 being able to recognize that if you can go lean and be mobile then you can move towards where the greatest opportunities are. And I say this as a warning to men out there who are following very traditional pathways that often involve them getting involved in long-term debt in very expensive economies. The modern like American male if he wants to go to college is likely to be put in a good college is likely to be walking away with what is it 60 a hundred grand worth of debt something like that. One thing you should note is that you don't actually have to do it here. If you want to you can go to Germany and they'll more or less pay for your education. I don't know if the Germans want me to tell you that. They're like we've got enough trouble with the Syrians and now we're gonna send the Americans over as well. But the truth is you can get very cheap education over there. I live most of the time in Budapest in Hungary and it's interesting to see these waves of American students coming over there to study medicine because it's five times cheaper than doing it in the States and just as good. So the first thing is in order to be an effective modern male one of the best things to be able to do is to think firstly nationally and then globally and to take advantage of the fact that this is an amazing time and place to be alive if you use it well. It's also a really difficult time and place to be alive if you are stationary if you cannot pick yourself up and move to places where the opportunities are better. When I first started playing music I was born and brought up in a city called Canberra which is the capital city of Australia sounds cool when you say capital but it's not at all a cool place. One of the most boring cities on the planet the only people there are public servants and heroin addicts sometimes are the same thing but there's nothing much going on there and myself and my crew started our band there we got to the top of the scene which meant not a lot and at some point we realized that if we wanted to go anywhere else there were systemic limitations to our location and that's a really important thing to note especially for people who are involved in everyone but guys who are involving themselves in entrepreneurship positive thinking self development there's a lot that's talked about in terms of your mindsets which is very important it is very important to cultivate positive effective mindsets but it is also important to be realistic and recognize when the place you're in does not support you. For me at that time that was not the place in Australia to be playing music for a lot of guys who want to have some kind of artistic pursuit or entrepreneurial pursuit or want to be in a world where free creative thinking is fostered and supported then your second third fourth tier city where people do as told is not necessarily the environment that you want to be in. Who's heard the saying that you basically are or resonate at the same frequency as the five people that you spend most of the time with. I don't know if I said the quote exactly right but you get the idea the people that you hang around with and are with most of the time tend to you tend to operate at that similar level. The people that I grew up with and still love to this day is close friends and not the people that I'm traveling the world with having crazy and wild interesting adventures with because those people have chosen lives that are stationary that are simpler more predictable or whatever they've chosen. But the point being that if you want to be excellent in any field one of the things you're going to need to do is move to a place where excellence is encouraged. There's a new archetype for masculinity which has kind of appeared roughly around the time when Tim Ferriss wrote his book the four hour work week. Is there anyone who has not read this book in the room? Okay. There's a few. All right. Well this archetype of a modern playboy entrepreneur which differs from the successful male of say like the 80s which was the Wall Street guy with the nice watch and the fast car is more exemplified by a man who is pursuing excellence internally in terms of his mindsets physically in terms of the way that he uses his body and then is hacking all sorts of systems in order to optimize what he gets out of life. Right. So the the four hour work week laptop entrepreneur modern male when he gets up in the morning does something along the lines of drinking his bulletproof coffee stretching for 30 minutes 28 minutes is the most optimal length of time to stretch opens his laptop does a little bit of this makes a few hundred, you know, a few K closes the laptop then goes and does his workout which is optimized perfectly so they're not a single motion or calorie is wasted. Then and he's doing this on a beach in Thailand or in Costa Rica or somewhere where it's you know beautiful and sunny. And then goes and eats some awesome paleo food with the right level of macro micro nutrients. And then what he does the rest of the day I'm not exactly sure because he's just got so much time to spend and then goes through his evening routine where he has apple cider vinegar with some honey and listens to some meditation stuff that pulses in various ways and makes you meditate like a monk and then falls into a blissful smug sleep of knowing that it not a second was wasted in that day. Yeah. So and I'm not making fun of that archetype because that is well I'm not look I'm not doing what I did. This I mean this is actually a great model for a man compared to what the one of the what eighties and nineties was of like work hard play hard snort cocaine bang hookers or something like that. This is you know this is a cool model because what it what is this using is using the resources and the knowledge of all of Western and Eastern psychology and certain health and all sorts of things in order to live a life that's excellent. Right. It's a cool model and people sometimes ask me James what's your morning routine. And I'm like well sometimes I get up in the morning and and then I do whatever I feel like doing. I'm actually somebody who is incredibly undisciplined who has no routine except for the fact that I always get what I said I'm going to do done. Right. That's that's kind of that's the way that I've managed to operate. I get up at all sorts of different times they had all sorts of different things. I try to eat healthy. I do stretch not every single day most days. I do work out not every day but most days. I am do try to use optimizing techniques in all sorts of areas including my business. But my I've