#853 - Dr Andrew Thomas - Should We Be Worried About Incel Violence?

28:32You know, it's this It's a very robust outer shell, defensive outer shell, that is difficult to penetrate and painful and arduous and probably pretty frustrating in order to be able to try and break apart. It's largely unphosphiable. So yeah, again, you can say all that you want. And I do, like the men and women that are struggling should be given a fucking ton of sympathy. I think that men in particular are given far less sympathy. The gamma bias really is very true. And in the same sentence, I can understand why it's so hard for somebody to go through the fucking fire and brimstone. Let me grab my flaming sword.

29:11I'm going to cut this apart. Yeah. And there are some cultural artifacts about the community, all the things that have popped up that only happen in the inside community. It doesn't happen elsewhere. That also really feeds into that hardens up that shell. So I've been doing a lot of talks for mental health professionals and talking about this. So people who might be practicing CBT, people who are used to dealing with beliefs and softening beliefs. And there are some aspects of the inside community that are essentially reverse CBT. Okay. So if you take coping, for example, if I get a depressed patient, if a depressed patient comes into clinic, their thinking will be very hard.

29:53hard thinking means, which like all on nothing catastrophizing, hard thinking equals poor mental health equals suffering, right? And so what we do with people who are depressed and what we do with people who are anxious is we soften the thinking. We take it from black and white to gray, okay? Now in the insult community you have this idea of cope, right? And cope by its own definition, even if you go to the black pill wiki and look at the page on cope, it gives a couple of examples there. And it's essentially encouraging each other to harden up your thinking. So the moment you start to get a bit flexible and think, oh, maybe, you know, I was rejected, but maybe it's because of this reason or that reason.

30:31They're like, nope, it's not because of that. You're coping. It's because you're, you're ugly. It's because it's over for you. You may as well give in. So they're actually encouraging hardening of thinking. So it's reverse CBT in that way. And the other thing that's quite interesting. So I've done a lot of qualitative in -sell interviews about their journey trying to engage with mental health services, which has been fascinating. And really, I'm opening about the diversity in the community, everything from very left leaning in cells with lots of female friends who would never hurt a fly all the way through to regular prostitute users who have been doing drug dealing, like massive, massive scope.

31:15And one of them introduced me to the idea of crabs in a bucket, if you heard of that. Yeah, so for the listeners down the hood of the... So if you get another crab in a bucket and they're alive, they'll start scaling the sides and the moment one gets to the top, they get pulled back down from the others who are also trying to escape. And you get a lot of that in the community as well. The moment there's a little glimmer of hope, people either ejected from the community or they're torched back into the hopelessness to stay in it. So it's like crabs pulling each other back into the bucket back deep into the community And so you get those little things that perpetuate the problem that feel like they're less about the individual and more about the set up

31:57How ethnically and politically diverse Are these groups? What's it like inside of the because from the outside a lot of it is you know the usual suspect It's white supremacy, it's right wing culture, it's misogyny, it's toxic masculinity, it's school shooters. How do you think myth busting quite a few of those now for a number of years have replicated some of this Would quite quite a bit and we tend to find that about a third but this is consistent in the UK and the US by the way about a third our BIPOC Or just non -white if you want to describe it that way So that's straight away, you know, if there are white supremacist movement, they're allowing a lot of non -white members in.

32:40So that kind of, again, raises questions about that. In terms of young, you know, we get huge standard deviations. You have guys who are in selling their 50s and 60s. You get somewhere 18 or 90. I think in most of our samples, we end up getting about 26, something like that. So they're not necessarily young. We recently took the Pew Center has like a political ideology measure that we pinched, which is quite interesting because what it does is it gives you the left wing statement of something in the right wing statement and says, pick which one you agree with most. So it might be, you know, government can do a lot more to help the poor versus the poor should get minimal funding and stand on their own two feet, something like that.

33:25And people could pick everything from environmental policy to gay marriage to these articles about helping out ethnic minorities. When you present that to in cells, what we actually find is they're picking the left wing statement more than 50 % of the time overall. So they're actually generally quite centrist, and they describe themselves as a politically centrist as well, and maybe slightly left leaning. And that makes perfect sense, by the way, because if you think about it, it's people who tend to have very little, low status, low money, who tend to be very pro -left wing policies, so that kind of makes sense.

34:01They do tend to be a bit more right wing on certain elements, you can't remember exactly what they are, but nothing that jumps out as obvious. What you do find, though, is that if you isolate the small proportion of in -sales, who are like, yes, violence in the name of in -sale is often justified, which I think in our sample is like six to 10 % something like that. Those tend to have quite right wing views, so they'll pick the right wing statement for everything. So it's almost like you've got this community and then within you've got little subgroups. And one of those subgroups is riskier than the others and that tends to be categorized by right leaning ideology.

34:42What about the views on violence and sexual entitlement? Is that universal across in cells. So again, no, no, it's not. That's that's the simple straightforward answer. People will like to take a mean and just generalize it across everyone and say, well, that's that's the typical and the typical is universal. But even if you take something like rate methexceptance, even if you take something like sexism, benevolent or hostile sexism, you will find people at both ends of the poll. And so it's very easy to potentially overgeneralise. And that's not saying that there are some nasty pasties in in cells and that there aren't more nasty pasties than you might get if you get a similar sample of the general population.

