#704 - Mads Larsen - Are Relationships Supposed To Last For Life?
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is mad's larson. He's a norwegian author and journalist whose research focuses on the history of human mating ideologies.

The narrative of human romance is an ancient story, but that story has not always remained the same. The last ten thousand years has been a crazy journey through different beliefs on why we should find and stay with the partner. And today we get to hear about all of the fascinating details.

Expect to learn why it's so illuminating to study the story of meeting ideologies across time. How are modern beliefs about finding a partner are historically very unusual, while having a daughter as a farmer could be a useful addition to your farming strategy? Why in sales are so unhappy?

Why old people are the happiest ever despite evidence to the country in the past and much more. This episode is absolutely awesome. mad.

I met him a couple of months ago at age best, the human behavior and evolution society conference in palm springs. And this guy is so, so good. I adored this conversation.

There is so much interesting stuff. In here are another underground hero. He will be coming back on the show.

I I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. This guy totally blew my socks off. Yeah, just sit back and enjoy this. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome 曼 孜 拉森。

Why is IT useful or interesting to study mating ideologies at all?

IT is the foundation of all social orders. We like to think that politics, philosophy of those big subjects to what is all about, but at the foundation it's how men and women reproduce um and upon that everything else rests so if that falls apart, our societies fall apart too.

Why does nothing need an ideology to sit over IT at all? It's a it's a physical activity like why the need for a story and what that means and how we should do IT.

Because with so we've change so much from our ancestral environment, having people commit to pair bonding for decades and to providing for offspring to dedicate the resources that that requires needs a lot of coersion. We have our biological impulses, but they do not align very well with modern demands for meeting.

So we need in addition to that, an ideology that compels people to make that core system uh that makes them think that it's their duty to uh to pair, bond and have children. And the audiology we have now is compare to previous ideologist, very weak in that regard. When I have an audiology where this has become completely voluntary and where is a you can make a good case for why perhaps you shouldn't have children. And that's a rather unique situation.

I like these of the word conversion.

the absolutely biological and cultural question. It's a huge sacrifice to reproduce and to have to make make enough people do that to a significant extent. Now that we also have a effective on reception, it's really difficult.

right? So what is IT that's changed primarily in terms of the demands on mating and resource supply in the modern world or even in the developed world compared with ten thousand, fifty thousand years ago?

So much um there are several factors contracts. Tion is huge before you just needed to wanted to copulate. And if you did that enough, you'd have children and then you'd be a course by your communities to pare, bond and take care of that children, that child, until it's a big enough.

Uh, in the modern rule salt we've now made, uh, we've d connected population from reproduction. And also in this uh, industrialized environments, we have children have become much more expensive instead of being free labor, their huge cost. Also, we have an ideology that over the past millennium has become more and more individualism. So we're not necessarily convinced that god is forcing us to have children because that is the meaning of life. Uh, we now think that perhaps being single and traveling and taking care of ourselves is more important than putting more children out into the world and in addition um at the moment we have this uh a quite uh significant uncertainty about the future that also this incentivizes reproduction.

What do you think is the ancestry typical mating strategy for humans over time? I know that we've had a few human ancestors and then we kind of had a little bit of A A movement. What was the journey through, uh, human predecessor mating systems?

You're thinking the past six million years, yeah, yeah.

give us the story to start. Six million years ago will take you from there.

yeah. So we started out like most vertebrates, we we made IT promise sely. Uh, that means that, uh, we probably live together in groups, multi male, female, multi mae, multi I fema groups, uh where where individuals for free to uh to copulate but were reproductive opportunities were mostly channel to high status males.

And the purpose of that is that you'd then distribute h the most successful genes within the population, which helps us uh adapt more quickly to changes at seta. Um this is what's most common across animal groups um but then some species um they develop a need for pair bonding. If you can get proteron al investment, if if if the males contribute with more than just genes, this can be very beneficial.

And this is what happened with, uh, our lineage with with the early commons about four million years ago, where the ecology changed, where IT was so beneficial if if, if males would contribute that we then had a transition. We don't know precisely which way the main hypothesis is that high status males started keeping hermes and providing for females and then there is no alternative hypotheses that is rather new. But quite interesting that this was a sneaky y new strategy for low status smells to be allowed to to copulate and reproduce if they offered provision ing and protection to females.

Well, I was like the a prehistoric sip version. Yeah, it's .

interesting. I thought this is, this is scholar, his theoretical biologist, to did mathematical models, and he just couldn't make IT add up for high status. Uh, males IT didn't IT IT would never make sense for them to go along with that initial transition from promise to mating to pair bonding polygons.

Pair bonding IT made a lot more sense that those males that were excluded meeting saw as uh offspring needed more uh more help, more provision ing. They were they were uh more dependent on the females that they would not go in and make the deal that, okay, I will provide you with calories and protection, but then you let me have sex with you exclusively. So I know that you offspring our mind and then the female had to make a trade off. You want the good genes from males that are only willing to contribute with genes, or do you want a low status mall to be around there and help you get food, help you get protection, help you out with the kid?

And that would result in kind of like a resource acquisition and supply arms race between the low status and the high status males. yeah.

So then this would push so IT would then start because this was so beneficial because across those four million years, the office in development period doubled. Uh, we just got bigger heads, more helpless when we were born. So IT became more and more beneficial to uh pass on the good genes and instead get a male that would help you out through the most vulnerable years.

So through the pregnant y and that in the beginning face of when the child needed the provision ing the most, then this developed until around two million years ago when most most homo communities consisted of mostly uh mostly facial females of provision ing males. And then a small number of police goni st. And a small number of premium matters because IT would never um IT would always in some instances the beneficial for the female to choose the superior genes of a high state smell rather uh then get a provision in low to smell to to to a as the father. So this is this is a competing ipod is that intuitively IT seems interesting.

Just how rare is male parental investment in the mammal and primate world?

Uh pair bonding .

yeah uh male parental investment primarily .

yeah so um I think among mamalis ten percent uh do pair bonding and among primates is twenty nine percent. But the reason why we think that, uh our lines where promiscuous made us six million years ago is that, uh chimpanzees and vulnus les are promiscuous metres and once a linate chest evolved pair bonding IT is so beneficial that it's exceptionally rare that you d evolved from IT. That's why we assume that six million years ago we also had, uh, police cuse ancestors.

M interesting. Okay, so two million years what happens next? Because we go through some rapid changes over from then until now.

yeah. So the interesting part is that although IT became highly beneficial with pair bonding, there was little pressure on males for not wanning multiple females to want to make promise is the original sly. And likewise, while IT was beneficial for fee males to opt for the provision ing of low status males, there was little pressure on them for not wanting or desire a more successful mate. So what we see what is quite interesting is that for those two million years of the norm was monogue pair bonding with some gi but um a really superior uh forager just couldn't provide for that many for that many females. But we see that with agriculture that took off and um result that in in pretty extreme uh politically in in the most adequately environments.

But that would have been one of the agricultural revolution fifteen thousand years ago, something like that twenty thousand years ago around twelve. Yeah okay.

So and then the the the main period was from when around seven thousand years ago, all the best agricultural land had been taken. So then if if you wanted to grow, what you had to do was um was to take land from others and that created a two thousand year period from seven to five thousand years ago. I had a pretty bizarre meeting regime. I don't .

know if you're .

familiar with this. No tell me, tell me. yeah. So I think you've cited this research. I think, uh I saw your your episode h with with harm. He cited the study from uh car minute all in two thousand and fifteen and he cited the regional hypothesis. There were the region researchers thought that what had happened seven thousand and five thousand years ago that there were just these extreme levels of polygonal uh that uh uh White process diversity in our lineage, uh, was reduced by ninety five percent, meaning that nineteen out of twenty males disappeared while the the extremists of diverse increased in line with population growth. And if you think about IT, that doesn't make sense, is just not paul, knowing what we know about human behavior.

Why would ever so you can imagine that to one generation of a patriot might cast rate every other male is to pregnant all the females, but that wouldn't make evolutionarily sense for him to do with the next generation, when all the all the men are his sons. And this would have been an extremely unstable system, and that this would happen all over the world for two thousand years. IT just seems impossible.

So two thousand and eighteen, a new main I posses, was establish that speaks Normal or favorably of our ancestors mating practices. And what probably happened was that for those two thousand years, all everyone did, uh, in order to able to grow their tribes, because the only way to grow was to take the fields of your neighbor. So then you had a universal system of intertribal rating.

When yukin group was strong enough, you would go to your neighbors, kill all the males and take all the females and all the fields and that was yours. And people kept doing this for two thousand years um until eighty five percent of the regional male day a was just wiped often after genetics like so it's year two thousand years of of universal genocide and rate that's what our ancestors rub to. That's what IT seems like.

And the reason why we got out of IT was that we invented new stories because up until five thousand years we can only CoOperate with kin and then somebody invented that some men, they are the descends dance of gods, so we can submit to them as leaders. And now we can grow our in groups. So instead of just being a kin group, we can now be thousands, and we can keep growing. And that is, of course, beneficial. Because then we can kill our smaller neighbours lot more easily.

okay. So is this the inception of having a broader mating ideology about five thousand years ago?

Well, what that created was the ability to create a lot larger societies and IT also this, the invention at the time was slavery. Before that, when you conquer someone, you killed all the males. Now you could either turn them into your slaves or your allies.

