#704 - Mads Larsen - Are Relationships Supposed To Last For Life?

29:26And this is what pushed up the marriage age. So reproduction didn't start until typically in your late 20s for women. Wow. Because I, you know, Game of Thrones as my greatest window into an accurate historical representation of what would have happened in medieval times for reproduction. You know, you've got a lot of essentially child and teen marriages and women occurring. And I certainly know that some of the aristocracy were doing this was that only a behavior or a trend that occurred in the upper echelons of the higher nability? Those who had resources. So you see that the very highest, the highest classes are those that are marked the least by these changes to the past millennium and mating moralis.

30:10They still, the very highest status men, they still had lovers on the side, they still had a couple of wives for a few centuries longer than the words opposed to. So they got away from this and the church tried to rest power from them, but it was a bad layer. They were still powerful. So yeah, among the higher classes, you typically would marry still when you were around 20 perhaps. Right. So this is really interesting. Obviously we're going to get into it as we continue down this little journey through time. But a lot of the conversations at the moment are for the first time since records began more women are childless at 30 than with children at 30.

30:46But it seems to me like if we luck only 500 600 years ago, you're maybe going to see very similar sort of fertility patterns amongst women, and albeit for very different reasons than individual choice and traveling the world and getting an education and stuff like that. But yeah, you're going to see, because of the demands that were placed on their requirement to accumulate resources, both as men and as women, in order to be able to get started with a family plus, you don't have quite as sophisticated social safety nets. So you do have this malthusian problem that keeps everything down. So it's like, okay, we need to restrict, restrict, restrict.

31:21Basically like an entry price into a nightclub that up until the point at which you can pay the entry price, you can't go to the dance, right? The dance being having kids. Yeah, yeah. And also at this point what was characteristic of the European marriage pattern was an exceptionally high percentage of never married women. In a polygonal system, mostly all women are married. Under this system, it had an extraordinary high percentage of typically 10%, which to us sounds very low, but at the time that was unheard of. So around 10 % of women never married during this regime. Wow. Okay. So we are currently in courtly love, courtly love.

32:06I love the fact that it's like one of its primary design justifications was to be a counterweight to the heroic love narrative, right? It's overly restrictive on men compared with what they had for their values set previously. That you must ensure that the woman is lusting after you, then we potentially add no sex before marriage in as well. That gives you the restriction of resources. You need to be able to pay the dowry. You need to make sure that you've asked for her father's hand in marriage. I'm going to guess that that comes around to some point around about this time too, which would mean the most difficult gatekeep arbiter on the planet, you've got to get his seal of approval before you can do it too, then you've got to go through the church, presumably there's some assessments that get done by the church too.

32:55So yeah, all of this not only acting as a what would end up being a useful sexual redistribution for creating the foundation of a non -caotic civilization moving forward, but probably at the moment the main thing it was trying to do is Let's just stop all of the powerful men raping everyone. Like, let's just stop that from happening first and we'll see where we go from there. And the core value here, you could, or this is the West's first sexual revolution. You could place that around the year 1200. And the core value here is female consent. So in antiquity, women work commodities, marriages were usually arranged between families.

33:34Again, it was a commercial contract. And then with these reforms, with they instituted something called a double consent. So women aren't free to choose to marry, men aren't free to choose to marry, but women now have a chance of refusal. So it's still, you go from an antiquity, the kindergarten group was the authority in marriage. Now you move to the nuclear family because that is how you live now. So it's still parents who arrange marriage, but crucially women are given leverage through being allowed to say no. So they are still chorased into marriages, still not individual choice, but they can say no.

34:10And that's that's huge progress. Right. And that's set women on a path of emancipation that is ongoing. The beginning of female emancipation in the West was the shortest imposition of female the female right to consent in the first sexual revolution. That changed everything that that's Yeah, everything that has happened since was a result of that first movement. Okay. What comes after Coltley love? Well, the the mating ideology that the society was built on then is something called companion at love. So this was a very pragmatic ideology and very different from court to love and court to love.

34:49You and I, we are aristocratic knights and we're going to travel through Europe to find our one true love and we're going to fall incredibly much in love and we're going to live in bless, bless forever after. And actually, this was not the reality for European peasants. So the ideology of companion at love is that a man and a woman shall marry for life through an arranged marriage, whether they like each other or not is not a big deal. And their primary task is to run the farm as partners, to run the farm and keep their children alive. So we're not going to sleep around, we're not going to divorce and find somebody else.

35:26We're just going to huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic, very unromantic ideology. It's about submitting to the needs of your family and your community and not giving into emotions or erotic or romantic impulses. So this was the reality for European peasants from the end up from from the from the from the first sexual revolution when the king group through this all and all the way up to 1750, which was the west second sexual revolution. This was when you this was a period of companion at love arranged marriages pragmatism and then you had a period before 1500 with sexual axiness and then a period afterwards with pure autism to restrict people's impulses to avoid Malthusian crises.

36:16I was just about to ask why the Puritanism?

36:22Well, after this period of sexual axonism, when we had rebuilt our population, and when we entered into a period of stagnation, and stagnant per capita growth, we needed to prevent Europeans from having too many children to having premarital sex, extramarital sex, and the way we have done this in the West is to villainize female sexuality. Women are the sexual selectors, and in order to prevent extramarital sex from happening or premarital sex, the church has in those incidents gone after the women. So you'll see in the 1400s, female sexuality is acknowledged and to an extent celebrated, and then when pureness comes, the ideologist, women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage.

37:14Women who are lustful are aligned with Satan, etc. So it's a way to oppress women and to coerce them into not having sex that they shouldn't have, which could then contribute to a maltussing crisis. So the choice we face in these situations is either we kill babies when they are born, the surplus of them, or we have to find a way to prevent people from having extra marital sex or sex that produces too much babies, and the means we have tended to use in the West is to demonize female sexuality in those instances. Why not try to control male sexuality? It's a really good question. If you look at the differences in male and female mating psychology, and who is in charge on these markets, markets.

38:02It seems like the more effective choice, I'm not condoning it, but it seems like the most effective choice to place the cost on the sexual selectors. You could imagine that men are so driven that, men generally do not have sexual access to women. And to tell men that they shouldn't have sex, number one, it would be harder because they have a stronger driver -short term relationships, but also that access isn't there for them. While if the women are the ones who make the decisions in these cases of at least the voluntary sex, then having placing an enormous burden on women that from our modern perspective seems totally misogynistic and unfair, it seems that that would be the more effective way of doing it.

