Chat LIVE with Ralph (DSO) and Michael Read (The Adaptive Man Podcast)

Chat with Ralph, it's the place to be. Ba da da da, ba da da da. Bald as the moon but full of tea. Ba da ba da ba, ba da da da da. Divorce debates and cheating confessions. Sexless nights and awkward questions. Oh, Chat with Ralph, it's a laugh and a half. Wow! Grab a seat, tune in for the gaffs. Bald and bold, spilling the truth. Get ready folks, here's your proof. Got no hair but I got the flair. Marriage drama, we lay it bare. Infidelity, it's a scandal. Spicy stew! Pour a cup, let's talk it through. So join the fun, don't miss a thing. Chat with Ralph Brewer, secrets swing. Bald is beautiful, and that's a fact. Now hit that stream, it's time to act!

See, Mike, I told you.

That's all AI, dude.

That took me literally 3 seconds to create. All I did, it says, what do you want? And I said, I want an old-timey radio jingle, incorporate things like divorce, infidelity, my bald head. It weren't really— it was very bald-centric, I noticed. It's made like 8 references to my bald head, which it's fine, I guess, you know. Kind of my calling card. So, so yeah, I'm very proud of that. I may end up doing another one, but it's, uh, Suno is the name of the program.

Don't touch it, it's great.

All right, yeah, well, I mean, you see how easy it is. I can, I can, I can rotate different ones if I want to. But welcome everybody. Yeah, let me, um, bring up the comments here right now. Usually it takes them a while to slowly but surely trickle in, but we are live on Facebook, two different Facebook accounts, two different YouTube accounts, and Twitter or X account. So always takes a bit for people to join us here, and then they'll be able to watch the recording of this live as soon as— or not live, a recording of this rather, in the archive as soon as we're done here. And then we'll do little clips and all that fun stuff. So this is where I can awkwardly wait a little bit for people to actually show up. But anywho, with us today is the lovely and talented— do you go by Michael or Mike?

Mike, Michael McGill, whatever you like. I'm so—

all right, all right, very good. Tell us about yourself, Mr. Mike. How did we meet and what is you do? Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my life?

I'm a men's coach. I'm kind of like you and your guys you're working with. I'm trying to work to do a little bit more science and psychology rooted work with guys, guys who don't respond well to the like the fluffy woo-woo spiritual tap into your inner child and just focus on your chakras kind of stuff to help them breaking like working on destructive patterns, like, you know, if they're gaming, pornography addiction, they're lacking in emotional intelligence, their relationships are falling apart, things like that. Um, a lot of things that I went through myself over the years. And it wasn't until a very recent, like, say, 2, 3 years ago, relationship of mine that blew up that was so— it was like déjà vu. It was like, holy shit, this is like— I could literally tell you what's going to happen next, and then it fucking happened. Just like, what the hell's going on? I wanted to then start digging into the research and realizing, like, oh, this is a pattern, and I'm the one common denominator throughout all of this. Holy crap. And then looking around, a lot of my friends, my family, my father, my uncles, my like guys in my family, same exact pattern, same exact problems. And you, you keep expanding hours and hours and hours and you're like, it's literally fucking everywhere. Holy shit. It's getting to the point that it's hitting like statistically significant numbers across society that now you got like governments paying attention and people, and it's really hitting the news and whatnot in terms of You know, men's loneliness crisis and the sexual recession and divorce rates skyrocketing. And everyone keeps wanting to look at like a, it's this one thing. If it's, you know what the one problem is, it's all this one problem and then everything will just get fit. You know, it's a multitude of problems and everybody's, yeah, everybody's background is, everybody's story is different. Everybody, all the guys in the space, especially like the nice guys recovering, um, it's, you're probably missing something in your training, in like your upbringing, something in your childhood, something— a lesson you didn't get taught along the way, some coding, some software that got downloaded into you over the years that is just not lining up to what reality is. And my goal is to help you kind of step in as much as I can with using like science and data-backed ideas and such to help guide you in the right direction.

Very good. Yeah, it's in, in our world, it's often you hear guys say, uh, feminism, feminism, feminism. It's just this evil ism. That's, that's the reason. That's the basically the crux of all of our problems. If we could just reverse the hands of time and take back that awful feminism, then all this would be fixed. Like, no dude, feminism isn't the reason why your last 5 women cheated on you. It's not the reason why you keep finding yourself in all these toxic relationships. And on this, you got a lot of work to do up here, and you identified it yourself. You're like, well, hold on a second, I keep seeing these patterns in my relationships, what's the common denominator? Well, shit, it's me, isn't it? Now, with that being said, with that being said, there's a lot of very codependent men, which is what Mr. Nice Guy stuff is really all about, who, uh, they kind of love the idea of this is ultimately my responsibility, and they actually really, really like that. And you're like, why? Because that means it's all my fault and I can fix it. It's like, not necessarily. So they're with some woman who they found out, you know, has cheated on him a couple few times. She's got this wrong, that wrong, has treated him like dirt. And he finds material like mine and others, and he says, oh, I see, it's just because I'm too much of a nice guy, I'm not masculine enough, I'm not alpha male enough, whatever it may be. So if I do all that, I can fix this. And then it doesn't fix anything, and she's still a dysfunctional, toxic human being. And he's like, well, shit, that didn't do anything. And then they swing the pendulum over to you know, being really toxic and just screwing as many broken women as they can. And then they always find their way back. This is a really, really common story. So I wrote about all this, guys. Let me get this book here. Time for me to promote. Oh, Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man is my latest book, my 5th book, believe it or not. It's available on Amazon, and if soon— audio is coming out soon for retail. But it is a available in audiobook format for our members of my membership group, The Brotherhood. And you can learn more at— boom, there you go— help4men.com/join. Go to that and you can find out about a men's group where we have all kinds of cool stuff, including my full library of books and audiobook. And you point the other way, other way, other way.

Sorry, let's go check it out. Go check it out. On my screen, it's over on the left of me.

Oh yes, I do it all the time. Every time I have like a little something on my face, I go, what? Oh, wrong, wrong side. A little shine over here. Yeah, there you go. So anywho, um, it's, um, it's a delicate balancing act, and some of us have a really harder, much harder time than others trying to navigate all this, trying to figure out how to navigate the relationship waters, how to find a good woman, how to maintain our sense of identity and our values and do all the other stuff. It ain't easy for some of us. And we all have some— not all of us, but a lot of us have people in our lives, men in our lives, who just seem to be naturals at it. Like, they got a good woman, they've been with her for 30 years, they seem so happy together, they got good level-headed kids. You're like, how do they? And if you sit that guy down and go, what's your secret? He probably wouldn't know. He's like, I don't know, I just found a good woman. And I— it's not that hard, dude. For him, not so much. For the rest of us, yeah.

He—

the thing— the point is that he's doing a lot of things he doesn't even know about it because he had a front row seat for how to do it as a kid. And it comes, quote, naturally to him. He just watched his mom and dad, and they watched Grandma and Grandpa and Great Grandpa. But a lot of you guys that are watching this right now don't have that luxury. You were raised in kind of shitty environment, and with, with it, they may have, you know, they tried. They just didn't have the tools in their box to do this thing right. And you sat back and watched, and now you're doing the same thing. That was right here. That's my story, and that's what got me into this as well. We all have to hit our little rock bottom moment of oh shit. And then we kind of look inward and say, what is it that got me here? Why am I always doing this? And that's, that's where you start to work on stuff. That's what a lot of guys need to kind of wake them up.

Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of like letting the battery drain out of before you really realize there's the wrong battery in there in the first place, to kind of like see what was actually being hidden down all that stuff. It's, it's similar to— it's analogous to— oh, I have to look at it. I've had people come talk to the guys, talk to whatnot. It's just like, oh, she's got this behavior, she's this, she said— like, it's going to keep reinforcing itself as long as somebody somewhere keeps recharging it. Like, somebody is feeding into this dynamic of letting her, or letting yourself, continue this behavior, and it's going to keep going until you basically leave nowhere for it to keep reinforcing itself. And then you get an opportunity to actually explore it. And usually rock bottom is one of the best places for it to actually look at it. And it kind of sucks you had to go down there to feel that kind of pain, but sometimes that pain was the threshold necessary to break through that barrier internally and say, like, okay, like, I actually have nowhere else to look now but inwards.

There you go.

Whatever I might be doing.

Yeah, very well put. And it's, uh, often just kind of— yeah, it's often just kind of the logistics of life kind of get in the way of you being able to do anything on yourself. So you may be like, uh, you, you may be so busy with the kids and so busy with the wife and so busy with work, and then suddenly wife says Adiós, buddy. I don't want anything to do with you anymore, and I'm going to take away the kids half the time, if not more. And you're left alone, and you're left without the kids being around and the wife to worry about. That often frees you up to where the fog clears, and you go, oh, I got a lot of other stuff I need to work on. And unfortunately, that was my story. Unfortunately, a lot of guys fill that void with what? Let me go out and get a new girlfriend. Let me go out and, I don't know, drink, drugs, whatever it may be, all kinds of different vices you you can fill your time with and fill the void with, so to speak. And not good. But if you take that opportunity to— all right, let's just not do this bullshit anymore. Let's work on this, whatever this may be for you. You have a really big opportunity to rebuild yourself from the ground up, and it can be a very rewarding thing. So I don't know if any of the guys watching this can relate to that, or any of you are in the position of your rock bottom moment. If you guys are able to leave a comment, we would love to hear from you. We got Mr., I believe it's a Mr., Lucas, who says became a YouTube member. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Lucas. For those that don't know, there is a little option on YouTube. Most channels have this these days, my Dad's Starting Over channel included. You can donate a small amount, $4.99, and you become a member on YouTube. It's just a way to give back and help support what it is that I do. And in turn, you get a giant library of videos that nobody else can see. So there you go. So thank you, Mr. Lucas. So check it out on the Dad Starting Over channel on YouTube. So let me hide that there. Um, what else to talk about? I know the thing that really got the needle moving as far as my YouTube channel and Facebook is concerned was this latest debacle with Mr. Andrew Wilson. Were you aware of that?

Oh, he's on the Whatever podcast.

Yeah, did you see the latest on him? Are you, are you in the dark on the Andrew Wilson situation?

I think I saw your post on it. I didn't actually watch the video, but I imagine he just kind of— I don't think he snapped. Very unprofessional, to say the least. Um, that he was his wife, that he's a third man she's been with, or the fifth man she's been with.

I don't know, third, third father. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That— I don't know, there's a lot to unpack with that one, what's going on with him. He might be just— I don't think there's entirely— I've watched some of the content there, and I don't think it's— it's tough because it's like, it's like cherry-picking the Bible, for example. I think it's kind of like what sometimes people do. It's like cherry-picking certain behaviors in, um, male-female dynamics. And he's like, there's certain things that might not be far off on, you know, like men being more assertive and leadership-oriented, and women like not being like followers but submissive. But there's even within that, there's, there's nuance as to how you go about explaining that. I think what they do is they just, they just, they just find the worst of the worst people and they say, cool, let's talk to them, throw them on there, and just, it just ends up being at the back. But now it's been thrown back in his face and he's kind of not like, I think he's not living up to his standards. But I'm not sure, I'm curious if he's actually like if he's going to be making any changes. I think he's still on the podcast. If he's— that definitely made the rounds on the internet though.

Yeah, somebody, somebody sent me a link and I have yet to watch it. I apologize to the person who sent it to me. I guess he officially replied to all of this, so I need to look at it and see what he had to say. Maybe he says like, hey, sorry about that, or maybe he's like, F all you people. I don't know, we'll see. But I, I thought it was— I, I have no skin in the game. I had a politically— all that other stuff, it's leave that for other guys to talk about. But I just thought it was very interesting, the, um, number one, his reaction and how it was a perfect example of guys don't do this. And then in turn, the reaction to his reaction from everybody, which was so split down the middle. Some people saying he won that debate, he defended the honor of his wife, and other people saying, oof, look at this narcissistic meltdown. I think, uh, it— I don't— narcissist is one word that's thrown around way too much these days, but, uh, It was a toxic meltdown in some form of a guy who just got his feelings hurt, basically. He didn't like that, and, um, that's okay, you know, you get your feelings hurt. But he did it in a way that he threw out a lot of bombs that probably shouldn't have, and it's an interesting thing to sit back and watch everybody's reaction to this. So what happens if I click on this? Oh, it just shows a little comments there right over your face. Oh, we don't want that. So Gentlemen, ladies, and germs, please don't be shy. Feel free to leave a comment for myself, for Mike. You got any questions for me, the new book, anything in the news? You want to talk about the Andrew Wilson thing, whatever it may be, or a question for Mr., Mr. Mike here? Please don't be shy. We are here for probably about the next 45 minutes or so. Depends on how lively of a conversation you guys, uh, provide for us here live. Um, we, uh, we want to get you guys involved as much as humanly possible. We don't have a whole heck of a lot of people on with so far. I don't know if I can trust the numbers that I see in front of me here because we're across so many platforms at once, but, um, a lot of things to discuss, including again the book. For those that didn't see, Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man is my latest book. Amazon, you can go to readrebuild.com. Let me find the little— did I bring— did I create a little banner for that? Yes, I did. There you go. Read Rebuild. Helpformen.com, bought the domain for that, just jumps you to our Help for Men website. And in essence, it's just as the subtitle implies, if you are a guy that's like, um, kind of lost, um, wifey said goodbye, or I really, uh, kind of lost my place in the world. A common midlife crisis for a lot of men, guys my age, I just turned 50, is to say, um, maybe it's not necessarily a big momentous thing in their life that chopped them, you know, or cut them off at the knees. But it could be one day you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, this isn't what I had in mind for me at age 40, 50, whatever it is. This— I didn't want to be sales manager of Acme Company with 3 kids and a wife who hates me. I didn't want— you know, I envisioned for myself, damn it, I was going to do this, this, and this. Why didn't I do it? And for some, that leads them to go, see ya, family, goodbye, and they run off to parts unknown and get them a girlfriend. I don't necessarily recommend that for anybody, but Whatever the impetus is for your realization, your wake-up, it's a very good opportunity for you to take inventory of yourself. And that's what the book is all about. And all of us have kind of had that little moment in our lives. And we got Mr. Joey Kirk here saying, what's up, Ralph? Just tuning in. Well, what's up, Mr. Joey? Thank you, Joey, from Facebook. Appreciate you joining us today. So if any of you can relate to that, or if you're in the middle of that, we would love to hear from you. Most of the guys that come to me still to this day come to me as a result of another book I wrote called The Dead Bedroom Fix, which is all about sex and marriage. Of anything I've ever spoken about ever in, in the history of Dad Starting Over, decade plus of creating content, uh, sex and marriage is the number one thing, and it always has been. It's, uh, it's the canary in the coal mine for a lot of other stuff in the relationship. I've often said, Mike, that when a guy comes to me and says, wife and I haven't touched each other in 5, 10, 15, 20+ years, and then they give me the next line, which is, but I'm telling you, Ralph, everything is awesome except for the sex. I'm like, bullshit. It is— there's no way on earth that a husband and wife don't touch each other for 5, 10, 20+ years and everything is just amazing in the relationship except for the sex. The sex is the, the canary in the coal mine, the barometer for other stuff going on in the relationship. And those guys have a lot in common with the guys that were cheated on, have a lot in common with the guys that are having a really difficult time finding a woman post-divorce, whatever it may be. They all have that same baseline, as I often say, of dysfunction in their lives. Have you seen a lot of the same in your little world?