35:29But we have to remember that within that you've got a lot of different voices with a lot of different views. What binds them together is that extremely dark, hopeless experience over their relationship and that manifests itself in a lot of different ways. A lot of in cells that I know, almost use the in cell forums like a little bit of escapism porn type thing. So they're feeling bad about themselves, they're feeling bad about the lack of relationship prospects. They just want to go to a place and get that message that reinforces how they're feeling without necessarily that informing their opinion of women at least in a short term.

36:11anyway. And this is something that's quite common. I mean, if you see people who have depression and you get them to take the phone out of their pocket and go on TikTok and start swiping, their content that they see the algorithm will be feeding them the sad stuff. It reflects it's almost like a mirror. And so I think a lot of the Insel forums act like a mirror for some individuals who aren't creating the content, aren't engaging with other users, just feel sad and want to know their others who feel like that. What do you think about the accusation that your industry of evolutionary psychology has a body count associated with then neglect of the in -cell topic?

36:51Yeah, so that's been a point of contention. So this was Daniel Connery being article in the Boston Globe that cited that. And I know Dan fairly well and he is a nice guy and I know that with that article that a lot was left on the chopping room floor. I think myself and Steve Stewart -Aulions have been arguing for years that there is a lot of sloppy communication in evolutionary psychology, particularly around sex differences, where people, because they're writing not for the public, they're writing for other academics and they're writing specifically for evolutionary psychologists. They are sometimes cut corners, knowing that people will fill in the corners of the logic of their ideas, sometimes people, because even research is a human, will slip into that thing of taking an average difference and saying, well, men do this and women do that when it's not meant typically do this, women typically do that.

37:53And so there's through sloppy writing and not recognizing that who we're actually writing for, which with open access journals, with pre -princes becoming more and more public. You only have to look at the Black Pill Wickey and go to the Black Pill Science section. There's over 200 peer -reviewed articles there with commentary. It's being digested by these communities. And so I think we have some responsibility to bear that in mind when we're writing and tighten that up and do it properly. At the same time, to then say that there's a body count associated with that, I'm not so sure, because again, there's a lot of cherry picking of evidence that's done by the community.

38:36So they will find a way of finding some evidence that backs up what they're saying and ignore the evidence that runs counter to that. And a point that kind of applies to this, but stuff that I've made about other things as well. If you've got an individual who the difference between the thing that makes them commit an act of violence is some evolutionary psychology research that they've read. You have someone who is very close to violence already. Who already has that disposition and has just found something that can be used as a reason. That's my argument. I don't think there's anyone who's going from zero to a hundred through the reading of evolutionary psychology work.

39:23And so then giving the ultimate responsibility, saying that there's a body count associated with that, I think is incredibly far fetched and unfortunately what it also does is it kind of diminishes the efforts of people like Jeffrey Miller, it diminishes the efforts of people like Will and myself who actually try to correct that and try to push back and encourage an accurate way of viewing that research when applied to real world -vating. What's this drama online about you guys being paid by some shadowy anti -extremist task force? I really, it's this stuff just really annoys me because there are certain things in life being sexist and being racist are two really good examples where you can just levy stuff with someone like if you call someone a sexist the burden of proof instantly shifts to the person who's being accused right and this is one of those things where someone comes up with a complete crazy theory and just everyone is like, oh well, that you need to disprove that.

40:30It's like, well, what do you want me to do, man? I'm a university lecturer in the UK who's not paid loads and loads and loads of money. If I was to do something shadowy like that and break the sort of ethical code of the British psychological society, I just lose my job in my livelihood. like why would I do that? Plus I think a lot of people with that particular research because it was funded by the Centre for Countering Extremism, which is an arms length body of the home office in the UK. Arms length means that they're they're not sort of dictated to by the home office, they can do their own thing.

41:08So there's the first layer of it not being to do with government. The second layer was then that we had it in black and white, that they were to have no impact over the actual study that we did. They didn't even get access to the data or anything like that. We kept all of that private. And so I even feel bad now. I'm kind of justifying it, but it's just laughable. The amount of safeguards that you go through. And bear in mind, right, the thing that really upsets me about this is a good example of your damned if you do, you need damned if you don't, right? For that study, we paid in cells. Okay, we're the best of my knowledge with only study ever to pay in sales.

41:48And that was me, right? That was only on my shoulders because I was like at the end of the day, these people are people. And you normally pay people for doing psychology studies and we should treat them like people like anyone else and pay them accordingly, like we would anyone else, bearing in mind that we know within that community that you've got diverse voices and you're not always paying someone for being an extreme misogynist. I took so much flak for that from both camps. I took so much flak from the people who weren't in Sal who were like, oh we don't want you pay in them. And I took flak from the in Sal's themselves who were like, oh you're selling all my personal data and this is a friend and stuff like that.

