Episode 2 - Women Can't Do Statistics

If you know more about Pokemon than anyone else in the world, there is a girl that's going to find that attractive.

There's an experiment for people to be had. Before they go on their first date, they flip a coin. Heads or tails? And if it's heads, they commit to going on three dates no matter what.

If you're five eleven and you're with a girl who loves you, you're six two to her.

Welcome back to the handsome hour. This is guaranteed to be the most handsome hour of your day by far, unless you're very good looking. And then every hour is sort of a handsome hour, isn't it? I'm Wes.

I'm Cody.

And I'm Stoney.

That's a first name and not a nickname.

It's a nickname, but the first name is stonier.

Really?

Yeah.

Let's get handsome. We we I'm

gonna try to

make that our our tagline.

Yeah. Let's let's get handsome. We have a great show today. Here's the thing is is people go on the Internet and they ask for advice and they share their stories and they expect to get good advice from people on Reddit. And the people who have good advice to dispense to these poor souls, they're not on Reddit giving advice, they're hosting podcasts.

That's

right. And so we thought that, you know

There's nobody on Earth more qualified to give this advice than us, two single guys, and

A recently un singled man.

That's right.

Yeah, and me. These are real questions people have, and I think the one thing I do like about Reddit is that it is still anonymous. I think that the Internet has become much less anonymous, but I'm glad that there's still a place that feels like a true town square, where people can tell you what they really think and ask their real questions because you would have to work kinda hard to figure out who they are. So this poster asks, is radio silence a bad idea before a first date, even if you've been talking for a while? And he writes, so I was talking with a girl I met online and we really hit it off.

We texted for five days, and then after that, we had a couple phone dates over a span of like ten to twelve days. So this poster asks, is radio silence a bad idea before a first date even if you've been talking for a while? He writes, so I was talking with a girl I met online and we really hit it off. We texted for five days and then after that we had a couple phone dates over a span of like ten to twelve days. There were a few days where neither of us initiated contact in between after having a phone date because I told her I preferred talking rather than texting.

The last time we called, I set up a date that was three days in advance and I told her I'd see her there and basically I just stopped talking to her because we had plans now and we would just talk in person. Right? That's how I've done it in the past and never had any problems. But I just found out there's a term called radio silence before that first date. I think not texting or talking up to that first date made her cancel and just ghost me.

I read that going radio silent is a bad idea before first date. What is your opinion? First of all, ten to twelve days of phone dates, but they live close enough to go on an in person date. I think that's the first move here that that feels off to me. It's You fool.

What what's what's taking you so long there? I think you gotta go on a date faster than that.

Yeah. First of all, part of the problem with modern dating is that we don't have a monoculture anymore. We are all broken up into these fractally hyper specific micro cultures and communities, all of which have their own unique sort of scripts and rule sets and norms that govern courtship. That is one of the many problems with modern dating, is that people are coming with different expectations as far as expected behavior, and because the sort of trust infrastructure and the fabric of our society is sort of breaking down, like, the public trust is so low that the smallest infraction against those expectations is seen as indication of, you know, moral bankruptcy, and this person didn't text me, and therefore I condemn them to hell in my mind. So that is the background of the context I would wanna set for this.

That's gonna come up basically every single time we read these, which is, you know, I feel like I'm always gonna come back to like, number one, like, give the person the benefit of the doubt. We're all nobody knows how to date anymore. We nobody knows what the script is. And b, there is no one script. Like, there is no so there is yes, there are some norms, and we can speak to what those norms are.

But for every norm, if you find the person who desires to break it in the exact same idiosyncratic way that you do, that's a great match. So blindly following norms is also not necessarily an advisable strategy, because it's going to not select as well for the kind of person who's gonna be a good match for you. So you should keep all of that in your head. But, all of that said, yeah, just take her on the fucking date, you loser.

Yeah. Like, there are no norms. I don't think anybody is expecting to wait, you know, do two video calls over twelve days before your date, and Tusa. You are the, you know, the man. Right?

You are the the the male in this relationship, and it's sort of on you to, like, decide what the norm is. You go in, you set the expectation. You say, okay. We're gonna go. Great to meet you.

We could text a little bit. Let's let's Friday night, Thursday night, whatever it is. What are you doing? Alright. Let's go out Thursday night.

Like, that's on you to decide and put your flag down. And if you just go in confidently, it almost doesn't matter what the norm is. Yeah. Right?

That's

right. Like, you are establishing what the norm is going to be.

You create your own unique micro culture with your penis.

Yes. And, yes, eventually with your penis. At first, you do it with your mouth.

But You enculturate her with your penis.

Yes. I have nothing to add to that.

So when I think about the norms, I think they're just the means to the end. The end is that the person you're trying to go on a date with is optimistic, looking forward to the date, and not in a state of fear. And that fear is usually around social rejection. So the norms, great. They can be very handy.

But if we ignore the norms for a second and just say, what was the output? The output clearly didn't work in that case. And so how do you give guidance when we don't have a monoculture about that? I don't even know if that's possible, but the feedback from whatever monoculture this person's in is that one didn't work out.

Well, I think in an environment without it's sort of like the state of nature, right? If there are no norms, it's not that everybody's doing the wrong thing, it's that no matter what you do, it's almost correct. Now, what this person did was not correct because it was stupid. But if there's no law to govern the dispensation of property rights, then whatever you own is yours, right? So Yeah,

yeah, that's right. It defaults to a deeper set of laws, a deeper set of norms, which are like the biological ones. And typically, I mean, everybody's different, everybody's idiosyncratic, but generally speaking, what women are looking for from a man is what Wes said, they want you to be confidently lead, make her feel safe and comfortable, and create a tone that strikes a balance between sort of playful, good, positive energy, and maybe just the tiniest amount of danger. Right? Not danger, danger.

Bad boy.

Yeah, bad boy. Like excitement, that is, that you're willing to cut a like, you're not gonna play it so safe that you're gonna be boring. Right? So that's the tone that you're aiming for, generally speaking, as a man. What this guy failed to do is he didn't move forward fast enough and confidently enough.

But all of the norms, to speak to your point, Wes, all of the norms can be violated if you do it by way of appealing to the deeper set of laws that are governed by biology. So for example, you can break every other rule if you do that. So for example, like, what I if you just get this girl on the phone, part of the problem is the super low bandwidth methods of communication. Like, if you're texting or even just calling, you're starting off from on the back foot, because it's so low bandwidth that the norms and expectations matter so much more, because she has to read into every little piece of information that you're putting out, because there's so little information to go on. So all she can do is to interpret it in the context of norm expectations.

So one of the best things you can do is just get to the highest bandwidth form of communication as fast as possible, which obviously the highest bandwidth one is in person, but short of that, a video call, short of that, a phone call. So that you can set this tone correctly from the beginning. This is why when I was dating, like, would always just try to call the girl, like, right away, oh, we matched on Bumble? Great, what's your number? I'm gonna call you right now.

And we just and it first of all, it was kind of fun and exciting, because most guys don't do that. So it's like, wow, he's confident, he's putting forward. But more importantly, I was able to get her on the phone, and immediately I was able to start kind of teasing her, and joking around, and setting this playful, good energy tone, so that she knows she's like, oh, and she immediately can see in a high resolution, high bandwidth way, that I am comfortable and confident and feeling good, and I'm not putting pressure on her, I don't care, like if she rejects me, I'm not gonna freak out and stalk her and show up at her front door. So I'm creating a sense of safety and security and fun and playfulness. She wants to go on a date.

And now, if I say, okay, we're going on a date on Friday, and I don't talk to her between now and Friday, she's it's probably fine. Yes. Because she already she's sold on me, and she wants to go on the date. So it's not the it's not the radio silence per se, it's everything around it. It's the context, it's the total message that's being sent between the silence and all the context around it.

