Psychologist Explains Women's Dating Strategies & Why Young Men FAIL (ft. PsycHacks)

Dr Orion taraban is a clinical psychologist and the owner of the psych hacks YouTube channel in this episode we discuss the psychology of dating the behavioral economics of dating and how those two things make men and women have very different incentives and approaches to their dating lives thank you very much for being here Orion wonderful to have you very happy to be here Charlie thanks so we were just talking about therapy and you were talking about how men uh go at a factor of I think you said three to one less often than women and that's not because women have three times as many problems as them can you talk about that a bit certainly I think that a lot of guys think about therapy and they say so you're saying that I will get to talk to somebody who will sit there like you are look very concerned say I see and I'll just vent about my problems and then I'll pay you a couple hundred bucks and that's going to help like that makes absolutely no sense to most men and the idea of the talking cure is actually it has a feminine origin this is something that a lot of people don't understand so it actually goes back to Freud the father of psychoanalysis Freud was a Jewish psychiatrist in Austria and because he was Jewish the anti-Semitism prevented him from really joining a lot of the professional organizations it was hard for him to get clients so he kind of could take whatever he could get which mostly meant that his patients were women and Freud was really clever he was very insightful he also was something of a businessman he was always looking for an angle he was searching for his Grand Design and so he was experimenting a lot with his therapeutic practices one day he had a patient we know her as Anna o and he was doing his thing when Anna basically just interrupted him said listen doctor just shut up for a while and let me talk and Freud was like okay I haven't tried that I've tried everything else I might as well just see if this works and he just shut up she talked the whole hour she said oh my God I feel so much better and Freud was like her Neurosis has decreased hysteria down 20 I mean he thought it was amazing and so he called it the talking cure that was inspired by Anna oh he started doing that with other people and he found that it had a potential to reduce neurotic symptomology right but I think it's important to understand that that was grounded in a feminine experience and this is the the age-old argument that husbands and wives get into each other the wife wants to talk the husband says okay I'm listening she starts to talk about her problems he starts to offer Solutions she says I just want you to listen he says well how is that going to help of course I'm listening that's why I'm trying to solve your problem it's just I just need you to listen ah you know that kind of a thing so I think feminine problem solving is more focused on emotional coping and masculine problem solving is more focused on actually addressing the problem in an actionable way ideally you do both but I think that our normal associations with therapy is still 120 years old which is the therapist is a screen he or she doesn't talk very much and you just vent and potentially arrive at some degree of insight and the Insight is the master key to solve whatever difficulty you're dealing with yeah I don't think that's true either do you I want to table this depending on the direction that you go but do you think that that masculine feminine difference is primarily biological or cultural I think it's both it's impossible to say it's one or the other okay we have biological predispositions but we are very much cultural organisms so I mean most studies that have to do with personality consistently come down to where it's 50 nature 50 nurture got it we know that there are some cross-cultural universals with respect to the Human Experience like emotions for example there's been uh some very rigorous studies where they look at indigenous folks in the Amazon rainforest Basin or Papua New Guinea with very limited contact with developed civilization and we see the same kinds of emotions the same type of emotional Expressions as we do in the first world or the Civilized world as you want to put it um but there's so many differences with respect to how men and women experience themselves and experience each other that are related to time and place yeah okay so for a combination of factors men are not going to therapy as much and you were saying that your approach tends towards I believe that masculine style of let's talk about solutions to this rather than just simply holding space for you to feel seen and heard which again has tremendous amounts of value that's right and guys need that from time to time too it's really important to have a safe non-judgmental space for everyone to say I can get this off my chest I need to speak this because in the act of speaking it there's a catharsis I can get it out some things sound a lot louder and bigger in our minds and then when we we verbalize them we can see them for what they are a bit more objectively but yeah I think men are more interested in actionable Solutions and time limited therapy and behavioral strategies yeah we also know that about 85 percent of therapists are women and just like we can imagine that there are certain things that women would feel more comfortable talking with other women about well I certainly know that there are things that men are more comfortable talking to other men about and so there's just a lack of Supply the demand is there but there's not a lot of male therapists and not a lot of male therapists that specialize in men's mental health I think there's like two in California yeah it seems like a lot of the demand and to a degree things like you know Charisma on command is satisfying some of that demand which is saying I'm having these struggles inside of myself I'm feeling like a lack of belonging I'm feeling that I don't know how to get the things that I want here's an action-oriented solution to do this and there's space it seems like I guess kind of what I'm interested in in the rest of my career is using that as a jumping off point which we discussed to take men or you know but particularly men also women a little bit deeper down the road of like I do think that there is value to a lot of these men who want Solutions being seen and being heard I have found that myself as someone who spent 10 15 years achieving and solving problems in the world to get to that classic position of is a set and in having some of those therapeutic relationships where I was able to speak things I hadn't spoken be received that was tremendously valuable for me and so when I do hear and it doesn't sound like this is what you're doing but sometimes when I watch these Instagram shorts of people saying men want respect women want love I get frustrated because I think that that's a heavy dose of cultural conditioning or at least I have felt that in my personal experience that I want I want both I think there can be I have a real hard time with shorts I use them because they're great at expanding the reach of the channel but they are just polarizing yeah the internet even more because there's no way that you can even come close to telling the whole story in 60 seconds or less and so no matter what you say sometimes people forget that it's just a facet of the truth and you know it creates a lot of reactivity yeah now you were talking about uh yes the Charisma on command I love your channel I've personally followed it for years and yeah by definition you're trying to help people solve internal problems with external Solutions when you look at the behavior of these actors on TVs and uh TV shows and movies you're basically saying look on the outside these are things that you can do you can change on the outside to solve this internal problem this is actually very close to acting so we talked about this a little bit my training is as a theater actor and um there's many many different approaches to acting the one that people are most familiar with is like the method acting approach you know Robert De Niro Al Pacino Marlon Brando they they like worked as a taxi driver for eight months to kind of become the taxi driver from the inside out in preparation for their roles um that's just one way of approaching acting another way that one that I studied in Conservatory is the grotowski method which is basically like screw your internal experience work on the external shell like if you change your posture if you change your expression if you change the rhythm of your movements and your gestures it will eventually trickle down and affect your internal experience and you can get there from the outside in just as much as from the inside out and I think that's a solution that not a lot of people know they think that it's fake on some level you might have to fake it until you make it but the thing about this is if you if you walk around moping with your shoulders hunched and your eyes Down cast and your tone is slow and lethargic and you're going to start to feel sad you're going to start to feel low and you can influence yourself more intentionally by changing your outward appearance than most people appreciate yeah I think that at least in my own experience it isn't it would be way harder for more people to feel authentic happiness authentic confidence by focusing exclusively on the inside right to do that as an internal game rather than you know stealing a couple of the lines from the YouTube channels that you like going out having some good interactions with people that ref they reflect and radiate positivity towards you you it's not that the end of the game to take their validation and make yourself feel good but it does create this sort of positive momentum at least that's what I saw over the course of my of my journey absolutely yeah yeah confidence is the consistent felt experience of success you do have to go out and do the thing otherwise you're just fooling yourself you have to do it enough times so that you feel all things being equal you can do the thing and then you have to take it in that's an important component I work with a lot of perfectionists who are actually drowning in the midst of their achievements they're doing really well but they're still hyper focused on the one percent they're not quite doing right so every once in a while we have to look back at how far we've come and allow our progress to emotionally impact us to update our browsers and to change our conceptualization of ourselves like our models of who we are and of other people yes I totally agree one of the um pivoting a bit the things that you are uh biggest on your YouTube channel which I did I did most popular but I also did most recent and I see that right in the same way that that uh we can become known for certain types of things with Charisma and command that there is a preferred type of content that the majority of the YouTube audience likes to see from you which is related to dating and it seems like it is men learning about uh some of the things that they're struggling with and dating with women same thing that we see on our Channel and so I wanted to ask if you have a high level overview of the modern struggle let's start with for men and then from women's perspective I sort of see it pop out in some of the titles and I have my opinion of it but I'm curious what you see on the inside well we're talking a eagles eye view of the dating Market is that what you're asking let's say from the people on YouTube that are like consuming your content what seems to be the problem that they are encountering for men the common complaint is where are the good women like I can't get women they're passing me by they have a lot of um let's say frustrated perspectives women just want Rich guys women just want tall guys they only go for the top 10 so if you aren't a movie star if you're not a millionaire there's no point um like the dating apps don't work uh if I try to approach a Woman in real life she might think it's sexual harassment and cancel me there's a lot of fear and anger in the masculine experience relative to dating today where is that always the experience of men or is that that's that's a today or the last I don't know 50 years thing do you think I don't know I mean I wasn't around 50 years ago dating it seems like the game has changed significantly in the last 50 years I think that as a man we're still even in today's day and age with all of our let's say enlightened views of gender sex and power we're still expected to initiate uh women still expect the men to initiate and they still expect the man to make the offer and that offer could be are you up to can I buy you a drink to will you marry me yeah it's like women are still waiting for the offer which is really interesting because women under 30 without children and outperforming men in that same demographic in almost every quantifiable metric most notably in education and earning so they're doing really well and to the extent that men made the offer in the past because they had the resources and the provision to to offer a life to a woman that's becoming increasingly less Salient in today's day and age but there's still um this expectation that men initiate and make the offer and if you're making the offer you're gonna hear no a lot like a lot a lot yeah yeah I got through my training and rejection earlier in life as an actor because again as an actor you get told no constantly and it's easy to take it personally because you know what are you selling you're selling your appearance you're selling your emotion you're selling your performance it's very it's almost isomorphic with your experience of yourself so it's very easy to take it personally um you kind of have to get rejected enough to learn that it's just information and it's necessary to get through that in order to get something worthwhile but men might have to go on hundreds of dates I usually say I've gone on more First Dates than most people have gone on dates but I like dating so I don't really know and so are these men frustrated that they're not finding it or that they're getting like no affection are they are you encountering on that online world everything from in cells up to I just can't find a good woman to marry or where where are these no's occurring is I