Hey folks, welcome back for another episode of Code Club. In the last couple of episodes I've been talking about a package that I want to build so that we can have the naive Bayesian classifier, the RDP classifier, available to us as an R package. This classifier has been really powerful within the microbial ecology field because it allows us to very quickly and accurately assess the classification of a sequence, a 16S-reversible RNA gene sequence, from an organism that we don't know its identity. Now, I know many of you do not care about microbial ecology. Why don't you? Anyway, I encourage you to stick around anyway, because we're going to be building out this package, and regardless if you care about microbial ecology or classification or bioinformatics or whatever, I think you'll still learn a lot as we go through this process. In today's episode, what I'm going to do is talk about the algorithm that the RDP classifier, the naive Bayesian classifier, I'll just call it the RDP classifier, that the algorithm that it uses under the hood, because this is the algorithm that we want to be able to implement in our own R package. I'm going to be going through their paper in some detail, maybe fleshing out some of their methods a little bit more to put it kind of in more understandable language perhaps. This paper was also published in 2007, so about 17 years ago. I would say that perhaps our standards for how we publish papers or benchmarking papers has changed a little bit over time, and so maybe I'll comment on that. The other thing is that the technology that was being used at the time for sequencing is a lot different than it is today, and so some of the thoughts that we might have would be a bit different than what they had back then, and so something we might think about doing with our R package is going back and regenerating some of their figures with kind of modern sensibilities more in mind. The first thing that I want you to know is that there's a difference between phylogenetics and classification. Phylogenetics allows us to propose a new taxonomic name or lineage or seeing how similar our sequences are to existing sequences, right? So typically what we do is we build a phylogenetic tree with a bunch of sequences from known organisms along with our unknown sequences to see where they cluster within those existing sequences. If they cluster away from existing sequences, then maybe we have a new lineage of bacteria that we want to consider. We do not propose new taxonomic lineages when we do classification. This is akin to when we use phylogenetics to insert a sequence and we see who it clusters near, right? So that's a phylogenetic approach that we're kind of approximating with classification. So again, we have an unknown sequence, we want to know who it is or what kind of organism did it come from. And again, this cannot be used to propose new lineages. There's a few different methods of classification that I want to share with you. So the first is what we might consider a closest neighbor approach. So typically what you may have done in the past is take your unknown sequence, you upload it to the NCBI website to run BLAST and you get back a report. I'll share with one of those with you here in a moment. An alternative approach would be a k-mer search. So largely what we're going to be talking about as we build out this package is the k-mer search. So this is the output I got from running BLASTn with an E-coli sequence against the Rebson RNA reference database that is available through the BLAST server at NCBI's GenBank. And so I want to kind of point a few issues with this approach, right? And so typically what we might do is say, oh, that's a Shigella boidiii, right? And what we need to do is look a little bit deeper. And I think by looking deeper, we'll learn a little bit more about some of the challenges with classification. So the first thing I want you to focus on is this query coverage. So the LA in BLAST stands for local alignment. A local alignment algorithm is only going to share the alignment for those positions in the sequence that are most highly conserved, right? So as you kind of scroll down here, you'll see things like this 97% or this 99%. And so that means that it's pretty, pretty similar to this sequence, whatever that is, right? This E-coli strain. But it's only comparing 97% of the bases. The sequence I uploaded I think was about 1,450 nucleotides long. And so that match is quite a bit different from the match below it, right? And so in this case, yeah, sure, like the top six or so different matches have 100% coverage. They're using all of the nucleotides I provided. And we can then look and see the percent identity, right? And so we see that the first two sequences are 99.73% identical over the full length of the gene, right? So you can hopefully see this starting to get complicated, especially since these two sequences have different names. Now, Shigella and Escherichia are basically the same thing. But if you're not kind of thinking deeply, you would say, wow, I have Shigella, Boydiei, or I have Escherichia, Frigasonii, right? If you're kind of looking deeper here, right? And so a question that comes to mind then is how many of these sequences, these matches, should I be accounting for when I determine my final classification, right? Because if you go down further, far enough, we see that there is some Citrobacter in here as well. And there's some Salmonella and Rautatella. Sounds like Ratatouille. Anyway, right? But these are all very high, similar matches over very significant chunks of our sequence. And so what do we do? How do we deal with this ambiguity? So there is one approach of using the top match. And so this we might think of as being one nearest neighbor. We're looking at the most similar match. Another approach would be to use the N nearest neighbor approach. And so N being the number of neighbors, right? So the top match would be N equals one. And so we might say, well, maybe we should use five nearest neighbors, right? And so then we would take the top five matches here and return the consensus, right? So here we would see that three of the five are Shigella. We can't really agree on perhaps the species level. And so we'll call it Shigella, right? Because the majority of the sequences are Shigella. In the RDP classifier database, Shigella and Escherichia are actually lumped together. Again, this is an illustration, but you can see the same type of thing across the phylogenetic tree. Again, as we kind of increase the number of neighbors that we might be interested in, we might be cutting ourselves off from identifying sequences that belong to particular lineages, right? And so we know that many of the genera within our reference databases only have one representative, right? So if I say three nearest neighbors, I would never see any of those genera because there aren't three. They don't have three representatives in them, right? And so this can cause problems. So a third approach, which is what we're going to talk about, is what we might think of as a model-based approach using the naive Bayesian classifier. And so I'll give you kind of a foreshadowing. We're going to use camer searching, and we're going to basically build a camer model of what each genera looks like. So this is the paper that we're going to be talking about, naive Bayesian classifier for rapid assignment of RNA sequences into the new bacterial taxonomy. And the new bacterial taxonomy that they're talking about is Bergey's reference taxonomy. I believe at the time George Garrity, the second author here, was leading up the Bergey's manual, which is the official naming scheme of bacteria. James T. G. has been a pioneer and leader in the field of microecology. James Cole and Joing Wang, I'm sorry for mispronouncing that, have been at the RDP for many, many years, and have been really instrumental in making this resource available to us. So this is figure one from their paper. This figure always makes me go a bit cross-eyed across the x-axis, if we call it that. We have the taxonomic lineages from phylum down to genus. They're looking at bacterial sequences. And the z going into the screen, if you will, is the sequence length going from 50 nucleotides up to full length. They're a bit vague here in terms of if this was kind of like averaged across the full length of the gene, or if these were random 50 nucleotide spots, I kind of guess that they took 50 and they stepped it across the full length gene. They do that elsewhere in the paper, and then they perhaps averaged. And so the height of the bar corresponds to the accuracy of the classification. So basically if you have 50 nucleotide reads, trying to classify at the genus level, then 51.5% of the time you would get the right classification. Whereas if you had full length sequences at the phylum level, that you'd be 99.8% accurate. And so I think this is interesting. Again, it kind of shows what we might think that as you increase the length of the sequence, and as you kind of go to a more coarse taxonomic level, the classification gets better. Although I'll emphasize that it's not perfect. And at some point, you don't really get amazing returns. So going from 50 to 100 is a big leap in accuracy at the genus level. 100 to 200 is a little less dramatic. And then kind of from 200 to 400 isn't huge, right? And certainly from 400 to full length isn't going to solve all the world's problems in terms of classification. This figure is figure two then. Panel A is the classification accuracy rate for the Berge corpus. So this is using the Berge base taxonomy with sequence segments of 100 nucleotides, 100 bases moving 25 bases at a time across the 16S gene. And so here these v1 through v9 are the nine variable regions of the 16S gene that people spend a lot of time talking about. I sequenced the v4 region for a lot of my work. Other people use v3, v4 or v4, v5. At the time this came out, I think v6 was actually pretty popular because it was short. It was actually about 60 nucleotides. And so then you see for each of these lines, it represents a different taxonomic level. And so what we see is like at the v4 region, we actually do a pretty good job of classifying at like the genus level. So 80% of the sequences gave a correct classification. Again, only using 100 nucleotides in the v4 region. And so if we came back here, we would see that that's actually higher than the 71.1% that we saw averaged across the full gene, right? And of course, today we're using longer reads. I'm seen as kind of a throwback by using the v4 region, which is only 250 nucleotides. And I suspect it's actually a bit larger of an accuracy level. And of course, across the gene, different regions classify to varying degrees of accuracy. I think this data is one of the reasons that the v4 region received so much favor in the microbial ecology field. Panel B then on the bottom shows us the average confidence estimate. And this is our degree of confidence in a classification. And so this might not mean a whole lot right now, except to say like the v4 region, and I would say also like the v1, v2 region, it actually did well up here for the average accuracy. We have pretty good, we have pretty good confidence in our classifications at that taxonomic level. Overall, I don't think B is super helpful. I would focus more on A. And actually what would be more interesting would be to basically do a join between these two figures and say, if we require say 80% confidence, what does that do to our classification accuracy? Anyway, something we might think about long term, as we think about perhaps redoing some of this work, going back to those full length sequences mentioned that I think was only 91% of the full length sequences gave a