So that was it's it's a weird thing to think about. But if we think that slavery is Better than genocide, that was actually progress at some point in our past. So we will look at our ancestors. It's stayed yah it's it's rather unpleasant group of people at times .

yeah when the choice is between slavery and genocide um and you're having to make A A value judgment of which one which one least bad of the two uh that's a little bit rough. okay.

So what given your research looking at this sort of journey of mating ideologies over time, what is the furthest back that you've managed to find? No obvious you say, uh, some kind of prototypical religion bonds groups together in a way that civilizes them beyond what they Normally would. And given that so much of what we were driven by previously, the motivation was very heavily meeting derived, or at least meeting was one of the outcomes that we wanted. I suppose you could say that any ideology that could he is a group together beyond kin is a making ideology. But what about when IT becomes a little bit more sort of specific about what you should, what a man's role is, what a woman's role is, how we should combine all of this together?

Yeah, that's a good intuition. E, to have that that is the kind of civilizing direction but the ideology made I didn't change that much from the period of described now and up until um the show is dissolution of europe's stripes about a thousand years ago. We can call that ideology is often called heroic love.

So if you want to start following the mating idealities who had for through antiquity up until the church is the solution of the tribes rogue e love. And it's it's it's it's a term that's problematic uh, because the point with IT was that during this regime, a woman had to always be ready to submit to the greater warrior. You didn't necessarily have a few rulers, rather state structure that could protect people.

People always up until this time lived in kin groups. And if other groups came and defeated you, then the men would be killed and and slow, then the women would often be captured. So if women wanted a chance to survive and protect themselves on their children, they now had to submit to whom ever had killed their father or their husband.

So this was, this was an extremely misogyny, rape culture. And this is what marked, you can up, up until, up until a thousand years ago, from from, from the beginning of agriculture. From that period. We talked earlier where what this was the original al patri, where the male images was matter and women are, they had different way of of conceptualizing this, but women were more like soil where the pedro seed were put. So this way, as long as you are these people, you could just capture many women s as you, as you wanted, we were able to, and then keep growing your king group.

I suppose, as well. This heroic of narrative is A A useful strategy to legitimize to the men what they are doing, but also as a coping strategy to dump en down the discomfort of what the women are subjected to.

If there is an ideology that said over the top that maybe this is the way that meeting is supposed to be done, maybe IT is beneficial that your last husband was killed and murdered, and that now you have a new one, because he's evidently the more heroic of the two. Therefore, IT is quite right that you should go as supposed to. The person that I cared about has just been dismembered in front of me and now this guy that I don't know like that's not a particularly reassuring story. Where is the heroic of narrative? Ah it's useful for both sexes in summer regards, in summer regards.

But I am sure IT was an absolute nightmare for these people that I had to go through this. And what drove much of this was, uh, that these kin groups generally practice plagne. So, uh, you'd had elite ite individuals who would hord women as wives, concubines and sex slaves for the low value men.

They didn't have access to pair bonding or or population. So then they were driven throughout antiquity to when they had a stronger of position to go to whichever, whomever their neighbors were, and then kill the men, take their stuff and take their women. So this this polygamous mating that mark this period under heroic club drove a lot of war, a lot of social instability. Um IT was a quite enormous change that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy, even on the most superior of males, that that changed everything.

When did that happen? Well the the .

roman empire are played around with monogamy, but they were never very serious about IT. And then the church started imposing IT in the fourth century, but also not very serious. And then you have a period that referred to the goria reform at the beginning of the second millennium, that, uh, you had a lot of church councils that work with these matters because the church wanted to grab more power of the people.

And if you can control their mating, if you can control their marriages, the sexual behavior at set up that gives you a lot of powerful, powerful men. So this is when they are dissolved, europe scribes to prohibit in cousin marriage changing rules uh, for inherited ance and ownership and then imposing lifelong monogamy, which was a very unusual, unique, rather extreme way of thinking of meeting. But when you do this, this, if you won't understand the origins of the modern world, this was IT.

Because this, then you create the sexual galison. This is how you make parents invest in children. This is where you prepare for growth and where you start creating a different, more individualism, psychology, a different way of thinking, your lower means to the room.

So instead of a superior men competing, older life require more women. You get to compete until you get one. And then you have to a, put your efforts in more, in a more productive direction.

How does IT help investment in children? Why was there not a massive amount of investment in children during the heroic matting era?

Because you would have one father with several women with a bunch of children, and you would try to maximize that to the extent that your resource is allowed. So you just had a lot less attention, poor child. And you also didn't have an ideology where you should necessarily invest so much in your children. They were more expendable. Well, if, if then, these are, these children are distributed over a more men, and you have a more limited amount of children, then you will be more incentivize to take care of those children that you do have.

What is the reason for the church, or anybody wanting to impose some sort of rule from a civilization design perspective? What was the advantage of the change that they were looking to enact? What was the outcome that they wanted by encouraging lifelong well.

that's really interesting in hindsight. If we like modern ny, we think IT was brilliant. But when we look at the document at that exists at the time, it's a bit of a mystery. Uh, we can suspect certain things um through dissolving europe's tribes and changing uh the rules for ownership and inheritance ance the church by the by the tenth century had grabs forty percent of the agricultural land in western europe so that was good.

You could see that as a pretty strong incentive that when you die, instead of your land being passed on to your kin, you now give IT to the church, you don't have to go to hell. That's a pretty strong material incentive. And then the other aspect, as I mentioned earlier, is that powerful men that hold a lot of women, if you can impose on them certain mating structures, then U S.

As the church, if you have to uh acknowledge or permit their marriages, if you can restrict them, then the church get powerful, powerful men, which is another a good understandable material incentive. And then it's it's all just speculation in terms about the spare spiritual unification are what they might have suspected the long term consequences would be. But my impression from having started a lot of deep cultural changes is that to some extent, things just happen.

It's it's just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things and then IT almost magically sorts itself out and nobody really understands what's happening when it's happening. And then one hundred years later, or in the modern times, historians look back and kind of try to make sense of what IT was. But generally, there aren't that many grand architects that have a particular invision that they're able to impose on .

their culture yeah, what's that quote about? Life happens forward, but only makes sense in reverse. And I guess that the histories kind of the same, that we can post talk, rationalized what was IT, that the churches grand plan was, where is know, it's much easier to go for a simple explanation, which was they wanted to control powerful men. These powerful men had lots of resources.

If the church slots themselves in between those men and one of the things that they want the absolute most, which is women, because presumably they couldn't swap themselves in between the men and their resources, like unless the church is gonna ge a war, and say, right now, half of these farms hours now, half of these houses hours now did is a much more crafty, subversive strategy to be able to somehow make divine the union between a man and a woman. And then for you to be the orbit that sits in between them, yeah, I can totally see how IT gives you powerful, a powerful men. But one thing that hasn't been mentioned so far, which I thought would have come up is, uh, sexual redistribution, right? That if you have high amounts of inequality within a sexual system, you get your male syndrome is not very good. He does this play a role at this stage, always is just such an accepted part of the way that the world existed that that no one was really bothered about. The k osc came along with IT.

No, in in high insight, we see that IT was uly beneficial. The modern world would not have happened if, if that redistribution of women hadn't happened, that the church and post on medival europeans. But whether anyone in the church were able to predict what greater sexual gelateria ism would have for consequences to social stability, the potential for growth, for peace at seta, I don't know.

I'd like to think that without smart, but I kind of doubt IT, maybe they noticed this as they went along, that they saw there were beneficial effects, I don't know. But yeah, the end result was was quite impressive. but. How IT came about who the architects were if they really imagine this, i'm kind of doubtful if if, if, if they understood the ramifications, what they were doing.

Okay, so heroic love. Yeah, finishes. The church comes in.

Sorry, men, no more guy banks for you. What comes next? Well.

this is fascinating, and this speaks again to how how nobody is in charge. So I, some of these mating ideologies, so what I referred to s cultural disorders. These are made ideologies upon what? You cannot be a social order, but they kind of make you lose faith in the previous ideology.

So when correctly love uh was uh created and disseminated through romances, embed lads from the twelve century. This this wasn't ideology with values and norms that primarily undermined heroic lob. So IT had an an exaggeration of the emotion of love, something that was incredibly strongly resistible and that last at a lifetime.

And this was meant to discourage chi status men, uh, from being polygamous, that if you pick just one woman that's gona last for life and it's gone to give you a special ecstasy that you can get if you have more women, and also if you force yourself on a woman. So what men should do, and this is what ballots and romances promote, that instead of being the greatest warrior, well, you also have to be the greatest warrior. But in addition to that, you have to talk to women, you have to use sophisticated social skills.

You have to fluor and instead of just raping her after you killed her husband, you have to make uh the woman feel a high uh degree of last and love so when he can help herself from having sexual because SHE SHE loves you so much and he loves you so much that when you can have sex so you have all these you have all these values that if you just read the romance of imbaLance and you don't know what they're reacting against, it's kind of hard to make sense up. But when you know the tenants of heroic club, you see that all these elements, of course, love, are constructed in a sense, to undermine those those strong believers from the previous regime. And also IT has to do with a new social that when you live in kinship groups um you stuck to your own.

