The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Dating Doctor: "Start Dating Like It's Your Job!", "Dating Apps Are Impacting Us More Than We Realise!"

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly, to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

Starting point is 00:00:37 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. When women are empowered to make their own sexual decisions, they target the top 10% of men. But why does any of that matter? Well, that creates a lot of problems, both for men and women. So it creates problems for women because... Dr. Orion Taraban is a clinical psychologist who specializes in modern dating and relationships by delving into the psychological aspects of attraction, communication, and emotional intimacy. The meteoric rise of dating apps has seen a catastrophic decline in all forms of relationships.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Fewer people are entering into relationships. Fewer people are even hooking up anymore. It is a crisis. And a lot of the traditional strategies are no longer relevant. So why'd you stop? First of all, date like it's your job. Lots of people just want a loving,

Starting point is 00:01:19 secure, peaceful relationship. That's like wanting a job that's high paying, low stress, and you're passionate about. If you want one of those jobs, they're the needle in the haystack. You might have to send out 200 resumes and you have to get over that rejection. Another thing, you get more opportunities for selection, the more attractive you present yourself, then everyone can be more attractive than you currently are. And also, the less conventionally attractive that you are, the more you have to learn seduction. And if you can do both, you'll be able to

Starting point is 00:01:43 have all kinds of relationships. So how do I become more attractive and also learn the art of seduction? So first of all, you need to... What role has pornography played in all this? It has completely changed the game of mating and dating. If you give men the opportunity to exist in a sexually satisfied state, which is what pornography does, then they aren't going to be having sex with real women. So the man that comes to you with this problem, what do you say to those men? The advice I would give is... Dr. Orion Terabann,

Starting point is 00:02:21 can you give me the macro picture as it relates to the work that you do? When I say the macro picture, I mean like what is going on in the world now that is so interesting and important for us to understand before we start talking about the relationship dynamics that we're going to talk about? What is that sort of macro picture at the moment? And how has that changed and changing?

Starting point is 00:02:45 I think probably big picture, the most salient thing in the world is the relationship crisis that we're working through. And it is a crisis. In the last 10 years, all kinds of relationships are being transacted less frequently. Fewer people are getting married at this country. I think in the most recent year in which statistics are available, it's at historic lows. It has never been this low before in the history of America. Fewer people are entering into relationships. Half the world's population lives in countries below reproductive rates, replacement rates. America would also be one of those countries if it weren't for its immigration.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Like its actual citizenry isn't reproducing enough to replace its own population but that's obscured by immigration really yeah fewer people are even hooking up anymore like there's fewer even casual sexual relationships being transacted which is somewhat surprising when you say fewer people are hooking up and there's fewer um transactional sexual relationships versus when? Versus like the 1950s or? Versus certainly 1970. So when the pill became widely available, there was predictably an explosion in casual sex relationships. We know that for both men and women, the number of lifetime sexual partners went up significantly. And we see that that's much lower these days. And that's kind of a problem because regardless of how you feel about casual sex, we live in a

Starting point is 00:04:14 culture in which sex precedes commitment. So the way to get to commitment and to long-term relationships and engagement in marriage, if that's what you're looking for, is kind of through sex. It's the first step of a process that can potentially end in children and family. So there are important downstream consequences in a culture where sex precedes commitment when there is less casual sex being transacted. All of those things you've described in the macro, those macro factors, why do any of them matter? Why do any of them matter? What's the downstream consequence of all those things? You know, you've described less people hooking up, but marriage and all these other factors, relationships, why does any of that matter to society? I guess on a macro scale, it could be population collapse. I mean, we know that some countries like Japan are already on the other

Starting point is 00:05:06 side of their curve and are going to have a very top heavy generation for the next 10 to 15 years, where one worker might be supporting over two citizens, which might be an economic burden that few workers can bear. Because there's young people in the workforce and then there's too many old people effectively. Yeah. And there's not enough in the workforce and then there's too many old people, effectively. Yeah. And there's not enough babies to kind of rise up and replace even those that are passing away. So that's why there's all these advances in robotics and AI, because they're trying to kind of make one person, two people to keep society stable. And the economic consequences of population collapse would be dire. Like they would have to be navigated with

Starting point is 00:05:45 a great deal of nuance and vision because the more accelerated the decline, the more unstable society becomes. So that probably is on a macro level, the most dangerous thing about this kind of situation. But for the individual, it just makes mating and dating so much more confusing than it ever has been. Like the individual probably isn just makes mating and dating so much more confusing than it ever has been. Like the individual probably isn't worried about the collapse of civilization and population decline. They're worried about, am I going to find somebody that I can have a satisfying relationship with? And that seems to be more difficult than it ever has been, which is paradoxical because it also seems on some level that should never have been easier in the history

Starting point is 00:06:23 of humanity to get into a sexual or romantic relationship with all of our new technologies. But it is. It is. Isn't that interesting? Who is suffering more or are they just suffering differently, men or women? Usually it's hard to be a man and it's hard to be a woman. It's like hard to be a human being. Down here, suffering is kind of standard. Like it's pain either way. What are the types of problems that start with men, men are having? Well, it's harder for men to meet women and to get into relationships. Like in the last 10 years, the number of relationships that were initiated online increased by 250%, which is huge. 10 years ago, about 20% of Americans met online.

Starting point is 00:07:10 Now it's over 50. The vast majority of couples are now meeting through social media or online dating sites. And across that same time period, we've seen a radical decrease in relationships that are being transacted. So it's correlative, but it's very suggestive that the meteoric rise of dating apps has also seen a catastrophic decline in all forms of relationships. Do you think dating apps are a net positive or a net negative? I think most people don't know how to use dating apps correctly. Dating apps are tools, and you have to adapt your strategy given what that technology is capable of doing. If you try to use dating apps casually, you're probably going to be infuriated, depressed, and hopeless. Like you need a strategy and that strategy generally requires massive

Starting point is 00:08:06 action. So especially for men. Interesting. We'll get into that because I want to dig deeper there, but just closing off on this point about the other ways in which the changes in society have started to impact men. I think a lot about the mental health statistics and about suicidality. I think at least in the UK, I know that the single biggest killer of men above the age of, I think 40 or 45 is themselves. And, um, I'm thinking, trying to understand if there's correlation there between a changing world that has changed dating dynamics, but also gender dynamics and the impact that that's had on men and masculinity, let's say? Well, masculinity is in a crisis, which creates an opportunity in the marketplace for lots of people to come in and say,

Starting point is 00:08:50 this is what it means to be a man. Like that would be somewhat unheard of a hundred years ago, because we all just more or less knew what it meant to be a man. But now we need personalities to come into the milieu and say, this is what it means to be a man. Now, in my opinion, a lot of that is what I would call performative masculinity and is not at the core of what it means to be a man, but can make you more visible in the sexual marketplace. Like one of the, regardless of your attitudes towards traditional masculinity or femininity, it makes that person more visible to the opposite sex. It's like by emphasizing what you might call sexual dimorphic characteristics.

Starting point is 00:09:35 What's that? That is a biological phenomenon that says that males and females look very different, but not in all ways. Like for example, the peacock, the male, is the one with the bright plumage, right? And so, whereas the peahen, the female, doesn't have that. And so a lot of the attraction between peacocks and peahens is based on that plumage,

Starting point is 00:09:59 because it's one way in which the males and females really differentiate themselves from each other. So it makes sense to stress the most visible, obvious differences from a biological perspective between men and women to make that contrast more visible. So I might get really big bicep muscles because that's one of the big sort of differences and she might get a boob job. Sure. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That's one of the, on some level, issues with respect to some of the gender conversations these days, which is that when you move further away

Starting point is 00:10:35 from these really obvious sexual signals, it's harder to kind of even see you. It's like, well, what are you and what do you want and what are you putting yourself out there for? Like it becomes more individualistic. It becomes more custom tailored, which is harder to see at a distance. And it's really important on some level to be able to kind of see things at a distance because there's an opportunity cost to approaching. If I'm going up to you and talking to you and learning more about you, I'm not doing that with anybody else, at least for this moment in time, right?

Starting point is 00:11:07 And so I kind of want to feel like there's a reasonable hope that if I go here, I might find something that I want or what I like versus this is just curious. I don't know what this is. The vast majority of people don't have the time and the energy to really explore and entertain their curiosity. They go where they need to go or they want to go. So going back to that starting point then, one of the things that's emerged as a solution to men, I guess, feeling lost about what it is to be a man is this performative masculinity.

Starting point is 00:11:36 In there, we put people like, you know, I've heard you talk about Andrew Tate being... I don't think I've ever talked about Andrew Tate. I really thought it was on one of your videos that I saw on TikTok or something. Would you fit him in the category of performative masculinity? I would fit him in the category of a personality who's come to the forefront to help men who might be lost and confused to find their way in navigating the current sexual marketplace. Absolutely. So he's offering a solution to navigating the current sexual

Starting point is 00:12:01 marketplace. Yeah. And what do you think of that solution? I don't follow, I haven't followed Andrew Tate very closely. I've watched just a few of his clips. I think he talked about acting in a way in such that your ancestors would be proud if they were watching you. And I was like,

Starting point is 00:12:18 no, that's a pretty good piece of advice. I actually follow very few content creators online because I'm trying to keep my content as original as possible. I don't want to necessarily just do reactions to other folks. He's clearly a problematic character. Like I think that he was indicted for sex trafficking in Europe, correct? Yeah, something like that. So I don't know the full story, but clearly people had, he was both loved and hated. That's for sure.

Starting point is 00:12:48 Just, I really want to just close off on the point about the world that men find themselves in before we move to the world that women find themselves in and then try and tackle some of those problems. So they're lost in terms of understanding what masculinity is. We know that there's been, they're finding it harder to find dates.

Starting point is 00:13:06 They're finding it harder to have sort of sexual relationships. Is there anything else that I need to understand about the man in the current social climate? Well, I think the problem for the vast majority of men, especially young men, is their invisibility. Most men are wallpaper. And the world does not treat men very well when they want nothing from them. I talk about that in the very first pages of the book, that to understand why some people are rich in relationship opportunities, whether they're romantic, professional, friendship, et cetera, and other people are not, it's not correct to say that it's the good people who have relationship opportunities or the virtuous people. It's the people that other people want things from

Starting point is 00:13:55 that have relationship opportunities. If you have more of what other people want more, you are going to have relationship opportunities throughout your lifespan. And that's very difficult because imagine being an 18-year-old man who have no money and you've never had money. You may not have a job. You may never have had a job. So you have no skills. You're kind of invisible to women because you don't have yet anything that women might find conducive for a long-term relationship. If you're cute, they might hook up with you. But if you're not even that, I mean, why waste their opportunity? Why waste their time when there are other more attractive options available? And you're also kind of useless to most men because you don't yet have the skills and the experience to be a good team player.

Starting point is 00:14:46 Like I wouldn't want you on my squad if you've never been out in the field. You're going to be a liability. You know what I'm saying? I don't have to carry your ass off the field. So you can't be here either. And that creates obviously the catch-22, which is where am I going to get the experience if no one gives me a shot? It's actually very difficult to be a young man. You don't have what either women or more experienced men want or need, and you're generally very disposable. And unfortunately, we've seen that. I mean, young men have a very high mortality rate in all kinds of ways. They were shipped off to wars. You talked about the suicide epidemic among older men.

Starting point is 00:15:30 Well, it's also very high among adolescent boys as well. It's hard to be a young man. I remember one of my guests telling me about a study where they analyzed the suicide letters of men. And they looked at the words used versus the words used in female suicide letters. And the most sort of frequent sentiment amongst those letters was about feeling worthless, feeling like you weren't needed. And the guest on the podcast concluded

Starting point is 00:15:57 that really what we needed to find a way is to send a message to men that you're needed. And it's a strange thing to say, but it correlates perfectly to what you were saying. The message sounds good, but it would be better to actually have opportunities to be needed than to be told that you are needed and that you are valued and that you are cared for. That's a nice emotional sentiment that doesn't really keep the demons away at night. People need to feel connected to other people. They need to feel like they have a place in the world. And it can take quite some time to discover that. One of the traps that I fell into

Starting point is 00:16:31 when I was a young man is I thought that I could figure that out by just sort of like noodling it out alone in my room. Like I was trying to figure out what I wanted my life to be about, what the purpose of my life was going to be before I even left the house. And I wasted a lot of time in fruitless rumination that way. It's much better to discover your purpose in life by moving through the world and examining your choices in retrospect. It's like you only really get to discover who you are by examining and understanding your revealed preferences based on your behavior as you move through the world. It's very easy to think of yourself in all kinds of ways when you're untested, when you're untried, when you're in the morally ambiguous situations

Starting point is 00:17:14 in which human beings find themselves as they navigate reality. Are you saying that the evidence you're looking for or the answers you're looking for come from? Taking action. Absolutely. They don't come from thinking it out. They often don't come from therapy. And that might sound weird coming from a therapist, but I do think that we live in a very overly therapized culture with the understanding that therapy is somewhat of a panacea in that it should be able to cure all that ails you. And I don't think that that's true. Therapy is very good for certain problems, and it's useless for others. What about women? What are the challenges that a woman faces in the modern world because of all these sort of macro changes that have taken place? Well, the main problem that I see women encountering, at least in my consultative practice,

