Episode 10 - To Win a Woman You Must First Become Gay

Welcome back to The Handsome Hour. As always, I'm Wes Myers. I'm joined today by Cody Zervas and Stoney Grunow. And on this episode, we cover some posts from the Internet. We hit the discourse.

We talk about throwing temper tantrums over text when, a woman rejects you and is sleeping with another man. We talked about how to be a bad boy, a real bad boy that all the women want. All the girls love a bad boy. And, we also talked about some dating app strategies involving pretending to be gay. It turns out for some people that being gay is the best way to attract women.

And

We're gonna be giving away a $10,000 cash prize if you can catch the special keyword that happens at some point in the podcast. Pay careful attention for that.

Yes. Great show. We don't talk about Star Wars this time. There's an absolute moratorium on talking about Star Wars on The Handsome Hour from now on, so don't worry about that. If you hated the last 10 episodes, then you will definitely find this to be a top 10 episode.

So we're we're we're remote now. This is a remote podcast. Stoney is in his basement in Williamsburg. If you need the address, you can, get to me offline. I'm in my home in New York.

Cody has relocated to a, a compound in Colorado where he has drone netting.

Deep in the mountains.

And he's deep in the mountains. He's doing sort of an Art Bell thing. I think he's gonna recording deep from under the, under the surface of the Mojave Desert here soon.

Pirate radio, baby.

In his bunker, yeah. That's the other thing that We were actually discussing this before the show. Backup plan for, The Handsome Hour is to get We're going to purchase in a decommissioned oil platform somewhere in the Gulf Of America and, we're going to be recording twenty four seven on shortwave radio, and we're gonna have repeaters set up around the country and sort of, you know, you can you can come in, if you're a trucker or if you're like a doomsday prepper, can you can tell us about your dating challenges and tell us about the different dehydrated foods you have, stored in your buffer.

Yeah. Have to imagine that, like, because normally pirate radio, you're on the run from the government, but I have to imagine in this case that it's not the government we're on the run from, it's it's probably just like the hose. Yeah. Right? Like, where our lives are in danger.

It's the women we've alienated. I got, released an episode a couple weeks ago,

or And not from the podcast, it's just by, like, just in our own dating lives.

Yeah, well, mostly by association with Cody. There'll be, probably angry women, but, you know, we're

It's true.

If you're a regular listener, if you're one of our 14 regular listeners, we love you, thank you. We're not gonna talk about Star Wars anymore ever on the show. That wasn't on purpose, and, you know, there was sort of a continuity there where if you finish one episode and then, like, immediately started the next episode, there was, like, thirty uninterrupted minutes of Star Wars conversation. But luckily, we've covered that ground well, so we never have to talk about it again. Do you guys just wanna jump into the posts?

Sure. Yeah, let's do it. Cool.

Okay. This is a conversation between a couple of folks who had just gone on a date. He's the man, our man here is reaching out to confirm the second date. He says, Hey, Lauren, excited for tonight. Still good for 8PM at Ted's?

Question mark. Lauren writes, Hey, Jeff, I am actually not good for tonight. I had a lovely time these last few dates getting to know you. I really appreciate the book you bought me on our second date. So I guess this is not their second date, it's like their third or fourth or fifth date.

This is hard to say, but I've been seeing someone else that I want to explore where that goes. You are a great guy and I am probably making a mistake. He replies, I'm sending you a Venmo request for the $250 for dinner that you owe me. You're trash. She says, check your Venmo, I sent you back the 250.

I hope that helps. Like I said, you're an amazing guy who deserves the perfect girl. I still feel like we would have worked together. We felt more like the right people just connecting at the wrong time. And then the, the commenter on this post writes, This was tough to read.

The guy is a huge beta simp, spending $250 on dinner dates, buying her a book and then throwing a temper tantrum via text. Fellas, what do we think?

There's so many things to say here. I mean, first

of

all, this guy is, I think, they're both right and wrong, right, as usual. So first of all, would say, you know, clearly he probably invested like too much too fast. You probably shouldn't be buying anybody a book or $250 dinner that early into knowing them. I think that the commenter It's like the letter of what he's saying is right, but the spirit is wrong or something. You know, I would never, I would not denigrate somebody for being a beta Simba.

I think that that discourse is also wrong, and like, it's it's factually right, but like, spiritually wrong or something like that, in the sense that it is true that there are a lot of women and men. There are lot of people out there who will try to take advantage of you, and you have to sort of be able to identify them and steel yourself against them. And if you are a quote unquote beta simp, like you will be taken advantage of by a lot of girls, but most sort of PUA red pill guys answer to that is to, right, become this sort of cynical player. And I think that's also wrong, right? It's like the correct stance is to like believe in romance and love, and be able to quickly identify the people who also believe in that, and then the ones that don't, and then very quickly weed out the ones that don't.

So you do have to, like, have a worldliness to you, and then to to follow a procedure for, like, exploring things with the right people as accurately and as fast as possible. So like probably taking girls out to, you know, expensive dinners is probably not the best way to do that. So yes, this this guy probably had does have is like miscalibrated in some ways, but I don't think he's miscalibrated in his Like, he's naive, but the answer is not to become bitter. Right? Like, there's something in the middle.

You can be you can be not naive, but still genuinely pursuing like, a warm and loving relationship.

Yeah, I think that honestly, if you're using the words beta simp unironically in the year 2026, you've lost the thread a little bit. And it's not because there's not, like, some, like, grain of truth to it, but the what you're supposed to be doing is giving helpful feedback, right? Like, you just label someone a beta simp, it's just like you're saying something about who they are, and it's like, this stuff happens. Like, I don't really I I think the thing that bothers me most about the entire exchange, okay, look, if you're going to reject me, just reject me. Don't be like, don't be trying to hedge it with like, I think you're a great guy and we just had the wrong timing.

Like, don't tell me if it's the wrong timing if you're picking someone else up, if you're picking someone else over me. You can't you can't say, I'm I'm just I'm going to start seeing someone else instead of you. Our timing is just wrong. It's like, well, clearly the timing is not wrong because you're ready to be in some kind of relationship. It's just not with me, and that's okay.

But like, don't also insult me with this, like, fake politeness, you know, you can be polite, but don't don't blow smoke at my ass and say that the timing is the issue, and what, you know, really what I would want is some kind of feedback, and you're just usually not gonna get that. Like, also, this is a part of dating, like, you spend money on women, and these people are in New York City,

and so 200 and dollars First of all, I just don't I don't believe, like, don't spend money. I I would not spend $200, $100 on I don't believe in the you spend money on women. Like, that just has to be the norm.

I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in here with

a couple of thoughts.

One of the things that struck me was how she used the word nice several times, and I feel like she has two brains going on at the same time, and she recognizes that this guy is possibly the better long term fit, the better on paper man, but she's going with another man who's possibly not as nice, possibly not as good on paper, but is giving her the emotional drive that she's looking for. So I I think she's revealing something about herself, and I think she's struggling with it. I don't have any judgment towards her either way. What I also feel about him is that he strikes me, and this is very, very, you know, microcosm input, but he strikes me as someone who's trying to play by the rules, and he's getting angry and bitter because the rules are not working out as they're supposed to. And I don't know what the solution is, though I totally agree with Cody.

And actually, when when you sent this, Wes, I was thinking, what does one do in these situations where where one wants to be chivalrous, but at the same time, do you just go to the woman and I haven't done this? Do you say, Hey, do you believe men and women are equal? And if they say yes, you say, Great, we're splitting it. Throw a little bit of the change of society.

After the fact, you mean?

Even when the bill lands, you know? When the check hits the table, that would be an interesting moment to really change the dynamic of the conversation. It certainly wouldn't have hurt him because it ended up nothing happened for this guy. So so why not change the dynamic? Because there is this resource going out with it shouldn't be an expectation, but it is, that something's gonna come back.

And I don't think the resources should be going out.

I have no problem buying my girlfriend dinner. Yeah. I'm not gonna buy dinner for some random girl until we've right? Until I care about her, until we're committed to each other, etcetera, etcetera. No, I agree.

I disagree with both of

you. Really?

Yeah. I think that if you're the man, you pay the check. I think that maybe don't take her to somewhere where dinner costs $250. That's one way to

do Yeah, a little bit of an expenditure seems

that expectation of, if you're the man, then you should pick up the check, is a historical expectation. And the question is, why are we keeping that expectation and not keeping other expectations?

Well, keeping that expectation presumably because you want to see her again. If you don't want to see her again, then don't be No, paying for

But I mean, you know, there's no expectation committee that's deciding this, but what expectations have fallen by the wayside in the last fifty years, and what expectations haven't? Has that expectation not fallen by the wayside? And why I

mean, surprised that women are looking at the bargain of feminism and that they're taking all of the benefits and they're issuing none of the none of the drawbacks?

