Ep. #48 A Scientific Review of The Mystery Method with Nathan Oesch

[Angel Donovan]: Angel Donovan here with another episode of Dating Skills Podcast, getting ready for X-Mas here. It's a little bit different for me, because I'm down in Mexico and hitting the beach every morning, but I hope you guys, wherever you are, it's not too cold and if it is cold, I hope you're just enjoying the season, because it's always the best time of year. Everyone's happy, there's a lot going on, so I hope you're enjoying it.

There's a fair amount of attraction, dating, and relationships research today. You see a lot of it in the papers, the general press, when they bring out these studies. A lot of them for us actually aren't that interesting. I mean, I have issues with a lot of the studies, the way they're done. They're often done on surveys and people are biased in what they respond to studies, particularly around sexuality, dating, and so on.

I'd like to see more hard data in these studies, where they're actually looking at behaviors and how things are influenced in terms of behavior, instead of looking at what people say they do, which isn't always what they do.

It's also unusual that an actual dating method or system – the kinds of things we look at here, the advice, the techniques, and all of these approaches to dating, sex, and relationships – we don't often see that that's evaluated scientifically. In fact, it's only been done once so far.

When I found out about the study that did that – it's a scientific review – I wanted to check it out. It was published in the Evolutionary Psychology Journal in 2001, and it was called “The Dating Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Emerging Science of Human Courtship.”

What was interesting for me was that the paper's conclusion was this: we argue that when properly and ethically understood, the dating and seduction industry – that's the pickup artist stuff as well – despite it's provocative label and origins outside of academia, it's founded on solid, empirical research as well as first-hand courtship and relationship experience.

They're saying that there is some support for some of the techniques and the methods in empirical, scientific research, things that are accepted scientifically today, so in the academic world, which is great because that means some of the stuff we learn about here is scientifically proven to work.

In our ongoing search for the ultimate truth on how to improve your dating skills, I had to get the researcher on to talk about this paper, and this is the man we have today. His name is Nathan Oesch, and he's currently at the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Oxford in England.

For those guys outside of England, basically Oxford is the Harvard of England, so it's a good place to be. It's at the top of the ranks of academia in the UK. He is currently a PhD candidate in social and evolutionary neuroscience, and he's going to probably graduate in the next six months, so he'll become a doctor, a PhD, right then.

He's also been reading and learning about dating and relationships for about seven years. He first found The Mystery Method and Neil Strauss and he's worked around that angle. So, as you'll see, that's something we're going to be talking about today.

Now, there's a lot of ground that we cover and a lot of references to some science, and we talk around a lot, so there's a lot of show notes today. It's pretty full. There's tons of links there for you to learn more about everything we're talking about, and of course we have the full transcript as usual, of the interview.

You can get all of that at DatingSkillsReview.com/DSP48. Let's get to this interview and find out what science says about some of the things that are used within the seduction community and have come out of the seduction community.

Nathan, it's fantastic to have you on the show today. How are you doing?

[Nathan Oesch]: Hey, I'm great. Thanks for inviting me.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. It's great to have another academic background guy. We love the rigor that you guys bring to these podcasts, so welcome. Welcome, academic rigor, and feel free to push back on anything I say today, if it just doesn't sound too rigorous and it sounds too wishy-washy to your academic background.

[Nathan Oesch]: Okay, fair enough.

[Angel Donovan]: What is your background? What exactly do you do and how did you get there?

[Nathan Oesch]: Well, right now I'm completing a PhD in experimental psychology at Oxford. My supervisor is a fairly well known evolutionary psychologist, and right now, I'm in the final year of my PhD, working on the evolution of language. That's one area of evolutionary psychology that hasn't really been explored as well as other areas have, and so that's what I've chosen to look at for my thesis.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Why dating? Why the seduction community? Where did you interests come into that? Where did this paper come from, that you put out?

[Nathan Oesch]: I guess it was about a year and a half ago now. A friend and colleague of mine asked me if I wanted to help him write this paper, basically in response to a journal that was calling for applied approaches to evolutionary psychology. We'd known each other for a while and both have known that we'd had some learning from the community, both in practice and from reading various materials.

We just felt at the time that it was an area that had not been taken seriously by a lot of academics, and we wanted to see whether or not any of these claims and principles could be backed up by legitimate scientific research.

[Angel Donovan]: That's great, because as you were saying to me before, you've been reading this stuff and playing around with it yourself for around seven years, since 2007, so you've got your own real world experiences, looking at it, and you finding it useful, I guess, versus the academic point of view where is it proven, is it not proven? You're taking those two perspectives and merging them.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, absolutely. I mean, when I first heard about the community six or seven years ago, I was naturally very skeptical about it. I didn't know what it was all about, but the questions they were asking I thought were very interesting, and I got very curious about it, and so I started reading a lot of material and trying out various claims that were made by the gurus and having, surprisingly, certain degrees of success with that. It's an interesting journey, I guess you could say.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, that's great. Let's talk a bit about the process for publishing. What has to happen? What I want people to understand who are listening is, in this academic process of publishing in a journal, what hoops do you have to jump through, to make sure that the paper's not just wishy-washy stuff and it's got some academic rigor and some science behind it? What controls are in place to make sure that it's quality and it's based on a hard process, which tries to look at facts only?

[Nathan Oesch]: Sure, yes. Well, the way the scientific process works within any area of science is through peer review, and that's that natural checks and balances that's done whenever you want to try to publish anything. This particular paper, there were four academics based both in the EA and in the United States, who read over this paper.

When we first submitted it, there were a lot of corrections and it wasn't immediately accepted by the editors. We had to go back and rearrange some things and change our argument a little bit. We wanted to try to stay as pure as our original vision as we could, and I felt like we did that successfully, but there were some comments and additions that they had in mind, and we went ahead and made those changes.

But to answer your question, it is a rigorous process, no matter where you're publishing. They don't just let you put anything you want into academic journals. Otherwise, it would be catastrophic for science, I think, if people could publish whatever they wanted to.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Well, when I read through it, it's got a lot of citations and references to previous studies and previous works, which seem to be, by the way you present them – it's commonly agreed upon now that the research and the studies that were done by these people at that time are good science, and it's become part of the science architecture and things that academics rely on today, going forward.

To me, it seemed like your paper basically, you looked through all of the research around the subject and in different areas of science, and you decided what was supported by existing research and studies and what wasn't. Is that a good take on how you went about it?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's correct, yes. I think a lot of the studies – first of all, it was a review paper, and so the objective was to review all of the current literature that's been in the field now for decades and decades. Of course, some of those papers were newer than others, but the point is that we were looking for claims that could be substantiated by legitimate psychological research.

Some of the claims couldn't be substantiated and some of them could. That's really what we were looking at, is the body of psychological and neuroscientific research that's been done, and asking the question whether or not they can substantiate any of the claims made by the community at all, or if it's just a bunch of bunk that they've been proselytizing for the past ten years or so.

[Angel Donovan]: A little bit later, I'd like to get into what you ended up rejecting in the paper, and also you just mentioned that, in the peer-review process, they made you change some stuff, but we'll come back to that later, to keep this a bit structured.

But what I wanted to talk about a bit now is once it was published, has there been any response from the scientific community, and was it expected or unexpected?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's an interesting question. I mean, I would say I've probably gotten about 50/50 in terms of just positive and negative feedback from people, but I will say that, just in terms of the academic community, most of the feedback from them has been overwhelmingly positive, at least thus far.

Interestingly, most of the negative feedback I've found has come from laypeople, who I think maybe just didn't really understand what the community is, or maybe they heard second-hand reports through the media or they've got misinformation from somewhere. I think most of the negative criticism has come from people who just didn't really understand, first of all, what the community is, and second of all, what we were trying to argue in our paper.

[Angel Donovan]: I guess it's just journalists and people like that?

