#739 - Dr Robert Glover - The Lifetime Problem With Being A “Nice Guy”

27:54Why doesn't everybody like me and everybody try to be just like me? There might be some similarities, but we might be very different and still relate to this. Yes, I'm a nice guy understood. What about hidden behavior? Things hidden from the elves. They keep things. Why is that so common? Why is it common? Because you know, those two things when you know, when we first started, you asked me, you know, what is the nice guy? And basically and and I said he's the guy trying to get everybody's approval and validation You know holding your finger up which way is a wind blowing? But the other piece is that hiding things about ourselves, you know hiding anything for example that might get that look on my wife's face, you know She got that look I must have done something.

28:36I better not do that again You know get that began at a very very early age when getting that look from somebody important to us might result in getting slapped, getting smacked, getting neglected, getting yelled at, getting shaken, whatever. So nice guys, this is part of that. I got to hide whatever there is about me that tends to create these negative reactions around me. But often there's another piece, not again, not universal, but often for nice guys in their family system. Somebody has been defined as the needy person, the most important person. Could be dad could be mom could be a sibling and their needs were more important They all the attention and focus went on you know making sure dad never got pissed off making sure mom didn't go on a tiring Making sure you know brother doesn't you know whatever, you know He's sick or he's he's out of control or so often for nice guys We try to become this needless wantless never rock the boat never be a moment's problem kind of person so So what we interpret is us having needs draws too much attention.

29:43Their needs are more important than mine. And so nice guys, we're, again, trying to avoid that negative reaction, the two things we often most hide are our needs and wants and our sexuality. The sexuality, that's kind of easy to put a finger on. We live in a culture that we're bombarded with sexual stimuli everywhere you go, but still Well, there's still that religious message that sex is bad, evil, save it for the one you love. Shame on. Yeah, it's the whole shame or after -owned sexuality. You'd think that would have gone away by now, but it's not. It's as strong as ever. So for the very young nice guy, when kind of back up a little bit back to the child development one -on -one stuff again, every child, when they experience discomfort of any kind, the The hungry and they don't get fed.

30:34They're wet, they're diaper, they mess in their diaper, they don't get changed, they're cold, they don't get held. They have stomach ache, they don't get burnt, whatever. Whenever a child experiences discomfort, their children are narcissistic by nature. Emotionally, they assume this is me. I'm the cause of this. I did something wrong, I'm bad. They don't think it, because the thinking brain is an online at the early age. The emotional brain, fight, flight, free survival brain is. And so a child will try to do two things in a very primitive way, a non -thinking, non -rational, purely emotional way.

31:08They will try to medicate the feeling states they're having, suck their thumb, eat, cry, sleep, sma, whatever to try to not feel bad right now. And again, in a very pre - very primitive, pre -verbal kind of way, try to do try to not do whatever that was. It caused the uncomfortable states or do something different. And so that begins at a really early age. And so the child is, these, these, these, the shame is is inaccurately internalized at an emotional level. I must have done something wrong. That's why this is happening. So I got to figure you how to do that different or not do that. High. And so all of this comes so early as part of an emotional language and emotional operating system.

31:55It's not in words. It's is primitive. So here we are trying to figure out how not to have these uncomfortable experiences and prevent them from happening again. And one of the best things our primitive brain came up with is hide. Hide, you know, whatever diet needs, all I have needs, I get I'm hungry when I have needs, I get slapped. Oh, their needs are more important than mine. So just hiding is part of that because we think it must be about me that's causing these painful negative experiences to be happening to us. Does this mean that nice guys often have coping strategies? Maybe they'll overeat.

32:35Maybe they'll be compulsive with social media use or porn or video games or substances or whatever. The thing about that model I just gave you, that child development model, every human does that, every human. But we all just pick, usually again based on temperament and maybe just life experiences and birth order, we all pick what are we going to do? How are we going to try to manage this? And I sucked to my thumb times in kindergarten. I think maybe I was trying to deal with someone comfortable with something. Selling. Selling exactly trying to manage some anxiety there. So that's what I did.

33:14Now we go through childhood and we hit adolescence and now we really want people to approval, and want to fit in and be noticed and have attention. All of this really, you know, gets fueled with our hormones and indeed for attention, where, you know, they really get solidified, and we pretty much carry these routines into adulthood. So yeah, trying to be perfect might be one. You know, trying not to be perfect because my brother was perfect and I couldn't, you know, compete with him. So I'll be the opposite. I'll make the mess. Yeah, when I eat, I sure do feel better when I've been on my day and night playing video games.

33:52I don't feel stressed when I'm oh is it porn amazing? I didn't know that this existed. Look how I feel. Oh you know if I get straight A's look I finally get some validation but I don't know if it's ever enough. I better keep you know succeeding performing. You know I better get into great amazing shapes so I can be valuable. Oh I'll never get in good shape so who cares I'll just keep It can take so many different forms and the only real logic to it is the infant logic that you and I and everybody else had at a few weeks and a few months old. Why are nice guys bad receivers? Because we think it makes us bad.

34:39You know, the thing is, is that, as I said, most of us is most nice guys and turnlice is belief. Well, I, because I have needs, that's why I, I have these bad things that happen to me. If I don't have needs, bad things won't happen. And often again, I could, I could look around in my family, oh, dads needs are more important. Well, this all makes your dads okay. Oh, now moms are happy. Let's all make sure moms okay. My little brother was a general fuck up at pretty much everything. Oh, okay. You know, we got to make sure little brothers okay because he's going to fuck up and I kind of like, oh, if I don't have needs, if I just kind of do everything right, I'll be the golden child, I'll get some validation.

35:22You know, I won't get noticed too much and get in trouble. And so again, that was my story. It's not every nice guy's story. But there's some fundamental peace in there that if it is visible, if people know I have needs, like that makes me vulnerable, it puts me at risk, it gets people to control over me, all old people something. So in my own personal work, one of the early things I'd start doing was making me a priority where I did for me. I'd do for everybody else, but I wouldn't make me a priority. I'd make sure my wife and kids, they all went to the dentist, I wouldn't go to the dentist. Oh, they, you know, if I saw something on sale, I'd buy it for them.

36:03I wouldn't buy it for me. So I had to start taking good care of me. The next step that kind of came with that, but it came a little bit later for me, was actually beginning to surround myself with people who wanted to help me meet my needs and then actually letting them. That was really anxiety -producing to let people do things for me. And I had to consciously just go, okay, I'm a it's as simple as like I'll take the garbage out and you know We got to take the garbage from the kitchen to the front gate. It's 20 feet got unlocked the gate put it out on the street My I'm taking the garbage out my wife will go you need help Well, no, I don't I don't need any help to take a bag of garbage from the kitchen to the front and I and so I My gut response always say no, but then I realize well, I don't need any help But she wants to be with me.

36:54She wants to accompany me She doesn't want to think I'm doing all the work while she's not she's very hard worker I go yeah, yeah come help me that do I really need the help no But it was actually it took me a while. I'm so learn in that way You know she's not really thinking I need help taking the garbage out She just wants to come take the garbage out with me just to walk to the street with me and back You know that's okay. Well, who might have say no to that? That's the thing about being a bad receiver. It robs people of the enjoyment of helping you. You've stole my words when I got divorced in my late 40s after 25 years of marriage to two different women.

