How Men Keep Sabotaging Themselves - Dr Robert Glover

Dr Robert Glover is a therapist, coach and an author. Being nice is something many of us aspire to become. After all, who doesn’t want to be nice? Well Nice Guy Syndrome has been ruining the lives of many men for decades, so perhaps we should aspire to be something else. Expect to learn what is actually wrong with being a nice guy, why men become so afraid of putting their needs first, how to stop people pleasing, why nice guys end up resentful and bitter, whether nice guys attract or repel women and much more... - 00:00 What’s Wrong With Being a Nice Guy? 05:54 The Origin of Nice Guys 15:06 Using Aggression as a Masculine Tool 22:15 Are Nice Guys More Orderly? 28:06 Why Nice Guys Keep Things Hidden 38:54 The Solution is Not to Be a Bad Guy 45:02 Alain de Botton on Nice Guys 48:37 Why Women Aren’t Complaining About Nice Guys 58:38 What Nice Guys Need to Know About Female Attraction 1:05:23 The Role of Emotional Tension 1:13:54 The Importance of Playfulness 1:25:42 How to Rehabilitate a Nice Guy 1:30:50 Your Most Formative Sexual Experience 1:39:59 Best Practices to Help Nice Guys 1:46:23 Where to Find Dr Glover - 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?

  What's wrong with being a nice guy?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  What's wrong with being a nice guy? That's a good question. You know, when I put out a book called No More Mr. Nice Guy, I'm sure a lot of people picked it up and said, wait a minute, there's already enough not-nice guys out there. Why does somebody write a book teaching men how to be not-nice? The problem with being a nice guy, just a quick elevator pitch, is that a nice guy is a guy who inaccurately internalized a belief system at a very young age. I'm not okay, just as I am. So he's trying to do two things, very unconsciously usually. One is become what he thinks everybody else wants him to be, so he'll be liked and loved and get his needs met and get laid, hopefully, regularly, and hide anything about himself that might get a negative reaction

• 0:44Speaker 01

  from people, hiding his needs, his wants, his sexuality. So while he's trying to get laid, he's hiding his sexuality. So a core problem with nice guy syndrome is nice guys tend to be unauthentic. There's not a real them there. They're trying to become something, hide something, and that tends to make them fairly dishonest, untrustworthy, frustrated, resentful, passive aggressive, a whole list of traits that can go along. And mainly, it prevents, and I'm a recovering nice guy, so I'm not speaking down to anybody. You know, it keeps us from just being ourselves, living up to our full potential, having what we want in life, having a good time. And so just a lot of baggage comes along with it.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  What are the component parts of being a nice guy? What are the traits that they embody or project?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  What you'll recognize most often and what listeners may recognize in themselves, core tendencies, often people pleasing, seeking external validation, and for men, usually seeking validation from women. Even gay guys, I find, tend to do it, even if they don't plan on having sex with the women. We can talk more about this, but we've learned from birth to please women. So there's that people pleasing, that external validation,

• 2:10Speaker 01

  failing to live up to one's full potential, a basic core dishonesty, you know, thinking, you know, I'm a good guy, I'm pretty honest. I always laugh when men tell me they're pretty honest. I say, that's actually a contradiction of terms. You're honest or you're not.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  And...

• 2:29Speaker 01

  And just, you know, for most nice guys, there's just a certain dull depression that they live with, just thinking, you know, I should be happy, I should be getting what I want, I should be getting love, I should, I should, but I'm not, and I don't know why not. And so there's, there's a lot of the characteristics, but the core piece you'll see the most often is that people pleasing, that seeking of external validation.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  Who is the prototypical nice guy avatar? Like, just describe him for me?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Oh, he's, you know, he's just that guy that's, you know, walking through life, trying to make everybody happy, trying not to do anything wrong, don't want to fuck anything up, doesn't want to piss anybody off, goes along to get along, you know, we've heard that, you know, happy wife, happy life, if I just make everybody happy, everything's good. I have a course that I've taught for a number of years called Nice Guys Don't Finish Last, They Rot in Middle Management. So he's good at being good, but you know, he doesn't excel, he doesn't stand out, because standing out is actually really scary for nice guys. It's too much attention, it's too much expectation. So, you know, when I started working with

• 3:47Speaker 01

  nice guys 30 years ago, most of the men I worked with, you know, probably were around my age, I was in my early 30s at that time. And so there's a lot of baby, baby boom generation guys, you know, they, they were trying to be different than their fathers, the World War II, you know, men, they were in that protest generation against Vietnam, growing their hair out, getting in touch with their feminine side. And, and so a lot of the men I worked with, you know, kind of grew up in that era. But I've been doing this for a while. And so, you know, my son's 38, for example, so, you know, I worked with millennials, millennials, men younger than that. And what's funny is, whereas my generation, a lot of

• 4:29Speaker 01

  them men, kind of attribute part of their nice guy stuff to, well, my dad wasn't there, or my parents divorced, or, you know, he worked all the time, or he was an alcoholic. Nowadays, I hear a lot of men say, oh, my dad was a nice guy. And and about all he taught me about life was don't piss off your mother. And and because he was walking around eggshells, trying not to piss off my mother. So, you know, I I've seen that whole range, all the way from the guys that were reacting to, you know, the the the asshole, um,

• 5:02Speaker 01

  patriarchal father to now the guys that were raised by nice guys and they don't know any other way of being.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  It's like one generation had the tyrant and the other generation had the compliant.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it. That's nice.

• 5:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  The tyrant, the compliant.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was. But here's the interesting thing, right? And it's so fascinating that you had one generation that was rebelling in their niceness, even if that niceness isn't that nice.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  And then another generation that was following in their niceness. So there seems to be a particular stickiness to niceness. If tyrants that are emotionally unavailable and not nice are able to create nice guys and nice fathers are also.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  We're in big trouble. We're.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  What's? Why is it so prevalent? What is? What is this pull? Are we, as men, are we inculcating or absorbing something from the world? Is this the way that we were raised by mom and dad? Is the what's the gen? What's the origin? What's the genesis, the seed of this?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's a good question, of course, and of course, what every nice guy wants. How did I get to be this way, you know?

• 6:15Chris Williamson?

  Who cursed me with this?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I quickly learned when I started working with nice guys again 30 years ago, that there is no one, you know, one size fit all, how you how you got to be a nice guy. I I thought there was at first. I thought they were all like me, you know, disconnected from their father in some significant way, you know, significantly raised by their mother, trying to please their mom and and and. And I thought, well, that that explains it all, but it didn't. And, um.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  There's so many pieces that go into it. A lot of men I work with that identifies being nice guys, I think part of it's their temperament. Part of it's just they're easygoing. You know, my, my, my mother would often say in adulthood to women I was dating, "Oh, Bobby never did like conflict." And I'm, I'm thinking, "Oh, thanks, Mom. You know what? You're telling these women, be nice to my son. Don't be mean to him." But I'm also thinking, who does like conflict? You know, I, I do tend to marry women who like to fight, but I, for me, it's kind of like, you know, can't, can't, can't, you know, instead of us, you, you doing something that starts a fight, I say to them, "Can't I just yell at you a little bit? You cry and then I hold you? Isn't that really what, you know, this is all about anyway?" And my wife will always say,

• 7:28Speaker 01

  "No, it, it doesn't count unless you're really mad at me." Um, so I, I don't like conflict in particular. So that's my temperament. So I'm, I'm a little bit...

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's a disposition that many of the nice guys will have, the raw materials of someone that's a little bit...

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Part of my nature.

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Part of my nature. But, but that's just kind of one category of nice guy. The other one that, that I bumped into, I call often those the "I'm so good" nice guy. He's the guy that just always did everything right, no matter what, you know? But the other side I talk about, you know, my Mr. Nice Guy is what I call "I'm so bad" nice guy. This is the one that, you know, maybe started rebelling at an early age, maybe had ADHD, undiagnosed, you know, he's always impulsive, getting in trouble, you know, not following through, getting yelled at, getting punished, starts doing drugs and alcohol at 14, you know, drops out of school, and then maybe at some point has a, a come to Jesus moment, religion, military, gets married as a kid, death in the family. He goes, "I got, I gotta quit, you know, self-destructing. I, I gotta,

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I gotta be nicer." So there's that kind of nice guy as well. So it's a different temperament than, than the, than the other.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  One of the pieces, you know, there's so many pieces that go into this, but to answer your question, how do we, what's the stickiness part?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Again, I think a real core piece that I see with so many nice guys is this attempt to to please women. And I was talking to somebody the other day, it makes perfect sense because if you think about it, we're all born to a woman. Our earliest caregiver, if it's not mom, it's probably some other woman. So from the time we're born, our very survival, our sustenance, our okayness depends on a woman and probably us getting along with that woman. That's probably a good thing, right? And so that's really normal that our first experiences are how to negotiate a relationship with a woman, to make that big, powerful, holds our life in her hands, person,

• 9:26Speaker 01

  how to make sure that's okay. And I don't know about in the UK, but when I was growing up in Seattle, I had one male teacher before I got to junior high.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  There's four times more female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are male kindergarten teachers.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  There you go. You've done your research. So, so I had one teacher. So that means just to learn how to get from second to third grade, not only had to learn my reading, writing, and arithmetic, how to please a woman. Okay, all of that's fine. There's, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. I think that's actually probably the way it's always been. But historically, I mean, if we go back even two or three generations, but if you go through most of human history, out of about age 12, the men came into the boy's life, took him, you know, from the women, took him out, had a masculine initiation, taught him how to get comfortable being uncomfortable, how to face his fear, how to live in the scary world of the masculine, and therefore, and spent most of his time from then on out with men in the

• 10:30Speaker 01

  masculine. And, and so he got, he moved through that, what do I have to do to please a woman? So I think that's a really normal thing that to try to please women, the survival for, for every young boy. But what's, what's missing is there's no initiation to teach them how to, how to go face their fears in the scary world of the masculine, and quit seeking the approval and validation of women. Because there's this really interesting paradox that I, it took me years to find out, and, you know, a lot of men I work with takes, you know, it's, it's a big surprise, is, oh,

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Pursuing women and trying to please them doesn't make them interested in you. It doesn't make them like you. It doesn't make them want to have sex with you. No, it actually doesn't. Actually, not trying to please women tends to make a guy more interesting to women in general. That's a big paradox for a lot of the men I work with. And it was for me. I mean, all this, me listening to them talk about their problems, me trying to be different than the jerks they complain about, me repressing my sexuality. So it's not like I just want that one thing from them. All that doesn't make them interested in me? No, it doesn't, actually. But they do seem to be drawn and attracted to the guy who's comfortable in his own skin, living a life, you know, on his terms, connected with men, putting a big dent in the universe.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  That is really attractive. But there's no, how do I get this woman's approval involved in that whole mix?

