1178: Connor Beaton | How Society Engineered a Generation of Lonely Men

1178: Connor Beaton | How Society Engineered a Generation of Lonely Men

This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers.

Even the occasional hacker, real life pirate, cold case, homicide investigator or hostage negotiator. If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and Cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show, a long overdue episode with my friend Connor Batton. He's the founder of Man Talks, a men's mental health companies, a smart dude.

We've been friends for years. Had a [00:01:00] lot of offline conversations that have been particularly insightful and I wanted to share some of that with you all here as well. Today we explore the loneliness epidemic in men, fatherless boys, the decline in dating and relationships, of course, with both genders, ai, girlfriends, incel, porn brain, and of course my favorite subject recently, I guess dick's.

Yes, A girthy tangent into the obsession over penis size and a whole lot more. Here we go with Connor Batten.

Thanks for doing this on short notice, man. I, I know we've been planning to do this for about eight years. A hot minute, man. A hot minute. Yeah. Uh, I'm just glad to be here. Yeah. Let's talk about arson, incel, and dicks. That's what we got today. That was great. Yeah, I, it's funny because I'm not actually joking.

That's all in

Connor Beaton: the notes here. That's, that the, it was in the notes, lots of stat. That's my wife was like, why do you have a stat about repeat arsonists? And I was like, well, because it fits in on the whole. Macro [00:02:00] picture of, you know,

Jordan Harbinger: kids without fathers. I thought that was really interesting. 'cause I grew up in Detroit or the Detroit area and every, there's something called Devil's Night, which I don't even know if it exists outside of Detroit, but it's the night before Halloween, I think.

And it is a massive arson night where tons of buildings, at least in the eighties and nineties, used to get burnt down.

Crosstalk: Really?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And usually abandoned buildings. Okay. But the problem with abandoned buildings in Detroit is people still live in them. You don't really know if it's abandoned. There could be homeless, you know, unhoused, people living in there.

There could be families with kids living in there. 'cause they're like, oh, this house isn't so bad. We'll just live in here rent free until dad gets another job. Yeah. It doesn't have electricity, but who care? You know, there's a lot. Or they does have electricity and gas, right? So like somebody will go in there and just burn it down, not realizing there's a family that lives in the basement.

So why would you do this? I used to light things on fire when I was a kid, but it was like wooden

Connor Beaton: sticks. There's a boxes, very renowned story in my family. That I reached a certain age and I started lighting everything on fire. Yeah. Like I, I got these, uh, rocket [00:03:00] engines.

Crosstalk: Oh yeah. Super

Connor Beaton: fun. And I, I attached them to my sister's Barbie car and I was trying to like, create a rocket.

And so I strung the wire back up to the deck and me and my buddy like lit it up. And I thought this rocket was gonna like, you know, you know, up a hundred couple feet, but instead it just blew up and like disintegrated the Barbie car. Oh. That it was strapped to, and then blew apart the fireplace outside that it was inside of.

And then the other story is spraying pine cones with crappy $5 musk. Yeah. Like one of my aunts gave to me and letting them on fire and then hocking them at my sister.

Crosstalk: Oh, that's terrible. I was with you. I think it's very throwing at, I I think it's a very like,

Connor Beaton: common thing she was riding by on her bicycle, right?

Yeah, of course. Like, no, no siblings were hurt in this story, but that's, uh, yeah. You know, I think it's very common. You know, there's, yeah. There's this thing called young man syndrome, you know, young Man's syndrome. Yeah. Young Man's Syndrome is this period of time where the highest mortality rates happen.

The highest suicide rates happen. The highest injury rates happen for young men, and it's between the ages [00:04:00] of 16 and 26. That's a long time, right? 10 years. You can do a lot of damage to yourself in 10 years. A lot of damage. But I think that's this period of time where young men are trying to sort out their relationship to risk taking relationships and sex, their own identity, and we have a very externalized way of trying to sort those things out.

Mm-hmm. You know, it's not like an internal process, it's usually not a social process. It's like I gotta go out into the world and try and grapple with who am I and who am I socially and contextually within the world. A lot of the times that leads to us doing really stupid things. You know, I was 19 and bought a thousand cc motorcycle.

I was gonna say, it's these guys

Jordan Harbinger: who ride bikes, no helmet on the highway, and they're, they're lane splitting. And you're like, you know that if you hit like a rock Yeah. You're dead. It, you're a meat cran. It's over. Yeah, it's over. And even with a helmet, what if someone is still doing this at like age, I dunno, 45 asking for a friend.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. I mean, there's probably a certain [00:05:00] propensity towards trying to feel alive through taking risks. Mm-hmm.

Jordan Harbinger: Just a risk. There's the whole like finding my identity, trying on new things. Yeah. I feel like I'm still doing that. I'm not doing as many dangerous things. Aha. Well that's fair.

Connor Beaton: Okay. A a lot of the times, this is a whole different subject, but what we psychologically do with things like trauma and abuse and abandonment and attachment issues is there's a whole bunch of ways that we have maladaptive strategies to try and deal with the pain and the suffering that can coincide with that.

So for some people they sexualize those wounds and they try and explore them and figure them out by different risky sexual behaviors. And then for other people, they will take crazy risks with money or they'll take crazy risks with gambling or relationships or in their career. And so some of those things can show up in that way.

But I think what you're talking about is just kinda like a normal, I'm trying to figure out who I am. You know, I'm trying to figure out what's my purpose, what's my function in the world? And I think that's a big question for a lot of men who [00:06:00] feel very rudderless. Yeah. In today's society. Yeah. When we see this like collapse of young men in today's society,

Jordan Harbinger: I wanna talk about loneliness first.

I think. 'cause the loneliness epidemic. It seems very real. I, I'm ashamed to admit this. I thought it was kind of a BS thing. 'cause I, 2020 hindsight I probably did experience it, but I forgot about it. And also a lot of my friends never talked about it. But the more I talk with men who are fans of the show, for example, and our advice inbox on Fridays or just online or just even on Reddit and look, this is an online forum, so self-selects a little bit for maybe people that are online all the time and are lonelier.

But I see and hear about this constantly. Yeah. Guys feel like they have very few and your, your stats that you sent me, many guys feel like they have no close friends. Yeah. That's actually almost hard to believe. It's hard to wrap my mind around

Connor Beaton: that. I think in the broader context, when we sort of pull back a lot of the male oriented spaces have collapsed over the last couple decades.

What is a male oriented space? It's like places that are just for boys and men to gather. Things like [00:07:00] Boy Scouts. It's not just boys anymore. It's co-ed now. Yeah, it's

Jordan Harbinger: co-ed. Is that a bad thing though? Let me pause on that. 'cause I'm a Yeah, as an Eagle Scout, it seems cool that you can sure do that with your son and your daughter.

Connor Beaton: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that we do need co-ed spaces a hundred percent, no doubt. And throughout the course of human history, young boys have had spaces where they've learned and grappled how to be young men. And in many ways, manhood and even masculinity to some degree, is, is something that is modeled for a young man.

And so when we collapse those spaces where young men learn, here's how I deal with anger. Here's how I deal with power. Here's how I deal with feeling powerless. Here's how I, you know, interact with women. Here's how I be a good citizen when those spaces start to collapse. A young man is left with a vacuum or a vacancy of learning how to go through this transitory period between being a boy and then being a teenager, and then being a man, and the responsibilities that come along with that, and the expectations that come [00:08:00] along with that.

I think we've gone through this transition where for a period of time we told men, this is exactly how you have to be. You have to fit into this box and fit into this mold. It was constrictive, and then that shifted, and for the last decade or two how manhood and masculinity has been formed is, here's all the things that you shouldn't do.

Yeah. Don't do any of those things. Don't be any of these things. Mm-hmm. But we haven't actually created direction for men. And so for a lot of guys, they fill in the gaps with charismatic online personalities that are very enticing, that fill that void. You know, we do need some of these spaces because young men are gonna go through these periods.

Where they're looking for advice. And one of the things that I sent you is just the impact of fatherless homes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We can get into that in a minute. I, I do wanna stick on the loneliness thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's really terrifying. 15% of men report having no close friends. In 1990, that was 3%. And if you had no friends in 1990, I mean, I don't know anybody, well, [00:09:00] I guess they didn't have any friends, so why would I know them?

But, but I feel like there weren't that many guys that seemed chronically lonely. Yeah. Like all of us played together. Right. Yeah. Among men, aged 18 to 24. 28% say they have no close friends. In contrast, only 10% of women report the same. So women are doing much better on this front. And in 2020, Harvard found 61% of men had felt serious loneliness in the past month.

Yes. That's really damning. I don't think that existed when I was younger. I could just be wrong. But it looks like the data supports that one in five men could not identify a best friend. I don't think I've ever had this situation in my whole life. Yeah, me either. 27% of men said they had a best friend they could talk to about personal issues.

That's really sad. Yeah. I mean, this is like 75% of guys don't have anybody they can talk to about personal issues. These are the, a lot of the

Connor Beaton: men that you see in the online forums that are trying to get some advice and some grasp on how to actually just operate as a human being in the world. You know, how to be social, how to interact with people at the coffee shop.

Not, not like [00:10:00] nevermind going up and you know, asking somebody else for their phone number or going on a date. Yeah. But just basic social things. And there's a lot of contributing factors to this. I do think not having fathers in the home has impacted this for sure. I think obviously the rise of social media has made it so much easier.

Yeah. For people that are naturally more introverted, that have higher levels of social anxiousness and anxiety, to not have to deal with the stress to just never do anything. I'm just never doing anything. But then also. There is this correlation for young boys that the more that they're incentivized to take risks, the more healthy and integrated they are in society.

Healthy risks, not like a dangerous, you know, death defying risk. What's a healthy risk like asking a girl

Jordan Harbinger: on a

Connor Beaton: date

Jordan Harbinger: is

Connor Beaton: that asking a girl a day, risking rejection, like taking the risks sometimes to join a sports team, taking a risk to go up to another guy at the gym, you know, in high school and start up a conversation.

Then maybe a friendship develops outta that, talking to another guy at a, at a party, you know, over a [00:11:00] drink and just starting up a conversation. Those are just little social risks that a lot of young men have not been taught to take and they'd not been incentivized to take. And so slowly it's chipped away at their capacity to even have some of these normalized social skills.

And then I think the other thing is we have replaced relationship in a big way with technology, right? So I'm, I worked at Apple for a period of time. I. Oversaw some of the retail stores in British Columbia. I remember being in the retail store and seeing kids that are like two, three years old just on iPads.

And I think we've gone through this generation where instead of being relational and learning how to regulate your nervous system and just be with unwanted emotions, any time that happens, what we see is young boys and young girls turning towards technology as a kind of salve, as a kind of digital soother for themselves when their system is upset.

And I think when you look at porn usage is another good example. Yeah, I wanna [00:12:00] talk about that. You know, young men use that, or men in general really use that as a method to soothe themselves. And this creates even more loneliness because you have access to just so much.

Jordan Harbinger: Let's get into that. I wanna drop these last few stats.

Men are five times more likely to say they have no close friends than they were in 1990. Yes. 25% of men say they have five or more close friends. So 75% of men. Don't have five or more close friends. It's insane to me. Well, do you have any, like, do you have any notion

Connor Beaton: of Yeah. Do you have any friends, Jordan?

