Ancestral Mating Strategies VS Modern Mating - Mads Larsen

why is it useful or interesting to study mating ideologies at all it is the foundation of all social orders we like to think that politics philosophy all those big subjects of what it's all about but at the foundation it's how men and women reproduce um and upon that everything else rests so if that falls apart our societies fall apart too why does mating need an IDE theology to sit over it at all it's a it's a physical activity like why the need for a story and about what it means and how we should do it because we've so we've changed so much from our ancestral environment um having people commit to peer bonding for decades and to providing for Offspring to dedicate the resources that that requires needs a lot of coercion we have our biological impulses but they do not align very well with modern demands for mating so we need in addition to that an ideology that compels people to mate that Co system uh that makes them think that it's their duty to uh to pair bond and have children and the ideology we have now is compared to previous ideologies very weak in that regard we're not have an ideology where this has become completely voluntary and where it's uh you can make a good case for why perhaps you shouldn't have children and that's a rather unique situation I like the use of the word coercion there oh absolutely biological and cultural coercion it's a huge sacrifice to reproduce and to to make PE make enough people do that to a significant extent now that we also have uh effective contraception it's really difficult right so what is it that's changed primarily in terms of the demands on mating and resource Supply in the modern world or even in the developed world compared with 10,000 50,000 years ago so much um there are several factors contraception is huge before you just needed to want it to copulate and if you did that enough you'd have children and then you'd be uh coerced by your communities to pair bond and take care of that children that child until it's uh big enough uh in the modern R we've now made uh We've deconned culation from reprodu C and also in these uh industrialized environments we have children have become much more expensive instead of being free labor they're a huge cost also we have an ideology that over the past Millennium has become more and more individualistic so we're not necessarily convinced that God is forcing us to have children because that is the meaning of life uh we now think that perhaps being single and traveling and taking care of ourselves is more important than putting more children out into the world and in addition um at the moment we have this a quite uh significant uncertainty about the future that also disincentivizes reproduction what do you think is the ancestrally typical mating strategy for humans over time I know that we've had a few human ancestors and then we kind of had a little bit of a a movement what was the journey through uh human predecessor mating systems you're thinking the past six million years yeah yeah give us the story of start six million years ago we'll take it from there yeah so we started out like most vertebrates we we made it promiscuously uh that means that uh we probably live together in groups multimale female multi-male multi-female groups uh where where individuals were free to uh to copulate but where reproductive opportunities were mostly channeled to high status males and the purpose of that is that you then distribute uh the most successful genes within the population which helps us uh adapt more quickly to changes Etc um this is what's most common across animal groups um but then some species uh they develop a need for pair bonding if you can get paternal investment if if if the males contribute with more than just genes this can be very beneficial and this is what happened with uh our lineage with our with early hominin about four million years ago where the ecology changed where it was so beneficial if if uh if males would contribute that we then had a transition we don't know precisely which way the main hypothesis is that high status males started keeping Herms and providing for females and then there's an alternative hypothesis that is rather new but quite interesting that this was a sneaky new strategy for law status males to be allowed to uh to copulate and reproduce if they offered provisioning and protection to females wow it was like the uh prehistoric simp version yeah it's a it's a it's an interesting hypothesis this is a scholar he's a theoretical biologist who did mathematical models and he just couldn't make it add up for high status uh males it didn't it it would never make sense for them to go along with that initial transition from priscu mating to pair bonding polygamous pair bonding it made a lot more sense that those males that were excluded from mating saw as uh Offspring needed more uh more help more provisioning they were they were uh more dependent on the females that they would now go in and make the deal that okay I will provide you with calories and protection but then you'll let me have sex with you exclusively so I know that you offspring are mine and then the females had to make a trade-off do you want the good jeans from males that are only willing to contribute with genes or do you want a low status male to be around there and help you get food help you get protection help you out with the kid and that would result in kind of like a resource acquisition and Supply arms race between the low status and the high status males yeah so then this would push so it would then start because this was so beneficial because across those four million years The Offspring development period doubled uh we just got bigger heads more helpless when we were born so it became more and more beneficial to uh pass on the good jeans and instead get a mail that would help you out through the most vulnerable year so through the pregnancy and then in the beginning phase of uh when when the child needed the the provisioning the most yeah and then this developed until around 2 million years ago when most uh most homo communities consisted of mostly uh mostly faithful females and provisioning males and then a small number of polygon and a small number of promiscuous maters because it would never um it would always in some instances be beneficial for the female to choose the superior genes of a high state of smell rather uh than get a provisioning low state of smell to to to uh as the father so this is this is a competing hypothesis that intuitively it seems interesting just how rare is male parental investment in the mammal and primate world uh pair bonding yeah or male male parental investment primarily yeah so uh I think among mammals it's 10% uh do pair bonding and among primates it's 29% but the reason why we think that uh our lineage were promiscuous maters 6 million years ago is that uh chimpanzees and bonnos are priscus maters and once a lineage has evolved pair bonding it is so beneficial that it's exceptionally rare that you de evolve from it that's why we assume that six million years ago we also had uh promiscuous ancestors interesting okay so 2 million years what happens next because we go through some rapid changes over from then until now yeah so the interesting part is that although it became highly beneficial with pair bonding there was little pressure on males for not wanting multiple uh females to want to make promiscuously polygamous Le and likewise while it was beneficial for females to opt for the provisioning of low status males there was little pressure on them for not wanting or Desiring a more successful mate so what we see what is quite interesting is that for those 2 million years the nor was monogamous pair bonding with some polygamy but um a really Superior uh forager just couldn't provide for that many for that many females but we see that with agriculture that took off and um resulted in in pretty extreme uh polygyny at in in the most um INE equitus environments but that would have been when was the Agricultural Revolution 15,000 years ago something like that 20,000 years ago around 12 yeah okay so and then it the the main period was from when around 7,000 years ago all the best agricultural land had been taken so then if if you wanted to grow what you had to do was um was to take land from others and that created a 2,000-year period from 7 to 5,000 years ago that had a pretty bizarre mating regime I don't know if you're familiar with this no tell me tell me yeah so I think you've cited This research I think uh what I saw your your episode uh with with uh harinam he cited this study from uh Carmin at Al in 2015 and he cited the original hypothesis there where the original researchers thought that what had happened 7,000 to 5,000 years ago that there were just these extreme levels of polygamy uh that uh the Y chromosome diversity in our lineage uh was reduced by 95% meaning that 19 out of 20 males disappeared while the uh the X chromosome diversity increased in line with population growth and if you you think about it that doesn't make sense it's just not plausible knowing what we know about human behavior why would every so you can imagine that to one generation a patriarch might castrate every other male and just impregnate all the females but that wouldn't make evolutionary sense for him to do in the Next Generation when all the all the men are his sons and this would be an extremely unstable system and that this would happen all over the world for 2,000 years it just seems implausible so in 2018 a new main hypothesis was established that speaks no more favorably of our ancestors mating practices and what probably happened was that for those 2,000 years all everyone did uh in order to be able to grow their tribes because the only way to grow was to take the fields of your neighbor so then you had a universal system of intertribal rating where when when your kin group was strong enough you would go to your neighbors kill all the males and take all the females and all the fields and that was yours and people kept doing this for 2,000 years uh until 95% of the original male DNA was just wiped off the off the genetic slate so it's yeah 2,000 years of of universal genocide and rape that's what our ancestors were up to that's what it seems like and the reason why we got out of it was that we invented new stories because up until 5,000 years ago we could only cooperate with kin and then somebody invented that some men they are the descendants of gods so we can submit to them as leaders and now we can grow our in groups so instead of just being a king group we can now be thousands and we can keep growing and that is of course beneficial because then we can kill our smaller neighbors a lot more easily okay so is this the Inception of having a broader mating ideology about 5,000 years ago well what that created was the ability to create a lot larger societies and it also this the invention at the time was slavery before that when you conquered someone you killed all the males now you could either turn them into your slaves or your allies so that was it's it's a weird thing to think about but if we think that slavery is is better than genocide that was actually progress at some point in our past so when we look at our ancestors it's they've been yeah it's it's rather unpleasant group of people at times yeah when the choice is between slavery and genocide uh and you're having to make a value judgment of which one which one's least bad of the two uh that's a little bit rough okay so what given your research looking at this sort of Journey of mating ideologies over time what is the furthest back that you've managed to find now obviously as you say uh some kind of prototypical religion bonds groups together in a way that civilizes them beyond what they normally would and given that so much of what we were driven by previously the motivation was very heavily mating derived or at least mating was one of the outcomes that we wanted I suppose you could say that any ideology that CES is a group together Beyond kin is a mating ideology but what about when it becomes a little bit more sort of specific about what you should what a man's role is what a woman's role is how we should combine all of this together yeah uh that's a good intuition to have that that is the kind of civilizing Direction but the ideology mating ideology didn't change that much from the period we've described and up until um the church's disolution of Europe's tribes about a thousand years ago we can call that ideology