Generation Z and the Decline of Intimacy | Rollo Tomassi DSH #879

stuff I've written in my first book about like you know plate plate spinning and and date which is really just a euphemism for dating non-exclusively and what that does it sort of insulates you from what we call one-itis or catching feelings or being like getting really kind of wrapped up in what we call the soulmate myth

and

and and essentially giving you uh a sense of abundance as as uh opposed to a sense of scarcity

All right, Rolo Tomasi here, author of The Rational Mail and a few other books.

Thanks coming on, man.

Good to see you.

Finally, I know.

You've been asking me to do this for a while.

Yeah, I know.

I think you're really interesting because we differ on a lot of stuff, you know?

Oh, is that broken?

No, I got it right now.

All right, cool.

Cool.

Perfect.

Yeah.

So I was telling you in the green room, I've been with the same chick seven years, only slept with one girl.

So you're like the total opposite, you know?

Yeah, total opposite.

You know what's funny is like, like my notch count is like public domain, I guess.

But I can remember when I was,

I would be on Pat Campbell's show.

He was my old partner from back in like 2017, 2018.

And he had a terrestrial radio show.

It was a syndicated show in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

So like the buckle of the Bible Belt.

And I remember one time I said that, I said, yeah, my notch count's like 41.

And like, you could hear this collective gasp from all the women that were in the production staff.

That was hot.

And they were like, they were like, oh, he's a man whore.

And I'm like, but what's funny is like then I'll meet other guys who are sort of in the space.

And if you're not in triple digits, you're like, you got to get those numbers up.

You're looking down upon.

Yeah.

And so it just kind of depends.

It's all contextual, really.

I mean,

I would not necessarily disrespect somebody such as yourself for making that.

It's a lifestyle choice.

And like for me, that's just where it was at.

And I've been married for 28 years now, too.

Nice.

Myron made an interesting tweet the other day.

He recommends people sleep with at least 50 women.

Yeah, you got to remember that's an abstraction, too.

So like I have to make the case for Myron again.

When he says stuff like that, it just means like get enough experience under your belt so that you understand,

so that you understand women's female nature and you understand your own nature as well.

So it's not like, it's not like, okay, so if that's the case, then I got to get at least another nine more girls before I'm like cool with Myron.

That's a good point.

So, but so that's not what's really about it.

It's not really about so much the number as it is.

So get experience more more than anything and it that tracks back to like uh stuff i've written in my first book about like you know plate plate spinning and and date which is really just a euphemism for dating non-exclusively and what that does it sort of insulates you from what we call one-itis or catching feelings or being like getting really kind of wrapped up in what we call the soulmate myth

and um and and essentially giving you uh a sense of abundance as as uh opposed to a sense of scarcity right so for instance if i've got a if i've got a guy who says I've only slept with one or two or three women, and you know, then I met my wife, whatever.

If the guy is approaching us from us from a position of abundance, then

that's a different context than if the guy's like, Well, she was the only thing, she's the only thing I ever had going, and I really wanted to be with her.

That's a different context.

I get that, yeah.

So, yeah, because some guys are limited with their options, whether it's looks or money or whatever.

Yeah, and most men are.

I mean, most average.

I've recently, um,

I'm trying to stop using the word or the the term beta these days but because i think it really

it's almost it almost hits harder if you say average average men x average men are like so um so because most average men tend to be more beta right there they tend to be what we in what we call the 80 80th percentile the 80 percenters right they're the guys who are just basically invisible to women and they have to do something to get out of that that percentile uh and get into the 20 or into higher 4% or 5%.

And so I'm trying not to use the term like beta too much or simp or incel.

And

I hate the word the term incel is like completely meaningless right now.

All it is is just an invective.

It's just an insult that people like use if they don't like you.

Anybody they don't like is an insult.

So I'm trying not to use those things, but I'm trying to put things in more objective terms.

And so that's why I use like average, the average guy.

I couldn't believe the stats on average guys and like how many girls are sleeping with.

and like I think 33% of them don't even get late at all that are in the yeah that's those are those are statistics from the GS GSS studies the general social survey studies from like 2018 but they still track even right now a lot of people are saying that they're they're kind of outdated

outdated statistics

if you look at like 2020 obviously during the the COVID you know pandemic people are either sleeping more together or they're not at all because they simply aren't getting out and going and doing it or if you're already in a relationship how's that going to affect that so they've been doing these sort of follow-up studies right now from like 2021 to well probably at the end of this year it'll be 2024 um to see where it tracks and it's still on a downward turn most like generation z um and the latter half of the millennials are simply not having as much sex as say like you know the boomers and my generation gen x uh did at the same age interesting so you got to remember that a lot of the the statistics get that get thrown out there, you can't just take one data point and say, this is how it is.

You have to take it in correlation to other data points.

So

if you want to look at a dynamic in a more broader sense, you can't just look at one particular set of data.

You have to look at other data and then say, oh, does this correlate with what we're seeing in the other one?

And then maybe compare that to even stuff that, you know, a third set or a fourth set outside of that to understand the whole dynamic.

Got it.

But do you think overall that people in their 20s are having less sex?

Yeah, well,

that's already on you know pretty much that's been a statistic since like 2016 2015 2016.

so it's a lot of attracting well you got to remember what's uh what's generation z is in they're in their coming coming into their late 20s now so i'm going to be interested to see what the generation is that follows generation z and see how things you know pan out um i am in my

my fourth book in religion i make the case for um

uh the different generations that have sort of come up prior to year 2000, prior to the internet, prior to cell phones, prior to social media.

And then you look at, like, say, the latter half of the millennials and pretty much all of Generation Z,

they have never known a society that hasn't had cell phones or the internet or high-speed internet, or they've never had to go through a dial-up modem or anything like that, or really kind of go through the

what I, for lack of a better term, the analog years, like in then into the digital years.

And so like I can remember where like when I was

probably my early 20s, you know, I still had a dial-up phone or you're not dial-up, but like, you know, push-button phone.

