When women are empowered to make their own sexual decisions, they target the top 10% of men.
But why does any of that matter?
Well, that creates a lot of problems, both for men and women.
So it creates problems for women because...
Dr. Orion Taraban is a clinical psychologist who specializes in modern dating and relationships by delving into the psychological aspects of attraction, communication, and emotional intimacy.
The meteoric rise of dating apps has seen a catastrophic decline in all forms of relationships.
Fewer people are entering into relationships.
Fewer people are even hooking up anymore.
It is a crisis, and a lot of the traditional strategies aren't really relevant.
So why don't you stop? First of all, date like it's your job.
Lots of people just want a loving, secure, peaceful relationship.
That's like wanting a job, that's high paying, low stress, and you're passionate about.
If you want one of those jobs, they're the needle in the haystack.
You might have to send out 200 resumes, and you have to get over that rejection.
Another thing, you get more opportunities for selection, the more attractive you present yourself than everyone can be more attractive in the current year.
And also, the less conventionally attractive that you are, the more you have to learn to do.
And if you can do both, you'll be able to have all kinds of relationships.
So how do I become more attractive?
And also learn the arts of seduction.
So first of all, you need to...
What role has pornography played in all this?
It has completely changed the game of mating and dating.
If you give men the opportunity to exist in a sexually satisfied state, which is what pornography does, then they aren't going to be having sex with real women.
That comes to you with this problem.
What do you say to those men?
The advice I would give is...
Dr. Orion Teraban. Can you give me the macro picture as it relates to the work that you do?
When I say the macro picture, I mean, like, what is going on in the world now?
That is so interesting and important for us to understand.
Before we start talking about the relationship dynamics that we're going to talk about, what is that sort of macro picture at the moment?
And how is that changed and changing?
I think probably big picture, the most salient thing in the world is the relationship crisis that we're working through.
And it is a crisis. In the last 10 years, all kinds of relationships are being transacted less frequently.
Fewer people are getting married at this country, I think in the most recent year in which statistics are available.
It's at historic lows. It has never been this low before in the history of America.
Fewer people are entering into relationships.
Half the world's population lives in countries below reproductive rates, replacement rates.
America would also be one of those countries if it weren't for its immigration.
Like, its actual citizenry isn't reproducing enough to replace its own population, but that's obscured by immigration.
Fewer people are even hooking up anymore.
Like there's fewer even casual sexual relationships being transacted, which is somewhat surprising.
When you say fewer people are hooking up and there's fewer transactional sexual relationships, versus when?
Versus like the 1950s or...
...versus certainly 1970.
So when the pill became widely available, there was predictably an explosion in casual sex relationships.
We know that for both men and women, the number of lifetime sexual partners went up significantly.
And we see that that's much lower these days.
And that's kind of a problem because, regardless of how you feel about casual sex, we live in a culture in which sex precedes commitment.
So the way to get to commitment and to long-term relationships and engagement and marriage, if that's what you're looking for, is kind of through sex.
It's the first step of a process that can potentially end in children and family.
So there are important downstream consequences in a culture where sex precedes commitment when there is less casual sex being transacted.
All of those things you've described in the macro, those macrofactors, why do any of them matter?
Why do any of them matter?
What's the downstream consequence of all those things?
You've described less people hucking up but marriage and all these other factors, relationships.
Why does any of that matter to society?
I guess on a macro scale, it could be population collapse.
I mean, we know that some countries like Japan are already on the other side of their curve and are going to have a very top heavy generation from the next 10 to 15 years.
Where one worker might be supporting over two citizens, which might be an economic burden that few workers can bear.
Because there's young people in the workforce and then there's too many old people effectively.
Yeah, and there's not enough babies to kind of rise up and replace even those that are passing away.
So that's why there's all these advances in robotics and AI because they're trying to kind of make one person two people to keep society stable.
And the economic consequences of population collapse would be dire, like they would have to be navigated with a great deal of nuance and vision because the more accelerated the decline, the more unstable society becomes.
So that probably is on a macro level, the most dangerous thing about this kind of situation.
But for the individual, it just makes mating and dating so much more confusing than there never has been like the individual probably isn't worried about the collapse of civilization and population decline.
They're worried about am I going to find somebody that I can have a satisfying relationship with and that seems to be more difficult than it ever has been, which is paradoxical because it also seems on some level that should never have been easier in the history of humanity to get into a sexual or romantic relationship with all of our new technologies.
But it is it is isn't that interesting who is suffering more or they just suffering differently men or women usually it's it's hard to be a man and it's hard to be a woman it's like hard to be a human being down here suffering is kind of standard like it's pain either way.
What are the types of problems that start with men men having.
Well, it's harder for men to meet women and to get into relationships like in the last 10 years, the number of relationships that were initiated online increased by 250% which is huge 10 years ago about 20% of Americans met online now it's over 50.
The vast majority of couples are now meeting through social media online dating sites and across that same time period we've seen a radical decrease in relationships that are being transacted so it's correlative but it's very suggestive that the meteoric rise of dating apps is also seen a catastrophic decline in all forms of relationships.
Do you think dating apps are a net positive or net negative.
I think most people don't know how to use dating apps correctly dating apps are tools and you have to adapt your strategy given what that technology is capable of doing if you try to use dating apps casually you're probably going to be infuriated, depressed and hopeless like you need a strategy and that strategy generally requires massive action.
So especially for men. Interesting.
We'll get into that because I want to dig deeper there but just closing off on this point about the other ways in which the changes in society have started to impact men.
I think a lot about the mental health statistics and about suicidality.
I think at least in the UK I know that the single biggest killer of men above the age of I think 40 or 45 is themselves.
And I'm trying to understand if there's correlation there between the changing world that has changed dating dynamics but also gender dynamics and the impact that that's had on men and masculinity let's say.
So masculinity is in a crisis which creates an opportunity in the marketplace for lots of people to come in and say this is what it means to be a man like that would be somewhat unheard of 100 years ago because we all just more or less knew what it meant to be a man.
But now we need personalities to come into the milieu and say this is what it means to be a man.
And a lot of that is what I would call performative masculinity and is not at the core of what it means to be a man.
But can make you more visible in the sexual marketplace like one of the regardless of your attitudes towards traditional masculinity or femininity.
And it makes that person more visible to the opposite sex.
It's like by emphasizing what you might call sexual dimorphic characteristics.
That is a biological phenomenon that says that males and females look very different but not in all ways.
Like for example the peacock the male is the one with the bright plumage.
And so whereas the the phen the female doesn't have that and so a lot of the attraction between peacocks and pecan hens is based on that plumage because it's one way in which the males and females really differentiate themselves from each other.
So it makes sense to stress the most visible obvious differences from a biological perspective between men and women to make that contrast more visible.
So I might get really big bicep muscles because that's one of the big sort of differences and she might get a boob job.
Sure. I mean, yeah, absolutely.
That's one of the on some level issues with respect to some of the gender conversations these days, which is that when you move further away from these really obvious sexual signals, it's harder to kind of even see you.
It's like, well, what are you and what do you want and what are you putting yourself out there for?
Like it becomes more individualistic it becomes more custom tailored, which is harder to see at a distance.
And it's it's really important on some level to be able to kind of see things at a distance because there's an opportunity cost to approaching if I'm going up to you and talking to you and learning more about you, I'm not doing that with anybody else at least for this moment in time, right?
And so I kind of want to feel like there's a reasonable hope that if I go here, I might find something that I want or what I like versus this is just curious.
I don't know what this is.
The vast majority of people don't have the time and the energy to really explore and entertain their curiosity.
They go where they need to go or they want to go.
So going back to that starting point then one of the things that's emerged as a solution to men, I guess, feeling lost about what it is to be a man is this performative masculinity.
In there, we put people like, you know, I've had you talk about and you take being.
I don't think I've ever talked about anything.
I really thought it was on one of your videos that I saw on TikTok or something.
Would you fit him in the category of performative masculinity?
I would fit him in the category of a personality who's come to the forefront to help men who might be lost and confused to find their way in navigating the current sexual marketplace.
Absolutely. So he's he's offering a solution to navigating the current sexual marketplace.
Yeah. Yeah. And what do you think of that solution?
I don't fall. I haven't followed Andrew Tate very closely.
I've watched just a few of his clips.
I think he talked about acting in a way in such that your ancestors would be proud if they were watching you and I was like, yeah, that's a pretty good piece of advice.
I actually follow very few content creators online because I'm trying to keep my content as.
Original as possible. I don't want to necessarily just do reactions to other folks.
He's clearly a problematic character like I think that he was indicted for sex trafficking in Europe.
Correct. Yeah. So I don't know the full story, but clearly people had he was both loved and hated.
That's for sure. Just I really want to just close off from the point of the world that men find themselves in before we move to the world that women find themselves in and then try and tackle some of these problems.
They're lost in terms of understanding what masculinity is.
We know that there's been they're finding it harder to find dates.
They're finding it harder to have sort of sexual relationships.
Is there anything else that I need to understand about the the man in the current social climate?
Well, I think that the problem for the vast majority of men, especially young men is their invisibility.
Most men are wallpaper and the world does not treat men very well when they want nothing from them.
I talk about that in the very first pages of the book that to understand why some people are rich in relationship opportunities, whether they're romantic professional friendship, etc.
And other people are not.
It's not correct to say that it's the good people who have relationship opportunities or the virtuous people.
It's the people that other people want things from that have relationship opportunities.
If you have more of what other people want more, you are going to have relationship opportunities throughout your lifespan.
And that's very difficult because imagine being an 18 year old man who have no money and you've never had money.
You may not have a job. You may never have had a job.
So you have no skills. You're kind of invisible to women because you don't have yet anything that women might find conducive for a long term relationship.
If you're cute, they might hook up with you.
But if you're not even that, I mean, why waste their opportunity?
Why waste their time when there are other more attractive options available?
And you're also kind of useless to most men because you don't yet have the skills and the experience to be a good team player.
Like, I wouldn't want you on my squad if you've never been out in the field.
You're going to be a liability.
You know what I'm saying?
I don't have to carry your ass off the field.
So you can't be here either.
And that creates obviously the catch 22, which is where am I going to get the experience if no one gives me a shot.
It's actually very difficult to be a young man.
You don't have what either women or more experienced men want or need.
And you're generally very disposable.
And unfortunately, we've seen that.
I mean, young men have a very high mortality rate in all kinds of ways.
They were shipped off to wars.
We talked about the suicide epidemic among older men.
Well, it's also very high among adolescent boys as well.
It's hard to be a young man.
I remember one of my guests telling me that they about a study where they analyze the suicide letters of men.
And they looked at the words used versus the words used in female suicide letters.
And the tip, the most sort of frequent sentiment amongst those letters was about feeling worthless, feeling like you weren't needed.
And the guest on the podcast concluded that really what we needed to find a way is to send a message to men that you're needed.
And it's a strange thing to say, but it correlates perfectly to what you were saying.
The message sounds good, but it would be better to actually have opportunities to be needed.
Yeah. Then to be told that you are needed and that you are valued and that you are cared for.
That's a nice emotional sentiment that doesn't really keep the demons away at night.
People need to feel connected to other people.
They need to feel like they have a place in the world.
And it can take quite some time to discover that.
One of the traps that I fell into when I was a young man is I thought that I could figure that out by just sort of like noodling it out alone in my room.
Like I was trying to figure out what I wanted my life to be about.
What the purpose of my life was going to be before I even left the house.
And I wasted a lot of time in fruitless rumination that way.
And it's better to discover your purpose in life by moving through the world and examining your choices and retrospect.
It's like you only really get to discover who you are by examining and understanding your revealed preferences based on your behavior as you move through the world.
It's very easy to think of yourself in all kinds of ways when you're untested, when you're untried, when you're in the morally ambiguous situations in which human beings find themselves as they navigate reality.
Are you saying that the evidence you're looking for or the answer you're looking for come from taking action?
Absolutely. They don't come from thinking it out.
They often don't come from therapy.
And that might sound weird coming from a therapist.
But I do think that we live in a very overly therapist culture with the understanding that therapy is somewhat of a panacea in that it should be able to cure all the nails.
And I don't think that that's true.
Therapy is a very good for certain problems and it's useless for others.
What about women? What are the challenges that are women faces in the modern world because of all these sort of macro changes that have taken place?
Well, the main problem that I see women encountering at least in my consultative practice is they have trouble finding the men that they want to have long term relationships with.
