Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in relationships, attraction, success, and fulfillment. Now, here's your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.
David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology podcast. I'm David Tian, your host.
In this episode, I'm hoping to help you appreciate the positive intent and the value and the worthiness of those parts of you that you might be ashamed of that you may experience as needy or wanting love or connection, or approval or significance, or desperately needing some security or certainty in your life. In order to compensate for those parts of you that you're ashamed of that you might perceive as weak, you may be tried to exile them or hide them, or cover them up, by acting the opposite, acting as if you aren't feeling needy underneath. [01:03.5]
What I'm covering here in this episode is a response to feedback from the past few episodes, starting with the Barbie movie analysis, and I'm actually going to be quoting from a couple of comments to that particular episode. Then to some more general feedback on the two-parter republished episode on our uncensored opinion of the red pill movement, and this one was with Steve Mayeda that we did together.
It's also in response to feedback I’ve gotten over the years and have even given myself, parts of myself given other parts of myself, feedback that has a similar theme—and I’ve got to say, I learned a lot about a certain segment of my audience, and it might be you listening, from the comments, the feedback, the emails, and messages on the Barbie movie analysis, so first of all, thank you for sharing your comments and your feedback. That's how I learned. [02:06.2]
My ideal format would actually be to sit in front of, or over Zoom, another person who has questions and we get to work through those together. I have tested that format and you might have known about this. There was an episode where I worked with a live caller, so to speak. That was awesome for me and I think for the other person as well, and I remember gushing to my wife about how great and rewarding this format is.
But when I tested it, about a third of the feedback was super positive, and then about two thirds or maybe a half of the feedback was more tentative and it was like, This is really great, David, but try not to do too much of this, and the feeling I got as I asked some more clarifying questions was that it was too slow and maybe they felt that it wasn't quite as relevant to them, because they were just listening in on someone else's therapy session. [03:02.6]
I'm hoping to still do more of these live sessions as episodes, but I took the foot off the gas on that particular angle or format once I got the feedback on that episode, even though I'm very grateful for the person who went on and agreed to share and be recorded. So, I'm mostly reduced to a one-directional recording here. Literally, I'm just talking to this mic and I don't know who you are listening to me right now, and even when it's a one question, even if it was an essay that I was given as a question, which I love—the more background information, the better—but I always still have so many more questions that the person asking, the questioner, hasn't even thought of as being relevant, but, for me, as a therapist, are incredibly relevant and are necessary to understand and form some kind of diagnosis of what's at issue and what the problem is. [03:59.0]
Even then, as a good therapist, I ought to and try my best to when I'm working with a client or clients, or in a group, try to withhold any judgments, final judgment. It's more of a working hypothesis that I form as I get to know the client better.
My own experience in my own therapy training has taught me that the best thing to do is always ask the clients parts why they are thinking this or what this is reminding them of, or going through the process with them, because at least half the time if not more often, it's completely surprising what they reveal and then it's like, Oh, no wonder they're reacting in this way to this stimuli or being triggered in this way by this.
Now it makes sense and it makes even more sense, and it’s often even more elegant in terms of an explanation for what is happening than the working hypothesis that I formed in the beginning just off the written answers or surveys that they sent in before we even met or from even our first session. The more I got to know them, the more complex and more rich they, as an individual, turned out to be. [05:10.2]
But in this podcast format, I'm reduced to working off assuming this person is like the other people I’ve worked with or reducing it to a kind of statistic and a sense of “The majority of men in this age range with this demographic, whatever, would believe this, or hold this or have experienced this.” But I don't know if that's true for you and your situation. I don't even know from the commenters, what your background is, and if I were to know, if I were to get that information, it would require pages and pages of comments, and that's just to get the background info.
So, as a therapist, and I try to be as honest and authentic as possible, especially as I'm getting older in this, and in this particular podcast, I find it a challenge to serve and honestly, authentically, genuinely, sincerely answer the questions that are coming at me, especially when they're aggressive and I can feel that there's a lot of emotion, often aggression, anger in the question. [06:11.1]
I don't fully understand why that anger is there. I just have assumptions based on a couple of facts that they might have shared about themselves. But I know that if I were to sit down with them and had the hours to really get to know them, and they me, we could form a relationship, a therapeutic relationship, that I would discover something much richer than anything that I could make up in my mind, which would be based off other clients, other people I’ve met in the past and demographic and psychographic research.
I am pleased to say that the Barbie movie analysis was rather polarizing, especially for my podcast. I generally see 95 percent positive reactions, often 99 percent positive reactions in terms of thumbs up versus thumbs down on this podcast-episode feedback, right? But on this one, it was more polarized. It was something like 75 percent positive or 80 percent positive, which was unusual for my podcast. [07:14.8]
Now, I have come to see over the past month that that is a weakness of my podcast because I'm not polarizing enough and that's something that I was thinking of doing an episode on, maybe you might be interested in the sort of behind the scenes thinking about the direction of this podcast. But I definitely just think I should be more polarizing. But I was actually surprised by the degree of anger, it seemed, in the comments, and at least half of the negative comments let me know that they hadn't even listened to the episode. They're just going off of the show description. [07:44.5]
Unfortunately, based on what they shared, there was very little that I could learn from them as far as how I could improve, other than the fact that they thought I was wrong and they were very offended that I would even support the movie, a feminist movie, or that I was sisterhood-adjacent, which the fact that I have an older sister, a younger sister, I love my sisters. I have and take pride in having close female friends, and I have a wife that I love and a goddaughter who literally saved my life. So, I'm very indebted to women, females in my life, so I'm happily sisterhood-adjacent. Anyone who's against my sisters, either real or in spirit, I will valiantly defend my sisters.
