Modern Wisdom - #838 - Dr Paul Eastwick - What Do People Really Want In A Partner?
Episode Date: September 14, 2024Dr Paul Eastwick is a psychologist, professor, and a researcher. What do people actually want in a partner compared to what they say they want? Paul is the lead author on largest study of its kind whi...ch was just released breaking down exactly this question. Expect to learn the #1 trait people actually look for in a partner, how well people know what they want, what Ideal Partner Preference-Matching is, the biases that affect mate evaluation, the sex differences in stated vs. revealed preferences, whether big data could improve dating app matching and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) 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: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://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
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What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Paul Eastwick.
He's a psychologist, professor and a researcher.
What do people actually want in a partner compared to what they say they want?
Paul is the lead author on one of the largest studies of its kind,
which was just released, breaking down exactly this question.
Expect to learn the number one trait people actually look for in a partner.
How well people know what they want, what ideal partner preference matching is, the biases that affect mate evaluation,
the sex differences in stated versus revealed preferences, whether big data could improve
dating app matching and much more. A lot of uncomfortable insights today as are very publicly acceptable proclamations about
what we want, supposedly, in a partner, are ripped away from our eyes and the harsh reality
comes in to smash us in the face.
Really interesting, fascinating stuff.
The study is massive and very impressive and pulls great.
So I really hope that you enjoy this one.
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But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Paul Eastwick. Your new study is one of the most interesting things that I think I've seen this year.
Oh good, oh good.
It also has maybe the highest number of authors that I've ever seen on a single paper.
It's a big, it was a big team.
Yes.
So how well would you say people actually know what they want in a romantic partner?
Um, it depends.
So what people are very good at recognizing is that some attributes
are very, very desirable, right? So there's
good agreement that traits like attractiveness and intelligent and
considerate and honest that these are desirable things that we want romantic
partners to have. And there's also a lot of agreement that we don't really want
somebody who's disorganized and careless and we don't really want somebody who's disorganized and careless, and we don't really want somebody who's anxious and easily upset.
So there's a lot of agreement and accurate self-knowledge
that some attributes are more desirable than others.
And you can ask lots of interesting questions about
why don't we want to be with anxious partners, right?
Why don't we want to be with partners who are kind of a mess, right? And why do we want to be with partners who are kind of a mess, right?
And why do we want to be with partners
who are attractive and intelligent?
The trick though, is when we expect people to have insight
about what it is that they uniquely like,
what do they like that makes them different
from other people?
And that's the insight challenge where we find,
sometimes people do okay and sometimes not so much.
Why is that an interesting insight?
What is it that you like that other people don't like?
Why is that an interesting question?
Well, I'll tell you, the reason I got interested,
the way I came to that particular question
was because of the work on gender differences.
So what do men and women want in a partner, right?
And so this is research going back
and it goes back like 80 years at this point, right?
I mean, middle part of the 20th century
when we started asking people,
it was actually the sociologists at first,
were really interested in what attributes
do men and women say they like,
and do we find these gender differences?
And you certainly do for attributes like attractiveness,
for attributes like earning potential, right?
Men will consistently say they like attractiveness
more than women.
Women will say they like earning potential more than men.
Women will say they like earning potential more than men.
So we were originally interested in whether we saw
that those gender differences also played out when we looked at how those attributes predicted
all sorts of downstream consequences,
because that is an individual difference of sorts, right?
How'd you mean?
Well, gender, right, what we're doing is
we're describing how some people are different
from other people, right?
And in some ways it's like one of the easiest ones
to latch onto in the mating domain, right?
But it does function like other individual differences
in that if men say something as a group
that this appeals to them more than
this other group women it requires some amount of individual predictive power right that the groups
have to be telling us something different that's going to then play out when we see what it is that
they actually find appealing so it was really the gender differences that got me interested in this accurate
self-knowledge question in the first place.
Right, so we have two things that are going on here.
One is what do people say that they look for?
And the other is what do people actually want?
So we have stated and revealed preferences.
Can you explain how you looked to sort of pull these two apart?
This is the internet, especially online sort of mating discourse.
It's the favorite.
Don't trust what people say, watch what they do.
You know, it's the death of every evolutionary psychology survey, a self
report that's ever been done because it says, well, no, no, no, that's
what people want to say.
So talk to me about how you tease these two things apart and avoided sort of too much confabulation between the
two.
You bet. And this is a key distinction and they're yeah these terms get bandied around
but I'll tell you how I use the terms and I think this is a very helpful way to think
about it. So when we're talking about attributes,
a stated preference for an attribute
is usually done very simply.
Here are a bunch of attributes, here are some rating scales.
Tell us how much you would like these attributes
in an ideal partner.
You can be more specific,
you can say ideal short-term partner,
you can say tonight.
Sometimes we would do studies where we'd say,
oh, when you go speed dating,
how much are you going to care about these attributes? But all
of those fit under the stated preference rubric. It's you know,
I see this trait, and how do I feel about it? Okay. A revealed
preference. It's not sometimes people confuse it with like, Oh,
but what do you actually choose? That's not actually exactly what it is.
A revealed preference is about
what does the attribute predict for you?
Okay?
So if you meet an array of people who vary in that attribute,
does that attribute help distinguish the people you liked
from the people you didn't?
So if I send, speed dating is a very helpful way
to think about this,
even though you don't actually need speed dating
to get revealed preferences, but it's helpful I find,
because you can imagine meeting a set of 10 or 20 people,
and some are very attractive,
and some are a little attractive,
and some are not attractive at all.
And the extent to which you have a revealed preference
for attractiveness is the extent to which attractiveness
is a driver of the liking that you experience
for these people.
Now, liking could be also be like a self-report scale,
liking could be a choice you make,
liking could be like, oh, who do you take on dates, right?
Liking can be measured in a million different ways, but it's some sort of
association, some sort of predictive relationship between the attribute and
some sort of evaluative experience that you have for a set of potential partners.
What did you do to work out the, I understand how you can do stated preferences.
You just give people a report. What did you do to work out the, I understand how you can do stated preferences.
You just give people a report,
you say here's a list of 35 traits,
rank order them from one to 35
in terms of which one you think is most important.