[Nathan Oesch]: Not journalists so much. I actually gave a talk on it last year, to a speed dating seminar, because they asked me to come and talk about my research. It was an unpaid, open invitation, and pretty much within five to ten minutes of my talk, I got a lot of giggles and snickers from the audience, and then once I finished my talk, the assaults just started from every corner left and right, accusing me of being a misogynist.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, really? Was this both men and women? It sounds like a bit of groupthink going on there.

[Nathan Oesch]: It was definitely groupthink, yes. I felt like it was a little bit unfair, because I wasn't there to promote myself as a pickup artist, I was there promoting myself as an academic who was looking at dating coach and pickup artist literature and trying to analyze whether or not their claims had any substance to them.

I felt like it was a little bit unfair, because I wasn't promoting those ideas. At least, I didn't feel like I was. I was mostly trying to look at it from a skeptical scientific inquiry. In some ways, I don't really blame them, because I think there's been a lot of negative media.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, yes. Look, in every subject in the world, there's going to be haters. That's my experience. I've run a few businesses in my life and I've done a whole bunch of things, and no matter how charitable or whatever it is, there's always going to be someone, somewhere, hating on it.

I think it's just the nature of the world. There's always going to be people who love it and there's always going to be people that hate it, and as long as you've got 80 percent who are loving it, you're probably going in the right direction.

Anyway, let's get more to the academic community, because that's really the more interesting part here. What kind of positive response did you get from it, that you were saying, and if there are any examples of negative, that would be interesting, too?

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I don't really have too many negative critiques that I've gotten from academics. I gave a similar such talk at UCL around the same time last year. There were about 20 or 30 people in the audience, and the reception I got was really overwhelmingly positive and I think people were curious and interested about it.

There were a few questions that maybe questioned the ethics of particular dating coaches and so on, but I tried to describe my own take on that, that those are perhaps a minority within the community that do behave unethically, but just as there are in any industry, whether you're talking about corporate CEOs or doctors or lawyers – you're always going to have a small minority, a shady element that are doing things maybe they shouldn't be doing.

I think in my own experience, knowing dating coaches and being around these people for the past six or seven years, I think they're basically decent guys. I don't think they're out to manipulate or hurt anyone, and I think they just want to improve their experiences with the opposite sex, like any normal person would.

I think maybe the difference between them and the average person is that they just put a lot more motivation and enthusiasm into mastering that area of their life. In my mind, I don't think there's anything really wrong with that.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, great. Let's get into the paper now, into some of the details and what you found. We can get a bit of education from this and understand it better. You chose to look at The Mystery Method by Erik von Markovik, and also you cited Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss, which is pretty similar, but you can tell me, why did you choose to look at these areas in particular, and also the model which you bring out in the paper, which is the model of attractive, comfort and trust and seduction, a three-stage model. Why did you choose to focus on that?

[Nathan Oesch]: I know a couple of reasons. I think probably one of the reasons was that, from what we could tell when we were writing this paper, is that Mystery and the people that have studied under him seem to have exerted the most influence in the community as a whole.

Granted, there's always different schools of thought and methods and strategies that men promote for meeting and dating women, but as far as we could tell, these seem to be the nearly universal concepts that perhaps not everyone agreed with, but the majority of people at least took some insights and information from that, because that was one reason.

I think the other reason is that, from a scientific perspective, when we looked at The Mystery Method, it seemed to us like a system. We didn't know at the time whether or not it was science, when we were writing this paper, but it seemed to us that it at least had the flavor of science. It was a very systematic, well-constructed system, which is kind of what scientists are looking for, when they're constructing theories and trying to understand the world.

[Angel Donovan]: It's very detailed.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, we felt like that was the best place to start. Most of the tips and strategies we felt like were very specific and were easier to evaluate through scientific investigation. Now, in contrast to some dating coaches that just advocate be confident or be smooth or wear the right clothes, which are kind of contestable hypotheses, really, when you get right down to it, we felt like at least Mystery had at least concepts that you could, at least in principle, look at and see if they had any credibility to them.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Just from an analytic point of view, then, it was specific enough that you could either say yes or no, you could look at it and you could prove it or disprove it.

[Nathan Oesch]: Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: Which areas of science did you look at, in order for this review? What did you look at and feel that was relevant to be supporting this kind of activity, or these kind of ideas about how human behavior works?

[Nathan Oesch]: Well, Hugo and myself are evolutionary psychologists, my co-author. We felt like that was really the best place to start, first of all because courtship and dating is very much a subject that evolutionary psychologists look at, from all different aspects. We felt like that was really the place to start, but as we got further into the literature, we noticed that there were a lot of concepts that didn't always follow the rubric of evolutionary psychology, so things like social psychology and neuroscience and neurobiology, it felt like we needed to talk about those areas also.

We wanted to have a complete picture of what the community was actually advocating, and so we tried not to limit ourselves too much in that, but start from evolutionary psychology's foundation.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, great, it went in areas of social psychology. Are there any other specific areas you brought up?

[Nathan Oesch]: Well, I think we mostly focused on social psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, just because I think courtship and meeting people in relationships is very much an area of social psychology. I mean, it's something that social psychologists have been studying for decades.

[Angel Donovan]: Just for people to understand, evolutionary psychology, the principle is basically to study how our brain has evolved and how our behavior is effected by – and you can explain this much better than me – the way the brain is formed basically determines how we behave today. Is that evolutionary psychology? I just want a very brief summary of each of those. In neuroscience and in social psychology, what's the different things that they're looking at?

[Nathan Oesch]: Evolutionary psychology, I think, to me, is really the study of human nature. It's trying to understand how certain traits and ways of thinking have evolved in our species, and how that, in our evolutionary environment, may have led to increased survival and reproduction. It tries to look at universal aspects of human nature and explain those in terms of evolutionary biology, so things like language or vision or main behavior or any of these things that tend to be universal among all humans.

It asks the question why are those things there, and how might them have aided our perpetuation as a species. Social psychology, I think, is really just the study of how an individual human relates to his social environment. It's like status, for example, or relationships, or how you interact with your family and friends versus how you interact with your boss.

[Angel Donovan]: It sounds like it's a lot more focused on studying how things happen today. It's a lot more looking at maybe a study of twenty people and how they're reacting to each other and so on, and under certain situations. Would that be correct?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right. Yes, I think social psychology is the way it's framed today's academic climate. It's not really framed in terms of evolutionary considerations, which is fine. That's the way it is.

[Angel Donovan]: Just looking at how it is today, just what they see.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right. At least in those cases, they don't make reference to the past as much as evolutionary psychologists do.

[Angel Donovan]: Cool. That's very clear. Neurobiology and neuroscience – is neuroscience the same thing?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think neuroscience is such a broad field, and I think it really taps into a lot of different areas, and tries to, I think, selectively analyze aspects of neurobiology that we felt like were supported or didn't support the various claims made by dating coaches. As we got into the paper, we talked about aspects of building comfort and trust with a person, for example, how those are influenced by endorphins and various other neurochemicals.

[Angel Donovan]: The neurobiology goes into hormones, analysis of hormones as well, basically how the brain's influenced by hormones or influencing hormones?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right. It's all based on physiology.

[Angel Donovan]: It's more like physical structure versus the other ones that are looking at actual behavior more?

[Nathan Oesch]: Exactly, yes. It's neuroanatomy, it's physical structure, it's hormones and peptides that are in the brain and throughout the body.

[Angel Donovan]: A lot more detailed.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, it's detailed and it's much more, in my opinion, an aspect of biology. It's looking at how these things actually work on approximate level instead of an ultimate level, which is what evolutionary psychologists look at. It's looking at the how mechanisms as opposed to the why mechanisms.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Let's look at some of the things you came up with in this paper, that you thought were interesting and that were supported. One of the theories that you brought up, which sounded pretty interesting, was parental investment, which is apparently something that's pretty well-respected now.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right. In the early 1970s, a guy named Robert Trivers came up with this what I think is a brilliant theory, about how sexes devote differential amounts of investment in their offspring based on basically the size of the gametes. The way biologists define male and female is that females have large sexual sex cells, and males have tiny sex cells.