Schrodinger's feminism, I believe, is what that's called. For our listeners who don't know, and they may not even know Schrodinger's cat, but the cat is you could Google it, but the cat is both simultaneously alive and dead according to quantum physics. And I think the idea with feminism is that you were both empowered and a victim at the exact same time, but we won't know until the moment of reveal.

Yeah, until there's an observation. Right.

They want to have all of the benefits of both sides. They want to have their cake and eat it too, so they want all the power that comes with feminism, but none of their responsibility.

Right, but on the contrary, I would say too that, you know, as much as feminism might be a one-sided bargain, seems like, you know, women want jobs, women want market opportunity and they want all these things that come with feminism. They want to vote for the president of The United States or whatever else, but I I think even from the man's point of view, it's like if if you were going to be a man living in a gender equal society, you still need outlets to feel like the man, right? And I think that personally, like if I'm seeing a girl and I like the girl and, like, I feel like I can, like, provide her things, like, maybe there's some sort of implication and it's like, you know, I want to create a space where I can be a man and where you can be a woman and I want it to be established that those are the roles in this relationship. So, I think that if you start out, you know, I don't think that you can I don't think you can do the same thing and just accept one side of the bargain?

I don't think that you can you want a woman to be a woman in the relationship. You want gender polarity. You want her to be in her feminine energy. You want to be in your masculine energy. And obviously paying the check on a dinner date is only one very small part of that but if you're gonna start it off on the foot is like, Oh, well, we're splitting everything, I like you but I'm not willing to like, you know, expend resources to secure you or something, then you can you expect the same sort of reciprocation in other areas when it becomes beneficial for you to have those things?

Because usually like, I don't know, I'm going on dates with girls who like wanna be stay at home moms or they wanna be wives, right? And so I just don't know, like, think that if that's the dynamic you are explicitly pursuing, then you have to start out that way, too. Like, you have to hold the door, you have to do those things.

But that dynamic is if you believe in that, great. But it doesn't sound like this woman was living up to anything resembling that side of the dynamic. If she said, Oh yeah, I'm seeing a couple other guys simultaneously ahead of time, then I think this would have been a much different exchange.

Yeah. Well, I also have to think too that obviously we're not hearing the entire story here, but his reaction is, like, especially pathetic in my opinion. Telling someone they're trash is like, it's very bitter, and you can be bitter and you can be, incensed by what someone else does, to you, especially in a dating context, but I have to think for someone who had such like a strong emotional reaction in this way, it's like, he's probably doing other things that sort of, like, he's probably been worn down and become bitter, we don't blame him for that.

I think that I kind of agree, like, think the only thing that that was wrong here was your trash. Everything else with this seems mostly fine. I've actually done this, by the way. I asked a girl to Venmo me one time after dinner. I mean, there's almost this I've been in almost this exact situation.

I did that too. I actually told the story on the pod when I did that. I just really think that you like, you have to be diplomatic about it, and she did what he wanted and she continued, like, playing the part or whatever, but it's just so hard for me to read this. It's just like he did throw a temper tantrum. Like, the commenter is correct.

That that is what that reads as, is a temper tantrum. And you I don't know. Like, Yeah, sure

it feels really shitty to be in his position. But there there's nothing to do but to just take it like a champ, just take it on the cheek and keep going, like, yeah. So, you know, it's like it feels it does feel like she's being a little bit performatively nice. You almost want her to clap back at the end because that would feel more, like, more honest. And so that's actually yeah, it's like that strikes me as almost like the like, that's the big her biggest issue in this is that she was almost too nice, and that does seem to imply that maybe she was being a little bit disingenuous earlier, and almost maybe leading him on a little bit.

She was playing the field, she was seeing multiple people, not letting him know, allowing him to be overly bought into the relationship or whatever.

And my money is she was sleeping with the other guy, then the question is, why did the other guy achieve that? And I don't think it was because of more resources. Probably because he was either edgier or the bad boy persona or who knows what. Then you say, don't be bitter and don't give up. And I agree with that.

If you're playing a kind of iterative game here in the economic sense, then the answer is, Oh, okay, then I should be the bad boy. You know, that's the challenge, is that's the takeaway?

No. So that's my point, is that like, it's the it's the meme. It's the it's the midwit meme, right, where it's like the the dummy on the far left end of the bell curve is like just a nice guy who like buys girls dinner and, you know, gets stood up or whatever and then just keeps doing it because he's an idiot. And then the angry midwit in the middle is like, PUA, red pill, play the game, be cynical, and then you go all the way to the other end and you come back around. And it's a similar thing.

It's like, well, then she just wasn't for you. If you being a nice guy does not get you that girl, then then you don't want that girl.

Think there's a limit there's a limited supply, and if you're going to function in this dating world, you need to tick whatever initial boxes they have. And it would be great if you met her through work or church or some situation where she saw you day in, day out, and after three months realized this is the most amazing guy ever. But that's unfortunately not what we're not what we're experiencing.

Sure. But again, I think I think that they probably both did have enough information in this situation to make the right like, both made the right decision. Or he he didn't make a decision. But meaning, like, there was plenty of information to be that was exchanged in both directions in this for the outcome to have been correct. This is not your wife, bro.

If she's sleeping with some bad boy I'm sorry, what are you telling me that you want to end up marrying the girl who was sleeping with some bad boy?

Saying all the girls are sleeping with bad boys.

Then they're not of then then be a monk. None of them are for you. Like, that's just not true, right? Not all of them are.

Of course.

And if they if that is true, then like, it's a lot then it's like, it's truly lost. All

of them left at, you know, mid thirties have, you know, their that Well, I don't even know how to articulate that. You guys go.

Well, no, it is a problem. He's sort of in a dilemma where the answer can't be become a bad boy, because that's sort of something you are or you're not, right? Like, have been the bad boy, now I'm the distinguished gentleman. I've retained a bit of edge, can keep it interesting, I flirt, I tease, and you can still do those things and adopt some of those, techniques and habits. I don't like calling them techniques, think that's just, you know, it's kind of just the way I am personally.

But like, what's he gonna do? He's gonna buy a leather jacket, he's gonna get a motorcycle, like, you know, the Being the bad boy isn't great either. You want to get laid, it's great to be the bad boy, but if you're like, you know, just like to, you know, use my own experience here, I've been the you know, I'm a pretty straight laced guy, but like, I've been the bad boy in relationships in the past where I was with people. I can think of one relationship in particular where her family did not approve of me. They thought that, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, which means I'm unemployed, and, I had a girlfriend.

I went to Christmas with her family, and, and her mother, like, got drunk and called me out in front of her extended family and said, Your relationship is not going to work because you're beneath her in society, and she was a doctor. She used those words. She said, It just doesn't work when the man is lower than the woman. And, you know, they're from another country, so I think that's, you know, why like, I appreciated the Lord.

You're an untouchable, didn't you know that? Right. Your untouchable cast.

Right, and and so, it was interesting, because we were there, and her uncle at the party is like a very successful entrepreneur, who's the also the only other white person in the family who was like, just like, dying to defend me and like, pulled me aside afterwards, because he like, loved me, but, you know, in the short term, that did draw that girl closer to me, like, didn't talk to her mother for several months after that, and she was like so apologetic and she felt so bad. But ultimately, she did come around to that point of view. She did come around to the idea that like Right. I was not a secure long term match for her, which I don't think was correct and it's we're over it by now, was several years ago, but, you know, it I'm sure that some of the things that drew me to drew her to me in the first place are the same things that ultimately made her decide that we were not a good fit for each other. And so Right.

It, you know, it's to this guy's credit, better to get that kind of feedback on date number three or date number four than a year and a half Yes. Into the relationship because you're gonna have spent a hell of a lot more than $250 by that point.

That's right. Yeah. You want to find out as fast as possible. The answer is, like, all I I feel like I'm just I just hate repeating myself, but the answer is always just diamond hands. Diamond hands, bro.

Like, every the problem is that every this happens to men and women on both sides. They get perverted by their interactions with the market as a sort of gestalt holistic thing rather than a series of individuals, and they they they end up they end up contorting their behavior and their personality to respond to the market as a whole, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where now they're performing in this way that produces negative results far worse than they would have gotten had they just been honest or true to themselves. And so the answer is always just, every time you have a negative experience, just go, it's not my fault, it's the market, Totally fine. Move on. That's just always

I totally I totally disagree with you. I'm thinking about the pipeline of, you know, what are most 17 year old boys? Most 17 year old boys are not cool. Most 17 year old boys are somewhere between nerdy Yep. And geeky and autistic and awkward and clueless, and they're they're largely undesired by the women they're surrounded by with, especially when those 17 year old girls might be chased by 19 year old guys with cars or 21 year old guys with beer money.

