How to Stop Wasting Your Life - Connor Beaton

Connor Beaton is a men’s life coach, founder of ManTalks and an author focusing on men’s wellness and personal growth. Why do so many men struggle with their own inner world? Many grow up believing they must handle life alone, stay tough, and hide their emotions. What helps men become emotionally stable, and how can they learn to work through challenges in healthier, more honest ways? Expect to learn why so many high-functioning men self-destruct in private, why so many men feel “emotionally safe” at work but not at home, the most misunderstood thing about men’s emotional lives, what’s an addiction that doesn’t look like addiction but absolutely behaves like one is, how men can build their self-worth, the traits of an emotionally safe man, why there is a trend to desexualise your brain and much more… - 0:00 Why Successful Men Self-Destruct 10:35 Is It Toxic to Use Pain as Fuel? 27:01 Why Men are Scared to Look Inward 36:33 The Absence of Modern Male Role Models 45:42 What Emotional Safety Actually Looks Like 01:03:26 Why Emotional Numbness Isn’t Empty 01:10:38 How Men Can Develop Worth Beyond Performance 01:20:48 Coping Mechanisms That Border on Destructive 01:29:05 Understanding the Madonna Whore Complex 01:40:29 Why Desire Collapses in Relationships 01:44:03 How to Keep Attraction Alive 01:57:42 Where to Find Connor - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why do so many high functioning men self-destruct in private?

• 0:06Connor Beaton?

  It's like you're like describing my, my clients. Oh, boy.

• 0:11Connor Beaton?

  I think there's a number of different reasons. There's, there's trying to maintain this image externally. And part of that image is the perfectionist. So there's never any room for downfall. There's never any room for weakness. There's never any room for problems or issues. And so for a lot of men, that becomes, it becomes something that they start to medicate. And usually that has rooting in childhood, right? That they had to be a certain way in order to garner love, to garner attention. So for a lot of super high performing men, they're, you know, they grew up in an environment where they kind of had to be perfect. And if they were perfect enough, then they would get affection, then they would get love, they'd get praise, they'd get validation.

• 0:57Connor Beaton?

  And so for a lot of young guys, it's like a lot of men in general, it's if I can be perfect enough and I can perform well enough, then everything will be okay. But if that starts to falter just a little bit, then it says something about me personally. It means that something's wrong with me and then shame starts to creep in and they don't want anybody to know that that's happening. And so slowly over time, because they can't admit that there's something wrong, they can't admit that there's an issue, they can't sort of vocalize it, they start to medicate that shame or they start to medicate the perceived weakness, the insecurity, the anxiety

• 1:37Connor Beaton?

  with booze or weed or women or, you know, hookers, whatever it is, right? Whatever their sort of drug choices could be gambling or whatever. And slowly over time, that becomes the method that they need in order to just maintain homeostasis. And it's almost like there's a debt building in the background that's building over time. Every little mess up, every little screw up is just sort of accruing this, this massive debt inside of them. And eventually it just craters. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, they need to be able to bring forward some of those weaknesses or insecurities or anxieties or, you know, the, the trauma that they've just been holding on for fucking decades, you know?

• 2:22Connor Beaton?

  So I think that's a huge part of it and.

• 2:26Connor Beaton?

  And I think for a lot of minutes, it's correlated to how it's correlated to their sense of masculinity and their sense of manhood. So it's like, well, if I admit this weakness, if I admit that I'm struggling, then it means that there's something wrong with me as a man, that I'm less masculine. And I don't think that that's necessarily something that we think about top of mind. It's more performance at all costs. And so I don't want to admit that there's something going on behind the scenes.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  As you're saying that, the word, I don't know why, but the word toxic masculinity came up. This actually feels like a kind of place that it suits in a bizarre sort of way. That it's taking traits of masculinity and making them a performance, forcing yourself to perform. And it's a way, not that masculinity itself is toxic, which is what the current like version of that is, that this is a way to turn your masculinity into something which becomes like a prison guard in a way that sort of locked you in jail for doing the non-masculine thing. And if you try, you can't necessarily break out of that. So the high functioning guys are what the world rewards them for in public, they struggle

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  with in private.

• 3:41Connor Beaton?

  Correct.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  High standards, hypervigilance, eroticism, obsession, drive, desire for conquer and mastery, lots of competition, lots of comparison between myself and other people. That is a type of pressure and that pressure causes them to set very high standards. And if they ever fall short of those standards, that causes pain. I am not enough because I have these high standards. These high standards are why I've managed to become so high functioning in the real world. I'm a hard charging sort of dude. But as fears about not being able to keep up with this work rate that I've already established for myself, my comparison group is getting better and more successful.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm finding it hard, like my physiology just can't keep up with the burnout level that I'm requiring of myself. All of these things build up, build up, build up, and there needs to be some sort of a release valve. One of the release valves could be learning self-love, self-compassion, having somebody that you can speak to about this, a supportive partner who makes you feel safe and secure in your like vulnerabilities.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  But if you aren't prepared to do that, or you don't have access to that, you turn to something else, which is also like a pressure release valve. Is that a fair?

• 4:56Connor Beaton?

  That's a fair. I think we could probably just summarize it by saying, and this is something that I wrote about in in my book years ago, which is that in male culture, it's very common that we teach strength through suppression. And for high performing men, that is way over indexed, right? So it's, I need to develop competency, capability, strength, whether it's physical, emotional, mental, in the boardroom, whatever. But I'm going to do that by suppressing the unsavory parts of myself. I'm going to suppress. Maybe it's empathy. I'm going to suppress that I'm exhausted. I'm going to suppress these types of things. And there's a cost to that suppression. And so, you know, part of the hallmark of being

• 5:41Connor Beaton?

  a great man in society has always been your capacity and capability of suppressing certain things in certain moments. So that you could go and do the thing that nobody else wanted to do, right? It's like Navy SEALs need to suppress certain things in certain moments so that they can get a job done. Same with CEOs and executives and athletes and yada, yada, yada, right? So there's merit in that skill in being able to sort of say, I'm going to put this aside for right now so that I can get this done and execute on something. But for high performers, it's usually that that is way over dialed. It's it's over indexed. And the the problem with that is that when some of those things that are being suppressed go undelved with,

• 6:24Connor Beaton?

  then, you know, it sort of amasses a ton of psychological energy, right? And so all of a sudden, you're having to keep down years of, I don't really like this fucking job, or I'm disappointed in this marriage, or, you know, this isn't really the like way that I thought things would play out, or I feel ashamed of. You know, all of these little micro failures that aren't really a failure to external people, but for me, it feels like this monstrous thing. You know, and so all of a sudden, this accumulation of all these suppressed emotions and disappointments and perceived failures start to mass. And that has a tremendous amount of energy, which then needs to be dealt with. And the problem is that how high performing men have often been taught

• 7:09Connor Beaton?

  to deal with those things is that, you know, we've sort of had this normalized culture of, you know, drink it off or, you know, go rub one off and you'll feel better. And so how we try and hit the reset button on some of those suppression, suppressed emotions is usually maladaptive behaviors. They're not supportive. You know, they don't help you feel better, right? It's like you go and hire the hooker or, you know, you go and watch the porn or you go and have a bender, you know, and take some Molly and go to a rave. And then the next day you're like, fuck, I feel like shit now. You know, and so it kind of compounds things over time. So a lot of high performing men will go on this arc. I think the other thing, maybe I'll just add one more wrench into the mix here,

• 7:53Connor Beaton?

  is many high performing men have built high performance off of what I call shame based motivation, dark motivation. And so part of their fuel source is they're trying to run away from the man that their father said they'd probably become. They're trying to run away from the shame or the pain that they experienced growing up. And so it's like, I don't want to be a failure at all costs, right? Or I fucking hate myself. And so I'm going to turn myself into this absolute beast that is incredible in, you know, in many different ways. Or, you know, he was like an insecure teenager or something like that. And so what happens for a lot of high performing men is they're actually using shame

• 8:37Connor Beaton?

  as a fuel source. And how they get to a place of excellence is through self deprecation. And this is very different for women. I thought like women don't generally use shame as a fuel source in the same way that we do, or pain in the same way that we do. A lot of men will use pain that they're carrying internally. To actually motivate themselves towards a goal. And I'm sure you've seen this with so many people that have sat across from you, right? Where you start to hear about their story and you're like, holy shit. I mean, the stuff that you went through, the stuff you experienced. And so for a lot of high performing men, what we do is we take that pain. We take that shame, we take that anger or that rage.

• 9:20Connor Beaton?

  And we use that as a fuel source for a period of time. And, and eventually what happens is it starts to have a net negative outcome. For there, we sort of reach a tipping point where all of a sudden, you know, I've worked with musicians where they get all the accolades and the awards. And, you know, they're like world famous rappers or whatever, athletes that, you know, win the Super Bowl. And then the crash comes, you know? And why is that? Well, they've been using shame for so long to drive themselves that they've never developed an internal architecture of self recognition, of real self recognition. And so they've just tried to motivate themselves to success through shame and self deprecation.

• 10:05Connor Beaton?

  And so when the accolades come, they can't actually enjoy it. They're not able to actually recognize that they've accomplished and achieved something meaningful. And so the whole time that they've been working, that they've been driving themselves and killing themselves and working towards this like big illustrious goal. All of a sudden it comes and they're not able to actually bask in the like, wow, I actually did that. And then the collapse happens, you know? And that's when you see them just fucking crash out, you know? And you see the, you know, the TMZ stories and shit like that.

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  Is it a bad thing to use your pain as fuel?

• 10:39Connor Beaton?

  No, I don't think so. I mean, this is, this is the kind of, this is the kind of catch 22 about it.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  It feels like a paradox.

• 10:45Connor Beaton?

  It is, it is very paradoxical and I've sat with this for a long time because I, I think in my own journey, this is very much the same thing. You know, I used my, my own pain, my own shame, my own, you sort of like rage towards the world to motivate myself for a period of time. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. It's if we don't build the the counter tools to support ourselves, the generative tools to be able to appreciate, acknowledge ourselves, to be able to recognize ourselves for actually doing good, to be able to receive goodness in the moments where we actually achieve, accomplish something, that's when it becomes problematic.

• 11:28Connor Beaton?

  So it's not necessarily a bad thing to allow pain or shame to drive us and to motivate us. I think for some people, for a period of time, that's actually maybe necessary because they need to to do something to disprove the internal story of I'm a piece of shit. I'm never going to amount to anything. I'm never, I'm going to show that, you know, I'm going to show dad, I'm going to show mom that, you know, whatever it is. And so it's not necessarily a bad thing. However, it has a shelf life. And if we don't develop the tools that are meant to go in tandem with it, it's always destined to fail, always destined to to end in some type of a collapse.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  I find this topic like endlessly fascinating. I think it's so interesting. I had this one insight I've been thinking about recently, which is an infinite one rep max. So the idea that

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  most people reach a particular level of pain. And that level of pain is maybe before a breakdown, like the whole point of there being warning signs is that they warn you before the catastrophe occurs, right? You slow down before you get toward the cliff, not as you're going off the cliff and you hit the brake as you're going off the edge.

• 12:46Connor Beaton?

  I mean, you could do that.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  It's pointless, right? Like, the whole point of the warning signs was to stop you from needing to go off the cliff in the first.

• 12:52Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  And one of the things that guys are praised for, and women as well, especially meritocratic capitalist society, blah, blah. If you're able to suppress, if you're able to outwork, out suffer, be more conscientious, if you're able to put up with discomfort, basically, you're able to do things that most other people wouldn't want to do or couldn't do for longer than other people. Society rewards you, so you are praised in public for this thing. But the problem is that same skill in your private life causes you to be able to put up with a level of suffering that is maladaptive.

• 13:32Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Chris Williamson?

