 Well, welcome to the show, Connor. Great to have you. Thanks so much for having me here. I think to start, it would just be great to hear a little bit about your journey as it's impacted the work that you do. And I think a lot of our audience members, especially men, will resonate. Now for the women who are listening, if you want to understand men better in your life, this episode is also worth turning into, even though we're going to focus a lot of what we're talking about today on men specifically. I grew up in Northern Alberta. It's sort of an interesting, interesting place to grow up, right? It's like the, I think I said this before, but it's like the Texas of Canada and you know, big trucks, lots of oil, lots of cowboys, lots of guns, but it's minus 30 out, you know, for six months of the year and you're, you know, you're building igloos in the backyard and stuff like that during the winter. But I ended up later on in life or sort of after high school going out and pursuing a music career, that went pretty well for a while and I was traveling the world and on paper from the outside, I think it probably looked like I, I had it all together. You know, I was really trying to pursue this, this life that I thought I needed to build as a man and I had this beautiful girlfriend and I was traveling the world and I had this cool career and I had the motorcycle and the Mustang and you know, all the, maybe not that that's what other guys aspire to the five liter Mustang, but yeah. And so all of that was going on, but behind the scenes, I was really struggling and you know, I was struggling with substance abuse, probably a, you know, a porn addiction and loss of infidelity and cheating and lying to people around me and I was just a mess. You know, I really felt out of control. The problem with it was that I didn't tell anybody. Nobody really knew what was going on and I was also sort of convinced as I've come to know now after working with guys for like a decade that I needed to hit rock bottom in order for things to change. And I think this is a big thing that a lot of us struggle with that we are convinced that in some way things need to completely fall apart and disintegrate in order for things to get better or shift or change. And I had bought into that on some, some level myself, you know, it was like that scene in Austin Powers where, you know, he's sitting on the steamroller and the guys just like standing down the hallway like screaming like, ah, no, I mean, so the steamroller was moving super slow. That was me seeing the like car crash of my life coming and just not fricking turning the wheel. Like I knew shit was going to fall apart and, but I felt helpless to actually do anything about it. And so, you know, sort of fast forward, my girlfriend found out, my girlfriend at the time found out that I had been unfaithful and normally in the past I, with other women and even with her, I had, I had sort of talked my way out of it, you know, talked my way through it and I couldn't do that this time and she left. She moved out. I was devastated and rather than sort of admitting what had been going on to the people in my life because I was so ashamed of my actions and I felt so out of control. I didn't tell anybody and I moved all of my stuff in a storage and I decided that the thing that I should do is live out of the back of my 2005, 2007 Pontiac G5, which, you know, six foot two living in the back of a two-door coop, not the, not the best thing to do living in Walmart parking lots, but it's really what, there was like a part of me that, that's what I felt like I deserved, you know, in this sort of strange way. But eventually that wasn't sustainable and I started to, you know, reach out to people in my life. Two major things happened that sort of shifted the course and trajectory of things. The first one was I sat down with a buddy of mine that I had traveled with, I had performed with. I sort of, you know, broke the lid loose and told him what had been going on behind the scenes about the lies and the cheating and, you know, all the stuff that I had been really struggling with, the substance abuse. I probably just talked at him for like 30, 40 minutes, you know, just like sitting in a confessional and just telling him everything. When I was done, he, you know, he just paused and there was a silence between us and he just said, thank you to me and he got emotional. And he said, you know, I got to share something with you as well. And I sort of braced for impact kind of, you know, thinking like maybe he's been doing the same shit behind the scenes. Maybe he's been messing around with, you know, my ex-girlfriend or something like that. And that wasn't it at all. He proceeded to tell me that he'd really been struggling with depression and that he had tried to take his life about a month and a half before. And, you know, I was devastated, but I was also struck by this very strange feeling of how can I know everything about you except arguably the most important thing? You know, I know the type of scotch you like to drink and the women you like to date and the food you like to eat and the TV shows you like to watch. But I didn't know that you were really struggling and he didn't know that I was really struggling. And so what was interesting is that as I started to reconnect with some of the other men in my life at that time, I started to see this pattern where we had these very surface level relationships that lacked depth. And when I was just honest and transparent with them about how shit in my life hadn't been working and how I was really struggling, you know, they started to tell me about the broken marriages and the businesses that I thought were good that were falling apart and, you know, the health problems that they hadn't talked about. And so I really started to get a deeper layer of who these guys were in my life. And the second thing that happened, I was fortunate enough to have a mentor in my life, you know, a man that was in his 70s who had been in my life before and I had shared with him what had been going on and just asked for a little bit of help. You know, I said, I don't really know what to do. I don't know how to work on this. Like I don't even know where to begin. And, you know, he luckily was very well versed in Jungian psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy and Gestalt therapy and Buddhism and Zen and Taoism. And so I just started to work with him and he really helped me and sort of pieced me back together in a way. And then that turned into a real genuine apprenticeship where I would pay him for his time to teach me these therapeutic and spiritual modalities. And another time when I didn't have enough money I would work on his farm and, you know, farm asparagus for him and shop wood and do all the things that he, you know, he couldn't do in his mid 70s anymore. That really kind of saved me and put me on this different path that would lead me to what I do today. Well, I want to say first, thank you for your vulnerability and sharing that story with our podcast audience. I think many of the men listening would be ashamed to share that with friends. And we'll talk about why that is. I want to touch on a part earlier where you shared that you had the sense and what you've seen in other men, the sense that you need to hit rock bottom for any of these major problems issues to be solved for you to rectify what's going on in this slow motion car crash that is life. Why do you think that is? Why is that happening in the modern man? So I think there's a couple of things that feed into it. I think the first one is this vacancy of initiation and initiatory processes within our culture. We, for a very long time, have had initiations that helped men cross a threshold into manhood. And those initiations oftentimes put a man in a position where he's powerless. If you look at any initiation that's existed historically or even today, they in some ways are designed to be unconquerable. You can't dominate that initiation process. You can't overpower it. In some ways, you as a man are put into a position of powerlessness where there's no victory and there's no winning. And you just have to kind of make it out alive. And so there's a great quote by Richard Rohr who said that until a man experiences a sense of powerless, he'll always abuse power. So I think that some men in my experience having worked with guys from all over the world now for the better part of a decade, I think when we as men miss out on some kind of initiatory process, we create a pseudo initiation in our lives. Psychologically, relationally, where we literally just blow up the house to see if we can survive it, to see if we can get through because there's something in that going through this dark period in our lives where it teaches us something about ourselves and who we are as a man and what we're capable of and what we can get through. And it's kind of this test that we've stripped out of our culture that I think is incredibly, incredibly damaging. So I think that that's part of it. In order to find yourself to live this authentic life, you have to know what that is. You have to know what you're made of. And the only way to do that is you have to lose yourself first. Losing yourself is the surrender to yourself, right? And this is that initiation process. There's no overpowering it. There's no overcoming. It's just a surrender to it. And then get out, find your way out. That's the only victory. And I love that you said that if there isn't anything set up that our mind, our body, our emotion, we'll find ourselves going through that. We'll make that for