Modern Wisdom - #751 - Macken Murphy - What Does Science Say Makes Someone Attractive?

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Macken Murphy is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, a writer and a podcaster. No one has ever said they want to be less attractive. But what does attractive actually mean? What do humans like to look at in other humans, and why? Thankfully science has some insights to help you understand why you like what you like. Expect to learn the role of symmetry in attraction, why the most average faces are actually the most attractive ones, how important muscles, waist-to-hip ratio, tattoos, beards, eye colour, height and voice are, how to work out what is a stated and what is a revealed preference and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Take your personal data back with Incogni. Get 60% off an annual plan at https://incogni.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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 everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Macken Murphy, he's an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, a writer, and a podcaster. No one has ever said that they want to be less attractive. But what does attractive actually mean? What do humans like to look at in other humans? And why? Thankfully, science has some insights to help you understand why you like what you like. Expect to learn the role of symmetry in attraction, why the most average faces are actually the most attractive ones, how important muscles, waist to hip ratio, tattoos, beards, eye colour, height and voice are, how to work out what is a stated and what is a revealed preference in attraction and much more.

So much fascinating stuff in this episode. Macon is a beast, he's knee deep, balls deep in all of the research, and I very much appreciate him, I very much appreciate you catching up with him, and he is an impressive individual, and I hope that you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mackin Murphy. Just be attractive, bro, is like the biggest meme in online data at the moment. What actually makes an attractive face? Well, there's a couple things that come up again and again in the literature, and then there's also a couple things that I think men think are very attractive and are surprised when they find out that women don't actually necessarily care about it. Now, that's not to say, we'll get into the weeds, but that's not to say that men are necessarily wrong to want to look like that. It's just that it's not the attractiveness component. So a couple of things that come up a lot are averageness, and that's mathematical averageness.

So having a nose that is of average size, shape, and placement. So some people think average and they're like, oh, normal. And it's like a person with a very average looking face, meaning a face that would be the result of a composite of many faces superimposed on each other. A person with that sort of face would look like a model, right? If you superimpose a set of faces, the face that results from it will be more attractive than any individual in that set. We can talk, if you want, I know that you're interested in this sort of thing as to the possible evolutionary and also just social reasons why that might be the case.

A quick two theories would be maybe average faces are easier to process and the processing speed is pleasant. It's like, oh, there's nothing glaring here. It's like, oh, there's nothing glaring here. And it's like, oh, I got quite like looking at this. From an evolutionary perspective, it could be that the average four traits are the end result of sexual selection. So we're putting the cart before the horse in the sense that the reason that the average nose is the average nose is because there's been so much historical selection on that

shape. On non-average noses against. Against non-average noses. So the reason that it's the average is because noses that are too big get cut out. So it's really that there's some other reason why that size, shape, and placement is attractive and it's become the average over, because we are the end result of previous selection. So, averageness comes up a lot. Another thing that comes up a lot is symmetry, right? Symmetry is definitely attractive

and it's attractive on its own. It also seems to correlate with other matrices of attractiveness. But symmetry comes out again and again and again. If the left side of your face looks a lot like the right side of your face, then you're likely more attractive than you would be if you didn't have that. And with both of these things, with with averageness, with symmetry, there are plenty of individual cases where people have very non-average traits and are still stunning. Plenty of people are highly asymmetrical. I mean, some of our considered most gorgeous celebrities have very asymmetrical faces. But these traits do matter. Symmetry, the standard Evo explanation is that this is a signal of let's say robust

underlying developmental qualities, right? That they were able to withstand the insults of their environment, right? At the very least, you know that they don't have some horrible injury to one side of their face or something like that. They didn't have some horrible illness and they don't have certain heritable genetic disorders, right? And this is something that we'll likely talk about more. Why do we care about beauty at all? And it's partially because beauty seems to be a signal of underlying qualities that matter more, such as health. So I'll note that these symmetry studies have mixed results in Western populations. So it's like, we know that symmetry is attractive, but there's a question of does it actually

correlate with healthiness? And that's not always the case. But it is the case at the very least that, look, if you've had a... I've got a broken nose from boxing, that certainly made me less attractive than I would be if I had a straight one. What does that tell potential mates? It tells them that something, for some reason, I couldn't handle it. Something went wrong for me at some point. And certain heritable genetic disorders that presumably you wouldn't be excited to pass on to your offspring,

if you LLs being equal, those also co-vary with high asymmetry. And so, symmetry, like when you see a symmetrical face, it's like, hey, you know, hey ladies, I don't have those disorders and I don't have horrific facial trauma, right? Have you ever seen soft white underbelly, that YouTube channel? I hardly watch anything. Okay. Well, it's a very big channel and he has a 50 million play interview with an inbred family. I highly recommend that you go and watch it. And one of the first things you'll

notice when you see those people is that they have, well, I don't know about this family specifically because I haven't seen it, but they'll look like something has gone awry. Highly asymmetric. Yeah. Highly non-typical. Yeah. Like, I mean, one of the guys is eyes are very, very wide apart. Uh, like, which they may be the same distance apart from the center of his nose. Who knows that might be symmetrical, but it breaks the rule of very non average. And I've also heard, you know, I've heard doctors privately, you know, use the phrase funny looking kid, right? Meaning like, not to make fun of them at all, but like, okay, we don't see anything wrong, but like for some reason this kid looks strange. Maybe there's something deeper here that should be looked at. But that's obviously anecdotal. I'm more of a data guy. It's interesting when the anecdotes align. But symmetry and averageness come up with the caveat

that some people hear that this is a sign of health and think that I think that health should be attractive, let's say. I'm not in the should business at all. It's just cold, what is, what is not. Now I want to talk, you asked about men. And so one thing that's interesting is that facial femininity in women, very attractive, very consistently. What's femininity in your world?

Well, there's a few ways to measure it. But basically, one way of thinking about it is you take the average shed of faces of women and the average shed of faces of men or the average shed of, let's say males and females, right, in this specific case, because there are some differences between gender and sex, you take the average chets, you know the average faces of males and females and there's different traits in those groups that are typical. If someone has more of those typical traits for one group, they'd be more masculine looking. Sometimes there are other ways of looking at it that that's just one.

There are different researchers who have very strong opinions as to what facial masculinity actually should be, right? Because some people say, well, that isn't a typical male face, but if you ask respondents, they all say it's masculine, right? So it's like, that is a masculine face because who decides what's masculine and feminine we do, right? So facial masculinity, though, is interesting. So facial femininity is very attractive to men. Men love stereotypically girly, womenly faces, right? They respond very heterosexual men respond to that quite strongly, typically. Facial masculinity, despite all the gigachat memes and things like that and what we think might be attractive, you know, some studies find that women prefer facial masculinity a little bit. Some find that they prefer facial femininity. Some find no effect. The latest Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and romantic relationships,

that's the latest review that I'm aware of. And they said, look, if anything, there's a slight preference for facial femininity in men as well. And that's a bit of a confusing result at first, because it's like, well result at first because it's like well facial masculinity It's like that there's so many things that are attractive about masculinity You know like facial masculinity predicts predicts fighting ability for instance, right? It's it's probably predicted by you know Testosterone levels and things that are impressive signals in other contexts So it's like surely women love, you know a gigachat type face women love a super masculine

Face and some super masculine face. Some super masculine faces like Henry Cavill, for example, are very attractive to women. I'm not saying that it's a huge disadvantage or something. It's just not all else being equal preferred. One common idea that you'll see in the literature is the masculinity trade-off hypothesis. If you're mating as a woman, think about this strategically. It's like, yes, there's all these perks that come with masculinity, but you're picking a mate that you're probably going to have to co-parent with.

You're going to have to raise children with them. And so maxing out on the super alpha dude, maybe for a one night stand, there's some indication for that. But if you're looking for hot guys for a long-term relationship, a prettier boy is more appealing because that might co-vary with traits that are less dastardly. That heavy brow ridge also means risky behavior, also means he's probably going to sleep with my sister. Yeah. Also means that he might lose his temper at you or your offspring and cause horrible damage. also means that he might get murdered because he can't stop mouthing off.

That's interesting that it skews toward femininity, not just averageness in men, whatever the midpoint between femininity and masculinity is. Has that been tested for short-term versus long-term, casual versus long-term? The masculinity thing. Yes. Yeah, so there's mixed results on that. And I'll also note that the masculinity trade-off hypothesis is very much a hypothesis, right? So, you know, it's tempting to, it's such a good story, right?

It sounds so good that in every paper on this sort of subject, someone's going to talk about the masculinity because it's a fun story to tell. I got to, I got to bring this up. Like I didn't realize how fallible scientists were, especially those even in evolutionary psychology, which is very rigorous. It hasn't been in the science. It hasn't been the replication crisis or anything like that. Except with the ovulation studies, don't forget.

Which we're going to get onto. But if you come up with a sufficiently compelling name, God, the meme just runs away with it. So yeah. And it's hard to let go of the memes. name. God, the meme just runs away with it. Yeah. And it's hard to let go of the memes, but the masculinity trade-off, I mean, you would predict the kind of obvious thing would be, okay, they should prefer them for short-term mating and prefer less masculine guys for long-term mating, and there's some mixed results on that. I'm quite skeptical of that whole. I think that there needs to be kind of a second round looking into that. It's not a particular area of interest for me, right? I know that there's some expert

on facial masculinity who's like, no, it is true. Fuck you. Yeah, exactly. But it's certainly interesting. I'll just note though that there are some strange things that make the masculinity trade-off hypothesis seem like it doesn't work. Like for example, so what's the most, the most facially masculine ornament is the male beard, right? Women generally don't grow beard, some do obviously, but for the most part that's facial masculinity 101 is big, bushy hair on the jaw, right?

And kind of the worst possible result for the masculinity trade-off hypothesis is that, you know, we don't see this, you know, short-term mating when I'm ovulating, I like the big bushy beard. That doesn't come up. In fact, what you see is big bushy beard is preferred as like a potential co-parent, a potential dad, which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect based on the masculinity trade-off hypothesis, is like, he's got a Big Bushy Beard, surely that's Mr. Short-Term Mating, but instead it's like, you know, not really too fussed about that, but he looks like he'd make a great dad. How interesting.

On average, do women prefer beards or not? Well, I spoke to the world's leading expert, but I would say the guy to talk to about beards is Barnaby Dixon out in Australia. He's got relationships with our lab out there. I spoke to him for a couple hours about this, and it's such a deep literature to get into. It's just deceptively, there's so much research on it and it's just, you think it's simple, then you get into it and you're like, this is one of the most complicated areas of psychological science. It's the hair on our faces, right? So I did a podcast with him on species and it was very interesting. He said that

So I did a podcast with him on species and it was very interesting. He said that you could probably, he's read every study on the subject and I'm not aware of any meta-analysis, but he said that you could probably draw a line right down the middle and have just as many studies finding that women prefer clean shaven to bushy beards as you would find bushy beards over clean shaven, right? So, and this is one of the annoying things about like being on TikTok is that I'll see like a, it recommends me, you know, people who aren't necessarily in the field but love the research and they'll cite an individual study. I saw someone recently, I won't name them, but they have a huge following. And they were citing one of Barnaby-Dixon's studies finding that clean shaven faces were not preferred to big bushy beards.

And I was like, yeah, but if you knew about the context, it's like, he's done several of these studies and it's gone both ways. Well, women do prefer his heavy stubble. That seems to be pretty consistent. If you shi- Yes. You're- You've dialed this in. Your looks maxing to a T.

This is hair maxing technically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're- I'm being- I'm being maxing. Stubble maxing. Yeah. So I would say that-

Stubble piled. I would say that, if you think about it, right, yeah. So you're a double maxing. Yeah, so I would say that I would say that if you think about it, right, and this is partially insights from Barnaby Dixon and partially kind of the theoretical musings of Jeffrey Miller, right, in this area. But if you think about it like from a signaling perspective, maybe it does, maybe it makes sense in a modern context that heavy stubble is the best signal. Because on the one hand, it's like I'm signaling these masculine traits, like I can grow a big bushy beard, right?

And the beard does seem to add some facial contour, right? It's kind of a coincidence, but it is interesting, just anecdotally, that it follows the same contour line that makeup does on women, right? The hair grows thickest around the jaw and chin, which obviously having a nice jawline is better than not. So you get some of that boost from the facial hair, right? But then you also show like, hey, I'm actually, what is a heavy stubble show? It's like I'm regularly maintaining this. Sufficiently refined.