Yeah. Are you one of those Canada? Are you in stat? You dunno them I know. Go to a different school. Oh yeah. We're fellow Canadians. I forgot about that. I'm, I'm, I'm from

Jordan Harbinger: Michigan, so I'm Canadian with shitty healthcare. Okay. But so in America, I have to explain this joke now in America, if somebody was like, Hey man, you don't, you're a loser.

You don't have a girlfriend. The most common lie in Michigan anyway was, she lives in Canada or she lives in Ohio and or goes to a different school and you don't know her Uhhuh. And so it became this meme as we became adults or somebody would be like, Hey man, how long has it been since we've been outta work?

And I'd [00:13:00] be like, someone will go, he has a job, but it's in Canada, has a job, it's in Ohio. You don't know the company. Never heard of the company and or like, Hey man, are you dating anyone? She lives in Canada. So it's just because it's such a transparent lie. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm from Michigan, so I'm actually south.

You're basically north of parts of Canada. You're adopted

Connor Beaton: Canadian. Yes. You're adopted Canadian.

Jordan Harbinger: A Canadian that can't get, did you, did

Connor Beaton: you, when you turned 18, go across the border and go to strip clubs and bars? Yes. Only

Jordan Harbinger: when I was 18 though. Not when I was 16 and had a really shitty fake ID that said I was 18.

Ah, yeah. Yeah. Because I couldn't pass for 21. Right. And then you go to Windsor and you buy beer at Jokers or whatever, and, um, Windsor, or you go to some strip club and the girls are just like, are you a child? Because you look like a child,

Crosstalk: like you have

Connor Beaton: no facial hair whatsoever and no money. I, I at least had like the big sideburns at 16, so I could somewhat pass.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Not as an 18-year-old. Not me. Although I didn't get in trouble. You know what, actually I must have passed because when you come back over the border customs agents were always like, do I need drinking in Canada? And they, they do. They didn't bug me at all. [00:14:00] Yeah. So I must've looked like maybe I was legally able to drink in Canada,

Connor Beaton: but, but imagine being a 16-year-old, 17-year-old.

18-year-old kid. Yeah. And having zero friends to go and do what you and I are talking about. I know that's. Sad. And it doesn't have to be that, like I'm not talking about like every young man needs to go to the strip club and no, that's drink booze and do that kind of shit. Like that's what I'm talking about.

Trying not to be a waste of time, but, but you know, just like the roaming around on bicycles and you know, trying to figure one another out and like who you are. Yeah. And our identity psychologically is social in its nature. And so part of our psychological development actually requires other people. So to know who you are, you also have to be in relationship with other people because they mirror back parts of you.

So it's an important developmental piece that, you know, I think a lot of young kids are missing out on. But I'm curious, do you have insight into what you think is causing so many young boys to collapse in their relationships?

Jordan Harbinger: There was a post in our subreddit, the Jordan Harner subreddit about why don't men approach [00:15:00] women more?

And one of the guys, and this is the most upvoted thing, said. Because when we do that, we get called creepy. And now instead of just being rejected, it can affect your career, it can affect your school, your reputation at school. The risk is way too high. It could be filmed, you could be trolled on TikTok for it.

And this has happened, I guess, to a few people in the sub, the subreddit. And that's really scary because first of all, I remember trying to approach women when I was in my twenties, and it was very difficult. And no one had a smartphone, right? You didn't have to. That moment in time alone, as ephemeral as it was, was terrifying enough.

And so most guys wouldn't do it. And eventually you'd get over it and it would be fine. And if you really made an asset yourself, you just don't go to that bar again or something like that, or you know, probably that would never even be a concern. Now the concern is you are immortalized forever in this moment where you did something silly and it spreads like wildfire and it literally poisons your entire, your job prospects or your academic career.

So a lot of [00:16:00] guys don't do things like that anymore, which is really sad. So the risk has become really high. And guys are just saying things like, it's too risky. It doesn't make any sense. And then of course you also have apps now that guys can sort of hide behind where they're like, nobody meets by approaching anyway, so they use apps.

I'd love to talk about the apps because you mentioned in the stats here, a recent poll on Bumble. One of these dating apps for people who don't know, shows that only 15% of women say that they'd be willing to date the men under five eight.

Connor Beaton: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Guys right now who are five seven are like, or under are freaking out.

However, I think the reason that this is important to qualify, and you can tell me if I'm just spouting BS here, this is in a vacuum, it'd be like somebody saying, Hey Jordan, would you rather date somebody that's super hot and rich or just one of those things? And I would go, oh yeah, I, I would like to date somebody that's super hot and rich, right?

'cause then I had a super high girlfriend who's rich. Uh, let's say I wasn't married, right? So that's the preference. But it's like if I just met somebody that I liked, none of those other things would matter anymore. So this height [00:17:00] thing. Guys see that and go, I am doomed because I don't fit this preference.

I'm now looking at this 15% of women, and then let's look the ones that are married and let's take out the ones that I'm not attracted to. Oh, great. Now I'm only gonna be looking at 0.0001% of the women in this app are gonna match with me, and that's just not how it works. I will also say, when I was younger and not married, I asked women how tall they thought I was After knowing them for a while, almost every girl said six feet tall.

I'm five foot 10 with shoes on, even when I am next to them. And they know how tall they are, right? They overestimated my height if I wasn't standing right in front of them in the moment. So what that told me was it doesn't really matter. It's more of a feeling. Yeah. They're not actually going, Hmm, well I'll stand against the wall and see how tall you are.

I dated women that were taller than me. And they would say things like, you are not that much shorter. Or they would say, no, we're the same height. And I'm like, I literally can do this on top of my head and I'm still not as tall as you. What, what planet are you on? And it just, [00:18:00] it was like a more of an emotional decision that I just wasn't shorter than them and that was it.

Yeah.

Connor Beaton: I couldn't

Jordan Harbinger: convince them with a

Connor Beaton: ruler. So there's a couple of important things here. One, dating apps are designed for us to prioritize our preferences. Yeah. And the reality is that when you're in the real world, sometimes your preferences are more malleable and fluid than, is this guy five foot eight?

If he is funny, if he's charismatic, if you find him attractive, if there's just like an inherent spark with him, that whole, like is he five foot eight goes out the window and it's completely irrelevant. Mm-hmm. The other thing is that obviously men and women, we have our insecurities. Those things show up in the dating apps and those things show up in our fear of rejection and all those different pieces.

One of the main things that I found is really interesting in a lot of the research around relationships, specifically in the area that you're talking about. Is that our perception of what it is that women want is often a little bit different than what it is that they desire. Yeah. And the other thing is that what we think women want, for [00:19:00] example, in height or in something like we're gonna talk about this, the size of your penis, the size of are gone there is often way different than we as guys think.

Yeah. And so a lot of this has nothing really to do with the average female choice and preference. More to do with sometimes our insecurities and our fears of being tall enough being whatever. It's girthy enough. Yes.

Crosstalk: It's like, God, am I gonna say that word? Yeah. You're gonna say, I'm say that word on podcast.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. But those things actually don't match up. And so when you look at the research, women will say sometimes, like for example, the 15% will be under five foot eight. But if you get them into a social situation and there's a guy that's five six or five seven and he's charismatic and funny, or he's just lovable, or he's attractive, that doesn't matter at all to them, and it really starts to fade away.

Are there some women that are still like, I won't date a guy that's under six feet tall? Sure. But yeah. Maybe that's not your cup of tea.

Jordan Harbinger: Anyway. I think a lot of women outgrow that. Man, you just remind me. When I was in law school, we were moving out of a house and we [00:20:00] had to move some of the previous tenants crap, like furniture.

They just left it there. The landlord was like, oh, maybe these guys will want it. We didn't want it. We moved one of the beds and we found a diary of a woman who was in a sorority. And of course we read that because we didn't know her. So it was like, look, this is gonna be fascinating. She had a whole bunch on how all the pressure from her girls in her sorority was on dating taller guys, but she only connected with guys that were shorter and it, she was eaten up inside about this because she didn't care.

But she had all this pressure and she's like, my goal is after school to just forget about how to the whole pressure thing and just go for the guys that I like, but I can't do it now because the girls would make fun of her. Which isic like the dumbest thing ever. I know that sort of disproves part of our point about preferences, but it also shows you that the social pressure for this stuff, even when you know it's dumb.

Yeah. And you're trying to outgrow it. It's really tough. I, I had a buddy who married a really attractive woman who was taller than him, and I remember I. Someone said like in front of him, we were [00:21:00] all cool with this. And we were like, so it doesn't matter that you're taller than him. And she's like, well, he's really hot.

Well, he is really smart, he's really funny. All these things were true. And this is law school as it's all full of like smart people. And she goes, he's not that much shorter. And it was like she was probably 5 9, 5 10, maybe even taller. And he was probably five four. This is a significant height difference.

Yeah. This was not like, oh, it's an inch shorter. I mean, it was noticeable, especially if she was wearing heels. I mean, it was just like, wow, okay, your now wife is so much taller than you. So it was such a fascinating thing because while it's a preference, the behavior doesn't necessarily match the preference outside of the vacuum.

And the problem with apps is you can filter so that you don't even see the people that don't fall in that preference, right? Where you're, you end up cheating yourself like crazy, right? Because you can say like, oh, I only want, let's say I only want a guy in this income level, but since it's a light preference and you wouldn't care about it, in reality now you're just only seeing people in that particular income level, right?

And you go, ah, there's nobody on here that I click with. Okay, well you did select millionaires [00:22:00] only, and you're wondering why they're all shallow a-hole who are looking for models on an app.

Connor Beaton: Well, I think we as men often conflate norms with the rules, right? And so there are norms, right? There are like normal ideal preferences that a lot of women do have.

Most women, if you ask them, they do want a man that's taller than them. Yeah, that is true. That's just statistically true. However, that's not a rule with no exceptions. Yeah. And I think that we as men, sometimes we have this very like linear process to these types of things where it's like that's just the way that every single woman is.

And because we want this very calculated, very linear process that helps us to kind of feel safe within the dating world, right? That allows us to be like, oh, if that woman's taller than me, then I shouldn't even bother approach her, right? Because she's not gonna find me attractive. And those norms don't help us actually get into relationships.

I have the exact same story. I know a woman who's six feet tall and her husband is like five foot seven. Whoa. Okay. And when they started dating, and they've been together for a [00:23:00] long time, they've got two kids they met in college. Same thing. She had a lot of pressure that was internalized. Right. She was like, you know, should I be doing this?

And what will other people think? Yeah. And you know, there was other, other questions from her friends of like, don't you want a guy that's taller than you? And, and she just kind of had to say like, I actually genuinely love this guy. He makes me feel everything that I want to feel. And so it doesn't matter how tall he is.

Right. She kind of owns it in the sense that, you know, she wears like three inch heels still. So she's like six two. Yeah. Six three. It's just like, that's how the marriage is. Right? So whats

Jordan Harbinger: interesting, what's interesting about this is guys have a choice how they respond to this, right? Like he could have gone, you gotta wear flat shoes only, I'm wear these, I don't know, whatever shoes that have big so on it.

Yeah. Lifts. Yeah. I got some lifts

Connor Beaton: in there.

Jordan Harbinger: And then also, I know a lot of women, back when high school and college, they used to slouch because they were like, I don't wanna be taller than the guys that are there because they won't talk to me. And my friend Kini used to do this all the time. We used to make fun of her.

