David Buss

They've said, you know, there actually isn't that much evidence for this dual mate hypothesis.

Something, uh, David Buss and Schmitt recently wrote in an article on sexual strategies theory, which is what I've just described, it's called sexual strategies theory, was that really this short-term mating strategy probably only applies to a very, very select few women, and those are gonna be women who score very, very high in sociosexuality.

If you look at, as I mentioned, uh, sociosexuality, big sex differences.

If you were to look at the two distributions, they're about, uh, one and a half standard deviations away from one another, if I remember correctly.

But more interesting than that perhaps is that the shift has gone from saying, ah, people have this... all women have this dualistic mating strategy, short term and long term.

To saying, okay, there's actually a lot of overlap between short and long-term mate strategies, that short-term strategies may actually be kind of a springboard or a doorway into long-term mate strategies.

A good example of this reported by David Buss in his research was that about 70-something percent of women who have affairs, they report, for example, being in love with their affair partner.

And this has led to kind of this new paradigm in evolutionary psychology that's called the mate switching hypothesis, which is that short-term mating is not something apart from long-term mating.

That's a really fascinating question.

So there is some Recent science, more recent than my book even, out of David Buss' lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

And that science shows that people definitely use their perceived options around them to identify whether they should stay with a current mate or not.

Hmm.

Sure.

Well, there was a big study done recently.

by David Buss, and I am blanking on the other person's name right now.

It'll come to me later.

Again, the exposure to them, to the psychological biases, conscious and unconscious that we have, um, there is a field called evolutionary psychology.

David Buss, a, a big, uh, name in that field.

Mind-blowing, fascinating how we, even though we have come this long way, we still have a, an animal brain, a primal brain in that sense, and it just, emotions are part of that initial evolutionary experience that we had, right? So many of those things, uh, he has a beautiful saying, l- a beautiful saying.

Um, it goes something like, how is not going to be, how, how we're not gonna be dysfunctional to society if we have primal brains with medieval institutions and godlike technology.

And then you start to get to, you've done those things, and you're like, "I still need to progress further." I think it should be-- We'll kinda go more into this 'cause I wanna re-pivot the convo back to the experiences your, you and your clients are seeing, and I can try to, try to translate from the crazy world of social that I'm in.

But if you look at the research, and I think Dr. David Buss has done a crazy amount of research on this in evolutionary psychology? Yeah, evolutionary psychology.

I actually have the textbook behind me from him.

I have a few textbooks that are really interesting.

Uh, the differences though, the main difference, um, for men compared to women is, is paternity uncertainty.

So David Buss has a great way of putting this.

He says, "There's never in the history of the world been, uh, a case where you have a woman who gives birth to a kid and then thinks, 'Is this my kid or is this some other woman's kid? I don't know.'" Um, whereas for men, if their partner gives birth, it's almost certainly their kid, but there is a possibility that it's not their kid.

And any, uh, any guy that ended up investing in a kid that wasn't his own biological kid, um, the-- all the paternal effort that he puts into that kid, he's putting it in effect into the genes of another guy.

Uh, the differences though, the main difference, um, for men compared to women is, is paternity uncertainty.

So David Buss has a great way of putting this.

He says, "There's never in the history of the world been, uh, a case where you have a woman who gives birth to a kid and then thinks, 'Is this my kid or is this some other woman's kid? I don't know.'" Um, whereas for men, if their partner gives birth, it's almost certainly their kid, but there is a possibility that it's not their kid.

And any, uh, any guy that ended up investing in a kid that wasn't his own biological kid, um, the-- all the paternal effort that he puts into that kid, he's putting it, in effect, into the genes of another guy.

Yeah.

I've read Mark Manson, read models, read, um, uh, David Buss.

I read, um, uh, there's a, there's a great British Evo.

His name is escaping me now.

yeah a very jacked uh uh uh dude uh he looks like a viking but he's he's cool he's he's smart um uh he he he's advised um i i'm in touch you know i dm with mac and murphy on on twitter a bit um yeah uh uh costello um yeah

yeah i've been messaging costello quite a bit yeah yeah he's great

yeah yeah they're both cool um i want to get in touch with david buss uh jeff jeff teed up an intro but bless bless hasn't replied yet uh but he's he's sort of the the godfather of lucius like he's you know he's the most cited guy in that field and um he has some papers on stated preferences that i really like that i want to i want to talk to him about um but uh Yeah, we've talked to Jeff's wife a bit, Diana.

Yeah, she's great.

And the men who'd benefit from being more assertive will take it straight to heart.

This was backed up by David Buss's book, Bad Men, Men Behaving Badly in the US.

And- That despite the fact that fucking like hashtag kill all men or hashtag like not all men, but it's always a man, which basically like is the same as all men.

It is all men.

Right, right.

David Buss talks about this also in his book, where women, when they're ovulating, they'll look for more masculine traits, like a chiseled jaw and someone that's more of a playboy or a bad guy, versus when they're in a different part of their cycle, and it actually does fluctuate.

Yeah, there's some really interesting research in the ovulatory shifts in women's preferences and things like that.

It's very messy research because of that.

but a way to self-validate herself in the sexual marketplace because out of all of the females that he could have had, he chose her, and this is a way for her to validate her marketplace value.

Right.

Well, I mean, there certainly have been people, actually, I think, David Buss, a number of years ago, probably many years ago now, talked about different reasons why women might engage in short term mating and clarifying their own mate value and clarifying what they want in a mate were some of the things that that he had suggested might be reasons for doing some of that.

And so certainly if you, you know, in a sense, are testing where you sit in the mating market, right, you can get useful information by seeing how a man that you might think is an eight or a nine or something like that reacts to, you know, versus other men, because you'll always get attention from men.