The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable

00:00:00I'm starting in Oni fans and I'm selling merch. This has taken way too long and I'm very sorry, but it is so worth it. The designs are unreal. We've upgraded the blanks so they're even better quality than last time. And this bursting heart design with Japanese text in the middle is just so beautiful. Also, your girlfriend's new favorite hoodie. I apologize to anybody who buys this because I get the sense that your girlfriend's just going to steal it. All of it is available right now at mwmerch.com and it's only available for six days.

00:00:26So get it. Once it's gone, you won't be able to buy it again. That's it. Completely sold out, never to be printed in the future. Mwmurch.com. Have you seen the type of dancing which is scientifically most attractive to women? I've not seen this. According to a study at Northumbria University, the dances found this one. This is the dance that women found most attractive. This is a man dance song.

00:01:00According to a study by Northumbria University, the dancers women found most attractive were ones who moved their head, neck and torso the most, while also mixing up their moves, creatively in showing more variation in rhythm. To test this, researchers use motion capture technology on 30 male dancers, turn their movements into computer avatars. The best dancers were the ones who used their whole body naturally instead of awkwardly repeating the same arm and leg movements. Look like that, dancing to me.

00:01:44He's my friend Ismail. And one thing that he was actually talking about was that the dance is quite feminine. And this mirrors something that you sometimes see in facial attractiveness research, where the initial assumption is like, oh, masculinity is just going to be amazing, as much masculinity as possible. But then in some areas with some traits, femininity is favored. And I think it seems like dance is... dancing femininity would be favoured.

00:02:10Well, what would a masculine dance look like? That's the question. Throwing yourself around in a mosh pit. Is that particularly sexy? Shadowboxing. Shadowboxing. Shadowboxing. Shadowboxing.

00:02:44What is it about shadow boxing that would give them the... Well, it's this... I share that intuition, but what is it about? What I think is it's guys posturing how hard they are. Look at how formidable and aggressive I would be, if only it was an air that I was fighting. There's no opponents. Yeah.

00:03:01I think that it ruins the positive illusion that they actually could win a fight. It's like... It's their shadow boxing. They're even losing... their shadowboxing file. Yeah, exactly, exactly. They're like this. Yeah. How many punches do you have to throw at this invisible person? Does looks maxing give women the ick, Rob? I think it does. I'd be curious to hear Mackin's thoughts, Steve as well, on this, which is the clavicular, the looks maxing

00:04:08looks maxing protocol, the bone smashing the injections, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, just quietly bone smashing. The, um, he recently, I think, got a nose job. I saw something going around on next to. And an ordinary guy doing all of that stuff, optimizing for appearance. I think most women would find that kind of guy very vain, very self-centered, uh, you know, someone who is maybe uninterested in a relationship and is more just interested in themselves. And so maybe it works for a clavicular because it made him famous. But for the average guy, I think that amount of looks maxing would be counterproductive. What do you think it signals? I mean, I would say that it signals narcissism, vanity, maybe sort of short-term oriented mating orientation, kind of, you're more

00:04:54interested in being immediately attractive to someone rather than someone who you would be interested in forming a long-term bond with. Yeah, and some of it's just a bit weird as well, right? The bone-smashing, that kind of thing is just odd. Yeah. Well, I saw this clip recently. He was, clavik, it was in this interaction with this girl at this bar in New York, and he was telling her how reading is a total waste of time.

00:05:16I don't read. That's ridiculous. That's absurd. And I couldn't help but comment at how shocking is it that the guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer isn't the fantasy. Sometimes people surprise you. Yeah. That's funny.

00:05:29actually, it's funny that you say that because on the main forum, looksmax.org, it actually, if I'm not mistaken, it used to say first rule of looks maxing, don't talk about looks maxing, which reflects a open understanding like never say that you're doing any of this stuff. Like looking good helps, but being transparent about the things that you're doing to look good probably won't improve your life. So is the reason for that, though? So I'm, you know, I'm looks maxing, but I don't tell you about it, Is that because what, like to bypass all of the prejudice is involved there? Like, I don't want you to think I'm vain. I just want you to think that I'm naturally good looking.

00:06:08Is that the, that natural beauty is better than artificial beauty? Yeah, so I believe that that was part of it. Then a second facet was actually that they didn't want, I mean, a lot of the methods that they use, such as bone smashing already mentioned, are probably very dubious. But I think that part of it is that they wanted to protect it with the, honestly, a view that a lot of us might agree with, which is that the mating market is competitive. And so if everyone gets better looking, it may be the equivalent of everyone's like kind of running faster. They were worried that other guys would learn the exploit.

00:06:42Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's like if other guys figure out that wearing makeup makes you more attractive, then everyone's going to be wearing makeup, but then there's just a hassle. Yeah, exactly. And you've seen that, you've seen that already happen to women. I mean, women, this is something that I said on your podcast three or four years ago that women have been looks maxing for decades and decades and decades. This is before it came in as a real trend. And that's kind of what's happened, right, is that all women are wearing makeup and now, or almost all of them are. And now if you skip that part of your routine, it almost comes across, and it shouldn't,

00:07:14it's unfortunate, but it almost comes across as unprofessional in a workspace. I mean, it's just this extra burden of... Minimum bar is being raised for what presentable is. Yeah, exactly. So if all men start doing the same thing, then, yeah, I would say that the minimum bar probably, I think that intuition, even if some of the methods that they're coveting and protecting are ineffective, I think that the intuition about competitiveness and how it works is probably correct. So we should do it, just shouldn't talk about it. Yeah,

00:07:38exactly. The thing that I wondered is whether or not it's to protect the costliness or the reliability of the signal, that if you find out that the only reason that this guy is good-looking is not because of what you might intuit is the ultimate reason of got good genes, strong immune system, sort of a natural sense and way of him, but it's too contrived. You actually think, well, what am I dating? I think this is the same thing. There is a kind of ick that women had where if they learned a guy was doing real social dynamics or reading the game by Neil Strauss and doing pickup artistry, even if you'd said I went away to a sex train, an intimacy training, sex training course weekend thing that was all professional and not not creepy but that means that

00:08:30when you go and do something in bed it's not because of your sort of natural proclivities it's because you've crafted and curated it we're happy for people to learn to become better at playing the piano we're less happy at people learning to become better at being themselves in a way does that make sense yeah well with no you're not and with beauty there's actually some evidence for this in women already. I'm not aware of any study that's been done on this in men, but Zia and colleagues in China, they actually tested, so it was makeup and plastic surgery that they tested on real women's faces. And they had men assess their attractiveness, their datability, et cetera. And what they found was that these methods worked to make them more attractive, but when men were informed, meaning once

00:09:12men knew, like, oh, this woman looks better, but she's had plastic surgery, they had a reduced datability effect. So it was an increase that was attenuated. So the attractiveness boost was still present, like they were still considered more datable. Okay. But that effect was attenuated when you were aware of the effort that had gone in. The net was still that there was a benefit. And you could see in these faces that the attractiveness difference, I can send you the study. The attractiveness differences in their example were large.

00:09:38Right. But it was an attenuated effect where it's like, oh, if they know, if they detect it, then they're less interested. And it may be because of what attractiveness evolved for, where it's like it's meant to be this health signal. youth signal, et cetera, but if we have this cognitive knowledge of like, oh, this isn't a real youth signal, right? This is a woman with facelift. That may change the valence slightly, but I'd be interested in Steve's thoughts. Yeah. So, I mean, I completely buy that that effect is real, but I'm not sure if that's an evolved tendency to, because the evolved tendency, it's just a gut level reaction to cues of health and fertility, I would argue, rather than a tendency to

00:10:17think that that that person's healthy and has good qualities that I would want to mix. my genes were to create offspring. And so finding out that it is not a real signal. I'm not sure if that would, like I say, I think that would, does have the effect of reducing attractiveness judgments, but I'm not sure if that we've evolved for that to be the case. Do you think we might have like a general kind of cheater detection thing where it's like, oh, this person is deceiving me in some way.

00:10:44And so it's not like, I mean, cheater detection refers to a specific phenomenon that's different, of course, but in terms of just general. Just general, what do you think would drive the effect of false beauty being a slightly less preferred compared to natural beauty? I think it could be that. I think it probably is something more general like that, just a general tendency to be wary of deception, I guess. I'm intrigued by this finding that it was attenuated but still overall a net benefit. And I think this suggests, at least to me, and I'm curious what Steve thinks about this, is that we, evolved to respond more so to signals than to the underlying property. So I'm imagining a

00:11:26sort of a variation of the study you described where you see someone who's very plain looking and for whatever reason, you know, is a contrived scenario, but they used to be very hot and then they got some surgery and now they're unattractive. And you have a choice between sleeping with this artificially unattractive person who's naturally hot or a person who is artificially hot but naturally is unattractive. Who do you choose? I think most people, especially most men, I think, would choose the artificially hot one because we respond more so to these signals than the underlying sort of trait that it's meant to communicate. At a gut level.

00:11:54At a gut level. I think it's so as well, actually. And actually, maybe, I'm thinking maybe it's not deception exactly that reduces the attractiveness, but maybe the inferences that we make about the personality of the person. Well, that's a insecurity. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I'm speaking from memory about the study, but I actually think that's precisely right.

00:12:12I'll check it after and send it to you over WhatsApp. But if I'm not mistaken, it actually was that there was a negative personality inference. and that that was part of the story. So it was like, yeah, they're more attractive, but now I'm not as impressed by their personality under this condition. And they might be just as impressed by the looks, but we don't judge people just on looks. And so the looks elevated, the personality takes it down.

00:12:35Which is where attractiveness was up, but datability had... Yeah, it was either datability or may have been overall personality perception, but it was some variable in that mix, for short. It's probably worth saying that a lot of this stuff is going to be either subconscious or sort of like peri-subconscious. It's a sort of thing that you intuit it. You don't really know why. It gave me the ick.

00:12:55What the ick is is a kind of nebulous, ephemeral, really hard to grasp onto, I'm not so sure about that thing. But that might actually be pretty evil. You know, it would be great. An evolutionary theory of icks would be wonderful. I've got a PhD student who's working on it right now. No fucking way. Dude, I don't fuck with me on evolutionary psychology, dude. I'm on the fucking frontier.

00:13:22There was a guy, I don't know if it was the same one, but he was presenting a poster at HBess on the evolutionary psychology of VX. So it's something that people are, it's something that people are interested in. It's up and coming, yeah. There's been a couple of publications on it already. So it's my student, Louisa Lee. There were no publications when she started.

00:13:36And then one has come out that, you know, she got scooped. We got scooped, basically. But, yeah, she's doing some good work. Well, what's the, what is the evolutionary psychology of VEK? She's trying to explain it in terms of a matreste, She's predicting that because women on average are choosier, women are more prone to the egg, which is, I don't think anyone would disagree with that intuition, and we've now got good evidence that that's the case.

00:13:58Yeah, and she's looking at it in terms of evolved disgust reactions. That's interesting. Yeah, it is interesting one. And so looking at it in terms of... Behavioral immune system. Yeah, behavioral immune system and evolved disgust reactions in response to sexual stimuli, just sort of stuff that's gross associated with disease and the like and moral disgust as well.

00:14:24I was going to say that maybe something in that women are more adept at reading social cues, which means that if a guy does something which is socially ungainly, he might be able to breeze through it, or his friends might be able to breeze through it, or if a woman was to do it that's the partner of a guy, he might not notice it, whereas if she's able to pay more attention more closely

00:14:43to how people are responding, understanding that sort of social hierarchy a bit more. So it's fascinating. And yeah, there's lots of things that you could do. Being unhygienic, being unhealthy, being rude. But the funny things are a guy trying to pick up a moving ping pong ball. Why is that an ick? Or why is a guy who misses a turn in a car, like doesn't drive dexterously?

00:15:09Why is that a particular, like stuff that's a bit more lifestyley and certainly more. Yeah, more modern novel. I mean, Diana Fleischman said this before. She's very, very attuned to her husband, Jeffrey's sort of social status and his level of competence. And if he misses a turn when driving, she literally feels her attraction to him go down for a little while. And then it comes back up. If he says a joke that doesn't land at a dinner table, she's actively unattracted to him for a little while. And then comes, she's like, I have some psychopathic tendencies.

00:15:39I'm aware of that. And then blew through, just kept on going. I can't see that going in the other direction as much. I can't see. Oh, my miss is Mr. Turn in the car. I'm sorry, darling. I can't have sex with you this evening. I could not.

00:15:51I could never. The way that you would press the indicator, I could never. I mean, we place more value on looks. So would it be something like, you know, seeing, you know, if your spouse, you know, gain some weight or maybe first thing in the morning looks a little disheveled or something along those lines that maybe is the same male response? Men are so much less choosier.