guess at The Funnel of dating well a lot of knows I think are increasingly becoming self-inflicted and you mentioned in cells there's that study that I'm sure you're aware of that I think 30 percent of men under 30 have not had sex in the previous 12 months and that's I haven't let that sink in I've heard it but that's that's that's incredible it's wild and that's like tripled in the last decade it's gone up for women too but not nearly at the same rate so I think a lot of men are seeing the stakes are really high the barriers to entry are they're really difficult to overcome I'm feeling hopeless I'm gonna try to turn a virtue out of a necessity and say okay I'm going to focus on other things in my life which might actually be a really good strategy for men I personally don't think that men should even think about settling down until they're in their mid-30s um because the uh the game changes at 30 to begin to privilege men for the first time women have a significant advantage over men in the 20s well let's talk about this so I think there's a Utah I've seen you talk about romance on the channel and I there I know that I had it I feel so far away from it that sometimes I don't talk about it but I have to recognize that there is a significant portion of men that didn't have that uh disruption of the Romantic ideal that I had for my my love in high school that I thought if I uh knew her schedule so well and could find her wherever she was in the hallway and was just always there waiting for her as you know she needed a shoulder to cry on or someone to be there I I had my lesson early and that's what it looks like we're supposed to do from the movies correct and I I'm just meeting you today but from following you on the channel correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you were a more socially awkward guy when you were younger yeah and maybe like me you took some of your cues on how you were supposed to behave relative to women from TV shows from popular music from Hollywood yes and that doesn't work yes and I was fortunate enough to have I think really the disruption to that experience in my early 20s where I found the book The Game which I don't recommend broadly because I think there's a lot of things that you don't need to take from it including lying about you know I just saw a fight outside or there was you know a couple things happening but the general idea in it that the way that I was approaching women and dating was flawed deeply that was an invaluable contribution to my life and it totally transformed so I had a tremendous amount of frustration prior to that luckily it wasn't angry frustration it was it was more internal attack sure and then uh finding that busted this romantic thing but we should take a moment to talk about like this romantic Vision that it seems like a lot of men that encounter your channel might have and are breaking out of and are frustrated yes as they encounter that they've been lied to yes um I have an episode coming out I've recorded it but it hasn't been published yet and it talks about the most common male romantic fantasy which is really hard for me to verbalize it cuts pretty deep my in my opinion the most common male romantic fantasy is I can be loved for who I am because that's deep down in his heart of hearts what every man wants to hear from a woman is that you're enough just being with you is enough I don't need anything I'm not like those other girls I'm just in love with who you are and the Romantic idea is the purity of my love like the depth of My Affection my loyalty and devotion these are not only the highest things that a man can offer a woman but it's the things that a woman is most looking for when she's filtering men and in her own selection process in The Mating and dating game and that's really not the case [Music] um for better for worse men have to provide value to justify the opportunity costs associated with choosing you over all the other options within a woman's frame is it well it seems like that there is still a possibility at least from my perspective of let me step back I I had that disruption and I went you know what I got to provide value so that means I need to get in shape I need to learn about external languages let's make some money let's get some cool experiences under my belt let's learn how to talk to girls do all these things and then there's a frustrating sense if you do that and you succeed that I had of this woman loves my Persona she loves all of the things about me and I've lost track myself probably of my own Essence in doing this I've I've uh put on a lot of cool decorum to make myself more appealing I am now hopeful believing that in a committed relationship you can get to the point where someone genuinely loves you for who you are I believe that yeah okay but it's not necessarily you know that's gonna happen the courtship phase because you don't love her for who she is you love her for the way that she looks and what she represents sexually to you or what she represents in your romantic brain or something like that that's what I was going to say is that that complaint is something that women have been duly familiar with for Generations it's like they have to wear makeup they have to dress in a certain way they have to perform femininity which is a suite of behaviors that are very culturally specific um so and if she shatters that fantasy of womanness of femininity too early it can jeopardize her chances of securing the desired relationship so women have understood more about how men select them than men have understood how women select them but more and more men are waking up to that yeah interesting and so there's this there are very practical considerations that people have when they're in this partnering phase and given dating apps and the ability to move to a big city there's more options than ever so the Stark reality of I'm comparing you to my next best option and that next best option is not necessarily based on deep seeing of one another's Souls but of physical attributes Financial attributes those sorts of things sure uh got it and that's that's existing at the beginning but I also see then there are these people that uh they break the romantic thing and but they remain in this jaded love isn't real thing because that was true in the way that they had to do the initial phases of dating and I don't think that that's the end of the road which is just something that has maybe uncomfortable with some of the red pill content that I've seen in the past love is absolutely real and one of the things that I believe is true about love is actually one of the most common everyday experiences on the planet like cosmically it's what keeps the universe together I think we have a very skewed understanding of what love is and it tends in the Romantic Direction which is I think such a distortion of the reality of love that it is wrong to use the same word for it my definition of Love is it's the humiliated self exalted and the humiliate itself yes because the it's like what are the the best examples of love that we have in say Cinema or in history in cinema the classic romantic hero let's say is Rick Blaine in Casablanca and at the end of that movie after struggling with the idea he puts the woman he loves on a plane with another man because he understands that it's good for her and for the social movement at the time and he suffers that humiliation such that the loved one has a better life than he could potentially offer her that's love love is wanting what is better for the other person love also it's interesting like boundaries is a relationship word relationships need boundaries relationships need rules and definitions love doesn't give a about any of those things you think that love will only love where it's allowed I mean that's insane right so what I say is that people need things from other people and the medium in which value is exchanged is called a relationship and you have to provide value in order to secure a relationship and there needs to be some kind of exchange at parity more or less and it's for the two people involved in that relationship to decide for themselves what is valuable and and how much it's valuable Etc but you don't need a relationship for love because love is you could say that it's beyond value or its value less it's kind of the same thing from a Zen perspective and love will will consistently want what is best for the loved one and think very little of itself I mean that finds in my opinion sympotheosis and like Christian mythology where it's the sacrifice I'm willing to suffer everything be out of my love for Humanity yeah I thought a lot about that story uh lately the I'm not I'm not a religious person but the you know the sacrifice on the cross and uh I'm I'm this sacrificial idea of love I also have a bit of a problem with of course and so I want to I want to dive into this with you my current thinking on it you know take Jesus is that if you look at it from a spiritual psychedelic sense uh well if you look at it from a material sense he took on everybody else's sin it wasn't his cross to bear but he bore it anyway he didn't commit the crime he but he was going to go suffer this burden for everybody else uh the way that I'm reading it now which is totally open to change even in this conversation is that the boundaries between him and other dissolved to the point where the pain of everyone was not their pain it was his pain of course as well and so the bearing of hit that cross is not a sacrificial though it might look like that if you're in this separate Paradigm it was that's why it was his cross to bear because it was he could not help but to take on the pain of other people and you know go through that entire ordeal and therefore save Humanity I mean there's so many levels of understanding that you can approach that story one level is how passive aggressive can you be it's like I never asked to be saved and now I'm supposed to be grateful for a sacrifice that was unnecessary and and unasked for it almost feels intrusive and some people can have that experience other people who like to talk about boundaries and love and relationships uh would say that there is like a toxic element to that relationship like one of the things about love is I think that love is unconditional but relationships are not and certain things can happen in a relationship that we might call it exploitative we might call it abusive we might call it toxic but from the perspective of love that just wants to give out of the generosity of its experience and wants only the best for the other those things don't make any sense my model for love is the sun which just gives it just shines and it's not worried that this guy down here didn't appreciate the sunshine today or that this person's like well I never asked to be born or look at the Sun or it's like the sun is so abundant in its own effulgence that it just shines and it doesn't even worry about how it's being received if it's being ignored or appreciated and I think that's the humility of Love also which is maybe what warms the sun's heart you know pun intended is that people down here are just sort of carrying on with their lives without really any consideration for the sun because if we really stop for a moment and thought man all of life would be extinct in the matter of days if the sun just disappeared or stopped shining like how much of our lives would be devoted to like giving praise to the Sun and appreciating the Sun and we wouldn't be able to sit here and have a conversation be too busy just making sure that the sun was feeling good about its sacrifice you know what I'm saying but the highest form of love is almost to be invisible to give and to enjoy the fact that there is no obligation even for gratitude yes it does not need to be received in order to be given yeah there's been a study about this in a in Zen monasteries where they have discovered that the most useful form of assistance is they called it invisible assistance which even absolves the recipient from the necessity of gratitude and appreciation so in this Monastery if you see a sandal is broken you just sort of take it and mend it and put it back you don't say anybody that you did a good deed you don't Instagram it and put on your social media you just do what is necessary so that the smooth functioning of that Society can continue and everyone is just doing that kind of behind the scenes whenever they get a chance that would change society if we all kind of behaved in that way of course now a couple questions that come up what if Just One of Us behaved that way this seems so the scary thing is to go first in that sort of relationship now you're mending all the sandals you're doing all the things you're trying to be the sun I have found that it is very difficult for me at least to be the son and not require appreciation we're not the sun yes so if we call that maybe a covert contract sure so we're doing things that look generous or altruistic but really we're doing so because we expect on some level some appreciation some gratitude or with in the context of dating a sexual opportunity or the prospect of a relationship and that's not love that's bartering disguised as love which gives love a bad name and if you're not there yet that's okay I'm not fully there either you have to be a very enlightened individual to be there but the way that you described it in an everyday Consciousness it's almost like a prisoner's dilemma kind of a thing which is that if I'm the first one to go then everyone else benefits from my free labor and altruism and I don't receive anything in return from the perspective of love that's not even a consideration it's just that I'm doing this because it feels like this is what I should do it's related to your conceptualization of Jesus on the cross which is as a person elevates his or her Consciousness that person has a a more inclusive definition of self so that you know at lower levels the self is just what's bounded by the body and the individual ego but you have to understand that you cannot exist in isolation no man is an island we all have relationships and those relationships have a reciprocal influence on our well-being and happiness so on some level I am my relationships I am the people that I keep around me that I interact with the most if if that's harmonious I'm gonna be at peace it's possible to be at peace