Why You Can't Get Laid.

the purpose of this video is not satire
and it's not self-pity a lot of what people have to say about this on youtube it's fundamentally self-centered self-indulgent self-pitying short-term thinking and what this video is about is really a very positive message about how you can make your own life better thinking long-term about who you want to be how you want to live your life how you're going to include other people in it and i mentioned satire for a reason a lot of these videos like it's a struggle to separate to what extent this person is trying to be a kind of embittered stand-up comedian you know like talking about their own heartbreak or talking about what happened to their sister or their best friend you know like to what extent is this social commentary to what extent is this social satire and to what extent are you getting really serious really useful first person reflections you get the person really telling you how they think you should live your life and how they're going to live their own life you know to what extent are we dealing with the problem itself in earnest and many of these videos even if they're made with the best of intentions it strikes me that the people uploading them aren't seriously reflecting just how negative the effects on the audience are going to be now for the audience's part you know there's something else here um it's up to you to decide to what extent the advice i'm giving is really applicable in your own life and that's a totally positive process like i think it's totally positive i'm not going to complain to you if somebody watched this somebody watch this and says well you know this guy recording the youtube video is mazzard he has his own background as uh six foot three inches tall conventionally attractive unconventional intellectual he's had these women throwing ourselves at him his whole life since he was 13 years old you know he has his own experience that's warped and skewed and his advice it doesn't apply to me or it's not something i could use or take on board in my life you know what i i think that's completely legitimate i think it's totally fine for you to criticize the advice i'm giving especially in terms of how it lives your life in terms of what your idea of a meaningful life is but what i can say you know in making this video is that this really fundamentally has a positive message like for you and you and you like this is something that can influence your life positively it can change your way of thinking about the relationships you've got about the relationships you ain't got like the ones you're not gonna get the failures you know i think your attitude towards failure is a huge part of success in life right and where you're going moving forward now you can already get the point this is not going to be a shallow discussion of a shallow topic i think it's it's one of the most meaningful things we have in our lives and it's one of the most meaningful variables we have in our lives it's one of the things we can really change and where our attitudes and our expectations and our efforts change everything right like there's so many people okay we'll use a real example i had a grandfather one of my grandparents his whole life he said he wanted to be a lawyer and he should have been a liar that everything would have worked out better if only uh he had been a lawyer now i disagree with him i think probably he would have had a completely miserable life if he and his wife who's very supportive this is what i'm told i mean obviously you know i i wasn't there i wasn't well you know i knew them i knew my grandparents but i wasn't in the room for this kind of thing but apparently the way she she replied to this and if she did like kudos to her this is a real it's a real alpha move she replied to this by saying every time you should do it you should do it today you know quit your job open up a new bank account like we'll move some money we'll go you can go back to you can go back to school you can start becoming a lawyer today we can make this work she said i'll support you you can change it and my lawyer i'm sorry about my lawyer my grandfather would respond to this by being totally self-pitying and saying no no no like it's too late like if only you had done this earlier in life and look you know i just want to say there's some there's some truth to that my grandfather in question here he was jewish he was a russian immigrant he was jewish from from russia and he was in circumstances including very real institutional anti-semitism at that time there were quotas for how many jews would be allowed in to each university no joke there was real overt institutional racism and so on there were tangible reasons why he couldn't first pursue his dream as a lawyer earlier in life i think he was totally deluded about what his life would have been like after he became a lawyer but my point here with this digression is this um you know this is something you can control this is something you can change so i'm going to start the first point is the shallowest in the video it gets deeper from here but already this is not that shallow you know i think for many people the discourse that goes on in their own mind takes place standing in front of a mirror and when they are thinking about why they can't get laid they're looking in the mirror and they're thinking about or they're asking themselves why they are not more attractive or how they could be more attractive or what they can do to become more attractive now again this may sound shallow but i think this leads to profound changes in your life okay what if instead you're asking the question about being interesting what if instead you recognize that when you're at an event like a conference when there's 200 people in the room could be 500 people could be 5 000 people many people in the room wants you know what yeah you might look around the room and some people stand out as attractive to you some people stand out as ugly and a whole lot of people there you're just kind of indifferent to they're neither attractive nor repulsive you're just indifferent and as you talk to people in this crowd if you're at a conference if you're at some kind of big event like this there's a lot of face-to-face interaction the people who will matter to you the people who you'll want to invite to go to lunch with you the people you'll want to get their email and meet up later or something you know every single time it's going to be that you found them interesting or they found you interesting every single time no matter how attractive they are if they're not interesting nothing happens or if you're not interested in them nothing happens and then conversely you meet someone you know just just give you a quick scenario say you're having a conversation and you are reflect you know i went to this pharmacy and i got ripped off by the pharmacist the pharmacist on the desk did this thing where they filled out something fake on the receipt and then i paid for it i only realized a week later is somebody somebody at this conference or somebody in the hotel lobby or somebody at the coffee shop someone you you no reason interesting they're not attractive and they're not repulsive they're just kind of neutral when you first behold them they say to you oh yeah you know what i used to work in a pharmacy and we rip people off that way all the time you know it's terrible you know like and you start having a conversation with this person about you know corruption in the pharmaceutical industry in the in the pharmacies in the world about this particular scam okay why did this conversation start what's going on in that conversation and you are going to find yourself attracted to this person why you're going to find just interested in this person why because what they're saying is interesting to you and a lot of the tests that we have going on right the test for is this person uh attractive enough for me are they intelligent enough for me are they of the right kind of moral and ethical character for me or the right kind of emotional care for me those tests are going on during that conversation you know i put the bar real low here for being interesting right like hey i'm complaining about being ripped off at a pharmacy this person says back to me that they used to work you know buying the front counter of a pharmacy or uh the the cash the desk they used to work but they used to check out people's groceries at a pharmacy or something and there's something already that you talk about there's something this is just a little bit interesting you know there's not not a whole hell of a lot of intellectual substance there but if you really reflect on your own life honestly i think you're gonna find that that quality of being interesting and of being interested in the other person and of them being interested in you it's so much more important than being attractive right and i'm going to go in the linear even if i'm wrong if you in the audience because my my advice is not universally valid if you in the audience are the exception of the rule or you personally say nope you don't give a damn about that you don't you don't care how articulate someone is or how intelligent someone is or the way in which that kind of conversation reveals something about their intellectual and emotional character and you start being interested they just like nope when you turn up at the conference and there are 500 people and everyone's kind of milling around and chatting each other that you just scanned the crowd and you purely evaluate people on the shape of the body and the proportions of their face and that is it for you that's when you see the world that's how you respond to other people and it doesn't change that when you talk to them you don't care if they're an idiot you don't care if they're an alcoholic you don't care if they're a gambling addict you don't care how much or little you become if that's how you operate because i'm not going to make the claim there's nobody on planet earth who thinks it feels that way let me tell you the other people you're interacting with okay it's not like that for them like the other people they are not evaluating you that way they are not evaluating the way you the way you do when you look in the mirror now in shifting the evaluation from the mirror and the question of attractiveness and being attractive to questions of being interesting and being interested and that being reciprocal with other people um you know this has its own kind of aesthetic challenges right now i'll just say to you i i a lot of this advice comes out of my experience with with particular friends i've had and their struggles with romance with getting laid and not getting laid with trying to have uh long-term uh relationships and failing and ending up with short-term relationships or ending up with no relationships at all but like you know just just challenge yourself in this way hypothetically you know there's so many guys and whether they obsess over a woman via instagram like they have a whole bunch of instagram messages back and forth or it's someone they're at work with they talk to at work and they're trying to make the transition to having a real relationship with this person you know if you actually recorded your own conversations with this person if you had a tape recorder and you recorded the conversations you had with them do you think that you are being interesting and do you think the other person is interested i've had friends i've had friends who send me screenshots of their conversations with women women they're trying to have a relationship with on instagram you know it's these messages back and forth and you sometimes many times these conversations end with a woman saying that they are just not interested like it can be as blunt as that um like they say things like look i'm not really it's been nice talking to you but i'm not really interested they will say words to that effect and like really what you got to ask the guy is at what stage did you think you were being interesting and i know it's subjective and at what stage is she interested like obviously not the example i already gave not everyone is going to be interested to have a conversation about corruption and bribery within the pharmaceutical system well maybe maybe everyone will find that it's pretty interesting conversation if you're talking to someone who knows you know what's saying them that kind of thing has happened to me so many times too um even when you meet someone where there were really clear barriers between you like let's say you meet someone and you know right away they're pretty serious about christianity like they're wearing a cross or some other signs that they're that they're christian but there's some type of conversation that gets you going where you you're interested in them them and they're interested in what you have to say and you start to respect and appreciate each other's point of view and you realize this person has a view of the world coming from their own experience and yet maybe the first thing you knew about them was negative like oh they're a christian there's some kind of pious christian okay but they're not only a christian you don't want to be there's those things you know what maybe your first impression of someone is that they're fat but if you talk them this way and you start getting to know them and you're interested and they're interesting and there's there's mutual interest there well guess what they're not only fat you know maybe the first thing you notice is that they have a crooked nose but they're more than a crooked nose there's there's something else there to appreciate so i just say i'm not letting anyone off the hook in talking about a shift from attractiveness to being interested and being interesting if anything i think the challenge for a lot of people it's it's harder to be interesting it's more demanding than being attractive now this is maybe a case where we can pause and ask is this exactly the same for men and women or is it like 10 percent different for men and women let me just say i've known so many beautiful women who never made any effort to be interesting like they really didn't develop themselves intellectually and they they try to hit on me they try to get something going with me and again so let's say it's a woman is 30 years old even but this is a woman who from age 18 to age 30 just made no effort just assumed all she needs to do is be good looking and present herself to the guy and say yup i'm i'm available for you to hit on me just present the opportunity for the guy to be winning witty and charming and do all the work and they meet someone like me and like you know i'm saying them yeah what what did you have to say to me uh-huh why why are you talking to me again and so this goes this goes way back and this is true in my my teenagers and this isn't something that's just happened lately but you know sorry what do you have to offer of what intellectual substance are you what you know what is there intellectually emotionally or otherwise that's common ground that's going to bring us together why am i having this conversation with you and you know as you can guess from my attitude my attitude is partly yeah you know what there are a lot of beautiful girls in the world there are a lot of beautiful women at this conference on this floor and this you know like i don't regard that as scarce i'm you know expecting the woman to be able to step up and make an effort now in in 2021 what i've just said is that more or less of a problem for men or is it exactly the same like you know i'm