Why Beautiful Women Are Nuts and Successful Men Are Assh*les-Orion Taraban

Welcome back, Orion. Thanks, Mark. It's always good to be here. So, we've done several talks now, and, uh, I just thought maybe we would just wing it, you know? You, uh, I don't really have anything prepared, but I, I watch your channel every Monday and Friday. You post a new video, and you've posted so many interesting little talks, you know, everything from, from, um, like, we, you did a beautiful talk on the difference between a mother's love and a father's love, which was a great talk. You did the holders and sniffers. That was a fun one. It was, that was about how partners handle, well, actually, farting in their relationship, which is kind of a trivial problem. But I talk about it more as a metaphor for, let's say, the unpleasant and distasteful aspects of our personalities. And I think there's basically two ways to approach it. You can either kind of hold it in and protect your partner from some of those aspects of ourselves that just aren't easy to get along with, or you tend to just sort of let them rip and say, "Hey, people got to love and accept me for who I am, and I'm going to go for the authentic approach, even if it might be a little distasteful from time to time." And I think those are two radically different approaches to relationships. And I think that you can have successful relationships both ways, but that you generally have to be with a compatible, like-minded person. Like, it's hard for holders and sniffers to get along.

The most interesting part of that talk for me was where were you, um, kind of quoted, I think it was a professor that you knew, who said, "You, you need to be with somebody who you like the smell of their farts." Yeah, it wasn't a professor, it was a mentor of mine, and that was some advice that he gave me long ago when I was a love-lorn young man. Because if you're really in love with somebody, you're, you're going to just accept everything about them, good and bad, at least tolerate. I think that that's something that we should stress more in today's day and age is, you don't have to like everything about your partner, but you might have to tolerate certain things, and that's okay. Because they might have to tolerate certain things about you. It's like, everyone thinks their farts smell better than they do to other people. Have we become too, too like spoiled? Have we become too spoiled? Like, like we're, we're our goals? I think our expectations are too high. Expectations are too high in so many different ways. And one of the most damaging expectations is that our partner should be everything to us, like our lover, and our business partner, and our best friend, and our therapist, and our mommy or daddy. And it's very difficult to get even one of those things discharged well from one person. And so that really puts a lot of pressure and expectation on relationships. And it's sort of like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And sometimes somebody who could be a great co-parent may not be a, a very emotionally vulnerable, supportive best friend. And that can create problems. Maybe a wonderful mother isn't a great lover, and vice versa. So it's important, I think, for people to understand that you can't get everything from everyone, and everyone has something about them that is going to be less than ideal.

I think the advice to find somebody whose farts you can live with is important, though. Because things, for whatever reason, are just easier to live with than other things. It's like, and I think everyone is has the right to have his or her own, like, deal breakers. The things they just really can't stand, or the things that get under their skin, and they don't want to have in their relationships. It can be useful for people to examine where that distaste comes from, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to force yourself to live with it. Um, some things are going to be more charming and quirky, other things are going to be gross and distasteful, right? And on some level, the practice of love is to accept the other person for who he or she is, and to hope that they also give you the same grace, as well, in return. You certainly don't show up to a relationship hoping to be changed by the other person, to be more in line with who they would like you to be. But people go to relationships all the time, consciously or not, to change their partner. Sometimes we can say that it's well-intentioned, like, "I can see the potential in you. You can be so much better, better than you currently are." But on some level, that's a kind of a disrespect to the individual as he or she is. And another person might not see anything wrong with that behavior or that trait. It really is a subjective thing.

One of the other talks you did recently, which was kind of addressing what you just spoke about, is "There's No Need to Understand the Problem." I thought that was great, because we're constantly focusing on, like, "Let's figure out your problems. Let's figure out your problems. Let's go to therapy. Let's figure them out." But the truth is, as you said, even if you figure it out, doesn't mean the problem has evaporated. It's still there. No, there's a couple things about this, I think. One of them, I said in the episode, I've said on the channel before, which is that insight isn't enough. And I learned this when I worked for a couple years in my training at an outpatient chemical dependency clinic. And you would see all kinds of folks come through your doors in that kind of setting. And there were folks who were kind of like frequent flyers. They've gone through the system, they've gone through programs multiple times, sometimes mandated, sometimes not. These folks had been thoroughly therapized. Like, they spoke the lingo better than I did at that point, and they could tell you all about their alcoholic family dynamics and their shame-based self, and the chain analysis of what led them to relapse, and how alcoholism from their great-grandfather has been passed down, down to the generations. And they still drink. So it's like, these folks were sufficiently aware, both of their vulnerability factors and the mental processes that lead them to drink and relapse, and yet they continue to do so.

By the same token, that same day, I could see somebody with a very low insight who would come into the office and say, "I want to stop drinking." "Why?" "Uh, I don't know. I don't like it anymore." And he just decides not to put the alcohol in his mouth anymore, and he's in recovery. Like, he's, he's getting better that way. What's really interesting about working with addicts in particular is, there are few sectors of mental health where you can see such profound growth and change in a human being in such a short amount of time. Like, if you can succeed in helping somebody go without alcohol or meth or opioids for three months, like, they can become a totally different person. Yeah, I've seen it happen. It's amazing. It's so hopeful and encouraging. Of course, the issue is to stay that way, right? Like, what's the joke? "Quitting is easy. I've done it a hundred times." So that's one thing is that insight is just not enough.

