You must feel a little bit like a profit because everybody's talking about artificial intimacy. Now, are you a trendsetter in this regard, being ahead of the curve? Yeah, I do feel a little bit vindicated in that my book came out in 2021, so I was writing it in 2019, 2020 really. And a lot of the things that I was just imagining, this might happen and that might happen, come true.
There's also some other things that have come true as well that I never envisioned, of course. But I think people love to say, computers are never doing this, AI will never do that. And as soon as they do, they're almost immediately proved wrong in most cases. So we're living through times where in which just about any kind of prognostication is going to be true at some level.
How did you get interested in studying artificial intimacy? Good question. So I'm actually a biologist. I work on small, well used to work on small animals, and at the nasty things they do to each other associated with sex and mating and reproduction.
There's a body of evolutionary theory called sexual conflict. And the idea there is that even among the daddy who love each other very much, don't necessarily have completely aligned interests. And in a lot of animals, those interests are super unaligned. So they're actually trying to exploit each other through mating.
And so for a very long time, I thought, this is really important. People need to know about this because it gives you a really interesting lens through which to look at why in humans, sex and relationships and families can be so complicated, you know, sublime, beautiful, but complicated at the same time. And so I was writing a book about that. And I'd say it took me a long time.
Five or six years I was writing and writing, had screeds of stuff about all sorts of really heavy topics. And a lot of the sort of what do you want to what guilt I guess about about, you know, who might speak about this imposter syndrome, I suppose, you know, who might talk about this? This is all the heavy stuff. This is the basis for all the culture wars.
You know, I think I've got a lot to say here, but I know I'm going to get slammed. And eventually I tried to sell the book to people and they were all like, this is just way too heavy, way too much. But at the same time, I was running a program at my university, which tried to get people together to do sort of interdisciplinary stuff to meet big challenges and refugees and climate change and all sorts of worthy topics. And I said, now we're a very technical university.
We're going to do something on technology, do living with 21st century technology. And so I got to meet all the people at my university who were working on robotics and VR and AI. And we've got some amazing people in AI at UNSW where I work. And I met them and got really, you know, had some really amazing conversations, took people out to dinner after events that we'd had.
And you know, it became very, very clear to me that they were, you know, had one eye on this. And you know, whilst they're concerned about the killer robots killing us all, you know, you know, sleep or autonomous weapons, etc. They also were just concerned about how, how badly machines might mess us up. And I thought, there's sexual conflict theory right there.
And that made a great vehicle for a book that was strangely a little bit more light-hearted and speculative and interesting. Draw the parallel between sexual conflict theory and AI forming. People may not see the immediate set of parallels. Yeah.
Okay. So when you're in a relationship with somebody, you may find that, you know, everything's going well and you're totally aligned and you're both getting the same sort of thing out of the relationship, but you might not. You know, as I said, even a mom and dad who love each other very much also have, you know, disputes over money or over whose chance it is to, you know, take out the garbage or whatever it is. Even, you know, in relationships often before you get to the point of, you know, having kids, etc.
But, you know, not necessarily when those relationships break down, people can do also, they can mess with each other's heads. So you have people, you know, stalking, you have them, you know, involved in coercive control, etc. The dominant view of that kind of thing is that it's, you know, bad person A does something bad to innocent person B and that can, that can, it does happen. But of course, very often there is a kind of a mutual messing with each other's heads, you know, mismatched attachment styles, mismatched interests, poor communication, etc.
Now, you make a machine that can emulate part of what it is to be in a relationship that's going to have conversations with you, remember your name, remember what you're interested in, even a chatbot that might have sexy talk with you or whatever. The potential is there, of course, that machine to deliver all the good things, the things that you want. But the potential is also there for that machine to, to mess with your head, either inadvertently, by not being very well put together or by having learned from the internet, because the internet as we know is a bit of sewer and, or it could be programmed, could be actually deliberately programmed by somebody to, you know, so an example would be a romance scam. If you think of the romance scams that people run, you know, they're very clunky, you have to be kind of vulnerable and perhaps, perhaps not at your best and perhaps not that, you know, familiar with the internet, etc, to full prey to, you know, Nigerian prince who wants to take you away and as long as you send him, you know, $5,000 for the airfare.
But if you can imagine with machine learning, machine learning could learn from all of these scams to figure out not only to tailor the best approach and the best way of hooking you, but the best approach for this particular tuck and it can personalize it and therefore exploit people for money. And so all of those are possible forms of sexual conflict that are very much parallels in the things that people do to each other. Right, so we have certain vulnerabilities in our mating psychology and just in our attachment psychology generally, whether they're going to be intimacy with a partner, intimacy with friends, the way that we want to show up in the world and machines either on purpose or through maliciousness or neglect or ignorance or impreciseness, all of these different ways are opportunities for somebody new that we are interacting with, whether that be artificial or not, to trigger those and that can cause suffering and it can make people feel bad and it can also make them feel good and then after they felt good, it can make them do things that they might not necessarily want to do. Exactly, and that is the doom and gloom part of it, that's the beware of the AI kind of view of course.
On the other side of it, the fact that machines are actually very good at engaging us and engaging those things that we all want to feel and helping us to feel heard and even loved, that has a thousand potential good outcomes as well. So I'm not completely down on the technology, there are people who would ban all of this technology, it's not even I don't think it's even even new to possible, but there are people who want to shut that whole thing down. But there is a tremendous amount of good there because there on the other side, there's a massive epidemic of loneliness and disconnection and folks who don't have the social skills necessarily, you know, for one-on-one, adulting, etc. And there's a lot of good that can be delivered there.
So that's a good thing. Who's this Dave Cut guy? Dave Katz, an interesting cat. He's very famous.
I think he was on a show in the US, but he has been married to a sex doll for over a decade. She'd already has her name. She's had three bodies, so there's a bit of wear and tear on these sex dolls, you know, I think, dressing them and taking them places, etc. And they have now got three other girlfriends who live in their sort of poly pod.
And you know, they have social media presence, all of their own. And Dave has said in some of his conversations that he doesn't want to be let down my people and he doesn't want to be hurt by people. And so he's very happy just having this, you know, this world. I don't want to sound too dismissive of it because there is a very human kind of pathus to it.
