Why Young Men Are Double F**cked | PsycHacks' Orion Taraban

0:01All right, Marketing School listeners, this is a 20 to 30 minute segment of a full interview. I've done with an amazing founder, entrepreneur, creative, visionary. You're going to get a ton of insights from this. And if you want to listen to the entire thing, go search for leveling up with Eric Su. That's the entire podcast that you're going to find. So you get 20 to 30 minutes here. And if you want the whole thing, you can just search for leveling up with Eric Su. And without further ado, enjoy the episode. All right. I know your name's Orion, but I'm going to call you Dr. Taraban still. So Dr.

0:35Taraban, how are we doing today? Oh, we're going. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on, Eric. This has been great. You have a really nice space here. Well, thank you. This is my friend's. Shout out Ryan at Upkeep. So I've done the nice introduction already by the time people see this, but can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're known for? And we're going to jump right into it. Sure. I'm a psychologist in private practice. I've worked for eight years in the field of men's mental health in particular. So my private practice was exclusively men. I've since started a YouTube channel called Psych Hacks that has garnered some popularity in recent years.

1:10And I now do consultations with both men and women from all over the world on a variety of issues. Got it. And Psych Hacks, by the way, just some numbers on that. So how many views are you getting per month right now? About 5 million a month at this point. And that's a combination of like shorts and longs. It is, but the shorts on my channel don't perform nearly as well as the long form episodes. Yeah. We'll go into that in a little bit. But first, I think it's a good place to start would be, we're gonna talk about relationships quite a bit, but I want to talk about relationships. Maybe we'll start it off in the context of relationships for successful quote or slash career oriented people.

1:48So what do you think the problem is with dating today? I'll just throw that at you right now. Well, Well, it definitely is a problem because we see that there are fewer people getting married. There are fewer people having children, which generally but not always happens in the context of marriage. But there are also fewer people entering into even casual relationships. Like according to the General Social Survey, about one in three men have not had any sex in the last 12 months, which has tripled from the rate 10 years ago. So one in three men under 30 are functionally invisible in the sexual marketplace.

2:23That's a very sensitive time in the game of mating and dating between 20 and 30, right? So we know that relationships are in a decline, which is actually kind of strange because it seems like it has never been easier with the uses of certain technologies to get into relationships. So it's a little counterintuitive, right? So there's a number of reasons why this is happening, okay? You focused specifically on successful individuals, and that is on some level part of the issue. So one dimension of this is that women increasingly are using their 20s to not prioritize getting into long-term relationships.

3:03On the whole, they're either prioritizing, let's say, fun, hedonistic pleasure like travel or short-term relationships or their education and their career. Okay? And this delays them seeking and finding long-term relationships until later in life. And this is potentially problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, the game of mating and dating shifts significantly at age 30. Age 30 is basically when the average man's sexual marketplace value exceeds the average woman's sexual marketplace value for the very first time, and it will never reverse after that point. So in their 20s, women enjoy a relative advantage in the game of mating and dating.

3:45And that advantage comes with certain privileges that if they're exploited, make it easier to secure relationships on their terms. But if they wait until after 30, we're in the balance of power kind of shifts, they find that it might be surprisingly difficult to secure relationships on their terms. Now that the men become increasingly powerful after that point, they are able to more secure relationships on their terms. Does that make sense? Makes total sense. And so when you think about, I mean, maybe the last 20, 30 years or so, you know, a lot more women have been going into the workplace and they've been making equal or more money than men.

4:24Which I think is a great thing. But there's also a tradeoff there. There's a huge tradeoff, which is I think that most women will only seriously consider a long-term relationship if they stand, if they perceive that they will significantly benefit. I think that if it's kind of a wash, it's actually a loss because they foreclose on future opportunities that might be better. And if it's not going to improve their life, it's just like an automatic no-go for the vast majority of women. But what that means as women become more successful, both in terms of their educational attainment and their income and their lifestyles, it's harder for men to offer them a significantly better offer.

5:03And a lot of women, I think understandably, might prefer to be single and unpartnered than to be partnered with a man that they perceive to be a liability. Right. And I think you had a quote around how – I'm paraphrasing here – but how women should look at men as jobs. Or maybe not should, but men do. They do. Okay, go for it. Whether they should or not. Women generally treat men the way men treat jobs, which is on some level they are going to enter into a relationship with their perceived best option. and that's a tricky thing because what constitutes a person's perceived best option changes from individual to individual and across time.

