Marriage Is Often a Terrible Deal | Orion Taraban

in order to have a relationship in today's day and age you have to be very attractive whether you're a man or a woman people don't need you as much as they did even a generation ago is marriage even a good deal today the contract is wild marriage is better than a high paying job if you can get the right one you only want to get married for one reason what is that I think the best reason to do that is Allan welcome back thanks for having me Eric I'm going to hit you hard right now

is marriage even a good deal today well it depends on which side of the contract you're on it can be a fantastic deal if you position yourself appropriately like the contract is wild the fact that you could potentially enter into an agreement with somebody who is significantly higher net worth Than You by orders of magnitude and after you put in a number of times for no fault at all you can pull a rip cord and take half with you is completely absurd to me especially given the fact that that person could then get married to

somebody else the following day like there's absolutely no cooldown period people can get married two times three times you can accumulate a vast Fortune obviously not very ethical you know people will be shameful of that strategy but it clearly works and it's clearly happening in today's day and age so it's probably a marriage is better than a high paying job if you can get the right one got and that's on the female side it's usually the female side it's not always but it's generally on the female side got it and I think you so you

said something on another podcast um where I think you said marriage you only want to get married for one reason what is that well if you did want to consider marriage I think the best reason to do that is if you want to have children because I think that fundamentally marriage is a construct to support raising children in a secure and loving environment and if you're not interested in doing that for whatever reason or you think that sometime in the future just be two consenting adults who enjoy spending time with each other there's no reason

to enter into that contract you don't even necessarily have to enter into that contract to have children and that's becoming very prevalent in today's day and age as well I know in California at least if you spend x amount of times maybe it's x amount of years or with somebody you're living with them basically they're considered your partner and that contract goes into effect is that yeah that's called a common law marriage and that differs from state to state significantly depending on the amount of time some states don't have it at all other states it's

as soon as you move in together it's not even a period of time after cohabitation that's why it may be wise to structure cohabitation agreements if you're looking to live with your partner but not get legally married because it can be construed in that manner it's probably better to just communicate this stuff up front right sure but this is all very busy and not romantic we're supposed to get into relationships because of our feelings and not because of any kind of Lifestyle material gain right and talking about the end of a relationship while you're in

it sounds like you're planning for it to fail which is part of the reason why people shy away from that conversation yeah but you did say this on another pod too you I think um with um with gay people they're straight up with each other they talk about all the business stuff up front right um they often have to because For Better or For Worse there aren't a lot of models for what gay relationships are supposed to look like because they were socially unacceptable for so long and so a lot of queer people they have

to approach each individual relationship from a blank slate where they have to negotiate all the terms who knows that we're even gay who do we come out to are we open are we closed um all these different aspects need to be addressed explicitly whereas a lot of straight people they say okay you want to be my girlfriend sure do you want to be my boyfriend great and they think that they both understand what they mean by that MH and so that's one of the things that I think that Straits can learn from gays and queers

is that it's a good idea to kind of discuss some of these attributes of the relationship more explicitly because chances are the way that you view the relationship isn't going to be identical to how your partner views it got it but you know at the end of the day though it's still a contract right and it is a business deal how I guess how should men approach it with women if we're talking heterosexual here like how would you approach it I guess if you approach the subject uh well I just don't see myself getting married

in the legal sense like I don't think that it's a very good deal from if If I Were Somehow courted by some sort of ays who was worth you know hundreds of millions of dollars or billions I might consider the proposition but in the vast majority of cases I'm going to be dealing with women who are going to be significantly um lower earning than I am and so I just see it as a lot of risk with not a lot of upside like I don't see what privileges wait for me on the other side of

the marriage contract I just see a lot of risk and responsibility and I I think that's fair there is a quote that sticks with me though I was with a group of um business people talking about and um you know younger guys I I think it's uh you know we like to go you know Party play around uh sleep around right but then as you get older you start to realize maybe that true depth is not really messing around it's maybe committing to one person going deep um what's your take on that sure I think

that it can be useful to sew your Wild Oats and I think that often when guys don't do that they have midlife crises I've made episodes about that where you get a guy who right out of the gate starts to be very responsible does the right thing puts a ring on the finger devotes himself selflessly to his wife and children all of his time all of his resources go to them and then he's now 45 he might be in the prime of his life he might be very attractive and he thinks well when do I

get a slice of my own life like all I've done since I became an adult was to serve and devote myself to other people what about me and I think that's a fair question to ask and if you've never seen the you've never been sufficiently disappointed by just sleeping around that's going to potentially hold an Allure for you as a man and it's sometimes necessary to allow something to shrink to First allow to expand sometimes you have to do a lot of it so you can kind of get it out of your system not always

but I think that's certainly something that a lot of guys do I mean uh Dan Ban's kind of going on a podcast tour right now where he's talking about hey maybe it's good to just commit to one person I saw that I saw him a little bit on Chris Williamson the other day yeah yeah that's it and um you know there's certainly something to be said about learning that lesson for yourself it's sort of like a rich person going on TV and saying money isn't everything to folks who are just trying to get by they

might roll their eyes at that so Dan has lived a life of sexual Hedonism for the last decade of of course he's gotten to the point where he can say this isn't where it's at but most guys have never even approximated that level of optionality so they might have to learn that lesson for themselves right and I think I think that's completely Fair um but yeah going back to it again I I do think it it's it's a business deal you know what's been effective when when I do talk like let's say I'm dating I

when I the way I bring it up is you can either have the government create the contract or we can create the contract which would you prefer and then at that point they're like oh okay yeah I rather create the contract together yeah that's what I I've coached a number of men going to go through the prenup process and one thing I tell them is that everybody already has a prenup and that prenup is the pre-existing marriage agreement that has been drafted by your state government and the odds that that that document that has existed

for decades is going to be custom tailored to your specific needs and relationships is functionally zero so you already have a prup the idea is is it one that you wrote or is it one that somebody wrote for you got it and just to sit on this one a little more you mentioned a couple of States I I guess if you're familiar with this which states would be the most restrictive when it comes to marriage restrictive in what sense restrictive in terms of like oh the they you move you're considered married oh gez I don't

know that off the top of my head sorry that's totally fine um I want to go in a different direction we can kind of jump around here I have a couple anecdotes to share with you um and maybe this is just an LA thing but um so let's say you know there are this is not let's say this is a real story so there are nines and tens in LA right and they're in relationships and you know they they have dinner with each other it's it's a bunch of beautiful women right and they're bragging about

how they're getting paid by other men for sex even though they're in relationships so they have secret sugar daddies is that what you're saying yes but I it seems like it's a prevalent thing here and um I just want to get your take on it because I was shocked when I first heard this I'm not particularly surprised yeah um I imagine that it would occur more in Liberal City centers like La I'm sure it's happening in New York as well and what about this do you find particularly shocking the fact that they're keeping it a

sec I think more so that the fact that they're bragging about it to their other girlfriends I think it's one thing to keep it secret but it's another thing to openly brag that means it's more prevalent and I'm kind of going I'll go deeper on this but yeah well I think it might be kind of a form a female form of lad culture in the sense of like sometimes guys get together and they brag about their body count and their sexual exploits yeah except that women are bragging about how much resources they're extracting from their

men which I think highlights the fact that men and women basically go to the sexual Marketplace for different reasons H and so what's the reason for men well men fundamentally try to exchange resources for sex and women fundamentally try to exchange sex for resources reversed yeah that's why they brag about the things that they brag about and not the other things got it and you've talked about before I mean you said or you didn't say this but you I think you you implied that men tend to compartmentalize sex better than than women I think that

that's true on the whole obviously there's individual differences yeah but yeah I think that for a lot of guys it's easier for them to have emotionless commitment sexual relationships yeah and if women are doing it what do you think happens well they are doing it like there's definitely a lot of women out there today that are acting like men have acted historically for sure and some of them can do that like that's not a problem for them they can comart mentalize just as well as a lot of the guys um I think on the population

level there are those sex differences yeah and I think that that's fair I think it'd be very hard if you're continuing to have sex with somebody which is a very intimate experience that you don't develop some kind of emotional bond with them like you don't have to fall in love with them they don't have to be your soulmate but like you will start to feel differently about somebody the more that you sleep with them and that seems to be just sort of natural and organic and on some level to resist that you have to do

violence to your own like attachment impulses right so so I'm going to I'm going somewhere with this I have a couple more anecdotes to share with you so um I had a friend recently so she let's just say she was um you know an executive assistant to high net worth people just leave it at that okay um nothing happens there but then so I'm like you know I reach out I'm like hey like so how are how are things going right um she's like well you know I put in my two weeks I'm like so

what are you going to do now she's like well I'm going back into the adult industry I was like wait wait what like you were in the adult industry before the and then I'm like wait what and so apparently she was in porn before and then like she's back to escorting and I'm like wait don't you have a boyfriend and here here we go again another and here's the thing the boyfriend makes take home millions of dollars a year right does very well for himself I'm like so he's okay with you doing this and she's

like well he actually brought up the idea that I quit and go back to doing this and I'm like why can't he just pay for your stuff right a couple million bucks like you can you can afford right an allowance um and she's like well no I I just I want to feel useful I want to do stuff right and so then I was like okay so then but then how do you compartmentalize it right so like you have so she's like well there's work sex and then there's partner sex and work sex is compartmental

