Dating Doctor on The NEW Rules To Attract Anyone & Why People CHEAT | Dr. Orion Taraban

One of the main reasons why marriages and long-term relationships fail is we want our partners to be too many things. It's actually a gift to give your partner to want only a few things. Is that a green flag or is that a red flag? It sounds very good on people.

Relationships should serve a purpose. A relationship that doesn't really have any kind of direction is generally going to flounder even if it's pleasurable. Now, passion often requires mystery. Security requires safety. Passion often requires an element of danger or risk.

I think it would be very difficult to come to complete self-awareness outside of relationships entirely. You're going to enter into a long-term relationship with someone where you're going to spend an inordinate amount of your life with that person. You better like the version of yourself that you become in his or her presence.

Like, why are you in a relationship with somebody that you're constantly pointing out what they're doing wrong? Complaining is not a good look for anybody. What happens when you win? Well, the game is over because what happens after the infinite game is over? Maybe nothing. And where's the fun in that?

If you look at the reasons of why men cheat versus why women cheat, are there different reasons for that? Um, have you also evolved in terms of who you desired as you have been in your early 20s struggling trying to find success to where you are now? Do you think that's evolved over time in terms of the characteristics?

>> Have what I've desired in a woman changed over time?

>> Yeah.

>> Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I didn't really have the best picker when I was younger. Um, we tend to want what we see and I was an actor back in the day and I saw a lot of actresses who are often very beautiful but aren't known for their emotional stability. Let's put it that way. And so I had a lot of very passionate, interesting, chaotic relationships when I was a young man. And I often was left scratching my head cuz I was like, man, women are nuts. Like, I can't find a stable, sane woman in this entire city.

>> And there's nothing wrong with me. It's just that these women are just they're just kooky. That of course is true. Um, and I had to do some self-reflection with respect to the origin of some of my desires. And I think we all unconsciously are impressed with something like a love template into our unconscious mind when we're young, mostly through observing the relationships of our primary caregivers, especially the opposite sex one. So your mom for your for as a man and then dad as a as a

>> Exactly. And my mother was a very effervescent, charming, creative woman, but she was also a very unstable one for multiple reasons. And I think I didn't fully acknowledge when I was younger the extent to which those early childhood experiences informed my attraction. And also to the extent that even though it might have been chaotic and painful that those relationships also gave me positive things that I was searching for that let's say more stable emotionally equilibrated women couldn't give to me. For example,

>> yeah, it might be kind of nutty to date those sorts of women. They're roller coasters, but it's never a dull moment. Yeah.

>> And boredom is a very difficult emotion for a lot of people to >> tolerate. And so I had to acknowledge that like maybe I have this longing for excitement, for this strong emotional intensity, and that's what's drawing me towards certain women and not others. And I had to kind of like accept that is true before I could potentially change it or get it satisfied in other ways, which I would highly encourage. Like it's probably not even possible for a long-term relationship to be that exciting, right? Good relationships are kind of boring because they're stable, they're they're reliable, they're they're supportive, they're they're built on kind of routine and and they have a structure and a shape to them that you can count on. Uh that doesn't necessarily mean that you should just suffocate the part inside of you that longs for novelty or adventure or excitement, but maybe there are ways to get those needs met outside of a romantic relationship.

>> Right. Right. I I remember Esther Pearl saying this that we used to depend on a village to fulfill all of the needs. So we would have 15 20 50 people for the individual needs that we have but in modern relationships we expect all of those needs to be met by one person.

>> Yeah.

>> And it's an insane high bar to have on just one person to fulfill the intellectual curiosity conversations you want to have the adventures great sex the cooking all that stuff. And then as you mentioned, figuring out where you can get that need met from your friends, from podcasts like this, from for intellectual conversations, and then figure out what none of those people can really give you in a monogous relationship, which really kind of boils down to a couple of very primal things that you need as as a man or a woman.

>> If you like that was such a light bulb moment for me.

>> Oh, I'm glad. uh to to realize you you can't depend on just one person to meet all of those needs.

>> Yeah. I think that it's one of the main reasons why marriages and long-term relationships fail is we want our partners to be too many things.

>> Yeah.

>> To the point that you just made. And I think it's actually a gift to give your partner to want only a few things.

>> This sets him or her up for success. It's so much easier to satisfy one or two or three needs or desires than 20 or 30. If you have 30 things you need from me and I do 29 of them excellently, human nature is you're going to focus on the 30th that I didn't do quite well >> and that's going to make me feel over the long run that there's nothing I can do that's going to satisfy you perpetually. that you're just going to be discontented, that you are ignoring the 29 things that I do well.

>> Um, so I think it's a good idea to get any need that you can get met outside of a sexual relationship met in that way. Whether it's friends, friends are so hugely important. I think we should have way more friends in modern life, family, your work, uh your community at large, like yeah, diversify your relationship portfolio.

Kurt Vonagget talked about that where he said that in his opinion, the reason why marriages fail is we used to live in these tribes and when a man got married, he suddenly got a hundred brothers-in-law >> and he now had a tribe of guys that he could do things with and go out and hunts and make fires and build [ __ ] It's like, yeah, that's great. And when a woman got married, she had a hundred new sisters-in-law basically that she could talk to and chat with and connect with. And nowadays, when they get married, a man just gets one person to do things with, and it's a woman. and a woman just gets one person to talk to and it's a man. So, it's not as satisfying. And sometimes couples make this mistake where they try to get the other person to be their boyfriend or girlfriend in the sense that like a woman will try to make her husband into her girlfriend, someone to talk to, someone to covet with, someone to have that kind of emotional connection with. And I think it's better if she treats her girlfriends like her girlfriends and her husband like her husband and vice versa for the men, right? Especially if the woman wants some sort of reciprocity, which we just talked about being emotionally vulnerable may not be so great for the relationship as a man.

>> Yeah. In general, there's exceptions to all rules. Some people can navigate this successfully, but I think in general, it's not associated with a high level of success.

>> Yeah. Um I want to read you something the about what I saw which I thought was really beautiful.

>> Uh this was from Carl Young modern man in search of a soul where he talks about the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction both are transformed and we talked about how it's you know, what we desire has changed as we've worked on ourselves asked certain questions about self-awareness. And I've read this somewhere which is it says sexual desire is the soul pointing towards your unrealized self. The person you want the most is often the part of yourself that you've denied the longest. You don't desire them, but you desire who you become when you're around them. So the real question isn't who you desire, it's what version of yourself are you longing the most uh to become through that desire.

Do you think then in some ways the person that we're attracted to or the sexual attraction that we feel is not necessarily revealing who we want, but it's more what we're missing in ourselves in that particular moment, which is why it's evolved as you're 20 versus 40.

I would say that's pretty deep.

>> This Carl Young might know what he's talking about. Yeah, there's a there's a lot to that. I mean, we could potentially see this more clearly >> in more dysfunctional relationships. Uh, I'm not saying that it only exists in these types of relationships, but because it's so stark, it might be easier to approach and you can see how that might play out in um more conventional or stable relationships. So, you can take for example the pursuer distancer relationship. Are you familiar with that term?

Pursuer distance like is it similar to adored versus ador?

>> No, that's sort of my terminology. Pursuer comes more from attachment relationship psychology.

>> Okay.

>> I'm sure you've heard of attachment theory. Yeah, we got secured detach over here. And we have anxious avoidant and uh what's the other one?

>> Anxious and avoidant.

>> I'm sorry. Yeah, I think they're technically both anxious.

>> Yeah.

>> But I think most people know it as anxious and avoidant. Okay. So, uh these folks often find each other in the sexual marketplace. And it can feel like fireworks because on some level both recognize in the other parts of themselves that they lack and desire to come into contact with. So for example, the anxious person can look at the avoidant person and think this person is so confident. They're so cool and collected. They're so self-sufficient. They don't need anybody. I wish I could have that kind of inner strength. And I feel like when I'm with this person, I feel so safe because I know that I can lean on them because they're so strong that it's they they almost need nothing from me in in return. By the same token, the avoidant might look at the anxious person and think, "Wow, this person is so full of life. this person. It's like they're they're feeling in color and I've been feeling in black and white this whole time. And when I'm with this person, I feel things that I've never felt before. And they are so affectionate and they're so uh warm and those are things that I've missed from my own life. And coming into contact with that, I just feel more full as a result.