ourselves. And the scary thing about that is what we create rather than having that process could be much more dangerous. And we're also living in this world where so many young men are just living a very safe life. You can look back into the 1940s and see a schoolyard jungle gym that would never be in the back of a schoolyard today. That this thing just has... It's like 10 feet in the air. There's iron and bars. And these children are living a very safe life. They're being coddled. We've been talking on the show about rather, well, helicopter parents and then the lawn mower parents of taking out any challenges that lie in front of you. And all that does is then convey a message to that child of reaching a life of safety. So that idea of losing yourself or having these challenges, that is the wrong thing. That's the thing that you need to be staying away from. Culturally, if you look at how we've evolved culturally over the span of tens of thousands of years, every single culture, pretty much every single one that I know of has some sort of rights of passage historically for young boys to enter into manhood. And there's many reasons for that and we could sort of discuss that. But the main thing is that there's no real demarcation unless you provide some kind of an initiation. So there's no real demarcation between well, I'm a boy now and I'm a man now and what does it actually mean for me to be a man within the context of my culture and my society within my tribe, within my community? If you look back and again some of these initiation rights still exist in many places, they can include a number of different things. It can be a vision quest where you're given water and you're sent out into the forest and you have to survive for four or five days on your own and then return oftentimes commune in a sort of animalistic way with nature. You know, that's a very animist based way of doing it. There are some that are much more physically taxing, right? I don't remember the exact name of the tribe but they stick their hands into gloves that are filled with bullet ants and the bullet ants will sting you and it's just the most excruciating pain. You know, it's like having the most painful ayahuasca trip ever on the face of the planet for, you know, 36 hours straight. The interesting part of it is that there's an arc to the initiation and there's different parts that show up, right? There's the calling, there's the descent, there's the abyss and you really meet who you are in the abyss. You know, do you want to completely run away? Do you, do you want to give up? Do you want to quit? Can you keep, you know, can you keep pushing through? And then there's sort of the atonement, right? Maybe you atone for what you've done or what you've experienced. You find a sense of forgiveness and then you return. And the whole point of initiation, I think that this is the really crucial part is that it wasn't necessarily about the individual. It's not for their personal betterment or their personal development. It's actually so that a boy can step into manhood and return back to his community and be more effective in his contribution to the culture, to actually contributing his skills, his talents, his attributes and being able to have real merit and worth within culture and society. And I think that's something that we're really struggling with today and it's why you see so much conversation about what's happening with young boys and what's happening with men and, you know, are men in decline and are boys in decline, you know, less men are going to college, less men under 30, you know, are having sex never before. It's like 27% of men under 30 haven't been sexually active in the last year, if ever, right? Which is up, I think it's three times in the last 10 years, right? It used to be something like eight to 10%. And so there's so many markers in our culture today that young boys and young men are really struggling. And I think in some ways it's, you know, it's because of this lack of initiation. I think it's also an absence of masculine energy or just male role models within our society that they can look up to. And so what happens is that we look to test ourselves, you know, and I did it in a number of ways. I bought 1,000 cc motorcycle at 19 years old and was driving 320 kilometers an hour down, you know, fricking city streets and highways and shit like that. Just doing dumb stuff. That's sort of baked into many of us. And so I think the last thing I would say is that when we don't have these things, when we don't have these moments to sort of test ourselves and see what we're worth and see what we're capable of, we kind of either go down a path of trying to create that in our lives unconsciously or we just resign to over domestication. We sit back and we play video games for 40, 50 hours a week and we smoke weed constantly and we just kind of check out from society. And I see this happening all the time with young men and it really is, I mean, I want to say heartbreaking because I think that that's true. But I've experienced it, you know, I lived it. It's not just an American problem, right? Those fertility rates and this extended adolescence, we're seeing it everywhere in the West and in the East. That tells me it's culturally but technologically as our cultures may be different, but the technology that we're all using is certainly the same and sending out the messages which extends that adolescence. And if we don't really have many problems that force us into being an adult outside of the initiation phase, there's no hardship to our facing where we have to buck up and make it happen. We're going to stay comfortable. Well, there's two things that strike me and the work that you do, the work that I see around men in general is this return to nature aspect of being out in the wilderness, getting away from the devices, getting away from the technology, sort of stripping away the distractions that we're facing in the modern world to create the space for us to actually share, be vulnerable to open up and go through all the work. The second piece to this is this incessant need for rugged individuality and proving once worth in a competitive state with other men and sort of where we are in seeking status, whether it's online or in person and what you're saying, like buying the decorative car, buying the nicer house, adding the addition, but inside internally, we have this intense struggle that we're hiding from everyone. So I'd like to unpack both of those dynamics because I know they come up in your work and I just find it so interesting in my own journey, going into nature, getting away from all of this tech habit and I'm doing it here in a couple days and coming back and feeling refreshed and spending that time with other men where there is not this competition, sometimes complete strangers in the men's group that I'm in that allows me to actually share and be vulnerable in ways that I don't often feel comfortable with my really close personal friends. There's such a merit to it in some ways because we begin to see who we really are, you know, undistracted. Honestly, I think that's very challenging for many guys because many of us, we don't like who we are. You know, if I could sort of print out the internal commentary within my head when I was 24 or 25, I mean, it was brutal, man. It was brutal. I hated myself with a very specific kind of intensity and the way that I talked to myself was terrible. You know, I was abusive and it was violent and it was cruel and it was mean and it was, you know, I was just constantly beating the crap out of myself. Anytime I got something wrong with a woman, anytime that I, you know, did anything wrong in my life, I mean, I just took a peg out of myself. I think that that's the case for a lot of men. Like one of the exercises that I'll do at a weekend is I'll get all the guys to write down their inner dialogue. So I'll say, you know, when you screw up, how do you talk to yourself? Write it out on a piece of paper, give them a couple of minutes and then I partner them up with another man that they've connected with, you know, in the past couple of days and I said, okay, cool. Read that off to him and speak it to him as if you're talking to him. Every single dude's like, no, like I like this guy. I don't want to shit talk to him like that. I want to talk to him like that's terrible. Okay, well, then why are you doing that to yourself? I think the nice thing about stripping away the technology, getting out into nature, being around other men, we can actually begin to clear the way to see what's going on in our heads, hearts and bodies. Are we really struggling with something from our past, you know, from our family or upbringing? Are we still carrying some heartbreak from a previous relationship that failed or you know, didn't work out? You know, are we dealing with some bitterness or resentment in our current relationship that's sort of poisoning the waters of our intimacy and sexual connection? Like what's actually going on? And if we don't create time to do that, then life will just continue to tidal wave over you. You know, sometimes you have to get out of the ocean to kind of pick your path to swim out and see where you want to surf. But if you never do that, I mean, you can get pulled into the rocks pretty quick. So I think that's one of the big ones. And then, you know, this secondary piece in terms of being around other men and having these conversations, I think that we've undervalued and underestimated the importance of having real, transparent conversations with other men to humanize the shit that we all go through