power exchange. But it's like, okay, the man's going to pretend to have some role. Like he's the president or he's a CEO of something. And then the woman's going to pretend to be like whatever the way out staff are as secretary, like whatever, whatever melts your butter. Like you can do that and it can actually help your stupid human brain think. Oh yeah, my mate is actually really cool

and like really powerful. Like if more people did that, I'm convinced that most relationships would be at least 50% happier. That's fucking interesting. A lot of what we've been talking about, Vincent Haranamon, who is Rob Henderson's co-writer on some collect articles, data scientist that supplied his data science to looking at dynamics in the marketing, dating market at the moment.

And yeah, there's this sort of ongoing women are outperforming men everywhere at the moment in education. You can have two to one women versus men in four year US colleges by 2030. Women earn 1,111 pounds more than a man between the age of 21 and 29 on average at the moment. And the issue that you have if you try and look at it from like a public policy perspective. And it's so, it's so interesting that I, I thought that you had to come up with a real world rational solution to this, but the way that your brain interprets the situation, your brain isn't this fucking all-seeing, all-knowing thing. You can use the same tricks that it's trying to play on you against itself. And if little, you know, if you do have the high powered boss bitch,

lady that's got herself into a relationship with a man who, you know, doesn't earn two million as much as whatever it is that she does, the fact that you can compensate for that by reversing the polarity is something also most guys should learn more about, like a masculine feminine. How would you introduce that to someone? Just the idea that if you play up the differences and the tension between sort of the masculine role and the feminine role, that's actually quite a bit hotter than trying to achieve similarity and equality, particularly in the bedroom, but in relationships generally.

So if you go to Burning Man, you'll hear a lot of people talking about, man, you got to get into your masculine polarity and rediscover your Jungian shadow blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of nonsense wrapped around it, but I think there are some deep evolutionary roots to some of that wisdom. Why do we find beautiful people attractive do you think? I? Think beauty is partly a legit indicator of

health fertility youth You know capacity to reproduce But then there's certain parts of beauty in our species and lots of other species that are kind of arbitrary Like the fact that we have green or blue eyes rather than dark eyes if you're from like a northern European population. Is that really adaptive in terms of like promoting survival better? Or is it just, oh, if you migrate to a northern latitude out of Africa 150,000 years ago, you don't need a dark iris anymore to protect your iris from bright sun. You're free to evolve all kind of crazy new colors, blue and green and hazel, like why? Because it's new and different and apparently

our ancestors thought that's kind of cool. So, eye color might be one of those sexually selected traits that's a little bit arbitrary. Likewise, maybe red and blonde hair color. Likewise, a lot of the facial feature differences between Africa, Europe, East Asia. Who knows why they evolved? So I think beauty is like half really about fitness and health and half a little bit arbitrary.

What are the traits that we usually enjoy? Someone doesn't understand sexual selection from a fitness signaling perspective. What are the typical traits that people enjoy? Well, when Tucker Maxx and I wrote that meat book, we put a lot of emphasis on just overall competence. Like, what is attractive about a guy to a woman? He can do stuff effectively, capability, competence. And in the physical domain, does he look like he could actually hunt an animal successfully?

Could he run? Can he jump over stuff? Could he throw things? Could he drag back a hundred pound gazelle from five miles away? If he doesn't look like he could do that, like, why would you mate with him? Because, you know, if you're a woman in prehistory and you've got babies, one of the main roles for the guy is provide meat, you know, provide resources. And any guy who looks like he's not going to be a good hunter is not going to be very attractive, it's actually. Likewise, he should look like he can potentially protect you

against other men who might want to kill your baby or rape your woman or fight against your tribe. So if you look like you're capable of defending someone, then that's attractive. And I think a lot of it just boils down to that. Like what are the physical cues that mean, you know, you look like you'd be a good bet for a long term mate who's capable of having kids providing for them, protecting them and, you know, helping them grow. What do you say to the people that go, Jeffrey, that's dumb. I

don't need a man to drag an antelope. 500 meters anymore. This is the real world in 2022. And this doesn't matter anymore. I'd say that's that's largely true objectively, but it can be quite hard to rewire your brain to say, oh, actually, I'm really attracted to guys who are 5'2' rather than 6'2'. Like, fine, you can do that. I don't know that many women who are successful at doing that. And the data from dating apps says, height is a major predictor of attractiveness on dating apps. Income, major predictor for men.

So, on the one hand, if you're a smart woman, you can use the evolutionary psychology insights to go, okay, even though he's only five foot four, he's great on these other, like a dozen other dimensions, you can leverage that to overcome your kind of aversion to shortness, right? And that can be really good, just like a man could, you know, overcome a version to some, you know, issue that a woman has, it doesn't actually matter now. Like maybe she's got some disability, she's missing an arm from motor cycle accident, whatever it is. Like there are ways you can kind of hack your brain to say that's okay, given all the other

traits that are good in this person. But man, if you don't have an evolutionary perspective, how do you do that, that hacking of your own brain? You don't even know where these preferences come from. So it's extremely hard to change them. What about from men to women? What are men looking for? It depends a lot on whether men are looking for a short term made or longer term made. We know what men are looking for in a short term

made, right? It's basically cues of youth and fertility and sexual accessibility and, you know, we're descended from male ancestors who were kind of scanning the environment for like, where is an easy way to have extra reproductive success with minimal investment? That would basically be any young, healthy woman who seems like fit and fertile and relatively like unchewzy, right? That's like minimum investment, maximum ROI. But then for long term mate, you know, if you're actually going to parabond with someone, stick around, raise

kids with them, then men get a lot choosier about women's mental traits, like intelligence and creativity and sense of humor, and women women's emotional traits, like stability and conscientiousness and reliability. And about women's social status, like, does she have a lot of friends? What's her family like? Is she socially savvy? Can she be a good kind of almost political companion where we can be like the tribal power couple? But I think it's important, like it's really important for men to understand the short versus long-term difference. Because if you don't, you end up choosing women for the short-term attractive traits, and

you get stuck in a relationship with them, and then you're like, oh no, she's like neurotic and not that smart and a bad match, but sex is great. The sex is great for a while until it isn't. So I think again, the better that men understand this, you know, the easier it is to sort of be honest with yourself about what are you really looking for and what length of relationship are you seeking? I had a conversation about this the other day talking about the difference between beauty and hotness.