00:16:10Yeah. Even in long-term relationships. I think that that gets offset. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think that it's a reflection, this sex difference in the ick, which Steve says is now backed by good data and is also something that everyone knows anecdotally. I think it reflects different risk levels between men and women, where for men, the biggest risk is, and this is something that a lot of evolutionary psychologists are talking about. Biggest risk is that you miss a mating opportunity, whereas for women, the biggest risk is that you mate with the wrong person. And so it's more important to have like this visceral.

00:16:42response where it's like, oh, you know, that last thing just pushed me over the threshold and you're now selected out. Like, I do not want to... More discerning. Yeah, exactly. What's the... Speaking of the sort of current world of lux maxing guys trying to rise to the top of the level as much as they can, what's the myth of the Chad? Well, so I wrote this piece, the myth of the Chad, and I think it dropped it in the group chat, which is, you know, for a long time, we've heard this story. I think you and I talked about this on a previous podcast. podcast, Chris, because it made some level of intuitive sense that as the dating marketplace has become more deregulated, people can meet each other. The idea of a deregulated mating marketplace. We live in sexual capital, late sexual capitalism. And so now you have, you know, with dating apps, online dating, people can meet each other more easily. We are, you know, supposedly placing more value on looks as a result of social media and dating ads and so on. So the story was, and we saw. And we saw.

00:17:42some statistical trends that supported this notion, at least initially, that a small percentage of men were getting the majority of female attention, and that men are sort of on the lower end of mate value were getting increasingly less female interest. And so the story was, what was it, like 20% of men are getting 80% of the attention. There's some truth to that, at least with regard to sort of match rates and swipe rates on Tinder and so on. But if you look at the actual data you dig into it and more statistics and findings have come out since. You and I've had those discussions a few years ago suggest that actually that story isn't completely true.

00:18:22That in fact, this has been going on for a long time, that very attractive men have always had the opportunity to mate with more women. So when you look at the data, it looks like something like about maybe 18 to 20 percent of men report having three or more sexual partners within the past year. year. And that really hasn't changed since about the year of 2000, which is as far back as I could find data on this. And so you might think, okay, well, that's, there you go. You got the chats. The 20% of men are getting three or more partners a year. Those are the guys, you know, hogging all the women. But then when you look at the sexual behavior of women, you find essentially the same

00:18:59pattern, which is that something like 12 to 18% of women also report three or more sexual partners a year. And what this means is that the vast majority of men and the vast majority of women have relatively unexciting sexual lives. The most common response to the question of how many partners have you had in the past 12 months is one, followed by zero. So most sex is going on relationships, followed by people not having sex at all. And then a small fraction of men and a small fraction of women who are high in sociosexual orientation, very promiscuous and open to short-term mating. They're having a lot of sex with each other. At least partly attractive as well, presumably. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. You're physically attractive. And what I said,

00:19:40is that because dating apps have made this, you know, sort of frictionless and because social media has created this kind of penopticon where, you know, men in particular, you know, they are, you got sort of the pickup artist in red pill guys who claim to be very successful with women bragging about how many women they've hooked up with. And then you have the in cells on the other side of this who are, you know, not bragging, but, you know, I guess whining and complaining about how little sex they're having. This gives easy the impression that, oh, wow, you got one segment of guys who are having all of the sex, and then you have this other section of guys who are having none of the sex, and then women are just passive bystanders who are maybe getting,

00:20:16you know, dup by the pickup artist or the chads or something. But what they suggest actually is that, you know, there is a kind of a chad, but the myth of the chad is that, yeah, that a one segment of guys are having all of the sex with all of the women. And it's not the case that there are, you know, there are fem cells, there are women in relationships, there are women who are just uninterested in dating. And you kind of see the mirror image of this for men as well. And weirdly, it suggests that men and women are more alike than many think, which is maybe a point to your book.

00:20:46It's one of the key ideas in my book, yeah. And I think that the average number of sexual partners that men have, if you exclude sex workers and women, is somewhat higher. But I do think it's a very important point, that, yeah, among the guys who are having sex with lots of women, generally having sex with the women who are having sex, with lots of guys. And that's the sociosexual few, right?

00:21:08Socio's Alexander Dayt Sites. The promiscuous 10% is the kind of meme version of it. But I actually, so I think that tons of people at home and in the YouTube comment section, I 100% think it's interesting and take it for granted that what you're saying is true. But where do you think the myth actually originates from and what do you think explains the, because it's not just necessarily the myth of the chat, it's also the illusion of the chat, where it's like people have this profound felt sense that they're being excluded from the mating market

00:21:39where some other, you know, some gorgeous guys are having tons of fun. Yeah. Well, you know, I think a part of it is the trend of dating apps. So, you know, the swipe rates are very easy to measure. There's been a lot of research on this. And we mistakenly kind of overinterpret the findings of what people see on Tinder or on Hinge, which do show, you know, on Tinder, it's something like 4% of the men get the vast majority of the swipes. And then much smaller numbers, or rather larger numbers of women get liked versus men. Same thing on Hinge, that the top 10% of male users on Hinge get 60% of the likes. And so it's very easy to come away from that thinking, like, oh, that's reality that 10% of the guys are getting 60% of the

00:22:26female attention. There was that other finding about male attractiveness. You guys have probably seen this that okay cupid data that's kind of you know it's it's a little outdated but um it also kind of makes sense in a way that people would come away from that thinking like oh most women are only attracted to that small section of fragment of guys and you know men are much more even and kind of fair in their assessment of women and then i think social media uh as well that you're seeing guys like they take these very anomalous interactions um where women suddenly lose interest in them or ghost them or something and they tell this, you know, elaborate story and it's very attention-grabbing. And then those stories go viral. But the reason they go viral is because they're anomalous and atypical.

00:23:07Normal stories of, hey, like, I met this girl and we really liked each other and now we're engaged. We're getting there. You post that. You'll get, you know, 17 likes. But if you post, you know, I had this one next stand with this girl, but then she ghosted me or like, I, you know, she was leading me on on the app, but then she didn't talk to me anymore. And you tell the story, it's like, oh, it's over boys or whatever. Like, those are the stories that go viral. And then The other point I want to make about this is that, you know, this promiscuous 10%, this, on the side of the women, that is a highly sought after group. And, you know, there is, you know, a small fraction of women who are more promiscuous than other women. And the very attractive men have access to that group.

00:23:50And the unattractive men who see this, they get jealous and they want access to that small group of women. as well. But they mistakenly think that that's all women. Not realizing that there's a huge cohort of women that have had zero or one partner in the last 12 months. It's sort of this, you know, this availability bias thing of like, well, I'm seeing all of this stuff happening online, all of the chatter about sex and chads and whatever, but you're not seeing this dark matter of women who aren't posting, who aren't on the apps, who are just like living their lives. Dark matter. Yeah.

00:24:20I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And now they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen backed by four clinical trials. And in those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Gone are the days of needing to

00:24:57buy a load of pills in the gym parking lot from some juice bro in a cyber truck. But if you're unsure about it, AG1's got a 90-day money-back guarantee. So you can try it every single day for three months and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, an AG1 flavor sampler and that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. I heading to drinkagy1.com slash Modern Wisdom. If there's this Porsche polygamy like Scott Galloway calls it going on, the moment, at least even if it's an online dating, even if it's not represented in who's getting laid and all the rest of it. But if there's some degree of big bucket of attention

00:25:36going towards small number of guys, historically, does that mean that monogamous marriage was basically affirmative action for men? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there was a recent paper about this where they suggested that marriage was affirmative action for sexual redistribution. Yeah, sexual redistribution of women. They also used the phrase DEI for men that, you know, by definition, most guys are not in the top 10% or top 20%. And so monogamous marriage was a way to, you know, sort of pair men up with women one-on-one, and it was a form of, I'll sometimes tongue-in-shek called it sexual communism, sexual social social social. For the deregulation of the dating march in place. And now that we've, you know, we've kind of lifted that norm. Now we're in. Yeah.

00:26:25We went through a phase, I think, you know, maybe arguably starting in the 1960s, we deregulated things, and now we're in this sort of the late stage. And I think now people on, well, for a while on the right, the kind of, I don't know, the Manosphere right have been calling for some kind of a return, return with that B thing. And then on the left increasingly, I think women are becoming fed up and they're the sort of, you know, finding ways to, you know, reinvent, you know, what's that phrase, demisexual? You're this phrase demisexual. I'm only going to sleep with people.

00:26:55that I'm emotionally connected to. Yeah, I'm not going to have sex with a stranger. You know, it requires its own category. It's a special category. Yeah, very rare. Sapio-sexual that's being attracted to people that you're intellectually simulated by. And then there's solo Polly. Solo Polly is my favorite.

00:27:13It's fucking hilarious. Solo Polly is just one person sleeping around. Uh. Okay, just a slide. Yeah, or like, just like a normal Thari or dude. with Ari or dude. Man-hor. Yeah, exactly. Just man-hoaring about. But yeah, the, I wonder whether part of some of the pushback against reintroduce sexual norms, regulate the sort of mating marketplace from women that you do sometimes see online, I mean, it's pushing back against

00:27:46freedom, independence, it kind of harkens back to pre-1960s type of restrictive expectations, gender stereotypes, et cetera. But I wonder if another part of it is that there is this implicit understanding that it maybe benefits men more than it benefits women to have marriage norms because it redistributes. It means that if it's got to be one to one, then maybe I'm going to be less able to compete, whereas if there's a little bit more free-flowingness in the casual sex marketplace, I may be able to show traits that aren't immediately obvious to a partner and be able to get somebody of a higher value, whereas with guys, they're always going to struggle a little bit more because women are choosier. I'm not sure, because I think if that were the case,

00:28:30then women wouldn't be so keen on the idea. And women often are very keen on the idea of having just one guy to themselves rather than having a guy who's going to have other women as well. I think that's why it was a puzzle to me about why it would be pushed back against to encourage monogamous norms from women, given that the benefits, at least traditionally, I'm trying to go through late stage everythingalism to work out where the culture has sort of come into land. Do you understand what I mean? I do. I do.

00:28:56Yeah. I've seen a paper arguing that polygamy actually can be beneficial to women because women can choose to marry a high status guy who's already got a wife and high status rich kind of guy rather than having to either not be married. Totally. Yeah. Wives. Yeah.

00:29:15And it takes away that choice if somebody wants it. that means that the only choice has had no partner or have somebody further down a totem pole. Yeah, I will highlight that this discussion is bordering on a really controversial debate in the evolutionary social sciences, which is whether humans are more like maximally constrained polygynous, where it's like we're naturally an animal where males mate with multiple females and accumulate wives, so to say, but cultural practices and cultural evolution has restrained us. And then the other perspective is that, you know, in as much as we, like obviously humans have a menu of mating systems, as a lot of evolutionary psychologists like to say. But in as much as we have a default state, it's pretty clearly monogamy.

00:30:01And you'll hear different evo social scientists from different backgrounds argue for very different cases. I personally, and I think in reading Steve's work, he's actually been quite influential to me in this, I personally think that, The monogamy case is stronger for a few reasons that I could speak of. And one of them actually is just that what we've said in this conversation is like, yeah, in theory, we've deregulated the market. So it's like, look, if an attractive man, if honestly, even if a kind of good looking man wants to just have infinite sexual partners, essentially, that is on the table for him, right? He can spend a lot of time doing that.

00:30:36But in the data, we're not really seeing people do that. Even though you're now as sexually permitted to do basically whatever you want with minimal judgment, most of what people do is still just do the boring thing and make monogamous. They fall in love. I largely interested in one other person, at least for a while. Yeah, I agree. I agree with my views. Yeah, your wish, which you gave me, then I repeat them.

00:30:59Are we serial monogamists, though? I mean, I've seen some ethnographies, hunter-gatherers, where, you know, it's common to pair bond with one person, maybe have a child, maybe two children, and then the kind of, uh, uh, uh, you know, The romantic feelings can dissipate and then form a new relationship. That is very common. That is swinging to. Yeah, yeah. Very common.

00:31:20I've seen data as well. In those kind of societies, though, often like a small number, a small but non-trivial number, 5% or so, first marriages do last for life. So I think serial monogamy is probably more common. And I think we know that because most people fall in love more than once in their lifetimes. But it does sometimes happen. And we have a pillageness streak as well. I think.

00:31:45But, yeah, so when the guard rails are often, there are no strict rules, you tend to find that most relationships are pair bonds and largely exclusive pair bonds. But you do also find that you have a small level of polygyneem and a small level of, and, yeah, small level of full life mating. But switching is not uncommon. Can you judge GPT? How many people, how many romantic partners does the average person, fall in love with across their lifespan.

00:32:15Because until you had reliable contraception, anybody that you fell in love with, presumably you were having sex with, and outside of either infertility issues or fertility compatibility issues, pretty much all of those people eventually would get pregnant if it was more than, I don't know, a couple of years, something like that.

