Modern Wisdom - #599 - Adam Lane Smith - 15 Harsh Psychology Truths

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Adam Lane Smith is a psychotherapist and an author. Adam has helped thousands of patients and couples to deal with problems from childhood, their relationships and their sex lives. He also writes amazing Twitter threads filled with insights from his time as a therapist and today we get to go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn the common trend Adam saw in every couples' therapy session he conducted, the biggest differences between male and female communication styles, why so many young girls are on depression medication, why the female sex drive switches after 6 to 12 months into a relationship, what mistakes all women wish guys would stop making on the first 3 dates and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Download Hevy, the best workout tracker for free at https://hevyapp.app.link/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Adam's website - https://adamlanesmith.com/ Follow Adam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheBrometheus  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Adam Lane Smith. He's a psychotherapist and an author. Adam has helped thousands of patients and couples to deal with problems from childhood, their relationships and their sex lives. He also writes amazing Twitter threads filled with insights from his time as a therapist, and today we get to go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn the common trend Adam saw in every couple's therapy session he conducted. The biggest differences between male and female communication styles, why so many young girls are on depression medication, why the female sex drive switches after 6-12 months into a relationship, what mistakes all women wish guys would stop making on the first three dates, and much more. Don't forget, you might be listening but not subscribed and if that's you, then come

on, sort yourself out. It would support the show and it would make me very happy and it means that you're not going to miss episodes when they go live. So go to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or the little plus in the top right hand corner on Apple podcasts. Ah, thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Adam Lane Smith. My favorite thing to do is troll through your Twitter and find interesting tweets to do with your history as a psychotherapist, as a couple's therapist working on attachment

issues, pull them out and then discuss them with you. So that's what we're going to do today. And well, actually, before we get started, if the people that haven't heard you before, because the show's grown a lot since the last time you were on, briefly what's your background? Yeah, so as a psychotherapist for years, marriage and family therapist, and what I found through my training and through training other healthcare professionals was that attachment was the vehicle underneath that was driving all of the diagnoses that we saw in the book, but what they were teaching therapists was that they only needed to treat the diagnoses because nobody understands attachment theory.

It is terribly misunderstood and it became my obsession and my specialty, so I've been training and experience in this and everything working with people on this for 15 years now through this process. I retired my license as a psychotherapist so that I could coach internationally and help people everywhere with attachment issues and I am working hard to change this game that says attachment is just something women study when they want to cry more and I'm teaching especially now men that I have found and coaching men through fixing their attachment in a way that is practical and makes sense to them so that you

can overcome a lifetime of dating problems, insecurities, fears, and everything else that comes with broken attachment. Beautiful. Okay, my first favorite one that I picked up recently, most couples therapy is useless. Not because the therapy is wrong, but because most couples don't go to therapy together until one of them is absolutely not wanting to work on the relationship anymore. They're using therapy as an excuse to air their frustration one last time.

Mm-hmm, so many times I've had couples come in, and that's exactly what it is. Is one is all in for it and is convinced I'm gonna fix their partner and tell them that they've been right all along, and the other partner comes in dreading it because their partner's the one who set it up and they say what, what sort of buzz saw am I walking into? And it is a miserable experience for all three people

involved, unless I can turn them around and convince the other partner that I'm there to help them. In which case, the first partner is convinced that I have somehow pulled a switch a route and they are now going to get betrayed by their coach. Now who's working with them, it's an ugly process. It is really ugly. The only time couples therapy really works is when they are coming in because they both

want to make it work, but they don't have the skills and they have no idea what to do. If they both want to make it work, it's an amazing experience. If one of them doesn't want to work and doesn't have the guts to say it, it's a horrible experience for both people. Why is it so rare for couples to go to couples therapy before the stage that one of them is basically ready to call it quits and needs an arbiter between the two of them? Because most people do not have the skills they need to speak to their partner proactively and productively about the problems, so they just pretend they're aren't problems,

or they throw anger and excuses at each other over and over and over again. One will try the other withdraws, then they switch, and the other will try again, and the other will withdraws. And they only vent to the people around them. They don't actually go out and get proactive solutions from the people around them. And their family system's usually broken, so they've never seen a healthy relationship. They think this is as good as it gets. They only seek professional help when one of them panics because

the other one has made a change. And I will also say this, women change for relationships, typically men only will change for circumstances, which is reality. Women will usually be done with a relationship a year or more before they're actually ready to get divorced. Men have no idea that this is coming, men get blindsided, and they say, wait, I'm finally willing to give it a try. Let's try couples therapy, and she's been done for a year. So this is a very common problem right there. Do you think that that explains part of the reason that most divorces are initiated by

women? Absolutely. At 100%. Because most women have spent five, ten, twenty years changing for the relationship, hoping that her husband will secretly somehow change for the relationship too, men only change when they observe a problem, and then when they believe that there is a solvable problem there that they can actually work on.

It takes both of those things for a man to actually work on something. Most men will only change enough to try to stop the discomfort that they're experiencing and try to go backward. Yeah, it's, I have a number of friends that have either been through couples counseling or are going to couples counseling at the moment. And I would say that the archetype is, as you've described, that it really is, if this counseling was to make the relationship better, it is a severe uphill battle, which I imagine from a therapist's perspective

makes couples counseling not exactly fun. So I went through school graduate program six years for masters degree and then additional three years of apprenticeship of hard apprenticeship under clinicians. So it's nine year process to become a marriage and family therapist at nine years of training of them telling us, you will want to, you will get burned out on this job. Couples therapy is hard. Couples don't actually usually get better. Very few of them do. It's hard work and you have to completely detach from their outcomes because otherwise you will drive yourself crazy watching one couple after another tear them self-apart and there's nothing

you can do to help them. This is the message that they gave us and it was very true. You come in, you do the best that you can, and you guide them forward. And usually, the biggest piece that I would do is this, is get them to a point where they could say, what got you together in the first place? Where do you have any commonalities? And where is there even a sliver of hope that both of you could work together on this? If there's even a tiny shred of hope, we can make this work. I, well, really briefly, one time, I had a couple come in to my coaching practice. They both had very, very bad attachment, very bad attachment. Neither one of them knew it. One of them was having an affair. The other one wanted the relationship to work.

The one who was having an affair wasn't sure if they wanted it to work or not. I educated them on attachment, first session, educated fully on attachment. Second session got them working on bonding together and doing what couples are supposed to do. Third session, top them communication skills and conflict resolution. By the fourth session when they walked in, both of them were happier in their relationship than they had ever been even as newlyweds, even as whether they were dating. The person who was cheating said, absolutely not, I'm going to do this marriage. It's amazing. They had healed their attachment together and they were now growing closer to their friends and their family at the same time. It only took three sessions of doing the deep work because both of them were committed to it. If a couple wants

to make it work, even extreme circumstances can work, but you must both want to make it work. How does a pair of people who have got ingrained responses, habituated thought patterns, routines built into their communication style, the way they relate to each other, the way that they show up to each other. How can it be the case that three sessions is all that it takes to deprogram something which at the very least we're taught should take 66 days to break and make a new habit. It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. It's curious because here's the pace. Is so many people are living with a decision they made when they were one year old that said,

I am scared. I am hurt. I am sad. I feel vulnerable. People will abandon me or people will betray me. There is something wrong with me or with other people And I am not ever going to be able to be open again because I will never be this hurt this scared this vulnerable ever again for the rest of my life They don't even remember this decision But that foundational belief has been set into their brain as an absolute fact of the universe Graviny pulls things down water is wet and love is impossible. And I must live in fear for the rest of my life to stay safe. That foundational belief once you hear it and say, oh, I have been believing that, but it's probably true. And someone comes in, an attachment

expert comes in and says, it is not true. Here's an alternate model for living that is possible. I want you to think about it over the next week and tell me if it's ruining your life, or if this is something that we can fix. And they'll think about it and it ruins it for them. And then they start seeing the matrix and they say, wow, maybe there is two different ways to live. And maybe I've been living the wrong way. Maybe I'm willing to learn.

And then they learn it once you've got it intellectually cool. Once you experience it, that's where it begins to change. Because when you experience the difference, your brain chemistry balances out, right? We've got, I deal with the five big brain chemicals. There's more than this, but the five big ones we work. We look at fast-suppressant, oxytocin, GABA, gamma amino-bioic acid, and serotonin. Those four are absolutely crucial to get through your good relationships. If you don't have good relationships, you've got a dopamine button that you can punch like a monkey. This is where people have porn addiction and all kinds of addictions and phone addictions and gambling addictions.