Now you might have different terms for it in the literature, but an immediate, very sexually available signal of fitness versus a more timeless, graceful, more subtle signal of fitness. And I am absolutely adamant that society is signaling almost exclusively off-hotness at the moment, that the inherent transactional transient nature of most of young people's relationships where basically they're masturbating with somebody else's body and they just that that happens to be another consciousness in the room that that is leading into hotness being used as the fundamental cute. So look at I don't even know if these magazines exist anymore but you know if you were to get a girl on the front of some lad mag some boys mag that's got fast cars and like scantley clad women that they're not selecting

for beauty that purposefully selecting for hotness i did two reality tv dating shows i did love island and one called take me out. And on that the same that not selecting for women that are beautiful. That's not to say that some of them aren't or weren't beautiful, but the primary value that they're selecting for is hotness, because they only have six weeks. If you only got six weeks in a villa and you have to share a bed, there's half the number of beds that there are people. So you're sharing a bed with somebody every night. And they need you to switch, switch, switch.

There's two eliminations a week and all this stuff. They need hotness. You can't have something that takes you three months to fully appreciate all of the nuances of Louise's fucking back arch. It's like no, no, no, no, no, the half sleeve tattoo and the lip piercing will do it for you straight away. Yeah, exactly. And there can be enormous pressure to kind of signal hotness. So I think tattoos and piercings and certain kinds of dressing in a certain way that basically advertises, like I'm potentially open to short term mating. What do you think it is?

If we match. What do you think it is about piercings and tattoos? What do you think is the subtext behind that? I think it's a little bit it's a little bit culturally arbitrary that it has become associated with openness to the kind of short term mating or you know openness to being open or polyamorous or whatever, openness to three sums, whatever, whatever you're into. But once you get the signal established, once there's a social consensus that, oh, if you have a lot of tattoos, that signaling a degree of sexual openness that would not be welcome in Salt Lake City

among the Mormons, you know, but would be welcomed in like Brooklyn or LA or whatever. But I think your point about hotness versus beauty is really on the money. And like some women are so beautiful, like whatever, Cape Blanchett or Anne Hath way or certain actresses like that. Where it's like almost hard to sexually objectify them. Like it feels almost wrong to sort of put them in the category of like, who is she so hot? Because classy beauty, you immediately think, oh, I wish I had a wife like that. Right, or I wish I had a girlfriend like that, right? Or I wish I had a girlfriend like that. I suspect there's something parallel

with men, where like certain men radiate kind of like short-term hotness rather than like good long-term husband potential. You probably encountered this in the modeling world a little bit. Correct, and in the Nightlife world a lot, dude. I mean, because I see it's so funny. You know when you go into a nightclub and there's a strobe light on, and you don nightlife world a lot, dude. I mean, because I see, it's so funny. You know when you go into a nightclub and there's a strobe light on, and you don't actually, when there's a strobe light, you don't see people move, you see snapshots of the person. It's there here, then they're here, then they're here,

then they're here. And running a club night is exactly the same as that, but socially. So I only get to see people for five hours on a Thursday and a Friday, or whenever it is that your particular portfolio of events is running for that season or that year or whatever. And you see things happen. So you'll see a new group of fresher students arrive and then maybe this guy in this girl, maybe they meet each other and then maybe they hook up and then

maybe they start talking and then maybe they're together for a bit and then maybe this new girl comes in and you but you don't see everything happen you just see kind of like this brief window into it and dude it's so fucking interesting to see to be able to select the kids that are going to be the ones that are going to have the status that are highly regarded and you're right I mean there's something there's something around girls that wear those choker necklaces that have been accused of being a black belt for blow jobs by not me. And you see that certain signals play out. And that's what creates the stereotypes culturally.

You see something, it gets reinforced, and then maybe people see that and think, well, I've just got out of a relationship with a boyfriend. Why don't I get a nose ring and start wearing choke and necklaces? Because that's what the culture is telling me that sort of person does, and it, broom, it just starts to feed itself. Yeah, and I think,

I would just caution young people like what you want is you want maximum flexibility to adjust your signals that you're sending out in a way that is like dynamic and adaptive. If you get a permanent tattoo that's visible in every job interview or at your wedding or whatever, it's hard to go back from that. It's hard to do tattoo removal. Whereas if you're wearing black belt choker, at least you can take that off and then become respectable on Monday. Don't need to still wear it at the wedding, yeah. So, of course, the more permanent, the signal, the more credible a signal it is, because

it shows extra commitment. But I think a lot of young people really, like they have a very short-term time horizon, and they're really not thinking ahead about how is this tattoo really going to look in 15 years? Is my future tiled are going to make fun of it? Talk to me about hard to fake versus easy to fake signals of fitness and prestige and stuff. I find that really interesting. Yeah, I got kind of obsessed with this branch of economic game theory called signaling theory back in the late 90s. And it had a big impact on most of what I wrote since then.

The basic concept is if you're trying to signal something like you're a male animal and you're trying to signal I could fight you, I could win, right? The most reliable signals are the ones that are hard to fake, where there's some pretty strong connection between the trait you're trying to show off, like formidibility or capacity for violence or body size. Pretty strong connection between that and the actual signal that you're displaying.

So a lot of animals will kind of fluff themselves up and make their hair stand on end or if they have feathers, they'll make a big show of it. So they're exaggerating their body size to intimidate rivals. But there's still a correlation between like your wingspan and the part of your body that can actually fight. Now, at a kind of like cultural level, I did a whole book called Spent. In 2009, it was about conspicuous consumption. And there, it's more often a matter of, I'm going to buy and display some particular good or service.

That is objectively expensive in order to show off. I can afford it. And there, like the credibility of the signal depends on, is it real? Is it actually a designer handbag or a real Rolex, or is it fake? And do you really own that Bugatti or did you just rent it for the weekend? And so people seeing this stuff are naturally kind of skeptical.