then I go a little deeper I'm like okay so of all the clients that you have like what percent are actually like are you attracted to like don't you see yourself maybe falling for any of them cuz if they become like a regular or anything and she's like maybe like 2% are attractive the rest of them are like you know I would never talk to them or see them right um and so there's this whole concept of work sex versus partner sex and where I'm going with this all is like our sex workers kind of

becoming normalized now because I saw um like a a longtime friend the other day he's like oh I'm dating only fans girl so it seems like you know the institution of marriage is kind of going down you know the the the rise of sex work like what's your take on all this stuff what's interesting I was doing a conversation with James ston on soft white underbelly a few weeks ago and I thought I was tossing him a softball I said what do we call when we exchange resources for sex I was obviously reaching for prostitution

and he responded with marriage so the idea that traditional marriage is not an exchange of resources protection and provision for let's say sexual access Andor exclusivity is absurd like that's one of the fundamental components of traditional marriage it's probably one of the greatest resource allocation prams on the history of the planet like it beats communism by far it's existed in far more different parts of the world for far longer yeah so I think that this can be taken to extremes and it can become let's say mercenary just like some guys some players can get lost

just in the game in the conquest and the the sexual Pursuit and the building up of numbers like people can get lost on both sides for different reasons yeah it's um it's interesting because I I'll go on my go on these walks with my mom and then one time we're just talking talking about this with your mom yeah yeah it's hilarious your mom think so so um I was like so Mom like you know you know body count back in your day when you started talking about body count and she's like it's at least 5x

higher for women and this is a women in her mid-70s right and she's saying that and I was just like that's that's fasinating but like the fact that sex work is seemingly becoming more normalized seems like maybe the body counts are will probably even the multiple will go even higher well also I mean sex work really does exist on a spectrum from let's say you're an actress in pornography and or an escort or prostitute to let's say a sugaring type relationship or even to a traditional relationship where a young woman marries an established man like

I think that what we're really disagreeing about is where to draw the line not that the line exists right you know so I spoke to a guy yesterday very successful guy probably pushing 80 or so so we're on the phone was only supposed to be a 15-minute call but we went for 40 and um towards the end of it he's like look man at the end of the day he's like I've been married to my wife 43 years or so I have three beautiful children I've stayed loyal everything but he's like at the end of

the day Eric and we can't say this in public and he said this to me I'm not revealing his name so it's cool but he's like yeah it's all paid for at the end of the day no matter how you look at it it's all paid for in some way shape or form sure all men pay it's one of my more popular videos yeah and the more she likes you the greater the discount so in general the less a woman authentically desires you the more you will have to compensate her in other ways Ian just

think about this woman you were talking to who's only authentically attracted to 2% of her clients like of course she has to be paid because what else is she getting y that makes sense yeah total I wish you had a chart for this I I bet you that chart would do really well on social sure yeah there's also something to keep in mind is that like women still want to be millionaires right however in today's day and age it might actually be easier for the a an average woman to get $1 from a million men

than from a a million dollars from a single man like an only fan exactly and that's certainly within the reach of even a modestly attractive woman who has an internet connection and a camera mhm yeah and you know when so I was at a YouTuber event maybe like a year ago or so and I met an only f scale and um I was like so I'm like part of my like I'm just really direct I'm just like so like how much do you do per month she's like 100 Grand I was like wow um I

was like so like what are you going to do with that money and she's like well I'm buying I'm like she's buying real estate super smart good for her right and I'm like so what happen like when are you going to stop oh I'll probably stop when I'm like 30 31 or so um and yeah to your point that is reinfor like in my mind I'm like if I were a gal I would definitely consider it sure you know what I mean this is why think so many women find that work empowering because you can

take I mean the margins are insane all you have to do is an internet connection and to take your clothes off on some level and you could be making millions of dollars like it would be very difficult to resist that option plus you don't need to depend on a man that's the other of course not you just have him if you want him and on your terms which is also part of the girl boss idea yeah what's your take on the girl boss movement in general it seems to be waning a little bit do you

think I I so I know that my friend is kind of um she was kind of she she actually wrote the book girl boss oh okay um so um but it to me it seems like you know I I have another um other people that have similar names for their companies they've changed the names right so to me it feels like maybe it might be waning a little bit um because I think there's more people waking up to the fact that maybe that's not such a good idea it's possible like I I think that the

meme is waning like you don't hear that phrase as much anymore but I don't know if women are not are any less interested in going out and being their own captains MH as to to take a metaphor from my book like women are still interested in going out there and having careers and being successful and making a lot of money and being self-sufficient I don't see any problem with that but it does create difficulties uh in the sexual Marketplace especially around men who for whatever reason will not or cannot adapt to that yeah so can

you explain that a little more why why is that a problem for I guess their women dating in general well there's so many different reasons why first of all is even though women tend to be very successful they still tend to desire men who can improve their quality of life which sounds pretty fair but the better your life is the harder it will be to find a man who can significantly do that and those men are going to be desired by an inordinate amount of women so the intersexual competition for those men is going to

be absurd and some of those men are just going to be happy enjoying their optionality with women right so there those women are unlikely to secure commitment or exclusive commitment from those men that's one part of it um the second part of it is that really a lot of traditional relationships throughout history have been based on necessity men and women have had to get along because life has been very very hard and when life is very very hard they have to lean more on the complimentary skill sets that they've evolved biologically and socially over hundreds

of thousands of years right and when we're liberated from necessity people get together not because they need to but because they want to which is why in order to have a relationship in today's day and age you have to be very attractive whether you're a man or a woman because people don't need you as much as they did even a generation ago they have to want you if they're going to enter into a relationship with you whether it's just for a night or for the rest of your life and so we've seen a ascendency in

the importance of attractiveness in the last let's say 10 20 years that has just been exponentially exacerbated by social media and like the Instagram Optics yeah and you're not just talking attractives you're talking talking power status Fame right that's all wrapped into attract yeah I don't just mean physical attractiveness exactly and but what's attractive to men isn't usually what's attractive to women correct yeah I mean we want Beauty youth Beauty youth small waists big hips and breasts and all that jazz I mean people have different types but like that seems to be fairly Universal mhm

and they want resources protection right uh it's even more difficult than that like for example the anecdote that you shared about the woman who's getting back into porn with the high earning man so you might think well Orion how does this work why is she going out and having sex with other guys when she already has the provider and the protector and the lifestyle right well because there might be other things that are missing maybe there is excitement to be found in this kind of work maybe there's a little danger or risk maybe there is

um a like a a hint of jealousy that can spice up the primary relationship like we need be so concrete when it comes to resources a lot of the resources that people transact in relationships are emotional and this is why folks like and people in general want what they don't yet have that's what want means it means to desire and to lack which is why we desire it because we don't have it yet and that's why a guy like Dan bazarian can spend 10 years having sex with who knows how many women and then say

well what I really want is one person to devote myself to right whereas a housewife might want some danger and some excitement in her life and so she steps out of the marriage so especially in today's day and age we're lured by the promise that we can have it all whereas I think in previous generations we just sort of made peace with the fact that that's not possible and you sucked it up and that's just the nature of life and you think a big part of that is just worsened by social media in general oh

yeah absolutely Ely I mean one thing that social media Instagram in particular has done is that it's gotten rid of small ponds in the sense that for a lot of history it was enough to be a relatively big fish in a fairly small pond now they're are no ponds anymore everyone is swimming in one gigantic ocean which means that that guy is competing for the Girl Next Door against every other man on the planet just one dm away exactly and and vice versa for women so it's not just enough to be attractive you have to

be significantly attractive in the ocean that is contemporary dating right and you still believe I think we talked about this last time but you still believe that Instagram is still the best dating app for men more so than women uh well it's definitely for both I mean they generally need to contract with each other in heterosexual relationships it's a great dating app for men if you can can get some decent following like most guys on Instagram they have 100 followers and it's like their friends and family so that's probably not going to be as helpful

for them MH that guy could DM a woman with a blue check mark with a million followers and he will never ever ever ever ever get a response right um it's certainly easy for women to attract a lot of attention on Instagram especially male attention cuz so much of our attraction is based on VIs cues the issue is that most women don't want to date their fans they want to look up you know they don't want the doting followers that might Stoke their ego from time to time but it might not be very emotionally satisfying

right it's it's interesting because Instagram culture there's um let's just say very prominent athlete I'll just leave it at that so very prominent athlete um and I I'll tell you where I'm going with this they just couple other anecdotes I want to share but um he has a Handler during games that will actively look at who kind of just sitting around Courtside um and that person will you know if they find that person attractive they'll they'll like say hey like so and so wants to talk to you or whatever and then the conversation just engages

on on it happens all on LinkedIn or sorry LinkedIn Instagram Instagram not LinkedIn LinkedIn is super professional but I've had women shoot their shot to me on LinkedIn really oh how' that go uh well you know it's a bit of a strange platform but you know that's where their connection happened so that's where their opportunity existed and they took it anything happened uh not in that case no got okay so going back I mean so prominent athlete has a Handler gets to Instagram so the athlete starts reaching out to these these women on on Instagram

