Modern Wisdom - #161 - Rob Henderson - Evolution & The Modern Dating Market

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force Veteran. The modern dating market is hard to navigate, our genetic preferences are outdated by 100,000 years, divorces are rising and I'm very single. Please help, Rob. Expect to learn how Tinder has messed everything up, why 20% of men have sex with 80% of women, why lifting weights is attractive, whether evolution justifies gold diggers, whether men can judge a man's attractiveness more accurately than women, why the withdrawal method is a suboptimal contraceptive strategy and much more. Extra Stuff: Follow Rob on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robkhenderson Sign Up to Rob's Newsletter - https://eepurl.com/gNOyq5 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, yes, hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Rob Henderson. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force veteran. But we're not talking about the Air Force today. We are talking about dating, specifically how evolution relates to dating, how our preferences, why we like what we like,

are shaping our behaviors in the modern world. Now if this sounds to you like the most dry boring conversation, you can think of, you're wrong. This is one of the most interesting and exciting new areas that I've delved into in a very long time. I absolutely adore evolutionary psychology, so get used to it because you're going to be hearing a lot more. Today, we talk about how Tinder has ruined the dating market. Why 20% of men are having sex with 80% of women. Why women are struggling to find appropriate

mates as the men going to college or university declines. Why weightlifting is embedded evolutionarily as something that we should be attracted to, whether men can judge another man's attractiveness more accurately than women can, why there is an evolutionary justification for gold diggers, and why the withdrawal method is a suboptimal strategy for contraception. So yeah, hitting all the big ones today, we did a relationship series a little while ago, four episodes focusing on mind, journey, and use of thoughts about dating.

If you haven't heard those, you should definitely go back and listen to them. And they were just so well received. Obviously dating and relationships is a universal. It's something that every person on the planet has in common. Everyone is trying to navigate this dating market as best they can.

So I'm going to reopen it. I'm going to start doing more episodes that relate to intergender dynamics and relationships and all that sort of stuff. If the things that you learn about today resonate with you, if you would agree or disagree, I want to find out there is a lot of stuff that is super left field but makes sense if you can get around the fact that emotionally it can be a little uncomfortable. So yeah, let me know what you think at ChrisWillX, wherever you follow me and if you are new here or even if you're a long time listener, make sure that you've hit the subscribe button. I can see on the back end all the plays coming in that are just people browsing the episodes

and having it subscribe. So go and hit the the button it would make me very happy indeed and it'll just take as long as this music gets to play but for lockdown as well, by the way. Yeah, yeah, it's great to be here, you know, in the middle of this pandemic. So what are we going to be talking about today? Yeah, I thought we'd talk about some evolutionary psychology, some social psychology, and what's going on with modern dating, modern in the sense of, you know, the 2020, but also in the sense of what's going to happen with this coronavirus and how that might affect the dating scene too.

I can't wait. I love it. So where do we stop? Yeah, I mean, I suppose we can start with some basic evolutionary psychology. So just right off the top here, I mean, you know, a lot of people have questions about why do we like what we like, how flexible are our preferences? You know, why does it seem like men seem to be attracted to younger women? Why do women seem to be attracted to exceptionally wealthy men? And of course there could be some cultural components,

but a lot of evolutionary psychology focuses on sort of more innate or more cross-cultural preferences. And they basically are looking at, you know, on sort of more innate or more cross-cultural preferences. And they basically are looking at, what is sort of evolutionarily advantageous for human beings to pass on their genes. And so evolution operates at the level of the gene. And so sometimes we do things that are advantageous

for our genes, but they actually hurt ourselves. One like. Something like, for example, for men, we'll sit with men risk-taking. So on average, women tend to be attracted to men who take risks in intelligent ways. But things like, say, motorcycle riding or bungee jumping or certain kinds of sports, I mean, these are, you know, typically more attractive, and they're also extremely risky. And so things like this can attract partners, you know, you know, partners, but they can also put your life in danger. But that's one of the interesting things about

evolutionary psychology. I mean, what are the principles is that, if you have a trait that is reproductively advantageous, but harmful to yourself, that trait will still tend to proliferate. Whereas if you have a trait that is advantageous for survival, but turns off the opposite sex, then that trait will tend to disappear from the population. So say you have some kind of trait that promotes longevity, but I don't know, it makes you

look unusual in some way, or just turns the opposite sex off, and it doesn't matter that it's keeping you alive. If you can't find a partner, that gene is going to, or those genes are going to disappear. So, something else that's important to know about evolutionary psychology and men and women is that women take on a much greater burden with child rearing than men do. So if you think about what does a man have to invest

to have a child will really not much more than a few minutes of activity. And that's maybe being very generous to a couple of men as well. Well, yeah, I'm trying to be nice. We've all had a bad night, all right? That's true. And there are some, so yeah, exactly. So some men they invest a few minutes, maybe a few seconds.

In some cases, whereas for women, they have to invest. I mean, if women have to get pregnant and have a few minutes, maybe a few seconds, in some cases. Whereas for women, they have to invest. I mean, if women have to get pregnant and have a child, I mean, that is, you know, nine months of pregnancy followed by, you know, years of having to take care of a child and so on. And so in the ancestral environment, women took on a much greater burden. And so women have evolved to be particularly choosy about who they partner with. They tend to be more scrutinizing. They evaluate men to see whether men is sort of worthy partner.

Whereas men tend to be slightly less scrutinizing and a little bit more relaxed in terms of who they're willing to have sex with. When it comes to long-term relationships, men do have some rigid standards about a good partner with. But even though today we have birth control, we have all of these reproductive technologies and so on. Our brains and our bodies are still stuck in this stone age.