How do you discover 10,000 people's revealed preferences?
Right, so there are a couple ways of doing it
and we actually did it in two different ways in this paper.
The main way that we did it,
and the is we just actually look at the revealed preference
in the sample, okay?
So in the whole sample of 10,000 people,
and I should probably explain briefly
what we did in the study.
We have a survey, it's about 10,000 people
from 43 different countries. And some of them are in established
relationships, some of them are single. And what they're doing
is they're going to be reporting on somebody that they're like,
kind of interested in dating, right, but but they're not
dating currently. And they're completing a bunch of traits
about these people, right, They're rating them on 35 different attributes.
We also have their ideals for those 35 attributes,
so we know how much they say, their stated preferences for those attributes.
And we've got a dependent measure, too, of, you know,
sort of how positively do you feel about this person, right?
It's sort of standard liking desire kinds of measures.
So what we can do is in the whole sample,
we can just look at, okay, when people felt
that these partners were, let's say a good lover,
I'll use that example first,
how positively did they feel about this person?
And it turned out that a good lover
was the single strongest predictor
of that dependent variable, right?
So a good lover is a very strong predictor
of feeling positively about a romantic partner, right?
That relationship was the strongest.
So we would say in this sample,
there is a very strong revealed preference
for a good lover,
even though people ranked it something like 12th in terms of their stated preferences,
it was their number one revealed preference. So that's, I think, a helpful way of thinking
about this distinction.
What is ideal partner preference matching? I know that this is kind of a body of work,
just I feel like that's important to get it out there.
Yeah, right.
So one of the questions we can ask in this literature,
I mean, looking at the stated reveal,
it's all very interesting,
but sometimes we wanna know, okay,
if you are a person who says you like attributes XYZ,
do you like partners more when they match
rather than mismatch XYZ?
Okay, so if you say you're somebody who really wants
somebody who's attractive and intelligent and funny,
you really don't care about attributes like,
are they religious and successful?
You don't care so much, okay.
Does the extent to which the partner matches those ideals,
those stated preferences that you have,
does that predict how positively you feel about this person?
And figuring out the right way to do that matching
has been very complicated.
And it's actually taking the whole field like a decade
to sort out how to do it.
Because it turns out there's all sorts of complex stats and that go into creating
that matching process. You know, anybody who's ever played around
with things like profile correlations or different scores
is going to be familiar with the many complexities that come into
play when you try to do this. But what we tried to do in this
study was basically take
all of the different approaches that are out there and say,
hey, we're gonna do them all.
And we're gonna show you how well
these different matching approaches work
to try to get at the question of whether people are happier,
more desirous of partners who match
rather than mismatch their stated preferences. And what did you
find? Well, what we found is that if you pull out that
unique component, okay, and and again, this was we really
didn't know what we were going to find going in what that
unique component was going to show because I'd seen studies
where this component was basically zero.
And and other studies showed things that were a little bit larger than that.
So what we found was that when you pull out that unique component across
all 35 traits, we found real effects.
They're not huge.
It's like two, three, 4% of the variance tops,
but it's there.
So a matching effect that is truly about
how much you desire these attributes.
We've taken all of that,
what we call normative matching out of it.
We just look at that individual differences component.
So if you meet somebody who uniquely matches
what you say you're looking for,
you'll experience more desire for that person.
It's not a huge effect, but it is there.
We are able to detect it.
Does that say that we have some degree of insight
into what it is that we want in a partner?
Yes, with the major, major caveat
of when we're thinking about collapsing across 35
attributes.
So across that whole set, we get a little something.
The challenge is, what if you care about one attribute?
What if you have a hypothesis about attractiveness?
Or what if you have a hypothesis about intelligence or warmth?
What happens then?
And that's kind of where things start to fall apart.
Why?
Well, those effects, because there are other ways
of looking at matching effects if you care
about single attributes and isolation.
This is a basic statistical interaction prediction.
So again, for listeners who are familiar
with these kinds of stats, what you're talking about is if you're the kind of person who says you really care about attractiveness,
okay, you rate that highly and an ideal partner, that's your stated preference.
We want to see whether it matters that for again, how much you're desiring this person,
that you think that person is attractive. So you should experience a stronger association
between how attractive you feel someone is
and how much you desire them.
If you say you care about attractiveness, okay?
So that's the way we test that prediction.
These are statistical interactions
and you do it for all the 35 traits.
And generally speaking, those are tiny, because the sample is so big, we detect many of them are
significant. Although many of them are not and actually sort
of shockingly, you know, like attractiveness isn't. But some
are and some are big enough to be notable, actually, the one
that really stood out was religious.
So I would say tentatively, like,
if you're the kind of person who says
you want a religious partner,
there may really be a matching component to that.
But for most of those attributes in isolation,
those effects are very, very small.
I mean, you need like thousands and thousands of people
to be able to see them.
Okay, well, I mean, you need like thousands and thousands of people to be able to see them.
Okay. Well, I mean, the least interesting part of that study is people were able to
slightly predict the things that they want. The most interesting part is what is it that
people stated that didn't come out as the revealed. So can you take us through where
people really missed the mark and sort of what you think is going on with the motivation
for those? Yeah, so there are some fun discrepancies there that surprised us a little bit.
We didn't, you know, I don't think we'd ever run a study where we had 35 different traits,
where we felt comfortable doing this kind of ranking approach,
where we take all the revealed preferences, kind of stack them up,
and we take all of the stated preferences and stack those up,
and we sort of see where the matches and the mismatches are. And so I mentioned one of the mismatches
earlier which is that people really seem to have a strong revealed preference for a good lover
even though that kind of ends up being about 12th in their stated preferences overall.
in their stated preferences overall.
There are a few other interesting ones. People don't say they care that much about an attribute
like smells good.
That kind of fits somewhere in the middle of the range.
They don't, you know, spontaneously think that sounds
particularly appealing, but it actually ends up being
the fourth biggest thing overall in terms of what they feel,
their revealed preferences for it.
And then of course, if some are,
if people are underestimating on some,
they're gonna be overestimating on others.
