How Does A Non-Monogamous Marriage Work? | Caleb Jones

Caleb Jones is an online coach, blogger and non-monogamy advocate. Statistically, most marriages end in divorce. This limited life span for the traditional approach to relationships has lead some people to seek an alternative setup. Today we hear from one of the most prominent figures in the non-monogamy movement as Caleb explains his relationship-rationale, we also discuss sobriety, weed legalisation and UK vs US politics. Extra Stuff: Check out Caleb's Website - https://calebjonesblog.com/ Follow Caleb on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheCalebJones Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Caleb Jones. He is an online coach, a blogger and a prominent figure in the non-Monogamous scene. Now statistically, most marriages will end in divorce. It's a sad fact, but unfortunately one that's true. And this has caused many people to seek an alternative setup for their relationships. Hilariously, I'm actually away in Barcelona at a wedding at the moment. So I apologize to Andy and Jess. This isn't a comment on how I think the future of your relationship is going to go. But Caleb is a superbly interesting guy. And this particular topic is nothing short of fascinating.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  I was, I wouldn't say triggered, but it brought up a lot of very visceral emotions. Thinking about allowing someone that you love to sleep with somebody else. And the discussion we have is quite nuanced. I'm really interested to hear what other people think because I found it challenging to talk about it and think about it in a very unique way. So I'm going to stop chatting shit and I'll let you listen to Caleb take it away. But yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts. At Chriswell X on all social media.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  For the moments that matter, choose Curad Naturals. Infused with aloe vera and vitamin E, Curad Naturals Bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts and burns while also moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life surprises call for the best, choose Curad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit curad.com to learn more.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all wheel drive Camry, Corolla Cross or Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade in. Get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  But for now, please welcome Caleb Jones.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Caleb Jones, all the way from the other side of the Atlantic. How are you today?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I'm good. How are you?

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  Very good, man. Very good. Very glad to have you on. Lots of interesting stuff for us to speak about. You have got the largest tankard that you're drinking out of that I've ever seen. What is that?

• 3:25Speaker 03

  You know, I drink a lot of water and so I would have these little cups by my desk and it was never big enough. So I was like, I gotta get a fucking, you know, I gotta get a tanker. I gotta get something real.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  What does that, that's like a what, liter and a half? Or you guys would call it like a gallon?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably a liter and a half. Yeah, yeah. It's just water. It'd be cool if it was vodka, but it's not.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Or like some mead. It's a bit Game of Thrones.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my entire life. So I just, it just makes me look cool when I drink my water, I guess.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting lifestyle choice. Why did you choose to do that?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  You know, I don't have an answer for that question. I wish I had an answer. I wish I had some kind of cool story like, well, my parents were alcoholics and no, my parents were normal. And um, here's my guess. So when I was in seventh grade, seventh grade, so I was about, yeah, about 12. I took one of the cans of beer out of my dad's refrigerator. And I took it on the side of the house and took a little coffee cup and I filled it up. And I promised myself I'd drink the whole beer because I want to get drunk. Because that's looks like a lot of fun.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  And I went, and I made myself drink the whole beer. I went, oh, this is terrible. I wait, I can't wait till I get drunk. I kept drinking and drinking and then nothing happened. I just felt dizzy for a few minutes. And I think maybe that was it. I don't, maybe, I'm guessing. I'm also a, an INTJ for Myers-Briggs. Those Myers-Briggs personality types.

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yep.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  So I'm an INTJ and I'm an extreme INTJ. So my little dot is in the far upper corner. And the INTJ is in the far upper corner of the 16 personality types. So not only am I, am I an INTJ, I'm an extreme version of an INTJ. And so one of the aspects of most INTJs, not all of them, is that I'm a control freak over myself. But I don't want to control anybody else. So I'm thinking that sub, this isn't conscious, but maybe subconsciously, I don't want to lose control of myself by getting drunk.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I think.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  I don't know. That's a guess. I really don't know.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  That's the same for my.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  I'm gonna have to do it at some point. People like, you guys drunk once. Alright, I'll get drunk once. It's fine.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  It's a, so I'm nine months into 18 months sober, right? I'm a club promoter by trade. So I've run, I've run nightclubs for uh, 12 years and that's been.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  You're in comedy, you're nine months in?

• 5:29Chris Williamson?

  Nine months sober, yeah. But this is the, uh, I've done six months twice and I'm doing nine months now, just to see if I can. Um, my argument is that I work in the nightlife industry. I've worked around about a thousand nights in my career across the last decade and a bit. Um, so if, if I can do it, other people can. And on top of that as well.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Do you, wait, do you consider yourself an alcoholic or no?

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  No, no. So Ed Latimore, have you heard of Ed?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I'd podcasted with Ed and he, uh, synopsized alcohol and people's views of sobriety better than anyone I've ever heard before. And it's this sentence. Alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  No one's saying to you, why are you not shooting up with heroin today? Why have you not got a massive line of cocaine on your desk behind you? But alcohol's so ingrained into our society that people just say, you're not drinking, you must have a problem with alcohol. That's the only reason that anyone would choose to go sober. Whereas for me, I, I, I was a typical so, social drinker. Go out, maybe. Once every fortnight, but I'm a club promoter drinker, right? So when you go out, you go hard.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  It's straight arming spirits into your mouth in a nightclub, etc.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  All that sort of stuff. Yeah, exactly.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  And I just about two and a bit years ago, I wanted to do more with my life. I wanted to have a lot of experiences. I wanted to travel more. I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted to push my business and my fitness and my, I wanted to develop a reading habit and a meditation habit and all these other things. And I looked at my time as if it was a set of accounts and saw that there was this big day and a half cost getting chopped out of my fortnight, fortnight period, one day hungover and then a half a day at maybe 50% capacity. And then you finally get back on to it. So I honestly think it, it doesn't surprise me that you have a lot of irons in the fire.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  Considering you've never been knocked off with a hangover, like the only time that you'll be like that's if you're ill.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's pretty much it. I've wondered about if I was a typical drinker or even a heavy drinker, because I've got some of those guys in my family. Where I would be today as opposed to where I am now. And also how I would look, how my skin, I'm 47, so how my skin would look now.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  You look fantastic for 47.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Well, I moisturize.

• 7:54Chris Williamson?

  That's the key. Ladies and gentlemen, moisturize early.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, my, I, there's an old Doctor Who line. The girl says, you're 900 years old. He's like, well, I moisturize. I moisturize, yeah. But I know, I have buddies who are my age, like I've known since high school, who are, you know, not even big drinkers, just but regular drinkers and my God, you can see the difference. Even guys don't get a lot of sun like me. They still like, wow. Or smokers too. Smoking is the other one. Smoking and drinking. I've never smoked anything either.

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  I smoked, I smoked some weed once for about three seconds. So I went, okay, here you go. Thanks. That's about it. Yeah. So what I had to learn how to do was to drink wine. I'll sip wine. Because for what you're talking about, I would sit with a group of people or even on a first date with a woman and they'd be drinking and I'd have nothing or my water and I go, why don't you drink? They, people get uncomfortable.

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Especially if everyone else is drinking and you're not, especially, including if you're one on one, they're drinking and you're not, people hate that. Why don't you drink it? So I had to learn to find whatever the most pussy wine there was, which is Riesling, I think.

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  So I get a Riesling, little girly wine, tastes almost like apple juice and I would take a sip. They go, oh, good, he's drinking. Okay, good.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  And then they start drinking again.

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  They don't notice that you've only gone through, you've gone through like one glass in the time that someone else has gone through a bottle.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Not even a glass.

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Half a glass.

