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Episode 265: Porn in a relationship, GF has a past, Is a marriage contract natural
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all right well what's new how are things going with you oh things are going great you know what's interesting is the news cycle has completely shifted from you know the current events that we that you guys have been talking about the last few months and now it's situated on this young lady who had been abducted i guess or not abducted but right we had gone missing um and so i was i was watching this and just kind of hearing your voice in the background of oh let's back the camera up and i'm like hmm this sounds like like news you know 20 years ago where you're watching the local news and like some somebody got kidnapped or some somebody's everybody's all converging onto this story uh which is really interesting for a country of 330 million people and yes i'm not trying to minimize this one lady's disappearance but it was very interesting yeah yeah notice that uh that these are fantastic ratings and it really helps that they have these little videos of her uh with her with her fiance and that they're attracted people okay particularly her and so this is a this just titillates the thing and just now now just you know everybody's gotta comment on it this is real simple like this is this is human nature 101. the guy killed her okay i guess it's uh 99 sure that that that that's exactly what happened and uh probably better than 99 so you know this [ __ ] happens and this has to do with the limited stress tolerance of males and relationships uh uh uh generally if they're if they they're disagreeable and impulsive and god knows what else was involved over-rewarded probably as well so what the hell such as life god it's awful but yeah but now now it's in everybody's face for two weeks uh and it and it's a national story uh more more for the reason of her attractiveness than probably anything else yeah the truth is is that that this is happening you know this doesn't this isn't so super rare people i mean it is rare but it's not that rare and uh it's not a one in 330 million type rare and so the um but i think the reason why this is titillating is young pretty girl you know instagram or what you know posting a bunch of stuff and um and you know now we get uh we get what is in my mind clearly a murder so a clear you know non-particularly premeditated uh just some [ __ ] getting out of control feeling out of control in the relationship and you know losing his cool and uh you know badly flawed human obviously so there we go very sad very sad but the conspiracy theorist in me seems to to always go towards well what else is the news not reporting forgetting this because of all the stuff going on but uh that's sort of the concept that that we're all under one big brother umbrella but we're we're not uh the news media is is scrambling to try to pull eyeballs for their advertisers as opposed to the other guy pulling out advertisers so they're using data analytics to try to figure out how many minutes should be on what story and they do that according to uh you know who it is that they think that their audience is and that they're running little field tests on that by the minute so the media are money-making machines they they could not possibly survive if they were not so yeah you don't have to look too far for a conspiracy uh yeah it it's in the wallet [Laughter] all right well bless you for ruining my ruining my my fantasy of of the conspiracies but i i appreciate your conspiracies but they're they're usually about lifting money out of people's wallets one way or the other that's you know almo almost always well speaking of media our first question today has to do with pornography and it's no surprise that there is more pornography media for males and there are females um because of what you guys have talked about on the show about the casual mating chip in the male's brain so this quit this first question is about that so uh dear doctors uh is it different when a female partner indulges in the equivalent of pornography but for women than it is for if a male partner indulges from what i understand if the man is still very into his partner or his wife it might not much might not be much of a problem at all but is it the same when a woman is indulging in shows and books and media that titillate the female mind um i would i would say that that uh this this sits under the the umbrella of individual differences so uh certainly with some degree um and in science uh we call this main effects so we're trying to look for the main effect is there a main effect that the more the more time and energy people put into pornographic titillation is that correlated with less interest in their partners yeah i think it is in other words i think it's correlated with with deficiencies in the relationship is it an indictment of any relationship no uh it's not in other words uh any specific relationship might might be fine no matter what anybody's doing uh in terms of this sort of titillation but but the main effect exists which is definitely true so so yeah and secondly then people a lot of times will worry about essentially trying to reverse correlation coefficients so let's suppose we have a relationship that has some significant deficiencies and that is drawing one of the other partners towards pornographic titillation makes a lot of sense that that would be true the uh then they go to therapy about their shitty relationship and you know that one party confesses or one party [ __ ] about you know the other person's uh pornographic whatever it looks like whether it's you know watching all my children for the female or it's you know watching debbie does dallas for the mail so whatever it is the one partner might be complaining and indicting the other partner of diverting resources away from the relationship towards pornographic or pornographic pseudo-pornographic processes and therefore the therapist being you know the geniuses that they are are saying ah well there's the answer to the problem you know you guys really you really have to get