She actually had like a postural issue because Right. She was constantly slouching. She flops

Connor Beaton: in. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Then there's the other [00:24:00] guys who, I mean, this is how I sort of chose to respond to it because I was attracted to these taller women. I was like, no, be this giant Amazon. Like I want people to look at us and go like, what the hell?

You know? I used to say things like, don't make me come up there. If she would get sassy with me, you know? And like it was interesting. One day I met one of her exes and this dude was legitimately like six, seven.

Crosstalk: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And he was like, oh, you're dating this short guy. He is drunk. Right. So there's a major, a-hole.

Actually, this is early on. This is probably like our third date or something. Oh God. And I was like, oh man. So I didn't feel bad 'cause I can't get taller, so I'm not gonna let this dude emasculate me. But I wasn't, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna meet you inside. You handle your business. I'm not gonna sit here and get abused in front of this girl from this guy.

And I figured it's either over with and this is gonna be like a big thing or whatever. She came in and she was like, I am so sorry. That guy is, he's a terrible person. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. She's, and later on in our relationship she's like, you handled that the exact right way because I was so embarrassed.

I didn't want you to have to see what I did next. And I was like, what was that? Because I did, I was looking out the window. 'cause I was like, what I, what they make out him outta here. Right. And she, she tore him [00:25:00] a new asshole in the next time we ran into him at that bar. She was like, don't fricking talk to me.

And he just like ran out like tail between his legs. He actually was the one who felt emasculated. 'cause he was like, wait, I got dumped for this fricking little shit. You know? And so you really have a choice of how you can respond to this. But I also really understand why guys, they're just on thin ice, right?

With a lot of this insecurity. It's not only height you, you mentioned earlier, and I'm gonna blame you for this penis preference studies

Connor Beaton: where I like that I just sent you just like this massive

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Arson dicks and you know, incel. It's just the, the trifecta. But this was fascinating 'cause I did look this up and I did a, I went down a girthy rabbit hole.

A girth rabbit hole. Yeah. Penis length and and stuff among other things. Hashtag girth rabbit hole. And the unfortunate news was like the preference for women was still well above average. Yes. Which is kind of funny because. It [00:26:00] doesn't make sense. If you look at the fact that we still exist and have not evolved to o like only men with larger dick not been the ones that reproduce.

So this preference is already a little bit suspect.

Crosstalk: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But then when you look into the data more, 'cause I, I was like, wait a minute, I need background on this. It turns out that when you rank the preferences, wait a minute, we choose, I think it was like six. They wanted six point, uh, four inch penis for short term relationships and 6.3 for, for long-term relationships.

Uhhuh. Yeah. Yeah. You got it. Yeah. And so it's basically the same, but most men are like five or five and a half. Yeah. That's the average globally. Yeah. And I think in the United States it's like five to 5.8 or something like that. I'm going off memory here. So like all the guys in this comment section of wherever these things are posted are like, oh my God, I'm, I'm screwed.

Yeah. Or see, yeah. Or that's why I need this pump or whatever. So, so they go crazy. But then when you look and you do further investigation, when they rank the size, it's like number 11 before that is like, how fun is the guy? How does he make me feel? [00:27:00] How smart is he? Height is in there, is he, are we compatible in other ways?

Is he good looking? Mm. Uh is, you know, income is high and it's like, oh, this is my preference. But in the preference range of preferences, this is way at the bottom. It's kind of like, would you rather shop at Target or Walmart? And if you just say 97% of people said Target, you're like, oh my God, Walmart's gonna go out of business.

Oh, but that was the 87th thing that was most important about which store they shop at. Yeah. So actually it doesn't matter almost at all. So I found that to be really fascinating. I'm saying all this because I don't want my short kings out there to get in their heads when these pieces of info are far from definitive when it comes to your dating life.

A lot of these surveys are done in a vacuum and it's basically borough science.

Connor Beaton: Yes. And I think that there's also an overemphasis. I. That we as men put on those parts of our body.

Jordan Harbinger: And penis size is almost exclusively a guy thing by the way. A hundred percent. I researched this. Women were like, what? And guys are like, well if I'm stretched this and bone [00:28:00] press that and like the girth is this, but when it's this and if it's warm outside, if it's above 28 degrees Celsius,

Connor Beaton: there's a, if there's a light breeze just hitting the tip at the exact right time.

Exactly. It's, it's that full mass. You know? Exactly.

Crosstalk: And they're like, is it bone pressed? Or was like, how hard do I press on the thing? 'cause if I do it, I get another two millimeters out of

Jordan Harbinger: it. Right. And it's like none of it ends up being relevant. Yeah. In all these forums, I'm gonna out myself here, but I did a lot of Reddit research.

There's, there's these like big dick problems sub Reddits where you think it's gonna be a bunch of guys bragging. And mostly it's like guys who are trying to hide the bulge. 'cause they're suffering work consequences, right. When they do presentations or they're losing clients. Or they like can't have sex with anyone because they have a giant dong.

Right. And it's like, oh, this is almost as bad as having something that's too small. Totally. Like there's anything on the extremes is actually really bad.

Connor Beaton: Well if you look at the data around if a woman breaks up with a man or divorces a man because he has a small penis, it's actually quite small. Yeah.

You know, not the penis, but the actual, like the divorces and the [00:29:00] separations, it's a very small amount because it's just not that big of a deal. I often, when I look at this data, I often wonder, what would that data be like pre dildos and pre-internet where you can see the comparison, you know, the largest penises on the planet.

Right. And so it's probably different 50, 60 years ago, but you know, it is what it is today. And I think when men put so much emphasis on that, it just creates such deep insecurity. When you look at the data and the research body dysmorphia amongst men is, is starting to skyrocket. It's really crazy, you know, you have men getting leg extensions to get taller.

I know, I was gonna mention that. They're breaking their femurs and installing these plates that they have to ratchet up and, you know, going to Turkey to get hair transplants and there's penis injections that they're now getting for, to have a, a larger, you know, girth or penis and it's like a form of Botox.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm researching this right now. That's so funny. You mention it, Botox is right, one of the names, no, no, no. Or Scrotox, [00:30:00] which is not exactly on the nose because it goes in the penis and not into the scrotum. My God. I am doing a show on penile enhancement and one of the doctors, uh, from this clinic called Upsize is like a really good authority on all this stuff.

And he is like, come in and get it. I'll hook you up and you can see if it works and talk about it on your show. So I am going in on Saturday. No way to get Boco done.

Crosstalk: No

Jordan Harbinger: way. Here's the thing. The results if they don't lie to you, are supposed to be like really modest. It's like not a big deal. And the rea, it's also temporary, otherwise I would never consider doing it because I looked up everything that can go wrong and it's like pretty much nothing.

'cause Bo Botox is pretty medium, so never let it be said. We don't go the extra inch for the size. Yeah, you're really going Or the extra centimeter in this case. The extra inch. Yeah. It's far from a mile. So apparently you can, it, it like adds like maybe a centimeter. Right. And candidly, one of the doctors was like, and that's if it actually does anything.

'cause for some guys it just like doesn't do much or doesn't do anything.

Crosstalk: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: It also relaxes some stuff. So it's like firmware, [00:31:00] erections, yada yada yada. So it's not about a length thing thing. But the other stuff that they offer at this place and other places that I've researched at this place called up upside, he only does like filler, which is like the filler that people get in theirs lips.

So put it in, uh, someone's penis. But there's other clinics that do like silicon sheets and stuff. Yes. That stuff is so dangerous. Yes, because the complication rate is like 5%. Yeah. And look. If you had a complication rate from removing a fingernail of 5%, it's probably an infection, and like worst case, you lose your fingernail.

What happens when they have to remove a silicon sheath from your penis? You don't magically regrow that tissue. Right. You just have a scarred, disfigured dick for the rest of your life. Right? Not worth it. Not worth it. Not worth it. No. So like all the stuff that does extreme different stuff and, and even that by the way, won't make it longer.

It just makes it girth here. Such an awkward word. And guys will do this. And this doctor, um, Joel Pash, he's really honest. He's like, guys will come in and say, oh, I'm doing this for my wife. And he is like, no you're not. Yeah. He's like, you wanna do something for your wife? Take [00:32:00] her to Paris. Do that for your wife.

Don't spend your vacation budget on a half inch girth of your penis that she doesn't care about. Like, right. If you have a super unhappy sex life because you have a really small member, okay, now it's like you're into like a medical kind of thing where it's like, eh, you know? But if you're like in the average and you just wanna monster dung, that's for you.

Don't lie and say it's for your wife. She married you already. Right. Obviously you had some sexual compatibility. If she, if you can't get a date at all because you have a three inch Okay. Like

Connor Beaton: I was just, do what you can. I'm sitting here thinking about two things. One, how different this conversation is than the one that you, than the one that you had with Richard Reeves.

Yeah. And two, how this is the

Crosstalk: bait and switch, how

Connor Beaton: we've gone from male loneliness to, to

Jordan Harbinger: dicks

Connor Beaton: to girthy

Jordan Harbinger: dicks. Yeah. I'm gonna do a whole show on it. So people who are really sad that we're gonna change as a subject from penises right now are get, they're like, that are really enjoying this part of the conversation.

They're get multiple hours. It's a, it's gonna be a long double episode, but I, I

Connor Beaton: do, I do [00:33:00] think that there's a good point here, which is a lot of the times the social issues that we as men face are ridiculed. Yeah. They're really ridiculed. There was a study that came out on the male loneliness side. That show that the average guy needs two nights a week with male friends for optimal mental health.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, interesting.

Connor Beaton: I do feel better when I ha

Jordan Harbinger: have a hang sesh.

Connor Beaton: Totally.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And

Connor Beaton: it was wild when the research came out and you saw the comment section, the amount of ridicule that was going towards, like, you know, how ridiculous is this and why do men need that much time together? And it was really telling, because I think for a lot of, a lot of these issues when men are suffering and struggling, it's often looked down on because it, the perception is that men are causing the suffering, the struggling.

And so it's very challenging to talk about male loneliness, suicidal ideation, the lack of fathers, the role that that has a lot of the issues that guys face dropping out of school. Right? We have less men going to school than ever before, less men in the workforce than ever before. What ends up happening is that when these issues [00:34:00] come up, there's almost like a vacancy or a vacuum of empathy and compassion, because the perception is men are the cause of this.

Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and just go fix it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's that bootstraps thing is funny because that, you know, where that expression comes from. I would assume a war, I can't remember the exact bootstrap, uh, which bootstraps these are for. But the point is that it's actually physically impossible to pick yourself up by your bootstraps.

Yeah. It's

Connor Beaton: like pulling the boots

Jordan Harbinger: on your feet. So when you say pick yourself up by the bootstraps, what you're saying is do something that is this whole cliche is that it's actually impossible to do that. Totally. It's always found that ironic. I do wanna talk about incel 'cause I think this is a fascinating, again, I'm gonna do a whole show on incel because it, the phenomenon itself is fascinating to me.

I used to really look at these guys negatively, but I do have a lot of empathy for these folks, especially given my previous line of work, which many people know is gonna be teaching men dating skills. There were guys that sort of butt, for the grace of God would've made a left turn and said they made a right turn and went into the self-improvement angle.

But there were guys that. Gave up and became sort [00:35:00] of incel red pill type guys. 67% of incel qualify for diagnosis of severe anxiety,

Connor Beaton: oftentimes severe social anxiety. Yeah, so they have severe anxiety, but their anxiety specifically around being in social situations, relationship situations, they are just chronically crippled by nervousness around even just talking to people having normal interactions.