• 9:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get you.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Glass for two hours.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  But it looks like I'm drinking because it's sitting in front of me and it's less than what I got when I was served to me. So they, oh, good, okay. He's drinking now. I can relax. Now that someone else is doing something, I can relax, which is the exact opposite of my entire viewpoint of life. But that's what human beings are. We're communal creatures.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  We're mimetic creatures, as my friend George and a previous host, a guest of the podcast would say. Yeah, alcohol's a weird one, man. It triggers people in such bizarre ways. You're totally right. This.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Like, there's nothing else. No one else is shooting up heroin or getting a tattoo or going like, going paleo. Or like riding their bike to work and saying like, why are you not doing all of these things? People do.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  That's changing, you know, in some parts of the world, especially in mine, I don't know about, I don't know about England, probably not. But in my part of the world, so the Pacific Northwest, United States, weed is becoming like that now. Oh, you don't smoke weed? People are kind of, they're starting to get surprised now because it's become so prevalent. And it's, and it's legal in most parts of the United States now, and maybe not most, a lot.

• 10:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  So weed, marijuana is starting to move in that zone of alcohol where people, they don't think something's wrong with you don't smoke weed, but they are, I've had people be surprised.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  That you don't.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  It's in this region.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that's partly because you're a blogger, an author, writer, one of those creativity types? Kind of pushing the boundaries. You maybe sound like the sort of person that has that personality.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Probably, yeah, probably. Another is, another aspect is that I'm a libertarian, so they just expect that that's part of the deal. Another one is people who know my lifestyle sexually, they go, well, really, I'm shocked you don't smoke weed. So maybe it's a lot of factors. That's a good point. I didn't think of that.

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  If you, if you're sleeping with, with multiple women and not holding down monogamous relationships, making a stand. Uh, presuming, people presuming that you may be making a moral stand or some sort of virtue stand with regards to the alcohol or the weed, which it doesn't.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Oh, I get that a lot.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it doesn't seem is the case. It's just a lifestyle choice. The same way as some people don't like to wear blue. Or some people don't like to drive stick. Like, this is just a lifestyle choice.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've gotten that a lot. People assume that I'm Christian or Mormon or something like that. Oh, you must be really religious. You don't drink? No, no. I'm agnostic. Yeah, I'm not religious. It's societal programming. No, I believe in God, but I'm not religious. So, no. So, yeah, I've definitely gotten that. Yeah, it's just part of it's part of the culture I've learned to accept. You have to learn to accept the oddness of your culture, or else you're gonna be pissed off all the time. And I want to be happy, so I can't do that.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  The marijuana thing's bizarre because we're seeing, we're seeing a substance go from being heavily controlled to legalized for medical use to like fragmented legalization across the states. In certain areas, it is still illegal. Some, it's legal for medicine. Some, it's totally legal recreationally. And we're observing the social conditioning change in front of our eyes.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Most Americans, I don't know about most, half, I forget the stats, they always change. Something like half or most of Americans are on something anyway. Prescription drugs, things like that.

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Something like the majority, not the vast majority, but the majority of women over thirty five, over thirty five or forty, again, I forget the statistics, are on some kind of mood altering drug.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  Man, that's terrifying.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  It's really bad. So, irregardless, irregardless, regardless of weed, irregardless is not a word. My grammar teacher, regardless of weed, people are on drugs anyway. It's just it's part of our culture.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  Which one do you want to choose?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  And it's getting worse. As societal, as Western society continues its slow collapse, you're gonna see more and more people going in that direction anyway, finding something that'll make them not miserable. So, it makes sense to me that more people will be smoking weed or prescription drugs. Heroin is a big epidemic now, at least in the United States. Heroin's gone crazy. Last four or five years, gone nuts.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  There's a

• 13:04Speaker 03

  I've seen it.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  There's some really interesting TV shows. So, the UK, we get exposed to some of the stuff from America, but I think it's quite, it's quite difficult for us to fact check, not fact check, but like a virtue check or integrity check. The Content that we're being fed because like I see a lot of stuff like so I'll see stuff from Netflix. That's like dope, which is a really cool Netflix documentary series, two seasons in. Um, each episode is in a different US state, uh, yeah, US city. And one film crew follows the cops and one film crew follows the drug dealers.

• 13:48Chris Williamson?

  And you see how the two are trying to catch each other and how they play off against each other. It's all, uh, all the drug dealers have got masks on and stuff like that. It's honestly fascinating TV program for anyone in the UK that hasn't seen it yet. I suggest that you go watch it now, but like stuff like that, like I don't know how, how realistic or how dramatized that is. But they talk about this fentanyl crisis and they talk about, um, like Xanax crises and, and all this sort of stuff. Um, and yeah, trying to judge it from the UK because we don't have. The big pharma companies aren't allowed to advertise on TV, so that ask your doctor. Like all that stuff doesn't exist.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  For us, I, I wouldn't.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  It's an epidemic, but it's not something you see out in the world. So you can go to a mall or walk down the street in the United States. You will not be able to tell that people are on whatever they're on, or they're going to take something later that evening. Even with a lot of the heroin people, you really can't tell. So, but when you get to meet people and talk to people and get into their lives, you find out, oh my God, really? Holy crap. Just women alone, women I've seen last four or five years, the heroin thing is. It's, it's nothing like it was 10 years ago. It's a noticeable difference. And again, that could be regional. The United States is such a big place. It's very hard to say in the United States.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Everything's localized, right?

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can't say, yeah, I live between Seattle and Portland. So in that area is what I experienced when I'm not traveling, I travel a lot. So it's hard to say the United States. That's why I like these people who set a goal to like visit a hundred countries. I, I, my goal is based on cities because if you've been to Beijing, have you visited China?

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  No, you visited Beijing. If you went to, to New York, have you visited the United States? No, you visited New York, same kind of thing. So, yeah, it is, it's, it's really interesting. And, uh, again, I just, this is, we, we talked about this earlier. I just not something I mentioned anymore. I just, I don't care.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  How, um.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  So I I totally understand the people's desire to escape feeling feeling feelings is hard, right? Like, like, some feelings really suck. Yeah. But I think it shows.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  That's why you have to learn to manage your emotional states. That's why you have to learn emotional control. I'm telling guys this all the time. What's if you don't you're fucked, especially living today, you're gonna be screwed with the internet, just with the internet alone. Very hard to be happy if you can't manage your own emotions. Because every day you'll be pissed off about something.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  You are constantly being triggered. You're right. It's interesting to see the difference between how and again, this may be localized within my area or my social group in the UK. But certainly for me, if you were to say, tell me one person that you know that is on a mood altering drug, I would actually struggle to be able to find someone that really someone that I know. And I think what that shows, what that shows is the natural way to deal with bad emotions can be dictated by what firstly, social societal conditioning in your local peer group, other people around you in the US, maybe, oh, you feel bad, there's a Vicodin, or you should just go see your doctor, or whatever it might be. Right. But

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  on top of that as well, obviously, it's top down, it's being broadcast at you like you have a problem. The solution, the solution is in a pill or a cream or a da da da da

• 17:03Speaker 03

  As you said that I just thought through in my own head, how many people I personally know on something, and I came up with six names. I know a lot of people, though. Yeah. So maybe I'm not a good example. But I, as I'm thinking, I'm thinking of more or seven. People, the number of people I personally know on something, even if it's a prescription something. Yeah.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  I so my point is that I think I wonder how many people who really need medication slip through the net. In the UK by not having this awareness about the fact that prescription drugs could help and how many people in the US are being oversold on things that they don't need because of this societal conditioning and because of this stuff here.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, that last aspect is most people who take these drugs. If you just did basic things like get eight hours of sleep, drink a lot more water, monitor your hormones, get your hormone tests done, meditate a little bit, focus on something you like, have more sex. You just do those basic things. All of a sudden, a lot of these symptoms, not all of them, depends the person, would go away with no drugs. And these would actually enhance your life instead of causing side effects. But what I just said, those things, those are hard. That takes work. People go, oh, I don't want to work. All right. Take a drug then.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, a pill's a pill's super easy. Have you read Lost Connections by Johann Hari?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic book on depression. Highly recommended if you've got a.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Some clinical depression or just in depression in general?

