0:00

Hello friends, welcome back to the

0:02

show. My guest today is Mads Larsen.

0:04

He's a Norwegian author and journalist whose

0:06

research focuses on the history of human

0:09

mating ideologies. The narrative of

0:11

human romance is an ancient story, but that story

0:13

has not always remained the same. The last 10,000 years

0:16

has been a crazy journey through different beliefs

0:19

on why we should find and stay with a

0:21

partner, and today we get to hear about all

0:23

of the fascinating details. Expect to learn

0:26

why it's so illuminating to study the story

0:28

of mating ideologies across time, how

0:30

our modern beliefs about finding a partner

0:33

are historically very unusual, why

0:35

having a daughter as a farmer could

0:37

be a useful addition to your farming strategy,

0:40

why incels are so unhappy, why old

0:42

people are the happiest ever despite

0:44

evidence to the contrary in the past,

0:46

and much more.

0:48

This episode is absolutely

0:50

awesome. Mads, I met him a couple of

0:52

months ago at HBES, the Human Behaviour

0:55

and Evolution Society Conference in

0:57

Palm Springs, and this guy is so

1:00

good. I adore this conversation.

1:02

There is so much interesting stuff in here. Another

1:05

underground hero. He will be coming back on the show. I

1:08

really, really hope that you enjoy this one because this guy totally

1:11

blew my socks off. Yeah, just sit

1:13

back and enjoy this.

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which makes you feel even

6:00

people to mate that core system that

6:02

makes them think that it's their duty to

6:05

pair bond and have children. And the

6:07

ideology we have now is, compared to previous

6:10

ideologies, very weak in that regard.

6:13

When I have an ideology where this has become completely voluntary

6:16

and where you can make a good case

6:18

for why perhaps you shouldn't have children. And that's

6:20

a rather unique situation. I

6:23

like the use of the word coercion. Oh,

6:26

absolutely. Biological and cultural

6:28

coercion. It's a huge sacrifice

6:31

to reproduce and to make

6:33

enough people do that to a significant

6:35

extent now that we also have effective

6:38

contraception, it's really difficult.

6:41

Right. So what is it that's

6:44

changed primarily in

6:46

terms of the demands on mating

6:49

and resource supply in

6:52

the modern world or even in the developed world

6:54

compared with 10,000, 50,000 years

6:57

ago? So

7:00

much. There

7:02

are several factors. Contraception

7:05

is huge. Before you just needed to want it to copulate

7:07

and if you did that enough, you'd have children. And

7:10

then you'd be coerced by your communities

7:12

to pair bond and take care of that child until it's

7:16

big enough. In the modern world,

7:18

we've now made, we've de-connected copulation

7:21

from reproduction. And also in

7:24

these industrialized environments we

7:26

have, children have become much more expensive

7:28

instead of being free labor, they're a huge

7:30

cost. Also we have an ideology

7:33

that over the past millennium has

7:35

become more and more individualistic. So

7:38

we're not necessarily convinced that God

7:40

is forcing us to have children because that is

7:42

the meaning of life. We now

7:45

think that perhaps being single and traveling

7:47

and taking care of ourselves is more important

7:50

than putting more children out into the world. And in addition,

7:53

at the moment we have this quite

7:56

significant uncertainty about the future that

7:58

also disincentivizes reproduction.

8:00

What do you think

8:03

is the ancestrally typical

8:05

mating strategy for humans over time? I

8:07

know that we've had a few human

8:10

ancestors and then we kind of had a little bit of a movement.

8:13

What was the journey through human

8:15

predecessor mating systems? You're

8:18

thinking the past six million years? Yeah,

8:20

yeah. Give us the story. Start six million

8:22

years ago. We'll take it from there. Yeah, so we started

8:25

out like most vertebrates. We made

8:27

it promiscuously. That means that

8:30

we probably lived together in groups, multi-male-female

8:33

groups, where

8:36

individuals were free to copulate,

8:39

but were reproductive opportunities, were mostly channeled

8:42

to high status males. The purpose of that is

8:44

that you then distribute the most successful

8:46

genes within the population, which

8:48

helps us adapt more quickly to changes,

8:51

etc. This is

8:53

what's most common across animal groups. But

8:56

then some species, they

9:00

develop a need for pair bonding. If you can

9:02

get paternal investment, if the

9:04

males contribute with more than just genes, this

9:07

can be very beneficial. This

9:09

is what happened with our lineage,

9:11

with early hominins, about four million

9:14

years ago, where the ecology changed,

9:16

where it was so beneficial. If

9:19

males would contribute, we then had a transition.

9:22

We don't know precisely which way. The main hypothesis

9:24

is that high status males started keeping harems and

9:26

providing for females. Then

9:28

there's an alternative hypothesis

9:30

that is rather new, but quite interesting, that

9:32

this was a sneaky new strategy

9:35

for low status males to be allowed

9:37

to copulate and reproduce if

9:40

they offered provisioning and protection

9:43

to females. Wow, it was like the

9:46

prehistoric simp version.

9:50

Yeah, it's an interesting hypothesis. This is

9:53

a scholar. He's a theoretical biologist

9:55

who did mathematical models, and he

9:57

just couldn't make it add up for high status

9:59

males. as males, it

10:03

would never make sense for them to go

10:06

along with that initial transition from promiscuous

10:08

mating to pair bonding, polygamous pair bonding.

10:11

It made a lot more sense that those males that

10:13

were excluded from mating saw as

10:16

offspring needed more help,

10:18

more provisioning. They were more

10:21

dependent on the females that they

10:23

would now go in and make the deal that, okay,

10:25

I will provide you with calories and protection,

10:28

but then you let me have sex with you exclusively,

10:31

so I know that your offspring are mine. And

10:33

then the females had to make a trade-off. Do you want

10:35

the good genes from males

10:37

that are only willing to contribute

10:39

with genes, or do you want a

10:42

low-status male to be around there and

10:44

help you get food, help you get protection, help

10:46

you out with the kid? And that would

10:49

result in kind of like a resource

10:52

acquisition and supply arms race between

10:55

the low-status and the high-status males.

10:58

Yeah, so then this would push so it would then

11:00

start because this was so beneficial because across

11:02

those four million years, the offspring

11:04

development period doubled. We

11:06

just got bigger heads, more helpless when

11:09

we were born. So it became more and more

11:11

beneficial to pass

11:13

the good genes and instead get a male

11:16

that would help you out through the most vulnerable

11:18

year, so through the pregnancy and then in the beginning

11:20

phase of when the child needed

11:22

the provisioning the most. And

11:25

then this developed until around

11:27

two million years ago when most

11:30

homo-communist consisted of

11:34

mostly fatal females and provisioning males, and

11:36

then a small number of polygonists and a small

11:38

number of premiscuous maters because it

11:42

would always in some instances be beneficial

11:45

to the female to choose the superior genes

11:47

of a high-status male rather than

11:49

get a provisioning low-status male to as

11:52

the father. So this is

11:54

a competing hypothesis that intuitively

11:59

it seems interesting.

12:01

Just how rare is male parental investment

12:04

in the mammal and primate world?

12:08

Pair bonding? Yeah, male

12:10

parental investment primarily. Yeah,

12:13

so I think among

12:15

mammals it's 10% do

12:18

pair bonding and among primates it's 29%. But

12:21

the reason why we think that our

12:24

lineage where promiscus meters six

12:26

million years ago is that chimpanzees

12:28

and bonobos are promiscus meters

12:31

and once a lineage has evolved pair

12:33

bonding it is so beneficial

12:35

that it's exceptionally rare that you

12:37

de-evolve from it. That's why we assume

12:40

that six million years ago we also

12:42

had promiscus ancestors. Interesting,

12:45

okay so two million years, what

12:48

happens next? Because we go through some rapid

12:50

changes from then

12:52

until now? Yeah, so the interesting

12:55

part is that although it became

12:57

highly beneficial with pair bonding, there was

12:59

little pressure on males for not wanting

13:02

multiple females to want to

13:04

make promiscus the polygonously. And

13:07

likewise, while it was beneficial for

13:09

females to opt for the provisioning of low-status

13:11

males, there was little pressure on them for not

13:14

wanting or desiring a more successful

13:16

mate. So what we see what is quite

13:18

interesting is that for those two million years the

13:21

norm was monogamous pair bonding

13:23

with some polygon. But a

13:26

really superior forager just

13:29

couldn't provide for that many females.

13:32

But we see that with agriculture that

13:34

took off and resulted

13:36

in pretty extreme polygyny

13:40

in the most inequitous environments.

13:43

But that would have been when was the agricultural revolution 15,000

13:46

years ago? Something like that, 20,000 years ago? Around 12.

13:49

Yeah, okay. And then the

13:52

main period was from around 7,000 years

13:55

ago, all the best agricultural land had

13:57

been taken. So then if you wanted to...

15:59

Yeah, 2000 years of

16:02

universal genocide and rape. That's

16:04

what our ancestors were up to. That's

16:06

what it seems like. And

16:08

the reason why we got out of it was that we

16:10

invented new stories. Because up

16:12

until 5000 years ago, we could only cooperate

16:15

with kin. And then somebody invented

16:17

that. Some men, they are the descendants

16:19

of gods. So we can submit to them

16:21

as leaders, and now we can grow our

16:24

in groups. So instead of just being a kin group, we

16:26

can now be thousands and we can keep growing. And

16:28

that is, of course, beneficial because then we can

16:31

kill our smaller neighbors a lot more easily. Okay,

16:33

so is this the inception of

16:36

having a broader mating ideology about 5000

16:38

years ago?

16:40

Well,

16:42

what that created was the ability to

16:44

create a lot larger societies. And

16:46

it also, the invention at the time

16:49

was slavery. Before that, when

16:51

you conquered someone, you killed all the males. Now

16:54

you could either turn them into your slaves or

16:56

your allies. So that was, it's

16:58

a weird thing to think about. But if

17:01

we think that slavery is better than

17:03

genocide, that was actually progress

17:05

at some point in our past. So when we look

17:08

at our ancestors, it's they've been, yeah,

17:10

it's a rather unpleasant group of people

17:12

at times. Yeah, when the choice is between

17:14

slavery and genocide, and

17:17

you're having to make a value judgment of which

17:20

one, which one's least bad of

17:22

the two. That's a little bit

17:24

rough. Okay, so what given

17:26

your research, looking at this sort of journey of

17:28

mating ideologies over time, what

17:30

is the furthest back that

17:32

you've managed to find? Now, obviously, as you say, some

17:35

kind of prototypical religion

17:39

bonds groups together in a way that

17:41

civilizes them beyond what they normally would.

17:43

And given that so much of what

17:46

we were driven by previously, the motivation was

17:48

very heavily mating derived,

17:50

or at least mating with one of the outcomes that we wanted. I

17:53

suppose you could say that any

17:55

ideology that cahuses a group together beyond

17:58

kin is a mating ideology. But

18:00

what about when it becomes

18:02

a little bit more specific about

18:05

what a man's role is, what

18:07

a woman's role is, how we should combine

18:09

all of this together? Yeah, that's

18:12

a good intuition to have, that that is the kind of civilizing

18:15

direction. But the ideology,

18:17

mating ideology, didn't change that much from

18:19

the period we've described now, and up

18:21

until the church's

18:23

dissolution of Europe's tribes about a thousand

18:26

years ago. We can call that ideology,

18:28

it is often called heroic love. So

18:30

if you want to start following the mating ideologies

18:32

we had through antiquity, up

18:35

until the church's dissolution of the tribes, heroic

18:37

love, and it's a term that's a little

18:40

bit problematic.

18:43

Because the point with it was that during

18:46

this regime, a woman had

18:48

to always be ready to submit to

18:50

the greater warrior. You didn't

18:52

necessarily have a few rulers

18:54

or other state structures that could protect people.

18:57

People always, up until this time, lived in

18:59

kin groups. And if other groups came

19:02

and defeated you, then the men

19:04

would be killed and enslaved, and the women would

19:06

often be captured. So if women

19:08

wanted a chance to survive and protect themselves

19:11

and their children, they now had to submit

19:13

to whomever had killed their father

19:15

or their husband. So this

19:18

was an extremely misogynistic rape culture,

19:20

and this is what marked up until

19:25

a thousand years ago. From

19:29

the beginning of agriculture, from that period we talked

19:32

earlier, this was the original

19:34

patriarchy where the male energies was

19:36

matter and women had different

19:38

ways of conceptualizing this, but women

19:41

were more like soil where the patriarchal

19:43

seed were put. So this way, as long

19:45

as you had these beliefs, you could just capture as many women

19:48

as you wanted or were able to, and

19:50

then keep growing your kin group. I

19:52

suppose as well this heroic love narrative

19:56

is a useful strategy

19:59

to legitimize

19:59

to

20:01

the men what they are doing, but

20:03

also as a coping strategy to dampen

20:06

down the discomfort of what the women are

20:08

subjected to. Yeah.

