#929 - Rob Henderson - The Psychology Of What Women Want｜Modern Wisdom

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 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 spoken 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 flashy headline you know right -wing men want the left wing art hoe the left wing art hoes want their 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 you think about what are the qualities that women find attractive in men, sort of self -sufficiency, ambition, income, you know, all the kinds of qualities that are associated with sort of a masculine guy.

And then you look at sort of the voting patterns of men, and you find that the predictors of voting for the conservative parties are also tend to be the traits that women tend to find attractive.

So if you look self -identified, if you ask men, 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, or the less masculine they feel, the more likely they are to support a left -wing candidate.

And then you can ask other questions about income.

There was a really funny study a few years ago, in the UK, about height, that there's a sort of a small but significant correlation between height and voting for conservative political parties.

I don't know if that would hold up today.

This was like 2016 -2017 that period.

But, you know, and then there's like interesting work around attitudes around like social dominance orientation, and, you know, men who are sort of 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 noticed that they didn't use right -wing women are looking to date left -wing men as one of the examples there.

I mean, that, I think that makes sense in general, you know, I saw this tweet going around the other day, got a lot of attention.

It was something like, 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, and 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 left -wing political parties, which I guess is like, that incentivizes, you know, this idea, I'm sure you've come across it, called woke -phishing, of guys who conceal their political views, usually guys who tend to be on the right, they will adopt the political beliefs of the opposing side simply to attract women.

And, you know, that wouldn't be a thing unless it had some basis in reality, unless, you know, somewhere in the world that actually paid off as a strategy.

Yeah you wrote an article about Harry Sisson, this sneaky feminist exploiting the dating economy thing.

What's the story there?

Yeah it was interesting.

There was a big sort of splashy piece in the New York post about this and a lot of people tweeting about this guy Harry Sisson who is referred to in the New York post as a Rising Star, a rising Gen Z TikTok star for the democratic national committee or something like that.

he's just sort of a left -wing guy, but there was a sort of trend going on on TikTok of these girls saying, oh, you know, 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.

He also said something like, I have no roster, something I don't have a roster.

Like if you know the word roster, you have a roster.

Yeah, yeah, pretty good heuristic there.

And then suddenly the others, these women, all discover each other and then 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.

You know, he did explicitly lie to them, you know, assuming all these allegations are true, but it's not like, you know, he violated any kind of law, I mean it's kind of gray area morally I think.

I think the sort of the outrage doesn't necessarily match the transgression.

Yeah, I wonder whether there is a - he's set himself an incredibly high bar.

If it was Andrew Tate, or some fucking guy from the right, would people be quite as up in arms?

Or is it the case that you've sort of proselytized about how pro -women you are and I'm softly softly and look at my feminine bona fides 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 I guess that idea is it's out of character.

You know, he portrays himself as very much a supporter of the Democrats.

He's a left -wing guy.

He cares about women and women's rights.

And then, meanwhile, behind the scenes, he's lying to women to get naked pictures of them.

And I guess that is kind of like the factor here is like, they felt lied to and then the image he projects into the public versus who he really is, there's a mismatch there.

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, 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, like you said, an Andrew Tate character, or just someone who openly said, like, I'm kind of a hedonistic, pleasure -seeking 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, you know, the whole like, sneaky -fucker idea in evolutionary biology.

The formal, the more scientific term is kleptography, of men who, or males, species, who adopt the appearance of more sort of feminine traits, and then thereby sort of disguise themselves.

and this is sort of, acts as a shield against more sort of dominant competitive rival males.

They think, oh, he's just a soft, you know, kind of a weak guy.

He's sort of a submissive feminine guy.

And they therefore feel less bothered if you see this weak guy hanging out with the women and then the woman, then the guy, the sort of sneaky fucker guy that gets to have his pick of the women here.

And I think like a lot of guys are kind of adopting of this, you know, you can, if it's the case that women want the handsome guy but then also a sort of politically left wing, and this is just going to incentivize a lot of camouflage, I think.

Why is it that, what is it do you think that's sort of allowing these guys to get in with women?

Is it 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 it signaling long -term investment?

Yeah, I think all of the above, you're signaling that you're a reliable person, you're compassionate, you're kind.

Our mutual friend David Buss, 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 if you talk about equality and all those kinds of things, then yeah, you're signaling that you're a kind and caring, compassionate guy.

But I think social media, it's difficult 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 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 supports and how he lives his own life.

But, you know, there's often a mismatch, right, between what gets attention and what you know, how people actually live.

So yeah, I think a lot of guys are wrestling with this.

Interestingly, I don't think this guy actually, Harry Sisson, he doesn't seem to have actually paid any real penalty.

I saw some people online joking that this is just going to increase his notoriety and perhaps even getting 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 an interesting debate that you highlighted that I totally hadn't seen, which is a lot of men, especially sort of red pill -y men, would use evolutionary logic to explain how somebody like Sisson 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 as a way to shame them and to also ward off other women.

So I think you said this isn't a bug in the system, this is the system.

That's right. Yeah, yeah.

