Modern Wisdom - #606 - Katherine Dee - The Rise And Fall Of The Girlboss Meme

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

Katherine Dee is a writer, journalist and internet historian. There are lots of male subcultures. Incels, RedPill, Pickup Artists, Soy Boys. But what are women getting up to? Trends like Hot Girls Have IBS. Hot Girls Eat Fish. And most well known, the girlboss meme. Katherine is here to explain just what is happening in the oestrogen-fuelled underbelly of the internet. Expect to learn why the girlboss meme came about, why there is a coming wave of sex-negativity, whether it really is possible to be hot while you have IBS, Katherine's biggest red flags when choosing a partner, whether it should be legal to pay to drug women so you can have sex with their lifeless bodies, why predictable is good when dating and much more... Sponsors: Get $100 discount on the best water filter on earth from AquaTru at https://bit.ly/drinkwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Katherine on Twitter - https://twitter.com/default_friend Follow Katherine on Substack - https://defaultfriend.substack.com/  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 Catherine D. She's a writer, journalist and an internet historian. There are lots of male subcultures, in cells, red pill, picker artists, soy boys, but what are women getting up to? Trends like hot girls have IBS, hot girls eat fish, and most well-known the girl boss meme. Catherine is here to explain just what is happening in the estrogen-fueled underbelly of the internet. Expect to learn why the girl boss meme came about, why there is a coming wave of sex negativity, whether it's really possible to be hot while you have IBS, Catherine's

biggest red flags when choosing a partner, whether it should be legal to pay to drug women so that you can have sex with their lifeless bodies, why predictable is good when dating and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Katharine D. Do you think that you're a picker artist? No, no. That's a question. Well look, you recently released a podcast where you considered that you might have been a picker artist all along, and definitely some of the insights that I've seen you write

are unusually insensitive, I think, about the dating world. Where have they come from? Why have you taken such an interest in attraction and mating? So yeah, I have a bit of a weird romantic history. I married very young and then I got divorced. It's in my first real time on the dating market. I was already in my late 20s. And like, it was like a crash course. And I mean, it was the first,

I don't know if relationships even the right word, but my first sort of foray into dating was so humiliating. I became like artistically sort of obsessed with preventing that pain. And I was like, I can't ever feel like this again. Because I really felt like I was like 14, but I was 27, and it was just like the worst. And I think that's what motivates me. Yeah, does that suggest that there's a some time and attention that everyone needs to spend kind of breaking up and making up and learning

those lessons and that it doesn't come really as a byproduct of maturity or age, it comes as a byproduct of the amount of times that you've done it? I mean, I think you just have to have the requisite emotional intelligence. I don't think that practicing on people, like that's also not, I wouldn't recommend that either. Because you know, you become jaded, right? And that's the flip side. There's such a thing as too much experience.

That's definitely true. Two years ago, you predicted a coming wave of sex negativity. I think that you were absolutely on the money with that, although it's maybe moving a little bit more slowly than you might have thought, but I think that you're absolutely spot on. Why did you think that that was going to happen? I started noticing, so the way I do my predictions is I look at where journalists are paying attention because I really do, I still believe in like a semi-media and institutions, I feel like they guide the conversation. And a lot of my predictions are about media conversations as opposed to like on the ground behaviors. And so one of the places that journalists scrape stories from,

at least when I wrote that, I don't know how true that is now, is Twitter, right? And it was very trendy to be sex skeptical. Sex day, and it might have been the wrong term, but it was, I mean, it's a very slip shot blog post, or it was like Cassandra having visions when I wrote it. It was, a lot of young people are very sex skeptical. And, you know, it's also, we've kind of run out of gas on sex positivity. So, you want to generate clicks.

So, it's like, how is the media conversation going to move? And where is this like guy's going to move? So, it kind of just made sense for the pendulum to swing. Like, you know, when we're at the point, routine Vogue is like the right way to, you know, introduce your cannibalism fetish in the bedroom, right? There's like so many things wrong with that sentence. It's like, you can only go back. You can't, there's no, you can't go further than that. Yes. Shapiro had a really good take. I don't think that he had a particularly good episode at all I don't think that he had a particularly good episode at all about the halftime show, the Rihanna did,

but he said something very smart when he was talking about it, which was when all the taboos have become mainstream, there is nothing left to transgress other than ideological transgression. And I think he just means that once everything has been put on the table, like where do you go to find the new, explicit, exciting, dirty thing? Right. I mean, there's two answers to that. One of them I won't mention, but I think people have

sort of rightfully brought to the, you know, they've made it their mission to make sure people are aware of it. It's a little more sinister. And then the other one is you, you know, you be Alex P. Keaton, right? Like you shock your, oh, from Family Tide. That's a very dated reference. It's also a very American reference. I think that's going to go in my head in two ways. Yeah. So just, you know, if everyone around you is a progressive, you shock them by being conservative. Right, I understand. Yes, so like culture becomes counterculture. Right.

Yeah, okay, interesting. Did you see that lady, there's a video of a lady floating around saying that there should be an ethical way for women to be paid to be drugged so that she can indulge in her king of sleeping with unconscious girls. I haven't seen the video but I've heard that talked about, yeah, I'm aware of that there's people who think that's not ironic. That's not an ironic video. Of course, it makes sense, right? There's a market for everything. It makes sense, right? There's a market for everything. That?

A market for someone to consensually be drugged and paid for being drugged so that this lady can have full fill her kink of having sex with them. I mean, is that, that's quite surprising. Even in this era, that's quite surprising. I'm not surprised by that at all. I'm more surprised when, surprised when I'll see TikTok sometimes of people like cavalierly talking about,

and this is off the deep end, so I'm just going to worry about what I'm going to say. Very cavalierly talking about playing with feces in sexual situations, that shocks me. You see a beautiful 21-year-old talking about, it's like, what did I just, because it's a TikTok, it'll auto-play, so you just watch it like 50 times to make sure you heard it correctly.

But, you know, you know, consensual roofing is a little bit less. Fair enough, maybe Scott, somebody shitting on you is less offensive than consensual roofing. Maybe you're right, maybe, maybe I'm, but I suppose one of the things, because I don't use TikTok. So I'm really not tapped into what I know is now a large burgeoning part of internet subculture. I heard you talk about the fact that you could predict

what was going to happen on TikTok by looking at Tumblr a few years ago, or that basically no one should be surprised by the trends that we see on TikTok, because they're just, they already existed. What is that? For people that weren't delving the depths of Tumblr five years ago, what's that sort of whole shoe theory? So basically that argument is, people think that TikTok introduced certain ideas or certain trends, but you could trace all of these back all the way to the dawn of the internet even.