and deal with. You know, the amount of weekends and workshops that I've led where, you know, men have talked about experiencing abuse as a kid or being bullied, you know, or really feeling like they struggle on having deep social anxiety with women. I mean, these are just all common things, but it's just not what we are normally talking about at the bar, you know, or after work with our buddies. It's just not the normal dialogue. And so we kind of need to have an opportunity to shift that culture and then bring it back, you know, into our everyday relationships. And I think those types of moments provide that. Plus they allow us to really dig into seeing and hearing ourselves in other men. You know, I think that's one of the, and it's hard to really present the value of that, you know, but really seeing yourself like, oh man, I went through that too, you know, or I struggled with that as well. And we get out of this like lone wolf mentality, like I'm the only one that struggles with talking to girls, you know, I'm the only one that struggles in approaching women or I'm the only one that, you know, had an abusive parent as a kid. It's like, no, no, brother, like that's not true at all. And, you know, I think that grief, sadness, anxiety, anger, these types of things are best processed when they're shared, you know, you can go and hit a pillow or, you know, hit a punching bag and get some of your anger out. But to have somebody else witness the anger that you've been carrying from being bullied as a kid or feeling outcast from your family, that changes something because now you're no longer carrying it alone. We certainly have to seek out those opportunities because they're just not part of our lives like they used to be. In fact, this was quite surprising to AJ and I a few years ago, both of us, and so I'm a generation older, I'm Gen X, AJ, Millennial, but both of us grew up going to Boy Scouts, just Boy Scouts alone. And when I went to Boy Scouts, it was just us boys. Some of the fathers were the troop leaders. I had a very active troop. We went repelling and skiing, campings every other month. There was just so many activities. And in those environments, of course you're forced to be your best and compete and figure out where you are in that hierarchical structure in men. And we had got the opportunity just a few years ago to a Boy Scout camp out in LA, and we were so excited to go there. And there was some discussion of an emotional intelligence badge for the guys, and we were chatting about it. And in discussing that, some of the parameters was about now that the Boy Scouts is a more inclusive space and women are in there now. And it's like, well, that directly changes the atmosphere of men being men and being in that group and figuring that out. Because their attention is now not about being the best or figuring out where they are in that system and the diplomacy that goes in traveling through that hierarchical male system, it's now, how do I get this girl's attention? And there's going to be the guys who are naturally going to be attractive to those women because they were given gifts very early in life and then the other men have to figure out ways in order to get those girls attention, whether of befriending the girls or finding unique ways to get their attention. It destroys that environment that allowed those men to begin to figure out in a supportive environment who they are and the diplomacy of bonding with other men that allows for that vulnerability to happen. In fact, of all the Boy Scout events that I've been on, sitting around the campfire late night, that's what we did. We discussed those things. We discussed about the girls in class. We discussed about how we felt in our home environment and what was going on. And of course, that was also going through, it's in the teenage, the beginning of those teenage years where those things are developed. Yeah, I think there's, I love what you're saying. Like in my book, I write about the myth of male vulnerability and I talked about this because I think in our culture right now, there's sort of all this conversation about men are in decline. Men need help and men need to step up. But the solution that's being presented is men just need to be more vulnerable. That's sort of like the cure-all solution that's thrown at men in the media, that's thrown on men online. And it's like, well, yes and no. I mean, some men, for me, I needed more than just vulnerability. I needed community. I needed to develop some skills. I needed to develop the internal skill of self-recognition and self-validation. Like it wasn't just me being vulnerable and opening up with other people. But I think that the other piece of it is that, you know, when a group of guys who are attracted to women get together and a woman enters the room, our relationships with one another as men suddenly changes from, okay, we can challenge one another to, oh, there's part of me that if I'm single and you're single and he's single, we're suddenly competing with one another. You know, especially if we all find that woman attractive. And that just starts to show up within our psyche and our behavior and our decisions. And so stripping away these spaces where we as men can talk, can connect, can open up, you know, can talk about some of the challenges that we're facing. And then support one another and challenging each other to step into who we see ourselves as capable of being. You know, what type of boyfriend or, you know, businessmen or entrepreneur or professional do we think we're capable of? And then I can, you know, we can support one another in that endeavor. I think that type of dynamic is what a lot of men are searching for. You know, can I allow you to challenge me to my own betterment? There's some really interesting research. I think it's Dr. John Berry and he's based in the UK or Scotland. And he's done a lot of research around men and he's found that one of the highest indicators of a man's happiness is whether or not he's working on himself, his self-improvement is actually one of the highest indicators that he will be, have a sense of fulfillment and purpose and meaning and joy in his life. Right? And so I think the more that we can create a culture of working on ourselves of some form of self-improvement as men, whatever area that's in, right? It could be woodworking. It doesn't have to be psychological development, right? It can be other things. But there is a deep long-end yearning sort of baked into us as men that wants to improve. And when we strip away the environments and the spaces for men to do that, I mean, we just crater the male population of society. Well, there's a discipline that goes along with that self-improvement and that mastery. It's not showing up once. It's not watching another YouTube video. It's not passively listening to the podcast and getting a quick tip or the biohacking or all these buzzwords that we hear. And we also use them to engage attention and get someone's attention. But when we're talking about self-improvement, we're talking about actual effort, consistency over a long period of time that leads to that self-mastery that men are after. And many of the challenges that we're talking about, well, there's another Netflix show. Just hit the reset button on the video game. There's a new shiny object on social media. There's another distraction and direction that we're being pulled in. And as our attention spans shorten, it becomes harder and harder to show up with that consistency and that discipline to reach the self-improvement, the mastery that we so crave. And I always showed her to think of the clients that we work with is showing up in our program that they don't have an outlet for that. They've put all of their eggs in this career cart that's allowed them to get the watch, to get the fancy car, to get the nice house in hopes that it'll translate to the partner that they can be happy with in a relationship. And then at the very end, they have a little bit of time left for these service-level relationships with other guys. And whenever we're dealing with a single guy, we're actually saying, you need to spend more time around other men. You need to actually enrich your social circle to be someone who is attractive enough to find the partner you're looking for. And instead, they want to go on the app and they want to know what's the best opening line or what's the Photoshop filter that I need to get more matches online. And they're sacrificing this whole side of these relationships that men need with other men to actually get to the self-improvement, to get to the mastery, to face the challenges that you need to know that you're on the right track. And then when you create an environment that encourages that, when you actually bring guys together and oftentimes they're complete strangers and joining the program, they lay down their guard a little bit and it's this ripple effect where there is an opportunity for vulnerability and then we go deeper and deeper and all of a sudden, we're hearing about these past childhood traumas. We're hearing about that atrocious breakup. We're hearing about that moment where your career collapsed and you were let go and it's something that you had fought tooth and nail for and meant the world to you. And in that loss of identity, in that loss of meaning, they can actually find what they're looking for a way out. But if we're not sharing as men and it sucks that has to happen with complete strangers oftentimes in these environments, if we're not sharing with our friends, we only spend another weekend watching the Super Bowl. We spend another