And they overestimated on some things like,
consider it a little bit,
other attributes that are a little bit more Other attributes, you know, that are a little bit, you know, more on the on the warmer side. People,
you know, say that those attributes are very, very
important. But then when you look at the revealed preferences,
yeah, it seems like a patient, patient, patient number 10. And
it comes in at number 18, which is interesting. What else have
we got here?
The warm, the emotionally stable, I think was another one that like,
people say they really want somebody
who's emotionally stable, but I mean, it's positive,
but it's not as strong as some others.
So maybe people in the end are okay with partners
who maybe have a-
What's this one going from 19 to six here?
Sexy? Yeah, right. Sexy from 19 to six. Okay, so partners who, you know, maybe have a. What's this one going from 19 to six here? Sexy?
Yeah, right. Sexy from 19 to six.
Okay, so this is interesting.
So actually with a lot of the attractiveness related traits,
people were underestimating those on average, right?
Sexy was one, I think nice body was one.
And so to bring it back to the gender differences,
we can look separately for men and women
at what their stated preferences show
and what their revealed preferences show.
And on the revealed preferences side,
what you see is that men and women
are really getting these attributes about the same.
Okay, attractiveness, sexiness, nice body, are really getting these attributes about the same.
Okay, attractiveness, sexiness, nice body,
those have the same revealed preferences for men and women.
And that, you know, does that shock people
in today's day and age?
It doesn't shock me because this is what we've been seeing
for like 15 years when we look at speed dating
or we look at ongoing relationships.
Revealed preferences for things like attractiveness
really don't show gender differences.
The stated preferences, of course, do.
And what we can show with this design is that what's happening here
is that both men and women are underestimating
how much they like attractiveness,
but women are, like, really underestimating how much they like attractiveness, but women are like really underestimating.
So the underestimation effect is bigger for women than it is for men.
Right?
So that's how they both end up at the same.
Just to dig into that, men prioritized in revealed preferences and in stated preferences? Yeah. And in stated preferences? Yeah.
Attractiveness more?
Yes.
The men and the women prioritize in terms of revealed preferences attractiveness equally.
Right.
But on their stated side, the men prioritize it more.
But the men are still underestimating.
Right?
So the men are still too low relative to other traits
in terms of how they rate the stated preferences
compared to where the revealed preferences come in.
The women are like way too low.
What else was interesting when it comes to the sex differences
between men and women?
So we can also look at some earning relevant traits.
We've got things like ambitious, and we've got things like a good job and we've got attributes
in that space financially secure is another one.
And so those as stated preferences generally rank quite a bit lower, but you see the gender
differences that women say they care about these attributes
more than men do. Once again, on the revealed preferences side, it's the same for men and women.
And again, we've been seeing this for, for 15 plus years now. But again, what's interesting here is
now we can figure out, well, who's, who's getting it wrong. And this is a case where actually both
men and women are getting it wrong, just in opposite directions.
So women are in their stated preferences
are overestimating a little bit,
how much they like those attributes
and men are underestimating a little bit,
how much they like those attributes.
They aren't dramatic errors,
but they're big enough and in opposite directions
that it explains why you see a modest gender differences,
gender difference in what men and women say they want
on those attributes and how they end up at the same place
in terms of their revealed preferences.
Why do you think it would be the case
that women would overestimate
how important a good job is in a partner?
I would have guessed the opposite.
I would have guessed that it's a stereotype about women. They would
have compensated for it. They don't want to seem like a gold digging hole. So they're going to
count a signal against that. And then they're going to be smacked in the face by the reality
of being a safety and resource seeking person. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
person and but it doesn't seem to be the case. Yeah, you know, I actually think there's some evidence that the gender difference and I think the overall
preference for those kinds of attributes that they have gone down a little bit
over time. I could be wrong about that but I think that makes sense when you
think about it in terms of you know, as women have entered the workforce
in greater numbers and entered more high prestige jobs,
you're likely to find that at least in terms
of stated preferences, they're not thinking in the same way
that they would have back in like the 50s,
like, oh, I need a partner who's going to really be making the money because
I'm not going to be earning as well. So I do think the stated preferences have come down in some sense.
But I also think you're right that some of what is affecting people's stated preferences
are stereotypes. And I mean that in the most neutral way possible, just when you ask people to describe the attributes
that another group has, right, they can do that.
And I think some of what men and women do
when you ask them to describe their ideal partner
is they start picking out attributes
that members of the other gender have.
And that's the funny thing is that, well, men and women know
that men tend to earn more than women
and attractiveness works the other way.
So men and women know that women on average
tend to be more attractive than men are.
So there are some of these, I think, stereotypes,
again, in the most neutral way of using that term,
kind of infect the way people provide
those stated preferences in
the first place.
And that could be a source of some of these discrepancies between what people say they
want and what they actually want.
Yeah, I'm sort of trying to work out what's a black pill and what's a white pill from
the study.
And I think it's really interesting, right?
Because this is, I'm going to guess guess the largest study ever done on stated versus revealed
preferences for men and women.
It's pretty close.
Yeah.
Okay. One of, at least the most recent, it's hot
off the press.
So just for the people that are only listening,
we'll have had the table up on screen for the
people that are watching, a good lover coming in
at number one, at number two, loyal.
So, um, you know, we have this big discrepancy in a good lover.
We have this big discrepancy in smells good and sexy.
So it seems like people wildly underestimate the importance of some more kind of
slightly shallow physical characteristics that are to do with intimacy, at least
like physical intimacy, but then when you look at the rest of the top 10, you've
got loyal coming in at number two. You've got honest understanding,
considerate, supportive,
you know, a lot of much sort of softer traits,
sympathetic and warm.
You know, these are, so we have sort of two things going on at once.
Like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right
at the same time here. You know, like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right
at the same time here.
You know, you've got this vicious.
Purple pill.
Yeah, it is a purple pill.
But it's this real blend.
It's this real blend of the two.
There is a sort of a focus on both the immediate,
attractive sexiness and the softness too.
I think that's right.
And again, what we're seeing here is that, you know,
these are people's own judgments, right?
So I'm making judgments about this person I know
and whether I find them attractive
and whether I think they're a good lover, right?