Yeah, and I don't want to get too distracted by the sidebar here, but by doing the phone thing too and and calling her right away, you're establishing that you're not a texting guy. Like, I I think that is sort of it it's it's it's giving the rest of the conversation that's happening before the date a very important context, which is saying that if if I have something important I want to say to you, I'm I'm gonna call you. Right? And if I'm not texting, like, if if if all she has to go on before she meets you is the way you're texting like, I I went on a date with this girl who was much younger than me a couple years ago, and she said that she was worried because I text like an uncle, and it's because, you know, she's from a younger generation and she's expecting me to to be emotionally effusive via text or something, right? But when you're calling her on the phone, it's like, hey, I can communicate.

I have social skills. I can talk. And if I text you in a way that feels off or something, like, it's an extremely low bandwidth medium and it's texting, you know? Yeah. Totally.

And it's she's not like trying like, it's just what you said. Like, she's not trying to read too much into However, I think the other thing that like, when you text like this before a first date, you're making two big mistakes. And the first one is that you're sort of stepping on the excitement of the first date, because a first date's supposed to feel exciting, like you're just, like, you know, meeting someone kind of for the first time and you're getting to know each other in this way where you can kind of feed off each other's energy and and and really understand what it feels like to be around this person, and you're surprised by new things you meet about them. When you when you talk to someone on the phone too much, you text with them too much, it it like establishes familiarity without actually establishing familiarity. Mhmm.

Like, it gives you the, like, sort of the simulacra or the or the illusion of like already knowing this person. So when you do meet them for the first time, it's not as exciting and it feels like you already know them, but there's going to be this like weird discord between what you expect from the way you've communicated with them already and then the reality of what this person's actually like. I So I think it just, number one, makes it less exciting and makes it feel a little bit weird, because there's just going to be this disparity between expectation and reality, which is going to be there at any first date, but the expectation part isn't nearly as it's not about high expectations, it's just a difference or something. And the other thing is that I this is a true I would say this is true for anyone, but I think especially for men. If you're devoting all this time to to talk to someone that you've not even been on a date with, it's it's like it signals that you don't have other things going on, or you don't have options or something.

Do you agree with that?

I wouldn't read into it necessarily that far. And I think if someone was to try to analyze it, they're gonna end up overthinking it if it is themselves. And in fact, if they don't have enough options, then they're gonna overanalyze it because they don't have enough options. So I wouldn't want to mess with someone's headspace along those lines.

Yeah. I think just, like, even if it was a girl, you know, if if let's say for whatever reason I I was on a dating app on on Sunday night, I I had a a date scheduled for this coming Thursday with a girl, I would wait a couple days. I would say something in the meantime. I'd be like, hey, how's your week going? Or something, right?

But if she's texting me every day and wanting to talk to me every day, I'm almost a little bit like, you know, why are you investing so much in this right now to where you're like thinking about me at, you know, two p. M. On a Tuesday when you don't you don't know if you like me, you know nothing about me. You you we might you know, we might go meet in person and and you might know this is over in the first two minutes. And so I don't know.

There's something there. I might not have the exact words for it, but it strikes me as just a little bit odd to have someone do that.

I think what you're touching on is the natural progression. And people who are in sales understand the natural progression. Even if you were to buy a car, you understand the natural progression. And, you know, you you might research online, you might walk around the lot, you might stare at it, you might sit in it, you might eventually take a test drive. And as you've gone through these steps, you're finally ready to buy.

And you also understand you do it in that order. You don't take a test drive first and then browse on the Internet to see what else is out there. So as you're going through that date, and I think both of you touched on this in different ways. You wanna escalate the communication level, as Cody says, the bandwidth, but you don't wanna do it in a way that either leaves it hanging or overdo it. And how exactly you do this?

There is no guideline. You can't say, oh, if you're 20 and in a small town, or if you're 35 in a big city, here are the different rules for you. There is no way to communicate the right rule, but you can constantly aim to get towards the, I'm gonna progress this in a way that meets the other person's expectations, leaves them feeling comfortable and optimistic.

Right.

How to do that is the hard thing.

Yes. Like, I think the the constant contact that we're going to be texting all the time and and and getting to know each other through the flow of our regular daily lives, that to me comes after the step where you say, I am definitely interested in you, and I definitely want to pursue this further and see if there's really something here. It's sort of like step two or three. And step one is, let's sit down face to face and see what this feels like.

And and also, for a lot of the guys out there who have the expectation to pay for the date, two drinks each person before you know it, that, you know, once a week is a significant outlay. So one of the benefits of a quick video call is just to help you flesh out, do I personally want to take this to the next step? Because it can get expensive.

That's true. That's very true. To address this poster specifically, I'm reading the comments he's getting here. I don't think she bailed on the date, if I had to guess, because he was talking to her before the first date of all of this. I think the problem is that he set the expectation that he was going to be talking to her all the time and then stopped.

To actually address the poster and their exact question, it probably wasn't the radio silence itself. It was that you were texting her constantly for five days, scheduled a date, and stopped talking to her. That is what threw her off.

Yeah. I think the norms are that, like, you're supposed like, look, if I just prescribed exactly what, according to modern dating norms, is maximally expected and will get best results, it would be finalize the plans two to three days before the date, and then send a text confirming that morning, but do it in a sort of over the shoulder way. So you don't go, are you going to meet? We're still on for tonight, right? You kind of go like, hey, by the way, I got a meeting this afternoon.

Probably might be running five minutes late, but see you at five, right?

Yeah, night before or morning of, just quick confirmation text.

Yeah, so you're just kind of gently confirming, and therefore it's not completely real silence, but you're still saving the majority of energy to be found had on the date, as you said, Wes. Yeah. That is what's optimal.

Do you want to move on to the next post?

Let's move on to the next post.

Okay. This next post is titled, a guy called me fat on a date. She says, today, I was on a date with a guy, and he asked me how much I weigh. I thought it was a weird question, but okay. I assumed it was fine since we were talking about working out in the gym, so I told him.

Afterwards, he had the audacity to call me not even fat, but hefty. For context, I'm about fifty nine or sixty kilograms, which I don't know how much that is. I'm a hundred and sixty five centimeters tall. I work out a couple of times a week, but I still have a little bit of a belly and big thighs, which he also commented on. I like to eat, but come on, that's why I work out.

I, for one, think I'm fine. I'm traumatized now. In case it's not obvious, guys don't do this.

A hundred and thirty two pounds.

Okay. And how much is a hundred and sixty five centimeters?

Five five. That's not crazy at all. I'm really bad at guessing women's weight, and I'm historically all over the map because I'm over two hundred pounds, so a hundred and fifty seems a lot lighter to me. And they're like, what? I'm a hundred and twenty.

I'm like, I don't know.

Yeah. That's that's this isn't even that's not even fat.

Here's the one thing I would say to this. He might be a chubby chaser. Okay? There are guys who there are guys who are into that.

How? He's such a it's funny because he's already on the date.

I know a guy who is a avowed chubby chaser. He will tell you that. And he loves it because to him, it's like, well, great. The girls that nobody else wants.

He hit the supply and demand curve just right.

That's right. So just, you know, keep that in mind. This guy might be might have been a compliment.

It's a it's a sign of high testosterone, isn't it? If you I I think that's true.

Look at the at the bigger question. Where is honesty as a part of your dating strategy?

Do you if you're if you're in the game of talking about weight, just don't talk about weight. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. It's just a minefield. Why are you entering that minefield?

She could be the perfect woman in terms of every body metric and measurement. And if you're talking about her weight on a date or body, like, don't have this conversation. She's going to be insecure about it no matter what.

I mean, I used to take girls on the roof of my condo building and talk and make jokes that I brought them up there to murder them.

I thought you were going to say you brought them up there because the condo building had a weight limit, and you thought they weren't going to collapse the roof.

And that was the test. Like, if they collapsed the roof, then they were too heavy for me.

Yeah. Sadly, you'd go with that test as well, I guess.

Yeah. No, so it tangential. But I guess the point there is that, I mean, look, you can get away with anything, but you are entering a minefield if you do that. Like, my like, alright, alright, so theory of mind. Where is this guy coming from?