Starting point is 00:18:07 is they have trouble finding the men that they want to have long-term relationships with. Almost every consultation I've done with a woman has been around, how do I get a man to marry me? And that's also kind of strange because I would think 80, 100 years ago, that was something that that girl was being prepared for since she was a very young person by her mother and her grandmother and her aunts and her female relatives with whom she probably lived in close consultation, and she never would have gotten to the age of 30 where this would be an open question still. And who are you? What's your sort of, if I looked at your CV, you know, you talked about your consultative practice. What is the experiences you've had and the education you've had that have brought you to this point where you've written this book about relationships and those

Starting point is 00:18:58 dynamics? What is your sort of professional personal experience? Well, professionally, I'm a psychologist. I'm licensed in the state of California. So I went to grad school and got a doctorate in psychology. I had all kinds of training experiences while I was moving through that. I worked at a chemical dependency clinic for two years. I worked with cancer patients and their caregivers in a health psychology setting for a couple of years. I worked with significant dysfunction in a community mental health center in San Francisco for a while. I worked in outpatient with severe personality disorders. So that was all part of my training. And then when I started my private practice, I began to focus on men's mental health. And for a long time, when I was a therapist,

Starting point is 00:19:40 I worked exclusively with men. That's changed a little bit now that I have a kind of a larger platform on which to reach people. But that's sort of been my professional experience. So in your private practice, when people come to you, what are men most frequently coming to you with in terms of the problem they come with versus what women come to you with a problem with? Well, in general, it's either money or women for men. Oh, really? Yeah. And this is nothing new. Like Sigmund Freud said a long time ago that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to teach people how to work and how to love. That's it. If you can learn how to work and love, you can be a fairly functional human being in society and have a satisfying life. And he also said that the goal of therapy was not

Starting point is 00:20:35 to cure suffering per se, which might be inseparable from the human experience, but to free human beings from neurotic unnecessary suffering so that they are better equipped to meet the necessary suffering and pain of being alive. So he had, I think, a more attenuated vision for what therapy could do. So it's either money, work, or women, love. And what I found is that it's either one or the other. I often did consultations with guys who were super successful professionally. They were making millions, but they were in failed marriage after failed marriage, or they couldn't for the life of them get laid, even if they were having parties with models on their super yachts. You know what I'm saying? By the same token,

Starting point is 00:21:19 there are fewer of them because they couldn't afford my out-of-pocket rate, but it's like there were some men who were just absolutely cleaning up. Like I've done some consultations, had some patients, young men who were just like plowing through San Francisco. I mean, they had sexual success in a way that most men would just fantasize about, but they had a really hard time getting their money straight, their career. They were super stressed out. They had anxiety disorders, things like that.

Starting point is 00:21:52 Which is actually fairly ironic because what I found is if it works in one domain, it generally works in the other. Interesting. So if I get my work right, then I'll get my love right? If it works in business, it often works with women. What do you mean? Sorry. Well, think about it this way. Men want sex and they want relationships from women. Women don't

Starting point is 00:22:13 go around giving those things out to men just because they want them. Okay. So what's the analogous problem in the professional arena, which is I want money. Let's say you're a salesman. I want money. I have this product or I have this service. I want people to hire me. I want people to buy it. Well, people aren't just going around with their wallets out saying, who's going to take my money? You know what I'm saying? So you have to find a way to get what you want from the people that you want it from. And a lot of the strategies that work in business to do that will work in the sexual marketplace as well. Interesting. That's very, very true. Because I think I told you before we started recording, when I was, I don't know, 18, there was this pickup artistry book sent to my house that I think my older brother had ordered, but he ordered it to the wrong address because he had moved out

Starting point is 00:22:58 to university. So he said, just keep it. Lucky accident for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I sat there and I read it cover to cover without moving. And actually much of the principles I learned about pickup artistry, about attraction, about being a high value male are actually things that I took into business when it comes to negotiation, sales, persuasion, and all those things. So I do see that translation. Well, another thing is that often when I say that, because people have all kinds of associations with pickup, they think it's kind of sleazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's especially for guys who couldn't get laid otherwise. And so they have to use manipulative tactics to get what they want. It's like, okay, well, yeah, welcome to advertising, right? Yeah. So that's one side of it. They think that those strategies just work to get laid or to have

Starting point is 00:23:39 casual sexual relationships. No, they often also work in long-term relationships. Not only because generally the pathway to a long-term relationship is through a more casual arrangement. Usually people date and hang out and sleep together for some weeks, some months before they define the relationship, right? So they kind of, for better or for worse, have to go through that proving ground before they get to here, right? But like, it's really important for long-term relationships. It's one of the principles for long-term success is complementarity of skill sets. It's like, if you're a startup founder, you want somebody who can do very well the things that you cannot do. Like having two CEOs is just a recipe for competition, struggle, and strife, right?

Starting point is 00:24:27 Yeah. So you need people with complementary skill sets in order to go the distance. In my experience, 90% of successful relationships are based on selection. If you can understand yourself, accurate self-knowledge, and you get better at discerning other people, you can have satisfying relationships with lots of different human beings. We're going to get into figuring out how you do that. But on the point I asked you there, I said, what do men come to you with in terms of problem sets? And you said money and women, ideally sort of work and women, work and love. So what do women come to you? They want to get married. So they just come to you with the love problems. Yeah. I mean, they do that now because I, I talk about lots of things

Starting point is 00:25:10 on my channel, but by far the most successful videos are the ones about intersexual dynamics. And so that's kind of what I'm known for. And so there is a bit of a selection bias there is the most popular videos are me talking about men and women. And so increasingly men and women come to me about their relationship issues, right? So that makes sense. But women use therapy for all kinds of different reasons, right? We know that women are by far bigger consumers of therapeutic services in particular, like actually going to therapy. And also more generally, like they make up the lion's share of consumers for just self-help material in general. Like there's a big market for that kind of self-betterment and self-improvement in the female marketplace. And we also know that about 85%

Starting point is 00:25:59 of mental health practitioners are women. Like when I was in my training, I think I was one of three people in my cohort that were men. I would interview at some placements where there weren't any men at all on the staff whatsoever. And just like I can appreciate that women might not feel entirely comfortable going to a man with certain of their issues, I know for sure that there's plenty of men who wouldn't feel comfortable going to a woman about some of their concerns. So when they talk about why, you often hear, it's usually women, they're dissatisfied with men's lack of interest in going to therapy. Men would literally want to refurbish a train, then go to therapy and talk about their feelings. Well, it's partly it's because

Starting point is 00:26:52 there aren't a lot of male practitioners. And I think what's good for men isn't always what's good for women and vice versa. What's good for the goose isn't always what's good for the gander. What I found is that women generally talk to process their emotions, and they're more keen on emotionally focused strategies, right? Whereas men, they try to resolve things through action and through solution. And they often see that just talking about their problems and paying for the opportunity to do so to be a complete waste of time and money, and I can understand why. Now, it does have its place.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Like, it's very important for some men to be able to have a safe space to really share their experience and talk about this stuff because, man, they can be judged harshly if they open up to the wrong people. So there's a time and a place for that for men as well, but it's generally not every week for several years. So let's go into those two, those three different problems then. So if a man comes to you and they are expressing an issue with love, they're trying to get laid, they're trying to find someone. Where do you start? What are the

Starting point is 00:28:00 sort of foundational things you need them to understand for you to all get focused in the right direction? I usually start with what they've tried in the past and where in the funnel they tend to be experiencing their difficulties. Like there's a, the advice is very different if you're not getting any matches on a dating app or you haven't been able to get a date in months versus I can get with women, but after three months, everything kind of seems to fall apart or I'm able, everyone just wants me for these long-term relationships and I just want to be able to play the field. So it's really depending on the goals of the man in question and where he's experiencing the difficulties. So if he's at the top of the funnel, so when we talk about funnels, if we have the top of the funnel is, you know, you're meeting people, maybe a little bit further down the funnel is you're, you know, having some kind of relationship with them short term. And

Starting point is 00:28:53 then at the very bottom of the funnel might be like marriage and kids. Sure. So at the very top, so if they come in at the top of the funnel and they've got problems just like meeting people where where'd you start that's a tough one i think it's a good idea in today's day and age to have kind of a dual strategy i think that you can use the apps for what the apps are good for but overly relying on them as a solution for your dating woes is probably not correct you're going to have to get out there and get better at your people skills. Because even if you do match with somebody, if you're more of an introvert, if you have a lot of social anxiety, even if you manage to get someone off the app into the real world, you

Starting point is 00:29:36 might be able to blow it because you're going to be nervous. You're going to be uncharismatic. You're not going to know how to lead the encounter in the direction of a sexual experience if that's what you're looking for. so it's generally a good idea to get out there there's really no antidote there's no there's no better solution than doing it it's just like learning a language you have to speak it you're going to make a lot of mistakes you're going to be embarrassed it's going to feel frustrating and impossible until it doesn't. So unfortunately, everything that you can say or read or listen to is just prelude to going out there and doing it and failing enough times and learning from your mistakes until you have a reasonable hit rate. But how do I increase my probability that a woman will give me that chance

Starting point is 00:30:21 and then stick with me? Like, how do I increase my chance of being attractive? Are there things I can do? Do I need to go hit the gym? Sure. Like when I talk about in the book is that everyone can be more attractive than they currently are. And if you're having a problem in that initial funnel,

Starting point is 00:30:39 it's generally a marketing issue. Because think about it, on an app, it's six pictures and three responses. In a meat market, it's, hey, how you doing? And it's like, she's going to give me a once over, she already gave me the side eye, and she's going to kind of make a snap judgment based on the vibe that I'm giving out, right? Neither one of those has anything to do with really who I am as a person. That's one of the things is that they can't really reject you because they haven't spent any time getting to know you. For better or for worse, if they like you or not,

Starting point is 00:31:11 they like the idea of you. They like the presentation of you. And it's really important not to disabuse people of that presentation too quickly. Okay. So to think about your exterior marketing. Absolutely. Okay. Because that's what men do. I mean, they don't go up to women randomly. They think, oh man, she's pretty cute. Right? They're paying attention to the surface marketing as well. What can I do with my surface marketing to make me more attractive? Well, you got to focus on what you can control because generally when we go down this road what i hear from men online is well that's all well and good orion but i'm five six you know i'm balding women aren't gonna like me and it's like yeah if you don't have some of the genetic markers it is

Starting point is 00:31:59 more difficult but everyone can get better at what they do. And on some level, the less conventionally attractive that you are, the more you have to learn seduction, the more you have to learn game. You have to think about the fact that attractiveness is not normally distributed across any population, right? There's gonna be a small subset of men and women who are just absolutely gorgeous. Some of that are, wow, that's interesting.

Starting point is 00:32:21 And most people are kind of in the middle, right? And seduction is the process of being able to direct attention to your purposes. And the more that you can learn how to direct attention for your purposes, the more that you can overcome some of the liabilities associated with being, let's say, in the fat part of the curve when it comes to attractiveness. Okay, so how do I do that? Well, you have to kind of learn what works. I think one of the things that all men can learn from the pickup community is that they were basically behavioral scientists. Some of them went to the field and said, okay, if I knew what I was doing, I'd be laid by now. I'd be awash in optionality. So maybe I don't know what women want. Maybe I don't know what works. Let's let the outcome teach me

Starting point is 00:33:12 what I should believe, as opposed to going to women with a preconceived notion about what should work or what they should want. And that's why on some level you've got what on the surface seems like some ridiculous strategies, like peacocking. It's like some men look at that and they're like, I would never do that. That's just so ostentatious and extravagant, but it can attract attention. That's a very, let's say, heavy handed way to do so. For someone that doesn't know what peacocking is. You know, dressing a little bit more flamboyantly to attract attention. Or like a flamboyant feature or like it could be a crazy hat. It could be a crazy hat. Flavor Flav had the big clock around his neck. I don't know if I just

Starting point is 00:33:49 dated myself with that reference. And sometimes it's just looking sharp. I mean, by far, one of the best things that men can do is just spend one or 2,000 bucks to get like two or three really good outfits. You can just cycle through them when you're dating, especially in some marketplaces. LA is tough. New York is tough, but it is so easy to be the best dressed man in San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:34:12 I swear to God, it does not take that much effort. And if you're the best dressed man in the room, you get like one free point. Can you imagine? Some women have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery to get one extra point. Some men just need to put some clothes on and get a better haircut you know what i'm saying and they refuse to do that for whatever reason what are the things should i be thinking about in terms of seduction if i want to be because one of the central things i need to understand as you

Starting point is 00:34:36 said that the pickup artist community learned is is what actually leads to the outcome because if i was to ask a woman hey how can i become more attractive to a woman? I guess what she might say to me is, be nice, be, you know, I don't know. I've asked that question to so many women in my life. And I've never gotten a good answer, because that's almost always the response is I want a kind man. I want a man who is, I feel safe with. I want a man who is loving. And usually the guy in question is listening to that and be like, well, what the fuck's the problem? It's like, I'm kind of shit. Like, I don't get it. Like, I need to be kinder. And they start to lean into that even more. And I don't think that these women are necessarily lying to these men, but they're leaving out the most important part.

Starting point is 00:35:26 One of my most popular YouTube videos is the part that women always leave out that speaks exactly to this problem, which is that women do want those things that they list off when men ask them that question. They just want them from the men that they're attracted to. They want the men they're attracted to to be kind and to be loving and to be generous and to make them feel safe. But it's not like being kind and generous and making women feel safe is going to lead them to feeling attracted to you. And that's the part that women leave out and men in their, let's say, naive but good-hearted intention to give women what they want and to be a better mate for them, they just totally lose out on.

