How Does A Non-Monogamous Marriage Work? | Caleb Jones

Caleb Jones 0:00 ... then the second level is you sit down and you discuss the ground rules, again, before you get too serious. Once you're already moved in and married and now you're gonna discuss ground rules, that's too late. So my wife and I had a very long, detailed discussion, this was several years ago, and I laid out all the negatives of being married to me.

Chris Williamson 0:17 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 0:18 And non-monogamy's one of them.

Chris Williamson 0:19 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 0:20 And, and that actually wasn't the one she was pissed off.

Chris Williamson 0:22 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 0:22 Uh, there was, like, four or five of them, and that was just one. Matter of fact, the one she was scared about was that I work a lot, I work every day.

Chris Williamson 0:27 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 0:27 She's like, well... She didn't care about the non-monogamy 'cause I'd already been doing it the whole time she met me, so she was used to it at that point. It was more like, "Well, you're gonna work a lot and you're never gonna spend time with me." It was more that kind of stuff. But you lay all that stuff out, and then you lay out the ground rules, and you're very specific about the ro- ground rules based on what you're capable of and what you think you're not capable of emotionally. You just don't go hog wild before she's my wife. Hey girlfriend, we're thinking about getting serious. We're gonna be non-monogamous. Here are the parameters. But here's what you can't do. You can't bring guys over and fuck 'em on my couch. That, I'll throw up. Y- y- you gotta be honest about that stuff.

Chris Williamson 1:00 (wind blowing) I am joined by Caleb Jones from all the way from the other side of the Atlantic. How are you today?

Caleb Jones 1:08 I'm good. How are you?

Chris Williamson 1:09 Very good, man. Very good. Very glad to have you on. Lots of interesting stuff there to speak about. You have got the largest tankard that you're drinking out of that I have ever seen. What is that?

Caleb Jones 1:20 You know, I drink a lot of water, and so I would have these little cups by my desk and it was never big enough. So I was like, I gotta get a fucking, you know, I gotta get a tankard or I gotta get something real.

Chris Williamson 1:28 What does that- that's like what, a liter and a half? Or you guys would call it like a gallon, I guess?

Caleb Jones 1:31 Uh, uh, yeah probably a liter and a half. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. It's just water. Be cool if it was vodka, but it's not.

Chris Williamson 1:36 Yeah, or like some mead. It's a bit Game of Thrones of you.

Caleb Jones 1:39 Mead, yeah. I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my entire life, so I just, it just makes me look cool when I drink my water, I guess.

Chris Williamson 1:45 That's a interesting lifestyle choice. Why did you choose to do that?

Caleb Jones 1:49 You know, I don't have an answer for that question. I wish I had an answer. I wish I had some kind of cool story like, "Well, my parents were alcoholics and..." No, my parents were normal and, um... Here's my guess. So when I was in seventh grade, seventh grade? So I was about, uh, yeah, about 12. I took one of the cans of beer out of my dad's refrigerator, and I took it on the side of the house, I took a little coffee cup and I filled it up, and I, I promised myself I'd drink the whole beer 'cause I wanted to get drunk, 'cause that's looks like a lot of fun.

Chris Williamson 2:16 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 2:16 And I went... (retching) And I made myself drink the whole beer and went, "Oh, this is terrible." And I waited, "I can't wait till I get drunk." I kept drinking and drinking and then nothing happened, I just felt dizzy for a few minutes, and I think maybe that was it. I don't... Maybe, I'm guessing.

Chris Williamson 2:30 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 2:30 I'm also an INTJ for a Myers-Briggs, those Myers-Briggs personality types.

Chris Williamson 2:35 Okay, yep.

Caleb Jones 2:37 So I'm an INTJ and I'm an extreme INTJ, so my little dot is in the far upper corner, and the INTJ is in the far upper corner of the 16 personality types.

Chris Williamson 2:45 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 2:46 So not only am I i- am I an INTJ, I'm an extreme version of an INTJ.

Chris Williamson 2:49 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 2:50 And so one of the aspects of most INTJs, not all of them, is that I'm a control freak over myself, but I don't want to control anybody else. So I'm thinking that sub- this isn't conscious.

Chris Williamson 3:00 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 3:00 But maybe subconsciously, I don't want to lose control of myself by getting drunk.

Chris Williamson 3:04 Yeah, I understand. I think it's-

Caleb Jones 3:05 Maybe? I don't know. That's a guess. I really don't know.

Chris Williamson 3:07 That's the same for my mom.

Caleb Jones 3:08 I've never... I'm gonna have to do it at some point.

Chris Williamson 3:10 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 3:10 People are like, "You got to get drunk once." All right, I'll get drunk once. It's fine.

Chris Williamson 3:13 (sighs) It's a... So I'm nine months into 18 months sober, right? I'm a club promoter by trade.

Caleb Jones 3:18 Wow.

Chris Williamson 3:18 So I've run, I've run nightclubs for, uh, 12 years, and that's been my trade.

Caleb Jones 3:23 You're in How many... You're nine months in?

Chris Williamson 3:24 Nine months sober, yeah, but this is the, uh, I've done six months twice and I'm doing nine months now just to see if I can.

Caleb Jones 3:31 Okay.

Chris Williamson 3:31 Um, my argument is that I work in the nightlife industry. I've worked around about 1,000 nights in my career across the last decade and a bit, um, so if, if I can do it, other people can.

Caleb Jones 3:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 3:43 And on top of that as well-

Caleb Jones 3:46 Do you, wait, do you consider yourself an alcoholic or no?

Chris Williamson 3:48 No, no. So-

Caleb Jones 3:49 No.

Chris Williamson 3:50 Ed Latimore, have you heard of Ed?

Caleb Jones 3:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 3:52 Yeah. So I'd pod- podcasted with Ed and he, uh, synopsized alcohol and people's views of sobriety better than anyone I've ever heard before, and it's this sentence. Alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem.

Caleb Jones 4:09 Yes. Exactly.

Chris Williamson 4:09 No one's saying to you, "Why are you not shooting up with heroin today?"

Caleb Jones 4:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 4:13 "Why have you not got a massive line of cocaine on your desk behind you?" But alcohol's so ingrained into our society that people just-

Caleb Jones 4:19 Right.

Chris Williamson 4:19 ... say, "You're not drinking. You must have a problem with alcohol."

Caleb Jones 4:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 4:24 That's the only reason that anyone would choose to go sober. Whereas for me, I, I ha- I was a typical sort- social drinker. Go out maybe once every fortnight, but I'm a club promoter drinker, right? So when you go out, you go hard.

Caleb Jones 4:37 Right.

Chris Williamson 4:37 Like you go, it's straight arm in spirits into your mouth in a nightclub, et cetera, et cetera.

Caleb Jones 4:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:42 All that sort of stuff. Yeah, exactly. Um, and I just, about two and a bit years ago, I wanted to do more with my life. I wanted to have a lot of experiences, I wanted to travel more, I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted to push my business and my fitness and my, I wanted to develop a reading habit and a meditation habit and all these other things, and I looked at my time as if it was a set of accounts and saw that there was this big day and a half cost getting chopped out of my-

Caleb Jones 5:13 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:14 ... fortnight, fortnight period. One day hungover and then a half a day at maybe 50% capacity and then you finally get back onto it. So I honestly think it, it doesn't surprise me that you have a lot of irons in the fire considering you've never been knocked off with a hangover. Like, the only time that you'll be like that's if you're ill.

Caleb Jones 5:32 Yeah, that's pretty much it. I've wondered about if I was a typical drinker or even a heavy drinker, 'cause I've got some of those guys in my family, where I would be today as opposed to where I am now, and also how I would look, how my skin... I'm 47, so how my skin would look now. You look fantastic for 47. 'Cause I've got buddies... Well, I moisturize. That's an old Doctor Who line.

Chris Williamson 5:50 That's the key, ladies and gentlemen. Moisturize early.

Caleb Jones 5:54 Yeah, my- I, there's an old Doctor Who line, the girl says, "You're 900 years old?"

Chris Williamson 5:59 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 5:59 And he's like, "Well, I moisturize."

Chris Williamson 6:00 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 6:01 I moisturize, yeah. But I know, I have buddies who are my age who I've known since high school who are, you know, not even big drinkers, just but regular drinkers and-... my god, you can see the difference. Even guys who don't get a lot of sun like me, they still, like, wow.

Chris Williamson 6:13 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 6:13 Or smokers too. Smoking's the other one. Smoking and drinking. I was never smoked anything either.

Chris Williamson 6:17 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 6:18 I smoked, uh, I smoked some weed once for about three seconds went, (coughs) "Okay. Here you go. Thanks."

Chris Williamson 6:21 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 6:22 That's about it. Yeah. So what I had to learn how to do was to drink wine. I'll sip wine-

Chris Williamson 6:27 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 6:28 ... because for what you're talking about, I would sit with a group of people or even on a first date with a woman, and they'd be drinking and I'd have nothing or my water.

Chris Williamson 6:35 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 6:35 And they'd go, "What? Uh-huh? Why aren't you drink?" They, people get uncomfortable.

Chris Williamson 6:39 Yeah, they do.

Caleb Jones 6:39 Especially if everyone else is drinking and you're not, especially, including if you're one on one, they're drinking and you're not, people hate that.

Chris Williamson 6:45 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 6:45 "Why aren't you drinking?" So I had to learn to find whatever the most pussy wine there was, which is Riesling, I think.

Chris Williamson 6:51 Okay.

Caleb Jones 6:52 So I get a Riesling, little girly wine, tastes almost like apple juice.

Chris Williamson 6:55 Yeah. Yeah.

Caleb Jones 6:55 And I would take a sip and they go, "Oh, good. He's drinking. Okay. Good."

Chris Williamson 6:58 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 6:58 And then they start drinking again.

Chris Williamson 6:59 They don't notice that you've only gone through-

Caleb Jones 7:01 As long as I took that sip, they're-

Chris Williamson 7:01 ... you've gone through, like, one glass in the time that someone else has gone through a bottle.

Caleb Jones 7:04 Not even a glass.