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  What are the covert contracts?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm glad you asked that. That's, um, that's my favorite part. I'm no more Mr. Nice Guy. And I know many men read it and say, Robert, that is the biggest takeaway. The covert contracts are unspoken, often unconscious agreements that the nice guy has with everything that's not him, with the world, with God, with women, you know, which is how things work. And in the book, I'm a little bit general, but I've broken it down to three specific covert contracts that nice guys have. They're all if then, if I do this, then this will happen. They all are basically manipulative. They all have strings attached. And often the nice guy isn't aware of them and nobody else is either.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So covert contract number one. If I'm a good guy, I will be liked and loved and get my, and going back to, and the women I'm trying to impress will want to be with me and have sex with me. So if I'm good, I'll be liked and loved. Number two, if I meet everybody else's needs without them having to ask, then they will meet my needs without me having to ask. Now, unfortunately, nobody else knows this contract exists. So they don't know, they're supposed to be reading our minds and figure out what we want like we're trying to do for them. Another core problem with this is that nice guys are actually really terrible receivers. We're not good at letting people do for us. We're not good at giving to ourselves. So that's covert contract number two. Covert contract number

• 13:26Speaker 01

  three is if I do everything right, then I will have a smooth, problem-free world. So it's kind of a Peter Pan-ish kind of thing. You know, I, I, I do everything right. I'm a, I'm a good guy. But unfortunately, we're, we're, we're the player, the referee, the scorekeeper, and we got the big scoreboard. Hey, I've done everything right. How come this stuff still isn't going the way it's supposed to go in my life? So nice guys are walking around these covert contracts and you ask, you know, what are, what, what, what's the core characteristic of a nice guy? One of them is, is that they're often really resentful. You know, they might say, well, I'm, I'm kind of bugged or I'm kind of frustrated, but they're really resentful and often rageful because I've been doing this,

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I've been doing it right. I've been following the rules. I've been, you know, being the good guy. I've been meeting your needs. I've been, you know, following all the rules, you know, how come I'm, when's it my turn? How come I'm not getting all the, all the stuff that I thought I would? And that leads to a lot of resentments. And that's one way I can tell, I tell nice guys, they, well, how do I know if I'm, if I'm using covert contracts? And I go, you'll know because you're walking around resentful and pissed off, either because you didn't get back in turn, or you didn't get appreciated for, for all that that you did. I, I heard somebody share a quote the other day that I really liked. To me is another really nice way of putting covert contracts. And this, I guess was from Neil Strauss. And he says, un, um, unspoken expectations.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  Expectations are premeditated resentment.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Isn't this, isn't that, that, that is what happens with covert contracts.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal by him.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  So the frustration and the resentfulness, that's coming from offering to the world something that you think should be universally liked. You have, there is, there's no way that anybody could be offended by what I'm doing. I'm following the rules. I'm offering the world lots whilst asking for nothing in return.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that not asking for something in return results in you getting nothing in return.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Funny how that works. I don't know.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  But it's, I suppose this as well plays into the dishonesty bit. And it's so, I understand. I would say that I'm, I'm very much in nice guy category. Very much a people pleaser. My temperament is to be averse to conflict as well. I've made a dent in many ways, but it's been done. It's been done by weaving my way through avoiding much of the, the conflict that, that I would maybe need to. So I suppose I can be, at least in some regards, a, a paragon or like a, a, a role model for the successful nice guy in, in many ways.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And, and me too, you know, again, I don't like conflict, but you know, I, you know, I'm, I'm doing okay.

• 16:25Chris Williamson?

  There's something I always felt, I always felt the fact that I wasn't like my, my go-to isn't typically aggression. That's not what I lean into.

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  Despite the fact I've got a background of fighting and doing other things and, and physical training and stuff like that. I always felt like it emasculated me. The fact that there was something more heroic about being someone that was quick to anger. You know, there was something kind of typically masculine about that. And I think I was

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  not strong enough to say ashamed, but it felt, it, it didn't feel as.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Grand to be someone who would be, I know that there's an ability in, you know, being under control, having your emotions under control. But there's also a degree of fragility, I think, that you can sometimes feel with that also.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Well, let me give one way to maybe look at the model and see if it fits what you're saying. Is that when I was writing No More Mr. Nice Guy, I really focused a lot on shame being a core foundation of Nice Guy Syndrome, that internalized belief, I'm not okay, and inaccurately internalized belief from our earliest life experience, a few weeks old, a few months old. By the time I finished writing the book and it was, you know, getting ready to be published, by that time I'd really come to also see that anxiety plays maybe an equally significant role in Nice Guy Syndrome, to where everything that nice guys are doing is trying to manage that sense of shame, I'm not okay, I'm unlovable, I'm defective, and their anxiety states, you

• 18:02Speaker 01

  know, I might piss somebody off, I might get rejected, I might get hurt, I might lose, I might live foolish. So, you know, both of those states really play into it. And one of the things I've come to see is that whether we've got, just to kind of break it down, whether we got kind of the asshole jerk over here, that fighter, that quick to fight guy, or the wussy doormat, you know, the nice guy over here that's the avoidant and kind of doesn't like the conflict, I think they're both on the same continuum. I think they're both in a fight-flight-freeze mode of managing their inner states of anxiety. The nice guy is in the flight-freeze bond, sometimes added to that list, and what we'd

• 18:43Speaker 01

  call the jerk is in the fight mode. Now, they're both still just trying to manipulate people in situations outside of them because they're anxious. The nice guy does it by being nice and avoidant and not upsetting anybody and, you know, waiting for it to blow over, you know, all that kind of, whereas, you know, the guy at the other end of the spectrum is just, he's just quick to react with aggression, to manage the people and situations around him. So, so he doesn't feel afraid and anxious. And so men will often, you know, they'll read my book or, you know, they'll hear some of my information. They'll say, Robert, I get that being a nice guy isn't working and I don't want to be that. But I don't want to be the asshole either, you know, where, where's that middle ground? And I go, I actually don't know where the tipping point is between two dysfunctional extremes. It doesn't exist, right?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  What, what we're actually talking about is, is going to a different plane, a different level. Where we actually learn to soothe ourselves, where we actually learn to be assertive, where we actually learn to have boundaries. Where we actually learn to be differentiated and ask ourselves, what do I want? And follow through on it. Where there's, you know, there's a whole different plane of behavior versus just what do I do to not feel anxious here? But again, the nice guy and the jerk, probably neither one is aware that they're trying to manage their anxiety states. And, and it isn't until you actually get told that maybe that's what you're doing, you go, oh, wow. I never thought about that before. And then, then you actually can feel your anxiety rather than trying to just manage it to where it doesn't, you know, make you feel so anxious.

• 20:10Chris Williamson?

  Is it a desire to feel safe then, to feel reassured?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, safety is at the core because when I took Child Development 101 back in grad school, I think the very first thing they told us, one of the few things maybe I remembered, was that for every child abandonment equals death. So children come into the world inherently vulnerable, right? There's no one to take care of us. It takes humans longer to mature and to self-sufficiency than any other animal on the planet. You know, our grandfathers, maybe that was about 12 or 14, you know? My age is more, you know, considered 18, 21, 22. Now it's like 35 for a young man to, you know, mature, to be able to take care of himself. That's a joke, um, but, but it's true. So we're dependent, completely dependent.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  And if somebody doesn't take care of us, we die. So if we get abandoned, neglected, uh, we die. So I know for me, like when my wife, you know, I'm, uh, my wife Lupita and I have been married for seven years now. Mexican woman I met here in Mexico. And, um, she gets a look on her face and like. I'll go into, you know, this motive. I gotta, I gotta fix it. She's upset. She's angry. I gotta make it better. And, you know, I've been working on this stuff for thirty years. So, you know, not like I don't know, you know, what's happening. And I'll just watch myself have this anxiety state that I gotta, I gotta talk her down through, over, get her back to good, you know, make her happy again. And I'm thinking, why am I worried about with this short little Mexican woman? Why, what look she has on her face? I love her, of course.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But why, why is that triggering such depth of anxiety? And really, as I really sat with and worked with it, it triggers a really old emotional state that does feel like I'm gonna die. If this doesn't get better right now, I'm gonna die. And I don't actually have that thought in my head, but my reaction to it feels that intense.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  That's the embodied sensation.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  That's the embodied, the nervous system, my emotional operating system. Yeah.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder, stepping outside of relationships for a second, or relationships with anybody, including friendships. One of the patterns that I've noticed, especially amongst some of my friends that are nice guys or recovering nice guys, is a desire to do things right.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 22:31Chris Williamson?

  To like, a task in and of itself. Uh, I would guess that nice guys are probably more orderly than the normal person. Sources will be stacked in the, in the right way, you know, mustn't have a dirty room.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause again, you'd think that, you'd think that, okay, I gotta do it right. I gotta get it orderly. But, you know, I've got my camera angles where you can't see what's over on the sides.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  All right. It's, it's, it's a mess.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  It is, is not terrible, but um, it, it is messier on the sides than it is behind me.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And so, again, a lot of the nice guys I work with,

• 23:08Speaker 01

  they may have perfectionistic expectations of themselves. Um, and some work really hard to, to, to meet them. And then they're, they're in a state of anxiety all the time. But others I know, they go, I haven't made my bed in years. You know, I don't pick up after myself. I can't remember the last time I, I checked my bank account balance. So you'd think there would be that, but, but ironically, um, there's not. And, and here's a piece that.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  That it may sound odd on the surface of it, but when I talk with nice guys about their fears and their anxieties, I think one of the biggest anxiety or fear state that the typical nice guy might have isn't so much a fear of failure, fear of foolishness, fear of looking foolish, fear of loss, fear of making a mistake, is fear of success. Because what happens if I do get it right? What happens if I rise up to a level of success? And then, you know, there's things that can happen. All of a sudden, the bar gets raised, the expectations are higher, I'm in a brighter spotlight, I might get attacked, I'm more visible. There's so many, I'll lose control over my time.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  All of these built in anxieties of what happens if I'm too successful. So again, a lot of times the nice guys will unconsciously, I don't really like the word self sabotage, but they'll get in their own way of living up to their full potential and keeping things messy around you is actually a pretty good way to, you know, you know, not live up to your full potential, not checking your bank account every now and then, you know, I'll bite you on the out sooner or later.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it, isn't it interesting that the almost universality of high ability of this honest, do you want to, do you need to sort the dog?

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  This is a regular occurrence, I can see.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  She's usually in the room with me and, and she's a dear, this is my

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  Bring her in, she can chill.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the problem is she's upset because somebody's out front and I'm the only one home and I don't want to go deal with whoever might be out there.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  It could just be my wife getting home with my daughter from school.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, she's just being a good girl. Let me know.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Poppy, there's somebody out there, there's somebody out there, let's go, let's go. And it may have been she just saw a cat. So, you know, I don't know.