38:50Yeah, because if you're going to try and restrict men overall, but even now, I'm going to guess that there is still a very large cohort of men more than 10 % who go to their graves without family or unmarried. Therefore, you're pointing the finger at the less reliable potential meter. Whereas if you point the finger at the women, it is more likely that you get more bang for your book, basically, on restriction. But presumably, there must have been, there is, there must be some moralizing around male sexuality too, just probably not quite the same level of demonization that women had. Absolutely.

39:28So, yeah, Puritanism also demonized Pramiscus men in those stories and the literature that exists from this period. The greatest villain is our, the favored villain is often a man who is known to have slept around. So Pramiscus men are also put forth as villains and discouraged, but the male sexuality is still acknowledged. There's something pathological about a woman who wants to have sex with someone who isn't her husband in the purest ideology. If you want to talk about patriarchal misogyny, the puritans were really, really bad. But then we have to try to then step aside back and of course, we moralize on it and say that this is terrible.

40:19But then we try to understand why did they do this? What was the function of this? Why did pureness and a rise in a period when it was crucial for the West to restrain people's sexuality to avoid Malthusian crises? Right. Yeah, I understand. If everybody is dying of famine and starvation, the difference between the pain of that and the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage, it doesn't, yeah, that I can't just say. Well, we have to choose. If we're not okay with killing babies and Christians haven't been because of their ideology while in antiquity people generally wear, we have to choose, right?

40:58They're killed babies or with strict people sexuality or we invent contraceptives, which we got around to later. What was the reason for not just killing babies? Oh, in with Christianity, life became sacred. So the Christians said that you can't take any life. So once a child, so they didn't, they criminalized in fantaside. So in fact, in fantaside, in particular, females elective in fantaside, killing, they would typically kill girls because they were costier, dependent a little bit on the context. But yeah, so the practice of infanticide was just cracked out on really hard by the Christians because it went against their belief of every life being sacred.

41:38Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting that the church's doctrine is both like Giverth and takeeth away here that they have made their own bed. Okay, we say that infanticide isn't good, we value human life. Oh, fuck. Downstream from that, we now have this other problem, which is being able to control population so that we don't get some fishery and runaway, like mouth -using bullshit, also not good. Okay, so I mean, one other thing that's kind of, I guess, interesting to add here is that the Middle Ages didn't finish until the 1500s. Right, we're still in the Middle Ages from pretty much fall of Rome 500 to 1500s -ish.

42:17Like, it's just one big long fucking medieval, like, hodgepodge, right? Then we get to, you said, 1750 -ish. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we're talking now only 250 years ago, and it feels like there is an awful lot of ground to cover in terms of sexual ideology. So what happened? 1750 so that's the West's second sexual revolution. This was one of individual choice. So what we don't think about in the West this is it's a evolution of psychologists called middle -ass stool was done great work on this, how throughout human history we've had arranged marriages. It makes the case that the human species is the only species on the planet where men select other men for reproduction.

43:04This has always been the case. And during agriculture it was more the king group. And then after the first sexual revolution this was a matter for the nuclear family, meaning the patriarch, the father of the family. So, human men and women, this is important to understand, to understand the present day mating dysfunction. We did not evolve under regimes of individual choice. We generally, we had an influence, but we generally didn't pick and attract our own mates, where we're given mates by our families and communities. So our, in a somewhat weak ability, or many people's weak ability to flirt and attract partners, or track short -belongton partners, this is thought of as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past that they in the West started getting from 750.

44:00So what happened with the dissolution of Europe's tribes is that our psychology changed fundamentally. This was the biggest change in introduction of agriculture. So we were put on a journey then save for 800, 900 years ago toward ever greater individualization. More and more and more non -stop still ongoing and it's not going to stop for a while. And by the 18th century, Europeans started more and more thinking that they should be entitled to make the wrong decisions in terms of mating, copulation and pair bonding. And what facilitated this materially is that you have this commercial revolution where more more people worked as servants in their youth for cash payments.

44:43So to accumulate these resources to be able to marry, people moved further and further away from family and they were paid in cash. And this was the material foundation for the West's second sexual revolution. So among these young proletarians, around 1750, this European marriage pattern just burst. And people started having a lot more sex pre before marriage on the side also. So you had this enormous growth in sexual activity, especially among young people that had enormous consequences. And this continued. So it wasn't like everybody started riding a way making during decisions, but it started among these young wage -journers and then over the centuries it to spread and the dam completely burst with a third sexual revolution in the 1960s.

45:34I love the idea that flirting is basically like an evolutionary anomaly that if you were to have the ability, and sexually, if you come from a long line of flutters and your great -great -great -great -great -great -granddaddy, he was a flirter and the granddaddy before, it's like, why? Like, why? You know, previously he would have just been taking what you wanted, then after that you would have been told what you wanted, then after that your dad would have told you what you wanted, and then only 250 years ago, would you have actually chosen what you wanted? Yeah, Leif Kenner, whom you know, he makes this interesting case today to be an effective broker.

46:19If you're a really good looking guy, in really charming, a good flirter and your short -term oriented, you're going to have a lot of mating success. In the olden days, there would be a greater, there would be a significant chance that you would get snuffed out. If you, if you were a solid guy, you created alliances, worked hard, led a family, you would be chosen for reproduction by other men and given to their daughters. If you were just as good looking adonis who like to sleep around, you're probably going to get killed killed by the men in the king group of your latest illicit affair? Yeah, because you're a threat in some regard.

46:57Even if you don't get rumbled by the king group of the men of the woman that you just managed to seduce outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage, even if you don't get caught by the scruff of the neck by them, you're just going to create an ambient sense of concern and envy and mistrust. Because, or we know that Mads, we've got to be careful about him, like he's got the, he's got the fucking charm. Like, you know, I've heard rumors and then it almost becomes, I guess, to some degree, a little bit like the witch trials that you have this, it's not quite original sin, but it's something inbuilt that will cause other men to feel envy and jealousy, and way rather than understand and turn it inward and work out what it is that's lacking in them that makes them envious of this person, and it's way easier to just moralize about the person that's the outgroup now and say, let's fucking kill him.

47:52And also, times were really tough a lot of the time. You needed a really solid guy willing to work really hard to do what every candidate provide for his wife and children to keep them alive. If you're just this charming, hearty who likes to chat up women around the farm, it's, that does, that did not generally promote a good genetic legacy. Times, the demands of the times were just different. times are very different than they are today. Are you saying that we are the descendant of the least charismatic, least good -looking, least flotatious men that existed? Well, it depends on the ecology, but yeah, generally our ancestors have not been letharials.

48:32That's only recently where that has been very beneficial. Right. So we get to 1750. People are now able to make their own decisions. questions. Actually one question there. How is it that the church loses control? Does the church feel like it is losing control? Does it try to claw it back? In any regard, I know that in the time of Charles Darwin, you know, Victorian England, we had an awful lot of sort of sexual puritanism there. I think the year of Darwin's birth, the total number of British divorces was eight. Not thousands, not hundreds, eight. No, what happens? 1750 is really interesting because there's a counter -reaction.