open to the possibility it's just as much of a problem with men why a lot of men are video game addicts a lot of men spend their time playing video games watching sports on tv you know etc so they may be just as badly off or worse in terms of actually meeting and interacting with other sex and in that fundamental basic sense being interesting so i gave you guys the um i gave you guys the warning that that was the shallowest point i had to offer but you know i i don't think it's all that shallow like i i when do you have this discourse in your life very few of us melissa and i talked about this before making the video this is a rare case because i had two hours advanced warning before i started recording by the way great to see 49 people in the audience if you can share the link if you know anyone who's interested enjoy this conversation share the link with your friends on facebook or share the link on twitter whatever you got if you share it on reddit i don't know who's gonna turn up but uh let's see also during the conversation i'm happy to answer uh questions from the audience uh but anyway by the way melissa also has the right to to shout in her opinion she's sitting she's sitting just off camera but yeah i'll just say like one of the things with melissa is i can definitely say with melissa you never had a friend you would talk to you about this issue in this way uh this does not have become the autobiography of of melissa on this issue but like but you know people who are frustrated people so we had the black pill being shouted out here you know people who are dealing with this i think a lot of it is staring at the mirror i think a lot of it is staring into the warped mirror of youtube a lot of it is alone one way or the other like alone with social media alone with reddit right but but it's not and it's not talking to someone who's maybe older more sophisticated more experienced and who actually sympathize with your situations actually trying to help that's that's pretty rare in our culture you know being in the position of being yes yes yes right and you know uh look i mean people people are profoundly alien on this on this issue people are mutually alien i have known older guys who tried to give me advice that i just completely laughed at i mean you can you can probably imagine there are older men who you know really are misogynists there are older men who really do regard all women as prostitutes there are women who there's a part of me there are men whose advice on this stuff would just be so irrelevant to my life and how i live it that you know that can be that can be totally counterproductive too but i mean recognizing the locus of where these questions are raised and answers uh can be significant and in saying people ask themselves this in front of the mirror and think about it in terms of attractiveness and that's already a problem i i'm just saying i think that's already something profound so i knew two women you can tell a lot about a woman from a relationship with her sister by the way so i need to i'm going to make this a little bit uh anonymous oh what were the rages so one of them was just over 30 and one was just under 30. so let's say one of them was 32 and one of them was 27 something like this it's not a big age gap but both of them both of them were on the like biological clock am i ever going to have a baby am i ever going to get uh married and keeping this anonymous i knew both of these women and for just a couple of days i met their mom and i saw them in the room with their mom and and so i saw their relationship with their mother you really see some all right and i remember so the mother was counseling both of them on settling down and getting married and both of them were like consciously at the stage of wanting to get committed and and settle down and move on and have and raise kids so there was a lot of talk like this going on between them and there was one time when the younger uh sister was not in the room and i was in the room with the mom and the older sister so i'm gonna make up a name say the younger sister's name was mary and you could see oh my god you could see how the mother had inculcated lifelong trauma into these two girls mother stood there and said in this whinging voice well you know i was just thinking if only mary could lose a little weight you know maybe some man would be interested and it was the way she was saying it you know it's not it's not that she said it at all the way she was saying it you realize they've grown up hearing this since they were maybe 15 years old and they're hearing it now and the younger sister was thin enough to be a wedding gown model she was thin enough you know saying wedding gown because they're kind of big billy gowns they often want someone with a very narrow waist the sister in terms of body fat was was you know she was she was very slender already i hope she there was absolutely no reasonable man on earth would not be interested in her for for wanting her to lose weight but like you know the depths of of the the the kind of misconception and the way in which the mother's misconception is being imposed on the daughters they're being asked to live up to that and and by the way the mom was like anorexic thin and i'm just being real with you when i first met the mom i just assumed she'd had cancer or something you know what i mean you meet someone who's older and they're real skinny or like you know i just assumed some if not cancer she had some serious health problem right where you're like oh it's not a it's not a health problem you know what i mean no okay so the younger sister she very beautiful i mean you know again apart she's not just not overweight she's very beautiful if you sat down and talked to her for five minutes you would realize right away she was someone who either had ptsd bipolar disorder something there's something really wrong with her like she starts off staring you in the eyes like a cult leader and then she drifts away where she's staring into space and she's like crushing something in her hand repeatedly like as some really like i don't care how good looking you are if i was with this chick i would not feel safe sleeping in the same room i'd want a padlock on the door she was terrifying now look i didn't ask any questions like i look a lot of you guys don't know me off camera i don't i do not ask nosy questions i just don't i can know people for years and not know things about them seriously i can know somebody for you after that after they've known me for five years they mentioned that they're a stripper and i didn't know that like seriously there's people i've known for years like there's privates why would i ask know i i don't have what do you do on the weekends oh they they're a professional stripper i didn't know that you know this is all kinds of things where i don't i don't know people's secrets they don't ask they want to tell me that they want to tell me but you know i found out after the the sister the younger sister left the older sister said you know yeah she's really going through a problem right now with uh psychiatric medication she was on some kind of com antidepressant or antipsychotic or or what have you you know um [Music] so you know okay so i'm just saying like if you're the mother in that situation or if you're the man who's potentially gonna not just seduce this woman but like have shoulder with her have a family don't think there were a lot of deeper more important issues here than whether or not she could lose five pounds or ten pounds on like are you are you kidding me so yeah i'm sorry this is again this is an aggression talking about the locus in which we we consider these things you know for most people it's the mirror for a significant number of people it's the internet whether that's reddit or facebook or youtube or something and yeah for some people it's their relationship with their own parents for some people their own mom and dad are the only people they talk to about who they're dating or you know again that's kind of alien to both melissa and i we neither one of us we didn't relate to our parents that way we didn't talk about our options in our in our love life that way um i i could digress now as there's a whole other there's a whole other topic but like the locus within which you consider these these questions and then what it is you're you're blaming for them what it is you're problematizing um and how easily people just think in terms of appearance where they just think about their own appearance and whether or not other people are attracted to that and they don't let them think through the extent which they themselves don't operate that way or you think wait i personally i don't just pursue the most attractive person i can find like in real life situations you meet a bunch of people and all the times you you meet someone and at first there's nothing attractive but what would you find attractive with them and then you find out what you have in common or they they say something that makes you think they're an intelligent and interesting person you know uh and and it goes from there something something develops from there so you know that's that's not deep it's shallow but really being honest with yourself about that i think has tremendously important implications throughout the rest of your life so i'm going to pause at this point and take a look at uh take a look at what you guys are asking me in the uh in the comments section i realize you guys are talking amongst yourselves which is great not everything has to be a question posed to me you can talk to uh to one another so ryan michael says the consequences of this topic are profound case in point the incel who killed five people in the united kingdom the other day so that is yet another in-cell killing that i've not heard about um i would just say though my advice here is not limited to incels the question of why you can't get laid could be asked for example by a divorced person like you know they've been married in the past they're not now it could be asked by someone who's had a series of successful short-term relationships or love affairs they're all kinds of people who are going to ask this and reflect on this it's not limited to the the in-cell phenomenon in some phenomena it's huge it's huge cultural issue if you think it's bad in western atheist culture take a look at muslim in cells take a look at hindu in cells cast hinduism what's it like to be a brahman in cell are you kidding me you know there are more sexually repressive cultures around the world where people start with this and you know within the more orthodox christian subcultures of our own society like people who still take christianity seriously it's it's a huge problem you know so yeah but the question of why can't you get laid this goes way beyond the the in so category okay so here's an interesting comment from william again he says quote let's be frank unless you look like the elephant man getting laid isn't a real problem i totally disagree will you i mean maybe we'll get into that uh if we'll get into that topic later on um i'd be interested to know what cultural background that guy has and what is what his assumptions are so i i i said earlier super briefly that you know um part of the problem with presenting this information in any format part of the problem with representatives information on youtube in a book in an essay in a poem uh is the extent to which your circumstances as the person giving the advice may just be incompatible with the circumstance of the person the audience receiving the advice but i mean one of the real differences in circumstances of sorry should be singular one of the differences between you and in your circumstance would be what it is you're willing to tolerate accept or fall in love with you know in a partner for someone like me uh if i were to meet women in a bar or nightclub i wouldn't be interested in a single one of them the type of women i want to meet are not at a bar or a nightclub you know so i mean something as simple as that now there are some men who would go to a bar or nightclub let's give an example uh in england this is a very big deal and people do meet this way you can go to a pub a pub just means a type of bar alcohol you can go to a pub on a night when they are playing sports on tv and you will meet other people who are watching that same sport rugby was the real sport for this rugby was the getting laid sport you can go wearing your rugby shirt and you can meet a young woman who is also drinking beer and watching rugby and looking to sleep with a guy who plays rugby and who has a guy who has a certain level of physical fitness too is part of the stereotype but i mean rugby knight at bars you could absolutely see that going on a lot of guys with big forearms it's a real forearm sport that they would wear shirts they really don't cross their arms and show off their their forearms all this hair oh yeah often the rest of them isn't that great but you really get really big forearms okay so you know someone who's in that subculture who's in that lane who has those attitudes and those values i could understand them saying what williams says here that let's be frank unless you look like the elephant man getting getting ladies and gentlemen but for me the whole problem stems out of the fact that i want to be with somebody who respects me and i want to be with somebody i have respect for now look if you're a rugby fan and you respect everyone else who's a rugby if that's all it takes for you you know i'm not i'm not saying you're sub-human or something but you're playing by a different set of rules right if you're someone who drinks alcohol and hangs out in bars watching rugby and you'd have plenty of respect for separately for someone else for whom all those those things are true too that's that's a big difference and then your your perspective is going to be going to be profoundly different all right okay so vegan soldier says being sold i don't remember singing here on the crowd before i'm just mentioning uh vegan soldier says quote the black pill is real it's mostly based on facial attractiveness and height especially for young men on tinder close quote so i would just say this phenomenon the black pill basically means people have completely given up on love romance etc um if you watch them on youtube you will be able to tell in 30 seconds what the problem is with any one of these guys it's not mysterious right away it's not just what they look like it's how they talk it's what their philosophy is towards life their attitudes right men who are black pill they come on youtube and they exhibit for you in a self-explanatory way exactly what the problem is and why they why they can't get laid so you know i think that's something to be very hard to get across in writing it'd be something to be hard for me to get across as my youtube channel criticizing another youtube channel but when youtube channels speak for themselves in the first person you can tell absolutely okay we've got a lot of hard-hitting comments here from ron sims ron sims i think you've been in my audience for at least five years a long time long long time viewer of the channel ron sims says quote what people don't realize is that attractiveness is used as a leverage or a cover of an otherwise empty unexamined vaped life close quote i completely disagree with you ron i completely disagree so i've got to say i feel that attractiveness um you know what your body and face look like is just in no way related cause and effect whether or not you're leading a meaningful life you know that's