20:12

But if there is an ideology that sits

20:14

over the top that maybe this is the way that

20:16

mating is supposed to be done, maybe it is beneficial

20:19

that your last husband was killed and murdered,

20:21

and that now you have a new one because he's

20:24

evidently the more heroic of the two.

20:27

Or it is quite right that you

20:29

should go, as opposed to the person

20:31

that I cared about has just been dismembered

20:33

in front of me and now this guy that I don't know. That's

20:36

not a particularly reassuring story, whereas

20:38

the heroic love narrative is

20:41

useful for both sexes in some regards. In

20:44

some regards, but I'm sure it was

20:47

an absolute nightmare for these people that had

20:49

to go through this. And what drove

20:51

much of this was that

20:53

these kin groups generally practiced

20:56

polygamous mating. So

20:58

you'd had elite individuals who would

21:00

hoard women as wives, concubines, and sex

21:02

slaves. So for the low value

21:04

men, they didn't have access to

21:06

pair bonding or copulation.

21:09

So then they were driven throughout antiquity

21:12

to when they had a strong enough position to

21:14

go to whomever their neighbors

21:16

were and then kill the men, take

21:18

their stuff and take their women. This

21:21

polygamous mating that marked this period

21:23

under heroic love drove a lot

21:25

of war, a lot of social instability.

21:29

It was quite an enormous change

21:31

that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy

21:34

even on the most superior of males. That

21:36

changed everything. When did

21:39

that happen? Well,

21:43

the Roman Empire played

21:45

around with monogamy, but they were

21:47

never very serious about it. And

21:50

then the church started imposing

21:53

it in the fourth century, but also not very

21:55

serious. And then you have a period that's

21:57

referred to as the Gregorian Reform at the beginning

21:59

of the second millennium.

21:59

millennium,

22:01

that you had a lot of church councils

22:03

that worked with these matters because the church wanted

22:05

to grab more power over the people. And if you can

22:07

control their mating, if you can control their marriages,

22:10

their sexual behavior, etc., that

22:12

gives you a lot of power over powerful

22:15

men. So this is when they dissolved

22:17

Europe's tribes through prohibiting cousin marriage,

22:20

changing rules for inheritance

22:23

and ownership, and then imposing

22:25

lifelong monogamy, which was a very

22:28

unusual, unique, rather extreme

22:30

way of thinking of mating. But when you do this,

22:33

this, if you want to understand the origins of the

22:35

modern world, this was it. Because then

22:37

you create the sexual egalitarianism. This

22:40

is how you make parents invest in children. This

22:42

is where you prepare for growth and where you start

22:45

creating a different, more individualistic psychology,

22:48

different way of thinking, you're lower men's testosterone.

22:50

So instead of superior men competing

22:53

all their life to acquire more women,

22:55

you get to compete until you get one. Then

22:57

you have to put your efforts

23:00

in a more productive direction. How

23:02

does it help investment

23:05

in children? Why was there not a massive

23:08

amount of investment in children during the

23:10

heroic mating era? Because

23:13

you would have one father with

23:16

several women with a

23:18

bunch of children, and you would try to maximize

23:20

that to the extent that your resources allowed. So

23:23

you just had a lot less attention

23:25

per child, and you also didn't have an ideology

23:27

where you should necessarily invest so much in your

23:29

children. They were more expendable. While

23:33

if then these children are distributed

23:35

over more men, and you have a more limited

23:37

amount of children, then you will be more

23:40

incentivized to take care of those children that

23:42

you do have. What

23:44

is the reason for the church

23:47

or anybody wanting to

23:49

impose some sort of rule

23:51

from a civilization

23:54

design perspective? What

23:57

was the advantage or the change

23:59

that they were looking for? to enact what was the outcome

24:01

that they wanted by encouraging lifelong monogamy.

24:04

Well,

24:05

that's really interesting. In hindsight,

24:08

if we like modernity, we

24:10

think it was brilliant. But

24:12

when we look at the document that exists at the

24:14

time, it's a bit of a mystery. We

24:17

can suspect certain things through

24:20

dissolving Europe's tribes and changing

24:24

the rules for ownership and inheritance. The

24:26

church by the 10th century

24:29

had grabbed 40% of the agricultural

24:31

land in Western Europe, so that was good. You

24:34

could see that as a pretty strong incentive

24:36

that when you die instead of your land

24:38

being passed on to your kin, you now

24:40

give it to the church so you don't have to go to hell. That's

24:43

a pretty strong material incentive. And

24:46

then the other aspect, as I mentioned earlier,

24:48

is that powerful men that hoard a lot

24:50

of women, if you can impose on

24:52

them certain mating structures, then

24:55

you as the church, if you have to acknowledge

24:59

or permit their marriages, if you can restrict

25:01

them, then the church get power

25:04

over powerful men, which is another good

25:07

understandable material incentive. And

25:11

then it's all just speculation

25:13

in terms of what the spiritual ramifications

25:16

are, what they might have suspected the long-term

25:18

consequences would be. But my

25:21

impression from having started a lot

25:23

of deep cultural changes is that to

25:25

some extent, things just happen. It's

25:28

just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things,

25:31

and then it almost magically sorts itself

25:34

out, and nobody really understands

25:36

what's happening when it's happening. And then 100 years

25:38

later, or in the modern times, historians look

25:40

back and kind of try to make sense of

25:43

what it was. But generally,

25:45

there aren't that many grand architects

25:47

that have a particular vision that

25:49

they're able to impose on their culture. Yeah.

25:53

What's that quote about life happens

25:55

forward, but only makes sense in reverse? And

25:58

I guess that history's kind of... of the

26:00

same, that we can post-hoc rationalize what

26:02

was it that the church's grand plan was,

26:05

whereas, you know, it's much easier to go for

26:07

a simple explanation, which was they

26:09

wanted to control powerful men. These powerful

26:11

men had lots of resources. If the church

26:14

slot themselves in between

26:16

those men and one of the things that they

26:18

want the absolute most, which is

26:21

women, because presumably they couldn't slot

26:23

themselves in between the men and

26:25

their resources, like, unless the church

26:27

is going to wage a war and say, right

26:29

now, half of this farm's hours, now half of this

26:32

house is ours, now, da, da, da, da, da, da, it's

26:34

a much more crafty, subversive

26:38

strategy to be able to somehow make

26:40

divine the union between a man

26:42

and a woman, and then for you to be

26:44

the arbiter that sits in between them, yeah,

26:47

I can totally see how it gives you power over powerful

26:49

men. One thing that hasn't been mentioned

26:51

so far, which I thought would have come up, is

26:54

sexual redistribution, right? That

26:57

if you have high amounts

26:59

of inequality within a sexual system,

27:02

you get young male syndrome, it's not very good.

27:06

Does this play a role at this stage, or was it

27:08

just such an accepted part of

27:10

the way that the world existed that no one was

27:12

really bothered about the chaos that came along with

27:15

it? No, in hindsight,

27:17

we see that it was hugely beneficial. The modern

27:19

world would not have happened if that redistribution

27:22

of women hadn't happened, that the church imposed

27:24

on medieval Europeans. But

27:26

whether anyone in the church were able to

27:28

predict what greater sexual egalitarianism

27:32

would have for consequences, for social stability,

27:35

the potential for growth, for peace, etc.

27:38

I don't know, I'd like to think they were

27:40

that smart, but I kind

27:42

of doubt it. Maybe they noticed

27:44

as they went along that they saw there were beneficial

27:47

effects. I don't know. But yeah,

27:49

the end result was quite impressive,

27:51

but how it came about, who the architects

27:54

were, if they really imagined this, I'm

27:56

kind of doubtful if they understood

27:59

the ramifications. of what they were doing. Okay,

28:01

so, heroic love finishes.

28:05

The church comes in. Sorry, men. No

28:08

more gang bangs for you.

28:10

What comes next?

28:11

Well, this is fascinating, and

28:13

this speaks again to how nobody's in charge.

28:17

So, some of these mating

28:19

ideologies are what I refer to as cultural dissolvents.

28:22

These are mating ideologies upon which you cannot

28:24

build social order, but they kind of make

28:27

you lose faith in the previous ideology.

28:30

So, when courtly love was

28:33

created and disseminated through romances

28:35

and ballads from the 12th

28:39

century, this was an ideology

28:41

with values and norms that primarily

28:44

undermined heroic love. So,

28:47

it had an exaggeration of

28:49

the emotion of love as something that was incredibly

28:52

strong and irresistible and that lasted a lifetime.

28:55

And this was meant to discourage high status

28:57

men from being polygamous. That

29:00

if you pick just one woman, that's going

29:02

to last for life, and it's going to give you

29:04

this special ecstasy that you can't get

29:07

if you have more women and also if you force yourself

29:10

on a woman. So, what men should

29:12

do, and this is what ballads and romances promote,

29:14

that instead of being the greatest warrior, well,

29:17

you also have to be the greatest warrior. But in addition

29:19

to that, you have to talk to women.

29:22

You have to use sophisticated social skills.

29:24

You have to flirt. And instead of just

29:26

raping her after you killed her husband, you

29:29

have to make the woman feel a high

29:32

degree of lust and love. So,

29:34

when she can't help herself from having sex

29:36

with you because she loves you so much and

29:39

she loves you so much, that's when you can have

29:41

sex. So, you have all these values

29:43

that if you

29:45

just read the romances and ballads, then you don't know

29:47

what they're reacting against. It's

29:50

kind of hard to make sense of, but when you

29:52

know the tenets of heroic love, you

29:54

see that all these elements of court

29:57

love are constructed in a sense to

29:59

undermine those strong beliefs

30:01

from the previous regime. And also

30:04

it has to do with a new sociality that when

30:06

you lived in kinship groups, you

30:09

stuck to your own, you were skeptical towards strangers,

30:12

strangers might want to kill you and take your stuff.

30:14

But now that we lived in a feudal Europe where everyone

30:17

was supposed to be Christian, then we're supposed

30:19

to have this openness towards strangers,

30:21

we're supposed to be friendly, courteous,

30:24

and all these norms that defines courtly

30:26

love is also the way European Christians

30:29

were supposed to treat each other and not

30:31

just women. So you have all this

30:34

brand new type of sociality that

30:36

would have never worked in the kinship system but

30:38

was crucial for feudal Europe to have

30:40

an effective cooperation. So

30:43

as you're becoming more civilized and

30:45

as you are more open

30:48

to new people, to being friends

30:50

with people, stuff like pubs and

30:53

ale houses and things will occur, people

30:55

will be migrating a little bit more.

30:58

It's not just my family bonds with the family

31:00

next door. Okay,

31:02

so what is the role

31:05

of marriage? Is marriage widespread

31:07

at this point? Is it that you go through the church

31:10

and the church does this thing? What about the

31:12

role of sex before marriage and

31:15

those sorts of impositions? Yeah,

31:17

so the transition was before marriages were private

31:20

but with the Gregorian reform, they had to be church

31:22

marriages which is also very important for courtly

31:24

love.

31:26

What's unique about it, it's something called the European

31:28

marriage pattern that develops there because this

31:30

had never happened before. No kin groups

31:32

had been dissolved the way the church did it. So

31:35

you got a unique situation in the West. What

31:38

happens is that

31:41

when you can no longer move in with your kin, you

31:43

have to start accumulating resources

31:46

so people's marriage age were pushed up from

31:48

say from their teens or early 20s up

31:51

to the late 20s. So you shorten

31:53

people reproductive period and this was crucial

31:55

because under in antiquity,

31:58

we practice what you can call fourth.

31:59

You have the primester abortion,

32:01

you might know this from Vikings, you

32:03

have the babies you have and then you have a look at them and

32:05

then you kill the ones you can't raise. So

32:08

this was how you kept the population in check. And

32:10

they tended to kill more females than males, so

32:12

you'd have a low sex ratio.

32:16

What they did now, because individual

32:18

life became sacred, you now have to restrict

32:21

people's sexuality. They had to have less sex.

32:23

And one way that they did this was through this European

32:26

marriage pattern, where your reproductive period

32:28

didn't start until you're around 30 years old.

32:31

That way you didn't have more children. So

32:33

it was very crucial in this period that

32:35

people's sexuality were restricted, otherwise

32:38

you'd run into a Malthusian crisis because you'd have

32:40

too many children. But what happened interestingly

32:43

is after the Black Death

32:46

in the mid 14th century, North

32:49

of Europe lost over, in my country, over 50%

32:52

of the population and around Europe, to a third

32:54

to a half was lost. So

32:56

in the 1400s, you had what's called

32:59

the sexual laxness of the 15th century,

33:02

where people were having a lot more

33:04

promiscuous sex sleeping around, etc.,

33:06

etc., because the environment could afford

33:09

it. And then when we rebuilt

33:11

the population around the year 1500,

33:14

that's when you have the reformation, that's when you have

33:16

a re-tightening of these sexual norms, because

33:18

we couldn't afford it anymore because we refilled

33:21

up our population, and that's when you

33:23

get puritanism, etc., What

33:26

you were talking about this sort of window, this reproductive

33:29

window that age 30, age

33:32

of late 20s was important, is that people

33:34

were told that they shouldn't reproduce after 30, or

33:37

they weren't permitted to reproduce until 30. So

33:40

before, when you had polygyny and you lived in kin

33:42

groups, you'd have a man with a lot of resources,

33:45

and he'd bury every time you feel like it. And then

33:47

he'd, if he'd married a woman at 20, and

33:49

he'd be 30 or 40, and she'd just start

33:52

reproducing right away. And the same,

33:54

if they were younger, you would always have a

33:56

place to live, you'd move in next to your

33:58

kin, on your kin group.

