An Evolutionary Psychologist's Take On Broken Dating Markets (Ft Geoffrey Miller)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.94704
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Malcolm and J.J.M. Miller discuss why the dating market is broken, how to fix it, and how parents can help their kids find a partner if they actually want one.
Transcript
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done polls of my my undergraduate males in my sexuality classes anonymous polls right through
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iclicker and stuff would you ever date a female student would you ever date a female student that
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you meet on campus about two-thirds say absolutely not what's the point of going to go oh my gosh
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i know and then right so they're terrified right would you like to know more hello everyone i'm
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so excited to see all of you here today because today i have both malcolm and jeffrey miller on
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the podcast this is really exciting because one we admire his work a lot jeffrey miller is an american
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evolutionary psychologist he's also an author and associate professor of psychology at the
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university of new mexico where he teaches a course on human sexuality among other things he's also
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mixing with university students who are in the thick of dating which is what we're going to be
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talking about today dating markets are broken what do we do to fix them how can people find a partner
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if they actually want one so we're really excited to get into this welcome to base camp jeffrey it's
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great to be here and great to see you guys again great and i want to know that this isn't just like
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if you're a young person and you're like oh i'm interested in this for me this is also going to be
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highly useful to parents because any parent right now who wants their line to continue one of the biggest
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challenges you're going to have to overcome is how do you secure a partner how do your children
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insecure partner within this corrupted market right now yeah yeah it's bad it's dire what are you
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seeing out there jeffrey like do your students talk to you about dating at all or are they like
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i'm not gonna go there are they not dating yeah well they they want to be dating you know the guys
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want girlfriends the women want boyfriends and i actually have a daughter who's 29 and you know
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active in the dating scene and we talk a lot about what it's like out there i talk a lot about the
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current dating apps and their failures and their frustrations with my students we have you know
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long discussions both in my human sexuality class and i also teach a course on effective altruism
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i teach courses on human emotions and motivations and yeah i've even taught a course on alternative
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relationships that covers all kinds of unusual things including including traditional christian
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monogamous marriage as an alternative relationship it so is though
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what so we get this impression sometimes that younger generations are in some ways moving in
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a more trad direction because they're like all the other stuff actually are you seeing this this trad
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movement within your students are you seeing it or is it just not i mean and here in albuquerque
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new mexico new mexico everything is a little bit behind the curve i mean we're not in brooklyn
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we're not the bay area so stuff comes here five years later you know after after it goes everywhere else
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getting serious about finding a long-term mate and people talking about demographic collapse and people
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being aware of it as an issue and certainly my you know 20 year old students talk to their 40 to 50
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ish year old parents right who are also keenly concerned like we want grandkids when are you
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going to deliver grandkids to us and so there's a lot of discussion about that and there's widespread
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frustration with dating apps right a lot of a lot of the kids are on tinder and hinge and they find it
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an incredibly frustrating demeaning dehumanizing process in different ways depending on whether
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you're a woman or a man right but there's there's widespread dissatisfaction out there and particularly
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on college campuses right which used to be epicenters of the mating market which used to be wonderful
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places to meet people a lot of that has been shut down actually quite cynically and deliberately by
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college administrators what wait wait okay so how talk more about this yes okay so about eight or ten
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years ago i was on our unm college committee to revise our sexual misconduct policies right and so this
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was setting the policies rules and norms about basically dating on college campuses and i've talked to a lot
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of other faculty other places who have been involved in this kind of thing and basically i would raise
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questions like look there's there's trade-offs here like yes we want to minimize date rape yes we want
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to minimize sexual harassment unwanted sexual attentions talking that's all bad but on the upside
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it would actually be nice if our students could date each other right and there are there are trade-offs
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there we're like if you have a policy that absolutely tries to minimize all possible date rape
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right and that basically criminalizes people approaching each other like with possible romantic
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intent right i said if you're going to do that you're going to stop the formation of couples on campus
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right and everybody else on the committee was like we don't care about the college campus being an
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effective mating market we do not care the only priority we have is to absolutely minimize
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unwanted uncomfortable sexual attention right so a lot of campuses have gone in that direction
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and the net result is like when i went to college in the 80s yeah like it was partly to find a marriage
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partner and partly to practice medium to long-term relationships and like yes figure out what the
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other sex is like and how like this is so common that i even grew up with this concept of a mrs degree which is
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an mrs degree that you were going college to find a husband and this was a viable strategy many many
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many many many many i i might even say it was a normative strategy for our parents generation well