it is often called heroic love so if you want to start following the mating ideologies we've had for through Antiquity up until the Church of dissolution of the tribes heroic love and it's it's uh it's um it's it's a term that's a little bit problematic because the point with it was that during this regime a woman had to always be ready to submit to the greater Warrior you didn't necessarily have a feudal rulers rather State structures that could protect people people always up until this time lived in kin groups and if other groups came and defeated you then the men would be killed and enslaved and the women would often be captured so if women wanted a chance to survive and protect themselves and their children they now had to submit to whomever had killed their father or their husband so this was this was an extremely misogynistic rape culture and this is what marked you could up up until up until a thousand years ago and from from when from the beginning of Agriculture from that period we talked earlier where what this this was the original patriarchy where the male lineages was matter and women are they had different way of of conceptualizing this but women were more like soil where the patriarchal seed were put so this way as long as you had these beliefs you could just capture as many women as as you as you wanted or were able to and then keep growing your king group I suppose as well this heroic love narrative is uh a useful strategy to legitimize to the men what they are doing but also as a coping strategy to dampen down the discomfort of what the women are subjected to that if there is an ideology that sits over the top that maybe this is the way that mating is supposed to be done maybe it is beneficial that your last husband was killed killed and murdered and that now you have a new one because he's evidently the more heroic of the two therefore it is quite right that you should go as opposed to the person that I cared about has just been dismembered in front of me and now this guy that I don't know like that's not a particularly reassuring story whereas the heroic love narrative uh it's useful for both sexes in some regards in some regards but I'm I'm sure it was an absolute nightmare for these people that had to go through this and what drove much of this was uh that these kin groups generally practiced polygones mating so uh you'd had Elite individuals who would hoard women as wives concubines and sex slaves so for the for the low value men they didn't have access to pair bonding or or copulation so then they were driven throughout Antiquity to when they had a strong enough position to go to whichever whomever their neighbors were and then kill the men take their stuff and take their women so this polygamous mating that marked this period under heroic love drove a lot of War a lot of social instability um it it was a quite enormous change that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy even on the most Superior of males that that changed everything when did that happen well the the Roman Empire uh played around with mon monogamy but they were never very serious about it and then the church Church started imposing it in the 4th Century but also not very seriously and then you have a period That's referred to as the Gregorian reform at the beginning of the second Millennium that uh you had a lot of church councils that work with these matters because the church wanted to grab more power over people and if you can control their mating if you can control their marriages their sexual behavior Etc that gives you a lot of power over powerful men so this is when they uh dissolved Europe's tribes through prohibiting cousin marriage changing rules uh for inheritance and ownership and then imposing lifelong monogamy which was a very unusual unique rather extreme way of thinking of mating but when you do this this if you want to understand the origins of the modern world this was it because this then you create the sexual egalitarianism this is how you make parents invest in children this is where you prepare for growth and where you start creating a different more individualistic psychology different way of thinking your low immense testosterone so instead of uh Superior men competing all their life to acquire more women you get to compete until you get one and then you have to uh put your efforts in more in a more productive Direction how does it help investment in children why was there not a massive amount of investment in children during the heroic mating era because you would have one father with several women with a bunch of children and you would try to maximize that to the extent that your resources allowed so you just had a lot less attention per child and you also didn't have an ideology where you should necessarily invest so much in your children they were more Expendable while if if then these uh these children are distributed over more men and you have a more limited amount of children then you will be more incentivized to take care of those children that you do have what is the reason for the church or anybody wanting to impose some sort of rule from a uh civilization design perspective M what was the advantage or the change that they were looking to enact what was the outcome that they wanted by encouraging lifelong monogamy well that's really interesting in hindsight if we like modernity we think it was brilliant but when we look at the document that exist at the time it's a bit of a mystery uh we can suspect certain things um through dissolving Europe's tribes and changing uh the rules for ownership and inheritance the church by the by the 10th Century had grabbed 40% of the agricultural land in Western Europe so that was good you could see that as a pretty strong incentive that when you die instead of your land being passed on to your kin you now give it to the church so you don't have to go to hell that's a pretty strong material incentive and then the other aspect as I mentioned earlier is that powerful men that heard a lot of women if you can impose on them certain mating structures then you as as the church if you have to uh acknowledge or permit their marriages if you can restrict them then the church get power over powerful men which is another uh good understandable material incentive and then it's it's all just speculation in terms of what the spir spiritual ramifications are what they might have suspected the long-term consequences would be but my impression from having studied a lot of deep cultural changes is that to some extent things just happen it's it's just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things and then it almost magically sorts itself out and nobody really understands what's happening when it's happening and then a 100 years later or in the modern times historians look back and kind of try to make sense of what it was but generally there aren't that many Grand Architects that have a particular Vision that they're a able to impulse on their culture yeah what's that quote about life happens forward but only makes sense in reverse and I guess absolutely history is kind of the same that we can post talk rationalize what was it that the church's grand plan was whereas you know it's much easier to go for a simple explanation which was they wanted to control powerful men these powerful men had lots of resources if the church slot themselves in between those men and one of the things that they want the absolute most which is women because presumably they couldn't slot themselves in between the men and their resources like unless the church is going to wage a war and say right now half of this Farm's ours now half of this house is ours now D D D D D it's a much more crafty subversive strategy to be able to somehow make Divine the union between a man and a woman and then to for you to be the Arbiter that sits in between them yeah I can totally see how it gives you power over powerful men one thing that hasn't been mentioned so far which I thought would have come up is uh sexual redistribution right that if you have high amounts of inequality within a sexual system you get young male syndrome it's not very good it does this play a role at this stage or was it just such an accepted part of the way that the world existed that that no one was really bothered about the chaos that came along with it no in in hindsight we see that it was hugely beneficial the modern world would not have happened if if that redistribution of women hadn't happened that the church imposed on medieval Europeans but whether anyone in the church were able to predict what greater sexual egalitarianism would have for consequences for social stability the potential for growth for peace Etc I don't know I'd like to think they were that smart but I kind of doubt it maybe they noticed this at they went along that they saw there were beneficial effects I don't know but yeah the the end result was was quite impressive but how it came about who The Architects were if they really imagined this I'm kind of doubtful if if if if they understood the ramifications of what they were doing okay so uh heroic love Yeah finishes the church comes in sorry men no more gang bangs for you what comes next well this is fascinating and this speaks again to how how nobody's in charge so I some of these mating ideologies I refer to as cultural dissolvent these are remaining ideologies upon which you cannot build social order but they kind of make you lose faith in the previous ideology so when courtly love uh was uh created and disseminated through romances and ballads from the 12th century this this was an ideology with values and Norms that primarily undermined heroic love so it had an an exaggeration of the emotional of love as something that was incredibly strong and irresistible and that lasted a lifetime and this was meant to discourage High status men uh from being polygon that if you pick just one woman that's going to last for life and it's going to give you this special ecstasy that you can't get if you have more women and also if you force yourself on a woman so what men should do and this is what ballads and romances promote that instead of being The Greatest Warrior well you also have to be the greatest Warrior but in addition to that you have to talk to women you have to use sophisticated social skills you have to flirt and instead of just raping her after you killed her husband you have to make uh the woman feel a high uh degree of lust and love so when she can't help herself from having sex with you because she she lust you so much and she loves you so much that's when you can have sex so you have all these you have all these values that's if you just read the Roman as and ballads and you don't know what they're reacting against it's kind of hard to make sense of but when you know the tenants of heroic love you see that all these elements of Coury love are constructed in a sense to undermine those those strong beliefs from the previous regime and also it has to do with a new sociality that when you lived in kinship groups um you stuck to your own you were skeptical towards strangers strangers might want to kill you and take your stuff but now that we lived in a feudal Europe where everyone were supposed to be Christian then we're supposed to have this openness toward strangers we're supposed to be friendly courteous and all these Norms that defines courtly love is also the way European Christians were supposed to treat each other and not just women so you have all this this brand new type of sociality that would have never worked in the kinship system but was crucial for feudal Europe to have an effective uh cooperation so as you're becoming more civilized and as you are uh more open to new people to being friends with people stuff like pubs and and Ale houses and and and things will occur people will be migrating a little bit more it's not just my family bonds with the family next door okay so what about what is the role of marriage is marriage widespread at this point is it that you go through the church and the church does this thing what about the role of no sex before marriage and those sorts of impositions yeah so the transition was before marriages were private but with the Gregorian reform they had to be Church marriages which is also very important for court to love uh and what's unique about it's something called the European marriage pattern that develops here because this had never happened before no kin groups had been dissolved the way the church did it uh so you got a unique situation in the west and what happens