He might have just been an asshole, and his intent was to insult. That seems pretty it's It seems unlikely to me. I think most guys don't go on dates with that intent. My guess is that he's just an idiot. That's most of what explains this type of male behavior.

Yes. They just don't know the rules. They don't know that how sensitive of a topic it is to women. They don't know, etcetera, etcetera. And they're just, you know, just struggling to find something.

He probably didn't. He needed something to say.

Yeah, or he thought he was making an edgy joke, and he just didn't, you know, he thought it would get a laugh, and it didn't, and or, you know, there's a million reasons that guys shoot themselves in the foot like this all the time that has nothing to do with the intent to harm or anything like that. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, general advice and type of thing to women would just be like, I mean, to admit, don't be stupid. Learn what topics are sensitive, and try to handle them with tact and grace. To women, recognize that, you know, most men are not as sensitive as you are to that tact and grace, to what those topics are and how they should be handled. And especially as you have said in the past, Wes, they're going to be especially awkward on the first few dates.

The way a guy behaves in the first few dates is not going to be super indicative of who he is in general. He's nervous. He's figuring out what you care about, and what you're sensitive to and not sensitive to. So like, you know, you don't you know, everybody the general theme I feel like I'm gonna be advocating for is like, everybody should just try to give it like, cut everybody some slack. Like, we all go, wow, the dating the dating landscape is brutal and horrific, and then we all turn around and contribute to it by being having exacting brutal standards for everybody else.

And it's like, maybe the first thing we can all do is just chill, breathe, give her cut everybody some slack, use your words. It's gonna be okay.

Yeah. I mean, I don't I I think in this particular case, I don't blame this girl for not wanting to go out with this guy again.

I don't blame her

either.

So along those lines of cutting someone some slack, what is that line where you decide, will go on a second date with this person. I won't go on a second date with this person. And I think what Cody is touching upon is how high up are we going to push that line so that anything slightly suboptimal is immediately excluded. Whereas, you're not sure what really is suboptimal till you get to know someone and go out for 10 dates with them. So I guess that's that's the question is that that you're looking for just one negative trait that allows you to put a line through that person's name, and you'll succeed.

You'll succeed in moving your standards up, but you'll possibly also succeed in being single for the rest of your life.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, this is actually everything that's really well established by psychological literature, and the psychological science. We are really bad at assessing the personality traits of other people, especially on limited data. In fact, I can cite a paper. It's Osh 1946, was the first paper that really well and there's been many papers since, of course, but that's the most famous sort of landmark paper that established this, that we are not good at that, most people are.

So it's like, whatever impression you're forming about somebody immediately, it's probably wrong.

So then there's an experiment for people to be had before they go on their first date. They flip a coin, heads or tails. And if it's heads, they commit to going on three dates no matter what. And if it's tails, they can take their usual approach. And then the question is, how often are you surprised by the third date?

How often do you think, I would totally have not have done this had I not flipped a coin, but, you know, by the third date, I found something more alluring?

Yeah, I think that's a great proposition. You know, I can tell you, I mean, I can tell you, in our experience, I don't want to speak for you, but I'm guessing you'll agree with me, Wes, doing matchmaking at Keeper, we see this pretty commonly. Like, people are often ready to bail on a first date for some really tiny reason, and if we encourage them to keep going

They will thank you. Yes. In many cases. And if not, then it was still the right thing

to In fact, not to go off the rails too much here, we just had a marriage happen this last week at Keeper.

Big wedding.

Yes. He tried to reject her, and we had to get him on the phone and argue with him. At the very early stages, we had to, like, I mean, I don't want to We had to tell him, like, you're making a really terrible choice. You're being a dummy. You need to get you need to just, like, give this one a deeper chance.

So it was exactly a case of of of something like along these lines, and now they're married.

It's often like that. I want to say that in ninety percent of cases where they end up getting married, you look back, and there was always some objection that you had to get them passed or some friction that they had to be helped through, whether it was she lives far away. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to make it up there. I don't know what we'll do together. Or people will always people will always find a reason to to to not want something that's that's very good for them.

Yes. They need someone who's the third party who they trust to say, you don't I'm not telling you to marry her.

But Just give it a chance.

Just talk to her. Okay.

I think that's happened in one hundred percent of all of our marriages.

I think it has I can think of one or two where it hasn't specifically, but I can think of more where it has. Yeah.

And if I can go into a hypothetical, why is that? When you select your successful when you when you when you say, okay. I will go on a second date with this person because they were so energetic, charming, captivating on the first date, everyone they've unless you're dating 18 year olds who have never dated before, then you're dating someone who everyone else has appreciated that energetic, charming, captivating side. But as time went on, they realized that there was some underlying reason why they couldn't date this energetic, charming person. And so by almost focusing on the people who present poorly for whatever reason on the first date, you might find that there's a not to be, you know, cliched, but there's a pot of gold somewhere buried under that wooden or lack of charisma personality.

Yeah. I agree a 100%. I I think it's not even, like, it it it's not even always lack of charisma. It's just like they didn't fix all my problems in one breath. You know?

It it the the bar could be very high for some people, but the you you raise a very good point, which is often the opposite is going to happen if, like, your first impression is going to be wrong on first dates in both directions.

Well, I was going in a slightly different direction in that if the first impression is positive and you presume that this person can produce positive first impressions, then what that's kind of telling you is that everybody else who came before you saw this positive first impression, got to the fifth date, got to the tenth date, and realized, oh my goodness, this person is, I'm just making up things here, a sociopath or lacks the soul or who knows what.

Yes, yes. It's like if you go to a doctor, if you go to the doctor's office, there are two doctors, right, two surgeons you can work on. One of them is perfectly polished and looks like straight out of PubMed or some doctor magazine, which I'm sure there is one. And the other one looks like a butcher. He's got big fat hands, and he's kind of sloppy.

It's like and you know that they're both, you know, surgeons at this prestigious institution. It's like, which one do you want? Well, you want the one who looks sloppy because you know he didn't get there by looking the part. Right? And it's like, yeah, if if you, you know, if you're a very charismatic because there's this, you know, charismatic guy who's, you know, seems perfect in every way on the first date, and he's been single for six years, it's a little bit like, well, there's got to be something else going on here.

Right? It's a little it's a little suspicious.

We do this with the restaurants. You know, you know that the restaurant in Times Square, New York is going to succeed because of its location. And as a result, it can have bad food. The restaurant with a much worse location, it has to have better food. Another reason is I don't like going to bars to eat because they're going to focus on alcohol.

They're not going to have the best food.

Yeah. I want to just pull it underneath you because you're you're leaning your head over back like this, and then we're not getting you.

There we go.

They say never eat at a restaurant with a view because you're paying for the view. If you eat at the top of the Eiffel Tower, the food no one's ever they're gonna have they're gonna be able to fill seats every day of the week for the entire year. Doesn't matter how good

the food is. Yeah, 100. I mean, there's a name for this. It's called psychopath charm,

right? Where Can get this? Is there a book on how to get this?

Yeah, an instruction yeah. It's called How to Make Friends and Influence People.

No, there is a book. It's called The Wisdom of Psychopaths. I read it a long time ago.

Really?

Yes. I don't I don't endorse it. I don't know if it's actually good.

But yeah, mean, right? It's like, what what's the basic idea? Low IQ psychopaths fill our prisons, high IQ psychopaths fill our CEOs and senators and our high status positions. They learn to manipulate the social fabric, and they tend to come across very charming and charismatic and etcetera, etcetera. And so, if you are only selecting hyper selecting for that, you are gonna be they're gonna be they're 4% of the population baseline, but they are gonna be vastly overrepresented in your sample, if you're only selecting for people who can do that.

Yeah, I had a friend in college who was incredibly charming when you first meet him. He wasn't a psychopath. But you would meet this person, and he would make you feel like you were the center of the world. Right? You he was so interested in everything you said, and you're he's just so charming and charismatic and fun to talk to, and you're just, like, just magnetic.

