 Boom! Welcome back to the 21 convention 2021 of Orlando, Florida being held at the 21 summit 2021 as well our super triple event. Our next speaker is a returning alumni speaker to the 21 convention first speaking in 2018 and later in 2019 at our fatherhood patriarch event. He's a clinical psychologist at Denver, Colorado. You probably know him best from his book The Tactical Guide to Women and is an amazing man. He's a man who I think particularly in the manosphere but even in the wider world today who really cares about truth and science in the pursuit of truth. So in our anti-scientific age where they tell you to trust the science and all this made-up garbage this is one of the few men who's an academic and a professional who actually really cares about these issues on a deep intellectual level. So without further ado please let me welcome back to the 21 convention stage Dr. Sean T. Smith. Welcome back sir. Morning gentlemen. There's a street in my hometown of Denver, Colorado. It's called Colfax Avenue and they say it is the longest continuous commercial street in the United States. I don't know about that but it's 26 miles long and my entire adult life I have had a particular affection and sentimentality for Colfax Avenue. So every year about this time of year when the weather is beautiful in Colorado I will gather up some family and some friends on a Sunday and we will walk 18 miles of Colfax Avenue through all kinds of neighborhoods just to see what we can see because you notice things in life when you slow down. For example here's something that my brother noticed this year he noticed that when he is walking along the well manicured bike path along the canal in his nice suburban neighborhood almost nobody will make eye contact and return a greeting but when you're walking down Colfax Avenue doesn't matter where you are doesn't matter what the person looks like doesn't matter how down and out they appear to be or how tough they appear to be or how many teeth they have in their head if they are awake and conscious there's a very good chance that they will look you in the eye and return a greeting with a smile that's an interesting disparity to think about but it's not what I'm here to talk about I want to tell you about a scene that I saw on Colfax Avenue many years ago this was a man and a woman having an argument a very loud argument but she was the only one doing any talking this man literally had his back against the wall and she was in his face on her toes finger in his face yelling at him on and on and he was standing there looking like a little boy who was just overcome with shame he's closed body languid he was trying to evade her eye contact and he would look over this way and she would circle around and get right in his face and continue yelling at him and he turned his head back this way trying to evade their eye contact she'd circle around get in his face scream at him now what can we say about these two individuals I don't think we can say anything really because this is just one data point and I don't know about you I try very hard not to take one data point and paint an entire picture about a human being but what can we say about the relationship if you think about the relationship as an entity that two people create it's it's of them but it's separate from them and it's larger from them and there's something going on in this relationship and and while we can't really judge anything about the individuals I think it's fair to say that if you were standing there with me and we were watching this unfold that maybe we can draw some kind of conclusion about the relationship because we have a woman who it's easy to say that she's the aggressor because she's the one that's out of control and she was the one that's out of control but if you want to understand an interaction in a relationship you have to look at more than one point of view you have to check out more than one vantage point so from her point of view maybe it's pretty damn aggravating to be with somebody who helped you create some sort of conflict and then goes catatonic when you're trying to solve it so who's the aggressor I don't know but I think it's reasonable to take a guess that in this relationship between these two people this might not be the first time they've ever gone down that path and might not be the last time where she is pursuing him in search of some kind of answer to something and he is retreating it's fair to say that maybe this thing that's unfolding in front of us is is a part of a larger pattern with them so if you think about the relationship as a thing on its own then you can ask yourself the question what is this relationship bringing into this man's life at that moment and at that moment it's probably not bringing anything good if you were to ask him in fact if if that blue genie from Aladdin were to come down and ask this man and say hey my man you can have anything you want one wish you name it he would probably say I wish this woman would just stop talking we've all been you know well I don't know if we've all been there a lot of us have been there and um when you so when you start asking what is the relationship bringing into a life that that's really what I want to talk about when you think about I want to for the next hour or so I want to think about relationships as an entity of their own we're going to set set the person aside we're going to set the woman aside I'm going to be talking about it the relationship it does not refer the woman it refers to the relationship and this this little talk is going to be a talk in four parts four chapters if you will chapter one is going to be called assessment I want to talk about one of the things that psychology is really good at and psychology is really good at taking something that's sort of abstract and pin it and get down and measuring the hell out of it and there's a particular methodology that psychologists use that I think is useful in thinking about the people that we bring into our lives and the relationships that we create with those people that's chapter one chapter two is called peter the great peter the great if you'll recall was the russian czar from 1682 to 1725 don't worry there's not going to be a quiz but peter is an interesting character fascinating character actually because he was so dichotomous on the one hand he's he's remembered primarily as being the great reformer for russia because peter inherited the throne at a young age and he looked around and he noticed that russia was landlocked and was a little bit isolated and it was a little bit behind the times and so he saw what was going on in western europe in terms of technology and trade and diplomacy and he wanted some of that for his country so he went to western europe and he brought back so much technology and he actually took this landlocked nation gave it a port created a navy brought them kicking and screening into the 1700s so peter the great was a great reformer peter the great was also in my estimation a bit of a regressive because while he was touring western europe he surely encountered some of the enlightenment ideals that were starting to form at the time things like personal sovereignty and rule of law those things could not have escaped his attention and yet he had no interest in bringing that part of of advancement back to russia he was pretty happy to be the autocrat and the boss so that's the dichotomous nature of peter the great he was a reformer and he was regressive in my estimation