Yeah. So I have excess time, excess control, excess attention. I was thinking about my trip to Thailand, which I did a couple of years ago. And get that in you, go on. And I was thinking about when I saw the girls behind the counter who make their faces lighter. So whereas I'm from Newcastle in the northeast of the UK, girls make themselves orange. What does that signal? It signals, look at all of the spare time I have. I can afford to go away on a holiday.

I can go to Malia or Magala for Marbella or wherever and I can catch a tan and lie by the pool because I have lots of spare time. I'm the sort of person that spends their time outside. I'm into fitness and health and all the rest of it. No one knows that it's come from a bottle and a makeup brand. The converse is true in Thailand because the indigent laborers that work in the fields get the tan most. So they counter signal by saying, I don't ever go outside. Yeah, I have a white collar job. I'm inside. So I think that with the stubble, Total Bro Signs hat on here, but yes, it

signals could grow a beard, chooses not to. Why? Well, most people that lead, especially now, and it will get onto this like cultural mediation, I suppose, which is interesting, but especially right now, many jobs, many jobs where you have an overbearing boss may have an issue and there is this sort of vestige of you should be clean shaven when you go to work. My dad still has that. My dad gets clean shaven before he goes to work. That's just been ingrained in him as one of the things that you do. So it's kind of a bit of a counter signal. It's like the red sneak, it's referred to as the red sneaker effect as well, that

the more money that you earn, the more casually that you dress, you know, like the guy with 17 letters after his name just says, just call me Jim. Whereas the dude that just has just got his PhD. Precisely. That's Dr. Mack and Murphy. I'd better be Mack and Murphy MSC than the parentheses Oxon. That's that. Oh, so if you're a real snob, then you delineate the fact that your degree is from Oxford, as opposed to other places. I don't have any letters after mine.

So you're telling me that my international marketing masters and your Oxford, whatever it is, evolutionary fucking psychology degree are of equal footing? Is that what we're saying? It's the, so I actually- Let's take that as a yes. Yeah, that's a yes. Thank you. That'll do. That'll do. That'll do.

And it's actually worth noting because I'm often called an evolutionary psychologist and I, worth noting because I'm often called an evolutionary psychologist and it's true that I'm a PhD student at the Psychology Department at the University of Melbourne, but at Boston University I did biological anthropology. At Oxford I did cognitive and evolutionary anthropology. So I had to take a lot of Evesite courses, I understand the field very well, but I also have some kind of just basic, there's just some basic theoretical qualms with some of the, not to get myself in trouble, but not even qualms. Let's just say that I think that there are more flexible approaches such as behavioral ecology that can yield more insights. And what you're talking about right now with the, I mean,

very good hypotheses, right? It's not my area, but those are very good and would really fit in to the behavioral ecology literature of, okay, in a cultural, sociological context where being tanned signals that I'm working in the fields and I don't really want to signal that, then maybe lightening does make sense, right? That's more- Everything's culturally mediated here because we have the exact opposite. And ecologically mediated because presumably if you were up north, we're working in the fields, doesn't make you tan, then...

Wouldn't matter as much. It wouldn't matter as much. Right. Very interesting. And a whole lot of women's beauty signaling, it's very interesting to me that so much of women's beauty signaling seems to be signaling that they don't work. Carrying a handbag, that is like a clutch, right? Carrying a handbag, that is like it's just, it's to have it, you're like a clutch, right? Just constantly holding something is very inconvenient. Long nails, right?

It makes it, even using a keyboard is tough with those, you know, it's difficult. Having, you know, long kind of hair that gets in the way and dresses that you couldn't sprint in, it's interesting. And then men's clothing, I think this is maybe changing a little bit. And there's definitely some cultural context where this isn't true, but a lot of, a lot of male fashion, like good male fashion is incredibly practical, typically. If a man starts, you know, having too many pockets even, he starts to look a little ridiculous.

Cantal tilt. The internet is obsessed with it. Yeah. What does the literature say? Do I need to have hunter eyes or pray? Well, I mean, it's, I'm not aware of any specific literature on cantal tilt. I'm sure that there's someone who's really dug into what makes an attractive eye. There are some things that clearly make an attractive eye such as having a limbo ring. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. The dark ring around the color,

people respond to that. The light white, having that really clear sclera, people seem to really respond to that. Both of those are probably cues to health, although that's still a putative indicator where it's still being looked at. Eye health, although that's still, it's a putative indicator. It's still being looked at. Eye color, very interesting. Basically, if you run a survey in the West, what eye color is sexiest? A lot of people will say, and generally you'll find that people say, oh, I love blue eyes, right?

It doesn't really come out in studies that there are strong eye color preferences. There seems to be a frequency dependent selection effect. One of my old mentors, Alexandra Ull, she looked into this and it does seem that, you know, if you're the only blue eyed guy in the room, then you look better than if everyone has blue eyes, right? And if you're the only brown eyed guy in the room, you look better than if everyone has brown eyes and so on,

but which might maintain eye color diversity. Cantal tilt is interesting. So there's definitely a lot of literature that I'm aware of on eyes, but Cantal tilt seems to be a bit of a meme. I'm sure that there's some research on this that I'm just not aware of, but anecdotally people seem to respond to it. And that said, though, I've become kind of acutely aware of it. And there are plenty of, again, it's kind of like the average and symmetry thing.

There are plenty of famous actors who are considered gorgeous by women who have a positive cantaloupe. So, or the reverse, whichever one's the bad one. They've got the kind of sloping eyes. Yeah. Why are faces so important? So, there are many ways to display your lack of genetic mutation or your fitness or your robustness from the environment thus far in your life. It seems like an awful lot of what we do is centered around the face. Why do we have a seems like an awful lot of what we do is centered around the face.

Why do we have a particular high degree of sensitivity and finesse and ability to discern when it comes to the face? Why is so much of what we do? Why is it not the hands? Why is it not the arms? Body shape, we'll get onto waist to hip ratio, all that stuff. Like those things are important But everybody knows that there's been a person who's maybe not been in the best shape ever But just has a gorgeous face guy or girl and you're like Fuck yeah, they're hot. Yeah, I mean, you know, they could do with hitting the gym, but they're hot. Yeah. Yeah

Yeah, that's that's interesting. I mean, I'm not sure that there's that there's anything I mean, we see that bodies become more important than faces for short term mating, and faces become more important than bodies for long term mating. And there's a huge, I had a conversation with Tanya Reynolds about this, and it was like, why would that be the case? Because as you say, both should be indicators of the same putative, underlying fitness indicators. I think that one thing that I would like to bring to this episode and leave people with in this context and in others is it's typically thought, and I think that this is in some context

the right way to think about it, but it's typically thought that beauty is a component of your main value, right? So it's like, you've got your personality, you've got the things you do, you've got the resources, you've got your willingness to invest, and then beauty is one of the list of things that you bring to the table. But really, I think a better way to think of it is that beauty is, and I'm certainly not unique in thinking this way. Beauty is a shortcut signal of your mate value, right? And so with facial attractiveness, right, one of the themes that's been coming up in

every conversation we've had about this today is that it's signaling underlying qualities that are maybe more important and the same thing with bodily attractiveness as well. And if you think about it, it's like some of the things that we do, it's like you can say, you can feel hard done by, and I totally understand it, that it's like, why do people with, you know, why are more facially attractive people? Why are we thinking that we have better personalities? That sort of thing. But to an extent, it's like, well, if two people walk into a room and one of them,

their hair is well styled, well groomed, they've got the perfectly manicured stubble or they've got makeup that's been styled perfectly and their outfit's on point and everything's just working. It's like, and then the other person comes in and they've literally put in no effort, they've got bad heads or their makeup's amassed or they're not doing the natural. Their nails aren't trimmed, their clothing is shit.

It's like if you're looking at those two people, all else being equal, if you have to make a guess, who's going to be a better husband and father? Who's going to be a better wife and mother? The person who is willing to do these extra things in order to socially signal, the person who has the excess time and resources to devote to those things. I don't think it's that. They're probably quite conscientious that they're going to this effort. Reliable, oddly. I would say to the basic question of why do faces matter, it's the same reason bodies matter. It's the same reason that style matters, it's a signal of qualities that matter more to us.

I mean, we think of beauty as this extremely shallow thing to care about. And to an extent, it is fair enough. But to another extent, the reason that we care about beauty in the first place is because it often signals deep. The reliable signal. Yeah. So it got me thinking there where you were talking about how specifically facial attractiveness and beauty is kind of an aggregate of a bunch of other things that contribute to that. Yeah. And there's still a lot of mystery there.

In the same way as a bank account, especially for a man, is an aggregate of a number of other things that he does. And so it's having a good body for men and women, perhaps for slightly different reasons. For a man, it might be something like dominance, aggression, but it's also other things like reliability, orderliness, ability to overcompane. That's kind of sexy. Agency, reliability, consistency, smarts to be able to actually understand what they're doing. And as with everything, and I love the fact that we started with the average-ness because

Fisherian runaway is basically what gigachat is, right? It's just this inset, like the most muscular guy had the most muscular son, had the most muscular son, had the most muscular son, and then you end up with gigachat. But what you actually look at is for most people, there are traits that are good in moderate doses, and if you overshoot them the same thing goes for the woman who's dolled up It's nice that someone puts effort in that the outfit works with the hair with the makeup with the nails with everything else But if you come in and you're completely caked what looks like you're trying too hard looks like you might be compensating

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the same thing goes the same thing goes for the man Yeah, well we want a little bit of muscularity, but the absolutely jacked out of his mind bodybuilder, well, what does that signal? Maybe it signals some sort of inner insecurity. Maybe this guy's trying to compensate for something. Maybe he's only going to live for another 10 years. A whole host of... I'm very concerned about his state of his mental health, all of these different things. So the averageness that we're talking about with regards to the face composition, and I do love that idea of like just processing speed.

It's like, yep, eyes, nose, mouth, yeah, that looks all of the things are there. Yeah, that took me 0.3 seconds. I didn't have to hesitate. Away you go. Beautiful. And we can fall in love with people's imperfections in a way, but they're imperfections I'm going to guess are almost always within a particular bound of this is average. But yeah,

I like the fact that there's a Goldilocks zone for most of these things. Some people love real muscular guys and some people real love more sort of skinny guys. Yeah. So this is a very complicated conversation. And I think I want to be careful about, again, conflating mathematical averageness with trait averageness. Right. So with muscularity, it's a little, we don't see this preference for average muscularity. Right. So we see a preference for average facial size, shape, placement of traits.

Right. But with muscularity, it's more complicated. I mean, Do women like muscular men? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some, some don't, right?

But, but there, there's a variety of convergent, and so I'm not saying that all women prefer muscles, and I'm also not saying as you noted that as muscular as possible is optimal, right? And it's also possible that a certain degree of muscularity is sexy in some contexts, but not in all, right? Like the bodies that are popular in pornography might not actually look that great in real life. There's something about the super stimulus of a super muscular lean dude or someone who's had their body done to an extreme degree that might work on camera but not in the real world. But in any case, muscularity, there was a recent meta-analysis that just got

published on this, or I believe it just got published. It might be still in the public awaiting review sphere. But certainly, the results are out. And they looked at all the studies on predictors of mating success in all these different ways. It just is the case in the sense that regardless of what people say is attractive and what isn't, men who are muscular have higher mating success than men who aren't. Men who are more bodily masculine in general seem to have higher mating success. There's a couple of different reasons why that might be. The first thought is pretty obvious. It's like maybe guys with muscles are just sexier.

And there are individual studies where it's like you show women a bunch of bodies and you're like, who's hottest in this crew? And it's like a guy who's more muscular than average and leaner than average, not stage-ready bodybuilder, but certainly pretty high standard. There's other studies that don't show that. But there are other ways in which muscularity can help you to compete for mates without making you more attractive. So one route by which this could be the case, there was a really interesting study which you might have already read. I'm sure one of your guess is... David Putz.

It might have been him. It was the Frat Boyz study. So they studied a bunch of Frat Boys. I'll email this to you afterwards because you're going to like reading it. They studied a bunch of Frat Boys and they had them rate each other on like who would roll who basically like who would be the best fighter, who's the most intimidating. That sort of question. I can't remember the scale items they used. And then they had women rate the frat boys as like how hot are these guys? And really weird result, how hot the women said the guys were. It wasn't a strong predictor of the male mating success.

