Modern Wisdom - #448 - Jon Birger - Are Women In Charge Of The Dating Market?

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Jon Birger is an award-winning magazine writer, a contributor to Fortune, a dating expert and an author. Typically men are the sexual protagonists. They're the ones who make the first move, they're the ones who come up with cheesy chat-up lines and deal with approach anxiety and rejection. But in a world where women are struggling to find men they're attracted to, what happens if this role is reversed and women start to be more proactive? Expect to learn why the changing sex ratios on university campuses is creating a problem for men and women's dating prospects, how an experiment on dating approach-strategies earned a Nobel Prize, why it is always statistically in your advantage to make the first move, whether we can fix the problem of raising up men's outcomes in life and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on everything from BioOptimizers at https://magbreakthrough.com/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Make Your Move - https://amzn.to/3CO9Jl2  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is John Berger. He's an award-winning magazine writer, a contributor to fortune, a dating expert, and an author. Typically, men are the sexual protagonists. They're the ones who make the first move. They're the ones who come up with cheesy chat-up lines and deal with approach anxiety and rejection. But in a world where women are struggling to find men they're attracted to, what happens if this role is reversed, and women start to be more proactive? Expect to learn why the changing sex ratios on university campuses is creating a problem for men and women's dating prospects. How an experiment on dating approach strategies and a Nobel Prize, why it is statistically in your advantage to always make the first move,

whether we can fix the problem of raising up men's outcomes in life and much more. I very much appreciate someone like John who is looking at the imbalance in the sexual marketplace but from a woman's perspective. What is it that women can do to make their dating prospects? And remember as well, the prospects of men too, you are takes two to tango in a relationship. perspective. What is it that women can do to make their dating prospects and remember as well the prospect of men too, you are takes two to tango in a relationship. What happens if they take a little bit more control, if they take charge and start to make the first move, it is a different and very interesting perspective to look at all of this stuff from. But now, please welcome John Berger.

John Berger, welcome to the show. Chris, thanks for having me on the podcast. Talk to me about how you ended up as an authority on the dating market. Well, authority may be a bit strong, but yeah, this is the first question I typically get, which is basically how the heck did a business journalist a writer for Fortune Magazine ever end up writing a book about dating.

And the answer is basically, it actually has a lot to do with my years at Fortune Magazine. The editorial staff at Fortune was more women than men, but it was one of these things where I couldn't help but notice that most of the men at Fortune were either married like myself or involved in long-term relationships, whereas the women, especially the ones

that seemed to know best and that I was friends with, they were disproportionately single. And they weren't just single, they had all these dating horror stories and dating histories that made no sense to me, especially since, from my perspective, a lot of them seemed to have way more going for them dating wise than we guys did. So the origin of my first book, Data Nox was basically just trying to explain how we got to a world in which dating had become so much easier for men than for women.

What was the summary of what you found out during that research? So initially, I thought to say something to do with the job markets in these really cosmopolitan cities, like New York or London or Toronto LA. I thought there was something about the industries, the job markets in these cities that was drawing more women, particularly college educated women, to these cities than men.

And that was my premise for data dynamics, but it turns out that I was wrong. That this is not a big city versus small town problem. This is an everywhere issue. So basically in every Western country and then many non-Western countries as well, over the past 20, 30 years we've had about one third, more women than men graduate from college or graduate from uni as you may call it overseas.

And as a result, you end up with a dating pool after college that has, you know, one third more women than that. And obviously, this wouldn't matter at all if we were more open-minded about whom we date and eventually marry. But at the same time that that this higher education, gender imbalance, has become wider and wider. There's been a simultaneous increase in what academics refer to as a sortative mating, which is just a fancy way of saying that university grads tend to want to date and marry other university grads. What do you think is the root of the associative mating increase? I think a lot of it is just familiarity. People tend to date and marry people who we come in contact with. I think 30, 40 years ago, I think there were more, like the communities we lived in

were more mixed when it came to socioeconomics. And you might go to a church or a social club with people of more varied backgrounds. But I think because of kind of some of the social stratification we've seen because of economic changes, I feel like I could be wrong about this. But my my my theory on your question is that university grads and non-university grads don't rub elbows in the same way they once did 30, 40 years ago. And I think that's kind of the root, the root cause of it. But I mean, I a big theme theme of both dataomics and my new book Make Your Move is encouraging people to get past this. And to be open minded about dating people, you

know, with different educational backgrounds, because I think that's the key to solving this problem. With the sex ratio hypothesis, and I've read a bunch of different studies, including I think the original seminal one that was done on it is a hell of an effect, you know, you see really really bizarre changes in the way that people respond to their local ecology. So there's this sentence in the study where it says it's almost as if human mating strategy responds to its local ecology like a

almost as if human mating strategy responds to its local ecology, like a plant or something, right? That you adapt the way that you go about finding and refining your potential partner pool based on the relative number of men and women and what your sex is as well. So if you are a guy and you have a surplus of other men, you have to play the game, so to speak, that women want, which tends to be more dates before first sex. It means that you end up with less casual sex, you have higher rates of virginity, blah blah blah. Reverse that when you have a surplus of women, and a scarcity of men, you have more casual sex, you have fewer dates before sex. And I think you have an increase in sexual violence as well when you have a scarcity of men in an increase of women. But the bottom line is that it's a very strange impact across both. Yeah, yeah. In terms of the sexual violence, one of the things I discovered when researching

the first book, Data Nomics, was I spent some time looking at trends in China where you kind of see the opposite, because of the old one, the one child policy in China where you kind of see the opposite. Because of the one child policy in China, you have a group of marriage age people where the overall population is more male than female. And what's interesting is that as the youth population skewed more and more male, various levels of criminality increased, burglary, murder, things like that. The only category of major crime that declined as the population became more male was sexual assault.

And the theory put forth by the author of the study was, you know, it's kind of crass, but she argued that when women are more scarce, men value them more, and are more protective of them. Even if they're not in a relationship, I don't think that they have a chance of being in a relationship with them. Yeah, I think this is more of a one in wrong thing than people making conscious decisions about how to behave based on a head count. I just think that the culture, as you alluded to, the culture changes depending upon these prevailing sex ratios.

