Mating Crisis: Why The Rate Of Single Men Looking For Dates Has Declined | William Costello PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: “Mating Crisis: Why The Rate Of Single Men Looking For Dates Has Declined” — William Costello (Part 1)
Date: February 28, 2026
Guest: William Costello, Evolutionary Psychologist, University of Texas at Austin

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the so-called “mating crisis,” exploring recent research and evolutionary explanations for the declining rate of men seeking relationships, shifting sexual activity rates, and their wider social and cultural implications. Tom Bilyeu and William Costello unpack how education, gender dynamics, modern dating, and evolutionary psychology all intersect, leading to unprecedented challenges and questions about fulfillment, gender roles, family, and societal stability.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Mating Crisis

• The “sex recession” and declining dating rates are not only about the number of people having sex, but also about dissatisfaction and a disconnect between men and women’s desires and behaviors ([00:30]).
• Quote: “You can still have this mating crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mating market from both sexes...upwards of 30% of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all, even for casual sex.” — William Costello ([05:00–05:42])

2. Sexlessness and Pandemic Effects

• Pre-pandemic, sexlessness among young men tripled, but recent data suggests women now surpass men in sexlessness, a possible result of differing risk tolerances during COVID-19 ([02:53–04:55]).
• Quote: “The sexlessness for men was going up up until 2018, but now women have actually overtaken them...” — Costello ([03:44])

3. Root of the Mating Crisis: Socioeconomic Shifts & Hypergamy

• As women outpace men in education and income, a “mismatch” emerges, shrinking the pool of “eligible” men ([06:21–08:59]).

• Quote: “Now, when you combine this socioeconomic success of young women in recent decades with their evolved mate preference for an equal or higher status mate, it just simply means… there's a lack of eligible men out there.” — Costello ([06:21])

• Hypergamy (women's tendency to seek partners with higher status) is under pressure. Some women are beginning to “mate down,” but this correlates with higher rates of infidelity, medication use, and intimate partner violence ([09:50–12:12]).

4. Modern Relationship Dilemmas and the “Have it all” Myth

• Cultural messaging encourages women to pursue ambitious careers, but biological realities mean the peak years for career and fertility coincide ([16:01–20:39]).

• Quote: “If she had a daughter...she would advise her, you can have it all, but not at the same time.” — Costello quoting his mother ([17:09])

• The motherhood penalty is the main reason for the gender pay gap, rather than simple gender discrimination ([20:05–22:16]).

5. Dating Apps, Scarcity, and Evolved Preferences

• Dating apps exacerbate selectivity, reducing people to data points — women using narrow criteria (e.g., height, income) shrink their pool to as low as 0.35% ([39:51–40:51]).
• Quote: “If women set their height preferences to six foot or over in America, they're reducing their mating pool down to just 18% of men. If they set it to 6 foot 3 and over, they're reducing it down to just 3% of men.” — Costello ([38:25])

6. Cynicism and the Self-Awareness Spiral

• Hyper self-awareness around mating strategies leads to cynicism and the sense that even self-improvement is manipulative ([22:16–29:03]).
• Quote: “Now...it’s so obvious...it’s like, am I being manipulated because somebody’s making themselves more attractive to me?... Cynicism seems the only outcome.” — Bilyeu ([27:26])

7. Workplace & Social Dynamics

• The shift in acceptable romantic approaches, fear of “unwanted advances,” and changing norms around workplace relationships add complexity ([29:03–32:34]).
• Men and women misread each other’s intentions, exacerbated by “sexual over-perception bias” in men and safety-based ambiguity in women ([32:34–36:08]).

8. The Scarcity Effect and “Eligible Men”

• The small pool of high-status men becomes less willing to commit in a skewed marketplace, mirroring evolutionary predictions ([38:08–39:51]).

9. Status Games and Potential Cultural Shifts

• Status can be assigned in arbitrary ways, but evolved mate preferences for resources and beauty have deep roots ([43:08–46:17]).
• The idea that society could champion and assign status to involved fatherhood is attractive but not widely supported by data ([44:55–46:17]).

10. Evolution, Gender Roles, and Fulfillment

• Gender differences in parental investment, risk, and psychological tendencies have deep evolutionary roots ([68:28–71:08]).
• Tom’s “physics of progress” for fulfillment: work hard, gain skills, serve self and group—historically, parenting provided built-in meaning ([63:16–67:48]).
• Quote: “Having kids is unrelentingly difficult and will challenge you at every conceivable turn... I will say thank you for your service to parents. I'm not trying to be funny, I mean it.” — Bilyeu ([66:14])

11. Polygyny, Social Monogamy, and Cultural Evolution

• Across history, societies have been mostly polygynous, but monogamy became normative for social stability ([71:30–76:55]).
• Societies with more surplus, unpartnered men (incels) see more instability and violence; monogamy evolved to address this ([77:17–79:20]).
• Quote: “Cultures that practiced monogamy as a cultural norm created a more egalitarian distribution of mates… and those cultures flourished.” — Costello ([75:50])

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Notable Quotes

• On both Sexes Struggling:
  “You can still have this mating crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mating market from both sexes...upwards of 30% of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all, even for casual sex.” — Costello ([05:00–05:42])

• On Hypergamy’s Consequences:
  “In those mate ships where women begin to mate down, we see increased infidelity for both sexes, increased use of insomnia, anxiety and depression medication...massive prevalence of intimate partner violence.” — Costello ([09:50–12:12])

• On Cynicism in Modern Dating:
  “Now that it’s a known thing...It’s like you get, oh, it’s toxic masculinity, you shouldn’t do it, blah, blah, blah. How do we step back from that?” — Bilyeu ([27:26])

• On Status and Dating Apps:
  “If women set their height preferences to six foot or over in America, they're reducing their mating pool down to just 18% of men. If they set it to 6 foot 3 and over, they're reducing it down to just 3% of men.” — Costello ([38:25])

• On Cultural Norms of Monogamy:
  “Cultures that practiced monogamy as a cultural norm created a more egalitarian distribution of mates and those cultures flourished.” — Costello ([75:50])

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• 00:30–02:53 — Introduction of the sex recession and population collapse concerns
• 05:00–06:21 — What actually defines the “mating crisis”; dissatisfaction vs. sexlessness
• 09:50–12:12 — Hypergamy, mate selection, “mating down,” and negative outcomes
• 17:09–20:39 — “Have it all, but not at the same time”; Motherhood penalty vs. pay gap
• 27:26–29:03 — Cynicism and self-awareness in dating strategies
• 32:34–36:08 — Sexual over-perception bias, miscommunication between the sexes
• 38:25–41:13 — Online dating, selectivity, shrinking dating pools
• 43:08–46:17 — Can we shift status? The myth of high-status “Dad”
• 63:16–67:48 — Fulfillment, childlessness, and meaning
• 75:50–78:05 — Transition to monogamy and why cultures flourished

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Tone and Style Notes

• Tom Bilyeu is candid, pragmatic, and deeply interested in the intersection of biology, psychology, and cultural evolution.
• William Costello provides data-driven, evolutionary-informed analysis, often referencing academic studies and evolutionary theory but punctuating some points with humor and personal anecdotes.

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Memorable Moments

• Tom’s story about meeting his wife as her teacher, and the evolutionary “status priming” of being at the front of the classroom ([29:03–30:20]).
• Discussion of the “female delusion calculator” and office experiments on women’s estimation of “eligible” men ([39:51–40:51]).
• The candid acknowledgement that no one—men, women, or society—has clear answers to the crisis, but that fulfillment and meaning must remain the North Star ([63:16–67:48]).

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Takeaways

• The “mating crisis” is not merely about the number of dates or sexual partners, but reflects deep dissatisfaction, unmet desires, and social misalignments downstream of rapid cultural and economic change and the inescapable forces of evolutionary biology.
• Despite some shifts, evolutionary preferences for status, resources, and certain gender roles remain powerful—and at times, mismatched with today’s technological and social realities.
• Solutions remain elusive, but self-awareness, honest conversation, and individual alignment with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment are repeatedly stressed as crucial.

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For deeper context and further insights, refer to the timestamps above, and consider exploring William Costello’s evolutionary psychology research and Tom Bilyeu’s additional episodes on the subject.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. There is something going on in the world today that I think we all need to be concerned about. We are in the middle of a sex recession. Now I know that sounds kind of funny until you realize that population collapse may be the most stark danger that we face as a civilization. So I brought on William Costello to talk about this startling phenomenon. Because when populations collapse, very bad things happen and there's no fast way to make up for the declining birth rate. This is something I was not paying attention to or taking seriously, but now that it's caught my eye, I'm telling you, this really is something that I think that we need to pay a tremendous amount of attention to. And William is probably not going to be the last person that I have on to cover this topic. Now, I found William's evolutionary approach to this issue to be incredibly enlightening and I am obsessed with viewing things, especially changes in society, through the lens of evolution. I think you guys are going to get a lot out of this topic. It will certainly uncover the way that the human mind works and how this important thing that we call sex is really beginning to change in this modern era. And we cover a ton of topics including the startling new dynamics between men and women, the scarcity driven nature of the mating crisis, the grim consequences of sexual dissatisfaction, and mind boggling shifts in the dating landscape that are going to leave you guys speechless. All right, buckle up for this one. I'm telling you, it's quite something. And while you strap in, make sure you head over to Amazon Music and subscribe. Amazon Music is the platform that has over 100 million ad free songs and now podcasts like this one, impact theory. So head over to Amazon Music now to satisfy your hunger for more episodes with yours truly. All right, let's get into William Costello, I'm your host, Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. I will start us with a Washington Post survey that shows that the rate of sexlessness among young men has tripled in the decade leading up to 2018. What in the hell is going on?