Almost every consultation I've done with a woman has been around how do I get a man to marry me?
And that's also kind of strange because I would think 80, 100 years ago.
That was something that that girl was being prepared for since she was a very young person by her mother and her grandmother and her aunts and her female relatives with whom she probably lived in close consultation.
And she never would have gotten to the age of 30 where this would be an open question still.
And who are you? What's your sort of, if I looked at your CV, you know you talked about your consultative practice, what is the experiences you've had and the education you've had that have brought you to this point where you've written this book about relationships and those dynamics?
What is your sort of professional personal experience?
And professionally, I'm a psychologist.
I'm licensed in the state of California, so I went to grad school and got a doctorate in psychology.
I had all kinds of training experiences while I was moving through that.
I worked at a chemical dependency clinic for two years.
I worked with cancer patients and their caregivers and a health psychology setting for a couple of years.
I worked with significant dysfunction in a community mental health center in San Francisco for a while.
I worked in outpatient with severe personality disorders.
So that was all part of my training.
And then when I started my private practice, I began to focus on men's mental health.
And for a long time when I was a therapist, I worked exclusively with men.
That's changed a little bit now that I have a kind of a larger platform on which to reach reach people.
But that's sort of been my professional experience.
When you're private practice, when people come to you, what are men most frequently coming to you with in terms of the problem they come with first is what women come to you with a problem with?
Well, in general, it's either money or women for men.
Oh, really? Yeah. And this is nothing new.
Like Sigmund Freud said a long time ago that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to teach people how to work and how to love.
That's it. If you can learn how to work and love, you can be a fairly functional human being in society and have a satisfying life.
And he also said that the goal of therapy was not to cure suffering per se, which might be inseparable from the human experience.
But to free human beings from neurotic unnecessary suffering so that they are better equipped to meet the necessary suffering and pain of being alive.
So he had, I think, a more attenuated vision for what therapy could do.
So it's either money, work, or women love.
And what I found is that it's either one or the other.
I often did consultations with guys who were super successful professionally.
They were making millions, but they were in failed marriage after failed marriage or they couldn't for the life of them get laid even if they were having parties with models on their super yachts.
You know what I'm saying?
By the same token, there are, there are fewer of them because they couldn't afford my out of pocket rate, but it's like there were some men who were just absolutely cleaning up like I've done some consultations had some some patients.
Young men who were just like plowing through San Francisco.
I mean, they had sexual success in a way that most men would just fantasize about.
But they had a really hard time getting their money straight their career.
They were super stressed out.
They had anxiety disorders, things like that, which is actually fairly ironic because what I found is if it works in one domain, it generally works in the other.
Interesting. So if I get my work right, then I'll get my love right.
If it works in business, it often works with women.
What do you mean? Sorry.
Well, think about it this way.
Men want sex and they want relationships from women.
Women don't go around giving those things out to men just because they want them.
So what's the analogous problem in the professional arena, which is I want money.
Let's say you're a salesman.
I want money. I have this product or I have this service.
I want people to hire me.
I want people to buy it. Well, people aren't just going around with their wallets out saying who's going to take my money.
You know what I'm saying?
So you have to find a way to get what you want from the people that you want it from.
And a lot of the strategies that work in business to do that will work in the sexual marketplace as well.
Interesting. That's very, very true because I think I told you before we started recording when I was at an 18, there was this pickup artist who books into my house.
I think my brother, my older brother, ordered, but he ordered it to the wrong address because he had moved out to university.
So he said just keep it. It's a lucky accident for you.
Yeah, yeah, and I sat there and I read it covered to cover without moving.
And actually much of the principles I learned about pickup artistry, about attraction about being a high value male are actually things that I took into business when it comes to negotiation sales, persuasion and all those things.
So I do see that translation.
And I think that often when I say that because people have all kinds of associations with pickup, they think it's kind of sleazy.
And it's especially for guys who couldn't get laid otherwise.
And so they have to use manipulative tactics to get what they want.
It's like, well, yeah, welcome to advertising.
So that's one side of it.
They think that those strategies just work to get later to have casual sexual relationships.
No, they often also work in long term relationships.
Not only because generally the pathway to a long term relationship is through a more casual arrangement.
Usually people date and hang out and sleep together for some weeks, some months before they define the relationship.
Right. So they kind of for better for worse have to go through that proving ground before they get to here.
But like it's really important for long term relationships.
It's one of the principles for long term success is complementarity of skill sets.
It's like if you're a startup founder, you want somebody who can do very well the things that you cannot do.
Like having two CEOs is just a recipe for competition, struggle and strife.
Right. Yeah. So you need people with complementary skill sets in order to go the distance.
In my experience, 90% of successful relationships are based on selection.
If you can understand yourself, accurate self knowledge and you get better at discerning other people, you can have satisfying relationships with lots of different human beings.
We're going to get into figuring out how you do that.
But on the point I asked you there, I said, what do men come to you within terms of problems sets and you said money and women ideally sort of working, working women, working love.
So what do women come to?
They want to get married.
So they just come to you with the love problems.
Yeah, I mean, they do that now because I talk about lots of things on my channel.
But by far the most successful videos are the ones about intersectional dynamics.
And so that's kind of what I'm known for.
And so there is a bit of a selection bias there is the most popular videos are me talking about men and women.
And so increasingly men and women come to me about their relationship issues.
Right. So that makes sense.
But women use therapy for all kinds of different reasons.
Right. We know that women are by far bigger consumers of therapeutic services.
In particular, like actually going to therapy and also more generally like they make up the lion's share of consumers for just self help material in general, like there's a big market for that kind of self-betterment and self-improvement in the female marketplace.
And we also know that about 85% of mental health practitioners are women.
Like when I was in my training, I think I was one of three people in my cohort that were men.
I would interview at some placements where there weren't any men at all on the staff whatsoever.
And just like I can appreciate that women might not feel entirely comfortable going to a man with certain of their issues, I know for sure that there's plenty of men who wouldn't feel comfortable going to a woman about some of their concerns.
But when they talk about why you often hear it's usually women, they're dissatisfied with men's lack of interest in going to therapy.
Men would literally want to refurbish a train, then go to therapy and talk about their feelings.
Well, it's partly it's because there aren't a lot of male practitioners.
And I think what's good for men isn't always what's good for women and vice versa.
What's good for the goose isn't always what's good for the gander.
What I found is that women generally talk to process their emotions and they're more keen on emotionally focused strategies, right?
Whereas men, they try to resolve things through action and through solution.
And they often see that just talking about their problems and paying for the opportunity to do so to be a complete waste of time and money and I can understand why.
Now, it does have its place like it's very important for some men to be able to have a safe space to really share their experience and talk about this stuff because man they can be judged harshly if they open up to the wrong people.
So there's a time and a place for that for men as well.
But it's generally not every week for several years.
So let's go into those two, those three different problems.
Then so if a man comes to you and they are expressing an issue with love, they're trying to get laid, they're trying to find someone.
Where does what do you start?
What are the sort of foundational things you need them to understand for you to all get focused in the right direction?
Well, usually start with what they've tried in the past and where in the funnel, they tend to be experiencing their difficulties.
Like there's a, the advice is very different.
If you're not getting any matches on a dating app or you haven't been able to get a date in months versus I can get with women.
But after three months, everything kind of seems to fall apart or I'm able everyone just wants me for these long term relationships and I just want to be able to play the field.
So it's really depending on the goals of the man in question and where he's experiencing the difficulties.
So if he's at the top of the funnel.
So when we talk about funnels, if we have the top of the funnel is, you know, your meeting people, maybe a little bit further down the funnel is you're, you know, having some kind of relationship with them.
Short term and then at the very bottom of the funnel might be like marriage and kids.
Sure. So at the very top.
So if they come in at the top of the funnel and they've got problems just like meeting people.
Where where'd you start?
That's a tough one. I think it's a good idea in today's day and age to have kind of a dual strategy.
I think that you can use the apps for what the apps are good for.
But overly relying on them as a solution for your dating woes is probably not correct.
You're going to have to get out there and get better at your people skills.
Because even if you do match with somebody, if you're more of an introvert, if you have a lot of social anxiety, even if you manage to get someone off the app into the real world, you might be able to blow it because you're going to be nervous.
You're going to be uncharismatic.
You're not going to know how to lead the encounter in the direction of a sexual experience.
If that's what you're looking for.
So it's generally a good idea to get out there.
There's really no antidote.
There's no there's no better solution than doing it.
It's just like learning a language.
You have to speak it. You're going to make a lot of mistakes.
You're going to be embarrassed.
It's going to feel frustrating and impossible until it doesn't.
So unfortunately, everything that you can say or read or listen to is just prelude to going out there and doing it and failing enough times and learning from your mistakes until you have a reasonable hit rate.
How do I increase my probability that a woman will give me that chance and then stick with me?
How do I increase my chance of being attractive?
Are there things I can do?
Do I need to go hit the gym?
Sure. When I talk about in the book is that everyone can be more attractive than they currently are.
If you're having a problem in that initial funnel, it's generally a marketing issue because think about it on an app.
It's six pictures and three responses in a meat market.
It's, hey, how you doing?
And it's like, she's going to give me a once over.
She already gave me the side eye.
And she's going to kind of make a snap judgment based on the vibe that I'm giving out.
Neither one of those has anything to do with really who I am as a person.
That's one of the things is that they can't really reject you because they haven't spent any time getting to know you for better for worse.
If they like you or not, they like the idea of you.
They like the presentation of you.
And it's really important not to disabuse people of that presentation too quickly.
Okay, so to think about your exterior marketing.
Absolutely. Okay. Because that's what men do.
I mean, they don't go up to women randomly.
They think, oh, man, she's pretty cute.
Right? They're paying attention to the surface marketing as well.
What can I do with my surface marketing to make me more attractive?
Well, you got to focus on what you can control because generally when we go down this road, what I hear from men online is, well, that's all willing, good or rhyme, but I'm five six, you know, I'm balding.
Women aren't going to like me.
And it's like, yeah, if you don't have some of the genetic markers, it is more difficult, but everyone can get better at what they do.
And at the level, the less conventionally attractive that you are, the more you have to learn seduction, the more you have to learn game, you have to think about the fact that attractiveness is not normally distributed across any population, right?
There's going to be a small subset of men and women who are just absolutely gorgeous.
Some of that are, wow, that's interesting.
And most people are kind of in the middle, right?
And seduction is the process of being able to direct attention to your purposes.
And the more that you can learn how to direct attention for your purposes, the more that you can overcome some of the liabilities associated with being, let's say, in the fat part of the curve when it comes to attractiveness.
Okay, so how do I do that?
Well, you have to kind of learn what works.
I think one of the things that all men can learn from the pickup community is that they were basically behavioral scientists.
Some of them went to the field and said, okay, if I knew what I was doing, I'd be laid by now.
I'd have, I'd be a washing optionally.
So maybe I don't know what women want.
Maybe I don't know what works.
Let's let the outcome teach me what I should believe as opposed to going to women with a preconceived notion about what should work or what they should want.
And that's why on some level, you got what on the surface seems like some ridiculous strategies like peacocking, you know, it's like some men look at that.
And I would never do that.
That's just so ostentatious and extravagant, but it can attract attention.
That's a very, let's say, heavy handed way to do so.
So someone that doesn't know what peacocking is, you know, dressing a little bit more flamboyantly to attract attention or like a flamboyant feature or like it could be a crazy hat.
You have a crazy hat. Flavya Flav had the big clock around his neck.
I don't know if I just dated myself with that reference.
And sometimes it's just looking sharp.
I mean, by far one of the best things that men can do is just spend one or two thousand bucks to get like two or three really good outfits.
You can just cycle through them when you're dating, especially in some marketplaces.
LA is tough, New York is tough, but it is so easy to be the best dressed man in San Francisco.
I swear to God, it does not take that much effort.
And if you're the best dressed man in the room, you get like one free point.
Can you imagine some women have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cosmetic cosmetic surgery to get one extra point.
Some men just need to put some clothes on and get a better haircut.
You know what I'm saying?
And they refuse to do that for whatever reason.
What other things should I be thinking about in terms of seduction if I want to be because one of the central things I need to understand as you said that the pickup artist community land is is what actually leads to the outcome because if I was to ask a woman, hey, how can I become more attractive to woman.
I guess what she might say to me is be nice be you know what I don't know.
I've asked that question to so many women in my life and I've never gotten a good answer because that's almost always the response is I want a kind man, I want a man who is I feel safe with.