What that means for investment is that females will be much more inclined to devote lots of resources and energy into offspring compared to males, because they have no other choice, in a sense. They have to devote all this time to gestation, and then once the offspring are born, the bare minimum, especially in humans, two to three years of breastfeeding and weaning their offspring, and even once they're toddlers, running around, they can't really take care of themselves like other animals do.

This is what's known as altriciality, and so I'll tell you when a baby deer is born, for example, it's out of the womb and scampering around all by itself. It's born, and for all intents and purposes, it can pretty much take care of itself. It might need a little bit of protection from its mother, from predators and that sort of thing, but it can find it's own food, it can find water if it needs to, it can run away to safety if it needs to do that.

But in contrast, human children are completely and utterly helpless. If they don't have mom around to carry them and feed them and do all the things that need to be done for an infant, then they're going to be done for. This is something that's specific to human children and something that – you have an extended childhood, which makes us unique compared to other animals.

I think the theory of parental investment, in my mind, is especially interesting when you look at humans, because it's like an extreme case of when you have mothers that are really devoted and then fathers that are not quite so sure.

[Angel Donovan]: How did you link that to the dating and seduction world?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think that was the first theory from biology and evolutionary psychology that we felt like could be used as a framework for explaining what's going on between men and women, and maybe a lot of guys intuitively understand that, at least on some level, but maybe they've never been presented with a theory proper in the data innovated over the past few decades in reference to this theory, and it's now been shown in a whole host of species, from birds to fish to insects, you name it.

Whenever you have this difference between males and females, it tends to be there. Just as an example, there's a study about birds, with a bird that hangs out in bogs and saltish ponds and that sort of thing. They found that, just in this particular species, the sexual dimorphism and contributing to parenting were actually reversed.

Where you have definitive male and female categories, it's the females that are larger and more brightly colored than the males. The females pursue and fight over the males and then defend them from other females until the male begins incubating the eggs.

It seems like those roles have been reversed in this particular species. That's part of the evidence that seems to support this theory, and so far there hasn't been a single case that biologists have scratched their heads and said, “That doesn't seem to fit.” Every single case so far seems to match up with this idea.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. In The Mystery Method, one of the underpinnings, right at the beginning that Mystery based it on, is that women are the ones who are deciding. They're the ones who are choosing whether they're interested in the guy or not, and so you're linking it to this parental investment theory.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, yes. I mean, it seems to be the case, both anecdotally and from a scientific perspective, that females just have a lot more to lose. Males have almost nothing to lose. It's five minutes of courtship activity and then they can run off and never have anything to do with it ever again, whereas females aren't given that choice. They're ritually connected to that offspring, and it's not only until the baby's born that they have any choice at all about whether or not they want to have any connection to that at all.

[Angel Donovan]: Do you feel that those two areas of Mystery Method, does the screening qualifying part and the comfort and trust part – do you feel that it supports both of those ideas?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think it does, yes. I don't know if Mystery talks so much about screening, but I think he does talk about attractive qualities that you need to convey to the woman, in order for her to feel like this is something she wants to get involved with.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. It's like qualification in reverse.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right. Yes, that's one way to look at it, I think.

[Angel Donovan]: A big decision for her. That was where you started, and this is one of the things I noticed you wrote in the paper, “men desire more lifetime sex partners, seek sexual intercourse sooner, and are frequently more motivated to seek casual sex than are women.”

That's based on this parental investment, and you're saying that's very well supported. Is that all guys, or is there some kind of variance in that? Are some guys less like this and some guys more like this? Is it based on the opportunities we have around us? For instance, if we get really good at this, if we get really good skills and we have more opportunities to date and meet women and so on, do we go towards this kind of behavior more?

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I think that's probably certainly the case, that if you're given a lot of opportunities, you're probably going to be more selective and picky as a man. In fact, that's one of the things that we talked about in the paper, is that having and showing that you have high standards automatically makes you more attractive as a male.

This is something that's been known for a while. There was this famous study done back in the late 80s, by Clark and Hatfield, where they had men and women approach other men and women on college campuses and just ask them straight up, “Would you like to have sex with me?”

It actually took a long while for this paper to get published, because back in the late 80s, evolutionary psychology was just forming as a field, and so a lot of people just thought it was a waste of time or bunk or why would anyone be interested in that. It was only later when the question was framed in terms of evolutionary psychology that people realized why it was so important.

What they found, predictably as you might might think, is that right around five percent or less that the women actually consented to that, whereas for men, I think it's upwards of 75 percent that they said, “Yes, I'd be interested in something like that.” I think that's a pretty clear, nearly black and white example of how this difference in parental investment leads to different ways of thinking about casual sex.

[Angel Donovan]: Two points on that, then, there's a YouTube channel – I don't know if you've seen it. I can't remember which one, but I'll put it in the show notes, where they've basically taken that study you just referred to and they've done a reality TV show out of it, and they've put a ton of videos with men and women approaching people and asking directly if they want to have sex or not.

You see all these people agreeing and walking around the corner and getting surprised, like, “You're on candid camera!” or “You're on reality TV!” I'll link to that, but basically they took that study and they proved it, because you see pretty much the same thing.

[Nathan Oesch]: Is that right right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yes.

[Nathan Oesch]: They kind of got similar results.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, similar results. They must have done it hundreds and hundreds of times, because there's tons of these videos. There's a few laughs there, kind of amusing, and you see it all there. I'm coming from my experience with people who have been in this community for a very long time, and that some people go down the casual sex route.

Once they get good at this, they get the skills, then they just go and have more and more casual sex. They want to enjoy it, and they enjoy a lot of quantity. Other guys, they go another way where they go into a long-term relationship and they focus on lots of other areas of their life. It could be traveling, it could be business, it could be hobbies, all these other things about life that they want to do, and they settle down with a girl that they like and they're not interested in this casual sex thing.

That's why I asked you if there's any variance there. I don't know if you ever read Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich.” He also talks about this a bit from a self-development perspective, where he looked at all the great business leaders of the time, and he found that many of them, once they got to 35, 40, they stopped basically running around and chasing women.

He said they would reinvest all of that sexual energy into doing other things in their life. In that case, these were business leaders, so it was business. They would make a lot out of that, because of all that sexual energy. He said that was key to their self-development and their growth and the growth of their businesses and all of this.

I'm just wondering, from your perspective, is their variance in the studies as to why men behave differently, especially when they've got the skills, or is it something to do with age or is there any other factors that you know of that are supported by science, that would predict this kind of variance?

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I think like everything in evolutionary psychology, is that a lot of it depends upon the environmental context in which you are. You can imagine a situation which a man was put on a desert island with a thousand single women and no other men. Then you can put that same man on the same desert island with just his wife, and you could look at how devoted he was to his wife in both cases, how much infidelity you might find, as it were.

There's a distinction that biologists make between social monogamy, in the one case, and then sexual monogamy in the other case. Social monogamy is something like mating institutions, like marriage, relationships, that sort of thing. Sexual monogamy is something like lust, your sex drive, your libido, and a lot of times those two things can be in conflict.

I think that's part of what human nature is about, and not just for men, but I think women have a similar kind of conflict of interests. It's one to have a deep connection with someone, fall in love, being able to share intimate things about who you are and have someone understand who you really are, and then to have this polar, extremely opposite direction that wants sexual variety and that wants to explore different things and someone else, as it were.