So the logic here is, the other example I pointed out was with Leonardo DiCaprio where every six months it's like, oh, another flare -up online of, Leonardo DiCaprio has another 19 -year -old supermodel girlfriend.

you've cycled out someone who just turned 25.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah he resets back, you know, rewinds the clock, and then there's all this discourse online where 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'd search for women who are young and youthful and all those kinds of things, and then women in response are trying to shame him and stigmatize this kind of behavior.

And there is an evolutionary reason for both of those things, right?

Like there is an evolutionary explanation for why men would enjoy being partnered with an attractive young woman because on average, attractive young women tend to be more fertile.

And so, 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 research on 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, they say 23 -year -old women are the most attractive.

They're not saying other 13 -year -old girls.

And then, you know, 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 mid -twenties, whereas for women it's a bit more sort of matched with their own age.

And there's an evolutionary reason for that.

But then for women who shame men for, you increasingly grow older and continue to date young women, the logic here is that, you know, you want to stigmatize this kind of behavior, you want to shame it, you don't want 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 in our DiCaprio model, and this reduces women's chances of commitment from one of these prominent guys.

It's interesting how, if that's correct, and if it is this unspoken price -enforcement mechanism to try and demotivate the high -value men from sleeping around, that this is kind of the opposite of a tragedy of the commons, because only one woman is going to be with them, at least at one time, right?

It's a very small portion of women that are going to get to date Leonardo DiCaprio, but a very large portion of women who are shaming him.

So, you've kind of got this huge contribution, a lot of women saying this is very much bad behavior, but how many of them are actually going to benefit from the enforcement of men going, ah, maybe I shouldn't go full Huberman pilled on this one, I might, you know, I might just play it safe.

Yeah, well I don't think these women, logically in their rational, conscious mind, they're probably not thinking someday I'm gonna date Leonardo DiCaprio and I'm going to get him to commit to me, but it could be more so like I would like to date a high -status man in general and your odds are still low.

He'd better not behave like that and trade me up for some 21 -year -old.

So I had this idea, looking at sort of the rise of sneaky fuckers, the Harry Sisson 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, 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 and 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, pro -creator propagandist, I don't know.

Interesting. Well, well, I, 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 lot of major metropolitan cities in the U S 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 soft harem dynamics of women basically being willing to date guys who may be dating other women, and even if they don't explicitly

know this or desire this, this is just sort of a natural outcome.

Yeah, I think ideally everyone wants commitment, everyone wants someone, but then I always think of this very nice line and in Steven Pinker's famous book, How the Mind Works.

And it's something like, 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 90s, so the references are a bit dated, but the idea here is most women would rather maybe share Leonardo DiCaprio than have some guy who's barely scraping by for their sole husband.

And I do wonder sometimes, because over the last five 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 people seemingly, uh, unwilling or, or uninterested in, and sort of figuring out what's going on there, improve men's prospects and thereby that would actually improve monogamy.

Yeah, you wrote about, uh, men floundering women most affected.

which, I love that framing, dude.

I've got one that I wanna give you in a second, which is even more spicy, but, men floundering women must affect it was basically an explanation of sex ratio hypothesis, right?

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, that's, you know, whenever you see men falling behind, often the headlines and the articles are framed as, well, women are suffering because they're unable to find a desirable male partner, but, you know, the logic is, let's concentrate on the woman who's suffering when actually the reason why she can't find desirable male partners is because the men are the ones who are floundering and falling further and further behind.

It's a, I always find that framing very interesting.

I think 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 reveal your priors when that kind of framing comes around.

And yeah dude, you know, if you as a woman of the internet, perhaps, who tweets things a lot or retweets things a lot, has an issue with the dearth of eligible male partners, but also tweets about 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, we put Title IX in and we changed the way that the 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 women have a problem, or if any group except the men have a problem, we say, what can we do to fix society?

But if men specifically have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they don't fix themselves?

And this sense that 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 opportunities, perhaps that they would have been used to.

Much of that is laid at their feet, right?

Their socioeconomic status is theirs too, oh, and it is only theirs.

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 can't even date you, I won't even, I can't even get myself to 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, I think that's well put.

And if you look at kind of the research on who people think 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 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 something wrong with society.

And it's interesting sort of, if you break this down politically, there's a really interesting book that just came out called Outraged by the psychologist Kirk Gray, and he talks about what he calls like moral dyad 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 you know he calls one group vulnerable feelers, and these are people who are sort of exquisitely sensitive to suffering, into pain, into anguish, you know constantly put upon and beleaguered.

And then he talks about what he calls thinking doers, and this is the reverse, people who are relatively unfeeling, but highly agentic, capable of strategizing, forming a plan, executing, and so on.

So an example of a vulnerable feeler, sort of the extremes, 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, highly agentic but relatively unfeeling.

We don't think of successful CEOs as, you know, exquisitely sensitive to pain and emotional suffering and those kinds of things, but they're really able to execute.

Um, but then when researchers apply this moral dyad 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 sensitive and vulnerable.

where as on the political left they tend to view sort of marginalized and mistreated groups as one or the other.