  Like, if you were able to say, um, I can work sixteen hour days, six days a week for a year, for five years, to build my startup, to make my, congratulations.

• 13:46Chris Williamson?

  Can you switch that off when it comes to your current relationship, which is totally toxic and turning your brain inside out? And you go, no, no, no, I'm the David Goggins of suffering.

• 13:55Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 13:55Chris Williamson?

  Like, fuck carrying the boats, I'll carry the whole fleet.

• 13:58Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Like, give me more, load more of this on to me. And I, I think the interesting element here is that your capacity that you are praised for in public is toxic in private and you don't get to compartmentalize it. And the issue with this conversation online, a lot of the time, is that people are conflating the place that the tool gets used, like, the tool should be praised and is very useful in the real world. It's useful at your father's funeral. It's useful at the job interview. It's useful when the shit hits the fan and you need to find a new career or whatever.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  It is not useful when it comes to dealing with your health problems.

• 14:44Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  It is not useful when it comes to dealing with your intimate relationships or the way that you and your friends don't ever see each other or ever open up to each other or whatever. And this, again, why do high functioning men often self-destruct in private? Because the same, it's, it's like having a sword and the sword having two edges and it being really great on the foreswing and then constantly fucking nicking you on the backswing.

• 15:12Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 15:13Chris Williamson?

  Does that make sense?

• 15:13Connor Beaton?

  It makes total sense. Yeah, I mean, there's a, I, I think about this a lot, that I think we as modern men have become very unidimensional. We've become very single, singular dimensional, that there's a kind of over indexing on these very specific skills and a letting go of other skillsets that could actually support us. And I think for a lot of high performing men, that, that is, that is a huge part of it. And it's challenging because I think one of the things that, I remember working, you know, my wife and I have an office in Manhattan. And I was working with, I was working with this client years ago and he owned a hedge

• 15:53Connor Beaton?

  fund and massive hedge fund in the city. And we started to talk about some stuff that, you know, his success was starting to be impaired because he was dealing with really high levels of anxiety. And his whole life has changed. He had had kids and blah, blah, blah. But he had found himself in this spot where he could cognitively see that the way he had done things up until that point was no longer going to work. And he could also cognitively see that this, that he had been suppressing a whole bunch of stuff from his youth, you know, stuff that he had gone through in childhood and decisions that he had made

• 16:33Connor Beaton?

  in the past. And he had never really dealt or confronted with any of them. And so he could cognitively see, I know that that's having a net negative impact on me, but I'm terrified to deal with this. And this is the other thing that most high performing men have to deal with is they're terrified to deal with the things that are actually starting to crater them because they're worried that it's going to hinder their performance to deal with them. So good. So good. Right? So it's like, well, how am I going to perform in my job, running this hedge fund, running this venture capital firm, running this tech company, you know, in whatever it is, whatever it is that they're doing, whatever their career is, how am I supposed

• 17:14Connor Beaton?

  to perform to make money, to provide for myself or my family, if I start to dive into this emotional shit? If I'm deep in my feels. Right. I'm deep in my feels. Pitch. And it's such a real thing. It's like, if I get cracked open and I start to talk about, you know, the neglect or my father's death or whatever it is, how am I going to function? And so there's this very real fear of if I started to deal with the thing that I know is bringing me down, it's going to bring me down even faster. And

• 17:48Connor Beaton?

  For a lot of men, that's the first hurdle. That's the very first hurdle is realizing that you can still function and you can still perform with your heart involved, I guess you could say, you know, with a kind of emotional deep dive that you know, you go into stuff from your past, being able to go into the things that you've been carrying and it will be different, you know, it does alter things, it does change things. And, you know, and there's a great Jungian psychologist named Dr. James Hollis, and he wrote this book called The Middle Passage. And it's all about how we go through this kind of turning in midlife. And we've kind of demonized it in Western culture. We talk about the midlife crisis, right? People have a midlife crisis

• 18:33Connor Beaton?

  and, you know, dude buys a Porsche or, you know, they get divorced and he gets the, you know, the young woman and he's like, oh, a midlife crisis. But the middle passage is really meant to be this, this period of time where all the things that weren't working that you've been ignoring come to the surface and you're confronted and having to deal with them. And it's an incredibly important part of maturation psychologically. But we try and bypass that in our culture. We try and get around dealing with the real unsavory parts of our life that we've just suppressed or repressed or ignored or pretend, you know, aren't really there. And it's incredibly important to go through that phase because

• 19:16Connor Beaton?

  otherwise maturation can't take place. There's a very interesting correlation between your ability to confront the unsavory truths of your life and maturation. Those two things go hand in hand. The more that you can look at things that are true, that you dislike about yourself and your life, the more that you're going to be able to mature. And for us in Western civilization, in Western culture, we don't like the descent, right? Stock market goes up and we treat ourselves psychologically in the same way as the stock market. We should always be growing. And so any type of descent, any type of collapse, any type of falling apart, there's a, there's not only a demonization of that, but we have devalued that period

• 20:01Connor Beaton?

  of time because it's brutal. It's hard. And when you hear people talk about it, usually...

• 20:10Connor Beaton?

  What you'll hear is people have really found a deeper, truer sense of who they are by going through these almost catastrophic periods of time in their life, where things completely fall apart. Everything, the business falls apart, their sense of self falls apart, their health falls apart, the relationship that they thought was so steady falls apart. And all of a sudden, they're left with, now I have to face the truth of what's always been there that I haven't wanted to admit. So I think that's a very important part. And for high performers, they're just better at pushing it down. You know, they're just better at ignoring it for a longer period of time and being very high functional while doing it. And then eventually it catches up to them.

• 20:55Connor Beaton?

  And usually it's in a moment where everything's come to fruition. You know, it's like everything has happened and everything's great. And they're like, yes. And then the collapse, you know? And then in alchemy, it's called the negredo, right? It's called the decay, the blackening, the falling apart. And so that's the period where we, you know, things decay and fall apart so that we can, you know, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes again and be risen anew in a sort of like a new way. So I feel like maybe, maybe you've gone through a little bit of that recently with the health stuff and...

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  Permanently.

• 21:31Connor Beaton?

  But like, what's that been like? Cause it, I mean, kind of, we're sort of talking about you in a way.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  Always. This entire podcast is a thinly veiled autobiography.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Every episode, dude, fucking thousand and something. And it's all just me talking to me. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega threes. They reduce, hello? Omega threes? There they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't. They support brain function. Maybe I should take more. They support brain function, reduce inflammation, improve heart health, and are backed by hundreds of studies. But here's the thing, all omega threes are not made the same. Most brands cut corners, they use cheap fish oil, skip purity testing, throw in fillers and call it a day. But with Momentous, you know you're getting the highest quality omega threes on the market. They're NSF certified for sport and they're tested for heavy metals and purity. So you can rest easy knowing anything that you take from Momentous is unparalleled

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

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• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  Certainly made me realize that the game that I'm playing, even if I can win it, is not necessarily the one that I was designed for. And that is tamping down sensitivity. That is not giving myself the level of self-care that I probably need or deserve just because I'm able to outwork my own system's red lights. Like I just take a mallet to all of the warning signs and I go like, you know, in the classic, like old car and all of the engine lights are on. But you know that if you whack the dashboard hard enough, the connection drops out for a little bit. I was thinking like whack-a-mole. Do you guys have that in the UK with like the little moles that pop up? And you're just like, no, no, no.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm not listening to you. I'm not listening to you. I'm not listening to you. But I think the toxic fuel thing and that being the concern of, well, if I face this thing, I'm going to be less effective. Maybe the world's going to abandon me. The whole reason that I started using the fuel was to get the world to accept me and want me, and now it kind of does. So you're telling me that I've got to let go of the thing that I worked to get to face the thing that I tried to run away from? It seems like a cosmic joke. Yep.

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  It seems so unfair.

• 24:22Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it's I think in many ways it's a reminder that like we can't. We just can't run from the things that that we know we need to address and deal with, you know, there's there's always a toll. There's always a price. And I think in a big way, part of the dilemma that we all have to face as human beings is, am I willing to pay the price to get that? Am I willing to pay the price to ignore that? You know, it's like I probably could be more successful in my career. But I'd have to sacrifice my kids. And I'm away from them a lot as it is, you know, I'm away from them right now to be here.

• 25:05Connor Beaton?

  And and every time I leave, it's a conscious choice. And I do believe that, you know, as fathers, we need to venture out into the world and and sort of show that for our kids. But but there is this sort of trade off that happens. I'm curious. I'm curious for you, as you've kind of gone through that, like, I mean, everything's blown up. Everything's like, because I can't imagine how different your life is now from the first time that we had our conversation two years ago. And I know you went through health issues. And so what's it been like for you to have this sort of like meteoric rise and then have something just sort of like stop you dead in your tracks and have to deal with something that was unexpected?

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  It feels a little bit like being a fraud in some ways because you have this perspective of yourself. You have this expectation which you've put on you. You have this expectation that you think the world is putting on you too. And you don't really know, no one, no one actually knows why people like them. Like, no one knows, from a content creator perspective, they don't like. Your friends will say stuff like, dude, I love how fucking good of a listener you are. And like, you just always make me feel safe, regulate, rah rah rah. But the bit rate of feedback is too low for us to actually be able to understand. So you go, well, maybe it's because like he kept going. Maybe it's because he showed the consistency or the resilience.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, to be completely flatlined and kicked in the nuts by something that you didn't choose to do, by something that was, you know, out of your control.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  Felt scary. It feels like, wow, the thing that I worked my entire life for is just about to be taken away from me. It's through no choice of my own. And I've worked very hard for a long time to make myself into someone that I'm proud of and my better self slipping through my fingers, through no, no action of my own. And again, it feels like a, like a cosmic joke. I think.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to the guy who looks at the inner child work, the mother wound, the past patterns that haven't yet been dealt with, the accumulation of sort of psychological discomfort like that?

• 27:19Chris Williamson?

  And say, I think that's sort of woo bullshit, dude. Like that, that doesn't resonate with me. I understand that if you break an arm, you need to put it in a cast, but this is just a question of overcoming suffering. It's noble to do that. It's like the sort of life that I want to live is someone who is stoic, who does like just get on with stuff. This, yeah, maybe I've hit some sort of a wall. Maybe I'm sort of broken in pieces on the ground, but the answer to that is to just like David Goggins it and stay hard as opposed to Eckhart Tolle it and like remind myself that I'm enough already.

• 27:54Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, I mean, I do think that it's a, it's a bit of both, you know? I do think that part of the challenge that a lot of men have with therapy and therapy culture is that it's become hyper feminized. And so I think when men look at that, oftentimes it's like, it doesn't resonate. It feels too woo woo. It feels too sort of like soft skills.

• 28:17Connor Beaton?

  But I think it really is about a quest of knowing thyself. And, you know, for.

• 28:26Connor Beaton?

  For every man, they're going to have a journey and inflection point where they have to decide, am I going to learn about who I am through trial and error and external experiences? Or am I going to put on this, you know, the psychological scuba diving mask and go in and actually see who the fuck I am? And I think it's easier for men to say, I'll just go out in the world, right? I'll just go build some shit. Because the truth is that the scariest place to be is inside of yourself. That's the truth. Most men know that, you know, barring some extreme situations and war zones and stuff like that. But for the majority of men, for a lot of the men that I've worked with, I've worked

• 29:07Connor Beaton?

  with Navy SEALs, I've worked with executives, I've worked with artists and athletes and every single man that I've ever worked with, the most terrifying thing for them is the truth of who they are. Because there's parts of them that they do not understand, and that's scary. There's parts of themselves that are out of control, and that's terrifying. And so I think for, what I would say to those men is, it sounds like you're not really willing to get in the arena with yourself, period. And you can find a medium that works for you, right? Goggins found a medium that seems to work for him, which is, that's not my medium, right? I don't want to get up at 5:00 AM or 4:00 AM every single day and run until my knees

• 29:52Connor Beaton?

  are grinding bones against each other. This is just not it for me. I want to push myself physically for sure, and I want to build things and push myself from an entrepreneurial standpoint for sure. But there is something to be said for the courage and the bravery that it takes to go in to who you actually are as a human being and start to discover the unsavory parts of yourself. Jung had this great saying that, that the, the real work of a man is, the real work of men is to discover their own shadow. And if they can do that, they have done something meaningful for the world. And what he meant by that was, if you don't understand your own

• 30:35Connor Beaton?