42:27So damned if you do, damned if you don't. But there's anything like that I just block in and just get on with it because I think that people like myself and Will have got a good enough track record now that people know that we call it how it is, right? So our thing has always been if you say something misogynistic, we will tell people exactly what you've said and we'll say this is the tendency. We won't oversell it, we won't undersell it, we won't say we support it, we will just describe it as it is with an idea of trying to reduce harm. That's where we sit. And there's a lot of insights who personally disagree with my perspective on that and that of my colleagues, but at least they know where we stand with things and they know that we generally call it as it is.

43:15What? So that was a rant there. You've got my back here. No, that's exactly why I'm here. What haven't we covered from the sort of current state of in -cell research, new insights that you've been getting from that? Right, what are we okay? So we're missing a couple of things. We're missing a couple of things. So the first thing that we're missing is everyone's still trying to describe stuff, right? So Intel researchers exploded, but it's still a load of people scraping forums. I mean, you went to the evolution in human behavior conference a year ago, a couple years ago in Palm Springs. There were loads of Intel talks, there very little data.

43:56Lots of theory, lots of scraping forums, not actually going and talking to these guys and finding out what they believe. Now people are doing that. That's up and running. But it's still in the descriptive. What we're missing is that move into doing something about it. Right? And this is why we're going down the mental health phase. Not to excuse anything about saying, right, we've described that now. We know there's some harm here. There's some self harm within the community. There's some harm directed outwards as well, but we also know that there are subgroups. So the first thing is how do we categorize the subgroups because they may need different things and then secondly how do we actually try to intervene and that's what we're trying to work towards now.

44:39So already talked a little bit about subgroupings with the small condoning of violence, hiding right wing. What you might find that's super interesting, we've got this as a preprint at the moment, we dug into the data in the Home Office, well, CCE paper, in more depth. And we found what we think are two statistical clusters of different types of insales or different pathways to all time. So on the one side, you have high autism traits, low mate value, butting. That's kind of like one cluster. And then on the other side, you have dark triad, right -wing beliefs. They both be into the ideology, but they don't seem to touch one another.

45:21So you've got almost like these two different types within the same community being labeled the same. Now of course, how you would help someone with poor social skills who's been bullied and maybe hates women because they feel like they've been hated on themselves, how you would address that would be completely different to someone who is right -wing ideology and highly narcissistic and has psychopathy. So at a just a beginning stage and to be else the reason I love that is when you talk to the NHS in the UK they say to you this feels more like a prevent issue this feels my counter -terrorism because some of these guys are really right -wing and high -dark tryout this doesn't feel like healthcare and then you go and talk to prevent and they say we see so many of these guys who wouldn't hurt a fly they've just got really poor or social skills, this feels like an NHS issue.

46:15And this is why I think it is, is because we've got these clusters. So we need to identify the clusters, identify the needs, and then try to do something about it in terms of helping. And I don't know anyone apart from our team that's trying to actively do that and do that in good faith. It's a problem with taxonomies of anything, right? As soon as you create a label, people get lumped into that label. Yeah, it covers all manner of sins and behaviors. And I suppose that because everything is so new, this still needs to be broken apart. Yeah, people is kind of scrambling around it. It's almost like, imagine trying to, imagine taking football hooligans, organized football hooligans and generalizing that to football fans.

46:58And ever instead of football fans, when actually there's this particular corner that we really need to get into and the others is kind of a long for the ride. Is there anything interesting happening with the state of sort of misogyny, misogyny research outside of the in -sale world at the moment? We've got a lot of shifting dynamics happening in the modern world with women outperforming men in education and employment, with poor mental health for men, with increasing levels of depression, of self -arm, of male -state and hypothesis, my thing, and I'm wondering whether we're seeing changing rates of anti -female viewpoints outside of the self -identified in cell movement.

47:44Yeah, well, the bigger movement is the wider red pill manosphere, which is what you're essentially alluding to. And if you're worried about risk of harm, I actually wonder whether it's, and particularly if you want to go down this route of the harm that you care about being perpetuation of misogyny. I've been more worried about Red Pill Manusphere communities because the main difference is that in cells have taken the Red Pill and the Red Pill in relation to feminism, but where the Manusphere communities by and large use that to inform some sort of action in cells are using it to form some sort of inaction.

48:28So the red pill is that men are hard done by there's a broken mating market. Women want one thing when they say they want another. Society says it's personality that matters but it isn't. Like there's these people wake up and they get this knowledge in their head. What insults do is they go, well if that's the real game, I can't play that. I can't keep up with that at all. So I will opt out and I'll get hopeless about it and that will go investor over here. On the other side you've got people say, well I'll use that to my advantage then. Maybe I'll opt out of mating altogether, the sort of men go their own wake community or I'll try to gain the system, pick up artist community.

49:04But what they all have in common is it's actually doing something with that knowledge, using that to change how you approach life and how to actually then engage with women or by and large. So I think people have been focusing a lot on in cell because it's a catchy term. It's more well defined out of those different communities, but I think really we need to be broadening it to what I call on my massage andistic ideology, and looking beyond that. Army, I call it that. Army, interesting. I wonder about that. There's going to try and say this in the most delicate way possible. I think the sort of cabin fever, social awkwardness, basically the stasis in the real world in terms of actually getting stuff done, getting up on time, being able to go and make things happen in your life that much of the in -sell movement perpetuates or causes or increases is in some ways helping to mitigate some of the violence that we could see, that the fact that it is encouraging people to stay in the house don't go outside.