But instead of complaining that they don't understand me, far more productive I think is just recognizing and owning the fact that I don't fully understand them and their point of view. But now I'm getting into the third point out of four that I had planned, so let me go back to the first to set up where I'm going with this. [08:52.5]
The first point is, I may not be able to understand you fully right now in this format, where I'm just talking into a mic and then waiting a week for your few paragraphs. Again, this format is limiting. I'd much prefer to interact with you live. But one thing that really stood out in these negative comments was their anger around how the Barbie movie treated the male characters, and here's one comment by Bill Usher, @billusher2265, and here Bill says, quoting from his first paragraph of his long comment, “Every male character in the Barbie movie is either incompetent, a bad person, or pathetic.” So, since almost all the male characters were Kens, if I just talked about Ken, I hope that I can directly address this view and I'm starting to get it.
It took a few weeks to understand and just let these comments marinate. I want to be as humble as possible. Again, this is my third point. I want to be as humble as possible in recognizing that I am not experiencing this inner turmoil or whatever you'd call it, rage, anger against this movie because of its depiction of men or male characters, and I want to understand it. [10:08.1]
But here is why I have a very sympathetic view of Ken. I wanted to call this episode an ode to Ken, because I very much related to the Ken character, and I thought it was a really clever depiction and, of course, a brilliant performance by Ryan Gosling. It turns out when Barbie launched in the late-50s, early-60s, it was immediately popular and sold out its first line, and then its popularity kept growing.
Let's see in this news report. As Barbie’s popularity grew, Mattel released new dolls, new clothes, and a range of haircuts, including one modeled after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy after former president JFK was assassinated. According to Paul Mullins, an anthropology professor at Indiana University, the first five years were actually some of Barbie’s most progressive years. She had no Ken to rely on, and instead of housework, she was independent working as a nurse, an American Airlines stewardess or a ballerina. Still rather stereotyped female occupations, but, hey, this was the late-50s. [11:08.2]
Then in 1961, Mattel released the Ken doll named after Ruth Handler, the creator’s son Kenneth, after fans begged for Barbie to have a boyfriend. Handler made sure Ken was never the husband and only the boyfriend whose role was to be a sidekick, because, of course, this was the Barbie line adults.
Now, what's interesting about that is here Barbie is first, obviously, and then from that, after a few years, Ken was created as her companion, her sidekick, and this flips the scripts that you find in the Bible and in a lot of Western and Eastern civilization where the man, Adam, was first in the Bible and then Eve was created from Adam's rib as kind of a companion partner, as a supporting role. [11:53.4]
But here you have a dystopia. I think from the beginning all the way to the end, it's a kind of dystopia. It's a weird universe, the Barbie world, Barbie Land, where Ken dolls are made as an afterthought. There was never meant to be equality in Barbie Land. That's part of the running joke. In my childhood in the ’80s when I was growing up, it was like G.I. Joe and the Transformers.
Those were the guy toys, and Barbie and Barbie-like dolls were available as girls’ toys. So, the world of these men's dolls is actually these other worlds, G.I. Joe, Transformers, as I mentioned, He-Man, and this was me growing up in the ’80s. I looked up when the Barbie cartoon started and it wasn't until the 2000s. But, of course, I knew about Barbie dolls. They were already in ascendancy, like I just mentioned, since the late-50s. So, part of the running joke in the Barbie movie is, what is it like to be the sidekick male in an all-girl world made for girls? That's part of the joke. [12:58.4]
Now, what was much more clever than that was, again, Ken is not supposed to represent men. He has no genitalia, right? Neither does she. They don't even know what sex is. That's why I was saying earlier, they're stuck in this adolescent level of maturity, because they don't actually know what sex is. They haven't actually gone through puberty. They're not actually horny.
They're like the guys, many of whom I have made content for and have worked with, who, primarily, are not after sexual gratification when it comes to women, because, actually, that on its own is a relatively straightforward thing to satisfy, get taken care of. This is an economic decision. This is like men who are emotionally needy for women apart from sexual gratification, though, of course, they feel that need in the background or maybe they perceive that primarily, consciously as their need. But, unconsciously, what they're really after is love, connection, significance, approval, and being told that they're enough, that they're worthy. [13:59.2]
Look, it might have come across, I'm starting to see this now, that my descriptions of the white knight syndrome or of nice guys, is like some kind of insult thrust at guys on the internet I’ve never met. It's not. Everything that I'm sharing is from my own experience. Me, personally, I’ve gone through this and I’ve been that way, and if I haven't, I say that explicitly, because then I know I have to own up to the fact that I lack inside knowledge of it. It's based on research or people I’ve worked with.
I understand that this may not be clear, because, so far, the main story that I’ve told about the period in my life around which I started getting into red pill and I kind of lost myself in it for six to eight, nine months, the main story is what led up to that, which was the attempted suicide and it was two attempts over a period of it was about two, three weeks. Actually, it was more like two or three months. [14:59.1]
In the telling of it so far in the videos I’ve made, I’ve skipped from me on the ledge of a 57-storey building, looking down, and then being pulled off the ledge by a very good friend, and then him going on suicide watch for a couple of weeks, and then me getting some advice that I had ignored previously and I thought, What can I lose? and I got into psychotherapy. Even then, it still took a long time, so a couple months later, I tried to off myself again by riding a motorcycle.