in the midst of chaos but let me tell you it's much more difficult right so then you have an understanding of yourself as related to your immediate sphere of influence and you can keep going to the point where all of existence is at least potentially included in your idea of self and that's what we might call A A transpersonal or Transcendent experience uh I've talked about loving like the sun another model that I often use with respect to loving without emotional attachment is to kind of love people like cats I see you have a few dogs have you ever had cats yeah okay well you if you try to pick up a cat that doesn't want to be picked up you're going to get the claws right and cats generally don't come when they're called cats are fairly independent just like people and the idea here is to let people come and go in their own time if you want to enjoy a moment with a certain cat like put out good milk the cat will keep coming back when the Cat is ready for that kind of attention and when the cat comes back you can have an interaction you can have a moment and then when the cat's ready to go no big deal thank you it was nice to you know just to pet you on the couch for a little bit Yeah and then we can move on to other things but it's like for for me one of the issues when I was in my 20s was trying to make relationships the center of my life it sounds like that's related to what you were describing now I think a relationship is more um it's very important but it's secondary to let's say my personal mission what I'm here to share in life you know it was back in the old ad copy for Christmas I've since taken it out but it was the fundamental line was you know relationships are everything and I think that was reflective of my own honest perspective at the time but a dysfunctional one and the lack of independent self-directedness and self-okiness and self-love created this whole coping mechanism which spawned a company which spawned a whole lifestyle all these other sorts of things from it but I I very much agree that uh as I have done more self-healing I see the the pressure that I put on relationships the need that I have for them dissipates which actually creates space for what we're talking about which seems like genuine love space sun shining type energy to arise because there is no longer that need to get whatever it is from the relationship you talked about use the term codependent earlier and you just used healing I released an episode recently called why men end up with train wrecks and I think it has to do with the fact that hurt people people with emotional wounding have a sixth sense for finding other people with complementary wounds and they come together to reenact the conditions of their wounding they're going to create a situation that looks different but feels emotionally the same and they do this they do this because they would like to heal that wound by achieving a different outcome the issue with that is that wounded people are really good at recreating the situation of their wounding but they're not really good at solving that ending they mostly haven't developed the skills to achieve a different outcome so it's somewhat tragic they come together they set the stage everything is ready and ready to go at the end of this Romeo and Juliet We're not gonna die but it's like we're five acts in and of course the um the ending is predictable yeah so it's generally advised to try to heal that on your own before you go looking for a partner yeah it's incredible to watch I mean I I love trashy reality television and I'm watching too hot to handle right now and there's the one girl who has a history of dating players and the guy that she picks has another girl and she steals him from that girl and then he Strays from her and she's heartbroken and it is so uh I think part of the appeal of reality TV is you get to see from your privileged perspective how obvious other people's patterns are uh what is frustrating to realize is that it's very likely almost everyone I've ever known has one of those patterns themselves yeah the fish can't see the water yeah that the people who especially like acquaintances can look right in and instantaneously understand what's going on The Closer friends might be uh selected so as not to put as much pressure on it that's why they're part of that you know enabling ecosystem but I've seen the same thing where where you can reset the stage good news from that is you're going to get lots of chances to try to solve this pattern in your life which and hopefully uh I think is something that I'm working on with my current girlfriend is we've set the stage we're there you know where we've the stage has been perfectly set for us to either reenact or find a way a different way through this and I'm uh hopeful that we find a different way I talk about something therapeutically called the crossroads so the crossroads just like in real life is a moment where a a decision really matters we have to make thousands of decisions every day but most of those decisions don't really impact our futures in very significant ways but when you're at a Crossroads that decision can lead you into two radically different directions and when you're trying to create a different outcome you have to make the the right decision for you at the crossroads you can make that decision ten thousand times not at the crossroads and it doesn't matter so I teach people that it's important to recognize the crossroads because that's an internal experience so it's usually some sort of somatic Activation so it could be like for me my heart starts to race and I start to get a little nauseated some people it's a tight chest or maybe they feel a little dizzy maybe they get tingling Sensations it's some sort of sign that your body's saying hey this feels familiar this is an opportunity to make a decision that's actually going to radically alter your trajectory one of the things I got my start actually working with addicts addicts and alcoholics and you people say all the time oh I've quit drinking or I've quit using it's like no you haven't you only get to quit when you want to use and you don't the craving is the crossroads saying that you've quit before while you while you don't have the craving to use is like okay man whatever you say um it's so much easier to quit then than when you have this full body experience that's pulling you in the direction of your habitual Behavior but that's the actual opportunity to make a different choice and the great thing about this is that if you learn to recognize the crossroads you can leverage them you can make 10 decisions at 10 subsequent Crossroads to change a behavior semi-permanently versus trying in 10 000 different ways not at the crossroads to not have the result that you're looking for does that make sense yeah well those Crossroads scenarios where your body is activated you get those somatic things what I have found at least in myself is that a lot of people call this being triggered oftentimes you you have that happen and when you're triggered the intensity is such that at least for me you can Retreat away you can dissociate you can go into your thoughts in your head do that you can lose track of your body and so it's not even always obvious when you're at a Crossroads because you've almost gone out of body and you're witnessing yourself or you're just like that that went Brown for a while if I'm a dissociative type when things get I guess so yeah that would be tough yeah I've I I mean that like you're you know you I'm sure you know the emotion of being super angry at someone and you're irate and you're in and you're positive that you're right but you've lost track of heart and Terror or rage that's building up inside of you so I guess in deepening my somatic connection I have found tremendously valuable for recognizing those Crossroad moments and then choosing differently and in conjunction with that a practice of mindful awareness because the thing about being triggered emotionally is that it can happen in a blink of an eye someone can go from more or less Baseline to enraged in the fraction of a second or terrified and dissociated in the same amount of time so things can happen very very quickly in the world of the psyche if you can bring more let's say mindful Detachment the self as the Observer whereas the psychological phenomena the thoughts and the emotions are at some um distance from Consciousness itself then you create a little space that's a buffer between the triggering stimuli and the self-validation which makes it true which Cascades the emotional response in the beginning it can just feel like a fraction of a second sometimes that's enough to drive a wedge in there to prevent the fluorescence of a hyper emotional state but with practice you can kind of dilate that buffer so that you're kind of sitting deeply and stilly within yourself and you can be at peace even in the most um chaotic or diffusive situations what when you're working with clients meditation comes to mind do you have other techniques or practices that help them to insert and find that sliver of space between Trigger and self-identification with Insight is really helpful here um I think a I read in a Buddhist text a long time ago that there are certain monks that could observe that There Were Ten Thousand which probably is not an exact number but it's supposed to mean a lot there's ten thousand of discrete psychological events that occur every second and with enough careful observation and insight we can discern these different separate psychological events so one thing that I do is I try to walk people through their experience of let's say the last time they lost their temper or the last time that they dissociated and when we observe certain cognitive and emotional phenomenon very closely and carefully we see that it's not just and before I knew it I was gone like there there are a predictable Cascade of psychological events that occur before the dissociation or before the rage episode and once you name them and the person recognizes those things inside of himself or herself it becomes much easier for them to see moving forward sometimes you have to believe it to see it sometimes giving something a name actually makes it visible and we're not very good at talking about these things we certainly don't talk about them in schools we don't talk about them very widely in our culture and because they don't have names they're functionally invisible to the vast majority of people what are these things that we don't talk about these names are there do you have any examples the words are difficult to to use so one thing that I talk about let's let's say um let's talk about panic attacks panic attacks are something that I've personally suffered from they're absolutely terrified terrifying and terrible I wouldn't wish them on anybody and a lot of people come to me for help resolving this difficulty and panic attacks actually one of the let's say mental illnesses or disorders that Psychotherapy has a really high success rate with like you can actually cure panic attacks with psychotherapy and one way that I talk about this experience is that it's caused by a catastrophic thought Cascade and a positive feedback loop of attention so generally what happens is panic disorder really becomes a problem after the initial panic attack which almost always appears out of the blue for people but it's so terrifying that after that they develop a sort of hyper vigilance they don't want it to happen again they're looking for the panic attack they're looking for signs that it's about to happen like their heart rate starts to get a little faster or they start to feel hotter on their skin or they start to feel light-headed now this hyper vigilance is actually what creates the opportunity for the next panic attack because if you go looking for something you're going to find something yeah attention is also sort of a magnifying glass whatever we look through it will get bigger attention also changes physiological behaviors this is why when you go into the doctor's office and they put this stethoscope on your back and they tell you to breathe breathe in breathe out they're actually listening to your heart but if you knew that it would change your heart rate and it would create like false positives for arrhythmias and things like that so they get you to focus on your breath so that your heart rate remains unchanged I just ruined that for me now and all the doctors yeah what do they call that white coat um white coat stress or something like that yeah um so you have this hyper vigilance you draw your attention to something attention is the conduit through which things enter your Consciousness attention itself magnifies it then on top of that there's no problems yet actually but on top of that is a judgment that this is bad it's starting again or I'm having a stroke I'm having a heart attack and then even that's not necessarily a problem then there's the validation of that belief which is that I accept that this is a true reality and I'm now cognitively fused with my experience and then it's Off to the Races and all of that can happen like that but there has to be at least let's say six discrete steps in the process of a panic attack that it can occur in you know three or four seconds and by naming them and spelling out the necessary sequence of events people can begin to see that in their own experience and begin to kind of slow down that process because at every Link in that chain you can intervene and disrupt the catastrophic thought Cascade before it fluoresces into Panic does that make sense of course yeah the same thing I think occurs at uh lower tier or grade issues than panic attacks so if you're out in a social event you're nervous about Emma do I look stupid here do I need a drink in my hand or whatever it's you know we've given people advice of how to disrupt these Cascade of thoughts and events that occur which is uh oftentimes I could get your hands out get your get your elbow is off of the side you know we're just trying to break that patterned response of anxiety that arises get people into a weirdly enough it gets you I don't know if it gets into presence but it gets you at the very least out of that triggered State and then you can chill be in a room as an adult and start a conversation without having bright red cheeks or Terror or stuttering Voice or something like that