The other thing that I haven't said on the channel, but I'll say here, is kind of a controversial take, but that not everyone should be in a relationship. Not everybody's ready to be in a relationship. Think about it this way: if, if you had a broken leg and you were trying out for, like, the varsity football team, no one would have a problem with you sitting on the bench for a while. It doesn't mean you'll never get to play, but maybe you need to heal your leg and go through some physical therapy and do what you need to do to get to a place where you could actually contribute to the team. That's a tough sell when it comes to, let's say, emotional or psychological injuries. Sometimes people think that if it's not visible, people should just be able to get over it, or our hearts are Teflon, or these folks deserve love and relationships too. And I think that's kind of a tough sell. It's like, some people, if they've been traumatized by previous relationships or their childhood or life, which is obviously subject to happening, it happens to lots of folks. It's like a broken leg. Is that maybe you need to take some time off the field and heal and do what you need to do to get to a place where you can contribute positively to the team effort? And insisting that you should play in spite of that insult or that injury to your heart or to your mind, I think that just is in spite of reality on some level. Does that make sense?

Makes perfect sense. Yeah. And so I always, you know, sometime I think every week I'm dealing with consultations from guys who are in less than satisfying relationships. And they think, "Yeah, she tells me she's still trying to get over her trust issues from the ex that cheated on her, or she had a narcissistic father, and she's working through that." And I was like, "Okay, that's good that she's working through that, but she's still in physical therapy. Like, she's, she doesn't get a spot on the team yet. She's on the roster. She, maybe she's on the roster, but she's on the, what, the disabled list or the injury list, whatever they call it." So, um, there's no need to go forward with somebody who's still in the process of healing. Um, and it's certainly not, I tell these men, it's not your responsibility to make all of these, like, changes to the game to accommodate where she is emotionally or psychologically. It's like, we're not going to change the rules of football so that people with broken legs can play. And we should be cautious about going out of our way to allow that to happen. Just give people some time. Take six months, 12 months, heal up, get better, and then get back on the field. It's not a big deal.

Aren't we often though finding a partner that might be slightly broken in hopes that we can fix him up and then make him something that maybe we couldn't get if they were 100% when we met them? Uh, I think a lot of people do. I, I certainly was that way when I was younger. And I'll speak from my own experience. I think I did that because I didn't have a very high self-esteem. I didn't know if I could successfully compete as a young man against some of the guys who were more accomplished, more attractive, stronger. On some level, I was wondering, what a healthy, high-functioning woman would want to do with me. So on some level, I'm, as not the fastest lion, I might have targeted the gazelles with the limp, you know? That's, I was like, "Okay, maybe that's my food." On some level. So, and, I think this was unconscious, but my thinking was that I will earn my relationship, I will earn my sex, I will earn my love by helping this person. Because what I, where I might have been able to compete, even back then, was with my mind and with my words and things that I was interested in, in that respect. So I thought, "Okay, I know a little bit about psychology, I know a little bit about X, Y, and Z. Maybe I can go in, help this woman, because I could see the potential in her. And as she gets better, she'll reward me in her gratitude with sex, love, and relationship." And it turns out that's not usually what happens. That's not how it works. No.

So I've discovered that as I've become more authentically confident and with a good measure of self-worth, in a sense of my own self-efficacy, I don't, I don't do that anymore. Um, but I think a lot of people unconsciously believe that they're not enough, and so they target partners, consciously or not, that are also deficient in some way, and expect them to be grateful for doing so. You see people in your private practice, you also are living in this world of relationships and everything else that we're dealing with in life. How many people are happy in their romantic partnerships? I don't know, man. That's, that's a tough one. It's like, we, we know outcomes about, like, marriage that 55% of all marriages end in divorce. It's only 40% for first marriages, only, but 55% overall because if you get divorced once, you're more likely to get divorced again. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the people who stay together are happy, nor does it mean the people who separated were unhappy. Like, I think that's obviously the case in, in, in some instances, but I think it's a bridge too far to just make that assumption. I can speak for my own personal experience, having been personally invited into hundreds of people's relationships. I can think of maybe one or two relationships, families, marriages where I would think, "Oh, this is pretty nice. I could do this." The vast majority of the time, I'm there and I'm like, "I don't know how these people do it." Like, I could not handle this. And that's okay. I don't have to, right? You know, but I don't know. I don't know. I think in general, people aren't very happy. And it doesn't seem like a relationship makes you happier. We sure are convinced that it will, though. We try so hard. Yeah.