never been able to maintain a really heavy discipline that follows an extreme set of steps to get the the most out of life. And that's just the way I do things. I'm not necessarily the best model for someone looking to find optimizing routines. But the thing about this archetype is I've taught lots of guys who fit into this category because it works for some guys they go out and they figure out how to work from a laptop or how to have skills that are mobile and move around the world which is something I think is fucking amazing and awesome photographers but massage therapists life coaches all sorts of guys who do something on the internet and money appears. These guys are often my clients and also I bump into a lot of these different guys through my travels and my my work. And one thing I've noticed is that as effective as they may be there is something missing in this archetype something very vital missing in it which is that sitting on a beach in Thailand doing all that stuff is really lonely if you don't have a crew around you is really unfulfilling if you're not actually able to like integrate into the society that you've decided to move and become part of and especially if you're not able to go out and meet women and bring them into your life. Now I don't want to get down on Tim Ferriss but any time I see him talking about his lifestyle and his routine there seems to be a severe lack of women in the picture. Right. Being able to know that at nine oh six you go to bed with your tonic. Where does the sex and the hanging out with the chick fit into that exactly I'm not so sure. It's a very individualistic and solo pursued a lot of this stuff because it's really around optimizing the individual which is all well and good but it doesn't take into account our most basic and pressing needs beyond those of survival which is community which is feelings of significant significance which is feelings of connection and of course which is feelings of sexual satisfaction and intimacy with a partner. In my mind the absolute most important skill that a man can learn whether he wants whether he's going to stay in one city and have a normalish kind of life or whether he wants to hit the road and be bouncing around the world taking the best of what's available out there the number one skill that a man must learn is seduction. It is not an optional skill. It is not a hobby. It is not something that you just pick up when you're a young guy to just get laid a bunch of times and then put down again because my definition of seduction competency is not hustling drunk girls into bed night after night in trashy one night stands. Yeah I mean that's that maybe an element of it or that may be something that you go through at some point in your life but seductive skill is the ability to have choice is the ability to go and see that woman over there and go okay everyone looks at the back there's no one there that one there that one that I want to talk to once not you Liam. To go over there and make a good impression and try and get something started because without it you are going to be living in scarcity. Most men although they may live in a major metropolis are essentially living in a small village when it comes to the choices they have with women and they are choosing from a very very small pool and therefore the likelihood of finding the one or the right one for that time is non-existent which means that they're often going to get into shitty relationships with girls that are not right for them they may be right the girl the girl and he may be right for other people doesn't mean they're awful human beings just means they're not right for each other and so I've met a lot of these digital entrepreneurs who are lonely right because they're doing all the stuff and it's working in a sense okay I've got the money and I've got muscles and I feel healthy but here I am maneuvering around the world with a severe lack of actual purpose so what I want to move on to is looking at how is it that you can develop social networks friendships and of course relationships with people in the most effective for our dating work week kind of way. Firstly have a think about your best friend and if anyone's there going like we'll go and make one yeah how is it that you knew or you know that that person is your best friend does anyone want to say anything about that how do you know yeah okay through all the stuff you've been through together let's let's let's look at that as a concept on the other side all of you have had a situation where you've been involved in you've been thrown in with a bunch of people for work or a sports team or university or something like that and you hang out with those people socially as well and you find that within that group that there's some people you click with and then so after work drinks or you know barbecues on Sunday or whatever people do when they're part of groups and you have a friendship and this friendship may last for years but the moment that you move away the season ends or the university ends or the reason for you guys to hang out together ends so does the friendship and you just waft off into Facebook you know acquaintances why is it that you weren't it meant that you may have been with those people for many years why is it that you're not friend really actually friends with those people as opposed to the best friend any quick idea yeah okay so the environment okay the environment shifts and changes but I mean my best friend and I leave very very different lives now all right he's a busker in Australia very good songwriter singer and plays music on the streets and I'm me right yet I still consider that person to be my absolute best friend now the reason that I have such a strong relationship with that person is because of all the things that we did for each other right it's all of the investments that we made in each other and those were various types of currencies so I'm going to talk to you guys about a concept I call the seductive economy which is the exchange of non-final financial currencies with other people in order to create bonds with them because the way that you actually create particularly between men strong relationships is through debts and favours the reason why the relationship of the in the sports team dissolves after the end of the sporting season is because you guys didn't invest anything in each other aside from time spent around each other right you may have been civil you may have been friendly you hang out you drink beer you do whatever you're doing together but there has been no real stretch on either side