Ancestral Mating Strategies VS Modern Mating - Mads Larsen

Mads Larsen is a Norwegian author and journalist whose research focuses on the history of human mating ideologies. The narrative of human romance is an ancient story. But that story has not always remained the same, the last 10,000 years has been a crazy journey through different beliefs on why we should find and stay with a partner and today we get to hear about all the fascinating details. Expect to learn why it's so illuminating to study the story of mating ideologies across time, how our modern beliefs about finding a partner are historically very unusual, why having a daughter as a farmer could be a useful addition to your farming strategy, why Incels are so unhappy, why old people are the happiest despite evidence to the contrary in the past and much more... Sponsors: Get $150/£150 discount on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #dating #love #philosophy - 00:00 Why Does Mating Need an Ideology? 03:09 Our Ancestors’ Typical Mating Strategies 12:33 The Oldest Mating Ideology 18:52 Why Churches Imposed Monogamy 23:20 When Courtship Was Introduced 34:33 The Basis For Our Current Mating Ideology 42:39 The Post-1750 Sexual Revolutions 48:38 Did the Church Lose Control in 1750? 55:48 Impact of Introducing Contraception 1:01:30 What is Causing Today’s Mating Dysfunctions? 1:10:27 Are We On the Verge of a New Mating Era? 1:23:11 Why Are People So Unhappy? 1:34:27 How Comparison Can Impact Wellbeing 1:45:19 Where to Find Mads - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is it useful or interesting to study mating ideologies at all?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  It is the foundation of all social orders. We like to think that politics, philosophy, all those big subjects are what it's all about, but at the foundation, it's how men and women reproduce. And upon that, everything else rests. So if that falls apart, our societies fall apart too.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  Why does mating need an ideology to sit over it at all? It's a, it's a physical activity, like why the need for a story and what it means and how we should do it?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Because we so, we've changed so much from our ancestral environment. 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 coerces them, that makes them think that it's their duty to, to peer bond and have children. And the ideology we have now is compared to previous ideologies, very weak in that regard. We're now having an ideology where this has become

• 1:22Speaker 01

  completely voluntary and where it's, you can make a good case for why perhaps you shouldn't have children. And that's a rather unique situation.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  I like the use of the word coercion there.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Biological and cultural coercion. It's a huge sacrifice to reproduce. And to have, to make people, make enough people do that, to a significant extent, now that we also have effective contraception, it's really difficult.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  So much.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  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 coerced by your communities to pair bond and take care of that children, that child until it's big enough. In the modern world, so we've now made, we've disconnected copulation from reproduction. And also, in these 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.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  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, at the moment, we have this quite significant uncertainty about the future, but also disincentivizes reproduction.

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  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 movement. What was the journey through human predecessor mating systems?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  You're thinking the past six million years?

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Give us the story. Start six million years ago, we'll take it from there.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we started out like most vertebrates. We mated promiscuously. That means that we probably lived together in groups, multi-male, female, multi-male, multi-female groups, where individuals were free to copulate, but where reproductive opportunities were mostly channeled to high-status males. And the purpose of that is that you then distribute the most successful genes within the population, which helps us adapt more quickly to changes, et cetera. This is what's most common across animal groups. But then some species.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  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 our lineage, with our, with early hominids about four million years ago, where the ecology changed, where it was so beneficial. If, if, 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 harems 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 low status males to be allowed to, to copulate and reproduce if they offered provisioning and protection to females.

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  Wow, it was like the prehistoric simp version.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, 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 males. It didn't, it, it would never make sense for them to go along with that initial transition from promiscuous mating to pair bonding, polygynous pair bonding. It made a lot more sense that those males that were excluded from mating saw as offspring needed more, more help, more provisioning. They were, they were 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 let me have sex with you exclusively, so I know that your offspring are mine. And then the females had to make a trade off.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Do you want the good genes 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?

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  And that would result in kind of like a resource acquisition and supply arms race between the low status and the high status males.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  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. We just got bigger heads, more helpless when we were born. So it became more and more beneficial to pass on the good genes and instead get a male that would help you out through the most vulnerable year. So through the pregnancy and then in the beginning phase of when the child needed the provisioning the most.

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And then this developed until around two million years ago, when most homocommunists consisted of mostly faithful females and provisioning males, and then a small number of polygynous and a small number of promiscuous maters, because it would never, it would always in some instances be beneficial for the female to choose the superior genes of a high status male rather than get a provisioning low status male to, as the father. So this is, this is a competing hypothesis that intuitively it seems interesting.

• 7:08Chris Williamson?

  Just how rare is male parental investment in the mammal and primate world?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Pair bonding?

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or male parental investment primarily.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think among mammals, it's 10% do pair bonding and among primates, it's 29%. But the reason why we think that our lineage were promiscuous maters six million years ago is that chimpanzees and bonobos are promiscuous maters. And once a lineage has evolved pair bonding, it is so beneficial that it's exceptionally rare that you de-evolved from it. That's why we assume that six million years ago, we also had promiscuous ancestors.