Here's a really good example. Multiple personality disorder, right? So obviously this was a trend offline, thinking like the late 80s. If I remember incorrectly, right? You have all these pop like psych books about it. Suddenly, you have like this cottage industry of therapists who are diagnosing people with multiple personality disorder.

It's the, you know, the jury's not out yet, if it's even a thing. You go on use net and there's all of these communities for people with MPD. And, you know, it looks very similar to what people see on TikTok and they're complaining about today, they're like, oh, kids are just self-diagnosing. But people have been self-diagnosing. As soon as they have a space to have these conversations, it happens. So you can trace it all the way back to use net. And then there's people have personal home pages dedicated

to like, oh, who are your altars, who are your other personalities. And then there's like people have like personal home pages sort of dedicated to like, oh, you know, who are your altars? Who are your other personalities? And then it really grows on Tumblr because it's just more accessible. And then TikTok is even more accessible and more and more people are online. So it spreads, but it's not native to TikTok, which is I think the big mistake people make. What's happened then? Is it more visible? UntikTok? Is it more obvious? Is it more clipable and resherable and commentable? Yeah, I mean, I think it's two very simple things. One, more people are online, all right? It's just sheer volume. The time they're spending online is much higher. And also like,

The time they're spending online is much higher. And also like, we really underestimate the power that journalists have. So when you write about something and you have an audience, you amplify the effect. And that's my big argument with Tumblr. I get misquoted a lot as saying that Tumblr like invented wokeness. That's obviously absurd, right?

Like Tumblr did an invent Foucault, you know. But Tumblr is like a really great vehicle of transmission for ideas because there was a lot of teenagers who were using it and there was journalists who were using it as a place to get ideas very easily and it was during the age of clickbait. It was like right when clickbait started. So you see, you know, maybe this is the first time you're learning about transgender identity and you're a journalist and you, you know, you make 50 bucks a pop on your articles, you get paid a little bit extra depending on the clicks and comments, right? I remember there is one outlet where it's like if you went

over the 600 comment threshold, you got a bonus. So you have to keep that in mind. So of course, you take these little niche things and you amplify them and your whole MO is to get people to click and to share and people read it and it mutates and it becomes mainstream. You also predicted the complete and total death of the girl boss archetype. Why? What led you to that conclusion?

It's a few things. I do have to say that other people also predicted this. I wasn't a pioneer or if I was one pioneer among many. I love to make sure I have a tattooed everyone. So it's a few things. One, the trend of burning out. So it's a natural life cycle. How long has this been going on?

Have we gotten everything out of it that we can? How much further can we go? And that's a really simple question. But I think, again, it's another thing super underappreciated and people don't ask that question often enough. And then the other thing is the way our lifestyles are changing. Like you can't really be a girl boss if you're like completely alone quarantined in your apartment. It just, you know, other like if you are getting into like the Alice and Roman recipes as many of us were at like peak COVID, it doesn't really mesh as well with the whole girl

boss thing. It's, you know, it kind of went hand in hand with sex skepticism and maybe a more like prudent approach to sex. You just don't even have the opportunity to be going out and hustling romantically or professionally, because you're stuck at home, and suddenly you realize maybe I should have been building my nest. Right.

How would you describe when it was at its peak or the promises that the girl boss meme was supposed to deliver on? How would you describe what a girl boss was? A girl, I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like. You know, women can do it too. Women can have it all. There is, there is a aesthetic dimension to it as well. I think for some people it was like this very put together minimalist, like she goes to the gym, she's accomplishing everything, and that was one sort of subgenre of the girl boss.

And then the other, I think slightly more interesting one was the train wreck girl boss, which I think a lot of people leaned into. And then the other, I think, slightly more interesting one was the train wreck girl boss, which I think a lot of people leaned into. What's that? You know, she's like, she fails at dating, but who cares? You know, she's like, she's doing great at her career. She doesn't need a man, but she's gonna sleep around like a man anyway.

You know, she's like not afraid to admit, she like farts. You know, this is like not afraid to admit she like farts. You know, you know, it was like a very specific sort of girl. That was like really sort of popular in the, you know, the 2010s. And when I was like just entering the workforce, this was like what everyone sort of aspired to be like, I also think it's sort of like, or, you know, this like trend, I mean, it's a little old now, but the trend of like hot girls have IBS. I think that's sort of an outgrowth. I'm going to carry. You saying this as if it's something

that I should be completely aware of, that there was a trend of hot girls identifying with their irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah. I think that you might be over believing how far down internet rabbit holes. I mean, I'm very online, but I pale in on-lineness to how online you are. Okay, so there was a period where everything was for hot girls, right?

And this was a commercial internet trend, so that means you would see it in big publications and very sort of like normies. Like a younger sister might be familiar with something like this is on TikTok. So hot girls are into tinned fish. So in this is about a year, 18 months old by now, hot girls have IBS, right? And it was like, you would fix hot girls

in front of something that's not really sexy, right? And there was like a few things that came up a lot, but basically I think what the trend was trying to encapsulate, like hot girls are just regular women, right? But it didn't really come off like that. But the girl boss, the second archetype of girl boss did the same thing, right? Or it's like, hot girls could be messy. Without really like critically evaluating that mess and it's like this culture of oversharing,

girl bosses aren't therapy and whatever and keep wanting to say hot girls, but hot girls or girl bosses or whatever, right? Like they, you know, they had a manic episode and it's meant $18,000, but who cares? Because, you know, they're a they had a manic episode and spent 18,000 dollars, but who cares because you know their product manager at Facebook. I. Oh my god okay so.

It seems like the girl boss archetype at least in part was. Wasn't that much about romance at least like specifically Like specifically, that was something that was quite vacant from the Girlboss archetype. Am I right? It was part of it, but it was like a sort of a different approach at romance. Like you see sort of in the late 90s and 2000s where it's just like hopelessness

and people want relationships, but the Girlboss sort of takes that and turns it around. And they're like, so what? Yeah, I'm sleeping around. I've slept with a hundred guys who cares, right? It's like, it's cool. And they don't want to catch feelings. And like, there is this like very weird thing

that you'd see portrayed in media, but also like in real life, if you were in certain circles of like, women clearly catching feelings but denying it and everyone around them sort of like encouraging their delusion. And I mean, all of that is just very millennial. And I think like, you know, again, it's run out of gas

but also people are like, this doesn't serve us really. Hmm. Why do you think it run out of gas? What do you think it was that stopped that particular type of how to sleep with them and not catch feels trend from slowing down? I mean, there's these behavioral trends, especially when they really are fads, they can only, their life is only so long. And like certain like bad behaviors become encoded in culture and sort of, you know, like socially sanctioned. But the other thing is

like people are lonely. And like, you know, when you're, you know, you reach like 35, 36, 37, and you just can't, you know, you can't do it anymore. It's just like, it becomes pathetic and it doesn't only look pathetic from the outside, but you feel pathetic. And I think a lot of it is just this cohort aged out of that behavioral pattern, yet lonely. And some people are gonna stick with the,

I don't need anyone, but some people are gonna be like, oh, I was wrong. This, you know, it's actually really hurt. What I find particularly interesting about speaking to you to do with this stuff is there's been an awful lot of assessment around the subcultures that guys have got going on.