You are skeptical towards strangers strangers might anna kill you and take your resort. But now that we lived in a future europe where everyone we're supposed to be Christian, then we're supposed to have this openness towards strangers, we supposed to be friendly, curious and all these norms that defines corby. Love is also the way european and Christians we are supposed to treat each other, and not just women. So we have all this, this brand new type of service that would have never worked in kinship system, but was crucial for fuel to europe to have an effective uh, CoOperation.

So as you are becoming more satellite ed and as you are more open to new people, to being friends with people, stuff like clubs and and ale houses and things were like people will be migrating a little bit more. It's not just my family bonds with the family next door.

Okay, so what about what is the role of marriage? Is marriage widespread at this point? Is that that you go through the church and the church does this thing? What about the role of no sex before marriage and those sorts of impositions?

Yeah so the transition was before marriages for private gan reform. They had to be church marriages which is also very important for court of uh and what's unique about it's something called the european and marriage pattern that develops her because this had never happened before. No king groups had been dissolved the way the church did IT.

Uh, so you got a unique situation in the west. And what happens is that you have when you can no longer move in with your king, you have to start accumulating the sources. So people's marriage age were pushed up from safe from their teens or early twenties, up to their late twenties.

So you shortened people reproductive period. This was crucial because under identification, we practice what you can call fourth trimester abortion. You might know this from vikings. You have the babies you have and then you have a look at them and then you kill the ones you can't race. So this was how you kept the population and check intended to kill more females than males.

So you'd have a you'd have a low sextile um what they did now because you individual life became sacred, you have to restrict people sexually, they have to have less sex. And one way that they did this was through this european marriage pattern where you reproduction period didn't start until you around thirty years old. That way you didn't have more children. So he was very crucial in this period that people sexually were restricted. Otherwise you're run into enthusiast crisis because you'd have too many children. But what happened, interestingly, is after a the black death in the mid fourteen th century north of europe, the last over in my country last over fifty percent of the population, and around europe, to a third to a half was lost, so in the fall in the fourteen hundreds, you had what it's called the sexual laxness of the fifteen century, where people were were having a lot more promise, sex, sleeping around at sea seta, because our environment could afford IT. And then when we rebuild the population around year fifty one hundred, that's when you have the reformation, that's when you have a retired tenant of the sexual norms, because we couldn't afford IT anymore, because we refilled up our population, and that's when you get purism at seta seta.

What you are talking about, this sort of window, this reproductive window, that a age thirty ish, late twenties, was important, is that people were told that they shouldn't reproduce after thirty, or they won't permitted to reproduce until thirty.

So before when you get polygonal and you lived in kin groups, you'd d have a man with a lot of resource. And he'd, barry, every time you feel like IT, and then he'd married up, see a woman at twenty, and he'd thirty or forty. And SHE just started reproducing right away.

And the same, if they were Young, that you would, you always have a place to leave. You move next to your king, on on your king group land. Now, in future europe, you'd have to accumulate resources to be able to afford what's called the neal local resident.

You don't live with your family, you live on your own. So you'd have to be on men and women would have to be on labor markets, typically in their twenty, until they had accumulated enough resources to get their own place. And this is what pushed up uh, the marriage age and which so reproductive reproduction didn't start until typically in you're late twenties for women.

wo cause I you know game a thrones as my greatest window into an accurate historical representation of what would have happened in medieval times for reproduction. You've got a lot of essentially child and teen marriages and women occurring, and I certainly that some of the aristocracy were doing this. Was that only a behavioral trend that occurred in the oppressions of the the higher ability.

those who had resources? So you see that the very highest the highest classes of those that are marked the the least by these changes to the past milenio of making Morales, they still um the very highest status men. They still had lovers on the side.

They still had a couple of wives for a few centuries longer than they were supposed to. So they got away from this. And and the church tried to rest from what I was, a bad lair. There was still powerful. So yes, among the harder classes, you typically would would marry still when you were around twenty, perhaps.

right? So this is really interesting, obviously going to get into IT as we continue down this little journey through time. But a lot of the conversations at the moment, uh, for the first time in records began, more women and child was at thirty than with children at thirty.

But IT seems to me like if we look only five hundred and six hundred ds years ago, you are maybe going to see very similar sort of flight lite patterns amongst women all be IT for very different reasons than individual choice and and traveling the world and getting an education and stuff like that. But yeah, you're going to see because of the demands that were placed on the requirement to accumulate resources, both thousand men and as women, in order to be able to get started with a family. Plus you don't have quite a sophisticated social safety night.

So you do have this malthusian problem that keeps everything downs, right? okay? We need to restrict, restrict, restrict basically an entry Price into a nightly b the uh up until the point of which you can pay the entry Price. You can't go to the dance, right? The dance being having having kids .

yeah and also at at this point, what was characteristic of the european marriage pattern was an exceptionally high percentage of never married women in a polygonal system. Mostly all women are married under this system. IT had extraordinary high percentage of typically ten percent, which to us sounds very low, but at the time I was unheard of. So around ten percent of women are never married during this regime.

wow. okay. So we are currently in courtly love. Courtly love. I love the fact that it's like a one of its primary design justifications was to be account, wait to the heroic love narrative, right?

Is is overly restrictive on men compared with what they had for their value set previously, that you must ensure that the woman is lusting after you. Then we potentially add no six before marriage in as well. That's another that gives you the restriction of resources you need to be able to pay the dowery.

You need to make sure that you ask for her father's handing marriage. I'm going to get that that comes around some, some point around about this time to which would mean you know the most difficult, they keep arbitron. The planet, you've gotta like, get his seal of approval before you can do IT too.

Then you got to go through the church, presumably this, some assessments that get done by the church, too. So yeah, all of this not only acting as a, what would end up being useful, sexual redistribution for creating the foundation of a non chaotic civilization moving forward, but probably at the moment, the main thing IT was trying to do is let's just stop all of the powerful men raping everyone. Let's just stop that from happening first. And i'll see where we go from there.

And the core value here, you could do this is the west sexual revolution. You can place that around the year twelve hundred. And the core value here is female consent.

So in antiquity, women were commodities. A marriages were usually arranged between families. Again, I was a commercial contract.

And then with these reforms, they instituted something called the a double consent. So women aren't free to choose to marry. Men aren't free to choose you to marry.

But women now have a chance of refusal. So IT still, uh, you go from in antiquity, the king group was the story, an marriage. Now you move to the nuclear family because that is that you live now.

So it's still parents to arrange marriage. But crucially, women are given leverages for being allowed to say no. So they are still corinto marriages, still not individual choice, but they can say no. And that's that's huge progress.

right? yeah.

And that said, women on the path of a manana page that is ongoing, the beginning of female amani page in the west, was the church's imposition of female, of the female right to consent in the first sexual revolution that changed everything that, yeah, everything that has happened since was a result of that first movement OK.

What comes after .

cully love. Well, the the mating ideology that the society was built on, and is something called companion at club. So this was a very pragmatic ideology, and very different from court to love in court to love.

You and I, we are a history, craic, nights. And we're gonna travel through europe to find our one true love. And we're gone to fall incredibly much in love, and we're gone to live in b bless forever after naturally, this was not the reality for european and peasants.

So the ideology of companion love is that a man and a woman shall marry for life during arranged marriage, whether they like each other is not or not is not a big deal. And their primary task is to run the farm as partners, to run the farm and keep their alive. So we're not going to sleep around.

We're not going to divorce and find somebody else. We're just gonna huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic, very unromantic uh, ideology.

It's about submitting to the needs of your family and your community are not giving into emotions or erotic or romantic impulses. So this was the reality for european peasants from the begin, from the end of, from the, from the first sexy revolution and the kin gript U. U.

Dissolved, and all the way up to seventy and fifty, which was the west second sexual revolution. This was when this was a pair of a companion lob, arranged marriages, pragmatism. And then you had a period before fifty one hundred with sexual laxness, and then appeared afterwards with purple ism, uh, to restrict people, people's impulses, us, to avoid module ing crisis.

right? I was. I just about to ask why the purism.

well, after this period of sexual lactance, when we had rebuilt a population and we we entered into a period of stagnation and stagnant per capital growth, we needed to prevent europeans from, uh, having too many children to having primary sex, extra marto sex. And the way we have done this in the west is to vin ize female sexuality.

Women are the sexual selectors and in order to prevent extra marital sex from happening or primary sex, uh, the church has in those intentions gone after the women. Uh, so you'll see in the fourteen hundreds female sexuality acknowledged and to an extent celebrated and then when puritanism comes, uh the ideologist women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage. Women were last for our line with safe in sector.

So it's a way to a press women and to coerce them into not having sex that they shouldn't have which could then contribute to multiple crisis. So the choice we face in these situations is either we kill babies when they are born, the surplus of them, or we have to find a way to prevent people from having extra marital sex, or sex that produces too much babies. And that means we have tended to use in the west is to uh, demonize female sexy in those instances.

Why not try to control mal sexuality is a .

really good question if you look at the differences in male and female mating psychology and and and who is in charge on these markets, markets, IT seems like the more effective choice are not condoning, but IT seems like the most effective choice to place the cost on the sexual selectors.

You could imagine that matter, so driven that telling men, men generally do not have sexual access to women, and to tell men that they shouldn't have sex, no one IT would be harder because to have a stronger dry for short term uh, relationships. But also they that access isn't therefor them. Well, if the women are the ones to make the decisions in these in these cases of at least the voluntary resets, then having placing an enormous burden on women, that from our modern perspective seems totally is org etic and unfair IT, seems that that would be the more effective .

way of doing IT. Yeah, because if you are going to try restrict men overall, but even now, i'm going to guess that there is still a very logical hot of men, more than ten percent who go to their graves without family or unmarried. A therefore, you you pointing the finger at the less reliable potential.

