Transcript for:
The Art of Seduction Lecture Notes

if you want to do well with women you are going to have to understand it as an art you don't need to be fake but you do need to be strategic every move or non-m move that you make makes you more or less desirable and if you're naive to that you're not going to get anywhere if on the other hand you come to understand women generally and how to be both Artful and genuine in seduction you've got a shot to help in this effort I'm joined by best-selling author Robert Green what should men learn learn from the fact that women fantasize about vampires and billionaires seduction involves the desire to lose control and Men share this as well which is why men are often attracted to women who are slightly dangerous women who are either a little bit crazy or women who have this incredible Sexual Energy that can almost dominate a man so seduction involves Crossing up closely to that border of something that's dangerous where you might be overwhelmed particularly in the day in in our world today where things are getting more and more Puritan and people are more constrained by political correctness and all these tenance that we're supposed to adhere to that we lead rather dull constricted lives we're not playful enough we don't things are too ordered and conventional and regimented in our world but secretly we want to get out of that secretly we are drawn to what is dangerous to what we can't really control seduction is a sense of I'm letting go a little bit I'm entering a world where the other person is leading me through an adventure and that's the excitement that's the kind of transgressive element a dangerous person is always going to have that a vampire I can understand billionaire is a different thing I mean billionaire has to do with security and comfort and money and the sense of a man who's made it you know he must have some quality that's that got him into that position kind of thing the fantasy of you can have any kind of object that you desire like in a fairy tale because this man has billions of dollars so he can afford whatever you want I prefer when I'm thinking about seduction to deal with kind of real life situation scenarios I understand romantic fiction but romantic fiction isn't isn't what aren't characters in real life that we're going to be encountering so it's a little bit distanced from me it's interesting the way I look at that and the reason I found the book a billion Wicked thoughts so intriguing is I think it is absolutely revelatory what men and women spend their time fantasizing about it certainly gives you a sense of the underlying algorithm that's running in all of our brains you know the fact that male pornography and male pornographic searches are all around like body parts and um things like it's basically just body parts that that really there's not even an and there it's just that's what male searches are all about they're describing the thing they want to see so it's all like hyper visual whereas the fact that women um are into a totally different kind of uh erotic stimulation to me that was that alone was already revelatory that they like story based they want to read that their porn is read Because what I'm hoping guys will get out of this episode is an understanding that there is an art to seduction you're not being fake by acknowledging that and the reason I wanted to start with where people fantasies lie is because if you understand that you understand the algorithm that you're trying to trip into now of course you're going to do it in a way that's far more real and grounded I'm not saying to act like a vampire but uh to to just address your work as it relates to both the vampire and the billionaire at least as I read it is um you talk a lot about there there is a type and I forget what which name it is for the type of Seduction um archetype but where they're playing with androgen and dandy The Dandy okay so the Dandy Blends the two so there's a familiarity for the woman of a vamp I think of vampires as being somewhat androgynous they're usually Ultra refined there's an aristocratic air to them and so you have this the The Dandy portrayal in that mixing the androgyny but then you need the like you talk a lot about Errol Flynn who had flashes of danger and so to me that's the vampire the vampire is obviously in the extreme obvious viously in the abstract it's fiction but it really does hint at something real and so getting people to understand this is the algorithm that's running in a woman's brain that it is very different than the algorithm that's running in the male brain and so your job is going to be if you if you're going to seduce somebody again this is me quoting you you have to be them focused and not you focused yeah um but then you know it's what's a little bit tricky here is you have to think that each woman has their own separate fantasy so first of all it's a particular type of woman that's reading romantic fiction not all women are reading that kind of thing but each person that you deal with has their own particular fantasies right and you want to be very sensitive to that so if you come at this with this idea that women have these preset kind of um ideals then you're already in trouble because you want as far as being you oriented you want to drop everything and you want to enter their world and look at the signs that they that they're giving out as to what their fantasies are if they happen to be reading that kind of fiction and they happen to be reading those kinds of stories then great a little red light goes on in your head but you want to be looking at all the other signs that they're giving out as well you know the movies that they watch the music that they listen to the clothes that they wear you know if a woman seems to be particularly repressed that's a sign that they're going to be attracted to that danger element right so you want to be pay paying deep attention to the individual this is a problem that men have in general that they need to address they're thinking in generic terms they're thinking that they don't individualize the woman and the worst thing you can do in seduction is to give the other person the idea that you are coming at them and thinking of of somebody else you're thinking in terms of stereotypes you're thinking in terms of your previous girlfriends you're not looking at them as an individual the kinds of things that they love the kinds of things that they that you can Prov them that they're missing in life so the game is most the most important game as opposed to just thinking in terms of of these categories is dropping all of that stuff in your head and just looking at the woman and entering her world and seeing it for what it is that's half the game of Seduction because if they feel that you are individualizing your attention that is absolutely the key to any kind of Seduction because we don't get any kind of individualized attention in this world we're hungry for it and particularly women coming from men because men don't seem to understand the fantasy element as you say a fantasy is kind of a story it's like a drama it's going and and so when you're seducing someone it's a story that you're bringing them into you're creating theater you're creating drama you're leading them into this world just like an author will lead a Reader through a series of steps right but you have to be very focused on them and who they are in particular and sedu ction involves a sense of vulnerability right a sense of openness where you're letting the other person come into you and the word vulnerable comes from the Latin meaning wound so vulnerable means the willingness to be wounded right and the archetypal um image of love and seduction was Cupid with an arrow and hitting you with an arrow and wounding you with love and creating blood from it it's like there's pain involved because you're opening yourself to another person you're willing for them to hurt you and you know that you could be hurt and so the origin of Seduction actually comes from our relationship to our parents and often times for a man or a woman Yung talked about this in terms of an animus and an anima and speaking as a man you know anima figures are those kind of women that inhabit your dreams and I have dreams all the time of that kind of anim woman it's usually usually a certain type A Certain look certain kind of feel to it okay and that anima figure for the man comes mostly from these earliest relationships in childhood like the mother figure generally could be a sibling and when you're a boy and you're facing your mother you're completely vulnerable you're weak you're dependent and that sense of being dependent is a source of a lot of your erotic tension but also a lot of your fears because men are afraid afraid of Letting Go afraid of being dependent afraid of being overwhelmed right so you carry within you these images of the anima and the animos You're vulnerable in those moments right but what you happen what happens to you as you get older is you try and make yourself invulnerable because life is hard it's harsh people are coming at you with a million different things you Retreat into yourself into your ego into your little castle you build walls around yourself and you you're afraid of letting someone in you're afraid of let letting go you're afraid of losing your defenses and in the 2023 it's worse than ever before because the world is very very intrusive people secretly want to be vulnerable I just wrote a chapter about this in my Sublime book in in relation to the idea of love people want to feel vulnerable they're just afraid and so it's I think very psychologically important for people today particular Ally for young people to be willing to be vulnerable and to experience what that's like to experience letting go of your defenses if you're hurt how do you deal with that because never you're going to be hurt that builds life skills that builds toughness that builds kind of thickness in your in you where you can endure being hurt because life involves in all sorts of hurts and you're able to function with it and and and actually invite it in it's almost good sometimes to invite a little bit of pain in your life life when you want to get physically well and you want to exercise you you realize that getting well involves pain involves repetitions