Like, everyone wanted to be around him. Right? And then you get to know him, and he he he basically has no true friends because it's all a facade. It's it's it's all charm. And if you, you know, if you get to a stage of the friendship where you wanna get to know him as a person, it's there there is something there.

Right? But you're not gonna find out what it is. Because it's it's always this, like, blustery kind of you never feel like you're talking to the actual person. You feel like you're talking to their PR department, and then that's all there is.

100%.

And you don't want to be that person.

So we have another thing here. I haven't read this at all. Stoney, you brought this. Do you wanna read it?

Sure. The conversation started with someone called Hickman, and then the poster was Wispen Wontex. The backstory was a gentleman moved to, I think, Far North Upstate New York and had done this I don't know exactly the reason, but he'd become slightly famous on Twitter x because of it. And then someone else chimed in and said, when people talk about housing options, when people talk about a lot of these quality of life issues, what they're really talking about is, can you find and or attract a woman in this scenario? You know, that it's very different if you're a couple deciding to move to a rural area that isn't much going on.

But if you're a single guy moving there and you are not able to bring the material aspects or the visual material aspects of this, that's, in fact that it's not just gonna make it difficult, but that's in fact what the conversation is secretly about when people say these things. So the quote is when someone who's not in this situation says that young men can survive on a $50,000 a year income in a low cost of living area, living in a rundown house for sheep. This is completely true. Men can survive easily in that situation, but it doesn't mean that they can attract a woman, and therefore, they can't have kids, and therefore, they can't pass on their lineage.

Sure. Okay. I could be a plumber in rural Indiana, and I could afford a home. But what I want is not a home per se. It is a home with a wife and kids and a family and a sense of belonging.

And material security is pointless without these other things. You know? At a certain level, I would be okay living in the woods. You know what I mean? Like, if if I had no access to women or anything and, you know, it was just over for me, sure.

I'll go get the house and and I'll I'll game. But that's not the that's not the goal of life. That's the that's ancillary to anything everything else. It's such a good post that it's like, I don't have anything really to add to it, it's just true.

It's just

worth saying.

I mean, this is connected to all sorts of insidious things that are happening. I feel like Ho Math, I know you like Ho Math a lot, talks about some of this, where I don't know if I can concisely summarize all of it, because it's all very complex, and I'm sure I don't understand every tendril. But the highest level summary being that there are these sociocultural economic trends that are happening that individuals are then having to contend with, often not realizing what in truth they're actually contending with, and having even less of an idea of how the other gender is contending with them. So they are experiencing them just firsthand as the material reality of their lived experience immediately, not realizing that they're surfing a giant sociocultural wave, and that it may be affecting the other gender even more, or in converse ways. So this is a perfect example of that, where I think it is objectively, obviously, everybody knows this, getting tighter and tighter financially with inflation and so forth.

Your dollar goes less far than it has in many decades, and so forth. And so single men but the expectation on the part of many women is that men can provide for them in the same way that they were able to in the 50s, or whatever. That a man with his sole income can provide for their family and take them on lavish vacations. That expectation was set and codified into our cultural mythos, all of our media, and our rom coms, and everything that we consume, that's kind of the expectation, right? But it doesn't match the reality of today, but it's still the background subconscious expectation.

Well, crucially, it's the man can provide for me in the way that I am currently providing for myself, from the woman's perspective?

At a minimum.

At a minimum.

Sure. Yes. Sure. And there are ways in which, again, as Homath and others have pointed out, in which, just to put it bluntly, the system is rigged to make it more difficult than it otherwise would be for that to be possible.

I mean, housing cost is the most obvious. And people will say, oh, houses have always been expensive. But if you just look at the price of a house not as a dollar value, but as a function of the median income median house to median income. And then if you also look at questions like how many people are married and living in a house they own by the age of 30, that number, I think, has fallen from 50% to 12%. So something is radically changing that.

I don't think anyone can buy a house in a major metropolitan area unless they're making easily, what, a quarter million dollars or more? And that's just not feasible for, a, most people, and even those who can make it, those until their thirties or forties.

Yeah. Well, so much of the real estate is not even viable for a young man now. Like, don't I grew up in a small town, and I my family, where they were all in, like, different small towns at different parts of the country. But it feels like in in the late nineties or or early two thousands that you could probably be a single person there, and there was, like, lots of job opportunities around and lots of things to do and, like, a thriving community of people your age. And you go there now, and the and the the average age has gone up in all of these places because all of the young people have left.

So it it's not only, like, yes, the costs have gone up across the board, but even in the places where costs have stayed the same or gone down, those are now much less desirable places to be if you are a single young person. So your your options are all concentrated in the types of places where costs have risen substantially, like the major metros. And, you know, even you look at, like, these booming cities in the South. There's Nashville, there's Charlotte, there's all these places where young people are moving, world costs are

going up there, too. Yeah. And it's challenging because it's still a zero sum market, and you can say this all you want, and still it, like, doesn't change anything. Like, we can identify what's happening, but it's like, okay. Well, women still want they still wanna live comfortably.

So

I I think I'm not gonna disagree with the zero sum market, but I am gonna suggest that it can go below zero. And what I mean by that is you can find that from one decade to the next, the percentage of people who are happy with their situation can go down. And I think we have entered a world where people are often not happy with their options. And I don't think it's easy to point to a single culprit, but I think it's easy to point to an overall systemic cause.

Yeah. Totally agree. Totally agree. I'm not sure that I though, like, the so I guess I'm just not sure that there's, like, advice to be given. It's like, well, what do you do?

It's like, well, you just you just do the best you can. If I had to try to give advice, I would say, like, you know, it's like, to men, I would say, find other ways, other than I mean, obviously, try to do as well as you can financially. Try to find other ways to show off your mate value. Show that you are conscientious like like, okay, so there is research that shows pretty clearly that there's a deeper factor rather than below pure financial success that's actually what's being selected for. So it's it's and it kind of conflates ambition, status, and financial success.

And so by being and conscientiousness being tied in there as well. So in other words, by being ambitious and conscientious and working hard, that can be oftentimes, I don't want to say, as good as being rich, but that be very attractive

as You're talking about signaling future. Signaling future value

for your current situation. Right. Right. So that's what I'm saying. So it's like, if you're a guy, and you have median income, if you're making 50 k a year or something like this, right, and you're not crushing it financially, and you are bemoaning the fact that that you feel like that's making it hard to be attractive to women, because you can't give them the lifestyle they want or whatever.

To that, I would say, it still will be very attractive if you can show off the qualities of well, that are touching at the same underlying psychological factor. So show that you're hardworking, show that you're ambitious and you're trying to advance in your career, you're not just totally happy, just being whatever, where you are forever, that can help. But then also other things that are other factors, like you can show off other qualities that that are attractive, are, generosity, and you can be physically attractive, you can be healthy, etcetera, etcetera. And so just try to build out a well rounded package. It's usually not enough.

A lot of times, a common mistake people make is that they over index on one thing. So they think it's just all about money and nothing else, or it's just all about looks and it's nothing else. And in truth, most people want a well rounded partner. So if you can be well rounded in these other areas, that probably you have bottlenecks there as well that you can be improving.

My question there would be, if we all took that advice, would it increase the number of happily coupled people? Or would it just make everyone healthier, but that the number of happily coupled people were still the same, that we had all simply raised the stakes? And Right. That I don't know the answer, or even I can guess at

believe I know. I mean, no one really knows. It's a fantastic question. It's the right question. And the answer is that, yes, the advice I just gave is beneficial to the individual who takes it, right?

But at a market level, at a global level, if everybody takes it, you're right. It just means that the baseline has risen, and the competition level is higher.

If we all get that incredibly painful leg surgery that extends your legs two inches, and every guy was two inches taller

Right.

Then we would not have Right back

anything where we

on an individual basis. It's just that we couldn't not participate if that became the de rigueur.

There is a next thing. So it's like, all of that is almost in some way a setup to say this next thing, which does turn the market from a zero sum market into a positive sum market. So this does follow the categorical imperative. We can adopt this at the global level, and it does work. Which is, everybody has a unique profile, so to speak, in terms of the relative weights of what they care about.