49:13So we have what we call the romantic century from 1750 to 1850. So I'm sure with your imagination, you can imagine what happened when this dam burst in 1750. Now we're going to start sleeping around, whoops, we have an invent of the contraceptive pill yet, what's going to happen? So what happens is you have an enormous increase in illegitimate birth. across Europe, it doubles, triples, quadruples. So what you typically have are all these lower class women who now can make their own decisions in terms of copulation and pair bonding. And their answers are there's no experience with it. So we didn't evolve to see through the intentions of men would involve to assess our own mate value precisely.

50:01So what would happen that you would have a lot of high status men or at least higher status men, say a son of farmers, urban men, who would then go after the daughters of crofters and other at the lower rungs of society. And they would say, I love you and I'm going to marry you. And let's have sex and they would do that. And when she got pregnant, they would leave her. So in Denmark, Norway up until 73734, if you had sex, that was a defect or marriage contract. And then what we see in the beginning of the 1700s, there's a huge increase in women taking men to cork for having sex with them but admiring them so they end that law in 1734.

50:42So after that, if you get pregnant, you're not entitled to marry the guy you had sex with. So from 1750, you get this enormous increase in illegitimate birth at the worst in Sweden and in Stockholm, 50 % of childbirths were by unwed mothers. lower in rural areas. In Paris you see an enormous increase of manned and children. So in the in the late 1700s there was an ideology which I also consider as a cultural disarvant because you couldn't build a social order on it and this was liberty and love. So this is the kind of Casanova ideology where you supposed to just enjoy sex for the sake of sex. You're supposed to sleep around, follow your lusts and this was an ideology that spread from the French court and then throughout Europe and it reached Scandinavia around 1770.

51:34So you had this period where you have certain eccentric milieuses where people advocated, let's just sleep around, let's just have a hell of a good time, let's just party and this created this enormous burden on women because women were left with a burden of childcare when these libertines left them once they got pregnant. So typically high status men took advantage of imparaged women and then just abandoned them. And this is what laid a foundation for the romantic ideology of the early 1800s. So liberty in love undermined companion at love where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down, they curve your family and liberty in love said, no, let's just have fun.

52:13And then when the social ramification ramification of that came manifest of themselves, the counter reaction was romantic love, which did the same as pure love had done. So, liberty and love celebrated female sexuality, let's just have sex. Romantic love said, no, women have no benefit from sex outside of marriage. We're all going to have to stop doing this. And similar to courtly love, it exaggerated the emotional love is something incredibly strong and something that lasted for life. So, from then on, men and women were only supposed to have sex within the confines of marriage and you should be married forever.

52:51And this started having an effect around 1850 and then across the West, the legitimacy rate started plummeting. So you see this counter reaction. First, you dissolve companion at love, then you see the effects of all this promiscuity. And then in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this effect, you have a counter reaction or romantic love where you then become more pure and again. And then you see the effect of that in the statistics. Right. You re -prioritize the emotional connection, the romantic connection between the man and the woman. And what that does is that again, create a dampener on the liberty and casserover guide, Lothario, that's just, okay, yeah, that's so interesting.

53:33I, what I'm seeing here is this, this flip flop between what seems in, sometimes human nature kind of just bursts through the cracks, it kind of grows and grows and grows enough, and then it splits through. That there is innate desires that people have. You're also responding to the local resources. So I'm going to guess that around about 1750 agriculture and greenhouses and shit like that meant that the ability to get an amount of food and an amount of living out of a square foot of land would have increased pretty dramatically, which means that this mouth using problems and okay, right? So we can't really, we're no longer limited in terms of food.

54:15What's the next thing that we can use? Fuck, they're having sex with each other. Say that it's all about romance. Say that it's all about the overprioritize the importance of emotional connection because that allows us to create. But we've also lost at least a little bit here. We've lost the the church's moralization, or at least it sounds like we've lost the church's moralization of the act of love. Yeah, and then 1800s, this was the time of enlightenment. This was about individual rights and powering individuals, not oppressing them, letting them make their own choices, personal agency, etc., etc.

54:54And this was also at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. So when this European marriage pattern burst around 1750, we were very fortunate for two reasons because we now experienced a population explosion in going ahead that is still ongoing. Well, I take that back. It's not ongoing anymore. But we had, we got this we were moving into this period, tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion. And also we offloaded an enormous part of our population to America and other colonial territories. Otherwise, we would have faced dire trouble in the West as the change of our mating practices, and also with the reduction in mortality from other causes.

55:40Okay, then perhaps the shortest, most acute change when it comes to human reproductive history, the introduction of reliable contraception. Well, yeah, so one of the aspects of romantic love is that you have gender inequality. You conceptualize men and women as complimentary that people are born as incomplete halves, and then to become whole, you have to find your true love, you have to bond with her, and then you individualize and you become a whole human. So this means that the man is supposed to go out and work and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care of the domestic arena. So they're conceptualized as equal but complementary, but in reality, this drove stark inequality.

56:26So the next mating ideology we move to, which is the one we believe in today, it's called Confluent Love, which is a mating ideology of gender equality, of convenience, reward, and self -realization. At this ideology, a rose quite a while ago, it was first introduced into Scandinavian literature in 1839, but it had existed in the West somewhat earlier. So people were thinking about this, that we should get through equality, that men and women should be the same and have the same opportunities, and that we should be able to have sex outside of marriage and sleep around. But the environment wasn't prepared for that, like you mentioned, this couldn't really be implemented until we invented effective contraception, otherwise this kind of mating would have placed too strong of a burden of women.

57:16So we see this discussion in Western culture from say around 1830, and then with a Darwinian revolution, we start thinking, okay, so we're dramatically thought, obviously, this is what God wanted us to do, that we have this impulses that you also mentioned. That's just a test from God to see if we deserve to go to heaven. So that we want to have sex and that we want to divorce, that's just a test. And also at the beginning of our conversation, you asked, why do we need these ideologies? And this is precisely why? Because we have this biological impulses to calculate in our love cycle, probably evolved to last around three to four years, which was the mating cycle of foragers.

57:57So with agriculture, we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy because in case of divorce, you can't split up the fields and bring your part of the farm somewhere else. So we were kind of stuck in these marriages that had to last many, many more decades than what we evolved for. So then you need these ideologies to make us fight these urges that we have to sleep around to have we evolve for cereal monogamy or perebonding to fight that because the agricultural environment and then the modern environment just required something else for us So then we use religion we say that this is what God wants But then with the Darwinian revolution we start thinking well if we're animals we too Then these impulses we have they're not moral tests.