it involves running so far that it hurts a little bit right so you have you want to be able to welcome a little bit of that pain so I think where we are in our culture right now seduction is incredibly important and I must say that on all of my social media when I do a um a little video about seduction I get the most views of all and the irony is that more than ever that word seduction has like an element of ew I don't like that I don't want to be seduced oh what an ugly book oh Robert's really evil but secretly people are yearning to be seduced so that's that's my answer to your question it's a great answer so now the thing I want to know is all right vulnerability is about a wound Opening Our eles up to being wounded in going through that process we learn a lot about ourselves and how to be in some sort of ironic sense uh by being vulnerable you're able to develop strength and a willingness to expose yourself like that why are people so hungry for it now why as we get more puritanical as we have to worry about political correctness why is it that the desire to let go becomes a thing that we're crying out for well people are generally ambivalent I try and make a case when I talk to people that your emotions are never singular they're never one thing we're we're const we have many moves our emotions are continually passing like clouds in the sky they're never set or fixed right so as Yung points out and a lot of other psychologists when you have a strong quality let's say a man who's hyper masculine who's so tough and rugged you can bet that underneath it is is an insecure Purity is a feminine streak that he is afraid of revealing so when people reveal a strong quality such as defensiveness such as resistance such as puritanical things such as virtue signaling such as I'm the saint and everybody else is evil you can bet that lurking underneath is a deep deep insecurity of I'm actually the opposite I'm hiding the opposite and the sense of being inauthentic of repressing a part of our s is very painful that secret self I call it the Lost self it wants to come out it wants to play it wants to be like that child and go out and play and be in the world and so when somebody enters your life who touches upon that who has a little bit of that dark energy and you fall for it it's because you've been repressing it and it's it's secretly what you want very much so I think people secretly want to be seduced now and I see signs of it in our culture I've seen signs of it in politics you find a a uh a what's the word um well like a a a charismatic politician there's a word I can't seem to my mind isn't a little bit slow today um that has this sort of strong quality like a demagogue demagogue thank you thank you God you you have to be my brain today CU sometimes it's like not clicking there so the demagogue we're attracted to the demagogue because secretly we want that kind of power we want that dark side to come out into play it's all through our culture entertainment is wreaking with this stuff you know you have in movies if you want to talk about vampires and going back to your vampire thing all of the evil characters the seducers yes in the movie we may moralize them we may say they're awful they're horrible we hate them but boy all of our attention is drawn immediately to those dark evil characters to those seducers to those people who have that dark energy people are dying for it you know it's been repressed and it's what I wrote about in human nature about the Dark Side of our shadow that we're trying to repress is seduction necessarily a dark energy it has to involve some kind of sense of danger of something that's a little bit naughty so if I want to pick up a woman and I go to a bar just throwing out a scenario here and it's so easy I I don't even have to buy her a drink she follows oh yes of course Robert I'll go home with you yes yes you're so attracted blah blah blah there's no interest there there's no excitement there's no spark but a bit of resistance a bit of I'm not so interested oh you know I already have a boyfriend blah blah blah whooo my interest is going like that so we are by Nature attracted to what we cannot have and I explain why that is so in the laws of human nature on on a chapter on the nature of our desire things that we can have or that we don't have excite our desire more than anything else so a sense of resistance a sense that we're not supposed to have this person or that they're not supposed to have us is exactly what entices us into it so if there's no element of naughtiness if there's no element of a slight taboo or transgressive nature it's not going to get our juices going our erotic our fantasy juices and all that other stuff like my wife and I are very much in another era my opening line to my wife was um you're not going anywhere sit your ass down and when I said that I was her teacher school for adults always feel important to say that um yeah I was her teacher and my opening line was playfully aggressive but aggressive and it that our courtship was very much like textbook seduction and it was awesome and amazing and also now so high risk that I don't know that I would have made that move now and so you know look to your point maybe over enough time this plays out that people push back against it and well they already are but what do you say to people in this moment well yeah there are boundaries you have to respect and you and it is a cultural moment and first of all there is nothing in The Art of Seduction That ever even comes close to advocating violence or rape or or Force ing yourself or coercion yes some of it's psychological and I know it it kind of Teeters on that boundary where you're psychologically manipulating someone to a degree but there's never any element of physical Force right so I understand personally I don't think that that is seductive to be forcing yourself on it to be that um you know overpowering I think is is not seductive because seduction is inviting the other person in it's a gentleness that brings them in later on the powerful stuff can come in but you have to be able to to see those codes and and respect them so there's nothing in The Art of Seduction That would ever violate that code I think so I know there's a a chapter in the in in the strategy part the second half of the book that people point out as kind of evil and I admit it's a little bit teetering towards that which is about isolating the other person so you kind of take them to a place where their family and their friends there's nobody around they don't have anybody else but you right and it could be an island it could be a place or it could be just literally where you take get them away from their familiar surroundings and when they're in unfamiliar territory they become much more vulnerable now I understand there's an element you would never ever start out of Seduction with that strategy I have those in order it's like it's like strategy number 17 of 24 it's towards the end it's towards when you've gotten them you've cast a spell and they're hooked a little bit toward okay so in the beginning you're respecting all of that but as long as there's never any taint of force of coercion because that's what the me too movement was about because men were exploiting and in a bad way and not in a seductive way were using their positions of power to get women to do sexual favors or to harass them in some way way there's nothing seductive about that there's nothing in my book about that so if you're reading the book you don't have to be afraid of violating any of me to uh uh tenants in fact the opposite because the fifth chapter or so was enter their spirit it's all about being incredibly incredibly receptive to who they are as an individual right and and knowing how to give the right gifts and how to how to see them for who they are etc etc etc so it's it's the reputation of Seduction That that some people are like think oh I don't want anything to do with that in fact the book is banned my book is banned in Germany they pulled it off the shelf German people are writing to me all the time how can I get a copy of your book specifically The Art of Seduction yes interesting do you have any sense of why feminists in Germany were protesting it feminists in France were protesting it and I wrote a letter to my French publisher explaining why that's ridiculous they published it and and the whole furer died down because it is ridiculous did they say why like well they found it psychologically manipulative so a man who is who is like that who who who there's another word I'm missing but who could be like that um this is a book that could help him do figure out the various tactics for for misleading a woman and leading her into uh you know like grooming her for some kind of relationship she's going to reget reget you know first of all that makes women seem like these weak little fragile little dolls from the 19th century that need all of this protection from the from the evil man but in fact if you you know my book explains to you how a Seducer works and it gives you the knowledge for how to resist him how to recognize somebody who might be using some of these tactics in a way that's going to be dangerous for you and I've had women write to me and tell me that the book has helped them immensely in understanding that then I'm not weak I can figure out I can I can identify a Seducer etc etc I can protect myself I have the inner strength to be able to do that so I think the book kind of fed into this idea that I was giving instruction but half the book is about women seducing men which is the absurdity I have gay seductions I have a transgender seduction it's not a book about men seducing women with their dark energy it's about seduction in general the whole psychological process it's part of our culture where we're infantilizing people well we don't think that they're adults and I assume that my readers are adults that they can see use the book for whatever purpose it can and a lot of it is to give them knowledge that will help them defend themselves against people who have bad intentions yeah I also think it's important for people to understand the way the world works and the reality is while a lot of the human animal makes us uncomfortable the human animal is what the human animal is and while anybody listening I will tell you it will