And so how does, how, how do you

compare that as far as like the sexual marketplace of say like the late 80s and the early 90s to what's going on today?

Well, the, you know, human beings are still human beings.

It's just, again, the

context of that particular era and wherever you happen to be geographically as well.

So

my sort of experience throughout the years is not only colored by sort of like the analog years, the 20th century years, and then there's the 21st century years.

And so, for instance, my daughter was born in 1998.

She's never known a world that hasn't had iPads and

cell phones and the internet.

And now

we're seeing technology advance at such a rapid rate that we're having trouble keeping up with it right now.

But

I think once Generation X is gone, that's going to be the last generation that was really experienced life before the 21st century.

Before technology.

Yeah.

That's why it's interesting, though, because there's so much access to women now in dating, but the rate of sex is down.

You know what I mean?

There's all these dating apps, Instagram.

That's sort of like

that's sort of part of an ongoing theme.

You've got to remember that globalization is not just about like economics and like immigration and things like that.

It's also about the sexual marketplace.

Globalization that has taken place from, say, the 20th century and then into the 21st century,

you probably had Mike on here.

He's talking about the differences between, say, the local sexual marketplace and the global sexual marketplace.

And this is something out of like my, I think it was my second or third book.

I made the observation that in sort of the 20th century, you were kind of stuck with like what your social circle happened to be then because there was no cell phone.

If you wanted to go hang out with your friends, you would like call them up on the phone, hey, we're going to meet at this club tonight, be there, blah, that's it.

Now you can go put it on Instagram and like people you don't even know will show up because there's, you know, you want to go see a new DJ or something like that.

So the just the technological side of things in the 20th century was more of of the localized sexual marketplace.

You had a, you know, a much broader pool than ever before, but still there was, it was just a pool of friends and social, your social circle that, hey, I know this chick, I know that girl, maybe you happen to be at the club, and she would happen to be there as well.

I mean, that's how I met my wife, basically.

Oh, at the club?

At the club, yeah.

At the place they tell you you're not supposed to meet your wife, right?

And so, and I was, it was just a social, you know, you're in this, in this localized

socio-sexual environment, right?

Now we have the global sexual environment.

So any girl that's on Instagram can see any other girl on Instagram.

And that girl, her ego is measured in likes and

little heart emojis and everything else.

But it's that the, at least the perception is that the potential for becoming intimate with somebody, say, in a foreign country is

a distinct possibility.

And if nothing else, it certainly is a source of attention

that feeds into other things.

So like when I hate to run Fresh up the flagpole again for this, but there was a time where people were asking, you know, how many girls at college really think, or how many girls at college are getting flown out to Miami to go on a yacht party with Drake, right?

And of course, Fresh said something like 30%.

And I'm like, dude, no, no, no, no.

It's definitely not 30%.

But the perception is what he should have focused on.

Because if one girl sees one single girl gets flown out to a yacht party, all of her friends that are in that global sexual market on Instagram, and again, it's exponentially, you know, goes out.

The perception is that I'm cuter than this girl, and I could get flown out too.

So therefore, my

sexual market value,

my estimated, my self-perceived value goes up because I'm cuter than this girl and this girl got asked to go out to a yacht party.

So

it's based on perception rather than the actuality of getting flown out to flued out to

Miami and go on a yacht party.

Right.

Comparison.

Are your friends flying a lot of girls out?

No, not really.

I'm trying to think who I would know that would do something like that.

I think it's kind of looked down on right now.

You have to be careful because I know that like, say, Myron and Fresh

have sort of fostered, let's just say,

relationships with women who are like, say, on the West Coast.

And whether or not they flew them out or not, I can't say for sure because I don't have the receipts for that.

But

the idea is that the possibility exists that they could.

So

like when

they are sourcing women from, say, like seeking arrangements or from Tinder or from anything, you got to remember that this is like, it's their sourcing process.

I'm not just saying fresh in general, those guys in general.

I'm just saying like guys in general.

Their sourcing is almost like a spamming approach.

It's almost like funnel marketing is what it is.

In fact,

Instagram is basically funnel marketing for women.

Yeah, I'm surprised they got banned.

Seeking arrangement is an interesting.

My friend was on there.

I couldn't believe how many matches he was getting because you just input your salary and then start getting hundreds of matches.

And then I think what's funny is like people think that it's like just sort of this side of digital prostitution.

And in some senses, I could agree with that.

But at least if

you're going on a site like that, it doesn't even have to be seeking arrangements.

There are other sites other than seeking arrangements, like executive introductions is just basically a matchmaking service for like very rich men.

And the women there are looking for very rich men, right?

So at least you know what you're getting into.

There's no like pretentious bullshit.

Right.

You know, it's like, oh, I wasn't on here.

I was on here to meet a nice guy.

It doesn't matter how much he makes.

You're on seeking arrangements.

Okay.

So obviously

the context when you're on there is these are good-looking women who are looking for men who have men of means.

So at least you know what you're getting into.

Now, if that's not something you want to get into, don't go on the site.

Right.

No, it's straight up honest.

They know your salary.

You can't lie about it.

You got to verify it.

So

show me your 401k.

I think they asked for that.

They might.

They might.

Show me your credit rating.

Pretty crazy.

You mentioned soulmate myth earlier.

So do you not believe your wife is your soulmate?

I don't believe in the soulmate as in general.

Now, I have, this is right straight straight out of my first book.

It's actually the first chapter of my first book,

is there is no one.

And people keep using the term like, oh, I think he's the one or she's the one.

Even guys will use that now.

And it's this idea that there's one perfect person out there for you and you just haven't met the one just yet.

And

which on the surface of it, from just, you know, pragmatically thinking and rationally thinking, it's kind of ludicrous to think that because there's how many people on planet Earth, I mean,

there's people you will click with for sure, and there's people

who you won't click with, and maybe you're in a toxic relationship with.

But as far as the idea of the soulmate, the soulmate is, the soulmate myth is really a story or mythology that we tell ourselves to support socially enforced monogamy.