It's got a little bit choppy. Hopefully you can still hear.

Oh, we got a bad connection.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even for my own life, but I've seen with other guys too, um, you do see this kind of—

back.

Hello?

Yeah, we're getting choppy here, folks. I apologize. You have an idea?

Hold on, I want to see if I could pull this on my phone. Maybe like I can do that, might be a little bit more easier to do. I'd be better reception.

Well, right now you're good as far as I can. In the meantime, I don't know what others are saying. That's always the danger of doing these, the live collabs, is that you got my internet, you got your internet, they got their internet. It's, it's who knows how it's going to turn out. And mine here at, uh, I have two different places I do these from. This space has the worst internet, so could be in part my fault. Internet, guys, is what it is.

Trying to pull up, see if I get my phone to pull this up. Um, might have better reception, maybe the same, I don't know. Okay, I think I can hear me now. Should be all right. Yeah, so the Canary in the Coal Mine thing with the sex drying up, absolutely. That was— yeah, it's a problem. The problem there, for a little bit like a science nerd shit, is that a lot of very early stage relationship stuff, and even in the first year, a couple years, honeymoon phase, whatnot, tends to be dopamine-heavy attraction to each other. Tends to be a lot of just novelty, excitement. It's not as much, especially if you're a woman who— men too, but if you have a person who do not do well with, um The less technical word is like romantic feelings, for example. So you have guys and women, men and women who just, they're not into the lovey-dovey stuff. They like, they don't get that warm fuzzy feeling in their chest when they see you and they want to kiss, hug, physical contact, sex. A lot of that is just oxytocin bonding. And ideally what happens in a long-term relationship is you're doing a mixture of, oh, I'm looking forward to seeing you, dopamine, I'm looking forward to seeing you, oxytocin. Oh, I actually got to see you. I get to hold your hand. I get to kiss you, hug you, make eye contact. Sex, things like that. And a lot of people will— if you, if you grew up, you know, in a household where hugs were not the thing, where love was not— where your parents never really like gave you that kind of physical connection or eye contact and things like that, your brain will literally just rewire itself and say, okay, we're not, we're not expecting this at all. Therefore, we don't have enough receptor sites ahead to actually uptake this hormone when it kicks into our system. Therefore, when somebody looks me in the eyes and tells me, tells me I love you, you literally get like a repulsion. Because your body's so not used to it after so many years. Could be childhood stuff, could be traumatic experiences, whatever it may be. You get a physical repulsion. And I actually, I remember I've seen guys who just like, well, we were having sex, but like, as soon as we're done, she runs away, or she doesn't look at me in the eye, she's like off somewhere else right now, or like she jumps in the shower right afterwards, whatever. What's going on with that? It's just like, okay, she's, she's like trying to stay present, but she really just can't. I mean, the guy says like, like She wants me to hug her more, and I don't know, she wants me to like, you know, kiss her. Every time I tell her, just like tells me she loves me, I just, uh, I don't know, I just got like, you know, goosebumps. What the hell it is? Telltale sign right there. It's like something is not vibing right now, either in you or in her or in both of you. And it's something to start addressing, to ask. Like, it's pretty normal for human beings to engage in these kind of activities. Like, the simplest example of this you could think of, if anyone has like little kids It's like, when you— babies don't talk. They don't. They can't communicate aside from just facial language and maybe like goo goo ga ga. Their communication is 99.9% emotional. If you make eye contact with a baby and they look at you and they smile and then you smile, you both just got a hit of oxytocin. That's what that feeling feels like. It's just like, oh, that felt good, dude. I don't know what it was that made me feel good. But again, like, if you grew up in those households with environments where you just didn't have that kind of regular opportunities for oxytocin with your parents— hugging, kissing, holding hands, cuddling, whatever it may be— which then graduates into sex and romance in adulthood, you're just gonna— you're only gonna be working along those dopamine pathways. And then finally, when that burnout does happen, which will eventually happen— this is exactly like— it's like chasing the dragon. It's like whatever kind of activity you're doing that's dopamine activated is going to just burn itself out. You're not going to be interested. And then there's nothing left to hold the relationship together anymore. And then that's either when you say, fuck it, I'm out. And that's why they keep hopping from relationship to relationship to relationship, because it's new, it's novel, it's that dopamine hit. Oh, I don't know what's going to happen, it seems exciting. And then as soon as it gets to like, hey, I think I love you, and they're like, hey, there's the door, bye. They just want to walk out of there. Yeah, that's, that's the cycle that repeats itself until you actually start to ask the question, why does this keep happening? There's something that you have to work on retraining in yourself, or you're not in your partner, in yourself, because you can't get anybody else to do something they don't want to do. You know especially if they're emotionally avoidant. Like, they will just completely shut down, and you're just wasting your time at that point. Work on yourself and see if they follow. If they don't follow, move on.

Yeah, my, my audience consists of a lot of anxiously— using the attachment theory as a template— anxiously attached men with avoidant women. And, uh, a common thing we hear from those men is, this woman wants nothing to do with me. When I reach to touch her, to give her a little kiss in the kitchen, or she's like, no, I'm all touched out, please, no, no, no. And on and on and on. He sees this day after. And unfortunately, a lot of these guys are very Mr. Nice Guy types, very anxious types, and they will notice one day, you know, I'm looking at the drawer of my wife's nightstand, and I'll be damned, I think the vibrator has, has moved. And then he'll do little experiments. He'll like, I'm going to move it over here, I want to see if it moves. And then the vibrator moves the next day, and then the next day. And he's like, she's moving this thing all over the place. I think she's using the— I had one guy, that's— I had one guy who put a recorder in the bedroom and recorded, and he got his wife on an audio recording using the thing. So he's like, aha, caught you! And it's like, you didn't catch her doing anything evil. What you caught is a very avoidant woman who still has sexual needs, but she can't fathom doing that with you. And it's not because you're repulsive, awful, terrible, horrible human being. It's because you're you're the guy she's married to, and she's— that you're the guy she needs to be vulnerable with. You're the guy that she has maybe some past resentments to, and all that gets in the way of wanting to connect. And she's just probably more apt to do a little roll in the hay with the pool boy, to use that overused, uh, metaphor or whatever, and, uh, more so than the guy that she's supposed to love and made babies with and everything else. That's just the nature of a very avoidant person. And most avoidants, by the way, are men. So you have the man who's cranking it away to porn, but he's just like, "Wife, leave me alone." You got the avoidant guy who's like, goes off to the escorts. "Yeah, but wife, leave me alone." And she finds all this out and she's heartbroken, like, "What the hell?" That exists, guys. That's out there. It's just not in my little audience, my world. So that not being able to combine the sexual with the how can you say it, the cuddly, the real, the, the schmoozy, the lovey, to keep those two worlds apart, the erotic, visceral, animalistic, and then the lovey stuff. That's pretty common in our world. And I've talked to men who say, I can't get turned on when I'm in love with a woman. I almost have to see her kind of below me in a way in order to get turned on enough to have sexual intercourse with her. And like, oh my God, dude, That's not unheard of, man. And I think some of you are dealing with a woman like that.