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  Depression in general. So he looks at the standard model of depression. It's a imbalance of chemicals in the brain. And.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Send that to me when we're done talking. I'm interested.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic guy. I cannot. Johann, if you're listening, he does tune in sometimes. If you're listening, I'm going to continue hassling you to come on because I need you. I need to speak to you, man. But it's fantastic book. Really, really interesting. And he identifies nine biological causes of depression. Sorry, seven biological, seven environmental causes of depression, two biological. And the environmental ones are like.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  That's about, that makes sense to me. Seven out of nine. That's about right. It's about what I would expect.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And he talks about loss of connection to nature, loss of connection to a meaningful future, loss of connection to work, loss of connection to childhood trauma, all of these things. And it's a very comprehensive analysis of people and it's very narrative based. So again, for anyone who's listening, who wants to enlighten themselves and make themselves a little bit better educated about why depression occurs, either in yourself or in the people that are around you. I can't recommend, it's the 80 20 book on depression for me. Like just read it. Super easy read, little bit long, but super easy read. And and you got it, man. But yeah, the way that people deal with it, they just think America appears to have, and it's bad, right? Because it reflects on you guys as a nation.

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  People see Americans as this quick fix, transactional, transitory, like lazy people because of that culture, which isn't true in terms of the culture. It's just in terms of how people are dealing with things and it's

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Historically, it has not been true.

• 20:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Historically, Americans have been the hardest working people on earth. Historically, right now, we're changing. Historically, and there's a decent, still a decent percentage of us who are not lazy. But that's all changing based on demographic factors and economic factors and cultural factors and all kinds of things. So it's changing.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you think the trajectory has got in store for you guys at the moment?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  For what?

• 20:32Chris Williamson?

  Moving forward with with that particular, I guess, line of sight for whether people are going to continue, whether there's going to be something to change. Does there need to be a big intervention?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  There needs to be, but there won't be.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Where Americans are now set on their path, we peaked, I mean, I'm not a historian, but based on the stuff I've read, and I've read a lot, America as a nation in relation to other nations peaked somewhere around the mid, I believe, the mid to late 1960s. And since then, we've been on kind of on the down slope, especially if you compare us to other nations.

• 21:03Chris Williamson?

  Is that happiness?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  And that is, what's that?

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  Is that happiness?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  That is one.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  It's economics, economically positioned in the world, our currency, levels of happiness. Now you have depression, suicide has gone up, all this crazy stuff. That's all happened. In my lifetime, I was born in 1972. And so in my lifetime, I have seen my country and most other countries in the Western world too, I don't want to just pick on my country, but I live here, so I see it.

• 21:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I have seen my country get worse in literally every aspect, except for crime rates have gone way down and technology has improved. Other than those two things, by every other measurement you could find, my country is worse off when I was, from when I was a kid to now. And this is the first time Americans have experienced this. Historically, if you were a 47 year old American, you would see your country, if you were born in the 1800s, 1700s, early 1900s, even mid 1900s, you would have seen your country grow and improve, even with problems. We grew and improved in the 20th century, even though we had lots of problems. So you, but you would have seen a net growth. And so like, for example, wages, real wages for, as suggested for inflation, have been stagnant

• 22:13Speaker 03

  since I was one year old. And I'm, I'm almost 50. So I've never seen wages increase in my country as compared to inflation. So in the 1970s, my dad was a lower income worker. He made a low, he was a lower, lower, middle class, maybe even upper, lower class guy. And he, he barely made me money, but he was able to, in the seventies, he was able to support a family of seven. He was able to support a stay at home mom, my wife, my wife, my mom, and us, I had five siblings, so the five of us.

• 22:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And that was in the late seventies, early eighties. Today, a guy, that's not even possible for a guy today in the United States. You couldn't even do that. You have to make a six-figure income or higher to maintain all that stuff. A low-income guy can barely even support himself. A low-income guy today would struggle to live on his own and have a car in the United States, in most cities, in most regions. So that's, and that's the difference I've seen since I grew up, just in my lifetime.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's not. I don't know, man. I don't know what the, I don't know what the future's got in store. I think, again, for the UK, we are a little bit less despondent because there's so much less turmoil. Like, I look at America, especially American politics, and it, it looks like a sitcom. But that's how it appears.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  It is. You're, you are correct. The perception is reality. It's a sitcom.

• 23:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  It's been a sitcom for quite a while. This is not, it's not with Trump. People think it started with Trump. It started long before Trump. But yeah, it's a sitcom. Correct.

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I, I see that. And I think, for some reason, maybe it's just me with rose, rose-tinted glasses, and some of the listeners may be saying that I'm completely wrong about this, but I just, the UK doesn't have that same degree of turmoil. We're not as, we're certainly not as polarized in terms of the, of the politics.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with you.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  Um, and I think that just that, like, that on its own forces people, when you have fewer people at the ends of each spectrum politically, in terms of how they identify with their particular, particular kind of thinking stance, which is what it's become, right? Political stance is now not just about politics. It downstream from that totally. Well, that, surely that's got to affect your opinion on weed. Surely that's got to affect your opinion on alcohol and, and on pharmaceuticals and blah, blah, blah, blah, taxes and all the rest of it. But I for the UK, people are a lot less identified with that. Um, we got a lot more rain to contend with. I think than you guys. So there's a lot more like umbrella putting up and putting down. Um, but like, I don't know, it's, it's interesting. I wonder how.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  I'll be there in, uh, I'll be there in October, I think.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. It'll still be, it'll still be okay weather by the time you get here. I was reading, um, just before we came on, I was reading a news article and it was talking about how to sell apps to kids. So it was an, an advice piece for app developers about the two trigger points for getting apps to kids. And we're talking like under, I think it's like under sevens or under eights. And it was like, there's two different types of people that you can sell to. One of them are the kids. And then get them to kind of pester the parents and the other ones, the parents. I'm, I, I was looking at this article. Like, I can't even believe that this is a thing. Like, in whose right mind should anyone be targeting? Well, why are you targeting apps at kids?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Money.

• 25:30Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Why are you surprised? Are you really surprised? You should be surprised.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  Not surprised. Not surprised. You are right. Not surprised, but I am, um, I'm concerned.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  No, I'm, I'm biased in this area. I'm an extreme capitalist, so I'm very biased in this area, but still, no one should be surprised. Yeah, that's this, again, this is part of the world we live in. Sure.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right. And so we touched on it before, your, uh, particular views on monogamy and dating and stuff like that. The listeners at home, as I mentioned before we started, we've, we've never had anybody on who has been a, uh, polyamory advocate or whatever you would even, I don't even know how you class yourself. So can you just take us from the beginning? Talk to us about your, your stance and about what it means and stuff like that.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  So the non-Monogamous, I don't call it polyamory because polyamory is a segment of non-Monogamous. So polyamory is very specific. Polyamory is when you are dating multiple women and they are dating multiple men. So it's kind of this big happy group. Kind of falling all over each other, which is fine. Got you. That's one segment of non-Monogamous. So I call it non-Monogamous. A, it's a little less threatening than polyamory. And B, it's more inclusive of every, all the different types of non-Monogamous. Cool. Um, so non-Monogamous is not a core. I mean, it sounds like it is sometimes, depending on what you read of what I write. It's not the core of what I talk about. It is a important slice of the pie. So it really starts with long-term masculine happiness. And so the way men work, and women are different, but the way men work is the freer you are