weekend indulging in the video games that we love. We learn each other's kids' names. We learn what company they work at. But we don't know what their core values are. We don't know what mission they're on, what actually motivates them as other guys. Well, it's hard to be there to support one another in these relationships. You know, we talk a lot about status. You know, I see a lot of like in, you know, in certain parts of communities of like, you know, women want men with status and resources and whatnot. And it's like, well, your social circle is a resource and that builds status. And so one of the biggest ways that you can signal to a woman that you are a competent, worthy pursuit as a partner, you know, long term or short term is the quality of your male relationships because that says something to her because women know how hard it is for men to have healthy, powerful relationships. So when women see a man who has really powerful male relationships, they are naturally drawn to it. They're like, oh, you must be doing something right. So there's a natural curiosity that then draws that woman in. So we often undervalue and underindex the actual, we could call it status that can come along with those types of depth oriented male relationships. I also wanted to touch on one thing which was use the word discipline. One of the things, I talk about this all the time, but one of the things that I had to work on in my own life and that I see a lot of men having to work on is their relationship to discipline because we've grown up in my opinion, and maybe not everybody, I'm making a general statement, but we've grown up collectively under this sort of guise that discipline is a form of punishment. And so a lot of men are trying to be disciplined by punishing themselves, right? Internally beating the crap out of themselves, you know, punishing themselves by shaming themselves, you know, and all these sort of subtle things that take place when discipline is meant to be a form of practice. It's meant to be a process that's unfolding that you're working on, you know, that you're sort of chiseling away at. You look at guys like David Goggins and Jaco Willings and it's easy to see like, oh, these guys are hyper-disciplined and hyper-ritual organized. It's like, well, they didn't start like that, you know, they didn't just like come out of the womb disciplined, you know, they built that shit. And so, but they didn't build that by, I mean, maybe Goggins is building it by punishing himself with like 10 miles a day and destroying his knees. But like, you don't have to do it like that, you know? And so when I started to shift from discipline being this internal punishment, punishing myself for getting things wrong to shifting to actually being disciplined and giving myself permission to practice cultivating this skill and this trait. I mean, that changed a lot for me. I think that changes a lot for for men. We can actually shift our relationship to it. That discipline is keeping the promise to yourself. And what we talked about in the video games and the alcohol, the substances, the dating apps, like those are all outlets for you not to keep the promise to yourself to show up to the gym tomorrow to show up to work on time to be there for the friend that you promised. And so much of what we're hearing of flaking and and canceling and not being there for people is this lack of discipline, this ability to trust your own word. And when you don't trust your own word, it's impossible to build relationships of value with others. It's impossible to go deeper and we sense that in other men. We have those relationships where it's like, well, you always know it's going to be late. You always know he's going to cancel last minute. You're just going to kick it another month. And yeah, you might have some fun out of the bar with him, but you don't have that realness, that sense of trust in the other person because oftentimes we're not even in a place of trusting ourselves. And I think that's what draws people to the discipline. It's not the punishment. It's not the calluses on David Goggins' hands. But it's the fact that you know that he's going to show up. There's a certainty in that discipline that builds trust and fosters the relationships of depth with other men that we're looking for. And there you go. There is a cost to not having that discipline or keeping your word with other people where with yourself, well, I'm not going anywhere and I'm just going to beat myself up tomorrow. But then I could just go drink the pain away and numb myself out of it where if I, how many times can I blow off AJ before he goes, you know what? There is no more going to the gym together. There is no more doing this together because I've already put in effort and time and you've blown it. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that we were talking about like the shadow, you know, before we jumped on and I think for many of us and we could sort of dissect why this has happened. But I think for many of us, we've actually discarded some of our more masculine-oriented traits and qualities into our shadow. We've disconnected from them. You know, maybe you grew up in a household with a single mom who, you know, had been hurt by your father and you know, she was constantly saying, don't be like your father, you know, or anger, anger makes a dangerous man or you know, whatever the case may be. And so you disconnected from your own sense of assertiveness or you disconnected from your own sense of discipline. Right. And there's many different examples that that can look like but I think that many of us need to explore what's in the sort of I call it the hurt locker sometimes. What's in the hurt locker of my own mind and my own heart. You know, did I grow up being told that I, you know, I just need to be vulnerable and emotional. And so I'm always that and I'm disconnected from a sense of anger that allows me to maybe set a boundary and say no and say, I won't tolerate that in a relationship. You know, that's not okay or to set a boundary with ourselves and say, I'm not going to, you know, speak like that or act like that or make that decision. And so we have to be able to explore this other part of us that we often don't want to look at. And just to tie this back in, I think that's why many of us create these rock bottom moments where we we sabotage a relationship. We sabotage a career. You know, we sabotage a work meeting because we stay up late drinking or watching porn until three o'clock in the morning or whatever the hell we do. We sabotage because we want to pull ourselves in the direction of understanding our shadow, understanding our hurt. There's a great quote by a guy named Francis Weller who said, your pain has its own intelligence. And so that shadow within us, that pain within us, if we don't become familiar with it, it will start to run our lives. Like I the first line of my book is a man's work begins in pain. Right. A man's work begins in pain. Why? Because if you don't know your pain, it's going to fuck your life. You know, it's going to cause you to sabotage. You're going to feel insecure in relationships. You're going to sabotage your sex life with your girl. You're going to start to act needy. Why? Because there's a part of you that's hurting. And if you can't tend to it, you're going to try and get her to do it for you. Right. A classic example of this. It's like, why? Why do we become needy? Why do we become insecure in relationships? Why do we try and seek validation? I was, I was like a like the captain of this, you know, I was like captain's validation seeking. You know, if there was a cape for it, I would have had it. But I did that because I felt like I lacked a sense of worth and I didn't validate myself. Right. I had never developed any internal sense of self validation. And so compassion was in the shadow. You know, my pain was in the shadow. And so I needed women to give me validation because I wouldn't do it for myself. So I think that there's a worthy endeavor and starting to go down that path a little bit because maybe your discipline is in there. You know, or maybe there's something within your shadow that's causing you to not be disciplined, you know, to constantly sabotage yourself and reinforce a story. And the last thing I'll say is like, I see a lot of men who are trying to impress someone, you know, their dad, their mom, you know, some form of parent or or a partner or whomever. And they're they're doing that because they want some form of reassurance that they are valuable because they haven't developed the internal sense of recognizing where their value is, you know, and that they've put the hard work and the effort into it. And maybe they lack the male friendships to say, dude, good job, you know, phenomenal work. Like I experienced this firsthand recently. Like I don't mean to keep like referring to my books. I hate when people do that on my show, but my my my book launched on the on the 31st and eight men in my life who have been a part of a group that I meet with on a weekly basis over the course of the last three years celebrated the crap out of me. You know, they shared it. We got on a on a call all eight of us, you know, they all have their own platforms. They shared it out and it was so cool to feel that level of support, that level of recognition, you know, getting text messages from my buddies reading the book for the first time being like, dude, this is phenomenal. Like this is changing my life and I'm like cool. This is, you know, that type of recognition from the other men in our lives makes it so that I can then go to