Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Why Intimacy Breaks Down in Modern Relationships | Caitlin V | Ep. 427

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Caitlin V, a sex educator and author whose work focuses on intimacy, communication, and long-term relationship dynamics. Caitlin has spent years helping individuals and couples better understand desire, connection, and the often-unspoken issues that quietly erode relationships over time. We discussed how communication breaks down, why people struggle to ask for what they want, and how unspoken expectations erode connection over time. We also talk about common misconceptions around sex, the real value of intimacy in long-term relationships, and what actually helps couples reconnect—not in theory, but in practice. This conversation isn't about shock value or trends; it's about understanding ourselves better, communicating more clearly, and building relationships that don't slowly decay in silence. Caitlin's New Book - Harder, Better, Stronger, Longer - https://www.amazon.com/Harder-Better-Longer-Stronger-Science/dp/1401998038   Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com BetterHelp: Listeners get 10% off their first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/clearedhot  

Okay, got to red smoke. Oh, west of the smoke. Okay, Kathy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Oh, one minute. What do you tell people you do for a living? Well, it depends on the context. Random, you're at a dinner with people you don't know.

So I will sometimes say I'm an intimacy coach or a relationship coach. Do you go right out with that or do you start with an educator? Yeah, no, no, no. I like to tell people that I'm a coach because that really is the best term that describes is what I do. Okay. I learned early on in my career that when you say sex coach, certain people have like an automatic response. It doesn't even feel voluntary. They just have like a disgust response almost to the fact that sex is been able. Do those people not have sex? Then why do they have such a response? Honestly, you'd have to ask them. This happened to me early on. I was flying into

Chicago and towards the end of the flight, the guy next to me asked me what I did for a living. And I said, oh, I'm a sex coach. And he literally threw his phone down on the ground of the plane in shock. And then it was like, what if my wife knew that I was talking to you? And I was like, then she'd know that you were talking to a stranger on the place. She'd never let me come to Chicago again. I was like, this sounds like something you should talk to a therapist. Because you involuntarily sat next to somebody that you didn't know what they did for living? And we didn't have a conversation about sex at all. We hardly spoke. But there's such sensitivity around it. And I mean, that's kind of the thing, right? Is it like, it's a thing that

we all do. Imagine if we treated food or sleep with this kind of disdain. It's not a thing that we all do. That is true, but it is a thing that all of us have a relationship to. You know what I mean, Michael? Very well. Thank you for your honesty. Michael, is your mom going to be okay watching this? Because I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions during this. Does she tune out now?

I'll just tell her not to listen to this one. Yeah, sometimes she's like, if I was a parent and one of my kids were to say that, I'd be like, yeah, I'd definitely want. And the second they left the house, I'd be figuring out what they were getting at. I mean, I don't care if she does listen to it. but I'll tell her she probably won't like it. Yeah, that's fair. I have to give, my mom has been absolutely incredible

throughout my journey. I mean, I told her when I was like 16 that I was going to do sex something for a living. And she was like, okay. Yeah. How did you know? I, so there's a couple of things that happened. I figured out how to have an orgasm early on in life,

like completely, naively, innocently, like a lot of people do. I figured out how to give my body pleasure. And then when I got to the age where sex ed became a thing, and I started learning about what that all meant. and that conversation turned towards avoiding pregnancy and avoiding disease, I had the natural inclination of like, but that's not what I've experienced. Like this is a cool thing that your body's capable of doing. Why aren't we talking about the pleasure aspect of that?

Oh, that's not part of the traditional curriculum. No, and I felt people were really being robbed of that part of the conversation, which is sort of like teaching driver's head, but only teaching about accidents, right? Driving can be so pleasurable. It also gets you from point A to point B. It's like an incredible experience that you could have for pleasure as well. we don't just focus on accidents because that's not why people drive. So I had this sense that like my peers were sort of being robbed of the main point of sex in sex ed.

But I knew even before I'd ever had sex and nothing traumatic happened to me. I didn't have like a bad experience early on. I just knew this is what I was going to do for a living. It took me a while to figure out exactly how because I didn't know that you could, you know, that like you could really get a degree and work one on one of the people outside of therapy. And I knew I didn't want to be a therapist. Like I wanted to help people. I wanted to educate. My mission from early on in life has been get quality sexual education that is pleasure-centric out to as many people as possible. Why do you think that the traditional, I'm trying to think of the sex ed that I got in the educational system.

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in just black and vanilla. No fluff, no excuses, just caffeine. Need something with even more horsepower? Grape X brings 200 milligrams of caffeine, zero sugar, and grape blast that hits harder than a door charge. Find it to Walmart, Target, Kroger, or black rifle coffee.com. Black Rifle Coffee, veteran founded, American roasted, this is America's Coffee. I don't know if I missed that day or just completely vapor-locked my brain. I don't actually remember receiving any. Maybe like a little anatomy physiology and science. It's often like an afternoon.

They often split boys and girls, take you into like two different rooms. You'll have like a health teacher or maybe like a phys ed teacher. Yeah, because you wouldn't want to talk about something you do together in a mixed company. Together, no, can't talk about it together. I actually write about that in the book. And then for me anyways, they would show a video that was often sponsored by like, like a tampon or pad company that would be like, we're teaching you about your body.

And I assume that I've never, I don't know actually what they show eight grade boys, but I assume it's a complimentary video that's like, here's what's going on with your body and you might notice some things at night. Maybe a condom sponsor? Yeah, that seems too progressive. I mean, with absence only sex said,

you can't even discuss condoms. So I imagine that it might actually be, well, I don't know, I don't wanna speculate who's sponsoring this thing. What would, who would sponsor? I mean, it could actually be a religious organization that sponsors it. That would not surprise me, but I don't, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not, uh, yeah, hip on current modern day sex that. I only know what I was missing. And again, it was like an afternoon, very passable. For me, the thing that sticks out the most that I remember,

and we had really, I went to school in Michigan, we had a super quality educational class. They showed a, uh, uh, six foot projection of a close up of syphilitic genitals, like a vulva that was just completely covered in open source. Okay. And I, that memory's never left in my head because again, I thought like this is not what this whole. I appreciate there are risks involved,

but this is not what this is about. Do you think they were trying to scare? Absolutely, they were trying to scare you. Why? Like I get, so, and of course,

I say why, but in the back of my head, I'm thinking, okay, I remember being 16 to 18. Your hormones kick in. Things start to shift. But there are so,

there is so much more in life than an unwanted pregnancy or an STD. And you actually can protect yourself against the vast majority of those with about that much education and willpower and intelligence. Why would,

it just seems as if it is shame-based. I mean, Michael, you were in high school a couple years ago. What was your sex ed? So this is nice to be able to touch into the number of general.

It was actually, I remember two, 26. I remember two. When did you turn 26? Last time I made fun of you saying you were 23, you said 25. Yeah, November.

Did you get yourself a good birthday for me? Wait, in November? Uh, fourth. Oh, happy, bleeding birthday. Thank you. Yeah. What did I get you? Uh, an insult probably.

Nice. I don't even know. It was your birthday. Honestly, because I don't care about you. Yeah. Go get yourself. Did you care about your opinion? So what was sex that's like?

Yeah, no, legitimately. I remember two, like, clearly I can remember two separate times. One was in eighth grade, one was in like freshman or sophomore year. In eighth grade, they actually didn't separate boys and girls. And, uh, and, and, uh, and, lady came in and she just basically explained sex and then she actually if I'm remembering correctly she didn't even teach abstinence only she was like hey this is what it is these are the consequences it was actually pretty neutral when you explain like sex you mean like physiologically like this is

technically what meets yeah she's like this is technically what sex is that it and And kind of explained pros, cons, and... Sounds like a riveting class. It was actually very neutral. It's surprising for Butte, Montana was very neutral and just kind of threw it out there. And then in my high school class, it went deeper into actual anatomy. And so it was like kind of sex ed, but more like a physiology type thing. Is that even really sex ed?

I mean, what are you educating the audience with? Are you, like, I would like to think education prepares you for something you might encounter later in life. Right. That description, what is that? And if that were the case, I would say, then communication has to be the primary thing that you teach in sex ed. I would have to agree. Yeah. Because you can, like, the anatomy and physiology is like pretty quick.

You'll figure it out. Yeah. Well, you have 50% of the puzzle figured out with just yourself. Yeah. Actually, depending on how you go, you might have 100% of the anatomy and physiology figured out. Yeah. That part's like pretty simple, right? Human beings have been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, pretty

successfully. That's how we all got here. So that part's not actually the tricky part, right? Giving people a heads up on like, here's some of the things that can happen. Here's how to prevent those things. But like more importantly, I think about it from like a harm reduction model. You teach people what the actual risks are. And I don't mean like the unintended pregnancy, the SDI risk. I mean like the emotional risk, the mental risks. You know, here's what it's going to, when you start having sex with someone, your neurochemicals start cooking up this soup that has you feel very strongly about them because that's your body's evolutionary response to mating that is going to create the sort of like magnetic pull.

It doesn't mean that they're a good partner for you or that that's the kind of person that you want to create a life with, but you're going to start feeling those way if you start having sex with someone. Like you can educate people on those things. And here's how to say no in a way that like preserve someone's dignity. And here's how to say no against, you know, aggression. And here's, you know, and that like there are ways that we can have a conversation about this where everyone can leave it feeling good and everyone can actually like get what they want

out of it. You ask like, why is it that we don't do that? I mean, I have a lot of theories ranging from that we just like don't know any better and we're passing on what generations before us have done. I think we know better. I have my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, I do think that there is, um, I think when we keep people away from pleasure and we keep people away from, um, being empowered in, in, in this area of their life in particular, they're actually a lot easier to control. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And then that may be my most conspiratorial end on why sex ed is the way that it is. And I don't know that any individual person is thinking on that level.

Like, you know, it would make them easier to manipulate if we take them away from pleasure. But I do think that when people are like empowered in their body, they know how to like relate to themselves. They have the discipline. They like they understand that, you know, their sexuality is powerful and they're able to wield it as a tool of connection. Then they move through the world a lot differently. I mean, that's the world that I want to live in. Yeah. But those people are a lot happier.

They're a lot more satisfied. And I don't know that like happy and satisfied people, I don't know that happy and satisfied is really like the goal for for most folks. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. Well, you'd have to have happy and satisfied and then things when it all gets messed up. Yes, right.

If you're happy and you're satisfied, you buy less stuff, period. You actually really do. You do. Because you're happy and satisfied with what you have. Yes. Happiest I've ever been in my life is when I had the least amount of stuff and responsibilities. Absolutely. And I would say that like the happiest I've been is when I had great relationships that were very fulfilling.

Yeah. And then less stuff. But, you know, this is like why sex sells, right? Like, can you really use sex to sell a car if someone knows that sex is actually a divine act that you share with a person? Somehow they figured out how to do this. I don't even think they're selling the car. They just use it to get your attention and then they slide the car in and hope that you buy. Right.

But if you're sexually satisfied and happy, I don't know that that works on you. I don't think it would. Yeah. The better you know yourself, I think the less the outside manipulation or malleability actually occurs. Yes. What, I don't really know a lot of people who had went to religious schooling. Do you have any idea what they teach in sex ed? I feel like there's a little bit more of a shame aspect or abstinence or you're going to hell.

And again, people, I want people to believe whatever they want to. I'm just curious what that experience is like. Yeah. So people who grow up, whether that's religious school or like a highly religious or like a highly religious or a household that like had a more strict view of a religious view of sexuality tend to experience more shame. And they tend to actually, they will self-identify as having problems with sex and sexuality more often than folks who didn't.

And the best place to look at that is people who report to be addicted to porn are overwhelmingly people from a religious background, specifically men from a religious background. Really? Yes. Because folks who didn't grow up feeling that sexuality, was shameful or that maybe even porn or masturbation was bad, don't tend to self-identify as being addicted to it. It is those folks who's, because think about like how much, how much energy there

is behind doing something that you're not supposed to be doing. How much shame, how much, that's kink, right? Like that is a definition of kink. It's just not conscious kink. It's an unconscious kink. To do something that you feel you're not supposed to be doing. And then to feel like you have a compulsion towards doing that, like you're not in control of yourself doing that. All of that is really, like, comes from a reading of sexuality that is based in a religious upbringing, more often than not. From somebody who works in this world, what are your thoughts on porn? Positive or negative in the overall? So porn has a time and a place, just like anything else. I like to think of porn as a tool. Okay.

I think porn can be an incredible tool, and I believe that people should have access to more erotic creativity. One of my jobs as a coach is just to give people ideas that break them out of the box of what they think their sex should look like. some of those ideas come from porn. So they come to me and they go, Caitlin, you know, I need to be able to like jackhammer my wife for 15 minutes in order for her to be satisfied. And I'm like, have you asked her? Yeah, you said.

I don't know that that's what she needs. Where did you get that idea? So that often comes to important. That's my concern with it is an unrealistic expectation that is applied to the real world, especially when, I mean, I didn't grow up with one of these devices. I, to this day, remember that. the first playboy that I found. It's a formative experience in most young men's lives.

Yes. What are you laughing at, Michael? Just because you're, you had a digital version of that? It's just funny. He's just like, yeah. No, it's totally different. I remember the first playboy I found under my cousin's bed and being like, what is in my God? Wow, this exists, right? But now people way younger than me, you're probably not an accidental keystroke away from it, but your access is just. You're this close to it at all times. Yeah, I mean, you can, on a device, you're like three clicks away from the biggest repository of adult content ever made. You know, remember, like, we didn't, just the same way that we didn't evolve to have access to, like, corn syrup and all of our food. We did not evolve to have access to erotic visuals all of the time.

And that's what worries me. Again, I mean, if people are into porn, my thing is this, as long as it's adults and it's consensual, I don't actually give a shit what you're doing. Like, if you want to wear a dive mask and hit yourself with a shit-filled panty hose, if that's what turns your screws, as long as your partner or you're by yourself, listen, I'm not going to judge you externally. I have thoughts, but I'll keep them to myself,

unless you ask, but that's an adult. Somebody in informative years whose brain is informed, who has access to that, and there is a difference between finding a two-dimensional image in real life, and then, I mean, you talk about AI and what they can create too. I don't, I think that can break a young man or woman's mind. And I don't know how you unwind that later in life.

I don't know that you ever fully do. I think that the distinction there is like, does someone feel like they can have a healthy relationship with their own sexuality, despite whatever they were exposed to early on? And I think that's very doable for most people. But I totally agree with you. I think that porn is amazing at doing certain things. It can open our eyes to all kinds of erotic possibilities that we might not have discovered otherwise.

And those don't have to be like aggressive or violent. That could be like, oh, I didn't even realize that like it turned me on. to have like a to have my mouth be covered because then I can't make any noise and then that part of my brain turns off and now I don't have to think while I'm having sex like that's great amazing you can learn that that's weird shit you could learn that's weird that's pretty run-of-the-mill I was thinking you meant like duct tape or a Ziploc bag with like no no I remember there was a moment where we had a toy it's okay if I tell like a personal story here you are on the internet you can tell whatever you want to Michael might pass it I'm gonna be honest

He's not that experienced. Keep breathing. Feel your butt in the chair. If you pass out and fall over, do you want us to revive you or just kind of let you go? Yeah, just let me go. He's going to revive. He's going to be the one that revived. Where is they going with that?

Okay, so I had this. Pineapple, Michael. That's your safe word. If it gets too far. It would be great for like an hour for now. He's like, pineapple. I'm out. He runs out of the room.

Wouldn't be the first time. So a former partner and I, we were having sex. I had this little flogger. I had a plastic handle and like the little dangly threads coming off. Okay. It's like a little sensation toy and you usually use it like this, right? Like you smack somebody with it. And he turned the plastic handle to its side and like put it in my mouth as a bit.

And my mind was blown. Not because like, not because it necessarily felt like amazing, but it was more like the creativity that went into that. I was more like, oh, yeah. Like, of course you could use that part as a bit. It didn't occur to me that that could be anything other than a handle, but of course it can, right? And like this is just a matter of like using a tool creatively.

We could think about like, you know, if you're a great chef, you know how to use spices creatively. You know how to use like waffles creatively, whatever, you know. Like you have more access to creativity because you've seen more stuff. You've watched a library of things and people having ideas. And I think that's really, really beneficial because people really get stuck on what sex needs to look like. And then, you know, once that creativity is gone, they get really tunnel vision on anything that's wrong, anything that's getting in the way of what they think it ought to look like. And often that can come with a lot of self-blame instead of reflection and exploration.

