Modern Wisdom: w/ Macken Murphy on Female Attraction (Transcript)

Okay, so you’re much closer in terms of relatively close.

MACKEN MURPHY: But each unit with circumference, it makes like more of a difference. Like that’s like a bigger increase in total volume.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Squaring the net or whatever.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the volume is getting bigger for an inch of circumference versus length. So, and then it’s 5 inches for short term.

The Most Interesting Finding

So the difference between—I wish I had measured this in advance—but the difference here is in fact pretty big and more interesting. And I think this is actually the most interesting part of the study, is that they also asked women to pick out the biggest and smallest from the array of models. So you can imagine that they, for the study design, they have an array of models that they can choose from that basically look like sex toys. And they say, you know, what’s ideal? What’s the biggest you’d seen ever? And what’s the smallest you’ve seen ever.

And very interestingly, most women had never seen a penis that big. And so they were exhibiting a preference for a penis size that was bigger than they had ever experienced. Right? So that’s the kind of—I would say that that’s now the trough of the roller coaster where things are as not fun as they could be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, it’s also not fun if you’re a woman too. You’re cursed to almost never encounter the ideal penis that you want.

Ideal Preferences vs. Reality

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s very similar to women’s height preferences where—so the six foot two analogy, I think is very good. If you asked women, you know, what’s the ideal height of a boyfriend? Maybe they’d say 6 foot 2. Right. A lot of them would say somewhere between, you know, as we discussed in the last episode, somewhere between, you know, maybe 6 foot 3 and 6 foot 5 would come up a lot. But maybe it would be 6 foot 2.

But then you ask them, have you ever dated a guy that tall? And most of them will say, no, never. Right? It’s the same thing with penis size. Now, these are ideal mate preferences, and ideal mate preferences can be a little silly, right? Like, what’s your ideal mate preference for a woman’s salary? Right. It could be as rich as possible. That doesn’t occasion security concerns. Right. But then in actual practice, you might not mind if it was even, you know, 20 grand a year, as long as everything else is lined up.

So this is an ideal preference. And so ideally, most women probably would like to date a guy who’s taller than 6 foot 2, who’s 6.3 inches. But because it’s an ideal preference, they’re likely flexible as to their minimum preference, which was not collected in this study.

The Behavioral Deal Breaker Question

One insight, though. They did ask a very good behavioral outcome question. I really like behavioral outcomes as opposed to just statements. Right. As to, like, hypotheticals. They said, have you ever broken up with a man over his size? I think that’s a very good question because that’s where it’s like, behavioral deal breaker. Yeah. And they said at least partially over his size. So there was no wiggle room in the question for, you know—well, there was a list of five things. And I’ll focus on the most socially appropriate one. It’s like, was it an influence as to why you broke up?

And about 27% said they had. So most women break up over this. Most women, this doesn’t appear as a deal breaker, but about a third have had the experience of saying, you know what? I’m going to call it quits. The size is not contributing to—yeah, the size was one of the contributing factors. And I’m willing to say that to a researcher as well. Right. Which is probably an underestimate.

And in most cases of that 27% subset, the vast majority of cases, it was because the guy was too small. There were some women who said that part of the contributing factor was too big, but it wasn’t common.

The Upper and Lower Bounds

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Couple of things come to mind. I would be interested to see the bell curve of how satisfied would you be? As in, I guess that the talking about fat tails when we’re discussing this is a fraught. I’m going to guess that being a little bit under or even like a maybe a standard deviation under versus a standard deviation over there is an upper bound. Like, on one you’re talking about less pleasure, on the other you’re talking about pain. Any woman who’s ever had her cervix hit knows, like, that’s not fun.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that I would imagine, actually you probably have more latitude on the small side than you do on the big side. Because there’s no hard and fast rule about small, like being literally impractical or dangerous.

MACKEN MURPHY: No hard threshold, whereas the length of those actually does.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Because if you’ve got that hit, then that’s it. It’s kind of—it’s going to be very comfortable.

MACKEN MURPHY: That’s a really interesting point. I was imagining that it would be in the abstract before you said that. I would have assumed, in the absence of data that it would function similarly to women’s height preferences, where it’s, you know, tons and tons of benefit up to some reasonable point, like being way too short and then a decline that doesn’t ever really bottom out. But given that fact that there is—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There is this only so much room at the end.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I know of a friend of a friend who got, who actually did get rejected from a sexual encounter for being too large, like flat out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that’s not going inside of me.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. So that can happen. And maybe, maybe that’s something that can’t be worked around in the same way. That’s interesting.

Study Design Limitations

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The other thing that I think about is presumably these women were handling it, but the reason to have a penis of any shape and size is not to handle it. It’s sometimes partly to handle it, but mostly for other things. I think if you were going to go full, whatever ethnographic with this, it would have to be, okay, away you go in a quiet dark room, come back and tell us which one you preferred.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, I mean, well, that’s—I mean, I don’t know how you’d get ethics approval, but it is interesting. A lot of people did say when I first made a video on this study, a lot of people in the comments did make that point. Like, you know, it’s interesting that they picked bigger than they’d seen on average because maybe that actually isn’t their preference if they had experience.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. Like, maybe this is your preference if you’ve never preferred it.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. Like it’s with full testing, maybe you’d end up with a lower or higher number.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow, that’s f*ing. Actually a lot bigger than I thought it was.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Broader Context of Ideal Preferences

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, interesting. Just to round out the ideal thing. Not fantastic news for 95% of men.

MACKEN MURPHY: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But on the flip side, I’m going to guess that there are preferences men have for women that 95% of women don’t meet. If you ask for ideal mate preferences.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. I mean, ideal mate preferences always have this, I won’t say cartoonish, but kind of fanciful angle to them where they often can’t be met in any reasonable way. When you consider all of them at once. Like, one really good example of this is if you were to ask men, like a group of men, okay, what’s your ideal BMI preference? In Western men, then, what’s your ideal bra size preference? Right. Those are going to conflict with each other in a way that is very unlikely to be satisfied in a naturally varying population. Because one comes at the directionality of one comes at the expense of another. Right. It’s kind of like girls with skinny—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Waists don’t have big tits.

The Truth About Body Fat Preferences

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, in general, right. And then it’s also like if you looked at someone’s preferences for good looks and loyalty, right, or good looks and attention from—maybe loyalty is a bad one—good looks and attention from attractive alternatives. Like attention from attractive alternatives, surely your ideal would be zero, right? I don’t want to have to compete. And then how attractive they are, your ideal would probably be quite high, right?

I would say you specifically—I just mean a person in general. So ideal mate preferences, they’re often not as informative as bare minimum mate preferences, which is where you actually see rejection, where you actually see cutoffs. I would have loved to see more data from the Prowse study about running back 27%. What was the deal breaker? What would be the deal breaker going forward? I think it’s interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Cool study you mentioned there about tall men, good looking men and infidelity and stuff. Do tall men cheat more?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, I thought in the abstract—I answered this question recently and at the time I answered it I was thinking I hadn’t seen data on it. And then some online social scientist who does these analyses kind of DIY style replied and basically said, “I checked this in a large data set, there wasn’t an association.”

I would have expected that tall men would cheat more because they’d have more opportunity. Not saying that all men who can cheat would, but just definitionally, men who can’t cheat don’t. And maybe it’s very difficult to cheat if you’re five foot four, right. Maybe that’s a real challenge. Not saying it’s impossible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You have to assume that the pool is smaller.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, the pool is smaller.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Most women want a taller guy.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. So I was surprised that there was no—I take his word for it that there was no association. But I was surprised by that. I would think that there would be an association between—in the abstract, I would think that any attractive trait in males would be associated with infidelity.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Head of hair, whiter eyes, whiter teeth, redder skin. Because you’re just opening up the pool of opportunity.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly.

The Ollie Murs Transformation Fallout

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can we recap the fallout from the Ollie Murs transformation? It’s a little old now, but I never talked about it at the time. So William Costello puts this Twitter poll out that for some reason goes absolutely f*ing ballistic, goes completely interstellar. And there’s basically thousands of women kind of saying—if you read the study—that they didn’t like leanness and muscularity.

This guy did a big transformation and went from kind of standard dude physique with a tiny little bit of definition to probably around 10% body fat with an okay amount of muscularity. And women were asked, do they prefer the dad bod version or the lean and rip version? And tons of them steaming in and saying, “No, I prefer that.” So give me a post mortem on Ollie Murs’s body transformation.

MACKEN MURPHY: I remember as soon as William posted it, I thought, “Oh, that’s a really good one.” I think I replied at the time. And when it was like really early days and he was like, “I can spot a sex difference from miles away,” he’s like, “I can manufacture one of these easily.” Because he obviously is very interested in sex differences or studies them as part of the bus lab and whatnot. And so he’s going to have really good intuitions for how to pick good examples that will draw them out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Something that women will—women and men will—

MACKEN MURPHY: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That’s what I should have said. Yeah. So to clarify with sex difference, he asked men, “Do you think he looks better before or after?” Meaning after this incredible physical transformation where he’s lost copious amounts of body fat and goes from essentially, yeah, as you say, like muscular guy at the pub, but not much more than that to stage ready, basically—except he’s not roided up or anything, but he looks incredibly lean.

And so William posts this and says, “Men versus women, what do you guys think?” And as you say, yeah, the women strongly preferred the before and the men strongly preferred the after. And there was an insinuation by men, a widespread insinuation, that women were basically being coy about their actual preference or lying about their preference. And that this is kind of like, “Oh, it’s known that women lie about these things.”

The reason that I don’t think that is because when you ask women about their height preferences, they’re very open about saying it’s tall in surveys, right? So I look at this sort of study and this sort of data, these sort of data all the time. Women are very open about preferring taller men. They’re also very open about preferring more muscular men, right?

So women say they prefer taller men. And then you look at height and mating success and generally taller men are more popular on the dating market. So that seems true and stated, true and revealed. Yep. Muscularity, same deal. You ask women, “Do you like muscles?” Right? They say, “Yes, we like muscles.” And then you survey muscular men and it turns out they also have more positive romantic experiences. So stated versus revealed, it’s all on track.

With leanness, it’s a little more complicated. It does seem that women don’t prefer too lean. And when you look at the Ollie Murs transformation, I would say that the main difference before and after, if we were to look at it—like he does look more muscular in the after, but I would say that very likely he just lost fat, right. Like I’ve seen those sorts of transformations before. Usually it’s just fat loss rather than any actual muscle gain.

And so I think that what happened here is partially that men looked at the photos and said, “Wow, that guy got jacked.” And then women said, “Oh, you know, I don’t really like that.” And they’re like, “Oh, what, so you don’t like jacked guys?” Right. But women were seeing that and saying, “Oh, this guy just like lost a lot of body fat. And I don’t like men who are too lean.” So women’s body fat percentage preferences from the research we have are a little—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Heavier than what the gym bros think.

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, it’s heavier than 10%.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like 15, right?

The Science of Body Fat Preferences

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it’s closer to that. So in the most recent study from Zia and colleagues, they use DXA images. Now DXA images—there’s a big pro and a big con. The big pro is that we know the body fat of the men. We know the body fat percentage, right. We actually, it’s not a guesstimate. The con is that like a DXA image doesn’t look like a real man. So I think that’s a real limitation of the study.

But in that study it was between 13 and 14.1% body fat. So that’s still pretty lean by the way. Like you’ve definitely got the kind of—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Four pack up top visible upper abs, but it is not as lean. Look, this is where two different worlds collide. You’re a bro listening to this and you hear 14%. “Dude, I can walk around at 14% a piece of piss. Yeah. Oh my God, I can have some bread. Thank f* that.” But if you’re a normal person, that’s pretty lean. 14% is a hard cut away. You’ve got a hard cut to do to get down to that.

So yeah, I tweeted about—sorry, I put in my newsletter—the ideal body fat percentage is higher than gym bros think. And I think that’s true. As an anchor, I think most guys would assume that optimal body fat for women would be 10, 10, 9, maybe even. I do think that most guys would just guess that you can get too lean, that it’s going—your face is going to look gaunt. But it wouldn’t actually be to do with the body that the optimal body fat percentage.

But then that being said, now somebody like Mike Thurston for instance, who at quite lean levels of body fat still looks quite full, still doesn’t look very dry. One of the problems that Ollie Murs had was he had like what I would call—as opposed to skinny fat—he had skinny lean, which is a slightly, not quite the right amount of mass to carry that level of leanness. And if you have a little bit more mass underneath it, I think it can actually make you look more healthy in that way.

And some people just don’t carry leanness that well. Some people don’t carry fatness that well. I’m somebody who doesn’t look great fat. I’m someone who looks all right lean, I can keep going. I think the leanest I’ve ever been in my life is maybe eight, eight and a half. That’s extremely lean and I look fine. Everything got pretty much better from that. And it doesn’t look—but Ollie struggled a bit more with that.

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, you’re making really good points. I think that it is—I think that a lot of gym bros would be surprised at how lean 13% can look. Yes, it really depends on how much muscle you have to—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And also where do you carry it and where do you carry it in different places. If you’re carrying it in your legs and your ass as a dude, yeah, you’re laughing. You’re carrying it around the midsection. If you got the classic tire, you can get down to 12% and you still have really have visible abs.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it’s a really good point. I mean when I read this, when I read this result and was reviewing other results, I was spending a lot of time looking at, “Okay, can I see a DXA verified guy? Like this is the number and this is him shirtless” and comparing it. And you can look a lot of different ways at 13 to 14% body fat. There are some guys who look all right, up to 20%, right. They still have visible chest separation, that kind of thing.

I would say though that most guys at 13 to 14%—they’ve got the upper abs very clear, maybe some forearm veins, right. Maybe like a little bit of upper chest definition. But it’s not stage ready bodybuilder by any means. I think that your point about Ollie not necessarily looking like fully healthy at that weight—that’s the key kind of evo psych interpretation of all of this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Why is it that women didn’t like the leaner guy? What’s the explanation for that?

The Evolutionary Psychology of Physical Preferences

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, there’s the health angle where if there’s a famine, he’s not going to starve anytime soon. But the angle that I take for women’s bodily preferences generally that I think is very—I think it has really good predictive power—is if you just say like between two guys, which of these guys’ physiques looks like it would win in a fight? Usually the one that looks like it would win is going to be preferred.

And if you look at those two photos, who are you betting on? You’re probably going to take the guy who’s a little softer. You look at heavyweight boxers, heavyweight UFC fighters, they’re generally quite lean, but they’re not insanely lean. Like in non-weight class, just fighting optimized sport, it doesn’t seem that being shredded is good for kicking ass essentially.

And I think that if you think about women’s evolved psychology, it came about in a context where men were often fighting, usually with weapons, right. And where it would be good to have as a long term pair bond, a mate who could disincentivize your own and your children’s harassment. You talk about ability, I’m talking about formidability, right? That’s exactly right.