Starting point is 00:36:12 So it's better to be attractive. Like if you want to be good at the game of mating and dating, you have an easier time, the more attractive that you present yourself. You get more opportunities for selection. You get more beneficial arrangements in the negotiation process. And it's easier to maintain your relationship in the long run against your intersexual competition

Starting point is 00:36:36 as well. So there's all kinds of privileges and benefits to being attractive. And everyone can be more attractive than they currently are. What do men need to do to be more attractive? I think they can learn to dress better. I think that they can take care of their physical fitness. For some men, it's as basic as hygiene. You know what I'm saying? I think it's also really important to learn how to talk. The most vulnerable organ in a woman to seduction is her mind, is her brain. Like you, that is her biggest erogenous zone. And if you can learn to talk to women in a way that women will listen and respond to,

Starting point is 00:37:19 you'll be able to do all kinds of things and have all kinds of relationships. What do I need to say? Well, it's not a script, right? So one of the, it's a, it's a lot about vibing, like female, feminine communications, but that feminine communication is very different from masculine communication. I'm not saying I'm saying away from men and women, because obviously men and women can do both, but masculine communication is about the conveyance of information using semantic words. I know that the message has been received. If you can more or less summarize that message back to me, it's like, I understood the content of what you said. Transmission complete, right?

Starting point is 00:37:59 Feminine communication is very different. It's more like emotional resonance. And communication has been received when I can succeed in provoking in you a comparable or analogous emotional experience to the one that I went through or I'm currently in. You can think of it like tuning forks. One of them is vibrating. If you bring another one up to it, it will start vibrating at the same frequency as well. And that's when you know that the communication has been received. And that's really important for men to understand because that leads to a lot of disagreements and arguments between men and women in their long-term relationships, where sometimes women are attempting to get men to feel the way that they currently feel. But men are paying attention to what they're actually saying. And they're saying,

Starting point is 00:38:44 why are you bringing this up now? Or that's not factually accurate. I don't understand. And it's because of this failure of intersexual understanding. The woman is trying to provoke in the man, the emotional state so that he can understand like in his bones, what it feels like to have been her in that moment. But the men are just paying, some men are just so literal. They're so functionally fixed on the semantic content of language. And the truth is that words are both.

Starting point is 00:39:14 Words always have this defined semantic meaning, but they also are in different containers of emotion. Like every word can be said with any different emotional of emotion. Like every word can be said with any different emotional content possible. You can say the word please seductively. You can say the word please threateningly. You can say the word please pathetically. I mean, that's what actors do, right? They invest this script, which are just words on a page, with emotional content, and that's what makes their performance enchanting. If you can do both, if you can be

Starting point is 00:39:52 very particular with your words, and you can invest it with some degree of emotional content, you can be a very charismatic communicator. And I guess you're saying that some men maybe lean one way more than the other absolutely they lean more towards the semantic information just like logic just absolutely like a robot yeah sometimes there's definitely some robotic men out there and what women want is more of the emotional resonance yes and how you're talking yeah they want a vibe you know it's that shakira song it's starting to feel right her hips don't don't lie. So it's this mood that's being generated where the two people, the two dancers, the two players begin to occupy a shared private world. And within that world,

Starting point is 00:40:38 the rules don't always apply. We've created a different bounded universe. And that's actually the goal of seduction is that just the two of us here, and we're creating this separate universe that's different from everything else that's going on. It's just you and me here. And we can then play according to the rules that we've developed inside of this little microcosmic universe. So I'm going to get my hygiene right. I'm going to hit the gym. I'm going to get a new outfit. Sounds like you're doing pretty good. I'm going to learn how to talk. Is there anything else that in that sort of initial top of the funnel attraction phase, I should be really focusing on to make sure that I increase my probability of just inviting someone in to the house?

Starting point is 00:41:24 Those things are the most important. A lot of guys get too focused on money at this stage. And the fact of the matter is, is that money is what I call an attraction proxy. You don't need money to get laid. You don't need money to attract attention. It's one way, like it will absolutely attract attention if you go to the vip section and order bottle service and you're throwing around tens of thousands of dollars that was my whole strategy when i was 21 wow you had tens of thousands of dollars thrown around good for you it was just a pre-25 strategy that converted well for shallow relationships and stuff but other than that it can work but at the same token i guarantee that there is an unemployed man living in his parents' basement who's getting laid tonight because he's a musician and he's playing at the local open mic on Tuesday.

Starting point is 00:42:12 You know what I'm saying? 100%. And he's up on stage. So if you're young and broke and you're not cute, then you have to find some way to stand out. By far, the most useful thing to attracting women is not money per se, because it's not always easy to tell who has money, especially in places like San Francisco. The billionaires dress like homeless people sometimes.

Starting point is 00:42:39 And it's not necessarily power because sometimes the most powerful individuals are actually hidden from the limelight. And that's what allows them to exercise their power with some degree of immunity. The most powerful people you know are probably not the most powerful people. The thing that works is fame, is renown. And renown can work at many different levels. You can be, and I learned this as an

Starting point is 00:43:06 actor, which is how I got my start in New York City, is like I performed on some very small stages throughout my career to sometimes just a few people in the audience. But the fact of the matter is for those two hours, if I was the lead and my name was on the marquee and the spotlight was on me, on some level, what I call, I was the contextual alpha. And within that tiny, almost insignificant world, I was at the top of that status hierarchy. And that's what gets you laid. Now, those same women had no interest in having a long-term relationship with me. And that's what kind of motivated me to take a hard look at the guy in the mirror and think, well, shit, why would a woman want to marry me? It's like, I'm living in this one room studio with roaches everywhere. It's like, I'm

Starting point is 00:43:54 broke. I'm living month to month. My lifestyle sucks. I don't really have much ambition except for this, let's say, very vague vision about becoming a successful actor, whatever that meant. I wasn't really, I didn't really have a plan and I didn't really have much to offer in terms of a long-term relationship. And so I said, okay, well, if this is something that I want, I got to, I mean, the cavalry isn't coming. I got to do it because no one else will. And I took kind of radical responsibility for my life and, you know, started down a different path. We talked about attraction. As you move down through that funnel, the next challenge becomes actually keeping someone. And I, it's funny enough, because in my early twenties, although I could seemingly attract women at this point, I couldn't get any of them to

Starting point is 00:44:41 want to be in a relationship with me, especially the ones I wanted. Yeah. What is useful to get a man or a woman is not the same thing as what works to keep a man or a woman. Those are two different problems. Some people actually make great long-term partners, but they're terrible at attracting. They're terrible at the marketing. Other people, they get the marketing down, but they lack the substance or they can't really go the distance from one way or the other. And so it's harder to keep their partners around. There are two different problems. The solution for one does not apply to the other. In particular, the vast majority of attraction is based on projected fantasy. I don't know who you are. I just see the outside. And I'm going to approach you because I like that outside. And my attraction is going to fill in the gaps in my knowledge base with what I want

Starting point is 00:45:32 to see there. That's why I talk about, I'm in an episode about how most men blow the first date. They blow the first date by talking too much. They talk too much out of the misguided desire to prove their value to women. They usually do it in a very heavy-handed, ham-fisted way. And generally, all they do is succeed in disabusing that woman of the fantasy that she had of that man, which is why she was sitting there on that date tonight. Because the likelihood that anything I say is going to match up with what you want to see in the privacy of your own mind is functionally zero. So I need to tread very carefully because you're not on this date because you like me

Starting point is 00:46:17 because you don't fucking know who I am yet. You're here because of what you hope I might be. And so I need to be very careful not to disabuse you of that hope too quickly. Right? It's actually the key to transitioning from one phase to the other. It's going to sound real bad, but it's a slow and gradual disappointment. Right? And you have to do this because if you don't do it, then what do you end up with? You end up in a relationship where you're not truly known and you're just performing all the time. And that's probably not sustainable, but it's certainly not very satisfying.

Starting point is 00:46:59 And there'll be a sudden disappointment. There generally is. I talk about that in the book. The crisis of disappointment is one of the first crises that all nascent relationships must pass through. And on some level, the relationship doesn't even begin in earnest until couples go through the crisis of disappointment, where either through one significant betrayal or the accumulation of small inconsistencies, the fantasy on which the relationship has been based up until that point shatters. And the person is really no different from who he or she was the day before, but he or she's going to feel completely different because it's almost like the scales have dropped from your eyes and you're seeing this person. And maybe what seemed cute and lovable and adorable just a week ago now is completely infuriating and difficult to live with. Sometimes the very things that we're most attracted to tend to be the things that we dislike most about our partners further down the road. It's a cruel irony. So interesting when you talk about this moment that some relationships go through where they have that sudden disappointment,

Starting point is 00:47:58 where the kind of honeymoon effect, the halo effect of this person kind of shatters. And you say that's when the relationship actually begins. Well, yeah, because it's at that point where you have the opportunity at long last to see the other person for who he or she is. And you couldn't see that before. You just saw what you wanted to see. You were distorted in your perception by your attraction. And you need some of that distortion because why else would you have taken the risk and the expense and the opportunity to pursue this relationship up until that point? Like you need some of that distortion because why else would you have taken the risk and the expense and the opportunity to pursue this relationship up until that point? Like you need a little bit of attraction. Too much of attraction is crazy.

Starting point is 00:48:32 I mean, it's completely distortive. Not enough attraction and you're not going to overcome the behavioral inertia. You're just going to be so in your head and you'll be like, this isn't worth it. I'd rather just do something with a higher likelihood of success where I can get one of my needs met in a more predictable and consistent way. Because relationships are really a roll of the dice, especially today, more than ever. So on that first date, can women also talk themselves out of it in terms of the women talking too much and the man going, Jesus Christ? They can, but most guys just are, they're trying to get laid.

Starting point is 00:49:08 So like the woman would have to be a total train wreck or that guy would have to have enough optionality that he could be picky. But most men are not picky because most men are just really hungry for anything that they're willing to get. I know that sounds bad, but it's kind of true. Well, I mean, it's supported by data as well, isn't it? That, you know, I've heard repeatedly that the top 10% of men are having most of the sex. They are killing it. It's like, what a time to be alive these days, man.

Starting point is 00:49:34 And that seems to be kind of the end state of a dysregulated sexual marketplace. And it's not unusual. It's not uncommon. Like we see this in all kinds of animal species, elephant seals, wild mustangs. It's like you see some alpha males dominate the females who congregate in harems around those men. And if that man is defeated by another contender, the women aren't loyal. It's not like those females love that individual and they'll stick with it even after it's defeated in combat. They just move on to the next one. 85% of cultures on this planet, according to people who know more about this than I do, have been polygamous. And what we see is that when women are able and empowered to make their own sexual decisions in the sexual marketplace, they target the top 10% of men. That creates a lot of problems though. It creates a lot of problems, both for men and women. It creates problems for women because the likelihood that any one of those 10% men are

Starting point is 00:50:38 going to give up their insane sexual optionality and enter into a monogamous exclusive arrangement with them is very negligible. Like that guy has to be so done with playing the field and so ready to start a family and settle down. So it's really about timing as opposed to being the right woman. You kind of just have to be good enough at the right moment to kind of capture that man's attention. And for the vast majority of those women, they're not going to be it. But what's the alternative? It's like, how about this guy? He's completely average. There's nothing bad about him.

Starting point is 00:51:14 Nothing that great about him either. He'd make a great husband. Like, that doesn't sound very attractive. I can understand that. Do you still think that relationships are a exchange of value between two people? Of course. And what is that exchange of value? Because when I read that, it kind of sounds like gold digging or something. Well, that's because often people take value very literally. And especially economics, that word just is associated very strongly with money

Starting point is 00:51:43 in the collective imagination. I think in one of the footnotes, I use a definition from von Mises from the Austrian School of Economics. And he basically defines economics as the study of human behavior in respect to means and with respect to ends and scarce means that could be applied in other ways. The easiest way to explain the value is that people don't move towards people they want

Starting point is 00:52:09 nothing to do with. They have better things to do, especially when they have these scarce resources like time, like energy, like attention, and that they want things from other people. If I, at a distance, can see there's, it's like going shopping. I can look at a distance, there's nothing in that store that I want. I don't have to go in and waste my time to figure out whether that's absolutely true or not because I have other things to do today. So it's like if there's nothing that I want from that store, I'm not going to walk through its doors, right?

Starting point is 00:52:39 People don't move towards those they don't want anything from. So what is value? Value can be all kinds of things. Value is anything that can be bought or earned. Okay. Not everything can be bought and earned. And I have a whole chapter about that, but a lot of things can be bought and earned. Okay. So give me some examples of the most important types of values that we exchange in the context of a relationship? Sex. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:07 Security. Yeah. Excitement. Yeah. Emotional support. Yeah. Child rearing. Okay.

Starting point is 00:53:17 And do women and men value those types of value differently? Of course. And what do men value more and what do women value more? That's a tough one because not only do men and women value those differently, but men and women value them differently at different stages of their life. Okay. Like I'm sure when you were doing the bottle service, you were not really thinking whether these women had good maternal capacities, right? No. You were trying to get laid. Exactly. You were approaching those women with a different

Starting point is 00:53:45 set of needs or desires. There's nothing wrong with that because it's actually very difficult for one person to meet this hyper-conflated set of needs and wants. That's one of the reasons why relationships tend to fail these days is we want too many things from one person. And we expect one person to be all things across our entire lives, which is very difficult, if not impossible. It's like incredible that it even happens at all. That didn't used to be the case, did it? Well, it didn't used to be the case, mostly because it was so difficult, if not impossible, to divorce. And there were a lot of social taboos against separation.