50:21I mean, if you're not going to speak to a woman because you're terrified of talking to her, you need to be a very unique brand of human to overcome that and go straight to punching somebody in the face or was. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to the, they go out and do things thing, I would guess that people who are in this online misogyny ecosystem in infrastructure, whatever your term is, on me, that they would be more likely to go and do that. The difference being that those people probably have a wider support group. They probably have friends. They probably have pursuits. If they're able to get out of the house and go and do things, maybe they're gainfully employed, maybe they've got hobby.

51:00I think that that acts as a bit of a bulwark against them. I don't know of any red pill killings. I haven't seen that. Come up. I imagine actually saying that it would probably be identified as in -cell because they'd say, look at this stuff, this sort of female hating content that they're sharing, despite the fact that they didn't identify as that. Just another point, fascinating to think about the similarities between MIGTOW and in -cells, men going their own way. I chose to do it in -cells. I didn't choose to do it. But after a while, if the in -sell ideology, if part of that canon is you shouldn't speak to a woman in case you go to jail, oh right, I'm not going to speak to a woman, how involuntary is it now?

51:44It's like predictively involuntary because you say, well, I've tried it before or I know what they actually want. I'm able to predict this trajectory out there. But you go, well, the Midtown, the In -sell people end up being perilously close together. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does make sense. And again, you see a lot of this in the therapy space because people it's about the evidence that people are using. So if you're out in the field and you're talking to people and you're getting feedback, that gives you a more accurate idea of what's going on. But if you're not doing that and you're getting an impression of rejection from the worst examples that constantly been fed to you, you're never experiencing rejection yourself.

52:23you've kind of internalized it. Now if I went to a nightclub, not that I would, I could ask out a hundred women in the evening and maybe I'll get rejected a hundred times knowing me, right? I've experienced it 100 pounds of rejection. The moment you internalize rejection, you're only limited in how often you're getting rejected by the speed of your own thoughts. So you could potentially be rejecting yourself hundreds of times a second. And I think it's very easy to fall into that loop. And of course, what do we do with people who reject us? What do we do with people we think we've been a reject us?

52:58Just in life, right? Do we like them? Do we think they're great? Do we want to help them out? No, by and large, the human reaction to people who reject us is I don't like you very much. And so this thing compounds and goes over and over and over and over and the way that I think you have to break that cycle is you have to get the reality check in there. First and foremost, it is the data accurate. Let's not be surrounded by the bush. There will be some men out there who they feel like they have no meeting prospects and they're right, 100%. Yeah. Let's not pretend that people like that don't exist.

53:34But if you do, then the root is around acceptance. The root is about acceptance. I think, well, what are you going to do with your life that isn't bound up in this frustration and this grieving process? But for a lot of people, like I can't tell you the number of interviews with in -sales and clients I've had as an insight and I'm sad across someone who is more attractive than I am. Like objectively, who have erupting out of the mating market purely because of their physical looks. So I think that there's a data problem here. There's a data problem in terms of not having access to it, making a load of assumptions that are never challenged and only have to be enforced by the two moms.

54:20What have you learned about men's experience with female therapists? So I've learned a lot about therapy in general. Now, in the UK, I don't know about your experience, you probably have like all -singing or dancing healthcare now. I, in the UK, it's quite common now that you have, like I say, a GP practice. and every time you go there, you see a different GP, the days of the family doctor of God. And what you learn when you see a different GP every time is you realize that there's a lot of variation in quality of GPs and this crap ones. The quality in therapists and the very, very, very good to therapists is 100 fold larger than that.

55:05Chris, could you just say for me a second, I'm a counselor? Yes. No, no, no, no, you personally say I am a counselor. You are a counselor. No, no, no, say you say I Chris and a counselor. I am a counselor. There we are in the UK. You're now a counselor. It's an unregulated. It's like life coach in the UK. Exactly. Anyone could set up shop as a counselor. You just made me change career. There we go. Is it really feel better? Don't you feel better? I do. Now there are accreditation bodies, but there are people out there practicing with no education. There's people out there practicing with no accreditation.

55:41And even those who have accreditation, there's huge variation in education levels. And so I just want to kind of frame that because I will talk about the experiences of some of the clients that have had come to me and what they've said they've had. but I kind of want to put down a backdrop of, there's a lot of crap therapists out there, and really a message to your views as well, if someone has only gone and seen a therapist once and had a bad experience, don't write off therapy, just write off that person and go to the next one, because chances are it'll be different next time. Now the other problem is that most cancers and therapists in the UK are women.

56:21So if you're going to have a bad experience with a counsellor, chances are it's going to be won because there's more of there's more of them. That being said, when I have a client come to me and say I've had a really bad experience, most of my clients are male and they do say certain things about their experiences with female counsellors. That I can't say as a pattern but it is something that I see quite regularly. So one that comes up from time and time again is if I've seen men who have been in relationships that have been seen by a female councillor in couples therapy. There's a huge perception that the female councillor has cited with the female partner and sort of double -double -double -teamed on the guy, so you get a lot of that.