Chris Williamson 7:05 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 7:06 Half a glass.

Chris Williamson 7:07 Yeah, I get you.

Caleb Jones 7:07 Half a glass for two hours.

Chris Williamson 7:08 Yeah. (laughs)

Caleb Jones 7:09 But it looks like I'm drinking 'cause it's sitting in front of me and it's less than what I got when I, was served to me. So then they, "Oh, good. Okay. He's drinking now I can relax." Now that someone else is doing something, I can relax-

Chris Williamson 7:18 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 7:18 ... which is the exact opposite of my entire viewpoint of life. But-

Chris Williamson 7:21 Man.

Caleb Jones 7:22 ... that's how human beings are. We're communal creatures.

Chris Williamson 7:24 We're mimetic creatures, as my friend George-

Caleb Jones 7:26 Right. Right.

Chris Williamson 7:26 ... and, uh, previous host, uh, guest of the podcast would say. Yes, alcohol's a weird one, man. It triggers people in such bizarre ways. You're totally right. This, like, there's nothing else, like, p- no one else is shooting up heroin or getting a tattoo or going, like, uh, going paleo or i- I- like, riding their bike to work and saying like, "Why are you not doing all of these things?" People do-

Caleb Jones 7:50 That's changing. You know, in some parts of the world, especially in mine, I don't know about, I don't know about England, probably not. But in my part of the world, so the Pacific Northwest United States, weed is becoming like that now. "Oh, you don't smoke weed?"

Chris Williamson 8:02 Okay.

Caleb Jones 8:02 People are kind of, they're starting to get surprised now 'cause it's become so prevalent.

Chris Williamson 8:05 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 8:06 And it's be- and it's legal in most parts of the United States now. Maybe not most. A lot.

Chris Williamson 8:09 Yes.

Caleb Jones 8:10 So weed, marijuana is starting to move in that zone of alcohol where people, they're, they don't think something's wrong with you if you don't smoke weed, but they are... I've had people be surprised that I don't smoke.

Chris Williamson 8:19 That you don't.

Caleb Jones 8:19 In this region.

Chris Williamson 8:20 Do you think that that's partly because you're a, a blogger, an author, writer, you're one of those creative-y types kind of pushing-

Caleb Jones 8:27 Probably.

Chris Williamson 8:27 ... pushing the boundaries. You maybe sound like the sort of person that has that personality.

Caleb Jones 8:31 Probably. Yeah, probably. Another is, another aspect is that I'm a libertarian, so they just expect that that's part of the deal. Another one is people who know my lifestyle sexually, they go, "Well, really? I'm shocked you don't smoke weed." So maybe it's a lot of factors. That's a good point, me making that up, maybe.

Chris Williamson 8:45 But if you, if you're sleeping with, with multiple women and not holding down monogamous relationships, making a stand, uh, presuming, people presuming that you may be making a moral stand or some sort of virtue stand with regards to the alcohol or the weed, which it doesn't seem-

Caleb Jones 9:01 Oh, I get that a lot.

Chris Williamson 9:02 Yeah, it doesn't seem as the case. It's just a lifestyle choice. The same way as some people-

Caleb Jones 9:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:06 ... don't like to wear blue or some people don't like to drive stick.

Caleb Jones 9:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:10 Like, this is just a lifestyle choice.

Caleb Jones 9:12 Yeah. Oh, I've gotten that a lot. People assume that I'm Christian or, or, or Mormon or something like that. "Oh, you must be really religious. You don't, you don't drink?" "No, no, I'm agnostic."

Chris Williamson 9:21 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 9:21 The opposite of religious. It's societal programming. No.

Chris Williamson 9:23 Oh, yeah.

Caleb Jones 9:24 I believe in God, but I'm not religious. So, no.

Chris Williamson 9:26 Interesting.

Caleb Jones 9:26 So yeah, I've definitely gotten that. Yeah. That's just part of, it's part of the culture I've learned to accept. You have to learn to accept the oddness of your culture or else you're going to be pissed off all the time. And I want to be happy, so I can't do that.

Chris Williamson 9:36 The mari- the marijuana thing's bizarre because we're seeing, we're seeing a substance go from being heavily controlled to legalized for medical use to, like, fragmented legalization across, uh, uh, the states. In certain areas, it is still illegal. Some, it's legal for medicine. Some, it's totally legal recreationally. And we're observing the, uh, social conditioning change-

Caleb Jones 10:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:03 ... in front of our eyes.

Caleb Jones 10:04 Mm-hmm. Most Americans, I don't know about most, half? I forget the stats. They always change. Something like half or most of Americans are on something anyway, prescription drugs, things like that.

Chris Williamson 10:16 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 10:17 Something like the, the majority, not the vast majority, but the majority of women over 35, over 35 or 40, again, I forget the statistics, are on some kind of mood altering drug.

Chris Williamson 10:26 Man, that's terrifying to me.

Caleb Jones 10:28 It's, it's really bad. So irregardless, irregardless, regardless of weed... Irregardless is not a word.

Chris Williamson 10:34 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 10:35 My grammar teacher. Regardless of weed, people are on drugs anyway. It's just, it's part of our culture.

Chris Williamson 10:40 Which ones you want to choose.

Caleb Jones 10:41 And, and it's getting worse. As societal, as Western society continues its slow collapse, you're going to see more and more people going in that direction anyway, finding something that will make them not miserable. So it, it makes sense to me that more people will be smoking weed or prescription drugs. Heroin is a big epidemic now, at least in the United States. Heroin's gone crazy last four or five years. It's gone nuts.

Chris Williamson 11:00 There's a-

Caleb Jones 11:00 I've seen it-

Chris Williamson 11:01 ... there's some really interesting TV shows. So the, the UK, um, we get exposed to some of the stuff from America.

Caleb Jones 11:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:10 But I think it's quite, it's quite difficult for us to fact check, not fact check, but like a virtue check or integrity check the, um, content that we're being fed, because, like, I see a lot of stuff-

Caleb Jones 11:24 How so?

Chris Williamson 11:25 Like, so I'll see stuff from Netflix that's like Dope, which is a really cool, uh, Netflix documentary series, two seasons in. Um, each episode is in a different US state, uh, yeah, US city. And one f- film crew follows the cops and one film crew follows the drug dealers. And you see how-

Caleb Jones 11:44 Cool.

Chris Williamson 11:44 ... the two are trying to catch each other and how they play off-

Caleb Jones 11:47 Cool.

Chris Williamson 11:47 ... against each other. It's all-

Caleb Jones 11:48 It's cool.

Chris Williamson 11:48 Uh, all the drug dealers have got masks on and stuff like that. It's honestly fascinating TV program for anyone in the UK that hasn't seen it yet, I suggest that you go watch it now. But, like, stuff like that, li- I don't know how, how realistic or how dramatized that is, but they talk about this fentanyl crisis and they talk about, um, like, Xanax crises and, and all this sort of stuff.Um, and, yeah, trying to judge it from the UK... 'Cause we don't have w- e- the... Big pharma companies aren't allowed to advertise on TV, so that-

Caleb Jones 12:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 12:16 ... "Ask your doctor," like, all that stuff doesn't exist-

Caleb Jones 12:20 Right.

Chris Williamson 12:20 ... for us. I, I wouldn't, uh-

Caleb Jones 12:23 It's, it's an epidemic, but it's not something you see out in the world. So you can go to a mall or walk down the street in the United States and you will not be able to tell that people are on whatever they're on, or they're going to take something later that evening. Even with a lot of the heroin people, you really can't tell.

Chris Williamson 12:35 Mm.

Caleb Jones 12:36 So, but when you get to meet people and talk to people and get into their lives, you find out, oh my God, really? Holy crap. Just women alone, women I've seen last four or five years, the heroin thing is... It's, it's nothing like it was 10 years ago. It's a noticeable difference. And again, that could be regional. The United States is such a big place, it's very hard to say, "In the United States-"

Chris Williamson 12:55 Everything's localized, right? Yeah.

Caleb Jones 12:57 "...in your area of the United States." You can't say... Yeah, I live between Seattle and Portland, so in that area is what I experience when I'm not traveling. I travel a lot. So it's hard to say the United States. That's why I like these people who set a goal to, like, visit 100 countries. I, I, my goal is based on cities 'cause if you've been to Beijing, have you visited China?

Chris Williamson 13:14 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 13:14 No, you visited B- if you went to, to New York, have you visited the United States? No, you visited New York. Same kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 13:21 (laughs) yeah.

Caleb Jones 13:21 So yeah, it is, it's, it's really interesting, and, uh, again, I just, this is, we, we talked about this earlier, I just, not something I'm interested anymore. I just, I don't care.

Chris Williamson 13:30 Yeah. How, um, so I, I totally understand the people's desire to escape feeling. Feeling feelings is hard, right?

Caleb Jones 13:40 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:40 Like, like some, some feelings really suck.

Caleb Jones 13:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:43 But, but I think it shows-

Caleb Jones 13:45 That's why you have to learn to manage your emotional states. That's why you have to learn emotional control. I'm telling guys this all the time.

Chris Williamson 13:52 What sort of-

Caleb Jones 13:52 Because if you don't, you're fucked. Especially living today, you're gonna be, you're gonna be screwed with the internet, just with the internet alone. Very hard to be happy if you can't manage your own emotions 'cause every day you'll be pissed off about something.

Chris Williamson 14:04 You are constantly being triggered, you're right. It's interesting to see the difference between how, and again, this may be localized within my area or my social group in the UK, but certainly for me, if you were to say, "Tell me one person that you know that is on a mood altering drug," I would actually struggle to be able to find someone that I-

Caleb Jones 14:23 Really?

Chris Williamson 14:23 ... someone that I know. And I think what that shows-

Caleb Jones 14:26 Huh.

Chris Williamson 14:26 ... what that shows is, um, the natural way to deal with bad emotions can be dictated by what, firstly, soc- uh, societal conditioning in your local peer group or the people around you in the US, uh, may be, oh, you feel bad. There's a Vi- Vicodin, or you should just go see a doctor or whatever it might be, um-

Caleb Jones 14:45 Right.