he was also in his personal life very dichotomous because peter was capable of tremendous violence and cruelty and you can make the argument that any sovereign of his era that was just part of the job and i don't get the sense that peter relished in that part of the job torturing people going to war killing people killing dissidents but he was willing to do it he was clearly willing to do it he did it to his own son which is a very tragic story i think that story shows both his capacity for connection and his capacity for his heartbreak and and cruelty at the same time but he was perfectly capable to be cruel of being cruel and violent at the same time dichotomous peter the great was clearly capable of relationships that were there were kind and compassionate he was capable of romantic connection and loyalty and peter the great had an untold number of women in his life but he had three primary relationships he was essentially a serial monogamous and two of those relationships were marriages and those two marriages had were with women who were ostensibly perfectly reasonable fine attractive intelligent women but they the relationships had very different characters and they had very different effect on his life and his his work so i want to talk about the those two relationships and i think there's something useful that we can gather from peter the life peter the great's romantic life it's not profound but it's useful chapter three i'm going to call shame and i'm not going to talk about it in the same sense that people like robert glubbers is such a wonderful job of talking about how shame can and can infect us and how it poisons our relationships i'm going to leave that part to the professionals i want to talk about shame in a more of an evolutionary sense like what's it for why do we have this thing and what are the messages that we as men get from society and how does it affect if it affects the way we choose our women and the relationships that we choose so that's chapter three oh and in chapter three i am going to share with you my favorite gender studies essay and if you don't have a favorite gender studies essay you should get one because that shit is hilarious there's there's nothing that these people cannot ruin for themselves this particular essay you may have heard about because it got a lot of press at the time and it's it's very instructive the reason i like this essay so much even though it is irrational it is emotionally unhinged it's very honest about what certain people and influential people out there in a society are demanding of you and me as men so that's chapter three shame chapter four i'm going to call the experiment and the experiment is something that i'm going to suggest to any man who's interested in possibly opening a can of worms you should you should take this under advisement that it might cause some problems but the experiment is simply to take an inventory of the relationships that you're choosing again separate from the people the relationships as an entity that you are bringing into your life and maybe there's some room for improvement because one of the things that i noticed early on in my career was that as i was talking to men about the relationships that they were choosing almost nobody no man that i spoke to could tell me who sat them down and talked to them about women and the relationships they choose nobody told them hey you can have standards you can you can look for women who are of good character and and have shared values and are emotionally mature and who take care of their mental health you can have some standards in your relationships in the women that you choose but even when i wrote the tactical guide to women to try to address that problem and clearly i keyed in on something that is resonating with people i knew that looking at the woman that you bring into your life for the women is only half the equation the other half is the relationship that's why i'm focusing on this today and the reason i frame this as an experiment there's actually two reasons one is that i don't want you to believe a word i say today i want you to approach everything that i say with tremendous skepticism because if you decide to experiment with some changes in your life it's your life so you run the experiment you collect the data you draw the conclusion it belongs to you the second reason to frame it as an experiment is that if you're thinking about making changes in your life you can reduce the amount of emotional investment in the outcome and you can also reduce the amount of resistance that you have to that to that change by framing it as something that you're just going to look at for a period of time and when you frame it as something that you're looking at over there it's easy to it's much easier to say well this is working so i should do more of it or this is not working so i should do less of it all right that's a lot of ground to cover you fellas ready to get to work all right then chapter one assessment there was a paper a very influential paper in psychology written in 1955 called construct validity and psychological tests i can hook you guys up with a copy if you're looking for some titillating reading but it was written by a man two men man named lee cromback and another man named paul meal and these were two men who were very interested in measuring things that are difficult to measure they were particularly in this paper interested in psychological testing so how was a person's mind functioning in the world and so they were laying out kind of a framework for looking at something that's difficult to measure and measuring it and way down toward the end of the paper toward the middle of the end of the paper there's this phrase that they put out there called um nomothetic network now in some professions has a particular meaning that i don't particularly understand nomothetic network because i'm not of that profession but in psychology what it means is nomothetic means grasping the nature of human behavior so you're you're taking something that's difficult to measure and you're measuring it basically nomothetic network is a really cool idea and it's it's not groundbreaking or anything it's that if you're trying to measure something you don't look at it from one angle you look at it from multiple vantage points that's the network part of nomothetic network is that you're identifying something that's difficult to measure for example the effect of a relationship on your life although that's not what they were talking about and you're looking at it from different angles i'll give you an example of how this works in the real world let's say that a person gets in a car accident and they have a head injury and they or the people around them start to notice that there are some deficits showing up maybe in memory maybe in um recognition of faces or maybe just in in some kind of way that they're functioning in the world something has changed with this person but it's really hard to pin down you can point to some specific things that they're doing that are kind of odd or out of character for them but you can't really identify what it is this is what psychologists are very good at so you would take this person potentially to a neuropsychologist and what the psychologist would do is administer all kinds of tests to that run the brain through its paces so you might ask the person to look at some photographs and then later photographs of faces and later on you'll ask them which one they remember now you