blow your hair back but I highly encourage people to read a billion Wicked thoughts um it is what people search for when they're searching for um pornography is is hair raising it is really pretty eye opening it is shocking and that's just who we are so under the hood is is a a monkey brain that is worrying and has had you know millions of years of evolution and we think that we've escaped all that but we haven't so and I'll I'll contextualize my own thoughts on this subject by saying I used to be the nice guy and I'm very curious to know if you think nice guys finished last I will say they do uh I certainly did when I was when I was playing when I was using the tactics of a nice guy now nice guy carries weird connotations today probably rightly so in that quote unquote nice guys I think are power less they don't understand the game uh you actually had a quote I can get really close if I have to paraphrase but um the idea being that um powerlessness yeah corrupts more than power yeah it's a quote of Malcolm X actually okay tell me more well um so we all desire a degree of of power and control in life and you have to understand the word power is not just like about politics or about Elon Musk or anything I'm talking about in our day-to-day lives right how we interact with people the sense that I cannot influence my boss my colleagues my wife my children the people around me is deeply deeply miserable for us right it makes us feel powerless and when we're powerless we either we turn in on ourselves we end up hating ourselves and we get depressed or we become passive aggressive and we start manipulating other people in ways where which we can justify to ourselves as oh no I'm not really doing that I'm actually a good person but it's actually can be very very harmful so you have to admit that you want a degree of power you want the the ability to influence people and you're not going to be hypocritical you're going to be honest with yourself you know how often are you checking your credit score afraid of identity theft or account breaches we all use the internet every single day for important things like 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from a place of deep deep insecurity you're not you don't understand really who you are and so you can't control it and so you're always trying to please people and when we can sense we can smell people's insecurities and when it comes to like seduction with between men and women women have a sick sense of they can smell an insecure man right and you can they can smell it in you they can smell it in all kinds of ways and trying so hard to please and trying so hard to be nice secretly indicates that you're actually very weak inside and it's very much a turnoff it's very anti- seductive and so you want to be nice but you want to be strategic about it you want to know sometimes I don't want to be nice sometimes I want to show create boundaries sometimes I want to pull back I want to play the coet I want the woman to know she does she can't take me for granted right I'm not interested in her the moment you show her that you're not interested in her she's going to be much more interested in you you're willing to play a little bit that tough part of it you're in control you're strategic you know when to use absence and when to use presents when to to text them and call them and when to disappear for a couple a week or so and make them feel like they don't you know they they can't take you for granted so know when to be nice and you can use it to to effect but you also know when I don't want to be nice in this world and that pertains to all sort of situations and negotiation Etc if you're always so nice in business you're you're going to be a doom you're not going to survive very long I come at this from a evolutionary perspective and so the reason because I was so bad with women for so long and then figured out how to quote quot play the game and it worked literally on a dime from what literally from one day to the next I could not be successful with women to I felt like within my sexual market value let me not oversell this but within my sexual market value I could be successful sort of when I wanted to be and it it was so it was such a set of rules that I was following that I actually had to laugh out loud I was like I cannot believe it took me this long to just figure out that oh I have to present myself a certain way that uh you don't want to go for the close right away that you really this is about um a strategic revealing of your personality it's about understanding what's going to get them exciting you might hate this description but it's marketing once you understand that you're a brand you have to establish what your brand means you have to make them feel some kind of way about you the way that you're establishing your B brand better be real and one of the things I'm sure we'll talk about today is I take all of this I I've been married to the same woman for 21 years we've been together for 23 to me that we had to seduce each other in the beginning and then at some point that becomes a a deep long-term pair bond which is a totally different game and I really hope everybody can get good at both games because that's really how you end up having an amazing love life that will ride with you through the ups and downs but seduction is real people need to stop pretending that it's not from my perspective this is based on Evolution that women and it's interesting cuz I think you push back a little bit on looking at the 30,000 fo view of men and women I'll make a case for it if you hate it tell me you hate it but here's my case there's a quote I forget who it's by forgive me whoever said this this is a paraphrase any individual woman is a mystery but taken as a whole they're a mathematical certainty it was technically said about men but you get the idea and that makes sense to me and so I you're right like ultimately I had to figure out my wife I didn't just have to figure out women as a general thing I had to figure out my wife but every time I think of my wife as thinking like me I can't predict her behavior the second I lump her in the mathematical certainty of women are like this then I'm way closer to being able to predict her behaviors and so I think it's very important to understand the distinction between how men think and how women think what we fantasize about how we approach sex what we think of as seductive but you're not going to get get that from a book so you can read all of the facts about this is how women think etc etc the best way to do that is by observing them so if you pay attention to the person that you're trying to S if you pay if you start paying attention to women as young an ear at the earliest possible age you will see these qualities in them you will see the fact that they are interested more in stories that they want that they don't want to be feel like it's just about sex and you're in a hurry to get them to that point these aren't great Mysteries that you need to read from a book it's pretty clear if you pay attention right so I just want to get men out of the M because we are so goddamn analytical it's such a problem that reading a book reading a text having algorithms is the only way we can think get the [ __ ] out of there and pay attention to the person develop your your mirror neurons develop your observational skills develop the human part of you that observes that feels what the other person is feeling if you depend so much on things that you've learned from The Art of Seduction or from a book it's going to make you a bad Seducer but to the degree that you can click into those human qualities that we all possess where you sense the emotional tone of the other person you sense what they're vulnerable vulnerabilities you sense what they're missing in life yes maybe 60% of women are missing a similar thing that there are patterns to and maybe reading about it can kind of click that into you okay fine I'm not going to say that that's all bad but the main thing you want is to be getting out of your head and into your emotions and into observing and into feeling what the other person is feeling and not being so head oriented not being so analytical you know that I think is the main problem that a lot of men face it's really interesting my experience was I needed to understand it analytically because I didn't have the intuition for it and it may be that I just just didn't look I don't believe people are born with intuition I think that it develops over time so for whatever weird reason the intuition I developed was that if I wrote poetry and showed up with flowers on the first date which I actually did multiple times uh that that would get me somewhere and it did not get me anywhere I was actually once this is where you ask any kids listening in the car to you turn the radio down whatever uh but this is a true story I was in bed with a woman we were getting naked we were rounding third base and I managed to mess that up because I displayed what I will call uh at a moment where I should have been confident and uh masculine you might hate that word but um I displayed what I will now God I don't even like saying this out loud but it's true uh I displayed a more feminine trait and was like let's not go any farther unless this means something which isn't what I was feeling those exact words which isn't what I was feeling it was what I thought she wanted to hear and it was not and it put the breaks on the whole situation well it's very easy to explain why that would happen because that makes her think that oh maybe he's not so into it maybe I'm not that attractive women secretly want to feel that you desire them that you're that she is so attractive that you're going to lose control and you didn't lose control in that moment and you blew it you [ __ ] it uph so it's very obvious why that didn't work yeah obvious to you now where were you back then Robert Green uh because I still want to punch myself in the mouth for that entire evening so yeah lesson learned we've all made mistakes like that yeah I'm going to guess that that one's pretty bad uh so what I had to really begin to understand was what women actually were going to respond to and not the terrible assumptions that I had built up in my mind yeah and what I began to realize is that um there are things that