So we have to have, if we're going to get people to just pair up with one-to-one, and we're going to, we want a society that is built on, like I said, socially enforced monogamy or just like straight up monogamy, one man, one woman in a heterosexual relationship.

And there has to be some sort of unitary

belief set that goes along with that.

And part of that comes from what I, again, this is out of my fourth book, but there's the idea of what's called the romantic.

romantic ideal, meaning one man, one woman.

And the man will do anything for his lady.

And it's, you know, he's the knight in shining armor and he'll go to war for her and die for her.

And it's this sort of noble ideal because they are two star-crossed lovers and they met out of beyond all chance.

And so, therefore, they're soulmates together.

Your soul belongs with my soul before we were even born, kind of thing.

And it becomes

part and parcel of religion.

It becomes part of this sort of ideological belief set.

In the book, in my first book, I relate in the very beginning of that chapter of this experience I had where I was in college and I was at a behavioral psychology

classes

and the the teacher asked say how many people believe in God and like very few people actually believe there most of them were atheists and then they asked how many people believe that there is a perfect person out there for them that there's a one or a soulmate every damn hand went up and I'm like

how can you believe in a soulmate but you don't believe in God because there's this just this

endemic want for that for that to be true.

And

that was really what set me off on the soulmate myth and the fallacy of the one, which is there is no one.

There are some good ones and there are some bad ones, but there is no just a one, right?

And I was kind of like springboarding that off of what the old school pickup artists would call one-itis, right?

So you catch feelings for one person, you think it's the one.

She's the one, right?

So she's the one I'm going to marry.

She's the one I'm going to have a relationship with.

So is my wife my soulmate?

We are a very good match.

Got it.

Let's just put it that way.

And we have been so for a long time.

Do I feel like there's some sort of spiritual element between my wife and I?

Yeah.

But it's, I refuse the idea of the mythology of the soulmate myth because what happens is then you get overinvested.

And so what it leads to a scarcity mentality and it leads to losing your identity.

And

quite honestly, and this is speaking from like 28 years of being married, a good marriage is built on polarity, not on similarity.

It's built on polarity.

It's built on maintaining your identities and not having one or the other

try to

reinvent their personality because they think that that's what the other person wants.

Because if they lose that person, that's their soulmate.

And if you lose that soulmate,

you know, it's like a Michael Bolton song, you know, how am I supposed to live without you?

Yeah.

Something sappy, you know, saccharine sweet like that.

So it's, it doesn't, honestly, I think it's probably one of the most debilitating beliefs that they're, especially,

not not so much now, but like when I was writing the books in the first place, like the very first book,

that was something that every guy was, look, I want to find the one.

I want to find some perfect relationship who's going to be just,

who's going to be as much into me as I'm into her.

It was just this,

there's a lot to that.

And that's actually the reason why I made that the very first chapter in the book, because I thought, if somebody reads this book, what do I want?

Like, if they only read one chapter, they go, okay, I'm going to read this and throw it away.

Right.

If they read one chapter, what's the most important message?

And that was the most important message, really.

Yes, wow, yeah, I don't like when people use that as a crutch, but at the same time, here's where I differ from the red pill stuff:

uh, I think sex is more than just a physical experience, and they're just rocking up bodies.

And you know, I think it's pretty spiritual, honestly.

Um, I

would only part ways with that in the sense that I understand the visceral side of it.

I understand the

guys who are who want to apply a cosmic meaning to sex.

And usually it's guys who don't have a lot of experience.

So when that's another reason why I

encourage, but I understand like the necessity for spinning plates and dating non-exclusively, because it gives you a better perspective on

what actual, at least the physical act of what sex is.

Right.

So

whenever I'm talking to guys who have sort of a limited experience with sexuality, they always tend to sort of spiritualize.

It doesn't even have to be that.

It doesn't even have to necessarily be religion.

It could be,

I've never meaningful, I have meaningful sex, meaningless, meaningful.

Meaning, the word meaning is a container word.

And you can put anything you want to into that container.

So if meaningful sex to me is getting, you know, a blowjob every two weeks, right, that has meaning for me.

Why are you to tell me that that's not, right?

Well, it's because we can contextualize that and put that into that container.

And then we can use that as sort of our justification for anything else that we want.

Now, is there some sort of cosmic significance to sex?

I mean, if you look at it from just a physical side of things, what is the ultimate?

See, there's a proximate goal or the proximate outcome, and then there's the ultimate outcome.

So the proximate outcome is when I saw my wife in the club that night, I wasn't thinking, hmm.

I wonder if she'd be a really good mother for my child.

I wonder if

we would be a really good fit together and she would make a good wife and everything else.

That wasn't what I was thinking.

I was like, I want to tap that ass.

How do I tap that ass is what I was thinking, right?

Because that was my proximate goal at that time, right?

The ultimate goal, of course, or the ultimate outcome of all of that was I reproduce with her.

I have a child with her who's a wonderful kid and who is married herself now as of last year, just celebrated her first anniversary.

And we both are on the same page spiritually.

We're both on the same page sort of like life plan-wise.

We're both, we're very compatible, but we also respect each other's individual identities too.

So, the things that I want to do, like people always ask me this, I'll say, like, Rolo, why aren't you married?

Why are you hanging out with these Maxim models or these FHM models?

Well, you know, I'm sort of vicariously living a lifestyle that they think is in some way

counterintuitive to what they would expect from, like, say, someone who's been married for 28 years.

And the thing is, is that's how good a match I am with my wife is that it's okay for me to be doing this.

It's all right for me to be doing these things

because she trusts me and she knows that there's no way in hell I'm going to cheat.

I've never cheated on my wife and

I never would, right?

But again, it's, you know, when you're, when you're looking at sex from a

spiritual side of things

and you have that as sort of your

base, your base ideology, for lack of a better term.

It starts to become, that's when I get those guys who will say, say, well, how can you do this?

Well, because you don't understand that I have come to the relationship I'm in with my wife right now because I did all those other things, because I had those experiences.

I'm not saying all of them were great.

You know, I don't necessarily,

of all of the women that I've been with over the course of my life,

Maybe I regret one or two or two, you know, something like that.