People often think relation, like a, like a romantic, that kind of relationship can make you happier. Can you chase it until you are exhausted, and then you chase it some more? A lot of people do that. Yeah. I think we need relationships. Like, a life without relationships would be very hard. I think Aristotle said that only a beast or a God could live outside of society. And society is formulated of relationships. Like, you have to be so self-sufficient and independent that you would need nobody, which would make you, I, I don't even know what it would make you, or you, you're just half feral. So most of us need relationships, and they are a potentially a great source of our meaning and satisfaction. They don't have to be romantic relationships, though. I think friendships are actually more important than romantic relationships in many respects. But we sure do value the romantic ones more. Well, we seem to. Sure, they're fun too. You know, so many, uh, of these kind of relationship gurus, which I'll lump you into that group, they seem to focus, focus on how women are aiming for these guys that are the most alpha, the most successful, the most attractive, the most, all that. But I, and you and I have talked about this off, I think at dinner once, where I, I think there are women who probably, because of some subconscious thing that they believe about themselves, will aim low. They will not go for a guy who is the most attractive, the best candidate for a good life. A lot of women learn to aim lower.

I don't think they aim low, but many of them learn to aim lower. Because you're right, it's, in the beginning, like ever since high school, most women, it's like there's clickish and faddish about which guys are hot and which guys are not. And even in high school, there was like, three guys of the entire class that had seemed like 90% of the girls were smooching over, right? And that, that doesn't change all that much. Especially core research, it seems like the vast majority of women are all kind of looking at the top, let's say, 15% of men. That 90% of the women were into. Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah. Certainly in with, like, for example, revealed preferences on dating apps. And some guys hear that and they despair. But I don't believe that that's justified. Because the top 15% of men is constantly being renovated. Like, it's very hard to be in that top echelon indefinitely. And the men who were there 30 years ago, likely are not there today. Do you see? So you get a, you get a moment, if you play your cards right, you get a little lucky, and you work pretty hard. Just like women, you know, it's like they're most attractive in a season, on some level. And men can kind of even the odds through hard work and dedication and a little luck over decades, potentially. Um, so I don't think men need to hear that stat and think it's never going to happen to me. I certainly, when I was younger, didn't think that I would be where I am today. Life is long and mysterious.

Okay, so what often women learn though, is that those attractive men are a wash of optionality. And the research also is pretty clear that men enjoy and pursue casual sex more often than women do. And so a lot of men who are in that highest echelon, who are getting a lot of female attention, I mean, why stop the, the buffet, as it were? It's like, why settle down with any one woman, especially now when everything's kind of coming in hard and fast, as it were? So that might not be an issue for a younger woman. But eventually, most women seem to want to have a family. And they might eventually despair of being able to get that from the most attractive man, either because that man sees that woman as exceedingly expensive, because of the opportunity cost it would require to devote himself exclusively to her and raising a family with her, or that she's not sufficiently attractive for him to do that. Like, that's the, the truth of the situation. And so a lot of women understand that, "Okay, if I really want this, maybe I need to go after a different type of man. A man who is more caring, who's able to provide, who has a stable job. Maybe he's not the most interesting guy, maybe he's not the most attractive guy, but if I play my cards right, I might be able to get a ring. I might be able to get a house. I might be able to get some kids."

I think what I'm, what I am, uh, referring to is more like, one of the most interesting things I've heard. I've done like over 8,000 interviews, and this to me was the most mind-blowing thing I'd ever heard. Um, Phil Messing, who is a New York Post reporter, he did a talk with, uh, Pete Panuco, who's a, who is a homicide detective in New York. And they did a talk about some of the big homicide cases in New York. And Phil was talking about going to, uh, to interview a death row inmate. And there's certain hours where they are allowed visitors. And he said it was the most fascinating thing to go during those visiting hours. And here, the way he described it was a lineup of tens of women. No kidding. They're here for their death row daddy. Wow. It's like, what the [ __ ]? You should make a documentary about that. No, but, but that's kind of what I'm talking about. These women could probably get anybody they want, but they're looking for this guy who's locked up, never getting out, jobless, moneyless, just crazy. That kind of behavior in serious killers, even that have targeted women, yeah, multiple times, or women that like look for in inmates, you know, they get, become pen pals. And I've done a couple of those.

Well, yeah, I remember seeing a couple episodes from a, I think there was one woman, she was Eastern European. MH. Yeah, who, um, got involved with someone on death row. Iana. Yeah, I think so. And what was interesting, as I recall about her story, is I think she was raised in, um, wartime. I believe you're right. I think she was raised in Bosnia during, in the '90s, during some of the, the conflicts in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. That's right. And you can have all kinds of ethics and and moral principles. However, in, in wartime, a lot of those things go out the window. Like, the ability to attach yourself to a man with a known willingness and track record in killing might be the safest [ __ ] thing that you could possibly do. Like, it's wise to do that. I learned this in my own family. Like, my grandfather was a soldier who, in the aftermath of World War II, walked with my grandmother and a few other civilians from Ukraine to Germany before kind of like getting everybody on boats to America. Like, I doubt that my grandmother and those civilians would have gone with him if he wasn't a killer and he didn't have a gun and knew how to use it. Like, they were safer with that man. Now, according to stories I've been told, it's, he was not the easiest person to live with, let's put it that way. And it's like, Ivana, you can take the girl out of war, but sometimes you can't take the war out of the girl. And what might be very adaptive and even rational in some context, might be really maladaptive and irrational in others. This is a very obvious example, but I think to a lesser extent, this kind of programming affects all of us to one degree or another. Where the things that, this is an interesting idea, is like, a lot of the, the, the neuroses, that's an outdated term, but a lot of like, the, the mental issues that people deal with at one point in their lives, where their most adaptive solution to a problem they were facing, usually in their families of origin, it may not make sense outside of the family, though. And it might be less effective, more expensive, even come with painful consequences. But if people haven't, like, updated their browser, if they haven't really, like, taken in the fact that they're no longer children living in that household under these circumstances, they can have those things affect them for often the, the rest of their lives, even. But like I say, most, the word dysfunction, is the word function. Dysfunction mostly works. If it didn't, no one would [ __ ] do it. So that's something to keep in mind when you're potentially judging other people and or judging yourself, is that there's probably a reason why you do the things that you do, even if they cause you pain. Yeah.