And so this perception that incel men are hate fueled death monsters that, you know, when I go out and, and murder people, is very rare statistically, they are generally very afraid, very fearful people.

Jordan Harbinger: You might not be able to enjoy the company of a woman, but you can enjoy the great deals and discounts on the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and Nvidia. We all love the idea of AI doing the heavy lifting, faster scheduling smarter systems, fewer human errors. Sounds great, right? Until it's not. In episode seven of the Cybersecurity Tapes, a healthcare [00:36:00] system fast tracks a shiny new AI rollout to improve patient logistics, but instead of streamlining operations, it sends ambulances to the wrong hospital.

Because here's the truth, AI only helps when it's implemented right and when it's rushed, it can create vulnerabilities that hackers are all too happy to exploit. That's what makes the cybersecurity tapes compelling. It's fictionalized drama based on real cyber incidents with actual takeaways on hot to spot red flags, patch the holes and avoid disasters before they happen.

Episode seven is a perfect example of what happens when good intentions meet bad planning and the stakes couldn't be higher. Search for the cybersecurity tapes and check out Episode seven is, especially if your company is riding the AI wave without asking, wait, is this secure? This episode is also sponsored by Better Help.

You might be surprised that even I get stressed out with work. I know. Unbelievable, right? But just because I've interviewed some of the most interesting people on the planet, doesn't mean I'm immune to work pressure. Kind of the opposite. In fact, running the show, managing a team, prepping for deep dive interviews, I can feel like spinning plates while someone keeps adding more plates.

And according to the numbers, I'm not alone. 61% of the global workforce is dealing with higher than normal stress levels. So if you're [00:37:00] feeling overwhelmed, it's not just you. But what's helped me, a few small things, getting outside every day, working out a bunch, but one of the best tools out there is therapy.

That's where Better Help comes in. It's the world's largest online therapy platform with over 30,000 therapists and a 4.9 apping from 1.7 million reviews. You can talk to somebody from your phone or laptop and switch therapists anytime if you need to. No awkward. It's not you, it's me kind of thing.

Required, and therapy is not just for trauma folks, it's for anybody who wants to feel more in control, build resilience, and actually enjoy their life. Again, even if you're a podcaster who gets paid to talk for a living.

Jen Harbinger: As the largest online therapy provider in the world, better Help can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com slash Jordan. That's better HE p.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust. I know you're not booking for a podcast, but it does help to have strong relationships.

We know they help you live longer and healthier. [00:38:00] This course, six minute networking teaches you how to do that and maintain those circles in very easy, non cringey, very down to earth ways. No awkward strategies or tactics, just practical exercises that will make you a better connector, a better friend, a better peer at home at work.

Yes, even if you're retired, six minutes a day is all it takes, and five minute networking was taken. Let's be real. But many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in Smart Company where you belong. Again, the course is free. Zero shenanigans over@sixminutenetworking.com.

Now back to Connor Baden. A lot of these, this is from my research on incel as well. A lot of these so-called like incel terror attacks, turn out to not be that when you do a deep dive. There was one guy who ran a van into people in Canada and when the, I guess csis or whatever, the Royal Canadian RCMP interrogated him.

RCM P Yeah. He was like, yeah, I didn't really mean that incel thing, I just did it for attention. Right. Because he was a psychopath and he did that incel comment 'cause he knew it would get clicks and media, [00:39:00] so they counted that as like incel murders people. But he was like, whatever. That's not even it.

Yeah. It wasn't even a thing. And then there's a couple really famous ones, Elliot Roger, who murdered his roommates and, and then a bunch of other people. He also had other mental illness that had a little bit, but not really. And it wasn't like I'm an incel when I'm doing this. He had all kinds of stuff that was going on and that was a mass casualty.

And that's kind of the only other one that's really out there. Meanwhile, there are maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions of incel and most of them are just kind of bummed out and played Diablo three all the time. Right.

Connor Beaton: Well, I think that's where, you know, this, uh, TV series on Netflix that got so much attention, adolescents, have you seen it?

Oh, I haven't

Jordan Harbinger: watched it. I heard about it though.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. I mean it's, it's interesting because it's, they're trying to portray an incel. And there's a lot about it. There's a guy in the UK named, uh, William Costello, and he's like one of the lead researchers of incel and they have some of the biggest body of work on, on research for, do you know him for incel?

Uh, not really. I mean, I follow him and I show I might need that intro. I'm wanting to have him on the show 'cause he's, he's super [00:40:00] interesting. But you know, they found a whole, like when you dig into the data, like 47% of incel men are non-Caucasian. Yeah. It says 42 in your notes here. 42. There we go. Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a perception that it's like angry white boys in their mom's basement.

That is 100% what I, yeah. Which is not generally the case at all. Again, they're generally struggling with severe anxiety. They have mental health issues. Oftentimes they need support and help. Quite often they come, they do come from father's homes. I. When you look at it, they have really major challenges with like suicidal

Jordan Harbinger: ideation.

30% of them think about suicide daily, which makes me so sad compared to the daily, everyday population is 5% saying they had a suicidal thought once or more in the last year. So this is heavy on suicidal ideation. They have no relationships, no close friends. That's one of those sort of characteristics.

Connor Beaton: Yeah, and I think this is the empathy gap that I'm talking about when it comes to men, it's like these guys, you know, and of course it doesn't excuse [00:41:00] behavior of going online and trolling women and you know, spewing hate towards women. I'm not excusing any of that. Right? Like if that's happening from some of those guys, I'm not excusing any of that.

There is an empathy gap. These are some of the men in our societies that are struggling the most. You know, they're thinking 30% of them are thinking about self harm. Yeah. That makes, that makes you sad every, you know, and so we have to approach these conversations, I think, in a different way to understand like, well, A, how are these young men getting to that place?

Then B, how do we create structures and systems within our societies to circumvent that from happening more and more? Because it is happening more men are getting more socially isolated. They are getting more lonely, they are lacking in male role models. And so when that continues to happen, they go into online gaming and you know, they're on Twitch all the time and then they're more isolated and then their only friends are in the digital

Jordan Harbinger: realm.

I, I'll tell you the one turning point for me, this is years ago I met this show fan. He was a really nice guy. He ended up [00:42:00] meeting my wife. We ended up hanging out and I was like, he's, he's shy, but he is like a sweet guy. I like him. I had a good time. I later found a bunch of his posts under another name that he was using, uh, and they were crazy vitriolic women hating incel posts.

And I saw him again and I was like, can I ask you a question? You know, we had such a good time with you, you got along with generally well, what's the real you? And he was like, I think the one that you met was closer to the real me. And I was like, what is all this shit? He was like, I just get really angry about the state of my life and I blame women for it, even though I know at some level it's really not them.

It just, they're just an easy target. And I find a lot of people agreeing with me when I post about this kind of thing because they're in the same situation. And that was really eye-opening for me because he didn't want to do anything harmful to women. He didn't actually want bad things to happen to women.

He just desperately wanted to not be alone. And the outlet was just, oh, if I complain about women, all these other guys will pile on. And I feel like I have community. That was really eye-opening and sad for me.

Connor Beaton: Yeah, they, they [00:43:00] get incentivized, they get rewarded, they get social connection. Like a lot of the things that they're lacking, they

Jordan Harbinger: get in spades.

If you read this, you would be like, wow, this guy's like one step away from going on a machete spree or like sexually assaulting someone. But then when you talk to him, he's like, would never do it. Has sisters that he has a good relationship with. Like, yeah. He's also had girlfriends in the past and those relationships by all accounts ended like more or less amicably and it was shocking.

Yeah. Because it was like two different people. Even to this day I'm like, God, but that angry guy is in there

Connor Beaton: scares me a little bit. I think sometimes when some of this data that we're talking about starts to come out, whether it's about dating apps or Yeah, whatever it is, I think sometimes people are worried or scared that that's going to reinforce certain behaviors within men.

I also think it's become much more socially acceptable, like there's just a gender war happening and there are women who think the world would be better off without men. You know, like the other, I've seen that too. The other side exists of like all men are. Are evil, all men are rapists. Like all men are this way, and [00:44:00] there's a kind of loathing on the other side that has become more socially acceptable, largely because women don't generally tend to take the dramatic action that men do when they get that far off the rails.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's interesting. You mentioned that men's psychological issues are often misrepresented. I'm curious about, I'd love to talk about this, 75% of therapists in some states, more than 80% are women. So what man? A lot of women understand men really well. I have female therapists. Why is that a problem?

Connor Beaton: It's not necessarily a problem. It's more about the macro picture of the vacancy of male role models. You know, there are certain things that men are going to be dealing with and struggling with that sometimes women just are not going to really understand. And the therapeutic industry is, I think, doing a disservice because it's approaching male issues from a female perspective.

And how so? Well, when you look at a lot of the training that therapists go through, they don't really learn how to differentiate between resistance in a [00:45:00] man or a woman. And how a man will show resistance versus a woman is oftentimes very different. Another version of that is how a man will signal that he's at risk for something like suicide.

So there's a study, I think I sent you some of the data in the UK that showed that 80% of the men who had taken their own lives in the UK had sought out help. And of those 80%, 95% of them were deemed as low risk or no risk. Yeah. Meaning that the therapists that they were seeing couldn't identify that they were at risk, were at risk for suicide.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's terrifying.

Connor Beaton: That's a massive body of research, right? It's not like 10 or 20 guys. It's a lot of men. Sometimes we miss out on the fact that when people go to therapy, they're incentivized to express and talk about their emotions. Not a problem. That can be very helpful, I think for a lot of men.

That's very helpful because we generally live in a culture of suppression, you know, and in my book I wrote about how within masculine culture, it's very common that we see strength [00:46:00] as a byproduct of our ability and capacity to suppress our emotions. Yep. So the more that we can stuff shut down, the stronger and more capable we perceive that we're going to be.

But it actually has the inverse effect. It actually, I wish I did not fully agree with that.

Crosstalk: I'm like, that's me. Definitely. Yeah. And my

Connor Beaton: dad. And probably my grandparents. Totally. Yeah. And so we, so we adopt this idea when in, in fact, it's the inverse of that we have to have some dominion over emotions. We have to be able to express them when necessary.

We have to, you know, have some level of connection or mastery with them. But the big thing that the therapeutic industry misses out on is usefulness and competency. So Richard Reeves, who you had on the show, sure he did. They did this big study through the American Institute of Boys and Men, and they looked at the notes that men had left behind when they took their own lives.

And the one word that stood out was useless, just chronically through all these notes. And so when men feel useless through in society, they feel useless. And marriage, relationship, family, friends, [00:47:00] the more useless a man feels, the more he can start to logically rationalize not being here. Yeah. And therapy is not optimized to help men be useful socially and relationally.

And it is also not optimized to help identify when a man feels like he's lacking competence in something and then help him to develop the systems to develop competence, even if it's something simple as, I need to get better at setting boundaries in my relationship. 'cause I let my girlfriend or wife or boyfriend walk all over me.

Right. Right. It's like, okay, well that's a skill set that you can actually develop. This is the difference is that men actually look at these things as systems and skills that we need to develop. Yeah. And the therapeutic industry does not tailor it to that way. So like our tagline is, it's not therapy, it's training.