And usually it's just after the fact, I wasn't regretting it at the time, but it's usually after the fact because you're kind of like saying, oh, that was kind of a mistake.

i could have used my time more efficiently right and especially when you get into your 50s you look back and you go how like how could i have done that better

and then try to relate of course nobody listens to you anyways

but like how would i have done that better how could i have made that more efficient how could i have made that uh a better decision at that time and it wasn't the it was hardly ever the sexual experience it was all the fallout that came after that

so um

so if I'm like in a relationship with a borderline personality disorder girlfriend, which I had when I was in my mid-20s, I didn't realize it at the time.

I thought it was great fucking sex.

But the thing is, is that,

but she was crazy in bed and crazy out of bed.

And so, it wasn't the sex part of it.

It was everything else that was outside of that.

And so

going through that and understanding that and learning all that stuff is what really helped contribute to a lot of the stuff that I write in my books, or at least it motivated me to do the things and be, have the interests that I do.

So, you know, I can remember,

I can remember being in

college and I was going, I think it was the first time I was, I was just a grad student, or yeah, undergrad at that time.

And I was looking at the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for like psychology.

And of course, it's like this, basically it's this big giant, you know, catalog of all these like personality disorders.

And they tell you, like, when you're reading this thing,

don't like, take it with a grain of salt because you'll see all of these like symptoms in all your friends, and they all say, Everyone, oh, you're schizophrenic, and you're bipolar, and you're like,

You'll over-diagnose it in the beginning.

But there was one part where I came across the cluster B personality disorders, and one of those is borderline personality disorder.

And it was exactly, I mean, every single symptom was what my

mid-20s girlfriend had at that time.

And I was just like, and I got chills.

So

when I finally realized that there was actually a diagnosis for that, that's when I began to think that just to understand how important it was for me to have gone through that and get out of it.

So that when I'm talking to guys who are in that position right there, here's what you can look for.

And here's what you're dealing with.

And here's how you, here's the decisions that you're probably going to need to make to get out of that, extricate yourself from that situation.

So

when it comes to whether it's a spiritual thing for sex or if it's the the physical side of sex, because I tend to look at, I've written a book on religion.

I mean, it's called Religion.

The title of the book is Religion, the Rational Male Religion.

The very last chapter in that book, I go into, and I'm not going to give it to you.

I hope people will read it.

Hold on, it's chapter 14.

It's the last chapter.

Because people want to say, well, Rolly, you're the rational male.

How can you believe in God?

Right.

And I'm like, well, I do.

And I come to it from a very rational perspective.

And I think

the very fact that I do that, like I come to that beliefs through a series of

if-then logic.

When I get to that point, I think the people who are like atheists hate my guts, and the people who are religious hate my guts too, because

I kind of destroy the magic for believers.

And then I kind of like throw like the more like atheist kind of readers off track because they tend to think of me as being like sort of like way more logical.

And or they demand like mr spock levels of like you know cutting off your emotional side right and which i think is emotion is part of the human experience right so if if if sex is some cosmically significant act for you i mean that's still part of the magic for you at least you haven't lost that magical side right but the thing is is that really what's the what is the the the visceral side of it what's the physical side what's the the material side of it right which is essentially it's for reproduction you know you you want to have sex because it's fun and it feels good and it's you're making a connection with your wife or your girlfriend.

I guess you're married, right?

About to be, yeah.

About to be married.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

We'll dive into that afterwards.

But

I'm not saying you shouldn't necessarily dissociate spirituality from it, but I'm just saying I think it's we do ourselves a disservice when it's just about the spiritual or it's just about the physical.

No, I think it's both.

Yeah, yeah, coming together, right?

The thing is, is like the people who throw me off, like who want to say, you're married, how can you be with these girls girls and these porn stars and everything, they are all coming from like a strictly spiritual perspective.

Whereas then there's the other guys who are like, who want to say, well,

it's all about just notch count and everything is like,

and by the way, I don't see it like that either.

I think that that's probably a

misperception that a lot of people have about the red pill, that it's just about getting your dick wet and it's measuring your ego by your notch count.

It's not that.

But there's that contingency of guys who want to say that.

I think

there needs to be sort of this understanding or mutual appreciation of the visceral, the animal side of us and the spiritual side of us because usually we tend to live in one or the other.

And I think that it's there there can be a balance between those two.

Agreed.

I love that.

You mentioned your daughter just got married.

How much say did you have in the husband?

Did he have to get your permission?

How much he asked me for my permission.

Actually, yes.

And I'm glad you asked that because I had this conversation with him.

And of course, I'm Roll Tomasi.

You're asking for my daughter.

You must have been shitting himself.

yeah well it's

you know you're in for a monologue so just like sit down here we go you know um

the the main the main gist of it was uh I said do you know what you're asking me He said well, yeah,

I want your daughter's hand in marriage.

I'm like, well, that's a very nice romantic gesture.

And I'm sure if we lived in the age of courtly love, that that would be, you know, like in the in the high renaissance, we would be, that would be, that'd be awesome, right?

But what you're really asking is there's a fun, there is a function function to asking a husband or a excuse me a father's permission to marry his daughter because it's um

i i actually once again wrote about this in in religion the idea of prearranged marriages

now of course this isn't a pre-arranged marriage but the the um the notion of asking for a father or father's for your daughter's hand in marriage you're not just asking me for to marry my daughter, you're asking me to blend my tribe with your tribe.

And

if you look at like the ancient Scots and you look at

just a lot of different ancient cultures, they have rituals that are like, if you're going to ask permission, you have to jump through a lot of hoops.

You got to trial by combat.

That's what I should have said.

You're going to have to defeat me in single combat before you can do that.

If we lived, you know, just a few hundred years ago, that might have been

that might have been part of it, depending on the culture.

Yeah.

So, but fortunately, we don't have to do those things.

There was one stipulation that they name their first child.

If it was a male child, I wanted to name the child.

But

other than that, I told him, I said, you're asking me to blend my family with yours.