Chris Williamson 14:46 ... but on top of that as well, obviously, it's top down. It's being, uh, broadcast at you. Like, you have a problem-

Caleb Jones 14:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:53 ... the solution is, the solution is in a pill or a cream or a da, da, da, da, da.

Caleb Jones 14:59 As you said that, I just thought through in my own head how many people I personally know on something. I came up with six names.

Chris Williamson 15:04 Oh, wow.

Caleb Jones 15:04 I know a lot of people though.

Chris Williamson 15:05 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 15:06 So maybe I'm not a good example. But I, I, as I'm thinking, I'm thinking of more, or seven people, uh, the number of people I personally know on something, even if it's a prescription something, yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:14 (sighs) I, so-

Caleb Jones 15:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:17 ... my point is that I, I think, I, I wonder w- how many people who really need medication slip through the net in the UK by not having this awareness about the fact that prescription drugs could help. And how many people in the US are being oversold on things that they don't need because of this societal conditioning and because of this stuff here.

Caleb Jones 15:38 Sure. Well, that last aspect is most people who take these drugs. If you just did basic things like get eight hours of sleep, drink a lot more water, monitor your hormones, get your hormone tests done, meditate a little bit, focus on something you like, have more sex, you just do those basic things, all of a sudden, a lot of these symptoms, not all of them-

Chris Williamson 15:59 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 15:59 ... depends the person, would go away with no drugs, and these would actually enhance your life instead of causing side effects.

Chris Williamson 16:06 I agree.

Caleb Jones 16:06 But what I just said, those things, those are hard. That takes work. People go, "I don't wanna, I don't wanna work." All right, take a drug then.

Chris Williamson 16:13 Well, pills, a pill's super easy. Have you read, um, Lost Connections by Johann Hari?

Caleb Jones 16:18 No.

Chris Williamson 16:19 Fantastic book on depression. Highly recommend it if you've got a-

Caleb Jones 16:22 Is it on clinical depression or just depression in general?

Chris Williamson 16:25 Uh, depression in general.

Caleb Jones 16:26 Okay.

Chris Williamson 16:26 So he looks at the standard model of depression, that it's a imbalance of chemicals in the brain, um, and-

Caleb Jones 16:33 Send that to me when we're done talking. That's, I'm interested.

Chris Williamson 16:35 ... is, is-

Caleb Jones 16:35 Yeah, I'll forget this isn't-

Chris Williamson 16:36 Yeah, man, fantastic guy. I cannot... Johann, if you're listening, he, he does tune in sometimes. If you're listening, I'm gonna continue hustling you to come on because I need you, I need to speak to you, man.

Caleb Jones 16:44 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:44 Um, but it's fantastic book. Really, really interesting, and he identifies nine biological causes of depression. Uh, uh, sorry, seven biological, seven environmental causes of depression, two biological, and the bio, the environmental ones are like, um-

Caleb Jones 16:59 That's about, that makes sense to me. Seven out of nine? That's about right.

Chris Williamson 17:02 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 17:02 That's about what I would expect.

Chris Williamson 17:03 Yeah, and he talks about-

Caleb Jones 17:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:05 ... um, loss of connection to nature, loss of, uh, connection to a meaningful future, loss of connection to work, uh, loss of-

Caleb Jones 17:13 Yep.

Chris Williamson 17:13 ... connection to childhood trauma, all of these things.

Caleb Jones 17:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:16 And it's, um, a very comprehensive analysis of people and it's very narrative based. So again, for anyone who's listening who wants to, uh, enlighten themselves and make themselves a little bit better educated about why depression occurs, either in yourself or in the people that are around you, I can't recommend, it's the 80/20 book on depression for me. Like, just read it. Super easy read. A little bit long, but super easy read, and, and you got it, man. But yeah, the way that people deal with it, they just think America appears to have... And it's bad, right? 'Cause it reflects on you guys as a nation. People see-

Caleb Jones 17:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:48 ... Americans as this quick fix, transactional, transitory, like, lazy people because of that culture, which isn't true in terms of the culture. It's just in terms of how people are dealing with things, and it's-

Caleb Jones 18:03 Historically, it has not been true.

Chris Williamson 18:05 Yes, yeah.

Caleb Jones 18:05 Historically, Americans have been the hardest working people on Earth. Historically. Right now, we're changing.... historically. And there's a dec- still a decent percentage of us who are not lazy, but that's all changing based on demographic factors and economic factors and cultural factors and all kinds of things. So it's changing.

Chris Williamson 18:23 What do you think- what do you think the trajectory's got in store for you guys at the moment?

Caleb Jones 18:27 For what?

Chris Williamson 18:27 Moving forward, with, with that particular, um, I guess, line of sight, for whether people are gonna continue, whether there's gonna be something that changed. Does there need to be a big intervention? Um...

Caleb Jones 18:38 There needs to be, but there won't be.

Chris Williamson 18:40 Right.

Caleb Jones 18:41 W- where Americans are now set on their path. We peaked ... I mean, I'm not a historian, but based on the stuff I've read, I've read a lot, America, as a nation, in relation to other nations, peaked somewhere around the mid- I believe the mid to late 1960s. And since then, we've been on kind of on the down slope, especially as you compare us to other nations.

Chris Williamson 18:58 Is that happiness?

Caleb Jones 18:59 And that is? What's that?

Chris Williamson 19:00 Is that happiness?

Caleb Jones 19:02 That is one.

Chris Williamson 19:03 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 19:03 It's economics, economically positioned in the world, our currency, um, levels of happiness, so you- now you have depression, suicide has gone up, all, all this crazy stuff. That's all happened. In my lifetime, I was born in 1972, and so in my lifetime, I have seen my country, and most other countries in the western world too, I don't wanna just pick on my country, but I live here, so I see it.

Chris Williamson 19:26 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 19:26 I have seen my country get worse in literally every aspect except for crime rates have gone way down and technology has improved. Other than those two things, by every other measurement you could find, my country is worse off when I was a k- from when I was a kid to now. And this is the first time Americans have experienced this. Historically, if you were a 47-year-old American, you would see your country, if you were born in the 1800s, 1700s, early 1900s, even mid-1900s, you would've seen your country grow and improve. Even with problems, we grew and improved in the 20th century, even though we had lots of problems. So you- but you would've seen a, a net growth in- so like, for example, wages, real wages for- as adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant since I was one year old, and I'm, I'm almost 50. So I've never seen wages increase in my country, as compared to inflation. So in the 1970s, my dad was a lower income worker. He made a low, l- he was a lower, lower middle class, maybe even upper lower class guy, and he, he barely made any money, but he was able to, in the '70s, he was able to support a family of seven.

Chris Williamson 20:33 Oh, my God. (laughs)

Caleb Jones 20:33 He was able to support a stay-at-home mom, my wife- my wife, my mom, and us. I had five siblings, so the five of us.

Chris Williamson 20:40 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 20:40 And, uh, that was in the late '70s, early '80s. Today, a guy- that's not even possible for a guy today in the United States. You couldn't even do that. You have to make a six-figure income or higher to maintain all that stuff. A low-income guy can barely even support himself. A low-income guy today would struggle to e- live on his own and have a car in the United States in most cities, in most regions. So that's- and that's the difference I've seen since I grew up, just in my lifetime. Yeah, it's not good.

Chris Williamson 21:07 I don't know, man. I don't know what the- I don't know what the future's got in store. I think, again, for the UK, we are a little bit less despondent because there's so much less turmoil. Like I look at America-

Caleb Jones 21:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:17 ... especially American politics, and it- it looks like, um, a sitcom. Like that's how it appears.

Caleb Jones 21:24 It is a sitcom.

Chris Williamson 21:24 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 21:25 It is. You're- you are correct. The perception is reality. It's a sitcom.

Chris Williamson 21:28 Okay.

Caleb Jones 21:28 It's been a sitcom for quite a while. It's not- it's not with Trump. People think it started with Trump. It started long before Trump. But yeah, it's a sitcom. Correct.

Chris Williamson 21:35 And yeah, I, I see that and I think for some reason, maybe it's just me with rose, rose-tinted glasses, and some of the listeners may be saying that I'm completely wrong about this, but I just- the UK doesn't have that same degree of turmoil. We're not as- we're certainly not as polarized in terms of the- of the politics.

Caleb Jones 21:54 I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you.

Chris Williamson 21:55 Um, and I think that just that, like that on its own forces people ... when you have fewer people at the ends of each spectrum politically in terms of, uh, how they identify with their parti- particular kind of thinking stance, which is what it's become, right? Political stance is now not just about politics. It downstream from that totally. Well, that- surely that's got to affect your opinion on weed. Surely that's got to affect your opinion on alcohol and, and on pharmaceuticals and blah, blah, blah, blah, taxes and all the rest of it. But I- for the UK, people are a lot less identified with that. Um, we got a lot more rain to contend with, I think, than you guys, so there's a lot more like umbrella putting up and putting down, and-

Caleb Jones 22:34 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:34 But like, I don't know. It's, it's interesting. I wonder how I'd be-

Caleb Jones 22:38 I'll be there in, uh, I'll be there in October, I think.

Chris Williamson 22:40 Amazing.

Caleb Jones 22:40 In October. It'll still be- Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:42 It'll still be okay weather by the time that you get here. I was reading, um ... just before we came on, I was reading a news article and it was talking about how to sell apps to kids. So it was an, uh, an advice piece for app developers about the two trigger points for getting apps to kids. And we're talking like under, I think it's like under sevens or under eights, and it was like there's two different types of people that you can sell to. One of them are the kids, and them- get them to kind of pester the parents, and the other one's the parents. And I- I was looking at this article like, "I can't even believe that this is a thing." Like in whose right mind should anyone be targeting-

Caleb Jones 23:20 Why?

Chris Williamson 23:20 Well, w- why are you targeting apps at kids?

Caleb Jones 23:24 Money.

Chris Williamson 23:25 Right. (laughs) Like yeah? I- okay.