Humans, there's some debate about this, but humans haven't really changed much in the last 100,000 years or so. So some strategies that we enact today reproductively are more beneficial for a different environment, for the ancestral environment. Yeah, I'd know a good example of this,

I think is men fighting, and the increased chance of men fighting when there's a group, have you seen this? Oh, oh, yeah, I haven't seen that specifically, but that makes sense. So if there's men tend to fight, it's a display of dominance. There's an embedded winner and loser behavior mechanism as well that the loser cowers, it means I am lower,

that the winner kind of is up and tall, stand up straight with your shoulders back. And apparently, I can't remember where I read it, I'm just swimming in evolutionary psychology at the moment. So it's like David Bus or Robert Wright or Rob Henderson. And yet that's when there's a group of people observing a man's likelihood of fighting, of getting to a physical altercation, goes up. And that would make sense in an evolutionary standpoint, right? If you are in a tribe, which only has 50 people in it, and everybody knows everything that's happened, and there there's people watching and you back down from a fight, they might think in future, I can push Rob around, that guy's a pussy. Whereas if you stand up for yourself, even if you potentially

lose, but if you stand up for yourself, people might think, yeah, Rob's worthy of respect. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems to, yeah, that seems to align with some evolutionary psychology principles. When there is a crowd, it would make sense that men are more willing to engage in physical altercation. I've also seen, if you look at data, Martin Wilson and Margot Daly, I think I'm getting the names right, Wilson and Daly in any case are the last names. They looked at young male homicides and the causes of young male homicides in the United States. And what they found is that most homicides started over what they call trivial altercations. Essentially sort of minor insults, you know, sort of dissing one another or insulting

one another. And these are the most common reason for a male homicide is because of these trivial altercations, what they discovered. And so interestingly, I just read a blog post about this on psychology today by Douglas Kendrick, and he said that if you're a young man, one of the things you can do to promote your own survival among Jebodies to be polite to other young men simply because you know disrespecting another young man is actually very dangerous based on based on some of these findings on on what causes men to kill one another

trivia altercations man. So, don't you think you don't know someone's drink over or cut in line at the supermarket? Oh, well, there's not enough people at the supermarket at the moment anyway to allow that is that you've got to keep two meter distance. So, okay, so men and women have different risks associated with having sex and until recently we were unable to have any reliable form of protection, despite how accurate and well-timed you think your withdrawal game is. It's not optimal. It's just some optimal contraceptive strategy. Yeah. So what else do we need to know? Yeah, I mean, something else that might be interesting are, you know, so I've read a lot about men in particular,

you know, why we are driven to do this things that we do. And something like weightlifting or playing sports, things like this. Well, one reason why, for example, men want to weight lift is to build big muscles. And the research does show on research on attraction that women are more attracted to men with big muscles. Muscular men are, they report having more sexual partners relative to less muscular men. Part of this is because building muscles is costly, right? It's a sort of fitness indicator, not fitness in the sense of like, you know,

sport or athletic, but fitness in terms of reproductive fitness, Darwinian fitness. If you can build muscles, it indicates a lot of things about you. It indicates that you're able to obtain, you to obtain calories, the resources necessary to build those muscles, it indicates conscientiousness, which is a personality trait. Someone who regularly goes to the gym, that person is diligent in hardworking, they have goals and stick to them, and then of course, they confer protective advantages to people who are less likely to mess with a muscular guy, relative to a smaller guy. Yeah.

And so, yeah, you see some of this in the research. Yeah, muscular men report more sexual partners. Yeah. I just want to kind of dig into that for a second here. The fact that women find those traits attractive and a man has those traits suggests that if she was to mate with him that her children would have those traits, which means that they are more likely to reproduce because other women will find that to be attractive. Yeah, so this is some call this the sexy son hypothesis. Which is a brilliant name. Yeah, yeah, so this is, I first talked about this, I think in Matt Ridley's book, The Red Queen,

the sexy son hypothesis is basically this idea that women are attracted to men who are attractive to other women. And the reason is because if they have sons with this man, that their sons will also be attractive to lots of women and thereby pass on those genes. But yeah, the basic idea you're describing is that when women want men who have certain qualities because those qualities will tend to pass down to their offspring. But I think it's also important to make clear that these aren't calculated or sort of

deliberate strategies that we're enacting. A lot of this is going on sort of under the hood. We're not even aware of why we like what we like or what we do. We just know that it makes us feel good. So when a woman likes a muscular man, it's not because all of these operations are going on well, my kids will be muscular and they're going to be muscular. If there's a woman out there who's gone through that discourse that we've just heard in her mind, I want to meet her and talk to her because she'd be fascinating. But yeah,

you're totally correct. And that was the point I really wanted to try and get out of you. Can you explain how genes and what they do to promote genetic fitness and emotions and feelings and the more conscious side of brain, how those two things into link? I think, is it Robert Wright that says genes are the preferences and emotions that are executed, something like that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, genes are basically selected for, and basically through evolutionary pressures, shapes certain behaviors.

And of course, like there are other factors involved, cultural factors, social factors, and so on, but a lot of our behaviors, our strategies, and acted through our genes. And it's not like we're consciously aware of it, we're just sort of going through these motions in the same way that say, when you're eating sugar,

you're not going through this calculated process of, well, I'm eating the sugar because it's giving me caloric energy, which I can expand later and so on. The sugar just makes us feel good. And our genes give us this little reward. Our biology gives us this little being like, okay, you're eating sugar, it makes you feel good because that's advantageous. But things don't make you feel good for no reason.

Like, everything that makes you feel good is something that at least in the ancestral environment paid off in an evolutionary sense. So when you see a beautiful woman or you see a particularly athletic man or whatever it happens to be, you feel a little bit good, you feel some positive response to that. And none of this is deliberate or calculated. It's just sort of built right into us.

And it's not anything that we're really thinking about necessarily. Yeah, for sure. I think this, for me, is precisely why I've found evolutionary psychology to be so interesting. It's even looking under the hood. It's taken the engine apart, and it's looking inside of the engine. It's looking at why do we like the things that we like, why are our preferences the way they are? And then when you take that, you take the fact that we have these unwritten rules about the way that we operate, and then you apply them to an environment in which they were absolutely not designed to operate, which is where we are now, I guess, what is it? The last 10,000 years, probably, I guess it'd be maybe 2000 to 10,000 years or so would be beginning, but especially now.

Yeah. You told you right. Perfect example. I love the idea of guys going to the gym, displaying the fact that they're able to get surplus calories because surplus calories is something which would have been a rarity, you know, 50,000, 50,000 years ago when all of our problems were problems of scarcity, not problems of abundance like now.

And a guy who's able to be big is, oh my God, he must be an unbelievable hunter, he must be very diligent, like you say, must be very conscientious, but people are now able to game that system, you know, like you're choosing to eat the protein shake and go to the gym and lift some weights and stuff. That's gaming the system. Right. Yeah, yeah.