It's because their brain chemistry is off from their wounded relationships. I think they've never been fulfilled. It is like a duck that is terrified of water so it lives its whole life on land. It's like a duck who will never fly because it's terrified of the sky as well. It's a duck who is continuously walking because it thinks water or flying is going to kill

it. That's what these people are like. As they experience even a little bit, the overwhelming brain chemistry that floods through them from good relationships is like a duck who finally learns to swim or finally flies and says, this is not just not scary. It is exhilarating. It's everything I was built for. Your brain is built for these things and the addiction to the good takes over and it heals you

much more rapidly than most people are expecting. It is not about habits, it is about cultivating the right experiences so that your brain takes over for you. The public school system treats boys like defective girls, then raises girls to act more like boys. Check the CDC's medication rates for ADHD in boys and antidepressants in girls. What's going on there? The American school system is designed to churn people out in factory settings, or churn people out in a prison setting, or a corporate setting in a cubicle. And it is not designed for young boys who are not designed for corporations,

or not designed for cubicles, prisons, and factories. It is simply not gonna work that way. So it punishes people who stick out, and it meditates them down. We have the medical system here in America, the medical model of mental health. I work with the response model. If something is off, the person is not responding right,

or the situation is not right, there's something happening where we need to change their response, not medicate them into oblivion because there's something wrong with their brain. Boys are not defective girls. Boys are boys and we need to create a system for them. Why the female set point? Why presume that boys should act like defective girls? It's the same reason that overseas, when American companies ship their jobs overseas, they usually pull in female workers into their sweatshops because they are quiet, they are more compliant,

they just sit there, they do what they're told, and they will do the tiny tasks over and over and over and then go home without complaining. They are most unlikely to complain or cause a fuss, they will simply do what they're told. That is why, that's the model that we want here in America for boys. So you've got higher agreeableness, a little bit higher on average, conscientiousness. I mean, you know, you look at the rates in schools at the moment and girls are out achieving boys when the title nine and some adjustments have been made to the way that the education system works. And I think it is plain that the current version of schooling that you have

is more suited to a female nature. Or you could in reverse say that female nature is more suited to the current iteration of schooling. There is a conspiracy out there that says that school has been purposefully sort of reprogrammed to make it more difficult for boys. I would be much more tempted to presume that it's just a easier, it's not a coordinated effort to keep boys down by the school system, it's simply the way to have the most peaceful sort of classroom and each individual teacher is optimizing for the most peaceful classroom, which is the one where students aren't doing things with their hands, whether not running around outside, whether it's easily structured timetables, homework is supposed to exams, all of these sorts of

things. They are done out of convenience, not out of malign coordination. Absolutely. There's enough idiocy in the world without bringing malice into it. It's okay to be sad that doesn't mean you're depressed. It's okay to be worried that doesn't mean you're anxious. It's okay to experience trauma that doesn't mean you have PTSD. Not everything is a diagnosable issue. So many people hide behind a diagnosis and say, I never have to get better. This is one of the biggest things with attachment issues too. People take an attachment style's quiz and say,

oh, I'm anxious attachment. I will be that for the rest of my life. Absolutely not. That is the medical system that says, you have a disease. We must treat you for the rest of your life. You will go through 10 years of therapy and take five medications.

As I was working as a psychologist, as a psychotherapist, I did in-home treatment for people and some of my clients were on 27 different medications at the same time and I would ask them what they were for and they would not know. And at least 12 to 15 of those medications would be psychological medications. Some of them were four or five different antidepressants and then three or different anxiety medications and then some for panic disorder and then some for who knows? They just kept throwing them in.

They had no idea. That's the American system right now. And if you have a diagnosis, it's not the end of your life, and not everything is a diagnosis. A diagnosis should just say, here's where you're starting, where are you going to go? There's something very reassuring in a way, I think, about pathologizing your emotions, about giving them a label.

It's not that the world is unfair, that life is difficult, that sometimes bad things happen, people pass away, you become destitute or broke or ill or sick or your family members die. It's not that, it's that you have X or Y or Z. It is a forcing function, a convenient way to reduce down the complexity of the world. And I see it in myself. I see it in my friends. I see it in the people that talk about this sort of stuff online. It is a very seductive solution to try and have a label that you can place behind something. It's not that your sleep pattern is very bad because of your poor habits around eating late at night, which causes your digestive system to cause you to not eat well and you're drinking too much water. And now you've got like shy bladder syndrome or you've got like a bladder problem that means

you've got the bathroom or whatever it is, which is causing your sleep to be bad, which means that downstream from that, your anxiety is higher the next day. It's, I'm anxious. I've got anxiety, I've got an anxiety problem. And yeah, reducing down the complexity of the world into a pathology, ADHD, we saw it before.

It's like giving that diagnosis. The number of ADHD diagnoses is gonna, was it like 10 times, 50 times or something? It's like giving that diagnosis. The number of ADHD diagnoses is going to, was it like 10 times, 50 times or something? It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. In America, they say one in seven little boys in America is now medicated for ADHD. And then that's, those are brutal medications. Do you know how many boys I've talked to and grown men who are in their 20s that say, I've been medicated for ADHD since I was four years old. I've been on stimulants since I was four years old because my pre-school teacher diagnosed me with ADHD and told them my parents they would kick me out of school if I didn't get on meds. A lot. Guys have never lived their real life.

What, how would you describe, I don't know whether you've ever been on ADHD medication, but from what you know about the experience of it, what can you tell me about what life would be like before and after for a young boy or girl and then also moving up into adulthood? Most of what I encounter is people whose brain is so fried from years and years and years of being doped up and zombified and then still being screamed at. Anytime they twitch wrong, they move wrong, they act wrong, they don't do something right, it's you have ADHD. That's your ADHD. Get under control. I don't want to tolerate you. You have this problem. People who have ADHD, sometimes it's not ADHD, sometimes it's an attachment issue.

Other times people have ADHD, have attachment issues from being yelled at for having actual ADHD. It's amazing how those two go hand in hand and those medications zombify you and then you've been on them for 20 years and you've never experienced what it's like not to be run down and also not to be yelled at for having a diagnosis. It's not just even the meds, it's the whole experience of being told there is something wrong with you and you will never function right. What was that psychological experiment where they took children who had minus tutters and emphasized the stutter. Yeah. So they encouraged one group and said,

hey, encourage them and the stutter got better. The other one, they stressed them out to the max and it made it so bad some of them couldn't even talk. It was 100%. If you encourage, they heal, ADHD, by the way, some people call it type E personality, entrepreneur. Some people who thrive in entrepreneurial settings have very ADHD style brains and behaviors,

and they can do amazing when you get them in the right areas. Boys with diagnosed, at least with ADHD, do amazingly well in non-traditional schools. When you get them in there, their achievement goes through the roof, but that's not what we're doing. We're not focusing on that.

Because we have a one-size-fits-all education model. Not everybody's got access to a Waldorf school or some sort of outdoorsy type thing, which means that if you are a child or a young boy or perhaps a girl who has ADHD, you are a square peg being shoved into an incredibly round hole and there are very few alternatives. I think, is it Elon Musk who dropped out of Stanford

after his first seminar? I think he lasted less than half a term or something and you're looking at a guy, whatever you think of his philosophy and his politics and his businesses, who is very capable at doing a lot of diverse things. That screams just like weaponizedized commercialized ADHD to me. It is. It is. It is. Weaponized ADHD is right. And that's why he can achieve the way he

does most likely. When you harness it right, it's an incredible power. When you live in a society where everything is one size fits all, then you are a giant living in a city for very short people. And nothing is going to fit right. You're going to bang your head everywhere you go. Let's also remember that saying, you know, having an ADHD problem, every pathology that you want to talk about is a spectrum. You know, even the most focused person in the world is the first percentile on the spectrum of ADHD. There's no point at which you hit a marker and it's like, oh, at this point, you're ADHD. Even you could say this about obesity, right? When you name somebody as being obese, it's actually a kind of arbitrary line

that's like, okay, above BMI of this particular thing, and BMI is just this decision tool that you've decided to use. But we're talking about a spectrum here. And ADHD is a function of a bunch of other, like phenomenon manifestations, the way that people behave and show up in the world. The same thing would be true for anxiety, for depression, for whatever it might be. And pathologizing it as well, using it as a label,

using it as an identifier is like, okay, up to a point, at what point do you say that you are ADHD or that you're just somebody that happens to have a more wandering imagination? And really how useful is it to be able to get yourself to that side? Robert Ploman, what is he? The third most cited psychologist of the 20th century, the preeminent behavioral geneticist in the world, he said that all of these diagnoses, as far as he can see, are basically pointless because everything's just a spectrum. So it makes it easy when you want to diagnose somebody, when you want to come up with a solution,

but it's not tremendously useful at them understanding themselves because everybody is on this spectrum. Everybody has different bits of all of these thrown in. When I was at graduate school, one thing they told us was, when do you undiagnose someone? And everyone in the room looked around and said, what do you mean? Everyone, when they get a diagnosis, they just have it. And they said, no, you undiagnose them when in the book, it says, when you can function well in your relationships and you can function well in school or work. Those are the two requirements.

You must have functional impairment from the issue. If you can get a person to where they are fully functional, they are no longer impaired, they no longer fit the diagnosis. You remove the diagnosis at that point and say, you no longer have this diagnosis. The problem is, we have removed that entire part from the book in our heads and no one undiagnoses anymore, and diagnosis is now a permanent thing for the rest of your life. That is not even built into the book, that is built into our culture. So you just spend your time accumulating and never reading yourself of different pathologies.