Women have this tendency to a lesser degree, not quite as extreme as men do, but I think it's trying to reconcile these two opposites that defines us as being human, and I think as we get older and we're not quite as motivated or energetic as we were when we were younger, we may settle for – perhaps settle isn't the right word, but we want something more long-term, something more stable where we can settle down and have a connection with someone as opposed to just these superficial connections that might have been satisfying for us in our youth.

I think it's probably depending on age, but I think it's probably dependent on the context that they're in. There's societies all over the world that are polygamist and then there are other societies that are more monogamous. Human nature is more flexible, I think, than most people realize.

[Angel Donovan]: You're saying there's a degree of self control there, that there's no biological robot being pushed around by our hormones and stuff that we have no control of? Do you think there's a degree of self control involved?

[Nathan Oesch]: Absolutely, yes. I mean, biology is not destined. I mean, you've heard of that cliché before, probably, but it's really the crux of it that makes us adaptive as a species. We certainly have these predispositions and impulses to work and act and think in one way or another, but it's really the flexibility and ability to make decisions and choose the better of two alternatives that makes us more adaptable as a species. I think maybe not everyone always realizes that.

[Angel Donovan]: One other thing I just thought, promiscuity – do you have any knowledge of it? Did you look at any of the promiscuity studies related to this, in terms of – for instance, I know there's studies based on different races and things like that. Did you look at any of that?

[Nathan Oesch]: We didn't, per se, for this particular paper, but one thing that we did have in the back of our minds is something called the Coolidge effect, which is almost like this novelty sequel behavior that's been shown in a wide variety of species, rats and humans and so on. It's just the idea that, in many species, you often find – say you put a male rat in a cage with five or six other females. Given the choice, he'll mate with all those females in the cage to the point of exhaustion.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, I've heard about this study. It's hilarious. The rat nearly kills itself, right?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, yes. He gets to the point of exhaustion, where he can't even move anymore, but then you put a novel female mouse into that cage, and all of a sudden he's got renewed enthusiasm because of this novel stimulus. He's ready to go again. That's really what the Coolidge effect is about, is just novelty. It's the desire and sexual interest that just comes from having a novel female in your surroundings. That's been shown in a wide variety of species, including humans.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent, excellent. Moving on. Thank god we're not just rats and we can stop before we kill ourselves. There'd be some people getting into these dating skills area and getting good at it and basically signing their own death warrant. That wouldn't be cool.

Another area which you looked at was indirect versus direct method, and some of the different scientific explanations for why they worked. You looked at, you said, direct method, which really isn't part of Mystery Method, it was more introduced by Bad Boy and Shark, but I think it may be covered – it's obviously covered in some other areas.

I don't think it was ever covered in any of the Mystery Method to my knowledge, but anyway, you compared these two methods. What did you find that supported them? Was one more supported than the other, or were they both supported? How did it work?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think our take on it was that both of them really had people's support, but for pretty different reasons. When we looked at the direct openers, we found that there were things like social dominance and social risktaking and courageousness that has long been known to be very attractive to women when used in the right context, but then on the other hand, we also found that using “indirect” openers were also effective in their own right, because they demonstrated things like creativity and intelligence, sense of humor and things that were attractive to women for slightly different reasons.

I think if the question is which one is better or which one is more effective, I think really that comes back to my previous point about environmental context that I was making before. You can imagine, in a situation where you're at a bar and there's women there and maybe some of them are looking to meet a guy, meet somebody new, you can imagine in that situation, a direct opener might be very effective because it's no-nonsense and it's also portraying you in a way that demonstrates things like social dominance and risktaking and that sort of thing.

Whereas in another context, like your best friend introduced you to his sister or something like that, maybe a direct opener wouldn't be the best strategy to use in that context, because it's perhaps going to come across as very awkward, especially if you were saying that right in front of his face.

[Angel Donovan]: Scientifically, what would be the thing that would say that's not appropriate? Is it because it's aggressive, dominant behavior?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think it's just a matter of environmental context, and I know that sounds a bit vague, but it's the difference between an aggressive impulse that a cheetah might have. That would be adaptive in a situation where the enemy was attacking its babies or its cubs or something, but you don't want to have that same aggressive impulse on its own children or its own cubs. It's really about the environmental context in which some predispositions are adaptive and some are not.

[Angel Donovan]: When I was reading through it, I got basically the direct method, like you just said. Just for guys, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, direct opener is just basically walking up to a girl and saying, “Hi, I like you,” or something direct like that, to show that you're interested in her.

Indirect would be asking her some other question that doesn't show any interest first off, or start talking to her without directly communicating, whatever it is, asking for directions or in a club, asking her for the female opinion, which died about seven years ago, but some people still use it, but that's something that some people used to use a lot. Those are the two approaches we're talking about here.

Now, from the direct method, I understand that you found that that was supported by the fact that confidence and dominant behaviors, which is required to go direct and show your interest like this, are supported by the literature. Is that correct?

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, that's right. I mean, if you look at it, we're just an ape, when it comes right down to it. Behavior in things like gorillas or chimpanzees, it's really the most socially dominant male in that group that gets all the matings, almost to the exclusion of all the other males in the group, unless the beta males can figure out some clever strategy to get them mating, like trickery or deception or something like that.

We're not so different. I mean, I think when you are dominant and confident in a way that shows that you're “alpha,” that can go a long way in the right context, but I think the context is important. I can say for myself that I've used that opener in some situations and had it go brilliantly, and have just the woman's attention latch right on me, like, “Don't go away, I want to talk to you,” and then in another context, it falls flat and she's like, “That's a bit weird to say that in this context.”

[Angel Donovan]: Is there any scientific search which lays out different contexts? Did you find anything?

[Nathan Oesch]: No, we didn't look that specific region, probably for time issues.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, your study was pretty focused. It has to be.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, but it's possible fodder for another follow-up study. I think my co-author would like to do a follow-up study on other, more specific areas of the paper, but for issues of time and resources, we didn't have all those things.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, of course. But the basic conclusion of that was both of these methods can work, there's scientific support for both of them working. Is that right?

[Nathan Oesch]: Absolutely, I think so. But like anything that science tells you, I think really you need to go out and try these things yourself and see if they work or if they don't, and if you try to figure out a few times and it doesn't work for you in any context, maybe try to find something different.

[Angel Donovan]: When there is some scientific validation, it is good. It helps guys have more confidence about what they're doing, and it's right. This is a relatively intangible area of life, and the more clarity and support or belief that we can give guys I think helps them a lot, from that perspective. That's why I'm really glad to have you on the show here, to give that kind of outlook, does this work or does it not work.

One of the areas – because the indirect method you said works because you're able to communicate attractive traits, which you said was supported in you, and you went through a list of them. One of them you brought out is humor, and everyone says it's important. I don't think there's any of the experts out there – at least I haven't read any of their material, which says humor is a bad idea.

Interestingly, women always say in surveys that I've seen, and I think a lot of the scientific literature I've seen I'd like you're opinion on, says that basically women are always attracted to humor. You brought that up, so let's look at that. How does humor help us attract women or influence mate selection, and why is that based on literature? Is there any information on that?

[Nathan Oesch]: Humor's one of those things that we're just now beginning to understand, I think, as psychologists. It's been very more intriguing to a lot of psychologists for quite some time now, about why it is that women find humor so attractive in a mate and vice versa. Men oftentimes find that as appealing, also.

I think we're just now scratching the surface as to what's actually going on there, but what we can say at the moment is that studies have shown that humor tends to be correlated with intelligence, and so it might be a proxy of something like genetic quality.

Humor also seems to indicate things about creativity and how resourceful you can be in certain situations. It could be something like an honest signal that communicates to that other person that you've really got the wherewithal to be creative and resource and also optimistic in situations.

It's easy to imagine a lot of different situations where being optimistic and positive fare a lot better for your genes than being negative and being defeatist all of the time. It could be that's an honest signal of a lot of things, but we just haven't, as scientists, been able to really nail down all of those things quite yet. But it's something we're still working on.

