Why Women Say They Want One Thing But Date Another - Rob Henderson

Left-wing women are learning to love right-wing men. Political division has become a sexual fetish. Today, in online political fandoms, people behind enemy lines are often seen as potential sexual conquests. Right-wing men want a liberal art hoe, whereas some leftist women lust after the right-wing anon. It's hard to pin down discourse like this sometimes, but this trend is also substantiated in studies about the dating patterns of progressive women. What do you think about that? Yeah, I you know I wonder about these sort of media trends, these headlines. Um because often the reason why they get uh so much interest is because they're sort of at odds with our intuitions, right? And I know you've you've spoken with with plenty of people about this idea of assortative mating. We tend to be attracted to people who are somewhat similar to ourselves. So then when you have this splashy headline, you know, right-wing men want the leftwing artho, the leftwing ard hoes want the Republican MAGA bro or something, you know, it's it's a little edgy. It's a little catches us off guard, but I think there's, you know, to the extent that it might be true, you know, if if you think about what are the qualities that women find attractive in men, sort of self-sufficiency, ambition, income, uh, you know, all all the kinds of qualities that that are associated with sort of an a masculine guy. Um, and then you look at sort of the voting patterns of men and you find that the predictors of of voting for the conservative parties are also tend to be the traits that women tend to find attractive. So, if you look at um uh self-identified uh if you ask men, you know, how how masculine do you feel versus how feminine do you feel? The higher men rate themselves as masculine, the more likely they are to support a conservative political candidate. Uh and the more uh or the less masculine they feel, the more likely they are to support a leftwing candidate. And then um and you can ask other questions about uh income. There was a really funny study uh a few years ago um in the UK about height that uh there's a sort of a small but significant correlation between height and voting for conservative political parties. Uh I don't know if that would hold up today. This was like 2016 2017 that period but uh you know and then there's like interesting work around um attitudes around like social dominance orientation and you know men who are sort of uh uh sure of themselves confident go out into the world achieve something. They also tend to like things like low taxes and they tend to like things like you know a strong military, police, all those kinds of things kind of cluster together. And so it would make sense I think that women regardless of political orientation even if they explicitly when you ask them about politics they're going to say I don't like this or that party but then they start to list out the qualities that they enjoy. You know those just tend to cluster more on the right side of the political spectrum. I notice that they didn't use right-wing women are looking to date left-wing men as one of the examples there. Yeah. Well, I mean that I think that makes sense in general. You know, I I saw this tweet going around the other day. Got a lot of attention. Uh it was something like uh you know, I I want I want a a boyfriend who who looks like a Republican but isn't one. Something like that, you know. But I think that's the dream is like, you know, you have all of the qualities of a sort of prototypical Republican successful guy or whatever, but then like they somehow still support the the left-wing political parties. Um, which I guess is like that that incentivizes, you know, this idea, I'm sure you've come across it called woke fishing of guys who conceal their political views, usually guys who tend to be on the right, they will uh adopt the political beliefs of the opposing side simply to attract women. And uh you know that that wouldn't be a thing unless it had some basis in reality unless uh you know somewhere in the world that that actually paid off as a strategy. Yeah. You wrote an article about Harry Sison, this sneaky feminists exploiting the dating economy thing. What what's the story there? Yeah, it was interesting. There was a a big sort of splashy piece in the New York Post about this and a lot of people tweeting about this guy Harry Sison who is you know he was referred to in the New York Post as a rising star uh rising Jenzi Tik Tok star for the Democratic National Committee or something like that. He's just sort of a left-wing guy, but uh there was a sort of trend going on on TikTok of these girls saying, "Oh, you know, I was Harry slid into my DMs. We were talking and I was sending him nudes." But then he turned out to or he would say things like, you know, I'm interested in women more for their bodies. I like their minds. Uh he also said something like, "I don't I I have no roster or something. I don't have a roster." If you know the word roster, you have a roster. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably pretty good heristic there. And uh and then suddenly there these women all discover each other and then uh you know come together start posting these videos about how Harry is kind of a duplicitous two timing guy or whatever. And I thought there was something very Gen Z about all of this because from what I understand he didn't sleep with any of these women. They felt betrayed or duped or something because they sent him some nudes and maybe some videos or something. But he to my knowledge it's not been reported that he slept with any of these women. And so you know it's like they're feeling burned but he didn't really cheat. they were never official. You know, he wasn't in a relationship or committed to any of these women. Um, you know, he did explicitly lie to them. Uh, you know, assuming all these allegations are true, but it's not like, you know, he he violated any kind of law. I mean, it's kind of gray area morally. I think I think that the sort of the outrage doesn't necessarily match the transgression. Yeah. I wonder whether there is a he set himself an incredibly high bar. If it was Andrew Tate or some [ __ ] guy from the right, would people be quite as up in arms? Or is it the case that you've sort of proilitized about how pro-women you are and I'm softly softly and look at my feminine bonafidees and oh hang on, you weren't living up to them. So there's a degree of hypocrisy between his public position and his sort of private communication. That's interesting. Yeah. So, so I guess the idea is it's out of character. You know, he portrays himself as very much a supporter of the Democrats. He's a leftwing guy. He cares about women and women's rights. And then meanwhile, behind the scenes, he's uh lying to women to get naked pictures of them. And I guess that that is kind of like the the factor here is like they they felt lied to. and then the image he projects into the public versus who he really is, there's a mismatch there. Um, but yeah, if you don't have that image that you project, what you have is young pretty famous guy with lots of access to women gets lots of nudes from women and is a bit duplicitous. Like that's not a story. It only becomes a story, I think, when you have somebody who has positioned themselves as not that. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So, so if he were Yeah. like you said, an Andrew Tate character or just someone who who openly said like I'm kind of a hedonistic uh pleasure- seeeking guy and then he's doing all of this. I think yeah, it wouldn't be a story, but it's the fact that he says one thing but then does another. There's the hypocrisy element that bothered a lot of people and it kind of reminded me of uh you know the whole like sneaky [ __ ] idea in uh evolutionary biology. Um you the the formal the more scientific term is kleptogamy of men who or or males species who adopt the appearance of more sort of feminine traits and then thereby uh sort of disguise themselves and this is sort of acts as a shield against more sort of dominant uh competitive rival males. They think oh he's just a soft you know kind of a a weak guy. He's sort of a submissive feminine guy and they uh therefore feel less uh less bothered if you see this weak guy hanging out with the women and then the woman the then the guy the sort of sneaky [ __ ] guy that gets to gets to have his pick of of the women here. And I think like a lot of a lot of guys are kind of adopting this of this um you know you can if it's the case that women want uh you know the the handsome guy but then also sort of politically leftwing and this is just going to incentivize a lot of uh camouflage I think. Why is it that what is it that you think that's sort of allowing these guys to get in with women? Is it a a degree of safety and security? Is it that this person doesn't seem like that much of a threat? Is it that they align with my political beliefs, that they're going to be more sensitive? Is he signaling long-term investment? Yeah, I think all of the above. Um, you know, you're Yeah, you're signaling that you're a reliable person. You're you're compassionate, you're kind. You know, our mutual friend David Bus, his classic study found that the number one trait that people search for, male or female, the number one trait that they search for in a romantic partner is kindness. And you know, if you talk about equality and all those kinds of things, then um yeah, you're you're signaling that you're a kind and caring and compassionate guy. But I think social media, it's kind of it's difficult to to sort through the actual signal versus the noise around it because if you're a high-profile guy with millions of followers and you're talking about equality and and women's rights and all of these things and then you as an observer are seeing those comments receive lots of likes and shares and retweets and this guy's getting so much attention and accolades and you're thinking, well, he's saying this and people are applauding him. And I think this strengthens the belief that what he's saying is actually what he believes. that's actually what he um supports and how he lives his own life. But uh you know there's there's often a mismatch, right, between what gets attention and what uh you know how people actually live. So yeah, I think a lot of guys are are wrestling with this. Interestingly, I don't think this guy actually Harry Sis, he doesn't seem to have actually paid any real penalty. Uh I saw some people online joking that this is just going to uh increase his notoriety and perhaps even um get him more attention. That one I'm less certain about, but so far he doesn't actually seem to have suffered in any real way. There was a an interesting debate that you highlighted that I totally hadn't seen, which is a lot of men, especially sort of red pill men, would use evolutionary logic to explain how somebody like Sison is sort of wired to sleep around with lots of women. But the same evolutionary logic also explains about why women who had been scorned by a guy like this would use gossip and venting and interpersonal attack um as a a way to shame them and to also ward off other women. So I think you said uh this isn't a bug in the system. This is the system. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the logic here is, you know, the other example I pointed out was with Leonardo DiCaprio where every six months it's like, oh, another another flare up online of, oh, Leonardo Caprio has another 19-year-old supermodel girlfriend, cycled out someone who just turned 25. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, he he resets back, you know, rewinds the clock. And then um and then, you know, there's all this discourse online where, you know, speaking very roughly, women seem to be more upset and men are like, "Hey, this is kind of evolutionary science. This is biology. You know, a super high status successful guy. you can't really be that surprised that he he'd search for women who are young and youthful and all those kinds of things. And then um and then women in response are trying to shame him and and and uh stigmatize this kind of behavior. And there's an evolutionary reason for both of those things, right? Like there is an evolutionary explanation for why men would enjoy being uh partnered with an attractive young woman because on average attractive young women tend to be more fertile. And so, you know, if you average that out through the course of evolutionary history, men who are more attracted to those types of women tend to have more kids. And then it's interesting if you look at um you know, research on on uh the ages that men tend to find women the most attractive, it all clusters around 23, 24 years old, regardless of the male participant who's being asked. So, even 13-year-old boys, um they say 23 year old women are the most attractive. They're not saying other 13-year-old girls. And then, you know, you you go all the way up to 70 plus years old and men tend to say, "Oh, women physically are at their peak in their early mid20s." Whereas for women, it's it's a bit more sort of matched with their own age. Um, and there's an evolutionary reason for that. But then for women who shame men for, you know, as they increasingly grow older and continue to date young women, there's uh the logic here is that, you know, you want to stigmatize this kind of behavior. You want to shame it. You don't want uh other men to do the same thing. you're basically trying to kind of police and confine men to be a bit more committed as a caregiver. And then when you have a super high-profile person like Leonardo DiCaprio, you know, you don't want that to become sort of normalized where every successful guy who women tend to be highly attracted to, every single one of those types of guys are following the Leonardo DiCaprio model. And this reduces women's chances of commitment from one of these um uh prominent guys. It's interesting how uh if that's correct and if it is this unspoken price enforcement mechanism to try and demotivate the high value men from uh sleeping around that uh this is kind of the opposite of a a tragedy of the commons right because only one woman is going to be with him at least at one time right it's a very very small portion of women that are going to get to date Leonardo DiCaprio but a very large portion of women who are shame ing him. So, you know, you kind of got this huge contribution. A lot of women saying this is very very much bad behavior. But how many of them are actually going to benefit from the uh enforcement of men going, "Ah, maybe I shouldn't go full cuban pill on this one. I might, you know, I might I might just play it safe." Yeah. Well, I I I don't think like, you know, these women logically in their rational conscious mind, they're probably not thinking someday I'm going to date Leonard and I'm going to get him to commit to me. But it could be more so like um I would like to date a high status man in general and and you know your odds are you better not behave like that and trade me up for some 21 year old. So I had I had this I had this idea um looking at sort of the rise of sneaky [ __ ] the Harry Sison sort of thing of the world. I wonder whether the increase in I don't know whether we're seeing an increase in that but it wouldn't surprise me if we are. Uh, I wonder whether that's a counter to the growing sex ratio imbalance of socioeconomically successful women compared to men. That this is a way for men to begin to level the playing field of maybe not earning quite as much as their female counterparts of maybe not being quite as educated as their female counterparts that they can't show up in the typical sort of protector provider role. So maybe they can get in there with like um procreator propagandist. I don't know. Interesting. Well, well, so, so the idea here is like as as women surpass men and and in one of the one of the pieces that I sent you that I wrote, it was something like uh in a large lot of major metropolitan cities in the US now, Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Americans under 30, women are uh performing as well or even better than men in terms of earnings and income. And so if women are outperforming men, then yeah, you're going to create these, you know, soft herum dynamics of women, you know, basically being willing to to date guys who may be dating other women. And even if they don't explicitly know this or or desire this, this is just sort of a natural outcome. Um, yeah, I I think like ideally everyone wants commitment, everyone wants someone. But then I I I always think of this famous uh this very nice line in uh in uh Steven Pinker's famous book, How the Mind Works. And it's something like um most women would rather share John F. Kennedy than have Bobo the clown all to themselves. And you know, the book was written in the '9s, so the references are a bit dated, but the idea here is most women would rather, you know, may maybe share a Leonardo DiCaprio than have you know, some some uh some guy who's barely scraping by um for their soul husband. And I I do wonder sometimes because like over the last 5 or 10 years there's been this discussion around uh polycules, poly relationships, open marriages, all these kinds of things. And maybe this is kind of the inevitable outcome of the deregulation of the sexual marketplace of men falling more and more behind and you know people seemingly uh unwilling or or uninterested in in sort of figuring out what's going on there and improve men's prospects and thereby that would actually improve monogamy. Yeah. you wrote about men floundering women most affected. Uh I I love that framing, dude. I've got one I've got one that I want to uh give you in a second which is even more spicy, but uh men floundering women most affected was basically an explanation of sex ratio hypothesis, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's yeah, that's um you know, whenever you see men falling behind, uh you know, often the the headlines and the articles are framed as well, women are suffering because you know, they're they're unable to find a a desirable male partner. But, you know, the the logic is let's concentrate on the woman who's suffering when when actually the you know, the reason why she can't find desirable male partners because the men are the ones who are like floundering and falling further and further behind. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. It's uh I I always find that framing very interesting and I think um it kind of shows who is still considered to be on top and who is still considered to be on bottom. You kind of beg the question or you sort of reveal your prior when that kind of framing comes around. And yeah, dude, you know, uh, if you as a woman of the internet perhaps who tweets things a lot or retweets things a lot, uh, has an issue with the darth of eligible male partners, but also tweets about, um, like these men are losers and incels, why can't they pick themselves up by their bootstraps? like cause and effect are occurring in front of your eyes here. That if most groups are falling behind, we spend billions and billions in taxpayer funded money to try and work out what's going on and help them and we put committees together and we create new social movements and we put Title N in and we change the way that universities are structured and we do all the rest of it. We don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Like if if women have a problem or if any group except for men have a problem, we say, "What can we do to fix society?" But if men specifically have a problem, you say, "What is it that men are doing where they don't fix themselves?" And uh this sense that uh sort of modern men are being made to pay for the sins of a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of and then also aren't getting the mating uh opportunities perhaps that they would have been used to. And much of that is laid at their feet, right? The socioeconomic status is theirs to own and is only theirs. Uh but when you're also being sort of lambasted, it's like so you didn't get the benefits, you were told that you did, you fell behind and then you were castigated for not having picked yourself up. And then on top of all of that, the women were like, "And I I can't even date you. I won't even I can't even get I can't even get myself to find a find an eligible partner." You go, there's like a lot of mental gymnastics going on there, I think, to just hide the fact that all groups can feel bad and all groups need sympathy and empathy, and empathy isn't a zero- sum game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was that's well put. And if you look at kind of the the research on who people think uh uh deserve help or who would benefit most from help, those kinds of things, it seems to be that especially on the political left, there's this belief that um historically mistreated groups, it's perfectly reasonable not to hold them responsible for their misfortunes. But then historically dominant groups, you know, men and white people and straight people and so on, that if they're struggling, if they're not doing as well in society, then, you know, there's something wrong with them. But if marginalized groups aren't doing well, it's it's something wrong with society. And, you know, it's interesting sort of if you break this down politically, there's a really interesting book that just came out uh called Outraged by the psychologist Kirk Gray. And he talks about um uh what he calls like moral diad theory and how you know basically we categorize people into two different types generally speaking like not even people but just entities in general including people which uh you he calls uh one group vulnerable feelers and these are people who are sort of exquisitely sensitive to suffering and to pain and to anguish um you know constantly put upon and belleaguered and then he uh talks about what he calls thinking doers and this is the reverse people who are relatively unfeilling but highly agentic, you know, capable of strategizing, forming a plan, executing, and so on. And so, like an example of a vulnerable feeler, you know, the sort of the extremes, a a newborn infant is a vulnerable feeler. We attribute basically no agency to the baby, but we attribute a lot of vulnerability to it. Whereas, a highly successful CEO would be the reverse. You know, highly agentic but relatively unfeilling. We don't think of, you know, successful CEOs as, you know, exquisitly sensitive to pain and emotional suffering and those kinds of things, but they're really able to execute. Um, but then when when researchers apply this moral diad framework to to human groups, you know, basically we see that political conservatives generally attribute both to most people. You know, regardless of your uh your background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, we're all kind of capable of being competent but also uh sensitive and and vulnerable. Whereas uh on the political left um they tend to view sort of marginalized and mistreated groups as one or the other. Um or or marginalized and mistreated groups as vulnerable feelers and and historically dominant groups as thinking doers. And so uh a cop and a criminal, for example, political conservatives say, well cops and criminals alike can suffer, can feel pain, can plan, can execute, are responsible for their own actions. Whereas political liberals tend to say um you know cops are these thinking doers, these mechanistic highly agentic beings and criminals are these vulnerable um um you know exploited uh people who are uh susceptible to being victimized. And I think that actually kind of explains, you know, like why we see relatively little concern for, you know, men. And then when we talk about men, I I find it interesting sometimes when you see because I spent a lot of time in academia. Uh, you know, it's not enough like I think left of center academics when they talk about men in broad strokes, I think there's this fear that they may be mistaken for talking about all men including um non-white men. And so often they'll say they'll they'll specify they'll say, "Well, these white men who are complaining about being incelss or these white men who are complaining about falling behind in society." And I think to myself, you know, it's not just uh it's just not it's not just white men. I was at this conference a couple weeks ago and this reporter uh uh for the New York Times, he was on stage and and he was a very interesting guy who was very balanced in his analysis of what happened with the 2024 election. And this white guy in the audience raises his hand and he says, "Yeah, that's all really interesting, but" and again, this is a white guy and the reporter is a black man. The white guy is like, "Don't you think that this was basically white male toxic masculinity?" Um, you know, these guys who are talking about how bad they have it at these white guys and the black New York Times reporter shoots back and says like, "Well, those guys are upset, but it's not just a white thing." Like, if