So these 17 year old guys are completely on the back foot. And as they look around at these repeated interactions, they very often come particularly the autistic ones, the kind of mildly autistic ones, as they just start to take all this data in.

Which I

love is.

Yeah. I did that too. And you keep on modeling and tweaking. Modeling, I'm using that in the kind of the AI sense, not the I'm a supermodel thing. But you keep on tweaking your approach, and you take the same approach as you would if you kept on getting rejected from jobs.

You know, you keep on saying, okay, I am not what this market wants. How do I how do I fit into this market? So even if in a romantic way we should stay true to the core, whatever that is, I absolutely think that if the market is telling you something, you should respond to it. And on top of that, like it or not, in our day and age, the woman who's gonna fall in love with you is the woman who's sleeping with you, not the woman who's not sleeping with you. And if you want a woman to fall in love with you, at least in New York City, then you've got to be sleeping with her.

If you're just waiting around for her to fall in love with you, then you're this guy in the text messages.

Yeah. Mean, it's interesting that on what is this? Episode 12 or something? Like, we still like that we're like, I don't know, this is a good core disagreement. Don't know if we've surfaced this before.

Yeah, no, I think that's I think I was totally honest, I think that's like that's just a 100% wrong. It's just totally wrong.

I think point goes to service here, I think, as the moderator.

And the reason it's wrong is that well, okay.

We'll look Go forward that, ahead. I just want to hedge and say I don't actually completely disagree with the sex point, but please continue.

It's wrong because, well, it depends on what you're looking for, right? And that's the huge asterisk here. A lot of guys do just want sex, and if you just want sex then sure that there's definitely some truth in that and and learning to perform as an attractive man will get you sex. So if that's what you want, then you can do that. And that is what a lot of guys want, especially when they're younger, and that is an arc that many modern guys have gone through and will need to go through.

That it's it's in many ways that is the sort of hero's journey of the modern man is like make yourself attractive to women, spend ten years on the app, sleeping around, being a man hoe, and then sort of eventually find God in your thirties or whatever.

Just to be clear, I never said any of those things.

Well, I'm I'm extrapolating a little bit, but that you you said about, you know, conform to the demands of the market.

Yeah, well, I think think Stoney's point is more like, if a woman is seeing two guys and she's only having sex with one of them, then she's sort of already made her choice.

Sure, that's that's true.

Yeah, I think that is true. I I, you know, this is maybe a little bit of a tangent, I would say that something I've learned recently is I used to only really push for like, you know, trying to kiss a girl or, you know, go to her place not necessarily to have sex or go to my place or like, you know, push interaction into a private setting. I used to only do that if I thought that the outcome was sort of guaranteed or like, you know, I thought that there was going be reciprocity there. What I've learned recently is actually that's not the move, is actually it's okay to try to kiss her and she's not ready to kiss you. Like, it's okay to like, she's going to be insulted if you don't try to escalate, right?

So even if she refuses your escalation, like, maybe that's not the greatest sign of the world. Obviously, you want her to reciprocate it, but, it's better to try to fail than to not try, even if the answer is rejection when you do try, because sort of that does put you in the category of like, you know, this is a guy who's serious, he is attracted to me. Girls will think, if you don't try to if you don't I don't wanna say this universally, but for at least the women that I am dating in the city, if you don't at least try, they're going to think that you are not attracted to them.

That's true. Again, though, I I think that, like, I mean, look, not to be, you know, I'll stop playing this role if this creates an uninteresting conversation. But I think anytime you're asking yourself, like, what do I need to do in order to perform as the as the role that they expect me to fill? You're already la you've already lost.

You're you're you're you're jumping you are extrapolating pretty pretty heavily, I think, what I said.

Because there's gonna be a name for this, and I don't have a good terminology around this. It be cut like, look, I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit because, of course, like, you should take in feedback. I'm not saying be Helen Keller completely blind and deaf to the data that the world gives you. Right? Like, yes, all information that comes in is a data point, but you should treat it as data, not as truth.

And most data that comes in is noisy at best and wrong at worst. And and default is that it almost certainly will pervert you if you do not have massive, massive defenses against it, as it does for most people, in my opinion. The answer, because every time you modify your personality or your behavior, it's a concession, and the problem is that you're actually hurting yourself. You are This is important data, and the data is almost always correct in the sense that you weren't compatible. And if you had made yourself different to be more compatible, yes, you would have gotten quote unquote better short term results, but it would have been net worse in the long term.

You would have made yourself appear to be more compatible with somebody that you actually weren't. You want to be, as we talked about a million times, you want, and as Wes was just saying, you want to be ruling out people as fast as possible. And so signals that do that for you are a good thing.

Yeah, but you're talking about core signals. I'm talking about showing

up Almost everything is a core signal.

That's fine. Head to head and wearing sweatpants.

No, okay. So If that's

who you are, then you should

do that. No.

Almost everything is a representation of, Let like, your deeper

me square the circle here. Okay. There are certain traits that are going to be universally desirable from your perspective and from a woman's perspective. What I mean is these are things that women are basically universally going to be attracted to, and traits that you can develop that you will want to have. These are things like fitness.

We might even call these vertical traits.

We might even call these vertical traits. We might call them that. You can be more fit. You can be a better conversationalist. You can be more worldly and better read, so you have interesting intelligent things to a conversation.

These are universally desirable traits that are beneficial for any person to have and that you will enjoy having. Now, if you are not cultivating those traits in yourself, if you are showing up in sweatpants, if you are showing up and your hair is messy and you don't look like you care, you're going to attract, if you attract any women at all, you're going to attract women who are you feel are probably below your league unless you're like an artist or a DJ or something and you live in Bushwick or whatever. Like, you know, you know the audience, but 99% of cases, like, you are not that guy, right? So you got to try your best at the things you can improve. Now, with the advice is like, be the bad boy, like, only do that if you're naturally inclined towards that.

Like, are certain traits that you might want to lean in more because you're naturally inclined towards those things. And if if it's, you know, being good at either talking about the Roman Empire or something, like, you can do that too. You can only take that so far with women. But if it's like, you know, you can't go buy a leather jacket and a motorcycle and, you know, get read a book by Ruche and, you know, become a pickup artist if you are not naturally inclined towards those things. You can be better looking.

You can be more well spoken. You can do all of these other things that are just sort of free money for any man, and the fact is that most men are not trying to do these things at all. You see in the discourse all the time, you see the chart where it's like, and the same guy who posted this originally is guilty of this very much, and I'm not gonna say who he is, but he's chirping at us all the time on the internet. They're always like, they're always like, Oh, well, I'm not good looking enough, and all women are only trying to date the top 10, top 20% of men. There is truth to that, but those guys are often also trying to date women who are out of their league also.

So you see what I'm saying here, like, you do need to be realistic from a certain point of view and you are going to constantly get rejected. And sometimes, a beautiful mid is the greatest blessing in any man's life and it's better to have that than like some, you know, dying piece who's you're never going to be able trust because you think that she just wants someone better than you at all times.

I do love I do love the phrase a beautiful mid.

Also Have you seen Brian Johnson's girlfriend? Yes. She I think she's so I think she's Kate ifel.

Kate Teller.

Yeah. I think she's I think she's above beautiful mid. One thing I would say is that by and large, the pursuit, at least by guys, to attract women, think, leads to a better society, because it leads to men trying to engage in improvement. Now, I'm not Yeah, this is the JD Unwin thing. I'm not familiar with that in particular, but this isn't original, I've heard this from a couple different places.

If all guys started saying, wait a second, I'm gonna be more professional, more responsible, more conscientious, I'm gonna show up on time, I'm gonna if I say I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna follow through with it, I'm gonna be able to have a car that doesn't break down all the time, I'm gonna be able to have enough cash in my pocket to to pay for a meal, and maybe even think about the future and houses and kids, I'm gonna build this future, I think that's a pretty good deal. I think society gets a great deal out of men trying to improve themselves so they're presentable on some level. And I don't, you know, I don't know about Wes, but but, you know, as Cody jokes about being a nerdy 17 year old and I was a geeky 17 year old, you know, all went through that journey, and I think that's a good journey. The guys who get stuck at 17 for years, parents' basement computer games, I have some sympathy for them if there was some reason they gave up, but that does feel like giving up. Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, like, if

you look, you know, I've done all these things in my life to try to make myself more marketable to women, and those things have had a net benefit on my life and on society and on the people around me, and the people I'm able to surround myself with as a result of those things. And if I had just married the first girl who ever gave me a hand job, like, you know, it wouldn't have been the same outcome. And I'm grateful that that didn't happen. And the thing that I want to emphasize is that you If you're black pilling online, you already lost. Like, you do create your own universe and if you're choosing to be negative, you're going to attract negative people and negative energy, and you're going to tune your brain towards only seeing negative things, and that's a very bad position to put yourself in, and I know it's not helpful just to tell someone that, when all they're seeing is negativity.