• 25:30Chris Williamson?

  So be it.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  She walked away, so.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  Bored of you now.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that there is this almost universality of not having healthy boundaries, of being dishonest, of being manipulative, although you don't think that you are, you're overly pliable in a way that means that you change yourself to get the outcome that you want from people. But it seems, at least based on what you've said here, that there there appears to be a boundary, at least typically, among the nice guys, where this doesn't, outside of relationships, friendships, family, dating, et cetera, this doesn't spread out into a

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  overbearing desire for for orderliness and and sort of perfectionism in all areas of life, you know, with regards to an obsession about getting it right, about being.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  It can't, it can't. I just what I'm trying to say is it's not universal.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Whereas the other stuff, whereas the other stuff is, yeah, but it's what it shows, or at least what it says to me, is that there's something, it's it's obvious that ground zero for this stuff is relationships.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  You know, that that would have been my first thought as well, because it is for me, and it is for many nice guys. But you know what, I've I've seen guys who are total nice guys in relationship, and they get on the job and they kick ass. You know, they're highly successful at work. I've known other people that it showed up, you know, at work where they're a total nice guy and going along to getting along and never really stepping up or never launching, you know, that that business. And but at home, you know, their their wife would say, he's not a nice guy. He's nice to everybody else, but he's not nice to me. So it it can be interesting. And and that was, again, when I started working with nice guys, I just assumed there's a one piece

• 27:25Speaker 01

  fits all. And and there's really not. Now, there are those certain commonalities. But I think partly because we're also dealing with temperament, that, for example, maybe you and I had very different life experiences, maybe we have some similarities of temperament, some differences, different life experiences.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  We're not going to turn out just the same. We may still have those tendencies of, you know, seeking approval, avoiding conflict, you know, kind of a, oh, you know, I'm so good. Why doesn't everybody like me? And everybody try to be just like me. Um, there, there might be some similarities, but we might be very different and still relate to this as, yes, I'm a nice guy.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  Understood. What about hidden behavior? They keep things hidden from themselves. They keep things hidden from everybody else. Why is that so common?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Why is it common? Because you know, those two things, when, you know, when we first started, you asked me, you know, what, what is the nice guy? And basically, and, and I said, he's the guy trying to get everybody's approval and validation, you know, holding your finger up, which way is the wind blowing? But the other piece is that hiding things about ourselves, you know, hiding anything, for example, that might get that look on my wife's face, you know, oh, she got that look, I must have done something, I better not do that again. And again, that began at a very, very early age when getting that look from somebody important to us might result in getting slapped, getting smacked, getting neglected, getting yelled at, getting shaken, whatever. So, nice guys is part of

• 28:53Speaker 01

  that. I gotta hide whatever there is about me that tends to create these negative reactions around me. But often there's another piece, not, again, not universal, but often for nice guys in their family system, somebody has been defined as the needy person, the most important person. Could be dad, could be mom, could be a sibling, and their needs were more important. All the attention and focus went on, you know, making sure dad never got pissed off, making sure mom didn't go on a tirade, making sure, you know, brother doesn't, you know, whatever, you know, he's sick, or he's, he's out of control. So often for nice guys, we try to become this needless, wantless, never rock the boat, never be a

• 29:34Speaker 01

  moment's problem kind of person. So, what we interpret is us having needs draws too much attention. And, and, you know, my, their needs are more important than mine. And so... Nice guys, we're, again, trying to avoid that negative reaction. The two things we often most hide are our needs and wants and our sexuality. The sexuality, that's kind of easy to put a finger on. You know, we live in a culture that we're bombarded with sexual stimuli everywhere you go. But still, there's still that, you know, that religious message that sex is bad, evil. Save it for the one you love. Shame. Yeah, just a whole shame wrapped around sexuality. You'd think that would have gone away by now, but it's not. It's as strong as ever.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  So for the, the, the, the, the very young nice guy, when, kind of, kind of back up a little bit back to the, to the child development 101 stuff again.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Every child, when they experience discomfort of any kind, you know, they're hungry and they don't get fed. They're, they're, they wet their diaper, they mess in their diaper, they don't get changed. They're cold, they don't get help. You know, they have a stomach ache, they don't get burped, whatever. Whenever a child experiences discomfort, their children are narcissistic by nature. Emotionally, they assume this is me. I, I, I'm the cause of this. I did something wrong. I'm bad. They don't think it because the thinking brain isn't online at this early age. The emotional brain, fight, flight, free, survival brain is. And so a child will try to do two things in a very primitive way, a non-thinking, non-rational, purely emotional way.

• 31:08Speaker 01

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

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And so all of this comes so early as part of an emotional language, an emotional operating system. It's not in words, it's not in picture memory. And it's it's primitive. So here we are trying to figure out how not to have these uncomfortable experiences and prevent them from happening again. And one of the best things our primitive brain came up with is hide, hide, you know, whatever that I have needs. Oh, I have needs. I get I'm hungry. When I have needs, I get slapped. Oh, their needs are more important than mine. So just hiding is part of that because we think it must be about me that's causing these painful, negative experiences to be happening to us.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean that nice guys often have coping strategies? Maybe they'll overeat. Maybe they'll be compulsive with social media use or porn or video games or substances or whatever.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  The thing about that model I just gave you, that child development model, every human does that, every human. We all just pick usually, again, based on temperament and maybe just life experiences and birth order. We all pick, what are we going to do? How are we going to try to manage this? And I sucked my thumb till I was in kindergarten. Think maybe I was trying to deal with some uncomfortable.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Self-soothing.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Self-soothing, exactly. Trying to manage some anxiety there. So that's what I did. Now, we go through childhood, then we hit adolescence, and now we really want people's approval and want to fit in and be noticed and have attention. All of this really, you know, gets fueled with with with our hormones and need for attention where, you know, that really gets solidified and we pretty much carry these routines into adulthood. So yeah, trying to be perfect might be one. You know, trying not to be perfect because my brother was perfect and I couldn't, you know, compete with him. So I'll be the opposite. I'll I'll make the mess. Um, yeah, when I eat, I sure do feel better. When I spend all my day and night playing video games,

• 33:52Speaker 01

  I don't feel stressed. When I'm, oh, isn't porn amazing? I didn't know that this existed. Look how I feel. Um, oh, you know, if I get straight A's, look, I finally get some validation, but I don't know if it's ever enough. I better keep, you know, succeeding, performing, you know, I better get into great, amazing shape so I can be valuable. Oh, I'll never get in good shape. So who cares? I'll just keep eating. It can take so many different forms. And the only real logic to it is the the infant logic. That you and I and everybody else had at a few weeks and a few months old.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  Why are nice guys bad receivers?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Because we think it makes us bad. You know, the, the thing is, is that, as I said, most of us is, is most nice guys internalize this belief. Well, I, because I have needs, that's why I, I have these bad things that happen to me. If I don't have needs, bad things won't happen. And often again, they, I, I could, I could look around in my family. Oh, dad's needs are more important. Well, let's all make sure dad's okay. Oh, now mom's unhappy. Let's all make sure mom's okay. My little brother was a general fuck up at pretty much everything. Oh, okay. You know, we gotta make sure little brother's okay because he's gonna fuck up. And I kinda like, oh, if I don't have needs, if I just kinda do everything right, I'll be the golden child. I'll

• 35:20Speaker 01

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

• 36:03Speaker 01

  them. I wouldn't buy it for me. So I had to start taking good care of me. The next step that, that kinda came with that, but it came a little bit later for me, was actually beginning to surround myself with people who wanted to help me meet my needs and then actually letting them. That was really anxiety producing to let people do things for me. And I, I had to consciously just go, Okay, I'm a, it's as simple as like, I'll, I'll, I'll take the garbage out. And you know, we gotta take the garbage from the kitchen to the front gate is twenty feet. Got to unlock the gate, put it out on the street. My, if I'm taking the garbage out, my wife will go, you need help? Well, no, I don't, I don't need any help to take a bag of garbage from the kitchen to the front.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And I, and so I, my gut response will always say no, but then I realize, well, I don't need any help, but she wants to be with me, she wants to accompany me. She doesn't want to think I'm doing all the work, well, she's not, she's, she's a very hard worker. I go, yeah, yeah, come help me. Do I really need the help? No. But it was actually, it took me a while, I'm still learning that way. You know, she's not really thinking I need help taking the garbage out. She just wants to come take the garbage out with me, just to walk to the street with me and back. You know, that's, that's, okay, well, who am I to say no to that?

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  That's the thing about being a bad receiver. It robs people of the enjoyment of helping you.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  You've, you've stole my words. When I'm, I, I got, I got divorced in my late forties after twenty-five years of marriage to two different women. And, and again, when I started dating and started meeting nice girls, you know, who wanted to do anything for me, wouldn't ever say what they wanted, wouldn't make a decision. I thought, oh, I, I, I had empathy for my two ex-wives, what I put them through with being a nice guy. But I remember I was dating one woman. And I met her because she sold me shoes at Nordstrom. And she, so she worked in retail fashion sales. And then one time she came over to my apartment and I'd done some laundry, left it on my couch. She started folding my laundry. And I said, you, you don't have to do that. She goes, no, I like doing it. And I, and she goes, and I'm good at it. And you know, so she folds on my laundry, puts a little stack on the end of my bed and she goes, but I won't put it away for you.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I said, I'm not putting it away either, I'm leaving it out there to remind me somebody loves me. You know, that, that somebody wanted to do something nice for me. After that, I started leaving my clean laundry on the couch. So she could have the joy of coming over and, because it gave her pleasure. Now that, who am I to rob her of that pleasure? And I need to work on it. Because how am I going to receive great things in this world? If I'm not good at receiving, if I can't, if I can't let somebody fold my laundry, how am I going to receive the blessings of wealth, of fame, of opportunity, of adventure? So it, it's, it's a very conscious practice, it was for me. So how do I let people give and let them have the pleasure of doing it?

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  So the solution is not being a bad guy, because a lot of people.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  You could try.

• 39:01Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, nice guys finish last, the bad guy gets the girl. You know, women will sleep with the alpha, but marry the beta. You know, pick your meme or cliche of choice.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  They're all out there, sure.

• 39:16Chris Williamson?

  To come up with. And it seems, I'm going to try and interpret what I think the your philosophy is, and let me know if I get it right. I think

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  the downsides of being a nice guy, although subtle and often completely opaque to the nice guys themselves.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:39Chris Williamson?

  Are

• 39:41Chris Williamson?

  kind of evident, given, can become evident, given enough crowdsourcing of sense making. So people and community come up with memes and characters in TV shows and stuff like that.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:56Chris Williamson?