And that is actually, and I talked about this a little bit in episode one, but nobody here's listening to this listened to episode one, so I'll say it again, and I go into a little bit deeper. You should think in terms of your, so to speak, market alpha. Your market alpha is the way is the delta between the average set of preferences and traits of the of the average market participant, and yours. So if you if you have different traits, or especially different preferences, that that can be market alpha. In other words, if you found somebody, if you if the average person cares about, like, just to use an example, if the average person thinks that this particular set of facial features is a 10 out of 10, optimally attractive, but you only think that's an eight.

Whereas you think this particular, your eyes a little bit wider, nose a little bit bigger, that's to you a 10, and to everybody else that's an eight. That discrepancy is an advantage. Now you can have a more attractive, if you find somebody who fits that exact description, you can get a more attractive partner that the market is undervaluing. So you can separate common, to use economic terms, I'll Tony, you can correct me, our our our resident master of economics, to separate common value from individual value, or price from value, if you wanna say it that way. So the market is pricing this person at this one way, but you price them differently, the value to you is higher or lower.

That is really the way that the market becomes more positive some, if you can identify those at a high enough resolution across the entire span of preferences and traits, not just physical, obviously, but everything. And the problem is that there's no great tooling out there. There's no great way to do that. It's hard. That's what we're trying to build at Keeper.

But until then, the best thing you can do as an individual is to try to focus on your differentiators. Put your, and the way I always like to say this is, put your best and worst foot forward simultaneously. Don't try to cover If you just try to make yourself generically attractive, this is part of what I was saying, then you are gonna be generically attractive, and you're gonna be competing against everybody else who's trying to be generically attractive. But if you can focus on the elements that make you unique, then you will attract the partner who is uniquely attracted to those, who does think that you're a 10 for your unique qualities. And this is the way that you, a, escape competition, b, and then it's just yeah, that's just the way it goes.

So you have to find the things that you think are pros, that everybody else thinks are cons, and vice versa.

Or even things that other people don't see as cons, or things people aren't thinking about. If you build a product for everybody, you build a product for nobody. And I don't really have much to add to what you said because you did it so so well roundedly.

I'm gonna take a a a different slant to this, but more more of a different perspective. If we were to look at advice to a friend versus advice to a society, and let's do it on the lens of getting into an elite university. The answer to get into elite university is usually study harder, but and that's the that's the advice parents give their individual child. But if you were to say, we wanna maximize the benefit to our society, you don't just say, study harder, everyone, because you're still gonna have the same output. You're still gonna have the same people getting into the same elite universities.

If you were to maximize your society, you would start talking about all of the other things they could learn, do, experience, self education, whatever. So as we're talking about this kind of global advice, I do think it's not zero sum. I think it is positive in the sense that if we all improve ourselves, I do think we're going to have more matches because the couple will be additive. If you can find ways that your partner's life improves and improves dramatically because you're in the picture, then I think almost by definition, that'll increase the likelihood that someone will partner with you.

Yeah. I don't think that dating preferences globally are perfectly elastic to supply. And I might be kind of bastardizing the economic terms here, but I I think that if every man instantly became two inches taller, I don't think that women would suddenly desire men who are taller on average. I think that women want men a certain number of inches taller than them in a certain range, and they're not going to suddenly go like, you know, if a guy goes from five'nine to five'eleven, I think he does now enters the preference range of more women. Mhmm.

And I don't think the range moves just, you know, two inches with both boundaries up in the same way.

As a tall guy, I'm I'm actually going to disagree with you because you look at women who are short. I've dated women who are five foot tall, and they're now with someone who's fifteen inches taller than them. They like tall guys. It it doesn't well, I think women's height preference is I wanna feel safe and protected, so I'm going to take a a mental image of this guy's stature and compare it to all the other guys' stature. So I do think that height is entirely relative to what you are.

So I imagine being a tall guy in a short country who goes to Holland, where I think the height is the second tallest in the world, is suddenly going to find themselves passed over a lot more. I think both perspectives are correct, because there's two things that

you're effectively competing with. You're competing against all the other market participants, but you're also competing against the per like, competing might be the wrong term them being single, remaining single, right? So when somebody is evaluating you, they're both evaluating you. Like, do I want to be with this person versus this guy versus the next guy? Or do want to be with anybody?

It is totally possible for all the options to be inadequate, and for them just to go, I'd rather be single than date anybody. And that does increasingly happen these days. And so I think both effects are true. Like, there is some threshold below which people would rather be single, and that threshold's gonna be different for everybody in the dating landscape, but it's probably gonna be, you know, there's gonna be an average, so there's gonna be some height. Like, if five three as a guy, probably most women would just rather be single.

Sorry not to call out

a There was a study where how much money you have to make per year to be equal in the eyes of women. And the numbers were shocking. I think for every inch, was $40,000 a year of income would kind of normalize that height difference. Yeah.

Yeah. So you can address the one by getting taller or improving traits that

Better improved shape, yeah, at least better dressing. But that is the competitive market. And then I think there's the internal work you can do, which is the complementary

market. But the point is just like, if you're a five three guy, don't compete with the guys on height. You're never going to win that. So there are some girls, they might not be the average girl, but there are some girls who don't give a shit about height, who care about other things, and you might be able to excel in those things. So when you look at it from that perspective, the shift is, because that, stated as such, is not that revelatory.

The problem is that most guys, or women, I'm sure women experience an inverse of this, they kind of stop after that. They go, okay, but I can't find her. It's like, okay, but do you believe that she exists? Okay. If yes, then, okay, now you just have a search problem.

So now you need to be It's like, well, you just, are you using the exact are you using the are you using the Height app?

Search and strategy. I'm thinking of the Moneyball quote, where Brad Pitt's character says, something like the Yankees in here were going to lose to the Yankees out there. And he's telling them that when you're competing in an asymmetric warfare situation against a much better funded

That's right.

Baseball team, you can't compete by dollars Yeah. Obviously.

Yeah. Totally. Moneyball's a great analogy. I feel like that's gonna come up a lot. Yeah.

You gotta play Moneyball with your dating strategy.

Moneyballs. Oh my god. There we go. You have to play Moneyballs and

And and and

comedy. Moneypenis.

We have young children listening, Wesley.

Moneyballs and Clean it up.

I think Moneyballs is a good level of like

Edgy, but not too edgy.

A child would not understand that joke.

Trust me, the children oh my god.

They are yeah. The the 12 year old from today is not the 12 year old from the nineteen eighty's.

Well, a woman wants you to be how does a woman evaluate height? I don't think I I I don't think that women are looking at I I don't think women decide what a tall man is by looking at every man and then comparing him to the other men. I don't think women are actually that good at telling how tall people are. I think I think they mostly define it in relation to themselves. So, like, yes, I'm six two in The USA.

I have a very easy time. I would have a tougher time in The Netherlands, but it wouldn't be, like, it wouldn't be directly proportional to

That's a great point. Yeah. That's a great you're actually making a really, really good point, Wes.

Thank you. I know. I I know I'm making a good point.

You wanna keep No. Raising

You can continue.

I'll just keep praising

you. Yeah. No. No. Wes, Wesley, you genius.

Right. I I think I'm just saying that you you were being evaluated as a person, and they're comparing you to themselves. And at a certain point, there's a sufficiency that's met, where you feel large to her, and it doesn't you know, if every other man was, like, five inches taller than you or something, maybe it starts to matter. But

Well, what I was gonna say, let me let me steel man what you're saying, or or frame it slightly differently.

Sure.

Which is that I think there's this limitation on the part of men that they go, well, women are, you know, men are normally distributed, but they're applying Pareto standards. They're like, they only want the top 1% or whatever. And it's like, yes, that's true. But the good news, and this is going to sound misogynistic, but it's really said with love, women can't do statistics. So they yes, they only want the top 1%, but if it feels like the top 1%, that's good enough, baby.

And guess what? The top 40% of guys can feel like the top 1%.