But if you want to say that 80% of women are only attracted to the top 20% of guys, the entry barrier to being in the top 20% of guys isn't something you're born with, it's effort. And quite honestly, like, I go outside every day and I see a couple in on the street and you look at these couples and you say, what is she doing with him? Well, those guys are not on the internet complaining. They I don't know what they're doing. I would like to know what they're doing, actually.

Swinging some serious pipe.

They're laying the wood, they're making a lot of money, they're being cool and telling good jokes, they're funny, they're able to control a room, they're in good shape, they're Indian and we're matched at birth or something. I don't know. But you could do those things.

You can't always win the race, you can't always come in the top 20% of the race, but you can try and you can do your best. Even if you have a

little even if you've got, like, a little penis. Even if you've a

little I I think by the time they discovered those those details, the the sale has largely been made.

Just get yeah. Get good at using your tongue. There's and I don't mean that literally. I do mean that literally, but also just think about all the other areas of life that same sort of, you know, framework applies to.

I was 17. I was an awkward, nerdy, autist who felt like I couldn't certainly, the girls I was interested in were not into me, and I felt like I was, you know, completely undesirable, and and then I went on the whole fucking ten year journey of, you know, try to make myself attractive to women and learning to be a player and everything. And then I have finally, in my thirties, realized that no, when I was 17, actually, there were there were girls that were into me. And I just was they were invisible to me. But actually, had I not been retarded, those were the right fit for me all along.

It's really not hard to be attractive to the other the other gender. Unless you're hideous, men and women are made for each other. You just have to show up. You just have to be there. I was not an attractive 17 year old.

I was extremely angular and obnoxious in so many ways, and there were still girls who were into me. There's always gonna be somebody for you, and almost certainly like, look, self improvement is fine. I'm not saying you shouldn't improve yourself. But you have an internal compass that tells you when it's genuine self improvement that you believe in, and that is aligned with your being, and what and and and your and your values, and when you're doing it performatively for the wrong reasons. If you're actually if it in which case it's not self improvement, it's it's performance.

Look, this is like a cliche. It sounds it sounds it sounds trite, but it's true. Like, do it for yourself. Don't do it for them. If you're improving yourself because that's what you believe in and that's a higher realization of like your of your highest self, like, great, do that.

That's what you should. But you should do that regardless. You should do that even if they were not

So it's a lot easier to do that if it helps your dating situation.

Yeah, well I think you're both right, but I do think that there when so I first of all, I just want to point out it's beautiful that Cody's journey took him from being a awkward, nerdy, autistic 17 year old right back to being an awkward, nerdy, autistic 33 year old. That's the second. But as one who embraces it. As, you know, you have to you kind of have to go through hell to realize that you were headed home all along. Exactly.

We often talk about, or I don't know if we've talked about it on the show, but like, Cody, you've talked about there being one quality that's predictive. And it's just like, it's not IQ, it's not EQ, it's some qualia that's maybe correlated with all these other things, but is just, like, the quality of a human being. And I if I try to put my take on what that quality is, it's like being fully yourself and putting yourself in a position in life where you can be fully yourself and have it work for you. And so it's sort of like if you, let's say that you are a stonemason and you see that everybody is investing in AI companies, that doesn't mean that you as a stonemason should go start an AI company, right? Because the world still needs stonemasons.

So you should be try to be the best stonemason and in that pursuit, you will develop a self confidence and a self belief and a sort of feeling of your own inevitability that is perceived by other people because you are willing to look at what's happening in the world and say, no, actually I am right. No, actually I know I can tune everything else out and I can say what is right for me and I can chase that and I can have no qualms and no reservations and if I meet you and you are not aligned with that, then I do not need you in my life and you wait for the person who is aligned with that.

I think

we can all agree And that is infectious.

It's a journey to get there. It's a very rare 17 year old that possesses that level of self awareness and self confidence.

No, dude, when I look back at my 117, it's so funny, like, know, when I think about myself at 15, 16, 17, you know, like, I I never had a girlfriend, but I did have, like, you know, girls that I kissed and stuff. And even when I got into college and stuff, you know, I was still figuring myself out. Looking back and thinking about specific memories, there are girls who were throwing themselves at me and I I was too stupid to see what was happening in the moment.

Girl came over to use the bathroom and I was like, Oh, sure. I was thinking, I thought there were Like, you know, she was driving by, she was like, Oh, I did. And then she hung out with me for like ten minutes, and then just kind of looked at me and then just kind of like, I gotta go. I'm like, Oh, okay. Completely oblivious, only later on

did other guys My have that senior year, there was a girl that I passed in the hallway going to our first block every single day, and I think her name was Anna, and I'd never really talked to her, and she was, like, in adjacent social circles. But I remember every day, would make eye contact with me and smile at me in the hallway, and I just never said anything to her. She Did was a

our fathers not explain this to us? Mine didn't. I wonder if that's wonder if you need like or an older brother or a father to say, this is how it works. This is this is the initiation of of interest that is subtle, and you need to respond to it overtly.

Well, and in fairness, this is where I think my I'm gonna circle back to agreeing much more with the sort of hoe math view of the world. I think the reason that's been lost is because men have been brow beaten now for multiple generations that anytime they make any like, you know, basically everything they do in public is wrong and sinful and evil, right? So they have absolutely no sort of self confidence that they can just go introduce themselves to a girl or make any sort of even polite respectful respectful, you know, overture or anything like I think that is totally to blame for that. Yes. Yes.

Most of all, like, the number one skill you have to have in life to be successful, and certainly in dating, is to just be able to go up to somebody and smile and say, hi, I'm Cody. That's really the main thing that you need, and that's been lost. Like, that is actually very hard in the modern world.

Right. And if you're hearing this and you think that that is a description of reality, and you think that you can't actually still do those things, just know that the brow beating is a 100%, it's a psy op. It's not real. If you if you're spending any amount of time reading negative content online or like, you know, black pill dating discourse, the answer and and it's not to say that none of that stuff is true or directionally accurate or has any merit because it does. But the answer is just to log off for a little bit, read a book about something instead, don't don't read that shit anymore, because in real life, women still want you to

approach them. You know, Yeah, know, Fiona might be worth saying, like, don't think this is a message that gets said very often, to to women, specifically is to say, women, if you're listening, you don't realize the extent to which there has been a full court press against men for multiple generations, specifically in this domain. I think women are completely insulated from that and completely oblivious to it. They don't know the extent to which it is messaged to men in which young men grow up hearing that everything they do is wrong, everything they do is evil, they're the enemy, they're intrinsically flawed, and the only way, their best hope of redeeming themselves is to sort of be this cowering, simpering, self effacing, self eliminating puddle. Right?

And then, so these sort of the women, they grow up and they they look around and they go, where are all the real men? And it's like, you don't understand the extent to which it's not like it's not like the real men just just magically melted away or something, or that like men are just they're just has been weaponized against them. Every moment of every day, they are, this is, you know, this is Like, what you see in modern men is the is actually, that is their best attempt to be good and righteous and moral according to what they have been told. Yeah, they're not weak, they're trying to be good. I mean, they end up being weak.

They are weak, to be clear. Which comes I'm like, this is

I was supposed say, that comes back to my feeling that the guy's anger was I'm trying to play by the rules. Right. In that first text.

Well, it's like, there's there's actually what happened is we gave the helm of the discourse over to the most unhappy people on the planet and the most bitter people

That's on the

planet because media stopped being a credential. The barrier to to being a thought leader stopped being credentials and verbal IQ and hopefully some sort of wisdom about how the world works. And instead, the gate became who can spend the most time on the internet, which naturally filters for unhappy people. So we get slate think pieces and we get, you know, blogs and we get tweets and we get HR departments staffed by the most unhappy people on the planet who will see other people being happy out in the world and they see men approaching women and they say, that doesn't happen to me, that's bad. And so really what the answer is is that you're trying to play by a set of rules that nobody actually wants you to play by, like women want you to approach them.

Oh, you if you're on a date with a girl, she wants you to pinch her on the butt, like it's okay to do that stuff, right? Like she's, you know, you make okay. Stoney's shaking his head. Well, Stoney's rocking his head back and forth, like, and and, you know, she's trying to play the middleman here, but like

I I think his message goes both ways, it's like Well, there's alpha. Women and men are being exactly, I'm sorry.

It's It was It's We're talking about being the bad boy, and it's like being the bad boy doesn't mean literally, like, be an asshole, it's like, show that you don't There's there's one set of rules that you think the world is abiding by and telling you to abide by, and then there's another set of rules that actually are sort of more like how things have always worked and they're still what people want and expect. And if you can just learn to tune out the new rules and abide by the old rules that everyone expects, then you are in a way being the bad boy, because you're eschewing this sort of, you know, be a little bit aggressive. You know, don't do rape, but be a little

bit Right?