Humans are interesting. They're fascinating, man. And we're all psychologists to some degree or another. Figuring to be. You do, because people are both a potential solution to a problem and the biggest [ __ ] problem you're ever going to have. When your partner is giving you a hard time over something and you just see it as, "It's not really warranted." You have to get inside her head, figure out what, what's going on there so that you can understand where she's coming from. It's so you need to become a therapist. That's true. But that goes back to the trap of understanding, which we were talking about earlier. Like, you can do that, or you can say, "I, regardless of where this is coming from, it's like, your leg is broken. Heal that, and then play with me." You'll never have a partner ever. Well, I don't know about that. We're all broken to some extent. To some extent. But like we said, some farts smell better than others. And some people actually have healed a little bit more than others. You keep coming back to the farts. It all comes back to the farts.

Two of my favorite talks you've done, they're like bookends. "Why Beautiful Women Are Nuts" and "Why Successful Men Are Jerks." Oh, yeah. Provocative titles. It's a while since I, I wrote those. You might have to jog my memory. Oh, yes, I remember now. Which one do you want me to talk about first? Take your pick. Which one are you in the mood for? Well, you got to compare the two. Let's go with "Why Successful Men Are Jerks," because I found that when we give men a hard time first, sometimes it's more palatable when we come to the women. You're, you're learning how to be, thank you, diplomatic. So, uh, the word I would use, which I used in the episode, but not in the title, is "Why Successful Men Are [ __ ]." And that's generally what men are accused of as being [ __ ]. And I think the issue, the reason why successful men turn out this way, I don't think they usually start this way, they turn into that, is because they have learned to do all kinds of things that they don't really want to do in order to get and keep women. I don't think women understand that probably 90, 95% of what an average man does is designed to increase his chances to either get or keep women. I would say higher than that.

You think higher than 95%? I mean, like, I remember having this conversation when I was younger, and we're all dating, and, and one of my friends goes, "Everything a man does, whether he's become successful, powerful, rich, what you name it, it's all just to get women." Well, I said that in the episode, "Why Successful Men Cheat." It's like, a lot of people shake their heads in disbelief. "Why would this guy who's at the top of his craft, his industry, he's president, he's king, like, he has everything, and he threw it all away by sleeping with some woman, some intern, some mistress?" And it's like, you're missing the point. The reason why he became the CEO and the president was to be able to do that. Like, that's, that's the brass ring. That's unconsciously held out for men. That's why they work sometimes to their graves, and they die in harness, because that's so frustrating for women, though. And in what sense? Like, a woman thinks like, "I'm the perfect partner for this guy. He should be happy with me forever." And she's done nothing wrong. And then one day he just finds a 24-year-old. And yeah, well, we can, I can talk about, I can talk to that. Like, it's very difficult to have stable, fulfilling long-term relationships. Not least of all, because no one continues to pay the plumber. What does that mean? So it's like, when your toilet is, when your toilet is clogged, the plum, the plumber is in very high demand. But after the clog has been resolved, no one continues to pay the plumber. You get him out of the house, you give him what he's owed, but that's it. We're done here. So it's like, people go to other people because they need and want things from others. The issue is that in giving those things to another, I'm complicit in my own obsolescence. Like a plumber who doesn't unclog clogs isn't a plumber. Like, he would get no business whatsoever. But as soon as he's done unclogging the clog, he's got no more business. Now, the world is full of clogs. There's always going to be plumbers, right? But the issue is, if I need to give you what you want to get into a relationship with you, but giving you what you want means you no longer need to be in a relationship with me, how the [ __ ] do we do this, right? And so in the long term, this is not something that we openly discuss at all. I've never heard anyone talk about this. We have to continue to find new problems to solve in the our partners' lives. We need new ways to be needed. And if those new ways to do not produce themselves, then either you generally, you just drift apart and maybe you separate, but maybe you just become like roommates and platonic friends living in your own house, which maybe isn't the worst thing, but probably isn't the best thing either, right? This is often why, in particular, marriages suffer a crisis when the kids are launched or about to be launched. You both parties might have chosen each other to some extent because you think that this person would be a good mother, very kind, good with children, or this would be a loyal family man. It's like, "Okay, now if you have kids, you'll never not be a parent." But like, those qualities and behaviors and attributes are much less relevant now that the kids are 20 than they were when they were two. So if you don't have anything else to give, you're like the plumber who's unclogged the drain. And that feels really shitty because it's like a, because raising children is no small thing, and a partnership of 20 years shouldn't be just thrown out like yesterday's garbage. Right? But the issue is, in there could be another 40 years of life left. That's a long time to not have a need to be discharged, to not have something that we're working on together. And so that's what I counsel folks who are going through this is, you have to find other projects that really speak to the both of you that you can collaborate on. And there's, there's tons that that could be. You could adopt a bunch of dogs and foster them. You could travel the world and start becoming influencers together. You can found a new business. You can build a house together. Like, you have to do some kind of overarching project. You need to keep dangling the carrot. There needs to be a new clog. Yeah, there needs to be a new clog that needs to be unclogged. And in the absence of that, you don't, you get rid of the plumber. That's why people who need nothing from their partners, their relationships are the most precarious.