• 26:58Speaker 03

  on a given day-to-day basis, meaning you can wake up every morning and do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want, without having to check in with anybody or get anyone's permission. If you, the more, the closer you are to that condition, the happier you tend to be. So you will be happier if you have your own business, generally speaking, than if you have a corporate wage job. Cause you have more freedom. You will be happier if you're allowed to have sex with multiple women, whatever you want, than if you're only allowed to have sex with one woman. At least long-term. And that's the way you're wired. You can't control this. That's just the way you are. There are rare and unusual exceptions, but they're the rare and unusual exceptions. So if you look at, when I talk about things like Alpha 2.0, that is an entire lifestyle where you're gearing your entire life around maximum freedom

• 27:42Speaker 03

  in all the seven areas of your life. The two core of those for a man being financial and sexual, that you start there. You start with those two core areas, because those help you with all the other areas, once those are at a baseline. And so, yeah, if you go into the woman part, you need to be allowed to, for number one, you need to have sex. A new movement now is guys not having sex. So that's not gonna make you happy long-term. You're a guy! So assuming you're having sex, you need to be allowed to have sex with multiple women, because long-term, you're not gonna be happy with having sex with just one woman. Short-term, you will. You can make it work for a while, a year and a half, two years, three years, whatever you are, every guy's different. But long-term, and the models I talk about are all long-term models that last for the rest of your life,

• 28:25Speaker 03

  not just in your twenties and early thirties, but your forties, fifties, sixties, and so on. These are long-term models. So if you want a long-term happiness model, you've gotta work in there in some way, your ability to have sex with multiple women if you choose to. And there's four or five different ways you can do that. We can talk about those if you want. But that's, that's where the non-Monogamous comes from. It's not about non-Monogamous. It's about long-term freedom, which creates long-term happiness for dudes.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think men and women are so different? What specifically, obviously genetically, you've alluded to the fact that a man's genetic predisposition is to push his genes as far as is possible. However, it would appear, based on some of the people who I've spoken to, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, that pair bonding has to occur. The reason that gestation is nine months and that sex is a long process, a pleasurable process, the fact that women don't have visual ovulation, all of these sort of things. The fact that conception is actually relatively fairly tough for humans compared with some other animals.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  All of that leads towards pair bonding. Pair bonding needs to occur because the infant is pretty much dependent on the mother, the family, but specifically the mother, for the first 10 to 15 years. And you need to have a father around to protect that particular pairing, or however many children there is, that particular family unit. You need to have the father around or else everybody dies. Because if a jaguar comes while you've got a mother.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  All accurate.

• 30:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  So. So now here's the problem. This is where people get confused. Everything you just said is scientifically accurate. I've written about this stuff myself. So you're, that's absolutely true. Human beings, and this is where people get messed up. Human beings are pair bonding creatures, but they are not sexually monogamous creatures. There are two, those are two different things. So you can be, I'm a perfect example. I am pair bonded. I'm married. I am pair bonded to one woman who I share my life with, who I love. I don't love anyone else. I don't want to be with anyone else. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with anyone else, just her and her with me. So we are pair bonded, but I'm allowed to.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Go out on the side and get laid whenever I want, whenever I choose with whomever I like. There's a few ground rules I agree to, but beyond that, I'm still allowed to be non-monogamous, even though I'm pair bonded. So what happens is people quote these scientific facts, and they are facts. Absolutely true. They say, "See, we're monogamous." Well, then, why is it we have a 76% north of 76% divorce rate? Why do we have a 77% infidelity rate if we're monogamous? We are pair bonding creatures. We are not monogamous creatures. So again, if you want to be long-term happy, and I realize this is difficult, because you're gonna run into all kinds of societal programming and societal conditioning that tells you this is wrong, you're gonna have to be long-term in your life, not when you're in your twenties. I tell guys, you shouldn't have a girlfriend till you're in your thirties, in my opinion.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  So once you're an older guy, yes, you need to be pair bonded, but not monogamous. So that means you sit down with your special someone and you explain it to her like an adult. "Hey, I love you. I wanna be with you. I don't wanna be with anyone else. And I'm a human being, and I'm a guy." And that means A, B, and C, we could lie to each other like teenagers and say, "Well, we're in love, and we'll be together forever, and we'll never wanna sleep with anyone else, because we're in love, and Disney's and Narnia and unicorns and roses and shit." Or we can be adults and say, "Let's be together. Let's figure out a plan where we can integrate this into our lifestyles, so I can be happy and you can be long-term happy, because I'm happy, and we avoid all these problems, or at least most of the problems that normal couples have." The 76% divorce rate people.

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  I mean, the fact that there is such a high divorce rate, people just presume, I guess, if you just, if you think about it, or if you to ask the layperson on the street, "Why is the divorce rate so high?" It would be maybe some kind of wistful heritage thing about, "Well, it wasn't that way in my parents' day. My parents are still together."

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Right. They just cheated.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Right. People stayed married, and the men, mostly men, cheated. They still weren't monogamous.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so why?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Long-term marriage and marriage working.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Well, they've been married for 47 years. He's never cheated. Maybe he hasn't, but the odds are... I've talked to a lot of old guys, guys my grandfather's age, guys in their 90s, World War II guys. These guys were married, and they stayed married. They were not monogamous. They cheated. You've seen, I don't know if you've seen the American show Mad Men about Americans in the 60s. It was the standard model back then. You cheated. That's just what you did when you're a guy. Women too, not as much, but they did too.

• 33:15Chris Williamson?

  Why has the divorce rate changed?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Because women are now allowed to do whatever they want. So back in the olden days in like the 1950s, which a lot of guys in my world, the red pyramid, the red pill minister world, I want to go back to, um, women weren't allowed to get divorced. So women would actually go into a court in the 40s, 30s, 50s and say, I want to divorce my husband. And the judge say, what the hell? Get, get, you can't get divorced. Get back to your husband, next case. Or and or they were not, they couldn't do it financially. They couldn't support themselves. They needed to be married.

• 33:44Chris Williamson?

  Ah, so we've

• 33:44Speaker 03

  And if they got divorced, their, their religious family would disown them.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so

• 33:49Speaker 03

  All these factors, all these factors are now gone. Women are now encouraged to get divorced. Now it's the opposite.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've become more financially independent, uh, more secular and more accepting, I guess, of divorce as a whole.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, uh, yeah, I, I mean, that

• 34:06Speaker 03

  And it'll get worse and it'll get worse. The divorce rate will increase. You're going to see soon in the next decade, you're going to see 90 plus percent divorce rates. People are very slow to figure this out. Written about this a lot. They don't want to admit the system doesn't work anymore. So they're just going to keep getting married, keep getting divorced, keep screwing up their kids, keep getting financially raped, keep cheating on each other and yelling at each other. And it's going to be a while before human beings finally go, you know, we should probably pick a different system. This isn't working. It's going to be a while. Unfortunately.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  The stats, I mean, you know, I, I, there's not much that I can say about the fact that more than three quarters of the people, uh, who get married end up getting divorced. As far as I was aware, maybe it's a UK stat. I think it was more than 50. Um, but no matter what the stat is, if it is a more likelihood, a high likelihood that you're going to get divorced than stay together. It's a worrying statistic. No matter what your views on monogamy are, it's a pretty worrying statistic.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah. Instead, people should figure out how to stay together like two normal human beings, the way human beings actually work, instead of the way human beings work in a Disney fairy tale. Where we're going to get married and we're going to be in love forever. We're never going to fuck anyone else because we're in love. And that's because, because no way. Yeah.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  What were you saying at the beginning about humans being mimetic creatures and about us taking a lot of societal conditioning? Swallowing that red pill, as you've alluded to, is a difficult thing to do when everyone else around you hasn't, right? Like when you, you're-