and then what happens is U by the way this athlete is married has kids uh CIS like Crystal Clean you know profile like you would never guess it's this person right um I guess you suggesting that his wife doesn't know that he does this I feel like she probably does I'm almost certain that she probably does yeah yeah yeah okay why do we both think that because women aren't nearly as foolish as men would sometimes prefer to think of them as like most women kind of know what's going on with their men they tend to

track their Partners much more closely than men do yeah uh and a lot of women aren't stupid in the sense that they know kind of what side of the bread their toast is buttered on some level what does that mean that means that like the the phrase I use in the book is that the vast majority of women would rather occasionally share a Ferrari than have exclusive ownership over a Honda so no offense to Honda I feel like a lot of them are maybe it's like an Unwritten contract maybe they're not saying it you know

what I mean well sometimes it's wise to pretend that you don't see certain things like that could be be the best move in that relationship and the reason I say that is cuz um my mom told me this but let's just say a family member um was prominent in the government and um the rule for him Taiwanese family right was just don't bring back another child right he brought back another child but it's okay so and then my other my other friend um you know he has a his has a Korean wife and she just

like go do your thing just don't embarrass me don't tell me and it feels like that's a trend I see with more maybe because I have a lot of Asian friends um it's like it's kind of in the contract it's agreed upon but in other cases maybe other cultures not so much not so much but it does seem to be pretty deep in East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures the best we get that in the west is probably FR where it's sort of like yeah everyone kind of has a mistress or another lover and the

idea that your wife or your husband was supposed to provide you with romantic excitement is absurd like that's just too much expectation for your spouse like go get your romance from a lover and you don't marry your lover that's a terrible idea because they're actually wildly different skill sets that go into making a good spouse and that go into making a good lover right and the lovers probably would be you know sugar daddy relation or sugar sugar relationships right um can or it could be whatever is missing in the primary relationship which doesn't always include

sex like I know some men who have had emotional Affairs didn't even sleep with women but because their primary relationship their marriage was so conflictual was so chaotic was so critical like they would just find a time to stay in a room together and just like hold each other tenderly yeah like that's what he was missing in his marriage or just talk or just talk for sure or of course if you have a dead relationship in terms of the passion and the sexual interest then just the excitement of re-exploring your body and feeling desired could

be compensation enough for stepping out of your primary relationship makes all all the sense I remember a long time ago there's a TED Talk um with with the sex worker and this got a lot of views she said look at the end of the day um when my client hugged me um he started crying he's like I haven't had a hug for three years and she's like at the end of the day what we're really helping with like you pay your therapist or whatever but like we we are helping with intimacy and companionship I definitely

buy that and I think men in particular are starred for nonsexual touch MH like no guys don't get touched and if they do get touched it's occasionally in a sexual way yeah and it's it's tough for guys it starts to get really lonely the amount you have to push when it comes to like your work your business and all the things it starts to get really lonely and yeah you don't get the things that you might have might might not have had a hug for three years yeah that's that's rough man yeah I got to

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now you talked about I I think it's good to review a concept here that we talked about last time but um monogamy is one thing but you brought up the phrase monogamish right can you redefine what that means yeah I was just on a podcast this morning and I was finally reminded where that term came from it comes from Dan Savage who is a gay relationship um consultant uh based out of Seattle I believe um so as far as I know he's the one who invented that word so I'm not trying to steal his idea

but I think it's a fantastic idea which is that it's certainly possible that someone can be 90 or even 95% monogamous and committed to one person but that extra 5% could just be a bridge too far and the idea that well you're either all in for the rest of your life with one person or you deserve to be alone because there's something broken or wrong about you because you can't have one single sexual partner for the rest of your life I think is well besides being judgmental and moralistic is just wrong it's just absurd right

that's not how so many people seem to be wired deeply and how do the how do people react to you in the YouTube comments when you say that the monogamous stuff yeah um and by the way I agree with you on my channel generally fairly positive you know most people aren't going to follow me if they disagree with my content too violently yeah so I can just imagine all the really romantic people pushing back on it but it's it is true it's like it it it does monogamy kind of seems like an absolute well it

is and I talk about in the book the origin of romantic love is transliterated religious impulse basically and just like the original religion that became romance was monotheistic the relationship ideal under romance is monogamy we've taken one God and put them in another human being is it true in the past you would know better than I would I think here but in the past so for example if you're like a gas Khan right you have you know hundreds of wives right and like thousands of kids yeah um but I've also heard that in the past

before religion really kind of took form um or became overly popular that women also had many men as well well it depends on how far back you want to go like this is talked about in sex at dawn have you read that book no it's an excellent book and it describes what sexuality might have looked like in prehistoric Days by examining let's say more primitive cultures that still exist on this planet and in a lot of cultures there is no monogamy it's like everyone kind of belongs to everybody else and I think one of the

arguments for the institution of marriage and monogamy was to ensure um paternity and why would we need to do that because now I have this private property that I would need to be sure stays in my family's line but in a lot of these tribal cultures it was communal living like no one had private property and no one really needed to know who was biologically leader to who because we were going to raise all the kids as a village anyway the idea also that sex would then lead to a child nine months later probably took

a long time to figure out right I we only have 5,000 years of recorded history so not very long yeah we probably figured it out in the last 5,000 years but who knows in those first hundreds of thousands of years of human modern evolution did we just do something because we felt the impulse and then like nine months later there was a consequence that's that's a that's a ways away right that's a that's a long temporal distance between cause and effect right so the idea that we're going to regulate sexual relations across that timeline would

require actually a huge social apparatus to do so got it I guess while we're talking about the past I mean the institution of religion I mean to me I'm I'm not particularly religious I'm more agnostic but it seems to me that religion is a it's a great operating system right you get a lot of principles a lot of wisdoms for your wisdom for your kids growing up um can be correct um and now it feels like maybe less people are religious more people are kind of like it feels like things are crumbling I remember you

were on a podcast talking about like it's it's kind of a crisis right now right so do you think religion was like a net positive before do you think like why why is everything kind of crumbling why is everybody why is everything crumbling well I think there's been a number of crises with respect to um becoming disillusioned with authority across the board whether it's religious Authority or political Authority or medical Authority like we've since learned very painfully in many many different ways that our gods have Clay feet which is that the people in positions of

Power are also human too and may be no better or worse than we are and that can be extremely terrifying for people who need a sense of organization and power to kind of like Stave off Natural anxieties about being alive and so I think that's also why people tend to flee from too much freedom and they put themselves in restrictive structures because too much freedom is just like boundless and vertiginous and people can't handle it it's like standing on the precipice of a really tall mountain like get that flighty feeling in your stomach and it's

kind of exhilarating but also really scary at the same time and so people will continue to develop structures in which they can embed themselves more comfortably to Stave off that sort of existential Terror does that make sense it kind of makes I mean it sounds like people would rather put themselves into prison than be free and take responsibility for themselves yeah I mean we tend to do that in lots of ways yeah we we're in prison of our own making the vast majority of the time but it might be that we're not good without them

it might be that we need that structure that these prisons can provide in order to function successfully as human beings so maybe sometimes prisons are a form of safety oh absolutely just like sha Shank Redemption where after like 30 years that guy gets released and he can't he can't deal with life on the outside and he just locks himself up in his room he eventually you know commit SU Sude but like you can get used to that comforting protectiveness of those four walls for sure I want to give I want to give you a quote

over here um this is a this is actually retweeted by nval ravikant who's that so he's a very prominent investor probably a billionaire um invested in a lot of great tech companies okay um so he retweeted this it says the rise of the masculine men and feminine women versus masculine women and feminine men the rise of it yes so he's like observing that this is happening or is he calling for it he's saying this is happening right now you're seeing masculine men pairing up with feminine women and then they're going against masculine women and feminine

men right cuz the it seems like things are kind of changing in front of us right now the the I guess the the Dynamics especially in the United States sure I think that there certainly is some truth to that I think that gender expression does exist on a Continuum and generally the more you swing in One Direction the more likely you're going to be attractive to somebody who is that same distance away from the center so like super masculine men often tend to end up with super feminine women and those who are closer to the

middle um they're more comfortable with those more egalitarian relationships yep um maybe I'll come back to that in a second but I I don't want to as you're were talking I'm just like you know one one thing that sticks out to me from the book I was reading one of your chapters and uh you talk about the concept of the captain right um and also you know how in some relationship Dynamics you know someone wants to have all the power but maybe they don't want any of the accountability but that can't happen if you're the

captain so can you define in your in your words what what a captain is and maybe we can go a little deeper there sure so in Chapter 2 I offer this extended metaphor of the sexual Marketplace as a kind of peer where a bunch of ships are are mored and captains are standing in front of them trying to attract passengers on board whereas the passengers are walking up and down trying to find the best captain and ship on which to secure their passage right and if they like each other enough they enter into some sort

of negotiation process and then eventually the passenger gets on the boat and they sail off to God knows where okay now most people start we all start as passengers as children we can't really do anything under our own power some people never get much more powerful than that however some people decide to become captains and I the process of attaining to one's captaincy is a time-consuming difficult and often painful experience it can take at least 10 years cases it is but I think it's worth doing totally um you get that sense of self-determination and self-efficacy