[C]

Yeah, so that was a big kind of statistic that was flying around there. There's some new statistics actually that show that that sexlessness uniquely being towards young men has actually reversed somewhat. And part of that might be that during the pandemic young men might have been more risk taking and they'd be more inclined to go out.

[B]

During the pandemic they were taking bigger risks. I thought for sure that going to go the other way, right?

[C]

Yeah. But young men would be less kind of disgust sensitive than women, so they'd be willing to maybe take the risk, especially for sex. So that has reversed so much.

[B]

Why would, that's, why would that go up during the pandemic? Like that felt like a time where everybody was becoming more and more risk averse. So what, what about being isolated or clamped down on or even just the risk of literal death made them more risk taking?

[C]

So the sexlessness for men was going up up until 2018, but now the new statistics are showing that it's not uniquely men that are sexless. Women have actually overtaken them. And that's what we're saying is might be a response to the pandemic that women would be staying in more risk adverse comparing to men. Men would actually go out and take the risk to have sex. But so what I'm trying to wrap

[B]

my head around is, is that a response to women pulling back which then make men go harder? Is that what we're talking about?

[C]

Yeah, I think men typically will be more willing to take the risk, women won't. There'll be fewer women who will take the risk and more men would be willing to have sex with them. That's just one theory. The other idea could be that it's just a naturally kind of cycling back and forth that this unique spike in sexlessness for young men wasn't any major artifact at all and it's kind of evening out.

[B]

So if it went up, I think the stat was 28%. What's it down to now?

[C]

I can't recall the exact statistic now, but I know that it's reversed and that women have overtaken that. It's. There's more.

[B]

You had to ballpark me. Are we talking 26%? Are we back down to like 10, 12%?

[C]

I think it was around the 12% mark. 12 15.

[B]

So it properly just completely reversed. So mating crisis over. We're good.

[C]

Not necessarily so. You know, I've spoken about that statistic on podcasts before as one kind of data point in what we call the larger mating crisis. But to think about it as a mating crisis. The evidence of young men reporting having sex within the last year, I don't think it's the best evidence of any phenomenon. You can still have this mating crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mating market from both sexes for men and for women. And there's still a lot of data points in that. So, for example, new Pew research showed that upwards of 30% of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all, even for casual sex. They're just backing out completely.

[B]

So help me reconcile that. We went from 20% sexlessness before the pandemic to its drop back down. We don't know the exact number, but more or less reversed. But guys are pursuing sex less. How do I. I don't know how to make that make sense.

[C]

Yeah, so it's kind of just pointing to this. Having sex one time within the last year isn't necessarily the greatest.

[B]

Kind of had sex once. But, like, they're not pursuing it.

[C]

Yes, just like.

[B]

Does you define the. What is then if you think there is a mating crisis? I thought the mating crisis was people are not having sex, so we're putting that on the shelf. So if it isn't that, what is the mating crisis?

[C]

Okay, so the mating crisis can be traced back to an essay my Supervisor wrote in 2016. So my supervisor is Dr. David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin, an evolutionary psychologist, and he wrote this essay saying, the mating crisis among educated women. He talks about this mismatch between women beginning to outpace men in educational settings. So he used the University of Texas at Austin as an example where women are beginning to outpace men in education at rapid rates. It's called the Pink Campus. And I know you've had Richard Reeves on to talk to you in the podcast, and he lays out all of those statistics in his book of Boys and Men. Now, when you combine this socioeconomic success of young women in recent decades with their evolved mate preference for an equal or higher status mate, it just simply means that there's a skew in terms of the lack of eligible men that are out there. And when you have a skew in a mating market like that, so fewer eligible men for women to compete for the market favors the scarcity. So Those few men at the top that women are interested in are less willing to commit to long term mating because they're the scarcity and it becomes a problem. So women have a double edged sword because highly educated women are competing with highly educated women and lower educated women for the same increasingly small pool of men that they're deeming eligible. And you know, you see articles every week about this talking about how women are beginning to freeze their eggs at rapid rates in response to this lack of eligible men out there.

[B]

So I know you've already said it, but I think it, it bears. When you say eligible men, you mean women have a set of criteria on average and given the only thing you've listed so far is college, but I'm guessing that there's going to be a broader set of things at play than that.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

But given that the women are just demolishing men in the educational realm and that's one of the criteria that they use to determine eligibility.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

That they're narrowing the pool by being. I don't, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say too selective. You're gonna have a problem with that and understandably so. But from their perspective, just from a numbers game, it's too selective. If you want a broad pool.

[C]

Yeah. It is just literally making. Narrowing your pool that you can choose from and broadening the pooling to choose from. Yes, that's the thing.

[B]

I don't want to get lost in this conversation just to make it nice and sticky.

[C]

Yes, absolutely. But yeah, when I think about it like that, I wonder what advice would I give to a sister of mine if I had one? I don't have a sister. The perfect follow up question, right. Would I advise her? Oh, just simply lower your standards. Marry a man less educated than yourself even though you're not really sure that's what you want. I don't know if I could bring myself to give that advice. And there is some evidence that women are beginning to do this and I think that's somewhat inevitable. So the phenomenon or the mating strategy that I described there of women tending to mate with higher status partners is called hypergamy. And you probably heard a lot about that on Internet discourse all around the place. But it's a very real phenomenon. And there is some evidence that hypergamy is in decline. Women are beginning to marry men less educated than.

[B]

A little in decline or a lot in decline.

[C]

I can't remember the exact figures off my head, but a little in decline. It still tends to be the preference, but they are beginning to mate down, so to speak. But this comes with a whole host of other problems. So in those mate ships where women beginning to mate down, we see increased infidelity for both sexes, increased use of insomnia, anxiety and depression medication. Among both sexes, you see a massive prevalence of intimate partner violence. There was a huge study done on 27 EU countries with over 21,000 EU women. And it showed that the woman earning more or being higher educated than her partner was a massive risk factor for all types of intimate partner violence. Which is kind of a really dark finding, but it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view because in evolutionary psychology we have something called mate retention strategies. And you have two strategies to mate. Retain. To retain your mate, you have the benefit provisioning strategy, which means you can provision your partner with so many benefits that she doesn't want to leave, she's happy to stay, she gets a lot of benefits from you. Whereas if you don't have a lot of benefits to provide, you choose the cost infliction mate retention strategy. And that's the type of inflicting costs on your partner to lower her self esteem so she doesn't feel like she can leave you. And in the most extreme circumstances, that even includes intimate partner violence. So you might recognize that in the kind of abusive language of abusive men who might say, who would ever have you except me? You're lucky to have me, no one will ever have you. And you try and lower your partner's self esteem or their sense of their own mate value so they don't leave you for someone else. And that makes sense if you think about a man who's suddenly threatened that his wife is earning more than him, or has begun to earn more than him, or is higher educated, she's spending her time around other high status men, more high status than you, she's away from you, even just from a proximity point of view, you are at risk, a bigger risk of losing her, so it is a threat to you. A lot of men do choose that strategy, which is a pretty dark finding, but one we maybe need to reckon with. As Richard Reeves points out, women are beginning to outpace men so starkly.

[B]

So let's go back to your hypothetical sister. What are we telling her?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, it's just an artifact of the modern mating market that the sexes aren't really depending on each other as role mates. In the same way, if we think even ancestrally, two of the main things that women used to rely on men for are protection. The bodyguard hypothesis, protection from other men. And Protection from the hostile forces of nature. That's not really such a prescient factor anymore. And also so protection and provisioning resources. If women are gathering their own resources, the state is protecting them as the bodyguard. Now, for a large degree, they might choose to, you know, to just go their own way kind of thing. We hear about men going their own way. But it actually might be the case that women are beginning to go their own way. And, you know, it's just not obvious what a woman might get out of settling down. And it might just be a bleak truth. We have to reckon with that. For the past number of decades, maybe centuries, women had been perhaps settling with men that they ordinarily wouldn't want out of strict economic necessity or strict monogamy norms.

[B]

Let me ask a really uncomfortable question.

[C]

Go ahead.

[B]

Were they settling for men that they didn't want, or did that change the context enough that there was just a broader pool of men that they wanted?

[C]

Yeah, I think the latter is probably more true. I don't think we had generations of women who were like, oh, my God, what have I had to do? I hate my husband. I don't think that's the case. I just think we had very strict kind of, you know, stricter lines around role mates. And it was. People were happy to kind of live in that world. You know, there's a really good book by a psychologist called Eli Finkel called the all or Nothing Marriage. And it talks about how in recent decades, we've began to put such a high stakes on our marriages that we demand them to be all things your partner must be sexually fulfilling to you, your best friend, help you fulfill your potential. All of it, all in one package. Whereas for most of our ancestral history, or in recent decades or recent centuries, your partner was a role mate that you chose to go through life with. There wasn't so many options to choose from in your city. You didn't have access to the whole world on a dating app to choose from. So it's a very, very evolutionary novel mating market we're in now, and one we really need to think about.