women want that don't they are not the same as what I want and so when I started realizing okay making that person my like what you just said you're losing control making and that's where I think you get like the billionaire archetype of okay this is somebody that has everything that is normally this you actually talk about this in your book you say normally men get completely lost in what I think you refer to as masculine Pursuits and so I read that to me Hyper pursuit in business being myopically focused on something working yourself to death which certainly resonates with the life my wife is living right now where I I work an obscene amount now if you ask my wife what does she want she'll say quality time which is another way of saying I want this person who's made a ton of money who's at the top of the business Heap I want him to stop all of that because I'm so irresistible that he's only going to pay attention to me and the way that makes her feel when I'm just completely focused on her I'm not touching ing my phone I'm not my mind isn't wandering I am locked in on her I'm making her feel physically attractive I'm making her feel the truth which is she is my mental equal like all of that that she's a woman I have to contend with that she's captured my imagination that she has taken this wild stallion as evidenced in and I don't mean stallion Studley I just mean this unbroken cult that is you know off- running in the world of business she's gotten a saddle on me slowed me down got me to pay attention to her I mean this is the Beauty and the Beast mythology where she is so special that she has been able to capture the attention of the person who's never had their attention captured before now I've never thought about this before I've only ever told my wife uh that I love you I've never told that to another woman because I was never in love before so for my wife it really was the um what in literary circles they call in erotic literary circles they call the magic hoo-ha so for my wife she was the only one that was able to break me out of that she's the only person that's ever gotten me to slow down in my ambition to pay attention to her and once I could see it from not just my wife's perspective but the general that's what women are looking for perspective and I was like oh wow like I really get now why she wants my attention that that isn't something I should be frustrated by that yeah this is even now 23 years in it's a seductive tool that I can play which is you've completely captured my attention like if I see my wife and she's looking good I'm going to stop whatever I'm doing and tell her and make sure she knows and feels it viscerally and all of that required me to understand just the psychology of the whole situation I have no problem with that is it something that I seem to have disagreed with no not at all that's just me um appealing to the nice guys out there of I get you either may it may be insecurity which mine was certainly driven by that or you may think it's a winning strategy I get that but it isn't well one thing that I think is very seductive that I can point out here and it has a little bit to do with what you're saying is what I call generosity generosity is is a very powerful seductive quality it doesn't mean money as as you might necessarily assume it can mean money but it means that you're generous with your attention you're generous with with what you're giving to the other person right so you know the main thing for a man who's we tend to be very linear focused mono focused on this one thing and there's an evolutionary reason for that for tens of thousands of years hunting we had to just focus on one thing women were focusing on many different things at the same time you know they're they're they could multitask we can't um so getting out of that mono rail that you're in with your attention and being able to give to the other person and give them attention and in the initial phases shower them with the attention that they're not getting from other people although you can go a little too far with that so you sometimes you have to step back and kind of be absent for a little bit so they they don't feel like it's you're not like a stalk you're not like it doesn't come from an insecure place you're in control of it but the sense of being generous with your personality with the time with the attention you get is incredibly incredibly seductive the sense that you're not generous and stingy with money you like take them to a cheap restaurant you ask them to pay you're kind of you know you that's a sign that you're not generous in general so uh maybe that's part of the the billionaire appeal where you assume that that person's going to be very generous at least with their money so the sense of being closed inside yourself and stingy and not wanting to give to the other person give of your time your attention your money all these other things that is deeply deeply anti-education in a negative way by um changing gender Norms I don't know if I want to get into that that Hornet's Nest but um you know in seduction I I I make it clear and I made it clear in my human nature book that we're a mix of qualities that nobody is completely masculine and no woman is completely feminine men have feminine qualities women have masculine qualities some men have more feminine qualities than masculine some women V we're a mix it's a chemical thing and there's no way to predict that right and it's always been that way but but um there's ways that kind of element of androgyny for instance can be very very seductive and very powerful if you know how to use it right so I'm not going to say that um that's overly complicating things in fact the sense of kind of crossing boundaries with gender is actually a sign of some of the periods in history where thing where things were the most open to seduction so for centuries women could not seduce men and I you I can I can delineate that period I mean going through all throughout ancient history and I talk about it in my new book because to be interested in a woman so much that you wanted to give them attention and time meant that you were feminine right and the men were masculine they were warriors etc etc they weren't interested in the inner worlds of women women were there to clean the house and and to make babies essentially so seduction was not something that really existed in the ancient world except with some exceptions like Cleopatra Etc so the idea that you're interested in a woman and in her world is already admitting there's a feminine element within you and so I look at moments in history and I just wrote about this like in the Middle Ages where our whole notion of Love Came From at least the Western Ocean or you look in the 18th century the grand EP of of Seduction with Casanova and all those characters you look at the 1920s in America and in Europe a period of incredible Sexual Energy freedom and seduction these were periods where there was a lot of androgyny going on so I don't necessarily think that that's something that's going to limit the the seductive qualities and the energy that's in the atmosphere I think what's hindering us is not the gender Norms it's more our kind of defensiveness our closed Spirit our desire to to be completely in control of of our circumstances by by withdrawing into our egos and being afraid of of being hurt being afraid of being wrong being afraid of of not being strong etc etc I think that has more a more inhibiting Factor on on seduction in the world why do you think young people are having so much less sex right now well for men a lot of it has to do with porn I mean I'm not sure I'm not a scientist I'm not a sociologist but that would be my estimation where first of all they're having a lot of sex virtually and second of all their idea of sex and what is pleasurable what a what a woman should be like comes from those ideals in pornography and the look etc etc and so it's not as much of a need for them Etc to to kind of physically we become much more virtual in how we get pleasure in life um um also I think there's an element of fear as I said I mean young people have grown up in these in these periods of massive uh economic instability they've had to deal with the 08 collapse with the pandemic and everything that's happened there so they've had to deal with circumstances that are very powerful and that are going to make them anxious as well as all of the helicopter parenting that many of them had to to live through so they're filled with much more anxiety right now than I think in my generation and that anxiety makes you want to kind of retreat into your own inner world and having sex at least for a man and you can probably relate to this it's a feeling of you're almost like it's almost like too much you're almost like weak afterwards you're almost like afraid of it you're afraid of the power that a woman has over you right you obviously get over that very quickly and you deal with it but there's an element of fear involved and especially when you're an adolescent especially when it's when you're younger and so I think the levels of fear and anxiety that young people are having in the world and rightly so I don't condemn that for that is probably why there's less physical ex sexual and psychological interactions with members of the opposite sex yeah I think it's inevitably going to be a very complicated issue and like you I'm not a scientist but um I am always willing to talk about things that I know nothing about just to walk people through how I think about a problem uh so looking at it I think that a big part of the problem is what you're talking about with insecurity I think that the way the world is set up right now whether it's um pornography whether it is uh a society that's really spent the last several decades telling men that they their masculine impulses are bad and for better or worse I think that sexuality male sexuality is tied up in power and I think sex itself is uh dances around power dynamics it's one of the the main things in female erotica as power dynamics and it man you want to dive into a hornets nest like power dynamics people get real weird about this subject um but with all of that if men are either because the economy is weird and they're not able to get on the property ladder and they've got you know $180,000 in debt