And on that point about, you know, going to the gym and building big muscles, um, something I want to touch on earlier about this, you know, a lot of these sort of secondary male characteristics. much on earlier about this. A lot of these secondary male characteristics, there's a paper called Beauty in the Beast by, I think it's an evolutionary psychologist, David Puts, and he basically found evidence for these secondary male sexual characteristics evolving not necessarily only to attract women, but also to signal dominance towards other men to basically intimidate potential sexual partners, sexual rivals. Basically what he found is that if you show women pictures of muscular men, for example,

and ask how attractive they are, women do have a small preference for muscular men, relative to less muscular men, but if you ask men how intimidating a muscular man looks relative to a non-muscular man, men are actually like the effect size for intimidation, men are much more intimidated by that. Other characteristics like beards, so there's a wide debate, you know, online and everywhere else, you know, do women like beards or not?

And, you know, I see you got a little stubble going on there, right? I can't decide. I'm trying to play both camps at the same time, Robert, that's it. Yeah, well, fortunately, you could grow it out. You can shave it, you know, there's no way of options. But for beards, the evidence is totally mixed about whether women actually like them or not. is totally mixed about whether women actually like them or not. Whereas for men, if you ask them how intimidating is this man with a beard versus without, men are very likely to say he's

more intimidating with a beard. Almost no man would say a clean shape in men is more intimidating than a man with a beard. That's so interesting. Did you have a look at men with checkered shirts? Let me take a look at that one. Yeah, that one. I think it was you who tweeted the study and then I tagged a couple of my buddies in it. I'm writing saying that the most robust characteristic of physical trait for a man to have is muscle size. It was more effective than low voice, than beard, and then height. low voice, then beard and then height. Is that okay? So I saw a study that was a big analysis and

there was varying small degrees, little bits here and there with certain women, certain age ranges of what they liked in men, but across the most robust strategy for making a man more attractive to women across age ranges was just put some muscle on. Oh yeah, yeah. If you're listening, if you're listening, you're struggling, you've had a little bit of a dry spell and you're thinking, I don't know whether I grow a beard or go to the gym, go to the gym first. Maybe grow the beard while you're at the gym. Nice.

I like it. Nice. I like it. Right. So Some interaction there. So yeah, and so there was an interesting study related to this where they basically, so group of researchers took a group of men and had them speak to a camera, you know, just a few minutes recording the short videos of these men. And then they showed these videos to different participants. So they showed these videos to a first group of women.

And then they had these women watch these videos and ask them, how sexually attractive do you find this man? And I think it rated them on a scale of one to seven. And then they showed those same videos to a group of men and asked these men, how likely is it that this man in this video would win a physical fight with another man? And again, like scale 1 to 7, right? And then they tracked the men in those videos 18 months later and basically asked them how

many sexual partners they'd had over those last 18 months. And they found that the number of sexual partners they had was associated with how formidable they looked, how tough they looked to men. That was, there was a link there, but there was no link between how many partners they had and how attractive they were to women. So it actually looks like how tough you look is more predictive of how many partners you'll have than how sort of sexy you look to you. What you're saying, Rob, is that men are better at picking out men that are going to get laid than women are. In a way, I don't know if you put it quite that way. Yeah, I know what you mean. But in terms of, yeah, looking at how tougher guy looks, yeah.

Yes. So we have different preferences for men and women. We have this ancestral environment, which is where our genes were created. They have these feelings and these emotions that execute what we should be doing, our behaviors and our preferences and things like that. Some of them were either not conscious at all, partly conscious or kind of completely conscious. You know when you see a woman or a man who peaks your interest and you go, like, she's hot, he's hot, whatever. So what do we move on to next? What's next? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can look at, for example, we could even go back to,

and this could maybe connect to some of the more modern dating kind of stuff, but, you know, again, so men have far smaller investments in sex compared to women. Again, this sort of few minutes, few seconds kind of thing. So it's advantageous actually, evolutionarily, for men to seek more variety. They tend to be more interested in novelty. I just listened to his podcast. I think it was Justin Lay Miller, who's a sex sex researcher and he reported that basically when women have sexual fantasies, it tends to be the same person throughout the duration of the fantasy, whereas for men, men tend to switch who they're fantasies about, minute to minute as they're going through the fantasy. As any man or woman who's listening knows is completely impractical and holy, it would be an operational

nightmare. We need real life you be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But yeah, in the fantasy, men will sort of go through these different scenes, different people, and so on. Whereas women tend to stick with the same person. And then you see this sort of in real life, too. Well, the thing is, so if you look at number of sexual partners, straight men, straight

women tend to report about four to six sexual partners is the median number that men and women report in the US at least. Less being women are about the same four to six sexual partners, but if you look at gay men, the numbers are something like 16 to 20 sexual partners. And the thing is, they're basically, I think this is a more sort of representative look at male sexuality in a way. I think straight men would prefer to have 20 partners versus four partners, but they have different challenges. They have to basically convince women to like them, and women are chooseier in comparison. And so, yeah, I mean, and this is something also that's interesting.

Women are chooseier, in a sense, but the psychologist, Deep Stewart Williams, has got a pretty big Twitter account. He has called, he's sort of described women's sexual strategies as selectively promiscuous. And what that means is that women will, you know, basically if a man has exceptionally high status, if you're a rock star or, you know, an actor or something like that, you can tend to, you can basically get a lot of female sexual partners. Many women will reduce their standards for emotional commitment or for trust or cooperation or all of these kinds of things if a man has this extraordinarily high status. So women can be in some cases sort of this selectively promiscuous

as used to where Williams puts it. But in general in their daily lives, they tend to be quite careful. Yeah, so what I want to kind of touch on here is that we have this evolutionary landscape, which has an asymmetry, no matter what you think, men and women aren't the same.