you look at the the the polling data in terms of who supported Trump, like it was across the board. men of all races shifted towards the Republicans in the most recent Yeah. The only the only segment he lost in was white people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's right. And so, so I think like a lot of people, you know, they want to isolate it and talk about the the most powerful and privileged group, white men, but actually it's it's a little more complicated than that. Uh, can I give you my spicy? We're about whatever 25 minutes in, so people that get mad at me have hopefully dropped off by now. Um, so I wrote this. I was too scared to actually post this. this. I wonder how often this happens with your newsletter, which by the way, everyone should go and subscribe to Rob's newsletter. I read it every week and it's [ __ ] amazing. Um, I wonder how many times you write something and you go, "Oh, too hot, like too spicy." But this was one that was too spicy to to go in the newsletter. Um, men not erect, women most affected. There is an a um there is an asymmetry in the way the discussion is framed around men not being able to get it up versus women not being able to reach orgasm during sex. Women not being able to come is often laid at the feet of the man. Men need to learn how to work with a woman's body more. Make her feel more comfortable. Lol. Guys just can't find the clitoris slash just use your your vibrator queen. Men are trash. But men not being able to get it up is never the woman's fault. No one is saying your head game is weak, Julia. step it up. Both are the man's fault and neither are the woman's. So I I basically it's not quite the same, but I think it's the only equivalent that we can find that if a guy has got erectile dysfunction is struggling to get it up in the bedroom, the only close uh comparable um situation that women have to deal with is that they they can't reach climax during sex. And if it's really hard or if you need to if there's like some [ __ ] sequence of like rain danceance things that needs to the moon needs to be in its sort of third [ __ ] quarter and we need to make sure that Mars is in retrograde and then f but that's laid at the feet of the man a lot of the time that you need to make her feel more comfortable. What you know what about during the day? Did you send her flowers? And yet if a guy's got erectile dysfunction it's never laid at the feet of the woman. Although to be really compassionate, I think a lot of the time in those situations, women will feel it's all about them. But if you look at the commentary that goes on online and men will also take ownership of like, I'm not good enough. I can't, you know, I'm sort of sexually uh insufficiently capable to to help my partner get to orgasm. But if you actually look at what's talked about online, it's guys, you're broken because your penis doesn't work. And guys, you're broken because you can't get a woman into this situation where she feels comfortable enough to come. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's what was men men not erect, women most women mostffect men not erect, women most affected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's Yeah. That Yeah. But that's an interesting point there that like well men aren't erect but then it's you know again it's it's the man's fault for being unable to achieve an erection and that yeah who's who's who's really uh vulnerable here which is yeah it's an interesting framing there like you mentioned that uh you know often women do feel um uh unhappy about this that that they see as a reflection on maybe their own attractiveness and you've probably seen some some research going on I saw I saw Ralph Dan tweet something about this there was a study about how um women essentially feel like extremely satisfied when their male partner uh has an orgasm and they feel very dissatisfied when they don't. like they feel like the sense of accomplishment by bringing their male partner uh to completion uh in the bedroom which I guess like you know there there's probably an evolutionary story you could tell there that uh you know historically evolutionarily uh male orgasm is required for the continuation of the species whereas women's orgasm you know it's it's great but also you know not necessaril not necessarily continuation. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Uh yeah that's that's an interesting one. I certainly remember looking at some stuff around well if you think about it this way the bar men coming is typically quite mechanical and that can be the case too for some women but not all women and if that's the case the bar for uh I have been able I have performed my duties as a woman in the bedroom is lower than it is for a man you know you have a full spectrum of happens at the gust of a wind to never going happen at all even on my own for women. Whereas for guys this is actually this is interesting. This is probably one of the few areas where male variability is reduced. Mhm. Right. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so in in this case it's um kind of the the complexity of your sexuality and what what brings you to be aroused and to have an orgasm. It's it's much more varied for women than for men which is yeah that's at odds with what we usually see. That's fascinating. Novel novel insight. That's some [ __ ] bro science for you, Rob Henderson. Really? Yeah. Dr. Rob Henderson. Well, I remember seeing um this study a while ago and I and I think like it's it's funny like you know the all all of these stories about conflict in the bedroom and how, you know, I've seen articles that we need to achieve like orgasm equity, that it's unfair that men always have an orgasm and women, you know, it's it's so unlikely for them. But then when you look at the data as far as like like in what relational context women actually have orgasms, um let me see if I get these numbers right. So, so when women are in a committed relationship with a male partner, so this is heterosexual couples, they orgasm something like 70% of the time. Um but then when you look at hookups, like a like a casual uh uh partner that you see on a somewhat regular basis, it drops to something like 25% and then for one night stand it's like well into the single digits. It's like 7%. And so, you know, like, you know, one one way that women might increase their odds of having an orgasm is to get into a committed relationship. There's something cosmically unfair that like when a man has a one night stand, casual sex, committed relationship. We Yeah, they usually make make it work. Whereas for women, like there's all these other What was that term going around a couple years ago? It was like demisexual or something like I need to have an emotional connection. Yeah. Yeah. That was demi and then there's sapioexual, which is I'm I'm attracted to your intellect or something else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the demiseexual thing was hilarious cuz I think that was called think just being a woman up until just being like a normal human up until not long ago. Uh yeah, I' I'd be very interested the orgasm equity, orgasm equality act thing. Um you do have the equivalent of orgasm billionaires out there, which are women who are just able to have orgasm after orgasm after orgasm during sex. And you know, as a the guy's side of the fence might decide to fly the flag for that and go, "Look, I I come once and I fall asleep 10 minutes later." So, uh, you know, where's the [ __ ] You're the Jeff Bezos of [ __ ] orgasms, darling. Uh, pass some of those back over our way. Uh, but speaking of that, uh, kind of the I guess topic of the internet at the moment, adolescence. Uh, I only I was away traveling basically from when it came out until yesterday. So, uh, I only got to watch I've seen a few episodes, but, uh, give me your your take on that and then kind of the subsequent fallout that's happened. Yeah. Well, what's really interesting, so, so, I mean, you know, the basic summary of the show, I'm sure a lot of your listeners have have seen it about this boy, this 13-year-old boy who's, you know, kind of unpopular at school. He goes to, you know, he's a working-class kid. He goes to this, you know, rundown, chaotic school. Um, you know, one thing a mutual friend of ours uh pointed out, William Costello, is that like cuz he's worked in schools in the UK before and he says like that is what a lot of these schools look like, just sort of utter chaos, teachers barely able to contain the classroom. And this boy um Jamie is relatively unpopular. He's sort of at the center of the story. And there the show makes references to you know how the kid listens to Andrew Tate and how he uh you know there were a couple of times the the you said something about like the 8020 rule about how 80% of women like 20% of men and so there are a lot of these kind of like red pill manosphere talking points um throughout the show basically suggesting um heavily that this boy got like you know sucked into this online rabbit hole and then when this girl uh on Instagram this girl he had a crush on in his class calls him an incel. He lashes out, gets mad at her, and then he stabs her. And then the boy's arrested, and you know, there's this kind of interesting scene of him. The whole episode, one of the episodes consists of him speaking with this I think she's a psychiatrist or something, and they're going back and forth about this. And yeah, it was um you know, like it was it was interesting as a piece of entertainment. I thought it was beautifully shot, but I don't think like there are a lot of things about this series. It's being treated as a documentary, but it actually doesn't really reflect what happens in real life. You know, like like, you know, if you look at the statistics for who commits knife crimes, it's not really like white 13-year-old working-class boys. If you look at the statistics for um who is most interested in watching Andrew Tate for example, you know, there was this interesting poll going around that um they broke down the the respondents by uh race or ethnicity and it was something like 41% of uh so this was in the UK something like 41% of black males in the UK said they were fans of Andrew Tate and then for uh what do they call like South Asian or something Asian men um it it was something like 30% and then for Weiss it was it was like by far the lowest. Um, and yet when people talk about his fans, they often say, "Oh, these white male incelss." Um, and then the other thing was, you know, that that uh, you know, it just it was just um, you know, the whole incel thing. He's 13. The kid looks like he's 11 and a half. His voice hasn't changed. Like, it was just hard for me to to to fully believe that uh, you know, some some like prepubescent kid is really feeling so stressed out about uh, you know, being a virgin or whatever. But William pointed out that actually um what's interesting here is that it's not so much that he's upset about not getting laid, it's about being called an incel and this term has become a slur and this really embarrassed the kid and so on. But you know overall it was it was fine but uh very much sort of it strayed a lot from from reality and yet it's being received in a lot of the mainstream media as like oh it's this iconic series that's accurately reflects what's going on with toxic masculinity and so on. Very um uh unrealistic. Yeah. art masquerading as reality. And uh yeah, that was one of the things that struck me. I mean, what one of the other things that that struck me was beautifully shot. Adored it. Cinematography is [ __ ] amazing. It was shot in a DJI Ronin 4, which is a really cool piece of kit that's been around for a little while. And um I I thought that was great. I thought the acting was a little underwhelming actually, especially from some of the kids. Um, and the acting was its most underwhelming when they tried to shoehorn in anything to do with mating psychology EP sort of tangential stuff because it was so hamfisted how they had to do exposition, the manosphere, the red pill, what have you been watching the Matrix? You're like, oh [ __ ] here we go. Um, so it just it felt, you know, the exposition, but I understand, you know, this show is going to be watched by people who aren't terminally online like me and you, so maybe it needs that exposition, but that just felt a bit like um, one of the interesting things, again, I was away for all of last week and hadn't watched it, but I must have been invited onto five, 10 different panel style shows of varying