  The solution, the low resolution solution that then gets proposed is if X, X being nice guy, is bad and doesn't get what you want, then opposite of X, Y, which is bad guy, must be good. So the prevalence of, you know, treat her like you don't like her, like why women love Chad's, like that kind of more lethario approach to attracting women and getting what you want in life. And sort of, you know, being ruthless and stuff. Is that a, an erroneous solution to the problem of nice guy-ness?

• 40:38Speaker 01

  It's the, a core problem with what you just proposed is it is equally inauthentic as, as the other, and it's equally attached to some external outcome by trying to figure out how to do it right. Have I just do this right again, then I'll get the women to approve of me. We're still in the same boat, we're just looking for a different right way of doing it. Now, as simple as this sounds, you know, like when I do like interviews with like a female coach that maybe works with men and um and I say something that you know, generalization like the feminine, meaning all things feminine, you know, women, but dogs, cats, babies, opportunity,

• 41:21Speaker 01

  money, weather, whatever, I'll say is highly attracted to a man who's comfortable in his own skin, knows where he's going and looks like he's having a good time going there. And the women, you know, coaches, interviewers, podcasters on the call always go, oh, yes. And I go, okay, they're reacting, kind of their nervous system is reacting to that thing. I didn't say the guy's an asshole. I didn't say he treats women bad. I didn't say doesn't give a fuck about he he's he's centered in his own body. He's he's differentiated. He's asking himself, what do I want? What's important to me? Following through on that, you know, not leaving the messes behind, not trying to be perfect, not seeking anybody's approval.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  He's on mission. He's on purpose. And in my experience, the feminine is highly attracted to that. You don't have to work at at getting the feminine to be attracted. Now, are you always going to have feminine approval? I told someone the other day, this has never come out of my mouth before, but I said, actually, there is no standard of feminine approval. The feminine is not about standards. It's just about whatever is moving. Masculine is standards. You you go into the masculine world, you know, when you've lived up to the standard, when you've hit the ball out of the park, when you've scored a touchdown, when you made A's, when you, you know, made X amount of money. The masculine doing standards are clear. We can go into that world and go, I've achieved, I've made it. We have it. We have the status.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Rigorous, it's orderly.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  It requires something of you. There's discipline. The there is no such thing as feminine approval. I mean, ask any guy, even a woman who approved of them dearly in one moment, I'll ask them, have you ever had experiences where the very next moment she was unapproving of you and nothing about you had changed? You hadn't even done and guys all go, yeah, isn't that the way it always worked? Yeah, that, you know, one minute, I when I was dating, I had women tell me, Robert, you're the most amazing man. I'm so glad I met you. I'm so grateful. I'm so happy. And then never hear from them again. Or say, Robert, you know, after two weeks, you know, I'm taking a break from dating, or I'm giving my ex another try. And I go, what just happened? That's the world of the feminine. It doesn't, it isn't nailed down and orderly.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  So we, we have to quit seeking feminine approval. One of my certified coaches wrote a book that I really like. But there's a line in there, it said that a man does not mature until he quits seeking the love of a woman. As long as we're seeking love, that's a feminine trait. As long as we're seeking to get that approval, that love, that validation from a woman, we're in a loop that there's no escape from. But when we, when we can self-validate, when we're on purpose, when we're living life on our terms, all of a sudden, that makes us very attractive to the feminine. It will come to us. That's, that's my experience. It will come. Now, as soon as you turn and go, oh, it's here. How do I keep it?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  How do I make? No, no, no, we just blew it. All of a sudden now, they're going to get that look on their face again. Like I go, what did I do wrong? So if we take the, how do I get the women's approval out of the equation? You're more likely to get it. Does that mean you just don't give a fuck, don't care, whatever? That's not what I'm, again, it's not black and white. We, we men want to make it black and white. It must be this, or it must be that. No, it's this. This is another level that we rise to, that lets us put a dent in the universe, that lets us live with purpose and passion, that lets us connect deeply with others, that lets us be vulnerable and courageous, that actually invites the love into our life that, that we desire, rather than seeking it.

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, ultimately, I was watching this, um, video from Alain de Botton from the School of Life. Do you know that guy? British philosopher, phenomenal insight.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  You, you were the second person who mentioned him in the last two or three days. I always pay attention when, so whenever I hear someone's name, like, you know, whenever I heard, you need to get on a Chris Williamson show. When I heard that three times in the same week, you know, I thought, wait a minute, that name sounds familiar. Oh.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  We're already, we're already booked in.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  I'm on, he's on my calendar. What do you, what do you know?

• 45:31Chris Williamson?

  It's, um, so I, I use a.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, what you're referring to, he wrote an op ed article in the New York Times, maybe 10 years ago. The title was, Why You Will Marry The Wrong

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  Wrong Person, yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  I love, I love that article. I copied it. It's, it's just classic.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  He's outstanding. He is on my Mount Rushmore of, of, of guests. He was very formative for me. One of the reasons that, gonna go on a tangent about why I love a Lander Button. One of the reasons that I really love him is he's so softly spoken and he's so embodied in the nuance of being fallible, of how our emotions run the show. He's not posturing. He's unbelievably smart. You know, he's very, very well versed in Renaissance art and history and poetry and, and sculpture and, and, and all this stuff. But there's no posturing from his left brain.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:27Chris Williamson?

  There's none of this sort of over rationality. He, he accepts with complete face value the fact that we can be self contradictory and embarrassing and, and all the rest of it. But anyway, he has, he has this line in a video that I was watching recently where he talks about a person whose greatest achievement would be after their death, people would say they never made a fuss. Oh, they didn't make a fuss. They didn't, you know, they didn't cause any ripples. They didn't make any waves. And he's talking about largely an equivalent of the nice guy, this person who's, you know, overly pliable, who's concerned about upsetting others, who's doing all of this stuff. And I, it really, it really sort of struck home.

• 47:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, oh my God, like, that's the, that's the inheritance and the legacy which is waiting for you. And ultimately, you can make it to the end of your life, having either made all of the messes in the world or made zero messes at all, depending on whether you go bad guy mode or nice guy mode. But like, your legacy as you look back on your life is going to be one of you playing a persona. You're never going to really be able to connect to any of the things that you do. People, accomplishments, praise, compliments, adoration, money, because it wasn't you that earned that. You didn't earn your money.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  The role that you're playing earned the money. The role that you're playing got the marriage. The role that you're playing got the relationship or the job raise or or created the family or the the billion dollar company. It wasn't you, wasn't you?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  That kind of messes with your head, doesn't it?

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  Scary.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  You know, when you were describing, and I can't pronounce his name, pronounce his name.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Alain de Botton.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's beautiful. When you were describing him, I'm sitting there thinking, I'm a straight guy. And that guy sounds sexy as hell, the way you were describing.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  I mean, he's got the classic philosopher's build, but so be it, so be it. Here's something else. So here's something else that I've had in in my mind since looking at your work and kind of. I've spent a lot of time over the last three years looking at evolutionary psychology, mating dynamics, so on and so forth.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  We don't see, especially from women at the moment, many conversations online about nice guys, about guys being too nice, about guys being too pliable. A lot of the conversations skews toward guys being too toxic. Guys being too immature, but it's immature. It it tends to be in a in a toxic manner. It's sort of the use and discard, the use and abuse, the the very sort of transient, transactional nature. What is the reason, do you think, that there isn't as much popularity? If if and I don't disagree, I think that a huge problem will be the pliability and and dishonesty and niceness of men.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Is it just less tweetable to to have that as the reason that you can't find? I've got all of these men that keep bending over backward and keep doing things for me. Is it that it's kind of publicly unpopular for women to call that out? Because it seems like they're being ungrateful. What do you what do you think it is?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Well. Because I'm not in a woman's head, I can't, and because I'm not on social media, I also, but I do know what you're talking about. Of course, there are memes that run. And I do, you know, because I get a Google notice every time nice guy, you know, pops up somewhere. I do see when it does pop up. It usually pops up in right wing Republican writing most often. But when women do write their blog articles about nice guys, it is most often how nice guys aren't nice, of how they use basically the covert contracts of,

• 50:28Speaker 01

  "Oh, I'm gonna listen to you talk about your problems. I'm gonna pay your car payment this month. I'm gonna pretend like I care about you." And then when they, you know, ask the woman out or want her to have sex, it goes, "No, I never thought of you that way. You're a friend," you know? And then the guy, of course, all that resentfulness, that passive aggression, the rage comes out. And so, you know, that meme does show up, but it still ends up being toxic masculinity. Here is my thought, and it sounds like you've looked a lot at this, and you might even have a better perspective than me. My thought is that, you know, I grew up during whatever the wave of the angry feminism was in the 60s and 70s. I don't know if that's first wave, second wave.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  But, you know, every man's a rapist, and erection's a sign of aggression. And, you know, that already bought in. My mother, you know, my mother's generation were the first, I think, true feminists. She raised my sister to not need a man, raised her boys to be different from their father. You know, that was kind of the beginning of that movement. And, um,

• 51:33Speaker 01

  so from that, I grew up, I don't want to be like those bad men that women are complaining about. So, so kind of the toxic masculinity meme has been around for a while. It just didn't have social media, and now mainstream media. Mainstream, I can't even listen to like NPR anymore because it's kind of like, it's just gone so much to like, let's just run fluff articles, you know, fluff stories and stuff like that.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Agreed.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I think there had to be a pendulum swing. You know, most of that's directed at patriarchy. You know, now you just say patriarchy and like, we all understand exactly what that means. It's evil, right? But patriarchy was also provide and protect. You know, there was also positives a part of it. And was there an ownership mentality? Yeah. Did that lead to colonialism and, you know, abuses towards women and children? Yeah. Uh, racism? Yeah. So, yeah, all of that. Well, you know, when we make a social change, we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, yeah, let's just rail against this big idea of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, you know,

• 52:44Speaker 01

  you know, mansplaining, man spreading, everything that men do is bad kind of stuff. I, I think maybe it had to go to an extreme and, and I think most sociologists that look at big shifts in society say when you have an oppressed people, um, downtrodden, it almost has to become like a revolution. It has to be at the extremes. It doesn't have to be.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  Needs to be a correction.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not like a Gandhi that just, you know, let's subtly create the shift. Um, so I think there has to be that overcorrection. And, and you know, so we went through the hashtag Me Too where, you know, men were, you know, you know, accused, tried, you know, prosecuted and, you know, in the media, lost jobs, lost status purely because some woman said, oh, I want to join the Me Too crowd, you know? And yeah, there was a lot of abuses that were being addressed. Should they have been addressed through social media? I don't know if that was, you know, the most democratic way to do it, but it's how it got done. And then, you know, yeah, if you, you know, publish something that gets a lot of likes and a lot of follows and yeah, other people are going to publish it.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it went to the extreme.