Make towel, red pill, black pill, in cells, simps, cook, soy boys, whatever it is. And as a guy who gets exposed to a lot of that stuff, I forget that there are a shit ton of subcultures going on that also influence value preferences and trends that girls are bothered about as well. And it seems like the girl boss meme for a very long time and maybe still is now was a very, very important part of it.

Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think there are always these archetypes. I think what's interesting is a lot of the male ones are sort of like. They're empowering through embracing disempowerment. You know, like there is something empowering about just saying, yes, I am an in-sell and finding other in-sells, right? Or, you know, men going their own ways, obviously like a, you know, a more extreme example of that. But with women, it's sort of like the salusion of empowerment. And it's still a, it's like not acknowledging the disempowerment in a real way or making light of it and not trying to fix it as much. There is of course like a victimhood stance that some people went into, but it just manifests in a very different way. I've heard you say as well that there's kind of two types of feminism clashing up against each other here. Sex positive feminism and corporate feminism

and not always do they end up agreeing. Yeah, you know, there's like, these things evolve especially when like, there's like intergenerational voices. You know, sex positive femininity or feminism rather push the envelope and it was genuinely shocking at a time. And a lot of people didn't know what to do with that early on. Like, you know, you have someone like a Tina Fey, right, who was sort of like an icon, you know, feels so weird to say that now, was an icon for a time.

You know, me not like totally understand, like at, you know, then like 21 year old millennial who's talking about sex workers' rights. What's your prediction moving forward? Given that you can update yourself now in 2023, two years on from the prediction of the death of the girl boss. Have we got further to fall? What do you think is coming next for female sub-cultures and trends? Um, well, I think that there is, I've seen like a lot of, like, very sort of moderate, like self-criticism. And I think people would be surprised. I constantly hear the woke will become woker. The left will move further. Using these terms very loosely, of course,

it becomes sort of divorced from the original meanings. But I've seen a lot of more mainstream and left wing women are starting to self-criticize and become a little bit more like walking with certain things back, right? Like you have the you know when I talked about the coming wave of sex negativity I was talking about, also people who were maybe more extreme or may like identify as right wing, but I think it's coming everywhere. And you see this, like, this move to moderation all over the place. Another really interesting thing is, you know, when I look at people in the transgender community talking, there's a lot of conversation about maybe being more deliberate about surgical choices, and this was always a conversation that was happening in this community, partially because of like, you know, affordability, but people saying

like, look, I got a sex reassignment surgery and it didn't work for me and it doesn't have to be, that doesn't mean you're not trans, but maybe don't get it. And that's a kind, that's not a conversation that you hear talked about very, very often, right? Because the conversation tends to hone in on access and making sure people get that, that particular type of medical care. But I think that's a sign of more moderation is just popping up everywhere. Another place, you see guys like people are moving away from alcohol. They're drinking less.

And maybe they're not literally drinking less. Like their behavior isn't reflecting that, but the conversation is in that direction. So, you know, those are just three different examples of places where people are being self-critical and slowing it down and, you know, being leading a slower life or at least the zeitgeist pointing towards a slower life. What is an example of some of the self-criticism that women have been doling out?

I've seen definitely like conversations about me too. And, you know, these are things we heard from sort of like the dissident center, I've seen definitely like conversations about me too. And these are things we heard from sort of like the dissident center, so to speak, and the right, from the jump was very critical of me too. But now you see from more of the center left and left saying maybe we took it a step too far. And being very conscious in the discourse Maybe we took it we took it a step too far and You know being very conscious in the discourse not to invalidate other people's experiences, but also like

Walking things back and basically saying what would an example of this be some of the push back to these gym TikTok things Yeah, yeah, what some Caleb was also like another like really great example of Don't know that don't know you just keep on naming people that honestly could be final fantasy or world of warcraft Carrakely and I would just be going along with it. Who was this? Um, okay, so there is this basically this this guy gets publicly humiliated because he led on a bunch of women On I think it was hindr or t right? And he gets publicly humiliated on TikTok and a bunch of journalists right about it

and a bunch of advertising agencies and corporations like jump on it and use it as a punchline. And it just blew up this guy's spot, right? I think if that had happened in 2018, people would have been like this guy's a jerk. You know, these women didn't consent to be, you know, in a roster or like, whatever thing, right? And I think because it happened

after there had been so many of these, you know, I think there had been so many like me two type situations that maybe were on the wider end of the great scale, you know what I mean? There is more like, what are we doing? Why are we humiliating the sky? Can't someone be like a douchebag and like the comfort of their own home without it being like a national news story?

And I think that was sort of like a, I think that was like a pivot point of saying like, we've been leaning into the victim with thing a little bit too long. And when I think of people saying the mood is changing or the vibe is shifting, those things that feel insignificant, actually are very significant.

That's really interesting. I think I would agree on the pushback against this super overzealous sort of me-tuing, the very middleing ground, not to say that it's not wrong or you know like shit-back behavior, but calling it me too, and you know this is the incentive if you think about it for long enough actually end up aligning for a lot of people to be on board with this, because if you end up expanding the definition of what sexual assaults or like

me to worthy behavior from a guy is to encompass more and more things, it dilutes down the legitimacy of genuine sexual assault and of genuinely predatory behavior. It's the same as if everything is racist, and nothing is racist. If everything is sexual assault, then nothing is sexual assault. Exactly. I think that the people who we assume and would never come to that conclusion, they're coming to that conclusion. Is it just that after a while, the incentives don't align with, it's no longer shocking for journalists to talk about this sort of stuff. It doesn't garner the same sort of clicks.

It doesn't, because people have seen it a million times before and if people start hate commenting whatever it is that you do or you end up with a ton of negative pushback, like that girl did the super famous TikTok of her doing like glute bridge and this guy looked over and tried to help her clean the plate once and then she went to town and then she got destroyed about it. Is it just that every type of meme or subculture that isn't grounded in genuine truth or integrity or alignment with what happens in reality? It never to be just runs out of steam. Is that what's going on? I mean, I don't think, kind of, yeah. I mean, I think we really do sort of like live in this, you know, economy of, just like clickbait economy.

And things just run their course, especially if like, it's just ceaseless discourse. I mean, another thing I think is that younger people are sort of less interested in discourse. And by that, I mean, like the constant culture war debates. Is this right? Is this wrong? Is this moral? And you see, like, they're much more interested in talking about aesthetics, micro trends, you know, nostalgia, and sort of a more, you know, they're just, they just seem like more interested in that. And I've seen, I'm also noticing that like the paranormal is becoming like more interesting to people.