Starting point is 00:54:22 But also, I would have been living in like a community where I could have got, you know, we're living much more isolated and lonely now. So I would have been, you know, the village would have given me some of those things that I'm looking for in terms of value. I would have had a big social structure around me. Absolutely. I talk about that in the book is that we used to live in small communities where we actually had lots of different kinds of relationships with lots of different people and also in extended kin networks and intergenerational housing, for instance. And so with the advent of the nuclear family and the dissolution of real community, we expect our partner to be all things, to be an entire village and an extended family. And that's just really not possible. I mean, the love marriage

Starting point is 00:55:01 in particular may even be a paradox in terms, because you want kind of, let's say, an emotionally stable, safe companion who is also your passionate lover and sexual partner. Spontaneous, risky. So difficult, if not impossible. Yeah. Like you certainly can't do both of those things at the same time. The best you can hope for is to kind of vacillate between the two of them yeah to kind of create a proportion just enough passion or spontaneity and risk to keep the kind of bedroom alive but still maintaining the stability and long-term security of the relationship it's very difficult to manage i find this difficult difficult. I find this difficult. I find it difficult to be in, I'm in a five-year relationship now. I'm like, how do you,

Starting point is 00:55:49 how do you go for another 50 years? Cause I, you know, with the same person and maintain the spontaneity and excitement for 50 years, you know, and being the kind of novel, sexually attractive, whatever, while also being stable, safe, predictable, comfortable, present at the same time. Like they feel like paradoxes. It's very hard and you have to be creative. It's part of the reason why there are, that places like Victoria's Secret exist. You know what I'm saying? It's like 21-year-old girls aren't shopping there, really. So if you're not willing to actually open up your relationship, then you have to kind of make your partner feel new,

Starting point is 00:56:35 which could mean different outfits. It could mean play and entering in and experimenting with different roles behind closed doors. It can also just mean travel. I mean, one thing that really seems to spark sex life in couples is foreign bedsheets. And I think that you've just sort of changed the context and that's enough of a spark of novelty to bring some of the sexual interest back for the man. I think novelty is more important for men than for women. One of the things that really works in my relationship that I think novelty is more important for men than for women.

Starting point is 00:57:08 One of the things that really works in my relationship that I've observed is just being away. Absolutely. So I come out here for, you know, I'm out here for a couple of weeks now. I'm not going to see my, and then I was doing Dragon's Den before this in the UK. So that was, I was away for a while then. In total, I wouldn't have seen my partner for about four weeks. So when I come back, it's kind of like a new person. It is. I mean, one of the things about what made relationships work back in the day is men didn't really spend a lot of time with women and vice versa. James Sexton, the divorce lawyer, he had this great line on the Soft White Underbelly interview when he was responding to the spike in divorces during COVID when everybody was shut down and forced into close

Starting point is 00:57:45 company with each other for extended periods of time. He said that men and women signed up for better or for worse, but not for lunch. It's really hard to just be in each other's space all the time. And the fact of the matter is when we lived in extended kin networks and communities, men had a bunch of men to do things with, and women had a bunch of women to talk to. And even in the 50s, which is kind of romanticized as the paragon of conservative traditional marriage, that was the time when the man was a traveling salesman and he was on the road for 200 days out of the year. Having an office has kept more marriages alive than probably any other toy or therapy or intervention on the planet. Like you need to leave. You need to leave. And it's even harder to do that with the advent of cellular technology. It's like being physically absent doesn't matter if the whole time you're

Starting point is 00:58:41 there, I know where you are at all times because I've put a tracking thing on your phone and I'm constantly communicating with you throughout the day. Like now there's no uncertainty. There's no mystery. There's no unknown. So when we get back together, what do we have to talk about?

Starting point is 00:59:00 I'm not interested in you because I believe you're an entirely known entity. You need to have something that I don't know yet to attract my interest and curiosity, which is the spark that eventually potentially leads to passion and sexual intimacy. But what does this say about the very nature of monogamy? Because if you need to, this doesn't feel like a natural thing. If I go back, you know, we, once upon a time, we couldn't just get on a plane or go to the office. We would presumably be around each other most of the time. I'm trying to understand if you think like monogamy is quote unquote natural.

Starting point is 00:59:33 Oh, probably not. Like I think that humans are probably monogamish, but like strict monogamy, which should be really rigidly and explicitly defined by the individuals in question, because there's clearly behaviors that are in the gray zone, like is harmless flirting cheating? You know what I'm saying? That some people might say, no, that's just part of the fun

Starting point is 00:59:59 of being a social human being and it's not gonna lead to anything. And other people might think, no, that's totally inappropriate and incorrect. So these things need to be discussed. Monogamy isn't just something that everybody agrees on and understands what that means. But yeah, I think that it's generally not something that we do naturally. One way to think about this is monogamy actually benefits men on a utilitarian perspective,

Starting point is 01:00:26 because there's generally more women than there are for men. If you maintain strict social monogamy, we have this many men and this many women, what that means is that even the worst men in society, in that community, can be functionally guaranteed of a wife. I want to really close off on this point about exchanging values. And that's really what a relationship is. When I spoke to James Sexton, the divorce lawyer you referenced there, we started talking about gold diggers. And he, you know, would reference divorce cases where there's a 70 year old, significantly overweight man who's, you know, with a 30 year old woman and i said to him is that not gold digging and i said is that love and his response to me i'll always remember it was he said well it's a

Starting point is 01:01:12 transaction she's getting something from him and in the words that you've described it might be safety it might be i don't know money or whatever and he's also getting something from her, which is, I guess, a feeling. I guess it's an emotional feeling. Presumably he's getting sex. Sex, yeah. He's getting the opportunity to walk in the door with a beautiful 30-year-old on his arm, which is certainly a bump to his ego, but is also good for the social game. The fact of the matter is, is that most women, most men would have sex with most women,

Starting point is 01:01:45 but most women would not have sex with most men. So we also know that men's threshold for selection is much lower than women's. Generally, women have more optionality than men do. And so when we see a woman with a man, we more or less assume that that's the best man that she could get given her range of options. Oftentimes with the men, it's the only woman that would have him, not quite the same thing. So if a very attractive woman is with a man, then that's an automatic status boost in any social circle that he navigates in, because everyone is going to assume that there must be something really important or significant about that guy, given the fact that we assume that that attractive or beautiful woman could

Starting point is 01:02:36 pretty much have any man that she wanted, and yet she's with him. For better or for worse, it's more difficult to know a man's true value given the reasons why men and women transact in the sexual marketplace. Like women's value in terms of sexual marketplace is just so much more explicit. Like it's men's downfall that we're too monomaniacally focused on the reproductive cues and the physical attractiveness for better or for worse. And that's hard for women, because some women have it and some women don't. You know what I'm saying? But for a man, when it comes time, like, is he,

Starting point is 01:03:13 it's difficult to even calculate a person's net worth if you have all of their income documentation. Like, you have accountants to do that, right, Stephen? You certainly can't do it on site. Like, if I didn't know about your podcast and you were just walking down the street with your plain old black tee, I'd be like, you might be functionally invisible. You know what I'm saying? And that's actually kind of good. It's nice to be able to be incognito and invisible when you want to be. To be so famous that you can't go anywhere without being recognized would be a liability more than an opportunity.

Starting point is 01:03:55 But it would take somebody to be curious about you to learn about all the interesting and valuable things about you and your lifestyle. And unless you advertise that in some way, most women would not go through the trouble of trying to figure that out. And that's not the same for a woman. Of course not. It's really hard for women to just be alone. Oh yeah, gosh. And sometimes they complain about that. And I get that.

Starting point is 01:04:20 There's been times when I've been approached and I would rather just be left alone. It's annoying to have to reject people. It's uncomfortable to be sexualized against your will when you don't want to be, right? I was actually watching something yesterday in my green room over there, just because it came up on my phone. It was an ITV documentary where they just basically followed a woman at night through a major city with a camera. And it is pretty horrific. One man comes up to her puts his arm around her and she's alone at night in the middle of the street context puts his arm

Starting point is 01:04:49 around her and basically stops her hey please what's your name please another a man who's in his 60s or 70s comes over hey do you want some piano lessons uh i play piano would you like some and she can't move down this high street without someone making a sound a gesture some kind of proposition like jesus christ that's what it's like to be like justin bieber or something it'd be really annoying yeah yeah it's interesting because that behavior is just point blank unacceptable but what i saw in that video as well was just how desperate men must be and especially in the way that the world has changed following the me too movement and we understand you know what consent really is and the experience that women have been through i i go there's a subset of men now that are going to be even more terrified to walk up to someone and say hi my name is steven um can we talk like you

Starting point is 01:05:39 i've done so many consultations with guys who are terrified of being MeToo'd, of being canceled, of being like surreptitiously recorded and humiliated on the internet, especially in San Francisco. And I have never once been slapped or had a drink thrown in my face or had an angry, uncomfortable interaction. Like the worst I got was I went up to a girl. I was like, hey, how you doing? And without even responding, she just sort of looked at me and then like looked away. And I was like, ooh, okay. All right. Not interested. Understood. That was the worst thing that happened to me. I think if you approach women in the right way, you can leave them better than you found them,

Starting point is 01:06:34 even if they're not interested in having a relationship with you, which most women won't be by definition. So get used to striking out. So what do you say to those men then that are scared of rolling up to someone and, you know, saying hello? It's all about how you approach them. And you approach them with, first of all, don't ever try to surprise a woman. Because a lot of guys do. It's like they run up, excuse me, and they get really close and they get in their face. They're nervous themselves. And you kind of, it's like approaching an animal, a deer in the wild. You know, it's like, here I am. I'm making eye contact. We've made eye contact for a while.

Starting point is 01:07:09 I'm getting up slowly. I'm moving towards you. Here are my hands. Sort of like interacting with the cops sometimes. It's like, I got nothing up my sleeve and we're going to do this slow. And I'm going to smile. I'm going to exude warmth. I'm not going to get in too close. I'm certainly not going to touch her. Does body language matter? Of course it matters. So I have a whole chapter about the game of please no in the book. Say that again. Okay. The game of please no. So this is a game that I played at Tisch. So I went to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to train as an actor. And in my first semester of acting school, we didn't do any acting really. We didn't study scenes. We didn't do plays. We played this one game and we played this game for, I think,

Starting point is 01:07:54 three or four months straight. And the game is called the game of please no. And I've since discovered that this game is the fundamental game of human relationships. It wasn't advertised to me as such, but I since understood that this is the core game at the heart of all human interaction, which is I'm going to you because I want something from you. Whether it's attention, sex, a dollar, a job, a house, a meal, it's like I'm here because I want something or else I'd be somewhere else.

Starting point is 01:08:34 Right? And the default answer is no. Can I have a dollar? No. Hey, could I take you out for a drink sometime? No. Could I have this job? No, no, definitely not. So, and there's some wisdom to that. Like I say in the book, the universe lives closed. If the default answer to the universe was yes, if we just lived in this like genie bottle where if we just think it and we want it, our wishes desolate and awful place for the survivors, I would think. So the default answer to every request is no. Why? Because it costs nothing to want, but it costs something to give. And there's that inherent asymmetry. So in general, the way to overcome that asymmetry is if I want something, in exchange for what I want to get from you, I might give you something

Starting point is 01:09:27 of commensurate value that you want from me. That's the pro-social solution that has brought people into relationships and society of all kinds, is the basis of relationship is the transaction of unequal goods of comparable value. And when that doesn't happen, for whatever reason, no relationship exists, nor can exist. In any case, going back to the game of please no. The game of please no, as it was taught to me in this acting class, always has two players. There's always, let's say, a wanter and a giver. The wanter can only say the word please. The giver can only say the words no and yes. And the giver has to start from a no position. And the game continues for as long as it needs to until the wanter can change the no into a yes using only the word please.

Starting point is 01:10:20 Okay. So how would we do that? Well, what you learn, like I was saying earlier, is that a word is both a semantic message, but it's also a container for emotion. So you're really leveraging the emotion of... And the nonverbal communication. If you're stripped of the ability to use your words, you have to use facial expression. You have to use tone of voice.

Starting point is 01:10:42 You have to use gesture. You have to use body language. And what you decide, what you discover is that you can communicate all kinds of different intentions without using words at all. Okay. So if I pick up this book and I go, I gesture to pass it towards you for people that can't see us right now. And I go, please. Sure. Yes. Thank you. So you've just said yes. Exactly exactly one of the best ways to get what you want is polite request okay and there was nothing unusual about your request it seemed like it was a completely normal thing and here we are we have good rapport why wouldn't i take the book from you you know um so what i've discovered by watching hundreds and hundreds of those playthroughs is that different strategies tend to emerge in that game that are predictably associated with success.