I was once doing a consultation with an older woman who was having marital difficulties, and she was just like, "I, I don't know what the problem is. Like, I have my own money from my family. Like, I don't, I'd be fine by myself. I don't need my husband for anything." And I was like, "If that's true, which it probably isn't, but if that's true, you should never tell him that. Don't ever say that with your mouth. And certainly don't communicate that with your attitude or your behavior." Because I'm sure he doesn't think that he does nothing for you. And if you act as if he does nothing for you, in spite of his efforts and his loyalty and his continued investment, he's going to feel like the biggest schmuck in the world. Because he's clearly still giving and trying, and it's not even being acknowledged or recognized. And that's a dangerous game to be, to have one's efforts not even recognized or invalidated. We need to need each other. And in the absence of that, we just have desire. We just have want, which is a very capricious thing. It comes and goes. If it's just desire, why not break up when the desire ends? That sounds reasonable. The whole basis of the relationship was desire. There's no more desire. We came here to eat dinner. We had our food time to go home. Makes sense. So, oh, sorry. I can pull it back around.

So I was about to say, you, so a lot of guys do [ __ ] that they don't want to do in order to be competitive with women, get access to them. And what they begin to learn as they make decent choices and become more successful is that women tend to respond to them more and better as a function of having things that they can offer women that women really want. Like, a 20-year-old man could give a woman his heart. But a 45-year-old man could give her a yacht, could give her a family, could give her travel around the world, could give her the ability to quit her job, could give her the ability to become a mother in a way that the 21-year-old might not be able to, because he's just not emotionally mature enough, he doesn't have the lifestyle, he doesn't have the wealth. Be extremely difficult for him to do that. And so what's, what happens as men become more successful and women start to respond to them differently, without them really changing much about themselves, they start to realize what really moves the needle with women. And it's not romance. It's not loving her more than the other men in her life. It's being able and willing to give her more than the other men in her life. And so men begin to dispense, because successful men are often very rational and very effective, they start to dispense with the behaviors that don't instrumentally move the needle with women. And so they stop the romance, they stop the courtship, and they maybe even become a little corrupted in the sense of they feel entitled that, "I have these things. This is what you respond to. So we can move forward in that way." In the same way that women can become corrupted sometimes when they realize how much men respond to their physical beauty. And some women believe that because of the way that they look, that they're entitled to certain things. It's, it's kind of the same thing in just different gendered expressions. And of course, it goes along those lines because men are fundamentally trying to exchange resources for sexual opportunity, and women are attempting to exchange sexual opportunity for resources. It's not the other way around. So that's why we see that successful men become [ __ ], which is a woman's term for a man not really caring about the emotional dimension of the relationship. And he learns that as a successful man, because when he was attending to that, but he was unsuccessful, it didn't work. And as he became more successful, and he didn't attend to it, he had more success and effectiveness with women. So women taught him what to value with respect to his dealings with them. Does that make sense?

Makes perfect sense. Do, what do you say to people who say, "You're, your views are so unromantic"? Well, they are. They are unromantic. Like, I, I understand what romance is. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but romance doesn't make happy people. And it certainly doesn't, I mean, life is not a romantic comedy. That's not this. The sweet, lovable guy doesn't always end up with the girl at the end of the movie, right? I mean, even think about the way that, that's, those narratives are played out. It's never the successful romantic CEO versus the poor, practical, small-town guy, because that guy would never [ __ ] win. He doesn't have either things. So the, the reason why romance kind of exists is it gives the small-town, poor, unsuccessful guy some chance of potentially leveling the playing field against this successful, accomplished man who actually can provide value to women and make their lives better than they might otherwise be. So romance is generally for unsuccessful men. It's a way for them to potentially offer something that the successful men either can't, but most likely won't, because they feel like they don't need to, because they've been taught that they don't, by women.

Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, if you want to get to the truth of why things are the way they are, we, we can't really be romantic. Imagine if, like, Romanticism used to be a, was initially like a genre of, it was a literary movement. And can you imagine if our, if our scientists of the 19th century were Romantics and weren't willing to like, cut open corpses and run experiments and separate the atom? It's like, it would be very difficult to understand the truth about the natural world. Now, is this the be all, end all, this kind of empirical scientific understanding? No, no. It has its limitations as well. But Romanticism is sort of like a fuzziness. It's sort of like a mood. And moods are, uh, moods are subjective. They're subject to change. And they don't often reveal actionable knowledge that we can use to make better decisions moving forward. That's what I got to.