So we're really getting at an individual psychology
about the kinds of traits that really co-vary very strongly
with good feelings
about that partner, desiring that partner,
and wanting to be with that partner.
There are other lessons, and again,
I'm now drifting away from this study a little bit,
with respect to, okay, but if I'm trying to attract somebody
in the first place, I think that's where,
in many cases, people can find the red pill pretty frustrating because if you feel like well I'm not
attractive or I don't have these traits that make me seem like I'd be a good
lover I'm at this major disadvantage. And my usual response to that is like, look, in a setting where people are meeting for the first time,
that is true. People reach consensus about attributes like attractiveness or being sexy,
being confident. These matter in a first impression context. But where the blue pill comes in a little bit is that it says, but as people get to know each other,
if you're in a context that is gonna create some repeated
interaction, consensus on those kinds of attributes tends to go
down. So over time we start to disagree more and more about
who's attractive and who's not.
So for somebody who's not conventionally attractive,
for somebody who doesn't go into the party
and attract all the attention,
what it means is that there are other avenues for you,
but they have to be avenues where you actually
get to know people over time,
because some people's opinions will diverge.
know people over time because some people's opinions will diverge.
What do you make of conventional and uncreative being ranked at number 35?
What do you think that says about people?
Yeah, that's a great point.
Um, uh, people, uh, certainly like to feel some excitement, right?
They, they, they want to, they want wanna feel like their partner is gonna inspire them. And this is very true in today's day and age.
It has become more true over time
that we want our partners to push us.
We want our partners to help us like become closer
to our ideal self.
I mean, it's like a core idea in
in close relationships research is that we take on attributes of our partners
and we want to experience new things with our partners.
So somebody who is who is not terribly creative that that doesn't sound like a like a
a recipe for a sort of a fulfilling, you know, growth
infused relationship.
I wonder because it's sort of trustworthy is one of the things that's in there.
And you think what trustworthies kind of like it's tangential to that.
It's this sort of reliable, predictable kind of way.
But it's, you know, this is exactly where the devil's in the details of we want predictable,
but not too predictive.
I don't want all that. Exactly.
But I want them to be reliable, but I don't want them to be, you know, to be able to know
what they're going to say every single time I have a boring conversation with them.
So it's this, it's this sort of delicate balance between the two.
Yeah, right, right.
And we like people who are, who we find exciting, right?
Who are adventurous, who are going to do new things with us.
But we also don't want to, you know,
close relationships are by their nature,
they're dangerous, risky things.
And they're dangerous and risky things
because you put yourself in a position
to be taken advantage of, right?
I mean, that's kind of the whole point
is that you're establishing intimacy with somebody,
you're opening yourself up.
There are tremendous benefits,
both psychological and tangible that come with that,
but it is a risk of exploitation.
There is a risk of being rejected,
of being taken advantage of.
And so this is why I think things like loyal
often end up pretty high on the list
because people want those reassurances from somebody, but they want the excitement too.
Just excitement that isn't gonna like,
mean that ultimately you're gonna reject me.
Yeah, not excitement.
I find you in bed with a different person kind of.
That's right.
That's a little too exciting.
I totally didn't think about the fact that
people take on the traits of their partner. The fact that I didn't think about it probably means that other people also didn't think about the fact that, um, people take on the traits of their partner.
I, the fact that I didn't think about it probably means that other people
also didn't think about it.
Sure.
Sure.
But you, you are going to absorb some of the traits of your partner.
So if they are anxious, it's not just anybody that's ever been in the car.
Any guy that's ever been in the car with a very nervous, uh, co-passenger girlfriend
and they, they panic about traffic.
And you're like, I'm a cool driver.
You're making me panic.
I'm just trying to do my thing here.
And you kind of absorb even if it's just for a brief moment.
But that's one of the reasons.
Like if it's somebody who has an anxious disposition, if it's somebody who, the most literal way,
if it's someone who smells bad, not only do you have to smell them, but you probably smell
bad too.
Yeah, right, right. You take it on yourself. And this is, you know, it's part of why this
work is called the sort of self-expansion and inclusion of the other and the self. But
one of the reasons that researchers think that initiating relationships can be so exciting is because of this self-expansion
experience that you get when you're spending time with somebody new that you're really excited about
because ultimately you're in you're introducing each other to new things new activities new
interests new ways of seeing the world and uh and it's all very invigorating and very exciting.
And part of the reason that you don't need to sleep as much
and you don't need to eat as much, right?
It's all very self-expanding in that way.
How much do you think the ranking that people have given
when it comes to their revealed preferences
of particular traits is simply choosing to not have the absence of that trait.
So the selection of good lover
being the selection of not a bad lover,
the selection of smells good
being the selection of doesn't smell bad.
What do you think about that?
That's a great question.
We have occasionally looked for those kinds of effects,
but it's very hard to tease apart
with these kinds of data, right?
Because what you might be seeing is that
if I think somebody is like a one or a two or a three,
I am penalizing them exceptionally harshly,
and I'm not really differentiating
between the five, sixes and sevens, okay?
When we're doing studies like this,
where people are reporting on,
it's either somebody you're in a relationship with
or somebody you're kind of into,
all of this, you know, these differences that we see here
are really happening in that upper end, right?
Because this is about differentiating somebody
who I think is a seven on attractiveness
from somebody who I think is a six. attractiveness from somebody who I think is a six.
But in contexts where you're meeting strangers
and it's maybe a broader set of possible people
that you'd be meeting,
I do think it's plausible that people are sort of
establishing some minimums and working up from there.
But like, it sounds like very clear and easy to picture how that
would work. The stats end up being absurdly complicated. Yeah, I imagine. I imagine they
are the stats. Stats was actually one of only two subjects that I got a C in a GCSE level. So I was
early onset bad at statistics. Yeah, it's tough. Thinking about the good lover one,
which is I think not only the starkest difference
between stated and revealed,
but also then comes in ranks at number one.
What do you make of that?
Do you just, is it a,
both as the gap and then as the fact
that it is the revealed?
That's a good question.
I think that when people,
when you imagine somebody who's a good lover
in the abstract,
that what people are probably thinking is
that's not gonna impact my day-to-day life very,
you know, like, well, what are we talking about?