that comes from like I can actually make something happen in the world ra rather than just relying on other people to do it for me mhm and I talk about how to become a Captain a person needs to accomplish three challenges one this person needs to build a boat this person needs to learn to sail and this person needs to plot a course and I talk about what those three challenges mean with respect to the sexual Marketplace in Greater detail in the book so once a person does those three things and I'm I'm using person

as opposed to man or woman because technically these roles captain and passenger are gender neutral both yeah women especially in today's St age are encouraged and empowered to rise to their captaincy and they can also marry and be a traditional mother and housewife if they so prefer so women actually have more optionality in the modern sexual Marketplace than men do because they can be either passengers or captains on the other hand men don't really men can be captains or they can be left on the dock they can't really be passengers because the idea that a

woman is going to work for 10 15 years to ascend to her captaincy so that she can care for an adult male dependent is loathsome to most women and so those women just aren't going to be contracting with those men in the vast majority of cases right so that's what I'm talking about with captains and passengers now with respect to the second point about power and accountability yet this is something that is really important to know we all consider that any Authority that thinks that it's above the law is corrupt like any king or politician

who thinks that he can't be held accountable for his actions we think that is Disturbed and wrong like morally so one of the Privileges of power is that it must divest itself of protection like legitimate power must be held accountable to the laws or to those that it serves otherwise we think that it's corrupt so it has to surrender the protection and be willing to be exposed to the accountability but the same token is just as much a corruption if you have a protected class of people that suddenly become empowered like a powerful person has

to give up that protection otherwise it's corrupt but if you're protected and you rise to power that's also corrupt because on some level you're saying that I'm I want to retain the Privileges of my protected status in my immunities but I also want to participate as a powerful player in society I want to have my cake and eat it well clearly everybody wants to do that but we don't have as much of a problem saying the powerful can't be protected than the protected can't be powerful so what would be okay if if I think about

relationships right so in some cases you might date someone who wants to make all the rules right but when it comes to taking accountability providing and everything oh nope that's that's all on you sure well this is another way of looking at it like this is that if a man and a woman have nothing and they build a life together at 21 they are like co-founders of a startup yes they are equal Partners they deserve equal rights in the profits and the responsibilities and the direction of that relationship why wouldn't they that's one way on

the other hand if you're a woman and you're entering into a relationship with a man who's already spent 20 years attaining his success and has built his business has made his millions and ascended to his status you then can't come in and expect to be an equal power broker with that guy and yet many do they they do but that's absurd in my mind it's like only Founders get Equity right if you come after the company has launched and it's uccessful you get a salary at best right cuz they've taken all the risk up front

of course M of course and that's why they're there like the reason why a lot of women in my mind reasonably don't like the startup idea is that most startups fail like I wouldn't feel comfortable hitching my horse on a lifetime scale to a guy who hasn't even made his first sale yet you know like that would be too scary that would be too risky yeah I haven't thought about it in terms of equity terms because once they meet a man that's you know 10 15 years into it and they're established they get 50% equity

for their that's a really good deal exactly if they get married under that contract yeah it's a great way of basically increasing your net worth overnight yeah and you can do it multiple times yep yep it it's going back to the captain thing and this goes back into East Asian relationships I suppose but my mom was was very much the bread winner so she was the provider and she was the caretaker so two in one right and I've seen a lot of that and a lot of my friends where the mom has full control and

she's running things and she's the bread winner but I you know had one of these walks with my mom again I'm like did you actually like doing that 44 years of doing it did you like doing it she's like no it took me out of my feminine I became the man I hated doing it there's nothing more that like and that's not to blame my dad or anything it's just saying that she felt like she had to take control and I've seen like it's she loses her you know composure is kind of low and but

I've seen that not just with her but in multiple instances and I'm just like in my mind the patterns are there it's like maybe it's not such a good idea for the majority well yeah and I imagine I don't need to pry into your family history but that probably led to some conflict between your mom and your dad oh all the time well yeah okay there you go so behind 95% of all relationship dysfunction is a belief one single belief that exists in the mind of at least one person relationship and that belief is I'm

giving and giving and giving and I'm not getting enough in return y that whether it's formulated in exact language that's the sense of it is that I'm giving more than I'm getting and this is getting old yeah and that's what leads to arguments that's what leads to sexual withdrawal infidelity all kinds of Naggy nitpicking critical Behavior it all comes down to the fact that I feel like I'm being cheated because I'm providing more value than I'm receiving right and of course if relationships weren't transactional this wouldn't matter mhm totally fair and this actually goes well

into the your concept of the adorer and the adored and it just dawned on me maybe a couple months ago I realized holy crap I think my mom was the adorer like why else stay in the relationship yeah that's a tough one I mean there might have been very strict cultural censures against divorce in especially East Asian yeah that might be changing today I wonder if that was happening in 2024 if she would have stuck around probably not probably not yeah um so you have I believe this is in one of your videos but you

talk about why women are the better adorers and maybe we need to redefine it again in your definition what's the the concept of adorer adored how does that work sure well I talk about the balance of Attraction which basically starts by positing that it's not possible for two people to like each other exactly the same amount which means that in any relationship one likes the more and the other person likes person less and it can change it can change absolutely but in general over time Dynamics tend to become kind of routinized so it's pretty rare

if you're in a 10-year relationship yeah that it's going to have wild swings from one day to the next it's interesting because I asked one of my good friends that we facetimeing today I was like so like which one is I I was using your phrase like you know who adors the other person more she's like well he's like changes it vacillates I was like oh I'm going to bring this up to you today and get your thoughts I mean it can but again over time relationship Dynamics become more and more aifi For Better or

For Worse that provides consistency which makes the relationship more efficient but it can also make it stale predictable and rigid so there's trade-offs to everything right um in a long-term relationship for there to be a wild Swing Swing and polarity there generally has to be some big major event like one person has to get caught cheating the other person has to get a promotion and now they're earning significantly more and their career is taking off but the other person's isn't like there has to be some big bellweather moment in the relationship to really change that

underlying Dynamic right and you just mentioned the word polarity and um one thing that stuck with me with what you wrote is you know even if you're tall Rich High status you can still fumble a relationship oh yeah I mean being tall isn't make you better at relationships man like I don't think there's anything that being tall is good for except reaching the upper shelf you know what I'm saying like it it doesn't make you a better lover it doesn't make you a better spouse doesn't make you a better human MH it doesn't make you

a bad partner or a bad spouse or a bad human it's just like there's no correlation that is a bad metric but rich and Rich and high status matters uh those matter a little bit more height does matter to a certain extent because it could be an indicator of good genes and uh reproductive viability so let's not put height down too much but I do think that height in particular is being overemphasized in women's selection process right these days and what I'm getting at here really is so even if you're high status you're rich you're

tall you can still fumble a relationship because you kill polarity by overinvestigation confident with women or with relationships those are radically different skill sets right like you try talking to your woman like you would talk to a business associate in the fast majority of cases it's not going to go very well yeah the underlying principles might actually be fairly similar but you have to be able to code switch is what I would call it right it's it's a weird thing that humans do right like the Kinder you are sometimes people take it for weakness they

take it for a bunch of other things like oh are you hiding something right it's uh it's it's misguided sometimes when people like someone they feel motivated to do nice things for them but the idea is that you can't like someone into liking you more right that's not possible and I think we all make that mistake at some point in our lives hopefully very young and then we get over it right I mean I you know going into dating a little bit I mean there has to be a push pull if it's just one side

pushing the whole time it's not going to work out well let me go back to your question about why women make better adorers which is something which is what I would to come back yes so um there's the adored and the adorer and they're gender neutral and they both have their pros and cons there's trade-offs to each it's not like it's better to be up here um they just have different attributes to their positions and the most defining attribute to the adorer the one who likes the other person more is that person gets to feel

more in the relationship whether it's the man or the woman the one who's adoring the other is the one who Waits anxiously by the phone and is disappointed when the call is in come or exhilarated when it finally comes through and looks forward anxiously to the next encounter and worries that it's not going to it's like this person feels all kinds of things both good and bad far more intensely than the person up here this is because the Ador gets to be with the one they love which is pretty much one of the most powerful

and exhilarating experiences a human being can have on the other hand the adore just gets to be loved by the one they're with which is much more muted and temperate with respect to the emotional climate and this is one of the reasons why I say that women make better adorers because in general women are more likely to look for the door for emotional reasons I don't feel the same way anymore I feel like I've fallen out of love with you right like those might be very valid reasons for a woman to leave a relationship whereas

men can do that too but I think they're more likely to stick around maybe out of a misguided potentially sense of Duty or obligation than women are right all right quick note this is about my company it's called single grain and single grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving Innovation and so I want to talk about a couple new strategies and if you need help with marketing great if not here a couple new strategies that you should try out one is programmatic cro so we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our

site we're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates we're also Auto optimizing auto updating uh from a from an SEO standpoint and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using Ai and so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint and our mission is just to drive more Innovation so if you want to learn more just go to single grain.com grain like rice so single grain.com to learn

more and we'll see you inside as you're talking I was just thinking about one of my friends he's got a fiance and he's the best possible option like I don't think would ever leave him right and um I guess the question is like if as long as you're the best possible option for you know your your partner she's not going anywhere or he's perceive best optioned that's the important part so what do you how do you define that well objectively a person might be a person's best option but if for whatever reason that person cannot