What about the women that are nuts? Attractive women are nuts. Oh, yeah. Beautiful women are nuts. So many of them are. Um, this one's actually pretty simple. The reason why beautiful women are nuts is that no one tells them the truth. No one tells them the truth. Especially if they're precociously beautiful. Like, I don't know, have you, have any of the women of the 8,000 interviews that you've done talked about this? Have they talked about going through puberty, puberty when they were still adolescents and and like dealing with the new kind of attention that they were getting from men? Yeah, it comes up once in a while. It's like, we don't want to talk about it because it's like, anything that happens before you're 18, it's like, "Oh, we don't." But you see that behavior. Well, you see that. Absolutely. And, and women, young women don't know how to handle it. When, why would they, or should they, right? But it's like, suddenly, because their body has changed, the boys in their classroom are treating them differently and looking at them differently. And not just the boys in their classroom, but the boys' fathers and the boys' grandfathers. It's like, men apparently never really stop desiring young attractive women. So these women now have to deal with a great deal of interest and attention, from which is a kind of power. And it's a power that they've done nothing to earn. They just sort of of like lived a little bit longer, and their body did what the body did, right? So this is can be very dangerous. Because, I mean, think about it. Why did I go through the trouble of like becoming a psychologist? Or why did I, before that, get really good at test prep and teach people about the GRE and learn how to do that? And before that, how did I, why did I become an actor? It's like, because people weren't just giving me money. People weren't just giving me sex. People weren't just giving me entertainment and flights and dinners. Like, and those things sound nice, don't they, right? They're not necessary, but they sure make life a little bit more pleasant. So I had to earn them, which is what most guys have to do. And we have to earn them generally indirectly by becoming very good at something, which takes a long time, and compete successfully with other men, often in the arena of life. And then maybe with some other things factored in, we can potentially get some of those good things. But we pay for them. Now, if I hit, if I ever since I was 16, people were offering to buy me food, or to, uh, pay for my tuition, or to take me out every night of the week, or to give me relationships and love. And would I have worked as hard as I have in my life? [ __ ] no. Absolutely. Like, I know that enough about myself. It's like, that's just too seductive. It's like the one ring of power, man. It's like, very few people could actually resist that. Because the reason why we struggle is generally to get those things, not because we are so virtuous that we believe that struggle is inherently valuable. Like some of us eventually get there, but we are vanishingly few. And we generally get there through, um, pathway that I'm describing now. Um, so a lot of attractive women, they realize that the source of their, um, I mean, and this has been happening as long as you've been kind of like a conscious adult. Why wouldn't you become entitled? Why wouldn't you expect it? If it's happened 10,000 times in the past over the last 10 years, it's like, I expect the sun is going to rise in the morning, even though there's no [ __ ] guarantee that it will. It's like, it's just happened billions of times. I think it's the safe bet. You see? So that can create problems. First of all, like, I don't even know if a totalitarian monarch doesn't get told no from time to time. Maybe the ministers have to be kind of gentle about how they oppose him or reject him. But like, there are few people that have lived in the history of the world that get more of what they want, less than what they don't, than a beautiful woman. And it's hard to be told no. It's hard to be rejected. It sucks to not get what you want. It does. Now, most of us, though, we, we learn to deal with that because we kind of accept that that's just the way the world works. Like Mick said, "You can't always get what you want." Most of us can't often get what we want, right? So if, but it does take time to learn how to tolerate rejection, to deal with the sting of disappointment and lack. It toughens you up. It might make you a better person, potentially. Can, anyway. But it takes a while. Uh, and it takes a while, whether that starts when you're two or whether that starts when you're 30. The issue is when it, like, anybody who is told no for the first time, they generally have a meltdown and a tantrum. And tantrums don't really look good on anybody. But they look much better than a toddler than an adult. Okay.

So one thing that can be very difficult is you're dealing with, with a beautiful woman, you're dealing with, like, a, a toddler, emotionally, at least in the respect of this person has never truly not been able to get what she wanted. And the likelihood that some kind of outburst is going to occur is quite high. And we often see that kind of disregulation, behaviorally, as kind of nuttiness, right? So that's one way. But let's talk about how no one tells these women the truth. Because men, very early on, it doesn't take long for them to figure this out, but they realize the truth does not get them laid. The truth does not get them laid. Like, almost every guy does this at some point in his life, especially because he thinks it's going to differentiate himself from all the other guys out there. "I'm not like the other guys, you know? I'm gonna, I'm just going to tell you how it is." If women can do this experiment, it'd be very easy. They can do it for free. They can make like a fake profile on a dating app with some pictures of a guy, even like attractive men, and just change what looking forward to casual relationships and see how many matches they get and what kind of responses they get versus if they say that they're looking for a long-term relationship. I think that probably 90% more than 90% of men on dating apps are looking for long-term relationships, which is fascinating. Do I think that 90% of the male population at any one time is looking for a long-term relationship? [ __ ] no. But they learn that if they say that they're just looking to have casual consensual relationship with another woman who's attracted to them, they don't get any responses. And women train them that way. Like, if the truth got men laid, the world would look so much better than it currently does. Like, can you imagine like women actually do have the power to remake the world indirectly by choosing which men to reward with sex and relationships and under what circumstances? And let me tell you, if, if a woman one, got better at assessing out the truth from lies, which they're not very good at, because most people aren't very good at that, um, and just did not have sex with men who lied to them, man, we'd have a much more honest population. Like, very quickly. But one, women have a hard time differentiating the truth from lies. Um, and two, they often care about other things more. They do. It's like, where would women hang out if they truly valued honesty above all things? Like, I don't know, charities? Where, where do honest men hang out? There's not that many. Where do they congregate? Where do they congregate? That's a good question. M. Maybe like philosophical clubs or churches? I, I mean, there's plenty of dishonest people in both of those, but like, probably better than dive bars or nightclubs, right?