• 35:37Speaker 03

  That's the big problem with guys in my audience. One of the biggest questions I get, "I don't know any other men like me. If I tell my mom, she's gonna get mad at me." Yeah, that's the big challenge. I've been working last year and a half on that specific problem for guys to plug into more communities and things like that. But yes, that's the problem. That's the problem. Because it's very rare these days. Now, 10 years ago, I would get this, but these days, it's very rare for a man to say, "Oh, no. Traditional monogamous marriage works great as long as you do these few things, and every guy should do that." Very rare, a guy, even a hardcore, right-wing evangelical Christian, even those guys don't say that. They say, "Yeah, it doesn't work, but I'm not gonna do this and this." Non-Monogamous, well, fuck that. No. Okay, but that's fine. You don't have to

• 36:22Speaker 03

  like it, but the alternative doesn't work. You're pointing at something that doesn't work. So you've either got something that doesn't work, or you've got something that works but makes you emotionally uncomfortable for a while. So those are your two options. I'd rather pick this, because I want to be happy. I'm not gonna pick something that doesn't work.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  So one of the first things that comes to mind for me when I think about a non-typical, non-monogamous relationship, as you're a non-typical relationship which is non-monogamous, is what do you do about the kids? What do you do about raising children in that sort of an environment?

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I know, I personally know about, let's see, as in right this second, I know, let's see, seven couples? Six couples? And I've known many other couples, six or seven? I have to think about that for a minute, who are married, who live together. No one really knows what kind of lifestyle they lead, other than close friends and people like me, and they have kids. As a matter of fact, when I was married the first time, back when I was young and stupid, I was married, 1,000 years ago, I was married traditionally and monogamously, and it didn't work because she got depressed and started taking pills. And when we were married, while I was married, four, literally, four houses down on my street, I didn't know this till after I had moved away, there was a married couple with two

• 37:41Speaker 03

  little kids who played with my kids, who had a wide-open marriage. I had no idea. As far as I know, they're still married. This is decades ago. And they were the happiest couple on the block. And they had kids. Now, no one knew. That's why I didn't know. Didn't know till later. He was kind of with the grape. I went, what? I actually called him up and said, is this true? I don't want to freak out here. But is it true that that is like, ah? And and my old thing, my old joke to myself is if I had just sat down and talked to that guy for an hour before I got married the first time, incorrectly, in my view, it would have saved me a lot of time and effort. So you can have kids. You just can't. I have kids. I raised kids under this model. I just got remarried, let's say, a year and a half ago. Yes. And so my daughter and my son were little when I was living this way. You just, there are rules. You don't parade women around your kids, obviously.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  You need to show your kids some level of consistency. You need to be an example. You don't go out and telling everybody in their school or all your friends and family that what you're doing if you don't want to. People don't have to know what you're doing. That's there's no requirement there. You just have to be realistic about your sexual desires. So, yeah, you can have kids. A lot of people have kids. And again, if I say have an open marriage and have kids, immediately your societal programming goes,

• 38:50Speaker 03

  okay, fine. You can you can live your life like two plus two equals five if you want. That's fine. Cool. You won't be very happy. You'll have a lot of problems. You can do that. Fine. I'd rather live two plus two equal four, even if I don't really like four and four emotionally bothers me initially. That's how I look at it.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  So some of the listeners may have heard us talk about him before, but Aubrey Marcus, I don't know whether you know who that is, the guy that owns On

• 39:13Speaker 03

  I've heard that name, but that's all I know. I've heard that name.

• 39:15Chris Williamson?

  So he's the CEO or founder of Onnit, which is a

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  supplement company that Joe Rogan is a partner of. Um, very big, very successful. Um, I haven't actually gone spoken that much about Aubrey, but people who read my tweets will have seen that recently I had to unsubscribe from his newsletter. Aubrey and his wife, Whitney, who is a very attractive, um, ultimate fighting championship type, uh, ring announcer commentator type woman, uh, super fit, very, but they are in a, I think it's classed as a polyamorous or an open relationship. I there's probably a degree of granularity that you would be able to discern from what's going on that I I'm not going to be able to get to. But, um, and he talks about this experience when his

• 40:03Chris Williamson?

  wife brought home another man for the first time. And

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  The way that he felt and then he talked about the first time that he had sex with another woman and he said both of those situations, every time that his wife brought another man home, he was dry retching on the floor and it took him four months to get over.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Oh my God, no.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  So this is, this is in his email newsletter. One of the things I can say about Aubrey is he's very candid, right? So his email newsletter.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, at least he's being honest. That's very cool of him. He's being honest. That's great. We need more people like that, actually. So I applaud him for that. I'm one of the few guys in the world, I think, literally, who talk about my non-monogamous exploits and my experiences under my own name with my own picture and it's me.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  And there should be a lot more people than just me. There are people I know with audiences my size are much larger who don't talk about this. So at least he's doing that. But yeah, one of the challenges with this are guys who do this wrong. So everything he's describing, I would never do in my marriage, that doesn't work. You, you, I don't want to be mean to this guy. I have no idea, but yes.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  No, fire away. You are, you're an expert in this particular field or as close to an expert as I can get hold of. So we're going to find out what you think.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  You have to sit down, you have to sit down and be realistic about what will piss you off and what will not piss you off before you actually get into the relationship and before you even have these discussions. So that's number one. A lot of people don't even do that. They say, okay, we're open. A lot of more like left wing, like hippie-ish type people, oh, we're sexually free. It'll be great. And then, yeah, and then their wife brings a guy to the house and has sex with him. Oh my God, no. You have to, you have to know your own parameters and be self-aware first. What am I capable of doing? What am I not capable of doing? If X, Y, and Z happened, would I be able to handle that or not? And you need to think that stuff through and even if you need to write it down, you figure all this stuff out and get it all on paper first. Um, I'm, I'm not, I'm not a super jealous guy, but there are things my wife could do that would, that would make me not retch

• 42:00Speaker 03

  on the floor, but things like, oh, Jesus, what the hell? So you have to be aware of those things first. Then your partner has to be aware of her things. So she has to, you know, you get into her head a little bit, because she's probably not going to tell you, and figure out what her parameters are internally. And every woman is very different. So for example, um, my wife is more comfortable if she's more aware of the specific women I'm playing with on the side. Whereas my last serious relationship, the girlfriend I had before her, she was the opposite. If she didn't know, she, she knew I was doing, but she didn't know any details. She was very happy. She thought it was fine. When she found out details, or when I told her things, she would get really pissed off. So every woman is very different about this. So that's the first level. Then the second level is you sit down

• 42:44Speaker 03

  and you discuss the ground rules again before you get too serious. Once you're already moved in and married, and now you're going to discuss ground rules, that's too late. So my wife and I had a very long, detailed discussion. I called the OLTR talk. I have a whole structure for this stuff. This was several years ago, and I laid out all the negatives of being married to me. And non-Monogamous is one of them. And actually, it wasn't when she was pissed off. There was like four or five of them, and that was just one. Matter of fact, the one she was scared about was that I work a lot. I work every day. She's like, well, she didn't care about the non-Monogamous because I'd already been doing it the whole time she met me. So she was used to it at that point. It was more like, well, you're going to work a lot. You're never going to spend time with me. It was more of that kind of stuff. But you lay all that stuff out, and then you lay out the ground rules, and you're very specific about the ground rules

• 43:27Speaker 03

  based on what you're capable of and what you think you're not capable of emotionally. You just don't go hog wild and, and bring men over. So he should have known, hey, look, look, wife, before she's my wife, hey, girlfriend, who are thinking about getting serious, we're going to be non-monogamous. Here are the parameters, but here's what you can't do. You can't bring guys over and fuck them on my couch. I'll throw up. You gotta be honest about that stuff. And he didn't do that. And a lot of people don't do that. And, and, and I, yeah, it damages the cause when that happens. I see that a lot of that.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  It reads to me, the, the emails and the stuff that I've seen from him and his semi diary, he uses his email list. Sometimes it almost feels a little bit like a journal.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's kind of cool. That's neat.