see that and that person might be deluded as to what he or she could get on the open sexual Market mhm that person might not sck around it's all based on perception right and speaking of perception you mentioned that if the man gets jealous right he is actually training her to to to figure out oh who's actually a better option I see what you mean yeah I did an episode on sexual jealousy and one of the points that I think is important to consider about jealousy is that we only experience jealousy when we there's a

perceived threat from a perceived Superior option like if your girl gets hit on some unemployed overweight loser of a dude you're probably not going to feel jealous no but if the guy is taller he's got a better head of hair he's worth more money he's got a six-pack he drives a you know whatever um you might feel intimidated and you and that jealousy is actually an emotional signal to like amp up your mate guarding Behavior which you can do more strategically than just getting upset and trying to control your partner right because in the moment

that you reveal your jealousy you're basically communicating to your partner that whether or not you think that guy is better I think he's better than me because that's why I'm getting jealous if I didn't think he was better than me I would just be laughing at the fact this guy was hitting on you i' be like go ahead knock yourself out shoot your shot so that's not a good idea it's not a good idea to communicate to your partner that there are better options for her available to her y you got to keep that poker

face on you do it's hard to do but it's really important y i I'm going to come back to some of the the Ador concept but um you know the you talking about monogamish earlier you're not saying that men necessarily should just go around sleeping around you're saying hey like they maybe you find someone that you really like okay she covers she he or she covers a lot of your needs but every now and then okay maybe you need to go you know get your fix right that can certainly be the case for a lot

of men right is I mean is that how you kind of think about it I mean it runs the gamut it's like I think that when people approach the idea of complete any exceptions to complete and total monogamy they think that they're just players plowing through a city right and there are some men who want to do that but most of them don't right it's actually really hard and exhausting and expensive to do that you don't get a lot of Roi actually because it takes a lot to seduce a woman successfully and if you do

all make all that effort and spend all that time and energy and money and you only do it once like if you succeed you might as well get some return visits on some level like I think most men would rather have a few stable lovers than just a Spate of casual nameless sexual encounters right but it's not for me to decide that for the individuals in question got it um but there's another thing to keep in mind is that people also use the word monogamy and think that communication occurred so for example is flirting cheating

depends well yeah that's kind of my point for some people it's just a harmless pleasantry that makes my day a little bit more exciting for other it can be perceived as a betrayal of their emotional in emotional yes exactly exactly so obviously in this case there's no physical or sexual Dimension to it but there's like a charge to the interaction right that could be out of bounds for some person and could be very much in bounds for another mhm so that could be an example of someone who's monogamish yeah which is oh you're saying that

in order to keep you feeling secure I have to like pretend that no other woman exists on the planet and to never joke with them or to compliment them like that sounds pretty tough but that might be how some people would prefer their relationships to function it's interesting because a lot of this stuff that you know I I'm in a couple of these entrepreneur groups and um I will tell you that 50 plus percent of people in relationships both men and women there's something else going on um from from what I've seen and it's uh

it's you know this is stuff that people don't want to hear in public right it's you know I but it's like you know you're talking about this stuff other people I think it's coming to light more sure um I think there's also a little bit of hypocrisy or maybe just misunderstanding between men and women on this regard it's like almost every woman I know has a plan B yes if not a plan c d e f and g my God so these might not be men that they ever slept with or even hint that they

would sleep with but they kind of know they could get them if they wanted to to their mind there's nothing wrong about that that's not cheating at all there's nothing sexual I'm not leading them on and they're right they're telling the truth let's assume that they are but that's also not quite Fair it's not 100% honest no it's not and that kind of optionality that kind of safety net is definitely going to impact how she shows up in that relationship mhm whereas For Better or For Worse most men do not have a plan B because

they not attractive to a b d e or lery and effort so that means that just passively most women tend to have more options than most men do and that definitely impacts the power dynamic in the relationship they also get a lot more inbound too so they're their their pipeline's a lot Fuller sure I mean women some women get hit on I mean hundreds if they're on social media but per day yeah per day and and women often get hit on in ways that they don't even appreciate is men hitting on them you have I

want to talk about the numbers behind it because you've clearly thought about this I remember there's there's a couple episodes where you you kind of break down the economics of dating and what makes sense and what doesn't and so um you have a quote here it says overpaying is the cost of winning for men maybe we's start start we'll start there overpaying is the cost of winning period like whether you're a man or a woman one of the things that you can do is think of life like an auction house so what happens in an

auction house there's a lot and who decides how is it decided who the lot goes to well the person who pays the most right which means that if you actually win no one else in the room thought that what you bought was worth that much which means almost certainly you overpaid for that now it might have been a dollar you overpaid it might have been a million dollars who knows but you the likelihood that you paid exactly the amount that the minimum amount that you could have gotten away with that still beat out of your

all your other comp comption is vanishingly small right so you paid more than you needed to to secure that lot and that's the cost of winning is you have to be willing to pay more to do more than anybody else is willing or able to do to win that lot right now that could be closing a sale that could be securing a relationship it's like the universe lives closed in terms of the particulars most things actually are zero some games right if I want to marry that woman you can't marry her too if I want

to hire that employee you probably can't hire him too you know so we're fighting over the particulars in the context of I think overarching abundance so we have to balance the scales finite resources and and by the way overpaying is not even just money it's it could be emotionally overpaying or paying with their time too it's a lot of things it's generally that like I mean the example I gave in that episode I think is of an Olympic Athlete which I think is kind of Germaine since we just went through the Olympics which is how

long does it take to stand on the Winner's Podium and to get that gold medal it could take 10 years of sacrifice and effort and heartbreak and loss and recovery and discipline and then you stand up there and your heart swells with pride when the national anthem is played and they hand you the flowers and you have a beautiful 3 minutes and then a week later the feeling is gone y it's like how the [ __ ] are those 10 years worth those minutes on the podium there's no way it's worth it like the medal

isn't worth it so unless you consider the gold medal to be the pretext for that 10 years of self-improvement like that's the only way that the gold medal might be worth it and you see that the real reward is the opportunity to grow and to evolve and to become better not the prize that is ostensibly handed to the winner on the podium more so the journey yes I know that sounds cliche but it's actually true got it and you talked about how traditional dating doesn't make sense for especially if you're a high status man okay

your time is very you know time is very valuable right um and then you kind of broke down like okay you're going to go on these dates maybe you're paying you know a couple hundred bucks or so and it starts to add up it's like but then there's no guarantee to anything even after the third or fourth date so then what happens yeah I talked about this in a three-part episode that began with one called why successful men use escorts and I wanted to talk about it from that perspective because I have worked with a

number of success High status emotionally secure men who use escorts what percent of my client base yeah of the super successful ones that use es and can I can I guess um gez I don't know if I have a number off the top of my head but you can certainly guess above 80% that seems a little high from my perspective but maybe I have a small sample size okay how big do you think your sample size would be uh in the super successful cohort yeah h maybe a hundred couple hundred people that I've worked with

directly and what would you define as super successful you know worth tens of millions of dollars okay got it all right continue please I think that it's probably closer to 50% okay but that's I still think much higher than most women think or our society accepts like that's a 50 is still high 50 is a is half of successful dudes are hiring women to have sex with them so I talk about this in the context of why really attractive men and really attractive women are just priced out of conventional dating people don't like the idea

of any men let alone successful men paying women for sex but they do it because it's cheaper than dating conventionally because their bottleneck is generally their time which is insanely valuable and the longer that they need to work through the courtship process the more expensive that is in terms of their time energy and money because they're also probably expected to foot the bill on all this dating and like you said there's even no reasonable guarantee that it will even lead to a single sexual encounter let alone a sexual relationship right and now we're talking that

a person could SP spend thousands of actual dollars and tens of thousands of opportunity dollars to go nowhere right and plus the power dynamics are a little different when the man is paying for escorts it's here's here are my resources and I just yeah yeah I mean versus the other way traditional dating it's it's reversed um it's in what sense so traditional dating maybe it's not reversed but in traditional dating the women has more of the power um and she's the gatekeeper of sex yes um now on if it's just a transaction then the man

has more power because they're the gatekeeper of the money it's true but even in conventional relationships it can flip around because men are The Gatekeepers of commitment they're the ones who get down on one knee it's not the women so women often make men jump through a bunch of Hoops in the beginning to get laid but men can make women jump through a whole bunch of things for many many years to get that ring or that commitment so it does kind of balance out but on the scheme of things we tend to prioritize the female

gatekeeping because you have to have gone through that gate before you get to the second gate because in our culture sex precedes commitment so a lot of guys just see female Gatekeepers with the doors closed because they haven't gotten far enough along in the relationship process to realize that they're the women are going to want to get in their gate too and now the turns have tabled as it were right and more successful let's say these men are let's say they're older maybe they're near 60s 7s they've probably had their kids already they've been married

they have no more interest in dating anymore they just want to they just want to go for transaction that's a huge part so um older guys who have are generally divorced sometimes they're widowed uh widower um they have their kids they just want something that's sorry that's all right that's sweet that's loving and that's on their terms mhm and they're actually willing to pay a very high price to be able to have relationships with women more on their terms right it it's interesting because I've had a couple friends they've had some nice said a couple

hundred million dollars or so and they're married have they're like Eric you know highly recommend you get married have kids try it but uh I would just never do it again and so it leaves me jaded you know what I mean it's just like cuz I I you know some of the philosophies like you know talking about like hey it it it's a tough contract it's a it's a tough deal right to to stomach um you know the the basic concept of marriage but I hear that constantly over and over from a lot of people

and uh yeah it's tough well it's also tough because you can hear that but if you allow that advice to influence your decision- making people will think that oh you're a coward or you're an Insel or it's like the only legitimate reason to not be married in our culture is to have been wounded which means either you're divorced or you're widowed like that's the only way you get out of fighting you you get your purple heart and then they don't have to send you back to the front but if you just say hey how about