I want a man who is loving and usually the guy in question is listening to them be like what the fuck some problems like I'm kind of shit like I don't get it like I need to be kinder and they start to lean into that even more.
And I don't think that these women are necessarily lying to these men, but they're leaving out the most important part one of my most popular YouTube videos is the part that women always leave out that speaks exactly this problem, which is that women do want those things that they list off when men asked them that question they just want them from the men that they're
attracted to. They want the men they're attracted to to be kind and to be loving and to be generous and to make them feel safe, but it's not like being kind and generous and making women feel safe is going to lead them to feeling attracted to you and that's the part that women leave out and men in their let's say naive but good-hearted intention to give women what they
want to be a better mate for them.
They just totally lose out on so it's better to be attractive like if you want to be good at the game of mating and dating you have an easier time the more attractive that you present yourself you haven't you get more opportunities for selection you get more.
Beneficial arrangements and negotiation process and it's easier to maintain your relationship in the long run against your intersection competition as well so there's all kinds of privileges and benefits to being attractive and everyone can be more attractive than they currently are.
What do many to do to be more attractive.
I think they can learn to dress better.
I think that they can take care of their physical fitness for some minutes is basic is hygiene you know what I'm saying.
I think it's also really important to learn how to talk the most the most vulnerable organ in a woman to seduction is her mind is her brain like you that is her biggest a rogina zone and if you can learn to talk to a woman in a way that women will learn.
And so you know the way that women will listen and respond to you'll be able to do all kinds of things and have all kinds of relationships.
What do I need to say. Well it's not a script right.
So one of the. It's a it's a lot about vibing like female feminine communications but that feminine communication is very different from mask and communication.
I'm not saying I'm saying away from men and women because obviously men and women can do both.
But mask and communication is about the conveyance and information using semantic words.
I know that the message has been received if you can more or less summarize that message back to me it's like I understood the content of what you said transmission complete right.
Feminine communication is very different it's more like emotional resonance and communication has been received when I can succeed in provoking in you a comparable or analogous emotional experience the one that I went through or I'm currently in you can think of it like tuning forks one of them is vibrating bring another one up to it it will start vibrating at the same
frequency as well and that's when you know that the communication has been received.
And that's really important for men to understand because that leads to a lot of disagreements and arguments between men and women in their long term relationships where sometimes women are attempting to get men to feel the way that they currently feel.
But men are paying attention to what they're actually saying.
And they're saying why are you bringing this up now or that's not factually accurate I don't understand and it's because of this failure of intersectional understanding the woman is trying to provoke in the man the emotional state so that he can understand like in his bones what it feels like to have been her in that moment.
But the men are just paying some men are just so literal they're so functionally fixed on the semantic content of language.
And the truth is that words are both words always have this defined semantic meaning but they also are in different containers of emotion like every word can be said with any different emotional content possible.
You can say the word please seductively you can say the word please threateningly you can say the word please pathetically mean that's what actors do right they invest this script which are just words on a page with emotional content and that's what makes their performance in chanting.
If you can do both if you can be very particular with your words and you can invest it with some degree of emotional content you can be a very charismatic communicator.
And I guess some you're saying that some men maybe lean one way more than the other absolutely they lean more towards the semantic information just like logic just absolutely like a robot.
Yeah, sometimes there's definitely some robotic men out there.
And what women one is more of the emotional residents yes, yeah, they want to vibe you know it's that Shakira strong it's a starting to feel right her hips don't lie so it's like it's this mood that's being generated where the two people the two dancers the two players begin to occupy a shared private world.
And within that world the rules don't always apply we've created a different bounded universe and that's actually the goal of seduction is just the two of us here and we're creating this separate universe that's different from everything else that's going on just you in me here and we can then play according to the rules that we've developed inside of this little
microcosmic universe.
So I'm going to get my hygiene right I'm going to hit the gym I'm going to get a new outfit sounds like you're doing pretty good.
I'm going to learn how to talk.
Is there anything else that in that sort of initial top of the funnel attraction phase I should be really focusing on to make sure that I increase my probability of just inviting someone in to the house.
Those things are the most important a lot of guys get too focused on money at this stage and the fact of the matter is is that money is what I call an attraction proxy.
You don't need money to get laid you don't need money to attract attention it's one way like it will absolutely attract attention if you go to the VIP section in order bottle service and you're throwing around tens of thousands of dollars.
That was my whole strategy when I was 21 wow you had tens of thousands of dollars throw around good for you.
It was just a pre 25 strategy that converted well for child relationships and stuff but other than that.
It can work but at the same token I guarantee that there is an unemployed man living in his parents basement who's getting laid tonight because he's a musician and he's playing at the local open mic on Tuesday.
You know what I'm saying he's up on stage so if if you're young and broke and you're not cute then you have to find some way to be to stand out by far the most.
Useful thing to attracting women is not money per say it's not always easy to tell who has money especially in places like San Francisco the billionaires dress like homeless people sometimes.
And it's not necessarily power because sometimes the most powerful individuals are actually hidden from the limelight and that's what allows them to exercise their power with some degree of immunity.
The most powerful people you know are probably not the most powerful people.
The thing that works is fame is renowned and renowned can work at many different levels.
You can be and I learned this as an actor which is how I got my start in New York City is like I performed on some very small stages.
Throughout my career to sometimes just a few people in the audience but the fact the matter is for those two hours if I was the lead and my name was on the marquee and spotlight was on me.
On some level what I call as I was the contextual alpha and within that tiny almost insignificant world I was at the top of that status hierarchy and that's what gets you laid.
Now those same women had no interest in having a long term relationship with me and that's what kind of motivated me to take a hard look at the guy in the mirror and think well shit why would a woman want to marry me it's like I'm living in this one room studio with my coaches everywhere it's like I'm broke I'm living month to month my lifestyle sucks I don't really have much
ambition except for this let's say very vague vision about becoming a successful actor whatever that meant.
I wasn't really I didn't really have a plan and I didn't really have much to offer in terms of a long term relationship and so I said okay well if this is something that I want I got a I mean the cavalry isn't coming.
I'm going to do it because no one else will and I took kind of radical responsibility for my life and you know started down a different path.
We talked about attraction as you move down through that funnel the next challenge becomes actually keeping someone yeah and I funny enough because in my early 20s although I could seemingly attract women at this point I couldn't get any of them to want to be in a relationship with me especially the ones I wanted.
What is useful to get a man or woman is not the same thing as what works to keep a man or woman those are two different problems some people actually make great long term partners but they're terrible at attracting terrible at the marketing other people they get the marketing down but.
They lack the substance or they can't really go the distance from one way or the other and so it's harder them to keep their partners around there are two different problems the solution for one does not apply to the other in particular the vast majority of attraction is based on projected fantasy.
I don't know who you are.
See the outside and I'm going to approach you because I like that outside and my attraction is going to fill in the gaps in my knowledge base with what I want to see there.
That's why I talk about I'm in an episode about how most men blow the first date they both the first date by talking too much they talk too much out of the misguided desire to prove their value to women.
They usually do it in a very heavy handed ham fisted way and generally all they do is succeed in disabusing that woman of the fantasy that she had of that man which is why she was sitting there on that date tonight because the likelihood that anything I say is going to match up with what you want to see in the privacy of your own mind is functionally zero.
So I need to tread very carefully because you're not on the state because you like me because you don't fucking know who I am yet you're here because of what you hope I might be and so I need to be very careful not to disabuse you of that hope too quickly.
Right it's actually the key to transitioning from one phase to the other is going to sound real bad but it's a slow and gradual disappointment.
Right and you have to do this because if you you don't do it then what do you end up with you end up in a relationship where you're not truly known and you're just performing all the time and that's probably not sustainable but it's certainly not very satisfying and there generally is I talk about that in the book the crisis of disappointment is one of the first.
Crisis that all nascent relationships must pass through and on some level the relationship doesn't even begin and earnest until couples go through the crisis of disappointment where either through one significant betrayal or the accumulation of small inconsistencies the fantasy on which the relationship has been based up until that point shatters.
And the person is really no different from who he or she was the day before but he or she's going to feel completely different it's almost like you're the scales have dropped from your eyes and you're seeing this person and maybe what sound what seemed cute and lovable and adorable just a week ago now is completely infuriating and difficult to live with sometimes
the very things that we're most attracted to tend to be the things that we dislike most about our partners further down the road this is cruel irony so interesting we talk about this.
This moment that some relationships go through where they have that sudden disappointment where the kind of honeymoon effect the halo effect of this person kind of shatters and you say that's when the relationship actually begins well yeah because it's at that point where you have the opportunity at long last to see the other person for who he or she is and you couldn't
see that before you just saw what you wanted to see.
You were distorted in your perception by your attraction and you need some of that distortion because while so would you have taken the risk and the expense and the opportunity to pursue this relationship up until that point like you need a little bit of attraction too much of attraction is crazy I mean it's completely distorted not enough attraction and you're
not going to overcome the behavior inertia you're just going to be so in your head and be like this isn't worth it i'd rather just do something with a higher likelihood of success where I can get one of my needs met in a more predictable and consistent way because relationships are really a role to die is especially today more than you know more than ever so in that first
day can women also talk themselves out of it in terms of the women talking too much in the man going Jesus Christ they can but most guys just they're trying to get laid so like the woman would have to be a total train wreck or that guy would have to have enough optionality that he could be picky but most men are not picky because most men are just.
Really hungry for anything that they're willing to get.
And it sounds bad but it's kind of true well I mean it's supported by data as well isn't it that you know i've heard repeatedly that the top 10% of men are having most of the sex they are killing it it's like what a time be alive these days man.
And that seems to be kind of the end state of a disregulated sexual marketplace and it's not unusual it's not uncommon like we see this in all kinds of animal species.
Elephant seals wild mustangs it's like you see some alpha males dominate the females who congregate in heroms around those men and if that man is defeated by another contender the women aren't loyal it's not like those females love that individual and they'll stick with it even after it's defeated in combat they just move on to the next one.
85% of cultures on this planet according to people who know more about this than I do have been polygamous and what we see is that when.
Women are able and empowered to make their own sexual decisions sexual marketplace they target the top 10% of men.
That creates a lot of problems though creates a lot of problems both for men and women.
It creates problems for women because the likelihood that any one of those 10% men are going to give up their insane sexual optionality and enter into a monogamous exclusive arrangement with them is very negligible like that guy has to be so done with playing the field and so ready to start a family and settle down.
So it's really about timing as opposed to being the right woman you kind of just have to be a be good enough at the right moment to kind of capture that man's attention and for the vast majority of those women they're not going to be yet.
But what's the alternative is like how about this you know this guy he's he's completely average there's nothing bad about him nothing that great about him either he'd make a great husband like that doesn't sound very attractive I can understand that.
Do you still think that relationships are a exchange of value between two people of course and what is that exchange of value because when I when when you when I read that kind of sounds like gold digging or something.
Well that's because often people take value very literally and especially economics that were just is associated very strongly with money in the collective imagination.
I think in one of the footnotes I use a definition from Von Mises from the Austrian School of Economics and he basically defines economics as the study of human behavior.
In respect to means and with respect to ends and scarce means that could be applied in other ways.
The easiest way to explain the value is that people don't move towards people they want nothing to do with.
They have better things to do especially when they have these scarce resources like time like energy like attention and that they want things from other people.
If I at a distance can see there's it's like going shopping I can look at a distance there's nothing in that store that I want I don't have to go in and waste my time to figure out whether that's absolutely true or not because I have other things to do today.
So it's like if there's nothing that I want from that store I'm not going to walk through its doors right people don't move towards those they don't want anything from.
So what is value value can be all kinds of things value is anything that can be bought or earned.
Okay, not everything can be bought and earned and I have a whole chapter about that but a lot of things can be bought and earned.
Okay, so give me some examples of the most important types of values values that we exchange in the context of a relationship.
Sex, yeah security, yeah excitement, yeah emotional support, yeah child rearing.
Okay. And do women and men value those types of value differently?
Of course. And what do men value more and what do women value more?
That's a tough one because not only do men and women value those differently but men and women value them differently at different stages of their life.
Like I'm sure when you were doing the bottle service you were not really thinking whether these women had good maternal capacities right?
You were trying to get laid.
Exactly you were approaching those women with a different set of needs or desires.
There's nothing wrong with that because it's actually very difficult for one person to meet this hyper conflated set of needs and wants.
