She fails at dating, but who cares? She's doing great at her career. She doesn't need a man, but she's going to sleep around like a man anyway. She's like not afraid to admit.
She like farts, you know, it was like a very specific sort of girl. That was like really sort of popular in the 2010s. It a manic episode and spent $18,000. But who cares because, you know, they're a product manager at Facebook.
Do you think that you're a picker, partist? No. You recently released a podcast where you consider that you might have been a picker partist all along and definitely some of the insights that I've seen you right are unusually incisive, I think, about the dating world. Where they come from?
Why have you taken such an interest in attraction and mating? Well, so I have sort of a weird romantic history. I married very young and then I got divorced. And so my first real time on the dating market, I was already in my late 20s.
And like, it was like a crash course. And I mean, it was the first, I don't know if relationships are in the right word, but my first sort of for re-entidating was so humiliating. I became like, autistically sort of obsessed with preventing that pain. And I was like, I can't ever feel like this again.
Because I really felt like I was like 14, I was 27. And it was just it was like the worst. And I think that's what motivates me. Yeah, does that suggest that there's a some time and attention that everyone needs to spend kind of breaking up and making up and learning those lessons and that it doesn't come really as a bi-product of maturity or age.
It comes as a bi-product of the amount of times that you've done it. I mean, I think you just have to have the requisite emotional intelligence. I don't think that practicing on people, like that's also not, I wouldn't recommend that either because you may become jaded, right? And that's that's a flip side.
There's such a thing as too much experience. That's definitely true. Two years ago, you predicted a coming wave of sex negativity. I think that you were absolutely on the money with that, although it's maybe moving a little bit more slowly than you might have thought.
But I think that you're absolutely spot on. Why did you think that that was going to happen? I started noticing. So the way I do my predictions is I look at where journalists are paying attention because I really do I still believe in legacy media and institutions.
I feel like they guide the conversation. And a lot of my predictions are about media conversations as opposed to like on the ground behaviors. And so one of the places that journalists scrape stories from, at least when I wrote that, I don't know how true that is now, is Twitter, right? And it was very trendy to be sex skeptical.
Sex negative might have been the wrong term, but it was very slip shot blog post. I was like a Sandra having visions. It was a lot of young people are very sex skeptical. And, you know, it was also we kind of run out of gas on sex positivity.
So you want to generate clicks. So it's like, how is the media conversation going to move? And where is the zeitgeist going to move? So it kind of just made sense for the pendulum to to swing.
Like, you know, when we're at the point, routine vogue is like the right way to, you know, introduce your cannibalism fetish in the bedroom, right? Because like so many things wrong with that sentence. It's like you can only go back. I can't get, there's no, you can't go further than that.
Yes, Shapiro had a really good take. I don't think that he had a particularly good episode at all about the halftime show that we honored it. But he said something very smart when he was talking about it, which was when all the taboos have become mainstream, there is nothing left to transgress other than ideological transgression. And I think it just means that once everything has been put on the table, like where do you go to find the new explicit, exciting dirty thing?
Right. I mean, there's two, there's two answers to that. One of them I won't mention, but I think people have sort of rightfully brought to the, you know, they've made it their, their mission to make sure people are aware of it. And it's a little more sinister.
And then the other one is you, you know, you'd be Alex P. Keaton, right? Like you shock your family tie. That's a very dated reference.
It's also very learned in reference. I think that's going to go ahead in two ways. Yes. So just, you know, you, if everyone around you is a progressive, you, you, you shock them by being conservative.
Right. I mean, I mean, I've heard that. I mean, I've heard that there's no one around saying that there should be an ethical way for women to be paid to be drugged so that she can indulge in her kink of sleeping with unconscious girls. I haven't seen the video, but I've heard that talked about, um, I've, you know, I'm aware of those people who think that's not ironic.
That's not an ironic video. I mean, of course, it makes sense, right? There's a market for everything that a market for someone to can centrally be drugged and paid for being drugged so that this lady can have fulfill her kink of having sex with her. I mean, is that that's quite surprising?
Even even in this era, that's quite surprising. I'm not surprised by that at all. I'm more surprised when all see TikTok sometimes with people like, cavalierly talking about, and this is off the deep end, so I'm just gonna warn you about it. I'm gonna say like, very cavalierly talking about playing with like, feces and sexual situations, that shocks me, right?
Like you see a beautiful like 21 year old talking about, it's like what did I just, like, and then, because it's a TikTok, it'll auto place, you just watch it like 50 times, just to make sure you're great, correct? But you know, consensual roofing is a little bit less. Fair enough, maybe Scott, somebody shitting on you is less offensive than consensual roofing. Maybe you're right, maybe I'm, but I suppose one of the things, because I don't use TikTok, so I'm really not tapped into, what I know is now a large burgeoning part of internet subculture.
I heard you talk about the fact that you could predict what was going to happen on TikTok by looking at Tumblr a few years ago, or that basically no one should be surprised by the trends that we see on TikTok, because they already existed. What is that? The people that weren't delving the depths of Tumblr five years ago, what's that sort of horseshoe theory? So basically that argument is, people think that TikTok introduced certain ideas or certain trends, but you could trace all of these back, all the way to the dawn of the internet even.
Like here's a really good example, multiple personality disorder, right? So obviously this was a trend offline, thinking like the late 80s, I'm remembering correctly, right? You have all these pop psych books about it, suddenly you have this cottage industry of therapists who are diagnosing people with multiple personality disorder, it's the jury's not out yet, if it's even a thing. You go on using it, and there's all of these communities for people with MPD.
And it looks very similar to what people see on TikTok, and they're complaining about today, they're like, oh kids are just self-diagnosing, but people have been self-diagnosing, as soon as they have a space to have these conversations, it happens, right? So you can trace it all the way back to using it, and then there's like people have like personal home pages that are dedicated to like, oh, you know, who are your alters, who are your other personalities? And then it really grows on tumblr because it's just more accessible, and then TikTok is even more accessible, and more and more people are online, so it spreads. But it's not native to TikTok, which is I think the big mistake people make.
What's happened then, is it more visible, on TikTok is it more obvious, is it more clippable and resharable and commentable? Yeah, I mean, I think it's two very simple things. One, more people are online, right? It's just sheer volume.