I was on a motorcycle trip with some good friends who were trying to help me out. A motorcycle trip is seven, eight, nine hours of riding, and when you're riding on these mountains, you're not talking to anyone. So, I'm on my own and I'm thinking, Well, this would be a beautiful way to go out. I’ve shared this before. I’ve even shared footage of myself on that day, doing kind of a selfie video, just kind of showing the beautiful scenery, and I thought, This is beautiful scenery, and if I just go out here, it would be a great ending. [15:54.7]
It was just sadness, no anger, and it wasn't even really active sadness. I wasn't crying or anything. I just thought, I’ve experienced everything I’ve wanted, and I couldn't see anything that would excite me going forward, and I shared in the video that you can find on my YouTube channel. It's the featured video that you'd see if you're not a subscriber yet, and I talked about how I discovered what it's like to experience unconditional love flowing from me and not requiring anything in return. And the object of my love, the person I was wanting to see, I figured I'd stay around on this planet long enough to just watch her grow up, and that was my goddaughter, who was turning two years old at the time.
I am currently writing a book and I shouldn't even be saying that, because every time I do, I know I get a little dopamine hit of like, Hey, I'm writing a book, but it's taking a long time and part of the reason is because I'm revisiting so many painful moments from my past, and, often, when I do revisit these moments, I come to them with a new perspective and I experience them differently, and I see new perspectives and it causes me to reflect and discover new things about myself and about life. [17:09.0]
Now, I realize I'm actually never done growing even from the events and memories from the past that those are a treasure trove of insights and life-transforming lessons. One phase of my life and I don't think I’ve shared much, I think I’ve only shared it in the first time I spoke with Steve Mayeda about the red pill, which I have not republished on this podcast but what is in the Man Up series of video podcasts on my YouTube channel, and even there, I don't think I went into much detail. So, let me help you understand my journey into red pill and out of it, and how and why you relate and can relate so much to Ken.
The reason, the precipitating reason, the surface-level reason, I was standing on the 57th floor of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, looking down trying to jump, which, by the way, you might be glad to know they make it really hard to clear that jump, which you don't know until you try to get to the edge. [18:07.0]
Anyway, I’m standing there, trying to work up the courage and then also figuring out how to get there to the very edge. The reason I was there was because my girlfriend that I'd been dating as boyfriend and girlfriend for four and a half, five years at that point off and on, that gets more complicated, had cheated on me on a girls’ vacation out, and I discovered this in a way that I didn't handle it well.
I just confronted her with it and then it blew up, and then she actually publicized this in a very dramatic way on her social media—and this was back in the early-2010s when there weren't that many social media platforms. Everyone was on Facebook and Instagram. There wasn't TikTok, or even Snapchat—and she's posting photos of herself making out with this guy and this guy she just basically met. Then just a month before that, there were photos of the two of us hand in hand on a red carpet, is it was pretty clear what was going on to anyone just casually even scrolling through her socials. [19:03.8]
Instead of thinking, Wow, I dodged that bullet, or good thing I figure that out now rather than later or until I was even further deep in that quicksand mud, instead, I felt like how Ken felt—and I discovered, just like Ken did, Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.
Everything else in my life was the same. It was just that she had cheated on me. But everything else stayed the same, and yet, that fact spoiled my enjoyment of all the rest of my life, all the good stuff I had in my life, and no amount of rational thinking or intellectual reminder of “Hey, appreciate the good stuff” mattered, not until I was face to face with really trying to drive that motorcycle, ride it right off the cliff that I finally discovered one thing that was worth living for, and it was the experience of unconditional love flowing from me. That was it. None of the other stuff mattered and I totally understand this at a deep experiential level. [20:06.7]
But it actually took me even longer to discover and fully understand why I was led to this dark, depressing place where I wanted to end my life. So, discovering unconditional love flowing from me kept me going, kept me on this earth, but it didn't explain why I was hurt so deeply and badly by this young woman who had cheated on me
I, too, went on a six to eight or nine months of anger, and, I'd say, the first six months, I was really aggressive with it to the point where I think I offended some of my guy friends’ girlfriends and they made these guy friends stop hanging out with me for a long while, because I was so angry to how the world was skewed to her side, the cheater, and how it seemed like she was getting away with it. There were only a few people on my side, good friends, mostly men, but some women, but even some of these women later turned to her side and I learned a lot from that, and I became a lot less naive and a lot more cynical about the world. [21:11.1]
So, to make sense of the anger and betrayal and hurt that I was feeling, I turned to the internet, and alongside reading these very complex, deep, but also abstruse psychotherapy texts, like Karen Horney’s work or Carl Jung's work, which, to be honest, were written a long time ago and weren't obviously immediately applicable to my life and my pain at that time. But I was starting to soak in these ideas, these concepts, and alongside that, I was getting into what would be considered sort of the forefathers of red pill. [21:43.6]
That's the way I see it, which was early manosphere, and I'm talking the Solomon II blog, which I have mentioned before I think in the last episode, the Jonah Hill one, as well as the Return of Kings blog. There's another one called the Heartist, Heart-I-S-T. I think the Return of Kings is down now, because that person has taken another route, which is also interesting from a psychotherapy perspective, and I don't know if Heartist is still up. I hope they're not, but it was a lot easier for me to be sympathetic and empathetic to their points of view because I was going through that, and there was this desire, this wish, this yearning for life and society to go back to the ’80s, or, actually, back to the ’50s, where they would have shamed with a scarlet A branded on her body. This ex who had cheated on me, they would have shamed her. She couldn't have shown her face in society because of how much she had hurt me and all, how she was so morally corrupt and how she did the immoral thing.