37:35And again, when I started dating and started meeting nice girls, you know, who wanted to do anything for me, wouldn't ever say what they wanted, wouldn't make it to say. I'd empathy for my two X wives, but I put them through what would be in a nice cat. But I remember I was dating one woman and I met her because she told me shoes at Nordstrom. And she worked in retail fashion sales. And her one time she came over to my apartment and I done some laundry, left it on my couch. She started folding my laundry. And I said, you don't have to do that. She goes, no, I like doing it. And she goes, and I'm good at it.

38:06And so she folds on my laundry, puts a little stack on the end of my bed and she goes, well, I won't put it away for you. I said, I'm not putting it away either. I'm leaving it out there to remind me, somebody loves me. That somebody wanted to do something nice from me. After that, I started leaving my clean laundry on the couch so she could have the joy of coming over him because it gave her pleasure. Now, who am I to rob her of that pleasure and I need to work on it? Because how am I going to receive great things in this world if I'm not good at receiving? If I can't let somebody fold my laundry, how am I going to receive the blessings of wealth, of fame, opportunity, of adventure?

38:46So it's a very conscious practice. It was for me. So how do I let people give and let them have the pleasure of doing it? So the solution is not being a bad guy because a lot of people and you could try. So you know, nice guys finish last. The bad guy gets the girl. You know, women will sleep with the alpha, but marry the beta. You know, pick your meme or cliche of choice. I thought they're all out there, sure. To come up with, it seems, I'm gonna try and interpret what I think your philosophy is, and let me know if I get it right. I think the downsides of being a nice guy, although subtle and often completely opaque to the nice guys themselves,

39:40are kind of evident given, can become evident given enough crowdsourcing of sense making. So people and community come up with memes and characters in TV shows and stuff like that. The solution, the low resolution solution that then gets proposed is if XX being nice guy is bad and doesn't get what you want, then opposite of XY, which is bad guy, must be good. So the prevalence of, you know, treat her like you don't like her, like why women love chads, like that kind of more, um, lethario approach to attracting women and getting what you want in life and sort of, you know, being ruthless and stuff, is that a, an erroneous solution to the problem of nice kindness?

40:38It's a core problem with what you just proposed if it is equally and authentic as the other and is equally attached to some external outcome by trying to figure out how to do it right. How have I just do this right again? Then I'll get the women to approve of me. We're still in the same boat. We're just looking for a different right way of doing it. Now as simple as this sounds, You know, like when I do like interviews with like a female coach that maybe works with men and And I say something that you know a generalization like the feminine meaning all things feminine You know women but dogs cats babies opportunity money whether whatever I'll say is highly attracted to a man who's comfortable in his own skin Knows where he's going and looks like he's having a good time going there and the women you know coaches interviewers, podcasters on the call, oh he's going, oh yes.

41:39Okay, they're reacting kind of their nervous system is reacting to that thing. I didn't say the guys in asshole, I didn't say treats women bad, I didn't say doesn't give a fuck about, he's centered in his own body. He's differentiated. He's asking himself, what do I want? What's important to me? Following through on that, not leaving the messes behind, not trying to be perfect, not speaking in your buddies approval. He's on mission, he's on purpose. And in my experience, the feminine is highly attracted to that. You don't have to work at getting the feminine to be attracted. Now, are you always going to have feminine approval?

42:16I told someone the other day, this has never come out of my mouth before. But I said, actually, there is no standard of feminine approval. But the feminine is not about standards. It's just about whatever is moving. Mass killing of standards. You go into the masculine world, you know when you've lived up the standard. When you hit the ball out of the park, when you scored a touchdown, when you made A's, when you, you know, made X amount of money, the masculine doing standards are clear. We can go into that world and go, I've achieved. I've made it. We have the standard. Rigorous, it's old Lee.

42:47It requires something of you. There's discipline. The fact there is no such thing as feminine approval. I mean, ask any guy, even a woman who approved of them dearly in one moment, I'll ask them, have you ever had experiences This is where the very next moment she was unapproving of you and nothing about you had changed. Do I need him? And guys all go, yeah, isn't that the way it always worked? Yeah, you know, one minute, when I was dating, I had women tell me, Robert, you're the most amazing man. I'm so glad I met you. I'm so grateful. I'm so happy. And then never hear from them again. Or say, Robert, you know, after two weeks, you know, I'm taking a break from dating.

43:23Or I'm giving my ex another try. And I go, what just happened? That's the world of the feminine. It doesn't nail down and orderly. So we have to quit seeking feminine approval. One of my certified coaches wrote a book that I really like. But there's a line in there that said that a man does not mature until he quit seeking the love of a woman. As long as we're seeking love, that's a feminine trait. Long as we're seeking to get that approval, that love, that validation from a woman, we're in a loop that there's no escape from. But when we can self validate, when we're on purpose, when we're living life on our terms, all of a sudden that makes us very attractive to the feminine.

44:08It will come to us. That's that's my experience. It will come. Now, as soon as you turn and go, Oh, is here, how do I keep it? How do I make it? No, no, no, we just blew it. They're all so now they're going to get that look on their face again. Like I go, what I do wrong. So if we take the how do I get the women's approval out of the equation, you're more likely to get it. Does that mean you just don't give a thought, don't care, whatever? That's not what I'm, again, is not black and white. We, we, we men want to make it black and white. It must be this or it must be that. No, it's this. This is another level that we rise to that lets us put a dent in the universe that lets us live with purpose and passion.

44:48that Lissa's connect deeply with others, that Lissa's be vulnerable and courageous, that actually invites the love into our life that we desire rather than seeking it. Well, ultimately, I was watching this video from Alander Boton from the School of Life. Do you know that guy, British philosopher, phenomenal in seeing it? You were the second person who mentioned him in the last two or three days. I always pay attention when, whenever I hear someone's name, like, you know, whenever I heard you need to get on a Chris Williams show. When I heard that three times in the same week, you know, I thought, wait a minute, that name sounds familiar.

45:25Oh, three foot. We've already booked it. I'm on, he's on my calendar. What do you, what do you, yeah, yeah, it's um, so I use a, I was just like what you're referring to. He wrote an op -ed article in the New York Times, maybe 10 years ago. And now the title was, why you will marry the wrong person, yeah. I love that arc. I copied it. It's just class. He's outstanding. He's on my Mount Rushmore of guess. He was very formative for me. One of the reasons that I'm going to go on a tangent about why I love the land of bottom. One of the reasons that I really love him is he's so softly spoken and he's so embodied in the nuance of being fallible of how our emotions run the show.

46:12He's not posture. He's unbelievably smart. He's very, very well versed in Renaissance art and history and poetry and sculpture and all this stuff. But there's no posturing from his left brain. There's none of this sort of overrationality he accepts with complete face value, the fact that we can be self -contradictory and embarrassing and all the rest of it. But anyway, But he has this line in a video that I was watching recently where he talks about a person whose greatest achievement would be after their death, people would say they never made a fuss. Oh, they didn't make a fuss. They didn't cause any ripples.

46:56They didn't make any waves. And he's talking about largely an equivalent of the nice guy, this person who's overly It really sort of struck home like oh my god like that's the That's the inheritance and the legacy which is waiting for you and ultimately You can make it to the end of your life having either made all of the messes in the world I made zero messes at all depending on whether you go bad guy mode or nice guy mode but Like your legacy as you look back on your life is going to be one of you playing a persona You're never going to really be able to connect to any of the things that you do.

47:43People, accomplishments, praise, compliments, adoration, money, because it wasn't you that earned that. You didn't earn your money. The role that you're playing earned the money. The role that you're playing got the marriage. The role that you're playing got the relationship or the job raise or created the family or the billion dollar company. It wasn't you. Wasn't you? I kind of mess with your head, doesn't it? Scary. You know, when you were describing, and I can't pronounce his name, pronounce his name. Alanda Boton. Oh, yeah, that's beautiful. When you were describing him, I'm sitting there thinking, I'm a straight guy.