58:41This is our nature So we started exploring what human mating nature is and this was a very strong literary movement in Scandinavia in the late 1800s And then also through the 1900s through literature, we started exploring how could we make differently. But what's really interesting is that the romantic regime did not peak until after World War II. So we experienced something that was really unexpected, because in the 1910s and 20s, we were moving away from romantic love. We wanted female equality, we were moving toward confluent love. But then after World War II, we had this enormous economic prosperity that allowed us to implement the romantic utopia, which is the breadwinner housewife model.

59:26So suddenly, marriage in the West became near universal. Almost everyone married, they married young. And now we got to experience that the romantic utopia is a couple of shortcomings. Number one, love generally doesn't last a lifetime. And utopia at staying at home wasn't that great for all women. So you had this in the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, and then you have the social revolution of the 1960s, and you could say symbolically that the break -through of conflict was in 1968. And then you start seeing in the beginning of the 7th and the mid -70s, across the west, you see in the statistics that this modern marriage pattern that we've had and that peaked after World Two, it just disintegrates.

1:00:11divorce peaks, remarriage goes down, people marry later, you have a lot more casual sex outside of marriage, people start having sex earlier, and you just see this complete change in the Western marriage pattern from the 1970s and on. And this is mostly just gone in one direction and this is the mating regime that we live under now, which has been accentuated through dating apps, through increased prosperity, through all that has happened in the past 40, 50 years. When you say Confluent Love, am I right in thinking that what that means is our union works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I'm useful to you.

1:01:00Yeah. So romantic love, we merge for life. That's the only way to be whole people. Confluent Love, we come together either for an optimistic short -term relationship, casual sex, or for a romantic relationship for as long as we have emotions for each other, we benefit another way, and then we move on to single them or another relationship. So we're not meant for each other for life, only for as long as we want to. So it's this confluence of people coming together and meeting and moving on. Right. So now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era, how do you think of sort of modern dating, dysfunction, demographic collapse, all of that stuff.

1:01:39Is that, you know, from 1200, was that just the first domino gets flicked, and it's an inevitable kind of, all the way along? How do you conceptualize this altogether? Yeah, I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I completely agree with your intentions behind that. Yeah, that is what set it in motion. We've always had arranged marriages and lived in kin groups and then more strictly under agriculture but still. And then we was set on this path toward individual choice, never -grady individualism. And then it's just to have like we've talked about in the very beginning, it's hard to convince people to take upon themselves the burden of decades of pair bonding with the same person and providing for offspring.

1:02:27And when you have a strong and realistic culture and a mating ideology just says that this is optional that you don't necessarily have to do that. We're facing an evolution that is quite predictable. And as you've talked about on many of your podcasts, it seems to be going the direction where we've ran out of tools. There's not much we could do. We had in the 1930s, the Client and Fertility also, which we counted. Then the numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1 .8, which was seen as a catastrophe, and then we counted through effectuating social democracy. We made it materially easier to have children through social democratic welfare.

1:03:09All that has played out now. That's no longer an option. In Norway now, a typical average woman, she receives more than $1 .2 million more from the state than she pays in taxes while men pay more in taxes than they receive. And when even that can't motivate reproduction at replacement levels, and this is Norway's richest country in the world, and we have the best welfare system. And when even that kind of money transfer can't facilitate reproduction, there's very little other countries can do. So up until 2010, Scandinavia wasn't anomaly across the West for till as decline for a long time. So we thought that the answer or many thought that the answer was that other countries had to be less canvier.

1:03:55They needed gender equality because we're the most gender equal region and they needed generous welfare. And now in the past decade, the Norwegian for Kilarate dropped from in 2010 from 2 .0 to 1 .5 and now it's dropped down to 1 .4 and that's with each woman on average being transferred 1 .2 million dollars over a lifetime. That's a lot of money. There's economic economic incentives no longer cease to work. So we kind of know that for other countries too, that would only be a short -term solution that would be counted by other forces that are more powerful. So if we think it's a good idea to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse, it's very difficult to see what kind of means we can effectuate that would have a substantial effect that could turn us around.

1:04:41What are the forces that are driving the decrease in fertility rates at the moment? Well, the larger forces are the material once this urbanization, like we've talked about before, and like many others have talked about how there's been when we lived as agriculturalists having children was free labor and now they're just huge expenses. So that is one issue. The other one is ideological that we know along with romantic love, the meaning of life, was to merge with the partner and have a bunch of children with confluent love. It's about self -realization, reward, convenience. When we have those beliefs, it's just we're just less incentivized to take upon ourselves these burdens.

1:05:32So also mention, fair of the future. And then you have what I've researched a bit is what happens with our mate preferences in this new environment of the past decades. How on one side when you make, as in Scandinavia, when you have gender equality and you have generous welfare, it makes it materially easier to have children. So that counts in a positive direction, but it also disincentivizes women from pair bonding with men of similar mate value. So that's another aspect of these ideologies and mating regimes that it's it's really difficult to make women mate with men with with low mate value unless they have to unless they are materially dependent on it or co -reurs to do so by their society.

1:06:22We have two attraction systems. We have the original one that we talked about when we started six million years ago, where Pramiscus made us. And this is a very discriminatory system for women where they're supposed to only be promiscuously attracted by the very most attractive men. Maybe this is somewhere between five and 20 percent of men, probably closer to five. And then five four million years ago, we evolved this other system to facilitate pair bonding, which is a much more in the sense democratic system, where a much larger proportion of men is able to trigger that love mechanism that motivates a woman to mate with them.

1:06:59But we see that when women don't have to, they become chooser and they direct their efforts at men with higher mate value than what they have themselves. And that makes it harder to pair up more people within a community, which then will have adverse effects on the fructility. Right. And when women are not financially or resourcefully beholden to their partner in order to be able to keep them ticking over because they have no job, they have no education or they have limited socioeconomic opportunities, I need to stay with my partner because the alternative is that me and potentially one, two, three, four, five children are out on the street.

1:07:43So we were basically kind of like a a financial prisoner in some regards to that husband. And now that women don't need that anymore, the gods are... Yeah, and from modern ideology, and I'm sure both you and I feel this way, this is grateful women. Women aren't dependent on being with a man. They are independent. They have their own money, their own economy, and they can make their own choices, and they can choose to direct their efforts and compete harder for the high -value men instead of settling for someone with a similar value as themselves. But then the consequence of that is that we have a very high increase in single -dom, we have a decline in fertility, and it also affects people's wellbeing.

