Transcription
Do you find that women, heterosexual women, respond to classical masculinity? Have to be very careful, as I asked, because they certainly respond more than they're supposed to, according to modern rules of femininity. Correct? But my guess is that it's greatly decreased from the market for masculinity in the 60s, let's say. So look again at inter- and intra-sexual dynamics, something I've spent an awful lot of time learning about—writing a book at the moment with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist. Okay, on this.
In the early 2010s, after the success of 50 Shades of Grey, mhm, there was a proliferation of dark romance novels. And they—there was a push back from the feminism movement saying that the portrayals of men as dominant, masculine—beard, big chested, in a loincloth or a plaid shirt wielding an axe—uh, wasn't what women wanted. They wanted a softer, more like the Brony guy or the Marlboro man. Correct? They—they wanted a softer version of this. So they started putting more agreeable, more feminized men on the front cover of books. They didn't sell, right? But I wouldn't guess that either of those would be where modern women's heads would be at now, in the space of 10 years. So I think that there's a—there's massively a difference between stated and revealed preferences.
Sure, right. And also, to, you know, to caveat that, the thing that you may sexually fantasize about is not necessarily what you want to get into a relationship with. Guys will say—say more that uh, what you optimize for in a one-night stand and what you optimize for in a marriage partner aren't always necessarily the same. I would think they would be wildly disparate. Correct? Which means that the front cover of the romance novel is not necessarily the partner that you want long-term; they're the one that you want to fantasize about. Most of these stories are driven by sex rather than driven by love.
So I—I have this hypothesis, and I wonder if you—you have names for all sorts of things that I let—before you give me—I just need to bunch this up—your acronym, your ponant for acronyms, yeah, and a friend Mary says, "Meme first, explain later." And I think that uh, some of my favorite episodes, they rely on aphorisms, they rely on—on creating memes. Sure, small, quippy razors and so on and so forth. First off, because it makes it easier to remember, but secondly, because that's what gets the hooks into you. This is how you make things. So if you are somebody that's listening that has an idea that really loves that idea, give it a name. Give it a name and give it a cool name. I came up with "Fame Seesaw" the other day, which is that uh, on your way up, people want to support you because you remind them of their dreams; when you're at the top, they tear you down because you remind them of what they gave up on.
Yeah, yeah. "Fame Seesaw," beautiful. And now, even if it's [__] wrong, you can't forget it, so it's good. Very nice. You were saying um, that when women, when heterosexual women, realize that they have several possible life cycles and they don't have a clear sense of which one they will actually live—"Am I going to get married and raise children and be at home with the children? Am I going to get married and have one child, maybe two, and be a career person? Am I never going to couple but have children? Am I going to have no children whatsoever? Am I going to do that in a coupled situation?"—their decision trees blow out as to what it is that they're actually looking for. And one of my strong senses is that women encountered something they weren't expecting, which is that they might even be smarter than the guy at work who they're competing with, but he's happy to come in all of Saturday, all of Sunday, and work hours that are completely psychotic. And so then the idea of, "Well, we need work-life balance; we don't want people coming in on Friday and Saturday because that's sort of an unfair advantage," that somebody who wants a healthy life is different from somebody who wants an extreme life. And so now you have this problem, which is: I'm attracted to the sort of man I wouldn't want to compete with at work. If I'm going to be in the office, I want to know that I'm not going to have to deal with the guy who's willing to give up every weekend and work hours that I'm unwilling to work, because that's not how I'm set. At the factory versus—"I want that guy as the go-getter while I'm pregnant and incapacitated in raising children, to make sure that not only he can shepherd our family through anything because he's highly capable, but can also get me back into the workforce when I'm done raising children." And this is somewhat what I believe is responsible for the sort of incoherent messages that men and women are sending to each other, is that when we don't know what life cycle we are going to be inhabiting, our eroticism and our romance and our desire is unstable.
One of the most uncomfortable correlations that I've found over the last few years is that as gender inequality—pay inequality between the genders—increases, relationship satisfaction for both men and women increases as well—sorry, decreases. The more egalitarian, the more equal the pay, the less satisfied both sexes are with relationships. Men who are in relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. Where a woman is contributing more than 70% of the household income, the marriage is twice as likely to end in divorce. For a woman to move herself the same distance on a 100 scale in terms of attractiveness that a man can by increasing his income by $100,000, she would need a 10,000 times increase in income. In short, women are interested socioeconomically in the status of their partner in a way that men aren't. Now the problem that you have is that women now have access to education and employment in a way that they never have done before, so they're no longer financially dependent on men.