levels, uh, including like mainstream British TV prime time spots and uh it was evident that they were just looking for somebody who could come on and sort of fight the fight for the pro men's side. Um first off, I hadn't seen it. Secondly, that is a fight that you only [ __ ] lose by going on and trying to defend an imaginary child stabbing an imaginary girl about an imaginary sllight. Like, so what are we talking I I thought about this an awful lot. um what it seems like happened, they invited me on the first night after adolescence sort of hit the the news headlines and then we were able to track, oh that's the person they got on instead of me because I said no and looked at that and that conversation was, you know, very placid and calm and then they emailed again the next day and we're like, "Hey, yeah, um you know, we really wanted a little bit more sort of uh different insights." And like what you mean is you wanted to create a firestorm, but who's going to come on and say, you know, we need more 13-year-old boys that are stabbing imaginary 13-year-old boys, stabbing imaginary 13-year-old girls. Like that is it's not a position. And then yeah, this [ __ ] it's supposed to be shown in the House of Commons. We want to be able to stream this in every school. Why? As a cautionary tale. As a cautionary tale for who? Because by every metric, this fantastically shot, really beautiful, very well put together, but like statistically pretty inaccurate sit. I mean, we there's [ __ ] papers out there. How many times have I talked to you about uh like the male sedation hypothesis? Like if you look at how radicalized young men could and should be, how little sex they are having, how isolated and lonely they are by every metric, how much they're falling behind socioeconomically, the state of their mental health, the online subcultures that help to sort of oify and make them feel worse about this. Like this isn't a request. This is not a request. And you're not allowed to cut this to make it into a request. But where are all of the insult stabbings? M like where are they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting. There there was that paper um last year I think with David Bus and William Costello where they wrote like why is there not more incel violence? If you look at you know like like if you look sort of throughout historically um uh instable or unstable uh uh countries, communities where growing numbers of young men are not doing well, unable to find partners, falling further and further behind. like usually this leads to increased violence, increased crime and so on. And we're not really seeing as much as you would predict based on the sort of historical trend and pattern. Um, and yeah, your your male sedation hypothesis, I think there's, you know, that that makes sense as a sort of an explanation. And yeah, it's uh it's weird that it it doesn't happen that often and then there's this fictional portrayal of it and then that gets blown up and that like you know like serious people who went to great universities and were supposedly mature, sophisticated adults watch a Netflix show and I I just like it blows my mind that you think like oh that's that's how the world is. That's how the world works. This thing this four episode thing you saw on Netflix that's where you're getting your information about what's happening online. what's happening. This is an accurate insight into what's going on with young men. House of Commons, high-ranking politicians. It's just insane. In the same way that you would say, you know, this is a cautionary tale against the the problems that 13-year-old boys are facing. Like, by that logic, Batman should be a cautionary tale against orphans and people that slip into wells. like you're taking the actual situation that was narrativized and I I have heard that the original uh story that this was born out of was a different demographic for the perpetrator that it was actually based on a real life story and that had to be that had to be changed uh for probably for a number of reasons. one that it would be politically inconvenient, but another one being that Steven Graeme [ __ ] wrote it. And Steven Graeme's as white as they come. So, if you want to be the main dad and have all of episode 4 be about you, you kind of unless you're going to he's a totally normal boy that comes from an interracial marriage like that, you know. But it was I thought it was interesting that they didn't have him come from a broken home. They didn't have him come from an abusive father. You know, there was a lot of sort of push back in that way. But I I watched episode three last night and that was the one I was particularly interested to get your take on because that was obviously them trying to sort of dig into what is the psychology, what is the ideology, the mentality of these young boys. And I found that one really dissatisfying. The way it was shot, the fact that they held it together for a full 60 minutes like a [ __ ] scripted podcast was unbelievable. Um, but they tried to sort of touch on, so what do you think about masculinity? What do you think being a man is? And at no point did they find really any tension in the the boy wasn't really able to give a particularly sort of strong answer to that. Uh the the broken home thing didn't work. There was some interesting stuff around the power dynamic between him pushing back against the woman and him typically sort of being able to play. But I I didn't see that quite so much as some thinly veiled misogyny as it was just young slightly shrewd boy or girl knows the limits of a person in power and is able to play with those to make them feel uncomfortable. Uh you know he even sort of comments on the like how flat chested she is and whether she's pretty and stuff like that. So you know there's always this like I know that if you do something to me that's not that's not right that I can kind of get you on it. But yeah, what did you make of that that sort of breakdown and the sort of masculinity fragile male ego discussion at large? Yeah. Well, it I mean as I was watching it um you know I thought about all the research on incelss and how you know if you look at the mental health of of incelss a lot of work from from our friend William Costello here about how 67% of self-identified incelss qualify for clinical diagnosis of anxiety severe moderate uh anxiety and this is like roughly twice as high among incelss as as non-insels. And so then when you see this kid and he's so emotionally uh uh fragile and kind of volatile and you know he probably does uh you know it's a fictional character but he probably would qualify for some uh threshold uh a score above a certain threshold for depression or anxiety and you know this psychiatrist lady is trying to sus this out and try to try to pinpoint you know what what exactly went wrong. I did find it interesting that they chose to have this character, like you said, raised in this intact family. And so, you know, I'm trying to figure out like why that specifically. It could have been a single dad. That might have been interesting if what's what's the guy's name? You mentioned Steven something. Grim. Grim. Yeah. So, if if if the show had been, you know, he was a a single father, you know, working overtime on his plumber job to make ends meet and maybe he wasn't always able to be there for his son the way that he should have, something like that. the fact that he had two parents and and so then I thought, okay, well, maybe the message is this could happen to anyone. You know, he's a he's a nice boy from a nice family, but he just got sucked into the incel red pill rabbit hole and he got brainwashed. But, you know, that like we didn't really get an explanation here. Maybe that's supposed to be the the idea here is that there is no explanation other than the incel, you know, online world. But then you would expect, like you said, you would expect more of this kind of violence because if even boys from good homes could, you know, become a criminal like this, then you should see way more boys doing this and you don't. Yeah. What about the boys from bad homes? What about the boys that don't have that good upbringing? Why are they not doing it at three times the rate, five times the rate, 10 times the rate? I watched a couple of behind the scenes uh on YouTube that Netflix put up themselves and Steven Graeme's explaining the script and he's talking about how he didn't want the excuse. He didn't want there to be an excuse that it was because of abuse from the family, which constrains the ex constrains the sort of explanatory mechanism straight down onto this sort of aggressive subculture. But I I've got episode 4 to watch this evening. Um unless they actually show how he becomes radicalized, like you know, he was on Reddit and he was looking at these things and he's doing all of the rest of this. It's like, okay, so where did he learn about this? Or is it just is the point really just that the male ego and sort of male sexual prowess and your mate value when threatened and specifically humiliated at large by someone is a dangerous object. If that's the takeaway, I [ __ ] fully agree. I fully [ __ ] agree with that because I think uh humiliation is unbelievably dangerous to anybody, but specifically to a young boy and at least again only in episode 3. Um if the story continues the way it does, it's like guy didn't bring a knife, got it from his friend, just wanted to scare this girl. This girl had bullied him. Like up until the point at which he brought a [ __ ] knife to her, she was in the wrong. She'd been mean. She'd been saying this stuff online. She deriggated his uh status in a lot of ways and then this situation gets out of control and it ends [ __ ] tragically again fictionally tragically. Um like we must remember at no point do we need to defend or like try and [ __ ] prosecute anybody because nothing happened. Um, but yeah, if that's the story and that's the takeway and maybe that's the reason that it was left so open-ended that you didn't have this sort of concrete explanation around masculinity around what were the subcultures you know that Andrew Tate shite is like a passing comment but to anybody that has the [ __ ] first idea about what the internet looks like I would guess that most incelss actually despise Andrew Tate because he represents an awful lot of everything that they they don't agree with that they don't think like He's just going to be a symbol of all of the [ __ ] that they can't get. So that plus red pill plus manosphere plus insight. It's like this is a [ __ ] massive world. It's like I'm sure it's the same when goodme meaning feminists hear oh she's a feminist you don't need to you can disregard her opinion because of you know other fringe like that includes [ __ ] pink pill and are we dating the same guy and r/female dating strategy like all of them probably can get lambasted under the rubric of feminist. Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. There's that kind of yeah outgroup homogeneity effect of like any man who comments on relationships or talks or you know talks about women in a stereotypical way. They're all part of that same Andrew Tate, Red Pill, Manosphere, that's all the same sort of collapse into the same group. But uh yeah, I I think that's right that like even even sort of politically, you know, the those findings about how generally if you if you measure the political attitudes of insults, they tend to lean center left. Um they probably don't really have sophisticated politics in general. They're just kind of upset. They're, you know, falling behind in terms of status, in terms of income. They don't view themselves as particularly desirable or attractive. And, you know, their politics are probably like completely orthogonal, unrelated to however they're feeling about themselves in relationships. But it's just easy to sort of vaguely collapse Tate and Trump and everything that you don't like into, you know, they're all just these doineering evil men. And also incelss are in there too somehow even though Andrew Tate and Donald Trump are like kind of the like literal opposite of incelss in like every kind of way in terms of income, in terms of success, in terms of women and everything else. So yeah, it's um you know the the show was and then like you know I think the show honestly it it could have been braver if they had an uglier kid. the kid is like he was a perfectly nicel lookinging 12 13y old boy or whatever and if they had had an uglier kid I think you would have felt like I think maybe it would have been dangerously close to making him too sympathetic you know like like you know it's like oh if he's a if he's a good-looking kid what does he have to complain about but if you had an ugly kid you might actually feel like yeah it does kind of suck being physically unattractive and then you might leap to well you know he wasn't justified but like if you're an ugly kid and you're being made fun of and and and then that's interesting so I wonder whether I wonder whether We have an additional sense of contempt or disgust or resentment or whatever for the kid that was called it, but that we know they weren't. Now, we're going really the casting directors here, we're giving them an awful lot of [ __ ] spare IQ points, but let let's just assume that they made this decision uh consciously that you've chosen a kid who facial symmetry, you know, like a normal normal looking boy, like [ __ ] middle of the bell curve of a kid. Um, that kind of makes it seem like, oh well, you weren't sufficiently robust psychologically to realize that all they were doing was teasing you and that it wasn't actually an accurate assessment of your future. You were almost certainly probably going to be you had like two friends. Um, you had an expensive pair of trainers. You come from an intact home. You've got an older sister. Your parents seem to love you. There's photos of them uh at this like party where they're all dressed up at the beginning of one of the episodes. So, all of the things are laid out there for you to sort of basically use your own sense of self to push back against these kids. And this is because you are deficient. And the reason that you're deficient is that your sense of self is being uh corrupted by these online uh platforms. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's that's Yeah. Well, there was that scene with him and the psychiatrist where he like asks like, "Do you think I'm ugly?" And I guess that that is like an incel trope of like, you know, you're you're every you know, you're all ugly. If you're not in the top 20% or top 10%, then you're just ugly. You're invisible to women. And he was trying to get this weird sense of validation from from this woman, the psychiatrist, um asking her to give her assessment of him. And he mentioned something about, "Oh, you're pretty." And I think it would have meant something to this boy to have a pretty woman say, "Oh, actually, you're not ugly. But I think she asked him back. Her her response was, "Well, do you think you're ugly?" Because she's interested in what he thinks. But yeah, I think um yeah, that would have been an interesting route to go because there was nothing there was nothing like he didn't have a lisp, you know, he wasn't overweight. Like there could have been something something that added a little bit more interesting to his character. Yeah, but you're right. I think there Yeah, maybe spare IQ points for for the for the producers here, but you know, they they cast like a very normal, very nicel lookinging kid with nothing um apparently wrong with him. And so then, you know, which which I guess maybe there is a kind of a left-wing sort of um social constructionist idea here where we're all good-looking, we're all above average, we're all on the right hand side of the bell curve, unless somehow you receive this ugly messaging from society, from the internet, from, you know, evil peddlers of uh incel ideology or red pill. And if we could just sort of get rid of those people, maybe silence those people, remove those accounts from the internet, then we would all finally accept that actually we're all beautiful and we, you know, there's no need to be so upset. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess as well there is a question to be asked of and I the amount of bullying you would need to go through to justify murder is essentially infinite. So kind of it's kind of a moot point. But there is a question of okay at what point does online bullying and castigation and ostracization and being disaffected and and humiliated by your classmates. At what point does that in and of itself independent of what's happening on the internet and ideology and all the rest of it? Like let's just say that instead of using this like specialcoded language of an exploding stick of dynamite and love hearts and all the rest of it, what if people had just been saying you're ugly or you're you're never going to get a girlfriend or nobody likes you. What if it hadn't been coded from the internet? What you end up with is bullied boy lashes out at the like tip of the spear of the people that are bullying him. And that makes for a much less. But in terms of dynamic is kind of probably 80% of the way there. Like they talked speaking of 80% like the 8020 rule, you know, 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men. It's like what? Like what? How is that got nothing to do? At no point does he mention it. At no point does it like like other than it's this undercurrent of women are choosy which like shock horror like that's every [ __ ] romcom since the beginning of time. I don't know. I It's very It's very interesting. I've been and I think what's more interesting is to me than the actual series has been the response online. Kia Starmer saying it needs to be played in the House of Commons. We're going to stream this in every every school up and down the UK. This is a cautionary tale. Um yeah, very very interesting. H yeah. Well, yeah, if you're if you're streaming it in the schools, I mean yeah, if the if the portrayal of schools in adolescence looks like that, like I you know, good luck. Like those kids aren't going to be watching it anyway. They're all going to be on their phones and you know, you play a movie in class, I know those kids are actually going to be watching it. So, I mean, who's who's that for exactly? So, yeah. I mean, I guess it it makes people feel good about themselves. You know, there there are sort of the more, you know, quasi conspiratorial corners of Twitter where they were like, you know, one point of this whole series is to essentially help to create crystallize a consensus that we need to to increase the level of censorship online. You know, if the if the belief among sort of policy makers and taste makers and cultural influencers is, oh, like you know, these these accounts, this ideology is leading boys to stab girls, then we need to start shutting down accounts, start, you know, patrolling the limits of, you know, acceptable speech online. Um, and you know, I I don't know if that was, you know, the intent behind like let let's make this show so that we can silence voices or something like that, but I do think that there are people who work in a lot of mainstream media outlets who don't like, you know, certain uh influencers, certain uh uh social media platforms or what have you. And if they can shine a light on this show and get it to become a thing and help to contribute to this consensus, then you know they're they're basically it's not it wasn't the original intent, but you know, it's a it's a it's a happy sort of byproduct of the show being around and being in a position to to amplify its message and get people to watch it. It's a useful popular political football that people can kick about. Yeah. Okay. Going to the other side of the spectrum now. What can psychology teach us about how to choose a good partner? I read this phenomenal article from you a while ago and then reread it recently. What can it how can it help us? Yeah. Well, one of the things that I point out right away in that piece uh yeah, how to choose a romantic partner is, you know, study after study finds, you know, you look at research on happiness, on well-being, on life satisfaction that the two biggest factors are what you do for work and your uh your marriage and family life, you know, your choice of spouse. And that makes sense. I mean, if if nothing else mathematically, it makes sense because you're going to spend most of your life uh on the job, whatever job you work your career, and then with your family, and that takes up the bulk of your time. And so, one thing that that occurred to me as I was writing that piece is just how much information there is out there about, you know, how to become uh educationally and occupationally successful. Here are the steps you need to go to college. Here are the steps you need to take to master a job interview. you know, here the here's the pathway to become a successful doctor, lawyer, what have you. And everywhere you turn, there's no shortage of advice. And it's perfectly kind of acceptable in the broader discourse to, you know, like what what are you doing? Oh, I'm watching this YouTube series on how to how to improve my career. That's fine. But if you were to say, you know, you're watching and I say, what are you watching? You're like, oh, I'm watching this YouTube series on how to be a better romantic partner and attract someone. Somehow that is like, you know, weirdly stigmatized. We would think of someone like that as like, well, what's wrong with you that you can't just find one? We expect people to just enter the world knowing how to be an attractive partner and to find a compatible partner for yourself, but we accept that actually it's it's perfectly fine to sort of seek out information and knowledge and mentors and so on to succeed in career. And why do you think that is? I am I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is, you know, there could be this thing where if you are if you require uh explicit advice on romance, that this in itself is is an indicator of low mate value or that you're unattractive. That if you naturally know what to do and naturally know how to succeed as a as a person in the romantic sort of dating market, then that in itself is an indicator that you're a worthy romantic partner. But if you need to seek out information and that suggests, oh actually like maybe you shouldn't even be dating in the first place. Whereas yeah for career less so I mean I still think that we if if someone effortlessly succeeds like in in in um in their career we do give them a bit of extra credit but we're perfectly fine with you know people who are trying to improve themselves. We are um willing to to confer special praise to those people too. So yeah, it's an interesting one and I think it's it's more so for for men um specifically like I also wonder if you know because of the you know the women are wonderful effects and and the sort of accompanying effect of we tend to be a bit more suspicious of of men that if you hear that a man is learning how to improve them their prospects on the dating market. Our mind immediately leads to worst case scenario of oh you're going to learn how to manipulate women you're going to learn how are you sis all over again. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so we don't think, oh, this is just a guy who's really falling behind and wants to learn how to have a good first date and and find a girlfriend. We think, oh, he's trying to hook up with as many women as possible and and and dupe all of them or something. Um, but but this piece was, you know, basically about, you know, assuming that you want to find a good partner, you know, what are you actually looking for? Um and earlier we talked about uh uh we we touched briefly on assortative mating and that does seem to be the case that if you look at measures of political orientation, religiosity, socioeconomic status, earnings, educational attainment that we tend to pair with people who are relatively similar to ourselves. Um there was an interesting statistic. So this study was from 2005 which found that if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, then your likelihood of marrying someone with a college degree is 9%. But if your highest level of education is a college degree, then your likelihood of marrying a college graduate is 65%. I'd imagine that's actually higher today. It seems like assortative mating is is we're sort of tilting even even further and further in that direction. But what's interesting there is that um the similarity even though that that's sort of descriptively true that is just the case that we tend to pair with people who are similar to ourselves when you measure level of levels of similarity within romantic partners similarity doesn't seem to predict relationship success. Um and I was reading that paper and my interpretation of this is probably that similarity is necessary but not sufficient for a long-term committed relationship. Surely though, if most people are mating assortatively, you have a much smaller sample size of people who have mated unassortively. Yeah. And there's that that issue of range restriction where if you're only looking at couples, then by definition, most of them are already pretty similar. And so, does that extra similarity help? Probably not. There's probably that threshold, that sort of necessary. You're also not seeing how many couples that were from different educational backgrounds that got together, broke up, and that shouldn't have gotten together and sort of flooked their way into it. That's that's kind of an interesting one. What about um personality traits, similarities in uh so being extroverted, being introverted, propensity for low moods, blah blah blah. Yeah. Well, well, the personality thing is interesting in that um one thing that shocked me when I was looking at the personality research and similarities in couples is that the correlations are remarkably small. They vary around sort of 0.1 2 statistically significant that if you're open, your partner that you tend to pair with will be a little bit more open than average. Same with these other personality traits. Uh one that's a bit higher than the others that I saw was for neuroticism, which is about 2.22 somewhere in that in that realm. Um and this is consistent with other work that uh you know people who are emotionally volatile tend to be uh attracted to one another or find something interesting about one another whereas people who are more emotionally stable tend to seek out partners who are stable. There was a really interesting essay a couple of years ago from our mutual friend Scott Barry Kaufman and he wrote about um people with with dark triad traits that they seem to find one another interesting and attractive. They're welcome they're welcome to each other. You know, everybody everybody that isn't Dark Triad is just going, "Please, for the love of God, date each other." That's a great way to That's a great way to kind of quarantine everybody out of the dating pool. Yeah. And uh and yeah, which which I think like, you know, if if you're if Yeah. So people who are sort of relatively narcissistic find other narcissistic people interesting and attractive and those kinds of things. Um, one thing that was interesting uh related to the personality point is is uh authenticity that uh this really interesting paper found that people who um score highly on measures of authenticity within their relationship. And so these were basically the extent to which participants agreed with statements like um uh I'll usually tell my partner things that are on my mind even if there's a chance he or she may not understand me. Um and when people uh are more likely to agree with those statements, they also tend to correlate highly with uh levels of relationship satisfaction. And interestingly, the reverse was was the case too that people who are low authenticity also tend to pair with people who are also um more uh deceptive or less authentic. And so there really is that sort of uh uh assortative mating there going on too, which I guess like one one potential inference here is that if you want an authentic partner, if you want someone who tells you the truth, you have to be a bit transparent. You have to be open yourself in order to establish that trust. What's that thing to be worthy of a worthy mate? Be a worthy mate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. The best, you know, the that's why we call them honest signals, right? Is that uh you know, only someone who's truly authentic and truly whatever that you know, you're going to be the most likely to attract a partner with those kinds of traits as well. If if authenticity is a a big predictor for relationship satisfaction, is that a vote in the box for oversharing uh for being quite transparent about sort of what's going on as opposed to uh keeping some stuff just for your journal and the therapist room? Interesting. Yeah, I I think generally well it depends on what what the um the conversation is about. Um, you know, if you have your sort of most wild extreme thoughts like I don't know, maybe maybe those don't always have to be aired. Well, like I'm I'm going to punch a baby and put it into the road or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but but I think like when it comes to um issues around the relationship itself that maybe there's a way, you know, I think like it's better to generally overcommunicate rather than to let things slide and let resentments build up and then it potentially explodes later into a serious argument. that uh I mean there's a way I think to overcommunicate in a kind of diplomatic respectful way of just like why do you do that that upsets me stop doing that you know that's probably not the best way to go about it but if you see something and you point it out in a gentle way and I think that is probably a better approach than just like yeah letting it all build up over time what about the role of when we think we can't do any better yeah yeah that that's an interesting one uh yeah our mutual friend David Bus on this one was fascinating paper here about how you There's this idea, you know, basically what are people looking for in a partner? Is it someone who just meets their relationship needs? You know, oh, like here are my 10 uh uh list of demands for my partner. Oh, you meet nine out of the 10 and this person meets 10 out of the 10 and so I'm going to go with a 10 out of 10. That kind of thing, you know, as if we're grading on some objective rubric. But that paper suggested that actually we we more so grade potential partners on a curve where we are kind of putting together multiple things uh in our environment. first um you know the person that you're with how do they stack up compared to uh partners that you could reasonably attract uh in your social environment and what they found is that if your partner is basically you know better quality than the alternatives realistic alternatives around you then people tend to be happy. if the person is kind of less attractive than uh potential realistic alternatives around you. People tend to be less satisfied. And that was especially true for people who evaluated themselves as being more attractive than their own partner. And so I think that's that that may be the most sort of dangerous situation here is if um you know if you're with someone who views themselves as much more attractive than you and also thinks oh well I could also do better and I see all these other people around you that this could could lead to a potential um unstable relationship dynamic. And so for for a lot of guys, I think what they if you ask them what they want, especially young guys, like under 25, they just, you know, I want the hottest possible girl, you know, the physically perfect 10 out of 10, I want a dime. But then, you know, if you point out to them, well, you know, if you're a pretty average guy, and you do happen to land a date with some supermodel who, you know, maybe in another, you know, some other day of the week is going out with Leonardo DiCaprio on his yacht, that uh, you know, that's probably not going to work out for you. And that may be another reason why we tend to make assortatively is gradually over time people kind of figure out where their level is and and find someone who's roughly the same level of attractiveness as themselves. But yeah, there is that that point there that um you know what predicts relationship dissolution and it does seem to be you know people thinking to themselves well you know is this really the best I could do? And this I think also has something to do with what we're seeing with the dating apps. Although I think this is sort of tapering off, but for the last basically since 2012 with the rise of Tinder, I think that probably contributed to kind of relationship um instability is more and more people thinking that they could do better because of the apps and then a lot of people realizing actually that's not the case. Yeah. Bus has got this line about mates once gained must be retained. M so for all that it sounds fantastic to get into a relationship with some smoke show especially when you think about and this is uh Seth Stevens Dvidowitz's insight um lots of people are selecting their partners based on the same criteria that everybody uses but that criteria is not predictive of long-term relationship success. So if you choose somebody that signals very high on a criteria that you know lots of other people are going to be interested in like hotness for instance. But if you take the genuine red pill which is hotness has basically zero predictive power in relationship satisfaction longterm as long as you're relatively sort of physically matched in terms of attractiveness. Uh what you get to do is tap into a blue ocean as opposed to a red ocean. you get to be able to find people who are going to make you happy over the long term and have the added benefit of other people kind of passing them by a little bit more. Or the the other approach is I'm going to choose somebody that everybody wants but all people would [ __ ] hate to be in a relationship with. And I'm aware that there's like a ton of gray in between those those two examples, but that is kind of the spectrum. Somebody that signals something everybody is after, but that doesn't that's not predictive of long-term relationship satisfaction. high competition, low happiness, and then on the other side, you have somebody who signals things that genuinely do predict relationship satisfaction long term, but that most people don't realize. You see that, you tap into that, and you actually get less uh insecurity, less mateguarding needed, less jealousy, less all of that stuff. Uh yeah, that's the that's a a good way to go about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's yeah you can kind of like moneyball your way into a relationship by going for people who are attractive maybe uniquely to you but that maybe others are overlooking in some way like that is yeah that's interesting I mean on the personality point I mean it is the case that uh uh similarity in personality is relatively low I mean statistically significant but small correlations but then what does seem to predict satisfaction is regardless of your own level of say conscientiousness um your partner's level of conscientious consciousness does seem to predict longer relationship uh duration. Uh interestingly, it also tends to predict your own level of uh career success. So, you and many of your listeners are familiar with the fact that you know obviously intelligence, IQ that predicts career success, but then also conscientiousness. Of the big five personality traits, conscientiousness has the strongest uh predictive power for how successful someone's going to be in their career. But what was interesting is in one paper found that even when you control for the participants own level of conscientiousness, their their romantic partner's conscientiousness predicts their own career success- which suggests that if you have a partner who's hardworking, diligent, focused, and so on, that that also somehow benefits you in your own life. Even small things like making appointments, following up on emails, all of those kinds of things, you know, that that compounds over time, having someone who's um very switched on like that. Um and then yeah, other other traits as well. Well, I mean, for for relationship satisfaction, agreeableness is one. Uh, low levels of neuroticism, and um and then, yeah, high high intelligence is is another. Um, and so it's interesting that even though the similarities aren't especially high uh within couples, if you want a relationship to last, it's good to have sort of more rather than less of of many of these traits. I I had a Tai Chiro on the other week and he was talking about uh openness, openness to experience and saying you basically want someone that's moderate or low. Um because as soon as you get above moderate, you're into sensation seeking and sensation seeking turns into well why don't we make this relationship open? Well, why don't we, you know, like the the weight is kind of hot. Why don't we like add him in this evening? Or they're more tempted to stray. Uh and I think it will be correlated with a bunch of other stuff. I'd heard you say before that uh impulsivity, dismissiveness, aggression, and being flighty and unreliable in addition to physical attributes like tattoos or piercings and so on are all indicators of sort of potential future mistreatment in a relationship. Why why those? Why that suite of physical and mental traits? Yeah, I mean all of those, you know, this sort of volatility