I'm going to just disagree with you multiple times here. The first thing I'd say is that studies have shown again and again and again that women will rate 80% of men as below average attractive.

Yeah. That's totally true.

And the other thing I'd say is that you guys talk about, you know, height being inherently good, not relatively good to help your dating chances. So they've done studies with peacocks, and the male peacock has this amazing array of feathers, which it uses to impress the peahen. And they've come along, they've said, what happens if we just cut off half of their feathers And their dating chances well, I guess dating is the wrong word. Their mating chances plummet. But I think if you were to cut off half the feathers of every single peacock, that you'd still have the same mating.

So I do think height is purely relative in the sense that if peahens can relatively pick the male with the best feathers, why can't women relatively pick the men with the most income and the most height? And if you think about what was rich seventy years ago, that would have been owning two televisions or two Whereas that's not, you know, if you tell a woman, oh, I own an 80 inches TV, congratulations, you went to Best Buy on, you know, Labor Day sale.

I don't disagree with you, Sony. I think both things can be true. And I think what you're identifying is true. I'm trying to identify a contravening force, which doesn't cancel out your point. It just complexifies the picture and softens it a little bit.

And that is that there is this seeing like a state problem, where when we measure and quantify the results of the dating market from a top down economics lens, yes, we see these quantitative effects happening. But for example, to say it in a different way, if you're five eleven and you're with a girl who loves you, you're six two to her. She'll tell you that you're six two. But my point is that partly what's happening is that the medium is the message. Not the only reason, but yes, what most people are really looking for in a partner is they want the sensation, that they got somebody attractive, that they did it, that they locked on somebody that's going be attractive to them, who's going to make a good partner in the long who's going be loyal to them, who's going to be impressive, impressive enough.

They don't have to be massively impressive, but impressive enough to their friends and family, and who's going to get along. And all of these other things are it's just that basic set. They just want the good life. Everybody just wants the good life. And these other things are, in some sense, proxies, and they're amplified by the dating apps, by the culture, by our ability to apply statistical analyses, to see these effects, etcetera.

So it's like, yes. So I guess what it comes down to is this it's just the classic stated versus revealed preferences delta. There's many ways to get a girl, and those are going to be highly correlative, but with the things statistically, like, that are quantifiable, like finances, but most of the time, there are going to be other ways to get her as well. It's going be correlative, but not deterministic.

Women will rate men's attractiveness on a Pareto distribution while men are normally distributed. But the mistake to make when looking at that fact as a man is to think that women view attractiveness the same way you do That's where it's, like, necessary criteria. You can find any and I I'm actually always fascinated. You can find any male celebrity who objectively looks like a slob. Do you know who Slavoj Zizek is?

Yeah. There are women online who are thirsty for him, and he looks he looks horrible.

Because he's high status.

Because he's high status.

Right? Certain circles.

Within certain circles. Or it's like Pete Davidson is, like, looks objective. Like, I guarantee you, if he was just a guy on a, you know, a computer in a laboratory that women in this study were rating, they would not rate either of those men as attractive. But because one of them is funny and they're both high status and one of them has smart things to say about, I guess, Marxism, I don't know. But when like and it's not an illusion.

It's literally not like women are physically attracted to those men. Like, they are perceiving them as sexy. And it's it's not just like, oh, well, he's high status. Like, they're not, like, making a bargain with themselves. No.

Those men are actually becoming more physically attractive to women for having those traits.

For now.

I'm going back to kind of the guidance concept. And I think the two broad areas of guidance would be, one, you have to constantly be more appealing in the traditional sense, in the sense that you might as well be in shape, well dressed, and somewhat financially successful. But that is a competitive game that's always gonna have a distribution that only a few people can win, but it's you still can't not play it. But the other thing is that you have to excel in a unique area, and status is certainly one of those. I imagine chess grandmasters find it easier to date than someone who's otherwise identical and random, and that's your comment around Pete Davidson.

But you don't have to go for SNL fame. You don't even have to go for chess grandmaster fame. There's gonna be this multifaceted area you can push yourself so that you become unique at your own game. And I think that would be almost the global advice

Totally.

For us to rejoice in it sounds Hollywood new new, avocado toast, but rejoice in our own uniqueness.

Yeah. Competition is for losers. That's true. And I think that's going to be a theme that we come back to a lot. It's like, yeah, part of the problem is that you're trying to compete with everybody else in the same way they're competing.

Find your unique niche, build it, and they will come. And you will find women. Women will naturally and this goes for women, too. Is vice versa. It's like, find your unique niche, and the men who are into that, you'll find each other.

Stop trying to just swim in the go be a big fish in a small pond. Find your unique pond.

And it doesn't have to be one of these globally desirable things either. Like, know, physical attractiveness, fitness, being funny, being high status, we use these as examples. These are things everybody finds attractive, but the it can be more niche than that. It could be more niche than a specific group.

Yeah. Should be.

I remember in my college, there were guys who were otherwise lame, but would get girls because they were in the coolest fraternity, right? Like, they had somehow, like, earned this, like, signifier of, like, coolness that, you know, no one really understands cool, but if you're understood as being cool, you get this, like, reward for it. Right? And everybody's just following this perception of that. If, know, certain realms are going to be more male dominated than others, but certainly, there is something to be if you know more about Pokemon than anyone else in the world, there is a girl that's going to find that attractive.

That's right.

Now That's right.

That's not probably what I would go for, because that's going to be a male dominated subculture. However, it's just to make the point that literally almost anything you can think of is like some girl's going to like that if you actually put in the work and become good at that thing. Totally.

Yeah. Pick your yeah, exactly. Pick your and so to bring it back to here, it's like, yeah, everybody's thinking about the wrong way. They're going you know, they're a Pokemon nerd. And they're brushing that under the rug.

And they're going, you know, oh, that's like a secret that I have to keep, that like is unattractive to women. I need to go on the apps and portray myself as like a generically attractive guy. You can't compete in that arena. It's like, no, dude, you're doing it completely inverted. Make the Pokemon thing your thing.

Lean into that, go to the meetups, go to the conventions, That's where you're gonna find your wife. And it's the same with this guy. It's like, if if if homesteading in a remote location or whatever is really important to you, go do that. That's where you're gonna like, are there a lot of women out in the cornfields? No, there are not.

But the ones who are there are gonna be down for what you wanna do, and they're gonna be that's gonna be a good match. That's where you're gonna meet your wife. That's where you're gonna meet your husband. Most people are not they're just not thinking about it. The dating situation is bleak.

I'm not gonna lie. It's just not as as bleak as people think. You know, there's a lot of room for optimization that people are not are not taking advantage of.

What would you say then to someone who said, it is that bleak. And whether you looked at it by marriage rates, whether you looked at it by political spectrum, and it can be very hard to date someone who's radically on a different political spectrum than you. I think South Korea I agree. Has really embodied or shown this to be an issue. So I guess what would I what would you say to someone who pushed back and said, you know what?

Not only is it bleak, it really is bleaker than you think it is. And I don't I don't have a I don't have any proof points for that. I'm just curious.

Sure. Well, I mean, my first instinct would be to go, well, let's look at what your strategy is to meet this person that you're looking for and see if it's optimized.

But that's an individual one. I'm more saying, how do we know it's not globally, or globally, at least in your neighborhood or community? Bleak?

It would be hard to make that determination because there's not a lot of good research or stats or data that will tell us how optimized most people are dating strategies are on average. I'm not saying it's not bleaker. It is bleaker. No doubt. Dating is harder now than it's ever have been.

That's objective fact. And yet, it can also be true that individuals have a lot of agency to control their own destiny. So you can choose to buy different food. There are a lot of different food suppliers. You can do your own.

There's also more transparency now than there ever has been, in terms of an ability to do research than there ever has been. And there's more options on the market for food supply chains, etcetera, than there ever has been. So if you're really committed, you can go do all of that research, and you can change what you eat and theoretically address the situation.