Yeah, that is a— I'm gonna try something real quick. I want to see if I can hop on my phone and see if the connection's any better.

Okay, you want to use that as the hotspot or you want to actually use that as your camera? You may go bye-bye on us, and if so, that's okay.

I'm curious if maybe it'll help a little bit, and if it doesn't, then we'll just see if I could do this.

Oh, it says you have— let's see, let me remove that and add this. Okay, you are on right now. Oh, we see you on the phone, so don't do anything wrong there. We're looking at you right now.

Okay, okay. There we go. Cool. There you go.

That's better.

That connection sounds a hell of a lot better. It looks a lot cleaner too.

Yeah, I think you're better here on the phone. So is that through the cell connection?

I think so. There might be cell plus internet. I don't know why my laptop is crappy, but it's fine. And talk about, um, relationships, and then like I have to kind of see her below me. Yeah, there's layers to that. And first off, it was interesting you mentioned avoiding men. It's, it's actually shifting now. You're saying actually a lot more men are becoming more anxious, more feminized, uh, than ever before. And a lot of that is just— it's kind of like a counterbalance effect. It's like the more women that step into the world who are told to or are expressing more of a masculine frame, men tend to say like, what do you need me to be? What kind of— what role can I fill? How can I step— what, where do I fit into this model? Oh, you need to be like— like, you got the masculine, I'll take care of this other thing. And oftentimes what ends up with a lot of women is like, they just, I thought I like it, but I don't. I can't explain it. I don't. I had a conversation with a patient of mine, my client, massage client, years ago. I was like about, it was last year I moved from New York to Georgia. Before I moved, I went to lunch with her. She'd been a client of mine for years and we were just, we were just very close in that regard. She was married, she had two kids, and her husband, like, he's a great guy. It's like he works his ass off. She's a stay-at-home mom. She's got some health issues. He takes care of her. She does the best she can. And we were talking about this and we got to a point she told me, like, yeah, we haven't slept, you know, god knows how long. And I feel bad. She's like, I feel bad that I haven't, but I just, like, my drive is just not— like, I don't know what's wrong. And I asked her, like, okay, like, what, what do you think it is? If you can point to something. She said— it was funny just watching her. She's like, I can't, I can't put the words to it, but it's just, like, not masculine. Like, I don't know what that means, but I just, like When I see my girlfriend's husbands, like, they look— they stand up tall, they dress well, they like— they project when they speak, like, they, they have good posture. Like, I don't— something about it, I just can't— I just look at him and I'm just like, I love you, you're so good, you take care of me and the kids, and I just don't have any sex drive for you. And I feel horrible about it. And this is what I think we talked— when we talked to my podcast a while back, it's this idea of like the cave people. Talking to each other, like the caveman, the cavewoman, they're having a very different conversation versus what your logical mind is telling you what's actually going on. It's very, very different. And I think even more and more nowadays, you're seeing, you're not going to see it openly, but behind the scenes, you'll see a lot of women saying like, I'm pro-feminist, I'm pro-women's empowerment, president. I really want a masculine man, but I'm really, really into like men, like women's rights, like, but I want him to like choke me in bed. But aside from that, it's just like, Like, so which one is it? And I think a lot of it is just women that are afraid to say it out loud because there's a lot of collective social inertia that's built around this idea of women being solo, independent, empowered, and not realizing like whether you like it or not, there's a cavewoman in the back of your brain that responds to certain things.

Mm-hmm.

And even with the caveman, same thing. It's like, if I'm not married currently, but I got any man who's ever been with a woman who's like gained a ton of weight, Like, I love you. Like, you're maybe my wife, mother of my children. Like, I'm not sexually attracted to you. She's like, oh, whatever. Like, I don't get to choose. I don't feel this towards you. And that's what bothers me. It's like, there's parts of my psychology that I don't get a choice in how it was expressed. It just happens involuntarily.

Yeah.

And so I think, yeah, back to the avoidant anxious thing. Yeah, I got a lot of guys who are basically saying like, well, okay, I'll just take on the role that needs to be filled in this relationship. And then the woman says, okay, I'll do the more masculine thing. And then they do it for a while, and then it just slowly erodes the relationship over time, and they can't figure out why. And she starts losing interest. He doesn't know what he's doing wrong. He's hoping, if I do more, maybe if I help her on this, do that, all it may be. And then one day she just, you know, catches the eye of the pool boy, or she just has that one guy at work who's been dressing a little bit nicer than usual lately. And that cavewoman goes like, I want that. Like, I love him, but I want that. I don't know. And you need to like either give me that or figure out how to get your partner to become that.

And if any ladies listening to this say, yeah, I can relate to that, my prescription is set aside your fear of rocking the boat, which is very common for a lot of ladies, and set aside your fear of upsetting him and hurting his feelings and just be really, really blunt. Honey, sit down. This is what I need out of you. And yeah, at first it'll be like, okay, but then eventually if he makes the change, you know what he says is, thanks, I'm glad that, you know, you told me that, I'm glad you opened my eyes to— I was falling asleep at the wheel here, thanks sweetie. Now with that being said, a lot of women reply to that with, I shouldn't have to tell him what to do, and in fact when I do tell him what to do and he does it, it really doesn't mean much because the only reason he's acting in this way is because I'm literally grabbing him by the hand and guiding him and telling him what to do. I want a natural, somebody who's naturally more, uh, confident, a guy who's more masculine. And that's a very vague term, means a lot of different things to a lot of people. It's kind of masculinity— what is it exactly? It's kind of like porn. I don't know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it, you know. Whoever said that years ago. But speaking of, you, you just said it there, um, we see— to, to be fair, we see it, we flip the genders where we have men that are like in the comments on the internet, I am a feminist and I'm this and I believe in this and, and I love my wife no matter what. And even though she may be 60, 70, 80 pounds heavier than what she used to be, she gave birth to my 3 children. I love her more than anything. And everybody's like, yeah, you're the greatest man ever. And then I would, to that I would say, dude, let me see your phone real quick. I'm gonna, I wanna jump over to your browser and see what you've been up to. 9 times out of 10, the man's gonna be, uh, no thank you. I think, why, why don't you want us to see? Because we all know what that man's doing. He's saying this, but his action is this. And there are millions of women out there nodding if they're listening to this, or eventually will listen to this, because they will say, yeah, I, I was upset with my husband because we haven't been really connected in that way, and I went and browsed on his phone because I thought maybe he was cheating on me or something, and I found porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, and it was 20-year-old, 20-year-old, 20-year-old, and none of these girls look like 'None of these girls look like me. They're all like perfect whatevers, and he's been telling me for years that he loves me for who I am. Obviously he doesn't because he's taking all this energy.' Same kind of thing with the wife who's just like, 'I love my husband because he's super sweet and soft and nice.' And the husband's like, 'Well then, how come we haven't done anything for years?' And she's like, 'Eh, just keep doing what you're doing. We're fine.' Okay, and then he sees the vibrator moving And then he reads the romance novel that talks about the guy with the rippling pecs, you know. And often they also, for whatever reason, are like part animal or whatever— the centaur with the rippling pecs or whatever, you know, and the vampires and everything else. And he's like, obviously this woman has some kind of energy in there. For some of you, it may be that you need to take a hard look at yourself and say, have you been falling asleep at the wheel? Both men and women, for a lot of you, oh yeah, you have. Now, with that being said, I also talk to a lot of guys that are like, time to get to work, and they put in the work. And objectively, the guy's like a million times better— better looking, better acting, more— he's better, he's more secure, he's been to the therapist, he's read all the books, he's, he's the total package. Women are hitting on him left and right, and he's like, wife? And the wife's just yawning. She's just like, I don't care anymore, you know, for whatever reason, the disconnection done, buddy. That happens, and a lot of guys don't want to admit that happens Quite a bit. Um, we got JP Ryan, Facebook, saying it's almost a contradictory message— or contrary message— a woman telling a man to man up. Uh, yeah, we do get mixed messages on the whole being a man masculine thing, don't we, as men?