If you see somebody wearing what looks like a Rolex, but everything else in their life is kind of like shitty and cheap. Then you figure, that's probably fake. Whereas if someone's already famous for being a billionaire and like you can easily Google them and you can see they're not worth, then they can just wear terrible, thinly shirts or whatever, and nobody cares because they don't have to signal through consumerism. I learned, I can't remember the Scott Alexander blog post, he did a glorious blog post, it wasn't,

I can't tolerate anything except the outgroup, it was something similar to that, where he talked about the fact that if you have four layers to classes classes that the top layer can use any of the bottom two's fashions, but it can't use the one below. And the same thing goes for everybody else is trying to signal that they are, but then you get counter signals, which is the person at the very, very top cares so little. And you see this in hipster culture, especially in the UK now, dude, some of the outfits

that guys and girls go out wearing, I'm at where the actual living fuck did you get those clothes from? They look terrible, but it's a signal of, I'm so cool, I don't need to adhere to your idea about what cool is. My cool is so huge and fucking compensatory has it's on orbit that i can still be cool even whilst wearing this 30-year-old mothball written flees yeah exactly the counter signaling um which is where like you would normally expect someone to signal in a certain way, but actually they're kind of signaling the opposite, but the viewer is savvy enough to figure out that they could have done the usual signal, but they're intentionally not. Like high fashion, Oat Koutour is an interesting case where basically you take like a 19 year old, you know, six foot tall, super beautiful model and you put something absolutely ridiculous, like truly absurd on her. And as long as it required, like at least, you know, 5,000 person hours of effort to do all the stitching, then you can sell it to like a 50-year-old

socialite who doesn't actually look that good. Right? And that to me is very bizarre because you basically have like closer or so ridiculous that only truly beautiful fit women can wear them, but they're being bought mostly by women, aren't. And that's kind of sad. Social proofs an interesting one. I think that's kind of being co-opted as a part of high value now, high value men and high value women, but I find social proof to be quite interesting coming from a nightlife background because that's what we're playing off. You know, I need to get each year in order to run my business. I need about 300 to 400 kids between the age of 18 and 21. That are the ones that are cool. They're in the know, they're going to the right parties, sleeping with the right people, sniffing the right drugs or whatever, they need to, that's the social proof. And then we've commercialized that, we've utilized that to reflect what it means to go

to voodoo events, right? You got a voodoo events event, but that's the one that's run by the really good-looking Canadian kid or whatever it might be. But social proof happens on an individual level too, right? Yeah, totally. In my experience, like Evolutionary Psychology was one important red pill, but marketing, understanding marketing and branding and how influencers work was another major red pill. And I think it's also crucial for people to understand, particularly in a modern social media economy where influencers are really driving a lot of the desirability of goods and services or experiences like going to

particular club. And we are just such hyper social primates who are just so tuned into these cues that it's kind of easy to manipulate that. And you find the attract of people and associate them with a particular brand and everyone's like, it's cool. That's cool. That's our industry. That's what Nightlife is. So there's a lady Ashley Mears, you're familiar with her? Oh, she wrote an awesome book. She was previously a top model in New York up until the age of about 25, but she was always at uni doing sociology throughout, left, became a professor, and then decided to do ethnographic research becoming a party girl. So 31 years

old, still very good looking girl, but now 10 years older than the girls that she's going out with. And they were the ones that were filler girls. So they got taken, we don't really have this so much in the UK, a little bit in London, but not so much. There would be a host, an event that would get the girls and they'd go and get sushi or whatever, like the, the, the, the drags of the sushi. And then he'd take them into the club and they'd sit on the tables with the guys that were spending money so that they would feel, and that's your conspicuous consumption thing. But that insight around girls being used to change the experience, even though the guys that are on the table know that they're kind of not there with them, but it's a signal.

Wait, it's not conspicuous consumption, is it? Is that status and prestige by being associated with beautiful women, therefore, I am as well? Is that what's going on? Well, there's a lot of mate choice copying dynamics where like a lot of species, if you're male and some female is clearly interested in you, then the other females nearby will pay attention to that. And they'll imitate the mate choices made by the other female, particularly if the other female is like more the other female is more attractive or older or more experienced. And so you get like this winner take all thing, like Beetlemania, right, where everyone's

like, oh my god, he's so cool. Why? Just because all the other people think he's cool. You know, Justin Bieber, who? This doesn't happen as much with men being attracted to women, but it does also happen there. And it's another thing that you can exploit and marketing, of course. An article came out in Psychology today, yesterday, the result of this exercise and study was that three traits emerged as general necessities, kindness, physical attractiveness, and good

financial prospects. So that was both male and female. There was variation. Men tended to view women's financial prospects as a luxury and only eastern women saw religiosity as a necessity. You see that? You only came out yesterday. Didn't see it. Dude, but it all, I'll send it to you once we're done. It's really, really fucking interesting. So they had a bunch of different criteria for men and women, West and East, and looked. But across them all, you did have some fairly universals, kindness, physical attractiveness, and good financial prospects.

I think humor was the one that just about got missed off as well. Yeah. And if you, if you dig down a little bit into those three traits and you're like, why would that matter? Well, physical attractiveness is pretty closely associated with health and longevity, which is like, okay, how long could I potentially be in a relationship with this person before they get sick and die? So it's kind of a time dimension. The resources dimension is like, how much could they

potentially give to me or help support me or like transfer to me that would be useful to me and like my kids in our life? And then kindness is like, will they actually transfer those benefits to me or withhold them for themselves or give them to somebody else. So if you multiply how long could the relationship last, how big are the resources, times, what proportion of the attention and investment do I get? That kind of covers a lot of what you want from a long-term mate.