[B]

All right, so your sister now better understands the problem, but she still does not know what on earth she is supposed to do. And I know you don't have, like a preset answer, but I think I. My whole thing in life is one ought to have a method by which they think through a difficult problem. So help her and all of the women listening right now, and guys, honestly, for that matter, that are listening, how do they think through this Problem. Like, there is a thing that they need to do. And so when you talk to Richard Reeves, it's, you can't leave men behind. You have to find a way to start supercharging them. And that for sure is where I come at. This problem is like, look, as some. I am married to a woman that went from when we got married, she was going to be a mother and she was going to raise the kids, and then we end up pivoting into our marriage, and she's now an entrepreneur doing her boss bitch thing and all that. That was like a whole thing. Like, we had to figure out how to navigate that. Not easy, but one of the things is. And people are going to hate this, but I was like, a word like, I'm going to outperform you. Like, I'm going to still be somebody that you look at with reverence. And that meant that I also had to step up my game. So it's like I. I am both in need of encouraging her to become everything that she wants to be and then absolutely making it anathema to my entire existence that I would ever say slow down so I can lead.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So it's like, okay, cool, if she's running faster and I want to lead and look, I've got a whole thing. You need to be able to both lead and follow. I don't want people taking this out of context, but setting that aside for a second, we can talk about that in a minute. But if I want her to still be able to say, I have dated across or up, I have to move faster as well.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And I think that, that. That is something that is getting lost in society right now. I think there is a massive. We are. I've heard you refer to this as we're making the male way of moving through life like the default thing. I don't think that's actually accurate. I think we're telling women, like, go be aggressive. Go be dominant. Sort of abstracting that from male ism or maleness. And we're saying to men, don't take up so much space. Don't be so aggressive. That's icky. That's toxic. And so you're masculinizing women, you're feminizing men, and now you're asking them to come together, all while an artificial womb feels like it's six weeks away. It's like, dude, this feels like a recipe for disaster. So what say you?

[C]

I think you hit on some real accurate cultural forces in the kind of cultural rhetoric that's Happening with the, the male default being what we're encouraging women to aspire to. Every week you see this article about how much better life is for women not having been straddled with a family and things like this. And it's just not clear to me that that goal is what women will want forever and always. It might be throughout their 20s, but most women are equipped with evolved psychology to want to start a family. So I'll give you some maybe folk wisdom from Mami Costello, my mother. She raised three boys, she didn't have any daughters, but she told me that if she had a daughter and she was facing this problem, she would advise her, you can have it all, but not at the same time. So for women, I think that's very important is that this boss bitch energy paper chasing throughout your 20s is running up against a ticking clock that people are kind of reluctant to talk about because it's seen as quite sexist to highlight that women have a narrow window or window to get their, you know, their biological kind of needs met in terms of starting a family. That is a more time squeezed mission for women. But I really liked your idea of the aspirational viewpoint for men is that yes, the women have had the breaks taken off them in education and the workplace and they're killing it in a brain based economy rather than a brawn based economy. And yes, that makes for fewer eligible men. Yes, that sucks. That makes it harder for you. And in the 1950s you would have found it easy to get a job and easy to get a wife. But so what? That's where you are. It's kind of, you take the Jordan Peterson kind of maxim of pick yourself up by your bootstraps buckle. You kind of have to, you don't really have any other option. You can complain about the world and say, I wish it was different, but you're not going to slow women down now that kind of train has run away and nor should we. You know, there's probably so much of an economic gain out of women's liberation into the workplace that that's not going to go back. And also just from a point of view of the amount of women that now have financial freedom to kind of not be dependent on perhaps abusive men. That's an under acknowledged net good of women's liberation. And women I speak to, talk to me about that, they say, oh, it's a great relief to no longer have, you know, to be dependent. So that's one positive that's not often talked about. But yeah, so I think men need to be aspirational. Yes, we need to a cultural conversation about what we can do to support them kind of in a feminized education system, so to speak. But yeah, aspirational is the way to go for men. And in terms of the conversation towards women, I would say Mother Costello had some good advice on. Think about your timing of all these

[B]

things, about how it all, how does that play out? So what is have it all? Let's start with defining that.

[C]

So if we're saying have it all by today's maybe day vision of success, about having your own career, having a great husband and a family too, all of it in the one. And women often talk about that. There's a lot of pressure to have all of these and probably because they come up against each other at awkward times. So just at the point when women are beginning to really thrive in their careers towards the end of their 20s, that's the point where they really, really want to start a family. And you know, the gender pay gap is really a motherhood penalty kind of gap. And men, if they took a break

[B]

from the go, go into that a little bit because I think this is super controversial but makes as a, as a CEO, I'll just tell you this, this makes so much sense to me. So what, why do you call it a motherhood penalty? Why isn't it rightly understood as just a gender pay gap?

[C]

Yeah, because there's a lot of evidence, I believe in 22 specific cities in the US is very apparent that women are actually even out earning men up until the age of 29. And then it flips because that's the precise age when women are kind of exiting the workforce necessarily if they want to have children. If men had to take time off work to have children, they would probably suffer a penalty as well. So, you know, I'm all for doing all sorts of initiatives, make childcare easier, more support there, follow like a Scandinavian model to help people get back into work after having a family, all for that. But it's absolutely the case that women just when they're about to really thrive in their career. And it baffles me when people speak about the gender pay gap on a very one dimensional level. And speaking to you with your CEO hat on, you'll probably realize this. You don't want to lose the female talent you have at that age. Right. Nobody does. So it's a, you know, and you see these cultural kind of corporate drivers, Morgan Stanley releasing this, you know, report talking about how it's the rise of the she economy and how majority of working age women will be single and childless by the year 2040. And it's like, you know, is this the. The vision is the dream? I don't know if that's the case for most women.

[B]

Oh, I. So I will just tell you this is fun talking to somebody who knows evolutionary psychology so well from an evolutionary standpoint. I promise you that is not the vision. Just because evolution bifurcated the sexes a very long time ago and said, okay, we have to make this an incentive that the sexes will actually come together. And you're far more likely to have a child that lives long enough to have a child if you've got two parents coming together and obviously making it and then taking care of it. But I think that as you get into evolutionarily novel environments when, when the rate of change from a cultural standpoint outpaces the evolutionary ability to keep up with it, like I don't know that there is a. We get on the other side of this and all is well. And I'm a hyper optimistic person, but as I look at this stuff, the only way that I can stay firmly like planted in the optimistic camp is when I just go, it'll work itself out somehow. Right in the. What was it? Steven Pinker? It's like you can't look at however many thousands of years of tomorrow is better than today over and over. And of course there are blips and wars and things like that, but I mean it's just the long arc of history has tended towards things getting better and better and better, but I don't actually see the path. And so the. I want to introduce an idea. I've never talked about it out loud, so I don't know how articulate I'm going to be on this. But this, this feels like a very important idea. We have become aware of the relation between the sexes and we're aware of how much things can be malleable. And once you have that level of self awareness in a world where you have the Internet and ideas can spread at the speed of light, there be there, there comes this. Everything is like self referential. It's all pastiche. It's all. It's so self aware, wink, wink, that I don't know that that goes anywhere other than the cynicism of the eternally visible. God, I'm trying to put words to something. So I grew up in the 80s and I fell in love with filmmaking in the 80s and the action genre of the 80s was very unself aware and so you could have Arnold Schwarzenegger throw a knife into a guy and it would pin him to a beam behind him and stick around.

[C]

Right?

[B]

And you just laughed. Your. It was so great and so unexpected. Now if you say that line, you're saying it like with a wink because we've heard that line and, and that created a downfall of cinema. From my perspective, once everything became, we're so aware, we, we already know how a movie's going to begin. We know that what happened because you have so many books on like how screenplays are structured, that in the middle, I'm going to ruin it for people that haven't become aware of this yet. In the middle of a story, it's called the midpoint, you're going to be as far away from how you're going to be at the end as possible. So if they have completely failed at the midpoint, guaranteed they succeed in the end and vice versa. And so once all of that stuff is so known, you have a real problem of like having a fresh story. So once men and women both know, like, oh, women hypergamy is a real thing. Women use their sexuality to attract men. No matter how old a guy gets, he finds a 22 year old attractive. Women look for status, money, access to resources. Like, it's just so known that you get what I'll call the Obama effect, which I actually learned from you. Okay. And this is, this is a really interesting idea. So he writes his book, his memoir, and says, oh, I read these books in order to be attractive to these different women. And then people went nuts on him, like, oh my God, it's so misogynistic and so manipulative. It's like, but that is life, that is evolution. But now that we're all aware of it, it feels icky.

[C]

Yeah, it's almost too on the nose to do something like that. You know, get the goal, get the girl. But that feels like such an intuitive idea for young men.