  Maladaptive behaviors, your own sabotage mechanisms. If you don't understand how you are harming other people, then you are, you're essentially passing on harm out into the world, onto other people inadvertently to your kids or your family members or your friends. And that's not really what, I don't know how else to say it, but it's like, that's not really where men find a sense of meaning and purpose. Like, in many ways, the archetypes of great kings and great men, they are the men that are servants to others. And how they go about doing that is by deeply understanding who they are. And so I think for a lot of men, when I hear that, I'm like, you're scared to know who you really are.

• 31:20Connor Beaton?

  You're actually just afraid. And that's okay, but don't fucking lie to me that you're just not afraid of who you actually are. Because so many times I've sat with men and I'll say, close your eyes. And the, the challenge that that man will have, he'll be a killer in the boardroom. He will be a killer on the football field. And I'll say, sit down, close your eyes, take a breath, tell me what's happening inside of you. An immediate confrontation. So we as men are sculpted through confrontation. Masculinity in some ways requires confrontation. And I think change requires confrontation. Any type of psychological change requires confrontation. I think the challenge is that some men

• 32:05Connor Beaton?

  are afraid of the confrontation with themselves. What are your thoughts on that?

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  I think it's superbly accurate. I think it makes for a very interesting redefinition of the word bravery, especially for men. Uh, that emotionality, tapping into yourself, being in touch with who you really are,

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  is seen as a kind of weakness. And yet, so much of that that I see among guys is like a sex-based gaslighting.

• 32:46Connor Beaton?

  I think, I think is, I think that's one of the things that's made you very successful. It's those little snips. Where did that even come from, Chris?

• 32:53Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 32:54Connor Beaton?

  Sex-based gaslighting.

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  Try and tell me it doesn't fit, though.

• 32:57Connor Beaton?

  It 100%.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking perfect.

• 32:58Connor Beaton?

  It's great.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  It is, because you're scared of what's inside of you. As a man, you're terrified of looking inside of yourself. You're terrified of being in touch with your emotions. You're terrified of your heart.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  Don't pretend like you're not. And don't pretend like the guys who are prepared to face it are somehow lesser.

• 33:15Connor Beaton?

  Right. Right? It's like, I, you know, I do martial arts, I do Muay Thai a couple of times a week. I absolutely love it. I love knowing that I can like, you know, kick some dude in the side of the head. That's like six, you know, six foot two. But I also am not afraid of how I'm feeling. And I do think that, I think this is what I was talking about before, which is that we've become so one dimensional. We've over indexed on like one specific thing. And that hasn't been, that hasn't been the truth for men throughout human history. I mean, when you look at, when you look at men from different walks of life and, you know, like the, the Spartans, right? They do hand to hand combat, sword training, fighting in groups.

• 33:58Connor Beaton?

  And then in the afternoon, they would learn how to write poetry and dance and play music. You know, so it's, it's always been a part of, of our development as men. It's just recently, in the last 100 plus years, that we've sort of condensed men down into this one dimension. And it's great if you want to pop out factory workers. It's great if you want to produce armies of people, armies of men, that their sole job for 10 hours a day is to put a fucking handle on an ice cream bucket. You know, it's like, you don't want a human being that's thinking about, how do I feel about doing this? You don't want that, right? Because that's not useful, because then that person's not going to be useful.

• 34:42Connor Beaton?

  So again, I think we're, we're entering into this territory. And I think this is what is causing a lot of, part of what's causing a lot of the challenges in modern dating is that. Women have become much broader in the sense that, you know, they still have network, they still have community, but they've learned how to compete with men. And I think that largely we as men have not adapted and figured out how to compete with women. I think that we are terrible at competing with women because women compete far different. They compete way differently than we do as men. We as men, we compete through competition, through competency. It's like, I'm gonna outwork you, I'm gonna be more competent than you, I'm gonna be more capable than you, I'm gonna figure out the systems and get better at it than you.

• 35:26Connor Beaton?

  And women have figured out how to do that as well, but they also have this whole other skill set of emotional intelligence, of being able to create network, of being able to social, socialize. And along with that, character assassinate, right? Like, and take you out in ways that we just don't-

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  You didn't even see coming.

• 35:45Connor Beaton?

  You didn't even see coming. All of a sudden, you're like, why is Becky from HR pulling me in and like, reprimanding me? Like, what the hell just happened? And so I think that's very intimidating for some men. I think it's very confusing because we've kind of been sold this bill of goods that if you just prioritize competency and capability, then you should rise through the ladder of culture and society and you should be able to be successful with women. And I think that that is really in jeopardy right now. I think there's this big kind of tug of war-

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:19Connor Beaton?

  -for whether or not that's going to be true or not. And you still have men that are outliers, that that is true, that because they're so successful, because they have high status and yada, yada, yada, that that still works. But I think for the average guy, that's becoming harder and harder.

• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the new stats? You know, hypergamy, the word hypergamy, favorite-

• 36:36Connor Beaton?

  Yep.

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  -of the romantic pill. I call the red pill the romantic pill now.

• 36:41Connor Beaton?

  That's great, that's great, I like that.

• 36:43Chris Williamson?

  Romantic pill. Because everyone that's in the red pill is a romantic. Everybody. Every single guy that's in the red pill is a romantic. Some have failed, some are successful, but fundamentally, they want-

• 36:53Connor Beaton?

  Relationships.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  They want to find and be loved by a woman. Yeah. It's the romantic pill.

• 36:57Connor Beaton?

  That's great.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  Hypogamy, the bottom two quintiles of men in terms of earning and the top quintile in terms of women for earning have the female as the primary breadwinner in the household now, that's in the US. So the bottom forty percent of guys who earn are dating up socioeconomically and the top twenty percent of women earners are dating down socioeconomically. So that is getting squeezed a lot. And how long have I been fucking screaming about this tall girl problem thing? Well, again, another great meme. If women are socioeconomically successful soon enough, they're going to stand on the

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  top of their own competence hierarchy, look across and find very few men. And the men that are there have a wealth of opportunities, so they're going to use and discard women. So, yeah, we are at this interesting tug of war, but I think it's not really even a tug anymore. It's like, it's happened, it's happened and it's happening.

• 37:59Connor Beaton?

  We're fully in it.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah. And we're just trying to sort of pick up the pieces. And for women, what it's felt like objectively is a lot of gain, lots of gains, right? I've now got degrees. There's more women getting like, I think it's creeping up into masters and doctoral degrees now as well. So it's not just that they're getting it at undergrad. More degrees, they earn more than guys up to the age of thirty, thirty-one. Now that's continuing to creep up as well. And you go, that just seems like a boon. Now there are prices that women are going to pay and those are going to be ones that are much harder to quantify. Quality of life, eight out of ten women that don't have kids and breach their reproductive window, don't say that they didn't intend to not have children.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  So, or say that they didn't intend to not have children, sorry. What this means is the prices that women and like the feminism problem or the femininity problem, supposed to the masculinity problem, are going to be felt later, further down the line, and they're going to be more subtle and they're going to be much more psychological, or at least much more hidden, I think. But objectively. Guys are already in it.

• 39:10Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

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• 39:54Chris Williamson?

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• 40:26Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, we're in it. I mean, the decline of men is staggering. You know, when you look at the stats and the data of, you know, there's less men going to college than ever before. And by 2030, you're going to have two women graduating with degrees for every one man, right? And when you look at the women that graduate from college, they statistically want men with college degrees. They want to date men with college degrees, right? So we're creating a population of men that a lot of women don't, that they say they don't necessarily want to date on paper, right? So you have less men going to college, you have less men in the workforce. I mean, there's a huge... Amount of men, something like six or seven million American men are not in the workforce right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:11Connor Beaton?

  This massive exodus from the workforce. You have more young men that are thirty living at home than ever before. You have more young men not dating, right? It's like, I feel like Scott Galler right now, just I can hear Scott just like listing off the stats, right? It's like, you know, forty percent of men of the age of thirty haven't approached a woman in the last year and haven't had sex with a woman in the last year. And so I think that when you look socially and economically, young men really are in decline. And I think the problem with that is that when we go to talk about young men, men's problems and how we can alter society or create social programs for men to actually support them, it all hell breaks loose.

• 41:56Connor Beaton?

  You know, it just, it just turns into a kind of, you know, missionary fest. It's like man hate just becomes very apparent when you start to talk about men's problems and men's issues, but. It feels like it's taking resources away from some other more deserving group. That's why. It's a zero sum view of empathy and resources. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that hierarchies have just shifted, right? And so there's the, the power distribution is not going towards men anymore. And I think that that is very hard for a lot of people to come to terms with. I think it's also detrimental for our society and our culture. And I do think that young men have, I think they have a hard time.

• 42:38Connor Beaton?

  I think that as a culture, we've forgotten how hard it is to, to take a young boy and turn him into a man and to get him through that period of going through puberty, having testosterone, wanting to basically like, you know, fight, fucking feed, crash out entirely and, and get him into manhood in a functional way. And so I think we almost have like a type of amnesia with how hard it is to turn a young boy into a man. I think it's, I think it's very, very challenging. And so. And then when we look at the social programs for young men and boys, they're few and far between. Right? So you have young boys that don't have father figures at home.

• 43:21Connor Beaton?

  You know, one in four kids in America don't have a father figure in the household. You have young boys that are going to go into an education system that is female dominated. So they're not going to have role models at home, not going to have role models in the school system. If they go through a therapeutic vein because they're having problems, that's dominated by women as well. And so there's a kind of vacancy, there's like a male role model vacancy. And for a lot of young boys, there's that what they're looking for is a type of transmission from men around how do I get through this process? How do I go from being this boy or being this adolescence? Into being somebody who can regulate, who can deal with the intensity of his anger, who can deal with,

• 44:06Connor Beaton?

  you know, the fear of the rejection of talking to a woman in a coffee shop or at the grocery store. And so I think that that absence is is really crushing for a lot of young men. And then I think when you couple that with

• 44:21Connor Beaton?

  with the parenting style that we've gone through in the last couple of decades, which is like the helicopter parent. It has completely debilitated a lot of young men. The there's two simple things that the parenting data that basically like shows when it comes to raising a healthy child, whether it's a boy or a girl, is that you need high standards and high support. You need those two things. You need really good, solid standards of here's what I expect from you. I want to help you develop. I want you to develop competency in these different areas. And then high support, I'm also going to help you to do those things. What a lot of young boys grew up with is extremely high standards with very little support.

• 45:01Connor Beaton?

  Right? It's like, I expect you to get the high grades. I expect you to be exceptional at hockey or lacrosse or basketball, whatever it is. But I'm not actually going to teach you how to do those things. I'm not going to support you to do that. Or in the last couple of decades, we've had the inverse. Right? Where it's been like, it's okay, honey. You got 10th place. It's all right. No worries. No standards, no expectations, no nothing. And for that young man, he's like, well, fuck, is this it then? Am I just supposed to? Okay, I guess I'll just play video games and jerk off watching Pornhub, you know, like. Nobody expects anything from me and culture is telling me that I'm the problem. So I'm just gonna check it out. So I think that you have this intersection of problems that are creating a shitstorm for young men.

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the traits of an emotionally safe man?