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  And so the transparency from Aubrey, I really admire.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's great.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  It was, I had to unsubscribe. Aubrey, if you're listening, I apologize, but it was, it was too woke. Like, it was so woke and everything was like hyper woke, each email that came through. And I think, well, he's big into-

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Those are the kind of people who screw this up. People who go too far with the left-wing wokeness stuff. And we're, we're creatures of nature and it doesn't matter. And no, it does matter. It does matter to certain people. So you have to be aware of these things. There are, there are boundaries of these things. Now, if you're not serious, then you can do whatever you want. So I talk about, I have, there's, there's different types. There's FBs, which are non-serious. There's MLTRs, where it's serious but not committed. And there's OLTR, which is like a girlfriend to your wife. So there's levels. And there's less rules as you go further over to this side of the scale. You can do whatever you want over here. Over here, if you want to be pair bonded, you've got to commit to some level of rules. It's not, it's not a free for all. It's not going to work. It's not how human beings work, unfortunately. It'd be nice if they did, but they don't.

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I think what it seems to me, so Aubrey's a big psychedelic warrior, right? Like, he's big into his mushrooms and his DMT and he goes away with the shaman and gets like, all the ceremonies and all that sort of stuff.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Not surprised, I guess.

• 45:28Chris Williamson?

  And I think, yeah, it fits the model, right?

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:31Chris Williamson?

  What I think, what I think he was potentially doing with this was almost seeing it as like a rite of passage. I think he had seen this particular prescription for non-Monogamous in whatever model it was that he thought, that he was going to adhere to. And then him and his then-wife were going to fit their life around this prescription. As opposed to having it be emergent, which is what you're talking about. He had seen, okay, this is what non-Monogamous is, therefore I'm going to stick to it. And I think he talks about, I think it's in his book, Seize the Day. He talks about how he brought this guy home and it was like this for the first

• 46:16Chris Williamson?

  X number of weeks or months or times or whatever that it happened.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 46:20Chris Williamson?

  And then, and then he had a breakthrough. And you sound, the terminology for breakthrough is taken from when people smoke DMT, right? It's that you have this breakthrough experience. So you take a hero dose of mushrooms and you break through. And I, I think he was maybe trying to layer a-

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Psychedelic framework or like fit a non-Monogamous into a psychedelic matrices. Like that was what he was trying to fit it into.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Too woke. You're right, too.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  Too woke. That's it. It could be summarized in.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  He's lost objectivity and he's lost reality. You need to be objective about these things.

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  I mean.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  And that's, that's an example. It's an interesting example of it going the other way. Most people are on the other side, more the right wing side, including people who are considered left wing people. Marriage looks like this and a relationship looks like this and it better look like this or you're a sinner. Or I'm never gonna get, usually people on the other side of irrationality. He's on this side of the irrational. There's a rational zone in the middle between those two extremes. You've got to be rational about how human beings are, but you also have to be rational and objective and self-aware enough to know what your limits are. And every guy's different and every woman's different.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. It's an interesting one. I mean, he's this, the penultimate email to the one that I unsubscribed from. The title was me and Whitney Neely split up today. And that's him and his, him and his wife. And I'm like, I appreciate.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little too much information. He shouldn't be, yeah.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  It's the wokeness, man. Like, so I appreciate the transparency and I genuinely do think, and it plays into his shtick, right? It's part and parcel of his thing. But I'm like, man, like if you and your wife are on the verge of splitting up, don't use that as your fucking weekly newsletter content.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:01Chris Williamson?

  Like that's, that's, that's a piece of advice. And another piece of advice, like he talks in the fucking first or second line of this, of his Instagram post from the same day was like, Whitney left to go to Texas to see her boyfriend today.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  So that is, this is an example of what you were talking about earlier about what polyamory is, the difference between polyamory and an open relationship.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  So in my view, and this is, this is not a fact more than my opinion.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  But I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. If you want to be pair bonded, that person shouldn't have other boyfriends because that's not pair bonding. So if your wife has a boyfriend. Or if you're married and you have another girlfriend on the side, a girlfriend, that's not pair bonding.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he has two, he has two girlfriends.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  He has two girlfriends, okay. So if he views these as real girlfriends, real emotional meaning and commitment to these women in addition to his wife, that's not pair bonding. That's something else, that's more polyamory. So that'd be a polyamorous marriage, which I don't, I'm against. I think that's a very bad idea.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 49:07Speaker 03

  I think polyamory is great if you are not pair bonded. So for many years, in my parlance, it'd be MLTR. So I had multiple MLTRs for years and it was great, but I didn't have a girlfriend. They were all women I was dating and I really liked, and I liked on an emotional level, but they weren't a girlfriend. Once you have a girlfriend, that's pair bonding. So if you have multiple girlfriends, I've talked to a lot of guys about this, hundreds of guys about this, almost never have I seen that work long-term, to have multiple, in the Western world. I mean, you could move to Saudi Arabia and do something else, but in the Western world, having multiple girlfriends, or multiple wives, or something to that equivalent, it doesn't work long-term in the West. You can't do that. If you're gonna be pair bonded, you need to be pair bonded.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  I am with you, I have no other girlfriends or wives except you, I'm allowed to go get laid on the side, these are not my girlfriends, these are women who are my friends. FBs, which is friend with benefits, it's a friend, not a girlfriend. So I have an OLTR, I have a wife, and I have FBs. They're not my girlfriends, they're just my buddies, and we have sex and that's it. We don't go on dates, we don't spend the week together. I already have that with my wife. That's more, that's a more long-term, sustainable model.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I think, Aubrey, if you're listening, we got some advice for you, man. Get in touch with Caleb, he'll do a little rundown and maybe, maybe give you a little bit of a...

• 50:28Speaker 03

  He needs to downgrade his girlfriends to FBs. He needs to make his wife his only wife and his only girlfriend, and she needs to make that kind of commitment too. And if she doesn't want to, they should get divorced, and they should just date.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Now it's sustainable.

• 50:41Chris Williamson?

  We fix it. I might re, I'll re-sign up to his newsletter and I'll reply and I'll give him, I'll give him the too long didn't read from the podcast, man. So, um, one of the things that I've, I've been thinking in the back of my mind and I can't fantastically put myself in the mind of a, a female, but to the girls that are listening, I would love to hear what your thoughts are about this, whether or not you would have ever considered this, or whether it's so kind of visceral and stomach turning because of the way that you naturally consider couples and partnerships to be, that it's difficult to almost put yourself into this situation. But I think certainly one of the things that, that will come to mind for many people when, and I'm,

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  I'm very empathetic, right? Like my, my empathy is crippling. So for me to think about, um, the way that-

• 51:33Speaker 03

  You're probably a nicer person than me though. You're probably a nice guy.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, but too nice sometimes. And unfortunately people, people, if they realize that, if they realize how empathetic you are, it's a big, big advantage taking thing.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:45Chris Williamson?

  And it causes you to move slow as well. Like you, when you're super concerned about how your actions are going to affect other people, it often causes you to, uh, to drop into inertia. So, but we all have our, our shortcomings and our advantages, right? Like there's people out there who might not have the empathy, but they have a whole host of other issues they got to deal with.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  That's me. I have very, I have extremely, I've been told, and then they're right, extremely low empathy. I, I barely give a shit about anything. So the advantage is I can move very quickly. I can get a lot of things done. I have a very organized, very good life. The disadvantage is I can hurt people's feelings if I'm not careful, people close to me. So I, so as you grow, you have to learn to mitigate those weaknesses. So you have to learn to become, stay empathetic, but not let it hamper you. And I have to learn how to be more empathetic.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Right?