is that you have when you can no longer move in with your kin you have to start accumulating resour sources so people's marriage age were pushed up from say from their teens or early 20s up to the late 20s so you shortens people reproductive period and this was crucial because under in Antiquity we practice what you could call fourth trimester abortion you might know this from Vikings you have the babies you have and then you have a look at them and then you kill the ones you can't race so this was how you kept the population in check and they tended to kill more females than males so you'd have a you'd have a low sex ratio um what they did now because you individual life became sacred you know have to restrict people's sexuality they had to have less sex and one way that they did this was through this European marriage pattern where you reproductive period didn't start until you around 30 years old that way you didn't have more children so it was very crucial in this period that people's sexuality were restricted otherwise you'd run into malthusian crisis because you'd have too many children but what happened interestingly is after uh the black death in the mid 14th century north of Europe lost over in my country lost over 50% of the population and around Europe to a third to a half was lost so in the for in the 1400s you had what it's called the the sexual laxness of the 15th century where people were uh were having a lot more promiscuous sex sleeping around etc etc because our environment could afford it and then when we rebuilt the population around year 1500 that's when you have the Reformation that's when you have a retightening of these sexual Norms because we couldn't afford anymore because we refilled up our population and that's when you get puritanism etc etc what you were talking about this sort of window this reproductive window that um age 30 late 20s was important is that people were told that they shouldn't reproduce after 30 or they weren't permitted to reproduce until 30 so before when you had polygamy and you lived in kin groups you would have a man with a lot of resource and he'd marry every time he feel like it and then he'd if he'd married a see a woman at 20 and he'd be 30 or 40 and she'd just start reproducing right away and the same if they were younger you would you would always have a place to live you'd moov in next to your kin on on your kin group's land now in feudal Europe you'd have to accumulate resources to be able to afford what's called a neolocal resident you don't live with your family you live on your own so you'd have to be on lab men and women would have to be on labor markets typically in their 20s until they had accumulated enough resources to get their own place and this is what pushed up uh the marriage age and which so reproductive reproduction didn't start until typically in your late 20s for women wow cuz I you know Game of Thrones as my greatest window into an accurate historical representation of what would have happened in medieval times for reproduction you know you've got a lot of essentially child and teen marriages and women occurring and I certainly know that some of the aristocracy were doing this was that only a behavior or a trend that occurred in the upper echelons of the the higher nobility those who had resources so you see that the very highest the the highest classes of those that are marked the the least by these changes to the Past Millennial of mating moralities they still uh the very highest status men they still had lovers on the side they still had a couple of wives for a few centuries longer than they were supposed to so they got away from this and and the church tried to rest power from them but it was a bad air they were still powerful so yeah among the higher classes you typically would would marry still when you were around 20 perhaps right so this is really interesting obviously we're going to get into it as we continue down this little Journey Through Time but a lot of the conversations at the moment are for the first time since records began more women are childless at 30 than with children at 30 but it seems to me like if we look only 500 600 years ago you're maybe going to see very similar sort of fertility patterns amongst women albe it for very different reasons than individual choice and and traveling the world and getting an education and stuff like that uh but yeah you're going to see because of the demands that were placed on their requirement to accumulate resources both as men and as women in order to be able to get started with a family plus you don't have quite as sophisticated social safety nets so you do have this malthusian problem that keeps everything down so it's like right okay we need to restrict restrict restrict it's basically like an entry price into a nightclub that uh up until the point at which you can pay the entry price you can't go to the dance right the dance being having having kids yeah yeah and also at this point what was characteristic of the European marriage pattern was an exceptionally high percentage of never married women in a polygamous system mostly all women are married under this system it had extraordinary high percentage of typically 10% which to us sounds very low but at the time that was unheard of so around 10% of women uh never married during this regime wow okay so we are currently in courtly love courtly love I love the fact that it's like uh one of its primary design uh justifications was to be a counterweight to the heroic love narrative right it it's it's overly uh restrictive on men compared with what they had for their value set previous ly that you must ensure that the woman is lusting after you then we potentially add no sex before marriage in as well that's another that gives you the Restriction of resources you need to be able to pay the do you need to make sure that you've asked for her father's hand in marriage I'm going to guess that that comes around some some point around about this time too which would mean you know the most difficult gatekeep Arbiter on the planet you've got to like get his seal of approval before you can do it too then you got to go through the church presumably there's some assessments that get done by the church too so yeah all of this not only acting as a what would end up being useful sexual redistribution for creating the foundation of a non-chaotic civilization moving forward but probably at the moment the main thing it was trying to do is let's just stop all of the powerful men raping everyone like let's let's just stop that from happening first and we'll see where we go from there and the core value here you could are this is the F West's first sexual Revolution you could place that around the year 1200 and the core value here is female consent so in Antiquity women were Commodities a marriages were usually arranged between families again it was a commercial contract and then with these reforms they instituted something called the double consent so women aren't free to choose who to marry men aren't free to choose who to marry but women now have a chance of refusal so it's still uh you go from in Antiquity the kin group was the authority in marriage now you move to the nuclear family because that is how you live now so it's still parents arrange marriage but crucially women are given leverage through being allowed to say no so they are still chused into marriages still not individual choice but they can say no and that's that's huge progress right yeah and that set women on a path of emancipation that is ongoing the beginning of female emancipation in the west was the church's imposition of female uh the female right to consent in the first sexual Revolution wow that changed everything that that's yeah everything that has happened since was a result of that first movement okay what comes after courtly love well the The Mating ideology that the society was built on then is something called companion at love so this was a very pragmatic ideology and very different from Court the love in court the love you and I we are aristocratic nights and we're going to travel through Europe to find our one true love and we're going to fall incredibly much watch and love and we're going to live in bless bless Forever After naturally this was not the reality for European peasants so the ideology of companionate Love Is that a man and a woman shall marry for life through an arranged marriage whether they like each other is not or not is not a big deal and their primary task is to run the farm as partners to run the farm and keep their children alive so we're not going to sleep around we're not going to divorce and find somebody else we're just going to huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring so it's a very pragmatic very unromantic uh ideology it's about submitting to the needs of your family and your community and not giving into emotions or erotic or romantic impulses so this was the reality for European peasants from the beg from the end of from from the from the first sexual Revolution when the king groups were dissolved and all the way up to 1750 which was the West Second sexual Revolution this was when you this was a period of companionate Love arranged marriages pragmatism and then you had a period before 1500 with sexual laxness and then a period afterwards with puritanism uh to restricts people people's impulses to avoid malthusian crisis right I was I just about to ask why the puritanism well after this period of sexual laxness when we had rebuilt population and when we entered into a period of of stagnation and stagnant per capita growth we needed to prevent Europeans from uh having too many children to having premarital sex extramarital sex and the way we have done this in the west is to villainize female sexuality women are the sexual selectors and in order to prevent extramarital sex from happening or premarital sex uh the church has in those instances gone after the women uh so you'll see in the 1400s female sexuality is acknowledged and to an extent celebrated and then when puritanism comes uh the ideology PE women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage uh women who are lustful are aligned with Satan Etc so it's a way to oppress women and to coers them into not having sex that they shouldn't have which could then contribute to and crisis so the choice we face in these situations is either we kill babies when they are born the surplus of them or we have to find a way to prevent people from having extramarital sex or sex that produces too much babies and the means we have tended to use in the west is to uh demonize female sexuality in those instances why not try to control male sexuality it's a really good question if you look at the differences in male and female matings psychology and and and who is in charge on these markets markets it seems like the more effective Choice I'm not condoning it but it seems like the most effective choice to place the cost on the sexual selectors you could imagine that men are so driven that telling men men generally do not have sexual access to women and to tell men that they shouldn't have sex number one it would be harder because they have a stronger drive for short term uh relationships but also they that access isn't there for them while if the women are the ones who make the decisions in these in these cases of at least the voluntary sex then having placing an enormous burden on women that from our modern perspective seems totally misogynistic and unfair it seems that that would be the more effective way of doing it yeah because if you're going to try and restrict men overall but even now I'm going to guess that there is still a very large cohort of men more than 10% who go to their graves without a family or un married uh therefore you're you're pointing the finger at the less reliable potential Mater whereas if you point the finger at the women it is more likely that you get more bang for your book basically on restriction but presumably there must have been there is there must be some moralizing around male sexuality too just probably not quite the same level of demonization that women had absolutely so yeah puritanism also uh demonized promiscuous men in those stories and the literature that exists from this period the greatest villain is are are the favored villain is often a man who is known to have slept around so promiscuous men are also uh put forth as villains and and and discouraged but the the male sexuality is still acknowledged there's there's something pathological about a woman who wants to