660: The Economics of Relationships: Insights from ‘The Value of Others’ Author Psychologist Dr. Orion Taraban

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It is my pleasure to welcome someone I have been following for, I don't know, maybe a year or two. And he has just blown up in terms of his fame and recognition because his content is so, so valuable. It's about a topic that all of us struggle with at one time or another, and that is the topic of relationships. And it's none other than Orion Taraban. He is the author of the new book the Value of Others Understanding the economic model of relationships to get and keep more of what you want in the sexual marketplace. And of course, I am an economist, and so I was particularly drawn to his work. You know, I always say economics is the art and science of making the best use of scarce resources. So I think that kind of plays into what Orion talks about. So, Orion, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing really well. Thanks for having me. Jason, this is a pleasure. And thank you for taking a chance on my book. That was lovely to. To know that you invested the time and energy into trying to figure it out. What I'm.

It's not a short book either.

No, it's kind of substantial. It's over a pound. I tried to give people their money's worth, as it were.

Yeah, no, it's, it's. It's a fantastic book. And, you know, I started following you on YouTube when you just had a very small number of subscribers. And I know that has all changed now, so congratulations on your success. But what you're sharing is really valuable to people. I mean, you're taking really a soft science, you know, relationships, and really adding a lot of, I think, your academic background to it as a. I mean, you are a psychologist, right? Yep. So I think that's really valuable, but it's also very pragmatic and understandable. Tell us about kind of the premise of the book. I Mean, of course I, I've completed it and I, I really enjoyed it, but kind of give us the Orion Taraban big picture, if you would.

Okay, sure. Yeah. It's my attempt at providing, let's say, a universal theory of relationships to help explain why people get into relationships of all kinds with the people they choose to get into relationships with. And I think a lot of the principles I discuss in the book are equally applicable to profess professional relationships and friendships. But I primarily focus on sexual relationships between men and women because that's kind of a juicy topic.

Right.

And it's one in which I think that some of these principles have not been given their fair shake, as it were. I think that I wrote this book because there's a lot of soft headed advice about how to go about procuring and maintaining relationships with the opposite sex. And I think a lot of that advice doesn't work and leads people to feel even more frustrated, dispirited and hopeless about the dating market, which if you haven't dated in the last five to 10 years, has changed significantly. Like, oh yeah, that's. I think one of the criticisms that come from some of the, the old school folks who are offering suggestions on relationships. It's almost like if you went to your grandpa about how to get a job and he was like, you know, well, first thing you got to get is a good card stock for your resume. And then you go down there and you have a firm handshake and you look them right in the eye and it's like, grandpa, that's, that's not how it works anymore, man. So a lot of that advice, it might have been applicable 10, 20, 30 years ago, but the game has changed radically with the advent of social media and dating apps and the hookup culture and all kinds of things with respect to the social advancements of women. So if you aren't adapting because of the evolving nature of the game, you're functionally obsolete.

Yeah, I would, I would agree completely. And you know, of course there are all sorts of changes along the way. You could go back to first and second wave feminism, but just more recently, if you look at the rise of Instagram and the rise of swiping apps like Tinder, I think those were mega game changers. Unfortunately, I don't think they changed things for the better. I think they made things much worse. But feel free to disagree with me on that.

I think it's a mixed bag. I think it's never been easier to get a relationship than it is today. And it's also never been harder. It's like, never been easier to be a man, and it's never been hard. It's never been easier to be a woman. It's never been harder. It's. It's this weird paradox, I think. You know, in the past, maybe we are in this, like, normal kurtosis, but now, again, I think it's getting flatter in the middle and more peaked at the extremes. So we have kind of a bimodal experience with respect to masculinity, femininity, and intersexual relationships. I think there are a lot of opportunities that we have today that didn't exist even five or ten years ago. And if we know how to be flexible and to utilize them appropriately, we can thrive. But it's sort of like those brick and mortar businesses that refused to get a website when the Internet exploded. It's like, because they were operating under outdated models of the way business operated, and maybe they were stubborn and proud and inflexible, they made room for the nimble, emergent industries that came to take their place.

Yeah, no question about it. Explain the bimodal concept that you were just mentioning with the peaks at the end. I almost think, is that kind of the opposite of the bell curve?