How funny. Okay, next one. There's two together that I really enjoyed here. Most men avoid therapy because most therapy approaches are not designed to help the male brain deal with pain or fine solutions. That makes men believe therapy is worthless and men skip things that feel worthless. Also, male depression is usually based on feeling helpless, powerless, and unable to affect one's life or environment. Therapy models focus on helping men feel heard and loved instead of restoring their sense of personal power. Men need solutions, not just feelings. Absolutely. And we are churning out here in the United States an overwhelming number of

therapists who do not have the skills that they need or the experience that they need to provide lasting solutions that will undiagnose you in the long term. There are not, it's not that every therapist is bad. I was a therapist for years. There's many of my colleagues who are wonderful. However, the system we are doing here in America is to desperately churn out as many healthcare providers as we can because we do not have enough of them and to focus their training in specifically on the diagnostic and statistics manual

so that you can treat issues. And then you're going to be coupled in with all kinds of medication and problems are not unf unfixable because you're just medicating and triaging. So much of mental health in America is based on the medical model and endless triage, endless triage management, symptom management, that's all it is for the rest of their life. And when you get a man into that system, men would rather kill themselves than sit there and say, I am disabled. I must have a medical help, a medical assistance for the rest of my life. And all I can do is sit

here and talk about my feelings endlessly for the next 10 years while paying $10,000 for the privilege. That is not what men are looking for. Men are looking for solutions, and they're looking for guidance in how to apply those solutions. When you give them those things, men will do just about anything for you. Why is it a problem for therapy models to focus on helping men feel heard and loved instead of restoring their sense of personal power? Why is that something which is uniquely male and why is that the approach that therapy models have when trying to fix men? The brain scans show us that the male brain goes backwards to observe and then forwards to act upon it.

It mostly goes like this. Back, observe, forward act. When we see a problem, we act upon that problem. This is how the male brain tends to work. The female brain tends to observe in the back and then go back and forth across the hemisphere and make a bunch of connections and process it and then think about it and pull pieces out and make deeper connections. That is often why women communicate to process with each other, to share with each other and

they need to feel hurt. They are also fairly risk averse, typically so a woman doesn't typically want to be the one who makes the final decision, but they value being hurt so they can have input on a group decision that all of them, their brains go back and forth and back and forth and make a decision together so that there is shared reliability and shared responsibility among the group. Men want to observe and act upon it and solve the problem. When you have a therapy model that just makes men feel heard and loved, okay, they kind of feel heard, I feel heard, and they kind of feel loved, well, I kind of feel loved.

Now I feel like a useless piece of helpless garbage that other people are sitting here loving. That means they just pity me. And I am just an endless creature of pity who will never solve any problems. It almost makes them worse. Is there a point where it helps men to feel hurt and loved? Absolutely.

Do men not need to feel hurt and loved? No, they do. But it just makes them feel like they are being pitted. And that is something men would rather die than experience for the most part. You said as well, most therapy approaches are not designed to help the male brain deal with pain or find solutions. What's the deal with pain, Elma? I can see the fine solutions. That's the back and forth. That's the, I have the information. It's time for me to enact something. What about the deal with pain thing? Most women, when they experience pain,

what they will typically do is look for comfort with other people, look to share that and be nurtured as they experience the pain. Women are very adaptable. They are wonderfully adaptable. So they endure through the pain by building connections and relying on those connections. Men hate that.

When men experience pain, if they then have to go and just be a burden to someone else, they feel worthless, they would rather march off into the wilderness and die, most typically. Men need to deal with pain by finding a way through it and finding a purpose through it so that they can push through that pain, push through the pain receptors, push through that and follow that mission. If you do that, men can go through the pain and put it in its place because they no longer feel helpless against the pain. There is a reason for enduring the pain. That's what men need. Can you tell that story about the blitz in World War II again? Yeah, so there's research that shows through the blitz in World War II, psychiatric men, psychiatric hospitalized men who were comatose, they had to sit

there, they were just miserable, wretchedly miserable. But when things started happening around them and society needed them, when the bombs started going off, and everything happened, they were needed. All of a sudden, they had a reason to get up and go do something. And that impelled them to pull out of their pain, out of their struggle, out of everything, and go do what they were supposed to do. It is the same thing as a depressed man who is finally called up to do something and goes and does it in his family, in his life. Men who are low and low and low, and then they find out that the woman in their life is

carrying their child, and all of a sudden it sparks a difference in him, right? He stops drinking. He gets, he cleans himself up. Same experience. I will endure the pain for the sake of my family, my country, my people, my whatever it may be. Here is my chance to rise up and make this change. That is what men are built for.

Does the fact that a man with a strong enough wife can bear anyhow, which is a nice synopsis, I guess, of what you're sort of touching on there? Does this explain why modern men are so insecure that there is a massive lack of purpose, relationships around them, we have more childless men than ever, we have no intergenerational pan-generational homesteads anymore. There is a lack at least in the west of patriotism, of nationalism. First off, why are modern men so insecure? And then secondly, how does what we've just spoken about play into that? So many of the men who come into my coaching program are lacking what I call human impact.

They have no ability to create human impact in their life. That's what a legacy is, is the lasting human impact that endures after your death. It does not have to be biological children, although that's one of the easiest ones to point at and create. It can be adopted children. It can be mentored people that you help. It can be people you rescue. It can be an organization that you build.

A human impact is the purpose of a man's life. Because someday you will die. You will be dust. Your money will be frittered away and taken through taxes and all kinds of things. Your property will be divvied up. Your everything you've cared for in your life will be taken away. The only thing that endures is the future generations who are fundamentally altered because of your existence on this planet. That is the purpose of a man's life. That is why so many

men want to kill themselves now. It's because they find no purpose and no ability to create human impact. Why would it be adaptive for a man to have that? How do women and their life goals and purpose differ from that? It's funny because many women, and I've worked with tons of these women, they have much the same purpose. Women are much more adaptable, but they want to be useful to the people in their life and help enhance those people's lives so they can go out and live and thrive. Women are about helping other people thrive, men are about changing the course of other people's life. If you want to

look at it that way. Women can find that purpose just about anywhere, helping just about anybody. As long as they have usefulness, women can be very happy. If they are loved and feel useful to the people that they love, that's when most women are okay and they can endure. They can crawl over broken glass. But there aren't looking for the overall life-changing creation that men are looking for. They're looking for enduring and helping people endure and nurture them as they go.

Whereas men are capable, mission-powerful. Absolutely. That's what men are looking for. Interesting. You've been helping some of your clients to detox from red pill fears. What's happening there? Absolutely. So many men who grow up either insecure with insecure attachment, they say something's

wrong with me. I don't know what women want from me. I'm scared of women. I'll try to please them like I please my mom. And then they're not happy about that. And then what am I supposed to do? How do I ask for sex? How do I communicate my needs? What do I do? Like we're in a weird society. Women are kind of confusing. Dating was really hard. It seems like women are really picky. What do I do? Then they encounter a woman who hurts their feelings. Usually a woman who's very chaotic may have a personality disorder.

Borderline personality disorder stands out pretty hard among the women who really devastate these men. And they have such a horrible breakup experience that they're agonized. And then they find online somebody who's willing to say, look, women really are horrible. Red Pill culture teaches. Women have borderline personality disorder.

All of them. It's normal for women to feel that way. They don't even feel anything like humans do. They don't feel like men do. They are incapable of loving you the way you want to be loved. There's a book, I believe that. I'm pulling that quote from, which is a big red pill Bible that they use. Women are not capable of the depth of loyalty and love that you are. You have every reason to feel scared of women and you need to control them. And that is just all it does is switch men from anxious attachment style,

where I think I am the problem, to avoid attachment style. Everyone else is the problem, and I must manage them like livestock while getting sex from them. And then dump them the moment they try to build any kind of intimacy or connection with me and make them live in fear all the time. And that's what Red Pill does is swap from one horrible life system to a different life system that's just as horrible, if not worse. Guys come into my coaching practice and say, Adam, I hate how I have hurt women for the last five years.

I am lonely. I am miserable. And I'm realizing this sucks. What is the alternative? Is there even an alternative? It seems like everyone that seems like Red Pill is right, but I'm just as miserable as I was before. What do I do? And I pull them in and I guide them through it. Either they have slept with 300 women or have never slept with a woman before because Red Pill has made them so petrified of women

that they are terrified. They're going to be eaten alive. I guide them through that because there is a third option, which is to actually be a human being who connects other human beings with trust, with honesty, and understanding what red and green flags to look for in relationships and how to communicate with women as if they are human beings too. And that's the magic. What if you could go in and tinker with the current world of men's dating advice, red pill, mannisfree stuff, what would be the main lessons that you would try to dispense with? Talk about commitment more and be very clear about what you want. Every woman who comes into my dating practice is scared to death to say, I just want to

find one man to marry and have children with and be with for the rest of my life. But if I mention that to any man before eight year three, he is going to get up and run screaming from me. And the men who come into my coaching practice say, I just want one woman to be with for the rest of my life and have children. But if I mention that before year three,

she will think I'm a psycho who's trying to control her. Then it makes you so attractive when you are very clear what you want. But you must understand that you also have to pass tests that prove that that is actually what you want. You don't have to pass tests proving that you are an eight-foot-tall millionaire who sweats diamonds and drives Lamborghinis.