Caleb Jones 23:27 Why- are you surp- are you really surprised? You shouldn't be surprised.

Chris Williamson 23:30 Not- not surprised.

Caleb Jones 23:31 I'm not.

Chris Williamson 23:31 Not surprised. You are right.

Caleb Jones 23:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:33 Not surprised, but I am, um, I'm concerned.

Caleb Jones 23:37 Now, I'm, I'm biased in this area. I'm an extreme capitalist, so I'm very biased in this area. But still, no one should be surprised.

Chris Williamson 23:43 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 23:44 Yeah, that's just the- again, this is part of the world we live in, sure.

Chris Williamson 23:46 Yeah. You are right. Um, so we touched on it before, your, uh, particular views on monogamy and dating and stuff like that. The listeners at home, as I mentioned before we started, we've, we've never had anybody on who has been a, uh, polyamory, uh, advocate, or whatever you would even- I don't even know how you class yourself. So can you just take us from the beginning? Talk to us about your, your stance and about what it means and stuff like that.

Caleb Jones 24:10 So the non-monogamy, I don't call it polyamory because polyamory is a segment of non-monogamy, so polyamory is very specific. Polyamory is when you are dating multiple women and they are dating multiple men, so it's kind of this big happy group.

Chris Williamson 24:23 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 24:24 ... kind of falling all over each other, which is fine.

Chris Williamson 24:25 Got you.

Caleb Jones 24:26 That's one segment of non- so I call it non-monogamy. A, it's a little less threatening than polyamory, and B, it's more inclusive of every- all the different types of non-monogamy.

Chris Williamson 24:34 Cool.

Caleb Jones 24:34 Um, so non-monogamy is not (clears throat) a core ... I mean, it sounds like it is sometimes, depending on what you read of what I write. It's not the core of what I talk about. It is a important slice of the pie. So, it really starts with long-term masculine happiness. And so the way men work, and women are different, but the way men work is the freer you are on a given day-to-day basis, meaning you can wake up every morning and do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want, without having to check in with anybody or get anyone's permission, if you- the more- the closer you are to that condition, the happier you tend to be. So, you will be happier if you have your own business, generally speaking, than if you have a corporate wage job, 'cause you have more freedom. You will be happier if you're allowed to have sex with multiple women whenever you want than if you're only allowed to have sex with one woman, at least long term. And that's the way you're wired. You can't control this. That's just the way you are. There are rare and usual exceptions, but they're the rare and usual exceptions. So, if you look at, when I talk about things like Alpha 2.0, that is an entire lifestyle where you're gearing your entire life around maximum freedom in all the seven areas of your life, the two core of those for a man being financial and sexual, that you start there, you start with those two core areas 'cause those help you with all the other areas once those are at a baseline.

Chris Williamson 25:48 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 25:48 And so, yeah, if you go into the woman part, you need to be allowed to... well, number one, you need to have sex. A new movement now is guys not having sex. So that's not gonna make you happy long term. You're a guy. So assuming you're having sex, you need to be allowed to have sex with multiple women because long term, you're not gonna be happy with having sex with just one woman. Short term, you will. You can make it work for a while, a year and a half, two years, three years, whatever you are. Every guy's different. But long term, and the models I talk about are all long-term models that last for the rest of your life, not just in your 20s and early 30s, but in your 40s, 50s, 60s, and so on. These are long-term models. So if you want a long-term happiness model, you've got to work in there in some way your ability to have sex with multiple women if you choose to. And there's four or five different ways you could do that. We can talk about those if you want. But that's- that's where the non-monogamy comes from. It's not about non-monogamy. It's about long-term freedom, which creates long-term happiness for dudes.

Chris Williamson 26:45 (smacks lips) Why do you think men and women are so different? What's specifically ... obviously, genetically, you've alluded to the fact that, uh, man's genetic predisposition is to push his genes as far as is possible.

Caleb Jones 26:58 Right.

Chris Williamson 26:58 However, it would appear, based on some of the people who I've spoken to, uh, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, that pair bonding has to occur, the reason that gestation is nine months and that, uh, sex, uh, is a long process, a pleasurable process, the fact that women don't have visual ovulation, um-

Caleb Jones 27:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 27:18 ... all of these sort of things. The fact that conc- conception is actually relatively fairly tough for, uh, humans compared with some other animals.

Caleb Jones 27:27 Yes, accurate. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:29 All- all of that leads towards pair bonding. Pair bonding needs to occur because the infant is pretty much-

Caleb Jones 27:36 Agreed.

Chris Williamson 27:36 ... dependent on the, uh, the mother, uh, the family, but specifically the mother, for the first 10 to 15 years. And you need to have a father around to protect that particular pairing or- or however many children there is in that particular family unit. You need to have the father around, or else everybody dies, because if a jaguar comes while you've got a mother w-

Caleb Jones 27:59 All accurate.

Chris Williamson 28:00 Okay.

Caleb Jones 28:01 So-

Chris Williamson 28:01 So-

Caleb Jones 28:01 So now here's the problem. This is where people get confused. Everything you just said is scientifically accurate. (clears throat) I've read about this stuff myself, so you're- uh, that's absolutely true. Human beings, this- and this is where people get messed up. Human beings are pair bonding creatures, but they are not sexually monogamous creatures. There are two- those are two different things. So you can be ... I'm a perfect example. I am pair bonded. I'm married. I am pair bonded to one woman who I share my life with, who I love. I don't love anyone else. I don't want to be with anyone else. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with anyone else, just her and her with me. So we are pair bonded. But I'm allowed to go out on the side and get laid whenever I want, whenever I choose, with whomever I like. There's a few ground rules I agree to. But beyond that, I am still allowed to be non-monogamous even though I'm pair bonded. So what happens is people quote these scientific facts, and they are facts, absolutely true, and they say, "See, we're monogamous." Well, then why is it we have a 76%, north of 76% divorce rate? Why do we have a 77% infidelity rate if we're monogamous? We are pair bonding creatures. We are not monogamous creatures. So again, if you want to be long-term happy, and I realize this is difficult because you're gonna run into all kinds of societal programming and societal conditioning that tells you this is wrong, you're gonna have to be long term in your life, not when you're in your 20s ... I tell guys, you shouldn't have a girlfriend till you're in your 30s, in my opinion. So once you're an older guy, yes, you need to be pair bonded, but not monogamous. So that means you sit down with your special someone and you explain it to her like an adult. "Hey, I love you. I want to be with you. I don't want to be with anyone else. And I'm a human being and I'm a guy. And that means A, B, and C. We could lie to each other like teenagers and say, 'Well, we're in love and we'll be together forever and we'll never want to sleep with anyone else because we're in love,' and Disneys and Narnia and unicorns and roses and shit, or we can be adults and say, 'Let's be together. Let's figure out a plan where we can integrate this into our lifestyles so I can be happy and you can be long-term happy 'cause I'm happy and we avoid all these problems or at least most of the problems that normal couples have.'" The 76% divorce rate people.

Chris Williamson 30:08 I mean, the fact that there is such a high divorce rate, uh, people just presume, I guess, if you just- if you think about it or if you were to ask a layperson on the street, "Why is the divorce rate so high?" It's-

Caleb Jones 30:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:20 It would be maybe some kind of wistful heritage thing about, "Well, it wasn't that way in my parents' day. My parents are still together." Perhaps that-

Caleb Jones 30:29 Right, they just cheated.

Chris Williamson 30:31 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 30:33 Right. People stayed married and they, and the men, mostly men cheated.

Chris Williamson 30:37 So, do you-

Caleb Jones 30:37 They still weren't monogamous.

Chris Williamson 30:38 Okay, so why-

Caleb Jones 30:39 Long-term marriage and marriage working-

Chris Williamson 30:41 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 30:41 Well, they've been married for 47 years. He's never cheated? Maybe he hasn't, but the odds are ... I've talked to a lot of old guys, guys my grandfather's age, guys in their 90s, World War II guys. These guys were married and they stayed married. They were not monogamous. They cheated. You've seen, I don't know if you've seen the American show Mad Men, about Americans in the '60s. It, it's, it was the standard model back then. You cheated. That's just what you did when you're a guy. Women too, not as much, but they did too.

Chris Williamson 31:10 Why has the divorce rate changed?

Caleb Jones 31:13 Because women are now allowed to do whatever they want. So, back in the olden days, in like the 1950s, which a lot of guys in my world, the red pier- the red pill menosphere world I want to go back to, um, women weren't allowed to get divorced. So, women would actually go into a court in the '40s, '30s, '50s and say, "I want to divorce my husband." And the judges would say, "What the hell? Get, get, you can't get divorced. Get back to your husband. Next case." Or, and/or they were now, they couldn't do it financially. They couldn't support themselves. They needed to be married.

Chris Williamson 31:39 Ah, so we've gone-

Caleb Jones 31:40 And if they got divorced, their, their religious family would disown them.

Chris Williamson 31:44 Uh, so as we-

Caleb Jones 31:45 So, all these factors-

Chris Williamson 31:46 We've become-

Caleb Jones 31:46 All these factors are now gone. Women are now encouraged to get divorced. Now, it's the opposite.

Chris Williamson 31:50 Well, you've become more financially independent, uh, more secular, and more accepting, I guess, of divorce as a whole, um-

Caleb Jones 31:59 Correct. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:59 And, uh, uh, yeah. I, I mean, that's, that-

Caleb Jones 32:02 And it'll get worse, and it'll get worse. The divorce rate will increase. You're gonna see soon, in the next decade, you're gonna see 90+% divorce rates.

Chris Williamson 32:09 Wow.

Caleb Jones 32:10 People are very slow to figure this out. I've written about this a lot. They don't want to admit the system doesn't work anymore, so they're just gonna keep getting married, keep getting divorced, keep screwing up their kids, keep getting financially raped, keep cheating on each other and yelling at each other. And it's gonna be a while before human beings finally go, "You know, we should probably pick a different system. This isn't working." It's gonna be a while, unfortunately.