Like what is it that maybe I need to shift or do differently in order to have a pleasurable experience? It's like, damn it, why doesn't my body work to do the thing that I think it should be doing? On the other hand, there are some other risks associated with overusing porn for adults, externalizing our turn-on and putting all of like what gets us going outside of us. So we lose connection to our own like internal wellspring of eroticism. And eroticism is like a life force. within us, right? Like, it is literally life force itself in that it's how people come into the world, right? It's like through sex and sexuality. So when you reach a point where your entire

relationship to your own sexuality exists outside of your body, it's going to be really hard for you to control your ejaculation, to get hard when you want to, to feel like you can connect to another person. Then, especially for younger men in particular, who grew up watching porn and having access to porn in the internet, they are experiencing erectile dysfunction at higher rates than previous generations. And it's because a real person in front of you, A, cannot compete with the internet, right? This is a true story. Where you're seeing, you know, you could, you could be watching 20 or 30 people have sex in one evening. You could select the exact kind of woman and experience and position that you're looking for and only serve that to yourself. Or it could be 15 at the same time,

right? So, so real person doesn't really compare. And also, real person, a lot more complicated. So much more nuance going on. Watching porn, very straightforward, you're not part of the action. Like, I like to think about it, like, um, uh, watching, uh, like, reaction videos or watching, like, other people do stuff on the internet. Like, some people are really into, like, watching folks. Oh, there's whole channels created around that. Oh, there's so much. They create content by reacting to other people's content, right?

Or like they, you know, I remember being shocked that there was a, um, channels where, like, kids opened toys and other children enjoy watching them. Oh, they mean the ones with hundreds of millions of views. Yeah, I was just, for me anyways, maybe this is like giving me as a way as an elder millennial. I was just sort of like, I don't really understand what we're. we're doing here. Like, what is the joy in doing that? But there is something that's very safe and very, like, sanitary about watching someone else do something, whereas, like, having sex

with another person is very, very vulnerable. It's very, it's raw, right? It's like, it's very physical. It's, it is, it is, like, happening right now. It is a sensory experience. Whereas watching two people or five people have sex on a screen is like, it's a very separated from your experience, very disassociated experience. What do you find it looks like when they externalize to the, to that on the extreme end. Are they just kind of detached from that sexuality and unable to even be interested, absent that external stimulus via specifically the porn? That can happen or their performance anxiety becomes so extreme that it actually manifests in their body and then they end up coming to me. So those are the men who come to work with me. Primarily, they have premature ejaculation or right

to all dysfunction or delayed ejaculation or they feel like they have no connection in their relationship or they lack the confidence to go and look for a relationship. Like they come to me because sex was part of their breakup or part of their divorce and they want to make sure that like that part of their life feels secure before they go out and looking for another partner. The role that porn plays in that is that it sets the expectation so high that they they no longer have a grasp of what their own sexuality looks like. Or they, you know, for men who have been trying to get to orgasm as quickly as

possible and they're watching porn so they're externalizing their turn on. And then they're also rushing their body through it. And bodies are really good at patterns. They're like really, really good at getting from point A to point B over and over again and figuring out the shortest way to get there. And by the way, anything that has to do with mating or passing on your genetic material, your body is extra incentivized to develop patterns that allow you to get there faster and more efficiently. And so the consequence of porn is often that you have this unrealistic expectation for yourself, you've often trained your body. And then on the other hand, so there's the premature ejaculation guys who are going fast.

But then there's another category of guys who watches porn for an extended period of time, like two to four hours, maybe even every single day. Do these people not have jobs? Or are they the pop-up window dude at work and the boss comes like, ha, just doing an Excel spreadsheet. I think this, a guy asked me this one time live and I was like, wait, let's just do some math together. Because if you're doing this two hours a day. That's 20 hours a week, a work week, if that's four hours a day.

That is an incredible amount of time to dedicate to anything. And you know on the weekends they're going well past three hours a day. Right. And so what they're doing is they're not letting themselves reach ejaculation. They're edging. They're getting close to the orgasm and going over the edge. He taught me that turn. Also gooning.

Gooning. Ooh, I heard that one recently. What does that one mean though? It's basically what you described of like hours at a time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like onomatopoeia.

You goon. Yeah. What the hell people? Right. Well, again, again, and it's sort of like, like, our bodies were not evolved to do this, right? So this is like, you know, when I have like, you know, what's an actual example. When I have like chocolate covered cherries in my house, my body did not evolve to like walk by those and say no to them, right? I'm just going to finish the bag. That's how that is. So I don't buy them because I know that I would be putting like the two hour. Yeah, yeah. I just can't like bring it into the house. So so for some folks, they have like a compulsion towards doing this. I also think it takes the place of having a romantic or intimate relationship a lot of the time. And they kind of tell themselves like this is, maybe they're not even conscious enough to tell themselves, but they're like, this is some form of a replacement for the kind of relationship that I would like to have, but don't feel like I could have.

And therefore this is, um, but there's so much more to a relationship than just that. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so anyways, those guys end up often with delayed ejaculation, meaning that they cannot reach orgasm when they're with a partner.

And again, it's like, it's just, this is what you were training your body to do over and over and over again. It is just running the pattern that you have been giving it, But people think that because porn is distinct from, you know, partner sex that their body will somehow behave differently. But the lizard part of your brain, which is a part that really controls the majority of your sexuality, it doesn't know the difference. Lizards can't, they don't have imaginations. They can't project into the future or in the past. They don't know that that's a screen, right?

So that part of your brain does not know that what's happening on the screen is distinct from what's like what's actually happening in your physical life. It cannot know the difference. That's when you become the edge lord, which is a term. my daughter taught me, which I once I looked it up, I said, hey, you can feel free to not share your entire vernacular with me. I thought edge lords were people on the internet that just said stuff to drum up conflict. That's what I think. That's the last time I've heard that term used, but let's remember this came from Julia. Yeah, she's younger than all of us. Yeah, she's younger than all of us. She's the one who had Guning. Oh, really? Yeah, she knew that one. Yeah, I mean, the language is changing.

Someone who deliberately tries to be shocking, dark, provocative, or offensive, especially online. Whatever. Is there an edging lord? That's your truth. Yeah, edging lord might be. My truth is the edging lord. Damn it. I can't keep up with the vernacular.

No, I mean, on one hand, it's great that we have, we can decide that we have a shared language to describe things. I guess. But it is happening so fast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, generational differences are. So I've heard 80, 20, or 90, 10 porn consumption man, woman.

What do you think that is? I actually think that that is only true in older generations. Really? Younger generations, a lot more women, like almost parody, almost 50, 50. 50. And it's actually different in different parts of the world. So I remember seeing, oh, God, what is the big, this is how much porn I don't watch. What is the, what's the big porn site?

Only fans? No, the actual, the orange porn hub. Orange porn hub, thank you. Pornhub does an incredible end of the year review where they share the analytics that they have, that they've collected over the year. No, it's incredible. I bet it is. You should pull it up.

And I think one year was like the- Hold that shit up, Michael. There was one country, I want to say it was the Philippines where women actually watched more porn than men in the country. So I think it's younger. I think younger generations.

So I live with a woman who's 10 years younger than me. And even just in that time, like smartphones happened when she was in high school. It didn't happen for me. I had a Blackberry at one point. I had one for a couple years too. Yeah, I had a blackberry. When I was in college, there was no such,

we didn't get images like easily on our phone. What did you find, Michael? You said, it's probably a 30-page report. Because it's Montana, it's blocked. What? Yeah, Portland homes blocked in Montana. Does it want you to put an ID?

Is it age-gated? Yeah. I'm assuming you're going to find it somewhere else. Upload your ID. Use your VPN. Do you not have a VPN? We would never skirt around laws. I'm sure the Australian social media ban is doing great.

Actually, we were just talking about that on the last episode. We pulled it up. They're doing age verification. IDs, which actually is going to help shut, even on a VPN, if you still have to show your ID with the selfie. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So this is for social media? Social media in Australia. This is for porn. It's just

like a very basic breakdown. Top 20 countries. US, we are again. I believe this is 25. It is. It's 25 at the top. We are a beacon to the rest of the world. We are number one. Champion. We are the champions. Jesus. Top 20 countries. Okay, so look at it follows the 2080 rule.

20% of countries are responsible for about 80% of traffic. Yep, there you go. or 20 countries. Okay, keep going. Netherlands, making the top 20. Let's get to the other stuff. Okay, most searched terms. Hentai was the most searched term followed by Milf.

I know the Milf one. None of these terms changed positions. Okay, so same as 2024. SFW content. I love that, do you want to know something cool about Milfs that I learned recently from a guest on the Holly Randall podcast? So before the proliferation of only fans, where content creators were selling directly to consumers.

You had porn studios that were making the majority of the adult content, right? And it was the prevailing belief in porn studios that people wanted like young virginal women. They wanted 18 years old, 20 years old. And so the majority of porn that came out while studios were in charge really preferred very young women. And by the time you were like in your late 20s, you pretty much had to retire as an adult store. OnlyFan comes around. And now you have this like democratization of content, right? where people are like literally giving money directly to the creator,

they're voting with their dollars from who they want. Suddenly, MILF is the number one term. So they actually, which is awesome, right? It wasn't that like men and consumers of porn were not like really necessarily desirous of like barely legal women across the board. Now they were looking at the soccer mom,

getting out of the Honda Odyssey. Yeah, and I hear all the time like they want a woman who's sexually mature. She knows what she wants. They want a woman who actually experiences pleasure, knows like how to ask for things, how to communicate about sex. Like people, when they're choosing who they want to like engage with sexually, they want a competent partner.

I think that's cool. I think that's like that was that made me feel really, really good about the world. Okay, let's see here. Oh, okay. Roll play fantasies increased in 2025, including driver. Rose by 98%. And driver, plumber, and chef. So they're looking for creative blue collar.

Yeah. Driver. Cheating in a fair videos were of interest this year. That's not great. Grew 90. It's cheating grew 94% and Cuckold grew 73%. To be honest, Michael might be 40%. What is that of all that assertions? Notice he's in a chair right now watching us. She is. I can't see any of his screens from here. All you can see is his mustache. You know what? There could be correlation to just like if the term Cuckold made it into a couple of major media outlets and people had never heard that. And then they start looking for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that could be more reflective of just mainstream coverage of these issues.

Oh, Colplay kiss cam fiasco. Oh, there we go. Yes. You think it might have contributed to the Office of Fair searches. A 388% increase for the term CEO. All right. Well, yeah, see, like, sex is so reflective of the world that we live in and just like whatever is in the cultural conversation.

What's number five there? What is the femme boy? Is that just an effeminate male? Yeah. Yeah, I believe so. And then safe for work content increasing safer work ASMR is up 56%. Meanwhile, the podcast category, I think that means actual podcasts. I don't think that means like podcast.

You know how you've been gone the last couple of weeks? It seems pretty sturdy. I thought we were standing the table after I got back. There's like a cool waterproof blanket under here. Michael, why have you not clicked on this? You can peruse the year in review. Well, it's going to take us to... Well, click yes.

Your Pornhub. See... Oh, okay, so this is interesting, too. Well... Verify your age. Click yes. As you know, you're elected officials in Montana. So you need to have an account.

Say, go sign into your account. Right. Yeah, you don't have to pretend to your account. I know this is your work computer, but... Yeah, I'm not sure if there's a way we can... There's not. Well, that's fun. Oh, okay.

I didn't. actually read a content you're right. So, okay, so this is one of the ways in which adult companies are responding to the AV laws is by just taking their content down. So like, I know you can't access some browsers and some other major porn sites in at least Florida. I wasn't sure about Montana.

And so you talked a little bit about like the risk of people who are underage, getting exposure to porn early on in life. Like that is obviously something that we need to solve for, right? But we need to solve for it in a way that preserves people's adults, consenting adults, abilities to access those things. And right now, because of the shame-based culture that we live in, we have a pretty

high number of people who don't want to be associated with the porn site, right? Like, I understand. I don't want to upload my ID for, I don't want to upload my ID for anything. Agree. Right? When they're, like, verifying your bank account, no. Like, why do you need my pick? And you need me to turn left and right?

Like, that feels like a huge violation. So I understand why someone would not want to do that in order to access adult content. And at the same time, folks like me who do not make adult. content that is meant for sexual gratification, but do make content that is sexual in nature for educational purposes are also not sure where we're going to shake out in this law. So, you know, I hope that my content can be accessible to folks who are over the age of 18, and we're clear about age-gaining folks and telling them that it is only for people over the age of 18.

But that said, 99% of everything that I have ever made is, is, like, appropriate for anyone who's having sex. Yeah. You know, I only want 18 and over to reach it, but it is also not like meant to cause people to experience like arousal and to be gratified in that way. No, you're an educator. Yeah. I mean, I would say for that, who is targeting the under 18 crowd? Because most people are probably either at that point of being sexually active plus or minus a couple years from 18.

Yeah. is, I mean, at some point you almost would, you would want to target the most, I'll use high risk. Yes. Yeah. We want to get people early on in life before they develop bad habits, really. I mean, and when they're really impressionable, one of the things that I actually write about in the book is the outsized effect that early sexual experiences have on us.

Like your first, first time, first few times, first relationship have a way bigger impact on the rest of your sex life than any other partner you're going to have. And if you're conscious of that and you're aware of that, you can choose wisely. or you can do the work to sort of unravel the impact of that, especially if it had some negative impacts. But for folks who have like an early, healthy, you know, emotionally stable relationship in which they're exploring sex and sexuality, that's a beautiful foundation to build the rest of your life from.

But for those folks who weren't so fortunate, they have more undoing to do later on in life. So, yeah, we do want to reach them. Yeah. I mean, they seem to be the most vulnerable population. Yeah. And there are people doing some incredible work. on educating folks who are under the age of 18,

and there are all kinds of excellent resources that are age-appropriate. Because, you know, we talk about like the talk or the birds and the bees, but it's not a single conversation, right? I never even got that from my parents. Oh, really? Yeah.

I insisted on it because I was like, I was like this. When I was younger, yeah. Yeah. How to go? You know, it went great, actually. Because, you know, I demanded it because I was already hearing it from other people. So people's older siblings, my friends in middle school, you know, they were,

They were sharing details. And so I went to my mom and I said, we need to talk. And I need you to confirm that this is true or not. And she was like, you know, she heard out everything that I had heard and said, like, that's true and that's not really true. And that shouldn't be true for people your age. And, you know, if you have any additional questions, I think she was shocked at how early that came up for me.

I think she was hoping that it had not yet. And it was actually way late. It would have been nicer to have that conversation with her instead of like piecemailing it together. Yeah. So how did you go from 16 and knowing you wanted to work in the, field to where you are now. I mean, your YouTube channel has almost a million subscribers. It's very clear that people are searching for this type of content. Many of the videos are

multiples of millions of views. I mean, it, and again, people can pretend that sexuality isn't a part of their life. I mean, those people are called liars, except for that I guess, I'm sure there's people out there where it's legitimately not. I mean, I think they're probably a fractional percentage, but I mean, I think it affects all of us whether we're interested in it or not. We live in a culture that has a lot of sexual messaging and advertising and all that. So I did not discover that I wanted to work directly with people right away. I decided to do sex ed. And so I was like working with groups and young people in the evening.

But then I went and got a degree in conflict studies actually and in like art history. And I had a minor in Japanese and I got to do this like very nice like liberal art school. And my thesis then was on sexual health as a human right in international law. Like all of the things that had been codified to that point that were like designed to protect. sexual sovereignty and autonomy and just like the lovely international things that lacked any teeth and any sort of like actual, I don't know, I don't want to say they lacked impact, but that's what I was interested in saying at that time. They may have lacked impact.

Yeah, they did, I think, across the board, but that was a while ago. So anyways, I left that and I decided to go get a master's in public health because I knew that I could go and study sexuality at that level, at a population level. And I was living in Indiana at the time. So Indiana University was the home of the Kinsey Institute. It's a fantastic institution for studying sexuality. So I went there. I got a master's in public health.

I got invited to follow my advisor there to the University of Texas School of Public Health to work on my doctorate. And I was in my doctoral program and so miserable. I did not like being in the ivory tower. I did not like the feeling of like we're going to just continue to publish and public and publish and other academics and researchers are going to read it. I had this feeling of like, what about the people who need this? What about the folks who are like suffering right now today? And the little bit of information could change the rest of their life. I mean, if you could keep

their marriage together, it could, it could have them, you know, seek the kind of support that they need. It could have them have a conversation that would change the course of their entire sexuality. Like, that's what I was living for. So I was always teaching at night and holding groups. And eventually I realized that I did not want to continue to pursue an academic path because I was good at it and I was going to keep going at it, right? Like I was going to end up being a tenure track professor and I was just never going to get out of the ivory tower. So I left that and a friend kind of gave me the word coaching. I was out for lunch and I said, I just want to help people. Like I just want to help people enjoy what I believe is a birthright.

And she was like, oh, that kind of sounds like a coach. So I started wearing that moniker. and as soon as I started identifying to people like, oh, I'm a sex coach. People would just like waterfall me with all kinds of information. Like I didn't need to ask any follow questions. They would be like, oh my God, it started when I was 14 in the babysitter. And let me tell you.

