#1072 - Dr Debra Soh - Why Nobody is Having Sex Anymore (& why it matters)

Is people having less sex a big deal? It is a big deal. Well, ask anyone who's not having sex if it's a big deal. I think they'll tell you, yeah, it is a problem, especially considering that it is young men who are typically in their prime and at the peak of their sexual drive. So not only is it, I think, quite frustrating for them, but also when you're in a situation like that where you're struggling, and it's not just about the sex, it's also about the connection and the emotional intimacy and the larger feeling of connectedness and community. So sex sanction is very much about the sex recession and the fact that young people, millennials and Gen Z in particular, are having less sex than previous generations. And I was skeptical at first. I thought that this talk about the sex recession and sexlessness was overblown. But after I sat down, I got a chance to go through the data myself, look at the media reportage, talk to people. and we see consistently with multiple data sets that one in three men and one in five women have not had sex in the past 12 months which is a large number of people and so i was interested with this book what is taking the place of sex and what what does that say about where we're headed in the future how different is modern sexual activity to what we understand about the past Well, in terms of, say, the outlets that we have available, so one question has been, is sex really on the decline or is it that other outlets are taking the place like porn, some masturbation, things like OnlyFans or now AI Companion. So each of these subjects have a different chapter in the book to themselves and in myself explaining, trying to understand what the trend is about. Is it convincing? I test them out myself, which was a lot of fun in many cases. Going through the scientific research in terms of what we do know about these technologies. and then also talking about the evolutionary biology and psychology that is underpinning them. So what makes these technologies alluring to human beings? And why is it that it's potentially dangerous or distracting us from real life sex? How different is the amount of sex, person on person sex, that modern people are having compared with what we understand about the past? Well, everyone across the board is having less sex. So regardless of whether you are married or in a relationship or single, It's in eastern countries, western countries, basically all developed countries and all age cohorts. But as I mentioned, most more specifically among young people. But your question earlier about, you know, is it taking the place of potentially masturbation or other outlets or other sexual outlets? And if you look at studies that are asking about adolescent sexuality. So this is a understandably uncomfortable subject to think about adolescent sexual awakening. But they have parental consent. It's a legitimate study. and what they found is even among adolescents they are having lower rates of masturbation and across the board with everyone less partnered sex less so less um intercourse less anal sex less all types of sex oral sex um partner masturbation i said solo masturbation as well so across the board there's been this decline so it's not that people are just preferring masturbation although i do think that is something that is happening especially when we look at pornography and AI girlfriends and boyfriends and that type of thing. But it seems like there's something else. There's a larger phenomenon. And I also speak to the role of endocrine disruptors in one chapter because I think there's something else biologically happening. So it's not just that the pie of sexual activity has been redistributed from person on person to solo person or person with machine or person with doll or whatever. It's that the overall size of the pie has gotten smaller too. There is less sexual activity happening. as a an aggregate yeah oh yeah that seems to be the case and what i find interesting as you mentioned with like dolls and robots with the technology improving over time i didn't think this was going to be the case i always thought people would prefer in person real life sex but i'm beginning to think people are actually preferring the solo methods and it's potentially dangerous if it comes to the point where we have these surrogates like robots where you can implant an ai and they are no different from real life person i really think people are eventually going to some people will be turning that way but it's going to be much more popular than i had anticipated when did the sex recession start in your opinion it's been documented for probably the last 30 years or so like the 90s it was when it really started to taper a little bit but it's been the most i'd say prominent in the last 20 years um it's covid definitely played a role in making things worse but it was on it was happening before that so the internet i think is a big part of what's happening smartphones as well as social media so sadly social media is supposed to make us more connected and it's uh if anything seems to have made us more divided even outside of the realm of sexuality i think in terms of politically in terms of men and women in terms of even subcultures on the internet just everyone seems to be fighting with each other and hating each other um so i think that's feeding into it as well there's this larger like political hatred that's happening between men and women that's also fomenting this decline in sex. Because if you hate the opposite sex, it's going to be very difficult to want to have a relationship with them or to date them. I had some stats I wanted to read out to you. One in eight 26-year-olds are a virgin. 24% had no sex in the past year, about double the rate of 2010. Among men from 18 to 24, around one in three report no sexual activity in the past year. 26 percent of u.s adults reported no sex in 2021 37 percent of adults having weekly sex is down from 55 percent in 1990 37 percent weekly down from 55 percent 37 percent of gen z had no sex in the last month versus 19 percent of millennials so even when we're talking millennials haven't got it you know there's a big jump again 48 percent of married couples had no sex in the past month and the uh dead bedroom subreddit is just cranking at the moment but this is my favorite one it's my favorite one by far survey of gen z found 67 percent would prioritize a good night's sleep over sex yeah i'm not surprised i'm not surprised you like a good night's sleep well that too but the fact that yeah this is such a common trend and it started i mean 2016 was when the first really big study came out showing this and at the time i thought this is probably a fluke it's probably one time thing but more and more just consistently right it's like so many so many data sources are showing the same thing it's very concerning i do think mental health is another big part of it right when people are i think people are very exhausted right day-to-day life but it's also lacking prioritization of sex these other replacements for sex are taking the place because they're easier and then globally five percent of people are depressed right now so if you're depressed or you're anxious like gen z is is uh half of gen z has a diagnosed mental disorder and of them 90 have anxiety there's a lot of anxious gen z years and so if you're anxious and depressed your last thing you're going to want to do is go out and meet people sit down have a date potentially face rejection have to be entertaining you know loss of motivation feeling very self-conscious all of this stuff so like it's multifaceted in terms of i think all of the factors that are leading people to decide instead you know i'd rather just stay at home and swipe on apps, even if I'm not meeting anybody. Sleep. Yeah, sleep. Or sleep. Yeah. What's happening with hypergamy? Hypergamy has taken on a life of its own, I think, in internet culture. So from a research perspective or scientific perspective, it's the idea that women tend to want to date or marry men who are at the same level of success or who are more successful than they are. So women typically marry up. And so, yes, this is true. I think in some ways it's gone a little bit off the rails because I write in Sex Stinction about three sixes rule. So the idea that women look for men who are six feet or taller, who make six figures or more, and who have a six-inch penis. Can I say penis on your podcast? You can say penis if you'd like. Every other meet outlet, I've been like, is it okay if I say this, you can leave it out. Or manhood. So basically, if a man does not meet those criteria, he's not considered worthy of your time in, say, the internet dating culture for women. and I do like I mean none of those things really correlate with success in a relationship or marriage so when you do the calculations as I have you know it comes down to like this tiny percentage and then you have to also take into account is he nice to you do you have chemistry do you have things in common can you have a conversation does your conversation last more than like five seconds you know so like the more important factors whittle it down even smaller to even smaller of a percentage. So I think women who are abiding by these criteria may be missing the bigger picture. How many women do you think are abiding by the three sixes rule? So it's interesting because when you look at the internet and what's on social media, this is something that women are really pushing forward. I question, but at the same time, having talked to a lot of men about what dating is like nowadays, they, from what I've been told, women have really unrealistic standards in terms of what they're looking for. but I would also say you know social media has made men want to date like super hot you know women who may or may not look like their photos may be super photo uh photo edited and really perfect looking but may or may not look like in real life or might have a ton of procedures as I have a chapter on plastic surgery so I think both sexes have very unrealistic expectations of what they want um but like anything like evolutionary psychology and biology is not prescriptive it's not saying this is what you should do it's just basically generalizing or noticing trends in behavior or that explains mating psychology and like anything the internet takes it and just like runs away with it i don't know i my favorite place for doing mating research is the pool at soho house here in austin and uh it honestly it's it's fucking ground zero for looking at mating dynamics and um a lot of the time i'd be there with friends and and there'd be a group of girls on the bed next to us and they'd be 24 or something and they're paying for a house membership and it's a couple of grand a year so they're probably educated and earning well or whatever they have never said oh it's because of the size of some guy's penis now you can say they wouldn't want to publicly state that that's kind of a bit uncouth that's going to make them seem a little bit silly the data that i saw from mac and murphy last he was sat in that seat suggests that if you're a guy with a six inch erect penis you're in like the 97th percentile so it's a it's bigger than basically any woman has ever seen um so i i get the sense that that's not an issue the six pack abs if you switch it out for that right which is a guy that's sort of muscular and in good condition i could see that a little bit more i think i think if women actually saw like full six inch penises more they would actually be like i mean 98th percentile well yeah because the average penis is five inches but what's interesting is most women say they want a six inch penis most men think women want a seven inch penis most men think that they have a six inch penis probably most men are actually hard on themselves that i didn't mean oh they have a they think they have a four inch penis yeah they have a five inch penis they women want a six inch penis and men think that women want a seven inch penis so that's the thing also with hibergamy i feel men are really i don't say hard themselves but difficult they challenge themselves more than they need to using the word hard because they think like women want again like i read about looks maxing men think that women want this super hot chad guy that he has a perfect bone structure that he has to have all these metrics right especially guys are getting penile injections in terms of filler they're getting like enlargement and and women i mean yes some women do like those things but by and large most women care more about resources and protection and are you a good person so i think hypergamy has also gone off the rails a bit in that way and that men men think that women just keep wanting more and more and more and better and better and better and to some extent that's true but i think also like you have to we have to give love some credit as well and if you're happy with someone i don't think the other person is going to have a reason to go elsewhere yeah i i get this and the internet it makes a lot of sense on the internet because it's very easy to put into a spreadsheet i can put my height i can put my penis length which i do all the time uh i can i can put all their objective metrics and it's kind of like that is having a boyfriend cringe now article uh very quickly if you go outside you realize that is having a boyfriend cringe is only true on the internet in the same way as the kardashians uh made skinny not a fad as cringe like it just it really doesn't exist if you go out into the real world if you go and sit around soho house pool for the most part the issues that at least i hear from women and i hear at my live shows is guys aren't ready to commit and they're not sufficiently emotionally educated and they don't seem very balanced and they don't really have their life together they don't have a mission they don't know where they're going now i think that a lot of that is maybe publicly acceptable ways of putting a more difficult to define uh sense that there just wasn't chemistry something wasn't quite right why it's like well if you're a post-grad girl trying to date a blue-collar guy there might be a little sense of socioeconomic imbalance going on here and uh have you heard me talk about the tall girl problem by giving you this one i have the high heel problems yeah fucking scott galloway scott galloway keeps calling it the high heel effect because he's ancient and has he's demented it's the tall girl problem and then he stole it from me and started talking about it on cnn and misnamed it and now that anyway tell me tell me chris what is the tall girl problem look it's it's exactly what you're talking about which is if you have women that are socioeconomically more successful you have an ever-increasing group of high-performing women and never decreasing group of ultra high-performing men that are above and across from them that gives most men this sort of invisibility cloak that means that they're not seen by women as potential protective providers uh it creates a large cohort of women that did everything right i went to university i got the job i pursued my career i've got financial independence and i'm struggling to find any guys that i'm attracted to and i i can't i can't really work out why and oh he's he seems really good but that guy that's in the rarefied strata at the top has a wealth of options so they're able to use and discard