Now, mating success is very hard to measure. They measured it by number of mates. So we'll talk about this more in a second. But at least in that study, with those measurements, the intimidation factor was better, right? It was better than being hot. It was better to be scary than hot. And so one potential idea is that if you're a super jacked, scary dude, and you're talking to a girl at the bar, everyone else is like, all right, that may as well be his wife. Like I'm not going anywhere near this situation. She's off limits.

Whereas if you're a super scrawny guy who is frail, maybe not. That's one idea. But another idea, and this is, I think, another likely hypothesis, frankly, is that, and this goes back to the masculine trade-off thing that we were talking about earlier, is that maybe the traits associated with the crewing muscles are also the same traits associated with aggressive pursuit of short-term mating. And so, measuring mating success with number of mates, in that case, they didn't look at how good looking were these girls, how intelligent were these women, how high mate value in general were these women. They didn't look at that. It was literally just how many people have you slept with, which say what you will, I mean,

that's an indicator of something. But it might not be that much more of an indicator than you're not an in-sell, right? Because after that, it's like, if you're at least at the bare minimum level of attractiveness to engage in short term mating, and that's not a particularly low level, right? That is at least medium, surely. But once you're at that level, if you want to, in a modern mating market, you could have a one night stand every week. So it's like, it might not be that great of an indicator. But it is interesting. What about weight, BMI, body shape for women? Well, I'll note briefly on BMI for men.

It is interesting. There was a dating app data set where it indicated that the best BMI to be as a man was about 27, right? And it's just hard to know how to interpret that because 27 could mean like, oh, that dude is jacked. There's many ways to reach 27 BMI, but that's a flaw in BMI as a rule. Yeah. And that's kind of why I wanted to introduce that is that BMI is a great measurement of weight per height because that's the only thing it is. Right? It's not a great measurement of health. It certainly tells you something. It's not a great measure of muscularity. It certainly tells you something. But it is interesting. So, I mean, we're speaking in a Western context.

And this is, I just know that this is what's going to happen. I'm going to talk about the actual findings from the anthropological literature on attractive body shapes and BMI in women. And a bunch of people in the comments are going to talk about how I'm pandering to women and I'm a simp and I'm just trying to make people feel better about it. You're among great company. Yeah, no, I know. I'm just saying that up front to take some steam out of that silly response.

I don't know whether you saw, I got to interject. I don't know whether you saw that me, you, William Costello and Alexander Datesite got lumped into a new term. Did you see this? We were given a name. I don't even want to hear it. Tell me. So here's the problem.

And if you want to create a name to like bring people in and kind of mock them as someone. Yeah. You can't make the name sound cool. What are they? Tell us the intellectual manosphere. Oh no. Oh no. We're part of the intellectual manosphere.

Well, that academic you know what's, but you know what's, you know what's thinking about that? Is that most of my, I can't really fit into that because most of my following is women. So that's, so I'm just, you have to take me out. I'm, I'm, I'm,

Unfortunately, you're a part of it. You don't get to choose. Okay. Neither do I. Intellectual manosphere is, yeah, what a, what a huge error to coin a cool card. What, to think that I'm intellectually you're a part of the man's fair?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that you're not giving yourself enough credit. I think that you're clearly a very sharp guy who knows literature better than many, better than many master students, frankly. But... Body shape, BMI. Body shape, BMI, yeah.

So this is, BMI. Yeah, so this is... In a Western context, quite low BMI's are attractive to men. I'm not denying that at all, for the most part. And in an industrialized context generally, among wealthy groups of people, or historically wealthy where starvation isn't a problem. Yeah, there's a lot of evidence that men prefer lighter body weights, right? But if you take a more broad view, this is not,

and this is going to get into some of the reservations I have about just jumping to Evesych as the tool to use because people have come up with these Evesych theories for like, why thinner women are a better choice. And then it's like, okay, well, we didn't evolve in a modern Western media hyper-wealthy, at least historically, unlimited food at the grocery store down the street situation. We evolved in a pretty, probably unstable, probably relatively scarce environment, or can we at least say that? probably unstable, probably relatively scarce environment, or can we at least say that? And so if you look at more traditional societies, oftentimes, plumber is better, right? Where it's literally women with more body fat are considered sexier,

right? And this is- Presumably up to a limit. Yeah, but you'd be shocked. I mean, if you look at, for example, and this isn't necessarily a more traditional society, it's just a society that historically has dealt with more resource scarcity than urban Japan. But if you look at, say, the South African Zulu, you'll consistently find BMI's of up to 38 being considered very attractive. And in the West, we'd be like, that is a very heavy person, just frankly. So what's going on there?

Well, one thing to notice first is that tons of women's evolved sexual signaling is conspicuous fat deposits. So we're the only primate that has year-round of fat deposits on the breasts, for example. We have conspicuous fat deposits on the buttocks as well, especially in women and on the hips. Fat, to an extent, in women, clearly works as a sexual signal. There's something desirable there. It seems that, in a within culture's context, there's some evidence that within cultures at least, people who are enduring more stress and scarcity tend to opt for heavier mates, men tend to opt for heavier women,

and those who are in a period of abundance, they've got lots of resources, tend to opt for relatively lighter mates. Another piece of evidence for this can be found, so that's within cultures cross-sectionally. We can also see this evidence across time. For example, American Playboy Centerfolds, they become heavier when the economy goes down and they become lighter when the economy goes up. You're kidding me.

Yeah, yeah, that's a real result. And I'll send you the PDF. Another- What's the, before you get into that, what's the proposed mechanism? What do you think's going on to make this- Oh, excuse me. I should have set up front.

Imagine you're in an environment where calories are either absent or unstable, right? So you're in a situation where it's like, I don't know, either I don't have food right now, or I don't know if I'm going to have food next month. Your brain is trying to determine who you should meet with. It's doing calculations behind the scenes saying whose meat value in this sociological context is desirable. And so the theory, and this certainly isn't my theory, I'm not presenting it as such, but the theory from this tradition of research,

the environmental security hypothesis, proposes that, and there's convergent forms of evidence, which we'll discuss and already have discussed in a sense, proposes that if you're in that situation, it's like, okay, well, who's going to be fertile if there's a famine? Or who's going to be fertile during a famine? Who is able to obtain calories? Women engage in tons of caloric acquisition in traditional environments, oftentimes more than the men, in fact, despite Western conceptions of this. Because they're gathering tubers and to an extent engaged in hunting as well, but mostly gathering fruits, nuts, berries, all the stereotypical things. You're looking around, you're in the situation where you're literally hungry and it's like, who's sexy right now? And then a woman who is

clearly advertising that she can obtain calories, survive a famine and stay fertile during periods of scarcity because low body fat is associated with infertility after a point. It's an incredible suppressant. Well, that woman is going to be more attractive than the woman who looks like if anything goes wrong, she's going to die. Right? Now, in a Western context where you're not necessarily thinking that, right, where that's not an issue, well, then you might be concerned with things like status, right? Signaling that like you can afford to go to the gym, that sort of thing. Then you're going to be concerned with things like youth, having youth and let's say null parity, the state of not having had kids yet,

which is signaled by an incredibly svelte body. And so maybe it makes sense in a resource abundant context to prefer that. But in a resource scarce context, which is where most of our evolved psychology occurred, we see that heavier mates seem to be preferred. Now, the evidence for this, and I'll just recap very, very quickly. Within cultures, it seems that those who are on the lower end of things, resources-wise, tend to prefer heavier mates. Across time, it seems that the media that men consume of pornographic media, the women get heavier

when things are going poorly economically and they get lighter when things are going well. So that's across time within cultures. Now let's talk about within individuals. There's a very funny study where they literally, they showed up at the university dining hall and they had a genius study to be honest. And they're like, okay, you guys are about to have dinner. Which of these, you know, what do you think, what weight do you think is sexiest? What body type do you think is sexiest? And they found that before

dinner, the men preferred heavier mates than after dinner, right? So now we've got within persons evidence, within cultures evidence, and across time evidence. And then we've got this very, you know, we talked about flashy theories that do well. We've got a great story as well. So you were asking about BMI and its attractiveness in women. Yes, it's true that in, you know, a Western context and maybe broadly in an industrialized context, this is more attractive. But that doesn't mean that that's the default state of our species. And you know, plenty of men prefer women with

more curvaceous figures. I mean, I honestly, I remember, I think, did you recently have Jordan Peterson on? I remember correctly. I remember when he had the gall to tweet not attractive with the picture of the plus size model who has a hip to waist ratio of like 0.7, an incredibly feminine, symmetrical, average face. And it's like, maybe not to you, but to most men throughout history, that would be one of the highest made value women that they'd ever encountered. If we entered a recession next week, then it might get a little bit more, she might be a little bit more attractive for everybody.

Yeah, and I think that she, I mean, not speaking about any specific women, you know, that's certainly not, it's not, it's certainly not my style to talk, to comment on like specific women's bodies. But like it was one of those glaring examples where it's like, okay, well, you know, Dr. Peterson, you're clearly not aware of this literature. Yeah. So a couple of interesting things. First off, is there a name for this?

Is it like the economic mediation of female BMI hypothesis? Yeah. So I've heard it called the environmental security hypothesis. But the last, it started getting research on it about 20 years ago, then they just hit a few home runs and then it was like, okay, this seems to be true. All right. But again, this is the difference in behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology is that evolutionary psychology, if you read one of their literature reviews on thinness, you'll just read about how, you know, not, you know, I'm not kind of character or anybody, but you'll often read stuff about just why thinness, our psychology evolved for thinness. And then if you read someone from a more behavioral ecology standpoint, it's like, well, in as much as we have a default state, it seems to be towards slightly heavier than is current, but we don't

really have a default state. It's flexible based on the environment, and that's pretty tied up with a bow. So male preference for female body size over time as gauged by BMI tends to, it's malleable. It varies based on your sociology ecology and it varies on the individual level as well. Like if you grew up in a stressed, resource-deprived environment, then yeah, you're probably going to prefer- Bigger women as you grow up. Yeah, probably.

I wonder if there's enough evidence to say that. So that would be fascinating to see how long it imprints, just how malleable are you. Is there a period during your formative years, if you were in poverty during your teenage years, does that lock in at that particular time? That would be fascinating to study. So this is why I love behavioral ecology

because they actually, they do something called the phenotypic gambit where they say, you know, everyone else can handle the mechanisms. We'll just figure out what's going on, what the relationships between variables are. So they come in like kind of cowboys and just get the relationships done and then leave the mechanisms. But it is interesting.

It's like you could have a cultural adaptation where it's like cultures over time figure out, you know, preferring lighter or heavier women makes a lot of sense, right? Or you could have individual level developmental mechanisms, right, where it's like during development, your brain builds itself differently. And then you can also have these immediate cues. I mean, the hunger study where it's literally before

versus after dinner, come on. That's your brain within an hour, changing your make preferences based on how hungry you are at the moment. Well, I mean, you know, two areas that I got fascinated by last year, Candice Blake's sexy selfies study, right? Which is women responding to the local socioeconomic environment by beautification and sort of posting photos with, I think she used like Instagram or something to kind of reverse anything.

Yeah, so it she used like Instagram or something to kind of reverse anything. Yeah. So it was Twitter and Instagram. Yeah. That was one. And then just all of the sex ratio stuff. Yeah. Like we like plants respond to our local ecology.

So you are, this is the first time I've even heard the word about behavioral ecology. Behavioral ecology. So behavioral ecology studies. This is the first time I've ever done it, but it seems to be blending two worlds that I'm pretty fascinated by. One being the more behavioral economic side, the rory Sutherlands of the world and the other being the evolutionary psychology, the David Busse's of the world. Yeah. So, it's actually, it's about as old as evolutionary psychology in terms of its application to humans.

Candice Blake is my supervisor. Good chick, great hair, great studies. An incredibly smart woman who is one of the only people in the human evolutionary sciences who I agree with about everything. One of the reasons that I chose her as my supervisor when I was figuring out after Oxford who am I going to do a PhD with is that we got on phone calls and it was like, oh my god, finally someone who… Did we just become best friends? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was just agreement, agreement, agreement. And you've also spoken to Rob Brooks who's my co-supervisor.

