PsycHacks

Men often complain that it's always the women they don't particularly like who seem to pursue them for relationships, while the women they want to engage always seem to slip through their fingers. This is because men do the right things with the wrong women. In this episode, I'll discuss a number of ways this occurs in the courtship process, while providing a general prescription for this difficul...

The fact of the matter is that the conventional roadmap provided by culture isn't going to work for a lot of people. If you want a custom-tailored life, you have to be prepared to build it for yourself. The issue is that the more you deviate from the well-trodden path, the less you will be comprehensible to those around you. This means that the cost of living your own life is the approval of other...

While the overwhelming response to my channel has been exceptionally positive, a small proportion of the feedback I receive is extremely negative. And this feedback invariably concerns my views on intrasexual dynamics. This doesn't necessarily bother me, but it is an interesting phenomenon. In this episode, I attempt to explain why this particular content can be such a bitter pill for some people...

Jealousy is like a powerful spice: just a little bit can make your food more interesting, but any more than that will probably ruin the dish. So it's a good idea to learn how to handle the experience of jealousy so as not to create unnecessary problems in your relationship. The key is to understand that jealousy functionally communicates the perception of a legitimate threat -- which can create un...

"The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 Depression is one of the most prevalent mental illnesses on the planet. Unfortunately, most people misunderstand it. They believe that it exists solely between the ears of the individual in question. This gives rise to the "intrapsychic fallacy", which maintains th...

If you're a man considering going down the path of marriage and children, it is essential that you learn how to maintain a woman's long-term commitment. This is because the more you invest in any one woman, the more leveraged you are and the riskier that relationship becomes, especially in contemporary society. The key to maintaining that commitment is to understand that everything you've ever don...

Learning how to keep your cool when women become difficult or provocative is an emotional survival strategy. Failing to master this skill is an invitation to hardship and regret. The strategy is simple: no matter what woman you're dealing with, and no matter what a woman tells you, to the extent that she becomes emotional, you need to mentally create a verbal sandwich around her words. I'll demons...

The number of a woman's previous sexual partners is often of interest to the men she dates. However, it's not immediately apparent why that should be the case. I argue that the sheer number might not be as important as many men believe, as this is actually being used as a heuristic to gauge other attributes of the woman in question, namely: her attraction and her ability to pair bond. I also discu...

Because of the way human beings develop, people only truly gain the capacity for critical, independent thought when they're 25 years-old. Unfortunately, by the time people reach this age, their minds are so full of nonsense that they could literally spend the rest of their lives sifting through the concepts, beliefs, and ideas that were functionally put there without their consent. And -- if you w...

The causal agent of relationship boredom is always the same. At some point -- and for whatever reason -- the two of you stopped telling each other the truth. I guarantee that if you start telling the truth in your relationship, you won't be bored for very much longer. So why does this happen? It turns out most people don't really want to know the truth -- and that's generally not why they entered...

Many folks start out on the path of virtue when they're young, but get sidelined into worldly pursuits by middle age. Why is this so common? In my opinion, this phenomenon is due to the fact that many people inappropriately expect more of virtue than it can deliver. Virtue only makes you good. Expecting wealth or beauty or status or sex or success or health simply because you are virtuous is fooli...

I was very happy to be able to sit down with Dr. Robert Glover ("No More Mr. Nice Guy") for a long chat the other day. When he wasn't cracking me up with his off-color honesty, we touched on a number of topics in our collective wheelhouse, including: love, attraction, authenticity, and men's need for a "tribe". My sexy grumble is my throat recovering from the flu. Enjoy. Dr. Glover's men's communi...

Throughout my dating history, I've been punished many times with sexual withholding for not endorsing a woman's beliefs. I call this the "Lysistrata Protocol", as it is inspired by the behavior of the Greek women in Aristophanes's play of the same name. However, while the women were successful in changing society on stage, this tactic is self-defeating in an open and diverse sexual marketplace. In...

At this stage of my career, I conduct consultations with men from all walks of life from all over the world. One of the most frequent reasons men book my time is to receive an objective, third-party gut check on their relationships: should they continue to invest or cut their losses? After only a few minutes, it often becomes clear that these men already know the answer to their question -- though...

If you're like me, you grew up hearing (over and over again) that women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man. However, it turns out that this is a third-grade statistic coupled with an equally elementary interpretation. When the analysis is appropriately controlled, the pay gap between the sexes shrinks in insignificance. That said, men still continue to earn more than women in both abso...

I've worked with hundreds of young men, many of whom are paralyzed with the prospect of answering the titular question: "what should I do with my life?" This is obviously an important inquiry; however, most have never been taught how to go about arriving at an answer. This often means that they will spend months -- if not years -- thinking through a solution through a process I can "chessing." Unf...

Most women find male anger terrifying -- which is why it is both tragic and ironic that they often play a part in encouraging it in their primary relationships. In effect, women inadvertently train men to be angry when they ignore, disrespect, or invalidate men who first attempt to communicate non-aggressively. If women only take men's complaints seriously when they escalate to aggression, then th...

This is the second installment of my two-part series on unintentional disrespect. The intention is to help prevent women from sabotaging the relationships they want with the men they want to have them with. In this episode, I identify two other ways in which women place themselves above men with their words and behavior, thereby enacting an assumed superiority. I also suggest that men are more sen...

This is an episode for the ladies. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the one thing you must never do to the man with whom you want to have a relationship is disrespect him. Unfortunately, respect can mean different things to men and women -- so it's important for women to appreciate respect through the masculine lens so that they can stay on the sunny side of the unbreakable rule. The fact of the matte...

One of the tenets of corporate human resources is to hire slow and fire fast. In today's episode, I'll discuss how the same advice holds true when vetting a woman for a relationship. Hiring slow means that you resist the urge to emotionally invest in a woman until you've collected many different data points across a significant time horizon. On the other hand, firing fast means that you terminate...

Gatekeeper: https://www.amazon.com/Gatekeeper-Tactical-Commitment-Shawn-Smith/dp/0990686469 I'm very excited to have Dr. Shawn T. Smith ("The tactical guide to women") back on the show. After briefly discussing his newest book ("Gatekeeper") and why it is important for men to appropriately vet their relationships with women (over and above the women, themselves), we discuss a number of questions c...

Because of their hypergamous tendencies, women generally mate and date for gain -- and they typically have no qualms about passing over men who are not in a position to provide benefit. However, in every culture on the planet, it is the servant who takes the money. The servant is the one who is paid. One of the most over-looked consequences of hypergamy is the creation of a relational indebtedness...

Whether we like it or not, life -- in its particulars -- is often a zero-sum game. In order to get what you want, it is often the case that no one else can have it. And getting what you want typically involves winning out against your competition. As a general rule, overpaying is the cost of winning: you will need to give more than anyone else in order to secure the desired good. One of the uninte...

The one thing that most prevents women from having the relationships they want with the men they want to have them with is pride. In this episode, I discuss three ways in which this pride tends to manifest in the game of mating and dating: in misappraising their value, in disparaging male attraction, and in deprecating the domestic. For women, humility is the pathway to more satisfying relationshi...

It is extremely important that men resist becoming emotionally attached to any given woman until she has been appropriately vetted for a relationship. If they allow their attraction to dictate their emotional involvement, then they might eventually have to choose between what is right and good for them, and what they have already decided to love. This is a painful choice that can be avoided with a...