 Do you want to escape the friend zone? Then you need tactical soap, pheromone and pea soap for men, proud channel sponsor at 21 Studios. I'm Anthony Dream Johnson, and I've proved this soap. Order now to link below. Use coupon code 21C for 10% off now. George Bruno with the 21 report in Orlando, Florida. We're talking with Dr. Sean T. Smith. Author of the book, The Tactical Guide to Women. It's an interesting title, isn't it? How was your experience with the 21 convention so far this year? I was saying in my talk, I have never seen a group of guys like this. A group of 200 men who are focused, squared away, and working on their values. It's unusual to say the least in just a lighthearted crowd. I mean, just never met a bigger group of wonderful guys. They're hungry, aren't they? Yeah, they are. They are. Yeah. What is your main message? My main message with this book in particular is that if you're a man who has ambitions and motivations in life, one of the most efficient ways to make sure that you don't get there is to bring the wrong woman into your life. And so it's not really a message so much about keeping the wrong woman out of your life as knowing what the right women are to look for, the ones that have the bare necessities to be able to participate as a grown-up in a relationship. And it doesn't matter really whether you're just looking to increase your notch count or you're looking for marriage and kids. Whatever capacity you want women in your life, you better be careful. And this isn't just an opinionated book. It's based upon research and experience because what you do for a living is... Well, I'm a clinical psychologist and I work with a lot of guys. I work with a lot of couples. So as they say, it ain't bragging if you can do it and you do this every single day. Yeah, do it every day. What is the most common problem that you see men dealing with when it comes to relationships? One of the most common problems, you know, there's the stereotypical stuff, all these stuff that you hear just in the popular media about the tensions between men and women and how men will not talk as much as women want and we will not have sex as much. But beyond that, the most common problem that I try to address is men attending to their own experience when a woman is showing her character at the beginning of a relationship so you can rule a man and rule him out based on what they're showing as human being. And we are very good at ignoring character and it's the most important question for a man to look at. And it's interesting because a lot of people are meeting through dating apps on their phone and there's not a lot of things that talk about character there. No. And I'm hearing from a lot of millennial guys and I'm an old guy in my 50s and I'm hearing from a lot of young guys that it is very difficult to assess a woman's character because there is this hookup culture and everything moves so fast and one of my messages is when you're bringing anyone into your life, particularly a woman that you're going to be connected to, you got to slow that process down so that you can have the time to see what kind of character shows up. It seems like in the swiping culture on these dating apps on phones, it's swipe left for no, swipe right for yes. And one of the things that came to my mind was you're always once swipe away from being replaced with these apps. Yeah, well if you choose women of character, women who are able to stay invested, you lower your chances of that obviously, but I feel bad for people who are having to navigate this sexual marketplace because of that component. I know not everybody participates in that component. I know a lot of young people completely stare away from that, but some ridiculous percentage of young people is participating in this and it's become a hookup culture where character is sort of the last thing you're looking for when you're looking at a picture on a screen and you're swiping right or left. Interesting. The common vernacular in many of the men's conferences and men's dating movements is shit testing somebody. Can we say that in a nicer way? Boundary testing is my best approximation of it and it's an old concept that when you're dealing with, let's talk about bullies, what do bullies do? They don't run up on the schoolyard and just start pounding on you. They got to test first. They got to find out who their victims are and even out on the savannah when a cheetah stalking their prey, they don't just run up on the herd because they're going to go hungry. They size up and they test and they prod and they poke and they'll get a reaction from the herd and then they know where the weakness is and they can go after the weakness and so shit testing between men and women, I don't know if I completely understand the term, but I do understand boundary testing and I see it, people do it all the time. I'll give you a little bit of shit to see what you'll put up with and how you'll respond. It's predatory behavior, not a big fan of it, but it's out there. It saves lives. It does save lives. Yeah, if you can shit test to, if you can test boundaries, I don't know that I think the way it gets talked about in the red pill community is that you should shit test and test boundaries so that you can test reactions and my stance on that is if you take your time with a human being, life will test their boundaries and you can be on their side and react with them. You don't need