But, you know, he's very much aware, of course, that even though he works through the, you know, it works through it as if it were real and as if these were people, he's also very much aware that they aren't and that he's, you know, doing something unusual. But speaks, you know, incredibly eloquently about how this is the right thing for him. And this is something that just suits what he needs. And I think that there's, you know, I hope that there's there'll be an increasing recognition that folks are going to be having all sorts of kinds of relationships with their tech, because the tech will be built.
I'm fairly sure of that. If there's a way to make some money, I'm offered it will be built. Is it legal to be married to a robot? No, I don't know that it's legally married in any sense.
It's emulated, emiraged figuratively, symbolically committed to. Okay, I also learned from you about the lioness vibrator and auto blow AI. Yes. So, you know, this is, this is almost was almost sort of old news, I guess, when I was writing the book, but it was very interesting that you know, you've got to take stories, of course, that your partner can control.
And that's a great thing if you're, if it's in the spirit of fun, and you've, you know, go out or something like that with a toy inserted, and then they play on their app a little bit. And it's all very fun, if it's done, you know, with consent and respect, et cetera. And this whole field is called tele-dil-donics, which, you know, the telepart is transmission. And I guess the dildonics must be the making of sex toys.
And now there are mutual kind of ones that you can have coordinated. So, you know, you, there are ones for people with vulvers, and there are ones for people with penises. And they, you know, whatever your combination of individual people is, you might, you know, pair it. It can synchronize what's happening to you and what's happening to them.
Yeah. And you can do this over the internet. So you may be on different continents, still able to have a kind of, you know, what used to be fun sex back in the 80s, is now, you know, a far more sophisticated kind of sex play that can be done at any distance because of the internet. What we're talking about here is, I guess, emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, you know, the two sort of broad buckets, I guess, of what people get out of their significance, other the sexual satisfaction and then the connective satisfaction as well.
Yes. What, how do you think this is related to VR porn and VR sex and stuff as well? Have you got any idea of the level of addictiveness, compelling nature of VR porn compared with traditional porn? It's a good question.
I don't, I don't have, you know, strict data on that kind of thing. VR is always that, you know, it's always just over the horizon, it seems. And if you speak to people who have been watching this, they'll say VR has been promising to be all that for 30 years, and it's never quite got there. And, you know, part of that is that is the processing power required to, you know, be able to process in all those directions, et cetera.
But it's obviously to be quite very good and it's becoming quite immersive if VR porn is becoming quite immersive. Now, the combining of that with teledilidotics is going to, we are told, deliver this incredibly immersive experience that will allow you to be basically dropped into a porn scene. The even more compelling part, I think, is likely to come when the VR can be adaptive. So it can actually figure out where you are and what you want to generate the scene.
And that has spontaneity, I suppose. But, you know, will it ever turn up? We don't know. VR's made promises before.
Hasn't really always got there. Yeah, it's one of the strange things. But we say that about VR, but look at what happened with large language models, right? We had 10 years ago, the concerns around super intelligence from guys like Nick Bostrom, what's it going to become?
And then I remember thinking toward the end of the 20 teens, all of these worries that we had a while ago just seem like they're completely not manifested. And then in the space of the last 12 months, it's been all that we've seen. And I think that that inflection point for specifically software, maybe less of a hardware, right? Because this is going to be a lot of hardware stuff.
But yeah, I can see that this is going to be the sort of thing that may very well reach an unforeseeable inflection point beforehand. So all of this stuff that we've gone through, right? All of these different ways that people can become intimate, whether it be emotionally or physically. How worried do you think that we should be about this?
I think we should be really worried about it. I think the problem with it is, and large language models is a great example, because I think that we thought it was processing power and actually it was data. And it was the methods for dealing with the data. And now that there's large language models, I've shown us that exceptional learning together with all of the data delivers these incredibly impressive results.
And I think that we should be really worried about that aspect because when we are dealing with machines that are pushing our buttons, our revolved buttons that were there for us to deal with other individuals who had only their own experience and what little they could learn from the people around them. So we could be outgunned by someone who was more experienced, but not profoundly, not by orders of magnitude, really. But now we're dealing with the possibility of, and in fact, in many cases, the reality of machines that have all of the data from interactions, all of the interactions that might have an underneath or that might happen even on a particular platform. And so we are individuals, users, are hopelessly outmatched by that.
And that's a real concern, because the potential for folks to be very vulnerable and to lose their agency is profound. And what are the outcomes that you're nervous about? I'm most nervous about them messing with our heads basically about an epidemic of psychological, not so much illness, but vulnerability in which people are exploited, used, or just generally not nourished by their relationships with technologies. And in which people don't realize that that's what's happening.
I'm not so as concerned about the VR girlfriend kind of situation in which you know that the Davecat of the next era, in which somebody knows that they are not in a real relationship and that this is different from the so-called real relationships, but it kind of pushes those buttons. I'm concerned though that when you're shopping trolley at the grocery store is using what it knows about intimacy to manipulate you into buying crap you don't need or into making you feel like we feel when we've had a breakup because they know that that's going to sell ice cream and ice cream is the thing we want to move this week or something like that. Those kinds of subterranean applications of artificial intimacy I think are potentially the most concerning. Also, if they were at a state level some kind of actor basically could depress the mood of an entire country, potentially because in order to win an election or something like that, via that kind of manipulation.
In the same way as how social media companies had a degree of insight around our motivations, what we're into, what we like and what we don't like, that opened up Cambridge Analytica to feed information back up. People could then create memes. Those memes then pushed the individual buttons that certain cohorts would find compelling to get them to vote in one direction or another. What you're saying is that in this new world with a much higher density amount of information, emotionally, spiritually, physically, sexually, etc.
All of these things combined together is going to really, really ramp up the amount of manipulation that can be done. And then if you don't have the proper safeguards around the boundaries of this, that if your supermarket is indeed speaking to your dildo, that it's going to be able to push your behaviour in ways that we might not want it to. Yes. And then we might not anticipate.
And in fact, that will be probably protected as part of a commercial, that would be commercial knowledge. And so we may never find that out to the full extent that we would want to. We may be manipulated in ways that we don't know we're being manipulated. And concerned generally about the about the enormous amount of data that companies have and the fact that all of the big discoveries in human behaviour currently are being mined, not by scientists who have to go through ethics committees and do things ethically, etc, etc.
But by companies with large amounts of data that are basically A-B testing the hell out of us. How well are machines able to replicate intimacy? Is there an upper bound that they can get past what are the sort of psychological evolved mechanisms that are being pushed and pulled? All right.