So, you know, of course, the new age has been trendy for a while. And we've had this new age renaissance, like astrology. But I see like the difference with like paranormal being like, it's not about predicting your own life. It's just, it's, there's like a pure leisure aspect of this. It's like this cultural exhaustion that everyone has. And it's changing what people are interested in. Didn't you say that manifestations making a comeback?

Yeah, there is, yeah, there's definitely, manifestation is everywhere, right? I don't know if it's making a comeback, but it's been around. For a long time, we've been living in this culture of, tell me what's going to happen next and how can I will myself into getting exactly what I want. I think in the future, everyone will be seeing exactly how they want to be seen for 15 minutes, something like that. You found an example of some lady that said, if your partner is

talking to you, and they're saying something that you don't want to hear, then block that sound out in your mind. Imagine the things that you want to hear, then block that sound out in your mind. Imagine the things that you want to hear them saying to you and manifest into existence that they stop complaining about the fact that you didn't pick up the dog poo outside, but actually how gorgeous you are, or whatever it was that she was talking about. Oh, it's bonkers, right? Yes. Yeah. That's full on bananas.

Yeah. It's really, I mean, some of the, some of the manifestation stuff is really out there. It's a helplessness, right? Like you just, you want something so badly and you don't know how to get it. I also think a big part of it is people aren't really out in the world living. A lot of our living takes place in front of a screen or on our couch or whatever. How does that change? Well, because if you're sort of stuck within your own mind, right? Like, there's nothing that you can actually physically do.

We're so cerebral that changing the way you think does make sense. And that framework. Because so much of our life is lived up in our heads and so a little bit in that side. Yeah, that's very interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially to do with the rise of like male subcultures online, especially, you know, the in-sell Black Pill ideology. How it is that my experience and most of the guys that I know as experiences

don't seem to necessarily speak to the world that a lot of young guys seem to be talking about online. And the reason that I think at least in part that this is true is that social media, increasing levels of social anxiety and a lack of exposure to mating in the real world means that a lot of especially young guys experiences about different ways that relationships can unfold or experience primarily through the internet. And by design, the stories that are going to catch fire on the internet are the most egregious ones about some guy that leaves to go and get the milk and comes back and finds his wife in bed

with the postman and the postman's dog, and then she leaves him and takes the kids and his leg and a bunch of other stuff. That quite rightly will get 100,000 votes on Reddit, which means that downstream from that, young guys who have no other evidence to suggest that women aren't all like that, take that as representative of what's going on at large.

And I think that this is one of the problems when you have a chronically online world, you have no real world evidence to suggest that the thing that the most online people and the most egregious stories talk about might not be true. Absolutely, and it's interesting. It's like, it depends on demographic too, and geography. There's all these little things that change people's bubble. Ask a woman who's a relatively attractive woman who's like between the ages of like 18 and 27 and they'll say like it's so easy to get a guy like, you know, you could just sort of

It's like a conveyor belt ask a woman who's you know 32 or older and there's this perception that any guy can get literally any girl, you know Ask most men. They're like all women are sluts and they have, you know, the, hate this term, but like a cock carousel, you know, the female alternative to the roster. So it's, you know, everyone, and they all underestimate sort of like how their specific circumstances also impact.

It's more than just like confirmation bias, right? Like, if you're a how their specific circumstances also impact, it's more than just like confirmation bias, right? Like, if you're a 35 year old woman in, you know, upper middle class, to upper class circles in Manhattan, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna struggle, right? It's just like, of course. But if you're in, you know, you're a 21 year old in the Bay Area, well, yeah, the world is your oyster. Yes. What about rejection sensitivity?

What's that? It's the first time I'd ever heard of it when you wrote about it. Oh, yeah. That was a very weird article. So that was an article I wrote, or I guess a blog post that I wrote, about how we experience like much higher volumes of rejection, that we don't even clock as rejection. And we're experiencing like microrejections every single day. And what might be perceived as an overreaction is just like a compounded reaction. Like so, you know, you put like, there's all these like micro ways we can get rejected online.

So then when we face like a real rejection, it might feel like more, more painful than it might have otherwise because we're sort of like swimming in this soup of rejection. Dating apps are like a really great example of this. You're being rejected thousands of times in some cases on dating apps. And like we don't really appreciate like how painful that is. Like if you're someone who only gets like one or two matches

in a month, like you might not consciously think I was rejected every single time I swiped, but that's act like you were. And like there's, you know And you synthesize that information. I know it sounds petty, but not getting likes on social media, not feeling heard. I think it's a more compassionate way to frame that, being unfollowed or being blocked.

All of these things, they feel so minor in the moment, but when you take them sort of like, holistically, and you're like, all of these things happening. And then there's like, there's things like even in the real world of like, you know, someone, you say, excuse me, but they're looking at their phone, and you're just sort of brushed off. Like this happening, this is happening to people, thousands and thousands of times, and it has to have an impact on the way we feel.

So there's a sea of ambient rejection that just happens. I mean, one of the ways that apps are designed is for you to not feel the pain of rejection. Right. I mean, once you're matched with somebody, you can message them and they could not message back. But even with that, it's, oh, maybe they didn't see it or maybe they were busy or maybe they, maybe they, you know, got hit by a truck or something. You don't actually know why it was that they rejected you. But I do think, I think that there's some legs to that. And obviously, the easy pushback is, well, we live in a time which has got the greatest wealth

and comfort of any civilization ever. All of these things pale into the background. But I do think that in a time where people have got fewer friends on average than ever before, the ability to ride the waves of small rejections in a increasingly cerebral, more neurotic, more socially anxious, less outside, less exposed to sun, less touching grass world probably does mean that a lot of people will feel these rejections and not only will they be more exposed to them, but are probably more sensitive to them when they do get exposed to them. So I don't

think that there's, I don't think that there's necessarily really any reason for people to feel like if that is something that they sense that some indication of personal failing on their part, it's like, like we weren't designed to be exposed to this many people, this frequently. And downstream from that, the number of potential rejections that you could have had in one day on the internet is the same as you could have had in an entire lifetime 10,000 years ago. Yeah, I mean, and the, you know, the other part of this is like boundaries have been sort

of obliterated. So like, we don't even realize sometimes like how intimate we are with total strangers, especially like, it's so so easy like via text, or like again, like to the dating app example, like in the talking stage as it's sometimes called, like you know, you open up so much, and like in person, those are like hard earned conversations, but they just flow when they're text.

And then so like when you lose a friend who's like just an internet friend, actually, it's really painful, right? Because you don't quite know how to measure that intimacy. Yeah. I mean, if somebody wants to rail against terminally online culture, they can say, look at how ridiculous this is. This is totally stupid.