You must prove that you are a man of substance who is out there to make change in the world, any kind of change, and who is reliable and consistent so that you could be dependent upon in a family situation. That is really all it takes, and most men cannot pass that test. You can learn to pass that test. Women will very much desire you for a lifelong relationship. How do women enact that test? Women enact that test, typically because they believe your words up front, but over time

they begin testing you. They begin challenging you. When you do something that is completely against what you have claimed you want in life, when you say, yeah, I want a committed, loving relationship and then you're secretly scrolling through porn. When you say, yeah, I want to get married, but maybe in like eight years. When you say, I'd love to have kids and you have never interacted with a child in your life and you have zero interest in children and keep pushing them away from you when they

try to talk to you. When you are just smoke and pot in your underwear playing Xbox instead of building a business, a side business or advancing in a career or doing anything, they look at that and say, where are you at? Like, you're not actually doing anything. What are you doing? Be the man she would want to be married to, instead of promising her that you are going to change into the man she wants to be married to. Do that on the way to building your good life.

You will find a woman who wants the kind of man you're becoming. Do you not think that current men's advice touches on that topic? Current men's advice says either completely disregard women as you build your empire or be so fearful of women that you end up manipulating them and playing games with them because that's all that they're capable of doing with you and you must keep them at arms length to keep yourself safe. That is by large the majority of men's advice that's out there on the internet right there,

and it's terrible. Well, I'm looking at this very deeply at the moment. One of the trends that I would love to try and tune down is this adversarial relationship between men and women. And I understand, I think that there's a little bit of credence to say that men's and women's dating strategies, mating strategies, in some regard, can be a little bit adversarial. We are evolutionarily programmed for them to not always align perfectly, but on average, they have to align at least some of the time or else they wouldn't be a fucking civilization. So, and it's not really so much about the adversarial nature, because even if you're the biggest damn-bills-erry in

Chad in the world, you're only talking about you and like 10 birds, right? It's only you and 10 girls that you can have. Let's say that it is exclusively refined and constrained within dating and mating. That's your adversarial relationship. Okay, that means that there's 3.5 billion minus 10 women on the planet with whom you should be able to have a non adversarial relationship. And yeah, and this isn't just coming from the men's side. This is absolutely our slash, the pink pill, our slash female dating strategy, you know,

all of that stuff that's just this toxic that comes from the women's side. All of that stuff says the other sex is the enemy. They are someone that you should fundamentally mistrust, fundamentally any gain that they have is your loss and any gain that you have is their loss. The goal is to walk away from the table with as many points on your side as possible and as few points on their side as possible

or just discount what the situation is left with. It's so scarcity mindset, it's so negative, some, not even like neutral, some, it's straight up negative, some scenario and that adversarial relationship between both mating and non-mating men with women. Blows my mind. Let me tell you exactly where that comes from. It comes from something called avoidant attachment style. Avoidant attachment styles, I believe, from childhood. That there's something fundamentally wrong with other people that they are incapable of acting morally just

or with any kind of faithfulness towards you and the stresses on that they will always default to selfishness. So you must endlessly pump up their positive feelings to then get them to do what you want them to do in return, but you must also keep them at arms like so they can never get in deep enough to see your human weaknesses, but try you turn on you rip you apart. That is avoid an attachment style. It comes in two different flavors. There's the nervous type where they just try to keep safe from other people and then

there's the manipulative type of coercing, controlling other human beings. These two can lead into things like anti-social personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. That's the extremes. What you're dealing with on both sides is avoidant men and avoidant women who want all of this. They want the pleasure without any real responsibility in the relationship because they are fearful and it's not just the other side that they are fearful of.

They are equally as fearful of their own side. It's just that they're trying to sleep with the other side, so it makes them more vulnerable to the other side than to their own side. That is what is happening there. It's a void in attachment style, setting the definition for dating throughout the entire world because then they go out and the secure people and the insecure anxious people try to earn their approval and live with them and connect with them. They set the tone for the entire dating pool for the whole work that way.

How effective have you been at deprogramming Red Pill ideology from men who maybe don't have a lot of real world experience? I have men come in who are so deeply terrified of women, that it is like working with the worst trauma cases that I worked with back in the day and in a low-income, high-risk clinic. It is like the ER of trauma experience. Men come in so overwhelmingly petrified, they can't even imagine opening up to a woman.

What I teach them is exactly how to do that in a few sessions, and when they experience it, it feels so good that they are a duck learning to swim and water for the first time. And then they realize how good it actually feels and the experience they have scares the crap out of them. So they leap backwards and pull back. But then they ease back into it again as she reassures him. As she doesn't pull out a knife and stab him in the heart, like Red Pill has proven that

it will happen. No, she actually embraces it and enjoys the intimacy with him and he enjoys it too. It is just a matter of can he believe it or not? Is he willing to give it a shot? If he's willing to be able to shot, we can get him there through experience. What would you say to the guys that follow the Red Pill ideology? I would say that's blue pill, white night thinking, you don't understand how women actually work. You don't understand the dynamics between the sexes. If you open up to a woman like that, she's not going to accept you. You're going to end up being

hurt and she's going to sleep with the six foot four lumberjack that lives next door. Yeah, I would say that if she has severe personality disorders, maybe she would. The number of women who have severe personality disorders is excessively low. If you look at the actual number of women who have overwhelming numbers of partners and just leap, but you'll find it's brutally low.

It's a tiny sliver of the female population that do that and is down to very much personality disorders or extreme avoidance attachment style. Most women are just looking for a loving relationship to be with you and feel safe with you and build a family with you and be the wind at your back as you achieve your goals through the rest of your life. That is what the vast majority of women actually want.

And I say that as a man who has built my own business, who has four children of the woman I've been married with for 14 years now. Marriage and Family Therapist for years, now a dating expert and dating coach. I have seen this through thousands and thousands and thousands of relationships. Women just want that love with you. It is nothing like what you have heard, but yes, there are women out there who can hurt you

and you've probably been hurt. And your experience right now is one of one or three of three because you attract those women because your own problems attract those women because you by your nature reject the good women. Learn how to not reject the good women. Learn how to be a good man yourself in romance and in love. And you will find the right woman. And if you can't, I will show you how to do that. One of the interesting things that I've realized when doing a little bit more research about the current trend

of dating and understanding what's going on in specifically the men's online space, is that as both men and women have become increasingly anti-social because they have better things to do with the time, whether that's spending time in the internet or just generally being distracted by porn, video games or whatever else. Your real world experiences with the opposite sex diminish. You have fewer and fewer of those experiences to disprove stories that you hear on the internet. And by design, the stories that catch the most attention on the internet are the most egregious transgressions of whatever sacred, cow or norm it is that you think should be accepted. If some woman, while her husband

goes out to get the milk, fucks the mailman and and and his dog and he comes back to find all three of them in bed together, you go, well, yeah, obviously that's going to get a hundred thousand upvotes on Reddit because it's fucking insane. And you that's not me saying that this sort of stuff doesn't happen, the dog thing maybe not. But But the point being that there are vicious both men and women out there who are very maligned and have a ton of malice in them and massive red flags. But because a lot of the world has no ulterior real world experience to disprove this, you end up with that model being used as, oh, well, this is what all women are like. And I had a, I posted an episode a couple of days ago and I had a very, very interesting comment. I'm going to read out here. The problem for many of us is this.

Anyone dysfunctional enough to put up with us is going to be too dysfunctional or untrustable for us to handle in return. And there was a reply to that that said, I actually had a rule like this while I was in university informed by the disaster that was my first uni relationship. If she approaches me, she's interested in someone much better than me and that she invented wearing my skin. I'm not going to be able to compete with that guy. How would you, I'm aware you don't know much about these two commenters,

but how would you analyze the two people that I've just mentioned? Sounds like learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is this belief that you can never get better. So where you're at is all you will ever be. So you are a piece of steaming garbage then people are attracted to steaming garbage. No, fix yourself. If you say I'm attracting disasters, then stop being a disaster and stop attracting you are a piece of steaming garbage than people are attracted to steaming garbage. No, fix yourself.

If you say I'm attracting disasters, then stop being a disaster and stop attracting disasters. People, you can change. Please take the time to learn the skills to change. Please take the time to learn the mindsets of changing. You are not a static creature. You are dynamic creature. You can and should be changing.