I I use this research in my dissertation study almost all mental disorders whether it's panic attacks or social anxiety they have at their core A syndrome called self-focused attention it's like these people their self is too much for them and they become more and more involved in themselves it's like a spiral the self is a labyrinthine infinite thing and people can be sucked into it generally people are happiest when they forget about themselves when they're in Flow State for instance why they drink at these social events because it allows you to lose connection with your own internal self and you're just vibing with the room at that point yeah but yeah you know it's kind of nutty I mean I hopefully anybody who drinks has at some point had the experience of going to one of these parties being sober and seeing how everyone else is behaving and then having the experience like oh that must be how I've been behaving when I've been drinking yeah that's an eye-opening experience yeah so yeah it does help to smooth the wheels alcohol but it also comes with a host of liabilities of course of course no and that was one of the first things I had to uh when I made a commitment towards working on some of my social skills dropping alcohol was was a prerequisite because if you're you oh if you're drinking you're not one I treated it kind of like a classroom it's like would you drink before you went to class you're not going to learn very much if you do that but I had that experience many many times of looking around and going oh that's that's what I looked like and you know that was the caliber of my conversation this is what it I looked you know spit my sweet hey what do you do it wasn't uh not as not as sexy on the outside as it might have felt on the inside I hear you I mean there's something a about that like I did a lot of drugs and and alcohol when I was younger and it like it got me to a place where I had no consciousness of any kind of consequences my behavior might have which made me incredibly confident but also Reckless and kind of nutty yep yeah not worth it ultimately I agree so pivoting again let's go back we were chatting about uh men women dating all of these kinds of things full circle full circle so we talked about uh the guys have let's see if I can recap this they they're looking for good women but they feel frustrated they've been told no potentially many many times and uh some of them have quit on that seemingly what are you teaching them in the YouTube channel and that is helping them get from that place of frustration to the next stage I'm not sure my first experience with let's call the it the black pill was in the comments of my YouTube Channel I didn't really know that this existed and it's my first exposure to it was it was hard like it the hopelessness and the Despair and also the simmering anger I think that the hopelessness is defense against seemed really a bigger problem than I had anticipated I don't know if that's just the internet and so this is how people behave anonymously in these forums but if people actually believe those things in the in the privacy of their own Consciousness and they're a non-insignificant minority of men that's a serious issue yeah so it's very hard to get through to those sorts of people because hopelessness is a defense against hope hope means you get back on the roller coaster which is please I'm dizzy I've I've fallen down three four eight nine ten times just let me stay down let the ref count me out don't give me hope anymore and they get angry and frustrated with anybody who tries to challenge that mindset that keeps them from more pain yeah there's a lot of safety in in staying down certainly I did my pre-doc internship at a the cancer support community in the East Bay so I was dealing for two years with stage four cancer patients and their caregivers I learned so much about life from working with that population and we often talk about hope and hope can be a dangerous thing especially for some people it's never for anybody else to say when somebody should stop hoping that's always a personal experience but we do know that objectively speaking a lot people will reach a point where any plausible hope that's things will improve is unjustified and some people resist surrendering that hope and that causes them an inordinate amount of pain and it's usually the caregivers that's harder for them to surrender that hope than the patients themselves who are going through the treatments which are often extremely painful if not tortuous and they reach that point where it's like I'm okay with this I'm at peace we're going to move forward to the transition so hope is a dangerous thing it is a source of pain interestingly it was in the box of ills that Pandora opened and released into the world with you know evil and deception and what was hope doing in that box that was like the last one collapse when she closed the box right yeah so you there's an interpretation that hope is the evil that lives inside yeah it's like the worst one potentially yeah yeah it's very strange that something good would be locked up in that box with everything else you know what I'm saying so there is a darker side to Hope let's not say that it's purely a positive thing let me ask because the difference in these two scenarios is one I imagine the hope is that this person is going to make it through cancer and live a cancer-free life after and the other version we're talking about hope hope is that what are these young men what would the Hope be that they could feel connected and loved in their life or that they would have a relationship it seems it seems whether hope is dangerous or is not as deeply related to what one is hoping for sure because it's very easy to look at a young man's relationship history especially if he's in his 20s and conceivably has Decades of life ahead of him where dating actually gets easier for men as they age like dating in my 30s was 10 times easier than dating in my 20s sure it's very easy to judge these folks and saying you gave up too soon but that's why I said that it's never for somebody else to decide when to give up hope I've gone through periods of hopelessness following uh difficult breakups in the past and I think that was a phase that I had to go through if somebody tried to instill hope in me prematurely I would have snapped at them and I wanted to stay down for a while yeah um and I got through it you know I think people have to get up in their own time I think it's a process got it so and I guess if if it is the case that this is manifesting itself primarily in Internet communities and comments and it is not spilling over to real world violence or things like that the best solution to this hopelessness might be you're permitted your homelessness just allow people to to have that well they're gonna have it whether you permit it or not so as opposed to trying to intervene support change Minds Etc yeah I think that's probably for the best because it's also let's be honest no one's really chomping on the bit to get into a relationship with these men that's why they're feeling hopeless so it's not like the women are missing out on great potential partners because if they thought that they probably wouldn't be in the situation that they find themselves in so I think that it's important to really appreciate that it's actually very very hard to be a young man I think that's something that our culture does a terrible job of recognizing like being a 20 year old man is really really tough because you are invisible to women functionally unless you're really cute but let's say 80 percent of guys aren't that you have no resources you have no status you have no game you have no relationship experience you have no maturity how can you take the lead and confidently move the relationship in a certain direction uh women just sort of expect men to know what to do even sexually like I learned where the vas deferens were in high school I don't know if that really helps out right no fallopian tubes it's like that didn't actually help me be a confident lover um and no one really wants to teach men how to be those things a lot of women just sort of expect that men should know how to do it which is kind of unfair but because of what we know how women choose men most 20 year old men don't have what women are looking for so they're functionally invisible to them by the same token they're also kind of useless to other guys because what do guys want they want competent teammates it's like what are your skills man what can you do what are you good at nothing you'd need a job you need training it's like oh geez oh man so like you're a liability for me right now I need somebody who already knows what they're doing because I got this business I don't have time to teach you it's very hard to get your first relationship it's very hard to get your first job these things tend to get easier as you age and 30 is really the pivot point in the game of mating and dating yeah I very much agree with everything you said luckily and I think I encountered I don't know a couple of books a couple of beliefs that made my 20s not necessarily the most successful period of my life not even close but the most exciting period of my life because I had such a ridiculous degree of hope I believed that with effort anything was possible in my 20s and I've you know I encountered reality on a number of occasions and bumped up against it pretty hard and so it does seem that messages and I even see Andrew Tate connecting with young men in this that that you uh are moldable growable evolving uh and don't need to have success right now those messages seem to be resonating at least on YouTube very strongly with men like just grind out your 20s or work that that seems to be a message that young men do connect with it's a it's solution it's like okay you're saying that if I focus on myself if I prioritize my health if I get some money if I learn some skills if I develop a lifestyle that's a pathway to Greater success with women and I'm benefited in the process okay great like men will do that for 10 years they'll grind for 10 years with the hope that it will give them better sexual options yeah it's amazing that kind of had a great time doing it it was so fun I'm really happy because it can be joyless if you're just doing things you don't want to do with The Hope or expectation that you're going to get a woman further down the road that's not worth it what was necessary was that I guess made it fun was that I wasn't get money get fit get this it was also chat with women and get rejected doing that but get a little bit farther you know what I mean now she she laughs at your joke uh now you're going on a first date now she wants to go on a second date that that progression because women were the driving Factor behind it all for me it's when I didn't give a damage guys I didn't give nothing else mattered money it was all secondary uh that progression and not waiting until I was 30 to begin that game but instead having you know relationships throughout my 20s was uh very exciting I I don't know I felt like king of the world for a lot of my 20s and it's funny to look back on I had a lot of very exciting and passionate relationships when I was in my 20s too I'm I'm happy for my experiences I definitely got uh emotionally beat up from a lot of those too right yeah yes so uh you had a video where you were talking about essential for performative masculinity and I wanted to ask you about this because you said the two things that make a man essentially and these are uh metaphorical rather than literal but our spine and balls and so first can you just uh unpack that a little sure so uh there's a lot of discourse about what it means to be a man in the modern age that I think would be absolutely ludicrous even 100 years ago where people just sort of understood what it meant to be a man and we also know that masculinity is a bit different from femininity in this regard it's like women become women more or less when they become reproductively viable it's like they are a full woman you never say you never hear the insult that you're not a real woman but you can often hear the insult that you're not a real man so it's like men can reach sexual maturity but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're men they have to do other things to become real men versus women they're not girls anymore they've reached sexual maturity but that's it like there's no fake women and real women there but there can be fake men and real men a real Mensch you know what I'm saying and I think that this was recognized because in most let's say tribal communities the way the human beings have lived for hundreds of thousands of years there was actually a pretty big separation between the the spheres of influence of men and women women were taking care of the food and the children so the children whether they were boys or girls basically lived in the mothers the Women's World whereas the men are you know building the huts and going out on the Hunts and doing that thing and so girls they have this seamless trajectory they stay in that domestic sphere in that traditional way of life whereas boys have to be plucked out of it and they have to encounter some of the harsh or truths of reality and they generally have to do that at like 13 and 14. that's why most coming-of-age rituals happen around that time bar and bought Mitzvahs for example in almost every culture on the planet there's some sort of rite of passage for men for boys that they don't exist for girls and it's usually having to do with bravery and um courage and often like pain tolerance like there's this far out rite of passage that occurs in a still today in a tribe in the Amazon Rain Basin where they make these like mittens out of leaves and fill them with fire ants and fire ants exactly and these are 12 13 year old boys and they have to stick their hands in these mittens for like an hour at a time and a single bite is enough to I mean it's Agony according to the westerners who have experienced this and they have to do this not just once but like 20 times before they're recognized as a man they have to this without crying they have to do this without screaming and only then it's like play time is over you don't get to be coddled anymore you don't get to be nurtured anymore we need you to be tough because we're going to rely on you during the