Of course. So you're slowly making your way through my entire lab where we have that we've probably the highest percentage of Chris Williamson Appearances that's not why I mean David bus isn't far off Williams been on buses been on our lab smaller So that's why I said percentage highest saturation Yeah highest saturation. Um, there's only a few more you that you was the guy who was the guy that did the body dysmorphia stuff Ozzy dude Candice sent me him. Mmm. Fuck, he was on the show not long ago. Not Scott Griffiths. It was Scott Griffiths. Oh, you had him on as well.

I'm not even joking. So I attend their weekly lab meetings, literally every week. Who was the dude? Was Rob the guy that did video games? Yeah, so he's into some of the techie stuff, but he's a hardcore biologist. But he's the dude that did like some of the sex stuff. No, when a woman outperforms guys in Halo 3. Was that Rob? I think it was. Maybe, I'm not sure. Anyway, we're getting the weeds.

So this is what I want you to get to. Yeah, who knows who. BMI, interesting for women, fluctuates over time. We respond to the local ecology. We respond across life within situations as well. Yes, yeah. What about waste to hip ratio?

Waste to hip ratio. Well, this is another one that's interesting, right? So I just spoke to Barnaby Dixon about it and I feel like I'm getting myself in trouble. I will make a note just about behavioral ecology. This is an audience that has had every evolutionary psychologist on the eye of being able to find. They're educated, they're balanced. No, no, but that's worse because I'm about to say another thing where maybe I'm pushing back against Evpsych. And I will note that a lot of evolutionary psychologists do actually

think about things more in a behavioral ecology way, almost despite the... They just maybe don't attribute it to... Yeah. And so what behavioral ecology is, so evolutionary psychology, just historically, it is the intellectual child of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology at that time in history. And I would say that most evolutionary psychologists have been psychologists who learned biological stuff later. Behavioral ecology is, we call it human behavioral ecology, but it's really just like behavioral ecology is a standard powerful tool for studying animals.

It's just reapplying the same tool, the same set of principles to humans. In some ways, it's simpler. In some ways, it's more complicated. The fields can complement each other in a lot of ways. They certainly inform each other in a lot of ways. They certainly inform each other in a lot of ways. And there are some individual evolutionary psychologists who have done incredible work that is very consistent with behavioral ecology, like Daly and Wilson, their classic homicide studies with income inequality in Chicago.

Fascinating and very behavioral ecology-esque. You want to ask about waist-to-hip ratio. And I want to say that I love evolutionary psychology. But if you open an evolutionary psychology textbook, you'll generally read that it's a universal preference that men like this very... Mason Is at 0.68, is that the positive ideal? Gretzgerald Yeah, about 0.7. Yeah. So 0.68, sure. And it's interesting because we see that in westernized college students, you'll see an even more extreme, closer to Kim Kardashian type ratio. But if you go to, and this is still in its nascent stages, it's possible that this turns out not to be true.

But there is this other idea that it's like, well, maybe in a super rich Western environment, that makes a lot of sense. But I was speaking to Barnaby Dixon, who's the beard guy who we mentioned earlier. And I just asked him about this. I was like, is there anything on variation? I know there's the BMI thing, but what about the, and this was off podcast. I was like, what about the waist to hip ratio stuff? And he was saying that he has some indicative evidence that maybe in environments where women are doing more physical labor, that super wide hips, which makes it harder to run, harder to jog, harder to do athletics. I mean, if you look at like incredible female athletes, they often don't, you know, they

often do have relatively masculine bodies. Maybe a more masculine figure in women is preferred as well. So it's like the waist to hip ratio stuff, it makes sense why it's attractive. It signals null parity as we discussed. It becomes harder to maintain this Coca-Cola shape after you've had children, unfortunately. It becomes more difficult as you age as well. And so it could be an honest signal to what we might call future reproductive potential, right? It also might be an honest signal to fertility.

There's more mixed results on that. I've seen a lot of mixed results on ways to hyper-ratio as association with fertility. Basically like zero. Yeah, so some people are like, no, it is, it does associate. Maybe it just doesn't associate in a modern context, but it is legit. And then, which is possible, right? Um, and then there's other people who say, no, that's just a bad idea, right?

But the, but it, but it is true that it's like women who are, you know, who have the most quote unquote future reproductive potential and are fertile, right? Um, women in their early twenties, let's say, are generally going to have this, you know, crazy waist to hip ratio and it becomes harder to maintain after they've had more kids, harder to maintain after they've aged. So it does kind of make sense that it's like, okay, that's a signal. Again, it goes back to signaling underlying qualities. It does make sense that that's kind of what happens there. But then if you think about it more broadly, again, just stepping back and

plenty of evolutionary psychological accounts are just correct. And there's certainly a huge contingent of people who think that they're always compatible with behavioral ecology. But this would be an area where it's like, well, maybe that's not representative of our ancestry actually. Maybe there's actually, we have a more modest preference in contexts where women are working all day. And you have to choose someone. I don't know. Well, I'm going to guess, just to interject, I'm going to guess that the, wherever it was,

West African, South African study that you looked at. I didn't look at the study. I was talking about me. Yeah. Him. But for 38 BMI was the one that was talking about. Oh, yeah, the South African Zulu. Yeah, yeah, that was talking about. Oh, yeah, the South African Zulu. Yeah, that's

not him. Yeah. That I'm going to guess that those women aren't going to be shaped like a snowman. They're going to be shaped with probably an awful lot of fact deposits in the ass and really, really big boobs. So even within that, I would be very interested to look at how does waist to hip ratio mediate that BMI? Because bigger girls that are bigger in the wrong areas can look less sexy than bigger girls that are bigger in other areas, right? In the same way as the dude, exactly as you said, a 28 BMI, like is that a 27 BMI for a guy? Yeah. Is it all in the gut or is it all on the shoulders? Yeah.

It's very different. You can move the body shape around. Yeah. I mean, that's a very good point. And with that study, I'll note that it was, that it was up to 38 because you were asking the context of a limit. Like when does it, when does it, when does it become a problem? That would be a very more extreme example. There are some groups actually now that I'm thinking about it where it was just basically, there are some groups historically where the heavier the bride is, the higher the bride price is. Yeah. So it's. Yeah, so it's like, it's this whole view, again, going back to the whole not attractive thing.

It's like, speak for yourself. Well, I mean, just to add on to that. But yeah, I agree with you that there's gonna be an interaction with waist-to-hip ratio. And the original, it's funny that you mentioned it, because the original evolutionary psychology studies on this, which were like, what's an attractive female body?

They were using drawn figures, which isn't great, but they made a matrix of heavier and curvier. And they were like, what's an attractive female body? They were using drawn figures, which isn't great, but they made a matrix of like heavier and curvier. And they were like, oh, the heavier doesn't seem to matter as long as they're curvy. Interesting. But those are the originals. But that's what I would have predicted. That the heavier can increase, you get, how would you say, like more leeway, there's more buffer with heavy, as long as curvy is retained. And the reverse wouldn't be true. Yeah, and it's probably just so we're not only talking about this,

because a lot of the things that you're saying are very likely true, but also so extrapolable to men in the sense that it's like, BMI of 30 probably is still sexy if you've got big shoulders, wide arms. Yeah. But again, if you're shaped, if you've got super skinny, wide arms. But again, if you're shaped, if you've got super skinny arms, twig legs, and you've got just a huge pot belly, and I understand that some people are gonna be listening

to this and feeling self-conscious of that. There's other things you can do. It doesn't matter, but that's just a different 30. Everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked, so it's okay. So the interesting thing that I was thinking about that to just add on, you won't have seen this because you're not as terminally online as I am. Sports Illustrated just had to let like a shit ton of its staff go. Jordan retweeted his old tweet.

I think that he foresaw like a Cassandra complex type thing. If he said, if he said, if he, if, if, well, you know, actually, I thought it was such a rude thing to say about a woman that I didn't, didn't fuck with it anyway. But, you know, what role does hype play in attracting men and women for men and women? Yeah. It's interesting.

Well, I think that let's, let's get men out of the way. Let's, let's get the, you know, since. Just like the blue-pilled cook that you are, let's get men out of the way. Let's get the, you know, since... Just like the blue-pilled cuck that you are. Let's get men out of the way and get onto women. We're in good company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Well, this is one of the things that I say where people are like, he's black-pilled.

And it's like, okay, I'm so upset that that's the direction. If you can manage to thread the needle between all of the pills at once, if you can be bigoted and cooked in the same podcast, that means that you're doing something right. Okay, sure. And you've managed to do both so far, so what? Yeah, what a disaster. That's, yeah, so I'm as long as, you know...

Everyone's upset with you. As long as extremists on both sides and, you know, reasonable people. So, well, height, actually, I think that, I don't think I'm gonna say anything particularly surprising. Every inch that, if you're a shorter guy, every inch that you add, and this is based on a couple of different datasets, I'm not just looking at one study here,

looking at things like just women's stated preferences, women in speed dating studies, women in dating app swiping, dating app filters, as well as response to online ads for, I'm single that kind of. So there's a bunch of different evidence that women like a very tall man who is not too very tall. So if you graft women's height preferences, it would look kind of like a candy cane where it's like, if you're very short, then adding a few inches really increases your

attractiveness. The difference between being 5'4 and 5'8, that's a big deal. That's going from a bit of a problem to actually probably not that much of a problem. Then it starts to taper off around six foot one, right? So it's like you're getting every inch is sick. And then around six foot one, it starts to taper off, which is hilarious because, you know, the average height of American men, I think it's about five foot nine. And on dating apps, I think it's about six foot one. I'll have to double check that, which is just ridiculous. Height inflation is such a disaster.

Yeah. I'm considering getting leg extensions just because of that. Height inflation and whole a disaster. I'm considering getting leg extensions just because of the height inflation and whole inflation, the two maladies of 2024. Once you get to around 6'1", you start to get kind of diminishing returns per inch, and that seems to settle down around 6'3". 6'3 to 6'5", there seems to be about, even it doesn't seem like being maybe 6'5 is better. Maybe it's not, but it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal whether you're six for three, six foot four, six foot five. Then around six foot six, six foot seven, six foot eight, that's when it's like, okay, this is definitely not optimal. Right. This is not ideal. But again, it's like a candy

cane. So it comes down, but you're still better off being like basketball player tall than being five foot 10, right? And it's interesting because this data converges with a very funny anecdotal experience. I know one of the only men ever to lie about his hide on a dating app to make himself shorter. He's 6'6", and he claims that he's 6'5", because he's like 6'6", just scares them away. To be honest, like looking up, if you're a 5' six chick, like, what do you know about anything over six feet tall? You can't even reach six feet tall. Like, you don't know what's up there. You can't get up there.

Well, one thing that is interesting though, is that it's not so a lot of people think, and this is the intuition, is like they want a man who's taller than themselves, and it's like they want a man who's taller than average. So it's not that they're looking up and saying, oh, that's, that's a lot taller than me is that they're looking at you and looking at the guys around you and they're like, oh, he's the tallest one. That's all of my fucking friends in Austin at all. It's super annoying.

Yeah. Super. Well, you're quite tall. You're five, 10, five, 10. It's a little taller than average. Yeah. So five, five, 10 and a half, I think technically if I was, if I was posting it on a black pill forum, but all of my friends, my housemates, six, four, another one of my friends is six,

four, another one of my friends is six, two. So I ever have to use the dating app. I'm six foot four and I'm showing up in stilt. Fuck it. Um, all right. So that's for men height. I saw, and I've cited this a bunch that the average preference in diff, Sided there's a bunch that the average preference in diff difference between

Men for women is 21 centimeters taller and women for men is 16 centimeters shorter This hold is this similar to any this? Yeah, that's it that yes that that sounds about right. Got it right, baby Bro signs for the win. Yeah, it's a that I believe that was actually a speed dating study that you're referencing if you're talking about the same one where it was like what height was optimal and they interpret it as a ratio, right? Where men prefer somewhat shorter and women prefer significantly taller. Men's preferences are kind of more interesting than women's, but they're also so much slider that it's almost not worth talking about them, but we can. It seems to me that men prefer women who are about average height or maybe a moderate amount

shorter than themselves. It's kind of unclear why. And I think that a combination of factors, it's a slight preference, but I would say that a combination of factors make it such that tall women, and I say this as someone who's dating an absolutely lovely, very beautiful, but also very tall woman, tall women I think have the hardest just on the mating market from a hyper-search. That's why I called it the tall girl problem.