Yeah, it would be. So I haven't made an episode about this, but I've been thinking about it. Like, for example, I think in today's day and age, it's never been easier and harder to be, let's say, a feminine woman. I mean, think about what it would take to be a feminine woman in the Wild west in the 19th century America. It's like, there's no indoor plumbing. Your cosmetics have to come by Calistoga wagon. It takes three months to get to you, and you have to do laundry by hand with the scrub board. And yet you see pictures of the women there, and they have their lacy petticoats and their bustles and the parasols. They put an effort into their feminine appearance that you only see at cosplay conventions in 2024. You know what I'm saying? Nowadays, we can have those cosmetics delivered via Amazon prime within 24 hours, have indoor plumbing. You have women who don't need to play up their passivity or their docility or their femininity in order to secure resources from a man, because they can get them themselves and invest them in their appearance. And yet we see fewer and fewer women presenting themselves in that traditional feminine way now that it's become easier and easier to do so. So it's Paradoxical, because I think it's never been easier in the history of the world for a woman to be feminine. And yet we see less and less of that in today's day and age. And it may even be frowned upon among certain circles of women and certain areas of society. So it can be hard to manifest certain aspects of traditional femininity as well. So it's never been easier and it's also never been harder.

For instance, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the professor. I believe his name is Gad Saad and he's, he's written a book called the Parasitic How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. It's just about sort of the woke culture and so forth. But one of the points he makes that's interesting is, and I want to ask you about this, why is it that women and men, but I guess particularly women, since men are the more visual creatures it seems there to be. There's a concerted effort at making oneself look ugly on purpose. I mean, face piercings and tattoos and obesity. I mean, like, it almost seems intentional. We know the food supply is poisonous in America. I mean, that's another discussion. But, and you know, his thesis on that was that women in particular are intentionally taking themselves out of the mating pool.

I don't know about that.

Yeah.

But I can't speak a little bit from my own personal experience. When I was in my 20s, when I was an actor in New York City, I was kind of a hipster and I was definitely more left leaning at that time. And it was cool to like buck some of the traditional standards of beauty and attractiveness. You know, I didn't get all pierced and tatted up because I kind of missed that wave. But if I was born maybe five or 10 years later, I might be that that way now and have those remnants today. So I think that it's sort of like a badge for those in the know to say, hey, I am kind of too school for cool, or I'm in the know with respect to the cutting edge and I'm positioning myself against the standard monolithic culture. So it's a kind of a. It's like hipsters are an evolution of hippies. It's a form of counterculture. And I think it's a way of identifying yourself to those who can pick up the signifier.

Yeah, I get it. I mean, you know, look, in the 60s people grew their hair long. They rebelled against the 50s culture, which was sort of conformist and that, you know, it just seems rather extreme now. And at least then I think you could argue that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin on stage, they looked attractive to some people. Right. But now it just seems like there's an intention to look literally ugly. I don't know, maybe.

Certainly getting old. People love it. I mean, Mick Jagger was kind of the androgynous rock star from the 60s and 70s who kind of square the line between performative masculinity and femininity. And I'm sure he did very well with respect to his sexual relationships. Nowadays, the lead singers that do very well also kind of blur the line between masculine and feminine. They paint their nails or they wear dresses in public and it.

Harry Styles and so forth.

Exactly like Harry Styles. He would be the Mick jagger for the 2000s. And as far as I can tell, he's doing very well with his female fans, you know what I'm saying? So that might seem really peculiar to some folks, but just like the long hair and the, the tight pants and the wagging hips might have seemed peculiar to those in the 40s and 50s.

Well, and you know, I mean, I wasn't really talking about the gender polarity concept when I said that. I was just frankly, ugliness. But whatever. Maybe I'm getting old and not very hip.

It's just so strange. It's like I've studied a little bit of beauty and it seems to be so relative to time and place. Like there was period. If you watch some old samurai movies, like Kurosawa films a lot, he takes pains for them to be historically accurate. And you might see every once in a while, one of the female characters smile and it's like she has no teeth because it was the fashion, the time for women to blacken their teeth.

Oh, weird.

Looks totally crazy to me. Yeah, but apparently that was like a sign of sexy femininity in 15th century feudal Japan.

Okay.

You know, you can go to African tribes or folks in Papua New guinea and they'll have elongated necks or. I mean, it's just. How did that happen? It's very strange, but I think that they're emergent phenomena. I don't think there was a cadre of men who said, you know what? We're going to decide. Long necks are really hot. Or a bunch of women got together. It's like, let's do this and the guys will come along. It's an emergent phenomenon in an ongoing dialogue between men and women. There's some people who can influence that. Like the, the folks in Milan and Paris, movie stars, rock stars, Celebrities, but I don't think anyone really controls it. And it's a ongoing emergent game. It's kind of fun if you don't take it too seriously.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I'm not that uptight, but. But, you know, just to your point on the music, you know, I always say that the peak of civilization was 1990, because in the 80s, it was cool to be a winner and to be ambitious and to be, you know, achieving something and to be a pillar of the community. And it seems like by about 1993, musical genres really caught hold. That was hip hop, rap and Seattle grunge music, you know, typified by the depressive kind of Kurt Cobain concept. Right. And that's when it became cool for women to like wear sweats and be fat, not wear makeup and wear flip flops. And so that changed, but to the much earlier point, decades earlier, because you mentioned Mick Jagger. Elvis Presley was probably the perfect example of someone who just pushed the limit of kind of androgyny and mixing the feminine with the masculine because, you know, he was like shaking his hips and doing all kinds of crazy gestures on stage. And back in that day, that was considered totally weird.