my wife and I don't need her to be the only source of validation and recognition in my life. You know, and so there's a sense of freedom that then enters into my intimate relationship with, you know, with my wife. And I think that that is what a lot of men are wanting to cultivate because they know that when they're getting it from themselves and other men in their life that it creates this opening and this freedom within their relationship. So what strikes me about that validation is we often see in our clients they shy away from sharing those accomplishments or sharing opportunities where they put in the hard work and got a certain result and we have to encourage them at the start of all of our group coaching calls to share their wins no matter how big or small they are. And what inevitably happens is other group members are proud for them and then they feel a sense of pride. It's not actually in the sharing. It's when the other men in the group express pride that they can now give themselves the credit give themselves the opportunity to feel prideful and it's it's shocking that we don't practice this of saying to your buddies, man, I'm really proud of you. That was incredible. And in turn, we never see it ourselves. We never feel it ourselves and we're just kind of walking around with this whole and then of course when we get in a romantic relationship, we're seeking that validation from our partner. We're seeking that validation from women because we're not getting it from the men in our lives. And of course that neediness pushes away the women in our lives. They don't want a man who's needy and then our clients will come to us and be like, well, I have the string of relationships and women that I'm really interested in but they don't seem to be interested in me. And again, it goes back to well, what's going on with your peer group? What's going on with the other men in relationships in your life? Do you feel whole and secure around them? Do you have them? Or have you gone the lone wolf? Have you put aside socializing? Have you put aside joining that group or maybe putting yourself out there in a bowling league or trying something new at a meetup group or not really giving yourself the opportunity for those other connections with men? And in turn, you should show up at home and you're just seeking all of this from the one person in your life, your partner who's not capable or ready to give all of that to you. Yeah. I mean, I think this is why men's work in many ways however we want to term that is so important, right? Just getting around other guys and having this kind of relational nutrition or sustenance from other men that we normally don't have. And I think a lot of that, you know, I've talked about the plague of absent fathers quite a bit in my work because you know, it's like one in four kids in America are going to grow up without a father, you know, in the household. It's a huge, huge number. And what's interesting is that if you look at the data and the research, a young girl can grow up in a household with a single mother and relatively be unaffected. There are some side effects that can start to show up but who really struggles and suffers are young boys. You know, the rates of young men who struggle in a single parent household is pretty high, right? It's like 90% of all homeless and runaway kids are from fatherless homes. And 63% of you suicides are from fatherless homes. And 85% of all children who show behavioral disorders are from fatherless homes, right? I mean, the stats are wild. Well, I think the underreported part of that that people gloss over is they hear that and they go, well, my dad was there. My parents didn't get divorced and they think it's okay. But what we're actually seeing the trend line is that for men, they're putting in longer hours on average at work. And with the recession and with the economic factors, they might be present. They might not be divorced, but they're not actually there to support the child rearing in a meaningful way. They're using work as an excuse, long hours, working overtime, working weekends, traveling. And they're spending less and less time actually interacting with the kids coming home exhausted. The kids are already in bed. And the women who are in the child rearing are also feeling the stress and strain of like, well, hey, I need you present to help support me with the child rearing. So both parents, even in an undivorced household, there is this absence of father. And I think a lot of times it gets glossed over when we hear these statistics because we're like, well, I had my dad there. My father was present in my life. You know, it was different between him being there and being present for you. You know, I love what you're bringing in because it's, you know, he could be a workaholic an alcoholic, you know, he could just not know what to do or what to teach you. And so he kind of just like goes through the motions of okay, I'll take you to practice and I'll take you back. But there's no conversations about having your first girlfriend or no interaction or interest in your life in terms of what's happening at school, you know, that that can be equally as damaging to have a father there and to have him take zero interest in your life. And so, you know, there's there's many different versions. I like what you're saying because it does broaden the scope of, you know, that an absent father isn't just somebody who's not in the house. Well, when my parents got divorced, they stayed with my dad. However, he got remarried. And when he and so I was a teenager, the way my dad looked at it was that his life needed to be his attention needed to be put to his new family with the new wife and the new child that was coming in. I was now a teenager. So hey, he's good. He does his thing. He's out skateboarding. He's playing guitars. I don't need to worry about him. It was like, well, you know, I mean, that's going on as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think. Yeah. I mean, just I'll say this really quick, like my my parents divorced when I was three. My, you know, both my parents remarried other people when I was five and six. And then they they built their own families. And one of the things that I got stuck in and I see a lot of guys doing this is that I kept trying to figure out why, like why did he do that? Cause I didn't know. I didn't know why he left. I didn't know why the divorce happened. And so I spent a very long time asking this question of like, why did that happen? And I think that we as men get caught in this rational loop of trying to figure out like, why did my dad do that or act like that or not, you know, not engage with me in this way versus focusing on the important material and information of, well, what was the impact that had on me? You know, because I did figure out eventually why he left. But it didn't change the void and the and the hurt and the pain that it caused me as a child. It didn't change that. And so I spent years and over a decade chasing like, why did he leave? And then I finally got to it and it all that was left was still that sort of like hole that I felt in me as a kid. And then I had to go and deal with that. And so if I could make a case for it to men that are out there that maybe you have a bit of a challenge with your dad or that relationship is like, maybe shift from asking why and shift to what's the impact that it has on you. And if you can bring that into a conversation with other men, there's worth in that. And there's a great quote by all maybe just wrap up on this is a great quote by Nietzsche. He said the the secrets of the father are revealed in the sun. I'm paraphrasing right but the secrets of the father revealed in the sun. And so we as as young men you know as sons we often move through life in this sort of pursuit of either living in opposition to our fathers. I don't want to be anything like him. You know, I don't want to become him which can create all sorts of trouble or we live in pursuit of trying to be him. You know, trying to live up to his expectations and trying to fill in his shoes and neither of which actually allow us to be free for who we actually are. And so I think part of this work that every man has to do at some point in his life is to really take a close look at the relationship that he had or has with his father. Not to blame his dad not to shame his dad not to say you should have done this or done that. It doesn't really do anything but to say what was the impact that it had on me and can I forgive him? You know, or can I embrace all of the goodness and greatness that he bestowed upon me and not feel this crushing pressure to live up to his expectations but that relationship is a huge one for us as men. You could have had the greatest family environment growing up but that family that environment will be focused on certain things. Therefore, it won't be focused on others. So you cannot go back and condemn the family. Why didn't you focus on these things? You guys only focus. There was reasons for that. That's why you have as you mentioned is how did that affect me so I can work on those areas? Yeah, and I think giving grace to your father and the expectations he created for you based on his own experiences. So those expectations are coming from a place of love, care, concern for you, wanting health, happiness, safety in your life but those expectations also came from the way that he was raised and for many of us in our generation my dad was raised by a man who was sent off to World War who came back from that intensely scarred and unable to express any emotion and that conditioned my