and they don't feel like they're going anywhere and they're lost in a sense of hopelessness they have easy access to pornography um they're just not feeling powerful and if they're not feeling powerful then they're going to uh struggle to feel confident in the bedroom and I mean just to really put it all out there um I think a guy has has to feel confident and Powerful not in a weird like I'm a dominant way but strong and confident rooted in his body and feeling good about himself to get and maintain an erection like you're not going to see a lot of people who are insecure scared uh sporting erections those are sort of flip sides the same take a lot of Viagra or something I guess but do you really think like I would be surprised it just that puts you in and also just bodies right so diet nutrition hour so horrible that I have to imagine a lot of people are just physically not in a place where they're feeling good about themselves uh you wrap that all up and you get to what I'm sure is the tip of a very large iceberg that I've grossly oversimplified but no no no I think you you touched upon a point that's very valid I and I didn't touch upon I think it's very true is that um it's it's not a good time to be a man right now it's very confusing you know our role models are very mixed up we don't really know what is a positive virtue for a man we think that we look at somebody like Andrew Tate as possibly an icon a lot at least a lot of young people do which I don't at all I think that's I think it's really gross and vulgar and full of all kinds of insecurities a man like that a kind of an icon sort of a sense of strength from either a political figure a leader or an actor or anything that used to be in the culture we don't really have that and men are are seen as something kind of ugly in our culture you know it seems like ugly energy that comes from men and I every time I read the newspaper I I see that kind of that kind of slant on things that anytime a man is sort of revealing a kind of atavistic trait of being kind of dominant and strong ew ugly oh he's you know he's awful he's he's primitive he's not you know etc etc and so it's very very confusing and I remember being a young man myself growing up I'm such an old person that I can remember like the late 60s you know and it was kind of confusing then and I was struggling and I had a good role model with my father he was very he was very gentle but he was also quite masculine Etc and I remember being confused about it and kind of straining and trying to find a proper masculine role model and it was a struggle and and I found it sometimes with my teachers my professors in school and other people I later grab itated to but the sense of this is what it means to be a man these are good qualities the quality of being a leader of being strong of even being kind of dominant and being able to dominate a group and dominate a room or to be so powerful that your voice can carry these are all positive traits we wouldn't be here right now Tom Talking you and I if men didn't have those traits right if they didn't have the courage to face you know enemies with Spears etc etc these are all positive qualities just have to be channeled in in socially productive ways which is what an Andrew Tate doesn't do but if only we could craft a Frankenstein monster of what an ideal male figure would be like it would be very very helpful for young men and I don't mean to craft it in a fantasy way it would be great if there was really people like that you know in this world today so you know um to me a masculine quality is a kind of inner strength a it doesn't need to yell it doesn't need to scream it doesn't need to bully people it's just so strong that people are attracted to it and it emanates it radiates itself and people can feel it you know so you don't have to yell at someone I remember when I was at uh on the board of directors of American Apparel and the CEO um who we ended up firing he was a good friend of mine he's brilliant in some things but he could he was yelling at people left right and Center he thought that's what power is that's what being masculine is and I thought it just showed incredible weakness the ability to set an example to tell people this is how you should be by how I'm behaving Etc taking responsibility these are that's a masculine quality not blaming other people we need to redefine what it means to be masculine and what are the positive aspects of it I think is very very critical for our culture talk to me about aggression I think men should have a gear that is aggressive should be a gear I don't think they should live there what do you think completely I mean and you know my wife can attest this I'm an insanely competitive person right to the degree that it's almost maybe unhealthy right so like I'm bicycling up a hill and people pass me God damn it you can't pass me I'm going to pass you even though right now I can't because I'm physically weaker I'm still trying to do that on my stupid recumbent bike Etc I'm very very very competitive and that competitive energy I think a lot of men have it's what directs us towards Sports you know and I'm I'm a Sports Addict Etc compet being competitive is aligned with being ambitious and getting back to seduction a man who seems ambitious is very very seductive and having no ambition is very unmasculine and very anti- seductive but we have we see the word ambition as being kind of ugly as if it's like egocentric as if it's selfish but damn it this world was built by people who are ambitious theyve created it right you wouldn't be here you wouldn't have the internet you wouldn't have all your little tools that you whine and complain about if it weren't for people who were incredibly ambitious ambitious people have created the world so men have aggressive energy it's the testosterone flowing through us right you can't you can't repress it you can't get rid of it it's there there and how you Channel it is the key you can become very self-destructive you can Channel it towards violence you can Channel it towards pushing people around or you could say I'm going to I'm going to channel towards being competitive to towards being the best person at what I'm doing we talked I think last time I was here when I was talking about the human nature we talked about Kobe Bryant a man who had a dark side he is so competitive to a degree would could have killed him it was just awful and he ack knowledges it he channeled it into the basketball court and it made him Fant made him the one of the greatest players ever it's how you take that energy that testosterone that aggression and what you do with it that's the critical factor and that's where I think a lot of men are confused about it you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion- Dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today I think that um if you want to do something extraordinary with your life you are going to have to find that aggressive gear you certainly in the business world if you want to do something uh you are going to have to be able to create momentum and creating momentum requires you to overcome the universe's tendency towards chaos everything is working against you um it just it's I mean it's the second law thermodynamics that everything moves towards chaos and when you think about that chaos being your competitors trying to outperform you uh one thing if you're in the game long enough that um Generations change wildly and so what worked 10 years ago just psychologically is not the right move anymore and you have to constantly reposition yourself and so things are always fighting against you and the only way to overcome that I have found is to have a sort of manal aggressive quality and you know look I'm well aware that Elon Musk is a very controversial figure but he's somebody that understands how to channel the aggression to get things done and if you read the biography written about him uh from Walter isix and that's one thing that comes through real clear is he's got that gear where he is aggressive he's biting he's going to uh fire people torture room like whatever it takes to get on the other side of that and there's an awesome quote by George Bernard Shaw which is the reasonable man conforms to the world the Unreasonable Man insists on trying to get the world to conform to him therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man and that quote is exactly what I mean when I say people need to be aggressive like you're going to have to be unreasonable and you're going to have to find a gear in you to actually see it come true because you can't just like you were talking about with the CEO of American Apparel you can't just run around yelling that's not what it is yelling is a tool and I would keep it in Your Arsenal because there are times but just the ferocity in fact ferocity that that is the word that sings most clearly to my heart men have to be able to channel that ferocity and it has to be under control so in life you have to be a strategist you can't just you you can't just depend on energy and domineering and and aggression it has to be something that you can control and that to channel it means that you have the willpower and the ability the self-awareness to know I need to channel it I need to put it into into this direction or that direction sometimes in life I need to step back and do a kind of Chinese strategy of of no of uh I forget what the word is but doing taking no action at all sometimes you have to be like Bruce Lee and be formless Etc other times you need to have a form and be aggressive the great leaders and a great masculine quality and it comes from Warfare is being strategic and is knowing what it fits the circumstance so aggression has to be not just physical it has to be intellectual it has to be mental and you have to and part of that mental part process is I have all of this energy it's very powerful I'm aware of it how can I use it to best effect you have to have some self-d Detachment some of these leaders like the man at American perel and even Milan musk to some degree are not self-aware and it can be there a killy's heel they can go too far they don't know when to step back they don't know how to put that that Iron Fist inside of a velvet glove and be a little you know strategically not in a weak sense so to me a if I were