00:32:32And the honeymoon period typically lasts around about that long. Yeah, it's like 85% fertility for a couple for one year, then it jumps up to in the 90s after two years. Here we go. So, 2026 Kinsey Institute's study of over 10,000 US adults found the average number of passionate love experiences is 2.05. 14% reported never having been passionate in love, 28% reported being passionate in love once, 30% twice, 17% three times, 11% four or more times, measured passionate love, the intense falling in love experience, not long-term attachment or commitment. Some people

00:33:02can fall deeply in love only once, others do multiple times. People also experience renewed feelings of love within the same long-term relationship, which is harder to count. So about two times on average throughout your life. So that would suggest, like, if you don't have reliable contraception, if having sex leads to having babies, and if you're having sex when you're in love with somebody, you know, 11% of people just going through the machinate, forget culture, forget anything over the top, like, those people would have cycled through multiple partners across their lifespan. Surely this is just the most unencumbered that you don't get to dictate your attachment system. unfortunately, as much as lots of people would want to not fall out of love with a partner that

00:33:43they're attached to or fall in love with a partner that they can't or whatever. This seems to just suggest that's what our system is doing. Most people by a distance, only is it, so 14 plus 28, so 42%, so only 42% of humans, less than half, have said that it's only happened once or not. that it hasn't happened twice or more. I think that's interesting because it aligns with the data I had mentioned about a number of sex partners as well, that most people say that in the past 12 months

00:34:16they've had sex with one person or zero people and that a small number of people, I don't know what the number exactly was up there, three or more times, it was a small fragment of people who say that they've had sex, or rather, well, have sex, have had three or more sexual parts in the past year, but then also fallen in love three or more times in their lives.

00:34:32So I think this is like this is like this one. What's going on there? We tilt toward monogamy. But then maybe a small percentage of people are more polygynous or high socio-sexual orientation, less menagerness. Yes. Yes. Yes. One thing in this kind of discussion is to remember individual differences.

00:34:47Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That humans aren't all the same. Indeed. We have different mating strategies. Yeah. What's this new study that shows preference for resourceful partners softens when women are richer?

00:34:59Are you talking about the P&S paper that we did? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is something that I could talk about for hours. please, you know, tell me to shut up after 30 to 50 seconds if you can manage it. But basically... What are you going to say 30 to 50 minutes? I was like, all right, did it kick back? Crack open a ton.

00:35:18That's funny. Yeah, so there's been a longstanding debate over the last, I would say, 37 years. I mean, it's been intense for 37 years, but it's, you know, it actually predates that even about the causes of sex differences in mate preferences. and a huge variable that people consider in this topic, probably the variable if you were going to pick just one, is gender inequality. And if you're going to pick a second one, it's probably income. And basis gender inequality mean? Well, I'm glad you asked because it means different things depending on which social scientist you're talking to. So we know, and anyone who listened to this podcast has heard a million times that men have a stronger mate preference for looks on average, at least certainly in their state of mate preferences and in some revealed measures as well.

00:36:10And then women have a stronger state of mate preference for resources. And then obviously there's the sex difference in age preferences where men have a preference for youth and then and then women have a preference for slightly older than them throughout their lives. So you've got all those differences, and there's been this very longstanding debate over the extent to which this is explicable with reference to social and economic factors, and the extent to which it's explicable by evolutionary factors. So what we did, if you go through this debate, there's been tons of cross-cultural studies. There's been seven really, really big ones. and those have generally found that, I mean, in five out of the seven have found something there with regards to mate preferences for resources and gender inequality. All of the ones that checked age found that when gender inequality is lower,

00:37:06mate preferences and age gaps get smaller. And then the beauty basically doesn't move. In fact, there's even some evidence that it goes in the opposite direction in one of those analyses. So you've got this kind of mixed result there. And then you can look at the individual level studies as well, where you look at when people have more money, what happens to their mate preferences. And I could talk about that more. It's actually a bit controversial.

00:37:31So there's different ways of measuring this. But basically what it finds is that it does not move in the way that you would expect from the social role theory perspective, where it's like, oh, when women have more money, they're going to start wanting young, gorgeous men, individual women who are. rich. That doesn't seem to happen. However, there are some caveats there. So we did, we've got all this cross-sectional data. Basically, you're hearing about correlational study, correlational study, until the cows come home. And we said, well, we're testing causal relationships, and we know what's happening correlationally. And there's been critiques, both from the evolutionary psychologists

00:38:08and from the social rule theorists about the correlational nature of these studies, depending on which ones they don't like, essentially. And so we said, okay, well, we'll do an experiment. And so we did a really complicated, unfortunately complicated complexity is not a virtue, but it's just necessary for this sort of study design. We did a 45 condition experiment that varied people's individual income and local gender economic inequality. And then we tried to see how those variables would predict changes and make preferences. So basically, participants were put inside of a virtual environment where their economics were different. Now, I'm sure the timer has probably gone for five minutes. I feel like I'm giving a massive speech here, but it is just a complicated background

00:38:48to review. And what we found was actually something that was slightly inconsistent with the EvoSyke perspective, slightly inconsistent with the social role perspective, and actually most consistent with a perspective that's been common in behavioral ecology for a very long time, which is that people will adjust their mate preferences strategically based on what the environment incentivizes them to want. And what we found is that when people are poor, as in as individuals they're poor, or as in the opposite sex is rich and their sex is disenfranchised, they upregulate their mate preferences for resources. So they wanted, this is true in ranked preferences, in rated preferences, and also in hypergamous preferences. So desire to mate with someone who's richer than yourself.

00:39:30And this goes for both men and women. For both men and women, yes. Is the effect less of a men than it is for women? The effect, it's really complicated. and it depends on which specific measure you're talking about. And so it depends. We could kind of go into detail in there. Our main analyses were testing the effects of the variables on both sexes. It's interesting, man. And we didn't find beauty preferences moved,

00:39:54which actually wouldn't make sense to a social role theorist. Can you explain? As in social rule theorists, they generally say, oh, the reason that mate preferences for beauty are different is because there are social and economic gender differences. But those experimentally, it doesn't really show up in the cross-cultural data to begin with, but also doesn't show up in the experiments. And then weirdly, the age differences didn't move.

00:40:18The age preferences, those didn't move. And I really expected them to because we pre-registered that we thought that was going to happen because that's what the cross-cultural literature showed, but it didn't. However, make preferences for resources, which is really what you'd expect to move in this sort of experiment, because that's the strategic variable that's being adjusted. It makes a lot of sense. I think verbally, like, I could talk about the modeling work and I could talk about it in like a really obscure way. But at a very basic level, I find it very intuitive that it's like, if I was poor and if women were rich, yeah, I would want to. You get a prioritise it. Yeah. I would want to date someone rich more than I currently do now. And vice versa, like, we even saw this in our qualitative data where, you know, when women were in conditions where it's like, oh, you have a lot of money and men are really poor. They're like, well, then I don't really need to date for money. That's fine. Interesting. But do you think that that's an evolved tendency? I would kind of. think that there's a evolutionary push toward men being, sorry, women being more interested

00:41:11in resources and status than men are. But they're also just, you just think about things and you just might reason, well, what's the best way for me to make a living in life? Well, I'm just going to reason about the fact that it would be better for me to marry this person who's wealthy than to measure, than to marry someone who's poor. If you see what I mean, so you could just explain it as a rational thing, a reason to thing rather than an evolved thing. Yeah. So I take an evolutionary anthropological. approach. My whole background is anthropology. And so it's slightly different from the evocyc approach where there's actually this maneuver that's used in Evo-anthro work, which is called the phenotypic gambit,

00:41:46where you basically say, well, I don't really know what's happening inside the mind. The mind is a bit of a black box. But I'm interested in the inputs and I'm interested in the outputs. So let me see what the inputs. Let me change the inputs and see if the outputs match what you would expect from a strategic perspective. Yeah. So look, it could be the case that it was purely conscious strategic thinking, which is also an evolved trait, right? That's an evolved ability that we should use presumably in ways that help our fitness. Otherwise, it couldn't have evolved. If strategic thinking didn't improve fitness, it wouldn't evolve. But there have been some scholars like Angostead in 2006 who have played with the idea that there might actually be

00:42:26a domain-specific, evolved psychological module in the mind that is designed to essentially detect scarcity and change your resource preferences to some degree. I'm not sure if he focused on scarcity. He looked at a couple variables, but I do remember that he did posit this. So I'm open to the idea that there's some evolved resource scarcity detection thing, but I don't know because the experiment didn't test that. It just tested the inputs and outputs. Yeah. If you consider that the reason that the age didn't show up is that the single biggest predictor of wealth is age, and if you control for wealth, much of what is added by age gets taken away. That's exactly what we wrote in the paper.

00:43:03Dude, don't fucking test me, okay? I know this shit. On this point about resources, so if you... 95% of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Momentus built Fiber Plus, because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip.

00:43:25Fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed, everything else you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. That's why I plan to make my next big dump momentous. Best of all, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days,

00:43:54and if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first. first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-O-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Yeah, this is generally sort of controversial, but the idea of the evolutionary adapted

00:44:23environment or the environment of evolutionary adaptation, wasn't scarcity more or less the norm? So this idea that we have an evolved module to detect scarcity versus abundance, I mean, everyone was roughly equally poor because in these communities people shared just about everything. Yes, you had talented hunters, but generally my understanding is they shared their spoils. And it wasn't until after the agricultural revolution that we were able to stockpile large amounts of resources. Well, yeah, this is actually something that's controversial in anthropology because it's true that if you go off of modern hunter-gatherers, then you do get this impression that like, oh, scarcity is the norm. But all the good places became agricultural. So it's like there could have, like you look at, there are animals where it's like they're in environments that they're very well adapted to and they're not really struggling.

00:45:10And I would say that there had been around for long enough for us to have been able to develop modules that would be baked in to be adapted to. Well, again, I personally don't have an opinion on the module thing. So it's not something that I'm, it's actually not something that I think is true. It's just something that I'm kind of putting out there. Like I'm genuinely open about mechanisms. I could hear any side of the story. but I do think that it's like there are there is some interesting shit here like for example

00:45:34there's the studies that we've talked about before where when men are primed with scarcity such as when they're hungry or when they're acutely poor or whether when there's a local famine they shift to preferring larger women right and that seems to suggest that there may have been some fluctuations in how valuable larger women were that selected for some and also it suggests that there was fluctuations in how large women were Yeah, exactly. There were times we spoke about this earlier on. There were times of surplus to the point where people could at least gain a little bit more body fat. Yeah, and there are very realistic depictions of obese people in prehistory. I know it's, I know it sounds surprising. If you manage to be fat in prehistory, that is a real accomplishment. Yeah. Real accomplishment. Yeah. So I think that there probably were some, I think there probably were some cases. You won't find it in modern hunter gatherers because they've been pushed out by the agriculturalists to these places that are really difficult to live for the most part. Oh, that's so fucking interesting. Okay, so when we do studies of modern hunter-gatherers by design, they're not in the desirable locations.

00:46:36No, they're usually-un locations have all been populated by modern people. So modern hunter-gatherers are in the scraps, the bottom of the barrel from an ecological perspective, from a soil-conditioned perspective, from how much wildlife they've got to hunt. So that's just not, whereas you could have the equivalent of a Galapagos Valley type thing with no natural predators and a. abundance of food and fresh running water, and even if you're not yet at the point of doing agricultural induced abundance, you're still so overwhelmed just from a resource perspective. There's fucking deer running everywhere and rabbits and berries. And there is paleoanthological evidence of these massive kill sites where it's just like you wouldn't believe how many animals they were killing. So it's like, it seems like they may have

00:47:21been doing okay in some cases. But I don't know. Again, the module thing, it's, it's, it's, it's tricky, right? It's, it's genuinely not something that I've thought very deeply about, because it's not an interest area for me. So what's the adaptive rationale, though, if there's lots of abundance, you would want a more attractive, a more, a more, a heavier woman. Oh, right. Well, that's, that's separate from the, separate from the P&AS paper. Indeed. Yeah, yeah. So the rationale there, yeah, exactly. So the, so some people call it that, and others call it the insurance hypothesis, and there's some kind of disagreements as to what exactly is going on there. It's in scarcity specifically.

00:48:00So in environments of scarcity, they prefer... Yeah, so you can say it the other way around. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. It's something that shows up with a lot of different study designs, which is pretty cool, right? Like you can do the cross-cultural anthropological stuff and see like, oh, yeah, among the South African Zulu, they're saying that up to, or in Jamaica or in St. Kitts, they're saying that, you know,

00:48:22women who have BMI's in the third. 30s are quite beautiful. And then you go somewhere like really like affluent Singaporean women or something like that. They have different preferences. So, or career or someplace. Then you see experimentally where when men are hungrier, they have a preference for larger women. And the idea is that it's like, well, what is fat? Fat is literally like a bank account filled with calories. And so if you're in an environment where it's, and also we know that when women are acutely starving, they can, they, they, they become infertile, right? So it's, so it's not just like, oh, this person knows where food is and will be able to feed me and offspring and do provisioning and stuff. It's not just that.