Starting point is 01:11:33 And you see these strategies in cocktail lounges, in corporate boardrooms, in exotic bazaars where you're actually trading spices and whatnot. It's like it's the fundamental strategies of negotiation, right? These are things like intimidation, seduction, victimization, playfulness, friendliness, straightforwardness, quitting. There's all kinds of strategies that have developed that leaving aside the moral or ethical implications of those strategies work. And they work by stimulating a certain emotion inside of you, which is manipulation. And if I can use my tone, my words, my actions to stimulate the right emotion in you then you are going to move in the direction where i want you to go basically so in the example of me passing

Starting point is 01:12:35 you the book um i used a i picked up the book i presented it to you and then in a very soft tone and with an assuring nod, I said, please, which made it very clear to you. There was a couple of things really going on there. I guess the first is I've gone to some effort to extend my arm and now you're going to have to leave me hanging. Yeah. Or, you know, the longer my arms, the more pain I'm getting in my arm from it being in the air. So there's a little bit of a, you know, an obligation on your side to put me out of my, my pain. Cause this book is quite heavy, lots of pages. Of course. And if we were playing an actual game and I was the giver, I might want to fuck with you a little bit and be like, no. Then I would have to keep going until I found a way to get you to say yes. Yeah. And you try lots of different things. And the most successful players of this game learn to listen

Starting point is 01:13:26 with like a third ear. Because just like please can be said in lots of different ways, no can be said in lots of different ways. And if you're listening clearly, the way a person says no always contains a clue into how they might eventually say yes. It's sort of like playing hot and cold, which maybe you did as a kid. Somebody would hide someone in the room and you move over here and they go colder and then you move over here and I know you're getting warmer.

Starting point is 01:13:51 So there's cues in how people respond to you that lets you know if you're kind of more or less on track and moving in the right direction or you're not. And if you're not, you kind of have to change tack until you find that resonance that, okay, now I understand you. Now we're getting somewhere. That's why I say, like, if it works in sales, it generally works in dating. What are the biggest mistakes men make when they're rolling up on a woman? So you said, you know, they might surprise them in some way. They might be shut down their personal space by getting a bit too close. Yeah. And we think most of them are overcompensations for their nervousness. It's scary to approach a girl. And so there's generally two things that happen. One is the men

Starting point is 01:14:37 hesitate too long and then they get weird and stilted. Like they start to think about, well, what should I say? I need a good opener. Like, okay, Matt, now that line sucks. And oh, geez. Oh, she's talking to somebody now. It's not a good moment. They get too in their head, which generally means they don't approach. But if they do, they're generally so like out of the moment and in their minds that their vibe is just off and women reject the vibe because they don't come off open and confident. How do I get the vibe? You start to listen. You start to listen. You start to listen.

Starting point is 01:15:07 It's like sales, man. The same approach isn't gonna work with everyone who walks in your dealership. Some guys, they're gonna need the real soft touch and you need to keep a real big distance and not interfere with their own process because they're gonna sell themselves on the car. Other people need a lot of handholding, a lot of guidance.

Starting point is 01:15:23 And it's not obvious which customers are which when they first walk in the door. You have to make some tentative bids and learn to listen to their response and be flexibly adaptive until you find where they're kind of starting to open up. Guy walks into a car dealership, he says, hey, can I help you? And then he's like, I don't know, I'm just looking around. That was not the right thing. He didn't even make eye contact. He's just like, fucking leave me alone. But if you were to say something like, I personally like it in blue, like that's kind of a surprising thing. And you might turn around. It's like, that's not what I expected you to say. I expected you to kind of give me the hard sell. And that created an

Starting point is 01:16:01 opportunity for curiosity, which may have led to a moment of connection, which could potentially lead in the direction of an interaction, which can lead to a sale. Like it's very difficult to get a sale without the interaction. So you have to put out tentative bids and learn to listen to how people respond. Okay. So the car, the person selling the car would say, I personally like it in blue.

Starting point is 01:16:21 Potentially. Okay. Just as a way to, I don't know. That just came into my mind. I don't know if it came into my mind i don't know i like it it's quite but it does it evokes curiosity because then you would because then i might respond that i i only wear black so i need something in black but then at least you have a

Starting point is 01:16:32 bridge one of the best pickup lines that i used when i was getting over my approach anxiety in san francisco is i'd go up and say hi hey how you doing what brings you out here tonight and i'd say i'm actually trying to get over my approach anxiety. How am I doing? And that led to an, like, what do you mean approach anxiety? Well, I don't know if you know this, but it's going to be really difficult for guys to approach women. Really? I had no idea. Yeah, it's a problem. I help guys with that all the time. I figured I should probably get good at it myself. Well, what do you mean? What do you do? I kind of help people. It's like, it's interesting. And it's also vulnerable in a good way because it's revealing of my present moment experience. Vulnerability is such a tricky word

Starting point is 01:17:11 because it has a lot of negative associations with it. A formative vulnerability. Well, it's also, vulnerable means wound. It's like where I could be hurt. It's woundability. Like, why would I tell you where my Achilles heel is? I don't know if you're going to be able to use that information well. How do I know you're not going to weaponize that further down the road, right? But one more useful definition of vulnerability is that I am sharing

Starting point is 01:17:40 with you my present moment emotional experience, whatever that is. And that makes it easier for women to see you. When you start to share and disclose some of your present moment emotional experience, it's like using the right words for a man. It unlocks their understanding and they can kind of like see you more clearly because you're putting something out there that they can potentially resonate with. They might not, and that's okay. You can just find someone else to play with, right? But in the absence of that, it's very difficult for a guy to get anything to happen. And most guys, they tone down that emotion.

Starting point is 01:18:24 They can be very robotic. They can be very monotone. Hey, how you doing? So one way is guys screw this up because they get two in their head and that makes them stilted and weird. The other way is they try to overcome their nervousness by overcompensating. They get really drunk. They get super bold and handsy because they're trying to be kind of dominant. And I suppose that can work, but it generally rubs women the wrong way. One of the things I've never forgotten from when I was 18 years old and I was reading those books

Starting point is 01:18:53 about seduction and pickup artistry is it talks about how to deal with a 10. A 10 out of 10. What'd they say? Well, it basically says you kind of need to be a bit of an asshole. Not an asshole in the sense of being rude or whatever, but you kind of need to...

Starting point is 01:19:09 So say if you were a 10 and we're out dinner, I didn't know who you were, but there was a group of very attractive women here and you were the one that I wanted and you were the 10. I wouldn't talk to you, right? You wouldn't talk to me, but the strategy it says is to basically pay attention to everybody else. And then when the 10 tries to talk to you you go one second and then just keep talking to everybody

Starting point is 01:19:28 else and it's that small communication that i am high value that um kind of would evoke their interest and curiosity why does this man not maybe ponder like pander to me, like all other men have always done? What is it about him that he's got such confidence that he will give me a slight nag, you know? Nines and tens are not a different species than the fives and sixes. And what are the women who tend to really be interested in most guys, the ones who are pursuing, the ones who stick around, who want those long-term relationships? For better or for worse, they're often the ones that the men kind of have this take it or leave it attitude towards. And they're not going out of their way, which can seem like they're very confident, they're very composed, they're self-possessed.

Starting point is 01:20:21 There might be something special or attractive about this guy because he's not pursuing me. I'm pursuing him, which can reduce cognitive dissonance in the direction of increasing attraction. Because think about it, I don't usually go out of my way for people, and yet I'm going out of my way for this man. Why am I doing that? It must be because I really like this guy, right? Sometimes our emotions only arise out of our behavior. People sometimes think we have an emotion and we act. Sometimes we act and then we have an emotion, right? So getting people, it's like, it's not possible to get others to like you more

Starting point is 01:20:58 by liking them more. That's one of the biggest errors in dating. And one of the best little strategies to increase interest is to ask other people to do things for you because it takes advantage of this little cognitive hack that I just described. You don't, Stephen, you don't go out of your way doing favors for people.

Starting point is 01:21:19 If I asked you a small but reasonable favor and you executed it, then consciously or not, you're going to think, wow, I don't usually do favors. I did a favor for Orion. He might be a pretty decent dude. Like maybe there's something to this guy because- Give me an example. So if I say, could you grab that for me one second? And I point at something. That's one of the easiest ways to do it. Sometimes it's just, I've seen it in pickup where you can just say, you're talking to somebody and be like, oh, you know, it's a little loud. Can we just, let's just step like two steps to the side. Just that two steps and complying with that reasonable request, it elevates unconscious

Starting point is 01:21:54 attraction. It also is an opportunity to create what you might call a yes chain, which is related to foot in the door, which is you're more likely to comply with a larger request if I first get you to consent to a number of smaller reasonable requests first. It's not the only way, but it's one way to potentially undermine resistance. And what if I'm a woman? Because a lot of women are struggling with the way that the world has changed and this sort of move towards dating apps and online dating. And they don't have the, it's not socially acceptable typically for a woman, or it's not socially typical for a woman to roll up to a guy in a supermarket

Starting point is 01:22:33 or wherever else and start to proposition him. It's typically thought that- And they're generally bad at it, I just have to say. Like I've had some women approach me and they're not good. Maybe most guys aren't good at picking women up either, but some guys do get good at it. They make it like their job to learn how to seduce or pick up women, at least for a few months. But most women, when they've approached me, they have very poor game. What should a woman be thinking about when she approaches a man? It's probably best for women to not roll up on men the way that men often roll up on women.

Starting point is 01:23:11 I did a series about this, which is reminding women that for the vast majority of our history, women have been the initiators. They've just initiated indirectly with plausible deniability. So the most stereotypical example, maybe you'll appreciate this given your culture, is the dropping of the handkerchief of the Victorian lady as she's walking in the park. And she sees in the corner of her eye an attractive man that she might want to initiate a conversation with. And as she's passing by his bench, without noticing, the handkerchief falls out of her pocket, which creates an opportunity for the man to notice it, pick it up and say, excuse me, miss, but I believe you dropped this. Oh my, how absolutely clumsy of me, my goodness. And

Starting point is 01:23:58 suddenly, boom, she's in a conversation with a man that she chose to have a conversation with. And if for whatever reason, the guy turns out to be a total dolt, she could just say, oh, thank you for this, but I'm late for tea. And she can just kind of scamper off because she has the plausible deniability that she didn't do this on purpose. So women do it with their eyes and stuff. That's what I say. It's like the come hither stare. And I did it really badly in that episode, but I was trying to demonstrate what that might look like. Eye contact is extremely intimate.

Starting point is 01:24:29 One of the things I say in that episode that I don't think many women know is that if you and I didn't know each other and we were out at a bar and I just like looked right into your eyes for three seconds. I think you wanted to fight. Exactly. Even there's this nervous laughter, which can potentially cover, okay, this is getting a little tense and maybe I'm trying to deescalate it by smiling and showing that I'm not a threat.

Starting point is 01:24:54 But absolutely, sustained eye contact between two strange men is an aggressive tactic. For more than a couple seconds, it's gonna be like, can I help you? Is there a problem here? He just looked at you. And why? Because it's too intimate. I don't know who you are, dude. Why do you think that you can get that close to me? You could be on the other side of the bar, but eye contact feels like you're inside me. It's amazing. So women can use eye contact to their benefit where they can basically call the men that they want to interact with to them but they have to be willing to do that if they're not

Starting point is 01:25:34 willing to drop the handkerchief or look them in the eye i mean that's sort of like the minimum necessary behavior where does love fit into all of this and what is love then because if we're talking about you know this being a transaction relationships really being about transaction of behavior. Where does love fit into all of this? And what is love then? Because if we're talking about, you know, this being a transaction, relationships really being about transaction of value, where does love fit? And is love just when the transaction of value is equal? Well, I think that's a very satisfying relationship when the transaction is equal. Like I talk about this on the channel. In good relationships, the transaction is invisible. It's just like your needs and wants

Starting point is 01:26:06 are kind of invisibly and effortlessly being met, while at the same time, my needs and wants are invisibly and effortlessly being met. And so we have the basis for continued satisfaction, which might be as good as it gets when it comes to relationships in many respects. Love is something that is a totally different beast. and it is very beautiful and it is very noble and transformative, but there's also a lot of misunderstandings about love. So, for example, I call things that cannot be bought or earned non-transactable goods, or NTGs. And of those NTGs, the three, I think, most important ones for relationships are loyalty, friendship, and love. You cannot do anything to buy or earn those things. Those are always gifts that are given at the spontaneous pleasure of the giver, and they always come with no strings attached if they are true gifts. Otherwise, they're just giving in the hopes of receiving, which is a bid for transaction. And a lot of things that go under the guise of loyalty, friendship, and love are really bids for transaction. So you have to be careful about that. But if there's nothing that you can do to buy or earn love, let's start with friendliness because that's maybe an easier one. It's like, you can't make anyone be your friend.

Starting point is 01:27:28 Like you could be the most amicable, cheerful, easygoing guy who's always down for whatever. And there's still gonna be a lot of people who don't wanna be your friend. In fact, many of those people will choose to be friends with people who are disagreeable or kind of dumb

Starting point is 01:27:46 or difficult or stubborn. It's like people, why do people choose as their friends, the people that they're friends with? It's just like, it wasn't like I interviewed a bunch of different candidates and I decided that you were the most friendly guy. And so I decided to make you my friend. Here's a friend offer.