It's a pretty good fucking function, yeah. It's a pretty good heuristic. It's okay to... It's not like we're doing some Excel spreadsheet where it's like, I have to rate all potential mates on the following 200 traits and like do a weighted linear model and like weigh it up and then like choose the best one. I know rationalists who do that literally, but you can achieve like a decision that's like 95% that good based on just a handful of simple traits. Yeah, I remember tweeting you I think is probably was probably two years ago, just as I'd started to really get into evolutionary psychology. And I had a problem that the more that I saw, the more I couldn't unsee. Yeah. And I can't remember what your advice was. I mean, I'm sure it was

great. I haven't forgotten it because it was rubbish. But I think it was something along the lines of like it gets worse before it gets better. You start to see things, because one of the criticisms that I understand this, you know, I try and put this across when I'm talking about these dynamics, is that I'm not trying to be dispassionate about this. I'm not saying that there isn't a place for love and a sense of phenomenological existential connection with somebody that you genuinely care about. I'm not trying to reduce it down to the, you know, the autistic, Excel spreadsheet. But there is a big period where you go through kind of seeing things

for what they are, for the signals that they are, or for the reasons that people's motivations have them to do this. What would you say to someone that begins are or for the reasons that people's motivations have them to do this, what would you say to someone that begins tumbling down the evolutionary psychology dating dynamics rabbit hole and starts to kind of, I don't know, is there like a nihilism, like when people learn about free will, is there an equivalent nihilism that happens with evolutionary psychology? It can be tough for a while. I do think there's a little bit of a dark valley that you go through that's basically

like, you know, maybe read the more animal and you read some David bus stuff and some Steve Pinker stuff and you read, yeah, the apes that understood the universe by Steve Stewart Williams. Great book. I've actually used that as required textbook and some courses. Dude, that would have been a great textbook. Yeah, yeah. It covers so much. It covers like 80% of ebbsite in a really digestible way. So, good to Steve Stewart Williams for doing that. So, I've seen this a lot. You get undergrads and they learn these things.

And they can get kind of despondent and kind of depressed for a while. In my last a few months or they might like take a course and then come back a couple years later into office hours and go, the first year after I learned about Evesite was rough. Like I saw all this stuff going on in a new light and I became very cynical about people's motives and their self-deception and all their little strategies and all their bullshit and I saw through it. But then how do you come out of it? Once you start living with the idea that humans are just like animals, like other species,

and you get used to that, and then you can start to see what extraordinary animals are we. It's so awesome. Other animals just running around doing all this sexual competition shit and all this mate choice shit, and based on really dumb traits, like, oh, I want to have sex with the bigger gorilla, not the smaller gorilla,

or the bird with better plumage. And then it's like, oh, at least we have the blessings of being able to talk, be creative and do art and music and humor and all this other amazing stuff. And we have a form of romantic love that is like really sweet and very emotionally intimate compared to what most other animals do. And then you start seeing the bright side. And then you can kind of get excited again about human life. What's your thoughts on the Manusphere? I've mixed feelings about it, but largely positive.

Like, I've been a sort of observer of it for like 15 years or so ever since the early days of like pick up artists and the early 2000s and David to Angelo aka Evan pagan is a good friend of mine and I've like appeared at David to Angelo events like 15 years ago. It was strange to see like second and third-hand ideas from like my early work, getting kind of recycled into Manosphere, like wisdom or good advice or often bad advice. And then get into arguments with Manosphere guys. We're like, Miller, you don't understand human sexual dynamics at all. This is my fucking work.

Let me explain to you how sexual selection works. Dude, you're literally quoting back to me something I wrote in 1994. Like, thanks. I think for a lot of young men, they need older successful role models who can explain this stuff to them in a very no bullshit, unpretentious way. And that's what Tucker Maxx and I were trying to do with our mate book. It was kind of like, conjoined evolutionary psychology with, like, brutally simple language that even your average, like, 20-year-olds could understand. And you know, sometimes the atmosphere, guys get a little bit overconfident, I don't

know, what's up, maybe their testosterone supplementation is too high or whatever, but they get a little feisty and a little combative. I just think if you're a young man listening to this, it's important to choose your role models carefully. And like try to choose guys who are actually succeeding at something other than just giving advice. Like, who can actually have good conversations with a variety of people on their podcast, or actually are making money in crypto, or have actually founded some company that's doing well, or who aren't just like anonymous behind the scenes,

kind of, manosphere trolls. The thing that surprised me when I was watching, reading mate your book, which is fucking dope, by the way, if there are guys out there that want to kind of learn the principles of evolutionary psychology for mating, and I think that women should read that book as well, because where all the good men are, is probably a pretty fair question to ask at the moment, and if you want to be able to coach whoever it is that you're

with in order to be better or to be able to understand what it is that you actually want, really, really fucking good book. It'll be linked in the show notes below. But one of the things that really surprised me about that book was how long you guys spent in a dating book for men, explaining to men about what it feels like to be a woman in the dating space. That was a really, really welcome surprise. One of the problems that I have, the specific problem that I have with the manus fear, is it treats women like the enemy fundamentally.

That is the primary problem that I have with it. And I really, really tried to tell the line, I'm happy with uncomfortable insights, right? I'm fucking all day. I'll talk about them because they're cool, like watching the fallibility of your own world crumble in front of your eyes is there's something kind of humbling about that. Like we're looking up at the night sky, right? Like it's all and it's dread at the same time. It's kind of cool. But you can push that so easily, you know, the hypergamous nature of women that they really don't have that much control over and saying, oh, you are actually only a five out of ten,

so you shouldn't be thinking, you need to get with a man that does it to homeless and lives on a couch and smokes weed all day. Like, all right, man, like, is that not being fucking done to death where you get idiot thoughts from Miami and put them on a podcast and do whatever. But there's a big section where you try and explain to men about what it's like to be a woman, understanding girls' feelings around physical safety, objectification, creeps, being self-conscious and stuff like that. And that is so fucking important, I think, for men to understand.

Yeah, Tucker and I did, you know, a podcast called Mating Grounds. We did like 250 episodes or something. Unreal. And and that, that insight about, hey, guys, you know, if you want to have success with women, maybe radical idea, maybe you should spend like at least a nanosecond trying to look at the world through a woman's point of view. And the number of guys we had call in to that podcast going like wow I never actually did that. Like even though I have a mom and multiple sisters and many like ex-girlfriends, I never actually

thought okay what would the dating scene be like if I felt physically vulnerable, sexually vulnerable? If a lot of the guys who approach me are straight up like sociopaths and bad dudes because they're the only ones who have the courage to be super assertive, right? So you're going to be a biased sample of men or online, you're going to be a biased sample of of a lot more trolls and good guys because trolls are very, very active. And just spend a minute thinking about that and then think how an honorable man who has his shit together can you break through all of that noise and chatter and fear and kind of like present yourself as, hey, how you doing? My name is blah blah blah. Just like have a normal conversation. So perspective taking is I think really crucial in this.