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  The incentives aligned to make it happen.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Of course they do. And social media is all about algorithms and, you know, the more something shows up, the more you see of it. Uh, that's why I don't, one of the reasons I don't like social media. Um, but I actually think that we're actually making an adjustment. You know, I, I, I saw articles, yeah, a couple of years ago, likening anything that had to do with men's work to like the, oh, there goes the balloons.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  You said it wasn't gonna happen.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  I didn't think it was gonna work. Have you managed to make balloons come up on the screen?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I'm magic.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  I promise, I promise.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I'm magic.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Stop doing it.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  I wish I, yeah, I can't quit moving my hands out. The thumb will probably go up.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  That's fine.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Maybe confetti.

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  All right, all right.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Okay, so even just a couple of years ago, I saw articles about linking the January 6th, you know, riots, you know, in Washington DC to anything having to do with men's work, like complaining that that all came out of the men's movement. And I'm going, and this was in mainstream, this Washington Post ran an article like that, right? So it was mainstream media.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  I think actually that, I think maybe we've reached that far, that far extreme. And I think maybe it's starting to where all of a sudden that's losing its interest. It seems to, you know, oh, okay, there's another meme about toxic masculinity. Oh, there's another meme about Andrew Tate. There's another, you know, blah, blah, blah. And people do get bored. And now maybe in this, because I'm in the middle of men's work. It's what I've done for years. And I'm, I'm in, you know, a men's program myself. I built a men's program. I believe in it. I, I really do think we're moving to a better space that as men become more conscious of, of the things that I think, you know, that I teach that are valuable.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  You know, being honest, being transparent, making your needs a priority, surrounding themselves with people on a helping get their needs met, living with purpose, living with passion, you know, being generous, making the world a better place, being open-hearted, being loving, you know, quality, good qualities. That I think is changing the world, is shifting the dynamic. Women, I think, will begin to go, that, that's actually really attractive.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  That's sexy.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  That's better. I like that. And, um, and I think there'll still be a few ones hanging on to, but I, let's all still stay mad at men. Let's, you know, let's still, and after a while, you know, one of the things that really was a big shock to me, I was probably in my 40s. Well, I was, I was talking to, you know, a feminist and I mentioned somebody who identified as a feminist, a woman, maybe on an airplane. And, and I said, well, here's the feminism I grew up with. And she said, oh, you mean that every man's a rapist? You you like believed all that? I go, well, it sure was. He goes, I was just a few angry pissed off women that got a lot of attention. I go, that's all it was? Not all women felt that way? She goes, no, and they still don't.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  I go, that's actually good to know that maybe all that noise that, you know, gets a lot of likes and follows. Maybe that doesn't represent the even the majority of women.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  There was a really wonderful term that I heard last year called the tyranny of the minority. And

• 57:16Speaker 01

  It happens.

• 57:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that that explains it. So

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Another way of putting it is the slowest dumb shit on the freeway is going to control how fast everybody can go.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  Very good. Yes, yes, we're controlled by the extremes and the idiots. Um. It's interesting to think about why that might be the case. I I think that you've probably you you're probably not far wrong that.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  It's still so popular to.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  Fit men into the oppressive, tyrannical, patriarchal, overbearing, dominating, controlling role. That if women were to if if a woman was to post online, something which is more more honest, perhaps, which would be. Um, I keep going out for men who are overly pliable and because they're so pliable. I'm concerned that they're not being honest with me. What does that sound like? Well, it sounds like a call for men to be less pliable, which is not far away from men to be more aggressive, more controlling.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  It's like writing a book that's called No More Mr. Nice Guy. Why would someone write a book teaching men to be not nice? We do. We do live in a black and white world. And again, media, social media loves the black and white. It doesn't like nuanced subtlety.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  That's the dangerous, the real N word of 2024 is nuance. That's the real one that you shouldn't be saying. All right. So getting into getting into relationships, which are obviously. I think ground zero for a lot of this stuff, you know, you can kind of hide things away from yourself when it's on your own. And you're in and out of work and all the rest of it. Not everybody is emotionally connected with the work and everybody's emotionally connected with how organized their source cupboard is. Relationships, real ground zero. What do nice guys not understand about how female attraction works?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Well, most of us are believing what our mothers told us, you know, if they told us anything, which is be nice to girls. That's what my mother said, be a gentleman. Okay, makes sense, you know, be a gentleman, and I am. I'm a gentleman, but a woman taught me this one. I always open the door for women. I tell them, wait for me, I'll open your door. Now, if you really break it down, that's me being dominant, you know, I tell them what to do. Wait for me, I'm gonna open your door. And of the several hundred women who I've told to do, wait for me, I'll open your door. Only one has pushed back against it, and she pushed back for a while, then all of a sudden, she quit and kind of decided she actually really liked, actually,

• 59:48Speaker 01

  what she did is she jumped to my bones in a public place, and I very, I said, we need to take this somewhere else. After a while, she'd been pushing back against my dominance. So,

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  for there to be attraction, there has to be a polarity. And polarity involves dominance and submission. I know those are evil, terrible words, you know, because we think about dominant man, you know, making women be submissive.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  You're in a safe space here.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I'm not sweating it. But yeah, it is going out on the internet, which is fine. You know, and what's happened is the polarity has just switched, where the females have become dominant, the dominant players, and the guys have become the submissive players. And then the women go, how come I can't find a guy that turns me on? And the guys are going, how come I can't seem to turn women on? Well, it's reversed the polarity. You can't have polarity, that's attraction, without dominance and submission. And the more subtle it is, the more subtle the attraction is, the more blatant it is, tends to be, the more intense the attraction is. We've probably all experienced that in one way or another. And I tell people, you can't have sex without

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  She's done my thigh. I don't, I don't piss her off. Um, you know, she can get shit done. I grew up in a middle-class, white-bread neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, surrounded by Boeing engineer families, you know, it's just, you know, I, I never had to fight for anything. Okay, so she's tough, but she doesn't, she's always told me, I love it when you tell me no. She goes, I don't, she goes, I, I don't want to be in charge. I don't want you to always ask me what, what, you know, what do you want to do? She, she likes it when I make, we'll walk into a restaurant and, you know, they'll, here in Mexico, and they'll say, they'll, they'll say, should I, they'll ask her, should I get, the waiter says, should I give him a menu in English? She goes, no, he lives in Mexico. Give him one in Spanish. And I'll say, yeah, give, give my wife and kids the menu in English.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  And then they hand her a menu and she goes, no, he's my boss. He'll order for me. And they always laugh about that. And I say, yeah, I get to be the boss when she says I can't. You know, so we got the whole, the whole shtick down. But the truth is, she is strong, she's powerful, she can get shit done, she can kick ass, but she doesn't want to be in that mode all the time. She wants to, to be led. She wants to submit. She wants to open. She wants to be done to in, in blissful kinds of ways. Well, that's my job, right? So, and even though I'm kind of more that, I'm, I'm go along to get along. I, you know, I'm, yeah, this or that, either one's okay with me. I'm kind of more that way. She doesn't like it when I'm that way.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So for her, she's happiest when I will play the default lead, the default decision maker. But she likes it best when I said, here's what I was thinking. What do you think? You know, I don't just say, what do you think? You know, what do you want? I'll say, you know, I was thinking a white with a little bit of tint of gray in it. What do you think? You know, she wants me to, to, to lead that and then she'll feel the polarity and then she'll tell me what she thinks or wants and then you just say, you decide. Okay, let's go, let's go, let's go pick out the paint. Am I being abusive to her by being dominant? No, I've heard so many women tell me when the guy leaves it all up to them to compliant.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  The women feel burdened by that. Most are in their masculine dominant role all day long in their work, in their career, raising children, even mothering is a masculine dominant state to be in. You're taking care of kids' needs. That's not feminine.

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  You don't then want to have to take care of your partner after that?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, then, then when the guy says, oh, I don't guess you want to have sex tonight, would you? Or what do you want for this? And it's, it's just one more thing that they got to check off their to do list. They don't want that. Now, am I making a generalization? Yeah. Is it fluid? Yeah. Is it nuanced? Yeah. Is it, okay, the guy's always got to be the dominant and the woman's, but no, that's not what I'm saying. But for, for men, when I start talking about them consciously setting the tone and leading in relationship. When I say that to a nice guy, the response, he usually, he'll, he'll ponder and go, okay, Dr. Glover, what I hear you say when you say, take control, I go, no, no, you did not hear me say the word, take control. I did not say it. I don't believe in it.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I'm talking about you lead, you set the tone, you state what you want, where you want to go, what you want to eat. And, and, and give her a chance to follow, like on the dance floor. She can't follow where you don't lead. Give her that and then be open to a discussion. Be open to her taking the, you know, setting the tone and leading. But it's not about, but guys, nice guys will say, well, you know, when you said, take control. Is more nuanced than that. But again, so that that that's my job is helping guys apply the the nuance, that that word of 2024.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  What is the role of emotional tension?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Oh, you've done some research. Um, yeah, that's a cute little wink of the eye that just.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm just flirting with you. I'm just trying to.

• 1:05:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm just trying to flirt with you.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I know the the girls like it. Probably the boys do too.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  I I live in a very gay community. So, you know, I know how it is. Um, okay. So the role of emotional tension. There we go. We just had emotional tension going on right there.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  I'm gonna I'm gonna make a generalization that doesn't apply to everybody, but it does seem to apply to a lot. And that's the generalized statement is, is that in general, for women to experience attraction, say towards a man, arousal, and to stay attached to that man over time, she has to experience some kind of emotional tension. She's got to feel something, the butterflies, and this, the that, the drama, the does he love me? He doesn't love me. And we men can kind of understand that a little bit. We kind of like the tension we feel of go, oh, she's she looks nice, you know, like her boobs, whatever. You know, that creates a tension for us. But in general, men don't like emotional tension, especially in a relationship.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  If you even think about, you know, our sporting events where we too did our tension, they have clocks on them. You know, we know it's going to end at this time. That's why baseball is falling out of favor. That's why they put a clock on baseball.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  They put the they put the pitch clock last year.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Chris Williamson?