Starting point is 01:28:01 You know, that would be, that would seem so strange to us, right? So the fact of the matter is for whatever reason, and it's kind of mysterious and unfathomable, I've decided to make you my friend. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be my, like, you're going to make me your friend, right? It doesn't necessarily go both ways, right? But you can't buy or earn friendship. You can't buy or earn loyalty. You can't buy or earn friendship you can't buy or earn loyalty you can't buy or earn love they're given at the spontaneous pleasure of the giver with no strings attached otherwise we would functionally be ascribing a value to them and we would say that these things are

Starting point is 01:28:34 transactable so you can't have it both ways another way to think about it is people aren't always in relationships with people they love. And they certainly can love people they're not in relationships with. Like I know people who are in very intact, stable marriages where there's not a lot of love. And maybe in those marriages, they both secretly love some ex in the past that they couldn't get for whatever reason. So like, it's certainly not enough to explain relationships on the basis of love because people rarely end up with the people who love them the most. So if you can be in relationships without love, for better or for worse, and you can love people that you're not in relationships with, then at the very least, we have to conclude that those

Starting point is 01:29:22 two constructs are independent of each other. Like when you love someone you're in a relationship with, it's kind of a happy accident. It's a coincidence. Maybe that's for the best, but like there's nothing you can do to get the other person to love you. It's their decision to do it or not. And if there's something you could do, then we make love a transactable thing. So it's like pick your poison. And I don't think it is. I don't think it's a transactable thing. So it's like pick your poison. And I don't think it is. I don't think it's a transactable thing. What role has pornography played in all this? You know, you must speak to a lot of men in your practice that are suffering with pornography addictions. Is it making us harder to find relationships? Is it changing our ability to keep and hold

Starting point is 01:30:01 relationships? Is it changing how we show up during sex? It can. Like I've done some consultations with guys who have used pornography very intensely and extensively. Do they tell you? Not always. Generally, when that's the issue, that's the issue they come to me for. It's very rare where it kind of comes out

Starting point is 01:30:22 in the course of things and then lots of things suddenly make sense, right? Usually they come out upfront and say, this is the reason. And it's a very, there's a lot of shame associated with this, with addiction in general, but with this addiction in particular. Like I do video conference calls with folks from all over the world,

Starting point is 01:30:43 but people don't have to turn their camera on if they don't want to. And by far the most common topic that men will turn their camera off for is discussing pornography addiction. Like they don't want to be looked at. They don't want to be seen, which can make it easier to actually be honest. It's like the confessional. There's this dark place. I don't have to look you in the eye and share this shameful thing, which might make it more conducive to share it, get it out, and discuss it and do something about it. So I can understand that. But it has completely changed the game of mating and dating, especially if you operate under the assumption that, in general, men attempt to exchange resources for sexual opportunity and women attempt to exchange sexual opportunity for resources. In the context of that,

Starting point is 01:31:30 if both parties could get what they want more easily, more safely, and more cheaply in other ways, then it would make rational economic sense for them to do so. Like OnlyFans. OnlyFans is a fantastic way for women to transact their sexual opportunity for resources in a safe, convenient, and easy way. Like we'll talk about men. This is really interesting because potentially women have always kind of wanted to be with the rich guy, but potentially for the first time in human history, it might be easier for the average woman to get $1 from a million men than to get a million dollars from one. Like the desire for a million dollars hasn't gone anywhere, but how you might go about getting it changes given the incentives and the opportunities in play. And you can moralize about women doing this, or you can moralize about men using pornography. It's not going to change anything.

Starting point is 01:32:32 Like if shame worked, it would have worked by now, I would think. So I think that rather than trying to lean into that social intervention, maybe we can understand why it is that women might get trapped in this way and men might get trapped in this way, because it does seem to be pretty gendered, right? There's not a lot of OnlyFans creators who are men. And if it's not OnlyFans, which is pretty hardcore for a lot of women, it's like Instagram. It's social media that they get trapped because they get attention, they get emotional validation, they get the dopamine hit from being liked, from being seen. That goes my plan B. So we use the word trapped. Are you using that intentionally? Yeah. Because these aren't the same. It's like,

Starting point is 01:33:15 I'm not, you could certainly make the argument that pornography is not the same as an actual sexual relationship. I'm not arguing that it is, but apparently it's similar enough that a lot of men can't tell the difference, or at least they can tell the difference, but it's negligible given the expenses and the costs involved. They'll accept the substitute, kind of like eating like our fake meat. I talk about that. Why do we have an obesity epidemic? It's because apparently there's all this processed food stuff that seems to be somewhat indistinguishable from whole foods that actually nourish you, especially because the processed foodstuffs are generally full of salts and sugars and things that you are programmed to want to put into your body through millennia of

Starting point is 01:34:02 nutrient-poor evolutionary conditions. Like these things resonate with male attention. Pornography resonates with male attention. I think I read an article recently where Starlink was brought to some remote tribe in the Amazon. And a month later, the guys were addicted to porn. Like they spent all day watching pornography. And so that's kind of one of the things I talk about in the book is that a lot of the things that we're going through are not really moral lapses. And making it a moral issue and about shame is, one, it's just not going to work. Like generally when people are ashamed, they just hide better, which doesn't make the problem go away. It kind of makes it more intractable. If you actually want to change behavior, you have to understand why people are doing it. You have

Starting point is 01:34:53 to kind of do a functional analysis, figure out what problem this acts as a solution for, and then to offer reasonable alternative solutions to that problem and what are the reasonable alternative solutions to that problem i guess the the most important question which i've missed here is is it a problem pornography yeah is there like if if the world became a only fans marketplace as it relates to relationships and sex where men are getting their you know their sexual whatever they want their sexual attention from only fans and women are selling that is that a problem if men are you know jerking off all day at home behind their computer screens and women are

Starting point is 01:35:37 on the other side of the computer screen selling images of their feet to men. Is that a problem? Depends on how you look at it, right? So I'm of the mind that the game will go on. The game will go on long after you and I are gone. I don't think that this, whatever we're passing through, spells the end of civilization as we know it, the end of sexual relationships. Things will continue to change and evolve

Starting point is 01:36:04 and both sides will adapt. And the goal of the game is to play for as long as possible. Okay. But better question then, is it a problem on the individual level? I think it can be. So the man that comes to you with this as a problem, what are the symptoms of that problem going to be in his life? He's never had a relationship, but he wants one. Yeah. He still lives in his parents' house. This is really important because you have to understand that sex is not just about sex. There's something called sublimation.

Starting point is 01:36:34 Have you heard this term before? I have, but I don't know it. I think it comes also from psychoanalysis. And it's the idea that certain impulses inside of us are real, they're powerful, and yet they're socially unacceptable. The libido, the desire for sex, is never going to go away because it's connected to the life force itself. Through sex, new life gets created. If the libido were actually domesticated, it would be very bad for humanity. That's why sex is always kind of like this wild west, this untameable wilderness that exists even in the heart of the most repressive societies on the planet.

Starting point is 01:37:13 Like it cannot be tamed and we shouldn't try to tame it too much, right? So that said, we can't give free reign to our sexual impulses all the time. Life would be chaos, right? So what folks generally learn to do is to channel or sublimate that sexual energy into other pro-social activities or behaviors. Socially acceptable behaviors. Exactly. Starting a company or building roads or writing a book. So you're saying that's why I'm an entrepreneur because I was sublimating my sexual urges. Potentially. Probably. And what I'm getting at is that if you, if you give men the opportunity to exist in a perpetually sexually satisfied state,

Starting point is 01:37:56 which is what freely distributed and accessible pornography does, then you take away that power source that serves for pro-social action. It's not just that these men aren't going to be having sex with real women. They're not going to have the energy and the drive to take risks like applying for that job or doing something where they might fail. Like the consequences to a diminished libido redound throughout civilization. Civilization is built on the repression of the libido. So you want horny men that can't get- Horny men are really useful

Starting point is 01:38:39 because horny men will do all kinds of incredible things to satisfy that urge. It's actually pro-socially useful to keep men in a horny state. But think about it. It's like, if I'm not hungry, why would I assume the risks and costs of hunting? And so if I'm doped up on weed and I'm using porn and I'm just in this like totally relaxed anesthetized state, then why would I even move, let alone do anything worth doing with my life? And men in that trap are aware of this and they're ambivalent, just like most

Starting point is 01:39:22 addictions. They know that the alcohol is killing them, but they also can't stop drinking. Like there's something really deep and dark about that addiction. Same thing with porn. They're ambivalent. They want to stop, but they often don't. And they need help. They certainly don't need shame and judgment. I was thinking, playing through the guy that calls you and then, you know, he hears you say this. I don't know if this is what you'd say or not, but if he arrives at that conclusion that everything you've said is correct, that watching pornography is basically taking away his life force energy, which is making him unproductive and unmotivated and he's not going to the gym because he can just jerk off watching OnlyFans or whatever. How do you get him to change his

Starting point is 01:40:05 behavior? It's tricky. There's lots of things that you can do. I learned a lot of those things when I was working in addiction for a couple of years. However, all of those things are prelude to not doing the thing anymore. Yeah. One thing I learned from working with addicts is that insight is not enough to change people. I worked with some folks who were very heavily therapized. They had been through all kinds of treatment, individual therapy, rehab. They knew about their family of origin. They understand about their own intra-psychic processes that lead them towards relapse. They're actually very self-aware from a psychotherapeutic perspective,

Starting point is 01:40:45 and they still use. And I also worked with folks who were not so self-aware, but were like, yeah, I decided that alcohol kind of made me not feel so good. So I decided I just shouldn't drink anymore. And those people got better. And the really self-aware, insightful guys often got lost in their own machinations, and they kept relapsing. So insight is sometimes useful, but it's certainly insufficient to actually changing behavior. To actually change behavior, you have to do the thing. The only way to stop drinking is not to put the booze in your mouth anymore. The only way to stop using pornography is to stop using pornography.

Starting point is 01:41:22 There's no other way about that. Now, when you stop a behavior, lots of things are going to come up. And so one thing that you can do is plan ahead for those contingencies. I used the term before. One of the most useful things with addictions of all kinds is to talk about functional analysis. What is this process, this behavior, this substance, what is it actually doing? What problem is it solving? Like I was addicted to cigarettes when I was younger, and nicotine is a really hard one to quit. And I probably quit eight or nine times before I finally kicked it for good, I hope.

Starting point is 01:41:59 Right. And one thing that helped me was to understand, well, when did I usually reach for the pack? And some of the biggest triggers for me was when I was bored and I just needed a little bit of, I don't know, something to do, some sort of stimulation. Maybe it gave me the opportunity to go outside and take a break from what I was doing, change the scenery, okay? Or I needed some sort of reward. I did something good. I deserve a cigarette here. Now, people need ways to alleviate their boredom, and they need ways to reward their good behavior. They just need to find ways to do that that doesn't sabotage their growth and create more problems in the long term than they solve, which is what cigarettes, I think, do for people, including

Starting point is 01:42:43 myself. And once I understood that I was basically reaching towards the pack when I was bored or I needed a reward, I found other ways that authentically alleviated boredom or were rewarding that didn't create more problems than they solved. Now, that wasn't easy, but that helped because in the absence of those things, I would feel bored and I'd just have to sit with it. Or I'd feel reward, I'd feel proud and I wouldn't be able to reward myself in any kind of a way, which generally led to relapse. So you have to understand why men

Starting point is 01:43:17 might be using pornography. And often it's loneliness, it's boredom. So are you saying the antidote would be the antithesis, i.e. it would be connection and something to do? Absolutely, yeah. Go get a job, go get some friends. And you gotta stop. You gotta stop at first.

Starting point is 01:43:38 And sometimes it's just about getting through the next 24 hours. Don't think about you're never gonna watch another movie again. Just make the decision not to use today. No matter how bad it gets, you're never going to watch another movie again. Just make the decision not to use today. No matter how bad it gets, you're just not going to use today. And if you still want to use tomorrow, you can use tomorrow. Do you think pornography is a net negative for society? Probably, yeah. I mean, pornography has always existed. There's like drawings on cave

Starting point is 01:44:01 walls of women with big boobs, right? So we've seen that in cultural artifacts from all kinds of civilizations throughout time and place. What makes pornography really dangerous today is just the scale on which it's being able, it's distributed, it's free, and it's readily available at any moment, as long as you have a internet connection. It's crazy. I was saying to a internet connection it's crazy i was i was saying to a friend the other day i was like you just go on twitter and i saw cara swisher who is the journalist podcaster in america i saw her do a tweet the other day she's saying i'm leaving twitter i've been here since 2007 i believe she said she goes i'm leaving it because it's become

Starting point is 01:44:38 like a porn hellscape horn really on twitter oh my god yeah you can scroll down your twitter feed you will even regardless of who you follow because they i think what's happened since um the buyout is they've tried to make it more addictive which means you're getting more viral content into your feed and more content that has a high dwell time i.e the amount of time you spend looking at it so that stuff's coming into your feed more regardless of whether you follow those accounts or not and there'll be a lot more graphic imagery um like that in your feeds these days and i was explaining this to my friend so i said what look at my twitter feed i scroll down i scroll down i scroll down and scroll down and you go down 10 posts and it's a famous story that actually just broke in

Starting point is 01:45:17 the uk it's a female prison guard having sex with an inmate and it happened in one of our prison uk prisons and that's in the middle of my feed it's a four minute video of this sexual act you know this and you go like if i was susceptible to and all men are susceptible to i am susceptible to addiction but if i was if i was someone that had just got away from my porn addiction seeing that that, you know. Well, it's the same thing with alcohol. It's like, it's everywhere. At least it's everywhere in America. And a lot of alcoholics on some level correctly despair. It's like, I have to choose between my social life and my addiction. Yeah, so true. And it can be very difficult to start to live a sober lifestyle. It's almost socially unacceptable not to drink, isn't it? In some contexts.