I said, as a son-in-law, I would love to have you because I think you're a great guy.

I think you're a perfect fit for my daughter.

But I also have to take into consideration your family and your family's family and the fact that any children that's produced as a result of this marriage, their goal,

how is this going to affect them?

How is your,

have you thought about any of this kind of stuff?

And I wish I would have talked to James Sexton before all of this.

James Sexton, the divorce attorney guy, because James was saying this, and I, he gave me some insight about stuff that I hadn't even thought about.

It's really, we, we know more about our, like, our home mortgages and our titles and our, and

the stipulations and the legalities of like buying a car title than we do about like marriage and what's entailed in marriage.

Like, yeah, this is what you're signing up for.

And he was, he was suggesting and now this is never going to happen but it was funny as hell he was suggesting that there needs to be like in the marriage contract you have to have like all you know you have to sign here sign here initial initial initial initial you know if you're going to buy a house or something yeah um and just so that you understand and you have read all of these sort of you know uh legalistic stipulations.

We don't, we don't do anything even remotely like that.

And I thought that was kind of a, that was interesting because I think we need to have not just a like premarital counseling, we need to have post-marital counseling as well.

And

that was part of the conversation that I had.

But

the main gist of the conversation I had with my son-in-law was that you're asking me, and I told him I'm happy to have my clan mix with your clan, of course, but I wanted him to understand what was going on because a marriage is not just about the two people involved in the marriage.

It's also involved with the in-laws and the friends of the in-laws, my friend.

Like, for what I do, there's probably some people who wouldn't want to be associated with me because like, like, they wouldn't want to marry my daughter.

I wouldn't want to marry off my son to them because of that.

Right.

Because maybe they had a bad, you know, they just didn't have a misperception.

Right.

I would love to have the opportunity to sort of clarify that.

But

the idea of mixing families is really what marriage is about.

And

like a lot of people want to say, like, oh, you know, the real purpose of marriage was to like strengthen alliances and like, like, you know, sell off your daughter like chattel and everything.

It's like, no, it wasn't.

I said for the nobles and the aristocracy of the time.

Sure.

But, you know, there was a lot more people who are of the lower classes that were getting married than the aristocracy just simply because of numbers.

Right.

Right.

So marriage served a much different purpose than just what, you know, just like solidifying alliances, you know, with Spain, with France or something like that.

And

so when I was telling him this, I said, you know, I'm happy to have my family be co-mingled with yours.

But I said, you're creating a ripple right now.

And what that ripple effect is going to be is you and my daughter are coming together and you're going to have children.

And those children are going to have children as well.

And when I married my wife, my parents are gone.

They're, they're already deceased, but my, my wife's parents are still alive.

And I, I

singularly take care of her mother, my mother-in-law, okay?

That's part of marriage.

I married my wife.

And so, you know, and I was taking care of my mom, I was taking care of my dad, you know, when they're in their last days, right?

But they're gone now.

And I don't, I don't, I'm glad I don't have to take care of my father-in-law because he's pretty much set.

But my mother-in-law has lived with us for a long time.

And I've always had, like, right now, I'm buying a house in Vegas.

I have to find a place that can accommodate my mother-in-law in a certain room.

I know what she does, I know what she likes to do.

And I'm because it's like, what is it?

In the mafia, what is it?

Dutia familia, right?

That's, that's me.

Like, you're not my blood relative, technically, but you're my married relative.

So when I married my wife, that was part of the the deal.

Right.

And when my

son-in-law and my daughter get married,

I told her, I said, you might have to take care of me.

You might have to take care of my wife.

Maybe I'll be gone, but you might have to take care of my wife.

Or something of the same nature.

If you have grand, if you have children or grandchildren that are produced as a result of this, what is your relationship?

The quality of your relationship is going to affect them as well.

So it's seeing the force for the trees because when you're asking for someone's hand in marriage, it's like you're just mooning over the girl.

Again, proximate outcome versus ultimate outcome.

The ultimate outcome of is I'm taking care of my mother-in-law.

I didn't see that coming when I got married in 96.

Yeah, that's good to think about.

People don't think about like the family.

Speaking of proximate outcomes, you say.

So you should think about that before you put a ring on it.

I like her parents, so I wouldn't mind taking care of her parents.

Yeah, I would do that for her.

You tweeted out happiness is a proximate outcome.

It's not an ultimate outcome.

And a lot of people think it is an ultimate outcome, right?

Yeah, it's probably one of the worst lies we sell, particularly to women right now.

I would say

if there's a particular gender that

social myth hurts the most, it's women.

Because it sells us on this idea of some sort of permanent contentment and happiness.

Or I'll read these.

You'll see this constantly.

It's this back and forth.

You'll see one article that says, single, childless women are the most happy demographic, right?

And then two months later, there'll be another one.

Single childless women are more miserable than ever.

Or women are just more unhappy than they've been in the past generations, right?

It's always this back and forth.

It's like these conflicting messages.

And the reason why it's so confusing and conflicting is because happiness is an emotion.

And that emotion,

it's part of it.

Like I can induce,

if you

give you some tequila right now,

it's going to alter your mood.

You're going to be happier, right?

If I give you SSRIs, if I give give you like antidepressants, I can affect your emotional state through chemicals.

So emotions can be controlled.

They're not magical, you know, things that pixie dust or, you know, light from heaven that shines down on you, right?

That includes love.

That includes, that includes depression.

It includes anxiety.

It includes anger.

It includes happiness.

Happiness is the one we focus on the most because we think we have this idea that we can just, if we could just find this perfect balance of like self-help books and healing and therapy and all this other stuff that we're going to find some permanent solution to be to living a permanently 100% content life and the fact of the matter is is that the human condition is defined by discontent not by content and and that's a good thing that's actually a that's a feature not a bug okay because god forbid we're just because if we were all content all the time we would not we wouldn't grow we wouldn't we wouldn't want more we wouldn't build more we wouldn't do more

but happiness and by the way, I got this, I was made aware of this concept through a book called Positive Evolutionary Psychology.