• 45:49Connor Beaton?

  Well, first, I think you need to have the ability to regulate your own nervous system. So you need to have some level of competency over your own emotional awareness. You need to have an understanding of what's happening inside of you. If you don't know, or you're not able to identify what's happening inside of yourself emotionally, when you're angry, when you feel shamed, when you feel anxious, when you feel sad, when you feel embarrassed, if you don't, if you can't differentiate between those things or identify them, and then be able to regulate yourself through them so that you don't lash out and get reactive and get defensive all the time, or you know, you you get rejected for a phone number at the coffee shop or whatever, and you you dissolve into a puddle

• 46:34Connor Beaton?

  of like, oh, my God, I'm such a piece of shit, which I understand, I've been there, I actually have been there, you know, I like was that guy when I was a teenager. Rejection was brutal, but if you if you aren't able to understand what's happening inside of you and move yourself through it, it's gonna be very, very challenging to do that for anybody else. So that's kind of like the first place, the first step. And then secondly, I think you need to have the capacity to draw out emotional content. And this is a this is a skill set that far few men learn. I think what we learn as men is get the get the content logistically, get the logistical content, like what happened, when did it happen? What did it look like?

• 47:20Connor Beaton?

  You know, like, we get all those details, but what we don't ask is, what was that actually like for you? You know, what was it like for you when your boss was pissed off? Or when you fucked up the presentation? What was that like for you? What happened inside of you? And so that's another skill set that I think a lot of young men need is to be able to draw out emotional content. Tell me what that was like? What happened? How did you feel in that moment? You know, when she said that, when he did that, what was that like? And those simple things are going to create a connection, a bridge for the other person to say, oh, this person is interested in how I'm feeling. And so I think for a lot of men, just showing I have interest in what's happening inside

• 48:04Connor Beaton?

  of you is also the next step. And then being to respond and not react. A lot of the times, we personalize the shit out of especially women's, the women that we're dating, but we personalize what other people are saying. And so you might have your girlfriend or your wife talking about something and, you know, she's talking about how she was disappointed in her mom or some argument with you. And all of a sudden, it's like, well, did I do something wrong? And how could I have done that better? And what's wrong with me? And so a lot of men collapse in to a type of defensiveness or reactivity to go on the attack, to character assassinate, to, you know, sort of just defend themselves in that moment.

• 48:49Connor Beaton?

  So we need to be able to regulate and then respond versus just reacting from whatever emotion comes up inside of us when somebody else is talking. And sometimes that means that we have to be able to hear what somebody is saying to us and about us without becoming defensive, without becoming reactive. How do you do that? Your breath is a big part of it. Like, I think this is just a very simple thing. Like, your breath is a huge piece of regulating your nervous system. And so, you know, for a lot of guys that I work with, when they There's this moment, Viktor Frankl has this beautiful phrase, which is between stimulus and response, there is a pause and we have to be able to feel that pause. So for a lot

• 49:34Connor Beaton?

  of guys, as soon as they hear hard content, you know, it's like you forgot something and your partner's upset and she's like, how could you have forgotten to do that? I asked you, I texted you and all of a sudden the shame and the guilt and that, you know, the heaviness, fuck, oh, fuck, I fucked up. Or like the defensiveness that happens, being able to literally take some breaths so that the emotional intensity and the charge that has happened inside of you can subside a little bit instead of immediately reacting from that place. What most of us do as men is immediately react from that place. So we're reacting from the shame, we're reacting from the anger, we're reacting from the defensiveness

• 50:14Connor Beaton?

  and the embarrassment. And so what I teach a lot of men is just like, take three breaths before you respond. I know it sounds super simple and super, it's like so simple that it sounds dumb, but if you can just start to interrupt the pattern of reacting immediately from an emotion, you can create a new pathway of being able to take some breaths so that you can quote unquote down regulate your system. Or at the very least, you can get some awareness of what is happening inside of me. So take a breath, understand what's happening inside of yourself and then you can either choose to set that aside or you can voice it, right? It's like, oh, I hear you and I feel really defensive, so I'm gonna

• 50:58Connor Beaton?

  pause, you know, or I get what you're saying and you're right, I totally forgot to do that, I'll take care of it. So you, you don't personalize what's happening and you're able to actually stay with your experience.

• 51:12Chris Williamson?

  The mindfulness gap is what my meditation teacher referred to it as.

• 51:16Connor Beaton?

  Yes.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  Space. I certainly know the periods in my life where I've had that the most. There's a few incidents that were really, really funny, where somebody got very agitated, like this guy in a Nando's I was in in the UK, I was with my friends, always use this as an example, it's so funny. And this guy sort of.

• 51:35Connor Beaton?

  Always Nando's.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  Had him, I know, I know, scum. I'm very working class, which is why Nando's for me is a huge treat.

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  I walked past this table, he kicked off at me because he thought that I got too close. And this was like, deep, deep, deep meditation mode, me. Like, this was the peak monk mode, three hour morning routine, like gratitude. This is when I was doing, I think, a thousand days sober and 500 days without caffeine at the same time. Oh.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  The alcohol thing's great, the caffeine thing's fucking miserable and pointless. But was a good lesson to learn. Anyway, this guy kicks off, and because I've, out of, he was obviously having a bad day. Like, he was obviously on the edge, he was having a bad day. And I remember, like, watching this thing unfold, and I just turned around and said, oh, and kept on walking. And he'd made this big sort of explosion. Oh, let me give you this, you're gonna fucking love this. You got into Joe Hudson yet? Have I got you into Joe? Art of accomplishment guy? He stinks of you. So, he taught me this idea called vagal authority.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  You already know what it means, right? Like, you're in a room, somebody's nervous system is dysregulated, somebody's is regulated. Which way does the rest of the room go? And which way do you go? That guy there, I held the vagal authority. Now, I'm not sure if he was able to take my regulation and go back to his family and be like, I don't think I should have blown up that much, that guy just warped near my table. Yeah, maybe not, but. But the, the, the idea that I am so regulated, that not only can I keep myself where I want to be, while you are doing something else, but also, I maybe have so much surplus, that you can kind of borrow from it. Like, my cup is so full, that the saucer that overflows around it can fill yours up. Yes.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  And, um, yeah, when I think about emotional safety, that regulation piece is a, a huge part. But I guess, a lot of guys will worry, fear.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

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• 54:19Chris Williamson?

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• 54:50Connor Beaton?

  Well, I think that that's when you... What I'm really talking about is a type of emotional containment. But is containment not through suppression? It's not by cutting yourself off from what you feel. It's not about, you know, beheading your emotions or numbing yourself out from them. It's actually by gaining a mastery through deeply understanding and feeling what you're feeling in any given moment to the degree that they do not control you. For the average man, what happens is that they feel something and they become something. They feel anger and they become angry. They feel shame and they're shameful, right? And so the emotion comes up and then they become that emotion. And then they respond from that emotion, they react from that emotion. Versus, oh, there's that emotion.

• 55:35Connor Beaton?

  I know that I'm feeling that emotion and I can feel that emotion, but I can still have enough space from that emotion that I can still respond in a grounded way. And this, this type of emotional containment, this type of emotional regulation is really what...

• 55:56Connor Beaton?

  When you look at people like Marcus Aurelius, when you look at really great leaders, when you look at Aragorn, I did this video about, you know, the masculinity of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, which is super fucking nerdy, but I'm kind of a nerd, so I thought I would do it. It's, it's becoming a, a man who is capable of dealing with the intensity and the charge within himself so that he can learn to deal with the intensity and the charge of others. That is a gift, right? That is a gift that we as men can provide the world, can provide our children, can provide our friends, can provide our family, the women in our life. And for a lot of women, that is what they're saying when they say, I want safety, I want emotional attunement.

• 56:41Connor Beaton?

  Now, it's not your job to make all women safe, that's kind of impossible, it's not your job to do that. It's also not your job to, you know, help the woman that you're dating feel better all the time, that's people pleasing and codependency and all that other type of stuff. But what you can bring is containment. And sometimes that containment can look different ways. It can be, you know, your partner, your girlfriend or your wife saying something that's crossing a line, that's like a little bit of a jab or an edge, and you saying, I didn't like that, don't do that again. I love you, I don't like when you talk to me like that. And it's, it's not a threat, it's not angry, you're not blowing up, oh, why are you fucking do this to me all the time, oh, I hate when you talk to me like that.

• 57:25Connor Beaton?

  It's just clear grounded boundaries. And, but you need to have emotional connection to be able to attune to the information of, oh, that wasn't okay. That pissed me off. So good. That made me feel embarrassed, that made me feel shame. And so emotions are just data, they're just data. And we as men, the, I think the men that become the real leaders of the future, I think the men that become really successful in the future, whether it's with women or in the business world, are going to be men that are exceptionally emotionally attuned, that are able to read the data that's happening inside of them, and...

• 58:11Connor Beaton?

  Not be numbed out or completely disconnected, but be able to understand that there's a very real intensity inside of them. And the interesting thing is that when you look at something like the, the neurology and the data around emotions between men and women, it's, it's generally that women will feel more emotions more often and men will feel singular emotions more intensely. And so men generally will stay in an emotion for a longer period of time and they'll stay in an intensity of that emotion. This is why you have guys that are like, you know, they'll stay in their depression for ages and ages and ages, right? They'll stay in their anxiety or their anger. They'll stay angry and frustrated, you know, days on end

• 58:56Connor Beaton?

  and they're holding grudges and they're not talking to anybody for days and they're cutting people off. They're just in that intensity of that emotions. So I think the more that we as men can learn how to deal with the charge inside of ourselves through the breath, through awareness of like, what is actually happening inside of me without saying, something's fucking wrong with me because I have emotions. Or, you know, I'm like, it's emotional competency. That's what it really is. It's being able to have emotional competency and say like, oh, you know, I, I felt angry when you said that, you know? I didn't like when you did that. That wasn't okay with me. Or I really loved when you, you know, did X, Y and Z.

• 59:38Connor Beaton?

  And that type of emotional attunement to ourselves and then to others is like a superpower for men. And I think that for a lot of women, it's, it's really what they're asking for. And I'm not saying that we as men should do that to give them that. I think that we should do that because it allows us a certain level of meaning and depth that I think most men are deeply craving, you know, deeply craving. And how are you supposed to walk through life?

• 1:00:13Connor Beaton?

  With a sense of purpose and meaning if you're disconnected from the data of your own emotions. It's so hard. And we need those things to set boundaries, to know when things are okay and not okay. We need those things for relationships and trust and safety. But we also need those things for leadership. Like, the, the men that are going to be leaders of the future will have an exceptional level of emotional literacy and they will have a very high capacity to regulate their nervous system. When you look at today's culture and society, people are fucked. Their nervous systems are fucked. And so who are people turning to?

• 1:00:56Connor Beaton?

  They're turning to people who have said, I'm able to navigate the shitstorm of the chaos of our times. The chaos of our social media and our culture and the uncertainty of whether AI is going to destroy us all and climate is going to kill everything and da, da, da, da. Most people's nervous systems are so hijacked. And so if you're a man who's able to regulate your nervous system in your relationship and in a work setting, in a genuine, meaningful way, without needing to numb yourself out constantly and chronically through booze or weed or porn or whatever it is, and you can do it in a genuine way that is aligned with your values, you're going to be unstoppable.

• 1:01:36Connor Beaton?

  You're going to be unstoppable because you will be signaling to women, I have done something that most men haven't done. Because most women know that for the majority of men, it's extremely hard to put on the scuba diving mask and go inside and confront the dragon within, the beast inside of ourselves. Most women know that that's something that we as men are afraid of. And so women are largely in our culture, I think, saying, I really am craving a man that has met himself, that's confronted himself, that's met his own demons and his own darkness and knows his violence and knows what makes him dangerous.