And I'd have to be like, look, I'm not your sex coach. You know, like we haven't. Yeah. I'm a lawyer. I'm not your lawyer. You know, but I knew that I was on to something. And this has been me my whole life. I was the girl that when my friends had to take a pregnancy test at the Burger King

bathroom, like I was in the stall. Right? I was the, one of my friends called me and told me he put icy hot on his balls when I was in high school. Classic mistake. Call me and was like, what should I do? And by the way, that guy's dad was a doctor. I was like, I'm not qualified to answer this question. Well, you waited out. You waited out.

You waited out. He called me on my parents landline at 10 p.m. to be like, my dick's on fire, you know? I was, wash it off. I have no further information for you. What life was like before we had the internet that we do today? Michael, just had a curiosity. If you were to Google, what should you do? if you put icy hot on your balls.

What does it come up with? I think it's going to say something like wash with a castile soap would be my guess now. And then give it 20 years later. And give it some time. Yeah, yeah. I've had some time to think about it. And it turns out icy hot. It's going to suck for a bit regardless of what you do.

Breathe. Breathe. If icy hot is applied to the testicles, immediately rinse the area with large amounts of cool water to remove the chemical as it can cause severe burns, blistering an intense irritation. Can I see hot? I guess if you're allergic to it. Yeah, apparently. your reaction to Icy Hot.

Yeah. 20 years too late, Google. Anyway. There you go. That's the pearl of wisdom for the listeners for today. That's what you're getting out of this episode. Goodbye.

Inquiring minds went on and we might have saved somebody to Google. We could have, Mills are still number one and cold water. So how did you get your first client? I was just posting on Facebook actually. Facebook. I just literally, I went on Facebook. I went on Reddit.

I was like, hey, I'm in Chicago. I am a sex coach. I was charging $25 an hour because I felt like I could just give someone $25 back. Like, you know, if they were like, you didn't do a good job, good, have your money back. You know, the coaching industry is unregulated. So there wasn't, like, I didn't have a need to go get a certification. I had already been teaching this stuff and learning about it since I was 16 years old.

I used to have my dad drop me off at Barnes & Noble. And I would read the science sex books, like not the erotic fiction ones, like the, like the anatomy and physiology of sexuality and women's anatomy of arousal. Like, I had been studying that stuff for a decade at that point. And so I just realized that the quickest way to helping people was just to offer my time in exchange for money. Like, that's it. I'm a coach. You can have your money back if I fail you.

How quickly did you get your first inquiry? I didn't even remember who. Actually, I do. I do. There was a client early on that changed how we ended up here in particular. Because at first I was working with anybody. I worked with women. I worked with couples.

I worked with men. Like gay men, it didn't matter. Like, you got sex problems? I'll help you solve them. And then. I worked with a young ride-chair driver. And he came to me because he was dealing with premature ejaculation. And he also, because of that, was like completely lacking in confidence, just felt like his

self-esteem was low. He didn't know how to date or approach women. And so we worked together for several months. And then, like, I couldn't get him to schedule our last session. He was kind of dodging me. And at first I felt like, oh, my God, like maybe his P.E. came back. I failed him. He doesn't want to talk to me anymore.

I don't know. And then sure enough, he called me. Can we have the last session in person? And mind you, I was just, I wasn't on the internet really at the time. I was just doing everything locally. And he goes, I want to meet you at a park. And I was like, oh my God, he wants my kidneys. All right.

I'll be the guy with the ski mask. Totally. Yeah. So I was like a public park, fine. All right. And sure enough, I get to the park and I see him like trudging through the park with like a giant cooler over his shoulder. And I was like, that's what he's going to put my kidneys in, right?

And he sets it down in front of me and opens it up. And it's full of like cut up frozen watermelon. And he's like, I brought this for you. Like it's just something to say thank you. I figured we could sit. It's not laced with anything. Yeah. He's like, I figured we could just sit in the park in the summer and eat some

watermelon together. And then he, and this, I cannot make this up. Reaches into his pocket and hands me like the stickiest, goziest wad of cash that I could imagine. Watermelon juice on it and everything. And he's like, and this is the tip. This is a tip for you because you changed my life. He's like, literally he gave me like his ride share driver tips because he felt like he,

what we had done together had changed his life so significantly that like he wanted to go out of his way in that way to thank me. And that was a huge eye-opening moment for me because I realized that this thing that, you know, I had not intended to set out to do, which like help a guy overcome performance anxiety and help him to figure out how last longer in bed, like had changed his world in such a significant way that, that like I needed to pay attention to that. I really believe in like answering the call that's being presented to you. And I had a couple other really intense experiences like that where I was able to help someone. It was easy for me.

It was fun for me. I enjoyed helping these guys like figure out what was going on for them. And then they expressed to me the level of transformation that that had allowed them throughout their entire life. Help them to heal a relationship with their parents. Help them to ask for a raise or leave a job with a boss. that was abusive towards them. And these are sex-related issues that cascaded well beyond outside of that particular zone, if you will.

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. It's very musashi of you. What is it once you know the way broadly you can apply it to everything? I just completely argue that quote. Oh, I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same, same but different, right? Yeah.

If you are kind of like stuck up or you feel like you have to do things just the right way in order to be worthy or you feel like not enough in one area of your life, chances are that that does spill over into the majority of other areas in your life. your life. And if you are always rushing to get something done or feeling like you can't perform up to the expectations that you have and you're not allowed to actually like ever speak about that allowed or you have a great deal of shame, like all of that. I like to think about sex is sort of one on ramp to self-inquency or self-reflection or personal development. And there are other on-ramps. You can explore your relationship with money. You can explore your relationship with your parents.

You can explore your relationship with like your physical body and exercise. All of those are perfectly valid on ramps. They all kind of lead towards the same thing, right? Which is developing, I think anyways, a relationship to yourself, of knowing yourself, of having some degree of practice, of discipline of like you develop as a person. They're all on ramps to the same place. And I like to think that if you choose the on ramp of sex, that we're starting at a particularly deep point in the person. We're going to like a very deep, vulnerable core piece of you as an individual. And so if we work on that, it is naturally going to start to unfold as sort of like if you unravel this one knot that's sort of like very deeply at the center of all the other knots, you're going to

loosen up everything. Yeah, I find those knots can be regardless of what it is. If there's an area in your life that you are struggling with or just consuming your attention, this is just me speaking for myself, it's like a black hole. It has gravity that pulls, it doesn't pull things into a different dimension. It just pulls everything closer to that knot and it all starts getting intertwined. So that makes sense. Yeah, that's true. I think that that's true, especially for like things that feel like addictions or, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So how long working with men and women and couples until you started seeing patterns? So I'm a researcher, right? So I came from, I came from, I came from, you know, I had 24-hour access to

a chlamydia lab. I used to drive samples. That's a really weird sentence. I know. It's one of the weirdest thing about it. I used to receive urine samples in the mail. I had such a interesting job. And it was my job, by the way, to, like, reach out to and find these people and convince them to join our study and to get tested and to, you know, pee into a cup and mail it to me in downtown Indianapolis, so that I would drive it over to the lab. Before they defrosted, by the way. It was such a, what a time that was. So I went from, from, like, having this, like, very, very intense background in scientific rigor to being in the wild west of coaching and just taking on clients who had no real relationship to each other,

but I was sort of using them as controls against each other to test different things. So I also was fortunate in that, like, in my formal education, I had not been exposed to, and it's partially because there isn't, a lot of research or literature that was specific to premature ejaculation or performance anxiety. So I was going in and able to actually, like, develop a theory from pretty much nothing. It was like doing grounded research because I didn't have exposure to that. And when I did look into the scientific researches, it was very limited at the time. This is 10 years ago.

It's still very limited. It's not a subject that gets a lot of funding. There's not a lot of money to be made off of premature ejaculation in particular. They do prescribe SSRIs off label to treat premature ejaculation. But that's not the major source of income for anyone developing and selling SSRIs. Yeah. So there's not a lot of money to be made in it. So there's not a lot of research going into it.

So I instead would, you know, speak to client A and then tell him to try test A and then speak to client B and have him try B and C and then switch it up and then see what client B did with C's protocol. And I would just keep notes across all of them. And eventually I would see that there are certain patterns that really developed. The biggest pattern is across the board, and this is true for all performance things, anxiety is, I think, tension. That's the word that I used to describe it. And that is physical tension, especially like tightness in the pelvic floor, tightness throughout the hips.

A lot of people are carrying around. Literally, like, clenching for lack of that, toward it just being. Yeah. Because think about it, when you feel a certain degree of like pressure to perform, that often does manifest in the body as like a holding, right? Like I got to roll my shoulders back. Maybe I stop breathing very deeply. Okay.

Maybe you have specialized training in like how maybe not to do that. I just accept moderate and mediocre performance in all aspects of my life. So I let go and just like, fuck it. It's going to be what it is. And let go is exactly it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is releasing tension. Totally.

Like, I don't know if I'm good enough to do this. Like, I'm probably not. So fuck it. Let's go. Well, find out, right? Yeah, exactly. But if you're coming into something like, I have to do this and I have to do this. I know what you're talking about.

And the future of my relationship depends on it and whether or not she stays with me or whether or not I'm a man depends on this, right? Especially if you're, if you're, you know, they say that like it's money, muscles and mojo is what makes a man feel like a man often. The triple M. And if you feel like you don't have access to, you know, a like solid core in any of those, or if you feel like you're, you know, maybe like you don't have a lucrative job or you don't feel like you're traditionally attractive or tall or hands, like there are a lot

of ways in which sex comes to mean a whole lot more than just connection and pleasure for people. Yeah. So you come into sex with all of that baggage, right? And then you're holding tension in your physical body often. And people literally hold tension to just like to reach orgasm, right? So you're coming in with a bunch of tension already. You're putting yourself up to having an orgasm a lot faster.

But there's also quite a bit of tension that occurs in your mind and in sort of like your heart and in your emotions as well. If you feel like you can't maybe speak these things out loud because you can never let your partner know that you're feeling fear or you're feeling insecure. all of this kind of adds up to someone who's not actually capable of being present and just doing the dance, you know? Which probably makes it even worse, especially if they have historical failure in that. Like that's a... Exactly. That sounds like you're on a water slide to hell. Totally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each time it gets worse. Because each time you have that experience, you're thinking, oh, my God, I hope that you use ED for example. Like, okay, so I lost my erection the last time that I had sex with this person. Oh, my God. If it happens again, what if it happens again? I can't, like, stand the thought of it happening again. Now you're here.

moment, buddy. Totally, right. What chance does your body have of performing when you're like, you know, like you're watching yourself from outside of yourself. How, what prayer do you have of being present, right? And this is why I say that like the things that I have noticed that are true across the entire spectrum. This is true for men, it's true for women, are the same things that allow us to be present

and to like slow down enough to relate to another person and relate to ourselves going back to porn. and porn allowing us to put all of our attention outside of ourselves. In order to have sex with another person and have it be really fulfilling, you have to be willing to put your attention inside of yourself, tracking your own body, your own thoughts, et cetera, and tracking their body at the same time. It takes practice to develop that sort of skill.

And if you're overly tracking yourself or if you're overly tracking the other person, then you're not remaining balanced. You're not like centered enough to like really be present in the experience. That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. Other than tension, What else do you see causing maybe in couples?

There's got to be, I just, I think one of the human conditions is thinking we're incredibly unique. And I've come to the realization that we're pretty much like 98% the same. And we all have kind of the same thoughts and we're capable of negative self-top or getting stuck somewhere else. I just, I feel like there's probably patterns and couples that you see as well. And I would imagine, this is a hypothesis, a lot of it stems from communication as well. I would argue that pretty much all of it stems from communication and can also be cleaned up,

at least in part through communication. A lot of people jump straight to tactics and skills and they want to like, you know, like, teach me how to touch her in such a way that like she melts or she has an orgasm or whatever. The skills and the techniques are, they're simple actually. And honestly, I can't tell you exactly what's going to work for your partner. The best thing I can do is teach you a system that will help you to assess and work with her to figure out what works for her on any given moment. all of the things that have to come prior to that are related to your ability to communicate about your intimacy.

And is that where the issue comes as a whole? So I think that my sort of central theory is that we all evolved to have sex successfully, right? Again, this is literally how we all got here. You and I wouldn't be sitting here if that weren't the case. Exactly. 400,000 years of uninterrupted sexual reproduction. And only like recently IVF and options that don't involve sexual reproduction. really 99.9% of all humans.

Anything that is stopping us from having a sex life that is at least satisfying is something that is actually like gumbing up the works that we are born with. It is something that is coming from outside of us or internally in the sense that it's like a thought or an emotion or a pattern that's coming from inside of us or inside of the relationship.

But it's really, I like to think about it, it's like it's all blockages. This is meant to flow. Like you have, you are born essentially with a system where the flow is unobstructed. And then the things that we pick up along, the way, the things that our partners say to us, you know, digs, the pain that we experience,

heartbreak, shame messages from our schools and our peers and our parents, like all of these things start to plug up the flow. And the cool thing about what you can do as a couple, if you're willing to do it, and you have to have two people that are willing to do it, is you can sort of highlight for each other where those blockages are.

And sometimes the blockages are too, intense for you to just work together and you need to bring in a third person or a professional. But the cool thing is that what I have found in the couples that I've worked with is, if there is a will, there is a way. You can find a place where both people can experience what it is that they want, sexually and beyond. But you have to be willing to put in that work. And a lot of that work is communication.

A lot of that work is in, you know, it's in the nature of communication. Do you find that they may be the issue? because they don't know how to start the communication or have the conversation. Because I mean, sex or sexuality, I mean, if you're with a partner or somebody for a long time, I would hope that it could be easier, but I think sometimes it could actually even be harder because you could be more ingrained in your own personal BS or your habit or routine or whatever that is. It's not the easiest conversations to have, right?

You could, there could be a level of embarrassment or like, you know, fragility or you feel like you're a little bit too vulnerable. Like I get that. Is it, but are you just seeing people that are not willing to have the conversation or they just don't know how to start it? It's definitely both. Yeah. We don't have great models for communication, right? And when I talk to clients, sometimes they have a level of resistance around even developing and like adhering to those models of

communication because he can feel a little forced, a little too structural. Maybe even like, I've heard a client say like, this is too corporate in nature. I don't want to do that. But the truth is that models and structures allow us to have great results. And we know that from running a company. We know that, right? Like when we have a repeatable system, when we have a breakdown at my company, I know exactly how we're going to repair it.

I know exactly what we're going to do in the next meeting. We're going to spend time on that one thing. We're going to use the system that we have put in place. And that allows everything to run really smoothly. But for some reason, we're like, that takes the romance out of relationships. No, the nightmare in businesses, if you don't have a system and you're winging it every single day. And the same is true for a relationship.

So I think that there are, yes, these conversations are difficult to have. Sometimes we're totally unpracticed at having them. Sometimes we've just never done it before. And so our lizard brain is like, this is for sure going to kill me. I'm definitely going to die, right? Skydiving, for example, right? Like the first time, every part of your brain, I'm not done it, but I'm assuming, has to be going, like, I'm going to die. And then you're like, oh, I didn't die.

I can do that again, right? And then the like, I'm going to die part has to quiet down a little bit over time. Same is true for having conversations about sex. I never had the I was going to die. I think the resounding narrative in my head was you're an idiot. You're an idiot. You're an idiot. You're an idiot.

Because you might die. Yeah. Actually, though, it quiets once you leave the aircraft the first time. And then I actually think you need a little bit of the I'm going to die always. If that totally goes out, you're not paying attention to the risk. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. In that particular genre, you know, testing gravity is not a low risk activity. Right, right. And it shouldn't be. And the same is true as relating, right? Yeah. I think that for the most part, our parents probably didn't show us how to have those conversations. If they had them, if they did a good job with that, they didn't do it in of us and maybe they did demonstrate that with us, but maybe we haven't seen other other elder

couples in our lives demonstrate that. So we just don't even know that it's possible. So for example, my partner and I, when we need to have a conversation, like we need to have a relationship level, we've had like some kind of breakdown where we're like circling a conflict. We don't see eye to eye on something important. You ignore it. We bury it and we move on. With a steamroller Because it'll never come up. We usually buy a flight somewhere. And we put on our... Yes, tell me more about this.

We put on our back and we get out of there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we just wait. And then we never argue about the same thing again on a merry-go-round. And then the range of things that we can talk about gets slower and smaller and smaller and smaller. And pretty soon it's just like, what do you want for dinner and where we're getting ice cream? Yeah. Like all healthy couples, obviously.

I'm a professional. That is why I do it that way. The goal of every relationship to get to a point where you actually do not talk and don't feel comfortable in your own home. That is the apex. I wish that for everyone. It's when you, it's, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's the top of the mountain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you have to hide each other.