Hunts we need to know that you can uh not slow us down that you're not going to complain when things when the rain starts to come or we get lost or we get hungry it's like you would be a liability and all of our lives would be jeopardized because of that so we need to be sure about you before we take you on in the sphere of men we don't have that anymore and For Better or For Worse right there's some far out Rite of passages man that's just one of them so um here we are today and we're trying to figure out what it means to be a man and we can look back to a few Generations ago and we have some cultural icons like the Marlboro Man that's a real man he's got the Stetson hat he's a cowboy stoic that's a masculine archetype we have like a bodybuilder hyper masculine dude there's traditional machismo these are all I call them performative elements of masculinity because they're behaviors that you can do or not do to communicate a culturally specific form of masculinity and femininity has its own component like femininity differs from uh let's say indigenous Community to indigenous Community it even differs from some parts of the industrialized World from the others right and it does seem very contextual based on what is needed in that Society often it's you know we need to hunt we need to get food and that's going to require pain but that those rights of Passage prepare people to exist in a context it does but we're getting further and further away from like those survival exact subsystems exactly and so I think that performative masculine and femininity certainly in like Western Europe for the last three or four hundred years has really deviated from let's say the skill set that might be more biologically encoded into men and women to survive at a more subsistence level of existence when you a society generates enough wealth there's a certain buffer between the sheer realities of existence and everyday life such that we don't really have to send the best hunters out for food if they come back with less food less frequently we're probably not going to starve so why not give them the shot at being a hunter especially if they want to like what's the harm do you see we have more of a buffer but that also means that our depictions of masculine and femininity can be more divorced let's say from uh necessity and that's why you have things like you know the three-inch golden lilies in pre-communist China with a foot binding thing it's like what does that have to do with survival but that's a form of femininity that was emergent in a very particular time and place or you have African tribes where they elongate the necks and things like that Victorian age women with the bustles and the big butts and the corsets it's like in the powdered wigs like what does that have to do with biological men and women do you see so the further we get from the realities and the necessities of nature the more we kind of get to be artistic and experimental I think and so there's just a lot of content on social media about how to be a man and it's like bench press your body weight uh grow a beard um earn money earn money get a gun learn to lasso a horse I mean it's like it's it's basically learn these skills and do these things and you will become a man and I don't change a tire well great I mean and again these are very useful skills but like well increasingly less so right like to generate I don't know I've never changed a tire and I've learned to change a tire because I did feel like I said I did get judgment from people it's like you don't know you're a man and you don't know how to change the tire and I was like yeah no one taught me man Chick-fil-A in a cell phone and and that's great you know but it is helpful to know how to change the tires so a lot of these skills and these behavioral sweets are useful for men and for women and they can increase your quality of life and you know open opportunities that might not otherwise exist for you for sure um but I do think that a lot of them can be more performative than essential and so I'm trying to cut through this partly I guess it's somewhat self-serving because I'm I'm not a traditionally masculine looking guy you know I'm not jacked I'm not I'm 511 you know so I'm not this towering presence I don't don't uh you know I don't ride a horse I don't know why I keep coming back to Cowboys but that's where my mind is at today maybe it's the drive here on Malibu oh yeah um so I'm not a traditionally masculine guy and you know I wasn't the quarterback of the football team or anything's like that but I think that essentially what it means to be a man is to have a spine and to have a pair and I Define that as spine is knowing who you are which is pretty much isomorphic for what you believe and to have the willingness to stand up and stop hiding and to say this is who I am this is what I believe and to be willing to accept the consequences of taking the risk of becoming someone women can do this too but we do know that women tend to be more cautious and conventional their safety in numbers men the greatest risk about being a man is like not taking a risk whereas women can kind of play it safe and there will more or less kind of be okay a lot of guys that they play it safe they just get lives of quiet desperation at best and the world passes them by at worst so they have to kind of take risks and a lot of guys are hiding and our culture certainly doesn't make it safe to come out of hiding if you have certain viewpoints that go against let's say the standard media narrative let's put it that way so people are becoming more timid and reticent to say this is who I am and this is what I believe but it's absolutely essential you have to stand up that's what a spine does it allows you to you know stand erect and once you stand up on this planet you cast a shadow because everything under the sun casts a shadow and so you have to deal with the consequences of taking the risk of becoming someone so that's part of it um the having a pair is more associated with billing being willing to like put it all on the felt which is like I am willing to sacrifice my livelihood my relationships my happiness even my life I mean that's what Warriors who are still largely massive men have are expected to do it's like I am willing to put it all on the line for what I believe and that is something that you can do uh physically like uh like a warrior or a soldier it's also something you can do intellectually and I think it's becoming increasingly important to do it intellectually in today's day and age that's where a lot of the real risks are being taken in the realm of ideas and that's where the new battle lines are being drawn and so that might look like splitting from what your community your is safe to say on social media sure because you deeply believe it and you're willing to suffer the social consequences of not fitting in or that's right and it's actually much harder to do that than people think I mean we just went through a period where we saw the social impacts of let's say obedience and Conformity like the shutdowns in this country were basically a Conformity study writ large it was fascinating to observe and people who didn't comply with the expectations of others even if they were family members even if they were friends they were ostracized they couldn't work they experienced a great deal of vitriol and animosity that took balls to be able to say Hey you know you're you're going to do what you're going to do this is what I believe and to risk losing even valued relationships and opportunities as a consequence of that the point that I have here is that there's a pain either way so there's the pain associated with others not understanding who you are and turning their back losing relationships losing money losing opportunities that's painful but there's also a pain associated with not doing all those things and I did a for example a um a consultation with a man a week or two ago he disagreed with a lot of the policies around the shutdowns and in his heart of hearts he didn't agree with them but he gave in and he eventually consented to doing certain things right and he came to me because his sense of self was somewhat shattered is that he saw how can I really believe that I have this courage that I have this spine that I have this strength when when the rubber hit the road I caved I folded and I did the thing that was convenient because I was afraid of losing my job or losing my relationships and he's now struggling with the consequence of the choices that he's made I think that probably a lot of people in today's day and age are actually doing that yeah how does one have a healthy measure of self I don't perhaps self-doubt isn't the right word but oh everybody says something I need to double triple check my my work on this one uh is there is there advice that you have for blending that because definitely you you want two things you want individual expression and social cohesion and there is uh most people do most things in a way that makes Society work and so if you stray wildly from that that seems to be a sign that you should uh at least if you decide to walk around your hands because you determine that's the best thing to do double check so I'm curious I agree with you on this particular covet thing if covet had been more like the Bubonic plague or just in that direction we would have a very diff you know it probably would have been appropriate to get masks and stay inside and shut down and all those different sorts of things but I suspect there would be a contingent of people that were just like no I'm gonna I'm gonna it's possible but I think we also were dealing with the Bubonic plague plague we wouldn't need mandates because it would become very probably obvious I mean the the foremost reason why anybody would undergo a medical intervention is for self-preservation and so if people saw oh my God there's dead littering streets here I don't think we'd have to pass a law and punish people for not complying I think people would be lining up let me ask them about Duty towards others because I can imagine both balls and spine leading to and I'm not saying that this is what you're encouraging I think mostly good things would come of this but towards like Psychopathic Behavior where you're exclusive of others so is there something else ball spine heart I know that that's not exclusive to men in that case but uh some degree of connection and compassion I hear what you're saying let's go back to your initial question which is um I think it requires a great deal of humility because I'm wrong like 20 times a day you know what I'm saying I I don't always get it right and if you and I disagree about something I'd think okay well that's interesting I mean Charlie seems like he's a sane intelligent guy I'm going to take that into consideration but if like the 99 people closest to me all disagree with me like I am going to be looking very very carefully at my decision I'll be analyzing my biases I'll be going to the research if there is any kind of empirical evidence to be reviewed I will be double and triple checking myself like the more that you stand in contrast to those around you the more humility you need to understand that most likely you're wrong but you're not always wrong like sometimes the individual is right and the crowd is wrong and it's actually a greater danger that the crowd is wrong than the individual is wrong right so you talk about how to see what you're saying most people are mostly doing things that are pro-social I would agree with that but we also I think generally have this um this opinion that vibrates through our society which is that things are just sort of going off the rails or that things are going to hell in a hand basket or however you want to put it so it might take individuals to stand up against the crowd if in terms of the majority we all sort of in our private Consciousness and relationships feel like things are moving not in a positive direction like someone has to stand up and say I don't want to participate in that anymore and maybe if some people do they will be and usually throughout history when people do that they tend to get martyred one way or the other but um enough of that could happen over time that collectively we can make a different decision and presumably that uh you know pair and uh spine would would be beneficial to women as well I imagine this is this I guess one of the things that I've struggled is I've been very interested in masculinity lately is I've been looking for a contemporary way that is exclusive of women of describing masculinity and inevitably what I find is that there's these wonderful ways of describing it like a spine and a pair but when you look at the metaphor that seems to be something that would be fantastic and I do see exemplified in some women perhaps I don't know if it's even less often so I guess it maybe it is in my in my limited experience I don't I don't know how to I even wonder sometimes if the word masculinity and femininity is a useful way of thinking about things I've tended towards just thinking about what does a mature human look like and shooting towards that because I can't find anything exclusive of women in in some of the definitions of masculinity yeah it's really tough because now we're getting into the exclusive feminine the hair splitting with respect to sex and gender like there's men and women there's males and females there's masculinity and femininity and those are not necessarily the same thing and we are talking about masculinity and men have both masculine and feminine elements and women have both masculine and feminine elements the most masculine people tend to be men and men in General on average are more masculine than women on average the most feminine people in the world are women and on average the women are more feminine than men do you see so it would look like two curves the Jordan Peterson style yeah exactly with significant amount of overlap in the around the medians right so it is possible for women to have a spine and to have a pair figuratively and they do exist absolutely that's why we were talking about masculinity and it seems like those curves are with a more abundant world that is not as you said faced with the scarcity of just life and nature they seem to be moving closer together whereas uh you'll see more emotional expressions in men that aren't