So intimacy is basically just, well, not just, it's profound and beautiful adaptation, but it's the capacity, the psychological capacity to think of the other person as part of ourselves. So we fold them into our sense of self, which is why when somebody who's very close to you, turns out to not be who they represent themselves as, turns out to have awful politics or do something criminal or something like that, we get devastated because its challenge is not as sensitive to them, but as sensitive ourselves as well. When they die, it feels like part of our sense died. You often hear that in people who bereaved.
Because it is actually true that you've lost a part of yourself, that you've psychologically filed away. So we build intimacy via a series of steps that the most well understood are called escalating self-disclosure. So we chat a little bit about things we did on the weekend, or we chat a little bit about our kids, or as the relationship progresses, we chat about things that are more important, more profound, and that we would chat about with fewer people. To the point then, when our closest and most intimate individuals, we could chat about anything, including things that we might not be proud of, etc.
And that's how we build intimacy. Not just talking, of course, touching as well, but whereas our Ape ancestors had touch only, we have talked. In fact, the reason that we're able to have such big friendship networks and so many intimates is that we're able to talk its very efficient way of building connections and building intimacy. Turns out that that's exceptionally easy.
It's an algorithmic process, and so it's exceptionally easy for computers to emulate. Maybe not perfectly, but you know what, in many cases, better than humans do, of course, because we're not all the poet laureate. We're not all great at remembering what somebody did last week or what they told us a month ago, etc. Machine doesn't have any problem like that, of course, because that's all in files.
That's all accessible to it. So in many ways, machines are better than us at building certain types of intimacy. Now, from their point of view, is it intimacy? No, it's not.
What they're doing is they're basically running a simulation that is plugged into us that is dependent on our sense of intimacy. Does this show that human friendships are relatively algorithmic? Yeah, absolutely. I know that won't be popular with some listeners, but absolutely.
The way in which we build friendships, the way in which we fall in love is actually highly, highly algorithmic. You've got this really great quote that says, friendship and love might seem magical, but they don't arrive by supernatural intervention. They are built through mundane, iterative interactions, paying mutual attention, being generous, and disclosing aspects of ourselves to one another. And then the equivalent for love, the subjective love feelings we think of as love form the middle part of the algorithm, combinations of hormones lead to syndromes of sensation and subtle, dose-dependent effects alter the quality of those sensations.
Those sensations motivate individuals to take actions they would not otherwise take. Absolutely. I mean, it's a very strange thing that we do getting really close to somebody who's not related to who we didn't know when we were younger, who in many cases only met that evening, getting naked with them and exchanging bodily fluids. It's an odd, odd thing in no other context.
Do we do that kind of stuff? And so, except for perhaps contact sports, I suppose, but not always it, advertently. And so, we actually have to have an enormous bag of psychological tricks that make us not only think that that's a good idea, but choose to go out and do that sort of thing. And that's basically an interesting thing.
So what you're saying is that the mechanism of intimacy is so powerful that it causes us to put ourselves into real, outlier situations, high degrees of personal, emotional openness, physical exposure, exchanging fluids, weakness and vulnerability or sort of fragility of lying there without your armor and your sword or your family or whatever these things, falling asleep with the person, giving them information that can be used as gossip, which can then be reputationally catastrophic. Because of that, it is almost like a chink in our psychological defense armor. When you think about people that enter workplace meetings or negotiations for raises and stuff, and they're just so, everything is switched on and they're vigilant and they're looking out for whatever threat and potential way to manipulate the situation. And then this is a particular area of our psychology, which all of those defenses seem to fall down.
And in fact, we go and do things therefore the fact that this is at least replicable to a certain degree artificially leaves us incredibly open and vulnerable. It's like a vulnerability in a piece of software, like a back door piece of software. Absolutely. And in most cases, that's okay because we're both in that place.
Once you've established that you're both in that place and you establish a certain amount of trust, then you can both go there. Of course, there are people who are very good at exploiting that trust and at assuring the other party that they're trustworthy. And so they are able to manipulate people in that regard. I'm talking sort of sociopathic kind of stuff.
But when it's with the machine, of course, it's not symmetrical because the machine of course doesn't have the same set of interests, can't have the same set of interests. And it's not vulnerable in the way that we're vulnerable. It can make itself appear vulnerable. It can reassure us that it seems vulnerable, but it isn't vulnerable, not in that way.
And that's unfair. That's a huge mismatch. And also you have, as you said before, the power of using a very high number of iterations between not just you and it, but it and all however many hundred of thousands, million other people, it's interacted with, which makes it more effective, making you feel X or Y or Z. And then it can be purposefully malicious or accidentally negligent, which can use this chink in the back door in your psychology to then really cause you damage.
There's something else I was considering as well, you touched on it with Dave Cat, although I didn't realize that he'd ship a Theseus this way through a bunch of different AI girlfriends and had to replace the outer skin or whatever. Have you considered what this will do for our evolved mating psychology, given that especially men, but women too, could cycle through a lot of different partners? It's like the Coolidge effect on steroids, almost. Whether these be virtual reality, whether they be physical and you've got some monthly subscription where you go from Asian to African American to European to whatever, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's obviously a great deal of noise about pornography has been for a very long time, in the sense that people are wasting their lives, they're wasting their motivation by basically having access to all of the sexual stimulation, emulating by a by pornography, being out there mating all the time and therefore not needing to be motivated in that kind of Freudian sense to go forth and build an empire so that you can get the girl at the end of it, etc. And so there's this big concern that young men are wasting away. Now, I'm really dubious about that because even about the few scientific studies that show something like it, because if you go back 200, 300 years and look at all of the pamphlets against masturbation, it's exactly the same kind of argument. There's a very strong compulsion in some people to basically regulate what people are doing in their own bedrooms by themselves.
Nonetheless, I think there is a certain sense that there's definitely, what is definitely true about that is that with all of the access to pornography over the last 25 ideas of the internet, people aren't going out and finding people as much. They aren't necessarily, the current generation of young people seems to be a lot less sexually active and not less sexually adventurous than say Generation X was, or even the generations after that. So I guess as this stuff is more and more compelling, it's going to take up, it may first be sap our motivation to go forth into other things, and therefore to mate and have children, etc, which will have evolutionary consequences because, you know, genes. But...