Yeah, I heard you say that. Was that to Candice? I actually said it. I shelled that theory. I've only come up with two cool names in all of evolutionary psychology, tall girl problem and male sedation hypothesis. But I'm shit at science, great at meming. So I played toward my strengths. I'll have to talk to you afterwards and tell you some of the theories that I'm working on testing. Tolgo problem is about socioeconomics, not about height.

Yeah, I heard you talk about it in that context, but it works in terms of height because, well, two things happen. One is that it might be similar to the socioeconomic situation. Although one thing that's interesting, and it's worth as a supplement to the modeling work. So Candice's modeling work, obviously a super cool study, very interesting. But then it's like, well, richer women are more married and less divorced. More educated women are more married and less divorced than less educated. So it's like this whole kind of meme of careful, oh, careful ladies, the richer you get, the

harder it's going to be for you to date. It's like, okay, theory, fine, modeling, fine, practice, they're doing better than the rest of the women. I would be very interested to look at that longitudinally over the next 10 years. I think it's going to get even better for them. And the reason I think that is because what we're seeing in Europe is that women are becoming more and more willing to date hypogamously. So we're seeing much more of these patterns where women who are super educated are like, you know what?

Sexy plumber, sexy firefighter, let's have it. Have you looked at the relationship outcomes for those relationships? Longevity, satisfaction? Well, this is something we can talk about as well. I mean, in the West, we see that there's that these relationships for the women make more, you know, maybe are more likely to have issues, but there's a real question of like, is that just, I mean, this would be my first gut reaction, is it's like, well, they feel they can leave?

Well, I mean, look, so this is, I love the... Those are the two ideas, right? It's preferences or they feel they can leave. Well, I mean, look, so this is, I love the... Those are the two ideas, right? It's preferences or they feel that they can leave. So I love the tall girl problem. I think that it explains an awful lot from... And the reason that I came up with it originally was I wanted to explain to educated and or wealthy women that were struggling to date that they weren't personally cursed, that their preference on average for men that are as wealthy or more and as

educated or more means that it amounts to a diminishing return. If you're standing atop your own hierarchy, it's very difficult to look at above and across the next one, especially when that one is slowly kind of sipping and sipping and sipping now. Yeah, because men are becoming less educated. Precisely correct. That being said, there's some pretty scary stuff that I'm sure that you've seen increases in domestic violence have been going up in line with the decrease in hypergamous dating. So that would suggest that perhaps men whose partners earn more than them, that they are

concerned and no longer financial prisoners, may be resorting to a cost-inflicting as opposed to a benefit- hoarding mating strategy. Yeah, I mean, that's extremely depressing and that's a horrible thing to hear. I'm not aware of that data. And this is... William Costello taught me about it. You can ask him about it at dinner tonight. Yeah, yeah.

So this is something that'll just kind of flag up front is that a lot of especially just internet characters are very willing to speak at length about subjects that they know incredibly little about. Well, you know quite a bit through talking to people and you're also, you know, this is kind of your role is that you're bringing on experts and then asking the questions that they're asking. Make a career out of being the most stupid person in the room. That's one of, I wouldn't say that at all. You're being humble. But that's why you're popular, is that you have a knack for as a smart guy obtaining enough information to ask the questions that everyone's wondering. So I'm not talking about you at all, but there's a real tendency of people who are

on the internet to just pick out one finding here, one finding there, and then just speak at length as if they've got all the answers to the world's problems. And the truth is that in academia, if you haven't spent a year reading about something, your knowledge is basically zero. That's entry level is once you've been thinking, mulling over and reading the literature, the idea of getting straight up to speed on a subject, they're very unlikely to have the right context to decipher it. With a question like this, it's like, I'm not an expert in domestic violence. I'm not an expert in hypergamous versus hypogamous dating outcomes. Even though I'm from a broad theoretical standpoint, as someone who looks at things from

a behavioral ecology point of view, I'm very optimistic that our nature, our cultural norms, will naturally change to accommodate shifts in gender equality. Just to interject, do you think that women's preference for socioeconomically competent men is sufficiently malleable for that? To me, and I think to a lot of the guys, and to give the guys on the internet that are talking about this, they're due, if it was being spoken about in a less cantankerous adversarial way, I think what they would try to say is something like, women's preference for socioeconomically successful men is so ingrained. It is such a fundamental part of their source code of attraction.

I don't believe that it is something that they are going to be able to reprogram. And I would say that largely, like I'm in that camp too, to a degree, I would say that it is akin and equivalent to men's preference in terms of strength, men's preference for youth and fertility. I think that that is the equivalent. And fundamentally online, just again to get meta for a second, this is the debate. The debate online typically is you have a preference. That preference is wrong. I have a preference. My preference is right. Your preference can be

changed. My preference should not. That's the way that the discussion online gets presented. But I think I'm right. I think that I speak, you know, my favorite place and it's a shame that you're leaving this week because we could have done it on Saturday, favorite place for dating and mating research, Soho House Pool in Austin. Soho House Pool, it's, you know, $3,500 a year for a membership. So that like has a pretty good selection effect

for the kind of people that go there. And I just sit by the pool and listen to the chicks talking and just wander over and say, hi girls, how are you? Talk to me about your current dating experiences. And they'll say, I've got a degree, I do this thing, I work in marketing, I work in sales, I work in this thing, I mean, blah, blah, blah. What's happening with your dating life at the moment? I'm really, really struggling. Why are you struggling? What are the things that you... And a lot of the time they'll say, okay, how old are you?

What's your income? What's your education level? And a lot of the time they're struggling to find men that they feel are at that level. So give me your thoughts on ability to nudge preference for hypergamy versus men's ability to nudge preference for youth and fertility. Yeah. And I'll note that the word hypergamy is kind of a… It's the internet meme, so I'm happy to use it in this context, but I almost never hear it in academia.

I mean, we might say hypergeny, right? But hypergummy, that's about marriage typically, and it's also narrowly to status, right? But we'll use it just in kind of a broad sense of But we'll use it just in kind of a broad sense of mating up socioeconomically. You're asking, is it flexible? How malleable is women's preference for socioeconomically as or more successful mates? Okay. Flat answer, we'll see right because the the weather there's no for all the internet chit chat and I think that a lot of the guys who are resistant to this it's not actually about the mating they don't care about the mating success of women they give a fuck like they

Don't care about women having trouble dating what they care about is they don't want women to have as much resources as men Right that that makes them uncomfortable at their status, their sense of manhood, etc. And they're masking that as like, oh, women, you'll have so much trouble dating if you get rich. But in reality, they just hate to see women make money. Because again, the flat reality is, is that women who are more educated, right, are more married and less divorced than women who are less educated, right? Does the same thing hold the wealth, do you know? I'll have to check. Although, yeah, I think I'm pretty confident in saying that it would. But again, it's not necessarily my area. In terms of how flexible it is,

there is some indicative evidence that at an individual level, it's flexible in the sense that women who have decided that they want to be the primary breadwinner, right? They tend to, in their mate selection, care about good dad qualities, right? And sexiness, right? Whereas, you know, how much money they make, that's not necessarily... That's interesting because I've seen, I've got some data that I've been throwing around with David that suggests that women's preference for socioeconomic success over and above their own increases.

As they were more... Yes, this is intent to be the breadwinner, right? Not... Right. But what's the determinant of that? What's the determinant of intent to be the breadwinner? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm thinking of what's that. Like, is that going to be a switch that people... That girls flick? They're like, oh, and now I'm going to be the breadwinner or a women breadwinner. Well, no, it's more just that I'm quite confident that humans can, I just think that humans are incredibly phenotypically plastic creatures. Well, this is the behavior of a ecologist and you coming out, right? Yeah, it's just that, I mean, I see that, you know, you could look at all of human history

70 years ago and say, oh, women just will only marry men who are more educated. And then you look at the modern trends in Europe and it's like, oh, seems to be changing. So I guess I just... Very interesting. And then also it's like, I think that it's possible that we'll also see some shifts on the male side of things. I mean, there are plenty of cultures where men actually do. I mean, the basic of sex difference, you're right. I mean, the basic of psych sex difference, you're right. I'll just put a flag down here to say that it's true that across cultures,

men have stronger beauty preferences and women have stronger resource preferences. But the fact that the degree of difference varies suggests that there is some potential for ecological malleability. And we're only now just entering into a phase where it's even possible to do the experiment. Like we're doing the experiment and we'll see how it plays out. For better or for worse. And I think that it probably, frankly, I think it probably will be for better. I think it's gonna be fun.

Yeah. Well, I mean, here's another thing that kind of doesn't get brought up an awful lot online. When you look at the increasing divorce rates, and yet I think homeowner birth control has an awful lot to answer for, I think that in many ways it was a very dangerous piece of technology to throw around, although it also opened up an awful lot of opportunities for women. Nobody talks about the fact that the success of marriage success, i.e., lower divorce rates, etc., was very heavily in part due to the fact that women were financial prisoners of their husband. If you don't have any resources and you don't have any education and you've got two kids

or no kids or five kids, where are you going to go? Where are you going to go? You're literally a financial prisoner. One other thing, you were talking about creators and stuff online. And this works for friends as well. But I'm playing with this idea. And I had a four, four questions that you can ask to gauge the honesty of other creators, but it also works for friends too. So first question, when was the last time that you heard them change their mind on something? Second question. Did they primarily identify out groups as a mode of bonding their in group together?

Number three, how often do they admit mistakes, genuinely not performatively, publicly is an advantage. And number four, do they want to hear alternative points of view for reasons other than mocking them? That four step process identifies pretty much like if you All the bad actors, yeah. Correct. If you put the guys that I don't, I just don't enjoy their content or I don't want to be friends with them. That all of those questions they answer in the negative. So, yeah, it's very interesting. It's very, very, what myths

Yeah, it's very interesting. It's very very what what myths if you could clean house What myths would you like to get rid of from the mating and dating world? What's been bastardized the most okay in your opinion? All right Well, the most meme one is definitely body count this idea that the idea that you that historical promiscuity is a predictor of bad outcomes and long-term relationships, that's pretty well validated by a bunch of studies. It's just that it shows the same effect. But, David's quoted a number of times, right?

Yeah. We see that the idea that it's like, yeah, if you're someone who loves casual sex and loves sleeping around, you're going to have a harder time. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that type of person is going to have a harder time in a monogamous lifelong marriage, right? If that's what they love doing, right? And that can be partial. It's just sociosexuality. Yeah, it's just sociosexuality. And that can partially be measured with the past sexual partners you have with the important caveat that there's a huge difference between an 18-year-old boy who's just showed up his freshman year of college and has somehow slept with 10 girls in the first week and a 32-year-old man who's had a few failed relationships,

a few flings and so on and has got to the same number over a longer time period in different contexts. But this idea that body count is associated, quote unquote body count as the term is, is associated with negative relationship outcomes is true, right? At least with based on the available evidence. The optimal number is about four. I think it's three for women. In terms of people's preferences. Yeah, it's like a very, very long spread out candy cane. I think the same zero is as desirable as like 12.

Yeah, it's something like that It's it might even be less it's like zero starts here and then it goes up for a second and then it plummets Right, so it's like between a few and several between a few and several is hot and then after that It's like what are you doing and before that? It's like why haven't you done anything? but but it's worth noting so you asked about memes to destroy it's like this idea that this is only important for women and that this doesn't have any effect on men sleeping around or it doesn't indicate anything about men's likely personalities, that it doesn't make much logical sense, right? They'll talk about these like pair bonding

memes using studies on other animals that have nothing to do with humans. But it's like, we see the same effect in men, right? So men who have higher body counts and men who are more sociosex sexually unrestricted generally have all the same negative outcomes. But the difference is that a man who is sexually promiscuous is not seen as, that's not seen as a negative outcome in the same way. Yeah. Well, in itself, it's not. The cultural, the culture surrounding it. But there's, you asked about memes to delete and it's like, look, I think that there's a great argument to be made that maybe sleeping around isn't great.

I think that you can say it from a societal level, this might not be good for people. You can say it at an individual level, this might not be good for people. You could write a great little essay that makes all the right points and I'd be like, well, that makes a lot of sense. If you say only for women, well, then you just sound like you're a sexist, right? Because it's like all the same points you could make would be makeable about men. And all they have is these trite analogies about, you know, a key that opens many locks, da, da, da, da.

And it's like, all right, look at the data. You're seeing the same effects in men and women, but you're only talking about women. Then also just from a societal perspective, it's not what I would call an exportable idea. If you're making a recommendation to people culturally and it's contradictory in its execution, it's not a good recommendation to say, men have fun sleep around, women don't. It's like the only way that's mathematically possible is if those men are sleeping with each other and that doesn't seem to be what they're recommending. What's the truth about women being more picky or discriminatory than men when it comes to physical attributes, physical attractiveness?