[B]

That's what I'm saying. It's because we're now aware of it. It's like when it was you just sort of figured it out. Like I figured it out along the way. I was very bad with women in the beginning. I learn how to play the game of seduction, of becoming sexually attractive, all of that. But I didn't think of it as a game. And so it wasn't icky. I was just like, oh, okay, this is what I have to do. Wow, I'm really beginning to understand it. But now once there's like websites, memes it's so obvious now. It's like, am I being manipulated because somebody's making themselves more attractive to me? It's just the tactics are so visible that cynicism seems the only outcome. And I don't know how we step back from the precipice of cynicism where it's like, even as I say, guys, go get fucking tough, go make money, go figure out making money as a proxy for, you know how to control your environment, you know how to create something of value, you know how to organize people. There's a whole list of things that go along with your ability to make money. But go make money, it's super valuable. It is not an end in itself. It's the great facilitator, as I call it. Anyway, make money, master your emotions, get physically strong, educate the shit out of yourself, do all of these things, gain confidence. But now that it's a known thing, it's like you get, oh, it's toxic masculinity, you shouldn't do it, blah, blah, blah. How do we step back from that?

[C]

Yeah, it's strange. And even as benign self development advice as Jordan Peterson gets framed as misogynistic, it's as if to develop yourself, particularly with the goal of achieving romantic success, that that gets framed as misogynistic. But you touched on a very interesting point there earlier as well, about how you had to learn the game or you had to go through the trial and error. And I was talking with my friend Chris Williamson about this and we talked about how the mating market and the mating game is the only game in town that you don't get to practice for. It's a real baptism of fire. You have to go in there, clumsily, develop yourself, figure out what works, get your heart broken, get rejected, get all of that anxiety. And people being very anxious and risk adverse now are not willing to do that. And even to do that is also kind of seen as to make those mistakes along the way in the mating market. It comes with a lot of costs. And you mentioned like the me too era, there's potentially a lot of real costs associated with making a lot of mistakes along the way there.

[B]

So I mentioned that before we started rolling. So for people that don't know. So I married my student, it was a school for adults, but yeah, we in another timeline, I often say that we're a me too story. But the reason I had brought that up, and this goes back to the same idea, is I was 24 when I met my now wife and I was dumb. I was under educated in life. I did not make much money at all. And yet I was able to attract her because she saw me teaching. So it was me teaching something that I knew and loved and was passionate about. She saw me at the front of a classroom. So it's like forget what the name for that is. Where, where when other women are paying attention to you or when people are paying attention to you, it's a status thing. So she's seeing me. Everyone in the room is paying attention to me. I know more about anybody in the class about this thing. And so it was like a very artificial environment, but the perfect environment for a woman to find me attractive. And it's like, yeah, of course, like one. I want to be very clear. I made a move on exactly one student and I ended up marrying her. So this was not like a thing. But I was very aware that that was going to put me in my best light.

[C]

Yeah. And you know, throughout recent decades and recent history, a lot of people met their partner at work. You know, both my brothers are married to or eng. Engaged to women they met at work as well. So, you know, it's not like this absolute fringe phenomenon that should be always frowned upon. And if you close that door for people to, you know, you're no longer allowed to meet a romantic partner at work. We spend all our time at work. It's like you're in proximity to people kind of with similar interests. They're going to see you hopefully shine in an industry that you belong in and should be thriving in. Of course romance is going to blossom. There's so that seems a bit of a misguided cultural idea to just completely shut down workplace romances. Yeah, I think that it would be a shame if that was a complete. I mean, I believe even like Facebook or Netflix have a policy whereby it's just not allowed at work for employees to get together, which seems very strange.

[B]

It doesn't seem strange to me. Again, putting my CEO hat back on. It seems stupid to me, but it is not strange in a world where it's lawsuits, this, that and the other. Like, look, and this is easier for me because I'm married, but when I step into the work realm, I turn my sexuality off because I am so paranoid about somebody misreading it. It feeling like a power play or whatever. And again, this is one of those where I don't know how we step back from this, but you can't expect anyone, guys or girls, because you could easily. What I mean is guys typically make the first move. But even if you flipped it and said women are going to make the first move, you are still going to run into a problem where an unwanted advance is made.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And to your point about this is the one thing where you don't get to practice, even if you could practice it. It's also the one thing that when you make the move for real, like we're living in a time right now where that, that an unwanted advance is like seen as violence. Like literally said, that is violence. Yeah. And so it's like, whoa, like what? Play that one out. Where do you think that goes?

[C]

For sure. I think the idea of flipping it, flipping the sexes there would have more legs than perhaps we might think. Because although it is still making a move, men would perceive a move being made on them as much less harmful, even sexual harassment. Men perceive it as way less harmful. When it's towards a man. Men perceive sexual harassment as less harmful, generally towards men or women, but specifically towards men. So flipping it would be, I think, would have some legs, I think the worst. Most men would probably be flattered and say, so why don't we flip it? I think that the desire is not there for women. I think most women want to be pursued rather than pursue men themselves. It's just that they want to be pursued by men they deem eligible or competent. And they've got this kind of avenue to repel or to kind of punitively punish men they don't deem eligible who are giving them the ick for coming on to them, which is a shame. You know, there's a funny phenomenon because men have this sexual over perception bias whereby we perceive a smile from a woman as giving us sexual interest. And this is, there's good evolutionary reasons for this is because our ancestors weren't the ones who missed a cue of sexual interest. It's actually like the smoke detector principle. It's better to be overly sensitive to these cues than to miss them. So we've got this over perception bias. But meanwhile, women have got, for a whole host of reasons, they've got a strategy to kind of give soft rejection or to misrepresent romantic interests for a whole variety of interests, one of which could be wanting to feel safe, not feeling safe enough to forthrightly reject someone. So you've got these two mechanisms running into each other where women are giving this kind of ambiguous no or token resistance to romantic pursuit, and men are kind of learning from that. Combine this with their over perception bias and you've got a recipe kind of for disaster there. It's a strange. I think both sexes could do better to understand, engage in better cross sex mind reading, which is something our lab is studying right now. Try to see things from the other's point of view view, learn about these biases that exist and be more maybe forthright and clear. I do have sympathy with women who say that they're reluctant to give firm rejections to men because I've seen some men get very aggressive even in response to rejection, which isn't very nice for a woman to have to deliver. But there's a whole host of other reasons women misrepresent romantic interest. 33% of women report to have engaged in a foodie call, which is misrepresenting romantic interest in order to dine at a man's expense.

[B]

Whoa.

[C]

Yeah. So it's pretty high. You'd think foodie calls are a real thing. Yeah. And you imagine this drives a frustrated young man on the dating scene crazy Because I heard that the average cost of a first date in New York was $90. And it's like, wow, if you're a young man and you don't have a lot of money and you get burned with a few foodie calls, what a tinder keg for resentment towards the other sex, you know? So it's not good. I don't know. I'm not saying that's very typical. That's 33% of women have engaged in a foodie call at some point. I don't know how typical it is or how often the frequency they engage with it, but more common than maybe we thought.

[B]

That is shockingly high by what I would have guessed.

[C]

But I bet you're real happy you're married now.

[B]

Yeah, it's. Well, so I'm real happy that I'm married for a lot of reasons. Like when I think about, I just missed online dating, so that wasn't even a possibility. I'm trying to make sure that's true. As far as I remember, it was not a possibility when I met my wife. Shortly after we got married, it started to be like a real fringe, like, oh God, can you believe? Cringe, cringe. But it wasn't an option. And so I'm very glad about that now that I hear more and more sort of what that ends up becoming in terms of creating this very interesting thing where you talked about this at the beginning, where a very small percentage of men that are quote, unquote eligible, which I want to keep saying is self defined, this is what women find attractive. But this super narrow pool. And then they become the scarce resource. I'm literally parroting back what you said at the beginning, but this is one of those things. It really took me a while to understand this. So women crush the. Not crush. They have a natural bias to want a certain subset of things. And as they move up the sort of hierarchy of performance, that the raw number of men in that begin to get smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. But now, because of dating apps, they can find those guys, but those guys still are a small relative number. They become the thing that are pursued, which then clicks over into. We should probably get more into evolved preferences on the sexes, because they are very, very different, robust, repeatable in study after study. But guys, when they're the ones that are the. The coveted thing, they're not going to commit. And so now you get another brick in this wall of the mating crisis.

[C]

Absolutely. Yeah. So the sociosexuality is either restricted or unrestricted, and it begins to mirror the one that's in the scarcity. So if women are in the scarcity, men are more keen to commit long term, and that's just as a crude sex ratio kind of balance.

[B]

But because they have to commit to get the girl.

[C]

Right? Exactly. It's like, oh, I need to. I'll give you, you want. There's not that many women around. I need to make sure I get one. So you mirror the sociosexuality of the other sex. But yeah, exactly right. And what online dating does as well is it exacerbates this problem because it reduces the person down to a set of static data points. So your height, your income, or your educational level. And that really is what's weighted stronger than your personality, even, which doesn't really shine through in a dating app, despite what a lot of people say. The. The example I always give is that dating apps don't allow a nice charming Irish accent to compensate for being 5 foot 7. Which leads me to believe I wouldn't get on so great on dating apps. And that's true. I mean, you know the dating app Hinge, I heard the relationship science director talking with my friend Chris that if women set their height preferences to six foot or over in America, they're reducing their mating pool down to just 18% of men. If they set it to 6 foot 3 and over, they're reducing it down to just 3% of men. So when you're skewing the sex ratio against you like that and encouraging men to see themselves as eligible, men to see themselves as the scarcity, that's setting the deck against yourself for women, which is.