And what's interesting is that most of the sex ratio research that you alluded to that has been, you know, come out over the past 20, 30, 40 years, it kind of evolved from research on other species. And in other mammals, other primates, you see similar things that when you have imbalances in the sex ratio among the mating population, you get the same sort of behavioral changes that we have observed when it comes to human mating and human dating. Well, one of the things that's interesting about the China study there is the increase in anti-social behavior and violent and non-violent crimes amongst men. Because this is something

else that you learn as soon as a man gets into a relationship, his testosterone drops. And then when a man has children, his testosterone drops again. Why? Well, it's because if you are potentially going to father a child or you're now the father of a child, going out and doing something reckless or getting into a fight, you don't need to do that anymore. It's way, way, way too much of a risk. So it's much smarter for you to down-regulate that testosterone, to be a more careful parent,

to not get angry at the fact that your child won't stop crying or whatever it might be. But this is one of the dangerous things. You know, these imbalances in the sexual marketplace are leading to an underclass of sexless men, which can create quite a dangerous foundation for you to then sit society on top of. I agree with everything you said, but what's for me extra interesting about this is this What you just described about putting men into competitive situations and suddenly they're testosterone levels rise and you get more anti-social behavior It's actually not just men that that when when you put women into competitive situations They're testosterone levels rise too.

If you read Hannah Rosen's book, The End of Men, she has a whole section all about rising criminality rates among women and how putting women into increasingly competitive situations has led to a rise in female criminality. No way. Yeah, it's fascinating. So a lot of these things that we like to say, it's a guy thing or a girl thing, it's actually a human thing.

And I'm always trying to kind of pull it back to say, you know what, this is about us as humans, not necessarily about you as a woman, me as a man, etc. The cities make this worse then? Did you find that the research coming out of cities serially about you as a woman, me as a man, etc. The cities make this worse then? Did you find that the research coming out of cities further amplified these problems? I mean, I thought that was going to be the case because I've lived in the air city for a long time and I've heard my female friends have all these dating horror stories, but I'm

not sure it's actually true. I mean, the imbalance, at least in the US, is actually greater in rural states, like West Virginia than it is in Manhattan. So I'm, and I've interviewed lots of matchmakers in less populous parts of the country where they've told me stories that sound very similar to what I've heard from people in New York City.

So I assumed that the city situation would be worse and just not sure it actually is. What was the response from women and men when you did your post book tour and you were talking about data nomics? I mean, with data nomics, I think for the women who showed up at my lecture's book events, I think it was kind of a sense of relief

that finally, like they knew there was something really messed up in the dating market. And all their married friends and their mothers and their grandmothers and their aunts kept telling them that they must be doing something wrong. And I think for a lot of them just hearing that this is actually a statistical problem, a behavioral problem, provided some sense of relief that wasn't their fault. But I will say, I didn't envision Dynamics as an advice book at all. It was kind of more pop science.

I had a really snooty attitude towards the whole self-help genre, I think, because I came from this, you know, serious journalism background writing for fortune. But when I got out on book tour with dataomics, while women, yes, were relieved to hear that there was this bigger problem that wasn't their fault and explained some of their experiences, they still wanted me to tell them what to do about it. And I didn't, I didn't really have any great answers for them then. And that's kind of what led to the second book. What did men say after data nomics? Well, you may not be shocked to hear this,

but men don't usually buy dating books. Yeah, men actually don't buy self-help books in general. So yeah, I did get some feedback from men. And if you Google my name, like on some of the reddit boards that deal with the red pill crowd, to me, like from what I read, it kind of sort of verified what they believed about the competitive nature of relations between the sexes.

But I wasn't really writing for men. I mean, I think this is a problem that exists for women and the reason I wrote the book is because I didn't understand and my wife didn't understand why we had all these single female friends who had everything going for them but couldn't seem to find a decent guy. Okay, so that's dataomics, which is basically you've created a problem for yourself. You've identified that there is an issue in the sexual marketplace, but there's an open loop on the end of this, which is, and what do we do about it? And that's where the next one comes in.

Yeah, I mean, in hindsight, it was probably cruel of me to write a whole book. No, get two books out of it, John. Why not? Don't give people all of the fucking answers in one. No, no, Chris, you're right from that point of view, but I will say my my other forgetonomics, a brilliant woman, the Amazie Tipton. She kept telling me that I needed more solutions and more hope in the book. And I kept ignoring her because again, I had this new attitude towards the genre.

And the last thing in the world I wanted to do was become the love doctor. Well, let me just interject that because I'm having a conversation at the moment with a couple of different publishers. And one of the potential things that would be interested in writing about is this imbalance in the dating market. I think it's fascinating. I think it's relevant. I think that it has existential consequences for society. Right. One of the very rough outlines that I sent over to a very, very good, well-known publisher, they came back and said something along the lines of, we would need it to be much more light-hearted because this doesn't sound like a tremendously uplifting book.

They put in bold letters at the bottom must uplift the reader. I'm like, well, to be honest. No, you're right. No, it's not massively uplifting. So in this genre, if you're going to write a self-help book, there has to be hope, it has to be uplifting.

This is something I've heard a lot. So I'm not the least bit surprised that, and if you look at the self-help books that sell well, they always are positive and they have solutions. And that book I referenced before, The End of Men by Hannah Rosen, it's a brilliant book, but I don't think it's sold pretty terribly well. It's sold perfectly well. Yeah, well, I can already tell from the title. The title itself is kind of dark, right?

And honestly, the data nomics was not my preferred title for data nomics. What would you have called it? I want to call it the man deficit. Yes, because that's one of the chapters, right? Right, right. But I was getting the same feedback. You got that's depressing, that's dark, it had not uplifting enough. But for me, it kind of, I mean, these folks know way more about selling books than you and

I do, so I'm not arguing against their knowledge. But to me, the man's deficit was more what the book was going to be about. But what's the point in writing the book because nobody's gonna read it. So I get where they're coming from and I do think, I mean, honestly, I think in hindsight, one of my, I don't know if it was a problem or maybe I didn't emphasize it enough with data nomics, was that I was way more interested

in solving the boy problem in education than I was in solving the dating problem for women. Well, that's two solutions to the same problem, right? Typically women are dating hypergamously as you have an increased number of women that are within a educated or highly educated field. They compete themselves out of their own dating pool because there are ever fewer and fewer men that are above and across from where those women are. So there are two solutions that you can either get women to

change the way that they're aiming or you can begin to bring the waterline of men up. Right, but as you can imagine, the probably isn't a huge market for books on education policy. I don't know if you read dataomics, but the last chapter is highly focused on how we solved the boy problem in education. And also trying to provide some advice to young people applying to college and to their parents or universities you make refer to it in the UK. Just letting them know that the prevailing sex ratios on college campuses have a huge impact on the campus culture, particularly when it comes to dating. I don't know if you want to get into that a little bit,

but to me, I think actually getting back to your first question, that were your prior question, this was a big reaction of the book, that particularly young people who would just graduate from college or parents of college or university applicants were telling me how shocked they were by some of the anecdotes and some of the research and data nomics showing how prevailing sex ratios in the college campus can have a huge impact on on the way kids on campus view dating.