57:05But you also get common complaints about lack of empathy, particularly within mating contexts. So female therapists report, supposedly, being unable to empathize with the male client over the fact that they're struggling to get a relationship. I have met people, for example, who have lots of female friends. They're very distressed because their female friends tell them you're an amazing person. It's only a matter of time for you, even though it's never happened. And they've gone to the female therapist who said the exact same and then they felt like everyone around me is saying that I should be fine.

57:47I'm not what's wrong with me. So you get an element of that. But then the real kicker, the real kick in the teeth is that you get a lot of ideology entering the therapy space. So I've had lots of clients talking about how they've been told that their problem is due to their toxic masculinity, that their problem I'm a bit of a woman, not statistic, but when being that they haven't, they don't engage with feminist ideology. And really in therapy, that's a complete no -no. And so actually a lot of my guys, I've seen like, I've seen conservative guys and Christian guys, guys from working class backgrounds, all of which, well, I can't gel with my therapist because I don't think that they will empathise with me.

58:37Now what's really interesting about that is that there's no real evidence in the counseling and psychotherapy literature that the qualities of the cancer actually matter. So you see a lot of this in alcohol and substance misuse, right? So a lot of clients will say, I only want a counselor if they've been an alcoholic themselves because only then will they understand me. From a human perspective, it makes total sense. But the literature actually shows that if they don't know the status of whether the therapist was an alcoholic, er, during the life or not, it makes no real difference. And similarly, it doesn't have to be this way.

59:18You know, guys who stick with male, with female therapists, providing, they're not bringing the ideology into the therapy space, providing, they are empathizing, should have decent outcomes. So part of it is a perception from the clients themselves. They can't possibly empathize with me so they won't. But part of it in the worst examples is that ideology entering into the therapy space. That's pretty disheartening, I guess. And I imagine just causes more men to think that therapy isn't for them or that there are an unfixable problem or to sort of discount mental health interventions overall. Yes, and this is the problem because you've got a sex which, by and large, is constantly being told you're not opening up and they see opening up as a sign of weakness.

1:00:13And then when they finally do get the brave enough to start doing that, it kind of backfires. Well, the experience is invalidated. I know that you might be feeling this, but that's because of dot dot dot. Yeah, and And invalidation is the bread and butter of council, it's that working relationship built on mutual trust and understanding that gets you places. And it's really like sometimes I find, so a lot of guys seek me out because of Twitter and stuff like that on my work. And sometimes I find it really upsetting because I've worked with a lot of women as well. I have really great success in in Council.

1:00:56I mean the difference to me from my perspective of male clients and female clients is that the female clients come to have a conversation with me that they can't have with their friends and family. Men come to have a conversation with me that they can't have with anyone. And I find that so upsetting because sometimes I'll be sat there and I'm like, you're having the type of conversation that one of my female clients would just be having with them or just not having with their best friend. And you feel like you can't have that and you can't open up to your friends about that. And so you've got to come and have professional mental health services in order to feel safe to open up with that.

1:01:40I've heard a number I've seen comments online, as soon as you start to talk about vulnerability, about emotional openness for men, there are many levels of hell. There are many sort of circles that you can descend through you can't crime front of your girlfriend, you should never tell her if you're upset, you should never tell her the way that you're feeling, you should never talk to your friends of crime front of your friends, never tell your friends how you're feeling because they're going to believe me, you know, there's this massive, massive fear of abandonment by the world that men have that if I'm not always stoic and strong in control, mastery, competent, admirable that the world is going to abandon me.

1:02:28And I get that the people may have had and they there very well are lots of people out there for whom these sort of friendships of convenience or event attainment or whatever, where as soon as you stop being a fun hang, I'm going to go and just spend time with somebody who's better. But that's disheartening, it's disheartening to me to think, because it's evident if these people have that reaction, it's evident that there is a part of them that thinks about opening up. Now we start to see a parallel with what goes on in the in cell movement with, it's about the data that people are getting, because again, you see worst -case scenarios shared online.

1:03:10So you can go on to X and people sharing cases where they cried in front. So what was one I saw the other day, like a Reddit post or something like that, where a guy and a girl were watching a horror film and he got scared for words when he's not normally skinned in the horror films and they broke up a week later. That's like drip drip drip a message don't engage with mental health don't show how you're feeling. Now the reality is if you've picked a half decent partner and this is where people should be really selective in the partners that they choose that is half the battle but also I can't tell you the number of male clients I've had the one one they they see me and they say oh I can be vulnerable around another guy and the world doesn't end and it was kind of okay, but that was in a therapy setting.

1:03:56I'll try it with one of my friends. The moment they do that, the number of times they collectively have the, oh thank God for that, because now I can talk about how I'm feeling as well. And it turns into a constructive conversation where everyone's been a little bit vulnerable with each other. It's like a Mexican standoff, so everyone's been vulnerable a little bit, so everyone's got something on the other person, And it's fine and people can just get out, get it out there and find out that it doesn't blow up in your face all the time. Well, I think if you're the sort of person who wants to talk about the way that they're feeling, which is someone who thinks about it and is probably most people, and you're around people who don't allow you to behave in that way, you don't have friends, you have acquaintances.