Oh, yeah, people loved him and hated him, which I think is true of Mick Jagger and Harry Styles and anybody who achieves that degree of popular celebrity.

Yep. But that's what our.

Right. Yeah, it's just. It's just testing the limits. And, you know, Elvis might seem super tame in 2024, and I think there might be something to that in the sense that we become socially accustomed to certain kinds of stimulation. And one solution is either to intensify, go even further than that, or we have to explore strange and auteur new dimensions of expression. Those are the only two ways. Paradoxically, it can also swing in the opposite direction. So I think that, you know, we're still around peak wokeness and those folks who are having children now, their children might grow up to rebel, to be very conservative and Christian and you can rebel against the counter rebellion.

The pendulum swings. I totally see your point. Exactly. Well, hey, let's talk about your great new book. By the way. You know, you've got tons of reviews on Amazon. The book is definitely hit. It's very good. I highly recommend it. Let's talk about kind of the overall premise of the.

Of others.

And you give this great metaphor in the book about the passengers and the captains, and I'm sure that some especially feminist women gave you a hard time about some of that. But I. I think it's very true and applicable. Why don't you tell us about that, if you would?

No pushback from women or feminists about that. Because I go out of my way to say that captains and passengers are gender neutral. And in fact, part of the book is exploring some of the intersections between those roles and gender because there are pros and cons on the various permutations. Some of them got upset with some of the things I said later on in the book, but no one so far has been upset about the captains and passengers metaphor. So what is that? In chapter two, I describe the sexual marketplace like this big old timey dock, and there are captains standing in front of their ships that are moored there, and there are passengers walking up and down the dock. The captains are trying to attract passengers onto their vessels, and the passengers are trying to secure their best possible rates on vessels that go to where they want to go. So they kind of need each other, but there's a certain antagonism between those two roles, much like between, let's say, labor and management. They need each other, but they're kind of not friends. But that mutual need is the basis of their negotiation. And I say that men can be captains and passengers, and women can be pass captains and passengers, but there are certain liabilities and benefits associated with those gender role interactions. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. It does. And the captain is making the decision as to what passengers to take and, like, go into that a little more.

Ostensibly, yeah. Though sometimes it's like a sham decision because there's nobody else who's interested in coming on the ship. So right decision really only becomes real in the context of optionality. And a lot of folks, especially men, don't have a lot of optionality. So it has to be a mutual decision. Like the captain has to agree to take on the passenger, and the passenger obviously has to consent to get on the ship. And everyone is more or less trying to secure a relationship with their perceived best option. I think that is fairly commonsensical. I don't think that we could argue that if someone actually could secure a better relationship with a better option, that they would forego that for a worser relationship for a lesser option. And to my mind, that suggests that the perception of value, the perceived best option, perception of value is at the heart of all decisions with respect to who we decide to get into relationships with. Value is a very abstract concept. I explained it in kind of a complicated way in the first chapter, but we can talk about it as anything that can be either bought or earned has a value in the marketplace. So this isn't just about resources in terms of money or income or lifestyle. We can also think about resources in terms of emotional support or excitement and alleviation from boredom or opportunity for career advancement or instrumental support. I'd like you to fix my bookcase or pick me up from the airport or childcare or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's lots of different things that people need from each other. And that's primarily why we go to each other to form relationships, is the mutual dischargement of that need. And the more we need, the more we have to be willing to provide in return. And so that's kind of what the passengers and the captains are negotiating between each other down at the docks is like, okay, a lot of captains would like to charge a premium for their tickets on their ships. But on the other hand, passengers generally want to secure their most affordable option. And so there is a tension there where they kind of have to, to meet in the middle if they want to mutually discharge their needs, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So you make the point in your book that usually it's best for the male to be the captain and the female to be the passenger. Correct me if I'm wrong, but why do you make that point?