Now, of course, as so often happens, the things that initially attract us to our partners are exactly the things that drive us crazy >> uh 6 to 12 months later once the, you know, the fairy dust has has has worn off.

>> And the anxious person looks at the avoidant, thinks this person is uh just too cold and aloof. And the avoidant looks at the anxious and thinks that I'm just being smothered. This person doesn't have an off switch. I just need some space. And so the avoidant starts to move away, which triggers the anxious person's anxiety. And so that person begins to move closer, which triggers the avoidant to move even further away. So that's the pursuer relationship. And if it's handled incorrectly, then on some level the avoidant can just chase the I mean the anxious person can just chase the avoidant person right out of his or her life. So these are both um attachment styles. We can think of them as a continuum with securely attached in the middle. And I do think attachment can change. I've noticed that to be the case in my own life. I used to be very avoidant. Now, I'm probably like on the avoidant secure cusp over here.

>> I'm the same.

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Uh there's pros and cons to those types of folks. It's not like, you know, we're just damaged goods and that everyone needs to be uh, you know, looking like everybody else.

>> Um, so as you begin to heal that, I think that what you're attracted to isn't again, it's like this polarity. If you're way over here as an avoidant, you're probably going to attract very way over here anxious. And if you're just like kind of over here avoidant, you might attract just kind of over here anxious. And securely attached people tend to get with securely attached people because they think the other two are just kind of nutty.

>> So, um, attachment can heal, but it generally comes from a few different sources. One of them might be developing inside of you the qualities or traits that you're attracted to in the other. For example, in the avoidant, it could be well developing greater sense of self-sufficiency and confidence. H when you have that yourself, then perceiving the other might not be quite as desirable as it used to versus the avoidant might have to learn to come into more direct contact with his or her own emotions. That way that person won't need the other to feel alive, to feel like life has color again, etc.

>> Yeah. I I even feel that in my life of girls that I was attracted to before where a lot of them were very toxic, you know. Sure. But it was exciting. It was passionate. It it kind of fulfilled the things that perhaps were monotonous when I was building my business. And then now I look at some of those girls and I'm like, man, this is so exhausting. And I could see that real transformation in just five to 10 years that's happened. Good for you. And um yeah, I think it's that polarity of what ultimately we're trying to figure out what's missing. So I think this kind of goes back to what Young was talking about in terms of the polarity. Yeah. And that could be part of what we're experimenting with on mass, which is women are exploring their masculine sides and men are exploring their feminine sides. And there's not anything necessarily wrong with that. Again, it could be that those traditional gender roles were just felt as too restrictive >> for too long of a time. And I do think that every human being has both masculine and feminine traits and impulses inside of them.

>> Um, some are the balance is going to be different for every single person. And that rigidity, the one way of expressing the genders has been very painful for a number of people in the past. Especially if you were say like a more masculine woman or a more feminine man, it's going to be hard.

>> Um, gender, traditionally speaking, was a kind of procrustian bed, which is that you had to fit it. and if you were too long, we cut off your legs. And if you're too short, we're going to stretch you out to make you fit. And that's that's painful. Now, that kind of pain can be associated with kind of a maybe even discipline. There's a sort of social efficiency in the sense that I kind of know what to expect from you and you kind of know what to expect from me. But maybe we're going through this process where all of us are having to look inside and accept that we're complex, sometimes contradictory creatures. But that getting rid of those definitions entirely might not also be a good idea. I think Jordan Peterson talks about like finding a fence in the middle of nowhere and you're like, "Why the [ __ ] is there a fence here?" Well, you shouldn't be too hasty to tear it down because someone at some point thought it was a good idea to put a fence here. So, if you don't know the reason for that fence yet, it's probably best to leave it in place until you do because building a fence actually takes a lot of trouble and expense and effort, etc. So, people don't generally do it flippantly or casually. And there could be fences around gendered expression of being. And we've more or less tore those fences down because we thought that we wanted to be free to roam wherever we'd like. And now we're potentially experimenting experiencing some of the consequences of taking down those fences.

>> Yeah. So the the solution is probably somewhere in the middle. Like we we people don't like to be too penned up. We kind of want free range human beings, but absolutely no boundaries at all is actually terrifying and anomic to most people. They they don't know what to do with that. It doesn't make them feel good. Yeah. Either option doesn't seem to be good on on on other side. Right.

Um in relation to the attachment theory that you're talking about, what one of the things that I talk about early in relationships are the priorities that I really value. So for me, number one is health. Cuz if I'm not healthy, if I'm not able to take care of myself physically, mentally, I can't give into the relationship. But the second one is my mission and my purpose. So whether it's the podcast, the things that I'm doing, cuz that's a very high part of who I am as a person.

>> Sure.

>> And if I'm lost as a person, if I can't get those things, if there's someone that's bogging me down, that's only going to create resentment in the relationship. And then the third is the relationship that I'm in and friends, family, and all that stuff. What are your thoughts on what whatever attachment style you're you're in, whether you're avoidant, anxious, or secure, to prioritize those other things that are important to you versus uh at least before the relationship.

Yeah, I think that what you're describing is more or less what captains have to do. The captains have to put the mission ahead of any particular relationship. And I've found personally in the past that when I've prioritized a relationship ahead of my mission, I tend to lose the mission and the relationship. A part of the reason why I was able to secure the relationship with that particular woman is because having a mission that I was inspired by and passionate about and diligently working toward was a big part of what made me attractive to that particular woman.

>> And women, better or worse, are generally more loyal to their feelings. And when the attraction shifts or where they don't feel the same way anymore, they fall out of love, then the relationship gets threatened fundamentally. So I've discovered that if there's ever kind of a conflict in a relationship where a particular woman wants me to prioritize her over the mission, I basically just give her her walking papers >> because I know that if I do that, I'm going to lose her anyway. So I'd rather just lose her now and keep my mission than lose both.

Um that said, to really be a confident, attractive captain, your mission has to be uh sufficiently meaningful and you have to be sufficiently successful in discharging it. There's lots of dreamers out in the world, right? And dreaming might be more suitable to a young man, but certainly at a certain point in your 30s, certainly by your 40s, it it's not a good look anymore. You have to have some demonstrated success under your belt or really what are you doing? I don't trust in your plan. I don't trust in your mission. There's some, as beautiful as it might be, I'm having doubts with respect to its feasibility, its realizability.

So um young men can dream and dreaming is absolutely has its time and its place. It's important to have a very clear vision of what you're striving toward.

>> but at some point you have to show demonstrable results to people or else no one's going to take you all that seriously. And then when the results come in it's actually much easier for everyone involved to have the captain stick with his or her mission.

>> Right. Right.

because it's also the potential that women fall for as well. That's why the the kid that's, you know, singing in the basement and and as long as he's talented that women can see the potential.

>> You know, again, younger women can I think every woman goes through a musician phase.

>> Yeah.

>> Musicians are often attractive. They're they're a romantic trope, right? Their song songs speak to the emotions more than any other form of communication. And so when women come under the spell of a musician, she's like emotionally entranced and she might not notice that he's living in his parents' basement and playing to three people on a Tuesday, right?

>> Um, but that said, most women kind of let that go in their 20s and they're like, "No, I I need a guy who has some resources. I need a guy who has his feet on the ground. I need a guy who is prepared to move forward with this type of structure that I'm looking for. They become much more reality based sometimes more so than men are.

>> Right. Right.

>> Men are still just sort of like it's it's kind of this weird thing where women are presumed to be so much more about the love aspect of relationships, but they are really coldly rational in many respects with when pertaining to their mate choices. Whereas men seem to be really rational and practical on the surface, but they tend to be kind of hopeless romantics under underneath the um the veneer.

>> Uh like women might want all the flowers and the the chocolates and the romance, but they're making very cool calculations with respect to who they want and what they want them for. Whereas sometimes men will get married for the tax benefits, but they're just like hopelessly in love with the girl. So, it's important for men and women to kind of be on the same page. And I think it's actually better for men to be more on the women's page in this respect. It's like relationships should serve a purpose.