that is really my position on that there are some beautiful people who lead a meaningful life and there are some beautiful people who have a meaningless life there's no shortage of ugly people leading i mean i'm sorry but like you know um i i feel like this view of the world and ron by the way i know you may just be joking around he may not need this it's a comment in the comment section and you know it's it's no big deal but you know i've grown up all my life with uh stereotypes about jews and judaism i'm ethnically jewish and like people would say to me that they thought all jewish people were highly intelligent intellectuals or geniuses like as if everyone who's born jewish is of this kind of a higher intellectual club they'd often be saying this to me and they don't think they're racist they don't think they're randy submitted and you know it's like you know have you ever tried going to a nightclub in tel aviv do you really think there are no stupid people leading a meaningless life and telling me hey have you ever tried going to watch a rugby game at a sports bar in tel aviv like you know these kinds of stereotypes it's understandable why there are stereotypes about beautiful people and this is particularly sorry this is not a big digression but this is particularly the type of beautiful people who are interviewed on television the type of beautiful people become famous as actors or models the stereotype exists for reasons but i have to say i just think it's completely false there's no there's no cause and effect relationship and let me just put you this way when you go to the library the door opens just as easily for the beautiful and the ugly alike when you take the book off the shelf it's just as much work for an ugly person to read it or a beautiful person to read it's not easier whatever it is you're doing to cultivate your mind or you know exercise your ambition in life or even just your curiosity in life it is no easier uh for an ugly person than for a beautiful person and vice versa so you know i think you've got to really keep that keep that in perspective despite despite those stereotypes that indeed the mass media tend to uh amplify shall we say we get a great comment you two look great together on the thumbnail thanks oh you can you can check out my instagram for more pictures of us uh more pictures of the happy couple i guess i guess it's really melissa's instagram you know you got that great picture of us uh picking berries all right well i i could share okay i won't some of you figure out some of you will figure out the instagram on twitter and some of you won't we'll leave that leave that mysterious thanks for the compliment so a quote from uh john pardon me james mcpine says quote i guess the difference would be in those countries muslim countries etc it wouldn't be as shameful to be a male virgin at 25 as it would be in the west everything i mean the way religion shapes everything uh sorry man what is not changed by religion i mean you know i mean i can ask sorry james i'm not saying this doesn't like james have you ever dated a muslim woman have you ever dated hindu you know have you ever even dated say a uh you know a hispanic catholic woman who takes catholicism really seriously i mean everything's different everything's different in ways that people are not even aware of it shapes their sexuality it shapes the questions that are asked and the questions that go when asked so no it's it's profoundly utterly different uh everything going on okay so another great question from alioth alioth asks why do you have your comments disabled in all your videos eliath if you click on the description for any of my videos just one of them you will find that every single time in the description to the video you'll find the answer to this question so i don't i i do wonder i mean you've watched at least one of my videos we don't know maybe you've watched a hundred of them but um i do have the link that answers that question uh in the description of video i'm i'm happy to have you guys here i'm happy to take the time to answer these questions and chit chat with you but i am a full-time university student studying chinese i have to make tough decisions about how much of my time i let the internet occupy and the internet's demands of my time are basically infinite the amount of time i have to give is finite so you've got to think about it that way all right [Music] okay all right so i'm going to get back to the topic here but turnbull i've seen the video you're talking about so turnbull says uh if you're just on topic of this video i'd recommend the ted talk quote how i hacked online dating by adie webb that's a terrible video it's a distant memory that video but i remember that i absolutely despised that video maybe by the end of this conversation you'll see why i uh why i despise it so much all right so okay so do you just wonder so ali off you haven't had five minutes you haven't clicked on that link you haven't taken my answer seriously it's like what do you think i've been uploading thousands of videos for seven years do you think i don't know what i'm talking about i think i don't know how much time it takes to run a youtube comment section yeah i don't know how about you do you have a youtube channel do you have a youtube comment section do you know how much time that takes up your life sorry i just don't understand why you can't fundamentally be sympathetic and take seriously when i've taken the time to give you an answer your question it's a serious question you got a serious answer the answer was already in the description every single one of my videos so you know respect it or check it as 50 cent used to say all right um i noticed that pretty much nobody is asking why does this why does this question matter this is a rare example of a question where everyone i think has a sense of the the gravity of it uh in our lives um i saw a youtube channel recently for the first time i it is a new youtube channel anyway so i i could have only discovered it a few weeks ago or something when you guys started those of you who support me on patreon will know the youtube channel i'm talking about because i shared the link he's the guy of first nations ancestry so american indian or indigenous canadian ever want to put it and he was talking in his youtube channel about how his whole life had changed for the better after he became vegan so we grew up in this indigenous culture that valorized hunting that viewed the killing of animals partly as spiritual and partly as manly and he grew up with all these things and as he said simply but bluntly you know um everyone in his family had reacted to his decision to become vegan this is a big deal that a big impact on his parents grandparents brothers and sisters that this was something everyone was taking very seriously they had never even considered not eating animals and it was so most uh white western people think of eating meat just as neutral or indifferent but he was really growing up in a subculture where eating meat and killing killing animals and and and eating them together was reviewed as morally positive this is you know now again i'm going to fill in the blanks a little bit here he didn't talk about it at such length but you know you can imagine there's this positive sense on of you're carrying on the traditions of your ancestors or this is some special cultural and indeed as i say spiritual significance hunting enemy so in that context he decided to become vegan and then he lists off for you all the ways in which veganism has made his life better he very briefly states that the reason he became vegan and the reason he first kind of heard about and thought about veganism seriously was that he got a new girlfriend who he's in love with very much it's not clear to me if they're engaged to be married or something it's a high commitment relationship and he provides the link to her channel so he has a serious relationship with this woman this woman already is vegan this woman already is actually a life coach and is some kind of spiritual leader in her own way after our own fashion now when you hear that i think it's just a great example of how you know the romantic relationships in our lives totally shape who we are and who we become the questions that go unasked in your life as opposed to questions that get asked every single day you know what i mean the way in which having just one person come to your life and love you and listen to you and you listen to them the way in which that shapes and reshapes everything it's difficult to exaggerate and i mean i know most people think about really shallow stuff like oh actually i remember this i remember a woman on my channel and she said that when she was single her bathroom would be unbelievably messy she just didn't think about where anything was or how disgusting i i'd haven't known people as well she said the whole bathroom was full of just you know unbelievable mess and what have you and she said as soon as she had a boyfriend or a serious boyfriend in her life there would be this huge change and just like literally making room for him on the counter of the bathroom and trying to reorganize her life that way well you know so you know that's something the question didn't even arise before you know it didn't even arise in our mind to think you know oh well you know well is is there something wrong with my bathroom is it a problem is it messy she didn't perceive it as messy you bring someone else in your life and suddenly you you perceive it as messy this guy uh again you can know who he is it's not that fascinating a case study i think it's typical he was an electrician he drove a truck or i'm sorry if he was an electrical engineer or something i'm sorry getting slid on but he did some kind of trade like this with his hands he drove a truck he ate meat he engaged in hunting you know he got a new girlfriend all kinds of things he would have never questioned he started questioning and soon enough you know he started coming up with new answers and the other thing is i think about this a lot in terms of politics and not just your personal life the other thing that changes are your priorities things that you maybe one day would have gotten to oh yeah again i can keep it shallow with reorganizing your bathroom and clean the bathroom oh yeah maybe one day i should clean up the bathroom or maybe one day i should think about trying a vegan diet maybe it's something you have thought about but it's a very low priority now that you're in a relationship this becomes a top priority and other things that used to be your top priority become a lower priority or you know disappear altogether so you know i think a lot of people really underestimate how profound that is and on the other hand people who know exactly how profound that is maybe they're the ones who are the most kind of desperately frustrated with their own inability to get laid or if they are getting laid their inability to form really meaningful long-term relationships being in a relationship i mean even if we just limit it to that narrow focus all right you might think it doesn't change who you are but even if we just admit these two points it changes the questions you're being asked it changes the questions you ask yourself and then it changes your priorities in life in terms of dealing with problems and what it is you're doing with time with the passage of a few months or a few years it changes everything it changes who you are now i'd also like to say um i wish we lived in a world where there were a whole lot of relationships that could be that close and that meaningful and change things that way i have never once heard a phd student a phd student i have never once heard a phd student say to me that their relationship with a professor with their supervisor changed their life this way never never i've never heard anyone say i'm not talking about sex i'm just talking about like their friendship with or their intellectual camaraderie with the person i have never heard anyone say that their relationship with the professor changed their life that way so you know and then on the other hand when there are exceptions to the rule they tend to get sexualized i remember i'll remember this forever even though such a brief thing i remember a woman called in to complain uh to a radio show so i played this with cbc radio here in canada she called in to complain that they were talking about people husbands cheating on their wives basically and she said look you know i think what you don't realize is that when it's just an emotional and an intellectual infidelity that that can be just as damaging and she had this example uh from her own life but what she was describing was a pair of work colleagues who really kind of loved each other there was no sex there was no kissing but there were they had a really meaningful life together as were colleagues and that this created uh jealousy in the man's wife even though it was a non-sexual relationship but this kind of thing so as i say it's incredibly rare and then when there when there is some exception this way people tend to sexualize it like they can't let go of the idea oh well you and your work colleague you're more than just colleagues you're more than just just friends or indeed you can imagine that the student and professor that somehow this is more than just colleagues this is more than just friends so yeah uh obviously i'm not going to slam the door on that and say that human nature is only susceptible to these kinds of profoundly important relationships when they are sexual or become sexualized but yeah it's it's terrifying to me at age 42 to look around the world and see how see how rare that is so look you know um i just i've almost finished i mean the last few pages of the autobiography of benjamin franklin benjamin franklin put a lot of time and effort into socializing with other men nothing in his autobiography indicates that he had an intellectual relationship with his wife so i'm not hating on her but we learned how we met her and how he ended up marrying her and he was he was trying to marry another woman and it didn't work out he ends up you know um you know we had kids of this woman she was involved with his life to some extent but he put a lot of time into these gentlemen's clubs he created as kind of round table discussions where they read a book and discuss the book and they discuss pardon me the kind of social change they wanted to make a lot of civic virtues stuff just give you an example he set up a street sweeping service for the neighborhood he was always doing fundraisers for things like this okay let's all donate money and hire someone to clean the streets this kind of thing a lot of civic virtues but you know there there isn't a single relationship mentioned or discussed in the book like a relationship with another man that's it that's important to him this way you know i'm just giving you my honest opinion based on reading his autobiography as gregarious as he was as much time as he was spending socializing i feel like this guy really spent his life alone like i feel like he just had very shallow i mean cooperative relationships with other men you know he was a newspaper editor and there were guys writing articles given to him yet business relationships other men and so on but i don't you know i don't think he had anything like this in his life that really challenged him and led him to let him to grow in that kind of way so just just mentioning um that that's one that's an example that that you know leads me to reflect that way i mean reading the autobiographies