your act together and invest in the relationship and blah blah blah this is bs uh the truth of the matter is the if the relationship is in in some kind of trouble and there's a pornographic process the pornographic process isn't likely to be significantly causal at all it's symptomatic okay makes perfect sense that that would be true so the uh so anyway that's how that's how i look at that so we're not going to fix the problem by telling you know tetting somebody and telling them to be at stimulus uh that that isn't how that works so the um so such as life you know no so do i think it's more or less of a problem with the female versus the male or the male versus the female or you know what does it say about the relationship etc the answer is in principle it doesn't say anything about the relationship it is statistically correlated with trouble okay but that's all it is and nobody knows what that correlation coefficient is i i rate my eyeball that correlation coefficient is moderate okay uh people differ tremendously in how how much they live in their imaginations and how how much uh how exciting or interesting pornographic type of things are so i could see some woman who's perfectly into her relationship but still really likes to read romantic fantasy and you know read you know reads quite a bit of them knocks off a couple of those books a month that doesn't mean she's not into her own life it just means that that's a place that she likes to live in imagination same thing is true with a a man probably not reading romantic fantasy probably you know probably watching porn i.e casual mating strategy so that doesn't mean he's not into his partner it just means that that he's got a a space inside of that mind that that wants to go and indulge itself in that kind of stimulation so again correlation not much causation but because the correlation is there it is a it's certainly notable to me as a psychologist that when a relationship is non-functional uh from from the physical side of it and somebody's indulging in a lot of porn uh i don't consider porn to be the problem i consider porn to be the thermometer okay in that in those in those cases all right good question yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah my mind was going towards because males have a casual mating chip and women apparently do not that it would be more problematic if the woman was but but that makes a lot of sense dr well thank you so much yeah women have cast mating strategy chips or or men would never be able to pull off casual mating strategy but the uh but they're not as prominent and their novelty seeking is not as high definitely okay oh that makes a lot of sense okay all right so our next question uh dear doctors uh dr hawk mentioned in a previous episode that a strategy for some people is to date a hundred people in order to gather enough data on what they want and need and what they should aim for given their own mate value at 24 years old i'm a female having left a long four year relationship i did quite a lot of market research and calibration via casual dating and sex which was incredibly informative and mostly fun i have high openness high extroversion above average iq so i enjoy meeting new people and having fun near enough after 100 plus matches and 20 dates i met my current boyfriend and it's been going great we've been dating about six months and we're in love he's conscientious in life and our relationship is constantly making plans and imagining our future and i'm really into him he is absolutely 100 a pair bonder type doesn't have any casual mating bones in his body likely due to low openness and introversion however when we connected online in the first few weeks i was still casually seeing one other guy and i didn't want to commit to being exclusive to the new guy without at least meeting the first but thankfully we did meet up and we've been exclusively focused on each other ever since however my current boyfriend really resents me having had casual mating partners because he said it's such a big turn off and likes to pretend that it didn't happen he's also hung up on the fact that i was seeing another guy while talking to him online i don't want to necessarily avoid talking about my history for the sake of keeping the peace because i'm not ashamed of it and i feel like he doesn't really understand my choices and my personality and i feel judged all at the same time this is especially frustrating because without my dating history i don't think i would be satisfied to pair bond or understand what i want from a long-term partner so it's hardly irrelevant to where i am now but i'm really committed to making him feel loved and secure with me do you think this is a natural reaction in the stone age as men especially want evidence that their pair bonded partners capable of loyalty and not flake or cheat on them in which case should i avoid bringing it up and accept my past decisions are sending the wrong signals or sit down to discuss if these decisions threaten the security of our relationship this is a very thoughtful question and um and i have i have different reactions to it the um i think that the relationship is in a really really good space obviously it sounds like it's an excellent space uh let's take a look at some of the features of that space the we've got young people and the young guy on the other side of this is relatively inexperienced and he's young and he's very excited about who he's with and so he undoubtedly feels over rewarded and therefore he feels to some degree insecure and that drives excitement and the importance of the relationship the uh it's like having a really good job and it's early in the job and you're being paid really well and you've got a fancy title and you're not quite sure that you deserve it and so you're working extra hard um there you know this is a the over-reward situation all good now the uh so we would expect that he would be motivated to to be he would have some motivation to sequester you okay so um there would be a there would be some mate guarding behavior and one of the ways he could make guard would be to signal to you his his annoyance