might ask them to memorize some numbers and then say them backwards which is a very challenging task you might ask them to put little pins and little holes one hand at a time and measure the the time on that you might ask them to read the word blue written in red ink in time precisely how long it takes for the brain to resolve that conflict and say the word blue the idea though is that you're again you're not just running one test you're running multiple tests and these tests have been given to so many people over so many years that we have a wonderful population norms for each one of these tests and vice little bell curve based on age and gender for every one of the tests and if you know what you're doing and you know how to do a lot of math you can take these test results and you can mix them all up mathematically and you can get a very good sense of what that person's baseline should be and then you can notice the discrepancies you can notice where the performance seems to deviate from the baseline and then you can tailor your rehab efforts to these to the nature and the quality of the deficit that seems to be showing up and that's the important part of this because when you have this kind of an injury the clock is ticking and you want the rehab to start as quickly as possible and so psychologists have gotten very good at very quickly identifying what it is that's going on here that's the no-mathetic network looking at something from more than one vantage point now so how do we how do we use this when we're talking about bringing women into our lives and bringing relationships into our lives well I'll give you I'll give you a little metaphor here I have here a small cigar in a metal tube this one happens to be a Romeo and Juliet which is not bad and let's say that we're going to play a game and the game is that I'm going to show you pictures of this object you have to guess what it is so the first picture that I show you I don't know if you can see that but it's just the rounded end of the of the canister so we have a canister with a cap on one end and a rounded end over here and I only show you the rounded end and I ask you what is this object you can't tell the scale of it or anything so you might look at it and you might think well it looks like a ball bearing or it looks like the business end of a ball peen hammer or maybe to you it looks like the end of some sort of erotic entertainment device I don't know what you're into and then I'm going to show you another picture but here's there's something interesting to notice about your first apprehension of this is that when you decide that this looks like a ball bearing for example it's a little bit challenging then to to change your frame around that's a little bit challenging not impossible a little bit challenging to see it as anything other than a ball bearing until some fact comes along that makes you go oh I get it now that was not a ball bearing when a man is interacting with a woman that he's considered bringing into his life and he becomes infatuated with her physicality or the way she speaks or she interacts with him or her smell or her touch or whatever it is damn near impossible to see her in any other light until some fact comes along and clubs us over the head and then we go oh maybe I didn't see the whole picture all right so getting back to this I show you this one picture and then I show you a second picture and the second picture is uh I guess you call it a lateral view where you get to see the side of the object and now you see the rounded in you see the tube you see the the threaded cap on the end and now something clicks and he goes oh well clearly that's not a ball bearing clearly that is some sort of um container and if you know cigars even if I don't show you the label you might guess that this is a cigar container and I realize that the metaphor is a little bit sloppy because had I shown you this first this wouldn't have done anything else wouldn't have changed your understanding but it's a sloppy metaphor grant me a little bit of leeway on that the point that I'm driving at is that when you go from this to this these two views what have we done there on that second view all we've done is double the amount of information you have about this object that's it we've only doubled it but we've done something much more than double your understanding of it and that's the cool thing about this nomothetic network methodologies and when you look at something from different angles things become much clearer and so what i'm suggesting today and what i'm talking about is when you're bringing women into your life that you're not just looking at her but you're looking at what this relationship is bringing into your life so let me stop there with that i'll come back to that idea when we get to the experiment i'll lose my train of thought here let me i got too much going through my head bear with me for just a second okay so this might seem like a very unromantic idea that you would take a situation like you're bringing this wonderful person into your life and she's a human being you don't want to forget the fact that she's a human being but then you're doing this very kind of cold and calculating thing and saying well what is this relationship bringing into my life and in particular is to be very blunt about it is it a net liability or is it a net asset that's a really cold and sort of unromantic way to think about romantic relationships to which i say good it should we can be romantic but we can also be disciplined thinkers those two things are not contradictory because a woman that you're thinking about bringing into your life may look absolutely perfect on paper but her effect on your life is anything other than perfect so that that brings so to wrap up this chapter one on assessment the point being that we're not just going to look at her character we're not just going to look at her values we're not just going to look at her maturity and her mental health and all of those things the way she should be looking at us by the way she should be assessing us closely we're also going to assess what the relationship is doing so that brings me to chapter two peter the great let me set the stage a bit more with um peter the great he was as a young as a young boy he was unbelievably precocious just energetic he wanted to know how everything works he wanted to experience everything he wanted to do everything he wanted to build things up he wanted to tear them down when he was in his early teen years he was organizing his friends in war games not like we used to like hiding behind bushes with little plastic guns he had actual guns with blanks and cannons and so forth and and in battlements and he you know regiments in his rank structure like this kid was unbelievably curious and energetic and precocious the kind of kid you want to have for your own it's just a one seemed like a wonderful kid and so when he was 16 and he was trying to to experience the world his mother natalia narishkin married him off to a woman named eudoxia lufakina and eudoxia came from on paper the ideal family and she was on paper the ideal woman for him because you know the the family of course is thinking we need to start getting some some progeny going we need the next heir to the throne and so we got to marry young peter off and get that process going peter was not particularly interested in this he was interested in blowing things up and going on boat rides and so forth so he gets married at the