to give them that test and become their enemy and become the person that's out to see how they're going to respond because life takes care of that on its own. In the movie, The Bronx Tale, there's the classic case of the man opening the car door for the woman she gets in, he walks around the back and the older guy was teaching the younger guy if she reaches over and unlocks your door for you, she's in. If she doesn't, and that's kind of a shit test, if she doesn't, she's gone. Kind of an old school for lack of a better term, shit test. What are some tests that men can do to test the character of a woman? Well, I talk about traits to look for and traits show up when a person's in conflict with another person or when they're in a social situation. That's a great movie, by the way. Chaz commentary is one of my favorite movies. I'm glad you picked that one. But if you want to call that a shit test, I'm all for that because that's a real life situation that he didn't have to contrive. It's just watching her and how she behaves in response to the world. Traits to look for are, okay, how does this woman handle herself when she's in a disagreement with her boss? How does she talk about her ex-boyfriends? How does she handle a conflict with her roommate and her friends? Because these are real life shit tests, boundary tests that will reveal her character. Because what she does to the rest of the world is what she's going to do to you after the honeymoon passes. And that's because anybody can be on their best behavior for three hours on a date, the first three months, a year. I've heard people say things like crazy doesn't show up for about two years. That's probably a fairly reasonable measure because there have been studies of how long people are on a honeymoon phase. And this actually is a chemically altered state of your mind where you're not seeing the world as it really is. You're not seeing her and you're not presenting yourself as you really are. And the studies say somewhere between nine, 15 months, somewhere in that is hard to pin down. After that, your brain starts to return to baseline and her brain starts to return to baseline. And then that's when the clock starts. That's when her character shows up and then you can start watching how she actually responds to you and the world. And so two years is not a bad amount of time to really get a sense of how somebody is. In fact, I'm rambling here, but the FBI takes about two years to decide whether or not they're going to bring somebody on board. So if that's good enough for the FBI, maybe it's good enough for deciding whether or not to bring someone into your life that's going to have a tremendous impact on your success. The choice of woman has such a profound effect, positive or negative on a man's life. Yeah. Yeah. And somebody out here on the elevator, one of the attendees described it to me as the force multiplier. Having the right woman in your life is the force multiplier that will take you further than you thought you could go. I've always said date long, marry slow and divorce fast. You're a wise man. What I have found in my life in dealing with men and women is that people are making decisions based upon emotions. And I like to tell people emotions are a nice place to visit. You just don't want to live there. Comment on something like that. Well, one of the big mistakes that men make in courting women is women have an urgency to keep the relationship moving. And I think that's sweet. I also understand that there's some genetics and biology behind it, but women are pressing generally to get the relationship moving toward commitment. Men, it's our job to slow things down so that mistakes aren't made. It's their job too. It's everybody's job to make sure that mistakes aren't made. But when you're in that honeymoon phase, where you're chemically altered, that's a terrible time to be making emotional decisions like, let's get an apartment together. Let's get a dog together. Let's do the things that are going to bind us together and make it very difficult for us to disengage if we decide to go our separate ways. Emotion is very present at the beginning of the relationship. Not a good way to base your decisions. You said a phrase that I hear all the time. When the honeymoon is over, it's a common phrase that people use when something happens the first time somebody passes gas in front of the other person. It's like, oh, the honeymoon's over. Or the phrase, letting your hair down because you're on your best behavior with everything for a long time. And then reality kicks in. And then you start to see anger problems or a person is maybe messy or how they treat their parent or how they treat other people. How does that change over time as you get to know somebody? Well, what happens when that honeymoon phase starts to wear off and our brains come back to baseline and also we just get fatigued with the effort of putting on our best face all the time is that reality starts to show up and anyone, man or woman who can't tolerate the pluses and minuses of the person that they brought into their life, it's a bad sign because you need to be able to tolerate that this person is a three-dimensional person and they're going to disappoint me sometime and they can't be the point of origin for me, the point of my emotional regulation so that if they mistreat me, suddenly I'm having a bad day. I've heard it said that if you can't accept the person