I think this is where being an autist actually helps you in the long run. The short run, you're very confused, because all the rules you've been told, you know, you're like, well, in a board game they explain the rules, and then I'm just going to play by the rules, and that's the board game. And then at a certain point you realize that there's this entire other set of rules and signals, and you suddenly discover there's something called nonverbal communication. You're like, Oh, I just thought everyone said what they wanted and explained to you what they were thinking. No.

They do it with looks and delays and side glances and eye movement and hair play. Them just playing with their hair, all these, oh, that's a communication paradigm. And once you get that, it's like the world just opens up. But to get there is a brutal, brutal journey, at least for the autists.

Yeah, totally. Alright. It might be good to move on. We've been we've been

Yeah, we've This is the fun part

of drive.

Thank you.

I'm gonna look through the sheet here, I'm gonna try to see, because we're we're doing pretty good on time. We probably have time for one more topic. I'm gonna try to find one that dovetails nicely.

I don't think we should I think our default should be, you know, we can go as long as we feel like on each one, but the default shouldn't be we always keep every We we, you know, we should The default assumption should be that we record at least one and a half, maybe two or three times as much content as we actually end up and we only keep the best bits.

Okay. So this one is interesting. This one, I I I don't know if this is going to I don't know how much we're gonna be able to talk about this, but I thought I found this post very interesting. This is from Reddit and it's it's a bit long, so give me

a second here. Is this in the sheet or?

This is not in the sheet, I added this one today. The thing about Tinder and all dating apps is that they are they essentially function like a ranked competitive video game despite their denials. Your profile gets more engagement, the more it gets pushed to the whores, that's the word he used, will say, the more it gets pushed to the women on there, is essentially Elo. Now, you may wonder where gay men come into play here. Well, it's very simple.

I was not wondering that.

The question on Cody's mind, how what does this have to do with being gay? Well, it's very simple. Gay men inherently have rock bottom standards and will blow another guy in a loaded public bathroom with a symphony of diarrhea splatters echoing in the background. I didn't read this post all the way. Just mark yourself as pansexual on the apps.

Your profile will be exposed to mad dudes and transsexuals just ready to take you down the I'm not gonna say what he said. I would avoid using the bisexual option. You need transgender in there to engage with your profile as well, since their standards are even lower than gay men. I'm not kidding.

What the fuck am I listening to? Is it is this is this guy saying, If you can't make it with women, try gay guys?

That's not what he's

saying.

I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. The first night I did this, got 50 consecutive likes on my profile from gay dudes, which sent my elo with women skyrocketing.

You might wanna define elo, because even I

was Elo fuzzy on is like the ranked system in League of Legends or Elo was originally chess.

Well, comes from chess, yeah.

It comes from chess. And so what he is saying is that the algorithm on the dating app is choosing how to show you to women or not, and the you will get deprioritized in the algorithm because women rate much more harshly than men do. But if you change your algorithm so that men are also rating you, then You'll more likes. You will get more likes,

and then And the algo does not differentiate between women's likes and men's likes, it'll boost you uniformly, which will get you more women's likes, so as long as you're willing to swipe left on all the male matches, who cares?

Yes. So what I've heard, and I've heard this done differently too, I've heard it where like a guy will sign up for Tinder or Hinge or something and he'll mark himself as gay and then he will get, you know, hundreds of likes from gay men, so the algorithm goes, this is a desirable person, and then he switches it from I'm looking for men to I'm looking for women and now the algorithm already thinks he's super desirable, so he's being prioritized in the feed of these women. And I think that does work.

We need

to I know sign it'll take you even more

Do this.

I mean, look, if you're you really gotta commit, though. What you really need to do is actually go on the dates with the gay guys.

Think this commitment is going a little bit far from my comfort level.

Go on the dates with the gay guys, and ideally let them fuck you in the ass, and then

Can I demand my Venmo back? That's the main thing. Long as as long as they Venmo me the money after the date, that's the Well,

better the best part of it is it costs nothing.

This reminds me of the South Park bit where the cop goes undercover as a prostitute, and he, like, does the full he does the full thing. He, like, gives the blow job and everything, and then only after he's done and the pimp has fallen in love with him does he pull his gun and goes, Freeze, I'm a cop. You know?

You have a good South Park cop voice, Godey. There's

no way I buy that the Tinder algorithm is that crude. I mean, I'm sure it's crude, but that's another level. There's no way it does not differentiate between men and women's swipes.

No. If I was building it, I wouldn't I wouldn't have thought about that. I mean, maybe if enough people wrote about it on Reddit, I'd update my algo. But, you know, if you're going to do, oh, the more likes, the more popular, that's a reasonable thing. You don't necessarily think I'm going to bucket them by the type of people who are making those decisions.

So kind of tie up the point here, I wouldn't actually recommend anyone do this. I think that it's very I think that gay men

Sodomy is immoral, kids.

Well, no, what I envision this sort of being like a Seinfeld episode, and I imagine Cody doing it, where Cody's like, I'm going to game the algorithm, then it works spectacularly for him, he meets the woman of his dreams. When his the woman of his dreams

No, I fall in love with a gay guy.

Then, no, he's gonna meet the woman of his dreams, and then he's gonna realize she was only marking herself as heterosexual so she can, you know, follow her lesbian dreams.

That would be like the George Costanza B plot. The A plot is Cody finds the woman of his dreams and then on date number eight or nine, she's ready to introduce him to her cadre of gays that every woman has and they all recognize him.

And they all know him.

They're all like, they're all like, Oh, you're you're Smooth Cody, right, or whatever your screen name is. Is there a service?

He isn't yeah, he swipes life on

every I like I like all these screen Okay,

so this is another post, I think this is honestly from the commenter, maybe the same person as before. Now I want be picking on this person in particular, it's just there's he's been pretty active on my timeline. So this is like a multi layered tweet, so you're gonna have to stick with me here. The original post says, more than one third of women have fallen in love with someone they didn't initially think they could and over seventy percent of people have become deeply attracted to someone that they initially were not attracted to. Then, Ali Voss, formerly, Cuffalo, friend of the show says, this is a large reason dating apps fail.

Human attraction, specifically for women, requires repeat exposure with low stakes. Dating apps do the opposite. Meet once on romantic terms and decide immediately if it ever happens again. And I think that that is true, so that's take one. Take number two is refuting Ali.

Take number two says, Ali is wrong on this. Let's say a woman waits until date number seven to have sex, but ends up marrying the man. She's not genuinely attracted to him in the primal sexual way. She likes him as a person and thinks he has great husbanddad qualities, then calls that love.

Downside optimizing for primal sexual attraction is it doesn't stick around.

Yes, you're both going to get old. And it's actually, you're going that primal sexual attraction isn't going to be there nearly as long as you think it is. Hopefully, you know, you have to do something to maintain the spark, but every relationship is going to collapse into some sort of companionship in the very long run, and in the medium term, it's more like you so here's the mistake that I think is being made by the commenter and why I think Ali is right. There's no difference. There's there's sure, okay.

Primal sexual attraction is one thing and liking someone as a person and thinking he has great husband and dad qualities is another thing. However, that leads to a type of attraction that is not that distinguishable from primal sexual attraction, right? Like, it's not like, you know, I wanna bang the biggest chimpanzee in the tribe because he's the leader and he can protect me, it's not the same thing, But women ultimately want men with good parenting qualities who can protect them and take care of them. And if that is if you were exhibiting that on the first date and getting primal sexual reactions from women, good for you. But most guys, you're just not going to be able to do that.

So consistency and even kindness and some level of dominance and decision making ability and ability to provide and ability to give emotional security and to show a woman that if she has children with you on some primal level that those children are going to have good qualities and they're going to be able to be safe and they're going to be able to reproduce, that is still real attraction. Like she's still going to have a physical reaction to you and she's still going to be aroused with you in a sexual setting and it is still sexual attraction. It's He's making a meaningless distinction that comes from, I think, a deep insecurity. Cody.

I kind of agree with this guy.

So there's a couple things going on here, and not to be not to equivocate, but I think they're both a little bit right. What I've heard people say in the past is, for the woman who, you know, you want to marry, you want her to look at you with this hunger and desire and move sexually faster with you than she would with the average guy, rather than the woman who's like: Oh, he's a nice guy, I'm going to take it slow and steady, I don't really know where this is going. So I really get that viewpoint. But at the same time, as I said, that lust is gonna fail, and you're gonna need to be there, especially if you have kids, as business partners for the next twenty, twenty five years raising children, which is just an incredible amount of work and joy. But to do so unaligned is going to be a disaster.