33:59

land.

34:01

Now in feudal Europe, you'd

34:03

have to accumulate resources to be able

34:05

to afford what's called a neo-local resident. You

34:07

don't live with your family, you live on your own. So

34:09

you'd have to be on labor, men and women would have

34:12

to be on labor markets, typically in their 20s,

34:14

until they had accumulated enough resources to

34:16

get their own place. And this is what pushed

34:18

up the marriage age. And which,

34:21

so reproductive, reproduction didn't

34:23

start until typically in your late 20s

34:25

for women. Wow, because I,

34:28

you know, Game of Thrones

34:30

as my greatest window into an accurate

34:32

historical representation of what would have happened in

34:34

medieval times for reproduction. You know, you've

34:36

got a lot of essentially child

34:39

and teen marriages and women

34:41

occurring. And I certainly know that some of the aristocracy

34:44

were doing this. Was that only a behavior

34:48

or a trend that occurred in the upper echelons

34:51

of the higher nobility? Those

34:53

who had resources. So you see that the very

34:55

highest, the highest classes are those that

34:57

are marked the least by these changes

35:00

to the past millennium of mating morale is they

35:02

still, the very highest status

35:05

men, they still had lovers on the side. They still had

35:07

a couple of wives for a few centuries longer

35:10

than they were supposed to. So they got away from

35:12

this and the church tried to arrest power from

35:14

them, but it was a bad land. They were still powerful. So

35:16

yeah, among the higher classes, you typically

35:19

would marry still when you were around 20, perhaps.

35:22

Right. So this is really interesting.

35:24

Obviously we're going to get into it as we continue down this little

35:26

journey through time, but a

35:30

lot of the conversations at the moment are

35:32

for the first time since records began, more women

35:35

are childless at 30 than with children

35:37

at 30. But it seems

35:39

to me like if we look only 500, 600 years

35:41

ago, you're maybe going to

35:45

see very similar sort of fertility patterns

35:47

amongst women, albeit for very different reasons

35:49

than individual choice and traveling

35:52

the world and getting an education and stuff like that. But

35:55

yeah, you're going to see because of the demands that were

35:57

placed on their requirement to accumulate

35:59

resources. resources, both as men and as women, in

36:02

order to be able to get started with a family.

36:04

Plus, you don't have quite as sophisticated

36:07

social safety nets, so you do have this Malthusian

36:09

problem that keeps everything down. So,

36:11

right, okay, we need to restrict, restrict, restrict. It's

36:13

basically like an entry price

36:15

into a nightclub that up until

36:17

the point at which you can pay the entry price,

36:20

you can't go to the dance, right? The

36:22

dance being having kids. Yeah.

36:25

Yeah. And also, at this

36:28

point, what was characteristic of the European

36:31

marriage pattern was an exceptionally high

36:33

percentage of never married women.

36:36

In a polygonist system, mostly all

36:38

women are married. Under this

36:40

system, it had extraordinary high percentage

36:43

of typically 10%, which

36:46

to us sounds very low, but at the

36:48

time that was unheard of. So around 10% of

36:50

women are never married during this

36:52

regime. Wow. Okay,

36:54

so we are currently in courtly love. I

36:58

love the fact that it's like one

37:01

of its primary design

37:05

justifications was to be a counterweight

37:09

to the heroic love narrative,

37:12

right? It's overly restrictive

37:15

on men compared with

37:17

what they had for their values set previously, but

37:20

you must ensure that the woman is lusting

37:22

after you. Then we potentially add no sex

37:25

before marriage in as well. That's another, that

37:27

gives you the restriction of resources. You need to be able to pay

37:30

the dowry. You need to make sure that you've asked for her father's

37:32

hand in marriage. I'm going to guess that that comes around to some

37:34

point around about this time too, which would mean, you

37:37

know, the most difficult gatekeep

37:39

arbiter on the planet. You've got to like get

37:41

his seal of approval before you can do it too. Then

37:43

you go to go through the church. Presumably there's some assessments

37:45

that get done by the church too. So yeah, all

37:48

of this not only acting

37:50

as a, what would end

37:53

up being a useful sexual redistribution

37:55

for creating the foundation of a non-chaotic

37:58

civilization moving forward. But

38:00

probably at the moment the main thing it was trying to

38:02

do is let's just stop all of the powerful

38:05

men raping everyone Let's let's

38:07

just stop that from happening first and we'll

38:09

see where we go from there and the core value

38:12

here You could or this is the West's first

38:14

sexual revolution You could place that around

38:16

the year 1200 and the core value

38:18

here is female consent So

38:21

in antiquity women were commodities a

38:23

marriage is we usually arranged between families

38:25

again It was a commercial contract and

38:28

then with these reforms With

38:30

they instituted something called a double

38:32

consent So women aren't

38:34

free to choose who to marry men aren't free to

38:37

choose who to marry but women now have

38:39

a chance of refusal So

38:41

it's still you go from in antiquity.

38:44

The kin group was to authority in marriage Now

38:47

you move to the nuclear family because that is

38:49

how you live now So it's still parents who

38:51

arranged marriage, but crucially

38:53

women are given leverage through being allowed to

38:55

say no So they are still coerced

38:57

into marriages still not individual choice,

39:00

but they can't say no and that's that's huge

39:02

progress Right

39:05

women on a path of emancipation that is ongoing

39:08

The beginning of female emancipation in the West

39:11

was the church's imposition of female

39:14

The female right to consent in the first sexual revolution

39:17

That changed everything that that's yeah everything

39:20

that has happened since was a result of

39:22

that first movement Okay,

39:24

what comes after courtly love?

39:26

well

39:27

The mating ideology that

39:30

the society was built on then is something called

39:33

companion at love So this was

39:35

a very pragmatic ideology

39:37

and very different from court to love in court

39:40

to love You and I we

39:42

are aristocratic nights And we're gonna travel

39:44

through Europe to find our one true

39:46

love and we're gonna fall Incredibly

39:48

much in love and we're gonna live in bless bless forever

39:51

after and actually this was not

39:53

the reality for European peasants So

39:55

the ideology of companion at love is

39:58

that a man and a woman? shall

40:01

marry for life through an arranged marriage,

40:03

whether they like each other or not is not

40:05

a big deal, and their primary

40:07

task is to

40:10

run the farm as partners, to

40:12

run the farm and keep their children alive.

40:15

So we're not going to sleep around, we're not going to divorce

40:17

and find somebody else, we're just going

40:19

to huddle down and make sure that as

40:21

many children as possible are alive

40:23

in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic,

40:26

very unromantic ideology,

40:29

it's about submitting to the needs of your family

40:31

and your community and not giving into

40:33

emotions or erotic or romantic

40:36

impulses. So this was the reality

40:39

for European peasants from

40:43

the first sexual revolution when the Kindredfühde solved

40:46

and all the way up to 1750, which

40:48

was the West's second sexual revolution.

40:51

This was a period of companionate

40:53

love, arranged marriages, pragmatism,

40:56

and then you had a period before 1500 with

40:59

sexual laxness, and then a period afterwards

41:02

with puritanism to restrict

41:04

people's impulses to

41:06

avoid multusian crises. I

41:08

was just about to ask why the puritanism?

41:13

Well,

41:15

after this period of sexual laxness when

41:17

we had rebuilt the population and when we entered

41:20

into a period of stagnation

41:22

and stagnant per capita growth,

41:26

we needed to prevent Europeans

41:29

from having too many

41:31

children to having premarital sex,

41:33

extramarital sex. And the

41:35

way we have done this in the West is to

41:38

villainize female sexuality. Women

41:40

are the sexual selectors, and

41:42

in order to prevent extramarital

41:45

sex from happening or premarital sex, the

41:48

church has in those instances gone

41:50

after the women. the

42:01

ideology is women

42:03

do not benefit from sex outside of

42:05

marriage. Women who are lustful are

42:07

aligned with Satan, etc. So

42:10

it's a way to oppress women

42:12

and

42:14

to coerce them into not having sex

42:16

that they shouldn't have, which could then contribute

42:18

to multiscient crisis. So the choice

42:20

we face in these situations is either

42:24

we kill babies when they are born,

42:26

the surplus of them, or we have

42:28

to find a way to prevent people from

42:30

having extramarital sex or sex that produces

42:33

too much babies. And the means we have tended

42:35

to use in the West is to

42:37

demonize female sexuality in those instances. Why

42:40

not try to control male sexuality?

42:44

It's a really good question. If you look

42:46

at the differences in male and female mating

42:48

psychology, and

42:51

who is in charge on these markets, it

42:54

seems like the most effective

42:57

choice, I'm not condoning it, but it

42:59

seems like the most effective choice to

43:02

place the cost on the sexual selectors. You

43:04

could imagine that men are so driven

43:07

that telling men, men

43:09

generally do not have sexual access to

43:12

women. And to tell men

43:14

that they shouldn't have sex, number one, it would be

43:16

harder because they have a stronger drive for short-term

43:19

relationships. But

43:21

also that access isn't

43:23

there for them. While if the women are the ones

43:25

who make the decisions in these

43:27

cases of at least the voluntary sex, then

43:32

placing an enormous burden on women

43:34

that from our modern perspective seems totally

43:36

misogynistic and unfair, it

43:38

seems that that would be the more effective way

43:40

of doing it. Yeah,

43:42

because if you're going to

43:45

try and restrict men overall, but

43:47

even now I'm going to guess that there is still

43:49

a very large cohort of men, more than 10%,

43:53

who go to their graves without

43:55

family or unmarried. Therefore,

43:58

you're pointing the finger. at

44:00

the less reliable potential

44:03

meta. Whereas if you point the finger at

44:05

the women, it is more likely that you

44:07

get more bang for your buck, basically, on

44:09

restriction. But presumably there must be some

44:11

moralizing around

44:15

male sexuality too, just probably not

44:17

quite the same level of demonization that women

44:19

had. Absolutely, so yeah, Puritanism

44:21

also demonized

44:25

promiscuous men in those stories,

44:27

in the literature that exists from this period. The

44:30

greatest villain is, the

44:32

favored villain is often a man who

44:34

is known to have slept around. So

44:37

promiscuous men are also put

44:40

forth as villains and discouraged,

44:43

but

44:44

the male sexuality is still

44:47

acknowledged. There's

44:49

something pathological

44:51

about a woman who wants

44:54

to have sex with someone who isn't her husband in

44:56

the Puritan ideology. If

44:58

you wanna talk about patriarchal misogyny,

45:01

the Puritans were really, really bad. But

45:04

then we have to try to then step

45:06

aside back and of course, remoralize

45:08

on it and say that this is terrible, but

45:11

then we try to understand why did

45:13

they do this? What was the function of this? Why

45:16

did Puritanism arise in a period

45:19

when it was crucial for the West to

45:21

restrain people's sexuality to avoid

45:23

Malthusian crises? Right,

45:26

yeah, I understand. If everybody is dying

45:28

of famine and starvation, the

45:31

difference between the pain of that and

45:33

the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside

45:35

of marriage, it doesn't, yeah,

45:37

I can understand. Well, we have to choose. If

45:40

we're not okay with killing babies,

45:43

and Christians haven't been because of their ideology

45:46

while in antiquity, people generally

45:48

wear, we have to choose. We either kill

45:50

babies or restrict people's sexuality or

45:53

reinvent contraceptives, which we

45:55

got around to later. What was the reason for

45:57

not just killing babies? And

46:00

with Christianity, life became sacred.

46:03

So the Christians said that you can't take

46:05

any life. So once a child is, so they

46:07

didn't, they criminalized infanticide.

46:10

So infanticide and particularly

46:13

females elected infanticide killing, they

46:15

would typically kill girls cause they were costlier,

46:18

dependent a little bit on the context. But

46:21

yeah, so the practice of infanticide

46:23

was just cracked out on really hard by

46:26

the Christians because it went

46:28

against their belief of every life being

46:29

sacred.

46:30

Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting that the church's

46:33

doctrine is both

46:36

like give us and take us away here that

46:38

they have made their own bed. Okay,

46:41

we say that infanticide isn't good.

46:43

We value human life. Oh,

46:45

fuck downstream from that. We now have this

46:48

other problem, which is being able to control

46:50

populations so that we don't get some fissure

46:52

and run away like Malthusian bullshit.