For a couple of reasons. With the advent of at least third wave feminism, women have been encouraged and empowered and supported to become captains in their own rights. And part of one of the promises of feminism was liberation for both men and women from their traditional gender roles. But we haven't really seen that. We've seen a lot of support for women to become captains, and clearly they're doing very well in society according to many different metrics. But it's not really the case that men can become passengers in the sexual marketplace because the idea of taking care of an adult dependent male is anathema to most women, especially successful women. They didn't go through the struggles of ascending to their captaincy with the idea that their reward at the end of the day was a guy who doesn't have a job or makes, you know, $30,000 a year and doesn't have much going on. So women today can be captains or passengers. Like they can prioritize their career and education and rise through the ranks and be very competent in the and self supporting. Or they can marry a man who is very successful, competent, and get her needs and lifestyle met that way so that she kind of has two different pathways in the sexual marketplace. Men really only have one. Like in, in no culture, even today, do we hear men say, what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, I want to be a house husband. You know, I want to meet a really successful woman and raise her children. That's not a viable pathway for men. Men. So men still really only can be captains because the passenger role is functionally close to them. So if you're not a captain as a man, you can't really secure passage. You just sort of languish on the dock and no woman wants you and you're kind of useless to other men as well. So functionally speaking, men only can become captains. And that's an uncertain venture because most men actually won't become captains. But the alternative of not even trying isn't particularly attractive. Well, the other reason is in general, women want relationships that will significantly improve their life. And if a man doesn't offer the opportunity to improve her life, she's probably just going to keep thriving on her own and waiting for a better option. So most of these women who become captains functionally want to get into relationships with a male captain. But that creates what I call in the book the two body problem, which is if a man and a woman both spend 10 years of delayed gratification and intense effort to ascend to their captaincy, like on what basis is the female captain going to leave her boat behind to join the man or the man's going to leave his boat behind to join the woman? You have the two body problem, which is once you attain to the captaincy and you put in that much time, energy, money and effort, you're not going to give that up to become a cap, a passenger on somebody else's boat. And so you enter into this sort of like Mexican standoff between men and women where it's like, okay, no, you should be on my vessel. No, no, you should be on my vessel. And so they can't really do business with each other. Like, two captains are kind of as useless to each other as two passengers. And there's a lot of different solutions that folks try to come up with to navigate this two body problem of two captains. But all of them tend to be less effective and less efficient than a pairing between a captain and a passenger, irrespective of their genders.

Yeah, you know, there's, there's so much I, I want to make sure we cover two of my favorite videos of yours. Number one, accept. You really enlightened me when I listened to that video. I did not ever think it that way. And That's. That's one of the things that's great about your content. It. It makes you think in new ways. And then how many women are construction workers? I think those are two important things. But another thing you talk about, and I think it applies right here in the captain passenger metaphor, is the adored and the adorer. And that is always true, that in every relationship, certainly every girlfriend I've had over the years, it's always like, I like her more or she likes me more. You can sense it, you know, And I'm sure she sense it too. Right. What's interesting about that and what I think you're saying is that it's actually better to be the adorer than the adored. I don't know. You want to talk about that a little bit?

It can be so just for your audience who isn't familiar with the concept, basically, I talk about what I call the balance of attraction, which is the fact that it's not possible for two people to like each other exactly the same amount.

Right.

Which suggests in every relationship, there's always someone who likes the other person more and there's someone who likes the other person less. I call this.

And it varies through time, too.

It can, though. So over time, folks do tend to settle into emotional patterns and, you know, relationship dynamics. So after usually a few months, there's not these wild swings where people are changing polarity. For something to radically change polarity for the woman I'm dating to. To become the adored after years of being the adorer, that would require some kind of really watershed moment in the relationship or in her lifestyle. Like, she'd have to become very famous or I'd have to lose all my money, or there'd have to be an affair. Like, something would radically have to change the nature and structure of the relationship for that to happen. So it can fluctuate. But generally, somebody is consistently the adored and someone is consistently the adorer. That's what I found.

Okay, so which one is it better to be?

Well, I don't think it is better to be one or the other. And that's one of the points that I make is a lot of times people think it's better to be the adored, and they think, oh, I want to be loved and I want to be the object of adoration. And that just sounds so nice, and that just seems so easy. And what I argue in the book is that there's actually pros and cons, benefits and liabilities to each of these positions that I think they're value neutral. And it's for each person to really be honest with him or herself to decide which of these roles might be a better fit for my personality. In fact, what I argue is that most people actually want to be the adorer.

That's exactly my point.