Right. Like, think that, you know, we're talking about the two types of attraction here. One is just primal sexual, the other one is more founded in your individual unique qualities that are, maybe not instantly demonstrable in a romantic setting. But the women who are indexing on the first set of qualities are themselves making mistakes. Those are going to be disproportionately women who end up as single mothers or as burnouts and you don't want to be if that's not you, you don't want to be targeting that type of woman because she isn't buying what you're selling, basically.

I don't know, like, I I I hear I hear commenters like this and it it it makes me wonder if they've ever been around people who are in a relationship. Like I personally, you know, I have I'm single, but I myself have been exposed to plenty of people my own age who are married in happy relationships and with normal people and they're normal people themselves and you look at them and you say, you guys love each other, you're clearly attracted to each other, you have a good relationship and these guys are not like Andrew Tate or something, they're normal guys. And so, it's like, what kind of life experience is telling you that women are not actually attracted to these qualities and that that type of attraction isn't real? It's like, I've been in I've been in relate because I'm not, you know, like, I'm a big guy and women might like that initially, but I'm not rich. I'm not like, you know, I'm I'm towards the right of some bell curves, I'm towards the left of some bell curves, I'm towards the middle of both most bell curves.

But those women have been genuinely passionate about me and clearly loved me and clearly attracted to me because of these other qualities that I have that women are generally attracted to, and it's not all things that are like, he's the alpha male, because I'm not.

Yeah, I I think my biggest problem with this is just the conflation or that like, you know, you can reliably say that attraction that are I should lean in more. My previous problem with this is just the conflation that there are the implication that, you know, you can reliably say that attraction that arrives sort of through higher dimensional exposures more slowly is not not raw physical attraction definitionally and vice versa. If we can tease that apart, then I think I largely agree. It's like, I wouldn't want be with somebody who didn't find me sexually attractive, who was sort of compromising for me, but I think that a lot of women do arrive at, you know, genuine attraction through the process that Allie's describing. It is a multimodal thing that that that requires a sort of more holistic exposure than men need, and and that that is how they genuinely arrive at real at real sexual attraction that is just as valid as the sort of kind that that is more indexed on looks.

Yeah, I mean, about how you make decisions about I I would compare it almost to your diet. Like, do I like a Caesar salad? Do I like beets? Do I like broccolini? Do I like asparagus the same way that I like a cheeseburger from Shake Shack?

No. If if if I'm just like, what is my favorite thing to eat for the pleasure of eating? It is going to be the burger. It's going to be a piece of pizza. Yeah.

But I'm I'm consciously I have an executive governor in my mind that tells me that I can't eat that every meal for every day of my life and women have that too, but it's much more instinctual. So if you're someone who and it goes both ways too. If you're constantly if you think that you have a type and you're constantly dating this type and it's constantly going bad for you, then you need to reevaluate what your type is and maybe try something different because the different thing will be much better for you. But that's what women are doing. Women

None of us are gonna end up settling down with the person we find most globally physically attractive. I'm not gonna end up marrying a fucking, you know, a cheerleader, yeah. Or It's like, and that's totally fine. I am totally content to not marry a supermodel because of exactly what you're talking about, Wes. It's like, I want the whole package, and I'm happy to trade a little bit of looks for

Cody's a lot not going looks. To marry Denzel Washington. You know, he's willing to

So I'm will I am willing to settle for, you know Cuba Gooding Jr. Cuba Gooding Jr, you know? And that's good enough for me, man.

Wasn't Denzel Washington's son in that time what was that movie? The really complicated

one. Thinking of Will Smith.

No. No. I'm not.

Is Denzel Washington's son an actor?

I think it might be.

I didn't even know that.

Will Has Will Smith been hit as a

that Jade and Smith have done, like, that they did that horrible time, like, future slam

fight Yeah, that was That was terrible. That was a bad movie.

Well, take Will Smith is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, is someone who married I I don't know the history here. Married Will Smith is a dork, right? Fundamentally, he's like a nerd, like he played a cool guy in the nineties and I think he thought he was a cool guy, but he's a, he's sort of a pathetic figure and he married someone who is, you know, cucking him, because he married the hottest girl in the nineties and now he's crying in public and Yeah. Embarrassing himself, and he made the wrong choice. He could have married, you know, I mean, Jada Pinkett Smith's not even Yeah.

Think she was hot, I I I don't know, but

Like, I think what happens is that, like, this is I think what it, like, what underlies a lot of what I say on this podcast, is that fundamentally, the problem there is that, you know, if Will Smith could have known when he was younger, when he was courting Jada, everything that would come out of that, do you think he still would have chosen her? No. I think almost certainly no. Right? And so actually, the failure was, well, he just failed to pick up on the right signals.

He just actually failed to index on the right things. It was it was actually a failure of his intake mechanism, right, and his evaluation mechanism. And so, like, he actually they weren't a good fit, and it would have been better if he could have identified that earlier. And so, like, what I think where you arrive at when you've experience when you have enough experience in your belt, and to be clear, like, it takes, for most people it's really hard to get here. But that place I'm trying to point to, I feel like, is that what you're trying to get to is that, and what I feel like I have arrived at, and I think a lot of people do arrive at, is that you can get to a place where you are, you genuinely change, like, your target.

Like, can I meet people all the time? I meet This happens to me all the time. I meet a genuinely beautiful girl, who's gorgeous, who maybe when I was 22, I would have, you know, yearned for or whatever. And now, I genuinely feel no interest. I haven't and maybe that's just because I'm an old man, and I've I and I've lost all my youthful sexual desire.

But but no, I think it's really because I'm more mature now, and like, I can I can index on all these other things way more accurately because I have the experience to do that and to to make better and more richer, more evaluations? And I can see that, like, actually would not be happy with this girl. Like, she would torture me, and we genuinely not compatible in, like, really significant ways. And I can factor that in, I can believe it. Like, the problem is that I think a lot of people can they can maybe get some, like, clues, right?

But they, like, they don't, like, they haven't embodied it yet. They haven't You have to make the mistakes to realize that, like, no, those singles were accurate, you can trust that part of yourself. There's this part of yourself that's like almost self delusional, right, where like, go like, you tell yourself like, yeah, but like, maybe she is my dream girl and it can work out. I mean, I know that she's like, I know that she tried to put my dog in the microwave, but like, you know, she didn't mean it. And it's

like, no, dude, she meant it. She meant it. Yeah, I mean, even physical attraction, people treat people treat all forms of attraction, I think especially physical attraction, like it's something that's set in stone. It's something you're bored with. It's something you can't control.

My physical type in the last ten years has done a complete 180. Not a complete 180, but it's done like a 90. And so, I don't think that was through any effort of my own but like those things do change over time and you have to recalibrate your expectations sometimes, but Sully, what do you think?

To which bit?

I don't know, you were yawning, I just want to keep you awake.

No, no, good. But I by the way, I looked it up, it was Tenet. That's where John David Washington was in the movie Tenet.

Wait, John David Washington is related to Denzel?

I believe that is Denzel Washington's son.

No. I thought this was

just a case of black guys having similar names.

If you Google Denzel Washington's son

This is about to look then at

John David Washington shows up.

Oh, my God. Wait. Oh, my God, you're right. Denzel is his father. Wow, nepotism strikes again.

That movie This is

the case every time, dude. Like, this happens to me Did you know Timothy Olyphant is a fucking Vanderbilt?

Who's that? I don't know who that is either.

Exactly. I think I've made my point.

Let's move on. I know who the Vanderbilts are.

Topic three, if you're a dad with sons, raising them under Christian values will cripple them significantly in today's society, especially with respect to dating. I don't think there's a lot of meat on the cob, as they say, on this one. Let's keep going. Topic four, still haven't heard a good answer to this question. If apps are that bad, why is it by far the number one way couples meet?

You've got us there. That's a head scratcher.

Yeah. I had a good reply to that. I I quote tweeted that. I said, that's like that's like saying, if if the Titanic sunk, then why do I see all of these people on lifeboats? It's it's like the I mean, the clean answer there is that the traditional ways that people have met have all gone away.

Dating apps have become the primary way that people meet and the way that people expect to meet, so they're not as open to meeting in other settings and they're not approaching in other settings, the social

Well, just going to quote the wokests and say, It is not my job to educate you. Take a statistics class for the love of Jesus.

No. So so let's let's pause for a second and and and discuss what the dating apps do a great job

at But Don't make me do it.

This isn't that they're good. They just do some things well. They lower the search cost incredibly well. You do? They hit your limbic system incredibly well, and they do reduce visible rejection.

The rejection on a a kind of swipe left, swipe right dating app is largely invisible. You compare that to the old days where you would, like, send someone a message on OkCupid, and then they wouldn't reply, the rejection was explicit. And the speed of which you can you can go through it, all these things are are great attributes. Now the end result is probably a worse life match, but it does serve a it does check a lot of boxes of accelerating how quickly you will meet people. Probably the wrong people or probably not the best matches, but you'll meet them.