That's one of the reasons why relationships tend to fail these days is we want too many things from one person.
And we expect one person to be all things across our entire lives which is very difficult if not impossible.
It's like incredible that it even happens at all.
That didn't used to be the case didn't it?
It didn't used to be the case mostly because it was so difficult if not impossible to divorce.
And there were a lot of social taboos against separation.
But I would have been living in like a community where I could have got you know we're living much more isolated and lonely now.
So I would have been you know the village would have given me some of those things that I'm looking for in terms of value.
I would have had a big social structure around me.
Absolutely. I talk about that in the book is that we used to live in small communities where we actually had lots of different kinds of relationships with lots of different people.
And also an extended kin networks and intergenerational housing for instance.
And so with the advent of the nuclear family and the dissolution of real community we expect our partner to be all things to be an entire village and an extended family.
And that's just really not possible.
I mean the love marriage in particular may even be a paradox in terms because you want kind of let's say an emotionally stable safe companion who is also your passionate lover and sexual partner.
Spontaneous risky. So difficult not impossible.
Like you certainly can't do both of those things at the same time.
The best you can hope for is to kind of vacillate between the two of them.
To kind of create a proportion just enough passion or spontaneity and risk to keep the kind of bedroom alive but still maintaining the stability and long term security the relationship.
It's very difficult to manage.
I find this difficult. I find this difficult.
I find it difficult to be in I'm in a five year relationship now.
I'm like how do you how do you go for another 50 years because I you know with the same person and maintain the spontaneity and excitement 50 years you know and being the kind of novel sexually attractive whatever.
While also being stable safe predictable comfortable present at the same time like they feel paradoxes.
It's very hard you have to be creative.
It's part of the reason why there are that places like Victoria's secret exist.
You know what I'm saying it's like 21 year old girls aren't shopping there really.
So if you're not willing to actually open up your relationship then you have to kind of make your partner feel new which could mean different outfits that could mean play and entering in and experimenting with different roles behind closed doors.
It can also just mean travel.
Yeah I mean one thing that really seems to spark sex life and couples is foreign bed sheets and I think you've just sort of changed the context and that's enough of a spark of novelty to bring some of the sexual interest back for the man.
I think novelty is more important for men than for women.
One of the things that really works in my relationship that I've observed is just being away.
Absolutely. So I come out here for you know I'm out here for a couple of weeks now.
I'm not going to see my and then I was doing dragons down before this in the UK so that was I was away for a while then.
In total I wouldn't see my partner for about four weeks so when I come back it's kind of like that.
A new person. It is I mean one of the things about what made relationships work back in the day is men didn't really spend a lot of time with women and vice versa.
James Exton the divorce lawyer he had this great line on the software underbelly interview when he was responding to the spike in divorces during COVID when everybody was shut down and forced into close company with each other for extended periods of time.
He said that men and women signed up for better for worse but not for lunch.
It's really hard to just be in each other's space all the time.
And the fact of the matter is when we lived in extended kin networks and communities men had a bunch of men to do things with and women had a bunch of women to talk to.
And even in the 50s which is kind of romanticized as the I the paragon of conservative traditional marriage.
That was the time when the man was a traveling salesman and he was on the road for 200 days out of the year.
Having an office has kept more marriages alive than probably any other toy or therapy or intervention on the planet like you need to leave.
You need to leave. And it's even harder to do that with the advent of cellular technology.
It's like being physically absent doesn't matter if the whole time you're there.
I know where you are all times because I put a tracking thing on your phone and I'm constantly communicating with you throughout the day.
Like now there's no uncertainty.
There's no mystery. There's no unknown.
So when we get back together, what do we have to talk about?
I'm not interested in you because I believe you're an entirely known entity.
You need to have something that I don't know yet to attract my interest in curiosity, which is the spark that eventually potentially leads to passion and sexual intimacy.
But what does this say about the very nature of monogamy?
Because if you need to leak this doesn't feel like a natural thing.
If I go back, you know, we once upon a time we couldn't just get on a plane or go to the office.
We would presumably be around each other most of the time.
I'm trying to understand if you think like a monogamy is quote unquote natural.
Oh, probably not. Like I think that humans are probably monogamy.
But like strict monogamy, which should be really rigidly and explicitly defined by the individuals in question because there's clearly behaviors that are in the gray zone like is harmless flirting cheating.
You know what I'm saying?
That some people might say no, that's just part of the fun of being a social human being and it's not like a human being.
It's not going to lead anything and other people might think no, that's totally inappropriate and correct.
So these things need to be discussed.
Monogamy isn't just something that everybody agrees on and understands what that means.
But yeah, I think that it's generally not something that we do naturally.
One way to think about this is monogamy actually benefits men on a utilitarian perspective because there's generally more women than there are from men.
If you maintain strict social monogamy, we have this many men and this many women.
What that means is that even the worst men in society in that community can be functionally guaranteed of a wife.
I want to really close off on this point about exchanging values, but and that's really what a relationship is.
When I spoke to James Sexton, the divorce lawyer you reference there, we started talking about gold diggers and he would reference divorce cases where there's a seven-year-old significantly overweight man who's, you know, with a third-year-old woman.
And I said to him, is that not gold digging and I said, is that love in his response to me?
I'll always remember it was he said, I'm not going to say that.
Well, it's a transaction.
She's getting something from him.
And in the words that you've described, it might be safety, it might be money or whatever and he's also getting something from her, which is, I guess, a feeling.
I guess it's an emotional feeling.
Presumably he's getting sex, he's getting the opportunity to walk in the door with a beautiful 30-year-old on his arm, which is certainly a bump to his ego, but is also good for the social game.
The fact of the matter is, is that most women, most men would have sex with most women, but most women would not have sex with most men.
So we also know that men's threshold for selection is much lower than women's.
Generally women have more optionality than men do.
And so when we see a woman with a man, we more or less assume that that's the best man that she could get given her range of options.
Oftentimes with the men, it's the only woman that would have him, not quite the same thing.
So if a very attractive woman is with a man, then that's an automatic status boost in any social circle that he navigates in because everyone is going to assume that there must be something really important or significant about that guy, given the fact that we assume that that attractive or beautiful woman could pretty much have any man that she wants to be.
And so if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
So if a woman is in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man.
So if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
So if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
So if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
So if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
So if a woman is not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man, then that's the only way to get the right to be a man that's not in the same position as a man.
But it takes, it would take somebody to be curious about you to learn about all the interesting and valuable things about you and your lifestyle.
And unless you advertise that in some way, most women would not go through the trouble of trying to figure that out.
And that's not the same for women.
It's really hard for women to just be alone.
And sometimes they complain about that.
And I get that. There's been times when I've been approached and I would rather just be left alone.
It's annoying to have to reject people.
It's uncomfortable to be sexualized against your will when you don't want to be.
Right? I was actually watching something yesterday in my green room over there, just because it came up on my phone.
It was an ITV documentary where they just basically followed a woman at night through a major city with a camera.
And it is pretty horrific.
The one man comes up to her puts his arm around her in the, she's alone at night in the middle of the street.
Contact puts his arm around her and basically stops her.
Hey, please, what's your name?
Please another man who's in his 60s or 70s comes over.
Hey, do you want some piano lessons?
I play piano, would you like some piano?
And she can't move down this high street without someone making a sound, a gesture, some kind of proposition.
I could use this Christ.
So what it's like to be like Justin Bieber or something.
It'd be really annoying.
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because that behavior is just point blank unacceptable.
But what I saw in that video as well was just how desperate men must be.
And especially in the way that the world has changed following the Me Too movement.
And we understand, you know, what consent really is and the experience that women have been through.
I go, there's a subset of men now that are going to be even more terrified to walk up to someone and say, hi, my name is Steven.
Can we talk about you? I've done so many consultations with guys who are terrified of being Me Tooed, of being canceled, of being like surreptitiously recorded and humiliated on the internet.
Especially in San Francisco, which is sort of like the epicenter for progressive feminism and politics in general.
I have done cold approaches to get over my own approach anxiety hundreds and hundreds and times in San Francisco.
And I have never once been slapped or had a drink thrown in my face or had an angry, uncomfortable interaction.
Like the worst I got was I went up to a girl.
I was like, hey, how you doing?
And without even responding, she just sort of looked at me and then like looked away.
And I was like, okay, all right, not interested, understood.
That was the worst thing that happened to me.
I think if you approach women in the right way, you can leave them better than you have found them, even if they're not interested in having a relationship with you, which most women won't be by definition.
So get used to striking out.
So what you say to those men, then a scared of rolling up to someone and, you know, saying hello.
It's all about how you approach them and you approach them with first of all, you don't ever try to surprise a woman.
Because a lot of guys do, it's like they run up, excuse me, and they get really close and they get in their face.
They're nervous themselves.
And you kind of, it's like approaching an animal, a deer in the wild.
You know, it's like, here I am.
I'm making eye contact.
We've made eye contact for a while.
I'm getting up slowly. I'm moving towards you.
You're on my hands. Sort of interacting with the cops sometimes.
It's like, I got nothing up my sleeve and we're going to do this slow.
And I'm going to smile. I'm going to exude warmth.
I'm not going to get into close.
I'm certainly not going to touch her.
This body language matter.
Of course it matters. So I have a whole chapter about the game of Please Know in the book.
Say that again. Okay. The game of Please Know.
So this is a game that I played at Tish.
So I went to Tish School of the Arts at NYU to train as an actor.
And in my first semester of acting school, we didn't do any acting really.
We didn't study scenes.
We didn't do plays. We played this one game.
And we played this game for, I think, three or four months straight.
And the game is called the Game of Please Know.
And I've since discovered that this game is the fundamental game of human relationships.
It wasn't advertised to me as such, but I since understood that this is the core game at the heart of all human interaction, which is I'm going to you because I want something from you.
Whether it's attention, sex, a dollar, a job, a house, a meal.
It's like I'm here because I want something or else I'd be somewhere else.
Right. And the default answer is no.
Can I have a dollar? No. Hey, could I take you out for a drink sometime?
No. Could I have this job?
No, no, definitely not.
So and there's some wisdom to that.
Like I say in the book, the universe lives closed.
If the default answered the universe was yes, if we just lived in this like, a genie bottle, where if we just think it and we want it, our wishes are effortlessly satisfied, the world, the universe would have been stripped of all of its resources by now.
Like if human beings continued to exist, it would be a very desolate and awful place for the survivors, I would think.
So the default answer to every request is no.
Why? Because it costs nothing to want, but it costs something to give.
And there's that inherent asymmetry.
And in general, the way to overcome that asymmetry is if I want something, I'll, in exchange for what I want to get from you, I might give you something of commensurate value that you want from me.
That's the pro social solution that has brought people into relationships and society of all kinds.
The basis of relationship is the transaction of unequal goods of comparable value.
And when that doesn't happen for whatever reason, no relationship exists, nor can exist.
In any case, going back to the game of please know the game of please know as it was taught to me in this acting class always has two players.
There's always let's say a wanter and a giver.
The wanter can only say the word please.
The giver can only say the words no and yes.
And the giver has to start from a no position.
And the game continues for as long as it needs to until the wanter can change the no into a yes using only the word please.
Okay, so how do we do that?
Well, what you learn, like I was saying earlier, is that a word is both a semantic message, but it's also a container for emotion.
So you're really leveraging the emotion of and the nonverbal communication.
If you're stripped of the ability to use your words, you have to use facial expression, you have to use tone of voice, you have to use gesture, you have to use body language.
And what you've just what you decide what you discover is that you can communicate all kinds of different intentions without using words at all.
Okay, so if I pick up this book and I go I just just to pass it towards you for people that can't see us right now and I go please.
Sure, yes, thank you. So you've just said yes.
Exactly. One of the best ways to get what you want is polite request.
Okay. And there was nothing unusual about your request.
It seemed like it was a completely normal thing and here we are.
We have good rapport. Why wouldn't I take the book from you?
So what I've discovered by watching hundreds and hundreds of those playthroughs is that different strategies tend to emerge in that game that are predictably associated with success.
And you see these strategies in cocktail lounges in corporate boardrooms in exotic bazaars where you're actually trading spices and whatnot.
It's like it's the fundamental strategies of negotiation.
Right. These are things like intimidation.
Okay. So this is a question of seduction, victimization, playfulness, friendliness, straightforwardness, quitting.
There's all kinds of strategies that have developed that leaving aside the moral ethical implications of those strategies work.
And they work by stimulating a certain emotion inside of you, which is manipulation.