  Fix that problem.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  How many times you can throw to first, you know, because, oh, we got to have it on a clock, you know? So, um, so men's tension is on the clock. Oh, yeah, I I I know this, you know, this this adventure flick I'm watching in the hero. This is happening. I know he's going to get out of it and it's going to be done in 35 minutes, you know? It's done. We're done. Shoot, go home, kick back into nothingness, right? The feminine never gets tired of tension. The feminine, if it isn't feeling tension, is bored, it will create tension. And so that's what's hard for men to understand. You know, we think to be nice to women will make them be attracted to us. But nice creates absolutely no attention, no tension, really for anybody, men or women.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  But we think, well, that's what mom told me to do. Go be, go be nice to them. It's what, that's what I, in junior high, all the women were complaining about those jerks who create attention for them. And so I listened to her complain about the jerks and she kept going back to the jerk, even after, you know, I'm such a nice guy. So in general, women need that emotional tension. Watch it, they create it within themselves. And, and we guys, if we have any kind of tension between us, we'll just have it out. Maybe we'll punch each other and then we'll be done. We'll go have a beer, it's all good, you know? We don't need to keep going back into that tension state to have a bond, have a connection. Well, we'll go do something together. We may go compete, we may go bring our A game and leave it all on the field, but then we walk off arm in arm.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  So it's just the, the, the difference between that masculine and feminine. So the hardest part for men to understand is that the women need that tension. So even when I say, wait for me, I'll open your door, and now I create a little bit of dominance and she waits for me, that's tension. Alright, it's just a little bit, it's a little subtle. You know, even like, you know, say, hey, put the menu down, I'll order for us tonight. There's tension in that, not being nice, it's actually creating some, what's he gonna order for? Is he gonna pick something I like? Do I trust him? Is it gonna be an adventure? You know, I, I tell guys, and you know, and, and you know, guys will think it's game playing, and it kinda can look like that, and, but the, the, the real thing is actually just, is how do we get more conscious?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  So I'll tell a guy, for example, you know, if a woman sends you a message, text message, or calls you, and if you reply right away, or you pick up the phone and answer, how much tension will the woman experience through that? Well, well, none. We've relieved it. As soon as we answered the phone, her tension went away. But what if you didn't answer it? What if you called her back in thirty seconds, forty-five seconds, an hour? And she goes, where were you? Why didn't you answer? And what if you didn't give her an answer to that? And she's going, why didn't he answer? What was he doing? Now, here's the thing. Because us guys tend, if we do have emotional tension, we like what I call positive emotional tension. You know, it, it, it feels good to us. For the, for women, they don't care.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Is it positive emotional tension? Is it, is it pet or is it net? Negative emotional tension. They don't care. Emotional tension is emotional tension. And so, you know, if it means, you know, them starting a fight. You know, them doing something that knows, that knows is gonna piss us off. It's kind of like, they don't care. They got our attention. And, and that's all that matters. They got our attention and there's tension. And, and even the thing of guys like listening to women talk about their problems. I tell guys, there's a, an inverse negative relationship between the amount of time a man spends listening to a woman talk about her problems and the likelihood he's gonna get laid.

• 1:10:28Chris Williamson?

  What you mean?

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  It means that if you sit and listen to her talk about her problems, you've actually relieved all of her tension. Tension flowed completely out of, because you know, she talks, she talks, she talks, all, all the tension came away. And what I tell guys is then you end up looking like her girlfriend with a penis. And odds are she doesn't want to have sex with her girlfriend. So anything we do to relieve their tension actually works against us and robs them. Kind of like we talked about earlier, are we gonna rob them of the joy of doing for us? Well, are we gonna rob them of the emotional tension that they have to have to feel, to feel something? To, to want to engage.

• 1:11:08Chris Williamson?

  You had this fantastic example of how emotional tension is enjoyed differently by men and women by the story arcs of romantic comedies and how men and women. Uh, experience, experience that. Can you explain that?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  What you mean like, you know, you, you, you take your woman to watch Titanic and she Titanic, you know, she's already seen it eight times and she walks away with her panties wet thinking, how come I can't have that? And the guy, the guy's checking his watch, checking his phone, is SportsCenter on yet? How do I get out of here?

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  I, I thought what, what was particularly interesting was you, you explaining and it really sort of hit home to me that, if you're a man who's watching a romantic comedy, you see, um, regulation at the beginning, everything is, is fine. Then you see dysregulation, something happens and everything goes up in the air. Then you see regulation again, or more like middle movie regulation where the, the couple first starts to get together. And you're like, oh, what? I mean, that's it. Like,

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Let's go home. The movie's done.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, done. Whereas what the woman then wants is this protracted, oh, but the ex-girlfriend's back in the picture. But oh my God, he hasn't got his right visa and he's going to be deported. How are they going to keep the relationship going? And it's just protracted and protracted and protracted and protracted. And then I don't know. I don't know what it's like to be a woman at the end of a rom-com, but it may be unsatisfying for there to be a conclusion. It's like, well, can we just, let's roll it for another three hours. Let's just continue to extend this.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  That's maybe where, where Bollywood figured it out. Let's just do the wedding scene. Everybody's dancing to a real upbeat song. We know it's over, but now they'll, they'll do a part two of it.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  And, and you know,

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  women I've been in relationship with learned, don't take me to a romantic comedy. I'm sitting there going, that is so fucking unrealistic. That doesn't happen in the real world. How come every guy has a job he doesn't actually have to go to? How come every woman's a fashion editor in every one of these? Yeah, I know he loves dogs, but he lives in this New York loft and makes canoes. That's how he supports himself. Come on, that's not real. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to go to a romantic comedy with me. Cause I live in the world of, could that really be real? Could that really happen? Do people really do that?

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Nope. You know, that's not how the real world works, but it creates emotional tension. And so that's really what it is all about. It's not about reality. The masculine wants to go resolve all the emotional tension to get us back into reality. So, yeah, I it's it's really hard for me to watch romantic comedy and just twiddle my thumbs and just not not say anything. Oh, it's excruciating.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  So, thinking about this dynamic that we have, this emotional tension, this amount of of dominance and and direction and and suggestion that comes from the man. There will be women listening and out there who enjoy.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  They're writing a blog article about us right now.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  Fine, it's fine. Add it to the list. But there will be women listening who are maybe a little conflicted. Or there will be men who imagine that the woman might be conflicted because you say, well, she wants, she comes home, she's had a difficult day at the work because Kelly, that bitch in the cubicle next door has done that thing again that pisses her off. And the woman wants to be able to vent. She also wants her man to listen to her. And it's this odd duality of not knowing what's best for us and of the things that we want not always being in our best interests.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:43Chris Williamson?

  And you quoted the best Onion article, which is Woman Turns Man Into A Partner She Doesn't Want To Be With.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  I I that the the article, the headline alone is is enough, right? You know? And and again, this is, this is the dance of relationship. Wouldn't it be great if, you know, we could just say, guys, just do it this way. Every woman's gonna like it. No, it doesn't work that way. And but what what you said was really true is that, yeah, for example, you know, the woman in your life's been in her masculine all day, doing it work, putting up with asshole managers, asshole customers, asshole clients, asshole coworkers. And now, you know, she comes home, there's one more asshole in the house putting demands on her. So, for example.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Um, the woman that folded my clothes that I mentioned, again, I met her at the mall as she sold me shoes. And when, and after we started dating, um, one of the things where we really clicked is she liked baseball. I like baseball.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  I'm a Texas Rangers fan. I could have been part of a threesome. It would have been great.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  We go, you go flirting again, but, but you, you lost to me as soon as you said Texas Rangers, you know.

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  Hey, those of us with the World Series championship in the last year.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're, you're the we, you're the homer. Yeah, we, we won the World Series. Let me see the ring, man. Show, show me the ring. Okay, so, um.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  She liked baseball. So, you know, she'd get off work, four or five o'clock in the afternoon. I'd already have a bar stool staked out at the Roost Chris that was right next to, you know, where she worked. Couple of baseball games are already on the screen at the bar. They have this great half price hamburger during happy hour. She'd come in and she would just start, you know, I'd already have the wine ordered, sitting there. You know, the, you know, the appetizers are coming and she's like this about her day, right? Like that. She's been in her mask all day. I would take out my phone. Set it at five minutes and say, you have my undivided attention for five minutes. Put the phone on the bar. I would give her eye contact. I would face her. I would listen, undivided attention.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  She would run out of steam before five minutes was up because she's going, I can sit here and complain, but there's a baseball game on. And there's a glass of wine sitting here. What do I prefer? Before five, now, if I didn't put her on the clock at five minutes, it was a game. It was me being dominant, but in a loving playful, if I didn't put her on the clock, she might be crabby all night long. And she would not enjoy herself because one of the things I found is that for.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Somebody who identifies as feminine to be in their masculine all day are often not good at getting themselves out of that masculine. I gotta go home and wash dishes and get the laundry done. There's things we gotta do before I gotta get up and go to work tomorrow. Oh, sit down, have a glass of wine. Tell me about your day. Let me rub your feet. I'm a big fan of, in a sense, leading her back into her feminine, out of that masculine, rigid, get shit done kind of state of mind. And now all of a sudden, she begins opening and she'll tell me your attention. I might even say, a woman taught me this. I'll say, you know what? I want to hear about your day, but give me the guy version. You know, and I've never had a woman ask me, what does that mean? I'll say, you, you, you want me to be your guy, right? Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  All right, then I need the guy version when you tell me about the day.

• 1:18:11Chris Williamson?

  Please translate.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  About how Kelly in the cubicle next to her, you know, and I know why she does it because she's just insecure and she's always wanting attention and she always takes it out of me. Dear, I love you. Give me the guy version. Kelly pissed me off today. Great. Now I understand why you had a bad day.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  So, you know, get playful with it. Get playful with it.

• 1:18:33Chris Williamson?

  There's definitely, one of the common threads that I'm noticing through a lot of the dynamics is a degree of playfulness and.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  It's my nature, so it is what I bring and, you know.

• 1:18:45Chris Williamson?

  But it's helping, it's helping to, it's helping to relieve the tension, relieve the tension, it's helping to relieve the seriousness of everything.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  That's what.

• 1:18:54Chris Williamson?

  That, that it, it gives more play. It gives like, in the engineering term, it gives more room within the system for things to breathe. You make a suggestion, but it's not, it's not done in too rigid of a fashion. There's, there's, there's movement in there and it's done, it's evident, the reason that you're doing it, and it's not in a mocking way, it's not in a passive aggressive way, it's not in a condescending or patronizing way, but the reason that this, I think, works is it shows, hey, look, like we're here to enjoy our time together. We're here, you're here to enjoy, we're here to enjoy this. And whether it's someone's had something good happen, someone's had something bad happen, someone's sad, someone's mad, someone's whatever.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  The appropriate amount of playfulness, I can struggle to think of really many situations in which it doesn't make it better.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, and that doesn't mean getting silly and everything's a joke. Cause again, guys will kind of like, oh, you mean make a joke about it? And go, and again, teaching men to, to be lighthearted, that, that, that, that can be a pretty daunting task.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Um, now what's funny though, if you get men with men and, and let them just kind of begin to let their hair down, guys get silly with each other and you know, and but we're, I think we're afraid of showing that to women. Oh, yeah. I won't, I won't appear manly. I won't be, you know.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  There's a degree of, there's a degree of competence, I think. Uh, I certainly noticed this, do you know who Charlie Hoopit is from Charisma on Command? He's got a very big charisma channel on YouTube, a really, really great guy, very embodied, ton of self-work, ton of men's work. Um, and he, uh, helps mostly men, but also women, uh, become more charismatic. So he, he, he's, he's learned the principles of, of confidence and charisma. And, um, one of the best tools that he teaches is when people ask a question, the best answer isn't always the right one. And, you know, he, he uses this example of, um, how to overcome your discomfort around trying to be funny.