I was totally in this self-righteous mode, and then, of course, when that ran out of energy because I was so angry, then it would devolve into “Oh, why? Why? How could you have done this to me?” and it was oscillating between these two extremes of anger and sadness, anger and sadness, but mostly anger. Probably 80 percent of the time it was anger, because I have very strong warrior parts and achiever parts who are looking for solutions to problems. [23:03.5]
They were looking for problems to solve and this was one of the problems, and the problem, from my view at that time for those six months where I would start counting from about the time I first tried to commit suicide and then coming to terms with it, like, This isn't going, I can't turn the clock back on this and we can't get back together, and just forget this.
Then I would, from there, count forward to six to eight, nine months, and in some ways I would count right up until I met my now wife, who disconfirmed a lot of what I had believed and harbored and thought was impossible. It's like what these red pill guys are, I don't know, the average dude who trolls on the internet thinks it’s a unicorn or impossible, a woman who is feminine, but her femininity also comes with or encompasses integrity and standards. And she's young and blah, blah, blah, right? [23:58.2]
And she's helped me to see that while they are still a very small minority of women, just as I believe good men of real integrity are also the small minority of men, so these women who are attractive and all these other things you're looking for and have morals are a small minority of women. They still exist and they're still out there.
But in that first year, fresh off that cheating, the betrayal and then the ensuing hurt, I didn't have any hope to find attractive women of integrity, and even if they did exist, I didn't think I knew or could tell whether they were or not, because, clearly, I was wrong on this one that I had invested a whole bunch of time and energy into.
It was a massive wakeup call and it was like, You don't know how to navigate this world of relationships where you're having to find and place your bets on one person. You may not know a whole lot about how to get the majority—which might only be 51 percent, right? To count as the majority—of women into bed with you, and, really, all that's required is excelling in the first hour to four hours of meeting them, and with some of them, you might be playing the long game. [25:12.6]
But whatever, it's nothing compared to the five years or whatever, four or five years that I was with this one and the 50 years that would be required for a marriage, and at that time, being in a relationship for five years, I thought I was qualified and had the experience to dole out relationship advice.
By the way, my relationship course, Rock Solid Relationships, I created much after it with a lot of growth after this betrayal. It was five years after. Even then, I’ve grown a ton since then, especially in terms of relationship knowledge and experience. But, luckily, revisiting the RSR material, all of it is true, and will prepare you to get into and strengthen any relationship that you find yourself in, even if it's a casual one and especially one that you want to grow for the long term. But back then, in the early-2010s, it was a wakeup call that I really didn't know how to navigate these waters. In fact, maybe I didn't even know which waters I was in. [26:07.5]
This manosphere and proto-red-pill world that I found myself in, which was really angry at women in the way, in a sense, Ken, his response to discovering patriarchy-- For me, that was like me discovering manosphere red pill. He discovered this patriarchy thing, and then just took it and ran with it, because this at least got him power, and me taking back my power, thinking all women are bitches and lying whores.
One of the things that really hammered this home for me when I was first trying to just recover from the breakup was we were living in Singapore at the time, but she and the ex, and coming fresh off this betrayal that she just plastered all over her socials, she was really attractive. She had a lot of connections. She was quite young. [26:52.4]
A girl in her early 20s has always got more power in a nightclub than a guy who is not buying a 10k table. Even a guy who's buying or splashing $10,000 minimum spend on bottles to book a table in a club in Singapore, now that might be $20,000–25,000, given inflation, even then they might say, “Sir, you've offended this beautiful young woman who has a lot of friends and is beautiful, and can bring in even bigger spenders than you.” They're not going to say that, but that's what they're thinking. “So, we're going to have to kick you out in a dispute.”
Then alone a guy like me comes from a pickup artist background where we're taught never to spend any money in the club and instead to get good at game, gaming the whole system, that I was hanging out at the VIP red rope and there were instances when I didn't have the connections to get through there.
There were a few times that I'm thinking right now where I'm hanging in there at that red rope and I'm having to pull all kinds of strings, I'm on my phone, texting, and then there are these women who are very attractive, the Misses Singapore, that sort of thing, or friends of mine, telling me just throwing their hands up, like, I can't I wish, I could get you in, but I can’t. I don't have the pull here. It's because inside is some celebrity. [28:06.0]
He might be C-lister in Hollywood, but in the early-2010s in Singapore, a C-lister in Hollywood was an A-lister in Singapore, so they're going to bend over backwards for this celebrity, who on that corporate spend of whatever company is sponsoring to bring him into Singapore is going to spend unlimited, and they've got that extra security around his what they used to call the dragon table. That's the $50,000 spend table. And there she is, my ex, right in the center of the whole thing and the celebrity is talking to her trying to mack on her.