>> Uh like what why do I need you? What are we going to do together? a a relationship that doesn't really have any kind of direction is generally going to flounder even if it's pleasurable now because you mentioned the hy hadonic treadmill what gives us pleasure now is unlikely to be what gives us pleasure to that extent in the future right? so we can't just have this relationship based on our feelings what are we what are we sacrificing all this time energy and money and opportunity in order to accomplish Some couples even have like mission statements. I I think that would be weird for a short-term relationship, but it might be very appropriate for a marriage or a long-term relationship. What does that look like? I don't even know what that means.

>> Uh, you know, one that I've heard, I'll paraphrase it as something like, you know, the this marriage is designed to help both of us become the best versions of ourselves. M

>> we are going to support each other in our own growth and self-realization that we are going to uh treat each other as we would like to be treated. Sometimes if there's children involved, we want to create a loving, healthy environment to raise kind, capable children. It's like the to be very intentional about what you're doing. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

>> Yeah. putting words to paper ultimately and and having something to look back to as well in case things get lost, which they're subject to doing and to review that every few years because missions missions change.

What about speaking of things that change? What about this idea of sexual boredom that happens? Well, you must have a lot of sex if you got a bored with sex. I mean, sex is

>> I thought you have the same partner, right? Got it.

>> That makes more sense. But if you're just like tired of sex,

>> stay with me. All right. Come on. Stay with me here.

>> You're a very privileged man.

>> When someone loses that sexual attraction in a relationship, which which can happen and often does happen over a long-term relationship?

>> Um, number one, is that something that they can overcome? And why do you think that happens? And is it different for men and women?

Yeah, it's different for men and women. Men and women are different in most respects. Uh, can it be overcome? Yes. I think it's inevitable. Like, it's pretty rare for there to be more sex and more passionate sex as a relationship goes on.

>> So, I think what we're really talking about on some level is slowing the decline. But same thing with like aging. you know, it's all moving in one direction, but we can do what we can to slow the deterioration of that the the progression of that process, right?

>> So, some of the main reasons why people lose sexual interest in each other in long-term relationships are one, they let themselves go. Let's just be real. It's like um taking care of your physical health, making sure that you don't have excess body fat, that you put effort into your appearance. These things are very important for just like baseline animal attractiveness, right? And I do think that there is a tendency to stop that once people get into a secure relationship. There's something called competition anxiety.

>> When things are still uncertain whether we're going to go the distance or not, whether we're truly with each other, people continue to more or less put their best foot forward and make the effort to be the most attractive option in that other person's paniply of optionality. When you enter into a long-term exclusive commitment, you've basically eliminated that competition, you've made an oath to God and all of your friends and family that you're not going to go anywhere. Whether that actually happens or not is another thing. But it's like where is my incentive on some level to work as hard as I have previously to maintain you your attraction among all the other options that you might have. So that's one thing is to continue to put a lot of effort into just your physical attractiveness.

>> Um, another thing is to not be so comfortable and secure. This is you mentioned Esther Pel. She wrote a book called Meeting in Captivity >> among others. and she makes the very persuasive argument that there's there's many different things that we go to marriage and long-term relationships for. One of them is security. That's a big part of what marriage is, is we're making this unit secure against all other outside forces and perpetual through time. But the issue is that pretty much everything that's good for security is bad for passion and vice versa. Security, for example, requires predictability. Passion is more spontaneous and unpredictable. Security requires um let's say like transparency. Passion often requires mystery. Uh security requires safety. Passion often requires an element of danger or risk. So her argument is basically like we've just swung too far like our mar we're making our marriages 100% secure coming up with that number which basically means that they're 0% passionate.

>> Yeah.

>> By the same token there's definitely some short-term uh relationships that can be 100% passionate but are generally very unstable and burn out very brightly and spectacularly. Right? So you can see that these two things might be antithetical to each other, mutually exclusive.

>> Um, but they do exist on a continuum. If we're using percentages, maybe we can make our long-term relationships 80% secure. We're still saving 20% for passion. I think that's really important. I mean, we call these sexual relationships. Why? Because it's the one relationship in the world where we're kind of allowed to do that, right?

>> Um, for example, what defines professional relationships for most people is that the it's the one relationship where they get money. And so financial consideration should be paramount when entering into professional relationships. Like how much you get paid for your labor is not a small point of consideration when entering into a professional relationship. Yes, jobs can be meaningful, but there's other ways to get meaning. there's often not another way to get money. Then it's just a different professional relationship, right? Same thing with sexual relationships. Like, it's great to be friends, but you can have friends, and it's probably better if you do have other friends besides your romantic partner.

>> Yeah. I like to have intellectually stimulating conversations. Do I need that from a romantic partner, etc., etc.? Yeah,

>> just like money is the siniquinon of a professional relationship, sex is a sinquon of a sexual relationship. And I do think that sexual incompatibilities, especially with respect to differing libidos, are very hard to overcome. Yeah. And it also changes, right? Hormonal things as you age, certain situations that happen throughout your life, throughout the years, throughout the months. I guess it's it's you have to learn to dance with it, right? It's not always going to be 100% secure. Maybe it's 80%, but sometimes it's going to be 50/50. all you just have to learn how to adapt ultimately.

>> Yeah. And I think that has to do with sort of something of a cultural or a value thing is that we think that toning back the security is like wrong. It's mad. That's toxic. Like the this the best relationship was 100% secure where it's 100% trustworthy, 100% transparent, 100% reliable. That sounds boring as [ __ ] Let's just be honest. And you know, I remember learning in school that many European empires basically waged wars and got on ships and sailed for two years to go to some distant part of the world just to get some spice. That's how boring their food was. Like they just got tired of eating the same thing. People will actually travel to the ends of the earth for some [ __ ] nutmeg. You know what I'm saying? So it's like we need spice in our lives and we will go to inordinate lengths to acquire it if it's missing.

>> Uh the same is true sexually and for our romantic relationships. What about the pre-selection process? So for example, body count. Do you think body count has any sort of correlation with long-term relationship satisfaction? And has there been any studies around this?

Yeah, body count is a very highly contested uh topic. There have been some studies to suggest that low body count folks are much more likely to go the distance in terms of long-term relationships in the same genders. That's what I saw. Like for example, uh a statistic that comes up a lot in this conversation is that when men and women are virgins at marriage, so in this case both parties, their divorce rate is something like 7%. Relative to a 55% divorce rate overall in America, which is enormous.

>> Um that said, only 3% of people are virgins at marriage according to my research. So this is a very small sample relative to the general population.

>> Sure.

>> And my hunch is that the reasons why the individuals involved waited for marriage, namely probably religion and very strong social pressures and stigmas are probably more responsible for the longevity of that relationship than just the pure fact that they hadn't had sex with anybody else. Also be lack of options, right? If somebody was aversion not as a choice but because they didn't have any other options. That's true. But it would be rare for them to now get married. That's a much bigger commitment. If you're saying that I'm a virgin because no woman has ever wanted me and now suddenly a woman wants to make a lifetime commitment exclusively to me. Probably we're not talking about the same men.

>> Difference. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.

Um, and is it different of if you look at the reasons of why men cheat versus why women cheat, are there different reasons for that?

Um, men typically cheat when there's opportunity and they feel like they can get away with it. I mean, that sounds not very great for our sex, but that seems to be the case.

>> Um, of course men can and do resist temptation. But I think the vast majority of men don't cheat because I think I think the research says that the majority of men don't cheat, but a big minority of men do. But of the majority of men who don't cheat, it's generally not because they're better at resisting temptation. It's just that no other women really want that man. So, it's like when women sometimes go on social media and loud their husband's loyalty, it's like, "No other woman is trying to take your husband away from you, Susan. Don't worry about it." kind of a thing.

>> Uh, the reasons behind cheating are complex and and varied. People cheat for all kinds of different reasons. The main difference is that women tend to cheat when they're emotionally dissatisfied with their relationships. men not so much. For example, relationship satisfaction between men who cheat and men who don't is pretty much the same. That men are more or less as satisfied or dissatisfied with their relationships regardless of whether they choose to cheat or not. It's almost like the cheating is a compartmentalized portion of their lives that doesn't have as much to do with their primary relationships. I know that might sound crazy to some people, but just say men men could love the the woman just as much. And it has nothing to do with that relationship.

>> If I had a nickel for every time a guy said, "I I I love my wife. I she's my favorite person in the world. I'm never leave her, but yeah, I [ __ ] other women."