Oh god, okay. Well, this is a funny one. Didn't expect you were going to come on and have easy, simple questions. No, no, no. I thought you were going to be a lot nicer to me. You've already gotten me in trouble a few times with everybody, but it's fine. This one's interesting because all right, it is true that I would say that women are more selective. Like most, you know, this is a pattern that we see across most animals, right? That female animals are more selective and in as much as women overlaps with female mammal, then you're going to see that effect.

And so women do seem a little more selective about who they may with. You've mentioned David Busse a couple of times, right? Those classic studies of of walking up to someone on a university campus. I mean, even if it's a really sexy guy going around like, hey, I want to go back to mine, it's some ridiculous number of men say yes and some tiny number of women do. So women are, and there's multiple ways of measuring it. I know that's kind of a silly study, but it does seem that women are more selective in

their mating. And so it's not particularly surprising that women want a higher percentile, right, of the mating market than men do on a lot of traits. And good looks seems to be one of them in the sense that men, I would say that most men are attracted to most women, right? And most women are attracted to a subset of men, right? So there's a difference there. And this is going to bring in a real funny insight from Alexander, a mutual friend, which is like, well, let's step back here. What if men just are less sexy than women?

Because there's no rule that the gender's average has to be equivalent. Like some people say, oh, it's illogical, it's delusion. And it's like, well, there's no rule. Like men, the average man is taller than the average woman. There's no rule that the average man can't also be less hot than the average woman. And it's interesting. How would you just a question here, I don't quite understand how you would compare female attractiveness or hotness to male attractiveness or hotness. So two ways you can do it, right? So the basic thing, the first basic thing to notice is that attractiveness is a perception, right? So when we say that, when we're looking at a study and we say this...

Oh, the ruler determines the length. Well, to an extent, I mean, but okay. So we can say empirically that apples taste better than cardboard because when we survey the humans who are the determinants of taste, the average human says the apple tastes better than the cardboard. I haven't run that study, but I'm pretty sure the p-value would be significant. With facial attractiveness and bodily attractiveness and all these things, it's measured the same way.

It's just kind of the Apple's cardboard thing. It's like, yeah, it's like, sure, people have different tastes, but on average, there's so much overlap. It's like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sure, but most beholders are seeing vaguely the same thing. And so there's nowhere really to go there. In terms of men being, is it possible that men are less attractive than women on average? It's like, well, if you ask women to look at couples and say,

who's harder the guy or the girl, they'll say, I think the girl is actually the hotter one more. But then if you ask men, the same thing happens. So men and women agree that women are hotter. And so it's like, by who's standard and whose opinion is there some objective thing to notice there? Another thing that people struggle with is that there are some studies that indicate that women find most men less sexy than average and some people are like, oh, that's a perceptual bias, right? It must be. And it's like, well, most men are less wealthy than average because some guys are super wealthy and most guys are moderately poor. Me and versus median.

Yeah, exactly. So it's entirely possible that we're living in a world of zeros and ones in a sense where it's like most men are completely unfuckable, let's say, and then some small subset of guys are just gloriously attractive. And if that's the case, then yeah. Use the bell code. Yeah, then it's like most guys are below average attractiveness. So, yeah, it's so two things that are really important on this that I really just want to put into the conversation. Yes, women generally find a smaller subset of the opposite sex physically attractive than men do. But women also put a lower priority on looks in general. So it's like good news, bad news.

It's like, sorry, fellas, most of you probably aren't looking that good to women on first contact. Good news, that doesn't really matter that much compared to if you were a woman in that same state. Mason Is there many ways to win? Gareth Yes, and women are more willing to compromise on their beauty standards than men, it seems. Mason Yeah. Well, I mean, again, this is where the Blackpill philosophy does come true to some degree. And I think that it's a culture which is born out of men who see themselves as genetic dead ends.

They see themselves as completely unable to get a woman because they have fallen below a threshold that is impossible. LMS, right? But L is first, looks, money status. So they believe that they've fallen below a particular net. Now, there is an argument about where that net is. And it's like, if you're not above a six out of 10, six out of 10 as being often rated by other men, not by other women. But I've said this before that a man's ability to change his mate value is significantly more malleable than a woman's.

That's the conventional wisdom. I think that it's… Well, can I say something just a little controversial is just the idea that women might be working harder at it than they get credit for. One quick example, one of the coolest studies of the past, certainly of this decade in my opinion, Marta Koal's enormous 93 country study on something like 93,000 participants across the world measured all of the things that they do to enhance their physical attractiveness and how much time they spend on it. And it's like all over the world

with some variance, right? And we can talk about that because again, I'm very interested in how sociology affects this sort of thing. But with some variance accounted for, women are spending much more time, significantly more time, on their looks than men. Five times, three times, ten times. About half an hour more per day, right?

So it's like, so a lot of, so there's this idea that like men can do this idea and this is accounting for everything, right? So this is including the time in the gym. This is including the time you spent picking an outfit. This is including the time you spent on my fitness pal figuring out like, oh no, what are my macros for the day? All of it together, right? The time you spent doing your hair, etc. Lining up the lovely heavy stubble to contour the face, whatever. All

of that together, women are spending more time. So there's this conventional wisdom of like, oh, men can do more than women to adjust their mate value. And it's like, maybe we're seeing a final product where women have already put in so much more work. It's like, imagine if, imagine how much harder it would be to compete as a man to upgrade yourself if every man except you suddenly spent an extra half hour a day on their looks. Even if that was just gym time, it's like, oh my god, everyone's hotter and I'm less hot by comparison. So this idea that there's more runway for men, I would be more open to saying that in a modern Western economy, there's more routes in the

sense that it's like, okay, I'm not the hottest guy, but boy, I can grind at computer science and become funny. Funny, educated, wealthy, fit. Yeah, exactly. And maybe, honestly, there's a huge, there's a huge, we don't like to talk about it, but there is variance between individuals as to how much muscle you can put on. There are people who just can't look a certain way and it's like hit the gym, bro. And it's like, well, they can hit it as much as they want, but they're still skinny, right? And there's not a lot of sympathy for that because we like to think, you know, people who have muscles like to think like,

oh, that it's just hard work, but a lot of us just vaguely are lucky, right? I know a lot of guys who are jacked who don't work that hard is all I'm saying. I have a couple of friends that are super responders to testosterone and they're just absolute hyper, yeah, complete hyperfreaks. And I also know guys who it's like they've never done a bicep curl in their life and they've got like 16 inch arms just flat. And it's like that's, if you're starting with 12 inch arms. So anyway, I'm getting off track, but this idea, there's this kind of conventional wisdom of like wisdom of men you have more kind of upward trajectory space through hard work. But then there's the other question of, okay, well, women are already working really, really hard.

The flaw for women has been brought up by this weird cartel that they're all doing it. Yeah, where it's like, if you're, think about just how much time it takes to get ready to go to work as a woman versus a man. It's like, if you've lived with a woman, then you know it's like, oh, we're going out to dinner. I'm going to be looking- Give me 45 minutes. Yeah, I'm going to be, yeah, if you're a man, it's like I'm going to be looking my best in 15 minutes, five minutes in the shower, five minutes on my hair, maybe shaving my face, and I'm out the door looking as good as I can look that day.

For a woman to go from her zero to her 10 in terms of effort, it's like it often takes a lot of time because we have these cultural technologies that are used in our society, such as makeup, such as these additional hair products, etc. And so I think that, yeah, I think that there's a real question there, but I'm not giving an answer. I'm kind of playing devil's advocate. I might agree with you, but that's certainly the conventional wisdom, so I'm probably giving an answer. I'm kind of playing devil's advocate. I might agree with you, but that's certainly the conventional wisdom, so I'm probably being an idiot.

Talk to me about discrimination around hair color. Discrimination around hair color. Well, you love evolutionary psychology, so I wanna just give you the basic Evo psych for you. Don't fucking throw me in with basic bitch. I'm a fledgling behavioral ecologist at the moment. I'm slowly, this is my new cool thing. My new shiny toy is this area of research. Well, you've spoken to a lot of people who would maybe at a conference, maybe depending

on the conference, say they're Evesych or behavioral, and that would certainly be me. It just depends on who I'm talking to. It's a shorthand for like, I use evolutionary theory and think about humans. Yeah, exactly. And Evesych is still the queen in this equation. I spoke at HBest last year. There's more. I just wanted to drop that out. Oh, wow.

Well, well, well. I think I might see you there this year if you're going in. Symposium. Yeah. What is a symposium? I hope your symposium's as good as my symposium. I don't even know if I'll get a symposium. Yeah, well, it's because you're a bitch.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah if I'll get a symposium. Yeah, well, it's because you're a bitch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's because I'm weak. Yeah. Yeah. So in any case, we'll have to do a study design on your tall girl syndrome stuff and see how it goes. Don't do that. Well, it would be cool if some of these ideas got into the literature because it is.

I got my first citation by David and William. Oh my god. For the male sedation hypothesis. Oh, really? Actually, in a paper, actually being tested. Oh my God. For the male sedation hypothesis. Oh really? Actually in a paper, actually being tested. Oh my God, that's so cool. I've been to a great name. Fucking great.

Yeah, that's it dude. I'm good at meming. I'm not good at science. You do the science. Go do the science, fucking nerds. I'm going to come up with the name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's funny is that the part of the reason Evesike has been so successful is because

David Buss is amazing at meming. Oh yeah. People don't talk about it. But like he has a knack so much of the words that we've used in this conversation are actually terms coined by him. All these little like putting mate in front of everything like all that little stuff like that's mostly if not his invention than his promotion. Yeah, and everyone stands stream from like a Basarian philosophy. Yeah, is that you can start sounding really science-y. Which is really what everyone wants. Yeah.

And you can also, and also here's the other thing, is that a lot of people who are in the scientific space, they coin terms, but they're terms that nobody can use because they don't make sense. I say the word mate preferences. Immediately you know exactly what I'm talking about. There's no confusion at all. Anyway, what were we trying to call it? Hack or discrimination about hack or...

Okay, so look, there's variation, right? And the some studies show different effects, but the standard Evo theory is actually quite simple and seems to fit at least with folk wisdom, right? Which is that men will prefer on average all else being equal, relatively light hair colors because hair darkens throughout life until it turns gray or white. And so lighter hair colors signal youth. And there's also some potential evidence that women's hair might darken during pregnancy as well. So we're going back to youth and null parity, right, being signaled by relatively light hair.

And in a Western context, this would be relatively light for our very diverse population where we have everyone from, you know, very Nordic people to just all sorts of people, right? So we have very light hair colors on that distribution. We see that, you know, a huge percentage of American women, there's one study where it was like 40% have experimented with lightning their hair, right? There's this effort, right, where it's trying to,

it seems to an extent, respond to this male preference for lighter hair that might be downstream of an ancestral signal of youth and null-app Right. Yeah, not fertility. And so the term nulliparity is the state of having not yet had children in biology. And the reason that that would be attractive is, and it's not attractive in all animals, but in our species where we're monogamous, pair bonding, theoretically. High MPI. Yeah. So theoretically, it's like you want to, this is going to sound like a crazy term, but the optimal male mating strategy for humans is often, you know, if you're in a evolutionarily

informed psychology classroom, you'll hear people use this phrase, which I'm going to sound psycho for saying, but it's called monopolizing a woman's reproductive years, right? Where it's like you're spending, you're trying to meet someone and then spend those 20 years with them where you're able to reproduce with them the entire time. Because if everyone's pairing up monogamously, as is the case in most human societies and cultures, then that's kind of where you'll end up at. Now on the other end, kind of for the same reasons, women seem to prefer somewhat darker hair, the whole tall, dark and handsome thing that seems to play out.

We've spoken a little bit about tall, just better fighters, you know, who are able to defend themselves, but dark seems to maybe come from a signal to age. There is some dispute of this, right? Some studies have found that men don't actually prefer lighter hair, but I'm very amenable to the idea that they do just because, and there might be some frequency effect, exposure effect, there's definitely a cultural effect, but that seems to be part of the story. What about age gaps? What about them?