women and then the that really sort of gnarly outcome is that if you have casual sex with somebody that skews your own uh self perspective of your mate value uh your self-referential mate value perspective gets a little bit tuned up and you think well that's i got it for one night i should be able to get it it's like there is a difference between what you can get on rent and what you can buy and that altogether it doesn't make for a very easy environment because these women don't want to be used and discarded, but they also don't necessarily feel that much resonance with the guys that are in the cohort of men that are socioeconomically below them. Men that are in relationships where they're not the primary breadwinner, 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. Man loses his job, the likelihood of divorce doubles. Woman loses her job, no difference in terms of the likelihood of divorce. So all of these things are kind of raw physics of the system. And we can say, well, maybe you can offset hypergamy. Maybe people are not going to, women are going to learn to value other things in this way. And I get the sense that this is more the literal physics of the system, like largely unbreakable. And I mean, just that, the coupling for young people, especially given women out earn men by a grand and a half per year up to age 30. one in seven couples now is the woman is the primary breadwinner yeah yeah the bottom 40 percent of male earners and the top 20 percent of female earners are dating uh female primary breadwinner so the top quintile for women in the bottom two quintiles for men are dating in the opposite hypergamous direction um just like don't even need to talk about the endocrine disruptors and the desire for sex and porn and all the rest of it just the coupling right just simply the coupling there because i i'd be interested to know how much hypergamy plays a role when it comes to a one-night stand well okay so that's a huge thesis of my book this idea that because women are becoming more educated more financially successful than men they have fewer suitable uh bachelors to choose from so what you find is that very successful problem well i i need to coin my own term for this and i'll go on cnn and and then call it something else call it something else and then you and scott can have a fucking battle to the end of time to work out who can misquote me so what happens as you're saying is that there's this smaller pool of very successful men who have their pick of the lot who don't aren't they're disincentivized in terms of settling down so if they want i mean they can have multiple marriages in a row you will see this happening so you can't have you know colligionate but what you have is multiple marriages in a row so they'll marry someone have children divorce or have another marriage have children divorce or go on so and then what happens is with men's uh dual mating strategy is that you know you have long-term choices and short-term options and so the women who fall into the short-term bucket may erroneously think that they have they're one of the long-term options but men very much when they meet someone or meet a woman they choose which bucket she's going to go into and she's there's not much chance of a crossover madonna whore complex yeah yeah exactly so in terms of hypergamy um and how to fix it i think getting rid of dei would be one start so diversity equity inclusion initiatives because that actively penalizes men punishes men for no good reason and if you are true it actually actively penalizes men as opposed to just lifting up other groups Yeah, well, I mean, coming from academia, I can tell you that they actually have job postings. I've seen them myself where they explicitly will say this job is for a minority or a woman, basically ruling out white men. I'm an immigrant. So it doesn't affect you. But it's crazy. I mean, I've had so many colleagues tell me this. I'm not in academia anymore, but they will tell me the things that they experience behind basically closed doors where if they want to apply for something, they'll be discouraged because they'll say this position is for a woman or for a minority. So don't bother applying. So this is just one, you know, faction of society. My understanding is this happens everywhere. This was very much in like corporations as well. But I think it's been hopefully dialed back a little bit, right? And your goal here is if you enable men to get access socioeconomically, that allows this imbalance, the tallness of women, the men get to grow a little bit. Right, right. It lets it be a little bit more of like an organic outcome. Isn't it strange? there's sort of a zero-sum perspective of empathy that any support that's given to any group is seen as being taken away from another group especially one that's more deserving and that if we support and raise up men that that means that we're taking it away from some minority or somebody else that should they should deserve it but if if your goal is to live a happy life if you're not enabling guys if you're a girl woman and a mother right you don't even need to be in the dating pool married mother that's existed in the dating pool presumably you want your daughters to be able to have eligible partners the very dearth of eligible men is caused by the fact that they're not being given this kind of access now it's an interesting one because i don't know if men are actually that keen about the idea of going to university i don't know how driven they are about about the career thing in quite the same way anymore part of it i think is because of the dei and the feminism and that they sense that they're not going to get a fair chance you know if they're being taught all through say the education system in high school even girls are getting i've seen i've seen polls where they show like male students say they feel it's unfair girls get are favored by teachers so already they're feeling a bad taste in their mouth and then you go to platy university and you you know that this the odds are stacked against you. I do think that I understand why some people, especially some women or more progressive women may be fearful of allowing men to have a fair chance or to roll back some of the advantages that have been given to women because they fear, is this the start of us not being allowed to work or not being allowed to pursue education or own property or things like that. But I do think, I think they have a very misguided idea of what the outcome is going to be, Because if it continues this way, where women are continuing to outperform men in education, they make more money. Who are you going to date? You know, they think that the men, because these men have fewer options, that they're all going to be clamoring for these women. But these women, because they're so educated, they're not going to want anything to do with these guys. So they're all fighting for this smaller pool of men. And it's going to be vicious. Yeah, it's not good. 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So your first day of menstruation is day one, and then it goes into, you know, I'll leave it at that. So basically, when you're ovulating, because you can get pregnant, your sexual psychology is, we'll say, at its peak. I think it's a very interesting time to be setting in terms of women and their main decisions, because that's when their decisions about sex have the greatest potential consequences. So if you're halting that process in a woman or an entire multiple generations of women, one in 10 women of childbearing age is on the pill. One in 10? Mm-hmm. I thought it would mean more. You would think it's more, but it's 11%. That's in America. No way, it's only 11%? Yeah, according to the CDC. Have you encountered any type of birth control or just a pill? So you could have the implant, the arm implant thing, you could have the injection, you could have IUD, you could have marina coil. Yeah, in sex tension, I have the statistic regarding all birth control, or rather all contraception. But in terms of the pill specifically, so what happens is if you're not ovulating, you're basically blunted in terms of that sexual interest and that signaling. because during that time women have been shown in studies to wear more provocative clothing they're more likely to want to go out to clubs and meet men to socialize things like that right to meet partners and also men can tell when women are ovulating so they can tell in terms of a woman's appearance they can tell by her scent and men who are in tell by the way that they walk you see that study where they did silhouettes of women walking down the street so good yeah it's wild so and men in relationships will show more mate guarding behaviors when their partner is ovulating if she's not on the pill. I didn't know about that. Yeah. So he'll call and check up on her. I don't know that these men are necessarily consciously aware, but they're trying to basically, you know, like C block other guys. So if that's off the table entirely, surely that's doing something as well to men's mating psychology. And so I think if women want to take the pill and not take the pill, that's their choice. But I wish there was more in terms of information for young women, especially considering that many young women get on the pill when they are, say, teenagers. They're on it for non-sexual purposes, things like regulating their menstrual cycle or, say, for their skin or whatever reason. And they, I don't think, are aware necessarily of this side effect and how this might change their reproductive choices. Because what happens is once you get on the pill, I have a chapter on reproductive technology like egg freezing and IVF. So once you start to delay your fertility, you're going to spend more time later on trying to make up for it if you decide to have children. And I don't think that young women are necessarily as aware of that either, that your biology is something very important to consider as a woman. And it's, you know, that's seen as sexist to say that, but that's the reality. And, you know, especially if you want a family, it's important to prioritize that because that process is going to affect you in a way that's different for men. Yeah, I had Sarah Hill completely just took my head off with all of the impact of hormonal birth control. I think that a lot of the modern mental health issues that we're seeing with young women can probably be laid at the feet of at least, I would love to do a cohort analysis between how many of the people that have got anxiety or depression also took hormonal birth control during puberty or are still on it now. I mean, the fact that your mate choices for women change when you're on the pill versus off the pill, that you seem to prioritize a little bit more for provisioning when you're on the pill and a little bit more for protection when you're off the pill these are you know small effects but they're there uh how many women that i've heard from who said i was on the pill for ages then i came off and i wasn't attracted to my partner anymore okay but when is the first time that most women come off the pill if they've been on it since they were teenagers it's when they're ready to have kids but if you're doing it right you've gone teenagers 20s found a partner stayed with a partner golden retriever moved in together engaged married off the pill ready to have kids right you are deep in it's a great piece of advice is you need to if you're thinking about getting the golden retriever right not even thinking about moving in not even thinking about the engagement thing you should come off the pill you should come off the pill and you're just gonna have to be extra careful protection you're gonna have to you should come off the pill and work out if you still like your your boyfriend because the likelihood of you not in some women it makes them more attracted to them right uh in women that are in relationships with more masculinized more formidable more attractive men they actually get released out of this hormonal fugue state and they're like i'm in a relationship with a chad this is great let me jump on you um but then in other versions they've been optimizing for something that a more sort of native physiology or hormonal profile of theirs would not have been too keen on and then when they when they reveal that that mask they go oh i really i really like you all that much yeah which is unfortunate for both of them and it's unfortunate for him i can only imagine as a guy you know if your relationship we were in love go back on the pill go back on the pill bring it back what was I going to say? I wonder if because young women are getting on the pill at such a young age, is this partially also why feminism has been so popular and why women really want to feminize men and they see masculinity as toxic? Because if you, while on a pill, your body thinks you're pregnant and you're looking for a nurturing caretaker, is that why there's been this larger movement socially to encourage men to be much more feminine, not to be risk-taking, not to be dominant. To a degree. To a degree, I think I could imagine so. I would also imagine that Me Too and a lot of the moral panic around the danger of men generally causes women to want a softer kind of man. Now, they only want a softer kind of man kind of in principle, not in practice. Right. In the mid-20-teens, they tried to put what are called cinnamon roll boyfriends or golden retriever husbands on the front cover of romance books. I say this as somebody that was in that industry for a little while. What's cinnamon roll? Cinnamon roll husband. Cinnamon roll husband is sort of soft, fluffy, very non-dominant, very pliable. um you know he's the kind of he's got a bit of a gut but he's the sort of guy who uh would be able to put up level shelves but wouldn't exactly ravage you in the backseat of a car okay right very reliable consistent husband and uh on with these romance books the person on the cover is the protagonist typically these books were post uh 50 shades of gray so it should have just ripped right you're buying bitcoin at five cent the market's only going up nobody wanted to buy them nobody wanted to buy these now it is kind of like female porn uh so do you really want to watch do you want your sexual fantasy to be about some guy that can put up level shelves but isn't that good in the bedroom no matter how much you try and sort of repurpose it but the point is women like the idea of this kind of they'll proclaim it right it's it's a view that they'll endorse that men should dial back their dominance and and their desire for conquer and aggression and mastery and stuff like that but it's not one that they'll they will uh endorse it but not embody it and um when push comes to show up and you go oh yeah yeah he should be more soft and more gentle and less concerned with achieving things and stuff what does your husband do oh he's a hedge fund manager oh fantastic very good i used to do mma as a as a young guy yeah lovely um i do think on the birth control thing you're right what is it doing to men um i think that well there's evidence to suggest that men who are around old women post-menopausal or young girls their testosterone drops their fertility drive drops so i know that you've got a question around what's the x factor that's contributing to uh testosterone dip i think that the artificial suppression of female fertility through birth control and the increasing isolation of men that they're