And so it’s like when you think about women’s bodily mate preferences and when you think about bodily predictors of fighting ability, it’s like the sorts of things that women talk about—like strong, veiny hands, big arms, broad shoulders, height, not too lean. All of these things gear towards being formidable.

The Formidability Factor and Male Beauty Standards

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that the guys didn’t account for the lack of formidability? Why did the guys not pick up on that when they said, “I think that he looks better in the second one?” Because they’re looking at it separated from formidability. They weren’t thinking, how much can this guy protect me and my kids?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was the reason for the guys preferring the other one?

MACKEN MURPHY: I don’t know. I didn’t find it particularly surprising and I think that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, me neither.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, there’s always going to be, you know, most men were surprised, but I think that the most vocally surprised men were obviously, you know, more surprised than the average man, if that makes sense. I saw it and just saw, oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Why didn’t they pick up on the formidability aspect? I think it is bodybuilding culture to some extent. Prolific. Yeah. Where bodybuilding culture has proliferated throughout the Anglosphere such that basically every young man is now—or not every young man, but a plural. A slight majority of all young men in the Anglosphere are basically recreational bodybuilders at this point.

And there’s a real status competition that is occurring between these men where they have their own—yeah, where they have their own beauty standard. That is, it probably started out as a competition for the female gaze essentially, but then it became a competition between each other such that more difficult is more impressive and therefore better to some extent.

So, you know, winning a bodybuilding competition is very hard because it involves putting on lots of mass and removing lots of fat. And those two activities are difficult to do alone, but even more difficult to do together. So it’s a good competition between males.

And it reminds me of women’s fashion modeling to some extent, where women’s fashion modeling incentivizes a degree of thinness that we know from the literature, men do not prefer—it’s past the optimum. And you can say like why is it that this beauty competition has passed the optimum of the beauty standards set by the opposite sex? And it seems to be downstream of difficulty, downstream of status and downstream of these standards set within the group. So I think that, you know, that’s a rambling answer, but—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, that’s great. Difficulty, status and the value set within the group. So for guys, every guy understands. F*. He’s had to work really hard. He looks like a reliable ally. He looks like the sort of guy I could go into battle with. I know how hard that is to do the status thing while imbued in that is. Allow me to elevate you. That’s really impressive. That’s something that I would maybe desire for myself.

I did see—do you see Sacha Baron Cohen also did a transformation? He’s in a superhero movie.

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, interesting.

The Sacha Baron Cohen Transformation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This stinks of your TikTok. Have a look at Sacha Baron Cohen. Have a look at the—there was a few articles that came up where basically he recently got divorced and got this role as a superhero type character in some movie and just goes through basically the same. But he’s 20 years older than Olly Murs. Same transformation lean looks for a 50 year old dude looks great. Like very stringy, very flat but like upper visible abs separation delta arms, all the rest of it. Like congratulations, well done Sacha.

And there’s a bunch of scathing articles basically saying this breakup body thing is cheesy and like shallow sort of gotham of thin desire for attention from men. But then there was some other stuff that I did think was quite interesting which is I looked at it with a lot of respect. Some women looked at it with almost like revulsion that why are you spending so much attention on your body in your 50s?

What’s going on there? Oh well, you’re probably trying to signal availability and attraction for a new mate. That means that you’re probably not going to be a particularly good family guy. You were in the era of guy that is supposed to be family guy.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that’s exactly right. Yeah.

The Dad Bod Phenomenon

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I remember a friend of mine, fitness athlete throughout pretty much every different discipline. He was a power lifter, he’s a weightlifter, he did bodybuilding, he did everything. It’s been with the same girlfriend throughout all of these and she said “I felt the most comfortable with you when you were powerlifting.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, that goes well with my formidability anecdote.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Now, if you were to pick the fattest of the strength sports after strongman, it would be powerlifting.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It wouldn’t be weightlifting. There’s a bit more athleticism required there. It wouldn’t be Hyrox or CrossFit or bodybuilding, like this spectrum of leanness. And I had this insight that basically, if you see, as a woman, if you see a guy that is very lean, very even, very muscular, even very beautified, even very preened in a way that’s evidently trying to attract the opposite sex as opposed to, like some weird—

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What that suggests is for every calorie that you have to spend in the world, quite a big portion of that is going to go to trying to attract the opposite sex through this sort of beautification thing. Even if you’re getting it wrong, even if you don’t know what the other sex likes. And actually, if you don’t know what the other sex likes, you f*ed it even harder because that suggests that you don’t understand us and you’re trying to do so.

This idea of it really made me rethink dad bods. Like, what—what is a dad bod? Is a dad bod the body of somebody who is a father, or is it the body of somebody who would make a good father? Do you understand the distinction here?

MACKEN MURPHY: I do. And what’s funny, what you’re getting at is actually the result of a—you’re anticipating the result of a study that’s already been done on dad bods, where they essentially—this was back when the term dad bod, which isn’t as hot as it once was. I mean, that term was like, very viral, and I believe it was 2020.

And what the researchers did when this term was peaking was they investigated personality perceptions as a result of body type. And what they found was what you’re describing, which is that they were ascribing more positive fatherly qualities to men who were less lean.

And I think that there is a tension among animals in general that pair bond and expect paternal investment. That, look, you can engage in paternal investment or you can engage in mating effort. Right. And you can’t do both those things at the exact same time. I mean, maybe to an extent, paternal investment can be mating effort in some cases, but for the most part, it’s like he’s either the sort of guy who’s going to spend a lot of time doing that, or he’s going to spend a lot of time doing this. Right.

And so if you’re you know, a guy who’s like hyper obsessed with looks. I think that that does strongly signal mating effort orientation and that might be—even if they’re better looking, it might give a personality cue that ends up being the turn off. I really do think that with a lot of this like “I don’t want him to be too muscular, I don’t want him to be too lean, I don’t want him to be, you know, too taking care of his hair,” that kind of thing. I do think that a lot of it is personality inferences. It’s like if he just genetically looked like that and never went to the gym, then that probably would be preferred.

Intrasexual vs. Intersexual Signaling

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That noble savage lumberjack build. Right. I don’t think women have got a problem with the dude that happens to walk around at 10% body fat, but the dude that happens to have massive hands or great hair. Yeah, but the guy that spends tons of time on that sort of narcissistic—narcissistic. It’s self centered. He doesn’t care about me in this sort of way.

So here’s an interesting one for you. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that women in marriages and men in marriages tend to spend their discretionary additional income on things that are typically signals that only the other sex would notice. But you can do this in different ways.

So for instance, women spend a lot more money on beautification. Guys spend more money on watches and cars and stuff like that, signals of wealth, et cetera. But by doing it that way, by doing it in really sort of subtle and highly finessed ways. If women do the beautification right, maybe other men would notice, but their partner might not fully—like wearing expensive set of heels that makes you look good, but is as much a signal to women as it is to the men. And your husband might not fully pick up on that.

And the guy is the same thing. Well, you know this new car, it’s fast and does whatever but it’s primarily an intrasexual, not an intersexual—intersexual competition device opposed to an intersexual advertisement device. So I always think that’s interesting.

One other bit on the Olly Murs Sacha Baron Cohen thing, I do think it’s a little bit of a failure of cross sex mind reading that guys looked at something that they confused for formidability. That famous David Puts study, this looks like formidability to me, but didn’t realize like women assumed that what they find attractive in a partner is what they will sleep with.

Will they? Because if other men found him more formidable, which they might have done, maybe women say that they wouldn’t have gone for that guy. But perhaps that version of Olly Murs would end up being more successful after 12 months because he’s been pre selected.

The David Puts study suggests women don’t actually know what they want to have sex with fully. So I wonder if you had a hundred Olly Murs and you put them at different levels of body fat percentage and sent them out into the world, which one actually would have performed better? Because we know that male pre selection and male, “he’s okay, he’s alright with me, I hold him in high esteem,” is something that women do use as a cue for attractiveness and maybe that is even more powerful than “well, he looks a little bit lean and I’m not too sure if he could survive a famine.” So perhaps the guys were right all along.

Optimal Foraging and Status Competition

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting, you’re reminding me of a concept from behavioral ecology where basically these researchers, the kind of anthropological site studies types will make an assumption about like “oh well, based on our calculations this is the optimal foraging party size or something.” And then when they find a discrepancy instead of saying “oh, I guess they’re making a mistake,” they think “oh, we must be making a mistake, like they must know something we don’t know.” So then they investigate more.

And with something like that where when you look at bodybuilders, there’s a really kind of simple surface level where you say, “oh, they’re wrong about what women want.” But in a way they might be even more right about what they want because they’re optimizing not just for women’s preferences but also for men’s preferences that will give them the social status that will be more valuable than looking better.

I’m telling you, I mean that’s something that we see, I mean that’s something that we see quite a bit of, right? I mean it’s something that we see quite a bit of, that people will modify themselves and compete in such a way that the mates don’t directly care about, but they do care about the status consequences of that competition.

Like you can imagine that playing video games isn’t attractive. But if you’re like Ninja, I believe his name is, he’s like really rich, very successful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you drank a hair blue, you could look a little bit like Ninja.

MACKEN MURPHY: Okay, well compliment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s one of the most f*ing rich famous dudes on the planet.

The Ollie M Body Transformation and Male Status Competition

MACKEN MURPHY: I’ll keep that in mind as an option if I ever want to go for that look. And you know, I’m sure that the video games component, like you could look at that from an outsider, like at his mating strategy, let’s say. I hope he doesn’t watch this because it is going to be uncomfortable.

You could look at his quote unquote “mating strategy” and say, “Oh, well, he’s spending a lot of time doing something women don’t like. How foolish.” Right? But then he’s acquiring limitless money and status and renown through other men.

So I think with the Ollie M thing, look, I looked at it and I didn’t care that women didn’t like it. I thought he looked cooler in the after. And that was that. I was like, I respect it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s it. Yes, yes.

MACKEN MURPHY: So my reaction was not like, from a social status perspective, I thought, that’s cool.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And if you walk into a bar and all of the dudes think that that dude’s cool because he’s just got lean, then maybe you are going to be more attractive.

MACKEN MURPHY: That’s much better than being more optimized for a body fat percentage.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It feels like this is related to what you learned about formidability from the female rapper Glorilla.

Rap Music as an Evolutionary Psychology Teaching Tool

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, I mean, I do a lot of these on TikTok. It’s a very TikTok-y thing to do. They do tend to go viral where I’ll just play generally a woman’s rap song and just listen to it and react from an evo psych perspective. And it’s a really useful teaching tool. Frankly, it’s a very useful teaching tool for my area of specific interest and expertise.

It’s really good for mate preferences because you see that in a lot of types of music, people are very coy about their mate preferences. Right? Like, they don’t necessarily state them, and if they do state them, they don’t state them accurately. But then you listen to rap music and you just get very accurate stated preferences where it’s like, yeah, I know the study. Like, I’m listening to it. I’m hyped. I’m like, I know the studies. I know that that’s accurate. Like, that’s true.

So you’ll hear, you know, and you also see more blatant intersexual competition where it’s not beating around the bush. It’s saying, straight up, I actually have like—I was listening to the rapper Lotto and she was bragging about the fact that, you know, her body count is so low that she might say that she’s a virgin. Right?

She’s mocking her rivals for giving it up too easily, quote unquote. She’s flexing the fact that she has tons of resources, that her boyfriends don’t mind if she cheats, essentially. Right? So she’s paradoxically signaling some things that are conflicting there. But she’s basically saying, “I’m the ultimate female, the f*ing omega female here. I’m the highest.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly.

MACKEN MURPHY: I have the highest mate value on all these variables. I have the highest reproductive value on all these variables. And I also have more resources for my future offspring than you could ever dream of. And I’m acquiring more from males constantly who don’t care if I’m going out and getting more genetic heterogeneity from multiple mates. Right? So it’s incredible to listen to just the blatant discussing of it.

And you know, I have a great appreciation for it. And it’s been good as a teaching tool. I feel like I’ve been able to teach a lot of people who would never take an evo psych class about mate preference.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s just as well that you’re using rap music, because if you’re using metal, like if you’re listening to a Bad Omen song to try and work out what Noah Sebastian thinks about his mate preferences, it’s all couched in fluffy f*ing language. It’s too whimsical. No, no, tell me. Tell me about hitting it from the back. That’s what I need.

Metal Guitarists and Intrasexual Competition

MACKEN MURPHY: There is a study on metal guitarists where they were like, is this intrasexual competition or is this intersexual attraction? Because it’s pretty clear with other forms of guitar playing that the guy who gets the guitar out to play “Wonderwall” at the party, all the other guys are thinking, “This guy is the worst.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We don’t like that.

MACKEN MURPHY: But yeah, but a lot of women actually are like, “Oh, you know, if he can do it.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, okay, this is cool.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, this is cool, right? Yeah, exactly. If it’s a—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If it’s a handsome—so f*ing Tim from Polyphia. Do you know what Polyphia is?

MACKEN MURPHY: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. It’s very mathy, fing super—maybe one of the best guitarists on the planet. Plays in it and he looks like an anime. He looks like someone out of Final Fantasy. So he’s got cool as f look and all over the place. So that’s a great question. Is it—what did you—before we continue, what did they decide? Is it intrasexual competition or intersexual advertisement?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, that’s exactly what they were investigating and they were interested because again, guitar is one where it seems so straight up and down, like this is to attract women. But metal is something where it’s like, you know, I’ve been to—I’m actually going to Metallica next year with my dad. I’m stoked.

So I don’t mind metal by any means, but at these concerts, I mean I haven’t done a poll, but I’m assuming it’s going to be like 90% male, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very male heavy.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yep. Especially as you get into the more hardcore heavy metal, it’s going to be. And even the environment, it’s kind of hostile to women in the sense that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like the mosh pit is not lots of black.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, we’re like a 120-pound woman is going to have an awesome time on average. I’m sure there’s one listening who’s like, “No, I love it.” So it’s interesting. It’s like, what are these guys doing?

And it seems to be that it is essentially a proxy for violence where it’s not something that’s necessarily—in the sense that it’s a competition between the males against each other. Not something that is attractive to women necessarily.

And the reason I use violence as an analogy there and even used the word “proxy,” which I probably shouldn’t have—the reason that I use violence as an analogy is that there’s evidence from some animal species, for example, that even though winning fights makes you more likely to mate, right, the fight itself is something that the females do not appreciate and do not like. Right?

So it’s not the case in some bird species, for example, that the female birds are standing around watching the male birds have at it and thinking, “Ooh, you know, I love the way he’s completely pecking the sh out of this guy.” Right? That’s not what seems to be happening. Instead it’s like, “Oh my gosh, there’s violence. Let me get out of here.” And then the fact that he won later gives him the formidability.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re saying that all guitar players are too pussy to fight?

MACKEN MURPHY: No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m sure that a lot of them could kick my ass. What I am saying though is that it functions similarly to that where it’s a massive status competition between the males out of view.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is Ollie M.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Where it’s—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is Ollie M again.