dad to not express any emotion and the emotion the pain, the anguish that happened during that war got passed down generationally and now we're in a situation where we're blaming our dads we're saying we don't want to be like them we have all these expectations that we hate we push against we try to run from in actuality we're not bringing the empathy and the grace to the way our dads are raised and maybe some of the generational trauma that came from that conflict being passed down into our own experience and for me it was realizing that my dad was doing the best he could with the tools that he had and his idea to move the family forward was to pour himself into work was to be around us less and the pain that I had from him not being there my junior high school at the football game where I actually was the star that I thought had huge impact on impressing my dad and he wasn't in the stands carrying that forward into college and trying to prove it in the career path that I chose and then when I stepped away and dropped out of grad school and experiencing the disappointment he felt largely because the expectation for him was get educated so you don't end up in the military so you don't end up shipped off and come back without a limb you know those are lessons that he had that he was working from in raising me but you got to take a step back you got to share this experience from that lens of what was it like for him and his experience in raising me instead of the blame the anger the hurt that we carry with us towards this relationship with our fathers and I found in sharing my own story of disappointing my dad finding happiness in this career that I chose and losing him and not having the opportunity to actually feel that pride but in calling my dad's friends to prepare for his funeral and hearing the stories that he had shared with them of pride so he never shared it with me but he was calling his friends to talk pridefully about all of the experiences that I was having gave me some closure and over the years they're all carrying this relationship this fraught relationship with their dad and they're fighting against him they're trying to prove something to him and in actuality just having a conversation coming at it from a place of forgiveness coming at it from a place of I want to understand you more deeply dad what was it like for you what were you experiencing in this versus being so focused on what you yourself were experiencing in the way you were raised can often move beyond that pain and break that cycle and you showing up for your children moving forward yeah so so good man so so true I mean one of the things that that I took on at one point was I wrote out 20 questions that I wanted to ask my father and because when I when I realized some of this like I you know I wanted to not let him off the hook I wanted to let let it go and forgive you know and and create this room where I could love him and appreciate him for who he was you know knowing that he's fallible because I think that the interesting thing is like I I think and maybe I'm wrong about this but I think that like every young boy and young man wants this like perfect father you know sort of longs for this father that's just going to be his hero and you know like just like the embodiment of the king and you know really teach him all the things and it can be so easy for us to to be disgruntled about not getting that and sometimes we take on the sort of ignorance of knowing or believing that we know how our father should have raised us you know which is a very ignorant place for us to position ourselves like I know my dad should have done this he should have called me more he should have you know taught me this he should have taught me nice like well how the hell do you know what what you needed you know when you were 12 you know and you were acting a fool or like you know but this is what we do when we're hurt right is we pass judgment we pass blame it on someone right you gotta play yeah right so I wrote down 20 questions I said listen dad I want to ask you some questions are you open to this and he's like okay well I might not answer all of them I said okay no problem and I just I just started easy right I just I just started with like you know just easy questions like what what makes you happy in life and and it was a really interesting experience we ended up having this two and a half hour conversation and you know and it was I think it brought us closer but it also gave me a sense of closure in understanding who he really was and I think that in order for us to in order for us to step into the the real authentic expression of who we want to be as a man and especially in relationship to women we have to look at that relationship to our father because for many of us they are the model that has created the blueprint of who are you as a man what does it mean to be a man what does it mean to be masculine what does it mean to to be a man and how you treat women you know how you talk to them how you engage with them and so I think that that's one of the reasons why this is is so valuable and the men that have gone through this as you're talking about AJ and Johnny is like oh it's freaking hard but it's liberating you know it's like it really there is something wonderful about it yeah they often look lighter after that conversation and we have a homework assignment in our program around asking your father these questions to deepen the relationship to get to a place of understanding instead of accusing blaming guilt-tripping arguing with his view understanding his past his present his future what he really wants for you who he was what his dreams were what his aspirations were how you coming into the picture impacted all of that and oftentimes this conversation is terrifying because much of the conversation we have with our dads is trying to impress them is not trying to go a level deeper is not trying to really understand them it's to get that validation from them and we don't get validation through understanding our dads so our dad is never questioned in this way or dad maybe doesn't share what's actually gone on in his life and of course then we're dealing with all these expectations both real and sometimes completely made up in our own minds based on what we assume the answers to these questions are so it's a really powerful exercise to have that level of conversation with your dad and and I encourage it in all of our clients because I'm like I can't have this conversation there's going to come a point in your life where you can't unfortunately have that conversation so even if your relationship is fraught now you haven't talked in years being the person to bring the olive branch to the situation to move beyond whatever those past transgressions were outside of maybe speaking to a therapist if if it really was you know physical trauma or abuse but looking to bring back that level of communication while you still have that opportunity while your dad is still around is such a powerful opportunity for men to really grow to understand themselves deeply and to move beyond the past pain that they might not even be conscious they're bringing in to future relationships yeah one I think this kind of ties into what we were talking about before where I think there's just a kind of vacancy or absence of mature male energy and so you see these sort of like meteoric rises of certain people who represent like I think love them or hate them and I don't want to share a personal opinion or perspective on this but like Jordan Peterson I think one of the reasons why he has had so much success in the public eye is because for a lot of men regardless of their age there's something about him that he represents this kind of father archetype right that he's the sort of like cup bearer within the public square of that father energy again whether you like him or hate him or otherwise I think that it that kind of energy is so lacking within so many of our lives that we we go and search for it in other places and one of the things that we can do is be around other men and kind of see that feel it experienced especially older men and then start to cultivate that type of mature masculinity within ourselves you know and begin to father ourselves in some way you know to parent ourselves in some way so that we we aren't constantly needing or looking for it from our from our parents I also just want to say I love that we were going to talk about dating and our relationships to women and we've talked about dad for like 20 minutes it's funny how that it's funny how that happens it certainly touches on it and I think the other paradigm that at least bears some sharing is the role models that are put forward culturally often center around validation from women so not to name names but massive influencers whose rise to fame have often been through the trappings of virtual status showcasing all the trappings and then surrounding themselves with women so it furthers this idea that in order to be a man in order to be masculine you must have all of these things and all of this female attention so we're now when we shift gears and talk about dating we're now in this crisis where we've heard toxic masculinity we've heard me too and men are coming to us completely confused as to how to approach women and what is the right way to be masculine to actually win the attraction of the women that they're interested in and this confusion both culturally what's going on the absence of fathers is leading men unfortunately to your point earlier to be completely disillusioned and rather enter the virtual world tap out and have