It's if you if you were an individual, like, yes, okay. From the top down, dating, very bleak. No one disagrees with that. Everyone knows it's bleak. If there's anything you can be doing personally to do better, you kind of need to make sure you're doing all of that before you start blaming the system.

And I think that's I mean, I think it's part of its mindset, but it's like, Okay, you know, women have high expectations. Well, are you doing anything to meet those expectations? No. Well, do something. Right?

Because you you you know, the world's not going to change for you Right. No matter how you think about it. Yeah. Think about playing pool. Imagine that there's a pool league and there's a pool hall, and you get really good at going and playing pool, and you're not tall and, know, you're missing some traits.

Imagine you go to pool night at the bar and you wipe the floor with everybody. Women are going to see that and women are going to be impressed by that, regardless of your other traits. Now, the guy you shit on who's six foot two and very handsome is still going to do fine with women regardless of his performance to game a pool. Let me take it

in a slightly different direction that I think is also a really good point. It's a point that I actually I I find myself making frequently, but which is that, like, it's kind of unintuitive how slowly skill works, just in general. Right? So it's like, imagine the first person who, let's say, ever picked up a guitar. Like, And then they worked really, like, wow, this is a crazy collection of wood and wires, but it makes sound when I touch it.

And maybe it's theoretically possible that if I touched it in just the right way, it would sound good. It sounds horrible when I touch it right now, but maybe. And so they work really hard on it for like a hundred hours, for like two weeks straight. They're just like five hours a day, they're just like working really hard to try to make this thing sound good. And then two weeks later, they go, it still sounds like shit.

Okay, this thing is hopeless. This will never sound good. I put in work, like, this thing's done. And they've never heard of Jimi Hendrix, or these guys who have put in twenty thousand hours into this twang paddle to make it sound good. And so they throw away the guitar, and they never touch it again.

And everybody does that, and so there are no good guitar players, ever. You could totally imagine that universe. And the only reason that there are good guitar players is because we all know that that's possible, because we have these examples in our popular like cultural memory or whatever. And I think my point here, obviously, you guys see where I'm going with this, but I will now bring it home, the metaphor, the point is, it can be really unintuitive how much agency an individual really has, but also how much work it takes to realize that agency. Or what other it might not be work, it might just be knowledge.

You just have to have specific knowledge. There's oftentimes more headroom than we think there is, but it's locked behind certain doors. And if you don't know that there are doors, you'll think that they're walls. And so it could be skill, it could be effort, it could be knowledge, and that's my claim here as well, that dating is a guitar, and that with the right knowledge and effort and skill, you can get a lot more out of it than you probably are currently, and that applies to most participants in the marketplace, not 100%, but most. And that that fact is a one ray of hope in an otherwise it's a silver lining in an otherwise stormy sky.

I like that very much. I'm still coming back in my head to the two strands. And one is how to go from average to exceptional, and the other is why can't the world succeed even with average people? And I would guess that we're all more exceptional on paper than our grandparents. Definitely.

Obviously, I'm gonna guess all of our grandparents married and had kids long before we did. So so why has the world changed for the average person? And I don't think we can answer that. And even if you somehow knew, I don't know what any individual could do. But I guess those are my two threads that I think about.

How do I move myself from average to exceptional? And also, how do we move the world so that you don't need to be exceptional to be happily married with kids?

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, that is obviously the goal. You shouldn't need to be exceptional. So yes, we have to change the system. But easier to change one individual's behavior than the entire system.

Easier to get a sex back than reform modern dating.

Right. Exactly.

I think the order of operations for the individual is like, Okay, first meet the minimum threshold of sufficiency for all of the things that you can change right now. That means if your beard looks bad, get it cleaned up or shaved. If your hair looks bad, get a haircut. If you don't know how to dress, dress better. Right?

These are all things anyone can do with any amount of money, and questionably dress better. But

Step one, get handsome.

Step one is do all of the things that you can do that are easy to do that everyone is going to be attracted to.

Yeah. Get over that threshold where somebody would wouldn't rather be single than be with you because of this thing.

Right.

Right? Meet the bare minimum requirements across the board.

Like, don't show up in sweatpants. Right. Step one. And that gets you pretty like, the bar is lower than you think. Yes.

It is.

And I'll I'll I'll expand on that. Regardless of where the bar is, there's always a proximal stage. And it was Jordan Peterson who started with the advice, clean your room. And I think what he meant by that was that this is something that, really, with just the modicum of discipline, everyone on the planet can have a clean room. And once you have a clean room, you can have a clean house.

Once you have a clean house, you can focus. Am I arriving at my job punctually and doing a good job and acting ethically? And once you've done that at your job, do you expand that to becoming a manager? Do you expand that to becoming a business leader? Do you expand that to helping your community?

And everyone kind of keeps on working up that, and that's an area where there is no zero sum game because if everyone kept on progressing up that ladder, we would have an amazing society.

Yeah. Totally agree. Dev, I did I I can't remember. This is gonna happen a lot. Did I bring up the delicious tacos thing last time?

I do not believe so.

I totally agree with everything you just said, Sony, and it kinda reminded me of this thing, which I'm now realizing might seem more tangential than maybe it was, but or than I thought it was. But yeah, Delicious Tacos, the writer has he says this thing sometimes that I think is there's some deep truth in it, where he goes, let me see if I can set the stage correctly. He goes, people talk about this and that in the dating discourse. They'll tell you that women want this, or men want this, and it's so hard these days, and this and that. And it's all BS.

What's actually true is that people date who is there. That's it. When two people work at a restaurant, guess what? They date. Because they see each other every day, and that's the obvious person to date, and so the two waiters are in a relationship.

Everything else is noise. Everything else is this it's not true. I mean, it's true in some statistical sense, but like, the best like, if you wanna date the hot girl, go where the hot girls are. Just be a guy that's if she works at the restaurant, you work at the restaurant. Like, it's that simple, guys.

And that is true and not true. So my point is that, obviously, it doesn't really collapse to that level of simplicity, obviously. But there is some truth. There's some metaphorical truth there.

Half of life is showing up.

Yes.

Now, that's just half, but that is half.

Yeah. If you're not doing well on a dating app, doesn't that is not a rational assessment of your overall market value, and it's not like ergodic or or

That's right.

It's not your your value to every single woman. It's because you are on a medium that overvalues extremely trivial things, and that is sort of the reason that it's failing everybody, not just why it's failing you. It's also failing the people who are judging you based on the criteria with which they are given to judge you.

That's right. That's what I'm trying to say, is that all this other shit is a product of the hyper novelty of modernity. It's what you were saying, Stoney, which is that it's just true that the average guy and the average girl end up together. That's the way we're designed to work for millions of years. That is the sort of baseline I mean, there's some complexity there.

But there's this baseline, deeper, just biological nature. And on top of that, all of this bullshit has been added of the apps, and modernity, and technology, and new culture, and religion is dying, and there's all these million And it's like, okay. And all that can be bleak, it can be discouraging, and it creates all of this complexity. But there is this thing where you can just kind of fall down to that base thing, where it's just like if you can just cut through all that noise, there is a there is a deeper truth there that it's like, no, man. Like, just just show up and be a man.

And if there's a girl, she'll show up and she'll be a girl. And guess what? There's a decent chance you're going to find each other pretty attractive. Because that's what men and women do.

I've been to a few weddings in the past couple years. I think one or two of those weddings that people met online, I think it was one wedding they met on a dating app. I went to two weddings where they met at kickball club as 20, early thirties adults. And if you you, like Right. You go I don't know what it is about kickball club.

You go to kickball club, you're there. The game is going to be an hour or an hour and a half or whatever it is, and they're going to be women there playing kickball with you. That's You get hit in the face with a ball, the girl's standing there, you guys laugh about it, she sees, oh, this guy, like, he handled it with grace. It's like you can you you you women on a dating app cannot see your positive qualities. If you are in an environment with women where they are forced to be around you and you do in fact have positive qualities, you are eventually going to find yourself in a situation where your positive qualities are going to be you're going to be able to demonstrate them to a woman who's in your immediate proximity.