>> But the man never thinks that these women are going to replace his wife,

>> right? I sometimes the mistresses think that she might be able to they might be able to replace the wife that leads to a lot of misunderstandings in these sorts of even like kings back in the day they had that pretty clear separation right between mistresses and the the person like their their wives their her concubines etc. Yeah.

>> Um, and often these were formally institutionalized. A recent example is the king of Thailand brought that practice back. It He hadn't that hadn't been practiced by a king of that country for I think over a hundred years. But a few years ago he reinstituted the practice and had an official mistress or concubine. I don't know what the technical word was but there was a whole ceremony and he was sitting on the throne next to his wife and this other woman who is going to be his mistress is you know going dressed very regally and going through the process and she becomes an official state concubine.

>> Wow. And I think he broke up with her like two years later.

>> Wait, the wife or the

>> No, no, no. The the the wife is still the queen of of Thailand.

>> Uh the king broke up with the mistress.

>> Mistress. Okay.

>> I think he said that she had trouble accommodating to her place like she wanted to be the queen. I think was the uh suggestion there.

>> Got it. Got it. And what about women? what what are the reasons why they would cheat?

>> Um, a lot of women cheat because they're emotionally dissatisfied in their primary relationships.

>> Um, most cheating from women begins as an emotional affair.

>> Uh, they become emotionally involved with a man, often a co-orker or someone that they see every day. And the more that you become emotionally involved with somebody, the more you want to share more and more of your life with them. That's just kind of how both men and women work. It's just that men can be more spontaneously attracted just based on a physique or a face. Like they don't even need to know the person inside of the body. And I know that feels weird to a lot of women. That's just how male sexuality works.

>> Uh women absolutely can become spontaneously attracted to men's physiques and faces as well. The idea that uh women aren't as shallow or superficial in that regard than men is is incorrect.

>> Um, they just have more reasons generally for seeking out sexual relationships than men do. So a lot of women are dissatisfied emotionally. They become entangled in some sort of emotional affair. One thing eventually leads to another. often they use the affair as a springboard for their next relationship. Whereas a lot of men who cheat have no uh intention ever of making the mistress the primary relationship. Often women will enter into a new relationship and then use that as a springboard for a new primary.

>> Yeah. Like a monkey branch, I guess.

>> That's what they call it online. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Um, so you know how we talked about in in Young like where Young talks about the sexual desire holding a mirror to the things that we're missing in our lives or the version of ourselves that are missing.

>> I guess is that in relation to that as well where for women particularly Espar talks about this is cheating happens or infidelity happens not because the person doesn't love the other person but they're trying to chase the version of themselves that they lost throughout the relationship.

>> Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Um h well we definitely learn about ourselves in relationship to others.

>> Um, this goes back to our primary relationships which for most people are with their mothers.

>> Um, we call good mother a lot of good mothering is based on emotional reflection. The baby is not self-conscious. the baby is throwing out all kinds of expressions and gurgles and sounds and movements and it's for the mother to kind of like make sense of those as communication and reflect that back to the child. So that's why good reflective mothering generally has to do with mirroring where the the baby starts to coup and giggle and smile and so the mother starts oh you're happy oh you're you're very pleased right now. It's like the mother the baby can see on the mother's face what its own face looks like which starts to get the selfawareness cogs moving on some level it's like the mother can take the chaotic disorganized impulses of an infant and categorize them into certain mood states or certain desires which helps to kind of make sense of the infant's life now fast forward is that I'm sure that you've noticed whether you want to or not that you kind of become a different version of yourself when you're with different people.

>> It's not because you're lying. It's not because you're pretending. It's just that different people elicit different parts of you. They they effortlessly call certain parts of you to the forefront while others tend to recede. Maybe with some people you feel very confident. Maybe with some people you feel very shy. Maybe with some people you feel kind of anxious. One of the primary just like with the infants, one of the primary roles of other people is to help us learn who we are. I think it would be very difficult to come to complete self-awareness outside of relationships entirely.

>> So, one of the primary considerations, I talk about this in my book as well, when choosing a long-term partner, is how do I feel when I'm around this person? If different people bring different versions of ourselves to the forefront and you're going to enter into a long-term relationship with someone where you're going to spend an inordinate amount of your life with that person, you better like the version of yourself that you become in his or her presence because you only have to accompany that person, but you have to be yourself. And if you don't like who you are for whatever reason when you're around this person, it's probably going to be a slow death.

Mhm.

>> What about this idea that to grow struggle and some level of difficulty is required and if that person that you're with brings out a version of yourself that makes you want to improve and to grow where you may feel inadequacy in certain ways because they can shine a mirror of of things that they're better at than you. Is that a green flag or is that a red flag?

>> Uh, I mean it sounds very good on paper,

>> but I don't think that that's going to be very successful in life.

>> Let me give you kind of an analog. I'm When I was younger, I was sort of a I had this persona about me that I was like the the seeker after truth. And it was my job to see as clearly as possible the unvarnished truth and to communicate that to other people. And if it hurt their feelings, [ __ ] them. If it meant that I lost opportunities or it doesn't matter. Like I was committed to this as Voltater said, "If the truth shall kill them, let them die." And I thought that other people were kind of more or less too fragile or too um sensitive with respect to this. And within that persona, I felt I was doing people a favor. Like a good friend actually tells people the harsh truth that they need to hear because they're that committed to their success. and their development.

>> Turns out though, that's a very easy recipe to to find yourself alone. Like, no one really wants to be around that person who's constantly pointing out the bitter truths of reality or the the things that they're not doing right, even if it's out of a good intentioned desire to help them improve and to get better, which I consciously was my intention. People don't want that. People don't want challenges in their relationships.

>> Isn't that a difference in values though? And ultimately, you need to find one person that you're going to spend your your time with. And I understand the mass majority of people don't cuz most people live in a fixed mindset reality, but there are people that have a growth mindset where challenging them actually feels like that person loves them. So, is it just the the fact that you haven't met that person yet that can align those values?

Maybe I think that uh again we can think of this as a continuum or proportional. We certainly don't want to just be in a relationship with a yes man even with a friend. A friend who never you know calls you on your [ __ ] or who uh never points out that your fly is open for example because it might embarrass you. like that person is something of a liability and if you rely too much on him or her then you're going to create this sort of like false sense of reality. But if all you're ever doing is pointing out that their proverbial fly is down, you're going to be [ __ ] annoying and no one's going to want to hang out with you. That's just the the real point here is that >> yes, it's important to to bring those to other people's attention as necessary and in the right manner and that most of your relationship is generally based on I think harmony and good feeling towards one another. Like why are you in a relationship with somebody that you're you're constantly pointing out what they're doing wrong? That's another part of that persona for me is that I had I had this persona of like being a fixer and that was I think fundamentally based on having let's say low self-esteem >> where I felt that this was how I could like earn my right to be in a relationship or to have friends is I was like providing value because if I didn't do that no one would want to just spend time with me as it were. So I have to like help them in some way. But that was a compulsion on my end. Does that make sense? Or were you attracting people that you knew you were trying to fix in some ways?

Sure. Um I know some bartenders who are sober and they say that it's better to be on this side of the bar than the other side of the bar.

>> Yeah.

>> A lot of therapists are like that, too. It's that, it's as long as I spend all day talking about other people's problems, I don't have to face my own. for instance.

>> Mhm.

Um I want to talk about this approach of finite game when you're in a short-term short-term mating strategy to playing an infinite game to pursue a long-term strategy. And this idea of like prisoners dilemma, right? Where you know if you're not going to see that person and you have the choice uh if you decide to cooperate, you get three years. If you don't, you know, then then, you know, one person gets five, the other person gets one. And it seems to work in that short-term game where you're never going to see that person again, which is why if you live in big cities,

>> you hope you're never going to see them.

>> Exactly. Yeah. 50 indeed. Right. Exactly. Happy right now. And um this is why in big cities, people are often times [ __ ] because you know, you're never going to bump in that person again versus if you live in a small city. H what's your advice to both men and women where perhaps that idea of playing more of a a finite short-term mating strategy works for these short-term relationships. But if your end goal is to play an infinite game, which is marriage for some people, then you do have to transition from a finite game into an infinite game. And how do you do that in a way where you can maintain that

Attraction and respect? Yeah, I think that's well said. I I do think that people need to accommodate their strategies to reality. And if you're in a big anonymous city with millions of people, you're going to pursue relationships differently than if you're in a small village of a hundred and you'll have to see these people every day for the rest of your lives. For better or for worse, the strategies that work in one are probably not going to work in the other.