You just exist. Yeah, you hide your browser history. Yeah, get a house with two wings. Yes, yes, two checking accounts, never talk about it, no transparency. Perfection. So what we do is, we actually, like, we've, we've named that there is, there's a beautiful garden that, uh, that we go to and we have conversations. We schedule them and we do them in the garden.

We start them before dusk, usually around like, 2 p.m. if we can do it. Okay, so you give them yourself a couple hours. We give us multiple hours of daylight, but not too much time because we actually need for the garden closes at five. So like, I know we have from two to five to have this conversation, which actually is very important because I need to know that it's going to end at one point, right? And we don't have endless capacity to hold emotional space and keep track of all the things that we've discussed. And, and, you know, I said to a client recently, take notes. He said, well, I keep having these deep conversations with my partner at like 9 p.m. at night.

And then I don't remember all the things that we discussed the next day, but it was really important stuff. Well, then take notes. Okay? Why would you, why would you treat your work as if it is so important that you're willing to write things down? But you wouldn't treat your primary romantic relationship that's going to have a way larger influence on the course of your life and maybe that you'll stay with longer than

any job you'll ever have? But you won't treat it with the same level of, like, respect and dignity to just like write some things down. And if you don't want to write some things down, ask if it's cool to record it. have a conversation and have it recorded. And then throughout the conversation, go back and say, hey, let's just summarize what we've discussed so far. I want to make sure that I'm understanding. Let me rephrase what I just heard to you so that I know that I got it.

Really basic communication tools that work outside of romantic relationships that make a huge difference and make it a lot safer. If we know, okay, we got to have a conversation about the sex life. We're going to do it during a time where we have space before to like take care of ourselves. I'm not going to be rushed. I'm going to get a shower and a lunch. You have to prepare your insults and arguments. Right. I'm going to open with this and then they're probably going to say this.

And then I'm coming right over the time. Oh, you have no idea. You're just, I am. I am that person. I am. In fact, I spend that hour unwinding all of the insults. I say them to myself so that I'm not going to say them. Yeah, totally.

It's tough to go into those conversations with your guard actually down. Yes. I mean, everybody goes into every situation, whether they realize or not with their combined life experiences. And they're not all the same and they're not all great. And especially if you've been hurt or burned, it's tough to go into those things without having like a little bit of a force field up. Oh my gosh. And not wanting to like defend ourselves, right?

Like I desire to defend myself 100% of the time. I did what I did for a reason. Yeah. And sometimes though, I think the danger in that is is the person isn't attacking you. They're seeking clarity, but you take it as an attack. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

And we're not giving them grace when we are defending ourselves. We are jumping into, we're jumping beyond the part where we can be curious and and understand what it was. was that they met by that and straight to, but like, you don't get it and don't tell me how I think. And, and, like, I am not coming to you as someone who is so evolved that they don't do those things, right? Like, the reason that I had to learn all of these systems is because I have a wicked tongue. My ex-husband said to me at one point, you've said things to me that I can never unhear. Because- That's true of everything you've ever heard, dipshit, you know?

Like, oh, I hope I always think gets to see you calling him a dip shit. That would be delightful. I don't know him personally, but that, that, that's true. That's like I've just seen things that I can't unsee. I'm like, yeah, that's how vision works. That is true. If your eyes were open and you saw it, you might be able to get past it, but yeah, I can't get into a time machine and put my hands in from your eyes.

So your work is to actually be able to forgive or move on. And that's why we're divorced because we reached a level where we couldn't continue to forgive. How long were you guys married? Married for five years together for nine. 19 years and 11 months. That you were married. Mm-hmm. Together for two years before that.

I'm divorced. Remarried now. Yeah, yeah. I knew you were married now. How long have you been married now? Just over three years. Yeah. I learned and I don't execute it perfectly or even well.

I would leave that up to my wife's choice, even though she'd probably be wrong in how she described my excellence in communicating. And I have many reasons as to why. Do you want to go alphabetically or historically? No, I know communication. I was very, we were both very young when we got married. And I'm not saying that people can't get young, married when they're young. I would put a little bit of caution into that.

Like 22 years. I don't even remember who I was when I was 22. And I look back now, I'm like, God, I wish I could choke myself and just ring my own neck for a little bit. However, out of that came three beautiful kids. So I actually would go through all of that again, even with the same outcome, because they are amazing in their own ways. But I, you know, and I couldn't, my wife is amazing. but I am trying to take the lessons learned from my previous relationship and own my part of it as well because it certainly was a two-person dance.

It wasn't just one person. And so it's not like I'd spend a lot of time thinking about my ex. I tried to spend time thinking about and identifying where it went wrong and what I could have gone better. And the communication, I think, was a large aspect of that, but it was lack of communication. Or it was really, I think, a little bit of a gap that got filled with some resentment. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Damn, I don't know if there's anything more insidious than that because it breaks down communication even more. And then you start making assumptions about behavior and you tell yourself this story in your head.

And I personally, like, I never went past high school, but I feel like I have an honorary doctorate and negative self-talk. Given from my own university that I created about negative self-talk. I could teach people if they want a course. That usually starts in the morning when I turn the lights on. I'm like, you piece of shit. A lot of successful people do, right? It's, you know, there's actually a healthy, I don't ever want to get to a place

where I'm like, you've nailed it. I would always rather feel like I have more that I can do than I have arrived. But that, you know, you can start telling yourself things that aren't true based off of assumptions that if you really go backwards, it was a breakdown on communication

with resentment that is like a parasite and it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew. Now, there's a lot of other things, but that is one of the lessons that I have learned. But yeah, it's tough, especially no relationship is perfect. The people who tell me they have a perfect marriage,

I'm like, oh, I don't know many other liars, just like you. Not that they're like a liar, but you're lying to me right to my face in this moment. But, you know, sometimes it's hard to schedule those conversations and you do get emotionally involved. And it's tough to stop yourself short of saying something that you can't unhear. I understand what he's saying, but like, do you live in the world of the real?

Like we all are stuck with the things that we have heard and have to deal with. And so I try not to repeat those mistakes. Not perfect at it by any stretch, but those conversations are tough, especially if you're in that heated emotional moment to say, we need to put a pin in this and come back to this, especially if one of the parties likes resolution. Yes. And if they like it urgently, which is me.

I'm like, we could just talk about it right now. Let's just get it right now. I don't care that it's midnight. I don't care that we haven't even. I don't care that. I want that done right now. And fortunately today I'm with someone who is wise enough to say, we can wait three days. Everything will be fine.

I love you. Like very good at validating and saying like you're safe. Our relationship is safe. It is secure. You have nothing to worry about, but we're not going to talk about it until we have time to talk about it. And that quiets all those parts of me down that just need to hear that. Super healthy, actually. Right?

Yeah, incredibly healthy. The distinction that I think I try to learn from my relationship with my ex there is that I have, my go-to is to use words to cause harm. and it took me 30 years at least of like doing that repeatedly and seeing the impact that it had on the people that I loved before I was really, really willing to let it go to say like this is not this isn't a weapon I want to wield anymore. And it's been actually like an unlearning for me because sometimes now I have to remind myself like that actually words do need to be used to put people like onto the right track. There is a needle to be thread there. And I am certainly like trying to do that all the time. It's different in my personal life and my business. Because in business you're kind of allowed to be like,

get back in your lane, right? But like in your personal life, there's a different balance there. So what I had to unlearn is that just because you could, just because like my brain can think of the worst thing possible to say, to go directly for the jugular and drain them, right? And like leave them feeling absolutely just destroyed. that's not a win for me, right? In my partnership, like if I, if it is me versus them, we've both lost.

So if I'm on this person's team and we are working together against something that we have identified to be a problem for both of us, then it is not up for me to like destroy them. That is not how either of us is going to get out of this better. And so I had to like work through this. So the hour that I spent driving to the garden is undoing all of those things in my mind and saying, okay, we don't have to go there. I don't have to go there. Assuming the best intent, you know, he probably didn't mean to do what I think he did,

and therefore I don't need to attack and I don't need to defend. And also there's this big softening that happens, I think, also just as a consequence of growing older, because we get smoothed out. All of the relationships, whether they like succeeded because we stayed together long enough to die, which is a pretty tough definition of success, or the relationships that, like, have come and gone with ease. Like, I see myself personally as like a stone that's just been tumbled and tumbled and humbled and is getting smoother and smoother all of the time until my like, until I have like

a smooth, glossy exterior that like is easier for me to let go of things to say, you know what? Like maybe I am the person who should have behaved differently. Maybe maybe the thing that I did was what escalated that or what led to that additional conflict or maybe I didn't communicate myself clearly and therefore they had incomplete information and it wasn't that they were trying to hurt me. It was that that's all that they could operate with. I think it's a good thing it's an hour away for a drive for you as well. I think that that preamble and maybe even the post afterwards, I actually think that's really healthy. If it was just around the corner, you probably wouldn't have time to prime yourself to be ready for that conversation. And here's

the other thing. I have a lot of support. I have a network of friends who I know I can pick up the phone and they will answer and I can say, hey, can I just work out this situation with you? He said this thing to me. It brought up that for me and here's what I'm thinking now. And they can hold that perspective. They can gas me up if that's what I need. They can come at it from my partner's perspective and add, you know, like, well, if I were him, here's how I would be thinking about it. I also have professional support because I am a coach. I've got a lot of resources. A lot of people do not. And they don't utilize the resources that they do have accessible. And this is especially true for men. More men than ever are reporting that they don't have any close friends or that they

have very few people that they feel that they can share vulnerable information with. Have you seen these staff? No, why do you think that is? Like, I think it's like one in seven men now report that they don't have any close friends. See, and technically with our anxiety rectangles, we are living in a world where we're supposed to be the most interconnected ever. Yeah. But I think it's very transactional. I think it's very shallow. Why do you think that people are reporting less and less close friends? Well, I think exactly for that reason that you pointed to, you have access to every single person on the internet in one way or another, right? Receive or mostly probably receive, but some you can transmit receive you.

You have like super broad but very shallow interconnectedness as opposed to like very deep but but like limited. Yeah, the mile wide and an inch deep versus an inch wide a mile deep. Yeah. I mean, exactly you can, you know, you're the exact thing that you like, what did you like wearing a dive mask and hitting yourself with a panty hose filled with the shit. Or someone else if they're into it. You can find the other person that's into it out of all of the people. He's right over there.

No, I got that. He left his Google search history open one time. Unfortunately, he's logged in under my account. It was on incognomode mode, but I guess. Listen, I don't care. Whatever, like I said, whatever turns just goes my quotes. No, yucking, you're young. It's fine.

But the cool thing is you can find that person now. But the thing is that you may not know your neighbor now, right? Yeah. Like, I think it's a, it's a number of factors that have all led in this, to this point. Why do I think it's worse for men than it is for women? I think men more acutely feel. Like I think that the impact on men is just that much worse than it is on women. I think the way that women are socialized, the way that women sort of like interact with

each other is already to build more of a network of relationships. Well, you guys communicate at a higher level, even just from a word count use per day. And more frequently. And yeah, and with more folks. And again, we evolved also to do that because this is part of what allows us to care for and raise children, right? And so women have had all these like protective factors against extreme social isolation and they're still experiencing it too. So men have less of those protective factors and so they're feeling it even worse.

I mean, what are your thoughts? Why do you think that is? I don't know. I do think it has something to do with people thinking that they know somebody or interacting just with the screen in front of them. There's there's something missing there. It might provide at a very shallow level what they think that they're looking for, but there's no depth to it, like you said. And also, we're bombarded with negativity. And I think people get, I mean, I don't think I don't have the stats on natural disasters. But if there is an earthquake and somewhere across the world, we're going to hear about it in our feet almost instantly, I don't think that used to be the case. And I don't think our brain is designed to deal with the amount of negativity that we have access to. So I think it shuts people. down and isolates them. And since men statistically, even though there are some men, I couldn't get to shut up if I wanted to, they talk less.

And so I think they just build themselves into a little cave and they just go a little bit farther and farther and farther. The problem is there's nothing great in there. No, no, no, there's literally nothing in there, actually. There's very few people I know that actually thrive. Like if COVID didn't show people anything, there were a couple people. They're like, this is the best. I want COVID to last forever. Almost everybody else was, my mental health is horrible.

I feel completely disconnected. I hate this. I want to be around other people. I think we realized for me anyways, I realized really the ways in which I took those relationships for granted because I thought that they would just always be there. I didn't even know what they were doing for me, but the power of community was really holding for me. Yeah, I think the consequence of the amount of isolation that people experience combined with the fact that when you reduce another person to like a single picture,

right, like a profile picture they're this big. And that's all who they are. The totality of their being. That's everything you've got, right? You've got like 150 characters or so many words of an Instagram bio and there's some images from their life. And then you feel like you have enough information to make an assessment about this person, about their character, about their interest, about whether or not you would ever be

friends. And then, furthermore, you feel like you have space and freedom behind the screen. to say anything to them, anything at all. If that person was behind you at the grocery store, you would realize that you have a full person in front of you with a life who had a history at a morning and has kids and a family and has the shit that they're dealing with, right?

But when you reduce them to a two-dimensional object on a screen, they're not really a whole human anymore, right? They're a sparring partner in the comment section. And I think that that also further isolates us because we experience people treating us like that. I don't know what your experience is. existing as a person on the internet or like comments just like everybody else's yeah but like people feel like they they they'll say things about us in this conversation as well right sure and

you know it's one of the i i try to be really selective about reading the comments because one of the things that like kind of comes up for me whenever i see something particularly um uh like hateful towards me is like i'm i'm a person like i can't see you saying that to me no they wouldn't another thing in the grocery store analogy is you better be real careful who you mouth off to because you might just get punched right in the face. That's true. And there's no consequence of that on the internet. Right. I was listening to very recently an episode with Rogan and Ethan Hawk. And he was talking about critics of his performance. And I would totally agree that those people, they're artists for sure. And, you know, art is, can be interpreted by different people. And he was talking about the negative

reviews and how he would love to say it doesn't impact him, but it does. And Joe's point, and I've heard it made it a few times. And I think I've talked about this particular type of common on the show is he basically said, do you think Michael Jordan is online in your comments section trying to tear you down? He's not. The guy's out there crushing it. The most successful, fulfilled, happy people are not to be found online, not because they're not capable of it. It's just not how they became the person that they are. So remember that when you're seeing the negative comment. And also, we have a negativity bias. So I don't know about you. You get a thousand. This was the most, you changed my life. And you'll get.

One comment like your shoes make you look like a moron. Totally. And that's the only one you remember. 100%. I'm going to find you and use all of my law enforcement contacts. And I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to kill your family. I'm going to watch.

Hypothetically. Forget the thousand nice things. You guys don't matter at all. This one kind of. And you don't know the person. And I suspect, of course, I have no data to show this. But I suspect that the people who are the most likely to make the negative comments are probably in a place in their life where you wouldn't want to trade with them.

Yes. So why do we pay attention? And I literally can say all that and then I am as susceptible to getting cooked by it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I wonder, like, in terms of the loneliness epidemic and the experience that men are having, is like how much of this is just happening on an individual level where like they're, whether they're the subject of those or the recipient of those, but they're like just swimming in this sauce.

And so this becomes reality, right? If you're not spending a significant amount of time in like the default world reality, like out interacting with the people. Maybe at a job, maybe a community service, maybe in a men's group, or maybe whatever it is. Like you're not in the tangible world. Just go play an organized sport. You're going to work on communication, teamwork, pros and cons, risk, all of these things. And just feeling strong in your body helps you to feel strong in your mind.

Yeah. Right? Like pushing yourself allows you to know that you have, you have limits beyond that which you knew. Like you can go much further than you thought that you could. You can have conversations that you didn't know. that you could. I think especially for younger people and the stats that are coming out, particularly around like young men in the early 20s who have like never been on a date or never asked a woman out on a date or had any sort of romantic relationship. Like, what are you

laughing at, Michael? I think so much of that. I saw that. What did you see? Are you watching the monitors? Did the camera happen to see that? Are you making this up? Oh, no, I saw it. Did the camera see it? Nope. Didn't happen. Yeah. So here's let's let's roll you in here, Michael. You went to Rome and Japan. Yep. How many women did you talk to on your trip? A handful. He's lying about that, I think.

This episode is brought to you by Better Help. We did it. We're into 2026 through the holiday season. And if you're anything like me, especially in years past, you know, the holidays can be a little bit rough. There's stress. There's buildup. There's anxiety.

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BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. With BetterHelp. Listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash cleared hop. That's better help. H-E-L-P-H-E-E-O-E-L-P-O-L-P-O-L-P-A.com slash cleared hot. Back to the show. Okay. He went to Japan and took pictures of architecture. Here's your question. How many women did talk to you? Yeah. A handful. Yeah, but I know you're lying, though, because you're embarrassed to say zero. No, I legitimately did talk to a handful of women. Now, was it an actual conversation? No, not really. It was like a server. Yeah. But I did talk to women. That's good. I talked to any other, like, people that were tourists or, like, women that were stats?