Or marginalized and mistreated groups as vulnerable feelers and historically dominant groups as thinking doers.

And so 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 cops are these thinking doers these mechanistic highly agentic beings and criminals are these vulnerable, exploited people who are susceptible to being victimized.

I think that actually kind of explains why we see relatively little concern for men.

Then when we talk about men, I find it interesting sometimes when you see, because I spend a lot of time in academia, it's not enough.

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 non -white men.

And so often they'll say, they'll specify, they'll say, well, these white men who are complaining about being in cells are these white men who are complaining about falling behind on society, and I think to myself, it's not just white men, I was at this conference a couple weeks ago, and this reporter for the New York Times, he was on stage, and he was very interesting guy, he 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 again, this is a white guy and the reporter is a black man.

But the white guy is like, don't you think that this was basically white male, toxic masculinity?

You know, these guys who are talking about how bad they have it, 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 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 election.

Yeah, the only… The only segment he lost in was white people.

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 most powerful and privileged group white men, but actually it's a little more complicated than that.

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Can I give you my spicy, we're about, whatever, 25 minutes in so people that will get mad at me have hopefully dropped off by now.

So I wrote this, I was too scared to actually post 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 fucking amazing.

I wonder how many times you write something and he go, oh, too hot, like too spicy.

But this was one that was too spicy to go in the newsletter.

Men not erect, women most affected.

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 the woman's body more, make her feel more comfortable.

LOL guys just can't find the clitoris, slash just use 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 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 and is struggling to get it up in the bedroom, the only close comparable situation that women have to deal with is that they can't reach climax during sex. And if it's really hard, or if you need to, if there's like some fucking sequence of like rain dance things that needs to, the moon needs to be in it's sort of third fucking quarter, and we need to make sure that Miles is in retrograde.

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 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 am not good enough, I'm sort of sexually, insufficiently capable 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. What was it?

Men not erect. Women most affected.

Men not erect, women most affected.

Yeah, that's an interesting point there.

That, like, well, men aren't erect, but then it's, again, it's the man's fault for being unable to achieve an erection and that, yeah.

Who's really vulnerable here?

Which is, yeah, it's an interesting framing there.

Like you mentioned, that often women do feel unhappy about this, that they see it as a reflection on maybe their own attractiveness.

And you've probably seen some research going on.

I saw Rolf Dagen tweet something about this, there was a study about how women essentially feel extremely satisfied when their male partner has an orgasm, and they feel very dissatisfied when they don't.

They feel the sense of accomplishment by bringing their male partner to completion in the bedroom.

Which, I guess, there's probably an evolutionary story you could tell there that, historically, evolutionarily, male orgasm is required for the continuation of the species, whereas women's orgasm, you know it's great, but also not necessary for the continuation.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah that's an interesting one.

I certainly remember looking at some stuff around, well if you think about it this way, 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 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 gonna 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.

Right? Oh, right. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in this case it's kind of the complexity of your sexuality and what brings you to be aroused and to have an orgasm.

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 fucking bro science for you, Rob Henderson.

Dr. Rob Henderson. Well, I remember seeing this study a while ago.

And I think like, it's funny, 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 so unlikely for them.

But then when you look at the data, as far as, like, in what relational context women actually have orgasms—let me see if I get these numbers right—so when women are in a committed relationship with a male partner, so there's heterosexual couples, they orgasm something like 70 percent of the time.

But then when you look at hookups, like like a casual partner that you see on a somewhat regular basis, it drops to something like 25 % and then for a one -night stand, it's well into the single digits, it's like 7%, and so 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 when a man has a one -night stand, casual sex, committed relationship, that yeah, they usually make it work, whereas for women, there's all these other, what was that term going around a couple years ago?

It was demisexual or something, like I need to have an emotional connection to feel aroused.

Yeah and then there's sapiosexual which is I'm attracted to your intellect or something else.

Yeah I mean the demisexual thing was hilarious because I think that was called I think just being a woman up until, or just being a normal human up until not long ago.

Yeah I'd be very interested to orgasm equity, orgasm equality act thing.

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 the guy's side of the fence might decide to fly the flag for that and go, look, I come once and I fall asleep 10 minutes later.

So, you're the Jeff Bezos of fucking orgasms, Darlene.

Pass some of those back over our way.

But speaking of that, I guess the topic of the internet at the moment, adolescence.

I only I was away traveling basically from when it came out until yesterday So I only got to watch I've seen a few episodes But give me your your take on that and then kind of the subsequent fallout that's happened Yeah, well, what's really interesting.

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 the you know, he's a working -class kid He goes to this, you know rundown chaotic school You know, one thing a mutual friend of ours pointed out, William Costello, is that—because he's worked in schools in the UK before, and he says that is what a lot of these schools look like, this sort of utter chaos, teachers barely able to contain the classroom.

And this boy, Jamie, is relatively unpopular.

He's sort of at the center of the story, and the show makes references to how the kid listens to Andrew Tate and how he—there were a couple of times that he said something about the 80 -20 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 throughout the show, basically suggesting heavily that this boy got like, sucked into this online rabbit hole.