What do you think there's about the zero some mentality that I've said about the manus fear? Because that's how it feels to me. It feels to me like a lot of the fundamentally good but delivered poorly and with a snide topspin advice from men sees any man's gain as a woman's loss. Like it's weird that a lot of the time they're talking about how to get women and to get with women. And then when a woman does,

does this sort of low-key admission that that's somehow their loss? Like because you gave yourself a way to this guy that we've coached to try and get himself into the position of how he can have sex with you, now you're a slut. Yeah, that's totally toxic. It's bizarre. And the irony is, a lot of the guys in the manosphere, if you ask, do you believe in capitalism or communism and redistribution? Capitalism? Why? Oh, because economic exchange is positive. Some, because we can all get wealthier if we like provide good good goods and services to each other.

And then you're like, okay, that makes sense in economic markets. Why do you think the mating market is somehow zero sum? Like this, there's some obvious low hanging fruits. Like if you have dating apps that are really, really good at matching people based on genuine compatibility, that's a win-win for everybody. It's way better than living in some medieval village where you have three potential mates and none of them share your interests and probably can't even read right? So there's so many positive, some ways we could restructure the mating market to work better for everybody.

I took a quote from mate and I put it in a newsletter the other day. So I'm going to two of both of our obsessions game theory and dating dynamics. So this was to do with slut shaming. Female promiscuity has a tragedy of the commons effect in the mating market. If one woman offers blow jobs on the second date, it's harder for other women to keep them in reserve until the fourth date is their special treat. This creates a downward spiral of young women feeling like they have to off more sex and to more guys just to stay in the mating game Thus slut-shaming is a way of enforcing a more restrained sexual norm on other women So that not all women have to become more promiscuous than any one of them would like that shit

fucking blew my mind and and fucking blew my mind. And it's really, unless you have this kind of game theory perspective, it's really hard to understand why slut-shaming has mostly done by women to other women. Correct. It also makes a lot of sense around why women tend to be the enforcers of slut-shaming because, so frequently, because women are the ones who have an incentive to protect the sexual marketplace from becoming a price war of easy sex. Yeah. And this is also why, you know, the main opponents of sex work are often married women, right? Because they have the most to lose if husband goes off, you know, and spends money

on an escort or some financial dominatrix or whatever. And if you just ask, okay, where are people's incentives? What's the incentive to impose a certain social norm on human sexuality? Often it's not that hard to figure out why it's happening. There's another case I did a little bit of research around who opposes abortions mostly and it's women. There are more women that oppose abortions than there are men. And I think there, a lot of that might be a bit of a virtue signal, right? Because if you're a woman who's like, babies are sacred. We have to protect babies. It's kind of like a way of saying, my maternal instincts are better

than yours. And I'm going to be a good mom. And one way I demonstrate, I will be a good and devoted mom who will, you know, protect your babies is to insult other women who seem not to protect their fetuses. And I did a whole book on virtue signaling, so I think a lot of this is just all the ways we demonstrate, like, we're morally good people, and so you can trust me, and I'm good. And You and I are both pretty active on Twitter and honestly like 60% of the shit on Twitter is a rich signaling to me. I would say probably even more. Most of the time people aren't saying the thing that they're saying. It's just a signal around the thing that they think they're supposed to say.

Here's how I see that that play out so much. Very rarely do you ever see someone respond to a tweet. Let's say that there's a back and forth of trying to dunk on each other. Nobody, I can't remember the last time I saw it where someone said, that is out of fucking order. Like you can't say that. Nobody ever wants to get to the stage where they call a stop to the game because the cool thing to do on Twitter is be this dispassionate fucking edge lord that just replies with memes of

Kathy Griffin, Kathy Neumann or Kathy Griffin. Because that's what's cool. Because the signal is, I'm so unperturbed by this, I've got so much other stuff that I could be doing, you're getting 1% of my attention. As opposed to saying, hang on a second, who the fuck do you think you're talking to? That isn't an acceptable thing to post to me. Yeah, my usual response when people just get out of order is I just block them,

like I block probably 30 people a day. But conversely, you can almost feel yourself getting swept up in that kind of edge, Lord-like um, game. I try to catch myself where I think, you know what, once in a while, at least a few times a day I should be like, good point, you're right, I should look into that more. Yep. I should be like, good point, you're right. I should look into that more. Yep. It's hard to do though. It's hard because it feels like you're being submissive.

It feels like you're losing. But actually to onlookers, I think to a lot of people watching the interaction, it's actually kind of cool to do that to just move. Yeah, we've been escalating this argument, but actually on this one issue, you're right. Yeah, well, that's a counter signal, right? That I am prepared to be so humble. Yeah, one of my favorite things to do, sometimes people have problems with the balance of guests. It's too much, too right wing or too male dominated or too white or to whatever. And the only thing

that I ever apply with is who would you like me to bring on? Like, give me, tell me. Tell me, put it in the, put it in the comments. Tell me who you think that I should bring on that fills the criteria that you have got an issue with. And the, it, I, it's, I can't remember the last time that someone responded to that. They put a dickish comment, I asked a question, their reply is almost never dickish. It's almost always, well actually here's a list of five people that I think are really interesting and some YouTube videos on where you get started. PS really love the show. And you're like, oh, okay, we've managed to neutralize this.

There's a lesson to be learned there, I think, about deescalating aggression. Yeah, and Twitter, to any psychologist, is just such a fascinating, like, hunting grounds for insights into human nature. That's one of the reasons I'm so active on it is I'm always like partly involved as kind of a Twitter player, but it's so easy to go meta and to be like this is just this is so funny like 8 billion primates running around on social media just like bashing each other verbally and playing these little status games and virtue signaling games. I wanna finish off that slutshaming thing.