At least in this particular domain, I do not want to get into the deeper discussion about that. Men and women are not the same in terms of their investment in how children are born. And what that means is that women have to be the gatekeepers and men have to be the sexual protagonists. What I think is interesting is that you see these roles play out in cultural memes that become caricatures, right? So you know, every man has a woman ever been called a sleaze. You know, like are a creep. Like there's no woman who's ever so much the sexual protagonist that a man would call her a sleaze, but that's a common put down for men, right? You know, or a fuck boy, or what, you know,

pick your vernacular, whatever you want to say. Um, so you have that, but you like, hang on a second, that is a modern day interpretation of an ancient system at work, right? Did that the fact that, oh well, he should text first? Perfect example. Like, why should a man text first? Well, probably because you have, as a woman,

you have more to lose by a sexual encounter, which means that you need to make him jump through more hoops to get to have that sex. Because the risk for you traditionally, over the last 100,000 years has been higher. Therefore, you're the gatekeeper, he's the protagonist. But that is a perfect example of how the modern world of dating, the modern interactions that every man

and woman that's listening will know reflect that. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, you can see this. Yeah, even even in our our more in line-dage, you know, the other day, for example, I was talking to a to a woman and she told me that she had a crush with this, you know, this guy at her work and I asked her, you know, why don't you ask him out then? And she said, oh, I would never ask a guy out. And I said, but you really like him, right? I have a number of male friends that would say exactly the same thing. She said, no matter how much I like a guy, I would never ask a guy out. And I said, but you really like him right? I have a number of real friends that would say exactly the same thing.

I would, she said, no matter how much I like a guy, I would never ask him out. And can you imagine a guy saying this? Like one of your guy friends, you know, he likes a, you know, some woman and you say ask her out and he says, no matter how much I like a woman, I would never ask her out. Does that make sense? That doesn't compute, right? And so, yeah, we see these, you know, as you're saying, the sort of protagonist, the sort of gatekeeper. You see these kinds of rules. As a perfect experiment there, to the men into the women that are listening,

to the women, how many times have you gone up to a guy and said, hey, I think you're really hot, are you single or whatever? Now, you may have gone up to a guy and said, my friend who sat on that table thinks that you're really single, but that doesn't count, so don't try and slip it past me.

And then on the flip reverse of that for men, how many times has a girl come up to you and said the same thing? Like it is, I can count, you know, I've worked a lot of nights in my life. And man, I can remember probably most of the times that that's happened. These are a very exceptionally unique makeup of a girl

who is prepared to go and do that. And you said, well, why? Why is that the case? Is it, it could, can such a skew in people's behavior simply be sociocultural? Right. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not aware of any culture or society in which it is the norm for women

to ask men out on dates or sort of take the initiative in these courtship rituals. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think it could be even more important, you know, it's just maybe we can sort of transition into, into yeah, this sort of modern dating. It could be more important for women to take this initiative, especially educated women, because among the educated population within the US, and I think within most Western countries now, there are more educated women than there are educated men. And so if you're an educated woman looking for a partner who's also educated, things are actually looking quite tough for them. It's bad dating market at the moment.

Yeah, yeah, it really is. Coronavirus aside, even before all of this, I think yeah, things were looking actually quite grim if you look at the data for especially educated single women. So there's this great book, just a couple of years old, from John Burger called Data Onomics. And he basically ran a bunch of analyses looking at, basically, how many single men and how many single women are there, how many educated women were educated women, and so on.

And what he basically found is that among people with bachelor's degrees or above who are in their 20s and their 30 sort of young adults, young singles, there are 33% more women than men. So there are four women who are college educated compared to every three men. And so basically the market is actually looking quite unappealing or sort of not being not unappealing, but it's not looking good for women. Whereas for men, it's actually the opposite. If you're an educated man, there's actually a surplus of potential partners for you. In part because if you're an educated man, you can date educated women of which there are

more educated women than men, but you can also date less educated women, right? Whereas educated women tend to be more reluctant to date men who are less educated. For some of the reasons that we mentioned before, women want men who have certain qualities, now there are some cases where women will date men who are less educated than them, but what the research shows is that in those cases, their partners tend to earn more than them. And in fact, women who date men with less education are twice as likely to be married to a man who has higher income than themselves. So, you know, if you basically, if you're an uneducated man, all hope is not lost for you. If you want an educated woman, but you just have to earn a lot more money.

You got to, you got to get your craft of. I've got a hustle man. Making some, yeah, exactly. So again, here's another cultural meme. And I can, I can feel the, the triggering. I can feel it happening. Even in myself, right? Like I, I don't like hearing the fact that women have hypergamous dating preferences

that they date what is referred to as up and across, right? They will, they, it's the same perfect example of this is if there are any tall girls who are listening, you don't tend to want a data guy that's shorter than you. If you take that as a characteristic across most important elements of dating, you most women on the whole don't want to date a man who earns less than them or who is less educated than them. And if you are less educated, you need to compensate by earning significantly more as the data would suggest. But you know, it's very easy to turn that into a caricature and what's the caricature of that, the gold digger. You know, that's the modern, that's the fuck boy, Tinder generation, WhatsApp world speak

of what that is. It's the girl who is purely interested in resource acquisition. And it's, again, it's challenging to, it's challenging to try and hit this across without it sounding like a value judgment that either encourages or discourages, says it's either good or bad. This isn't, I'm gonna try and create some form of disclaimer for Rob as well here. This isn't, I'm gonna try and create some form of disclaimer for Rob as well here.

This isn't, yeah, exactly. This isn't either of us saying that this is good or bad. This is the way that people should or should not behave. But I would challenge anybody that's listening to say that this isn't the way that people behave. We have some pretty robust data and everybody knows, everybody knows the guy who is prepared to sleep with women who are of varying standards. But I don't know many women that are prepared to sleep with men who are of varying standards. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah, and yeah, it's important that the studies that I'm describing and some of these generalizations, these observations,

they're descriptions, they're not prescriptions. These are sort of describing what people do, but it's not saying this is what people should do. Some people sort of make this, what's called the naturalistic fallacy, which is basically that just because something exists in nature, that means that's the way it should be. But clearly this is in the case, I mean, you know, coronavirus exists, right? That arose, you know, that, you know, someone ate a bad or something, and now there's this pandemic. Should that be the way it is? Darkness, darkness on a nighttime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there are some maybe less savory aspects of human nature, but doesn't mean you

should enact it, but we are describing it. I think describing it and talking about it and bringing some of these out into the light can help us, you know, inhibit it or redirect it to something that would align more with our moral commitments and, you commitments and try to make people happier. Perfect example of this before we delve fully into the world of Tinder. A perfect example of this is the modern setup of monogamy. What you're... I'm going to ask you to put your money where your mouth is now having read a bit of evolutionary psychology, what your feelings on what would have been a typical ancestral setup for relationships?