How so? So in data nomics I did an analysis of about 40 major public and private universities. And I rank them by their their sex ratios. And I paired that ranking with students' own descriptions of what dating life is like on these college campuses. And the descriptions came courtesy of the college-prowler, you know, college review book. it's basically a book written for applicants. So if you want to know what the engineering program is like, University of Georgia, or what the cafeteria food is like, or in this case, what the dating life is like there, you can read, you can read, and it's all written by current or recent students. So you can get a sense of what life is like on these college campuses.

And it was really striking how differently kids talked about dating at various schools depending upon the prevailing sex ratios. And I'll give you some examples here. So Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is kind of a science and engineering school in upstate in New York, RPI. RPI is about 70% men, 30% women, more than two men for every one woman. And here's what students said about dating at RPI. More people are involved in relationships.

Girls seem to become stuck up because they're in such a minority that they can afford to be choosy. Caltech, which is California Institute of Technology in California, and if you remind me, I have a funny story about Caltech, which I can add at the end. Caltech is 60, 40, 60% men, 40% women, three men for every two women. Here's what students said there about dating. Students here tend not to date but have relationships. Breakups are rare and many couples get married after Caltech. Even the schools that were 50, 50, it was kind of a more, it was more familiar to me as a 50-year-old guy when it came to like, what I remember about college. So Tufts University, which is in suburban Boston, Tufts is 50-50. Halfway through sophomore year, people begin to pair off and generally stay paired

off through junior and senior year. That's, that was, that's familiar to me. That's what I remember. University of Miami, which has a reputation as a big party school, but it also happens to be 50-50. And here's what students say about dating there. Random hookups are common in the beginning, but after a few months or a year, relationships take over. So compare that, the schools, they're either more men than women or 50-50 to some of the schools that are disproportionately female.

I'll start with New York University and New York City. NYU is 61% female, 39% male, I get three. Is that that's about representative typically, I think, on average for most colleges now? It wasn't when I wrote the book. It was more like 75, 35, almost not 75, it was more like, I'm sorry, it was closer to 58

30 42. Yeah, I wrote 57 But now it's yep, but I think this year is graduating class. I think you're right. I think at least in the US it's 60 40 It's gonna be bang on so so neat. Yeah, so new yeah, so NYU, New York University, here's what kids say about dating at NYU. Guys take advantage of the male to female ratio and most have no plans of settling into a long-term relationship. Boston University, where actually my son is a senior, senior. BU is 62% female 38% male. Here's the comment. Freshman year is a sexual explosion. There are girls to go around and around again. And lastly, Sarah Lawrence

College, which used to be an all-girls school in suburban New York, it's now co-ed, but it's 75% female, 25% male, three women for every one man. You could probably guess what I'm about to read to you, but let me share. Quote, the girls complain about loneliness. The guys get more than they can handle and mindless one-night stands are rampant. So for me, like doing the college research really kind of showed how

these prevailing sex ratios don't just affect the statistical odds of getting into a relationship, but they change culture, they change behavior as well. Yeah. And rolling the clock forward, the people that graduate from those colleges, presuming that men and women drop out at similar rates, I think men might drop out a little bit more than women actually, but probably not enough to rebalance this sex ratio that we've got. I think that, yeah, you'd be about right at saying 60, 40 women to men, but by 2030, the projection is two thirds women to one third men at a four year US college. So this trend is going to continue to get more

and more pronounced. Yep. Yeah. No, I mean, I, as I said, with my first book, part of my purpose in writing was reversing that trend and trying to figure out how we get more, more men do attend university or college, but that's kind of a, that's a long-term thing. It's not going to solve the dating problem in the short term. Well, the other thing is that dating is inherently an individual act, right? Dating your dating strategy, what sort of partner you're looking for, how you're going about looking for a partner. That's something that you can impact individually.

What you're trying to do, or what you would be trying to do there by continuing to improve men's desire to go to college, that's systemic, right? That's completely, that's a big broad social change that you're trying to get to do. Yes, it happens individually one by one by one, but I feel like trying to impact individuals dating strategies is a simpler problem than trying to improve an entire sexist view of how to go to college. No, no, you're right, but I guess from my point of view, the boy problem and education isn't just a dating problem. Oh, yeah, I mean, don't just go to college to get late. Yeah, although your son, your son did choose one of the colleges that's got a high your son your son did choose one of the colleges that's got a high So my son is actually gay so he gets

Oh god he's ruined it. I know I know why didn't he go to the one with the technology college is 75% men because because I believe it or not prevailing sex ratios have no impact on same sex data because you can always divide by two the rules are just thrown out of the window. But I will say my son Alex, because he has lots of wonderful female friends. But he gets no benefit from the oversupply of fabulous women at BU.

Bloody hell. OK, so getting on to make your move, what are the mistakes that men make that you're trying to get women to avoid making? Well, so I, the book is really written for women because that's who buys dating books and you know, there are two big themes of make your move. The first one is basically encouraging women to be more assertive, to make the first move with men because, and we can get into this, I believe, that research shows there are lots of advantages to doing so. And it's going to be easier to find your

true love, so to speak, if you don't wait and wait for him to find you. And the second big theme of Make Your Move, and I think this has been a little bit more controversial, but I'm happy to make my arguments, is encouraging people to get off the dating apps because I don't think online dating has been good for relationships, for romance, and I think it's only gonna get worse. Talk to me about how you think the Me Too movement impacted dating. So I look at it from the standpoint of women

and I think in general, I think the MeToo movement has been good for dating and good for men because it's clearer now. There was a lot of gray area behavior before MeToo, which men I think unfortunately thought was okay, but never really was okay. And me, probably like lots of other men, I know after the Me Too, Me Too, launched, I spent some time thinking back

about experiences I'd had when I was younger that seemed perfectly fine at the time but weren't. And I think this has been important. But I think there's a real value for everyone to think about how the changes and gains we've made thanks to the MeToo movement, how that might impact traditional dating strategies that involve playing hard to get. Because as you know, pretty much every popular dating book that's been written over the past 30 years from the rules to ignore the guy, get the guy

to why men love bitches, that they all revolve around a very complicated version of playing hard to get. And look, I wasn't dating in 1950, maybe playing hard to get worked really, really well back then, and I'm not saying it didn't. But I do believe that nowadays, and I actually think to a certain extent, even before the Me Too movement, that playing hard to get has become harder and harder. And think about it this way.