1:04:44Those aren't the people for you and I'm aware you want to school with them, you're drinking in the same pub as them, you work in the same cubicle as them, they suck. Maybe they don't suck for everybody, but they suck for you. They're not built for you. And I remember when I first started learning to fight and the biggest lesson that somebody who is a complete new boxer that becomes a novice boxer learns is that when you get punched in the face, you don't shatter. And you'll see that people win this response. They win when the fist is coming toward them. And then you see professional fighters, guys like Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, who will watch a fist come and brush the tip of their nose and then use that as the opportunity to respond.

1:05:29So I think it's kind of the same. I think about it emotionally, the same as that, learning that you're not made of glass, learning that the world won't reject you if this is the case. And defaulting to, it's not a me problem if the people that I speak to about emotions can't handle it. It's a them problem. Yeah. And to talk about a parallel, this is one of the things that people don't really expect from the outset if they go through a rehabilitation process with alcohol. Because if you've been addicted to alcohol and you get cleaned up and you want to stay sober, you have to get rid of your friend group.

1:06:06You instantly lose all of your friends around you because they tend to be a friendship group built on going out and getting drunk. That's the only thing that you have in common. And so you have to sort of take that away to give yourself the social setting that's most optimal for your recovery. And maybe there's a parallel here. What tweaks can you make in your social circle to best optimize your mental health? And don't get me wrong. There are some people out there who are naturally stoic. And for people who are naturally stoic who aren't, the idea that people repress things is a bit bogus, you know, encouraging people who are happily stoic to express all of these emotions because if they don't do it, it's wrong.

1:06:50It's kind of backwards and maybe that says something about the gender and the emotional intelligence and the emotional capacity of people who build a career in therapy. By and large, there's a lot of people who are quite happily stoic, that's fine. But if you're the type of person where you feel like you really do want to open up and share and feel better that way and you feel unable to do it, then I think you're right, looking at a change would be a good idea. What's this new stuff on how income and population density affects family size? Oh, that's interesting. I'm calling that the musk effect.

1:07:25But I tag a Neelon mask hoping that that would get picked up and retweeted, and then I would be able to make an income on Twitter with my millions of followers. So, a co -author of mine, a piece of Jonas and managed to get the dating website service to give us some data. Yeah, and that we managed to get it from this company that basically owns a whole bunch of dating websites all over the world. And some of them quite niche like Jewish dating and, you know, uniform dating and that sort of thing. In this data set, we've got about four million dating profiles with characteristics about the people, but also things like how often are they getting messages and likes from other people and stuff like that.

1:08:10We did one paper which is about interest, like who's getting interest on dating websites where we showed the combination of income and occupation predicted that people got more hits, particularly if they were male. And this follow -up paper, we thought, oh, we've got a data set here of 4 million people. We know where they're from, we know the states, we know the countries, and we also know how many kids they've got. Can we predict who's having kids? And what we basically found is that there's a bit of a no -grainer in some respects that if you've got a lot of money, it's easier to provide for more kids.

1:08:50and so generally speaking income predicts greater number of children. I know that you can probably find some counter examples of that from your networks and people you know in your life of those who may be around social security, you have big families, but by and large the more you have, the constraints, the number of kids you have gets reduced. But there's also something else going on, where it's people in cities by and large who are having smaller numbers of kids. And we believe there's a reason consistent with evolutionary theory for that, which is that when you have a dense population, when you're shoulder to shoulder with people, when you can't get a dentist because therefore, when you can't get into a GP surgery, when you go to Tesco, and it's Black Friday and there's everyone around, when you're in that sort of environment, you're getting this signal that resources are tight.

1:09:48Space is a premium, resources are a premium. And so in that case, it might be a better strategy to put all of your eggs in one basket and have a smaller number of children that you know that you can provide for and really help and support, rather than having lots in a very dense environment that are going to struggle to thrive. And then in the study what we found was that if you look at the population densities, the countries and the states from the participants, and looked at their income and put these in a model, that yes, you find those two predicted. So people who have more income, they tend to have more kids.

1:10:30But there's also this thing of if they're in really packed, packed, dense cities, then they tend to have fewer kids, but then what's really interesting is you get an interaction. So if you're in, I do this now for an interaction, I don't know, I don't know why. It's like I'm a power ranger. So what you find is in the really highly densely populated areas, that income kind of counteracts the population density effect. So what that means is yes, you're in a situation where there's lots of people around, they It could be competing for space, they could be competing for resources. But if you've got the money, you can care less about that sort of stuff and so have, again, more kids relative to that.

1:11:16So the reason I called it the musk effect, I could have called it the Boris Johnson Effect if I wanted to as well, is you can think about these guys who are raised in cities rather than out on the outskirts in farms who have those very large families and also have the very large income to boot. Now what's really cool about that study is that if you're thinking about implications what to do with that information, well there are certain things that you can do to give the impression that a city or an area is less dense than you might think it is. This is going to sound like a really, really weird example, but I want to say that you can and fit the birth rate collapse by getting nicer walkways and putting more things on the list.