Yeah, so I mean, basically what I've read for, you know, what goes on a hunter-gatherer societies, they were largely monogamous for the most part, for multiple reasons. One reason is it was essentially impossible to stockpile resources in a hunter-gatherer forging society. So a man could not accumulate vast amounts of material wealth simply because if you're in a small band or a tribe and you're constantly moving, going where the food is, where the water is, you can't hoard lots of material resources and carry it around with you. That's one reason.

And then another is that simply, men had to rely on one another, and trust one another in war and in hunting. And men aren't going to go fight for someone in their tribe who has all of the women. Why would they do that? And so basically men had to essentially, I mean, the sounds, maybe it doesn't sound so good, but basically men had to create a system where the sort of access to sexual partners or whatever was roughly equal in order for the tribe to survive. Now this doesn't mean that in hunter-gathered societies, infidelity didn't exist or make

poaching, which is, you know, luring someone else out of a relationship. Like, there's research on modern day hunter-gathered societies And there is infidelity, there is cheating, there's divorce exists in a way where basically like people will switch partners later on and leave their current partner. So there's all of the things, all these things that are sort of recognizably parts of human nature. But polygamy and its variations didn't appear to exist until the rise of agriculture.

Once people were able to sit in one place and stockpile resources, the invention of money, the ability to command large armies and so on, Those things didn't come until after the advent of agriculture, but in small bands, they're mostly monogamous, is my understanding. But often the question is, are we naturally monogamous? Are we naturally promiscuous? What are we?

And the answer is we're both, there is no universal template for human beings. It looks like in terms of stability, monogamy is the best, both in modern society and in forging societies. But people still do have urges and people want to have more than one partner, divorce is widespread. And so, yeah, we sort of want to, what does it have our cake and eat it to? Yeah, which is very, that's very human. Yeah, for sure.

Okay, so we're moving into the modern world, we're moving into Tinder and modern dating and stuff like that. What you've been thinking about to do with that recently. Yeah, well, one thing that's been on my mind lately, and I talked about this in a recent newsletter, is what is coronavirus going to do with casual sex, which Tinder and these other apps are associated more with casual sex, although people do meet the partners on them. And you can't, like all the bars are shut down, right? Like you can't go out, you can't go to restaurants, like you can't meet anyone anywhere.

And so that's, you know, one obstacle if you want to meet someone new. And another is, we don't know who has this virus, man. Like, are you like excited to go meet someone new? If you don't know, like, who has this virus, who doesn't? Like, who's eager to like have a new sex partner who who might have COVID-19. So yeah this is something that my impression is that there will be less casual sex at least throughout the course of this epidemic. And I think people will sort of recommence to whatever relationships they happen to be in for now. will sort of recommit to whatever relationships they happen to be in for now.

After this is all over, I'll be curious to see how it goes. I've heard some stories about couples who live together are starting to feel a little bit irritated at their partner because they've been cooped up inside for so long with this sort of social distancing stuff. But yeah, tenders are very interesting. But yeah, tenders are very interesting. Speaking of education and so on, there was a study, I think it was this year, maybe it was late last year, on Tinder. I want to say it was in the Netherlands where they basically took male profiles on Tinder, took the same exact man, same profile, and all they did was change his education. So, in one profile, the man had a bachelor's degree, and in another profile, the same man, he had a master's degree, and found that the man with a master's degree got about twice

as many likes compared to the man with the bachelor's degree. So yeah, you mentioned earlier to your listeners here, you know, hit the gym, but maybe also, you know, hit the books. If you want to get more, there's only so many hours in the day. That's right. Well, prioritize one or the other. But yeah, so this is pretty interesting. Even on Tinder, you see these sorts of, you know, these sorts of mating strategies emerge in terms of status, education, and all

of these kinds of signals. And you know, relatedly, given that the economy seems to be tanking right now, this could be bad news for some men and maybe good news for others. But basically, what the research shows, this rise in sexy selfies, right? So this research, basically, that was done on sexy selfies and what they found was that basically, so they had a question, why are women taking sexy photos of themselves in this way? How did they define sexy photo? I'm not exactly sure, but sort of provocative, maybe not wearing much, something like that. I don't respect the photo, or well-posed photos and stuff like that.

Right, so beach photos is kind of thing. And so the researchers ask, well, are women doing this because, like, are the societies women doing this in more misogynistic maybe? Societies that are more likely to objectify women or view them as sex, you know just just for because of their sexuality or something like that Or could it be something else? And so they basically like collected, you know data from all of these different countries different regions within countries and they found That you know the misogyny of a country had nothing to do with how many sexy selfies women were posting, but what sexy selfies were associated

with was economic inequality within developed countries. So, for example, within the US, in regions like New York City or Miami, San Francisco places where there's a bigger gap in income between men, you're going to find a proliferation of more female sexy selfies. And the researchers posit that the reason for this could be that if there is a small number of men who have a lot of economic resources, women are basically competing in sort of advertising themselves to these men. They have to open that game.

Basically, they're upping their game in regions where, yeah, basically, there's a lot of halves and or rather few halves and a lot of have nots. And yeah, I mean, there's also interesting research from the 2008 economic recession on purchasing habits of women. And what they found was that, shortly after the 2008 economic recession, sales of cosmetics increased. And again, the researchers there

are positive that in an economic downturn where women are again sort of upping their game, trying to find the relatively fewer men who are economically successful in those situations. I feel like we're sort of like just talking about women and as you mentioned Gold diggers earlier, I want to again, you know, discolid, you write this disclaimer here that, you know, women are gold diggers or anything, but that they are enacting a strategy that paid off for their ancestors to identify. Don't care about your feelings, Robert, unfortunately, and the guys from DataNomics know that first hand.