not hanging around with fertile women or any women at all and of them, more of them are elected infertile through birth control. I think that that is definitely a potential X factor that I don think anybody has priced in No one priced in the fact that male sex drive and their hormone profile is impacted by the fertility of the women in their local ecology And if you're not around women that are fertile and not around women at all, that is going to drive your sex drive down, and it's going to drive your testosterone down. Interesting. I was going to ask you, what was it like shooting for those novels? um so the way that i used to do it was i would shoot with a photographer for just my portfolio stuff so it wasn't it wasn't purposefully raunchy shit i guess i i don't know i just i just turned it on uh i don't know i don't know what happened anyway i got picked up the first shoot that i did got picked up by uh a really good uh author and put on the cover of a book called ricochet and then i got flown out to go and do some of these like book conventions i suppose but the entire thing is like 2 000 dark romance readers so there's me and a couple of the other cover models and then the husbands of the authors that are there to help them okay and that's it and it's just apart from that it's just female female readers um which sounds wonderful in practice but the um i was 27 28 or something like that um the age profile i was the youngest person in the room usually by like a factor of two um anyway it was it was interesting it was fun um it's a part of my history but i'm i'm i've aged out yeah i could be i might just pivot into cinnamon roll husband i can't wait for that get a gut chill out there you go if this podcast you know if it tanks well anyway so we we've already got what's happening with hormonal birth control for women and then we do have endocrine disruptors for men too yeah yeah so definitely i mean there was there have been a number of studies showing this that testosterone levels have been declining for the last say 40 years and it's been you know pretty severe i would say in the last 20 years and researchers have accounted for things like age, diet, weight, exercise, lifestyle choices like alcohol, smoking, and cannabis. And still they say there's something going on here where it is environmental and that it is something specific to this time period. And so they do think that there's something in terms of the food we're eating potentially or in our water supply. I've read a lot of the animal literature in terms of drugs in the water and how this affects fish. What are the craziest stories that you learned about that? There was one species of Japanese fish and they tested diazepam. So, okay, well, there was one study that looked at fish that were exposed to pharmaceutical waste. And then also there was, I'm trying to think what the other source was. But basically, one part of the water supply, the fish were masculinized. So they're intersex in both directions. Some of the fish were more masculine, and then some of them were feminized. So it's basically saying, you know, this is happening to the fish. Like, what do you think it's doing to humans? But with these Japanese fish, they were lethargic, and they were basically too knocked out to breed. The courtship behavior was messed up. The female fish, their ovaries were so distended, and I felt really bad for the fish looking at these pictures because I thought that doesn't look very healthy or comfortable. So it's basically these drugs are doing something, I think doing something to us. And if you're not even aware of it, even if you do manage to find a partner and fall in love and decide you do want to have a family, you may come up against these issues. And then if you're not even aware that this is what you're ingesting on a daily basis, what do you do then? ssri's drive sex drive down right yeah yeah they affect libido and there's also post ssri sexual syndrome yes yes yes yes yes ssd yeah yeah and the fact that um in many cases we don't know the effects of these drugs on children and in some cases they are being prescribed to kids so that's very concerning a quick aside you've probably heard experts like dr ronda patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s they reduce hello omega-3s there they are they reduce brain function no they don't they support brain function maybe i should take more they support brain function reduce inflammation improve heart health and are backed by hundreds of studies but here's the thing all omega-3s are not made the same most brands cut corners they use cheap fish oil skip purity testing throw in fillers and call it a day but with momentous you know you're getting the highest quality omega-3s on the market they're nsf certified for sport and they're tested for heavy metals and purity so you can rest easy knowing anything that you take from momentous is unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. That's the ball. Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom. and modern wisdom. A checkout. Is the issue, do you think, more about a desire for sex or coupling? You mean in terms of why people aren't having it? Yeah. Probably both. I think at the core, everybody wants to find someone. Many people may say that they've given up and they're happy on their own, but I do think that's what most people deep down want. And sex is, well, see, the thing with sex, though, I think porn is a big part of this issue in terms of why people are turning away from actual sexual activity. They're getting their needs met through this proxy that simulates real sexual activity. Because when you're watching porn, the same network of brain regions is activated as when you're actually having sex. So you're having the resulting orgasm and you are getting these feel-good chemicals. It helps to self-soothe and regulate your emotions, help you calm down if you're stressed out. and so it makes men i think in particular less likely to want to go out and go through the hassle of having to talk to a woman having to sit through a date having to pay for the date having to follow up and all this stuff like why bother do that if you can get sexual gratification on a screen but i think also that leads to potentially like an overall sense of lethargy because when you are masturbating and having orgasm you are you know you're gonna be sleepy after so is that also you can tell me do you think this is a true not for you but just a trend more generally with young men in terms of does does this affect their motivation because i'm i'm wondering for guys this question of why men are not are falling behind in society right and i i'm very concerned for young men because i imagine i hear all the time from parents that their daughters are doing really well excelling academically but their sons just for whatever reason are just they're not they're not enjoying it you know they're having mental health issues they're just staying at home and fapping all the time yeah well maybe not fapping but they're like you know vaping and playing video games or online betting or whatever and they have no motivation do you think porn could be part of that because i think if you're exposed to this at such a young age and this is the thing that you're watching every day and it's your coping strategy that potentially that's the thing you're going to constantly gravitate toward and it's actually going to you know make you really sedated and lethargic more broadly in life yeah i think sedated is a great word i've got another idea that Scott probably can't wait to fucking misquote the male sedation hypothesis, young male syndrome, which I know that you know about historically high volumes of young sexless men tended to cause anarchy and revolutions and push over granny and set stuff on fire. Why is it given that we've seen the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men in the modern world that we're not seeing the concordant amounts of antisocial behavior? And it's my belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive-seeking behavior through screens, video games, and porn. And yeah, that's what's happening behaviorally. Maybe there's some endocrine disruptors, maybe a lot of weed. I think more people, more young guys smoke weed than drink alcohol now. So yeah, it is a real push toward lethargy. Do I think that you're anesthetizing yourself from your sort of mate seeking behavior by being able to use porn almost certainly to a degree i mean there's even the opposite which is what was it masturbate before you evaluate was a tagline at university which was do i really want to sleep with that girl let me let me have a wank first and work out if i still do and for the most part the guys were like no i wasn't that i i'd like what was it uh i didn't like you i was just horny um and in some ways you go ah that avoids me from making a mistake but when you do it on mass and when it's very easily available um i mean look yeah there's some mixed bag data dr david lay is very anti-porn panic i know mike israel is very anti-porn panic too and then on the other side there's some people that behaviorally it's not recognized as an addiction properly yet i don't think right but um it seems impossible to me that one of the strongest drivers for humans being given to them freely they can push essentially push a button like rubber button for a while and and they get to uh experience this thing that i mean you know what would be fascinating i would You'd love to have seen in hunter-gatherer tribes how much masturbation occurs. You're probably too busy foraging. Okay, well, that might be true. Just talk to me, the neuroscience of porn use. Is there anything distinct about that that's different to what's happening when people have sex? Okay, I was going to mention, I was going to say something. Oh, so what I was going to say, I agree with you in terms of like, if you're i can see if you're doing it like constantly and it becomes a lifestyle thing how this is what my concern is if it's like a lifestyle thing for guys because i've had men say to me when they are not watching porn if they manage to cut out porn entirely that they actually have more motivation to go up and talk to a woman because i would imagine if you see a woman that you're attracted to and you want to go speak to her and say you're maybe more shy or anxious you know in the back of your mind that you can go home and masturbate and that's going to give you're released after in some ways would that not make it a little bit easier for younger guys especially who may not have as much experience with women and especially post me too where they're already a little bit understandably more scared to talk to women how it knowing that you have this other option might that's a good point that that is a good point uh i mean it's the same thing as if the only way that men could get sex was by marrying a woman you know asking her father becoming a pillar of the community showing his competence or if you just need to be in a night club at the right time in the right place at two in the morning like men will meet those standards appropriately including the standards for themselves in order to get sexual gratification through a screen i mean it is i can't remember who said it to me but just for a second think about how stupid the human brain is and think about how strong our sex drive is that looking at a seven inch across screen that i am not a part of of someone else having sex with someone else can confuse my brain into thinking some sex is going to happen here yeah like that that is how strong this drive is right that a two-dimensional exclusively video and audio representation on a teeny tiny little screen popped up against a pillow is enough to convince your brain there might be some sex on you should respond appropriately yeah uh it is mad also think about what it's doing to kids like this is one of the rabbit holes i've been going down more recently and thinking about how is this affected gen z's development they're exposed to porn at such a young age but um in terms of the difference between say what's going on in the brain it's the same brain network basically you know like regions that are involved in physiological arousal penile tumescence visual uh regions um this is my dissertation actually so it takes me back now i'm trying to remember what other parts of the motor you did a dissertation on penile tumescence no no not just penile tumescence but it was on basically male sexuality and sexual arousal and yeah i looked at the structure and function of the brain i used four different types of brain imaging it was a lot of fun it was a very expensive study but i was i was extremely really fun for the men. And so basically it's the same network. It's not activated as strongly but it's very much the same regions and that's why pornography is so compelling and why I think for people who especially if you are, if that is your primary mode of sexual release very much become a preference or a stand-in. You're habituating. More than anything just what do you do? You know, you know, guys that tend to go to the same bar all the time sit in the same seat order the same coffee like this just becomes a part of your daily routine and there's this weird habituation effect i think with porn mary harrington calls it the law of fap entropy which is whatever you start out wanking to gets progressively more extreme over time that's actually i like her work but actually that's not exactly accurate tell me what is accurate for guys who end up watching quote extreme stuff that's actually what they liked all along it just took them a while to admit it to themselves oh god the algo wasn't delivering them what they needed until it took a bit of time to refine it well because i understandably men who have these unusual sexual preferences they're a little bit yeah balloons they're a little bit more reluctant to to say out loud so even to themselves even to themselves and oh that's so interesting to say their partner or their friends if they're talking about this you know that's so good i love i love I mean, the law still works, but not for the reason that you think. It's not a progressive habituation to more extreme stuff. It's a progressive revealing to yourself of what you wanted. That's so cool. What about gooning? Let's talk about gooning. Oh, boy. Yeah, I mean, you could spend your life masturbating watching porn if you want to. There's enough content out there for sure. So gooning, I'm sure your audience knows what this term is, but it's basically predominantly men who like to masturbate to no end in sight. And basically, my understanding, they might have multiple screens open for hours. They don't reach an orgasm. It's like edging, but for a longer period of time. And they don't really have any conflict about it. They quite enjoy it. How has porn affected women? I think there are more women struggling with porn issues than people realize, because this has predominantly been an issue, like, say, porn, quote, addiction. Although, like you said, I don't believe porn is addictive. I think it's a poor coping mechanism for people who have anxiety and who procrastinate. That's really what it's been. Sedating, not addicting. Yeah, well, because if you say you have anxiety or you lack assertiveness, it's a very easy way to distract yourself and not have to deal with the problems in your life, which I have a lot of compassion for people who struggle with this. Because I think