MACKEN MURPHY: Exactly. Where it’s like, we’re not playing heavy metal guitar to impress women directly. We’re doing this to settle the status hierarchy amongst ourselves, using this alternative to—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Then the women will pick off and then—

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. And then once we’ve all agreed on that, then we can move.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So what you’re saying is becoming a metal guitarist is a high risk strategy because if you become the best, great.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But if you suck, you double lose. Not only do you do something that I find unattractive, but everybody else seems to think you’re really uncool because you’re no good at it.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. I think that learning the—in terms of low risk, high reward strategy, learning four chords.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rhythm guitars. Rhythm guitars.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Want to be the rhythm guitarist?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Learning four chords on the guitar and buying an acoustic guitar and, you know, learning a few good songs, really.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Aspiring male metal guitar players that have their entire future is just forked in front of them. And which way do you want to go?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, they can do both. But the metal aspect, it’s very likely that the returns to mating won’t come in until you’ve appreciated quite a bit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, also as well, you’re going to be playing to audiences that are 90% men.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, whereas if you’re f*ing Benson Boone or whatever, Luis Haldi or some sh, it’s just all checked.

Male Formidability and Female Attraction

So okay, I remember reading forever ago and I’ve not been able to find it again. I’m gutted. A study that was looking at—maybe it was had this happened or maybe it was women being asked to envision it happening. An altercation occurring where their male partner was unable to protect them and that the question was how much does your attraction drop pre and post this interaction or pre and post infidelity? And that the pre and post “he couldn’t protect me” was greater than infidelity.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I haven’t been able to find it again. Is that—have you come across this? You’re the f*ing ChatGPT of—

MACKEN MURPHY: I haven’t. Well, I hallucinate quite a bit less I would hope. But I think that I actually did see this and I think that it was actually an online poll rather than—so that’s probably why you weren’t able to find it.

I think I’ll take the results kind of face valid that—I mean attraction is a funny word, right? Because it’s like I wouldn’t be surprised if you even found that a breakup was more likely to be precipitated. Infidelity has a very high breakup consequence rate. It’s one of, if not the most common causes of divorce and it’s a very common cause of relationship dissolution.

You don’t really hear about men losing fights leading to breakups as often. Although, you know, maybe it’s just such a low frequency event that it doesn’t have the same influence on human relationships. But I think it could even be the case. What I’m getting at is that the attraction component is taking a bigger hit, but the actual relationship stability—maybe it goes the other way. I’m not sure.

It doesn’t surprise me though. I mean it’s a huge negative signal. Come on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Beauty matters way more than chastity and it’s not even close. Explain that to me.

The Truth About Body Count and Virginity

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, you see these studies on the importance of—so we have these cross-cultural studies going back to 1989 with David Buss, where you look at men’s stated preference for chastity versus good looks. And you also look at these more recent kind of individual level studies that are a little more modern and take different methods.

And I would say, yes, that men on average care more about looks than a woman being chaste or pure. For example, there was one study where men perceived one group of women as more physically attractive and likely more promiscuous. That was their inference, which is commonly the case with attractiveness, where when people perceive attractiveness, they tend to also perceive promiscuity. And they still chose that group.

I mean, there’s this—I think it’s actually apocryphal. I hate to ruin this, but I do think it’s a fake advertisement. But the fact that this advertisement is so viral shows that it’s tapping into something that is appreciated to some degree or reflects something true-ish. It was a used Porsche dealership ad where it was, you know, “You’re not the first, but do you really care?” And it’s a beautiful woman, right, is the idea.

And I think that the fact that that’s something that’s very clickable, very viral shows that it is something that a lot of men find intuitive. But it’s also something we see in these studies that signals to low sociosexuality. Are those attractive? Of course. But is it a high priority? Not really, no. Men put looks over chastity in most cases.

Why? That’s interesting. I think that’s a question that I’ll have to think about and circle back to you because it’s a really good one. But the first thing that’s coming to mind is that especially in a modern environmental context where we have contraception and where a lack of sexual history might signal some kind of religious commitments or atypical social development, it may be the case that the strategic salience of chastity or virginity actually flips to an extent.

You’ve seen the studies from Thomas and Stuart Williams and these guys. They’ve done their ideal body count studies. And it’s an ideal mate preference, right? So you should get, you know, you should get even if it’s a ridiculous result, you should see it if that makes sense. Like the ideal mate preference for penises we discussed earlier was bigger than they’d ever seen. So these do tend to be quite fanciful. And it was, you know, I believe it was peaking at one, two, and three.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not zero in terms of zero was as attractive as six.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah, that’s well remembered. I think that’s exactly right. So men were as put off by virginity as several past partners, like an above average number of past partners.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the average for men and women?

Average Body Count Statistics

MACKEN MURPHY: Okay, so the average body count based on CDC data, median and excluding virgins from the data set, they put out four for women and six for men. Now the reason for the discrepancy could be due to a variety of factors. There are so many statistical potential explanations for it. But it could just be as simple as men over-report and women under-report.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s both five.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. I would say that from that you can safely say that the average body count in the US probably isn’t over six because why would men lie and say it’s lower than it is? I think that for us, in kind of an urban, college-educated background, secular, relatively secular, at least—I think that given our backgrounds, our kind of social circles might find that surprising.

But you also have to think about the fact that there are very conservative religious people. There are people who are incredibly asocial. I mean, this is a CDC general population census.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s going to overestimate how normal the normies are.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. So we’re hitting all types. We’re hitting people who are devoutly Muslim. We’re hitting people who are playing video games all day and haven’t spoken to a woman in two years and they don’t care that they haven’t spoken to them. So yeah, I think when you run those numbers, it’s going to be between four and six, and six is probably fair. It’s not higher than that for a median. Mean is higher.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is it surprising that most people, even men, don’t want virgins? Even female virgins are discriminated against?

Why Virginity Isn’t Preferred

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that it is interesting, right? I think that contraception has changed the strategic valence of past sexual partners such that disease risk and the risk of a covert pregnancy that you’re not aware of that’s existing from the previous relationship—those sorts of risks are very reduced. And as a result of them being very reduced, now body count—and I’m using that term because it’s what everyone uses; number of past sexual partners would be the technical term—is mainly used as a proxy for personality.

And so I think that what men and what women are—we haven’t spoken about women’s preferences here, they’re pretty interesting too—I think that what is being scanned for is primarily cues to personality.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I can’t get over the f*ing chastity thing. Like it’s lower, I think, than most people would assume. And I would guess for any normal person with a normal amount of looks and social exposure throughout their life and is thirty—this is especially if you’re a woman who’s three or four or below—you have either had to be in long-term committed relationships for most of that time or actively turning down suitors. Like you’re going to have to be saying no quite a bit.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Okay, so I’m going to revise something about the beauty over chastity statement. It’s not like an absolute in all cases. On the tail end, I’m imagining I would be confident saying that if we’re talking about normal variation—like do men care more about a woman’s sexual history or the way she looks within—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Depends on how much she looks and how much—

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. Within normal variation, then I would say that yeah, beauty is winning. But then when you get into abnormal outlier cases, things are going to change a lot.

But in terms of the—I do want to circle back to the personality indicator. Body count as a personality indicator. It’s an indicator of sociosexuality to some degree. And then it’s also an indicator of normal social adjustment. And I say normal as in typical in the sense that if someone has—I remember speaking to a man who was very classic kind of bro type, you know, very muscular, lots of tattoos. I’m not talking about some very hippie, polyamory type person. He’s like kind of a bro type.

And he was talking about how weird it was that one of his friends preferred virgins. And I said, “Well, would you date someone if they were?” Because I was putting my researcher hat on. I wanted to double-click on this. I was like, “Oh, you know, this is pretty interesting. He’s saying that this other mate preference is really weird. So what’s his mate preference?”

And he said, “Oh, I’d be so freaked out. I’d feel like I was doing something illegal.” And I think that that might get at it to an extent where it’s so uncommon in his social circles and in many men’s—you know, in America, these surveys are America, UK, that sort of thing—it’s so uncommon to encounter that when you do, it might be a signal of some kind of maladjustment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is this happening?

MACKEN MURPHY: Whereas it’s a balance between, “Is this person normal functioning, well-adjusted, sexually active individual—you know, a person who has sex, just my type,” that kind of mentality. And then on the other end, “Is it someone who is going to cheat on me, who is not going to be able to hold a stable, committed relationship down?” That sort of thing.

And so I think that that’s what explains the—I guess when you think about it, I know that from a first principles evolutionary perspective, you might think that no sexual history is always better. But when you take it in our current ecological context, I think that men’s preferences make some strategic sense.

The Reality of Being Someone’s First

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And not even necessarily our current—although I guess when you start to fold religion in previously, that gets a bit squirrely. There is something sacred about the first time. Everybody remembers the first time, unless you were drunk, I think. And do you want that to be you? If you’re a fully fledged adult that has done it five times before, number six is going to be someone’s first. Really?

I have a friend who dated a pretty public-facing girl and she made it—you can still go on the Internet and search these stories. And he was the one that took her virginity, and I think he was thirty and she was sort of early twenties, like twenty-two or something like that. And fair play. But yeah, there’s a bit of—I don’t even know what to say about it.

MACKEN MURPHY: The facial expression you’re making is, I think, confusion. I think that that’s a good one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s just—for the guys that are listening, you and this is the reason that it’s interesting and the reason that me and you took an interest in this is that a lot of the talk in kind of the red pill bro-sphere would be around, you know, virgins is what you want. This is why you’ve got to get your passports, bro, et cetera, et cetera.

MACKEN MURPHY: And then you see men like normal men’s preferences and they don’t—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We don’t want that. And if you just think—everybody listening to this is going to be of age and a little bit older. Just think about what that would be like. And you would know maybe beforehand or certainly afterward. Would that be like super sick, bro? Or would that be something else? And I don’t know what it is. And you’re like, “What the f* just happened?” Like that feels—

And there’s also, here’s another thing to fold into that. I wonder whether there’s a sense of obligation.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: From guys to girls that, “Oh, first she’s going to expect”—which kind of pushes out the casual sex angle here. That if this is your first, that’s going to be special. Maybe she’s going to expect more. I’m not just one number, which means that a particular type of sex—casual sex—

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s less accepted. I’m more obliged to stick about perhaps.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. I mean you hear—I think that honestly it’s just a very—the takes that you’re describing are very online and kind of only work online. They don’t really map onto the modern mating market in a way that a lot of people find relatable.

I think that the facial expression you made in reacting to your friend’s story—I think that that explains it. The thing is that it’s not—it’s just that it kind of feels a little weird. I think that past a certain age it’s a little odd. And I think that that’s where these mate preferences come.

I think it’s worth noting here—I’m conscious of the fact that we might switch topics—that women’s mate preferences are surprisingly very similar here. If you ask about women’s ideal preferences, I think that there’s this concept among men that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, get away with way more.

Women’s Preferences on Virginity

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah. That women love playboys, that sort of thing. But there does seem to be a similar effect where it’s true that women discriminate much harsher against virgins than men. This is again—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s interesting.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, this is the Stuart Williams and Thomas paper where there was a gap where women’s kind of “ick” at the whole virgin thing was stronger. Men also exhibited it, but women’s—it was a bigger one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which is so interesting.

The Impact of Partner Count on Relationship Preferences

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I find that very intuitive. But then their optimum was very similar. We’re again talking like one past partner, two past partners, three past partners, four. That all looks pretty swell.

The decline starts after above average, where we’re talking 7, 8, 9.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s a slightly longer tail.

MACKEN MURPHY: But then as you pass that—like this male has slept with, it’s kind of funny how well it maps onto the averages—he slept with more women than most men will sleep with in their lives. That’s when it starts to, that’s when we get the plummet.

And it’s like the willingness to date a man who has slept with like 20 women, 30 women.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you’re saying personality cues again.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it’s like, is this guy really going to be like, just be realistic, like odds on how likely is this guy going to be to never cheat on you and never want to cheat on you, that kind of thing? Very low probability.

Then also like how likely is he to take you seriously and be interested in you? So I think that it makes sense. But when I first heard about those data I was surprised by them.

The intuition again, going back to the 80s in the kind of evo psych literature has been like, oh, chastity is going to be much more important to men than women. But then the actual research has showed surprisingly less consistent sex differences. And then, you know, if you’re talking about modern Anglosphere populations, basically no difference.

Appearance and Sociosexuality Cues

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean if you were in Victorian era England, the judgment on tattoos, dyed hair, choker necklaces, piercings would be significantly harsher because all of those are cues of sociosexuality.

I think everybody interprets tattoos, dyed hair, piercings, choker necklaces. The choker necklace thing is f*ing fascinating. You’ve seen that, right? Yeah, that it’s fewer dates before sex, like more likely to give oral sex a bunch of others. And it seems to be borne out in the data a little bit too.

MACKEN MURPHY: That’s the thing is that with appearance enhancement that has stereotypes associated with it. There’s going to be a self-enforcing effect. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because you know that this is going to be the way that it’s, so you are expecting people to interpret you in that way and are prepared to play up to it.

MACKEN MURPHY: Even if the appearance based stereotype is at first completely meaningless and inaccurate. And it’s a joke about like the location of the necklace being related to oral somehow, like it’s a black belt or whatever. Even if it starts as like a silly meme among high schoolers, once it’s there, now there’s the social expectations associated with it.

And so when you’re waking up in the morning and being like, oh, I want to wear this type of necklace, you know that that association is there. And so there’s going to be some effects found.

And we see the same thing with tattoos where it’s like people think the tattoos are associated with sociosexuality and then when you test it, it actually is. Right. People think this. Yeah. You think about facial piercings, you think about choker necklaces, these things.

It’s like maybe at first it was nonsense, but once there’s the association, you’ve just made everyone who’s not that way reconsider. And just that alone is going to have a small effect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

MACKEN MURPHY: And these are small effects, but they’re still interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What is the impact of body count on long term relationship success?

Body Count and Relationship Success

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, it’s very intuitive. I’m always surprised by how controversial this is because I say it quite a bit and I say it not even kind of bracing for impact, if that makes sense. I’m like, this will, this seems intuitive, right?

But people who love to have casual sex and sleep with lots of people and hop from relationship to relationship and as a result of all those behaviors end up with a higher number for their age than you would otherwise expect. Those people are less likely to succeed in long term monogamous pair bonds than people who do not like doing that and do not have that sort of track record.

And when I say succeed, I mean in terms of every outcome measure. I mean, you know, more likely to get divorced, less likely to be satisfied in their relationships, more likely to cheat.

There was one analysis I believe was by the IFS, where if an individual—and this is from, this is all true for men and women, by the way. I know that on the Internet there’s a huge focus on women, but all these effects, there’s no sex difference and sometimes the effect is even larger in men than women. So that aside, right, we’re talking about everybody here.

If you subdivided the data neatly and said people with a body count below five, people with a body count above five, what’s their infidelity rate? The infidelity rate of the above 5 group was double that of the below 5 group.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. So this is not a nothing burger, right? This is a thing. And the reason it’s a thing is very intuitive, right? It’s like, what is an affair, for example? Like, an affair is a form of casual sex.

