Transcription
Just, I really want to just close off on the point about the world that men find themselves in before we move to the world that women find themselves in and then try and tackle some of those problems. So, um, they're lost in terms of understanding what masculinity is. We know that there's been, they're finding it harder to find dates. Um, they're finding it harder to have sort of sexual relationships. Is there anything else that I need to understand about the the man in the current social climate?
Well, I think the the problem for the vast majority of men, especially young men, is their invisibility. Most men are wallpaper. And the world does not treat men very well when they want nothing from them. I talk about that in the very first pages of the book that to understand why some people are rich in relationship opportunities, whether they're romantic, professional, friendship, etc. and other people are not. It's not correct to say that it's the good people who have relationship opportunities or the virtuous people. It's the people that other people want things from that have relationship opportunities. If you have more of what other people want more, you are going to have relationship opportunities throughout your lifespan.
And that's very difficult because imagine being an 18-year-old man. You have no money and you've never had money. You may not have a job. You may never have had a job. So, you have no skills. You're kind of invisible to women because you don't have yet anything that women might find conducive for a long-term relationship. If you're cute, they might hook up with you. But if you're not even that, I mean, why waste their opportunity? Why waste their time when there are other more attractive options available? And you're also kind of useless to most men because you don't yet have the skills and the experience to be a good team player. Like I wouldn't want you on my squad if you've never been out in the field. You're going to be a liability. You know what I'm saying? I don't have to carry your ass off the field.
So you can't be here either. And that creates a obviously the catch 22, which is well, where am I going to get the experience if no one gives me a shot? It's actually very difficult to be a young man. You don't have what either women or more experienced men want or need and you're generally very disposable. And unfortunately, we've seen that. I mean, young men have a very high mortality rate in all kinds of ways. They were shipped off to wars. You talked about the suicide epidemic among older men. Well, it's also very high among adolescent boys as well. It's hard to be a young man.
I remember one of my guests telling me that they about a study where they analyzed the suicide letters of men and they looked at the words used versus the words used in female suicide letters and the t the most sort of frequent sentiment amongst those letters was about feeling worthless, feeling like you weren't needed. And the the guest on the podcast concluded that really what we needed to find a way to is to send a message to men that you are needed. And it's a strange thing to say, but it but it correlates perfectly to what you were saying.
The message sounds good, but it would be better to actually have opportunities to be needed.
Yeah.
Than to be told that you are needed and that you are valued and that you are cared for. That's a nice emotional sentiment that doesn't really keep the demons away at night.
People need to feel connected to other people. They need to feel like they have a place in the world. And it can take quite some time to discover that. What I've dis one of the traps that I fell into when I was a young man is I thought that I could figure that out by just sort of like noodling it out alone in my room. Like I I was trying to figure out what I wanted my life to be about, what the purpose of my life was going to be before I even left the house. And I wasted a lot of time in fruitless rumination that way. It's much better to discover your purpose in life by moving through the world and examining your choices in retrospect. It's like you only really get to discover who you are by examining and understanding your revealed preferences based on your behavior as you move through the world. It's very easy to think of yourself in all kinds of ways when you're untested, when you're untried, when you're in the morally ambiguous situations in which human beings find themselves as they navigate reality.
Are you saying that the evidence you're looking for or the answers you're looking for come from taking action?
Absolutely. They don't come from thinking it out. They often don't come from therapy. And that might sound weird coming from a therapist, but I do think that we live in a very overly therapized culture with the understanding that therapy is somewhat of a panacea in that it should be able to cure all that ails you. And I don't think that that's true. Therapy is very good for certain problems and it's useless for others.
What about women? What are the challenges that are a woman faces in the modern world because of all these sort of macro changes that have taken place?
Well, the main problem that I see women encountering, at least in my consultative practice, is they have trouble finding the men that they want to have long-term relationships with. Uh almost every consultation I've done with a woman has been around how do I get a man to marry me? And that's also kind of strange because I would think 80 100 years ago that was something that that girl was being prepared for since she was a very young person by her mother and her grandmother and her aunts and her female relatives with whom she probably lived in close consultation. and she never would have gotten to the age of 30 where this would be an open question still.