Yeah, it's tough with that too, because men— not even— I know you said your audience is kind of like have maybe higher than neurodivergent community, but even regular men we love to fix shit and we love to do shit and build shit. And in this building and doing and fixing shit requires instructions. So when you say man up, it's like, that's way too fucking vague. It's way too vague. Like, what does man up look like to you? What does it mean to you? Like, well, just get your shit together.

Cool.

What does that look like? Where, where did my shit go and why isn't it together? Like, what do I need to do to man up, to get my shit together? And I think for a lot of men, it's, it's This has started coagulating onto the internet in terms of like, you know, angry manosphere, red pill movements and things like that, where it's like we're starting to use evolutionary psychology and this and that to kind of point out women's flaws and problems. In reality, it's just like, it just is what it is. It's okay. It's not a good thing or bad thing. You just do it. And it's like a giant message there. Oh yeah.

I'm gonna put little comments on screen so you can see that we got a lot of comments coming in here finally. Very good. Yeah, we have, uh, We got Mr. D Hill from YouTube who says, it happened to me. Wife was making more than I was. I put the career on hold to be a stay-at-home dad at her request, and she, she reassured me it was not a big deal. But later she cheated on me and she blamed me for not providing. So, uh, D Hill, you would look at that and say, aha, she said this but her actions said something else. We know for a fact, yeah, statistically, um, if you want to be a stay-at-home dad, your chances of divorce just went— your chances of a dead bedroom just went And a lot of people say, well, there's a lot of, a lot of factors in there. Correlation does not mean causation. Yeah, but there's a lot of things that go with that. And one, and I have heard from the women directly who tell me, I hate to say it, but coming home to a husband who's cleaned the house and yeah, he's done a good job with the kids and everything else and he's playing with the kids, I, I'm jealous of him, number one. I wish I could be in that position. And I feel less— it pains me to say, but I, I have less respect for the man because I make so much more than him. Or he's unemployed. I had one guy told me this years ago, and it always stuck with me, that he said, um, my wife— he was, he was not a stay-at-home dad. He was a kind of an entrepreneur that did like a bunch of little things all together. And when you put all the little things he did together, he actually made a pretty good living, more than his wife. But the fact that he didn't have title of VP of sales of whatever. The fact that he had to tell people— I remember one of them was, I sell like, uh, collectibles on eBay, was one of them. Another one was, I do landscaping work. And another one was, I did all these little things. So when they would go to some event, well, what do you do for a living, Joe? Well, I do eBay and I do blah blah blah. And people would be like, oh, isn't that nice? And the wife later admitted that that was kind of embarrassing to her. That she hated him hearing him do his spiel. We lost Mike. She hated him doing his spiel of eBay, blah blah, and all this other stuff. It was embarrassing, quote, to her to hear that. She wanted a guy who was like more of a status. So, and that was very eye-opening to him. We're going to let Mike back in here. There you are, you're back.

Hit the wrong button to go. I was looking at the comments while I was listening to you talk and I hit the wrong button to go back.

No worries. So we were saying how some women, the status alone is enough for them to go, I'm sorry, but I'm kind of embarrassed by this. Sometimes it's a money thing, you know, what does your husband do? He's a stay-at-home father. Oh, isn't that nice? Wow, good, good for him. Good for you guys. And it slowly chips away at respect. And yes, that very much goes against what we hear from society at large and kind of sucks. And that's going to be coming more and more common with men staying home because our ladies are doing really well in the workplace, and they may in fact make a lot of money, and it may make no sense to put those kids in daycare when dad could just stay home and take care of a lot of stuff. Just, it makes financial sense.

So when you say guys, I have a guy that I connected with for my podcast who did stay-at-home father, and he has a whole like program worth focusing on helping guys who want to be stay-at-home fathers and navigating that. I think part of that comes down to as well, I mean, you can't, you can only do so much about a woman feeling, you know, envious and, you know, guilty about not being home with the kids when she chose to have the career. But it is possible, I think, to do, if you can at least have a really open and honest and brutally open, like, conversation with your partner about, like, what does our polarity look like despite the fact that it seems to be economically reversed? It's like, normally I'd be the one making the money, you'd be the one at home with the kids. Now we're reversed, but can we still maintain this dynamic where you still see me in like a masculine male position that makes you happy to see me and attracted to me and calm down, all that stuff? Um, but yeah, I think there is also that layer of women— men do too— like status seeking amongst your friends and your colleagues and your family, where it's like, oh, what does your husband do? Oh, he's, you know, gigachad, Coordinator, manager of Google. You're like, oh, fucking, that's awesome. What does your husband do? Oh, he stays home with the kids. Like, uh, bigger chat sounds better. I don't know why, but it just— but if you— that's part of it also. The thing is creating a community, people you surround yourself with. It's like, do you surround yourself with people who actually respect you for what you do? Like, if you have a community of stay-at-home dads and like if you have other men you connect with who do that exact same thing and the wives are all on board with it too, then it might be easier to navigate because then you're not really competing with the, with the next person.

Yeah, yeah.

But if you're posting on the internet saying like, oh, my husband is a this and this, and you— yeah, it's tough when you have a person who derives a sense of self-worth by their spouse's status in the world. That's a dangerous one, I think, in general. Or you say like, oh, like, what do you think of me based on what my husband does? There you go. That's a terrible way to go about living your life. It's one thing to say like, what do you think about me, about what I do? But what about this person that I chose to be with.

I'm fooling around here with the, the comments. We got, uh, Joey says unhealed avoidance and attachment issues are subconscious, and I feel like some women with those issues create situations where when you are approached with the issue, she has you fix it, and then the goalposts move, and then you fix the next thing and the goalpost moves. As a man, if you aren't aware of your own attachment issues, you end up ruining your self-worth and self-esteem trying to be what your partner once but never measuring up. And in the end, you become resentful and never want to change a thing about yourself for anyone. It's tough. Very well put. That's pretty much the crux of it right there. Um, D Hill says, yeah, it sucks. I thought I was doing the right thing for our family, but I guess not. Strange thing is that she affair down. Yes, that's very common. The guy is not a provider at all. He doesn't even have a car. So she wasn't looking for Mr. Take Care of Me. She was or on a monetary way, or Mr. Status, whatever. She was looking for just some fun on the side, and it probably literally didn't mean anything to her in that way. And I'm not saying, Mr. D. Hill, so forgive her and take her back and everything else. It shows she's got a problem, and there are a lot of men who can relate to her problem, which is, you know, I was with escorts and everything else. Do those escorts mean anything to you? No, they're, they're just to get, you know, to scratch that itch. Well, you had a loving wife at home who wants you and everything else. Why not her?

And that's—

wife is, you know, mother to my children and everything. I don't look at her that way. I, I want to be crazy and sexy and kinky, so I have to pay people to do that. That's—

have you talked about the Madonna complex on this channel yet?

Say again?

Have you talked about the Madonna whore complex in this channel?