Point which, and the reason for that is the thing that tends to characterize the adora role more than anything else is that this is the person in the relationship who feels more right. This is where all the emotions happen. The person who's the adorer gets to wait with bated breath for the phone call to come in, is really excited when the date happens, is crestfallen when the date falls through. This person has the dizzying highs and sometimes the terrifying lows. They're a little insecure and a little out of control, but that's part the of of riding the roller coaster, right? And they get to be with the one they love, which is the paramount human experience on this planet as we've chosen to define it. The adored, on the other hand, has a much more muted emotional experience because they're not with the one they love. They're loved by the one they're with, which is a very different experience. So that's why I often say that it's better on the whole for women to be the adorers than the adored. Why? Because I think that for better or for course, women go to relationships to feel more than men do. Like, they want to have the tingles, they want to have that limerance, they want to have an emotional experience. And if they lack that, they're going to feel like something is missing. There's no chemistry, they're likely to become bored and either leave the relationship or never selected to begin with. So I think that men are often better at sort of like discharging duty or responsibility and are okay. In fact, sometimes they even prefer more muted emotional experiences. And that comes from being in the adored role. But of course, there's some men who, who want to be the adorers. There's some women who want to be the adored. So we don't have to be, you know, dogmatic about it.

Right, right. But it. But you just made me think of that in a new way. So it was very interesting. Well, Orion, what else would you like people to know? Questions I haven't asked you. Just share what you want to share here.

Well, I think again, the reason I wrote the book was out of a attempt to help clarify things that haven't yet been said with respect to these sexual Relationships. These are things that I've discovered and practiced and consulted on over at least the last 10 years. And they've been associated with a great deal of success in my own personal life and in those that I've consulted. They can be difficult for a lot of people to approach. Like it's a radically different way of looking at things and it can feel very transactional, it can even feel very cynical. But I would just encourage folks to keep an open mind and to try or test some of these things out for themselves. There's no need to take anything that I say on faith, but potentially use some of these teachings and implement them in your own life to see if what I'm saying might be true. And of course follow that, like if something works, keep doing it. If it doesn't, you know, throw it out. It's not a big deal. And so that's all I would ask for people is to of keep an open mind and to approach some of these principles like a scientist is like not to have contempt prior to investigation, but to maybe implement them as a behavioral experiment in your own life to see if what I'm saying might have any validity.

And in your email newsletter you give suggestions for people to do behavioral experiments, right?

Oh, I do, yeah. That's one of the fun little things I do every week. So I, I provide some sort of content on an idea that I had and, and every week I offer a behavioral experiment suggestion which is something that you could try out if you feel like it and see how you feel as a consequence of undergoing that behavioral change just for a time limited period.

Yeah, I think most people would say that the, the dating and mating market nowadays is pretty difficult. Although you, you know, sort of gave an answer. So sometimes it's better or worse or you know, like everything is throughout time. But what suggestions would you have for people? What action steps would you have for people if they're in a relationship or if they're not? Because if they're in a relationship, you know, a lot of people get lazy. I'm certainly guilty of that myself. You know, you kind of have to keep that dynamic stimulating or you know, someone's going to check out.

It's just absolutely true. So I talk about in the book how every relationship has three phases. There is attraction, negotiation and maintenance. And I have a video coming out about this in the next few weeks because I failed to mention this in the book. And it's a very important point and you're alluding to it, which is that it always happens in that order you have to attract before you can negotiate. You have to negotiate before you can maintain. However, relationship phase, once it's initiated, never terminates. Like once you succeed in the attraction phase, your reward is that you get to start negotiating. But just because you got to start negotiating doesn't mean you get to stop attracting. In fact, by the time you actually get a relationship contracted, which is the maintenance phase, a lot of your maintenance is about maintaining attraction. And those original terms, which is frame management, which is a part of the, the tacit renegotiation that happens over the course of a relationship. Most of the terms of a relationship are never negotiated explicitly between men and women. Most of these terms are negotiated tacitly and behaviorally as people kind of begin to change. And the partner either accepts that change or resists that change. And so, so the partners are functionally communicating like how expensive the new terms of arrangement are going to be for the other partner by their reactions to their new behavior. So you're absolutely right. You, you have to continue to maintain attraction. You never get to take your foot off the gas with respect to that part of the relationship. Just like every day I have to show up and do my job. And if I just phone it in for too long, like I'm going to stop getting clients, they're not going to come back. I'm going to get bad reviews. It's like we accept that as just common sense with our professional careers. We need to normalize, continuing to make an effort to maintain attraction in our relationships indefinitely. And that can sound exhausting. A lot of people actually don't enjoy the dating process. They much rather would skip ahead, if possible, to the maintenance phase where everything is safe and secure and pleasant. But I don't think, I think that comes with a host of other liabilities. Generally that puts sex and desire on the chopping block. People start to become complacent. They let go of their own self development. You know, the stereotypical thing is the, the wife puts on 30 pounds or the guy doesn't take the woman out for dates anymore. They stop investing in themselves in terms of personality or growth and development. And so I'm, I'm not curious about you anymore. I'm not interested in you anymore. These are things you can never stop. For better or for worse.