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Okay, so two million years, what happens next? Because we go through some rapid changes over from then until now.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  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 females to want to mate promiscuously. 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 two million years, the norm was monogamous pair bonding with some polygyny, but.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  A really superior forager just couldn't provide for that many for that many females. But we see that with agriculture that took off and resulted in in pretty extreme polygyny at in the most inequitous environments.

• 8:51Chris Williamson?

  But that would have been, when was the agricultural revolution, fifteen thousand years ago, something like that, twenty thousand years ago?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Around twelve.

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, so.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  And then it the the main period was from when around seven thousand years ago, all the best agricultural land had been taken. So then if if you wanted to grow, what you had to do was was to take land from others. And that created a two thousand year period from seven to five thousand years ago that had a pretty bizarre mating regime. I don't know if you're familiar with this.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  No, tell me, tell me.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think you've cited this research. I think what I saw your your episode with with Harinam, he cited this study from Carmen at Al in two thousand and fifteen. And he cited the original hypothesis there where the original researchers thought that what had happened seven thousand to five thousand years ago, that there were just these extreme levels of polygyny, that the Y chromosome diversity in our lineage was reduced by ninety five percent, meaning that nineteen out of twenty males disappeared, while the X chromosome diversity increased in line with population growth. And if you think about it, that doesn't make sense. It's just not plausible, knowing what we know about human behavior.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Why would every so you could imagine that for one generation, a patriarch might castrate every other male and just impregnate all the females. But that would 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 two thousand years. It just seems implausible. So in two thousand and eighteen, a new main hypothesis was established that speaks no more favorably of our ancestors mating practices. And what probably happened was that for those two thousand years, all everyone did.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  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 raiding where you, 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.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  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 kin 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.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So is this the inception of having a broader mating ideology about 5,000 years ago?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  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 a rather unpleasant group of people at times.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. When the choice is between slavery and genocide, uh, and you're having to make a, a value judgment of which one, which one's least bad of the two. 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.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  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 coheses 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?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 now. And up until the Church's dissolution 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's dissolution of the tribes, heroic love, and 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.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  You didn't necessarily have feudal rulers or other 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, then 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 up until, up until a thousand years ago.

• 14:35Chris Williamson?

  From?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  From, from the beginning of agriculture, from that period we talked earlier, where what this, this was the original patriarchy, where the male lineage was matter and women are, they had different way 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 you, as you wanted or were able to, and then keep growing your kin group.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well, this heroic love narrative. Is 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. But 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 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.

• 15:44Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's not a particularly reassuring story, whereas the heroic love narrative, it's useful for both sexes in some regards.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  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 that these kin groups generally practiced polygynous mating. So 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 peer 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 this polygynous mating that marked this period under heroic love drove a lot of war, a lot of social instability.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  It was quite enormous change that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy, even on the most superior of males, that that changed everything.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  When did that happen?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Well, the the Roman Empire played around with monogamy, but they were never very serious about it. And then the church started imposing it in the fourth 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 you had a lot of church councils that worked 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, et cetera, that gives you a lot of power over powerful men. So this is when they dissolved Europe's tribes through prohibiting cousin marriage, changing

• 17:29Speaker 01

  rules 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 superior men competing all their life to acquire more women, you get to compete until you get one. And then you have to put your efforts in more, in a more productive direction.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  How does it help investment in children? Why was there not a massive amount of investment in children during the heroic mating era?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  What is the reason for the church or anybody wanting to impose some sort of rule? From a civilization design perspective, what was the advantage or the change that they were looking to enact? What was the outcome that they wanted by encouraging lifelong monogamy?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's really interesting. In hindsight, if we like modernity, we think it was brilliant. But when we look at the document that exists at the time, it's a bit of a mystery. We can suspect certain things.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Through dissolving Europe's tribes and changing the rules for ownership and inheritance, the church by the tenth century had grabbed forty percent 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 hoard a lot of women, if you can impose on them certain mating structures, then you as the church, if you have to acknowledge or permit their marriages, if you can restrict them,