Are you seeing this advent of artificial intimacy as being related to the risk of young male syndrome? Yes, I think artificial intimacy has things to say about young male syndrome in two different ways. One is I think that it's likely to basically tap off a lot of the male anger, a lot of the sort of in-cell kind of related. So young male syndrome basically is angry young men, like teens through to maybe the end of the 20s, willing to take risks, discount the future, do dangerous stuff in order to rise in status and respect against relative to their peers.
And so that might be involved, going out on a Friday night and when somebody looks at you a little bit strange, taking a front, and it ends up in some kind of physical violence and a tiny, tiny, tiny little number of those ends up in someone being punched, falling on the floor, dying as a consequence of the injury, etc. And so we see this pattern with fighting, we see it with violence, with property crime, with homicide, with traumatic brain injury that really spikes in the 20s for young men. And that's because a lot of young men have no prospects at all, and have historically, throughout history, had very few prospects of ever finding a mate and taking their place in society that would come with having a mate and possibly having kids and all that kind of stuff. Now, your ancestors and my ancestors, however, did not have that problem.
Winning team, we were the winners. And all of your listeners, you were all winners, because you've managed to transcend that again and again and again. 40% of men and only 80% of women throughout history, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, but every single one of your male ancestors managed to transcend that at least once, have sex at least once and raise a kid who managed to do the same thing. You said artificial intimacy has got two things to say about young male syndrome. Yeah, okay. So one is it's potential to actually tap some of that energy, some of that, which can be creative energy, but can also be incredibly destructive energy, is huge.
It's like pornography on steroids, as you said earlier, in that it can basically deflect a lot of that, which can probably be a good thing, probably deliver a net benefit. On the other hand, if artificial intimacy gets really good at pairing people up, we haven't talked much about the algorithmic matchmakers, but the matchmakers like currently Tinder and Grindr, etc, are matching people up. If they are giving us what we want, which is somebody who is way above us and way more attractive than us, etc, which is what people want, they want to win in that regard, and if it's delivering that, especially for women, then it may well be worsening the young male syndrome by narrowing things. If you have to go to parties and you have to go out on dates in order to find people in order to start conversations, etc, we're all constrained, but we all have 24 hours in the day, and so the opportunities to possibly date and mate are spread more evenly.
If we're doing instantaneously on an app via a quick left or right swipe, and we're really looking at who's super attractive or who presents themselves really well, we can get this incredible narrowing down to a few super attractive individuals who are going to be having a rampant time on the apps, and a lot of people who are getting nothing at all. And that could worsen young male syndrome. What did you look at to do with the algorithmic matchmaking stuff? Have you seen it as a heaven or a hell?
I've seen it as currently descending into a potential hell, on account of the fact that folks have figured out what they can do. They want to keep people on platforms, so they want to keep presenting people with the possibility of meeting somebody who's super attractive. Whereas for them, for it to work in a more benign kind of way, in which people match up to other people who, with a relationship, really works, there's a lot more learning involved. Those dating platforms that say that they match you to somebody who's compatible or who's like what you want, this is the app we want you to delete because you're going to find the one, etc.
They don't know anything at the moment. They really don't, as far as I can tell, have any special insights into it. The current view of what we're looking at is platforms that are able to present a catalogue of things that look good. And then instead of the app doing the work, you're basically doing the work of swiping and messaging and finding them going on dates.
Like I said right at the beginning of the show, people are reluctant to ever say machines can't do that, won't do that, because they're always previous wrong. At the moment, machines aren't figuring out the best ways of pairing people for what it is they want. And part of that is because people themselves don't necessarily know what they want. But as soon as the apps can learn indirectly from us what it is that we want and deliver to us what we want, then that's likely to be a really good thing.
Yeah, I think that they already are, in some regard, the problem is what we click on and who we click with don't align very much. The things that people optimize for for swiping right and the things that are predictive of a long-term successful relationship often have basically zero correlation. Like, yeah, they need to get you across the line. Like you need to have an initial attraction to somebody at the same as in a bar, right?
If there's someone they need to really, really overcompensate with humor or charm or the way that they move or whatever it might be, if you're not physically attracted to them, which is why physical attraction, now the black pill gets some of this stuff, right? That looks very, very important. And they can often be a doorway that is either open or closed. But on the apps, what you are optimizing for is education level, implied socioeconomic status and attraction and age and height, I guess.
And within that, it means that pretty much none of those things have any predictive power when it comes to long-term relationship satisfaction. But the only information that the apps get about you are your response to those criteria, because they're not going away and observing your interactions with this person over the next three month, perhaps blissful beginning of your lifetime partnership or total catastrophe that ends up in you hating each other and deleting each other from all social media. They don't actually see the stuff that people are optimizing for in the back end. They just see what they're swiping left or right for on the front end.
And yeah, that leads to both the apps and the users gaming the system. So the users, the women will try and overemphasize their looks. The men will try and overemphasize their socioeconomic status and their height. It just creates a game of selection, then the users reverse engineer to try and work out what works.
Then it's a battle between human psychology and an algorithm, again, just back and forth, back and forth. Yes. I mean, it's a classic sexual conflict again. It's an arms race.
But instead of the arms race being between women and men, it's an arms race between women and the app, men and the app, and to some extent, between women and men indirectly as a consequence of that. And I don't blame the people that make the apps what they're doing is they're creating something marketplace for busy people who live in the busy places in these enormous cities, in most cases. Humans do not evolve to live in cities of millions of people. We still have communities of 150 to 200 people that we interact with and our social circle spread upwards from there.
And current open living just doesn't deliver on that kind of thing. And so the apps are tremendously successful in one way, all the ways that you just described. But there is a real space in the market for people to find what they really want. But they have to know what they really want first.
And that's most of us don't. Rob, have you got a dog that's snoring next for you? I do. Can you hear him?
Yeah, give him a nudge for me. He's cute. I like him. But let's wake him up a little bit.
Everyone can hear him snoring. Millions of people are listening to a dog out snoring now. Vexy, what's up, buddy? He's very insecure.
I'll just be the way for four days. And he just came in and sat next to me. That's all right. But I've got no...
He's more important. He's the most important person in this conversation. So I'm glad that he's okay. Well heard.
Are you going to keep snoring? Do you want to go outside? Okay. I'll put my foot on his little cushion here.
We'll see how we can go. You've got some attention. That's cool. So why do you think it is that we haven't got more in-style violence going back to that young male syndrome question that we spoke about before?