accurate classification at the genus level. We see that that actually varies across the different phyla. And so here we see that for the firmicates, about 12.7% of the sequences were misclassified, proteobacteria about nine and a half, actinobacteria only two and a half, right? And so the amount of variation in classification accuracy varies by lineage. And so again, this idea that if we get full length sequences will solve all our problems. Eh, not so much. I think we still need to be mindful that to get accurate classification, you probably really need a full genome, although there's still a decent number of misclassified sequences in here. I think it's still pretty good. The other thing they point out is that some of these are due to taxonomic anomalies, where it's really not the classifier's fault, because it might be assigning a sequence or the sequence might be coming from a lineage, that's polyphoretic, that it's not a single entity. It's actually kind of, it's like E. coli on chagelle, right? Like that's something where you can't accurately distinguish between the two. And so again, that's kind of an example of a misclassification. So this table actually gets me thinking about two types of misclassification. The first would be calling something Citrobacter when it's an Escherichia, right? Those are different genera. We should not be confusing the two. Another type of misclassification is something that you've perhaps seen in analyzing your own data, where it comes back as an Interobacteriaceae rather than an Escherichia, right? So an Escherichia is an Interobacteriaceae. So that's not wrong. It's just not complete, right? And so we can have a misclassification at the level of, that it's calling a classification, but we can also have a misclassification because it doesn't go as deep. I would prefer to have that latter type of misclassification over the former, right? So I'd rather say something's an Interobacteriaceae than saying it's a Citrobacter. It's an Escherichia and getting those mistaken, right? And so again, these are things to be thinking about as we go through and think about the types of experiments that in the end, we might want to do with our version of the classifier. So a couple of things to think about in terms of the paper and how we kind of process what they did and their experiments. The database that they used, again, used the Bergeys classification. They also did some work with an NCBI-based database and got very similar results. But the Bergeys-based database that was available through the RDP contained 453 Genera that only had a single sequence in the database. They had a total of 988 Genera in the complete collection with about 5,000 sequences. So almost half of the sequences or half of the Genera in the database only had one representative, right? So again, if we did like N nearest neighbor with like two, then we wouldn't see like nearly half of these Genera. So that's something to be aware of, right? We might say, well, why can't we just get representatives of everything, multiple representatives of everything? And the reality is that that's hard, right? There's going to be some Genera that we see a lot of like Escherichia and other things, but well, we just don't see a whole lot of. The current database that was released last summer in 2023, I think in July, it contains 1720 Genera represented by a single sequence. So considerable growth here out of 3883 total Genera. So again, a very similar ratio and nearly 25,000 sequences in the database. Okay. So again, we've seen growth in the database, but as these databases get bigger, the number of Genera goes up, and the number of Singleton Genera goes up as well. Next, remember that the RDP uses Berge's taxonomy. So this is the official taxonomy used by bacterial systematicists. So these are the taxes that are correctly named, right, that are appropriately named and proposed and accepted by the community. There's other taxonomies out there. We can take the same sequence and give it different names depending on what taxonomy we're looking at. We could look at, say, the NCBI, silver, green genes, and others, right? You might have your own taxonomic scheme that you want to apply to sequences. And so the advantage of a standalone tool, like we previously have put into mother and what we'll hopefully be able to develop here, is that we can use the same sequences with multiple different taxonomies so that if you want to know what the classification is according to NCBI, silver, green genes, RDP, you can get them. And so we'll see about doing that again as we go forward in developing this package. All right, so let's dig into the methods. So it's called a naive Bayesian classifier. What is Bayes theorem? This is Bayes theorem, okay? And so it was proposed by Reverend Bayes, of all things, and he was a statistician, and I think a Presbyterian minister. And so kind of breaking down all this conditional probability that on the left side of the equal sign is the probability of a genus given a sequence. And I'm going to put that in terms that we're using for our application, right? So if you give me a sequence, what's the probability that it belongs to, say, Escherichia or pseudomonas? On top here, this P of B given A, it's the probability of seeing a sequence if it came from a genus. So hopefully you can see that we've we've flipped the situation that we have a sequence. What's the probability of seeing that type of sequence if it came from a specific genus versus what's the probability of seeing a genus given that we have this specific sequence. And the way to make that conversion is through knowing the probability of the genus, so PA, and the probability of the sequence. This then is the materials and method section that we're going to be talking about and is a description, basically, of how we go from this to a classification. So the first thing to talk about, again, are the Berge's taxonomy and the database that they used. Again, these are small subunit RNA gene sequences. I should add that I know people have used mother to classify other sequences, right? Not just 16s RNA gene sequences, but people have used large subunit people have used I think 12s other other small subunits, right? And so I think that's really the power of the method is that it's generic. It can be generic enough that we can apply it to a bunch of different cases. Okay, something to note is that each sequence was labeled with a set of taxa from domain to genus. So we go from domain to genus, we don't have species information. And so that's the reason that the classifier does not output a species level classification. There is strong consensus in the field that we cannot use 16s to classify to the species level. If you want the species level, you need to sequence the full genome. Okay, so we can't ask, you know, we can't ask more of the gene than it can actually give us. And so again, that's why it's giving these different ranks. There are in their database some subclasses and some orders and I think subfamilies maybe. But we're only going to be working with these more traditional taxonomic levels. Thinking about what we need to do for our package, we need to get reference sequences and their linear and taxonomy from phylum to genus. And so I have this, because we have these types of files from the RDP that they post online, but that I've also modified in an easier to digest manner for the mother software package. So we'll need to be able to get this loaded into our package. So these are things to think about as we go along. The algorithm description is summed up in this paragraph. So I'm going to step through this. So the classifier uses a feature space consisting of all possible eight base subsequences or words. So what does that mean? If we think of this sequence, so this is the same sequence repeated many times, and we're going to look at eight base subsequences or eight nucleotide words, or eight Mer's, right? So k hyphen Mer is a eight Mer where k equals eight. And so what I've highlighted here are all the possible eight Mer's. Again, for the first, you know, 10 or so different eight Mer's that I've shown. Okay. And so we're going to need to step through each of these, extracting the eight Mer's from our sequence, all possible eight Mer's from our sequence. And so this is for the part of the sequence I showed all of those k Mer's. And so if we think about, you know, what I showed here is 36 nucleotides with eight nucleotide k Mer's that there will be 29 possible eight Mer's here. And so the total number of k Mer's is the length minus the k that the length of the k Mer plus one, that will tell us the total number of k Mer's for our sequence. So there's a trade off with the k Mer size. So if we use a very small k Mer like say two, then there's going to be 16 possible k Mer's. And we're going to be likely to see the same tumor many times within our sequence. And so that's not going to give us a lot of resolution. At the other end, though, if we use too large of a k Mer, say like 10, then there's going to be four to the 10 possible k Mer's. And so if we have to keep track of all those k Mer's, that's going to use a ton of RAM. And so I've got a pot over here on the right, showing the number of k Mer's as a function of the k Mer size. And so this red dot is at a k Mer size of eight, which is what they used in the program. And so with eight Mer's, there's 65,536 possible eight Mer's. Okay. And so again, if we think about like a v four sequence, it's going to be about 250 nucleotides, it's going to have 243 eight Mer's. So it's very unlikely that we're going to see the same eight Mer multiple times in our sequence. So that should give us pretty good resolution, right? Similarly, if we look at a 1500 nucleotide sequence, it's going to have 1493 eight Mer's. And even at that length, we're not likely to see the same eight Mer duplicated. So again, they said that size eight was chosen for all further work to reduce the memory requirements, that they found that eight and nine performed pretty similarly, but say six and seven weren't so good, didn't produce such good accuracy levels. They didn't show the results of that. But they said eight and nine were very similar, but nine required a lot more RAM. So they ran with eight. Next, the position of the word or the camer within the sequence is being ignored. This is the naive part where the naive Bayesian doesn't care about the context of where that word comes from. And so only those words occurring in the query contributed to the score. And so if if a camer wasn't found in the sequence, the sequence isn't being penalized. It's only being credited or not credited for what it has in the sequence. And this will hopefully make more sense as we go through here. Okay, so now we have some more things that we know we need to do. We're going to have to be able to get an unknown sequence into our functions. And we're going to need to collect all of the eight nucleotide words, perhaps other sizes as well from our unknown sequence, as well as from our reference database, one of the first things that we're going to need to do is to calculate the word specific prior so the probability of seeing each word across our entire database. And so we'll do that using this formula here, where our probability of seeing a word, again, regardless of what genus it comes from, is the number of times we see that word across the whole database, plus point five, divided by the total number of sequences plus one. This plus point five and plus one, ensures that the values of the probability go between zero and one. So again, thinking about that formula I just described on the last slide and applied to generating that p s given G, we're going to then think about that at the genus level, right. So