just anger and you'll see women that are earning money which or you know providing for the family in a way and I'm not there there is a contingent of people that thinks that that is bad and I'm curious what your thoughts are I think a healthy human being has acknowledged and integrated his or her masculine and feminine elements and they're probably not going to be in 50 50 balance sure in the vast majority of people I don't think there's anything wrong with men being feminine or women being masculine like morally I don't think so it does create some predictable Downstream difficulties in the game of mating and dating though because a lot of Attraction is based on sexual polarity got it okay yeah because I think one of the things that uh not in this conversation but that I find uh frustrating is that uh being when people talk about masculinity there is an implied ought in there that one that a man ought to be this that a woman ought to be feminine and what you are seem to be suggesting is that that's not the case but you will have predictable outcomes in the heterosexual dating Market if you don't uh have one of these in in Spades absolutely like I don't think there's any moral obligation for men to be masculine or women to be feminine that said if a man signifies femininity it's going to be harder for him to find a heterosexual partner and if a woman signals strong masculinity it's going to be harder for her to find a heterosexual partner got it that's just the way it is got it got it that that I can get down for it I like that um in terms of we talked a lot about men uh I don't know if you said this or someone else but you mentioned men having this fear of not being enough what are women struggling with in the dating world is it being too much is it uh you did well I'll let you answer there's no good men yeah there's the same thing just flipped well it's a little bit different because the women aren't getting rejected like men are so they they're not as angry in general um a lot of bad things can happen to women in the game of mating and dating of course um but they don't seem to be as bitter um the difficulty that I think that women are experiencing is that on the one hand they are outperforming young men right they are earning more they are graduating college high school graduate schools at significantly higher rates they're doing they're doing pretty well relative to men in that same age demographic and they still retain elements of hypergamy which is that they wanted mate and date for gain basically they they don't want a handyman's dream they don't want a fixer-upper they want to be able to look up to a guy they want to feel um safe because he's stronger and taller they want to feel taken care of because he has an established lifestyle and resources that could generously provide for her and any potential children but that basically means that as women improve their station relative to men especially in the younger cohort where most of the dating occurs there's a smaller and smaller pool from which most women would even be willing to entertain the possibility of a relationship and the issue with that is those men by definition are doing better than those women so these like top 10 percent of men have absolutely incredible optionality and men and women's sexualities are different it's going to be harder for a man who has incredible sexual opportunity to forego that for a committed exclusive relationship then vice versa so what this means is that as women do better and better relative to men there are smaller and smaller pool of men from which they're going to select in a proportion a non-significant proportion of those men have no intention of giving up their Heyday right now which means that the men that women most want things from are the least likely to give it to them yeah and that's a really tough sell women don't want to hear that because what they hear is well you just want me to settle for somebody that's that I don't want yeah yeah and it's like I get you yeah that's I wouldn't want to do that either but we're coming up against something's got to give and I think that what's interesting is that women are still waiting for the offer we didn't talk about this on camera yet right women still waiting for the offer this was earlier you know I don't know if it was on camera but go ahead women are still waiting for the offer which is anything from you up to yeah yeah can I buy you a drink sometime to will you marry me and what's interesting is that pretty much every other traditionally gendered role in the game of mating and dating has been challenged in post-modernity except this and there's I don't think any essential reason why a woman who was doing very very well couldn't propose marriage to a guy and say hey I'll take care of you for the rest of your life but women for whatever reason don't want that they don't want to make the offer they're still waiting for the offer they're not asking men out on dates they don't want to take care of they're not getting down on one knee yeah and offering that life Financial safety and sure you make the home and it's like I like I like modernity but I also yeah I don't want to give up some of these other things too and and that's that's tough and a lot of guys I think understandably see that as a kind of double standard hypocrisy and you know if you're doing better but you're not willing to share it and you're still waiting for us but you're going to reject me because I have less I'm in a double bind as a guy why would I even try I'm just going to save myself the pain of an inevitable rejection yeah and it sounds like women the type of things that women are attracted to giving their independent rise relative to men in their own age range is doomed to make them unhappy most of the time except for the one girl out of many who you know does secure the monogamous relationship with that guy I have a really exciting episode that I've just recorded hasn't been published yet it's called the way it all ends where I play the chess out 20 moves and I talk about the five possible ways that the game of mating and dating can end for women and they cover all of the possible mutually exclusive outcomes and I assign certain let's say odds ratios or probabilities to each one of those outcomes uh just in brief it's that again most women like let's say that the top eighty percent of women are actually competing for the top 10 percent of men because of the hypergamous tendencies that we just discussed um but that also means that the intersexual competition is astounding yeah and those men are loath to give up their optionality so there's a lot of issues there but the dream is that um she keeps her standards very high she beats out the intersexual competition and secures the higher value the high value man that's the dream amazing one outcome yeah second outcome is she lowers some of her standards in order to beat out the intersexual competition to secure the higher value man now she's one of maybe a couple of girlfriends for a second well potentially because these higher value men they might be able to provide for you materially but they might not offer let's say exclusivity they might not offer legal marriage and things like that whereas a lower status man might because he needs to offer more to secure the same sexual opportunity relative to the higher status intersexual competition then there's the women who lower their stand don't lower their standards don't beat out the intersexual competition and settle for a lower value man there's the women who lower their standards still don't beat out the intersexual competition and still settle for a lower value man and then there's the women who decide they can't secure and they won't settle and so they end up unpartnered and there are different odds ratios with respect to all five of those outcomes and only one of those outcomes is very desirable yeah and I think that's about one percent yeah so you've got by far the least likely outcome so you've got 90 according to your your math you've got 99 percent of women who are going to have sub they're not they're going to be disappointed with their life relative to their expectation yeah well I mean have you met people people are disappointing I have an episode about that so everyone settles to some degree or another and we have to learn how to be disappointed in ways that we can live with and it's again for each person to decide for him or herself what they're willing to be disappointed in not for me or for culture or for anybody else to understand Define that for somebody else but yeah we all are disappointed by each other that's part of and I disappoint other people I'm sure it's just part of Being Human yeah gosh I'm stubborn I uh I don't I don't like stopping there when I get disappointed I go I will find a way too too well never no I'm kidding but no acceptance is one way and to find uh yeah Beauty in the in the quote unquote limitation and just with with what you have but when I think of uh being with someone who has settled for me and is not thrilled with me or it's a lot of problems yeah I I can't I can't stomach that so I don't think that that's uh I don't think that's happening in my life in my current relationship but yeah when there's there's so many ways that relationships can go wrong and I am sure uh I I don't want any of them oh absolutely it's very very hard to have a successful harmonious loving relationship it's extremely uh valuable right of those five outcomes the one that I think is most common that will affect about 50 of women is outcome three which is they keep their standards high they don't beat out the intersexual competition and settle for the lower value man what this means is that most women end up with the relationship they want but not necessarily with the man that they would prefer that's why Chris Rock said that the number one reason your woman is always mad at you is because you weren't her first choice um and it does create a lot of difficulties in relationships so yeah and so you think that there will be half of relationships that are like that that you know when things get tough maybe she shoots a text to an old hey you know I was thinking about you and yeah that's a mixed mating strategy that's long been identified by evolutionary Psychiatry psychologists um women can uh they seek out different things from different men and this goes by many names on the internet but they might seek out genetics from an alpha and provision and resources from a more stable beta and do you you know I've I got to talk you know Chris Williamson's Channel he uh he's talking to an evolutionary psychologist who is trying to debunk a lot of that he was one of the guys who started calling out of favor the mixed mating strategy yeah yeah and so I don't know enough about it to dive into it but I know that I was chatting with him and he said he went in some of his research that he's finding that that is not uh that it is in fact falling out of favor and that some of the um views that women just want you know one seed and then some other guy like they would really really like that one percent that's what they're absolutely aimed at and now with social media it seems like it's tantalizing like you can see it but you can't touch it and it seems like we should be able to all get those things with the Advent of Technology like given the Infinity of options and um the ways that we can all connect I should be able to find somebody who's like a perfect match for me she's out there or he's out there and it's just a matter of time before we find each other um I think that is one of the opportunities of the Modern Age I don't want to go back to the days where there was three women in the village and two of them were old and I guess I'm with you for the next 70 years I like having options but we can get into a the illusion of infinite optionality which can also degrade the dating experience for both men and women yeah one thing you know I'm trying to like avoid this circumstance in my head and one thing that seems to to um potentially break it would be if you sure if you line everyone up on all these spectrums uh height finances muscularity uh desirability and place them of course women are going to want numbers 98 98 99 and 100 they're all going to want those guys sure but if uh this is I guess it's more romantic but I think there's still something to it if there is a real truth of compatibility where you know guy number 80 or guy number 65 is actually better than guy number 95 for that woman given that they both like hiking and that they both want three kids and that they both want X Y and Z that you can have a a much higher percentage of happy staple relationships than if you presume that all people want is to optimize their finances or uh height or absolutely yeah absolutely because a lot of those things that people sort for especially on the apps are really superficial both men and women and they have little to nothing to do with any kind of predictable relationship success and so this seems like the solution right here I just want to flag this because go please continue and um any relationship success I think that a lot of these things are actually related to status and status is important in the game of mating and dating but it's like a flex to have a boyfriend who's 6'3 and makes seven figures and has a washboard AB but what does that have to do with being kind what does that have to do with listening what does that have to do with emotional intimacy and connection what does that have to do with shared values sometimes the really beautiful men and women are completely insufferable sometimes they haven't developed even basic dimensions of their personality because they've you 've enjoyed optionality Handover fists since they've hit puberty basically so they're kind of underdeveloped imps a lot of them it's very difficult to have a connection with somebody who's not really there even if they look perfect on the outside and but here's the thing when I've said this on the channel you kind of have to have that experience yourself like as a guy you got a day to 10 yeah and realize that oh it's not actually all it's cracked up to be because until you do that you're going to think I'm full of yeah you'll be like oh that sounds nice or Ryan I better that's a that's a bad problem to have dating a Brazilian lingerie model and it's like oh yeah be