48:27And that guy sounds sexy as hell the way you were He's got the classic philosophers build, but so be it. He's something else. So here's something else that I've had in my mind since looking at your work and kind of, I've spent a lot of time over the last three years looking at evolutionary psychology, mating dynamics, so on and so forth. We don't see, especially from women at the moment, many conversations online about nice guys, about guys being too nice, but guys being too pliable. A lot of the conversations skews toward guys being too toxic. Guys being too immature, but it's immature. It tends to be in a toxic manner.

49:10It's sort of the use and discard, the use and abuse, the very sort of transient transactional nature. What is the reason, do you think, that there isn't as much popularity? If and I don't disagree, I think that a huge problem will be the pliability and dishonesty and niceness of men. Is it just less tweetable to have that as the reason that you can't find me? I've got all of these men that keep bending over backward and keep doing things to me. Is it that it's kind of publicly unpopular for women to call that out? Because it seems like they're being ungrateful. What do you think it is? Well, because I'm not a woman's head.

49:50I can't and because I'm not on social media. I also but I do know what you're talking about. Of course there are memes that run. And I do, you know, because I get a Google notice every time nice guy pops up somewhere, I do see what when it does pop up. It usually pops up in right wing Republican writing most often. But when women do write their blog articles about nice guys, it is most often how nice guys aren't nice of how they use basically the covert contracts of oh, I'm gonna listen you talk about your problems I'm gonna pay your car payment this month. I'm gonna pretend like I care about you and then when they you know ask the woman out or wanted to have sex and it goes no, I never thought of you that way.

50:41You're a friend, you know, and then the guy, of course, all that resentfulness, that past of the graph, the rage comes out. And so, you know, that meme does show up, but it still ends up being talked at masculinity. Here is my thought. And it sounds like you've looked a lot at this, and you might even have a better perspective than me. My thought is that, you know, I grew up during whatever the wave of the angry feminism was in the 60s and 70s. I don't know if that's first wave, second wave. But you know every man's a rapist and erections a sign of aggression and you know that already body my mother You know my mother's generation with the first I think true feminists She raised my sister to not need a man raise her boys to be different from their father You know that was kind of the beginning of that movement and

51:33So from that I grew up with I don't be like those bad men the women are complaining about so so kind of the toxic masculinity has been around for a while. It just didn't have social media. And now mainstream media, mainstream media, I can't even listen to NPR anymore because it's gone so much to like, let's just run fluff articles, fluff stories and stuff like that. I agree. I think there had to be a pendulum swing. Most of that's directed at patriarchy. Now you just say patriarchy. and like we all understand exactly what that means, this evil, right? But patriarchy was also providing protect.

52:17You know, there was also positives, a part of it, and was there an ownership mentality? Yeah. Did that lead to colonialism and, you know, abuses towards women and children? Yeah. Racism, yeah. So yeah, all of that. Well, you know, when we make a social change, we tend to throw the baby out with the bath water. So yeah, this was real against this big idea of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, you know, man -splaining, man -spreading, everything that men do is bad kind of stuff. I think maybe it had to go to an extreme and I think most sociologists that look at big shifts in society say when you have an oppressed people down drawing, it almost has to become like a revolution.

53:04It has to be at the extremes. It doesn't have to be a correction. Yeah, it's not like a Gandhi that just, you know, let's subtly create the shift. So I think there has to be that over correction. And so we went through the hashtag me to where men were, you know, accused, tried, prosecuted, and in the media, lost jobs, lost status, purely because some women said, oh, I want to join the Me Too crowd, you know. And yeah, there was a lot of abuses that were re -adressed, should they have been addressed through social media? I don't know if that was the most democratic way to do it, but it's how it got done.

53:44And then, if you publish something that gets a lot of likes and a lot of follows, other people are going to publish it. So yeah, it went to the experience. The incentives aligned to make it happenable. Of course they do. And social media is all about algorithms and you know the more something shows up the more you see of it. That's why I don't... One of the reasons I don't like social media. But I actually think that we're actually making an adjustment. You know, I saw articles a couple years ago, likening anything they had to do with men's work to like the... Oh, there goes the balloons. Jesus Christ.

54:25I didn't think it was going to work. How have you I wish to make balloons come up on this. I promise. I promise. Stop doing it. I wish I, yeah, I can't put my hands out. The thumb will probably go up. Maybe confetti. All right. All right. Okay. So even just a couple years ago, I saw articles about linking the January 6th, you know, riots, you know, in Washington DC to anything having to do with men's work, like like, complaining that all came out of the men's movement. And I'm going, and this was in Maine, it was Washington Post, Brandon article like that, right? So it was mainstream media. I think actually that, I think maybe we've reached that for an affarixtreme, and I think maybe it's starting to where all of a sudden that's losing this interest, is it seems to, you know, oh, okay, there's another meme about toxic masculinity.

55:19There's another meme about Andrew Tate. There's another, you know, blah, blah, blah. And people do get bored. And now maybe in this, because I'm in the middle of men's work. It's what I've done for years. And I'm in a men's program myself. I built a men's program. I believe in it. I really do think we're moving to a better space that as men become more conscious of the things that I think, you know, I teach that are valuable, you know, being honest, being transparent, making their needs of priorities, surrounding themselves with people on how to get their needs met, living with purpose, living with passion, you know, being generous, making the world a better place, being open -hearted, being loving, you know, quality, good qualities.

56:05That I think is changing the world, is shifting the dynamic. Women I think will begin to go, that's actually really attractive. That's the best. That's sexy. That's better. I like that. And I think there'll still be a few ones hanging on to, but I, let's all still stay mad at men. Let's, you know, let's still, and after a while, you know, one of the things that really was a big shock to me. I was probably in my 40s when I was talking to, you know, a feminist. And I mentioned somebody who identified as a feminist, a woman, maybe on an airplane. And I said, well, here's the feminism I grew up with.

56:42And she said, oh, you mean that every man's a rapist? You like believed all that? I go, well, it sure was, it goes, how was just a few angry pissed off women that got a lot of attention? I go, that's all it was, not all women felt that way? She goes, no, and they still don't. I go, that's actually good to know. There may be all that noise that, you know, gets a lot of likes and follows. Maybe that doesn't represent the even the majority of women. It was a really wonderful term that I heard last year called the tyranny of the minority. And it happens. Yeah, I think that that explains it. So another way of putting it is the slowest dumb shit on the freeway is going to control how fast everybody can go.

57:24Very good. Yes, yes, we're controlled by the extremes and the idiots. It's interesting to think about why that might be the case. I think that you're probably not far wrong that it's still so popular to fit men into the oppressive tyrannical patriarchal overbearing, dominating, controlling role, that if women were to, if a woman was to post online something which is more, more honest, perhaps, which would be, I keep going out for men who are overly pliable and because they're so pliable, I'm concerned that they're not being honest with me. What does that sound like? Well, it sounds like a call for men to be less pliable, which is not far away from men to be more aggressive, more controlling, more driving a book.

58:16It's called No More Mr. Nice Guy. Why would someone write a book teaching men to be not nice? We do. We do live in a black and white world and again media, social media, loves the black and white. It doesn't like nuanced subtlety. That's the dangerous. The real n -word of 2024 is nuance. That's the real one that you shouldn't be saying. Getting into relationships, which are obviously, I think, ground zero for a lot of this stuff. You can kind of hide things away from yourself when it's on your own. You're in and out of work and all the rest of it. Everybody is emotionally connected with the work and everybody's emotionally connected with how organized their source cup it is.