again, like I just said, we can think about this with G being saying the asherichia or the pseudomonas or whatever. And then this m w is going to be the number of sequences that have a specific eitmer in that genus, plus the probability of seeing that word across the entire corpus divided by the total number of sequences from the genus plus one. I should also add here that if this value is zero, the probability won't be zero because we're going to have the pi divided by the denominator here, right. And so that will come in handy here when we calculate the joint probability of observing genus G from a partial sequence s, right. And so if we take our unknown sequence now, and we look at its eitmers, we can then look at the eitmers that we have and compare those eitmers probability in each of the different genera. And so then we can get the probability of sequence given the genus by this this pi sign is a multiplication where we multiply together all of these probability values for all the words that we see in that species, right. And so then we can imagine we're going to get a bunch of p s given G's because we're going to have the same sequence but for many different genera. So now we know that we need to get p w g for each genus and word. The naive Bayesian assignment will be determined by this formula, which is Bayes theorem, right. And so here, what we'll find is that it will assume that all genera are equally probable. So we have equal priors. And at the constant terms, PG and PS can then be ignored. And so basically what we end up with is that the sequence is going to be a member of a genus given the highest probability score, right. So we take that PSG across for the same sequence across all genera, and we find the PSG that has the largest probability. And that then becomes our classification. So the next thing we need to add to our to do list is then for each unknown to calculate p s given G. So now we need to get the confidence in our classification. So recall that we have eight character words, right. And so now what we're going to do is we're going to conduct what's called a bootstrap trial, where bootstrapping is I consider a part of like bioinformatic black magic. I don't know that we totally understand why it works, but it works pretty well for giving us confidence in our classification, or in a phylogeny. What the algorithm does here is that because we need the bootstraps, the sub samplings to be independent of each other, they don't want to resample everything, but they want to subset all of the possible k-mers. And so because each k-mer is eight nucleotides long, they then take a one eighth subset from the possible words. So say we have a sequence and we found the 800 k-mers in that sequence. What we would then do is randomly grab 100. So one eighth of the 800, randomly select those k-mers out, and we're going to sample with replacement. So we'll grab one out, record it, put it back in, grab another one out, record it, put it back in. So that's with replacement. And we'll then grab that one eighth subsampling or the 100 words. And we're going to then take those words. So we'll then classify that using our algorithm. And we're going to repeat that process 100 times. Based on those 100 randomizations, we will then record the genus that has the most frequent classification for our pool of bootstrap sub samples, right? And then at the higher rank assignment, so say like the family of the class or the order or the whatever, we're then going to sum the results for all genera under the taxa. This gives us then our bootstrap confidence estimate. In general application, we're typically happy with an 80% confidence on our bootstrap. I don't know where this 80% comes from, but it's frequently used with bootstrapping. So I've added steps three through eight here, where again, we randomly sub select one eighth of the total words from the sequence, we then calculate the probability of a sequence given the genus or the genus given the sequence, right? And then we repeat steps three through 500 or maybe 1000 times depending on the speed. And we calculate the number of times each genus is returned, as well as kingdom through family. And then we return the taxonomy with more than 80% confidence. And so again, in practice, what happens is if our genus is say it like the 60% confidence, then we typically report that as unclassified and we go up the next level. And so if family is over 80%, then we would return the family. If family is below 80%, then we go up the next level. We can also think of this outline then as pseudocode. These are the things that we need to do in our march towards coming up with a classifier. The things on the right again correspond to the database, whereas the things on the left correspond to our unknown sequences. And so my thinking is that the things on the right with the database can be pre calculated. And so then we can use them with a large number of unknown. So we shouldn't have to do the stuff on the right for every sequence, we can pre calculate the stuff on the right, and then run through everything on the left. The other thing that I noticed is that step two in both of these is calculating the eight nucleotide words. And so they think that's going to be where we start in our next episode of trying to build out this package. And so we're going to start by extracting k-mers from our sequences, either our unknowns or from our reference sequences. So I hope this description of the paper has been helpful in informing you how this classifier works. Perhaps you've used the RDP classifier in the past on their website. And you've always wondered how it worked, or perhaps you've used BLAST and didn't know why BLAST was such a bad thing. I hope this has shed some light on the strengths and weaknesses and kind of why we get the results we get from these different classifiers. Again, in the next episode, I'm going to start coding up the package by building out functions to extract the k-mers. In our case here, perhaps starting with eight nucleotide words from our unknowns and from our references. So that you don't miss that episode, please, please, please, be sure that you subscribe to the channel, and we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


Hey everyone, welcome to today's day trading recap for Thursday May 20th Plus 1,302 on the day that marks our 12th green day in a row So going back to a few Tuesdays ago one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven and twelve so Can't beat that.  Let's take a look at these. I'll show you what we did starting with the mighty 90s The first one was on the list was Facebook This is a really nice winner And so let's take a look at the Facebook expand the screen here So Facebook had initially this push-up and then it pulled back and had a nice little volume spike on this pullback We got long right here It pushed up got out of half of my contracts right there for a nice profit And then it came back down and chopped around for a while and then finally you're ripped higher and we got out of the Rest up here right near the pivot. So plus 880 on that one Netflix so Netflix kind of just died today We had a nice push With volume here. So I got short right here Just on this little pullback on this bar here got out of half my contracts for a nice little profit on that piece And then this thing just kind of chopped around and like flat lined and so when that happened I ended up just cutting out of the rest and Taking taking a little scratch, you know, plus $40 on that one and you can see it hasn't really done much even since then this thing is just Absolutely flat-lined So I'm not sure what's not sure what's up in Netflix today And then my last mighty 90 was in zoom now zoom. This was kind of a mistake I jumped in this one a little early without realizing the situation Expand this here. So I had this nice push-up into a pivot I was looking at them to go short here and And I didn't realize how early in the bar we were this volume bar got got bigger than the first which kind of negates that that Trade so I never really should have been in that trade So when it pulled back a little bit to this pivot, I just got out ended up taking a loss because I got in I think right Right in this area. So anyway, it took a loss on the mighty 90 and then I turned around Based on that volume bar on this little pullback got long right here and then it pushed up Got out a half kind of chopped around chopped around and then bounced again And when it started kind of flat-lining, I ended up just getting out of the rest And took a took a profit out of the runner of 470 so plus 470 on the runner minus 360 on the mighty 90. So net net winner in zoom today and then Boeing a nice runner in Boeing now this one Big spike in volume here. So on this little pullback got long this thing ripped up I got out of half my position right here and then I was trying to get out of another quarter of it I was literally a tick away just didn't hit it and then it dropped Then I had to sit through all this chop all this chop But the patients paid off because then it ripped back up and I just got out of my last piece just a couple minutes ago And so booked 576 on that one and then lift This is actually the first one of the day and this is one that I blame 100% on Chad This is what there wasn't anything else going on at the time So I decided to take a little small position here and in lift I was looking for a an upside volume or downside volume runner here So it bounced and then when it pushed up above this, that's kind of our exit criteria to bail So I cut out obviously bounced quite a bit more, but then it did fall But I did not participate in that so I ended up taking a loss on that one of 304 and I already mentioned zoom so that's it So plus 1302 on the day that street continues will be streaming live again tomorrow on Friday And then we're offline all of next week. So Tomorrow's our last day streaming in a little while. So look forward to seeing you then talk to you then


Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm Jonathan Asley of JonathanAsley.com and I'm so excited to be doing this live stream for you today.  Really quickly, if you're brand new to my YouTube channel, please hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you can be notified of new videos. And if any time during this video the content resonates with you, please hit that like button, I'd really appreciate it. Also, this is officially your explicit language warning. I do occasionally use expletives to enhance a sentence and if that's not your cup of tea, then I highly recommend turning off this video right now if you're watching the replay or you're listening to live stream because there is gonna be explicit language probably throughout this video. All right, let's just jump into our topic.  So let me tell you where this topic was born. I was watching one of my contemporaries on an interview for a podcast and they're a relationship coach and they were talking about the differences between men and women that men are logical and women are emotional.  Let's be real for a second because if this was so true, if men are truly so ridiculously logical, then why are men so absolutely irrational in their life? Let me repeat that, why are men irrational in their life? And so, and if women are just so emotional and they're just so tied into their emotions, then why are women so irrational in their lives? And when I say so and I'm dramatizing this, it's because we've been indoctrinated into a relatively new phenomena that men are from Mars and women are from Venuses and the whole problem in human relationships happen to be the gender differences and if you understand the gender differences that all of a sudden, magically your relationship is gonna work out when you understand how men work. Now, there's kind of an irony because when I started my website, I called it understand men now. Now, let me just share this with you. The reason why I started my website called understand men now is because women are fascinated with what men do. Women are absolutely fascinated. Women buy books trying to understand men far exceeds the number of books that men try to understand women. In fact, men barely buy books trying to understand women. In fact, most of the books men buy to try to understand women is not to understand women, it's how to meet women, okay? So to the extent that most issues that men have with women centers around the confidence in meeting women whereas women will buy book after book after book after book after book trying to understand men. Why are men liars? Why are men ghosters? Why are they cheaters? Why are they nurses? Why, why, why, why, why, why?  And so coming back to this notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus is look, we all come from one planet, planet Earth, okay? We come from the planet Earth. And while there are biological differences between men and women and there's even sociological differences within men and women, there certainly are. You can't wrap it all up in a nice package and say, this is gonna solve your problem, understanding that men have higher testosterone so they need to go into their cave a little bit more. Like, okay, that might be true and this whole notion that men are more logical but I want you to think about this for a second. A man with 150 IQ may not be the same as a man with a 90 IQ. Let me repeat that, a man with a 90 IQ may not be the same as a man with 150 IQ. So there's even within men, there's differences of logic between them.  In fact, women can be as equally emotionally unavailable as men. Women can be avoidant personalities just like men.  And by the way, ladies, the only reason why I tend to focus based on gender, it's because you wouldn't click the button if it was based on just being human. Let me repeat that, you would not click the button if this just said people. For some reason, human beings are so fascinated is I've got to figure out men. I've got to figure out men because if I figure out men, my whole relationship life will just magically work out perfectly. Let me repeat that. So many of you have been indoctrinated into this belief that if you understand male behavior that all of a sudden your relationship woes are just gonna naturally fall into place as if men are really good in relationship. Let me repeat that as if men are really good at being in relationship. And I'm here to say most men are rather clueless when it comes to the mechanics of a healthy, happy relationship. And quite frankly, if men are clueless and women accept that cluelessness, then they're just as equally clueless as men. Or at least this is my perception of how I've observed human behavior. Now, what I've also noticed is that the best relationship books have nothing to do with gender. Let me repeat that, the best relationship books have nothing to do with gender. Let's start with my book.  This has nothing to do with gender. It's not based on gender. Self-love is not singular to men or women or any type of variation of that. It's all about self. It's a journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work. And by the way, I also encourage therapy and seeking professional medical treatment if one needs so in my book. So it's not singular to self-help is the only solution, but I just wanna put that out there. Another great book, eight dates by Dr. John and Julie Gottman. Eight dates by Dr. John, not gender-based, you know? How to be an adult in relationship. Not gender-based, non-violent communication by Marshall Rosenberg, non-gender-based. You know, if the Buddha dated, non-gender-based. See, part of our problem when it comes to dating, mating and relating is we've set ourselves up for failure by pitting the genders against one another, especially with gender expectations that men are the chivalrous one and they're just gonna claim you and ladies, all you have to do is sit back in your feminine energy and just things will magically work out.  And if this was so true, then why is the number one search term by women? Why are men commitment phobic? Why do men ghost? Why do men disappear? Why do men ignore me? Why do men fear intimacy? This is what you're searching for. You're trying to figure out the answers, but here's the problem is it's not singular to a gender because human beings are riddled with childhood wounds and traumas as well as adult traumas that cause them to be rather dysfunctional in relationship. Let me repeat that human beings, penises and vaginas. When I say human beings, penises and vaginas are riddled with dysfunctionality. This is why I highly recommend ordering the book, excuse me, the Hoffman process, the Hoffman process to do a deep dive into your childhood wounds and traumas because here's the bottom line when it comes to being in a healthy, happy relationship, it requires two fundamentals to be in a healthy, happy relationship that have nothing to do with gender. Those two fundamentals are emotional maturity and understanding the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship. Let me repeat that emotional maturity and understanding the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship. So when I pulled out this book, How to Be an Adult in Relationship, that's the emotional maturity piece. And then when I pulled out this book, Eight Dates by Dr. John and Julie Gottman, this is understanding the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship. By the way, all the books I recommend are in the description under Jonathan recommends books. My book is under selflovethebook.com because if you don't understand, God, did you hear that high pitch? My voice went high pitch for a second. If you don't understand, I feel like Peter Brady and the Brady Bunch when his voice changed. If you don't understand the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship and you yourself are not emotionally mature to be in relationship, then your relationship is doomed regardless. And by the way, let me tell you something about women. Women tend to believe they are far more emotionally mature than men. Let me repeat that women tend to believe that they're far more emotionally mature than men.  I see women who have abandonment issues. I see women who have fear of intimacy issues. I see women who have terrible communication skills. I mean terrible communication skills. If you wanna get a sample of this, then I highly recommend watching. There's a series on Showtime. If you don't have Showtime, you may wanna go check it out. The series is called Couples Therapy. Couples Therapy. And this is true hidden behind the scenes sessions, of real therapy sessions, hidden cameras. And these are couples, men and women alike as well as heterosexual, homosexual couple or there's a lesbian couple in season one and then there's a gay couple in season two. And my thing is the women are equally bad at expressing themselves to their partner just as men. The women are equally as bad as the women.   So why do I, okay, first off, why am I screaming at the top of my lungs?  I know you can hear me, okay?  So I won't say women. Now, are there nuggets in there? Absolutely, each one of these books have some value. What doesn't have value is when we pit one gender against the other, when we pit the genders against one another, and that's what's happening frequently in the dating, mating, or relating realm is we're pitting the genders against one another and this is why there is a lack of real connection happening because what's missing is most human beings, men and women alike, are more focused on what they can get than what they can get. Let me repeat that, men and women and women are just as bad.  He was a narcissist and he abused me and used me and everything else. And yes, you're the martyr because you were the victim in all of this. Let me just say this, if you tolerate bad behavior that's not on him, that's on you. Or let me rephrase, it's not on them, it's on you, okay? If you tolerate bad behavior, if you compromise your boundaries, if you don't stick to your standards, that's not on the other person, that's on you. But Jonathan, I loved them so much and I was so in love with them. You know what, here's the thing, for all of you people out there that claimed you loved the other person but you threw them under the bus when things didn't go your way, because if you genuinely loved the person, you would actually want them to be happy whether they're with you or not. Let me repeat that, if you genuinely love the other person, you would want them to be happy whether you're with them or not. But I can tell you, there's a significant percentage of people watching this or will be watching this that simply believe that they're better than their last partner because they feel like they were used in their last relationship. And by the way, I'm not here absolving bad behavior. Let me repeat that, I'm not here to absolve bad behavior. If you have to call a doctor, an attorney or a policeman, then you have every right to actually feel some level of victimization, okay? If you actually had, but if you don't have to call any one of those three people, then you have to take ownership in your part of what happened in a relationship and this isn't gender-based. This is why this whole thing, because let me tell you something, men can be incredibly irrational in their life, just like women can be incredibly irrational in their life. So this whole notion that men are more logical and women are more emotional doesn't benefit you until you actually work on your own stuff. Let me reframe that. What's more important is rather than focusing on what's the differences in the genders, why not focus on where we're alike? And first and foremost, where we're alike is that most of us are rather emotionally dysfunctional, weak and unskilled when it comes to communicating our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, when it comes to being in an interpersonal relationship. This is why I recommend all of these books I recommend to help you shore up your emotional maturity so you can be more aligned to attracting someone else who matches your emotional maturity. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? I hope it is. So this is just my clip note version of what I think is just crap is this whole notion that men are more logical and women are more emotional. It doesn't really matter because I know some women who are absolutely, they're all in their head and they're ultra analytical. And I know men who are ultra sensitive in their emotions. So let's stop worrying about the differences in the genders and let's start working on ourselves. Can we do that? Can we do that, please? Can I get an amen? Can I get a thumbs up, please? All right, I think this would be a good time to start answering questions. Really quickly, if you do have a question, please write the word question and then post the question in the comment section of the live chat. Also, you can purchase a super sticker or a super chat. The money that I get from the super sticker and super chat goes to a foundation I'm creating for my son Connor who passed away. The foundation is to help support a scholarship fund for those who need personal development work and I'm gonna be helping them along the way with this fund. So again, if you purchase a super sticker, super chat to either honor me or Connor or have a question post there or you can write the word question. Now really quickly before we get started, just a heads up for those of you who are my fans, I haven't been feeling well for the last few days. I've had a gastrointestinal problem. I had a stomach bug. It did not feel well. I'm only about 80% today. Yesterday was Father's Day and sadly I was by myself because my oldest son was out of town. My youngest is obviously in heaven and my father lives in another country. So it was a tough day for me but I did get myself a gift that I'd like to share with you all and I got myself a license plate frame and I wonder if you can see this. It says, salty love in honor of Connor. Salty love in honor of Connor, salty love. Connor's nickname is Salty and I thought this would be a great gift, my Father's Day gift to myself. So my foundation is called salty love and it's kind of taking the bitter sweetness of what's taking Connor's nickname, salty and the bitter sweetness of his passing is that love can be a little bit bittersweet. And I just want us to all remember that when we have love in our heart, even the worst things that can happen in our lives doesn't mean it has to bring us down. It doesn't mean we have to fold or collapse as human beings when we lose a relationship, when we lose a loved one, when some tragedy happens. Again, if you don't have to call a doctor, an attorney or a policeman, I believe we're all learning new ways to love on ourselves and that's my invitation for every one of you is to find new and better ways to love on yourself. And again, my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway? All right, so we're gonna do Q&A right now. So let's see what we've got. By the way, everyone, thanks for the kind wishes, I appreciate that. Okay, Yvonne writes, question. Oh, and by the way, let's try to make the theme centered around the differences between men and women. So I'd like that to be the theme, but it doesn't have to be in the question. So Yvonne writes, a guy wants to take me out on Sunday, but is wishy-washy about plans, makes excuses, says he's tired where I'm at and where he's at. So, okay, so today is Monday, Sunday is seven days to six days from now and he's wishy-washy about plans. Is this a boyfriend? Is this your first date? Is this someone you're in relationship with? I mean, I need a little bit more, but he's making excuses, says he's tired where I'm at and where he's at. So he's basically telegraphed. This is not a male or female thing. This is telegraphing that he basically is not making a plan. Now, you can make a plan for Sunday. You can say, hey, why don't you come over to my place and we'll go walk across the street and there's a great sushi restaurant a mile away from my live. That's one way you can set the plan or you can just say, hey, if you haven't made a plan, I'm making plans to do something else. Okay, let me repeat that. You could say, since you haven't made a plan for this Sunday, I've made plans to do something else and I just wanna give you a heads up on that. But my question is, if this is a first date versus a committed relationship, if this is a committed relationship, I'd like to get to the bottom of what's really happening in this relationship. I'm sure there's a lot more going on, whatever excuses he's making. I'm sure there's some chaos going on in his life and he's incapable of leaning into a fully committed relationship. That's my suspicion. So thank you for your question, Yvonne. I don't think I really helped but at least I gave you some thoughts to consider. All right, if you have a question, post the word question. Let's go through this. Let's see. All right, Sadie writes, question. Jonathan, what are your views on micro cheating? Ooh, a man messaged me and flirted with me but he was engaged.  Now he's single and wants to date me. Can he be trusted? He's 65. What are your views? Well, first off, I don't know what micro cheating is. Now, there's something called, here, hold on. There's a book by Dr. Sherry Myers. There's a book by Dr. Sherry Myers called Chatting or Cheating. Now, there is a form of cheating called emotional sex. So there's the physical aspect of cheating which is physical sex or there's another aspect of cheating called emotional sex. So what I suspect or at least I think what you're getting at is that there was some level of emotional connection towards you. There was an indication of wanting to cheat but it wasn't an actual cheat. So I don't call that micro cheating.  I don't know.   I don't know.  In other words, someone is in a relationship with someone else but they're engaging emotionally in relationship with someone else. That's, I wouldn't call that micro cheating. I would call that emotional sex. My thoughts on it, as far as going forward, you've got to answer that for yourself. You know, what is that? How do you feel about that? By the way, ladies, I just want to say something. A lot of your questions, you have to ask these for yourself, okay? Because what's most important is how do you feel about it? How do you feel about this behavior? If it doesn't resonate with you, then I wouldn't engage. It's just as simple as that. If that behavior doesn't resonate with you, either discuss the behavior with the person or don't engage with the person. It's very binary, okay? Either discuss it or don't engage. But I don't know what other information you need other than I can just say that what I suspect is happening is emotional cheating but not an actual physical cheating.  Let me repeat that.  Women in marriages or in relationships cheat far more on an emotional level.  That's what I just mean by that. So I'm just gonna say women tend to cheat far more than men on an emotional level than men do. But anyway, I don't think I really answered your question but I really appreciate the settlement of it. Thank you so much. All right, let's see what other questions are here. Again, if you have a question, post the word question or purchase a super sticker. Okay, actually Lisa wrote something. Society encourages us not to take personal responsibility anymore. Blame others. Oh my God. Here in the United States, we are suckling on the nipple. We're suckling on the nipple of victim consciousness. Oh my God. We are riddled with human beings that take no personal responsibility for their choices. It's always men's fault. It's always women's fault. It's always the government's fault. It's always this person's fault but people don't take ownership in their lives. That's why when I said before, when I hear the rhetoric, for example, on narcissism, it's all narcissists, narcissists, narcissists. Well, do you know what's so funny? Do you know one of the fundamentals of narcissists is they choose weak people. They don't choose emotionally strong people. They choose emotionally weak people. So if you're an emotionally weak person, then you might wanna do all this work before you engage in relationship with another human being. Because if you don't take ownership on your part and look at, listen, I am not here to absolve bad behavior by any human being and verbal abuse by any human being. But the reality is, is we were abused by our parents significantly.  I was bullied as a child.  I take ownership, now, look at it. And I wish I had the strength as a child to stand up to bullies. I do now, I didn't then, but I don't blame them for it.  And that's what's most important. You have a chance. Either get busy living or get busy dying. We can blame everybody else but look at when there's blame. There's three fingers pointing back at ourselves. And by the way, I know some of you that have feel like you have every just cause to blame but it's like what Dr. Phil says. How's that working for you? Blame doesn't benefit your life going forward taking personal responsibility for your choices, being in victor consciousness, your actions. By the way, read this book. The four agreements, the four agreements. Be impeccable with your word. Always do your best. Don't take things personally and don't allow the projection of others to affect your chi. That's the fundamentals of this book.  Oh, by the way, with my book as well. These two books combined. Oh my God, gold. By the way, there's a link below. By the way, if any of this is resonating with you and you'd like to speak to me as a coach, check out a link to a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. All right, let's see what other questions we have. These are really good, so thank you. Ah, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Question, question, write a question. Oh, there's a super sticker from Lynn. Thank you so much. Tisk, tisk wrote, love is not based on sex. Love comes as a choice after the sex. You choose to care and show compassion, which is really what love is, compassion and care. By the way, love is not based on sex, that's true. Love comes as a choice after sex. I disagree with that. And let me just share with you where my disagreement is.   Being loving, being caring, being compassionate can happen well before sex. So I just wanna say, it's not a choice after sex, okay? It's a choice actually before sex, in my opinion.  But that's just my book anyway. Thank you, Tisk, Tisk, I really appreciate that. Ha, ha, or ha, right. You speak with such enthusiasm, Jonathan, that I fear for your blood pressure. Well, I do take blood pressure medicine, so I fear for it as well. Actually, my blood pressure medicine is a diuretic because I have a little bit of too much sodium in my diet and I try to cut out sodium, but the blood pressure is relative to having a little bit more, too much fluid. But thank you, I appreciate that. He seems like he wants a free maid. I don't know what that means, so okay. If you have a question, post the word question. Oh, here we go, Teresa writes. Question, I dumped my fiance because he was getting pornos from his ex, pornos from his ex-wife and getting off on them. I considered this cheating. Do you consider that cheating? He did this with other women, too. I guess you can, you know what, again, what matters most is that you didn't consider it very, you did not find that acceptable behavior from your partner, okay?  I'm gonna tell you something, the reason why I'm so passionate about this, not a day goes by that I don't hear something unique. I mean, by the way, I've heard it all and that's not, I mean, that's a little bit unique. Oh, my heart-blend blood pressure is going.   