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and you went to college looking for a wife malcolm and your brother known his wife like freshman year
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freshman year yeah both me and my brother went to college explicitly to find a wife in in part
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but now wow you know what you're saying jeffrey reminds me it's like very similar to what happened
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like it has been creeping up with parenting in general where like car seat laws may be causing
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fewer lives to exist in the united states for example just because they're so prohibitively
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cumbersome uh then they're they're actually you know saving like this this interest in in protecting
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people at all costs at the cost of even growth of the thing we're protecting is is pretty insidious
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it's pretty wild i mean i almost feel like there should be some kind of index on like dating friendly
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colleges because i know many parents are still the only reason they're they're saving in their 529
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accounts and they're actually planning to send their kids to colleges they're like at least this
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is where they'll find their partner and and here like now the universities are like no no definitely
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not don't even think about it that's crazy yeah so if if you're a parent and you actually
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want your kids to be able to find possibly a spouse or at least enjoy a long-term relationship
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and use college as among other things a mating market call the college's dean of students and ask
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what exactly are your policies are you a dating friendly campus or are you all about like absolutely
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minimizing like sexual very interesting contact right call them up and ask them because it's often the
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dean of students and you know to some degree the dei officers and and so forth it's the administrators who
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are pushing this kind of stuff and and and it's often the the students don't really know the ins and
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outs of it all that they know is that there's a general chilling effect right and that they're getting
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signals that it's not cool ever right to ask out anybody on campus right and i've done polls of my
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my undergraduate males in my sexuality classes anonymous polls right through iclicker and stuff
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would you ever date a female student would you ever date a female student that you meet on campus
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about two-thirds say absolutely not what's the point of going to go oh my gosh i know and then
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right so they're terrified right because they know if they're accused of sexual misconduct they
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can get thrown out and that they've racked up student debt and they don't get a degree and
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it's yeah oh that's horrifying and so like i ask who who do you date then and they're like well i go to
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the local community college or i just i've given up on dating already at age 20 and it's a nightmare
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that is wild what do you also pull your female students are and are they having like are there
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interesting asymmetries also that you're noticing between men and women willingness to date i mean
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there have been some things that have gone viral on tiktok recently where young women are like well
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i'm going out my tits bouncing i just wish someone would cat call me like they're really getting to
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the point where they're getting frustrated because no one's paying attention to them i guess because
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there's so much liability around it but are you seeing well like what are you seeing in terms of
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different experiences dating between men and women that could be a leading indicator of something
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interesting i think the young women are not aware of just how terrified the young men are
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about these campus misconduct policies they're not tuned into this like they know uh this is
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weird nobody's dating me approaching me trying to talk to me why not right part of the issue is
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sex ratio so a lot of college campuses it's roughly two women for every man it's getting to like 60
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female which so 1.5 to 2 women per per man and that as you guys know shifts
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the the power in the mating market towards male short-term mating yeah right and and this is why
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study on this by the way just side note here i don't know if you've heard of this study but there
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was a study that looked at the percentage of women on college campuses and dating norms within college
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campuses and the more women you have on a campus as a proportion of the the more promiscuity you get
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whereas the fewer women you have the more monogamous relationships are yeah that's right and that's
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that's what all the data seem to seem to show and so if you get female dominated campuses you might
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think naively oh that gives women the power to set the norms in terms of relationships no no no
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right the sex that is in higher demand and it has heterosexual dating market has more power so the
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men have more power and that means they can impose you know to to the degree that men are on average
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more interested in short-term mating and casual dating and casual sex and hookups right then the
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women are kind of forced into that and that's exactly why when tucker max and i wrote the mate book
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10 years ago we said like if you're a young man you should try to go to a campus that's you know got a
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high proportion of women and you'll have more bargaining power there but if you're a young
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woman right you want to go to like caltech or one of the rare kind of engineering oriented schools
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that's a little bit more male dominated smart ooh the good tactical tips coming in although i do
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wonder if calling the dean of students would work if you're talking about a religious conservative
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university because they do often have like i mean byu for example has some pretty yeah i've talked
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with fans of the show and the number of them who want to go to byu is actually really high like
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most of them are very strongly considering byu yeah to find a wife and all of the catholic parents
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that we talk with are like well obviously my kid's going to find their their spouse at like
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one of these eight catholic universities but i mean they also have strict rules but they're