Well, why don't we flip it on its head? Why don't we start talking about the gender sex gap between men and women. So I know that I think it's the bottom 80% of men on Tinder are competing for the bottom 20% of women. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. That was a fascinating finding. Yeah, where they basically found, yeah, exactly what you're describing here, that men who are not exceptionally good looking or have certain status markers, they're having a much harder time on Tinder. Just to put this into perspective, if I recall these numbers correctly,

men on average, swipe 60% of the female profiles they see, they like them, was it swipe right? Yeah. You know, they like those profiles. Don't pretend you don't know, Robert. I know. Let me pull up my app real quick And then uh whereas women on the other hand, I think it was 4% they swipe right on 4% of the male profiles They see that is an unbelievably low number. I mean just purely from a

Time investment standpoint You get to get through a hundred people to get four right swipes, and if you have a particularly bad afternoon, it's not a ridiculous stat to think you might not swipe right on anyone, unbelievable. It's almost like the experiences are completely different, whereas I mean, this wasn't a psychologist. I just, in a casual conversation, I once heard someone describe this sort of difference between men and women in terms of how they value it with the opposite sex, or something like, men look for reasons why they wouldn't sleep with a girl, whereas women look for reasons

why they would sleep with a man. So the default position for man is, I would sleep with her, unless there's some extraordinary reason why I shouldn't. Whereas for women, I'm definitely not going to sleep with him unless there's some particular reason why I should. And this is sort of, we're seeing this on Tinder with the frequency of rights wipes. So, yeah, so basically there's a large group of men who are collecting large numbers of likes. I have a friend, and you probably know guys like this, who are racking up huge, huge numbers on these dating apps. Yeah, I have a friend who has something like 20,000 plus matches on Tinder.

I think he closed it down. He ended up getting a relationship and he settled down. But for a while, I'm surprised he didn't break the fucking servers. Yeah, closed it down because Tinder came in and they said, sorry, we just can't give this account any more storage space with the $20,000 like. Yeah, shut it all down. No, it was actually opposite. I don't know how this happened, but he was a Tinder identified him as some kind of valuable

user. And like, if all of these perks and benefits and like lifted his limitations on how many points. Was it like Amazon Prime or something? If you've ever, if you've ever actually spent more than a thousand pounds in a year on booking.com, you get to become a genius. And booking.com, being a booking.com genius is fantastic. You get 10% off, you get early check in.

So I wonder if he got like early check in and. Yeah, essentially the equivalent of that. No, I haven't, I've never gotten those privileges. Sometimes Amazon sends me complimentary protein bars because I order so many of them, but I've never anything like free Amazon Prime. But yeah, so you have guys like my friend here who has all of these likes,

and then you have other guys, and I think this is probably more typical of the male experience on dating apps, where they go through dozens or hundreds of profiles and get maybe a handful of matches with women. And so, yeah, this is sort of the typical male experience where the competition isn't this tough. And one thing I'm concerned about now with the economic downturn is that it could get

tougher. As women are losing their jobs. Yeah, yeah. And full of guys, maybe, you know, guys who've been working from home, you know, podcasters and so on who, you know, have stay at home gigs, you know, things might turn out pretty good for them, but for other guys. That's hoping Rob, he's hoping, Mace, I'm fucking. I was praying.

I just been praying for a pandemic to happen. So that I'm dating, a dating situation can improve. No, man, it's, again, this is under the tough pill for, for men to swallow. And, and you know, when we talk about a world which I absolutely haven't delved into, but in cells, mig, towel, which is men going their own way, red pill, black pill movement, roller, tamasis going to come on at some point when I can finally get a hold of him.

You know, all of this, all of this kind of like men going their own way thing, I think is in response to the challenges that men are seeing in the dating market. It's increasingly hard for men to find women. The stats don't lie, I can't remember how big the sample size was for Tinder, but it was, I remember that they analyzed a lot the difference between how many men that 80-20, which is so funny that it's a perit a distribution as well, that 80-20 distribution between the bottom 80% of men competing for the bottom 20% of women, which conversely means that the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. Like, that top 20% of men have such an unfair advantage.

And I got a comment, an unbelievably long comment that was very well written or like, I didn't understand most of the language and it's someone who had crawled out from these reddit sub threads about Make-Tow and in cells and stuff like that. And had said about, he was making a comment on a girl that I had unreasonably who created a website like OnlyFans long story short. He said one of the things he accused me of playing the game because I'm 32 and still single. He said that if I was being charitable slash respectful generally for men as a whole, I wouldn't continue staying single until 32. The implication is that I'm playing the game,

that I'm tying up the options of a number of different girls throughout, they're 20 throughout, they're 20 throughout, they're 20s, which is restricting men from, I mean, first off, I was very flattered. But yeah, yeah, that's about to say. Secondly, the fact it was so well written, man. Like, this comment was hit, it had line breaks

and he managed to make shit bold on YouTube. I didn't even know you could do that. So I'm like, this is this guy, is this a fucking small thesis. You should submit it at Cambridge. And he went through it and then I replied, I reckon if this tiny little reply, and then he went again, and there was a little bit

of sort of vitriol in it, but what made me really sit back was that it was very well balanced and worded and obviously understood what he was talking about. And I was like, there is an entire body of knowledge here trying to figure out why men aren't getting laid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, I mean, that definitely sort of is, at least to me, a very charitable,

probably one of the more charitable interpretations I've seen. It's a back-hander way of doing it, yeah. Right, but yeah, I mean, there are a lot of guys out there who are struggling. I know guys like this who aren't doing so well in terms of dating, in terms of jobs, they're not where they want to be. And yeah, they're struggling. And I don't think guys like you are tying women up or anything like that, in terms of keeping them out of the dating pool. But I do think there are some challenges right now, simply because the modern world is, there's a mismatch between our sort of innate desires and the way that the modern world is set up, such that there aren't as many men in college

and women tend to prefer educated men. but men aren't going to college and people are wondering why that is. There aren't as many, many who are earning. In terms of the millennial generation, I believe that women are earning as much and in some cases, even more than millennial men, at least in the UK, I read this. So you got a better educated richer women. Yes, women are better educated and richer, which again is, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But if they're looking for male partners, they're going to look for men who are also better educated and richer and preferably even more educated and richer than themselves. So every woman is now becoming

the tall friend, right? They're becoming the tall friend who can only date basketball players and, you know, like pro sports guys because, and the, the, the converse of that is really, really bad for both men and women, which is the alternative if women tend to date up and across or their preference is to date up and across to richer and or better educated men, and there are a few of those men around, there's two choices left, which is both genders get to remain single for the rest of their life, or women get into relationships with men that they're fundamentally unattracted to. Which is also not ideal. Right. Tim? Well, there's also the other option would be women can, part, women can essentially share

a man, right? So some people have speculated that this is what's basically going on in these gender imbalanced communities like universities and colleges where there's a surplus of women relative to men, men are much more likely to play the field so to speak. You know, they're more more reluctant to settle down, more interested in casual sex and so on, and in colleges where there are more men than women, there's actually more relationships, more emotional commitment, and more of a dating culture.