And then when this girl 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 can 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 were 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 who is most interested in watching Andrew Tate, for example, you know, there was this interesting poll going around that they broke down the respondents by race or ethnicity.

And it was something like 41 percent of, so this was in the UK, something like 41 percent of Black males in the UK said they were fans of Andrew Tate.

And then for, what do they call them, south Asian or something, Asian men, it was something like 30 % and then for Weiss it was by far the lowest. And yet when people talk about his fans, they often say, oh these white male incels.

And then the other thing was, you know, that it was just, 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 fully believe that, you know, some like prepubescent kid is really feeling so stressed out about, you know, being a virgin or whatever, but William pointed out that actually 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 very much sort of, it strayed a lot from from reality, and yet it's being received in a lot of mainstream media as like oh it's this iconic series that accurately reflects what's going on with toxic masculinity and so on, very unrealistic.

Yeah, art masquerading is reality, and yeah, that was one of the things that struck me.

I mean, one of the other things that struck me was I beautifully shot, adored it, cinematography is fucking 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 I thought that was great, I thought the acting was a little underwhelming, actually, especially from some of the kids, 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 ham -fisted how they had to do exposition.

The Manosphere, the Red Pill, what?

Have you been watching The Matrix?

You're like, oh fuck, here we go.

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 the exposition, but that just felt a bit like.

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, ten different panel style shows of varying levels, including like mainstream British TV, prime time spots.

And it was evident that they were just looking for somebody who could come on and sort of fight the fight for the pro men side, first off, I hadn't seen it.

Secondly, that is a fight that you only fucking lose by going on and trying to defend an imaginary child stabbing an imaginary girl about an imaginary slight.

So what are we talking about?

I thought about this an awful lot, what it seems like happened, they invited me on the track, oh, that's the person they got on instead of me, because I said no, and looked at that.

And that conversation was very placid and calm.

And then they emailed again the next day, and were like, hey, yeah, we really wanted a little bit more different insights.

And what you mean is you wanted to create a firestorm, but who's gonna come on and say, we need more 13 -year old boys that are stabbing, imaginary 13 -year old boys, stabbing, imaginary 13 -year -old girls.

It's not a position.

And then you had this fucking, 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.

I mean, there's fucking 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 ossify 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 incel stabbings?

Like, where are they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

There was that paper last year, I think, with David Buss and William Costello, where they wrote, like, why is there not more until violence, if you look at, you know, like, like, if you look sort of, throughout historically, instable or unstable 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 increase crime and so on and we're not really seeing as much as you would predict based on this sort of historical trend and pattern.

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, it's weird that 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 are supposedly mature, sophisticated adults watch a Netflix show, 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 with young men.

This is an accurate insight into what's going on with young men.

House of Commons, high ranking politicians, it's just, it's, same.

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Batman should be a cautionary tale against orphans and people that slip into Wells, like you're taking the actual situation that was narrativised.

And I have heard that the original 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 changed, probably for a number of reasons, one that it would be politically inconvenient, but another one being that Stephen Graham fuckin' wrote it.

And Stephen Graham's as white as they come.

So, if you want to be the main dad and have all of episode four be about you, you kind of, unless you're gonna, he's a totally normal boy that comes from an interracial marriage.

But 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 pushback in that way.

But 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 fucking scripted podcast, was unbelievable, 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, the boy wasn't really able to give a particularly strong answer to that.

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 being able to play.

But 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 and in power and is able to play with those to make them feel uncomfortable.

He even sort of comments on the, like how flat -chested she is and whether she's pretty and stuff like that.

So there's always this like, I know that if you do something to me that's not right, that I can kind of get you on it.

But yeah, what did you make of that sort of breakdown and the sort of masculinity, fragile male ego discussion at large?

Yeah, well, as I was watching it, I thought about all the research on incels in how, you know, if you look at the mental health of incels, a lot of work from our friend William Costello here about how 67 % of self -identified incels qualify for clinical diagnosis of anxiety, severe moderate anxiety, and this is like roughly twice as high among incels as non -incels.

And so, then when you see this kid and he's so emotionally 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 a depression or anxiety.

And you know, this psychiatrist lady is trying to suss 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, trying to figure out like why that specifically, it could have been a single dad, that might've been interesting.

If at what's what's the guy's name you mentioned Steven something grim grim.

Yeah, so if if this show had been you know, he was a single father you know working overtime and 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 brainwashed, but, you know, that, like, we didn't really get an explanation here, maybe that's supposed to be the idea here, is that there is no explanation other than the in -cell, 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've watched a couple of behind the scenes on YouTube that Netflix put up themselves and Stephen Graham'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 sort of explanatory mechanism straight down onto this sort of aggressive subculture.

But I've got episode four to watch this evening.

Unless they actually show how he becomes radicalized, Like he was on Reddit and he was looking at these things and he's doing all of the rest of the stuff.

It's like, okay, so where did you learn about this?

Or is it just, is the point really just 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 fucking fully agree.