[Angel Donovan]: I think that's really – we've been looking for the best advice for a long time, and I've honestly looked around for some kind of training or something to help guys with humor, and I've never found anything really effective.

I think part of that is because it's really complicated, and as you said, people don't really understand it and it seems to involve quite a large component of emotional intelligence and calibration, because something could be funny in one situation and in another situation, it's not funny at all.

I've spent a lot of time in very different cultures and I can tell you something that's funny in Asia is not funny in the West, and is not funny in Eastern Europe, certainly not funny in Africa, and the opposite goes. You take something from Latin America and you put it in Asia and it's shocking. It's not funny.

There's a lot of this context involved, which seems to make it a more complex subject to get a hold of, and it sounds like you're saying that the science hasn't wrapped its papers and its research around that, either.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, absolutely. I mean, as you were saying, I think context is really important, and I think what's also interesting is that I think developing a sense of humor takes time. It's not something that you're born with. I think you really have to immerse yourself in the cultural milieu that you find yourself in and try out a lot of things, tell a lot of jokes that fall flat and don't always work as well as you might think they would.

I think humor is probably one of those things that you have a predisposition that you're perhaps born with, but then it's something you also have to develop over time, trying out different things, some things that work, some things that don't, very similar to dating and courtship itself. It's something that you really need to develop over time, based on the social environment that you're brought up in.

Even comedians that I know, to develop just an hour of routine, have to go through hundreds of hours of falling flat and telling horrible jokes just to get that perfect sixty-minute set. It's not as if they just woke up one morning and had this brilliant compilation of jokes. It's something that they synthesized and refined and sculpted over time, and making it this really creative art form.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, it's a skill. It's a skill also. It's something that can be learned. It's not like you have to be born with it. I think some of the great things to do is read some of the autobiographies of some of the top comedians. I think Steve Martin has one, and who's the other guy? One of the other top comedians – I'll put it in the show notes. I can't remember right now.

It's really good to read through them, because they talk about the problems they had, and like you say, the hours that they spent practicing and falling on their face as well, until they got it down to an art when it was working and they were funny most of the time.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think it's like any skill, whether it's courtship and dating or learning to play tennis. You can be born with a certain innate predisposition to do maybe slightly better than somebody else, but it's hours and hours and hours of honing on your craft and refining it that really makes the difference between the guy who can have women swooning or women that are just turned off.

I think not only is it an honest signal of how intelligent and creative you are, but also how much work and perseverance that you put into that craft. It's difficult to say why humor is such a good indicator or honest signal or those qualities of intelligence and creativity, but hopefully future research will be able to shed some more light on those questions.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, it's great to hear. We've got a candid answer here: well, we don't know. Science doesn't really know why this is so important. There's a few ideas there, but it's basically there's going to be some future research out there which tells us what humor's really about and more detail about it.

One of the subjects we didn't touch on I thought might be related to the direct approach, is mirror neurons and the transfer of emotions that is covered in some research and also some books. I don't know if you've looked into that, or you did look into that for the study.

[Nathan Oesch]: No, we didn't look at mirror neurons specifically for our study, but it is interesting in the sense that it's this new area that's only been around for the past decade or so, which seems to show that we're kind of intimately connected in almost this spooky way, that when we watch someone do a behavior or say a certain thing, those same neurons that are fired in their brains tend to be fired in our own brains.

It seems to be something about perception and social behavior that is really intimately connected, to where you can really empathize with a person, almost on an unconscious level when you're watching them or observing them do something.

I think that speaks to something very deep about human nature, is that we're a fundamentally social species, and there's something that must have been very important as far as our survival and reproduction for that system to exist at all. That's another area that we're just really starting to scratch the surface on.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, but it's nice that we've got MRI, magnetic resonance imaging scans now, that if I'm correct, we can actually see these neurons. Basically, you can compare maps and put people in different situations to understand. Is that correct? Is that how that area of research is actually getting more detailed, technical, more hard versus soft?

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, yes. FMRI's really been our best tool for understanding this better. We've actually found, in subsequent studies, that not only does this system exist in humans, but it seems to exist in other primates as well, like monkeys and chimpanzees. There's also some trace in the system which suggests a very old evolutionary basis for it, which is interesting.

[Angel Donovan]: For people listening, the whole idea of mirror neurons is that basically, when I'm looking at you and I'm talking about something and I'm expressing something and expressing emotions and I'm moving facial muscles and so on, you're going to perceive movements of my neurons, based on everything you're seeing, and you're going to mirror those neurons. Is that correct, the way you want understand it, too?

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes. I'd probably phrase it slightly differently. The same neurons that are involved in moving your face and talking and gesturing and so on, those same neurons that control those things in your brain are simultaneously activated in someone else's brain, while they're observing or watching that.

[Angel Donovan]: It's kind of like, to understand you, I have to do that, right?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think so, yes. There almost seems to be this unconscious or implicit empathy thing going on. I don't know how else to explain it.

[Angel Donovan]: It could be an important aspect of our communication, I guess. In order to understand what you're saying, in order to understand what you're doing, I have to copy the neurons in my brain that you're using to do these things.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, and a lot of people have argued that mirror neurons are the missing link for studies of language evolution, which is my primary area of expertise. I don't think that's quite been demonstrated yet, at least in a more specific context, a testable hypothesis, but just on the surface, there's obviously some sort of an important aspect to that, in terms of communication and understanding other people's intentions. That so far seems to be pretty clear.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, you said you're into some neurobiology, and I've read a bit about mirror neurons. I like the concept, because it's harder science, it's using the functional magnetic resonance imaging, so we can actually see what's going on, and I was talking with Robert Greene last week, and we were talking about his rake character, which is basically the seductive character who is completely comfortable with his emotions.

Often, we associate it with very romantic, very seductive personalities who are just very direct, a bit like we were talking about the direct approach earlier. If you think about celebrities, if you look at videos on YouTube of Russell Brand, he's just very in the moment, emotional, and he's just full-on with the journalists and so on.

The way I'm looking at that currently is that it has to do a bit with the mirror neurons, because you're transferring those emotions to them. Currently, one of my friends, David Tin, he bought a product training for this, called The Desire System recently, which goes into that. It's like a newer area, but I think it's really interesting because it has this hard science, which is currently getting established. It's not there yet, but it's harder than a lot of the other studies, because we actually can see pictures of the brain, which are saying something about it.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, yes, and I think it's appearing to a lot of psychologists because historically, at least social psychologists, they use questionnaires and some subjective measures, trying to understand what's going on between people. Something like a mirror neuron, there's no subjective element to that. I mean, when you see these neurons lighting up in people's brains at the same time, just one person's observing another person, there's not much subjective about it to that.

[Angel Donovan]: I guess it was surprising at first. It's like, “Huh. Why is it doing that?”

[Nathan Oesch]: It's very mysterious and spooky and we really just don't understand what's going on there. To me, it speaks about the very deep social connectedness that we have as a species, because of our connection with other social animals, like chimpanzees and gorillas and other primate species.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. We've done the topic of mirror neurons. I wanted to ask you about that, because I know you also are a molecular biologist. You were into molecular biology before, so I guess you were into that data and everything before.

Okay, another area you tackled in the paper was, in Mystery Method, it's known as pre-selection, but you referred to something that's called mate-choice copying. Could you talk a little bit about the scientific support for that?

[Nathan Oesch]: Mate-choice copying is something that's been understood by evolutionary biologists for a while now, and it's been documented a wide variety of species, everything from fish to antelope to birds. I mean, it's very common among a lot of bird species, but it's only just recently that scientists have started looking at whether or not this phenomenon exists in humans.