58:57Relationships, real ground zero. What do nice guys not understand about how female attraction works? Well, most of us are believing what our mother's told us. You know, if they told us anything, which is be nice to girls. That's what my mother said. P .A. gentlemen. Okay, make sense, you know? P .A. gentlemen, and I am. I'm a gentleman, but a woman taught me this one. I always open the door for women. I tell them, wait for me. Open your door. Now, if you really break it down, that's me being dominant. You know, I tell them what to do. Wait for me. I'm going to open your door. And of the of the several hundred women who I've told to do it.

59:38Wait for me. I'll open your door. Only one has pushed back against it. And she pushed back for a while. Then all of a sudden she quit and kind of decided to actually really liked actually what she did is she jumped my bones in a public place and a very I said I don't we need to take this somewhere else after the while she's been pushing back against my dominance so for there to be attraction there has to be a polarity and polarity involves dominance and submission I know those are evil terrible words you know because we think about dominant man you know making women be submissive you're in a safe space I'm not I'm not sweating it, but it is going out on the internet, which is fine.

1:00:22What's happened is the polarity is just switched, where the females have become dominant, the dominant players, and the guys have become the submissive players. Then the women go, how come I can't find a guy that turns me on? The guys are going, how come I can't seem to turn women on? Well, it's reversed the polarity. You can't have polarity. That's attraction without dominance and submission. And the more subtle it is, the more subtle the attraction is, the more latent it is, it tends to be the more intensity attraction is. We've probably all experienced that in one way or another. Now, I tell people you can't obsess without dominance and submission.

1:00:59Otherwise, there's two bodies lying next to each other waiting for something to happen. You got to have a top and bottom. You got to have a picture and catch it, right? There's got to be a polarity. Now, the beauty is that polarity can flip it around. you know, back and forth. And I think in very conscious relationships that happens beautifully. My wife's very strong. She grew up eight out of 10 kids in poverty in Guadalara, Mexico, alcoholic father, got beat on by family members, beat on by neighbors, you know, abused by family members, abused by priests. You know, she's been through, you know, she goes to the gym two hours a day, she can out squat me easily.

1:01:40She's done my thigh, I don't, I don't piss her off. You know she can get shit done. I grew up in a middle class white bread neighborhood of Seattle, Washington Surrounded by Boeing engineer families, you know, it's just you know, I never had to fight for anything Okay, so she's tough But she doesn't she's always told me I love it when you tell me no she goes I don't I don't want to be in charge I don't want you to always ask me what what you know what do you want to do? She she likes it when I'll make we're walking to a restaurant and you know I'll go here in Mexico and they'll say, they'll say, should I ask her?

1:02:14Should I get the waiter? Say, should I give him a menu in English? She goes, no, he lives in Mexico. Give him one in Spanish. And I'll say, yeah, give my wife and kids the menu in English. And then they hand her a menu and she goes, no, he's my boss, he'll order for me. And they always laugh about that. And I say, yeah, I get to be the boss when she says, I can't. We got those, those stick down. But the truth is, she is strong, she's powerful, she can get shit done, she can kick ass. but she doesn't want to be in that mode all the time. She wants to be led. She wants to submit. She wants to open.

1:02:47She wants to be done to and blissful kinds of ways. Well, that's my job. So, and even though I'm kind of more that, I'm going along to get along. This or that, either one's okay with me. I'm kind of more that way. She doesn't like it when I'm that way. So for her, she's happiest when I will play the default lead, the default decision maker. But she likes it best when I said, here's what I was thinking. What do you think? You know, I don't just say, what do you think? You know, what do you want? I'll say, you know, I was thinking of white with a little bit of tent of gray in it. What do you think?

1:03:24You know, she wants me to lead that. And then she'll feel the polarity and then she'll tell me what she things you want. And then you just say, you decide, okay, let's go. Let's go. Let's go pick out the paint. Am I being abusive toward by being dominant? No, I've heard so many women tell me when the guy leaves it all up to them to comply with it, the women feel burdened by that. Most are in their masculine dominant role all day long in their work, in their career, raising children, even mothering is a masculine, dominant state to be in. You're taking care of kids' needs, as that's not feminine.

1:04:01I don't then want to have to take care of your partner after that. Yeah, then when the guy says, well, I don't get you going to have sex tonight, would you? Or what do you want for it? And it's one more thing that they got to check off there to do is they don't want that. Now, am I making a generalization? Yeah. Is it fluid? Yeah. Is it nuanced? Yeah. Is it, okay, the guy's always got to be a dominant the woman's but no that's not what I'm saying but for men when I start talking about them consciously setting the tone and leading in relationship when I say that to a nice guy the response he usually ill pondering okay Dr.

1:04:39Glover what I hear you say when you say take control I go no no you did not hear me say the word take control I did not say it I don't believe in it I'm talking about you You lead, you set the tone, you state what you want, where you want to go, what you want to eat, and give a chance to follow, like on the dance floor. She can't follow where you don't lead. Give her that and then be open to a discussion, be open to her, setting the tone and leading. But it's not about, but guys, nice guys will say, when you're old, when you said, take control, it's more nuanced than that. but again, so that's my job as helping guys apply the nuance that word of 2024.

1:05:22What is the role of emotional tension? Oh, you've done some research. Yeah, that's a cute little wink at the height of just just flirting with you. I'm just flirting with you. Yeah, I know the girls like it. The pride of the boys do too. I live in a very gay community, so you know, I know how it is. Okay, so the role of emotional tension, there we go. We just had emotional tension going on right there. Yep. I'm gonna make a generalization that doesn't apply to everybody, but it does seem to apply to a lot. And the generalized statement is that in general, for women to experience attraction, say, for as a man, a rousal, and to stay attached to that man over time, she has to experience some kind of emotional tension.

1:06:16She's got to feel something, the butterflies and this, the vat, the drama, the does he love me, doesn't love me. And we men can kind of understand that a little bit. We kind of like the tension we feel. We go, oh, she's, she's nice, you know, like her boobs, whatever, you know, that creates attention for us, but in general men don't like emotional attention, especially in relationship. If you even think about our sporting events where we do our attention and clocks on them, we know it's going to end at this time. That's why baseball has fallen out of favor. That's why they put a clock on baseball.

1:06:51They put the pitch clock last year. Yeah, you're not problem. How many times you can throw it at first? Because, oh, we got to have it on a clock. So men's tension is on the clock. Oh yeah, I know this, you know, this, this adventure flick I'm watching in the hero. This is happening. I know he's going to get out of it. It's going to be done in 35 minutes. You know, it's done. We're done. Shoot. Go home. Kick back into nothingness. Right. The feminine never gets tired of tension. The feminine, if it, if it isn't feeling tension, is bored. It will create tension. And so that's what's hard for men to understand.

1:07:28You know, We think to be nice to women will make them be attracted to us, but nice creates absolutely no attention No tension really for anybody Man or women, but we think well that's what mom told me to do go be go be nice to them It's what that's what I in junior high all the women were complaining about those jerks who create attention for them And so I listened to her complain about the jerks that she kept going back to the jerk even after you know, I was such a nice guy So in general women need that emotional tension watch it they create it within themselves And and we guys if we have any kind of tension between us We'll just have it out maybe we'll punch each other and then we'll be done.