no sexual partners to not get involved in dating at all which is harming our ability to move forward as humans and actually have children and offspring. Yeah I was gonna say I feel like I could stand up and clap for you there that's a very succinct way of putting it and I think it's true right because when we begin to abide by this notion that we need to be who a woman or women in general want us to be we've sort of lost course you know we've disconnected from our own essence of running around trying to get the validation from the people and I think the interesting thing is that you know this is a byproduct of a lot of young boys like I said before growing up in spaces where there just isn't male energy or presence right it's like I think it's 36% of teachers in America or male right then you look at something like the therapeutic and psychological field right people are always like why don't more men go to therapy and it's like 29% of psychologists are men right you think that the content online is geared towards men the majority of it is content that is telling men how they should be right there's a difference between talking about men and talking to men and the problem is that the majority of people in our culture are not talking to men they are talking about them and it's a lot of female centric feminine oriented content that's like this is how you should be as a man this is how you should speak this is how you should behave and and so I think that there's many guys that are out there that are like stop just stop you know like stop telling me how I need to be or who I should be and stop talking about me as if I'm an object you know talk to me learn how to talk to me now that's what I think men are really I think that's what I've seen and that's what I feel you know when I go online and read some of this content it's like well if only 29% of psychologists are men you just have to see that the majority of the comments the content that's being put out is not for men right it's just not statistically it's just not going to be so I think we have to do a much better job within our culture within our society of learning how to speak to men and engaging one another in these types of conversations because they are powerful and they empower us well one of the things that we've been discussing here is all these innate ideas baked into our DNA that we need to contend with or we will build in a destructive manner and society is telling us that if we engage in a in those things that they're wrong this idea of toxic masculinity and all this other stuff but then we see these archetypes that are getting all this attention on the internet that basically is all these things that are oppressed in us blown up and blown out of proportion so it's easy to go well I have all these feelings and this guy's living it and he's surrounded money and women and all of this so maybe that's where I'm supposed to be and everyone's telling me that I'm not supposed to be that so now I have a direction because as young men we are looking to model we have to model somebody and modeling something where everything that we do is wrong doesn't feel good and now we see somebody who's modeling everything that we're told is wrong and he's surrounded by everything that we want so we have but we have nothing else to model again this comes back to having those male role models in her life it's like well the minute somebody like Jordan Peterson shows up who seems to live life in another manner through intellectual pursuits we're like oh all of a sudden that's a new direction that we can move into but we all know what gets clicks and views on the internet I mean AJ and I talk about this all the time it's like well do we want to start saying crazy things just to get more views or that's just not who we are was it how we set out to go about this 16 years ago I love what you're saying is it it really touches on I think what a lot of men are feeling I mean I've struggled with that as well right it's like do I really have to say crazy shit in order to you know in order to get some attention but I think you know it speaks to the nature that there are many guys that are just trying to find their way there is this absence of of male energy grounded mature male energy within our culture I think that our culture has also done a good job of telling men that they're not necessary or needed for a while so that that has its own consequence but then I think that also you know men we we're often very external creatures you know we look out at the world and we try and figure things out externally and so I think that we've kind of gotten into this cycle of trying to look out at the women that we're dating and trying to figuring figuring out who we should be based on what they say they want and that's a trap right I mean that's just a trap like Jung Jung had this great quote that I absolutely love and he said that a woman stands where a man's shadow begins right a woman stands where a man's shadow begins a woman stands at the precipice yeah of what a man doesn't know about himself right and so so when we start to try and form who we are as a man based off of what we think a woman wants us to be we are immediately going on a losing game right we're just going to be chasing our tails we're chasing right and we're chasing them but when we begin to like one of the things that I write about is that we actually need to turn the lens away from trying to figure her out trying to solve her problems you know trying to become who we think she wants us to be and turning that lens towards the tough question which is sometimes unknown of who the hell do I want to be what matters to me as a man and and even more importantly who do I become when I'm around this woman you know that is a very important question do I become needy do I become more grounded do I become insecure do I become somebody who's pursuing his best goals like one of the indicators that I knew that my wife was was the though like I don't want to say the one because I hate that notion of like she's the one right like but that I knew that I wanted to pursue her and that I wanted to that I wanted to commit with her was that I became someone in relationship to her and I've always been somebody that pursues big goals but I became somebody way more grounded and somebody much more focused and disciplined and and that ease showed up and it's not because she was telling me to do that or anything I'd already been on that journey before I met her but all of that just kind of started to settle in now that doesn't mean that you know we don't have challenges and whatnot but I think that that's a really important thing that we as men need to take is like who do we become around the women that we're dating or pursuing or trying to date right because that will tell us that gives us information that we can actually begin to work with about who we are and we can spend some time on that content psychologically emotionally physically versus like what does she want you know how do I how do I figure it out you know she wants me to be more vulnerable okay she wants me to open up more the amount of men that come to me they're like okay my wife is telling me to open up more my girlfriend's telling me to open up more what does that mean like how do I how do I do that it's like okay let's back up the train the other thing to AJ and I here is I'm just tired how many men do you hear that from they're tired of chasing they're tired of pretending they're tired of doing all of these things that they've been told or at least or think that they're supposed to be doing to get the things that they want and when actuality it's all inside them they have to they have to detangle it and some of these lifestyles that they're pursuing they're not sustainable to bring this to where we started this which is once you get on that hadonic treadmill or tried to live into this these unsustainable ridiculous fantasy lifestyles you understand if there's you have enough awareness that the trajectory is going to land you in your your rock bottom absolutely yeah because we chase who we think we need to be for them you know and we try and construct ourselves into an inauthentic version of who we actually want to be the hard part like the easy it's an easy thing to meet a woman and extract who she wants us to be guys are very good at getting the information out it's like okay she wants me to be smart and funny and she wants me to show up on time okay I'll do all these things that's actually way frickin easier than saying who the hell do I want to be what types of morals and ethics do I want to have what values do I want to embody in my life what type of communication do I want to have with women what's actually important with me how do I want to speak to other people my family friends children like those are the hard questions to ask because they're nebulous they're vague some a lot of times they're unknown and they actually take a long time for us to curate in our lives and so the men that will inevitably become God I hate I'm going to put heavy air quotes around this high value but but I think it's it's like it's a you know it's a very common used word and I think it's important but the men that will inevitably become high value are the men that put in the work to to saying and understanding and living and embodying what is actually important to them because they will have they will have done the work to say this is what's meaningful to me you know this lifestyle and the first sign that you're not there is you don't have boundaries so we're talking about chasing women we're talking about guys who will