00:49:03It's also like a practical thing of like, oh, if we're in a famine right now, these women can definitely get pregnant. These women definitely can't. So that's, that's a huge point. But what is it flip then in conditions of non-abundance? Yes. This is what's so, this is what's so much more difficult to explain. And the leading hypothesis, I would say, for why thinness is preferred in abundance is because it's a very reliable signal to youth and nulla parity. So it's one of those things. But isn't that the case in all societies and isn't some degree of chubbiness assigned in all societies, regardless of their abundance or scarcity, that the person is going to be able to get

00:49:42pregnant? I'm just not sure why I'm not really persuaded by the adaptive rationale for why it was switch and also why it was switched so quickly and you just get a little bit hungry and suddenly your preference of switch. and then eat some food and then they suddenly switch back. The switches are very small in those studies. So we're talking about like a 10 pound difference. Like it's like, I believe the dining hall study, for example, which has been replicated.

00:50:06It is pretty cool where it's men going into a dining hall versus coming out. Yeah. It was a small shift. Like it wasn't like they were preferring completely different looking women. But the cross-cultural stuff where it's a really big differences in environment, then you're seeing genuinely different beauty standards. And a lot of people say it's like, oh, they're like, it's, it's interesting how much Western male psychology often resists this. Like I've had interviewers really push back on me like, you know, isn't this just that they're taking what they can get? Like these men don't have options and so they have to go with the bigger women.

00:50:41And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not understanding. It's not, it's not, it's not, they are, they are given a chart of body types and asked what's attractive and to what degree. That's what they prefer. 2 a.m. at the bar, that's all that's left. Yeah, that could just be a status thing, right? I wonder if it's that certain body types get linked with status in different cultures. And cultures where there's not a lot of abundance to be able to get bigger indicates that you have good access to resources.

00:51:08It becomes associated in status and it's the reverse in more abundant societies. On this point, total conjecture here. But in both environments, fatness or thinness could signal conscientiousness. So if you are in an environment of abundance and your thing, that signals impulse control and the ability to withstand temptation, conscientious personality. And then in environments of scarcity, if you're big, that means you're conscientious because you went out and acquired the calories. And you're a hard worker. That's really cool. Yeah. I like that. So the status, the status link is really interesting. What you're saying is really interesting.

00:51:38And it does fit with the cross-cultural beautification research as well, where what we see is that, I would say broadly, this isn't based on one study, but many, you know, individual sites, essentially. So maybe you do like a true cross-cultural regression and it doesn't come out. But it does seem, based on reading individual accounts, that in environments where food is abundant, the signal is like, oh, I'm going to increase movement and restrict calories. And then you go to some places where, you know, they have the fattening huts, for example, where it's like restrict movement and increase calories in order to try and be more targeted. What's a fattling hut? So this is a, something that's seen in some cultures where women before marriage will restrict their movement

00:52:29and increase their caloric intake in order to... And you're a hut? I don't know if it's always literally the case. But yeah, yeah. Where's the hut? There's actually even, I was reading one account and I can't remember which, I think it was Mauritania, but I'm not sure, where it was them talking about how, and I really realized like, oh, this is a beauty preference. Like, this is real because they were having to stop the men from spying on the women who were in the

00:52:58fattening huts because they were coveting, they were coveting this. So it was like, so it was like they really wanted to see. There's a supermodel beauty pageant going on. That's a cent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not a dog eating contest. Yeah. So it's just a really.

00:53:11I imagine actual supermodel contest as well, the same thing. Yeah. So I would say that the state, the status thing is interesting. I have no doubt that there is that that could be part of it. it. But when I look at the full range of evidence and include the hunger studies, it's like, well, the status benefits of thinness or fatness are the same. Going into the dining hall versus coming out and the mate preference is still shifting. I think there's probably some kind of mechanism there.

00:53:34I got fucking ripped on the internet until the guy realized that the clip had been cut, both before and after what I meant, what I actually said, about saying, I think that OZempic is more pushed back against by people who are in shape than people who are out of shape because it derogates the signal of I got here naturally and there is a sense that that is somehow superior, that is somehow better. And that whole world of when you can manipulate the smoothness of your skin using makeup or face tune or cosmetic surgery, when you can get limb lengthening surgery or you can wear boots that have got here, heels on them. All of my friends, all of my friends wear cowboy boots because it's a two-inch height advantage whilst wearing a cool piece of footwear. And in Texas, you can get away with it.

00:54:27Like all of these different ways, it says it's this arms race that's permanently going on, but what you need to do is actually scrutinize now. And maybe this is part of the reason that people are more hypervigilant, that there are more ways to cheat the system to bypass what this signal is supposed to mean. Are you actually in good shape? Or are you on a lot of T-R-T. Like, do you actually have the ability to gain muscle or are you somehow, are you speed running that? Are you actually youth fecundity, nullaparity, or is you got foot reduction surgery and have you be not, you know what I mean? Like, all of the different, I didn't really, I found this out a couple of weeks ago. I didn't realize that women's feet grow, like when they have kids.

00:55:10Like women's feet get bigger, which is why there's a preference for smaller feet. Did you hear this from World Coast Dull in my case? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it true? Well, you always got the sex doll stuff. study as well where it's like those sex dolls have tiny, tiny feet. And it's like, why would that be? And he's like, oh, it would even be like unusable feet. It's part of the super super simulmonary. Yeah, exactly. Fish area and runaway, but in reverse. No foot at all. Yeah, that's how up to. Going back to the sort of inequality thing, what is the state of the gender pay gap in big cities now? Because I saw some data. Been for a while, it was 29 that women

00:55:43were out earning men by about £1,000. I think now it's up to 31, 32. Does anyone know this? Don't know the exact numbers, but I do know that in a lot of cities it's reversed and that young women are earning more than young men. Yeah, major metro areas in the U.S., so New York, D.C., Boston, L.A., I think Seattle as well. I don't know the state of Austin, but it wouldn't surprise me if Austin showed the same pattern as well. For under 30s. Yeah, yeah.

00:56:08I think it's squeaking into the 31s, 32s now. And that's what's going to be really interesting. Like, yeah, maybe you're right, and we've managed to, preference for resourceful partners has reduced as women have gotten richer. There was some studies a little while ago. Vincent Harenham put this one out in his paper from like, article from like six years ago that suggested that very high-powered career women had an increased preference for more high-powered men.

00:56:38So ambitious people desire more ambitious partners, specifically women to men. The effect didn't reverse. but it seems that what you're suggesting here maybe for the middle bit of the bell curve perhaps when you get to the top 10% of hyper-ambitious people that somehow flips because they've warped so much of their sense of self-worth around ambition that inevitably it's going to bleed into

00:57:04what they find sexually attractive to or the desirable in a partner or maybe there's such an outlier that they breach some threshold of being able to talk to the normies about what they're going to, you know what I mean? All of these things like an elite athlete would probably be good if their partner at least understands how the game of American

00:57:20football's played. Yeah. Right. I think you can take the gender economic inequality findings of ours to the bank because they're consistent with the cross-cultural literature. The income finding is very interesting, but it's matched with the cross-sectional literature on individuals. I don't know what any of this means.

00:57:38Okay. So it is true that higher income women, uh, in the, So in our experiment, there was a broad, like they were less interested in mating up economically. So higher income women less interest in mating up. But it's true also that in the wild, higher income women tend to still have strong preferences. I was about this. What you see in the real world is like high achieving, highly educated, high income women tend to marry men who are still doing at least as. well as they are. So there's a couple caveats on that broad pattern. One thing that's interesting

00:58:22that comes from the social role theorists is that they say, well, richer women are qualitatively different from poorer women in that they are different in lots of ways. And so to say, oh, they're different in this way, it's not really controlled. That's part of the reason we did an experiment, by the way. But then also, richer women have stronger mate preferences in general, like in Koyoma's research, in Luz research, they want hotter guys too. And, and in fact, what do you think is going on there? Well, I mean, I was an old David Buzz study that literally said, like, attractive women want it all. Yeah, like that was the type of us. But rich women, rich women also won it all. And I think that part of it is that people who are,

00:59:02people who are good at, people who are good at getting stuff probably are confident in their ability to get stuff, people who are, you know, high achieving. I think that it's very, like my older sister is a successful banker. If she has a preference for a guy who's doing well economically, that's like that's a very realistic preference, whereas for a woman who's working at a gas station, that's a very unrealistic make preference. And then also when you look at the ratios of preference, as opposed to just the absolute preference, I do have to kind of tip my hat to the social role people a little bit on that, where it's like it does seem that even though richer women have a stronger mate preference for resources, they have a lower relative mate preference for

00:59:43resources in Luz data, for example. So it's like, I want, so it's like, I want, so it's like, I'll put it in a kind of imaginary example. It's like you talk to a poor woman, exemplary poor woman, and she says, you know, I kind of want a rich guy. And I kind of want a hot guy. And then you talk to an exemplary rich woman, and it's like, I really want a rich guy. And you say, oh, it doesn't match the thing. But then they say, but I really, really want a hot guy. And I also really want a guy who's going to take care of the kids. And I also want a guy who shares my same political beliefs. And it's, like, oh man, so they just have higher standards across the board, and as a relative preference,

01:00:17it seems to decline. Also, I would say that there's the... That sounds like it increases, not declines. So it increases absolutely, but then maybe decreases relatively. So it's like... So it's like if I, they're, they're maybe able to relax that preference relative to relative to other preferences, but not relative to their own level. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't drop away, though. It doesn't drop away. And I think they used to predict that it would. Then it's just there because women are poor. There's a household that we need to hit, and we can portion this out however we want between the two different partners. Inasmuch as there's a winner, yeah, in as much as there's a winner on that bickering between the Evo-psics and the social psychologists, the Evo-pses won that one because it was pretty clearly predicted, like, hey, richer women are going to have a reduced make preference for resources, and then they tested it in a bunch of different ways, and it didn't.

01:01:06But there is some caveats. What's fascinating here is it's just people with high standards have high standards. Yeah. the high standards that got them to be valedictorian, the high standards that got them to get a high-powered degree and then a good career, and then to work at it to get promotion, and to make it to C-suite or become partner.

01:01:21And then when it came to choosing a partner, they have high-standard, high-standard, high-standard. It's just kind of... It's a sort of thing that your parents would understand. If they have high standards for themselves and their own... For everything else. ...then also for a partner...

01:01:36You see this with the research on perfectionism, that perfectionists... It comes in at least two broad buckets, but maybe three, I think, actually. The first one is perfectionism around your own behavior and your own standards. But the other is perfectionism for the people around you's behavior and standards, too. This is one of the problems that perfectionists have built themselves into a more perfect life. It's not one-to-one. It might actually be negative.

01:02:00But you have pushed yourself unreasonably to raise your standard of living. And then as you become more of an outlier in terms of your perfectionism in your own life, you look for more perfectionism from a higher baseline, which is your new one, in the people around you. And that happens more on average from people that are perfectionists. Yeah, interesting. You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown. It's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep. The eight sleep pod five comes with a smart cover you throw in your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. And now they've added the world's first temperature regulating

01:02:39duvet and pillowcase. So you've got 360 degree coverage for deep, uninterrupted rest. It's like being Walt Disney without the cryogenic chamber and the racism. Best of all, their autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns and makes adjustments to improve your sleep in real time. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That's why 8-sleep has been clinically proven to add up to one hour of quality sleep per night. They have a 30-day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.

01:03:10Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below. Are heading to 8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Another thing I'll say on that is that there is also the caveat of the, I mean, I actually really would love to hear Steve's thoughts

01:03:31on revealed preferences, state anniversary. If we can gently steer the conversation, if I can ask the captain of the ship. Take a hard fucking left-up. Put the hat on. To steer off that. I've actually wanted to hear his opinion. Put it on.

01:03:42Put it on. But there is the, there is the, there is a, oh, this is going to be terrible in my head. But there is the revealed element where it's like, if you look at women now today, and this is from the Institute of Family Studies, where they, it's kind of, it's a kind of a way of visualizing the data more than anything, but they bucketed different income brackets. Yeah. And in the top 20% of women, like the top quintile, They are already, on average, are dating down very slightly economically. The bottom two quintiles of men are doing the same thing. Yeah, they're dating up.

01:04:14They're dating up. So there's this really weird kind of thing there where it's like you can say in the abstract, and I'm teeing you up for some thoughts on stated versus revealed, but you can say in the abstract, oh, rich or women, they have a stronger mate preference to made up, let's say. But then you see what they're doing and it's like, oh, they're less likely to do it. So it's like, what does stronger mean in that context? Yeah, but they're necessarily the fact that they,

01:04:35on average going with somebody who's earning somewhat less than them isn't necessarily because that's what they prefer. It's what's available. There's not, at those kind of echelons, there's just not much available at all.