have sex with someone who isn't her husband in the Puritan ideology it's if you want to talk about patriarchal misogyny the Puritans were really really bad but then we have to try to then step aside back and and of course we moralize on it and say that this is terrible but then we try to understand why did they do this what was the function of this why why did puritanism arise in a period when it was crucial for the West to restrain people's sexuality to avoid malthusian crisis right yeah I understand if if everybody is dying of famine and starvation the difference between the pain of that and the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage it it doesn't yeah I can well we have to choose if if if we're not okay with killing babies and Christians haven't been because of their ideology while in Antiquity people generally wear we have to choose we either kill babies or we strict people's sexuality or we or we invent contraceptives which we got around to later what was the reason for not just killing babies Oh in with Christianity uh life became sacred so uh the Christians said that you can't take any life so once a child so they didn't they uh criminalized infanticide so inant infanticide and particularly uh female selective INF fanticide killing uh they would typically kill girls cuz they were costlier depending a little bit on the on the context but yeah so the practice of infanticide was just cracked out on really hard by the Christians because it went against their belief of every life being sacred yeah okay well that's interesting that the church's Doctrine is uh both like giveth and taketh away here that they have made their own bed okay we say that in fanticide isn't good we value human life oh [ __ ] Downstream from that we now have this other problem which is being able to control populations so that we don't get some fisherian runaway like malthusian [ __ ] also not good okay so I mean one other thing that that's kind of I guess interesting to add here is that the Middle Ages didn't finish until the 1500s right we're still in the Middle Ages from pretty much fall of Rome 500 to 1500s is like that's it's just one big long [ __ ] medieval like hodg Podge right then we get to you said 1750 ish MH y y I mean you know we're talking now only 250 years ago and it feels like there is an awful lot of ground to cover uh in terms of sexual ideology so what what happened 1750 so that's the West Second sexual Revolution this was one of individual choice so what we don't think about in the west this is It's a evolutionary psychologist called M apost has done great work on this how throughout human history we've had arranged marriage marriages he makes the case that the human species is the only species on the planet where men select other men for reproduction this has always been the case and during agriculture it was more the kin group uh and then um after the the first sexual Revolution this was more a matter for the nuclear family meaning the patriarch the father of the family so human men and women this is important to understand to understand the present day mating dysfunction we didn't not evolve under regimes of individual choice we generally we had an influence but we generally didn't pick and attract our own mates we were given mates by our families and communities so our in our somewhat weak ability or many people's weak ability to flirt and attract Partners attract short longterm Partners this is thought of as as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past that the in the west started getting from 750 so what happened with the dissolution of Europe's tribes is that our psychology changed fundamentally this was the biggest change in introduction of Agriculture so we were put on a journey then say for 8 900 years ago toward ever greater individualization more and more and more and more non-stop still ongoing and it's not going to stop for a while and by by the 18th century Europeans started more and more thinking that should be entitled to make the wrong decisions in terms of mating copulation and pair bonding and what facilitated this materially is that you had this commercial revolution where more and more people worked as servants in their youth for uh for cash payments so to accumulate these resources to be able to marry people moved further and further away from family and uh they were paid in cash and this was the material foundation for the West Second sexual Revolution so among Ong these young proletarians around 1750 this European marriage pattern just burst and people started having a lot more sex pre uh before marriage uh on the side also so you had this enormous growth in in sexual activity especially among young people that had enormous consequences and and this continued so it wasn't like everybody started writing away making their own decisions but it it started among these young wage Jers and then over the centuries that spread and it um and and the dam completely burst with a third sexual revolution in the 1960s I love the idea that flirting is basically uh like an evolutionary anomaly that if you were to have the ability ancestrally if if if you come from a long line of flirters and your great great great great great granddaddy he was a flirter and the granddaddy before it's like why like why you know previously you would have just been taking what you wanted then after that you would have been told what you wanted then after that your dad would have told you what you wanted and then only 250 years ago would you have actually chosen what you wanted yeah Leif caner who whom you know he makes this this interesting case h today to Be an Effective F if you're a really good-looking guy and you're really Charming a good flirter and you're short-term oriented you're going to have a lot of mating success in the olden days there would be a greater there would be a significant chance that you would get snuffed out if if you uh if you were a solid guy who created alliances worked hard led a family you would be chosen for reproduction by other men and given to their daughters if you were just this good-look Adonis who like to sleep around you probably going to get K killed by the by the men in the king group of your latest elicit Affair oh yeah because you're threat in some regard even if even if you don't get rumbled by the king group of the men of the woman that you just managed to seduce outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage even if you don't get caught by the Scruff of the neck by them you're just going to create a ambient sense of concern and envy and mistrust because oh we know that mads we've got to be careful about him like he's got the he's got the [ __ ] charm like you know I've heard rumors and it almost becomes I guess a to some degree a little bit like the witch trials that you have this it's not quite original sin but it's something inbuilt that will cause other men to feel uh envy and jealousy and weigh rather than understand and turn it Inward and work out what it is that's lacking in them that makes them envious of this person it's way easier to just moralize about the person that's the outg group now and say let's [ __ ] kill him and also times were really tough a lot of the time you needed a really solid guy willing to work really hard do whatever he can to provide for his wife and children to keep them alive if you're just this charming hottie who likes to uh chat up women around the farm it's that does that did not generally promote a good genetic Legacy times the demands of the times were just different times were very different than they are today are you saying that we are the descendants of the least charismatic least good-looking least flutatious men that existed well it depends on the ecology but yeah generally our ancestors have not been lotharios that's uh that's only recently where that has been very beneficial right so we get to 1750 people are now able to make their own decisions uh actually one question there how is it that the church loses control does the church feel like it is losing control does it try to claw it back in any regard I know that uh in the time of Charles Darwin uh you know Victorian England we had an awful lot of sort of sexual puritanism there I think uh the year of the year of Darwin's birth the total number of British divorces was eight yeah not thousands not hundreds eight yeah no what happens 1750 is really interesting because there's a counter reaction so we have what we call the Romantic Century from 1750 to 1850 so I'm sure with your imagination you can imagine what happened when this Dam burst in 1750 now we're going to start sleeping around whoops we haven't invented the contraceptive pill yet what's going to happen so what happens is you have an enormous increase in illegitimate birth across Europe it doubles triples quadruples so what you typically have are all these uh low lower class women who now can make their own decisions in terms of culation and pair bonding and their ancestors no experience with this so we didn't evolve to uh see through the intentions of men wouldn't invol evolve uh to assess our M our own mate value precisely so what would happen that you would have a lot of high status men or at least higher status men say uh sons of farmers uh Urban men who would then go after the daughters of crafters and other at the lower rungs of society and they would say I love you and I'm going to marry you and let's have sex and they would do that and when she got pregnant they would leave her so in in Denmark Norway up until till 7:30 7:34 uh if you had sex sty was a defacto marriage contract and then what we see in the beginning of the 1700s there's a huge increase in women taking men to court for having had sex with them but at marrying them so they end that law in 1734 so after that if you get pregnant you're not entitled to marry the guy you had sex with so from 1750 you get this enormous increase in illegitimate birth at the worst in Sweden and in in Stockholm 50% of child births were by unwed mothers lower in rural areas in Paris you see an enormous increase theand abandoned children so in the in the late 1700s there was an ideology which I also consider as a cultural disant because you couldn't build a social order on it and this was Liberty in love so this is the kind of kasanova ideology where you're supposed to just enjoy sex for the sake of sex you're supposed to sleep around follow your lusts and this was an ideology that spread from the French court and then throughout Europe and it reached uh Scandinavia around 1770 so you had this period where you have certain eccentric Muse where people advocated let's just sleep around let's just have a hell of a good time let's just party and this created this enormous burden on women because women were left with the burden of child care when these Libertines left them once they got pregnant so typically High status men took advantage of of of impoverished women and then just abandon them and this is what laid a foundation for the Romantic ideology of the early 1800s so Liberty love undermine companionate love where where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down take care of your family and Liberty love said no let's just have fun and then when the social Ramic ramification of that uh came manifested themselves the counter reaction was romantic love which did the same as Puritan love had done where you again so Liberty love celebrated female sexuality let's just have sex romantic love said no women have no benefit from sex outside of marriage we're all going to have to stop doing this and similar to courtly love it exaggerated the emotional love as something incredibly strong and something that lasted for life so from then on men and women were only supposed to have sex within the confines of marriage and you should be married forever and this started having an effect around 1850 and then across the West the legitimacy rate started plummeting so you see this counter reaction first you dissolve companionate love then you see the effects of all this priscy and then in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this affects you have a counteract or romantic love where you then become more purtin again and then you see the effect of that in the statistics right you reprioritize the emotional connection the Romantic connection between the man and the woman and what that does is that again creates a dampener on The Libertine Casanova guy lothario that's just okay yeah that's so interesting I what I'm seeing here is this this flip-flop between what seems in