Now, short-term finite games are associated with winning. They're associated with getting what you want. Um, but what happens when you win? Well, the game is over. Well, now what are you going to do? Are you just going to find another short-term game to play that you will either win or lose? Then what happens? So, if you make a life out of playing short-term games, then you're constantly needing to find another game to play because eventually it will come to some sort of resolution.

Then you say, "Well, okay, well, Ryan, then what if we make the games longer?" I'm like, okay, well, now you're starting to approach an infinite game because ultimately the best situation is one in which there is no winning or there is no losing, which enables the game to prolong for as long as possible so that we can all play more or less forever because what happens after the infinite game is over? Maybe nothing. And where's the fun in that? So it's like if you truly love the game, you kind of want the game to go on for as long as possible.

For example, we could consider evolution to be a kind of infinite game. Evolution doesn't actually have a set destination in mind. Humans have made that fallacy over the last 100 or so years where they think that here we are, human beings. We are the pinnacle. We clearly all of evolution is tending towards self-awareness and high intelligence and you know, bipedal locomotion, etc., because we're at the top for now. And that's as long as we are well-suited to our environment. But it could be a time when being a very self-aware creature doesn't work very well for our environment. Um, evolution is about chasing adaptability, right? And adaptability is something that's always changing because circumstances and environments are always changing. And there's no morality associated with it. It's like, which is better, wings or fins? It's like, it depends. Do you live in the air or do you live in the sea?

So, and the point of evolution is to make sure that life finds a way to go on. That no matter what happens on this planet, some of the organisms are going to find a way to survive so that life can continue on. Evolution wants life to exist for as long as possible. It doesn't want one species to win and like wipe out all the other species, right? That stops the evolution, which actually will eventually extinguish life because there will be a time in the infinite progression of time when humans are ill-suited to their environment and then, poof, no more life, the game is over. That's not that fun. And so life, through some kind of mysterious intelligence, has developed a capacity to continue to adapt itself so that the game can continue on for as long as possible. Which means that no one can really be a permanent winner or a permanent loser for the game to continue on.

So, for your long-term relationships, I think that's really important is like, give up winning. But you, what's Okay, so you're in an argument with your partner. You have a point. You win. Great. Now what? So, we're just going to like pick up where we left off. Well, now you're a loser and I'm a winner, and we have to navigate that. Or are we going to get into a different argument where maybe you can come back and get me this time and vice versa? It's like there's a lot of scorekeeping in that type of relationship. But there's no score in evolution. It's just whatever it takes to make life continue. And I think that there's some wisdom to that in our long-term relationships. We shouldn't seek to win at the cost of the other. That's a short-term strategy.

Yeah. And I guess that applies to all sorts of relationships, from platonic relationships to to business relationships. Business relationships, business can be one-time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, there's a time to be loyal and there's a time to betray. In romance, people don't like to hear that, but it's true. And in business, there's hostile takeovers, man. It's like, yeah, we, it's not always just kumbaya and be a good person.

Do you think it, it's changed what women value in men today versus what has, how has that changed, you think?

Well, in the main instance, you know, it's been said that modern women don't need men. And I don't think that's true on the population level. Like, women need men around. Men have built the vast majority of civilization. They keep the power on. They run the mines. They make sure the streets are safe. There's, however, a lot of modern women don't need a particular man to have a relationship with anymore. We humans have entered into relationships from the dawn of time, as far as I'm concerned, because we need and want things from each other. And for the vast majority of our history, relationships have been based on necessity. Most of the humans who have ever lived on this planet have lived at the poverty level, sometimes even the subsistence level. And life is very difficult in those circumstances. If you're poor, you need people. Like, you can't just be, um, self-sufficient under those conditions.

The more money you have, money you can think of as a potential to, um, just like as pure potential to get your needs and wants met. The more money you have, the less you need other people, which we kind of see as a, in American society over the last 100 years, which is as the GDP has gone up, people are living more, uh, isolated or even anomic lifestyles because frankly, parts of living in the village and being the villager, as I was discussing, are very inconvenient. So it's nice when you have money to be able to say, I want to work with this person and not that person. I want the terms of our agreement to last this long, but not any further, etc., etc.

So if women traditionally have gone to men for provision in particular, because they couldn't provide for themselves, well, what happens in today's day and age where women are earning as much as men, more? Sometimes it's not a statistically significant difference. I see it as 1 or 2% in say, like London, if it's under 30 and they're childless as well. So you have to have those conditions in place. But they're, they're more or less earning the same. So the idea that a woman needs a man in order to fund her own lifestyle is absurd. Now, she might need a man to start a family. I mean, part of the realities of women entering the workforce is we've doubled the labor, which effectively have the value of that labor, which is in our grandparents' generation, a man could work one job and bring home enough to pay for a wife and children. Now, the reality is that most couples need a dual income household. They both the mother and the father need to work in order to afford the lifestyle to raise a family. And that unfortunately brings with it a lot of absurdities, which also I think lower the likelihood that men and women are going to enter into that kind of relationship.

Absurdities like, in many cases, when both the parents work, the father is earning money so that he can support a woman who's not his wife to raise his children. Because when the mother is working, it's going to be this whole private sector industrial complex to raise the children, whether it's wet nurses to nannies to babysitters to daycares. All of this is very, very expensive. Um, but if the woman needs to work as well to be able to afford that, then the money that they're earning is largely going to surrogates to raise the children. And a lot of women bulk at the idea of going back to the way things were. For some, well, I think we can understand potentially why, but a lot of women have a learned mistrust over having a single man have power over them or authority. They don't want to be obedient or to listen to their husbands, per se. But to avoid that, many women spend most of their day being obedient to their employers, who are largely men. And so when we work that out, the man is earning money to support a woman who's not his wife to raise his children. And to avoid being obedient to her husband, the woman spends most of her days following instructions from her employer. And to be honest, I don't know if that's a better situation for women. Uh, the marriage contract and the employment contract are very different from each other, and generally the employer tends to have far more power, and the employee has much less recourse than in the marriage contract, for instance.

So, long-winded answer, but some of the things, many of the things that women needed men for in the past don't exist anymore. Yes, it's quite possible that women don't need a particular man, or if they do, it's kind of on a case-by-case basis. As I've mentioned in my book, one of my former clients told me that when his wife filed for divorce, she told him that she could get everything that she needed from a man from TaskRabbit and Tinder, which is kind of a cruel thing to say as you're walking out the door, but she kind of has a point. Like, husbands are expensive. It's like the villager. Sometimes you have to do [ __ ] that you don't really want to do because that's what makes the village work.

And I think people will do that when there's a strong absence of alternative. But now with the optionality that most people in the West possess, that's a harder and harder sell. So I think women don't need men for the same things anymore, or even most of the things. So that now moves towards desire. So most of the time people get together because they need things from each other. But if they need anything for each other, they can still get together if they want things from each other. But desire is far more fickle than necessity.

That's where like standards come in, right? It's like if you're at the point of survival, you can't really be too picky. Let's just be honest. Um, but if you're not there, if there's a big buffer between your lifestyle and subsistence, you kind of have the right and the option to be picky. And so now more and more criteria get put into the like the coupling equation, which reduces the total number of relationships being transacted. And of course, desire is also very fickle in that it doesn't last forever, right? So if we come together primarily because we want to, well, why would we stay together when that wanting abates, which it generally does in romantic relationships? And so now we enter into more, let's say, short-term relationships. I think it's probably the case that we're going to have something akin to to the workforce occur in the sexual marketplace. Whereas three generations ago, maybe a worker would work for a single employer for all of his career and then collect a pension and retire and, you know, ride off into the sunset. Now, the average American, I think, has 12 or 14 different jobs in his or her lifestyle. And no one really expects a pension. No one really expects that this employment contract is going to last for the rest of my life. It serves a purpose. It's going to give me money now, as long as it also is interesting and fulfilling, maybe even fun. Like, people now have more criteria for their work than they did in the past. To work just used to be a vessel for, uh, as a way for people to earn money, and it wasn't fun, and it wasn't necessarily meaningful. It was just a way to collect a paycheck, and then you find your meaning and your fun elsewhere. Right? I think the same thing is happening in the sexual marketplace, where it's not like people are going to get married at 18 and 19 and then live the rest of their lives together. We don't see that happening in the West at all. So there's generally, maybe we're approaching serial monogamy. There's even signs that that's beginning to fall apart in some respects. So I think that shorter-term relationships are probably the future. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Like everything else, relationships are kind of a trade-off. And there are pros and cons and benefits and liabilities to both of those options and other options that we haven't discussed.