So that's the first half of it, right? That's what you guys put forward in the book. And then I worked it through using broch signs on my newsletter, reading that first section about the fact that women enforce it mostly and why you can't have the price of sexual access kind of get spiraled down and down Reading that got me thinking about the equivalent for men and I think that it explains simp shaming too So I reword what you put at the top male resource commitment has a tragedy of the common's effect in the mating market

If one man offers gifts and resources by the second date It's harder for the other men to keep them in reserve until the fourth date is their special treat. This creates a downward spiral of young men feeling like they have to offer more and more gifts and go on increasing the extravagant dates to more and more women just to stay in the mating game. Thus, simptshaming is a way of enforcing a more restrained resource giving norm on other men so that not all men have to become more resource committed than any of them would like. Similarly, this explains why men, and mostly the enforcers of simptshaming, because men have an incentive to stop simps from cheapening the value of all men's resources. Tardely in iron law, men call women sluts and men, a women call men simps all the time, but this game theory explanation makes a lot of sense to me. If women give sex without commitment,

it cheapens the value of sex. If men give resources or commitment without sex, it cheapens the value of resources and commitment. Yeah, and you can see this in some weird little subcultures like financial domination, right? Where you might not be familiar with this, but there's a certain kind of online sex worker who's just like, I'm the Dominaterix, you send me money, men who fetishize supporting women, will just send these women like thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. They sometimes they drip feed it back to them as an allowance and stuff, right? back to them is an allowance and stuff, right? Yeah, and I don't really get it, but like whatever,

as long as you're not like a married guy and you're taking money out of your mortgage account and sending it to some other random woman. But whenever other guys hear about guys who are into being fin-dombed, financially dominated, like that's like the ultimate simp. And then the teasing is relentless. I think there's even a bit of stigma about,

men who visit text workers for the same reason. It's like, how much are you paying? Like, why can't you just go to Chris's club and pick up a woman for free whatever. But I think this this is what you know cultural norms are is our it's often our attempts to kind of control the mating dynamics of other people. Why do you think it is that men who work on their charisma or their abilities with women in like an over conscious way? Why do you think it is that there's a bit of an egg factor sometimes around that, both

from men and women? I think it's a funny thing. I don't know how much of that is kind of unique to this particular cultural moment in like British and American mating dynamics. I don't know how much of it is just a sort of like innate wearing of any guys who give off cues of being kind of macchibellian or sociopathic or narcissistic. Right? This is concept of the dark triad, personality traits, psychopathy and macchibellianism, narcissism. And so the guys who are high on those dark triad traits do tend to care a lot about good body, how they dress, how they act, maximizing cues of dominance and status that they display

and kind of parlaying that into mating success. But the guys who really benefit from like reading mate or reading Manosphere stuff are not typically those dark triad guys. They're more often guys who are kind of like a little socially awkward and aspy like me or like I used to be and so I am where it's like I just don't understand women. I don't understand clothing. How do I get in shape? What is a conversation? Like doing kind of remedial work on that, I think is,

that's a huge win, because there's a lot of guys out there with amazing potential that's not realized. Why? Because K through 12 public education doesn't teach any of this stuff. Why would it? Mail mentors, like guys, dads, and uncles don't seem to be bothering to teach it. Well, I think as well that the gap between that generation and where we are now in terms of what you need to know in order to be effective in the mating market. This is one of the common criticisms

thrown around some of the guys in the manosphere that, bro, you've been married for fucking 40 years. Like, you literally got into a relationship during a different, like a prehistoric era. Yeah, I think that is like 50% accurate and 50% like a bullshit cope because human nature doesn't change that much. Yep, I agree. Generation to generation.

It might be true that a lot of guys, dads and granddads and uncles didn't actually have that much like mating experience themselves. Right? They might not have actually had that many girlfriends. They might have only been in the mating market for like two years before they married someone as a college sophomore. Right? So they might not know what they're talking about. But on the other hand, you know, to the extent that they've had real life experience and mating experience, there's no expiration date on human wisdom about sexuality. One of the just, yeah, just because you're doing a dating app and you're like meeting people through, you know, Instagram or TikTok or whatever does

not really change the basic traits that people are looking for or the trade-offs are facing. I think one of the things as well, specifically on the guys side, is that men like to see proof of work or the equivalent of proof of work, right, from the user crypto metaphor, like where's your show me your workings, where's your proof, it's like having a fat personal trainer. It's fine, I'm sure you can get me in shape, but I'm probably going to have a little bit more faith in the in the trainer that's not fat. And it's the same thing with this that people want to see proof of work.

Why do you think I thought about this loads? I think there is a subreddit called the pink pill, but it's a little bit more like our slash women's rightsy rather than here are the fundamental principles of evolutionary psychology that you should use to become a more attractive, better balanced partner for the man that you actually want to settle down with. Why do you think there isn't a pink pill? There really needs to be, and I think an awful lot of young women would be hell about happier if they had more insight into their own preferences and desires and frustrations and where they come from and how to manage

them better. My wife, Diana, is working on a sort of advice book for women, and I don't want to give away too much information about it, but what Diana has noticed in reading many, many advice books for women is that they're like 98% validation and 2% actually, like you need to change this. Right? A typical like Jordan Peterson book for young men is like 98% you kind of suck and you really need to get your shit together. And here's all the things you need to do because no,

you're not actually a very good guy yet and you can become that, but you're not. Women's advice books more often are like, you're awesome, you're a queen, like you're wonderful and men don't appreciate that yet and here's how to manipulate them into appreciating your inner awesomeness. I think that's terrible. Like everybody who's young needs to work on themselves in all kinds of ways.

So I think the absence of a pink pill is partly young women are so used to being kind of coddled in terms of advice that they get. And I see this in academia too, in terms of like how mentors treat grad students. You can give pretty brutal feedback to male students often and they'll be like, yeah, you're right, I didn't work very hard on that paper, I need to fix it. It's extremely tricky to give brutally honest feedback to a lot of female students now.

Because it'll be like, you're just sexist, your patriarchal, like... Does that actually... Have you seen this happen to colleagues or whatever? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty common. It's a pretty... And it's really handicapping because like if you're trying to learn how to run a study or do science or write a journal paper or give a talk, like you really need a lot of

brutally honest feedback to get better. You'll be like trying to become an Olympic, you an Olympic skier where your coach is always like, awesome run. Oh, another awesome run. Great turn. No, you're not going to make progress without clear feedback. So, I think there needs to be a little bit of a cultural shift where young women need to appreciate, like, it's not actually doing you any favors in long run to never get any, any honest advice about what you're doing wrong. I wouldn't want that either.

The girls that I know that I'm friends with would feel so fucking patronized if they found out that because of other girls who were kind of lauding this sort of damically thing over the head of whoever it is that was potentially going to give them this feedback as soon as they stray into an area that they think that which again presumably is the loud minority that believe they're steering the ship. If I, if any of the girls I'm friends with knew that that was happening, they would be very, very unhappy. There is a big, big chunk of them that just want to become better and improve.