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rules oriented toward monogamy i guess yeah so look if you're a parent the the bottom line is
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don't just choose whatever university you think will have the highest prestige will be most helpful
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in terms of your kid's career and and like that you can brag about like to your your extended family
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and your neighbors but really think strategically about it as as a mating market and even if it's not
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kind of a hardcore catholic or mormon university at least find out like do the administrators think it's
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okay for students to date each other yeah they basically really discourage that yeah and like
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i wouldn't necessarily want one of my kids to get married at age 21 but i would want them to be able to
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have the experience of having at least some medium-term relationships to kind of like calibrate
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what do i want from you know a potential partner what different advice would you give to a son versus a
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daughter on the dating market and to your male versus female students because i mean it's very
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different tactics honestly the when i'm teaching my human sexuality class the thing that gets the most
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interest is identifying personality disorders to avoid oh and the red flag so the women are very
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interesting right yeah the women are very interested in like yeah i'm kind of attracted to bad boys but i
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actually want to avoid like really hardcore psychopaths narcissists machiavellians like all
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that dark triad stuff and for the men i talk quite a bit about borderline personality disorder and how
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it will wreck your life if you're not careful but how how do you how do you spot this stuff yeah
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yeah i mean that that's a whole tangent but you know because a lot of them are anyone who's dating
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yeah everyone's like no really like we're talking about how you get skittles here and now it's like
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how do you avoid the poison ones and you're like wow you know that's a whole other conversation and
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it's like well it is important in the acquisition of skittles to not get poison skittles
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to avoid poison skittles in the mating market okay for borderline for avoiding women with borderline
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personality disorder right you want to avoid any signals of extremely high risk seeking which is
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drug abuse alcohol abuse bad driving frankly even extreme sports you want to interrogate them about
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their attitudes towards exes right if they diss every single man they've ever gone out with and like
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my father sucked my ex-boyfriends all suck like maybe it's you maybe it's not them maybe that common
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denominators like you pick badly and then drive men away if you get into a relationship with a
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borderline then they tend to flip-flop between idolizing you and demonizing you right so one hour
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they'll be like you're the best thing ever i feel so connected to you this is awesome i'm more in love
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with you than ever and then an hour later they're having an argument and they're saying you're you're just
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you know the worst piece of shit ever and i don't trust you at all and so that kind of instability
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and how they interpret other people's social behavior another big red flag for borderline women
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is they don't have any female friends because they they burn through all their their same-sex
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relationships because other women are are sick of dealing with their their nonsense so that's my my
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capsule two minute lesson that's really good no those are really easy to spot so that's amazing
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yeah all right now let's talk about like dating apps as a dating opportunity right now and i also
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want to talk about passport bro wives because these are two areas where you're actually seeing tons of
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wives we had an episode on just how common passport bro wives are and people one hugely underestimate this
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in korea if you look at rural korea one in four wives are from another country if you look at sweden
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or norway and you look at immigration rates you would think that the immigration rates would lean
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male because you're getting so many immigrants from like middle eastern countries but it actually turns
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out that they're gender equal because you get so many passport wives from russia and south america
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are the two core places they're coming from so i'd love it if you could talk about these two pathways
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so i know a lot more about dating apps and about passport wives in terms of the passport situation
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if you are concerned about finding you know a traditional monogamous marriage and having a
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bunch of kids then you need to find somebody who is from a culture or a nation or a subculture
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that has been open to that and encouraging of that and it's it's really hard if you grow up in a
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subculture that is systematically opposed to long-term marriage and having kids like frankly a lot of
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american culture is i can see the appeal of just trying to you know find a mate where you can and there's a
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long tradition in human evolution of people mating outside their tribe right we are all genetic hybrids
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and mongrels to one degree or another and partly that's because people growing up in a particular
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clan or tribe are related to everybody so you don't necessarily want to marry your cousin or your second
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cousin but also we're intrigued by cultural difference as long as it's not too too different
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so that's really all i can say about the passport wife thing i do worry that often
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people might be matching up with others who seem like okay maybe they share some core family values but
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there's a whole bunch of other cultural baggage right that comes along with other cultures that you
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might not even be aware of right yeah you get you get some wife from lithuania or or namibia or or india
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or whatever and unless you have a deep deep understanding of that culture and all the expectations around
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mating and parenting and so forth and how extended families work in those cultures right
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that can be a real handicap you can have some surprises and shocks and the other thing is
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you know the older i get the more important i think it is actually to try if possible to stay