Actually, the incident that I'm thinking of was just before she cheated, about a month before, when I was the boyfriend at the time, and I'm telling the security guy, like, Hey, look, I supposed to go in there, because, actually, we were holding hands as we were going in and then we got separated and she just kept going. [28:54.0]
Yeah, there were a lot of red flags like that that I totally ignored just like Ken, and it's ironic because the kind of the humor of the movie is that Ken has to have ignored it because he was created as the rib. He's created as the partner, in this sense, and that was hilariously handled in the movie, of course. But I was not a Ken. I responded like Ken, but I was an equal. I was a human being. I was not in Barbie Land. I was in the world, and I couldn't get in there and she totally ignored me and just walked in, and she acted as if she assumed that I would just walk in, because I usually do have the pull. But not in this case, and I got the rope put right in front of my belt kind of right in my stomach. The bouncer was like, So sorry, man. I’d seen him a few times as a special event bouncer, so he was like, I can't let you in. I'm going to get in trouble if I do, and this whole thing is coming out.
Then I had to pull some serious strings, emailing, can you believe it? Emailing on my phone and then I showed that. Eventually, I was able to show the email to the bouncer. He called in this supervisor. I think it was someone handling the celebrity’s agenda or itinerary, and then she okayed it and then the bouncer could let me in and then I got in. But it was ridiculous how much more I had to work when all she had to do was be hot, and that was a harbinger of things to come. [30:15.1]
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There were many a night in the three months after that betrayal, two to three months, where the wing that I hung out with the most during that time who was also going through a breakup and had a net worth of almost a billion dollars—I mean, he could buy his way in and he didn't do that very often at all because he was hyper connected—but we're always the sort of hangers on. We'd have to do all this extra stuff. We’d either have to pay or we’d have to pull strings, and they, these beautiful young women in their early 20s, just sauntered in just because they were hot.
That was the system in Singapore, but I’ve seen this all around the world teaching pickup all around the world. In New York City, especially, I’ve seen this where you'd have to have a recognizable, at least B-list celebrity, in order to trump a really beautiful young woman, because that's how clubs worked. [32:04.6]
If there were clubs with just rich guys and no beautiful women in it, it would die really fast, because the rich guys would just take their money and leave. The whole reason they're there is to mack on the hot girls, so the currency of the nightlife is hot women who don't mind being objectified and valued in this way, and trust me, in their early 20s, they do not mind getting all this free treatment, free VIP red-carpet treatment at all.
Now, one exception to this sort of status-fame thing and then also just buying your way in is having great social skills, and since that time, I’ve met a few rare individuals who can get in, in some cases, get 17 dudes in with them at the top clubs, while the models were forced to wait outside for half an hour. Anyway, those are massive exceptions. Shout out to Andrew, for those who know. [32:53.1]
But the point is, I was bitter. I was angry. I did not like how the system worked. I did not like how it rewarded hot women, and in the comments, when she posted these photos, they weren't saying it. It was just about-face. They would go from that one week she posted on my profile on Facebook, “I miss you so much,” because she was away on this trip. “I miss you so much. I love you,” or whatever. “Can't wait to get back together with you.” Again, this public posting between couples, if you guys do that, nowadays I see that as a big red flag. But, anyway, this was sort of the norm and I didn't know any better, right? This is sort of like me as a Ken, a naive Ken living in Barbie Land, right?
Anyway, she posts all this stuff and then the next week she's posting, because I confronted her and figured it out and kind of kicked her out and everything, and then she got really angry and got her revenge by all this stuff back and forth. It was awful. She'd post a photo of her making out with this new guy and all the comments underneath were so super supportive. [33:50.3]
On the sly about a month or so later when I was super depressed and just sort of staring out into space—I had not learned meditation yet. I had not done any psychotherapy work. That was several months down the road, and I actually at that point, I hadn't even discovered, I mean, I hadn't even started reading any kind of deep psychotherapy—a few of her friends reached out to me quietly, “Hey, how are you doing? You know, just checking in,” because I just went silent, because I had nothing to actually compare.
She's just showing off her life, her social life, and how exciting and all that stuff it was, and that's a social currency that was rewarded. All of a sudden, society rewarded the cheater, the liar, the one who was immoral, the one who, in my view, was the one who was who lacked integrity. I was the one who was cheated on and yet they were championing and supporting the cheater. So, my problem-solving parts immediately went into [action]. “Let's figure out how to Machiavellian manipulate this situation so that I can not just regain my own power, but take more power.” [34:55.7]
Then that was in the land. That's when I really connected with the red pill energy of “Let's take it back. Let's get revenge. Let's change the system,” and I totally was into that, and I think that scared off a bunch of my guy friends’ girlfriends, like I mentioned, and they were sort of the collateral damage. Sorry about that. Some of them are still not talking to me.
So, in that period, when Ken came back to Barbie Land and installed patriarchy and the “Yeah, let's stick it back to them for all these years of being neglected and being trodden on,” and all that, right? I totally got that energy and had all kinds of schemes and strategies for getting as much sex with hot women as possible now. At that point, I had already ridden to the hype, but I was going to get it in a kind of power way, not in a way where it was like, Let me seduce them so that that was a sign of my own worth. Now it was more like, Let's get that, let's get it back, and all is fair in love and war, and that sort of thing. That's a pretty tame way to put it. [36:01.1]
Luckily, I didn't actually follow through with any of these Machiavellian type of strategies, except a few that kind of were just aimed at her and her alone, and they fizzled out pretty quickly. The satisfaction I got from pulling off one of those things that hurt her was like, Yay, and then the same day, it was like, Okay, now my life was still the same. It's not changed the material reality of it. I still have this sadness and this loneliness, and there's still this real confusion that I didn't even understand.