because it's pornography, it's related to sex, it's a lot more stigmatized. So I understand why people want to call it an addiction because there have been studies that claim that it's addiction, but they don't account for other confounding variables. So they don't ask about things like paraphilia. From what I've seen, they don't ask about anxiety. So you don't know when you're looking at these brain regions that are supposed to be different that are correlated with addiction. You don't know if what you're seeing in the people with porn problems is due to addiction or is it due to the fact that they're anxious or the fact that they have these unusual sexual interests. So I think that research could be a little bit cleaner. If it does happen that new studies come out showing this, then I'm fully on board with that. But I'm just not really convinced because when you talk to guys with porn problems, almost always they have anxiety. And it's a way for them to avoid talking to their spouse or their girlfriend. So what's different with women? Women, I think it's the same thing. We don't know as much about women because this is an issue that I think has only really become more of a problem with the younger generation. Maybe even millennial women, like younger millennial women, with the accessibility of porn. but I think even because it's even with studies when they're looking at say the the effects of porn on kids women have only really started to show more negative body image say or body comparison more recently because girls are being exposed to it now the girls tend to watch porn later than boys and they tend to watch it maybe once or twice out of curiosity but I do think with like Gen Z they're being exposed to this even before their first sexual experience before their first orgasm they can't make sense of it and I think that it can be integrated into their life a little bit more so it's same thing i think anxiety usually for anyone with a porn issue there's a history of some form of sexual trauma unfortunately so there there is a way that anyone with a porn issue most people with a porn issue there is some history of sexual trauma not everyone but in my experience many of them have had some issue with uh yeah either with abuse or being exposed to porn at a young age either accidentally and that was like a traumatic thing like when i say trauma i'm not the way sometimes people use the word trauma nowadays is very flippant right they use it over the you mean actual insignificant no yeah i'm referring to something that is actually quite horrific and awful or they um or they might have been shown it in the process of grooming so what do what do you think's going on is it just disinhibition dysregulation is it the same reason that people who maybe had a childhood trauma struggle with gambling or struggle with drugs or alcohol or their emotions rage is it just the same but this the particular pathway these people have found is porn or is there something specific about the the mechanism that porn gives that helps them to sort of alchemize or try and alchemize whatever they went through it could be partially biological thing because it's like a self-soothing thing so especially for children if they're not taught ways to self-regulate they're looking for ways to feel good when they're stressed out or upset right so some people gravitate toward drugs and alcohol other people might gravitate toward porn i think it depends on how old you are probably when you come across it initially what your experience is when you see it like is it a pleasurable thing but i think for the men say like when i was doing research who had had these negative experiences in childhood it was a way of revisiting it to try and make sense of it i think um but i i really strongly believe like sitting down with a competent therapist and working through that stuff could be very helpful for people better than porn yeah before we continue i've been drinking ag1 every morning for as long as I can remember now because it is the simplest way I found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition and that is why I partnered with them just one scoop gives you 75 vitamins minerals probiotics and whole food ingredients in a single drink now they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen the same one scoop once a day ritual but this time backed by four clinical trials in those trials it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in people who already eat well. They've upgraded their formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients and clinical validation. Plus, it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit. Right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 welcome kit, plus bonus AG1 travel packs. And for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of omega-3s just go to the link in the description below or head to drink ag1.com slash modern wisdom that's drink ag1.com slash modern wisdom what do you think about the relationship between porn use and the type of sex that people are having in terms of it influencing the type of sex so in terms of say very extreme thing previously okay i would start with before the internet. So if, because there's a concern about does porn make men more violent? Does porn make men entitled with sex? Previously, if a man grew up, had his first sexual experience prior to online porn, I would say porn is not the thing that made him, if he is, say, violent or likes to degrade his partners or treat them poorly. I wouldn't say that's porn. I would say that's due to the way he was raised. He's probably antisocial, probably has some dark triad personality going on there probably doesn't think very highly of women, has a lot of hostility toward women. But those views would have been formed prior to porn. So I don't think porn is the problem. I think he probably was interested in violent porn and violent sex because of other factors in terms of how he was raised financially. Nowadays, with the fact that kids are being exposed to this so young, I'm really concerned about how this is affecting their sexuality because we do see studies coming out showing that kids who are having problematic sexual behaviors it's due to being sexualized by porn like early exposure this kind of sexual choking that i write about in sex extinction young women gen z women in particular it's almost ubiquitous so i think that is being be due to them being exposed to this at such a young age and believing that this is what they need to do in order to attract men or to be enticing in the bedroom and i'll be very clear that you could die from doing this so it's not safe there's no safe way to do it i know this was louise perry's thing that she was helping to prosecute uh guys that had killed their partners right and then used whatever it is the rough sex excuse thing which uh yeah i mean that's that's fucking horrific uh there is a bit of research that i wanted to talk to you about which i've never spoken about on the show before you're probably familiar with new study interviewed 302 adults of those more women enjoyed aggression in porn were aroused by portrayals of female pain and reported wanting to see more aggression and this is a bar chart which shows women saying double the number of women saying aggression is arousing uh triple the number of men triple number of women to men hard aggression is arousing. Maybe four times the number of women to men would like more aggression in mainstream pornography. Maybe 30% more actively seek aggression. The only thing that men are stronger on is aroused by women showing pleasure in response to aggression. And that's maybe 5%. Aroused by women showing pain in response to aggression, nearly double women to men. Okay. This seems to be pretty. This is a small sample size, It's ranging from two people, but this is, you can dig deeper and find out, kind of the same pattern. And it's something that I remember I once read a feminist who wrote about this, and she said something along the lines of, it's an uncomfortable fact for most modern feminists that women seem to prefer aggressive porn than men do. And misogynists use this as an excuse that, like, she wanted it made type thing. that to me does suggest that the picture is a little bit more complex than just guys have learned it in porn yeah and now they're doing it to women and women feel the need to perform up to it that no one's pushing women in that way it's not the only study of that kind and um no i agree i'm not one of those people that think that this is entirely like men pushing it on women and women have no choice but to do it i do think there are some women out there that's that sexual max masochism so it's a sexual arousal at the idea of being hurt humiliated degraded by your partner so that's the only paraphilia that you actually find in women typically so usually women oh that's sorry that's so interesting the only paraphilia that's typical in women yeah paraphilia being signed to odd sexual uh proclivities is masochism if you do self masochism um yeah masochism is when it's happening to you sadism is when you're doing it to someone else okay cool cool how much sadism is there in women um so when you do see other paraphilias like sadism it usually is uh correlated with personality disorders right the cluster b dark triad okay anyway so the uh say the masochism for women yeah so evolutionarily it could be because women well women's bodies have you heard of the study where women basically are aroused to any type of porn so it's whether it's yes yeah the more sexually fluid girl on girl guy on guy girl on guy but this is why this is why just to be clear animals having sex not people having sex with animals i don't agree with beastality what's that uh fucking hockey players the two hockey players boning what's that thing that it's that series hot one not hot ones that's the wing thing what the fuck is it two hockey players two hockey players it's taken the world by storm he did rivalry fucking hot ones i didn't know he did rivalry i knew i got there you're canadian you're supposed to know i'm sorry it was a hard week for you um i don't actually watch porn so that might be why i've never heard he did rivalry was a book it was a book about these two hockey players on opposing teams and then they they they fuck each other why are you reading this i'm not reading it right this is a big tv show i didn't see i've not i've never seen anything like this i'm the this man in the room um this this has this has broken the internet and uh it's you should absolutely have a look at this you'd love to look at this so it is it is basically revealing just how flexible women's sexualities are yeah that these two guys there was a book book super popular then pivoted over into this tv series and the tv series is fucking ripped it's like a uh a broke back mountain on ice right but was it actually pornographic or was it just like hinted asking the wrong guy i'm sorry okay i didn't get i mean i have to assume that there was either implied or like pretty close to like raunchy shit happening on the on the screen okay um anyway that that you're quite right why is it that you think that women's sexuality is more fluid than uh men's well uh the unfortunate reason is rape so in the past right evolutionarily speaking it protects the woman's body if she can become aroused regardless of what is happening which is why sometimes during sexual assault women can still reach orgasm yeah and then they feel lots of shame afterward because it's fucking horrific they think did i want that did i want this thing how fucking awful am i i i am traumatized and now i did my body did a thing to me that i'm traumatized about as well so brutal speaking to those findings though um i'm i would be curious to know where how they sample like do you do remember like how they sampled for those women uh preferences related to aggression pleasure and pain and pornography among male and female interviewees i've got the it's uh i can send you the uh the journal article but certainly even if we don't look at aggression is arousing heart aggression is arousing like would like more aggression in mainstream pornography actively seek aggression aroused by women showing pain in response to aggression just look at the romantic genre well evolutionarily speaking like in terms of masochism it would benefit women to show a capacity to endure pain yeah or like it's not going to say subjugation but it may it evokes like caretaking behaviors from men right if they see that a woman is great um like in need of help or support i suppose so to a degree but there's also a kind of resilience in masochism right that i can withstand it there's almost a anti-fragility not a fragility that goes back to the trauma that I talk about sex extinction and the, um, it's in the porn chapter about how many individuals who are into BDSM and kink actually do have a history, especially of physical abuse in childhood. Oh, I imagine that made you very popular. It's still happening now. People are. You were a sex positive. Oh yeah. Right. Research writer person. I was a columnist for a well-known men's magazine with nude women in it. And, um, writing this book, I was so grateful to have the chance to sit down and really question a lot of the beliefs I had. And I went through my own data that I collected when I was still in sex research and I found the same thing. And I was amazed. I thought. What do you mean? You went through the data and what did you find? I found that interest in BDSM and kink is more is correlated with severe physical abuse in childhood. And this is even more so the case for men who are into BDSM and kink as compared to men who are community controls. obviously men who have porn problems who are not into bdsm or kink and also more so the case than men who are convicted of child sex crimes so there's something with bdsm and kink yeah is a better predictor of male childhood abuse trauma female too but then the pedophilia is victimization um yeah well convicted sex sex offense or pornography yeah so we don't know how many of those are unreported and stuff like that right but also there are times when men will abuse children and not necessarily be pedophiles that's like fine you know very fine details but overall yeah wow yeah child sex what do you think that says about what bdsm and kink is doing for people it's really sad i want to be clear like i'm not saying this to make judgment about people or to try and shame them i really hope my in bringing awareness to this because bdsm is so commonplace in society right it's so normalized almost it's almost seen like there there is a variation i think in terms of people who just who might partake in sexual activity that is like playful or passionate right versus wanting to strangle your partner wanting to really hurt them wanting to humiliate them or if you enjoy those behaviors done to you especially for women because physical harm it wouldn't really make sense for women or men but why would physical harm be correlated with orgasm right if you can potentially become pregnant from this act why would it be beneficial to you and your offspring to find physical pain and what do you think arousing yeah why why because something went wrong with the system and it's getting wires crossed yeah so i my hope is that by bringing attention to this because so many people i sense enjoy these things but don't really know why or They think it's something that, it's something they take