And I was looking for some more like, you know, A-plus kind of good news kind of stuff about evolutionary psychology because I think a lot of people really, when they look at EvoPsych, they think of it as, oh, it's just about guys trying to justify getting their dick wet.

Okay.

Well, this book was not about that.

Okay.

The other thing is, evolutionary psychology is not just about sex.

Okay.

It's also about consumerism.

It's about economics.

It's about other things too.

But everybody, the sexy stuff, the fun stuff, the stuff that people post tweets about, that's what they go.

That's what goes viral.

That's what goes viral.

But so the concept is this, is that happiness is a proximate outcome, not an ultimate outcome.

So we can't be happy, but we can do things that make us feel happiness.

So if I'm playing guitar and I'm just, I come up with a great riff or something like that, it's intrinsically rewarding to me.

And I feel happiness as a result of doing something that makes me feel happy.

Okay.

When I'm not doing it, it's not that, oh, I wrote this great song.

It's so awesome.

The awesome song is great.

I'm glad people dig on it.

But it was the process of writing that song that made me happy.

It's not the actual outcome of it that made me happy.

Okay.

So when people say, well, what, you know, are you happy?

Well, that's a sort of a subjective term because am I doing something right now that's making me feel happy?

Or do I have some sort of overall, well, let's see, on an overall scale, do I really feel happy?

You're going to give an answer based on what your emotional conditions are at that particular time.

So

when we talk about happiness,

it's not something that is a permanently maintainable state, although we believe it is.

That's why we get addicted to drugs.

That's why we have SSRIs.

That's why we prescribe this.

We prescribe

antidepressants to women because women believe that they're unhappy.

And they're unhappy because they're not doing anything.

They're just simply,

they're not doing the things that would make them feel happiness.

Because our emotions, evolutionarily speaking, our emotions are meant to drive us from one state to another.

And usually those predicaments are reproduction or survival.

So if you're, if you're, have you ever been hangry before?

Yeah.

We're like, ah, you pissed off on it.

Well, that's a reaction because what that anger and that frustration and that urgency does is in our evolutionary past, would have driven us to go run down small prey and go and kill something so that I can eat something.

I always wondered where that came from, actually.

So, but that's the

prompt.

That anger, that hungriness, that emotional state drives us because we're hungry.

It's survival.

We need to eat something or kill something or find some food and get out and get off our asses and do something.

We don't have to worry about that in the 21st century because we can just go down to Taco Bell and pick up a Taco Bell Grande, right?

But

the idea of a permanent happiness is something of like, say, a goal state.

And I think more so for women because women tend to be more focused on long-term security than men, than men are.

Men are out there like doing stuff.

And not to say that women don't, but if women are unhappy, or I have like some of the girls that I work with or that I talk with, they'll say, oh, I'm so depressed.

I'm so this.

I'm like, get off your ass and go to the gym.

You will be happy when you're at the gym.

Happiness, the happy place is the gym.

Go there.

I can flip the switch.

Or I can say like, well, what do you enjoy doing?

Well, I like doing this.

I like going to the library.

I like going and hanging out with my friends.

Like, usually it's something really like, I want to go drink.

And like that,

the urge to go drink is a chemical escape that will prompt, like I said, you can prompt your emotions through drink.

Like

when you break up with a girl or a girl breaks up with you or something like that, what's the first thing guys do?

Go down to the bar and get drunk.

And the reason why they're doing that is because the happiness, the feeling, like the euphoric feeling of being in love or being in lust or having sort of like that infatuation, it triggers a chemical response in your brain.

And what happens is when you take that chemical response away, now you have to go find something to replace it with, right?

You have to perform novel behaviors.

I'm going to go work out.

I'm just going to focus on my work.

I'm going to go work out more.

I'm going to go get drunk.

What those are is it's trying to fill that sort of dopamine endorphin

chemical cocktail with something that is close, like chemically close to it.

So that's why guys go get blackout drunk after they get through a breakup.

It seems like the easiest way to go and feel good because all of those good feelings are now gone.

The generator for those is gone.

And so there's this vacuum of that good feeling.

So what do they do?

They replace it with drugs or alcohol or whatever else.

And so when we're talking about happiness, and really, I look at it as like, say, contentment, as I was saying before, that's a little more philosophical, but like from a chemical perspective, our emotions are part of a process where we interpret our surroundings.

So if we have like instinct, we have emotion, and we have reason.

And we can look at these through the brain as well.

It's called the triune mind theory.

And which is a theory that was supposedly debunked back in the 70s, but now I think a lot of people are kind of taking a new look at it because we know more about like our neurology.

So if you look at like, say, the lizard brain or the hind brain, I'm sure you've heard those terms thrown out there.

That's your instinct.

That's like at the base, like your brain stem, right?

And that's like if I threw something at you right now, you'd instinctively like, you know, flinch or whatever.

It's this autonomous kind of instinctual reactions.

And so there's that's that's a way, it's the most immediate, fastest way of interpreting our surroundings.

You know, if you're in a dangerous situation or like a fly's fight or flight, right?

Exactly.

That's those are the instinctual, that's the instinctual way of processing like stimuli from outside.

Then there's the emotional way.

How does this make me feel?

Am I pissed off?

Am I hangry?

Right.

Am I happy?

Am I, do I want to get laid?

I'm like, I want to get laid.

You know, what's the emotional

processing that goes along with what I'm seeing?

How do I feel about what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, like through the senses, what I'm smelling, what I'm tasting, that kind of stuff.

And that's, it's, it's slower than instinct, but it's faster than reason because reason requires a lot of time and learning.

So you have to, um, you have to learn karate.

Nobody wants to get into a conflict and like get punched in the face.

Nobody would, you know, most human beings are conflict diverse, right?

They don't want to put their face in front of a flying fist, right?

But they will if they're trained for it and they've, they've learned and their rational, reasonable brain says, okay, I've trained for this, wax on, wax on, I know what I'm going to do.

Or, for instance, I drove my Camaro here, right?

Human beings didn't evolve to drive cars at 90 miles an hour, right?

