Your teachers told you that looks don't matter and it's what's inside that counts, while advertisers sold you products to make you attractive enough to love.

Your buddy in high school told you good guys finish last, but all the movies you watched growing up showed the good guy getting the girl.

And lately your social media feed is just filled with men

bemoaning hookup culture and saying they wouldn't date women who participate while they

themselves engage in it. In other words, you're just getting bombarded with contradictory messages

about dating. And while dating can feel like politics or philosophy, where there are just no factually

right answers, really, in those domains, you can kind of just end the conversation by saying

agree to disagree. This is an empirical area, human mating behavior. Just as in the mating behavior of any other species, there will be sensible

and nonsensical ideas. And we can separate the wheat from the chaff in the same way we would

were we talking about any other animal by sincerely testing the predictions of our ideas, of our hypotheses, by

running studies, and then analyzing the data. Today's episode is a long discussion about the

science of human mating behavior that I don't personally think is appropriate for children,

but parents you know best. The topics we discuss include what men

and women want, what they get wrong about what the opposite sex wants, hypergamy or the concept

of hypergamy, and where it meets reality, scary versus sexy traits in men, including tattoos and masculine faces, an audit of the red pill

and the manosphere. And if you don't know what those terms refer to, it might be best to just

stop listening before we get to them. We also talk about the maybe mating crisis, and we wrap up

with some data-driven dating advice.

Now, there are very few topics where I have the appropriate academic background

to have a vague sense for what's wheat and what's chaff.

It might sound strange, but this topic actually is one of them.

I research human mating behavior

...