We're talking about, you know, 30 minutes, you know,
every evening or, you know, 30 minutes every week
if you've been in a relationship for a while.
But then in reality, somebody who's a good lover,
that that idea incorporates a lot of other good things that relationships have, right?
So it also indicates things like they're sensitive,
they're giving, they're caring, right?
But they also like know what they're doing
and they like care about whether, you know,
whether, you know, my sexual experiences are good, right?
So I think it's one of these attributes
that when it's disembodied and abstract
and disconnected from a particular person,
it sounds just kind of okay.
But when we think about our partner that way,
it sort of brings in all of these other components
that really make a sexual or romantic relationship
what it is.
I imagine that's a really good point.
I imagine that smells good, has a good body, is sexy.
You know, what is it?
It's somebody that has a good body thing,
reliable, disciplined, has agency over their life.
They're motivated.
They can overcome discomfort.
You know, it's like this whole list of things
that are upstream from, has a good body.
And I guess the same thing goes for smells good.
It means that they've probably got good personal hygiene
and they take care of themselves
and maybe they're considerate of others
and so on and so forth.
You know, another, this is just occurring to me now
and this would be an interesting thing to test
is that when you ask people,
how much do you want these traits in an ideal partner,
they are mostly thinking about,
who I want with me by my side,
doing the hard tasks of life.
But when they're thinking about a real person
that they are in or wanna be in a relationship with, that these
sexier, more romantic components come to the fore more.
It's a bit more visceral.
Yeah, right. Because I'm thinking about this person and all the visceral things that they inspire for
good or for ill. And so I think that's quite, that's another possible
explanation for why we see some of those discrepancies. Were the stated or revealed
preferences for short term or long term relationships or both? These were all, we usually describe it as
an ideal romantic partner, which at least to me connotes something long-term.
We didn't ask about short-term ideals in this study, really just because of time.
Did you work out overall whether men or women were more accurate?
That's a good question. Actually, I don't think we did.
Um, but that's something we could, we could certainly do.
I mean, you know, simple stat.
Yeah, right.
It shouldn't take too long.
Right.
That shouldn't, that shouldn't be too bad.
I, my sense is that they're probably similar, but I don't.
Um, but I didn't, I didn't look at whether there's sort of overall mismatches there.
I mean, certainly we saw with attractiveness, women had it off more than men, and for earning
potential they were kind of similarly off.
I wonder, did you consider or would you consider doing a follow-up study to do the reversal?
How important do you think that the opposite sex thinks that trait is in you?
Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
And you know, I mean, there's some studies
that have done that, not at this kind of scale,
but people's ideas about what the other gender likes,
I think the evidence suggests it tracks pretty well
what people say they like, right?
But we've never tried to look at,
well, what would the discrepancies be there, right?
Between my ideas about what you like
and your revealed preferences for, you know,
some of my gender.
Yeah, what actually, because that's what's important.
And this is, this is, I think,
probably the most interesting element.
Basically, is it even worth talking about mate preferences
if they don't actually reflect
our revealed mate preferences.
Like what we're both doing is we're both playing this game.
I can predict what you say you're going to want,
but that's pointless.
Like I'm not here to just play some lexical game.
The reason that we try and predict what other people want
is to predict what they want,
not to predict what they say that they want.
Right, right.
I do agree that this is part of the challenge here.
And again, it is true when we talk about that whole suite of 35 traits that we can
get some action there. They're not miles away. Right, right, right. Exactly.
That people do seem to have some self-insight. But on the specific traits,
usually my bias as a researcher
is that I'm usually much more interested
in those associations,
what we call reveal preferences here,
that I wanna know how strongly does this attribute
predict some DV that I care about?
I think people's ideas about the attributes they like
are also interesting, but not because I'd want to use it strategically to like try to match it
exactly. I'd want to know what what their revealed preferences are and try to match that.
Are you familiar with the Keynesian beauty contest? Do you know what that is?
Uh, no, tell me.
Okay, Keynesian beauty contest describes a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for
selecting the most popular faces among all judges rather than those they may personally
find the most attractive.
This idea is often applied in financial markets whereby investors could profit more by buying
whichever stocks they think other investors will buy rather than the stocks that have
fundamentally the best value because when other people buy a stock, they bid the price up, allowing an earlier
investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases
are supported by its fundamentals.
So it's basically this world in which we are trying to predict what other people
will predict as opposed to just predict what's going to happen in the real world.
And that's where, when we get to what do you think other people would look for in
a partner, that's what when we get to, what do you think other people would look for in a partner?
That's what you're doing.
You're not just trying to think,
what do I think they want in a partner?
It's what do I think that they will say?
And then that gets in social desirability.
That gets a lot of this sort of
second, third order thinking in it.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And so you could imagine that somebody
who's paying more attention to revealed preferences might be able to get
a leg up in that kind of way. That's an interesting idea.
Yes. What were some of the biggest unanswered questions that you had after the study? Their
implications, what it means for what people want at the moment?
So one of the questions that remains unanswered that I'm very interested in is, you know,
in this study, I'm a participant and I'm rating this partner on these traits.
Now that's very useful.
I mean, again, I'm a psychologist, so I believe in subjectivity is really important.
And that if I want to understand my experience of why I like this person rather than that
person,
it helps to have me rate those traits.
That tells me a lot and we get the revealed preferences from those kinds of ratings.
But if you were, say, a matchmaker, if you were an online dating company,
you wouldn't have data like that if what you were trying to do was predict who was going to like whom.
You would need people's self-reports on both sides, right? Or, I mean, you know, if we're just dreaming
here, you might have like, you know, independent coders, you know, rate people on their traits, okay?
So what would we see for both revealed preferences and also that matching phenomenon
if we're using both people's self-reports, right?
So your self-reports of your traits and then my ideals
and trying to match that way.
Now it is a basic rule with this kind of data
that when you move from my judgment of the trait to your judgment of
the trait and you try to predict something that predictive relationship is going to go down.
But we have some wiggle room here. It might go down, but might still be useful. It might be
the kind of thing that a matchmaker could use to predict who you're going to like more or less. It could also go down to basically zero.
So, so that we don't really know yet.