01:04:49Tall girl problem. Tall girl problem. Exactly. Okay, so if there's a shortage of tall men, then you'll settle for a guy who's not. Yeah, like tall women are probably also less likely to. Exactly, not because they prefer shorter men. So I don't think that's revealing a preference necessarily.

01:05:04Well, what about the, what would you, could you, I don't know if you've been following Paul Eastwick's work on stated versus real preferences. I've been, you know, I've been reading a lot of his scientific work. I haven't read his book yet. But I would love a rejoinder to his, so he makes the claim that essentially, I'll summarize it and then maybe you can tell me what you think about it. But he makes the claim that, yes, in survey data, you see these consistent sex differences in what men and women want. But when you measure it through speed dating or through how these stated preferences predict romantic evaluations of partners, well, then women care a lot more about looks than they say,

01:05:43and men care a little more about resources than they say, such that there's essentially no sex difference. And I think I even saw an excerpt from his book where he says, well, how could these sex differences in preferences have evolved if they don't result in behavior, if they're just resulting in survey items. Now, I don't necessarily buy that kind of, I buy his data. I don't necessarily buy the follow-up part of the argument, but I'd love to hear with your billion years of sex difference in the background, what's the, what's your joinder?

01:06:11Well, first of all, let me say, I think he's a great scholar. I don't agree with him on this, but I do think he's a very good scholar, and he's worth taking seriously and reading his work. So I think he seems to be, he seems to focus a lot on the two lines of evidence that don't show sex differences in mate preferences. and exclude pretty much everything else. So one thing he focuses on the speed dating data that he's personally done and often doesn't find the differences that you might expect.

01:06:38I'm not sure if it's representative samples for a start, like a lot of the studies that he's done have been university students, all of whom are quite possibly, I mean, presumably do have pretty good career prospects. So there's not going to be a huge amount of variance there necessarily. In a speed dating context, you don't get to know somebody particularly well, so their looks are going to be a large part of what shapes your assessment of them. He points out that a lot of the data that evolutionary psychologists look at dating app data, for instance, is evolutionarily novel. It's not a speed dating. It's an evolutionary novelty. It's nothing like what happens in reality.

01:07:20But he's happy there because you don't find the differences that you expect to find. So he focuses on that. And actually, there is some speed dating. research that does show some of the standard differences. Rob Kersbann, I think, did one study that did find it. So it's mixed rather than showing no effect at all of the standard, evolutionarily psychology predictors stuff. With the revealed preferences, I think that, well, I don't know, it's also, I'm a bit dubious about it, partly just because it goes against the 90% of

01:07:56other, or 95% of other research. including real world data that does find directions, effects in the direction you'd expect, like women are more likely than men to leave a guy who is unemployed, who becomes unemployed, or fails to earn a decent living. And actually, there's one reason that the revealed preferences data might not be accurate, is that when you're looking at how important it is in a relationship that the guy is earning quite a bit among current couples, those are current couples and there's going to be a bunch of couples

01:08:30who partnerships that have dissolved already and you're going to catch them as they lose their job before they do exactly and so you're just looking at the subset that remains after those kind of processes have happened so you're going to have reduced variance in terms of ability to make a living and earn a good wage and reduced variance

01:08:48therefore means that the correlation is going to be weaker and other things are going to become more important seemingly more important but maybe that's probably the data rather than the fact that women actually don't care more about that after all than men. Did you see the worldwide preference matching paper? I think I did, yeah. Yeah.

01:09:07Yeah. Last year, right? Yeah, so that was one to kind of remind people. I know that you spoke to Eastwick about it on the show, so people may already know. It was the first episode that I did with. Yeah. So it was basically he had people, and I'm summarizing someone else's work, so there's a chance I make an an egregious error. We're not around academics yet.

01:09:24So it's... Directionally correct. So the directionally correct summary is that you had people assess their romantic partners on various traits and then saw how much those assessments correlated with their overall romantic evaluations of them. And in that, he found no sex difference. And he also found some weird findings. Like the number one thing people wanted was someone, by that measure, was someone good in bed. Yeah.

01:09:50So the overall, overall romantic evaluation was most, which is intuitive. but it's very difficult to separate that out from the fact that you're in a relationship with someone and needing to be physically intimate with them regularly like almost all sex for all the myth of the Chad and the fucking girls being ran through and guys

01:10:08are manhors and all the rest of it almost all sex the whole galaxy of sex occurs in relationships and then there's one brown dwarf star on the outside that's casual sex from a like portioning the sex across this exoplanet Yeah, it is.

01:10:25Am I wrong? That everyone on the other planet is looking at. It's almost all sex occurs inside of relationships. Yeah. Right? Like the global amount of sex that happens. In the relationship. It's almost all inside of one form of relationship or another.

01:10:36Yeah. Did you see Jake Kozlowski from Keeper AI put up the Ask Men if they'd marry down on three axes? I think I'd DM him every time he tweets out new data. I'm like, can I get another look at that? Can I go a little bit closer on this? Jake's got the possibility to be a really fascinating source of stated preferences with real world results. Real world incentive. So for the people that don't know, Keeper AI is an AI matchmaking service. It's 50 grand. The guy pays the women don't. It's five

01:11:08grand per date for the first, for each date for the guy. On top of the 50. It's credited against it, but it's only credited against it up to the first five. So if you have like 10 dates in order to get there, then you're going to pay 75. Anyway, they have a pretty comprehensive. intensive psychometric evaluation, personality testing, all of these sorts of things. Pull up the Keeper AI website, Jared, it's kind of fun. And anyway, because he's got this raw data and he's happy to aggregate it and presumably the terms and conditions just say like, hey, fucking open this sucker up. Asked if they'd marry down on three axes.

01:11:44Women say no far more than men every time. Earns less. Women are 12 more likely, 12 times more likely to refuse. Less intelligent, six times more. Less educated, four times more. marrying down is a near deal breaker for women and a non-issue for men consistent across all three. So especially when you bundle those together, like that is a real fucking covariate bastard. But a multivariate bastard, what I realized, thinking about Eastwick stuff, if you're in a world where the new ecology involves this ability to sterile, artistically design what it is that you want, like stated preferences become revealed preference.

01:12:23Does this make, am I saying? Yeah, no, it makes sense. And what's funny is that I actually DM'd Jake that exact point where it's like... Don't fuck with me, dude. I'm on the fucking level of the academics. All day, I'm on fire today. One and a half new tonics, don't fuck with me.

01:12:40You've been anticipating a lot of things. And it's interesting because it's not... I don't really think it is a stated preference in the traditional sense because it's a stated preference with consequence. And if you actually look at the tradition... Proper incentive. Yeah, so I'm very...

01:12:53interested in stated versus revealed preferences. I'm very interested in which people assigned to what. And there's actually precedent for this scholarly precedent where in Buss and Schmidt's preferences and behavioral manifestations, I think that they had classified ads as a, as a behavioral manifestation essentially, where it's like it's not like an expression, but like what people are actually shopping for. Skin and the game. And so that's, yeah, exactly. So it's like if I tell my matchmaker, can I please have a. young wife, that's more than just a statement. That's an action, yeah, in a way.

01:13:29But I don't know. Is this a unique, is because of matchmaking, I guess, arranged marriages are a kind of matchmaking, but they're not done with, hey, here's my fucking list of requirements type thing. Is this a new category that's somewhere in between stated and revealed preferences when you look at something like Keeper AI and you go in with your preferred list of things? Is it stated? Is it revealed?

01:13:49What is it? It's converting your state of preference into a reveal preference by. going out of the world and making it happen and putting skin in the game to do so. So it feels closer to stated, I mean, revealed would be, because you can, I can give, you can be my coach or whatever, the matchmaker, and I can give you the list, and then you show me someone and I can still choose. Actually, I may give you this list, but then I meet this person, and this actually isn't what I want. Let me scratch these two things off the list and add this other thing and then go that direction. So it still feels more stated. The two, two slamming lines I've

01:14:17seen recently, one from Jake that says, being good at dating apps is mostly orthogonal to being a good spouse. The people that win on dating apps are actually probably not the people that you want to get into a relationship with. And then Diana Fleischman, female dating strategy tells women to date only men who ask first, text within three days, pay and reliably plan the next date. Sure, this might be a good filter to make sure he's really into you, but it's also a way to select a man who is great at wooing side chicks.

01:14:42Right, right. Just the ability to play the game. But the Jake one about being good at dating apps is orthogonal to being a good spouse would be a fantastic study to do. How many swipes have you got? How many first dates have you got? It doesn't even matter really about conversions. And then how likely were you to cheat, infidelity, level of relationship satisfaction with your other partners down the line? Like, tell me about your online dating era and tell me about your spouse's relationship satisfaction now and the quality of your relationship. Like, it might actually be that the traits that make you good on a dating app

01:15:16opposite contrary to what make you a good spouse. There was a study a few years ago on Tinder users back when I think Tinder was still the number one dating app in the late 2010s and this was only on college students and they looked at students who had never used Tinder and students who were currently using Tinder and they looked at the dark triad personality traits and found that the users of Tinder scored significantly higher. Pretty sizable effect sizes in 0.3.4. for higher for the Tinder users and the non-tender users.

01:15:50So these are more psychopathic, more Machiavellian, more narcissistic. But I didn't say, as I recall, they didn't say anything about sort of, were the successful users higher on the dark triad traits than the less successful users? But, you know, this is, presumably people don't want spouses who are high on dark triad traits, but that's what those are the people who are using these, these apps. They're more likely to use them. There is plenty of research. I think, though, that shows revealed preferences for some of the traditional Evo-Syte predictions,

01:16:21like the fact that guys who are wealthier, more likely to get married, more likely to stay married, more likely to have kids, more likely to get remarried if they divorce, whereas it doesn't predict that anywhere in there as well for women. Women's wages don't. And women's looks are a better predictor of whether they get married, and the wealth of their marital partner then is the case for men. Men's looks don't predict that anywhere near as well.

01:16:51And all of that's revealed preferences, right? Did you see that witness study looking at facial attractiveness who's 12 times more influential on swiping behavior than height is? Facial attractiveness? Yeah. Yeah, so they did. So I tweeted that and someone replied, photo competition app shows photos for the most important factor.

01:17:11and I was like, oh, you did kind of get them there. But it is an interesting, it is an interesting study, right? Trying to find some white pills. Yeah, so what they did was they tried to, so what they did was they tried to essentially set up a gamified dating app. Importantly, there was no height filters on this app. So that's usually how people see height in a dating app. That's usually how it has, in a real dating app,

01:17:33that's usually how it has an influence. And I'd actually be interested in Rob's opinion on whether, kind of testing the intuition of whether a height filter, is a stated or revealed preference, because that's also kind of in between. But yeah, they set up this game, and then they, and it was, it was very sophisticated. I had a lot of people come back to me asking,

01:17:51including really prominent scholars coming back, like kind of challenging the study. And I had to open the study back up again and check. And I was like, no, they actually thought of that too. And yeah, they found that essentially face was everything. And anything else was you could put anything in your bio, you could have any height. And it wouldn't really make that much of a difference

01:18:10with the caveat. With the caveat that filtering for height wasn't an option. And then it had a typical dating app interface. So it's like if you're looking at 50 different faces as a participant in this study, and it's literally like face, face, tiny details, tiny details, there is kind of a click-through temptation of like, I mean, this is what happens on real apps though. I mean, it's accurate. On real apps, people are doing the same thing.

01:18:34So I think it's methodologically, it's very ecologically sound if you want to find out what's happening. Yeah, exactly. To your question, I wonder after the introduction of height filters, did users come away more satisfied or less satisfied or the same compared with prior to the introduction of height filters on the apps? Like, are women happier? Presumably men aren't happier, especially the men who aren't at tall. I've said this before. Tinder released the height filter as April Fools about a decade ago. And then just as a feature available to premium users, like three years ago. And I've heard that six foot mark is like it's somewhere.

01:19:10arbitrary because I read this and I don't know exactly. Guys just lie. Well, guys lie, but then the six foot, it's just because it's a round number and I've heard that in Europe the number is 180 centimeters, which is something like 5, 10 and a half or 511. And they just go 180 because it's a nice clean number. You know, if they wanted six feet, they could go 182.5 centimeters. And so even the six foot thing is somewhat arbitrary. So what you're saying is that we should change the units of measurement to make more guys six foot. All the short things, got to get on the metric system. So it's It's going to be scientists, drug dealers and short kings. You've got to be Europe maxing.

01:19:44If you're not Europe maxing. If you're not metric maxing, dude, what the fuck are you doing? That would really be DEI for man if we could change it to the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why, for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangy nectar.

01:20:10And I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there are no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase

01:20:36where I go into the link in the description below. are heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash bottom wisdom. What about that mate budget study

01:20:48that normally did because that was about trade ops, right? And typically some people generally have good things that come along with good things, but for the most part,

01:20:58there are some sorts of trade arts with someone's spent an awful lot of time dedicated on one thing that may be neglected another part of another area. It's an interesting study there, right? So basically, Explain for the normies?