Meta, well, as if you point to finger, or at the women IT is more likely you you get more buying for your book, basically on restriction. But presumably there must have been there is there must be some moral sing around male sexuality too. Just probably not quite the same left of demonization that women had.

absolutely. So yeah purton ism also demonised promises men in those stories in the literature that exists from this period. The greatest villain is are are the favorite. William is often a man who is known to have slept around.

So promiscuous men are also uh put forth as villains and and and discouraged but the male sexuality is still acknowledged there there's something pathological about a woman who wants to have sex with someone, reason or husband in the pandion logy. It's if you want to talk about patriarch miocene, the purity were really, really bad. But then we have to try to then step aside back, and and of course, we moralize on IT and say that this is terrible.

But then we try to understand, why did they do this? What was the function of this? why? Why did purism is in a period when I was crucial for the west to restrain people's xuv, to avoid multiple an crisis?

right? Yeah, I understand if if everybody is dying of feminine starvation, the difference between the pain of that and the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage. IT doesn't .

that we have to choose if if we're not okay with killing babies. And krishnan haven't been because of the ideology. While in antiquity people generally wear, we have to choose why they kill babies. Always strict people's sexuality, or or we invent contraceptive, which we got around to later.

What was the for? Not just killing .

babies oh in with Christianity life became sacred. So the Christian said that you can take any life. So when the child and so they didn't, they are criminalize in fantasize so in fact in fantastic and particularly uh female elective decide killing uh they would typically kill girls because they were cost here depending a little bit on the on the context but yeah so the practice of infanta IDE was just cracked out on really hard by the Christians because went against their belief of every life being sacred yeah okay.

Well that's interesting that the church is doctoring is uh both like give and take a away here that they have made their own bed. Okay, we say that in fancy doesn't good. We value human life.

Oh fuck. Downstream from that, we now have this other problem, which he is being able to control population so that we don't get some Fishery and run away like mouth usi an bullshit also not good. okay.

So I mean, one of the thing that that kind of, I guess, interesting to idea is that the middle ages didn't finish until the fifteen hundreds was still in the midst ages from pretty full of road and five hundred to fifteen hundred dish like that. It's just one big long fucking media like hodgepodge right? Then we get to you at seventeen, fifty eight.

Yeah I mean, you know what? Talking now, only two hundred and fifty years ago. And IT feels like there is an awful lot of ground to cover in terms of sexual ideology. So what? What happened? seventeen? fifty?

So that's the west second sexual revolution. This was one of individual choice. So what we don't think about in the west, this is its evolutionary psychologist called me, allows apostles on great work on this, how throughout human history, without arranged marriages that makes the case, that are, the human species is the only species on the planet where men select other men for reproduction.

This has always been the case. And during agricultural IT was more the king group uh and then um after the the first sexy revolution, this was a more a matter for the nuclear family, meaning the pay rock, the father of the family. So human men and women, this is important to understand to understand the present day making this function.

We did not evolve under regimes of individual choice. We generally, we had an influence, but we generally didn't pick and attract their own mates. We were given mates by our families and communities.

So our in are somewhat weak ability, or many people's weak ability to flub and attract partners, attract short, long term partners. This is thought of us as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past that the in the west started getting from seven and fifty. So what happened with the distribution of europe's stripes is that our psychology changed fundamentally.

This was the biggest changes, introduction of agriculture. So we were put on a journey and safe for eight, nine hundred years ago, toward every greater individualizing, more and more, more, more non stop still on going. And it's not onna stop for a while.

And by by the eighteen century, europeans started more and more thinking that they should be titled to make their own decisions in terms of mating population and carbonic. And what facilitated this material is that you have this commercial revolution and more and more people work as servants in their youth for uh for cash payments. So to accumulate these resources, well, to marry, people moved further and further away from family and they were paid in cash.

And this was the material foundation for the west second sexual revolution. So among these Young proletarians, around seven hundred and fifty, this european marriage pattern just burst. And people started having a lot more sex p uh, before marriage, uh, on the side also.

So you have this enormous growth in in sexual activity, specially among Young people, that had enormous consequences. So and and this continued IT wasn't like everybody started writing away, making their own decisions, but IT IT started among these Young way journals. And then over the centuries, that spread, and it's and and the damn completely burst with a third sexual revolution in the one thousand nine hundred and sixty.

I love the idea that floating is basically like an evolutionary anomaly, that if you were to have the ability uncertain, if, if, if you come from a long line of flutter and your great, great, great, great, great granddaddy, he was a flutter, and the granddad before IT. Why, like why you know, previously you would have just been taking what you wanted, then after that you would have been told what you wanted. Then after that, your dad, we've told you what you wanted. And then only two hundred and fifty years ago would you've actually chosen what you wanted?

Yeah, leave. Can whom you know, he makes this this interesting case today to be effective first. If you are a really good looking guy and really charming, a good florida and your short term oriented, you're gonna have a lot of meeting success.

In the old days, there would be a greater, there would be a significant chance that you would get sniped out if, if you, if you were a solid guy, you created alliances, worked hard at a family. You would be chosen for reproduction by other men and given to their daughters. If you were just as good looking at on is you like to sleep around you probably gonna killed, killed by the, by the men in the king group of your latest delist.

A, yeah, because you're a threat in summer gard, even if, even if you don't get rumbled by the kinda pp of the men of the woman that you just managed to reduce outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage, even if you don't get caught by the script of the neck by them, you're just going to create a ambient sense of concern and envy and mistrust because or we know that mad. We've got to be careful about him like he's got the he's got the fuck in charm like, you know, i've heard rumors and then IT almost becomes, I guess, a to some degree, a little bit like the which trials that you have this it's not quite original sin, but it's something in built that will cause other men to feel envy, ga alousi and way, rather than understand and turn IT in work and work out what IT is that's lacking in them that makes the envious of this person. It's way easier to just moralize about the person that the out group now and say, let's fucking killing.

And also times we are really tough. A lot of the time you needed a really solid guy willing to work really hard to what every can to provide for his wife and children to keep them alive. If you are just a charming hot who likes to a chat up, women around the farm that does that did not generally promote a good genetic legacy times. The demands of the times were just different times are very different than they are today.

Are you sing that we are the descendants of the least charismatic, least good looking, least fluent, tious men that existed?

Well, that depends on ecology. But yeah, generally our ancestors have not been lofa ious. That's that's only recently where that has been very beneficial.

right? So we get to seven, fifty people are now able to make their own decisions.

Um I actually one question that how is IT that the church lose his controlled? Does the church feel like IT is losing controlled? As I tried to claw IT back in any regard, I know that in the time of Charles dw in in Victoria in england, we had an awful lot of of sexual purtended m that I think the year of the year of Darwin's birth， the total number of british divorces was eight. Yeah, not thousands, not hundreds.

Eight know what happens. Seventy and fifty is real interesting because there's account reaction. So we have what we call the romantic century from seventeen to eighteen.

Fifty, i'm sure. Would you imagination? You can imagine what happened when this damn st.

In seven and fifty? Now we're gonna start sleeping around. Oops, we have an event of the contraction tive pill yet.

What's gonna happen? So what happens if you have an enormous increase in illegitimate birth across europe? In doubles, triples, corrupts. So what you typically have are all these, uh, low, lower class women who now can make draw decisions in terms of population and airbender and uh the answer no experience with this. So we didn't evolve to uh see through the intentions of men would IT involve involve uh to assess our our mate value precisely.

So what would happen that you would have a lot of high status men, at least higher status men, say a sons of farmers, uh, urban men, who would then go after the daughters of crafters and other at the lower runs of society, and they would say, I love you and i'm gona marry you and let's have sex and they would do that. And when he got pregnant, they would leave her. So in in denmark, norway, up until seven, thirty, seven, thirty four, uh, if you had sex, I was a defect of marriage contract.

And then what we see in the beginning of the seventeen hundreds, there is a huge increase in women taking men to court, driving at sex with them, but admire ing them. So they end that law in seventy and thirty four. So after that, if you get pregnant, you're not entitled to marry the guy, you and sex man.

So from seven hundred and fifty, you get this enormous increase in illegitimate birth, at the worst in sweden. And in installed, fifty percent of child birds were by unwed mothers. Low and rural areas in paris, you see an enormous increased amount of abandoned children.

So in the in the late seventeen hundreds, there was an ideology which I also consider as a cultural disordering, because you couldn't build a social lord on IT. This was liberty in love. So this is the kind of casinos ideology where you supposed to just enjoy sex for the sake of sex.

You're supposed to sleep around, follow your lists. And this was an audiology that spread from the french court then throughout europe, and IT reached uh skein avia around seventy and seventy. So you have this period where you have certain eccentric million, where people advocated let's just sleep around.

This is something, how have a good time? Let's just party. And this created this enormous burden on women, because women were left with the burden of childcare when these live teams left them once they got pregnant.

So typically, high status men took advantage of of published women and then just abandoned them. And this is what later foundation for the romantic audiology of the early eighteen hundreds. So liberty love under mind companionate love, where where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down, they care of your family.