The time they're spending online is much higher. And also like, I think we really underestimate the power that journalists have. So when you write about something, you have an audience, you amplify the effect. And that's my big argument with tumblr.
I get misquoted a lot as saying that tumblr like invented wokeness. That's obviously absurd, right? Like tumblr didn't invent Foucault, you know? But tumblr is like a really great vehicle of transmission for ideas because there was a lot of teenagers who were using it, and there was journalists who were using it as a place to get ideas very easily.
And it was during the age of clickbait. It was like right when clickbait started. So you see, you know, maybe this is the first time you're learning about transgender identity on your journalist and you make 50 bucks a pop on your articles. You get paid a little bit extra depending on the clicks and comments, right?
I remember there was one outlet where it's like, if you went over the 600 comment threshold, you got a bonus, you know? So you have to keep that in mind. So of course you take these little niche things and you amplify them and your whole MO is to get people to click and to share. And people read it and it mutates and it becomes mainstream.
You also predicted the complete and total death of the go boss archetype. Why? What led you to that conclusion? Another, so it's a few things.
I do have to say that other people also predicted this. I wasn't a pioneer or if I was one pioneer among many. I love to make sure I have had to everyone. So it's a few things.
One, it's the trend of burning out. So it's sort of the natural life cycle. How long has this been going on? How have we gotten everything out of it that we can?
How much further can we go? And that's a really simple question, but I think again, it's another thing that's super and are appreciated and people don't ask that question often enough. And then the other thing is the way our lifestyles are changing. You can't really be a girl boss if you're completely alone quarantined in your apartment.
It's just, if you are getting into the Alice in Roman recipes as many of us were at peak COVID, it doesn't really mesh as well with the whole girl boss thing. It's kind of went hand in hand with sex, skepticism and maybe a more prudent approach to sex. You just don't even have the opportunity to be going out and hustling romantically or professionally because you're stuck at home and suddenly you realize maybe I should have been building my nest. Right.
How would you describe when it was at its peak or the promises that the girl boss meme was supposed to deliver on? How would you describe what a girl boss was? A girl, I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like. Women can do it too.
Women can have it all. There was a aesthetic dimension to it as well. I think for some people, it was like this very put together minimalist, she goes to the gym, she's accomplishing everything and that was one sub-genre of the girl boss. Another, I think slightly more interesting one, was the train wreck girl boss, which I think a lot of people leaned into.
What's that? She fails at dating, but who cares? She's doing great at her career, she doesn't need a man, she's going to sleep around like a man anyway. She's not afraid to admit, she's like farts.
It was a very specific sort of girl that was really popular in the 2010s. And when I was just entering the workforce, this was when everyone sort of aspired to be. I also think it's sort of like, you know, this is like trend, I mean, it's a little old now, but the trend of like hot girls have IBS. I think that's sort of an outgrowth.
Hang on, hang on, hang on. You saying this is something that I should be completely aware of, that there was a trend of hot girls identifying with their irritable bowel syndrome? Yeah. I think that you might be over believing how far down internet rabbit holes I've been.
I'm very online, but I pale in onlineness to how online you are. Okay, so there was a period where everything was for hot girls, and this was sort of like a commercial internet trend, so that means you would see it in big publications, and very sort of like normies. Like a younger sister might be familiar with something like this, is TikTok, so hot girls are into tinned fish. So in this is about a year, 18 months old by now, hot girls have IBS, right?
And it was like, you would fix hot girls in front of something that's not really sexy, right? And there was a few things that came up a lot, but basically I think what the trend was trying to encapsulate, like hot girls are just regular women, right? But it didn't really come off like that. But the girl boss, sort of, the second archetype of girl boss did the same thing, right?
Where it's like, hot girls could be messy, without really like critically evaluating that mess, and it's like this culture of oversharing, girl bosses aren't therapy and whatever, and keep wanting to say hot girls, but hot girls or girl bosses or whatever, right? Like they had a, they had a manic episode and spent $18,000, but who cares? Because they're a product manager at Facebook. Oh my God, okay, so it seems like the girl boss archetype, at least in part, wasn't that much about romance at least, like specifically that was something that was quite vacant from the girl boss archetype, am I right?
It was part of it, but it was like a sort of a different approach at romance. Like you see sort of in the late 90s and 2000s, where it's just like hopelessness, and people want relationships, but the girl boss sort of takes that and turns it around, and they're like, so what, yeah, I'm sleeping around. I've slept with 100 guys, who cares, right? It's like, it's cool, and they don't want to catch feelings, and like there is this like very weird thing that you'd see portrayed in media, but also like in real life, if you were in certain circles, of like women clearly catching feelings, but denying it, and everyone around them sort of like encouraging or delusion.
And I mean, all of that is just very millennial. And I think like, again, it's run out of gas, but also people are like, this doesn't serve us really. Mm, why do you think it run out of gas? What do you think it was that stopped that particular type of how to sleep with them and not catch feels trend from slowing down?
I mean, there's these behavioral trends, especially when they really are fads, they can only, their life is only so long. And like certain like bad behaviors become encoded in culture and sort of, you know, like socially sanctioned. But the other thing is like people are lonely, and like, you know, when you reach like 35, 36, 37, and you just can't, you know, you can't do it anymore, it's just like, it becomes pathetic. And it doesn't only look at that from the outside, but you feel pathetic.
And I think a lot of it is just this cohort aged out of that behavioral pattern, you get lonely. And some people are gonna stick with the, I don't need anyone, but some people are gonna be like, oh, that was wrong, this, you know, this actually really hurt. What I find particularly interesting about speaking to you to do with this stuff is, there's been an awful lot of assessment around the subcultures that guys have got going on. MGTile, Red Pill, Black Pill, Insell, Simms, Cook, Soy Bois, whatever it is.
And as a guy who gets exposed to a lot of that stuff, I forget that there are shit ton of subcultures going on that also influence value preferences and trends that girls about it as well. And it seems like the girl boss I mean, for a very long time, and maybe still is now, was a very, very important part of it. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think there are always these archetypes.
I think what's interesting is a lot of the male ones are sort of like, they're empowering through embracing disempowerment. You know, like there is something empowering about just saying, yes, I am an incel and finding other incels, right? Or men going their own ways, obviously like a, you know, a more extreme example of that. But with women, it's sort of like the stileusion of empowerment.