• 1:02:17Connor Beaton?

  That is, I think, what men are really being asked to do. And I feel bad for a lot of the young men because so many of them are either finding the sort of like false gods of masculinity, or there's just a vacancy entirely. You know, there's just a vacancy.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Choices between extreme and void.

• 1:02:39Connor Beaton?

  Yeah. Yeah, and you're gonna take extreme every single time.

• 1:02:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because it's better to be uh given some advice that sounds right but may not be than no advice at all, because that sounds like that feels like being lost.

• 1:02:52Connor Beaton?

  It's it's my biggest problem with progressive liberal um talking points around masculinity in men is that there's there's no target, there's no aim. It's a it's a continuous laundry list of the things that you should not do. So there's no actual aim or definition, there's there's no um trajectory that you can point yourself towards and say, I want to become that, I want to move in that direction. That is something that I can ascend towards.

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  The uh vagal decapitation that you were talking about, that like, you know, person who only lives above the neck.

• 1:03:33Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  Um, I'm gonna keep going. I've had my new tonic today, dude. I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep.

• 1:03:38Connor Beaton?

  I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start taking those.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  Keep naming shit that you came up with. Um, hey, do you want one for your the turning or whatever it was, the narrow path, the turning?

• 1:03:46Connor Beaton?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  Manopaus.

• 1:03:48Connor Beaton?

  Oh, Manopaus.

• 1:03:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Connor Beaton?

  That's good.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:51Connor Beaton?

  That's true.

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  Works on many levels.

• 1:03:53Connor Beaton?

  It's true.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  The thing that comes to mind, and what I'm particularly fascinated about is almost objection handling, uh, some of the stuff that comes up that will come up for guys that I've seen.

• 1:04:06Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  Online a lot.

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the first objections earlier on is, well, that toxic fuel has helped me to be successful. Also, I turned that toxic, I alchemized that bad thing into something good. Is that not something I should be proud of? Um, another element might be in order for me to delve into this, I feel like my real world performance is going to dip, and it very well may do. Uh, Tiger Woods had this issue with his swing that he developed as a young golfer that he needed to purposely go back and fix. So he needed to adjust his hand position, adjust his backswing, because there's there's too many variables in that. Why are you grinning?

• 1:04:41Connor Beaton?

  You said Tiger Woods had a problem. I was like with Swedish bikini models.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had many problems. This is before that. This was in the confines of his sport. He had to basically unlearn, which is 100 times harder than learning.

• 1:04:54Connor Beaton?

  Yes.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  He had to unlearn and then relearn in order to get to the next level, but that required a false peak. He got to as good as he was going to be with this. He had to go back and then come back up. So I think even if you do go, well, look, you might real world effectiveness might be reduced if you crack yourself open in this sort of a way.

• 1:05:16Connor Beaton?

  For a period of time, yeah.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. And in my experience, that's true. That's true. I just need to put it out there. I know that you said, you know, you can show up in an open hearted way in a blah, blah, blah. The first couple of years of trying to feel feelings fucking blow, dude. I'm just gonna be upfront about it.

• 1:05:33Connor Beaton?

  I got it. I got it.

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  But another one of the objections is the world to me seems to be split largely into two groups. People who know that they should be feeling emotions and either are or are not. And people who just don't feel emotions that deeply or are so good at repressing them that functionally it's the same thing. And these two groups constantly argue between each other. The second group, the group that doesn't necessarily feel emotions quite so deeply, the Tim Kennedys of the world, for instance. I actually think that David Goggins is a bad example of this because I think he does feel things very deeply.

• 1:06:09Connor Beaton?

  He does.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  Which is what's caused him to go and do something so extreme as a mechanism for him to be able to alchemize it. Tim Kennedy would be an example of somebody who, at least in my experience, slightly less so. If you're a sniper, a Green Beret, all that stuff, that tends to not be your archetype. For them, when they start to talk about, well, the opening up of emotions, I don't even know what you're talking about. Tapping into inner child wounds, doing the shadow work, alchemy, things falling apart, the phoenix, all this stuff. I just, it doesn't resonate that much with me. And also on the female side of this are the sort of women who would see a man opening up in that way and think less of him.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  Who would see a man that wants to try and have a deeply connected, heartfelt, emotionally aware, emotionally mature relationship that not only experiences emotions, but talks about them and works on them together to transcend and include them.

• 1:07:04Chris Williamson?

  That group of people who are, it would be wonderful for them all to just get together, but unfortunately, sometimes they cross over. And you have the guys that don't feel with the girls that do, and the guys who do feel with the girls that don't, or don't take it in the manner that they want it to. And I think just identifying, hey, if you're a dude who has the horrible affliction of actually feeling things, as far as I can see, you have two choices. The first one is to actually

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  open the bank account of this emotional inheritance, and have a look at what's inside of it, and do the work on it. The second one is to be floating above your life like a hovercraft for the rest of time. Like you never, like being a poltergeist, you're like haunting your own existence.

• 1:07:59Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  You never actually come into contact with your own life, fully. That advice is not for the group of guys that don't feel stuff quite so deeply.

• 1:08:08Connor Beaton?

  Correct.

• 1:08:09Chris Williamson?

  And it's that group, I think, that often tends to throw shit. Well, maybe it's not, maybe it is the, um, I don't want to have to feel the thing that I know I should feel. Perhaps it comes from both directions. But you, this is like trying to speak Arabic to a dog or something. You know, a dog that doesn't speak Arabic as well. It's just never going to work on that second group. But I think, what I'm trying to say is,

• 1:08:36Chris Williamson?

  if you are the sort of guy who really feels things very deeply, I think that you have a beautiful adventure ahead of you, but it's fucking terrifying.

• 1:08:44Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  And you have a, almost like a burden or a cost to pay, or a demon to slay that some other guys might not, and they've got other ones.

• 1:08:51Connor Beaton?

  Yes.

• 1:08:52Chris Williamson?

  But your one is to put the scuba mask on.

• 1:08:54Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  And go diving.

• 1:08:55Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, if you're, if you're the guy that, and I really do, it feels like a curse, you know, at first, um, to have such a soft heart. You know, it does. When like, when I was, when I was a boy, I mean, I, I had such a soft heart. You know, I was just, you know, my parents got divorced when I was three. I remember so many nights just crying because my dad was gone. And I look back and I was like, man, I was a really big feeling kid, you know? And life had a way of hardening me up.

• 1:09:34Connor Beaton?

  But I think for a lot of men, we look at that, we look at that and we say, oh, if I'm a big feeler, either there's something wrong with me or that's a curse that I have to deal with. So let me numb it out. And numbness is not a sign of emotional vacancy for the majority of men. Numbness is a sign of emotional fullness, that you are over capacity. Numbness is not emotional vacancy, it is emotional fullness. It's that your system has become overridden with too much emotions. And so your brain's only way to deal with that is to say, let me just turn off the sensor. Let me shut down the, the like inflow of information of everything that's going on down there.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  Hit the dashboard, get the warning.

• 1:10:20Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, hit the dashboard, get the warning light off, right? So I think you have to start to look at it as whether or not you're going to choose to go on that journey and confront that truth about yourself and learn how to deal with this gift that exists inside of you. It really is a beautiful gift.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about guys who have that disposition? Where do you think they find their self-worth from? Because it seems to me, especially in the modern world, the group that doesn't feel is able to trade on their masculinity publicly in a different way. It's much more observable, it's much more obvious, it's more classic.

• 1:11:02Connor Beaton?

  Accomplishment doing.

• 1:11:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep, archetypal. Again, the objection of, well, not only is it gonna maybe make me worse for a little while and I've got to feel all of these things and it's gonna be really hard and I've managed to survive so long without doing it and the stuff that I alchemized was for me avoiding it, not me diving into it. And now you're gonna say that maybe the world's gonna laugh at me a little bit too.

• 1:11:24Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about building self-esteem as, holding on to self-esteem, holding on to things to be proud of in a world that doesn't, especially in the messy middle bit, which is where presumably most guys get stuck. Before you've got to Marcus Aurelius level where everyone goes, oh my God, the vagal authority and the guy, he's so fucking, he's, I don't know what it is, he just makes me feel like calm and secure when I'm around him. I don't really know what's going on, but there's something. Before you get to that, you're this dude that's like trying to decode the fucking like Da Vinci project here.

• 1:12:01Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  How should guys think about finding that self-esteem and that sort of pride on the journey?

• 1:12:09Connor Beaton?

  There's a very simple truth and equation around developing worth, which is confronting and doing hard things that you know are hard, that you know you need to do, always develop a sense of worth and value. And so if you are a man that has, you're just a big feeler, you know, you're a big softie inside and you have this, you know, beautiful treasure trove of emotions that no one's really ever ushered you into understanding. No one's really ever taught you what to do with them, how to handle them, how to deal with that intensity that lives inside of you.

• 1:12:53Connor Beaton?

  You have to choose whether or not you're going to address them. And I think what you said is accurate, that if you don't, you'll always kind of be a ghost floating around in your own body. You know, because you will have, you will be cutting yourself off from a part of who you actually are. You will literally be disassociating from a part of who you are.

• 1:13:14Chris Williamson?

  You'll feel like you got shunted to the side of the road of your own life.

• 1:13:17Connor Beaton?

  Correct.

• 1:13:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Connor Beaton?

  And a basic psychological principle is that when we fracture off from something that is true, it creates mental suffering. So.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Tell me more about that.

• 1:13:28Connor Beaton?

  Well, if you're in, if you're in great shape and you look in the, in the mirror and you look at your body and you think, fuck, I look like shit. But objectively, and even subjectively, there's a part of yourself that knows like, actually, I'm in great shape, you start to suffer because you are fractured off from a sense of truth. If anxiety is another version of this, right? All of a sudden, a moment where you're just like, your body's pinging off, the alarm bells are going off inside of your body and you're like sitting at home watching Netflix. And you're like, I should be safe. I am objectively safe, but my body is telling me that I'm not. So you're fractured off from the truth of your reality. So coherence and.

• 1:14:12Connor Beaton?

  Congruency. Yeah, I love that word. Coherence and congruency are mental well-being. The more you can align yourself objectively and subjectively with what is true, the more that you actually develop mental wellness. So if you have a lot of emotions inside of you, and you are ignoring those emotions, how you feel about things, and the intensity with which you feel about those things, you are going to create more and more suffering by ignoring those. It's just, that's a fundamental truth of our psychological well-being and our emotional well-being. And you're going to have to deploy a disproportionate amount of energy to try and ignore what you're feeling internally.

• 1:14:56Connor Beaton?

  So you're going to, you're going to cut yourself off at the knees in some way, shape or form. Whether you will, you know, chronically be confused. This is a case that I see for a lot of men. They have big emotions, they ignore their emotions, but then they're chronically confused about whether or not a relationship was right for them, whether or not the career is right for them, whether or not they're moving in the right direction. They're just, they're just generally lost. And there's like an ambiguity and a haze that shows up for them psychologically. Why? Well, because they've cut themselves off from a huge amount of data and information of what is true in themselves and in their life. So they can never find clarity because they don't have any emotional clarity. So they're just lost because they're trying to find the truth of their life

• 1:15:40Connor Beaton?

  purely through rationale and logic, completely ignoring emotional truth and data. So they can never find truth. They can never find a path forward. They can never find meaning and purpose because they're, they've over-indexed on rationality. So we have to move more towards coherence and congruency. And as we do that, as we get more in alignment with what is true. Then we produce more psychological well-being. That's the outcome. So if what's true is that you have a lot of emotions and you feel incompetent at dealing with those emotions, then, or you are just ignoring those emotions and pretending like they're not there,

• 1:16:22Connor Beaton?

  you're going to create emotional dis-ease and discomfort and suffering within yourself. But if you acknowledge and you say, you know what? I have all these emotions. They're super intense. Sometimes I'm anxious, sometimes I'm angry, sometimes I'm this, but I have really intense emotions. And what's true is I fucking suck at dealing with them. And what I was taught growing up was just to disassociate from them. Well, now you have a truth. The truth is I need to become more competent at feeling my feelings and moving through them so that they don't take charge of my life. Because there's something important there. And then you have a pathway forward. And that is a form of confrontation, but it's a form of aligning yourself with the truth.