age of 16 and a little bit about eudoxia i don't know a tremendous amount about her but she was apparently well bred because she came from a minor noble family which again was perfect on paper she wasn't particularly educated but she was sweet and she was well bred i guess as you would say good mannered and so forth and she was very excited to be the wife of the czar she was very excited to have his children and and to become part of the royal family and she was a bit older than him and so she was maybe a little more equipped for for this than he was emotionally he had no interest and so what started to develop between them was that she had what very quickly became unrequited love for him and he was really kind of not interested in her even though they had three kids two of them died young one of them made it into adulthood and um his name was alexa and peter and alexa had a conflict that was absolutely heartbreaking and certainly shows his capacity for cruelty but young peter and young eudoxia were caught in this sort of pursuit and retreat pattern where she wanted him he wasn't very interested they were married for about 10 years and over the course of this marriage that tension started to turn into hostility because the more she pursued him the more he became disinterested in her and became annoyed with her which did what caused her to get frustrated which caused her to to turn up the heat and start complaining and start nagging and peter just wanted away from this and eventually peter started lobbying his family to lock her up in a convent that's how the aristocracy at the time got divorced they would send their wives to a convent where their heads would be shaved and they would essentially be silenced for the rest of the life which is in my estimation not a very nice thing to do to a person but peter was clearly aggravated with her in fact peter could have done anything to get away from her for example he had a a mistress she's called a mistress i think it's more appropriate and more respectful to call her a girlfriend her name was anamonse and peter said anna up in an estate a beautiful estate out in the country he could have done the same thing for eudoxia but he chose not to do that he chose to lock her up it's almost as if he was incredibly aggravated and if that blue jimmy from Aladdin had come down and said peter my man one wish what would you like he would say i wish that woman would just stop talking and so that's what he did he made eudoxia stop talks talking he put her over here locked her up and eudoxia went away but the relationship did not go away the relationship stuck around so let's leave eudoxia right there from home which is she's locked up in the convent head shaved probably mad as hell peter goes on about his life and eventually peter meets a woman named marda skaronska and marda she's an interesting lady she came from a polish-lithuanian family that was there were farmers so she was she was a peasant and there was a conflict and i don't know how voluntary it was but but marda made her way into the russian court by way of a general the general she was spotted in the general's she was spotted in the general's presence by a man named um um oh jeez it's it's evading me i'll come back to it but one of peter's lieutenants this is driving me crazy doesn't matter one of his lieutenants spots marda and he says oh i i know who's gonna like her the boss is gonna dig her i want i want her to meet the boss and they're varying accounts of how that exactly this happened but that's the general consensus is that um damn it's gonna come to me as soon as i walk out of this room that this man saw marda and he said peter's really gonna dig her because she's earthy she comes from a background that that um peter would appreciate because one thing about peter is that he he when he was touring western europe one of the things he did very interesting he he went incognito he would change his clothes and he would give himself a false name and he would go into the shipyards and he would work with carpenters like get his hands dirty and build calluses because he wanted to know how ships were built so peter had this this affinity for people who were hardworking and so he would have liked that about marda she was kind of loud she was boisterous she was very vivacious she could drink a little bit and she was hot and so um this man said peter's really gonna dig her i'm gonna introduce him so peter and marda met and they spent the rest of their lives together they eventually ended up getting married they had a secret marriage and then they had a real marriage later on but they spent their entire lives together and marda when she married him she took on the local religion russian orthodox and she changed her name to kathryn and she later became kathryn the first she was an empress after peter died so from peasant to empress is quite a story um and she's an interesting lady and she became central to peter's world like he he just adored her he clearly adored her there are stories of peter traveling and she would often go with him when she when he traveled but when she didn't go with him they corresponded with each other and these letters that they sent to each other they're just adorable like they're playful and they're sweet and they're flirtatious let me read you one one little passage from a letter that peter wrote to marda or kathryn and this was after they'd been married for about or not married but they'd been together for about 20 years and and here's his letter to her he says praise god all is merry here but when i come to a country home and you are not there i feel so sad and he continued on but when you state that it's miserable walking alone although the garden is pleasant i believe you for it's the same for me only pray god that this is the last summer will spend a part and that we may always be together in the future it's just adorable i've been married about 20 years and i still feel the same way well over 20 years i still feel the same way about my wife and i realize if not everybody does but this is how peter felt about kathryn and she returned his affections and she she occupied in a place in his life that nobody else could for example she could tease him about his mistresses she knew he had mistresses she could give him she could rib him a little bit nobody could rib peter about his mistresses which i think says something about his devotion to kathryn like he was kind of sensitive about that topic but she could joke with him about it and he would tolerate it and peter also had this peccadillo he had a temper that he didn't like you can imagine that if you are an emperor at a young age and you get basically anything you want and there's really no penalty for anything you do that you might not develop the ability to handle setbacks with grace and and patience and peter true to that um he developed a temper that he really disliked he regarded as a weakness and he counted on kathryn to help him manage that which is is a very i mean if you think about what that says about his character that he didn't have to address that weakness in himself he could have just gone through life having temper tantrums and getting his way but he wanted to improve i think that says something tremendous about him um although he's a mixed bag she occupied a position where she could help him manage his temper there's a story of the two of them in the palace after they'd been together for many years and she might have been nagging a little bit and