It's like this is helping you to be more competent as a man. And if you can do that, you're actually going to uplevel your level of confidence. Wow.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Richard Reeve's, episode 1126, we do a deep dive into more on, we, we focused [00:48:00] more on, um, education gap and stuff like that. Workplace less on the dick gap.

Yes. And more on the education and workplace gap. I like that. I got this side of you. I just Yeah, I know you

Connor Beaton: get there. I feel much more prepared for that version than the, than the education and the workforce gap. I think

Jordan Harbinger: it's because I just had more respect for him than I do for you. Yeah. That's right.

That's right. That's fair. That's, that's right. No, you and I go way back. I'm not a researcher. No. I feel I, I just felt comfortable with it because I feel like we've known each other for three. We've got that rapport. I feel like we've got that rapport. I feel like

Connor Beaton: Richard Reeves would not. Conversations, I think, I think he politely

Jordan Harbinger: change the subject immediately.

I could be wrong. I don't know. That's right. I'll try next time he's on the show. Um, I, I do One bit of good news from your notes was that more men are seeking therapy than ever before. Yeah. I don't think we necessarily have more problems. I think we are recognizing the problems more. I should say. So it's not just like, oh, more men are seeking therapy because more men have issues.

Right. I think those, these issues have always existed, but to your earlier point, we've just choked them down and drank them away or something like that. Like if you came back from Vietnam and you had PTSD, you just became an alcoholic or a drug addict or just like beat your [00:49:00] kids or something. Or handled in some other destructive way.

I mean, there's a million stories like that, or you just suffered in silence. Now I think guys my age, especially and younger, they're gonna better help.com/jordan. They're talking about it, which I encourage, I mean, I, that's, I do it. I feel a million times better after talking to a therapist, even if I'm just venting about something.

Because to another one of your earlier points, if you don't have a best friend that you can do that with regularly, where is it all going?

Crosstalk: Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: where is it going? You gotta get those demons

Connor Beaton: out, man. Well, and that's the case for a lot of, a lot of men is that it's not that they have a vacancy of friends, it's that they actually have an absence of one or more friends that they can talk about meaningful shit with.

That's actually the gap. And so a lot of men will say, no, no, I got, I got buddies in my life. I have friends in my life. But then if you dig a little bit deeper and you say, do you have men in your life that you can talk about meaningful, substantial challenges with, embarrassing challenges, with struggles that you're having financially, relationally, sexually?

The answer is almost always no. You know, so few men actually [00:50:00] have guys in their life that they can say, Hey, you know, my wife, or, you know, my girlfriend and I were going through these challenges. We're trying to have a kid. It's not going well. Those types of conversations are becoming more prominent among men.

I think it's becoming much more socially acceptable amongst men. And one of the things that I was talking about was that we've, we've lived and we've been raised by the men who were raised by the men that came back with incredible trauma from World War ii. Yeah. My grandfather fought in World War ii.

And what he and everybody else faced was insanely traumatic, you know, insanely challenging. And some of the stories I heard my grandfather talk about were wild. And as a kid I didn't think much of it because they seemed like, didn't even like seem real. But as an adult you're like, holy shit, you saw that happen, the saving private Ryan Beach scene type stuff.

Totally, yeah. And then they raised the next generation of men, and those men were handed down the trauma that their fathers experienced and witnessed. And so I think we're just starting to like really [00:51:00] sift through that and sort through that. And metabolize some of what a lot of men experienced post World War ii.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I, there's a lot of this epigenetic generational trauma stuff too, that's sort of new science. I have you heard about this at all? Yeah. Yeah. Where I used to think it was a ridiculous argument where like people say, oh, well if you're a a black dude, you know, you got generational trauma from this.

And I was like, ah, come on. I, I, that's not a real thing now. It's like, oh, it kind of is. But it also explains why a lot of us Jews are a little weird, right? Like, okay, so a bunch of your family was like right in a pogrom and then the Holocaust and then another pogrom, and then you came here and duh duh.

And it's like, oh, okay, maybe I didn't inherit some shit.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. It activates certain genes in the body and, and genomes and yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I would love to talk about, going back to Dick's now, I wanna talk about porn brain. Yeah. You mentioned porn. It's unfortunately, and I can tell by online comments, in real life discussion with younger guys, especially porn is clearly the primary driver of sex education among men that I would say are [00:52:00] maybe under 40.

I'm 45. The online porn thing started when I was in college, but it was a little nascent. It was easy to find, but it wasn't like nobody I knew was like addicted to it. And by the end of college, some guys you were like, dude, do you ever leave the house? So that sort of started then. But if you're under 45, under 40, you probably had porn in like middle school.

Mm-hmm. So I had, I don't know what a half decade of like hooking up with girls, maybe even having sex with girls before porn hit the scene. And then it was a slow ramp up. These other guys had porn way before they saw, right. A real woman in the flesh other than, you know, from the neck up or whatever. So.

Dial up. That's terrifying. Yeah. The dial up. The dial up, like the dial up, like load line by line. Just like there's eyes. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, oh, please, please be naked. And the rest of the chick. Yeah. Yeah. Please be hot and naked. Please be naked. And, and the guys who are under 40, like they, their first exposure was probably like a mobile phone with a friend is showing them.

Well,

Connor Beaton: the, the, the research shows that most young [00:53:00] boys are fighting porn between nine and 11 years old. Horrifyingly young. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about just the vast impact of chronic sensory overload. If an 11-year-old boy opens up the internet and starts watching porn, he can within a few hours or a few days, see more naked women in that span of time than any man throughout human history will have seen throughout his lifetime.

I

Jordan Harbinger: always think about that and it's terrifying. Yeah, imagine. 'cause I guess I would have to chat GPT this, but if you lived 3000 years ago and you were not like I a Pharaoh or something like that, you probably saw, I don't know, a handful, maybe you slept with a handful of women in your tribe if you were like a real Chad going for it.

Right. The Chad, um, to use an incel term, but like most, that was it. And that was like your lifetime and you died when you were 26 or something from a stubb toe, and that was the end of it. Now you get these little kids who are essentially looking at these little clips or whatever of porn and yeah, their brain is like probably not evolved to handle that.

Yeah.

Connor Beaton: Do we [00:54:00] know what that does to your brain? What does it do? I mean, the research on this, from what I've seen is, is kind of varied, you know, for some people there's, I. Definitely desensitization is a big one. What, how does that show up? Because like erectile dysfunction really? Okay. Yeah. So if you as a man watch too much porn for a long period of time, what will eventually happen is that, and this is, this is research back, is that you end up going down more like deeper, more intense forms of pornography because you need novelty to, 'cause you need more novelty over time.

And then that ends up desensitizing your system so that nothing actually really gets you aroused. Nothing in real life. Yeah. Nothing in real life. Yeah. But also then the porn that you watch, you have a harder and harder time getting aroused because you're so desensitized. I see. You know, if you're a 9-year-old kid that starts watching porn and then fast forward to 29, yeah.

29 years old and you've been watching porn every other day for 20 plus years, your system gets desensitized. And then on top of that. It skews and alters your perspective and perception of what sex [00:55:00] should actually be like. Yeah. Real life sex. And so a lot of, a lot of this, what, I'm sorry,

Crosstalk: I just, you know, back to in intrusive thoughts, sometimes continue, but it,

Connor Beaton: you know, it skews what you perceive sex to be.

Yeah. And so for men, what generally happens is this really hyper fixation on performance. Yeah. Lasting, long size, all those different pieces. And then depending on the pornography that they're watching, some men will need to replicate what they've been watching in porn in order to actually have, you know, ejaculate or whatever.

Yeah. Wow. So it, it can really screw up your

Jordan Harbinger: real

Connor Beaton: sex life.

Jordan Harbinger: I've heard that there's also, have you heard of Death Grip? Have you heard of this? No, this is, oh boy. This is, I swear this was, this is real. I, I was like, this is fake. I gotta look it up. Apparently, and it doesn't happen to everyone obviously, but guys who watch a lot of porn, they start to increase the tightness of their grip on the penis, Uhhuh, uhhuh.

And eventually it gets so tight because of desensitization of nerves and stuff like that. Yeah. That real vaginas don't [00:56:00] work for them at all. Yeah. And you see these relationship issues where guys can't do anything with their girlfriend or can never finish because they literally need this death grip and you can undo it, right?

But it takes like, you have to abstain from masturbation for like 60 days and these guys are essentially porn addicted. Do you know, multiple time per day kind of guys. So like they can't do that, right? It's very hard and it ruins relationships. Imagine if your partner could never finish with you, but he's watching people swinging from the ceiling, doing whatever, novelty porn, and you're just like, well, I can't compete with that.

You know, he is watching anime, tentacle stuff.

Connor Beaton: I think the interesting thing is that porn kind of plays a role in everything that we've been talking about so far. You know, like number one, from an attachment perspective, it creates a kind of pseudo attachment. So if you look at OnlyFans as an example, so first off, OnlyFans did like, I think in 2023, did like $6.6 billion, right?

The, the, the women of OnlyFans just like rated in. They, they've accrued and

Jordan Harbinger: there's guys on there too, from what I understand there. There are guys

Connor Beaton: on there. There are guys on there for sure, but they, you know, on average they're not doing nearly [00:57:00] as well. That's probably true. Yeah. And when you break down what men are generally looking for, the women that are doing really well, a lot of them are the sort of like nextdoor girlfriend experience.

They're offering this kind of pretend pseudo relationship. You have women that are doing like fin subbing. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but this is like financially submissive. So a man will become a financial submissive to a woman. Oh, it's called Fin Dom. Fin Sub Fin

Jordan Harbinger: Dom. Fin sub. I

Connor Beaton: don't know the difference.

Yeah, she'll be a fin dom and he's the fin sub. Oh, okay. Okay. So she'll basically tell him, like, she'll text him and be like, send me a hundred dollars right now. Yeah. And basically they play this game of, instead of. Trading his nuts. They drain his

Jordan Harbinger: bank account. I had dinner with a friend yesterday and she was telling me she has this very attractive female friend who's a really nice person, and everyone loves her.

They have a nice circle of friends. She was like, Hey guys, I'm bringing this guy that I'm dating. I have to warn you, it's gonna be, our relationship is a little weird. And just so you guys know, it's gonna be a little weird. And they're like, [00:58:00] what do you mean? Right? And she's like, you'll see when we get there.

Tell me more. So they go out to dinner, and again, this is a very nice girl who's like, had a bunch of normal relationships. Yeah. And they're like, oh, we wanna meet your new boyfriend or whatever. They have dinner they're going to like, they go to like one of those Michael Meeta nice restaurants or whatever, and the guys are like, you know, okay, I had this and this and this.

I, I owe $67. And the girl's like, John, pay for my friends. And they were just like, no, you don't have to do that. She's like, no, no. He's gonna do it. You're gonna do it. Huh. And she's like abusing him verbally, Uhhuh. And everyone was like. Oh my, what is, you know, 'cause they were embarrassed and she's like, no, no, I told you this is our thing.

So she's berating him and he pays for all the food. And the guys and girls in the group were like, we gotta talk to her. This is very uncomfortable. Yeah. We're now abusing this guy and we didn't sign up for this. So while they're telling her, she's like, okay, then you're really gonna hate this part. And she goes to him and she's like, go gimme a thousand dollars right now from the ATM.