Why should anybody be bothered about whether they make or break friends on the internet, your friends should be in the real world, there should be the people that you care about the most. But the bottom line is that you need to adapt to the world the way it is, not the way that you want it to be, and people are chronically online, people aren't spending tons of time in the real world with genuine friends. And yeah, it's that's very, very interesting. Okay, so you also did a blog post recently, which was like 80 pieces of dating advice. I found some of my favorites and I want to go through some of these with you. So the first one is, if a woman likes you, she's automatically going to assume other women are pursuing you because she thinks everyone views you the way that she does.

I call these love goggles. Yeah. You know, when you're in your paranoid that someone's going to take your guy, right? What does that speak to about women's psychology? Is that suggesting that you become besotted and that kind of jades your opinion of how other people view that same person, but in reality no one probably cares about your new crush. Um, you know, it sort of comes, so I wrote that because it comes from this, a lot of a lot of women are um, paranoid really the wrong word, but like insecure, right, that like they're competing um, when some when they're not always um, and it's like sometimes like

I have like tons of male friends who will be like, I don't know why she thinks this, right? She's sort of like the only, I couldn't pursue someone else even if I wanted to, sort of thing, right? There's just, because there is no one else. And it's like an answer to the insecurity in women, but also the confusion from men. When you like someone, you assume,

you see them with rose-chitchu glasses, right? You can you assume everyone else sees Intotagia favorable light. And that's not always like, it's like, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen this probe with like no one wants your husband, right? Like, I'll leave you like. Yeah, what's up?

Like the overprotective wife whose husband is just some random fat dude and you're like what? Like, chill girl. It's sort of like a meme that you see in TV and stuff. That's definitely something I think that most online men's dating advice doesn't really think about, which is the insecurity of girls that are besotted or have fallen pretty quickly for a new guy. And, you know, although the internet and stats on Tinder may suggest that it's only the

top 20% of men that this is happening to, every girl that's listening has fallen for some dude that is a strong six. And it's just been like, look, I don't know what it is about him. He makes me laugh. He's cute He's got an interesting job. He goes to the gym. He does whatever he smells nice fucking cool hair Whatever it is that they like plays a guitar. We'll call this like medium ugly, right? There's this whole meme like medium ugly like women sort of like I don't know why I just like you know He's a hard six. He's a hard five, but like, I still want him. Yeah, yeah.

And that, that degree of insecurity is interesting. Okay, next one. Not having friends is a red flag. Shit talking X is a red flag. Why? Um, I, it's, you know, it's, it's conventional, conventional wisdom, right? Like if every ex is a problem, well, who's a common denominator?

And I know we're sort of in like an epidemic of friendlessness, but at the same time, like you should have at least one friend, or at least two friends, barring extreme circumstances, like you know, some people live in like rural areas or something, but you know, it makes it more difficult. But you should, you know, you should be able to have long-term relationships. Convoluted dating advice for men or women is always a grift. Don't let your romantic life

become a product. What do you mean by convoluted dating advice? You know, just like how every little thing, you know, matters like every little thing is a red flag every like if you know, move your hand two inches to the right and then the signals like, you know, whatever, like there's all this weird stuff like that out there. And usually it's just a way for someone to sell a personality or a course or a book or, you know, just get attention. Oh, because what they do is they purposefully overcomplicate the dynamic of how to get somebody because that gives them the, what does my house make, that calls it?

It's like secret knowledge or gated knowledge or something. This is, he's got a Charlotteson's playbook and it's a bunch of different things that you can go through to determine whether or not a guru was actually a Charlotton or a fellow jit. One of them is this gate-kept secret knowledge that nobody else understands. It's always using terms that no one's ever heard of before or that a purpose built to try and describe what they're talking about. It is always very convoluted. It is always very complex. Right. You don't need to wear a certain perfume or a certain lipstick for men.

Men and women both are actually pretty simple, I think. Be direct, not desperate. Yeah. Desperate is like cloying and asking repeatedly, sort of being a hangar on, not taking signals. Litigating answers is like a big one. And directness instead of saying what you mean and being honest and transparent. Who do you think that's a big deal for, guys or girls? I think both in different ways. You know, I don't think we talk enough about women do this thing, like drunk texting, but really they got drunk for the sole purpose of sending 20 desperate

text messages. Counting the seconds between responses, things like that. Just be, it's hard. It's because you think if you send a lot of messages or if you somehow, it'll change or it'll appeal to this person, but it doesn't. And being direct is always going to be pretty attractive, I think, from both guys and girls. There's very few people that I could imagine,

very few situations in which somebody being more direct, it was first date and they're being like overly, they're over, oversharing. As soon as you get past that sort of first step being direct, I think makes a lot of sense. Okay, next one. He doesn't have NPD. What's NPD? Narcissistic personality disorder. Thank you. He doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder. He wants to have sex and you're too available. And on that note, you never want to be too available. Even if the person likes you, that's how you lose your value.

That doesn't mean you can't be a ride or die, but boundaries don't only protect your feelings. They protect your worth. What's that? All right, so the MPD thing, it's like one of these excuses people use, like, oh, he loved bombed me, you know, like, so love bombing is like when you're,

it's a clinical term, but the way it's used is like, when a guy's like too sweet in the beginning, and you like, you know, you are taken with him, well, you know, it's like obvious, like millennia old tactic. And now that we've like medicalized it for some reason. Now it's mythology. Right, and just like, you just want it to fuck you. Like obvious.

But yeah, being to avail is like saying yes to everything. You know, again, it seems so cliche and obvious, like don't answer, like what are you doing text at three in the morning, but like a lot of people actually do are like dropping everything. You don't have to play hard to get in like some labyrinthine way, but you also don't have to like put your own life on hold

to make the other person know that you like them. You can do that in ways that maintain your self-respect. One of the things that does trend in dating and relationship circles that I think is actually really useful is this phrase called libern, which is like an obsessive sort of love. And it's not love, right? It's like, it's like the crush that rules your life. And I think that is actually like a really good thing to be aware of because that's, you're not in love. It's, you didn't meet your soulmate. Like, you, it's feeling avoid and you're actually using it in the same way people might use a substance. Like, it is sort of an addiction.

I think a lot of people, yeah. I think a lot of people fall into that trap. Never heard that word before. I got, I went down the rabbit hole of liminal spaces. I know that that was a huge thing on the internet, but something tells me that that's like old news too. Yeah, I mean, liminal spaces are interesting. It's a different, different lane, but it, they are interesting. I'm. It's a different lane, but it's there.

I'm aware it's a different lane. Look, I'm just trying to find common ground between me and someone that is the most online person I've ever met. Okay, next one, predictable is good. Why? I mean, you don't want someone who always is keeping you on edge, right? Like you should know how they react. And that works in both ways.