• 1:17:06Connor Beaton?

  For the other guys that don't have the big emotions, you know, they probably land on the scale of being, likely having higher levels of the dark triad, higher levels of psychopathy, lower levels of empathy, lower levels of agreeableness, extremely disagreeable. And, you know, we could talk about why that may or may not have happened. It may be a psychological disposition, predisposition. Or it could just be that that's neurologically how they were designed and their nervous system was designed. And there's just not a real connection between what's happening in their bodies and their emotional bodies and their mind. Those men, those men will either...

• 1:17:55Connor Beaton?

  Get to a place in their life where they realize that the void of empathy is so catastrophic that they have to address it. And then go about the journey of understanding how to develop a different sense of empathy, a different sense of compassion. And maybe they don't feel the full spectrum of emotions that are there. And there's, but I think that these cases are fewer and far between. I think that generally speaking, more men have more intense emotions inside of them that they just are ill-equipped to deal with and they don't want to admit that because admitting a lack of competency as a man, especially a high-performing man, is like the worst fucking thing that we could do. And so we don't want to do that.

• 1:18:39Connor Beaton?

  But I think that for, for the other men that genuinely are just like, I don't feel a lot and I don't believe that it's because of childhood trauma or, you know, something that caused this, uh, this maladaptive way of, of moving through and I just have higher levels of, I don't give a shit and I just go forward. Um, it's not to say that that's bad or wrong or that it's worse or anything else. It's just that at some point in your life, you will likely have to develop and work hard on developing empathy and compassion. And either you can proactively do it or you will systematically destroy enough relationships and opportunities in your life that you will come to the point where you will be forced

• 1:19:22Connor Beaton?

  into a kind of submission and to a kind of like knee lock or an arm bar where you're like, oh, look at the wake of destruction that I have left. I'm four marriages deep. Shit, I wonder why. Or like, I've destroyed five business relationships and imploded two companies and all of my former employees fucking hate me. I, I should probably figure this out. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1.

• 1:19:45Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:30Chris Williamson?

  and AG1 Welcome Kit, plus bonus AG1 Travel Packs. And for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of Omega 3s. Just go to the link in the description below, or head to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. I was gonna say, what are some things that are coping mechanisms or addictions that don't look like it?

• 1:21:05Connor Beaton?

  Coping mechanisms or addictions that don't look like them?

• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are, but upfront, the guy who is incessantly using alcohol on a nighttime, for instance, would be one that's pretty obvious. Even if they can't necessarily see it themselves, eventually they probably will. For instance, a switch out for that, which I think people kid themselves over, is sleeping pills. I think using an RX to go to sleep. If you need a stimulant to get you up in the morning, and an RX to get you to sleep at night, that's, that's probably...

• 1:21:38Chris Williamson?

  The closest or the earliest warning sign that burnout is on route because you you literally can't start without assistance and you can't stop without assistance either. You're having to use a fucking firework to get you up in the morning and a hammer to get you to sleep. But it's the sort of thing, well, everybody uses caffeine, you know, everybody, you know, like fucking, okay, I use a bit of Adderall, dude, like, fuck, whatever, like.

• 1:22:03Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, but if you're slamming like, you know, eight, nine milligram nicotine pouches every single day. I mean, that's become a common one, right? I mean, I've seen all the videos of the guys like flipping the nicotine pouches in and you seen those? Okay, somebody in the comments section will have my back. There's a bunch of guys that have like, they take the nicotine pouches and they they toss it in in like a really magical way and they're like, and they'll do this thing and there's a whole culture around it. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, nicotine pouches are a big one.

• 1:22:41Chris Williamson?

  Screens, video games?

• 1:22:42Connor Beaton?

  Screens, video games, work, you know, I think is a very socially acceptable one, right? It's like the more that you work, that's sort of like this addiction that's socially acceptable. And I think just being busy, just being like the chronically busy person, you know, it's like, how are you? Oh, I'm so busy. Let me, let me, let me stroke myself while I tell you how busy I am, you know, and like all the things. But that's part of our culture, right? It's very socially acceptable. It doesn't look like an addiction, but I think that many of us are addicted to being busy. You know, sometimes I'll give my clients an assignment of doing nothing for a day. I'll say, put your phone at home and go do

• 1:23:23Connor Beaton?

  nothing. No plan, no agenda, no tasks, no outcome, nothing for you to do. Go and do nothing.

• 1:23:34Connor Beaton?

  And the first question that most guys say is, but what am I supposed to do? And I'm like, that's it, right? You're literally, I want you to go and do nothing. But they're so addicted to wake up in the morning, emails, notifications, starting, you know, getting the days, you know, they're working all day long and crush crushing and accomplishing da, da, da, that there's no off switch for that.

• 1:23:53Chris Williamson?

  Justin, my friend, worked with a coach who got him to, he had to start a hobby that he promised he wouldn't try to get better at. Which I, so it sticks with my mind. He told me on my birthday, like three years ago, it still sticks in my mind now. It's such an insanely difficult thing to think about doing. And he said, what did he take up? Was that water, water coloring? I think so. Interesting. I, I used to be a musician. I'd like to, I'd like to, you know, learn to make paintings. Wouldn't that be cool?

• 1:24:22Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  And as soon as he does it and he thinks, well, that was, you know, that was all right. He wants to go on YouTube and look at tutorials. He wants to research what's the best water coloring set. He wants to start optimizing the canvas.

• 1:24:32Connor Beaton?

  How do I master this?

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. And his coach said to him, no, you're not allowed to try and get better.

• 1:24:38Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:39Chris Williamson?

  You just have to do it.

• 1:24:41Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Chris Williamson?

  For the enjoyment of doing it. And is it telec and exotelic? The difference between done for its own sake and done because of the reward that you get externally for having done it.

• 1:24:54Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 1:24:55Chris Williamson?

  And I, I think that the desire for progress, a lot of the time is you sacrificing the telec for the exotelic.

• 1:25:02Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Chris Williamson?

  Right? It's like, well, if I get better at this, then people will be real impressed.

• 1:25:06Connor Beaton?

  Well, I think that this speaks to, again, I mean, one of the things that I've been talking about lately is that how we as men versus women develop a sense of identity. And we as men are so culturally and socially conditioned to develop identity through competition based efforts, activities, through doing things that are about achievements and accomplishments and competency. And that's largely there because we as men will usually coordinate ourselves in a hierarchical way. And we're okay with doing that. You know, it's, it's, that's part of the equation for the majority of men is that there's this either spoken or unspoken hierarchy that starts to form within friend groups,

• 1:25:51Connor Beaton?

  within high schools and colleges and on the sports team. There's like this jockeying for position that naturally happens. And even in friend groups today, usually for a lot of men, it's like, You know, how successful you are, how much you're doing, how much you're accomplishing, you know, that kind of stuff.

• 1:26:06Chris Williamson?

  I've been in rooms with guys who are super successful and one of the subtle ways that this happens is everybody always turns their chairs to angle slightly toward the person who's like the head of the table, even on a circular or a rectangular table, everybody slightly does that. Or when that person starts speaking, more people shut up. Most people, all of them shut up. I've been in rooms with certain guys where if they fart, the rest of the room will decide to be quiet. It's like, wee wee? No, no, no, he wasn't talking. It's okay. And that's this kind of respect that guys want from other men and rightly so. Like, wow, I'm the top of the tree. Like, isn't this great? I've spare resources. I've got assistance when I need. The women are gonna see me because I'm at the top of my competence hierarchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's true.

• 1:26:51Connor Beaton?

  But I think that largely women coordinate in different ways. They coordinate through network, you know, through community, through relationships. And it's almost

• 1:26:59Chris Williamson?

  Way harder.

• 1:26:59Connor Beaton?

  It's almost

• 1:27:00Chris Williamson?

  Way harder, dude. Fucking so not cool. So not fucking easy to understand. Oh, this is why the movie Mean Girls was made.

• 1:27:12Connor Beaton?

  That's right.

• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  Like, that is how women compete.

• 1:27:15Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  And

• 1:27:16Connor Beaton?

  It's totally foreign.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Underdog is how men compete.

• 1:27:23Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Chris Williamson?

  By punching each other in the face and working out who won. Then being friends after.

• 1:27:26Connor Beaton?

  Totally. But I think, I think that

• 1:27:28Chris Williamson?

  Fuck being a girl, dude.

• 1:27:29Connor Beaton?

  Part of the challenge that I think a lot of men are having is that, you know, we are used to competing in hierarchies. We're used to that system. But now our culture and society has moved towards a network-based form of competition. And I think for a lot of men, they don't know how to compete in that environment because it's completely different rules. And

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  And what is, what is that? Is that who you know, friendships, allegiances?

• 1:27:55Connor Beaton?

  You, you almost never want to profess that you are better than anybody else.

• 1:28:03Connor Beaton?

  So.

• 1:28:04Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's this female minimization of competency.

• 1:28:06Connor Beaton?

  That's right.

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  They come out of the the exam and they go, you're going to have done so well. No, no, no, me?

• 1:28:12Connor Beaton?

  You did it, right? Like, you know, it's like the the women hanging out and it's like, you know, Becky clearly doesn't look great and she's put on a little weight, but it's like, you're so beautiful. You're the most beautiful one, Becky. It's like you can't admit any type of hierarchy. It's a faux pas within the network organization. And I think for for men, that's not how we operate. You know, we it's like, dude, what's happened? You're like, you've put on some pounds, hey? You know, like, what's going on? I thought you said you're gonna hit the gym. Like, what's what's happening? So I I think for a lot of guys, it's there's in the in the workplace, that's showing up. But I also think in relationships, that's showing up. Um, because there's just like these these skill sets that we don't

• 1:28:54Connor Beaton?

  that are not sort of like second nature to us that we're having to learn. And I think in in a lot of ways, like the school systems are not teaching us that. And so, you know, there's like a, again, there's like a vacancy there.

• 1:29:04Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. How many men have mommy issues?

• 1:29:10Connor Beaton?

  I don't know a percentage, but I mean, I think that I think that for a lot of guys, if you're a people pleaser, if you're a nice guy, you, you know, you have mommy issues. And for a lot of guys that, um, have you ever heard of the Madonna whore complex?

• 1:29:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I thought that was disproven, but yeah, go ahead.

• 1:29:29Connor Beaton?

  The Madonna whore complex?

• 1:29:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At least from an EP perspective. The only reason, the only reason I say this, I first read it in, uh, uh, not Steve Stuart Williams, Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.

• 1:29:42Connor Beaton?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  From nineteen ninety-three. And, um,

• 1:29:46Chris Williamson?

  I remember one of my EP friends saying that that didn't show up in the data, but I was like, but every single guy.

• 1:29:56Chris Williamson?

  Would say that it does.

• 1:29:58Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, that it, that it, well, I think it's more of, this is where I think things like evolutionary psychology are, are challenging because part of our psychology is there's a lot of research coming out around right brain development and the development in the unconscious. There's a guy named Alan Shore, who has done some phenomenal, phenomenal work. He's got a book called Right Brain Psychology.

• 1:30:20Chris Williamson?

  Got it at home.

• 1:30:21Connor Beaton?

  Developmental, developmental unconscious, unconscious. And it is astounding when you see how our unconscious mind, which is a huge part of how we identify, but a huge part of how we relate to others is actually developed and formed. And, you know, a lot of it is within the first three years, but the, the main part of it is that your unconscious doesn't work like your conscious mind does, right? It works through archetypes and myths and stories and symbolism. And for a lot of men, they do fall into this kind of Madonna whore complex because they have.