That's the, the Madonna whore complex, a very, very common thing. Yeah, which is, I can't, you know, in part I can't see my wife as an erotic sexual thing anymore. She's the mother to my children. She's the Madonna. And so I've put her up on the pedestal of she's too good to do those dirty things with. But this one over here, who I have no interpersonal anything with, I'll do all kinds of nasty stuff with her. And believe it or not, there are moms and wives out there who are saying, I sure wish I would do filthy things with my husband, but he has no interest. And then they discover, they pick up his phone and see all kinds of stuff, and it's just, it's baffling to people. But this is a really common thing. Um, JP Ryan, in that a woman asking a man to do the masculine things, uh, she wants may feel emasculating when he may be spending significant energy doing the things she asked him to do that most would interpret as feminine. Honey, you are so good taking care of the house while I bring home the bacon, but I need you to take charge. So what I'm hearing is a lot of men saying the women tell us this, the women direct us to do this, the women are, you know, bossing us and directing our lives in a certain way, and then we're like, yes dear, whatever you say dear, and I'll be damned, she's not happy with it. A lot of that can be avoided, guys, by having a good sense of identity and who you are and your own values and everything else. To when somebody comes to you and says, do this, you say, no, that's— I don't want to do that, that's not me. Um, my wife, for example, makes very good money as a surgeon. So if my wife said, you know, it makes financial sense for us to take the kid out of daycare and you stay home. I'm like, it does, but no, I'm not doing that. I, I want to build this business. This is my mission in life, and the Help for Men organization, and you know, all this other stuff. That, that's what keeps me going. That's, that's what lights a fire under my butt. Without that, I'll be like, I'll probably be a depressed dude, especially a dude sitting at home with a kid all day long. And it's like, no thank you. There's nothing wrong with that. Whoa, Ralph Brewer, you may piss her off, or what? So that's, that's who I am. That's not a me being an ultra manly dude, that's just me being true to, to who I am. So guys, I talk about this and more in my latest book, Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man. Check it out. Let me see my name on the bottom. Do a search for Rebuild Ralph Brewer on Amazon and you'll find it, or go to readrebuild.com. Making sure I'm not missing any training. Say it again.

Training number one is learning how to disappoint a woman. There you go. Training. And it's, it's, it's actually part of what we do sometimes in the coaching space is like, your job is to do something that like, you know, you want to do and you know it's going to piss her off, but it's actually not a bad thing to do. And just like sit with her discomfort. Sit with her displeasure. I'm going out with the boys to go play a sport, whatever it may be, or I'm gonna go to the theater. Like, I don't really want you to. It's like, well, there's nothing on the agenda right now that really needs my attention. I haven't had time for me. I love you, I'm gonna go do my own thing. Yeah, but she's gonna be pissed. Cool, let her be pissed. And then when she gets through that, she'll be like— how many times you see women who are just like, I didn't want you to, but I appreciate that you were willing to like stand up for your own like interests. And then that becomes like sexy in itself. And all of a sudden she's like, wow, he actually has the balls to stand up to me. But it's a lot of things. If you— especially me, this was me and the nice guy thing. You grew up with like a father that was— that pedestalized the mother, but the reverse wasn't true. Like, you need to pedestalize each other, that's fine. Like, you're both in holding each other in high regard. But if it's like, you know, you're up here and I'm down here and it's never going to reverse, you become this person who's conditioned to make sure mom or your sister or your aunt or your grandma is happy no matter what. Even at your own expense. You take that to an adult relationship and the woman just goes like, I don't know why I'm getting the ick. It's just— I can't explain, it's just nasty. It's just like, you don't have any hobbies, you're— and then you end up saying like, your happiness is my happiness, which means when she's inevitably going to get unhappy at some point, and it's going to happen no matter what you do, it's now your burden. And then you're gonna dump more on her of saying like, I feel bad that you're unhappy because I'm supposed to fix it, but I can't fix you because you're unhappy with your emotions and I can't fix your emotions. Which is then causing you to feel even more unhappy because now you're holding your emotions plus my emotions, and then it just turns around and around we go. Yeah, Chad with the no car, no job, who, you know, fucks like a champion, suddenly like, I want to go hang out with him. I can't explain why.

So it's the, um, these old axioms, they are old axioms for a reason, which is you can't make everyone happy, nor should you try to. And you're, you know, one of the things that a lot of men going through a lot of the rebuilding process and trying to overcome their codependency and so forth, one of the hardest things they have to deal with is, I'm going to piss people off and people are not going to like me because of insert reasons. And you say, yeah, welcome to real life. Welcome to being a secure individual. You recognize that not everyone's going to love you, and in fact, you may really piss people off. But here's the phrase I find myself saying to so many men all the freaking time: dude, you're doing nothing wrong. It's okay what you just did. It's okay to take a timeout for yourself and go for a walk. Yes, but my wife was so mad because I was— that you did nothing wrong, dude. It's okay. It's okay to go to the gym and work on yourself. Yep, but my wife got mad because I did it 3 times one week. You're doing nothing wrong. It's just a lot of people don't have the, the tools for how to soothe themselves, how to regulate themselves, and that lack those lack of tools, plus a childhood of being taught over and over again, you're a bad boy unless you make mommy or daddy happy, you're a bad boy unless you do all this and this. And that just builds and builds, and you carry that to adulthood, into your relationships, and you don't have the ability to regulate yourself. So wife needs to be happy 24/7 or else I feel like shit. It's like, yeah, that's not a good way to go through life, dude. That's, that's, that's a whole lot of not good right there. And you're just going to end up, uh, being a lesser man and having a wife who just continually resents you. And some of you may be married to very good, secure women who are just really tired of having such a pushover dude who has no sense of self, and he doesn't have an opinion on anything, and he just goes with whatever. And she's like, can this guy come up with something, please? I'm looking for some kind of connection with you, and every time you're like, whatever, that's fine. 'Okay, that's fine, whatever.' She's like, 'No, I'm asking for you to get involved here. We're, we're a couple, we're partners here.' 'No, whatever you say, dear,' because he knows if he opens his mouth, she may get upset, and he will shut down, and he will pout, and he will throw a hissy. And she's like, 'Oh gosh, it's just such an awful, awful circle to be caught in.' And a lot of you guys have that exact issue, and you got to work on it.

Yeah, it's like the way I like to think of it and tell guys, like, the delta between between the fantasy in a person's head and the reality is grief. It's frustration, it's anger. And a lot of times what will happen is she was expecting a certain thing and you just either weren't going to do it or it didn't line up the way you wanted to, and she's going to get upset, or you're going to get upset. Because like, we can fantasize about some crazy shit just as human beings. Like, oh, wouldn't it be awesome if I was a millionaire, billionaire, whatever? Wouldn't it be awesome if I could do that? And you can't. And like, the frustration of accepting that you can't have a certain thing, or you feel a certain way, or something didn't work out the way you wanted it to It's just that it's a small micro grieving process, and you're going to have an emotional flare-up as a result. Frustration. Like, I wasn't expecting it. I was going to work today and I was— I got stuck in bumper bumper traffic. I wasn't expecting that. This is frustrating. Or, you know, something happened. I was expecting a promotion. It didn't happen. Frustration. So that the expectation was the fantasy, then the reality was what actually happened. And that's going to happen non-stop throughout your whole fucking life. That is the epitome of the human experience. Like, it's just going like, oh, I hope this worked out like this, and then fuck, it didn't. Oh, this is where I fuck it up over and over and over again. And when you start taking it on that you have to go through your own emotional digestion— this is what it's like. A lot of times what happens with guys— I have some guys I'm working with now who just— I refer to as being like emotionally constipated. Like you have just a lot of pent-up emotion, anger, grief from your childhood, anger from your childhood, grief from this, anger, frustration from that. You have not shit it out in a while, and it's just backlogging and backlogging and backlogging, and it's gonna blow up somewhere, and it's usually on your wife or your kids or yourself.