01:21:09Sure. The normlies? So yeah, Norm Lee. Normally he did a study where he gave people a budget of mate dollars and then asked them, create the ideal mate that you can with this budget. Some people got a big budget where that was the case, men and women, they both wanted everything. They wanted good looks.

01:21:30They wanted like a good job, high status, blah, blah, blah, the works. But if they had it. had a smaller mate budget, which I think is probably more like most people's situation in life, no offense. If they had that, sex differences became more pronounced. And so men would spend more to get an attractive partner, whereas women would spend more to get a partner with resources and status. He also did a study where he had people allocate for themselves, if I'm not mistaken.

01:22:08and it mirrored that same pattern where it's like when men were kind of RPG style building their own character. I think it was him. I don't mean to give him credit if it wasn't. But basically men tried to make themselves richer relative to women and women tried to make themselves prettier relative to men. That's the reason why we don't see women turning up in supercars with expensive Rolexes at a nightclub or guys spending tons of time doing the beautification thing. We know we have an intuition about what is effect. It's the failures just continue to stack up in really interesting ways. Well, this is something that we proposed actually in our PNAS paper. In the discussion section, we talked about this where it's like it is interesting and quite

01:22:50conspicuous, but also quite circumstantial, that over the 1900s, there's pretty good data from David Buss. It's hard to do. It's hard to gather this survey data. But it does seem that over time throughout the 1900s, especially in the period after women's kind of financial emancipation, let's call it. mate preferences converged quite a bit between men and women. And then also we're now seeing this tremendous behavioral convergence where it's like,

01:23:17women aren't doing sports cars and flashy watches, but they do have pretty nice handbags, pretty nice shoes, and they are pretty ritsy in terms of their finances. So that's only signaling to women. And that, well, maybe. And then, but men are definitely, even if you say for the women's side, that's not true, on the men's side, we see that men have tripled their parenting effort since the 1970s.

01:23:36and male beautification, I know that it's really trendy right now with the whole looks maxing thing, but this is actually just the newest instantiation of a documented trend going back to the 1990s. You can read the historian Lynn Luciano's work on this, where male beautification has increased decade on decade to a point where basically everyone, even like a normal man who doesn't consider himself like a beautifying person, his daily routine would be unrecognizable to his grandfather. Like the average... Shave you had, dude. Shave you had you don't need to think about it. We did a little data analysis on using health data,

01:24:13essentially seeing like how much has weightlifting actually increased. And generation on generation, it's like you go from basically like not a behavior to every young man is now like every other member of Gen Z essentially is like a recreational bodybuilder. That's right. I totally... Women do find that attracted though, right? they do find some muscularity attractive and good grooming attractive. They find parenting attractive.

01:24:40But I'm not persuaded at all. In fact, I don't think it's the case that men think that she's really hot. I love that handbag. I don't think so either. I don't think it's conspicuous. But I do think that it is, I do think it's conspicuous. And so it's worth pointing out where it's like, I don't think that women are necessarily signaling their resources to attract men.

01:24:58But it's interesting that they're signaling resources more over the same time. period. And in the male beautification, I would really put my foot down and say, no, that that is to attract women. I think it is because they have their own money. Right. Okay. So this is your pet theory, right? That because the socioeconomic imbalance between men and women has been reduced or even reversed, men need to find a different way. They need to compete on another domain of attractiveness. And that has been self-beautification. I'm going to make myself look nicer. Now, I- beauty is the flashy one. Parenting is the quiet one. That's, actually better evidenced where it's like men used to. Yeah, exactly, where it's like, and we see

01:25:37this even in, um, in Lee's 2015 study, um, where it does seem that when women have their own money, they recognize where it's like, well, I have the financial thing kind of sorted. I really need like a helper at the nest a little bit more. And that's been the preference shift. And men have definitely responded to that. I mean, men have tripled their, a man today spends more time with children. I believe, I think I heard this from you that it was then, then women did in the 1950s. There's a dramatic difference, though, at least in the U.S. context, I've read that this differs by socioeconomic status and education where educated upper middle class men are spending far more time with their children than fathers in the past, whereas non-college men are spending the same

01:26:19amount as decades past, or even slightly less. The average is getting brought up by primarily by college-educated men. All those women don't necessarily have as much money. Yeah. But then the men are also spending lots. It's part of it, though, just that people, guys are thinking, it's only fair. You know, they're responding to arguments that have been made by feminists and others, just that guys haven't been pulling their weight in the past, and they think that they should. To a degree, can I, on this handbag point, I think I heard this from Tanya Reynolds, that she suggested that it's not that men obviously aren't attracted to, you know, these

01:26:57luxurious handbags. And in some cases, women, you know, they're buying these handbags or wearing them to impress women. I know what you're going to say. But it's about deterring. Detering rivals. Look at how much my husband is in the hole for this stupid bag that he doesn't understand what it is. None of his friends understand what it is. I'm not even doing it for other guys. It's not my boobs, right? Which would be the sort of thing that wouldn't be a deterrent. It would actually probably be the cause of ire from other women, whereas women would compliment handbags more than they would complement boobs. Yes, yeah, yeah.

01:27:32And so if you imagine that we're in an environment of, you know, increasing mate competition. If you were in a few of you were attracted men. Why the massive engagement? Then, yeah. Look at how much he's in the hole. Yeah. So ultimately, stay clear. But what's the benefit, though, of intimidating other women and saying, look at this great handbag?

01:27:48To keep them away from the partner. But why, if guys don't care about it, why would other women think? think, well, I better stay away because I don't have it as nice a handbag. Well, if he's so invested in her that he spent 20 grand on a handbag, then it's probably not worth my time to poach him or to attempt to poach him. I see. So it could be a mate poaching deterrence. It could also be just kind of classic high status to low status threat behavior. I remember literally the first day of my PhD arrived in Melbourne and went for a walk with Candice.

01:28:16And I asked her this exact question. I was just like, why do you think women love the handbags? Because I knew that she was really into the beautification stuff and that she really had. or had around those things. It just immediately said to scare young women. Just immediately. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, okay, interesting. And I do think that it is, I feel like I've, I've since then maybe tried to observe it as like a second order thing. And I think it's kind of maybe the male equivalent of like a guy who's really jacked walking into the room when a woman walks in and she's very glamorous. She's got the expensive shoes, the expensive bag, just throws it on the

01:28:47table. It's like, I like, I run this shit. Like, it's kind of like that atmosphere. But there's also a sense, at least with guys, guys that have got a ton of muscle on them, you have to have spare time. You have to have spare time. You have to have spare money to be able to afford the food and the PEDs. You need to be at least somewhat disciplined. You need to have the time to be able to plan your training sessions and not be at work every single hour of the day in the same way as the long nails that a woman might have and the well-done hair and the good beauty regime is costly in terms of time. And that indicates an awful lot more about lifestyle than just resources to. But I totally do didn't think about the fact that guys going to the gym as a form of male beautification.

01:29:26If you class that in, which I just totally did not consider, if you add in guys going to the gym as a form of male beautification, it's got to be 4x, 5x, 6x, 6x, 10x, what it would have been 100 years ago for male beautification. Yeah, I mean, that's what the best study on beautification did. It's Marta Cowell's study. And she found that in all except for seven countries, women beautified more. There were seven that men beautified more slightly. And this was the weightlifting side of it, essentially, was the behavior where men were.

01:30:03It's a big Pac-Man chunk that's been taken out of the side. Yeah, it is. And some might say, oh, well, a lot of men beautify, a lot of men hit the gym, sorry, for health, not beautification. And some of them do it for status competitions. They actually, but they thought of that. They had a question in there that it's like, okay, doing it for, beauty, though, basically, how much time are used to, like, bodybuilding. And so they, they, they really were able to drill down on that. And there was one other behavior. This is so counterintuitive, where

01:30:31among the people who did it, men actually did this behavior more. So think about different beautification behaviors. I won't bore you by making you guess, but it was makeup. Among people who wear makeup, the men who wear makeup spend way more time on it than the women. Just because they're less good did it? They've been growing up on YouTube tutorial. Yeah. I think that it's, um, what she said to me was that she thinks that it's, um, essentially men who wear makeup have some kind of special qualitative difference. Maybe it's that they're like a sense. I told her, look, you're picking up on like male beauty influencers essentially like, like, like who is. And so they just have different.

01:31:08Yeah. Yeah. But I thought that was interesting is that the, um, is that in terms of numbers among the people. It's just James Charles on repeat. Yeah, it's just James Charles clocking in 16 hours a day. Yeah. Yeah. And causing the difference. So it was, it was interesting. So it was, so it was Basically, yeah, there was this, the second biggest difference technically was the weightlifting. The biggest was the makeup, but it was because of that effect. Going back to the clavicular thing, it's kind of fascinating, the weightlifting being the biggest change, because I don't know whether guys increasing their upper body strength makes a bigger impact on attractiveness of formidableity. Like if you were to just to rank it, starting at a baseline of this, and you gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass, are you more attractive?

01:31:49or more, more formidable to other guys, that would be fascinating to work out because I don't know what the net gain is. And obviously you get both, and that's what's great. But certainly when we look at sort of the myth of Chad and Louis Thru's documentary and sort of the caricature of hypermasculinity at the moment, a lot of what guys are doing,

01:32:08it's the male-to-male transsexual, as Mary Harrington calls it. It's like the most caricatured parts of the masculine luck to the point where that hyper-masculinized face we know from tons and tons of data is not as attractive as a average or slightly feminized face on a man is to women.

01:32:26And all of these other things, to me, seem to be just signaling formidability. Signalling status and formidability to other men, it's the handbag of the face. The David Putt's work would suggest it's more about formidability, or rather the increase in formidability

01:32:43would outpace the increase in the increase. I mean, we've dropped it on the show like 10 times, but it's the fucking can, it is the best. Do you know it? Do you know this one? Yeah, I know it. Yeah, yeah, I can do it. So David Putz and his colleagues famously did this study where they brought in a group of men and recorded them in these videos and very, very short clips. And then they brought in a different group of men to watch the men in these videos. And then they asked these men who were watching these other men in the clip. You know, they asked them a question, which is, how

01:33:18likely is it that this man that you're watching in this clip could beat a man in a physical fight, and it was arranged from very likely to very unlikely. And then they showed a group of women these videos as well of these men in these short clips, and they asked these women, okay, this man in this video, how sexually attractive is this man? And then these researchers followed up with those men in the videos 18 months later and collected data on them, including how many sexual partners they'd had over the previous 18 months. And they found that how formidable they were predicted how many sexual partners they had, whereas how sexually attractive they were to these women had no relationship at all.

01:34:02So, formidability-based. The most fucking insane study. Now, as we mentioned, this was on college students, you know, fraternity members. It was like a specific frat, wasn't it? Oh, was it? I think so. I'm not sure. Okay.

01:34:18But, you know, this is consistent with David Putz's other work showing that formidability seems to have this huge effect on sexual success. This is my take. This is my take on clavicular and the lux maxing world. Yeah. They have closed their eyes, thrown the dart and hit the bull's eye if they've fluked, optimizing formidability for male attention over attractiveness to only land in the middle of David Putz's study, finding out that formidability is better predictive of male-made

01:34:46success, then attractiveness. Fame is also this form of like psychological formidable ability too where, you know, I've seen... How well regarded. Yeah. And they'll keep their distance from, like a famous person, you know, like if there's a famous man who's getting a lot of attention from women, ordinary men are going to be intimidated by that fame and they're probably not going to try to interrupt him or compete with him for attention and that kind of thing. But if you're famous and you're jacked, then it's like, you know, like imagine the rock being surrounded by, how many men are going to be like, oh, I can take that girl from the rock. I can poach that girl from the

01:35:15the rock. Like, he's famous. is Andy's jacked and so no one will attempt to interfere with his his mating success. Yeah. Haven't you been studying female teacher sex scandals? Studying. That was behind the paywall, but I love Chris Williamson and I love modern wisdom. So, you know, let's bring it out. Yeah.