1:08:09We'll go out of a beer. It's all good You know, we don't need to keep going back into that tension state to have a bond at a connection Well, we'll go do something together. We may go compete We may go bring our A game and leave it all on the field then we walk off arm and arm So it's just the difference between that masculine and feminine. So the hardest part for men to understand is that women need that tension. So even when I say, wait for me, I'll open your door and now I create a little bit of dominance and she waits for me, that's tension. All right? It's just a little bit. It's a little subtle.

1:08:43You know, even like, you know, say, hey, put the menu down. I'll order for us tonight. There's tension in that. Not being nice is actually creating something. What's he going to order for? Is he going to pick something I like? Do I trust him? Is it going to be an adventure? I tell a guy's, and you know, guys will think his game playing. And it kind of can look like that. But the real thing is actually just, is how do we get more conscious? So I'll tell a guy, for example, if a woman sends you a message, text message, or calls you, and if you reply right away or you pick up the phone and answer, how much tension will the woman experience through that?

1:09:19Well, well, none. We've relieved it. And so as we answered the phone or tension went away. But what if you didn't answer it? What if you called her back in 30 seconds, 45 seconds, an hour and she goes, where were you? Why didn't you answer? And what if you didn't give her an answer to that? And she's going, why didn't you answer? What was he doing? Now, here's the thing. Because those guys tend, if we do have emotional tension, we'd like what I call positive emotional tension. You know, it feels good to us for you right? For the for women they don't care. Is it positive emotional tension? Is it net?

1:09:54Is it pet or is it net negative emotional tension? They don't care emotional tension is emotional tension and so you know if it means you know them starting to fight You know them doing something those they know's an epis way soft. It's kind of like they don't care. They got our attention And and that's all that matter they got our attention and there's tension and even the thing of guys like listening to women talk about the problems. I tell you guys there's an inverse negative relationship between the amount of time a man spends listening to a woman talk about her problems and the likelihood he's going to get laid.

1:10:28What do you mean? It means that if you say it and listen to talk about her problems you've actually relieved all of her tension. Tension flow completely out of it goes you know she talked she talked she talked all the tension came away and what I tell you guys is then you end up looking like her girlfriend with a penis and odds or she doesn't want to have sex with her girlfriend. So anything we do to relieve their tension actually works against us and robs them. Kind of like we talked about earlier, are we going to rob them of the joy of doing for us? Well, are we going to rob them of the emotional tension that they have to have to feel something to want to engage?

1:11:07You had this fantastic example of how emotional tension is enjoyed differently by men and women by the story arcs of romantic comedies and how men and women experience that. Can you explain that? What you mean like, you know, you take your woman to watch Titanic and she's already seen it eight times and she walks away with her panties wet thinking, I can't have that. The guy, the guy's checking his watch, checking his phone, his fort center on yet. How do I get out of here? I thought, what was particularly interesting was you explaining it really sort of hit home to me that if you're a man who's watching a romantic comedy, you see regulation at the beginning, everything is fine.

1:11:56Then you see dysregulation, something happens, and everything goes up in the air. Then you see regulation again, or like middle movie regulation, whether the couple first starts to get together and you're like, oh, what, I mean, that's it. Like, there's got a whole new movie's done. Yes, done. Whereas, what the woman then wants is this protracted, oh, but the ex -girlfriends back in the picture, but oh, my God, he hasn't got his right visa and he's going to be rewarded. How are they going to keep the relationship going? And it's just protracted and protracted and protracted and protracted. And then I don't know what it's like to be a woman at the end of a rom -com, but it may be unsatisfying for that to be a conclusion.

1:12:31It's like, what, can we just, let's roll it for another three hours. Let's just continue to extend this. That's maybe where Bollywood figured it out. Let's just do the wedding scene. Everybody's dancing to a real upbeat song. We know it's over, but now they'll do a part two of it. And you know, women I've been in relationship with learned don't take me to a romantic comedy. I'm sitting there going, that is so fucking unrealistic. That's not gonna happen in the real world. How come every guy has a job? He doesn't actually have to go to how come every woman's a fashion editor in every one of these?

1:13:05Yeah, I know he loves dogs, but he lives in this New York loft and makes canoes That's how he supports himself. Come on. That's not real. Yes Yeah, you don't want to go to a romantic comedy with me because I live in the world of could that really be real? Could that really happen do people really do that? No, you know, that's not how the real world works but it creates emotional tension. And so that's really what it is all about. It's not about reality. The masculine wants to go resolve all the emotional tension to get us back into reality. So, yeah, it's really hard for me to watch romantic comedy and just twitle my thumbs and just not say anything.

1:13:45I was excruciating. So, thinking about this dynamic that we have, this emotional tension, this amount of dominance instant and direction and suggestion that comes from the man. There will be women listening and out there who enjoy. They're writing a blog article about us right now. It's fine. It's fine. Add it to the list. But there will be women listening who, maybe a little conflicted or there will be men who imagine that the woman might be conflicted because you say, well, she wants, she comes home, she's at a difficult day at the work because Kelly, that bitch in the cubicle next door, has done that thing again that pisses her off.

1:14:27And the woman wants to be able to vent. She also wants her man to listen to her. And it's this odd duality of not knowing what's best for us, and of the things that we want, not always being in our best interests. Right. And you quoted the best onion article, which is, woman turns man into a partner she doesn't want to be with. The headline alone is enough, right? And again, this is the dance of relationship. Wouldn't it be great if we could just say, guys just do it this way, everyone's going to like it. No, it doesn't work that way. But what you said was really true is that, yeah, for example, the woman in your life spent in her masculine all day doing it work, putting up with asshole managers, asshole customers, asshole clients, asshole core workers, and now she comes home.

1:15:27This is one more asshole now, is putting demands on her. So, for example, the woman that folded my clothes that I mentioned, again, a meter at the mall, as she sold me shoes. And after we started dating, one of the things where we really clicked is, she liked baseball, I liked baseball. So, it's a dangerous fun. I could have been part of a three -sem, it would have been great. We go, you're flirting again. But you lost to me as soon as you said Texas Rangers. You know, I know those of us with a world series. You're the we you're the Homer. Yeah, we won the world series. Let me see the ring. Show me the ring.

1:16:07Okay. So, um, she liked baseball. So, you know, she'd get off work four or five o 'clock in the afternoon. I already have a bar stool staked out at the Roost Chris. That was right next to, you know, where she worked. Couple of baseball games are already on the screen at the bar. They have this great half -priced hamburger during happy hour. She'd come in and she would just start. I'd already have the wine order sitting there, you know, the appetizers that come and she's like this about her day. Like that. She's been in her mask in all day. I would take out my phone, set it at five minutes and say, you have my undivided attention for five minutes.

1:16:46Put the phone on the bar. I would give her eye contact, I would face her, I would listen, undivided attention. She would run out of steam before five minutes was up because she's going, I can sit here and complain, but there's a baseball game on. There's a glass of wine sitting here. What do I prefer? Before, if I didn't put her on the clock at five minutes, it was a game. It was me being dominant, but in a loving play, if I didn't put her on the clock, she might be crabby all night long and she would not enjoy herself because one of the things I found is that for somebody who identifies as feminine to be in their masculine all day are often not good at getting themselves out of that masculine.

1:17:31Well, I got to go home and wash dishes and get the laundry dunked. There's things we got to do for I got to get up and go to work tomorrow. I'll sit down. Have a glass of wine. Tell me about your day. Let me rub your feet. I'm a big fan of an essence leading her back into her feminine out of that masculine rigid, get shit done, kind of state of mind. And now all of a sudden she begins opening and she'll tell me your attention. I might even say a woman taught me this. I'll say, you know what, I want to hear about your day, but give me the guy version. You know, and I've never had a woman ask me, what does that mean?