1:08:21People generally express a desire to be pair -bonded and they want to be together with someone. That's kind of what we've been doing the last four million years. And then when people react to different incentives in a modern environment, we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships? Yeah, I looked at a study, a pretty what looked like significant assessment that said gender inequality, specifically when it comes to finances, is correlated with both male and female satisfaction in relationships, which is a really, if you want to talk about like unfortunate, uncomfortable realizations that if you as a man are able to, whether by coercion or restriction or capacity or whatever, out -earn your female partner and if the brakes are put on your female partner, she's happier and you're happier on average.

1:09:22Yeah, I know if there's so many depressive statistics. If you want to look at what actually get the fertility rate up, you have to, if what will really work is to, and we don't want any of this, we have to get rid of gender equality, get rid of prosperity, domestic violence works, there's tons of stuff that work to make women submit to being in a relationship that they otherwise want to be in. Yeah, to go to stop being whatever is cost benefiting to what's it called when the man, And there's two types of make guarding, right? Yeah. Whatever the second one is, I know what you mean, yes. Yeah. So no, if you look at what actually would work to get the fertility rate up, these are very dystopic choices we have.

1:10:07There are pretty much nothing that we in the West would be ideologically disposed to doing that could have a significant positive effect. all those mechanisms that we know would have in effect would be go against what we believe in. So we're in a very difficult situation. One thing that has kind of been running through my mind is you've told us this tale is, especially when you look at the modern world, which still has an awful lot of the carryover, I think, from the romantic era of, you know, moralizing around faithfulness, and just a lot of sadness, a tragedy, loyalty to your partner and stuff like that.

1:10:48It seems so insane that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where our evolved mating psychology and the structures that we had for so, so, so long have just become perverted and perturbed and ruined and repurposed and counted and so on and so forth. And we are, we talk about evolutionary mismatch and awful lot. Everybody knows what that is. But this seems to be like, it's a fucking sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch, right? You know, you've got the culture from before and the counterculture to that culture. And then you've got new technology, reproductive technology. What about the fact that we're all individuals?

1:11:30Female socioeconomic access and egalitarianism. That's fucking new. Like how do we work that out? We're no longer living in pan generational houses. Our kin doesn't give us any advice about. The world is moving so quickly that our parents advice basically doesn't even work for the new generation because they don't understand what's it mean to be dating on Tinder? And then we've still got all of these vestigial mating systems from before. So it really doesn't surprise me, you know, when you take a really global look at human mating psychology, plus the modern world, plus the journey that our psychology has been dragged through really over the last few millennium.

1:12:10It's really not surprising that people are struggling at the moment. Yeah, on top of that, dating apps are a little over a decade old, and we haven't figured that out at all, and the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them are go so counter to people's needs and desires and how our psychology functions. It's, we put ourselves in a situation where there's like you say, there's so much novelty on top of novelty that men and women don't even understand what their mate preferences are and how those are being influenced by the social order and the technology they use to meet people.

1:12:48So we're just, we're following these six million year old impulses, which are the strongest one. And they're overriding impulses that are four million years old, not even to think about the newer ones that we've developed. And in all of this, we're in this uniquely new mating regime of individual choice that we have not evolved for at all. So it's when you look back and you think, why was it that, say, perhaps through the two million year history of the Gino's Homo, if it is the case, in fact, that we always had parental choice through that, is it because everybody discovered that individual choice doesn't add up?

1:13:30I mean, there's no way the West is going to go away from that and I certainly wouldn't advocate it. But if no one else managed to figure that out, how sure are we that this is going to work for us? And yeah, if you extrapolate from today, if with this decline in fertility, maybe we're certainly going to write out this experiment. I don't see us changing anyway. But there are people people around the world who aren't pursuing that regime, that are showing different numbers. And it's, I mean, we love our ideology. We think it's superior to everybody else's ideology. That's just how humans work. But there's one fend, I mean, you could say everything is relative, but there's one thing that isn't relative.

1:14:17That's an evolutionary iron law. No matter what your ideology is, if that ideology causes you to stop reproducing, that ideology will cease to matter. You will disappear. Yeah, I mean, this was one of the most interesting takeaways I've had from a lot of conversations about demographic collapse and population decline, which is ideology, political leaning, your world view at large, your openness, your conscientiousness, all the rest of those things are highly heritable, highly heritable. Your political ideology is very highly heritable, right? As is the rest of your fucking psychology. So if you are somebody that is part of a particular political movement that either doesn't promote or actively discriminates against reproduction, you are a dying breed because your children would have more likely been like you and look at the groups that are reproducing.

1:15:21Something tells me that conservative Ashkenazi Jews are not going to have that much of a fertility problem. Something tells me that Mormons or that some sects of Christianity, I know that some are down, but some sects of Christianity also going to be fine. So what do you look at over a long enough time horizon? You actually look at this sort of almost like full circle loop back around to a much more not necessarily puritanical, but like a religious sacred view of what this is. And remember, if you are somebody that's conservative or somebody that's religious, the likelihood that your children are going to be that way is it's absolutely not predetermined, but they are predisposed.

1:16:06Right? So when you end up with this sort of ever increasing cycle of this, so there was there's an argument to be made, I think, that, you know, like, anti -natal climate -concerned liberalism is not long for this world, right? It's not to say that you can't have a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years time and reconverts a bunch of seventh -generation conservatives or whatever, but yeah, you will end up with less demographic political variety over time if you have this because the selection effect occurs within particular cohorts within very particular strata and it presses down very hard on them and the other ones are just like what demographic collapse and fine.

1:16:54Yeah well we also have some tremendous novelty coming up which we have to bear in mind. I predict that the West will have a fourth sexual revolution, coinciding with the fourth industrial revolution. What will happen when we start being able to create babies outside of women's wombs when we'll be able to gene edit etc etc and we'll get AI robot lovers and spouses etc etc. There's going to be such tremendous technological novelty that's going to change society that it's almost inconceivable that this will not have a tremendous effect also on mating. So if we extrapolate into the future without taking that into account, yes, then the West, as it function now, would just made itself out of existence and other groups would take over who have higher fertility.

1:17:46But that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing. There will be so much change in the decades ahead that it's very difficult to imagine how mating will be in the future. But I think that revolution will be so large that it will fundamentally changed that aspect. Like we talked about in the beginning, the foundation ever social order is mating. So then the question is, how will these new technologies affect how we mate and how will that create a new foundation for a new form of society? Yeah, yeah, I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throws of something that it even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system.

1:18:34As soon as you have external wounds, as soon as you have AI companions that can give you better than real life love, yeah, the pods, hikiki moori problem gets sorted, but it only gets sorted from the individual's perspective, from the population perspective, it's not sorted at all. But then if you can counter that with artificial wounds, but then who is it that you're choosing like who's genes are you choosing to do this? And if you have embryos selection, which is already online, embryos selection for IQ, for externalizing behavior, for depression, for anxiety, for autism, you already have this.