Yes. That's And if you

put yourself in enough of those situations, eventually, whatever your faults are, someone's not going to care and they're going to see the good. Yeah. It might take a long time, she might not be everything you ever dreamed of. Like, if you

just ask most like, this will solve most people's dating 50% of people's dating problems can be solved by just going, well, are you talking to them? Are you talking to girls? And, oh, I can't find a boyfriend. Are you talking to boys? Are you meeting men?

No. No. What? Go to where the You wanna meet a boy You wanna get a boyfriend? Go to where the men are.

Go start talking to men. Talk to five new guys every day, you'll have a boyfriend within two weeks. Same with guys. It's a little different for guys, but it's roughly the same legit. It's like, all this other stuff is separating you from that basic thing.

It's like, just go talk to girls. There's a million different ways. You can go to the bar, that's not the only way. Go to kickball. That's why run clubs are becoming popular.

It's like, oh, you mean when men stand next to women for an extended period of time, they they end up dating? Oh, no no way. This is blowing my mind. It's like, it's just an it's a run club. It's just an excuse to talk to girls.

It's not that hard. And everything else has perverted that. It's gotten the way of that. Like, the dating apps are a way to have people not talk to each other. It's a way to oh, dating apps are a way to not meet girls.

It's a way to feel like you're doing something without doing something.

That's right.

It's a way to say, I'm look at me, I've performatively swiped on a thousand people today. Right. I'm solving my problem. That satisfies me.

Right. So part of what's happening here in this original post, to bring it home, is that it's like, yes, it's true that men are lamenting, they're struggling to attract women, and they can't talk about that. That's totally true. That actually explains a huge amount of the cultural discourse, is that it's actually about some kind of sexual access dynamics, and nobody can say that. Yeah.

Okay. Obviously. But it's like, okay, so what you're really saying is that you wanna go to the place where there are no women and meet women there. Which is, I'm obviously inverting what I said earlier, and they're both true. Which is like, it's like, what it is, it's coping with an excuse.

It's like, you're coping. It's like, you wouldn't have this problem if you were talking to women. Your problem is that you're not meeting any women, you're not talking to girls, and you're lamenting the fact that you can't go to the place where that'll let you do that even less. It's like, dude, this problem solves itself. Go talk to a 100 girls, you'll get a girlfriend within a couple weeks, and then guess what?

She'll fall in love with you, and then she's gonna move to the countryside with you. She will, once she's in love with you.

I worry a little bit, because we have opened this can of words. I don't want us to sound glib here, because there is another part of this post that we have not really addressed. And what some guys are going to say when they hear us say this is, sure, I could join Rutten Club, I could do whatever it is, and I could meet plenty of girls, and some of those girls would like me. Like, they will they will agree a 100% with everything that we have said so far. But the part in the post where he's like, it's not just about finding a girl, he says it's about finding a girl who's not going to cheat on you and leave you.

Right? Because that is the other side of this insecurity that that men have. And often it is, like, self defeating, and it is often an excuse to not even try. But it's this idea that, okay, well, great. I've met a girl, and I've been able to show her my positive qualities and get her interested in me by putting myself in the right place for that.

However, I am still competing with everybody else on the market. And if I am on average not near the top of the market, if I'm not in the top 10% or the top 20%, then it's not going to matter because she's just going to leave me for someone else.

I guess what I'll say is this seems like advice that if everyone took it, more people will be successful. So this is the difference of just be taller or just have better abs. But this is advice that would lead in my mind to more couplings and hopefully better fit couplings. It wouldn't necessarily solve your concerns about how do I know I've picked the right one? But it would increase exposure to multiple people at the same time in a safe setting, hopefully allowing you to pick the better one.

No guarantees.

Yeah. No, I I agree. So two two points. And we we these might be I mean, we'll let you guys obviously talk to you, but like, this might be this might be a good place to end. One, my point is that we are allowing all of this other bullshit to pervert and corrupt and distract us from these fairly simple, basic human processes and stuff.

And my attempt here, I realize I was sounding a little bit glib, I take that back. I don't want to I'm very deeply empathetic with people struggling in the dating environment, and but my intention is to point the finger at the environment, and to say, there are these fucking corporations, and dating app companies, and a million people who are these powerful players, and forces, and dark forces, that do not have your best interests at heart. They are perverting and distorting the landscape. But the good news is that, in some deep sense, they can't touch your soul. And they can't change, at least not yet, fundamentally, what it means to be human.

And so you do have this power to resist them if you can just avoid the light show. If you can just avoid the BS that they project on the wall, and to use the cave analogy, and just pull yourself away from their circus, there's a little bit of hope. Okay, that's the first point. Second point is, and these might be better relayed, actually, in the inverse order of what I just said, but to speak to what you were saying, Wes, it's the Jordan Peterson thing, that Stony was saying. It's like, okay, yes, there are different bottlenecks.

The problem is that what I'm seeing from this post a little bit, and I see this often, is that people are complaining about the state of the world when they haven't cleaned their room. It's like, okay, well, first clean your room. It's like, yes, fair enough. Fair enough that like, finding a good loyal partner is a challenge. I'm not saying it's not, but are you mating any partners?

It's like, clear that bottleneck first. Clean your room first, because I don't even believe you that You see what I'm saying? It's like that it's possible for you to have an accurate picture down the road of the bottleneck three steps down the road, when you haven't addressed the bottleneck that's in front of So fix this bottleneck first. If you're meeting lots of girls, well, guess what? Now you have optionality.

Now you can apply some kind of Now you can solve the next problem. And the next problem is, okay, well, how do I select the right one? How do I sort? How do I identify a girl who's gonna be loyal, and etcetera, etcetera, and not cheat on me from all these options that I now have? Okay.

Now we can address that. You can solve that, and that also can be You can also There are ways to solve that. So the point is that you do one thing at a time, you can clear each of these bald necks, there are strategies that can be used to address all of them. But let's be honest about the state that we're in, and the order in which they come. And let's not just throw our hands up and look at the whole system and say, well, I have no agency, nothing can be done, it's completely bleak, when clearly, you haven't even addressed the first bottleneck.

You haven't even done, to your point Wes, there's an order of operations, you haven't even done the first thing yet. So don't complain about thing number nine, because you might find that it's not as you perceive it to be when you get there. That's likely going to be the case.

Don't allow yourself to be cynical and jaded. Give women some credit. I don't think, you know, if if a guy has this specific concern of, you know, oh, well, even if I find her, she's just gonna find someone else. It's like, well, first of all, don't you're probably using that as an excuse to not do step one because you're intimidated by step nine. And sure.

Does that happen? Yes. But I don't I don't think you guy are sitting to yourself thinking, oh, well, as soon as I get a girlfriend, if I can get a hotter one, I'll just dump the one I like, women want a love story. Women develop attachments. The right woman will love you for you

Right.

With your flaws, and she'll bond with you, and she will want to see things through and build a life together, even if there's a quote, better alternative, maybe, that she perceives.

Yeah, double wires are pre syoped by these peep There's an industry that predates on its ability to make you cynical about the state of things. This is, in some sense, a psyop. There are yes. Like, are there horrific, shallow gold diggers? Women?

Totally. Are there horrific, psychopathic, dark high, dark triad men? 100%. But they are also the complete opposite. There are genuine people who will pair bond with you for life and be loyal to you to the end.

Your quest is before you. Go find them.

Listen to a Taylor Swift song and try to make a girl's life feel like that. The most average girl, like, you know, look at Taylor Swift, the most average girl you've ever seen in your life. The girls like that stuff for a reason. And it's not like, those songs aren't about having the richest guy or the the coolest guy. It's it's like it feels like a love story.

It feels beautiful. It feels happy and homey and comfortable. Like, a lot of women just want that.

Yeah. Totally.

And you can provide that to a woman. No matter almost any guy listening to this right now, you can absolutely provide that feeling to a woman.

That's right. And if you give her that feeling, she's gonna tell you that you're six two and worth a million bucks.