• 20:10Speaker 01

  then the church get power over powerful men, which is another good understandable material incentive.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And then it's all just speculation in terms of what the 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 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 hundred 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 able to impose on their culture.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's that quote about life happens forwards, but only makes sense in reverse? And I guess that history is kind of the same, that we can post hoc 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. Now half of this farm's ours, now half of this house is ours, now da, da, da, da, da.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  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 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 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. Does this play a role at this stage? Or was it just such an accepted part of the way that the world existed that no one was really bothered about the chaos that came along with it?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  No, in hindsight, we see that it was hugely beneficial. The modern world would not have happened 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 authoritarianism would have for consequences for social stability, the potential for growth, for peace, et cetera. I don't know. I'd like to think they were that smart, but I kind of doubt it. Maybe they noticed as they went along that they saw there were beneficial effects. I don't know. But yeah, the end result was quite impressive. But how it came about, who the architects were, if they really imagined this, I'm kind of doubtful if they understood the ramifications of what they were doing.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so heroic love finishes. The church comes in, sorry, men, no more gangbangs for you. What comes next?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Well, this is fascinating, and this speaks again to how nobody's in charge. So I, some of these mating ideologies are what I refer to as cultural dissolvence. These are mating ideologies upon which you cannot build a social order, but they kind of make you lose faith in the previous ideology. So when courtly love was created and disseminated through romances and ballads from the 12th century.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  This was an ideology with values and norms that primarily undermined heroic love. So it had an exaggeration of the emotion of love as something that was incredibly strong and irresistible and that lasted a lifetime. And this was meant to discourage high status men from being polygynous. 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.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  You have to flirt. And instead of just raping her after you killed her husband. You have to make the woman feel a high degree of lust and love. So when she can't help herself from having sex with you because she loves you so much and she loves you so much. That's when you can have sex. So you have all these values that's. If you just read the romances 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 courtly love are constructed in a sense. To undermine those strong beliefs from the previous regime. And also it has to do with the new sociality that when you lived in kinship groups.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  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 towards strangers. We're supposed to be friendly, courteous, and all these norms that defines courtly love. It's also the way European Christians were supposed to treat each other and not just women. So you have all this brand new type of sociality that would have never worked in a kinship system. But was crucial for feudal Europe to have an effective cooperation.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  So as you're becoming more civilized and as you are more open to new people. To being friends with people, stuff like pubs and ale houses 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 sex before marriage and those sorts of impositions?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  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 de love.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  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. 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 research sources. So people's marriage age were pushed up from, say, from their teens or early twenties up to the late twenties. So you shorten people reproductive period. And this was crucial because under, in antiquity, we practiced 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 raise.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  What they did now, because you, individual life became sacred, you now 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 your reproductive period didn't start until you're 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 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 1400s, you had what's called the sexual laxness of the 15th century,

• 28:10Speaker 01

  where people were, were having a lot more promiscuous sex, sleeping around, et cetera, et cetera, because our environment could afford it. And then when we rebuilt the population around year fifteen hundred, that's when you have the Reformation, that's when you have a retightening of these sexual norms, because we couldn't afford it anymore, because we'd refilled up our population, and that's when you get puritanism, et cetera, et cetera.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  What, you were talking about this sort of window, this reproductive window that age thirty-ish, late twenties was important, is that people were told that they shouldn't reproduce after thirty, or they weren't permitted to reproduce until thirty?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So before, when you had polygyny and you lived in kin groups, you'd 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 twenty and he'd be thirty or forty, 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 move in next to your kin, on your kin group's land. Now in feudal Europe, you'd have to accumulate resources to be able to afford what's called the neo-local resident. You don't live with your family, you live on your own. So you'd have to be on labor, men and women would have to be on labor markets typically in their twenties, until they had accumulated enough resources to get their own place. And this is what pushed up the marriage age, and which, so reproductive, reproduction didn't start until typically

• 29:32Speaker 01

  in your late twenties for women.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  Wow, because 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 higher nobility?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Those who had resources. So you see that the very highest, the highest classes are those that are marked the least by these changes to the past millennia of a mating moralities. They still, 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 the church tried to wrestle power from them, but it was a bad layer. They were still powerful. So yeah, among the higher classes, you typically would marry still when you were around twenty perhaps.

• 30:30Chris Williamson?

  Right. So this is really interesting. Obviously, we're going to get into it as we continue down this little journey through time, but.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the conversations at the moment are, for the first time since records began, more women are childless at thirty than with children at thirty. But it seems to me like if we look only five hundred, six hundred years ago, you're maybe going to see very similar sort of fertility patterns amongst women, albeit for very different reasons than individual choice and, and travelling the world and getting an education and stuff like that. 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.

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  It's basically like an entry price into a nightclub that 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.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  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 polygynous system, mostly all women are married. Under this system, it had extraordinarily high percentage of typically 10%, which to us sounds very low, but at the time that was unheard of. So around 10% of women are never married during this regime.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay, so we are currently in courtly love, courtly love. I love the fact that it's like, one of its primary design justifications was to be a counterweight to the heroic love narrative, right? It's overly restrictive on men compared with what they had for their value set previously, 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 dowry. 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 to some, some point around about this time

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  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've 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.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And the core value here, you could, or this is the 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. 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, 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,

• 34:00Speaker 01

  but crucially, women are given leverage through being allowed to say no. So they are still coerced into marriages, still not individual choice, but they can say no. And that's, that's huge progress.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  And that set women on a path of emancipation that is ongoing. The beginning of female emancipation in the West was the Chertes imposition of female, the female right to consent in the first sexual revolution. That changed everything. That, that's, yeah, everything that has happened since was a result of that first movement.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What comes after courtly love?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Well, the, the mating ideology that the society was built on then is something called companionate love. So this was a very pragmatic ideology and very different from courtly love. In courtly love. You and I, we are aristocratic knights and we're gonna travel through Europe to find our one true love. And we're gonna fall incredibly much in love and we're gonna live in blessed, blessed 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.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  And their primary task is to run the farm as partners, to run the farm and keep their children alive. So we're not gonna sleep around, we're not gonna divorce and find somebody else. We're just gonna huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic, very unromantic 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 begin, from the end, from, from the, from the first sexual revolution when the kin groups were dissolved. And all the way up to seventeen fifty, which was the West's second sexual revolution.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  This was when you, this was a period of companionate love, arranged marriages, pragmatism. And then you had a period before fifteen hundred with sexual laxness and then a period afterwards with puritanism to restrict people, people's impulses to avoid Malthusian crises.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  Right, I was, I was just about to ask why the puritanism.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Well, after this period of sexual laxness, when we had rebuilt the population and when we entered into a period of stagnation and stagnant per capita growth. We needed to prevent Europeans from 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. The church has, in those instances, gone after the women. So you'll see in the 1400s, female sexuality is acknowledged and to an extent celebrated.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  And then when puritanism comes, the ideologists, women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage. Women who are lustful are aligned with Satan, et cetera. So it's a way to oppress women and to coerce them into not having sex that they shouldn't have, which could then contribute to a multi-Asian 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 demonize female sexuality in those instances.