Chris Williamson 32:30 The stats, I mean, you know, I, I, there's not much that I can say about the fact that more than three-quarters of the people, uh, who get married end up getting divorced. As far as I was aware, maybe it's a UK stat, I think it was more than 50. Um, but-

Caleb Jones 32:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:42 But no matter what the stat is, if m- there's a more likelihood, a high likelihood that you're going to get divorced than stay together, it's a worrying statistic. No matter what your views on monogamy are, it's a pretty worrying statistic.

Caleb Jones 32:56 Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah. Instead, people should figure out how to stay together like two normal human beings, the way human beings actually work, instead of the way human beings work in a Disney fairytale.

Chris Williamson 33:07 Well, it's-

Caleb Jones 33:07 Where we're gonna get married and we're gonna be in love forever. We're never gonna fuck anyone else because we're in love and that's 'cause, 'cause Snow White. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:15 What were you saying at the beginning about humans being mimetic creatures and about us taking a lot of societal conditioning? Swallowing that red pill, as you've alluded to, is a difficult thing to do when everyone else around you hasn't, right? Like, when you, you're-

Caleb Jones 33:33 That's the big problem with guys in my audience, right? They're one of the biggest questions I get. "I don't know any other men like me. How do I... If I tell my mom, she's gonna get mad at me." Yeah, that's the big challenge. I've been working last year and a half on that specific problem for guys to plug into more communities and things like that. But yes, that's the problem. That's the problem. 'Cause I, it's very rare these days... Now, 10 years ago I would get this. But these days, it's very rare for a man to say, "Oh, no, traditional monogamous marriage works great as long as you do these few things, and every guy should do that." Very rare a guy, even a hardcore right-wing evangelical Christian, even those guys don't say that. They say, "Yeah, it doesn't work, but I'm not gonna do this and this. And m- non, non-monogamy, well, fuck that. No." Okay, but that's fine if you don't, you don't have to like it, but the alternative doesn't work. You're pointing at something that doesn't work. So, you've either got something that doesn't work or you've got something that works, but makes you emotionally uncomfortable for a while. So, those are your two options. I'd rather pick this because I want to be happy. I'm not going to pick something that doesn't work.

Chris Williamson 34:34 So, one of the first things that comes to mind for me when I think about a non-typical non-monogamous, uh, relationship as you're... Or a non-typical relationship, which is non-monogamous, is what do you do about the kids? What do you do about raising children in that sort of an environment?

Caleb Jones 34:53 I know, I personally know about, let's see, as in right this second, I know, let's see, seven couples, six couples, and I've known many other couples. Six, six or seven? I have to think about that for a minute. Who are married, who live together. No one really knows what kind of lifestyle they lead other than close friends and people like me, and they have kids. As a matter of fact, when I was married the first time, back when I was young and stupid, I was married 1,000 years ago, I was married traditionally and monogamously. And it didn't work because she got depressed and started taking pills. And, uh, when we were married, while I was married, four, literally, four houses down on my street, I didn't know this till after I had moved away, there was a married couple with two little kids who played with my kids, who had a wide open marriage. I had no idea. As far as I know, they're still married. This is decades ago. They were... And they were the happiest couple on the block, and they had kids. Now, no one knew, that's why I didn't know. I didn't know till later, just kind of through the grapevine, went, "What?" I actually called him up and said, "Is this true?" And I don't want to freak you out here, but is it true that... And he's like, "Oh, yeah." And, and my old thing, my old joke to myself is if I had just sat down and talked to that guy for an hour before I got married the first time, incorrectly in my view, it would have saved me a lot of time and effort. So, you can have kids, you just can't... I have kids, I raised kids under this model. I just got mar- remarried, let's see, a year and a half ago. Yes. And so my daughter and my son were, were little when I was living this way. You just, there are rules. You don't parade women around your kids, obviously. You need to show your kids some level of consistency. You need to be an example. You don't go out and telling everybody in their school or all your friends and family about what you're doing if you don't want to. People don't have to know what you're doing.... that, that's, there's no requirement there. You just have to be realistic about your sexual desires. So yeah, you can have kids. A lot of people have kids. And again, if I say, "Have an open marriage and have kids," immediately your societal programming goes... (imitates programming) Okay, fine. You can, you can live your life like two plus two equals five if you want. That's fine, cool. You won't be very happy, you'll have a lot of problems. You can do that, it's fine. I'd rather live two plus two equal four, even if I don't really like four and four emotionally bothers me initially. That's how I look at it.

Chris Williamson 37:02 So, uh, some of the listeners may have heard us talk about him before, but Aubrey Marcus, I don't know whether you know who that is, the guy that owns Onnit-

Caleb Jones 37:08 I've heard that name, but that's all I know. I've heard that name.

Chris Williamson 37:11 So he's the, uh, CEO or founder of Onnit, which is a supplement-

Caleb Jones 37:15 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:16 ... supplement company that Joe Rogan is a, a partner of. Um-

Caleb Jones 37:20 Right.

Chris Williamson 37:20 ... very big, very successful. Um, I haven't actually gone, uh, spoken that much about Aubrey, but people who read my tweets will have seen that recently I had to unsubscribe from his newsletter. Um, Aubrey and his wife, Whitney, who is a very attractive, um, Ultimate Fighting Championship-type, uh, ring announcer, commentator-type woman-

Caleb Jones 37:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 37:44 Uh, super fit, very, very... But they are in a, I think it's classed as a polyamorous or an open relationship. I, there's probably a degree of granularity that you would be able to discern from what's going on that I- I'm not gonna be able to get to, but... Um, and he talks about this experience when his wife brought home another man for the first time-

Caleb Jones 38:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 38:03 ... and the way that he felt, and then he talked about the first time that he had sex with another woman, and he said both of those situations, every time that his wife brought another man home, he was dry retching on the floor and it took him four months to get over. And-

Caleb Jones 38:21 Oh my God, no.

Chris Williamson 38:22 So this is in his-

Caleb Jones 38:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:23 This is in his email newsletter. One of the things I can say about Aubrey is he's very candid, right? So his email newsletter-

Caleb Jones 38:29 Yeah, at least he's being honest. That's very cool of him. He's being honest, that's great. We, we need more people like that, actually, so I, I applaud him for that. I, I'm one of the few guys in the world, I think, literally, who talk about my non-monogamous exploits and my experiences under my own name with my own picture, and it's me.

Chris Williamson 38:46 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 38:46 And I, there should be a lot more people than just me. There are people I know with audiences my size or much larger who don't talk about this.

Chris Williamson 38:52 Hmm.

Caleb Jones 38:52 So at least he's doing that. But yeah, one of the challenges with this are guys who do this wrong. So everything he's describing, I would never do in my marriage. That doesn't work. Y- y- (laughs) I, I, I don't wanna be mean to this guy. I have no idea. But yes.

Chris Williamson 39:07 No, fire away.

Caleb Jones 39:07 A lot-

Chris Williamson 39:08 I mean, you are, you're an expert in this particular field, or as close to an expert as I can get a hold of, so we're gonna find out what you think about it.

Caleb Jones 39:13 You have to sit down, you have to sit down and be realistic about what will piss you off and what will not piss you off before you actually get into a relationship and before you even have these discussions. So that's number one. A lot of people don't even do that. They say, "Okay, we're open." A lot of more, like, left-wing, like, hippie-ish type people, "Oh, we're sexually free. It'll be great." And then, yeah, and then their wife brings a guy to the house and has sex with him. Oh my God, no. You have to, you have to know your own parameters and be self-aware first. What am I capable of doing? What am I not capable of doing? If X, Y, and Z happened, would I be able to handle that or not? And you need to think that stuff through, and even if you need to write it down. You figure all this stuff out and get it all on paper first. Um, I'm, I'm not, I'm not a super jealous guy, but there are things my wife could do that would, that would make me not retch on the floor, but things like, "Ugh, Jesus, what the hell?" So you have to be aware of those things first. Then your partner has to be aware of her things. So she has to, y- you need to get into her head a little bit, 'cause she's probably not gonna tell you and figure out what her parameters are internally. And every woman is very different. So for example, um, my wife is more comfortable if she's more aware of the specific women I'm playing with on the side. Whereas my last serious relationship, the girlfriend I had before her, she was the opposite. If she didn't know, she, she knew I was doing it, but she didn't know any details, she was very happy. She thought, thought it was fine. When she found out details or when I told her things, she would get really pissed off. So every woman is very different about this. So that's the first level. Then the second level is you sit down and you discuss the ground rules, again, before you get too serious. Once you're already moved in and married and now you're gonna discuss ground rules, that's too late. So my wife and I had a very long, detailed discussion I call the OLTR talk. I have a whole structure for this stuff. This was several years ago, and I laid out all the negatives of being married to me.

Chris Williamson 41:00 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 41:00 And non-monogamy was one of them.

Chris Williamson 41:01 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 41:01 And, and that actually wasn't the one she was pissed off. There was, like, four or five of them, and that was just one. Matter of fact, the one she was scared about was that I work a lot, I work every day.

Chris Williamson 41:09 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 41:09 She's like, well... She didn't care about the non-monogamy because I'd already been doing it the whole time she met me, so she was used to it at that point. It was more like, "Well, you're gonna work a lot and you're never gonna spend time with me." It was more that kind of stuff. But you lay all that stuff out and then you lay out the ground rules, and you're very specific about the ro- ground rules based on what you're capable of and what you think you're not capable of emotionally. You just don't go hog wild and, and bring m- men over. So he should have known, "Hey, look. Look, wife," before she's my wife, "Hey, girlfriend, we're thinking about getting serious. We're gonna be non-monogamous. Here are the parameters, but here's what you can't do. You can't bring guys over and fuck 'em on my couch. That, I'll throw up." You, you gotta be honest about that stuff.

Chris Williamson 41:47 You-

Caleb Jones 41:47 And he didn't do that. And a lot of people don't do that. And, and, and I... Yeah, it, it, it damages the cause when that happens. I see that, a lot of that.

Chris Williamson 41:55 It reads to me, the, the, the emails and the stuff that I've seen from him and, uh, his semi-diary, he uses his, uh, email list sometimes, it almost feels a little bit like a journal. Um-

Caleb Jones 42:05 Wow.