sometimes uh human nature kind of just bursts through the cracks it kind of grows and grows and grows enough and then it splits through that um there is innate desires that people have uh you're also responding to the local resources so I'm going to guess that around about 1750 uh Agriculture and green houses and [ __ ] like that meant that the ability to get an amount of food and an amount of living out of a square foot of land would have increased pretty dramatically which means that this malthusian problems not okay right so we can't really we we're no longer Limited in terms of food what's the next thing that we can use [ __ ] they're having sex with each other uh uh say that it's all about romance say that it's all about the the over prioritize the importance of emotional connection because that that allows us to create but we' we've also lost at least a little bit here we've lost the um Church's moralization or at least it sounds like we've lost the church's moralization of the active love yeah and the 1800s this was the time of the Enlightenment this what was about individual rights uh empowering individuals not oppressing them uh letting them make their own choices personal agency etc etc and this was was also at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution so when this uh um European marriage pattern burst around 1750 we were very fortunate for two reasons because we now experienced a population explosion in going ahead that is still ongoing well I take that back it's not ongoing anymore uh but we had we got this moving into this period tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion and also we offloaded an enormous part of our population to America and other uh Colonial territories otherwise we would have faced dire trouble in the west um as a as a as the change of our mating practices and also with the reduction in mortality from other causes okay then perhaps the shortest most acute change when it comes to human reproductive history the introduction of reliable contraception well yeah so one of the aspects of ROM rantic love is that you have gender inequality you conceptualize men and women as complimentary that uh people are born as incomplete halves and then to become whole you have to find uh your true love you have to bond with her and then you individualize and you become a whole human so this means that the man is supposed to go out and work and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care of the domestic Arena so they're conceptualized as equal but complimentary but in reality this drove Stark inequality so the next mating ideology we move to which is the one we believe in today it's called confluent love which is a mating ideology of gender equality of convenience reward and self-realization and this ideology arose quite a while ago it was first introduced into Scandinavian literature in 1839 but it had existed in the in the west somewhat earlier so people were thinking about this that we should get true equality that men and women should be the same and have the same opportunities and that we should be able to have sex outside of marriage and sleep around but the environment wasn't prepared for that like you mentioned this couldn't really be implemented until we invented effective contraception otherwise this kind of mating would have placed too far too strong of a burden of women so we see this discussion in Western culture from say around 1830 and then with the Darian Revolution we start thinking okay so with romantic love we thought obviously this is what God wanted us to do that we have this impulses that you also mentioned that's just a test from God to see if we deserve to go to heaven so that we want to have sex and that we want to divorce that's just a test and also at the beginning of our conversation you asked why do we need these ideologies and this is precisely why because we have these biological impulses to culate and our our um our love cycle probably evolved to last around 3 to four years which was the mating cycle of foragers so with agriculture we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy because in case of divorce you can't split up the fields and and bring your part of the farm somewhere else so we were kind of stuck in these marriages that had to last many many more decades than what we evolved for so then you need these ideologies to make us fight these urges that we have to sleep around to to have uh we evolve for serial monogamy or serial pair bonding to fight that because the the cultural environment and then a modern environment just required something else for us so then we used religion we say that this is what God wants but then with the Darian Revolution we start thinking well if we're animals we too then these impulses we have they're not moral tests this is our nature so we started exploring what human mating nature is and this was a very uh strong literary movement in Scandinavia in the late 1800s and then also through the 1900s through literature we started exploring how could we make differently but what's really interesting is that the Romantic regime did not Peak until after World War II so we we experienced something that was really unexpected because in the in the 1910s and 20s we were moving away from romantic love we wanted female equality we were moving toward confluent love but then after World War II we we had this enormous economic prosperities that allowed us to implement the Romantic Utopia which is the bread winner housewife model so suddenly marriage in the west became near Universal almost everyone married they married young and now we got to experience that the Romantic Utopia a couple of shortcomings number one life does love generally doesn't last a lifetime and the Utopia at staying at home wasn't that great for all women so this and you had this in the 1950s in the beginning of the 1960s and then you have the social revolution of the 1960s and you could say as symbol symbolically that the the Breakthrough of confident love was in in 1968 and then you start seeing in the beginning of the 70s around the mid 70s across the West you see in the statistics that this modern M marriage pattern that we've had and that peaked after World War II it just thegrates divorce Peaks remarriage goes down people marry later you have a lot more uh casual sex outside of marriage people start having sex earlier and you just see this complete change in the Western marriage pattern from the 1970s and on and this is the and this is this has mostly just gone in One Direction and this is the mating regime that we live under now which has been uh accentuated through dating apps through increased Prosperity through all that has happened in the past 40 50 years when you say confluent love am I right in thinking that what that means is our Union uh works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I'm useful to you yeah so romantic love emerge for life that's the only way to behold people confident love we come together either for an opportunistic short-term relationship casual sex or for a romantic relationship for as long as we have emotions for each other or we benefit in another way and then we move on to singledom or another relationship so we're not meant for each other for Life only for as long as we want to so it's this Confluence of people coming together and meeting and moving on right so now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era how do you how do you think of sort of modern dating dysfunction demographic collapse all of that stuff is that you know from 1200 was that just the first Domino gets flicked and it's an inevitable kind of all the way along how how do you conceptualize this Al together yeah I I wouldn't use the word inevitable but I I I completely agree with with your intentions behind that yeah that is what set it in motion we've always had arranged marriages and lived in King groups and then more strictly under agriculture but still and then we was set on this path toward individual Choice never great individualism and then it's just to have like we talked about in the very beginning it's hard to convince people to take upon themselves the burden of Decades of pair bonding with the same person and providing for Offspring and when you have a strong individualistic culture and a mating ideology assess that this is optional that you don't necessarily have to do that we're facing an evolution that is quite predictable and as you've talked about on many of your podcasts it seems to be going a direction where We've ran out of tools there's not much we could do we had in the in the 1930s uh decline in fertility also which we countered then it the numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1.8 which was seen as a catastrophe and then we counted through effectuating social democracy we we we uh made it materially easier to have children through Social Democratic welfare all that has played out now that's that's no longer an option in in Norway now uh a typical the average woman she receives more than $1.2 million more from the state than she pays in taxes while men pay more in taxes than they receive and when even that can't uh motivate uh reproduction at at at replacement levels in and this is Norway is the richest country in the world and we have the best welfare system and when even that kind of money transfer can't uh facilitate reproduction there's very little other countries can do so up until 2010 Scandinavia was an anomaly across the West fertil has declined for a long time so we thought that the answer or many thought that the answer was that other countri had to beavia they needed gender equality because we're the most gender equal region and they needed generous welfare and now in the past decade the Norwegian forer rate dropped from in the 2010 from 2.0 to 1.5 and now it's dropped down to 1.4 and that's with each woman on average being transferred $1.2 million over a lifetime that's a lot of money there's econ economic incentives no longer cease to work so we kind of know that for other countries too that would only be a short-term Sol solution that would be countered by other forces that are more powerful so if we think it's a good idea to still making uh to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse it's very difficult to see what kind of means we can effectuate that would have it a substantial effect that could turn this around what are the forces that are driving the decrease in uh fertility rights at the moment well the larger forces uh the material ones is urbanization like we've talked about before and like many others have talked about how there's been when we lived as agriculturalist having children with free labor and now they're just huge expenses so that is that is one issue um the other one is ideological that we no long with romantic love the meaning of life was to merge with your partner and have a bunch of children with with confluent love it's about self-realization uh reward convenience when we have those beliefs it's just we're just less incentivized to take upon ourselves these burdens so also mentioned Fair of the future um and then you have what I've researched a bit is what happens with our mate preferences in this new environment of the past decades how um on one side when you make uh as in Scandinavia when you have gender equality and you have generous welfare it makes it maturely easier to have children so that counts in a positive direction but it also disincentivizes women from peir bonding with men of similar mate value so that's another aspect of these ideologies and mating regimes that it's it's really difficult to make women mate with men with with low mate value unless they have to unless they are materially dependent on it or coerced to do so by their society we have two attraction systems we have the original one that we talked about when we started 6 million years ago were promiscuous maters and this is a very discriminatory uh uh system for women where they're supposed to only be uh promiscuously attracted by the very most attractive men maybe this is somewhere between five and 20% of men probably closer to five and then five four million years ago we evolved this other system to facilitate pair bonding which is a much more in a sense democratic system where a muchar larger proportion of men is able to trigger their love mechanism that makes that motivates a woman to mate with them but we see that when women don't have to they uh become Chooser and they uh direct their efforts at men with higher mate value than what they have themselves and