careful what you wish for yeah yeah that's that's I don't know that everybody will have that experience but that was my experience which is some of the most uh conventionally beautiful women that I was with were not the women that I most enjoyed being with and it was interesting to watch myself feel almost full in a way of like the high fives and oh my gosh and the looks and the stairs but then very quickly um I didn't feel good about the relationship and it you know these were sometimes shorter sometimes longer but it was uh I'm glad for those experiences and I do think I wish that people understood at a deeper level that I I that is not what I will be aiming at for the rest of my life it is an ego boost yeah when you walk in to a room with a dime piece on your arm and everyone's looking at you and you know that you're with the best looking woman at one of these events it is a huge confidence boost but it does cater to the ego and the ego is a suffocating tiny room in which to live personally and interpersonally so and most the time you're not going to be at one of these events where you get that confidence Rush most of the time you're going to be behind the scenes with this person he might spend three hours getting ready and you understand um you know where their intentions are things might not gel I mean everybody is different but it's it's not the things that I sort for these days I have two suggestions for both men and women about dating on my channel for guys it's find your ugly duckling because we have to admit that physical attractiveness is hugely important to men but what I found like I just said is that sometimes when women Blossom too early they don't always cultivate other dimensions of their personality so I like to look for women who maybe came into their own after college maybe in their early 20s that's where they started to kind of fluoresce into their beauty but during that time they had their heads down they focused on their studies they actually have a an interesting personality they have hobbies and friends and now they've maybe they'll never be the lingerie supermodel but they're attractive enough to generate my sexual interest and there's enough to them inside to keep me sustainably interested because I get bored real easy man you know I like to talk about all kinds of things I'm curious about everything I like to travel I like to learn I like to connect I talk to people for a living you know if I can't talk to a person that I'm in a relationship with that would be really hard I don't care how much of a stud you are most of your relationship you're going to be talking as opposed to anything else yeah yeah for women I suggest that they find their Dark Horse because the issue is that too many women are just hanging out the Widow at the Winner's Circle and trying to pick these top 10 guys who have already established themselves and these guys have infinite optionality and every woman needs to give that long hard talk to the woman in the mirror and say could I beat out 99 other really beautiful women for this one particular person By definition most of them will not that is not a good strategy because they also spend the best years of their lives from a sexual Marketplace perspective chasing after men who probably will never give them what they're looking for and that puts them behind the curve when the game changes at 30. I keep bringing up 30 because 30 is the moment at which the average man's sexual Marketplace value exceeds the average woman sexual Marketplace value for the very first time and so the game completely Alters that's why most marriages happen at 29 it's the last possible moment where a woman typically enjoys a Marketplace advantage over a man and so she's securing a lifetime relationship at that Peak which is actually a really smart thing to do sometimes women get a wrap for being irrational but if you look at how they actually made in date you couldn't say that like they're very rational so let me just put a pin in this which is to look for the Dark Horse women need to kind of be Savvy investors they need to kind of like learn how to pick them they need to be able to exercise appropriate discernment with respect to which men are likely to go the distance there is a risk there but my argument is that it's a smaller risk than hanging out the Winner's Circle where you're most likely not going to be the one who's picked so sometimes we've been on the wrong pony that's okay if you start in your early 20s you have a few races that you can you can take to the to the Winner's Circle you know what I'm saying and um to to figure out all of those successful men they weren't always those successful men and they probably were guys who didn't have a lot of optionality and that's why they worked so hard to generate the success that they do that's pretty much why guys like you were mentioning do anything they sublimate their sexual drive into achievement making stuff happen yeah I I can't help maybe I'm a hopeless romantic I don't think I am in that I I don't disagree with that but I guess what is my feeling that that presumes that the axes on which people are choosing is the you know Winner's Circle of financial success handsomeness Etc and for women it's uh Beauty which I I don't deny are very important I want a beautiful person that I'm attracted to my experience though is that there are deeper emotions that people are often trying to feel when they sort for finances or beauty or whatever so if they're sorting for finances they want to feel safe and secure and uh taken care of and if they're sorry for beauty perhaps they're looking for a deep sexual connection or something like that and those first things might be correlated but not causal to the deeper desires that's been my experience at least and um I the the framework that seems at least the one that I want to take onward with me is rather than looking for an ugly duckling or something like that to just be as uh deeply me as I can and polarize for the things that will be a fantastic match for me uh holding attraction as a necessary component that I need to feel but not as a spectrum underwear like 10 is better than nine is better than eight it's like look if I'm if I'm drawn to you and we've got chemistry uh it seems better than me trying to uh hold hold that one axis in such high regard I suppose I think a lot of what you're saying is true I think that a lot of these things that people filter for are proxies for other things that can be secured in other ways absolutely um and sometimes and maybe even most people can stick with that connection if they find it I find that in the real world it does create a liability like when I was 30 and I was unmarried I thought that I was behind the curve now I'm 40 and half the people who were married then are divorced yes the whole idea about being ahead and behind is ridiculous anyway everyone's on their own path but it does feel that way sometimes to certain people and why did those people break up yeah I mean it's hard to know what a relationship feels like from the inside but I do think that it can be difficult because people are people if over time a man loses or a woman loses sexual attraction for their partner that creates a significant liability for that relationship can people stay faithful and say Hey you know this Dimension has fallen away but I'm going to prioritize the emotional connection absolutely they can do they often not yes I also think that for better for worse our culture is becoming increasingly narcissistic where they prioritize The Superficial dimensionalities of appearance and status and things like that and generally people need to have those narcissistic fantasies crumble they call it narcissistic collapse it's usually a very painful experience the individual involved and it usually comes through some sort of profound disappointment and the opportunity there is that they can then build back on firmer ground on a real personality as opposed to a fabricated one which they had to develop because it was the best possible strategy that was on hand to them in their families of origin during their childhood yeah narcissists are just really really terrified children so you do you subscribe to the belief that a lot of these personality disorders are our childhood coping mechanisms whether it's borderline or NPD or I don't know if it's so called NPD uh you still call MPD yeah um absolutely personality disorders almost always have their origins in childhood I don't think that you could be like a healthy secure individual and become disordered personality wise as an adult it's so difficult because personality is like the water that the fish swim in and that's why they can be so difficult to recognize in yourself because personality believes that it is this healthy normal standard of action in the universe so one of the most common Universal attributes of personality disorders is externalization which is everyone else is the problem right I'm normal because that's how I experience myself I don't know any different right who who really has an experience of a different personality right very few people so of course you're going to normalize your own experience and it takes some time sometimes longer than other people might wish before they say oh I'm actually the common denominator in all of these difficult or failed relationships maybe I do have some contribution to this issue generally some kind of real injury has to occur where there are illusions of let's say omnipotence or omniscience or like infinite attraction Beauty gets shattered and because that's who they identified with that was um that's the um that's the rampart that they built around the wounded scared child within everything kind of falls down and it feels like a I mean from folks that have gone through it it feels like death I mean it is an ego death yeah and underneath is is just a child who probably was rewarded for certain ways of relating and it created this unintentional reinforcement schedule that just went off the rails as it was implemented year after year in early childhood experiences sure well this this maybe takes us close to Full Circle here so one of the things when I think about um not you but when people talk about masculinity is they're afraid that Modern Men are being made soft and I know what they're pointing to I know what they're pointing to this victim mentality that sure is not healthy and is a way of acquiring power and it's not healthy for women either yeah for anyone yeah they often conflate that with what you're describing which is the collapse of a Persona and the finding of the wound within which is a very emotional experience sometimes it can be you know I've gone through it on different plant medicines and all different kinds of things like that and I found that to be uh like so good for me and so good for the people around me and better for the world and I think that they're seems to be confusion for men or about masculinity about on the one hand this victim mentality that is just like this you know please look at me everybody and that life is too hard and on the other hand this collapse of the the Persona that reveals something wounded and then deeper than that true self whatever so I say that you can respond to that but also I think this is a good uh topic for us to begin to wrap on which is your more spiritual beliefs I I hear some of that underlining your concept of almost everything that we've discussed today so I'm curious so to talk about the victim mentality it's a really people should be very cautious about assuming the victim posture people can be victimized I think that if you're not an adult you probably have a non-zero contribution to that victimization but it could be like 99 you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time that can happen even so it's helpful to focus on the one percent that you may have contributed to the situation so that you don't get re-victimized in the future folks who um don't move in the direction of account of self-accountability tend to repeat the victimization in different relationships in a different places over time they haven't really learned their lesson as it were um I think that sometimes it's important to signify that victimization has occurred sort of like the soccer players of the World Cup you know they have to make a show that they've been touched or that they've been tripped to attract attention to something that might be Salient to the play of the game right and so I think that if we're talking about modern men's plight more generally a lot of these guys who are being criticized for assuming a victim posture they do have a point like our society is really bad at approaching the idea that men have it hard and it's like if you go that route in the very next breath you also have to add oh but women have it hard too and it's like we can't just focus on men's issues independent of how they might impact women's issues and in fact when socially we talk about improving men one of the rationales for doing so is that it's good for women which you did just a few you know minutes ago it's not a it's not wrong it's not bad but why can't men's issues be appreciated and addressed in and of themselves why do we have to uh relate them to the female experience I think that's interesting um so I think that men just like the soccer players they might be clutching their knees and rolling around the ground to attract attention to an issue but if the whistle doesn't get blown you have to get up and start running again you know what I'm saying so there is sometimes more than a grain of Truth to a lot of what men are complaining about in today's day and age but complaining doesn't really get a lot of sympathy it can attract attention but if play continues we have to get up if we can and keep going no one can evolve spiritually no one can move forward in their personality development from the place of a victim it's not possible it's through radical acceptance that a person sort of takes accountability and responsibility for his or her own life and says I'm in a position to change things that's where the word responsible comes from it's like I'm able to respond to this situation I'm able to respond to my pain because no one else can I'm a therapist I can't take away somebody else's pain even if I wanted to and I don't necessarily want to I think that can be a dangerous thing to do because pain