• 1:30:59Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have to explain what it is.

• 1:31:00Connor Beaton?

  Madonna whore complex is when the sort of Coles notes of it, or Cliff Notes, I remember what they have here in America, but the, the short version of it is that you fall in love with a woman and you project the kind of puritanical, idealistic version and view of a woman onto her. Jung would say that you project the purest version of your anima, of your own feminine within your psyche onto her. And you start to treat her as this very sort of perfect, pure, wonderful version of the feminine that you never want to sully, you never want to mistreat, you never want to any of those things. And so

• 1:31:42Connor Beaton?

  what happens is that you sort of bifurcate your vision of that woman. And you never interact with her by bringing maybe the truth of disappointment to her, or when you're upset, or when she's done something that you didn't like. And so resentment starts to build. And you bifurcate your own sexual desires for her. This is the big part of the Madonna whore complex, that for a lot of men, they will find a woman that they love and that they really want to be with, but they find themselves not being able to bring the sort of sexual vitality that they've had in past relationships to this woman that they really love and that they really admire. And this is where a lot of infidelity happens, is that.

• 1:32:24Connor Beaton?

  A man will be with a woman that he wants to have kids with and marry and that he really loves and yada, yada, yada, yada. But he takes the primal sexual nature within himself, how he wants to actually be in the bedroom. And does not bring that to the Madonna. Why? Because that would be.

• 1:32:46Connor Beaton?

  That would be, I don't know what a word I would could use, but like sullying or or bringing down. Desecrating. Desecrating the, you know, the Virgin Mary, right? Desecrating the Madonna, desecrating this image of this very pure, loving, kind, nurturing embodiment of the feminine. What's the genesis of that? Great question. So you can grow up with a mother that you held in that esteem. Right? If you grew up in an environment where you had this mother that, you know, she was maybe a single mom and your dad wasn't in the picture. And so she was your only primary attachment. And she was very loving and nurturing and kind. And so you kind of idolized her.

• 1:33:29Connor Beaton?

  And there's, there's this idolization that happened, or the inverse is usually very common, right? Mom was disconnected. She neglected you. She was abandoning. She was harmful or abusive. And so you created a, a kind of caricature or an archetype in your mind of the ideal woman that you wanted to be with. If only mom was like this, I'd be happy. If only mom was just loving and kind, I'd be happy. And so that, that archetype exists inside of your unconscious and it lives inside of there. And you kind of walk through the world, looking at women, saying, I wonder which one is going to fulfill this. And then you project that onto the women that you start to date.

• 1:34:11Connor Beaton?

  And eventually you find a woman that's like, she meets all the right requirements and it just goes heavy, you know, gets projected onto her really heavily. And so this sort of.

• 1:34:22Connor Beaton?

  This projection of the idealistic woman gets layered over top of the woman that's actually in front of you.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  It's a very specific type of idealistic woman, right? Because you could say, I want an ideal woman in the bedroom.

• 1:34:34Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 1:34:34Chris Williamson?

  And that would be on the other side.

• 1:34:36Connor Beaton?

  Right, yeah. And so what a lot of men end up doing is that they find these types of, they find this woman, they fall in love. It's like everything that they've ever wanted. But there's parts of themselves that they never bring into the relationship. So they're usually, some of the characteristics are like, they're usually completely annihilated whenever that woman is disappointed, right? She's disappointed, she's upset, he's done something. It's like catastrophic for that man. She's usually on a pedestal. So you have this like one up, one down type of dynamic where she's the, you know, over functioning and he's the chronic under functioner, right? Everything that's wrong in the relationship is because of him. And, you know, he's always doing something wrong.

• 1:35:20Chris Williamson?

  And this is his perspective?

• 1:35:21Connor Beaton?

  That's his perspective, right? It might not be her perspective. And slowly he'll start to withhold parts of himself. He'll withhold maybe the more aggressive part of himself. Or he'll withhold his boundaries, he'll withhold his wants and needs and desires. So he'll withhold all these things. This is like classic people pleasers and nice guys. And they'll withhold all these parts, but they'll also withhold those like primal sexual energy. So the ways that they want to engage sexually with that woman, they withhold those. And then it has nowhere to go. And then they'll, they'll find a whore, right? They'll find an archetype of the whore, whether it's through pornography and OnlyFans girl,

• 1:36:03Connor Beaton?

  the porn that they're watching, or, you know, somebody that they start to idolize online or somebody that they actually find. And so I see a lot of men that are unfaithful, that have gone through this cycle, is that they've bifurcated their vision or they've separated out their, their vision of the woman that they're with. And they've taken parts of themselves that they would normally want to bring into the relationship. And either tried to kill them off, like, oh, that's not okay, that, that primal way that I want to be with that woman, I'm gonna try and kill that off. Or they, they just have a different place that they get that need met, right? Porn, OnlyFans, et cetera.

• 1:36:42Chris Williamson?

  How do guys combine the two?

• 1:36:46Connor Beaton?

  It's pretty uncomfortable. You have to start to bring those more usually primal elements um that you would bring to A one night stand? Yeah, to a one night stand, or you know, to a woman that you like you weren't in love with, or you know, or even just the more primal elements of admitting that you're disappointed, or that you're upset, or that you're angry. So you have to start to take up some more territory. You have to start to have needs. You have to have some desires. You have to let those needs and those desires be known within the relationship and start to say, you know what? I've never actually told you what I want. I've never actually told you what my expectations are. I've never actually told you what it is that I desire, you know, in the bedroom.

• 1:37:31Connor Beaton?

  And so I'm gonna start to expose some of these things and bring them forward. And you start to do that slowly and incrementally and consistently. And you start to bring that more shadow oriented or primal self back into the relationship. And it's can be challenging because what starts to happen is that that woman slowly comes off the pedestal. And your projections of the feminine start to, you know, get taken off of her. Because for a lot of men, what happens is that they they project onto the women the parts of themselves that they feel deficient in, right? So she's so compassionate. She's so loving. And meanwhile, inside of him, he lacks self compassion. He's not loving to himself at all.

• 1:38:16Connor Beaton?

  He's, you know, ripping himself a new asshole every single time he fucks up. So we start to dismantle this this pure, perfect image of that woman. And if the funny thing is, is that if that man stays with that woman for long enough, stays with the Madonna for long enough, she will slowly turn into Medusa. Seriously. She'll slowly turn into this embodiment of what he resents and what he hates. And he'll kind of become bitter. And she'll become this archetype of something that he has disdain for and contempt towards. And a lot of that is because he hasn't brought forward his needs, wants and desires, his expectations.

• 1:38:59Connor Beaton?

  So he starts to see her, this Madonna, he starts to see her as the embodiment of everything that refuses to meet his needs, when it's actually him. Refusing to bring forward.

• 1:39:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you haven't.

• 1:39:12Connor Beaton?

  What he needs, wants and desires.

• 1:39:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you haven't asked.

• 1:39:14Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Chris Williamson?

  How could you expect this person to deliver you to fucking Neil Strauss? It's always Neil Strauss. Always, always, always, always. Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. It always is.

• 1:39:26Connor Beaton?

  Yes.

• 1:39:26Chris Williamson?

  And it just completely captures the issue of poor communication. But poor communication is just the end result of, well, maybe you didn't have the bravery to look at your emotions. Well, maybe you're so busy that you don't have time to feel your emotions. Well, maybe you're so sedated that you don't have time. You know, like go back down the stack.

• 1:39:45Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:46Chris Williamson?

  To find where the genesis of this was. So, yeah, when people talk about, you know, good communication is important. It's like, yeah, but you don't fix that by just communicating more.

• 1:39:55Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 1:39:55Chris Williamson?

  Because the communication needs to say something and where's the origin of the thing that you're gonna say.

• 1:39:59Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Chris Williamson?

  It's done there.

• 1:40:01Connor Beaton?

  It's in there.

• 1:40:01Chris Williamson?

  It's done there.

• 1:40:02Connor Beaton?

  Yeah. And so you have to, again, there's no change without confrontation, right? So for a lot of men, they have to confront the truths inside of them. They have to confront, here's the need that I have. Here's the want that I have. Here's the expectation or the desire that I have, that I've been just chronically withholding from the relationship. And then to start to slowly bring that forward, knowing that it's going to alter the image that you have of that woman.

• 1:40:29Chris Williamson?

  What if in doing that, I certainly see stories from guys online about, I had this girl on a pedestal. I learned about her past and it was sort of an ick. To me, I sort of almost have a fear of this Madonna being sullied into a whore by somebody that isn't me. That's a kind of fragility around that perspective. Or of bringing this in and of maybe not seeing her as the perfect embodiment, white as snow. Managing the transition from Madonna to amateur singer.

• 1:41:07Chris Williamson?

  How do guys deal with that, that pivot there? It's going from being a goddess to mortal, maybe another way to look at it.

• 1:41:17Connor Beaton?

  Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is.

• 1:41:22Connor Beaton?

  For those men, you are pedestaling that woman because you are used to being in a subservient position with women and not used to being on equal ground. So for a lot of these men,

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  if you're emotionally, if you care, if you're emotionally intimate with them, you're happy to be, you're happy to be on the pedestal, but only if you're going to discard them afterward.

• 1:41:46Connor Beaton?

  That's right. Yeah. So what men will, what will often do, and I see this so, so often, it's wild, is that we'll toggle back and forth between this, right? We'll have the, the women that are like the one night stands or that, you know, that we're friends with benefits with, and there's no real emotional connection. There's no desire for a relationship there. It's fun. It's exciting. You can express whatever the hell you want sexually. There's a complete sexual freedom. And then there's the women that you fall in love with and all of that shit's out the window, right? And it's like, there's a huge challenge, which with bridging the gap and actually having a relationship with a woman where both of those things coincide.

• 1:42:27Connor Beaton?

  And there's this very strange, like inverse relationship between the more that you pedestal a woman, the less that you feel worthy of her, right? It's like the saying, like, when you pedestal a woman, don't be surprised when you find her looking down on you. But that usually is because a man has grown up as a young boy, either needing to idolize his mother, or he created an image of the ideal mother that did not exist in his life, that he had a mother who, you know, was an addict, or she was abusive, or, you know, she was cycling through

• 1:43:08Connor Beaton?

  men and she was just unsafe, or whatever it was, right? And so he, he had to create the image of an ideal mother that he ultimately needed. And then what happens is he falls in love with the woman and he projects that image of that ideal mother unintentionally onto her. And of course, you don't.

• 1:43:29Connor Beaton?

  Want to fuck your mother, right? So, so what ends up happening is there's a type of like impotency that starts to show up.

• 1:43:34Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:43:34Connor Beaton?

  In those types of relationships. And it's not true intimacy, impotency in the sense that he, you know, can't get it up ever or whatever. But he's not bringing his own potency, whether it's here's my boundary or I'm upset with you. I didn't like that, or that's not okay, or here's what I need, you know? Here are my expectations in the relationship, or here's what I want to explore sexually in the bedroom. Those things get completely omitted and he finds himself in a more subservient relationship.

• 1:44:01Chris Williamson?

  Such an interesting dynamic. One other one that causes that impotency that I see a lot of guys talking about is navigating the transition from honeymoon phase to, from like passionate love to companion at love.

• 1:44:16Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Chris Williamson?

  And the sort of deceleration

• 1:44:20Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Chris Williamson?

  in drive sexually that comes from familiarity, kind of knowing all of the tricks.

• 1:44:26Connor Beaton?

  Complacency killer.

• 1:44:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so how do guys navigate the nine month hump, 18 month hump of going from this girl's hot as fuck? And all I want to do is horrendous things to the lower half of her body. So now, I don't know, man, I'm a bit tired tonight.