There are, there are practical ways that these data could prove useful.
Uh, or, uh, we kind of end up in the same place where we're right now.
Anybody who tells you that they have a matchmaking algorithm is probably just,
you know, trying to sell you a secret sauce.
Yeah, I saw you tweet an article, I think, from The Guardian that was quite critical
about the effectiveness of online dating for finding soulmates.
Yeah.
A little bit of an assessment.
People's sort of ambient dissatisfaction with this stuff.
Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded
into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate? Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded into
a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate?
I think it's possible and that's what we need to see is if you can get a sample that's this large
and you have people on both sides before they actually meet each other,
maybe there is something you can do to predict good matches. Now I want to be clear about what
I mean by good matches because if you have people's self reports ahead of time,
there are a few things that are very easy to do. It's very easy to predict who's popular.
That isn't challenging. If somebody tells you, I tend to be popular with members of the gender that I'm interested in.
Guess what? They will be. So those kinds of
I'm interested in, guess what, they will be. So those kinds of,
of, of self reports tend to have accurate insight, what is much, much harder. And we've never been able to do, and I've never
seen anybody else who's able to do it is to actually create that
matching that that specific matching component or what I
usually call compatibility, that it's not about your popularity. It's really
about the two of us fit together well. That's the sort of the holy grail in this space.
Yeah, it's very interesting. I know that you've done a good amount of work about compatibility
and sort of how people evaluate mate evaluation theory and stuff like that.
evaluate mate, mate evaluation theory and stuff like that. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, um, I guess the one, the one question that I have, or the sort of main potential
flaw that I see in the study is that when people have been doing their revealed preferences,
that is still mediated by their own biases, right?
They're describing either a real or imagined partner.
And in that they are, it has to go through the filtering,
which means that all of the muck of their cognitive makeup
and their desirability and so on and so forth,
how do we not know that they're maneuvering
and manipulating the revealed person, avatar,
through their own psychology?
Oh yeah, it's a great point.
And that motivated reasoning is in many ways,
again, this is like one of the essential truths
of close relationships,
is that people are very motivated
to see their partners in a positive light.
There are some experiments, like 30 years old now,
but there are really great studies
where you tell people things like,
hey, you know, good relationships have a lot of conflict. And then people will be like, Oh, yeah, oh, my relationship
has a lot of conflict. Yeah, this is not usually something that people would be willing to say.
But when you tell them that actually would be a good thing. Oh, now they see the conflict in
their relationships. Right now they're now they're willing to identify those moments.
Right? Now they're willing to identify those moments. People do that with traits too, right?
So for a lot of these traits, you know,
there's a good version and a bad version of the thing,
right? We were kind of talking about this earlier,
but you know, there's a good way of being sensitive, right?
You're aware and seem to care that I'm feeling off today
and you want to talk to me about it.
But there's another way of being sensitive.
It's like, oh man, this person is really touchy.
And so what people will do is that
when they're in a relationship that they're happy with,
they'll think somebody is the good version
rather than the bad version of an attribute like sensitive.
And so whenever we're getting people's own judgments,
it's always gonna have that sort of mucky self-report stuff in it.
And that's not that useful if your goal is to try to, you know,
predict who's gonna like whom before they have a chance to meet each other
and engage in that motivated reasoning one way or the other.
There's a third stage that I would love to look at. So, um, one of the bits of research that I've done with David Buss was about the
difference between, uh, what people will click on versus who they will click with.
And the fact that algorithms seem to have a very good predictive power of being able
to get you to swipe right on somebody.
But when it actually comes to long-term compatibility, it, the predictive
power is essentially zero, right?
Which presumably you've seen too.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So, so we have the way that I'm kind of conceptualizing is we have three,
we have stated preferences, then we have revealed preferences, and then we have
effective preferences for the long, for the long term as well.
So I would love to, to work out, you said that you liked this thing,
you ended up liking this thing,
and what were the traits that ended up being effective
over the long term as well?
And that would require it to be, I don't know,
longitudinal, or for you to look at changes,
or like, what do you wish that you could change
in a partner if you could?
But that would be so cool,
because that would actually show
not only what do people say they want, what do people are attracted to, and then what is
it that's got the best predictive power for effectiveness long term. Yeah, that's a great
point. And one of the challenging things is that, you know, with any, the way humans go about
initiating relationships is that you got to go through this stage to process, right? So I got
to be sufficiently appealing to somebody initially in a first impression and a second impression,
and then sort of get to those later stages. I think one of the challenges of modern dating is that as we have expected various online forms to be able
to do the job for us, it makes it a lot harder for some people who don't
immediately convey a positive first impression to get to the later points
where they their other attributes or just the opportunity for some
compatibility to grow and emerge,
they can't get to that stage.
Well, this is the emergence of the black pill, right?
Yeah, right, right, right, right.
But I think what the black pill misses,
and I suppose we can pin this on the red pill too
a little bit, is that the answers in that space,
I mean, correct me if you disagree,
but the answers in that space are mostly about boosting my attributes
so that I don't get cut off at the early stage of the process.
Right. So that I'm appealing enough.
And look, you're lifting weights is great.
People should people should work out.
People should take care of themselves.
But I think that what gets missed
is that the thing that connects people and
that gives them meeting opportunities is social connections, social networks,
spending time with people, spend time with people that you aren't going to hit on
just for the sake of being around other people and being in those networks that
grow and morph and change.
And, you know, I worry that we have like forgotten that.
It is certainly a sort of treating dating
like a Petri dish.
And humans are very bad at working out exponentials,
they're very bad at working out compounding,
but exponentials occur in social networks as well.
If you start to add one person
into your friend group, into two people,
into four people, into, you know, before you know it,
the number of different connections between everyone
and then all of their connections outside of it
are very difficult to predict.
I think this is, you know, I texted William Costello
about this not long ago saying that I felt like
my tumbling down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology has been so
great at really sort of helping me to understand how, why humans are the way they are. But
when it comes to the mating research, it's one thing that's fundamentally missed. It's
missed by the red pill. It's missed by the black pill. It's missed by, it's missed by everybody.