Starting point is 01:46:02 I think it just makes other people uncomfortable because it calls their own use of that substance into question i think people who are really intentional and cognizant of their use it doesn't make them uncomfortable when somebody doesn't drink what would you say then so if if you were to give very top line advice to both a man in that that's 35 years old and struggling to get into a relationship and a woman that's 35 and struggling to get into a relationship if you could only speak to them for just 30 seconds to give them advice what would you say to each wow and you've got to be honest here and unpolitically correct because i know because i think the thing you'd probably say if the cameras weren't pointing at you is probably the most important thing no i just need more

Starting point is 01:46:42 information it's like why is that 35-year-old struggling? Is he because he's just socially awkward and he has the rest of his life kind of on track? Like he's a decent dude, he's got a decent paying job and- Him. Him. I think the advice I would give to him is to sort of date like it's your job.

Starting point is 01:47:15 Now, lots of people think that they just want a loving, secure, and peaceful relationship. And they just want those three things. But that's actually an enormous ask. That's like wanting a job that's high-, low stress, and you're passionate about. It's very difficult to get all three of just those things, right? Most people that you know do not have all three of those things at their work. Most relationships are not those three things. If you want one of those jobs, they're out there, but they're kind of the needle in the haystack. It is a numbers game, especially as a man. As a male in general, you disseminate lots of pollen, lots of seed, because most of them are going to lead nowhere.

Starting point is 01:47:52 They're going to be evolutionary or relationship dead ends. And so if you really want a job and you're serious about it, you need to make getting a job your job. And you need to send out, you can't just say, I tried once or twice and it didn't work out, man. It's like, you might have to send out 200 resumes. You might have to take some coaching classes to learn how to interview better. You might have to do some research into the company and the kinds of questions they ask and to learn about their culture so you can demonstrate goodness of fit, like make getting a job your job and then reproduce at scale. Don't you just think it's

Starting point is 01:48:31 going to take care of itself? Or that you're a victim of circumstance? I don't think most guys think it's going to take care of itself. I think most, the trap, that trap is something that women can fall in. It's like, they want the meet cute and it's going to happen when it's going to happen. And you know, if it's meant to be, then it's meant to be. And if he didn't, if he didn't try enough and he left, then I guess that wasn't the one anyway. Like, well, what were you doing? Were you providing value? Were you doing anything to keep him in that relationship? It's that's, that's something that a lot of women fall prey to, in my opinion. Most guys, especially by the time they're 35,

Starting point is 01:49:06 like fuck all lands in your lap as a 35-year-old man. Haven't you learned that by now? Like if you want anything in life, you kind of have to go out and get it, make it happen. So assuming that women are gonna be any different would be absurd. And you have to get over that rejection. You have to get over the pain.

Starting point is 01:49:20 Treat it like a scientist. Do the AB testing and put yourself out there at a mass scale, which is an uncomfortable and expensive proposition. But hopefully in three or four months, you can accomplish what you would otherwise spread out over three or four years. And you can move on with the business of whatever you want that relationship to actually do. You want to diminish the actual time you spend in the sexual marketplace. Because the longer you spend as a guy, the more rejection you're going to feel and the more inertia will set in. It feels like we're going through a interesting transitional moment in the world of dating and

Starting point is 01:49:59 relationships. You talk about that a lot, the sort of the transition period we're going through with things like obviously birth control, but more recently things like artificial intelligence, which are really going to put a spanner in the proverbial works of dating and relationships. Well, yeah, it's the same trap as porn for men. Like with the advent of virtual reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence, like if it's hard for men to tell the difference on some level between an actual sexual encounter and pornography now, now, can you imagine where it's going to be in like five years? Gosh.

Starting point is 01:50:33 And it's going to be a significant trap. Imagine 20 years. I mean, we'll be in a Blade Runner situation where you have holographic girlfriends who tell you exactly what you want to hear and you can change their appearance at will. I mean, I don't know. But like, that's not too far-fetched. Doesn't sound like the worst thing. I mean, because people are unsatisfying. Like, people are disappointing. People are real. And that can be tough. Like all relationships require some degree of settling to some,

Starting point is 01:51:08 to some extent. And that's not very sexy. That's not very satisfying. And I think that when we're, when we're awash in optionality, or at least apparent optionality, it becomes harder and harder to settle for something that is less than perfect. That's something I talk about a lot also. It's like the meat market, the dating scene has changed so much. Like it used to be that you as a guy could do fairly well if you were the biggest fish in a relatively small pond, right? There are no ponds anymore, dude. We're all swimming in one gigantic ocean. The fact of the matter is, is that guy is competing for the girl next door with every other man on the planet.

Starting point is 01:52:02 And every woman is competing for the most eligible bachelor in their little community against every other woman on the planet. And every woman is competing for the most eligible bachelor in their little community against every other woman on the planet. It's so easy for people to connect with each other through social media. And that's why on some level, the best dating app in the world is not a dating app. It's Instagram. Are you hopeful? Sure. The game will go on. People will find a way to make it work. There's always opportunity. Maybe you know this, but there were more new millionaires created in 1929 in the stock market crash than in any other moment in American history. Like there is a way to thrive and succeed in almost any game and under almost any circumstances, but you have to be flexible and you have to be

Starting point is 01:52:45 able to spot the opportunity, which often means that you have to buy when other people are selling, which is very difficult to do. In general, just in terms of like modern survival, the individual should be very cautious about moving in the direction of the majority. Like most people's lives are not awesome. So why moving in the direction of the majority. Like most people's lives are not awesome. So why move in the direction that most people are moving? If anything, that could be a reliable indicator that there might be something of interest in a different direction. As an entrepreneur, I'm always looking for ways to connect and to create.

Starting point is 01:53:20 And that's why I decided to launch the Conversation Cards. I turned to Shopify, who also sponsored this podcast, and Shopify made it so easy to set up an online store and reach all of you no matter where you are in the world. I remember the challenges we faced when we first launched the Dire Over SEO conversation cards, managing inventory, ensuring a seamless checkout process, and reaching our audience. Shopify stepped in and made everything so straightforward and efficient. It was like having an entire team of experts by our side, allowing us to focus on creating content and connecting with you. What I love about Shopify is no matter how big you intend to grow your business, they give you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next

Starting point is 01:53:59 level. And to say thank you for listening to this podcast, we're giving you a trial which is just $1 a month and you can sign up by going to shopify.com slash Bartlett. The link is in the description below. You know, I'm thinking a lot about the video I saw on your YouTube channel called How to Be a Man. Yeah, that's one of the more popular ones. It's interesting because a lot of women come up to me that are raising young men. And they'll ask me about this particular subject. They'll say, because there's so many different performative influencers

Starting point is 01:54:29 out there that are doing this sort of performative masculinity, what should I say to my son makes a good man in 2024? Because a lot of the things that sort of some narratives are suggesting make a good man are quite feminine traits typically. But those aren't necessarily always conducive with being attractive. So if I was to throw this to you and say, how do I be a man? What would your answer be? I think there's lots of ways that you can be a man, right?

Starting point is 01:55:02 And I don't think we should be bogged down in those performative aspects of masculinity. Okay. But the way I talk about it in the video is the way to be a man fundamentally is to have a spine and a pair of balls. And both things are important. And if you have those two things, then in my opinion, you're a man,

Starting point is 01:55:20 no matter what you look like or how you act. And I think that kind of cuts to the heart of what has even historically been the core of masculinity. One of them is having a spine, which is the willingness to stand up. Like a spine is what actually allows you to stand erect. And a man generally needs to have something that he stands for because life is very, very difficult. In particular, the moment you stand up, you cast a shadow, which is a symbolic way of saying, as soon as you stand for something, you will attract resistance to that something, no matter what it is you stand for. There is no,

Starting point is 01:55:54 there's nothing that is so unambiguously right and good that it does not cast a shadow, except pure light. Let's put it that way. Only light does not cast a shadow, right? And we are not pure beings of light, right? So we need to be able to stand up and to rise above the field of undifferentiated humanity because there's things that need to be done. There's loads that need to be lifted. There are fires that need to be put out. And the spine is what is also the conduit of the nerves that allow locomotion, that allows movement through reality, movement through the world. And that's generally what's necessary. There are so many problems. Like sometimes guys come to me and like, well, what should I do with my life? Just like fucking

Starting point is 01:56:39 look around, man. Start with what is very obviously a problem in your life. Fix that. And once you fix that, then you can begin to broaden your scope with respect to the problems you tend to identify. Don't try to solve humanity's problems right now when your life is not in the state where it needs to be. Like focus on yourself first, put your own mask on before you assist others on the airplane. And then once you get things in order and things are generally working, you can begin to broaden your scope. And that's really important because one person who does that can benefit, well, now they can benefit millions of people through the internet and social media.

Starting point is 01:57:20 It's incredible. It's an opportunity that has never existed on the face of this planet. And they can do it from the privacy of their own living rooms. It's incredible. It's an opportunity that has never existed on the face of this planet. And they can do it from the privacy of their own living rooms. It's amazing. So that's important. But you also need a pair, which is to be able to have the willingness to deal with the consequences of standing up and casting a shadow. If you stand up and the moment you meet with any kind of resistance or pushback or antagonism or criticism, which you absolutely will receive, you shouldn't have stood up to begin with. Like, that's just going to hurt. It's going to teach you the lesson that it's better not to

Starting point is 01:57:58 stand up. It's better just to kind of blend in. It's better to push all that stuff down because look at what happens when you try. Well, yeah, well, you need to have some pushback to be able to deal with whatever comes your way as a consequence of standing up. Anybody who stands up will cast a shadow. And part of that shadow is the projected envy of others who, for whatever reason, as yet lack the courage to stand up themselves. It's so much easier to attack those for standing up than it is to stand up and run the risk of those attacks yourself. Right? And especially with the internet, it's so much easier to do that these days. You can hide your face, your name, and just take potshots at anyone and anyone, everyone and anyone anonymously. It's part of the reason men end up having these sort of midlife crises that we've talked about,

Starting point is 01:58:51 because they stop standing up and they stop having a pair of balls. Because I've heard you talk about selfishness and that men aren't selfish enough. I think selfishness is a good thing to be, especially in relationships. At my stage of life, I think selfishness is a good thing to be, especially in relationships. At my stage of life, I think that 90% of successful relationships is selection. I'm not a big fan of compromise. To my mind, compromise is two people not getting what they want. I think it's better to be pretty selfish and explicit about your selfishness and to find someone who doesn't mind it, who can work with that or even enjoys it

Starting point is 01:59:27 and thrives in those conditions. But there's always going to be compromise now. Something you'd rather not change. I'd be cautious around compromise because generally it does create this sense of obligation and debt. Like I'm going to give up something that I want to make you happy.

Starting point is 01:59:44 And so I'm going to expect you to that I want to make you happy. And so I'm going to expect you to sacrifice your happiness at some future date because of something I want to do. But if you're not unwilling to compromise in terms of what you're looking for, you're probably going to be looking forever, no? Well, there's other things that you can do. You can clarify your selection criteria. Okay. And generally, the fewer criteria you have the more successful you will be like only go into the sexual marketplace wanting just a few things okay so no like

Starting point is 02:00:13 vel i'm not dating him he's got a velcro wallet oh like the yeah i mean it's like some women will disqualify really decent male partners for a trifle. And they often do that when they're young in a wash in optionality, because why not? What's your selection criteria? Okay. So I used to have much higher selection criteria. Same. And one of the mindsets that, it's going to sound weird, but one of the mindsets that I've worked against and has led to a lot more satisfying relationships

Starting point is 02:00:50 is that I have tried not to go to the sexual marketplace looking for my equal or someone who can meet me at my level. In the past, I would go there and I'd be like, I want to talk about quantum mechanics and Shakespearean literature and go wilderness backpacking. And I also do these mindfulness retreats and I'm interested in enlightenment and spiritual discipline. And I want a woman who's interested in all of those things. And I also want to be attracted to her too. So it's like, and is expensive. Every time you say and, probabilistically, you're less likely to get what you want, which redounds to actual expenses in terms of time,

Starting point is 02:01:25 money, opportunity in the sexual marketplace. So you should be very cautious about what you say and to. And I remember I was having some trouble meeting women that met all of my extrapolated criteria. And I still had, I'm sure, plenty of unconscious criteria that I was exacting on them as well. And I brought this to a mentor and he listened patiently to me. And he basically, when I was done said, oh, Ryan, why the fuck would you want to talk to a woman about quantum mechanics? Like you do not need a woman to do that.

Starting point is 02:01:54 Like if you really want to do that, if that's something that's really important to you, I guess that's your right. But you just need someone who's interested in quantum mechanics to do that with. That could be a man. It doesn't have to be a woman. And it was like, ooh, that's right.