displeasure anger and effect about any indications uh that about basically signals some disgust with respect to your history or on casual mating strategy that that history and any acceptance of it is you know he's feeling threatened um and remember he had to bring his a game to get to the eggs somebody else didn't which means that that other people fancier and sexier than him got there okay which means that he is in a fundamentally theoretically insecure position because you can attract and have as sexual partners people that are fancier and sexier than he is that didn't have to go through 20 dates uh to get to the eggs so uh as a result what we're getting is anger which is a feeling of quote you're you're being unfair okay so he feels like hey i'm a parabonder i'm all in and he's feeling uncomfortable about the idea that that you could and and might actually um defect uh for for a shorter for a short term gratification of someone fancy fancier than he is now we're not saying that you will and we're not saying that you would we're just saying that his reading of your sexual psychology based on what it is that he knows about you tells him that that's a theoretical possibility it's always a theoretical possibility but this is more than theoretical it's actually it's got a few percentage points in it it feels like it could legitimately happen and so um i would say i mean he's also he also has clear evidence that you know he he's not scratching after a prize nobody else wants so that that keeps some anxiety up there and the the as we just talked about the ultimate other side of this anxiety this has nothing to do with your case i'm just pointing out the the the ultimate realities here that that males have a lot to lose a tremendous amount to lose uh in the face of female infidelity they have more to lose than females have to lose the uh if they are pair bonded so as a result you know this is uh they will use their anger they will use their voices they will use their words they will use disgust and insults they will use their physicality i.e this [ __ ] killed this girl his fiancee probably behind some frustration where he was feeling over rewarded and he felt like she had a little bit of too much of a mind of their own and they were arguing which was apparently going on and that you know it reached his stress tolerance so it's got zero to do with your situation except that you understand that this is on a continuum of frustration so that guy was way up there at the 99.99 percentile frustration your guy is you know down there in the 50th percentile uh extremely physically safe but he's is rattling his cage feeling like you've got you know sex appeal and a little bit of a section sexy open his chip that uh that threatens his the fidelity of his situation where he feels like he's long-term invested in you and he could wind up accidentally being long-term invested in somebody else's kid now so it's early and he's still learning about you and he's still calibrating how much you like him relative to how much you like the possibility of further casual mating strategy exploration and you know competitive comparisons that you might make between what you have and what it is that you could get so that all being the case uh knowing that no hearing where you are in this situation my my attitude is to use a strategy that i call confess and avoid and that was given to me by my late brother-in-law who is a prosecutor and um and then later on a major litigator in in civil uh law and that is if you're guilty what's that big d big d yeah so big d would say if you're guilty confess it right up front and act act like you're not ashamed of it which sounds like she's not particularly and the attitude in other words i wouldn't be bringing up and processing any of your sexual history the uh but if it comes up and he's sort of a little bit frustrated and cross-examining or making a little making a little dig in other words signaling his his anxiety and his and his feelings of unfairness i.e his anger because he feels like well you could go find someone under casual mating circumstances that would be sexier and fancier than him for a short-term liaison but he could not do the same and he wouldn't be interested so therefore it feels like the insecurity of the relationship is spinning on your sexual openness and that feels unfair to him and he's twisted up now this is very common it's usually the shoes on the other foot uh between males and females but in this particular case it happens to be on the feet that it's on so confess and avoid is that we're we're not going to be bringing this up or going over our histories or talking about it or making little jokes about it no we understand that this guy's sensitive and we have no need to process this in any way publicly however if it does come up he brings it up other people in conversations drive it then the attitude is confess and avoid and it's like yeah yeah whatever that's in my that's in my history oh well so i had i have you know six percent of me is i'm six percent wild and ninety ninety four percent tame you know that's how i am whatever the uh and so as a house cat goes that's pretty pretty pretty domesticated yeah i'm 90 i'm 90 plus percent domesticated and i'm a tiny bit wild that's all we just confess it done and by not being sort of defensive about it but being open and kind of blase about it we are indicating that we are neither ashamed of it nor where we are particularly intrigued about it in fact we're a little bit bored with the whole discussion which is a very good play it's good for him to see that that uh the more anxious you are about cross-examination about it or defensive about it the more fire there is this is why it doesn't work to do this if they're like well where where were you is this your signature on this document it's better to say yeah that's my signature of course it is like who else would be on that check okay in other words the attitude is blase like of course i had other people interested in me of course i found some other people interesting and yes big deal so what life moves on you know i'm i'm 95 domesticated five percent wild and that means