Sure. But you're seeing something which is particularly heartbreaking in my group of—of females, which would be women in their mid-to-late 50s. I have to be honest, I've seen some of the women I was most impressed by never coupling. And when I—when you talk to them, there's some very uncomfortable things that get said, one of which was, "I was looking for a man I could look up to, and the pool was just so small." And then—and, you know, you're thinking, "Well, okay, it's illegal to say I'm looking for a man that I could look up to," right, because that's not in accordance with modern feminism and egalitarianism. But on the other hand, this idea that when you're, you know, one of the world's leading chemists or something, there's just not that many men that are going to be in that position.
I got another meme for you. Yeah, this is—I got in a lot of trouble for this; it's called the "Toll-Goal Problem." So if you stand at the top of your own status hierarchy, it's very difficult to find somebody else across and above from yours. You know, if you're a 6'1" girl without heels, you're looking at professional athletes. And two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030, between the ages of 21 and 29, women earn $1,111 more on average than their male counterparts, right? But women still have this vestigial attraction to the man who is across and above from them—that's hypergamy—and this means that as you rise up through your dominance hierarchy, it amounts to an opportunity of diminishing returns. But then why are we not allowed to build better men? I mean, this is the really—this is this thing that just floors me. I'm now—through—through being a father, looking at the subset of young men who are absolutely looking to crush it, and the advice they're being given is so horrific. What? Like, "Well, that doesn't seem mentally healthy," and uh, you know, "I—I think it's much better for you to sort of enjoy this time with everyone else," and you know, it's just like watering down raw ambition. And you know, was it Ludacris who said, "Get out of the way"? You know, "Get out of the way of these people; these people want to invest and blow your socks off and just do amazing things." And there's some administrator or nanny or Nurse Ratchet who's like, "Well, that would be arrogant; we can't have that." And—and you're saying, "I don't think you understand it, but ambition is a necessary input for certain humans, and if you sit there and say, 'Why do you have a right to innovate when nobody else is innovated?' Or—'Don't you realize that your go-getter personality during the COVID situation was based on your privilege?' And uh, 'In fact, a lot of other people are suffering from mental health.'" He's just thinking, "Why am I taking the most promising people and tying them to the most damaged people? Why not instead take the most promising people and have them get a PhD by the age of 21 and study what to do for their—for their fellow souls who are struggling?"
Do you remember when Elon took over Twitter and he started to rip out the tech team? Yeah, and—and he said, "I want to make Twitter a place where the people who want to work the hardest on the biggest problems can come and work." And people said—they looked at that and said, "This is going back to an archaic form of Silicon Valley where people are forced to sleep under desks," and it's a blah blah blah. Those people do not have theory of mind to understand what it's like to be someone as driven as it takes to look at that from Elon—not as modern-day slavery, but, "No, wait a second, it can be modern-day slavery, or it could be the person saying, 'For God's sakes, I'm burning to solve this problem; let me sleep under my desk!'" Unhook—unhook the leash and let me go at this. And there is a—there is a cohort of people out there for whom that's their calling. They didn't want to work at Twitter if they got Frappuccinos and Mindful Monday afternoons off and to be able to play ping pong for half the week and whatever it was that was going on. They want to go, and they want to feel like they're contributing to an astronomically sized goal, an unreasonable goal, and they want to feel the—the rush of—of going toward it. And I think you're right; I think that there is a dampening of ambition. And since being in America, since moving to America 18 months ago, it's the fuel that I've had from the enthusiasm from the people I've been around has fueled me, empowered me in a way that I—I didn't—I wasn't—it was alien. I was 33 years old and I'd never felt it before. I want to look—there's so much to do, and it requires ambitious people, and those people have to be both arrogant and humble. It's a complicated thing; it involves mentorship. It's—I want to say also something about elitism. Elitism is incredibly unfair. You know, I—I've hung out with Stanley Jordan, and I am never going to play any instrument the way Stanley Jordan plays the guitar. He's an elite object; I am not going to be that guy. You have to learn how to let elite people do elite things that—where you can't compete with them. I don't know what to do about this—the idea that we're turning against the concept of elite because we've got this sort of pretend elite that sits in these chairs that screws everything up, and you've got all of these ambitious people who are being destroyed by enforced helplessness. You know, how do we get—how do we fire the administrators necessary to return universities to being universities? How—how do we explain that some people are built to fly wingsuits? You know, it's a super dangerous activity, but somebody needs that brush or they're not alive. You know, people need danger; they need risk; they need to be able to create, and they don't need you in their—in their way all the time.
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