1:19:10And then if you can get into gene editing and then if you can get into IVG, it's like, okay, here's a section of the skin from my arm, go forth and make one million Chris Williamson's, like I would Jesus Christ, but yeah, it's a, Maybe we are. Maybe this is a uniquely interesting time, but I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are thinking about at the moment, you know, hungry, you have one kid and you do this thing and you have two kids and you get more taxes off and you have three kids and you don't pay taxes for life or Norway and the way that you guys 1 .2 million that you give to women and, you know, we need to get people to do CBT to overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of it, I wonder whether ultimately all of those things are going to be in vain within the space of five decades because the technology is just going to rip out anything that we try to construct using like cultural technology, ideological movement, or Hollywood.

1:20:09Why don't we get Hollywood to like put dads that are competent again at the front and we shouldn't have Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as the lead. We should have like, you know, like a good stand -up family guy. And you're like, yeah, but if in five decades, it's artificial wounds and sex robots all the way down, what does any, what do any of those interventions really matter? That's not to say that making the well -being and flourishing of people who live right now isn't nothing, but over a long enough time horizon, they all just get like someone shakes the etch sketch and just deletes all mating history.

1:20:44Yeah, no, I'm, when you look at the history of western mating, it's, I don't fear very much that we'll be returning to a handmade tale, pure kind of female oppressing regime. I think we're going to move forward in that we will experience a novel shadow level that we, it's very difficult for us to imagine today. So yeah, we can talk about it, we can speculate, but when we are at this side of these big revolutions, as we seem to be now, before we go into it and see how dramatically the world would change in this time, a lot more rapidly than with previous such revolutions, it's all we can do is mostly hold on.

1:21:28Like, I don't believe that there, I don't, I love what you're doing with your podcast, but people can get informed, and that's good, but that somehow we're going to figure something out. make a plan and then effectuate it and and and stuff the demographic collapse. That doesn't seem to be how the world works. It's just going to be a world win, a hurricane of change. And then at the end of it, I think it would be really cool if we still have a bunch of humans around. I'm kind of I'm a little bit specious that way, but things can play out in a matter of ways that are just is impossible to predict on this side of the singularity.

1:22:09Yeah, yeah. It's the technological change. The size of the wall that occurs is so high that it's very difficult to have something permeate through it. And yeah, I totally agree. One of the other things that you do, your other wing, one of your other many other wings, an evolutionary lens on well -being. And obviously we've had a lot of conversations recently about in cells. I only learned this from you in sings as well in voluntary singletons. Given your evolutionary lens background and your studies into well -being, what are you making of the generalized anxiety, depressive states, whatever it is, 50 % of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular, persistent feelings of hopelessness.

1:22:58You've got guys with testosterone in the toilet, the single biggest threat to a man under the age of 50 is his own hands, you know, in terms of suicidality, all this sort of stuff. How do you sort of conceptualize all of this together from a well -being perspective? Why are the in -sales and the in -sings and everybody else so unhappy? Yeah, I know that's something I think we should really be concerned with. We should try to change to all and make a better world, but as we've spoken about, it's our ability to affect change that way is somewhat limited, but when we're going through these deep changes, as we are now, when we have before, people will face despair.

1:23:37They will lose faith in the story that has united us. We haven't yet found to moris ideology that will give us the answers and the comfort and lessen our anxiety. So we really should be sympathetic towards each other and that pain that people are suffering when we go through these changes because these changes are very hard on humans. We like stable periods when we know, when we convince the self that we know what truth is. So when you look at in -sales and instincts, you should expect them to, that they should be miserable. From an evolutionary perspective, happiness is a reward you experience when you solve adaptively relevant problems.

1:24:12And nothing is more central to that activity than reproduction. So if you're not succeeding on short or long term mating markets, if you're not able to pair bond, your well -being system should go into high alert and let you know that your strategy is a failing. So when men become depressed and despondent from not succeeding on the short -term market, and women become depressed and despondent because they know it is on modern dating markets, they have unlimited access to sex with higher value men, but none of these men are willing to pair bond with them. That is supposed to give you a depression.

1:24:47That's your organism telling you that you're failing. So, instead of villainizing, incel men or making fun of incing women, we should try to spread a better understanding of the hair you're podcast is valuable. People need to understand the different made preferences that men and women have. They should understand the different power dynamics and short and long term mating. and see how today's meeting, particularly with dating apps, is creating a stratification that is creating this function for almost all groups of society, or at least potentially. So a better understanding of what is going on might not help us tear this clown car into safe shores, but it might help us sympathize more with each other's plights, especially We are between men and women because men and women have such different challenges in today's dating economy.

1:25:40And if we kind of, if men impose male -made preferences in their analysis of how women are doing and opposite, we just don't understand each other. And that just creates bigger dysfunction, poorer communication, and people get even more miserable. How much of the current unhappiness do you think should be laid at the feet of mating and dating problems because there's lots of other things going on. Social media and comparison and intergenerational competition theory where we are the first generation that's not done better than our parents and so on and so forth. But how much of this do you think ultimately is just post -talk rationalization that I can't find a mate and romance seems to be dead and my partner might leave me at any point if the confluence no longer works?

1:26:25It's a good question and I haven't seen any statistics that are able to get at it. It doesn't show up there. So we'll have to speculate. So in Norway now we have something called a men's panel. It's a it's a it's a big research project or more of a council that they're trying to figure out what men are falling behind. And you see this around the world in the UK they're talking about having a men's minister. It's been suggested, etc. And I know at least for the new this Norwegian effort, which by the way is the third in 15 years, we've got to figure this out. They haven't figured it out anything previously, it's not even within their mandate to look at a mating marginalization and the stratification that is happening on modern Denmark.

1:27:07It's just the thing that feels inappropriate to talk about. But especially when it comes to men,

1:27:15what one of the prime functions of having to sexes, to have a sexual reproduction is the sexual selection where women select which men get to get to breed. So, males of all species have been under enormous pressure to succeed in this regard. That is the motivation. That is their their reason of being at the deepest mouth most foundational level. So, we have reason to think that now that more and more men are being excluded from short and long term mating when they're being selected away by women because they are not valuable enough in the modern environment, we would predict that these men would do poor and poor, they would not be motivated to put in the effort because they have a sense of how hope it might not be a conscious sense, but that drive that men would have in other times when they had a better prospect of acquiring a mate, when that disappears, we should expect male marginalization also in other areas of life and society.