you know a little bit of my history was that direction next like that's it so confess and avoid uh her alternative that she's contemplating is actually deeper processing like essentially attempting to educate him to walk him through this get to the root of his anxiety etc okay you could do this and depending upon who he is and who you are how it goes down it might be a useful process i would say i would use confess and avoid for a while and live through the fact that you are early in a pair bonders process with you that he's feeling highly invested he's feeling very rewarded and i believe that his anxiety will be significantly lower six months from now than it is now so i don't really think there's much to be done other than play confess and avoid strategy for a while and let's just have this his anxiety fade if it doesn't if it if it remains persistent in a pain in the ass then we will need to confront it okay but right now i feel like that anxiety is rel relatively fair um and you you're probably being open and pretty honest human you've probably been mildly open with him about this information and it turns out he's not very personality uh designed very well to handle that and so it's a little much so we we may have put a little too much on honesty in the equation a little too early and we've now got him all sensitized and facilitated so let's just calm him down confess and avoid and let's see where we are you know come this spring well thank you dr lyle yeah i know there's there's there's uh consistent discussions uh between listeners of the podcast on the on the facebook group about this particular topic um you know from the males perspective from the females perspective and the unfairness of the males feel surrounding the fact that they could not have gotten the casual mating strategy in the same way it seems to come up a bit yeah so [Music] oh well wake up welcome to life guys you know just just that's such a life all right all right okay our next question dear doctors i understand that marriage is unnatural to our natural history and you're generally against getting married if you're not absolutely sure and haven't been together for 21 decades just a joke centuries 21 21 centuries but what advice would you give for someone in a pair bond to make them continuously more attractive for a pair bond so if someone wants to simply settle down and be happy with one person how do we beat our genes i know that there may be other people we can be happy with and people better than ourselves that both people may or may not be with or qualify for but once you decide you want to be with someone how can we beat our genes and make this pair bond last hopefully forever there would be several things that that we would do let's see i would say that one of the biggest problems that any any relationship faces is that the there's a whole slew of them but but one of them is that they become they can become life has a tremendous amount of maintenance and resource acquisition uh problems so you know washing the kitchen floor cleaning out the old rotting vegetables um you know uh buying you know shoelaces for the broken shoelaces for junior there's a tremendous amount of maintenance behavior that goes on and a lot of uh relationships marriages will become business-like so that's one problem so there's a couple of things that we want to be on the lookout about that the the one one problem is is that uh that it's a we do we we wind up oftentimes making that partner a huge part of our trading processes in the world they you will trade more time and energy with that person potentially than with anybody else and um and so this is you know my mind's going several different places and so it's a little unfortunate because i'm not you know i didn't think this went through before i started there there are things that we the the root of the happiness in this in this relationship there are many uh angles to it but one of them and the one most important is the romantic sexual process so you can have a very good relationship a great friendship it can be cozy you can be reasonably proud that you can parade around with someone who's reasonably attractive and you can be best friends but you might the this physicality might have been dead 10 years ago so we call that what it is you know i i call that a b plus marriage in most cases if it's that good to my way of thinking is what we're trying to do is we're trying to hope um that if that if we have a relationship that actually has all the pieces the question is is it doomed to lose them and the answer is it depends upon the personalities that are involved and the the answer is it is not doomed it may be doomed by the personalities but it very well may not be doomed by the personalities if uh if both male and female are sufficiently parabone oriented specifically the male uh and then it turns out that he feels sufficiently highly rewarded in the relationship um and that relationship has steam that goes on for years if it has enough steam to go on for five years it may have a steam to go on for 50. okay so there's no in principle reason why that relationship wouldn't be able to be a long you know a lifetime parabond situation it is certainly possible and that has been achieved many times by many people it's just not statistically very likely because it doesn't look like that very well matches the wiring of the species but it doesn't but it's not completely in opposition to the wiring of the species either so uh given given enough vasopressin in the mail and uh and the way those two might be matched up etc and their personalities absolutely could go down what are some things that could get in the way of it the things that can get in the way of it are things like essentially using the fact that we're married as a tremendous security blanket to essentially give us some monopoly and therefore eliminate competition this is a this is a significant problem the it seems like this is a this is a uh like an employer and an employee like making a guarantee that we both you know you keep you keep scoring 27 points a game and uh i will keep giving you i'll give you a long-term contract for