Well, do men actually lock in at 21 years old once they hit 21 and then just want 21 year olds for the rest of time? No, in terms of physical attractiveness, there does seem to be, you know, a probable thing in the early 20s. But if you look at men's dating app filters, for example, they'll tend to filter out extremely young women once they get older, but they do want increasingly wide-aged apps as they get older. Is that not just because that's what they think that they can get?

Could be. Yeah, totally. Like, I'm 45. But I also- Getting a 21-year-old seems unrealistic and might be a bit icky, so like, yeah, let's put it at 27. Well, yeah, I used to say might be a bit icky is going to be, you know, that's part of like, part of mate value is like, what does this mate signal to other people about me? So why would women prefer an older mate? Well, this is the thing is that in countries,

so women have, we talk about women being more selective, the more selective party holds more power in terms of who gets together, right? That's how it is in business as well. The person who's more willing to walk away from the negotiating table and has more of the things that the other person wants. Anyway, I don't need to explain that.

That's pretty simple. But in countries where women are free to choose, they tend to choose men who are slightly older, not super older. So we're talking like two to four years, right? And that seems to be reducing even now where it's like age gaps are getting smaller and smaller. And it could be, again, like we talk about malleability, it's like, let's talk about malleability in a context where you're completely dependent on a man for his resources. Maybe a guy 13 years older is the best because he has more resources, right?

But in a cultural context where you have your own money, right? It's like, I don't want the deteriorating sperm of this old man. Let me give you a counter example in a society where you on average are outperforming socioeconomically the men who are around you at your age bracket. Yeah. One of the best predictors of wealth is age. Is age. And yet we still see that women who have these options and have the freedom to choose, choose very small age gaps. And this is the thing is that if you ask men what do you want, they tend to want pretty big age gaps pointing downward.

But if you ask women what do you want, they say, oh, I want, you know, a few years older maybe. And then if you see what women actually do, what do they get? They get a few years older, maybe. If you look at what they do on dating apps, they filter out much more men. Because again, think about this. One very simple thing that really everyone in the audience should understand about sexual selection is that we're looking for indirect benefits and direct benefits. If you focus too much on either of those, indirect benefits,

that's who do you want to have your kids, right? Who do you want the offspring genetically to be with, right? And then direct benefits, that's who do you want to raise your kids in a species like ours, but also who do you want to take care of you, help you out, be compatible with you, etc. Right? And if you focus too much on either of these, then you miss the entire picture. So thinking, you know, about direct benefits, sure, older is better. From a direct benefits perspective, of course, the older may is going to have more money, more status, they're going to be able to take care of you better in a modern economy.

But from an indirect benefits perspective, sperm to quality declines every year. The signals of quality, those decline every year. You become all that facial attractiveness signaling, that goes away. Those signals of underlying genetic health, those go away. The muscularity, that goes away. So there's a real balance here where it's like in a culture with very high gender inequality and where women don't have control of their own resources. Maybe or and there's you know there's debate as to why this varies but the fact of the matter, the underlying fact of the matter is that in cultures where women you know have their own

resources and are free to choose their mates, they choose men who are slightly older than themselves and that seems to me to get like a little bit of the direct benefits but mostly maintain the indirect ones. And there might also be to be 100% fair. There might also be a direct benefit to having a mate your own age in the sense that they'll actually be around to raise your own kids. There's a reason that women generally aren't fawning over, you know, 60 year old men. It's like human children they take a long time to take care of. That's not necessarily the best part now around. Talk to me about tattoos.

Well, I mean, I wish I would have told me in high school, but it doesn't seem that women care about them very much. You know, women perceive tattooed men as more healthy, masculine, dominant, etc. Healthy? Yeah, and it might be just because it's like you'd more likely be a gym bro, but the more, you know, evolutionarily coherent one, the one that's like really complicated is like, well, a tattoo is exposing yourself to a high infection risk. And it's like, I can handle that.

I don't necessarily think that's true, but it is interesting that, you know, there are some immune markers that are higher in men who are heavily tatted. So, and that could just be because it's like, if you go into a tattoo and it makes you really sick, you're probably not gonna get another one. And so guys who are heavily tattooed,

it's like bounces off them. But those are attractive traits, and yet women don't seem to find tattoos more attractive than not. And so the question is, and most of this is Polish data, it probably varies between societies and cultures and sociocologies. And it would definitely vary in Japan.

Yeah, right. There's going to be huge cultural context there. Right. I mean, there are some countries on earth where this amount of tattoos would make me look like some kind of criminal, but in Boston, it's totally chill. Wasn't allowed to go in the bats in Japan when he went there, the public bats. You're given one pat thing and he's like thigh full, two full sleeves, stuff on his back and he's like, the fuck am I going to do with this?

He's a 250 pound guy. That doesn't cover a nipple. So yes, women interpret men more healthy, more masculine, more dominant. But there's all these trade-offs, it's like, because you asked them, it's like, okay, do you think it's like digitally modified photos? Do you think the ones with tattoos are hotter than the ones without? And you talked to a couple thousand women about that. And the result was that it's like, yeah, he's healthier, probably more masculine, probably

more dominant, probably, but he's not more attractive. And it's like, why? And it goes back to the masculine, probably more dominant, probably. But he's not more attractive and it's like, why? And it goes back to the masculine and the trade-off thing. This is actually kind of good evidence for it is that they're like, well, I don't think he's going to be as good of a dad. I don't think he's going to be as good of a husband. Hmm. Tattoos, what about women with tattoos for men? Well, that's really interesting and there's actually a cleaner story. Well, that's really interesting and there's actually a cleaner story. So there was a fascinating French study and it's one of the most ecologically valid studies.

Really that I've ever read, not to overflatter it, but it's just usually when you do a study, right? You do it in a lab setting or you do it digitally or you do a survey and you just don't know whether it's going to translate. What they did was they did real-world human mating behavior where they took a bunch of women and they sent them out to the beach in a bikini and we're just like, read a book for hours and we're going to count how many men approach you. Every time a man approaches you, we're going to have someone run up to be like, stop. We're doing a study to reset the timer.

It's not people thinking it's their boyfriend or whatever. I'm not sure why they did that method, but that's what I assumed when I was reading the study. Sometimes they sent these women out with fake tattoos on, and sometimes they sent them out without. They found that with fake tattoos on, women got approached substantially more. They were like, huh, this goes against the lab studies that show that men say they don't like tattoos.

This is an interesting little problem, what's going on here. Then they asked men on the same beach, what do you think that girl? They didn't find that the tattoos made them hotter, but they did, the men did say, I think that that woman would be more likely to say yes to a date with me, right? So the anticipation was basically like, these women are more open to- Socio-sexual-y. Yeah. I mean, it might have been a socio-sexual signal. They didn't measure that. But the idea-

I bet it would be. Yeah, but it could be that. It could be that. And it could also just- Openness, openness on its own. Openness to new experiences. Like- No, no, no, it wasn't openness It could be that. And it could also just- Openness on its own, openness to new experiences. No, no, no, it wasn't openness like psychological trait openness. It was literally like, I think that this person would be more willing. It was just the basic question of like, if someone walks up into her on the street, is she more likely to say fuck off or say yes, and they thought yes. Right.

But the outcome that they're looking for is a sociosexual one. Potentially. Well, unless they're saying, hey, why don't we go for a coffee? I'd love to learn about your tattoos. Yeah. Well, here's the thing is that it's not all, I mean, it's interesting. They could easily be approaching to ask for a date. They don't want to get rejected.

But it does highlight two things. One is that not all beauty signaling is about signaling attractiveness. So sometimes you don't want to look more beautiful. You want to signal underlying personality traits. It's like, if you want to look, I don't know, it might make sense. If you're a woman who's interested in short-term mating, maybe it would make sense to deck your body out in cool tattoos to be like, hey, I'm more socially liberal, probably. I'm more interested in risk-taking, more adventurous, etc.

Yeah. So I think that sociosexuality is totally fair estimate. But the basic idea is like, it's not that tattoos make women more attractive, if anything, they make them less attractive, but it is a signal of, as we say, openness to going on a date with a guy that they've just mattered whatever Have you seen the studies on women wearing choker necklaces? Is this the same result pretty similar? Okay? Yeah Yeah, both men and women rate that woman is probably having had more Partners than previously. Yeah Well with tattoos we have the it's interesting that you said sociosexuality because it's probably bang on now that I think of it because there is some research indicating that people with

tattoos have higher sociosexuality. I mean, there's going to be outliers, of course, and there's going to be people who don't fit that pattern. But yeah, maybe having tattoos is like, yeah, not only do I have tattoos, I probably have casual sex and people learn that through cultural reinforcement and life experiences. Then when they're on the beach, they're like, oh, maybe this person would be more approachable. Mason What is there to know about stated and revealed preferences when it comes to attraction?

David Oh, that's an incredibly deep question. Well, you've been very interested in beauty today and I think one place to start would be that people, if you ask them what matters most in a mate, I mean, the jury is still out. But if you ask people what matters most in a mate, they're generally not going to say looks, right? They're going to say, I want someone who's honest, who's loyal, who's kind. These are the bus studies and other replication sense, right? But then if you do an experiment like a speed dating experiment, it's the hot person wins. If you do a vignette study where it's like photos and biographies, the hot people win generally at least past a certain threshold. And so there's this kind of tension there where it's like, okay, okay, so we've got all this data showing that people say

that they care more about personality traits than looks. And then we've got all this data looking at what people do and they seem to care more about looks than personality. One exception to this, which is interesting, is that interpartner correlations of attractiveness, right? Those tend to disappear, at least in one study, after nine months of knowing someone before the date, meaning that I've phrased that terribly because I can see the confusion. If a couple knew each other for nine months or more before they started dating, each partner's physical attractiveness does not predicts the others, which is a strong signal that physical attractiveness was not a huge factor in their decision to date each other. Because in most couples, interpartner correlations of attractiveness are similar to self-rating

and other ratings of attractiveness. They're pretty significant, right? What's the mechanism that you think is going on where this nine-month window seems to change something? Personality, accumulated information about personality pushing out physical attractiveness as a determinant of mating. But when you don't have enough time, you've met somebody a couple of times or whatever it is, you use much more easily accessible cues which are-

Physical indicators of mate value. This isn't a particularly controversial way to think about beauty. The Steven and Ludo review article on this, they titled it Physical Indicators of Partner Quality. And that's their... They weren't using that only for beauty, but that's one way of saying beauty. Is that you're looking for someone who is high mate value, and when you just meet them, 95% of the information you have is their looks, and after nine months, 5% of the information you have, let's and after nine months, 5% of the information you have, let's say, made up numbers, but let's say, is their looks.

And so it doesn't factor into your decision as much. And so if you meet someone at a bar, if you meet someone at a pub and the first interaction you have is securing a date, well, then you probably both met each other's looks thresholds. That's kind of the only thing that makes sense. But if you met someone as a coworker and you were working together for a few years and then after a blossoming friendship became something else, you're like, you know what, let's actually get drinks this week, right? How much did it look factor into that decision, right? It's hard to say. And in this study, apparently not at all.

Interesting. All right. So, at least not measurably. Let's keep saying that. Keep digging deeper into the state didn't reveal preferences thing, because I think a lot of the time it's kind of like the God of the gaps for people that want to make arguments before and against a lot of the theories. It's like, oh yeah. I mean, you know, people will say anything in surveys and my lived experience. Yeah. Yeah.

It's better. It says something else. Yeah. And there is, you know, as a, there is, as someone who thinks about things from a behavioral ecology lens, even though the two studies I've done are both very eviscily, frankly. But I do think about issues pretty behavioral ecologically. And the first word of that is behavior, right? Watching what people actually do, right? Evolutionary psychologists really like looking at stated preferences, right? The favorite tool of an evolutionary psychologist is

a questionnaire, right? That's often been said. And then other scientists like economists and behavioral ecologists like looking at what people do. So there's stated preferences, what people say, and then there's revealed preferences, what people do. But my personal opinion is that you need to look at both. There's an old joke about economists. I'm going to butcher it because I'm not a funny person, but you go to an economist's funeral, and nobody's mourning because his revealed preference was to die. It's like what people do is constrained by the vicissitudes of life, the chance happenings and limitations of one's own position. When we see that, sometimes it's like, okay, well, I don't see a reasonable way where your

decision was constrained. The fact that you chose to go on a date with the hottest guy at the speed dating event instead of the funniest guy tells me that you probably do care about hotness more. What's the use of stated preferences then? Other than to measure them against the divergence from reveals? Let's talk, that's a great question. I'll give you a couple of examples where I think stated preferences become a factor. Men say they want larger age gaps than they get, right? And it makes sense where the constraints coming from because women are the selectors typically, they select more at least,

and they say that they want smaller age gaps, and then the smaller age gap happens. So it's like, that looks to me like dueling preferences, butted it heads and the woman's preference one out and she went I'm not compromised. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, the man might want a woman seven years younger But he ends up with a woman three years younger and then you asked the woman and it's like well My state of preference is three years older and that's what I got and it's like okay That seems to be a case of dueling preferences that makes perfect sense another one would be and this is really interesting is that we see in these stated preference studies that men don't care that much about

Ambition about resources, you know, oh, she can have whatever career she wants You know, I don't really care about her education And then you look at what men actually do and it's like you very most educated men are with educated women Right most rich men are with women from the same socioeconomic background Even if that woman individually isn't making as much money, right? The same stratosphere class-wise. Just to interject, I saw Alexander's video, maybe a year or year and a bit ago, and he was talking about do men trade wealth for locks?