And so if someone has had lots of casual sex, they’re telling you to some extent, oh, I’m more likely than someone who has not done this. I probably enjoy this, right? Because I keep doing it over and over. I mean, I’m sure there are some cases where that’s not true. And people change, obviously, but it’s a huge, you know, past behavior is a predictor of future behavior.

So you’re basically saying, oh, I’ve got like, when people are surprised by this, I’m surprised because it’s like you’ve got two groups of people. Let’s say people who have slept with lots of people and people who haven’t. And you’re trying to predict who’s going to sleep with more people in the future going forward. Why would you predict anything other than—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The only explanation I could come up with is that somebody has closed the loops.

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, they’ve gotten it out of their system. Yeah, the classic imagine if I said that with alcohol, right? I’m going to get it out of my system. I’m going to, so I can drink less in the future. I’m going to drink more during my undergrad. Right.

Imagine if I said this with drug use. Imagine if I said it with positive things. Imagine if I said I’m going to get the gym out of my system, right? That doesn’t happen that it’s like, oh, I’m going to go to the gym every day, I’m going to work on my muscles. And then in the future I am not going to want to do it as much because I used to do it.

Like you build healthy habits, you build unhealthy habits.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that there’s ever the potential for somebody to stray because they had unfulfilled variation early on in their sexual career?

MACKEN MURPHY: That’s, I mean, it’s a really good point. And I think that what we’re talking about here is average population level trends, which is the sort of thing this data is good for. I think that there probably is some causal relationship, but the data don’t speak to that yet. And you actually can’t ethically design the sort of experiment that would tell us.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing ethics boards, dude. They suck so hard.

MACKEN MURPHY: So many interesting questions that we could answer.

Premarital Sex as a Predictor

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it’s an interesting one around how people interpret sociosexuality. Buss had in “The Evolution of Desire,” I swear one of the lines that’s still in my Readwise is “the single biggest predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sex.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that true?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, it’s sex predicting sex.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right, but is that true? Is the single biggest predictor of extramarital sex, premarital sex, single biggest predictor?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, it’s David Buss saying it, so—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m very tempted to just slightly older book though, right? Like has “Evolution of Desire,” what, how old now?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, that’s true. It’s like 1999 I believe. So I mean in my data and looking at other people’s data, I would say relationship dissatisfaction, but that is—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Could that be due to, think about—

MACKEN MURPHY: Think about relationship satisfaction is like the dam lifting up and like all the other causes being allowed to run roughshod.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Relationship dissatisfaction is not one of the predictors that you could be able to say in advance. Exactly.

MACKEN MURPHY: It’s like, obviously when things get bad, they get bad. Right. It kind of is predicting itself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And maybe it’s because they’ve got wandering eyes, maybe it’s because they’re not paying as much—

MACKEN MURPHY: Exactly. And then it’s also, it’s not a, like, it’s kind of an all-cause thing because as soon as you don’t care about the relationship, any other motivator becomes much more pertinent. Like maybe you were the sort of guy who never, or had a wandering eye and, you know, couldn’t be swayed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dissatisfaction has now meant that the first thing to the surface is now what bursts out. And the most salient personality trait you have is your high sociosexuality. You slept with 25 women before you go.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that the best predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sex. Maybe that’s true. I mean, I do know that if you look at people who do go the very religious route and they just have one person and that sort of thing, I mean, they do tend to have—and they don’t live together before marriage. Yeah, I mean they seem to do pretty well.

I do think though that this is correlational and so there are going to be individuals who don’t fit that pattern. And one thing that we cannot test—this is a huge caveat—is that we can’t know. Like if you take that person who had a high body count, let’s say, and cheated. We can’t rewind the clock and say, oh, if you hadn’t built that habit, you would have like, maybe, maybe it would have been even worse.

Like, I can’t recommend from this. I can’t. Like tentatively I would say it’s probably not a good idea if you want to marry for life. It’s probably not a good idea to sow your wild oats. It’s probably not a good idea to try and get it out of your system. With the caveat that it’s hard to know from the data with great confidence that there aren’t individual cases where that actually is protective.

The Causal Question

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But also, I really wanted to get into this, the causal effect. Somebody’s just lost their virginity yesterday and they’re going to get into a relationship which is going to be their lifelong relationship in eight years time. They want to have sex with lots of people. They want to. They really, really want to.

MACKEN MURPHY: And is me saying hold it back, is that going to make them less likely to cheat? Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s a good point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does it change? Does it change? Does you sleeping around? Because one of the questions would be, well, you know what, it’s like you developed some sort of habit, some sort of lifestyle. You’ve maybe gotten rid of some of the stigma that’s a part of it. Inculcated some kind of f*ing sexual rhythm with new partners, whatever it might be. You know what’s out there.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, right. And you actually know the mechanics. I mean, people who have never had a one night stand, they actually don’t.

The Reality of One Night Stands

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Know the mechanics of a one night stand. Yeah, exactly. That’s such an interesting point. I think one night stands are apart from in modern media, often romanticized by people that have maybe only been in long term relationships like the taxi home, the f*ing cleaning up of the clothes in the morning. It’s not the beginning of a love actually movie. It’s just steeped in awkwardness and stories that you tell your friends in WhatsApp chats the next day.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, I think there’s some cases probably where people have that experience, don’t like it, and it actually solidifies their commitment to monogamy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*, I’m not doing that again.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that when we’re talking about, I made kind of a glib analogy, I was feeling quite cheeky, made an analogy to alcohol. And I think that to walk that back to some degree, I would say that it’s probably true if we’re talking about very high cases, but there probably are some cases within normal range where like if you came to me and said, look, Macken I really want to drink and party and all that sort of stuff, would my advice really be going into undergrad? Well, don’t do it because you’ll become an alcoholic later. Or would it be like, well, have a little bit of fun, try not to go too far and then after check back in and maybe don’t. Maybe you could make similar advice about how to navigate sexuality. If you are someone who’s sociosexually…

Understanding Population Data vs Individual Cases

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is the problem with these sort of big population level data, these big surveys. We don’t know what the underlying motivation is. But there are lots of different ways Robert Plomin. I always think about Robert Plomin when I think about this stuff. I don’t think about casual sex. I think about Robert Plomin.

And he said to me that there’s lots of ways to get fat. He’s talking about behavioral genetics. He’s saying there’s lots of different ways to get fat. Some people have a higher ghrelin release, some people got a bigger stomach, some people just don’t like exercise. Some people got a slower, lower BMR. A million other ways that I haven’t thought about.

What that means is when you look at fat people, you are looking at many different routes up the top of the same mountain. When you look at high body count people, many different routes up that maybe it’s because of social approval, maybe it’s because of a need for connection, maybe it’s because of a difficulty with commitment, maybe it’s because of high sociosexuality, maybe it’s because of a high sex drive, maybe it’s because whatever’s going on, maybe it’s because of your job, right? You’re a stripper or whatever, or a f*ing metal guitar player.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think in that case the negative predictive outcomes might be maintained. But yeah, I completely take your point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And we don’t know how people are getting up because we’re just taking these big aggregate pieces of data.

Context Matters in Relationship History

MACKEN MURPHY: I also think that another thing to keep in mind, the reason that body count means anything is likely because it’s a proxy for sociosexuality. And so when we’re looking at an aggregate, as you say, sure, there’s some predictive benefit. But if we were to look at any individual case, you could assess it and say, okay, well how predictive is this of sociosexuality?

And we even see this in the recent research from Thomas’s team and I believe Stuart Williams is on it as well, where they looked at this across nations and they took a more fine grained, nuanced approach than they did in 2019. And what they did was they looked at essentially the effects of recency, right?

And you can really think about this: what’s a better cue to sociosexuality? If you’re 38 and you meet a woman who’s 34 and she’s slept with 10 people, but they were all in undergrad and since then it’s been one boyfriend, right? That’s very different to meeting the same 34 year old woman who’s actually it’s been 10, but they were all this past month. Right. And you’re number 11. What’s the cue? Right. In terms of personality.

And what they found was that people were sensitive to that. And I think they’re sensitive to a lot of things. I think that if you’re talking about a body count of seven being “high,” it’s not really high for a 35 year old. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not a 35 year old to someone who’s only slept with one person in the last 10 years.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. But it actually is insanely high for a 19 year old. Right. That’s a shock. Right. So I think that for people listening to this, I would say that if you’re trying to… I mean, I talk about this stuff first and foremost because I find it interesting. Not necessarily… It’s kind of a second order effect. If anything happens to be useful, that’s wonderful. Right. And we want to extract that as much as possible. But that’s not my primary motivation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As a life coach. Are you.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. In terms of looking into it. But I would say that if you were trying to glean something practical from this, don’t… I wouldn’t take the kind of caveman approach of “oh, high body count, bad, low body count, good,” or you know, a cave woman as well, because these preferences are apparently very similar. I would say these outcomes as well.

I would say, okay, well, I’ve got this piece of information, but what’s the context of that number? Is this a person, if you want long term, healthy monogamy, is this a person who has had five long term relationships? Because that might even be a green flag. If you’re 30 and they’ve had a few relationships, that sounds pretty good. If you’re an undergrad and you met someone in the numbers five and it’s all one night…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s such a good point. If you were to do a third iteration of Thomas’s study and say, were these in a committed relationship that lasted for longer than six months or were these one offs?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, completely different story.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Totally different. Yeah. That’s so great.

Do Men Care About Women’s Careers?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. 7.1 million views, quote, tweeting, “men do not care about your career. Ladies. I’m sorry, they just don’t. They will date a waitress at Applebee’s over a corporate executive if they treat them right and make their lives easier.” What does the science say about this?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, the “men don’t care about your career” – it kind of depends on what men you’re talking about. If you’re talking about successful men, they clearly do. I mean, there’s no… this whole meme of successful men will date… what did she… a waitress. Applebee’s waitress. So the successful men will date an Applebee’s waitress doesn’t line up with the data that richer men tend to select richer women. More educated men tend to select more educated women. Richer women appear basically immune to the decline in marriage that has transpired since the 1970s.

So when you look at this data holistically, it doesn’t seem to be the case that there is an effect of men selecting downward for youth and beauty and whatnot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Trading wealth for looks.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. At the expense of career and education. When you look at the most successful men, they tend to pair up with the most successful women. This whole men will date a Denny’s waitress kind of fantasy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Be careful with what you say about Denny’s. I’m a huge Denny’s fan.

MACKEN MURPHY: No. Nothing. Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a Denny’s waitress, but I’m just saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, no, no, no. I don’t care about the waitresses. I care about the restaurant.

MACKEN MURPHY: Okay, so Applebee’s, then.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Applebee’s. You can talk shit on as much as you want.

MACKEN MURPHY: Okay, I’m not talking shit.

The Applebee’s Theory of Attractiveness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, just be careful with Denny’s tiptoeing around. I’m a proud fing Denny’s attendee. One point that I do want to bring up. A friend of mine has an Applebee’s theory of attractiveness, which is, if you see some chick that’s super famous, like Sydney Sweeney, for instance, so he uses this example of Jennifer Aniston versus Megan Fox. Jennifer Aniston you could see working in Applebee’s. You just saw her. You’d be like, f, that’s a hot Applebee’s waitress. But you could see it working in Applebee’s. There’s no way Megan Fox works in Applebee’s.

And what is this test meant to deduce whether or not you can… whether or not you’re actually able to sleep with super famous celeb women? Total pulled out of his ass bro science. But he basically says if you could imagine her working in Applebee’s, you probably got a shot. Is she sort of God tier? Yeah, you’ve done everything.

MACKEN MURPHY: Nobody’s going to find a… I need to see your friend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, he’s… He would not f Jennifer Aniston or Sydney Sweeney or fing Megan Fox.

MACKEN MURPHY: They’re all rejected.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Applebee’s coming up a good bit. So how much truth is there in “men don’t care about your career?” Because it seems to me guys would be happy to sacrifice more in terms of socioeconomic status from a woman than women would be in a guy. That’s pretty uncontroversial.

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, that is one of the most well supported findings in psychology.

Disposition vs Career Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so is this just doing reductio ad absurdum on that “men do not care about your career. I’m sorry, they don’t. They’ll date a waitress at Applebee’s over corporate executive if they treat them right and make their lives easier.” It’s interesting there that they said “treat them right and make their lives easier.” Not “is hot.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, actually that’s a good point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s disposition.

MACKEN MURPHY: I heard that, but it landed on my ears.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As a previous meme, they’re talking about disposition, agreeableness, conscientiousness.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that the caveats that is chucked in there probably makes it true in the sense that yes, people will select for personality and beauty over career.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Highly disagreeable woman in masculine energy, not soft or sensitive, not treating you right, making your life more difficult versus less educated, less wealthy.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah. We don’t see… If you look at the biggest studies on stated and revealed preferences, career comes in as a low, moderate priority. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For the men on women or for both?

MACKEN MURPHY: For both. Well, in revealed preferences for both for men, especially in stated preferences. So the sex differences in revealed preferences are less consistent. I think that my initial reaction of “oh, that’s nonsense” comes from knowing that successful men tend to pair up with successful women and that suggests some caring there.

And then when you ask men, there does seem to be some stated preference for career, it’s not “don’t care.” And then when you look at revealed preferences, again it’s a low priority. I do think that with the personality caveat or with a beauty caveat, it kind of becomes true. But to say “don’t care” is quite misleading.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s interesting that you and I actually misread even as I was saying it, didn’t realize that it said “treat them right and make their lives…”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly right.

Elite Men and Assortative Mating

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which went to looks and youth. It was 35-year-old corporate executive versus 21-year-old Applebee’s. And then one of the reactions, the reaction that actually got me onto it was from a woman being critical. “Smart men don’t marry bimbos because that would be a very, very stupid thing to do. The men claiming they don’t care about intelligence, education or status are just revealing where they’re at on the hierarchy more than anything else.” There’s a lot that’s been pulled out of this, but the first one, smart men don’t marry bimbos, Katherine D. Boyle or some shit.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that is very accurate actually to the data in terms smart men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Don’t marry bimbos because that would be a very, very stupid thing to do. The men claiming they don’t care about intelligence, education, status are just revealing where they’re at on the hierarchy more than anything else. How’s that accurate to the data?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, they’ve put some linguistic top spin on it in order to make it a tweet. So it’s not precise, but it is accurate directionally in the sense that higher status men marry higher status women, more educated men marry more educated women, richer men marry richer women, men with higher income marry higher income women, even though oftentimes those women stop working after marriage.

At the initial point of contact, they tend to both be in similar stratospheres and they also tend to marry similarly in terms of their own age. The richer a man is, the smaller in age gap he is likely to have, which a lot of people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The richer a man is, the smaller the age gap.