46:55

Also not good. Okay, I mean, one

46:57

of the thing that's kind of I guess interesting to add here

46:59

is that the Middle Ages didn't finish until

47:02

the 1500s. Like we're still in

47:04

the Middle Ages from pretty much fall of Rome 500 to

47:06

1500s ish. Like

47:09

that's just one big long fucking

47:11

medieval like hodgepodge,

47:15

right? Then we get to, you said 1750 ish. Yeah,

47:19

yeah. I mean, you know, we're talking now

47:22

only 250 years ago and

47:24

it feels like there is an awful lot of ground

47:26

to cover in terms of sexual

47:29

ideology. So what happened 1750? So

47:32

that's the second sexual revolution.

47:35

This was one of individual choice. So

47:39

what we don't think about in the West, this

47:41

is it's a evolutionary psychologist called

47:43

Miguel A. Sapostoulis who has done great work on this. How

47:45

throughout human history, we've had arranged

47:48

marriages. He makes the case that

47:50

the human species is the only species on the planet

47:53

where men select other men for

47:55

reproduction. This has always

47:57

been the case. And during agriculture,

48:00

It was more the kin group. And

48:02

then after the first

48:05

sex revolution, this was more a matter for

48:07

the nuclear family, meaning the patriarch, the

48:09

father of the family. So human

48:12

men and women, this is important

48:14

to understand, to understand the present-day mating

48:16

dysfunction. We did not evolve

48:19

under regimes of individual choice. We

48:22

generally, we had an influence, but we generally

48:24

didn't pick and attract our own mates. We

48:27

were given mates by our families and communities.

48:30

So our

48:33

somewhat weak ability, or many

48:35

people's weak ability to flirt and attract

48:37

partners, attract short-long-term partners, this

48:41

is thought of as a form of mismatch

48:44

due to individuals not having

48:46

that responsibility in the past that in

48:49

the West started getting from 750. So

48:52

what happened with the dissolution of Europe's tribes

48:54

is that our psychology changed fundamentally.

48:57

This was the biggest change in its introduction of agriculture.

49:01

So we were put on a journey then, say, for 900 years

49:04

ago toward ever greater individualization,

49:07

more and more and more and more nonstop, still ongoing,

49:09

and it's not going to stop for a while. And

49:12

by the 18th century, Europeans

49:16

started more and more thinking that they should

49:18

be entitled to make their own decisions

49:20

in terms of mating, copulation,

49:22

and pair bonding. And what facilitated

49:25

this materially is that you have this

49:27

commercial revolution where more and more people

49:29

worked as servants in their youth

49:32

for cash payments. So

49:35

to accumulate these resources to be able to marry,

49:37

people moved further and further away from

49:40

family, and

49:42

they were paid in cash. And this was

49:44

the material foundation for the West's Second Sexual

49:46

Revolution. So among these young Prolocarians,

49:50

around 1750, this European

49:52

marriage pattern just burst and

49:54

people started having a lot more sex

49:58

before marriage. on

50:00

the side also. So you had this enormous

50:03

growth in sexual activity, especially

50:05

among young people, that had enormous

50:07

consequences. And

50:09

this continued. So it wasn't like everybody

50:11

started writing away making their own decisions,

50:14

but it started among these young wage earners,

50:17

and then over the centuries it spread, and

50:21

the dam completely burst with a third

50:23

sexual revolution in the 1960s. I

50:27

love the idea that flirting

50:31

is basically like

50:33

an evolutionary anomaly,

50:36

that if you were to have the ability,

50:39

ancestrally, if you come from a long

50:41

line of flurters and your

50:43

great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy, he was a flurter

50:45

and the granddaddy before it,

50:47

why?

50:49

Why? You know, previously

50:51

you would have just been taking what you wanted, then

50:54

after that you would have been told what you wanted, then

50:56

after that your dad would have told you what you wanted, and

50:58

then only 250 years ago would

51:01

you have actually chosen what you wanted.

51:03

Yeah. Léif Canair, whom you know,

51:06

he makes this interesting case.

51:10

Today to be an effective flurter, if you're a really

51:12

good-looking guy and you're really charming, a

51:14

good flurter and you're short-term oriented, you're

51:17

going to have a lot of mating success.

51:21

In the

51:23

olden days, there would be a significant chance

51:25

that you would get snuffed out. If

51:29

you were a solid guy who created alliances,

51:32

worked hard, led a family, you would

51:34

be chosen for reproduction by other men and

51:36

given to their daughters. If you were just

51:38

this good-looking Adonis who liked to sleep

51:40

around, you're probably going to get

51:42

killed by the men in the kin group

51:44

of your latest illicit affair. Yeah,

51:47

because you're a threat in some regards,

51:49

even if you don't get rumbled

51:52

by the kin group of the men, of

51:54

the woman that you just managed to seduce

51:57

outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage, even

51:59

if you don't get- caught by the scruff

52:01

of the neck by them, you're just

52:03

going to create an

52:06

ambient sense of concern

52:08

and envy and mistrust because

52:10

oh we know that Mads, we've got to be

52:12

careful about him like he's got the fucking

52:14

charm. Like you know I've heard

52:17

rumours and then it almost becomes I guess

52:19

a some degree

52:22

a little bit like the witch trials that you

52:24

have this... it's not quite original

52:26

sin but it's something inbuilt

52:29

that will cause other men to feel

52:31

envy and jealousy and

52:33

way rather than understand and turn

52:35

it inward and work out what it is that's lacking in them

52:37

that makes them envious of this person it's way

52:39

easier to just moralize about the person that the out

52:42

group now and say let's fucking kill him. And

52:45

also times were really tough a lot of the

52:47

time you needed a really solid

52:49

guy willing to work really hard to

52:51

do whatever he can to provide for his wife

52:53

and children to keep them alive. If you're

52:55

just this charming hottie who likes to

52:58

chat up women around the farm,

53:00

that did

53:02

not generally promote a good genetic

53:05

legacy. The demands of the times were

53:07

just different. Times are very different than

53:09

they are today. Are you saying that we are

53:11

the descendants of the least

53:14

charismatic, least good-looking, least

53:16

flirtatious men that existed? Well

53:19

it depends on the ecology but generally

53:22

our ancestors have not been lotharios.

53:25

That's only recently where that has been very

53:28

beneficial. Right. So we

53:30

get to 1750. People

53:32

are now able to make their own decisions.

53:36

Actually one question, how is it that the church

53:38

loses control? Does the church feel like it

53:40

is losing control? Does it try to claw it back

53:43

in any regard? I know that in the time of Charles

53:45

Darwin, you know, Victorian

53:47

England we had an awful lot of sexual

53:49

puritanism there. I think the

53:51

year of Darwin's birth,

53:54

the total number of British divorces

53:56

was eight. Not thousands,

53:59

not hundreds.

54:00

No, what happens in 1750

54:02

is really interesting because there's a counter reaction.

54:05

We have what we call the romantic century from 1750

54:07

to 1850. I'm

54:11

sure with your imagination, you can imagine

54:13

what happened when this dam burst in 1750. Now

54:17

we're going to start sleeping around. Whoops,

54:19

we haven't invented the contraceptive pill yet.

54:22

What's going to happen? What happens

54:24

is you have an enormous increase in illegitimate

54:27

birth. It's Europe. It

54:29

doubles, triples, quadruples. What

54:31

you typically have are all these

54:35

lower class women who now

54:37

can make their own decisions in terms

54:39

of copulation and pair bonding.

54:43

Their ancestors had no experience with this. We didn't evolve

54:46

to see through the intentions of men. We

54:49

didn't evolve to assess

54:51

our own mate value precisely. What

54:54

would happen is that you would have a lot of high status

54:56

men or at least higher status men, say,

54:59

sons of farmers, urban

55:01

men who would then go after the daughters

55:03

of crafters and others at the lower

55:06

rungs of society. They would

55:08

say, I love you and I'm going to marry you. Let's

55:11

have sex. They would do that. When she

55:13

got pregnant, they would leave her. In

55:16

Denmark, Norway, up until 734, if

55:19

you had sex,

55:22

that was a de facto marriage contract.

55:25

What we see in the beginning of the 1700s, there's

55:27

a huge increase in women taking men to court

55:30

for having sex with them but marrying them, so

55:32

they end that law in 1734. After

55:35

that, if you get pregnant, you're

55:37

not entitled to marry the guy you had sex with.

55:40

From 1750, you get this enormous increase

55:43

in illegitimate birth. At the worst

55:45

in Sweden and in Stockholm, 50% of

55:48

childbirths were by unwed mothers, lower

55:52

in rural areas. In Paris, you see

55:54

an enormous increase in the amount of abandoned

55:56

children. In the late

55:58

1700s... There was an ideology

56:01

which I also consider as a cultural

56:03

disorbent because you couldn't build a social order on

56:06

it, and this was liberty and love. So

56:08

this is the kind of Casanova ideology

56:11

where you're supposed to just enjoy sex for

56:13

the sake of sex. You're supposed to sleep

56:16

around, follow your lusts. And this

56:18

was an ideology that spread from the French

56:20

court and then throughout Europe, and

56:22

it reached Scandinavia

56:24

around 1770. So you

56:26

had this period where you have certain eccentric

56:29

milieus where people advocated, let's

56:31

just sleep around, let's just have a hell of a good time, let's

56:33

just party. And this created this

56:35

enormous burden on women because women

56:37

were left with a burden of childcare when

56:40

these libertines left them once they

56:42

got pregnant. So typically high status

56:44

men took advantage of impoverished

56:47

women and then just abandoned them. And

56:49

this is what laid the foundation for the romantic

56:52

ideology of the early 1800s. So

56:54

libertine love undermined

56:57

companionate love where you're just supposed

56:59

to be pragmatic and double down, take care

57:01

of your family. And libertine love said, no,

57:03

let's just have fun. And then

57:06

when the social ramifications of

57:08

that came manifesting

57:10

themselves, the counter reaction

57:12

was romantic love, which did the same

57:15

as Puritan love had done. Where you

57:17

again, so libertine love celebrated

57:19

female sexuality, let's just have sex. romantic

57:22

love said, no, women have no benefit from

57:25

sex outside of marriage. We're all going

57:27

to have to stop doing this. And similar

57:29

to court, the love, it exaggerated the

57:31

emotional love as something incredibly strong

57:34

and something that lasted for life. So

57:37

from then on, men and women were only

57:39

supposed to have sex within the confines of marriage,

57:41

and you should be married forever. And

57:43

this started having an effect around 1850. And

57:47

then across the West, the legitimacy rate started

57:49

plummeting. So you see this

57:51

counter reaction first, you dissolve companionate

57:54

love, then you see the effects

57:57

of all this premise goodie. And

57:59

then if in order to reduce the suffering

58:01

of the women that this affects, you have a counter-actual

58:03

romantic love where you then become more pure

58:06

written again. And then you see the effect of

58:08

that in the statistics. Right. You

58:10

re-prioritize the emotional connection,

58:12

the romantic connection between the man

58:15

and the woman. And what that does is that, again,

58:17

creates a dampener on the libertine

58:20

Casanova guide Lothario that's

58:22

just, okay. Yeah,

58:24

that's so interesting. What I'm seeing

58:26

here is this flip-flop

58:29

between what seems

58:31

sometimes human nature

58:34

kind of just bursts through the cracks.

58:36

It kind of grows and grows and grows enough, and then it

58:38

splits through that there

58:40

is innate desires that people have.

58:43

You're also responding to the local resources. So

58:46

I'm going to guess around about 1750, agriculture

58:49

and greenhouses and shit like

58:51

that meant that the ability to get an

58:54

amount of food and an amount of living

58:56

out of a square foot of land

58:59

would have increased pretty dramatically, which means

59:01

that this Malthusian problems and okay, right.

59:03

So we can't really, we're no longer limited

59:06

in terms of food. What's

59:08

the next thing that we can use? Fuck, they're having sex with each

59:10

other. Say that it's all about romance.

59:12

Say that it's all about the over-prioritize

59:16

the importance of emotional

59:19

connection because that

59:21

allows us to create. But we've

59:23

also lost at least a little bit here. We've

59:25

lost the church's

59:29

moralization, or at least it sounds like we've

59:31

lost the church's moralization of the act

59:33

of love. Yeah, in

59:35

the 1800s, this was the time of enlightenment. This

59:38

was about individual rights, empowering

59:40

individuals, not oppressing them, letting

59:43

them make their own choices, personal agency,

59:45

etc., etc. And this was also

59:47

at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. So

59:49

when this European

59:52

marriage pattern burst around 1750, we

59:55

were very fortunate for two reasons because

59:57

we now experienced a population explosion.

1:00:00

in going ahead that is still ongoing.

1:00:03

Well, I take that back, it's not ongoing anymore.

1:00:07

But we got this, we were moving

1:00:10

into this period with tremendous economic growth

1:00:12

that helped us take care of the population explosion, and

1:00:15

also we offloaded an enormous part

1:00:17

of our population to America and other

1:00:20

colonial territories. Otherwise

1:00:22

we would have faced dire trouble in the

1:00:24

West as the

1:00:27

change of our mating practices and also with

1:00:29

the reduction in mortality from other causes. Okay,

1:00:32

then perhaps the

1:00:35

shortest, most acute change when

1:00:38

it comes to human reproductive history, the

1:00:40

introduction of reliable contraception.