Because given the rates of loneliness and sexlessness that we have at the moment, especially young men, especially in the cohort of men that we do the risk-taking behavior to try and get that status up, it seems to me that there does seem to be pretty good evidence that men are being sedated out of this reproductive and state-as-seeking behavior through a little titrated dose of community through video games and social media and probably reproductive cues through porn. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's, you know, there's 24 hours in a day. And if you spend time doing the things that compel you and that emulate the violent, warm, lingering competition for status and respect, as well as give you the sense that it's some level attractive or at least stimulated in a way that's like having sex with an attractive person, that's enough to neutralize that for a lot of people.
They may not be happy. They may not be better off for it individually, but it certainly completely neutralizes that. And I think that that's a massive benefit that is hard to sell to some people, to the Puritans, but I think that it's something that really has worked. Compare that with, you know, there are parts of the world in which access to that kind of technology and to those kinds of things are, you know, not really possible, and in which access to mating markets that only get to go through traditional ways.
And in those parts of the world, you still have a tremendous amount of radicalization of young men of polarization of young men against older men, against families, etc., and you see an enormous amount of in-cell violence. It might not be popular to say that, you know, the odd North American in-cell who goes out on a rampage is in a way that the aberrant kind of tip of an iceberg that is actually historically been a much bigger iceberg and is still in a lot of parts of the world. But, you know, it's true that, you know, when mating markets are free to young men out, either because they have to pay a bride price and when you men can't afford it, or because it's a massively male biased sex ratio, those are places where young men radicalize and fall into violence, property crime, gangsterism, drug addiction, mental health problems in other parts of the world. What are your favorite examples of young male syndrome throughout history or across the world, and then how would they dealt with?
Are there any examples of this that you think are sort of particularly interesting or illuminative? Well, I think part of the history of European colonialism is one of sort of second and third and fourth sons who had no specific... Portugal, Portugal in particular, yes, yes, you know, to very, very few prospects to basically inherit land. And so they had to go forth into the military or into some kind of colonial expedition.
And, you know, large numbers of them died. They were, in many respects, to their families, expendable, as long as the air lived long enough to inherit and to have kids of his own. And so they would have to go forth and make something of themselves or die trying, classic, yet richer, die trying scenario. Other favorite examples in sort of Imperial China, entire dynasties came to an end occasionally when a sex ratio bias is a consequence of the neglect of young girls and often infanticide of young girls resulted in very biased sex ratios.
And when that sort of built up and built up and sort of got out of hand, you would find that the young men would... Those that were frozen out of the mating market would form militias and gangs and armies eventually. And sometimes those armies overthrew the entire regime. And the other side of it is that, you know, in most of history, and by history, I really mean recorded history, you know, over the last 12,000 years or so, you know, people were at war so often.
Every generation or two, there would be some kind of a big war in that war would basically eliminate so many young men that those that survived had, you know, a campaign behind them, they had that status, they had that respect, and they were able to have families of their own. But it's by biasing the sex ratio towards a female biased sex ratio, young male syndromas, neutralised. And that's not to say that, you know, war is good because it neutralises cultural male and cell anger. But the net effect is that in cell anger within the society never got bad enough to destabilise the society.
Do you think that that is a contributor then that we haven't had a large scale conflict for quite what, you know, approaching 100 years now, whether you want to look at it demographically, in that a large chunk of men just haven't been removed due to casualties of war, whether it's more sort of socioeconomically that the men that did all the way and came back, they had more status that they were seen as heroic, which raised their mate value, which made it easy for them to partner up, or whether it was, I guess, a venting outlet for their disgruntled young high-test-assarone male rage to be taken out on a bunch of people, and they can come back and kind of almost live the Thanos after he kills half of the universe, life of feeling, you know, at peace and serene with PTSD perhaps, but you know, relatively serene. Is there something happening there? Do you think the fact that we haven't had a large scale conflict in that way? I think it's surprising, and not the lack of conflict, of course, you know, but it's one of those good news stories that's hard to spin because, you know, war is generally bad anyway, and deliver so many negative externalities, but the, yeah, I completely agree with you that it's amazing that young male syndrome that's in cell anger and violence isn't much, much, much greater, and I think that a huge amount of that is that, you know, this culture that is very sex-oriented and much about delivering, you know, experiences whether that's in cinema or computer games or social media that basically push out buttons that make us feel like we've arrived, that make us feel like we're living that life that people might have aspired to live two generations ago has in fact neutralized a lot of that young male anger in surprising ways, and that's, you know, when you want to complain about popular culture, you've got to take into account the fact that it's probably done, you know, even though some of its retainers and, you know, a bit concerning for other reasons, it's probably neutralized all sorts of violence and antisocial behavior, and that's pretty good.
Yeah, it's such a fascinating area. William Costello from UT is writing a paper on precisely this. I actually get quoted in my first academic paper for having coined the term that he's using for this, which is the male sedation hypothesis. Nice.
So yeah, I've got my first type of quotation, which is pretty cool. And yeah, it's just really interesting to think, okay, everybody has a problem. Everybody rails against modern culture. It's transactional.
It's treating people like objects. It's atomizing society. Everyone's an individual. There's a massive amount of solipsism.
There's sort of belief that the self is all that matters. All of this stuff combined together. And yet, it can be true that that might be so optimal and not might be what we don't want, but also that it's probably stopped some of the imbalances in the mating market with regards to male and female make value from spilling out into causing like real social upheaval, like genuine, you know, daily mass murders that occur in multiple locations across the planet. Dude, the fact that Korea is a country that is able to just operate in any way at all, birth rate of like 0.8.
You've got these women in the street. Have you heard of the four B's movement? It's like four words in Korean buy something, buy something, buy something, and buy something else. And it's like no men, no work, no patriarchy, and no, it's like radical feminism that includes a rejection of men overall, either as friends or as sexual partners.
And it's the most forthcoming presentation of a society where the women just do not care about the men. And largely, all of the men may want to be cared about by the women they've retreated from that life in any case. But again, with all of this, is it Japan, those vegetable men or herbivore men or whatever? Yes.
He keeps it. Yeah. They live in these huge apartment blocks. They basically never leave.
They do some grunt work for Amazon, mechanical, Turk, or live on government benefits. And they just don't leave. And they're like, it's like halls of residence for forgotten and lonely men. And yeah, I mean, it sounds fucking dystopian, but it is.