pride in. They're using. Maybe it's something that you should look a little more deeply into. They're using their sexual preferences as a way to work through something that maybe should be done with a therapist. Yeah. Interesting. I remember I was talking to a researcher and they were telling me about how this, maybe not uncontacted tribe, but this relatively uncontacted tribe, one of the rites of passage that they had for women was that men would get reeds, thick reeds and sticks, whippy sticks, and they would stand there and they would whip the women across their backs. every woman in the tribe had huge scars everywhere across their backs and the goal of the women was to be able to stand there and not flinch not make noise, not cry, not whimper not yell, not do anything and this was supposed to be a presentation of their capacity to endure what would become giving birth child rearing and that when you were talking about um it might engender sympathy from men which i can completely see like the just the power dynamic the subjugation uh all of that that does make sense i allow me to come and hold you but if you're able to withstand pain there's also a kind of resilience in that which i think would almost work against it so yeah kind of interesting i always think about that that example when it comes to sort of female behavior and kink i'm like is this maybe some kind of demonstration of my capacity of the woman's capacity to endure hard things physically uh not like lift heavy things right that's the guy picking you up and putting you against the wall that's the ability for him to physically dominate you but the woman's ability to endure the pain might actually be maybe like a fertility cue of some kind, like my pain tolerance. I don't know. It could be. I could see it. Real nascent idea. It's wet clay. All right. I could see it if it is something that is like culturally enforced and it's like a rite of passage. But if you as a woman are intentionally putting yourself in those situations when you don't need to, there are plenty of guys out there who are, I mean, vanilla is seen as a negative thing. I don't think being vanilla is a bad thing. So there are plenty of vanilla guys out there who are not going to want to strangle you during sex and not going to want to like you know degrade you during sex so if you're intentionally putting yourself through that even if it is a way to show how strong you are why would you choose to do that when you don't need to you don't need to uh romanticy i was sat on the plane flying to st louis a couple of weeks ago and there was a lovely woman sat next to me and she had her ipad up and she was reading court of thorns and roses now what is that that is that is one of the most popular romanticy books at the moment you're familiar with romanticy is it it's basically like erotica it is that's probably that that's a word that you would use okay um i respect the art form and also the fact that the fan base is fucking massive and i don't want to get lynched by uh no no it is it is um story it's female literature literacy porn wrapped in quite a lot of story but there are sort of peak dirty moments anyway the our friend is tapping away and she didn't have her glasses on the font size was quite okay quite large and i i had a realization that chicks can basically watch porn on a plane i guess so they can basically watch their equivalent of porn on a plane and i'm looking at this i'm trying not to move my head at all i'm keeping my head dead straight i'm going uh and i spoke to some friends after it i've not read the book i didn't i didn't read enough to fully capture what the narrative arc was okay um but in might be a thorns and roses or one of the other books like that uh the protagonist is a fairy prince or a fairy king who has the ability to transform himself into this like monstrous beast and i think that in that sort of shows what it is that one of the sort of archetypal desires that women have this um he is dangerous but not around me yeah and i think i was talking on the way in about that that study with a couple of french i have a group of uh evolutionary psychology researchers in a whatsapp chat and whenever i get confused by stuff i put in and they give me the answer and andrew thomas from uni of nottingham gave me a fucking fantastic answer for this one what he said was the aggression is arousing etc etc etc i'd love to get your thoughts on this he said um what women think is i want a man who has the capability to be aggressive because protection attraction dominance all that stuff testosterone but he'll never be aggressive with me and it's a pattern misfiring of the sort of pattern detection which is well most guys that have the capacity to be aggressive don't have the regulation to be able to turn it off and create bright lines and and and contain it in that way uh if you have a guy who is a just a you know someone bumps into you on the street or you get scared and he beats up all of the guys that are there how many of them have gone through the full fucking samurai keanu reeves training and come out the other side as hmm you know that's not that's not most guys most guys that are great and dangerous physically just dangerous physically everywhere yes it's not compartmentalized I definitely agree so that's the allure of I suppose the romance novel where you can have the duality there that doesn't matter who can become the beast but he's never going to be the beast with you yeah interesting so we have basically the most sexually permissive culture in history that is also having the least amount of sex Yeah, which is wild. It's crazy when you think about, like, I was thinking about social media and even something as subtle as that, like everyone's on social media. But I do think it even that is changing the way that people view potential partners, how they view their own partners. How so? Study that I cited in Sex Stinction showing that roughly one in 10 men actually loses interest in having sex with his own partner after looking at influencers and that women also feel less sexually desirable after being on social media. one in ten men lose interest for a brief window of time? They didn't specify. Okay. So they're less interested in having real sex with their partner when they've been looking at influencers on the internet. Yeah. So I do remember at uni, it's so fucking bad. That was an English study too, actually, so. Good. It was probably the people that I used to employ. It was probably the lads that used to work for me. I do remember there was two two guys that were going to go on first dates with these two chicks two nights in a row on the first one he turned up and he ended up going back with her and having sex but he said she looked nothing like her Instagram it was gutting she was so hot on the Instagram kind of like a catfish type thing and he had this joke about he wondered if he could have just sellotaped her Instagram to her forehead so he could have looked at that and then the next night the guy went out on one and she was really lovely and great and then i don't think they'd slept with each other that night and he came back and looked at her instagram and got turned off because she wasn't able to present herself in the marketplace of that's a good thing no i said that that's what i said that's what i said i was like dude you found a barn find that's a diamond in the rough you found somebody that's really fantastic he shows up wonderful in person that the marketplace where most other people are going to be competing for with you for her she's she just not presented i don't know what what it was i didn't do my research uh so what is it he didn't like about the fact that like so he can't send people to her profile to look at her no you just i think that there was a it wasn't even as deep as that sorry it was significantly more deep than that not that he couldn't show off this girl that could potentially coming to girlfriend or whatever to other people on instagram i think it what i believed it to be was he was so conditioned to judging a woman's attractiveness through her social media profile and especially given that it's the most extreme version of you and for men to right the most extreme wealth or whatever um that he he got the ick by her having a bad instagram account instagram man um i don't know i didn't i i the club promotion industry is a weird and wonderful place i'll never forget it two nights in a row one guy saying i wish i could have strapped her instagram to her forehead and the next night the guy going she was amazing but i went and looked at her social media profile after we'd been on the date and it was a turnoff, dude. I got the ick because her Instagram wasn't hot. So he wants the hot Instagram lady who's just as hot in real life. Yes, I think so. Look, these guys were 19. They had no prefrontal cortex. I don't even think that that's that uncommon, though. I think it's that social media has done something like that more subtly, though, to the general population. You think? We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance. But most people have no idea where those are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. 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That's functionhealth.com. slash modern wisdom why so uh guys are less likely to want to have sex after they looked at influencers and girls are less likely to feel attractive yeah they feel less attractive okay so it's a comparison game yeah right why what do you think's going on what's the what's the mechanism well i think well the i wrote a chapter about plastic surgery and when you look at this trend of you know especially really young in some cases girls getting procedures done i do think social media has done something to make them feel that they need to do this to compete and to get a partner or to at least be found attractive. And there has to be something with just like constantly being inundated with these images on social media. They have found in say adolescent girls that girls who are less popular or girls who tend to do upward comparisons or tend to compare themselves to say more attractive women or more popular girls tend to fall prey to this a little bit more. in an attempt to try and clamber up this felt imbalance of a hierarchy that they're comparing themselves to okay talk to me about what's happened to plastic surgery over time we've seen increases in it the types changed what what's the context of people getting different looks so you the kardashians did the fucking bbl for a while is that still in now it is breast augmentation for Gen Z women. So they are actually, boob jobs are very popular among that cohort. I do think that's influenced by pornography. Also labiaplasty. I was just looking actually at a study a couple nights ago showing that women, very many young women feel self-conscious about their labia and are actually getting these procedures done, which is also influenced from porn. And it, I mean, it's just crazy to me. It makes me wonder, is that why people are not interested in having sex? Same with guys. Guys are getting filler injections into their penis for even sexting purposes. like they just want to look better. George, my housemate used to make this joke every time that we're on a plane. It's the same, you know, someone, it's kind of like a dad joke, but he's not yet a dad. And you know, those teeny tiny 175 mil cans of Diet Coke. Yeah, you would always say it's like, I keep a hold of one of those and I go back and I take a dick pic with it in the background. So it would make it look, you know, it's like, oh, that's a 330 or a 355 mil pan. But I've kept I've kept the airplane mini and that's you know comparatively doing that instead of getting the filler in the penis i agree i agree make diet coke mini diet coke's great again um so yeah you i mean the labia labiaplasty and the penis stuff it seems to be obvious that it would be influenced by porn but even things like i see um like news reports of women under 30 getting facelifts getting upper eye lifts right and i in my personal opinion i don't think women that young need to be getting extensive work done because you do not have the signs of aging yet to justify what do you think they're trying to do well i think um if you look at say when women are the most fertile it tends to be mid-20s so my sense is most women are trying to look like they're in their mid-20s so if you're older than that you're going to try and look younger and if you're younger you're trying to look older and so you're going to use you're going to choose the women most fertile in the mid-20s early to mid-20s right yeah yeah i found out some really fucking uncomfortable data around when men are most fertile it's really young yeah it's really young yeah like illegal in some states young and you go really which is just i don't know we talk about women's biological clocks we never really think about there's so much sperm right speak for yourself But there's so much sperm. And you only need one. They have a larger window, though. They also have a larger, like men can still impregnate someone later on in life. There are higher rates of chromosomal abnormalities, but the potential, whereas for women, it's a little bit more unforgiving. But anyway, so you think, well, I've seen, what is it, buccal fat? Buccal fat? Yeah, buccal fat removal. Yeah. The cheek fat thing? Yeah. What's that trying to achieve, do you think? to look older because you're removing the baby fat essentially in your face but what happens is as you get older your face naturally loses fat right and so you're going to look more gaunt and you've over shorter yeah and then you might potentially need to use filler too oh so i used i got fat removal before i was 24 and then after i was 28 i had to use filler to replace where i got rid of the fat right yeah i mean i so i want to be clear like i don't want to come down on men and women if they choose to get these procedures because i understand especially if you have a public facing job there's a lot of pressure to keep your looks up and to look young but my concern is more so when it's really young people or i would say even for men who are doing this you really don't need to like it is brutal i mean the some of the young girl is supposed to be young girls that i've seen uh videos of on tiktok there's like 22 23 year old chicks and they look mid 30s or 40s with all of this work that's been done and um i was i was thinking i was having a conversation last night about how the sort of ideal female form has changed even with sort of relatively extreme cosmetic procedures so geordie shore which was the british equivalent of jersey sure um that back in the day was a lot about fake tan um it was big hair yeah uh it was almost pin upy in a way there was it was high suits too weren't they that's because of that's something else but yes that that was sort of parts i learned what chav was chav exactly well look careful right i i those were those are my no those were my customers it's kind of like calling someone a hick no it's not okay i mean it was me too but those were my customers for a very long time it was fake tan it was um big boobs maybe augmented maybe not brows too very specific eyebrows very painted on sort of aggressive brows big hair tight dress short dress right um i love that i'm just to be clear i'm not making fun of it that aesthetic yeah strong aesthetic yeah great early 2010s aesthetic uh and the guy's um equivalent i think up until