If you're a guy at a party and you're talking to a woman and she seems disinterested, the correct response is not to assume she's playing hard to get and want you to keep at it. The correct response is to leave her alone. So, if you have all these dating book gurus, like the rules, ladies, telling women, and I think in one of their books, they actually say explicitly, don't act so interested, treat them like a guy you don't like. Well, that's not gonna work nowadays. And I'm not saying that to defend the men.

I'm saying this to give an advantage to women because if you as a single woman know that guys are gonna be more hesitant and more reluctant to make the first move, wow, you have a huge built-in advantage over other women who are sitting back and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for the guy they like to step up. Because those women are playing by the old rules and you're playing by the new rules. Yeah, well, I mean, this is the wild thing and I really feel

for young guys now that are coming up. I was on a night out not long ago with one of my friends, young dude, real successful guy, big YouTube channel, university degree, prestigious uni, all this stuff. We were on a night out and I was like, oh, there's a group of girls over there. Why don't we go up and talk to them? I'm like bored of your crack. I'm bored of what you've got to say to me.

Like why don't we go up and talk to them? And he looked like I'd suggested that we go and like pour their drink over their head. Couldn't believe the fact that I was suggesting that we go up and speak to a girl, no, I would never, I would absolutely never. What about all of the Me Too stuff? And that was the first time that I've ever seen in real life. You know, it's somebody that's close to me that has similar values to myself, that's British, show the impact, the fear, like complete terror. And I think that you've quoted in the book, you say, men used to worry about being rejected, now they're worried about being labeled a predator. Yeah, that's a quote from a, um, from Brian Howey, who's who,

Brian runs a comedy show or a dating town hall called The Great Love Debate. That was a quote from Brian. He does these dating town halls all across the US. That was his takeaway. But I'm curious, your friend. Is he younger than you? Yeah, he's 21, 22. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's, when I talk to both men and women that age and that age group, I'm always amazed that there's like this, I mean, obviously awkwardness and embarrassment, like, it's never a good thing. But I feel like with the, the Gen Z crowd, there is a next level fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.

High-pissence to it. And any kind of awkwardness terrifies them. And this doesn't bode well for dating, because dating really involves taking chances. But the good news for women is that my kind of go to line when I'm talking about make your move on the lecture circuit is that men like women who like them. So when a woman takes a chance, striking up a conversation with a guy. The odds of her having blowback are far less. Even though she's anxious and she's worried

and she feels the awkwardness, I think the odds of it being a positive experience are better than for your friend. Or maybe it's all in our heads, but I think even if it is all in our heads, I just think there are these huge advantages for women to making the first move, particularly if they've already identified the guy they like. This is the double-edged sword of the repercussions of me to into the dating market, I think,

that I can sympathize with the young guys who are lonely, would love to get a girlfriend, but are now terrified of being labeled a predator. I think that one of the best fixes that you could have would be for women to kind of get a firmware update to their operating system and realize that men aren't playing by that old set of rules anymore. So the thing is that women who aren't interested

and women who aren't interested are both using the same strategies to respond to men that approach them. The men aren't playing by that set of rules anymore. If you say no to a guy, and he's a respectable guy that's learned from me too, he's going to think, oh, I've fucking held. I better not push this. I don't want to end up on the the front page of reddit tomorrow. And, but if you're doing that in some sort of a strategy to say, well, if I say no, that's kind of this sexy,

men love bitches strategy thing, I think that explains a lot about why sort of chatting up and the circuits of dating a crumbling a bit. So I had an interesting conversation with a woman named Francesca Hogi, who is a kind of a high profile dating coach, matchmaker in Los Angeles. And we were talking about this very thing. And here's what I'm just reading from the book here. She says, quote, if a woman comes across as indifferent, men will take that as a sign that she's not interested and will move on. It's getting to a point that if the woman doesn't make the first move,

the men are not going to. This is not the time to be demure, at least not if you're single and don't want to be single. I think she's right. I'm obviously, I'm generalizing and they're going to be individual situations that play out differently, but I'm writing, you know, my advice and make your move is macro, not micro. And so I can't, I can't account for every individual situation, but I think what you just described is spot on and that there has been this culture shift as a result, women who are willing to make the first move or at least make it clear to men that if they make that like just to open the door wide enough so that the men know that it's safe to walk.

And then maybe with a single signal. Yeah. happens as somebody who, like me, who's writing dating books and telling and sort of pushing out the idea of women making the first move, is that you get people from the play-hard to get crowd who, they're quick to say, oh, terrible things happen to women who make the first move. And they paint this picture that's kind of like Kurella de Vil chasing some poor guy down the street. And that's their image of what a woman making the first move is.

And to me, a first move by a woman can be much more subtle. I'll just give you an example from the book. There's a woman I interviewed, very attractive, really big personality. and you know, some guys are a little intimidated by women who are kind of the life of the party. But she was at a super ball party a few years ago, talking to a guy who she really liked a lot.

But he seemed nervous and wasn't sure what to do. So after like 45 minutes, he said to him So are you going to ask for my number? Now she didn't have to grab his ass or like, you know, buy him a drink or you know like She had to do anything outrageous All she had to do was make it clear to him that that if she if he called her or he texted her She would say yes. And that's the great thing from my perspective when it comes to women making the first move is that it doesn't have to be this giant display, this big event, the way it sometimes, the way men sometimes think it has to be. What was that Melinda Gates story?

So the Melinda Gates, so let me see if we can find it out. So what's interesting, I'm a big fan of dating in the workplace and the research shows that couples who meet at work marry at a much higher rate than couples who meet in any other way. I think the marriage rate for workplace romance is something like 30%, which is crazy high. You don't really need a PhD in relationship science to understand why workplace relationships succeed. I mean, you already know the person.

So, like, I think about like the US version of the office with Jim and Pam. I mean, they do everything about each other long before they went out in an actual date. So to me, they were like halfway there or more before the first date. And I think this is the advantage of dating people you know from work because you've seen them at their best in their worst. Somebody who is a good person in the workplace is going to probably be a good person in the relationship. Somebody who is selfish or cruel in the workplace is going to be selfish and cruel in a relationship. But obviously there are challenges to

workplace dating, particularly nowadays. And you alluded to this Bill and Melinda Gates story about how they first started dating. I came across this podcast interview that Melinda Gates gave before they were divorced, but what she was talking about, how she and Bill first started dating. I guess they had met at some kind of a manager's retreat. And like a month later, he called her up. And he, and according to her, he said, you know, I was thinking maybe we could go out. If you give me your phone number, maybe two weeks from tonight. And that's, that's Melinda's recollection. And Melinda basically did what Annie's self-respecting 1990s woman would have done. She played hard

to get. And she said, I said to him two weeks from tonight, I have no idea what I'm doing two weeks from tonight. And I said, you're not spontaneous enough for me. So, but he didn't build it and take no for an answer. And this is how she described it. It was really sweet Melinda recalled. He called back an hour later and said, is this spontaneous enough for you? And like, when I heard her tell the story, my initial reaction was, oh, that's a cute story, because I grew up in an era where that would have been a cute story. That's not a cute story nowadays. No, that's a harassment lawsuit waiting for you in the next day. The CEO ringing some assistant girl twice after she said no. That is Forbes article in New York Times front page.