MACKEN MURPHY: The less likely the precise phrasing would be that the less likely he is to have a large age gap. So you see with these 10-year downward age gaps as well as these 5-year downward age gaps, they’re less common among the male economic elite than they are among poor men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Explain me that.

The Jeff Bezos Archetype

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, I think that it’s that these men are very successful and they’re crushing at everything they’re doing. It’s kind of the Jeff Bezos archetype where it’s like Jeff Bezos could, if he wanted to marry a 21-year-old, but he probably doesn’t want to. He wants to marry someone he can actually relate to, who’s a fellow multimillionaire and successful in her own right. And that’s who he gets along with and who appeals to him.

And I think that that’s probably just the case with these. I think it’s just probably the case with these elite males that they also covet eliteness in their partners.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so it’s kind of a refined taste born out of a refined lifestyle.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To be able to achieve high socioeconomic success as a man.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve had to become discerning and you probably have non-typical challenges that you’re facing and you want somebody that can keep up with you. The great line from David Senrow, he says he’s read like 500 biographies of greatest founders from history. Everyone should go and listen to founders. And he says the rule that I’ve learned about choosing a partner is that as a high performing CEO or founder, you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all. And I feel like it’s playing into that.

MACKEN MURPHY: It is. I was speaking to a very successful businessman, one of these absolute crushers. And he’s dating someone who is in a non, just a not highly cognitive role. And he’s like, “Look, they’re great, but I miss when I was dating women who were in my space because at least they understood what the f* I was talking about when I came home from work, the sort of deals I’m working on, the mechanics of it.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Being a partner in this.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. One thing that I love about my girlfriend, frankly, not to be cheesy is just that she’s also a researcher. And so when I’m explaining something or presenting a paper or talking to a conference, all aspects of my work are fully understood by her.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not laborious. You don’t need to overly explain.

MACKEN MURPHY: And to the point where I can actually acquire assistance on and offer assistance on research matters.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Such a huge.

MACKEN MURPHY: It’s a huge hack. And a lot of these successful men, they wouldn’t have anything to talk to with the Applebee’s, Denny’s waitress. Tons of things to talk to. Because Denny’s is incredible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

MACKEN MURPHY: Applebee’s specifically.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, Denny’s supremacist.

Evolving Partner Preferences

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Look, I’ve been in relationships in the past and this is an interesting pivot that guys in their mid to late twenties will see. And I certainly saw as well that what I was selecting for in my 20s was not what served me in my 30s. And that was largely due to kind of growing up, not being so much of an adult infant.

But that as I started to grow as a person and have, I think what really happened was my true interests came to the surface, that I was less embarrassed about what it was that I was interested in. I felt less shame about being nerdy or sensitive despite presenting like the school bully, like inside our Milhouse, as Finn Taylor said.

And what that meant was what I wanted in a partner changed. I couldn’t get away with somebody who was simply pleasant and attractive. I needed to be able to have a little bit more of a conversation because what it made me feel like was I was sort of Batman by day but Bruce Wayne by night and I couldn’t bring my work home.

It’s obvious that these conversations are important to me. It’s obvious that thinking about this stuff fires me up and I’m interested in it. And if I can’t bring that into my relationship. For instance, if you needed to re-explain what a sex difference is or what intersexual competition is every time that you needed to talk about. So how was today, honey? What are you working on at the moment? That would be tough.

And I think the desire that people have to be able to really resonate with their partner on the surface, especially again, online red pill bro sphere doesn’t necessarily sort of hit, but when you get into the nuts and bolts of how this long term relationship is actually going to work.

A relationship is essentially one long f*ing podcast. That’s what it is. It’s one big conversation the rest of time. And you want to the theory is basically that you should try and have the most generative conversation that you can. You want to be able to speak to someone for 20,000 hours without getting bored.

If you’ve got that plus the basics sorted, I think you’re probably going to get through. They’re pretty good with loyalty, they’re pretty good in terms of attractiveness on your level, et cetera, et cetera. That functionally is a big, is carrying a big part of long term relationship success. I think. Can you talk to this person and not get bored?

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, I think, I mean what you said there, I hope somebody clips it because it’s a really good point that I think people should hear and I think the analogy is funny.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean, I’m always going to pedestalize my own industry.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Well, one thing that was coming to mind was that it must be quite difficult for you to find someone who you can actually explain your work in a way that is coherent. With me, I’m wearing a few hats and so.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But you can niche down. Yeah, you need to find somebody that’s in the niche.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. I don’t need someone who understands all elements. They don’t need to understand TikTok and that kind of thing. Understanding one or the other is probably fine, but with you, your career genuinely is very, very strange.

The Niche Career Challenge

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s. Yeah. Thank you. I was thinking about what it would be like if you were a UFC fighter. Do you need to date another UFC fighter?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, a lot of them do. Ryan, I believe is. He’s not a UFC fighter, but I believe his Mrs. is excellent. And when you kind of hear that guy interviewed and stuff, it’s like, yeah, that tracks.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, of course. But the more niche that your pursuit is, especially if it’s sort of sex coded.

MACKEN MURPHY: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If it’s male coded or female coded.

MACKEN MURPHY: I understand what you’re saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, f*, you’re a teacher. Well, okay, you’re going to date another male teacher. Well, you know, you can probably. I think a lot of teaching, especially of primary school, secondary school kids, most competent people can hold a conversation there.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But if you’re talking about, oh, I teach pure mathematics at postgrad, oh, f*ing hell.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think it, Yeah, I think it’s understanding the kind of elements in nature, obviously you don’t need to have dating within your career isn’t necessarily necessary. But dating within your kind of stratospheric ballpark of a doctor and a lawyer both understand long hours and cognitive labor and, you know, trading lots of education.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even if one’s a pediatric surgeon and the other one does sports rehab or some shit. Yeah, exactly.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be even closer. Such as this. I think that where this whole kind of Applebee’s waitress fantasy falls apart and the reason that you just don’t see it right again, you can. This is so fact checkable. You can see how many times does that happen?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Times does that happen?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, you can see is this something that happens? And when you actually look at the data, educated men marry educated women, richer men. You know, I’ve said this all before, so it’s like, it doesn’t seem to happen very often. Not as a norm.

And I think that in terms of explaining it, part of it is just that part of it is just proximity effects, of course. But then I think part of it also is selection for genuine selection for similarity, someone you can talk to. I think that a corporate lawyer could totally date a sick businesswoman or a surgeon or whatever. I think that, yeah, I think that most of them, if they were dating someone who’s.

The Podcaster’s Unique Challenge

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It doesn’t need to be within the same niche. One other interesting f*ing appendage to add on to the work that I do, unfortunately, there is basically no moat around podcasting because everybody has conversations and what you’re basically doing is chatting shit for a living.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the issue of that is that everybody partakes in what you do in one form or another. And what I do and the particular skill set that I have built up permeates the rest of my life in a way that if I was a surgeon or a UFC fighter, it wouldn’t.

Unless you’re a very bad fighter, you’re not randomly getting into punch ups on the street or over dinner or with your partner. And you, presumably, you’re not just spontaneously doing improv surgery when you’re out at a bar.

MACKEN MURPHY: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But everybody partakes in what I do. Which means that at least in my experience, it’s been sometimes a little bit of a challenge to make girls feel comfortable not being, not having a self assessment of their boring.

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, yes, I completely understand what you’re. Is that you’re a professional conversationalist whose job is to.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What the f* have I got to talk to him about? What have I got to talk. He just spent the afternoon with Jordan Peterson and Macken Murphy talking about God. It would be like being a professional porn star and going home to your amateur sex. But apart from the fact that you have sex everywhere, you have it over dinner, you have it as the kids are at the table, you have it as you’re doing the dishes. It’ll be like that. And this is what I mean. It permeates everything.

So it’s an interesting shot. What I’m saying is it incredibly unique. Podcasters need more sympathy is what I’m saying. Jesus f*ing Christmas.

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, it’s. Yeah, I mean, that is absolutely fascinating. I’m glad I double clicked there because I was expecting just the kind of mechanics of the work being hard to understand. But the porn star analogy really drove it home for me. But.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I know the language.

The Cost of Turning Passion Into Profession

MACKEN MURPHY: Do you feel when you get home—so to say that there is a—I was speaking to a guy who was a professional guitarist in his early 20s, and he said it ruined guitar for him. Not—he was playing Wonderwall, so he was working for these cover bands and things like that. He was a pro guitarist, right, but not like a huge success.

And he said that it killed guitar for him where it was like he got paid to do it so much that it was like there was a period where it took a while to get back into it. And I’ve even found this with social media to some extent that it’s like when I was doing it and there was no money involved and it was kind of just for fun, there was a lot more—it was a lot—there was so much more creative passion at that time. And I kind of have to get myself—I forced myself in that headspace.

Do you leave like—does talking become kind of like, look, I talk, I talk, I talk professionally. Let me rest. Does that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, like the porn star coming home and going, “Honey, not tonight.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. Like, I’ve been doing this all—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, nine to five. Yeah, come on. I could talk about this for a long time. I wrote a little note to myself probably about five years ago, just as I started to turn pro with the show, which was during COVID. And I’ve come to sort of think about turning anything that you love into a labor as a very dangerous pursuit. Yeah, very dangerous. You need to pick it very carefully.

If you play pickleball, you love pickleball. You play a couple of nights a week and on a weekend with your friends, you’re really into it. And you watch, maybe you’ve even taken classes and you’re becoming a bit better or whatever. You don’t need to cross every T and dot every I. You don’t need to put that much work in.

But as soon as you decide to turn pro, as soon as you make it your thing, all of that sh*t goes out the window. You need to be getting agility coaching and you need to be working on your sleep and your hydration and your nutrition and you’re going to miss weddings and your girlfriend’s going to get mad at you and you’re going to need to work on—you’re going to get injuries and you’re going to have to rehab them and your sense of identity is going to be wrapped up and you’re going to be on this roller coaster.

In some ways you’re going to love it more because you’ve committed to this thing, but in other ways it’s going to feel like a labor.

The Three Dials of Professional Growth

And the way that I’ve come to see it is Paul Graham’s got this great “How to Do Great Work,” wonderful essay. And there’s a few different dynamics going on. You need like a 3D graph to explain it.

At the very beginning, you have the most enthusiasm typically, because everything’s freshest. You’re doing it just for the love of it. Isn’t this amazing? But your experience is the lowest it’ll ever be and the returns per unit of effort are also the lowest that there ever been.

And as you go over time, typically I’ve found passion—the free, liberated passion—does wane a little bit. Like if I look at my day, I did 11 hours of calls back to back on Wednesday this week. I started at nine and I finished at eight and there was no—there was zero break in between.

Now I’m front loading a lot of this because I’m about to go away on tour and I’ve got to eat a lot of sht. And there’s like tons of big episodes that I’ve told you about that coming up and I’m trying to negotiate all of this bullsht and like 90 minutes just on flights, just 90 minutes on my flights the next two months, right? Trying to move. I got to go from f*ing Portland, Maine to LA to this to that.

Two and a half hours on copywriting for the channel, titles and thumbnails. But I extended that because I want to get out ahead so I don’t need to do these calls when I’m away. I had a call with my doctor team for half an hour in the morning. I had to call with my GM and my business development guy for a half an hour, and I look at my date, I’m like, that’s 11 hours of calls back to back.

I didn’t need to do that when I started because the obligation—it was just doing it for love. Yeah, it’s just doing it for fun. So when you start to turn pro with things, typically a lot of this comes along for the ride.

But I’m at the stage now where every word that I say, every episode that I record, everything that I put out, there has never been a point before now where it’s had as much impact, where it can move the world in a better direction, where it generates more revenue, where it grows the platform more, where I have—and I’ve never had more expertise than I do now.

So you have these three dials that are all moving, and there’s probably more, but you have these three dials that are all moving at the same time. And I think what the goal is, at least in my experience, doing anything for a really, really long amount of time—I’ve been doing this show for nearly eight years now. That’s a long amount of time to do anything right. Even to be in one job now in the modern world, eight years is pretty long.

Managing Passion Over Time

You’re managing your passion by tolerating how hard you work by putting your foot on and off the gas. There’s a couple of little hacks that you can do to keep it going. Working with other people—huge hack. Celebrating wins as well—huge hack.

If you’ve outsourced your motivation to a group around you, little goals, having side quests that you do that don’t distract from the main thing, but just keep it sufficiently varied. That’s why the live shows are so important to me, because if I can get out there and get on stage and get some positive reinforcement from 10,000 people, sick—I ride off that for a while.

But I’d be lying if I said that I had the same motivation that I did when I started the show. But the reason that you start doing a thing is not the reason that you keep doing it after a long time.

You know, the reason that you started your post grad studies will not quite be the same as it is now, and it won’t be the same as when you’ve got your doctorate, and it won’t be the same as when you start writing books, and it won’t be the same as when you’re on Substack. You know what I mean? It’s not going to be the same throughout time.

So an interesting question is how do I keep the main thing the main thing, when the fuel source driving the main thing changes and the direction the main thing’s going in is altered as well.

And I talked about this with Chris Bumstead, the Chris Bumstead episode. People can go and listen to that. And he says the same thing. He’s like, the reason I started doing bodybuilding, it’s not the same as when I was partway through my career, was not the same as when I thought I was going to retire and wasn’t the same as when I did retire. And it’s not the same that I do it now, now that I have retired, but it’s the same thing.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so what does that mean? Well, you’ve got different fuel sources, different directions and it’s fascinating. I really love that you went there. F*ing great question.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, I mean, that was really interesting. It’s a challenging idea, this idea of going pro. I mean, I think one of the funniest things, and I’m sure you experienced this switch at some point has been everyone in my life pivoting from being not open—you know, everyone’s supportive, but maybe being a little bit irritated with how much time I’m spending on TikTok—to being like, “Please post more on TikTok.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, we’re stuck at the shop. I remember when I used to play—I played violin between the ages of maybe 11 and 15 and I played in orchestras and stuff. I did notice over time my mum would ask me to play for her more.

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, that’s interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Presumably just because it was less painful, it was less sh*t to listen to. So as somebody gets better at what they do—and this is what I mean, it is a vicious, it is a vicious dynamic, this trade off that you have, where motivation can dwindle over time and there’s other fuels that come in and—okay, how can I bolster this?

Because habit as well, there’s another one that I didn’t account for. Like just at 2pm Central Time, I’m supposed to speak to an academic with an unpronounceable surname. That’s what I do, right. That’s what I do. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. That’s what I do.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you go, well, if I didn’t do that, I’d feel, you know, out of sorts.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it gets easier.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But is that motivation? No, not really. It’s more habit. And does that make it less pure? Well, I don’t know. The outcome, the expertise is better. But how would it be even better if you could get the money?

It’s a real—it’s a real interesting sort of nebulous thing, and I think anybody that does anything for a long time should be aware of this. And I would say use the fuel that you have would be a piece of advice.