And liberty love said, no, let's just have fun. And then when the social rather ation of that, uh, came manifesto themselves, the counter reaction was romantic love, which did the same as pure and love had done. Were you again so liberating love celebrated female sexuality was just have sex.

Romantic love said, no, women have no benefit from sex outside of marriage. We're gonna to stop doing this. And similar to court to love, IT exaggerated emotional love is something incredibly strong and something that lasted for life.

So from then on, men and women were only supposed of sex within the confines of marriage, and you should be married forever. And this started having an effect around eight hundred and fifty. And then across the west, the legitimacy rates started planting.

So you see this counter reaction. First you dissolve companion love, then you see the effects of all this promise you. And then in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this effects, you have a conceptual romantic club where you then become more current again. And then you see the effect of that in the statistics.

right? You reprise tize, the emotional connection, the romantic connection between the man and the woman. And what that does is that again, creates A A dampener on the liberty casanova guy authorial, that's okay. Yeah, that's so interesting. What i'm seen here is this this flip flop between what seems in is sometimes human nature kind of just burst through the cracks that kind of grows and grows and grows enough and then IT split through that um there is the innate desires that people have. Uh you're also responding to the local resources.

So i'm going to get around about seventeen, fifty agriculture and Greenhouses and should like that meant that the ability to get an amount of food and an amount of living out of a square foot of land would have increased pretty dramatically, which means that this malthouse um problems not okay, right? So we can't really were no longer limited in terms of food. What's the next thing that we can use? Fuck that having sex with the each other.

Uh, say that it's all about romance. Say that is all about the the over. Prioritize the importance of emotional connection because that, that allows us to create. But we've we've also lost at least a little bit here. We've lost the um churches moralization or at least that sounds like we've lost the churches moralization tion of the act of love yeah .

and then eighteen hundreds, this was the time of enlightenment. This what was about individual rights uh, and powers, individuals not pressing them, letting them make their own choice as personal agency at seat seta. And this was also at the dawning of the industrial revolution.

So when this, uh european marriage pattern burst around seventeen fifty, we were very fortunate for two reasons because we now experienced the population explosion in going ahead that is still ongoing. Well, I take that back. It's not ongoing anymore.

Uh, but we have we got this we moving into this period, tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion. And also we offloaded an enormous part of our population to america, another, uh colonial terrorists, otherwise we would have faced dire trouble in the west. Um as a as a as the change of our mating practices and also with the reduction mortality from other causes.

Okay, then perhaps the shortest, most acute change when IT comes to human reproductive history, the introduction of reliable .

contracts tion. Well, yes, so one of the aspects of romantic love is that you have gender in equality. You conceptualize men and women as complimentary that uh, people are born as incomplete half.

And then to become whole you have to find, uh, your true love. You have to bond with her, and then you individualize, and you become a whole human. So this means that the man is supposed to go out and work, and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care of the domestic arena.

So their conceptualized equal, but complementary. But in reality, this drove stark in equality. So the next mating, our ideology we move to, which is the one we believe in today, it's called confluent lab, which is a mating ideology of gender equality, of convenience, reward and self realization.

At this ideology arose quite a while ago. I was first introduced into scanning aba literature in eighty and thirty nine, but if that exists in the west, somewhat earlier. So people were thinking about this, that we should get through equality, that man, women should be the same and have the same opportunities, and that we should be able to have sex outside of marriage, sleep around.

But the environment wasn't prepared for that. Like you mention, this couldn't really be implemented until we invented effective contraction. Otherwise, this kind of made what a place far too strong of a burden.

women. So we see this discussion in western culture from, say, around eighteen thirty. And then with a Darwinian revolution, we start thinking, okay, so we're dramatically. We thought, obviously, this is what god wanted us to do, that we have this impulses that you also mention, that just a test from god to see if we deserve to go to heaven, so that we won, have sex, and that we wanted divorce. That's just a test.

And also at the beginning of conversation, you ask, why do we need these ideologies? And this is precisely why, because we have this biological impulses to copulate. And our, our, our love cycle probably evolved to last around three to four years, with was the mating cycle of orders.

So with agriculture, we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy. Because in case of divorce, you can split up the fields and and bring your part of the farm somewhere else. So we were kind of stuck in these marriages that had to last many, many more decades than what we evolved for.

So then you need these ideologies to make us fight these urgence that we have to sleep around to to have, uh, we evolved for zero and argument, or zero bounding to fight that, because the that with cultural environment, and then the modern environment just required something else for us. So then we use religion. We said that this is what god wants.

But then with the Darwin, an revolution, we start thinking, well, if our animals sweet too, then these impulses we have there, not moral tests, this is our nature. So we started expLoring what human made nature. And this was a very, a strong literary movement in the scanning aba in the late nineteen hundreds, and then also throw the nineteen hundreds to literature.

We start expLoring how could we make differently. But what's really interesting is that the romantic regime did not peak until after world war two. So we we experience something that was really unexpected because in the in the nineteen, nine hundred and twenties were removing away from romantic love.

We wanted female equality. We are moving toward confident love. But then after world were two weeks, weeks had this enormous economic prosperity that allowed us to implement the romantic europa, which is the bread winner housewife model.

So suddenly, marriage in the west became near universal. Almost everyone married. They married Young.

And now we got to experience that the romantic auto bias, a couple of shortcomings. Number one, life does love generally doesn't last a lifetime. And you top at staying at home wasn't that great for all women. So this is you had this in the one thousand nine and fifties, in the beginning of the one hundred and sixty, and then you have the social revolution of the sixty sixties. And you could say us symbolically that the the break of confident love is in in nineteen and sixty eight.

And then you start seeing in the beginning of the seventies, around the mid seventies, across the west, you see in the statistics that is modern, a marriage pattern that we've had him that peaked after two, eight, just a synagogue's vorce peaks. Remarriage goes down, people marry later. You have a lot more, uh, casual sex outside of marriage.

People start having sex earlier. And you just see this complete change in the western marriage pattern from the nineteen and seventies and on. And this is the and this is this is mostly just gone in one direction. And this is the mating regime that we live under now, which has been a accentuated to dating apps to increase prosperity through all that has happened in the past forty, fifty years.

When you say confluent love, am I right in thinking? But what that means is our union are works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I am useful to you.

Yeah, so romantic love remerge for life, that the way to be hold people confident love. We come together either for the opportunities, shorter's relationship, casual sex or for a romantic relationship. For as long as we have emotions for each other, we benefit another way and then we move on to single them or another relationship. So we're not meant for each other for life only for as long as we want to. So it's this confluence of people coming together in meeting and moving on.

right? So now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era, how do you how do you think of sort of modern dating, this function, demographic collapse, all of that stuff is that, you know, from twelve hundred, was that just the first domino gets licked? And it's an inevitable kind of the all the way along. How how do you conceptualize this all together?

Yeah, I I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I, I, I completely agree with your chances. Hind, that, yeah that is what set is in motion. We always had arranged marriages and lived in kin groups and then more strictly under agriculture, but still, and then we were set on this path toward individual choice.

Never get individualism. And then it's just to have, like we talked about in the very beginning, it's hard to convince people to take upon themselves the burden of decades of pair bonding with the same person and providing for offspring. And when you have a stronger realistic culture and a mating ideology, assess that this is optional, that you don't necessarily have to do that.

We're facing an evolution that is quite predictable. And as you've talked about on many of your podcast, IT seems to be going the direction where we ve ran out of tools. There's not much we could do.

We had in the in the nineteen thirties, uh, uh, declining for tilly also, which encounter then IT. The numbers of seeing carnaby went down to one point eight, which was seen a catastrophe. And then we counted through effective social democracy, we, we, we are made IT materially easier to have children through social democratic welfare. All that has played out now that's that's no longer an option in in norway now uh a typical the average woman SHE receives more than one point two million dollars more from the ate that he pays in taxes while men pay more in taxes than they receive.

And when even that can't uh motivate uh reproduction at at replacement levels in and this is norwest the richest country in the world and we have the best welfare system and when even that kind of money transfer can uh facilties reproduction, there's very little other countries can do so often until two thousand and tens can in navy wasn't Normally across the west fertilize decline for a long time. So we thought that the answer, or many thought that the answer was that other countries had to be less via they need a gender quality because with the most gender equal region, and they needed generous welfare. And now in the past decade in the region, for killing rate dropped from in the two thousand and ten from two point zero to one point five.

And now I dropped down to one point four. And that's with each woman on average being transfer one point two million dollars over a lifetime. That's a lot of money there. An economic incentives no longer sees to work. So we kind of know that for other countries to that would only be a short term solution that would be countered by other forces that are more powerful. So if we think it's a good idea to still making to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse, it's very difficult to see what kind of means we can affect ate that would have a substantial effect that could turn this around.

What are the forces that are driving the decrease in fatlings rates at the moment?

Well, the larger forces are the material once as urbanization, like we've talked about before, like many others have talked about how there's been when we lived as agriculturalist, having children was free labor and now there is huge expenses. So that is that is one issue the other one is ideological that we know long with romantic love. The meaning of life was to mature the department and have a bunch of children with with confluent love.

Its about self realization uh reward convenience. When we have those beliefs it's just we're just less than sentience ze to take upon ourself these burns. They also mention fear of the future.