Right. Right. Yeah. So that's the normal and the gay story. But I have to say, I don't like these corporate rules that ban people from dating. If the single CEO of McDonald's wants to be in a relationship with another, a single executive at McDonald's, as long as there's everything's above board, and I don't see the harm in that,

but I guess it really depends what you prioritize. I mean, if you put a high priority on marriage and family, maybe you're gonna be more willing to take a risk with an office romance than you would be if you're just looking for a hookup. Going back to men and women's complete inability with an office romance than you would be if you're just looking for a hookup. Going back to men and women's complete inability to decipher what the other sex is asking them to do, didn't you look at how useless men and women are at distinguishing flirting? Yeah, I think I honestly think this is the fundamental problem because I think particularly when you talk to singles

about making the first move, they'll say, well, I was really clear. I floored with him. He obviously wasn't interested, or maybe she wasn't interested. The, the, yeah, that, I quote some science, some research in the book, which shows that, I think it was 65 or 70%

of flirtations are completely lost on the person on the receiving end. So if you're a woman, all those shoe dangles and hair flips, he has no idea what's going on. I actually had this funny conversation with my literary agent, and she was telling me, oh my god, if I did a shoe dangle with my husband, he would have thought there was something wrong with my foot. Well, man, here's the thing, like,

both men and women are bad at detecting subtle advances, but the environment that we have in 2022 is increasingly neurotic, and people are less able to deal with awkwardness. There are more externalities with being rebuffed. You don't want to end up as the the butt of the joke in some WhatsApp group chat the next morning. Oh, you won't believe what this girl did when or guy did when they came over. So it's almost like the risks are kind of higher in a way for people who do want to do the approach and given the fact that women culturally just aren't the sexual protagonists ever, you know, in history. It's very rare to have that being held up as some archetype that

everybody finds admirable. It doesn't surprise me and all of this wound up together explains it's one of the many reasons why I think it's men between the ages of 18 and 30 are reporting three times as many men in the last ten years are reporting no sex within the last year. Three times as many men between the ages of 18 and 30. That's the age during which most men would be, you know, having sex, being single, perhaps meeting new women, going through multiple relationships. But yeah, when you've got, no one can determine whether each other is flirting, and both sex is as so terrified as to not flirt, that it doesn't happen. It doesn't surprise me. Yes, but from my perspective, I'm writing for

women. And to me, what you see as a negative, I view as this massive opportunity for single women because those who are willing to take a chance just have this huge advantage because the marketplace, so to speak, is so different than it used to be. Well, you stand immediately and you call this the suitors advantage? Explain that to me. So I have this quip in the book in which I say that making the first move is the only dating strategy ever to be awarded a Nobel Prize. And that's kind of true. But only kind of. So there are a pair of economists who won the Nobel Prize for what they called matching strategy. And matching for them, yes, it involves relationships and marriage,

but it also involves school admissions, job applications, hiring, things like that, any kind of matching. And what they found in their research is that whichever party initiates the match, on average, has a better outcome than the one on the receiving end. And when you think about this from a dating perspective, it makes perfect sense because one of the advantages that men traditionally always had is that at least if they were courageous enough, at least they had a chance with their first choice woman. So, all they had to do was ask her out. She could say no, she could say yes, but at least you got kind of a defendant an answer if you're willing to ask the question. And it was society said it was okay for you to ask Susie out in the

date because that's what men do. But if you're Susie and you've't ask Chris out in the date. You have to wait for him to notice me. That's tricky because, as I said, most people aren't good at communicating romantic interests. If your options are limited to the people who make a first move with you, it's no surprise that the outcomes on average are going to be worse for people who are on the receiving end of the matchmaking process rather than those who initiate the match. That was born out in a bunch of experiments that you did, right? Where you got men and women to rank each other based on what they wanted and then

men approached and women approached and whichever sex was the one that decided to be proactive, they, on average, all of them ended up with a higher level rating. Well, I wish I could say it was my research, but this was actually part of the research that won the Nobel Prize. So there's these two parts. Whatever, take it. Take it. Yeah, yeah.

So I have my Nobel Prize and I can laws it back there. But yeah, yeah, that was the gist of it, that in this experiment, the men were the ones who were allowed to propose marriage, essentially. And the men on average ended up with higher ranked women on their list. I'd have to go through the math and you probably don't want me to, but the just if it is the outcome was on average better for the men in this experiment than it was for the women. And I think it's for all the reasons, you know, I just discussed. You say that women in their 20s have an advantage at finding a partner as well. How come? So I might not put it that way, but I do think there's an advantage to starting earlier that there's a lot of messaging

that singles, I would say women particularly, but I actually think it's men and women as well that you hear like young educated people are told that it's best to focus on your career in your 20s and worry about relationships or family in your 30s. And to me there are all sorts of problems with this advice. First, if you're actually worried about your career and your earnings, research actually shows that couple to people, married people, earn more than single people. So the whole kind of note, the economic notion underlying this advice is simply wrong. But there's also kind of an assumption built into this.

The dating will be just as easy at 31 as it was at 23. And for men, for educated men, it is. It's actually easier. But for women, it gets harder. And I always like to compare this to the game of musical chairs. And Chris, did you ever play musical chairs? Of course. That was a world champion day.

So, yeah. Okay. So you know the basic idea. Like, you know, you start out with 25 players and 24 chairs and in the first round of musical chairs, in that case, you have maybe a four or five percent chance of losing in the first round. By the last round of musical chairs,

when there's two players in one chair, you have a 50% chance of losing the game. So the more players and shares are taken out of the game, the greater your odds of losing. And this is what you see playing out in dating with educated people when you know, this is the situation women are facing. So let's say you start out with a dating pool with 40 women and 30 men. Once half of the women get married, once 20 of the women get married to 20 of the men, the dating pool becomes 20 women and 10 men. So we've gone from a four to three ratio to a two to one ratio.