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geographically close to parents and grandparents totally right and to really leverage the power
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of the extended family when you're raising kids together so i love political theorist yaram
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hazoni who did a great book called conservatism a rediscovery and he writes quite extensively about
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kind of being based and grounded in an extended family that lives nearby and the the many many
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benefits of that so you know i understand the appeal of getting a kind of passport spouse but just be
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aware that like if you're trying to raise kids and the kids grandparents are thousands of miles away and
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you're never going to see them that's a major major handicap yep one thing i'm really interested in
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though like just on this is that one of our listeners sent to me an essay an article on american reformer
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called highway america is a relic of the past that is essentially encouraging young men to do road
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trips like a job drive across the usa and just stop at every like diner and coffee place along the way
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and like hit on attractive young women who are working there because it's it's almost implying that
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like you could be a passport bro domestically there are all these women in flyover america that may be
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more traditional and we should we should consider they're there that if you go get a passport bro
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wife i think a lot of people underestimate how far the urban monoculture reaches in terms of the value
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system and a lot of these women just want to use you they'll say they want a lot of kids and then
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after the like two kids they're like okay that's all i'm going to do because i really wanted was was
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stability and wealth and i already have that and i don't want the additional work now and that's not
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to say they all do one funny story i heard recently from a i don't know yeah it was a fan in the
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comments or something is they were talking about one of their friends no it might actually be like
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somebody i know personally one of their friends wives who was a passport wife from some somewhere in
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east asia and they they got to four kids and then she's like you need to take another wife now
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she's like i'm done with with these kids you this is too much work you need another wife and i'm like a
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lot of people would see that as a very favorable outcome from a passport bro wife and they're like
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need more wives what are you doing with only me but you keep in mind that you know that you are
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merging cultures and that can be a very difficult thing to do but let's know i met my wife on a
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dating app okay cupid before it went crazy i've said in my book i said it went crazy like it was bought
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by match group and they killed the you know just full profile search for a profile to to try to push
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people onto the other more addictive swipe based system and the guy i actually said this in front
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of the guy who was in charge of determining this change at one point i didn't know he was in charge
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of determining this change he's like no it was all based on the data more people were using it after
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the change it was okay you created an addictive cycle uh of course more people were using it but
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basically any app that uses a swipe based system is not worth using as a guy so and the reason it's not
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worth using is if you look at something like tinder and you look at the average guy on tinder
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everybody knows the statistic it's less than one percent of women are swiping right on them
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that's the average guy that's 50 percent of men so 50 percent of men less than one percent of women
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are swiping right on you they are all going to the same men so it just doesn't really work at the
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system because it it means even for the top men they have no motivation to treat these women seriously
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and all these women who are using it end up feeling like every guy is just using them because
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it's every guy that they're choosing within this ecosystem is using them so they end up becoming
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super misandrist but anyway what's your like what do you do yeah and i i would echo like when i was
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using ok cupid to date like 10 to 12 14 years ago it was awesome it was so good and i i think i answered
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literally all of the 3 000 plus same because you can sit up there and farm uh attention you'd end up in
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people's feed with your answers yes simone came up with a unique system where she would do the answers
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in long form so that it would show up on people's feeds oh i see that's clever yeah but yeah the match
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group absolutely killed it and they are now in the business of monetizing subscriptions and eyeballs and
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not creating matches the the stats i've seen is that roughly one in five million swipes results in a
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marriage oh my god on those apps i mean it's literally less you'd have to swipe all day every
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day particularly if you're a guy right to get even a reasonable number of dates and then because the
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algorithm isn't matching you effectively based on any kind of psychological traits or life interests or
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politics or religion or you know interest in family formation and this is why i've started working
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as a sort of consulting scientist with keeper which is a new dating app that really tries to help
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people who seriously want to get families right to find each other and particularly based on deeper
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psychological compatibility so yeah i'm interested in keeper because it seems to me like the new match so
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when i was on ok cupid i was just looking to date at that time like i didn't want to get married but
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then there was another girl in my office who really wanted to get married and so she went to match.com
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and then like a couple months later she met the guy who then like one month later after that became
00:24:04.320
her fiance and they got married and like it was done and we i'd known a bunch of people who just done
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that it was like match was for closers and i think that's kind of fallen apart or it's not really for
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demographic that's relevant to young people and when i first heard about keeper it was under it sounded so