Like what makes them angry, but what makes them happy? You know, someone where you don't know if they're gonna like you one day to the next, like that isn't fun. I think a lot of these, this like advice that's about like predicting and sort of like assessing out like what does this really mean? What it like, when a guy says X, it means Y, a lot of that is sort of like trying to like

rationalize when people don't really like you or when they're playing games with you. You should like, you should be able to tell pretty early what things mean, even if there are certain nuances that vary from person to person. Interesting. Yeah. There's a conversation I had with Logan Yuri who is the director of relationship science for hinge and she was talking about how a lot of people Don't believe that the person that they've just started dating is right for them because they don't feel a spark And with other people they have felt a spark, but those people they felt a spark with were perhaps unpredictable or had a

Whole laundry list of other problems. What they don't realize is that some people are just sparky. They spark with the person that they check out, they spark with the Uber driver, they spark when they go to the bar and give their ID to the person at the front. They spark with everyone, including the people they date, and that having that spark isn't particularly indicative of anything. But one of the most reliable predictors of relationship success is something called psychological stability. So after an incident where your baseline has been knocked off, so an argument or something sad or whatever it is, how long does it take for you to get back to baseline? And that's a very, very reliable predictor of relationships success long-term.

That's predictable, right? Unpredictable would be, they're going to block me on social media in the only way that I can send the messages is by pay piling them one cent amounts with a message hidden in the references, or they're going to be straight back loving me within seconds of this thing happening. Yeah, I think a lot of people crave those relationships. One, because it feels like when those people are odd and positive, it feels more valuable for some reason, but also they're using their relationship to fill another void. It's addictive Like these are traps that I've fallen into, which is why I share my knowledge with the with the world. There should always be forward momentum. That doesn't mean moving too fast, but don't let yourself fall into relationship purgatory.

Men will take the initiative if they're serious, sure, they are insecure men, but even they will move things along. Yeah, just if you know, if you aren't insecure, man, but even they will move things along. Yeah, just if you don't know if he's your boyfriend, within like, you know, a month or two, then he's, you know, he's not your boyfriend and keep it moving. I, I, I, yeah. I think that's very true. And, you know, I know from being a chronic guy around the party scene throughout all of my 20s, that the dudes that were reticent about the what are we conversation don't have tons of, on average, don't have tons of emotional baggage that means that they have trouble committing. It's that they're next waiting for something better to come along,

or that they're just generally emotionally unavailable. Now, again, on average, this differs from person to person, this may not apply at all areas underneath the fucking normal distribution of experiences. But if you are never, if he never asks you out, if he never says to you, why don't we do this? Here is a plan. Here's something that I think would be cool. If it's always you pushing to see when we go to see each other

next, what is it that's happening? I do think that that would be an amber flag. Yeah, absolutely. When men are sure, they're really sure. I would say yes. Okay. You can't manipulate your way into a relationship with sex. If they don't want to date you, they don't want to date you. Doing this is a good way to get used for your body. This is a bad advice you see all over like women's publications or like women's media, or at least you did especially in the 2010s, where it's sort of like, you could blow your way into having a boyfriend, but

you know, and if a guy likes the way you give head but doesn't like you as a person, you're just going to keep blowing it. You know, it's not going to be your boyfriend. And it's like brutal, but it just like kind of is what it is. Wow. Yeah, I think that's true. I don't think that you can sex your way into a relationship. Now, there's some guys that are reticent up until that point.

I think, again, looking around me at most of the guys that are my age now, you know, my friends that are between sort of 30 and 35 and still single and dating. Most of them are their relationship with sex, especially casual sex, is wildly different. So I wonder how much of these things are just trends that occur when people are a little bit younger, a little bit more emotionally immature, still have a greater desire for sexual variety and novelty and new experiences and everything's just a bit excitable. But I do think that that calms down over time.

Yeah, I think you're probably right. Like who is dating advice generally for? I think it's for people in their 20s. I agree, okay. Men drop hints about weird things that into through jokes. You can learn a lot about people by what they joke about. Pay attention, then make them think your psychic by calling them on it. Yeah, I mean, just exactly exactly what it sounds like.

A companion piece of advice to this is like people will tell you how they'll hurt you early on. People tell themselves constantly and we just don't pay attention or we write things off as jokes. You know, if a guy like jokes about a sex act a lot, like he's probably into it and is gauging your reaction. I have a friend who at every party on meetup that I've ever been to talks about eating us and he talks about it in the most, it is trying to laugh it off, he'll sort of slot it into a joke, but it's pretty ungainly, it's pretty consistent as well, reliably. I would go as far as to say that I've never been to a party where this hasn't come out of his mouth. I'm like, this is not, this is not some mere like quirk of your language, this is not some mere quirk of your language.

This is something much deeper that is coming out of you. Yeah, I mean, and but people do that with all sorts of things, right? It's not just like the guy is constantly joking about eating ass. Also like, you know what people are preoccupied with is revealing for, and these are, again, like it's obvious once you say it out loud,

it's easy to miss. Another sort of companion piece of advice is if they think you're cheating, they are, they are cheating or they know that they themselves are capable of cheating. Yeah, because they use theory of mind to project forward what they would be doing if they were behaving in that way. Okay, don't seek someone out who's like your ex. They're not going to be the same. They're not even going to be better.

Heal that wound that motivates you to have a type. Yeah. You know, if you dated someone who was like a particular profession, it's not that you have like a thing for people in that profession. You miss your ex and don't, you know, don't make some, don't try to relive that story and change the ending. Start, you know, start something new. Okay. It's always going, it's always better to be the less invested partner, even if it isn't the most fun option. This has been old school dating advice for as long as dating

advice has been around, right? Like the person that holds the most power in the relationship is the one who cares less. Where does it's always better to be the less invested partner, even if it isn't the more fun option come from? I'm that. I mean, it's just old school. You don't want to, it's conventional wisdom. You don't want to be the one You don't want to, it's conventional wisdom. You don't want to be the one who's constantly chasing. Basically, you just don't want to be the chaser. What would you say to people that push back with every relationship should be equal?