Well, the even those benefits that we tout have tons of negative externalities.

Oh, sure.

You need to be rejected so you can calibrate what you're targeting. You need to be explicitly rejected. You need

to No, he doesn't. He has diamond hands.

Diamond hands, baby.

I don't I don't see how that refutes my point.

No, was mainly joking. No, I'm not saying they're great. I'm just saying they do a lot of

things the apps do well is they allow women to be whores anonymously. Alright? If you're in the top

That's 20% traveling internationally does.

That too. That was the original Tinder. Yeah. Yeah. That when women had needed to just find themselves by, you know Yeah.

Look, if you're in the top 20% of guys and you want to just sleep around, you know, the dating apps are a great way of doing that and not incurring the reputational cost you would have done otherwise. That that is their chief advantage, I would say. Yeah. Look, not to be flippant. I mean, yeah, I think I think you're right.

They let you meet a lot of people. I think that there's gonna be a massive selection bias Mhmm. And that you you are gonna be selecting against, in many cases, exactly the kind of people that you do want to meet. So it's like, yeah, you're meeting a lot of people. Are they the peep are they is that good?

I'm not so sure. But

By the way, the response to why is it number one, why is McDonald's the number one restaurant on the planet? It doesn't mean it's good.

It's a dumb question. I don't we don't need to humor it. It is an incredibly

dumb question.

Like, I I just come on. Don't make me explain, like, fucking Statistics 101, dude. Survivorship bias, etcetera. Okay. Here's a Chris Williamson post that might be juicy.

Imagine we we we have to imagine us clipping this and putting it as a response to this post.

The Handsome Minute. Welcome back to the Handsome Minute.

Welcome back to the Welcome back to the Handsome Minute. Okay, here we are. Let's do the next I

think we should call it the Handsome Hour Minute. I like your South Park gay cop voice better, Cody.

Freeze them a cap.

Yes, that's it.

Alright. Chris Williamson, some call him Chris Will X, says, women feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them. 72% of men have a positive view of women, 50% of women have a neutral or negative view of men, 21% of women have an actively negative view of men. Only 7% of men feel the same. For all the talk about manosphere inspired misogyny, three times more women hold a negative view of men than men hold of women.

I think that that is true. I I think that that comports with what I see.

Yeah. Here's what have to say to all the women. You are the number one target of psyops globally forever. This is what all women need to understand. Anytime there's ever a psyop ever anywhere in the world ever in history, you're the target.

You're the You have to just go through the world knowing that. That like, your for better or worse, your demographic is more gullible than everybody else. Sorry. So what that means is that like, just from an opportunistic perspective, every time that somebody so goes every every time that the mustache twirlers get together to stroke their cats and and plot against humanity, the first thing they go is they go, how can we trick the young women? Because if we can trick the young women, you can get the you can get the men to follow begrudgingly.

And everything sort of follows from there. So like, you have to understand that like, most of the everything that society tells you is a lie. Like, that that would be my message to women. It's like, you just have to stop believing civilization and society at large. They're lying to you all the time.

Everything they tell you is a lie.

Cody, I agree with you. I don't know, a, if you're the best messenger, or if b, that was the best message. So let's say it in a way if they've never

heard I'm charging of this message clicks, my man.

Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. But let's see it in a

way give me your sweet sweet they've because never this too is a sigh up.

They've never heard of, you know, they've never heard this concept before. How do we make it as palatable as possible? And while Okay. You know, the word go Okay,

wait a minute. Listen up, listen up, girdle leaf. You know how sometimes you go out with like your This is not working. And you like you like go get nail polish from and and brunch samosas with your girlies? Okay.

Sometimes those girlies are talking shit. Okay? Sometimes Samantha does not have your best interest at heart. Okay? What I was Sometimes

What I was thinking is perhaps it would be more palatable to say that they're more willing to care about strangers, and they're willing to care about perception. I think that's a little bit easier than they're gullible.

I mean, look. Yeah.

Way to demoralize men there is there is like a a political demoralization complex that's very much, in operation, And the way to demoralize men is to take away their access to women, and the way to take away their access to women is to turn women against men because it's going to be very hard to turn men against women from a blank slate. And I think that women in what is what is the pitch you would make to men to turn men against women? Well, what do you do? They're gonna come for your jobs? Okay, maybe, but like that's very abstract.

They're not a threat to your physical safety. So the way to turn men against women is to have men to take away

their All whole attest to their hypergamous whores who will never really love you. Well, is what

I think that that is maybe the one avenue. Yeah.

That and that's

That's maybe what a a pressure point, and you do I mean, you do hear that,

then and then to turn women against men you tell them that they're all evil rapists

who like Right, it's like who

is off the cliffs.

Yes, but I think the point I'm trying to make is that the official messaging you see is that you're telling is you know the media or whoever telling women that men are a threat to their physical safety because they're all abusers and rapists and cheaters and all of these things and and those stories get clicks and if it bleeds it leads. When you see that type of messaging coming for, you know, towards men, it's it feels more organic, like the messaging that says, like, all women are, you know, whores to to you.

By by definition, it's organic because the mainstream media is never gonna push that that line.

Right. It it's it's like that is a reaction to men from men who are having a bad experience with women, and the reason that they're having a bad experience with women is largely because of women acting and behaving on the messaging that they are receiving. So that while I think it is true and I think that that threat of thought is very much out there and prevalent, It's a reaction to the official messaging that women are receiving.

Yeah. Yeah. I I just think I think the the main takeaway I would try to issue here, and to look like, I mean, this post is kind of about women's sentiment, obviously, so I was kind of focusing on women. But, you know, you can say the same thing to men similarly, is that like, you just have to develop an immune system against this sort of ambient messaging that just sort of exists everywhere all the time. That is, I think, well, I was about to say clearly, but it's not so clearly, but is against your best interest.

It is not helping you. These people do not have your best interests at heart. The the anybody generating these messages. But I think that frankly women need to hear this more. Men are just more disagreeable on average, and so they're just gonna be more likely to sort of have this immune system, and women just aren't.

They just sort of accept it on average just more so. So I began this, to be clear, if it sounded like I was blaming women, I was not. I was blaming the people who attempt to set out to sigh at them. Like, they're the bad people. The women, in many cases, are trusting and loving, and they're hearing this story and they're just accepting it because they trusted the institutions and they trusted the mechanisms.

And I'm just here to tell you, sorry, women, you can't trust the things that you thought you could trust. I hate to be the one that has to tell you this, but this goes for men too. Mean, lot of men are are suckered in in the same way. Everybody needs to develop a healthy distrust of of the sort of centralized messaging apparatuses. If you want the truth, go outside.

Like, women, go talk to men in the real world. Men, go talk to women. And sure, some of them are fucked up and are gonna not be great, but you're gonna find some good ones too. Like, it's a mixed bag like anything else, And you will find that these totalizing narratives are you know, there's some truth in them, and there's a lot of bullshit, as with everything else in life.

I think the best way to explain this concept to people is to kind of remind them that when they were teenagers, they had goals, and they usually had to talk to their parents to achieve those goals, but the narrative they told their parents was very rarely the real reason why they were pursuing something. They would usually frame it in such a way: Oh, I'm going over to this person's house to study. No, it's because there's a party on, but I'm not going to say that. We're all used to teenagers lying through their teeth constantly to get their goals. And yet, when we hear politicians or the media, it's almost like we're going to believe them.

Or even better, we believe that all of the politicians are corrupt, but then they're altruistic when they fund the NGOs. No. If they're corrupt politicians, they're going to be funding corrupt NGOs. It's not rocket science, but it still takes a couple seconds to wrap your head around that.

Well, and not to make this too broad, but the sort of the issue of the left is that they are a coalition of parts that are constitutionally and naturally incompatible. Think about the left wing in America has to unite, black people, immigrants, Hispanics, white women, gays, and those groups don't have anything in common. The, you know, what is the most homophobic demographic in The United States? It's black people, right?

I think actually Muslims. Muslims Well, they're part of the coalition too. And I think it's simply anti gay. They're not afraid of gays, they just completely

What do you think homophobic means? You think homophobic means being afraid of gay people, Stoney?

I am against the word homophobic for that reason, because it distorts the message. It already is speaking to the narrative. Are you a homophile? This only makes me think of camping when you're like, wait, do I want the hydrophile or the hydrophobic coding for my boots?

What's a celiac? What would be a homophiliac?

That would be if you bled too much.

No, that's a homosector who's allergic to gluten.

Oh, okay.

That's a homo celiac.

It's all.

Some of these sound right to me. I think you're making a good point. It's the Carl Schmitt

is the to get all those people on the same page is by giving them a common enemy, and so someone This has to be the

bad is the

Carl Schmitt, the political theorist, said you can only unite a people against something, that you need a common enemy.