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mysterious it was like well you have to like put down 50 000 and then you only get it if you get
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married you know like something like it required a ton of commitment and i think it's changed a lot
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since then but i was really intrigued by like what are some smart people's entrepreneurial take to like
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get people to actually commit because i feel like switching costs now are so low and the desire to
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actually commit is so low that people even when they're matched with someone who's a really good
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potential partner they're like like she's not a brazilian model like i'll pass i'm not feeling
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it right now they're not taking it seriously so what does keeper do because i think they had to walk
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back the financial commitment part because i don't think they were going to get a lot of customers doing
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that but like what's going on so i mean the economic model is is basically you want to make sure that the
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people who are on a serious dating app are really actually serious about finding a long-term partner
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partner so they do still have a marriage bounty plan where you basically sign a contract that says
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for not just for marriage but different milestones of the relationship like you know if you have been
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dating for a year or you're actually cohabiting or if you get married or even if you have your first kid
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there's kind of an escalating payout structure right so that basically your incentives to find the
00:25:37.600
long-term mate are absolutely aligned with the dating apps incentives in terms of revenue generation
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and then there's a second model which is basically you pay per contact you pay per date
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right okay but i mean you do that on ashley madison so i you know that's not well but then
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you're right ashley madison is for people already married cheating right so keeper is strongly
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discouraging casual dating cheating etc they they actually you know are have ways to vet people in
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terms of their authenticity and their and their commitment to to the process so i think what will
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probably end up happening more often is that keeper is all about like quality over quantity they're
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really trying to find an extremely good match for each person and they're sort of like suggesting
00:26:37.360
here's the match we're going to give you one at a time right we encourage you guys to like
00:26:45.040
communicate a little bit if you want full contact information then that's that's a little bit of a
00:26:51.200
cost like a couple hundred dollars right so you're not treating it as if it's like a gamified
00:26:59.600
like source of sexual validation like how many people are swiping on me and like how many can i swipe
00:27:04.480
on no just taking that off the table the whole mental model of it is sort of like imagine your parents
00:27:12.160
or a trusted mentor or like here's a young woman i know and respect who i think would be a great
00:27:20.000
match for you young man and if i introduce you right you're going to treat her like a real human
00:27:28.080
being not just like a profile right so that's the mindset it's a little bit more like traditional
00:27:34.480
matchmaking but using like ai algorithms and using the power of big data so it's completely the opposite
00:27:41.840
mindset of like swipe swipe swipe and and then like text and then get ghosted right
00:27:50.720
the core failing of the swipe ecosystem which is switching costs the core failing of the swipe
00:27:56.000
ecosystem is that there is always another and when there is always another and there is incredibly low
00:28:00.560
switching costs that then then people do not treat any particular relationship particularly seriously
00:28:06.640
yeah but how much are people putting down for bounties like what is what do you think is a
00:28:12.240
compelling marriage bounty i think so far typically the marriage bounties are on the order of 10 20 30
00:28:19.200
000 but some people are going up to like six figures you know over 100 000 some people have put
00:28:25.440
down like seven figure bounties like i will pay you two or three million dollars if you find me a good
00:28:30.400
spouse and this is a this is a dating app where the median male annual income is something like 170
00:28:39.280
180 000 and like the top quartile is mid six figures so these are successful people and a lot of them you
00:28:49.440
know if if they're serious about finding a spouse are willing to pay for it and they know like look if if
00:28:57.120
you're some entrepreneur and or angel investor or whatever and you've got a serious net worth then
00:29:05.280
finding a good wife or husband is is a massive life benefit how much is it worth to you right to find
00:29:13.600
someone who's a extremely compatible and wants to have a bunch of kids with you and b where you're so
00:29:19.920
compatible that the likelihood of a disastrous divorce is very very low it's funny when you mention
00:29:26.160
marrying you know wealthy people and i think that this is you know in different classes often
00:29:31.440
marry what's in the class and and my mom when when i was looking for a wife you know around the time i
00:29:36.560
was dating you she's like why don't you just go to debutante balls you can you can find great wives
00:29:41.360
at those and i was like mom how do you think i'm going to get invited to a debutante ball i live in
00:29:46.800
effing like scotland and san francisco you think they're having debutante balls in san francisco
00:29:52.160
you need to be aware of where certain like groups or meeting was in each generational pool
00:30:01.040
and and update as that switches yeah and it is a colossal failure honestly of of you know older
00:30:10.880
millennials and and gen x like me and the boomers that we have failed to maintain and update those
00:30:17.440
kinds of informal or formal mating markets like when i was in high school there was a thing called
00:30:22.080
cotillion right and if you were a sort of bourgeois young man or woman right you you would go to these
00:30:29.200
things like four times a year and all the young men would dress up in tuxedos and then they would
00:30:32.960
dance to punk music and and you would get used to interacting with other people in in the cotillion group
00:30:40.000
as real people and often they were going to the same high school as you but you saw them in a new
00:30:44.160
context where it's like ah this is romantic there's candlelight there's music it's it's at a country
00:30:49.760
club that's cool but what are the modern equivalents right church yes that can work
00:30:56.320
college clubs yeah but then you got the the sexual misconduct policies to worry about yeah crossfit
00:31:03.280
right going to some demanding leisure activity that has a decent sex ratio that can work i mean that's how
00:31:10.400
my co-author tucker max found his his wife he's like i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to crossfit classes and
00:31:16.960
i'm gonna find i'm gonna find a registered nurse oh right so specific right and he he tuned it in and
00:31:26.240
he and he found one and she's great and she's smart and now they have whatever four kids and live in rural
00:31:32.240
tennessee and they're they're they're out there and he's teaching his kids how to do long-range
00:31:38.000
precision rifle shooting and and it's great dream yes living the dream that's so interesting okay well
00:31:46.240
so i mean one thing that malcolm and i talk about a lot is basically arranging marriages or very lightly
00:31:53.040
arranging marriages for our children or at least doing matchmaking we've created this group of parents
00:31:59.120
with kids of similar ages to our kids and then when they start hitting age seven age eight we're
00:32:03.760
going to try to get them on like you know summer camps together vacations together you know hanging
00:32:08.480
out doing stuff together you know maybe once a year once every other year so they start to get to know
00:32:12.400