Once five more couples pair off, it becomes 15 women and five men, a three to one ratio. So the point I'm always making look is if you prioritize marriage, if you're a woman who prioritizes marriage, there was no reason to delay. Either in terms of economics or career, as I said, I've yet to see any good evidence that focusing

on career, not family, your 20s is beneficial. But especially when it comes to relationships because the dating math is just gonna get harder as you get older. Although, one of my arguments and make your move is that there is an advantage for older women to dip down age-wise. And I know a bunch of couples where it's kind of a reverse age gap, a woman, five, six years older than the man. And by dipping down age-wise, women can kind of offset some of this.

Well, this, I wanted to explain for the people who don't understand why this is obvious, the reason that it's more of a problem for women dating at 31 than it is for men dating at 31, is that women, as they get older, on average, are dating men that are their age or older, whereas men have a broader cross-section of women that they can access who are younger than them. So it means that men basically get a broader dating pool as they get older, technically. No, that's absolutely terrible. But what I'm saying is that even if people were only dating others, they're exact age. If 28-year-olds were only dating 28-year-olds, you would still get this musical chairs problem that I made out.

But you're absolutely right that the problem becomes worse because men kind of have this huge pool that make an older man, like the 31-year-old man, can date more broadly than the woman who is through custom or experience or socialization. Thanks, you can only date somebody a year or two or somebody older than them. Well, another consideration here in terms of attractiveness to men is that one of the fundamental things that men are typically attracted to is youth signaled through fertility, right, or fertility signaled through youth, which is, you know, you can imagine a girl who spends her 20s going to college and maybe getting a postgraduate degree as well and then working her way up through a company to be a high-powered executive to

then get to the stage that she's 31 and says, right, I'm now ready to find Mr. Wright and go after him. And she doesn't realize that Mr. Wright very well may be more attracted to the 24-year-old Starbucks employee who is younger and in his eyes fitter than this girl. Many men, not all men, but on average, men don't value education levels as much as women do. They also don't value resource levels as much as women do. Yeah, I mean, certainly that's, I think that's been the case in the past, but there was an interesting, okay, cupid study which came out probably six years ago in which they found that, that, that accept on the margins, except for young women who are basically supermodels.

Men didn't really perceive a big attractiveness difference between say a 33-year-old woman and a 23-year-old woman. And this notion that men all favor youth, it wasn't exactly born out by the dad yet, but yeah, if there's some 21-year-old model or a starlet, yes. That's interesting. That runs pretty counter to what I would have expected and what I've seen in a fair bit of data. But again, another one of the things to consider here is that the men as they get older, they are accumulating more status and resources, which allows them to slowly rise up through their own dominant hierarchy, their competence hierarchy as well.

So the men that are 21 who might want to try and date the 25-year-old woman are competing with the men who are 31, who have 10 more years of experience and charisma and status and resources and the understanding of what shirt goes with what pants and stuff like that. So it makes it a more difficult game. The couple who I feature in the chapter on these reverse age gaps on women dating younger men. I think when they got together she was 32 when he was maybe 27 or 26. when he was maybe 27 or 26. And one of the things that they talked about was that when he was dating people his own age,

he's a very competitive person. And he was frequently dating women who were in his own field. He's a kind of a photographer, designer, arts type. kind of a photographer, designer, arts type. And he would get really pissed off in jealous. Anytime his girlfriends seem to be doing a little bit better than them career wise. And one of the things that they talked about is that this kind of competitiveness was really a non-issue for them because he

understood that she was five years ahead of him career-wise and it actually made the relationship easier because she could be really supportive of him and he could take her advice and there wasn't this kind of friction of two successful people, the same age, two doctors, two lawyers who are married to each other and are anxious about the status of their career. I do think that these reverse age gaps can kind of address this problem that you hear women talk about all the time about having a hard time finding men who are comfortable with their success. And I think, you know, if you did a younger man, I think that's going to be easier.

Yeah, I wonder, it would be interesting to see some more research on this. I think that it's going to be difficult for women to fundamentally be attracted to men that are younger than them. So I've got a little bit of research here from Vincent Harinam, if you're familiar with him. Guy, right? Not, sorry. Right, so, for Kuala, data scientist, very interested in the dating market.

You'd love his stuff. I'll send you some articles once we're done. So this is just a bunch of stuff that you might not have been familiar with, all fairly recent research. So I'm just gonna run through some of this and I'll get your thoughts afterward. Let us consider height.

According to one study, women were most satisfied when they're part. It was 21 centimeters taller. This was corroborated by other studies which found that 49% of women prefer dating taller men and that the shortest man a woman would date is 5 feet 9 inches on average. A 1939 study found that American women rated good financial prospects twice as highly as males when engaging the value of a marriage partner. This finding was replicated

in studies conducted in 1956 and 1967. Moreover, David Bus attempted to replicate these studies surveyed 1,491 Americans across four states in the mid-1980s. Once again, women valued good financial prospects in a make roughly twice as much as a mailedid. This gender difference has not changed. In fact, 2014, Pew Research Survey reported that 78% of unmarried women placed a high premium on finding a spouse with a steady job. Only 48% of men shared this view. In the study, the attributes valued in a marriage partner, psychologists Douglas Kendrick asked men and women to indicate the minimum percentiles of each attribute that they would find acceptable when it came to earning capacity, women indicated that they preferred a man who earned more than 70% of all of the

men in contrast, men desired a mate that earned more than 40% of all other women. Basically, it just bears out, this is the sort of resources and status hypergamy thing that seems to be born out in the data, but it seemed like when you looked at stuff to make your move that you found a little bit of a different narrative coming through for women. So, yeah, I mean, I do think men are competitive by nature, and this is why I think the reverse age gap, like when you talk about a man wanting to be with a woman who earns less, I understand where that comes from.

I don't think he's going to feel the same way if it's like this couple interview for my book where he's 27 and then she's 32 and she's supposed to be making more than him because because of the age gap. And the other thing I'll point out is that if you look at the same few research data, yes, it shows that married men earn more than their partners. But if you look at the trends, the percentage of women who are primary red winners in their family has been steadily increasing. There's actually a higher percentage of women married to lesser educated men in the

US than men married to lesser educated women. Is that not only in college graduates though, is that not only in college graduates? No, it's everything. So this notion of the doctor who's married to the nurse or the investment banker married to the cocktail atress, this is not born out by reality. This is kind of this stereotype that's out there. And actually men are choosier about women's education

than women are according to the Dalat. Given the fact that there's more women graduating university, this makes sense, though. It doesn't, it would need to normalize for the fact that there's far more women coming out of college in order to ameliorate that. You're right, but there is this notion out there that mental mental Mary anybody and the women are too choosy and the data does not bear that out. The data shows that when it comes to education at least men are more choosy about education than women are.