that makes it harder to pair up more people within a community which then will have adverse effects on the fertility right and when women are not financially or resol ful beholden to their partner in order to be able to keep them ticking over because they have no job they have no education or they have limited socioeconomic opportunities uh I need to stay with my partner because the alternative is that me and potentially 1 2 3 four five children are out on the street so we basically kind of like a a financial prisoner in some regards to their husband and now that women don't need that anymore the gloves are yeah and and from from Modern ideology and I'm I'm sure both you and I feel this way this is great for women women aren't dependent on being with a man they are they are independent they have their own money their own economy and they can make their own choices and they can choose uh to direct their efforts and compete harder for the high value men instead of settling for someone with a similar value as themselves but then the consequence of that is that we have uh uh we have a very high increase in singledom we have a decline in fertility and it also affects people's well-being people generally Express a desire to be pair bonded and they want to they want to be together with someone that's kind of what we've been doing the last four million years and then when people react to different incentives in the modern environment we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships yeah I looked at a study a pretty what looked like significant assessment that said gender inequality specifically when it comes to finances is correlated with both male and female satis action in relationships which is a really if you want to talk about like unfortunate uh uncomfortable U realizations that if you as a man are able to whether by coercion or restriction or capacity or whatever out earn your female partner and if the breaks are put on your female partner she's happier and you're happier on average yeah I know if if there's so many depressive statistics if you want to look at what actually get the fertility rate up you have to if what would really work is to and we don't want any of this we have to get rid of gender equality get rid of prosperity uh domestic violence works there's tons of stuff that work to uh to make women submit to being in the relationship that they otherwise would want to be in yeah to go stop being uh whatever it is cost benefiting to um uh what's it called when the man there's two types of mate guarding right uh whatever the second one is I know what you mean yes yeah so no there's if you look at what actually would work to get the fertility rate up these are very dystopic choices we have there there are there are pretty much nothing that we in the west would be ideologically disposed to doing that could have a significant positive effect all those mechanisms that we know would have an effect would be go against what we believe in so we're in a very difficult situation one thing that has kind of been running through my mind as you've told us this tale is especially when you look at the modern world which still has an awful lot of the carryover I think from the Romantic Era uh of you know moralizing around faithfulness uh Chastity uh loyalty to your partner stuff like that it it seems so insane that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where our evolved mating psychology and the structures that we had for so so so long have just become perverted and perturbed and ruined and repurposed and countered and so on and so forth and we are you we talk about evolutionary mismatch an awful lot everybody knows what that is but this seems to be like it's a a [ __ ] sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch right you know you've got the the culture from before and and the counterculture to that culture and then you've got new technology reproductive technology what about the fact that we're all individuals female socioeconomic access and egalitarianism that's [ __ ] new like how do we work that out um we're no longer living in pan generational houses our kin doesn't give us any advice about the world is moving so quickly that our parents advice basically doesn't even work for the new generation because they don't understand what does it mean to be dating on Tinder and then we've still got all of these vestigal mating systems from before so it really doesn't surprise me you know when you take a really Global look at human mating psychology plus the modern world plus the journey that our psychology has been dragged through really over the last few Millennium it's really not surprising that people are are struggling at the moment yeah on top of that dating apps are a little over a decade old and we haven't figured that out at all and and the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them goes so counter to people's to people's needs and desires and and how our psychology functions it's we've put oursel in a situation where there's like you say there's so much novelty on top of novelty that men and women don't even understand what their mate preferences are and how those are being influenced by the social order and the technology they use to meet people so we're just we're following these six million year old impulses which are the strongest one and they're overriding impulses that are four million years old not even to think about the newer ones that we've developed and in all of this we're in this uniquely new mating regime of individual choice that we have not evolved for at all so it's when you look back and you think why was it that say perhaps through the the two million year history of the Ginos homo if if it is the case in fact that we always had parental Choice through that is it because everybody discovered that individual Choice doesn't add up I mean there's no way the West is going to go away from that and I certainly wouldn't Advocate it but if no one else managed to figure that out how sure are we that that that this is going to work for us and yeah if if you extrapolate from today if with this decline in fertility maybe I mean we're certainly going to write out this experiment I don't see us changing any any anyway uh but there are there are peoples around the world who aren't in who aren't pursuing that regime that are showing different numbers and it's I mean we love our ideology we think it's Superior to everybody else's ideology that's just how humans work but uh but there's there's one F I mean you could say everything is relative but there's one thing that isn't relative that's an evolutionary iron law no matter what your ideology is if that ideology causes you to stop reproducing that ideology will cease to matter you will disappear yeah I mean this was one of the most interesting takeaways I've had from a lot of conversations about demographic collapse and population decline which is um ideology political leaning your worldview at large your openness your conscientiousness all the rest of those things are highly heritable highly heritable your political ideology is very highly heritable right as is the rest of your [ __ ] psychology so if you are somebody that is part of a particular political movement that either doesn't promote or actively discriminates against reproduction you are a Dying Breed because your children would have more likely been like you and look at the groups that are reproducing like something tells me that conservative ashkanazi Jews are not going to have that much of a fertility problem right something tells me that Mormons or that uh some sects of Christianity I know that some are down but some sects of Christianity also going to be fine so what do you look at over a long enough time Horizon you actually look at this sort of almost like full circle loop back around to a much more not necessarily puritanical but like a religious sacred view of what this is and remember if you are somebody that's conservative or somebody that's religious the likelihood that your children are going to be that way is it's absolutely not predetermined but they are predisposed right so you end up with this sort of ever increasing cycle of this so there was there's an argument to be made I think that uh you know like anti-natal climate concerned liberalism is not long for this world right it's not to say that you can't have a a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years time and reconverts a bunch of Seventh Generation conservatives or whatever uh but yeah you will end up with less uh demographic uh political variety over time if you have this because the selection effect occurs within particular cohorts within very particular stru and it presses down very hard on them and the other ones are just like what demographic collapse I'm fine yeah well we also have some tremendous novelty coming up which we have to bear in mind I predict that the West will have a fourth sexual Revolution uh coinciding with the fourth Industrial Revolution what will happen when we start uh being able to create babies outside of of women's wombs when we'll be able to Gene edit etc etc and we we get AI robot lovers and and and spouses etc etc there's going to be such tremendous technological novelty that's going to change society that it's almost inconceivable that this will not have a tremendous effect also on mating so if we extrapolate into the future without taking that into account yes then the West as it function now would just made itself out of existence and other groups would take over who have higher fertility but that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing there's there will be so much change in the decades ahead that it's very difficult to imagine how mating will be in the future but I I I think that Revolution will be will be so large that it will fundamentally change that aspect like we talked about in the beginning the foundation every social order is mating so then the question is how will these new technologies affect how we mate and how will that create a new foundation for a new form of society yeah yeah I I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throws of something that even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system you know as soon as as soon as you have external wombs as soon as you have ai companions that can give you better than real life love uh yeah the Pod hiiki Mori problem gets sorted but it only gets sorted from the individual's perspective from the population perspective it's not sorted at all but then if you can counter that with artificial WBS but then who is it that you're choosing like whose genes are you choosing to do this and if you have you know embryo selection which is already online you know embryo selection for IQ for externalizing behavior for depression for anxiety for autism you already have this and then if you can get into Gene editing and then if you can get into ivg it's like okay here's like a here's a section of the skin from my arm go forth and make 1 million Chris Williamson's like I Jesus Christ but yeah I it's maybe we are maybe this is uh a uniquely interesting time but I wonder whether I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are uh thinking about at the moment you know uh Hungary you have one kid and you do this thing and you have two kids and you get more taxes off and you have three kids and you don't pay taxes for life or no way and the way that you guys 1.2 million that you give to women and you know we need to get people to do CBT to overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of it I wonder whether ultimately all of those things are going to be in vain within the space of five decades because the technology is just going to rip out anything that we try to construct using like like cultural technology ideological movement oh Hollywood why don't we get Hollywood to like put dads that are competent again at the front and we shouldn't have Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as the lead we should have like you know like a good standup Family Guy and you're like yeah but if in five decades it's artificial wombs and sex robots all the way down what does any what do any of those interventions really matter that's not to say that making the well-being and flourishing of people who live right now isn't nothing but over a long enough time Horizon they all just get like someone shakes the eter sketch and just deletes all mating history yeah no um when you look at the history of Western mating it's it's I don't fear very much that we'll be returning to a uh a