probably about five years ago we were a little bit delayed on the guys thing was sort of big muscles not so concerned with height fake tan plunging v-neck neckline um tight jeans um expensive watch thing jeans uh yeah maybe but so i was what i was trying to do this conversation i was having last night which is so interesting i was trying to work out what's what was being signaled then and what's being signaled now okay and i think what's being signaled now is a more extreme version of of that by both men and women so the male thing it's all about formidability now it's the over exaggerated handsome squidward cheekbones and the the jawline it's the height the height um but it's a lot less to do with i'm not really seeing anyone talk about tan all that much not even seeing if you look at dark brows are really big for guys the most popular lux maxes aren't that concerned with muscularity extreme muscularity in the way that it would have been 10 years ago 10 years ago would have just been get as wide as and as muscular as possible that's not quite the case now and then with the women it is all both of them are basically caricatures of the most sexually dimorphic physical traits right it's fisherian runaway i think it's called yeah um where the the stag that's got a uh the stag deer that's got antlers so big that he can't lift his head up and he dies the peacock that's got such a ridiculous tail that he gets caught with the first second there's a predator around but like he did some great boning on the way out um that that is seems to be what's happening with men and women now it's just a more what's the next evolution it's more extreme limb lengthening surgery the brows the cheekbones the mandible surgery all that stuff for women especially i think it can also be the equivalent of showing off an expensive handbag so instead of saying here's my designer bag or here's my designer titties or you know that my my lips or whatever like i have a man who will pay for my surgery and make me look like this it's a good argument for why i've heard about why women uh have long nails and long hair it's just fucking impractical so it's it's it is itself a status of of of wealth and and luxury that not only can i maintain them but i have a life that requires so little hard labor that this hair and these nails and this makeup um i mean female intersexual competition is just like fucking endlessly interesting yeah right like uh shoes and bags exclusively intersexual I do not know the difference between whatever you're wearing and something that was one-tenth the price and something that was a thousand times the price. I have no idea. But women do. Women know. And if you're in a relationship, it's basically my man is so invested in me that he spent however much money on this thing. So, like, don't even think about going there. Which is why I also think that women tend to go a little bit overboard in some cases with the work done as a way to signal. that they have the money and the resources or man that is paying for it. Because usually when you think of plastic surgery, men don't like plastic surgery. Typically men, they don't like it in women because it masks their underlying health and fertility, right? So if a woman can turn back the clock in terms of aging, signs of aging, or appear more attractive than she naturally was, maybe, maybe you don't mind so much, but from the conversations I've had with men, men tend to not really like plastic. No, I, I, I agree. Natural beauty. I agree. I mean, uh, I saw this tweet after the Grammys that fucking ripped. And it was, men love Sidney Sweeney and hate Sabrina Carpenter. Women love Sabrina Carpenter and hate Sidney Sweeney. And the explanation that I saw, I was so fascinated by it. And it seems to be pretty accurate. I don't know that many guys that are like, I love Sabrina Carpenter. And I don't know that many women that love Sidney Sweeney. That's funny. I've seen this. I mean, I think they're both pretty. So I don't know. I guess I'm like one of the odd ones. You need to be more judgmental. Um, the best explanation I saw was that Sabrina Carpenter, her physical presentation is basically gay and female coded. Huh. And Sydney Sweeney is sort of low maintenance, natural male coded beauty. Um, less sort of curated in that sort of a way. And, uh, that low maintenance thing sort of seems to come across. But yeah, I think the reliable signal of fitness cue that's being sort of hidden by lots of plastic surgery is so true. And I get the sense that the Luxmaxing community for men is doing the same thing. I was going to ask you about that. What are your views? Because when I write about this, I get a lot of young men who get upset at me and say, you don't understand, right? this is the time for the fucking patriarchy to step in writing as a woman sit down let me mansplain to you what do I think I think I have a really fucking I think this is an interesting take my advice to guys is just work away get rich honestly get rich don't worry about all the taking the hormones to make your bones structure get popular looks are important but you can make some pretty good changes just by becoming more diligent what i would say about the lux maxing thing um is what guys seem to be optimizing for is formidability so they're optimizing for the sort of things that other men respect not that women are attracted to so other men would if you look at most guys that have lux max and put them in front of women i wonder whether women would find them more attractive so it's intersexual competition again or whether men would find them more formidable. I think that more men would find them more formidable than more women would find them more attractive. Because most women are not looking for their guys to be hyper, hyper masculine like that. There's even some evidence to suggest that women prefer a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body. And not super jacked either. No, not super jacked. But they want average face or sometimes actually slightly feminized face with masculinized body. But all of the guys are just pushing toward heavier brow a deeper jaw stronger cheekbones but you know the david putt study that he did about when he brought uh people into the lab and got women to rate attractiveness and men to rate formidability remind me so fucking good so uh photos of guys shown to women and men women were asked to rank um how attractive do you think this man is men were asked to rank how likely do you think it is that you could beat this other man in a fight oh one year later they brought the men from the photos into the lab and asked what their sexual success had been over the last year and the female ratings of attractiveness had basically zero predictive power for their sexual success but the male ratings of formidability were very predictive wow so even though what i think is happening at level one this is like the epstein files at level one where he didn't kill himself is lux maxes are optimizing for uh formidability because they're disregarding women and it's intrasexual competition because i just want to mog other guys i just want to be better than other men level two epstein's still alive and playing fortnight in israel is actually by pursuing formidability they may end up closing their eyes and throwing the dart at the dartboard and hitting the bullseye of women actually finding them more attractive than if they tried to pursue attractiveness as the main outcome but this is again this is working theory at the moment yeah i mean because i could see that in terms of tattoos there have been studies to show that men when they get tattoos it actually is more so about scaring off their male rivals because women don't some women like tattoos but not all do and some women actually are turned off by tattoos So it's more, again, like you said, of scaring off and beating your rivals than directly attracting women. But I also wonder if it's that these men are projecting onto women their preferences. So men care more about looks and, you know, youth. So I wonder if when you look at, say, marriage or marital satisfaction, whether men find their wives attractive has a greater correlation with their marital satisfaction than whether women find their husbands attractive. So I wonder if these young guys are projecting onto women thinking that women care so much about looks when it's actually that's what they care about in their partners. Oh, it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading using their own assessment criteria and saying, you must think the way that I think. I'll do more beautification. Well, Mack and Murphy's got this great idea where he talks about how the increases in male beautification are to try and offset this inability to get hypogamy to work. That men have realized that because they can't win socioeconomically, they might have to turn the vanity mirror around in an attempt to out-beautify their socioeconomic lack. Yeah, especially when they're young and they're just starting out in their career and they're thinking, okay, how do I attract women? I don't have the money yet. I don't have the resources. Well, I can just get really hot. There's worse theories. There are worse theories. What about the effects of sexlessness in marriage? Well, I can tell you, when I was in research, I would interview some men who had not had sex in decades, which is why. In a marriage? Yeah, in a marriage. Married men who'd not had sex in decades. Yeah, I mean, at that point, there's a lot of cheating. Not that that's justified, but I think it can be very damaging to a relationship, even if you're not married, to be sexless, because that's a way to bond with your partner. Especially for men, they tend to use sex as a way to have intimacy, like emotional closeness with their partner. One of the few places that they can. Yeah, yeah. So I feel for people out there. I'm assuming marriage is very difficult as is, and I'm not sure what would be useful for your audience, like how to overcome that. put your phones away number one it's crazy some of the stats i was reading in terms of people using social media during sex right after yeah that same study during i can't remember the how my head it's it's in sex extinction that i i cited it but it's i don't know i was trying to figure that out myself i'm thinking how do you excuse yourself to go post something and then come back i can't be posting it can't be posting there's no way that you can do that i could see scrolling at best. Or if you go to the bathroom, maybe. During sex. Or even right after, it was pretty bad. It's the during that gets me. Maybe it's my friend strapping their Instagram to the forehead. Maybe it's just that. I don't know. Yeah, I found this. Sorry, I was going to say, there's another study that showed the more the people are on their phones and ignoring their partners, they have less sex, which makes sense. Is that called flubbing? Flubbing. Flubbing. They need to rename that. It's a stupid name. Yeah, Arthur Brooks and Matthew Hussey taught me some interesting stuff around this about sort of revitalizing. And James Sexton as well taught me some interesting stuff. Arthur's was more neuroscientifically backed. that one of the problems you have in long-term marriages is that safety turns into consistency, turns into comfort, turns into laziness, and that we just go through the same dance. We do it on a Tuesday, and it happens in this way, and there's no distance, there's no intrigue. Where do you go today? Are you wearing something new? This is a little bit different. there's no push and pull, right? And a lot of the chemistry and the reason that I think people are so enlivened and excited at the start of a relationship is there's so much to discover about someone. When you feel like there's nothing left to discover, sort of where am I injecting my fantasy into, literally? And what, bring that back online, Arthur had a pretty interesting sort of few-step process, which was to basically flirt. it's like to flirt with your partner throughout the day and to treat them as if they're an object of desire especially if you're male to female this is something that esther perel uh i i got wrong i should have pushed back against when she came on the show and she said something to the effect of um what woman has been aroused because she's seen her partner aroused like i understand what you mean at sort of the first level but almost every definition of female arousal arousal includes my partner desires me like being desired by their partner yeah so what better that's the most non-fungible like uh difficult to fake signal that i am that i desire you is me being aroused so you go okay i think i think that you probably can do the unmarried fucking 38 year old guy telling people who are married how to re-invite live in their sex life I think that there is good legs to like make flirting great again. That's my that's my argument. Or I was going to say if your lady is down for it to try on a wig. Try on a wig? Mm-hmm. Me? No, no. Well, I mean, you can if you want to. To be someone different? Role play? Yeah. If she is willing to put on a wig because then it really changes the way she looks. If you're looking for sexual novelty. Oh. Then do something nice for her. Get her flowers, obviously. And then get her a wig. If she wants to wear one, yeah. That's interesting. I remember reading, Roy Baumeister is doing a fucking awesome series on sexual novelty at the moment. Okay. On his sub stack. It is a travesty. Everyone needs to go and read Roy Baumeister's sub stack because it's got three likes and they're all me and my friends. And he's the goat, right? He's the guy that did the original marshmallow test. And he's writing about sexual novelty at the moment and he finds this story of a client that was working with a therapist and she was saying that i think this was a long quite a while ago um and she was saying that her husband was uh struggling to be excited in the bedroom and this was a long time before before porn and the after a while you know weeks and months of this lady coming in and this was a repeating challenge that was being had maybe he's just a bit old maybe it's whatever and the uh the therapist asked have you sort of what is it that you're doing to him and the client said sort of explained and it was it wasn't particularly intimate said have you considered using your hand she said like my my hand on him no and she said okay why why don't you just try and do that and sure enough went back and this had you know the most amazing effect because sexual novelty had been so constrained to one thing for fucking five decades that simply the act like second base was enough to blow this guy mind this dude in his 60s or 70s because that was something that he never got to experience i just thought that was so interesting to you know whether it's the um coolidge effect or some sort of equivalent like refractory what novelty looks like um but this series from baumeister is fucking sick he basically makes the it makes the argument that in a relationship if this is the one you should titrate the uh sort of sexual access and sexual novelty as slowly as possible and it's gonna suck i mean it's stuck for the women as well actually won't suck for a long time um but i i really think that there's something to it i really think that he's fucking i think he's fucking nailed it and he's just all he's doing is respecting the neurobiology especially of men he's gonna do a separate treatment on women he's