And it's even missed by evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology. Everybody misses it,
which is the phenomenological sense of falling in
love with another person because it can't appear on a spreadsheet.
There is no way that we can describe it, that we can measure it.
It's this sort of, you know, weird sense of stuff, fluttering of
butterflies and all the rest of it.
Yeah, right.
And, and, and, you know, we can talk about she's trading her fecundity
for his resources and her youth for the mate value.
And in some form or another, red pill, black pill,
evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology,
the full work, social psychology,
everyone will come up with their own way to describe this.
And no one is talking about,
yeah, but sometimes you just sort of fall in love
with somebody and you have no idea why and what the fuck's going on there. And I think that's, that's,
that's really the X factor. It really sort of throws a wrench into the works of all of
our presumed God-like predictive powers. It goes, yeah, that's out the window. Sorry.
Right. I think it is extremely chaotic, right? In the chaos theory sense of the term, right?
That it really hinges on a set of interactions
that can go in any of a wide variety of different directions.
And once you fall in love with somebody, you can pick out,
and I believe people when they say this,
when they say, I fell in love with you
because you're smart and that time you were really interested
in what had gone wrong with my job
and because my dog seems to love you.
And I believe people when they tell me that,
that is why, and there was no way
that we were gonna flag those three things before you actually got together.
There was no way to know.
And that, I think it's, you know,
I find it both inspiring, but also kind of daunting.
Like disenchanting as a researcher.
Yeah, right.
It's like, well, then what the hell are we gonna do?
What am I doing with my job?
Yeah, but I will say, you know,
we're not alone in this space.
Like, personality researchers are getting into this stuff,
right?
People are starting to take this,
like idiosyncratic personality,
that the things that describe you
can't be captured by scales
that you just feed to everybody.
And, you know, we're getting there.
I think things are gonna look different different in, in 10, 20 years
and are going to look pretty creative.
You gave me an idea before, when you were talking about, uh, the
challenge that people have of getting past the first door,
right?
Of sort of getting someone to swipe, brighten them on a dating
app or getting a phone number or in a bar, or, you know, just
getting a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying
to speak to them.
Um, I think that there's a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying to speak to them.
Um, I think that there's a lot of sympathy that gets given to people who don't even get a chance.
And that kind of makes sense.
It's like an archetype of the poor down on his luck guy that would make a great
partner, but isn't able to do it or whatever.
Um, but no one really ever talks about the reverse, the person who might be
really phenomenal
at making a sparky conversation,
but just have like a completely objectionable,
like, un-deal-with-able personality, right?
Or the emotional stability, for instance.
I'm going to guess if somebody is very low
in emotional stability, they can probably kid many people.
There may be lots of people listening
that have been in relationships with people like this who have got past the
front door, got into a relationship, everything seemed fine. And they go, oh, there's like
a Jekyll and Hyde, Batman and Bruce Wayne scenario going on here. And I totally get
it. People can't get a date. Sympathy is needed. how can we get these dudes to be more attractive?
How can we get these women to be more interesting
when they're talking to people?
But there is a whole other cohort of people
that need mate retention tactics
as opposed to sort of mate attraction tactics.
So there's a couple of interesting things here.
First of all, I think the traits that you're describing
that are probably most likely to show that pattern
would be some of the more, you know, like narcissism and market market, like dark, dark
triad stuff. I think, um, actually the evidence on those traits being appealing at first is
like a little mix. I think they're like a little bit desired. Um, but they certainly
don't bode well, um, for people's long-term relationships.
And that's men and women.
Yeah, and that's men and women, yeah.
So those attributes aren't great.
But what's so interesting with things
like emotional instability,
the thing is those attributes,
you tend to come off badly at first,
and they're not great in the long run.
But what starts to happen is that again this
gets into this like inclusion of the other and the self kind of thing is that
somebody who is anxious if they get in a relationship with somebody who helps
bring their anxiety down maybe because they're super cool or just they make
that person feel safe and comfortable.
You can get a person who's like, look, I am still an anxious person,
but I'm not anxious when I'm with my partner.
I'm not anxious when I'm with these two friends.
It doesn't even have to be romantic.
And I think it's not like a route to personality change necessarily,
but it is a route to arriving at a place where
you can have a happy, fulfilling relationship because you've found a way to tone down those
traits at least within the context of that relationship.
How much do you think that the results you found both from a stated and revealed preferences standpoint, how much do you think
that they were always this way? How much do you think that these preferences have been
subject to change across time? And can you think of any stated or revealed preferences
that might be more or less subject to change?
It's so interesting because I think about this all the time with the earning potential differences
or lack thereof in particular.
I watch a lot of movies and I recently was watching
the 1950s version of A Star is Born.
And in that version, you know,
the main female character becomes a major success
and the man just absolutely falls apart, right?
He cannot handle his partner being successful.
And it is very understood in that movie,
like very few men would be okay with this.
Like this is absolutely emasculating
that this is happening to him.
So there is part of me that thinks,
boy, this has gotta be a recent phenomenon, right?
Where men and women have the same revealed preferences
for things like earning potential.
And then I read, you know, like Jane Austen,
and you know, they're like, everybody's gold digging.
So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying,
I don't know, I suspect there are cultural trends
that push these things around,
but you know, I wish I had the data
for what people really wanted in the 1800s,
or, you know, going back even further.
But I, my guess would be is that
as long as there was variability, right?
As long as there were rich women and poor women in the,
you know, in the social circle,
as long as there were rich men and poor men,
that both men and women were gonna gravitate
toward the good stuff,
regardless of which gender they were pursuing.
But that's just a guess.
Yeah, it's an interesting one.
I wonder whether increased globalization
and increased inequality in that we can now see,
there's people who have obscene amounts of wealth
that aren't like God-like creatures, you know, that isn't bestowed
down or blessed.
He's not the King.
He's not, he's not somebody that's untouchable.
It's somebody that you can track their journey, you know, Walter
Isaacson read 800 pages and you know, Elon Musk, one of the top richest
guys in the world, you know, his story.
So I wonder, you know, Candice Blake did some really fantastic work about how the proliferation of sexy selfies
in areas of high income inequality.
Oh, wow.