each other and then later on a set of discord servers all sorts of things are like virtually they
00:32:18.000
might like play video games together or something and then over time be like hey you know you're 21
00:32:23.840
you're 18 like have you seriously concerned so and so we we think that a lot of people aren't really
00:32:30.720
talking about how really only until very recently in human history have families and parents stopped
00:32:37.440
becoming involved in their kids matchmaking and dating lives i mean now it's kind of considered
00:32:44.000
weird for a family to even weigh in or provide an opinion on a boyfriend or girlfriend and i get it
00:32:48.560
because you could lose your kid if you like you know they insist they have to marry this person and
00:32:53.280
you hate them then they're going to choose them and you lose your relationship with your kid but on the
00:32:58.160
other hand you know i think a lot of a lot of people would appreciate having a little bit more help and
00:33:02.720
guidance even if they might complain about it what are your thoughts on getting involved in and meddling in
00:33:07.680
your children's dating lives i'm all for it i think absolutely and you know thankfully like with my
00:33:14.080
daughter we talk quite a bit about her her dating life and her relationships and her mate choice
00:33:19.360
criteria and she knows i'm like i've written books about this so i'm not just some random random old
00:33:25.360
dude but i think a lot of parents have a real failure of nerve i think they're absolutely gutless on
00:33:32.560
this issue and they need to weigh in and they need to start doing it from you know the time their their
00:33:39.520
kids are teenagers and be willing to say i just don't think she or he is is right for you but let
00:33:46.160
me explain why and let me unpack it let me give you my life experiences right that are my relevant
00:33:54.640
source of wisdom about how this particular red flag right in this young person is going to play out in the
00:34:04.560
future so the parents have to be articulate about it they have to connect it to their own life
00:34:09.600
experiences that requires a bit of vulnerability but i i see this this massive failure of parental duty
00:34:19.040
like where oh yeah you're allowed to give your kids advice on education career but not about mating
00:34:25.280
and it it's so it's so dumb because like in retrospect my parents when i was a teenager
00:34:34.800
could have easily found like a dozen young women who i would have actually had quite a happy marriage
00:34:41.440
with like they knew me better than i knew myself a fair point right they knew my my strengths and
00:34:47.840
weaknesses my traits my quirks because they were surrounded by you know other parents kids and they
00:34:54.800
they were they were smart and observant and the notion that a 20 year old knows themselves better than
00:35:01.040
their parents do is in a way very narcissistic and very strange yeah yeah no absolutely and and like oh also
00:35:14.240
you can weave together the parental advice and the dating apps right oh wait how well like for example
00:35:22.160
you could actually include your parents in the assessment right now if you're if you're on tinder
00:35:29.200
right of course your parents aren't going to be standing behind your shoulder like monitoring every
00:35:34.240
swipe but if you're on like a keeper dating app where you're getting just one hopefully really yeah
00:35:41.920
the time right you could potentially share it with them zoom with them get their advice and you have a
00:35:47.920
rich enough set of information about each potential mate right that the parents could look at that
00:35:55.520
and go yeah well actually let me explain to you why like hopefully keeper is even smarter than you are
00:36:04.560
about why this would be a great match or maybe why not right and so we we would i ideally want to empower
00:36:11.680
young people to like fold their family and their friends into this dating app experience
00:36:20.640
i like that so if if you're not comfortable doing it with your parents at least maybe do it with your
00:36:25.280
siblings at least do it with with housemates with friends whatever don't keep it as like your secret
00:36:30.800
little vice like like tender hinge where it's like i just do this to be like a solipsistic
00:36:38.480
like secret of sexual religion you mentioned this one of the things we talk about on this channel a
00:36:42.560
lot is cross-cultural differences and a big difference across the american cultural groups
00:36:47.600
and you can go to our videos on the backwards cultural tradition everything like this and the
00:36:50.800
various culture is is some groups like the backwards cultural tradition which is like the appalachian
00:36:55.440
cultural tradition primarily vets spouses through siblings and then other groups primarily vet spouses
00:37:03.680
through parents and i i just happen to be through culture that primarily vet spouses through siblings
00:37:09.280
and so this is to say that there are many ways that you can build a vetting system for spouses
00:37:14.240
that rely on people who know you better and rely on the crowd opinion but the crowd opinion is always
00:37:20.400
going to be better than your individual opinion and and i know that as a society we have completely
00:37:25.440
atomized romance but it's really stupid especially if you want to get married as young as you need
00:37:30.240
to to have a lot of kids recently we did an episode i don't know when it'll go live but it was on we
00:37:35.600
need more teen marriages and the problem the biggest problem with teen or young marriages is i mean young
00:37:42.000
you know early 20s whatever is that you don't fully know yourself yet you don't know who you're going to
00:37:46.640
become and you're not fully myelinated but your parents and your friends like aggregately the
00:37:53.200
people around you know you the people who have a vested interest in your future know you and this
00:37:58.400
is why so many societies used people like that for marriage choosers of these and people can be like
00:38:04.640
well what about love and it's like well you know love isn't it didn't exactly evolve within a context
00:38:10.320
that's meant to choose as a perfect spouse it's meant to make you love whoever you think is going to
00:38:16.240
be the the parent of your kid because you know then you don't kill them or the kid or anything like
00:38:21.200
that it's not meant to be a spouse choosing mechanism within an evolutionary context
00:38:28.320
yeah and i'll just just for those who are brothers sisters moms dads who are listening to
00:38:32.880
this and thinking like how can i get involved in a way that's meaningful malcolm actually his whole
00:38:36.800
family got involved in pitching me to him kind of like one malcolm participated in that very early
00:38:43.680
on in our dating even when i was under the impression that we were never going to get married
00:38:48.720
you introduced me to your dad it was like with your mom or something it was it was with you
00:38:54.400
introduced me to you in like the first and then after we broke up you you literally you were out of
00:39:00.320
the country and you had me go to dinner with your parents who were in town and then after we got back
00:39:04.800
together one so like his brother and sister got involved just hammering malcolm on like you need to
00:39:10.480
marry her she's right for you wait do you remember this wait what do you remember about
00:39:15.040
also that they they were just like how come in that way that they always are how come you need to
00:39:20.960
just do she you're not gonna find anyone else you're you know you're impossible she's the only
00:39:25.200
one who'll deal with you and then your mom started sending both of us engagement rings that she found
00:39:32.000
on first dibs and she just kept sending the rings and sending the rings and sending the rings and
00:39:36.640
then being like oh i'm gonna come you know visit you should propose to her here you should propose to
00:39:40.880
her there and she's just like a constant force in both of our lives making it really top of mind
00:39:45.760
and making it like i think a lot of parents just aren't necessarily thinking about like
00:39:51.360
about doing this like the reason i got married at the age i got married at and i think that a lot of
00:39:56.160
people they don't they don't see this is i had a a family that was around me constantly telling me to
00:40:02.080
get married to this person and they didn't say this for other girls i dated they didn't they actually
00:40:07.520
they'd never said this about any girl i dated before that you need to marry this they even moved
00:40:11.040
up the timeline they actually moved up like his family moved up the timeline because i was like
00:40:15.440
well i want malcolm to propose to me when he can through his work afford to pay using his own salary