Husbands who complain about having zero sex have no idea how the female sex drive actually works and the complaining makes it much worse. My favorite thing is when couples come in and they haven't had sex in a year and I ask why and she looks at him and says because he hasn't asked and he says, well, I kind of hinted and you just never seemed interested and she says, well, what is the last time you spent time with me? Well, why would I spend time with you if you're not having sex with me? And that right there is exactly the spiral. Women after one year, their sex drive switches from bonding with you mode to long-term stability and mate retention. If you have given her the adequate emotional bonding and if she has decent enough secure enough

attachment to receive that bonding, her sex drive will go way up because her brain says, keep this man around and have as many of his babies as I can, we must have 15 babies in the next week. That's what her brain will say. And I've seen couples, I've worked with couples in their 60s who come in and sorry for this mental image, but they come in having very little sex and they leave after a few sessions having sex three or four or five times a week in their sixties because they improve their actual emotional intimacy, which leads to better non-sexual physical intimacy, which then leads overwhelmingly to sexual physical intimacy. It should begin

in your emotional bonding and connection. It will drive her sex drive through the roof and she will not only be receptive to you, she will be chasing you through the house. Yeah, you had another tweet that said, at about six, twelve months into a relationship, the female sex drive switches from attraction and bonding to long-term stability. That means emotional intimacy, trust and predictability. Many couples lack these three things, so has sex drive tanks, neither person fully gets why. So many women that I work with do not understand how their own sex drive works. I have clients who come in and they say, Adam, I don't know why I don't have a high sex

drive. I just feel like my husband is mad at me for not having sex with her, but I just kind of don't want to. What's the problem? I say, well, you don't want to because he's not doing what he's supposed to be doing as your husband. They say, thank you for saying that. And I say, okay, well, what would it take?

Well, I don't know, just like maybe more time together. And so we run through a list of exactly like 12 to 15 things of what spending time together should look like. And then we give him a measurable list of, do this, do this, do this, do this often. This amount of time, this level, do this. And they do it for a week or two. And all of a sudden, her sex drive goes through the roof and they do it for a week or two, and all of a sudden her sex drive goes

through the roof, and they're very happy. So I remember reading in Jonathan Heights, the happiness hypothesis, about the passionate and companion it, two styles of, it's not perhaps. Mm-hmm. Is there an equivalent for men? For these emotional intimate bonding like this? Yeah, so you've said that with women around about six to 12 months, the arousal response occurs due to different stimulus. Yeah, there is. Is there any good one for men? There is.

Yes, okay, here's what it mostly is. I'm trying to frame it. People don't usually ask that. So let's talk about this. The male sex drive typically works. If we have resources, then we want to go reproduce because we have enough resources to protect whatever would happen if we reproduced. That's a cheap way of saying it. But the male brain has to say, look, if I'm going to throw endless resources at something, I need to make sure it's actually going to be sustainable and that everything is going to continue the way it needs to. So if a woman is betraying him, if a woman is completely anti-maternal, usually, if a woman is actively hurting him and attacking him, or if his stress level is overwhelmingly high from his environment, that's where the man's sex drive typically goes down. It takes pretty significant factors of this is not sustainable for a man's sex drive to

tank that hard. It's tough, not impossible, but tough. I do know that bonding through oxytocin actually helps men achieve faster erection and more lasting erection. So oxytocin is very important for men. It's the bonding hormone you get through emotional intimacy, but it is very important, but men can still endure without it. It takes a lot to turn off the male sex drive. We're a little bit more simple creatures. I think that we are. What was it that you taught me about the role of vasopressin for men during sex?

So the research shows that when men have orgasms, it works a little bit different than how women have orgasms. Women will have orgasms and their orgasm happens largely due to an overwhelming supply of oxytocin that causes massive constrictions through the uterus and same hormone that causes labor and birth. We have a synthetic version that we use called potosin that actually induces labor, it's synthetic oxytocin, and women flood with that during sex and that's what leads to one orgasm, which then leads to another and then leads to ten and then leads to her having a toe tag because she's

died. But that's what it's supposed to be. Men have one orgasm, if they get any, and oxytocin may or may not affect the male brain as much as it does in the female brain, it seems to more be there to move the semen along. And he may bond a bit with you through oxytocin, but men have far more receptors for vasopressin. V vasopressin is the hormone responsible for bonding when you achieve a mission together.

You solve a problem together. You accomplish a goal together. Men are goal oriented. Who could have predicted that? If he accomplishes insects with you, it says, we're going to give you 10 orgasms, most women respond by saying, no, let's not do that. Or why the arbitrary number? He is actually setting a goal with you, wants to achieve it and wants to high five with

you. And that is actually going to bond him to you more than his own orgasm is going to bond him to you. If you go with him and accomplish a mission together, that's going to be what does it. So a failure of cross sex mind reading in that women wouldn't understand why they would create some arbitrary number of, this is how many pumps you're going to give me before we finish. This is how long it's going to last for. This is how whatever else it is. Saying that to a woman is unlikely to cause her to have any

additional bonding with you, but to a man placing some sort of challenge in front of him that he can get to achieve, whilst also having sex, sex is good, but achieving this. Okay, so this is... Together as a team, together as a team, you achieve that by the way. That's the Vassipreson piece. Your brain says, we did this as a team. What else can we do as a team, too? And it makes his brain say, I want to work with you to solve other problems as well, because now I have proven that you are a good trustworthy ally in my life. That's

the key right there. What is the takeaway lesson for women in the bedroom with regards to Vassar Pressing and maximizing that for men? Stop not asking for orgasms. Stop just letting it not happen. Stop just laying there and closing your eyes and thinking of England. Actually engage in it. That's all right.

I'm okay. Ladies that are listening, if you want to close your eyes and think of England, that's actually certified by me as something that's totally okay. If she can say, Hey, look, this is what does it for me? Help me achieve this and I will be your best friend.

And they do it and then tell him that that was amazing and how great it was and do it, but mean it. Don't fake it. Don't be pretend. Do it and accomplish it together and then celebrate the win together. That's the other thing is most women are so embarrassed when they have an orgasm. Do it, embrace it and celebrate the win together as a team and man you guys are both have a much better time. I'll just tell you that. What in your time looking at the sex lives of men and women

were the most common reasons for women struggling to achieve orgasm? Usually because they have their own attachment issues, so they're either avoidant or they fear oxytocin, so you'll see them pull away during physical intimacy. They will prefer to be facing away from you during sex so that there's not physical emotional intimacy. They will pull away after sex, get their clothes on really fast and try to pull away, and they're not comfortable with that closeness. That's one big one that I work on, as oxytocin aversion usually through avoid an attachment. The other is anxious attachment, so they're massively insecure.

They are doing the sexual act to try to please their partner. It's not like they're a prostitute. They're trying to make their partner feel good and feel joyous and loving, so their partner won't abandon them. They are trying to be useful to their partner. Sex then is a performance. It's an act to make their partner feel good. They are absolutely not focused on their own sex drive at all. Working as a couple's therapist

for years, I didn't see even one divorce case where at least one of the spouses didn't have attachment issues every time. But most couples therapists aren't trained in attachment and don't know to check for that. Attachment is what makes you connect to another person so that you can say, look, I'm going to tell you the truth. Let's deal with the truth. We will get through it together and we'll solve this problem. If you don't have secure attachment, it is very hard to cooperate to solve problems. Then you get people who are just defensive, running away, trying to escape, managing their partner,

pushing buttons for years and years and years until they reach a point where they have pushed too hard and it's now broken. I've seen, especially since our first conversation, a massive proliferation of discussions around attachment. On the internet, I've had researchers like Jessica Baum on the show, she was fantastic, but I do sometimes worry about people who talk about attachment getting out over their skis. A little. And not only using it for situations where it maybe doesn't apply, but also using it erroneously, similar to how you tried to sanitize some of the men's

advice earlier on. What are the things that attachment doesn't explain, doesn't do what would you tell the world about attachment that it isn't, and that people need to dispel in terms of attachment. I get this all the time. People, especially, political persuasions start asking me, hey, is the other side doing X because of attachment? Is it all just down to attachment?

And what I tell them is this, attachment forms the foundation of your life, and it can definitely color some choices, but we will not know some of the intricacies until we fix attachment, and then we need to look at what remains, and then we'll be able to solve those problems together as actual human beings working together

with respect for a human dignity, instead of screaming at each other, assuming everyone is our enemy. Attachment doesn't touch everything. It touches a lot of things, but we won't know what it doesn't touch until we have fixed the massive epidemic in our society that, by the way, is increasing. The research that I've seen lately says up to 65% of people now might likely have an attachment issue and don't know it. So the research is definitely proving it's going in the wrong direction. We need to turn that around so that we can figure out what is and

isn't attachment. I also heard that theories around attachment being exclusively or even majorly contributed to by childhood rearing are coming under more and more scrutiny. Now, you know, 50% of everything that you are psychologically is heritable on average. So presumably there's a huge heritability component here. Are there any elements of discussing attachment with regards to childhood rearing. What's missed there? Do people get out over their skis too much with regards to that as well? And how else is attachment contributed to? The biggest piece that I see is I have people come to me and say, Adam, I think I have attachment issues and I don't know why my parents were actually pretty cool. They were actually pretty loving. I don't know what's wrong with me. What I see is people whose brains

learned through experience, something called an attachment wound, through some sort of painful experience, your brain learned that it is not safe and it will do anything to avoid that. It's like experiencing a trauma. So being in the NICU, we call it the NICU when the baby comes out and they get put into early, they get put into it in closed chamber and they're trying to keep warm, but they don't get physical contact. The brain separates out and doesn't get what it needs for those first few months.