And it's like not acknowledging the disempowerment in a real way or making light of it and not trying to fix it as much. There is of course like a victimhood stance that some people went into, but it just manifests in a very different way. I've heard you say as well that there's kind of two types of feminism clashing up against each other here. Sexposity feminism, core feminism, and not always do they end up agreeing.
Yeah, you know, there's like, these things evolve, especially when like there's like intergenerational voices. You know, sex, sex positive femininity or feminism rather push the envelope. And it was genuinely shocking at a time. And a lot of people didn't know what to do with that early on.
Like, you know, you have someone like a Tina Fey, right? Who was sort of like an icon, you know, feels so weird to say that now was an icon for a time. You know, me not like totally understand like, that, you know, then like 21 year old millennial who's talking about sex workers' rights. Hmm.
What's your prediction moving forward? Given that you can update yourself now in 2023, two years on the prediction of the death of the girl boss. Have we got for the fall? What do you think is coming next?
For female subcultures and trends? Well, I think that there is, I've seen like a lot of like very sort of moderate like self-criticism. And I think people would be surprised. Like, you know, I constantly hear like, you know, the woke will become woken, the left will move further, you know, using these terms very loosely, of course, from the original meanings.
But I've seen like a lot of more mainstream and left wing women are starting to self-criticize and become a little bit more, like walking certain things back, right? Like you have the, you know, when I talked about the coming wave of sex negativity, I was talking about also people who were maybe more extreme or may like identify as right wing, but I think it's coming everywhere. There's, and you see this like, this move to moderation all over the place. Another really interesting thing is, you know, when I look at people in the transgender community talking, there's a lot of conversation about maybe being more deliberate about surgical choices.
And this was always a conversation that was happening in this community, partially because of like, you know, affordability. But people saying like, look, I got sex reassignment surgery and it didn't work for me. And it doesn't have to be, that doesn't mean you're not trans, but maybe don't get it. And that's a kind, that's not a conversation that you hear talked about very, very often, right?
Because the conversation tends to hone in on access and making sure people get that particular type of medical care. But I think that's a sign of more moderation is just popping up everywhere. Another place, you see, is like, people are moving away from alcohol. They're drinking less.
And maybe they're not literally drinking less, like their behavior isn't reflecting that. But the conversation is in that direction. So, you know, those are just three different examples of places where people are being self-critical and slowing it down and, you know, leading a slower life or at least the zeitgeist pointing towards a slower life. What is an example of some of the self-criticism that women have been doling out?
I've seen definitely like conversations about me too. And, you know, these are things we heard from sort of like the dissident center, so to speak. And the right, like, you know, from the jump was very critical of me too. But now you see from more the center left and left saying, like, maybe we took it a step too far.
And, you know, being very conscious in the discourse, not to invalidate other people's experiences, but also like walking things back and basically saying. Ooh, what an example of this would be some of the pushback to these gym tiktok things. Yeah, yeah. Wesom Kello was also like another really great example of some of them.
Don't know that. Yeah. He could be a final fantasy world of warcraft characters. And I would just be going along with it.
Who was this? OK, so there is this. Basically, this guy gets publicly humiliated because he lied on a bunch of women on, I think, it was Hendry or Tinder, right? And he gets publicly humiliated on tiktok and a bunch of journalists right about it and a bunch of advertising agencies and corporations like jump on it and use it as a punchline.
And it just blew up this guy's spot, right? I think if that had happened in 2018, people would have been like, this guy's a jerk. You know, these women didn't consent to be, you know, in a roster or like whatever thing, right? And I think because it happened after there had been so many of these, you know, I think there had been so many like me two type situations that maybe were, you know, on the wider end of the great scale, if you know what I mean?
There was more like, what are we doing? Why are we humiliating this guy? Like can't someone be like a douchebag in the comfort of their own home without it being like a national news story? And I think that was sort of like a grip.
I think that was like a pivot point of saying like, we've been leaning into the victimhood thing a little bit too long. And when I think of like, people singing the mood is changing or the vibe is shifting. Those things that feel insignificant actually are very significant. That's really interesting.
I think I would agree on the the pushback against this super overzealous sort of me toing the very middling ground, not to say that it's not wrong or, you know, like shit back behavior, but calling it me too. And you know, this is the incentive. If you think about it for long enough, actually end up aligning for a lot of people to be on board with this, because if you end up expanding the definition of what sexual assault or like me two worthy behavior from a guy is to encompass more and more things, it dilutes down the legitimacy of genuine sexual assault and of genuinely predatory behavior. It's the same as like if everything is racist and nothing is racist.
If everything is sexual assault, then nothing is sexual assault. Exactly. And I think that the people who we assume would never come to that conclusion, they're coming to that conclusion. Is it just that after a while, the incentives don't align with, it's no longer shocking for journalists to talk about this sort of stuff.
It doesn't garner the same sort of clicks. It doesn't, because people have seen it a million times before. And if people start hate commenting, whatever it is that you do, or you end up with a ton of negative pushback, like that girl did the super famous TikTok of her doing like glute bridge and this guy looked over and tried to help clean the plates once. And then she went to town and then she got destroyed about it.
Is it just that every type of meme or subculture that isn't grounded in genuine truth or integrity or alignment with what happens in reality, inevitably just runs out of steam? Is that what's going on? I mean, I don't think, kind of, yeah. I mean, I think we really do sort of live in this, you know, economy of the clickbait economy and things just run their course, especially if like it's just ceaseless discourse.
I mean, another thing I think is that younger people are sort of less interested in discourse. And by that, I mean, like the constant culture war debates is this right, is this wrong, is this moral? And you see like, they're much more interested in talking about aesthetics, micro trends, you know, nostalgia and sort of a more, you know, they're just, they're just seem like more interested in that. And I've seen, I'm also noticing that like the paranormal is becoming like more interesting to people.
So, you know, of course the new age has been trendy for a while and we've had this new age when it's not like astrology, but I see like the difference with like paranormal being like, it's not about predicting your own life. It's just, there's like a pure leisure aspect of this. It's like this cultural exhaustion that everyone has and it's changing what people are interested in. Didn't you say that manifestation is making a comeback?