[B]

That's so interesting because one, this whole arms race begins with height is an easy one to talk about, but looking at the I. Ladies, you have to forgive me. This is what it's called. It's like the female delusional calculator, or female delusion calculator, something like that. So, and we. We did a test here at the office and we said, all right, ladies, give me a guess. Six foot or higher. A hundred thousand or dollars or above. Not obese and any ethnicity. What do you think the percentage ends up being? It's 0.35%. And they were all guessing like 15, 20, 30%. We're like, you are so far off. And those like, the. The sort of meme and culture is like, well, that's what I should get. And that doesn't seem that crazy. But in reality, it's a ridiculously small. Ridiculously small. Less than half a percent.

[C]

Yeah. And in terms of, like, coming at it from an evolved mate preference point of view, the selection pressures that would have acted on female choosiness for height and formidability are that the idea of protection and ability to provision resources, it's an example of evolutionary mismatch. And it's obviously a very convenient one for me, being 5 foot 7 to talk about, but maybe it's time we let that one go.

[B]

Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. So when we going back to, like, what. What is it that we can do about this? So what advice do you have for young people? Anybody male, female, either? Like, how do we navigate this? So, guys, we know, like, you can push yourself, you can make yourself better, but for real, for real, like, what do we do with women? Is it paint a new picture? Motherhood is rad, and is it just beating that drum? Is it. We need to socially champion people that are far more feminine and aren't stepping into a more masculine role. Like, what do we do for real?

[C]

So I'm optimistic that the pendulum for women and their drives might swing back towards the middle right now.

[B]

It's what they want or what society reinforces.

[C]

Both kind of things, because they'll kind of work in tandem to some extent. So it's not that long ago, it's only a number of decades that women have really had the brakes taken off them in education and the workplace, and they're beginning to kind of really shine. So it's a very novel kind of thing. And it's like the thing to do of, oh, you know, make your feminist ancestors really proud. You know, what would they think if you went to be a trad wife, stay at home, mom, you know, it's kind of repellent. Right. The nightmare scenario can't do that. But that pendulum might swing and it might become a bit more loose that people can choose from a variety of different options, which is good. Right now the main option seems to be boss bitch energy, but that might cool as it becomes a little less novel that women can do this. One thing I would like to see happen, but I'm less optimistic about is that mate preferences are very, very sensitive to what we assign status to. So you can assign status to any number of things. So it's not outside the realm of possibility that you mean for men or

[B]

for men and women?

[C]

For men and for women, what makes it there is some sex difference that physical beauty results in high status for women in a way that it doesn't necessarily for men and kind of resources reduces in status and strength results in status for men in a way that it doesn't for women. But status is to some degree arbitrary. So there's a really good book by an author called Will Storr called the Status Game. Really good book. And it talks about how there's this tribe and they assign status to who whichever farmer in their tribe can grow the biggest yams. And that is the high status thing to do. So it kind of shows you this flexibility of status. So what I'm optimistic about.

[B]

I don't know that I agree with that. Okay, so for instance, are women going to ever be prized by men for the ability to grow big yam?

[C]

Less likely. But what I mean is the male status, what we assign status to for men could be a bit more malleable. Yep.

[B]

So but on that so one we've already now slashed it. Now it's about men's status can be malleable. But if there was no fitness to the yam thing, do you think it would ever catch on? Like for instance, I've heard you talk not, I don't mean this word in a bad way, but I've heard you talk disparagingly about guys. If you're trying to make video games your status thing, women just do not care. And so I wouldn't pursue that angle. And I, yeah, I probably agree.

[C]

I think, I agree with honorable exception. I think the really high status gamers I've come to learn can actually be kind of very successful in the making.

[B]

I think that that has to do with money and fame. I don't think it has to do with gaming.

[C]

Right. And it's a very narrow pool of those gamers that are going to reach those, those heights. But yeah. So the white pill I was trying to get at is that maybe we could see a world where we assign status to being a really involved stay at home father. But like I say, I'm less optimistic about it.

[B]

Why are you? You can give me either the why you have enough optimism that you say that or why you're pessimistic that you want it to work. But you probably because I think that will never work.

[C]

I'm less optimistic because none of the data shows that that's what women want. There's one study that showed that just 5% of young women desire a partnership where they work full time and their partner works part time or not at all. So that's very kind of bleak. And that was a study of young women. So you'd think that those younger women would be more primed to say, yeah, I'm very egalitarian, I could work and my mate could be the stay at home dad. So there doesn't seem to be any mate preference shift for women there. I'm optimistic or hopeful because I think involved fathers are really beneficial to families and to children. And that's something really important that we need to. As well as lionizing motherhood, we need to lionize fatherhood too and involve.

[B]

Yes, but so men as mothers does not strike me as a winning thing. And trust me, I hear the comments lighting on fire as I say those words. But what you're describing, I will say is traditionally the feminine role. And the reason that I think evolution will get behind that is from a physiological standpoint, only a mother can breastfeed and give birth. P.S. and so once your evolution, you have to optimize one of the sex to carry the baby to term and then breastfeed it. And I don't think it's a mistake that evolution optimized. Just like I'm going to put all of those things in one bucket. So I'm going to optimize the female hip design for childbearing. I'm going to optimize the breast design for breastfeeding. And by the way, I'm going to optimize the brain design to care enough about this infant to be able to pick up on cues that maybe a guy doesn't pick up on. Also. PS 15% of women have a fourth photoreceptor. Could that be tied to raising infants that they can see different colors in their cheeks and so they can really understand. I don't know. I'm just saying that from, from a biological perspective, evolution has honed each of us to be good at something. And so when I think about evolved preferences, a hundred percent culture plays into this. But again, I've heard you say that culture is downstream of biology, which I agree very much. And I don't think that an alien civilization, their culture would look anything like ours, presuming that they evolved in some different way. So if culture is downstream of biology and evolution has optimized one of us for the, the very tactile early nurturing of an infant and the other for something else, which we can get into what that is in a minute, it. But I don't think that culturally you could try to reinforce something that goes against the biology. So to be very pointed, I don't think you can ever get culture to say a man staying at home and taking care of an infant is of course one offs 100. But I don't think that will ever take over the, the, the physical preference. It's a terrible way to say it, but the en masse preference of women because it doesn't have an evolutionary correlate.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the way we describe it is that genes hold culture on a leash and culture is a biological output. And yeah, ultimately I do think you're right. Will neither the mate preference won't shift or it won't shift very fast anyway or in great numbers. And also just the personality inclination of males to be interested in being that involved in the home. Humans are a remarkable ape in that the male invests as much as it does. But you're right to point out that males invest far less than women do. So yeah, perhaps it is as bleak as we might think.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I won't give myself over to bleakness just yet. But this does feel like something that for us to get to a winning solution, people have to be able to confront the truth. Truth, the reality of how things actually are. And then we can build things that work. Okay, so this was me responding to your idea of involved fathers. And I think that's critically important. So now from an evolutionary lens, what does a, an involved father look like if it's different than the picture that not to get you in trouble that I just painted of a more feminine role.

[C]

So the main role of fathers, outside of just the bodyguard hypothesis of protecting is teaching and teaching by action. So men are very good at kind of the rough and tumble and learning that way and kind of making children feel safe kind of thing and encouraging them to take risks and go out and learn about the world. Whereas women would be more riskier, risk averse and be like, oh, don't take a risk. Don't cycle your bike out in the street. Come on. You know, just very much keep safe, safety conscious. Whereas men are kind of like encouraging the child. It fortifies the child with an ability to navigate the world in a way that the safety ism of female typical parenting doesn't. So I think that's a huge one. And if we look at the kind of the current malaise of teenagers or young people, they're exactly this problem. They're safety conscious. Safety is the paramount value of all values and they just don't take risks. So that could be lacking. There could be just.

[B]

Would you call that the feminization of culture, perhaps?

[C]

Yeah, that's kind of. Yeah, that's what.

[B]

Does it make you uneasy to say that?

[C]

A little. But just because there's such variability among men and women. But no, I think female typical parenting certainly looks like more safety oriented than, than, than male parenting.

[B]

When you say that there's so much variability, what do you mean?

[C]

It's just that, you know, a lot of women will act. Have more male typical psychology or male typical behavior. You know, I just hear the, the complaints of people saying, Well, I know 10 women who are not safety oriented at all. So you always got to kind of give yourself a bit of ass cover there.

[B]

Yeah. So I mean, well, let's address that head on. So one, I want to be very clear and I'm sure I speak for both of us, women should be able to be whatever they want.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

I'm married to a woman that has chosen not to have kids.

[C]

Word.