A child who's hurt, a child who's abandoned, a child who's traumatized. From birth up until about age 12, your brain is trying to learn through experience with your peers, with your parents, with people in the world, what is going to happen? Your brain continues to learn beyond that. I'm very much a follower of Carl Jung who said that your brain is growing throughout the course of your life. You can change. I have people come in the oldest client I ever had was 79 years old who came in and said, I'd like to fix my attachment. Okay, let's fix the attachment and we did. That you can still continue to change. It is challenging those beliefs. Yes, they do come from childhood.

No, they are not set in stone. They continue to grow over time. We are not just creatures, we are cognitive beings, and we have to embrace both sides, and we have to educate both sides of that makes sense. There was a really good article from Vox that came out recently about attachment, what it explains and what it doesn't.

And there was a section in it that I put on my story today that said, knowing how you relate to romantic partners can be both helpful and a hindrance, focusing on attachment style as an immovable obstacle can lead to a loop of repeated mistakes. Instead, a more nuanced approach could offer insight into your trigger points and how to move beyond them. And this is a quote, I think it has a beautiful capacity for growing self-understanding and self-emperathy, Karen says. At the same time, we've got to make sure that we check ourselves enough to go, I'm not going to use self-knowing as self-justification to not grow and to not change. That is a really, really good insight. I love that.

I love that. I love that. Doesn't that go right back to the discussion we had about getting diagnosis and saying, I have this for the rest of my life. That is the worst mistake people make when they say, Adam, I took an attachment style quiz and I am simply anxious about it. So I will just be that. And I say, no, I have, I built my attachment bootcamp course. Take that. It will fix your attachment. Go from insecure to secure. Change what you're doing. Come to my coaching. Join my attachment circle community. Let me talk with you, work with me. Come to my live events, anything, learn that you can change, do not settle where you are and have helplessness where you say, well, I'm just going to be miserable for the rest of my life. And it's on my partner to make me

feel better because I have a diagnosis of an attachment issue. No, fix it, then attract different people and be more fully who you are supposed to be in your relationships. That's the answer. Yeah, self-knowing is not self-justification is something that I'm gonna carry with me. I think that's a really little summary there. Okay, next one.

Most people in therapy are there because the people in their life who actually needed therapy refused to get it. How do you know this? You, the person only comes in and you only speak to them presumably the abusive uncle or shit father or bad baseball coach isn't there? How do you know? The number of times, interestingly, in my practice through therapy and now as a coach, is people come in and I assess where they're at and I say, okay, this sounds like an

environmental issue. A lot of my training was not just a medical response. It was an environmental focus. It was, where is your environment reshaping you? That was what my previous license was all about. Where, how is your environment causing this issue? So we would look at that and say, tell me about the people in your life. Tell me how you're interacting with them.

Tell me their responses. And then I would say, bring that person into therapy with me. Now, it's bring that person into coaching with me. And let's bring that person into coaching with me and let me talk to them. And we talk and I interview them and I look at them and I see how they act. And by and large it is that person who actually really needs the help, the one who refused to come in because the one who actually came in was the one trying to work and make it better. By and large that is the case. And especially when I work with young people whose parents are the ones who are the driving force and teaching them the bad messages.

That's it. Most men don't know how female communication works. They provide solutions, which is what they would want when a woman wants validation. When this is pointed out, most men assume it's untrue because they'd hate to receive only validation instead of a solution. Isn't that true? Have you ever had that experience where a woman says, talk to me and you say, what am I supposed to talk to you about? Have you ever had that experience, Chris? Yeah, of course, especially with younger partners, you know, in your early 20s, I think, when everybody is poor at communicating, it's very common. Why do women do this? Women do this because to them communication is trust. It illustrates that you trust them. It illustrates your willingness to spend time with them.

It illustrates you want them to understand you so that they can be more helpful to you in the future. It illustrates to them that you are emotionally invested. When you listen to them, when you share with them, that's what that tells them. When you let them share with you, it tells them very much the same that you are curious about helping them. You're curious about being with them. You are interested in them. You're invested in them.

You are willing to spend your time on them and you like your time with them. When men stop and try to throw at solutions, they are cutting to the end of the conversation and saying, I don't have time for you. That's what the woman is actually hearing. Not here is a wonderful solution that I wish someone had given me. They hear, I don't have time for you, take your solution and get out of my face. That is what men are accidentally saying. When they number one, shut them down to solutions and when number two, they refuse to open up

about their day, share about their thoughts, share about their difficulties they're experiencing. When they refuse to share, you are telling her, I am not interested in you. I could replace you with any woman out there That's so interesting a failure of cross sex mind reading yet again Yet again What are the differences in male and female communication then so why in your opinion? Do so many couples struggle to communicate effectively? Well, why did we evolve communication in the different ways? Why did men develop one brain that is solution focusedfocused and women develop a brain that's relationship-focused?

You go back to the hunter-gatherers, you go back to 20,000 years ago before the Neolithic Revolution. Before we realized if we eat seeds and poop them out, that it grows more seeds, where we pooped them out, so we should live there. Before we learned that, men had to go out and hunt and survive and fight, women stayed at home and bonded and nurtured and cared. And that's where our communication styles really started coming out. The guy who was out in the field with the mammoth saying, hey, John, I hope you're feeling

okay. I hope things are all right. You know, if it's not too much trouble, maybe you could think about going over there because there might someday be like, and by that time the mammoth has already run you down and killed you and you and John are now dead. So those guys were like, what's going on here? Go over there. Go live over there with the women because I don't want to hear it.

That's, that's, there it's, hey, you go over there. There's a mammoth, a stab at the spear. I'll jump on its back. That's the communication we evolved is find me a solution now. I don't have much time and I got to get it done quick. Women, other way, slower communication. They were on the, the children teaching, guiding, listening, nurturing, sharing of resources, sharing of time, women developed sharing, men developed solving.

If you look at the different communication styles, even today, we are still living those same patterns. Why then, is it the case that men and women can't communicate and why they want to go for dinner? They can, if the man explains what he is looking for. So the more anxious a woman is, the more she is afraid of disrupting the relationship, a fully secure woman is not as likely to have that problem, but any woman with any level of anxiety is going to struggle because he says, where do you want to eat? And she doesn't think selfishly

and say, I want to eat over here. She says, what would he want to eat? What's a good answer for us? What's a good experience for us? Where did he want to eat last time? Would he want to eat there again? Well, and then anxious women, their brain kicks in and says, but if we pick wrong, he could be mad. He could have a horrible time. It could even lead to us breaking up. I don't want to do that. And they cycle out like that and then they get stressed out. And then the other half of women have a mental problem, a mental load problem where they've been struggling with it

and making decisions all day. And they're exhausted and say, just you make the decision. You're a man. You tell me what we're supposed to do because they're resentful because they feel overburdened and stressed out. And the guy is said, they're going, just pick. Just eat.

Where do you want to go? That's why that fight is happening because he doesn't see that happening under the surface and she doesn't know how to convey that to him either. That's why men and women will starve to death slowly, arguing about what they wanted to eat for lunch last week. One of my boys has got a solution that he uses when he wants to go somewhere. His partner is, the woman is pretty sort of decision oriented in any case, so it wouldn't be an issue to get her to contribute where she wanted to go. So he has used neural

linguistic programming to trick her into going to the place that he wants to go to. So what he says, he proposes the place that he wants to go in the negative. So he'll say, listen, with regards to dinner this evening, would you be opposed to going to cheesecake factory? And she's gonna say, well, like, I mean, who's opposed to going to cheesecake factory? No one's opposed. It's like, well, look, I'm not opposed to going to cheesecake factory.

There's maybe somewhere else, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, if you're not opposed, my preference would be cheesecake factory and given that you're not opposed to it and this is my preference how about we go Cheesecake Factory which actually thinks of like a really fantastic although slightly manipulative way to

go to Cheesecake Factory It sounds like a couple that needs to work a little bit on balancing out but hey you know what if it's working for them so far, they haven't killed each other, then power to them. As much cheesecake as you want. Okay, next one. That's right. Most women with attachment issues ramp the sex drive through the roof, even more than usual at the start of a relationship, and then no stif, the moment it becomes long term, and they hate themselves for both sides of it.

Mm-hmm. I made so many women angry with a comment along the lines of this one on Instagram where I posted that if she is just you, if all she thinks she has to offer in the relationship with her body, then she really has nothing to offer in the relationship. And so many women got angry at that because so many women, that's all they feel they have to offer. It's an endless act of, please don't leave me. I will do anything to make you like me. And that's all they think

they have. And then they are just in perpetual survival mode, so then after they've made you happy, happy, happy, happy, they just sit and collapse, and then men complain, women today don't have any cooking skills, domestic skills, they have nothing, we ask, because those women are terrified, and they're just an endless survival mode, so they just try to make you happy, and then collapse until the next time they have to make you happy. That's Unfortunately, how it goes? Why would the sex drive fall off a cliff?