And some people find this surprising, but it's really not because in these colleges with more men, they're men are basically competing to get a girlfriend. And women on average tend to prefer courtship, commitment, relationships, and so on. And in environments where there are more women than men, women basically have to compete for the small pool of men. And what do men like? Well, men on average tend to like, you know, more casual situations, you know, more short-term relationships, one night stands, you know, things that are more casual. And so women are more likely to do those things to try to get men to like them.

So they've got to play each other's game, right? When men are the surplus rather than the scarcity, they have to play women's game, and when women are the surplus rather than the scarcity, they have to play men's game. Right. Yeah. And we're seeing a kind of inversion. I mean, I think in the past, when men have more education than women, maybe monogamy was easier in some ways, simply because if women prefer dating men who are educated and have higher earnings and so on relative to themselves, then yeah, I think maybe it was easier back then in some ways. And today, when things are sort of flipped, and they're reverse now, we're women,

have more education and so on than men, becomes harder. And so some people have suggested that polygamy or some variation of that will arise. There's a lot to overcome there. So basically, a lot to overcome there. And I think the whole, we haven't really dealt into it too much. That is a whole another two hour episode.

I think if we try and really get into how does monogamy help with resource distribution, between men to women, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what an increase in sexual liberation for women in education for women in, you know, we're talking now, we're using terms, speaking about the fact that women are potentially too educated to date men, or at least to dead men that they are attracted to, that they're potentially almost shooting themselves in the foot by their earnings and by their level of education because they're reducing their own dating pool down. And I wonder as we go through potentially more gender pay, changing, and I don't know what the immediate future has in store. I mean, the immediate future has absolutely for calling stock, because everyone's locked in the house. But the after that, once the world rebeens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the shorter term, I'm more pessimistic. I think basically no one has the answer right now. We're going to sort of fumble and muddle our way through trying to figure out what to do. In some ways, I've written about this a lot of men are simply just dropping out. You mentioned the big toe guys, the big toe guys. A lot of the guys now, more and more it seems, are just not interested in relationships at all.

They're sort of retreating into video games or porn or these other sort of distractions. And I wonder if, as technology improves, once there's virtual reality where a man can put on a set of goggles or something and lose himself in some fictional porn world, whether some small percentage of guys will just be okay with that. So, increasingly, the bigger percentage of guys potentially. Yeah, and in that case, yeah, in the real world, basically, there will be even fewer men for women, as men can either drop out. And then there could be some sort of equilibrium reached where, yeah, maybe some mix of polygamy and and repert a technology and so on

will, you know, will have a new norm or rise. I was talking to Douglas Murray, guy that wrote Manus of Crowds. I had him on the podcast and he's unbelievable guy. Oh, don't know whether you've seen either, but he's got Jack. He's got a son of Jack out of nowhere. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago and he had, you know, his blazer on in his shirt and everything. I had no idea that was underneath. I'll do it.

He's anyone anyone that's listening that remembers my episode with Douglas. I mean, he'd had a couple of wines. So he's fairly lucid anyway, but he just looked like normal dude. Normal guy, but he has been pounding the gym. Go on his Twitter search, Douglas Murray, go on his Twitter, have a look. The guy's jacked out of his mind.

But anyway, so I'm talking to him, and he in his book, Manus of Crowd, he's got this chapter about women, and he talks about his significantly less diplomatic than me and you have been this evening. But he's he's talking to one of his friends and his friend said he was saying, how's your young son who's 17 or 18 or something like that? Is he is he dating anyone? And his friend replied and said, oh no, he's not interested in girls. And obviously Douglas is a gay man, immediately, oh my god, he's not fucking gay, is he? Like just

having seen like the potential future that this this fella had ahead for him. Oh, right. And he said, oh no, no, no, he's, he's not gay. He's just kind of thinks that women are a little bit difficult to get his head around. So he's kind of just exited that situation. I can't remember what he said he was doing, like working a lot on his career and maybe doing music or playing video games or something. But you can imagine that, you know,

if you are the bottom 80% of men who are disenfranchised from the dating market who essentially can only get yourself into a relationship where your partner low-key is unattracted to you, from the dating market who essentially can only get yourself into a relationship where your partner low key is unattracted to you, even if they don't know it, and you feel like you're the worst of a bad bunch. I mean, sorry for redpilling you this evening about it, but I'm single as fuck so I can say what I want. But you know, if that's what happens, like, there's the potential for a whole fucking disenfranchised

male militia of single guys walking around. And I think that, you know, as much as they're very, very well spoken and have some incredibly sophisticated arguments, there is a significant portion of the MigGTOW Red Pill in cell Reddit movement for whom this is probably the easiest explanation. Yeah, yeah, I think so. There are more and more guys I've noticed who either... Yeah, to me, that mindset of the 17-year-old kid is unimaginable. When I was 17, when my friends were 17,

like, you know, girls were all, we could pause, like, that's all we could think about and talk about, right? It was like sports and girls and that's about it. Yeah. And yeah, I'm seeing more young guys just sort of like either, either say they're not worth it or say that they can't figure it out or they don't really know and just general confusion. And, you know, one of the things I think is important, having conversations

like this, because when guys go online, there are some very toxic parts of the internet where guys go like, you were talking about caricatures earlier, they sort of take principles in evolutionary psychology or in research and then they exaggerate them or they, you know, sort of turn them into the worst possible version of what the finding was in order to, you know, assuage their own feeling about why they can't get a girlfriend or something like that. And yeah, I mean, I have some sympathy for these guys too, but I mean, I think that there's a lot of this sort of red pill, McDow stuff is really just sort of, you know, they want girlfriends, right? And this is what's what it turns into. That's a lot of less time. Like your your misses would not let you spend five hours a day on Reddit.

So the presumption is that if you're on Reddit five hours a day, you haven't got a bird. Yeah. So the alternative is unless girls are going gay, and I haven't got, I don't know the stats about that, but unless girls are going gay, they're not dating either. You know, if men aren't dating women, women aren't dating men. That's not necessarily true. So women can date a man who is dating multiple women, right? So,? So, I think this is probably what this YouTube commenter guy you mentioned earlier was, you know, when he said you're hugging up these women. So, you as a 32 year old, you know, good looking guy,

you probably have six or seven girls on the side. No, no, sorry. No, right, stop. I have to go on. Yeah, yeah. And so, I think this sure. Yeah, yeah. And so, I think this could be going on here. I have friends who have speculated this.