Um and then you have whatever research a bit is what happens with our mate preferences in this new environment of the past decades. How um on one side, when you make a essence getting of you when you have general equality and you have generous welfare, IT makes IT material easier to have children. So that counts in a post direction.

But IT also discount vies women from peer bonding with men of similar mate value. So that's another aspect of these ideal dist matting resumed that it's it's really difficult to make women make with men with with low mate value unless they have to, unless they are materially dependent on IT, of course, to do so by their society. We have two attraction systems.

We have the original al, one that we talked about when we started six million years ago, were promised us matters. And this is a very discriminatory uh uh system for women where they are supposed to only be uh precise, attracted by the very most attractive men. Maybe this is somewhere between five and twenty percent of men, probably closer to five.

And then five, four million years ago, we evolve this other system to facilitate pair bonding, which is, say, much more in the sense, democratic system, where A, A, A much larger proportion of men is able to trigger, I love mechanism that makes, that motivates a woman to make with them. But we see that when women don't have to, they are become two ier. And they uh direct their efforts at men with hired mate value than what they have themselves. And that makes IT harder to pare up more people within a community, which then will have adverse effects on effort late.

right? And when women are not financially or resourcefully beholding to their partner in order to be able to keep them taking over because they have no job, they have no education or they have limited social economic opportunities. Ah I need to stay with my partner because the alternative is that me and potentially one, two, three, four, five children out on the street. So we basically kind of like A A financial prisoner in some regards to their husband. And now that women don't need that anymore for modern ideology.

and I am sure both you and I feel this way, this is grateful women, women aren't dependent on being with a man. They are. They are independent.

They have their own money, their own economy, and they can make their own choices. And they can choose, uh to director efforts and compete harder for the high value instead of settling for someone with a similar values themself. But then the consequence of that is that we have uh um we have a very high increase in single dom.

We have a decline and fortification and IT also affects people's well being. People generally expressed a desire to be pair bonded and they want they want to be together with someone. That's kind of what we've been doing the last four million years. And then when people react to different incentives in the modern environment, we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships.

Yeah, I looked at a study, a pretty what looked like significant assessment. That said, gender in equality, specifically when IT comes to finances, is correlated with both male and female satisfaction and relationships, which is a really, if you want to talk about that unfortunate, uncomfortable realizations, that if you as a man, are able to, whether by coersion or restriction or capacity or whatever, out on your female partner, and if the brakes are put on your female partner, she's happier and you're happier on average.

Yeah, I know if if there are so many depressive statistics, if you want to look at would actually get the futility to rate up. You have to if what will really work is to, and we don't want any of this, we have to get rid of gender equality, get rid prosperity uh domestic violence works, there's tons of stuff that work to uh to make women the bit to being in a relationship .

that the yeah to go stopping a whatever is cost benefiting to um what's IT called when the man there's two types of make guarding right whatever the second one is， I don't you .

mean yes yeah so no. There's if you look at what actually would work to get the fertility rate up, these are very this topic choices we have that there are there are pretty much nothing that we in the west would be a geologically disposed to doing that could have a significant positive effect. All those mechanisms that we know would have an effect would be go against what we believe in. So in a very difficult situation.

one thing that has kind of been running through my mind, as you told us this tail, is especially when you look at the modern world, at which still has an awful lot of the Carrier, I think, from the romantic era of you moralizing around faithful ness, chastity, loyalty to your apartment, stuff like that IT IT seems so insane that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where are involved, meeting psychology.

And the structures that we had for social so long have just become perverted and perturbed and ruined and repair, posed, encountered and sun and sofa. And we are, we talk about evolutionary mess matter of a lot. Everybody knows what that is, but this seems to be like it's A A fucking sedimentary rock of evolutionary mess match, right?

You know, you've got the culture from before and and the counter culture to that culture. And then you've got new technology, reproductive technology, about the fact that we're all individuals, female economic access and legiti ism. That's fuckyou.

New like how do we work that when no longer living in pan generational houses are kin doesn't give us any advice about you. The world is moving so quickly that our parents advice basically doesn't even work for the new generation because they don't understand what I mean to be dating on tender. And then we've still got all of these vestigial mating systems from before. So IT really doesn't surprise me. You know, when you take a really global luck at human mating psychology plus the modern world post the journey that our psychology is being dragged through really over the last few malaysia, um it's really not surprising that people are are struggling at the moment yeah on top of .

that dating after a little over a decade old and we haven't figured that out at all. And and the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them are go so counter to people's to people's needs and desires and how our psychology functions.

It's we put ourself in a situation where there's like you say, there's so much novel to on top of novelty that men and women don't even understand what their mate preferences are and how those are being influenced by the social order order and the technology they used to meet people. So we're just we're following these six million year old impulses, which are the strong is one, and they are overriding impulses that are four million years old, not even to think about the newer ones that we've developed. And in all of this were in this uniquely new mating regime of individual choice that we have not evolved for at all.

So it's when you look back and you think, why was IT that, say, perhaps through the the the two million year history of the genus homo, if if this is the case, in fact, that we always had parental choice through that is IT. Because everybody discovered that individual choice doesn't add up. I mean, there's no way the west is gna go away from that, and I certainly wouldn't advocated.

But if no one else managed to figure that out, how sure are we that that that this is going to work for us? And yeah if if you extrapolated from today, if with this decline in fortification, maybe I mean we're cerceris inly going to write out this experiment, I don't see us changing anyway. Um but there are there are people's around the world who aren't in who aren't pursuing that regime that are showing different numbers.

And it's I mean, we love our ideology. We think it's superior to everybody else's ideology, just just how humans work but but there's there's one friend. I mean, you could say everything is relative, but there's one thing that isn't relative.

That's an evolutionary iron law, no matter what your ideology is. If that ideology causes you to stop reproducing, that ideology will seize to matter, you will disappear. Yeah.

I mean, this was one of the most interesting takeaway i've had from a lot of conversations about demography collapse and population decline, which is um ideology, political leaning, your world view at large, your openness, your conscientious ously, all the rest of those things a highly heritable, highly herriton. Your political ideology is very highly herriton right, as is the rest of your fucking psychology.

So if you are somebody that is part of a particular political movement that either doesn't promote or actively discriminates against reproduction, you are a dying breed because your children would have more likely been like you. And look at the groups that are reproducing like something tells me that conservative ashcan oi, jews are not going to have that much of a fatlings problem, right? Something tells me the moments or that.

Some sets of Christianity, I know that sum down, but some sets of Christianity also going to be fine. So what do you look at over a long enough time horizon? You actually look at this set of almost like full circle loop back around to a much more not necessary protonix, but like a religious sacred view of what this is.

And remember, if you are somebody that's conservative or somebody that's religious, the likelihood your children are going to be that way is is absolutely not predetermined, but they are prety disposed, right? So you end up with this sort of ever increasing cycle of this. So there was there's an argument to be made, I think that, uh, you know like anti nat climate concerns.

Liberalism is not long for this world, right? H, it's not to say that you can't have a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in fifty years time and reconvert a bunch of seventh generation conservatives or whatever. Um but yeah, you will end up with less a demographic uh political variety over time if you have this because the selection effect occur.

S within particular cohorts, within very particular trader and IT presses down very hard on them. And the other ones are just like what demographic collapse? I'm fine now.

Well, we also have some tremendous novelty coming up, which we have to bear in mind. I predict that the west will have a fourth sexual revolution, a coinciding with the fourth industrial revolution. What will happen when we start a being able to create babies outside of of women's woods, when we'll be able to gene edit at sea sea um we will get A I robot lovers and and and spouses sector at seta.

There's gonna such tremendous technological novelty that's going to change society that is almost inconceivable that this will not have any tremendous effect also on mating. So if you're extrapolate into the future without taking that into account, yes, then the west as IT function now would just made itself out of existence and other groups would take over who have higher fertility. But that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing there.

There will be so much changed in the decades ahead that is very difficult to imagine how much will be in the future. But I I, I think that revolution will be will be so large that I will fundamentally change that aspect. Like we talked about the beginning, the foundation of social is mating. So then the question is, how will these new technologies affect how we made? And how will that create a new foundation for a new form of society?

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throes of something that even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system. You as soon as, as soon as you have external problems, as soon as you have A I companions that can give you Better than real life love, I get the pod he kick MRI problem gets sorted, but they only gets sorted from the individuals perspective, from the population perspective.

It's not solid at all. But then if you can counter that without official whom but then who is that that you're choosing, like whose jeans you choosing to do this? And if you have, you know embryo selection, which is already online, you know embro selection for I Q, for externalizing behavior, for depression, for aniele, for autism, you already have this.

And then if you can get into g editing and then if you can get into I V G and it's like, okay, here's like a here's a section of the skin from my ARM go forth and make one million Chris Williamson's, like, I juice Christ but yeah I it's maybe we are maybe this is uh, a unique, interesting time. But I wonder whether I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are uh thinking about at the moment, you know, uh, hungry, you have one kids and you do this thing and you have two kids and you get more taxes off. You have three kids and you don't have taxes for life, no way in the way that you guys, one point two million that you give to women and you know, we need to get people to do C, B, T, to overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of IT.

I wonder whether ultimately all of those things are going to be in vain within the space of five decades, because the technology is just going to rip out anything that we try to construct using like, like cultural technology. Ideological movement of hollywood. Why don't we get hollywood to like, put dads that are competent again at the front? And we shouldn't have homosexual and pedigree fin as the lead.