I talked to other people, like a couple other people. I generally don't really like talking to new people anyways. So I'm just kind of cute to myself. But, yeah, I talked to a few other people. Really good way to develop a social circle. Yeah, social circle in a different country, people I'll never see again. That's what the internet's for. You could FaceTime them.

Checkmate. Yeah, I don't really want to do that. So what he is describing, though, I've also seen some stats, not only around And I mean, again, he, Michael and I know each other really well. People think I give him a hard time, which is 100% accurate. I'm trying to forge him into a weapon that he doesn't even understand the lethality that he'll have that he's going to crush the world at some point after he's not 23 anymore. But it's, I, we, and we've talked about relationship stuff off air and obviously I'll

leave that stuff off air. But I've also seen stats that are showing men of his age are. that's a little bit more of the trend. And also, young men and women are avoiding engaging in sexual activity. And what do you think that is a, what do you think that's about? Well, I think that online dating has made a pretty significant shift in the way that people meet each other. And there's been some positives that have come from that. And there's been a lot of negatives that have come from the shift towards online dating.

Because when you meet someone in person, you have a chance to actually, like, see them in motion. Your nose actually responds much faster to a person than your eyes do. You actually get information. Yeah, because your nose developed first. So it's older technology. And your nose also will tell you so much more about whether or not a person is a good genetic match for you to meet with, right? Which may or may not mean that they're a great partner for you. But they will let you know that there is attraction there, right?

Your eyes, which are younger in evolution, they will tell you whether or not you're physically attracted to another person, right? But they can't tell you if the two of you are going to have like any sort of chemistry in the same way that your nose can and in the same way that interacting with someone in a physical space can. You know, I learned how to partner dance in the last couple years. I learned how to swing dance. And you can pick up so much about a person from partner dancing with them, the way that they move and they engage, like so much more than you can get from just having a conversation.

And certainly so much more than you can get from a photograph, right? So when we're dating online, we're choosing people with our eyes and we're not choosing them based off of like how they actually move into space and do they make us laugh and how do they smell. we're choosing them based on like five to seven images that they curated and a handful of words. And then online dating becomes a very, very miserable game that people are playing and they feel like it's just a numbers game because it sort of is. How many times you have to roll the dice on someone that looks attractive to you before you find someone who smells attractive to you? Your body actually feels good around who you have chemistry with.

And so people burn themselves out. They go on 50 or 100 dates to find one person that they want to go on more. more than one date with. That sounds exhausting. That is, it is exhausting. It is exhausting. And I'm saying this, like having had very limited experience with it, all of my partners, made significant relationships, I met online, or met in person rather, I've not really spent

a lot of time online dating because every time I've tried it in my past, I've gone, oh, this is, the juice is not worth a squeeze on how much effort this takes. And that's for me. Yeah. What did you describe it as, Michael, the last time you described online dating? Was it a dumpster fire? Oh, yeah. I mean, something similar to that.

You're an attractive guy. I imagine that you would do well. Take it easy. We don't really use compliments in this. Don't use my ego like that. Let me recognize that. Michael, you're not the most hideously ugly person. I mean, I could guess a reason or two why somebody might give you a second look.

Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah, I have zero experience with it. Thankfully, because I have heard that version, a dumpster fire version more often than that. Did you find that it was exhausting? Like mentally emotionally exhausting? It's incredibly exhausting. I mean, even trying to set up a date is like pulling nails.

It's ridiculous. Teeth, I guess the expression is pulling teeth. And then getting to the date, it's like half the time, it's not even worth it. You're just like, this person is not what I want at all. And it's just like, oh my God, it's so exhausting. Whereas like if you're in a room with a whole bunch of other people, you can like assess 20 or 30, maybe you go to like a house party, you can assess like 50 other people of the Opposite.

Yeah, house parties. Big party guy. DJ, big Mike. House, house, house, house, house. But there's a certain advantage to being in person with other folks. Or like in other countries where he didn't talk to anybody. Yeah. You and I had different.

I have hope. I travel different. But it's not for, again, I'm super extroverted. So everywhere that I've traveled, I've wanted to meet people and date people and have, you know, explore and meet the locals. do all the things. So you think the online thing, though, is what's causing the decrease. Do you think it's a decrease in desire to have sex from younger men and women, or they're just tired of the tools that they have to play with? I think that vulnerability is cringe. And I think that, and I'm not shading Jen Z. Michael, write that down for a t-shirt.

Vulnerability is cringe. It might actually sell quite well. I think that, so here's that I live across the street from middle school. Yep. And I don't know if you are familiar with this. This is maybe specific to Los Angeles where I live to, but like everyone dresses the same now. Like every middle schooler, they wear the same clothes. They look indistinguishable from one another. And I mean, you know, no disrespect to the middle schoolers I live across from. But I can't help but notice. Like I'll see them walk in a pack of like six or eight and they all look like carbon copies of each other.

There's this sort of move towards a singular, like acceptable, very sort of lowest common denominator aesthetic that I think we're seeing in plastic surgery. We're seeing that in people's faces. And we're seeing it in, certainly in younger generations. And I think that's sort of like across the board, we're seeing sort of like a neutralization of our aesthetic. I mean, you can see it in apps.

Like apps are moving overwhelmingly to like black and white and gray scale. They used to be a lot more colorful. So I think we are, we are across the board, we're experiencing this sort of like move towards things that feel maybe safer, feel a little blander, feel a little more neutral. And I think that the experience of online dating is already like rife with rejection. It's already a place in which you have to be vulnerable

to get a result, but the very act of being vulnerable means that you're putting yourself out there when people do not want to meet with you or they cancel or they go to you or they say, but like, that hurts on a pretty deep level. And so it's just a lot safer. for not to. It's just, it's a lot safer to not express yourself outside of what is considered acceptable. It's a lot safer to just not be vulnerable. And I don't envy people who are growing up

a younger generation today who have had their entire life on camera, who have had selfie mode on their phone since childhood. Filtred out with the selfies, yeah. This is the other thing that's true about middle schoolers, at least from my experience, I'm not a parent, is that they look a lot older. They They know more about makeup and hair and all of these things. Like when I look at- Anxiety rectangle. When I look at my images from middle school, like I, that girl could not exist today. She had braces and a funny haircut and she didn't know any differently.

There was no makeup tutorial on YouTube telling me otherwise. I was just like slapping on whatever glitter I had, you know, from-clay. I think your life is better, though, at that age, not worrying about the makeup. I agree. But I think that all of that absolutely leads to a world in which we are less excited to engage with one another because we are constantly monitoring ourselves for acceptability. That's a lonely place. And also, over a long enough period of time, will destroy populations.

I think so, yeah. That's not good. No. And you know what else is interesting about younger generations? Gen Z drinks a lot less alcohol. That's probably for the better. It is for the better. And also, and Jeff Galloway makes this point really eloquently, it means that less people

are making sort of like sexual mistakes, which on one hand is great, right? That probably leads to reduced consent regret and unconsensual encounters and mixed communications and like, you know, just regretful experiences, right? And at the same time, a lot of folks' early sexual encounters, at least like from my generation, came with alcohol's assistance. 100%. Right. And so we have this like trade off to get you outside of your own skin. Totally. So really good thing that people are not drinking as much and they're staying in their bodies and they're, you know, they're experimenting with other things.

But like, you know, alcohol is like a particularly, it's got a lot of. a negative consequences on the individual and society as a whole. Totally. Phenomenal. And we don't have like a replacement social lubricant that allows people to sort of like relax and find a little bit more courage to engage with each other. So there is a bit of a trade off there. How do you think we fix that? Because all you're doing is kicking the can down the road. I think for the general, well, here's the thing. How old are you? I'm not supposed to ask when I'm 36. Okay, I'm 48. So basically an elder. It's not a big girl. Do you identify as Gen X?

I don't know. I don't identify as anything. Just show up. Show up low expectation. I mean, in this world, I could be a Gen Z, right? I can identify as whatever I want to. If I can pick a gender, why can't I pick an age? I know, I know folks who are very Gen Z in their 40s.

So you can, you can identify with your gender. I was born in the late 70s, whatever that is. I look back on those experiences of being uncomfortable and having to talk yourself into saying hello to somebody and not having the words and just being like, I swung a bug, I got to go. You need those little micro-upercuts in your life because they, in totality, they of course suck in the moment. And you feel like, I am an idiot.

I'm never doing that again. And then you're like, oh, I'm going to go do that again right over here. Really? Yeah. And that helps you later in life. So these people, the young men and women who are devoid of those experiences, they're still going to have to work through this awkward phase. some point. I guess I'm glad now looking back at how old I am that it happened at that phase of

my life because I wouldn't want that to happen in my late 20s. Let's do that in your late teens, early 20s, because then you can build on those things. I'm worried they be a little bit behind the power curve. Right. Get that out of the way. You know, it's easier to fall down and get back up young. You're the most capable of doing so at that time. Like, yeah, I'm not saying go embarrass yourself where you live, but you're probably going to move away from where you live growing up. So maybe, I'm not saying be an asshole, but be the fullest expression of yourself. Right. You might not have to have to see those people ever again.

Be willing to make mistakes. Yeah, take the little micro uppercuts. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Those little moments of discomfort are exactly what forms you so that you have the capacity to do the things that you want to do later in life because life only becomes increasing shades of uncomfortable.

But hopefully you get a higher degree of choice as you go. Well, that cohort, I think, is just pushing that can down the road. Yeah. I don't know if there's a lot of benefit in that. That's an interesting thought. I like your perspective that they're going to have to go through it eventually. I don't know how you skip that phase. Well, I guess if you want to date, Mary, have kids, then I don't know how you skip it.

Exactly. You are going to, hey, spoiler alert for everybody on life. You are an idiot. You are going to be an idiot many times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more you're an idiot now, I would like to say the less you will be in the future depends on the person. Well, the good news is that we're all idiots. Like, you're not special for you.

I think that's the other piece of this is like we all, You said it earlier. We all kind of believe that we are alone and we're the only one who's dealing with the thing that we're dealing with. Such a dangerous narrative. And we're not everybody's got it, a version of the thing that you've got. And when you don't talk to other people about it, even if that person is like a professional, but certainly if you don't talk to another human being, especially one who looks like you, especially if you're a man, if you don't talk to another man or another guy your age or roundabout about the thing, then you are going to continue to live with the illusion that you are alone and you're not.

And feeling that you are alone is the thing that causes you to isolate. then you do become alone. Well, then you feel like you're alone, but you're connected to your device. So you have access to the world. It has access back to you, but you're not actually physically interfacing with it. I don't know what comes from that because, I mean, we're in a place now. My kids do not remember a world pre-internet. I do.

Right. And my oldest is 22. I have 22, 20, and 17 boy, boy, girl. So, I mean, we'll see, I guess, what the long term is because we don't know. Right, we don't. But here's what I think. If I had to like offer a prescription for the world, I actually think I would take it all the way back to pleasure. I would teach people how to experience and prioritize and feel like they have autonomy in the things that bring them pleasure. It doesn't necessarily, it shouldn't be limited to sex. In fact, if sex is your only source of pleasure, you are setting yourself up to fail because you're going to put way too much pressure on sex, right? But if it is doing hot yoga that brings you pleasure, if it is fishing that brings you pleasure, if it is working and building with your hands that brings you pleasure, if it is like being in community and making food and feeding the people that you love,

but like focusing in the things that like allow for you to feel good. Like just good for goods sake, things that bring light to other people, that bring joy to other people, because those are the most satisfying things anyways. Those are the things that are that inoculate us against feeling isolated, right? Like you love baking?

Fuck yeah, bake and share what you've baked with other people. I guarantee that will be a source of pleasure that you can go back to over and over again. You're digging a well for yourself, right? The cool thing about the things that bring us pleasure is that they are unique to us, right? We share them with other people, but there is a sense of like autonomy and sovereignty

and self-expression in that because it doesn't have to, it's not for anyone else. It doesn't have to, you can wear the thing that you love so proudly because it is just the thing that you love, right? It gives you an opportunity to connect with other people who are also in that thing or can benefit from that thing. And if you can have a relationship to pleasure as a whole,

that is not situated in shame. You can allow yourself to enjoy something and you can allow yourself to hold that thing gently because you love it. You don't have to be perfect at it because it brings you joy. You're going to continue to learn about it for the rest of your life

because you're not trying to be perfect at it. You just are receiving satisfaction from it. And then you can bring that into the rest of your world, the rest of your life. if feeling joy and satisfaction and connection for you are associated with getting things right, being perfect, being impeccable, not being vulnerable, it's going to be very, very hard to share your world with other people. And again, just to bring it all the way back to sex, like sex is a great place for you to start doing that.

It's a great place for you to connect with yourself and connect with other people around something that feels good and can be done thoughtfully and intentionally and healthily. and, you know, if we just were to focus on that aspect of sex and relationships, I think it would be a lot easier for people to sort of set down the rest of it and just see the inherent good that can come from us in getting involved with one another. Yeah, which is basically what these devices take from you. It is an illusion of pleasure. Correct. Yeah. I mean, the research is resounding.

The dopamine in the micro and then what it does, you get used to it. It destroys self-image. It destroys your real-world dopamine receptors. It's like you have to keep escalating, escalating, escalating. Yeah, it's a wild way to live. I'd be curious in 30, 40 years looking back on the data, like, oh, yeah, that was real good job, everybody. Real good job. Yeah, it'll be interesting.

The society's population is just diminishing. Because, you know, nobody, we end up, what's the movie with Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock when they're in the future? And sex was a headset and they sat on couch, demolition man. Oh. Yes. $100 you haven't seen that movie, Michael. He's like, God. You are unbelievable. One out of ten, he catches.

I see to look it up right now. You're going to see Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock, and they're probably in some weird police uniforms. Yep, that's exactly what that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the illusion of connection, illusion of satisfaction. And we talk again about, like, people who have an unhealthy relationship with porn, like illusion of connection there, that, like, you're getting this need met.

But it's not, it's not the thing itself. It's not the thing that you're actually looking for. It's just like a simulacrum of relationship, of romance, of sexuality, of intimacy. It's not the thing itself. The thing itself is like way scarier and more vulnerable, but it's also way higher reward. Like you, I think maybe you could look at it like this. The more that we play it safe, the less that we get out of our life, right? Higher risk anything.

The more that we put of ourselves into anything that we do, we do risk failing and falling on our butt. We risk the discomfort. We risk being humiliated. We could fall on our face and we will if we're doing it right. Yeah. And you need to do that. Yeah. You have to get stone, in my opinion, at least.

I have learned the most success in failure. You can learn from both. The failures have stayed with me a lot more than the successes. Yeah, I don't want to rob people from that. It's hard to look at my kids and think in my head, man, I can't wait until you fail. Not like macro failure in life, but, and it happens to all of them. They get the little uppercuts along the way. And sometimes I see it coming.

I'm like, I'm not saying a damn thing. As long as they're safe, like, we're going to let this happen. An interesting person, you know? I'm not a, I was learning about hydroponic plants the other day. And like I was like growing, like green onions. I learned that if you cut all the green onions off, you can just stick the bottom and water and they grow back. Really? I had, okay, I, thank you.

I was today years old when I learned this. You just like chop them all off, throw them. in water, put them in a window sill, they'll grow back. And they're growing back, and I'm on like the third or fourth round of them growing back from just water. And they're like not as strong as they were. Yeah, that makes sense. The flavor is not happening so much, right? So then I'm looking up and like, how is it that we grow plants and water? And they give them just the right amount of potassium and nitrogen and all the things that they need, right? But what ends up happening is that you grow these like really beautiful, like stunning plants and they have no flavor at all.

Because the thing that makes for an interesting plant, this is true. I mean, Psalms know this about wine and I sure there's a ton of other examples out there, is that they are made interesting by their hardship. It is not having enough nitrogen that made that lettuce look a little funky, but taste incredible, right? Like, it is the conditions of hardship that actually shape us to have flavor. Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. What is it, have you noticed anything when people find you men or women? A lot of people, probably myself included in this, you'll try to solve it. You try to solve something, anything you're dealing with. And then you get to a point.

And a point is different for people and depending on what it is. And then finally, you're like, I can't do this on my own and I try to seek help. Where is that point or have you found any patterns in that point for people coming to speak with you? Oh, they're at that point. Yeah. They're beyond that point, right? Because I work with men who, for the most part, would prefer to just not have to deal with this. Or let anybody know that they are dealing with it for sure.

Yes. It is inherently a courageous. act to reach out to me or my team in order to get support because it requires this tremendous first step of saying like, I actually cannot do this on my own. I need help with this, which requires us even saying that this is a challenge. One of the greatest barriers that I have to entry is just not wanting to admit that there is a problem at all, right? Because it is, it is scary to even say that, right? I'm looking forward to the place in my life where there are no problems of any kind. I feel like it's next week. Right, right, right.