And if I can use my tone, my words, my actions to stimulate the right emotion in you, then you are going to move in the direction where I want you to go, basically.
So in the example of me passing you the book, I used a, I picked up the book.
I presented it to you. And then in a very soft tone, and with a, we're sure we're not, I said, please, which made it very clear to you, there's a couple of things really going on there.
I guess the first is, I've gone to some effort to extend my arm.
And now you're going to have to leave me hanging.
Yeah. Or, you know, the longer my arms, the more pain I'm getting in my arm from it being in the air.
So there's a little bit of a, you know, an obligation on your side to put me out of my, my pain, because this book is quite heavy.
Of course. And if we were playing an actual game, and I was the giver, I might want to fuck with you a little bit and be like, no, then I would have to keep going until I found a way to get you to say, yes.
Yeah. And you try lots of different things.
And the most successful players of this game learn to listen with like a third year.
And it's just like, please can be said in lots of different ways.
No can be said in lots of different ways.
And if you're listening clearly, the way a person says, no, always contains a clue into how they might eventually say, yes, it's sort of like playing hot and cold, which maybe you did as a kid.
Something when I had someone in the room and you move over here and they go colder and then you move over here.
I know you're getting warmer.
So there's cues in how people respond to you that let you know if you're kind of more or less on track and moving in the right direction, or you're not.
And if you're not, you kind of have to change tack until you find that resonance that, okay, now I understand you now we're getting somewhere.
That's why I say like if it works in sales, it generally works in dating.
What are the biggest mistakes men make when they're rolling up on a woman?
So you said, you know, they might surprise them in some way.
They might be shut down their personal space by getting a bit too close.
Yeah. I think most of them are overcompensations for their nervousness.
It's scary to approach a girl.
And so there's generally two things that happen.
One is the men hesitate too long.
And then they get weird and stilted.
Like they start to think about, well, what should I say?
I need a good opener. Like, okay, Matt, now that line sucks and now she's talking to somebody now.
It's not a good moment. They get to in their head, which generally means they don't approach.
But if they do, they're generally so like out of the moment and in their minds that their vibe is just off.
And women reject the vibe because they don't come off open and confident.
You start to listen. You start to listen.
It's like sales, man. The same approach isn't going to work with everyone who walks in your dealership.
Some guys, they're going to need to real soft touch.
And you need to keep a real big distance and not interfere with their own process because they're going to sell themselves on the car.
Other people need a lot of hand holding and a lot of guidance.
And it's not obvious which customers are which when they first walk in the door.
You have to make some tentative bids and learn to listen to their response and be flexibly adaptive until you find where they're kind of starting to open up.
Guy walks into a car dealership says, hey, can I help you with anything?
He's like, I don't know.
I'm just looking around.
That was not the right thing.
He didn't even make eye contact.
He's just like, fucking leave me alone.
But if you were to say something like, I personally like it in blue.
Like that's kind of a surprising thing.
And you might turn around.
It's like, that's not what I expected you to say.
I expected you to kind of give me the hard sell.
And that created an opportunity for curiosity, which may have led to a moment of connection, which could potentially lead in the direction of interaction, which can lead to a sale.
Like it's very difficult to get a sale without the interaction.
So you have to put out tentative bids and learn to listen to how people respond.
Okay. So the car, the person selling the car would say, I personally like it in blue.
Potentially. Okay. Just as a way to.
I don't know. That just came into my mind.
I know there's a like it.
It's quite, but it does it evokes curiosity because then you would, because then I might respond to it.
I anywhere black. So I need something in black.
But then at least you have a bridge.
One of the best pickup lines that I used when I was getting over my approach anxiety in San Francisco is I go up and say, hi, hey, how you doing?
What brings you out here tonight?
I'd say I'm actually trying to get over my approach anxiety.
How am I doing? And that led to it.
Like, what do you mean, approach anxiety?
Well, I don't know if you know this, but it's going to be really difficult for guys to approach women.
Really? I had no idea. Yeah, it's probably help guys without all the time.
I figured I should probably get good at it myself.
What do you mean? What do you do?
I kind of help people. It's like, it's like, it's interesting.
And it's also vulnerable in a good way because it's revealing of my present moment experience.
Vonerability is such a tricky word because it has a lot of negative associations with it.
Affirmative vulnerability.
Well, it's also vulnerable means wound.
It's like where I could be hurt.
It's wound ability. Like, why would I tell you where my Achilles heel is?
I don't know if you're going to be able to use that information well.
You know, how do I know you're not going to weaponize that further down the road?
Right? But one more useful definition of vulnerability is that I am sharing with you my present moment emotional experience, whatever that is.
And that is makes it easier for women to see you when you start to share and disclose some of your present moment emotional experience.
It's like using the right words for a man.
It unlocks their understanding and they can kind of like see you more clearly because you're putting something out there that they can potentially resonate with.
They might not and that's okay.
You can just find someone else to play with, right?
But with in the absence of that, it's very difficult for a guy to get anything to happen.
And most guys, they, they tone down that emotion.
They're very, they can be very robotic.
You're very monotone. Hey, how you doing?
So one way is guy screw this up because they get to in their head and that makes them still to the weird.
The other way is they try to overcome their nervousness by overcompensating.
They get really drunk. They get super bold and handsy because they're trying to be kind of dominant and I suppose that can work.
But it generally, it generally rubs one the wrong way.
One of the things I've never forgotten from when I was 18 years old and I was reading those books about seduction and pick up our street is it talks about how to deal with a 10.
10 out of 10. What did they say?
Well, it basically says you kind of need to be a bit of an asshole.
Not an asshole in the sense of being rude or whatever, but you kind of need to.
So say if you were a 10 and we're and we're out dinner, I didn't know who you were, but there was a group of very attractive women here and you were the one that I wanted and you were the 10.
You weren't talking to me, but the strategy it says is to basically pair attention to everybody else.
And then when the 10 tries to talk to you, go one second and then just keep talking to everybody else.
And it's that small communication that I high value that kind of would evoke their interest and curiosity.
Why does this man not. Maybe pond like panda to me like all other men have always done.
What is it about him that he's got such confidence that he will give me a slight neck, you know.
Nine and tens are not a different species than the fives and sixes.
And what are the women who tend to really be interested in most guys, the ones who are pursuing the ones who stick around who want those long term relationships.
And they're worse. They're often the ones that the men kind of kind of have this take it or leave it attitude towards and they're not going out of their way, which can seem like they're very confident.
They're very composed.
They're self possessed.
There might be something special or attractive about this guy because he's not pursuing me.
I'm pursuing him, which can reduce cognitive dissonance in the direction of increasing attraction because I think about it.
I don't usually go out of my way for people.
And yet I'm going out of my way for this man.
Why am I doing that? It must be because I really like this guy.
Right. Sometimes our emotions only arise out of our behavior.
People sometimes think we have an emotion that we act.
Sometimes we act and then we have an emotion.
Right. So getting people it's like it's not possible to get others to like you more by liking them more.
That's one of the biggest errors in dating.
And one of the best little strategies to increase interest is to ask other people to do things for you because it takes advantage of this little cognitive hack that I just described.
You don't, Steven, you don't go out of your way doing favors for people.
If I asked you a small but reasonable favor and you executed it, then consciously or not, you're going to think, wow, I don't usually do favors.
I did a favor for Orion. He might be a pretty decent dude.
Like maybe there's something to this guy because.
Give me an example. So if I say could you could you grab that for me one second?
I point at one of the easiest ways to do it.
Sometimes it's just I've seen it in pickup where you can just say you're talking to somebody and be like, you know, it's a little loud.
Can we just let's just step like two steps to the side just that two steps and complying with that reasonable request.
It elevates unconscious attraction.
It also is an opportunity to create what you might call a yes chain, which is related to foot in the door, which is you're more likely to comply with a larger request if I first get you to consent to a number of smaller reasonable requests first.
It's not the only way, but it's one way to potentially undermine resistance.
And what if I'm a woman because a lot of women are struggling with the way that the world has changed and this sort of moved towards dating apps and online dating and they don't have the.
So the it's not socially acceptable typically for a woman.
Well, it's not socially typical for a woman to roll up to a guy in a supermarket or wherever else and start to proposition him.
It's typically thought they're generally bad at it.
I just have to say like I've had some women approach me and they're not good.
Maybe most guys aren't good at picking women up either, but some guys do get good at it.
They make it like their job to learn how to seduce or pick up women at least for a few months.
But most women when they've approached me, they have very poor game.
What should a woman be thinking about when she approaches a man?
It's probably best for women to not roll up on men the way that men often roll up on women.
I did a series about this, which is reminding women that for the vast majority of our history, women have been the initiators.
They've just initiated indirectly with plausible deniability.
So the most stereotypical example, maybe you'll appreciate this given your culture is the dropping of the handkerchief of the Victorian lady as she's walking in the park.
She sees in the corner of her eye an attractive man that she might want to initiate a conversation with.
And as she's passing by his bench without noticing the handkerchief falls out of her pocket, which creates an opportunity for the man to notice it, pick it up and say, excuse me, miss.
But I believe you dropped this.
Why? How absolutely clumsy of me, my goodness.
And suddenly, boom, she's in a conversation with a man that she chose to have a conversation with.
And if for whatever reason, the guy turns out to be a total adult, she could just say, thank you for this, but I'm late for tea.
And she can just kind of scamper off because she has the plausible deniability that she didn't do this on purpose.
So women do it with their eyes and stuff.
That's what I say. It's like the come here, they're stare and I, I did it really badly in that episode, but I was trying to demonstrate what that might look like.
Eye contact is extremely intimate.
One of the things I say in that episode that I don't think many women know is that if you and I didn't know each other and we were out at a bar.
And I just like looked right into your eyes for three seconds.
I think you want it to fight exactly.
Even there's this nervous laughter, which can potentially cover.
Okay, this is getting a little tense.
And maybe I'm trying to deescalate it by smiling and showing that I'm not a threat.
But absolutely unsustain, sustained eye contact between two strange men is an aggressive tactic.
For more than a couple seconds, can I help you?
Is there a problem here?
It just looked at you, you know?
And why? Because it's too intimate.
I don't know who you are, dude.
Why do you think that you can get that close to me?
You could be on the other side of the bar, but eye contact feels like you're inside me.
It's amazing. So women can use eye contact to their benefit where they can basically call the men that they want to interact with to them.
But they have to be willing to do that.
If they're not willing to drop the hanker chiff or look them in the eye.
I mean, that's sort of like the minimum necessary behavior.
Where does love fit in sort of this?
And what is love then? Because if we're talking about, you know, this being a transaction relationship is really being about transaction of value.
Where does love fit? And is love just when the transaction of value is equal?
Well, I think that's a very satisfying relationship when the transaction is equal.
Like I talk about this on the channel.
In good relationships, the transaction is invisible.
It's just like your needs and wants are kind of invisibly and effortlessly being met.
Well, at the same time, my needs and wants are invisibly and effortlessly being met.
And so we have the basis for continued satisfaction, which might be as good as it gets when it comes to relationships in many respects.
Love is something that is a totally different beast.
And it is very beautiful and it is very noble and transformative.
But there's also a lot of misunderstandings about love.
So for example, I call things that cannot be bought or earned non-transactable goods or NTGs.
And of those NTGs, the three, I think most important ones for relationships are loyalty, friendship, and love.
You cannot do anything to buy or earn those things.
Those are always gifts that are given at the spontaneous pleasure of the giver.
And they always come with no strings attached if they are true gifts.
Otherwise, they're just giving in the hopes of receiving, which is a bid for transaction.
And a lot of things that go under the guise of loyalty, friendship, and love are really bids for transaction.
So you have to be careful about that.
But if there's nothing that you can do to buy or earn love, let's start with friendliness, because that's maybe an easier one.
It's like, you can't make anyone be your friend.
Like you could be the most amicable, cheerful, easygoing guy who's always down for whatever.
And there's still going to be a lot of people who don't want to be your friend.
In fact, many of those people will choose to be friends with people who are disagreeable or kind of dumb or difficult or stubborn.
It's like people, why did people choose as their friends the people that they're friends with?
It's just like, it wasn't like I interviewed a bunch of different candidates.
And I decided that you were the most friendly guy.
So I decided to make you my friend.
Here's a friend offer. And it would be, that would seem so strange to us, right?
So the fact of matter is for whatever reason, and it's kind of mysterious and unfathomable.