I don't actually know of any research, but I have friends who have speculated a lot of guys, they know, have four, five, six girls through Tinder that they're sort of shuffling through. There was that big piece in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago where they interviewed all these guys and they're like, you know, whatever, you know, whatever, I racked up 40 girls this year or whatever it is. And so, yeah, I think a lot of women are, you know, sort of dating or hooking up with guys who are seeing multiple women on the side. And then there's a lot of men out there who really aren't seeing anyone.

That gets us through the casual stage of relationships, but it doesn't get us to long-term partners. I see. Oh, I see. Yeah. So what do you think is happening there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what's going to happen there. Currently, I mean, it looks like, I mean, relationships are still faring, but at a lower rate, right? Marriage rates are declining. Devolence rates are increasing. Well, my understanding is divorce rates have mostly stabilized, but marriage rates have

declined, and people are getting married at older and older ages to... This will help you at mom. Yeah, yeah, for both of us. So, yeah, long-term relationships, they'll probably survive. I mean, we've gone, I mean, as humans, right? We're very, very adaptable, flexible. So, yeah. That's one of the most interesting things

from reading evolutionary psychology that just how adaptable humans are, just how they're able to take. You know, we, the fact that we're able to step into our conscious process, you know, even the fact like this whole conversation here, why do we think this, why do we have this preference, why do women like this, well, men like that, why is there this disparity between this and the other, the fact that we're consciously able to step in and look at our own programming means that we're able to transcend it. The problem is that you can't get rid of the preferences. Evolution is a slow process and especially when you have a an environment like the mon world which is changing so fast, evolution is pointless

at the moment anyway. What are you evolving to adapt to? And by the time you have your kids, the situation that they've got the genes to be adapted to has gone. It's pointless being unbelievable at writing on a typewriter because now there's a laptop. It's pointless at being able to be a fantastic flying plane because now there's a laptop. It's pointless at being able to be fantastic at flying a plane because now there's surface-to-wire missiles and it's the engineers that are taking it out. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, one of the things that sort of tragic and perhaps one reason I think why people are so afraid of getting old, there was this piece in the Wall Street journal recently on how old people now don't want to be called senior citizens,

you know, sort of baby boomers, they'd rather be called, you know, something else. They're trying to find a different label for themselves because they're terrified of being associated with that label, senior citizen. Because they knew what a senior citizen was when they were not a senior citizen. Exactly. And people are terrified of aging.

And the thing is like in more traditional societies, forging societies, a lot of status was conferred on old people. Well, one reason was because if you could make it to that age, you're robust in that environment, if you could live to 60 or 70. And then another reason is because you've accumulated all of this knowledge that will help the tribe survive. Whereas today it's the exact opposite. It's the 20-year-olds who know sort of the most about, you know, societal trends and, you know, sort of what people are thinking and feeling and where the direction of things are going. And older people are sort of out of the loop. And I think there's something sad about that, you know, that things have flipped this much where we've created

a society somehow where young people have more status than old people in some ways. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, especially when one of the things that you are able to accrue as you get older is wisdom. And now with the advent of free information, free global information at the touch of a button, there are no longer gatekeepers to that wisdom. There is more information on the internet than your granddad will ever know. And with that in mind, it becomes a lot less about life experience and much more about kind of very brute force learning and skill acquisition abilities. If you can learn something

fast, if you're able to do wrote recall very effectively or whatever you pick your skill about learning, if you're able to do that, you're so much quicker ahead. If you can learn in two years, what takes someone else 20, it doesn't matter how old they are. It literally doesn't matter how old they are. So yeah, it's fascinating times at the moment. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface as well, Rob. I would love to get you back on if you'd be so kind. I mean, we've got, you know, I know, I know that you've got fuck all else to do at the moment because you've. Conquarantine, man. Please. For the love of God, just podcast me again. I think that you had a connection. Yeah, I know. Look, there will be so many questions

and comments and feedback. If you've got anything that you've been interested in throughout this conversation, where should they go on Twitter to, Hustle? Yeah, you can just follow me at Rob K Henderson, so R O B K Henderson. Sweet. Yeah, I'd love to hear everybody's feedback about this. I want to know if you're a girl who's the protagonist

in dating or if you've got a sister that does it or if you're a guy who's finding it easy on Tinder, or hard on Tinder, or whatever, you know, this is a very much an emerging field. And if you can help to shine a light for me and Rob, then that'll make us better educated as well. I also have to give a massive shout out, Rob, to your mailing list.

I think it's fantastic. I'm subscribed to, I think it's like five mailing lists, total and yours is one of them. So the link to that will be in the show notes below as well. Link to Rob's Twitter. Dude, I hope that you enjoy. Oh, let's finish up. Sex toy sales. For God's sake, we can get into sex toy sales. Tell me about sex toy sales. Yeah, so basically, since the spread of this pandemic, the coronavirus thing, So basically, since the spread of this pandemic, the coronavirus thing, sex toysales have increased. Yeah, in multiple countries, they increased, I think, 71% in Italy. Yeah, they increased in Canada.

The Italians do not give a fuck, do they? Right. Yeah, I think, yeah, people sort of know, especially single people, they know that they're going to be locked down for a while and you're not going to be able to jump on Tinder and scratch that itch. So it's time to order some, you know, some. 17% increase. Yeah.

So there are probably, yeah, besides like Zoom, I think sex toy companies are also making a lot of money right now, you know. That's the, no one's talking about that. No one's talking about the stock market crash, but no one's talking about the price of silicon. The price of silicon is going through the roof. Latex cat suits. There's a little of everything. Yeah. Look, Rob, I'm going to hassle you. I'm going to bring you back on mine. This was absolutely amazing. Links to everything we've spoken about, mailing list, Rob's Twitter, all the rest of it.

You know what to do, like, share and subscribe. If you're new here, hit the subscribe button, you get an episode every Monday and every Thursday with the most interesting humans on the planet, like the wonderful Rob. But for now, thanks man. Alright, thanks Chris. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend, it would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions

or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media, but for now, goodbye friends.