you know 13 million a year like everybody's happy at the contract signing because everybody's feeling like the guy that just the the owner's like oh good this guy is you know undervalued in the marketplace but i'm paying them a lot i'm giving them a lot but i'm getting a lot and i've got him locked up and off the market so that next year when you know something happens and another big star gets injured it's a competitor for this guy this guy i've got and i've got him locked up and and i've got him for you know 13 million a year and that's going to look like a deal in two years that's what he's thinking okay on the other side the player was thinking thank god i got a five-year contract at 13 mil i'm rich i've got 65 million dollars now that all looks grand on the day of the signing let's move forward into this process about what we're going to see happen oh now the player gets injured now the owner's burned guy's out for two years with a anterior cruciate sprain and now the guy just paid 65 million dollars for three years of a guy when the guy comes back he's not the player he was before i.e the woman relaxes and gains 25 pounds okay well that's not who we set the contract up for that's not what the guy was thinking that's not why he was feeling overrewarded and now we got a problem okay so the answer is the that that the quote beautiful feeling of long-term security in that situation is a fallacy in a ruse and it's people are very motivated you know can be very motivated to seek it particularly when they're feeling over rewarded okay and they are they're walking into a situation where they are seeking the security of a monopolistic process where there's a barrier to exit for the other party and they're willing to accept it for themselves because they feel like they're over rewarded but the truth of the matter is when they get into that thing they have both basically signed for each other an indemnity that basically says you can be 70 of what you are now and i'm stuck with you not a good idea okay so um so i would say a thing that people need to watch out for is is to be consciously and deliberately understanding that you are that you are designed to try to get what you want and expend the least energy possible to do it all the way down to this thing's dead below the waist and we're intermediately resentful of each other and that we're intermediately resentful of financial conflicts and i don't know what we call it now we call it a business with a couple of children and we're intermediately happy because our lives aren't too bad but it's not too great either okay so what happened we stripped away competitive force so when you get married you are you are basically putting yourself in a position where you do not have to compete as hard that's a problem people okay don't expect a union line of production to be as good as one where the people can be freaking fired on an at will it's not going to be okay i worked in the prison system everybody's like in some union and it's government work and believe me people are lazy as hell they did the minimum they did their jobs but boy they didn't have to work too hard they didn't have to push too hard and the work was not that good i was staring it with my own eyeballs right very different than when you were when you were under the specter of having having to perform if the if the prison system was a sales office for you know sacramento honda they all would have been fired none of them would have made it no competitive fire so when you when you introduce marriage into the into the process you will reduce the competitive stress you need to be aware of that and you need to be go against your genes and realize it's my job to keep sharp that will if you do that and you make those extra efforts uh that the beauty of that is that if you unilaterally know the other your other partner doesn't even have to know it but if you bring you know continue to work hard to bring your a game to it then they will not feel the resentment that typically takes place when person number one starts chiseling five percent and then the person number two chisels back they chisel back seven and now the third person chiseled another three and now we go into the chiseling chip where people try to get the main thing that they want for the least amount of time and energy possible and this is not an optimal situation all right wow so hold on i think i'm not done some other little open loop out here so um so what are we going to do we're going to be aware of the chiseling chip we're going to be aware ie the energy conservation system and that we are giving it carte blanche by signing on the dotted line and having a marriage so that is a serious problem we uh so another thing that i want people to do is to trade as little as possible with your mate so if you make decent dollars per hour for god's sakes don't clean your own house the uh that that that type of thing would be a mistake i was just talking to women today husband and wife are both very stressed they both make over 200 000 a year and she's talking about how they both work super hard and he does this and he does that and you know he he does the shopping and then i do this i'm like what the hell guys have no time for each other no time for the relationship but you're gonna chop vegetables and you guys make a half a million dollars a year don't you understand that there are human beings out there that'll chop those vegetables for twenty five dollars an hour it's a criminal waste of life unless you really enjoy chopping the vegetables now there's a lot of people that they can't make those trades but if you can make those trades do it and in some cases it's worth trading straight across in other words have a third party be the person we both have to pony up money or the budget has to pony up money so that you know that the girl the woman isn't the one cleaning the toilets for god's sakes okay so you want the relationship to be as much as possible an exchange between people who enjoy each other's company greatly doing the things that they enjoy greatly including the the natural emergence of sex and romance as well as the other things