I've decided to make you my friend.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be my like you're going to make me your friend, right?
It doesn't necessarily go both ways, right?
You can't buy or earn friendship.
You can't buy or earn loyalty.
You can't buy or earn love.
They're given at the spontaneous pleasure of the giver with no strings attached.
Otherwise, we would functionally be ascribing a value to them.
And we would say that these things are transactable.
So you can't have it both ways.
Another way to think about it is people aren't always in relationships with people they love.
And they certainly can love people they're not in relationships with.
Like I know people who are in very intact stable marriages where there's not a lot of love.
And maybe in those marriages, they both secretly love some X in the past.
That they couldn't get for whatever reason.
So like it's certainly not enough to explain relationships on the basis of love because people rarely end up with the people who love them the most.
If you can be in relationships without love for better for worse and you can love people that you're not in relationships with.
Then at the very least we have to conclude that those two constructs are independent of each other.
Like when you love someone you're in relationship with, it's kind of a happy accident.
It's a coincidence. And maybe that's for the best.
But like there's nothing you can do to get the other person to love you.
It's their decision to do it or not.
And if there's something you could do, then we make love a transactable thing.
So it's like pick your poison.
And I don't think it is. I don't think it's a transactable thing.
What role has pornography played in all this?
You know, you must speak to a lot of men in your practice that are suffering with pornography addictions or that is it making us harder to find relationships?
Is it changing our ability to keep and hold relationships?
Is it changing how we share during sex?
It can. Like I've done some conversations with guys who have used pornography very intensely and extensively.
Do they tell you? Not always.
Generally when that's the issue, that's the issue they come to me for.
It's very rare where it kind of comes out in the course of things.
And then lots of things suddenly make sense.
Right. Usually they come out up front and say, this is the reason.
And it's a very, there's a lot of shame associated with this with addiction in general, but with this addiction in particular.
Like I do video conference calls with folks from all over the world, but people don't have to turn their camera on if they don't want to.
By far, the most common topic that men will turn their camera off for is discussing pornography addiction, like they don't want to be looked at.
They don't want to be seen, which can make it easier to actually be honest.
It's like the confessional.
There's this dark place.
I don't have to look you in the eye and share this shameful thing, which might make it more conducive to share it.
Get it out and discuss it and do something about it.
So I can understand that.
But it has completely changed the game of meeting and dating, especially if you operate into the assumption that in general, men attempt to exchange resources for sexual opportunity and women attempt to exchange sexual opportunity for resources.
In the context of that, if both parties could get what they want more easily, more safely and more cheaply in other ways, then it would make rational economic sense for them to do so.
Like only fans. Only fans is a fantastic way for women to transact their sexual relationship opportunity for resources in a safe, convenient and easy way.
We'll talk about men. This is really interesting because potentially women have always kind of wanted to be with the rich guy.
But potentially for the first time in human history, it might be easier for the average woman to get $1 from a million men.
Then to get a million dollars from one.
Like the desire for a million dollars hasn't gone anywhere, but how you might go about getting it changes given the incentives and the opportunities in play.
And you can moralize about women doing this or you can moralize about men using pornography.
It's not going to change anything.
Like if shame worked, it would have worked by now.
I would think. So I think that rather than trying to lean into that social intervention, maybe we can understand why it is that women might get trapped in this way and men might get trapped in this way because it does seem to be pretty gendered.
Right. There's not a lot of only fans, creators who are men.
And if it's not only fans, which is pretty hardcore for a lot of women, it's like Instagram, it's social media that they get trapped because they get attention, they get emotional validation, they get the dopamine hit from being liked from being seen that goes my plan B.
So we use the word trap, do you using that intentionally?
Yeah, because these aren't the same.
It's like, I'm not you could certainly make the argument that pornography is not the same as an actual sexual relationship.
I'm not arguing that it is.
But apparently it's similar enough that a lot of men can't tell the difference or at least they can tell the difference, but it's negligible given the expenses and the costs involved.
They'll accept the substitute kind of like eating like our fake meat.
I talk about that. Why do we have an obesity epidemic is because apparently there's all this processed food stuff that seems to be somewhat indistinguishable from whole foods that actually nourish you, especially because the process foodstuffs are generally full of salts and sugars and things that you are programmed to want to put into your body through millennia of nutrient
poor evolutionary conditions.
Like these things resonate with male attention pornography resonates with male attention.
I think I read an article recently where star link was brought to some remote tribe in the Amazon and a month later the guys were addicted to porn like they spent all day watching pornography.
And so that's kind of one of the things I talk about in the book is that a lot of the things that we're going through are not really moral lapses and making it a moral issue and about shame is one it's it's just not going to work.
Like generally when people are ashamed they just hide better.
Which doesn't make the problem go away it kind of makes it more intractable.
If you actually want to change behavior you have to understand why people are doing it you have to kind of do a functional analysis.
Figure out what problem this acts as a solution for and then to offer reasonable alternative solutions to that problem.
I guess the most important question which I've missed here is is it a problem pornography yeah is the like if the world became a only fans marketplace as a relationship and sex where men are getting there.
You know their sexual whatever they want their sexual attention from only fans and women are selling that is that a problem men are you know jerking off all day at home behind their computer screens and women are on the other side of the computer screen selling images of their feet to men is that is that a problem.
It depends on how you look at it right so I'm of the mind that the game will go on the game will go on long after you and I are gone I don't think that this whatever we're passing through spells the end of civilization as we know it the end of sexual relationships things will continue to change and evolve and both sides will adapt and the goal of the game is to play for as long
as possible. Okay but better question then is it a problem on the individual level I think it can be so the man that comes to you with this is a problem what are the symptoms of that problem going to be in his life he's never had a relationship.
But he wants one yeah he still lives in his parents house this is really important because you have to understand that sex is not just about sex.
There's something called sublimation have you heard this term before I have but I don't know it I think it comes also from psychoanalysis.
And it's the idea that certain impulses inside of us are real they're powerful and yet they're socially unacceptable.
The libido the desire for sex is never going to go away because it's connected to the life force itself through sex new life gets created if the libido were actually domesticated it would be very bad for humanity that's why sex is always kind of like this wild west this untamable way.
This untamable wilderness that exists even the in the heart of the most repressive societies on the planet like it cannot be tamed and we shouldn't try to tame it too much right.
So that said we can't give free rain to our sexual impulses all the time life would be chaos right so what folks generally learn to do is to channel or sublimate that sexual energy into other pro social activities or behaviors.
So you're not socially acceptable behaviors exactly starting a company or building roads or writing a book.
So you think that's why I'm an entrepreneur because I was sublimating my sexual energy potentially probably what I'm getting at is that if you.
If you give men the opportunity to exist in the perpetually sexually satisfied state which is what freely distributed an accessible pornography does then you take away that power source that serves for pro social action.
It's not just that these men aren't going to be having sex with real women they're not going to have the energy and the drive to take risks like applying for that job or doing something where they might fail like the consequences to a diminished libido or down throughout civilization civilization is built on the repression of the libido.
So the horny men are really useful because horny men will do all kinds of incredible things to satisfy that urge it's actually pro socially useful to keep men in a horny state.
But think about it's like if I'm if I'm not hungry why would I assume the risks and costs of hunting.
And so if I'm doped up on weed and I'm using porn and I'm just in this like totally relaxed and nestedized state then why would I even move let alone do anything worth doing with my life.
And men in that trap are aware of this and they're ambivalent just like most addictions they know the alcohol is killing them but they also can't stop drinking like there's something really deep and dark about that addiction same thing with porn.
They're ambivalent they want to stop but they often don't and they need help they certainly don't need shame and judgment.
I was thinking playing through the guy that calls you and then you know he hears you say this I don't know if this is what you'd say or not but he arrives at that conclusion that everything you said is correct that watching pornography is basically taking away his life force energy which is making him unproductive and unmotivated and he's not going to the gym because you
can just jerk off watching only fans whatever.
How do how do you get him to change his behavior.
It's tricky there's lots of things that you can do I learned a lot of those things when I was working in addiction for a couple of years.
However all of those things are prelude to not doing the thing anymore yeah.
One thing I learned from working with addicts is that inside is not enough to change people I worked with some folks who were very heavily therapist they had been through all kinds of treatment.
They had a visual therapy rehab they knew about their family of origin they understand about their own.
Interest psychic processes that lead them towards relapse they're actually very self aware from a psychotherapeutic perspective and they still use.
And I also worked with folks who were not so self aware but we're like yeah I decided that alcohol kind of made me not feel so good so I decided I just shouldn't drink anymore.
Those people got better and they're really self aware insightful guys often got lost in their own machinations and they kept relaxing.
So insight is sometimes useful but it's certainly insufficient to actually changing behavior to actually change behavior you have to do the thing like the only way to stop and bring is not to put the booze in your mouth anymore.
The only way to stop using pornography is to stop using pornography there's no other way about that now when you stop a behavior lots of things are going to come up.
And so one thing that you can do is plan ahead for those contingencies.
I use the term before one of the most useful things with addictions of all kinds is talk about functional analysis what is this.
Process this behavior this substance what is it actually doing what problem is it solving like I was I was addicted to cigarettes when I was younger and nicotine is a really hard one to quit.
And I probably quit eight or nine times before I finally kicked it for good I hope right.
And one thing that helped me was to understand well when did I usually reach for the pack and some of the biggest triggers for me was when I was bored.
And I just needed a little bit of I don't know something to do some sort of stimulation maybe I it made me it gave me the opportunity to go outside and take a break from what I was doing changes scenery.
Or I needed some sort of reward I did something good I deserve a cigarette here right now people need ways to alleviate their boredom and they need ways to reward their good behavior.
They just need to find ways to do that that doesn't sabotage their growth and create more problems in the long term than they solve which is what cigarettes I think do for people including myself.
And once I understood that I was basically reaching towards the pack when I was bored or I needed a reward I found other ways that authentically alleviated boredom or were rewarding that didn't create more problems than they solved.
Now that wasn't easy but that helped because in the absence of those things I would feel bored and I just have to sit with it where I'd feel reward I feel proud and I wouldn't be able to reward myself in any kind of way which generally led to relapse.
So you have to understand why men might be using pornography and often it's loneliness it's boredom.
So are you saying the antidote would be the antithesis I would be connection and something to do absolutely yeah.
Go get a job go get some friends and you got to stop.
You got to stop at first and sometimes it's just about getting through the next 24 hours don't think about you're never going to watch another movie again.
Just make the decision not to use today no matter how bad it gets you're just not going to use today.
And if you still want to use tomorrow you can use tomorrow.
Do you think pornography is a net negative society probably yeah.
I mean pornography has always existed there's like drawings on cave walls of women with with big boobs right so.
We've seen that in cultural artifacts from all kinds of civilizations throughout time and place what makes pornography really dangerous today is just the scale on which it's being able it's distributed it's free and it's.
Reddily available at any moment as long as you have a internet connection.
It's crazy I was saying to a friend of the other day I was like you just go on Twitter I saw Kara swisher who is the journalist pollcaster in America.
I saw her do a tweet the other day she's saying I'm leaving Twitter of been here since 2007 I believe she said she goes I'm leaving it because it's become like a poor hell scape.
War and really on Twitter oh my god yeah you scroll down your Twitter feed you will.
If regardless of who you follow because they I think what's happened since the buyout is they've tried to make it more addictive which means you're getting more viral content into your feed and more content that has a high dwell time.
I the amount of time you spend looking at it so that stuff's coming into your feed more regardless of whether you follow this accounts or not and.
There'll be a lot more graphic imagery like that in your feeds these days and I was explaining this to my friend so I said what look at my Twitter feed.
I scroll down I scroll down I scroll down I scroll down and you go down 10 posts and it's a famous story that actually just broke in the UK it's a.
Female prison guard having sex with it in mate and it happened in one of our present UK presence and that's in the middle of my feed it's a four minute video this sexual act you know this one and you go like.
If I was susceptible to.
And all men are susceptible to I am susceptible to addiction but if I was if I was someone that had just got away from my poor addiction saying that.
You know what's the same thing with alcohol it's like it's everywhere at least it's everywhere in America in a lot of alcoholics.
On some level correctly despair it's like I have to choose between my social life and my addiction yeah so true.
And it can be very difficult to start to live a sober lifestyle so I'm a socially unacceptable not to drink is it.
I think it's just makes other people uncomfortable because it calls their own use of that substance into question I think people who are really.