Okay. Which I know doesn't it doesn't fit the stereotype, but it's true. And then going back to David bus, I met him at a conference a bunch of years ago and we're talking about some of this stuff. And he expressed with great certainty that if you have 40, 50% more women than men graduating from college, that there will always be like this large proportion of women who never get married and that's just the way it's going to it is and that's the way it's going to be and that those women will never ever ever stoop so low as

to marry an electrician or a plumber or anything like that and I just don't I don't agree with that it's not not the kind of role I wanna live in. I see so many examples of what I call mixed-collar relationships in the world these days. We've also said that in your research, there's been an increase in assortative mating. Yeah, there has. And I think, sometimes I would have interviewers ask me,

well, why wasn't this an issue in 1940 when there were more men than women attending college? And my answer to that is, well, the college thing wasn't as important back then. And people weren't making decisions about marriage as much based on whether or not somebody went to college. But that would not also fit the hypergamous women who prepared to date up and across if men are outperforming women than anything either. No, no, no, yeah, you have a point.

But I just, if you look at some of the more recent data, particularly from Q research, you do see the beginnings of what of a trend. And I hope it's a longer-term trend of people being more open-minded when it comes to whom they date and eventually marry. Actually, there was a brilliant reporter for the Guardian who interviewed me about data omics.

She wrote a story about the book. She was telling me that she had been in a long-term relationship with a bus driver. And they were very happy together. And so for her, and she had kind of successful friends who some of them were dating highly educated men, some weren't. And it wasn't quite the same taboo

in terms of dating somebody less or educated, at least among her friend group, as it might have been for her parents' generation. And so my hope is we're moving towards a world where the gentlemanly electrician is just as good a catch as the asshole investment banker. How easy do you think it is for women to hack that hypergamous nature? I mean, to me, I think a lot of this goes back to how we meet because when you talk about things like,

I want a guy who's six feet tall or makes more than $127,000 a year, whatever it is in pounds, or is this age or this amount of hair. It really sounds more like picking options in a car than it does finding your true love. And to me, all of this goes back to the cesspool that is online dating. Like if you met a guy who was five foot nine at a part, not you, but a woman met a guy who's five foot nine at a party

and brilliant and funny and handsome, she's not gonna notice these five foot nine. I mean, I'm six feet tall. My wife is five, too. Everybody looks tall to my wife. Like, whether I was five, eight, or six, two, she would think I'm tall. But when it comes down to putting a number on a screening function

on a dating app, people start treating dating like shopping. And there's this really unhealthy consumerist mindset that I think is infected the world of romance in which everything is shopping. And if you don't like it, you can return it. And it's all about finding the best deal. And you can just punch in some metrics on a dating app and out will pop up your Prince Charming.

And, A, I don't think that's true. And B, and I think this is really the important thing, that the stories of how we meet are important. Like you could meet somebody on a dating app and not hit it off, but meet the very same person. You could be in a tennis club or a running group with and get to know him or work with them. And it would be a totally different connection

than chatting with them, and it would be a totally different connection than chatting with them on a dating app and meeting up at Sushi Palace at 7 p.m. and all the research shows that the stories of how we meet are really important, and people become much more invested in kind of stories that involve meeting in the real world, meeting in the wild. It's also much, particularly for women. I don't think men fully appreciate the safety concerns related to online dating.

I mean, I was on a podcast with a mail author a few months ago and he was recently divorced and he was telling me the story about going out in his first online first date and he discovered that the woman who we met at the coffee shop knew everything about because she had been Googling him. And he thought this was weird and creepy. And I was like, that's not weird and creepy. That is the way that that's what every woman I know is doing. And it's because, if you look at the surveys on this, the majority of women consider online dating to be unsafe. 55% have been threatened with physical violence while using dating apps. with physical violence while using dating apps. So obviously they are going to protect themselves by doing this research.

They're also going to tell their roommate or their mom and their sister, I'm going to be at Sushi Palace at 7 if you don't hear from me by 10 get worried. But the problem with this beyond the obvious is that if you enter, if you go into a first date with this level of anxiety and fear, it's not going to lead to falling and like or falling in love because you're on guard to make sure that Robert the Hanson Money Manager isn't actually Billy Bob the married ex-con. Whereas if you're dating somebody you actually know and actually like from the real world, it might not be a great first date, but there's so much more comfort involved in that first date experience and you can just kind

of relax and get to know the person and it doesn't have to be like an interview in which you're trying to poke holes in their story. Based on what I have seen from your advice in Make Your Move, it seems to me that it's mostly competitive edges that specifically women would be able to find by adjusting their dating strategy. So the first one would be, don't be afraid of making the first move, of approaching the man, of being the protagonist in the flirting relationship, right? Of suggesting that he get your number or asking for his number or whatever.

And then the second one being more like a modality change that look at the other places that you can try and find people that you would want and find people that you would want to date rather than online dating. So, yeah. Both of these, no matter whether they run counter to culture or expected norms or whatever, they're just opportunities, as far as I can see it, all that they are are competitive edges that women can find incredibly easily by deciding that they're going to do something different to what the rest of the market does. So I've got this stat that I always throw around about podcasts.

So 90% of podcasts don't make you past episode three. And of the 10% that do 90% don't make you past episode 20. So by making it to episode 21, you were in the top 1% of all podcasters ever in history, right? I love that. It's awesome. Great stat. That's consistency. Consistency is the most underrated and rare internet creator value that exists as far as I can see. Very, very few people do a hard thing at the same time every single week for an extended period of time. Similarly to this, if most women aren't doing a thing, however,

you know that there's a competitive edge by doing that thing, we've already seen it's born out in the data. If you decide to be the protagonist when approaching somebody on average, you will end up with a preferable partner to if you wait for those people to come back around, right? Nobel Prize shit. The other side of that is that, I don't think that online dating is a fantastically fun experience for most men. Most men are kind of wistfully sat on their own, not really getting matches from women,

and most women are getting matches from men that they're not tremendously interested in and potentially fearful of, even if they do manage to get a match and then go on a date, and then it's this sort of weird, performative thing where you're fact checking against the profile for all of it. So both of these are just competitive edges, but the same way is the consistency thing being a real easy hack to be able to get through podcasting.