1:12:02Yeah, this is the idea. This is the idea you could have the 50 minute cities and stuff like that. The cringe example I was gonna say actually is that, I don't ask my why I know this, but I've been planning to take a cruise in a couple of years at time. And there's this one cruise line where I know the ships are identical and the capacity is identical, but the configuration is different and you get complaints on all of the reviews of the one ship saying it's too dense, it feels like everyone's on top of each other and stuff like that and on the other one you don't even know, same amount of people, same size ship, different configuration.

1:12:37So it is pointing at could there be these little tweaks that if we're worried about population decline or maybe the best thing to do isn't shove everyone in a city or if you are going to shove everyone into a city can you make it feel like it's a little bit more spaced out in room. I asked Stephen J. Shaw probably the best population birth rate researcher that I know. I asked him what's going to happen as population started to decline. Let's take America, for instance, there's not exactly a shortage of space out here. And I said, okay, so let's say that we go from 330 million to 150 million, we're going to get chopped in half.

1:13:13Let's say it's going to happen over the next, I don't know, 150 years, something like that. Are we going to see half full school classes? Are we going to see towns that every other shop or every other house is going to be empty? And he said, no, that's not what's going to happen at all. You're going to have entire towns that are totally empty. And most of the big cities are going to remain the same level of population density. So this probably doesn't speak particularly well for your current working hypothesis. No. Because you're not going to have an even removal of humans across the entirety of a country.

1:13:52They're still going to congregate around the most popular, biggest cities with the best infrastructure and the coolest gyms and the best food or whatever it might be. It's going to be entire towns that essentially just get abandoned. Yeah. And why would you want to? Why would you want to move out of a city where if you've lived and you've grown up there then you've got instant access to all of these things that really speaks to that instant gratification. Mind you, I used to, I grew up in a city and I've moved to a smaller one. And the idea that I couldn't go to a corner shop and buy paracetamol at 2 a .m.

1:14:24Like, you know, really sent the, you know, the shits at me. And then I just got over it and found out that it was fine. So I think either what's gonna happen is you're gonna need to incentivize moving out. That can be done, you know, people can be nudged. Or it's more about saying, well, if people want to stay in those cities, what can we do? Because it's meant to be this idea of a subtle cue, right? So it's not necessarily something that people are aware of, but it's just the idea that people's everyday life is feeling a bit cramped. And there are things that you can do to diminish that feeling that don't necessarily mean that you've got to remove the number of people from a city.

1:15:05Have you got any idea whether income inequality impacts the family size? Not from this study, no. I don't have any questions about that question. That would be a really cool. It would be cool if someone could do that. I know, for instance, income inequality does all sorts of weird things to female beautification and self -objectification, sexy selfies, candidates, Blake's work, all that sort of stuff. So it would make complete sense if... Yeah. I mean, it does all sorts of things. Again, looping background to in cells in cell chattetends to happen a bit more in high income in a quality areas. One of the reasons I'm eminionary as well is that it popping into my head are these examples from all these different cultures.

1:15:49Like there are some, I'm pretty sure the Iqbo in Africa, for example, they depend on large families. So you get to a point where income inequality,

1:16:03maybe because when you get to a certain level, you really depend on having more kids in order to proper the family. The Eugbo come to mind because they're a good example where in the west, normally when a couple has a kid, their marital satisfaction, their relationship satisfaction goes down quite reliably. And then to back up again, hopefully if you're lucky, the Eugbo is the opposite. So maternal mental health, the relationship satisfaction goes up one you have additional children because it extra pairs of hands to help the family and the community. So there's some interesting things to think about there in terms of both ends of the scale and what having a big family actually does for you.

1:16:48Body count, the internet's favorite mating topic to discuss. We spoke a little bit about this in the past. We did. What did other new nuances in there? Okay, so the last time, when was the last time we did this? We did this probably a couple of years ago now and I'm sure that into that podcast I was like I've got this great study that I'm writing up Well, this is how long it takes me to write stuff up because I'm pretty sure this week I'm finally gonna push the button on it, but basically What I realized was this there's quite a bit of research out there around absolute number how many past partners people are having, what the optimal is, Steve and I did some stuff on, you know, how willing would you be to date someone who had this number of partners and we tracked that relationship.

1:17:36But one day I was there thinking, we're missing a trick here, there's an extra thing, because if you've got 12 partners, but you had 11 of them when you were 18 and experimenting, and then you've only had one in the last 20 years. That says something very different than the other way around, doesn't it? Like if you've got someone who had one partner when they're 18 and now they're mid 30s and you find out they had 11 in the last six months. Something weird's going on, right? So it's not just about the number. It's about when they happened, right? So I've run this study and we were about 5 ,000 people across three studies with 15 subsamples and 11 of those subsamples were from different countries.

1:18:21And what we did is we said, here is pictorially, here is a representation of someone's sexual history, the number of partners they've had on when they happened in a sort of notches on the bedpost sort of way. So this was the start and then they had one here and what here and what other but so you can see it. And then we messed with that by either by changing the number of lines. So we did 412 and 36, which are the numbers from minus Steve's original study where 4 was optimal. 12 was kind of in the middle and 12 was the same was 12 the same as 1 or 0? No 12 was so so zero was about the same as 5 or 6 something like that So you do remember right those so so a virgin was less desirable than having someone with one partner or two or three It won't pass that then it starts to shoot down.