• 1:21:00Chris Williamson?

  And he says, if you walk out of the house and you're with people, you walk out of a bar or whatever, and the weather is one extreme of either hot or cold, make a joke about it being the opposite.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  And he was like, it's the shittest joke. It is the worst. It's a pure dad joke. But he said, it'll get a chuckle out of people. If you walk outside and it's freezing hot and you go, dude, wish I'd brought some shorts today. This is great. Um, like people have a little bit of a, a chuckle about it, but it really, really showed me. And I have a friend, George, who's been on the show a lot. He, a lot of the time, if you're playing kind of like a game of tennis, so you're playing a game of tennis, which involves a, a linear conversation. Here is a question. There is an answer. Here is a question. There is an answer. Here's another answer. Here's another question. And you play this back and forth. He regularly hits the ball sideways.

• 1:21:49Chris Williamson?

  So he'll call back to a thing that happened a couple of weeks ago, or he'll say, oh, you know, I bet that such and such a famous person from the media would have done that or whatever, like he'll rip the conversation out like orthogonally from where it is. And there's play in that. He's not answering the question because he, he has the comfort in himself to not need.

• 1:22:12Chris Williamson?

  To get validation by being, I am the person that always knows the answer. I am the person that is always able to give the the correct conclusion, that draws the line, that puts the full stop and dots the i's and crosses the t's. I don't need to be that person. And it's such a breath of fresh air because you're having this conversation and and you're like, I'm excited, like, I don't know what's gonna, and it engenders that in you as well. But there's definitely like good boy energy and nice guy energy in. I will answer the question properly. I will ensure that this, if somebody has asked something of me and to deliver it, I shall. And that removes the playfulness.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and when I work with guys around this, again, when I, when I learned to date in my 40s and 50s, I, you know, I was never good with women. And if I got one, I kept them way too long. And I started getting successful, you know, with dating and getting laid and guys said, Robert, teach us. I'm not a dating guru. But what you're talking about is it, again, for most of the men I worked with, they get so afraid, I'm gonna do something wrong, I'm gonna make a mistake, I'm gonna piss her off, I'll blow it. And then it's irreparable. And I'd say, you know, just touch her. Don't, you know, if you have the impulse to touch her, touch her. If you have the impulse to tease her, tease her. If you have the impulse to tell her, come on, let's go do this. Don't hold back.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  It's crazy as it sounds, I tell guys, blurt and act on impulse. You think that's a recipe for disaster, but the truth is, it lets them be themselves because their authentic self comes out. And, you know, I've had so many experiences, you know, around, if I just blurted, acted on impulse. You know, I remember one woman I dated, on the second date, we were gonna go for a walk and she said, let me go use the restroom in a restaurant. And she went to the restroom, came back and I, so I'm gonna go use the restroom. I said, by the way, I enjoyed watching you walk away from me. And as soon as I said it, I thought, oh, fuck, I probably blew it, you know. After we broke up, we stayed friends and she said, months later, she said, you remember when you said that to me? I said, yeah, I thought I blew it. And she goes, oh, no, I loved it.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Well, I, I just blurted it, right? I didn't hold it back. I remember another woman, early, first date, we were walking and she said something about her.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Her sister, her sister-in-law, they're, they're having a shoe party, you know, where women get together and look at shoes.

• 1:24:32Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like the lamest thing.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  A tougher word.

• 1:24:35Chris Williamson?

  That I can think of.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  The A shoe party.

• 1:24:38Chris Williamson?

  Lamest party in history, but okay.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  And so I blurted without thinking, oh, shoe shopping is women's porn. She turned and looked at me and she goes, you get it, you understand. You know, and, and, and so guys will say, well, I'm not funny, you know, I'm not, I'm not, you know, I can't, I'm not talking about telling jokes. I'm talking about whatever that thing that came to the tip of your brain, but you held it back.

• 1:25:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Cause you're afraid it might be the wrong thing to say, the wrong thing to do. As soon as you held it back, you killed the tension. The putting it out there and sometimes you crash and burn. You know, there's the sweat flops, you go, oh man, that didn't get one laugh, you know? But you gotta take that risk. Every comedian, you know, has had plenty of bombs to, but man, that one landed. And, and it's not about trying to get it right. It's about taking the censors off and letting that you that maybe just speaks to the obvious out there and people, people relate to it or they won't.

• 1:25:42Chris Williamson?

  It seems a lot like one of the key tactics for rehabilitating a nice guy is learning to kind of get out of your own way.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it because what we've been doing is again, go all the way back to where we began this. They've been trying to manage their shame. I'm, I'm bad. I'm not good enough. I'm going to be found out. I'm going to die. Their anxiety, oh no, somebody will react negatively. There'll be pain involved. And, and so that is what's driving the bus is their shame and their anxiety. And so who is really in there? You know, who is the person? One of the things, the comments I get from people that work with me or, you know, come to my workshops or seminars or do calls with me, they'll say, Robert, I appreciate how authentic you are. And I'll go, nobody would have accused me of that 30 years ago.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Nobody would have said, Robert, I love how real you are, how authentic you are, how you just share yourself, how you share your mistakes, your fuckups. I didn't. And, and I couldn't attract a woman to save my life, you know, back in those days. I, I kinda could, but I, I didn't know that what I was, what I did that might attract a woman. But I wasn't real. I wasn't authentic. I was holding my finger up, checking the wind. I was a chameleon. You know, what's, what's gonna give me the most laughs? Or what's gonna give me, you know, what, what, what will kinda go over well, but not too well? That, you know, now I'm not on the spot, but I gotta follow through. And man, to just take the sensors off and just blur, act on impulse, be you, I think is such a powerful rehabilitation.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  And since most nice guys, their sensors are the most prominent with women, that's a great place to go practice.

• 1:27:27Chris Williamson?

  One of my, the same friend I was talking about before, Mr. Orthogonal Tennis Game George, he, he has this idea called only the irrational behavior survives. What he's talking about, what he's talking about is he imagines being at the funeral of somebody that he knows, and he thinks about the conversations that the people are having around the room. And they're not having the conversation, the washing was always folded, and he turned up on time and all the rest of it. He uses this example of his mom, and he says that his mom hates fighting, just really does, does not like physical fighting, big, big problem with it. And once, his brother was in the car, his younger brother was in the car with her, and they were driving somewhere, and she, I don't know, 50s year old woman,

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  normal British woman, saw two 18 year old boys sort of squaring up to each other and pushing and trying to fight or whatever on the side of the, on the pavement. She stops the car in the middle of traffic, gets out and runs over, and the brother's like, Mom, what the fuck are you doing? Like, what, the two guys, twice your size and quadruple your testosterone, what the fuck are you doing? She runs over and she gets in between them, physically gets in between them, like, no fighting, no fighting, gets back in the car, and the brother's like, Mom, that was insane. You could have been hurt, you could be, she's like, I don't care. I don't care. I just don't like fighting. No one's fighting. And he said, at her funeral, People will say she was the sort of person that would stop the car in the middle of traffic to stop two boys from fighting. And it's like that only the irrational behavior survives

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  is is similar to what you're talking about, that there are rough edges to our personality and our behavior. But ultimately, that is our personality and behavior. Like, your goal, your goal should not be, as a person on this planet, to smooth out any of the things that make you anything into this sort of vanilla amorphous blob that kind of like just glides through. It's like, no, you have things that you want to say and actions that you want to take and changes that you want to make. And just the faith to be able to do that, unencumbered, is, that's what life is.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it takes support, it takes practice. Um, yeah, you know, talking no more Mr. Nice Guy, but Nice Guy's being Teflon men. No stick, you know, nothing, I don't want anything to stick to me. But we do connect, as you said, around our rough edges. You know, what we remember about people might not even be always a thing, it might even bugged us or got on our nerves when they did it, when we're around them. But it is also the thing we miss. I mean, you know, Nala, the pit bull's back at my, my door again. I've got French glass doors, so I can see her outside my office. Yeah, you know, when she barks during, you know, I'm on an interview, a podcast, it really bugs me. But you know,

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  if I didn't have her, and I'd notice, oh, I miss her bark. You know, I love when she'd go crazy and let me know that somebody was out front. Our handyman, the water guys deliver water, they call my dog's name because they know she'll bark differently when she's had her name called. And then, and I would miss that if it ever went, I go, what's wrong with Nala? How come she doesn't bark at people outside anymore?

• 1:30:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  It's, it's rough edges, boring, you know, all that smooth, get it right, no, you know, that's boring.

• 1:30:48Chris Williamson?

  Why is your first sexual experience so important?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  You talking about mine?

• 1:30:55Chris Williamson?

  The.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  You're an article.

• 1:30:57Chris Williamson?

  Come on, even that's too far for me. Um, yeah. First sexual experience, why is it very formative?

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Okay. You know.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  That is a good question, but it's also a difficult one to answer because our first sexual experience is probably conception, you know, I'd say birth. We're born sexual. The essence of who we are is sexuality. Every living thing is built to reproduce after its own. So our sexuality is the essence of who we are. We kind of live culturally thinking, well, you know, children don't become sexual until, you know, that particular age, whatever that might be. But the truth is, you know, little boys, little girls discover their body parts at a very young age and, oh, there's pleasure. Before you, you know, they understand the words of parents, don't stop doing that, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  finding the pleasure in their own body parts. And the essence of our psyche is, is, is our, our sexuality. You know, if so many great teachers, you know, all the way from Freud to David Data to Osho to David Snarch, people at least I value, talk about the most profound way into who we are, yom, is to our sexuality, because it is the essence of who we are. So to bring that back to answering your question, I will often ask people like in workshop, you know, again, I primarily work with men these days. Well, I hundred percent work with men these days. I'll ask them, what was your earliest sexual memory? And it doesn't matter what it

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  was. First time you noticed you had an erection, first kiss, first wet dream, first, I'll show you mine, you show me yours, first, whatever. And it can vary, you know, every, but I'll say, what is your first memory? And then I'll say, get it, get clear in your mind, what was it? And then I'll ask them, did it occur in the open? Could you go tell your folks about it? Could it be celebrated? Did your parents say, "That's amazing, let's go get pizza." That's a, you know, it's a developmental milestone. Um, or was it hidden? Was it secretive? Was it guilt ridden? Was it shame based? Uh, even worse, did it feel good, but you felt bad about it feeling good?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Alright, so for about 99.9% of the people on the planet, our earliest sexual experience was wrapped in shame. In, in hidden darkness, guilt, "I'm bad, I can't let anybody find out." So our sexuality gets crosswired with those features. It's bad, it's evil, hide it, repress it, don't let it out. And then that takes, you know, as many different forms as there are people in terms of how that manifests from, from there. So then we get to be adolescents and adults and can't figure out why sex is so messy, so difficult, so challenging. So, you know, how come it isn't work? How come, how come it's not easy?