1:28:18So that we're not looking at that is unfortunate because we would expect that to be the foundational level upon which this other malaise attaches to. But I haven't seen any statistics or research that allows me to assign a proportion of unhappiness to men being to more men being selected away from mating. So I don't I don't think that is possible. I think it's more a foundational aspect that it's really difficult to get Yeah, man. I mean, the fact that we're not tearing each other apart, I suppose, you know, when you look at the sadness and the depression and the hopelessness and stuff like that, and a more obvious question would be, how wouldn't we all feel like this?

1:29:00You know, so much change and adaptability is fundamentally one of the things that humanity has as its, you know, Keystone advantage. But there's a limit, you know, dear God, there's a limit to how quickly the world can change and we can hold on for dear life. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's so it's such a slippery slope, right? Because as soon as you say, well, the world is changing very quickly and we're not adapted for technology. Like the victim hood mindset just immediately seeps in everything is out of my control. The locus of control gets externalize that's associated with more depression. Therefore, people don't feel like they can enact any change.

1:29:41They're no longer agentic or sovereign individuals. You're like, oh my god. So yeah, like trying to thread this needle between compassion and encouragement is a really difficult one. And I mean, you know, all of this work on well -being that you're doing through an evolutionary lens must, it must feel like human well -being is kind of being just pulled apart. Yeah, and like you said, young women are doing worse than young men. And what we see in the research that we're doing now is that this big change in well -being at least in Norway, Norway is doing better than most other countries. We're doing it with such a successful, successful country in the past decades.

1:30:25So we were at the top of the world happiness report, but we're now have slid down several spots. And this seems to be entirely because of this drastic reduction in well -being among young people, 15 to 24. And we've made interviews with them. There's quantitative service of them, and we're doing quality of interviews. And young people are feeling bad. And you have many aspects. And social media seems to facilitate some of these mechanisms that drive ill -being. the economy, fair of the future. You have all kinds of things that are weighing on young people, and it's very difficult to sort them and see what is what.

1:31:06But I think like you that the main driver now is that we are as a civilization in such a transformative time. It seems that we're moving out of this modern narrative of believing in liberal humanism that's peaked in the 1990s, that we in the last decade have lost more and more faith in, we don't know why we should cooperate, it's to America sliding apart, we don't know which future to strive for. We get these answers from this underlying story which are focused as a scientist master narrative, that story that gives meaning to everything and lets you know what is true or not, why you belong together, what you should strive for.

1:31:46And we've had these changes, I've studied these changes of the past millennium and also further back. And when we get into these these deep master -narrative transitions, it's really, really hard on the human psyche when we lose that narrative. We turn on each other, we get dispawned, we have anxiety, we feel terrible, and we lose faith in the future. But then every other time until now, we've always succeeded, we've always got an out of it, and we've found a new story. And now we seem to be transitioning into something that is perhaps a form of data massed and narrative. And if we succeed with this, and we make it with a forced industrial revolution, and we're able to unite and around this new narrative, then we could face a new golden age.

1:32:26The future could be very fantastic. But when we're in these transitions, it's a lot more easy to spot what could go terribly, terribly wrong instead. What was that study about the Norwegian generational happiness switch? Yeah, so we've Norwegians, this Norwegian sort of called Norwegian Monitor. They've been serving happiness since 1985 and young people have always been the happiest and old people have always been the least happy, which makes sense. Happiness is a reward you get when you succeed with reaching adaptive relevant goals, which young people have tons of, but when you're old you kind of don't have these goals anymore.

1:33:06So you would expect Japanese to go down on what's happened in the last since 2009 is that you had this incredibly sharp decline for the youngest and then for also for the middle aged and this this this weak rise in happiness and and quite strong rise in satisfaction for the oldest generation for your tired people. So the impression we get from talking to them is just that young people are becoming miserable and losing fate in a future I don't think they will have good lives. There's so much so many threats coming up while the old people are realizing that they just time their right life really well.

1:33:43So they have this newfound gratitude. They see that, all right, I might have 10, 15, 20 years left to live. And that'll probably be okay. The biggest changes won't come into life to that. So just have this, this yeah, an amplified sense of having had a great life and that they should be be grateful for now getting out in time and having been with this post -World War II boom of economic prosperity, well life just got better and better and better. And now when it seems to turn, they're ready to check out in not too long. And this, they feel bad about their children and especially grandchildren.

1:34:17They feel really bad about them, but that doesn't seem to affect their quality of life. It just makes them more appreciative of their own lives. Oh, wow. Yeah, because you would think as grandchildren optimizing machines, you would have presumed that the impending uncertainty about the future of our grandchildren could have negatively impacted our subjective well -being. But it seems like that's not the case. It seems like... What they say to us is that they sometimes stay awake at night because they feel so bad about their grandchildren and they're a little bit surprised and have a little bit bad conscience for it, but it doesn't reduce their quality of life.

1:34:58So yeah, they just, they get this, this, a much stronger sense of satisfaction and a somewhat stronger sense of happiness from now seeing future generations will struggle while they will not. Okay, so do you believe that comparing yourself to the generation that came before you and your level of success or well -being Is that a big determinant of well -being? Yeah, you have to separate a little bit different aspects of well -being. We concept like well -being plus meaning. Happiness plus meaning equals well -being. So happiness is this solving adaptive relevant problem for yourself as an individual.

1:35:38And that is inherently relative. You have a comparison group. And if you're doing better than your comparison group, you experience a sense of happiness temporarily. And if you divorce, you have a temporarily sense of of unhappiness. So that's one of the reasons why social media has been so destructive we believe for young people's happiness because it's just exploded their comparison group. Before you compare yourself to your person, your local community, now you compare yourself to the Kardashians and people that fly private jets on YouTube and suddenly your life is not that great anymore. Relatively.

1:36:13So yeah, happiness is an inherently relative assessment. Yeah, what's that quote comparison is the thief of joy? It seems like it's actually the comparison is the underpinning of happiness or dissatisfaction. Yeah, no, so if you, that's one of the reasons why altrism and doing voluntary work, working with refugees or people who are worse off, that has a strong effect also on your happiness. It reminds you just how far you could have fallen and you're not. Yeah, it recalibrates your comparison group in a beneficial way. Wow. So a good intervention for well -being is to remind yourselves of just how the myriad of different ways that things could have gone wrong or all of the people from your past that had things that weren't as good as you.

1:37:03I mean, does that famous? It's either Aristotle or Aralius that says, the things that you now take for granted were ones that you once only wished of having, right? In the past, in the past, you only wanted to have this thing, and today you walk past it without even looking at it twice. It's the same thing with mating ideologies. All of these mating ideologies come with a utopia that we think if we can just get this utopia, it's going to be amazing. And then when we finally get the mating ideol, implement the utopia, we discover things like life, love doesn't last forever. Being a state at home mom isn't paradise.