I fully fucking agree with that because I think humiliation is unbelievably dangerous to anybody, but specifically to a young boy and at least again, only in episode three, 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 fucking knife to her, she was in the wrong, she'd been mean, she'd been saying this stuff online, she'd derogated his status in a lot of ways, and then this situation gets out of control.

And it ends fucking tragically, again, fictionally tragically.

Like we must remember no point do we need to defend or like try and fucking prosecute anybody because nothing happened.

But yeah, if that's the story and that's the takeaway 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, So that Andrew Tate shite is like a passing comment.

But to anybody that has the fucking first idea about what the internet looks like, I would guess that most incels actually despise Andrew Tate because he represents an awful lot of everything that they don't agree with, that they don't think, he's just going to be a symbol of all of the shit that they can't get.

So that plus Red Pill plus Manosphere plus, this is a fucking massive wall.

It's like, I'm sure it's the same when good -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 fuckin' pink pill and are we dating the same guy and r slash 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, out -group homogeneity effect of like any man who comments on relationships or talks, or 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 collapsed into the same group.

But yeah, I think that's right, that like even sort of politically, you know, those findings about how generally, if you measure the political attitudes of insults, they tend to lean center -left. 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 and relationships but it's just easy to sort of vaguely collapse Tait and Trump and everything that you don't like and so you know they're all just these domineering evil men and also incels are in there too somehow even though Andrew Tait and Donald Trump are like kind of the like literal opposite of incels and 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 show was and then like you know I I think the show, honestly, it could've been braver if they had an uglier kid.

The kid is like, he was a perfectly nice -looking 12, 13 -year -old boy or whatever, and if they had had an uglier kid, I think you would've felt like, I think maybe it would've been dangerously close to making him too sympathetic.

You know, like, you know, it's like, oh, 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 kinda 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, that's interesting.

So 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 fucking spare IQ points.

But let's just assume that they made this decision consciously, that you've chosen a kid who facial symmetry, you know, like a normal looking boy, like fucking middle of the bell curve of a kid, 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, 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 at this 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 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 corrupted by these online platforms. Oh yeah, well there was that scene with him and a psychiatrist where he asks, do you think I'm ugly?

And I guess that that is an incel trope of like, 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 this woman, this psychiatrist, 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 response was, well do you think you're ugly?

Because she's interested in what he thinks.

But yeah, I think, yeah, that would've been an interesting route to go.

Because there was nothing, like he didn't have a lisp, you know, he wasn't overweight.

Like there could've been something that added a little bit more to his character.

Yeah, but you're right, I think there were, yeah, maybe spare IQ points for the producers here.

But, you know, they cast like a very normal, very nice looking kid with nothing apparently wrong with him.

And so then, you know, which I guess maybe there is a kind of a left wing sort of 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 incel ideology or Red Pill ideology online.

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 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 the amount of bullying you would need to go through to justify murder is essentially an infinite, so it's kind of a moot point, but there is a question of, okay, at At what point does online bullying and castigation and ostracization and being disaffected 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?

Let's just say that instead of using this special coded 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 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 tip of the spear of the people that are bullying him.

And that makes for a much less, but in terms of dynamic, it's kind of probably 80 % of the way there.

Like speaking of 80%, the 80, 20 rule, 80 % of women are only attracted to 20 % of men.

it's like what like what how is that that's 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 fucking rom -com since the beginning of time I don't know it's very it's very interesting I've been and I think what's more interesting is to me than the actual series is being the response online Keir Starmer saying it needs to be played in the House of Commons we're going to stream this in every school up and down the UK, this is a cautionary tale.

Yeah, very, very interesting.

Yeah, well, yeah, if you're streaming it in the schools, I mean, yeah, if the portrayal of schools in adolescence looks like that, good luck, those kids aren't gonna be watching it anyway, they're all gonna be on their phones and you play a movie in class, I know those kids are actually gonna be watching it.

So, I mean, who's that for exactly?

So, yeah, I guess it makes people feel good about themselves.

You know, they're sort of the more quasi -conspiratorial corners of Twitter where they were like, you know, one point of this whole series is to essentially help to crystallize a consensus that we need to increase the level of censorship online.

You know, if the belief among sort of policy makers and tastemakers and cultural influencers is, oh, like, you know, these accounts, this ideology is leading boys to stab girls, then we need to start shutting down accounts, Just start patrolling the limits of acceptable speech online, and, you know, I don't know if that was the intent behind, like, 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 certain influencers, certain 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 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 amplify its message and get people to watch it.

It's a useful, popular political football that people can kick about.

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?

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 wellbeing, 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 nothing else, mathematically, it makes sense because you're going to spend most of your life 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 occurred to me as I was writing that piece is just how much information there is out there about, you know, how to become 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'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 are you doing?

Oh, I'm watching this YouTube series on how to improve my career, that's fine.

But if you were to say, you know, you're watching YouTube, and I would say, well, 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 perfectly fine to sort of seek out information and knowledge and mentors and so on to succeed in career.

And so… 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 require explicit advice on romance, that this in itself 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 person in the romantic 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 maybe you shouldn't even be dating in the first place.