I blame the dads. Well, that's what I talk about in the end of that episode is that, the, there are exceptions. Not all beautiful women are nuts. But those women tend to have very strong male figures in their life, fathers and brothers, who were able to tell the woman the truth and bear her hatred, bear her insults and her criticism and her emotional outbursts, because it was the kind of like, the right thing to do. Not just from the perspective of some vague virtue, but for her, it's the best thing to do, because now she can become like a, a full emotional adult. Those are rare. It's rare for men and women. It's true. It's like, chronological age has absolutely nothing to do with emotional, psychological age. And most of the people who are walking around, despite what their driver's license says, are probably between 8 and 12 years old. But if you accept that that might be true, the rest of society starts to make a lot of sense. You certainly can't begin with the assumption that people are just virtuous and mature. Why would the world look the way that it does? If you go the other way around, a lot of things make sense. Now, I do think that there's reason to be hopeful. I do think that the state of humanity is probably trending in a positive direction. You think so? I do. I do. Uh, it did seem like there was a lot of barbarism back in the day, man. Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not like that stuff doesn't happen at all in today's day and age, but I do think it's on the decline. I think that fewer people live in poverty today than they have at any point in human history. There's more literate people. I think the quality of life for

The average person has increased significantly. I think there's less violence overall. Clearly, we have things to work on, but I think there are also reasons to be hopeful. But you have to understand that these things, they take a long time to change. The degree of understanding in humanity is still very low, still very low. And if you go too high, you lose people, or they get scared, and then they, they attack you. So you kind of have to like, just be a little bit further along and increase a person's understanding by like another degree, another step. And there could be a lot of steps to get to where we ultimately want to go together. So there's no hurry. It's not going to happen while you and I are alive.

One of your other talks that I thought was great was "How to Pass Through Suffering." Oh yeah, that was a useful one, I think. Mhm. Because life is suffering. A lot of it is. It doesn't have to be. I just wrote a script today, so this is kind of top of mind about suffering. Suffering is different from pain, in my opinion. Suffering is pain plus judgment. And the judgment is generally that this pain is unbearable, or unendurable, or unjust, or unfair. Okay. I think pain is everywhere around us, except maybe for this one very thin, very narrow, fluctuating path that kind of like is hedged on all sides by pain. We can call that the path of light. And I think those are the two ways that all human beings can learn. You can either learn through pain, or you can learn through light. And 99% of people learn 99% of their lessons through pain. Pain is a wonderful teacher because pain never lies. It doesn't care about your feelings. It will tell you the honest, brutal truth in a way that your loved ones won't, your therapist won't, your priest won't. Pain always gives you direct, honest feedback about how your behavior aligns with reality. We experience pain when our mental models cause us to act in spite of reality. So, to give a very commonplace example, if I believe that that outlet over there should have no power in it, and so I would be free to stick a metal piece in there and suffer no consequences, I would experience pain as a consequence of that decision because my model was wrong. I thought that there was no power doing that, or I didn't understand that metal conducts electricity, or what have you. But like my ignorance motivated me to feel pain because I acted in a way that was like, in spite of the way things are. That's a very, I think, obvious and physical example. But we can see that even with emotional and psychological pain as well, is that at the root of it is that there's some sort of belief that reality should be other than how it is. And they're clinging to this idea, and in some cases, continuing to make decisions in line with this incorrect model that bring them in constant contact with pain.

But pain, there's kind of like a guardianship to pain because it's on either side of the path of light. It's like the rumble strips on the edge of a road that let you know that you're starting to drift off course. Like the more sensitive and responsive we become, the less pain we really need to feel to kind of wake up and course-correct back on the path of light. Which is not a static, um, unchanging route. Like it's very difficult to constantly, unwaveringly follow that path. It's very hard to see, which is why we get that feedback from the path of pain. Pain is good. It's the, it's the gift that nobody wants. And a life without pain would be very difficult to endure because we would be so far off that path. Our lives, and collectively humanity, would devolve to such a degree that I don't think any of us would want to be on this planet. Like pain ideally helps us get on that straight and narrow path where we suffer less. Because what I found is that the more pain there is, the less light there is. But the more light there is, the more pain there is. And in some cases, light is transmuted pain. The great benefit to light, which we can say collectively is knowledge, wisdom, or revelation, is that it can be communicated to other people. Pain cannot be communicated to people, not really. Like, if you've never broken your leg, how can I really tell you how that feels? If you've never lost a child, how can you really understand what that grief feels like? The only way you could possibly approximate it is if you've broken your leg or you've lost a child, and it still wouldn't be exactly the same thing. But at least we're kind of in the ballpark, right? So pain is a very personal and subjective experience, and it can't really be communicated or transmitted. Which, if that were the only option, would suck because that means that every person has to like start over and learn all the lessons from scratch, and we wouldn't get anywhere.