1:19:16And the arc is longer for men than it is for women? A little bit, yeah. But the differences are more about whether you're asking about a short term meeting context or a long term meeting context. So we picked four, which was optimal, then 12, which was midway down the ramp and then 36 when it starts to tail off. We said, well, make those three conditions. And then what we did is we displayed those different conditions in different ways, 15 different ways each to participants ranging from increasing in frequency sharply. So they started off with a couple of partners and then recently they've had loads through to equally spaced out over time to the opposite where they had loads and loads of partners around this actual debut and then they've really slowed down and had some clear long term relationships.

1:20:05And we ran that with all the countries and stuff and we found some really interesting stuff. So first of all first thing to say is that effect of, and we were at saying basically, here's someone's sexual history, how willing would you be to go on a date with them in a long -term context? Would you entertain a relationship with this person? Reliably, four scored higher than 12, scored higher than 36. Every single country. China, Brazil, Poland, Australia, Norway, UK, US, Greece, Slovakia. I've got a picket. There's going to be a one that I've missed in Norway. Every single country, a little bit of a variation in the strength of the effect, but there, everywhere you look.

1:20:52And there's a marked differences there in terms of culture, but you find out it's a constant. So that was the first thing. So first of all, to my knowledge, the first look at body count cross culturally and it seems to point at something which there's some small relative differences between cultures but by and large it's something that is a human constant but then what we found was an interaction with this frequency change thing so the differences between 412 and 36 are largest when it looks like new partners is increasing in frequency then it becomes super important the number of past partners that you've had.

1:21:33So if you were to take a ball for example, the line kind of looks like this. If you've had four partners, it doesn't really matter when they were, you're kind of appraised similarly. But when you go for 12 and 36, it changes and people become a lot more forgiving if those partners, if those new partners are confined to the past and were around sexual debut and you kind of slowed down, then the size is shrink between them. And again, we find that in every single sub sample and every single culture that we looked at, which is fascinating. And the worst type of cross -cultural psychologists going, because I don't care so much about the differences, I care about the universal element, and that's something we found, but also really interesting, almost next to no sex differences whatsoever, which is opposite to this sexual double -standard thing that people predict.

1:22:23So people think, oh, you know, the guys will really care about the number of past partners that women have, the women won't. It's sort of like, oh, you know, he's a Chad, I'll excuse him. No evidence of that. Pretty much at all. So men and women, when they were praising someone for a long -term relationship, kind of want the same things. And actually, funny enough, this is something that I'm wide of research program thing. So there's this study, there's some stuff I've done with Steenyev, there's some stuff I've dealt with, Lave Kaner, time and time again, people think that there will be a sexual double standard.

1:22:57They predict that other people will give a sexual double standard, but when you get people to respond from their perspective, they don't, just quite interesting. Just elaborate on that. I'm a bit confused. So sexual double standard, so there's this societal level and then personal level. So societal level would be hypothetically if I said to you, would a woman respond about a man with 12 sexual partners differently to a man responding about a woman with 12 sexual partners? If we asked people that what would they say, participants will come back and say, oh yeah, if you asked a bunch of people that, you'll find that the men will be much harsher on women and women will be much harsher on men.

1:23:47Yes, and they repul that that's what's going to happen because that's the societal level expectation. But then you get the same participants and you say, yeah, but what do you think? Would you date that person? And you actually look at what people do and the actual judgments they make when they have to personally do it, you don't find evidence of that double standard. So people think that people are going to act a certain way, but they end up not doing it. Do you know what the Keynesian beauty contest is? It brings a value. You're going to have to remind me. It's basically not, imagine a beauty contest in the first version of it.

1:24:26Me and you and the rest of the judges are trying to judge who we think is the most attractive. In the second version of it, me and you and the rest of the judges are trying to judge who we think the other judges will think are most attractive. So, a Keynesian beauty contest is kind of the way that the financial markets work. It's not necessarily about which is the best company. It's about which do other people think is the best company. And you can continue to scale this up three, four, five, six orders away. And it's kind of a little bit like this. What do you think other people would think and then what would you do?

1:24:59But people decide to not use their Keynesian answer compared with their personal answer. They never actually decide to draw that link. gotcha, yeah. So it's like levels, multiple combinations of theory of mind. Yeah, absolutely. And that feels like what we've got going on here, but just with that one level above, it doesn't seem to feed into people's personal behaviour. And of course, that's the most accurate source. And it could kind of be harmful because if we're constantly saying that there's a sexual double standard here, we're reinforcing the idea that men are overly critical towards women about their sexual history, we're also reinforcing this idea that women will let guys get away with things and not hold them to the same standard.

1:25:41When if the reality is we find that people are actually doing that, then we've got a discrepancy between what society says people do and what they actually do. Oh yeah. Andrew Thomas, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love your work. I've very much appreciated watching what you've been putting out. Where should people go? They want to read the things that you write in your columns and your tweets. So probably two things. So Twitter, which is at at Dr Thomas AG, but also from a therapeutic perspective, maybe check it out, angiatomist .org. I've got detail on there about what I do and how to reach out to.

1:26:12Cool, dude. I appreciate you. Until next time. Cheers.