Anecdotally, it's been supported by people like Mystery and other dating coaches, I think, when they've been in public gatherings and so on, but there's now been at least two or three other studies that have shown that this is a real effect, which is pretty interesting, and at least been exploited by Mystery and other dating coaches for probably longer than it's been fully understood by the scientific community.

It's just basically the idea that – for example, they've shown that sage grouse, which is this bird, take a fake sage grouse and surround him with other females, whether those are a stuffed dummy or actual sage grouses. All of the other female sage grouses just collectively congregate around this male, supposedly the most popular male in there, even if it's a stuffed sage grouse, not even a real animal.

[Angel Donovan]: Maybe someone should start selling stuffed models to take with you to clubs or something.

[Nathan Oesch]: It could work.

[Angel Donovan]: Humans may be a little bit more difficult than grouses, I guess.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I think we're a little bit difficult.

[Angel Donovan]: We can see through that.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, but I think the basic principle still holds. This is commonly known as Mate Choice Copying behavior. You've seen this in birds and lots of other species. It's not entirely surprising that you'd find it in humans, but there it is. It seems to be a real phenomenon.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, and the scientific community, the name it's given it, mate-choice copying, it makes it easier for me to understand, actually. I think in general, it's just like, “Oh, that girl likes him and so the other girl is copying her and she now likes him.” It's something I guess is pretty to explain as well. I like the term that the scientific community has given to that.

In other areas, what we called keno or touching – I think not just Mystery Method, but most of the methods talk about touching and its importance. What kind of scientific support is there for that?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think it's long been understood by psychologists, the important role with touch, not just mating behavior but really social bonding and getting to know a person on a very deep and intimate level. Touch is one of these things that stands out from speech and language in the sense that it can't really be faked.

My supervisor, Robin Dunbar, for example, is famous for this grooming language hypothesis, which says that if you look at all primates, for example, the way they have a social bonding and becoming more connected to a person is by grooming each other's back. Part of that obviously is for removing parasites and cleaning the other person and that sort of thing, but a large part of that seems to be devoted to establishing a strong social bond and becoming more connected in someone else's crisis.

It's only when you have human groups that are so large compared to other primates – humans live in groups of about 150, at least if you look at primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, whereas most apes live in groups of about 50 individuals. It's my supervisor's hypothesis that at some point during human evolution, language replaced grooming as a way of social bonding and becoming more connected with people.

What that really says, from a touch standpoint, is that there seems to be something very basic and rudimentary about touch that we have from six million years of evolution or more, that really works as a very strong social bonding mechanism and coming closer to another person in a way that not even language can really replace.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. I mean, everyone pretty much agrees. I guess the whole thing is how not to go overboard with it and how much is appropriate. Is there anything you've found which looks at that aspect of it, what is appropriate and what is inappropriate? I know it varies according to culture as well, so it's probably a very difficult subject to look at.

[Nathan Oesch]: I don't know if there's any cites that really back that up, but I think it just has to do with basic social intuition. I think when you first approach a person, when you start touching them right away, it could maybe seem a little bit awkward.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes. You mentioned the oxytocin link, which seems to me – I like hard science, I like technical chemicals, and like I was saying, resonance machines and so on. For me, that was attractive, that idea, because you can actually detect hormone changes based on how much people are touching.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I think there's a tradeoff. If you start touching a person too quickly and too much, like you said, it can come across as creepy or inappropriate, but there's a polar opposite to that, whereas if you go on five or six, seven, eight, nine, ten, dates with a person and you never touch them at all, you're probably going to be just their friend.

You have to make the move at some point, so there's some place where she's comfortable enough where that touch can be really effective, and that's for the neurochemicals that you were talking about before. They found that, for example, like when other apes groom each other, there's a very intense neuropharmaological thing that happens, where basically you get this huge endorphin hit from when another animal's grooming you.

The same seems to be true with humans, too. There's something very seductive, if that's the way you want to use the word, about being touched and also touching another person. You get this – literally – an endorphin hit, almost the same way as if you would if you hit your knee with a hammer.

You've got this intense endorphin release that gives you this mild high, whereas you can associate that endorphin hit with being touched or touching another person, obviously that could be a very strong mechanism of social bonding and feeling intimate with a person. I think there's a lot to be said with this advice that Mystery gives out.

He gives attachment and pulls it away, and so you feel a loss of that neurochemical connectivity that you're getting from being touched or touching someone else. You're getting this endorphin release and all of a sudden, you don't have it anymore and you want more of that. It's almost like a craving, the way a drug addict might crave another hit of whatever drug he's taking.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, when you're talking about endorphins there, what I was thinking about is some personal experience of mine. I spent some time in Latin American and I spent some time in Asia, particularly Japan. I'm thinking of the Japan example. Now, Japanese tend to touch a lot less. I noticed, when I was dating or meeting Japanese girls in the past, is that to touch, they would react. Sometimes you could actually see the change in color in their skin.

I really felt that there was that kind of biological change, especially when you initiate touch for the first time. I felt like they felt it a lot more intensely than, say, a Latin girl, who as a population, they tend to touch people a lot more. Maybe their endorphins are spiked less or they're more used to the endorphin spikes from this kind of thing.

I imagine that this isn't supported by any kind of study, it's just some kind of remark that maybe some scientific study in the future may look into that and see that there's some kind of correlation with how often we experience touch and how our tolerance for these spikes in hormones and so on and how they react.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, I think that the neurochemical system is always going to be in place. It's a part of human biology, but as I was saying about context before, there's all these different cultural standards about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.

If you're going to use this information to try to get in better graces with a person or improve your relationship with them, I think it's important to keep in mind what is culturally appropriate and what is not. I think you can do more damage by trying to force drugs on a person, as it were.

[Angel Donovan]: Take this endorphin.

[Nathan Oesch]: Well, I think you need to – like any of these things – be socially appropriate and socially savvy about what is it you're actually doing. When in one context something might be 100 percent appropriate and expected, in another context it might be completely inappropriate and not something that you should do.

I think whenever you're using any of this information, just like anything else, you should gauge it on the person's comfort levels. Are they expecting this? Are they wanting this? Or are they not completely interested? You're going to have to gauge that, based on how attracted you think they are to you and so on and so forth.

Just like anything in evolutionary psychology, it's based on the environmental context in which you are, whether it's some tribe in Sumatra or whether it's a person you just met, sitting next to you on the sofa. You have to look at all these different cultural codes and decide for yourself what's appropriate and what's not.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, there's limits. You can bend culture a little bit in their expectations, just to talk on this for a quick bet. I think the context can be bent, provided you do it in the right way. It can be placed as an excitement, something a bit different. It depends on the personality of the person, it depends on the context.

For instance, a Japanese girl on holiday in Australia or London or something is going to be a little bit different to someone you meet in Tokyo during the day or something, or when she's out, going to work or whatever. You can bend some of the rules. You don't absolutely have to stick to some of the cultures, and they'll be okay with that, as long as you keep certain boundaries and you lead in a positive way, I guess.

That's a complicated topic, and we're getting off-track here. I know that there was some areas that you felt there wasn't as much scientific basis for, and that should either be explored in the future to see if there it is there, or were there any areas where you felt there was actually science which was saying, “I don't think that's right?”

[Nathan Oesch]: The ones we talked about in the paper would be nagging and then peacocking. I'll start with nagging first. We didn't find a whole lot of information about using this kind of very subtle jibes on how worthy you thought this woman was and that sort of thing. I think part of the problem too is there's lots of misunderstanding about exactly what nagging is.

The scientific perspective is a little bit tricky to try to test that idea, because you don't always know if you're getting exactly what the concept is we're referring to. But from my understanding, it has to do with showing that you have high standards as a male.

From that perspective, I think there is literature to support that idea, that women tend to be more attractive to men that have high standards. If you're a guy with lots and lots of choices, it's almost a counterpoint to pre-selection or the mate copying argument.