01:35:32Yeah, this is, this was my, you know, kind of, this is my conjecture. I don't have hard evidence for this. But I was building on something that Louise Perry had written, I believe this was in The Spectator. You know, she was kind of riffing on this idea of only, fans and how sexual attention for women can be as satisfying as, um, as, you know, actual sex can be for men. So, you know, men really like to have sex. Women really like sexual attention. And these can be sort of equally powerful incentives. And, you know, in the context of only fans, it's this super normal stimulus in the way that porn is

01:36:06for men. So porn, you know, you get novelty, all these different naked women and so on. It's very exciting for men. Whereas only fans as a creator can be very exciting for women because you're getting large, huge amount of sexual tension. thousands of men and all of them are praising you and telling you how beautiful you are. You could imagine this would be extremely enjoyable for some women. Now, the female sexual scandal thing, the female teacher sexual scandal, I should say, in every few months we see these stories come out of some surprisingly attractive female teacher who sleeps with a male student, some 15, 16 year old kid, and, you know, all these, the online discourse around this always goes crazy. It's also

01:36:45important here to remember that male teachers are still far more likely to commit this transgression of sleeping with an underage student than female teachers are. The reason why those stories go viral is because, again, they're anomalous. My suggestion for, at least in some cases, why these female teachers sleep with their male students is because the response that they get from the male student is a one-of-a-kind, unique sort of supernormal stimulus, where, you know, if you're an attractive 25-year-old woman and you get naked in front of, you know, your typical 28-year-old guy who's seen naked women before, whatever look on his face, whatever attention he gives you is not going to be nearly as potent as when you undress for the first time that you see,

01:37:30and you see a, uh, now, now that look like a chef, that look, that look with your race, yeah, half, half Latino, half Asian. does not scream captain of the ship when it's facing backward. I don't know what it is. You look like the guy out of Tintin. Wait, I don't know this. Pull up the fucking, pull up the dude from Tintin in the hat. You can keep going for now.

01:37:56Oh, I lost. Okay. So, you know, so the response, right? So you're an attractive 25-year-old woman. You get naked in front of a 25-year-old guy. You know, the response is, you know, he's going to be like, wow, cool, because, you know, men like seeing naked women. but a 16-year-old male who has seen very few naked women in his life, he sees a fully grown in a woman at the peak of her fertility and so on for the first time. The attention he gives you

01:38:22is going to be extremely potent. And it's the kind of look and level of attention that most people wouldn't have access to. The reason that this is interesting is what is the motivation for these female teachers to do it? For male teachers, we have at least a little bit more of an understanding. I think there is a question, and that's one of the reasons it's fascinating. It's so anomalous. Like, why? Why you could go and get anyone? Yeah. Well, so for this, it's, if you're, you know, if you're a predatory male teacher, you know, it's sort of this warped extreme version of the typical male, which is, you know, you want, you know, someone who's attractive and whatever. And then like, you know, there's that kind of like vulnerability and that

01:39:04power asymmetry and so on. Whereas I think if you're a predatory female teacher, you're, you you get your rocks off through this extreme level of attention. It's not so much the sex in and of itself, although that may be part of it, because, again, you get to see this teenage boy have his first sexual experience with a full-grown woman, and I think that in itself, that kind of power that you have over him

01:39:23and that level of attention is so unique that you couldn't replicate in any other situation or context. In the same way, that for the male teacher, right? Like, sleeping with this underage girl, you couldn't replicate that in any other... Dude, I'm into, like, horrendous chick books. Like, just like, like every Frieda McFadden book, I just blast through. And I've read The Teacher. Have you read The Teacher? Dude, it is, Frieda McFadden is the person that did The Housemaid, right, of which Sidney

01:39:53just started in, and then she did The Housemaid's Revenge, and then she did The Housemaid, cometh backeth, and then she's done, like, The Patient and the Teacher and a bunch of others, and it's just easy reading, right? It's my guilty pleasure. And this one about the teacher the main guy that usually all the guys in the books turn out to be the bad guy. Like that shock horror, Frieda McFat, like the guys turn out to be the bad guys. And they're all scumbags the way that they're presented. So like rightly so. But this one takes it to another level.

01:40:22And it turns out this teachers being like wooing a first off he's wooing a 16 year old. And then you find out that he was wooing another 16 year old, but doing it when she was 15. And then it turns out that he's one when she's 40. And I'm like, this is, it. completely changed. Even the 16 thing, you're already like, fuck me. And it's in the first few chapters. Like, whoa, that's, okay,

01:40:46that's a little strange. The final, for people that want to read the teacher, listen to the way, the final, final, fucking bit of it, the whole twist at the end is that the young jock who's in high school has been sleeping behind the back of the guy that was a nasty teacher with his wife. And the jock was 16, too.

01:41:07and I'm like the only reason the reason that you had to put in oh and he slept with this other student when they were 14 is to even the scales but even then when I read it there's a bit of like retribution the guy was real mean and then he's like tried to kill people and whatever whatever like you had it come in and fuck him but that even this example that we've got in front of us as I read it I was like good for her she got railed in the shoe cupboard you know what I mean he's a guy that worked in like the local shoe store or whatever and at the end you find out it's the high school jock. I was like, is that really the, it just completely lays out, like, however ethically dubious it was, I mean, maybe she means it as a, something for people to think about, because it definitely made me think, made me go, huh, how do I feel about that? Do I feel, does the fact that it was being done by her husband before and younger make this less, because she's like a 32-year-old woman, the 16-year-old boy? She described as attractive. in the book? Yes, yes, and

01:42:09classically overlooked. Okay. You know, like, um. She wants the attention. So that's with your theory. Yeah. Well, I mean,

01:42:16this idea of like, so I don't know like, because every time we see a story, it's always an attractive female teacher. And maybe it's possible. Again, there's this dark matter. The unattractive ones just don't make the headlines.

01:42:27Yeah, because no one wants to click on an unattractive teacher who sleeps with some kid. But if she's hot, people will click on the story. But if it's the case that more attractive teachers tend to do this, I think that two sort of aligns with, well, well, two things here, which is one, like they are likely to get that sort of intense reaction from male students because they're

01:42:44attractive. And then the other thing is to just have more opportunity, right? Like, if you're an attractive person, you just have more opportunity in general. And so, you know, that also sort of, you know, maybe, maybe there are ugly teachers who would like to sleep with their teachers. They just don't have, you know, very many chances. Didn't you have a Twitter poll on this regarding, it was a really interesting, would you rather where you found a big sex difference on like, would you rather sleep with someone very attractive or someone who's very, attracted to you? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I put it two different polls on Twitter. First, for men, and I asked, you know, this is a forced choice, this contrived scenario, would you rather

01:43:19sleep with someone who you find intensely attractive, but they are not at all attracted to you? Or would you rather sleep with someone who finds you very attractive, but you are not attracted at all to them? So I administer that poll first to men and to women and literally got the exact opposite, where something like 75% of men were like, give me the hot person who finds me ugly. That's way more preferable than sleeping with an ugly person who finds me hot. Whereas women, it was the opposite. Women were about 75% of women said they would rather sleep with someone

01:43:50who they find ugly, who finds them attractive, than to sleep with a hot person who is unattracted to them. So it's almost like men and women were made for each other. This was something that this was a mess up that I did in my conversation with Esther Perel, where she said something to the effect of, when have you ever, she was talking about desire and what makes a woman feel desired. She said something to the effect of when have you ever heard of a woman being turned on because her partner was like aroused in front of her. Like women need to be wooed. And I was just like in, I wasn't

01:44:19in my EP hat. I was in my relating and she's the expert hat. And I should have just said, dude, like being desired is probably the number one thing that women want as a turn on. Or the other thing that women want as a turn on, just put this hat back on backwards for me. I've worked out who it is that you look like. I got it. wrong. Put it on backwards. Put it on backwards. Hold on. I got a, you know, I got a big dome, man. You do, both of you do, actually. I can't believe it. No, no, no. So, there it is. So I thought that it was Tintin. It's not Tintin. It's Indiana Jones. And it's this. I'm just glad you. Is that not you? I mean, you know, oh wait, but don't I have to wear it like this?

01:44:58Yeah. No, he's going on backwards. Does he not? No, he's got it the right way there. Okay. Well, it's not a captain's hat. Anyway, I knew that I was right. yeah i uh where that's tintin no no it's fucking the kid from indiana jones Andy um

01:45:15yeah i'm i'm like I'm kind of fascinated by what's going to unfold over the next few years with what's happening with increased socioeconomic successful women male beautification I actually think that what guys think they're doing even if it doesn't work with the formidable

01:45:29double loop close eye bullseye thing is uh I think that it's a kind of rejection of the female gaze in some ways. Like it's just male-to-male intracultural competition. Do you ever remember Ziz? He was kind of the original Luxmaxer in some ways. He was a bodybuilding icon in 2010, 2011, 2012 and died. Ozzy guy, real good-looking dude, just trained in the gym. He wasn't like doing the hardcore luxemax and stuff, but just trained in the gym. And he had this line, which was disregard women, acquire dance moves. And it was just him talking about

01:46:04you want to go out with your boys and have a good time. and they were saying this is a naturally very attractive man who'd then done some weightlifting to make him look real Adonis, Greek Goddy. But I get the sense that it is kind of a rejection of, I'm just going to focus on becoming the most, like, mog. You know where that comes for it? Do you know the etymology of monging is? Yeah, a-mog.

01:46:24Alpha male of the group. That was what it came, and then that shortened to mogging. So alpha-male of the group is referring to your status within the hierarchy of other men, not like Chad of the group. Chad is almost rejected as a term. It's like I'm not doing this for anybody else and this is, you know. This is, there was the clavicular profile and, you know, I don't know how representative he is,

01:46:47but this aligns with what you're saying here where he said two interesting things. One, he said something like, you know, I might, the main thing is mugging people. Like that's where he gets his rock. All I want to do is mugging. Mog. That's like, that's what's fun for me. The second thing he said was knowing he could have sex with a woman. was more satisfying than actually having sex with a woman.

01:47:06Just the knowledge that he could is good enough for him. So, yeah, it's like disregard women, you know, get get jacked, higher dance moves or whatever, mug other men and not have sex with women. How common is that ever going to be, though? I'm going to be that comment. You've got to be a real extreme to say, I'm going to do all of the work to be able to have sex with a woman, but it's somehow more enjoyable to me to not do it. I mean, this might be part of the medical castration thing that's going on,

01:47:30or the performance enhancing castration. How much do you think a denial of sex differences at the moment has led to the current mating crisis? Is that something that you've drawn a lineage through? Hmm. You're looking at me because I'm talking quite a bit in my book about the denial of sex differences, but I can't see a direct line from that. I mean, if you've talked about in your book, Superb, you discuss the dangers of ignoring, minimizing sex differences. but you know you also sort of acknowledge that that historically people have sort of overstated

01:48:05the sex differences in the dangers of overstating can be particularly harmful to women but to men as well and so so what yeah I'm curious what are the dangers of minimizing and then overstating the dangers of minimizing so we talked about this right so one danger is that just as people used to try to force boys and girls and men and women into traditional gender roles, even if they didn't quite fit them. You can get the reverse. If you minimize or deny sex differences and just think that they're due to discrimination, you're going to think that actually we should be trying to minimize them, we should be trying to push boys and girls and men and women out of traditional gender roles, and that is a problem if they don't fit into them. That's one

01:48:49problem. Another one, if you minimize sex differences, is that you might fail to notice physical problems and psychological problems that present differently in one sex than the other. So the classic example is cardiovascular problems like heart attacks. The symptoms are different for men and women, and the male symptoms are better known. So the pain and the sort of chest and down the arms is quite well known. That's much less common in women.

01:49:18Shortness of breath is a much more common symptom in women. People don't tend to know that. They often in the past, especially just didn't know that. And so women would have heart attacks and not be aware of it until they'd progress quite a long way down the road. And so, you know, it cost lives by not noticing sex differences rather than noticing. On that point, like, you're minimizing sex differences. I'm thinking about, with Chris's question, of something like, you know, if you truly believe in sort of, you know, blank slateism for men and women, and then you're, lucky you're a young, naive girl and you go off to college and you assume, oh, you know, men and women are basically the same. and then you go to a frat party and get really drunk

01:49:56and you assume, you know, guys are kind of like girls and there's no real, and you don't understand that there are like, you know, predatory men. You know, the average difference isn't, as you've mentioned in your book, aggressiveness is not that large. But in the tails, the most extremely aggressive, sexually predatory people tend to be men. And if you go to, yeah, get drunk at a frat party and you're 18,

01:50:12you don't understand. There are sex differences here in terms of, you know, motivations around sex and so forth that this can, you know, so I don't know whether it's like denial of sex, of differences between the sexes. it's a denial of why they come from. Well, there is both. I think the one you're talking about is where you might fail to see the sex difference at all,

01:50:31regardless of where it comes from, and open yourself up to certain kind of risks that you otherwise might not. But you are right. There are a lot of sex differences. People will acknowledge the differences, including that difference. But I just think you can attribute it entirely to largely to socialization. What's happening with the dual mating and mate-switching hypothesis race at the moment? Is there been any update? I can't spoil their party, unfortunately, but there is new...

01:50:57Oh, fuck you, dude. I genuinely can't. Behind the sea, you're going to under the busters because you've got special behind the sea's access? It's not that. It's just that I recognize that when people present work that's, you know, like at a conference, it's like, oh, it's preliminary, oh, we're going to have to roll it out in its own time. This is a modern wisdom conference. I know, I know. I mean, I'll happily tell you the full kind of update off camera. You like when I, you know what it's like.