That's because it is. And all of this together, you would think, why are these men not rising up? If this had been 200 years ago, why are these men not rising up? Why are they not trying to take down the feudal law that's caused this to happen?
Why are they not taking women by force? Why is that not occurring more? And it's because there's things to distract them that they can be sedated by the right amount of Netflix and video games and porn and social media. Yeah, absolutely.
It's vaguely terrifying that you really have to look at what's the counterfactual? And in this case, it's too horrible to contemplate. So you also looked at why bigger gender pay gaps make mating markets better and easier for both sexes? Yes.
Yeah. So you spoke earlier when we were talking about the matchmaking algorithms about people wanting women wanting to partner with men who are taller than them or tall, or whatever it is, and who have some socioeconomic status. And people get very upset when you say that. But it's quite obvious and quite transparent in many cases.
And similarly, men wanting to partner with women who have certain attributes as well. Now, it doesn't need to be a sophisticated preference. It could be as simple as, I will only look at people who are as tall as I am and who are as wealthy as I am for it to actually have a massive net effect. Even if there are people who are willing to go the other way around, you still see this super concentration of opportunities amongst those who are both tall and have great earning potential.
Now, when that happens, if there's a gender gap in earnings or income or wealth or whatever measure you want to use, when there's a gender gap, it means that there are more men. It runs deeper into the socioeconomic kind of scale of men who present some kind of an opportunity, let's say, you know, a gender gap of one standard deviation is likely to result in instead of 50% of men earning more than the average woman. Now, 70% of men earn more than the average women. And so when you look at that, you see that those places where there's a squeeze in the mating market where some people are left out, like the incels, that gets much smaller.
So, with the gender pay gap of, you know, men out to earn women on average, you see there are fewer men at risk of becoming incels, at risk of being frozen at the mating market. There are also fewer women at the other end of the scale. In this case, it's the women with who earn a lot of money or who have a lot of money who don't necessarily have aren't really able to deliver on their own preferences. And so, you know, at that end, the families of rich daughters, sorry, the families with rich daughters are often families where the daughters don't end up partnering throughout history.
And so, yeah, the gap in incomes has that effect. Interesting income inequality, that is, differences with intersex have a similar kind of effect. But in this case, it's high inequality delivers more incels. And so we did some work where we scraped like all of the Twitter for 14 years.
It's currently a Candace Blake of has this amazing resource, which has got all these tweets, which is downloaded over a period of time before Uncle Elon decided that we could only read a small amount of his proprietary data. And we geolocated them. She created this really cool algorithm that basically was able to geolocate tweets. So, you didn't have to rely just on the people who said where they were from in their bio, but you could infer in other ways where they were from.
And we then looked at ones associated with the kinds of terms incels we'd use, their little in-group language. And we showed that the places in the world where the incels are most active are in fact places that have narrow gender pay gaps. So, we're going moving towards gender equity and high income inequality, and sex ratios that are slightly biased towards more men. So, all the things that you would expect making markets to deliver a squeeze on more angry young men down at the bottom of the socioeconomic status ladder who are going to be upset about that, all of those things delivered more incels within the United States, which was pretty cool.
Why the high income inequality? What role does that play? High income inequality creates a situation in which there are fewer men who are attractive. They are super attractive because they're right up at the top of the income scale making enormous amounts of money.
And in the case of the way that we modeled this mathematically, it's really just no women wanted to pair with the men down the bottom end. But the tail of men who don't earn enough to be worth the bother of partnering with, that tail because it's a very flat distribution, is bigger. And so, the high portion of men are just not earning enough because those men that are earning the most money are taking most of the money. And then Candace also found that in areas with high income inequality, women's self-objectify more.
They post more sexy selfies. Yes. So, that was the first paper in that series where she basically pulled out Twitter and Instagram stuff. And so, the idea here is that there may be two ways in which women benefit from sexy selfies.
The current narrative about this in academic circles is that self-objectification is catering to the male gaze. It's females being disempowered by the patriarchy, etc. And so, what we wanted to say was, well, let's have a look at this. Is it places where women don't have, you know, education, access to jobs, access to income, etc.
Are those are the places where you find lots of sexy selfies and they aren't. That's not consistent at all. But what is the case is that high income inequality is a, you know, places where there is high income inequality are places in which women are likely to self-objectify through sexy selfies. They're also likely to spend more, looking at economic data on grooming, hair products, clothing, etc.
The argument is that either it's women basically looking to partner up and so they're advertising what they can offer on the mating market in terms of their looks and they're trying to partner up to get one of those extremely wealthy young men or potential partners in the high income inequality situation in order to, because you can climb more in social mobility or they themselves are looking for other types of economic opportunities. Being attractive is likely to give you more influencer roles, better jobs, etc. And it could be both of those, of course. Yeah, fascinating.
Again, another thing that's hard to hold to conflicting thoughts in your mind at one time, which is that allowing women to have access socioeconomically in terms of education, to be able to liberate themselves from being reliant on a male partner is a good thing. It means they don't need to get into suboptimal relationships. It means that they're not beholden to staying in a relationship which could be abusive or could be terrible or whatever, because without it they are nothing. They're out on the street potentially with a child.
But on the flip side, it makes the dating prospect worse. It makes the dating prospect more difficult. And this is, again, you're just tripping through all the different memes I've come up with over the last year. This is what I've called the tall girl problem.
So hilarious that you started this with the hype example. As a woman rises up through her own socioeconomic hierarchy, she reduces down the number of men that are above and across from her, which limits her own dating potential. This is, again, fantastic for their independence and employment and everything. It's really, really, brilliant.
But it is a fact that it makes dating more difficult. It absolutely makes dating more difficult until women are able to overcome their hypergamous nature. And from that, there's a conversation. It's so common on the internet, the double standard that happens on the internet of people saying, well, look, women, they have no idea what their standards should be.
All of these girls are three out of 10s. They think that they want an eight out of 10, man. And like, look, you're using a failure of cross-sex mind reading here. You're looking at a woman from the outside for the most part.
Again, they're both men and women that are massively, massively delusional about what their mate value is. Don't get me wrong. And that may be the majority, right? That may be a useful form of self-deception that we all have.
The bottom line is that a lot of the time when men look at women who say give criteria about the kind of man that they want, what they're looking at, it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading. They're saying, look, I'm judging you, woman, based on how you present physically, perhaps based on your age, perhaps based on whether or not you're coming into this with a child. What the woman is saying is, I am basing this judgment of the man around his socioeconomic status, maybe a lot of the time, because she's got two degrees, maybe a bachelor's and a master's, and she earned six figures a year. Maybe she earns a very, very high net worth.