Luckily, I had so many strong women in my life, like I just mentioned, growing up, role models in a way, and female friends who even if they were sleeping around, would try to do it, just like I did, in the most ethical way possible, trying their best not to lead anyone on and all of that stuff, and I just also adopted this. We were even getting consent before consent was a thing, because the last thing you want is all this drama from someone who is hanging on. [37:00.6]
So, I'm not going to take too much credit for this, but I quickly discovered how empty that mode of revenge anger was, how deeply unsatisfying it was. I think, just looking back now, and I need to reflect more on this, but my hypothesis is that my early years up until about 29 or so, I would identify as an evangelical Christian. Part of that worldview is that there's a small minority. I was a reformed evangelical Christian. That is a small minority of human beings who will make the choice from their free will to believe in Jesus Christ, blah, blah, blah, to be saved to make it to heaven.
I was already used to thinking that the small minority was the elect and it wasn't counterintuitive to me that it would turn out to be that only a small minority of human beings, especially hot women, would be good, and I was quite tempered. I was tempered by quite a lot of maturity because I was forced to mature through this process and I recognized how even when I was rampaging through my hedonism, I was well-intentioned. [38:11.0]
I didn't want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to have some fun and to maximize it, because I believed that, at that point, evolution was all there was and I’d better get some fun before I died on this planet, this rock hurtling through the universe, right? But I had no intention to harm anyone and I could see that there was this immaturity then now from my perspective in coming out of the red pill, and I didn't judge that and I don't judge it now.
Now, it might come across that I have parts that do this podcast, and now I'm starting to transition into the third point—there are parts of me that are in charge of or like to do public speaking. The parts of me that I activate in therapy don't like to do public speaking because there's so much humility there. Like I was kind of sharing at the beginning, I don't really know you yet and I reserve judgment on that, even 10, 20 sessions in. [39:03.5]
There are parts of you that you may not even know and you might have just met in our session may reveal these routes or sources of your behavior that you didn't even know consciously. So, if they don't even know themselves, it's crazy to think that I could know them that deeply. But what would happen for a one-dimensional, one-way podcast like this one where I'm speaking into a mic like it's almost like a talk, right, or a sermon, is that my therapy parts would say nothing.
Now, I have these teaching parts and I have multiple ones that might come online at different times to handle this work, because they enjoy a lot of it, and sometimes those parts come across as demeaning or arrogant because I’ve got a quirky sense of humor and I find many mistakes I made in the past kind of funny in retrospect—and if you can't joke about it, I mean, this kind of shows you haven't learned from it and fully owned it and integrated it. But also beware that humor can be a way, a mechanism for distracting or changing the subject. [40:02.4]
Eventually, I felt it was quite empty. The anger and the rage sort of dissipated, because I recognized that there must be some people who are good who are also attractive, and I knew that there were women who were good because I grew up with them and I knew plenty. As far as them being attractive, it seemed like that was just a genetic thing and maybe an upbringing thing, and it was just a matter of scouring the earth—and here's one place where I'm quite different from almost but not all men I meet and talk to, which is at that point in my life, I had the freedom to work remotely.
There were the early-2010s and Singapore was really expensive—still is and maybe even more so now—so I broke my lease early. I put some stuff in storage, but I put most of my stuff into five or six suitcases, and then I moved to, of all places, the W in Bangkok, the W Hotel in Bangkok, which has just opened and had this great promotional rate, because I figured I was going to Bangkok quite a bit for pleasure trips and I was doing the math and I realized I could live at the W and any hotel or in that range for cheaper or at least the same price as what I was paying in rent for my two-bedroom condo in downtown Singapore. [0:41:13.2]
I didn't need to be in Singapore all the time for my work. I still had tons of client work in Singapore, but I could batch it and the immersive experience for the clients is actually better, though it does take a lot more energy for me. So, I made that move. I could just up and go.
Along with that freedom and a kind of minimalism, still I had five or six suitcases, so this was sort of like a luxury nomad, and I could store the luggage at the W and I would pop in and out, so I wouldn't even need anything more than a tourist visa. I was constantly traveling and I loved it and I was quickly racking up the night so I got to the ambassador status at the old Starwood, which is now the Marriott, pretty quickly and living that life, and I cracked the miles hacking thing, so I was always flying business class—and, by the way, I teach how to do this in my course, Lifestyle Mastery—but that was just along the way. That was just a way to get some fresh air. [42:01.4]
I wanted to just get out of the stale-for-me environment where I couldn't compete against my ex who was an attractive, still young woman, coming into the prime of her femininity or whatever. Now looking back, I was still going through early stages of maturity in her early 20s, which is to be expected, but I had not taken that into account and I didn't know any of this stuff, developmental psychology, really, actually, developmental psychology for adults, for young adults.
So, I just upped and went, and this was a breath of fresh air for me. I got a new environment, cut off all the old anchors, could set new anchors, and it was awesome. Instead of giving into the despair of the red pill, and then some guys went to black pill, I didn't get into that, because like I was saying, I was used to thinking of the elite.