But we have, we can figure it out after we learn certain things.

We know the rules of the road.

We know what we're, you know, we learn to anticipate things to turn, slow down here and that kind of stuff.

But we do that through a process of reason and rationality But that is the slowest part

So that's why we tend to default to emotions and we let emotions make decisions for us rather than our rational minds because our rational mind takes longer to learn things right that way and so when we're looking at emotions when we're looking at happiness Those are physical.

That's a those are physical manifestations.

They're not like spiritual emotional, you know, crazy woo-woo magic things.

Those are actual things that can be altered by your brain chemistry.

So when we're looking at, um, when we're looking at happiness in particular, the happiness part of all of that is what is intrinsically rewarding to you and what do you do that makes you happy as opposed to being in this nirvanic euphoric state.

The only way you get to that is drinking or drugs or SSRIs.

Yeah, I'm glad you ordered it like that because for years I thought this is a classic one that money would bring happiness and chasing money and then I got some money, nothing changed.

But you know what made you happy?

Getting the money.

Right.

Doing the things that got you the money.

Once you had it, you're like, what the hell?

Yeah, once I had it,

I can buy it.

You can have anything you want.

I want more money.

Yeah, there's no.

Because you were enjoying making the money, right?

The process of making the money.

In fact, that's one.

You want to know the Tomasi secret of success?

If you can find a way to be happy making the money, then you can make money.

You can do if that becomes the process of doing that becomes intrinsically rewarding, then that's the key, really of the methodology, anyways, to success.

And that was hard for me to find podcasting and for you to.

I used to work for this guy.

His name was Dave Vandevelt and he was the, he used to be the one of the principal founders of Kettle One Vodka.

Okay.

And then he left that place and then he started and founded Van Gogh Vodka, which is where I came in.

I did all their bottles and I did all their art direction for them.

But one thing I learned from him and sort of just like on the fly, I mean, I learned a lot of things from him, but this was a guy who would like work all the time.

He would like literally park his RV outside of the headquarters of our place in Orlando, Florida.

And he would have been happy as a pig and shit just to just sit there in that RV and just work all the time.

Now,

he had a girlfriend who ended up becoming his wife later on who said, we need a house, you know, but all he wanted to do was be there doing new projects, new products, and everything else because that's what made him happy.

And I didn't realize, like, how can somebody possibly work this hard?

And like, you know, he didn't do anything with his money except channel it back into the business to make more because that's what made him happy was the actual process.

And I didn't figure that out until I started reading the

biography of like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

Both of those guys have like similar kind of personalities.

Like Elon Musk doesn't care about where he'll couch surf with his father.

He has no house.

He has no house.

Why?

He's got more money than God.

Why would he?

If he's not the richest, he's the second richest.

I know that maybe Jeff Bezos is more rich than he is.

But the guy will still literally

couch surf because he wants to be closer to the Tesla Giga Factory or SpaceX or something like that.

So he can go to sleep as an inconvenience for him.

He just wants to get up and go and do it because that's what he wants to do, because doing it makes him happy.

So that's why he keeps repeating that process.

People go, oh, you're the most successful guy in the world.

Why is that?

Because my singular focus is making myself happy by doing more shit all the time.

The same thing you could say was true for Steve Jobs.

Yeah, love it.

Are you working on another book right now?

I am, actually.

I'm working on a book called Reignite.

And

it's going to be,

I told everybody I was never going to do another book for the series, but this is going to be in the series.

It'll be the sixth book.

The finale.

For now.

I said the fifth book was the finale, but

Reignite is going to be a book that is specifically catered to guys who are between the ages of 45 and 65 years old.

Interesting.

Because that is the prime demographic for male suicide.

And

also, I should say, like the prime demographic for first divorce for men is like 43, I think.

And so

it was prompted by a couple of things.

I'm doing a program through Mike Sartain's group, the Men of Action Group, but we're focusing on 45 to 65-year-old individuals.

And whether they're coming out of a bad divorce or they simply never got married, it doesn't matter to me.

We're just helping guys sort of like reintegrate themselves into the global sexual marketplace, into a very confusing landscape that they don't really, they're unprepared for, they don't understand.

Now, there are guys who who I have worked with in the past.

Like I'm very good friends with Robert Kiyosaki, my close personal friend.

And then his group, George Gammon,

Ken McElroy, and Jason Hartman.

They're all real estate guys, like big Bucks real estate guys.

But they all have sort of one commonality.

Well, with the exception of McElroy.

McElroy would not like me saying this about him.

But they want to be able to sort of navigate the sexual marketplace.

And so they have read my book.

In fact, that's how I helped Robert Kiyosaki through his divorce with Kim Kiyosaki.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's when he reached out to me.

And then we started having, we had a sort of a professional arrangement first, and then we just became really good friends.

I didn't know he got divorced.

No, he did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you're not supposed to.

You weren't supposed to know that.

So the book itself is going to be sort of helping guys sort of reintegrate themselves back into the sexual marketplace after a bad divorce, or maybe they came out of a sexless marriage or something like that.

Those are common, I heard.

Because there's no support base for those guys.

Like when guys come out of

a divorce and they're just absolutely ruined emotionally and financially and just like in every way imaginable, they will, they're faced with a choice.

And the choice is I can either delete myself or I can rebuild myself.

And the older that individual is, the harder rebuild myself that choice becomes for them, which is why that's the prime demographic for men.

Men kill themselves at like three and a half to four times the rate of women just in general.

Wow.

But when a man man is divorced, he is eight times more likely to take his own mother.

Holy crap.

And so that's why I'm actually doing something.

So we have a, not only do we have a group called Reignite, I'm writing the book for these guys in specific.

It's, I don't want to call it a primer because I think it's general for everyone.

But the Reignite book is to reignite your life, like get yourself back into the game kind of thing.

And

most of these guys are very confused.

They don't know how, they don't know anything about style.

They don't know anything.

All of the things and all of the limited social skills that they had to learn to get with their wife 20 years ago or 25 years ago is not necessarily in play in 2024.