But what's that a reflection of to me is probably just not a fully engaged partner in your relationship and my suspicion that his emotional maturity is rather weak, which now my question is, how is your emotional maturity if this behavior is unacceptable and you set a boundary and he keeps crossing the boundary, then my question for you is why, what's the definition of insanity? What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. My question for you is, what do you wanna do about that? That's what I'd like to hear you say. By the way, my coffee cup today, I'm drinking coffee, I swear a little, you'll feel better. Hence why I use expletives to enhance the sandwich. Alrighty, great question. Well, not a great question, but a good question, Theresa. Thank you so much. What makes a great question is when I can go into real detail. All right, if you have a question, post it below. All right, Grace writes, question. The man I'm dating had 10 questions for me to answer. I asked him to answer his own. He did. He calls texts and seems interested. Do you think this is genuine? Hey, I think that's great. Any man that asks you questions about you and you do the same for him, that's a great start. That's a great start. So I think that's, do you think it's genuine? Here's the thing about it being genuine. You gotta lean into your own heart and really tap into your intuition and say, does it feel sincere and genuine? Now there's people that can actually hide their emotions and lie and that sort of thing, but most people aren't that sophisticated enough to be true sociopaths. So my guess is it's probably rather genuine. Does it mean he's a good candidate to be in relationship? Do you mean you're a good candidate to be in relationship? We don't know yet. That's why it's called dating. Dating is a, the purpose of dating is a vetting process to decide if you wanna be in relationship with someone. Let me repeat that. The purpose of dating is a vetting process to decide if you wanna be in relationship with someone. The purpose of a relationship is a vetting process to decide if you wanna be in partnership with someone or if you're only seeking something casual. Let me tell you, most humans at midlife are only capable of a casual relationship. I would say well over 80%, 80% of humans are really only capable of a casual relationship. That's basically companionship, connection and sex without any real destination. If that's all they're capable of, men and women alike. In fact, Esther Perrell wrote a fantastic book called Mating Incaptivity, Mating Incaptivity. And one of the things she talks about in her blogs and podcasts is something called stable ambiguity, stable ambiguity. What that means is there's monogamy and exclusivity but what's ambiguous is where's this relationship going? That's because most humans don't know how to build a healthy, happy relationship together. Most men are rather clueless and they're winging it. They're winging it, they're winging it. And by the way, if men are winging it, you're winging it. Because if you're not reading, like here's a great book to read, Spiritual Partnership by Gary Zoop. Oh, by the way, I have to stop for a second. Someone recently said in a comment, all you do, Jonathan, is pitch others books. You provide no value.  Educating human beings through material.   I'm just giving you, I'm just schooling you. I'm just giving you, this is just a perspective. I'm just offering a perspective. And I recommend reading these books to increase your chances for success because let's face it, 80% of relationships fail. Let me repeat that, and I'm gonna scream this at the top of my lungs, 80% of relationships fail. Whether it's marriages or relationships, they fail.   Okay, it has nothing to do with men and women.  All right, I'm going off on my tangent. I'm gonna reel it back in. All right, anyways, Grace, do I think he's genuine? You gotta tell me. All right, let's see what we have here. Okay, Lisa writes, question, what do you say when a man asks you if you live alone? I feel like many of them are, wait, I feel like many of them are only seeking sex. Oh, by the way, well, that's a great question. By the way, I think the reason why I would ask that question is because I wanna know if they're an empty nest or not. Do you have children at home? Are you responsible for another human being? Are you a caretaker for someone else? Because if I'm gonna be in relationship with you, I'd like to hang out at your home with just you and I.  Now, if he's asking you that as a first before you've ever met him, I ask that question just like I said, that might be a question. Well, I'd simply say, are you an empty nester? Do you have children at home? Are you a caretaker for anyone? Another way of saying it is deal it alone. I don't see anything nefarious about that. I actually think that's a great question.  Every man thinks about sex on a first date. Wait, first off, not Lisa. Everybody hear me on this. Every man is thinking about sex on a first date. If you ladies haven't figured out this point, stop dating, learn this lesson because that's what's on our mind as emotionally evolved as I am.  And what's my chances of getting laid on the first date? Now, do I actually act upon it? No, but am I thinking it? You gotta be absolutely. If I'm attracted to someone, I've had sex with her 30 times before she got to the dessert, if we went out to dinner. So that's just human behavior. So I wouldn't make a big deal out of it. At least that's my impression anyway. Lisa, thank you for your question. Okay, Bonnie writes, question, why do men hide or avoid you if you ask a question they don't like? Wasn't a difficult question and I'm very able to handle the truth, much better than avoidance or lies. So, Bonnie, was the question you asked him, do I look fat in this dress? Was that the question you asked him? Because I'm gonna tell you something, I don't wanna answer that question. Did you ask him a question that was very intimate and personal and he doesn't feel safe with you? That might be a question that might be difficult.  Sometimes someone can ask me a question that triggers, I mean, it could be an off the wall question but it triggers me thinking about my son and in that moment, I completely withdraw within. Does that make me an emotionally unavailable person? No, it just means something got triggered. So I wouldn't overthink this, okay? But just to understand that if you're in a relationship with someone, it's important to develop the skills to communicate at an emotional level. This is why I highly, highly, highly recommend reading this book, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. This should have been called Compassionate Communication. But I wouldn't over, well, at least my feeling is, let me go back to this. Just understand that sometimes when we get triggered, it's our natural reaction to recoil inward. Doesn't make the person a bad person, it doesn't make them disingenuous. It just happens to be a very natural human behavior, men and women alike. So what you might think is benign might be something triggering for him. So why don't you share, Bonnie, what the question was and let's discuss that and I can then tell you whether or not that's something to really, to think about, okay? All right, bump, bump, bump. All right, Hazel says, wait a minute. You don't ask the question to a guy that's for you to know if you're fat and that's your insecurity. Exactly, I'm just being, I was using that as a rhetorical one. Kimberly says, I think about sex on a first or second date. I asked, could I have sex and then make love to him the rest of my life? See, women do the same thing. So, and by the way, yes, women, by the way, women will reject a man because they don't figure, they look at a man saying, I could never have sex with them. Sex is on the mind of human beings. In fact, the older we get, we figure we have a short window to have sex in our life. So we're very much on our minds on a regular basis. So anyway, thank you, Kimberly, I appreciate that. Okay, Zim writes, question. Is it okay for a guy like, is it okay for a guy like me to get a vasectomy? After a famous bisexual lady just got pregnant again, she has her own documentary. She inspired me to do this, should I do it? That's a very personal question, Zim. If you don't want to have children, I certainly, if that's something you don't want to have, then I certainly think you have every, if you have every desire to want to do that, again, it's not a hundred percent guaranteed. I know that as a man ages, his sperm level drops down, but even men in their 80s can procreate children. So I think that's a personal question. And nowadays, you can have it done, they can put you in the twilight sleep and have it done in just a few minutes, so or however long it takes, but there is no guarantee. And yes, somebody can get pregnant after having that, but it certainly puts the odds in your favor of not getting someone pregnant. All right, Yvonne writes, God bless you, Jonathan. Thank you so much, Yvonne, I appreciate that. All right, do we have a question? Question, okay, Darlene writes, I met someone that is interesting. I asked the question, do you see yourself married one day, too old to waste time? He said, no, maybe if I meet someone special, our thoughts. You know, here's the thing about midlife. Most folks, by the way, the divorce rate on second and third marriages is higher than the first. So a lot of people are reluctant to get remarried. So then this is actually one of the fundamental problems with partnership. So you have to decide for yourself, what does partnership look like for you? Now, oftentimes, see, I believe a lot of men operate from the premise of, I'll believe it when I see it, I'll believe it when I see it, I'll believe it when I see it.  My belief is a little bit different. I operate from the premise, when I believe it, I will see it. When I believe it, I will see it. Not when I'll believe it when I see it. And what I mean to say is, I operate from the premise, I wanna get remarried. So I'm thinking about, I'm actually on the hunt for a wife, okay? I'm on a hunt for a wife. Even at my age, I'm in midlife, I'm in my fifties. I'm on a hunt for a wife. I operate differently. When someone's not on the hunt for a wife, they just somehow hope that magic fairy deaths will make them change their minds. And most of the time that doesn't work. So my invitation is, and by the way, 80%, I'm gonna make up a number here, but most people at midlife don't wanna get remarried. Men and women alike. So then what does partnership look like for you? What does partnership look like for you? Only you can answer that for yourself, going, that's why, again, read this book, Spiritual Partnership. Read the book, Eight Dates. Read the book, Eight Dates. So you can design your own relationship together. Ladies and gentlemen, I wanna say something. What's missing in the dating process today is a desire to actually co-create a relationship. And the problem is this.  Wait, hold on one second. Where's my puzzle? All right, I found it. Here's a 500-piece puzzle, okay? 500-piece puzzle. Now here's the problem with midlife relationships. When you're in your 20s, you each come to the table with 10, 20, 30, 40 pieces, okay? And what happens is you're building a life together and you're making this puzzle of 500 pieces, right? The problem with midlife is I come to the table with 490 pieces, you come to the table with 490 pieces.   So this is where compromise comes in and as people mature in age, they become very set in their ways. They don't want to compromise. Women oftentimes compromise way more than men because you ladies give your power away to men because you've been indoctrinated in this whole.   It doesn't work. What works is two people that say we wanna be in partnership with one another.  It requires intentionality, intentionality, being intentional in the process. And if you're not intentional, you're winging it, you're winging it. Is this resonating? Is this making sense?  Stop giving your power away to men. Own your sovereignty.  Ladies, the minute you give your power away to man, he basically, by the way, when you do that, just understand he gets to dictate how this relationship is. So when he decides he wants to pull away because he can't handle the emotional responsibility of a relationship.  Just remember, you chose that guy, either accept him for who he is and accept the relationship for who he is or choose someone who's aligned. So maybe you find someone understanding it's a 500 piece puzzle and we're gonna figure out how to make it work together. Stop expecting men to lead the relationship process.  I think my neighbors are probably freaking out. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. All right. Oh, Bonnie back. My question, nine year relationship was based on his energy and all of a sudden avoidance and lack of physical interest. We were separated due to him recovering at the VA but he had a lot of freedom. So Bonnie, this is a man who went through a health crisis. That might have weared on him emotionally significantly. So he may still be processing a lot of his emotions on what's going on and his behavior is a result of that adult trauma. Trauma causes many human beings to retreat inward. Many human beings don't have a capacity to take on other people's emotional responsibility when they can't even take care of their own emotional responsibility. So that's most likely what's happening in that dynamic. That's just my cliff note version based on what you shared but thank you for giving me that heads up, nine year relationship. I guess the question is what, it's a nine year relationship. How often do you physically see each other? How often do you guys have sex? Do you have a plan of how to take this relationship into a partnership? These are all the additional questions you may want to explore before you get too deep because I wouldn't spend nine years with someone unless I knew we were in a fully rooted, deeply rooted, committed relationship. That's at least my perception anyway. Thank you, Bonnie. I appreciate that. That says, yes, this resonates with me big time. Thank you. All right. M G Mooney, whatever, the puzzle analogy. Love it. Yes, I made that up just a few minutes ago. Melissa writes, Melissa, question. What's the difference between I care about you and I love you? Oh, I love, love, love this question. So actually to me, I wanna differentiate.  Okay, I care about you, I love you, I'm in love with you. So I care about my deepest, I care about my friends, for example. I care about them, I love them. I care about my friends, I love them. I want the best for them in my life, okay? Now, and usually it's a relationship that's close to being in a two lane street with my friends, okay? I care about my clients, but that's kind of a one-sided relationship because I care about my clients. I mean, I love them, but I care about them because it's a one-sided relationship, okay? When it's a two-sided relationship and there's deep care, I think there's love goes synonymous with it. When it's a one-sided relationship, they might be care, but there may not be the corresponding love. But let's talk about I'm in love with you. So I'm gonna read to you what I'm in love with you means to me, okay? What it means to me is the following. I'm here, you matter. We are important. I've got your back. I'm not going anywhere and I only want you. Let me repeat that. I'm here. What that means is I'm present. I'm present. I'm not thinking about the future. I'm not thinking of the past. I'm not thinking of the past relationship. I'm not thinking about a future relationship. I'm present to this relationship right here. I'm here. You matter. That's saying you matter to me, okay? I'm not, in other words, you matter to me. You're important to me. We are important. Number three, we are important. That's seeing the relationship as a separate entity.  It's like this, okay? That space in between is the we. There's a sovereignty of me. There's a sovereignty of you. And then that space in between is the we. I'm here, you matter. We are important. I've got your back. That means I'm in partnership with you. If you need me, I'm gonna be there for you. If you've got your car broke down and you need my help, I'm gonna be there for you. I have your back. I only, I'm here, you matter. We're important. I've got your back. Wait a minute. I'm here, you matter. We're important. I've got your back. I only want you. I only want, wait a minute, I missed one. I'm here, you matter. We're important. I've got your back. We're a team. We're a team, right? Going back to that teamwork. And I only want you. I only want you. That means I'm gonna be exclusive, monogamous to you. That's what I love you means to me. I love you. I'm in love with you, excuse me, okay? I love you means I care about you and we're hopefully in the two lane street. But if you wanna go deeper, then I'm gonna say I'm in love with you. I'm here, you matter. We're important. I've got your back. I'm not going, oh, I'm not going anywhere. That was the one I missed.  I'm not going anywhere. I'm fully committed to this relationship. I'm rooted in this relationship. That's what I'm in love with you means to me. So I hope that helps.  So thank you so much. J.O. writes, great content. Thank you for your insight. Very much, I appreciate that. Thank you so much. J.O. gave me a super sticker. Thank you so much, I appreciate that. All right, let's see. Question, some bloke, some bloke. Why is the man I care about so much afraid of commitment? All right, okay. He was abandoned as a child. He had traumas as a child. His parents got divorced. He had a girlfriend that rebuffed him when he was a child or when he was younger. He had an adult trauma. He had a marriage that went failed. He had an ex-wife that was belligerent and accusatory of him and nasty to him. These are just some of the reasons why people, human beings, men and women alike are afraid of commitment. By the way, everyone, thanks for reminding me. I'm not going anywhere. I don't know how I blew that one. Thank you. Bonnie says, thank you so much. I've also grown a lot and realized I've allowed so much bad behavior. He lied, he cheated, he stole, damaged and physically abused me and I allowed it no more. Way to go. The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Here's the thing. Don't point the finger at him because there's always three pointing back at you.  And by the way, I still feel victim consciousness in what I read, but you have taken ownership of it. So that negates it. But I do feel a sense.  That's just my opinion, my perception, but thank you. I appreciate that. Oops. Much Dutch, thank you so much. You're very wise person. Oh, thank you, Donna, for sharing that about that. All right, let's see what else we've got. All right, let's see if we've got any more questions. Okay, here we go. Natalie writes, question. If a man is emotionally unavailable due to childhood trauma and doesn't realize it and doesn't want to do nothing to change it, is there any hope? Everybody, what is the answer to Natalie's question? Do me a favor, respond to Natalie's question because everybody else knows the answer. By the way, hope is something you do. What's the likelihood of him being emotionally mature enough to be in a healthy, happy relationship? Pretty much slim to none. But hope focuses on the slim part. That's what hope does. A realist go, the chant ain't gonna happen. That's what a realist does. A hope person says, I'm gonna hold hope for that one slim chance that he's the exception and not the rule. Anyway, big hugs to you, Natalie. I hope you find answers on that one for yourself. But by the way, Lisa says no. See if anyone else says no hope. Laurie says no hope. Joe says nope, Natalie. Move on, Natalie. See, everybody knows the answer to that question. Okay, Lisa writes, is there anything as a woman we can do to help men feel emotionally secure in the early stage of dating? Yes, yes, yes, you can. Question, is there anything we women can do to help men feel emotionally secure in the early stage of dating? I'm reading it twice because there is something you can do. And it's called lead by example. That's right, when you lead through healthy communication. By the way, I've got a new book I wanna share with everyone. I got this from a client. I haven't started reading it yet. The title is, unfuck yourself.  Because here's the bottom, we're going back to what was that question again. If it's really, it's an, you know how you lead by example, read all of these books to prepare you to be in a healthy, happy relationship. And I will tell you the best book to read, Lisa, to prepare you is if the Buddha dated. I love this book because it takes out all of the gender expectation in relationships and focuses on the core values, the core values, the core values, the core values, the core values, the core values.  Not that you read it, but you've been following it. It's this whole feminine energy, masculine energy. Men are supposed to do this and men are supposed to do that.  Read this, read spiritual partnership, read these books that I recommend. That's what you can do to prepare to be in a healthy, happy relationship. Let me repeat that. That's what you can do to prepare to be in a healthy, happy relationship. Can I please get an amen? Can I get a thumbs up? Can I get likes? Please. Thank you. I think I'm gonna take one more question because I am running on empty here. Lisa says, you're funny. Thank you. I'll look into that book. You're very welcome. Lisa says amen, oops. Well, Lisa says amen. Natalie says, I almost wanna buy this book, The Rules, to see who you are, Jonathan, arguing with. Okay, got it. I appreciate that. All right. Oh wait, question. Can you repeat that please? Joy, of course I can. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My ears are bleeding. I'm sorry. Core values exactly. Joy said, what did you say again? Okay, here's the last question of the day. How often would you recommend meeting in the early stage of dating? I'm dating a 31-year-old teacher who is a relationship material but doesn't seem to wanna meet as often as we can. So my belief is it takes roughly two times a week for the first six weeks to get to stage one, okay? And then maybe two to three times a week including an outing, a vacation, having sex in the first 90 days of relationship but ultimately a healthy happy relationship when two people live relatively close to one another because proximity creates continuity. Let me repeat that. The closer two people are, the deeper roots that they can build in relationship. So I'm like for me, I'm looking at a relationship where I'd like to spend three or four days a night a week together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, teamwork building skills, partnership skills both in our personal and professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy that eventually leads to us moving in together or getting married. That's my standard, okay? That's the standard I'm looking for. So I highly, by the way, if you look at most people who are in healthy happy relationships today, most people, the people you know, they probably spent on average two to four days a week together once they got past the six to 12 week mark and they built their relationship by spending time together. And by the way, I know a couple that live 30 miles apart and they've been together three years and they still make time to see each other three to four times a week, including once a month, they take a vacation together, they travel together, they go many vacations and then they take big vacations about four times a year together. And when I say big vacations, in fact, they're in Hawaii right now, okay? Maybe it's two to three times a year. That's my recommendation, but I know many of you can't do that because of distance and other reasons, but ultimately, if you wanna live together and get married, you better be spending a lot of time together because men don't bond through the telephone. This is one truth about men. We don't bond through the telephone, you guys do, we don't. We bond through physical activities together.    All right, I think that's gonna do it. I'm running on empty, everyone. Listen, I wanna thank you all for being part of this live stream. I hope you got value from this. If you did, please share this with friends. Please like this. Please tell others about my work. And if you'd like a little bit more of a personal touch, check out the link to a free discovery call. Check out my group called Midlife Love Mastery. Check out my book, What the Heck is Self Love Anyway. And under Jonathan recommend books, check out all the other books I recommend. All right, this is a great place to wrap up. I'm gonna first, I'm gonna wrap up as I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone, a pet, a teddy bear or a pillow and give it or them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now.