1:18:05I'll say, you want me to be your guy, right? Yeah, yeah. All right, then I need the guy version when you tell me about the day I was about how Kelly and the cubicle next to her, you know Well, I know why she does it because you do insecure and she's always wanting attention and she always takes it out of me I know dear. I love you give me the guy version Kelly pissed me off today great Now I understand why you had a bad day So you know Get playful with it get playful with it. There's definitely one of the common threads that I'm noticing through a lot of the dynamics is a degree of playfulness.

1:18:40It's my nature, so it is what I bring. It's helping to relieve the tension. It's helping to relieve the seriousness of everything. It gives more play in the engineering term. It gives more room within the system for things to breath. You make a suggestion, but it's not it's not done in too rigid of a fashion. There's movement in there. And it's done. It's evident the reason that you're doing it. And it's not in a mocking way. It's not in a passive aggressive way. It's not in a condescending or patronizing way. But the reason that this, I think, works is it shows, hey, look, like we're here to enjoy our time together.

1:19:25We're here to enjoy, we're here to enjoy this. And whether it's someone's had something good happens, someone's had something bad happens, someone's sad, someone's mad, someone's whatever. The appropriate amount of playfulness, I can struggle to think of really many situations in which it doesn't make it better. Yeah, that doesn't mean getting silly and everything's a joke because, again, guys will kind of like, oh, you mean make a joke about it? And again, teaching men to be like -hearted, that can be a pretty daunting task. Now what's funny though, if you get men with men and let them just kind of begin to let their hair down, guys get silly with each other.

1:20:10And you know, but we're I think we're afraid of showing that to women. Oh, yeah, I won't I won't appear manly. I won't be you know, it's a degree of, does a degree of competence, I think. I certainly notice this. Do you know who Charlie Hoopit is from charisma on command? He's got a very big charisma channel on YouTube. It's a really great guy, very embodied, ton of self work, ton of men's work. And he helps mostly men, but also women, become more charismatic. So he's learned the principles of confidence and charisma. And one of the best tools that he teaches is when people ask a question, the best answer isn't always the right one.

1:20:54And he uses this example of how to overcome your discomfort around trying to be funny. And he says, if you walk out of the house and you're with people, you walk out of a bar or whatever, and the weather is one extreme of either hot or cold, make a joke about it being the opposite. Yeah. And he's like, it's the shitdest joke. It is the worst, it's a pure dad joke, but he said, it'll get a chuckle out of people. If you walk outside and it's freezing hot, and you go, dude, wish I'd brought some shorts today. This is great. Yeah. Like, people have a little bit of a chuckle about it, It really, really showed me, and I have a friend, George, who's been on the show a lot.

1:21:31He, a lot of the time, if you're playing kind of like a game of tennis, so you're playing a game of tennis, which involves a linear conversation. Here is a question, there is an answer, here is a question, there is an answer, here's another answer, here's another question. And you play this back and forth, he regularly hits the ball sideways. So he'll call back to a thing that happened a couple of weeks ago, or he'll say, oh, you I bet that such and such a famous person from the media would have done that or whatever, like he'll rip the conversation out like orthogonally from where it is. And there's play in that.

1:22:05He's not answering the question because he has the comfort in himself to not need to get validation by being, I am the person that always knows the answer. I am the person that is always able to give the correct conclusion that draws the line that puts the full stop and dots the eyes and crosses the teeth. I don't need to be that person and it's such a breath of fresh air because you're having this conversation and and you're like I'm excited like I don't know what's gonna and it fight engenders that in you as well But there's definitely like good boy energy a nice guy energy in I Will answer the question properly.

1:22:42I will ensure that this Somebody has asked something of me and deliver it. I shall and that removes the playfulness Yeah, you know, and when I work with guys around this when again when I said when I learned to date in my 40s and 50s I you know I was never good with women and if I got one I kept them way too long and I started getting successful You know with dating and getting laid and guys said Robert teach us. I'm not a dating guru But what you're talking about is it again for most of men I worked with they get so afraid I'm gonna do something wrong. I want to make a mistake. I'm gonna piss her off I'll blow it and then it's irreparable and I'd say, you know, just Toucher don't you know if you have the impulse to touch your toucher If you have the impulse to tease your teaser if you have them both to tell her come on.

1:23:28Let's go do this Don't hold back. It's crazy. It sounds like till guys Blur and act on impulse You think that's a recipe for disaster, but the truth is it lets them be themselves because their authentic self comes out and And I've had so many experiences, you know, around one, if I just blurted, acted on impulse, you know, I remember one woman I dated on the second date, we were going to go for a walk and she said, let me go use the restroom or a restaurant. And she went to the restroom, came back and I saw her, I'm going to use the restroom. I said, by the way, enjoy watching you walk away from me.

1:24:02And as soon as I said it, I thought, oh fuck, I probably blew it, you know. After we broke up, we stayed friends and said, months later, said, you remember when you said that to me, said, yeah, I thought I blew it. He shows, oh, no, I loved it. Well, I just blurted it, right? I didn't hold it back. I remember another woman early first date, we were walking and she said something about her sister or sister -in -law there, they're having a shoe party. You know, we're women get together and look at shoes. Sounds like a lamest thing. A tougher word. I can think of. A shoe part. Lamous body in history, but okay.

1:24:41And so I blurted with that thinking, oh, shoe shopping is women's porn. She turned and looked at me and she goes, you get it. You understand it. And so guys will say, well, I'm not funny. You know, I'm not, you know, I can't, I'm not talking about telling jokes. I'm talking about whatever that thing that came to the tip of your brain, but you held it back. Yeah, because you're afraid it might be the wrong thing to say the wrong thing to do as soon as you held it back you killed the tension The putting it out there and sometimes you crash and burn, you know, there's the sweat flops You got oh, man that didn't get one laugh, you know But you got to take that risk every comedian, you know, I've had plenty of bombs the but man that one landed and And it's not about trying to get it right is about taking the sensors off and and letting that you that maybe just speaks to the obvious out there and people, people relate to it or they won't.

1:25:42It seems a lot like one of the key tactics for rehabilitating a nice guy is learning to kind of get out of your own way. That's a good way to put it because what we've been doing is again, go all the way back to where we began this. They've been trying to manage their shame. I'm bad. I'm not good enough. them would be found out. I'm going to die. They're anxiety. Oh, no, somebody will react negatively. They'll be pain involved. And so that is what's driving the bus. Is there shame in their anxiety? And so who is really in there? You know, who is the person? One of the things that comments I get from people that work with me or, you know, come to my workshops or seminars or do calls with me.

1:26:26They'll say, Robert, I appreciate how authentic you are. And I'll go, nobody would have accused me of that 30 years ago. Nobody would have said, Robert, I love how real you are, how authentic you are, how you just share yourself, how you share your mistakes, your fuck -ups. I didn't. And I couldn't attract a woman to save my life back in those days. I kind of could, but I didn't know that what I did that might attract a woman. But I wasn't real. I wasn't authentic. I was holding my finger up checking the wind I was a chameleon, you know, what's what's gonna Give me the most laughs or what's gonna give me you know Well, well kind of go over well, but not too well that you know now I'm not on the spot that I got to follow through and Man to just take the sensors off and just blur act on impulse be you I Think is such a powerful rehabilitation and since most nice guys their sensors are the most prominent with women.