That's a vision, just all this impact and shit. It's gonna go over your wife and kids. Sorry, I'm 5 years old.

Yeah, yeah.

Perfect analogy.

Yeah, yeah, in there. And the idea is like, you, you need— that is part of self-regulation, is like, I got frustrated, life didn't happen the way I wanted to, I got a rise out of it, I calm myself down. She gets a rise of it, let her calm herself down. Don't get in the way of that process. She needs to practice her own self— you pissed her off because you forgot the milk, you didn't do that— like, yeah, she'd let her be mad and then let her come back on off that high on her own. This is like, no, yeah, I fucked up, my bad. When you're calm, we'll talk about it. When you're ready, we'll talk about it. I apologize, I'll work on it next time. We'll discuss something, put it into place next time, but I'm not going to try to fix your state right now. I'm going to let you move. Like, you're going to shit out your own emotions at your own pace, and I'll be here, and then we'll talk about it afterwards. And that's, that's the recipe for a perfect relationship.

Yeah, but that is completely and utterly foreign. It's like an alien language to a lot of us. A lot of people that are watching this, they've never seen that in person. They've never seen that with mom and dad, their friends. They're like 'Who talks like this? Nobody talks like this. You battle it out and you scream at each other, you throw a plate across the kitchen, and somebody— the police are called, and then eventually you kiss and make up. That's how people do it, right?' It's like, 'No, dude, it's not. That's not how healthy people do that. I'm sorry that you had to see that and you grew up with that, and that's what you expect, and that's what you've seen in all your relationships. But no, that's a really shitty way of going through life. It's not good.' A lot of you are caught in really, really dysfunctional relationships, and you may not even know it. You may be completely ignorant of it. Unfortunately, it's sad. And while I'm thinking about it, I'm noticing the little like count is going up, guys. If you could do me a favor, if you could pause what you're doing for a second, and wherever you're watching this, if you give me a like or a follow or a subscribe, that would really help quite a bit. That always tells the algorithm— everyone always refers to the algorithm— it tells the algorithm like, this is worthy of other people seeing it, and then it will show it to more people. And you know how it works, guys. So give me a like if you could, please. I would really appreciate it. Thank you so very much. We're coming up on the end of the hour already, Mr. Mike. That was fast. Uh, anything else to, uh, promote or talk about while we're on here?

Nothing really comes to mind right now. Still doing the coaching. Any guys that are out there maybe looking for some support, looking for some guidance, and more of like a scientific, technical perspective, I'm trying to approach these problems and step by step what to do. Happy to be of support wherever I can. I lived that life myself for a long time. I had my— my mother was like— I was my mother's emotional caretaker. I was like the, the house's emotional bodyguard, a lot of stuff. A lot of guys I've seen the same exact thing. Um, and also buy your book. I haven't read it yet, but it's a good book. Thank you. I appreciate that.

It looks— I mean, it looks nice. The COVID is really well done. It's my Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man. This is actually available on hardcover as well. I have those copies coming. So make it like an official, official book with a hardcover paperback, and then the audio was coming soon. And of course Kindle and PDF and all that stuff is available. So a book is always a—

say again, sorry, there was a delay. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this one last thing is I think we're, I think we're just collectively slowly reverting back to just more, I would say, primitive ways of doing things. It's not the right word. Like if an individual person has a certain script in their head of how things are supposed to play out. When they don't, they tend to just repeat it. They tend to create the environment that repeats it. I think there's like almost like a collective societal level script of just like male and female psychology that's slowly letting itself— because even in your book, it's like how to rebuild, or dead bedroom leads to how to rebuild. It's almost like a sequence of like, okay, when, when the sex falls off, read this book, and then when it falls apart, read this book, because it's gonna happen probably to some of you guys. But then you wonder like how much, how many more, how much more for the further in the future we go before it's like, okay, we're back to square one where we're just back into the dynamics we've been talking about for a long time of just men doing more masculine things, women doing more stay-at-home moms and things, all the sort of stuff, whatever it may be. That I've heard it referred to as like balkanization. It's this idea that we're eventually going to start going back to being like tribal again in some way, and within those tribal— that tribalism is just going to be this we're going to revert back to more traditional gender norms, even if we don't want to, because it's just like the people who are— seem to be happiest across the longest period of time seem to be the ones that kind of exemplify these behaviors. I think I made a comment about one of your posts recently about how like the most successful people in society generationally are usually like more old-school conservative communities because they're the ones actually like replacing and having a lot of kids, whereas angry feminists and angry incels are not having these kids as fast. So this idea is going to eventually die out. No wonder if it's like we're going to loop back to the beginning given enough time.

I think a phrase— it's a good topic for discussion, we could talk about this for hours— but a, a word there that you used in the middle of that, which I think is really important, is community, which is something that is sorely lacking for a lot of people. And it does seem that certain types of people, political persuasion, whatever it may be, tend to value community more than others. And so I don't necessarily know if more procreation, more kid-making, makes people happier, but it does fill them with a sense of purpose, which is something a lot of people are missing. Like, I have my purpose now: make sure these little ones are alive and thriving and they grow up healthy, and the community all comes together to help do so. But so when the— when we start making fewer and fewer kids and people are moving apart from each other— and I used to live in New York, but I got a job in California, so I move over here away from my extended family and everybody else, and now my support network is gone, and now I'm alone, now I'm divorced. I hear this all the freaking time, Mike. And now I realize the importance of community and being around friends and family. And so I can see us maybe reverting back to more— less of the trying to get the McMansion and the big job and everything else, and more and more people going, you know, a little apartment in the city is not that bad after all, or a little home, you know, a little ranch, bungalow, whatever, in the suburbs is not so bad because I got ants so-and-so down the street, grandma's down the street, mom and dad are over here. I bet we return more to that. Does that need to be under the umbrella of having a more traditional mindset— woman stays home, guy works— or will that just happen naturally on its own? As— here's an interesting food for thought. I did a video on this here recently. Somebody sent me an article from the New York Times that was dated 2017, so it came out 8, 9 years ago. About how interesting it is. Now keep in mind, New York Times, I'm the first to say it's a pretty leftist, progressive kind of publication, so keep that in mind. But the, the theme was—

pardon me—

the theme was basically— frog in my throat— socialism, uh, led to more sex in marriage. So women tend— the women tend to be the drivers of, are we going to have sex in this relationship or not? And under the world of communism, socialism, the women were more apt to say, yes, I want more sex. And so the, the article research, well, why is that? And it would seem that when you have a lot of social safety nets in place, the women can relax. I don't have to worry about it, is somebody going to get fed? I don't have to worry about, is the rent going to get paid? I don't have to worry about— I have to worry about insert 20 things here, and then I can allow what Mother Nature wants us to do to come more to the surface, which is getting it on, making more babies. So is there something to be learned for that? And their point is that maybe we need to return to more socialistic government-run programs to relieve some of the pressure on a lot of women. This is just kind of a canary in the coal mine of society in general. If we want to raise the birth rate, well, then take over a lot of this stuff and help out people, you blah, blah, blah. Point taken, right? But can that also be— can that, uh, what do you call it, uh, can that culture, can that atmosphere be cultivated also not necessarily in a communistic way but in a more traditional conservative way? We can, we can do the same thing by saying, ladies, you don't have to work. Ladies, you don't have to do this. Ladies, you can stay home. Let us take care of everything. And then will we see that? I don't know. It's— case could be made either way, but it's an interesting thing to look at. And, uh, I, I think to go to the extreme of communism, kind of silly, but it does illustrate the point. Now, what was interesting is you had people, women, that responded to that article, whether it was on my Facebook page or when you went to the article directly, who said, I lived under communism and this is true. But you know why it's true? We were all bored out of our minds. We had nothing to do, so we just filled the time with having fun however we could. And a lot of the time was, I guess, where you and I are sitting here doing nothing. Let's just get it on. Maybe sometimes it's that simple when you got a lady who's working 80 hours a week and you got a guy who's working 80 hours a week and you got the kid. You have no time for each other. So there's something to be learned from all these different things, but it's very interesting. And we may in fact see us circling back to that.