Everybody should be equally invested. That's a sign of an unassended, unawakened relationship between two partners that is still playing a game, a power game of push and pull. Relationships become equal over time. And, you know, a lot of dating advice is for the earlier on in the funnel. And you don't start, nothing starts an equal footing too bad. If you have to open up the Notes app to type out a message, break up.

open up the Notes app to type out a message, break up. Yep, you just, it has to be an essay. You already took a wrong turn somewhere. Yeah, I think back to some of the times in the office at the events company that I used to work at. And the number of times that the guys would be crowd sourcing the way to do a reply from the boys that were in the room. Like, oh, fucking hell, that's like, she's, look, she sent me and they'd scroll for it to go,

look, she sent me all this. We go, oh, you must be in trouble. And then we would end up helping them formulate a response, as they desperately try to crowdfund whatever the way to calm this particular outrage down is best. Yeah, that's, it's never good, it's Some are good side. No, never date someone who you wouldn't feel comfortable marrying Definitely never date someone you wouldn't be so want to be seen in a restaurant with That was me talking to me

Because I've definitely dated people I wouldn't want to be seen in a restaurant with. Why? Why wouldn't you have wanted to be seen in a restaurant with them? Like, they, you know, were like fully realized steam punk outfits or something. I have dated some weirdos. But, you know, I do think there is a thing of like, you know, good for right now, not good for, you know, for forever. And sometimes you do end up marrying that person and you're like, you know, in six years

past, I'm like, what did I do with my life? You know, so just, it's, you know, even if you're not ready for that step, it's good to take every relationship seriously just in case because you kind of don't know how things are going to go. And you don't want to, you don't want to be in a situation where you're making excuses for people. There, you can be compassionate of people's flaws, right? But you don't want to make excuses.

And I do feel like there's a lot of excuse making in dating where it's like, oh, he sleeps on a mattress and cheats on me, but I'm not going to marry him. And then he knocks you up and like, maybe you do marry him, you know? That was one of the heuristics I spoke to Louise Perry about her saying, if the only people that you ended up sleeping with are getting into relationships with, were people that you'd be prepared to marry, it would fix a lot of downstream problems because the alpha widows phenomenon, have you heard of this?

Yes. Yeah, so the fact that girls who will maybe get sex off a very high-value man, but that man wouldn't get into a relationship with them, then deal with a skewed perception of their own mate value moving forward, which means that they're permanently going to be chasing down fucking Christy and Grey as opposed to maybe setting their sights towards something which is more realistic for a long-term relationship. Those women are delusional for other reasons, because those men tend to make it clear pretty quick that they're never going to commit.

And it's sort of like hope is the last thing that dies, kind of, situation with that. So, they need... If someone doesn't respect you, you probably shouldn't sleep with them. A welcome realization that they might need. Okay, don't date down to feel better about yourself. It's not fair to them, and it's also not fair to you. Yeah, a lot of people date, you know, even temporarily, like people who can be like infrastructure for their self-esteem.

And it breathes resentment. And then it also, I mean, I think that guys can kind can get like alpha widower, right? And that's way less discussed. Sometimes women just leave them on, but sometimes women like we'll sleep with them one or two times. And it's just because they wanted to be with someone that makes them, that like, reifies their own

value to themselves. Oh, because they would adore them so much that they would get a emotional support. That's the moral of that short story from the New Yorker cat person that went viral in 2017. What is it? It was the most viral short story of all time. So like, it's isn't, her promise isn't another random reference, but you know, it's a short story about this woman who sleeps with this sort of like, slavv and league. And you know, she, she ends up ghosting him if I recall correctly. But sort of the moral of the story is like, she sleeps with him because she

sort of gets off on how much better she is than him. And this is something that's kind of missed in the story and it's sort of treated like now is like this weird me too parable, but it's not really that at all. It's like women will date down thinking they won't get rejected and also so they could feel adored. But that's not always what happens. Relationships shouldn't be a sporting event to see how much suffering you can withstand. It's not getting better, leave while you can. Yeah, don't, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to be with the woman who calls you 20 times yelling at you, you know. There's that offspring song where there's like a lyric that's like the more you suffer the more it shows you care.

Nope. Absolutely not. Well, people use pain or their ability to withstand something uncomfortable as a proxy for how much they care. I did this with my business. I first started my business. I realized that if the business did well, that meant I was a good person, and if the business did badly, that meant I was like less of a person. But over time, I actually short-cutted or totally bypassed

the performance of the business, and just went to how much suffering did I endure during the preparation for this most recent club night that we did. And even if the event was successful, but I hadn't had a difficult week of work, I would somehow feel like a piece of shit because the only way that this success was worth anything was if I'd bled in the process for it. And it's kind of, it feels like a little bit similar to do with relationships that what you're doing is, well, I actually know, I'm not sure

that it is so much because the reason that someone sticks about isn't even because they're getting that much out of it. If all that you're doing is permanently suffering, and I don't even know if it's more men than women that do this, I think that this is probably sex equivalent, like sex balanced with regards to whether men and women do this the most. Perhaps in different ways, I think that the guys will tend to treat the girl more like shit, whereas the girls would tend to be more overbearing on the guy and sort of more naggy, but I think the outcome ends up being the same. Yeah, I feel like people think they've invested so much time.

Also it's another component of it, like, widely of now. But yeah, just like putting up with like anything that's going to end up with you feeling resentful when you're older is probably, you can't always predict that, but sometimes you can. On that point, there's a secular and holy apolitical reason that body count matters. You start to get jaded after a while, being spiritually run through is a thing. Yeah, you, you know, people are very similar, and you experience the same thing over and over again, and it loses its specialness, right? It is, and it sort of has nothing to do with like, you know, any religious reason or, you know reason like anything about like dirtiness or whatever, but you just you run out of energy for people

and You want to you want to conserve your energy basically? I had a guy called Andrew Thomas on the show a little while ago and he was teaching me about a study that they'd done the Optimal number of partners that people say they want their long-term partner to have. So if you could pick from zero to a thousand, how many partners would you want your future partner to have? And the optimal number for both men and women is around about three to four for long-term. Now, if it's short-term, you get a slightly flatter, people are prepared to have the same amount. But zero partners was as desired as around about 11 or 12. So zero's

to few, three to four was optimal, and then it tails off back down to 12, which is around about the same as zero. I thought that was quite interesting. Yeah, because you don't want to be, when you're an adult, you kind of don't want to be someone's first, especially if you've met them as an adult, but too many, you're like, well, what's going on there? Maybe a bit of a red flag. Okay. The most durable relationships are between people who grew up with similar values.

This is something that I've seen time and time again with a bunch of my friends, especially from the UK. It's the people who have shared interests, similar sort of goals, a similar sort of worldview. I mean, one of the most, again, in terms of relationship satisfaction prediction, if you hold the same political beliefs, your relationship is way, way more likely to be successful, because downstream from that are a whole host of other things about the way that you view the world, the way that you view personal finances, how you should raise your kids, the way that you should own a home, your relationship to debt, your relationship to death, all that stuff.