[B]

I'm married to a woman that is trying to be the best entrepreneur that she can be. Word I love the most. Like, I'm still with this woman. I'm in awe of her. She's unbelievable. But at the same time, I'm very honest that that transition was difficult and it wasn't like, oh, okay, cool. Like we had to really think about what that means and like, how do we, you know, process through that, how do we position ourselves? Because I will say that I think that not having kids is a way higher risk strategy for especially women, but I think it's even a high risk strategy for men in terms of being fulfilled at the end of your life. And I think if you go into it with your eyes wide open, then you can mitigate those risks by how you structure your life. How you frame your life intellectually, how you think about it, it. But if you just go into it blindly, there's going to be a real problem. Anyway, I say all of that in response to. For a long time, I was very hesitant to even form a thought about how I actually thought this all should be, because I was worried about the backlash. And when Covid kicked off, for a whole host of reasons, I realized that I needed to start figuring out how I think through these problems, because I don't. I don't have wisdom on everything that I talk about. So sometimes I'm just like, okay, how would I process through that? Process problem. But when I get to something like looking at what's happening in culture right now, this does seem to be like the feminization of culture. And I think that the way we should all be looking at this, and I think this is true for a lot of things. Not just the male, female dichotomy. I think there's a lot of dichotomies in life. So in business, there's one between a visionary and an operator. And the solution to all of these is the thing that makes it work is the tension between the two. And you should never want for the conversion of the other. So, for instance, I don't. If my wife and I had kids, I would not want for her to convert to a masculine way because, oh, my God, like, you're going to make them scared to take risks. No, it's going to be the tension between the two of us where you're trying to keep them safe. I'm trying to encourage them to take risks. And so between those two things, they will find their path.

[C]

Path.

[B]

If it's just all masculine energy, you're going to have certain pathology on that side. If it's all feminine energy, you're going to have pathology on that side. So it's like, maybe for all of human history, we've seen the pathology of too much masculine energy. Cool. I'm just saying, the second you swing to the other side and it's all feminine energy, you will now get new pathology. And until we can be honest, like, if guys can't admit, hey, cost. Inflicting strategies on your woman is evil. Dude, don't do that. That's so gross. You should be mortified. If you ever find yourself saying the words like, you could never find somebody as good as me, you're the asshole. And it's like, if we can't look at that and be like, that's grotesque. Don't do that. But at the Same time over here. It's like there is going to be things that are equally problematic, like telling a guy not to be aggressive or telling guys that they need to shut up and sit down. No, no, no. If a woman wants to beat me at anything, she is going to have to outperform me, period.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Facts, simple as. And like, that doesn't mean that I'm going to try to compete with everybody at every point. It's like I'm going to have my areas. But if I'm trying to, like, be the best at something, I'm trying to be the best.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And you touch on a point that Jordan Peterson talks about, about how this kind of new experiment of sharing the work domain actually is pretty novel. You know, for most of our ancestral history, we had different roles, different work roles for the family. And now you hear of all sorts of arguments where men complain that they're getting in trouble for debating or arguing with their female colleagues the exact same way they would with a male colleague. And it's seen as being aggressive or adversarial, but it's just male typical engagement.

[B]

It is aggressive and it is adversarial and step up.

[C]

And that's preferred by mental, but it's no longer allowed. It's kind of framed as being aggressive or bullying. If it's bullying.

[B]

Now, now we've gone into judgment about whether it's good or bad. The reality is so in, in a work environment like this is something I've thought a lot about. Companies go out of business way more than they stay in business. And if you can't have a meritocracy where the best idea wins, you're done. You will go out of business. People's livelihoods will be destroyed. Any equity the person has built is destroyed. The money that they invested in the company, people invested in the company, it's gone. And so in the same way that legally companies are treated like a human, I would say that it is a life and death situation. And the only way forward is the best idea wins. And I don't care if that comes from a female intern. I don't care if it comes from a male CEO. It's like, what is the best idea? And if you're a moron as a CEO, if you're a moron and you think because you're a guy you have better ideas, ideas, the market will slap you into oblivion. And if you're a woman that thinks your ideas are better because you are handling it in a more emotionally deft way. Also false it's like the reality is you need to be able to get ideas out on the table. You need to be able to debate them openly without shutting the other person down. Because as much as I'm saying yes, it is aggressive and adversarial if you shut down amazing people, amazing thinkers, because you're, you're so dominant, you're so aggressive that you don't know how to elicit the idea and how to elicit the feedback and how to get people to challenge your ideas. You're also dead. So it's like you can't pretend that, that some women maybe on balance the, the majority of women, they have a different way of moving through the world. You need to be aware of that and all that. But at the same time, you can't soft shoe it so much that you're afraid to say, this is what I think. I'm going to fight for this idea. I need you to fight back. Because if you can't present a compelling argument.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And yeah, it is good to hear that kind of refreshing meritocracy kind of idea coming from you is good. Something you said got me thinking about also like the prioritizing of almost like a libertarian freedom of choice for what you want for your own life. Life as the master value. In recent decades for people, I only

[B]

have one master value, so I'm not sure where you're headed. My master value is fulfillment.

[C]

Right, okay. But yeah, what I mean is that there used to be kind of these macro systems or the, the fulfillment of having a family would find you whether you wanted it or not kind of thing. Because it's not an, it's pretty recent that we've had the emancipatory pill. Right. So that's actually causing two that are status driving mechanisms for women wanting status in the workplace and the freedom to not be reliant on a man. And they're able to kind of control their fertility and they're running into that time window. So it's like this idea of, you know, this individualism is almost run rampant, that it's like, oh yeah, whatever you want for your own life. But if so many people want that, the boss bitch, career focused energy, suddenly you've got a macro problem of society is, you know, a fertility crisis because of the individual choices in the market. So it's a, it's almost like before the pill, which was massively emancipatory for sure, you would organically find your way into kind of an equilibrium. You'd stumble into it Whereas now with complete control over fertility, almost complete control, it means you're kind of the individual choices that might be better in some way for the individual, or they might think it's better for themselves as an individual is leading to a massive societal problem.

[B]

So it's a. Yeah, and here we are. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, this is why I feel like this is so important is, you know, again, just to plant a flag. I want to find the way back from the precipice. And I suppose I should define what that is in a second. I want to find the way back back. But in a hyper self aware world where everything feels manipulative, I don't know what the way back is. So here's the precipice. The more you educate women, the fewer kids they have. If you stop having too many kids, society collapses. Now you'll build back, it'll be a pendulum. And I hear people say all the time that no society's ever recovered from a declining birth rate. That's just patently false. Look at what happened to London during the Black Plague. It was like the population cut in half. Still way bigger now than they were. But that is cold comfort to any one of us that only get, you know, an 80 to 120 year lifespan. And the pendulum ain't going to swing that far in that life. So it's like you get what you get while you're alive. And the fact that, oh, it'll bounce back in 150, 200 years, like Jesus.

[C]

Right.

[B]

That's not, not comfortable.

[C]

The opportunity cost for. And you know, when I talk about this fertility crisis, sometimes incur, incur a little bit of flak of people saying, oh, are you telling women what to do with their bodies? And things like that. But I'll refer to statistics that 80% of childless women are involuntarily childless. That's by their own desires. So this is not me and any other culture warrior online talking about this fertility crisis. And women need to fix it and do their Handmaid's Tale kind of role. This is saying women, by your own desires. This is what you're saying is lacking. So it's not a crisis that I'm saying I'm unhappy about. It's even if we only look at women's own desires, they're having fewer children than they want.

[B]

What's your North Star like? If you're coming up with a solution to a problem, what's your North Star?

[C]

I really don't know. I don't know the way Back when especially we're met with such resistance from, oh, you know, is this even a thing? There are some people who are saying, oh, ridiculous, it's not even a problem. It's racist to say it's a problem. It's all sorts of things how, you know, apparently it's racist to say it's a problem because it's only certain demographics. Yeah. So they're saying, oh, there's plenty of people being born in Africa, which I think is actually a quite a racist idea because it implies, oh, the people being born in Africa, we can just import them in and they'll be our labor force. And that seems a bit kind of icky to me, actually, from the other side of things. But yes, it's kind of like until the problem is acknowledged, I can't see. I'm still stuck there, to be honest, at trying to move the needle on that front at first, get people to acknowledge in the mainstream. And we're beginning to get there. But it's still kind of framed as this nefarious kind of idea to bang that drum. So, yeah, I'm still kind of there trying to move the needle towards acknowledgment first.