only done it on men so far but basically if you're like this is the chick for me okay move move as slowly as possible through the different stages of doing things because there is only so much sexual novelty that you can have once you've gone to the end or close to the end, it doesn't feel as exciting to sort of skip back. If you know how the story ends, you know how the book, the series finishes, reading the middle bit is just less enlivening. Yeah, sure, I'll give it another read, but it's nowhere near as... So he's turned one page a week, I think, and stretched this book out over a decade or so. I thought it was really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to also why casual sex is not a good thing. I think it's better for both sexes to be less promiscuous, but definitely if you well if you have sex on the first date a man's going to put you in the short-term bucket but even if not i would say even if you have sex too soon and you're dating somebody at some level they're like you said it's like shortening that book how how uh how does it feel to believe this and say this is a former sexologist writer um i'm probably alienating like 90 of the field i mean there are certain things when you are in the field i should say i have many friends and colleagues who do amazing work and who are very unbiased. They're not politically motivated. They just do their research, and I respect that. My issue is when people are, quote, sex positive, and they're pushing these narratives that are unhelpful and that I think are doing a disservice to our society. Is it not empowerment? And it's leading us to be sexless, ultimately. No, I don't think it's empowerment. I think it's masked as empowering, but they're lies, ultimately. And I find the fact that people get so upset by me challenging these ideas tells me that I'm onto something because why do they get so defensive? If what I'm saying is completely nonsense, why do they feel the need to push back so badly? But yeah, this book is full of... Heretical ideas. Yeah, anti-sex positivity thoughts that are not allowed, I guess. But it was amazing for me to write because I felt... I like to challenge myself and say, if there are thoughts or beliefs that you don't want to look at, you have to look at those and you have to ask yourself why you don't want to. And if you're afraid of alienating or upsetting people, that's not a reason to question what about sex dolls would you learn they're good are they bad didn't you i am didn't you didn't did you design one i made one in my likeness i did well i was on the hunt to make it for sale i'm not answering that question it was actually a lot of fun to go on that exploration so in the each chapter i go into a little like mini adventure that's what i call them where i go and i research the technology and try it out and so i went and explored sex dolls and robots and it's crazy what's out there it's very very realistic i have to say i didn't consummate my relationship with any of these dolls but in terms of it would have been weird to have done it with your own one yeah yeah i was thinking about that i thought is that technically masturbation or is that you know what is that what's what's autogynephilia which one's that one autogynephilia is when you are sexually aroused at the a man is sexually aroused at the thought of having the body of a woman so when you see someone who's born male who is has a desire to transition to female that is if they are attracted to women or if they are attracted to both men and women that's autogynophilia whereas if they are born male and attracted to men and want to transition to female then they are it's considered the gay subtype so this is my first book the end of gender but basically yeah autogynophilia is a huge huge motivator for the whole trans ideology activism wonder if you once who are the angriest or autogonic files i wonder if you would be able to provide them with i wonder if you could get people a self sex doll of them but the opposite sex i've seen some people do this they will get like you're fucking kidding me no i thought this was a new idea i was breaking new ground i made a joke to see if we can ebay your old sex doll and try and you know fucking help the advance of the book and get some sales in there. And then I thought this was new frontiers, but people have got sex dolls of themselves in the opposite sex. Yeah, and they wear them. What's wear them mean? Well, they put it on themselves to become that. So it's like a suit. Yeah. So it's not really a doll, I guess. It's more like a rubber suit. But it's in the fashion to look like a doll to some degree. It's just like silicone material. Okay. But what else can I tell your audience? We're getting there. The sex robots are definitely coming. They are. Right. Yeah. Okay. Is there a line between doll and robot? So right now, like the AI software is very – I love that chapter. Writing the chapter on the AI companions was so much fun. It's also just so frightening for me because they're so realistic. But so importing that into a doll is very much possible. Now it's just about a question of how do you get the robot to move in a realistic way sexually. So you have robots that can, say, gyrate their hips or they'll have like internal suctions in the vagina. So it helps with an orgasm. What other things can they do? But in terms of the movement, it's still quite limited. The difference between a doll and a robot would be that physical movement. So a doll is stationary. Or sometimes they'll hang them, but I guess it's still stationary. They'll hang them? They'll hang them up on so they're standing. What are they doing with them when they're standing? Well, you can look that up. Okay, fair enough. I don't need to. I have to assume that the market sex dolls is 99.99% men, or is there some women in this? Mostly men. During the pandemic, one company told me they made $20 million in sales, which is astronomical. It is mostly high school educated. So on average, high school educated men who make about 40K a year. How much are the dolls? Starts at a couple hundred to tens of thousands, depending on how realistic you want it to be. So if you're a blue collar worker, you're going for the more sort of entry level one. Yeah. There are some guys who are saying make more, like I'm thinking of one particular study where they had the income. And so some guys making, say, more than six figures will have the dolls. But it tends to be more among men who either, I think, are quite heartbroken and they don't want to bother going through or they're divorced. They don't want to go through the process. Or it's guys who want to have sexual novelty, but they can't actually either attract real life partners or they don't have the means for it. So they'll buy the dolls instead. That makes me sad. The idea that, you know, someone's past emotional challenges, you know, whether deserved or accidental or purposeful, victimized, whatever. It causes them to sort of turn away entirely from human. Yeah. And I suppose that the fact that you now have this option for someone to, I don't need to. You can just, you can just, what about the AI companions thing? I saw a bunch of fewer or two or three weeks ago when ChatGPT discontinued 4.0 and 4.0 had a very particular type of personality to it. And that discontinuation was for lots of people. There was a subreddit, and I can't remember what it's called, AI Partner, r slash AI Partner or something. People being beyond hysterics, like absolutely fucking heartbroken by it. So what was your experience with AI companions? Because people do fall in love with their AI chatbots. And before I tested them out, I didn't think such a thing would be possible because I didn't think that the technology was that realistic. Until you fell in love with one. Until I fell in love with all of my dozens of AI boyfriends. You had dozens? I had dozens. Do you like Bonnie Blue? Go on. I had girlfriends too. So I made dozens of them across dozens of platforms. I really wanted to try them all out to see where are they at. And there were a couple of platforms that were definitely more realistic. But I will say what happened with ChadGPT, that's not the first time. There's another platform that something similar happened a couple of years ago where they remove the erotic role-playing capabilities or they put it behind a paywall. And people were so devastated because they said, my AI doesn't remember me anymore. Like they're really cold. It reminded them of being socially rejected in the past and it's very upsetting for them. So again, I mean, the scientist side of me thinks like, this is so cool and so crazy that we're advancing so quickly. But then the other part of me says, wait a minute, like look at where we are right now as a society. And is this really a good thing? Because what is this going to do now? if we have this discrepancy in terms of the sex ratio and people having sex and people not even wanting to connect or date you know there's a study by pew showing that over half of single people are not interested in dating at all so now you're we have not in short term not in casual or long term mating yeah it's wild i remember seeing that study it's gonna be so easy just to go down the route of one of these alternatives and it they are so realistic like you really cannot tell that it is an AI. If I had not programmed it and myself had said, this is your name, this is what you look like, this is your personality. It's only over text, or is it voice? You can do voice too. So kind of like when you speak to ChatGPT. Yeah, I thought it sounded like a real person I was talking to. And does it push into erotica as well? Yeah, yeah. They flirt with you. They get, like if you're sarcastic, they pick up on it. It was crazy. Like I really thought it was going to be very stilted. Some of them are still like that where you, some platforms, you have to be very literal. Really work with it. Yeah. they're a difficult partner yeah uh okay so what what is the biggest story about sort of human needs and and relating beyond bits just not going into bits at the same rate anymore like people aren't doing the thing but what what does that tell us about the ways that humans are connecting what's a deeper lesson that we're not connecting that's what I think there are a lot of stand-ins for connection like something as simple as having a conversation person versus over a screen there is there's a difference there there's a difference biologically in terms of like how we respond to that and I just think more broadly in society like if you go out I'm sure Austin is the same as Toronto where most or maybe it's not but most people are on their phones you know what I'm thinking when you're at the airport you're on the plane every everywhere in public everyone is just on the phone all the time people don't really talk to each other, even make eye contact. And I do think that has larger ramifications beyond something so small as preferring to look at your phone, you know, because you're bored or whatever. And so I think that over time has snowballed into this thing where we are very much like enclosed. We all have our own little bubbles because it's like the norm now socially. It's seen as weird to talk to strangers or to make small talk or it's like cringy or whatever, But especially in terms of romantic context, like everything is made to be so simple and convenient with like dating apps or people say using social media to meet. But that's not really meeting someone in real life. And it's almost as though the convenience of it is a reason as to why people don't take it so seriously. Right. If it's so easy to meet people, why would you care? Why? It didn't cost you anything. It didn't require anything of you. Yeah. A home cooked meal is treated with more love than a McDonald's. Yeah. although i mean i'm very healthy but i would say you know mcdonald's was great at one point mcdonald's is good but you're never going to look at it and think um this is a very valuable meal unless you're starving right um okay what about fertility rates and reproduction like because ultimately everything that we've spoken about up until now is the proximate reason for behavior right all of it is just it's pleasure and it's connection and it's all the rest of it But the ultimate reason for the behavior is to reproduce. Right. It is the same. It is not far off the same as saying we have managed to construct a world in which these screens and this media and these xenoestrogens and this culture and these thoughts and the way that this has come together has caused people to throw themselves off of buildings. Like because genetically that is the equivalent, right? Survival and reproduction. And the only reason for the survival is so that you can do the reproduction. If you didn't need to survive, it would just be reproduction. How have we managed to get ourselves to the stage where an animal has been convinced to select themselves out of breeding? Because life is so distractible. We're so distracted, right? It's so easy to be. Well, relationships are hard, right? Dating is hard. Finding someone is hard. Connecting with people is hard. Because people are unreliable. People have their own decisions and autonomy as they should. And so when you have alternatives, either romantic alternatives or just ways to pass the time that don't involve that messiness, I think it can be quite alluring. So I agree with you. I don't think everyone has to have children. But I do think for people who want kids, like I'm concerned about the people who, like one of the reasons for 25% of people who aren't having children, they say the reason is because they haven't found somebody, which I imagine is quite devastating. And so I also talk in the book about single motherhood by choice and the fact that there are real implications for this discrepancy in terms of the sex bias and people not wanting to connect or people, say, not being able to connect. What discrepancy, sorry? Oh, just that there are fewer viable men. And these men typically are less interested in settling down or there's going to be less commitment as a result of that because when you have a smaller pool of men, like on university campuses where you have fewer men than women, men are going to set the terms of dating and relationships and sex. That's what you were talking about earlier on, that women think that if men are more desperate socioeconomically, that they'll work harder for the women. It's kind of like a perspective around sex ratios. They have an implicit understanding around sex ratios. who still understands mating preferences from women to men, which is that they're going to largely be invisible. Yeah, well, that men are going to be setting the terms then of dating. The high-value men will be. Yeah, in terms of how soon you're going to have to have sex, or they'll go somewhere else, or if they want commitment from you, but they want to be, quote, polyamorous or whatever, you're going to have to put up with that. I learned a new term last year, which is solo poly. Oh, yeah. Remind me what that is. I've heard of this. It's a guy, typically, or it's a person who is just sleeping around. It's just a guy that's sleeping around, but I think that a lot of the partners may think that they're the hub, and then there's lots of spokes coming off, solar poly. Yeah. Okay. When it comes to the reproduction thing, you mentioned IVF, fertility windows, other stuff. What else is interesting? that? My issue with