trying to bring up something that he didn't want to discuss and he lost his temper and he destroyed this beautiful venetian mirror that was in that was in the palace and he looked at her and he said thus i can destroy the most beautiful object in my palace and she knew what he meant it's like tread lightly woman because you might be next but she didn't she didn't back down she didn't get inflamed she didn't she didn't react um in any sort of emotional way according to the person who saw this um she just looked at him and she calmly said have you made the palace a more beautiful place by doing so and you can almost picture peter just walking away he appreciated that she could help him manage this thing and this is something this is another thing that he wrote about her let's see where is it i'm sensible that i have my faults and that i easily lose my temper for which reason i'm not offended with those who are unfamiliar terms with me when they tell me of it and remonstrate with me as does my catherine i think this really says something about his character and it says something about their relationship and not only were they romantic and sweet and supportive of each other they got through them very hard times there was one time in particular where peter had lots of children with different women but they had had several children he and he and catherine and there was one in particular most a lot of them died because you know that's what happened back then but there was one in particular peter petrovich and peter i think this is me speculating but i think little peter reminded peter the great of himself because he was he had that same he said same eyes but he also had the same um curiosity about things and energy and vivaciousness and little peter petrovich was just the apple of peter's eye and catherine too they both adored this kid well peter died peter petrovich died when he was about two and a half and this was devastating for the two of them and peter did something very uncharacteristic he retreated to his chamber for days in morning and so did catherine she retreated to her chamber for days and this started to cause problems because this was very uncharacteristic for a hands-on leader to just walk away from his post but that's how devastated he was so after this had gone on for about three days um one of peter's favorite lieutenants a man named dolger rookie i'm not recovering i'm not recalling his first name call him jeff dolger rookie goes to peter and knocks on the door and he says boss if you don't come out we're coming in to get you which is a pretty audacious thing to do with the czar so peter opens the door looking all pale and haggard he says what what's the matter and jeff says your retirement and your useless and excessive sorrow are the cause of the disorder that prevails in the country and that's a very audacious thing to say to the czar you might have been taken a little bit of risk by saying that the things were getting clearly kind of desperate and peter just looks at him and says you're right and he decided that he was going to pull himself together so peter pulls himself together after the death of his cherished son and what's the first thing he does does he go to his office and start signing bills and the lie i don't know what the czar did back then but does he go back to administrating does he meet with his counsel and talk about what to do with denmark or whatever no his first impulse in his first action was to go to catherine so he walks down the hall toward catherine's chamber past the potted ficus plant and the rumba i imagine with jeff and he goes to catherine and he says takes her in his arm and he says we've tormented ourselves too much let us no longer murmur against god's will the message being that we are going to pull ourselves together and i think it's it's wonderful that his that was his first impulse i'm wonderful i don't know if it's wonderful it's just a reflection of their relationship that that was his first impulse that as he regains his footing and reestablishes his foundation his first impulse is to go to catherine because she's that central and that important to him and and vice versa they had another really bad time several months before his death getting a little short on time so i won't go into it but essentially she screwed up in a very bad way in a way that he could have taken as an unforgivable betrayal and there was a lot of iciness with them for several months but she recognized what she did and she was able to to apologize to him and they were able to put things back together so here's here's this man who is all powerful in his own country and he has this woman that he's willing to to get through things like like with any like any modern couple getting through a difficult time without the benefit of any relationship counselors or anything else they just figured it out and they stayed together and they worked it out so that's peter's relationship with catherine a wonderful relationship that affected him in a tremendously positive way meanwhile eudoxia is over here in the convent and remember he got rid of eudoxia but he did not get rid of the relationship because eudoxia had people just like any um anyone's ex-wife has people and you might think to yourself well peter was the emperor clearly those people couldn't affect him the way an average ex-wife could affect an average man and he'd be right arguably it was much worse for peter because her people didn't want alimony they wanted his head some of them wanted his job or they wanted to put eudoxia in his chair and eudoxia wanted to put her son in his chair and this stuff swirled around him for the rest of his days and so here we have one of the most powerful men on the planet at the time with these two different relationships one that served him very well and that he served her very well and another that served him horribly and that he served her horribly and i don't want to paint peter as any sort of victim of his relationship with eudoxia because as bad as it was for him it was a measurably worse for her we don't do anybody any favors when we bring the wrong women and wrong relationships into our lives so what do we learn from peter like i said it's i don't think it's anything profound i think what we learn from peter the great is that this question of choosing our relationships carefully is a very old question now remember when peter married eudoxia it was an arranged marriage he had no power in that in that choice no power in that decision he didn't want to do it he's going to do it anyway being the czar is not always easy i guess i wouldn't know but what happens when men like us 300 years later 200 yes my math i'm a psychologist i don't do math when men like us put ourselves in a in a position that is powerless by our own decision and why would we do that well that brings me to chapter three shame let's talk about what shame is how it functions why we have it and we have these um we have these basic emotions the core emotions you probably heard them there's like joy anger fear sadness uh disgust those are those are basically the the basic emotions core emotions and the reason we can categorize those experiences under one heading of emotion is because they all serve a similar purpose they all serve to either motivate us towards something or motivate us away from something something good that's going to advance our survival something bad that might damage our survival and interestingly um you know well we can even point to