5:46Like for example, some people at one stage of their career might just prioritize earning potential. Like that's the most important thing. They don't care if they have to work long hours. They don't have to, they don't care if they have to commute. They don't care if they don't have a lot of influence in the company. They just want to make bank. But that might change later on in life. Maybe they have children. They want more flexibility. They want to make work fewer hours. So the overall best option for employment changes over the course of a career, same thing for a relationship. That also is part of the reason why it's so hard to stay together in the long term is because people's individual goals shift significantly over the course of their relationships.

6:21And it's hard for one person to evolve in tandem with that set of shifting priorities. Does that make sense? Makes sense. So, okay, if we back up a second, so women are starting to make a lot more money equal or more than a lot of men, right? So that decreases their dating pool. Now, men, on the other hand, in their 30s, I mean, they're kind of forgoing relationships too because they now have optionality. So what are we to do? Yeah, and that's also part of why women don't want to get into relationships when they're young. It's like if you are a fairly attractive young woman in today's day and age, especially if you can leverage technologies like Instagram, you might have hundreds or thousands of men liking your photos, sliding into your DMs.

7:08it's going to be hard for any one man in her actual purview to say, I'm better than all of these thousands of men who are reaching out to you and might reach out to you into the indefinite future. So a lot of women, I think, rationally decide it's not the time for me to commit because I'm getting this flood of optionality. And that basically changes for guys. Like men often inappropriately believe that women are just sort of like more attractive than men, or they just inherently enjoy greater optionality than men. Like no one will enjoy greater optionality than a young, beautiful woman, right?

7:46But if you're a rich, famous man, you have comparable optionality. But many men never get to explore that optionality because they commit to a woman in their early, their late 20s or their early 30s before they really come into their own. Most men aren't even, quote, husband material until they're 35. Yeah. So, I mean, still, what are people to do? It seems like everything's just broken. I mean, you kind of mentioned that, you know, online dating actually decreases the likelihood of relationship starting. So let's go into that a little bit. Yeah, this is sort of counterintuitive. You would think that with online dating, it should be easier than ever to get into a relationship.

8:26Okay. To understand why this phenomenon occurs, you have to kind of appreciate the underlying assumption of the transaction in the sexual marketplace, which is at base, men are attempting to exchange resources for sexual opportunity, and women are attempting to exchange their sexual opportunity for resources. And I'm using resources in the most, like, broad sense possible. It's not necessarily money, though it certainly could be. It could also be attention. It could be emotional validation. It could be instrumental support. It It could be children. It could be commitment. It could be time. All kinds of things.

9:02It's resources like everything except sex. So men try to exchange everything except sex for sex and vice versa. You gave a really good analogy here, the Ken and Barbie doll analogy, and I think it applies here. Oh, sure. So in a gross oversimplification of the issue, men typically want the Barbie doll, and that's kind of what pisses women off the most when they feel objectified. right they want to be seen and appreciated for the person inside of the body and women tend to want all the shit the ken doll comes with and on some level the ken doll is a cipher it's almost like they can dispense with the doll entirely and they just sort of want the clothes and the little accessories that come with the doll yeah does that make sense yeah totally and i think the catch 22 here that that's tied in with all this is that men want they want chastity right they want they want They want a clean mind.

9:57They want a clean body at the end of the day. Sometimes. Most of the time. Well, what I say is that female chastity is something that is very ambivalently valued by men. It is very highly valued in a potential wife, and it is a frustrating obstruction in a potential lover. And women have to navigate that confusing ambivalence that men exhibit towards their chastity. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think it's like the catch 22 I'm talking about here is like if, OK, you want, let's say you're a woman and you want to be valued by a guy. Well, like you don't really have you need experience. Right. But then like if you gained experience with sex, then like you're also giving up your chastity.

10:41Right. Yes. I think, to be honest, it might be more important for men to have the experience than for women to have the experience. But who are they going to have the experiences with? You understand? Yeah. It's tricky. This is because women tend to choose competent men over incompetent men. And often women sort of assume that men are just supposed to know what to do with them, which is certainly not the case. You ladies don't come with an instruction manual. You know what I'm saying? So it takes a long time for a man to be a confident, competent lover and partner, which leads to the sort of uncomfortable conclusion that men kind of have to practice.

11:24Yeah. Makes total sense. By the way, like when you think about your content, are you helping more men? Are you helping more women? What do you think it is? Most of my audience is men, but I try to put the episodes on psych hacks to be beneficial to both men and women. And this, I think, is different from some of the other content creators in the space that cater exclusively to men. I think that women have to be part of the solution. Like, I don't think that any solution that only serves men and doesn't serve women is likely going to be a solution on the population level. We have to include women as part of the solution.