Yeah, there is, yeah, there's definitely, manifestation is everywhere, right? I don't know if it's making a comeback, but it's been around, like we've been, for a long time, we've been like living in this culture of, tell me what's gonna happen next and how can I will myself into getting exactly what I want? Like, I think, you know, like, you know, in the future, everyone will be seen exactly how they want to be seen for 15 minutes, something like that. If you found an example of some lady that said, if your partner is talking to you and they're saying something that you don't want to hear, then block that sound out in your mind.
Imagine the things that you want to hear them saying to you and manifest into existence, that they stopped complaining about the fact that you didn't pick up the dog who outside, but actually how gorgeous you are, whatever it was that she was talking about. Oh, it's bonkers, right? Yes, yeah, that's full on bananas. Yeah, it's really, I mean, some of the manifestation stuff is really out there.
You know, it's a helplessness, right? Like you just, you know, you want something so badly and you don't know how to get it. I mean, I also think a big part of it is, people aren't really out in the world living. A lot of our living takes place in front of a screen or on our couch or whatever.
Well, because if you sort of stop within your own mind, right, like there's nothing that you can actually physically do. We're so cerebral that changing the way you think does make sense in that framework. Because so much of our life is lived up in our heads and so a little bit inside. Yeah, that's very interesting.
I've been thinking about this a lot, especially to do with the rise of like male subcultures online, especially, you know, the in-cell black pill ideology. And how it is that my experience and most of the guys that I know as experiences don't seem to necessarily speak to the world that a lot of young guys seem to be talking about online. And the reason I think, at least in part, that this is true, is that social media, increasing levels of social anxiety and a lack of exposure to mating in the real world means that a lot of especially young guys' experiences about different ways that relationships can unfold are experienced primarily through the internet. And by design, the stories that are going to catch fire on the internet are the most egregious ones, about some guy that leads to go and get the milk and comes back and finds his wife in bed with the postman and the postman's dog and then she leaves him and takes a kid's and his leg and a bunch of other stuff.
That quite rightly will get 100,000 votes on Reddit, which means that downstream from that, young guys who have no other evidence to suggest that women aren't all like that, take that as representative of what's going on at large. And I think that this is one of the problems when you have a chronically online world, you have no real world evidence to suggest that the thing that the most online people and the most egregious stories talk about might not be true. Absolutely. And it's interesting, it depends on demographic too.
In geography, there's all these little things that change people's bubble. Ask a woman who's a relatively attractive woman who's between the ages of 18 and 27. And they'll say it's so easy to get a guy, like you could just sort of, it's like a mare belt. Ask a woman who's 32 or older and there's this perception that any guy can get literally any girl.
Ask most men, they're like all women are sluts and they have the haters term, like a cock carousel, the female alternative to the roster. So it's, everyone, and they all underestimate sort of like how their specific circumstance is also impact, it's more than just like confirmation bias. Like if you're a 35 year old woman in upper middle class to upper class circles in Manhattan, yeah, you're gonna struggle, right? It's just like, of course.
But if you're in a, you know, you're a 21 year old in the Bay Area, well, yeah, the world is your oyster. Yes, what about rejection sensitivity? What's the first time I've ever heard it when you wrote about it? Oh yeah, that was a very weird article.
So that was an article I wrote, or I guess a blog post that I wrote about how we experienced like much higher volumes of rejection that we don't even clock as rejection. And we're experiencing like micro rejections every single day. And what might be perceived as an overreaction is just like a compounded reaction. Like so, you know, you post, like, there's all these like microwaves we can get rejected online.
So then when we face like a real rejection, it might feel like more painful than it might have otherwise because we're sort of like swimming in the soup of rejection. Dating apps are like a really great example of this. Like you're being rejected thousands of times in some cases on dating apps. And like we don't really appreciate like how painful that is.
Like if you're someone who only gets like one or two matches in a month, like you might not consciously think I was rejected every single time I swiped. But that's actually you were. And like there's, you know, you synthesize that information. I know it sounds petty, but like not getting likes on social media or like not feeling heard.
I think it's sort of a more compassionate way to frame that, being unfollowed or being blocked. Like all of these things, they feel so minor in the moment. But when you like take them sort of like holistically, you're like all of these things happening. And then there's like, there's things like even in the real world of like, you know, someone, you say excuse me, but they're looking at their phone and you're just sort of brushed off.
Like this is happening with people thousands and thousands of times and it has to have an impact on the way we feel. So there's a sea of ambient rejection that just happens. I mean, one of the ways that apps are designed is for you to not feel the pain of rejection, right? I mean, once you're matched with somebody, you can message them and they can not message back.
But even with that, it's, or maybe they didn't see it or maybe they were busy or maybe they, you know, got hit by a truck or something. You don't actually know why it was they rejected you. But I do think, I think that there's some likes to that. And obviously the easy pushback is, well, we live in a time which has got the greatest wealth and comfort of any civilization ever, all of these things pale into the background.
But I do think that in a time where people have got fewer friends on average than ever before, the ability to ride the waves of small rejections in a increasingly cerebral, monorotic, more socially anxious, less outside, less exposed to so and less touching grass world probably does mean that a lot of people will feel these rejections and not only will they be more exposed to them, but are probably more sensitive to them when they do get exposed to them. So I don't think that there's, I don't think that there's necessarily really any reason for people to feel like if that is something that they sense, that some indication of personal failing on their part, it's like, we weren't designed to be exposed to this many people this frequently. Absolutely. And downstream from that, the number of potential rejections that you could have had in one day on the internet is the same as you could have had in an entire lifetime, 10,000 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, and the other part of this is boundaries have been sort of obliterated. So we don't even realize sometimes how intimate we are with total strangers, especially it's so easy via text, or again, like to the dating app example, in the talking stage, as it's sometimes called, you open up so much. And in person, those are hard earned conversations, but they just flow when they're text. And then so when you lose a friend who's just an internet friend, actually it's really painful, right?
Because you don't quite know how to measure that intimacy. Yeah, I mean, if somebody wants to rail against a terminally online culture, they can say, look at how fucking ridiculous this is. It's totally stupid. Why should anybody be bothered about whether they make or break friends on the internet?
Your friends should be in the real world. They should be the people you care about the most. But the bottom line is that you need to adapt to the world the way it is and the way that you want it to be. And people are chronically online.