systems within the brain chemical systems and physical structures that are connected to approach and avoidance it's that uh that basic to who we are and we can see it in almost any other animal you see these these avoidance and and and approach reactions to things interesting thing about it is that approach and avoidance are are rarely exist in in isolation like we're rarely purely approach or purely avoidance because the brain is the mind the brain is almost always in conflict with itself and approach and avoidance are two of these things among many others that sit in in in conflict with each other they're all it's like they're in a tug of war and so we may feel like we want to approach something at the same time we want to avoid it and you can see this in animals like if you you can if you watch a dog for example that sees something on the ground that might be dangerous you can watch the dog approach it and then back away and kind of look at it and wagging its tail and it's dancing around that it approaches it and then it backs away then it circles around or approaches it and it backs away approach avoid approach avoid it's almost like there's a little monkey in its brain flipping a switch approach avoid approach avoid and humans will do the same thing like we should not like horror movies because horror movies evoke fear and anxiety anger sometimes discussed but yet we pay good money to go see them so it's just interesting to me that that those are two things that sit in an opposition to each other and it's rarely clean cut there's a different sort of category of emotional experiences that are much more cognitive they're not that basic and they seem to serve a different function there are things like grief guilt depression on the negatively valent side and then on the more positively valent side there are things that you might even equate with like religious behavior there's things like compassion and forgiveness and humility gratitude so we have this this other set of experiences that are much more cognitive and they're emotional but they don't serve the same purpose they don't really motivate us towards something or motivate us away from them they do something else and the way evolutionary psychologists think about this category of emotional experiences is that they all serve a similar function and that they all serve to cause us to step back quiet down a little bit and recalibrate ourselves and think about how our behavior is functioning in the world shame is clearly one of these experiences that causes us to recalibrate ourselves if you think about a little boy who is being scolded by his mother whether or not he deserves it doesn't matter listen she's being scolded and the message is i'm not a big fan of you right now because what you did was hurtful and thoughtless and you need to go think about it if you think about that little boy what does he look like he looks just like that guy on Colfax like he's he's standing there with his arms crossed and he's avoiding eye contact and the first opportunity that little boy is going to get out of there he's going to go out and play or he's going to go hide in his room he's going to do something to get away from her scrutiny because the function of shame as far as I can tell is that it causes us to essentially say to ourselves sit down shut up stop making things worse stop doing anything until you figure out what it is you're doing that is causing other people to get angry and and rejecting of you which is a very useful thing to do if you have any desire to have any kind of connection with other human beings now obviously this can be weaponized and this can be used against us and I don't have anything to back this up other than my opinion and my observations but it seems to be the case that women are particularly good let me rephrase that because I don't I don't know if I want to say it that way women have a particular way and we have a particular way of responding where they can manage our behavior by getting us to feel ashamed again that's just my opinion but let's talk about the messages that come down to us as men from certain segments so let me tell you about my favorite gender studies essay this is one you might have seen it came out in 2018 it was written by a gender studies and sociology professor out of boston her name was susan her name is susannah dunedal walters and this was published in the washington post which is not a small outlet and the name of the the essay the opinion piece was called why can't we hate men you remember seeing that it's such a subtle title right it doesn't take anything it's like a bridge too far what does that mean allow me to investigate no this is just club you over the head with your despicable and in this essay susannah walters by way of context she wrote this shortly after the harvey weinstein stuff came out and harvey weinstein is a the king of scumbags absolute dirt bag but allegedly i guess i should say but susannah walters starts out her essay saying i'm not mad about that because you're all scumbags and you have always been scumbags and you're worthy of our hatred you're worthy of contempt and the essay itself like i said it's it's kind of unhinged it's hard to follow it's it's irrational but the message is very honest the message is that she's demanding something in particular because we are so contemptible what is she demanding she gets to it on the last paragraph she's not demanding opportunity because it would be absolutely absurd for someone in her position cushy job high pay can't get fired doesn't really need to produce anything other than angry words it would be absurd for her to say that she lacks opportunity and everybody knows that there's nothing stopping her from getting a real job she could go out into the marketplace and compete with everybody else and she would probably enjoy a competitive advantage because of her demographic features and everybody knows it so she's perhaps wisely if she's this wise she's not demanding opportunity she's demanding something different she's demanding that we all sit down and shut up so let me read you her last paragraph her closing argument this is where she tells us what she would like for men like you and me all right yada yada yada you're all despicable so men if you really are hashtag with us and would like us not to hate you let's pause there for a minute and take in the full bouquet of the narcissism what do i care if this woman hates me even if i do care if she hates me there's nothing i can do about there's no alternative because anything i do to try to repair it's only gonna make it worse because she's on a mission to hate me but i'm aware that this sort of manipulation does work on certain men and they're probably most men at some point in their lives there's a point in my life where this might have worked on me so anyway if you're if you're really with us and you do not want us and you would like us not to hate you for all the millennia of woe you you have produced and benefited from start with this lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down because she's so beaten down it's poor woman pledge to vote for feminist women only don't run for office don't be in charge of anything step away from the power we got this and please know that your crocodile tears yada yada yada okay so that's her closing argument she wants all of us to know that we're despicable she wants us to sit down and shut up and just hand her whatever it is she thinks we possess that we can handle