that they enjoy together and as little as possible down into the nitty gritty training uh trading processes involved in maintenance behavior okay so this is why i discourage people from going into business with their partners this is you know a lot of dentists out there are the one you know the wife is the you know believe me i've met a few women dennis and the and doctors and the husband is the office manager that happens but mostly it's the other direction and so when that happens you know i'm no fly on the wall but uh so i don't know what's going on behind closed doors but i'll bet you those relationships are worse than average i think that they're probably they have admiration and respect for the fact that they're in there both pulling like a couple of plow horses that they're working side by side to drag the family finances forward but when it comes to the romance workings all day long with someone uh with your romantic partner no i think that's a bad deal so i think that uh is as much independence as that you can breathe into it uh that there's time and energy for including occasionally independent vacations are certainly girls and boys night out people doing their own things and then also also taking the time to get away from everybody else and kids and everything else and have alone time together so that you have uh many vacations or or significant vacations or time off of significant hours where you get to periodically and repetitively immerse each other in individual processes where we're not just talking over you know the the shoelaces and the fact that there's a stinky trash can that needs to be washed out so these are these are the the ideas a relationship needs leisure uh for the uh normal romantic processes we don't want to bury it in maintenance minutiae uh we want to try to avoid that and we also want to be cognizant of the fact that we're designed by nature to chisel all contracts and therefore the biggest contract of all a life partner stands right in you know in line for us being motivated for the energy conservation system to get a little bit more and give a little bit less and so understanding that we want to re we want to consciously and deliberately go against that process to therefore periodically delight that partner signal to them how valuable they are that we would do such a thing that will then uh cause the repetitive igniting of a virtuous process hey but all of that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work we don't know what the individual differences are in novelty seeking people age they lose their attractiveness they change they fall out of favor or they slip below thresholds for our partners for various reasons and there's nothing to be done about that that is not a problem that we could have necessarily solved so we solve every problem that we can solve and the rest is up to fate and then when we find ourselves in a situation where there's nothing more that we can do and somebody doesn't qualify then we have to do something else which is people have to be gutsy enough to do what they can do to confront that and then make decisions as intelligently as possible to optimize everybody's life happiness so those are those are hard times but anyway long complicated story to another another terrific and thoughtful question and so hopefully uh there's some ideas in there that some people can use thank you so much dr lyle it's it's so relevant i know it's in in that answer you said that if there's no competition or if there's less reduced competition than people are not optimizing their life experience and because kind of relevant to the current events of lockdowns is that when they start to reduce comp the competitive processes that you know people aren't as happy because i know somebody sent me a question um recently saying well you know what is the psychological problem with the government you know reducing competition doesn't it make people you know less more relaxed and yeah i think you i think it's great that you yes does make them more relaxed and uh and so this is this is the great seduction of collectivist economics you know socialistic communistic etc the um that that is the great seduction is oh we're gonna feel more secure it's like hey the uh the truth is the greatest security is a vibrant free economy that has all kinds of opportunities so that it if you don't cut it at shop one there's shop number two over there and that they're needing people okay and that you might be good enough to be in shop number two that's the security that you want your country to have that uh people individually typically don't want that security they want some kind of guarantee so the security and romantic relationship for the true romance doesn't come with marriage at all zero in fact it's gonna make you less secure okay it's gonna be you more likely statistically likely to be in that relationship 15 years from now but it's going to make you statistically less likely to be in love why because we reduced your competitive edge okay and so we we are going to institute a chiseling chip and a feeling of relaxation just like when we have a union shop okay so that's uh it is exactly the same principle and so you know what can i say these are realities of the world people will try to finagle different ways to make themselves more secure rather than face the market i understand that very well i would just soon have some somebody decree some guarantee on me that that i can't possibly you know do worse than x no matter how terribly i perform who wouldn't want that okay but we we can see uh you know security in exchange for freedom in an exchange for optimization of what we could be capable of and what we need to be in order to experience the best that is within us you know that's a that's a dangerous and seductive step and it's one that in your own life you know when that when it happens and there's reasonable reasons why that happens there's reasonable reasons why there's a thing called marriage i'm not anti-marriage per se i am very wary of it okay very wary of it it's a seductive process uh that that probably has been very costly for for the the lives and happiness