Chris Williamson 42:06 Uh-

Caleb Jones 42:06 Well, that's kind of cool. That's neat.

Chris Williamson 42:08 Uh, so the transparency from Aubrey, I, I really admire. But-

Caleb Jones 42:12 Yeah, I think it's great.

Chris Williamson 42:13 It was, I had to unsubscribe. Uh, Aubrey, if you're listening, I apologize. But it was, it was too woke. Like it was so woke and everything was, like, hyper-woke, each email that came through. And I think-

Caleb Jones 42:25 Well-

Chris Williamson 42:26 He's big into-

Caleb Jones 42:26 Those are the kind of people who screw this up, people who go too far with the left-wing wokeness stuff and, "We're, we're creatures of nature," and, "It doesn't matter," and...... no, it does matter. It does matter to certain people, so you have to be aware of these things.

Chris Williamson 42:40 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 42:41 There are, there are boundaries to these things. Now, if you're not serious, then you can do whatever you want. So I talk about, I have... There's, there's different types. There's FBs, which are non-serious. There's MLTRs, where it's serious but not committed. And there's OLTR, which is like a girlfriend or your wife. So there's levels. And there's less rules as you go further over to this side of the scale. You can do whatever you want over here. Over here, if you want to be pair bonded, you've got to commit to some level of rules. It's not, it's not a free-for-all. It's not gonna work. That's not how human beings work, unfortunately. It'd be nice if they did, but they don't.

Chris Williamson 43:09 Yeah. So I think w- what it seems to me, so Aubrey's a big, like, psychedelic warrior, right? Like, he's big into his, uh-

Caleb Jones 43:15 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:15 ... mushrooms and his DMT, and he goes away with a shaman and, and gets, like, uh, does all the ceremonies-

Caleb Jones 43:21 Oh, got it. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:21 ... and all that sort of stuff.

Caleb Jones 43:22 Not surprised, I guess.

Chris Williamson 43:23 Uh, and I think, yeah, it fits the model, right? Um, and-

Caleb Jones 43:26 Yeah. (clears throat)

Chris Williamson 43:26 What I think, what I think he was potentially doing with this was almost seeing it as, like, a rite of passage. I think he had seen this, um, particular prescription for non-monogamy in whatever model it was that he thought, uh, uh, that he was going to adhere to. And then him and his then-wife were going to fit their life around this prescription, as opposed to having it-

Caleb Jones 43:57 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:57 ... be emergent, which is what you're talking about. He had seen-

Caleb Jones 44:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:00 ... "Okay, this is what non-monogamy is, therefore I'm gonna stick to it." And I think he talks about, I think it's in his book, Seize the Day. He talks about how he brought this guy home, and it was like this for the first X number of weeks or months or times or whatever that it happened.

Caleb Jones 44:15 Oh, my God.

Chris Williamson 44:15 And then, and then he had a breakthrough. And you sound... The, the, the terminology for breakthrough is taken from when people smoke DMT, right? It's that you have this breakthrough experience, or you take a hero dose of mushrooms and you break through.

Caleb Jones 44:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:29 And I, I, I think he was maybe, uh, trying to layer a, (clicks tongue) a psychedelic framework or, like, fit, uh, non-monogamy into a psychedelic matrices. Like, that was what he was trying to fit it into, is that-

Caleb Jones 44:43 Too woke.

Chris Williamson 44:44 Just-

Caleb Jones 44:44 You're right. Too woke.

Chris Williamson 44:45 Too woke. (laughs) That's it. It's- could be summarized in-

Caleb Jones 44:47 He's lost objectivity and he's lost reality. You need to be objective about these things.

Chris Williamson 44:52 I mean, and it-

Caleb Jones 44:52 And, and that's, that's an example. It's an interesting example of it going the other way. Most people are on the other side, more the right-wing side, including people who are considered left-wing people. It... Marriage looks like this, and a relationship looks like this, and it better look like this or you're a sinner, or I'm never gonna get... Uh, usually people are on the other side of irrationality. He's on this side of the irration- There's a rational zone in the middle between those two extremes.

Chris Williamson 45:14 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 45:14 You've got to be rational about hu- how human beings are, but you also have to be rational and objective and self-aware enough to know what your limits are. And every guy's different. And every woman's different.

Chris Williamson 45:24 Yeah. It's an interesting one, man. It's an interesting one. I, uh, I'm mean, his, this, the penultimate email to the one that I unsubscribed from, the title was, "Me and Whitney Nealy Split Up Today." And that's him and his, him and his wife. And I'm like, uh, I appreciate-

Caleb Jones 45:37 What are you... Yeah, it's a little too much information. You shouldn't be-

Chris Williamson 45:40 It's the-

Caleb Jones 45:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:40 It's the wokeness, man. Like, so I appreciate the, the, um-

Caleb Jones 45:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:43 ... transparency. And I, I genuinely do think... And it plays into his shtick, right? It's part and parcel of his thing. But I'm like, man, like, if you and your wife are on the verge of splitting up, don't use that as your fucking weekly newsletter content.

Caleb Jones 45:56 Yeah, correct.

Chris Williamson 45:56 Like, that's, that's, that's a piece of advice. And another piece of advice, like, he talks-

Caleb Jones 46:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:01 ... in the f- the fucking first or second line of this, uh, of his Instagram post from the same day was like, um, "Whitney left to go to Texas to see her boyfriend today." And I'm like-

Caleb Jones 46:14 So that is... This is an example of what you were talking about earlier about what polyamory is, the difference between polyamory and an open relationship.

Chris Williamson 46:21 Okay.

Caleb Jones 46:22 So in my view, and this is, this is not a fact more than my opinion-

Chris Williamson 46:27 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 46:27 ... but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. If you want to be pair bonded, that person shouldn't have other boyfriends, because that's not pair bonding. So if your wife has a boyfriend, or if you're married and you have another girlfriend on the side, a girlfriend, that's not pair bonding. That's polyam-

Chris Williamson 46:41 Yeah, he has two. He has, he has two girlfriends.

Caleb Jones 46:44 He has two girlfriends. Okay. So if he views these as real girlfriends, real emotional meaning and commitment to these women in addition to his wife, that's not pair bonding. That's something else. That's po- that's more polyamory. So that'd be a polyamorous marriage, which I don't, I'm against. I think that's a very bad idea.

Chris Williamson 47:02 Why?

Caleb Jones 47:02 I think polyamory is great if you are not pair bonded. So for many years, uh, in a, in my parlance, it would be MLTR. So I had multiple MLTRs for years, and it was great. But I didn't have a girlfriend. They were all women I were da- I was dating and I really liked, and I liked on an emotional level, but they weren't a girlfriend. Once you have a girlfriend, that's pair bonding. So if you have multiple girlfriends... I've talked to a lot of guys about this, hundreds of guys about this. Almost never have I seen that work long term, to have multiple... In the Western world. I mean, you could move to Saudi Arabia or do something else. But in the Western world, having multiple girlfriends or multiple wives or something to that equivalent, it doesn't work long term in the West. You can't do that. If you're gonna be pair bonded, you need to be pair bonded. I am with you. I have no other girlfriends or wives except you. I'm allowed to go get laid on the side. These are not my girlfriends. These are women who are my friends, FBs, which is friend with benefits. It's a friend-

Chris Williamson 48:00 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 48:00 ... not a girlfriend. So I have-

Chris Williamson 48:01 Right.

Caleb Jones 48:01 ... an OLTR, I have a wife, and I have FBs. They're not my girlfriends, they're just my buddies. And we have sex, and that's it. We don't go on dates. We don't spend the week together. I already have that with my wife. That's more, that's a more long-term, sustainable model.

Chris Williamson 48:16 I understand. I think, we... Aubrey, if you're listening, we got some advice for you, man. Get in touch with Caleb. He'll, he'll, uh, he'll do a little rundown. He'll maybe, maybe give you a little bit of a-

Caleb Jones 48:23 He needs to downgrade his girlfriends to FBs, he needs to make his wife his only wife and his only girlfriend, and she needs to make that kind of commitment too. And if she doesn't want to, they should get divorced, and they should just date.

Chris Williamson 48:35 There we go.

Caleb Jones 48:35 That's the su- now it's sustainable.

Chris Williamson 48:37 We fixed it.

Caleb Jones 48:37 That's a sustainable model.

Chris Williamson 48:38 I might re... I'll re-sign up to his newsletter and I'll reply and I'll give him...

Caleb Jones 48:42 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:43 I'll give him the too long, didn't read from the podcast, man.

Caleb Jones 48:45 Fair enough.

Chris Williamson 48:45 So, um-One of the things that I, I've, I've been thinking in the back of my mind, and I can't fantastically put myself in the mind of a, a female. But to the girls that are listening, I would love to hear what your thoughts are about this, whether or not you would, uh, have ever considered this or whether it's so kind of visceral and stomach-turning because of the way that you, uh, uh, naturally consider couples and partnerships to be that it's difficult to almost put yourself into this situation. But I think certainly one of the things that, that will come to mind for many people when... And I'm, I'm very empathetic, right? Like my, my empathy is crippling. So for me to (laughs) think about, um, the way that-

Caleb Jones 49:28 You're probably a nicer person than me, though. You're probably a nice guy.

Chris Williamson 49:31 Uh, yeah, but too nice sometimes. And unfortunately, people-

Caleb Jones 49:34 Right.

Chris Williamson 49:34 ... people, if they realize that, if they realize how empathetic you are, it's a big, big advantage-

Caleb Jones 49:39 Oh, I know.

Chris Williamson 49:39 ... to faking things.

Caleb Jones 49:39 Yes, yes.

Chris Williamson 49:40 Um, and it cau- it causes you to move slow as well. Like you, when you're super concerned about how your actions are going to affect other people-

Caleb Jones 49:48 Yes.

Chris Williamson 49:48 ... it often causes you to, uh, to, uh, drop into inertia.