00:40:21.200
for an engagement ring i just i don't know like i was just it's a stupid thing on my i don't know why
00:40:25.920
i said that but i did and malcolm's mom was like oh it's just that and she like pulls off her earring
00:40:33.280
which is just like big diamond and she's like slides it across the table and she's like all
00:40:38.000
right turn this into a ring because you can afford this like she's just like she was like okay you
00:40:41.760
know what do we need to do to close her her like her constant phrase to the family was dinners for
00:40:46.880
closers she just was always about like let's get it done and i i think parents when they think about
00:40:52.080
getting involved maybe they think about nagging maybe they think about like i think you have to
00:40:57.040
think about this like a salesperson like where is the friction and how can i remove that or how can
00:41:01.280
i keep this top of mind like what's my drip campaign where's the propaganda so okay jeffrey
00:41:07.120
you're you're you're totally trapped now because i'm going to put you you on on our list of matchmaking
00:41:11.760
families for your youngest daughters because you know we've got we've got really great young men
00:41:17.440
for them to consider later on in life i mean american culture is like oh it's really creepy to think
00:41:26.880
that far ahead but it life is short and life goes by fast and you know the standard parental advice
00:41:34.000
is like oh the days are long and the years are short and before you know it your toddlers will be in high
00:41:38.480
school and then they'll be looking for mates and frustrated and you know another issue here is like
00:41:45.360
apart from the collective wisdom of the extended family and the parents and the siblings it's also really
00:41:51.280
really really helpful to get to know the family of a potential mate early right because of heredity
00:42:00.720
because traits are heritable right don't look at the woman look at her mom right because then you know
00:42:06.000
how she's going to age yeah so you want to be able to integrate information about all these phenotypic
00:42:12.080
traits right all these physical and and mental traits physical and mental health right and this is another
00:42:20.000
one of the many reasons for pronatalism in big families is you just get a bigger sample size of
00:42:24.960
what are the genes in this family like that's true and so like there was a funny asymmetry where
00:42:30.560
when my dad as a long young lawyer age circa 26 started dating my mom age 19 college student
00:42:38.160
my mom had 11 brothers and sisters right big family wow so my dad could meet all these siblings
00:42:46.080
and just see the the mosaic of traits right expressed in all these siblings and get a much better kind of
00:42:54.000
estimate of what my you know 19 year old mom was going to be like versus my dad was an early child
00:43:01.360
so she had to assess him just based on him and his parents and that's pretty much it right so one
00:43:10.480
one hidden cost of very very small families is it makes potential suitors less confident about like
00:43:20.560
what what really is this person like because i can't see the way that similar genes are expressed
00:43:27.760
in siblings and parents yes that's really interesting there's there's even this old victorian dating guide
00:43:33.440
that was written where the the author was also like just don't date an only child they're going to be too
00:43:38.320
selfish and their parents clearly failed to thrive like that just he just like was completely writing
00:43:43.760
off all single children even in the victorian age there's there's there's got to be some wisdom to
00:43:47.840
this yeah i actually don't think it's it's the case that the single kids are sort of messed up
00:43:54.400
psychologically per se it's just you don't know as much about the genes that they like lady carrie
00:44:00.800
because you don't have as big a sample of of their relatives 100 yeah that's a really good point okay
00:44:06.400
final final rapid fire question in what way or it to what scale do you think we're totally super
00:44:13.200
screwed by ai boyfriends and girlfriends coming online and providing basically the ultimate
00:44:20.720
sync for anyone who decides like i am just gonna just focus on hedonism and this perfect boyfriend
00:44:29.040
girlfriend that i can you know eventually plug into a very responsive sex doll like whatever right like
00:44:33.600
we're it's going to get way more advanced than it is now do you think that we're super screwed are we
00:44:38.480
just going to lose a certain portion of the population that only cares about a certain type
00:44:41.840
of pleasure well what do you think is going to happen as this rolls out i think it's a it's a big
00:44:47.600
big problem and i think we're going to be blindsided by it and i think it's going to actually affect
00:44:52.640
young men and young women about equally but in different ways right so yes the young men are going to be
00:44:58.320
able to get this like super attractive curvy vivacious validating like girlfriend and they'll
00:45:05.200
be able to put on the virtual reality like headset and have like virtual sex with these ai girlfriends
00:45:10.880
sexy haptic suits yeah and and by contrast dealing with like real women and all their their nonsense will
00:45:18.880
become quite unattractive but on the on the other hand for the young women right they're going to get these
00:45:25.360
ai boyfriends like chat gpt which is currently kind of my wife's secondary partner like we're
00:45:32.640
by the way building better ai girlfriends was our fab.ai for anyone who wants to check it out thanks
00:45:37.520
just in case you wanted to like sterilize more people yeah i know we're in the early stages well
00:45:41.920
hey elon's doing it was grok we just have to beat him okay yeah simultaneously through one side of the
00:45:48.560
mouth and so the like if you read women's romance novels right you know what women want and what they
00:45:54.560
what they crave and so if you have like ai boyfriends that are on the one hand kind of like dommy and
00:46:01.520
superior and they they push the hypergamy button right where the women are like oh man i can't believe
00:46:08.800
such a such a bad boy such a high status pirate captain is my own personal werewolf conversation
00:46:17.280
partner but on the other hand you know the ai boyfriends will be able to remember every single
00:46:23.360
detail of the young man's lives their birthdays their interests their pets like if the woman's like
00:46:29.920
i love this movie the ai boyfriend will be able to like literally go off and and basically like
00:46:35.040
watch every episode yeah and then be able to talk about it you know every line every reference oh god
00:46:41.360
and so real real young men who are like distractible and have fallible memories and
00:46:47.360
like insufficient attentiveness and all that will seem really lame by comparison so i worry a lot about
00:46:54.880
this and i think it's one of probably my top five ai risks that you know i i would be concerned about
00:47:06.560
so ai for matchmaking great ai for fake boyfriends and girlfriends could be very dangerous but on the
00:47:16.720
like okay what's the silver lining you could potentially design an ai boyfriend or girlfriend
00:47:23.040
that is specifically to level up social skills yeah a lot of people are arguing this that's a good point
00:47:30.080
yeah maybe you could do that but then you'd have to be really careful about how exactly are the
00:47:35.760
economics of the ai boyfriend girlfriend software makers aligned really with the long-term interests
00:47:44.400
of the users right is it really leveling them up or are they just getting a kind of gamified like
00:47:52.720
way to overcome my alleged autism kind of thing yeah i don't know the way dating apps have devolved
00:48:00.160
on the broader scale aside from you know some of the more innovative really results oriented ones
00:48:05.440
suggests that look not good but i don't know i mean part of our approach that we're taking with our
00:48:11.200
kids is more like if you want pleasure sure use ai for that but marriage is is as much a career choice
00:48:20.720
a survival choice as it is i mean it's it's really actually not at all from our perspective about
00:48:28.000
pleasure or romance i mean it's it's great if those things are there and that that should you know
00:48:34.960
compatibility is important etc etc but like we're trying to raise our kids to not think that because
00:48:40.880
i mean we for the vast majority of human history and maybe i mean you can comment on this because
00:48:45.360
you're probably way more informed on this from an evolutionary psychology perspective but for the vast
00:48:48.880
majority of human history the human pair bonding has not necessarily been about romance or love
00:48:54.960