2026 is going to be my year. Yeah, there's always, I don't have a single problem. There's nothing to look at over there. I'll have all the money I've ever wanted it and that will solve all problems. But don't lift the rug. There's nothing under there to see. And don't worry about the backyard. The back goes back there just because I like guarding.

Yeah, it's perfect. Right there, too. So they have to have already done these really courageous things of saying like there is a problem and I'm not capable of solving it on my own. Huge steps. So I do coaching, but what I actually sell a lot more of than coaching, is courses. Because I realized really early on that if I put what I was doing with a client into a video course and told men that they could just take it privately at their own pace, you know,

without having to actually talk to another person, that they would do that. It would definitely be their first step for most people. It is incredible. They actually adhere to these courses, like really, because I will buy an online course and kind of like dabble a little bit, but I do really well in a container with another human being. That's where I really thrive. Unless it's maybe like learning a really specific skill than I can stick with the course for a long enough time. But either way, I developed all these courses because I realized that it was a way better way to reach people.

I remember my mission was just get this to as many people as possible. YouTube is a medium for that mission to get to as many people as possible. My TV show on Discovery Plus and on HBO Max is just a medium for that. The courses, just a medium for that. The book, just a medium for that. How do I get this information to more hands? And you get it to more people by decreasing the barriers to entry so that they can just do it on their own, on their phone.

You know, in the privacy of their own home, no one has to know that they're going through the course. And they can work that out to the degree that they're capable. You're still kind of doing it on your own, but you're doing it with help. You have a framework. And then, yes, exactly, a structure. And then if you're not able to, or that's not satisfying or you find that you're not able to complete the online course, you have ADHD like I do. And so that's not the ideal framework for you. Have you been diagnosed with ADHD?

Yeah. I'm seeing a rash of people who have told me they have ADHD. And I say, who tells you that you have that? And they're like, me. I'm like, that's not how that works. Yeah, you know, I was first diagnosed at 18 and I was like, that's not me at all. That's like, I was just like, screw you. I swear.

And trust me, I legitimately, I get it. But it's hilarious to me if you ask that one question. Like, oh, did you go to a doctor? I'm like, no. No, yeah, totally. My dad and my uncle used to tell me all the time ADHD is not real because open up your brain and tell me where the ADHD is. And like there's no gene that has 80.

I mean, this is, you know, two guys kicking back beers and saying this to a 12-year-old. But I don't know. A lot of wisdom. So much wisdom. They were very wise men. I did. I love them, miss them every day. But they, so you find that the online course isn't for you great? Like, hire a coach.

The reason that I put this all down into a book with like, what, 75,000 words is because I wanted people to be able to access it in an even easier to afford format in a format that you need not sign into anything. I mean, you can have it on a e-book or on an audio. book, but like a format that you can just like, you can digest this even more so at your own pace. The power can go out and you can have a single candle and you can still get this information. Like just put it into as many ways as possible so that men can receive it. Yeah.

How did the TV shows come about? The TV show, they found me on YouTube actually. So for a while when I was kind of like coming up on YouTube, I would get casting calls on a pretty regular basis. People would reach out to me and they'd say, you know, we're thinking about we're developing a show on this or that. We want to talk to you and want to film it. many of those. You've gotten casting calls? I get him, generally it's a host to the potential to be a host on

a show that has some tangential connection to the military. Okay. We would love to you come on and talk about the different calibers of guns. I'm like, listen, I understand how to use a gun. I'm not an expert in how they're made and people ask me about bullets. I'm like, where did you get your bullets? I'm like from the green box. They came out of the green box into a brown one. Like, what kind were they? I'm like the kind that went bang. I don't know. I don't care. I know how to use the tool. I'm sorry. I never got into the gun thing. It was it that didn't turn my screws. Sorry. There is someone who is an expert at that. 100%.

Go find that guy as a host. I don't know. Do you have any interest in doing those larger media productions? Only because what I value the most right now is my time. Yeah. What we're doing right now is, I think, my favorite thing. And I accidentally fell into this years ago. And I mean, you and I would not have met otherwise.

It's true. And I'll be honest, I've never until, who was it or reached out? Were they part of your team or a publisher? Yeah, a publisher. So before that, I had never come. come across your content on YouTube, but that's a matter of my own algorithm. Like I'm very heavily into sovereign citizens

getting thrown on the ground and arrested. Very, and it's like, I wonder why that's the case. Because I click on every single one. Oh yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially on airplanes, I'm like, yes. Yeah, mine's all pop culture criticism, which I'm like. Yeah, and so I wouldn't have naturally encountered that. But so you and I would have never had the chance

to have this conversation. And I would much rather do this with my time than travel somewhere and be on a set for eight to hours, be told what to wear, kind of where to stand, what to say. I am not against any of that. I value this more. Yeah. I absolutely get that. Having had a TV show, I can say absolutely. Yeah. There is a distinction that you have a level of control that you do not enjoy when you're on someone else's production. Yeah, you are not paying the bills for what's making the production go. So at some level, you're somebody's employee. And I've been working for myself now for almost 10 years,

and I don't think I could get back. Yeah, it's very hard. It is very hard. Now, I loved doing the show. again, it was a fabulous vehicle for fulfilling my life mission of getting it to the hands of as many people as possible. I got to work with couples on the show, which was also a tremendous opportunity, too, because we get to actually, like, show what people are like behind closed doors in a way that you just can't really capture, I think, anyways, like in an honest and very vulnerable way. So on my show, we actually had cameras inside folks' bedrooms. And so we actually had bedroom footage of them being intimate. I feel like there's some waivers associated. Oh, there were so many we were.

But again, I wasn't not the legal on the show because it was a real production. So I didn't have to do all those things. Whereas on my YouTube channel, I am the legal team. Do you feel like the people who signed up for that, there was a slight level of exhibitions? Voyeurism or that might have been a little bit of a king. Yeah, you're not signing up for that without having like a degree of. Because that sounds mortified to me, by the way.

I would not even pitch that idea to my wife because even if she were to say, yeah, I guess I'd be fine doing that. I'm like, nope, not my thing. No way. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing that was really cool about it was that these cameras were running 24-7 throughout the, you know, half a year or something that we shot. And so it wasn't just sex that we saw on the cameras.

I would literally give them an assignment. They'd have to go, like, you know, practice it. Probably a fraction of what you did. But we would see all kinds of other things. And as a coach, someone coming in and trying to describe a sexual encounter, it is very difficult. I was involved in a study during my master's degree that was trying to sort of pinpoint a moment where an STI was transmitted. And we created, my advisor, Vanessa Schick, made this calendar that are like a tool to

collect data. That would be like person A, hand A, person B, hand B, toy. This is, you know, IU. And then like across time and then it would be like mouth to toy to hand to this. And then you're trying to have people like actually remember what happened first and then what and then what. It's very difficult for someone to describe a sexual encounter, like to remember it and describe the actions and behaviors faithfully. But then there's all of this subjective terminology that doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to anyone else, right? Like what is hard, what is soft, what is fast, what is slow.

We may have a very different definition of what hard and soft are. And so I have a client come in and they say, well, we started really slow. Okay. And then we did this and we did this and we did this and then this happened, right? Ten seconds of video, I know way more than. and they're able to put into words. And we don't have to argue over what slow is. Yeah, totally.

Because we can now have an exact conversation where I could pinpoint, here is the moment where this shifted. And if you had gone in a different direction, you would have gotten a different result. So that part was really, really powerful. And I enjoyed that part of the show. But yeah, they came to me and asked me if I wanted to be involved.

And I'd done so many of these casting calls at this point, and they were all just like, Zoom interviews. That on that one in particular, I was just like, here's what we got to do. And I just laid it all out. Like if you want to make that show succeed, here's exactly how I would do it. And they're like, when can you come to L.A.? Damn. Would you do another one?

Would you do another show if they offered it? Yes. There are things that I would do that I would like insist on doing differently that we film the show under like pretty intense COVID policies. And so now it would be very different. Be, I think, a lot easier for us to film the show. Because there would just be like less red tape and restrictions in the way. but I have some ideas over like how the length of time that is like really necessary to see the kind of transformation that I want to see.

I mean, we did several one-offs during the show. There's a great one-off session that I do with an adult virgin. I think he is around the age of 30 and he's never had any sort of sexual conduct of the woman. And it's phenomenal. I mean, I talked to him for like an, I don't know, it's an hour and a half. It's cut down to maybe like three minutes in the show. It is so many people's favorite moment in the show. Really?

Yeah. And it's partially because he's so earnest in like his learning. We have like a sex doll and I like show him, you know, like here's a bubble. We do an anatomy lesson. We like kind of go through the whole system to that he feels a little bit more comfortable. Was his mind just blown? This yes, yes. But like what's even cooler about that is like the, you know, I'm actually like having him like interact with the doll and try some different like techniques on it.

And you can just watch the gears turning. I think that's the cool part. is that because he's not under pressure, because he's not with a real woman, to be like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. I've got this, right? Instead, he's, like, really feeling it out, and he's really, like, thinking about it.

And you can just see him, like, putting all of these gears in place. Again, it's, like, being willing to just, like, try, right? And do it imperfectly? How do you arrive at 28 without any sexual experience? And I say that without any judgment. I know life is different for people. How did he get to that point? I think for a lot of folks,

they sort of believe it's going to happen and that they don't necessarily need to do, be an active participant in making it happen. And they sort of assumed that like by now it would have happened. By now it would have happened. Oh, and then they get to college and then they think, well, it's just, it's definitely going to happen at one point in college. And then maybe they get through college and it didn't happen.

And then they start to like at each turn. Now it's becoming an issue probably. And then they start to pull themselves out of the field. A lot of men across the board, even the most sexually experienced men I have ever worked with will say to me, I'm not very experienced. I have less experienced in other men. because they assume the story that they have about other men is that they have more sexual experience. Everyone else has more experience.

But where are they hearing those stories from? That's interesting. I don't, I think it is just sort of part of the air that we breathe is that part of the way that men in particular feel insecure about themselves sexually is that they feel they should have had more experience. I mean, you're the professional here. What's more important? Quality or quantity? I mean, I would take quality. all the time. I think so too.

Yeah. But then again, you can have sex 100 times with one person and learn their body really, really well, or you can have sex one time with 100 people and learn a whole bunch about bodies. You're going to learn either way. That's true. Okay. And there's no, like, right way of going about getting those experiences, but I think if you just assume that they will happen to you and that you're not being an active participant in making

them happen, then you might wake up one day and realize that those, those, those, you those early ships have sailed. And now the barrier to entry is a lot higher because partially because you didn't go through and have those little like micro experiences of fucking up. But now the assumption of your peers is going to be that you do have experience. And so you're going to be a little bit more in your head and more self-conscious because of the lack of experience. Did he find a partner? He did have intercourse after that.

And, you know, the- How to go for him? That I don't know. The running joke on the set, though, was that like once this airs, you're going to have people being like, I'll, I'll take your virginity. What's his Instagram? Like, don't go into your inbox. There were producers on set that were like, I'll, I'll fuck him.

That's kind. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're giving. They're giving. And I think, you know, it's doing it for the plot a little bit too. But I think, you know, we have a lot of assumptions about our desirability or attractiveness. And then, you know, you see something like that.

And you're like, actually there's like, they're totally, there's multiple lids for every jar, it turns out. Yeah. Have you followed it all or seen the P. Diddy documentary? No, but only because I'm very, very sensitive to these things. And even just reading the files from the court case was a lot for me. Did you watch it? I was just on the road in Texas, had a little bit of hotel time. I had watched the first episode before I went.

It was a quick turnaround. But yes, stripping out the abuse, which was horrendous. and there was nothing that I would like to do more to people like that than to beat them to death with my own hands for clarity. I cannot stand that type of violence against victimizable community. At my baseline level, I want to do something about it. Stripping that aside, the, and again, I'm not anybody to judge others' sexual proclivities, but my God, they were essentially, first off, for years,

a spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't watched the documentary, which by the way was produced by 50 Cent, one of his mortal enemies. That's a great backstory, by the way. Well-played Netflix to hand that over. Man, they dug deep. Oh, yeah, because 50 Cent had been on it for like 10 years, by the way. 50 Cent knew that 50, no, no.

And Josh Johnson actually is an amazing YouTube comedian and has two hour-long specials where he explains the backstory. And it is hysterical how that man played the long game. He played the long game. Let me just say, as somebody who didn't know much about the situation, 50 months in prison is not enough. He got 50 months with time served. So he, I think, will be out in four plus years. Wow.

It was pretty amazing. And again, I wasn't a juror. And they actually did interview a couple of the jurors. And one of the issues that it came back to was clear understanding and definition of consent. and if it wasn't consensual, why did some of them stay for years and stay involved? And again, I'm glad I wasn't in that room having to make that decision. I don't know the legal threshold for these things. I was just looking at it from the perspective of sexual behavior.

So I hate the name Diddy, by the way. Sean, one of the women that was featured, he was married before and actually at the end of his marriage to the woman, I think, who has the majority of his children with him. There was a woman named Cassie, and she was the one who was actually. very physically abused in the security camera footage. Right, right. For years, they, I mean, it started, they were in a hotel in New York and they hire a jigolo. And Sean comes down with like this mask on, going back to a term that is one of my favorite cuckold, which once I understood what it meant, I tried to apply it very broadly in my life to things that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And he would sit there and kind of direct. And there was this power play of she would have to ask to do, you know, kind of anything. And sometimes the answer was yes. And sometimes it, no, you're not ready. But so this went on with this particular man who was in the documentary and was interviewed. But they would have, they would have sex for a day and a half for two days. The baby oil, the 10,000 bottle. He described the first time that they handed over a bottle of baby oil.

He was like, I put it on like a normal human being. And he said that the woman was like, no, no, that's not how we do. And she's just like, shh, so I don't know what that's all about, nor do I know what the laundry bill was like at that particular hotel. Oh, my gosh. You're just throwing sheets out at that. But is that, is that? And it's interesting, it seems as if you get into socioeconomic statuses where nothing is outside of your ability to procure it, that kinks start to present themselves. I would have to describe.

And so eventually, Sean participated, but they would call him out on, he would travel with him. sometimes like this for years and eventually they introduced I think it was either ecstasy or mal I don't have experience with either one but that's because he was asking he's like how do you guys do this for so long there's no way that you're doing this for multiple days sober no and so that all of the chemical stuff came along a little bit later on but for years and then you know that behavior was obviously repeated and it was it was all over the place and I just I'm like was this person always like this or when you have access and the ability for everything is within economic reach.

Is that the only way that you can actually feel alive or normal? Yeah. I think that from everything that I understand with this case in particular, so much of it comes down to power. There was, again, she would ask for permission, and sometimes it was yes, and sometimes it was no, and it didn't seem to be any justifiable in air quotes, determining factor as to why he said yes or no.

Right. But there was an, I mean, you could tell in just the way he was physically abusing her and the physical abuse in that, in the security camp footage, which I think came from a hotel was one of many, many. Oh, yes, I imagine that wasn't the first or the only time that that happened. But in the case documents that I read, some of the earlier allegations against him were coming actually from college women when he would, like, perform on college campuses

and that he would, again, like was accused of drugging and assaulting college women after performing on their campuses. And the thing that really stuck out to me as fascinating about that is that I should think that as a music performer at a college campus, it would not be difficult for you to have consensual sex. You would think so, right? Somebody who is relatively famous, especially as their ascent in some... In my personal experience, like, someone with a microphone and any degree of talent, like... They're throwing panties at that person.

Yes, it's not... You do not have to drug or coerce women into having sex with you. ties into the control aspect, though, yeah. Unless you enjoy having power over other people, unless the actual joy that you are getting is in doing harm to other people. And then sex is just the vehicle for that. The other piece about that, I think is interesting. Like, if you do have that degree of power and socioeconomic status,

going, like, circling back to the conversation we had earlier, your life is easy, right? In many ways, yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not necessarily all easy. People say money doesn't solve all problems. It solves quite a few. It solves a lot of the core ones that most people deal with. And to a degree, if you can pretty much buy anything in any store and there's no real, like, adversity, we think that we don't want adversity, right?

We think that we want the beautiful butter lettuce that was made under perfect conditions. We actually do want adversity. We want a little bit of adversity. We want it, we call it in my partnership. We call it mild adversity, you know, the things that like make for an interesting experience. If you go on a vacation and everything works out exactly right, like they have your car ready and the hotel room is just fine and the beach was perfect that day and the lobster was delicious or whatever. Like there was no, yeah, like what was memorable about that? Oh yeah, but that wasn't a nice sunset, wasn't it?