12:04We shouldn't be fighting each other. No, certainly not, but that's what's happening. This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately, it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite-only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com slash founders to learn more about it.

12:35And then you can apply. And we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Hey, let me answer your question about the online dating. Okay, so why it tends to lead to the decrease. Like I said, men are attempting to exchange resources for sexual opportunity. Women are attempting to exchange sexual opportunity for resources. Okay? So let's look at what happens when a guy sits down with a dating app.

13:07Within his subjective experience, it's one of him and an infinite sea of women. Okay? So what he's basically thinking is I'm in high demand relative to an inexhaustible supply, which means rationally speaking there's going to be a woman out there in that sea of infinite optionality who is willing to transact her sexual opportunity more cheaply and he's correct there will be a woman out there and so what that does in his perception is it drives down the perceived cost of the sexual opportunity and that leads to the fuck boy phenomenon which is that men are increasingly emboldened to just say, hey, are you going to put out?

13:53Because I know that there's somebody else out there who will, and he's right. Okay. By the same token, what's a woman thinking in her subjective experience? She sits down with the app. It's one of her and an infinite sea of men. So she thinks that she's in high demand with an infinite supply. So in that case, it's a seller's market. Before it was a buyer's market. In this case, it's a seller's market. So she thinks that she should be able to transact her sexual opportunity for the most resources as possible because she believes correctly that in that sea of infinite optionality, there's a man who's willing to pay more to take her on a better date and to provide more commitments.

14:32That's why women like almost across the board on the apps, right on their profile, I'm looking for a serious committed relationship, which is sort of like the gendered equivalent of a guy saying, I'm just looking to fuck. Or I'm looking for a generous man. Could be that. But the point is, is that the market value of a serious committed relationship, all things being equal, is exceedingly greater than the market value for any given sexual opportunity. So it's not a symmetrical request in terms of the economics. The sex is cheaper than the commitment. But because of their subjective experience, men and women are both doing the rational thing on dating apps.

15:10But what that is leading to is a larger and larger gap between the valuation of the same thing, the sexual opportunity, to the point where it's becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for them to actually negotiate and form a relationship with each other. Because the guy thinks he should get more for less and the woman thinks she should give less for more. Right. So have you thought about how this problem can be solved? Well, you might want to get off the apps or at least use apps for certain purposes and not others. So I've been thinking a lot about this, and I don't know if there are any pure solutions to this problem.

15:46I think there are only tradeoffs. One of the things that I was thinking about – how old are you, Eric? 37. Okay, so I'm 41, so we're close to the same age. Maybe you remember this. I remember when I was young in this country, there was a lot of talk in the mainstream media about how the nature of business and the professional world was changing. People didn't work for one company anymore. There were no pensions that were given. Companies didn't take care of their employees like they used to. And by the same token, employees were disloyal and they were just mercenaries. They would hop from company to company just looking for the best deal.

16:23No one had any kind of professional loyalty anymore. Do you remember something along those lines? Okay. Nowadays, it's almost unheard of that one person is going to stay with one company for the rest of their career. or it's unheard of that a company will offer the kinds of pensions and benefits that they offered even 30 or 40 years ago. I think according to the most recent statistic I read, a person will have 12 different jobs in the course of his or her career, but I expect that's even greater in the advent of the gig economy. The gig economy has disrupted a lot of industries. It's created some problems, but it's also created greater optionality and has solved others.

17:01Do you understand? It's like it's not a net, it's not a complete positive or a complete negative. We could probably argue whether it's a net positive or negative, but that's what we're dealing with. There's trade-offs, right? So I think, realistically speaking, we're going to be heading in the direction of, let's say, gig relationships. Well, we have to understand that we don't have a lot of good models for relationships. Like on some level, it's marriage or hooking up or nothing at all. And that doesn't work for a lot of people. And the way that we kind of approach marriage in this culture is, I call it a hyper-conflated idea because we want lots of different things.

17:45We want a legal contract. We want a religious commitment. We want cohabitation. We want co-parenting. We want a passionate lover. We want a best friend. And other people might want a therapist or a mom or a daddy or a personal chef or a maid, all kinds of things, right? And that's just really, really hard to deliver all of those things indefinitely to one person for the remainder of your life. And I don't think that's necessarily what we should be doing. I don't think that's how it was 100 or 200 years ago. We didn't put that pressure that our spouse was going to be an entire village of people.