• 1:34:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, people who think that they have a, a low sex drive might actually just be psychologically scarred from the way that they perceived it.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  That's very possible. I, and I've, I've often said, you know, I, I, we'll get personal, I didn't discover, I didn't know I could actually masturbate myself to ejaculation until I was a freshman in college. That's pretty late compared to, to most. And, and you know, I was kind of a late bloomer in a lot of ways around sexuality. And I was just, well, that's just me. But yeah, it's very likely me growing up in a fundamental Christian church where I heard messages really early that if you lust after a woman's breast, you go to all, you go to hell for all eternity. You know, where, you know, my mom taught me to be, not be like my dad. Where, you know, I listened to the women that he's a jerk, he only wants one thing. You know, yeah, there might've been some scarring that went into the, you know.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to work out.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  You know, it's better to not have a sex drive. "Oh, my penis betrayed me again by getting erect." You know, what, stop doing that, you know, you know.

• 1:35:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to work out from a first sexual experience perspective. My first, the, the first time I had sex, the girl who I worked with at the local hotel where I was the room service boy.

• 1:35:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what a, uh, fucking, what was it? A VW Lupo is?

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  A Lupo?

• 1:35:32Chris Williamson?

  Lupo. It's like the size, it's smaller than a Fiat 500 and it was three door and it was in a, uh, like an industrial estate halfway between.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  Did you have sex in a Lupo?

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  I, I had, I, I, if you think that having sex for the first time is difficult, having sex for the first time in a car that's like half the size of a jumper, just turns the, turns the difficulty level up to 11. Um, but yeah, I, maybe, maybe that's, I don't know what that means. We were next to a, like a Mercedes Benz mechanics. Maybe that's why I love F1 so much. I'm not sure. I keep getting an erection whenever I see Lewis Hamilton. I'm not sure.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  We, we could really spend, my, my, my first attempt was in a Chevy Vega. You know, probably slightly bigger, slightly bigger. The next time I tried it, it was on a parked school bus. I got smart, right?

• 1:36:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very nice. Very good. Well, I mean, the school bus, yeah. But, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting to think about how we sort of internalize these stories. And I had a, do you know who Dr. Paul Conti is? Is that with Stanford?

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  I've heard that name. I couldn't tell you who he is, but I have heard the name.

• 1:36:40Chris Williamson?

  So he did a four-part series with Andrew Huberman last year.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  I've heard that name too.

• 1:36:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Every, everybody says that name all the time.

• 1:36:47Chris Williamson?

  He's fantastic. They're both fantastic. And, um, Paul does, uh, evidence-based unconscious work, trauma, uh, and such, uh, from a very medical standpoint. And, um, he was talking to me, he gave me this really lovely frame, very interesting about how formative experiences in our past can reshape the way that we see the entirety of that world. But importantly, they reshape our memory of what it was like before that as well. So for us to say something like, uh, I get in a car accident when I'm 25. And, uh, then you get travel anxiety, which causes you to, uh, not enjoy driving or to feel anxious when you're driving.

• 1:37:29Chris Williamson?

  And then at 35, you tell yourself, I've never liked driving. You're like, no, until the age of 25, you loved it. Do you not remember? You did that thing. It's like, no, no, no, no. I was anxious the whole time. And this, this ability that like the fallibility and the malleability of our memory and our sense of self and our understanding of ourselves, um, the fact that for sufficiently formative experiences.

• 1:37:52Chris Williamson?

  Can like manipulate those and mold them in a different way. I just thought was so, it's fascinating, but kind of brutal as well.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Well, and maybe this is the same, another way of explaining the same thing. Every time we recall a memory, we fundamentally change the memory. Because every time we recall it, we're now in a different emotional state, a different position, different surroundings. We, accurate memory does not exist, right? You know, what, even, even as we think we're remembering our earliest sexual experience. You know, if there was actually a camera there filming it, we might find out it was completely totally different surrounding wise than we thought. So every time we recall a memory, we're altering it. So our memories keep changing over a lifetime. So, um, but, but what happens at that trauma we're talking about and that what I call the cross wiring,

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  that's happening at an emotional level. And so it doesn't matter, even if our memory is accurate in terms of, you know, digitally accurate. What, what matters is emotionally, how we move forward with it. And so now, if, you know, we've been a sexual creature since birth and all of a sudden something happens that sex is hidden. Well, I better keep it hidden from, from here on out. And we don't make that as a conscious decision. It's just an emotional roadmap that we start following.

• 1:39:18Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Very, very interesting. Okay. So we identified this.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  And people are sitting, listening to you and I talking very openly about sexual experiences and they're going, you're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to talk openly about those things. Cause they're going on their emotional wiring of how you're supposed to, to, you know, be about sex.

• 1:39:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, like the VW Lupo opens all sorts of doors.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Three of them, exactly.

• 1:39:43Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct. Unless you can clamber out the back. Honestly, dude, I, I, and I remember how not far the passenger seat went back as well. I just thought this is fuck.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Well, and you gotta do it in the passenger seat because of the steering wheel, but you guys have the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

• 1:39:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, speak for yourself. Look, we've gone through this litany of problems, right? This big, big, big, big list. And we don't have enough time to prescribe the panacea for all of the nice guys listening. Given the fact that you've done so many. Seminars, coaching sessions, working with people. What have you found if you were to give the biggest movers of rehabilitation for nice guys?

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  I don't think I've ever used that exact word for it.

• 1:40:29Chris Williamson?

  What are the practices? What are the places that they should focus on in order to start to embody themselves more honestly?

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, be their authentic selves, exactly. I'll just walk you through what I did. Number one, I tell people, find safe people. Don't try to do this on your own. You didn't become a nice guy in social isolation. Don't try to get over it in social isolation. We have to have safe people to start releasing our shame, to tell people, I've got this story about myself. And people go, that's not bad. That's not terrible at all. You're, that's normal, what you're describing. So we need safe people to support us, release our shame, perhaps mentor us, encourage us, help us face our fears. So I tell nice guys, go find a coach, therapist, men's group. I love men's groups. Did a big chunk of my own personal rehabilitation in men's groups.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  I was leading five men's groups a week when I was in private practice up in Seattle. I'm a believer, so find a men's group. Don't try to do this alone.

• 1:41:32Chris Williamson?

  How do you, so just to interject there, how do you know if it's a good men's group or a bad men's group?

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  That's a good question, and it is somewhat subjective because something, a group you love, might not work for me.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  When I started looking for something about all that existed at that time was the Robert Bly, mythal poetic, go out in the woods, beat a drum, have the talking stick and say, oh, I did that. I ended up in a 12 step program is where I started. It not, wasn't by choice, it's just where I landed. I got lucky. I landed, I was in a men's group led by a woman around sexual shame who liked men. And so that was good for me. I tried some other men's groups that I just never connected or resonated with.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  So, you know, it doesn't hurt to check out, you know, ask the person, what's your journey? You know, where have you worked on yourself? And then just see, do you connect with them? That's usually a good place, do you connect? So, go find a coach, therapist, men's group, 12-step group, something where you get to go, start revealing your, releasing toxic shame. Start being honest. Nice guys think they're honest, we're anything but honest. I remember pretty early in my process, I realized almost everything I told my then-wife was, whatever won't rock the boat. So, I told her, I'm gonna work on being honest. Whenever I catch myself making up a story to tell you, I'm gonna come tell you, I was gonna lie to you. Here's the lie I was gonna tell you.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Here's the whole truth. So, I started doing that. And actually, I used to tell her her middle name ought to be Overreact, because that's what she did in every... The funny thing was, well, I actually just started telling her the truth about shit. She'd go, "Okay, thanks for telling me that. Glad you didn't lie to me." And, you know, whoa, that's different. You know, when I was trying to get her not to overreact, she did. When I just told her the truth, "Yeah, okay, don't lie to me." That was it. So, work on being honest. And again, we need safe people usually to do that. Work on making your needs a priority. Start asking yourself, what do I want? What's important to me? You know, am I, do I, do I need to go to the gym? Do I need to go to the dentist? Do I need to take some time to relax? Do I need to rest my eyes? Do I need to go read a good book?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Do I, you know, how do I get my needs met? And how do I let people help me get my needs met? And how do I surround myself with people who want to help me get my needs met?

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Uh, start working on boundaries. That's, that's a big one for nice guys is well, nobody grows into adulthood, knowing how to set boundaries because nobody teaches children how to set boundaries. Um, because in, in the real world, the big people get to do whatever they want to the little people. And because we were all little people, we never learned. You could say, no, stop that. I'm going to remove myself now. So learn about boundaries. I was in my thirties in my second marriage with a PhD. Before I'd ever even heard of boundaries, a therapist I went to taught me about them. Uh, so start working on boundaries. And then I just, I think the one other piece I'll throw out there that I think is just so fundamental.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Especially for guys, for nice guys. Go connect with men. Go build a tribe of men. I've had to do that a few times in my life, but seven years ago, when I got married down here in Mexico. Um, not yet fluent Spanish. My wife only speaks Spanish and I'm living at here, working at home. I, I had no guys in my life and I went seeking and found a men's program and joined it. And now, if you looked at my text messaging, my calendars, my email, I'm on Zoom. I'm messaging with buddies all the frigging time and it just, it makes everything about my world better.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm more on point with, with my work. My relationship improved. I'm in better health. I'm happier. So build a connection with men. So there, there's about five things that are a pretty good start.

• 1:46:22Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Robert Glover, ladies and gentlemen. Robert, I adore your work. I think it's very much needed. It's so fascinating that it's been around for quite a while, you know, and, and yet this single thread of guys being overly pliable, of resenting despite the fact that they're playing the game correctly. They think that they're doing all the rest of it. Is uh, it's so fascinating and I've, today's been phenomenal. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your work. You've got

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  Druda.

• 1:46:50Chris Williamson?

  On the internet.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dr. Glover.com, you know, good place to start out. Uh, it's, we're in the process of rebuilding it, but you can go find good stuff. Uh, integrationnation.net, my new men's program. Uh, my co-author said, be sure and mention the big stick. This, uh, go find the big stick. Tony Endelman is a certified coach. I, I asked him a few years ago, Tony, what do you think about digging into everything I've ever created? And trying to put it in one book? And he goes, yeah, I'm up for that. I go, okay. And he did, did a beautiful job. So, um, Dr. Glover.com, integrationnation.net, big stick.

• 1:47:28Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Robert, I appreciate you. Thank you very much.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  Chris, this was a blast. Thank you. So much fun.