People aren't spending tons of time in the real world with genuine friends. And yeah, it's very, very interesting. So you also did a blog post recently, which was like 80 pieces of dating advice. I found some of my favorites, and I want to go through one of these with you.
So the first one is, if a woman likes you, she's automatically going to assume other women are pursuing you because she thinks everyone views you the way that she does. I call these love goggles. Yeah. You know, when you're paranoid that someone's going to take your guy, right?
What does that speak to about women's psychology? Is that suggesting that you become besotted in that kind of jades, your opinion of how other people view that same person? But in reality, no one probably cares about your new crush. You know, it sort of comes.
So I wrote that because it comes from this. A lot of women are paranoid is really the wrong word, like insecure, right? That they're competing when they're not always. And it's like sometimes, I have tons of male friends who will be like, I don't know why she thinks this, right?
Like she's sort of like the only, like I couldn't pursue someone else even if I wanted to, sort of thing, right? There's just, because there is no one else. And it's like an answer to like the insecurity in women, but also like the confusion from men. Like when you like someone, you assume, you see them with rose-stitched glasses, right?
And you assume everyone else sees them in such a favorable light. And that's not always a kid. It's like, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen this or if like no one wants your husband, right? Like a human.
Like the overprotective wife who's husband is just like some like random fat dude and you're like with like chill girl, like sort of like a meme that you see in like TV and stuff. That's definitely something I think that most online men's dating advice doesn't really think about, which is the insecurity of girls that are besotted or have fallen pretty quickly for a new guy. And you know, although the internet and stats on Tinder may suggest that it's only the top 20% of men that this is happening to every girl that's listening has fallen for some dude that is a strong six. And it's just like, look, I don't know what it is about him.
He makes me laugh. He's cute. He's got an interesting job. He goes to the gym.
He smells nice fucking cool hair, whatever it is that they like plays a guitar. People call this like medium ugly, right? There's this whole meme like medium ugly. Like women sort of like, I don't know why.
I just like, you know, he's a hard six. He's a hard five, but like I still like him. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And that that degree of insecurity is interesting. Okay, next one. Not having friends is a red flag.
Shit talking exes is a red flag. Why? I'm I it's, you know, it's conventional conventional wisdom, right? Like if every ex is a problem, well, who's a common denominator?
And I know we're sort of in like an epidemic of friendlessness. But at the same time, like you should have at least one friend or at least two friends barring extreme circumstances, like, you know, some people live in like rural areas or something, but you know, it makes it more difficult. But you should, you know, you should be able to have long term relationships. Convoluted dating advice for men or women is always a grift.
Don't let your romantic life become a product. What do you mean by convoluted dating advice? You know, just like how every little thing, you know, matters like every little thing is a red flag. Like if, you know, move your hand two inches to the right and then it signals like, you know, whatever, like, there's all this weird stuff like that out there.
And usually it's just a way for someone to sell a personality or a course or a book or, you know, just get attention. Oh, because what they do is they purposefully overcomplicate the dynamic of how to get somebody because that gives them the, what does my housemate Zack calls it? It's like secret knowledge or gated knowledge or something. This is, he's got a charlatans playbook and it's a bunch of different things that you can go through to determine whether or not a guru is actually a charlatan or a fella jit.
And one of them is this, yeah, gate kept secret knowledge that nobody else understands. And it's always using terms that no one's ever heard of before or that a purpose built to try and describe what they're talking about. It is always very convoluted. It is always very complex.
Right. Like you don't, you know, wear a certain perfume or a certain lipstick for men. And, you know, like men and women, both are actually pretty, pretty simple, I think. Be direct, not desperate.
Yeah, you know, desperate is like cloying and asking repeatedly, you know, sort of being a hanger on, not taking signals. Litigating answers is like a big one. And directness is just saying what you mean. And being honest and transparent.
Who do you think that's a big deal for, guys or girls? I think both in different ways. You know, I don't think we talk enough about like women do this thing like like drunk texting, but really they got drunk for the sole purpose of sending, you know, 20 desperate text messages, right? You know, like counting the seconds between like responses, things like that, you know, just just be it's hard.
It's because you think if you send a lot of messages or if you like somehow some it'll change or like appeal to the to this person, but I mean, it doesn't. And being direct is always going to be pretty attractive, I think, from both guys and girls. There's very few people that I could imagine very few situations in which somebody being more direct unless it was first day and they're being like overly over sharing. As soon as you get past that sort of first step being direct, I think makes a lot of sense.
Okay, next one. He doesn't have NPD. What's NPD? Narcissistic personality disorder.
Thank you. He doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder. He wants to have sex and you're too available. And on that note, you never want to be too available.
Even if the person likes you, that's how you lose your value. That doesn't mean you can't be a ride or die, but boundaries don't only protect your feelings. They protect your worth. What's that?
All right, so the NPD thing, it's like one of these excuses people use like, oh, he loved bombing me. So love bombing is like when it's a clinical term, but the way it's used is when a guy's too sweet in the beginning and you are taken with him. Well, even said obvious, millennia, old tactic. Now that we've medicalized it for some reason.
That was apology. Right, and just wanted to fuck you. It's obvious. But being too available is saying yes to everything.
Again, it seems so cliche and obvious don't answer. What are you doing text at three in the morning? But a lot of people actually do. Or dropping everything.
You don't have to play hard to get in some labyrinthine way. But you also don't have to put your own life on hold to make the other person know that you like them. You can do that in ways that maintain yourself respect. One of the things that does trend in dating and relationship circles that I think is actually really useful is this phrase called nibern, which is an obsessive sort of love.
And it's not love. It's like the crush that rules your life. And I think that is actually a really good thing to be aware of because you're not in love. It's you didn't eat your soulmate.
It's feeling avoid. And you're actually using it in the same way people might use a substance. It is sort of an addiction. I think a lot of people fall into that trap.
Never heard that word before. I went down the rabbit hole of liminal spaces. I know that that was a huge thing on the internet. But something tells me that that's old news too.
Yeah, I mean, liminal spaces are interesting. It's a different lane. But it's there. I'm aware it's a different lane.
I'm just trying to find common ground between me and someone that is the most online person I've ever met. OK, next one. Predictably is good. Why?
I mean, you don't want someone who always is keeping you on edge. Like, you should know how they react. And that works in both ways. Like, what makes them angry?