Use the Fuel You Have

So if—someone came and asked me this in London a couple of weeks ago. Basically said—no, sorry, the first work in progress live show that I did here said, “Dude, my life’s going great.” I’m like, okay, well, that’s a first in terms of questions that I get asked at Q&As. You were at the Melbourne show, and it wasn’t usually, “My life’s going great.”

MACKEN MURPHY: It was usually—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Here’s a challenge that I’m facing. “My life’s going great. I really, really want to crush it at the moment, and I’ve got tons of energy, but I feel like work life balance kind of important.”

I sort of looked at the dude who’s dark—I couldn’t see the light was my own. I said, “How old are you?” He’s like, “23.” So, bro, fing hell, let’s send it. You’ve got the freest motivation in history. It is never going to be easier for you to do the sht that you need to do than right now.

Because for me to have the energy that I had when I was 23 doing club promo or 31, one year into the podcast, that unbridled blue sky vision, f*ing light sky ceiling thinking—that fuel source is largely spent in many ways, and it’s been taken on by perhaps even more potent ones, but that one’s gone.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It will never be easier to get you to do the sht that you need to do than when you are compelled to do it. So fing send it. I’m castigating this guy who’s like, “Yeah, my life’s going great, but I’m kind of taking it easy, but I really want to go harder. But I realized that work life balance—” Dude, you’re 23. Worry about this in a decade.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like, fing take a flamethrower to the middle of the candle and blow the sht out of it.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that feels like what I want to do.” Okay. Go forth and f*ing end some worlds.

MACKEN MURPHY: Because honestly, the work life balance is going to be a lot easier when your wife and kids are begging you for balance—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And as opposed to inverting it, as opposed to inverting it. Yeah.

Hyperandry: The New Mating Market Reality

Okay. The bottom 40% of men and top 20% of women are now hyperandrous. What’s that mean?

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, I’m glad that you struggled with the pronunciation there because it actually highlights just how interesting this change is that hypergamy—hypergyny—have been these prevailing norms. Hypergamy just meaning, you know, marrying up, essentially. And the default, when you say that term has been, “Oh, that’s women marrying up.” Right. That’s almost always what it’s meant to refer to.

And over the last half century or so, women’s economic and social gains have been tremendous, such that men and women are rather equal in terms of their economic productivity and social status. And this has occasioned a rebalancing of the mating market, such that if any significant number of people pair up, there’s going to be a number of people who are pairing up in the reverse of the normal—hyperandry. Right. Where the male is mating up.

That’s a term that I actually believe was coined by one of my supervisors, Rob Brooks.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I love Rob.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. So it’s interesting. What do you want to discuss related to this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, first off, explain what—the bottom 40% of men and top 20% of women are now dating more socioeconomically successful women to less socioeconomically successful men. Why is that? Why bottom and top? Explain that you were—

The Economics of Modern Mating

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, so I understand. So the one real risk of confusion here potentially would be that thinking that they’re pairing up other. So what seems what that data reflects. This is from the IFS analysis, is that. And I believe it was 1.4 million was the sample size.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s a representative.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot of people. Is that the bottom two quintiles of men on average? Right. If you were to take. If you were to separate. And it’s just a way of. It’s just a way of looking at the data. It’s nothing more than that. If you were to separate people into quintiles and say, okay, what are the bottom two quintiles of men doing? Like, on average. And on average those men are marrying up.

So if you were to take one of them at random and say, do you earn more or does your partner earn more? On average, they would say, my partner earns.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that’s 0th percentile to 40th percentile of income.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. And if you look at 80th percentile to a hundredth percentile of income in women, they’re marrying down there. And you were to just randomly say, are you. Do you make more or does your husband make more? On average? They would say, well, I make more.

And that’s a real change. I think it’s pretty interesting. And it’s hard to know how much this reflects a. This is a recalibration of behavior to the new landscape. Yeah. The new ecology. It remains to be seen how much it’s a recalibration of preferences. I know that this is something that’s very interesting to you, but as humans.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think, well, as a woman in the top 20% income bracket, it’s unbelievably interesting to me.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it is interesting. Right. I think it’s interesting too. It’s what I’ve been studying for the last year. It’s a problem that I’ve been thinking about. We’ve got some new research under peer review right now on this exact subject.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you say much about that or is it too early to blow your load on it?

MACKEN MURPHY: I wouldn’t use that phrase, but premature. Yeah, premature publication. You know, I’ve gotten in trouble with this before where I’ve had Candace say, “please stop talking. Please stop doing a podcast.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We love you, Candace.

Human Adaptation Mechanisms

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, a podcast tour prior to peer review. And I suppose it could influence things in some way if it’s already a known fact. But I think that I’ll talk more about it in the future. For now, we’ll just say that it’s an interesting problem. Right. Because humans have a diverse array of variation producing mechanisms that we can leverage towards adapting to the ecology. Right.

And it is possible to adapt to the prevailing ecology, as you say, without adapting what you want internally. You can make a strategic. So a really short term. I’m talking about different behavioral adaptation mechanisms. We’ve got really short term stuff like thinking through your situation, like playing chess and saying, oh, it’s going to suck if I. I might want to get my queen out now, but the chessboard is going to be all sorts of messed up if I do that.

So I’m thinking about what I should do and I’m doing something different from what my impulse is. Right. We can do stuff like that as people and we can adapt through that. We have longer term, medium term adaptations such as cultural adaptation. So that’s where for example, in the case of this. In the case of this precise example, it used to be humiliating and strange to at a dinner party, say that your wife makes more money than you, but already we have culturally adapted to the new market, the new ecology by making that kind of banal. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s maybe depends on what the audience is.

MACKEN MURPHY: It’s landing with it maybe results in one joke at your expense. At worst. That doesn’t really go much further than that. Most people would be completely normal as.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Opposed to if it was 50 years ago.

MACKEN MURPHY: Exactly, exactly. So we’ve got some cultural adaptation and then there’s the longest term, slowest and most uncontrollable. I mean it just is what it is. Genetic adaptation. Right, yeah. So which could be the preference in this case? So if our mate preferences are hard influenced by our evolved psychology. Right. Then you’re going to have a very long period of behavioral and cultural adjustment. But internal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, this is so cool.

MACKEN MURPHY: You know what I’m saying?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have conflict.

MACKEN MURPHY: So what this evidence is showing here is strategic adjustment, that chessboard level mechanism that we were talking about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Some cultural adjustment.

MACKEN MURPHY: Maybe, maybe, yeah, but that’s not shown in the data. But we know that there’s some, we know there’s some cultural adjustment. We can see that there’s some cultural adjustment. It’s interesting, right, because it’s not clear from that data, but is it the case that these, let’s say bottom 40% of men are like, well, you know, I would like to be. I have the kind of cultural coding that I should be a provider that would give me a lot of self esteem. I would quite like that.

You know, I maybe have some mate preferences geared towards that as well that are evolved to some degree. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. I have this intuition. But strategically I know I’m going to be single if I don’t mate up. Right. And also I know that I’m not going to pay rent if I don’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Make the same thing is in reverse too exact.

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, yeah, exactly. And that’s even the more risky one because I would say that I would be quite confident that those bottom 40% probably the bottom 40% of males. I’d be pretty confident based on what I’ve seen that they’re probably just either ambivalent or kind of stoked to be mating up.

They don’t, you know, it’s like, she’s paying off my car. Right. You know, I’ve been that guy. I know what that, I know that situation. It’s like most of my rent is covered. My car is getting paid off. It’s not that stressful. Right. Even if at a dinner party it might be, there’s a joke at my expense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about the inverse?

The Tall Girl Problem

MACKEN MURPHY: But the inverse is where the concern comes in. That’s where we see these New York Times articles. That’s where we see these viral tweets. That’s where. Yeah, exactly. That’s where we see this kind of cultural tension that is happening where it’s essentially it’s what you call the tall girl problem. So to say where there is a widespread concern that the mate preferences of the most successful women won’t adapt over a short term time horizon.

And so what we’re really interested in investigating and we’re doing this completely neutrally, it’s just interesting. Can they adapt? Right. That’s the current research question that I’m.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Suggesting that they are adapting behaviorally but.

MACKEN MURPHY: Emotionally, you know that there are. I know that, you know this data, I’m just repeating it for the audience’s sake. That these culturally incongruent pairings, these hyperandrous pairings, they’re associated in some data from.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Europe, for example, by domestic violence.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. With worse relationship outcomes. Which would suggest that it’s like maybe there’s a strategic situation where it’s like I’m going to adapt my behavior so I can make.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, think about that, dude. Think about how ruthless it is. I can’t be bothered doing the caveat. But evidently this is only a hypothetical. Imagine how ruthless it would be if you were to say to women, you have two choices in life. One is to pursue the career that you want and the other is to be beaten up by your husband.

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, that’s all. Obviously that’s not the actual thing, but that is the. But that is that the data is in that trend where it’s like there’s this, these status reversed marriages have these horrible outcomes in some cases or they have a higher probability of these.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or you have a more milquetoast example. You have the choice between pursuing the career that you want and being in a happy relationship. Or are you attracted to your partner?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. So what we’re hoping, I guess and also optimistically investigating is to what extent are these preferences for women mating up malleable? Are those malleable and to what extent are they rigid?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dude, you’ve always been so f*ing white pilled on this ever since we started talking about this years ago.

The Case for Optimism

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the question is to what extent are mate preferences flexible to what extent are we flexible? And I’m. Without getting too into recent research, I think that we have a lot of reason for optimism here. And I think that there is. So look, I think that there is some evidence of really unfortunate cultural growing pains, so to say where these relationships where the woman makes more have these negative outcomes for now.

But I feel confident that over a longer term, over a longer time horizon, humans will be able to adapt.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why? How long? Evolution takes f*ing forever.

MACKEN MURPHY: When you look at the anthropological literature, there are many cases where female provisioning is greater than male provisioning. Right. So for example, among the Paliyan of South India, they live in montane rainforests and the primary food source, yams are gathered rather than hunted. Right. And gathering is more of a cross culturally, it’s more of a female coded activity and hunting much more done by males. Right.

And so the long and short of it is about 70% of food is produced by women. Right. And there seems to be cultural adaptation to this. It seems totally fine and it doesn’t seem to be causing trouble. What I would say is that we’re in an uncomfortable state culturally because we are. Yeah. We’re pivoting from a culture where male provisioning is the norm to a culture where bi parental provisioning is the norm. Right. Socioeconomically.

And so what I would say is this, is that in the short term it is true there are these horrible growing pains. But I feel confident if I’m going to bet on human adaptability versus non adaptability, I’m going to bet on human adaptability every time just because I’ve seen there’s evidence for.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So do you see the studies?

MACKEN MURPHY: I see so much variety cross culturally. But I don’t want to downplay though the thing is, the thing is this, is that you don’t want to. When we’re talking about something as serious, when I’m talking about something as serious and awful as domestic violence or divorce or infidelity or even relationship dissatisfaction. Relationship dissatisfaction is awful, very painful.

I don’t want to come on here as the over optimistic anthropologist, right. And just say, oh, everything’s going to be all right, guys, you know, everything’s going to be fine. I know that there are these issues, but I’m confident that even my phrasing it as growing pains maybe was insufficiently sensitive to how bad some of these issues can be. However.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Pain.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. However, again, look, we’ll have another conversation about it in the future. It’s a topic that I’m investigating. I think that humans are adaptable and that there’s bound to be a period of tension when you’re switching provisioning strategies.

The Future of Coupling

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Here’s the sort of nuts and bolts of it. Unless you’re going to put the kibosh on the socioeconomic status of women or men and women are going to stop coupling up, this is going to happen.

MACKEN MURPHY: Thank you. Yes. So this is the exact point I’m making is that there is no conceivable future. I think where anyone is going to put the brakes on women’s economic gains. Like that would seem, you know, morally.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Insane, especially in the current climate.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t. It’s complete non starter. Right. And so it’s literally.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And also. Sorry, women wouldn’t put it on themselves.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Don’t think. Which would be another option.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For some way, either externally or internally, someone would put kind of ceiling socioeconomically on women.

MACKEN MURPHY: So the options for the mating market and the options for successful women are adapt or don’t pair up. Right. It’s like if you’re a top 20% woman, your choices actually are either accept the likely possibility that you probably won’t date someone at or above your level or don’t pair up. Right.

There is going to be some portion of them who still manage to action on dating up economically, but it’s not the norm already. And soon, if trends continue, it’s going to be. Yeah, the top half of women don’t pair up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Up.

MACKEN MURPHY: If that makes sense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

The Adaptation Imperative

MACKEN MURPHY: And so you can either—so for men and women, the option is the option that it has been for us and all of our male and female ancestors for time immemorial. Adapt or die, bro.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is so interesting. I f*ing—especially having watched this. This is a wonderful thing about being in a niche for a while. You get to see things unfold. You know, I’ve been talking—

MACKEN MURPHY: It’s a long time to be in this. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fascinating. You know, I think I first said “tall girl problem” 20, 21.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m seeing it unfold. You know that top quintile are the tall girls.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In this.

MACKEN MURPHY: And then you see even this year all these New York Times articles, these things basically focusing, zeroing in on this subgroup and saying, “Hey, what’s going wrong?” You know.

Can a Civilization Make Itself Too Unattractive?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I voice noted you a while ago basically saying could birth rate and coupling rates be going down because everyone is just fat enough? Basically my argument—reductive way to put it. Basically I said, can a civilization make itself too unattractive?

MACKEN MURPHY: I think, I think I nixed this idea in the—in the—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t want to talk about it?

MACKEN MURPHY: No, I’m, I’m abs—no, I suggested it as something.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, okay. Okay.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that in our initial interaction I said, “Ah, I’m not sure,” but I’m not going to talk about it more.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so here’s my perspective. I wondered whether or not humans can eat themselves out of being attractive sexual objects. Like, obviously with increasing weight there’s changes in vasculature, libido, like issues, et cetera, et cetera.

But even though people typically mate with people of a similar level of attractiveness, presumably there is kind of a floor below which people are just less attractive. No matter how unattractive you are, and especially if it’s becoming unattractive due to gaining a lot of weight—like if you’re morbidly obese, what you know inside is maybe a you that wasn’t.

And maybe your sense of your own mate value, you kind of have like alpha widow distortion of yourself. You have like mirror widow distortion of yourself where you think, “Well, look, I know that I might be a bit f*ing fat right now, and maybe that’s made me go from a five to a four to a three or whatever it might have been, but I know, like deep down I know that I’m not and I really shouldn’t be dating this sort of people.”

I wonder if our own sense of our own mate value physically is able to be sufficiently malleable to wax and wane with the sizes of weight gain that we’ve seen. And I’m wondering whether the lack of coupling up and the increase in birth rates could just be due to the fact that everybody finds each other a bit less attractive. Because the number one source of malnutrition globally is obesity, not starvation.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not saying all the starving people are having sex either.

The GLP-1 Experiment and Marriage Trends

MACKEN MURPHY: I think the—there’s a few interesting threads that you’ve pulled out there. One is that there is the very broad correlation in the sense that over the same time period that we’ve seen singleness and sexlessness rise, there’s been obviously increasing obesity over that same time period.