to create that masculine virtue that Frankenstein that I alluded to it's a man who also knows how to be incredibly strategic about life and knows when to hit and when to pull back and when to be ferocious and when to be gentle and sweet Etc and in control in control of your energy that is the key you have it so I compare it to a person who's riding a horse I've I've done this metaphor I even know on this show before right you are like a rider on top of a horse the horse is your energy is that aggressive masculine energy and horses are incredibly powerful animals right um they have they can they can they can go faster than any almost any other animal they're incredibly strong and powerful you are the rider if you let the horse just go anywhere it's going to run off a cliff it's going to throw you it's going to kill you but if you hold the rins too tight and you try and control everything that it does the horse senses that you're weak and it won't follow you and it just will sit down become stubborn like a mule but if you know how to hold it kind of and I used to ride horses if you know how to hold it kind of firmly but not too firmly you know how to keep your thigh so it sense the horse knows that you're they're directing it then you have the power to guide it and that is what I'm talking about you have this energy this strength this ambition this competitive desire if you don't control it it's going to run you into all kinds of problems and Makia my mentor talks about this a lot what brings a man to power is often that that ID that incredible undirected energy is so strong it makes makes him a prince it brings makes him a CEO but then once he arrives there and circumstances change and now he has to be a manager or now the world has changed he can't shift he only knows that one gear and it ends up destroying him makaveli's ideal in mind as well is a man man who understands how to shift with the times knows that what I was my aggressive energy isn't going to always work and I need to be able to take it a step back etc etc and that was what was wrong with the American Apparel CEO he only had one gear he only had to go One Direction he didn't know how to kind of deviate and how to move with the times it wasn't 2006 anymore where everything was about sexy clothes and shorts in the 80s things were moving and changing adapt with the times being fluid and formless and having that water quality that Bruce Lee talks about I mean martial artists have an have probably the best way of channeling that that aggressive energy to me that's almost perhaps in some ways the perfect metaphor here for it because you can't be a master in martial arts if you haven't mastered yourself and your brain and your energy you have to master yourself and then you can you can kick butt in any kind of encounter or battle that's one thing I like about the Bruce Lee quote his whole quote is well the ending part of the quote that people often quote they truncate it and they just say be like water but what he says was be like water it can flow or crash and so the idea that yeah there are times where you need to be gentle and then there are times where you really do need to be forceful and we have there's a cultural message that says being forceful like you said is Icky it's gross um that the natural tendencies that men have are bad and they need to back off um I yeah Public Service Announcement don't do that now don't be a [ __ ] don't lose control as you're saying you really do have to know when to yield what weapon and I'll quote something that um Jordan Peterson said I think this is really smart even if it doesn't end up being the literal translation but he said uh the Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth and he could never wrap his head around that as neither could die if you interpret Meek as weak it's like that's just not how life works the weak will suffer as they must and the strong will do what they will and he said there's an ancient Greek translation of the word meek that basically means the person who is good with a sword but keeps it sheathed so uh and this is something that uh an MMA trainer FAS zahabi who used to train George St Pierre may still train him um he said to me was you know I I wanted to get good at fighting so that if I ever back down from a fight it was my choice and I wasn't doing it out of cowardice yeah yeah and I was like whoa so yeah if you are good with a sword can defend yourself have that aggressive killer inside but keep it tamed keep it under wraps uh then you've really got a shot but even just looking at I don't know if you watched any of the footage and I am certainly not encouraging people to but I saw some of the footage of um October 7th and bro like just realizing death is violent death is a tearing of the body like it there there is just a moment where you may encounter violence of such high consequence such Terror such violent ending of life that if you don't have a gear of like I'm here to [ __ ] [ __ ] up like you you are in real trouble they're there're unfortunately we are not at the end of history and it is entirely possible that someone bad comes for you and you better be ready yeah I mean um gez I mean I couldn't look at that footage and you know being Jewish and all that it's just it's I can't even go there I get it um but um more likely I go back to the 48 Laws of Power in that most of us aren't going to face that kind of flight 91 type scenario where we're in in confronting although in America now with all the guns you never know but most of us aren't going to confront that what you're going to confront is that ugly energy that you find in the office that you find in business where you find people who are duplicitous who have bad intentions who want to [ __ ] you over in some way or other right but they're smiling they seem to be on your side they've got money they've got funding they seem like a legitimate person and then you find out that they're that they're not what you thought they were and so if you ENT enter life being naive thinking that PE appearances are what people are that people aren't necessarily so tricky if you're not willing to look behind and see what's behind the mask then you are in for a life of pain and so the violence that we're facing in the world today is not the violence that ancient Romans faced on the battlefield you know with KN with swords going directly into your chest I mean come come on who could face that now but we Face veiled violence we Face people who don't who don't want to hurt you physically but they're going to hurt you mentally they're going to play with you right and so you have to be strong strategic you have to understand the game you have to understand the laws of power you have to understand that there are some people who have bad intentions and I I say the percentage of them are like 5% they're certainly not 95% most people are decent are Meek in in a way you know they're not they're not Lions they're more like sheep but those 5% can ruin your life and they're everywhere around you and you know have you have to be strong you have to how to defend yourself so you're not going to maybe face the terror but you're going to face a kind of psychological Terror that if you enter the world and you're 22 and you're not prepared for it and you think everything is just sweet and nice because that's how you've been brought up you know everyone is if they appear appear to be virtuous they are virtuous which is [ __ ] you're going to you're going to be in a lot of pain and you're going to suffer for it and you're going to be fired and you're going to end up being 35 and you don't know where your career is going you don't realize you took a wrong turn because you were naive so to me it's more the psychological Terror and dangers that we face more than the physical ones it's interesting to me it is a similar part of the psyche you said that who could deal with that now the getting stabbed in the chest I very grateful that at least here that's so rare that we effectively just don't think about it but I do worry that that is a void that will be exploited by people that are more than prepared to come and actually stab you in the chest how do you think about that do you do you ever allow yourself to think on the darker side of things and say men really need to get back to that kind of core strength or um are you glad that that has quote unquote passed well um you know it's easy to say because I don't have to go on a battlefield with the Roman Legions and face that even though I'm wearing some degree of armor you know so I can write about Napoleon and I can fantasize about all the drama because Napoleon is a figure that I think is extremely exciting and interesting from a strategic point of view and bullets are flying and people are dying and horses are there and it's blood everywhere it's chaos and smoke you know it's easy for me to say sitting in my comfortable chair you know to ride about that it's one thing what would I be like and I often ask myself would I be one of those cowards or would I be someone who would face the bullets and I I'm under the illusion that I would be relatively Brave on a battlefield like that because in life when I have faced people who are dicks who are trying to hurt me I've been very I know how to push back I've been strong it's not the same as a battlefield but I feel like I have a degree of fearlessness in that I don't care what happens in fact I'm willing to die you know I don't care so you know when I was writing the laws of human nature I had a feeling like I'm killing myself writing this book because it's too much I can't make it and in the end I nearly did I practi ially killed myself I came this close to dying right but I did I didn't pull back I didn't follow my doctor's advice didn't follow my wife's advice because damn it I have to do this and I don't care so I have an element of I don't care and I think that's an important part of of courage in life where you're willing to you don't really care about the con consequences you have to do something and it's important that you do it and if it hurts you physically so be it that's that's the nature nature of it but I I can romanticize that Battlefield aspect of it and I can think that really you know facing that physically really would strengthen you it would be an insane experience