But I also know exactly the books that you mean. I was looking, I can't remember the title of this book, but it was like, not gonna dress up for you or like girl doesn't wear high heels or some shit like that pink and yellow and fucking fluffy front cover and the entire thing was about how it was like you don't deserve this something and it was all about how at the moment in your dating life is completely fine. And that you just need to keep on plugging away with your current modus operandi until you find the man that is going to be right for you. It's this like fucking awful cocktail of molly coddling, um, victim mentality, um, victim mentality and glitter. Yeah, sparkly stuff.

And yeah, any young person who thinks that they're immune to this problem or that, oh, nobody would ever, you know, call me, okay, ask yourself the last three times someone's broken up with you. Have you asked them why? Like, have you done up like a them why? Have you done a deep briefing where you're like, okay, we're broken up. Don't want to get us back together, but please just spend half an hour giving me your honest feedback about everything I did that was stupid and annoying that I can fix. That's actually under my control. Anybody who hasn't done that with people they've broken up with It's because you want to be coddled like you're not willing to have honest feedback and

It's been great listening to uh, you know my wife Diana You know before we got married If she would break up with guys, she'd be like, would you like my honest feedback about what you could expect? She offered the debrief did she? She offered the debrief and often because she tended to date like rationalists and effective altruists who would be like, yeah, actually, please, do tell me, do tell me. And that's great because she leveled a lot of guys up in terms of, you know, they ended up with like much better girlfriends after that than they ever got before that.

So this kind of honest feedback can be super useful, but most people aren't willing to seek it out. Is there a reflection from this kind of molly coddling of women into, you know, we've just seen that there is a vast majority of women that aren't having children, you know, there's some stats around either divorces or singletonness as well which are pretty alarming. Is there an equivalent on the male side with in-cell culture, Blackpill and Mig-Tout, whereas women are retreating into a community of women that are telling them, you will find the right man, they just don't deserve you, babe. Is the male equivalent to retreat into,

you don't need a woman, we've got you, let's just go get Jacked in the gym, bro. Yeah, I think there's a weird kind of symmetry in those reactions, but I think, just because there's an average sex difference in kind of how you deal with negative information, I think a lot of the guys who are very frustrated by the mating market are all women or just superficial gold diggers.

Okay, I don't match their traits. I never can. I didn't buy Bitcoin in 2012 when it was buck or whatever. It's hopeless and Then you You know you go join a bunch of bitter dudes and hang out in their bitter cave and you just Like yeah, okay fine. Mating is optional I guess I Had I had five grand of Ethereum when it was a hundred and sold it at $150 and thought that I'd done

the deal of the lifetime. Many such cases. I mean, yeah, like the crypto winter after what, early 2018, it's like, who was selling Bitcoin at $2,000 millions of people? Everybody. Everybody was. And now they're all bitter about it and sad and but man those opportunities are still out there by the way. Not necessarily in Bitcoin, but in other things. This is not investment advice, but by Cardano. There's a movement at the moment to ban all dating apps because they disproportionately

give a very small percentage of people almost all of the success. What do you thoughts on that? You certainly get like that Pareto principle where like 80% of mating is done by whatever 20% of guys or 2% of guys. But that's only the short term mating, really. It's not like the top 20% of guys are getting 80% of the marriages. So you need to focus on the right metric. If the metric is how many one-night stands is someone having? Yeah, dating apps are extremely unfair and they're very much a kind of winner-take-all market,

particularly for males, but also to some degree for females. But to me, that's not the relevant metric. The relevant metric to me is who's getting together and form a long-term pair of bonds and getting married and having kids. And if you focus on that, I think a lot of dating apps still have enormous potential to help people meet other like-minded people. And like the weirder someone is, the more unusual their beliefs, the more useful good dating apps could be. How'd you meet?

So like I happen to meet my wife Diana, you know, in professional context and like, conferences and we work in the same field. But after we started dating, we thought, I wonder what our match percentage is on OK, Kupid, because we each used OK, Kupid independent lane. We're like, OK, let's compare. And we're 98% match. And that was sort of like very validated algorithmically reaffirming to us, you know. But the problem is, okay, how else would like, apart from working in the same field, how would we have found each other apart from OKCupid? If we're like Darwinian, libertarian agnostics who are like into this and that kind of sex, and have this and that weird set of alt-centrist political views, you can't just go to a bar

or a club and expect to find someone who matches on all those things, especially if you really care about those values as we did. So if you're using dating apps and you're like, I just want to maximize one night's dance, you're probably going to be very frustrated. But if you view it as this amazing way to find your future spouse, it actually matches you on stuff you care about. Like, that's the thing that matters. That's the story you're going to tell your grandkids in the future. What pieces of dating advice do you think that people should dispense with, or do you

wish that more people were focusing on when they're making their choices with mates in 2022. I think people are innately somewhat attracted to general intelligence, but I think a lot of men in particular underestimate just how incredibly useful general intelligence will be in a long term mate in a woman. Even if the woman does not have some high-flying career, like the amount of life stress you can avoid if your spouse is really smart and decisive and well-informed and has some wisdom is enormous in terms of raising kids where you live, building a good social network, being like frugal with money, making good investment decisions, handling health crises, figuring out, should we worry about that lump that we found or whatever?

worry about that lump that we found or whatever. Like, there's dozens of domains where general intelligence really cashes out. And I would urge, like, most young men, you should try to date smart and not just hot, because until you've dated some really smart women, like for a while, and given their intelligence like the chance to shine so you understand, wow, there are a lot of hidden benefits to this. Until you have that experience, you'll kind of not pay enough attention to it. I like that. What are you working on next?

Have you got anything coming up? I want to do some more psychology research on global catastrophic risks and existential risks because that's been one of my passions the last few years. I would really like humanity to survive into the 22nd century. That would be cool. And there's a bunch of risks that are pretty scary that I think deserve a lot more attention, a lot more research. Which ones, what are you focused on? I mean, a lot of these risks are well known to the rationalist community and the effective altruist community like, you know, artificial general intelligence and super intelligence. Big potential X risk, bio weapons and pandemics and particularly genetically engineered bio weapons, big risk.