If you've got lots and lots of women around you and you're not desperate and you have many opportunities, naturally you're going to be a bit more selective, just based on opportunity passed and how much time you have on your hands.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. You're saying that's a pretty weak link, right? You couldn't really directly support the idea of nagging, which at the basis, it's basically saying, “I'm not interested in you.” It's a way of communicating I'm not interested, I'm not showing any intent here, I'm showing that I'm disinterested.

[Nathan Oesch]: That's right, yes. So far as I know, there hasn't been a study that's shown that, yes, if you do this, women will find that attractive. That's not to say that someone will test that idea in the future and find a different result, but to date, we don't really have any good evidence for that, as far as I can tell.

[Angel Donovan]: Another area you looked at was peacocking.

[Nathan Oesch]: Peacocking was an interesting idea, because I think both of us throughout there was probably some truth to that, but in all of our search of the literature, we haven't found anything that could really back up or support that claim, and so we didn't feel like trying to argue that it was right, and we didn't have any way of substantiating that was appropriate.

Interestingly, there's just been a study that's come out by someone at the Harvard Business School, looking at something she calls a red sneakers effect. I think it was published in the Journal of Consumer Research or something like that, but basically the idea was that we have these high profile figures like Mark Zuckerberg or people that are obviously high status individuals.

What's interesting, when they go to a board meeting and they're wearing a sweatshirt or a jumper or these crummy, sit around the house clothes, they're actually judged to the higher status than they would be if they were in a business suit, which is somewhat counterintuitive, but according to the authors who did this study, they thought that it's basically what you call peacocking.

By standing out, making yourself slightly different, slightly eccentric compared to the norm, you're actually considered to be slightly higher status because, in some sense, it's almost like a constantly signal. You're showing that you can deal with that social pressure, showing that you have enough balls, in a sense, to walk around like that.

The authors that looked at this phenomenon found it in a wide variety of contexts. They looked at business board meetings and business school interactions, having people go into luxury boutiques, so they have somebody dressed in a dirty t-shirt walking into a luxury boutique shop and then have that same individual walking in wearing a mink.

They found that the people walking around in a dirty t-shirt were actually given more credibility and more respect, and they were expected to spend more money than a person walking around in a mink fur. In my mind, I think that basically shows the fundamental idea behind peacocking is right.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, okay. This study came after yours? Yours was in 2012 and this one was more recent?

[Nathan Oesch]: It was, yes. It had just come out a couple months ago, and when I found this study, I shouted out to my co-author right away and I said, “Oh, wow, look at this. It's a shame we didn't have a chance to mention that in our paper,” because we felt like we basically captured the essential idea behind peacocking.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, it's also a little bit of common sense. When I look around today, I see a lot of people chasing to have some kind of different image. You've got tattoos, you've got piercings, and if you think about it, it's getting more and more different. People are getting more individual with their looks and so on, and they're chasing to be different and out there. There has to be some kind of reason behind that. This could be an explanation.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes, there's been other scholars that have argued that things like tattoos or dying your hair or wearing flashy rings or whatever it might be, it makes you stand out and makes you interesting and unique. Even if women don't find it immediately attractive, their attention's going to be drawn to you, just by sheer fact that you're standing out.

I think as long as it's done in a clever way and not in a way that makes you look like a social loser or something like that, or in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, where it's already understood that he's a high status male, I think it just adds to your mythology, by having the guts to do that sort of thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. It's a dominant move. It's like, “I'm just going to be me and I'm going to stand out.” As you mentioned, you get noticed, and for some guys, their problem is that they just don't get noticed. Even when they approach, sometimes they don't make enough noise, they don't stand close enough for the girl actually to notice them. If you are getting noticed, that's 25 percent already there, you know what I mean?

[Nathan Oesch]: Absolutely, yes. That's oftentimes a huge part of it, just having them drawing their attention on you, and then hopefully you can take it from there.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent. Were there any surprises for you when you went through this science? You said you've got your own experience in there for a while beforehand. When you looked to the science, did you find anything that surprised you, that rejected some of the ideas you had or some of the things you'd seen?

[Nathan Oesch]: For myself, personally, I think I was a bit surprised when I started looking at a little bit of teenage community literature on direct openers, because I guess that was something that, just on the basis of it, it seemed like it would never work, having to walk up to a random person and say something like that and have them respond in a positive manner.

I think in the beginning, when I was first reading about this stuff, the indirect openers made more logical sense to me, and I could see how, if you show a person what kind of person you were first, then they would hopefully respond favorably to that. I think direct openers, that was a bit of an epiphany for me, when I actually went out and tried those things for myself, to see if they worked or not. I was surprised that they actually did.

[Angel Donovan]: It's really interesting, when direct openers first came out, it was about 2003. Most people at that point were doing some kind of Mystery Method. Before that, actually, it had been more direct. It's funny, because of the way it evolved.

In the late 90s, it was direct and most people were – it wasn't very structured, but most people were doing some kind of direct thing. Then Mystery came along and he became a bit more popular and his theories started propagating and more people started doing this indirect style, and then Bad Boy and Shark, Ranko Magami, came along.

They were in these private forums called Mystery Lounge, and they were basically calling people girls, because they were using indirect openers and they were saying, “Why can't you just tell the girl you like her?” It was pretty immature conversation, but at the time, they did it so much that a lot of the guys started trying it. We tried it, me and a couple of friends. We had our own company, so we were just exploring new things to teach guys all the time, at that time.

Because we'd been using indirect for a while, I think it didn't work, even though I'd actually started with direct. It didn't work, and I think it's because something we were doing subconsciously at the time, you know? I think what I'm trying to bring up here is, if you have started to do it one way and then you just go halfheartedly or you don't believe in something and you try and go the other way, like the direct, I think you can take an early opinion on that.

You have to really give it a really, really good try, better see it in action, see it working if possible, because direct totally does work. I think either way works and it's fine, from what I've seen. It works great. There's many guys, like Yad. I don't know if you know Yad. He's got tons of in-field video footage of him doing the direct style in the streets. I've seen him do it, and there's many other guys doing it. It works great, probably for some of the scientific reasons you brought up.

But from a learning perspective, I know it can be difficult for guys to switch their mindset between the two, which you've probably also seen as why you want to tackle that as well, because you get people who say, “It's indirect, nothing else works,” or, “Direct, nothing else works.” The reality is they both work. Is that what'd you say, that science could probably say?

[Nathan Oesch]: I think so, yes. But I think what's interesting about direct is that what's maybe slightly different from indirect is that, to me, it's not so much about the content of what you're saying. The whole point that we were trying to make in our paper is that it's not the specific words that you're using, when you use a direct opener.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it. It's things like social dominance and confidence, social risk-taking, courageousness. Those are the things that the woman's being attracted to. It's not so much the specific words that you're using. I've found, in my own experience, it's how I make the delivery, how confident am I in saying that, when I say it, that I feel like it's going to work. I feel like the more I know that the more confident I am it's going to work, most of the time it tends to work.

But if I just go in there halfhearted and be like, “Oh, I wonder if this will do anything,” she's probably not going to go for it. He's going to be like, “This guy's faking it. He can't back it up. He's not practicing what he preaches. He doesn't back it up with anything.” I think they hear what you're saying and just walk away.

[Angel Donovan]: One of the things I saw in the paper is how effective strategies of women are on us. At one point, you were talking about the effects towards the end, which might connect with why the academics asked you to change some things. I'd like to talk about that now, if possible.

You said women are manipulating perceived attractiveness through use of perfume, cosmetics, clothing, liposuction, cosmetic surgery, and we actually had a show on looks and how women do this and some of the science behind that, with a guy called Dr. Gordon, a few episodes back, which is interesting about that. He's been studying that for twenty or thirty years now. But anyway, it disrupts mate choice by men, and you were saying that basically, you could compare these kind of skill sets we're developing to those.