[B]

Okay, so I think with any of these things, whenever you're trying to think through a problem, this is certainly what I put on myself. You have to know what your North Star is. Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to get to? So in business, I call this the physics of progress. So the first rule of making progress is you have to know what you're trying to achieve. What is your goal? Like hyper. Hyper specific. So for me, my very specific, very aggressive goal is human flourishing, which I will round to fulfillment. So fulfillment has a recipe, as far as I can tell, which is evolutionarily derived. So from what evolution has had to do to ensure that you had kids that had kids, you end up with the following recipe. You have to work really hard. That's important. You have to work hard. If you don't work hard, none of this, you just won't feel what you want to. You won't feel fulfilled even if you do all the following things that I'm about to say. Say if you don't work hard to get there, it just doesn't work psychologically. So you have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you and the group that are exciting to you. It's got to be fun and enjoyable that allow you to serve not only yourself, but the group. And if you do that, if you're working your ass off to gain a set of skills that you care about towards a goal that is exciting and honorable. Exciting is self evident. Honorable means that it uplifts a group as well as yourself. You will be fulfilled. Now, I think that the thing that does that, that hides in that is meaning and purpose. So like I'm doing this thing, I'm killing myself. I'm working so hard, but it gives my life meaning. I matter to the group. And the thing that historically gave you that, that made you feel like, whoa, I'm sacrificing myself doing something that I love, but I'm sacrificing myself to a greater good is having kids. And the second you don't have kids, you don't have built in flourishing. Now that doesn't mean that having kids works for everybody because some people can't wrap their heads around it. They have the wrong frame of reference, it ends up being a nightmare. And having kids is unrelentingly difficult and will challenge you at every conceivable turn. And I think it was either Plato, Plato or Aristotle that said the only impossible job is raising children. You're going to break them to some degree. It just is what it is. And so, man, when I think like I, I, when I meet parents, and I'm not kidding, I will say thank you for your service. I'm not trying to be funny, I mean it. As somebody that hasn't decided not to have kids, I am very grateful to people that have decided to have kids. But what I know that my wife and I have to contend with is especially as we get older, finding meaning and purpose in our lives without children, without being able to point to them and saying, okay, what I did mattered because they will live on beyond me me. We have to really work to make sure that we're thinking about our lives in the right way so that we don't, while we're working, feel like I matter and then as we stop working, go, I don't matter anymore. And what did I really leave behind? It's like, so my wife and I have sat down, okay, we're not having kids.

[C]

Cool.

[B]

We have to think through these things, like, how are we going to address this? And like think about that. And so if that's our North Star, then it's like, hey, all the stuff that I'm saying about women, like, hey, you need to be thoughtful about like, what, what does it look like to define success as a woman? And if it's going to be boss bitch, it's like Cool, I'm totally here for that. But think through, what are the trade offs? Right? Yeah, same thing with guys. If you're not going to better yourself, if you're not going to push yourself to chase status and be better or you're not going to have kids and, and bring a masculine influence, cool, fair enough. What's the trade off?

[C]

And it seems like a hasty move to kind of disavow this evolutionarily present meaning making mechanism that we've had, you know, that, you know, it obviously didn't work for every parent ever and always. Every parent didn't feel a great sense of meaning, but probably most did, you know, and it probably found them. You hear lots of stories about when young parents have children, how they step up and they suddenly, men in particular, how when they're about to have a child that can step up and really make something of themselves. Very motivational. So it seems a very hasty thing to kind of disavow that culturally en masse. Say, oh no, that's no longer going to be the greatest source of meaning for young people. Yeah, that's a scary thing to just let go of. Without a ready made answer in response, it's like, what are you going to do instead? Have people got a good answer? I don't know. If traveling the world and you know, know there's a real absence of that meaning making. I think. Yeah, you're right.

[B]

Okay, so I want to have on my tombstone one simple phrase. You're having a biological experience. And I'm obsessed with that. Because if you understand yourself and you understand the way your brain works and you understand the way the body works, then you can optimize towards fulfillment. Because what I'm saying is evolution has created that recipe, not me. I'm just trying to point out what has happened. I'm not trying to say this is what ought to have happened, just it is. And so given that you have an evolutionary, you have a background in evolutionary psychology, that's a better way to say that. What are the differences between the sexes?

[C]

Differences between the sexes. So one of the biggest personality differences is the people versus things personality difference. Women tend to be more interested in people and social relationships and men seem to be more interested in things, objects tinkering with how they work. In terms of sexual psychology, massive differences between the sexes there. And the way we describe it is that where the sexes faced similar selection pressures throughout our ancestral environment. So then we would expect them to be the same. So we both face the problem of getting food into our body. To fuel our body in the exact same way. So guess what? Men and women treat food psychologically pretty much the same. Same problems. No major asymmetry of difference between the sexes there. Sexual psychology is a radically different ballgame for women versus for men. Women have far greater obligatory parental investment. So sex is a far more risky endeavor for women, or has been ancestrally for sure. Sure, they may get pregnant. They may have to be stuck with the child, have to breastfeed that child. Infant mortality was massive throughout our ancestral history. It's a huge success story of recent decades, how much we've improved that. But it was a risky endeavor. The minimum parental investment of a man is one successful sex act, which I'm reliably told can be accomplished in a number of seconds. But, you know, so it's a massive different ball game. And where you have massive biological differences between the sexes, we should expect some psychological differences underpinning them. And we do find that you find men have a massive greater desire for sexual variety and sexual frequency. My supervisor calls that the most boring replication in all of psychology now, because it's just one of the biggest effect sizes. So to put that into perspective, the effect size of the difference between men and women in terms of desire for sexual variety is about as big, as big in magnitude as the sex difference in upper body strength between men and women. So that's a huge psychological effect. And in psychology, if we have an effect size that's small to medium, we're happy with that. We'll say, okay, we'll take that as a psychological finding. So the sex psychology differences being so huge, so robust, repeatedly replicated over and over again. We just did it actually the other week, again. Yeah, it's just a stark phenomenon, but it makes sense in the light of evolution when you think of the different selection pressures that would have shaped that psychology to underpin the biological differences.

[B]

Okay, so if culture is downstream of that biology and all those things you just said are true, how do we end up with. I think it's 83% of all historically studied societies have been polygamous. Is that what you just told us? Would that have predicted that finding?

[C]

Yeah. So you see a large amount of societies being preferentially polygynous, meaning one man with multiple wives. Now, even within those societies, most mate ships would have been monogamous, but it makes sense because a woman can only benefit so much. She can't benefit that much from having multiple husbands. She can only get pregnant so many times, once.

[B]

It wouldn't be more resources, like if I Can get multiple guys. Like, word, perhaps.

[C]

Yeah. But it's harder to kind of control those men. But men can really benefit from multiple wives. So they really go to town and you see whenever a man has this power. So Genghis Khan is the ultimate example. So the most amount of offspring born to One woman is 69 to this Russian peasant.

[B]

Startling, right?

[C]

Startling. Seems true, Seems impossible, but seems nothing compared to someone like Genghis Khan, where It's estimated that 1 in 12 people are related to Genghis Khan because he sired so many. Off suffering. Yeah. You have a similar effect in Ireland with King Nile of the nine hostages. He apparently had so many concubines that all of us in Ireland are related to in some way. Apparently. He's a very, very handsome dude. We're all kind of related to him in some way. But yeah. So there's very few polyandrous societies in

[B]

the world that would be multiple males, single wife.

[C]

And where you find those are predictable areas too, of really, really harsh environment. So in the high mountains in Nepal, and the way that works is a family might say that they have two or three brothers, and instead of each brother finding a wife of their own and dividing up the farmland, which is quite limited amongst three different families, they would say, hey, let's have fewer families, same land, all live together and two brothers. Invariably it's two brothers to promote genetic relatedness and more peace there really fast.

[B]

Before you move on, that seems insane when you talk about men want more sex than women and just that alone, a woman having to please two men that both one already wants more sex than she wants.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

[C]

Disaster. Yeah. Well, polygyny is no picnic either. So I'll tell a funny story about the anthropologist Helen Fisher. She was walking along and I always forget which tribe it was with the himb maybe, but with this polygynous farmer. And he had currently had three wives and she was walking with him and she said, in an ideal world, how many wives would you want? And he stopped and he thought, and he leaned in and said, none. He would like none. Because apparently in these polygynous marriages, the sister wives poison each other's children. They're constantly fighting. It's no picnic. So not easy. But yeah, our ancestral history of polygyny is very interesting. And that got really, really bleak about 8,000 years ago, where it's estimated that at that time, 17 women reproduced for every one man. And what's thought to have happened there? Whoa. Yeah, really, like if you look at the graphs and Maybe you can put them on screen, but you see an absolute nosedive for male effective population. So men just so many men dying before getting to reproduce.

[B]

So let me say this another way. For one Guy was getting 17 women pregnant on average, and then guys were getting zero.

[C]

Our men were dying before getting a chance to reproduce. Yes. So remember, this is a time of a lot of mortality, so a lot

[B]

of men wouldn't it have to be what I said is true. True. One guy on average was getting 17 different women pregnant.

[C]

Yes. And what happened, or what is postulated to happened, is that this coincides with the onset of agriculture, which for the very first time allowed the most high status male in a society to stockpile resources to such a degree that it created such massive inequality that it was better to be the fourth or fifth wife of the high school. 17.

[B]

I want to perhaps either I'm misunderstanding this or you're hedging against something that is just mathematically true. Is what I'm saying accurate?

[C]

Yes. And the other theory is that it's coincided with either agriculture or chiefdoms where you had this really, really high status guy. Now what happened in response to that is the cultural norm of monogamy evolved and cultures that practiced monogamy as a cultural norm created a more egalitarian distribution of mates. It meant that even the most high status man could only have he couldn't monopolize the mates. And this gave your kind of disgruntled young men, your incels in a society a fighting chance. And rather than being focused on causing trouble out there, status seeking, trying to find mates, competing with each other, they were focused on their family unit. And then like you said, moving beyond the family unit to their society and those cultures flourished. So you, and you do see that in the ethnographic records that cultures that practice monogamy began to flourish. And Jordan Peterson gets in trouble for this because he says, oh, socially enforced monogamy, but that's a well established finding in the literature that that caused cultures to flourish.