But what makes them happy? Someone where you don't know if they're going to like you one day to the next. Like, that isn't fun. And I think a lot of these, this advice that's about predicting and sort of assessing it, what does this really mean?
When a guy says x, it means y. A lot of that is sort of trying to rationalize when people don't really like you or when they're playing games with you. You should be able to tell pretty early what things mean. Even if there are certain nuances that vary from person to person.
Interesting. Yeah, there's a conversation I had with Logan Yuri, who is the director of relationship science for Hinge. And she was talking about how a lot of people don't believe that the person that they've just started dating is right for them because they don't feel a spark. And with other people, they have sparked a spark.
But those people they felt a spark with were perhaps unpredictable or had a whole laundry list of other problems. What they don't realize is that some people are just sparky. They spark with the person that they check out. They spark with the Uber driver.
They spark when they go to the bar and give their ID to the person at the front. They spark with everyone, including the people that they date. And that having that spark isn't particularly indicative of anything. One of the most reliable predictors of relationships is something called psychological stability.
So after an incident where your baseline has been knocked off so an argument or something sad or whatever it is, how long does it take for you to get back to baseline? And that's a very, very reliable predictor of relationship success long term. That's predictable, right? Unpredictable would be they're going to block me on social media.
The only way that I can send a message is by pay palling them one's sent amounts with a message hidden in the references. Or they're going to be straight back loving me within seconds of this thing happening. Yeah, I think a lot of people crave those relationships. One, because when those people are on and positive, it feels more valuable for some reason.
But also they're using their relationship to fill another void. And it's addictive. These are traps that I've fallen into, which is why I share my knowledge with the world. There should always be forward momentum.
That doesn't mean moving too fast, but don't let yourself fall into relationship, purgatory. Men will take the initiative if they're serious. Sure, they are insecure, man. But even they will move things along.
Yeah, just if you don't know if he's your boyfriend within a month or two, then he's not your boyfriend and keep it moving. I think that's very true. And I know from being a chronic guy around the party scene throughout all of my 20s, that the dudes that were reticent about the what are we conversation don't have on average don't have tons of emotional baggage. That means that they have trouble committing.
It's that they're next thing waiting for something better to come along or that they're just generally emotionally unavailable. Now, again, on average, this different person to person, this may not apply at all areas underneath the fucking normal distribution of experiences. But if he never asks you out, if he never says to you, why don't we do this? Here is a plan.
Here's something that I think would be cool. If it's always you pushing to see when we go to see to the next, what is it that's happening? I do think that that would be an above like. Yeah, absolutely.
When men are sure, they're really sure. I would say yes. OK, you can't manipulate your way into a relationship with sex. If they don't want to date you, they don't want to date you.
Doing this is a good way to get used for your body. Yeah, I mean, and this is bad advice you see all over women's publications, or women's media, or at least you date, especially in the 2010s, where it's sort of like you could blow your way into having a boyfriend. But if a guy likes the way you give head, but doesn't like you as a person, you're just going to keep blowing. You know, it's not going to be your boyfriend.
And it's like brutal. That's just like kind of is what it is. Wow. Yeah, I think that's true.
I don't think that you can sex your way into a relationship. Now, there's some guys that are reticent up until that point. I think, again, looking around me at most of the guys that are my age now, my friends that are between sort of 13 to 35 and still single and dating, most of them are their relationship with sex, especially casual sex, is wildly different. So I wonder how much of these things are just trends that occur when people are a little bit younger, a little bit more emotionally immature, still have a greater desire for sexual variety and novelty and new experiences, and everything's just a bit excitable.
But I do think that that calms down over time. Yeah, I think you're probably right. Like who is dating advice generally for? I think it's for people in their 20s.
I would agree. OK, men drop hints about weird things that into through jokes. You can learn a lot about people by what they joke about, pay attention, then make them think you're psychic by calling them on it. Yeah, I mean, just exactly what it sounds like.
A companion piece of advice to this is like people will tell you how they'll hurt you early on. People tell themselves constantly and we just don't pay attention or we write things off as jokes. If a guy like jokes about a sex act a lot, he's probably into it and is gauging pure reaction. I have a friend who, at every party on meetup I've ever been to, talks about eating ass.
And he talks about it in the most, he's trying to laugh it off. He'll sort of slide it into a joke. It's pretty ungainly. It's pretty consistent as well, reliably.
I would go as far as to say that I've never been to a party where this hasn't come out of his mouth. I'm like, this is not some mere quirk of your language. This is something much deeper that is coming out of you. Yeah, I mean, and people do that with all sorts of things, right?
It's not just like the guy who's constantly joking about eating ass. Also like what people are preoccupied with is revealing free. And again, it's obvious once you say it out loud, it's easy to miss. Another sort of companion piece of advice is if they think you're cheating, they are cheating.
Or they know that they themselves are capable of cheating. Yeah, because their use theory of mind to project forward what they would be doing if they were behaving that way. OK, don't seek someone out who's like a Rex. They're not going to be the same.
They're not even going to be better. Heal that wound that motivates you to have a type. Yeah, if you dated someone who was like a particular profession, it's not that you have a thing for people in that profession. You miss your ex.
And don't make someone don't try to relive that story and change the ending. Start something new. OK, it's always going to be the less invested partner, even if it isn't the more fun option. This has been old school dating advice for as long as dating advice has been around, right?
Like the person that holds the most power in the relationship is the one who cares less. Where does it always better to be the less invested partner, even if it isn't the more fun option come from? That, I mean, it's just old school. You don't want to, it's conventional wisdom.
You don't want to be the one who's constantly chasing. Basically, you just don't want to be the chaser. What would you say to people that push back with? Every relationship should be equal.
Everybody should be equally invested. That's a sign of an un-ascended, unawakened relationship between two partners that are still playing a game, a power game of push and pull. Relationships become equal over time. And a lot of dating advice is for you earlier on in the funnel, and nothing starts in equal footing too bad.
If you have to open up the notes app to type out a message, break up. Yep, it has to be an essay. You already took a wrong turn somewhere. Yeah, I think back to some of the times in the office at the events company that I used to work at, and the number of times that the guys would be crowdsourcing the way to do a reply from the boys that were in the room.