Intentional and cognizant of their use it doesn't make them uncomfortable when somebody doesn't drink.
What would you say then so if if you were to give very top line advice to both a man in that that's 35 years old and struggling to get into a relationship and a woman that's 35 and struggling to get into relationship.
If you could only speak to them for just 30 seconds to give them advice what would you say to each.
And you got to be honest yet and unpolitically correct because I know because I think the thing you'd probably say if the cameras weren't pointing at you is probably the most important thing.
No I just need more information it's like why is that 35 year old struggling is he because he's just socially awkward and he has this less the rest of his life kind of on track like he's a decent dude he's got a decent paying job and him.
I think the advice I would give to him is to sort of date like it's your job.
Now lots of people think that they just want a loving secure and peaceful relationship and they just want those three things but that's actually an enormous ask that's like wanting a job that's high paying low stress and you're passionate about.
It's very difficult to get all three of just those things right most people that you know do not have all three of those things at their work most relationships are not those three things.
If you want one of those jobs they're out there but they're kind of the needle in the haystack it is a numbers game especially as a man.
As a male in general you disseminate lots of pollen lots of seed because most of them are going to lead nowhere they're going to be evolutionary or relationship dead ends and so if you really want a job and you're serious about it you need to make getting a job your job and you need to send out you can't just say I tried once or twice and it didn't work out man it's like you
might have to send out 200.
Resumes you might have to take some coaching classes to learn how to interview better you might have to do some research into the company and the kinds of questions they ask and to learn about their cultures you can demonstrate goodness of fit like make getting a job your job and then reproduce at scale.
They just think it's going to take care of itself without you're a victim of circumstance.
I don't think most guys think it's going to take care of itself I think most the trap that trap is something that women can fall in.
It's like they want to meet cute and it's going to happen when it's going to happen and you know if it's meant to be then it's meant to be and if he didn't if he didn't try enough and he left and I guess that wasn't the one anyway like well what were you doing.
You providing value or you doing anything to keep him in that relationship it's that's that's something that a lot of women fall prey to in my opinion most guys especially by the time the 35.
Like fuck all lands in your lap as a 35 year old man you know haven't you learned that by now like if you want anything in life you kind of have to go out and get it make it happen.
So assuming that women are going to be any different would be absurd and you have to get over that rejection you have to get over the pain treat like a scientist do.
Do the A B testing and put yourself out there to mass scale which is uncomfortable and expensive proposition but hopefully in three or four months you can accomplish what you would otherwise spread out over three or four years and you can move on with the business of whatever you want that relationship to actually do you want to diminish the actual time you spent
you spend in this actual marketplace.
Because the longer you spend as a guy the more rejection you're going to feel and the more inertia will set in.
It feels like we're going through a interesting transitional moment in the world of dating and relationships.
You talk about that a lot the sort of the transition period we're going through with things like you obviously birth control but more recently things like artificial intelligence which are really going to put a spanner in the proverbial works of dating and relationships.
Well yeah it's the same trap is porn for men like with the advent of virtual reality robotics and artificial intelligence.
Like if it's hard for men to tell the difference on some level between an actual sexual encounter and pornography now now can you imagine what's going to be in like five years.
And it's going to be a significant trap imagine 20 years I mean we'll be in a blade runner situation where you have holographic girlfriends who tell you exactly what you want to hear and you can change their appearance at will.
I don't know but like that's not too far fetched.
Doesn't sound like the worst thing.
People are unsatisfying like people are disappointing people are real and that can be tough like all relationships require some degree of settling to some to some extent that's not very sexy that's not very satisfying.
And I think that when we're when we're a wash and optionality or at least apparent optionality it becomes harder and harder to settle for something that is less than perfect.
That's something I talk about a lot also it's like the meat market the dating scene has changed so much like it used to be that you as a guy could do fairly well if you were the biggest fish in a relatively small pond.
Right. There are no ponds anymore dude.
We're all swimming in one gigantic ocean.
The fact the matter is is that guy is competing for the girl next door with every other man on the planet.
And every woman is competing for the most eligible bachelor in their little community with against every other woman on the planet.
Are you hopeful? Sure. The game will go on people will find a way to make it work.
There's always opportunity.
Maybe you know this but there were more new millionaires created in 1929 in the stock market crash than any other moments in American history.
Like there is a way to thrive and succeed in almost any game and under almost any circumstances but you have to be flexible and you have to be able to spot the opportunity which often means that you have to buy when other people are selling which is very difficult to do.
In general just in terms of like modern survival.
The individual should be very cautious about moving the direction of the majority.
Like most people's lives are not awesome so why move in the direction that most people are moving.
If anything that could be a reliable indicator that there might be something of interest in a different direction.
As an entrepreneur I'm always looking for ways to connect and to create and that's why I decided to launch the conversation cards.
I turn to Shopify who also sponsor this podcast and Shopify made it so easy to set up an online store and reach all of you no matter where you are in the world.
I remember the challenges we face when we first launched the Diroverseo conversation cards managing inventory and throwing a seamless checkout process and reaching our audience.
I was like having an entire team of experts by our side allowing us to focus on creating content and connecting with you.
What I love about Shopify is no matter how big you intend to grow your business they give you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
And to say thank you for listening to this podcast we're giving you a trial which is just one dollar a month and you can sign up by going to Shopify.com slash Bartlett.
The link is in the description below.
I'm thinking a lot about the video I saw on your YouTube channel called How to be a man.
Yeah, that's one of the more popular ones.
It's interesting because a lot of women come up to me that have young, they're raising young men and they they'll ask me about this particular subject.
They'll say because there's so many different performative influencers out there that are doing this with performative masculinity.
What should I say to my son makes a good man in in 2024 because a lot of the things that sort of some narratives are suggesting make a good man are quite feminine traits typically.
But those aren't necessarily always conducive with being attractive.
So if I was to throw this to you and say how do I be a man.
What would your answer be?
There's lots of ways that you can be a man, right?
And I don't think we should be bogged down in those performative aspects of masculinity.
But the way I talk about it in the video is the way to be a man fundamentalist to have a spine and a pair of balls.
And both things are important.
And if you have those two things, then in my opinion, you're a man no matter what you look like or how you act.
And I think that kind of cuts to the heart of what has even historically been the core of masculinity.
One of them is having a spine, which is the willingness to stand up like a spine is what actually allows you to stand erect.
And a man generally needs to have something that he stands for because life is very, very difficult.
In particular, the moment you stand up, you cast a shadow, which is a symbolic way of saying as soon as you stand for something, you will attract resistance to that something.
No matter what it is you stand for.
There is no, there's nothing that is so unambiguously right and good that it does not cast a shadow except pure light.
Let's put it that way. Only light does not cast a shadow, right?
And we are not pure beings of light, right?
So we need to be able to stand up and rise above the field of undifferentiated humanity.
Because there's things that need to be done.
There's loads that need to be lifted.
There are fires that need to be put out.
And the spine is what is also the conduit of the nerves that allow locomotion that allows movement through reality, movement through the world.
And that's generally what's necessary.
There are so many problems.
Like sometimes guys come to me and like, well, what should I do with my life?
Just like fucking look around, man.
Start with what is very obviously a problem in your life.
Fix that. And once you fix that, then you can begin to broaden your scope with respect to the problems you tend to identify.
Don't try to solve humanity's problems right now when your life is not in the state where it needs to be.
Like focus on yourself first, put your own mask on before you assist others on the airplane.
And then once you get things in order and things are generally working, you can begin to broaden your scope.
And that's really important because one person who does that can benefit, well, now they can benefit millions of people through the internet and social media.
It's incredible. It's an opportunity that has never existed on the face of this planet.
And they can do it from the privacy of their own living rooms.
It's amazing. So that's important.
But you also need a pair, which is to be able to have the willingness to deal with the consequences of standing up and casting a shadow.
If you stand up and the moment you meet with any kind of resistance or pushback or antagonism or criticism, which you absolutely will receive, there was, you shouldn't have stood up to begin with.
Like that's just going to hurt.
It's going to teach you the lesson that it's better not to stand up.
It's better just to kind of blend in.
It's better to push all that stuff down because looks what happens when you try.
Well, yeah, well, you need to have some pushback to be able to deal with whatever comes your way as a consequence of standing up.
Anybody who stands up will cast a shadow.
And part of that shadow is the projected envy of others, who for whatever reason, as yet, lack the courage to stand up themselves.
It's so much easier to attack those for standing up than it is to stand up and run the risk of those attacks yourself.
Right. And especially with the internet, it's so much easier to do that these days.
You can hide your face, your name, and just take pot shots at anyone and anyone, everyone at anyone, anonymously.
It's part of the reason men end up having these sort of midlife crises that we've talked about because they stop standing up and they stop having a parables.
Because I've heard you talk about selfishness and that men aren't selfish enough.
I think selfishness is a good thing to be, especially in relationships.
At my stage of life, I think that 90% of successful relationships is selection.
I'm not a big fan of compromise.
To my mind, compromise is two people not getting what they want.
I think it's better to be pretty selfish and explicit about your selfishness and define someone who doesn't mind it, who can work with that or even enjoys it and thrives in those conditions.
But there's always going to be compromise now.
Something you'd rather.
I'd be cautious around compromise because generally it does create this sense of obligation and debt.
Like I'm going to give up something that I want to make you happy.
And so I'm going to expect you to sacrifice your happiness at some future date because of something I want to do.
But if you're unwilling to compromise in terms of what you're looking for, you're probably going to be looking forever.
Well, there's other things that you can do.
You can clarify your selection criteria.
Okay. And generally the fewer criteria you have, the more successful you will be.
Like only go into the section marketplace wanting just a few things.
Okay. So no like, I'm not dating him.
He's got a velcro wallet.
Oh, like the, yeah, I mean, it's like some women will disqualify really decent male partners for a trifle.
And they often do that when they're young in a washing optionality because why not?
What's your selection criteria?
Okay. So I used to have much higher selection criteria.
And one of the mindsets that it's going to sound weird, but one of the mindsets that I've worked against and has led to a lot more satisfying relationships is that I have tried not to go to the section marketplace looking for my equal or someone who can meet me at my level.
In the past, I would go there and I would like I want to talk about quantum mechanics and Shakespeare literature and go wilderness backpacking and I also do these mindfulness retreats and I'm interested in enlightenment and spiritual discipline.
And I want a woman who's interested in all of those things.
And, and I also want to be attracted to her too.
So it's like and is expensive every time you say and probablyistically you're less likely to get what you want, which redounds to actual expenses in terms of time, money opportunity in the section marketplace.
So you should be very cautious about what you say and to.
And I remember I was having some trouble meeting women that that all of my extrapolated criteria and I still had I'm sure plenty of unconscious criteria that I was exacting on them as well.
And I brought this to a mentor and he listened patiently to me and he basically when I was done said, all right, why the fuck would you want to talk to a woman about quantum mechanics?
Like you do not need a woman to do that.
Like if you really want to do that, if that's something that's really important to you, I guess that's your right.
But you just need someone who's interested in quantum mechanics to do that with that could be a man.
It doesn't have to be a woman.
And it was like, whoa, that's that's right.
And so what I did is I looked at all the things that I was going to the sexual marketplace to find.
And I thought, could I get this need met in any other kind of relationship with any other person on the planet.
Besides a woman in a sexual relationship.
And the vast majority of those things I could say yes to.
And so I made a commitment to get those needs met elsewhere.
Because it's as a man, it's generally easier and cheaper to get those needs elsewhere than in sexual relationships with women.
And that was also great because it also forced me to cultivate and maintain my non sexual relationships, both with men and women, right, which put less pressure on my female partner to be everything and anything to me.
So, you know, what was left was all of the things that either either wouldn't or couldn't get met in any other kind of relationship, which first and foremost was sex.
And it's just how it is a straight guy.
It's what it's why I go for it in a sexual relationship.
The second criteria is that she needed to be sufficiently attractive to me in the sense that I knew that if I were to walk into most rooms and want secretly to be with that guys girl that it wasn't going to work with the woman that I was with.
That's not very virtuous to admit, but it's probably better for me to acknowledge that and work with that than to pretend that that doesn't exist because it's probably not going to go away.
So she needed there needed to be lots of sex.
She needed to be sufficiently attractive to me.
And I like that. Let's say soft femininity that comes out of women in the context of a close intimate relationship that you can't get from a platonic or a professional female friend or colleague.
So those are the three things that I went looking for with the fourth criteria that she couldn't be so disagreeable that it was going to create more problems than are solved by these three criteria being met.