[B]

Okay, so two questions. One, how do we end up getting to monogamy? So is it societally they recognize this is a problem. Is it, is it top down or bottom up? That was really my question. And then I actually don't, I haven't paid close enough attention. Why does Jordan get in trouble for saying that? Like what do they actually push back on?

[C]

Okay, so the first question is that yes, in any society where you have this surplus population of unpartnered young men, you're incels. It's called young male syndrome, and they cause a lot of trouble. And cultures throughout history had all sorts of cultural institutions to try and deal with this surplus population before even monogamy took hold as a cultural norm. You might send your surplus population of young men off on exploring adventures. You might send them off raiding war

[B]

because you just want to kill them off.

[C]

Well, you want, not necessarily kill them off. You might find something more useful to do with them. If they're exploring, they could actually find something useful. Or if they're raiding other villages as Vikings or warriors, it's more useful to you than them just dying. But yeah, primarily it's better than them causing trouble at home.

[B]

So, I mean, look, I, I'm definitely leading the witness because I know the punchline to this, this joke. But when you're sending. What, what is the reason that people go to war?

[C]

Yeah, so the main reason throughout our ancestral history is to get mates, to get brides. And there's the Yanomamo tribe in, I think, think Bolivia and Venezuela. And there was an anthropologist called Napoleon Chagnon, and he was studying them and they got into a conversation and he asked them, why do you go to war? And they all said, to get mates to get brides. And they asked the same question in return. What does your civilization, what does your society go to war for? And he said things like democracy, freedom. And they all just laughed their head off at him. They couldn't believe that people would go to war for such a reason. So there's two reasons to gain brides like that. So your unmarried young men would go to war for that reason, or also just out of a kind of a, like a, an arms race of we can't be seen to be seen as weak. If we don't go to war with the others, they might think we're easy pickings and they'll come to war with us. And they probably would. So it's kind of this constant tension, but those are the two main drives.

[B]

Yeah. So that, that is by far the most horrifying reality I think, that we have to face, which is that over evolution, you start, some person. In fact, gosh, I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are over what period of evolution. Because if this is only the last like 8,000 years or whatever, that's pretty short time period. So would that be evolved anyway? In your answer, please hit me with that. But the real question being that we have to face that at least for the last 8ish thousand years. The number one reason that people went to war was to steal women, which is. I mean, that's rough to look at.

[C]

And it's still used as a motivation for modern war, like even jihad. They will motivate young men. That's the precise demographic they want is young unpartnered men. And what do they promise them? 72 virgins in the afterlife even, or the promise of brides in this life for sure. Even then at a more micro level with gang culture, a lot of young men probably get into a gang with the opportunity to get some status and get a girl, you know, they don't have many options. So it's still a very big motivating factor for men. But one of the kind of. Of the white pill about it is that it was this cultural device for occupying your surplus population of young men. You also had the monastery, more peaceful kind of way to occupy them, things like that. But we've run out of those devices, really war and, you know, the monastery and things aren't the same cultural institutions they once were. But we do have the Internet and that seems to be what's pacifying modern young men from being out causing young male syndrome problems. They seem to be spending their time in front of screens and video games or online. And there's a lot of problems with the online hostility that incels. Engage in or that. But you know, the other alternative might be worse. If they weren't being occupied in those virtual worlds, they might actually be causing more trouble. Trouble,

[B]

yeah. That is, it's again, standing at the precipice, a very bleak picture of how we end up walking backwards. So to understand how we end up extracting ourselves from this problem, I need to understand why Jordan Peterson is attacked for talking about culturally enforced monogamy. If it is the thing that help stabilize a society, what are people actually pushing back? Like what are the words they say to him?

[C]

Yeah, so he wrote a really good essay in response to this, to his criticism, where he cites a lot of the literature where culturally enforced monogamy or socially enforced monogamy is absolutely a common reference in the literature.

[B]

Are people saying you're enslaving women? Like what. What is the actual criticism so typical

[C]

with Jordan Peterson kind of critique? It gets hyperbolic. The most extreme version of what he's saying. No sense of charitable interpretation at all. And they're kind of suggesting. Yes, that he's saying we need to, you know, really punitively enforce. And the word enforce is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. What he's referring to is just a cultural norm. And we absolutely have had and still have a strong cultural norm for monogamy. You can only book a hotel room as a couple, you can't book as a throuple. Now we live in a strongly culturally enforced monogamy. It's absolutely the main cultural script currently and has been certainly for the past number of centuries. So he's saying an uncontroversial thing, but just people are completely uncharitable as we've seen many cases with Jordan Peterson.

[B]

Okay, let me see if I can construct the argument. So from a Steelman perspective, I'm not trying to give a cheap version of the this. We have fought very long and hard as women. I assume this is the perspective it's coming from. We fought very long and hard as women to come out from under the yoke of men. And if you're trying to put this culturally enforced monogamy back on us, you're saying that we have to be tied again to men. Like you're coming up with another reason. Like before it was I couldn't control my reproduction and I couldn't get a job. And so I finally fight back against all of that. And now you're coming back with okay, well if we couldn't do it because it was impossible to survive without a husband, now I'm gonna repress you culturally and just make it the norm that you're stuck to one guy.

[C]

Yeah, that's absolutely the Steelman version of the argument. And fair enough if you want to say that. But it's this idea that a kind of free reign libertarian sexual marketplace would return to this kind of effective polygony. And that might not be any picnic for women either because recent studies have shown that one in three UK men would be open to a polygynous mateship. But guess what? Women are not so keen on it. They don't really want this arrangement. So on the one hand it sounds like monogamy is a cultural device to curtail women's sexual freedom, but you could look at it that it actually is a way to curtail the most high status males skills sexual monopolizing. So you know, it's. Yeah, you can't just look at it in one dimensional analysis. But yeah, it's that polygony was no picnic for anyone involved. And this idea that monogamy is just

[B]

why isn't it dope for the high status males? Like I get so I'm with your farmer.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

In that I love my wife and you can't imagine how much. And even if she was just like that would Hurt my feelings things. I wouldn't do it for that reason alone. But the reality is, bro, the thought of having another one of my wife, like, because that you get pulled in a direction, which I think is amazing. I've got a whole diatribe about how important I think it is that you and your spouse shape each other. But the thought of being pulled in multiple directions because there are times where my wife believes I should be doing XYZ thing to stand up for her honor or whatever. And I'm like, but you're wrong. Like, you are acting like this is nuts. I don't think you should be acting like that. And so if I had two women pulling or three, oh my God. But if your gang is con and it's just like, look, I have a wife, I don't know, just making this up. I have a wife and then I have 8,000 concubines. My wife is cool if I go sleep with any of them. I have no emotional obligation. You don't get to tell me I need to stand up for this, that or the other. And like that horrible for the 18,000 women. I understand that. What I'm trying to figure out, if you're a sociopath and you're that guy, why is that bad for you?

[C]

I don't even think it needs to be a sociopath. I mean, if we're, we're doing a cross sex mind reading study now where we're looking at men's and women's desired number of sex partners at various points throughout their lifetime over the next month, over the next year, six months, months, 30 years, the whole lifetime. And some of the men, their desires are just crazy high. They're all saying like a hundred partners a month. Some of them, like, we've boot them out of the study, they're too high.

[B]

And even you boot them out of

[C]

the study sometimes if it's ridiculously high, like a thousand or maybe kidding or messing, or it's just a really like an under.

[B]

You have Wilt Chamberlain, 10,000 women in his life running the math. I'm like, bro, when do you eat?

[C]

This is the point I was making. So you mentioned that, oh, these sociopathic men, I don't necessarily even think it needs to be those sociopathic men. Like, look at any man that finds himself in a position where he can. Mick Jagger, any top level rock star will kind of act on that desire for sexual variety if that's socially sanctioned. So you need a socially sanctioned norm or a cultural norm to kind of buffer against that being the, the, a fine thing to do. You know, it's not just a curtailing women's freedom, it's actually as much curtailing high status men's freedom.

[B]

Interesting. Okay, so I'm definitely not a libertarian, but this, this is where things get tricky for me because I don't want to see people hemmed in. I don't want to see people told that they can or can't do it. The tragedy of the commons is real people are going to, if they know somebody's going to go take that resource, they're going to take just it is what it is. You're not going to get around that. So my question becomes, it seems like wherever we end up as a society, we end up because it is human nature married to that contextual moment. And you either have to change human nature or the context. Nothing else will work. And that's why you're going to get into very weird moments because as the context becomes novel and it disrupts the fitness of our evolutionary strategies, now we are going to do what evolution has programmed us to do, period, end of story. And so as you create a weird context, you're going to get weird ass results.

[C]

Yeah, that's, I think you're exactly right. And that's where I focus so much of my time thinking about evolutionary mismatch is this idea that our modern world just looks radically different from the world in response to which our psychology evolved. And yeah, that's the primary mission is to understand how that, what's happening with that interaction. How does our evolved psychology evolve for mating, work in an online setting? Evolutionary novel. But yeah, you're not going to change human nature. We're rapidly changing cultures faster than we can keep up. And it's just the best we can do is try and keep up and understand, never mind figure out what the best way to integrate and to live our life using it. But yeah, certainly denying our evolved nature is going to get us nowhere.

[A]

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