So basically it seems like women self-objectify more
where they can see both how high they could climb
with the right partner and how low they may be able
to fall essentially.
So I wonder whether in a world that is basically
that tuned up to 11, everybody
can see how high they can climb.
Everybody could see how low they could fall.
Um, but then you throw the spanner in the works now, which is female
learning potential and female financial independence, you know, women
out earn men in the twenties.
It's basically a motherhood tax.
A pay gap is essentially just a motherhood tax now and title nine's has been reversed, two women for every one man, completing a four year
US college degree.
From the metrics perspective from 50 years ago, if you'd crossed off the M and the F
and not shown people what it was, they would have said, oh, those are the guys and those
are the girls.
And you go, no, it's actually the other way around.
So yeah, you think, what does it mean that ancestrally,
it should be the case that women would be more sensitive
to the resource and status capacity of their partner
in a world where they are now potentially out-earning
their partner, especially during the time
when they're looking to find a mate, et cetera.
You know, as you grow up a little bit older,
men's desire to be obsessive and conquer
and do mastery and stuff like that, plus motherhood tax,
I think results in men on average earning
and still is going to result in them earning more
across their lifespan.
But it's a real sort of upside down.
Well, how much can we change our both stated
and revealed preferences?
How much are we able to step in and consciously go, Oh, turn this down or
turn this up?
Yeah, it's a great question.
You know, we've tried to do some amount of experimental manipulations of
people's stated preferences.
It turns out it's pretty hard.
It's pretty hard to change in a deliberate way.
People's ideas about what they want.
We can do it with, you know, sort of these,
it's like these conditioning paradigms, right?
Where you get people to experience positive outcomes
with particular attributes,
and you do it more or less in various conditions.
But all of these effects that we get,
they're useful for testing things in the lab.
But, you know, we're not changing whether people say they care
about earning prospects in an enduring way.
But I do think it's important.
When I think about the problems when it comes to
gender relations today, I think a lot of it,
because we see these revealed preferences
aren't so different, I think a lot of it because because we see these revealed preferences aren't so different. I think a lot of it is that like our ideas and
our expectations and those things can matter. I mean we can get really mad when
our when we feel like our expectations aren't gonna be met or you know when we
think the world should be working this way but it's working some other way. So
I'm encouraged at one level that well it seems like if we want a route for change
here, we just got to change the way people think about themselves, the way people see
themselves.
At the same time, I also know that any kind of lasting intervention is always a challenge. Mm. So what have you learned about where positive feelings
about our partners come from?
Like, what does it mean to say that we have a positive,
sort of, disposition toward our partners?
What is that sense and where does it come from?
I mean, it's a deep question because in some ways,
it's the thing we focus on the most.
I mean, again, I'm a close relationships researcher
first and foremost, and the main thing we study
is how positively people feel about their partners.
And we think it's important because it's gonna predict
break up and divorce.
It's gonna predict the health outcomes, right?
But how exactly do you come to look at a rating scale and say,
I'm at the top of this scale, or I'm kind of middling.
I think a lot of times we think it comes from this general sense that you kind of lock in and you
retrieve it the way you would retrieve the response to any other question like
oh I think I'm extroverted but I also think that there are certain key major
moments that happen for people in their relationships sometimes they're called
like turning points, right?
And sometimes it can be a small thing,
like the one time that, you know,
you made breakfast for yourself and not me,
and that can be a real turning point.
And I realized like, wait,
do you even like actually care that I'm here?
It can also be a very positive thing,
like the time that you skipped hanging out
with your friends, cause I'd had a bad day. And those moments too, can also sort of push us in
dramatic ways that that again are kind of random, like that same event could
have happened to 10 other people and not have the same positive effect that it
did on me. So I think it's some combination of those two things, right?
Like overall senses that we kind of lock in
and retrieve easily, but also these little moments
that end up being very memorable.
And other than that, I don't really have a good sense
of how people integrate those things.
Do you think that it would be useful for people
to become better predictors of their own revealed make preferences.
I wonder whether in your big cohort, the people who's stated and revealed had the
smallest distance between the two are more reliably successful in relationships
because they're better able to expedite finding partners that are like the ones
that they want to be like?
That's a really interesting idea.
And we've, I don't even know if we've ever collected
the data that would really give us the right way
to look at it.
We at some point had some data where we tried to get a sense
of who knew, like who was gonna get an accurate sense
of like how popular they are.
And there are a few speed dating studies to that effect,
but not about like, oh, this at the end.
Basically, if you had relationship satisfaction,
if you'd just got one more for the people in relationships,
I guess even for the people that weren't in relationships,
you could have asked a question like,
how satisfied are you typically in your
relationships?
And if you had somebody you would have been able to see quite easily, is there,
is there a covariance between someone's ability to stated and
revealed are accurate? They seem to be a little bit higher. I mean,
if it was lower, uh, that would just throw a complex matter in my hypothesis.
But, um, yeah, that would be cool to find out.
Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And the the
general idea of looking at how satisfied you are with a whole
suite of relationships, you know, it is, this is where like,
polyamory research really has a leg up on what basic close relationship researchers do is
because they can in principle see how you are reacting across multiple partners. And
that has the potential for all kinds of fascinating insights because it suggests, you know, we
might be able to see things like, you know, I say that I really care about attractiveness,
but it turns out that I'm the kind of person who's I'm happier with the partner that I really care about attractiveness, but it turns out that I'm the kind of person
who's I'm happier with a partner
that I think is less attractive, right?
We would be able to see those kinds of differences
in the way you are reacting
to multiple partners at the same time.
So unfortunately, those samples are pretty hard to collect,
but they can reveal a ton of insights.
Paul Eastwick, ladies and gentlemen.
Paul, I love this research.
I'm fascinated to see what you do next.
Where should people go?
They wanna keep up to date with all of the stuff
that you're doing.
That's a great question.
You can follow me on Twitter,
at Paul Eastwick.
And yeah, I'm gonna have a book coming out
in about a year and a half.
It's gonna be a little ways off.
So yeah, you can look for me then.
But for right now, bring you back on. Love to bring you back on when the book. That'd be great.
That'd be great. Oh, yeah, we did it, man. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.