handmaid's tail Puritan kind of female oppressing regime I think we're going to move forward and that we will experience a novelty at a level that we it's very difficult for us to imagine today uh so yeah it's we can talk about it we can speculate but when we are at this side of these big revolutions as we seem to be now before we go into it and see how dramatically the world would change and this time a lot more rapidly than would previous such revolutions it's all we can do is is mostly hold on like I don't believe that there I don't I I love what you're doing with your podcast but I people can't get informed and that's good but that somehow we're going to figure something out make a plan and then effectuate it and and stop the demographic collapse that doesn't seem to be how the world Works um it's just going to be a whirlwind a hurricane of change yeah and then at the end of it I think it would be really cool if we still have a bunch of humans around I'm kind of I'm a little bit specious that way but things can play out in a matter of ways that are are just impossible to predict on this side of the singularity yeah yeah it's the technological change the size of the wall that occurs is so high that it's very difficult to have something permeate through it and yeah I totally agree one of the other things that you do your other Wing one of your other many other wings uh an evolutionary lens on well-being and obviously we've had a lot of conversations recently about uh incels and I only learned this from you in sings as well involuntary Singletons um given your evolutionary lens background and your studies into well-being what are you making of the general generalized anxiety uh depressive States you whatever it is uh 50% % of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness you know you've got guys with testosterone in the toilet the single biggest threat to a man under the age of 50 is his own hands you know in terms of suicidality all this sort of stuff um what how do you sort of conceptualize all of this together from a well-being perspective why are the incels and the in syns and everybody else so unhappy yeah I know that's that's something I think we should really be concerned with uh we we should try to change the world and make a better world but as as we spoken about it's our ability to effect change that way is somewhat limited but when we're going through these deep changes as we are now and we have before people will face despair they will lose faith in the story that has United us we haven't yet found tomorrow's ideology that would give us the answers and the comfort and lessen our anxiety so we really should be sympathetic towards each other and that pain that people are suffering when we go through these changes cuz these changes are very hard on humans we like stable periods when we know when we convinced theel that we know what truth is so when you look at incels and instincts you should expect them that they should be miserable from an evolutionary perspective uh happiness is a reward you experience when you solve adaptiv adaptively relevant problems and nothing is more Central to adaptivity than reproduction so if you're not succeeding on short or long-term mating markets if you're not able to pair bond your well-being system should go into high alert and let you know that your strategies are failing so when men become depressed and despondent from not succeeding on the short-term market and women become depressed and despondent because they know it is on Modern dating markets they have unlimited access to sex with higher value men but none of these men are willing to pair bond with them that is supposed to give you a depression that's your that's your organism telling you that you're failing so instead of villainizing uh incel men or making fun of insing women we should try to spread a better understanding and here your podcast is valuable people need to understand the different mate preferences that men and women have they should understand the different power dynamics and short and long-term mating and see how today's mating particularly with dating apps is creating a stratification that is creating dysfunction for almost all groups of society or at least potentially so a better understanding of what is going on might not help us steer this this clown car into safe Shores but it might help us sympathize more more with each other's plights especially uh between men and women because men and women have such different challenges in today's dating economy and if we kind of if men impose male mate preferences in their analysis of how women are doing and opposite we just don't understand each other and that just creates bigger dysfunction poorer communication and people get even more miserable how much of the current unhappiness do you think should be laid at the feet of mating and dating problems because there's lots of other things going on social media and comparison and you know intergenerational competition Theory where we are the first generation that's not done better than our parents and so on and so forth but how much of this do you think ultimately is just post talk rationalization that I can't find a mate and romance seems to be dead and my partner might leave me at any point if the Confluence no longer works it's a good question and I haven't seen any statistics that are able to get at it it doesn't show up there so we we'll have to speculate so in Norway now we have something called called a men's panel it's a it's a it's a big research project or more of a council that they're trying to figure out why men are falling behind and you see this around the world in the UK they're talking about having a a men's Minister it's been suggested Etc and uh I know at least for the nor this this Norwegian effort which by the way is the third in 15 years to try to figure this out they haven't figured it out anything previously it's not even within their mandate to look at uh mating marginalization and the stratification that is happening on Modern dating Market it's just a thing that it feels inappropriate to talk about but especially when it comes to men what one of the Prime functions of having two Sexes to have uh sexual reproduction is the sexual selection where women select which men get to get to breed so males of all species have been under enormous pressure to succeed in this regard that is the motivation that is their their reason of being at the deepest M most foundational level so we have reason to think that now that more and more men are being excluded from short and long-term mating when they're being uh selected Away by women because they are not valuable in the modern environment we would predict that these men would do poor and poor they would not be motivated to put in the effort because they have a sense of how hope it might not be a conscious sense but that drive that men would have in other times when they had a better Prospect of acquiring a mate when that disappears we should expect male marginalization also in other areas of life and Society so that we're not looking at that is unfortunate cuz we would expect that to be the foundational level upon which this other males uh attaches to but I haven't seen any statistics or research that allows me to assign a proportion of unhappiness to men being to more men being selected away from mating so um I don't I don't think that is possible I think it's more a foundational aspect that it's really difficult to get at yeah man I mean the fact that we're not tearing each other apart uh I suppose you know know when you look at the sadness and and the depression and the hopelessness and stuff like that and a more obvious question would be how wouldn't we all feel like this you know so much change and and our adaptability is fundamentally one of the things that Humanity has as its you know Keystone Advantage but there's a limit you know dear God there's a limit to how quickly the world can change and we can hold on for dear life uh and um yeah I think it's so it's such a slippery slope right because as soon as you say well the world is changing very quickly and oh we're not adapted for technology like the victimhood mindset just immediately seeps in everything is out of my control locus of control gets externalized that's associated with more depression therefore people don't feel like they can enact any change they're no longer agentic or Sovereign individuals blah blah blah you're like oh my God so yeah like trying to thread this needle between like compassion and encouragement is a really difficult one and I mean you know all of this work on well-being that you're doing through an evolutionary lens must it must feel like human well-being is kind of being just pulled apart um yeah and like you said um young women are doing worse than young men and and what we see in the research that we're doing now is that this big change in World being at least in Norway and Norway is doing better than most other countries we we're doing as we're such a success we've been such a successful country in the past decades so we were at the top of of the world happiness report but we now slid down several spots and this seems to be entirely because of this drastic reduction in well-being among young people 15 to 24 uh and and we've we've made interviews with them there there's quantitative service of them and we're doing qualitative interviews and young people are feeling bad and you have many aspects and and social media seems to facilitate some of these these mechanisms that drive ill beinging uh the economy Fair of the future you have all kinds of things that are weighing on young people and it's very difficult to sort them and see what is what but I think like you that the main driver now is that we we are as a civilization in such a transformative time it seems that we're moving out of this this modern Narrative of believing in Liberal humanism that's peaked in the 1990s and that we in the in the last decade have lost more and more faith in we don't know why we should cooperate is who America is sliding apart we don't know which future to strive for we get these answers from this this underlying story which I refer to as a society's Master narrative that's that story that gives meaning to everything and and lets you know what is true or not why you belong together what you should strive for and we've had these changes I've studied these changes of the past Millennium and also further back and we when we get into these these deep Master narrative transitions it's really really hard on the human psyche when we lose that narrative we turn on each other we get desponding we have anxiety we feel terrible and we lose faith in the future but then every other time until now we've always succeeded we've always gotten out of it and we found a new story and now we seem to be transitioning into something that is perhaps a form of datest Master narrative and if we succeed with this and we make it to the fourth Industrial Revolution and we're able to unite and around this new narrative then we could face a new golden age the future could be very fantastic but when we're in these transitions it's a lot more easy to spot what could go terribly terribly wrong instead what was that study about the Norwegian generational happiness switch Yeah uh so um we've Norwegians uh this this Norwegian Serv called Norwegian monitor they've been uh serving happiness since 1985 and Young young people have always been uh the happiest and old people have always been the least happy which makes sense happiness is a reward you get when you succeed with reaching adaptive relevant goals which young people have tons of and when you're old you kind of don't have these goals anymore so uh you would expect your happiness to go down and what's happened in the last uh since 2009 is that you had this incredibly sharp decline for the youngest and then for the also for the middle-aged and this uh this this weak rise in happiness and and quite strong rise and satisfaction for the oldest generation for your tired people so the impression we get from talking to them is just that young people are becoming miserable and losing fate in the future they don't think they will have good lives there's so much so many so many uh threats coming up while the old people are realizing that they just timed their right life really well so they have this new found gratitude they see that all right I might have 10 15 20 years left to live and that'll probably be okay the biggest changes won't come until after that so just have this this yeah an