but I think of it like the the toughness the mental aspect is to me the most important part of it you know so I'm very interested in sports kind of takes up a lot of my free time as watching sports because it's pure strategy and I'm just love strategy and I love watching football and I love the violence of it and I love getting my neon miror neurons H and oh wow I just got tackled and I love the Strategic part of it you know and these men are facing the almost the equivalent of what a Roman legion is because one wrong hit and there they could be paralyzed for life you know but what I love about sports is it's the mental aspect that makes you a great athlete right yes there's so many people in this country who have incredible physical talents but it's the mental part that separates you the ability to learn the ability to deal with failure to develop kind of toughness to know how to channel those competitive instincts to know how to always bring full energy and focus to each moment right and so I may not be able to identify with the legionnaires of Caesar but I identify with football players and the fact that they have to be very attuned to the moment in the flow thinking like a quarterback I mean if you put yourself in the shoes of Patrick Mahomes in that moment and the amazing things he does because he's absolutely like a wizard on the football field he's thinking but he's thinking so quickly these are the kind of qualities that I think are are amazing and I and I really admire and I really Envy I wish I I had that it's interesting a lot of what we just talked about goes back to what you said about ambition is seductive why why do women find ambition seductive I think you'd have to go to evolutionary reasons I think it goes back to something biological almost it shows that a man can provide he's he's going to be someone who's going to make a good living he can provide for me he can take care of me you know um I don't know how much of that is still alive in in human psychology but I believe that is the root of it that a man who doesn't have ambition H you know I can't lean on him for support phys materially and psychologically but an ambitious man he you know he may be uncontrollable he may be a little bit dangerous but damn it he's going to be able to to survive in a very tough world and women know it's a tough world and you know they need sometimes they need that kind of powerful figur as of support in their life even though they're they're often the Breadwinners now and they're they still have that desire for a man that shows that he can take care of himself he can take care of his world he can provide for them if they need it Etc what's the difference between the way that a man would seduce a woman and the way that a woman would seduce a man well it's it's it's very Elemental I mean it's of course it depends on the circumstances but as I outline in The Art of Seduction women will use the visual sense factors the senses that men are so vulnerable to you know how they dress how their body looks their perfume the uh the sound of their voice I say in The Art of Seduction that a woman's voice is perhaps one of the greatest Under undervalued tools that a woman possesses men don't realize it they don't think about it because they so think that only are looking at like the physical component but a woman's voice is very very powerful and I relate it to the voice of the mother in a kind of a sing song equality and I've have known women in my life who's go wow that woman has an incredibly seductive voice it's very powerful tool so men are drawn to those sense cues and and and they're very they're almost like you can't control them and women have learned over centuries how to appeal to that they also know that men have a desire to pursue to hunt to to to go after something if that's the kind of man all some men are not like that and so they know how to play the coet the coet was a feminine invention there are now men who are coets for sure but the original CSH is a female quality of I'm I I'm I make the man interested and then I pull back he has to chase me because they know men love to Chase and if I show that I'm not interested in him that excites his interest so those are the ways that women will seduce a man a man a man will seduce a woman by things we've already talked about the quintessential male Seducer is The Rake doesn't seem like he'd be very very uh attractive because he he he can only have as many women as he can find in his life right he's not willing to settle down but when a rake is is interested in a woman he's 100% attend attuned to them he's in their world he's listening to them for the one month or two month that he's with that woman she is his whole life right and not in a scary sense but in a very interesting poetic sense he knows how to give the right kind of gifts he knows to take her to the the right places he's very attentive his energy is focused on her and um and he knows how to lead so leading is not just forcing someone it's like I'm leading you into the story that I'm creating I'm taking you to certain places even literally to certain places but I'm leading you down a path and you're excited by the adventure and the Mystery of where is this is going and so you know those are those are two different kind of stereotypical strategies that men versus women will will utilize I want to go back to what you were saying about the female voice so this twice now at least twice where you've made reference to they do something that is modeled after the mom or like the mom obviously there's the old phrase that men marry their mothers and women marry their fathers I've never really liked that um it I've always thought it might be closer to something something like men marry women who make them feel the way their mom made them feel see that uh but what is it about the mom why would that be a positive seductive trigger well it's not necessarily positive um but it's uncontrollable so a lot of our erotic desires what we're interested in are things we cannot controled they go back to our first years in life right and we're not even aware of it we're not even con ious of it and so the mother figure for a boy for the for a male is extremely powerful it's extremely great because if you think about it unlike a girl our first years of our lives are completely involved dependent on a woman the opposite sex right and so that has an extremely powerful impact on our personality and we internalize Her Image in our head and that turns into what we what Yong called the anim and animos you might believe that it's just nonsense but I happen to believe it's very very real it's very amazing Theory okay so that female figure from your mother gets under your skin and sometimes mothers are not good necessarily good figures maybe they're narcissists maybe they were so much involved in their own looks that they didn't pay you much attention so it's not always that they're a POS it's a positive thing but because that got under your skin in a way you're not even aware of you're attracted to women who have that narcissistic quality because you want to repay a lot of that drama that occurred in those earliest years um I know people are going go though that's such [ __ ] I can't you're not even aware that's happening I'm I'm sorry to say because it's occurring in your unconscious but if you look at it if you see the patterns in your love life and you see the kinds of women that you are attracted to you will will inevitably see an element of what I'm talking about right sometimes it's a woman that has a physical resemblance to your mother and that's an extremely common pattern believe me but sometimes it's more a psychological quality the fact that she was very solicitous with attention and showered you and made you feel special man I've never gotten that feeling again since I had with my mother you're not aware of that but you're looking for the for the woman that will give you that feeling again or as I said your mother was a narcissist she was just completely involved in herself and her clothes and her look I want to find a woman who's like that because maybe this time I can get that woman to really love me and give me the attention I never really got from my mother so these early early years have such a powerful impact on you you're not even aware and the flips side is the same for women with the father figure and um I think a lot of women will admit that the Father Figure had a very very powerful impact on what they're attracted to they're usually more honest about it because men um find the the whole issue of the mother kind of creepy the sense of being so dependent on a woman being so weak that I'm after my mother oh it's like a Freudian edle thing oh my God that's disgusting I don't want to even admit it but it's very true it's very real yeah that one's uh that one's tricky all right you I didn't convince you um no that one I'm really just trying to sponge I've never quite understood it so you've given me another brick of information to lay down in my desperate attempts to map how this stuff all really works okay um like you and you said this at the beginning really the thing you want to get to is what really works like where does a rubber meet the road on all this stuff not not in fantasy land but like for real for real um somebody's going on a date they met them online never met them before there's like a screen check process you guys have had to do this sort of dumb some of the guys here will show me the way that they have to flirt on the apps in order to get to the first date so how one how do you set it up in the flirtation to get to the date and then how do we be maximally seductive on that date well you know I didn't grow up in the era of Tinder so it's um you know it's I don't really know I've never had to deal with it right do you think it's going to be a different set of rules I have a feeling it's going to be the same set of rules but it's a different playing field I will give you that but well the the main thing is that I would say in in a in a kind of macro sense of is pay attention to the nonverbals so seduction is a language that does not involve words it involves what is not spoken it involves your body body language your eyes your smile your face how you compose your face how you walk how you present yourself the um the places you