Nuclear war is still a major risk. Is nuclear war a true X risk? I think it's certainly a global catastrophic risk uh... there's been a lot of discussion about like okay which of these global catastrophic risks that could actually kill like all eight billion people in a way we can never recover from um... nuclear war it might leave enough uh...

little pockets of humanity that we could bounce back eventually, but it would still be, you know, still be a pretty bad yeah, it like it might mean oh we colonize Mars in the year 2600 rather than 2050. So the psychology of those is really interesting because I think we have a pretty accurate model of what the major catastrophic risks are. But the human ability to understand those is very, very bad. Like we do not have a good intuitive grasp on any risks that affect like more people than just like me, my family, my little tribe. We never evolved the ability to be long-term asked about like what affects all of humanity. So I would love to do more research on that,

where you actually use the behavioral science insights to try to guide public understanding of these risks and also guide policy. What we do about it. Man, there was a brief period after I read the precipice twice back to back. And I was already familiar with ex-risk a lot, but that book just really, really drove it home. And it was like an existential crisis from an existential risk book. I read it and I was like, okay, you know that this is important. You believe that this is important. What the fuck are you doing with your time

that isn't screaming from the high heavens to everybody that this is the single most important task for everybody to have their focus on? Like, you should stop doing podcasts about fucking sexual selection. You should stop eating and sleeping and you should spend your time and whatever influence you have,

trying to get people. And as soon as I watch Don't Look Up, I just immediately resonated with the scientists on that, you know, as that's the job that I should be doing, and there's still a part of me, man, there's still a fucking bit of me that goes, sack it all off, turn the YouTube channel into an exclusively existential, become like the Pretty boy gateway drug to ex-risk awareness and fucking go for that. I don't know, man, that entire subject area terrifies me.

It's super important, and it's kind of a downer, but yeah, maybe you should, maybe you should become pretty post-opal for ex-risk. Fuckess. Because, like, it does need a lot more attention. And I have exactly the same reaction. Like everybody watching this should go read Toby Orts' Depressapist. They should also read Daniel Ortsberg's book, The Doomsday

Machine, about the risk of nuclear war throughout the 20th century. And they should watch, don't look up, after they read the press office. Yes. And so how do you how do you get excited about this and how do you find balance in life? I don't know, like I've spent thousands of hours learning about crypto in the last 12 months, literally thousands of out. And like I could have been running really great

psychology studies about X risk and I didn't. Well, partly you want to get into a position where you've got the social network and the financial resources and the life skills and like the professional elbow room where you can actually have an important impact. Yeah, the change needs to be magnified. Well, that's the argument of the effective altruism movement, right? That you, Jeffrey Miller, going in giving your time at a fucking local dog's shelter or something or flying off to Africa is not maximizing the impact that you could have because you can generate more of an impact monetarily by selling books and doing talks and things like that and then just giving it to the people that can actually go and do that like the specialization for work

but tuned up for effective altruism and you are right there's But dude, I could Absolutely see a future in which I Dedicate a big ton of time to just trying to make that accessible. If I was to give advice to the guys that are already down that rabbit hole about existential risk, the thing that I think that they're missing is a bunch of ways to incentivize influencers and creators to make it sexy and to make it interesting.

It is a really, really important. And these guys, they're fucking rationalists, right? They know where the blocks are. They should be able to see where they are. And it's the fact that tell me who, the influential existential risk YouTuber is. Who the fuck is it? It's not, there's nobody.

There isn't a person that's doing it and yet it's potentially the most important subject topic that humanity's ever going to deal with like that should be that should be something that people focus on. Yeah, and it could be other things like so there's like a lot of money in effective altruism now. There's a lot more money than talent. But there's a tendency in the rationalist community to think, well, the way you solve problems is you write white papers for your friends and you do analyses and you share like the inner esoteric wisdom

within the few thousand people in that effective altruism community and you don't really do public outreach because there's an assumption that the public couldn't handle it right or if the public got alarmed by this they would all go stampeding off in the wrong direction like they might go, oh yeah, the real X risk is like the world might get two degrees Celsius warmer. They might not care about AI. So I get that, but this is the thing that's annoyed me the most. And ever since that table from Toby's book got put online, I post it around about every six months saying, this is your regular reminder

that climate change is not an existential risk priority. And people are concerned about the planet. It's obvious that you can weaponize societal concern about the future of primarily not humanity, mostly nature, but that there is a compulsion in there where people can think on that broad scale, right? It just happens to be that the first fucking movement that got a hold of that was pointing at a risk, which is like what, one in 10,000 over the next 100 years, one in 30,000 over the next 100 years, I think Toby's got it in his book. It's nothing. It's negligible. One in ten for artificial intelligence, one in ten for bioengineered weapons, one in thirty for maybe nanotechnology and natural pandemics. Yeah. Like, there you go. That's the fucking focus. Do you care about the dolphins? Do you care about not being turned into fucking paper clips?

That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're on the same page here. And so I wish that some of that money, that war chest to fight X-risk, went a little more into social media outreach and asking like, how could we make this like one of Jordan Peterson's top three priorities? How can we get, like Joe Rogan's talked about this a lot with some

I'm in the busrooms being on and and like yeah, but it's it's not like the it's not the major focus of a lot of key public people and it's weird because like the richest guy on the planet Elon Musk this is his entire fucking deal ever since he was a teenager we have to go multi-multi-planetary to minimize existential risk so we don't fucking go extinct and that's his driving motivation and yet for all the you know the billions of people who are kind of all-struck by space X only a tiny fraction of them even understand why Elon Musk wants to

do all that. So yeah, Elon himself should do more about this, but I think he realizes like it's kind of a bummer and people don't want to hear it. Would you be up for coming back on and doing a primer on existential risk at some point? Like if you haven't heard about it before, if you don't know about it, here's what we need to know, and we can just thrash that out for an hour and a half or something. Yeah, that would be awesome. I'm down.

It looks like, you know, I'm not an expert on like all the technical risks, but I think I can provide some kind of evolutionary context of like why long-term survival of humanity is kind of important. I'm down. Jeffrey Miller, ladies and gentlemen, people want to keep up to date with what you do, where should they go? Primolpoly.com is my website. And probably the best books, if you're interested in reading something I've written, is the mating mind or spent or mate or virtue signaling. Amazing, they'll all be linked in the show notes below. Jeffrey, thank you for coming out, man. It's been a pleasure. you