her and it's no coincidence that her her weapon of choice is what shame shame on you sit down shut up don't take up any space in the world so why am i discussing this as i'm discussing bringing women into our lives what's what how does this all come together well you remember that peter was powerless when he chose eudoxia he didn't choose eudoxia actually and if we allow ourselves to buy into this message this kind of message when you hear words like patriarchy toxic masculinity or mansplaining or when you hear about the wage gap that has been debunked god knows how many times but people still throw it in your face the wage gap the wage gap when you hear these things i think it's useful to frame them for what they are this is shaming behavior this is the behavior that says you need to sit down and shut up well i don't know about you but i am not going to stifle myself just because some miserable no account gender studies professor insists that i do it i have work to do and if she's troubled by that she can take it up with her cats i don't care but i know that there are men out there that don't feel that way there are men who are retreating from relationships and retreating from education and careers eight out of ten suicides are men did you know that in 2013 because statistics lag a bit in 2013 if a man between the ages of 20 and 49 died the likeliest cause of death was suicide take a walk through reddit look at the hopelessness and the nihilism that exists there the hopelessness around women in particular men out there are hearing these messages and they're they're buying into it to some degree so getting back to peter he came from a position of powerlessness in that first relationship choice if a man adopts this kind of messaging to any degree and most of us are functioning just fine but if we buy into this kind of messaging we're putting ourselves in a helpless position in choosing our relationships because we're saying to ourselves well i'm a piece of shit so i guess my relationship to women needs to be one of apology and supplication and and mother may i it's a horrible way to start any kind of relationship it's not good for you it's not good for them i mean think about think about going on to a car lot and you approach the first salesperson you see and you say please please sir here's all my money will you please just sell me a car i don't care what it is and this i look around and i see the way men are approaching women and i'm seeing a little bit of that energy and it's not good for anybody wasn't good for eudoxia wasn't good for peter wasn't good for their son alexa everybody suffered in that scenario and we all know men who have suffered in a in a similar way so that brings me to chapter four the experiment i'll just lay it out for you and like i tell my clients i'll lay it out and if you decide you want to try it that's cool that's not that's cool too and you should think carefully because sometimes you open a can of worms that you wish you hadn't opened but here's how it goes here's what i'm proposing if you have a relationship or a relationship that you're seeking or relationships that you can look back on here's what you might try first of all you identify what's important to you in your life whether it's religion your career fitness your community whatever it is you identify okay these things really matter to me my career really matters to me say for example and then you ask yourself a tough question you don't ask yourself what do i want from this thing you ask yourself what's the man i want to be in that situation so let's say your career is important to you the man i want to be is someone who is a leader and brings people up behind me and raises all ships maybe that's that's the mission that you've decided on that's the kind of man you want to be so you got the thing that's important to you you've got the man you want to be in that situation and question number three this is the tough one the relationship or possible relationships or past relationships how have they affected the man you want to be in that situation so you walk into a tense meeting with a boss or a client or a prospect what are you carrying in from your relationship are you carrying in the feeling of strength and competence like peter got from catherine or are you carrying in a sense of distraction and and annoyance or or defeat like peter experienced with eudoxia you qualify you quantify it as an asset or a liability in that little category and then you can look at all of them and you can say well on balance this relationship she's delightful but this relationship there's a bit of a discrepancy there remember discrepancies are really useful discrepancy between the bike path and colfax avenue when you think about discrepancies you can notice things and if you notice there's a discrepancy between the way she looks on paper and the way she actually functions in my life well then you come up with a different set of questions like what do i want to do about it maybe she doesn't belong in my life maybe i need to make some improvements here's something i've noticed about men is that when a guy latches on to a question like that and sometimes you need a trail to follow to get to a question like that like what's important who do i want to be how is this affecting me when you follow that kind of trail you can come up with some tough questions and men who are genuinely interested in understanding how a thing is functioning not just how the thing is functioning in their life but also how they're functioning and what they're creating men who are not just looking for some kind of ideology that will blame women or blame society or blame mommy but they actually want to take charge these guys tend to be pretty good at finding the resources that will help them overcome that first challenge which is how do i even put words to this thing how do i describe this thing that i'm feeling like maybe it's a therapist maybe it's a coach that you really respect maybe it's a mentor maybe it's some material that's out there in written form but when guys really latch on to a question like that and it's an honest question about how can i function better men tend to be pretty good at finding those resources so i got a scene earlier if if you want to embark on this kind of experiment it's your experiment it's your data you collect it you draw your own conclusions don't believe anything i say and i can hear right now i'm going to wrap it up here i can hear the the objections particularly when this shows up on youtube if you look down in the comments i'm going to see guys that are saying i can't raise my standards around women because that's really the whole point i'm suggesting here is that we can all almost all of us afford to raise our standards a little bit and what we expect from relationships and what we're willing to give and what we expect of ourselves and there are going to be men who hear this and they're going to say i can't raise my expectations because women have become hopelessly corrupted by feminism or by only fans or by tinder or whatever it is the social fabric is hopelessly destroyed between men and women and my response to that objection is you sound kind of hopeless good because hopelessness is not necessarily a bad place to be as long as it doesn't lead to um being immobilized and nihilistic but if you're merely hopeless that things can't improve they have nothing to lose by trying something different trying some new behaviors and and seeing if some new