We should have like, you know, like a good stand up family guy and you like, yeah, but if in five, if decades, its artificial woods and sex robots all the way down, what does, what do any of those interventions really matter? That's not to say that making the well being in flourishing of people who live right now isn't nothing. But over a long enough time horizon, they all just get like someone shakes the actually sketching and just delete .

or mating history yeah no, i'm when you look at the history of western mating, it's it's I don't fear very much that we will be returning to A A handmade tail pure and kind of female suppressing regime. I think we're going to move forward and that we will experience a novel title level that we it's very difficult for us to imagine today. Uh, so yeah, it's you.

We can talk about IT. We can speculate. But when we are at this side of this big revolution, as we seem to be now before we go into, didn't see how dramatically the world will change in this time, a lot more rapid ly them with previous such revolutions.

It's all we can do is is mostly hold on like I don't believe that I don't I love what you're doing with your podcast but and people can get inform and that's good. But that somehow we're gonna gure something out, make a plan and then effectuated and and stuff the demographic collapse. That doesn't seem to be how the world works. Um it's just gonna be a word win a hurricane of change yeah and then at the end of IT, I think IT would be really cool if we still have a bunch of humans around. I'm kind of i'm a little bit species that way, but things can play out in a matter of waves that are are just impossible to predict on the side of the singularity.

Yeah, yeah. It's the technological change, the size of the wall, that because is so high that is very difficult to have something permit through IT.

And I told, agree, one of the other things that do your other wing, one of your other many other wings uh evolutionary lens on well being obviously we ve had a lot of conversations recently about in cells and I only learn this from you in things as well in voluntary singletons um given your evolutionary lends background and your studies into well being, what are you making of the general generalized, the anxiety, depressive states, whatever is fifty percent of girl's age twelve to sixteen have regular, a persistent feelings of hopelessness. You ve got guys to test us, run in the toilet. The single biggest threat to a man under the age of fifty as his own hands in terms of suicide or this sort of stuff. How do you sort of conceptualized all of this together from a well being perspective? Why are the insects on the instance and everybody else so unhappy?

Yeah, I know that's that's something I think we should really be concerned with. Um we we should try to change all, make a Better role. But as as we spoken about, its our ability defect changed that way somewhat limited.

But when we're going through these deep changes as we are now, when we have before, people will face despair, they will lose faith in the store that has united us. We haven't yet found tomorrow ideology that will give us the answers in the comfort and less or anxiety. So we really should be sympathetic towards each other.

And that pain that people are suffer when we go through these changes, because these changes are very hard on humans. We like stable experience when we know, when we convince themselves that we know our truth is so when you look at in cells and instance, you should expect them that they should be miserable from an evolutionary perspective, uh, happiness is a reward you experience when you solve a adaptively relevant problems. And nothing is more central to adaptively than reproduction.

So if you're not succeeding on short or long true mating markets, if you're not able to pair born, your well beings system should go to hide, alert and let you know that your strategy is a fAiling. So when men become depressed and respondent for not succeeding on the shorter market, and women become depressed and respondent because they know on modern dating markets, they have a limited access to sex with higher value. En, but none of these men are willing to care bone with them.

That is supposed to give you depression. That's your that's your organism telling you that you're fAiling. So instead of vining uh in cell men or making fun of insuring women, we should try to spread a Better understanding.

To hear your podcast is valuable. People need to understand the different mate preferences that men and women have. They should understand the different power dynamics. And short, long for meeting and see how today's made, particularly with dating apps, is creating a certification that is creating this function for almost all groups of society, or at least potentially so I Better understand of what is going on.

Might not help us star this this cloud car into safe shores, but IT might help us sympathy more more with each other er's supplies, especially uh, between men and women, because men and women have such different chAllenges in today's dating economy. And if we kind of if men impose male mate preferences in their analysis of how women are doing an opposite, we just don't understand each other. And that just creates bigger this function, poor communication, people get even more miserable.

How much of the current unhappiness do you think should be laid at the feet of meeting and dating problems? Because a lot of other things going on, social media and comparison and you know into generation or competition theory, where we are the first generation that's not done Better than my parents. And so and so but how much of this do you think ultimately is just post hoc rationalization that I can't find a mate and romance seems to be dead and my partner might leave at any point if the confluence no longer works?

It's a good question, and I haven't seen any statistics that are able to get at IT. IT doesn't show up there, so we'll have to speculate. So in norway now we have something called called a mense panel.

It's a it's a big research project. More the council that you're trying to figure out why men are falling behind. And you see this around the world in the U. K. They're talk king about having immense minister.

It's been suggested at seta and uh I know at least for the this this norwegian effort, which by the way, third in fifty years to try to figure this out. I haven't figured that out anything previously. It's not even within their Mandate to look at uh, mating marginalization and the ratification that is happening.

A modern deady mark is just the thing that feels inappropriate to talk about, but especially when IT comes to men, what one of the prime functions of having two sexes to have a sexual reproduction is the sexual selection where women select which men get to get to breed. So males of all species have been under enormous pressure to succeed in this regard. That is the motivation.

That is there, the reason of being at the deepest, most, most foundation level. So we have reason to think that now that more and more men are being excluded from short and launch mating when they're being, uh, selected away by women because they are not valuable enough in the modern environment, we would predict that these men would be poor and poor. They would not be motivated to put in the effort because they have a sense of how hole IT might not be a conscious sense, but that drive that men would have in other times when they had a Better prospect acquiring a mate.

When that disappears, we should expect male martialists ation also in other areas of life and society so that we're not looking at that is unfortunate because we would expect that to be the foundational level upon which this other malays uh, attaches to. But I haven't seen any statistics or research that allows me to resign a proportion of unhappiness, two men being to more men being selected away from mating. So um I don't I don't think that is possible. I think it's more a foundational aspect that is really difficult to get at.

Yeah, man, I mean, the fact that we're not tearing each other apart, I suppose you know, when you look at the sadness and and the depression and the hopelessness and stuff like that and a more obvious question would be, how wouldn't we all feel like this? You know, so much change. And our adaptor is fundamentally one of the things that humanity has as its keystone advantage.

But there's a limit, you know, dear god, there's a limit to how quickly the world can change and we can hold on for dear life. Yeah, yeah. I think it's so it's such a slippery slope, right? Because as soon as he say, well, the world is changing very quickly and all were not adapted for technology like the victim hood mindset, just immediately seems that everything is out of my control.

The local of control gets externalized that's associated with more depression. Therefore, people don't feel like they can enact any change that no longer agent reign individuals. But yeah like, oh my god so yeah like trying to thread this needle between like, compassion and encouragement is just a really difficult one. And I mean, you know, all of this work on well being that you're doing through evolutionary lens must I must feel like human well being is kind of being just pulled .

apart yeah and like you said, a Young women are doing worse and Young men and and what we see in the research that we're doing now is that this big change will be, at least in norway, is doing Better than most other countries. We, we as research a success. We've been such a successful country in the past decades.

So we were at the top of of the world happiness report. But we are now slit down several spots. And this seems to be entirely because of this drastic reduction well being among Young people, fifteen to twenty four.

Uh and and we ve we've made introduce with them that there's quantitative service of them and we're doing positive into use and Young people are feeling bad and you have many aspects and and social media seems to facilitate some of these these mechanisms that drive ill being, uh, the economy fare of the future. You have all kinds of things that are weighing on Young people and it's very difficult to sort them and see what is what. But I think like you that the main driver now is that we we are as a civilization in such a transformative time.

IT seems that we're moving out of this, this modern narrative of believing in liberal humanism that peak in the nine, and that we in the in the last decade have lost more, more faith. We don't know why we should CoOperate to amErica sliding apart. We don't know which future to strive for.

We get these answers from this, this underlying story, which are focused as society aster narrative, that is that story that gives meaning to everything. And and let you know what is two or not, why you belong together, what you should strive for. And we've had these changes, i've study these changes of the past millennium and also further back.

And we when we get into this these deep master average transitions, it's really, really hard on the human psyche. When we lose that narrative, we turn on each other, we get despondent, we have anxiety, we feel terrible, and we lose faith in the future. But then every other time, until now, we've always succeeded.

We've always got out of, and we found the news story. And now we seem to be transitioning into something that is perhaps the form of data mask and narrative. And if we succeed with this, and we make IT to the force industry revolution and able to unite and around this new narrative, then we could face a new golden age. The future could be very fantastic, but when we're in these transitions, it's a lot more easy to spot what could go terribly, terribly wrong.

Instead, what was that study about the norwegian? An generational happiness switch?

Yeah uh so, uh, we in norwegians, uh, this this norwegians are we called norwegian monitor the'd been A A serving happiness since one thousand hundred and five and Young people always been uh the happiest and old people have always been the least happy, which makes sense. Happiness is award you get when you succeed with reaching adapter relevant goals, which Young people have toned up, and when you all, you cannot don't have these goals anymore.

So you would expect japanese to go down. And what's happened in the last since two thousand and nine, instead, you had this incredibly sharp decline for the Youngest and then for the also for the middle aged. And this uh this this weak rise in happiness and and quite strong rise and satisfaction for the oldest generation, for your tired people.