I don't have to go to the front at all they're like no no you got to get shot at I might die yeah that's a risk we all have to take but like you got to man up and do it so there's an element to that with respect to marriage MH like if you're 50 and you're unmarried and someone says why aren't you married you say actually I watched my wife die of pancreatic cancer people are going to say like oh I get it no problem but if you're 50 and unmarried and you say I

just never really saw the point they look at you like you're from outer space yeah that's today's society um I mean I will say though I I'm it the I would want to cuz I actually do want to have kids so that that's that's the one thing that like overrides everything else but that that's a personal thing um you have this interesting quote here um so Orion why should people get married after they've been together for 30 years I have a quote about this you said this yeah I said this yeah so it makes a

lot of sense to me okay so so okay me what did I say instead of getting married in the beginning you get married you celebrate everything after you've lasted 30 years oh I see yes you remember this well yes um have the wedding as opposed to get married yeah to my mind it's always a little peculiar that we have the big celebration at the beginning it's like you guys haven't done anything yet it's like people celebrating the fact that they raised money for their startup or that you just founded the startup like you you registered

the trademark it's like it's going to be company what are you celebrating exactly like maybe after you've grown it and it's ipoed and you have this enormous payout and you've now provided job opportunities to hundreds of people and value to Millions yeah that's where we're celebrating so yeah maybe we can it can be a both and as opposed to an either or solution it's like what if we had a big party when a coup's children have all successfully launched cuz it's almost like Mission [ __ ] accom brought into world you raised them and now

they are functional adults let me shake your hand and give you a present like that sounds like a good idea but we don't do that right and you've not been married before right okay neither have I and so like one of my friends who got married got divorced he's like the one thing I'll tell you Eric and he's back with somebody else now but he's like um the one thing I'll tell you is that the one thing I don't regret is spending money on that I was like Wow interesting like you and I wouldn't know

cuz we haven't been through it but it's just like well James had a good line which was functionally he wouldn't want the first time that all of his loved ones got together to be his funeral there's some truth to that it's like it's actually pretty rare to bring a lot of people together in a celebratory and loving context yeah yeah and and some the argument for it also is we don't celebrate enough and we don't get our friends together enough so that's another ARG especially guys but maybe you do it twice you know what I

mean why not I mean uh you see people renewing their vows right and they have a big celebration for it okay I have to ask you I mean you you've you're a deep thinker you've got this this this book over here which I might want to go back and talk about your business like we did last time but maybe I'll I'll save that for a little bit but what if you changed your mind on in the last 12 months well here's an example so I worked really really hard for a very long time there were

years where I was working at least 110 hours a week without a single week off year after year after year and I was very focused and driven to create the life that I'm more or less currently enjoying but while I was doing that I often had this fantasy that one I became like successful like once I made enough money then my dream was I wanted to just not work for a month and go to Japan like that was my fantasy and I wanted to not just go to Japan for a week like a tourist I

wanted to kind of like live in Japan as much of a local as I could right I don't know why this was my fantasy but it was my fantasy and I thought about it for years and at some point I was like you know I kind of owe it to myself to try this out so I reached a point where uh this was sort of like my Victory lap and I said great I'm going to take a month off which I haven't done in two decades and I'm going to go to Japan and I'm going

to just not work and I'm just going to be and I'm going to see what that's like and I went crazy in like two weeks like it was very very hard for me to just be and I realized that that is not the goal that I should be striving toward this idea that oh I'll just have this passive income and I'll tool around the world and just live a life of leisure Andor self-motivated inquiry like my life was going off the rails to go to that prison metaphor before it's like I need my routines my

routines stabilize me emotionally they keep me healthy physically my relationships ground me they give me inspiration my work gives me purpose and fulfillment and I thought I was rewarding Myself by taking all those things away from me right and to my surprise I was floundering in a matter of days like within weeks I was just like this isn't working out at all yeah so I was really wrong about kind of what the goal of my life was supposed to be or the reward for my hard work was supposed to be I think that's very it's

good perspective and it's it's good that you got to realize this sooner than waiting until retirement because I think what we all want wanted when we were younger was I want to be on the beach I don't want to be doing anything I be commercial yeah I don't want any responsibilities and then you realize like no like it's it's actually about what you contribute to the world and also because it's fun I love what I do and it's all self motivated and self-directed I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years I don't do anything on any

given day that I don't want to do it's wonderful it's fun it's fun it's exhilarating no two days are the same it I've learned so much because I've had to wear so many different hats growned people it's been reing I love it like I don't want to ever stop doing it yeah you know what one of my we talk about this sometimes in in like in business people circles and we're like you know the greatest scam is saying that you you you complain about having to work all the time but the reality is work is

actually so fun but you know they they they tell their wives oh my God babe I'm going to have to stay in longer but they're having a blast I mean that's great if that's actually true I think most people are not in that position though the vast majority no the vast majority are just grinding yeah and they're making the best of their situation for sure but to your point you know it takes 10 maybe 20 years to to build this up and nobody wants to do that nobody wants to go through the pain everybody wants

to win nobody wants to repair oh yeah no one wanted to help me in the process too like when I needed the most help nobody was interested now I'm fairly successful and sufficient and the help is coming out of the the woodwork it's like yeah you're two decades too late my dud oh now you want to help me right um so I have couple more I've a lot of good on liners here from you so the cost of being in love is giving up control you can't have it both ways like the feeling of limerance

of being in love is like an exhilarating outof control Topsy Turvy feeling and it really is it's like a person who is struck by Cupid's arrow let's say like everything goes out the window like will quit their job they'll move they'll leave their family they'll change their religion they'll do all kinds of things that are out of character because it's almost like all the rules no longer apply and they stepped into a parallel universe that has different laws of physics if you all want to have that kind of emotional exhilaration you have to surrender control

it's like part of what makes roller coasters is thrilling is that you're being taken for a ride you can't be riding a roller coaster while simultaneously dictating how the roller coaster progresses that doesn't work you either sit there and you get taken for a ride and you do the loop to loops and you we and all that jazz or you design the roller coaster yeah I'll tell you a story here um one of my friends so he's in Europe and then this beautiful woman walks by and then she kind of judgmentally looks over and like

what kind of watch is that right and then it's like he's like well he answers her and then he he in his mind he's thinking oh is she like a hooker and so he kind of he's like so tell me what you do right they're kind of going at each other a little bit um so they end up talking about this book and I this this all this is all connected um starts talking about this book and they get to talk in and then you know as she's leaving she gets in this gold wrapped Lamborghini

you hear the book playing on blast audiobook goes off and then turns out by the way she's not a prostitute the company she runs does a billion a year in Revenue okay and separated from her husband right but the whole premise this book is it's called reality trans surfing and um it's all about giving up control it's all about surfing the wave and the whole like what stuck with me because when my friend explained I'm like 11 hours into the book but like he's like yeah you know what the more importance you place on things

the more you try to control things the more it gets away from you versus letting it go with the flow sure I made an episode a long time ago that was called hold people like sand and I think that's the right attitude to have towards your relationship if you try to really squeeze sand it forces its way through the cracks in your fingers if you don't hold it at all it just spills out every which way so you kind of want to hold it gently yeah um too much control and you lose what you try

to keep too little control and it's never yours to begin with I'll come back to the dating thing in a moment but I just the the way so you know I I have a friend nam's Alex Heros articulates himself very well when he talks about I'd love to meet Alex he is I've seen him on so many different podcasts and he has yet to say something that I disagree with yeah you know he's he's great his wife is is amazing too Lea um but you articulate yourself really well and I've asked him this before too

I guess you know where where what does your learning stack look like what are you consuming right because it's it's pretty up there in terms of like what am I reading yeah I just want to know like the way you think the way you articulate yourself specifically like where is that all coming from well I think I've spent maybe 35 to 40 years preparing to answer all of these questions like the vast majority of my life has been spent in study study for what I don't know I guess preparation for this moment that is unfolding

right now right but like I was a voracious reader I don't get a chance to read as much these days because I don't think that we should just consume there comes a time where we have to create and produce right and I think my Decades of study and introspection are starting to pay off because I might have some perspective of value for other people but when I do read I generally read people who aren't alive anymore like I stay away from current events I stay away from popular Trends yeah if a book has remained enshrined

in the literary tradition for hundreds of years it's a pretty good bet that there might be something of value in that book right so for example um I also like to do lists because if I'm only Guided by my own preferences I tend to just get more of what I already know that said if I just randomly choose [ __ ] it's often not very good or satisfying because extraordinary things are rare right so I often find book lists that are curated by experts in the field and I surrender to those lists and just put

myself through a course of study for instance got it reminds me we're talking to Lindy effect here if it's been around for a thousand years probably be around for another thousand years so maybe but there's certainly something in it that many many people have decided is worth preserving and we should be reticent to throw that out on a whim what would be some of those books if any come to mind yeah a great series that I've been working through is the Penguin great ideas book there's 120 of them and they span from let's say ancient