1:00:43

Well, yeah, so one of the aspects

1:00:46

of romantic love is that you have gender

1:00:49

inequality. You conceptualize

1:00:51

men and women as complementary, that

1:00:54

people are born as incomplete halves, and

1:00:57

then to become whole, you have to find

1:01:00

your true love, you have to bond with her, and

1:01:02

then you individualize and you become a whole human.

1:01:05

So this means that the man is supposed to go out and

1:01:07

work and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care

1:01:10

of the domestic arena. So they're conceptualized

1:01:12

as equal but complementary, but in reality

1:01:15

this drove stark inequality.

1:01:17

So

1:01:18

the next mating ideology

1:01:20

we move to, which is the one we believe in today,

1:01:22

it's called confluent love, which

1:01:25

is a mating ideology of gender

1:01:27

equality, of convenience,

1:01:30

reward, and self-realization.

1:01:33

And this ideology

1:01:35

arose quite a while ago. It was first

1:01:37

introduced into Scandinavian literature

1:01:39

in 1839, whether that exists in the

1:01:43

West somewhat earlier. So people were thinking

1:01:45

about this, that we should get true equality, that

1:01:47

men and women should be the same and have the same

1:01:49

opportunities, and that we should be able

1:01:52

to have sex outside of marriage and sleep around.

1:01:55

But the environment wasn't prepared for that. Like

1:01:57

you mentioned, this couldn't really

1:01:59

be implemented. until we invented effective

1:02:02

contraception. Otherwise, this

1:02:04

kind of mating would have placed too strong

1:02:06

of a burden on women. So we see

1:02:08

this discussion in Western culture from,

1:02:11

say, around 1830, and

1:02:14

then with the Darwinian Revolution, we start

1:02:17

thinking, okay, so we're romantically,

1:02:19

we thought, obviously, this is what God wanted us

1:02:21

to do, that we have this impulses

1:02:23

that you also mentioned, that's just

1:02:25

a test from God to see if we deserve to go to heaven,

1:02:28

we want to have sex and that we want a divorce,

1:02:30

that's just a test. And also, at

1:02:32

the beginning of our conversation, you asked, why do

1:02:34

we need these ideologies, and this is precisely

1:02:36

why, because we have these biological

1:02:39

impulses to copulate in

1:02:43

our love cycle, probably evolved

1:02:45

to last around three to four years, which was

1:02:47

the mating cycle of foragers. So

1:02:50

with agriculture, we needed to commit

1:02:52

to lifelong monogamy, because in case of

1:02:54

divorce, you can't split up the fields and bring

1:02:57

your part of the farm somewhere else. So we were kind

1:02:59

of stuck in these marriages that had to last

1:03:01

many, many more decades than

1:03:03

what we evolved for. So then

1:03:05

you need these ideologies to make us fight

1:03:08

these urges that we have, to sleep around,

1:03:11

to have, we evolved for serial monogamy

1:03:13

or serial pair bonding, to fight

1:03:15

that because the agricultural environment and then the modern environment

1:03:17

just required something else for us. So

1:03:21

then we used religion, we said that this

1:03:23

is what God wants, but then with the Darwinian

1:03:25

revolution, we start thinking, well, if we're

1:03:28

animals, we too, then these

1:03:30

impulses we have, they're not moral tests,

1:03:33

this is our nature. So we started exploring

1:03:36

what human mating nature is, and this was

1:03:38

a very strong literary movement

1:03:40

in Scandinavia in the late 1800s. And

1:03:43

then also through the 1900s, through literature, we

1:03:46

started exploring how could we mate differently. But

1:03:48

what's really interesting is that the romantic regime

1:03:51

did not peak until after World

1:03:53

War II. So we experienced

1:03:56

something that was really unexpected

1:03:59

because in that... In the

1:04:01

1910s and 20s, we were moving away from romantic

1:04:03

love. We wanted female equality. We

1:04:06

were moving toward confluent love. But

1:04:08

then after World War II, we had

1:04:10

this enormous economic prosperity that

1:04:12

allowed us to implement the romantic utopia,

1:04:15

which is the breadwinner housewife model. So

1:04:18

suddenly, marriage in the West became

1:04:20

near universal. Almost everyone married.

1:04:23

They married young. And now we

1:04:25

got to experience that the romantic

1:04:27

utopia is a couple of shortcomings. Number

1:04:30

one, love generally doesn't last a

1:04:32

lifetime, and the utopia of staying

1:04:34

at home wasn't that great for all women.

1:04:37

So you had this in the

1:04:40

1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, and

1:04:42

then you have the social revolution of the 1960s. And

1:04:45

you could say symbolically that the

1:04:48

breakthrough of confluent love was in 1968. And

1:04:52

then you start seeing in the beginning of the 70s, around

1:04:54

the mid-70s, across the West, you

1:04:56

see in the statistics that this modern

1:04:59

marriage pattern that we've had and that peaked after World

1:05:01

War II, it just disintegrates. Divorce

1:05:04

peaks, remarriage goes down, people

1:05:07

marry later. You have a lot more

1:05:10

casual sex outside of marriage. People

1:05:12

start having sex earlier. And

1:05:14

you just see this complete change in the

1:05:16

Western marriage pattern from the 1970s and

1:05:19

on. This is

1:05:23

mostly just gone in one direction. And

1:05:25

this is the mating regime that we live under

1:05:28

now, which has been accentuated

1:05:30

through dating apps, through increased

1:05:32

prosperity, through all that has happened

1:05:35

in the past 40, 50 years. When

1:05:37

you say confluent love, am I right

1:05:40

in thinking that what that means is

1:05:42

our union works

1:05:46

and continues to make sense for

1:05:48

as long as you are useful to me and I'm useful

1:05:51

to you? Yeah. So romantic

1:05:53

love, we merge for life. That's the only way to behold people. Confluent

1:05:56

love, we come together either for an optimistic short-term

1:05:58

relationship, casual sex. or

1:06:01

for a romantic relationship for as long

1:06:03

as you have emotions for each other or we benefit in another

1:06:05

way, and then we move on to single-dom

1:06:07

or another relationship. So we're not meant for each other

1:06:09

for life, only for as long as we want to. So

1:06:12

it's this confluence of people coming

1:06:14

together and meeting and moving on. Right.

1:06:17

So now that we've arrived pretty much close

1:06:19

to the modern era, how

1:06:21

do you think of

1:06:24

modern dating

1:06:26

dysfunction, demographic

1:06:28

collapse, all of that stuff?

1:06:31

Is that from 1200,

1:06:33

was that just the first

1:06:35

domino gets flicked and it's an inevitable

1:06:38

kind of all the way along? How

1:06:40

do you conceptualize this altogether? Yeah,

1:06:42

I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I

1:06:45

completely agree with your intentions behind that. Yeah,

1:06:48

that is what set it in motion. We've always

1:06:50

had arranged marriages and

1:06:53

lived in kin groups and

1:06:56

then more strictly under agriculture

1:06:58

but still, and then we were set

1:07:01

on this path toward individual choice and ever-great

1:07:03

individualism. And

1:07:05

then it's just to

1:07:08

have, like we talked about in the very beginning, it's

1:07:11

hard to convince people to take upon

1:07:13

themselves the burden of decades

1:07:15

of pair bonding with the same person and providing for

1:07:17

offspring.

1:07:20

And when you have a strong and realistic culture and

1:07:23

a mating ideology that says that this

1:07:25

is optional, that you don't necessarily have to do that,

1:07:28

we're facing an evolution that is quite predictable.

1:07:31

And as you've talked about on many of your podcasts,

1:07:34

it seems to be going in a direction where we've

1:07:36

ran out of tools. There's not much we could

1:07:39

do. We had in the

1:07:41

1930s a decline in fertility

1:07:44

also, which we countered.

1:07:47

The numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1.8,

1:07:50

which was seen as a catastrophe, and then we

1:07:52

countered through effectuating social democracy.

1:07:55

We made it materially

1:07:57

easier to have children through Sophie.

1:08:00

democratic welfare. All that

1:08:02

has played out now. That's no

1:08:04

longer an option. In Norway now, the

1:08:09

average woman, she receives more than $1.2 million

1:08:11

more from the state than

1:08:14

she pays in taxes, while men pay

1:08:16

more in taxes than they receive. And

1:08:18

when even that can't motivate

1:08:21

reproduction at replacement

1:08:23

levels, and

1:08:26

this is Norway's richest country in the world,

1:08:28

and we have the best welfare system, and when

1:08:30

even that kind of money transfer can't facilitate

1:08:33

reproduction, there's very little other countries

1:08:35

can do. So up until 2010, Scandinavia

1:08:38

was an anomaly. Across the West,

1:08:40

fertility has declined for a long time. So

1:08:42

we thought that the answer, or many thought that

1:08:44

the answer was that other countries had to be like Scandinavia.

1:08:47

They needed gender equality because we're the most gender-equal region,

1:08:50

and they needed generous welfare. And

1:08:52

now in the past decade, the Norwegian fertility rate

1:08:54

dropped in 2010 from 2.0 to 1.5, and

1:08:58

now it's dropped down to 1.4. And

1:09:00

that's with each woman on average being transferred $1.2

1:09:03

million over a lifetime. That's

1:09:05

a lot of money. Economic

1:09:09

incentives no longer cease to

1:09:11

work. So we kind of know that for other

1:09:13

countries too, that would only be a short-term

1:09:16

solution that would be countered by

1:09:18

other forces that are more powerful. So

1:09:21

if we think it's a good idea

1:09:24

to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse,

1:09:27

it's very difficult to see

1:09:29

what kind of means we can't effectuate

1:09:31

that would have a substantial effect that could turn

1:09:33

this around. What are the forces

1:09:36

that are driving the decrease in

1:09:39

fertility rates at the moment?

1:09:44

Well,

1:09:44

the larger forces,

1:09:47

the material ones is urbanization,

1:09:49

like we've talked about before and like many others

1:09:51

have talked about how there's been when

1:09:54

we lived as agriculturalists having

1:09:56

children with free labor, and now they're just huge

1:09:58

expenses. So that

1:10:00

is one issue.

1:10:03

The other one is ideological,

1:10:05

that we no longer, with romantic love, the meaning

1:10:08

of life was to merge with your partner and have a bunch of

1:10:10

children. With

1:10:12

confluent love, it's about self-realization,

1:10:15

reward, convenience. When

1:10:18

we have those beliefs,

1:10:21

we're just less incentivized to take upon

1:10:23

ourselves these burdens. I also

1:10:25

mentioned fear of the future. And

1:10:28

then you have, what I've researched

1:10:31

a bit, is what happens with

1:10:33

our mate preferences in this new environment

1:10:35

of the past decades. How

1:10:38

on one side, when you

1:10:41

make Athens-Cannévia, when you have

1:10:43

gender equality and you have generous

1:10:45

welfare, it makes it maturely easier

1:10:47

to have children, so that counts

1:10:50

in a positive direction, but it also disincentivizes

1:10:53

women from pair bonding with men of

1:10:55

similar mate value. So that's

1:10:57

another aspect of these ideologies in mating

1:10:59

regimes, that it's really

1:11:02

difficult to make women

1:11:04

mate with low mate

1:11:06

value, unless they have to, unless

1:11:09

they are materially dependent on it or

1:11:11

coerce to do so by their society.

1:11:14

We have two attraction systems. We have the original

1:11:16

one that we talked about when we started six million

1:11:18

years ago, where promiscuous maters, and

1:11:21

this is a very discriminatory system

1:11:24

for women, where they're supposed to only be

1:11:27

promiscuously attracted by the very

1:11:29

most attractive men. Maybe this is somewhere

1:11:32

between 5% and 20% of men, probably closer

1:11:34

to 5%. And then four million

1:11:36

years ago, we evolved this other system to

1:11:38

facilitate pair bonding, which

1:11:41

is a much more, in a sense, democratic

1:11:43

system, where a much

1:11:45

larger proportion of men is able to trigger their

1:11:48

love mechanism that motivates a

1:11:50

woman to mate with them. But

1:11:52

we see that when women

1:11:54

don't have to, they become

1:11:56

choosier, and they direct.