What are most podcasters not doing, which is still a good outcome? Okay, consistency. What are most women not doing in the dating market, which is a good outcome? They're not approaching and they're relying to heavily on online dating. Yeah, that's a great summary. I mean, the only thing that adds to the online dating thing is that to me, it goes beyond, you know,

coming up with a little edge or a little strategic advantage. I mean, there is a fundamental efficacy problem with online dating. There was a study out of the UK a few months ago, which found that the divorce rate for couples who meet on dating apps is six times higher than it is for couples who meet in the real world. There was a Stanford University study which claimed in the body of the report that there was not much difference in the one year break-up rates of couples who made online versus the real world. But if you dig into the appendix and you look at the actual data, the one year break up

rate for couples who meet online in this study was 16%. For couples who meet through friends and family, it was 8%. For couples who meet at work, it was 6%. And for couples who meet in a house of worship, it was 1%. 1%. Yeah, I quoted this the other day. So it's not just that, or the women are relying too heavily on one thing and the need to diversify their strategy. I actually think there is something fundamentally awful about

online dating that is going to lead to less, I mean, I believe it or not, I'm a romantic at heart. And despite the incredibly autistic view of dating and data, I want people to be happy and I want people to find true love. And I just think it's really hard to find true love when you're going out with complete strangers on a dating app. And I'm always like comparing it to friendship. I don't know if you've heard me with this stick before, but Chris, do you have a best friend? I do. Best mate, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. How did you meet your best mate? Through another one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay.

How did you meet your best mate through another one? But in the real world? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, by referral, in the real world. And you have real world experiences together? Many, yes. Right. Can you imagine going on bestmate.com and finding a connection like the one you have with your best mate?

Not going to happen. No, I mean, obviously it's like, human beings evolved to social animals. We connect through shared real world experience, like all primates do. So I'm, yes, I believe you can get an edge by logging off the dating apps, but to me it goes beyond that. I worry about the state of romance

and about the people's ability to find true love if they're relying on dating complete strangers. I gave a talk at Ron's College, which is a small liberal arts school in Florida, few months back, and we were talking about this online dating stuff, and at the end of the class a woman raised her hand and said, okay, I get it. Nobody likes online dating, it sucks, but how the heck am I supposed to

meet somebody if not through an app? So I took a chance and I asked a question. And the question was, how many of you have somebody you already know and like from the real world whom you've ever wondered about dating. There were 40 kids in this group, 40 hands went up. Now, look, I know that if it was a group of 48-year-olds, it might have been a different result than pulling a group of 22-year-olds or 21-year-olds. But I do ask this question a lot, and what I find is that the majority of singles already have identified somebody they already know and like from the real world who they've been interested in dating.

Some of you, as you're already probably a third of the way, maybe even halfway there with this person, and like if all that's holding you back is some fear of ruining the friendship, don't worry about that. Like, you know, take a chance, embrace the awkwardness, take a chance with the person who you know you have a connection with as opposed to going out on 100 blind dates with strangers from the internet. One of the last things that me and you both agree on, I think, is a suggestion that women should uncheck

the college box when it comes to looking at who they're trying to date. And I think that you're right. Online dating has facilitated a much more like technocratic, bureaucratic, predisposed, transactional way of looking at, okay, so what are the things that I want? Like it's, you know, options on a car,

optional extra, I need the air conditioning in the leather seats, whatever, right? Like it's not the way that things work. And it doesn't account for in real life changes. I've got friends who are five foot eight, five foot nine, guys that aren't into the gym, they're not in like ridiculous shape or anything, but they crush on nights out because they're charming and they're funny and they're outgoing and

they can hold eye contact and they're great. And you think, well, that person on an app can't get any of those, which are the characteristics that we value the most overall. So what dating apps have optimized for are people selecting some of the most arbitrary features of a mate that they can whilst emitting all of the ones that we probably genuinely do care about, right? However, I think that one of the challenges, I was listening to you on a podcast with a couple of girls, it was a dating podcast,

and you were talking about like unchecking the college box. And one of the girls said, well, I've got a postgraduate degree and you know, even if the guy that I was speaking to had like a community college degree, I might feel a little bit, I don't really know, we're going to be able to have this connection. So I do think that there is work to be done to try and undo some of the to try and undo some of the predispositions that girls have around who they're going to be attracted to. There is a huge pool of sexless men. This is where MIGTAO and the in-cell sort of black pill forums have come out of,

yes, they're at the very, very tail end of this, but still there is a big, big pool of men who we haven't really spoken about today on the podcast. This is mostly kind of college for college or college for professional. As you start to drop a little bit further down, that hierarchy for men, you know, there is a huge, huge pool of guys down there that would make absolutely fantastic partners, I'm sure, but might not hit those quantifiable metrics of success. So I definitely think that women opening up that dating pool a little bit more is a good thing for them to do. Yeah, and like the guys I'm thinking about aren't necessarily the young in-sell guys. I

mean, I, for years and years, I coach travel baseball. And the, you know, even though I live in kind of a leafy suburb, the travel baseball crowd tends to be, the parents tend to be a little more blue collar. So it's a lot of policemen and like Christians and guys who run landscaping businesses, things like that. And they're awesome guys. Like, you know, they're real men, not like me. Like, you know, I keep thinking to myself. And also, like a lot of them earn a shitload of money,

you know, doing construction, all sorts of, I mean, not running businesses. I always like to joke that my plumber, I guarantee, it earns more than me because every time he comes here late at night, he's driving an Audi. So, so the, so these guys, not only are they really good guys, they probably, some a lot of them probably earn more than you think. And I suspect, I think there are a lot of women who maybe think they want the smart lawyer or banker, but if you put them in the room with kind of the, the manly man who can like fix your dishwasher or change your tire, or even I can change your tire. But, you know, like, some of these guys, they might actually feel more of a connection

with than the university educated bloke that they've been having trouble with. John Berger, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go? So my website is johnberger.com. I'm off of Twitter these days, but you can find me on Instagram. I'm think I'm John underscore burger one on Instagram. Also if you have a book club and you want to read one of my books, I've partnered with obviously you can read it if you want, but I've partnered with an author platform called

bookyayah.com. And basically, it's a platform that connects book clubs with authors who maybe could do remote events with book clubs. So you can find me on bookiaio as well. Cool. I really appreciate reading a lot of the dynamics that I'm familiar with and I've been learning about and very interested in. But from a female perspective, I think that it's something that I hadn't considered and the more that I think about the experience that women have with dating, the more that I can understand where we're at. So I appreciate the work that you do.

John, look forward to whatever it is that you right next. I think it'll be really, really cool. Thanks Chris. I appreciate you having me on. you