Do wealthy guys get with good-looking women? And it actually seems that most partners pair off. Yeah, good-looking people get with good- looking people, rich people get with rich people. And there are these status for resources trades or resources for looks trades. And these trades do seem to happen more men to women, right? But overall, it's like if you just look around even, it's like, oh, yeah, people who have college degrees tend to date people who have college degrees. People who are super hot tend to date people who are super hot. Now, that's a stated versus revealed preferences problem because you asked the guys,

do you care? And they said, not really. And then you looked at what they did and they ended up seeming to care, right? And so now we've got a case where we kind of have to look at the whole picture. And I'm not saying that it's a closed question, like the age gaps one seems pretty straightforward to me. This would be an example of it being a little more complicated, right? So the age gaps one seems straightforward in the stated preferences are probably accurate direction just because of the totality of the evidence. And then the looks question, it seems to be the revealed preferences probably are more

indicative looks probably do matter quite a bit at least when you're getting to know somebody. And then for something like this, now, now it's a little more tricky, isn't it? Because maybe men care more than they say, right? I certainly don't relate to the idea of not caring, right? Like I feel I might be biased because internally, like, I've obviously got quite a bit of education and I can't, at a personal level, I would rather all else be equal date a woman who's very educated. My girlfriend's a scientist, and so it's fantastic for me that when I'm having

trouble sorting something out, I can talk to her about it and she gives me coherent, helpful advice. Well, beyond just having a fucking research assistant you get to have sex with, what you also have is somebody that understands your passion. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's not just, it has a utility beyond just practicality where it's like, well, yeah, it's super helpful just emotionally in the sense that it's like, oh, this is someone who understands. Yes, me. Yeah, exactly. So I think that there are probably a lot of men who if you ask them on a pen and paper, and again, this is probably my bias. I think there are a lot of men

who it's like they're educated, they're doctors, they're lawyers, whatever. And you say, do you care about a woman's education? And they say, no, I'll date anybody. And then in practice, they're on the date with a woman who doesn't have the same education with them and they're bored, right? Because they're just not interested in the same thing. That's a specific subsection of men though. Yeah, it is. So very specific subsection of men. So the other possibility though, and I'm going to give full, this is totally possible and maybe

even more likely, is that men actually don't care that much about money and status in women and education. They're telling the truth when they say they don't give a shit. And it's not that they don't say that they don't give a shit. They say that it matters, it's just not top, it's just not, it doesn't matter to them as much as it matters to women in these questionnaire studies. And then in the behavioral studies, that doesn't seem to be as much for sex difference, at least according to some scholars. It's also possible that it's just exposure and opportunity.

It's like if you're a male lawyer, you spent the last eight years of your prime, getting educated around educated women. So it's like, who did you happen to date? Who did you happen to marry? Educated women because those were the women that you happened to meet based on who is in your local environment. So I'm open to both possibilities. I think that if you really want to understand human mating, you don't want to say something as blunt as watch what they do, not what they say, right? Even though for the most part, I am more interested in what people do than what they say. I think that if you really want to understand human mating behavior, you want to take a step back, relax and say, okay, what do people want? What do they end

up doing? And what's the most coherent explanation I can build based on the combination of those? Have you had a look at Gregory Clark's work? No. He is a Demographer I suppose He has behavioral genetics background. He wrote a book called for whom the bell curve tolls which is a fucking Phenomenal title interesting. He has tracked although putting the phrase bell curve in a title should be, you know, that's a risky move. He likes to sort of glance off the bottom of certain things. I really appreciated the fact that, again, same as a ploman, actually a little bit more kind of like based...

Have you had a pomegranate? Of course. What a smart guy. Phenomenal guy. And there's a really sweet guy as well. Fucking super sweet counter signal. I mean, dude, if you're going to do behavioral genetics and be really accepted even

slightly by the mainstream, you need to do the counter signaling thing, right? You need to be overly, not pliable, but like kind of placid and and so like gently softly, softly. I'm not saying that this predetermines, but it does predispose and I'm not saying like it's caveat caveat caveat page Harden, right? You know, Paige wrote the genetic lottery. OK, she's the only well known public facing behavioral geneticist that's ardently from the left.

As far as I'm aware, she's plumber not. I think he doesn't bring his politics into it too much, but she's like outwardly like these are my politics. So fascinating. Gregory Clarke, let's do it. Gregory, I'll send you the episode, tracked the social status of people via a very complex system of surnames in the UK for like 700 years. And he found that people's social status is genetically determined that over time you may Assortatively or unassortatively make yourself out of your social class either down or up

But give people enough time and their family phenotype is more important. Yeah, that's what they go back to this sort of Regression to your phenotypical mean. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's fascinating I will say though that again, I'm gonna have to kind of plant that I haven't spent a year on it flag in the sense that it's like- I'll send you a podcast. Yeah, yeah. Well, here's the thing is that I've read, you know, I've read a couple of relevant books on behavior genetics.

I read Plomins book. I spoke to Plomin for a few hours. I've read several articles on it, but I really am not a, I'm just not, and I understand the behavior genetics of infidelity quite a bit, but I just don't, I'm not an expert on, I'm just not an expert on it and I'm not going to pretend to be. And there's a lot of even academics who will come on shows like this and just be like experts on everything they're asked about. And it's like, well, I know that you're not like experts on everything they're asked about. And it's like, well, I know that you're not an expert and everything.

Science is lame. Bro science is real. Bro science is super fun. That's really, but I have this rule that I stole from Douglas Murray, which is normalize saying I don't have an opinion on that. I don't know. Yeah, I've said that several times today. That is, again, when was the last time that your favorite content creator said

that they don't know would be a great fifth question to ask. Like just because you're great in behavioral ecology, infidelity, make preferences and attraction, doesn't mean that I should believe what you say about geopolitical strategies to fix the problem with the Middle East. Yeah. It's so based, so true. And I will, one thing that I'm happy to be proud of is that on every single podcast I've ever done, I've said, I don't know more than once. There's never been a time where I've gone on a podcast and just gone through, yes, yes, yes, I know this, I know that. It's always at a point where I'm like, I haven't studied that haven't studied that. And I've said that a few times this time.

There is a degree, and I think I'd probably say that I've had maybe second only to Ricardo Lopez. I've had more evolutionary psychologists on this podcast than pretty much anybody else. And what I do like are when that caveat comes in, and you know the boundaries of whatever somebody's talking about, but then they go, but let's have a bit of fun. Let's have a bit of fun. Let's postulate about the mechanism, you could say. And it's like, look, we don't know what's going on here. Here's some cool ideas, because that's the fun bit. The fun bit of evolutionary theory, and presumably of behavioral ecology as well is going like, why does that happen? Well, given what I know about the way that humans work and given what

we know about the environment that they're in, let's have a play with a couple of mechanisms. And that for me is like, is the best stuff. I fell in love with this subject when I read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. That books from 1993, dude. And you can read it today. And there's some stuff in there with psych. Like that's just silly. It holds so much fucking water still now. Phenomenal read. It's one of my top five books of all time.

Steve Stewart Williams, April understood the universe also in there. It's just brilliant. And I loved learning about evolutionary psychology. First off, because it helped me to understand me. Yeah. Helped me understand why I am the way I am. What are the mechanisms that are driving me? Why do I feel that way about these things?

Oh, this isn't some weird quirk of my psychology. This is like the source code that I'm built on. And this is a commonality. And this is what I'm trying to do a lot of with the show, which is look, if we open up the hood of our preferences, of our fears, of our dreams, of the ways that we think about ourselves, of our curses, of our competencies, if we do that, it makes you feel less alone and less personally cursed and less inside of your own head. Very wise and flattering words about evolutionary psychology, I'll weigh in mostly to agree.

Evolutionary psychology was my first love in science. My closest mentors at Boston University were anthropologists, but they came, like Carolyn Hodgshamian, she was one of my professors, and she came straight from Santa Barbara, the Mecca of Evesych. What I loved about Evesych was that while cultural anthropology, and to an extent other disciplines, emphasize what makes us different, evolutionary psychology emphasizes what makes us all the same. They would call it the psychological unity of mankind, our shared nature as a species. I think that evolutionary psychology, while I think that on some questions, there are better tools

now after learning more about the field, frankly, at Oxford and its alternatives, while my opinion has kind of shifted on it, I still maintain that they're right about so many things and that their big wins are some of the biggest in psychology ever. It's incredible that Bus' original mate preferences stuff holds up nearly half a century later and that you can still basically find the exact same results by running the exact same study. I mean, you want to talk about a replication crisis, that's awesome. But again, for things like understanding the complex interplay between culture, environment and nature to determine who we find sexy and who we don't. I've come to just think that evolutionary psychology is part of the picture.

Necessary but not sufficient. Yeah, you also need a deep understanding of sociocology. Well, ultimately, you're not looking... Which many evolutionary psychologists have, of course. I mean, I'm not criticizing anyone. They know you're not. The human behavior isn't occurring inside of a faraday cage. People are influenced by what we said before, like two very obvious ones, beautification in relation to local socioeconomic inequality and the sex ratio hypothesis, right? Two, just two effects that occur. Yeah, income inequality and sex ratio, fascinating.

Yeah. And you're like, right, okay. And both of those are like, you know, pretty hardcore, at least every evolutionary psychologist will be familiar with that. Yeah, exactly. And that's a huge, that's a brilliant point because that's very behavioral, ecologically compatible,. Those two fields would not disagree. Yes. So you go, okay, well, in this, I need to do more work because this is literally the first time I've ever heard the words behavioral ecology put together. Maybe I've heard it at some point before, but it's the first time I've heard it used properly. So I need to look into the field more. But the way that I could see, if you're right with the way that your field looks at the

world, functionally, it will be better at predicting behavior. Yeah. So one, yeah. So there are cases where you test them against each other, like you could test them against each other. Whereas like this is what we should do. This is what humans should do. This is what their preferences are, but that's in a, you know, Petri dish, confined

box, sandbox, Faraday cage. If you're not in this hermetically sealed lab, what happens? Well, you are intrinsically fused with the culture and with the presuppositions of what you think and your assumptions about yourself and about the world and about your place in the world and about what other people think of you. And so, perfect example of this. 20 years ago, every girl wanted a thigh gap. Now it's like... When the economy was great.

Dude, I've really, really enjoyed this. I'm very glad that you've come through. We have literally like five more episodes to do. And I look forward to finding some ungodly time for one of us when you get back to Australia to run this back again. But I'm really glad that you came through and stopped off in Austin. Where should people go? They wanna keep up to date with everything that you do.

You're massive on TikTok. You've got fantastic podcasts as well. Where should people go? They wanna check out. Yeah, well, there's, I guess there are a few things that are worth flagging. The first, for my kind of social media presence, it would be good to just google my name and follow it. And then in terms of the actual work I'm doing, so there's academic work, which I'm going to keep everyone abreast of. And then there's also some corporate work as well, frankly, where you've met Tim today.

So we're working on an app called Coupley, and you can go to just to flag this, right? Coupley.io slash Mac and if you're in a relationship, and you're looking to improve your relationships, this is an app where both partners download it and we're going to be bringing some of the science that we talked about today into the app to help improve couples and help them last longer. Yeah. Dude, I appreciate you. You're awesome.

Your stuff's really, really good and I'm glad that we connected and I hope that you continue going and I hope that we have more conversations. Cheers. Thanks so much, Chris. Appreciate it.