of men you're left to wonder were there more important relationships that are just omitted entirely or you know is this just their way of writing about their life as opposed to to how it really was one of the autobiographies i read many years ago was that of charlie chaplin and you know likewise the shallowness of his relationships with everyone other than the woman he's having sex with at that time is terrifying charlie chapman had a huge number of kids by the way with a bunch of different yeah you know really he had a he had a he had a sex life that inspired uh scandal and rumor in the press and he ended up marrying a woman his last wife who stayed with him was dramatically younger than him and this also you know excited a lot of a lot of gospeling what have you anyway okay so guys coming back to the title of this video and i just mentioned i'm uh uh i'm paying attention to the the comments as they as they pop up so you guys are welcome to participate you're also welcome to hit the thumbs up button you can change your mind later and hit thumbs down or you can undo the thumbs up so that it's neither thumbs up and thumbs down but if you hit thumbs up now it'll help more people discover the video and join in the topic um so a lot of the advice i'm going to give here i'm going to mention here it does relate to particular people i've known and particular people have given advice to uh in my life and you know it took some time to reflect on this day and i do think it's a real significance and importance for for others um [Music] and very unusually i have a few things written down on paper i almost never make any notes before the last string recording a video we have just just a few notes okay number one i think it's really important that you don't tell people what you're looking for and that you don't tell yourself what it is you're looking for so you don't you know use more technical parliaments that you don't reify in your own mind what it is you want or who it is you want this is quite a difficult discipline for some people of actually being open-minded of actually being willing to meet people one at a time at a on a one-by-one basis and i think on a deep level what it requires is the admission that you yourself don't really know what it is you want or even to put it more scrupulously um that you don't know what would be good enough for you like you may have a sense of what the standards are you're imposing and what it is you want people to live up to so again i feel all this stuff it really applies to men and women you know equally whether you imagine a man or a woman doing this a lot of us go through our lives with a definite set of criteria with a checklist of of what it is they want a partner to have and they people i mean people at the office people at the workplace people at the university with their the other university students people talk about this stuff openly and loudly all the time they say oh well i want to be with someone who is xy and zed and you know he or she has to have this requirement in this requirement they have to this that they have a whole list of things set up in their mind and they will talk about it openly they'll talk about it they'll say it to someone who's trying to flirt with them or start a relationship with them right there you know now the reality is so i'll take i'll take an easy example um okay let's let's do some easy examples let's do some difficult examples all right let's say you meet a young man i i spend a lot of time on university campuses still now but have been for for many years i've been on and off a student the university i've been on and off an instructor at a university too but let's say you you meet a young man and while he's a student in university he's saying all the time that he's only interested in japanese women what he really wants is a japanese girlfriend or a japanese wife okay let's fill in he's a bl he's a white guy yeah in a university in the west he's a white guy and he says this is what he likes this is what he sees on the internet you know this is what he's into he's only looking for a japanese girlfriend or a japanese wife now that is going to have consequences in his life now i'll go say further even if he doesn't say it out loud to anyone if he actually kept that to himself he doesn't know if he just thinks that that's just part of his internal monologue that's going to impact his life here and now it's going to close all kinds of doors it's going to and people are going to pick up on it like you know when you're when you're talking to other people face to face even if you don't announce it if you don't let it out you have set this limitation for yourself you've created this category so this guy goes through university um let's say he went to university in chicago right and he's preparing for this life he's fantasized about in japan this is probably a life mostly made up of ideas he's got from the internet or maybe from movies or comic books or something you know he's got this idea built out of his life he gets none of the kind of really requisite experience of making a relationship work as a result because he's got this fantasy built up in his mind of what it is he's looking for him what is he's going to find in japan naturally everybody is turned off by him while he's at the university including the small number of japanese women he manages to meet while he's university which tiny majority of the other and then he goes to japan and you know guess what once he arrives in japan you know who he is a whole lot in common with he has a whole lot in common with the white women who are living in japan he has more in common with a white american woman who's chosen to move to japan and to start learning japanese and to start trying to have a more meaningful life over there someone who's made a similar decision for for similar reasons there's a lot of common ground there there's the basis for a really great relationship right and if you're telling yourself that all you want is to be with a japanese person if that's your guiding right obviously you're not even gonna consider that you're not gonna be open right now the other horrifying thing he's gonna realize this may be obvious in in other examples is that once he actually goes to japan once he starts talking to japanese people every day he's going to realize what we all know if you're over the age of 30 you already know this you don't like japanese people you don't like japanese women you like one japanese woman at a 10 thousand and guess what if you were really being honest with yourself if you were and if you really had this kind of experience in life which not everyone has if you were meeting and talking to a lot of scottish women you know what the truth is you don't like scottish women you're really interested in you could really have a relationship with one scottish woman out of ten thousand you know what german women french women like we could we can go down through the list here the reality is that once you really know who you are and who these people are that actually it's going to be really rare that you meet someone you're compatible with intellectually emotionally or otherwise you can have a could have a great future with them and what really matters is not whether or not they're they're japanese now likewise you know if someone is going around with a list in their mind let's just say it's a woman who's going to a conference i'm mentioning conferences because that's where you can meet people you know are going to be like-minded you know in advance so let's take it all the way back here does anyone remember the old atheist conferences these are one called skepticon skepticon the skeptic conference so there were these conferences for people who were atheists that were pro science or antivirus and people would go there to get laid surprise surprise so you know naturally um some woman might go to one of these conferences and let's say she has in her mind she wants a man who was over six feet tall someone who was atheist and anti-religious and let's say she also wants a guy who has an advanced degree in the sciences like she just made that up in her mind she's like well you know really i want a guy who's got at least like a master's degree in physics or chemistry something like that maybe thinking mechanical engineering maybe but she'd really like someone with an advanced degree in in physics or chemistry that's in terms of who she is that's what she's looking for well once she goes to that conference just like the young man who went to japan you know what she's gonna discover it's not every guy who's over six feet tall it's not every guy who's got a degree in chemistry you know advanced degree in chemistry or physics right when you meet these people and you start dealing with them in real life you're gonna realize even just at that conference whoa the vast majority of these guys who meet my checklist of requirements the vast majority of them i'm not attracted them or even if i am attracted to them i could never have a relationship that works with these guys and then on the contrary you've got to let yourself really be open-minded maybe you meet a guy who is five foot six like he's shorter than six feet tall and he has a university degree in english literature he doesn't have a degree in this let's say he has a phd in the poetry of shakespeare but when you meet him you start to realize hey what's really scarce here what's really you know what's really rare that i have to value and i have to act on is the common ground i do have with this guy not the common ground i don't have with him not the things that he's lacking but it's the things that he's got and that's what i've got to work with and that hey this is one guy in ten thousand you know i could be attracted to when i'm interested in him and he's interested in me there's something really precious there that you shouldn't reject him or shut him down for that reason but i would say the the power of this the reason i say don't tell other people what you want don't tell other people what you're looking for don't tell yourself what you're looking for is that what i see is both women and men they tell themselves this again and again and again and then they can't even perceive it when they meet that person they've really got you know common basis for relationship they meet that person again whatever he's five foot six and he's an english literature whatever the reasons are or again it's the young man he thinks he's only looking for a japanese woman but there's a he meets a white woman who's studying japanese and really you have more in common than someone you know or but whatever that that man maybe he goes around saying he wants to be with a woman who's five years younger than him and he meets a woman who's five years older than him instead but you know like are you letting yourself even see that are you letting yourself even talk to that person in a way where you're going to discover how much common ground you've got how much potential you've got to really have a meaningful relationship you know so uh you know in terms of people i have known face to face i've known people who are so hung up on tattoos they were there are people who only want a relationship with someone else who has tattoos and there are people who can never be attracted to someone who say they will never be in a relationship with someone who does have tattoos like there are people who are who who reject anymore tattoos and said can't even find track there can't even look at them or want to see them make it or something and there's the opposite with the one i'm using this this is an extreme example but i've really known people like this and there are people who have internalized some kind of social hierarchy whether that's you know bachelor's degree master's degree phd or whatever they're people who are like oh well he he's not even a university graduates there are guys like that maybe he's an electrician you know maybe finished high school he got the practical trade like plumbing or electricity maybe he's a really great guy maybe you can have a really great life together in various ways but you have to let yourself see that and so much of what we do in relationships and again you're sabotaging yourself because you're telling yourself this and you're telling others this you're letting everyone at your university know everyone in your workplace know everyone in your family know oh no no i'm only interested in in this kind of guy who meets these parameters and the reality is you know you could meet someone who meets none of those criteria who doesn't check any of those boxes on the checklist where it really works it really is you really are attracted you can really have a great sex life with them and maybe a great love life a great intellectual life great emotional life too and there are once you meet enough of the people who have all those check marks you will realize that even within that category it is like one person out of ten thousand so you might as well just stop sabotaging yourself with the categorical thinking now i don't know how many you people are vegan in this audience i'm trying to tell by my sense of smell what percent of the audiences is vegan right now right but you know man you know it's so easy to tell yourself i want to be with someone who's vegan right and for a lot of people like not just the first six months that they're vegan right but like maybe like the first 10 years that you're vegan you haven't met that many vegan people in real life just like i'm sorry i know that example might seem shallow but the young man who's in university and says he only wants to be with a japanese woman but he doesn't really know many japanese people he hasn't really lived in japanese culture he hasn't known hundreds or thousands of japanese women you know maybe he did maybe he knew one japanese girl in high school he really had eyes for her or something but you know he doesn't really have any deep knowledge of the culture of people or just just even what they look like or something well up to a certain point as a vegan and it can be ten years you've only met and spoken to like five other vegans and and just like that young man has a fantasy about japan based on what he saw on the internet youtube reddit wherever wherever it gets this fantasy or pornography or whatever like you have your own fantasy about what vegans are supposed to be who you want them to be for you what it is how you're gonna have all these other things in common and then if you actually get to know hundreds or thousands of other vegans i am in a position to say over seven years i got to know thousands of other vegans you were gonna realize whoa it's like one person in ten thousand i've really got some kind of common basis with so even with something like that even with something as important as that you might as well flip it around and say i'm i don't know what i want i'm going to profoundly admit to myself i don't know who i'm trying to meet i don't know what i want i'm going to meet people on a one-by-one basis and if i meet someone it's a really great guy it's a really great woman you know whatever you're pursuing if i meet someone that this can really work with you can meet them and then say to them look i need you to live up to this standard i need you to be vegan for you to be with me that either it's either it's going to work or not and sometimes you know people try and they break up and they get back together two years later or five years later or whatever it is like look you and i have something really special something that we can build on but