Whereas for career, less So, I mean, I still think that we, if someone effortlessly succeeds like 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 effect and the sort of accompanying effect of we tend to be a bit more suspicious 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 gonna learn how to manipulate women, you're gonna learn how to… Harry Sisson 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 find a girlfriend.

We think, oh, he's trying to hook up with as many women as possible and dupe all of them or something.

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?

And earlier we talked about, 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.

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 sort of tilting even further and further in that direction.

But what's interesting there is that the similarity—even though 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 levels of similarity within romantic partners, similarity doesn't seem to predict relationship success.

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 unassortatively.

Yeah, and there's 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 necessarily of an occupation.

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 fluked their way into it, that's kind of an interesting one.

What about personality traits, similarities in being extroverted, being introverted, propensity for low moods, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, well, the personality thing is interesting in that 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 .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.

One that's a bit higher than the others that I saw was for neuroticism, which is about .2, .22, somewhere in that realm.

And this is consistent with other work that people who are emotionally volatile tend to be 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 people with dark triad traits that they seem to find one another interesting and attractive.

They're welcome to each other.

Everybody that isn't dark triad is just going, please, for the love of God, date each other.

That's a great way to kind of quarantine everybody on that.

Yeah, get them out of the dating pool, yeah.

Yeah, which I think like, you know, if you're, yeah.

So people who are sort of relatively narcissistic find other narcissistic people interesting and attractive and those kinds of things.

One thing that was interesting related to the personality point is authenticity, that this really interesting paper found that people who score highly on measures of authenticity within their relationship, and so these were basically the extent to which participants agreed with statements like, 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.

And when people are more likely to agree with those statements, they also tend to correlate highly with levels of relationship satisfaction.

And interestingly, the reverse was the case, too, that people who are low authenticity also tend to pair with people who are also more deceptive or less authentic and so there really is that sort of sortative meeting there going on too.

Which, I guess like 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, that's why we call them honest signals, right, is that only someone who's truly authentic and truly whatever, that you're going to be the most likely to attract a partner with those kinds of trace as well.

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If authenticity is a big predictor for relationship satisfaction, I mean, is that a vote in the box for oversharing, for being quite transparent about sort of what's going on as opposed to keeping some stuff just for your journal and the therapists' room?

Interesting. Yeah, well it depends on what the conversation is about.

If you have your sort of most wild, extreme thoughts, like, I don't know, maybe those don't always have to be aired.

Well, I'm gonna punch a baby and put it into the road, or - Yeah, well, but I think, like, when it comes to issues around the relationship itself, that maybe there's a way, you know, I think it's better to generally over -communicate, rather than to let things slide and let resentments build up and then it potentially explodes later into a serious argument.

I mean, there's a way, I think, to over -communicate and 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's an interesting one.

Yeah, our mutual friend, David Buss, on this one was fascinating paper here about how, you know, there's this idea, you know, basically what are people looking for in a partner?

Is it someone who just meets their relationship needs?

oh, here are my 10 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 gonna go with the 10 out of 10, that kind of thing, as if we're grading on some objective rubric, but that paper suggested that actually we more so grade potential partners on a curve where we are kind of putting together multiple things in our environment.

First, you know, the person that you're with, how do they stack up compared to partners that you could reasonably attract 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 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 may be the most sort of dangerous situation in here is, 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 lead to a potential unstable relationship dynamic.

And so for a lot of guys, I think what they, if you ask them what they want, especially young guys, like under 25, they just, I want the hottest possible girl, physically perfect, 10 out of 10, I want a dime.

But then, 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, you know, that's probably not gonna work out for you.

And that may be another reason why we tend to mate assortatively is gradually over time people kind of figure out where their level is and find someone who's roughly the same level of attractiveness as themselves.

But yeah, there is that point there that you know, what predicts relationship dissolution And it does seem to be 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 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.

So, for all that it sounds fantastic to get into a relationship with some smoke show, especially when you think about, and this is Seth Stephens Davidowitz's insight.

Lots of people are selecting that partners based on the same criteria that everybody uses, but that criteria is not predictive of longterm 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 and relationship satisfaction long -term as long as you're relatively sort of physically matched in terms of attractiveness, 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 other approach is I'm gonna choose somebody that everybody wants, but all people would fucking hate to be in a relationship with.

And I'm aware that there's like a ton of gray in between those two examples.

But that is kind of the spectrum.

Somebody that signals something everybody is after, but 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.

because you see that, you tap into that and you actually get less insecurity, less mate guarding needed, less jealousy, less all of that stuff.

Uh, so yeah, that's the, that's 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 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, your partner's level of conscientiousness does seem to predict longer relationship duration.

Interestingly, it also tends to predict your own level of 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 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 partners 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 compounds over time having someone who's very switched on like that.

And then, yeah, other traits as well.

I mean, for relationship satisfaction, agreeableness is one, low levels of neuroticism, and then, yeah, high intelligence is another.

And so, it's interesting that even though the similarities aren't especially high within couples, If you want a relationship to last, it's good to have sort of more rather than less of many of these traits.