cancel on their guy friends who won't show up to the Super Bowl because she finally responded you finally got that message back on the dating app oh another first date I gotta go see this new option and we see these guys how many first dates have you been on 30 this month well no wonder why you don't have any guy friends how do you have time to even get your work done if you're going on that many first dates and it's this total lack of boundaries this inability to say no I can't do that no I'm not going to show up in that way no that's not who I am is usually the first symptom of being this low value guy who's chasing validation who's given women all the power in the dynamic and the best part is she doesn't stick around long you might think you get the text back you might think you get the second date you might even get the hook up and you might get the alcohol flowing but she doesn't stick around she doesn't want that in her life long term that's not what she can build a family around that's not what she can actually invest in and trust that you will be there through the hard times she just knows that you're a plaything you're something that she could bend to her whim and if you get around enough women you hear these stories of how they talk about these guys like oh I got him to show up with flowers and I'm going on my third date today and he paid for the Michelin Star dinner and I haven't had to pay for meals in a month and then of course guys feel spurred and they feel taken advantage of but again it's because they're running from doing the work themselves they're running from figuring out who they really are what their core values are what a meaningful life means to them then showing up in that way that the right partner and having trust in yourself that the right partner will appear the right partner will be there through the work and I want to add to this I've had this unique experience I'm now living in I've been living in South America for the last three months there is this phenomenon like for men in the past you've only had so many moves that you can make before you had to face yourself and put it together and hit you hit rock bottom now there's endless pathways that you can just continue chasing and what I see and I have to hear it from the people down here in Medellin Columbia is now these guys who maybe are not having much luck and being in that exact the same place that AJ just mentioned in America and they're feeling this way and they're running into these situations well then they come down here where it's like well now I'm the guy with all the money and now I'm the American and I have the green card and guess what happens they find themselves in the exact same position and now they're beating themselves up even worse because what they thought they were going to come down here and be the king hero that they couldn't be in America and it's still not working so where else do I go do I go to a different foreign country do I now go to Thailand it's it's it's mind blowing to me but it's been eye-opening from from what I've seen down here yeah I think it's it's where you guys are speaking to I love and I agree whole heartedly I think it's like you know the choice paradox I don't know if you guys are familiar with I'm sure you're familiar with that but it's like you know the more choice we have the harder it is to choose yep and dating apps have you know blown that out to the nth degree and one of my mentors his name is Dewey he's been doing Gestalt for like 40 years I love that what he says he says health is your ability to choose health is your ability to choose and I think as men what for some of us what has happened is that we have had a diminished capacity to choose what we actually want because suddenly for some guys on dating apps they can choose a lot they can choose so much 4% right exactly the data is in 4% of guys who who log into the app instead of a profile have endless choice guess what there's 96 more of you listening are in that situation and you're chasing your tail and spending a lot of time in the superfluous and trying to find the right lighting in the right photo with the dog and the right photo with your family and oh I'm kite surfing now and oh look I just got back from Columbia see how awesome I am and yet still not getting responses not getting the second date on this hedonic treadmill that oh I'm just one more first date away from this perfect instead of actually doing the hard choices and the hard choices are working on yourself meeting people in person working through the social anxiety of that first interaction with the beautiful woman working towards something more meaningful than your career working towards something more meaningful than the video game level completion that work and when you join us in our coaching programs both of us and in this work you actually find meaningful relationships outside of just that pursuit of the partner that so many of us are spending all of this time on those dating apps and money on those dating apps seeking yeah I mean I I tried to steer clear from them because I mean from for many reasons but I mean I think they they can be good they can be fun but they can also be fresh I see a lot of guys that are on there that are in that 96% that's just like you know even one of my buddies we're talking about this the other day he's a successful you know relatively good looking guy he's super well dressed he has a great career he's a super well known photographer and he goes on to these dating apps nothing gets skunked and you know he was on there for several months and just couldn't close anything no dates like no nothing and he started to get bitter you know like really to resentful he's like what the you know what's wrong with women or what's wrong with are these dating apps races like what's happening and it was just so wild to see where he started to go and I was like listen man delete the apps go and talk to women in real life talk to me in your coffee shop like you will you will stand out and you'll develop the skill of interacting with them because even if you are really gifted at talking to women on dating apps that doesn't mean that you're gifted at talking to them in real life you know yeah we have to take a step back and understand I think two things number one women do want men that they respect right they want to date men that they respect they want to hook up with guys that they respect they want to marry men that they respect like women and us too right we want women that we can respect I think that's a really important quality of that the amount of men that I see in relationships with women who they're struggling with the number one question I ask them is like do you respect her because if the answers no that's a really serious problem you know and it's something that either needs to be worked through and you need to understand that or you need to take a step take a step back from it and and the second thing I wanted to say is are you as a man operating and acting in a way that you respect because if you are trying to get her to respect you you've lost the game you know you've just lost the place like they respect them and you respect themselves that's right and and being able to be around other men who are going to check you are going to challenge you you know we're gonna what I call calling you forward calling you forward into the version of yourself that you say you want to be it's like god damn that's valuable you know and and it teaches us to develop that sense of respect that has to be cultivated and earned within ourselves you know to be able to say I actually I really respect myself and who I like I respect who I am today and that's so important because I can guarantee you that when I was chasing women and acting like a fool I did not respect myself at all you know at all so yeah don't allow marketing to manipulate your brain and the thinking that you are now a loser because you can't get the dating app to work that's ridiculous those things are being manipulated left and right so throw that out the window number two we're discussing all the issues that this modern culture and technology is how it is affecting men we haven't even discussed and that's another subject with other qualified people about how it's affecting women as well and there that's a whole another thing that dating landscape has completely changed the one thing that hasn't and that's what we just wrapped up with is it's all about you respecting yourself and the end of the day and other people the worthwhile high-value people will find that in you thank you so much for joining us Connor where can our audience find out more about the work that you do thanks for having me guys this was a blast I'm glad I got to dive in with you you can find me at man talks calm I have a book out called men's work that you can find on man talks calm and then I'm on Instagram at man talks and yeah you can find it all on both of those platforms we love asking every guest one last question what do you believe your x-factor is what makes you unique and extraordinary Connor oh I mean my my team and my friends say that I have a superpower for making people cry like in a good way like helping them like people if they spend enough time with me they will eventually just just let some tears out but I think my x-factor is that I have become very good at helping people find their way back to their own sense of home and I think that that is that's part of my x-factor it's beautifully put and I'm excited so work more with you we enjoyed having you on this is great Connor thank you thanks for having me thank you