1:12:00

their efforts at men with higher mate

1:12:02

value than what they have themselves and that makes

1:12:04

it harder to pair up more people

1:12:07

within a community which then will have

1:12:09

adverse effects on the fertility. Right

1:12:11

and when women are not financially

1:12:15

or resourcefully beholden to their partner

1:12:18

in order to be able to keep them ticking over because

1:12:20

they have no job,

1:12:23

they have no education or they have limited

1:12:26

socioeconomic opportunities, I

1:12:28

need to stay with my partner because the alternative

1:12:31

is that me and potentially 12345 children are out on the

1:12:34

street. So we were basically kind of

1:12:36

like a financial prisoner in

1:12:38

some regards to their husband and now

1:12:41

that women don't need that anymore, the gods

1:12:44

are on. And for modern ideology

1:12:46

and I'm sure both you and I feel this way, this is

1:12:48

grateful women. Women aren't dependent on being with

1:12:50

a man, they are independent, they

1:12:52

have their own money, their own economy and they

1:12:54

can make their own choices and they can choose to

1:12:57

direct their efforts and compete harder for the high

1:12:59

value men instead of settling for someone with

1:13:02

a similar value as themselves. But then

1:13:04

the consequence of that is that we have

1:13:06

a very high

1:13:08

increase in singledom, we have a decline

1:13:11

in fertility and it also affects people's

1:13:13

well-being. People generally express their desire

1:13:15

to be pair bonded and they want to

1:13:18

be together with someone, that's kind of what we've been doing

1:13:20

the last four million years and then

1:13:22

when people react to different incentives

1:13:24

in the modern environment, we see that quite

1:13:26

a few of those work counter to people

1:13:28

being able to find each other and create relationships.

1:13:32

Yeah, I looked at a study, a pretty what

1:13:34

looked like significant assessment

1:13:36

that said gender inequality

1:13:39

specifically when it comes to finances is

1:13:42

correlated with both male and

1:13:44

female satisfaction in relationships

1:13:47

which is a really if you want to talk

1:13:49

about like unfortunate uncomfortable

1:13:54

realizations that if

1:13:56

you as a man are

1:13:59

able to to, whether by coercion

1:14:02

or restriction or capacity or

1:14:04

whatever, out earn your female

1:14:07

partner and if the brakes are put on your

1:14:09

female partner, she's happier

1:14:11

and you're happier on average. Yeah,

1:14:14

I know. If there's so many depressive

1:14:16

statistics, if you want to look at what actually

1:14:18

get the fertility rate up, you have

1:14:20

to... What would really work is to...

1:14:23

And we don't want any of this. We have to

1:14:25

get rid of gender equality, get rid

1:14:28

of prosperity. Domestic

1:14:30

violence works. There's tons of stuff

1:14:32

that work to make

1:14:34

women submit to being in a relationship that they otherwise

1:14:37

wouldn't want to be in. Yeah, to go stop being... Whatever

1:14:40

it is, cost benefiting to... What's

1:14:44

it called when the man... There's two types

1:14:46

of mate guarding, right? Whatever

1:14:49

the second one is. I know what you mean. Yes.

1:14:51

Yeah. So no, if you look at what actually would

1:14:54

work to get the fertility rate up, these

1:14:56

are very dystopic choices we

1:14:58

have. There

1:15:00

are pretty much nothing that we

1:15:02

in the West would be ideologically

1:15:05

disposed to doing that

1:15:08

could have a significant positive

1:15:10

effect. All those mechanisms that

1:15:12

we know would have an effect would

1:15:14

go against what we believe in. So

1:15:17

we're in a very difficult situation. One

1:15:19

thing that has kind of been running through my mind as you've

1:15:21

told us this tale is, especially

1:15:24

when you look at the modern world, which still

1:15:26

has an awful lot of the carryover, I think,

1:15:29

from the romantic era of

1:15:32

moralizing around faithfulness,

1:15:35

nastity, loyalty to your

1:15:37

partner, stuff like that. It

1:15:41

seems so insane

1:15:45

that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where

1:15:47

our evolved mating psychology

1:15:51

and the structures that we had for so, so, so

1:15:53

long have just become perverted

1:15:56

and perturbed and ruined and

1:15:58

repurposed and countered and and so

1:16:00

on and so forth. And we

1:16:03

talk about evolutionary mismatch an awful lot. Everybody

1:16:05

knows what that is. But this seems to be

1:16:07

like, it's a fucking

1:16:10

sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch.

1:16:13

You've got the culture from before

1:16:15

and the counterculture to that culture. And then you've got

1:16:18

new technology, reproductive technology. What about

1:16:20

the fact that we're all individuals? Female

1:16:22

socioeconomic access and egalitarianism, that's

1:16:24

fucking new, like how do we work that out? We're

1:16:26

no longer living in pangenerational houses.

1:16:28

Our kin doesn't give us any advice about, the

1:16:31

world is moving so quickly that our parents' advice basically

1:16:33

doesn't even work for the new generation because they

1:16:35

don't understand what it means to be dating on Tinder. And

1:16:38

then we've still got all of these vestigial

1:16:41

mating systems from before. So

1:16:43

it really doesn't surprise me. When you

1:16:46

take a really global look at

1:16:49

human mating psychology, plus

1:16:52

the modern world, plus the journey

1:16:54

that our psychology has been dragged through really

1:16:57

over the last few millennium, it's

1:17:02

really not surprising that people are struggling

1:17:05

at the moment. Yeah, on top of that, dating

1:17:08

apps are a little over a decade old and

1:17:10

we haven't figured that out at all. And the incentives

1:17:13

that drive those apps and those who create them

1:17:16

goes so counter to

1:17:18

people's needs and desires and how our

1:17:20

psychology functions. We've

1:17:23

put ourself in a situation where there's, like you

1:17:25

say, there's so much novelty on top

1:17:28

of novelty that men

1:17:30

and women don't even understand what

1:17:32

their mate preferences are and how those

1:17:34

are being influenced by the social order and

1:17:37

the technology they use to meet people. So

1:17:40

we're just, we're following these six

1:17:43

million year old impulses, which

1:17:46

are the strongest one. And they're

1:17:48

overriding impulses that are four million

1:17:50

years old, not even to

1:17:53

think about the newer ones that we've developed.

1:17:55

And in all of this, we're in this uniquely

1:17:58

new mating regime of individuals. choice

1:18:00

that we have not evolved for

1:18:02

at all. So it's when you

1:18:04

look back and you think, why was it

1:18:07

that, say, perhaps

1:18:09

through the two-million-year history of

1:18:11

the Guiness Homo, if it

1:18:13

is the case, in fact, that we always had

1:18:15

parental choice through that, is

1:18:17

it because everybody discovered that individual

1:18:20

choice doesn't add up? I

1:18:22

mean, there's no way the West is going to go away

1:18:24

from that, and I certainly wouldn't advocate it. But

1:18:27

if no one else managed to figure that out,

1:18:30

how sure are we that this

1:18:32

is going to work for us? And

1:18:35

yeah, if you extrapolate from today

1:18:37

with this decline in fertility, maybe,

1:18:41

I mean, we're certainly going to ride out this experiment.

1:18:43

I don't see us changing anyway,

1:18:46

but there are peoples around

1:18:48

the world who aren't pursuing that

1:18:51

regime, that are showing different numbers.

1:18:55

I mean, we love our ideology. We think

1:18:57

it's superior to everybody else's ideology.

1:18:59

That's just how humans work. But

1:19:03

there's one thing... I mean,

1:19:05

you could say everything is relative, but there's

1:19:07

one thing that isn't relative. That's

1:19:10

an evolutionary iron law. No

1:19:12

matter what your ideology is, if

1:19:15

that ideology causes you to stop reproducing,

1:19:18

that ideology will cease to matter. You

1:19:20

will disappear. Yeah, I mean,

1:19:22

this was one of the most

1:19:25

interesting takeaways I've had from a lot

1:19:27

of conversations about demographic collapse

1:19:29

and population decline, which is

1:19:34

ideology, political leaning,

1:19:37

your worldview at large, your openness, your conscientiousness,

1:19:39

all the rest of those things are highly

1:19:41

heritable, highly heritable. Your

1:19:44

political ideology is very highly heritable,

1:19:46

right? As is the rest of your fucking psychology.

1:19:49

So if you are somebody

1:19:52

that is part of a particular political movement

1:19:55

that either doesn't

1:19:58

promote or act... actively discriminates

1:20:01

against reproduction, you

1:20:04

are a dying breed, because your

1:20:06

children would have more likely been like

1:20:08

you, and look at the groups that are

1:20:11

reproducing. Something

1:20:13

tells me that conservative Ashkenazi

1:20:16

Jews are not going to have that much

1:20:18

of a fertility problem, right? Something

1:20:21

tells me that Mormons or

1:20:24

that some

1:20:27

sects of Christianity, I know

1:20:29

that some are down, but some sects of Christianity

1:20:31

are also going to be fine. So what do you look at over

1:20:33

a long enough time horizon? You actually

1:20:36

look at this sort of almost like

1:20:38

full circle loop back around

1:20:41

to a much more, not necessarily

1:20:43

puritanical, but like a religious sacred

1:20:45

view of what this is. And remember,

1:20:49

if you are somebody that's conservative,

1:20:51

or somebody that's religious, the likelihood

1:20:53

that your children are going to be that way is it's absolutely

1:20:56

not predetermined, but they are predisposed, right?

1:20:59

So you end up with this sort of ever

1:21:01

increasing cycle of this. So

1:21:03

there was an argument to be made, I think,

1:21:06

that, you know, like anti-natal

1:21:08

climate concerned liberalism

1:21:12

is not long for this world, right?

1:21:15

That's not to say that you can't have a sufficiently

1:21:18

compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years'

1:21:20

time and re-converts a bunch of seventh

1:21:22

generation conservatives or whatever. But

1:21:26

yeah, you will end up

1:21:29

with

1:21:30

less demographic political

1:21:33

variety over time if

1:21:35

you have this, because the selection effect occurs

1:21:38

within particular cohorts, within very particular

1:21:40

strata, and it presses down very hard on them. And

1:21:42

the other ones are just that, what demographic

1:21:44

collapse? I'm fine. Yeah, well,

1:21:47

we also have some tremendous novelty coming

1:21:49

up, which we have to bear in mind. I

1:21:52

predict that the West will have a fourth

1:21:55

sexual revolution coinciding

1:21:58

with the fourth industrial revolution. What

1:22:00

will happen when we start being

1:22:03

able to create babies outside of

1:22:05

women's wombs, when we'll be able to

1:22:07

gene edit, etc. We'll

1:22:10

get AI robot lovers

1:22:12

and spouses, etc. There's

1:22:15

going to be such tremendous technological

1:22:18

novelty that's going to change

1:22:20

society, that it's almost inconceivable

1:22:22

that this will not have a tremendous effect

1:22:25

also on mating. If we extrapolate

1:22:27

into the future without taking that into

1:22:29

account, yes. Then the West, as

1:22:32

it functioned now, would just made itself out

1:22:34

of existence, and other groups would take

1:22:36

over who have higher fertility. But

1:22:38

that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing.

1:22:41

There will be so much change in

1:22:43

the decades ahead, that it's very difficult

1:22:46

to imagine how mating will be

1:22:48

in the future.

1:22:49

But

1:22:50

I think that revolution

1:22:53

will be so large, that

1:22:55

it will fundamentally change that

1:22:58

aspect. Like we talked about in the beginning, the foundation

1:23:00

of our social order is mating. So

1:23:02

then the question is, how will these new

1:23:04

technologies affect how we

1:23:06

mate, and how will that create a new foundation

1:23:09

for a new form of society?

1:23:11

Yeah.

1:23:12

Yeah, I suppose we

1:23:15

are living maybe in

1:23:18

the last death throes

1:23:20

of something that even slightly

1:23:23

resembles an ancestral mating

1:23:25

system. As soon as

1:23:27

you have external wombs, as

1:23:29

soon as you have AI companions that can

1:23:32

give you better than real

1:23:34

life love, the

1:23:38

pods hikikimori problem

1:23:40

gets sorted, but it only gets sorted from the individual's

1:23:43

perspective, from the population perspective it's not

1:23:45

sorted at all. But then if you can counter that

1:23:47

with artificial wombs, but then who is it

1:23:49

that you're choosing? Like whose genes

1:23:51

are you choosing to do this? And if you have embryo

1:23:54

selection, which is already online, embryo

1:23:56

selection for IQ, for externalizing behavior,

1:23:58

for depression, for anxiety, autism, you

1:24:01

already have this. And then if you can get into gene editing,

1:24:03

and then if you can get into IVG, it's

1:24:06

like, okay, here's like a here's

1:24:08

a section of the skin from my arm,

1:24:10

go forth and make 1 million Chris

1:24:12

Williamson's like I would Jesus Christ,

1:24:15

but yeah, it's maybe

1:24:18

we are maybe this is a uniquely

1:24:21

interesting time. But I wonder

1:24:23

whether I wonder whether some

1:24:25

of the interventions that we are

1:24:28

thinking about at the moment, you know, hungry,

1:24:31

you have one kid and you do this thing and you have two kids

1:24:33

and you get more taxes off and you have three kids and you don't pay taxes

1:24:35

for life or Norway and the way that you guys 1.2 million

1:24:38

that you give to women and you know, we

1:24:41

need to get people to do CBT to

1:24:43

overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of it.