1:27:24That's a great place to go practice. One of my, the same friend I was talking about before, Mr. Othogin -Olltheneske and George, he has this idea called only the irrational behavior survives. What he's talking about is he imagines being at the funeral of somebody that he knows and he thinks about the conversations that the people are having around the room. And then not having the conversation, The washing was always folded and he turned up on time and all the rest of it. He uses this example of his mum and he says that his mum hates fighting. He just really does not like physical fighting. Big problem with it.

1:28:02And once his brother was in the car, his younger brother was in the car with her, and they were driving somewhere. And she, I don't know, 50s year old woman, normal British woman, saw two 18 year old boys sort of squaring up to each other and pushing and trying to fight or whatever on the side of the on the pavement. She stops the car in the middle of traffic, gets out and runs over. And the brothers like, mum, what the fuck are you doing? Like, what the two guys, twice your size and quadruple your testosterone, what the fuck are you doing? She runs over and she gets in between them, physically gets in between them like, no fighting, no fighting, gets back in the car.

1:28:37And the brothers like, mum, that was insane. You could have been hurt, you could have been hurt. She's like, I don't care. I don't care. I just don't like fighting. No one's fighting. And he said, at her funeral, people will say she was the sort of person that would stop the car in the middle of traffic to stop two boys fighting. And it's like that only the irrational behavior survives is similar to what you're talking about that there are rough edges to our personality and our behavior. But ultimately that is our personality and behavior. Like if your goal, your goal should not be as a person on this planet to smooth out any of the things that make you anything into this sort of vanilla amorphous blob that kind of like just glides through.

1:29:22It's like, no, you have things that you want to say and actions that you want to take and changes that you want to make. And just the faith to be able to do that, unencumbered, is that's what life is. Yeah. And it takes support. It takes practice. is, yeah, I thought I'd know Mr. Nysky, but Nysky's being Teflon men. So no stick, nothing, I don't want anything to stick to me, but we do connect, as you said, around our rough edges. You know, what we remember about people, might not even be always a thing. Might even bug this or got on our nerves when they did it, and we're around them. But it's also the thing we miss.

1:30:02I mean, you know, my, not all of the pit bulls back at my door again. I've got French glass doors, or something, see her outside my office. Yeah, when she barks, I'm on an interview, a podcast, it really bugs me. But if I didn't have her and I'd notice, oh, I miss her bark. I love when she'd go crazy and let me know that somebody was out front. Our handyman, the water guys deliver, they call my dog's name, because they know she'll bark differently when she's had her name called. And I would miss that if it ever went, I go, what's wrong with the dollar? How come she doesn't bark at people outside anymore?

1:30:41Yeah. It's rough edges. You know, all that smooth, get it right. No, yeah, that's boring. Why is your first sexual experience so important? You talk about mine. The art of work. Come on, even that's too far for me. First sexual experience, why is it very formative? Okay, you know, that is a good question, but it's also difficult one to answer because our first sexual experience is probably conception, you know, I'd say birth. We're born sexual. The essence of who we are is sexuality. Every living thing is built to reproduce after its own. So our sexuality is the essence of who we are. We kind of live culturally thinking, well, you know, children don't become sexual until, you know, that particular age, whatever that might be.

1:31:39But the truth is, you know, little boys, little girls discover their body parts that are very young age and oh, there's pleasure. Before you, you know they understand the words of parents, don't stop doing that, you know, they're finding the pleasure in their own body parts. And the essence of Marseiqui is sexuality. You know, if so many great teachers, you know, all the way from Freud, to David Data, to O -Show, to David Snarge, people at least, I value, talk about the most profound way into who we are, Yom is to our sexuality, because it is the essence of who we are. So to bring that back to answering your question, I will often ask people like in a workshop, you know, again, I'm primarily worked with men these days.

1:32:29Well, I 100 % work with men these days. I'll ask them, what was your earliest sexual memory? And it doesn't matter what it was. First I mean, notice you had an erection, first kiss, first wet dream, first I'll show you mine, you show me yours, first, whatever. And it can vary. You know, every, but I'll just say, what is your first memory? And then I'll say get it, get clear in your mind. What was it? And then I'll ask them, did it occur in the open? Could you go tell your folks about it? Could it be celebrated? Did your parents say, that's amazing. Let's go get pizza. That's a developmental milestone.

1:33:08Or was it hidden? Was it secretive? Was it guilt -ridden? Was it shame -based? Even worse did it feel good? But you felt bad about it feeling good, right? So for about 99 .9 % of the people on the planet are early as sexual experience was wrapped in shame and hidden darkness guilt on bad. I can't anybody find out. So our sexuality gets cross -wired with those features. It's bad. It's evil. Hide it. Repress it. Don't let it out. And then that takes you know as many different forms as there are people in terms of how that manifests from there. So then we get to be adolescents and adults and can't figure out why sex is so messy, so difficult, so challenging, so, you know, I come in, it's a work, I come, I come, I come is not easy.

1:34:06Yeah, people who think that they have a low sex drive might actually just be psychologically scarred from the way that they've perceived it. That's very possible. I have often said, you know, I will get personal. I didn't discover, I didn't know I could actually masturbate myself to ejaculation until I was a freshman in college. That's pretty late compared to most. And you know, I've kind of laid bloomer in a lot of ways around sexuality. And I was just, well, that's just me. But yeah, it's very likely me growing up in a fundamental Christian church where I heard messages really early that if you lost after a woman's breast, you go to health for all eternity, you know, where, you know, my mom taught me to be not be like my dad, or, you know, I listen to the women that he's a jerk, he only wants one thing, you know, yeah, there might have been some scarring that went into, you know, and trying to work out, you know, it's better to not have a sex drive.

1:35:01Oh, my penis betrayed me again by getting a wreck. You know, what? Stop doing that. You know, you know, I'm trying to work out from a first sexual experience perspective. My first, the first time I had sex, the girl who I worked with at the local hotel where I was the room service boy. Do you know what a fucking, what was it? A VW Lupo is? It's Lupo. It's like the size, it's smaller than a Fiat 500 and it was three -door and it was in a, like an industrial estate halfway between... Did you have sex in the loophole? I had to... If you think that having sex for the first time is difficult, having sex for the first time in a card that's like half the size of a jumper just turns the difficulty level up to 11.

1:35:55But yeah, maybe that's... I don't know what that means. We were next to a, like, a Mercedes -Benz mechanics. Maybe that's why I love F1 so much. I'm not sure. I keep getting an interaction whenever I see Lewis Hamilton. I'm not sure. We could really spend my my first attempt was in a Chevy Vega. You know, it probably slightly bigger, slightly bigger. The next time I tried it, it was on a Park School bus. I got smart. Yeah, very nice. Very good. Well, I mean, the school bus. But yeah, it's it's it's very interesting to think about how we sort of internalize these stories. And I had a, do you know, Dr.

1:36:33Paul Conti is, is that with Stanford? I've heard that name. I can tell you who he is, but I have heard the name. So he did a four -part series with Andrew Cuban and last year. I've heard that name too. Yes. Yes. Everybody says that name all the time. He's fantastic. They're both fantastic. And Paul does evidence -based, unconscious work, trauma and such from a very medical standpoint. He was talking to me, he gave me this really lovely frame, very interesting about how formative experiences in our past can reshape the way that we see the entirety of that world, but importantly, they reshape our memory of what it was like before that as well.