That was the sunset that remember we had to race across the island because you left your toothbrush or whatever and then we almost missed our flight. Like those are the things that we really remember. And so I think that we get into a point for many of us because we are so comfortable where we actually begin to manufacture adversity or we begin to. begin to need to entertain ourselves through seeking increasing levels of intensity in order to have us feel alive. My thinking on that as like someone who's not an expert on the case and hasn't followed it that closely again just because my own sensitivity towards these things is that if you are in a position where you wield a lot of power over folks and you are able to coerce people

into staying with you for many, many years. And I think we don't fully understand, and courts are not an ideal place to really flesh out the dynamics that exists, the psychology that exists, between, you know, someone who's saying, I love you, I'll protect you. I'm the only person who can make your career or give you what you want or give you access to the people that you need access to in order to succeed. But in order for me to do those, you have to behave in this way or do these things or, you know, submit yourself to me in these ways. Like, there's an incredible dynamic there that, yes, of course, we're talking about adults who do have free will and have the capacity to go and leave. I'm glad that I'm not the person who has to decide or be in that jury to determine whether or not that person's, like, staying because they are consenting to this. I do think that there's, like, a great degree of coercion that is involved in this. And I think sometimes about that quote, the everything is about sex except for sex,

which is about power. And I don't agree with it wholeheartedly. I think it's a bit of an oversimplification of something that is like not explicitly about power. I think sex is about union and can be about divinity and can be about connection and can be about a whole lot of things. It doesn't need to be a power exchange. But in those instances, I think sex becomes just the theater in which power is executed.

And I think because it is particularly often very secretive because people experience quite a bit of shame because it is inherently taboo. Like I teach a system that was invented by my mentor, Jaya called the erotic blueprints. And the blueprints are energetic, sensual, sexual, kinky, and shape-shifter. And I'm happy to describe all those things. Shapeshifter. Are we talking about ghosts or werewolves? The shape-shifter is someone who can just play in all the other roles. Okay. Who, like, can speak all of the languages. If we were to think about each of the blueprints as a language, like the shapeshifter is just multi-fing. Go through it. Go through the blueprint. Okay. And then I'll circle back to keep, but you may have to remind me.

how we got there. I may forget. Okay, great. The system of five different ways that arousal exists in the body, the arousal curse. So Jaya is a tremendous body worker, psychological body worker. Literally got to like interact and witness people's bodies over years. And what she noticed is that there are sort of like five arousal patterns that exist in people. And the first one is energetic.

And these are folks who are turned on by tease and anticipation and like almost the space between. They're very, very sensitive, and they need for the energy between them and their partner to feel right. Like the intangible aspects of the relationship have got to feel good before they can feel aroused and turned on and be interested in. They have to be connected in a way. Yes. They also can have like full body, non-touch, non-genital orgasms. And they are, but the downside, their shadow side is that they are so sensitive that they can sort of short circuit. These are folks that like if you go straight for their genitals or straight for their genitals or straight for their.

their nipples or straight for their breast that like they might be like, oh, that was too much. And then they're not actually able to like get back into the flow or to get. Okay. Interesting. Because antennas, finally tuned to antennas. So that's the energetic. Next blueprint is the sensual blueprint. These are people who are turned on by things in their five senses. So the way that something looks and tastes and touches and smells. And they also are very, very sensitive. They can also have like non-genital, non-touch orgasms. they often give themselves away because they'll moan when they're eating something.

Like they'll take a bite or something and be like, mm, so good. That's very sensual in nature. They also tend to like surround themselves with things that are like censorally pleasant. So they may like have select fabrics and they might like be playing music all the time in their home. They have like a specific kind of music that they like to be surrounded by her candles or they like to arrange the pillows in such a way. And their superpower is that they have a super high tolerance for pleasure. Like they can really be in pleasure for a long time because they can get pleasure in their five senses.

So they may like to go from like trading massages to a lot of cuddling, a lot of closeness, like a lovemaking. Like all of those things might be things that they want to do and have like a lot of capacity for. Their shadow side is that they can get they can get lost in their head if they're not staying grounded in their body through their senses. So that can look like being close to having an orgasm and then having it disappear. they also can kind of like get disrupted by things not being sort of right. So the pillows being off or there's a dirty pile of laundry or I hate this song. They can like need for those things to be correct for them to actually like stay present and stay in their bodies. So that's energetic and sensual.

And then we have sexual. And this is what most of us think of when we think about eroticism and arousal. This is like genitals and porn and or something. orgasms and strip clubs. And it is like very body-based. It's very straightforward. It's, it's really hyper-focused on performance and genitals and orgasms. And for people who are primarily sexual blueprint, they can like get turned on by looking at a naked body or thinking about sex. And they can fail to understand why the other blueprints need the bells and whistles that they do in order to be erotic, right? They can understand themselves. Totally. Their superpower is their

simplicity, but that can also be their shadow side. And the, other thing that's interesting about sexual blueprint folks is that sex for them is just sort of like a basic need. It's like I need to have air and water and food and some sort of sexual connection. And so they can sort of see it like their daily meal or like the bread that they have or the rice that comes with every meal. And so like when they're not having it and they don't know that they're going to have sex again, they can start to spend out a little bit. They can start to be like, but it's been since last Tuesday that we had sex and I don't know when the next time that we are going to have sexes and that can make them feel a little ungrounded.

So that is energetic, sensual, sexual. Next is kinky. So kinky in the erotic blueprints has a really broad definition. I think it's really, really genius in this way. So kink in the blueprints means anything that is taboo. Anything that's taboo to you, it's highly subjective. That shifts all over the world. Exactly. Yeah. And person to person. What is taboo and not allowed and kinky for me It may be very, very different than what is not allowed for you. The thing that makes it kinky for an individual is just that it is taboo to that person and that can fall under psychological kink or physical kink. So sometimes when we think about kink, we think about whips and chains.

But it can also be calling someone by a name or doing Dom subplay that is strictly psychological in nature. There need not be any pain exchanged in order for something to be kinky. It could even be like role playing. what did we see earlier, like driver and chef and all of that? Yes, plumber. Plumber. That can be kinky because you're like, not supposed to have sex with the plumber, therefore it's kinky. So their superpower is their creativity, right?

Like real kinksters can use kink for healing. They can turn, you know, any appliance in your kitchen or any, like, you know, they can turn a spatula into a sex toy or they can like, you know, use something, almost like an improv actor can take something and like make it into a sexual scenario that can turn someone on. like that is their real superpower. Their shadow side is shame. So that's in the blueprint system. Shame is sort of housed inside of the kinky blueprint.

And then last, as you noted, is the shapeshifter. Now, shapeshifters have the capacity to do any of the other four blueprints. And so what they do is they shape shift to meet their partner. So your partner, let's say they're primarily sexual, like little side of kinky. Shafshifter can do that because they speak all the languages. Okay, like I'll totally meet you there. But what ends up happening is that they don't get all of their needs met. because they're constantly shifting to meet the other person.

Okay, that makes sense. And so often what they're told is like you're too much, you need too much, you're asking for too much, you're too voracious, when actually what's going on is just like they have a lot of capacity. And sometimes in order to like meet those needs, they want to pile on a lot more because they want to experience all of the other blueprints. And they can have the superpowers in the shadows of all of the other blueprints. Is this under this model, are you supposed to,

or do you naturally find somebody that is similar, or are there like one aligns better than another one? Or like two opposites attract. So it's not, it doesn't divide cleanly along gendered lines, but it is true that there are a lot of women that are energetic sensual and are paired with a lot of men that are kinky sexual.

And so a lot of those folks find the erotic blueprints because it's a language and a system that makes so much sense because it describes their experience, right? She wants him to slow down and breathe and make eye contact. And he wants to bring a rubber ducky. Exactly. Exactly. And he's like, what do you mean by? Why don't you know this? Just like, bend over and let me spank you, right?

So it's a great system for those folks. Yeah. And it is also true that like people of all different kind of blueprints find each other. A lot of people that I have worked with, men in particular have come to me and I'll describe that system and they'll be like, I'm a sexual blueprint. Right. But men were also all conditioned to be sex. Well, all of us were conditioned to be sexual blueprint. We didn't realize that like this other stuff could actually be arousing and considered erotic.

Well, especially when all the education is kind of really aligned towards the. Again, the sexual, very clinical description, anatomy, physiology. Like, that didn't surprise me at all. Exactly. Right. Yeah. We don't even know that, like, these other things could qualify as erotic in nature. Yeah.

Right. So they'll come in and they'll be like, you know, I'm a sexual blueprint. And then when I work with them, I'll say, you know, maybe over time, identify that they're actually energetically very sensitive. Like, they can pick up on little things being off in their partner or in the relationship. You know, they're the kind of person who says, like, hey, is there something that you? you want to tell me? Yeah. Like, you know, I feel like there's something in the air between us.

The vibe is off, right? And then they wonder why they, you know, are ejaculating so quickly. And it's because they're so extremely sensitive. And then as soon as they sort of like close that gap, it's overwhelming for their system and their system responds in kind. And it can look, that's just one example of the ways that it kind of exists in bodies. But the system as a whole, I remember, I remembered for myself where we got over here. So Kink in particular.

Right. I think that there is a lot of power in the transgressive. I think people who are kinky or have like already explored their kink. And there's two ways of looking at the blueprints. You could say that some people are sort of just born with their their blueprint stack. And I think everyone has access to more than one, certainly. It's very rare that I've met someone who just solely identifies as one blueprint. But for most people, like, they're going to need sensual first in order to get into sexual in order to get into kinky. or they actually need to start with kinky before they can move over to energetic.

I think all of us sort of like have an entry point and then other areas that that makes available to us. Jaya herself believes and teaches that not everyone has all of the footprints in them. I and some other blueprint coaches believe that actually everyone does have access to all of the blueprints. And the way that I'd like to go about that is by actually taking them outside of the bedroom and showing folks where they have access to these in other areas of their blueprint. life. So you have access to the kinky part of you when you are enjoying breaking a rule, like when you're kind of like getting away with something, you know, whatever, whatever that is. It's highly subjective, like I said. So there is a lot, a lot, a lot of power in working up

against something where we experience any degree of shame, right? Especially thinking about porn in particular and people who grew up in religious households. So you asked, do people end up having kinks when they have a lot of power? And I think that, when when everything is on the table, it's very hard to find things that are taboo enough to sort of like excite a response in someone. And I'm not saying that what what did he, John Combs did, falls within the erotic blueprint framework. But when I think about kink like very broadly, I always think about it in terms of like what was that person getting access to that was taboo for them and therefore gave them a rise out of it because the other shadow side to the

king blueprint is that you can need higher and higher and higher degrees of intensity in order to feel the same level of stimulation and that sort of sounds like part of that case it seems like what they were doing grew in size and scope to me the power dynamic too it makes sense of the epstein's of the world and tied to very powerful people who honestly they could pay for whatever they want and kind of do whatever they want. Why would you do that? Why would you associate from a person like that? Not that I'm not justifying it in any stretch, but it makes more sense to me.

Oh, it might actually just have been about the power dynamic. Which if your power dynamic is to prey upon people, I hope that I meet you one day with a potato peeler. I hope that you find some just good old fashioned adversity in your life so that you can know what it feels like to overcome a challenge and not have to. victimize, marginalized and vulnerable people for, you know, to get your rocks off.

Yeah. Do you recommend for couples, even if they think the classic, like, our marriage is perfect, our sex life is perfect? Do you still recommend they sit down and have a conversation about this? It's analogous to- About the erotic blueprints in particular? Well, robotic blueprint are just sex in general? Are you getting out of this or being honest about what it is for you? Because the easiest thing to say is everything's great,

everything's perfect. But that's I don't think that's the reality for anybody. Like I said, I know those people just go to the categories of lying about that particular thing. But to me, it's analogous of checking under the hood before the check engine light comes on. Right. Yeah, she uses the check engine light a lot as an analogy. I think that just because something is good doesn't mean it can't get better. And it can be really scary to kind of like peel back and say like what is it that is actually going on?

And are there ways in which this could improve? Especially when it can touch on insecurity for so many people. It can go straight to like, I'm not. not enough, straight to defensiveness, but it was fine before. It doesn't mean that anything is wrong. Nothing has to be wrong for something to improve. Like there's nothing wrong with my home or my, you know, my like skiing technique. But I'm still going to take a lesson because I want to enjoy it more and I want to get better.

This is not about fixing anything a lot of the time. So I think often, especially in long-term relationships, probably on both people's sides, But there are some things that they would like to say, right? Maybe it's often, and I teach that this always has to come first in having these more vulnerable conversations. We've got to begin by clearing the air and cleaning up anything that hasn't been said or hasn't been acknowledged, right? Because if we don't do that, then we're sort of like working in a field that has like a whole

bunch of like rocks and twigs and leaves. You're going to step on one too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely you're going to step on one. So go through and like do the work of clearing all of those out. And then you've got a free space that you know you can run around in. And when you can run around everywhere, then you're safe to go everywhere, right? So clean up everything that needs to be cleaned up.

You know, we never took care of that. I never apologized for this, et cetera. I let resentment grow. One of my coaches said to me, this line I'll never forget, resentment is the biggest boner killer. Michael, write that down for a T-shirt as well. It's really good. You can buy it. I have it on my merch.

That's T-shirts taken. Yeah, damn it. But I think you could also say, and I haven't made this T-shirt, resentment is the biggest lady boner killer, too. Okay. All right, fair enough. So we got to clear up that stuff first. And then we can go from like where is it that we would like to go from here? And I always tell people to make the distinction between fantasies that you want to stay as fantasies

and fantasies that you want to make into realities. Because we all have some fantasies that are exciting and interesting to us. But like they don't need to come into fruition. We don't really want to have sex with a plumber, right? We don't really want to have that experience. But like it's nice to think about. It's exciting to think about. So those fantasies that you can bring forward that fall under that category,

if you feel safe to share those with the partner and they feel safe to share with you, that's cool. Maybe there are ways that you can like role play and like have an experience of that. Then there are those fantasies that you would like to see happen. Maybe it's like as straightforward as like having sex outside of the bedroom. Like maybe it is bringing a mirror or a toy. or restraints in Tibet. It could be just experimenting with a prop

or something that you haven't allowed yourself to experiment with. On a more extreme end, it might be like going to a sex club or even having a threesome, you know, but these are very, very, very common things that people name that they do want to experience. They want to work with a partner to experience.

It is a skill that we can all develop to be able to hear a partner's desires and fantasies and not make them about us or about us lacking anything. You know, if a partner comes to you and they're like, I want to have a threesome. And your initial response is like, what am I not giving you that you need? Like understandable response, but probably, you don't get that it's actually not about you. You can't give them two bodies at once.

You can't. If you could, you would, right? Do you ever see that actually working out, though, in the long term? People who, like, see group sex? Group sex or open marriages. Actually, if you extend the timeline long enough, not that I have a huge, you know, data set to support this, but I do know of a couple of people. And over a long enough timeline, it doesn't seem to work that well.

Well, you could say the same about monogamy too. Sure. Over a long enough timeline, very few monogamous relationships work. I think if you're the right person, and again, consensual adults doing consensual stuff could care less. I could tell you for me, that one wouldn't work. Like I would not be as secure enough human being to be okay with life. I think we had to make some distinctions here, too, because there is like the couple that

occasionally has a threesome with someone who they met online while they're on vacation. Right? And then they go home and they don't, that's just a fun thing that they like sometimes fantasize about. They don't remain in contact with that person. There is a pretty big gap between them and someone who like is in a thruple and has a ongoing intimate emotional relationship with another person or in like the spare bedroom. Yeah, exactly. There's so much range.

And then we also have to, you know, there's, there's sexual exclusivity and then there's romantic exclusivity. And these are things that I've played around with a lot in my personal life. And where I eventually landed is like I prefer romantic and emotional exclusivity. I want to be one partner with one partner. Part of that is because I really value my time. And I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time talking about feelings with a bunch of people. It seems to, it gets exponentially larger.

The more people that you involve, the more conversation. And time goes into the relationship. Yeah. When I was younger in my early 20s, like that sounded fun and I enjoyed doing it. Today, it's not how I want to spend my time. I prefer just like the simplicity of having one person knowing that I am their person and that they are in mine. It feels a lot easier. In terms of like sexual exclusivity, though, like I've been bisexual.

I've identified as bisexual since I was a teen. Actually, it was my dad told me that I was bisexual. He was like, when I was, before I even clocked it and myself. Yeah. Yeah. I kept like wanting to rent movies with like a lesbian and bisexual leads. And my dad was like, you know, I'm on to you, right? And I was like, what do you mean?

And he was like, are you not seeing this? Are you not seeing this in you? Seeing it was one, seeing it in one thing, recognizing it is another. Yeah, right. So, but my like desire to approach women, by the way, my comfort approaching women to go back to like how scary it can be to approach the same sex, opposite sex has like waxed and waned over time. But I really appreciate that in my relationship, I can express that like today on the flight on one of the airports on the way here, I saw this like, incredibly beautiful TSA agent in her uniform and her like tight bun and her glasses. And I was like, did it for you. Wow. Yeah. Really, really, really. Unexpectedly, surprisingly, just like smack in the

face like, hello, did it for me. And so, and so like I like I like can express that to my partner and that like, you know, that's not where we're at today. But there may be a future in which like I wanted to pursue a sexual relationship with a woman. That's something that he can't give to me. And so So it falls under sort of like a different category. So you asked, have I seen it work long term? There are couples that I've had the pleasure of knowing or working with or being friends with for whom that really, really works. Like polyamory, having relationships with multiple people, it serves them.