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting, man. It's, it's, it is interesting how you do that. Do you find, um, within the non-Monogamous community, uh, people skew to less empathetic? I'm gonna guess maybe.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  No, I don't. I, I run into people who are more like you.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Especially the polyamory people. I'm really not in that group.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  I mean, they're non-Monogamous, so they're my brothers. I love them, but, but I'm not a polyamorous guy.

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  So, but yes, especially the polyamory world. Yes. Much more empathetic guys. Yes.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. That's interesting. But yeah, so- To try and put myself into the mind of a of a girl thinking about this particular situation, certainly one of the problems that you may come up against, I'm going to guess you will have a a format for this or a structure for this that exists, where you have a man who does want to be able to have other partners outside of his main relationship, but that

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Which is all men.

• 53:30Chris Williamson?

  But go ahead.

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  But the the girl in the relationship has no desire to be with other men.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Or normal.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but that, I think what

• 53:42Speaker 03

  You just described the norm.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  At least in the earlier parts of the relationship, you just described the norm. He wants to play around and she doesn't doesn't want to or doesn't want to yet.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  What that leads to people thinking, and what it certainly leads to me thinking, is that this there's some kind of imbalance unfairness between the two that somehow the open, non-monogamous relationship would work more easily or would somehow be more balanced, is my way to put it, if both partners had other things going on.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  That's true, but if one partner doesn't want those things, which happens all the times, happened to me a lot.

• 54:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Then fine, the the as long as she is allowed to, because that's one of the first questions she's going to throw at your face when you start describing these things to her, the very first thing that's going to tumble out of her mouth is, well, can I fuck other guys? Either she doesn't want to and has no intention to do it, thinks it's gross. If she were to do that, she's still going to say that. And if you say, well, then you're out. If you say, yes, if you really want to do that, yes, of course. Then she goes,

• 54:48Speaker 03

  oh.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So I mean, so there we lead on to the next thing, which is that for men, and again, this is evolutionary conditioning, for men, allowing your partner to sleep with other men provokes an incredibly visceral response.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  Incredibly.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  And if you want to have your cake.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  You need to, I'm going to guess that it's probably a pretty difficult sell to say, "Our relationship is going to be non-monogamous, but only for me."

• 55:21Speaker 03

  And not long-term sustainable.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so if you're-

• 55:24Speaker 03

  I've never seen that. I've seen guys try that. I've never seen it last more than nine months.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  Where the guy is able to-

• 55:28Speaker 03

  I've seen numerous men try that, in the Western world.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  Guy's able to sleep around, girl isn't.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he literally says, "I'm gonna fuck other women, you can only fuck me," and she's like, and he's a strong alpha male, and she's a little willowy, little submissive girl, and she goes, "Oh, okay," and within nine months, they either break up, or she bangs someone else just to, just to make it even, and to balance it out, just to get back at him.

• 55:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so for guys, I mean, like, for me personally, again, maybe I'm too blue pill, or maybe I haven't taken the red pill yet enough for this. I struggle to see a situation in which I would be able to stomach somebody that I love, sleeping with someone else with my allowance, with my grace.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  So there's several answers to that. Answer number one, and they're in their different areas. So answer number one is, a significant percentage of women who are not super young, so if she's under the age of 23, she's gonna have sex with other guys. That's, that's what young girls do. If she's older, a significant percentage, and in my experience, in my anecdotal experience, but I have a lot of anecdotal experience, it's around 40 to 50% won't sleep with other men. Even if they have the opportunity to, they don't want to, they think that's gross. So even though you're sleeping with other women, they say, "Okay, you're a man, you're a barbarian, that's how men are, but I don't do that, I'm appropriate, I'm a Christian, or I'm a this, or I'm a that, so I'm not gonna do that." So that's one. Number two, if she does, women are not like men. And so what men do is they negative fantasize about, "Well, well, if, if I'm allowed to go out

• 56:56Speaker 03

  and have sex constantly with other women, and I'm gonna constantly do that for the rest of my life, oh no, she's gonna constantly do that." No, she doesn't. Women go through horny phases, they go through non-sexual phases, they go through all kinds of different phases, so if she does, she might do it for a few months, and then stop and never do it again. Or maybe do it once every 10 years, or once every few years, off and on very rarely. She's not gonna do it consistently, like I do, or like you would do it, because we're men. Men are not like women. That's the second answer. Third answer is, you should train yourself to get to the point where you care less. So if you're a jealous person, it's gonna be harder for you to be a happy person. So if you have this thing where, a lot of guys are like this.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  There's, there's guys who are really jealous, guys who are moderately jealous, and guys who really don't give a shit. So the really jealous guys, if they even see a guy comment on her Facebook page, or they hear a thing on Instagram go off on her phone, and they just go into a rage. You have a problem. There's something wrong with you. You need to fix. You don't say, "Well, I'm a man and that's just how I am," and, and quote a bunch of, you know, evolutionary psychology about how I need to, you know, protect my women and I'm not gonna... You can, you can give me all that science you want. You're, there's something wrong with you in terms of your long-term happiness, if you're that angry and that jealous. So if you are, on a scale from one to 10, you're a 12, if you visualize a woman you like having meaningless sex with a beta male who's no competition to you,

• 58:22Speaker 03

  wearing a condom, if that just drives you insane, then it's, it behooves you, in terms of being a man and being a happy man and who approved yourself, to get that 12 down to a six, or a seven, or a five, or somewhere in there. Drop it down. You should do that anyway, regard, even if you were planning on being monogamous for the rest of your life, you would do that anyway. You shouldn't go through life being that touchy about these things. Cause that's all I see all the time, and that's one of women's biggest complaints about guys. Is they start seeing them and all of a sudden the guy starts to just put all these fences and walls around them, and the woman's attraction for the man goes down. She's like, "Ugh." Now for a while she likes it, cause that means he likes me. But after a while, "Oh my god, kill me."

• 59:03Speaker 03

  And that's one of the reasons why 75% of boyfriend-girlfriend relationships are terminated by the female. Because the woman gets tired of this stuff.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  Is that the statistic?

• 59:11Speaker 03

  That's the stat. Three-fourths. Three-fourths of boyfriend-girlfriend relationships are ended by the woman, and 70 to 80%, depending on the study you look at, at least in the United States, of divorces are initiated by the female. So women like getting into relationships, women hate staying in relationships. It's not what they like.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  You could argue that, you could argue that the girl is ending the relationship because they potentially found out that the man had cheated.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  That's a huge percentage of them, yes. And one of the reasons I've been able to do this, you can do this now, especially now. Uh, if a woman starts complaining about this, if you start, start explaining this to a woman when you first start verbalizing it, "Oh, you can't fuck other girls. That's not what a relationship looks like." All you have to do, I've done this with many women, including my wife when I met her. All you have to do is say, you look at her and you say... Every boyfriend you've ever had of a decent period of time has cheated on you, right? And they go.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  And that's it, you're in, you're done. That that covers so much of it because they know monogamy doesn't work. So that's the fourth answer is the fourth answer is. What is your alternative? Your alternative is something that doesn't work, that we know for sure doesn't work. It's not like maybe this might work. We know for sure the odds are overwhelming that it probably won't work. So by saying I can't do this, again, you're going back to a system that doesn't work. So you have all that's those are my four answers to that.

• 1:00:34Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of people, because of the visceral reaction that you'll get, maybe the dry retching on the floor, or just the sensation that people get, both guys and girls, when you think about, you know, to the people that are in relationships who are listening. Just for a second, put yourself in the mind and think what would happen if you tried to have an open relationship or a non-monogamous relationship where you were allowed to sleep with other people, but you had to put up with your partner sleeping with someone else. It evokes such a very, very visceral response.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  It does.

