Joe Rogan - Does Polyamory Work?

I do not think polyamorous folks are on the right track. I think that what they're up to is, I mean, I know from the ones who are serious about it and talk about it, that even within the polyamorous community there's a recognition about just how difficult it is to make it work. But I don't really want to interfere with their right to do it. I would like to be able to talk about whether it's a good idea, whether it has societal implications that we should be aware of. How do you feel like they're not on the right track and isn't everyone's track? I mean, if we can accept trans folk and we can accept women to subscribe to cultural norms and wearing high heels and make up in the worst place, why can't we accept polyamorous behavior and what so? That's what I'm telling you, is that though I personally would counsel somebody if, you know, and I have had this conversation with many students, for example, I would counsel them away from it because I think it actually prioritizes one thing, which is desirable, but that the cost of it is very, very high. What does it prioritize? It prioritizes not locking yourself into a single sexual relationship. And I think there's a way in which there is a terror that surrounds locking yourself into a single sexual relationship. And part of the terror goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. If you think that beauty is maxed out at 20 and then it wanes over life, then as a woman, you're trapped in this terrible situation where you've got this power long before you know what to do with it. And it's going to evaporate, so you better capitalize. And if you're a man, you're very frightened that you're going to get into a relationship and then you're going to watch this person that you love fall apart in front of your eyes and you're going to be, you know, you're going to be caught in that situation. And I don't think this is the reality of a pair bond. I think the reality of a pair bond is way better than we fear. But that because we've got this overly simplistic mythology surrounding it, a lot of people are trying to solve that problem. How do I not get locked into that relationship that's going to trap me with somebody who's... How do I not get bored? ...decaying in front of me, right. Yeah, I don't think it's a decaying thing. I would push back against that. I would say people just want more variety. They just want...they're attracted to other people and they want to act on that. And if they find a partner who is also willing to do that and they stay together, I don't see what would be the issue if they wanted to do it. Well, I'm telling you specifically that. I don't want to stop them from doing it, but I do want people to think very carefully about the issues. I mean, I'm just speaking as one guy who's lived one life. The value that I get out of having as close to perfect security at home as I can have in a relationship... I mean, Heather and I have been all over the world. We've taken our kids into parts of the Amazon that are four hours by boat from the nearest road, right? This is not a boring relationship. This relationship has been a nonstop adventure. Right, but no one's trying to push polyamory on you. Right. Well, A, I wouldn't say that that's true. I would say that the... People are? Not as an individual. But what I would say is they are promoting an idea that this is the sophisticated way to live. It's the wave of the future. Really? Yeah. How common is this? Well, I mean, you mentioned sex at dawn yourself. And so the idea is... Yeah, but Chris is my friend and he's crazy. There you go. But what I would say... But he believes it. He might be right. He does believe it. For him it is right. I have been convinced by a friend who I had a long-standing argument with on this topic. And what he convinced me is that... A friend who is polyamorous. Yes, a friend who is polyamorous. And this friend has convinced me that it can be accomplished, that there's somewhere to get. But he acknowledges that it actually, in the case that he points to, took several generations, literally several generations to arrive at a stable situation. Well, you guys have a wonderful relationship, though. I know many people who have terrible, terrible relationships. And for them, the notion of monogamy seems absurd. It seems like a trap that you get stuck in. You grow to resent each other. And then you get sick of each other and then you fight in court until you figure out who gets all the money. I would say those people shouldn't be together, obviously. I think you're right. But then there's a conflation between polyamory and promiscuity. That just a free-for-all, a sex with strangers free-for-all, is different from the kind of careful approach to polyamory that this friend takes, which still looks extraordinarily difficult to pull off, given what human beings are from a jealousy perspective. But isn't monogamy extraordinarily difficult to pull off? I mean, isn't the rate of divorce in this country alone, it's somewhere around 50 percent. And Chris Rock famously said, that's just 50 percent who had the courage to leave. How many cowards stay? Well, but this is part of the point about novelty. We are living in a situation where our narratives sell us a false picture of our opportunities. Our narratives are partially driven by an economy that wants us to be insecure enough to spend money like crazy. And so I'm not telling people that they should live one way or the other. I'm telling them that they should understand what their real options