is an excellent teacher um only the person in pain is responsible because only that person can change either internally or externally to get out of that pain it's not something that anybody else can can do from the outside in so that's what I mean about taking responsibility for one's own uh hurts from one's own pain or even one's own victimization it's to put yourself in back in the seat of agency a victim is always me things happen to me they're never the agent it's never I and that's a disempowering place to be me as an object I is a subject so there might be a point to people need to take a knee sometimes and stay on the ground catch their breath but they also need to get back up and the way they stand back up is by saying I I choose to stand back up um the uh I again agree with all that interestingly one of the man there's there's Peril on both sides always one of the things that I've discovered is that I had a very heavy leaning on eye in that in the codependent enmeshment style relationships and uh it has been not I don't know that it's victim but to recognize other people's contributions has allowed me to you know separate end relationships that sort of thing that I was always I could fix this I can do this I created this I did that and I don't think that contradicts anything that you just said no we can call it pathological responsibility yeah it's an inappropriate Assumption of responsibility yes and it was because I uh had a very immature understanding he's like well if I take responsibility it's it's a control mechanism I control everything and there is has to be some acceptance of uh there's a whole world outside of me there's there's independent people I do not control everything and when they react a certain way I have to investigate you know might have caused this triggered this in some way but uh there is a limit to my ability to take responsibility for everything on the planet absolutely and that inappropriate application of responsibility can come out in a number of different ways for some folks it's the way of bartering into a relationship that they don't feel like they would be entitled to otherwise it's like you might not like me but I will provide this service for you I don't trust that just in and of myself you would feel attracted so I'm going to come in and like make your life better and assume responsibility and and control where it might not be required or asked for but it's also a almost inevitable strategy when dealing with um difficult families of origin children are inherently narcissistic they can only see things from their perspective they cannot really empathize with anyone else because perspective taking requires a cognitive flexibility that developmentally only occurs later on in life and when when something happens when Mommy is upset or daddy is angry it's actually more threatening for the child to believe that that's a flaw in the parent given the child's dependence on the parent it's like if they conceptualize themselves as just an innocent object here to mommy and daddy's inappropriate behavior they're screwed it's like I need this people to live and I can't trust them so no child does that because well no child can do that developmentally but instead what they say is well I'm the problem I've done I'm the bad boy I'm the one who made mommy cry or made daddy scream and it's a way of like assuming control over a situation that otherwise might be completely intolerable to the child and that's actually that could be the healthiest thing that kid could do so the thing about dysfunction is it's mostly the word function yeah yeah so dysfunction works that's why it's here that's why it's still around years later and that might have been the most functional adaptive response to that child in that family ecosystem the issue is that you know you and I are the hypothetical child no longer a boy you know we're we've grown up we've fled the coop but you can take the boy out of the house but you can't always take the house out of the boy as it were so part of the opportunity in a therapeutic relationship is to identify these strategies these ways of being that actually served a really helpful important function at a certain time and place to not vilify them to not pass judgment on who we are as a consequence of needing those things in order to survive either physically or emotionally and to let them go and to experiment with new ways of being that might be more appropriate to you know being an adult beautiful beautiful and so now that's fine with this you're spiritual beliefs um if you if you're comfortable sure I would love to understand what they are and because I think that might ground everything that I just we got to talk about yeah it's it's um It's Complicated let's put it that way I have been interested in spirituality from a very young age I remember my grandmother gave me a book of saints and when I was a boy and I wanted to be a saint when I grew up I walked around with this big old cross and I you know made a show of being holy and it was very silly back then but I lived in a Buddhist Monastery in China for several months I studied um Qigong and Zen very in-depth I have I went to a Jewish private school for most of my elementary and middle school education so I still read Hebrew I'm very familiar with the Old Testament and Judaica I have also been confirmed I've I've gone to church a lot personal follower of Jesus I've gone down and explored shamanistic experiences in in the Amazon rainforest and Beyond I'm interested in like a maybe a Williams James approach to spirituality the are you familiar he wrote the varieties of religious experience and one of his primary Theses was that there was a like a throbbing fundamental beat that exists through all manifestations of religion or spirituality on this planet and that's the real core of spirituality so I'm not a big fan of Dogma I understand that it might have its time in its place because we're not always right we need to often surrender to something greater than ourselves to find a teacher to find a mentor because we don't know anything when we show up most of us right um so it is important to have the humility to surrender to a structure um but also to understand how that could be culturally bound and potentially inappropriate to the individual and restrictive I think that there is a narcissism to the modern day application of spirituality which is that's like a religion of one so it's like I'm the pope and I'm infallible and like the way I do it is right and I don't need to do this because I'm cherry picking the things about this that I like and the things about this that I don't and I think that's dangerous um most religions it's religion is kind of a bad word especially in California but most religions um get it right in the sense that you need a community within which to practice what you preach on some level that's why in the Buddhist communities they have the Sangha that's one of the three principles of Spiritual Development you need to have the opportunity to actually put into practice new ways of being a new ways of relating to each other and I think it's too easy when you have a religion of one to kind of let yourself off that hook you can have this like satisfying internal experience that could be very valuable that could be very profound and ineffable but if it doesn't translate into let's say um a more elevated way of moving through the world and dealing with others I think it's spiritual masturbation and what have you found is that core heartbeat and it might be tough to put into words but I'm what I've found is that it's very important to have a felt experience with a higher power a lot of why people are falling away from religion among many other things is that it seems like an antiquated system of rituals I go through it's almost superstitious I don't know why we do these things I know that we do them if we're Catholics or we're Jews or whatever um and I I feel a sense of guilt if I was raised in that culture if I don't do those things but I don't I don't feel I don't have that I don't have a felt connection with the divine and I do think that is possible for human beings to have and I think that's the core of all it should be the core of all religion in all spirituality I think as soon as you get people in a certain time in place practicing a spirituality you kind of inevitably develop a religion a religion is just a systematized culturally bound practice of spirituality so it's kind of unavoidable that things begin to crystallize in certain ways and it's important to be able to separate the things that are let's say more essentially spiritual from the time and the place in which that practice got crystallized and so ideally it sounds like each whether it's religion spiritual definition that each individual would have a felt personal experience not and they would not be you know while you might sit in a church it's not that from the pulpit down to you and you just have to cognitively believe and then enact these things you need to not need to the whole point is yeah is the experience yeah yeah when you believe in things you don't understand that's Superstition right Stevie Wonder said that religion should not be a cognitive thing theology is very interesting I'd love I'm really interested in theology um I like to read all kinds of texts from all sorts of traditions but that's not the core of spirituality and shouldn't be the core of religion either you have to have that felt experience and it's usually uh it's a trans personal or Transcendent experience which is you have an experience of yourself mediated through the relationship with the Divine that is just far more expansive far more beautiful far more real than anything that you have previously known about yourself or that was possible within the limited bandwidth of reality that you normally traffic in and then when you do that a lot of I mean at least this is what I found that some of the virtues that were practiced out of good socialization like you say thank you be grateful do this nice thing for your sister which were um they weren't coming from a place of I want to share my toy all right you know this feels so wonderful once I share his toys having uh all of many of those trite things it is better to give than to receive uh those those things that I'd heard as a kid and what this is insane I'll do it because you're making me sure I have found uh deep truth in in a lot of those things as I have felt you know something approximating when it sounds like you're experiencing many of those things are true it is better to give and to receive and that's to bring It full circle related to the game of mating and dating as well one of the principles that I have is there's something called the balance of Attraction which is that it's not possible for two people to like each other exactly the same amount which means that there's always going to be an attraction in Balance I call this person who like to say the person more the adorer and the person who likes it the person less the adored culturally we think that everyone wants to be the adored I'm up on the throne everyone's worshiping me or giving me the the treats of uh Society but almost everybody actually wants to be the adorer because the adore is the one who gets to have the emotional experience the adore is the one who gets to be on tenter hooks waiting for the phone call who gets to have the butterflies in anticipation of the date who gets to be crestfallen when the date gets canceled and Overjoyed when they show up unexpected most people want the emotional component to relationships and part of the cost of enjoying that is that they're The Giver it's hard to take like it's actually a sacrifice that most people have to make in order to create the pretext forgiving to be possible do you think that it's possible to have I mean maybe not at every moment but uh two adores in a relationship two people who adore well sure that's the um old romantic comic Trope where you get the lovers and they say I love you more no I love you more knows daily I love you more they're competing to be the bigger adorer and you can the the balance of Attraction shifts all the time it shifts moment to moment through interactions the polarity can shift the Gap can shift without the polarity changing generally over time people settle into kind of Habitual ways of relating to each other and they tend not to change until something happens um but yes those can fluctuate and people can take turns um but it that has the liability of not really feeling organic or natural um I think people tend to find polarity here I think it's hard for two adorers to be together and even harder for two adored to be together I think generally in a relationship there's one person who's more comfortable being the adored and one person who's more comfortable being the adore and that's kind of where they settle awesome so uh not the people don't know this at this point but where can they find you if they want to hear more of this stuff we talked about a lot of the stuff that I've seen in some of your videos oh sure yeah my YouTube channel is called psych hacks so you can look that up I think I have about 600 episodes on the channel now you can also go to my website orionterabandsid.com I won't spell it maybe we can put the pinned description for this episode you can get more information about uh consultations and getting in touch with me for other things as well and you do consultations you'd mentioned before I do I love my consultations they're an unexpected perk of my small little celebrity that's awesome well if you guys enjoyed this if you want to do a consultation here's your guy you can go to his website and check them out thank you guys we'll see you the next time peace [Music] thank you

Channel: Dropping In Podcast

Views: 267,381

Keywords: Charlie and Ben, Charlie and Ben Podcast, The Charlie and Ben Podcast, The Charlie and Ben Show, Charisma On Command podcast, charlie and ben episode, republican, democrat, conservative, liberal, left, right, masculine, politics, jordan peterson, logic, reason, facts, relationship, business, stress, philosophy, confidence, alpha male, sigma male, dating, pickup, masculinity, social media, psychedelic, enlightenment, epistemology, reality, spiritual, meditation

Id: NhGG3iWWmUI

Length: 121min 5sec (7265 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023