So the impression we get from talking to them is just that Young people are becoming miserable and losing faith in the future, I think they will have good lives. There's so much so so many um threats coming up while the old people are realizing that they just time the right life really well. So they have this new fund grade to they said, all right, I might have ten, fifteen, twenty years left to live and that would probably be OK.

The biggest changes won't come on to laugh that. So just have this this year. And amplified sense of having had a great life and that they should be grateful for now getting out in time and and having been with this post world were to boom of economic prosperity, will life just got Better and Better and Better? And now when IT seems to turn, they're they're ready to check out and not too long. And and this they feel bad about their their children and especially grandchildren. They feel really bad about him, but that doesn't seem to affect their quality if IT just makes them more appreciative .

of their own lives. wow. yeah. Because you would think as grandchildren, optimizing machines, you would have presumed that the impending uncertainty about the future of our grandchildren could have negatively impacted our subjective well being. But IT seems like that's not the case. IT seems like what .

what they say to us is that they sometimes stay awake at night because they feel so bad about the grandchildren. And there are a little bit surprised that have a little bit bad conscience for IT, but he doesn't reduce their quality of life. So yeah, they just they get this this a much stronger sense of satisfaction and the somewhat stronger sense of happiness from from now seeing how future generation will struggle while they .

will not ask. okay. So do you do you believe that, uh, comparing yourself to the generation that came before you and your level of success or well being, is that a big determinant of, well bing? Yeah, uh.

you have to separate a little bit aspects of well being. We we concept that well being plus meaning happiness plus meaning equally well being. So happiness is this solving, uh, adaptive veran problem for yourself as individual.

And that is inherent relative. You have a comparison group. And if you're doing Better than your comparison group, you experience a sense of happiness temporarily. And if you diverse, you have a temporarily sense of of of unhappiness.

So uh, that's one of the reasons why social media is has been so destructive, we believe, for Young people's happiness because it's just exploded their comparison group. Before you compare yourself to your pair in your local community, now you compare yourself to the garda and people that fly private jets on youtube, and some of your life is not that great anymore. Relatively, we have happiness is an inherently relative assessment.

Yeah, the what's that quote comparison is the thief of joy IT seems like it's actually the comparison is the undermining of happiness .

or dissatisfaction yeah no so if if you um that's one of the reasons why all Chrism and doing voluntary work working with refugees or people are worse off, that has a strong effect also .

on happiness yeah IT a retaliates or comparison .

group in in in a beneficial way wow so a good .

intervention for well being is to remind yourselves of just how the myriad of different ways that things could have gone wrong or all of the people from your past that had things that weren't as good as you I mean that that famous uh it's out the aristor israelis says, um uh the things that you now take for granted or ones that you once only wish ed of having right in the past. In the past you only wanted to have this thing and today you walk past IT without even looking at IT twice.

It's it's the same thing with mating ologies. All of this meeting ideologists come with the utopia that we think, if we can just get this utopists going to be amazing. And then when we finally get the meeting argal implement topia, we discovered things like life, love doesn't last forever.

Being a stayed home mom is in paradise. So yeah, we keeps striving for IT. We make a Better and Better society. And once we get IT, we accustomed to IT, and we come up with new utopias.

I had this day for a little while reflecting on my own life, especially in my twenties, and I started getting in the self development and personal growth that I was able to emirate my own feelings of insufficiency. As as long as I was doing personal growth and self development because I think that the subtext of what IT taught me was I might not feel like i'm worthy enough right now.

But if i'm half a percent Better tomorrow, maybe tomorrow is actually the day when I will. Finally, and if you just continue to keep yourself on this ham to wheel a kind of is a south right a kind of papers over the cracks of perhaps deeper issues that you need to deal with? Like I don't have a good sleep and wake pattern or i'm not I don't have people around me that I can talk to whatever the reason is that you decisive ed with life. But yeah I see in a lot of the self development community people using the promise of a Better tomorrow as a um uh a plaster that are a banded that they can place over the feelings of insufficiency that they have today.

Yeah well theoretically, uh, the optimal recipe for a happy life is that you should start out as low in societies you can without being traumatized by IT and then make gradual progress throughout your life and reach as high as you can, because as long as you keep doing Better than you use to, you get this happiness reward. So if you want objective success, being born at the top of society is the best.

But if your parents are beautiful, successful millionaire, you probably won't be and and that you're not going to be happy. So so there's something to getting that even progress. And then in addition to that, and you need a couple of crisis that you take yourself out of through your own resources.

Yeah I mean so much so much interesting of their first of have a lot of friends who are self made that success is million's one billion uh and I asked them both about the intentions for their children because I know that what they valued during the upbringing was very heavily the the chAllenges that had to overcome, you know, this sort of working class grit spitten sodus mentality.

But if they do that to their children, what the fuck was the point of working is hard, in any case, to not give them the benefits of the the resources and and and the livelihood that you worked so hard to be able to afford them. But then if you give IT to them, your condemning them to a life of inferiority unless you're gonna have like multi generational self made billionaire, like that's also pretty unlikely. So that's tough.

Um edi hond, the famous boxing promoter from the U K, said is beautifully conceptualized this and he said his dad made his father made the the boxing organization that he's a part of and his father had had an awful lot of success and then add came in and took IT to new heights made IT is bigger than ten hundred times big than I ever was and did all the rest of things and somebody asked, like, if you could go back and change anything now, what would you change? And he said, I never got to do IT first, but IT always felt like he was living in his father shadow that the new frontier was never broken by eddy IT was always broken by his, his father and he he is evident that he lives with this pain of the the action of IT. I mean, do the fucking drama from mega death, you know, the story of metallic? So originally metallic s drama got kicked out or left the band.

I think he got kicked out of the band. So he decides to go and start a new band called mega death. Mega death goes on to be one of probably the top ten metal bands in history, but they're not metallic.

And an an interview, this interview of my housemate sites all the time. This guy still with, you know, one of the most successful metal bands in history, always has this gap between what he could have been and what he was. So yeah, it's very much not an objective assessment of opposition, is very much a relative assessment of of our predict.

I also had this idea kind of plays off the back of this, that one potential strategy that you can go through or that would be maybe adaptive, is, let's say, there are ceilings to the level of status and resources and declared and whatever that you're going reach in life, like there is only one richest guy in the planet, right? And wants to you hit that, there is no further to go. So IT is kind of a zero some game in terms of the rank order in summer regard.

And presuming that you're going to reach asm top right and top out at some point, I wonder whether there is an argument to be made that actually stretching out the progression and the development of your material acquisition. Like winning the lottery could be one of the worst things that could ever happen to you because it's such a huge step change. It's like all right now, how much like how slow is the development from this new couple of million dollar that I previously never had wealth going to be? As as as opposed to if you were able to you know regularly and consistently move five percent per year toward whatever the end financial goal is.

So yeah, IT made me think about how people that achieve rapid success may end up. It's called gold metal syndrome, uh, from olympians, right? Like I finally did the thing. Now what? And I wonder whether, yeah, I wonder whether there is an equivalent for slow life strategy there.

There's the good news is that there's these other source of well being. I reconceptualize well being as happiness pass, meaning equals well being. So happiness is what you can succeed as an individual. Meaning is what you do for your community, what you do for other people.

So when you see that very successful business people, when they get to a certain point in their life with success, they start becoming philanthropists, to start doing charity, to start working for others. And happiness is limited. Their limits to our happy.

You can be how much well being you can get out of that. But there seems to be no limits to how much well being you can get from working for others. That meaning, part of the equation can potentially be a lot, lot higher.

You can, for instance, see with the suicide bombers and revolutionaries that they are, they derive so much meaning for working for a cause and ideals that they believe in, that they're willing to sacrifice strong life. This is called the devoted actor theory with an evolution psychology. So that is when this meaning quest becomes pathological.

So what you're thinking, instead of of spacing your billions out through life, at some point when you have enough individualism, success, start working further, people start making other people feel Better, then you will get a sense of meaning. A one thing is you will get more happiness from recollecting, a comparison group, but you'll get this satisfaction that has a number one. IT can be a lot more intense than happiness potentially, but also it's more enduring.

Happiness is a temporary reward. IT goes up and then IT goes down, meaning seems to accumulate over a lifetime. So as people get older, once you've had enough individual successive, if they want to keep flourishing and feeling well, then working for the good of others is a very beneficial strategy. Depends a little bit on your personality, but most people bending a lot from working for others.

Mads, i've been informed today this has been absolutely fantastic. We met each other at each best. What, five months ago, six month, four months ago, something like that been very much looking forward to this.

This absolutely, completely delivered. So much new stuff that i've never learned before. I really, really appreciate the insight.

Let's run this, backman. Let's find more things that we need to talk about. I really, really enjoyed IT. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with you and the work that you do.

Where should you send them on the internet? I have nowhere to send them right now. Maybe you can. A place that a political article I wrote in the in the description under the video.

And I am working on two books, and I have completed one that i'm hoping to get published soon. And then I am finishing up another one on the sister of meeting. I have one chapter left to write, and then I will submit that the publishers are hopefully some put in the future. I will have some books to offer and and I would very much like for people to read those. But at the moment, yeah they can also go to google scholar and and put my name there and and we'll get up a bunch of articles .

that are britain. When you are ready to publish that bucket, it's going to do unbelievably well. I love, I love these insights. Thank you very much getting for your time. And i'm looking ford to speaking to the next time.

Thank you so much. Chris been wonderful. I really enjoy IT. Thank you.