are. And polyamory, as an experiment, is all well and good. But what happens when you introduce children into the mix? Right, that's very, very different. It's very different because children are so costly to raise and because human males are wired to fear raising offspring that they themselves did not produce genetically. Now, I don't think it makes sense to actually care very much about your genes and advancing their interests. I think this is something evolution has stuck us with that is not valuable. It's actually destructive. It's something we can potentially move past. But we are wired for it. And so what I'm expecting to happen is if you have a large scale experiment in polyamory, what it's going to do is it is going to break down into polygyny and it's going to break down into single motherhood as men leave these relationships in order to engage in perhaps more polyamory with younger women. And it's going to be yet one more thing that is unevenly distributed between the sexes. So choose your mate wisely. Well, choose your mate wisely, but we don't even realize that we are interfering with your ability to do that in ways that we don't we don't intuit. We have a landscape in which nobody is paying attention to the way we are interfering in the normal processes that would cause you to find a mate with whom you might have a very rewarding life-longer. What processes are you referring to? Well, let me take an absurd one. Okay. We have no idea what effect deodorant is having on us choosing the right mate. We do know that in studies that there are molecules that you can't consciously tell you're detecting that do affect mate choice. And we know that we're interfering with that stuff. Well, we know that birth control affects that as well. Yes, we do. Promotional birth control. Yeah. Specifically. Women's ability to smell whether or not she's even genetically compatible with a man. Absolutely. And... Which is really freaky. It's like those lizards. How do they know? Right. They just know. Rub it up against each other. Get a sense. So, I think what... Do you wear deodorant? I try not to at the moment. I'm wearing it because sweat stains would be socially costly. Oh, you're wearing...you're wearing anti-purse breath. I guess I am. Yeah, I guess I do wear worse. It's different. There's an important distinction there. Yeah, that's dangerous. Well, but here, this is... You're clogging up your pores. This is a great example because I actually did spend, I don't know, if it was a year as an experimenter. Not wearing deodorant. How'd that go? Well... He was already married. So, a couple interesting facts. One, it did drive some people crazy. I'm sure. Not me, though. Not you. Didn't drive you...didn't bother you at all? I'm not...we've all been around people we love who at some point are like, dude, take a shower. Right. But, yeah, no. But as long as you took a shower. Well, actually, the thing is though... Is it a shave the armpits thing? Like, if you shave your armpits, do you...I mean, it's the one spot, right? Yeah. We're not putting deodorant anywhere else on our body. We're just putting it on the armpits. Like, is it a shaving thing? Like, if you shaved your armpits... If you shave your armpits, you decrease the rate at which it diffuses into the environment. So, you should make a judgment call. Well, but in some sense, look, I don't know which it is. Maybe we're being wusses, right? And we're being, you know, we've got an industry of, I don't know how much they make per year selling us these things. Because we're afraid of our own human smell, right? But there's a huge difference between the way somebody smells if they don't have good hygiene and somebody who has the luxury of daily showers and doesn't wear deodorant. Frankly, I don't find somebody who is taking daily showers and isn't wearing deodorant. I don't find it that off-putting. And in Europe, it's considered much much... It's just a different smell. You smell them. As opposed to smelling Reitgard or whatever it is. Exactly. And so, anyway, I have no idea whether if we backed our deodorant and antiperspirant stuff off, whether it would change, who ended up with whom, and whether or not marriages would last. Might have a small degree of change. Right. But how many other things are there on the list that we wouldn't think to name that actually interfere? What about makeup? What if women stopped wearing makeup? How much would that change? Who hooks up with who? How much would it? And, you know, if we... How much would it change if we actually learned that there's a difference between hotness and beauty and we actually allowed little girls to recognize that maybe they weren't so interested in being hot because although it gets you a lot of attention, it's the kind of attention that's a dead end. Right? How much would that change who ends up with whom? I mean, a lot of who ends up with whom at the moment is presumably dictated by people having had their attention captured through hotness. And then there's a question of whether there's anything there to back it up. So what I want to see, for my own kid's sake, is I want to see a world in which the noise of the way the market influences how we interact with each other and the notions that get promoted as sophisticated. Where that noise is reduced so that people can really begin to detect the patterns in their life. Actually, this worked for me. I dated in this way and this worked for me. I dated in that way and it didn't work for me. It wasn't rewarding. That begins to tell you something.