He goes and withdraws a thousand dollars Uhhuh. And then he's like, what are we doing now? And she's like, shut up, go to the room for the rest of the night. And then they basically had to do an [00:59:00] intervention where they're like, this is unhealthy for everyone and you can't do this. And she's like, I know I feel bad.

But also, like, he really likes it. So they had this talk with him where he's like, no, I, I appreciate this, I enjoy this. And she's like, it's kind of fun. But obviously you can't have a serious relationship with somebody like that. Right. If you're a normal person, you're not a sociopath. So this is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard, because I don't understand where that comes from.

Yeah. If somebody treated me like that for one second, I would, no, I would never stand for that. This guy wants more of that.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. I mean, generally, so this is what I would call sexualizing your trauma. Yeah. So like we can fetishize our trauma in all kinds of different ways. And so depending on what that guy's background was like in his upbringing, he might just be playing out some type of repetition Yeah.

Of what he experienced as a kid or what he felt was happening as a kid. But this is the type of stuff that can start to unfold when you've just been watching so much porn that you're desensitized. And do you think that's like a normal way of being? And in the BDSM [01:00:00] community, they have a a saying that I've interpreted as like, don't yuck.

My yum. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, don't poo poo what I wanna be doing. But I mean, I think that these are some of the things that guys are dealing with.

Jordan Harbinger: So another example of this, this trauma thing where it's more obvious. Same friend had dinner with her the other night. Same dinner with this story came out.

She's like, yeah, I'm going out with this guy. And he's like a wealthy New York blue bloody family where like they probably have like a house in Nyack and a house in Manhattan, or apartment in Manhattan. And then another house in what it was at Hamptons or something like that. Yeah. Like this guy's got dough and his thing is he wants her to be mean to him, but sporadically and unpredictably.

So like they'll be having a nice dinner and he'll say something and she'll, instead of going like rolling her eyes gently and being like, well, I disagree with that. He's like, no, I want you to tell me what you really think. She's like, shut the hell up. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And he is like, keep going, you know?

And she's like, why? And he is like, you know why? Yeah. Because he is like getting turned on by it. And her and I were talking about this and I was like, yeah, if you ever meet his [01:01:00] mom, I feel like you're gonna understand what's going on here. Like, you're gonna meet their parents. Yeah. And the dad's gonna be like, does anybody want dessert?

And the mom's gonna go, shut up, Tom, you're an idiot. We're talking and you're gonna go, ding. Yeah, I get it. But then it's like, can you have a serious relationship with someone like that? You're marrying into this family with this trauma. They're not dealing with in a normal, like healthy way. I don't know, man.

Connor Beaton: I mean, look, sometimes you can use kin, kin, BD SM to move through some of those things, but what you're talking about are generally results of pretty real and severe attachment disorders that lead to anxious and avoidant and, you know, disorganized and, and sometimes a, a result of like pretty severe trauma and those types of things.

You know, they do require you to have some type of understanding of what's actually going on. Yeah. You can't complete resolve them just through kink and BDSM play, depending on the situation. You can definitely move through some of it, and I, I know some people that have used BDSM and kink as a means of like working through some of that stuff and reclaiming power from trauma or abuse or [01:02:00] abandonment or neglect, and that absolutely can happen.

But I think for a lot of people it's not conscious like that and it's just this repetition of a trauma, you know, of a pain.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I suppose if you've got your therapist and you're conscious of why you're doing it, but it still pushes the right buttons, right? That's different than being like, yeah, I have no idea why.

I like to have somebody punch me in the face randomly while we're driving the car. Just keep doing it. It's like I had, I had a buddy

Connor Beaton: of mine that like went to a king party and he is like, everything was really cool, except there was this one dude that wanted to be rolled up in a carpet and stepped on stuff and he was like, I couldn't not think about it.

And like sit in the corner with a drink being like, I. What happened to that guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like what the fuck happened to him? You know, he wants to be rolled up in a carpet and stepped on. I was like, I don't know, man. Oh man. Like I don't even wanna get into that one. Speaking of giant dicks now

Jordan Harbinger: for a word from our sponsors.

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. When I started this podcast 18 years ago, I wore every hat, producer, editor, marketer, designer, and if [01:03:00] I'd been selling a product back then forget it. I would've needed something like Shopify just to stay sane. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide.

In fact, it powers 10% of all e-commerce in the us. That's right. One out of every 10 online sales happens on Shopify. Everyone from massive names like Mattel and Jim Shark to new brands just getting started. They use it to run their stores. It is legit. And if you've got a product idea side hustle, Shopify makes it ridiculously easy to get started.

Choose from hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful online store that fits your brand's vibe. No coding Wizard read required. They're built in AI tools, help you write product descriptions, headlines, even cleans up your product photos. So if you're not a copywriter or a photographer, no problem.

Launch email and social campaigns right from the platform targeting your customers wherever they're strolling or scrolling. Shopify is your expert on everything, inventory, international shipping returns. They figured it out so you don't have to. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify.

Jen Harbinger: Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today@shopify.com slash Jordan. Go [01:04:00] to shopify.com/jordan shopify.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Progressive fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more.

Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary not available in all states or situations.

I've got homes. Dot com is the sponsor for this episode. homes.com knows what when it comes to home shopping. It's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you got kids, it's also schools nearby parks, transportation options.

That's why homes.com goes above and beyond. To bring home shoppers, the in-depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home [01:05:00] every single time. And when I say in-depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood complete with a video guide.

They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place. homes.com. We've done your homework.

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smarts and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email us. We are more than happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Connor Beaton, I talk to a lot of women my own age, just friends of mine, and they'll say that when they sleep with younger guys, like if they're divorced or they're still single or whatever, [01:06:00] younger guys, you would think, oh yeah, this 28-year-old guy is gonna like rock my world.

My husband was 55 and wasn't really interested anymore 'cause of hormones. They say they're terrible because they don't know really what they're doing because their sex ed is from porn, right? And they have to be like, yeah, you know that that doesn't feel good. Right? That hurts. Like, what are you doing?

And I don't wanna get too graphic, but they'll be graphic. And I'm like, wait, guys, think that's real? And they think that that's real. 'cause they see it in porn.

Connor Beaton: Well, I mean, you look at some of the videos online, like people going around and uh, I, what was it? A buddy of mine sent it to me and it's like this guy just walking through the streets of like Vegas or somewhere.

Just asking people like thumb in or thumb out. He was asking women thumb in or thumb out. He was talking about like having a thumb in the butt while having sex. Right. And, and so it's so funny to see some of the people's faces, like a lot of like the younger crowd like got the reference, but then anybody over like 35, 40, like no reference, what's up?

They're like, whatcha talking about thumb in, thumb out? You like

Jordan Harbinger: what? So gross.

Connor Beaton: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: These guys are largely clueless and I feel bad for [01:07:00] them. Right, because you have to get feedback from somebody that's gonna give you feedback. But a lot of the younger women they're sleeping with maybe don't even know.

That's like, okay, yeah, maybe they don't even know. Like they're the woman they're sleeping with is like, it's not my job to teach you how to do

Connor Beaton: this. I think there's a lot more sexual openness, but I wouldn't necessarily say that that's sexual literacy. Yeah, like competency. I remember being a young man and I think I was fortunate in some ways, like being able to get attention from women wasn't always challenging, but it was still really confronting like the risk of rejection and like feeling embarrassed.

I was at that very like interesting intersection between, I had access to porn, but I also had access to women. And I think about the men today. And if I had the access to porn in the way that there is today, I don't know if I would have been as relentless pursuing relationships with women because porn is just this easy access.

Yeah, low risk, high reward experience. You don't have to get told no, you're not gonna get rejected in any [01:08:00] way, shape, or form. You can explore whatever the hell it is that you want, and there's really no real risk of embarrassment. Whereas in real life, all of those things exist. You have to risk being rejected and embarrassed and sometimes humiliated having like a humiliating experience if you can't get it up or you come too fast.

So I think for a lot of guys, it's just, it's like this linear problem solving tool where it's like, oh, I don't have to deal with anything. And then the other reason why it's so addictive for a lot of men is it's what I call the nervous system reset button. So if you're stressed out, if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling bored, if you're feeling angry, if you and your girlfriend got in an argument and you're pissed off at her porn is the ultimate reset button for your whole system.

And so you go jerk off, you ejaculate a whole bunch of neurochemicals, dopamine, prolactin. They all course, through your body, your body relaxes and it shifts how you were feeling before. So for a lot of guys, it's a state change tool, right? It's [01:09:00] like as soon as you're feeling something that you don't like, what a lot of guys will go do is jerk off and watch porn, and then they don't have to feel that anymore.

But what ends up happening for a lot of men is it creates a dependency. And so they, in order to feel better, in order to not feel bored, lonely, angry, sad, whatever it is, they need porn in order to do that. And for some men, they become so dependent on it for very specific things like going to bed at night.

I've worked with men where they're like, in order to go to sleep, I need to jerk off and watch porn. Geez. And other guys, it's like, in order to start my day, I need to jerk off and watch porn. That's how I have to start things. Otherwise I'm a mess.

Jordan Harbinger: This might be above your pay grade here, but what if you make the porn with your significant other and you use that and it's not from the internet.

Is that better? I mean, sure. Asking for a friend. Yes. Sorry, wife. I'm not talking

Crosstalk: about you. Sure. Yes. Or

Jordan Harbinger: wait, that came out even worse. Uh, I'm, yeah. This is a hypothetical. You're like, yeah, like you're like, I'm in trouble. Should I edit

Connor Beaton: that

Jordan Harbinger: part out? Nope. I'm leaving it in. But I'm just [01:10:00] gonna leave it there and let you talk.

Please start talking. Yes. Uh,

Connor Beaton: yes it is. And if you still have a dependency on the porn over the real life sexual experience, it's gonna be hindering your relationship. You know, ideally. The average human being is actually wanting, is skin to skin penetration.

Jordan Harbinger: So, sorry, to clarify, is it better if you're making it in your, like let's say you're traveling a lot, so you make some with your significant other, is that still, that's still bad?

Connor Beaton: No. Oh, it's not, not as bad. No. Not at all. Explore, have fun, you know, send the, I mean within moderate, like, like whatever is, is within your relationship, right? Like, well, yeah, this send the news and I'm talking about con

Jordan Harbinger: consent, consensual of course. Like, Hey, I miss you. Here's your pick ature of me in front of the mirror.

I just mean, is that better than like watching a stranger? Yeah.

Connor Beaton: I think for the majority of people in relationships, that is what they're looking for. For some people it's not right. For some people it's maybe you're playing around with, I want you to go and watch some chick on OnlyFans tonight. Like that can be it for some people.

But I think for the majority of people in relationships, they are wanting sexual [01:11:00] exploration with their partner. Yeah. And that's fulfilling and satisfying and however you want to do that, whether it's sexting or FaceTiming and exploring it in that way. Like for some clients that I've worked with in the past, like I'll have them explore power dynamics, you know?

And if they're traveling a lot as an example, I. There's so many different ways to do that. You know, creating a separate phone number sometimes, or like a WhatsApp and pretending you know, that there's like a role play there. I see. Oh, that's kind of a cool idea. You know, so there's, there's a whole of news, there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can do things, but I think generally for most people, and you know, you and your partner have to figure out whether, because some people classify porn as cheating and some people don't.