with all their habits as they are now, don't go into a relationship or long-term relationship or marriage expecting them to change. When a person expects another person to change or hoping that something is going to change, what is the danger of that? I don't have a lot to add to that other than you're right it's going to get worse. I don't know if you said that but I'm saying that if you're starting off at a bad point it's probably going to get worse and there are three areas sex money and children and if people are not in tune on those three areas and in fact if they're divergent in any of those areas that's a problem that's only going to magnify with the effect of time and so better to recognize those things out of the gate where you can still be polite to each other and go your separate ways. What is the percentage of marriages that make it now? I heard someone say 50%. I've heard people say 60%. What do you know to be true about? It's a complicated question because and I don't know the answer to it because there's a lot of statistics that go into it. The 50% statistic is a little bit misleading because I think what gets thrown in there is all marriages so second, third, fourth marriages and what we do know without question is that your second marriage if you didn't, well I guess you'd be divorced if you're going to your second marriage. Your second marriage is likelier to end with divorce than your first marriage was and your third marriage is likelier to end divorce than your second marriage was but that's just statistics. What statistics don't take into account is individual motivation so if you get divorced from your first marriage and you figure out what your role in that was, you figure out what her role is and you really create a coherent story about what happened and what drove you so that you don't have to do it again. Then the odds of your second marriage are good because you've done the work. You've learned your lesson. It's the people who don't learn their lesson. They jump into their next marriage and then they create the whole thing all over again. So what percentage? I don't know. The lesson here is learn from your mistakes so that you don't become part of that statistic. So don't focus on the fake statistics of half of all marriages end. Yeah, it may be real. It may average out to that. I don't know. That almost creates fear. Yeah. I heard someone say if you went skydiving and the instructor told you that this parachute is documented as only opening 50% of the time and that's a common scenario kind of a, I would say, I call it tongue-in-cheek but there are some people who say that seriously. Would you go into marriage if you knew that it only had a 50% chance of success and it's almost like asking, I mean that's a rhetorical question. The answer is no, I'm not willing to take that risk because there's a lot at stake, a lot at risk. Would you bet your future on a coin flip? But it's not a coin flip and that's the illusion. You have so much control over the variables that go into a successful marriage or successful relationship and it starts with who you choose and it starts with understanding your own patterns and your own history knowing what pushes you in the wrong direction so you don't get somebody who pushes you in the wrong direction. There's a lot of variables you can control that take that 50% statistic and lower it dramatically. I have a friend who's an officiant and works with a wedding chapel. You can just schedule your wedding there and it's like weddings in Vegas kind of thing. I wonder what these statistic are, the statistic is about these impulsive, like we went to Vegas and got married. You hear, I mean that's almost like a movie cliche now. Yeah, I don't know what the statistics are on that but here's an interesting statistic that the more ostentatious and showy a wedding is the likelier that it will end poorly. So a low-grade wedding like mine we went to the justice of the peace and then we took all our friends and family out to dinner and we spent a minimal amount of money but we had connection with the people that were important to us and we're doing great. Statistically we would fit that that when you're not showy about your wedding and your rings and the flowers and all that nonsense maybe that says something about the quality of the relationship. There's something to be said about that. My grandparents had an arranged marriage. What do you know about arranged marriages versus the modern way of getting married in western sieves? My understanding is that the outcomes can be pretty good and it has to do with the fact that if you take two people, it's an interesting experiment that was a couple years ago, if you take two people, you put them in a situation where they're going to become very familiar with each other very quickly and the way this experiment worked was they gave these two people a list of questions intimate questions and as they started discussing this they started finding their common ground and the number of people who said that they could love this person that they just interacted with was astronomical just because we are social creatures were made to connect and we can connect with the number of people out there most women are going to be wrong for you 99% of them are not the right fit but that 1% that's left over is a huge number and there's a lot of them that you could actually connect with and make it work. Very interesting. All