All through high school, we’re looking at getting into the top schools and getting into the only A in the class and all that. I was used to thinking in this upper area, and so I was already used to thinking the minority, I'd be in the small minority. When it comes down to it, it's a very small minority of women who are attractive and have integrity, and have the other things you're looking for, that just kind of made sense and it's just like, Okay, I need to search, to widen the search net, right? I did. [43:13.0]
So, I started living in Bangkok and then I could kind of meet women in Thailand. It hurt that I couldn't speak Thai at all or very well, so in Thailand, I was limited to English-speaking women, but still, there were quite a lot. Then I would go to Indonesia, which is a country I know many Americans, many Westerners don't know that it's the fourth largest, most populous country in the world, almost 300 million people in Indonesia. Also the largest Muslim country in the world. I know you probably don't know that if you grew up in the West, because I didn't know that until my first year of living in Singapore.
There are a lot of rich Indonesians who went to international schools or learned English, so there was that world, and so I think I could spread my net of possible women that I could meet and get into a relationship with, in all of Southeast Asia, which really widened it up, versus little Singapore, which is a city state of 5 million people in total. [44:07.6]
It really widened it up for all of Southeast Asia, but I can also easily fly out to China, Japan, Korea, which I did, and then I also went on trips to Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Latvia, Estonia, so I was open to going anywhere. “I'm looking for a one-in-a-million woman right now,” I said that to myself and I'm like, Okay, how do I meet these? How many millions do I have to expose myself to in a way? And then I got a lot more strategic. I was on Instagram, looking for attractive women and then just triangulating to meet them. I actually have a system to do that, and it was working relatively well. It just took a little time, but it was also fun, so it wasn't a difficulty for me.
So, I came out of that red pill cynicism of “all women are this” where I've seen this online, where comments are like, “Get a woman to like you,” or whatever. “Yeah, you'll have to make more money than hers” was the comment, and that's impossible. All right? I read that, it was a comment on one of our ads that we were putting on Facebook about how to connect with women. It was like, Yeah, you'll have to make more money than the woman and that's impossible. [45:11.0]
That belief never had occurred to me until I read it, and I don't think it's ever occurred to any of my in-person clients. Part of the problem here is to work with me in person is quite expensive, because you're taking my time, which is not scalable, and generally—I'm looking at it now for the past month and I suspected this, but I kind of sat down and looked at it deeper—my clientele is mostly top five-percent earners, especially for their age. For their age, it’s even higher. Then the top 20 percent overall, so I know very little actually about what it's like to be in the bottom 20 percent of earners and, I would say, even the bottom 50 percent of worldly success, and then even the bottom 50 percent of success with women. [45:55.5]
I felt like I had no success with women growing up, but actually, now that I look back at it, when I was 16, I lost my virginity to one of the most attractive girls in the school and we dated until I graduated, and then we broke up the summer before college. But I would be in the cafeteria with some guy friends and then she would sneak up behind me, kind of “Surprise” and hug me from behind and plant a big kiss on my cheek, and we’d just quickly say, “I’ll see you after class.” She’s like, Yeah, I’ll see you after class, great. Then I’d turn back and I’d look. These guys are looking at me and then they'll say multiple times, like, Dave, you're a really lucky guy, and I was just like, Yeah, thanks, because I have no control.
I had no control over that. I have no idea why she liked me at that time and maybe even now I don't know exactly, and I didn't know at that time and I didn't know for the next 15 years or so how to control it. If there was a girl that I liked that didn't like me back, I had no idea what to do to get her to like me more. I was just being me and I had the grace of these girls to like me, but I was being liked. [47:00.4]
For me, it is actually arrogant, I discovered, for me to speak on behalf of all Kens or all those who hate their Ken-ness, because in a way, I’ve grown out of that Ken phase, luckily, and I totally got it when Barbie said to Ken, and I don't remember the exact line, but it was something along the lines of “You've got to find out who you are apart from me.” They don't have to be Barbie and Ken. They can be Barbie and they can be Ken separately, and I had to learn that the hard way. It took years.
In fact, it took all my life up until that point in my mid-30s for that to sink in, and this is actually backed up by evolutionary psychology for the thing that the red pill really loves, evo psych. Geoffrey Miller’s amazing book, The Mating Mind has shown that art was created, evolved as a way for men to woo women, to seduce women, to win over women, and this is true from the evo psych perspective, almost all male achievement, like the Taj Mahal, that sort of thing, is from a desire to dominate in the mating hierarchy, either over competition from other men for a woman or for women, or to directly win over a woman. [48:16.2]
This might be something for you to think about as a fun thought experiment in sci-if. Imagine a kind of dystopian world, and for whatever reasons, you can make up some kind of virus or whatever, where they have to sequester all the females in some areas of the world behind these high walls or wherever you can't get through. Then all the men are just on their own. You’ve got to do whatever you’ve got to do to keep society going.
Then there's sort of like a lottery or a draw of some kind where you're chosen as a man to be taken to where the women are so that you can inseminate and continue the human race and so on, and then it's totally random. It doesn't really depend on anything that you can control. Or let's make it a little bit easier to believe. Maybe they're looking for genetics, so you can't really control that. That's determined by birth. They're looking for good genetics. The rest of the time, you're just going to do whatever you need to do. [49:02.6]
I'm thinking I can see myself basically not caring so much about my clothes. I'd be in very functional wear. I’d have cargo pants on with lots of pockets. I’d just shave my head, because it’s much ado. Who cares about your hair? Actually, it'd be slicker, like GSP in a fight, yeah? Just thought a lot about that, an all-boys situation. A lot of the things that we do, like peacocking and all that, would just go by the wayside.