Yep, no question about it. It's, you gotta show up every day. It's, everything takes maintenance. So do those three phases, Orion, typically take place over a certain amount of time? I mean, how do you sort of play those out in a six month relationship, one year relationship or a 40 year marriage. Right. You know? Yeah.

What I say is that they always happen in those three phases and some of them can happen in an evening and some of them can happen over the rest of your life. Like let's say I go to a meat market bar, I can just like make eyes with some girl at the bar. That's attraction. Once we get kind of mutual exchange, I can go up to her and say, hey, you want to get out of here? And if she says yes, that's negotiation. And then we can do whatever we're going to do and I can say, hey, this was great, I'll call you. That's maintenance. So it's like you can do all three phases in an hour if you want to. And sometimes they're spread out over, you know, 60 years.

Right, interesting. Very interesting.

So I don't think that there are rules about how long the attraction phase is supposed to take. In fact, attraction is a choice, but it's not a conscious choice. So most of us don't have access to the decision maker with respect to that. Like for better or for worse, we can't, at least in terms of our experience, we can't really control who we're attracted to. And that can certainly go down, but it's very difficult for that to go up significantly. Like sometimes you can meet a very attractive member of the opposite sex and be like, okay, wow, I'm pulled towards this person, I want to go talk to him or her. And then they open their mouth and they're like, oh, okay, nevermind. So you could lose attraction very quickly, but it's very rare that you, you might see somebody that doesn't even register or you're even disgusted by, but then they open their mouth and you're like, oh, wow, I really love what this person has to say and I'm going to ignore some of the things that I've seen. So attraction is generally not a choice. It happens unconsciously. We generally know who we're attracted to and who we're not very quickly. And attraction, it's very easy to lose and very hard to gain.

I have noticed though, in the past, at least for me, that attraction, if it doesn't happen initially right away, it can increase over time just by hanging around with the person. Now maybe that isn't romantic attraction and it's just sort of friendship attraction. I'm not sure. But is that possible?

You're absolutely right. The relationships, the long term relationships that I've had that have been most successful when I first went out with them, I were like, I was like, oh, they're okay. My head wasn't in the clouds and I wasn't walking on air and my heart wasn't beating out of my chest when we touched. You know, that spark, which is something that a lot of especially young people are chasing, I think that's associated with very poor relationship outcomes or at least very short term and passionate and tempestuous outcomes. It's sort of like the candle that burns twice as bright, burns for half as long kind of a thing, right. And these women that I had very fulfilling long term relationships with, like, I would just keep showing up because there was kind of no reason not to. And over time I started to appreciate them on a deeper level level. And that was the basis of an enduring relationship. So it can happen that way, but that's a slow and gradual process. And if at any point of that, like six month period, if something that was too unattractive happened, it probably would have, you know, shattered the process and we wouldn't have been in a relationship. So that's kind of my point is that it's so much easier to lose attraction than it is to gain attraction.

I'm curious. Orion and a lot of people would ask a musician this type of question. But other than your own great work, who else do you look to? You know that that has really good teachings on this topic. Maybe people of the past, the famous psychologists or, or contemporaries.

Sure, I do read a lot. Like, I don't get to read as much as I would like to these days because I'm very busy. But I've spent the last 30 years basically reading as much as I could I can about all kinds of different things. When I do read, I generally read dead people. It's very rare for me to read a living contemporary author. A lot of of the basis for the economic model I actually got from von Mises in the Austrian School of Economics.

Are you libertarian?

I'm adjacent. I don't know if I'm full on libertarian, but I do like a lot of their ideas.

I've had many Mises Institute people on the show over the years.

I mean, that dude was just so smart. I remember I read Human Action for the first time and it was like I would be shouting out loud every page because he had a banger. At least every paragraph. That guy got it. He was very direct and incisive and cutting with his insights. So that definitely opened my eyes. And as he discusses. Economics is really very similar to your definitions. The art and Science of making decisions with scarce resources that can be implemented in various ways. So it's a decision making science and people make decisions with respect to who they get into relationships with. And so that was sort of my first glimmer that maybe some of these principles can be applied to human mating and dating, especially because I think von Mises makes a fairly strong argument that that a lot of these axioms that govern how people make decisions are kind of universal, culturally independent, and may even be. I don't think he makes this argument, but may even be neurobiological in the same way that logic doesn't differ from culture to culture from time to time, which suggests that the perception or appreciation of logic might be built into the human brain and its expression in the mind. Mind.

Yeah, I would say, except lately.