After a while because it is built on emotional intimacy and women who have those attachment issues, those insecurities are incapable of receiving that good love and reassurance, even if he's giving it. So even if he is trying to build an emotional connection with her, she will actually push it away and do the one thing that would make her feel safe and secure because it's the one thing that makes her feel most unsafe and insecure. That right there is the problem. Those women actively reject the very thing that would enhance their relationships and their sex drive. So a woman, a man who gets into a relationship or a one night stand, a casual sex with a woman who is very performative in the bedroom, in the first instance, that's got to be one of the amber flags

at least for this kind of a personality I'm guessing. Exactly. Well, she goes to bed with you on the first date. Yes, it's a gigantic red flag or amber flag in that case. Yes, it is. It's massive. If she is able to build any kind of barrier and say, you know what, I'm looking for some level of commitment before I will do these steps with you. And then

she follows through on that and then continues looking for additional commitment. That's where the healthy women really are, to be honest with you. Do you not think that there's a case where the predisposition that women have to make men wait to be more choosy with their partners can be heavily deprogrammed by a wildly sex positive culture that tells women that true freedom is having a job like your father and having sex like your brother. It's even that though is based on fear because women don't really want that. The research shows that only 2% of women prefer a hookup over a real relationship. 98% of women prefer a real long-term relationship over any kind of a hookup. But they say that up to 80% of university women will have a hookup. It's that they are settling

for the little that they actually believe is possible and the little that makes them not least not feel as unsafe. It's false intimacy and false connection for the sake of feeling like there's something in their world that makes them feel connected to a human being it is not that they crave it is that's they think all they can get and everything else is too terrifying to reach for that's very sad why do you think that that's the case why they thinking like that because so many of them didn't receive the love they needed from their father growing up and it's it's back to daddy issues which so many people make fun of, but so many of them did not bond fully and connectedly with a fully embracing and vibrant father who showed them what love

and cooperation and intimacy and trust and conflict and conflict resolution and cooperation is supposed to look like. And they are just petrified, no one on this earth will ever really love them. Okay, next one. Some people actually believe you must have sex with someone before you marry them to make sure if it's good sex. And if sexual behavior is innate and not cultivated through deep connection, a communication and sharing of needs,

these people want physical intimacy without emotional intimacy. Yeah, it's an excuse not to commit. Nobody who says, have sex before marriage, otherwise it's gonna turn out bad. No one like that ends up getting into a very happy marriage because all they have done is emphasize the overwhelming pleasure and it's just one more reason

not to have a loving intimate relationship. Usually those women are like, what if he has a three inch penis with a barb on the end of it? And I don't find out to my wedding night, that something outrageous like that, that is just overwhelming. That's one thing I hear all the time, and all the other women like, yeah, that could totally happen.

No, no, no, no, the extreme outlier. So you have to bang your way through 20 dudes so that you can find one who has a perfectly shaped penis. Yeah, no, I don't think that is how our human species evolved to function like that. The other piece though is this is one more excuse to not get married. People will do everything but get married. People will have five children and three dogs and buy a house and move to another country and give their partner one of their kidneys, but will not get married because the concept

of becoming responsible to another human being, and being legally vulnerable, in any way, shape or form, terrifies them. Those are the people that say you must have sex before marriage, because what if it's bad? That's not to say, to just jump on the back of the first point you made that.

That's not to say that anybody that has sex before they get married is inherently going to be a bad marriage partner. It's the people that proselytize about it to others that it's something which you must do that that is another quite dark amber flag. And yeah, I mean, the UK's ONS data came back and for the first time ever 51.4% of children are born outside of marriage. So this is to either single mothers or outside of marriage or a civil partnership. So this is to either single mothers or a outside of marriage or a civil partnership. So this is to either single mothers or

mothers that are just cohabitating with no legal agreement or perhaps even not cohabitating separately, habitating but with no legal agreement. A lot of avoidance going on here. Massively, massively, very much fear, very much terror. this is why the divorce rate is declining but it's declining because fewer people are getting married it's it's why the sex rate is declining because people are so terrified of each other they don't even have sex anymore people are going to sit in their home and watch porn or binge net flicks or suck down energy drinks they're going to dope them in binge over and over and over

because their brains are so deficient on every other hormone that they're and neurotransmitter they're supposed to have because they are we are not meant to live in cold sterile little apartments and little tiny cubicles where we don't connect with other human beings. We are meant to be in big messy, dirty, hard environments that challenge us and make us bond with other human beings through trials and through nurturing and through sadness and through joy. We are meant to live messy lives and our lives are not messy enough. Michael Easter wrote a great book called The Comfort Crisis, which is about this and talking about challenges of excessive convenience. And it's really, really, really not good. And it's so difficult to push back against because convenience feels good and comfort feels good. The warmth of the couch on an evening time when it's cold outside and you've had a hard

day at work compared with whatever the thing is, the difficult conversation with your partner, taking the dog out for another work, going to the gym like you said you would, spending time on dualingo to learn Spanish because it's the new year's resolution that you made for yourself. All of these things are difficult. And the problem is that the over-ten window of difficulty has been constrained so much that our lives are unbelievably comfortable, and it means that we are ever less resilient when discomfort comes and knocking. And it's going to happen. You know, unchosen suffering is going to come and smash you in the face,

whether you're ready for it or not. And the more fragile that you've made yourself by never exposing yourself to the outsides of this overt and window of comfort, the less capable you're going to be of dealing with it. Absolutely. You must experience these things. And one more time, as a child, your brain decided that if you were ever vulnerable and exposed to other people, you would die through your dealing with an ongoing fear of death that tracks right in. So not only are you too comfortable, but the brain says, hmm,

would I rather sit here and jerk off to porn and drink this mountain dew? Or would I rather go have a conversation that could kill me? No, I think I'm going to stay right here. That's the difference that so many people are experiencing is that level of dichotomy. And it's just, it doesn't have to be that way. And it cannot remain that way. So what's interesting, I had a conversation with William Costello, good friend, one of the number one in-sell researchers in the world, and we were discussing this advent of AI-generated images for only fans and chat GPT that would potentially be able to give

you the virtual girlfriend experience completely customized to your quirks and fetishes. And then we discussed about what happens if we roll this down the line and you get to VR. And you have a virtual reality world and then it's kind of like, uh, her, I think is the movie. I can't remember. There's a movie that's got maybe Waking Phoenix and someone that's, that, where he has a virtual girlfriend. One of the things that William brought up, which was an odd white pill, was you could imagine a world in which the art technology is sufficiently widespread and sophisticated and avatars in a virtual reality world are able to model

male or female preferences sufficiently accurately that you will be able to for the first time in human history have a sandbox to practice mating in, to practice discussing with somebody at a bar, to practice, practice getting intimate with somebody without being too pushy, to practice fully getting intimate with someone. What it means is one of the concerns we have at the moment, overcoming this approach anxiety, the challenge of getting over the initial approach hump is very high, but if you were a level 87, Dungeon Master in like girlfriend VR or whatever, you would have, it would be one of the first times that you can have a realistic crossover from what's happened in VR

over into that. And then imagine in this world, you know, in Tanya's time, instead of you making your coaching courses online, you're able to get some VR programmer in. You can give them, here's your five most healthy women that you want to look for, and here's the five most red flag women. Here's the avatars. And then, all right, boys, like, you know, every single night, you're going to spend a bit of time in the VR world,

practicing, and then you go out to the bar and you're just this super capable dude. I think, I thought that was really, really exciting. That was the best white pill I've heard about VR for guys and for women in basically forever. Imagine if we sanitized the birds, it was a poor graphic, but imagine if we made that into a high school course that each person had to take of, here's how you

approach another human being in a loving, healthy way that will actually lead to a committed relationship. Here's what it's going to look like. You're going to have to go through a whole semester. By the end of the semester, you have to get this other person, this other dating simulator, whatever, to marry you. If that was at the end of it, imagine what we could accomplish in our society by that point, because we'd all graduate with a degree in being able to get someone to marry us. And that in itself, that would be fascinating. That's benevolent VR.

That's where if we get it right, if we manage to interject into the current sort of trajectory of what's going on, that would be great. So you put out a list of the dumbest mistakes that guys make on the first three dates. And I want to go through these. The first one was their way too shy and stick to surface level talk. So many guys are trying to give the woman a fun experience. And that's

not what women who are looking for commitment or looking for. They're not. They're tired of the fun. They are tired of just having endless people dancing for them. That's not really what they want. They want substance, but they're afraid to tell you they want substance. Give her your life mission. Give her your purpose. Give show her who you are and where you are going and invite her along on that journey. That is what attracts women. But surely you also need to come across as being fun. You can't just do the most boring thing in the world, so how do you balance these two?

If you are talking about what is most deeply passionate to you, how could it possibly not be fun? Yes, if you're just rambling on for six hours about your stock portfolio or something like that, it's awful. But if you're having an intimate conversation with another human being explaining that, and then learning her mission, learning her desires, what's she's passionate about? It should be fun, but not fun for the sake of fun. It's not masturbatory fun.

It is fun for a purpose that drives education about the other person. What is the easiest way for a guy to broach going beyond surface level talk and into something a bit deeper. Tell her stories that illuminate what your life goals are, that illuminate what your values and principles are. Don't tell her life stories that try to make her impressed by who you are, or make her feel sorry for you, or make her want to jump on top of you. Tell her the life stories that illuminate who you really are as a man, and where you are are going and that, that right there will educate her while also entertaining her. What's the difference between the two? Or could you give us an example?