right, I'm going to say a phrase and then you're going to tell me what you think about that. Love at first sight. Yeah, bullshit. There's attraction at first sight. That's a good way to start. Okay. Because what is love? You kind of have to know something about the person to love them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That's an interesting one. I suppose it would depend on how connected you were to a person. Right now I've been away from my wife and daughter for a few days now. Yeah, I miss them. I'm actually looking forward to seeing them. I usually do. But there's a particular urgency. Yeah, I want to get home and check out what my daughter is doing. So my wife has been up to because they're entertaining and they make me happy. So I'd say there's something to that. Out of sight, out of mind. Men and women, this is something that men and women don't understand about each other. Men have difficulty understanding how women can have their family and go out into the world, go to the workplace or whatever they do and they still feel connected to their family is still on their minds like they never left. And women have a difficult time understanding with men that we can go out into the world and it's like they don't exist. Because we can go out and we can slay the dragon. We're built for that. Go out, slay the dragon. And if you're slaying the dragon, you better be paying attention to what you're doing. And so men are built to forget about what's going on at home, not permanently, obviously. But then when we come home, we're happy to be home. And so this is a point of contention that I wish I could get every man and woman to understand about each other is that there's a difference in the way we go out into the world. Hypergamy doesn't care. Hypergamy, the way evolutionary psychology uses it is that men and women try to get somebody that's at their level and we all know what our level is. I go very intuitive about that. Try to get somebody at our level and higher. The way it gets used in the red pill community, I don't fully understand. I'm going to be honest about that. I hear that phrase a lot. I haven't quite wrapped my head around it. But I think that the gist of it is that female nature will always default to female nature and that women have no loyalty is the way I understand this. I don't know. I got to think about that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. There's a guy out there. He needs what you have to say. He needs your insight. He's had a number of failed relationships. He gave up that giving up is manifest in the way he looks. He feels hopeless. He might have written women off, which is a popular phrase. I mean, before I even heard the term mig-tau, I would hear men say, I've written women off. I'm not playing that game anymore. The words of a hurt man, of a man who has failed. But we know he's only going to be miserable with that kind of life. Give him some hope about relationships, about himself. What can he literally do, like Dr. Jordan Peterson in his 12 rules for life said, make your bed. Something as simple as that. What would be Dr. Shawn T. Smith's first rule for that man? Well, it would be put your shoes on because, and I said that before the make your bed thing came along, that guys get depressed in a unique way. Guys get depressed. They get irritable. They get withdrawn. Women, when they get depressed, they fit more the medical description of depression that we're accustomed to. They lose their energy. They become sad. Men behave differently when they get depressed. And depression is interesting because the condition prevents the cure. When you're depressed, you don't want to move, but the cure is to get moving. That's the hardest part about it is the depressed person needs to move, but can't get moving. And so the simplest thing you can do when you're depressed is the thing that you should do, which is I know you have, you know what you need to do. Nobody needs to tell you, you need to hit the gym, you need to get walking, you need to get working, you need to get yourself moving and engaged in the world. That's the cure to depression. But how do you do that when the condition itself is preventing you from doing that thing? Well, you can set your goal to get to the gym, but really more important than getting to the gym and having a complete workout is just getting your ass out the door. So you put your shoes on. And if all you can do is go to the gym and go inside to the locker room and take a leak and turn around and leave, okay, you made it to the gym. You got your shoes on. And before you can even get to the gym, before you have to get to your car, before you can get to your car, you have to get dressed. And then after you get dressed, you got to put your shoes on. And that's the most basic thing to do is don't set your sights on, I'm going to go to the gym today and I'm going to do an hour on the treadmill. I'm going to get my shoes on right now. That's all I'm going to worry about for these next few seconds is get my shoes on. And then I'll do the next thing. I like that. Well done as well begun. This was a great talk with Dr. Sean T Smith. How can people reach you? Where can they find you? You can find me on Twitter, my handle is iron shrink and you can find me at docsmith.co. That's about all you need to know. Excellent. Yeah. George Bruno for the 21 report with Dr. Sean T Smith. Thank you, Dr. Thank you, George.