Like, oh, fuck you now, that's like, she sent me and they'd scroll through it. They go, look, she sent me all this. We go, oh, you must be in trouble. And then we would end up helping them formulate responses.
They'd desperately try to crowdfund whatever the way to calm this particular outrage down is best. Yeah, that's never good, so we're good sign. No, never date someone who you wouldn't feel comfortable marrying. Definitely never date someone you wouldn't be seen in a restaurant with.
That was me talking to me, because I've definitely dated people I wouldn't want you to see in a restaurant with. Why? Why wouldn't you have wanted to be seen in a restaurant with them? Like, you know, wear like fully realized steampunk outfits.
I don't know. I have dated some weirdos. But I do think there is a thing of like, good for right now, not good for forever. And sometimes you do end up marrying that person.
And you're like, in six years past, I'm like, what did I do with my life? So even if you're not ready for that step, it's good to take every relationship seriously just in case, because you kind of don't know how things are going to go. And you don't want to be in a situation where you're making excuses for people. You can be compassionate of people's flaws, right?
But you don't want to make excuses. And I do feel like there's a lot of excuse making and dating. Or it's like, oh, he sleeps on a mattress and cheats on me, but I'm not going to marry him. And then he knocks you up.
And like, maybe you do marry him. That was one of the heuristics I spoke to Louise Perry about, where I was saying, if the only people that you ended up sleeping with are getting into relationships with were people that you'd be prepared to marry, it would fix a lot of downstream problems. Because the alpha widows phenomenon, have you heard of this? Yes.
So the fact that girls who will maybe get sex off a very high-value man, but that man wouldn't get into a relationship with them, then deal with a skewed perception of their own mate value moving forward, which means that they're permanently going to be chasing down fucking Christi and Gray as opposed to maybe setting their sights towards something which is more realistic for a long-term relationship. Those women are delusional for other reasons, though, because those men tend to make it clear pretty quick that they're never going to commit. And it's sort of like hope is the last thing that dies kind of situation with that. So if someone doesn't respect you, you probably shouldn't sleep with them.
A welcome realization that they might need. Don't date down to feel better about yourself. It's not fair to them. And it's also not fair to you.
Yeah. A lot of people date even temporarily people who can be infrastructure for their self-esteem. And it breathes resentment. And then it also, I think that guys can get alpha widower.
And that's way less discussed. Sometimes women just leave them on. But sometimes women will sleep with them one or two times. And it's just because they wanted to be with someone that that like, like, rayifies their own value to themselves.
Because they would adore them so much that they would get emotional support. That's the moral of that short story from the New Yorker cat person that went viral in 2017. What is it? It was the most viral short story of all time.
So like, this isn't, I promise, isn't another random reference. But it's a short story about this woman who sleeps with this sort of like, slovenly guy. And she ends up ghosting him, if I recall correctly. But sort of the moral of the story is like, she sleeps with him because she sort of gets off on how much better she is than him.
And this is something that's kind of missed in a story. And it's sort of treated like, now is like this weird me too parable. But it's not really that at all. It's like, women will date down thinking they won't get rejected and also so they could feel adored.
But that's not always what happens. Relationships shouldn't be a sporting event to see how much suffering you can withstand. It's not getting better, leave while you can. Yeah, don't want to be with a woman who calls you 20 times yelling at you.
It's there's an offspring song where there's like a lyric that's like, the more you suffer, the more it shows you care. Nope, absolutely not. Well, people use pain or their ability to withstand something uncomfortable as a proxy for how much they care. I did this with my business.
First of all, my business. I realized that if the business did well, that meant I was a good person and if the business did badly, that meant I was less of a person. But over time, actually, short-coded or totally bypassed the performance of the business and just went to how much suffering did I endure during the preparation for this most recent club night that we did. And even if the event was successful, but I hadn't had a difficult week of work, I would somehow feel like a piece of shit.
Because the only way that this success was worth anything was if I bled in the process for it. And it feels like a little bit similar to do with relationships that what you're doing is, actually no, I'm not sure that it is so much because the reason that someone sticks about isn't even because they're getting that much out of it, if all that you're doing is permanently suffering. And I don't even know if it's more men than women that do this. I think that this is probably sex equivalent, like sex balanced with regards to whether men and women do this the most, perhaps in different ways.
I think that the guys will tend to treat the girl more like shit, whereas the girls would tend to be more overbearing on the guy and sort of more naggy. But I think the outcome ends up being the same. Yeah. And I feel like people think they've invested so much time.
Also, it's another component of it, like, why leave now. But yeah, just like putting up with anything that's going to end up you feeling resentful when you're older is probably, you can't always predict that, but sometimes you can. On that point, there's a secular and holy apolitical reason that body count matters. You start to get jaded after a while.
Being spiritually ran through is a thing. Yeah, people are very similar. And you experience the same thing over and over again, and it loses its specialness, right? And it sort of has nothing to do with any religious reason or political reason, anything about like dirtiness or whatever.
But you just run out of energy for people. And you want to conserve your energy, basically. I had a guy called Andrew Thomas on the show a little while ago, and he was teaching me about a study that they've done, the optimal number of partners that people say they want their long-term partner to have. So if you could pick from zero to a thousand, how many partners would you want your future partner to have?
And the optimal number for both men and women is around about three to four for long term. Now, if it's short term, you get a slightly flatter. People are prepared to have the same amount. But zero partners was as desired as around about 11 or 12.
So zero is too few. Three to four was optimal, and then it tails off back down to 12, which is around about the same as zero. I thought that was quite interesting. Yeah, because I mean, you don't want to be, when you're an adult, you kind of don't want to be someone's first, and especially if you've met them as an adult, but too many, you're like, what's going on there?
You've never read for like, OK. The most durable relationships between people who grew up with similar values, this is something that I've seen time and time again with a bunch of my friends, especially from the UK. It's the people who have shared interests, similar sort of goals, a similar sort of worldview. I mean, one of the most, again, in terms of a relationship satisfaction prediction, if you hold the same political beliefs, your relationship is way, way more likely to be successful.
Because downstream from that, there are a whole host of other things about the way that you view the world, the way that you view personal finances, how you should raise your kids, the way that you should own a home, your relationship to death, your relationship to death, all that stuff. And if you do have incredibly different values, I can't think of any friends that are in relationships who do have different values, and it's ended up succeeding. All of them, by design, have evolved to be in a relationship with someone that has them. The only people that can think of that have different values are going through, it's a bit of a break up.
