 I started out extremely shy, super shy, to the point where, who's sort of a gorophobia? Anybody? Okay, a gorophobia basically means you don't want to leave the house. And when I started this journey, that's basically where I was. I didn't want to leave the house. I was scared to death of people. I was scared to death to go out in public and kind of socialize. I couldn't talk to anybody hardly. And that became my mission in life. When I graduated high school, I realized that if I didn't do something about this, I was gonna spend my life miserable and alone. I looked at a lot of people that I knew in my life that were had lives like that as I got older and it just, it scared me. And so a lot of this journey for me was about fear in the beginning. It was about stepping through fear and the fear of becoming what I envisioned for my future was greater than the fear of what I had to face. And that's what got me started. Who's been down that road? Where you're kind of scared to, it's a good place to be because at least it gets you moving, right? And so I had to sell all my video games, my computers, my D&D, all the stuff I did with my really introverted friends and I started this journey. I read every personal growth book I could find and I did that for like 10 years. The problem was, and this was the big problem, was that my life was not changing. Not changing the way I wanted it to. I had a lot of knowledge. I could talk a good game. I could tell people what they could do in their lives that changed their lives. And a lot of people changed their lives but my life wasn't changing. And I didn't understand why. And it wasn't until I figured out, like years later, I stopped reading all the books and I started actually taking action. It started with me going to hypnotherapy college and I spent a year in this college where we actually spent a lot of time not reading, not studying, but learning to feel. Learning to relate to what we were feeling inside and shifting our emotions. And then I continued on with various teachers, some of whom Robbie knows about back there. And that's when my life really started to change. That's when huge shifts started to happen. And so I remember this period in my life where I had recently moved into a yoga community. I figured I wanted a complete change. I wanted to completely throw everything out the window. I'd always had this idea that I needed to be safe. I needed a good job. I needed to have my cubicle job. I needed to have my good retirement. I didn't wanna rock the boat. My family was always saying don't take any risk, be safe. And I reached a limit with all that. I'd been studying a lot, learning a lot, working really hard. And I decided to take this risk and I got rid of everything I owned. And I moved into this crazy yoga. I call it the yoga cult now. But it was a yoga community. He had one bag of stuff, the whole bit. And I spent a year of my life there. And I thought to myself when I moved in there that I'm a really spiritual guy. I'll meet a nice cute spiritual yogini. This is where I'll shine. Because I study so much spirituality. I study so much knowledge. These girls like me. The problem was that when I got in there, these girls didn't like me. They saw me as a project to be fixed. And I couldn't understand why that was. These girls looked at me as still, like there was still something not right about me. But I'm like, I'm just like you. I'm a spiritual guy just like you. And they still weren't attracted to me. And this is the part that really got me was this guy moves in. Now he had no place to go. He had just got out of jail. He had no car, no money, no job, and he's on parole. And what do you think happened? Every girl in there wanted him. He was a magnet for every one of these spiritual girls. They chased him. I had a really good friend, Kathy, who used to hang out down there with me a lot. And the moment she saw him, she went nuts. And she's like, she couldn't get enough of him. She talked about him constantly. And she kept saying, Dan this, Dan that. I want to hang out with Dan more. And I didn't get why this was. And I would ask her. I'd pull her aside and say, what is it about him? Is he better looking than me? And what's going on? She said, no, he's not really better looking than you. It's just that he's got this energy. He's got something about him. And I didn't understand what it was. So I decided I could either hate this guy, which I did for a little while, or I could actually become his friend. And so I ended up doing something that was probably pretty stupid if you look back on it, was I moved into a three bedroom apartment with him and Kathy. And again, he's on parole, has no job, no money, but I said, fuck it, I'm gonna do it anyways. So I want to see what it's like to be around this guy all the time. And when I moved in with him, it was really interesting because he gets on a match. He borrows the money to get on a match. And there's one girl after another coming over to the apartment all the time. And I hear him giggling and laughing. I hear him arguing with him. I hear him saying stuff that I would never say. I hear him being cocky, I hear him being arrogant. Yet these women love him. And I couldn't understand why that was. And what I didn't realize at the time was that I was your consummate nice guy. I was nice to a fault. I didn't wanna rock the boat at all. I didn't wanna upset anybody. I didn't wanna bother anybody. I didn't wanna push anybody's boundaries. So I was always trying to get rid of all the tension in any conversation and make everything smooth all the time. Anybody guilty of that? Okay? It sucks, doesn't it? Because when you take all the tension out of a conversation, what happens? You make it boring. You become boring. You become uninteresting to women and to other people often. And so that's the problem that nice guys have. They're kind of in a catch 22.