Yeah. Cuz this is it's quite a shift, right? If you look at hundreds and thousands of years of, if you look at, you know, the way we've evolved to look at our partners, women generally look for resources. Men usually look for beauty for all, you know, reproductive purposes, right? And I wonder if there is some, as we evolve with technology, I don't know if you've heard of, uh, Elon Musk talking about high basic, a basic high income as AI increases productivity and it, it kind of sourced through that nobody is going to be forced to work eventually, and it's going to be an option because there's just going to be so much productivity. This is a very optimistic view that he has where AI is just going to, you know, in the, in the 80% chance that AI actually ends up becoming a positive force, that work is an optional thing. And potentially in that hypothetical scenario, it means that wealth and resources may not be as valuable for for men, particularly. How do you think that would contradict the hundreds and thousands of years that we've evolved to look for in partners when this happens?

I think resources are still going to be important, even under that potential scenario. I don't think that if all men have this universal basic income or high income, as you describe it, that women would see that in the panoply of the sexual marketplace as the lowest hanging fruit. Like, yes, it means that all of your basic needs would be met, which means that that comes standard, which is means that it's no longer applicable to my decision-making process because I get that in both cases. So what else you got?

So that becomes invisible and taken for granted to the extent that benchmark. Yeah, it's like it's like saying she's got two legs. It's like, well, I would kind of assume that she does, right? That's not really a selling point for me.

So if all men have $100,000 a year. Now the benchmark is going to be at half a million. I mean, that's going to happen within 6 months. I mean, let's hope on some level that Elon's vision doesn't come true. There's going to be a lot of issues with that. And just think of how people spend their free time today. Like, they're not out, you know, rescuing kittens and running marathons or making symphonies or poetry. It's that most people with their spare time anesthetize and sit in front of a screen. And I think that's unlikely to change if you give two billion people the right to not work. Like, you're just going to have an underclass of captured minds that are largely directionless.

Yeah. And it's, I guess this idea of hedonic adaptation, eventually it's not going to be $100,000. That's just going to be the minimum, like minimum salary, and then most people are just going to want more and more because scarcity is obviously always going to be a value. So whoever has more, ultimately.

Yeah. The point is is that we could have already done this. I mean, like think about where the US was in 1925. It's like the amount of wealth that this nation has developed in the past century is to the tune of trillions of dollars. It's like we could certainly afford to make sure that everybody in this country has a basic level of, you know, comfort with respect to their living, like everyone is sheltered and has food, etc. Um, we don't do that. Like, where is the money going? So the fact that if Elon thinks that if we produce more wealth and more value, then we will eventually be able to do that, I don't think so. I think the government will continue to kick the can down the road indefinitely because the idea, I mean, we would descend into some kind of dystopian hellscape if billions of people didn't work is a necessity. I'm reminding of the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is one of my all-time favorite novels. And in that society, no one has to work, and people aren't paid in money. They're paid in soma, which is like a perfect drug. And they live in basically a high-functioning socialist society where everybody has housing, and they have roles to fulfill, and sex is free and plentiful, and there's plenty of entertainment. And at one point they experimented with having people work fewer days, and they just didn't know what to do with their time. Um, in that book, human beings are created in test tubes, basically, and they're genetically modified for certain roles in society that are created for them. So there's like a makework project associated with this society, and there's different levels of, let's say, intelligence. We don't like to talk about that, but they have the epsilons all the way up to the double plus alphas. Um, to expect an epsilon in that society to use his or her free time for self-development, mastery, or even just basic well-being is absurd. Like, that's beyond what an epsilon can do. Now, of course, we don't have those kinds of rankings in our today's society, but we can clearly see that there are stratifications with respect to people's abilities, with respect to people's self-discipline, with respect to people's capacity to motivate themselves. And I think that those are fairly rare qualities. If you just look around, to expect the average person, or certainly all people, to be able to behave that way as our most high-functioning, most disciplined individuals is absurd.

Yeah. And I think the idea of building an identity around work, I don't, I don't, it'd be a shame if that went away, right? I'm reminded of a quote by, um, John Maynard Keynes. I think it was in the 1930s. He said that in a hundred years, productivity will be so high that we'll only need to work 20 hours a week. We're still working 40, 50 hours a week, right? I don't think that's really changed even with the advent of AI and productivity that's been rising. And I think people associate their identity with work, and I think that's more of a cultural thing.

Certainly. I mean, that's so many of our last names in the English language are work. Smith is a blacksmith. Cooper is someone who makes barrels. So we were largely identified with our work. But I think that there were other factors as well, especially religion, that I think is no longer as applicable in today's day and age. I've heard that a medieval peasant actually only worked something like 200 days out of the year compared to over 300 in the modern American. So there actually might be more of a leisurely life associated with being a serf in Russia. Uh, certainly in hunter-gatherer societies that still exist in say, Papua New Guinea, the people there work three or four hours a day and then spend the rest of the time just sort of socializing and taking naps and lounging about, etc. So, yeah, I think people do feel the need to identify with something that gives their life some structure. I don't know if people know what to do with themselves with a lot of free time. I think that's very, it's a difficult challenge to master.

Yeah. What do you think then today is a form of value that's the most scarce in a man?

I think one that's kind of hotly debated these days. I don't know if it's the scarcest, but would be stoicism. Would be emotional restraint. And I think that's because for the last 30 years, men have been told to open up, to be more emotionally available, to be vulnerable. They've been said that this locking away of their emotions is toxic. It's toxic to them. It leads to them dying earlier than women. And women themselves have said that they want a man who's emotionally available. They want a man to open up to her about his feelings. And I think that men have more or less done their best to accommodate all of these sources, from their parents to their teachers to the women that they date. And I think that there is a decline in emotional restraint and stoic behavior among men. And I do think that that is probably one of the more masculine things that a man can do. A lot of femininity and masculinity is really based on, a lot of it is a lot of it is arbitrary. A lot of it is cultural. Like you can see different expressions of both of those vary greatly from time and place throughout history. Some of them are more or less biological, but some of them are cultural. And a lot of it has just rested on polarity, that within any time and place, whatever the women do, the opposite of that is going to be masculine and vice versa. And if traditionally women are associated with emotional expressivity, then that becomes keyed in a feminine direction, whether you like it or not. And so the opposite of that would be emotional restraint. And I do think that there are some, let's say, evolved, there's an evolved attractiveness to that in men, which is life is full of all kinds of sharp, dangerous things that you can bump your shins up against. And if you start to yelp and cry and, uh, moan and sigh whenever you come into contact with those things, or any time you come into contact with difficulty, I don't think that you give off the sense that you're a competent and capable protector or provider or a leader. Like, I would have a lot of trouble following somebody, a man or a woman, who seemed to be stressed out over every minor inconvenience. Uh, I, I would be very curious as to how this person got into a position of power or authority. I wouldn't think, wow, it's so nice that he or she is letting me into their internal world and that they're really just human after all. [ __ ] that.

So, it's like one of my more popular videos from a long time ago is called "The Captain Can't Complain," which is that's one of the obligations, in my opinion, to being an authority figure, whether you're a man or a woman, is that the captain needs to be able to communicate confidence, calm, poise, and capability to those who follow him or her. And if the captain can't do that, it's going to create all kinds of fear and instability in those who are in the crew, and it could even lead to a mutiny or a coup, which is a radical destabilization of the structure of society. So I think it's really important for those in charge to be able to communicate that. Now, does that mean that they never talk about what's going on inside of them? That they just have to swallow everything and pretend that they're a rock? No, I don't think so. But there's a time and a place to open up, and it's not to those who put their trust in you. Like, find other captains in a confidential relationship. I'm not necessarily saying a therapist, that that can be helpful, that you can talk about what you're experiencing and talk to people who can sympathize because it's part of their experience as well.