and yet now people modern people are expecting a courtesan without paying them a salary without
00:49:02.880
having the budget for that like they just want someone who will who will amuse and pleasure them
00:49:06.480
who is perpetually young and attractive when that's never been what marriage has been about i mean
00:49:11.840
it's been about like a sort of commercial religious family-oriented agreement and we're trying to
00:49:18.640
reorient our children around that that all this romance stuff is this other thing that is better
00:49:25.200
handled with ai anyway so just use ai for that and then think of marriage as something completely divorced
00:49:31.680
from it but but how are you how are you thinking about preparing especially your younger kids for for
00:49:37.920
this i mean there's some time you can see how it plays out a little bit what are your initial thoughts
00:49:44.560
i mean one one thing i talk about a fair amount with with both my wife diana fleishman and we also
00:49:49.200
have a friend athena activist oh she's so cool yeah she's cool she wrote a book called a field guide to
00:49:55.280
the apocalypse and the mindset there is like in terms of guiding kids and their mate choice
00:50:02.320
hedge your bets about what the future will be like right so the future might be
00:50:10.160
super high tech and maybe we have benevolent ai and every everything gets easier but the future might
00:50:15.760
also be post-apocalyptic ai makes a lot of trouble there are a few survivors right how do you survive
00:50:23.120
or it might just be kind of a gentle grid down you need to go into like prepper homesteading
00:50:28.080
mode okay so find a mate who would be good at any of those right game out what are some likely and
00:50:39.120
plausible scenarios and try to find you know a partner for your kids or for yourself who is going to be
00:50:48.240
as at home and making a living podcasting as they are at milking cows or defending your homestead
00:50:56.720
against marauders right or dealing with you know a butlerian jihad when you're all fighting the ais
00:51:06.320
and that i think helps keep people grounded because what i worry about at the moment is a lot of people
00:51:12.080
like in brooklyn or the bay area are choosing their mates on the assumption that the current service and
00:51:18.480
information-based economy will just continue largely as it has and at this particular point in history that
00:51:26.000
seems more unlikely than many other possibilities yeah that checks out that's solid advice okay cool
00:51:36.560
jeffrey thank you so much for coming on base camp this was really my pleasure great to have you on
00:51:41.120
great yeah our friends like it when other friends come on because like there's this weird little
00:51:46.080
social network where everybody knows each other worlds collide yeah but also you provided a lot of
00:51:51.200
really good tactical advice that is not stuff that's obvious to us so this is very useful to i'm
00:51:56.960
thinking differently about the the way we're gonna tweak our our propaganda and messaging with our
00:52:03.520
children so i'm really excited about this for propaganda and messaging i mean these things are
00:52:08.240
important in the very we don't brainwash our children even a little never that would never happen
00:52:13.840
in our house they they they are crazy i mean they're they're just as worse so wait if we want to end our
00:52:20.960
our podcast on a fun and and differential note what are you gonna have for dinner tonight yeah jeffrey
00:52:26.880
what's for dinner oh god only knows um oh stuffed peppers i believe my my wife is is making that's pretty
00:52:35.680
fancy shit man stuffed red peppers stuffed with cheese you're like with with cheese and whatever
00:52:44.400
our kids will eat yeah oh yeah we've got these stuffed peppers my god no yeah we we try to feed them
00:52:52.480
pretty well my kids this is the thing my kids will only eat if every ingredient is separated from every
00:52:57.920
other ingredient yeah we're like they've got this whatever like they've got too much jewish dna i don't
00:53:03.760
know but they want everything completely separated and not touching anything else yes the idea of
00:53:09.360
putting one food inside another food oh goodness oh no no no peppers that's sacrilege pretty nice
00:53:16.800
red fruits can have seriously negative effects on one's powers this one curbs magical abilities
00:53:22.240
are you trying to say you don't like tomatoes this green squishy area is particularly dangerous
00:53:27.840
just look at it there's obviously something diabolical going on
00:53:32.560
are they really that bad rice has been tainted by its evil
00:53:40.320
yeah like even if you know they they ask for pepperoni pizza but then they have to remove
00:53:44.480
all the pepperonis because they're like we're gonna remove the pepperoni and we're gonna remove the
00:53:48.720
cheese yeah we're gonna eat every piece individually oh yeah but no the exciting plan is for our little
00:53:55.600
girl stella is turning two tomorrow and we're going to take them up to meow wolf which is an amazing
00:54:01.280
experience in santa vee new mexico looks super fun what is meow wolf it's cut it's hard to explain it's
00:54:08.080
it's a semi-psychedelic exploratory experience that is part museum kind of artsy but partly you just go
00:54:17.360
there and explore it and m-e-o-w-w-o-l-f meow wolf there's actually several of them in different
00:54:24.160
american cities now and they're great fun and highly recommend it it's really fun this is pretty cool
00:54:30.320
oh yeah no it's gonna be you guys do birthdays properly so yeah wait it's a birthday yeah
00:54:37.200
it's her birthday yeah it's a good birthday party our kids would spurg out there too much they'd be
00:54:43.040
it's like a bad trip for them i just know yeah we don't we don't let our kids out of the house
00:54:46.320
anymore we'd be better than to do that we had a our bigger problem is they busk and they steal
00:54:52.720
so we we can't we can't take them anymore because it's it's just too dangerous they barely steal
00:54:58.320
simone okay but they busk very aggressively so we can't you told me the story of a kid goes to school
00:55:04.640
he comes back with a pokemon card we go how did you get this pokemon card and then he tells me well
00:55:10.320
another kid at school ripped my art and i was like well what does that have to do with this pokemon card
00:55:15.120
any and then he goes well i told him that if he didn't give me his pokemon card i would tell the
00:55:20.800
teacher and then we're like octavian that's blackmail you shouldn't do that and he and he looks at us
00:55:26.720
very sternly and he goes there have to be consequences yeah when it comes to propaganda in our household i
00:55:31.200
feel like our children are more heavy on the propaganda than we are so but yeah he's like a little
00:55:42.480
we're so scared we're so scared all right well enjoy the stuffed peppers tonight and thank you
00:55:48.880
so much for your tactical advice i'm very excited about this i'm i'm gonna i'm absolutely gonna be
00:55:52.880
recommending keeper to people because like actual traditional matchmakers every time i like suggest
00:55:58.080
people try them out they're like these people are so like incompetent and like this actually sounds
00:56:02.720
organized they are like you want to know like in in the startup world it's all about playing a game
00:56:08.160
of arbitrage like where can i you know where can i act tap into this market where there's an advantage
00:56:13.760
and it's clear that like if you want a professional results oriented gets things done fairly affluent
00:56:20.560
partner like this is where you should go so get it while you can last guys before everyone else hears
00:56:26.480
about it i'm really excited about that so yeah it's it's good to hear one before you know our matchmaking
00:56:31.360
network starts to work because we have teenagers reaching out just being like hey like i'm in
00:56:34.800
college like where do i go and we're like well you know we'd add you to our matchmaking network but
00:56:39.680
it's all like two to five year olds now it's not really gonna be your thing i mean maybe if they want
00:56:45.680
to be like you know age gap relationships in like 10 to 15 years but not yet so what are you gonna do
00:56:51.520
all right well thank you very much jeffrey good to see you guys take care all right have a great day
00:56:57.120
you too no toasty you fill the gun with water from the hose yeah from the spigot
00:57:06.160
not by filling your mouth and spitting in it octavian did you show him that no
00:57:16.720
i'll just clean the water well yeah you're gonna shoot it out octavian right oh professor are you
00:57:56.720
Yeah okay Toasty. Okay now do, okay now go in that. Okay. Okay Toasty.
00:58:05.760
Toasty. Now go there and defend yourself to the top of the queen. Okay.