And if you do have incredibly different values, I can't think of any friends that are in relationships who do have different values and it's ended up succeeding. All of them, by design, have evolved to be in a relationship with someone that has them. The only people that I can think of that have different values are ones that are going through a divorce or a breakup. Yeah, it's super real. I dated and married someone who was outside of my culture

like completely. And I mean, the things we would fight about were like, we're wild. Like, neighborhood choice. I mean, it was just like, every, just diverging on things I never even considered. Especially given how many different places there are that you could diverge on,

all the idiosyncrasies of you and your fears and your concerns and the difficulty of trying to create a relationship together, and then not being able to agree on whether you should live near a park or an apartment, whether you want a garden or whether you want to be in the center of the city, is going to layer on a lot of complexity that you probably don't need. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's sort of a weird, I say values because like in my case, it was like a geographic difference. They really impacted us, but I think like it really does come down to values because maybe you do have this, like there are cultures, right, cross-cultural combinations that have similar values. And then those can work, but if it's too many differences, and it's very hard. If he texts you six months later and says

he was actually in love with you, he's horny. If she texts you six months later and says that she was actually in love with you. She feels ugly. Yeah. That's just the support, I suppose, that where both men and women go to, what they fall back on. The number of... So, again, some of the guys I used to work with would have 2am, 3am, and 4am broadcast

lists on WhatsApp. And that would be for at what stage of the night they had got to. And you had decreasing quality, but increasing likelihood of reply from each of the different broadcast lists. And it would just be a you-up text that would go to all of them. And then it would go, it's 2am.

It hasn't worked. 3am, let's try this next one. And then 4am was like, I'm gonna have to scrape the barrel here and then they would send that message. So, we're singing over here? Yeah, I mean, Club promo is not exactly known for its chivalrous dating behavior. But where are the woman who wants to use you as a supporting infrastructure for herself esteem, in cells are right about emotional tampons. Are you friends? Are you a reliable source of male validation? I'd never heard of emotional tampons before.

Yeah, it's a word from the incellosphere. and they, I think, weaponize it and say all male female friendships. Oh, not, you know, the Encel world is a huge ecosystem, many different subtypes, I don't want to generalize, but, you know, they think that many women are just using men. And I think, I mean, I don't think it's all male-female relationships or friendships, but you should be cognizant of it because there definitely are women who keep like harems of men that they perceive as like low value

to pad their self-esteem and to make them feel better about themselves. One that's very obvious, if you have to drink or smoke to have sex with them, you don't like having sex with them. I mean, the fact that this is even remotely useful wisdom, I think speaks a lot to what Louise Perry has been talking about, which is this sort of disembodiment of women specifically from having sex, that, you know, how to sleep with him and not catch feels is a non-ironic title of a Cosmopolitan article where he's saying okay, so I'll try and what like switch off any

psychological response I have to doing this thing in a desperate attempt to achieve Freedom which is like I know Working like my dad and having sex like my brother. Yeah, and it, you know, it's really disheartening because a lot of, you know, a lot of sort of contemporary relationship podcasts and stuff talk about women dissociating during sex. Like it's just something, like something all women share all the time. And of course, like I think every woman, you know, will experience it a few times or at their sexual history, but like to be regularly dissociating, because you're that just connected from your partner and you're doing it to pass the time,

or to please someone is like very, very upsetting. Why do girls like shows like call her daddy and stuff? Do you listen to these? Do you resonate with them? I don't resonate with them too much of a weirdo. But why do you think that girls like them? Because I don't have theory of them. I think a lot of men like them. I think I listen to it just for pure entertainment

and also just sort of just check in with different sub-cultures. I listened to a wide range of crazy stuff. I mean, it is entertaining, I think, for some women, it validates poor choices to hear other people making those same choices. Like, call her daddy was infamous for, you know, they were, they were constantly cheating on their partners. And it was very like validating for a woman to hear other women talk about it so cavalierly. Or, you know, sort of like that, that level of casual sex. But I do think a lot of men listen to those shows. Because I find the ones where

with more female audiences, even if they're that candid, they're softer and less vulgar. Or the type of vulgarity that they use is like more, wouldn't be resonant to men at all. I don't, I mean, I'm sure that this is probably how it feels for a girl to listen to Joe Rogan or something, but I've given Call Hadaddy a couple of cracks. And I don't really understand where it's kind of like a little bit of a different language. I don't understand a lot of the space, like the cultural space that she's coming from, and she's unbelievably successful, but I would be, it would be surprising to me if there was a large cohort of guys that listened, but I'm being surprised by a lot of the things that were seeing on the internet today, so

maybe actually that's not that surprising. I wouldn't underestimate her appearance, or like both of their appearances, because there is Sophia with an F as a new podcast for the other host. I mean, they're both like very thin and very beautiful. Like, could you imagine if there was like two fat women, like, it just wouldn't, you know, maybe, maybe it would be as popular, but it would be popular in a different, a different way and also a different scale. Is there something about that that, if it it's two hot girls talking about their failing forward through relationships, is there something that almost legitimates girls that see themselves or their insecurities make them feel like they're not as attractive as those girls?

So they go, oh, well, if this really good looking girl can fail forward through relationships, that makes my piece of shit car crash of a love life feel like it's less of a big deal. Um, maybe. Um, I, I still think that the, I would, I'd be interested in looking at the, the audience demographics of Call Her Daddy. Um, I think that, I also think there's types of, of hot girls that, like, there's the hot girl that a girl would think is hot, and then there's a hot girl that a guy would think is hot, and I think's a hot girl that a guy would think is hot, and I think that's actually a really useful distinction.

And I think the call her daddy hosts were more like hot girls for guys, and hot girls for girls. Hmm, yes, I understand what you mean. Okay, last one. When people give advice, they're speaking to themselves as much as they're speaking to you. That doesn't mean their advice is bad, but it's important context. Yeah, every, I think, I think everyone who talks about lifestyle and culture is talking to a younger version of themselves, either they're trying to validate

their choices or they're saying, this is what I would have done if I had known better. I think you're right. William Costello, one of my friends, says research is me, search, and he's coming out of the world of academia. But I do think that it's very much the same. You know, most of the people that I know, whatever they're interested in, it's because it's got some sort of relevance to them. It's questions that they're trying to work out themselves or whatever. Because I like, by design, what person would be able to dedicate many hours per week or per day to writing about something, speaking about something, if they didn't have some sort of personal curiosity.

Yeah, you have to, you know, you have to have skin in the game. Yes. What are you working on next? I, Hill, I have a lot going on. I'm doing a project with my friend Namakates about cyber dating. We're doing a podcast together called we met online. It's not launched yet. What cyber dating? Is that why you don't meet in the real world? Yeah, like, you know, all things romance on the internet. Okay, cool. It's much, much, much broader than just e-dating.

And I'm also working on a book of art and short stories with 2D Cloud, which is a really cool independent press that everyone should check out. It's, yeah, I have a lot of stuff going on, but those are the two most exciting ones. Cool, why could people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do and read your writing?

defaultfriend.substac.com Katherine, I appreciate you. Thank you very much for today. Yeah, thanks for having me.