• 1:44:47Connor Beaton?

  Yeah. Couple of things.

• 1:44:52Connor Beaton?

  The first thing is bringing what I call expectationless desire back into your relationship. So a lot of the times when a relationship exits that, that honeymoon phase where it's like hot and heavy and it's super intense, and then you kind of get into a groove and complacency starts to set in. And all of a sudden, you know, it's seven, eight o'clock at night. You both have your sweatpants on and the TV's on and you're just fucking chilling out. That type of complacency really erodes sexual intimacy and polarity and charge.

• 1:45:25Connor Beaton?

  Over time, over time, because comfort, comfort and safety, it's like you do want safety. A lot of the times when you, you know, when you want sexual polarity, there has to be some level of safety there. But comfort over time can be a killer because you really fall into grooves that lead to complacency. So for a lot of men, what? What I talk about is bringing expectationless desire to the table, which means that you just start to bring, whenever you, you know, look at her and you feel that like little bit of excitement of like, oh, she looks really good today, or like, hmm, we haven't had sex in a while, or whatever. You bring that to her, whether it's through, you know, a look, a touch, a comment,

• 1:46:07Connor Beaton?

  and you start to bring that to her without the expectation that it needs to lead to sex. What ends up happening when a lot of couples get into this complacency state where desire has completely dropped, is that men, we stop, we stop making those comments, we stop initiating those types of pieces. We stop bringing this like, I'm aroused by you, I desire you, or, you know, I find you exciting. And we also start to really fall back into this complacency place where, where maybe we want the other person to initiate, or, you know, some resentment has started to build up, or, you know, the, the, the mask of who they were has started to fallen,

• 1:46:50Connor Beaton?

  and we see them for, you know, see them in a different way. But we stop bringing these like little pieces of excitement and desire into the relationship. And that simple act of just bringing expectationless desire, so that you're not expecting sex to happen right in that moment, can really refuel things, because when complacency sets in, what happens is it pressurizes when sex is going to happen. So it's slowly over time, it's like, it's been two days, it's been three days, it's been four days. And then what happens for a lot of guys is like, oh, when is this going to happen? And they start to track, right? And the like calendar comes out. And like I've had guys that, you know, it's like they've done the math, they've got a fucking spreadsheet of like, when rejection happened.

• 1:47:33Chris Williamson?

  Three hundred and twenty hours since the last time I asked.

• 1:47:35Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:36Chris Williamson?

  It's been five hundred hours since.

• 1:47:37Connor Beaton?

  Exactly. But there's been, you know, every time they've brought desire or expectation to, you know, their girlfriend or their wife, every time that they've brought desire or arousal to them, it's like, there's this really big expectation that it needs to go somewhere. It's like, okay, I'm gonna make this effort, I'm gonna make this effort so that we have sex. And for women, what, what happens is for a lot of women, they have, you know, like receptive desire. We as men usually have spontaneous desire. So guys can, you know, most men can look at, you know, see their partner in a certain outfit, and it's like, oh, I'm aroused, oh, I'm turned on. And for a lot of women, it's it's the inverse. Some women do have spontaneous desire where they

• 1:48:21Connor Beaton?

  just will look at us in their gray sweatpants and they're like that right now. But for most women, it's it's a receiving. They need to receive and kind of get the battery charged up in some way, shape or form.

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  I disagreed with Esther Perel on this. She came on the show and she was saying, what woman do you know that is aroused by a man being aroused at her? I'm like.

• 1:48:42Connor Beaton?

  Lots.

• 1:48:43Chris Williamson?

  Every.

• 1:48:43Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Chris Williamson?

  Like is being desired not one of the biggest turn-ons for a woman? I think I I might have needed to just ask her a different sort of a an angle. Maybe I misunderstood what she said, but that was phenomenal conversation. I think she's fucking great at what she does.

• 1:48:57Connor Beaton?

  Yes.

• 1:48:58Chris Williamson?

  But that was one angle where I thought, hmm, I think you need to update your data on that one.

• 1:49:04Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, look at us talking about what women want.

• 1:49:09Chris Williamson?

  Explaining our way.

• 1:49:09Connor Beaton?

  Man explaining. But I do think that part of that, you know, when that period of time happens is just bringing this like little spontaneous, unscheduled, uncalculated, non-expecting form of arousal into the relationship and reinjecting it.

• 1:49:26Chris Williamson?

  Depressurizes the.

• 1:49:28Connor Beaton?

  It depressurizes it. And I think for a lot of women, when they get into that relationship and there's like complacency that sets in, then there's like, oh, when he brings desire to me, there's like an expectation that now I have to perform. Now I have to put out.

• 1:49:42Chris Williamson?

  And she will have also had some sort of a pivot too, I guess. So, yeah, you're now, you're adding pressure on both sides.

• 1:49:50Chris Williamson?

  One thing I was thinking as you were talking, the complacency comfort thing, which is like safety on steroids, it's very sort of, it's like toxic safety, I suppose, at least toxic to the bedroom. I wonder how much the working from home revolution.

• 1:50:05Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Chris Williamson?

  Has been cancerous today.

• 1:50:07Connor Beaton?

  Terrible.

• 1:50:07Chris Williamson?

  One of my, dude, I was away, it was George Mack's birthday this year, and one of the guys was sat around the table at dinner. We were in a corner bar here in Austin. And we were talking about working from home, which I still currently am until the office and studio gets built. And he was saying, I can't fucking bear working from home. And he's got nothing to do. I would much sooner work from home, but I feel like such a cuck being in the next room. And my girlfriend, if she asks me how my day went, it's like, you fucking know how my day went. You heard it. I was sat in there. I was sat in there like a degenerate with my shirt on and my sweatpants because I couldn't be bothered to get changed. And he said, I need to leave the house. I need to create

• 1:50:51Chris Williamson?

  some sense of mystery, some sense of absence and intrigue, not just for her, but for me as well.

• 1:50:56Connor Beaton?

  Totally.

• 1:50:56Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I wonder how much the working from home revolution has caused some dead bedroom, because, well, the guy hasn't gone out and killed any deer. Maybe he managed to do it from his laptop in the dining room, but there's no intrigue. There's no mystery.

• 1:51:12Connor Beaton?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do. I do think that's a big piece of the equation, you know, that if you're around each other too much, that complacency just starts to set in, right? It's like, there's nothing to talk about. There's nothing new. There's nothing exciting. And, you know, like, even after my wife gave birth to our second child, I mean, I I've traveled a number of times since then. And some of that's been pretty hard. But a lot of it is just creating some separation, creating some space, you know? And so it's like, I didn't need to, I didn't need to come out here, you know, like you and I could have done this virtually, but I wanted to. And I wanted to create a little bit of space

• 1:51:55Connor Beaton?

  and separation. And I think it's good for kids, but it's also good for marriage. You know, it's good for a relationship to have space, because otherwise, you're just on top of each other constantly. And, you know, it's like, you do have to have.

• 1:52:11Connor Beaton?

  Really great relationships have a couple of things. Number one is that really great relationships have zero guesswork. So I never want to have to guess around what it is that you want, need, expect, or desire. Those types of things should be communicated because I think for a lot of couples, what ends up happening is it's a constant throwing the dart to try and get the bullseye. But you're not even anywhere near the board. And so there has to be some, there has to be very good communication about expectations, needs, wants, and desires. The other thing is that there needs to be some level of space and mystery. And I think this is very important for men as well. Like, I joke with my wife that the reason why she's with me is because I'm kind of like an untamable beast.

• 1:52:56Connor Beaton?

  You know, like, there's, there's this part of me, she knows me super well. And, uh, you know, we have such great conversations, we have a lot in common, blah, blah, blah. But there's always this edge. I have this edge that I'm like, you'll never know this part of me. You'll never really understand this aspect of me. And part of it's a joke, but part of it is just keeping a little bit of that mystery alive, you know, of that edge of like, I, I think that the game is over when a woman says, oh, I know you better than you know yourself. I think the game's over at that point.

• 1:53:33Chris Williamson?

  How do you blend that with, well, I need to be able to be, um, burialless with my partner. I want them to fully know me. I don't want to hide things from them. I don't want to hide things from myself. Are we not supposed to be in this, you know, seamless transition where we tell each other everything? Is this not the reason, it's the only relationship apart from my therapist?

• 1:53:57Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 1:53:57Chris Williamson?

  That I can do this with.

• 1:53:59Connor Beaton?

  Right.

• 1:53:59Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about, uh, that not being some beginning of, oh, this is just for me, this is my little precious secret that I have?

• 1:54:08Connor Beaton?

  Yeah, it's not about. Intentionally withholding, it's about a display of, one, I know myself exceptionally well, and two, I am resourced in relationships outside of you. So for me, I have, you know, I have my own men's group, I have my own group of men that are very good friends of mine that know a tremendous amount about me. And there's things that I bring to them, that I talk to them about, that I don't necessarily need to bring to my wife and talk to her about. And we talk about a lot, I don't want to paint the wrong picture, that like, you know, that there's things that are, you know, withheld or hidden, or that I'm keeping secrets or anything like that.

• 1:54:49Connor Beaton?

  But it's just that not everything needs to be processed and spewed out into the relationship, not everything. And I think that that has become a kind of unspoken expectation in some modern relationships, that like, the relationship should be a container to talk about and process literally everything. And that your partner should be your therapist, and your coach, and your parent, and your, you know, and your best friend, and your lover, and your affair partner, and like, literally everything, right? And I don't necessarily, I don't think, I don't agree with that. I think that that's, usually doesn't work for most people.

• 1:55:31Connor Beaton?

  Because what happens is that it's a sign that they are under-resourced in other relationships, and that they are under-resourced in their self-relationship, that there's certain parts of themselves that, that they don't necessarily understand, or that they're not connected to. So, I think in part, and I also think that, you know, when you look at, I don't know if this is going to get me in trouble or not, but when you look at, not in my relationship, just online, when you look at like, female desire, and, you know, women's archetypes of arousal and desire, it's, it's really that, that kind of beast that gets tamed.

• 1:56:12Connor Beaton?

  Right? And when you look at something like Beauty and the Beast, I think it's a great example of feminine desire, right? You have the kind of psychopath in Gaston that is lacking empathy, that's not compassionate, that is overly relentless, that doesn't pick up on her cues, that she's not interested. But then you have this other archetype that is literally a beast that has not been in a reciprocal relationship, but has kind of been a romantic that wants that. And part of the feminine desire is to be in relationship with the beast that, you know, has the status and has those things, but

• 1:56:51Connor Beaton?

  also the desire to sort of tame that part of him. And so I think we as men, what ends up happening is that we get into relationships with women and we oftentimes, in an effort to create safety for her, we overly domesticate and tame ourselves. And we become this very docile version that then collapses the polarity. And we lose a kind of intensity and ferocity, a kind of primal nature to ourselves that creates attraction. And we try and signal safety by being excessively docile. And I think that that actually, in the long term,

• 1:57:36Connor Beaton?

  maybe not in the interim, yeah, but in the long term, does more harm than good.

• 1:57:42Chris Williamson?

  Kind of beaten, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're so great.

• 1:57:44Connor Beaton?

  Thanks, buddy.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  I think your work absolutely fucking rules. Where should people go to check out everything you do?

• 1:57:49Connor Beaton?

  You can go to mantalks.com, Mantalks on YouTube, on Instagram. Check out the Alliance. We've got a great, you know, community.

• 1:57:58Chris Williamson?

  The book?

• 1:57:58Connor Beaton?

  Thousand plus dudes. Yeah, the book is called Men's Work, which has been crushing. And I'm working on a second one, which is fun. So yeah, thanks for having me back, brother.

• 1:58:06Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you, man.

• 1:58:07Connor Beaton?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08Speaker 02

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