of humans um i understand why it's there i also understand uh the threats that it poses for optimizing human life yeah that's such a good point because if people who were married right now immediately got a legal divorce if they were in a good relationship wouldn't they still be wanting to be together of course and if they weren't why the hell were they married in the first place of course why are they still married yeah yes and so you know i understand these these things are complicated the the the you know 200 years from now or 100 years from now when the financial aspects are likely to be so extraordinarily different than they are now because people are likely to be 10 to 20 times wealthier you know 100 years from now than they are now so basic standard of living of aesthetic comfortable secure finances are likely to be a worldwide phenomenon in 100 years so a woman with two children and no fancy skill and nothing other than an average income on a 30-hour work week that individual is going to be living or can live the lifestyle of a person of a family now making 300 000 so that's i mean that sounds outrageous but it's true okay so the the average the average family in the united states lives literally easily at the 99 percentile of how people were living 100 years ago so the uh when that happens that's the next phase uh the next sort of most important phase of human financial capability is going to be when a woman can just you know when a couple can say have a couple of kids and say well it's no financial disaster at all for us to break up now that we're not that into it let's just kind of go our own ways for a while and see what we feel the this no longer has to be it doesn't have to be the catastrophe uh that it generally is now well it was not a catastrophe ten thousand years ago because they didn't have any money and it won't be a catastrophe a hundred years from now because they'll have plenty uh and so it will change the game and in fact it is changing the game that is the chief reason why it is that divorce is so much more common now than it was in 1950 so in in 70 years it has been the empowerment of women specifically and of responsible men knowing that they aren't leaving their children destitute that they could go on to a new relationship and many men can swing the fact that they've got checks to write on both sides of the equation but they can still do it in relative enough comfort that everybody's okay that you know divorces are now possible in a way that they were really not possible for conscientious people you know the average conscientious person 50 years ago uh the consequences financially for the children and everybody would have been too great but not you know it's much less true now and it's going to be massively less true in the generations to come so we are we are watching a sociological change that you know uh should be you know should take us back to greater flexibility and less sort of tragic waste of human happiness potential if you think about this this is very similar to what has happened in in the workplace i mean an awful lot of people have incredible potential around the world today but certainly if you think of you know think think of the 1935 people desperate for work and very creative intelligent people having you know hoping that they could work you know on an assembly line somewhere canning food like that's it that's as good as it got that those nervous systems had within them phenomenal potential for life satisfaction doing doing having completely different circumstances the sum total of happiness inside those nervous systems would have been so much greater okay that that same kind of constraint is taking place now all over the world right under our faces with respect to marriage okay people are feeling the same type of constraint often okay and they are feeling hamstrung by legitimate financial considerations and they're feeling like no i just like that guy had to stay on that job canning peas you know for for 26 years between 19 you know 28 and 1940 57 or one of the hell it is that he retired um he didn't have any other reasonable choice and you know in the same way people will feel that same way about their marriages like well there's just no reasonable responsible choice um you know it would be a a terrific change in our to the negative of everybody's financial circumstances it would be substantive and real and and very disturbing and therefore hell with it i'm not going to do it okay but you can imagine uh people uh most people in the united states with creativity and intelligence and drive don't sit in the in the soybean factory they aren't sitting there anymore they're not doing that for 30 years they don't have to because they've got options and that same thing will be true with human romantic life you know i won't let to see it but we're seeing it in gradations that's why it's different now than it was in 1980 okay 40 years later it's different the uh the uh thank goodness so i was one of those people that needed to get out of a marriage and i was able to get out i would not have been able to get out had that been 1960. the the social pressure and the anxiety lack of birth control would have had a kid or two there's no way in hell i would have left and i would have spent my life with someone that i didn't want to spend my life with okay so that uh that would have wasted a bunch of happiness potential that sat inside my nervous system so yeah we want to optimize this life experience by allowing these nervous systems to have the best experience as possible and uh and so one of the ways you know we we try to do that is we try to honor where we've got some control and try to face realities when we need to wow thank you so much dr lyle so instead of maybe a lifelong marriage contract would you be in favor of something called a love lease oh oh man you're getting clever these days nathan i'm like yeah well whatever you got yeah you're getting into my sister's house there you go there you go that's good you get to you get some good female energy throwing a few tomatoes at you that's fair you
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