you know there's there's there are things you have to do to to be on my level or to to make this worthy that that is what most people are going to end up doing because you realize that even even something as crucially important as vegan versus non-vegan that you can't really make this work as a category as a chicken market so we got sympathy coming in from the audience oh atlanta richard says that he's in a doomed romance there's a woman uh oh a particular woman or maybe several women that he feels he can't pursue because they're not vegan man up what can i tell you you know i mean i know what may seem hard or impossible um a lot of interesting questions you know um uh i know it may seem hard or impossible to meet someone and start to fall in love with them or have them start to fall in love with you i mean however however far it goes and then say look you know for this to go further i need you to be vegan what about quitting alcohol and what about quitting gambling what about quitting going to the nightclub you know like you know what about quitting smoking actually the vegan thing it's not it's not that hard on the spectrum of these things it's not that hard what about quitting islam what about quitting mormonism like people people in relationships act each ask each other to make make huge commitments and huge changes in their lives and they do you know and i think oh this is the other funny thing about relationships so i was trying to hint at earlier how crucial these relationships are and then i wish you could have relationships like this with your professor or somebody else but it seems to almost always 99 of the time it's someone you're in love with or something right why is it that people are willing to get motivated and prioritize doing what they need to do in order to be a better person for someone else and not for themselves that's the biggest riddle of all right people people will so easily get motivated like oh i gotta lose weight i gotta get in shape i gotta get healthy for my girlfriend for my boyfriend you know i've gotta do this for someone else but but you wouldn't do it for yourself like you know six months earlier or two months earlier or something right oh you know i gotta quit gambling quit smoking quit drinking i gotta get my i gotta do this for you know this woman i'm in love with oh but first what about you you don't count for nothing you wouldn't do it just for yourself you wouldn't quit gambling just so you could be a better person oh no no you're willing to be a better person for someone else and by the way you see this all the time with the religious mentality there are all kinds of things people wouldn't do something for themselves but they'll do it for god they'll do it for jesus they'll do it for a statue there's a statue they put on an alcove and they pray to it and talk to it every morning and they say to the statue i'm doing this for you like they say to the statue okay i'm going to give up eating meat you know whatever it is i'm going to give up gambling i'm going to they'll be celibate or they're doing it for this statue they won't do it for themselves but the statue they're motivated for right whether it's for god or from some girl they're in love with or something that's a really sick sad part of human nature that you know what we won't do for ourselves we will do for for others so by the way it's interesting from natasha natasha says quote i appreciate that isil doesn't refer to grown women as girls you know the funny thing is in real life like off camera i correct myself with that all the time because in our culture you do hear it all the time like you know i say oh you know i remember i was talking to this girl and i'll be like no no no she was about 21. i'm a young woman you know i do actually out loud correct myself that way so no i i do think it's a significant thing that we make the effort to not say girl unless unless you're genuinely talking about someone young enough that they are they are a girl um and you know what's funny i used to fight about this as an editor all the time so i was a newspaper editor i was also an editor of non-fiction in books and i would all the time kind of put the hammer down and say no we're not going to refer to young women in their 20s as and sometimes it would get it would get dicey because they'd be like well okay this is 18 or something you know is 18 uh a girl or is it an adult or is it but yeah no no no no but i mean well yeah but some people would say boy melissa's been you know mentioning the gym whether it's boy boy versus man or something right and you know i mean obviously in that case you can just say teenager you can avoid the problem but when you're actually editing when you're actually rewriting someone else's text and people will fight you you know people want to use especially girls but they do also use boy boy is used there's the same kind of cultural issues with boy in some ways worse when there's racism involved or something you know why are you calling someone a boy when you could be going to a man but yeah so we have a really shallow comment from post human quote maybe the answer to this riddle is selfish gene propagation which unconsciously leads to such commitments i'm sorry posthuman i'm sorry but you're dead wrong i'm sorry but there's no way evolutionary psychology and genetics can explain this one sorry heart hard no on that i know i know you're writing with no bad intentions okay so moving on to the next on my my number list of notes all right so this one um this one's hard hitting for me and i remember one male friend of mine in particular i i talked about this a lot with and i think a lot of you at first you're not going to get what i'm talking about you're going to feel feel alienated from this and then if you just think about it reflect for a few minutes you'll see how it really matters in your own life a lot of us suffer from what i call the seinfeld syndrome explanation and this ultimately does come down to a problem of being selfish self-centered engaging in short-term thinking but to some extent it's also dehumanizing the other people who are in your life uh potentially or actually the other people you're you you have sex with or that you're trying to have sex with and have sex with yet your potential partners or actual partners now i call this the seinfeld syndrome i used to many years ago i used to talk about tv shows like beverly hills 90210 pardon me as an example of this but i think nobody remembers the tv show in beverly hills not to know seinfeld was a comedy show where pretty much every week there would be a new girlfriend who emerged in this man's life they would romance each other fall in love to some extent and then next week there's a new woman that he's dating and nothing in his own life would change he didn't do anything for these women the furniture in his apartment didn't change you know he wasn't making their lives better in any way right he also wasn't learning anything from them or changing as with many american tv shows there's a sort of artificial sense in which each of the characters is static where each episode it's as if the whole world resets and begins again and there's no particular progression in the plot or the no character development or what have you um but many men i have known maybe one woman i've known they live their lives in such a way that they feel there's this one lego brick in the wall there's this one space in their lives for someone to come into their apartment and have sex with them and then leave and that's it they live like seinfeld where they are going to continue living their own lives in their own terms they are going to continue pursuing their own story in which they are the main character and the people they have sex with come into their lives as a kind of accessory as a kind of incidental and evanescent addition that adds some color to their lives and then disappears now um i draw your attention back to the title of this video and again this is not about incels we're here talking people who can get laid but nevertheless they're complaining about why they can't get laid they're either not getting laid as much as they want to or they're they're not having the kind of relationships they're they're hoping to have um you know i remember talking face-to-face with a male friend of mine about this and i don't i wasn't exactly using socratic dialogue but i was asking questions in a very barbed way to get him to uh to get him to really reconsider and i remember saying to him so your assumption is she won't come over to your apartment and he was just kind of confused but i was like so what your assumption is you'll go to a hotel room your assumptions would go to her apartment and you know he was kind of like answering but he was you could see he was kind of mystified right and um the next time you go to visit your parents you're going to take her with you that's good questions he had not thought about at all right and um i was like the bed in your apartment i've never been to his apartment it's a single bed or a double bed you gonna buy a new bed like he's he's really flabbergasted about this he hadn't thought about this this wedding and so i asked a series of leading questions and what i said to him was you know which he didn't see coming at all he didn't see where these questions were leading or was going to i said you assumed that you were gonna do absolutely nothing for this woman you assume that you are not going to change your life in any way for her you are thinking about this woman like you're hiring her to come and clean your apartment and then leave you're looking at this as a service that is going to come into your life and exit leaving you unchanged right like that that's how you're really thinking about this woman it doesn't even occur to you that you are going to have to change for her that you're going to have to provide some kind of meaningful life for her that you're going to live some kind of life together now the conversation progressed but you know my ultimate point was that i said to him i mean this you know you've got to be pretty good friends to say this to a man but you know i said to him look on a really deep level you think of women as prostitutes you know you are thinking about these relationships in terms of like how much money do you have to spend and how much time and effort do you have to spend to have sex with this woman and then that's all it is to you right now this may seem like a huge leap from the seinfeld tv show to this real life experience so this one guy this friend of mine that as you can tell i was quite tough on but it's not you know the seinfeld tv show shows you this one kind of narrow snippet of a man's life and it gives you none of the women's perspective by the way you know and you know it shows you a few amusing dialogues between seinfeld and the woman he's dating at the time and you laugh at it and then again she disappears as inexplicably as she appears and it's always presumed that to some extent the wealth and fame of seinfeld makes it easy for him to have this series of relationships with each other okay so that that woman who should have you think in her own life she is not the main character in her story as opposed to being a minor supporting character inside felt sorry so this woman we're talking about a fictional character here but if this were a real woman in a real situation so she's not thinking about having children she's not thinking about her career and her education options and making different decisions for the man in her life and where you're going to live and what you're going to do together like there aren't long-term implications to this relationship for her and what it means for her and like you know again in terms of having a human heart like this person isn't a prostitute she's being treated like a prostitute she's just being treated as a sex object and then started you think she isn't falling in love i think this doesn't change the way she feels about herself and the way she looks back on the relationships you had in the past the way she looks at relationships yet in the future you know i mean if you just think a few steps deeper about what the relationship means to both of the parties involved and what demands each is making on the other you know i know these these sitcoms they tend to focus on the most shallow and trivial things like whether or not you're willing to change the style of clothes you wear for the other person in your life you know any relationship the books you read will change the conversations you have about the books you're reading will change right like you know do you think this is trivial i don't you know like just at that level right like this is really deep so how far how far are you going to go for the person your life uh i'm sorry i'm not gonna get the name uh out of my youtube channel there was a time uh a long time ago so by the way so i've said before i would love it if these kinds of questions could be um you know could be applied to non-sexual relationships also that'd be great but for most people they never i had a friend who was just a friend and i remember uh she was talking to me about a youtube video i made at that time criticizing a particular spiritual leader i'm sorry i'm not gonna get the name doesn't matter but at that time i made a video you know i'm an atheist skeptical person and this friend of mine she's also an atheist she's also a skeptical person and she said you know that she had read the autobiography of this guy i think so if not it was some other book and she said you know actually she saw a lot of value in his work now i remember i sent her a voice message rather than text because you might not get the sincerity if it was just text and i said look you know i've got to tell you like you know i did like two hours of research before making that youtube video like you know i feel like at the time i knew how many hours maybe it was three hours maybe it was four hours but it was not so look i am not an expert on this on this guy you know like this that i just made a youtube video about let's say it was four hours let's be generous whatever it was you know but like you know i read about this for a couple of hours and then put together this this youtube video and like you know like i don't know him i don't know this spiritual group but i know you and if you're telling me that his like his autobiography is worth reading this is meaningful and important i'm willing to listen like i'm i'm interested in what you find worthwhile about this and i'm willing to do more reading like you know maybe i'll delete my earlier youtube videos you know maybe i'll actually reconsider that extent but it's like look i'm you know i take seriously you know your perspective now you know as it happened the rest of the conversation didn't didn't go that way you know it was more of a situation where she she did explain what it was she found interesting about the guy's autobiography and it was kind of like well you know he comes out of this background then he questioned that background he took a new direction he's like you know there was some kind of human sympathy things there but it wasn't something where i was going to the boy it didn't it didn't motivate me to read the book and it didn't kind of totally change my view of this guy it just sort of showed a more human sympathetic side of this this kind of cult leader in my in my opinion uh but the person i was talking to say she was a secular atheist person she was not a cult follower or a devotee of this guy at all but you know my point is like if you if you think about