Well, there's always people who use logic badly or who decide they don't want to use logic at all. Right. But it's sort of like a potential.

I'm just making the comment that it just seems like on social media and the political realm that people have lost the ability to use critical thinking. It's just.

Yeah, I don't know if that's, if that's recent. The only recent change is we've never seen it on this magnitude with this intensity. Like social media is more powerful than the nuclear bomb.

Bomb. Oh yeah.

And I don't think that we've really collectively appreciated that reality. Some people are figuring that out and they're going to be the ones who are kind of pulling the strings right now. The rest of us might eventually catch up, but it's extremely dangerous.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. And that's why I, I say that these companies should not be treated as private companies. They've got to get rid of their exemptions under. What is it, section 230. They need to be regulated. And I'm an Austrian school guy. I don't like regulation, but this is just too big and too power. When you have companies that have revenue the equivalent of the GDP of the 70th country on the planet, this is no longer a regular company.

I hear you. And who regulates the regulators? So, you know, it's a problem that doesn't have any good solutions, but it.

Doesn'T have a good solution. But just keep.

As a private enterprise. Yeah, I don't think that that's entirely a good idea either.

Yeah, I'm just saying that they shouldn't be able to shut people off. Like if we're having a conversation on the phone. Phone. The phone Company doesn't get to shut us off as long as we're paying the bill. Right?

Yeah.

And I think that's part of the.

The ongoing judicial or case law about this is like, are they actually providing a public commons or is this a private platform? I think that's an ongoing question. And obviously they have very vested interest to keep it a private platform.

Right? Absolutely, absolutely. Because they say they're not publishers, but they really are publishers by choosing what goes on and off their platform. Maybe they don't publish, but by just being the arbiter, what gets seen and what doesn't, that is publishing.

You know, they clearly make decisions about that. Yeah, yeah, I would agree. One of my former supervisors and colleagues got a job at Facebook leading a mental health team because there are folks whose job it is eight hours a day, five days a week reviewing flagged and disturbing content. And these are, you know, there's sexual assaults, there's beheadings, there's. Oh yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of really dark and twisted stuff that's on the web and that people try to post. And it's these people's jobs to view the content and make a human decision. And so basically he was managing the vicarious trauma of every day being exposed to the most dark and awful sides of humanity. So clearly even the most hard nosed libertarian would say, no, that stuff, it should be a free market and first amendment, we should allow people to do that kind of stuff. So clearly, really, we, we all agree that decisions need to be made about what content should be disseminated. But that suggests that you're already making decisions about what's published and what's not. Right. So you're already on that slippery slope.

Yeah. Look at, you know, if it's who you want for president versus who I want, that should not be censored. Okay, that, it's just certainly, yeah, that.

That seems very problematic.

But that is what they do. They definitely do it.

They probably do it more subtly than that.

Of course. Orion, I'm keeping you too long. I know that, but I just. Before you go, of course, I want you to give out where people can find your information. And your, your YouTube channel has over 600,000 subscribers now. I mean, I think I started subscribing when you had about 20,000. So congratulations. It's. It's just blown up and that, that's great. The book is available in all the usual places. But I just love to get your comment about two things. I think these two videos were just really interesting. The videos. I ment mentioned earlier that women are construction workers because I think that really speaks to how women need to treat their life with urgency. And I, I see so many sad and depressed women in their 30s and older that have missed that because they followed the sort of, you know, go get your mba, go achieve, go do this. And none of this stuff is particularly satisfying to women that I've noticed. It is to men, but it isn't to women as much. And it can be.

I know women who are very, as far as I can tell, satisfied with their careers and, and their lifestyles. And you know, not every woman wants to be a housewife. Like I wouldn't want to be a house husband. So I understand that and I'm, I'm all for choice.

I'm for choice. But the difference is there's a difference between choice and agenda. That is a distinction, I believe.

Well, like my friend Sean Smith likes to say, feminism has been lying to women. And the, the fundamental lie is that you can be every everything and no one can be everything. And that form of just unilateral empowerment and uncritical support for women has obscured and mystified the trade offs that all human beings must take on when they make decisions as they move through the world. Right?

Yep.

And one of the things I argue in the book is that women on some level might be able to have a lot of it, but you can't have it all at once because you, you have to make decisions about where to allocate your resources. And if that's true, if a woman wants everything, it might be best for her to priorit long term relationships and mate selection from 18 to 25, because that's when she's going to be most attractive and have the highest sexual marketplace value with which she can secure better terms for a more attractive long term partner. And if after 10 years of that, at 35, she is for whatever reason missing out on the experience of being an employee, she can get a job, but the vice versa is, is very difficult. And a lot of women, especially if they were attractive in their 20s and they had lots of optionality, they're not prepared by how kind of quickly that can drop off in their mid-30s, especially because their competition ain't getting older. You know, there's always a fresh cohort every year, right? And the most eligible successful men do not find a 38 year old who is going to put pressure on them to reproduce in the next 12 months a very attractive mating option, especially when the man might have access to more Attractive younger women who are going to fit into his life and aren't going to put that of kind, kind of time constraint on his decisions.