1:37:20So for us to say something like, I get in a car, accident when I'm 25 and then you get travel anxiety which causes you to not enjoy driving or to feel anxious when you're driving and then at 35 you tell yourself I've never liked driving you were like no until the age of 25 you loved it You know remember you did that thing. It's like no, no, no, no, I was anxious the whole time and this This ability that like the fallibility and the malleability of our memory and our sense of self and our understanding of ourselves The fact that for sufficiently formative experiences Can manipulate those and mold them in a different way.

1:37:57I just thought it was so fascinating, but kind of brutal as well. Well, and maybe this is another way of explaining the same thing. Every time we recall a memory, we fundamentally change the memory. Because every time we recall it, we're now in a different emotional state, a different position, different surroundings. We, accurate memory does not exist. Right, you know, even as we think we're remembering our earliest sexual experience, you know, if there was actually a camera there filming it We might find out it's completely totally different surrounding wise than we thought so every time we recall a memory We're altering it so our memories keep changing over a lifetime so but what but What happens that that trauma we're talking about and that what I call the cross wiring That's happening at an emotional level.

1:38:49And so it doesn't matter even if our memory is accurate in terms of, you know, digitally accurate. What matters is emotionally how we move forward with it. And so now, if, you know, we've been a sexual creature since birth, and all of a sudden something happens that sex is hidden, well, I better keep it hidden from here on out. And we don't make that as a conscious decision, it's just an emotional roadmap that we start following. Very very interesting. Okay, so we identified this. Yeah, and people are sitting listening to you and I talking very openly about sexual experiences and they're going, you're not supposed to do that.

1:39:30You're not supposed to talk openly about those things. Does there going on their emotional wiring of how you're supposed to, you know, be about sex? Yeah, well like the VW Lupo opens all sorts of doors Three of them exactly it precisely correct unless you can clamber out the back honestly dude I and I remember how not far the passenger seat went back as well I just thought this is what and you got to do in the passenger seat because of the steering wheel But you guys have the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car well speak for yourself look We've gone through this litany of problems, right?

1:40:02This big big big big list and And we don't have enough time to prescribe the panacea for all of the nice guys listening. Given the fact that you've done so many seminars, coaching sessions, working with people, what have you found if you were to give the biggest move of rehabilitation for nice guys? I don't think I've ever used that exact word for it. What are the practices, what are the places that they should focus on in order to start to embody themselves more honestly? Okay, yeah, be there authentic selves, exactly. I'll just walk you through what I did. Number one, I tell people, find safe people.

1:40:45Don't try to do this on your own. You didn't become a nice guy in social isolation. Don't try to get over it in social isolation. We have to say, have safe people to start releasing our shame to tell people. Well, I've got this story about myself and people go, well, that's not bad, that's not terrible at all. You're normal, that's normal, what you're describing. So we need safe people to support us, release our shame, perhaps mentor us, encourage us, help us face our fears. So I tell nice guys, go find a coach, therapist, men's group, I love men's groups. Then a big chunk of my own personal rehabilitation in men's groups.

1:41:23I was leading five men's groups a week when I was in private practice at Seattle, I'm a believer. So, find men's group, don't try to do this alone. How do you, so just to interject that, how do you know if it's a good men's group or a bad men's group? That's a good question, and it is somewhat subjective because something a group you love might not work for me. When I started looking for something about all that existed at that time was the Robert Bly, mytho poetic, go out in the woods, beat a drum, have the talking stick, and say, oh, I did that. I ended up in a 12 -step program as where I started.

1:42:02It wasn't by choice, it's just where I landed. I got lucky. I landed in, I was in a men's group led by a woman around sexual shame who liked men. And so that was good for me.

1:42:22I tried Core piece, I would recommend, whether you're looking for a coach, a therapist, a men's group, is find somebody who leads it who's actually done their own work. You mentioned embodiment quite a bit. Somebody who's actually gone out, worked on their own stuff. I became a therapist. I got my PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy at 29 years old. Started a few years later, started doing, trying to do a real therapy. I'd never been to therapy. and you know, it wasn't till I got into therapy and men's groups and started working on my own toxic shame and my own anxieties and my own patterns that I could actually really help people.

1:43:05So, you know, it doesn't hurt to check out, you know, ask the person, what's your journey? You know, where have you worked on yourself and then just see, do you connect with them? Let's use a good place, do you connect? So go go find a coach therapist men's group, project a group something where you get to go start revealing you releasing toxic shape Start being honest nice guys think they're honest or anything but honest I remember pretty early in my process. I Realized almost everything I told my then wife was whatever won't rock the boat So I told her I'm gonna work in being honest whenever I catch myself of making up a story to tell you, I'm gonna come tell you.

1:43:47I was gonna lie to you. Here's the lie I was gonna tell you. Here's the whole truth. So I started doing that. And actually I used to tell her her middle name ought to be overreact because that's what she did. And every, the funny thing was, well actually just start telling her the truth about shit. She'd go, okay, thanks for telling me that. Glad you didn't lie to me. And you know, whoa, that's different. You know, when I was trying to get her night to overreact, she did. When I just told her the truth, No, okay, don't lie to me. That was it. So work on being honest and again, we need safe people usually to do that Work on making your needs a priority.

1:44:22Sorry to ask yourself what do I want? What's important to me? You know, am I do I do I need to go to the gym? Do I need to go to the dentist? Do I need to take some time to relax? Do I need to rest my eyes? Do I need to go read a good book? Do I you know? How do I get my needs met and how do I let people help me get my needs met and how do I surround myself with people? who want to help me get my needs met, start working on boundaries. That's a big one for nice guys is, well, nobody grows into adulthood knowing how to set boundaries because nobody teaches children how to set boundaries. Because in the real world, the big people get to do whatever they want to the little people.

1:45:02And because we were all little people, we never learned, you could say, no, stop that. I'm going to remove myself now. So, learn about boundaries. I was in my 30s in my second marriage with a PhD before I'd even heard about boundaries. A therapist I went to taught me about them. So, start working on boundaries. And then I just, I think the one of the pieces I'll throw out there that I think is just so fundamental. But I see for guys, for nice guys, go connect with men, go build a tribe of men. I've had to do that a few times in my life. But seven years ago when I got married, down here in Mexico, not yet fluent Spanish.

1:45:41My wife only speaks Spanish. And I'm living here working at home. I have no guys in my life. And I went seeking and bound a men's program and joined it. And now if you looked at my text messaging, my calendars, my email, I'm on zoom. I'm messaging with buddies all the friggin' time. And it just, it makes everything about my world better. I'm more on point with my work, my relationship improve, I'm in better health, I'm happier, so build a connection with me. So, now there's about five things that are a pretty good start. Dr. Robert Glover, ladies and gentlemen, Robert, I adore your work. I think it's very much needed.

1:46:27it's so fascinating that it's been around for quite a while, you know, and yet this single thread of guys being overly pliable, of resenting, despite the fact that they're playing the game correctly, they think that they're doing all the rest of it, is it's so fascinating. And I've today's been phenomenal. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your work. You've got Jota. Yeah, DrGlober .com, you know, good place to start out. We're in the process of rebuilding it, But you can go find good stuff. IntegrationNation .net, my new men's program. My co -author said, be sure and mention the big stick.

1:47:07This go find the big stick, Tony Endelman, is a certified coach. I asked him a few years ago, Tony, what do you think about digging into everything I've ever created and trying to put it in one book? And he goes, yeah, I'm up for that. I go, okay. And he did. He did a beautiful job. So, um, DrGlover .com integration nation .net big stick. Hell yeah, Robert, I appreciate you. Thank you very much for that. Chris, this is a blast. Thank you. So much fun.