18:24Do you understand? So it could be that we can grow up a little bit, mature, and be able to say, hey, there's an opportunity here, which is with the kind of dissolution of traditional relationships, maybe we can construct new versions of relationships that serve the needs and desires of the actual individuals involved in them, as opposed to just trying to fit the individuals into this one size fits all template of relationships. I think I understand what you're saying. I mean, there's multiple jobs to be done just like in a workplace, but what do you do about the mother of your children? What do you mean?

19:00So like, let's say you are, okay, a man, a lot of people aren't going to like that I say this, but like there are a lot of, at the end of the day, a lot of entrepreneurs that I know, you could say maybe 50 % or more end up having some type of affair, right? At least the ones that I've met over the years. At least the ones that admit to them. It's probably even higher than them. You're absolutely right. And people are not going to like me saying this, but it's true. And so it's like, okay, well, the mother of your children probably wants you to stay loyal, doesn't want you to mess around. But unfortunately, I think a lot of guys want to mess around, right?

19:34Well, sure. That's part of the reason why they worked so hard and delayed their gratification and became high status and successful, whether they're conscious of it or not. It's like I once read an article, I think it was in Time magazine or some well-circulated periodical, and the author, a female author, was expressing her dumbfoundedness over why so many presidents and magnates and successful men cheat. and it's like she totally didn't get it. It's like the men became successful in order, not necessarily to cheat, but in order to have access to more and more attractive reproductive opportunities.

20:14And on some level, that's why I often recommend that men try to hold off making that long-term commitment as late as possible because they're generally all things being equal. Unless they fuck things up, they're going to have more and more attractive opportunities with women as they age, as they increase their status, their prestige, and their wealth. Okay? And then they can make a determination as to, well, do I want, can I, I can choose my best possible option or I can enjoy my optionality just like those young women did when that man, potentially 15 years ago, asked that girl to be his girlfriend and she said, no, I'm just not ready to have a relationship yet.

20:53It's kind of for the same reason. It's tricky. Like, marriage is many things to many people. But I will say that in some cultures, it's just sort of expected that men have mistresses in France, in the Far East often. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm not making a moral determination. I'm saying that it happens. And in some cultures, there is an attitude of tolerance around that. As long as everyone kind of knows their place and understands the privileges and responsibilities afforded to each. So do you think the concept of monogamy is maybe outdated? If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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23:17Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a game. With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. some people are wired for monogamy other people it's not so much um there's a concept of being monogamish that i think i don't i didn't invent that word i think that might have come from maybe esther perel uh but don't quote me on that monogamish is the idea that i can be 90 95 percent sexually exclusive, but attempting to be 100 is probably going to lead to too much temptation over a long enough timeline, and it will lead to lying, cheating, and the dissolution of the relationship.

24:20So why even do that? If I know that I can't deal with that over a long enough timeline, why put my neck in the noose? So I will give you this 90, 95 percent. I'm not going to embarrass you. I'm going to be safe. I'm going to be responsible, but don't begrudge the 95%. And the fact of the matter is, though they might not publicly admit it, if your 95 % as a man is significantly better than 100 % from the other men that woman could potentially transact with, she's not going to like the idea, but she's probably not going to cut off her nose to spider face. Man, if only this concept could be taught to everybody.

25:06I think the world would be a safer place. Yeah. It's tough though, because we have this idea that it's like it has to be all or nothing. No, you have to have, like in any relationship that isn't sexually exclusive is somehow exploitative or abusive or immature. And I don't think that's necessarily true. Obviously it can be, but I don't think it's necessarily true. You know what's interesting? I mean, I have a theory here and maybe you've seen enough with the work that you've done, which I want to talk about in a second too. But when I think about a lot of my Asian entrepreneur friends, their wives are just like, just don't embarrass me.

25:42Just don't do anything. And then I remember, you have a relative. Let's just say it's like, as long as you don't bring a kid home, just don't do that. Person brought a kid home. But point is, I think with Asian cultures, it seems like it's more tolerable. I remember watching a video with a guy walking around Japan saying, hey, like, is prostitution like, okay. And then like 99 % of girls like, yeah, I don't like it, but yeah. I think I saw that. My rule of thumb, though, the France example kind of contradicts that, what I'm about to say, is it's the cultures that haven't historically been steeped in Judeo-Christian religion, so either Christianity or Islam in particular, they tend to have a more, let's say, honest tolerance for almost like human nature.