1:37:39So yeah, we keep striving for it, we make a better and better society, and once we get it, we are accustomed to it and we come up with new utopias. I had this idea for a little while, reflecting on my own life, especially in my 20s when I started getting into self -development and personal growth, that I was able to ameliorate my own feelings of insufficiency as long as I was doing personal growth and self -development, because I think the subtext of what it taught me was I might not feel like I'm worthy enough right now, but if I'm half a percent better tomorrow, maybe tomorrow is actually the day when I will finally, and if you just continue to keep yourself on this hamster wheel, it kind of, it's a salve, right?

1:38:22It kind of papers over the cracks of perhaps deeper issues that you need to deal with. Like I don't have a good sleep and wake pattern, or I'm not, I don't have people around me that I can talk to, or whatever the reason is that you're dissatisfied with life. But yeah, I see in a lot of the self -development community, people using the promise of a better tomorrow as a plaster or a band -aid that they can place over the feelings of insufficiency that they have today. Yeah, well theoretically, the optimal recipe for a happy life is that you should start out as low in society as you can without being traumatized by it and then make gradual progress throughout your life and reach as high as you can.

1:39:15Because as long as you keep doing better than you used to, you get this happiness reward. So if you want objective success being born at the top of society is the best, But if your parents are beautiful, successful millionaires, you probably won't be. And that you're not going to be happy. So there's something to getting that even progress. And then in addition to that, you need a couple of crises that you take yourself out of through your own resources. Yeah. Well, I mean, so much, so much interesting stuff there. First off, I have a lot of friends who are self -made, successes, millionaires, one billionaire.

1:39:52And I asked them both about their intentions for their children because I know that what they valued during their upbringing was very heavily their challenges that had to overcome this sort of working class grit, spitten, sawdust mentality. But if they do that to their children, what the fuck was the point of working this hard in any case to not give them the benefits of the resources and the livelihood that you worked so hard to be able to afford them, but then if you give it to them, you're condemning them to a life of inferiority unless you're going to have multi -generational self -made billionaires.

1:40:31That's also pretty unlikely. That's tough. Eddie Hurn, the famous boxing promoter from the UK, said beautifully conceptualize this. His dad made the boxing organization that he's a part of. And his father had had an awful lot of success. And then Eddie came in and took it to New Heights, made it bigger than ten hundred times bigger than it ever was, and did all the rest of the things. And somebody asked, like, if you could go back and change anything, what would you change? And he said, I never got to do it first. That it always felt like he was living in his father's shadow, that the new frontier was never broken by Eddie.

1:41:13It was always broken by his father. And he, it's evident that he lives with this pain of the echo of it. I mean, dude, the fucking drummer from Mega Death, you know, the story of Metallica, so originally Metallica's drummer got kicked out or left the back. I think he got kicked out of the band. So he decides to go and start a new band called Mega Death. Mega Death goes on to be one of probably the top 10 metal bands in history, but they're not Metallica. And in interview, this interview of my house made sites all the time, this guy still with one of the most successful metal bands in history always has this gap between what he could have been and what he was.

1:41:57So yeah, it's very much not an objective assessment of our position. It's very much a relative assessment of our predicament. And I also had this idea kind of place off the back of this that one potential strategy that you can go through that would be maybe adaptive is let's say that there are ceilings to the level of status and resources and the claim and whatever that you're going to reach in life. There is only one richest guy in the planet, right? And once you hit that, there is no further to go. So it is kind of a zero sum game in terms of the rank order in some regard and presuming that you're going to reach asymptote, right?

1:42:34And top out at some point, I wonder whether there is an argument to be made that actually stretching out the progression and the development of your material acquisition, like winning the lottery could be one of the worst things that could ever happen to you because it's such a huge step change. It's like, all right, and now how slow is the development from this new couple of million dollar that I previously never had wealth going to be, as opposed to if you were able to regularly and consistently move 5 % per year toward whatever the end financial goal is. So yeah, it made me think about how people that achieve rapid success may end up, it's called gold medal syndrome from Olympians, right?

1:43:18It's like I finally did the thing. Now what? And I wonder whether, yeah, I wonder whether there's an equivalent for slow life strategy. Well, they're the good news is that there's this other source of well -being. We conceptualize well -being as happiness plus meaning equals well -being. So happiness is what you can succeed as an individual. Meaning is what you do for your community, what you do for other people. So when you see that very successful business people when they get to a certain point in their life with success, they start becoming philanthropist, they start doing charity, they start working for others.

1:43:52And happiness is limited. There are limits to how happy you can be, how much well -being you can get out of that. But there seems to be no limits to how much well -being you can get from working for others. That meaning part of the equation can potentially be a lot, lot higher. You can, for instance, see with suicide bombers and revolutionaries that they are, they derive so much meaning for working for a cause and ideals that they believe in that they're willing to sacrifice their own life. This is called the devoted actor theory within evolution in psychology. So that is when this meaning quest becomes pathological.

1:44:29So what you're thinking instead of spacing your billions out through life, at some point when you have enough individualistic success start working for other people, start making other people feel better. Then you will get a sense of meaning. One thing is you'll get more happiness from recalibrating a comparison group, But you'll get this satisfaction that has as number one, it can be a lot more intense than happiness potentially, but also It's more enduring happiness is a temporary reward. It goes up and then it goes down meaning seems to accumulate over a lifetime so as people get older once they've had enough individual success if they want to keep flourishing and feeling well Then working for the good of others is it's a very beneficial strategy Depends a little bit on your personality, but most people benefit a lot from working for others.

1:45:17Matt, I've been enthralled today. This has been absolutely fantastic. We met each other at HBES what, five months ago, six months ago, something like that. I've been very much looking forward to this. This absolutely completely delivered, so much new stuff that I've never learned before. I really, really appreciate the insight. Let's run this back, man. Let's find more things that we need to talk about. I really, really enjoyed it. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with you and the work that you do, why should you send them on the internet? I have nowhere to send them right now.

1:45:46Maybe you can place that a polygons article I wrote in the description under the video. I'm working on two books. I have completed one that I'm hoping to get published soon. And then I'm finishing up another one on this history of mating. I have one chapter left to write. And then I will submit that to publishers. I'll hopefully at some point in the future. I will have some books to offer. And I would very much like for people to read those, but at the moment, yeah, they can also go to Google Scholar and put my name there and they'll get up a bunch of articles that I've written. Mate, when you are ready to publish that book, it's going to do unbelievably well.

1:46:20I love these insights. Thank you very much again for your time, and I'm looking forward to speaking to you next time. Thank you so much, Chris. It's been wonderful. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.