China books there's 120 books yeah U they're generally pretty small you know from 100 to 150 Pages um all in the public Dom from some of the cultural philosophical and psychological thinkers that Humanity has produced from ancient China to let's say contemporary America right um and I've had I haven't read a bad book like it's exposed me to some ideas and some authors that I never would have chosen to read on my own and that's what's great it's allowed me to expand my horizons and I've I've yet to read a book that I don't get

anything from yeah what's it called again I just want to write it down here oh uh penguin the uhuh penguin imprint has a line of books called the great ideas series okay they have great design too so they're very attractive they look good on the bookshelf um but I'm also very careful about what I consume like I don't consume a lot I don't consume a lot of political content or social commentary I really like to go to the primary source I want to make it my own mind so I'll read the bill that people are

arguing about or I'll listen to that person's actual words or read their book and make up my own mind right in today's day and age we often don't know what to think we don't we we know what we're supposed to think about certain things well I think it's how whatever Channel portrays it and then they suck you into their way of believing it and then before you know it you're no longer thinking for yourself yeah it happens pretty slowly for a lot of people and it saves you a lot of time you know it's like

the cliff snow oh this guy good this guy bad great that's all I need to know yep we all just want shortcuts at the end of the day most of us do but that often comes at a high cost I don't know if there really are shortcuts no well like you said I mean the the the quote that always sticks with me from Thomas soul is uh there are no Solutions only trade-offs yeah that one is really good I use it in the book too for relationships in particular yeah and you I yeah we did

talk about this a little earlier so okay um I think Danica talked about so Dan Patrick is for everyone successful race car driver right um and I think she was one of the only female race car drivers NASCAR I'm sure she's not the only one but I think she's the only one anybody would ever know okay that's fair so she talked about um you guys had a conversation around it seems that maybe more women today are defaulting back to becoming the tra traditional women or is it that men are looking for more traditional women today

it's one or the other uh so we were talking about going back to traditional relationships yeah so she's I my note here says Danica Patrick talked about defaulting to a traditional woman back to being a traditional woman today what does that look like like you're you're not going to go to college and you're going to bake pies and bear children I think it's more so hey you know you're going to be the character Aker while the husband is the provider and the protector yeah you you can do that I think that there's definitely a push

in a lot of social commentary to go back to traditional relationships now of course how far back is an open question a lot of these folks like the tradcons want to go back 70 years the 1950s but if we go back hundreds of years that model of relationships didn't exist in fact that's a very anomalous moment in the history of intersexual relationships so related to this I read a comment on one of your videos and this guy got a lot of upvotes on it so he's like um you know hey um Native American here he's

like I used to only date uh Americans before specifically um white white people right and um he's like total disaster he's like but then I went to I I started dating people from from Europe whether you know France um or some Eastern European countries and he's like everything has been Pleasant I'm now married to a French woman and and he's like it's because they are traditional um so I I think we're seeing a lot I I think we're seeing more content about people just saying hey we just want a traditional wom we want to see

a traditional woman um so I just want to see if you had anything to add to that if not I'll move on I mean I think it's going to be tough because most women in America aren't even thinking about getting married and having kids until their 30s like I have personally known many women in their 20s who think that they're never going to want to be married or to have children right that just seems so far away into their future and that they have plenty of time anyway and that's difficult because why go to college

why build a career why devote most of your adult life to a professional Direction only to then surrender it when it starts to pick off yeah so that's going to be a tough sell for a lot of women like that doesn't make a lot of sense to me not cost bias sure sure but like I I wouldn't want to spend 10 years preparing for a game that I never got to play same here yeah yeah I will say one thing there's there's women I've dated in the past work really hard um you know have a

great job but mid-30s now we might have talked about this before but mid-30s now um and they're kind of lamenting the fact that they're not in relationship you know not married no kids yeah um so again trade-offs I I don't think there's any right or wrong here I think it's just well I think that what's wrong is the idea that women can have it all because nobody can have it all like we've just been saying everything involves a trade-off right and it is possible for women to have the professional identity and to be mothers and

wives they might have difficulty doing both simultaneously in which case I think it might make sense for them to prioritize the relationship first because when they're in their 20s that's when they're going to be most attractive to the men that they most would want to potentially marry and have children with mhm and if by the time they're 32 they feel like they've missed out on the opportunity to be an employee they can go into the job market right but it's much harder the other way around I'll go back to my mom again because again we

have these these deep talks she so so open about these things now but um you know her her whole thing was she wishes that she wasn't as loyal in her 20s and that she dated more sure because she would have opened up her pool a lot more but because she was so loyal and because she turned all turned away all the advances of the other men um she had to and in in in Chinese culture you're called a if you're over 30 and you're not married you're called a CER which means you're leftover woman over

30 I thought it was over like 26 it's they're raising the age well I mean maybe over 26 but by the time you're 30 you're like basically like you know you're you're you're like dead to be versus like if you're a guy and you're you're over 30 that you're like um you're like um you're called some some form of like um hidden gold or Hidden Gem oh nice yeah yeah yeah there's definitely some double standards when it comes to men and women in the sexual Mar unforunately yeah they're never going to go away though we

should just sort of accept them now what you were getting at has some truth to it like I don't want to go back to the days where I had no choice and it was just like the two women in my Village mhm and the divorce was impossible no matter how bad the relationship got and that's just what you had to do to make do with your lives like that doesn't sound very fun or nice or satisfying to me like I like having options I like being able to choose what works best for me um I

think that is is the basis to even make a legitimate decision if you are constrained in your optionality too much you're not really choosing you're it's being chosen for you right right totally 100% um you have one of the most toxic beliefs is that you get to be yourself in a relationship yeah I was just talking about this yeah I think that's responsible for a lot of relationship dissatisfaction the idea that out there like when I'm at my job that's where I have to put it all together and be Prof Prof when I'm working with

my mom you know I have to be a good daughter or a good son it's like I'm always playing these roles out in the world but when I'm at home in my relationship that's where I get to let it all go I don't have to perform anymore and I could just be myself warts and all and you're supposed to love and accept me no matter what and I don't think that's true and unfortunately I think that that belief can lead to some people treating their spouses their Partners worse than they would treat a random stranger

on the bus like in my mind relationships are roles you only get to stop playing the role when you're alone like having a boyfriend or a husband or a girlfriend or a wife is a privilege just like having a job is a privilege if you think you can show up and dispense with professionalism and just expect that everyone should enjoy working with you and you deserve your paycheck that's absurd and narcissistic no entitlement it's extremely entitled but the idea here is that I should be accepted by you and so I can dispense with being attractive

I can dispense with being kind I can dispense with being respectful because that's for the other people mhm I think it's a better idea to treat those closest to you better than you treat people who are further away and that actually incentivizes people to be the best versions of themselves in relationship to you cuz you're you're in it for the long term with these people so why would you not invest more a lot of people though men and women they throw all the good stuff in the early stages of the courtship to hook somebody and

then they slowly spend the years pulling it back right when really it should be the other way around yeah it's interesting you know with with a lot of people that own businesses you keep working on it you keep compounding it over a long period of time but the whole thing is you're continually working on it whereas in relationship sometimes we kind of just let it all go I I talk about that there are three distinct phases in any relationship there's attraction there's negotiation and there's maintenance but it's wrong to suggest that these are discreet episodes

it's not like we deal with attraction the beginning and then never again or we've negotiated the arrangement of our relationship and so we never have to renegotiate moving forward in point of fact that all three of those phases interact with each other and can't really be extricated from each other completely so I just separated them kind of conceptually to highlight the different features that they possess but the idea is you must always remain attractive to your partner because I just I just wrote a script about this called the lens of Attraction okay um it's been

the video script yeah for a new episode um it's been remarked by I'm sure lots of different therapists that often the things that you're most attracted to in the early stag of relationships are exactly the things that drive you [ __ ] nuts like two years down the road like what is what's that about like obviously the behavior hasn't changed the same behavior today than it was two years ago so why do you have such a radically different attitude towards your partner and I think it's because everything that is done is perceived through the lens

of Attraction and when the attraction is high your partner is going to see what you do positively generously it's going to give you the benefit of the doubt is going to make the most favorable interpretation of Your Action and when that attraction is low that partner is going to be negative and critical and disparaging the same behavior so let me give you an example so it can certainly be the case that someone might say oh I love how funny you are like you're so easy to get along with and oh my God you crack me

up like being with you is just a blast and then like two years later it's like can't you take anything seriously like are you just a clown all the time like who are you performing for cont well yes the it's interesting because high and low attraction come with emotional correlates the emotional correlate to high attraction is desire for low attraction is disgust which is I think a more visceral form of contempt right same thing um someone might say I love how driven and ambitious my partner is like he gets focused on something and nothing can

stop him two years later all he does is work it's like I had to cancel our plans again like it's like he we should be married to that company oh my God yeah it's like the exact same [ __ ] Behavior but because that person in my two hypothetical examples for whatever reason didn't make the effort to maintain the attraction thought that maybe that was just the initial stage of the courtship right that changed the interpretation of the behavior you know it's interesting I have some friends that are married for 30 40 years or so

and they kind of run their marriage like a business because the traction was going down and they're like you know what I mean a business is an organization of people right so they they started organizing like a business where they have like a daily walks you there's a weekly date there's a quarterly bigger date and there's a yearly you know Extravaganza right how do you think about this stuff um it sounds very unromantic which it is and I think people can be very judgmental about folks who structure their relationships in that way MH um but