this as just one little lego brick missing from your life and you know sometimes one person takes that position and sometimes they're discarded and a new person takes that position right this is a kind of fundamentally unbelievably selfish and destructive attitude towards uh the relationship life and what's really tremendously important is that instead you're open to the extent to which you know simply put you are going to be living your life for another person and you are going to be living your life with another person i mean sorry but i think that's a great example like there's something you've okay like this cult leader so i've read a newspaper article about the cult leader it's just simple let's just i've looked up a couple newspaper articles but now i'm talking to someone who's read a whole book and knows more than i do and who's a friend of mine or you're in love with them or whatever your situation is okay and like i said well well look i don't know the truth i don't know him i only know these couple newspaper articles i read i read the wikipedia article i read the wikipedia article on some newspaper just a little bit of research you know okay so that's that's what i know but if you know more about this and if you care about if you have a perspective okay i want that to come into my life and i want that to change my life and you know maybe i'm going to read a book or i'm going to read another article i'm going to change my view and i'm going to i'm going to hear what you have to say so guys that is not shallow that is not a minor thing and i think you guys can you can uh you can imagine easily enough you're going to listen to this broadcast for an hour and a half melissa is talking to me 12 hours a day or something you know like the the influence i have on her life uh her intellectual development and the questions that are raised and just reconsideration of things you might have taken for granted right when you really live with someone and really care about someone and i don't know everything sometimes we sometimes talk about things i don't i know nothing about you know what i mean the point is not that i know about everything or care about everything but by by involving uh the person in your life that way you've got to be willing to change a lot more than just your furniture you know uh i could digress i mean obviously it's possible to go too far you know it's possible to be willing to change everything in your life and expect nothing in return it's possible to be too self-sacrificing if you've been watching my channel for a long time you know i made a video about that years ago yeah about four years ago you know you can go too far to the extreme the other way but what i see in this generation for men and women alike instead is a big problem with uh the seinfeld syndrome okay guys if you have a moment hit thumbs up share the link if you want to if you've got anywhere to share it with your worthless friends on facebook and instagram that you haven't talked to in years i am glancing now at the at the comments but there's nothing particular to derail me i'll continue on the next point here so one guy in the audience says that he's taking these principles and applying them to his uh platonic relationships um you know richard like you know good luck with that my experiences in life that the platonic relationships that i have nobody is motivated enough to to really pardon me to inconvenience themselves to really keep the relationship going pardon me my point being if someone isn't in love with you will they really make the time will they really make it a priority to keep the the friendship going now you know if they do that's great i'm happy for you i'm just saying most of my experience there's so many people i've met there people i met became friends with it cambridge university at oxford university in bangkok thailand in nangkai chiang mai you know i've lived all over the world in in france there were people who could be my friends still today and you know they they didn't make the effort you know in that sense they they let me down and then on the other hand you know the people who do make the effort very often there's something non-platonic there that's um that's motivating it but you know if you got uh platonic friendships um [Music] you know it's that's a wonderful thing and you know to to some extent uh you know just the geography of your life is a part of that you know a brief digression i know i've mentioned this before when you were around korean ojibwe people out in saskatchewan they really had this cultural expectation that they'd bump into you again they're used to living in these small communities in remote parts of canada where they'd say goodbye to you and i'd be like look if you don't take my email and like if you don't become my facebook friend if you don't connect you're never going to see me again they wouldn't get it oh i'll see you around yeah no great they were real and they were they were being sincere they weren't giving you the culture like for them culturally they really expected like they're used to growing up in communities where you can't get away from people like but we're minimum once a week you bump into everybody who lives in that community i remember when i told my father about that and he mentioned a small town in france he knew i think he lived in the small town of france for three months or something doing a project like for work he'd been there for a couple months and he said you know he'd never been anywhere else where people would make an arrangement to see you by just saying i'll see you tomorrow when i'm going to the bakery like no time no location i mean but you where you could meet every single person in town by sitting at the coffee shop that it was the crossroads in the middle so you know there are some differences so to have to have platonic relationships in that i was never in that small town in france you said my father told me about but in that small town in france or something maybe that's maybe that's different but you know you live in a big city anywhere i mean you know melissa is from the greater detroit area you have to drive for an hour to see anyone like just in a different neighborhood when i was in los angeles i did meet up with some friends in los angeles and when they got there it's like okay how many hours did you have to get here like for one or two people the location i chose was a quick drive then for those oh yeah they drove an hour they drove 45 minutes like people have to you know it's a huge amount of effort so yeah you know if you don't if you're not in love with the person are you really motivated to uh to make that make that happen yeah turn vel says that uh uh it's been very hard for him or her to keep long-term friendships with the exception being being people he or she has known since middle school um yeah i don't want to get into a big digression of that but melissa and i talk about that a fair bit that we have a culture where people tend to rely on just keeping friends they've had since high school or primary school and i think there's a strange kind of weakness that comes into that individually and culturally which is that they don't build up the capacity to make new friends as adults which could be a very big problem um okay so all right this one this one's a little bit more critical in the pejorative sense this is a little more blamey can we say that is blamey a word no don't get defensive guys this one's a little bit more blamey um all right there are short-term relationships that you're intentionally there are short-term relationships that you are intentionally and consciously pursuing short-term relationships there are long-term relationships that you are intentionally and consciously pursuing as long-term relationships there are long-term relationships that fail and turn out to be short-term relationships and there are short-term relationships that fail and turn out to be long-term relationships can can you imagine the square here guys short-term long-term meant to be long-term but turns out to be short-term meant to be short-term but turns out to be long-term um you tell me if this is more of a problem for women or men in the current generation i've i've known my share of both with this problem a lot of people from age 18 to 25 if not 18 to 35 but for the crucial first quarter of their life they say they don't want anything serious they only want short-term relationships and that's all they have right they don't pursue they don't try to have long-term relationships and i think they really cannot imagine the extent to which they're sabotaging themselves because then whenever it is they switch whenever they switch to wanting a long-term relationship or marriage or having kids or even though there's no kids involved when they switch to wanting to have a more meaningful life and more meaningful relationships they don't know how they are in a much worse position than someone who from age 18 to 25 was trying to have long-term relationships and failing like if you have two people and let's just say they both had 20 sexual partners is this too high let's say you have two people and between the ages of 18 and 30 both of these people had 20 different sexual partners but one of them with each and every one of those relationships was trying to make it like their long-term life partner relationship they were trying so what does that mean they did the dishes together they shined each other's shoes they helped each other they talked about job interviews and work they met each other's parents all 20 times took even induced to my parents and they were trying to make it work as a marriage okay that person has really been practicing they've really been rehearsing and refining what it takes the discipline of mind the generosity of spirit the type of cooperation right that's required to make a long-term relationship working to have have a meaningful life together with another person or with other people plural if you're in the minority who have some kind of three-row three-way relationship polyamory open relationship whatever because regardless i mean that's just at a higher skill level really you know if you have more than two people involved but it's by trying to build long-term relationships even if you fail again and again that you learn to have long-term relationships and there are all these people there are no statistics there are all these people who go from age 18 to 30 and even if they've had 20 sexual partners every single one of them was declaredly or validly a short-term low-commitment relationship you didn't introduce them to your parents you didn't really get to know them that way you didn't really ever trust them and trusting someone can lead you having your heart broken and being disappointed but you learn from that and you take that learning experience putting into your next relationship put in the future right you didn't really trust them you didn't really commit to them all the way again even if that would would end badly right and i know i know it's going to sound weird to some of you but did you really do their dishes did you really shine their shoes did you really help them get dressed before they went to a job interview did you really talk to them about how the job interview went afterwards it's totally different in a short-term relationship like if you are in a short-term low-commitment relationship you may not be aware of it but like you call someone oh oh we're gonna meet up tonight oh oh right right right you got that job interview okay cool cool cool cool tomorrow okay tomorrow at six okay i'll pick you up you know you may not know but like okay what if this is the person you're planning to marry you're planning to have kids you're trying to make it work long term it's different okay and again even if you fail even if you're terrible at it you know you'll learn that you're terrible at it right you'll have to adapt like oh okay you know all right you're going to a job interview how can i help you know maybe i help by just doing more of the dishes for a couple days or something you know what i mean maybe you know we'd be helping some shell away then but you help by talking to them about it by caring about it you know there's a lot to think about and a lot to agonize over with those decisions in life and where you're really involved together talking as if you know you know as if this matters forever and you're you're building up those you're building up those uh those skills turn of all says quote i hope we do the hot crazy matrix chart next turn of all that is an obscure cultural reference that i have already addressed on my channel so i don't know if he's saying that because he knows it or not but i have already made a dedicated youtube video on that very topic so i could give you the uh i could give you the link but i don't know if i don't know if i need to um okay natasha you're going to get your question just a second uh atl richard says quote i did not come here for you to explain my life's mistakes how wrong you are richard um well look so what i just said i i i invited you to ask yourself what i was talking about here is this more true of young men or young women it's easier for young women you know like if young women just want to have a sexual partner with no strings attached with no commitment that's more attainable for women than for men like they have to make less effort unless you're an extremely good looking or extremely wealthy man or something for a man to go out and have a succession of of low low commitment uh short-term relationships i just say it's more work um and i've known guys to live that way i just i've never lived there i've i think i can use his name i had a friend named gregoire he was french what a shock and i mean um he's one of the few people i've known he he probably had sex with more than one thousand women but if not it was many hundreds and i saw the way he lived and i saw the time he put into it and you know i mean it was it was a discipline i was you know it was work you know obviously he was he had sex with a huge number of women and you could say well it's not that much work well yeah but i mean for a for a good looking woman to have zero commitment uh relationships that might be easier however the stigma is greater for women you know the question of self-respect is very different for most women not all there's nothing there's no gender essentialism here but you know obviously that guy i mentioned gregoire it was very interesting to hear his perspective on the world i mean like i learned a lot from him even if though i did not want to live a life like like he did at all um obviously his respect for himself only increased by sleeping with large numbers of women that he had no meaningful relationship with and i remember talking about he he really appreciated the questions i was asking because i was already cagey and insightful enough to ask some questions i remember talking about the significance of lying i said yeah but okay but like you say you have so like you don't hate yourself like you're not crying yourself to sleep at night for firstly but what about the lies doesn't it ever come back to you how you lied or what if what about the girl breaking down weeping you know whether it's the next day or the next week the next month what about when you lied and they figure out that you're lying and they break down i was asking questions like that and he loved it he loved being challenged he was really happy to have someone you know just cross-examining him about his philosophy and what it what it really meant in his life you know and