Survival of the Pretiest by Nancy Ektoff. I read this a few months ago, but both my personal and professional lives have been so hectic that only now am I getting around to doing a review. I took notes, however, so I don't think I forgot anything too important. It was written by Nancy Ektoff, a Harvard Medical School psychologist, and the book is several things. It's a discussion of historic attempts to quantify beauty. It's a discussion of how fashion works and other beauty markers work as signaling. It contains hilarious anecdotes about the extent to which people go to achieve beauty, and by far the most interesting. It presents a lot of raw data about beauty. It was a great read, funny, shocking, telling, and it teaches us a little bit about the world in which we live. I have two criticisms. First, I may have almost preferred the data without the book around it. That may be the geek in me talking, but yeah, just the data itself. What we know, what we think we know, and why we think we know it. The way the book is structured, it's actually not a very good reference book. It's hard to look stuff up. In my electronic version, there's no appendix that has a list of the research that was cited in the book. That was the best part for me, the data. Second criticism, not at all unexpected from a book authored by an academic, but it nods a little too hard to political correctness, and repeats, for example, the statistic about women earning 77 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. I think that statistic has been pretty exhaustively disproven at this point. There's a little bit of that, but it's easy to ignore. Let me just jump right in and talk about some of the funny things this book presented. The first thing the book does is that it establishes that beauty is a real thing. It's not some social construct. They do this by conducting a couple of heartbreaking experiments that involve babies. So babies who have no social, no cultural influence yet, or minimal cultural influence, they're from three to six months old. Researchers have consistently shown that three to six month old babies will look longer at attractive faces than unattractive faces. That's pretty heartbreaking. Now you may ask how do the researchers know which are the beautiful faces? Well, they just create, they do independent surveys. So the babies will look longer at faces that are generally considered beautiful, that are rated beautiful by just regular people, and they will look less at faces that are rated as ugly by just regular people. So the point is that beauty is a real thing for better or for worse.  The mothers whose babies were more likely to be rated as ugly spent less time holding them, and they reported higher difficulty and higher stress taking care of the child as compared to the mothers with beautiful babies. That's very, very, very sad. Mercifully, the mothers were never told that that's what was being measured. The researchers kind of told them something else instead of telling them, we think your kid is ugly, so we're going to measure how you react. Other data presented from the book, beautiful people were less patient, they were less willing to wait than ugly people. We also know that people assume that attractive people are better at almost everything. So any positive quality from intelligence to wealth to being good in bed to being good at your job, people will assume higher competence in beautiful people. In primitive cultures where there's a lot of disease, beauty tends to be even more important than in modern cultures, which are the ones that are usually accused of being materialistic and excessively committed to superficial things like beauty. In cultures where there's a lot of famine, or sometimes something supersedes beauty, for example, in cultures where there's a lot of famine, fatness, obesity becomes a status signal and people will gravitate towards that even though they will at the same time rate obesity as less attractive. The status signaling that happens in the culture will nevertheless make them choose obese people. Interestingly, average-looking people rate themselves as happier than beautiful people and there's no consensus as to why this is. There's a little bit of speculation that cause and effect is confused. So it's not the beauty that's making people unhappy, but it's the sort of discontentedness that's making people pursue beauty and pursue health and fashion and all these things more rigorously. There is a standard of beauty that transcends race. So beautiful people of any race will always be rated as beautiful, no matter who is doing the rating. Although the ratings are more consistent if people are rating their own race. So if Asians are rating Africans, they'll still pick the beautiful ones, but the cluster will be a little bit broader, whereas if Africans are rating Africans, it'll be a tighter grouping. If Mestidozo's are rating Mestizo, Asians rating Asians, Europeans rating Europeans, it'll just be a tighter cluster, but there is consistency when you do this between races. The book discusses historic attempts at measuring beauty, most of which were hopelessly flawed and laughably silly. One attempt from several hundred years ago involved face angles, and by this methodology, Greek statues had the greatest face angles followed by Europeans. That was interesting to me because I had no idea that old Greek statues were exaggerations of European faces, but in fact they are. When we do know a few consistent things about beauty, for example, symmetry is a big deal, because it's a sign of health that's consistently part of beauty. Thick shiny flowing hair is important. Something about the skin is important, and it wasn't clear if it was the fairness of color or the smoothness she was a little vague about that, maybe because of her bias towards political correctness. When it comes to describing beauty, this was interesting to me as a writer. Most people end up describing not the beauty, but the effect that it has on others. So when you're writing about a very beautiful person, you may stop writing about them and start writing about the reaction that everyone around them has or the feeling that everyone around them gets when this person enters the room, for example. It seems that averageness is attractive. So this came about in a very interesting way in the book. It was presented in an interesting way.  This researcher did a blend of all their faces trying to capture some physical characteristic that was indicative of criminality, but what this researcher ended up doing was just creating a pretty handsome face. And as it turns out, that averageness is quite attractive. So if you blend the characteristics of a population, you'll find a pretty attractive face. And there's a lot to say about averageness. The book talks about another study about birds. This was a look at birds that get killed during severe windstorm.  So you can intuit the appeal of averageness. You're safe if you represent the average. So average facial characteristics will always be beautiful. It'll never be extremely beautiful, however. And it seems that extreme beauty always comes from a lot of averageness with a single feature or a couple of features that are outliers. Okay, getting more specific. Men prefer youth. That's both true for gay men and straight men. Lesbians are neutral. And straight women on average prefer slightly older men. How important is beauty? Well, men value beauty much more than women do. And it's also becoming more important. In 1939, men rated beauty on a scale, how the importance of beauty on a scale of one to three, I guess in 1939, they used scales of three. But anyway, 1939, it was 1.5 out of three for men. And for women, it was 0.94 out of three. That was in 1939. 1989 has gotten much more important. Men now rate beauty, or not now, 1989, men rated beauty as 2.1 out of three. And women rated it as 1.67 out of three. Men will spend a lot of time looking at women. Women will not spend a lot of time looking at men. Interestingly, women, when looking at magazines, will spend more time looking at other women than at men, like they're checking out the competition or getting ideas for themselves. In women, men prefer younger. And the men's attractiveness to beauty is pretty merciless. It's hard to get away from it. However, before any female listeners start complaining, the women's attraction to men's status and wealth is just as merciless. You cannot get away from it. In one study of medical school students, 60% of men wanted a woman who earned less money than themselves. And none of the women, zero of the women, wanted a man who earned less money than themselves. Pretty telling. There was a study of West Point cadets, which I liked a lot. West Point is the United States Army's military academy. It's where the army gets its officers from. And I like this study because it punished false signals. The study found some correlation between masculine facial features and the rank achieved by male cadets, like a prominent jaw, deep-set eyes, small ears set close to the head, and a prominent brow. So cadets that had those facial features seem to achieve a slightly higher rank. However, cadets that had those facial features but had little leadership ability, they were the lowest rank of all. It's as if they were punished for sending false signals. So if you don't have masculine facial features and you're incompetent, that's preferable to having masculine facial features and being incompetent. There's quite a bit in the book about the extreme lengths that people, mostly women, go through to achieve beauty. There was a hilarious passage from an old British legal case from hundreds of years ago. A husband sued for a divorce, saying that the woman he woke up with in the morning looked too old, even to be the mother of the woman he'd gone to bed with the night before. Makeup has a long history. Red pigments were applied to the lips in 5000 BC, so over 7000 years ago. And red oxide from iron has been found inside Sumerian and Egyptian tombs. Okay, fair skin. The book was a little bit vague on this, because it's a controversial topic. But if anyone has ever attempted to quantify this preference, it was not cited in the book. That would be interesting precisely because it's so controversial. There's one theory. So the book, without ever quantifying it, the book does discuss a theory that a historically selection for fair skin may have been made because fair skin people, on fair skin people, it's easier to, number one, detect disease, and number two, see signs of sexual interest, namely like blushing of the cheeks. It's easier to detect than fair skin people. So that's one theory without ever quantifying the preference. Some other interesting statistics about plastic surgery, and there was a whole chapter about plastic surgery. These are just a couple of data points that I pulled out. Half of the world's cosmetic surgeons are in America, and one-third of those are in California. 70% of cosmetic surgery patients earn less than $50,000 a year, and a full third earn less than $25,000 a year. So cosmetic surgery is heavily skewed towards the poorer part of the population in the United States. There was a little specific information about men's and women's preferences for the opposite sex. Aside from men wanting youth and women wanting status and wealth, men seem to like a waist to hip ratio of 0.7. Women liked either slightly or moderately taller than average men. And there was a ton about fashion, which I think I won't go into this book review, but it painted a evolving fashion as sort of a cat and mouse game between the upper and middle class, where the upper class is constantly trying to distinguish themselves, and the middle class is always trying to imitate the upper class. There were many funny examples cited in the book about different authorities trying to stop this, and for example, forbidding the upper class from wearing anything but black. If I remember correctly, that was in some northern Italian town, maybe in Venice, the church banned that. And so of course, what happened was the middle class started wearing black to imitate the upper class. In another time, the legal authority tried to restrict the middle class and found that everyone was always completely happy to face the punishment or pay the fine in exchange for breaking the law and wearing the accoutrements that were reserved for the upper class. That's just an overview. Those are the things that I highlighted in my Kindle app. There is much, much more. I kind of wish there was an appendix that had just the data without the book around it. Sadly, the book does not, but I see that I have filled almost 20 minutes. So I hope you enjoyed this book review. The next book review will be Nietzsche and the Nazis by Stefan Hicks. That's all for now. Have a good one.


Recently, advancements in wearable energy harvesting technology have been made to address occupational health and safety concerns. In particular, vibrations generated by workplace activities can be used to power wearable sensors, thus eliminating the need for frequent charging or battery replacement. This review examines the potential benefits of this approach, including its ability to detect chronic health issues before they become serious, reduce the risk of worker injury due to repetitive motion, and increase the accuracy of data collection. Additionally, it explores the limitations of current devices, as well as opportunities and directions for future research. This article was authored by Fatemay Maktari, Xinxiang Chen, Chen Hwong, and others.