Light can be transmitted. Light can be communicated, which is fantastic. And that's like the best resource that we have collectively to fight back against the darkness and to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering on this planet. And the light that I can transmit is my own transmuted pain. It's me potentially saying with my words, "I've learned this hard lesson from the teacher, pain, and I'm going to try to teach it to you so that you don't have to learn the same lesson that I did." Now, that said, I do think that everyone's has the right to make their own mistakes. I do think that there might be something, let's say, cowardly and meek about somebody who just takes good advice and on face value and never runs the risk himself or herself. I do think that we're allowed to make our own mistakes, which is why I never prevent people from doing something that I believe has a high likelihood of causing them pain. I'll, I'll counsel them against it, but I won't stop. I won't stop them because, just like myself, they might have to feel that pain. They might have to feel it enough, and they might have to feel it enough times to finally learn their [ __ ] lesson. And once they learn their lesson, they course-correct. They change their behavior. So they're a little off the path of pain and a little bit more on the path of light, and they suffer less. And the more light there is, the more light there will be because people who begin to suffer less have no interest in going back, not really. And they start to become, it's like a virtuous cycle, and they're like chasing after the light. They follow the light. And that's the best way that I think we have as individuals and collectively to get out of the misery that might otherwise be human existence. So thank God for that. Uh, yeah, thank God for that for sure.

Yeah, your talks just get more and more fascinating as they go on. Oh, thanks. Your channel's incredible. I actually didn't, uh, answer your question about the suffering, though. So there's the episode you're referring to, okay, is called "A Horse in the Rain." Yes. So it's a, it's an attempt to teach people what to do when they are in the midst of suffering. And this was a question that I was asked in one of my courses back when I was a professor. And the question was, functionally, "Dr. Terban, you've talked so much about unnecessary suffering and how to undo it, but what about the, the calling some suffering unnecessary assumes that some suffering is necessary." Which I kind of believe is true. Certainly from like a Buddhist perspective, we can't escape old age, sickness, and death. Let's put it that way, unless we die young, I guess. Um, so there's some necessary suffering that human beings are subject to. Passing through, how do you deal with that? And what came to me was this image of a horse in the rain. You ever seen a horse in the rain, Mark? You just stand there. That's right. It's just standing there getting wet. It's not trying to dance around the raindrops in some sort of manic, futile desire to not get drenched. It's not like beating its hooves and lamenting the injustice that it's raining here and not over there on those horses. It's not enviously plotting against the horses in the stable. It's not like laying down and just surrendering, "Oh my God, this is so miserable. I'll never be dry again." Like those are all human forms of suffering. Animals don't experience that, which is part of why I think we envy animals in some, in some respect. So a lot of the, it might be necessary to be wet. It might be necessary to be in the rain. But all these other judgments and stories that we're subject to telling ourselves about our circumstances are totally unnecessary and make the suffering so much more painful than it otherwise needs to be. It's really not that painful to be wet and to be cold for a while. It's okay. Those, those are conditions that will change. And then you might end up being so dry and hot that you'll miss being cold and wet at some point, you know? That's kind of the human condition. So the issue is to not make your situation worse than it already is.

A compliment to this is the advice I've given about what if you find yourself in the jaws of life? That's what I call it. Sometimes people just end up, sometimes through their own fault, sometimes not, but they find themselves in a really dangerous and precarious situation. The jaws of life. It's like you're the bunny, and life is the wolf, and it's got you in its mouth, right? I don't know if you've ever seen that in a nature documentary, but what the bunny does under those circumstances is not fight against what's happening. It doesn't resist what is happening. Why? Because the teeth are right there. If the bunny was to start to struggle, those teeth would just dig deeper and deeper into its flesh, and it would be next to impossible at that point to escape. So what the bunny does, he goes limp. It almost plays dead. It doesn't expend unnecessary energy struggling against something that it can't escape from. And it potentially waits for its moment, which often happens where, in some momentary lapse of concentration or attention, or a feeling like the dinner is a sure thing, the wolf relaxes his mouth a little bit, and the bunny [ __ ] dashes out as fast as it can. So that's the goal is like, when you're really dealing with something difficult, don't make it worse than it already is, and wait for your moment. If you're lucky, you might get one, and then you take it as best you can.

On that note, we'll, uh, we'll wind it up already. Wow, this was so fast. That was an hour already? That was an hour. Good lord. Well, this has been great, Mark. Thanks for all your talks are fantastic. I think your, your mind is just so f fting. Oh, thank you, sir. All right, till next time. Bye-bye. Thanks.