It's a good quote from Ben Shapiro, if you know his work, and he says, uh, like, I'm a communist at home and a capitalist everywhere else in society. There you go. Yeah, it makes sense. He's talking about in terms of his kids, he's like, I'm a dictator to my parents, my kids, but like, I'm in charge, I'm dad, I have to be in charge, fine. But outside in the world, I compete in a healthy way. But I think there is something to that idea. Like, generally speaking, socialists Nope, lost you.

I don't know if you guys are seeing what I'm seeing, but Mike is frozen on my end here. Oh, I hear you. There you are, you're back.

Okay, usually that kind of thinking of like egalitarianism is really the better word, tends to be a more feminine attribute. Like, we have to make sure everyone get— because it's more of a female survival strategy, is like, we have strength in numbers, but other women here, we can all get along. But even within that, what's interesting is you see a lot of— there is competition under the surface, you just don't see it obviously. Like, a lot, a lot of egalitarian behavior tends to be less, less about let's all get along and more about I don't want you getting ahead of me. And it shows up in certain ways. Yep, very well.

Yeah.

And a lot of it is especially nowadays with social media. And I was thinking about this earlier, how I think it was Jordan Peterson quote, it was, um, like, things like social media are basically just female aggression amplification machines. Like, the way that women tend to be aggressive towards each other tends to be amplified dramatically on— because there's like, it's anonymity, you don't know who's saying it, you can say whatever you want, you can do like, you can spread rumors, lies, gossip, innuendo. When men are aggressive, we punch each other in the face, but I can't punch you in the face if you piss me off and you're 2,000 miles away from me. But I can get in your head if I could just say something on a Facebook post or spread some rumors around that kind of like screws with things. So like egalitarianism thing, it's like, it's nice on paper, but there is still a layer of competition going on behind the scenes there, and it's not going to work out in that regard. So the balancing act is just like, you need to have a little bit of both. You need competition or else you're never going to have innovation. But you also need to help people out, otherwise things just evolve into anarchy over time.

The whole, uh, what is my community going to think of me? What are my peers going to think of me? How are they going to rate me? Where do I fit this little hierarchy? I must belong, I must belong, I not— I must not be an outcast. That is way more common with the ladies than it is with the men, for sure. And social media just feeds into that fire, dude. It's just like throwing jet fuel into that, because the woman scrolls on Instagram and sees perfect women with their perfect husbands and their perfect kids in their perfect house and the perfect car. I don't measure up to this, and I feel bad. While men just scroll and go, huh, she has a nice butt, and that's a funny cat video, and that's it. We don't really put that much thought into it. It's just a totally different way of looking at the world. Interesting thought was that my, uh, my youngest daughter is 4 years of age, so soon it will be kindergarten time, and the thought of where to put them in school. And, uh, my wife comes from work and she's like, all the nurses and everybody at work are telling me like, don't send your kids to school in that school because all the kids are super rich and everybody expects you to drive like a super fancy car when you get to be 16 or else you're just ostracized from the community. And I'm just like, that is such a nothing thing to me, you know? So she's like, well, what if, what if our daughter comes home one day and says, I feel bad, everybody else is driving Porsche and I don't have a car. I would say, yeah, it's— yeah, same with me. When I was a kid, I didn't have a car either. You'll live, you'll be fine. And but to my wife, it's like a— she'll feel bad, she will feel left out, she will not be part of the community. This is a major thing. And to me it's like, who gives a shit? I don't, I don't care. I had the same thing as a kid. Here's how I drove as a kid. Mom, can I borrow your car? Yes. All right, cool, thanks. That was it. That's what I did. And it was a luxury to have a car. Rural Indiana where I grew up. But apparently in that little community, it's a given you will have a Tesla or whatever it may be. And I don't care what the norms are, that's kind of silly to think that way. But here's my wife who has a medical degree, she also has her MBA, she can speak 3 languages, and here she goes going, what if our daughter feels bad because everybody has a car better than her? I'm like, what, are you serious? But you realize that it's very much ingrained in and who they are as women, just a different worldview. And it can really cause them a lot of anxiety.

Yeah, it's dangerous when we create systems to try to benefit off that, that idea. There's a book, the— there's a book called The Men Rebuilt. That's a good book too. Um, but it's also the, uh, what's called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He talks about this. He's a sociologist from New York. You kind of raised the alarm on this for quite a while now, of social media, what the problem does. Like, there's two things in here, and more so to female psychology than men. Men have different problems, but in the women's case, it was, um, the— it's like the comparison bias and the prestige bias. One of these two, these two. Comparison is just like, okay, what do I look like compared to my peers? And then prestige is who's the most popular person in this group and how do I emulate them? And that's totally fine to do if you like have a couple close friends and, you know, that guy starts working out a little bit more and you're a little bit out of shape. Okay, that's fine. And you start working out more too. Like, it hurts a little bit, but like, okay, motivates me to like get back in shape. Or she's got nice hips. You like the small comparisons, people in your proximity, in your, in your world. It's totally fine because it helps to kind of like, like help each other climb the ladder collectively. Like, you help me, then I help you, then you help me, then I help you. But when you have 14-year-old girls comparing themselves Kim Kardashian and shit like that. It's like, it's a recipe for disaster because you're never gonna be able to catch up, and you'll just keep kind of like, they'll just keep going and going. So in that case, different kindergarten, maybe. Maybe she's got like, like an average middle-class kindergarten. She'll be much happier that way. Who knows?

Yeah, interesting. We got, uh, Russell saying, this reminds me of your interview with Michelle Langley where she said the last piece of equality for women is accountability. 'Not sure what else men can do. Step aside and yet make more.' Well, I guess, uh, Russell, I would push back on that. What more you can do for what? What's the end goal here? You mean to what, to make the ladies happy? To live a happy life with a lady? I don't know what you mean by that. Just interesting food for thought. I don't have to necessarily answer that. But, um, Mr. Mike, I'm gonna go ahead and call her quits. Thank you so much for joining me today. Do appreciate it. Sorry we had all the interwebs issues, but, uh, is what it is. I, I've been on calls here before. I was with Orion Taraban once and it just kept locking up and spitting us off like every 5 minutes. So yeah, I've, I've chatted with him 3 times, 2 or 3 times now. Mhm. And he was— yeah, he was an interesting chat for sure. So I'm hoping to get him back on here soon. But, uh, guys, thank you so much for joining us. If you haven't already, give me a follow, subscribe wherever you're— I got guys on Facebook, YouTube, X, however it works. Give me a follow, give me a like. I would really appreciate it. Thank you so very much. And last but not least, I keep reaching there. Check out the book Rebuild: The Complete Guide to Starting Over as a Man. You can learn more at readrebuild.com. And Mr. Mike, once again, thank you so very much for joining me, sir. I appreciate you, man.

I appreciate it, Ralph Brewer.

All righty, and we'll catch you on the next one. Toodaloo, everybody.