Caleb Jones 49:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:52 Um, so, but we all have our, our, uh, shortcomings and our, uh, advantages, right? Like, there's people out there who might not have the empathy, but they have a whole host of other, uh, issues they gotta deal with.

Caleb Jones 50:02 That's me. I have very, I have extremely, I've been told, and, and then they're right, extremely low empathy. I, I barely give a shit about anything. So the advantage is I can move very quickly. I can get a lot of things done. I have a very organized, very good life. The disadvantage is I can hurt people's feelings if I'm not careful, people close to me. So I've... So as, uh, as you grow, you have to learn to mitigate those weaknesses. So you have to learn to become... stay empathetic, but not let it hamper you. And I have to learn how to be more empathetic.

Chris Williamson 50:26 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 50:27 Right? All right.

Chris Williamson 50:27 Yeah, it's interesting, man. Is, it's, uh, is interesting how you do that. Do you find, um, within the non-monogamy community, uh, people skew to less empathetic? I'm gonna guess, maybe guess.

Caleb Jones 50:40 No.

Chris Williamson 50:41 Really?

Caleb Jones 50:41 No, I don't. I, I run into people who are more like you.

Chris Williamson 50:44 Okay, that's interesting.

Caleb Jones 50:45 Especially the polyamory people, and I'm really not in that group.

Chris Williamson 50:48 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 50:48 I mean, they're non-monogamy, so they're my brothers, I love them.

Chris Williamson 50:50 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 50:50 But, but I'm not a polyamorous guy.

Chris Williamson 50:52 Yep.

Caleb Jones 50:53 So, but yes, especially the polyamory world, yes, much more empathetic guys. Yes, absolutely.

Chris Williamson 50:57 Interesting. That's interesting. But yeah, so to try and put myself into the mind of a, of a girl, uh, thinking about this particular situation, certainly one of the problems that you may come up against, and I'm gonna guess you will have a, a, uh, format for this or a structure for this that exists, where you have a man who does want to, uh, be able to have other partners outside of his main, uh, relationship.

Caleb Jones 51:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:23 But that-

Caleb Jones 51:24 Which is all men, but go ahead.

Chris Williamson 51:26 (laughs) But the f- the, uh, girl in the relationship has no desire to be with other men.

Caleb Jones 51:35 Norm- normal.

Chris Williamson 51:35 Yeah. But that, I think what that-

Caleb Jones 51:38 You just described the norm.

Chris Williamson 51:39 Okay. What happens-

Caleb Jones 51:40 At least in the earlier parts of the relationship. You just described the norm. He wants to play around, and she doesn't, doesn't want to or doesn't want to yet.

Chris Williamson 51:46 What that leads to people thinking, and what it certainly leads to me thinking, is that there's, there's some kind of imbalance, unfairness between the two, that somehow the open, non-monogamous relationship would work more easily or would somehow be more balanced, is ma- a way to put it, if both partners had other things going on.

Caleb Jones 52:10 That's true, but if one partner doesn't want those things, which happens all the time, it's happened to me a lot-

Chris Williamson 52:15 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 52:16 ... then fine.

Chris Williamson 52:17 Mm-hmm.

Caleb Jones 52:17 The, the l- as long as she is allowed to, because that's one of the first questions she's gonna throw at your face when you start describing these things to her. The very first thing out, that's gonna tumble out of her mouth is, "Well, can I fuck other guys?" Even if she doesn't want to and has no intention to and thinks it's gross if she were to do that, she's still gonna say that. And if you say, "Whoa, whoa, no, no," well, then you're out. If you say, "Yes, if you really wanna do that, yes, of course." And then she goes, "Oh."

Chris Williamson 52:44 Cool. So I mean, so there we lead on to the next thing, which is that for men, and again, this is evolutionary conditioning, for men, allowing your partner to sleep with other men provokes an incredibly visceral response.

Caleb Jones 53:00 Incredibly.

Chris Williamson 53:01 And if you want to have your cake, you need to... I'm going to guess, uh, that it's probably a pretty difficult sell to say, "Our relationship is going to be non-monogamous, but only for me."

Caleb Jones 53:16 And not long-term sustainable.

Chris Williamson 53:18 Okay, so if you're-

Caleb Jones 53:19 I've never seen that... I've seen guys try that. I've never seen it last more than nine months.

Chris Williamson 53:23 Where the guy is able to s-

Caleb Jones 53:24 I've seen numerous men try that in the Western world.

Chris Williamson 53:26 Guy's able to sleep around, girl isn't.

Caleb Jones 53:28 Yeah, so he's, literally says, "I'm gonna fuck other women. You can only fuck me." And she's like... And he's a strong alpha male, and she's a little willowy, little submissive girl. And she goes, "Oh, okay." And within nine months, they either break up or she bangs someone else just to g- just to make it even-

Chris Williamson 53:42 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 53:42 ... and to balance it out just to get back at him.

Chris Williamson 53:44 Yeah. So, f- for guys, I mean, like for me personally, again, maybe I'm too blue pill or maybe I haven't taken the red pill yet enough for this, I struggle to see a situation in which I would be able to stomach somebody that I love sleeping with someone else with my, uh, allowance, with my, um, grace.

Caleb Jones 54:06 So there's several answers to that. Answer number one, and they're, and they're different areas. So answer number one is, a significant percentage of women who are not super young... So if she's under the age of 23, she's gonna have sex with other guys. That's, that's what young girls do. If she's older, a significant percentage, and in my experience, in my anecdotal experience, but I have a lot of anecdotal experience, it's around 40 to 50% won't sleep with other men. Even if they have the opportunity to, they don't want to. They think that's gross. So even though you're sleeping with other women, they say, "Okay, you're a man. You're a barbarian. That's how men are, but I don't do that. I'm appropriate. I'm a Christian," or, "I'm a this," or, "I'm a that, so I'm not gonna do that." So that's one. Number two, if she does, women are not like men. And so what men do is they negative fantasize about, "Well, well, if sh- if I'm allowed to go out and have sex constantly with other women, and I'm gonna constantly do that for the rest of my life, oh no, she's gonna constantly do that." No, she doesn't. Women go through horny phases, they go through non-sexual phases, they go through all kinds of different phases. So if she does-She might do it for a few months and then stop and never do it again. Or maybe do it once every 10 years, or once every few years, off and on very rarely. She's not gonna do it consistently like I do it or like you would do it 'cause we're men. Men are not like women. That's the second answer. Third answer is, you should train yourself to get to the point where you care less. So if you're a jealous person, it's gonna be harder for you to be a happy person. So if you have this thing where, and a lot of guys are like this, it, there's, there's guys who are really jealous, guys who are moderately jealous, and guys who don't, really don't give a shit. So the really jealous guys, if they even see a guy comment on her Facebook page, or they hear, uh, a thing on Instagram go off on her phone, and they just go into a rage, you have a problem. There's something wrong with you, you need to fix. You don't say, "Well, I'm a man, and that's just how I am." And, and quote a bunch of, you know, evolutionary psychology about how, "I need to, you know, protect my woman and I'm not gonna..." You can, you can give me all that science you want, you're, there's something wrong with you in terms of your long-term happiness if you're that angry and that jealous. So if you are, on a scale from one to 10, you're a 12 if you visualize a woman you like having meaningless sex with a beta male who's no competition to you wearing a condom, if that just drives you insane, then it's, it behooves you in terms of being a man and being a happy man and to improve yourself, to get that 12 down to a six, or a seven, or a five, or somewhere in there. Drop it down. You should do that anyway, regard- even if you had planned on being monogamous for the rest of your life, you would do that anyway. You shouldn't go through life being that touchy about these things. 'Cause that's all I see all the time, and that's one of women's biggest complaints about guys, is they start seeing them and all of a sudden, the guys starts to just put all these fences and walls around them, and the woman's attraction for the man goes down. She's like, "Ugh." Now for a while she likes it, 'cause that means he likes me. But after a while, "Oh my God, kill me." And that's one of the reasons why 75% of boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are terminated by the female. Because the woman gets tired of the stuff.

Chris Williamson 57:05 Is that, is that the statistic?

Caleb Jones 57:06 That's the stat. Three-fourths. Three-fourths of boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are ended by the woman, and 70 to 80%, depending on the study you look at, at least in the United States, of divorces are initiated by the female.

Chris Williamson 57:18 Interesting.

Caleb Jones 57:18 So women like getting into relationships. Women hate staying in relationships. It's not what they like-

Chris Williamson 57:23 You could argue that-

Caleb Jones 57:23 ... generally speaking.

Chris Williamson 57:24 ... you could argue that the girl is ending the relationship because they potentially found out that the man had cheated.

Caleb Jones 57:29 That's a huge percentage of them, yes.

Chris Williamson 57:31 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 57:31 And one of the reasons I'm being able to do this, you can do this now, especially now, um, if a woman starts complaining about this, if you start, start explaining this to a woman when you first start verbalizing it, "Oh, uh, you can't fuck other girls. That's not what a relationship looks like." All you have to do, I've done this with many women, including my wife when I met her. All you have to do is say, you look at her and you say, "Every boyfriend you've ever had of a decent period of time has cheated on you. Right?" And they go... And that's it, you're in. You're done. That, that covers so much of it, 'cause they know monogamy doesn't work. So that's the fourth answer is, the fourth answer is, what is your alternative? Your alternative is something that doesn't work, that we know for sure doesn't work. It's not like maybe this might work. We know for sure, the odds are overwhelming that it probably won't work. So by saying, "I can't do this," again, you're going back to a system that doesn't work.

Chris Williamson 58:27 I think a lot-

Caleb Jones 58:27 So you have all, that's, those are my four answers to that.

Chris Williamson 58:30 I think a lot of people, because of the visceral reaction that you will get, maybe the dry retching on the floor or just the sensation that people get, both guys and girls, when you think about, you know, to the people that are in relationships who are listening, just for a second put yourself in the mind and think what would happen if you tried to have an open relationship or a non-monogamous relationship where you were allowed to sleep with other people, but you had to put up with your partner sleeping with someone else. It evokes such a r- a very, very visceral response, but-

Caleb Jones 59:01 It does.