01:51:20It's like when I bring Navy SEALs on and they go, dude, I know exactly what happened with the summer. I can't tell you on that. Well, it's not me trying to oar a farm or anything like that. It's literally just like, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know that, uh, Ryan Dobson and his party are, are going to be rolling out some cool research pretty soon. Is it not public once it's been, uh, put out of the conference? Uh, well, I was told by Candace, no, but maybe that that's kind of a social intuition. Come on, Candace. But I'm a new academic, so I don't necessarily have the...

01:51:53This is the issue. This is the issue that Mackin's got. Mackin and Williams the same, and I don't understand it, but I kind of get it. There's sort of the mafioso of the human behavior and ecology world, and you don't want to step on the toes of anybody is just a mere underling. But if you were the boss, right, or an underboss, if you're David Bus, you can just start spouting theories whenever you want. But if you're sort of a new entrance at the bottom of...

01:52:18It's constantly signaling. Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay, I've got a question that I've never been able to work out. Why do you think women's sexual desire declines faster than men's in relationships? I genuinely don't know. I tweeted it as a question. I'm hoping that maybe Steve or Rob here have better answer than I. I genuinely don't know either.

01:52:38Bro, if I'm three for three here, this is fucking money. I mean, would it not make sense that women at the peak of fertility would have the strongest desire for sex. I mean, for distracting age. But this isn't, this isn't, so that effect exists as well. Yeah. But this effect is even more peculiar where if they remate again later, the sex drive

01:53:00goes up again. It's just that it's like, oh, the first year or two. Would that not just be sort of a meat retention strategy? Right? You're in a new relationship. So you would want to sort of boost your sexual whatever libido. So you're getting, it's an adaptation to get them on the hook to say

01:53:16if you mate with me, there'll be sex all the Yeah, but once you have a guy locked in and you've been married for 20 years, and you're no longer fertile, and, you know, the risks to you are very low if you're, you know. Yeah, I wish it was 20 years. The decline is, the decline is. Percipitous. Within the first year, I think it dropped by half and then it drops again and then it drops again. But I talked about this earlier on. Your risks of pregnancy are much higher, the older you get, too.

01:53:40Yeah, there's not a big cost for men. So maybe looking at the women's side of it is the wrong, maybe it just doesn't decline for men because it's not such a big cost for men. Maybe sex starts as a bargaining strategy, but then, sorry, a retention strategy, but then becomes a bargaining chip later. I don't know if that's too. That's fucking cold. I don't know if that's too out there, but maybe the strategic function of non-conceptive sex. Because there's two types of sex, right? There's concept of sex and non-conceptive sex.

01:54:04And humans are weird that we do both. And this non-conceptive sex, I could see it having this retention function early. But then once you're in the relationship, it's like, well, what am I doing with this? And maybe it's a bargaining show of something. I remember that study that you tweeted, which was women say that inside of relationships they have around about the amount of sex that they want and men self-report that they would like to have about twice as much sex as they are, which suggests that the couple zero in on the preferred level of sex that the woman wants and that the man is making a compromise. Yeah, yeah, that was that was from Roy Baumeister, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, I think he does. He does offer this as an idea that sex can be a bargaining chip.

01:54:52And that kind of as the relationship prolongs and endures and so on, that, you know, sex is essentially used initially the reason why it's so high is to lock the male partner in and to, you know, to get this all the time. And then, you know, once he's committed, then you don't have to have as much sex. You're thinking about sort of the costs and benefits of sex in general. general and you know the the costs are relatively low when you're in your 20s and you know early 30s but then as you age pregnancy gets high and then you hit menopause and but if you can presumably these studies have controlled for age though yeah again there is the age effect is real um there's actually some new data on that which is not uh which is kind of kind of weird actually but we can talk about that separately um but yeah no it's a it's a within a relationship time span effect and it's surprisingly quick so

01:55:41wouldn't necessarily just be like fertility decline. It seems to be like genuine. Maybe it's just non, maybe there's not much evolutionary storytelling to be told here. It's like boredom, but I don't know what's the, well, are we talking like, like, in absolute terms? Like, how much is it actually decline absolutely? It'll be on my Twitter if you want to pull up the graph. It's going to be odd to find.

01:56:01Because like relative to men, it totally makes sense that men are always going to have a stronger sex drive, like in relationship, single, whatever the situation is men are just because, like an error management perspective. it's better for men to just sort of be ready to go at any time. But for women, I'm just wondering, like, how much of the decline occurs from time one to time two to time three and so on. Not sure. Could I say, do you know the idea of women using sex to get guys into relationships? I think it's a bit more symmetrical than that.

01:56:29I think that sex bonds both parties, both partners to each other. The king of sex differences telling us, I don't think there's a sex difference there, which is kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, there's always got to be one. I wanted to ask something, and you can tell me if this is taking us too far afield here, on our earlier discussion, something occurred to me, which is, you know, like, what's the question we're interested in, like, regarding sex differences? Is it, you know, how interesting that men are different now than they were decades ago, or how interesting is it that sex differences are larger in this context, but smaller in that one? Or are we interested in, you know, what's, like,

01:57:06the true sex difference? You know, you strip away everything, and, like, once you really drill down, here's what it is. And I remember I had this conversation, I think I was in college, working as an RA years ago. And, you know, we were reading about weird societies, Western educated, industrialized, rich democracies. And, you know, there was this thing going on both of you, you know, all of you are aware of this of like, oh, we can't really learn anything about, I mean, I'm simplifying someone. We can't really learn much about human psychology, studying weird societies because this is a very sort of peculiar time in history. These are very strange, you know, weird societies in both senses of the term.

01:57:40And so we need to collect data from other countries and other parts of the world and look historically and so on. And I wondered like when we're trying to study psychology and we're trying to study human nature, what is more reflective of human nature too? Is it you got to look at the hunter gatherers, you know, whether extant hunter gatherers or hunter gatherers, you know, in pre-agricultural times when they were sort of scattered all over the world and had access to different kinds of land and territory and so on. we got to study the hundred gatherers in environments of relative scarcity because that's what humans, that's how humans lived for most of our evolutionary history. That's what human nature is. Or is it that can't be human nature because they lived in relative scarcity and they're only behaving that way because they're stuck in this kind of, you know, archaic, pre-industrial,

01:58:30pre-literate society. And actually, we should be studying rich societies because now that you have all of your needs met, now sort of the true underlying traits and attributes and characteristics can finally emerge and, you know, instantiate themselves. So it's kind of like the gender, gender inequality paradox, but except with like the abundance paradox, let's say, we're becoming, you know. Like, what, I mean, yeah, or, or does the question not even make sense that there is no real true human nature and that it'll always kind of interact with environments in weird ways? Yeah, both of the ideas came to my mind as you were, as you were saying that.

01:59:03In terms of what the evolutionary push is just directionally, I think it's good to look at all a different types of societies. Do you find that it in hunter-gatherers? Does it persist even in weird societies? But sometimes that's quite good evidence in weird societies often you have a push against traditional sex differences and they often emerge anyway, suggesting that there is an innate nudge. Yeah, if they get bigger in abundant societies, it may be that they're expressing themselves more than the level for which they were selected to be expressed.

01:59:37So it could be that human nature is able to express itself to an unnaturally extreme degree, potentially. Yeah, does that... Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I spoke to the anthropologist William Buckner about this, and he actually had a real gripe about the Evo-Syck studies on sex differences and mate preferences. his gripe was that if the logic is that the EEA is what forged these, then they really should be more consistent, the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, which isn't, which is, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's caricatured as like, oh, there was like 10,000 years in the

02:00:18police just scene where we're really, but it's really, it's like a composite of all selection that has happened, essentially. And Steve could probably summarize it better than me. Um, but, um, his perspective, which I think is really fair, um, was that these, the, um, um, um, was that these, sex differences and mate preferences are less consistently found in these small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, and they're more consistently found in these industrialized populations. And that feels like, it gives me a gut feeling of like, something's a little odd here. Because really, if it was like, these are formed by, you know, these sex differences and mate preferences evolved in a hunter-gatherer context and then you go and ask the schwar and they're like hey we actually don't really agree with you

02:01:04about that that's that that's real alarm bells i it's not it's not necessarily a quality paradox but just across time exactly and you don't find it at all at all and some of those societies right some some sex differences aren't found and some of them even seem to be reversed like among the um among the wadabe of the sehull region it's men who are you know wearing tons of makeup and looking incredibly glamorous and they actually stand side by side in male beauty patterns And the females actually pick a partner based solely on the physical appearance. Or not solely, but quite a lot. Speaking of some odd rituals, Craig Jones, BJJ guy was telling me he went to go and see a,

02:01:42I don't know whether we're talking hunter-gatherer, but certainly something that's got some primitive elements to it. And the young women would walk through a kind of alleyway of men, guys on either sides, and the guys would pick sticks of a particular width, and they would whip the goals as they walked past, and the goals were not to make a sound. And if the girls didn't make a sound, they were seen as high as status

02:02:07because their pain tolerance was higher. And every woman that was in this tribe, maybe hunter-gatherer stuff, I'm not too sure, every girl that was in the tribe, their back looked like some saying horrendous out of the 1700. So they're signaling mate value through formidable as... Through pain tolerance.

02:02:24I could withdraw, childbirth. Specifically, I can endure childbirth. We are very varied as a species, culturally, right? It's amazing. Yeah, it does give me pause that my preferences aren't found as consistently among hunter-gatherers. Definitely does give me pause.

02:02:39The reason I don't just automatically just say, well, then it didn't evolve the way evolutionary psychologists have said, is that even though you do more consistently find them in non-hunter-gatherer societies, you do find them very consistently in those societies. which I think would be surprising if there was no innate push.

02:02:58So I'm not exactly sure how to square the circle there. And it does give me some degree of pause. But yeah, I do think there's something there. And also, you know, there are other lines of evidence that do find it in more traditional societies, that do find sex differences and mate preferences, maybe not in sort of self-report contexts. But if you look at folk tales and various stories from right across the world, different world regions, you do find very consistently that people put more. more importance on women's appearance than they do on men's, and more importance on men's

02:03:29resources and status than they do in women's. So a lot of it does depend on the kind of data that you look at. It just occurred to me, Steve, in your book, I think you point out, you know, one line of evidence for, you know, the sex differences being, you know, sort of evolutionary in origin, not entirely socially constructed is the way that gay men, what they find attractive, appearance in youth and so on. But do gay women, like what are they attracted to? Do they like resources and status in their female partners? Does anyone know?

02:04:02Yes, I think that they do. And I don't think they put like huge amounts of weight on the parents, even though they're evaluating women rather than... Yeah, that makes sense to me, because I've seen, you know, gay men tend to be very fit and so on. Indeed. And gay women less so. But then what, what,

02:04:17are they attracted to the kinds of things that heterosexual women are attracted to in a partner? Career ambition and success and those kinds of things. You know what I would love to see. I would love to see a sex toy study between what straight women like and what gay women like. Because there's no reason that the sex toys should in any way resemble a male. Yeah. Except for female anatomy.

02:04:41Yes. But the way that it's put together, the humanness of it, right, shouldn't actually matter. Unless you manage to say that, well, and this is true, the penis is the optimal vagina penetrating machine. Right. It's been shaved across time. A billion years. Yeah, over a billion years of penis evolution. Speaking of the ways that humans are quite different.

02:05:01Mackin, can you tell me what this hamster thing is? What hamster thing? Oh my gosh. What's this hamster thing? There's something to do with a hamster from you as a kid? What hamster thing? Were you not obsessed with hamster? I was, yeah, but I didn't realize that this was going to be a huge.

02:05:16I didn't realize this was very huge. It's interesting that you say that because. Oh, my God. Oh, nice. That's incredible. We got to hear this. I didn't realize that this was public. This is, I feel like I'm in a fever drink.

02:05:29I'm not that I was obsessed with hamsters as a child. Not sexually, right? Not sexually. I was just, I pivoted from the penis thing to the hamster thing seamlessly there, but it wasn't for sex. Yeah, I mean, this is an incredible gift. Thank you so much. Yeah, my dad got me a shirt that's a hamster man on it.

02:05:46And I think there are some photos on Google images floating around of me as a, of me as an year old point. Be careful what you put on the internet as a year old doing. I didn't even put it there. I'm going to put this on right now. Heck yeah. Boys, I appreciate you all. You're all awesome.

02:06:00What do you want to plug? Why should people go to check up to you? Rob Henderson's newsletter on substack, Robka Henderson.com, and the paperback of my first book, Troubled a memoir of foster care family and social class. Nice. My new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences,

02:06:11my previous book, The Eight That Undersed the Universe and my substack, which is the Nature, nurture Nietzsche newsletter. Nothing to sell. Follow me on TikTok. Yeah, you do. At Hamster Man on TikTok. Or at Macon Murphy.

02:06:23Boys, I appreciate you all. These are on table. are so fucking fun. It's the best. I love you all. Thank you for coming. Thanks, Luke Smith. See you next time, everyone. Boys, yes. We've done it.