that, again, and if people choose to see these interventions, you know, it's not my place to judge them. I can understand if you want to have a family and it's going to help you, then I understand why people go that path. But my concern is that we're not rectifying the underlying issues. So if the issue is women can't find a partner with whom they'd like to settle down with, or there are fertility issues on the man or the woman's side, or on both people's side, then these interventions aren't really solving the underlying problem, right? And so that's only just going to get worse for future generations and for the individual people who are potentially undergoing these interventions. I got in a lot of trouble for talking about birth rate decline this year. Oh, really? Before the year even started, I got in a lot of trouble about it. I did some more digging. I went and did some sort of quite hardcore data digging around this. One interesting fact that I found was that the total maternal rate has basically not changed the tmr it's called total maternal rate is the number of children per mother the number of children per mother i think has gone from over the last 50 years something like 2.6 to 2.45 2.4 something like that uh so it is not the big difference is not um mothers having fewer children it's women not becoming mothers and again i got one of the things I got shouted out about was putting it all on women. Unfortunately, um, census data, world health organization, CDC, the only people who, uh, they only capture data about mothers. Like they don't have fatherhood data. Right. um, parental uncertainty might contribute a little bit to that. Uh, uh, absentee fathers and stuff like that as well. Abandoning mothers, like pregnant women like might contribute to anyway. Um, so you have, um, four out of five women who end up without children having broken through menopause didn't intend to be childless it's called involuntary childlessness you've got this really interesting situation which i don't know why more women i understand why more women aren't talking about it because it kind of goes counter to what the current very pushed narrative is but that's 80 percent four out of five women who end up without kids who didn't intend to end up without kids around about 10 percent of women can't physiologically right uh awful pain grief right about 10 percent of women don't want to voluntary childlessness then four out of five women have support groups with other women to grieve over families that they never had like who the fuck's campaigning for them that feels like a group that's really important they're really really important and ever growing you have this weird dynamic at the moment which is any woman who is still fertile can endorse the view that women don't need to have kids without having to embody it because until they can no longer have it they always have the option to still do it right and i wonder i really hope that this isn't the case but i get the sense that i'm right but early on this that we're going to see a huge fucking crisis of middle-aged femininity within the next 15 years when a lot of gen z and millennial women age out of their ability to have kids and focused on one area of life that they maybe really enjoyed and took a lot of value from and you know good for you you've got your you don't need to be beholden to anybody and that's awesome um but to to sort of turn around and go fuck i i i wish i'd done something different i really hope that that's not the case i don't i don't take any glee in women who don't want to have kids having them and women that want to have kids not being able to um but i i think i think we're going to see we think that the fucking crisis of masculinity is bad at the moment among young men i think that the one around women is going to be way worse yeah i think being able to talk about, especially women's work-life balance and how women structure their lives is important to be able to talk about it honestly, because like you said, I think there's a real push for young women to focus on career. And all four women being ambitious and making their own money and being successful, I think that's fantastic. But I think there's this false idea that motherhood is somehow a burden or that it's unimportant. I think both sides of the political aisle make some good points and also make some fallacies in that i think say progressives will say motherhood is terrible you know it's uh what's the term that they use domestic prostitute no that's an interesting way of putting it it's something about what is it the costs are basically that you know like you're you're going to be destitute because as a woman you have to be no more financial independence you're relying on yeah it's so expensive and you know if you do um focus on raising a family then you don't make money and then you put yourself in potentially abusive situations like you know like there's all that which i you know can happen no one wants to be a financial prisoner this is what no one talks about about the low divorce rate in the past that how much of the low divorce rate was because the women had nowhere else to go yeah yeah so i understand that side of it but at the same time you know if a woman decides to have children she is going to be the primary um caretaker like the way that progressives frame it is that the man can just step in and do half of the chores and whatever no the baby's going to prefer mom the baby wants mom's body baby wants mom yeah and then the other side is you know because not all conservatives but there's a sentiment among conservatives to tell young women don't worry about your education and career just get married young have tons of children and worry about your career later but that's difficult if you have no work experience how are you going to get a job in your field especially nowadays if you have no work experience right especially given how difficult it is to support a family on a a single person income. Yeah, that too. So look, I think that everybody that wants to have kids should be able to afford to have kids. And the fact that people can't afford to have kids or more accurately, I think, feel like they can't afford to have kids, given that the poorest countries are the ones that have got the highest birth rates. I think that's awful. I think it's awful that people can't afford to have kids or feel like they can't afford to have kids. But I don't think that that's the issue. i think if you were to ask any couple or almost any couple especially married couple what's the reason that you haven't yet had kids it's not going to be that they're too expensive the issue and most of the commentary the commentariat that's throwing their opinions into the like me that's throwing their opinions into the fucking mess with this a single people saying it's too expensive to have kids you're not in a relationship this is like you telling me how much you'd beat some guy up that stood in the ring while you're in the stands yeah like you're not in the situation where you can talk about having kids it's not what you're facing so i wonder how much of this and this may be from the guy's side too i wonder how much of this is kids are too expensive to have is a much easier explanation than i can't find a partner to have them with i yeah i definitely think financial reasons could be a part of it. But I do think when you're speaking of women who are getting to an age where my sense is some women may not be aware that their biological window is definitive. How tight is it? Well, women's fertility drops down by half by 35. And then you know menopause starts into your 40s by mid 40s so there's you can't really negotiate with biology at that point i mean you can use the technology you can try but we all have our windows and it's like i said you know set i remember reading a tweet from fucking stefan molyneux like six seven years ago like culture warring before the culture war was even a thing and he's having some pop on taylor swift's 30th birthday basically saying uh taylor swift turned 30 today 90 of her eggs are gone i wish that she'd become a mother see that type of commentary is not nice it's not helping and i i always had that in the back of my mind just one of these things it kind of kicked up a big furor and it's just a it's just a fucking prick thing to say but i did a little bit of research the reason that 90 that 90 figure is true but i didn't realize it's because girls lose their eggs before they hit puberty. I think 50% of your lifetime eggs are gone by the time that you become, is the word fertile? I guess, or like able to have kids. Yeah. Like whatever, your puberty comes online and 50% of them are gone. Like that doesn't feel, the 90% number, that feels like somebody's inflated the stock price or something. Yeah. Well, I was going to say also, speaking of the fertility issues are the endocrine disruptors. When a girl is born, she's born with all the eggs she's ever going to have. So if her mother was exposed to something when she was in the uterus, that's going to affect her daughter and her grandchildren potentially because it's affecting the eggs. Three generations of people, three generations of women in the same location for a brief period of time. Yeah. But my hope and what I like with your podcast is that it's very much like balance and I really want to try and close this division between men and women because I think that's a big part also why this is happening the adversarial narrative yeah and why they're not interested in in having sexual relationships or being close you're having that that intimacy because so much of this discourse is so polarizing and so much about blaming the opposite sex for everything that's going wrong not just in terms of dating and relationships but just the world world yeah yeah i mean instead of cooperation each sex just optimizes against the other yeah It's just this evolutionary arms race, but it's been turned up to everything. It's like, yeah, okay, there is a kind of, I come up with a way to be funny or cute or attractive or whatever. And after a while, that strategy sort of becomes detected. And then I need to demonstrate more value and more value and so on and so forth. And it's just that, but not even on steroids, like in a fucking different universe where the humans are so tribal that we're even splitting ourselves up based on fucking. sex right yeah and i don't know okay can anything be done top down to fix this give you some proposed solutions i was gonna say with the evolutionary uh co-evolutionary arms race so that's david busses theory um the goat yeah he's a friend of mine a mentor daddy david and it definitely shows up it's it's amazing because once you become aware of this dynamic and how men and women are constantly trying to out-compete each other you see it in everything so in terms of advice i would say for I'll start with women I'd say I definitely think people should meet in real life as opposed to on apps or through social media online or whatever so my I do think men should be the ones to approach women so women have to make it so obvious if they're into someone and things you can do I have suggestions in sex fiction but one big one is to smile very obviously and if you're like me and you have resting bee face to practice smiling in the mirror until it's not uncomfortable and not awkward, which can take some time. But I guarantee you, if you see a man you find attractive and you smile at him, he will come and talk to you. Cultivate receptivity. Yeah, exactly. Because men are biologically wired to pick up on these cues. And there's a part of the brain called the medial orbital frontal cortex that lights up when someone sees an attractive face. And it lights up even more strongly when that face is smiling. So I thought that was really fascinating because... Your resting bitch face is resting ugly face to a degree. Or it's like resting F off. face yeah um and also things like touching your hair touch your your face your neck you have adjusted clothing things like that men are again going to pick up on this and see this as a sign that you're interested okay and so that will help to remedy i think some of the um the backlash or the difficulty after me too and then for guys oh and the other thing i would say to women is so basically your options are to compete for the high status guys right to date someone whom you may consider if you are say a very educated successful financially successful woman you may feel like you're dating a guy who's less successful than you but that's totally fine right my my issue is when society is telling women this is a great solution like just have a house husband you know you don't need to go for these guys you can make your own money and you can be the provider in the in the household and no higher rates of divorce yeah higher rates of domestic violence higher rates of male cheating when that happens. So, you know, not to say that happens for everybody, but I think just to also have a bit of compassion for men who are struggling because my sense is women, we are doing very well, right? And I don't think it takes anything away from women's success or women's ability to succeed by having some compassion for men who are struggling. And then I would say to guys, it's probably a combination in terms of why young men are not doing as well. I think the mental health aspects eat healthy food that goes for women too but there have been studies that have shown um if you cut out ultra processed food depression will remit on its own there's one study i remember reading is crazy within 12 weeks a third of the sample that had depression geez i didn't go into remission that is crazy own wow yeah so if you're struggling like with your mental health or i guess i should talk to the camera when i say this but if you're if you're struggling with your mental health eat healthy food go to the gym i'm sure chris's audience knows work out get sunshine and um i would also say if you can go without porn for 30 days try and see if that helps you you might be surprised at your motivation not expect that you're going to be a proponent for nofap well i hear from so many guys that it's helped them so i'm willing i'm willing to go there i'm curious let me know how it goes okay as a woman tell me how it goes every single day report in on how your nofap is going with an update detailed notes i want an excel spreadsheet I'm sure that that will go well. Debra, you're great. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing? So you can get – should I talk to the camera or should I tell you? No, talk to me. Okay. You should get Sex Stinction, The Decline of Sex, and The Future of Intimacy. You can get it on Simon & Schuster's website. You can get it everywhere you get books. You can get it at drdebrasseau.com. And the audio book is read by me, and you can get it for free on Audible. Sounds awesome. I think you're doing the goddess's work. really really cool really really awesome stuff I appreciate you thank you when I first started doing personal growth I really wanted to read the best books the most impactful ones the most entertaining ones the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting but there wasn't a list of them so I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own and then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found and you can get that for free right now so if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die that's chriswillx.com slash books