And who are you? What's your sort of if I if I looked at your CV, you know, you talked about your consultative practice. What is the experiences you've had and the education you've had that have brought you to this point where you've written this book about relationships and those dynamics? What is your sort of professional personal experience?
Well, professionally, I'm a psychologist. I'm licensed in the state of California. So, I went to grad school and got a doctorate in psychology. I had all kinds of training experiences while I was moving through that. I worked at a chemical dependency clinic for two years. I worked with cancer patients and their caregivers in a health psychology setting for a couple years. I worked with significant dysfunction in a community mental health center in San Francisco for a while. I worked in outpatient with severe personality disorders. So that was all part of my training. And then when I started my private practice, I began to focus on men's mental health. And for a long time when I was a therapist, I worked exclusively with men. That's changed a little bit now that uh I have a kind of a larger platform on which to reach reach people. Um, but that's sort of been my professional experience.
So in your private practice, when people come to you, what what are men most frequently coming to you with in terms of the problem they come with versus what women come to you with a problem with?
Well, in general, it's either money or women for men.
Oh, really?
Yeah. And this is nothing new. Like Sigman Freud said a long time ago that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to teach people how to work and how to love. That's it. If you can learn how to work and love, you can be a fairly functional human being in society and have a satisfying life. And he also said that the goal of therapy was not to cure suffering per se which might be inseparable from the human experience but to free human beings from neurotic unnecessary suffering so that they are better equipped to meet the necessary suffering and pain of being alive. So he had I think a more attenuated vision for what therapy could do. So it's either money work or women love. And what I found is that it's either one or the other. I often did consultations with guys who were super successful professionally. They were making millions, but they were in failed marriage after failed marriage or they couldn't for the life of them get laid, even if they were having parties with models on their super yachts. You know what I'm saying?
By the same token, there are there are fewer of them because they couldn't afford my out-of- pocket rate. But it's like there were some men who were just absolutely cleaning up. Like I've done some consultations. I had some some patients, young men who were just like plowing through San Francisco. I mean, they had sexual success in a way that most men would just fantasize about, but they had a really hard time getting their money straight, their career. Um, they were super stressed out. they had anxiety disorders, things like that. Which is actually fairly ironic because what I found is if it works in one domain, it generally works in the other.
Interesting. So, if I get my work right, then I'll get my love right.
If it works in business, it often works with women.
What do you mean? Sorry.
Well, think about it this way. Men want sex and they want relationships from women. Women don't go around giving those things out to men just because they want them. Okay. So, what's the analogous problem in the professional arena, which is, I want money. Let's say you're a salesman. I want money. I have this product or I have this service. I want people to hire me. I want people to buy it. Well, people aren't just going around with their wallets out saying, "Who's going to take my money?" You know what I'm saying?
So, you have to find a way to get what you want from the people that you want it from. And a lot of the strategies that work in business to do that will work in the sexual marketplace as well.
Interesting. That's um that's that's very very true because I I think I told you before we started recording when I was I don't know 18, there was this pickup artistry book sent to my house. I think my brother my older brother had ordered but he ordered it to the wrong address cuz he had moved out to university. So he said just keep it.
Lucky accident for you.
Yeah. Yeah. And I sat there and I read it cover to cover without moving. And actually much of the principles I learned about pickup artistry, about attraction, about being a highv value male are actually things that I took into business when it comes to negotiation, sales, persuasion and all those things. So, I do see that translation.
Well, another thing is that often when I say that because people have all kinds of associations with pickup, they think it's kind of sleazy and it's especially for guys who
couldn't get laid otherwise and so they have to use manipulative tactics to get what they want. It's like, okay, well, yeah, welcome to advertising, right?
Yeah.