clusters around neuroticism or or low emotional stability. And you it's interesting I'm reading this uh this person it's called uh the person a new introduction to personality psychology uh new textbook sort of covering the the latest in in that whole field and one of the things they point out is you know people who are highly neurotic you know high on neuroticism they'll often you know complain about bad things happening to them and there used to be this question of well you know are they basically um uh overstating the their own level of suffering. People who are neurotic, are they going through the same thing as everyone else? But that because of that personality trait, they are exaggerating the extent of their own mistreatment. But actually there is a bit of that going on. But additionally, when you look at objectively what happens to people at high neuroticism, they have more interpersonal conflicts, more issues with their friends, uh more uh arguments with their romantic partners, just generally more difficulty in their lives. And so, yes, they may overstate what they're going through, but they are objectively going through worse sort of interpersonal disputes than than the average person. And so, you know, if you want to avoid that, you know, you got to kind of avoid sort of the aggression, the flightiness, and all those kinds of things. Um, the openness point is interesting. I would imagine there is research indicating that that tattoos correlate with openness to experience. I would imagine the same goes for, you know, unusual piercings um and those kinds of things. And so yeah, if you you know there was this study about this about um uh promiscuity in tattoos uh that you know basically the more if you have a tattoo you tend to be sort of more open what what's the phrase socioexual orientation basically more interested in promiscuous sex uh those things correlate together and then the more tattoos you have the more open you are to having open sex with you know these uh unfamiliar people. um which lines up with the other research on tattoos as well that it's correlates with um you know low impulse control and those kinds of things and so yeah I mean it's funny we um you know I had this tweet uh put out a while ago was something like uh you know people put a great deal of effort into designing well no the phrase is don't judge a book by its cover and people and yet people put a great deal of effort into designing book covers this tweet is not about book covers in other words we spend so much time adorning ourselves, the way we dress, our haircuts, the piercings, the tattoos, everything else. And they are sending signals about who they are. You know, there's a there's a really great paper from a few years ago. It was something like personality is revealed on the weekends. And the paper covered, you know, basically can cover frequency of going to the movies, going out, how many uh social nights you have, you know, what your bedroom looks like correlates with your personality. So many things about you reveal this. And so, yeah, all all that you mentioned, aggression, flightiness, and everything else. Um but yeah but so you want someone with with relatively low neuroticism and then yeah with with education with with intelligence those things as well that um what's interesting about the intelligence one is that when you ask people um and these are sort of hypothetical scenarios sort of roughly what's the ideal level of intelligence for your partner people tend to choose around 120 IQ which is roughly the 90th percentile of intelligence and so people want someone who's like obviously smart visibly intelligent, but they don't want some super genius. Um, maybe because of stereotypes about geniuses being, you know, kind of kind of quirky or or personality-wise being a little off. Um but when you look at the uh the correlation coefficients sort of how similar spouses are to one another within marriages um there is a similarity in that um you know they their IQs tend to correlate with one another but there's still about a 10point IQ difference between spouses on average um which is smaller than it is for say um two siblings. So this is all from Robert Plowman's work that um two siblings within a family on average tend to have 12 point IQ difference from one another which is smaller than if you were to choose two random people in the population the difference there would be about 17 points and so spouses 10 points. I mean that's even more similar than two siblings would be. Um but one thing I've tried to track down is uh whether they're whether it's more likely that the like in heterosexual couples is it the man who's more likely to have the higher IQ or the woman? I think, you know, based on what we know about hypergamy and everything else, the prediction would be probably the male has higher intelligence. I remember I posted this this poll on Twitter a couple years ago where I asked um you know people to imagine that they were a contestant on who wants to be a millionaire and you have to choose who's going to be your lifeline for the phone a friend option. You don't know what the question is going to be and you can either choose uh who's going to pick up the phone. You don't know what the question is going to be. They don't know what the question is going to be. you can choose your mom or your dad. And something like 80% of respondents chose their dad. And so I think like you know I think that people probably have this intuition that within couples men have you know a bit more sort of varied knowledge and those kinds of things. Yeah. What about other red flags managing emotions guessing game character assault silent treatment stuff like that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well that's that yeah that was one of the most important kind of uh findings as far as like what to avoid for for red flag. Um, you know, David Bus says, "One of the things you want to look for is are they able to or how quickly do they return to their emotional baseline, all of us, regardless of our personality traits and our temperaments, you know, we have a, you know, we we're capable of getting angry or upset or irritated. But some of us are able to sort of take a step back, take take a couple of breaths and sort of, you know, detach and and think about the situation uh rationally and kind of calm ourselves down. But other people, they kind of spiral out. Like they get angry and then they keep they look for more reasons to get angry and then suddenly they're off on a on a, you know, different path. And so you want someone who's able to to control their own emotions. Who that doesn't mean not be emotional, but just able to sort of understand that this is what I'm going through that they're able to to identify and label their emotions. This was an interesting um finding from I think the guy's name is Lawrence and Reed. He's a professor at NYU. He talks about how um people with uh borderline personality disorder, which generally afflicts on average women more so than men, um one of the hallmarks of borderline personality disorder is the inability to um understand and articulate and verbalize what you're feeling. you know, so these people, they're kind of like, I'm feeling this thing and like very clearly it's negative, but I can't tell the difference between, you know, ordinary anger or rage or irritation or just sort of being m, you know, mildly or moderately upset that it's sort of all or none. Um, they generally know they're feeling good or bad, but then when it comes to sort of isolating, well, this is what I'm feeling and this is, you know, how you're making me feel and here's how it came about, it's it's difficult for them. And um, you know, it's it's sort of a spectrum. you know, it's you got to be careful, you know, basically finding people who who are unable to do that. Um, and then and then yeah, one of the green flags is, you know, someone who's stable, someone who's able to control themselves, who's able to communicate. And one point I try to make in that piece is, you know, communication is even more important during a period of emotional tension and dispute and hostility of someone does something that upsets someone else. That's when communication becomes even more important than it otherwise would be. Yeah. You know, uh, Visakhan Verasami, do you know that guy? He's great. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's s such fire. And, uh, he says, "It's the lows, not the highs, that make or break a relationship. Why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person? It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times. And the handling of bad times, it's much more important to the success of a marriage. But as a species and as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's also it's it's the lows, not the highs, right, that make a relationship. Like it's really easy in the medium term to get hyped about a person who seems to relate strongly in specific ways, but in the long term, it's it's really just how you handle misunderstandings and conflict and confusion and disagreement. Because insufficient good times may be a reason for a relationship to break up, but I would wager that it's far more too frequent and too poorly handled bad times. Like the highs weren't high enough. It's like no no the lows were too low. Yeah. Yeah. And and the way that you I think reveal um you know the other person's personality and and learn about that person during those low times is basically to give it um give it some time, give it some space, allow their relationship to to develop because you know when you're when you're first dating someone that you like, you're on your best behavior. You know, you're you're showing the best parts of yourself, the most interesting, witty, dynamic, everything. You're trying to impress this person. and you want them to like you and they're they're doing the same to you as well. You're showing each other the best versions of yourself. But uh one thing that the psychologist Shant T. Smith points out, he wrote a book about commitment is that generally speaking um about a six-month mark, the rule of thumb is after about 6 months, you do start to learn about that person uh and you know, basically reveal their true selves to you and how they're really like and how they handle pressure and what they're like when they're sleepd deprived, what they're like when they're jet-lagged, what they're like when they're having a bad day at work. And you know for the first couple of months if you have a bad day at work you still you're still excited to see the person you like that the bad day doesn't even bother you but after six months after you sort of uh become accustomed to the relationship then you are more likely to to expose those other sides of yourself. So I think that's important too is that I think a lot of people they jump into a relationship it seems so exciting and then they don't realize that um you know people are different at different stages of the relationship. You got to give it time you got to allow them to sort of reveal themselves to you. Um, and then I think it also helps I can't remember who said this. It might have been on your podcast. Someone pointed out that a good way to see what another person is like in a relationship is to go on a trip with them. Oh, that was Rogan. That was Rogan on my episode that I did with him the other week where he's like, "You got to go on a long trip. You got to go on a long trip and you got to go somewhere stressful and you got to go on a long journey." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jet lag, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe travel coach, you know, like like put it like put on as much sort of like stress test the relationship seal hell week. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. And then you'll see, you know, like, oh, that's what this person is like under unpredictable circumstances out of the sort of rosy glow of everyday predictable life. Yeah. You said, uh, clarity and inquisitiveness as well. Uh, inquisitiveness I thought was a really interesting one. But those two together that kind of goes back to the authenticity thing, right? Like this is how I'm feeling even if it might make you upset or even if it might make me feel vulnerable or whatever. So I can and I guess that's a counter as well to the person that gets so agitated that they're unable to say I I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't know what I'm feeling. I I can't talk about this. I guess clarity uh and inquisitiveness are kind of the opposite of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. If if you look at the the opposite, so you're being unclear and and uninquisitive, uncurious about the other person. But yeah, the the green flag is um yeah, to be transparent, to to say what you mean, to be clear about what your intentions are, what you'd like, and then um yeah, inquisitive of if you are uncertain if there's an ambiguity in the relationship, you don't know what the other person is thinking or feeling that uh you ask the person about it and then the other person, you know, ideally they're not going to be upset with you. You know, that was one of the other red flags is um you know, basically forcing you to play the guessing game of well, if you really cared about me, you should know how I'm feeling. And if you really were paying attention, you would already know why I am upset. But, you know, a more healthy relationship style would be, you know, to just say like, "This is what I'm feeling. This is what's upsetting me." And and um go from there. And yeah, it's just um you know, all of these things like it's it's interesting. There's like such a a wealth of information about assorted mating, mating psychology, what to look for, what are the predictors of a happy and healthy relationship and and yet there's such little guidance on this point. And then when any ever anyone tries to point this out, especially if you try to promote anything resembling sort of conventional committed relationships, people start to get wary. You know, the slings and arrows come out. There was that story more than 10 years ago now. uh the the Princeton mom letter. Are you familiar with this? No. There was this um so she was a Princeton alumni uh whose daughter attended Princeton I think this was 2013 2014. But this woman who I think was in her 40s uh Susan Patton I want to say she wrote this uh op-ed in the Princeton student newspaper basically imploring the young women at this college like hey you're surrounded by very smart, ambitious, bright young boys. You should start thinking about marriage. Like you should start searching for a husband now. And then in response, she got all of these criticisms from like bigname mainstream media outlets calling her anti-feminist and calling her a traitor to the movement and all these kinds of things. And what she said was perfectly reasonable that, you know, she had a couple of interesting lines in there. One was um you know, you're you're never going to be surrounded by so many men who are worthy of you. And then the other line was something like uh you know, if you are with a man who's less intelligent than you, you're never really going to be fully satisfied. And you know, she was kind of pointing out, oh, generally that's that's true. Like women do tend to want men who are bright and ambitious and intelligent and all those kinds of things. And your uh mating prospects change dramatically after college. I mean, I've had so many conversations now, and I'm sure you have, too, with young people in their early mid20s, and they're like, I didn't know how good I had it when I was at college, when I was at university, and it's like, you know, especially if you're a man and 60% of the campus is women, and they're all, you know, young and bright and ambitious and interesting and whatever, and then you enter the workforce and it's like all your co-workers are older than you and they're married and they have their own separate adult lives. And it's just um you know the your your your mating prospects transform and become generally less promising. And you know no one no one tells young people about this. Louise Perry told me about that article the other week and she uses this really wonderful example where she says um if you buy a lamp before you move into a house, it's quite easy to find a place within that house to fit the lamp. But if you've spent a couple of decades creating the perfect house, finding a lamp that fits all of your prior, as in your life is the house and your partner is the lamp, it's way easier to build a house around a lamp than it is to find a lamp that fits the perfect house. And a lot of the time if people have got deeper down into their careers in they're not growing with someone, they're trying to slot somebody into their existing growth. and uh you're more sort of cemented um and and sort of I guess in some ways stagnant like you think you know what you like. You don't develop what you like in um uh partnership with another person. You're trying to see will they fit this thing and this thing has become increasingly more complex, increasingly sort of grander and bigger and and and uh I less capable of being changed. So yeah, I thought that was another uh interesting twist on that essay. Yeah, I've seen um this this kind of framework. I think it was called, you know, two approaches to a marriage. One is the startup marriage and the other is the capstone marriage. And so the startup marriage is you're sort of entering together to build this thing, this life together that you know, if you're in your, you know, early mid20s or something, you're young, you're just starting out, but you find someone that you care about and that you love and you get married and you're sort of building the life together. And then the capstone marriage is, well, I've succeeded in my education and my career and my income and everything else, and now the final milestone is, you know, now I'm going to get married and and bring this person in. Um, and I think I think both of those can work in different ways, but that's that's an I like the analogy from from Louise there that um yeah, I you get sort of older, you get set in your ways, you find it harder to, you know, introduce someone into your life. When you're young, you're just more flexible and you're probably more willing to relocate. You're probably more willing to maybe change up careers. There's so many other things you can do when you're young that becomes harder when you're old um or older anyway. But on the other hand, I could imagine the argument going going the the opposite way where, you know, when you look at um there was there was this interesting thing from the Institute for Family Studies about sort of the optimal age for marriage to reduce likelihood of divorce that it it was the case that if you get married very young, divorce rates are higher than average, you know, maybe because you're immature, because maybe uh financially strapped, those kinds of things. But then at a certain point, it starts to sort of this um uh uh what is it? sort of a a U-shaped curve here where around 30 or 31 that was kind of the ideal as far as like the lowest likelihood of getting divorced and then once you sort of reach your mid late 30s it starts to creep up again. And so I do wonder yeah what's what's um it could also be the case though that like for most people if you haven't found a partner by your mid late30s that um you know maybe there's something going on with you um that uh that makes it difficult to to find a partner. Yeah, there's a question of, well, why is this restaurant got no people in it? Like, if this restaurant was any good, it would be it would be sold out. And yeah, well, I mean, look, uh, flying the flag for both me and you, two people who, uh, maybe should have been married before we are. Um, uh, I think retrospectively, what you get to look at is what what did I prioritize at what ages what stages of my life? And there's certain people, at least I've realized this since being in Austin, who if you've got a lot of kind of upward mobility and if you've got things that you really want to do in the world, you end up or at least those people seem to be very very good candidates for massive [ __ ] midlife crisis because what you end up with is is this like unrequited, unfulfilled lack of validation from the world. for me and I had to give up so much of me in order for the world to to in order for this relationship to happen. Um, but then on the flip side, you know, there's this I I asked you to send me that uh free press article earlier on. And I think it's a a really really good synopsis, which is uh do not mistake side quests for the main story. And your side quests are things like, you know, brunch with the girls and and Vegas with the boys and the parties and the career and all the rest of the stuff. Like the main quest is the person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with because a great career and a shitty marriage results in a pretty shitty life, but an average career and a great marriage results in probably a pretty [ __ ] awesome life. So ensuring that you get the priority of those the right way round. And then on top of that, all of the other stuff that people I mean, you've seen the stats around uh why Gen Z say that they uh don't want to date, like just not ready. Um want time to work on myself. It's going to get like why women don't want to have kids, like can't wear cute heels. Uh like, you know, there's a lot of reasons. Those are side quests. Like I think there's a good argument to be made that the place that you live and the job that you do isn't a side quest. It's certainly one of the main story lines, but wearing cute heels or like [ __ ] Vegas with the boys, those definitely are side quests. So, yeah, ensuring that you stay on the main mission. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is this all for that kind of thing? Like, you know, eventually you're going to want family, you're going to want kids and grandkids and all those kinds of things. And yeah, I think it's um I I I wonder if like the reason for that for for Gen Z like where are they looking to as far as sort of role models and guidance and you know you mentioned sort of you and me like I think that you know this this sort of path of of you know prioritizing if you have a kind of an unusual career that requires a lot of time and a lot of commitment a lot of hours and you also derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction for it then that's great that can work for a lot of people but that's not going to work for everyone you know Jordan Peterson points this out that for most people living a convent conventional life is actually your best shot at happiness. That for most people, you know, getting married, settling down, have, you know, having kids, having a family, all those kinds of things like that for most people is a good path unless there's some extraordinary reason why that isn't the right path. Maybe you have some extremely um lucrative or unusual ability or talent or skill set or something else. But we get these interesting messages because those people who tend to um have the spotlight um who did sort of delay marriage and career and so on. Often they will attempt to justify their own lives and say, "Well, it worked for me. This is a great life. You should prioritize your career. This is how you get to where I am." That kind of thing. And most people aren't like that though. You know, like by definition, if you do have a platform and you do have an audience and those kinds of things, you're you're very atypical. You're an unusual weird person. You're selecting for the advice of people who are not like most people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because if if you're an ordinary person who's achieved happiness and success, chances are you don't have, you know, this huge megaphone and you don't have a large following. You're raising your kids and you're raising your family and you're that's where you're getting your life satisfaction and your meaning from. And I'm not even saying like one way of life is better than the other, but for most people, you know, the the the type of life that would lead to happiness, those messages aren't as uh salient because of the very fact that those people aren't sort of out in the world the way that um you know, peculiar psychologically atypical people are. [ __ ] yeah. Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen. Rob, you're awesome, man. Where should people go? They should read your writing because I read it every single week and then shamelessly repurpose it on my own newsletter a lot. Where should people go? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Rob Henderson's newsletter. I'm on Substack. Uh Rob K. Henderson on Twitter. Uh you can buy my book. It's out in paperback. Troubled by Rob Henderson. And uh yeah, Rob K. Henderson. Look that up. And I'm everywhere. So damn right, Rob. Until next time. Appreciate you, man. Thanks, Chris. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on. Top it.