And so we're through a group of guys who are just sort of getting together and doing things.

I'm of the opinion that when

you can't give men female therapy.

It's not interchangeable.

And that's the thing that really, really, it's one of my biggest pet peeves these days is women saying, oh, if a man's in therapy, it's so sexy.

No, no, it's not, because what he's doing is he's going and seeing a counselor that is, has no earthly idea how to counsel a man, right?

Or how to, how men communicate.

They're using female therapy techniques on men.

And

from my perspective and from my experience, men tend to communicate far better when they're all working on something like doing, right?

So some of the best conversations I've ever had with my brother, my brother reconditions and restores like classic muscle cars.

Some of the best conversations I've ever had with him is over

the hood of the Chevelle, right?

And so I thought about that and I go, you know, some of the best tribes that I have, like my band is a tribe.

My workout partners are a tribe.

My, you know, the people that I go fishing with are like Mike is part of my tribe.

You know, there's different,

men have little sub-tribes right now.

Maybe it's your, maybe it's your church.

Maybe it's your Bible study.

Maybe it's your men's group.

I don't know.

But men have little kind of sub-tribes.

And the reason why they form those sub-tribes is because they share a common interest.

So that's what I'm going to be doing with the group.

But it's also something I'm going to sort of dive into deeper in the book itself.

But the idea is that getting guys together over a common interest, maybe we go to the gun range, right?

Maybe we go fishing, like a deep sea fishing trip.

Maybe we go

play golf.

I don't know, whatever guys do, right?

But those interests.

I don't care.

We can play chess.

I don't care.

That's where those conversations take place because there's a mutual project.

Guys need to go and kill the woolly mammoth, right?

They need to have something, a collective project that they're working on to give them a sense of purpose.

And when men are united in a purpose, that's when they communicate.

And that's when you can have guys who are like, you know, maybe, maybe it's better for me to not kill myself.

Maybe I should rebuild myself because now I've got guys who are dependent on me or I got guys who are like, I want to go back to my squad.

I'm going to go read, re-enlist because I can't

leave my people behind, right?

So, and having those conversations and having those trial, like tribalism is another thing.

I think a lot of people think tribalism in a negative context.

I don't see it that way at all.

I see it as a feature and not a bug, especially when it comes to men who are who tend to be more hierarchical.

We organize society in hierarchies, and those hierarchies are formed around tribes.

So, that tribe could be your work, it could be the military, it could be my band, it could be whatever, right?

It doesn't make any difference.

That tribe is what gives men a sense of purpose.

And as I said before,

I hear a lot of people saying, you know, you want to live a life of meaning or purpose or whatever.

I think purpose is much easier to define than like some ephemeral definition of what meaning is, right?

So if that guy says, you know, my purpose is to finish this holly four-barrel carburetor here and we're going to go and do this and this is our project.

And enduring that part, it's intrinsically rewarding to repair that thing.

But as we're doing that, we're having these really good conversations as a result of that.

And I think that if more therapists, like, you know, board-certified APA therapists would use like even just simple techniques like that, I think they would be much more effective in sort of like helping men.

100%.

If I'm sitting next to my boy on the couch, I'm not going to tell him shit that I'm dealing with.

But if we're in the sauna, if we're playing basketball, if we're doing an activity, I'm going to open up a little bit.

We don't need a drum circle, right?

We don't need to sit around and like, let's all sit and talk about our feelings.

Like if you do that with guys, it'd be like, that's cringe.

Yeah.

Like guys are like,

what are you, gay?

But if you go say, hey, man, let's go to the gun range, right?

And then as a result of you going out there and shooting and everything like that and you have these really great conversations like i've had really great conversations with my father-in-law that i never had before he's the i'm not a gun guy at all but like he's the guy who made me a gun guy because we had those conversations because he said hey come to the range and i'm like okay well i've got a i've got a nine millimeter that's all i've got okay well hey you can shoot my my black powder he's like all into this stuff if you're if you're even slightly interested in in like shooting at all he's got you covered and so of course then what happens is I start buying more and more because I'm a collector.

And so now I guess I'm sort of like a hobbyist when it comes to that kind of stuff.

But as a result of having those conversations, and I've never communicated with my father-in-law like I have since we started like going shooting together.

So wow.

I love that.

Rolo, where can people find you and find your books and your podcast?

Sure.

My books are available, all five of them, soon to be six, are available on Amazon.

I also have, oh, if you don't like to read, I know how kids are today.

You can get them on Audible as well.

And as Mike Sartain says, you can listen to them at two and three and seven speed if you'd like to, if you're impatient enough.

So they're all available on Audible.

They're all available on Amazon and they are in digital format as well as physical format.

And by the way, if you're ever from Vegas and you have the book, I'm happy to sign your books for you whenever I, if you catch me, I'd be happy to do so.

Oh, that's cool.

And then, of course, I have, technically, I've got two shows right now.

My main show, of course, is The Rational Mail.

That's on 1 p.m.

Pacific, 4 p.m.

Eastern every Sunday.

That's my long-form show.

My channel, of course, is The Rational Mail.

And then I also do a,

I guess every other week, sometimes every week, show called Access Vegas.

It's here locally in Las Vegas, and that's with Mike Sartain and myself.

And we do a panel show, not unlike Fresh and Fit, but

our mission is not to kick the girls off.

Our mission is to have substantive, constructive conversation so that we can sort of like, you know, have a sort of a meeting of the minds.

And then we do interviews and we do, like, we do debates and stuff like that as well so um that's access vegas uh and that's usually on thursdays and in fact today being thursday it's today uh at 8 p.m pacific and 11 p.m eastern time uh we usually have anywhere between like

six and eight girls on the show.

Damn.

And some of them are porn stars and some of them are FHM models and some of them are entrepreneurs and some of them are real estate people.

So we have a we try to get a broad variety, although it is Vegas.

So if we have more porn stars than we have real estate,

you can assume me.

I love it, man.

Thanks for coming on.

That was awesome.

Yep.

Thanks for watching.

Guys, as always, see you next time.