So, that's one side of it. They think that those strategies just work to get laid or to have casual sexual relationships. No, they often also work in long-term relationships. Not only because generally the pathway to a long-term relationship is through a more casual arrangement. Usually people date and hang out and sleep together for some weeks, some months before they define the relationship, right? So they kind of for better or for worse have to go through that proving ground before they get to here. Right? But like it's really important for long-term relationships. It's one of the principles for long-term success is complimentarity of skill sets. It's like if you're a startup founder, you want somebody who can do very well the things that you cannot do.
Like having two CEOs is just a recipe for competition, struggle and strife, right?
Yeah.
So you need people with complimentary skill sets in order to go the distance.
In my experience, 90% of successful relationships are based on selection. If you can understand yourself, accurate self-nowledge, and you get better at discerning other people, you can have satisfying relationships with lots of different human beings.
We're going to get into figuring out how you do that. But I but on the point I asked you there, I said, "What do men come to you with in terms of problem sets?" And you said money
and women ideally sort of work working women, work in love.
So what do women come to you? They want to get married.
So, they've just come to you with the love problems.
Yeah. I mean, they do that now because I I talk about lots of things on my channel, but by far the most successful videos are the ones about interexual dynamics. And so, that's kind of what I'm known for. And so, there is a bit of a selection bias there is the most popular videos are me talking about men and women. And so, increasingly men and women come to me about their relationship issues, right?
So, that makes sense. But women use therapy for all kinds of different reasons, right? We know that women are by far bigger consumers of therapeutic services in particular, like actually going to therapy and also more generally like they make up the lion share of consumers for just self-help material in general. Like there's a big market for that kind of self- betterment and self-improvement in the female marketplace. And we also know that about 85% of mental health practitioners are women. Like when I was in my training, I think I was one of three people in my cohort that were men. Uh I would interview at some placements where there weren't any men at all on the staff whatsoever. And just like I can appreciate that women might not feel entirely comfortable going to a man with certain of their issues, I know for sure that there's plenty of men who wouldn't feel comfortable going to a woman about some of their concerns. So when they talk about why you often hear it's usually women, they're dissatisfied with men's lack of interest in going to therapy. men would literally want to refurbish a train then go to therapy and talk about their feelings. Well, it's partly it's because there aren't a lot of male practitioners. And I think what's good for men isn't always what's good for women and vice versa. What's good for the goose isn't always what's good for the gander. What I found is that women generally talk to process their emotions and they're more keen on emotionally focused strategies, right? Whereas men, they try to resolve things through action and through solution and they often see that just talking about their problems and paying for the opportunity to do so to be a complete waste of time and money. And I can understand why. Now, it does have its place. Like, it's very important for some men to be able to have a safe space to really share their experience and talk about this stuff because, man, they can be judged harshly if they open up to the wrong people. So, there's a time and a place for that for men as well, but it's generally not every week for several years.
So, let's go into those two those three different problems then. So, if a man comes to you and they are expressing an issue with love, they're trying to get laid, they're trying to find someone.
Um, where does where do you start? What are the sort of foundational things you need them to understand for you to all get focused in the right direction?
Well, I usually start with what they've tried in the past and where in the funnel they tend to be experiencing their difficulties. Like there's a the advice is very different if you're not getting any matches on a dating app or you haven't been able to get a date in months versus I can get with women but after 3 months everything kind of seems to fall apart or I'm able everyone just wants me for these long-term relationships and I just want to be able to play the field. So it's really depending on the goals of the man in question and where he's experiencing the difficulties. So if he's at the top of the funnel, so when we talk about funnels, um if we have the top of the funnel is, you know, you're meeting people, maybe a little bit further down the funnel is you're, you know, having some kind of relationship with them short term and then at the very bottom of the funnel might be like marriage
and kids.
Sure.
Um so at the very top, so if they come in at the top of the funnel and they've got problems just like meeting people, where where do you start?