Chris Williamson 59:01 ... I think that is a hurdle so many people will struggle to get over. Um, and I'm gonna guess potentially more guys will struggle to get over that hurdle of allowing the partner to sleep with other people-

Caleb Jones 59:14 Correct.

Chris Williamson 59:14 ... than maybe even girls. Yeah. I thought-

Caleb Jones 59:16 Yeah. No, not maybe. That is correct. Guys have much hard- a much harder problem with this than women do.

Chris Williamson 59:20 Cool. I thought-

Caleb Jones 59:20 Women are accustomed to men sleeping around throughout all of human history, so they're kinda used to it. They don't like it, but they're more accu- it's men who have a problem with it. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:27 Interesting. Um, but yeah, I mean, that, that response-

Caleb Jones 59:30 And that's why the divorce rate's gonna continue to get worse. Because of what you just said. What's working, what, where people are doing now isn't working, but the alternative is so horrible they're gonna keep going back to what isn't working, over and over and over. Unless your goal in life, and there are a few men who say this to me but not many, unless your goal in life is to have serial short-term monogamous relationships for the rest of your life. So in other words, if you tell me, "Hey man, my goal is to have a girlfriend and I'll have her for about a year and a half, two years, then I'll break up with her, it'll be monogamous, then I'll get a new girlfriend. And I'll date her for about a year, and then I'll have a new girlfriend." And on and on and-

Chris Williamson 1:00:05 Do that, do that 20 times-

Caleb Jones 1:00:06 If you wanna do that, you do 70-

Chris Williamson 1:00:06 ... for the rest of my life.

Caleb Jones 1:00:08 For the rest of your life, if you say, "Look, I'm cool doing that until my 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s," and you really say that with honesty, then you could ignore everything I'm saying 'cause that'll work. Other than that, if you want something long term, you're gonna have to embrace a model that is something other than what doesn't work.

Chris Williamson 1:00:24 So, as a bookend question to what has been a really interesting discussion, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think is the optimal setup for a relationship in life. So we've talked about you've, you've had multiple long-term partners moving through. Would it, would you have preferred in a different iteration of the world where you could control everything that occurred within it, do you think it's optimal to have A, uh, what, I can't remember what, the MLFB or whatever it was?

Caleb Jones 1:00:56 OLTR?

Chris Williamson 1:00:56 The main one.

Caleb Jones 1:00:57 So one, one wife or girlfriend you mean?

Chris Williamson 1:00:58 Yes. Is it optimal, if you can, to have one for 60 years, 30 years, however long, from mid-30s until whenever? Or from-

Caleb Jones 1:01:08 Are you, are you talking about optimal as in how human beings are now?

Chris Williamson 1:01:11 For you, if you were to say to someone, "This is what I think is, for a broad cross-section of people, the best way to do things."

Caleb Jones 1:01:21 Yes, for a broad cross-section of men, but not all men, 'cause there are exceptions to all these rules.

Chris Williamson 1:01:26 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 1:01:26 There are some men who should never pair bond. There are a small percentage of men who should never have a girlfriend. They should just go bang chicks and date and, into their 60s and 70s and there's just, but that's an exception. Um, yes, for a broad cross-section of people, the least bad scenario, 'cause I don't wanna say best 'cause there's problems with what ... There are problems with the models I'm talking about.

Chris Williamson 1:01:45 Yes.

Caleb Jones 1:01:45 Everything you've talked about are, those are accurate criticisms. The least bad system is a long-term pair bonded wife or girlfriend, however you wanna term it, s- assuming you're over the age of 35, 'cause I tell guys don't, don't settle down with a woman until you're at least 35. That's insane. At least you're 35. So, assuming you're 35 or older, you have a long-term, decades-long wife or girlfriend that you are really good with and you're very complementary with and compatible with and you are allowed to get sex on the side within ground rules. These are not your girlfriends. This is more casual, friendly sex when you need it as a man, and she is allowed to, too. And the older she gets, the less she'll do it. She may not do it at all as she gets older. That's the least bad scenario for the broadest cross-section of people, yes.

Chris Williamson 1:02:34 My, my.

Caleb Jones 1:02:35 'Cause that is ... Uh, what I just described is doable long term. What is not doable long term is we're gonna be married, you're never gonna touch anyone else for the rest of your fucking life and I won't either, and you roll your eyes as you're saying it when you're a guy. "I promise I won't either, honey. And we're never gonna get divorced, we're never gonna split up." That's not long term sustainable because that is a fundamental violation of everything in which, all the ways in which you were designed as a man and as a woman. That's why it doesn't work.

Chris Williamson 1:03:02 Okay. So, I'm gonna finish off with a question which is, you've got the monogamy, which is the traditional relationship approach, which you've just identified there. And then you've got Aubrey's relationship, which is-

Caleb Jones 1:03:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:13 ... I'm gonna have a wife and the wife's gonna have ... Which one is-

Caleb Jones 1:03:16 A polya- that's a polyamorous marriage.

Chris Williamson 1:03:18 W- which one is the, in your eyes, the least effective? Which one's gonna f-

Caleb Jones 1:03:24 Neither of those are long term sustainable.

Chris Williamson 1:03:25 Which one's gonna fail first?

Caleb Jones 1:03:29 Hi- how long ... His? How long has he been married?

Chris Williamson 1:03:31 Uh, I'm not sure. I don't know.

Caleb Jones 1:03:33 His? His will. You can, you can grit your teeth and be monogamous to a wife for a long time. I did it for nine years and I'm a really high sex drive, so you can do it. Women, men and women can grit their teeth and suffer through shitty marriages. A lot of people can do that. They did that all throughout the '50s and '60s and all that good stuff. So you can have a marriage, traditional monogamous marriage that lasts a long time. It won't last forever. That's not how you're designed. And if it does last forever, someone's cheating and someone's putting up with it.

Chris Williamson 1:03:59 But someone's going to encounter ... In the polyamorous marriage, someone's going to encounter a problem that is, they're unable to-

Caleb Jones 1:04:05 That is catastrophic to the relationship. If he's retching on the floor because there's a man fucking his wife in his house-

Chris Williamson 1:04:12 (laughs)

Caleb Jones 1:04:12 ... how is that long term sustainable? It's not. Can't do it.

Chris Williamson 1:04:16 Well, I mean, I, I ask myself the same question.

Caleb Jones 1:04:18 Whereas the guy who has a wife at home and he cheats on her and hopes he doesn't get caught, you could stretch that out for a, a long time.

Chris Williamson 1:04:25 Some people-

Caleb Jones 1:04:25 Not forever, but you could stretch that out, sure.

Chris Williamson 1:04:27 Some peop- some people make it last for their entire lives, right?

Caleb Jones 1:04:30 And that's fine, but that's not monogamous. So that's what I would view dysfunctional non-monogamy. You're non-monogamous 'cause you're cheating. You're having sex with multiple people, you're just pretending you're not. So now you're dealing with drama and lying and all kinds of other problems that are dysfunctional to your core relationship with your wife.

Chris Williamson 1:04:46 And again, if-

Caleb Jones 1:04:46 I don't have to lie to my wife ever.

Chris Williamson 1:04:48 ... if you, if you're an empathetic individual as I am, the, the times that I have cheated in past relationships have caused such second order, third order, fourth order effect guilt and then self-referential guilt and then, f- you know, all of those things-

Caleb Jones 1:05:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:05:03 ... feelings of, uh, lower degree of virtue, lower degree of integrity, all of those sorts of things, um, that, for me, I was like, well, I, that's, that's not, not a workable model. Cheating, being in a relationship and cheating is not a workable model. For me, I, I-

Caleb Jones 1:05:18 Not if you wanna be happy.

Chris Williamson 1:05:19 No.

Caleb Jones 1:05:19 Not if you wanna be happy. I've talked to a lot of guys about that model and that's, they, they tell me exactly what you're saying, or very, or they're just terrified. They're constantly worried they're gonna get caught. They have multiple phones and multiple accounts and all that good stuff. That is not a long term sustainable model if happiness is your objective. Now, if you say to me, and there's a few men who say this, "I don't care about being long term happy. I don't give a fuck about that. I wanna live my life this way. And yeah, you might be happier than me, I don't care." Great, then go ahead and cheat. But if your objective is long term happiness, you are correct. You can't adopt a cheating model long term. You've got to figure out something else that is more long term sustainable, even if it makes you uncomfortable during the first few months or a year or two you try it.

Chris Williamson 1:05:57 That's interesting. Caleb, for the listeners at home who want to find out a little bit more, maybe some people think, "Oh, it's a, an interesting discussion that I want to read a bit more about," where would you direct them?

Caleb Jones 1:06:09 I have a lot of websites. The easiest place to go would be calebjones.com. So C-A-L-E-B as in boy jones.com. That's what, kind of the central hub of all my websites.

Chris Williamson 1:06:18 Yeah.

Caleb Jones 1:06:19 Most of my ... A lot of my content is business and s- location dependent income and all that good stuff too. Again, n- non-monogamy is a segment of what I talk about in terms of masculine l- now I can't talk. Masculine lifestyle design.

Chris Williamson 1:06:30 Yeah. I got you. Well, Caleb, it's been, it's been really interesting. I hope that we have, uh, opened some people's eyes to a, a alternative approach to relationships. I think certainly for me over the last few years, I've seen people talk about non-monogamy in different, um, uh, versions as we've gone through today. Increasingly, I do wonder what the trajectory of that's gonna be. I wonder whether people are gonna dig their heels in. As divorce rates continue to go up, I wonder whether people are going to dig their heels into the existing model more or whether more people will begin to migrate across to non-monogamy.

Caleb Jones 1:07:07 I think you're gonna see a lot of both.

Chris Williamson 1:07:11 Everything gets polarized, man. But it's been, it's been really fascinating. Thank you so much for your time.

Caleb Jones 1:07:14 You bet. Anytime.

Chris Williamson 1:07:16 Catch you later on, man.

Caleb Jones 1:07:20 Outro: Love wins. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Love wins.