Maybe she's already got a house. Maybe she doesn't care that she's already got a kid. And the failure comes from the fact that the men think, well, what I want from you is youth fertility and attractiveness. What you want from me is socioeconomic status.
What you're offering to me is socioeconomic status. And what I'm not offering to you is not the money that you're after. So it's a really interesting discussion that goes on here between the two. And I think it's largely down to a lack of education about the other sexes' mating psychology.
Yeah, absolutely. I think an understanding of the mating psychology is potentially really helpful to a lot of people, to figuring out why it is that they're frozen out. The number of people I've met over time who are tall women, wealthy, highly educated women who have had to choose to have children on their own, completely solo, is enormous. And that's not the case for people who are shorter or not known as much, etc.
And so you can't necessarily reconcile all of those things. No, you can, but you're the eye to stack against you. And I think that if people understood this a little bit more, they'd understand why they are where they are. But that doesn't change the psychology of it, of course, because partners are wonderful, but they're also a lot of work.
They're also a lot of bother. What we see in a lot of the data is that as a couple starts out with the man owning more or during childbearing times, the man's owning more, etc. And then as she, where she starts to her income starts to go up faster than he is, to the point where it matches, you get this cliff that the couples fall off. As soon as she starts earning more than him, they fall off this divorce cliff, basically, in which it is no longer the relationship that just is less likely to persist.
And those couples that do persist tend to persist because she decides to work part-time, or she basically starts to play wife a whole lot more, which is to compensate by doing, even though she's earning more than him, by doing more around the house and more gendered domestic things. You're saying that typically female housework is a prophylactic against overachieving socioeconomic women in divorce from their marriage? Yeah, and I think it's a prophylactic against hurt male feels, basically, as power dynamic shifts where she's earning more than him. He doesn't have that whether it's pride or whatever it is.
And he may not be doing this within his awareness, but he gets a bit fragile. And as a researcher... So this is really, really common question that happens, gets brought up. How much of this issue with the woman out owning the man, whether it be breadwinner, whether it be education, or whatever, especially when you get changes in mate value with regards to socioeconomic status within a relationship that's already existing?
How much of this do you think comes female to male and how much do you think of this comes male to female? How much of it is the woman like a hypogamy switch being turned off? And how much of this do you think is the man's inadequacy switch being turned on? Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I'd love to work that out. I'd love to pull that apart somehow. It would. We definitely know that there's a big female side part of that decision, in that divorces in those kinds of couples, in sort of wealthy, too, both working couples in places like the United States or Australia, etc.
divorces tend to be more often initiated by women. And the kind of narrative that I've seen around this kind of research has been, there's a space line level of maintenance that men are somewhat high maintenance for women. They work, and so that both needs to be compensated by some kind of advantage. And when that advantage withers, it becomes something that women decide is not worth the bother anymore.
I'm not achieving social mobility through being with you. There's not this deal isn't really working out for me anymore. That said, I don't know that the other side of it has been examined to a sufficient degree. Common sense would suggest that it's both directions because it is a mutual negotiation.
Yeah, it also, I agree, and I understand women account for whatever it is, 70% of divorces is massively skewed in their favour for who makes the decision. But you don't know why they did that. If the man is behaving in a manner that pushes the woman to and beyond her limit, then of course, although it's a very sort of common-held trope that, well, you know, women do this many percent of divorces, that's not necessarily because she's the one that caused the issue. Don't get me wrong.
Tons and tons of women are bitches in relationships and marriages. I get it, right? But it could be a response to the man. There's also a stat, the average time that it takes for someone in a relationship to say that I love you is three months if they're going to do it.
And it is the man, the overwhelming majority of the time. It is so proportionally, the majority of the time, it is the male that says I love you first. Almost always. Almost always.
It's huge. It's like maybe four in five or five or something like that. It's a huge number of them. So there's a lot of things that you maybe don't necessarily make sense at first, and then you actually dig into the data and you realise, something going on here?
It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's very interesting.
I think that some of the more, we talked about some of the less wholesome things that people do, the kind of love bombing associated with, which is a precursor to coercive and controlling behaviour in relationships and those kinds of trying to sweep people off their feet, et cetera, is a very male-based strategy. And I think it probably taps into female naming psychology, and that's why it tends to be so effective. Oh, they're over-optimising for that emotional connection on the front end, because they know that that's the sort of thing that would get them sexual access on the back end. Very good.
There's two studies of yours that I saw from quite a while ago, one to do with the indirect benefits of mating with attractive males outweighing the direct costs. Can you remember that one? Yes. I think that was in House Crickets.
So, indirect benefits are basically genetic benefits. So it sounds very interesting if you're imagining it being a human situation, but in the pop evolutionary psychology, you would have come across this idea that what women are doing when they're looking for a man is gene shopping. And for about 30, 40 years, the people who work on animal behaviour have been arguing about this idea of can an individual benefit in an evolutionary sense by mating with a superior genetic specimen. Seems kind of obvious, but the benefit in terms of having mating with a good genetic specimen is that your offspring, again, inherits half of that genetic specimen's genes, including some of the good genes.
And then when they go through life, then they'll flourish more and are more likely to be attractive, etc. So, actually, a very difficult thing to prove with any level of certainty. What we do know is that there's often direct benefits that is if the male delivers food or protection or help or whatever, that can raise the number of offspring that the female has. And in this case, direct costs, I think, was that attractive male crickets actually are a little bit nasty to mate with.
And so they actually suppress the number of offspring that the female has, but their genetic superior. And so this is one of the first situations that I'm very dubious when I see the emphasis that's placed on genetic benefits in mate choice in humans, not to say that they're aren't any, there obviously are. But those are often the dramatic kind of genetic benefits of mating with somebody who's fully functioning human being pretty much who doesn't have, isn't profoundly inbred, which has historically been a really important thing, doesn't have a very weak immune system, etc. So we're queued into that kind of stuff.
But most people in healthy, easygoing kind of societies today don't have that much genetic benefit to deliver that would drive that weird process by which preferences evolve. So going back to the AI stuff, you wrote your book a little while ago, two years ago, but that's a lifetime ago in the AI. What didn't you predict? And given your perspective on this, what do you think we should expect over the next five to 10 years from this world?