I think it can work it's a system yeah like I said there are there are tradeoffs when a dynamic gets established it can become rigid and stultifying and boring and predictable but it also can be very efficient right like I don't want to have to renegotiate the gender roles every weekend it's like that requires so much communication and energy and time let's just do our [ __ ] jobs and move forward with we'll get more done this way right right um so I think it's really really important to always date your partner even if you're

married to them like women don't ever stop being your man's girlfriend girlfriends Inspire so much more joy in men than wives do in general yeah like girlfriends are fun they're sexy they're playful they're spontaneous they're attractive you have a good time with your girlfriend wives have this connotation of being a obligation right right the old ball and chain you don't say that about a girl that you're just dating right so I think that it's important for both Partners to REM to remain their boyfriends or girlfriends for each other and that will help to keep some

of the attraction alive I like that you have um a quote here that that connects while it says beautiful women make men want to be better they generally do right right this is kind of important because if a guy is too rational and he looks at the cost benefit return on a lot of relationships and especially marriage he might think well this this doesn't make a lot of sense like what's in this for me like it just seems like a lot of risk and downside and obligation and etc etc now we can make a case

as some people like Jordan Peterson have done to say that that obligation that restriction is actually a good thing you just don't know it yet because it's going to be The Crucible through which you transcend and transform yourself it's like there's probably some truth to that for sure um but purely rationally that relationship Arrangement doesn't make sense to a lot of men so why do men do it on some level they have to be so into the woman that they're willing to do something kind of nutty and the more attractive a woman is the more

likely that guy isn't thinking with his brain you know what I'm I'm saying 100,000% it's like there I felt this in my own life there are certain women that have motivated me to do things that I would never do with less attractive wom you move Heaven and Earth sure yeah um and it's not entirely based on the physical phenotype though that's it's strongly related to that and that's unfortunate because you know there's only so much a woman can do to improve let's say what she's working with but almost everybody can be more attractive than they

currently are attraction is really the ability to command attention and there's lots of different ways to command and maintain attention right and women who learn how to do that will get more of what they want from men right has your uh has your the growth of your YouTube helped a lot with that with commanding attention yeah oh yeah I get propositioned all the time these days yeah but how often what does it look like oh like daily you know they show up in my DMs this that or the other um women often aren't as direct

so they certainly can be like sometimes they just send pictures or videos and it's like wow okay this is this is nice um but often times they want to like debate an idea or they come with praise or they they try to tease me or say that I'm wrong like those are probably the three primary ways that women flirt yeah um so it's all kind of indirect with plausible deniability a lot of the time yeah but yeah I get a lot of optionality these days it's um it's interesting I I made an episode a while

back called being famous is like being a woman mhm did you watch that one I've heard this phrase many times oh really oh okay so maybe I inadvertently plagiarized it didn't mean to oh it's all good so I'm not even that famous so like everything I'm about to say you can multiply by 100x with somebody who's actually you know an A-list person right so I remember about a year and a half into psycha when it started to take off I got an email from a man from a barber in San Francisco and he knew I

was located in the Bay Area and he was like a Dr terband love your stuff man we every time a new episode comes on the whole Barber Shop shuts down and we all listen to it together we think that you're the best we'd love to have like come in anytime for a free haircut man our pleasure our way of saying thanks all the best and I was like wow I didn't I didn't take him up on it um but I was moved I was touched and it took me a while to figure out that that

was the first time I had ever been offered something as an adult man mhm just for being like me you know what I'm saying like wow somebody wanted to give me a $40 haircut like that was nice of that guy it feels good doesn't it nobody does anything for Med usually no one [ __ ] g g me anything you know it's like I was I was so touched by the offer of a haircut you know and then I was like well wait a minute how many times have I personally like offered women drinks and

meals and travel and time just to like lure them into my presence to potentially initiate a sexual relationship and I'm just one man multiply that by 10x 100x a THX depending on how attractive that woman is and it's like attractive women just live in a different Universe I remember I was dating a very attractive woman back in the day and she just thought the world was full of nice people that people were just going out of their way to help each other all the time like if she needed to move there was always three guys

who were willing to help her move and and every time she walked through the door people would hold the door open for her and they offered to buy her food and did she need anything it's like dude they all wanted to [ __ ] you sweeetie yep no no that's that's crude that's crass they thought I was a good person and they're just good people and I was like oh my gosh can you be more naive yeah but if you've gotten it since the time you were 13 which I'm sure a lot of these precociously

attractive girls do we're not supposed to say that but like that's what happens it distorts your view of reality totally and it's tough when they start to you know get a little older and you don't get the same treatment that you used to get yeah a a woman who ages out gets to experience what it's finally like to be a young man you know what they say they say okay so so here's what the the fame thing so they say it's it's really fun the journey the process of becoming famous is really fun but being

famous sucks losing your Fame is death I bet it would be really tough mhm like once you get a taste of it it's like wow I can't believe I lived the other way for so long like being famous is definitely life on easy mode man like people are offering you help all the time they they're extending your invitations you're they want to see you they want to know you they want to say that they know you to other people yeah dating becomes significantly easier you can dictate the how's and the Ws and the wars and

the WIS MH it's great yeah I I think the way you've crafted your brand is great and final final part here the way you've crafted your brand it's it's not too in your face right it's very calm you know it comes from a place of like deep thought um whereas you know other dating shows or whatever it's it's a little hardcore we'll just leave it at that but how okay so you know you you've gained more You' gained more of a following especially on YouTube how is uh living in Napa conducive to your your dating

life oh it's not there's nothing going on in Napa in terms of a dating life I'm just curious yeah um Napa is a beautiful peaceful place but it's also a little stodgy like the average age is 50 MH I was over living in the city it was a little too extra for me but Napa does feel like a retirement community from time to time a very pleasant beautiful retirement community right but that's why I love that I get to travel these days so I get to have my peaceful little life and then I get to

experience other cities and excitements from time to time and that balance really works for me got it okay so it's your home base but you're hopping around a lot you're traveling quite yeah I think I need both okay got it and are you getting invited to speak at conferences now things like that I've been invited to to talk at a few conferences and I've I've attended they've been a really great experience on the whole like I have yet to have a negative experience with my fame I'm sure that it will happen at a certain point

in time but like I haven't had an antagonistic interview yeah when people stop me in the streets they're very respectful and like it's great man I mean it's very moving I don't take it for granted because it's all a very new thing for me you know what's funny I I didn't tell you but um so I I've had some uh women female friends watch the last interview that we did and they're like this is fantastic I'm never showing my boyfriend so it's like this shit's good but like I'm not we're not giving this knowledge to

to the boyfriend yeah I think women often already understand a lot of the things that I talk about like maybe you've heard that men are in love and women are in business kind of a thing like women for better for worse they've cultivated more cunning and indirect means of getting what they want I don't know if it's you that mentioned it but it's it it is women are very much looking for it's it's a job to find the right man right and if there's another job good job out there then you move on did you

talk you talk yeah an episode about that I called it uh women treat men the way men treat jobs yes yes and it's not personal so it's like if you're working a job and you get cold C by a recruiter and he says Eric you know triple the salary triple the salary we'll give you a limited P PTO you can work from home you're at least going to consider that offer no hard feelings most lik yeah exactly you're going to be like hey I've really loved working here you guys have been great but I have

to do this for my career I hope you and everyone's going be like yeah we totally understand they may feel a little envious but they're they know they do the same [ __ ] thing right last thing over here so I was choosing between two I'm going to choose this one so um I'm paraphrasing here men who cheat are just as happy as men who don't that's what the research says in terms of their relationship satisfaction yeah like there's no statistical significant difference between those two groups however there's an enormous difference in relationship satisfaction between

women who cheat and women who don't and that's part of why I think that men tend to compartmentalize sex better than women MH that for women sex is more bound up for with emotional outcomes and reasons than for men right and I mean it's something they have the gatekeep so it's something they have to gatekeep yeah they they do and um they're more likely to open the door for a man that they feel authentically attracted to Y which is pretty rare I think for a lot of women right Orion part two this has been fantastic

this was great Eric thanks for having me on man what's the best way for people to find you online get the book oh yeah so I have a YouTube channel called psych haacks so that's probably the best way to follow my content my book came out recently the value of others there is a paperback an audiobook and an ebook the links to everything are on my channel but you can also find this on Audible Amazon you know all the main marketplac that people go for things these days and very well written too so congratulations thanks

man it was a lot of fun to write it's in the Amazon top 10 in a number of categories it's doing really well for a book that has no publist agent marketing team or advertising fantastic well can't wait for your next book but uh thinking of what it's going to be can't wait to start it [Music]