That's true. I've seen that. And you, you kind of have to have that conversation and be open and transparent of, do you use porn? Do you watch it? Does your partner use porn and watch it? Is that something that you wanna do in your relationship? Like, all of those things are important. And I think for a lot of guys, the challenges that we treat porn, like we treat unwanted emotions, which is I'm never gonna fucking talk about my relationship to porn.

So [01:12:00] they get into a long-term relationship. Some stuff starts to happen, starts to go sideways. They watch more porn and more porn. They're not communicating to their girlfriend or their wife, and then all of a sudden it comes out that they've been watching a whole bunch. And it creates this big rupture in the relationship.

Crosstalk: Yeah,

Connor Beaton: because it hasn't been talked about. It's been hidden, it's been suppressed, and that's just a recipe for disaster. You know, anytime that you suppress stuff and are hiding things actively, even if it's lying through remission, you're gonna cause a pretty big rupture and conflict somewhere down the road.

Jordan Harbinger: I see this kind of post all the time online on our sub or other ones where there's a existing relationship issue. Like my boyfriend's not interested in sex at all anymore and hasn't been for several months. And then it's like, oh, and I found out he's watching porn. Because there's a major difference between, wow, he's just really stressed out and he doesn't have any sex drive.

I'm concerned about him. Is it me or is it something else? Oh, he's using porn now. It's definitely just, I'm not good enough as a female or whatever in his life. Too sad that it's way [01:13:00] worse, right When When they find that,

Connor Beaton: yeah, and a lot of guys have so much shame around it that when it does come out, it's like the shame becomes crippling for them.

It's like, oh, I'm, what's wrong with me? I'm such a piece of crap. Well, they promise to never use it again. Yeah. Then they have no use again. Again, it's like, but you have no tools to actually stop using it and you've become dependent on it. And so for a lot of men, I mean, I'll speak personally, it took me a long time to stop watching porn.

Jordan Harbinger: I basically quit cold Turkey, but I, that's how I quit things is I just never do it again.

Connor Beaton: Porn was one of those, like, I like to say that I was a hobbyist addict. Like I, I dabbled in different addictions. Porn was probably like my main one for a long time. How long did it take to quit? Probably a year, year and a half.

Really. So you just kept going, like relapsed back into it or? Yep. Yeah. Just relapsing into it and, you know, just kind of like, okay, this is the last time, I'm never gonna use it again. You know, like a lot of those, like lottery mindset, promising orientations and it, it just, it had been in my life for such a long time and I think that's the case for a lot of guys.

Yeah. Where it's like a really hard thing to quit. And [01:14:00] what I like to say is, with addiction specifically, because most addictions are attachment issues, is that you can't replace addiction without relationship. I. So if you want to have some type of real replacement for porn, and it's not something that you can just quit cold Turkey.

Right. Like for you, you're just like, I'm done

Jordan Harbinger: with, that's, I quit stuff. But it's not the easiest way. I just, and some,

Connor Beaton: some guys can do that though. Some guys can literally say, I'm gonna go no fab for the next six months. I'm not gonna masturbate, I'm not gonna not, I'm not gonna watch porn. I didn't say that.

And they can, I just had no porn. I know, I

Jordan Harbinger: know.

Connor Beaton: I got those guys. Those guys are

Jordan Harbinger: on another level that's like hardcore. I, I don't know how you resist

Connor Beaton: that. That's, yeah. But you know, some guys can just do that. Yeah. 'cause it's, it's just like some people can say, I'm not gonna drink this month. And it's no problem.

Yeah. And other people, it's just like, I am struggling to not have a drink. And so porn is that for a lot of men now and it's, I think it's one of the most under-reported addictions that we have to date,

Jordan Harbinger: period. I would agree with that. I mean, I have no evidence for this, but I would guess if I got to ask 50 guys that I knew decently well, if they did [01:15:00] cocaine, drank too much, smoked too much weed, ate too much junk food, or watch too much porn.

I don't know which ones would be very upfront about the porn thing. Totally. I think they would probably sooner admit that they were doing tons of blow and smoking weed every day and eating Cheetos every day than they would be to be like, yeah, three times a day with porn PornHub. I, I don't think most guys would admit that they would admit using it.

'cause guys talk about that kind of stuff. I don't think they would ever be honest about the frequency if it was bad. Totally. Well, it wasn't until I was

Connor Beaton: more candid about my usage with porn that I actually was able to move away from it, the struggle and the challenge that I was having with it. And I think that's the case for a lot of guys is like they become dependent on it.

Uh, maybe I'll just talk personally for a moment like. I had an issue with porn while in relationships I was gonna ask while cheating in relationships. Oh wow. You know, and so like sex was a big challenge for me in a lot of ways. And porn was just an outlet where, you know, I could turn towards that whenever I, [01:16:00] whenever I wanted.

Because it's just like, it's just there. You know, it's on your computer, it's in your pocket. It's like having a liquor cabinet in your pocket that you can pull out at any time and a dispenser at any time for weed. But it doesn't cost you anything, you know, which is like it mental, right? Yeah. It's just crazy.

And you can drive afterwards and you can just wash your hands. You can drive afterwards. Maybe not during, I mean that's if you can like Good for you. Some people are definitely driving. Tesla is a self-driving. That's, there you go. That's why E Love and created it. Good lord. But you know, I think it's one of those things where in order to overcome it, you have to face the shame and the embarrassment of what's actually been going on.

You kind of like have to eat the humble pie for a little

Jordan Harbinger: bit. The whole idea that you need more and more extreme stuff. That's really gotta be scary. Because I would imagine that one day, like, and, and that kind of never really happened to me. I think probably 'cause I didn't use it frequently enough and then got rid of it.

But I would imagine there's guys out there that one day are just like, how am I sitting here watching ai, alien porn? What is going on? I

Connor Beaton: think it was

Jordan Harbinger: 2023.

Connor Beaton: The number one [01:17:00] most searched, uh, word on PornHub was hentai. And hentai is anime porn. Anime porn. Right. That's, and so like, that's the number one such thing.

And then, you know, you have all, all kinds of other stuff, but a lot of it is, it's not even based in reality. And that's kind of where it's heading, right? It's like AI is going to completely flip. The porn industry. I don't know if you've seen this, but there are entire content creators now. The script is ai, the woman is ai, the platform is ai.

You know, everything is just completely ai. And so we're gonna be even more removed because right now, you know, if a guy goes online and he's watching porn, at least it's a real person. If he goes onto a webcam site and he is like talking to some chick, yeah, it's a real woman, but maybe he's talking to some dude behind the camera that's like typing for her.

Or if he goes on OnlyFans, same thing. Like a lot of those OnlyFans when you talk to them. The likelihood that it's actually, that woman is very, very, very low. I read

Jordan Harbinger: a

Connor Beaton: piece about this very low,

Jordan Harbinger: I think in [01:18:00] Wired or something, and there's whole industries where these chatters are paid about a dollar an hour.

Yeah. Because some of the more popular creators are talking with thousands of people at once. Yeah. So they hire these agencies to chat. Right. And they're AI bots. Now, a lot of 'em are AI bots and a lot of them are just, uh, like $1 an hour paid and they're probably training the AI bot. Right. That's copying the things that they say.

It's really crazy. Yeah. I'm sure if the person has 15 followers, it's probably them answering the dms. But yeah, the popular ones, they use these, these services. That's insane.

Connor Beaton: There's a guy that I saw on Instagram the other day that was talking, he's, I think he was selling a course on how to do this, which was kind of funny.

But he created an AI program that basically turned him into a filter. So he would record himself saying sexy things or like sending a specific like voice messages. Like, Hey Jordan, how's your day? And blah, blah, blah. And the AI filter would turn him into a beautiful blonde woman with big boobs and it would alter his voice.

And so it was literally him just recording himself. But what you saw was this [01:19:00] beautiful blonde woman speaking some sexy message to you. Gosh, that's crazy. So that's and, and he's. Allegedly making tens of thousand dollars a month.

Jordan Harbinger: I saw something similar yesterday on Instagram, however, it was deep fakes of celebrities and it was the guy showing he had a, like a light and he would shout it on his face and like, yeah, I

Connor Beaton: saw that.

Oh yeah. Wasn't that incredible. Turned into Elon

Jordan Harbinger: and then turned into Elon. Turned into like Timothy Chala May or something. I don't even know who these people are, but I'm guess shadow me. He turned, yeah. Eme, he turned, he turned into, I saw Adam Sandler, this sushi plays the other day. It was funny and I almost yelled out Shae really loud, but then I thought, why be that guy?

Yeah. Um, he did, uh, a couple of other like Star War. What's Mark Hamill guy who plays Luke Sky. Yeah.

Crosstalk: It was so convincing,

Jordan Harbinger: my man, so real. I couldn't believe it. And then I was just like, well, make damn sure you're never talking to anybody online who you, you know, don't say anything. You wouldn't wanna Yeah.

Say in front of a perfect stranger who knows how to use AI deepfake software.

Connor Beaton: That's it. Well, and I think it's, it's detrimental. I think two things are gonna happen, and I think that women are gonna [01:20:00] start to be disproportionately impacted as well. I think men are going to be more and more sucked down this rabbit hole of AI pornography that's just hyperrealistic and virtual reality oriented.

Customized for them. Customized for them. And, and that's like personalization's gonna be king and is starting to be king. Not, not just in the porn industry, but I think in, even in like the mental health space, in the therapy space. Like you know, one of the biggest use cases for chat t is apparently therapy.

Wow. That people are using chat t And I've had people that have told me this, like that have reached out and said, I've been using chat GPT as like my coach and I've told it to be like Eckhart Tolle and Connor Beaton and to give me life advice. And they're like, it's incredibly profound. It's so good. And I was like, what?

What are you talking about? Yeah. So I think, I think men are gonna go down this rabbit hole of more and more AI oriented because it's just gonna look so real. And I think what's gonna start to happen with women, and there's already apps, I think there's an app called [01:21:00] Dips, E-D-I-P-S-E. Where it's basically AI erotica and because for women it's a very different, like women get caught in like the story.

And so some women will get addicted to pornography, but what more women will get addicted to is the romance novels. And they'll get really sucked into these like hyper erotic romance novels. You're gonna start to see these very personalized romance novels where you as a woman are in the story and the hero or the guy that's sort of like sexualizing is gonna be sexualizing you.

It's not gonna be sexualizing this like damsel that you're projecting yourself onto. It's she's, they're actually be sexualizing you. So you get to be a part of this erotica. And then I think it'll be personalized into a maybe a video or something like that and you can tailor it. But we're not far off from that, you know?

Geez. It's, it's like the porn industry. And I think the last thing I'll say is I think OnlyFans models, I. What you're gonna start to see is that real life models are gonna start to charge more of a premium because [01:22:00] the AI at some point is likely going to have to be tagged. And you'll see this whole industry come out where men are fetishizing women that aren't even real and they know that and they're having relationships with women and you know, it's like that movie her with Joaquin Phoenix.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like, but porn,

Jordan Harbinger: well, I can't say that. I am not curious about that. Yeah. Because it seems really interesting. But I can see that being horrifically bad for you if you really get interested in it.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. It might be a, a solve for some people. You know, I think in Japan that's already starting to happen where there's such a separation between the men and women.

And I think that for a lot of guys out there, they've just given up on hope of being in any type of relationship with a woman. And so I struggle with it sometimes.

Jordan Harbinger: Instead of the porn element though, I want the advisor, I want like, okay. I. This thing knows me really well. What would I tell myself if I were not emotionally invested in this problem?