That's the age that women are told, go make it in the workplace. Don't be dependent on a man. And they're using their prime years for college, advanced degrees, or working in a cubicle doing spreadsheets all day, whatever it is. Right. And this is the prime time to find a mate. Once that goes away, it can't be redeemed ever.

I mean, I get it. It's like, I agree with a lot of first and second wave feminism. You know, Virginia Woolf talked about how in order to write, you need money and a room of one one's own. That's absolutely true. Like, women could not become a political entity in earnest until they were an economic agent. And so those two things kind of go hand in hand. And I don't like the idea of being dependent on anybody. I get it.

But they're dependent on a corporation.

Well, that's certainly true. A lot of them are. Yeah. There's not a lot of female entrepreneurs. They're dwarfed in number by the number of entrepreneurs.

You know, then they're dependent on their company, their business, the regulatory climate, you know, their customers. I mean, everybody's dependent on somebody.

Okay, you're absolutely correct. And the idea that I'm going to be dependent on this one human being, that might be. Be a tough road of hope for a lot of people. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's going to change the fabric and the process of the game of mating and dating. Because the fact of the matter is, I talk about later in the book, most human relationships have been transacted out of necessity. Men and women have needed each other.

Right.

And they've needed each other because life has been very, very hard for the vast majority of humanity throughout its history. However, if I don't really need you and you don't really need me, then we're only really going to contract with each other if there's a strong desire. Desire. And in the absence of that necessity or desire, there's nothing. And so that's why we see more men and women pulling out for longer periods of time because they don't need a partner and more desirable options exist somewhere out there in the seemingly infinite pool of potential mates. And so that's. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's certainly significantly reducing the number of relationships that are being transacted on an annual basis. Basis.

I think if it's a continuum. We need to need each other a little more than we do now for sure. I mean, in the past, maybe, you know, marriage was just a business deal in historically, right?

Oh, usually, yeah. That's how it's mostly done.

The pendulum needs to swing a little bit toward actually needing each other because we do need each other. Right. And a lot of times it takes decades to figure that out that we've missed that opportunity.

And yeah, I hear you that it's a tough sell though, because it's like we're not going to get rid of washers and dryers so that women can go back to using the washboards to do the laundry. Like I now need a woman to do the laundry. It's like that's never going to happen. Right. So a lot of these modern technologies and conveniences have, let's say permanently, in the absence of some sort of nuclear catastrophe, have permanently eliminated that need that we've needed to discharge and increase that if we become. Become successful. It's like, you know, if I'm making seven figures a year, I actually don't need a housewife because I can afford a wet nurse and a tutor and all kinds of people can do grocery shopping. For me. It's like I can outsource the vast majority of need and necessity that I used to go to for my partner.

But you still need a woman for companionship and for sexual fulfillment and, you know, for children. You do.

The question though is do you need the same same woman for sexual outcomes?

Arguably no. But arguably no.

Some people are going to still want that, but you're getting at something. So it's like if there's any necessity left, it's a very high level necessity. It's like I want somebody who is a like companionship or somebody to resonate with on a spiritual level, like to do deeply understands me. And 1.

Those are high asks high expectations there.

Yeah, very high expectations. And the question is like, well, what's that worth? You know, so it's like if you only provided companionship or you only provided like deep spiritual connection, does that necessarily mean that I have to marry you? Do we need to formalize that with a business contract? Do I need to spend 60 years of my life with you? Do I have to buy you a car and put you in a house? Like, what's the value of that?

Yeah.

And the fact of the matter is, is that the less value provided, the less value can expect. And so I think that means that relationships are going to become a little bit more fragmented probably more tempor, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. It's going to be good for some people, it's going to be bad for other people. But we all kind of have to adapt to the changing scenery.

Yeah, we certainly do. And you're helping people do that. So I appreciate your work, Orion. Do you want to give out a website or have people go to your YouTube or what?

Sure. So my YouTube channel is called Psych Hacks. That's the easiest way to find my content. Get links to buy the book. The value of others here at is book a paid one on one consultation, join my free weekly newsletter, et cetera. So those are some of the best resources out there.

Excellent. Orion Taraban, thank you for joining us.

Oh, it's been a pleasure. Jason, great conversation. Thank you.

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