Yes. So many men default back to trying to explain what they've purchased recently, or they default back to how amazing they are in some way. They try to tell stories that pitch them as, I'm better than my friends, or these are my exes. This is why I left them because I was better than them, or whatever it may be that you are trying to elicit a certain feeling in the other person that then makes them act a certain way. Instead, tell the stories that educate them while also entertaining them and say, this is a glimpse into who I really am. Convenient and inconvenient. Here is who I am and here is what I'm trying to achieve.

Those are the pieces. So you may say, here is, let me tell you a story about my work lately. Let me tell you a story about this place where I volunteer. Let me tell you a story about my family. And you tell that story to show her who you are. There will be a lot of women that are listening. So I would like to know if, whether you think that this is something that guys that you go on dates with do, regularly, or whether you would like them to do it more. The second one, they go way too hard with Red Pill and Pickup Artist tactics. So many guys are trying to rush through and establish

physical contact and dominance as fast as possible. And what they're trying to do is mimic being in love. They're trying to do something called love bombing. They're trying to make her feel, wow, he's really in love with me. And then it releases the same oxytocin hormone in her that creates a rush and makes her feel overwhelmed. It's love bombing. And it is just fake. And it is not what she's actually looking for. In secure women will fall for it. Secure women will shove you back and through the door because they know what you're trying to do and it's really uncomfortable for them. The only thing you're going to do is farm insecure women,

which is why Red Pill and PUA guys say, hit on 100 women a night and one of them will sleep with you. You are trying to find someone who's so insecure she lets you jump through her boundaries and make her feel validated. One of the problems that a bunch of friends had about 10 or 15 years ago when the game came out first with Neil Strauss was they became very disenchanted with who they were personally because they created a delta between the person that their evening partner was going to go home with and the person that they really were. And that made them feel bad about themselves. They thought, oh, hang

on. So this is how performative I have to be in order to get a girl to go home with me, which then makes them both resent themselves, but even more so resent women, because they feel unlovable as who they are, despite the fact that they've never shown who they are to the person that they're talking to, because that person is inherently broken and unlovable, but that, um, positing an ideal version of you, or a, a PUA ideal version of you, and feeling the gap between where you are and who that person is, get made more of the guys that did pick up Blackpill than the guys that didn't go home with girls.

These are the guys who come into my coaching practice with millions of dollars in the bank and they sleep with five different girls every week and they say Adam I have never been more miserable than I am right now. These are the guys who come in because they think everything is about being fake. This is why I go back to Red Pill. It teaches you to be avoidant on purpose to never find real love because real love is impossible. When you learn that that is not true, when you learn that you must be who you are so that you can attract someone who is attracted to you long term, that's the only way to build puff. And once you do that, then you start filtering for the right people.

Next one, they play games like Don't Text To For Three Days, bro. Game playing is just a way of saying, I don't trust you enough to connect with you, so I'm going to push your buttons. I'm going to manage you like a video game, and I'm going to play until I get a win condition or until I get game over and then I'm out of here and that's what games are if you're playing games with her and trying to read her mind and trying to figure it out

You've already lost We've got the other side of this as well, which is their way too nice and overly romantic Way too nice and overly romantic either comes across as love bombing like you're being fakes You're trying to make her feel amazing to forget that she doesn't actually love you yet, so she'll sleep with you. Or it comes across as being eager to please mom, because you're trying to please women the way you please your mother growing up, and you don't know what women actually want from you. Both are a fairly big turn off for secure women.

The only people who respond to that are avoidant women who are looking for anxious men to snap up and have sex with for a period of time and then dump you and then just reconfirm the red pill beliefs or women who are really anxious and are ultimately craving that approval from you and you don't really want to connect with either woman you want a woman who is secure and stable who is going to give you a life partnership. Mark Manson's models says that the number one turner for women is neediness, what's he thought from that? Neediness is very different from having needs. Neediness is childhood. Neediness is saying, I can't find solutions.

I'm going to lay here crying until someone else solves my problem for me. It is not like most men say, being a completely immovable stone that never has a weakness because women don't want that either. They want to see that you have vulnerabilities and challenges that they can help you with, but they also want to see you rising to the occasion and solving those problems because they want and respect a man who views solutions

and approaches them and applies them. They assume she doesn't want to hear from them again because she wasn't explicitly throwing herself at him. So many guys who don't, who navigate from Red Pill into regular dating and say, she didn't try to sleep with me. What's wrong with me? And they build validation based on if she's trying to have sex with him and women do this too.

If you don't understand what real interest from a securely attached person looks like, someone who's not rushing into the relationship for validation, if you don't know what that looks like, you think they are uninterested or bored or boring. Then you must recalibrate what actual romantic interest looks like before you can really pursue a healthy relationship. They try to rush to sex. Rushing to sex is just going to muddy the waters. Number one, it's going to flood you with feelings and her with feelings that are not actually what's happening. It's going to convince you that you love each other even when you don't, you don't even know each other yet.

And it's going to turn off any women that you actually would want to build a long-term relationship with. I wonder, I really do, would be very interested to get some more data around attachment styles and psychological stability correlated with whether women have sex either on the first date or how many dates it would be, and this would need to be revealed rather than stated preferences because there's a pretty big observer effect here to perhaps give a different answer to the one that actually happens. I would be very interested.

I'm pretty fascinated by the ability of modern culture, especially a very sex-positive modern culture, to perhaps reprogram or deprogram some felt innate predispositions that women do have when it comes to how long they feel like they should wait. Because if you're around, unless you come from a particularly traditional, very strong values household, if you are a girl that is around a bunch of other girls and all of those girls have a lot of casual sex, regardless of your own personality disposition and your own values, it's going to be very difficult to not have that impact to the way that you see relationships.

Well, especially if you look at it and she says, I have very little to offer. Here is a really awesome man. All the other women on earth are going to give him sex instantly. Why on earth would he stay with me if I don't? I'm going to have to let him do whatever he wants so that I can try to keep him to be competitive in the marketplace of pulling in a good man. That's a lot of women, women set the price of sex for each other, and a lot of women are racing toward the bottom. They share the wrong type of stories, Mrs. Men. Goes right back to what we talked about, is share the stories about your family,

share the stories that illuminate your good friendships, share the stories about your accomplishments without being a pompous asshole about it, share the stories that show her what you're building, not just what you've accomplished in the past, but what you're building for the future. Share the stories about your business. That tells you you have a business. Share the stories about your best friends. It tells you you have best friends.

Share your stories about your best friends and how they are moral people. It tells her you spend time around moral people. Tell her stories about your mother or your sister or your family. It tells her that you value those people and you will continue to be around them and it tells her what you do when you're in relationships. Tell her those stories rather than stories that make her think that you are a complete stud in the bedroom

and you have a million dollars in the bank. That's not what a stable woman's looking for. Final one, they don't mention commitment at all. Women are petrified to mention commitment, men are petrified to mention commitment. are petrified dimension commitment. Most people want it. Everyone's afraid to talk about it because they think they will be the psycho in the room. What I tell people is through my three-date method. You should be dating through the first three dates so that you can talk about becoming an exclusive couple by the third date. And this is the system that actually works for people who are moving through with good secure attachment. Three dates is all you really need to build

a at least exclusive relationship. I'm not talking get married yet, but to know that the other person is the right person for you, three dates, and then you begin really testing for deeper commitment. Do you think that it's more difficult in the modern world for men or women to talk about commitment early on? I think that both are equally terrified of it,

and I think that women are utterly afraid of it, and I think that women are utterly afraid of it because they think they are never allowed to speak about it. I have women who come into my live events on TikTok, for example, and they say, Adam, it's been eight years. Do you think he's ever going to think about marrying me? And I say, have you ever asked him, well, anytime I've kind of brought up the idea, he's broken up with me for about six weeks and then gets back together with me and has slept with three other women. So I've learned

never to even mention commitment. Hmm, okay. Most women will wait around for eight years on the idea of maybe getting married someday. So I would say that society definitely is harder on women who want commitment, but if women were more open about what they wanted, they would filter out the men who don't want it, and they would attract the men who absolutely do want it. Adam Lane Smith, ladies and gentlemen, may I absolutely love you. I love your work. I think you've tweaked this fantastic and really, really enjoying seeing your flourishing, all the different courses and books that you're releasing. If people are interested in what we've gone through today and they want to go deeper,

why should they go? So I have my website, AdamLaneSmith.com. I've got my attachment bootcamp course on there that guides you through the 10 steps of fixing your attachment and building amazing relationships. I've got my personal coaching on there that I can work with you. And I am on Twitter at the BroMetheus.

I'm on YouTube at AdamLaneSmith. I'm also on Instagram at AttachmentAtom. And I'm on TikTok at AttachmentBrow. You can find me anywhere on the internet and now on Facebook, interestingly, of all places. I blew up, and about one month, I went from 300 followers to almost 10,000 followers based on just a couple of things I posted on there. So people are hungry for this good information.

I'm happy to help. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for the day. Thank you. Offends, get offends