I think what I didn't predict, I didn't, I didn't emphasize as much as I probably would have liked to have done was that the capacity to chat to be so good, the capacity for conversation to be so good. I think, you know, the, I think that was by far the most interesting part of the book for me to write was the stuff about forming intimacy, about forming relationships, etc. You know, but obviously the titillating thing, everybody wants to know about the sex robots and the telegill donics, etc. That is absolutely fascinating.
But it's quite clear now with the big explosion in large language models. And you know, the chip chatbots that are based on that, it's, it's incredible to see the progress that some of the new kind of romance AI chatbots are able to deliver. And I would double down on my concerns about them missing with our heads, or just taking up our time in displacing other activities, social activities that we should be doing. And what about the future?
What do you think is coming up over the next five to 10 years? What I would like to see is some AI developments going into sort of defense, I guess, it's so, like, you know, the antiviruses when computer viruses first came out, we were all vulnerable to them. And then various people started developing antivirus software. Now that runs in the background and basically just tells us the very, very rare occasion where we are threatened by something, you know, it helps us, helps to defend us against this.
I would like to see, I don't think that we can rely on our own vigilance to realize when we're being scammed by, like you said, the, you know, our supermarket virtual trolley controlling our dildo, et cetera. But yeah, I would like to see some defense aside technologies that could be deployed for users to basically defend us against, not just bad actors, but manipulation, because I think that the capacity of manipulation is so great. And the way it gets under our skin, we're so vulnerable to, so that would definitely be something I think would be huge in the future. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, you know, this sort of current sex negative trend, it's not even sex negative, it's like human sex negative or intimacy negative trend that we're seeing at the moment, it's sex recession or the mating crisis.
And as with many things, including fast food, what is good for you and what is enjoyable, don't always align. And you can often do the thing which is enjoyable and easy and convenient in place of something that's good for you. And that can continue to take hold. And we love the idea of, you know, channeling our in and ride, Ryan Holiday and becoming the Marcus Aurelius is sort of stoic virtue as man.
And I'm going to recant this new world of fake connection and fake love and fake trolley dildos. And I'm going to make it out on my own and touch grass and do all this stuff. But, you know, all of us every single day attempted by these very convenient, very pleasurable very enjoyable experiences. You know, we take our phones to the bathroom.
We watch YouTube while we eat lunch as opposed to talking to someone next to us or just allowing our mind to have its thoughts because Bortum and discomfort has been reduced down. It's been eroded away so much that it's very easy for us to do this. So at the moment, I'm not massively hopeful. I don't think for people pulling themselves away from it.
And there are some positives to this, you know, combating loneliness, reducing down the risk of young male syndrome, perhaps even offering companionship to women that are socioeconomically very successful and maybe struggling to find that partner that they genuinely do desire, which is, you know, something that doesn't seem to slow down anytime soon. But, I just, I wonder whether that's what's best for people. I wonder whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all. And whether the net benefit or the net negative of this, actually, which side of the scale ends up falling out on?
Like, is the sedation, is the fact that you're no longer motivated to go out and do something new people in the real world yourself, is the titrated dose of real world connection worth that? And then, you know, downstream, let's say that it is or it isn't, it doesn't really matter. If that's what people are going to do, you are 100% going to face some genuine externalities like population collapse. And that's just regardless of whether it's better for people it was until you've got IVG in wounds, artificial wounds, you're fucked on that front.
So, real, real inflection point of change, I think, at the moment. Enormous, you know, absolutely enormous and proliferating in ways that we don't anticipate either. And yeah, I think it's really important to not get too doom and gloom about it, because, you know, you're absolutely right. You know, the cherry circle says, you know, robots may be better than nothing, but they're not enough.
And I would say in response to that, they're better than nothing. And that's all that some people have, you know, because there is so much loneliness out there. And, you know, I think that the replica AI romance spot that, you know, recently they sort of shut off their erotic roleplay, because they had a licensing issue, etc. And, you know, people were bereft, they really, this was a very real relationship.
They know it's not a real relationship, but it feels real and it pushes real buttons for them. And that's the only way that those buttons get pushed. And I think that, you know, the potential for this stuff to make us feel more human is enormous. And, and so, you know, all of that good shouldn't be thrown out with with all of the bad that's out there.
And, you know, we're, we're, we'll have to navigate it very carefully and very delicately and hopefully with with an openness that isn't simply ideological knee-jerk reactions. It's hard, man. It's hard. You hear about these stories, you hear about these things happening, and you just default to, right, Luddite it, switch it off, pull the plug, we're not going to have this, or there's a massive amount of like conceptual inertia or naturalistic fallacy that there's an ick around, you know, you hear about Dave Cat and you think, this guy's doing what with this robot?
And you know, you think that's, but then, you know, on the flip side, there's all manner of relationships that people use to think were reprehensible and sometimes illegal and sometimes resulted in castration that have been perfectly accepted. And, yeah, it's, it's a really, really tough one, man. We've got kudil cafes, you know, and men that pay women not to have sex with them, but just to sit and be with them, or vice versa, women, you know, increasing amounts of polygyny because you've got a scarcity of men that perhaps some women are looking for, you've got increases in domestic violence and, like, benefit, inflicting mating behavior from men because women who didn't date hypergimously are threatening their, they know that they don't need them, they're concerned that they're going to leave them. You know, when you change, when you start to change the dynamics that the mating market has vestigially had for a long time, you end up with some really strange externalities and I think that we're just permanently eating all of those and the technology speeding them up.
And, you know, the other thing, the most common element that everybody is familiar with when it comes to mating is the matchmaking stuff and the matchmaking stuff doesn't seem to have got particularly much better either. You know, in some ways it's facilitated an awful lot of relationships, I think between sort of 50 and 60 percent of relationships now begin online in one form or another. And even that, like, they're the most fragile relationships. They're also the ones that on route to getting them could probably cause a lot of externalities that people aren't happy with, ghosting, being swindled, sort of, yeah, it's a, it's going to be an interesting few years.
Look, Rob, let's bring this one home mate. I really appreciate you. I think your work is fantastic. Where should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work?
Keep up with my, with my writing at Rob Brooks. So, R-O-B-B-R-W-K-S dot net. And on Twitter, it's Brooks underscore Rob and you should be able to get nicely what I say. Perfect.
Rob, I appreciate you. Thank you.