you know he was willing to have a laugh at his own expense he wasn't he wasn't thin skinned about it you know um yeah so he he had slept with an enormous number of women and i just mentioned most of his career he was in the uh the hotel industry one way i could tell this guy's whole life story but you know keeping it slightly anonymous i don't i honestly i don't think he might he'd mind me talking about people but yeah i don't think he might mind if i told this whole life story frankly um but working at hotels he did meet women who were in town for just a few days where there were short-term uh short-term love affairs but anyway yeah um so this this particular issue it may be a little bit different for women and men in terms of the amount of work you have to put in to get the same outcomes but fundamentally and profoundly i do not think this is different for women i think this is fundamentally the same or it's only five percent different or or or ten percent different all right so question from oh so another good comment from natasha versus natasha says quote red pillars fear vulnerability yes yes it's a huge issue and it's a huge issue for women also you know there are women who do not want to be vulnerable and that leads to other decisions made by women it's just not called the red pill when women do it okay uh quote quoting natasha natasha asks isil what are your thoughts about short-term relationships that are meant to be short-term that later evolve to be long-term by circumstance in one word tragic okay happens all the time and you know what you know what the most common reason is it's pregnancy you know one of my brothers had someone over to tour his apartment you know we're like i don't think he was looking for a roommate i think it was like he was gonna leave the apartment and he had to sublet it to someone else something like that he invited someone over to tour the apartment to take a look at the apartment before deciding whether or not she was gonna rent it they had sex on the floor and the child that was conceived is a fully grown adult today there was absolutely no basis for that relationship nothing in common no mutual respect no admiration no nothing you know and the woman's situation was that she had already had multiple abortions i forget if it was two abortions or three she already knew what it was like to have an abortion so i forget i'm sorry but she had had as i recall more than one abortion and she said that she made herself a promise after the last time she had an abortion that she'd just never do it again well there's something else you should have promised yourself that you'd never do again if that was your perspective and um you know i'm out of touch with those people i i haven't been on speaking with any of my brothers for for many many years but uh they they were those two they ended up just hating each other you know they managed to kind of cooperate for a couple years for the sake of the baby you know but ooh that got dark that got really really dark uh that relationship and you know in case you guys are imagining this brother has anything in common with me like intellectually or morally or something no uh he really doesn't we might as well be two different species of mammal frankly i have nothing in common with that brother he's not he's not like me in any way um so yeah i mean that's my short answer that natasha and i think again there's a there's a very interesting kind of self sabotage um let's let's take it all the way so the question is what about relationships that were meant to be short term but that turn out to be long term let's talk about prostitution what if a woman and a man meet because the woman is working as a prostitute and the man pays her for sex and then you know they get to know each other and get to like each other and things whether or not she gets pregnant or whether or not there are other factors or something right i i think it's always going to be tragic you know and i think even uh if you go kind of the opposite extreme where it's you know people who are on some temporary work assignment and they're just looking for a short-term fling while they're on vacation or while they're on this work summit i i think it has more in common with prostitution than you you might at first suspect uh short-term relationships meant to be meant to be short-term and i'm not saying this to demonize prostitutes or or john's or anything else you know we're all human you know um i i totally demonize gambling i totally demonize the drinking of alcohol in the future on planet earth there should be zero gambling and zero drinking of alcohol there are all kinds of things i'm totally morally opposed to but you know human sexuality is not something we're gonna outgrow or overcome or eliminate so you know we do have to tolerate prostitution in our society no matter how inconvenient or disturbing it may be in different ways and how exactly you tolerate it legally is a big question in political science what the best way to do that is to minimize other negative consequences there's a lot to say there but you know without dehumanizing anyone involved in those short-term relationships um if you say to me that you think it's possible to just overcome that and have a positive long-term relationship as if it had been intended to be a long-term relationship from the start i basically say no i think it's i think it's really always going to be tragic okay so great question from ron this comes back tonight was talking about melissa off camera before so ron asks quote my question for you and others in the chat would it be preferable to be single not have sex or be involved with anyone at all until you develop yourself so you know there is this ancient saying in english if you can't handle the orange peel you can't handle the orange and melissa and i have talked about that lately it's just come up in different circumstances whether related to friends or politics or whatever it is that yeah there really is a sense in which a lot of people need to make the hard decision that they they can't cope with their relationship they can't handle what's involved what's involved with it so they should they shouldn't be in a relationship at all just one of the ones that came up is well at what point are you able to stand up to your own parents so like you know you have a new girlfriend or new boyfriend you introduce this person to your parents you introduce the person you're in love with your parents and they disapprove or want to want you to break up if you can't handle the orange peel you can't handle the orange if you can't handle that if you can't stand up to your own parents you shouldn't be in a relationship at all it's not i'm not saying your parents are right whether your parents are right or wrong doesn't matter if you aren't at the point where you can articulate these things and talk about them and stand up to your own parents about them you shouldn't be in a relationship that's just one example but i think i think there are a lot of examples where you can say look this is the kind of red line where this is showing that you are not ready to ready to deal with this and you know what happens when you do something you're not ready for when it comes to human sexuality you're normally talking about trauma that marrows your life for decades i'm just gonna be real with you i mean if you if you read a book and you're not ready for it yet it's really not the same thing you know what i mean it's really not um nothing else is human sexuality that way you know what i mean i'm sorry i'm sorry any of you guys in the audience we may have some young people we have some some more people here but like there are things that you might have done at age 30 sexually where if you had done them at age 20 they would have been horrifying and traumatizing and and messed you up i don't even say for life you might have messed up for five years like i'm gonna take you five years to get over it you know when you talk about people who are 35 they can go to an orgy and they don't care i mean there are so many like you're so jaded and experienced by 35 like oh yeah i'm gonna stand here in the corner and smoke a cigarette while watching my husband have sex with another woman and it's just whatever there are all kinds of people who get to that at 35 but there are people who do that while they're in college at age 18. most people it's the opposite right they do all that stuff when they're way too young to cope with it they're doing that at 18 and then you know at 35 they're boring and monogamous you know so like there's all kinds of things that that like they wouldn't be traumatizing if you were ready for them if people put themselves into the situation when they're when they're not ready for them and look you know um the the ultimate thing is just you know most relationships involve people screaming at each other weeping being dejected you know the greatest extremes of both happiness and sorrow happen within relationships and sometimes for for relatively trivial reasons give you give you a great example you know i had a blonde ex-girlfriend she's been mentioned before i never give her name lucky for me i only have one blonde ex-girlfriend i had a blonde ex-girlfriend and we were going into a situation where i was gonna go talk to a book publisher these are the days this is when i was going to publish a book this is a million years ago book about buddhism and say okay i'm going to sit down with this guy and have a series of long meetings i've already been together with this girl for years very attractive very attractive girl i could go on about how attractive she was she was a bimbo okay she was really not intelligent enough to be with me she really wasn't and i was like look you know i've taken you into a whole series of like business situations where like i was meeting my boss i was in some kind of high pressure degree or even when i took you to meet my parents you know and you have you have ruined it you have done terribly like it's been a disaster every time she would say something so stupid i didn't have to dig myself out of a hole it's like you know what you know what when i'm sitting down with this guy and talking business about the manuscript what i would really appreciate is if you you leave the room and you you don't say anything at all you don't like because i've already been together with her for years i was like look this is a serious conversation with my book publisher it's going to change the rest of my life it would really be great if you didn't screw it up for me by seeing something stupid like you've said in every single high pressure and professional situation i've ever been in with you you know what i mean you know so the actual format where this meeting took place it wasn't really in one room um i'm sorry i could i could describe the whole situation but it was a situation that was quite easy for her to kind of walk in and out of um open let's say it was an open plan office put it that way okay so you know it's not yeah so you know we have kind of we meet the publisher we have initial chit chat talk about this and that actually that conversation that stage goes goes really well i'm talking with this guy about politics and history and book publishing and research and where books are imported and exported from at that time i knew that kind of stuff we're talking about importing books from india and things and various things call and it's like okay let's sit down and get the business so we sit down at something that's more like a boardroom table and you know my girlfriend takes off and in the middle of this and it's in quite a tense part of of the negotiations you know about about this book she come she runs with them she doesn't even walk she runs into the room like a little kid and says the stupidest thing you could possibly say for no reason you know interrupting our our conversation and the funny thing was before she said it she she runs and she says oh can i just say one thing and i said her you know i really prefer if you didn't like we're really in the middle and then she goes on to see you know and so this guy the the book publisher you know she she found that her own she's a real attractive girl she's really good looking girl she's at the time she's in the primary life and i mean he just he's an older dude he just knows he's just sitting there he's looking at me like you like bimbos like this is what you put up like that is it you know what i mean like he did say a few words to me i mean i forget he said this is this is totally not what he said verbatim but he said the equivalent of like yeah that's uh that's quite a quite a spark plug you've got there so he said something witheringly contemptuous of like yeah i can see that you are a highly intellectual man who has chosen to have in your life a woman who is vastly inferior to you in terms of intellect and self-discipline like you know yeah it knows you know yeah it's a real no he wasn't even saying i have bad taste in women or something i think his perspective was like well i can see where your priorities lie young man you know um [Music] yeah and i remember when i got back to oh i'm just going to simplify i'll say our hotel room the actual arrangements are more complicated but we'll say it's a hotel room i got back there and we're sleeping tonight i got back and she's there and she's sitting there silently and she said can we just not talk about this at all can we just never mesh [Music] all right so ron sims goes out in a limb here and admits something ron sims says that he turned 30 just a few days ago and is still a virgin he avoids the whole relationship and sex things because he is still not where he wants to be well ron you know you got to learn how to do dishes you got to learn how to do dishes with someone you got to learn how to do dishes for someone you know you got to learn how to live together in a you know really positive way yep natasha says talk about an incompatible relationship exclamation point lol that's correct yeah it was incompatible in every way including sexually the sex was really bad for me it was great for her i think i think i've never experienced that before since frankly an asymmetrical artist it was an absolutely terrible relationship i completely regret it but i could also sit here and tell you exactly why i got involved and exactly why i got committed to it and you know um you know it for me it meant so much just to have somebody to laugh with just have someone to tell jokes with during those years of my life and you know there was not there was really nothing good in that relationship but you know um [Music] yeah and i i i gave that relationship 110 for me i was planning to spend the rest of my life with her i was i was working as hard in that relationship as i would as if we were married and trying to make it work for life i absolutely put 110 and i got so much less work done on everything else in my life as a result like all like all the hours sunk into that but yeah anyway yeah but ron i'm just mentioning that about doing dishes because it's very easy for people to think that sex is the issue or attracting people's issue that these other things the issue and i'm just saying there is actually an art to how you live with someone day by day how you share an apartment how you share your life and that's something you're not practicing so obviously sex itself it's a skilled art in its way but um yeah i'm just saying there are these other things that are that are less often talked about that i'll certainly matter okay so the last thing which could have been first that's tremendously