And this was great because I knew what I was going to a relationship for.
I wasn't bringing a lot of need or expectation.
It was harder for me to be disappointed by women.
And it also allowed me to entertain the possibility of a satisfying relationship with lots of different kinds of women.
Like outside of those criteria, she could be anyone from any kind of walk of life.
And that's great because you kind of want to have your applicant pool as wide as possible, the initial phases of a selection process.
Yeah, I can relate in many ways.
I think at my earlier years, I thought I wanted to date another entrepreneur, but I think that would have absolutely been absolutely hell.
When I say I'm an entrepreneur, someone that was just obsessed with their career.
But then where does that leave space for a relationship.
And also I, I thought I wanted to date someone that believed the things I believed I'm quite logical need evidence to believe the things I believe turns out I found the opposite.
And it's the best thing ever because she basically is everything I'm not.
And I find that really curious.
So she's very spiritual.
She takes life at a certain pace.
She's very in tune with herself.
She's got a trying at home, which she's got like her crystals and stuff on it.
And I don't believe any of those things, but the good part is that she doesn't care if I believe it.
And that's what makes it work because I can just listen.
I can look over. And there's no pressure to do some chakra meditation or whatever.
And that's what works is great.
And it sounds like you really learned a lot of lessons.
And one of the things that's really important is if you want to love, you have to accept your partner.
Like wanting them to be better, whatever that means is kind of a subtle form of disrespect because it's basically communicating that you're not good enough as you are.
So like, and people have their preferences.
Some things are so much easier to accept than others.
And that will differ from person to person.
So if whatever reason you're dealing with somebody who you honestly don't feel like you can accept, like if this never changed, it would degrade your capacity to participate in through the askliness relationship.
Just find somebody else to have a relationship with.
Don't fuck them up by trying to change them.
No, because part of the fun of loving is that they're different.
And that you do kind of eventually want to create this safe context for the people to be themselves because you can only love to the depth of your knowledge.
You can only love to the depth of your understanding, which is why to bring it back around.
It's important to slowly disappoint your partner from the marketing and the attractiveness that initially bring people out on the date.
So, so you're not just performing all the time.
You do need to do that slowly.
And to actually show the other person who you are.
So you can be seen, which increases the likelihood that you can be loved.
You cannot love something that you do not understand.
That's just superstition.
All right. What is the most important thing from your book, the value of others, understanding the economic model of relationships to get and keep more of what you want in the sexual marketplace?
What is the most important thing in this book that we haven't talked about?
I think the most important thing is that people is really understanding that people want things from other people.
And that if you want to be rich in relationships, then you need to cultivate the things that people want so that you can give them to those things.
Like the epilogue of that book is a parable from the life of Jesus about the coin of Caesar.
And I think about this in terms of relationship.
It's like render on to Caesar.
What is Caesar's? Like people need and want things from each other.
Give them what they need and want.
And you will have a satisfying relationship.
People don't want to admit that.
It's so okay. Can I talk about this for a second?
This is so important. I'll answer that indirectly first using an analogy and then directly indirectly.
Let's talk about professional relationships.
Like what makes a professional relationship a professional relationship?
The transaction in the here's what I want.
Here's what I'll give you.
Yeah. A professional relationship.
Yeah. Like what's the one thing that you get from a professional relationship that you don't get anywhere else?
I'm not trying to trick you.
I think you know this one.
Well, there's many things I get from a professional relationship.
So like me and Jack, we're in a professional relationship.
Reference is what I like to think.
We're in a professional relationship.
What do I get from Jack? I mean, I can lie.
He's just here because he likes you.
No, no, no, no. Why is he here?
He's getting a lot out of it for himself.
Is that it? Jack, are you just here?
Could you getting a lot of stuff out of this?
He loves it. Jack, you love it.
You tell him. Ah, Jack gets it.
What makes professional relationship professional is the transfer of money.
Jack shouted money by the way for everybody.
Jack just shouted money from the back.
He's always saying friendship.
He loves it. He shouted money.
No, no, does that make Jack a mercenary?
Is he just here because he's getting paid?
Let's hope not. But here's the thing.
Maybe you're aware of this, especially once things started to come back online after the shutdowns from COVID.
There was a hiring problem, like a lot of people didn't want to work.
And the companies were kind of scratching their head and they were thinking, wow, I understand.
We offer a really compelling mission.
We are a really inclusive family-like environment.
We really believe in the development of our employees.
We offer bean bag chairs and ping-pong tables.
I don't understand why anyone want to work.
Not work for us. Why is anybody in the dating professional arena is like, well, what do you pay?
Maybe don't buy bean bags.
Maybe pay your employees more.
Like everybody who's looking for a job would just say, the reason why you have trouble hiring is you're paying $3 an hour and you require a master's degree.
The issue is that for everybody's dignity, we can't be too explicit about the transaction of money even in our professional relationships.
He's here because of money, right?
But if you just like pull out a lot of cash and was like, Jack, what are you going to do for this today, buddy?
You know, will you jump over here?
He'll eventually have to choose between his self-respect and his financial goals, right?
And eventually, like many people, he'll choose his self-respect because he's going to feel undignified for what he has to do to get that money.
And so to protect people's dignity, we cover the professional interaction with a lot of bullshit, with a lot of mission and inclusivity and all these other things that generally don't solve as many problems as paying people more.
Like paying people more doesn't solve every problem from an employee's perspective, but it solves a lot of fucking problems from an employee's perspective, right?
To be fair, there are plenty of high-paying jobs like in medicine, venture capital that have terrible cultures.
Like to be a medical doctor, you have to go through the residency process, 120 hours, we're working for a dollar an hour, you're not sleeping for three days straight.
It's tough. Top tier law firms, venture capital.
They're like, if you can't take it, buddy, that's okay.
Don't swim with the sharks.
We pay you enough. I don't want to hear any complaining.
And show me the results.
So it's like, when you pay people more, they're willing to put up with not having those other things.
Okay? The issue is when a lot of good meaning, but soft-headed people take the bullshit seriously.
And they think, oh, yeah, I hear a lot.
Culture is important. We'll give people culture.
And they think that that's going to be a substitute for giving people money in a professional relationship.
And that's not true. Okay?
Do you buy that? 100%. Great.
So now we'll answer the relationship problem directly.
One of the rules about relationships is you cannot be too explicit with a transaction, because then it will feel like prostitution.
Okay? And no one wants to feel that way.
Man are a woman. And it's been, it offends the dignity of the individuals involved.
And so we cover it with a lot of bullshit.
The core of relationships is getting your needs met from another person.
If you don't give people more of what they want or need, they will be dissatisfied.
If you give people more of what they want and need, you will be able to dispense with a lot of the bullshit that society tells you relationships are actually about.
In the same way that paying people more allows companies to dispense with the bullshit around how companies are supposed to be.
That is most people that I know would rather take a high paying job and have fewer of these other fluffy things around it than vice versa.
By the same token, most people are going to be satisfied if they get their needs and desires want in a, met in a relationship.
If you want a satisfying relationship, meet the needs and wants of your partner.
And then you won't need to do all the bullshit.
And you don't need to do the bullshit.
What is the bullshit in the context of religion?
Can we speak some examples of Valentine's Day or?
Oh, there's so many different forms of the bullshit, especially from the context of a psychotherapeutic perspective.
The issue is that you have to understand what your love languages are.
Or you have to understand, I'm an INTJ and you are an ENTP.
And we want things like we have to accommodate other people's personalities.
We have to learn to communicate.
We have to learn to compromise.
We have to just love more.
We have to find God. You go to church.
You're playing out your role playing the people in your practice.
Sure. Right. And it's like you don't have to do any of those things, like especially if a lot of soft headed, but good-hearted people accept that bullshit is true.
It's like, oh, yeah, communication is important.
We'll just learn how to communicate better with my partner.
Yeah, you could be the best communicator in the world.
But if you're not giving your partner what she needs and wants, it's going to be a high conflict of difficult relationship.
And if you give her what she needs and wants, you don't have to communicate with her at all if you don't want to.
Like, I've gotten to the point where I think it's possible to have a completely satisfactory relationship with someone that you don't even speak their language.
Because a lot of what makes relationships work is the dischargement of need and want.
And a lot of communication can be accomplished nonverbaly.
So I guess the conclusion here, if I was to guess, is that we need to understand what we need, but also we need to understand what we are actually offer.
Yeah. If you're having trouble in the dating market, there's really two possibilities.
One is you're being too picky, you want too many things.
And or your value proposition is dubious that what you hope to get isn't commensurate with what you will give in return.
People don't like hearing that.
People don't like hearing.
How would you say that in a simple way?
If you want more, you have to be prepared to give more.
And the problem is people want a lot of things.
And they don't have a lot to offer.
You said it. You said it.
You're the one that said it.
I didn't say it. It's the last part.
But it is true that the more that you want, the more you have to be prepared to give.
And that's fair. Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense.
I mean, it's like simple mathematics.
It is. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.
And the question that has been left for you.
Oh, how interesting. Is there something you wanted to do in your life that you didn't do because you were afraid?
Sure. Yeah. There have been things that I haven't done because of fear.
I think on the, like I didn't go skydiving, for instance, but I don't know if that's really what she's, this person is talking about.
And I am confident in saying that I have since overcome my fear and all those important hesitations.
One of the hardest things to do is to overcome the fear of an important instrument in a often because of the kind of superficial and casual.
And casual nature of relationships these days.
It's often family. And family relationships can be very difficult to navigate because we come with a whole host of expectations about how mothers are supposed to act and fathers and brothers, et cetera, et cetera.
And sometimes people can hold on to grudges in a very long time in families.
And there's those grudges can also be maintained through the fear of being the first person to forgive and the first person to extend an olive branch.
Both sides generally feel like they've been wronged.
And so both sides are functionally waiting for the other person to act first.
And what I found is that's one of the secrets of forgiveness.
It's like four. You give it first.
And I mean, necessarily mean the other person will forgive you as well.
But one of the most important things that I've done is being willing to overcome that fear of offering the forgiveness.
And not having that be reciprocated.
And that was a fear that kept me paralyzed.
And that was a very important thing to do.
And I think that's the only way to overcome relationships in the past that I think was really helpful and important for me to overcome.
And how has that benefited you?
That full giveness. People I'm sure I've hurt you and it's very difficult to go through life and to not be hurt.
There's all kinds of things to bump into both figuratively and literally.
And I think that without forgiveness, a person's heart just fills up with anger and resentment over time.
And I think of forgiveness as an emotional survival strategy and something that I did to save my own life, to save my own heart doesn't technically involve another person.
It's a relinquishing of hatred and resentment and anger because I don't want to feel that way anymore.
And the more that you feel those things, the more that you're feeling apparatus is clouded and it's harder to sense any other kind of emotional information or energy.
And so it can kind of be a self-affilling prophecy for a lot of people who have been hurt.
They go around getting hurt even more.
So I think that was something that I was afraid to do was to was to really look at the anger inside and I kept it inside for longer than I probably needed to and to kind of clean up my heart and to clean up my relationships.
You referenced earlier, Dr.
Orion Teraban, you referenced earlier that in this day and age, you can clean up your life, you can clean up your heart, your soul, your environment, and then you can help millions of others, which is a unique opportunity that's been presented to us in 2024 with the power of the internet.
And that's exactly what you're doing in every sense of the word.
It sounds to me like you have been on a journey yourself and you've arrived at a place where you're helping millions of millions of people through not just the book that I have in front of me here today, which is essential reading for anybody who wants a really different, quite honest, challenging perspective on what's actually going on with relationships and love
and all these interpersonal dynamics that most people are afraid to talk about out loud, but also through your YouTube channel, which has been an absolute smash hit and I was on there earlier on watching many of your videos and the way that you deliver your message is both based on science and facts and solid data, but also based on the experience that's come out of your
practice of many, many men and that blend of insights, I think, presents a really important unique perspective on these issues.
So I thank you for all of the wonderful work that you're doing because it's certainly helping so many people and it's a very essential voice and you're a remarkable communicator as well.
So I think sometimes it's not necessarily what we're saying, it's how we're saying it and you say it a really impactful, honest, dare I say vulnerable way.
So thank you for the work that you do Dr.
Orion, that was high praise man.
Thank you that wow. I do hope that I'm on that positive.
I don't always get it right.
I am trying my best and learning as I go.
This was a wonderful conversation.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Stephen.