And then also we’re going to get to run the experiment here with these GLP-1 agonists. There’s already been a massive reduction and that reduction is going to continue. I think that we’re going to see obesity essentially disappear from America in our lifetime. And that’s, that’s, that’s an incredible—from a health perspective, from a human flourishing perspective, that’s an incredibly positive thing.

As far as the causes of sexlessness and singleness, I actually think this is something that I was speaking to Andrew Moore about rather recently is that I think that the coincident timing within the case of singleness, declining marriage, et cetera—I think it does, I think it is downstream of what we were discussing earlier more than anything. Well, it’s a complex, it’s a complex issue, right?

But because here’s the thing is that people hear, people hear reducing marriage and they think—sorry to interrupt you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, it’s a habit of mine. It’s terrible.

MACKEN MURPHY: People hear reducing marriage rates and they think reducing marriage rates bad. But a lot of the people who aren’t getting married shouldn’t. People who shouldn’t have gotten married. Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s why divorce rates are going down.

MACKEN MURPHY: Divorce rates are also going down exactly. Like the people who get married today—no joke, the people of my generation, Gen Z, the people who are getting married from my generation are currently on track to have a divorce rate similar, most similar to people in the 1950s. And divorce rates overall are as low as they’ve been since 1970 among people who get married.

So marriage among the people who participate in the institution is doing better than ever. Right? It’s good, right. So people hear like, “Oh, marriage rates declining bad.” And they’ve actually upticked a little bit since COVID. There’s kind of a post-COVID bump, but overall, overall it’s flat.

People think that’s bad. And I agree to an extent, but with the caveat that if the reason marriage rates are declining is because women who would have married due to having to be financial prisoners of men—I know that’s a term you’ve used before—if that’s the reason they’re declining, well that, I mean that just seems like a righting of a great wrong.

So in terms of like explaining declining marriage rates, things like that, I would lean towards that explanation. The connection with obesity though, I mean, it’s interesting and what you’re describing in terms of the kind of internal mate value—like we see with—I know that there’s one speed dating study on this, I can’t remember the author’s names but essentially the long and short of it is, is that it’s not that people are attracted to people who are their league, it’s that they’re attracted to the best looking person that reciprocates their interest.

Yeah, so it’s not that—it’s not that, like, because sometimes people ask this about, like, “Oh, do you know, are—do when unattractive people pair up?” Right. “Are they actually, you know, is that their preference? Or is like, do—do unattractive people prefer the looks of unattractive people to super attractive people?” That doesn’t—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Would the three not date the eight? Well, if they were able to get reciprocal attention, probably.

MACKEN MURPHY: I wish it was true that it was like, “Oh, twos are most attracted to twos, threes are most attracted to threes,” or however you might slice it, but it doesn’t seem to be true.

Attractiveness and Relationship Outcomes

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there any data suggesting that people who are less physically attractive have worse relationship outcomes?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, there is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s really unfortunate. And I’ve never heard of it before.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, it’s like, even in, like, it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but even in my infidelity study, which we talked about last time I was on, people tended to cheat up, not down, in attractiveness. And one implication of that would be that if you’re more attractive, that’s probably a protective factor against infidelity. I think that it’s interesting. So with the only negative outcome that I’ve seen—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sorry, just to interject there. Keep the only negative outcome that you’ve seen pinned. That only works—like, the more attractive you are, the more protective it is against infidelity. But that’s only if the person that you are dating is within that attractiveness band.

MACKEN MURPHY: Because if attractiveness was—that would be true if attractiveness was evenly distributed. But the—but the more attractive you get that you get so rare. Right, right. Like—like you were a man.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, so the opportunity for your partner to find another eight or above. Yes, exactly. Find a two or above.

MACKEN MURPHY: So you’re so like, you used to be a male model. Correct. So you might—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Some would say still am.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Right, right. Are you—do you work as one?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, some would just say I did my first editorial shoot that I organized myself. I did that with a photographer I’ve worked with for nearly 20 years now. I did that in Newcastle over Christmas. I haven’t put any of the photos out from it. I did it kind of just for my own archive.

Yeah, it was so much fun. But it also reminded me how much I fing hated that industry for so long, dude. Because ordered around, being on set early, not being able to do—I would much sooner wear Crocs and socks and fing turn up here and speak to you. I’ve pivoted. It was cool for the time. But yeah, as you’re saying, if you’re an eight, there are way fewer nines and tens.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. So the reason that you’re dead—right. In terms of if it was perfectly even distributed, it wouldn’t have a protective factor. But let’s say people have a tendency to cheat up and not cheat down in terms of physical attractiveness and that the vast majority of people who do cheat will only cheat up in terms of physical attractiveness.

If you’re, you know, formal male model—even if you’re dating someone who’s a female supermodel—like how many male models is she running into? Right. That’s like one in a—one in one in a hundred thousand.

The Dynamics of Cheating Up

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Question on that. The people who are cheating up—we could call it the people that are cheating up. Presumably one of the reasons for that is that it’s easier to get commitment from somebody to short term mating than it is to long term mating. So you can get a little bit of a trade. But I must imagine this changes the sort of people that men cheat with and that women cheat with because women are—you can see where I’m going. So—

MACKEN MURPHY: No, no. But maybe the audience can.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. I just like it. It’s been—I haven’t got to talk about this in depth for a long time. And it’s fun when you see somebody’s eyes light, which has happened throughout the conversation and you’re like, “Oh, they know where I’m going.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is the good marriage, coming home from work thing I was talking about.

MACKEN MURPHY: If you take us home. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Basically, if you are—guys will—women will tend to have higher standards for short term mating than they will for long term mating. At least in terms of physical attractiveness. The same is not true for men. Men will have the opposite.

MACKEN MURPHY: So it’s one of the sneaky surprises of that study which we discussed last time I was on here was that I understood—so look, it’s just easier for—for a woman to cheat up in terms of physical attractiveness because men will cheat. Men will have these short term flings that are so low. Yeah. Like there are male rock stars who—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Will just f* a groupie.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. Who will have sex with completely random—will have sex with completely random individuals who you would never expect. And you just don’t see that with female rock stars for the same—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Taylor Swift’s not being—

MACKEN MURPHY: Slanging it to like random guys. Right. That’s—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s just not what she wants.

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean that—I’m choosing this very outlier example. But it’s also shown just—in case some people are saying, “Well that’s not normal human mating”—it’s also shown in normal human mating that men will relax their mate preferences for short term and uncommitted mating.

So it was surprising in a way that men could—not that they wanted to. They’re wanting to was not unusual to me at all. It was surprising that they could effectively cheat up on average in terms of physical attractiveness. I found that surprising.

The pin that I put in in terms of the only negative relationship outcome I’ve seen—if we were to go through, you know, associations between attractiveness and mating, right. It’s just win after win after win for the more attractive people. Right. We’re talking about more mates, more desirable mates, more committed and doting partners in some studies. It’s just—

The Challenge of Maintaining Attractive Partners

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I’m getting, I’m going to push back on that one. “Mates once gained, must be maintained,” once said the philosopher D Bus. And this point is basically the more attention that your partner gets, the greater the amount of competition is.

And yet it seems like, like most people would make—many people may make this utilitarian rational—”Well, how hot is my partner and how hot is the person that’s pursuing me? And if there are nine, how many more nines and tens are there?” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you’re also a nine, you’re being pursued by a lot of people.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And if you have relationship dissatisfaction, even if it’s nine to nine or let’s say it’s eight to nine, the nine is going to be like, “Oh, there’s so many f*ing potential suitors.” So I do think that there’s a challenge of—I don’t think it’s good all the way up in terms of attractiveness.

The Rarity of Being a Nine

MACKEN MURPHY: You’re right. But again, I have to bring back in the rarity phenomenon where if you’re a nine, a true nine, you’re just much more likely to be the more attractive party in the imbalance. Hence the more committed and doting partners aspect of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But even within that, there’s a suggestion that when you have attractiveness imbalance, there’s—

MACKEN MURPHY: Other tensions as well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. Yes. You have high rates of f*ing, what is it? Men who aren’t the primary breadwinner, 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. When you’re in relationships that have got too big of a mate value discrepancy, partners tend to switch from a benefit affording to a cost inflicting mating strategy, which that’s where we see stuff like negging, excessive mate guarding, domestic violence, in extreme circumstances like you’re subject to that heavy mate guarding.

MACKEN MURPHY: So that’s an interesting angle. I was going in a different direction. I’m going to 100% take your point and add that to my list of negative outcomes associated with being good looking hot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, I f*ing added it.

MACKEN MURPHY: You’re subject to more heavy mate guarding.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Regardless of how attractive your partner is.

The Cost of Being Attractive

MACKEN MURPHY: So in terms of the switch to a cost inflicting versus a benefit affording strategy, it’s more like what the male can do than the absolute size of the gap. So it’s associated with the size of the gap because that indicates something about what they have options to. But a lot of it is just benefit provisioning. And you know, in a modern context, there are lots of benefits that can be provided.

There was a recent study from some Polish researchers. I texted you about it, but I’ll share it here for redundancy. Where they found that the greater the gap was between a man and a woman in attractiveness, if they measured the gap, they could effectively predict to some degree how often he would go down on her in bed. Right. So there’s a lot of benefit provisioning that can happen in relationships and attractive people are much more likely to be the beneficiary in that scenario. Yeah, and many other things. Right.

I just had a very poorly timed licking of my own lips, which I hope people do not zoom in on and make edits of. So here’s where I’m going with this, is that there is some suggestive evidence that people who are very good looking might have slightly lower relationship satisfaction because they’re more likely to be, you know, keenly aware of the fact that they could swap out their partner at any time. And dating down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, they have optionality distress.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like imagine what it’s like to be, you know, like an incredibly beautiful woman. Right. You’re just constantly being bombarded with your other choices at your work on the bus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Same would be true if you were a very high status man.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. Being a male rock star, imagine how difficult it is to be. I mean, you’re kind of a podcasting rock star. It must be very difficult.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Unbelievably, unbelievably. All of the women who come up to me on the street and say, “My boyfriend listens to your show.”

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, that’s fine. Point taken. But the long and short of it is that there is a cost there. But for the most part I would say like if I was rolling the dice to start the game of human mating there and I just like, I want the best overall outcome. There’s no world where I wouldn’t want to be more attractive. Right.

There are costs, but the costs are almost, it’s almost suffering from success. Like there are problems in the same way that like being too rich causes new problems. Like the problem of roll the dice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And get a slightly bigger penis. You’ll be fine.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, right, exactly. Like the problem of too many people wanting to date you is just so much better than the inverse problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

MACKEN MURPHY: Even if it caused a little bit of relationship dissatisfaction.

The Asymmetry of Non-Monogamy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I sent you a voice note a few months ago talking about the asymmetry of costs and benefits of men and women for non-monogamy. And I’ve never heard anybody else talk about this, although I’m sure I’m not the first to talk about it. So I’m going to try and remind you of what it was that I said.

So basically I was thinking about the prospect of a man and a woman entering non-monogamy and what the benefits are and what the costs are. So the unique thing that I haven’t heard anyone talk about before is that there are greater benefits for men because on average, men have more variety in their sexual fantasies across any single sexual fantasy. If you ask a man how many partners he wants throughout his life, etc., etc., it tends to be higher. Men do men have higher sociosexuality? Is that a way that you would be able to say it?

MACKEN MURPHY: Oh, yeah, right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. But that would be—

MACKEN MURPHY: It’s one of the most replicable findings in all of psychology.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so men are more sociosexual than women, they want more sexual partners, and they’re more open to casual sex too, which is typically what non-monogamy has, at least in part. But they’re also more subject to dissatisfaction at the thought that their partner is getting physically intimate with another person, specifically another man. So there are greater benefits, but there are greater costs and both are paid by the man.

If there was such a thing as emotional non-monogamy, not sexual non-monogamy, emotional non-monogamy. So for the guys that are listening, imagine the relationship that you’re in. Potentially you get to sleep around, but you have to deal with your misses sleeping around. How much, hey, do you get from getting to spray it about a bit versus how much do you have by the thought that she’s being sprayed at a bit?

Now the inverse would be, and typically different ways that you can set up non-monogamy, but a lot of them are physically you can be intimate. Emotionally we are monogamous. Like that’s one relatively common setup. Imagine the inverse. Imagine physically we can be monogamous, but emotionally we are allowed to spread about.

Now I would suggest that in those situations women would feel very uncomfortable with it. That’s not for me to say that women don’t already feel very uncomfortable with the non-monogamy thing, but I think that’s because they don’t derive the same benefits that men do. Not because they pay higher costs, as in they’re not going to find it quite as painful. They’re still going to find it very painful, especially if you’re not agreeing to this, if you’ve been f*ing conned, coerced, persuaded into doing this thing.

But the pretty replicable study of, as a man, imagine your woman sleeping with another man but not being emotionally intimate or being emotionally intimate with another man and not sleeping with him. And for the woman, imagine the same. And men typically say, “Well, I’d rather that she said she loved him but didn’t f him.” And for women, they said, “Well, I’d rather that he fed her but didn’t say that he loved her.” At least that’s one of the. And when you combine these two worlds together, I thought, huh, there seems to be something interesting there. So what do you reckon?

Evolutionary Costs and Benefits

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, I think there definitely is something interesting. And I think what’s interesting, I’m going to agree with everything you’ve said and just add the ultimate lens. So this is all quite proximate. It’s about the feelings. But the asymmetry in feelings is also reflecting an asymmetry in costs and benefits at the evolutionary level.

So while a man can have multiple women who are pregnant by him at one time, a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time. And so there’s a much more powerful evolutionary benefit to sexual variety, as you’re well aware of. But then there’s also a greater risk of cuckoldry. Right. There’s no chance of a woman accidentally raising a child that is not hers. Right. That’s just not the sort of—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No woman has ever given birth to a child that wasn’t hers.

MACKEN MURPHY: Exactly. And that’s not something that’s occasioned by, well, I mean, I guess technically with modern technology, but it’s not something that’s occasioned by infidelity.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, yeah, that’s true.

MACKEN MURPHY: The surrogate scenario but it’s neither here nor there for the purposes of our discussion. So there’s an asymmetry at the evolutionary level that buttresses this asymmetry at the proximate level. And it’s interesting, I mean, what I’ve been trying to get my head around since that voice note that I’d actually like to hear your opinion on is given both the proximate and the ultimate levels, what sort of man would we expect to benefit most from true non-monogamy? And what sort of women would we expect to benefit most?

My intuition on the women’s side would be, you know, highly committed partner who doesn’t have the conventional cues to physical attractiveness that can get passed on. But I wanted to hang on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So explain that for me. You think that the woman would be in a relationship with a guy that is non-typical in terms of attractiveness?