Yeah, it's super real. I dated, I married someone who was outside of my culture completely, and the things we would fight about were wild, like neighborhood choice. I mean, it was just diverging on things I had never even considered. Especially given how many different places there are that you could diverge on.
All the idiosyncrasies, of you and your fears and your concerns, and the difficulty of trying to create a relationship together, and then not being able to agree on whether you should live near a park or an apartment, whether you want a garden or whether you want to be in the center of the city, is going to layer on a lot of complexity that you probably don't need. Yeah, absolutely. And that's sort of a weird, I say values, because in my case, it was a geographic difference. It really impacted us.
But I think it really does come down to values, because maybe you do have this, like there are cultures, right? Cross cultural accommodations that have similar values. And then those can work, but if it's too many differences, then it's very hard. If he texts you six months later and says he was actually in love with you, he's horny.
If she texts you six months later and says that she was actually in love with you, she feels ugly. Yeah. That's just the support, I suppose, that where both men and women go to, what they fall back on, the number of... So again, some of the guys I used to work with would have 2 AM, 3 AM, and 4 AM broadcast lists on WhatsApp.
And that would be for what stage of the night they'd got to. And you had decreasing quality, but increasing likelihood of reply from each of the different broadcast lists. And it would just be a UOP text that would go to all of them. And then it would...
2 AM hasn't worked. 3 AM, let's try this next one. And then 4 AM was like, fucking hell, I'm gonna have to scrape the barrel here. And then they would send that message.
So we're singing over here? LAUGHTER Yeah, I mean, Club Promo is not exactly known for its chivalrous dating behavior. But where the woman who wants to use you as a supporting infrastructure for herself is seen, incels are right about emotional tampons. Are you friends?
Are you a reliable source of male validation? I'd never heard of emotional tampons before. Yeah, it's a word from the incelosphere. And they, I think, weaponize it and say all male-female friendships.
Well, not... In the incel world is a huge ecosystem, many different subtypes that I don't want to generalize. But they think that many women are just using men. And I mean, I don't think it's all male-female relationships or friendships, but you should be cognizant of it because there definitely are women who keep like harems of men that they perceive as like low value to pad their self-esteem and to make them feel better about themselves.
One that's very obvious, if you have to drink or smoke to have sex with them, you don't like having sex with them. I mean, the fact that this is even remotely useful wisdom, I think speaks a lot to what Louise Perry's been talking about, which is the sort of disembodiment of women specifically from having sex, that how to sleep with him and not catch feels is a non-ironic title of the cosmopolitan article where he's saying, okay, so I'll try and what, like, switch off any psychological response I have to doing this thing in a desperate attempt to achieve freedom, which is, like, I know, working like my dad and having sex like my brother. Yeah, you know, it's really disheartening because a lot of contemporary relationship podcasts and stuff talk about women dissociating during sex. Like, it's something all women share all the time.
And of course, I think every woman will experience it a few times throughout their sexual history, but like, to be regularly dissociating because you're that disconnectioning your partner and you're doing it to pass a time or to please someone is like very, very upsetting. Why do girls like shows like Call Her Daddy and stuff? Do you listen to these? Do you resonate with them?
I do. I don't resonate with them. I'm too much of a weirdo. But why do you think that goes like them?
Because I don't have a theory at all. I think a lot of men like them. I think some of us, I think, like, I listen to just pure entertainment and also just sort of check in with different subcultures. I listen to a wide range of crazy stuff.
I mean, it is entertaining. I think for some women, it validates poor choices to like hear other people making those same choices. Like, Call Her Daddy was infamous for, you know, they were constantly cheating on their partners. And it was very like validating for women to hear other women talk about it so cavalierly.
Or, you know, sort of like that level of casual sex. But I do think a lot of men listen to those shows. Because I find the ones where with more female audiences, even if they're that candid, there's softer and less vulgar. Or the type of vulgarity that they use is like more, wouldn't be resonant to men at all.
I mean, I'm sure that this is probably how it feels for a girl to listen to Joe Rogan or something. But I've given Call Her Daddy a couple of cracks. And I don't really understand where it's kind of like a little bit of different language. I don't understand a lot of the space, like the cultural space that she's coming from.
And she's unbelievably successful. But it would be surprising to me if there was a large cohort of guys that listened. But I'm being surprised by a lot of the things that we're seeing on the internet today. So maybe actually that's not that surprising.
I mean, I wouldn't underestimate her appearance. Or like both of their appearances, because there's Sophia with an F as a new podcast for the other host. I mean, they're both like very thin and very beautiful. Could you imagine if there was like too fat, it just wouldn't, maybe it would be as popular, but it would be popular in a different way and also a different scale?
Is there something about that that, if it's two hot girls talking about they're failing forward through relationships? Is there something that almost legitimates goals that see themselves or their insecurities and make them feel like they're not as attractive as those goals? So they go, oh, well, if it's really good looking girl can fail forward through relationships, that makes my piece of shit car crashable of life feel like it's less of a big deal. Maybe.
I still think that the, I would, I'd be interested in looking at the audience demographics of Call Her Daddy. I think that there's types of hot girls that like there's the hot girl that a girl would think is hot and then there's a hot girl that a guy would think is hot and I think that's actually a really useful distinction. And I think the Call Her Daddy hosts were more like hot girls for guys and hot girls for girls. Yes, I understand what you mean.
Okay, last one. When people give advice, they're speaking to themselves as much as they're speaking to you. That doesn't mean their advice is bad, but it's important context. Yeah, every, I think, I think everyone talks about lifestyle and culture is talking to a younger version of themselves, either trying to validate their choices or they're saying this is what I would have done if I had known better.
I think you're right. William Costello and my friend say's research is me search and he's coming out of the world of academia. But I do think that it's very much the same. You know, most of the people that I know, whatever they're interested in, it's because it's got some sort of relevance to them.
It's questions that they're trying to work out themselves or whatever. Because I like by design, what, what person would be able to dedicate many hours per week or per day to writing about something, speaking about something if they didn't have some sort of personal curiosity? Yeah, you have to, you know, you have to have skin in the game. Yes.