important is this and guys you can tell me if you relate to this or not if you think of your life as a series of circles you know so you've got a circle for your career you've got a circle for like your intellectual life which may be your education or what you're interested in personally uh your own self-development or what have you if you have you know you may have a circle separately for family not everyone does what is your what is your family life if your life is separated into circles in this way that may be intellectual maybe emotional maybe aspirational i know people overuse that word now you may have different ambitions that form different circles in your life like for me i had a circle in my life for humanitarian work for years i had a circle in my life for vegan activism for trying to change the world through this particular type of political activism but you you may have a circle in your life for being a film critic or something too there may be some particular thing like even if you don't earn money doing it you know and of course you may have you may have a very important circle for for earning money um and these things you know if you think of sex as just one more additional circle that's outside of these things i really do think that's a crucial reason for why you are not getting laid right now all these things i mean in terms of my numbered list of of issues i've gone over in this video i think a lot of people might respond to you and say well really you're talking about things that become problems after the relationship has started and what i'm saying here is no no no i'm not um the way you think about your potential relationships in the future the way or the way you think about your own actual relationships in the past it shapes the way you interact with others it shapes the flirtations you have and don't have and what what comes next to them when you think about sexuality not as a separate circle or a separate interest you know something supplemental to and outside of your career that your education how you're developing intellectually and and your family life when you think of it instead as one circle in the middle that overlaps with all of them right it leads to very different relationships in your life short term and long term the way that you talk to people the way that you involve people in your life is very different short term and long term now i think the easiest example of this to relate to is family even though many people in the audience may you may not get along with your family you may not think that introducing people to your family is a great idea or it's very enjoyable for for for them for your family for yourself etc you know but it's the one that's easiest easiest to visualize in [Music] canadian culture in american culture i think i can say that the assumption is that people sleep to sleep together this especially urban united states of america you may have sex with a person you may be having sex with multiple people while not telling each of them about the other you're having low commitment or no commitment uh relationships and then there's some point at which that short-term relationship matriculates into is promoted into being serious enough that you introduce these people to your to your family that you include them in your family what i point out to you is that many people also sabotage themselves in the same way by saying okay this is just a person you're pursuing sexually this is just a person you're you're gonna have sex with but you're not introducing them to your intellectual life that you're not introducing them to your career you're not involving them with these these other things in your life and it would be very different if you involve people in your life that way from day one and as they say i'm not here giving advice about how to conduct a relationship after you've begun it i'm actually talking about your attitudes before the relationship has begun you know some of you can relate to this some of you aren't whether you think of this as a man or a woman i think this applies to men and women exactly the same way you know if there's someone you think is hot and you meet them at the workplace you meet them at the university if there's someone you meet and talk to every so often maybe you know them at your gym i don't know what's a good example maybe the gym is the best example maybe the worst so every so often you chat with this person at the gym and you are just looking at them and you are just talking to them thinking that you want to have sex with them and that you want to incorporate them into your life as a sexual partner in this separate circle this separate category for for sexual partners right obviously this relates to some extent to the the seinfeld syndrome you know um talked about earlier every conversation you have with them and literally even how you look at them is different than if you were looking at them as a whole person and that you were presenting yourself as a whole person and you were talking them in a way where you're going to integrate them into your whole life now so some of you guys maybe you'll have to think about this after maybe you can think about it right now can you think about times when you were you were hitting on someone you were approaching someone you were sexually trying to initiate a relationship with someone whether you think about it seduction or or first conversation okay did you mention anything about your family did you like i'm not saying would be the main thing you talk about did you include your family life in those conversations or were you consciously or unconsciously kind of anonymizing yourself you know like kind of presenting yourself as an anonymous sexual partner because you were thinking of that other person as a kind of anonymous sexual partner also it's just fitting into this into the circle into this category and look i i understand there are there are people for whom that works there are people who go to swingers clubs and go to go to mask parties and they never know anything about the people there i i understand there's a tiny minority of the population who prefer completely anonymous dehumanized and dehumanizing relationships that's obviously not what i'm addressing here also if i give you guys fitness and weight loss advice that is not intended for people who are already olympic athletes you know what i mean and you know for the tiny percentage of the population who prefer relationships that are both dehumanizing and you know where they themselves are also dehumanized you know you may imagine that's the most gratifying and satisfying life to lead if you know any of those people living that way they they weep into their pillow often enough that has its own tragedies that has its own its own tribals but i'm saying that already from you know step one you know already from the first step of the first conversation the way you present yourself the way you talk about yourself the way you present your own life and the way you ask them about their life it's profoundly different if you were relating as the whole person and the whole life to that other person the whole person in the whole life and not as you know okay this is this separate circle this is the separate thing in my life where you know you're trying to kind of sync up with them and play a game where you are only going to know them as a sex object and they are only going to know you uh as a sex object now okay again i was kind of expecting more people to respond to this dionys i don't know i don't know how you feel about those guys you can really you can tell me how you feel um okay one reason why people do this one reason why they try to have a separate compartment a separate category right is the fear of vulnerability that came up you know before in the chat right one reason why people try to have this separate category and try to you know again extricate it from their intellectual emotional family life career life and everything else right like and then people will say explicitly look i don't want you to be involved with my i don't want you to know my co-workers or colleagues or i don't even want you to know about what i'm doing with my like some people will will say that their relationship said no no they want to just keep this this is a separate you know compartment life one of the reasons people do this is the fear of rejection right like okay if this person really knows who i am if they know about my career or my education my intellectual my family or something they're gonna they're gonna reject me so i have to anonymize myself i have to sort of play this game sort of sort of be this other person right and of course you know an alternative to both of those attitudes is to realize right right right but the vulnerability that's exactly what you have to get over and that's exactly what this flirtation interaction this relationship like it may be a failed relationship but this attempted a relationship for better or worse the one way you could absolutely certainly benefit from this relationship is precisely by dealing with and overcoming your vulnerability precisely by sharing your real life and who you really are with the other person and by inviting them to share their own life and who they really are that's a benefit you're definitely going to get even if nothing else works out in a relationship right and in terms of fear of rejection right you have to learn to embrace being rejected for the right reasons right like okay well you know i don't gamble you know if this person is a gambler if they're people who go gambling every weekend that's their regular thing as they cancel on the weekends okay well like if i reject them for gambling and i feel that's for the best i got to know this person and then you know there's this thing and then i reject them you know i have to be able to accept reciprocally that there's something about me which from their perspective it's a good and wholesome reason for them to reject me like you have to learn to regard the rejection possibly now of course by the way guys if you've lived with gossip people used to gospel it's amazing how people used to gospel but still start with the damn there were there were bored people who really talk about you on your back and it's kind of mind-blowing but you know um uh it is tragic if someone rejects you because someone else made up a lie about you i mean someone else could say that you're a gambling addict and actually you don't gamble at all someone else made a story you know of course there are situations where rejection is really tragic it is really sad and you know i mean that that's also part of the human condition but within the the the context we're talking about here if you get rejected or you reject someone else because you're sharing who you really are you know in all these different ways you know you you have to accept that as positive and maybe maybe you can still just be friends with this person maybe you are still colleagues or something else you know but again so these are these are benefits you can get definitely whereas the other benefits of a relationship are um probabilistic and many of them really are are quite improbable okay guys so for me that's a wrap i'm looking at the comment section i feel that i have completely um exhausted my audience was there anything you want to jump in on i mean we were talking about a lot before uh before i got in the microphone you know things related to this no i okay all right guys you know um [Music] we're all mammals we're all products of millions of years of evolution but the reason why i talk so rarely and so little about evolutionary psychology is that i do not think you know evolution defines who we are i don't think it provides us with a limit and i don't think it provides us with a sense of purpose or direction you know what is the purpose of your relationship with another person you know i remember i gave the example some time ago on the channel you can have such a tight close relationship between two people who run a convenience store together you know you're a married couple and you run a convenience store there was a time when i was imagining my relationship with melissa being that we'd run a bakery together you know where every day you do this work and it brings you together and you cooperate of course you know a newborn infant this is another type of very intense all-consuming work and responsibility where you have to you have to work together you know but you know what the meaning of your relationship is or your relationships plural are why you're pursuing uh this relationship and you know what what it is what it is you're trying to get out of it and then the unexpected things you'll get out of it you weren't trying to get you know i'm sorry but you know just give an example you know exactly the things that you might reject someone for could end up making the relationship more enriching like someone is a bumpkin who grew up uh in the woods in a small town living living in the remote countryside but by bringing them into your life you gain that perspective and you learn how they see things that you never saw it that way like that's not why you like them that's not what you liked about them but that that becomes you know like um this whole discussion has been very heteronormative and there have been references to getting married getting married and having having kids you know of course you know if for you the point of the relationship is to do cancer research together so if for you the point of the relationship is to you know be a creative artist you could be a pair of filmmakers together work together on films that was how that was how the first star wars got made you know you got you guys may or may not know this i think that only the very first star wars film was any good and you know then he divorced his wife he never made a good film after he divorced this one i i seriously think that george lucas's wife was the talent by the first the first star wars movie you know but you know you could be filmmakers together and not have children you know there are all kinds of other reasons you know to to be in a relationship you know but you know my reason for making this video and the reason why i feel this is positive you know this is a really positive encouraging motivating video and not a contemptuous one is that i think as shallow as the title is video might seem about about getting laid right getting laid can be and should be part of leading a meaningful life getting out and saying what do i have to share with someone else and what do they have to share with me and what can we be together and who can we become you know sorry who can i become and who can she become right living our lives together asking ourselves these questions holding each other to a higher standard you know the way in which you provoke and motivate each other to live more and learn more and so on you know getting laid destroys many people's lives innumerable people their lives are destroyed by these you know inborn instincts we have right but what i'm doing in this video and on my youtube channel it generally is emphasizing the extent of wish this could be a tremendously positive you know part of your life and of someone else's life and where even if your relationships fail even if they fail again and again and again you're able to look back on that relationship you're able to look back on each and every relationship you've had in your life and you're able to say this is how i became a better person and this is how she became a better person also by going through that chapter for life with me