MACKEN MURPHY: I would say that. Which women would benefit most from non-monogamy? Which men would benefit most from non-monogamy? Okay, I’m imagining that a woman who is dating a man who is very committed handles the kind of supportive side of things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Cinnamon roll husband.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, but isn’t providing paternal benefits, but not genetic conceptive benefits.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s interesting.

MACKEN MURPHY: That’s one angle.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What a wonderful archetype. I love how you get. Once I get you three hours into a podcast, you start to get much more spicy. The f*ing academic hat comes off. Well, certainly the point of offsetting the risk of cuckoldry by cuckolding other people, which is basically what men are doing in this situation, is like a very meritocratic approach.

Anthropological Perspectives

MACKEN MURPHY: And that’s what happens among some anthropological, in some anthropology studies. This is the mainstream explanation for what’s going on. Where you look at, you f* my—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wife, I f* yours and her friend.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, yeah, it’s basically like, why. So you’ll look at a given society such as among like the Himba of Namibia, and you’ll say, you know, why is it that the man I asked one of the leading researchers this, like, well, why is it that they’re putting up with infidelity? Like, why are they putting up with their wives cheating so much? Surely this is just nightmare mode for them.

And they’re like, well, whatever paternity they. And why are they. This is the other thing is that they’re good fathers to children that they know are the results of cuckoldry. Right. So they know that the child’s not theirs. They know that it’s conceived through an affair and yet they’re investing in the offspring and they’re completely tolerant of it. It’s like, why are they putting up with that? And it’s like the social benefit, because it’s so widespread, they regain the paternity that they lose in their own nest, in other nests.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But presumably this only works if you think that you are extracting more from the system. So if you were a high, okay, so on the guy’s side, presumably it’s high mate value males or high attractiveness males.

MACKEN MURPHY: I mean, that’s what you’d think. But then you like, I’m just going to be, you know, I don’t want to get too spicy too deep into the podcast. But like, I have not had the experience of meeting polyamorous males and being like, “These guys are super Chad, Chad, handsome.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess you’re just selecting that you’ve got to account for the selection effect of just high sociosexuality and wants to do this.

MACKEN MURPHY: Right. I mean, I’m agreeing with you in principle that you’d think like, oh, the people who’d be most enthusiastic about polyamory—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are the ones that can extract the most from the benefit system without paying them of polyamory.

MACKEN MURPHY: But you know what, actually, I’m going to dial back here actually, because we’re talking about polyamory, capital P. Flying the flag, wearing the label and saying, you know—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m polyamory, not just slinging it about.

MACKEN MURPHY: But if we think about like what polyamory actually is, it’s just multiple mating and kind of this informal hierarchy of some variety. And when I think about it, without the label situation. Yeah, it is. That is what very handsome men are doing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

MACKEN MURPHY: So, yeah, I think that the people that were kind of thinking, oh, they’d extract. The people who would extract the most benefit from situationships are probably hot guys.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As soon as you get outside of San Francisco.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The rules of this change.

The Rich Gay Uncle Hypothesis

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. And those guys would extract the most benefit then. Those guys do seem to be setting up situations.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it’s so great you had this lovely line in WhatsApp chat. Getting cuckolded is true disaster mode for a male, whereas for a female, technically your long term mate could be out and about without too much going wrong for you.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, I mean, that’s a bit of a glib summary, but I think I can stand by it. It is in principle possible to “get away with it” a lot more as a female monogamous mammal than a male monogamous mammal.

However, especially in humans, because humans do like mate switching quite a bit, it’s a massive risk. You see how upset women get at the thought of sexual infidelity by males. And look, in our species, sexual infidelity often leads to mate switching. So it actually is very stressful. You could lose your entire investment. You could lose your mate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So he’s—

MACKEN MURPHY: So I think it’s disaster mode for both. But yeah, in terms of who is sexual infidelity more threatening to? It’s probably going to be male mammals.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So this is where I would love to get some data around how split. Like if you were to have a distribution of how much men agree or disagree, I think it’s going to be more extreme for the men because some men will hate the idea of their partner sleeping with other men so much more than they would enjoy the freedom to be able to sleep around themselves.

MACKEN MURPHY: I think that’s most men. I mean, literally when I think about the imbalance here. Every time I meet a polyamorous man and I’ve met a couple actually, I really just desperately want to pick their brain because I know myself, the benefits of the occasional fling are so small. Diminishing benefits. We’re talking next to nothing, may as well not have happened level of low benefit compared to the emotional pain is literally like I would put myself into something, I’m imagining something where if anything, even on that spectrum happened. Years of mental recovery.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And also probably the end of your relationship. The inability to see your partner in the same way.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. End of the relationship. End to my self esteem for a period of months. So when I speak to these men, I do find it very interesting. I’m like, okay, so you have just—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing zeroth percentile jealousy and mate guarding.

MACKEN MURPHY: And 99th percentile external extra pair mating motivation. I’m like, there must be a story here where the extra pair mating motivation is either so high that it’s intolerable or the jealousy is so low that it’s inconsequential.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Imagine if you have the desire for extra pair mating being very high and the jealousy being moderately high and you have this tension. It’s like one of those bridges in an earthquake that’s being flexed and pulled against itself.

Polyamory and Evolutionary Psychology

MACKEN MURPHY: I’m going to say who this is because I heard them speak about this in a public interview, but there’s a very famous evolutionary psychologist who’s polyamorous. His name is Primal Poly on Twitter. And I remember listening to a podcast that he did on this where he was talking about how it was a multi year process, or at least a year process. I believe the word year is ringing in my ears where it was trying to deal with the negative psychological ramification side of things. So there was the high motivation, right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For moderately high.

MACKEN MURPHY: And then the moderately high jealousy. And to me, I remember listening to it and thinking, I think it was a podcast with Sam Harris maybe. And I think Sam’s response was, you know, is it really worth the hassle? You know, so it’s interesting. I’m not commenting on his honor, it’s not a personal thing at all, but because he’s a public figure and I’m commenting on what he’s—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Him and Diana have not been shy about talking.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. So I feel like it’s fair game. Normally I would never discuss someone else’s sex life as an object of interest, but in this case.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But we don’t have enough publicly non monogamous people in the world of mating research to be able to do that. But so the worst situation to be in, I imagine, would be to not match the extra paired jealousy and extra paired desire with your partner. Like, if those two things are out of whack.

Like you have high desire, any amount of jealousy, but potentially low jealousy, and your partner doesn’t match that. That’s when you’re going to start. And if you’ve f*ing spent too much time at SF parties or, you know, you’ve listened to too much Diana Fleischman or whatever, before you know it, you’re like, huh, maybe I could start a polycule with John next door or whatever. And meanwhile your partner’s going, Yeah, exactly. Because that’s going to really twist it up.

But I think that’s a f*ing interesting one. I also want to learn about what the rich gay uncle hypothesis is for homosexuality.

The Rich Gay Uncle Hypothesis Explained

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, I don’t know if that’s the formal name, but it’s the name that an evolutionary biologist at Boston University who will remain unnamed. It’s what he informally called it in one of our lectures and it was pretty interesting.

So the idea here is that we have this powerful cultural stereotype in the west of the rich gay uncle. It is known that gay men tend to have slightly higher incomes. And the idea is that there’s some social investment that tends to happen diagonally from them to the offspring of their closest kin, their siblings.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re also more likely to have older brothers. So they’re more likely to be an uncle.

MACKEN MURPHY: They’re more likely to have the opportunity. That’s exactly right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look at me throwing f*ing shit into. That’s mnemonic for you.

MACKEN MURPHY: I know exactly. It’s hitting me as well. I feel smarter than I. So they tend to be quite successful and avuncular. And that’s interesting. Now they’ve tested this in the west and it has not borne the type of fruit that you might expect it to. There doesn’t seem.

The idea of it as a hypothesis is basically this. I should have explained this at the outset is that it’s hard to explain. We know that there is some heritable component to homosexuality, but it is quite difficult to explain how that persists.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Given that you can’t reproduce if you’re truly being gay.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, you’re truly like. I know that a high percentage of homosexual people have some opposite sex encounters.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: At some point in their life. Unless you’ve thumbed it in enough times to be able to actually have a kid.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah. This is just not how. So it’s like at the very least, even if in a state of nature a lot of homosexual people would reproduce anyway, it’s at the very least reducing their odds not to feel opposite sexual. So how does that persist?

And so the idea was is that maybe it would persist through kin selection. So one way to win the game of survive and reproduce is to get your genes into the next generation by reproducing yourself. But the other way is to piggyback off the reproduction of your kin. A sibling shares 50% of your genes. So it’s entirely possible that you can have offspring adjacent to you that shares 25% of your genes and you can essentially pass on your genes by supporting them, surviving and reproducing.

And so the idea was with this hypothesis, this rich gay uncle hypothesis, that maybe the way homosexuality persists is by instead of having one kid, you support two kids of your closest kin.

Genetic Mechanisms and Evidence

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Could that be passed on genetically? Is there a lineage for this to be able to work?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yes. So that could work. If you’re asking is this theoretically possible? Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. In terms of the mechanic, I don’t understand how the lineage of the person who did the thing but wasn’t a part of the promulgation.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yes. So it would be the case if the genes for homosexuality. And this is how most behavior genetics works, if it’s more like genes that increase your probability of expressing homosexuality rather than like an individual gene that causes it, then if you have some of those genes enough. So if you have enough of those genes that you exhibit the behavior, then your kin still have some of those genes as well. And you’re passing on your—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Genes indirectly through them, through their kids.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. That’s the hypothesis. It is not well supported in the West. It hasn’t borne out. It is well supported among the fa’afafine of independent Samoa.

So this is a group where it’s. I don’t want to analyze. Because the culture is so different. I don’t want to analogize it to American and western homosexuals, which have their own kind of cultural phenomenon that we can talk about. This is different. It’s considered a third gender in this space. And they are natal males. So they’re biologically male and they are attracted to males and they are not transgender. That’s not what’s going on. They present in a very feminine way and they occupy their own space.

And it’s a similar percentage to what we see with western homosexuals. So some might say that it is a cultural reinforcement of homosexuality, essentially. Like a cultural space that homosexual people can fill. And in those groups, it does seem that they are statistically more avuncular. They invest more. They act more as uncles than straight uncles do.

And so it seems to be that there’s some support for this idea that they lose. We talked about losing paternity and regaining it elsewhere. They lose paternity, but they regain kin selection benefits by supporting their sisters and brothers in their reproduction.

Birth Order Effects and Immune System

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It feels to me like the male provisioning equivalent of alloparents. It feels a little bit like the grandmother hypothesis, but actually outside.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yes, it’s very analogous to that. That’s a great analogy. It’s a lot like the grandmother hypothesis where at a certain point, if you have 20 brothers, maybe it’s better not to stay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you’ve got f*ing 20 brothers, you are gay. If you’ve got 20. If you’re brother 21. With 20 brothers, your odds are so.

MACKEN MURPHY: Low because it is a loading effect where one older brother, there’s a slight increase of you two brother.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And then if you’re my f*ing brother 20.

MACKEN MURPHY: There’s no chance you come back around and come straight.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Actually, yeah, it’s a horseshoe theory.

MACKEN MURPHY: But what I’m saying is that it’s like imagine your brother. Imagine you’re brother 7. Is it optimal for you to get on the same pitch as them and compete for the same women? Or is it better to step off the pitch and say, hey, you guys, go get up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The birth order effect, it’s basically connected. It’s basically I’m going to. The weathervane, lick my finger and put it in the air to be like, how’s the sex ratio going to be in this local ecology?

MACKEN MURPHY: So that’s what some people. So I’m definitely not the first person to have said this. Whether it’s true or not, it’s kind of touchy because it does seem to be downstream. The birth order effect mechanistically seems to be downstream of an immune response.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Immune system. Because it works. It works for abortions and it works for miscarriages.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, so those things can be adaptive, to be clear. You can have a mechanism like that and have it be adaptive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’d be weird that it would go through the immune system.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it’s a bit quirky, but it could go like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are other explanations for birth order effect? Why would the woman’s immune system react in this way to having a male inside of it?

The Rich Gay Uncle Hypothesis

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, well, it could be more of an adaptation on the part of the mother rather than the gay son. Like, maybe it’s not that the gay son gets a selective benefit from investing. It’s that the mother’s total reproductive pool is increased by not adding another competitor and instead adding another helper. Again, this isn’t a theory that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, so the mother could—that the immune system thing could be the mother’s way of insuring the rich gay uncle?

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, yeah. So in terms of where the adaptation is actually happening, that’s why it would be quirky. Like, the reason that I had that gut reaction is that it would be strange for the mechanism adaptation to mechanistically occur as an immune system response in the mother. It would probably be more likely to be adaptive for the mother in terms of the locus.

However, I actually don’t think we’re talking about it. And it’s very interesting if you had to say, “Mac, put your chips down. Is this true or not?” I’d say that the rich gay uncle hypothesis is probably not true. I would say that the Fa’afafine are a unique cultural case where they have a cultural scaffolding that makes it adaptive in their case.

But if you looked at homosexuality writ large, I don’t think that that’s the explanation for its persistence. No. And I don’t know what is. My honest answer is—because people, I do AMAs occasionally. Every single AMA people are asking, “Explain homosexuality.” And I understand it. It’s like the first thing you’d want to ask an evolutionary sexual scientist. Right.

And my honest answer is I’m not sure what’s going on, but this is a pretty cool explanation.

Wrapping Up

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Macken Murphy, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, so much fun. Last time that we got to hang out was in Melbourne.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are you going to come to Bali with me? After my Australia and New Zealand tour.

MACKEN MURPHY: In March, I’ve already started my cut.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s f*ing go. So I’m going to take you this evening to Bill Perkins’ Formula One party. So Bill wrote “Die with Zero.” He’s got a party over at his very large—the most expensive house in Austin ever sold, actually, I think up until a few years ago.

And if you want to do some ethnographic mating research, the cohort of people that are going to be here at this party this evening is going to be good. So we need to get finished so that we can actually get turned around and go to that.

Where should people go? You’ve got a great TikTok. You’ve got great other stuff too. They want to check out your channel.

MACKEN MURPHY: Well, first, my girlfriend’s listening at home, thrilled at the sound of me going to this party. So I’m in, girlfriend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Don’t worry about it. I’ll look after him.

MACKEN MURPHY: And then, yeah. So in terms of where people go, I think that searching my name on any social media is a good place. I don’t really have anything to sell. Just more videos on topics like this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F* yeah. Oh, and go and check out “Species,” the podcast.

MACKEN MURPHY: Yeah, it’s mostly retired, but occasionally I still do an interview.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve moonlit it, but there’s good s* in there, dude. I love going back and listening to the “Species” podcast. Macken Murphy on TikTok and Twitter and everything else. Until next time, man.

MACKEN MURPHY: Thanks, Chris.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much for tuning in. And congratulations for not being so TikTok brained that you actually made it to the end of a full podcast.

MACKEN MURPHY: Hooray.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Maybe another podcast with the one and only Naval Ravikant would also be good for you to watch. That’s right.

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