Starting point is 02:02:07 And so what I did is I looked at all the things that I was going to the sexual marketplace to find. And I thought, could I get this need met in any other kind of relationship with any other person on the planet besides a woman in a sexual relationship? And the vast majority of those things I could say yes to. And so I made a commitment to get those needs met elsewhere. Because as a man, it's generally

Starting point is 02:02:33 easier and cheaper to get those needs met elsewhere than in sexual relationships with women. And that was also great because it also forced me to cultivate and maintain my non-sexual relationships, both with men and women, right? Which put less pressure on my female partner to be everything and anything to me. So, you know, what was left was all of the things that either wouldn't or couldn't get met in any other kind of relationship, which first and foremost was sex. It's just how it is. It's a straight guy. That's what I would go for in a sexual relationship. The second criteria is that she needed to be sufficiently attractive to me in the sense that I knew that

Starting point is 02:03:15 if I were to walk into most rooms and want secretly to be with that guy's girl, that it wasn't going to work with the woman that I was with. That's not very virtuous to admit, but it's probably better for me to acknowledge that and work with that than to pretend that that doesn't exist, because it's probably not going to go away. So there needed to be lots of sex. She needed to be sufficiently attractive to me. And I like that, let's say, soft femininity that comes out of women in the context of a close intimate relationship that you can't get from a platonic or professional female friend or colleague. So those are the three things that I went looking for. With the fourth criteria that she couldn't be so disagreeable that it was going to create more problems than are solved by these three criteria being met. And this was great because I knew what I was going to a relationship

Starting point is 02:04:21 for. I wasn't bringing a lot of need or expectation. It was harder for me to be disappointed by women. And it also allowed me to entertain the possibility of a satisfying relationship with lots of different kinds of women. Like outside of those criteria, she could be anyone from any kind of walk of life. And that's great because you kind of want to have your applicant pool as wide as possible in the initial phases of a selection process. Yeah, I can relate in many ways. I think at my earlier years, I thought I wanted to date another entrepreneur, but I think that would have absolutely been absolutely hell. When I say an entrepreneur, someone that was like just obsessed with their career, but then where does that leave space for a relationship? And also I thought I wanted to date someone

Starting point is 02:05:06 that believed the things I believed. I'm quite logical. I need evidence to believe the things I believed. Turns out I found the opposite and it's the best thing ever because she basically is everything I'm not. And I find that really curious. So she's very spiritual.

Starting point is 02:05:21 She takes life at a certain pace. She's very in tune with herself. She's got a shrine at home, which she's got like her crystals and stuff on it. And I don't believe any of those things. But the good part is that she doesn't care if I believe it. And that's what makes it work. Because I can just listen. I can look over. And there's no pressure to do some chakra meditation or whatever. And that's where it works. It's great. It sounds like you've really learned a lot of lessons, you know? And one of the things that's really important is if you want to love, you have to accept your partner. Like wanting them to be better, whatever that means, is kind of a subtle form of disrespect because it's basically

Starting point is 02:05:59 communicating that you're not good enough as you are. Yeah. So like, and people have their preferences. Some things are so much easier to accept than others. And that will differ from person to person. So if for whatever reason, you're dealing with somebody who you honestly don't feel like you can accept, like if this never changed, it would degrade your capacity

Starting point is 02:06:19 to participate enthusiastically in this relationship. Just find somebody else to have a relationship with. Don't fuck them up by trying to change them. No, because part of the fun of loving is that they're different and that you do kind of eventually want to create this safe context for the people to be themselves because you can only love to the depth of your knowledge. You can only love to the depth of your understanding, which is why to bring it back around, it's important to slowly disappoint your partner from the marketing and the attractiveness that initially bring people out on the date. So you're not just performing all the time.

Starting point is 02:06:53 You do need to do that slowly and to actually show the other person who you are so you can be seen, which increases the likelihood that you can be loved. You cannot love something that you do not understand. That's just superstition. All right. What is the most important thing from your book, The Value of Others, understanding the economic model of relationships to get and keep more of what you want in the sexual marketplace? What is the most important thing in this book that we haven't talked about? I think the most important thing is that people is really understanding that people want things from other people. And that if you want to be rich in relationships, then you need to cultivate the things that people want so that you can give them to those things. Like the epilogue of that book is a parable from the life

Starting point is 02:07:40 of Jesus about the coin of Caesar. And I think about this in terms of relationship. It's like, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Like, people need and want things from each other. Give them what they need and want, and you will have a satisfying relationship. People don't want to admit that. It's so... Okay, can I talk about this for a second? This is so important. I'll answer that indirectly first, using an analogy analogy and then directly. Indirectly, let's talk about professional relationships. Like what makes a professional relationship a professional relationship? The transaction and the, here's what I want. Here's what I'll give you. Yeah. A professional relationship. Yeah. Like what's the one thing that you get from a professional relationship that you don't get anywhere else i'm not trying to trick you i think you know this one well there's many things i get

Starting point is 02:08:32 from a professional relationship so like me and jack we're in a professional relationship we're friends is what i like to think but we're in a professional relationship so what do i get from jack i mean he's just here because he likes you no no no no why is he here um he's getting a lot out of it for himself is that it jack are you just here um he's getting a lot out of it for himself is that it jack are you just here because you're getting a lot of stuff out of this he loves it jack you love it here tell him ah jack gets it what makes a professional relationship professional is the transfer of money jack shouted money by the way for everybody jack just shouted money from the back i was saying friendship he loves it he shouted money no no does way, for everybody. Jack just shouted money from the back. I was saying friendship.

Starting point is 02:09:05 He loves it. He shouted money. Now, does that make Jack a mercenary? Is he just here because he's getting paid? Let's hope not. But here's the thing. Maybe you're aware of this, especially once things started to come back online

Starting point is 02:09:20 after the shutdowns from COVID. There was a hiring problem. Like a lot of people didn't want to work. And the companies were kind of scratching their head and they were thinking, well, I don't understand. We offer a really compelling mission. We are a really inclusive family-like environment. We really believe in the development of our employees. We offer beanbag chairs and ping pong tables. I don't understand why anyone would want to work, not work for us. Whereas anybody in the dating, the professional arena is like, well, what do you pay?

Starting point is 02:09:54 Like maybe don't buy beanbags, maybe pay your employees more. Like everybody who's looking for a job would just say, the reason why you have trouble hiring is you're paying $3 an hour and you require a master's degree. The issue is that for everybody's dignity, we can't be too explicit about the transaction of money, even in our professional relationships. He's here because of money, right? But if you just like pulled out a wad of cash and was like, Jack, what are you going to do for this today, buddy? Will you jump over here? He'll eventually have to choose between his self-respect and his financial goals, right? And eventually, like many people, he'll choose his self-respect because he's going to feel

Starting point is 02:10:36 undignified for what he has to do to get that money. And so to protect people's dignity, we cover the professional interaction with a lot of bullshit, with a lot of mission and inclusivity and all these other things that generally don't solve as many problems as paying people more. Like paying people more doesn't solve every problem from an employee's perspective, but it solves a lot of fucking problems from an employee's perspective, right? And to be fair, there are plenty of high-paying jobs, like in medicine, venture capital, that have terrible cultures. Like to be a medical doctor, you have to go through the residency process, 120 hours where you're working for a dollar an hour. You're not sleeping for three days straight. It's tough. Top tier law firms, venture capital, they're like, if you can't take it,

Starting point is 02:11:25 buddy, that's okay. Don't swim with the sharks. We pay you enough. I don't want to hear any complaining. And show me the results. So it's like when you pay people more, they're willing to put up with not having those other things. Okay? The issue is when a lot of good meaning, but soft-headed people take the bullshit seriously. And they think, oh, yeah, I hear a lot. Culture is important. We'll give people culture. And they think that that's going to be a substitute for giving people money in a professional relationship. And that's not true. Okay? Do you buy that? 100%. Great. So now we'll answer the relationship problem directly. One of the rules about relationships

Starting point is 02:12:07 is you cannot be too explicit with the transaction because then it will feel like prostitution. Okay. And no one wants to feel that way, man or woman. And it's been, it offends the dignity of the individuals involved. And so we cover it with a lot of bullshit. The core of relationships is getting your needs met from another person. If you don't give people more of what they want or need, they will be dissatisfied. If you give people more of what they want and need, you will be able to dispense with a lot of the bullshit

Starting point is 02:12:39 that society tells you relationships are actually about in the same way that paying people more allows companies to dispense with the bullshit around how companies are supposed to be. That is, most people that I know would rather take a high-paying job and have fewer of these other fluffy things around it than vice versa. By the same token, most people are going to be satisfied if they get their needs and desires met in a relationship. If you want a satisfying relationship, meet the needs and wants of your partner. And then you won't need to do all the bullshit. Then you don't need to do the bullshit. What is the bullshit in the context of relationship? Give

Starting point is 02:13:17 me some examples. Is it like Valentine's Day? Oh, there's so many different forms of the bullshit, especially from the context of a psychotherapeutic perspective. The issue is that you have to understand what your love languages are. Or you have to understand I'm an INTJ and you are an ENTP. And we want things, it's like we have to accommodate other people's personalities. We have to learn to communicate. We have to learn to compromise. We have to just love more. We have to find God and go to church. You're playing out, you're role-playing the people

Starting point is 02:13:49 in your practice. Sure. Right. And it's like, you don't have to do any of those things. Like, especially if a lot of soft-headed but good-hearted people accept that bullshit is true. It's like, oh yeah, communication is important. Well, I'll just learn how to communicate better with my partner. Yeah, you could be the best communicator in the world, but if you're not giving your partner what she needs and wants, it's going to be a high conflict, difficult relationship. And if you give her what she needs and wants, you don't have to communicate with her at all if you don't want to. Like, I've gotten to the point where I think it's possible to have a completely satisfactory relationship with someone that you don't even speak their language.

Starting point is 02:14:29 Because a lot of what makes relationships work is the dischargement of need and want. And a lot of communication can be accomplished non-verbally. So I guess the conclusion here, if I was to guess, is that we need to understand what we need, but also we need to understand

Starting point is 02:14:44 what we actually offer. Yeah. If you're having trouble in the dating market, there's really two possibilities. One is you're being too picky. You want too many things. And or your value proposition is dubious. That what you hope to get isn't commensurate with what you will give in return. People don't like hearing that. People don't like hearing that. How would you say that in a simpler way? If you want more, you have to be prepared to give more. And the problem is?

Starting point is 02:15:17 People want a lot of things. And they don't have a lot to offer. You said it. You said it. You're the one that said it. I didn't say it. You said the last part. But it is you're the one that said it i didn't say it you said the last part um but it is true that the more that you want the more you have to be prepared to give and that's fair yeah no it makes perfect sense i mean it's like simple mathematics it is um we have a closing

Starting point is 02:15:38 tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that has been left for you oh how interesting is there something you wanted to do in your life that you didn't do because you were afraid sure yeah there have been things that i haven't done because of fear i think on the like i didn't go skydiving for instance but i don't know if that's really what she's, this person is talking about. And I am confident in saying that I have since overcome my fear of an important estrangement. Often because of the kind of superficial and casual nature of relationships these days, it's often family. And family relationships can be very difficult to navigate because we come with a whole host of expectations about how mothers are supposed to act and fathers and brothers, et cetera,

Starting point is 02:16:50 et cetera. And sometimes people can hold on to grudges in a very long time in families. And those grudges can also be maintained through the fear of being the first person to forgive and the first person to extend an olive branch. Both sides generally feel like they've been wronged. And so both sides are functionally waiting for the other person to act first. And what I found is that's one of the secrets of forgiveness. It's like four, you give it first.

Starting point is 02:17:24 It doesn't necessarily mean the other person will forgive you as well, but one of the most important things that I've done is being willing to overcome that fear of offering the forgiveness and not having that be reciprocated. And that was a fear that kept me paralyzed in some of my relationships in the past that I think was really helpful and important for me to overcome.

Starting point is 02:17:49 And how has that benefited you? That forgiveness? Well, it helped me to get rid of anger in my heart, man. It's like people have hurt me. People I'm sure have hurt you. And it's very difficult to go through life and to not be hurt. There's all kinds of things to bump into, both figuratively and literally. And I think that without forgiveness, a person's heart just fills up with anger and

Starting point is 02:18:23 resentment over time. I think of forgiveness as an emotional survival strategy. It's something that I did to save my own life, to save my own heart. It doesn't technically involve another person. It's a relinquishing of hatred and resentment and anger because I don't want to feel that way anymore. And the more that you feel those things, the more that you're feeling apparatus is the more that your feeling apparatus is clouded and it's harder to sense any other kind of emotional information or energy. And so it can kind of be a self-fulfilling prophecy

Starting point is 02:18:53 for a lot of people who have been hurt. They go around getting hurt even more. So I think that was something that I was afraid to do was to really look at the anger inside. And I kept it inside for longer than I probably needed to, and to kind of clean up my heart and to clean up my relationships. You referenced earlier, Dr. Orion Taraban, you referenced earlier that, you know, in this day and age, you can clean up your life, you can clean up your heart, your soul, and your environment, and then you can help millions of others, which is a unique opportunity

Starting point is 02:19:30 that's been presented to us in 2024 with the power of the internet. And that's exactly what you're doing in every sense of the word. It sounds to me like you have been on a journey yourself, and you've arrived at a place where you're helping millions and millions of people through not just the book that I have in front of me here today which is essential reading for anybody who wants a really different quite honest challenging perspective on what's actually going on with relationships and love and all these interpersonal dynamics that most people are afraid to talk about out loud but also through your youtube channel which has been an absolute smash hit and i was on there earlier on watching many of your videos and the way that

Starting point is 02:20:09 you deliver your message is both based on science and facts and solid data but also based on the experience that has come out of your practice of many many men and that blend of insights i think presents a really important unique perspective on these issues so i thank you for all of the wonderful work that you're doing, because it's certainly helping so many people. And it's a very essential voice. And you're a remarkable communicator as well. So I think sometimes it's not necessarily what we're saying, it's how we're saying it. And you say it in a really impactful, honest, dare I say, vulnerable way. So thank you for the work that you do, Dr. Orion Staroban. That was high praise, man. Thank you. Wow. I do hope that I'm a net positive. I don't always get it right. I am trying my best and learning as I go. This was a wonderful conversation.

Starting point is 02:20:57 Thank you so much. Thank you.

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