• 37:48Chris Williamson?

  Why not try to control male sexuality?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. If you look at the differences in male and female mating psychology, and who is in charge on these 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 relationships. But also, that access isn't there for them.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  While if the women are the ones who make the decisions 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.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  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 unmarried. Therefore, you're pointing the finger at the less reliable potential matter. Whereas if you point the finger at the women, it is more likely that you get more bang for your buck, basically, on restriction. But presumably, there must have been, there must be some moralizing around male sexuality too, just probably not quite the same level of demonization that women had.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So yeah, Puritanism also demonized promiscuous men in those stories and the literature that exists from this period. The greatest villain is our, the favored villain is often a man who is known to have slept around. So promiscuous men are also put forth as villains and discouraged, but the male sexuality is still acknowledged. 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,

• 40:09Speaker 01

  the Puritans were really, really bad. But then we have to try to then step aside back 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 crises?

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, I understand. 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 doesn't, yeah, I can understand.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Well, we have to choose. If we're not okay with killing babies, and Christians haven't been because of their ideology, while in antiquity, people generally were, we have to choose. We either kill babies or restrict people's sexuality, or we invent contraceptives, which we got around to later.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  What was the reason for not just killing babies?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And with Christianity, life became sacred. So the Christians said that you can't take any life. So once a child, so they didn't, they criminalized infanticide. So infanticide, and particularly female selective infanticide killing, they would typically kill girls because 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.

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting that the church's doctrine is both like giveth and taketh away here, that they have made their own bed. Okay, we say that infanticide isn't good, we value human life. Oh, fuck, downstream from that, we now have this other problem, which is being able to control populations so that we don't get some fisharian runaway, like Malthusian bullshit. 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-ish. Like that's, it's just one big, long, fucking medieval, like hodgepodge, right?

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  Then we get to, you said 1750-ish?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  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 in terms of sexual ideology. So what, what happened 1750?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  So that's the West's second sexual revolution. This was one of individual choice. So what we don't think about in the West, this is, it's an evolutionary psychologist called Menlois Apostolus done great work on this, how throughout human history, we've had arranged 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. And then after 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.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  We did 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 somewhat weak ability, or many people's weak ability to flirt and attract partners, attract short and long term partners.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  This is thought of as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past, that 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 since introduction of agriculture. So we were put on a journey then, say, for 800, 900 years ago, toward ever greater individualization. More and more and more and more, nonstop, still ongoing, and it's not going to stop for a while. And by the 18th century, Europeans started more and more thinking that they should be entitled to make their own decisions in terms of mating, copulation and pair bonding.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  And what facilitated this materially is that you had this commercial revolution where more and more people worked as servants in their youth for cash payments. So to accumulate these resources to be able to marry, people moved further and further away from family, and they were paid in cash. And this was the material foundation for the West's second sexual revolution. So among these young proletarians, around 1750, this European marriage pattern just burst. And people started having a lot more sex before marriage, on the side also. So you had this enormous growth in sexual activity, especially among young people, that had enormous consequences.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And this continued, so it wasn't like everybody started riding away, making their own decisions, but it started among these young wage earners, and then over the centuries it spread, and the dam completely burst with the third sexual revolution in the 1960s.

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea that flirting is basically like an evolutionary anomaly. That if you were to have the ability ancestrally, if you come from a long line of flutters 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?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Leif Keneer, whom you know, he makes this, this interesting case.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Today, to be an effective flirt, 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, 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-looking Adonis who liked to sleep around, you're probably going to get killed, killed by the, by the men in the kin group of your latest illicit affair.

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because you're a threat in some regard, even if, even if you don't get rumbled by the kin 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 an 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 fucking charm. Like, you know, I've heard rumors and then it almost becomes, I guess, to some degree, a little bit like the witch trials, that you have this, it's not quite an original sin,

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  but it's something inbuilt that will cause other men to feel envy and jealousy and way 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 out-group now and say, let's fucking kill him.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  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 chat up women around the farm, that did not generally promote a good genetic legacy. The demands of the times were just different. Times were very different than they are today.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that we are the descendants of the least charismatic, least good-looking, least flirtatious men that existed?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on the ecology, but yeah, generally, our ancestors have not been loathirious. That's only recently where that has been very beneficial.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  Right, so we get to 1750, people are now able to make their own decisions. 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 in the time of Charles Darwin, Victorian England, we had an awful lot of sexual puritanism there. I think the year of Darwin's birth, the total number of British divorces was eight.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  Not thousands, not hundreds, eight.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, what happens in 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 gonna start sleeping around, whoops, we haven't invented the contraceptive pill yet, what's gonna 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 lower-class women who now can make their own decisions in terms of copulation and pair bonding. And their ancestors had no experience with this.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  So we didn't evolve to see through the intentions of men. Wouldn't evolve to assess our mate value precisely. So what would happen? That you would have a lot of high status men, or at least higher status men, say, sons of farmers, 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 gonna marry you. And let's have sex. And they would do that. And when she got pregnant, they would leave her. So in Denmark, Norway, up until 734, if you had sex, that was a de facto marriage contract. And then what we see in the beginning of the 1700s,

• 50:35Speaker 01

  there's a huge increase in women taking men to court for having had sex with them, but not 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 Stockholm, 50% of childbirths were by unwed mothers. Lower in rural areas. In Paris, you see an enormous increase of abandoned children. So in the late 1700s, there was an ideology which I also consider as a cultural disorban, because you couldn't build a social order on it. And this was liberty and love. So this is the kind of Casanova ideology,

• 51:19Speaker 01

  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 Scandinavia around 1770. So you had this period where you have certain eccentric milieux, 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 childcare when these libertines left them once they got pregnant. So typically, high status men took advantage of impoverished women and then just abandoned them. And this is what laid the foundation for the romantic ideology of the early 1800s. So liberty and love.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Undermined companionate love, where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down, take care of your family, and libertine love said, no, let's just have fun. And then when the social ramifications of that came, manifested themselves, the counter reaction was romantic love, which did the same as puritan love had done. Where you, again, so libertine 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 gonna 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

• 52:48Speaker 01

  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 promiscuity. And then, in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this affects, you have a counter reaction where romantic love, where you then become more puritan again. And then you see the effect of that in the statistics.

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  Right, you re-prioritize 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. What I'm seeing here is this, this flip-flop between what seems, sometimes, human nature kind of just bursts through the cracks. It kind of grows and grows and grows enough, and then it splits through, that there is innate desires that people have. You're also responding to the local resources. So I'm going to guess that around about 1750, agriculture and greenhouses and shit like

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  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 problem's, okay, right, so we can't really, we're no longer limited in terms of food. What's the next thing that we can use? Fuck, they're having sex with each other. Say that it's all about romance. Say that it's all about the over prioritize the importance of emotional connection. Because that that allows us to create. But we've also lost at least a little bit here. We've lost the church's moralization, or at least it sounds like we've lost the church's moralization of the act of love.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the 1800s, this was the time of enlightenment. This was about individual rights, empowering individuals, not oppressing them, letting them make their own choices, personal agency, et cetera, et cetera. And this was also at the dawn of the industrial revolution. So when this 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. But we had, we got this, we were moving into this period of tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion. And also, we offloaded an enormous part of our population to America

• 55:27Speaker 01

  and other colonial territories. Otherwise, we would have faced dire trouble in the West as the change of our mating practices and also with the reduction in mortality from other causes.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, then perhaps the shortest, most acute change when it comes to human reproductive history, the introduction of reliable contraception.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so one of the aspects of romantic love is that you have gender inequality. You conceptualize men and women as complementary, that people are born as incomplete halves. And then to become whole, you have to find 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 complementary. 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.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Of convenience, reward, and self-realization. And this ideology arose quite a while ago. It was first introduced into Scandinavian literature in eighteen thirty-nine, where it had existed 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 on women.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  So we see this discussion in Western culture from, say, around eighteen thirty. And then with the Darwinian Revolution, we start thinking, okay. So we're romantic, like we thought, obviously, this is what God wanted us to do, that we have these 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 a 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 copulate. And our, um, our love cycle probably evolved to last around three to four years, which was the mating cycle of foragers. So with agriculture, we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy,

• 58:01Speaker 01

  because in case of divorce, you can't split up the fields 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 have, uh, we evolved for serial monogamy or serial pair bonding, to fight that, because the agricultural environment and then the modern environment just required something else for us. So then we use religion. We say that this is what God wants. But then with the Darwinian 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.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  And this was a very, uh, strong literary movement in Scandinavia in the late eighteen hundreds. And then also through the nineteen hundreds, through literature, we started exploring, how could we mate differently? But what's really interesting is that the Romantic regime did not peak until after World War Two. So we, we experienced something that was really... Unexpected, because in the in the nineteen tens and twenties, we were moving away from romantic love. We wanted female equality. We were moving toward confluent love. But then after World War Two, we we had this enormous economic prosperity that allowed us to implement the romantic utopia, which is the breadwinner housewife model. So suddenly, marriage in the West became near universal.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Almost everyone married, they married young. And now we got to experience that the romantic utopia has a couple of shortcomings. Number one, life does, love generally doesn't last a lifetime. And utopia at staying at home wasn't that great for all women. So this, you had this in the nineteen fifties and beginning of the nineteen sixties. And then you have the social revolution of the nineteen sixties. And you could say as symbolically that the the breakthrough of confluent love was in in nineteen sixty eight. And then you start seeing in the beginning of the seventies, around the mid seventies, across the West. You see in the statistics that this modern matter marriage pattern that we've had and that peaked after World War Two, it just disintegrates.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Divorce peaks, remarriage goes down, people marry later. You have a lot more casual sex outside of marriage. People start having sex earlier. And you just see this complete change in the Western marriage pattern from the nineteen seventies and on. And this is the, and this is, this is mostly just gone in one direction. And this is the mating regime that we live under now, which has been accentuated through dating apps, through increased prosperity, through all that has happened in the past forty, fifty years.

• 1:00:45Chris Williamson?

  When you say confluent love, am I right in thinking that what that means is our union works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I am useful to you?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so romantic love, we merge for life. That's the only way to be whole people. Confluent love, we come together either for an opportunistic, short term relationship, casual sex, or for a romantic relationship for as long as you 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.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  Right, so now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era, how do you?

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  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 do you conceptualize this altogether?

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I completely agree with your intonations behind that. Yeah, that is what set it in motion. We've always had arranged marriages and lived in kin groups and then more strictly under agriculture, but still. And then we were set on this path toward individual choice, never go to 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 that says that

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  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 in a direction where we've ran out of tools. There's not much we could do. We had in the, in the 1930s, a decline in fertility also, which we countered. Then the numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1.8, which was seen as a catastrophe. And then we countered through effectuating social democracy. We, we, we 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.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  In Norway now, a typical, the average woman, she receives more than 1.2 million dollars more from the state than she pays in taxes, while men pay more in taxes than they receive. And when even that can't motivate reproduction at, at replacement levels.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  And 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 facilitate reproduction, there's very little other countries can do. So up until 2010, Scandinavia was an anomaly. Across the West, fertility has declined for a long time. So we thought that the answer, or many thought that the answer was that other countries had to be like Scandinavia. 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 fertility rate dropped from, in 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 dollars over a lifetime. That's a lot of money. There's

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  economic incentives no longer cease to work. So we kind of know that for other countries too, that would only be a short-term solution that would be countered by other forces that are more powerful. So if we think it's a good idea to still making, 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 a substantial effect that could turn this around.

• 1:04:42Chris Williamson?

  What are the forces that are driving the decrease in fertility rates at the moment?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Well, the larger forces, 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 agriculturalists, having children was free labor, and now they're just huge expenses. So that is, that is one issue.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  The other one is ideological, that we no longer with romantic love, the meaning of life was to merge with your partner and have a bunch of children. With, with confident love, it's about self-realization.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  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. 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, on one side, when you make, as in Scandinavia, when you have gender equality and you have generous welfare, it makes it materially easier to have children, so that counts in a positive direction. But it also disincentivizes women from peer bonding with men of similar mate value.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  So that's another aspect of these ideologies emitting, which seems 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 six million years ago, where 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 peer bonding,

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  which is a much more, in a sense, democratic system, where a, a much 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 become choosier 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.

• 1:07:18Chris Williamson?

  Right, and when women are not financially or resourcefully 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 one, two, three, four, five children are out on the street. So we were basically kind of like a, a financial prisoner in some regards to their husband. And now that women don't need that anymore.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for for modern ideology, and 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 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 a 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 wanna they wanna 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,

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  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 satisfaction in relationships. Which is a really, if you want to talk about like unfortunate, uncomfortable 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 brakes are put on your female partner, she's happier and you're happier on average.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. 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. Domestic violence works. There's tons of stuff that work to to make women submit to being in a relationship that they otherwise wouldn't want to be in.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to go stop being a whatever is cost benefiting to, what's it called when the man, there's two types of mate guarding, right? Whatever the second one is, I know what you mean. Yes.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  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 are.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  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 of, you know, moralizing around faithfulness, chastity, loyalty to your partner, and stuff like that.

• 1:10:49Chris Williamson?

  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 know, we talk about evolutionary mismatch an awful lot. Everybody knows what that is. But this seems to be like it's a fucking sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch, right? You know, you've got the culture from before 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 fucking new. Like, how do we work that out?

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  And 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 vestigial 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.

• 1:12:10Chris Williamson?

  It's really not surprising that people are struggling at the moment.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, on top of that, dating apps are a little over a decade old. And we haven't figured that out at all. And the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them are go so counter to people's to people's needs and desires and how our psychology functions. It's we've put ourselves 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.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  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 two million year history of the Guineas homo, 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

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  is going to work for us? And yeah, if you extrapolate from today, if with this decline in fertility, maybe, I mean, we're certainly going to ride out this experiment. I don't see us changing anyway. 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 but there's there's one thing, I mean, you could say everything is relative, but there's one thing that isn't relative. That's an evolutionary iron law.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  No matter what your ideology is, if that ideology causes you to stop reproducing, that ideology will cease to matter. You will disappear.

• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  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 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 fucking 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

• 1:15:14Chris Williamson?

  would have more likely been like you. And look at the groups that are reproducing. Like, something tells me that conservative Ashkenazi Jews are not going to have that much of a fertility problem, right? Something tells me that Mormons or that 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

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  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 a, there's an argument to be made, I think, that, you know, like antinatal, climate concerned liberalism is not long for this world, right? It's not to say that you can't have a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years' time and reconverts a bunch of seventh generation conservatives or whatever, but.

• 1:16:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you will end up with less demographic political variety over time if you have this, because the selection effect occurs within particular cohorts, within very particular strata, and it presses down very hard on them. And the other ones are just like, what demographic collapse? I'm fine.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  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, coinciding with the fourth industrial revolution. What will happen when we start being able to create babies outside of women's wombs, when we'll be able to gene edit, et cetera, et cetera, and we will get AI robot lovers and spouses, et cetera, et cetera. 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

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  the future without taking that into account, yes, then the West, as it function now, would just mate 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 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 think that revolution will be so large that it will fundamentally change that aspect. Like we talked about in the beginning, the foundation of our 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?

• 1:18:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throes of something that even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system. You know, as soon as you have external wombs, as soon as you have AI companions that can give you better than real life love.

• 1:18:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the pod hikikimori 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 wombs, 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 one million Chris Williamson's. Like, I mean, Jesus Christ.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I, it's, maybe we are, maybe this is a uniquely interesting time, but I wonder whether, I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are thinking about at the moment, you know, 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 Norway 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

• 1:20:05Chris Williamson?

  like, like cultural technology, ideological movement, or 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 stand up family guy. And you're like, yeah, but if in five decades, it's artificial wombs and sex robots all the way down, like, what does any, what do any of those interventions really matter? That's not to say that making the wellbeing 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 Etch A Sketch and just deletes all mating history.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, when you look at the history of Western mating, it's, I don't fear very much that we'll be returning to a a Handmaid's Tale, 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 will change. And this time, a lot more rapidly than with previous such revolutions. It's all we can do is mostly hold on.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Like, I don't believe that, I don't, I, I love what you're doing with your podcast, but I, I, people can 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.

• 1:21:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  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 just impossible to predict on this side of the singularity.

• 1:22:08Chris Williamson?

  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 wellbeing. And obviously we've had a lot of conversations recently about incels. And I only learned this from you, incings as well, involuntary singletons. Um, given your evolutionary lens background and your studies into wellbeing, what are you making of the general?

• 1:22:47Chris Williamson?

  Generalized anxiety, depressive states, whatever it is, 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. What, how do you sort of conceptualize all of this together from a well-being perspective? Why are the incels and the insins and everybody else so unhappy?

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's, that's something I think we should really be concerned with. We, we should try to change the world and make a better world, but as, as we've spoken about, it's, our ability to affect 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 will 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, because these changes are very hard on humans. We like stable periods when we know, when

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  we're convinced ourselves that we know what truth is. So when you look at incels and insins, you should expect them that they should be miserable. From an evolutionary perspective, happiness is a reward you experience when you solve adaptively, 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 these on modern dating markets, they have unlimited access to sex with higher value men, but

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  none of these men are willing to pair bond with them, that is supposed to give you depression. That's your, that's your organism telling you that you're failing. So instead of villainizing 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 in 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 clown car into

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  safe shores, but it might help us sympathize more with each other's plights, especially 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.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  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 hoc 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?

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  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'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 men's minister. It's been suggested, et cetera. And I know at least for the 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 mating marginalization and the stratification that is happening on modern dating markets. It's just a thing

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  that feels inappropriate to talk about. But especially when it comes to men.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  What one of the prime functions of having two sexes to have 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 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 selected away by women because they are not valuable enough in the modern environment. We would predict that these men would do poorer and poorer.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  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 because we would expect that to be the foundational level upon which this other malaise 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 I don't I don't think that is possible.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  I think it's more a foundational aspect that it's really difficult to get at.

• 1:28:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, man. I mean, the fact that we're not tearing each other apart, I suppose, you know, when you look at the sadness 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.

• 1:29:04Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Chris Williamson?

  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. The 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 wellbeing that you're doing through an evolutionary lens must, it must feel like human wellbeing is kind of being just pulled apart.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like you said, 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 wellbeing, at least in Norway, Norway is doing better than most other countries. We're doing, we're such a success, we've been such a successful country in the past decades. So we were at the top of the World Happiness Report, but we've now slid down several spots. And this seems to be entirely because of this drastic reduction in wellbeing among young people, 15 to 24. And, and we've, we've made interviews with them. There, there's quantitative surveys of them and we're doing qualitative interviews and young people are feeling bad.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  And you have many aspects and, and social media seems to facilitate some of these, these mechanisms that drive ill being.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Uh, the economy, fear 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. It's 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 society's master narrative.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  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, 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 despondent, 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've found a new story. And now we seem to be transitioning into something that is perhaps a form of dataist master narrative. And if we succeed with this and we make it to the fourth industrial revolution and we're

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  able to unite in 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.