1:24:46

I wonder whether ultimately

1:24:48

all of those things are going to be in vain within the space

1:24:50

of five decades, because the

1:24:52

technology is just going to rip out

1:24:55

anything that we try to construct using

1:24:57

like, like cultural technology,

1:24:59

ideological movement, or Hollywood, why

1:25:01

don't we get Hollywood to like, put dads

1:25:04

that are competent again at the front and we shouldn't

1:25:06

have Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as

1:25:08

the lead we should have like, you know, like a good stand

1:25:10

up family guy. And you're like, yeah,

1:25:12

but if in five decades, it's

1:25:15

artificial wombs and sex robots all

1:25:17

the way down. What do

1:25:21

any of those interventions really matter? That's

1:25:23

not to say that making the well-being and

1:25:25

flourishing of people who live right now isn't

1:25:27

nothing, but over a long enough time horizon,

1:25:30

they all just get like someone shakes the etch a

1:25:32

sketch and just deletes all mating history.

1:25:36

Yeah, no, when you look at the history of

1:25:38

Western mating, it's I don't

1:25:41

fear very much that we'll be returning

1:25:43

to a handmade

1:25:45

tail Puritan kind of female

1:25:47

oppressing regime. I think we're

1:25:50

going to move forward and that we will experience

1:25:53

a novelty at a level that we it's

1:25:55

very difficult for us to imagine today. So

1:25:58

yeah, it's We can

1:26:00

talk about it, we can speculate, but

1:26:05

when we are at this side of these big

1:26:07

revolutions as we seem to be now before

1:26:09

we go into it and see how dramatically

1:26:11

the world will change in this time a lot more rapidly

1:26:14

than with previous such revolutions, all

1:26:17

we can do is mostly hold

1:26:20

on. I love

1:26:23

what you're doing with your podcast, but

1:26:26

people can get informed and that's good,

1:26:28

that somehow we're going to figure something out, make

1:26:31

a plan and then effectuate it and stop

1:26:35

the demographic collapse. That doesn't

1:26:37

seem to be how the world works. It's

1:26:40

just going to be a whirlwind, a hurricane

1:26:43

of change and then at the end of it,

1:26:46

I think it would be really cool if we still have

1:26:48

a bunch of humans around. I'm

1:26:51

a little bit specious that way, but things

1:26:54

can play out in a matter of ways that are

1:26:56

just impossible to predict on

1:26:59

this side of the singularity. Yeah,

1:27:02

the technological change, the size

1:27:04

of the wall that occurs is

1:27:07

so high that it's very difficult to

1:27:09

have something permeate through it and I totally

1:27:12

agree. One of the other things that you do, your

1:27:14

other wing, one of your many other wings,

1:27:18

an evolutionary lens on wellbeing

1:27:20

and we've had a lot of conversations recently

1:27:23

about incels and I only learned

1:27:25

this from you in things as well, in

1:27:27

voluntary singletons. Given

1:27:30

your evolutionary lens

1:27:33

background and your studies into wellbeing,

1:27:35

what are you making of the

1:27:39

generalised anxiety, depressive

1:27:42

states, whatever it is, 50% of girls

1:27:44

aged 12 to 16

1:27:47

have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness.

1:27:50

We've got guys with testosterone in the

1:27:52

toilet, the single biggest threat to a man

1:27:54

under the age of 50 is his own hands

1:27:57

in terms of suicidality, all this sort of stuff.

1:28:01

How do you conceptualize all of this

1:28:03

together from a well-being perspective? Why are the

1:28:05

incels and the inthings and everybody else so unhappy?

1:28:08

Yeah, I know. That's something I think we should

1:28:10

really be concerned with. We

1:28:15

should try to change the

1:28:17

world and make a better world, but as we've spoken about,

1:28:20

our ability to affect change that way is somewhat

1:28:22

limited, but when we're going through these deep

1:28:25

changes, as we are now and we have before,

1:28:27

people will face despair. They will lose

1:28:29

faith in the story that has united us. We haven't

1:28:32

yet found tomorrow's ideology that will give us

1:28:34

the answers and the comfort and lessen our

1:28:36

anxiety. So we really should

1:28:38

be sympathetic towards each other and

1:28:40

that pain that people are suffering when we

1:28:42

go through these changes, because these changes are very

1:28:44

hard on humans. We like stable periods

1:28:47

when we know, when we convince ourselves

1:28:49

that we know what truth is. So when

1:28:51

you look at incels and inthings, you

1:28:54

should expect them that they should be miserable.

1:28:56

From an evolutionary perspective, happiness

1:28:59

is a reward you experience when you solve adaptably

1:29:02

relevant problems. Nothing

1:29:04

is more central to adaptivity than

1:29:07

reproduction. So if you're not

1:29:09

succeeding on short or long-term mating

1:29:12

markets, if you're not able to pair bond, your

1:29:14

well-being system should go into high

1:29:16

alert and let you know that your strategies

1:29:18

are failing. So when men

1:29:21

become depressed and despondent for

1:29:23

not succeeding on the short-term market, when

1:29:26

women become depressed and despondent because they

1:29:28

know it is on modern dating markets, they

1:29:30

have unlimited access to sex with higher value men,

1:29:33

but none of these men are willing

1:29:35

to pair bond with them, that is supposed

1:29:37

to give you a depression. That's

1:29:39

your organism telling you that you're failing. So

1:29:42

instead of villainizing

1:29:45

incel men or making fun of insing

1:29:47

women, we should try to spread

1:29:49

a better understanding that, here, your podcast is valuable.

1:29:52

People need to understand the different mate preferences

1:29:55

that men and women have. They should understand

1:29:58

the different power dynamics in short and long-term. term

1:30:00

mating. And see how today's mating,

1:30:02

particularly with dating apps, is

1:30:04

creating a stratification that is creating

1:30:07

dysfunction for almost all groups

1:30:09

of society, or at least potentially.

1:30:12

So a better understanding of what is going on

1:30:14

might not help us tear

1:30:17

this clown car into safe shores, but

1:30:20

it might help us

1:30:22

sympathize more with each other's plights,

1:30:25

especially between men and women, because

1:30:27

men and women have such different challenges

1:30:30

in today's dating economy. And if

1:30:33

men impose male

1:30:36

mate preferences in their analysis of how women

1:30:38

are doing an opposite, we just

1:30:40

don't understand each other, and that just

1:30:42

creates bigger dysfunction, poorer

1:30:45

communication, and people get even

1:30:47

more miserable. Mason Wethmore How much of the

1:30:50

current unhappiness do you think

1:30:52

should be laid at the feet of mating

1:30:54

and dating problems? Because there's lots of other things

1:30:57

going on, social media, and comparison,

1:31:00

and intergenerational competition theory,

1:31:02

where we are the first generation that's not

1:31:04

done better than our parents, and so on and so forth. How

1:31:07

much of this do you think ultimately is just post hoc rationalization

1:31:10

that I can't find a mate and romance seems to be

1:31:12

dead, and my partner might leave me at any point if

1:31:14

the confluence no longer works? It's

1:31:17

a good question, and I haven't seen any statistics

1:31:20

that are able to get at it. It doesn't show up

1:31:22

there, so we'll have to speculate.

1:31:25

So in Norway now, we have something called

1:31:27

the men's panel. It's

1:31:29

a big research project, or more

1:31:32

of a council, that they're trying to figure

1:31:34

out why men are falling behind. And

1:31:36

you see this around the world. In the UK,

1:31:39

they're talking about having an immense minister.

1:31:42

It's been suggested, etc. And

1:31:44

I know, at least for this

1:31:47

Norwegian effort, which by the way is the third

1:31:49

in 15 years to try to figure this out, they haven't

1:31:51

figured it out anything previously, it's not

1:31:53

even within their mandate to look at mating

1:31:56

marginalization and the stratification

1:31:58

that is happening on modern dating markets. It's just a thing

1:32:00

that feels inappropriate to talk about. But

1:32:03

especially when it comes to men, one

1:32:09

of the prime functions of having two

1:32:11

sexes, to have sexual

1:32:13

reproduction, is the sexual selection

1:32:15

where women select which men get to breed.

1:32:18

So

1:32:21

males of all species have been under

1:32:23

enormous pressure to succeed

1:32:25

in this regard. That is the motivation.

1:32:27

That is their reason of being

1:32:30

at the deepest, most foundational level.

1:32:33

So we have reason to think that now that more

1:32:35

and more men are being excluded

1:32:37

from short and long-term mating when they're being selected

1:32:41

away by women because they

1:32:43

are not valuable enough in the modern environment,

1:32:46

we would predict that

1:32:48

these men would do poor and poor. They would not

1:32:51

be motivated to put in the effort because

1:32:53

they have a sense of how hopeful,

1:32:55

it might not be a conscious sense, but

1:32:58

that drive that men would have in other times

1:33:01

when they had a better prospect of acquiring

1:33:03

a mate, when that disappears, we

1:33:05

should expect male marginalization also

1:33:08

in other areas of life and society. So

1:33:10

that we're not looking at that is unfortunate

1:33:13

because we would expect that to be the foundational

1:33:15

level upon which these other maleis

1:33:18

attach us to. But I haven't

1:33:20

seen any statistics or

1:33:23

research that allows me to assign

1:33:25

a proportion of unhappiness to

1:33:28

more men being selected away from mating. So

1:33:31

I don't think that is possible. I think it's more

1:33:33

a foundational aspect that it's really difficult to

1:33:35

get at. Yeah,

1:33:38

man. I mean, the fact that we're not tearing

1:33:41

each other apart, I

1:33:43

suppose when you look at the

1:33:45

sadness and the depression and the hopelessness

1:33:47

and stuff like that, and a

1:33:49

more obvious question would be, how wouldn't we all feel

1:33:52

like this? There's so much change

1:33:54

and adaptability is

1:33:57

fundamentally one of the

1:33:59

things that... humanity has as its, you

1:34:01

know, keystone advantage. But

1:34:04

there's a limit, you know, dear God,

1:34:06

there's a limit to how quickly the world can

1:34:08

change and we can hold on for dear life.

1:34:12

And yeah, I think it's

1:34:16

so it's such a slippery slope, right? Because

1:34:18

as soon as you say, well, the world is changing very quickly,

1:34:20

and we're not adapted for technology, like the

1:34:22

victimhood mindset just immediately

1:34:25

seeps in. Everything is out of my control.

1:34:28

The locus of control gets externalized, that's

1:34:30

associated with more depression, therefore people

1:34:32

don't feel like they can enact any change, they're no longer

1:34:34

agentic or sovereign individuals blah blah

1:34:36

blah. You're like, oh my God.

1:34:38

So yeah, like trying to thread this needle

1:34:41

between like compassion

1:34:43

and encouragement is a

1:34:46

really difficult one. And I mean, you know, all of this work

1:34:49

on well-being that you're doing through an evolutionary lens

1:34:51

must, it must feel like

1:34:53

human well-being is kind of being just pulled

1:34:56

apart. Yeah, and like

1:34:58

you said, young women are

1:35:00

doing worse than young men. And

1:35:03

what we see in the research that we're

1:35:05

doing now is that this big change

1:35:07

in well-being, at least in Norway, Norway is doing better

1:35:09

than most other countries we're

1:35:12

doing. We're such a success, we've been

1:35:14

such a successful country in the past decades.

1:35:17

So we were at the top of the World

1:35:19

Happiness Report, but we're now slid down

1:35:21

several spots. And this seems to be entirely

1:35:24

because of this drastic reduction in well-being

1:35:26

among young people, 15 to 24. And

1:35:31

we've made interviews with them, there's

1:35:33

quantitative service of them, and we're doing qualitative

1:35:36

interviews, and young people

1:35:38

are feeling bad. And you have many

1:35:40

aspects and social media seems

1:35:43

to facilitate some of these mechanisms

1:35:45

that drive ill-being, the

1:35:49

economy, fear of the future. You

1:35:52

have all kinds of things that are weighing on young

1:35:54

people, and it's very difficult to sort them

1:35:56

and see what is what. But I

1:35:58

think like you that the main driver

1:36:00

now is that we are, as

1:36:03

a civilization, in such

1:36:06

a transformative time. It seems that

1:36:08

we're moving out of this modern narrative

1:36:11

of believing in liberal humanism that peaked

1:36:13

in the 1990s and that we

1:36:16

in the last decade have lost more and more faith

1:36:18

in. We don't know why we should cooperate.

1:36:20

Is who America is sliding apart? We

1:36:22

don't know which future to strive for? We

1:36:25

get these answers from this underlying

1:36:27

story which I refer to as society's master

1:36:29

narrative. That story

1:36:32

that gives meaning to everything and

1:36:34

lets you know what is true or not, why you belong

1:36:36

together, what you should strive for. I've

1:36:39

studied these changes of

1:36:41

the past millennium and also further back.

1:36:44

When we get into these deep

1:36:46

master and average transitions, it's really,

1:36:49

really hard on the human psyche when we lose that

1:36:51

narrative. We turn on each other. We get despondent.

1:36:54

We have anxiety. We feel terrible. We

1:36:56

lose faith in the future. But then,

1:36:59

every other time until now, we've always succeeded.