Captains need other captains to support each other. Like a men's circle can be. Best. Yeah. But the men in the circle are can best serve each other if they're also all captains. It's like, men are not just captains by right of their sex or right of their birth. As I discussed in the book, the rise to captaincy is a very long process that can take over a decade. And most men don't get there. Most women don't get there. Most people don't get there. It's extremely difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and, uh, it has no guarantee of success. But the alternative is that you become a passenger, and that means that you are on some level disempowered and dependent on the captains in your life, or else you're just going to languish on the dock or float directionless in the ocean.

Do you think then relying in some way as a man on emotional connectivity with your female partner is actually a deterrence to the relationship because ultimately, as you become more vulnerable, as you become more emotionally connected, you're you're kind of sharing that vulnerable part about yourself. You feel like if that's if that's hurting the relationship, and it's something that you encourage to share with other men, but you're you're ultimately saying that emotional vulnerability is not something that's actually going to be that's going to be helpful for the relationship.

I personally, I don't feel like it improves romantic relationships between men and women when the men are emotionally vulnerable. I think that there's also a lot of misunderstanding around the word vulnerability. Uh, we were just talking about Mark Manson before we started rolling, and in his book Models, I think he talks about a definition of vulnerability that I think we can summarize as almost like self-involving self-disclosure. A lot of people think vulnerability is where we start to share our wounds. That's kind of what vulnera means in Latin. It means a wound. Yeah. So this is how I was traumatized. These are the terrible things that have happened to me. These are my deepest fears. This is my soft white underbelly, as it were. Right? And that is a very limited part of what vulnerability can mean. Sometimes it's actually more vulnerable to share your joy, to share the things that you love, to share the things that move you, the things that inspire you. Those things are often more precious to us and are more easily damaged. They hurt more when someone takes that information and misuses it than if someone takes the things that we, um, that we dislike or that have hurt us. So sometimes just sharing how you feel in the moment, whatever that happens to be, can be a way of emotional connection.

But I do think that certain emotions are better kept in your back pocket when dealing with women in close personal relationships as a man.

Yeah. Because it's not, you can still share your emotions, but often times it can be things that you're happy with and things that you're proud of.

Sure. It's not necessarily about the negative side, like complaining about the little things that are happening or things that you have doubt about. Complaining is not a good look for anybody. Um, it's like if you have time to complain, then well, now you've positioned yourself in a personal way relative to this problem. So what are you going to do about it?

Mhm. A lot of complaint, whether it's a man or a woman, is designed to get the other person to take action to resolve the complaint, or it's just this kind of like toxic venting that becomes this mood that tends to just sort of make everyone inside of it a little bit ickier, you know? So, I think that if you're actually willing to complain about something, then you're actually willing to do something about it. So, what are you going to do about it? And if that question follows every complaint, well, then we might have to choose what we decide to complain about, what we decide to get upset about. I try to only get upset about things that I have some level of control over. And then I have some kind of self-acknowledged responsibility to do something about it. If something is beyond my control on some level, I can't allow myself to become too emotionally involved in it, no matter how much it might inspire pathos or pity or terror. And there's a lot of things in the world that exist on those spectrums that were shown every day on mainstream media and social media. But because there's very little, if anything, I can do about them, on some level, I can't allow myself to get too emotionally involved in them. Then I become like alienated from myself, and my whole emotional experience becomes vicarious, which is kind of psychotic.

Mhm. Yeah. And this is also the core thesis of stoicism, right? Control things that are within your control. Think about things that are within your control. Do you think that transfers to how young men today that struggle with self-esteem could start to build confidence, not to try to care about the things that are not within their control, like what other people say about them, but to take action in the things that they can control, like working about having success and the things that you know are within their own control?

Certainly. So it's very difficult to have confidence without success. I mean, ultimately, it's the consistent felt experience of success. So you have to be able to do the thing, success. You have to be able to do the thing enough times that you can kind of trust that you can do it. Consistent success. And then you got to take it in and have that emotionally impact your self-image. And some perfectionists fail to do that last step. So that's why I've included that. Now, when you're just starting out as a guy, there's not a lot of things that you can do right or well, especially relative to overarching society where you're potentially being compared with or competing against people who have been doing these things for decades. Like, good luck with that.

Yeah. I remember being a young man and feeling very, very hopeless. Um, partly because I wasn't focused on things that were within my control. Like, it took me a while to kind of get my head screwed on straight. But I just saw that the world, I didn't see a way in. Like, everything seemed to be kind of functioning smoothly without me. I didn't see a place for me anywhere in the world. And I largely despaired of my ability to to to make a lot of money or to, um, live in a certain way. I mean, most of my 20s I was just living month to month, earning enough money to make enough money to stay in New York City for one more month to do the same. So the idea that I would one day be in the position that I am today, I think would be baffling to my younger self. Um, but ultimately, it was pain that motivated me to try. Like the pain of living in that way, the pain of being passed over for certain relationships with women. The pain of seeing some of my friends who I thought were no better or no worse than me begin to make something of themselves and to improve their conditions. And I think pain is a great motivator. It's the gift that nobody wants. And I think that when people are in, when the pain associated with changing is less than the pain associated with staying the same, people actually finally begin to take action.

But until that happens, it's really hard to get anyone to move in a direction that you might very clearly see would be in his or her best interest to do. This is something that I've learned as a therapist over the years is to never want something for someone else more than he or she wants it for themselves.

So sometimes I have met with patients who want very, very little, like especially depressed people. Um, and a lot of the times these are young people, and their parents and their friends are throwing their hands up in the air. It's like, I can't, I don't know what to do. I'm giving them this opportunity. I'm motivating them. I'm encouraging them, but they just don't move. And it's like, yeah, that's because you want them to improve their lives more than they do. And ultimately, it's not going to work unless that impulse is intrinsic to the person involved. So, one of the best interventions, a little risky, but one of the best interventions that I've learned with those types of folks is to say, I don't give a [ __ ] on some level. Like, I'm not in pain if that lifestyle doesn't bother you, it doesn't bother me. I don't need you to be any different than you are. Why are you here? Do you think you might need to be different than than you are? Do you want things to be a bit changed? And so I put it back on them. And so I play being a little less interested in their growth or motivation than they are. And I gently kind of push them up from below, then try to yank them towards me from above. And I find that to be more effective.

What is that? What is that saying? That you can take a, you can take a horse to water, but you can't force her to drink it.

Pretty much.

Yeah. I would say though, you know, there are both men and women who have built a lot of confidence that has been unearned, right? Some people were born with a lot of money, and perhaps people have sucked up to them. So they've built up this almost this, yeah, this unearned confidence that has carried throughout their their childhood and then has led to their lives. What, what happens in a scenario like that when confidence has been created but it hasn't been earned?

I think that that does exist, probably fortunately for everybody, that's a minority of people. Most men are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Most women did not hit the genetic lottery. But I do think that those two conditions are kind of analogous to each other. Yeah. Like a really gorgeous woman is kind of like being a billionaire's son. You know what I'm saying? Is like from the time, from as soon as you can remember, people have been nice to you. People have been kind to you. They've been jumping through their butts to try to help you. Though almost all of these people, you eventually learn had an ulterior motive. They wanted to get to your money. They wanted access to your sexually, etc., etc., which can make these people paranoid and cynical. Um, but it's difficult. Okay, so let me back up a bit. I don't know if that's really confidence. Um, a lot of those people's ability to get what they want has nothing to do with their own efforts. It has something to do with just that they were they were kind of born into, whether it's great wealth generationally or great genes, as it were. Um, I think that what can more commonly develop, unfortunately, is a kind of arrogance, or we could call it narcissism. Narcissism is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. I think that pretty much everyone is narcissistic to begin with. All children are narcissistic in the sense that they have no empathy for other people. They can't even take the perspective of another human being. That's a fairly advanced cognitive action. So the world revolves around each one of us when we're small, for better or for worse, just because we don't have the hardware yet to support mental models to resist that self-centeredness or solipsism, etc. But the thing is that most of us get that beaten out of us one way or the other, um, in our childhood and adolescence. We, we don't always win. Even when we try our best and try our hardest, which can be one of the most bitter defeats. Um, we don't always, we're not always the smartest in the class. We're not always the strongest or picked first for dodgeball. You know what I'm saying? So it's through these small little insults to our sense of specialness that we more or less become kind of normal, like we get humbled in a sense, and that might make us kind of a decent human being on some level, that we know that there's not everything about us is wonderful or perfect, and that we have flaws and foibles, and we have a more well-rounded self-perception, which generally makes us easier to deal with. Um, without that happening, people can retain their narcissism later and later into life. And I think that any insults to that fundamental specialness are generally very painful and result in all kinds of emotional discomfort. Now, when a 2-year-old is disappointed, the 2-year-old will tend to have a tantrum. It'll cry and scream or throw itself on the floor and kick and pound. And that's not a great look, but we kind of say, "Ah, it's it's toddler. We understand." Um, not a great look when you're 22. Really bad luck when you're 32 or 42. And I've known some people who have had tantrums at that stage of life. So, it's it's kind of good to get out of your system eventually. And some very rich men and some very beautiful women don't get told no until much later in life, if ever. But that doesn't mean that it's not as painful to them as it is to the 2-year-old. They just don't, they haven't on some level built up a callous or an emotional resilience around that.