amplified sense of having had a great life and that they should be grateful for now getting out in time and and having been with this post World War II boom of economic Prosperity where life just got better and better and better and now when it seems to turn they're uh they're ready to check out in not too long and and this they feel bad about their their children and especially grandchildren they feel really bad about them but that doesn't seem to affect them quality of life it just makes them more appreciative of their own lives oh wow yeah because you would think as grandchildren optimizing machines you would have presumed that the impending uncertainty about the future of our grandchildren could have negatively impacted our subjective well-being but it seems like that's not the case it seems like what what they say to us is that they sometimes stay awake at night cuz they feel so bad about their grand children and they're a little bit surprised and have a little bit bad conscience for it but it doesn't reduce their quality of life so yeah they just they get this this a much stronger sense of satisfaction and a somewhat stronger sense of Happiness from from now seeing how future generation will struggle while they will not Christ okay so do you do you believe that uh comparing yourself to the generation that came before you and your level of success or well-being is is that a big determinant of well-being yeah uh you have to separate a little bit different aspects of well-being we we concept like well-being plus meaning happiness plus meaning equals well-being so happiness is this solving uh adaptive relevant problem for yourself as an individual and that is inherently relative you have a comparison group and if you're doing better than your comparison group you experience a sense of Happiness temporarily and if you divorce you have a temporar sense of of uh of unhappiness so uh that's one of the reasons why social media is has been so destructive We Believe for young people's happiness because it's just exploded their comparison group before you compared yourself to your par in your local community now you compare yourself to the Kardashians and people that fly private jets on YouTube and suddenly your life is not that great anymore relatively so yeah happiness is an inherently relative assessment yeah the what's that quote comparison is the thief of Joy it seems like it's actually the under comparison is the underpinning of happiness or dissatisfaction yeah no so if if you uh that's one of the reasons why altruism and and doing voluntary work working with refugees or people are worse off that has a strong effect also on your happiness it reminds you just how far you could have fallen and you're not yeah it it recalibrates your comparison group in a in a in a beneficial way wow so a good intervention for well-being is to remind yourselves of of just how the Myriad of different ways that things could have gone wrong or all of the people from your past that had things that weren't as good as you I mean there's that there's that famous uh it's either Aristotle or Aurelius that says um uh the things that you now take for granted were ones that you once only wished of having right that in the past in the past you only wanted to have this thing and today you walk past it without even looking at it twice um it's it's the same thing with mating ideologies all of these mating ideologies come with a Utopia that we think if we can just get this Utopia it's going to be amazing and then when we finally get the mating AEL implement the Utopia we discover things like life love doesn't last forever being a stay-at-home mom is in Paradise so yeah we keep striving for it we make a better and better society and once we get it we accustomed to it and we come up with new Utopias I had this idea for a little while uh reflecting on my own life especially in my 20s when I started getting into self-development and personal growth that I was able to ameliorate my own feelings of insufficiency as long as I was doing personal growth and self-development because I think the the subtext of what it taught me was I might not feel like I'm worthy enough right now but if I'm half a percent better tomorrow maybe tomorrow is actually the day when I will finally and if you just continue to keep yourself on this hamster wheel it kind of it's a Salve right it kind of papers over the cracks of perhaps deeper issues that you need to deal with like I don't have a good sleep and wake pattern or I'm not I don't have people around me that I can talk to or whatever the reason is that you're dissatisfied with life but yeah I I see in a lot of the self-development community people using the promise of a better tomorrow as a um a plaster that are a Band-Aid that they can place over the feelings of insufficiency that they have today yeah well theoretically uh the optimal recipe for a happy life is that you should start out as low in society as you can without being traumatized by it and then make gradual Pro progress throughout your life and reach as high as you can because as long as you keep doing better than you used to you get this happiness reward so if you want objective success being born at the top of society is the best but if your parents are beautiful successful millionaires you probably won't be and and that you're not going to be happy so so there's something to getting that even progress and then in addition to that you need a couple of crises that you take yourself out of through your own resources okay yeah I mean so much so much interesting stuff there first off um I have a lot of friends who are self-made successes millionaire as one billionaire uh and I asked them both about their intentions for their children because I know that what they valued during their upbringing was very heavily their uh the challenges they had to overcome you know this sort of working class grit spit and sawdust mentality but if they do that to their children what the [ __ ] was the point of working this hard in any case to not give them the benefits of the the resources and and and the livelihood you worked so hard to be able to afford them but then if you give it to them you're condemning them to a life of inferiority unless you're going to have like multi-generational self-made billionaires like that's also pretty unlikely so that's tough um Eddie Hearn the famous boxing promoter from the UK said he beautifully conceptualized this and he said uh his dad made his father made the the boxing organization that he's a part of and his father had had an awful lot of success and then Eddie came came in and took it to new heights made it bigger than 10 100 times bigger than it ever was and did all the rest of the things and somebody asked like if you could go back and change anything uh what would you change uh and he said I never got to do it first but it always felt like he was living in his father's shadow that the New Frontier was never broken by Eddie it was always broken by his his father and uh he he it's evident that he lives with this pain of the the echo of it I mean dude the [ __ ] drummer from Mega Death you know the story of Metallica so originally Metallica's drummer got kicked out or left the B I think he got kicked out of the band so he decides to go and start a new band called Mega Death Meade goes on to be one of probably the top 10 metal bands in history but they're not Metallica and in interview this interview my housemate sites all the time this guy still with you know one of the most successful metal bands in history always has this gap between what he could have been and and what he was so yeah it's very much not an objective assessment of our position it's very much a relative assessment of our of our predicament I also had this idea kind of plays off the back of this that one potential strategy that you can go through or that would be maybe adaptive is let's say there are ceilings to the level of status and resources and declaim and whatever that you're going to reach in life like there is only one richest guy on the planet right and once you hit that there is no further to go so it is kind of a zero some game in terms of the rank order in some regard and presuming that you're going to reach ASM toote right and top out at some point I wonder whether there is an argument to be made that actually stretching out the progression and the development of your material acquisition like uh winning the lottery could be one of the worst things that could ever happen to you because it's such a huge step change it's like all right and now how am I like how slow is the development from this new couple of million dollar that I previously never had wealth going to be as oppos as opposed to if you were able to you know regularly and consistently move 5% per year toward whatever the end Financial goal is so yeah it made me think about how uh people that achieve rapid success may end up it's called gold medal syndrome uh from Olympians right it's like I finally did the thing now what and I wonder whether yeah I wonder whether there's an equivalent for slow life strategy well well there there the good news is that there's this other source of well-being I we conceptualize well-being is happiness plus meaning equals well-being so happiness is what you can succeed as an individual meaning is what you do for your community what you do for other people so when you see that very successful business people when they get to a certain point in their life with success they start becoming philanthropist they start doing charity they start working for others and happiness is limited there are limits to how happy you can be how much well-being you can get out of that but there seems to be no limits to how much well-being you can get from working for others that meaning part of the equation can potentially be a lot lot higher you can for instance see with uh suicide bombers and revolutionaries that they are they derive so much meaning for working for a cause and ideals that they believe in that they're willing to SA acfic your own life this is called the devoted actor Theory within evolutionary psychology so that is when this meaning Quest becomes pathological so what you're thinking instead of of of spacing your billions out through life at some point when you have enough individualistic success start working for other people start making other people feel better then you will get a sense of meaning one thing is you'll get more happiness from recalibrating your comparison group but you'll get this satisfaction that has has number one it can be a lot more intense than happiness potentially but also it's more enduring happiness is a temporary reward it goes up and then it goes down meaning seems to accumulate over a lifetime so as people get older once they've had enough individual success if they want to keep flourishing and feeling well then working for the good of others it's it's a very beneficial strategy depends a little bit on your personality but most people benefit a lot from working for others Matts I've been enthralled today this is been absolutely fantastic we met each other at HB what 5 months ago six month four months ago something like that been very much looking forward to this this absolutely completely delivered so much new stuff that I've never learned before I really really appreciate the Insight let's run this back man let's find more things that we need to talk about I really really enjoyed it where should people go they want to keep up to date with you and the work that you do where should you send them on the Internet uh I have nowhere to send them right now maybe you can uh place that uh polygon article I wrote In in the description under the video and then I'm work I'm working on two books uh I have completed one that I'm hoping to get published soon and then I'm finishing up another one on this history of mating I have one chapter left to right and then I will submit that to publisher so hopefully at some point in the future I will have some books to offer and and I would very much like for people to read those but at the moment yeah they can also go to Google Scholar and and and put my name there and and they'll get up a bunch of articles that I've written mate when you are ready to publish that book it's going to do unbelievably well I love I love these insights thank you very much again for your time and I'm looking forward to speaking to you next time thank you so much Chris it's been wonderful I really enjoyed it thank you if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe