An Evolutionary Psychologist's Dating Advice - Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, Associate Professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and an author. Geoffrey has been writing about sexual selection and dating dynamics for over 30 years. His work has provided the foundation which much of the modern Red Pill, Pink Pill and Manosphere dating advice has been based on. I wanted to find out how much of this guidance is accurate and how much has been lost in translation. Expect to learn how evolutionary psychology can help marriages to be much happier, what Geoffrey thinks about the modern Manosphere, my hypothesis around the game theory of slut shaming, the fundamentals that everyone needs to know about how sexual selection works, how women can hack their own hypergamy, why me and Geoffrey are going to dedicate our lives to existential risk and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Mate - https://amzn.to/3gh88JZ Follow Geoffrey on Twitter - https://twitter.com/primalpoly Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #evolutionarypsychology #dating #redpill - 00:00 Intro 00:30 Why Women Aren’t Having Children Anymore 08:20 ‘The Mating Mind’ After 22 Years 16:23 What All Married Couples Need to Know 28:18 Responding to Critics of Evolutionary Psychology 32:32 Difference Between Beauty & Hotness 44:08 Psychology of Social Groups 54:26 Geoffrey’s Thoughts on the Manosphere 1:04:18 How Twitter Shows Human Nature 1:09:04 Is there an Increase of Simp-shaming? 1:25:24 Should Dating Apps be Banned? 1:32:56 Importance of Existential Risk 1:40:45 Where to Find Geoffrey - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's important to choose your role models carefully. Try to choose guys who are actually succeeding at something other than just giving advice, who can actually have good conversations with a variety of people on their podcast, or actually are making money in crypto, or have actually founded some company that's doing well, or who aren't just like anonymous behind the scenes kind of manosphere trolls.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Geoffrey Miller, welcome to the show.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  It's great to be here, Chris. Really excited.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  I just saw an article from Metro UK that's trending on Twitter today. Half of women aged 30 don't have children for the first time since records began. 50.1% of women born in 1990 haven't had children by 30, according to ONS stats. In comparison, 57% of women born in 1970, 76% born in 1950, and 86% of women born in 1941, all had at least one child by the time that they turned 30. That is crazy.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  It's a pretty big difference compared to what's, you know, ancestrally normal for humans. I mean, bear in mind, you know, if people are reaching puberty ages 12 to 14, and they're not, you know, reproducing for another like 16 to 18 years, that's, that's like a hell of a delay. And, you know, my mom had me when she was 19, and that was pretty normal in the mid 60s. So on the one hand, if you compare age 30 to a modern career track for women, like if you're an academic female trying to get tenure, you know, you might have like grad school till age 26 or 28, postdocs till age 30, get your first assistant professor job, 36 years till tenure, you know, you don't even feel

• 1:50Speaker 00

  financially secure till you're late 30s, right? But biologically,

• 1:56Speaker 00

  You're like, I've been capable of having a kid, you know, for years and years and years. So it's a crazy mismatch.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  Dude.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Mismatch is what we call it.

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  A mismatch. Dig into that. What's that mean?

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Mismatch between what was ancestrally normal, like in prehistory, versus what the modern world has. So, you know, a simple mismatch would be like what we eat in terms of modern American diet versus like paleo diet. Um, or how much sunshine we get if we're indoors most of the day versus outdoors. But I think the mating uh market mismatch is a particularly interesting and frustrating.

• 2:36Chris Williamson?

  That's what I've been fascinated by for the last couple of months. It's so endlessly interesting. I learned, I can't remember what book it was. I want to say maybe Steve Stewart Williams' book, uh, The April Understood Universe, about the effect of a couple who have been together for quite a while, elected not to have children. They chose not to, but find each other becoming increasingly unattractive and can't really explain why. Is this an effect that's that you're familiar with as well?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  This has not been very well studied, but I suspect there is maybe, maybe some kind of instinctive thing where, look, if you're a human and you're in like a long-term committed loving pair bond, and you've been having sex with someone, week after week, month after month, year after year, and you're still not pregnant.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Under ancestral conditions, that would have been a pretty strong cue that either you're infertile or they're infertile, but whatever the case is, this might not be a viable long-term relationship reproductively. And so, you know, maybe there's some emotional um reaction to that that basically means I'm going to divest from this relationship. So that's another example of mismatch. Once you have effective contraception and you can have sex for years and years and years and no baby, what's the emotional impact of that? We don't know. I don't think it's been very well studied, but I suspect it's.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Often not good for relationships and people might find themselves sort of, you know, questioning their commitment or falling out of love a little bit or being a little less attracted to their partner. And they might think like, there's no rational reason for this. I love them. I'm committed. Maybe we're married. We have a mortgage together. Why am I not into them anymore? It might be their body telling them, like, okay, if you love them, where's the baby?

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's because it doesn't know that you've elected to have this say the fact that we have now been able to decouple having sex from making children because of effective contraception. There's a, isn't there an equivalent that women have either just before giving birth or just after giving birth that they can find, is it the smell of their partner particularly off putting and it's something to do with the protectionist strategy and then perhaps the smell of their own family, family members are increasingly attractive?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've seen some stuff on that. I don't know how well replicated it is, but it would certainly make adaptive sense that, look, if you're heavily pregnant or you've just like where you might even be dilated and there might even be like an infection risk if you had sex, might be bad for the baby. Or in the first few weeks after giving birth, like you don't want a woman to be like super horny then. And so she might down regulate how kind of biochemically attracted to husband she is. But on the other hand, she might be more attracted to boyfriend or husband and other family members in terms of like, I want cuddling. I want support. I want emotional closeness and

• 5:58Speaker 00

  intimacy, you know, because that's what you need when you've got a young baby.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this Wall Street Journal article that got shared by Rob Henderson the other day? A gender split over sniffing a baby's scalp. Mothers get more aggressive and fathers less so when they inhale a chemical found in abundance on infants' heads. Did you see this?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  I didn't see it, but it, it kind of makes sense because like, look, when, when you're a new dad,

• 6:30Speaker 00

  and you're used to having a lot of testosterone and being kind of aggressive. You really want to go very, very gentle. You know, you really want to tamp that down.

• 6:41Chris Williamson?

  Turn everything down, yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Because, and, and this is one reason testosterone levels drop when, when men have, have kids is to like, basically reduce the risk of, of like frustration driven infanticide, you know? But on the other hand, women might need to get a little more protective

• 7:01Speaker 00

  about the baby and have a kind of mama bear syndrome where, you know, they might actually need to get a little more vigilant for threats and a little more assertive about dealing with threats. As for many primate species, infanticide is a big, big problem.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  From the father?

• 7:21Speaker 00

  From the father and from other females often.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  How would it be adaptive to have infanticide from the father?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  It depends on how confident he is, he's really the father.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  If he's highly confident, you do not want to kill your baby. But if you're, if you have a lot of doubt, um, then th- this is like the grisly logic of evolution and it's not, it's not pretty, but if you're pretty sure it's not your kid, then you'd really prefer that woman to start cycling again and get fertile again so you can have a kid with her. Lions do this all the time, kill lion cubs that aren't theirs. And a lot of primates do this also. So yeah, evolution's incredibly smart about kind of managing, you know, niceness versus aggression and who do you seek bonds and support with?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  All throughout, you know, the reproductive cycle.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating. Is it right to say that you're one of the OGs of applying evolutionary psychology to sexual dynamics, do you think? Your, the mating mind book is 22 years old now.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it depends on how you count it, right? The real OG was Darwin. Darwin 1871, Sexual Selection, um, book. Amazing book. It had a huge impact on me. And then you get a kind of long lull. And then in the seventies, nineteen seventies, you got Sociobiology and E. O. Bolson, who recently, you know, died and then got

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  Cancelled.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Posthumously. Posthumously cancelled. Uh, and then you had people like anthropologist Don Simons, who wrote this amazing book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, nineteen seventy nine. And that had a big impact on my little field. Evolutionary psychology, which really only got started in kind of the mid to late eighties. And I got into it in grad school at Stanford circa nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine. And I'd been writing about, um, sexual selection and human evolution all throughout the nineties. And then finally, The Mating Mind book came out in the year two thousand. Um, five years later than I meant to publish it, but, you know, that's

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  Bob Wright's book, uh, that came out, what, ninety three, ninety four?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Ninety, ninety three or four, yeah.

• 9:46Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, dude, that is so good. To go back and read, to go back and read that now, it's, I did a, I did a reading list, a free reading list last year. And I had ten books that were like, you just have to, before you read anything else, these are the ones that you have to read. And Bob Wright's was, was in there. It's fucking phenomenal, man.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, huge respect to him. I did a great podcast interview with him a couple of years ago. He's still active. Uh, that book, The Moral Animal, big impact. Steven Pinker's books throughout the late nineties, big impact. And there was kind of a golden age of, uh, like, popular science based on evolutionary psychology and kind of the nineties through early two thousands. Both before everything got super politically correct and woke.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, why do you think that's, we're, we're lacking some of those discussions now?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  It's just extremely

• 10:45Speaker 00

  difficult now to teach, even to teach undergraduates at most universities about like, basic sex differences. You know, I've taught a class on psychology of human sexuality for about 20 years. And you increasingly get blowback from the undergrads, like complaining, "I can't believe that Professor Miller is reinforcing the gender binary and he's like comparing male humans to males of other species, how dare he?" And it's gotten

• 11:16Speaker 00

  like viciously and oppressively political, particularly the last five years. And that's sad because

• 11:24Speaker 00

  undergrads really want to understand mating and sex and romance. And they're kind of being denied that by like a tiny percentage of people who have a really strong political agenda.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  Such a shame, man. Like, if, I don't know, I think a lot, I know that you're big into existential risk, which is my other pet obsession. And

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  that, it really does feel like fucking being on the cusp of something absolutely terrible and awful happening. That's just completely getting in the way. There's a quote someone put on a YouTube video a while ago, "It's the loudest minority who act like they're steering the ship." And fuck if that's not true.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so where do undergrads go if they're curious to understand this, right? Hopefully, they're listening to like your podcasts, hopefully, they're reading Jordan Peterson.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  There's this whole parallel, you know, intellectual ecosystem that's grown up that is much more honest about these things than anything you get in most American universities.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that someone hasn't looked at dating and sexual selection through an evolutionary lens before, how do you introduce it to them?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  I think one important thing to point out is neither sex is at fault for what's going on. Like, both sexes, men and women, both evolved to do the best they can, given the reproductive incentives that they faced. And so neither sex is like the norm that you have to compare the other sex to. You often have men saying, "Oh, my God, women are so neurotic, they're so anxious, they're so fearful, like, that's weird, I don't get it." Well, if you take a woman's point of view, you know, ancestrally, if you're spending a significant amount of your adult life, pregnant, or with a baby, or with young kids,

• 13:29Speaker 00

  the objective risk that you face from predators, and pathogens, and diseases, and starvation, is just higher than what men face. So, of course, evolution shifts your kind of, you know, your risk tolerance in a different direction. And conversely, if women are like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe men are so into status, and aggression, and dominance, and why do they do that? Doesn't make any sense to me." Well, if you think, who managed to reproduce which kind of men attracted women, and had the status and social support and the influence to be attractive?

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Like, given female hypergamy, given female mate choice. Of course, you know, we're all descended from males who played that game avidly. So I think one crucial kind of emotional insight from an evolutionary perspective is just to accept men and women, and their natures, as they are, you know, and then to figure out, okay, given that...

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Plus like, modern culture and technology, how do you do the best you can?

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you not find it fascinating to see how those predispositions that we have towards certain things, that's the common thread that runs through everything and then it gets repackaged into memes that we see in fucking sitcoms and products. It's so, when you start to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of why people like the things that they like and don't like the things they don't like, it is, it is kind of like seeing the code instead of seeing the, the game.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I actually still like the, the red pill metaphor and there's like so many things that have red pilled me, but probably evolutionary psychology was the biggest red pill for me, just thinking, human nature and human culture as it is, is the outcome of an extremely long story, a really long story, way back in deep time. And the better you understand that story, uh, the less puzzling modern life is. And I, it's gotten to the point where like, if there's a married couple and they don't have evolutionary insights into their relationship

• 15:58Speaker 00

  and their, their values and preferences and, and what drives their reactions, I think, like, why would you handicap yourself that way? Like, it's really sad. You'd be much better to go back to like, read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, rather than go to marital therapy.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Like, do both, but Jesus, read something about human nature if, if you really care about your relationship.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you wish more married couples knew?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  I wish more married couples knew that you don't have to take your emotional reactions nearly as seriously as you typically do. For example, um, a lot of-

• 16:46Speaker 00

  People think, okay, I know I'm not supposed to like hit my spouse. I'm not supposed to do physical violence to my spouse. And so if I have an impulse to do that, I have to control that. That's not civilized, that's bad.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  However, there's a lot of other reactions we have that are basically what economists call punishment routines, like somebody else does something that pisses you off. Right? And you have a reaction to punish them, to give some negative reinforcement. This can range from, I want to hit them, to I want to cuss at them, to I don't want to talk to them for a day, to I want to complain about them to my friends, or god forbid, on social media. Those are all punishment routines.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  The instinct to want to punish them, even over something that's maybe objectively trivial, can be very strong.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  But we have this double standard where like we go, okay, physical punishment, that's super bad. We don't do that in a civilized marriage. But all these other things, right, are still considered kind of fair game, even if they're objectively like a massive overreaction to what actually happened.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  I think conversely, if you understand like why we want to punish our mate for certain like transgressions, then you can actually play with that. Like you can make it funny. You can kind of playfully exaggerate it.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  Give me an example.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  My wife, Diane and I do this all the time. Like, um, if she's pissed off at me for whatever, failing to do something in the kitchen, instead of taking it seriously and going, oh my god, Geoffrey, you suck, you're such a bad husband, she'll start like mouthing nonsense syllables, but in an angry way and kind of a self mocking way. And so she'll be like.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  And then I'll start arguing back using like my defensive like nonsense syllables like

• 19:01Speaker 00

  why can we do that because we're both evolutionary psychologists and we both know at some level

• 19:07Speaker 00

  the desire to over punish for trivial stuff is is just ridiculous and if you understand how ridiculous it can be then you can make fun of your own reactions and then you're actually like closer to each other because like I have the faith that she has enough self insight

• 19:31Speaker 00

  that she can mock her own like feminine responses.

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  Programming, yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And she has confidence I have enough insight into my sort of masculine nature and programming that I can make fun of it.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And by contrast, you go to marital therapy and most therapists will be like you all have to be 100% earnest all the time about your feelings and you have to take your feelings seriously and like express them and and work through them and talk it out.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  So Diana, if you were angry that Geoffrey had used the source and not put it away and you felt upset about it, then this is justified. We do not have any unjustified feelings in this. That's fucking interesting. I've never been to counselling, but I imagine in movies where I've seen it, that's what they do.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's just very few good role models in movies or TV about how to manage these things. Like you'll almost never see somebody in a serious adult drama actually make fun of their own reactions in a kind of wise and insightful way.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  The only time that you would ever see it is kind of the ditzy female, classic American ditzy suburbs, early 30s, still not married, like wine aunt type, lovable, like always the bridesmaid, never the bride type one, like, oh, here I go again, losing my shit about something that doesn't really matter, which is kind of touching. The reason that people laugh at it is the fact that they know there is a compulsion that is a part of her programming that had, if she had all of her rational capabilities, she might dial that back, she might tamp that down a little bit. It's just that you try to turn that up to 11.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that, those are two big takeaways, like, try to have some insight into yourself, and then try to be playful with it.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Before we started recording, we talked, for example, a little bit about female hypergamy, which is, you know, women tend to be attracted to guys who have relatively high dominance, or status, or prestige, or fame, or whatever. That's another thing where you can kind of role-play that stuff up in a relationship. So you can kind of create hypergamy even when it doesn't really exist at some objective level. And, you know, people in like the BDSM and kink communities do this all the time with what they call power exchange, where it's like, okay, the, you know, the man's gonna pretend to have some role, like, he's the president, or he's a CEO of something, and

• 22:10Speaker 00

  then the woman's gonna pretend to be like, whatever, the

• 22:14Chris Williamson?

  Secretary or some

• 22:15Speaker 00

  The White House staff or a secretary, like, whatever, whatever melts your butter. Like, you can do that, and it can actually help your stupid human brain think, "Oh yeah, my mate is actually really cool and like, really powerful." Like, if more people did that, I'm, I'm convinced that most relationships would be at least 50% happier.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  That's fucking interesting. A lot of what we've been talking, I had Vincent Haranamon, who is Rob Henderson's co-writer on some Quillette articles, data scientist that's applied his data science to looking at dynamics in the market, dating market at the moment. And, um, yeah, there's this sort of ongoing, women are outperforming men everywhere at the moment in education, you're gonna have two to one women versus men in four-year US colleges by 2030, women earn 1,111 pounds more than a man between the age of 21 and 29 on average at the moment.

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  And the the issue that you have, if you try and look at it from like a public policy perspective, and it's so, it's so interesting that I, I thought that you had to come up with a real world rational solution to this. But the way that your brain interprets the situation, your brain isn't this fucking all seeing, all knowing thing. You can use the same tricks that it's trying to play on you against itself. And if little, you know, if you do have the high powered boss bitch lady that's got herself into a relationship with a man who, you know, doesn't earn two million euros, much whatever it is that she does. The fact that you can compensate for that by reversing the polarity in the bedroom is, that's really, really fucking interesting.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's, um, yeah, that like the, the new agey tantric concept of polarity is something also most guys should learn more about, like a masculine feminine.

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  How would you, how would you introduce that to someone?

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Just the idea that if you play up the, the differences and the tension between sort of the masculine role and the feminine role, that's actually quite a bit hotter than trying to achieve like similarity and equality, particularly in the bedroom, but in relationships generally. So if you go to Burning Man, right, you'll hear a lot of people talking about, man, you gotta, you know, get into your masculine polarity and rediscover your, your Jungian shadow, blah, blah, blah. And like, there's a lot of nonsense wrapped around it. But I think there are some deep evolutionary roots to some of that wisdom.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Why do we find beautiful people attractive, do you think?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  I think beauty is partly a legit indicator of health, fertility, youth, you know, capacity to reproduce. But then there's certain parts of beauty in our species and lots of other species that are kind of arbitrary, like the fact that we have green or blue eyes rather than dark eyes. If you're from like a Northern European population. Is that really adaptive in terms of like promoting survival better? Or is it just?

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Oh, if you migrate to a northern latitude out of Africa 150,000 years ago, you don't need a dark iris anymore to protect your iris from bright sun. You're free to evolve all kinds of crazy new colors, like blue and green and hazel. Like, why? Because it's new and different, and apparently our ancestors thought that's kind of cool. So eye color might be one of those sexually selected traits that's a little bit arbitrary. Likewise, maybe red and blonde hair color. Likewise, you know, a lot of the facial feature differences between like Africa, Europe,

• 26:18Speaker 00

  East Asia. Who knows why they evolved? So I think beauty is like half really about fitness and health and half a little bit arbitrary.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  What are the traits that we usually enjoy? Someone doesn't understand sexual selection from a fitness signaling perspective. What are the typical traits that people enjoy?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Well, when Tucker Maxx and I wrote that mate book, we put a lot of emphasis on just overall competence. Like, what is attractive about a guy to a woman? Just he can do stuff effectively. Capability, competence. And in the in the physical domain, that's like, does he look like he could actually hunt an animal successfully? Could he run? Can he jump over stuff? Could like, couldn't he throw things? Could he drag back a 100-pound gazelle from five miles away? If he doesn't look like he could do that, like, why would you mate with him?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Because, you know, if you're a woman in prehistory and you've got babies, one of the main roles for the guy is provide meat, you know, provide resources. And any guy who looks like he's not going to be a good hunter is not going to be very attractive sexually. Likewise, he should look like he can potentially protect you against other men who might want to kill your baby or, you know, rape your woman or fight against your tribe. So if you look like you're capable of defending someone, then that's attractive.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of it just boils down to that, like, what are the physical cues that that mean, you know, you look like you'd be a good bet for a long-term mate who's capable of having kids, providing for them, protecting them, and, you know, helping them grow?

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  What do you say to the people that go, Geoffrey, that's dumb. I don't need a man to drag an antelope 500 meters anymore. This is the real world in 2022. I don't, this doesn't matter anymore.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  I'd say that's, that's largely true objectively, but it can be quite hard to rewire your brain to say, oh, actually, I'm really attracted to, like, guys who are five foot two rather than six foot two. Like, fine, you can do that. I don't know that many women who are successful at doing that. And, you know, the data from dating apps says height is a major predictor of attractiveness on dating apps. Income, major predictor for men. So,

• 29:10Speaker 00

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

• 29:55Speaker 00

  of hack your, your, your brain to say, that's okay, given all the other traits that are, that are good in this person. But man, if you don't have an evolutionary perspective, how do you do that, that hacking of your own brain? You don't even know where these preferences come from. So it's extremely hard to change them.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  What about from men to women? What are men looking for?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It depends a lot on whether men are looking for a short-term mate or a longer-term mate. We know what men are looking for in a short-term mate, right? It's basically cues of youth and fertility and sexual accessibility. And, you know, we're descended from male ancestors who are kind of scanning the environment for like, where's an easy way to have X reproductive success with minimal investment? That would basically be any young, healthy woman who seems like fit and fertile and relatively like unchoosy, right? That's like minimum investment, maximum ROI. But then for a long-term mate, you know, if you're actually going to pair bond with

• 31:05Speaker 00

  someone, stick around, raise kids with them, then men get a lot choosier about women's mental traits like intelligence and creativity and sense of humor and women's like emotional traits like stability and conscientiousness and reliability. And, and about women's social status, like, does she have a lot of friends? What's her family like? Is she socially savvy? Can she be a good kind of, um, almost political companion where we can be like the tribal power couple?

• 31:49Speaker 00

  But I think it's import, like, it's really important for men to understand the short versus long-term difference. Because if you don't, you end up choosing women for the short-term attractive traits, and you get stuck in a relationship with them, and then you're like, oh no, she's like neurotic and not that smart and a bad match, but Sex is great. But the sex is great for a while until it isn't.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  So I think, again, the better that men understand this, you know, the easier it is to sort of be honest with yourself about what are you really looking for? And what length of relationship are you are you seeking?

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation about this the other day, talking about the difference between beauty and hotness. Now, you might have different terms for it in the literature, but an immediate, very sexually available signal of fitness versus a more timeless, graceful, more subtle signal of fitness. And I am absolutely adamant that society is signaling almost exclusively off hotness at the moment, that the inherent transactional, transient nature of most of young people's relationships, where basically they're masturbating with somebody else's body, and they just that there happens to be another consciousness in the room, that that is leading into hotness being used as the fundamental cue.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  So look at, I don't even know if these magazines exist anymore, but you know, if you were to get a girl on the front of some lad mag, some boys mag that's got fast cars and like scantily clad women, that they're not selecting for beauty, they're purposefully selecting for hotness. I did two reality TV dating shows, I did Love Island and one called Take Me Out. And on that, the same, they're not selecting for women that are beautiful. That's not to say that some of them aren't or weren't beautiful, but the primary value that they're selecting for is hotness, because they only have six weeks. If you only got six weeks in a villa and you have to share a bed, there's half the number of beds if there are people, so you're sharing a bed with somebody every night, and they need you to switch, switch, switch, there's two eliminations a week and all this

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  stuff, they need it need hotness. You can't, you can't have something that takes you three months to fully appreciate all of the nuances of Louisa's fucking back arch. It's like, no, no, no, no, the half sleeve tattoo and the lip piercing will do it for you straight away.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And there's, there can be enormous pressure to kind of signal hotness. So I think tattoos and piercings and certain kinds of, you know, dressing in a certain way that basically advertises like, I'm, you know, potentially open to short term mating if we match.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it is, what do you think it is about piercings and tattoos? What do you think's the subtext behind that?

• 34:44Speaker 00

  I think it's a little bit culturally arbitrary that it has become associated with openness to kind of short-term mating, or openness to being open or polyamorous, or whatever. Openness to threesomes, whatever you're into. But once you get the signal established, once there's kind of a social consensus that, oh, if you have a lot of tattoos, that's signaling a degree of sexual openness that would not be welcome in Salt Lake City among the Mormons, but would be welcomed in Brooklyn, or LA, or whatever.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  But I think your point about hotness versus beauty is really on the money. And some women are so beautiful, like Kate Blanchett, or Anne Hathaway, or certain actresses like that, where it's almost hard to sexually objectify them. It feels almost wrong to sort of put them in the category of like, oh, she's so hot. Because classy beauty, you immediately think, oh, I wish I had a wife like that. Right? Or, I wish I had a girlfriend like that. I suspect there's something parallel with men, where certain men radiate kind of like

• 36:09Speaker 00

  short-term hotness, rather than like, good long-term husband potential. You probably encountered this in the modeling world a little bit.

• 36:15Chris Williamson?

  Correct, and in the nightlife world a lot, dude. I mean, because I see, it's so funny, you know when you go into a nightclub, and there's a strobe light on, and you don't actually, when there's a strobe light, you don't see people move, you see snapshots of the person, it's, they're here, then they're here, then they're here, then they're here. And running a club night is exactly the same as that, but socially. So I only get to see people for five hours on a Thursday and a Friday, or whenever it is that your particular portfolio of events is running for that season, or that year, or whatever. And you see things happen. So you'll see new group of fresher students arrive, and then maybe this guy and this girl, maybe they meet each other, and then maybe they hook up, and then maybe they start talking, and then maybe... They're together for a bit and then maybe this new girl comes in and but you don't see

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  everything happen. You just see kind of like this brief window into it. And dude, it's so fucking interesting to see, to be able to select the kids that are going to be the ones that are going to have the status that are highly regarded. And you're right. I mean, there's something, there's something around girls that wear those choker necklaces that have been accused of being a black belt for blowjobs by not me. And you see that certain signals play out. And that's what creates the stereotypes culturally, you know, you see something, it gets reinforced. And then maybe people see that and think, well, I've

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  just got out of a relationship with a boyfriend. Why don't I get a nose ring and start wearing choker necklaces? Because that's what the culture is telling me that sort of person does. And it, it just starts to feed itself.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think

• 38:01Speaker 00

  I would just caution young people like, what you want is you want maximum flexibility to adjust your signals that you're sending out in a way that is like dynamic and adaptive. If you got a permanent tattoo that's visible in every job interview, or at your wedding or whatever, like, it's hard to go back from that. It's hard to do tattoo removal. Whereas if you're wearing, you know, black belt choker, at least you can take that off and like then become respectable on Monday.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Don't need to still wear it at the wedding. Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  So, like, of course, the more permanent the signal, the more credible a signal it is because it shows extra commitment. But I think a lot of young people really like they have a very short term time horizon and they're really not thinking ahead about how is this tattoo really going to look in 15 years? Is my future toddler going to make fun of it?

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about hard to fake versus easy to fake signals of fitness and prestige and stuff. I find that really interesting.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got kind of obsessed with this branch of economic game theory called signaling theory back in the late 90s, and it had a big impact on most of what I wrote since then. The basic concept is if you're trying to signal something, like you're a male animal and you're trying to signal, I could fight you, I could win, right? The most reliable signals are the ones that are hard to fake, where there's some pretty strong connection between like the trait you're trying to show off, like formidability or capacity for violence or body size. Pretty strong connection between that and the actual signal that you're displaying, right?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  So a lot of animals will kind of fluff themselves up and make their hair stand on end, or if they have feathers, they'll like make a big show of it. So they're exaggerating their body size to intimidate rivals. But there's still a correlation between like your wingspan and like the part of your body that can actually fight.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Now, at a kind of like cultural level, I did a whole book called Spent in 2009 that was about conspicuous consumption. And there, it's more often a matter of I'm going to buy and display some particular good or service that is objectively expensive in order to show off I can afford it.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  And there, like the credibility of the signal depends on like, is it real? Like, is it actually a designer handbag or a real Rolex or is it fake? And do you really own that bug body or did you just rent it for the weekend? Right? And so, you know, people seeing this stuff are naturally kind of skeptical. Like, if you see somebody wearing what looks like a Rolex, but everything else in their life is is kind of like shitty and cheap, then you figure, ah, it's probably fake.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Whereas if someone's already famous for being a billionaire. And like you can easily Google them and you can see their net worth. Then they can just wear, you know, terrible Henley shirts or whatever and nobody cares. Because they don't have to signal through consumerism.

• 41:44Chris Williamson?

  I learned, I can't remember the Scott Alexander blog post, he did a glorious blog post. It wasn't, I can't tolerate anything except the out group, it was something similar to that. Where he talked about the fact that if you have four layers to classes, that the top layer can use any of the bottom two's fashions, but it can't use the one below. And the same thing goes for everybody else is trying to signal that they are. But then you get counter signals, which is the person at the very, very top cares so little. And you see this in hipster culture, especially in the UK now, dude. Some of the outfits that guys and girls go out wearing. I'm where the actual living fuck did you get those clothes from?

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  They look terrible, but it's a signal of I'm so cool. I don't need to adhere to your idea about what cool is. My cool is so huge and fucking compensatory, it has its own orbit, that I can still be cool even whilst wearing this 30 year old mothball ridden fleece.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  And the counter signaling, um, which is where like, you would normally expect someone to signal in a certain way, but actually they're kind of signaling the opposite. But the viewer is savvy enough to figure out that, oh, they could have done the usual signal. But they're intentionally not. Um, and like high fashion haute couture is an interesting case where basically you take like a 19 year old, you know, six foot tall, super beautiful model. And you put something absolutely ridiculous, like truly absurd on her. And as long as it required like at least, you know, 5,000 person hours of of effort to do all the stitching.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Then you can sell it to like a 50 year old socialite who doesn't actually look that good. Right? And that to me is very bizarre because, um,

• 43:55Speaker 00

  You basically have like clothes that are so ridiculous that only truly beautiful fit women can wear them, but they're being bought mostly by women who aren't. And and that's kind of sad.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  Social proof's an interesting one. I think that's kind of been co-opted as a part of high value now, high value men and high value women. But I find social proof to be quite interesting coming from a nightlife background because that's what we're playing off. You know, I need to get each year in order to run my business, I need about 300 to 400 kids between the age of 18 and 21 that are the ones that are cool, that are in the know, that are going to the right parties, that are sleeping with the right people, that are sniffing the right drugs or whatever. Like, they need to, that's the social proof. And then we've commercialized that, we've utilized that to reflect what it means to go to voodoo events, right? You go to voodoo events event and, but that's the one that's run by the really good looking Canadian kid or whatever it might be. But

• 44:54Chris Williamson?

  social proof happens on an individual level too, right?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. In my experience, like evolutionary psychology was one important red pill. But marketing, understanding marketing and branding and how influencers work was another major red pill. And I think it's also crucial for people to understand, particularly in a modern social media economy where, you know, influencers are really driving a lot of the desirability of goods and services or experiences like going to a particular club. And we are just such hyper-social primates who are just so tuned into these cues that

• 45:41Speaker 00

  it's, it's kind of easy to manipulate that.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And just you, you find the attractive people and associate them with a particular brand and everyone's like, oh, I guess that's cool.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's, that's, that's our industry.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  That's what nightlife is. So there was a lady, Ashley Mears, you familiar with her? Oh, she, she wrote an awesome book.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  She was previously a top model in New York up until the age of about 25, but she was always at uni doing sociology throughout, left, became a professor and then decided to do ethnographic research, becoming a party girl. So 31 years old, still very good looking girl, but now 10 years older than the girls that she's going out with. And they were the ones that were filler girls. So they got taken, we don't really have this so much in the UK, a little bit in London and not so much. There would be a host of an event that would get the girls and they'd go and get sushi or whatever, like the, the after the dregs of the sushi. And then he'd take them into the club and they'd sit on the tables with the guys that

• 46:47Chris Williamson?

  were spending money so that they would feel, and that's your conspicuous consumption thing. But that insight around girls being used to change the experience, even though the guys that are on the table know that they're kind of not there with them, but it's a signal. I, well, it's not conspicuous consumption, is it? What's, is that, is that, that status and prestige by being associated with beautiful women, therefore I am as well? Is that what's going on?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Well, there's a lot of mate choice copying dynamics where like, and a lot of species, if you're male and some female is like clearly interested in you, then the other females nearby will pay attention to that. And they'll imitate the mate choices made by the other female, particularly if the other female is like more attractive or older or more, more experienced. And so you get like this winner take all thing, like Beatlemania, right? Where everyone's like, oh my God, he's so cool. Why? Just because all the other people think he's cool. You know, Justin Bieber, who? This doesn't happen as much with men being attracted to women, but it, it does also

• 48:02Speaker 00

  happen there. And it's, it's another thing that you can exploit in marketing.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. An article came out in Psychology Today yesterday. The result of this exercise and study was that three traits emerged as general necessities: kindness, physical attractiveness, and good financial prospects. So that was both male and female. There was variation. Men tended to view women's financial prospects as a luxury, and only Eastern women saw religiosity as a necessity. You see that it only came out yesterday?

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Didn't see it.

• 48:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's all I'll send it to you once once we're done. It's really, really fucking interesting. So they had a bunch of different criteria for men and women, west and east, and looked. But across them all, you did have some fairly universals: kindness, physical attractiveness, and good financial prospects. I think humor was the one that just about got missed off as well.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you if you dig down a little bit into those three traits, and you're like, whoa, why would that matter? Well, like, physical attractiveness is pretty closely associated with health and longevity, which is like, okay, how long could I potentially be in a relationship with this person, like, before they get sick and die? So it's kind of a time dimension. The resources dimension is like, how much could they potentially give to me or help support me or like, transfer to me that would be useful to me and like, my kids and our life? And then kindness is like, will they actually transfer those benefits

• 49:38Speaker 00

  to me? Or withhold them for themselves, or give them to somebody else? Right? So if you kind of multiply, like, how long could the relationship last, times how big are the resources, times like, what proportion of the attention and investment do I get? Like, that kind of covers a lot of what you want from a long term mate.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  It's a pretty good fucking function, yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  It's a pretty good heuristic. And like, it's okay to, it's not like we're doing some Excel spreadsheet where it's like, I have to rate all potential mates on the following 200 traits, and like, do a weighted linear model and like, weigh it up and then like, choose the best one. I know rationalists who do that, literally. But you can achieve like,

• 50:31Speaker 00

  A decision that's like 95% that good, based on just a handful of simple traits.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I remember tweeting you, I think it was probably two years ago, just as I'd started to really get into evolutionary psychology. And I had a problem that the more that I saw, the more I couldn't unsee.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

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

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  of seeing things for what they are, for the signals that they are, or for the reasons that people's motivations have them to do this. What, what would you say to someone that begins tumbling down the evolutionary psychology dating dynamics rabbit hole and starts to kind of, I don't know, is there like a nihilism, like when people learn about free will, is there an equivalent nihilism that happens with evolutionary psychology?

• 51:57Speaker 00

  It can, it can be tough for, for a while. I, I do think there's a little bit of a, like a dark valley that you go through. That's basically like, you know, maybe read The Moral Animal and you read some David Buss stuff and some Steve Pinker stuff and you read, yeah, The Ape That Understood The Universe by Steve Stuart Williams. Great book. I've actually used that as required textbook and some courses.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that what a fucking great textbook.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It covers so much. It covers like 80% of evpsych in a really digestible way. So good to Steve Stuart Williams for doing that. So I've seen this a lot. You, you get undergrads.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  And they learn these things. And they can get kind of despondent and kind of depressed for a while. Um, it might last a few months or they might like take a course. And then come back a couple of years later into office hours and go. Wow, the first year after I learned about evsite was rough, like I saw. All this stuff going on in a new, new light. And I became very cynical. About people's motives and their, their self deception. And all their little stratagems and all their bullshit and I saw through it. But then, um, how do you come out of it? You, um.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Once you start living with the idea that humans are just like animals. Like other species. And you get used to that and then you can start to see, but what extraordinary animals are we? Like it's so awesome, other animals just running around. Doing all this sexual competition shit and all this mate choice shit and based on really. Dumb traits like. Oh, I want to have sex with the bigger gorilla, not the smaller gorilla. Or the bird with better plumage. And it's like, oh, at least we have the blessings of being able to talk. And be creative and do art and music and humor and all this other amazing stuff.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  And we have a form of romantic love that is like really sweet. And very emotionally intimate compared to what most other animals do. And then you start seeing the bright side. And then you can kind of get excited again about human life.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on the manosphere?

• 54:26Speaker 00

  I've mixed feelings about it, but largely positive. Like, um. I've been a sort of observer of it for like 15 years or so, ever since the early days of like. Pickup artists in the early 2000s and, um. Uh, David DeAngelo, AKA Evan Pagan is a good friend of mine and I've like appeared at David DeAngelo events. Like 15 years ago.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  It was strange to see like second and third hand ideas from like my early work getting kind of recycled into Manosphere like wisdom or good advice or often bad advice.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Uh, and then get into arguments with Manosphere guys who are like, Miller, you don't understand human sexual dynamics at all.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  This is my fucking work.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Like preach, let me preach, let me explain to you how sexual selection works. Like dude, you're literally quoting back to me something I wrote in 1994. Like, thanks, but.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  I think for a lot of young men, um, they need

• 55:42Speaker 00

  like older, successful role models who can explain this stuff to them in a very no bullshit, unpretentious way. You know, and that's what Tucker Maxx and I were trying to do with our mate book. It was kind of like conjoin evolutionary psychology with like brutally simple language that even your average like 20 year olds could understand.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  And, you know, sometimes the Manosphere guys get a little bit, um, overconfident. I don't know what's up. Maybe their testosterone supplementation is too high or whatever, but they get a little feisty and a little combative, but. Um, I just think if you're, if you're a young man listening to this, it's, it's important to choose your role models, uh, carefully and like try to choose guys who are actually

• 56:41Speaker 00

  succeeding at something other than just giving advice.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Like who can actually have good conversations with a variety of people on their podcast, or actually are making money in crypto, or have actually founded some company that's doing well, or who aren't just like anonymous behind the scenes kind of manosphere trolls.

• 57:04Chris Williamson?

  The thing that surprised me when I was watching, reading Mate, your book, which is fucking dope, by the way, if there are guys out there that want to kind of learn the principles of evolutionary psychology for mating, and I think that women should read that book as well, because where all the good men are is probably a pretty fair question to ask at the moment. And if you want to be able to coach whoever it is that you're with in order to be better, or to be able to understand what it is that you actually want, really, really fucking good book. It'll be linked in the show notes below. But one of the things that really surprised me about that book was how long you guys spent in a dating book for men, explaining to men about what it feels like to be a woman in the dating space. That was, that was like

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  a really, really welcome surprise. One of the problems that I have, the specific problem that I have with the manosphere, is it treats women like the enemy fundamentally. That is the primary problem that I have with it. And I really, really tried to toe the line. I'm happy with uncomfortable insights, right? I'm fucking all day, I'll talk about them because they're cool. Like watching the fallibility of your own world crumble in front of your eyes, is there something kind of humbling about that? Like we're looking up at the night sky, right? Like it's awe and it's dread at the same time. It's kind of cool. But you can push that so easily, you know, the hypergamous nature of women, that they really don't have that much control over, and saying, oh, you're actually only a five out of 10, so you shouldn't

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, Tucker and I did, you know, a podcast called Mating Grounds. We did like 250 episodes or something.

• 59:04Chris Williamson?

  It's unreal.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  And that, that insight about, hey, guys, you know, if you want to have success with women, maybe, radical idea, maybe you should spend like at least a nanosecond trying to look at the world through a woman's point of view. And the number of guys we had call in to that podcast going like, wow, I never actually did that. Like even though I have a mom and multiple sisters and many like ex-girlfriends, I never actually thought, okay, what would the dating scene be like if I felt physically vulnerable, sexually vulnerable, if a lot of the guys who approached me are straight up like sociopaths and bad

• 59:48Speaker 00

  dudes because they're the only ones who have the courage to be super assertive, right? So you're getting a biased sample of men. Or online, you're getting a biased sample of like a lot more trolls than good guys because trolls are very, very active. And just like spend a minute thinking about that and then think, how, how is an, you know, an honorable man who has his shit together, can you like, break through all of that noise and chatter and fear and kind of like present yourself as, hey, how you doing? And my name's

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  blah, blah, blah. Um, just like have a normal conversation. So perspective taking is, I think really crucial in this.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you think there's about the zero sum mentality that I said about the manosphere? Because that's how it feels to me. It feels to me like a lot of the fundamentally good, but delivered poorly and with a snide topspin advice from men sees any man's gain as a woman's loss. Like it's, it's weird that a lot of the time they're talking about how to get women and to get with women. And then when a woman does, there's this sort of low key admission that that's somehow their loss? Like because you gave yourself away to this guy that we've coached to try and get himself into the position of how he can have sex with you, now you're a slut?

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's totally toxic. It's bizarre. And the irony is, a lot of the guys in the metasphere, if you ask like, do you believe in capitalism? Or like communism and redistribution? They're like, capitalism? Why? Oh, because like economic exchange is positive sum. Because we can all get wealthier if we like provide good goods and services to each other. And then you're like, okay, that makes sense in economic markets. Why do you think the mating market is somehow zero sum? Like, there's some obvious low hanging fruits. Like, if you have dating apps that are really, really good at matching people based on genuine

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  compatibility, that's a win-win for everybody. It's way better than living in some medieval village where you have three potential mates and none of them share your interests and probably can't even read. Right? So there's so many positive sum ways we could restructure the mating market to work better for everybody.

• 1:02:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  That shit fucking blew my mind.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  And it's really, unless you have this kind of game theory perspective, it's really hard to understand why slut shaming is mostly done by women to other women.

• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  Correct. It also makes a lot of sense around why women tend to be the enforcers of slut shaming because so frequently because women are the ones who have an incentive to protect the sexual marketplace from becoming a price war of easy sex.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is also why, you know, the main opponents of sex work are often married women. Right? Because they have the most to lose if a husband goes off, you know, and spends money on an escort or some financial dominatrix or whatever. And if you just ask like, okay, where are people's incentives? You know, what's the incentive to impose a certain social norm on human sexuality? Often it's not that hard to figure out why it's happening.

• 1:04:17Chris Williamson?

  There's another case, I did a little bit of research around who opposes abortions mostly, and it's women. There are more women that oppose abortions than there are men.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  And I think there, a lot of that might be a bit of a virtue signal, right? Because if you're, if you're a woman who's like, babies are sacred. We have to protect babies. It's kind of like a way of saying, my maternal instincts are better than yours. And I'm going to be a good mom. And one way I demonstrate I will be a good and devoted mom who will, you know, protect your babies is to insult other women who seem not to protect their vituses.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  And, you know, I did a whole book on virtue signaling. So I think a lot of this is

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  just all the ways we demonstrate like, we're morally good people. And so you can trust me and I'm, I'm good. And

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  You and I are both pretty active on Twitter and honestly, like 60% of the shit on Twitter is virtue signaling to me.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I would say probably even more. Most of the time, people aren't saying the thing that they're saying. It's just a signal around the thing that they think they're supposed to say. Here's how I see that that play out so much. Very rarely do you ever see someone respond to a tweet. Let's say that there's a back and forth of trying to dunk on each other. Nobody, I can't remember the last time I saw it, where someone said, "That is out of fucking order." Like, you can't say that. Nobody ever wants to get to the stage where they call a stop to the game. Because the cool thing to do on Twitter is be this dispassionate fucking edgelord that just replies with memes of Kathy Newman or Kathy Griffin.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Because that's what's cool. Because the signal is, "I'm so unperturbed by this. I've got so much other stuff that I could be doing. You're getting 1% of my attention." As opposed to saying, "Hang on a second. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? That is an unacceptable thing to post to me."

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, my usual response when people just get out of order is I just block them. Like, I block probably 30 people a day.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  But conversely,

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  you know,

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  you can almost feel yourself getting swept up in that kind of edgelord-like

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  game. I try to catch myself where I think, you know what? Once in a while, at least a few times a day, I should be like, "Good point. You're right. I should look into that more."

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  It's hard to do, though. It's hard because...

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  It's so fucking hard.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  It feels like you're being submissive. It feels like you're losing. But actually, to onlookers, I think to a lot of people watching the interaction, it's actually kind of cool to do that jujitsu move of like... Yeah, we've been escalating this argument, but actually on this one issue, you're right.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, that's a counter signal, right, that I am

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:07:27Chris Williamson?

  Prepared to be so humble. Yeah, one of my favorite things to do, sometimes people have problems with the balance of guests. It's too much, too right wing, or too male dominated, or too white, or too whatever. And the only thing that I ever reply with is, who would you like me to bring on? Like, give me, tell me, tell me, put it in the, put it in the comments. Tell me who you think that I should bring on that fills the criteria that you have got an issue with. And the, it, I, I, I can't remember the last time that someone responded to that. They put a dickish comment. I asked a question. Their reply is almost never dickish. It's almost always, well, actually, here's a list of five people that I think are really interesting and some YouTube videos on where you get started.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  P S really love the show. And you're like, oh, okay, we've managed to neutralize this. There's a lesson to be learned there, I think, about de-escalating

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  de-escalating aggression.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, Twitter, to any psychologist, is just such a fascinating like hunting grounds for insights into human nature. And that's one of the reasons I'm, I'm so active on it is I'm always like partly involved as kind of a Twitter player, but it's so easy to go meta. And to be like, this is just, this is so funny, like

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  eight billion primates running around on social media, just like bashing each other verbally and playing these little status games and virtue signaling games.

• 1:09:04Chris Williamson?

  I want to finish off that slut shaming thing. So I, that's the first half of it, right? That's what you guys put forward in the book. And then I worked it through using Bro Science on my newsletter. Reading that first section about the fact that women enforce it mostly, and why you can't have the price of sexual access kind of get spiraled down and down. Reading that got me thinking about the equivalent for men, and I think that it explains simp shaming too. So I reword what you Put at the top, male resource commitment has a tragedy of the commons effect in the mating market. If one man offers gifts and resources by the second date, it's harder for the other men to keep them in reserve until the fourth date is their special treat. This creates a downward spiral of young men feeling like they have to offer more and more gifts

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  and go on increasingly extravagant dates to more and more women just to stay in the mating game. Thus, simp shaming is a way of enforcing a more restrained resource giving norm on other men so that not all men have to become more resource committed than any of them would like. Similarly, this explains why men are mostly the enforcers of simp shaming, because men have an incentive to stop simps from cheapening the value of all men's resources. It's hardly an iron law, men call women sluts and women call men simps all the time, but this game theory explanation makes a lot of sense to me. If women give sex without commitment, it cheapens the value of sex. If men give resources or commitment without sex, it cheapens the value of resources and commitment.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can see this in some weird little subcultures like financial domination, right? Where, you might not be familiar with this, but there's a certain kind of online sex worker who's just like, I'm the dominatrix, you send me money. Men who fetishize supporting women will just send these women like thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  And they, sometimes they drip feed it back to them as an allowance and stuff, right?

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it, I don't really get it, but like, whatever. As long as you're not like a married guy and you're taking money out of your mortgage account and sending it to some other random woman.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  But whenever other guys hear about guys who are into being fin domed, financially dominated, like, that's like the ultimate simp. And then the teasing is relentless.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  I think there's even a bit of stigma about, you know, men who visit sex workers for the same reason. It's like, how much are you paying? Like, why can't you just go to, you know, Chris's club and pick up a woman for free, whatever.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  But I think this is what, you know, cultural norms are is our, it's often our attempts to kind of control the mating dynamics of other people.

• 1:11:57Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that men who work on their charisma or their abilities with women in like a, an overt conscious way, why do you think it is that there's a bit of an ick factor sometimes around that, both from men and women?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

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

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  of dominance and status that they display and kind of parlaying that into, into mating success.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  But, you know, the guys who really benefit from like reading mate or reading manosphere stuff are not typically those dark triad guys. They're more often guys who are kind of like a little socially awkward and aspie like me, or like I used to be and still am, where it's like, I just don't understand women. I don't understand clothing. How do I get in shape? What is a conversation?

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  Doing kind of remedial work on that, I think is, you know, that's, that's a huge win because there's a lot of guys out there with amazing potential that's not realized. Why? Because K through 12 public education doesn't teach any of this stuff.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Why would it?

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Male mentors, like guys' dads and uncles, don't seem to be bothering to teach it.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think as well, the gap between that generation and where we are now, in terms of what you need to know in order to be effective in the mating market, this is one of the common criticisms thrown around at some of the guys in the manosphere, that, "Bro, you've been married for fucking forty years. Like, you literally got into a relationship during a different, like a prehistoric era."

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that is like fifty percent accurate and fifty percent like a bullshit cope. Because human nature doesn't change that much.

• 1:14:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep, I agree.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Generation to generation. It might be true that a lot of guys' dads and granddads and uncles didn't actually have that much like mating experience themselves, right? They might not have actually had that many girlfriends. They might have only been in the mating market for like two years before they married someone as a college sophomore, right? So they might not know what they're talking about. But on the other hand, you know, to the extent that they've had real life experience and mating experience, there's no expiration date on on human wisdom about sexuality.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, just just because you're doing a dating app and you're like, meeting people through, you know, Instagram or TikTok or whatever, does not really change the basic like traits that people are looking for or the the trade offs they're facing.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the things as well, specifically on the guy's side, is that men like to see proof of work, or the equivalent of proof of work, right, from, to use a crypto metaphor, like, "Show me your workings. Where's your where's your proof?" It's like having a fat personal trainer. Like, "It's fine, I'm sure that you can get me in shape, but I'm probably gonna have a little bit more faith in the in the trainer that's not fat." And it's the same thing with this, that people want to see proof of work. Why do you think, I thought about this loads, I think there is a subreddit called the pink pill, but it's a little bit more like r slash women's rightsy rather than here are the fundamental principles of evolutionary psychology that you should use to become a more attractive,

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  better balanced partner for the man that you actually want to settle down with.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that isn't a pink pill?

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  There really needs to be, and I think an awful lot of young women would be, you know, a hell of a happier if they had more insight into their own preferences and desires and frustrations and where they come from and how to manage them better.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

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

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  wonderful and men don't appreciate that yet and here's how to manipulate them into appreciating your, your inner awesomeness. I think that's terrible. Like everybody who's young needs to work on themselves in all kinds of ways. So I think the absence of a pink pill is partly young women are so used to being kind of coddled in terms of advice that they get.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  I see this in academia too, in terms of like how mentors treat grad students.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Uh, like you can give pretty brutal feedback to male students often. And they'll be like, yeah, you're right. I didn't work very hard on that paper. I need to fix it. Uh, it's extremely tricky to give brutally honest feedback to a lot of female students now.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Because it'll be like, you're just sexist, you're patriarchal, like.

• 1:18:47Chris Williamson?

  Does that actually, have you seen this happen to colleagues or whatever?

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's pretty common. It's a pretty.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  And it's really handicapping because like if you're trying to learn how to uh, run a study or do science or write a journal paper or give a talk, like you really need a lot of brutally honest feedback to get better. You're like trying to become an Olympic, um, you know, skier where your coach is always like, awesome run. Oh, another awesome run. Like, great turn. Uh. No, you're not going to make progress without clear feedback. So I think there needs to be a little bit of a cultural shift where

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  young women need to appreciate like it's not actually doing you any favors in the long run.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  To never get any, any honest advice about what you're doing wrong.

• 1:19:50Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't want that either. The girls that I know that I'm friends with would feel so fucking patronized if they found out that because of other girls who were kind of lauding this sort of Damocles thing over the head of whoever it is that was potentially going to give them this feedback. As soon as they stray into an area that they think that, um, which again presumably is a loud minority that believe they're steering the ship. If I, if any of the girls I'm friends with knew that that was happening, they would be very, very unhappy. There is a big, big chunk of them that just want to become better and improve. But I also know exactly the books that you mean. I was looking, I can't remember the title of this book, but it was like, um.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Not gonna dress up for you or uh like girl doesn't wear high heels or some shit like that, pink and yellow and fucking fluffy front cover. And the entire thing was about how, oh, it was like, you don't deserve this something. And it was all about how everything that you're doing at the moment in your dating life is completely fine. And that you just need to keep on plugging away with your current modus operandi until you find the man that is going to be right. It's this like fucking awful cocktail of mollycoddling, victim mentality,

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  and glitter, like sparkly stuff.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

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

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  honest feedback. And it's been great listening to, you know, my wife Diana, you know, before we got married, if she would break up with guys, she'd be like, would you like, would you like my honest feedback about what you could fix?

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  She offered the debrief, did she?

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  She offered the debrief. And often, because she tended to date like rationalists and effective altruists, who would be like, yeah, actually, please do tell me, do tell me. And that's great, because she leveled a lot of guys up in terms of, you know, they ended up with like, much better girlfriends after that than they ever got before that.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  So this this kind of honest feedback can be super useful, but most people aren't willing to seek it out.

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  Is there a reflection from this kind of mollycoddling of women into, you know, we've just seen that there is a vast majority of women that aren't having children. There's some stats around either divorces or singletonness as well, which are pretty alarming. Is there an equivalent on the male side with incel culture, black pill and migtao? Whereas women are retreating into a community of women that are telling them, you will find the right man, they just don't deserve you, babe. Is the male equivalent to retreat into, you don't need a woman, we've got you, let's just go get jacked in the gym, bro?

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a there's a weird kind of symmetry in those reactions. But I think just because there's an average sex difference in kind of how you deal with with negative information. I think a lot of the guys who are very frustrated by the mating market are kind of like, oh, all women are just superficial gold diggers. Okay, I don't match their their traits. I never can. I didn't buy Bitcoin in 2012 when it was buck or whatever. So it's hopeless. And then you, you know, you go join a bunch of bitter dudes and hang out in their bitter cave and you just like, yeah, okay, fine. Mating is optional, I guess.

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

  I had, I had five grand of Ethereum when it was $110 and sold it at 150 and thought that I'd done a deal of a lifetime.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Many such cases. I mean, yeah, like the crypto winter after, what, early 2018? It's like, who was, who was selling Bitcoin at $2,000? Millions of people were.

• 1:25:03Chris Williamson?

  Everybody.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Everybody was. And now they're all bitter about it and sad and.

• 1:25:12Speaker 00

  But man, those opportunities are still out there, by the way. Not necessarily in Bitcoin, but in other things.

• 1:25:19Chris Williamson?

  This is not investment advice, but by Kadano. There's a movement at the moment to ban all dating apps because they disproportionately give a very small percentage of people almost all of the success. What are your thoughts on that?

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  You certainly get like that Pareto principle where like, okay, 80% of mating is done by whatever, 20% of guys or 2% of guys. But that's only the short term mating, really. It's not like the top 20% of guys are getting 80% of the marriages.

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  Right? So you need the right, you need to focus on the right metric. If the metric is how many one night stands is someone having? Yeah, dating apps are extremely unfair and they're very much a kind of winner take all market, particularly for, for males, but also to some degree for females.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  But to me, that's not the relevant metric. The relevant metric to me is who's, who's getting together and forming long-term pair bonds, getting married and having kids.

• 1:26:28Speaker 00

  And if you,

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  if you focus on that, I think a lot of dating apps still have enormous potential to help people meet other like-minded people. And like, the weirder someone is, the more unusual their beliefs, the more useful good dating apps could be.

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  How do you mean?

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  So like, I happened to meet my wife Diana, you know, in professional contacts and like conferences and we work in the same field. But after we started dating, we thought, I wonder what our match percentage is on OkCupid? Cause we each used OkCupid independently and we're like, okay, let's compare. Like, huh? And we're 98% match. And that was sort of like very validating.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Algorithmically reaffirming.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  To us, you know.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  But the problem is, okay, how else would, like, apart from working in the same field, how would we have found each other apart from OkCupid? If we're like Darwinian libertarian agnostics who are like into this and that kind of sex and have this and that weird set of alt centrist political views, you can't just go to a bar or a club and expect to find someone who matches on all those things, especially if you really care about those values, as we did. So if you're using dating apps and you're like, I just want to maximize one night stands, you're probably going to be very frustrated.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  But if you view it as this amazing way to find your future spouse, you know, who actually matches you on stuff you care about, that's the thing that matters. That's the story you're going to tell your grandkids in the future.

• 1:28:28Chris Williamson?

  What pieces of dating advice do you think that people should dispense with? Or do you wish that more people were focusing on when they're making their choices with mates in 2022?

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  I think people are innately somewhat attracted to general intelligence, but I think a lot of men in particular underestimate just how incredibly useful general intelligence will be in a long term mate and a woman. Even if the woman does not have some high flying career, like the amount of life stress you can avoid if your spouse is really smart and decisive and well informed and has some wisdom is enormous in terms of raising kids, where you live, you know, building a good

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  social network, being like frugal with money, making good investment decisions, handling health crises, figuring out, should we worry about that lump that we found or whatever? Like, there's dozens of domains where general intelligence really cashes out. And I would urge...

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  Like, most young men, you should try to date smart and not just hot.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Because until you've dated some really smart women, like for a while, and given their intelligence, like the chance to shine, so you understand, wow, there are a lot of hidden benefits to this, until you have that experience, you'll kind of not pay enough attention to it.

• 1:30:13Chris Williamson?

  I like that. What are you working on next? Have you got anything coming up?

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  Um, I want to do some more psychology research on global catastrophic risks and existential risks, because that's been one of my passions the last few years. I would really like humanity to survive into the 22nd century. That would be cool. And there's a bunch of risks that are pretty scary, that I think deserve a lot more attention, a lot more research.

• 1:30:47Chris Williamson?

  Which ones? What are you focused on?

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, a lot of these risks are well-known to the rationalist community and the effective altruist community, like, you know, artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, big potential X risk, bioweapons and pandemics, and particularly genetically engineered bioweapons, big risk. Nuclear war is still a major risk.

• 1:31:15Chris Williamson?

  Is nuclear war a true X risk?

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  I think it's certainly a global catastrophic risk. There's been a lot of discussion about, like, okay, which of these global catastrophic risks could actually kill, like, all eight billion people in a way we can never recover from? Nuclear war, it might leave enough little pockets of humanity that we could bounce back eventually, but it would still be, you know, still be a pretty bad thing. Yeah, it like, it might mean, oh, we colonize Mars in the year 2600 rather than 2050.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  So the psychology of those is really interesting because I think we have a pretty accurate model of like what the major catastrophic risks are. But the human ability to understand those is very, very bad. Like, we do not have a good intuitive grasp on any risks that affects like more people than just like me, my family, my little tribe. We never evolved the the ability to be long-termist about like what affects all of humanity. So I would love to do more more

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  research on that, where you actually like use the behavioral science insights to try to guide public understanding of these risks and also guide policy, what we do about it.

• 1:32:56Chris Williamson?

  Man, there was a brief period after I read The Precipice twice, back to back. And I was already familiar with X-Risks a lot, but that that book just really, really drove it home. And it was it was like an existential crisis from an existential risk book. But I read it, and I was like, okay, you know that this is important. You believe that this is important. What the fuck are you doing with your time that isn't screaming from the high heavens to everybody that this is the single most important task for everybody to have their focus on? Like, you should stop doing podcasts about fucking sexual selection. You should stop eating and sleeping, and you should spend your time and whatever influence you have, trying to get

• 1:33:38Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:34:07Speaker 00

  It's super important and it's kind of a, it's kind of a downer, but yeah, maybe you should, maybe you should become pretty poster boy for X risk podcast because like it, it does need a lot more attention. Um, and I have exactly the same reaction. Like everybody watching this should go read Toby Orz, the precipice. They should also read Daniel Ellsberg's book, uh, the doomsday machine about the risk of nuclear war throughout the 20th century. Uh, and they should watch, don't look up after they read the precipice.

• 1:34:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:34:41Speaker 00

  And so how do you, how do you get excited about this? And how do you find balance in life? I don't know. Like I've spent thousands of hours learning about crypto in the last 12 months, literally thousands of hours. And like, I could have been running really great psychology studies about X risk and I didn't. Um, well, partly you want to get into a position where you've got the social network and the financial resources and the life skills and like the, the professional elbow room where you can actually have an important impact.

• 1:35:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. The change needs to be magnified. Well, that's the argument of the effective altruism movement, right? That you, Geoffrey Miller, going and giving your time at a fucking local dog's shelter or something, or flying off to Africa is not maximizing the impact that you could have because you can generate more of an impact monetarily by selling books and doing talks and things like that. And then just giving it to the people that can actually go and do that. Like the specialization for work, uh, but tuned up for effective altruism. And you are right. There's, but dude, I, I could absolutely see a future in which I dedicate a, a big ton

• 1:36:00Chris Williamson?

  of time to just trying to make that accessible. If I was to give advice to the guys that are already down that rabbit hole about existential risk, the thing that I think that they're missing is a, a bunch of ways to incentivize influencers and creators to make it sexy and to make it interesting. You know, it is a really, really important. And, and these guys, they're fucking rationalists, right? They know where the blocks are. They should be able to see where they are. And it's the fact that, tell me who the influential existential risk YouTuber is.

• 1:36:36Chris Williamson?

  Who the fuck is it? It's not, it's not, there's nobody. There isn't a person that's doing it. And yet it's potentially the most important subject topic that humanity is ever going to deal with. Like, that should be, that should be something that people focus on.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it, it could be other things like, uh.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  So there's, there's like a lot of money in effective altruism now. There's, there's a lot more money than, than talent. But there's a tendency in the rationalist community to think, well, the way you solve problems is you, you write like white papers for your friends and like you do analyses and you share like the inner esoteric wisdom within the few thousand people in the effective altruism community. And you don't really do public outreach. Because there's an assumption that the public couldn't handle it. Right? Or if the public got alarmed by this, they would all go stampeding off in the wrong direction. Like, they might go, oh yeah, the real X risk is like,

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  the world might get two degrees Celsius warmer.

• 1:37:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  And they might not care about AI.

• 1:37:48Chris Williamson?

  So I get that, but this is the thing that's annoyed me the most. And ever since that table from Toby's book got put online, I post it around about every six months, saying, this is your regular reminder that climate change is not an existential risk priority. And people are concerned about the planet. It's obvious that you can weaponize societal concern about the future of primarily not humanity, mostly nature, but that you, that there is a compulsion in there where people can think on that broad scale. Right? It just happens to be that the first fucking movement that got a hold of that was pointing at a risk, which is like, what? One in 10,000 over the next 100 years?

• 1:38:32Chris Williamson?

  One in 30,000 over the next 100 years? I think Toby's got it in his book. It's, it's nothing. It's negligible. One in 10 for artificial intelligence? One in 10 for bioengineered weapons? One in 30 for maybe nanotechnology and natural pandemics? Like, there you go. That's the fucking focus. Do you care about the dolphins? Do you care about not being turned into fucking paper clips? That's the problem.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

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

• 1:39:20Chris Williamson?

  Nick Bostrom's been on.

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

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

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  So, yeah, Elon himself should do more about this, but I, I think he realizes like it's kind of a bummer and people don't want to hear it.

• 1:40:12Chris Williamson?

  Would you be up for coming back on and doing a primer on existential risk at some point? Like, if you haven't heard about it before, if you don't know about it, here's what we need to know and we can just thrash that out for an hour and a half or something?

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be awesome.

• 1:40:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm down.

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  Looks like, you know, I'm not an expert on like all the technical risks, but I think I can provide some kind of evolutionary context of like, um, why long-term survival of humanity is kind of important.

• 1:40:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm down. Geoffrey Miller, ladies and gentlemen, people want to keep up to date with what you do. Where should they go?

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  Primalpolly.com is my website. Um, and probably the best books, if you're interested in reading something I've written is, uh, The Mating Mind, or Spent, or Mate, or Virtue Signaling.

• 1:41:02Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. They'll all be linked in the show notes below. Geoffrey, thank you for coming on, man. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:41:17Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  And Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  From the director of Birdman and The Ravenant.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.