Yeah, right. And, you know, we live in a media world where the story of the happy family who has a dog and three kids and is living a happy life, that's not a news story, right? What's a news story is, you know, the girl who gets murdered by her boyfriend or the girl who gets raped in the park or the Tinder swindler or West Elm Caleb or any of these salient examples that are in fact very rare and depict things that very rarely happen and most men are not a threat to women in any real sense. But the only way that, you know, a certain political element can unite all of the people they need to unite is by portraying, you know, folks like triumvirate hosts of this podcast in a very negative light, naturally. So anything you read about me in the media is not true.

A controversial opinion of mine is that socializing is like exercise. Even if you don't feel in the mood to do it, you should still be doing it because it's good for you. It's not really

a dating take. By and

large, that's yeah. It's a muscle that you need to exercise and social confidence is I heard a

quote one time that was basically like, there are no introverts. There are only situations in which you feel more or less socially comfortable, and that if everybody like, everybody would prefer to be socializing almost all the time with the big caveat that they want to be socializing, you know, with the people they feel comfortable with, and sort of among their sort of cognitive phenotype. Right? So it's like you want to be with your people, but if you can be with your people, everybody is an extrovert.

And you'll hear people say, Ugh, I don't have the energy to meet new people tonight.

That's because You're great guy. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think that Right. What Cody said is correct, but it's because meeting new people is inherently awkward. Like, someone who doesn't have the energy to meet new people might still have the energy to spend time with their, you know, girlfriend or friends.

I don't think what I said is fully correct, but I feel like there is some interesting truth in it. It's like, yeah, it's like I I would absolutely have the when I when I say I don't have the energy to meet new people, like I would have the energy to hang out with somebody I like, who I have clothes with. I I don't have the energy to interact with normies, that's the problem. Right? For people I don't have the energy to do the dance, to, like, put on the performance to to where the heck, hey, everybody.

I'm Cody. What do you do for work? That's so interesting. Tell me more.

I'm beginning to think you should be a voice artist, Cody. We've had a lot of good voices out of

you tonight. I'm trying to put on You know, I'm trying to I'm trying to I'm trying to put some more sauce on it tonight.

You're doing a lot more sauce on it. I'm trying to I like the sauce here, Cody.

I'm try we're trying to get the energy levels up. We're trying to make some clippable moments here.

Like the lighter sauceier, Cody. Yeah, we're going for takes.

This is quoting big wet boy, JP, That's why lesbian relationships don't last. Jordan Peterson said it directly on his daughter Mikaela's podcast. Women on average experience higher levels of negative emotion making them more sensitive to problems in a relationship. That's also why women initiate seventy to seventy five percent of divorces. Put two women together and that sensitivity gets doubled.

Multiple studies UK, US, Nordic countries consistently show lesbian couples have significantly higher divorce rates than gay male couples often two to three times higher. Do you think differences in negative emotion explain a lot about relationship longevity across different pairings, or is it more about culture and expectations?

I think that that is broadly true. I think that

You got to have a hot take. People are scrolling, they're seeing this post, they see the Handsome Hour Boys underneath it.

Yeah, think lesbians get I would bet that lesbians get divorced at a much higher rate, in part because they get married at a much higher rate, and they get married faster. I don't know if that's a fact, but I bet if you look it up, it's true. They say, what does a lesbian bring to a third date? And then the answer is a U Haul. Love that joke.

Which is, but I think that, I mean, but also that is also probably downstream from more propensity to negative emotions, it's like I feel alone, I feel like I need someone to take care of me, oh, here's a person, I'm gonna latch onto you, there we go. And also a lot of lesbians are I don't This is maybe a hot take, I think that gay men are largely just gay, I think that a lot of lesbians are lesbians because of like trauma and like bad experiences with men, so they feel like they just need a woman to take care of them.

Yeah, isn't there just like hard science that shows that? I could be misremembering.

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm sure that there I think that I don't think I'm just making that up.

There there is hard science to show that gay guys are more likely to be inflexibly coded to be gay.

Whereas Gay guys are more gay than lesbians are lesbian.

Or they're more likely to stay that way. Whereas lesbians, one the phrases I love is, lug, lesbian until graduation. So they're college, they're a lesbian until graduation, and then they go and they get married and, you know, have a family and kids.

Right. Homosexuality is just another way that men are more honest than women.

Well, it's also true that the majority of men who report as bisexual are, in practice, just gay and the majority of women who report as bisexual are in practice only dating men. So, you know, do women in heterosexual marriages, why do women initiate divorce more? I think it's I think part of it is is just goes back to what we talked about before where, if you're a woman, someone's going to take care of you. Right?

Look, I mean, that's part of it. It's certainly not the entire thing. I mean, what's that horrific stat I think I may have quoted before, is that if you lose your job as a man, there's like a fifty percent chance you're gonna get divorced in the year after that.

There's also a stat that says too, like, when women get cancer, they're much more likely to get divorced. Men will divorce when they get sick, women will divorce men when they lose their jobs.

And they lose their status, yeah.

But also, like, men will precipitate a divorce by just kind of quiet quitting the relationship because they don't, like, there's a major, I mean, losing your wife is akin to losing your job as far as a status downgrade when you're a man, so like, as a man, you will hold onto a relationship that you don't actually want to be in, and you'll just sort of like, tune out and become a shitty husband and wait for your wife to initiate the divorce. So I bet that it's, in practice, it's like who actually quit on the relationship, it's probably closer to equal as far as who initiated the divorce itself in terms of paperwork.

Because if You're almost contradicting yourself. If it's the lesbians have a massively higher level of divorce than gay men, then that would strongly indicate that it's not just men quiet quitting.

Last topic. Topic. Red button, blue button.

It's a thought experiment. It's been going viral recently. The way it goes is your your every person on earth is offered this choice, and the choice is if you press the red button, you are guaranteed to survive, nothing happens. If you press the blue button, only the people who have Everybody survives if and only if greater than 50% of people have pressed the blue button, otherwise everyone die everyone who pressed the blue button dies. So red guaranteed safe, blue button only safe if over 50% of people who, of all people, press the blue button.

So what button are we pressing?

Oh, I mean, red, for sure. Right?

So It would also depend on what kind of society I lived in.

You live in the current society.

If I lived in Haiti, I'm going red. If I lived in America in 1910, maybe I'd

go blue. Okay, but you live in America in 2026? Red. You're going red? I'm going red too, but I don't think blue is irrational.

Blue

is there because you believe in a better world and you want to save everybody. Believe in a better world. Not aware that if everyone were to save everyone, everyone would just pick red.

Yes, I think that you're sort of so my first instinct was to pick blue until I thought about it a little bit. And I think that by picking blue, you're a, betting on altruism or you're trying to pick altruism saying that even if someone wasn't smart enough to pick red themselves and they still deserve life, but you're also sort of betting on, like, if you pick blue, it means that you think you you only pick blue if you think blue is going to win. So you're also betting on human irrationality and human stupidity, which I think is a safe bet. Like, I I bet that if you gave I bet if you did that as a national poll, I bet blue wins.

That's an interesting take. Yeah. I think the usual take is like, yeah, because like, this is this is interestingly, like, extremely divisive. And the people who are, you know, blue voters are like, if you vote red, you're evil. I I think the best yeah.

I I think the logic goes like this, right? It's that, like, some percentage of people are going to either be mistaken or make a mistake. Like, they'll either not understand the question or not understand the the the choice, or they will, like, misclick somehow. Right? And those will be the first set of blue voters.

And then the next set will be the ones who recognize that they'll be the first set and want to save them. And then the final set might be something like people who know people in the second set. So like, they themselves don't care about the first set, but they know people who are gonna be altruistically motivated and they care about them because they're like their close family or loved ones, and so they wanna save them. And like, that's the sort of chain.

Yeah, the floor on blue is twenty five percent. If you gave this poll to in The United States, the minimum number of people who die is twenty five percent, because at least twenty five percent of people are going to pick blue out of confusion, or some sort of misplaced altruism, but I bet that confusion and just stupidity accounts for at least twenty five percent.

The winning strategy is to simply not love stupid people.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. Problem solved. Problem solved.

I I think we do have to love stupid people, it doesn't mean we have to push blue.

I am pushing red personally, but I am doing that purely out of self interest. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna leave it up to chance.

Listen, I think the takeaway here is coach your altruistic loved ones on game theory. I think that's the takeaway here.

Nobody wants to hear game theory from anybody else, you know?

But they need to. Is your respi as a red pusher, it is your responsibility to take your loving aunt or sister or whoever is your your precious blue voter in your life, and to sit them down and explain explain prisoners dilemma prisoner dilemmas to them. Your your poor normie sister who doesn't understand and just wants to save, like, sit them down and give them the presentation. This is your duty. You have to do this.

It's the handsome hour.