[Nathan Oesch]: Yes. In my mind, what dating coaches and pickup artists and what have you, whatever you want to call them, in my mind, it's not even giving men an advantage on women, but it's leveling the playing field in some sense.

I feel like women have had these things all along, for 100 years or more. They've had girlfriends that they can talk to, they have plastic surgeons that they can go to, they have makeup and clothing that they can wear, all of these different resources, however you want to count them up, to improve their success in dating and relationships.

There's social support or material support or plastic surgery or whatever it might be, whereas men I don't feel like have had the same – when we're having a problem with our girlfriend, what do we do about that? We can have a beer with a friend in a pub and say, “Oh, this sucks,” and then that's the end of the conversation.

Historically, at least until the community came along, there was no outlet or resource for men to go to, to help them try to improve this area of their lives. If it wasn't working – it was almost, in fact, taboo to mention that you even had a problem.

Men are supposed to intuitively and inherently know how to get women and how to be experienced and how to have success in this area of their lives, and they're not supposed to even admit that they have any problems with that, whereas with women, I think it's generally more accepted that there's this dirty guy, blah, blah, blah, and I”m going to talk about it with my girlfriends and now we're going to go out and pamper ourselves with coffee and get our back on the horse and find another great guy and so on and so forth.

It's an unfortunate stereotype that men are these – they know everything there is to know about dating and relationships, and sometimes they hurt women, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I think the flipside of that is not always talked about, that women are using just as many strategies and ways of manipulating and trying to get what they want out of dating and relationships that maybe men have or have not used, historically.

[Angel Donovan]: Dr. Gordon Patzer, he was talking about – basically, it's scientifically proven, the huge amount of influence, all of these factors, all of these things that women are working on have on us. I was wondering if guys get to the point where they see through it. I don't know, we were talking about this control versus biology thing a little bit earlier, and maybe age and maturity.

It could be that testosterone dies down as we age, although there's ways to prop that up, and that we're less biologically driven to these kind of signals, or that overage, our brains evolve a bit and we get more control over it.

We can actually say, “Oh, she's wearing really awesome lipstick and eyelashes and she's had awesome liposuction and all this stuff,” but I can see all of that. It'd be interesting to see what kind of degree of control we have there. You mentioned that the paper had some changes, some revisions. What was that circling around?

[Nathan Oesch]: There are a number of problems, I think. They're subtle with the wording and so on. Because this was an applied evolutionary psychology paper, one of the things that they wanted us to talk about was the ethics involved, the pros and cons, whether or not there was an ethical issue at all. What we wanted to try to argue was with any piece of information or technology, there's always a possibility for abuse.

Whether it's learning how to operate a firearm or anything you might use in that respect can be used for positive or negative purposes, and so they wanted us to talk about whether there were any downsides to this. That was something that we strayed away from in the beginning draft of our paper, because we just wanted to present the facts and we didn't want to go into whether or not it was right or wrong, because it wasn't the point of an evolutionary psychology paper.

That was something they felt like we needed to bring up and address. We were fine with that. I think in retrospect, we felt like that was a good addition to the paper. I think we welcomed the opportunity to talk about how we felt about this information. It's all about how you use that information and it's really up to the individual.

I mean, there's good people and bad people in society, and they can take information and do good or bad things with it. I can always say, from my own standpoint, that I've really made a conscious effort to be ethical and treat people with respect, and not try to manipulate people into one single agenda or something like that.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, I think you make a great point. It fits with what I was talking about with Robert Greene. Robert Greene, all of his books, they just reflect reality. He writes about reality. He's got the 48 Laws of Power, which talk about how people manipulate power between them, and this is what happens in the world.

People use it for good and they use it for bad. That's the role of science as well, to look at the truth and the reality and not make judgments about whether it's good. Some people can use it for good and some people are going to use it for bad. We're going to use it for good. That's what we are, we're good guys.

[Nathan Oesch]: Absolutely.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, just a couple more questions here. I'd be interested, from your perspective, in terms of a learning process, because you're in academia and you have to write these papers which have rigor and stuff, so you go through this process, especially for your PhD, which you're currently closing up soon, congratulations for that.

What can we do better ourselves, do you think, in terms of testing and verifying the things that we're learning and doing in this area of our life? Is there any ideas that you have, you've taken from that academic background and used or think could be used to help us learn better, in a more controlled fashion?

[Nathan Oesch]: When you say we, are you talking about just regular people?

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, regular guys. They don't have your background, but maybe there's a couple of insights you can bring, which would be good things to keep in mind for guys just listening to this podcast that could be helpful, to give them a bit more rigor about how they're learning and help them learn faster, at the end of the day?

[Nathan Oesch]: Well, I think at the end of the day, you just have to get out and try things yourself. I mean, you can only use dating and technology and science, for that matter, as a guideline or a guidepost to what you should or shouldn't do, but at the end of the day, you're not going to get any results and you're not going to see success if you don't go out there and actually try some of these things.

When you're doing that, I think it helps to have a skeptical mindset about whether or not this stuff is real or just a bunch of hogwash, but you do have to make the effort. You can't just sit in your bedroom and read all day and expect good things to happen. You have to try these things in a wide variety of contexts, not just in the bars and clubs but in your social circles.

I think you also have to expect that you're going to fail, and that's the hard thing to realize at first, but certainly I've failed many times, when I was learning this stuff, and still do. But on the other hand, I also have a lot of success and I never would have gotten to that point if I hadn't just gone out and actually tried things. I think it's leave your ego at the door and just telling yourself that you don't really care, and you care about succeeding more than you do about failing.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, that's a great point. With that, at the end of this session, I always ask the same question, which is what are the top three things, based on what you've learned from this scientific study and in your own experiences, also, the top three things that you would do to improve your results with women as fast as possible? What would be the top three recommendations, top things you would do, if you had to start out from zero again?

[Nathan Oesch]: If I was starting from scratch? Jeeze, I think the first thing I would do is just get a basic understanding of what courtship and dating is about. I would probably recommend Mystery's material and Neil Strauss's material, The Rules of the Game, just getting a basic understanding of what you're actually looking at, what kind of the rules of the game are, so to speak.

I think the second thing I would do would be to just get out there and try some things, get out there and fail, because you're going to fail a lot in the beginning. It's only after repeated failures and also figuring out what you want from this – everyone's got different goals, and I think the more specific you can be about what you want, the better off you're going to be.

Not only that, but your goals are going to change. As you have failures and some successes, you're going to realize that what you thought you wanted in the beginning is not really what you wanted. I think that is a revelation to me. I had this idealized notion of exactly what I wanted, and then as I actually encountered it firsthand, I realized, “No, that's not what I want at all.”

This interaction, this person, this experience is not what I wanted. You revise and sculpt your goals in light of new experiences and interactions you have. That would probably be the second thing, is just perseverance.

I think the third thing would be find a mentor. Find someone that's better than you and that knows what they're doing and can show you the ropes. That would be the third thing that would really change my success.

They don't have to be the best, but if they can just get you out to the club or social situations and you have somebody to drawn on, their knowledge and experience, I think that can really elevate your game. They don't have to be the best coach in the area, just somebody that's willing to go out and discuss these issues with you, because you learn a lot just from people that have done these things.

[Angel Donovan]: yes, that's a great point. Obviously that mentor should be having better results than you. You should be able to see those results. A mentor is key in every part of your life. It's so invaluable. You made some great points there, thank you very much, Nathan.

Thank you for this great session, tons of little scientific literature. We're going to put loads of those references that we referred to quite a bit, and I'll even try and get some of those studies you referred to and put them in the show notes as well. Thank you very much.

[Nathan Oesch]: Great. Yes, it's been my pleasure. I hope it was helpful to you listeners. I definitely enjoyed it.