• 1:32:35Chris Williamson?

  What was that study about the Norwegian generational happiness switch?

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, so, uh, we've Norwegians, uh, this, this Norwegian sort of called Norwegian Monitor, they've been, uh, serving happiness since 1985 and 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, but when you're old, you kind of don't have these goals anymore. So, uh, you would expect happiness to go down and what's happened in the last, uh, since... Two thousand and nine 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 in satisfaction for the oldest generation, for retired people.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  So the impression we get from talking to them is just that young people are becoming miserable and losing faith 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 newfound gratitude. They see that, all right, I might have ten, fifteen, twenty 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

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  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 their quality of life. It just makes them more appreciative of their own lives.

• 1:34:25Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  What what they say to us is that they sometimes stay awake at night because they feel so bad about their grandchildren 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 now seeing how future generation will struggle while they will not.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so do you do you believe that comparing yourself to the generation that came before you and your level of success or well being, is that a big determinant of well being?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to separate a little bit different aspects of well being. We can set like well being plus meaning, happiness plus meaning equals well being. So happiness is this solving adaptively 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 do worse, you have a temporarily sense of unhappiness. So that's one of the reasons why social media 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 peers in your local community. Now you compare yourself to the Kardashians and people that fly private jets on YouTube.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  And suddenly your life is not that great anymore relatively. So yeah, happiness is an inherently relative assessment.

• 1:36:17Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. So if you that's one of the reasons why altruism and doing voluntary work, working with refugees or people who are worse off, that has a strong effect also on your happiness.

• 1:36:38Chris Williamson?

  It reminds you just how far you could have fallen and you're not.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it recalibrates your comparison group in a beneficial way.

• 1:36:46Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So a good intervention for well being is to remind yourselves 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, it's either Aristotle or Aurelius that says 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.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  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 ideal, implement the utopia, we discover things like life, love doesn't last forever. Being a stay at home mom isn't paradise. So yeah, we keep striving for it. We make a better and better society. And once we get it, we are accustomed to it and we come up with new utopias.

• 1:37:46Chris Williamson?

  I had this idea for a little while, reflecting on my own life, especially in my twenties, 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 that 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

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  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, or a Band-Aid that they can place over the feelings of insufficiency that they have today.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, theoretically, 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 progress throughout your life and reach as high as you can. Cause 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.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  And that you're not going to be happy. 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.

• 1:39:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, so much, so much interesting stuff there. First off, I have a lot of friends who are self-made successes, millionaires, one billionaire. 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, 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 fuck was the point of working this hard in any case? To not give them the benefits of the, the resources and, and the livelihood that you worked so hard to be able to afford them. But then if you give it to them, you're condemning

• 1:40:26Chris Williamson?

  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. Eddie Hearn, the famous boxing promoter from the UK, said beautifully conceptualized this. And he said, his dad made, his father made the boxing organization that he's a part of. And his father had had an awful lot of success. And then Eddie 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, what would you change? And he said, I never got to do it first. That it always felt like he was living in his father's shadow, that

• 1:41:09Chris Williamson?

  the new frontier was never broken by Eddie. It was always broken by his, his father. And he, he, it's evident that he lives with this pain of the, the echo of it. I mean, dude, the fucking drummer from Megadeth, you know, the story of Metallica? So originally Metallica's drummer got kicked out or left the band. I think he got kicked out of the band. So he decides to go and start a new band called Megadeth. Megadeth 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 cites all the time, this guy still with, you know, one of the most successful metal bands in history.

• 1:41:51Chris Williamson?

  Always has this gap between what he could have been 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 predicament. I also had this idea, it 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 that 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 sum game in terms of the rank order in some regard. And presuming that you're going to reach asymptote, right? And top out at some point.

• 1:42:36Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether there is an argument to be made that actually stretching out the progression and the development of your material acquisition. Like, 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 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 people that achieve rapid success may end up, it's called gold medal syndrome from Olympians, right? It's like, I finally did the thing.

• 1:43:21Chris Williamson?

  Now what? And I wonder whether, yeah, I wonder whether there's an equivalent for slow life strategy.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Well, there, the good news is that there's this other source of wellbeing. I, we conceptualize wellbeing as happiness plus meaning equals wellbeing. 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 philanthropists, they start doing charity, they start working for others. And happiness is limited, there are limits to how happy you can be, how much wellbeing 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.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  You can, for instance, see with 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 sacrifice their 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 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,

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  but you'll get this satisfaction that has, as 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 is, it's a very beneficial strategy. Depends a little bit on your personality, but most people benefit a lot from working for others.

• 1:45:17Chris Williamson?

  Mads, I've been enthralled today. This has been absolutely fantastic. We met each other at HBES, what, five months ago, six months, 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?

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I have nowhere to send them right now. Maybe you can place that polygamy article I wrote in the, in the description under the video.

• 1:45:52Chris Williamson?

  I will do.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  And then I'm working, I'm working on two books. 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 write and then I will submit that to publishers. So hopefully at some point in the future, I will have some books to offer 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 they'll get up a bunch of articles that I've written.

• 1:46:16Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Chris. It's been wonderful. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.