I had a tie to Shiro 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 weight is kind of hot.

Why don't we like add him in this evening or they're more tempted to stray.

And I think it will be correlated with a bunch of other stuff.

I'd heard you say before that 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 those? Why that suite of physical and mental traits?

Yeah, I mean, all of those, the sort of volatility clusters around neuroticism or, or low emotional stability.

And, you know, it's interesting, I'm reading this, this person— it's called, The Person, A New Introduction to Personality Psychology.

New textbook, sort of covering the latest 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 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 end neuroticism, they have more interpersonal conflicts, more issues with their friends, more arguments with their romantic partners, just generally more difficulty in their lives.

And And so yes, they may overstate what they're going through, what they are objectively going through worse sort of interpersonal disputes than the average person.

And so, you know, if you want to avoid that, you know, you gotta kind of avoid sort of the aggression, the flightiness and all those kinds of things.

The openness point is interesting.

I would imagine there is research indicating that tattoos correlate with openness to experience.

I would imagine the same goes for, you know, unusual piercings and those kinds of things.

And so, yeah, if you, you know, there was this study about this, about promiscuity in tattoos, that, you know, basically, the more...

If you have a tattoo, you tend to be sort of more open.

What's the phrase? Socio -sexual orientation, basically more interested in promiscuous sex, those things correlate together.

And then the more tattoos you have, the more open you are to having open sex with, you know, unfamiliar people.

which lines up with the other research on tattoos as well, that it correlates with low impulse control and those kinds of things.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's funny.

I had this tweet put out a while ago with something like, you know, if people put a great deal of effort into designing, no, the phrase is don't judge a book by its cover, 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 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 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 that, you mentioned aggression, flightiness, and everything else.

But yeah, but so you want someone with relatively low neuroticism, and then, yeah, with education, with intelligence, those things as well.

What's interesting about the intelligence one is that when you ask people, 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, maybe because of stereotypes about geniuses being, you know, kind of kind of quirky or personality wise, being a little off.

But when you look at the the correlation coefficients, sort of how similar spouses are to one another within marriages, there is a similarity in that their IQs tend to correlate with one another, but there's still about a 10 -point IQ difference between spouses on average, which is smaller than it is for, say, two siblings.

So this is all from Robert Ploeman's work, that 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.

But one thing I've tried to track down is 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 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 poll on Twitter a couple years ago where I asked 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 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.

So I think like, you know, I think people probably have this intuition that within couples, men have, you know, a bit more sort of varied knowledge and those kinds of things.

What about other red flags?

Managing emotions, guessing game, character assault, silent treatment, stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah, well, that was one of the most important finding, as far as what to avoid for red flag.

David Buss says, one of the things you want to look for is how quickly do they return to their emotional baseline?

All of us, regardless of our personality traits and our temperaments, we're capable of getting angry or upset or irritated, but some of us are able to take a step back, take a couple of breaths and detach and think about the situation and rationally, and kind of calm ourselves down but other people, they kind of spiral out.

Like they get angry and then they look for more reasons to get angry and then suddenly they're off on a different path.

And so you want someone who's able 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 identify and label their emotions.

This was an interesting finding from, I think the guy's name is Lauren Cian -Reid, he's a professor at NYU.

he talks about how people with Borderline Personality Disorder, which generally afflicts, on average, women more so than men.

One of the hallmarks of Borderline Personality Disorder is the inability to understand, and articulate, and verbalize what you're feeling.

So these people are kind of like, I'm feeling this thing, and very clearly, it's negative, but I can't tell the difference between ordinary anger, or rage, or irritation, or just sort of being mildly or moderately upset, that it's sort of all or none.

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 difficult for them.

And, you know, it's sort of a spectrum, you know, it's, you gotta be careful, you know, basically finding people who are unable to do that.

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 communication is even more important during a period of emotional tension and dispute and hostility.

If someone does something that upsets someone else, that's when communication becomes even more important than it otherwise would be.

Yeah. You know Visakan Virasami?

Do you know that guy?

He's great. Yeah. Yeah.

He's such fire. And he says, it's the lows, not the highs that make or break a relationship.

Why does 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 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 really just how you handle misunderstandings and conflict and confusion and disagreement, because insufficient good times maybe 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 the way that you, I think, reveal the other person's personality and learn about that person during those low times is basically to give it some time, give it some space, allow their relationship to develop.

Because when you're first dating someone that you like, you're on your best behavior.

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 doing the same to you as well.

You're showing each other the best versions of yourself.

But one thing that the psychologist, Sean T.

Smith, points out, he wrote a book about commitment, is that, generally speaking, about a six -month mark, the rule of thumb, is after about six months, you do start to learn about that person and 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 sleep deprived, what they're like when they're jet lagged, like what they're like when they're having a bad day at work, and for the first couple of months, if you have a bad day at work, you're so excited to see the person you like that the bad day doesn't even bother

you. But after six months, after you sort of become accustomed to the relationship, then you are more likely 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 people are different at different stages of the relationship.

You gotta give it time, you've got to allow them to reveal themselves to you.