They're not like always open necessarily. Sometimes they have other relationships. Sometimes they don't. The couples that I see it really works for, they really prioritize the primary relationship. relationship. And then, of course, there are individuals that practice what's known as solo poly, and they don't have, like, a core couple. They're like individuals that are doing their thing. And I don't, I guess it works for them. I don't see, we can't measure them by like the long-term relationship because that's not sort of the orientation. Yeah. I think that polyamory

and non-monogamy and open relationships became really popular over the last couple years in media, at least they did in my world. You see more of it for sure. And I think it gave people the idea that they should try it. And I don't think that was accurate. It's not for most people. Yeah, I was going to say. To me, it's like an orientation. If you grew up, suspecting that you could like love and have relationships with more

than one person, if you had a relationship with one person and then like you really felt like you wanted to add another person into that relationship, even early on in life, as early as like 14 or 15 when you were first kind of like dating and trying these things out, you might be a really good candidate for polyamory. Yeah. If you have not felt that before, and all of a sudden you like read an article in vogue that describes this relationship style. Or you watch the real housewives of Salt Lake City. Right, right.

And then suddenly you're like, oh, that's an interesting option. Maybe we should try that. You might lose it all, buddy. And I would say I think a lot of people are going, they're looking at their primary relationship. And they're going, you know what, I would like more. I don't want to do, this is my very hot take. I don't want to do the hard work that is involved in really taking care of this and making sure that, like, I can get all of my sexual and erotic needs from this relationship. That takes a lot of work.

Yeah. Let's chase the new flashy shiny thing. There's a new thing. Yeah. Don't, we're going to bring her home and that's going to, like, revive our sex life. Right. Now, you're adding another person into the works. Everything becomes more complicated.

Not to mention that that person also has feelings, wants, needs, desires, rights. And yeah, I think a lot of people think that they will solve something or fix something. And all they really do is complicate and often make things worse. Yeah, I can see people taking that option or choosing that option as an escape. How big have you grown your team now? Obviously, you started off at 16, known you wanted to go to this path. How big have you been able to grow it? So I have two full-time employees that are absolutely incredible.

They are the machine that makes the entirety of Caitlin V exist. and like operate in the world. So I'm very blessed to have those too. And then we work with a team of seven coaches who I oversee and send clients and referrals over to those coaches. And then I have the pleasure of sort of like working with a lot of people through them, even though I as a coach can only work with a few people a year. And then we have so many contractors and agencies that are,

overseeing and supporting different parts of the business. So I have a web developer who I've worked with for a decade now who oversees my website. I have a social media team that supports me with like content posting and clipping and all of the things that you know go into it and can be there are a full time job. There is a full ecosystem in and itself. Yeah. And I have, I'm supported by maybe 14 or so contractors in any given moment. People that like come and go as, you know, as per project.

basis. Right now we're doing a virtual summit on January 17th, which I thought was like, I will admit, I'll be the first to admit that I really thought you just kind of like jumped on Zoom and then you put people up and you had their slides up. And what I have learned is that yes, that is an option. But if you want to deliver something that like really gives people an incredibly high quality experience, it takes a huge team in order to do that. So that's my humbling lesson right now. It's like waking up every day and being like, oh, we need to hire one more. person to we get a higher. Oh, and one more person. Okay. Here's something else I didn't know about. Yeah, right. Oh, we need one. Oh, got it. Okay. And we also need that other software. That software is

very expensive. Are you sure we couldn't have done that with software that we already had? No, no, no, no, no, no, buy the software, buy the software. It's a humbling experience. But yet, it's grown. I never thought I was going to be a CEO. I started a YouTube channel because I wanted to respond to the need that I was seeing is there was a lack of people having the conversations that I felt they should have access to on the internet. And YouTube was pretty ripe for that at the time. And to this day, I don't think that there's a really advanced and nuanced conversation about the subjects that I talk about in particular happening. Part of that is censorship. Part of that is just the lack of communication and connection that exists when we're all sort of like in our own little

boxes. It's certainly been a surprise to end up here with the size of the team and the business that I have. Do you like it? Most days, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, there's no perfect job. Yeah. I never, if you had had given me earlier in my life a piece of paper, as many pieces of paper as there are pages in this book, I would have written down everything that I thought I would have potentially done. Nothing I do now would have been on that list. Not a single damn thing, except for the first job in the military. Beyond that, it's like, ooh, didn't really forward. It didn't really forward to think beyond that one. So let's figure it out along the way.

And I'm curious, and your thoughts on this, I was thinking about this earlier. Like, I think there is wisdom in driving towards the things that we know that we want. And I think there is also wisdom in being open to moving where the flow of our life seems to be pushing us. I'm leaning the older I get to the ladder. I do think it's great to have goals. Otherwise, you're kind of a compass that doesn't have a true north. True. And so this macro goal, I think, is great.

but does it matter how you get there? I think, and I have found in my life, that lift your head up like, okay, cool, I can still see it. I'm heading in that direction. I'm not farther away than I was when I started. But you get to a fork in a road, God, I have to make the right decision here or otherwise. I'm never going to get there.

And now it's like, I'm going to be okay, either way. Because, yeah, I can backtrack and I've done that. I was like, okay, we're in a cul-de-sac. We need to get out of here. I'm back down that mountain. Totally. And you can, but you learn from that, and then maybe you recognize that in the topography

in the next split intersection. section that you come up to, but the more I have tried to control things in my life, the less it has actually benefited me. And I don't think you can short-circuit the experiences you need to have to get to that place, because it is tough to, I'm not saying surrender yourself to the, you know, the winds of life, but I'm also kind of saying surrender yourself to the wins of life. But you have to be able to, you have to have enough experiences along the way to recognize that if you do that, you're going to be okay because you have the tools necessary to solve the problems in front of you. I don't know how you short-circern.

I'm yet to figure out a way where you can actually shorten that other than reps in time. Right. Yeah. I don't know that you would want to. Yeah. And I think as with most things, like what you're pointing to is that the answer is both. Yeah. The answer is like have goals and flow. And what works for me may not work for somebody else because again, I, my N in life, my data point is one. It really is. And I really try to remember that, especially when people ask me for advice or, hey, they ask me, what should I do and how should I do? I'm like, I can maybe help you with the How. I can give you a template, the why you're going to have to figure out that one on your own. Because if you have the wrong why, which are something I might think is the wrong why,

maybe for you, it absolutely clicks. And that's your true note. And you go, who am I to say? Because your ends one, too. Right. You know, yeah. What else, how big do you want to grow it? I mean, what else do you have that you want to accomplish? Is this your first book? This is my first book. Yeah. You're going to write another one? I have a lot more that I want to say. There were a number of things that were a little bit more topical or timely that I took out. of the book. Some of the stuff that we talked about today, like the state of men and boys and masculinity. That was because putting that into the book in the way that I had initially envisioned

would have made the book like very of this moment. Yeah, it locks you in time. And I really wanted it to be timeless because sex is timeless. It's existed as long as we have and even before. And we'll continue. So I wanted this book to like stand. Hopefully we don't know. It might continue. Demolition man might become a documentary. Let's not be so short. I did want I did want the book to to just exist as its own and to be found on a bookshelf 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years from now and still be relevant and it will be. But there is more that I want to say on what I see as a coach, a lot of the conversation that we had today that is a little bit more of this moment. So I have a vision of where it might go. If I was to write a second book, I don't know for sure. Where is it

that I want to take it. I, the mission for me is still the mission. It's get this information into the hands of as many people as possible. The question that I wake up trying to answer every day is how do I empower more people to carry this message forward? Not for me, but for what I perceive to be the good of all. Like how do we restore pleasure as a birthright? How do we make an army of people who have access to quality pleasure-centric information

and have audiences of folks who will listen to them and take that message further and further and further. I am one person. I can get it as far as I can, but I can get it much further if I empower people to carry it themselves and to carry it everywhere that they go. And so I think my job is to translate it well for the masses.

I think coming from the world of science and research to YouTube is, first of all, a tremendous jump. But it does give me, a chance to take things from the evidence base, combine them with the anecdotal experience that I have from coaching and put it out in such a way that people can really digest it and learn from it. I would love to continue to train coaches and work with coaches because at the end of the day, as much as like I'm a content creator and now an author and a show host, like my heart is in coaching. I love working one-on-one with someone and watching them transform their life.

That is what thrills me more than anything else. And so I want to empower other people to be able to do that. There are a lot of obstacles that exist for professionals in my industry. And the people who are like really phenomenal sex coaches, like their heart is just in helping people to do this. They're not necessarily great business people as a whole, generally. I actually was just pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed business building. And so that's something that I was able to do. But I want to make it easier for folks who have that gift to,

to make a living giving it. I want to put sex coaching on the map. Sex therapy exists for a very good reason. It will continue to exist. Sex therapy is really excellent for folks who are dealing with co-occurring instances of like anxiety, depression, have severe trauma, have C-PTSD, have needs that are beyond just like what the average person needs in order to like have a great sex life, right? What's C-PtSD?

Complex PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. What defines it as complex? So I, it is a, from what I understand, it is the, it is a collection of symptoms and experiences that comes from like repeated trauma. Okay. And it is like a diagnosable cluster of symptoms that is distinct from PTSD. But I'm not an expert on that and I'd have to verify. that there are a lot of people, I would say the majority of people who could just have a better sex life. And if they had like a little better, a little more connected, little more pleasurable, satisfying sex life, would have a better marriage, would sleep better at night, would be happier co-parenting.

Like it's just little tweaks. It would make a huge difference in their world. And they may also feel a little bit more like excited to wake up and go to the gym or take their supplements or whatever it is. And so I want for sex coaching to exist in such a way that people feel like they can just access that and that that is a really simple and effective way to see a positive shift inside of their life and inside of their relationship. Like that is my ultimate dream. That's awesome.

We have been out for over two and a half hours. Is that true? Yeah. I just looked over at my phone. Your boyfriend will kill us if I don't get you out of here soon. We've got to get you to the hotel. We'll end with where people can find you. But before that, where would you start couples?

What's your advice you have for couples? Obviously there's advice for- Can we get if a couple's listening? Yeah. Couples listening or just, well, yeah, anybody who, I mean, at some point, you know, whether whatever preference you have, hopefully you don't live your life by yourself and you end up with a partner. What advice do you have for them?

So this is it's going to be two prong. Start with yourself because you are the person who you have access to. You are the mind and the brain and the body that you can know to the degree that it is knowable. And so you have to start with you. Your sexuality pre-existed your current relationship. And it is something that you will have until you die. And so it is something that like you need to understand and even nurture. for yourself and reflect on for yourself.

It exists independently of the other person, and then it also exists with the other person and the couple. So start with you. Get clear on what it is that you're thinking about, struggling with, where those things came from. Like know yourself sexually first. And also, like, understand that you can meet your own needs to a degree sexually and that you, well, it may not be a perfect solution

and it may not be a permanent solution, like taking care of your own needs. own needs if you have a partner who isn't or can't or is not willing to for whatever reason, like get right with you first. That's number one. And then as a couple, the place where I would start is, we go back to the things that we've kind of like addressed today, which is make some time, elevate the conversation. Find a garden.

Find a garden. Find a garden. You know, actually, that's it. It's find a garden. It really is. Find a garden and schedule some time in the garden. don't just schedule like a one-off in the garden. Part of doing that like process of self-reflection and self-discovery is going to be being able

to have that conversation with your partner. It's going to be the part that allows you to not get defensive or go on the attack when you go to communicate with the partner so that you can like have a quality communication. Take breaks. Don't communicate past your edge. Write things down. Develop a structure for communication.

Repeat what they said. Go back and review it. summarize it, like do all of the things that allow communication to be successful, you will find, again, in the process of self-discovery, that you might think, I want to have a threesome. But then you ask yourself one question further, which is like, what is it that that would give me? Oh, it would have me feel really desired. Oh, what I'm actually looking for is to feel really, really desired. Okay, I can take that to my significant other. And I can take that to them not from a place if you're doing a bad job of desiring me, but from an earnest place of, you know, what would be really

fulfilling for me if I felt like you really deeply wanted me. And here are the things that would indicate to me that I was really wanted. And then revisit, come, go back to the garden. Yeah. You know, take it, take it to a professional, take it to a coach, a therapist, take it to a friend who is supportive, not a friend who has a lot of spicy opinions and, and you know isn't going to be able to actually hold quality space for you. We've got those friends. and then come back, come back to the garden, come back to the garden, and keep making the garden safe. You know, I think that that if you're a couple that keeps struggling, if you go to the garden and you end up fighting every time, what that is pointing to for me is that there's a lack of foundational safety in the relationship.

You might feel like you're at risk of being broken up with. You might be in a habit of threatening. If you keep that up, you know, we're going to get divorced or you joke about divorce or whatever. Like you might feel like you're, you're, you're, you're. your previous relationship was so unsafe that you're now projecting that into the current relationship. But if the communication isn't landing, if it's not going forward and if you're not seeing progress and time, that's an indication that the foundation of safety isn't there. And then for you, the thing to start with then would be to go back and get safe with one another, get safe with

yourself, get safe for the other person, and help them figure out how to be safe for you. And once you have that, you can go anywhere. The sky is the limit. You got a lot of runway in front of you if you can get to there. It's good advice. Where can people find your stuff? The book comes out what? The book comes out on February 27th. January 27th. January 27th. I was close. I got the, I got the day right. You did. It'll still be on sale February 27th too. That's true. But it will start being on sale. You'll get a much better chance of being on the best seller list if they buy it in January. Yes. And you know what? A book like this on Men's Sexuality, Quickside, when I took this idea to agents and publishers, I heard over and over again men don't buy books and men don't buy books on sexuality.

And thankfully, I found an agent to represent it and Hayhouse was excited to publish it. Yeah. But I would love to prove those people wrong by saying, yes, they do. Actually, men do care. I bought a book on the last trip I was on. Men read. Yeah. They read.

And you know what? A lot of men read like, you know, a handful of books every year. Yeah. So like, why not this, like, let this be the book then, right? Read this book. I agree. So the book comes out January 27th. You can get all the bonuses and free downloads.

And I made a whole thing on what I couldn't say in the book so I could get all that off of my chest at hblsbook.com. That's harder, better, longer, stronger, HBLSbook. There's some little Easter eggs on the cover. You probably can't see you on that image. Maybe you can. You'll have to get the book in order to get the. And like I mentioned, we're doing a summit on January 17th. And it's free.

It's totally free. It's called the Pressure to Power Summit. it. You can get more at the, at the HPLS book website. And if you sign up, if you, if you, if you join as a VIP, you can get a signed copy of a book. Sweet. And then you have your YouTube channel. Have YouTube, Caitlin V on YouTube. I have a thousand. Do you do all the other socials? I am mostly on YouTube. I've been kicked off of every other social for talking about sex. And you can find me on Instagram. You can find me on TikTok. I'm on like my fourth TikTok. But find me on YouTube. That's the corner of the internet that I existed. And then, and then if, if the, I have

14 courses like I mentioned, and you can get those at my website by, you can search CaitlinVee or CaitlinVeele.com. Awesome. Well, let's get you back to your boyfriend. I appreciate you making the travel. Thank you so much for having me. Well, of course, I am sorry that the snow conditions are what would be called by locals. What do you think, Michael?

Dog shit. Horrible, yeah. Dog shit, snow conditions. Flood warning in December. You were born and raised in Montana. Have you ever heard of a flood warning in December? No, I've barely ever heard of a flood warning in Montana. Yeah.

That's fair, actually. I only learned how to ski at like 33, and I feel like I got hip to skiing just as soon as skiing became impossible. Like, there's no snow here, there's no snow at mammoth. So here's what you're going to do tomorrow. You're going to go up chair one, which is the top of the mountain, and then go down the backside. It is the most sheltered, and if there is going to be fresh snow or better riding conditions, spend your time on the backside of the mountain. And it'll be okay. I'll be there.

Thank you. Awesome. How long are you in Montana? for? I'll be here until Sunday. Awesome. Well, hopefully by then, and I'm lying when I say this, we'll get some better weather because I've already looked at the weather report and it's not going to be good. I know, but this would be a great opportunity for me to learn how to ski in various conditions. Oh, that's definitely a glass. I'm relatively new to it. Half full approach. I like where your head's at. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, I plan on skiing for a long time, which means I got to get

those reps in now while my body isn't as fragile as it will be in the future. Cool. Well, skis back your boyfriend. Thank you so much. Thank you. You know,