take the woman to reveal who you are if you take her to a a pizza and beer joint that probably that says something as opposed to an elegant restaurant how you dress is part of that language are you just wearing your shorts and t-shirt or do you present yourself in a nice maybe those shorts and t-shirt for some would work but for a lot of women it shows you don't really care so pay attention to all the non-verbal things to the little signs that the woman is very very attentive to and be able to control that to some degree so you want to present yourself as they say the most anti- seductive quality is insecurity so it's hard to fake the nonverbal secure cues that are in the world and a lot of that centers around the eyes and the face and the mouth and how you smile Etc and there are weak ways of looking kind of and there are aggressive ways and confident ways that are directed Through The Eyes but if you don't feel it it's very hard to fake it so you have to put yourself in a mindset a kind of an as if strategy as William James said where you feel confident where you feel strong you talk yourself into that mood etc etc and you let the nonverbals kind of communicate themselves so you're strong you're taking them to a place but you're also attentive sensitive you're a you're willing to reveal that slight feminine streak in you but you're in control you know what you're going to do you know the exactly where you want to take them and you of course you're you're going to let see how things play out you don't have everything plan that would be very anti- seductive as well but you have a sense of this is who I am and this is how I'm going to present myself the flirtation is not in the words that you say but it's in the looks that you give in the energy that you that you radiate right and the strength that you show and and the fact that you're looking them in the eye but not in a scary way kind of thing and then mirroring Behavior is is extremely uh a sign of of the other person is follow falling under your spell so you you smile in a certain way and you see if she responds in the same way right and you kind of learn how to kind of go with her energy in the moment as well but one thing you have to be careful of is you have to use who you are so what's flirtatious for one guy is going to work for the other guy you know so if you happen to be good with words you know I I have to admit I'm I'm weak at a lot of things you know I wasn't that quarterback in high school Etc and all that stuff but I had a way with words you know and I had a way of kind of weaving a world with the words that I said with the metaphors with the things that I said and so I would kind of use my flirtatious style was to kind of envelop them in these kind of images that I would create and that worked for me sometimes it didn't work because some women weren't interested in that they wanted the quarterback but for a lot of women that that was my style what is your style I don't know what it is but it has to fit who you are I think that is very good advice um the thing that I would put out there is there the big click for me was when I realized that I needed to have absolutely no fear of loss and so going into uh a situation you met them online you guys have had some FLIR flirtatious exchanges they one of the things that's really anti-education is Wilt at that moment you you you cut it off and you go oh this isn't going to work man they are so stupid you are such a bad Seducer women are testing you often and by they're showing you that maybe they're not interested they might actually be interested but they want to see are you willing to pursue them are you willing to deal with some obstacles in the way you know are you willing to like you know move past their resistance not physically forcing them but if they don't seem so receptive to you on that first date that doesn't mean you have to give up it just means give it a second date and and show that you're you're still interested in them is a very powerful message it means I can deal with maybe your kind of somewhat pissy side or your sort of negative side or your kind of pickiness you know I'm still there I'm still interested okay that shows that you're willing to jump over this one hoop that I've set for you so just immediately wilting is a bad sign no agreed my advice would be if somebody is in that situation somebody's displaying something they don't like I mean look I'm not going to say it at everything that comes up but for the most part I would try to be playful with that yeah and if you if you can really stay centered if you can be somewhat unflappable and what I always uh have said about the way that I was with Lisa was I was aggressively myself and so I wasn't afraid of losing her now I still strategic about the way that I packaged myself like I said this is a game of marketing you are going to be who you really are but you need to bundle that in a way that's going to communicate who you are well and if I know that one of the things that people are going to be most attracted to is somebody that is confident cool then I'm I need to be confident in who I am and also if you really want to get people's attention be counterintuitive be be interesting like say things that they couldn't have predicted that are real they're true to who you are but if you can find those things where it's like oh wow I never thought about that that's you're coming at something from an oblique angle then it's like okay you're not exchangeable I can't this isn't just I'm trying on somebody that looks different but is exactly the same as everybody else it's like you're you one have the confidence to say something you're like I don't know how this is going to land but it is true and therefore I'm going to say it and the way that I see dating is is you're throwing the bat symbol up in the sky you're not trying to win the person over I mean you're trying to seduce don't get me wrong there's there's an agenda there but you want to make sure you're seducing the right person and so in the beginning of this I'm just going to be this is who I am packaged in a way that is meant to uh elicit a response from the right person so I'm not going to make it hard to be interested in who I am and all of that but I'm going to be myself I'm going to say things that are expected this was the same Discovery I had with interviewing was uh in the early early days I did it was like my maybe fifth interview and I did the whole interview and at the end of the interview I said uh hey do you mind if we start over I want to film this again because I'm either going to quit doing this because I was bored out of my mind because I wasn't asking the questions I really wanted to ask I was asking the questions I thought I was supposed to ask and now I want to ask what I really care about and he was a game and so we refilmed it it and that was the beginning of me actually having a career as an interviewer was when I was like I don't care if this is the question people want me to ask I'm going to ask the question I'm actually interested in and bringing out that kind of intrigue especially if you can focus it on them so if I'm asking you questions maybe other people haven't asked from an angle people haven't asked it or I have a follow-up question that is surprising and shows I'm really paying attention I actually care it'll get pretty interesting pretty fast yeah I mean um a couple things that I would add to that first of all as I say in The Art of Seduction any kind of moralizing judging quality is very anti- seductive so you're very tolerant you're very open you're not you're not there to judge the other person and if they make a comment you don't want to go touch upon politics Etc but just the sense that you're it's a non-judgmental environment is is very St because we live in a world that's so partisan but the other thing is so when we talk about interviews I've done hundreds of these over the years podcaster including yourself you're one of my favorites thank you sir and I could notice a difference between interviewers the ones that come with a preset agenda of questions not just an opening question but a whole scent of questions and they're not really paying attention to you and your answers and they're they're kind of in their heads and they're thinking about their next question Etc they make me uncomfortable and I don't do as well but if the person is interviewing me is in the moment they're kind of responding they're alive they're giving me you know body language verbal accus their eyes and we're interacting then I open up to them and then then there's a nice flow it's a similar thing between a man and a woman you're in the moment I can't say that enough you're in the moment you're not in your head going does she like me am I going to have sex with her tonight you know do I find her that attractive you're in the goddamn moment you're alive you're attuned you're listening and I can tell you um my wife has said this and I've known it from other women before I met her is I would listen very deeply and then I would hear something that kind of signaled to me a sign of something that they were interested in or something that said something about who they are and then four hours later or the next day I would bring it up again wrapped in my own little way of wrapping things up and they whoa you don't have no idea how much that impresses a woman because it says I was paying attention I was listening to them and I and I brought back what they said later is very powerful so be in the moment don't be thinking about your next question your next step how you're going to you know what you're going to be doing next but be alive and be attentive and be in the flow I love that Robert where can people follow you they can follow me everywhere uh I have my website po sedu C and.com I have uh in my Instagram at Robert Green official I also have a YouTube channel you can subscribe to that well boys and girls it will be time well spent so make sure you do go give a follow and speaking of places that will be well worth your time if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace to learn more about these complex topics check out this episode with Jordan Peterson identity to me is something that's practical your identity is a uh it's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world and