That's a tough one. I think it's a good idea in today's day and age to have kind of a dual strategy. I think that you can use the apps for what the apps are good for, but overly relying on them as a solution for your dating wos is probably not correct. You're going to have to get out there and get better at your people skills. Because even if you do match with somebody, if you're more of an introvert, if you have a lot of social anxiety, even if you manage to get someone off the app into the real world, you might be able to blow it because you're going to be nervous. You're going to be uncarismatic, you're not going to know how to lead the encounter in the direction of a sexual experience if that's what you're looking for. So, it's generally a good idea to get out there. Um, there's really no antidote. There's no there's no better solution than doing it. It's just like learning a language. You have to speak it.
You're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to be embarrassed. It's going to feel frustrating and impossible until it doesn't. So, unfortunately, everything that you can say or read or listen to is just prelude to going out there and doing it and failing enough times and learning from your mistakes until you have a reasonable hit rate. But how do I increase my probability that a woman will give me that chance and then stick with me? Like how do I increase my chance of being attractive? Are there things I can do? Do I need to go hit the gym?
Sure. Like what I talk about in the book is that everyone can be more attractive than they currently are. And if you're having a problem in that initial funnel, it's generally a marketing issue. Because think about it, on an app, it's six pictures and three responses. In a meat market, it's, "Hey, how you doing?" And it's like, she's going to give me a once over. She already gave me the side eye, and she's going to kind of make a snap judgment based on the vibe that I'm giving out, right? Neither one of those has anything to do with really who I am as a person. That's one of the things is that they can't really reject you because they haven't spent any time getting to know you. For better or for worse, if they like you or not, they like the idea of you. They like the presentation of you. And it's really important not to disabuse people of that presentation too quickly.
Okay. So, to think about your exterior marketing.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Because that's what men do. I mean, they don't go up to women randomly. They think, "Oh, man, she's pretty cute, right?" They're paying attention to the surface marketing as well.
What can I do with my surface marketing to make me more attractive?
Well, you got to focus on what you can control. Because generally, when we go down this road, what I hear from men online is, "Well, that's all well and good, O'Ben going to like me." It's like yeah, if you don't have some of the genetic markers, it is more difficult. But everyone can get better at what they do. And on some level, the less conventionally attractive that you are, the more you have to learn seduction, the more you have to learn game. You have to think about the fact that attractiveness is not normally distributed across any population, right?
There's going to be a small subset of men and women who are just absolutely gorgeous, some that are, wow, that's interesting. And most people are kind of in the middle, right? And seduction is the process of being able to direct attention to your purposes. And the more that you can learn how to direct attention for your purposes, the more that you can overcome some of the liabilities associated with being, let's say, in the fat part of the curve when it comes to attractiveness.
Okay. So, how do I do that?
Well, you have to kind of learn what works. I think one of the things that all men can learn from the pickup community is that they were basically behavioral scientists. Some of them went to the field and said, "Okay, if I knew what I was doing, I'd be laid by now. You know, I'd have I'd be a wash in optionality. So maybe I don't know what women want. Maybe I don't know what works. Let's let the outcome teach me what I should believe as opposed to going to women with a preconceived notion about what should work or what they should want. And that's why on some level you've got what on the surface seems like some ridiculous strategies like peacocking. You know, it's like some men look at that and I would never do that. That's just so ostentatious and extravagant. But it can attract attention. That's a very, let's say, uh, heavy-handed way to do so.
For someone that doesn't know what peacocking is, how describing,
you know, dressing a little bit more flamboyantly to attract attention
or like a flamboyant feature or like it could be a crazy hat you have.
It could be a crazy hat. Flavor of Flave had the big clock around his neck. I I don't know if I just dated myself with that reference, but um there's and sometimes it's just looking sharp. I mean, by far one of the best things that men can do is just spend one or 2,000 bucks to get like two or three really good outfits. You can just cycle through them when you're dating, especially in some marketplaces. LA is tough, New York is tough, but it is so easy to be the best dressed man in San Francisco. I swear to God, it does not take that much effort. And if you're the best dressed man in the room, you get like one free point.
Can you imagine? Some women have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery to get one extra point. Some men just need to put some clothes on and get a better haircut. You know what I'm saying? And they refuse to do that for whatever reason. If you love the Driver CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.