1:37:01

We've always gotten out of it and we found a new

1:37:03

story. Now we seem to be transitioning

1:37:05

into something that is perhaps a form of

1:37:07

data's master narrative. If

1:37:10

we succeed with this and we make it to the fourth

1:37:12

industrial revolution and we're able to unite

1:37:14

in around this new narrative, then we could

1:37:16

face a new golden age. The future could

1:37:19

be very fantastic. But when

1:37:21

we're in these transitions, it's

1:37:23

a lot more easy to spot what could go

1:37:25

terribly, probably wrong instead. What

1:37:27

was the study about the Norwegian generational

1:37:30

happiness switch?

1:37:33

Yes. This

1:37:36

Norwegian monitor, they've been serving happiness

1:37:38

since 1985 and young people always

1:37:44

been the happiest and

1:37:47

old people have always been the least happy, which makes sense.

1:37:50

Happiness is the reward you get when you succeed with reaching

1:37:52

adaptive relevant goals, which young people have tons

1:37:54

of. When you're old, you don't have these goals

1:37:56

anymore. You would expect

1:37:59

Japanese to go down. What's happened

1:38:01

in the last, since 2009, is

1:38:04

that you had this incredibly sharp decline

1:38:07

for the youngest and then also for the

1:38:09

middle-aged, and this weak

1:38:12

rise in happiness and quite strong

1:38:15

rise in satisfaction for the oldest generation,

1:38:17

for your tired people. The impression

1:38:19

we get from talking to them is just that young

1:38:22

people are becoming miserable and losing fate in

1:38:24

the future. They don't think they will have good lives. There

1:38:27

are so many threats coming

1:38:29

up, while the old people are realizing

1:38:31

that they just timed their right life

1:38:34

really well. They have this newfound

1:38:36

gratitude. They say, all right, I might

1:38:38

have 10, 15, 20 years left

1:38:40

to live, and that will probably be

1:38:43

okay. The biggest changes won't come until after

1:38:45

that. Just have

1:38:48

an amplified sense of having had a great

1:38:50

life and that they should be grateful

1:38:52

for now getting out in time and having been

1:38:55

with this post-World War II boom of economic

1:38:57

prosperity where life just got better and better and better.

1:39:00

Now when it seems to turn, they're

1:39:02

ready to check out and not too long. They

1:39:05

feel bad about their children and

1:39:07

especially grandchildren. They

1:39:09

feel really bad about them, but that

1:39:12

doesn't seem to affect their quality of

1:39:14

life. It just makes them more appreciative of their own

1:39:16

lives.

1:39:17

Wow.

1:39:18

Yeah, because you would think as

1:39:21

grandchildren optimizing machines,

1:39:24

you would have presumed that the impending

1:39:28

uncertainty about the future of our grandchildren

1:39:31

could have negatively impacted our

1:39:34

subjective well-being. But it seems like

1:39:36

that's not the case. What

1:39:38

they say to us is that they sometimes stay

1:39:41

awake at night because they feel so bad about

1:39:43

their grandchildren, and they're a little bit

1:39:45

surprised and have a little bit of a bad conscience for

1:39:47

it, but it doesn't reduce their quality

1:39:49

of life. So yeah,

1:39:51

they get a

1:39:54

much stronger sense of satisfaction and a somewhat stronger

1:39:57

sense of happiness from now

1:39:59

seeing. future generation

1:40:01

will struggle while they will mask. Okay,

1:40:04

so do you believe that comparing

1:40:08

yourself to the generation that came

1:40:10

before you and your level of success

1:40:12

or wellbeing, is that a big determinant

1:40:15

of wellbeing? Yeah,

1:40:18

you have to separate a little bit different aspects of wellbeing.

1:40:21

We can separate wellbeing plus meaning. Happiness

1:40:24

plus meaning equals wellbeing. So happiness is

1:40:26

this solving adaptive relevant

1:40:28

problem for yourself as an individual, and that

1:40:30

is inherently relative. You have a

1:40:32

comparison group, and if you're doing better

1:40:34

than your comparison group, you experience

1:40:37

a sense of happiness temporarily, and

1:40:39

if you do worse, you have a temporarily sense

1:40:41

of unhappiness. So

1:40:45

that's one of the reasons why social media

1:40:47

has been so destructive, we believe, for

1:40:49

young people's happiness because it's just exploded

1:40:52

their comparison group. Before

1:40:54

you compared yourself to your peers in your local

1:40:57

community, now you compare yourself

1:40:59

to the Kardashians and people that fly private

1:41:01

jets on YouTube, and suddenly your

1:41:03

life is not that great anymore. Relatively.

1:41:06

So yeah, happiness is an inherently relative

1:41:08

assessment. Yeah, what's that

1:41:10

quote? Comparison is the thief of joy. It

1:41:12

seems like it's actually the comparison is the

1:41:15

underpinning of happiness or dissatisfaction. Yeah,

1:41:18

no. So that's one of the

1:41:20

reasons why altruism

1:41:23

and doing voluntary work, working

1:41:25

with refugees or people who are worse off, that

1:41:27

has a strong effect also on your happiness.

1:41:30

Does it remind you just how far you could

1:41:32

have fallen and you're not? Yeah, it

1:41:34

recalibrates your comparison group in

1:41:37

a beneficial way. Wow.

1:41:39

So a good intervention for

1:41:41

wellbeing is to remind

1:41:44

yourself of just how the

1:41:47

myriad of different ways that things could have gone wrong,

1:41:50

or all of the people from your past that

1:41:52

had things that weren't as good as you. I

1:41:55

mean, is that famous, it's

1:41:57

either Aristotle or Aurelius that says, The

1:42:01

things that you now take for granted were

1:42:03

ones that you once only wished of having.

1:42:06

Right? In

1:42:08

the past, you only wanted to have this thing and today

1:42:10

you walk past it without even looking at it twice.

1:42:14

It's the same thing with mating ideologies.

1:42:16

All of these mating ideologies come with a utopia

1:42:19

that we think if we can just get this utopia, it's

1:42:21

going to be amazing. And then when we finally get the mating

1:42:23

agile, implement the utopia, we

1:42:25

discover things like love doesn't

1:42:27

last forever. Being a stay-at-home mom isn't paradise.

1:42:31

So yeah, we keep striving for it. We make

1:42:33

a better and better society and once we get it, we

1:42:35

are accustomed to it and we come up with new utopias.

1:42:38

I had this idea for a little while reflecting

1:42:41

on my own life, especially in my twenties when I started

1:42:43

getting into self-development and personal growth, that

1:42:47

I was able to ameliorate

1:42:50

my own feelings of insufficiency as

1:42:53

long as I was doing personal growth and

1:42:55

self-development, because I think

1:42:57

that the subtext of what it taught me was I

1:43:00

might not feel like I'm worthy enough right now, but

1:43:03

if I'm half a percent better tomorrow,

1:43:05

maybe tomorrow is actually the day

1:43:07

when I will finally. And if you just continue to

1:43:09

keep yourself on this hamster wheel, it

1:43:12

kind of, it's a salve, right?

1:43:14

It kind of papers over the cracks of

1:43:16

perhaps deeper issues that you need to deal

1:43:18

with, like I don't have a good sleep and wake pattern, or

1:43:21

I'm not, I don't have people around me that I can talk

1:43:23

to, or whatever the reason is that you're dissatisfied

1:43:26

with life. But

1:43:27

yeah,

1:43:29

I see in a lot

1:43:31

of the self-development community

1:43:34

people using the promise

1:43:36

of a better tomorrow as

1:43:39

a plaster,

1:43:43

or a band-aid that they can place over

1:43:46

the feelings of insufficiency that they have today.

1:43:49

Yeah, well, theoretically, the

1:43:52

optimal recipe for a happy

1:43:54

life is that you should start

1:43:56

out as low in society as you can without

1:43:59

being traumatized. by it and

1:44:01

then make gradual progress

1:44:03

throughout your life and reach as high

1:44:06

as you can. Because as long as you

1:44:08

keep doing better than you used to, you

1:44:10

get this happiness reward. So if

1:44:12

you want objective success, being

1:44:14

born at the top of society is the best. But

1:44:17

if your parents are beautiful, successful

1:44:20

millionaires, you probably

1:44:22

won't be and that you're

1:44:24

not going to be happy. So there's something

1:44:26

to getting that even progress and

1:44:29

then in addition to that, you need a couple

1:44:31

of crises that you take yourself out of

1:44:33

through your own resources. Yeah,

1:44:36

well I mean so much interesting stuff

1:44:38

there. First off, I have a lot of friends

1:44:40

who are self-made, successes,

1:44:43

millionaires, one billionaire. And I

1:44:45

asked them both about their intentions

1:44:47

for their children because I know that what

1:44:50

they valued during their upbringing

1:44:52

was very heavily their challenges

1:44:55

that had to overcome this sort

1:44:57

of working class grit, spit and

1:45:00

sawdust mentality. But

1:45:03

if they do that to their children, what

1:45:05

the fuck was the point of working this hard in any case? To

1:45:08

not give them the benefits of the resources

1:45:11

and the livelihood that you

1:45:13

worked so hard to be able to afford them. But

1:45:16

then if you give it to them, you're condemning

1:45:18

them to a life of inferiority unless you're going to have

1:45:20

like multi-generational self-made

1:45:22

billionaires. Like that's also pretty unlikely.

1:45:24

So that's tough. Eddie

1:45:27

Hearn, the famous boxing promoter from the UK,

1:45:29

said he beautifully conceptualized this

1:45:32

and he said his dad made,

1:45:34

his father made the boxing

1:45:36

organization that he's a part of and

1:45:39

his father had had an awful lot

1:45:41

of success and then Eddie came in and

1:45:43

took it to new heights, made it

1:45:46

bigger than it's 10 hundred times bigger than it ever was

1:45:48

and did all the rest of the things. And somebody asked like

1:45:50

if he could go back and change anything, what

1:45:52

would you change? And he said, I

1:45:55

never got to do it first. It

1:45:58

always felt like he was living in his father. Shadow

1:46:00

that the new frontier was

1:46:03

never broken by Eddie. It was

1:46:05

always broken by his his father and He

1:46:09

it's evident that he lives with this

1:46:12

pain Of the the

1:46:14

echo of it. I mean dude the fucking

1:46:17

drummer from mega death, you know the story

1:46:19

of Metallica So originally

1:46:21

Metallica's drummer got kicked out

1:46:24

or left the bat I think he got kicked out of the band So

1:46:26

he decides to go and start a new band called mega

1:46:28

death mega death goes on to be one of probably

1:46:30

the top 10 metal bands in history But

1:46:33

they're not Metallica and in interview

1:46:35

this interview my housemates sites all the time This

1:46:38

guy still with you know, one of the most successful

1:46:41

metal bands in history always

1:46:43

has this gap between What

1:46:47

he could have been and and what he was so

1:46:49

yeah, it's very much not an objective

1:46:52

assessment of opposition It's very much a relative

1:46:54

assessment of our of our predicament. I

1:46:57

also had this idea kind of plays

1:46:59

off the back of this that one

1:47:01

potential strategy that you can go through

1:47:04

or that would be maybe adaptive is

1:47:06

let's say that there are ceilings

1:47:09

to the level of Status and

1:47:11

resources and the claim and and whatever

1:47:13

that you're going to reach in life Like there is

1:47:15

only one richest guy in the planet, right? And once

1:47:17

you hit that there is no further to go So it

1:47:19

is kind of a zero-sum game in terms of the rank

1:47:22

order in some regard and presuming that

1:47:24

you're going to reach Asymptote right and

1:47:26

top out at some point I

1:47:28

wonder whether there is an argument to be made

1:47:31

that actually stretching out the

1:47:33

progression and the development of your material

1:47:36

acquisition like Winning the

1:47:38

lottery could be one of the worst things that could ever happen

1:47:40

to you because it's such a huge step

1:47:42

change It's like alright and now how

1:47:44

much like how slow is the development? From

1:47:47

this new couple of million dollar

1:47:49

that I previously never had wealth going to be as

1:47:52

opposed as opposed to if you were able To

1:47:54

you know regularly and consistently

1:47:56

move five percent per year towards whatever

1:47:59

the end financial goal is. So

1:48:01

yeah, it made me think about how people

1:48:03

that achieve rapid success may

1:48:06

end up, it's called gold medal syndrome

1:48:09

from Olympians, right? It's like I finally did

1:48:11

the thing, now what?

1:48:14

And I wonder whether, yeah, I wonder whether

1:48:16

there's an equivalent for slow life strategy. Well,

1:48:18

there's the good news is that there's this other

1:48:21

source of well-being. We

1:48:23

conceptualize well-being as happiness plus

1:48:25

meaning equals well-being. So

1:48:27

happiness is what you can succeed as an individual.

1:48:30

Meaning is what you do for your community, what you

1:48:32

do for other people. So when you see

1:48:34

that very successful business people, when

1:48:36

they get to a certain point in their life with success,

1:48:39

they start becoming philanthropists, they start doing

1:48:41

charity, they start working for others. And

1:48:44

happiness is limited, there are

1:48:46

limits to how happy you can be, how much well-being

1:48:49

you can get out of that. But there

1:48:51

seems to be no limits to how much well-being