• 1:01:06Chris Williamson?

  I think that is a hurdle so many people will struggle to get over. And I'm going to guess potentially more guys will struggle to get over that hurdle of allowing the partner to sleep with other people, maybe even girls. Yeah, I thought.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, not maybe, that is correct. Guys have much harder, much harder problems than women do.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Women are accustomed to men sleeping around throughout all of human history. So they're kind of used to it. They don't like it, but they're more, it's men who have a problem with it.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. But yeah, I mean, that, that.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  And that's why the divorce rate is going to continue to get worse. Because what you just said, what's working, what people are doing now isn't working, but the alternative is so horrible, they're going to keep going back to what isn't working over and over and over, unless your goal in life. And there are a few men who say this to me, but not many. Unless your goal in life is to have serial, short-term, monogamous relationships for the rest of your life. So in other words, if you tell me, hey, man, my goal is to have a girlfriend. And I'll have her for about a year and a half, two years, then I'll break up with her. It'll be monogamous, then I'll get a new girlfriend. And I'll date her for about a year and I'll have a new girlfriend.

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  Do that 20 times for the rest of my life.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  For the rest of your life. If you say, look, I'm cool doing that until my 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. And you really say that with honesty, then you could ignore everything I'm saying because that'll work. Other than that, if you want something long-term, you're going to have to embrace a model that is something other than what doesn't work.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  So as a bookend question to what has been a really interesting discussion. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think is the optimal setup for a relationship in life. So we've talked about you've, you've had multiple long-term partners moving through. Would it, would you have preferred in a different iteration of the world where you could control everything that occurred within it? Do you think it's optimal to have a, uh, well, I can't remember the MLFB or whatever it was?

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  OLTR, so one wife or girlfriend, you mean?

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Is it optimal, if you can, to have one for 60 years, 30 years, however long, from mid 30s until whenever? Or from?

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Are you talking about optimal as in how human beings are now?

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  For you, if you were to say to someone, this is what I think is for a broad cross-section of people, the best way to do things?

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yes, for a broad cross-section of men, but not all men, because there are exceptions to all these rules.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  There are some men who should never get pair bonded. There is a small percentage of men who should never have a girlfriend. They should just go bang chicks and date and into their 60s and 70s. And there's a, that's an exception. Um, yes, for a broad cross-section of people, the least bad scenario. Because I don't want to say best because there's problems with what, there are problems with the models I'm talking about.

• 1:03:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Everything you've talked about are, those are accurate criticisms. The least bad system is a long-term, pair bonded wife or girlfriend, however you want to term it.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Assuming you're over the age thirty-five, because I tell guys, don't, don't settle down with women until you're at least thirty-five. That's insane. At least you're thirty-five. So assuming you're thirty-five or older, you have a long-term, decades-long wife or girlfriend that you are really good with and you're very complimentary with and compatible with, and you are allowed to get sex on the side. Within ground rules, these are not your girlfriends. This is more casual friendly sex. When you need it as a man, and she is allowed to too, and the older she gets, the less she'll do it. She may not do it at all if she gets older. That's the least bad scenario for the broadest cross-section of people, yes. Because that is that what I just described is doable long-term.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  What is not doable long-term is, we're gonna be married, you're never gonna touch anyone else for the rest of your fucking life, and I won't either, and you roll your eyes as you're saying it when you're a guy. I promise I won't either, honey. And we're never gonna get divorced, we're never gonna split up. That's not long-term sustainable because that is a fundamental violation of everything in which, all the ways in which you were designed as a man and as a woman. That's why it doesn't work.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I'm gonna finish off with a question, which is, you've got the monogamy, which is the traditional relationship approach, which you've just identified there. And then you've got Aubrey's relationship, which is, I'm gonna have a wife and the wife's gonna have, which one?

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  That's a polyamorous marriage.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Which one is the, in your eyes, the least effective?

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Neither of those are long-term sustainable.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Which one's gonna fail first?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  His. How long has he been married?

• 1:05:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure. I don't know.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  His. His will. You can, you can grit your teeth and be monogamous to a wife for a long time. I did it for nine years. And I'm a really high-sex traitor. So you can do it. Men and women can grit their teeth and suffer through shitty marriages. A lot of people can do that. They did that all throughout the fifties and sixties and all that good stuff. So you can have a marriage, traditional monogamous marriage, that lasts a long time. It won't last forever. That's not how you're designed. And if it does last forever, someone's cheating. And someone's putting up with it.

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  But someone's going to encounter, in the polyamorous marriage, someone's going to encounter a problem that is...

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  That is catastrophic to the relationship. If he's retching on the floor because there's a man fucking his wife in his house. How is that long-term sustainable? It's not. Can't do it.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, I asked myself.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Whereas the guy who has a wife at home and he cheats on her and hopes he doesn't get caught, you can stretch that out for a long time. Not forever, but you could stretch that out, sure.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  Some people make it last to their entire lives, right?

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  And that's fine, but that's not monogamous. So that's what I would view dysfunctional non-Monogamous. You're non-monogamous because you're cheating. You're having sex with multiple people. You're just pretending you're not. So now you're dealing with drama and lying and all kinds of other problems that are dysfunctional to your core relationship with your wife.

• 1:06:50Chris Williamson?

  And again.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  I don't have to lie to my wife.

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  If you're an empathetic individual, as I am, the the times that I have cheated in past relationships have caused such second order, third order, fourth order effect guilt and then self referential guilt. And then, you know, all of those things, feelings of a lower degree of virtue, lower degree of integrity, all of those sorts of things. Um, that for me, I was like, well, I that's that's not not a workable model. Cheating, being in a relationship and cheating is not a workable model. For me, I.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Not if you want to be happy.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Not if you want to be happy. I've talked to a lot of guys about that model and that's they tell me exactly what you're saying. Or very, or they're terrified. They're constantly worried they're going to get caught. They have multiple phones and multiple accounts and all that good stuff. That is not a long term sustainable model. If happiness is your objective. Now, if you say to me, and there's a few men who say this, I don't care about being long term happy. I don't give a fuck about that. I want to live my life this way. Yeah, you might be happier than me. I don't care. Great, then go ahead and cheat. But if your objective is long term happiness, you are correct. You can't adopt a cheating model long term. You've got to figure out something else that is more long term sustainable, even if it makes you uncomfortable during the first few months or year until you try it.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Caleb, for the listeners at home who want to find out a little bit more, maybe some people think, oh, it's a an interesting discussion that I want to read a bit more about. Where would you direct them?

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  I have a lot of websites. The easiest place to go would be CalebJones.com. So C A L E B as in boy Jones.com. That's what kind of the central hub of all my websites.

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Most of my, a lot of my content is business and location dependent income and all that good stuff, too. Again, non-Monogamous is a segment of what I talk about in terms of masculine and I can't talk masculine lifestyle design.

• 1:08:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I got you. Well, Caleb, it's been, it's been really interesting. I hope that we have opened some people's eyes to a

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  alternative approach to relationships. I think certainly for me over the last few years, I've seen people talk about non-Monogamous in different versions as we've gone through today. Increasingly, I do wonder what the trajectory of that's going to be. I wonder whether people are going to dig their heels in as divorce rates continue to go up. I wonder whether people are going to dig their heels into the existing model more, or whether more people will begin to migrate across to non-Monogamous.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  I think you're going to see a lot of both.

• 1:09:15Chris Williamson?

  Everything gets polarized, man. But it's been, it's been really fascinating. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  You bet. Anytime.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

  Catch you later on, man.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  All right. You too.