possibilities present themselves when you decide to give yourself a different experience and so if your belief is that the social fabric is hopelessly destroyed well no individual man can fix that but what if some critical mass and some sufficient number of men decide i'm going to look beyond the messages of shame i'm going to raise my expectations i'm not going to approach relationships from this from this subservient obedient mentality that people like susana walters want i'm going to take up some space in the world and i'm going to become a relationship expert and i'm going to build good relationships and carry good people along with me if enough people decide to correct their little portion of the social fabric and mend it then i don't know i don't know what happens from there maybe the social fabric changes i think that's all i got to say about that so i don't know if you want to do some q and a it looks like we've got a few minutes left um i'll leave i'll leave it up to you guys okay yeah let's let's do a little q day go to the mic if you got a question i'm getting the message that we got a little bit of time here so let's do it is this on it is cool um first of all personal note second time i've had the opportunity to hear you speak and each time i do i come away with something profound so i want to thank you that's very kind thank you looking forward to reading your book again with new perspective second one just anecdotal example i was listening to your story about the man being shamed out on the street and the way he looked away and i reflected on that and i thought i know me and i know what i would do today at this point in my life i would glare right into our eyes and i'm wondering from your perspective what kind of effect might that have on the relationship and what might it reflect about me if you don't mind giving me an opinion on that because that's what i've come to and that's how i would have responded yeah i don't know what it would say about you because i'm gonna follow my own rule that's one data point about you and i can't paint a picture about you but i i don't know if i talked about this i can't remember what i what i talked about earlier but i love the question because when we think about that man and the woman on the street it's really easy to say he she was the aggressor because she was out of control and yes that's true she was out of control but if you want to understand a an interaction in a relationship it helps to look at it from more than one angle and from her point of view it might be pretty damn aggravating to try to deal with someone who helps you create some sort of conflict and then goes catatonic when you're trying to solve it that might be part of their pattern i don't know but my guess is that if i had to speculate about you is that if you were willing to glare at her at that moment that perhaps it never would have reached that pitch with you because maybe you would have worked with her early on when the conflict was developing and and come to some sort of reasonable conclusion is that a fair answer yeah okay thank you yeah dr smith uh thank you so much it's a great talk my name is information was valuable on a an intellectual basis on more of a mundane kind of question how does a man guard himself against beauty i mean let's be frank you know most men when they meet a woman for the first time it's about tits and ass there i'm sorry how do they pretend to themselves against what tits and ass they're they're going to be you know in limerence over this gorgeous girl how do they get past that and start to look at values yeah mental discipline this one i if i can get guys do anything it would be to be disciplined thinkers about relationships yeah you can enjoy the of course you should enjoy the relationship you should enjoy this process of falling in love or whatever that is actually let's talk about love in a minute what what that might be but um yeah we have a responsibility to ourselves to not walk around acting like one giant walking hormone that we have these brains and that we should be assessing her character and we should be assessing what the relationship is bringing into our lives because women are pretty good at that women are much in my estimation my experience women are much better talking to each other about what the relationship is bringing into their lives and what is the quality and the character of this man we need to be doing the same thing and i don't have any other answer for you other than it's tough to do push-ups but you do them anyway and it's tough to be disciplined when you think about relationships but you do it anyway so love let's talk about a definition of love just for a second just because i got myself on that on that little tangent this question what is romantic love it was presented to me by an old professor in a way that i think is really it spoke to me but if you here's the way he put it let's say that you have a coworker who gets a a promotion or whatever you know something great happens to them professionally and you're happy for them but you also have that little neuron in the back of your brain that's going on son of a bitch and because you you know the brain is always in conflict with conflict with itself and so when good things happen to other people you are happy for them but you're also maybe a little bit resentful sometimes with romantic love here's a way to think about it that goes away that when something good happens to your romantic partner you're just happy because you're as invested in their success as they are in yours and vice versa and yet sex got romantic love what do you think of that definition i don't even tell me later we can continue that discussion so another question we have time for one more question guys one more question the woman pointing to the gentleman on the side of the street and it's my own point of view that's a shit test and basically we've all been in a situation where somebody is challenging us and you don't have to agree with me but i have tested this and that is if somebody puts me in that situation especially a woman where they're pointing their finger at me my response is go fuck yourself and don't ever talk to me like that again and what i have found is they get angrier sure they do but subsequently they come back and they start to apologize if i succumb then this sets a precedent and the precedent is i could be pushed around don't ever let anybody fucking push you around ever and i don't care if i'm right or wrong but there's a correct way to talk to me and there's an incorrect way to talk to me and in the street if you're pointing your finger at me i don't care if i'm wrong don't ever do it that way to me ever again or i'm walking that's just my point of view yeah fair enough and it's not unreasonable to think that maybe what that woman wanted in that moment was something from him like just answer me like just do something and he was he was just he was like catatonic he was just not there the expression was blank and so i i don't really know what a shit test is there's so many different definitions people test each other all the time men test the hell out of each other and women will test us too and women test each other so yeah maybe it's testing behavior maybe it was behavior just to design to elicit some kind of response and it never needed to reach that level because had he responded earlier he could have dealt with it but yeah i'm with you that's all the time we have guys let's give it up for dr shon t smith