And then I think it also helps, I can't remember who said this, it might've been on your podcast, someone pointed out that a good way to see what another person is like in a relationship was to go on a trip with them.

Now that was Rogan.

That was Rogan on my episode that I did with him the other week, where he said you gotta go on a long trip.

You gotta go on a long trip and you gotta go somewhere stressful and you gotta go on a long journey.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, jet lag, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe travel coach, you know, like put it, like put as much sort of like stress test the relationship as much as possible.

Navy seal hell week.

Yeah, there we go. And then you'll see 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, clarity and inquisitiveness as well.

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 don't know what I'm thinking, I don't know what I'm feeling, I can't talk about this.

I guess clarity and inquisitiveness are kind of the opposite of that.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess, if you look at the opposite, so you're being unclear and uninquisitive, un -curious about the other person.

But yeah, the green flag is to be transparent, to say what you mean to be clear about what your intentions are or 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 go from there and yeah it's just. You know, all of these things like it's interesting, there's like a such a wealth of information about assorted mating, mating psychology, what to look for, what are the predictors of a happy and healthy relationship and yet there's such little guidance on this point and then when 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, the Princeton mom letter.

You familiar with this?

There was this—so she was a Princeton alumna whose daughter attended Princeton—I think this was 2013, 2014, but this woman, who I think was in her 40s, Susan Patton, I want say.

She wrote this 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.

You should start searching for a husband now.

And then in response, she got all of these criticisms from like big -name 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, 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, 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 the, 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 meeting 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, mid -twenties, 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, especially if you're a man, and 60 % of the campus is women, and they're all young and bright and ambitious and interesting and whatever, and then you enter the workforce and it's like, all your coworkers are older than you and they're married and they have their own separate adult lives.

And it's just your mating prospects transform and become generally less promising and 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, 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 spend a couple of decades creating the perfect house, finding a lamp that fits all of your priors, 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, they're not growing with someone, they're trying to slot somebody into their existing growth.

And you're more sort of cemented 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 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 less capable of being changed.

So yeah, I thought that was another interesting twist on that essay.

Yeah, I've seen this kind of framework, I think it was called, two approaches to a marriage.

One is the startup marriage, and the other is the capstone marriage.

And so the start of marriage is, you're sort of entering together to build this thing, this life together that, if you're in your early mid -twenties 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 gonna get married and bring this person in.

And you know, I think both of those can work in different ways, but that's an interesting, I like the analogy from Louise there, that yeah, you get sort of older, you get set in your ways, you find it harder to 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 or older anyway.

But on the other hand, I could imagine the argument going the opposite way where, you know, when you look at—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 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 financially strapped, those kinds of things.

But then at a certain point, it starts to, it's sort of this, um, what is it, sort of 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 late 30s, that, you know, maybe there's something going on with you, 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.

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 So I think, retrospectively, what you get to look at is, what did I prioritize at 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 fucking midlife crises.

because what you end up with is this 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, in order for this relationship to happen.

But then on the flip side, I asked you to send me that free press article earlier on.

And I think it's a really, really good synopsis, which is, do not mistake side quests for the main story, and your side quests are things like, you know, brunch with the girls 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 in a shitty marriage results in a pretty shitty life.

But an average career in a great marriage results in probably a pretty fucking awesome life.

So ensuring that you get the priority of those the right way around.

And then on top of that, all of the other stuff that people, I mean, you've seen the stats around why Gen Z say that they don't want to date, like just not ready, one time to work on myself, it's gonna get, like, why women don't wanna have kids, like, can't wear cute heels.

There's a lot of reasons, those are side quests.

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 storylines.

But wearing cute heels, or like, fucking Vegas with the boys, those definitely are sidequests.

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 gonna want family, you're gonna want kids and grandkids and all those kinds of things.

Yeah, I think it's um— I wonder if, like, the reason for that, 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 sort of path of prioritizing— If you have a kind of an unusual career that requires a lot of time 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 conventional life is actually your best shot at happiness, that for most people, you know, getting married, settling down, 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 lucrative or unusual ability or talent or skill set or something else, But we get these interesting messages because those people who tend to have the spotlight 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 very atypical, you're an unusual, weird person.

So you're selecting for the advice of people who are not like most people.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Because if you're an ordinary person who's achieved happiness and success, chances are, you don't have this huge megaphone, you don't have a large following.

You're raising your kids and you're raising your family and 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, the type of life that would lead to happiness, those messages aren't as salient because of the very fact that those people aren't sort of out in the world the way that you know, peculiar psychologically atypical people are.

Fuck 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. Rob Henderson's newsletter, I'm on Substack, RobK Henderson on Twitter.

You can buy my book, it's out in paperback, Troubled by Rob Henderson.

and yeah, Rob K. Henderson.

Look that up and I'm everywhere so.

Damn right. Rob, until next time, appreciate you, man.

Thanks, Chris. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were easiest to read and the most dense and interesting, but there wasn't a list of them.

So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.

And then, I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found and you can get that for free right now.

So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to ChrisWillX .com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die.

That's chriswillx .com slash books.

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