What would the smart Jordan, and then maybe add in like a little bit of, I don't know, some super, you know, what would Oprah plus Jordan plus my wife, plus my [01:23:00] dad, plus my best friend, plus my producer plus these 10 super smart show guests. What would those people amalgamated into one brain? Yeah. Tell me to do about this particular problem.

That seems really cool and I think that's there.

Connor Beaton: Yeah, like that, those start to happen now, but I think what hopefully what young men start to do is use these tools to help them develop competency versus I. What's happening right now, which is avoid the risk of rejection and embarrassment. That's really how these tools are being used in a lot of ways.

And so, you know, you could have like a, a bot that's supporting you in learning how to talk to women better in real life and like how to get through some of these challenges.

Jordan Harbinger: Let's talk about fatherless kids and the time we have left here, which is quickly coming to a close. 43% of US children live without their father.

That's way more than I was hoping to see. 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father. That's, I guess, not surprising, but that's still sad. A lot of youth suicides from fatherless homes. I mean, the stats are damning [01:24:00] 85% of children who exhibit behavioral disorders, fatherless homes.

Connor Beaton: You gotta give thenar, you gotta give the ars

Jordan Harbinger: arsonist. The

Crosstalk: ars. Let me see,

Jordan Harbinger: where is this? 90, 90% of repeat arsonists, 90% of repeat arsonists. This whole thing is just crazy. Kids in juvenile state facilities, 85% of youth in prison, fatherless home, I mean, this is 75% of adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers, fatherless homes.

This is

Connor Beaton: horrible. Yeah. 85% of behavioral disorders in kids are in kids that have no father in the home. Uh, the interesting thing is that if you look at the data, one in four children, so 25% of kids won't have their father in a home, and then 43% don't have any father in the home. So it's, you know, it, it's, it's a pretty wild thing to start to look at.

But then when you start to look at the impact of that, and then you break it down, young boys will disproportionately be impacted by this. We do see that young girls have sometimes a proclivity towards more hypersexuality and teen pregnancy and things like that, but things like [01:25:00] socialization, friend groups, academics, all of those things generally stay on average and aren't really that affected because they have their mother in the house.

Whereas young boys like really start to go off the rails, adverse behavior, acting out, taking big risks, self-harm starts to go up, um, quite a bit when, and this is like a new thing that's happening in younger generation, in the younger generations now, where young boys are disproportionately harming themselves more than they ever have.

So things like cutting and self abuse, uh, that's starting to go up. The role of the father is incredibly, incredibly important, especially for young boys because number one, it's really supposed to model what a man can look like. So it gives that young boy a trajectory. This is where I could go or shouldn't go, even if it's not great.

Even if that man is lacking an ambition and you know he is got some anger problems and that kinda stuff, it at least gives that young boy like guardrails. You know, kinda like the boiling alley analogy. It's like put the guard,

Jordan Harbinger: the guardrails up. You know, [01:26:00] it's interesting you should say that because I've seen and heard quite a few guys say, I had a terrible father.

He cheated on my mom and he used to drink too much. And I'm thankful because I know I do the opposite of the things my dad would do. And I'm like, is that just a weird cope? And they're like, no, I, I am actually glad that I grew up with this person 'cause I have a model for what not to do. But if you had no father, now you are stabbing in the dark because you dunno, you, you don't have a real role model for how your behavior affects others in some way.

I

Connor Beaton: think one of the

Jordan Harbinger: other

Connor Beaton: things that's not really in this data, 'cause those are completely absent fathers, is what I call ghost dad. Ghost Dad is the dad. That's either the Bull Cosby movie from 1984.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Is that is it? I think it is. I can't look it up right now, but I think, oh my gosh,

Connor Beaton: that's

Jordan Harbinger: great.

Connor Beaton: I didn't even know that reference Ghost dad is basically the dad that's there, but not he's around but is emotionally disconnected, doesn't really take in just in life, doesn't really teach you much of anything.

And so he's essentially absent. Another version [01:27:00] of this that we see is when divorce happens and a young boy is separated from his father and he only sees them once a month. Right. Or once every couple months. And so that can have a very similar impact on a young boy. Having a man in the house gives that young boy some trajectory towards what he could move towards or in what he should avoid, like what's working and what's not working.

And kids are very perceptive and so they know very quickly like, oh, dad's anger sucks. You know, he's constantly being passive aggressive to mom. And he's, he yelling at me all the time, like he's kind of a dick and kind of an asshole. And so I don't want to be like that, but it gives that young boy something to push up against, which is a very, very important part.

And so that's one piece. The second piece is, generally speaking, fathers will help to do a couple things for kids, but for young boys especially, the first one is risk incentivization. So mothers statistically and and traditionally will try and get their kids to take less risks and actually be safer, [01:28:00] and fathers will actually encourage risks.

Yeah, I can see that even in my own family, a hundred percent. Same with mine. And my, and my wife. And my wife is like very, very progressive, very liberal in a lot of ways. And even with her, I see her like, oh, should he be on that? Should he be jumping off that like he's on those rocks over there. And some of that, you know, is her, her family system.

'cause her parents do it too when they're over. I just witnessed that. Like, should he be standing on those rocks? I'm like, he's fine. Yeah. Well what if he falls? I'm like, then he falls and he befalls. You know, then he is, he's gonna hurt himself. He's gonna learn not to stand there anymore. Right. And so, you know, I think the risk encouragement is a big part of it and it encourages that boy specifically to go out and face the hardship that we've been talking about this entire podcast.

Right. To face the hardship of the rejection, the not defaulting to these coping mechanisms like pornography or, you know, chronically smoking weed every single day. It incentivizes him to have to go forward and do hard things like generally fathers are there encouraging their sons or [01:29:00] sometimes maybe more forcefully getting their sons to do hard things.

Yeah. So the risk piece is a big part of it. And then the last piece is regulating intense emotions. Sometimes through rough and tumble play. Like my son is four years old and he is so physical. He's just such a physical kid. My daughter's not like that. Yeah, my daughter gets so annoyed when I wrestle

Jordan Harbinger: with her.

My son loves

Connor Beaton: it. My daughter kind of likes it, but my son like goes full hook, you know, on it. And I'm not, I'm not like encouraging him to do that. When young boys go at three years old, there's a spike in their testosterone from birth until three years old. It's all the same levels, but then at three there's like a pres spike.

So it's almost like a much smaller version of what you'll see in teenage years as they go through puberty. And that's why when you see three years old, three to four years old, young boys start to sometimes bite and hit and Oh yeah. You know, become, become more aggressive. That's good to know that that's a normal thing.

And you're like, what? I, I remember being like, and I know the data. I'm being like, is this [01:30:00] normal? Like what my son's going through? Like is he all right? We called him our

Jordan Harbinger: three major. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he'd be like, I'm not doing that. Yeah, no. And he goes, get his Nerf gun. Start opening fire. And we're like, okay.

That's uh, A little disturbing pal. Yeah. By the like ghost dad, 1990. 1990. Bill Cosby, he's been walking through doors. He's been falling through floors. He's been going through a lot lately, but he's still dad. Wow. Yeah. Corny. Yeah. Some of that didn't age well for Cosby. No. Oh yeah. Bill Cosby. No, pretty much the whole thing.

Aged like

Connor Beaton: milk. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. But I, you know, I think for a lot of young boys that. Being able to regulate your intense emotions is another big part of it. Yeah. And so when you don't have that, when you have a vacancy of learning how to do that, there's a much more hyper reliance on your mom in order to teach you how to do that.

And so you have a lot of young men that have been taught how to deal with their emotions from their mother. And it's not to put down moms in any way, shape, or form. No. They're the

Jordan Harbinger: ones that are there when the dads are gone. That's right. We're we're doing the opposite of trying to put the moms down.

That's right. Just to be clear.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. [01:31:00] And sometimes, depending on what that mom's gone through, she can, you know, say things like, never be like your dad. Your dad was such an angry man and you should, and anytime that that boy starts to express anger out of her own fear or her own trauma because of what she went through, she'll demonize him.

She'll shame him. Yeah. So if, if she shames him, shames his anger, you know, good boys don't get angry. Real men don't allow themselves to get angry. He can disconnect or even disassociate from his anger. And we need some connection to our anger in order, for example, to even set boundaries or know if a boundary's been crossed.

Like that's part of the marker that a boundary's been crossed. And so a lot of these boys grow up to be men that have no boundaries. They don't stand up for themselves. They're sort of like chronic or classic nice guys that, you know, never insert themselves in a relationship. And then, you know, that can lead to some of the stuff that we've been talking about of, it's too hard for me to go and talk to a woman or be in a relationship.

Yeah. It's just easier for me to go jerk off and watch porn and be in these little [01:32:00] forums online and have my digital friends and, and not need to deal with the hardship of being in a relationship. And so those things can snowball really quickly.

Jordan Harbinger: I can definitely see the line that you would draw between someone who is raised without a dad.

Learning to become a really nice person and then having that kind of blow up in their face with the people pleasing stuff and having that result in broken relationships, lack of attraction, getting walked all over in a relationship, turning that into, well, women cheat and break your heart and you know, break over your boundaries.

Right. I'd rather not deal with that and then dot, dot dot. Or just a guy who says things like, all women cheat. I see that a lot and I'm just like, oh my God, a significant number of men believe this. Yeah. That's really horrible. Yeah.

Connor Beaton: Well, it's, I think it's a deep fear. Yeah. That a lot of men

Jordan Harbinger: have. It's a deep fear for everybody, I think, but I don't think all women cheat.

Yes. It's a deep fear for me too, but I don't think all women cheat. I think some women do. Yeah.

Connor Beaton: Yeah. I did this one video where I was talking about getting clear on what your fears are of women and what you're afraid of when it comes to women, because the [01:33:00] reality is, is that men and women hold different power.

Women are generally afraid of what a man can or would do physically, and men are generally afraid of what a woman could do, character or socially. And for a lot of guys, I think they're just disconnected from that fear. Or it's like all encompassing, you know, there's like such a deep terror of you could destroy me and my character or my reputation or you know, you could break my heart by going and cheating on somebody and you know, just terrorized them.

But that has anything to do with dad. That's just a little aside. No,

Jordan Harbinger: no, but that, that stuff is interesting. I mean, endlessly fascinating. I know we're outta time, man. Thanks for doing this. Long overdue. Yeah. Maybe in the next 10 years we can do another one. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll,

Connor Beaton: we'll do, we'll do another one in seven or eight years.

Jordan Harbinger: That's

Connor Beaton: right.

Jordan Harbinger: Sounds good to me man. Thanks for coming in. Thank you so much. Conversations like these always blow my mind. 66% of men. Between the ages of 18 and 29 have not been on a date in the last year, and no, it's not because of their height. 50% of men between 18 and 25 have never asked a woman out on a date.

I mean, this does not bode well. Guys, we are porn [01:34:00] brained. We are overly interneted and we are under socialized. This is not a good sign for either gender. There's a lot more to discuss with this. I think this is just the beginning of this kind of dialogue here on the show. All things Connor Batten will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, we bit wiser. This is very practical. We always go for something that'll have specific and immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes.

That's how long the reads are. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's every ish Wednesday. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget, of course, about Six Minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. It's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share [01:35:00] it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in these types of topics, maybe a guy who needs to hear about it, or a woman who needs to hear about it for that matter, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.