What is your advice to men, and we'll we'll close it off here, to to men that feel a lack of purpose or that feel invisible or that feel this sense of nihilism that, you know, they talk about the black pill that's been arising?

A lot of men are invisible. Uh, I mean, according to some recent studies, one in three men have not had sex in the last year under the age of 30. So we can say that a third of men are invisible in the sexual marketplace. Now, invisibility is interesting because it's kind of like on a, uh, a curve in the sense that both the least powerful and the most powerful people in a society are invisible.

What do you mean? Because the people on top are lonely?

No, it's just that sometimes we just associate power with the visible face of power, the king, the president. When the most powerful people are the ones in the shadows who are pulling the strings, and you don't even know their names or their faces. So how are you ever going to oust them? It's the public face that gets its head on the chopping block when things go sideways.

Interesting.

Yeah. It's like it's a superpower to be invisible. The One Ring makes people invisible. It's like people have long thought, what I could do with the power of invisibility. It's not always a liability, but some folks when they feel completely unseen or unseeable, it messes them up. Absolutely. This is why you can have people in the middle of the day in San Francisco standing in the middle of the streets like waving their arms and shouting nonsense, and people will just like walk right by. Like these people, we need to be seen. We need to be validated by other human beings, or else we go a little nutty. But the point I'm making here is that invisibility isn't necessarily a bad thing. What makes invisibility a good thing is that you have the freedom to move undetected in a way that when you actually are visible, you can't. So that's the, that's the benefit that young men have is that they have the power to make moves undetected. They have a freedom of movement that the more, uh, powerful folks don't because they're kind of ossified within their power structures. So they're kind of, they did. So it's really about seeing what you have. Where's the good in what we have? And there is definitely good in being invisible. You have way more freedom. You have way more, um, you, you can, you can move in many different patterns in a way that you can't when all the eyes are on you.

Right. You can make all the mistakes that you want, and it's not going to be as big of a consequence.

Absolutely. That's huge because you are going to make a lot of mistakes when you're starting off. And thank God that, you know, you don't have a YouTube channel with 100 million people watching it. You know, that would be terrifying.

Uh, which is why I think that when people become famous too young, their lives tend to self-destruct.

Yeah. And we've definitely seen that. Um, last question for you. Is there a question about relationships that you're still trying to figure out? Not personally, but just in general, that still ponders you at night?

H I mean, I don't have it all figured out myself. I do spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, and but relationships are fascinating, and because people are fascinating. And like the game of evolution, I think the game of relationships will continue to evolve, and we're in a state of that right now where new structures are coming into play, old structures are coming extinct. The old guard says that this is the end of the world. The new guard says that, uh, we're entering into a brave, bright, utopic future. They're both probably wrong. Um, but I don't think I'm ever going to run out of material when it comes to relationships because people are endlessly fascinating, and the ways that they get together and relate to each other are going to be infinitely complex.

Some things that I don't yet figure out. Um, what keeps me up at night? Um, could be recent, could be something you feel like you don't have the answers for, but you know, deep down it does. I don't know what we're going to do about the birth rate. Yeah. So, fewer people are getting married and fewer people are having children all over the developed world. I think that America is above that, but really, we're, we're above the replacement rate, but I think that's mostly because we're accounting for immigration. Then, so all over the world, the birth rate is going down as the structures that traditionally support raising children are being dismantled, and we are quite literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now, forcing people back into those structures just to have children will be difficult. And we haven't yet developed potential other technologies or structures to support raising of children other than the traditional marriage. And so that's probably the biggest thing. I don't know how that changes yet, which is interesting, right? Because it's what we've been evolutionarily designed to do, which is to reproduce and to leave some sort of a a legacy behind.

Do you think, what do you think causes that has been causing this misalignment of this desire that we have?

We do want to leave a legacy, but I think, and I'm not the first person to make this argument, that we want more of a mimetic legacy than a genetic legacy. M the idea that like if you were to donate your sperm to a sperm bank and someone somewhere on the other side of the world actually used that to create a child and so your genetic legacy came came to fruition, but you've never met this person, never had a chance to pass your values or your memories, you didn't have a chance to like have an impact that outlasted you mimemetically. I think that's less fulfilling. So I do think that people want a mimetic legacy than a genetic legacy, and that there's many ways to have a mimetic legacy that doesn't involve having children. But why do I mean, people used to have 10 kids 100 years ago because you lose a third of them in childbirth. Okay. So then we basically zeroed out infant mortality. Well, then you had six kids because you were poor and you needed an extra set of hands on the farm to make sure that people could get fed. Okay. So now we raise basic income and GDP, and so now people have three kids. Uh, well, now, uh, we've disrupted traditional gender roles. So women are also working, which means that they're not going to want to create a family with a man who earns as much as they do because she's going to need to take at least some time off away from work, and he doesn't have a replacement rate for her income. So she wants a man who has significantly more than she does to create to even maintain the lifestyle that she's used to providing for herself, which means that there are going to be fewer men that she's going to consider for those that kind of relationship.

So now there's just on average, I think 1.9 people, 1.9 children per couple, which is already below replacement rate. So how do we manage that? We definitely don't want to go back to having kids die. We definitely don't want to go back to people being poor and needing unpaid labor. I don't think we're going to go back to women not working and surrendering their income and private property, etc. So, it's like, and I don't think communicating to women that they should marry men that they're not that attracted to, that will lower their quality of life because it's like their duty to the human race. I think that's going to be a tough sell. So, I don't know what's going to happen.

I want to end it on a positive note. So, I'm going to ask you a final question.

Well, the positive note is I don't think it's all going to fall apart, right? I just don't know what it's going to look like moving forward, but I'm not all catastrophic. We're going to find a way.

I agree though. It's it's a big problem. Korea as well. I mean, this is Korea has the lowest birth rate.

Lowest birth rate in the world. Yeah.

It's it's a it's a dilemma. Um, one final short one for you to to end this as a as a way to ponder this for people is if your YouTube channel, if all of your online social media content had to get shut down today and you had to leave a final tweet, 140 characters, about how to have a successful relationship in the modern age. What would that tweet say?

Let's hope that doesn't happen. There's still more things I want to say.

We got, we got here. So yeah, we'll knock on the wall.

I think it goes back to my very first episode that I published on my channel, which was called "Be the Person You Can Love." And I think that was the first message I sent out to people. And I think it could be my last. Be the person that you can love. And I think that speaks to a lot of the topics that we discussed today. If you can be the person that you can love, then maybe you can stop seeking out the disavowed or underdeveloped parts of yourself in other people, which generally doesn't lead to a lot of long-term success. Seek that fulfillment not from other human beings. See if you can get it yourself. See if you can get it from God or some sort of higher power. See if you can get it from the creation of meaning and your mission. And then allow people to be as they are. Don't try to change them. Just like you kind of expect to be accepted in your relationships, accept the people that you're in relationships with. If you can't, don't be in relationships with them. But ultimately, if you are the person that you can love, I think you'll have a much easier time relating to others.

Beautiful. Orion, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I know you mentioned that you early on that you were trying to seek truth and to be the teller of truth. I honestly think that's why your content stands out amongst all of the other content that's out there, is that even if it hurts, even if it's not comfortable to hear that content or the the lessons that you're teaching, people I think deep down know it's true in a lot of ways. I think that's why it resonates. So, thank you for your content and thank you for the work you do.

Thank you, Sean. I do my best.

Awesome.