I haven't explored this as much as the toxic shame that drives the achiever. But a level above that is the desire to get to win the approval to be worthy of a woman, this ideal woman in your mind—which if you ask a psychotherapist, they’d trace it back to probably a mother figure, if not mother outright—to win over the affection of the women that are your ideal, and there's no shame around that. That's how the animal kingdom works and that's exactly what's happening in the Ken and Barbie world. [49:58.7]
See, here's the thing we trick ourselves, we men trick ourselves into thinking: “We don't need women. We don't really care about them. We're just going to do our own man thing.” If you have testosterone and you've gone through puberty, that is not true for you anymore. That whole thing that you might have gone through in grade school, “Girls rule, boys drool,” or “Girls have got cooties.”
After you go through puberty, you're not in that world anymore. You want to get the women to like you and not just for sex, which is, again, a minority, maybe a minor need that you're trying to meet, for most guys. I understand that for some guys, that's an overriding thing. But what's underneath that, underlying it, or maybe more dominant than just the sexual gratification is to have women approve you, give you their stamp of approval that you are worthy of being attracted to. And how do you know that? When she spreads her legs for you and says or demonstrates that she wants to have sex with you. Then there's that validation.
It might be obvious now, and it's obvious to me now that as a pickup artist, all successful pickup artists are validation-seeking through their behavior, because women ultimately are the judges for whether they are a good pickup artists or not, obviously. Imagine someone who says he's a good pickup artist and no women like him. That would just be total fraud, right? [51:18.5]
So, who is going to judge? Who is going to demonstrate that? How is he going to demonstrate that he's a good pickup artist or attractive as a man, or worthy as a man, or in Ken's term enough, “Kenough”? It was women. And the guys who are blind to that are still at an even earlier level, and I'm not saying that in a demeaning way where there's levels, because I'm going to get to that comment.
I just mean that I went through that earlier and I get it, and it's sweet, in a way, because it's sweet in a way that a young boy is in his kind of innocence and he wants the girls to like him, and I get that. My son will go through that and that's normal, and that he and all men, if you want to find happiness as an adult male, is going to have to go through that process of coming to believe that you are enough apart from whether women are attracted to you or not. Question is, do you like yourself? Do you love yourself? [52:14.1]
That was beautifully put in the phrase or the term “Kenough” that Ken finally realized that he is Kenough, and, of course, it is a process so I'm sure they're going to set that up with their sequel that they have planned.
Okay, so let me read out this comment to Bill Usher's comment by Uros Zivkovic, @uroszivkovic9988, and he begins his comment with “Hello David, I think you should stick to dating advice as this seems to go far beyond that honestly.” Yeah, it does. I don't want to do dating advice anymore and that was one of those things like, Holy crap, how did this guy think I was just about dating advice? So, look for some big moves, hopefully, in the next several months to make it clear what I'm doing here.
I'm going to skip to the bottom and then come back into the middle. At the bottom, he says, “I also have to add, that the way you speak about men watching this”—the Barbie movie—“is incredibly arrogant and demeaning, one critique most men have with movies such as this.” [53:10.6]
That phrase, “one critique most men have with movies such as this,” was gold for me, so thank you, Uros. I can't say I can thank you for all the other nasty comments you put later, but this one was great because you taught me something. You taught me or you showed me that I missed why these guys were so angry about this, because they believe that the movie is making fun of Ken when the way I saw it was that Ken was the frickin’ hero.
Barbie was, of course, going through her own character arc. To me, it was going to be quite obvious, right? But for Ken, it was totally new to even contemplate that, this kind of sidekick that was created, a male created for female world and what it would be like to live in that and, genetically, in a sense, be created for that. It was hilarious and fascinating all at the same time, and I didn't see his character arc as demeaning at all, because that was my character arc leading up to my mid-30s, and I thought it was awesome and the message was great. [54:08.7]
I recognize now that the way that Bill had seen the Kens as-- how did he put it? “Incompetent, a bad person, or pathetic.” I do believe that they were meant to display Will Ferrell as incompetent, because the guy is a comedian and he's supposed to be making fun of himself. That's part of the shtick, right? But the Kens? Those guys were awesome. I thought that they were hilarious and very clever.
What he's seeing is that one critique most men have with movies such as this in their depiction of Ken, they're coming across as arrogant and demeaning to Uros, I think. If Uros was sitting in front of me, I would want to confirm that, but what I'm getting from his and other comments is that they thought and felt that the way that Ken was depicted was demeaning, whereas I thought it was incredibly empathetic. I really connected with it and, as a result, I had a lot of understanding for that guy, Ken. And it was brilliantly played and it was hilarious. [55:04.1]
Okay, then he goes on, “You present yourself as above the rest, as enlightened among the blind.” I wouldn't say the rest. I'm pretty sure I quote and share as many sources as I can of other sources of wisdom and so on, like I liberally quoted from my friend, Mark Manson, I think in the last episode. But the whole reason I'm doing this is because, yeah, I think I have something that can help people, so I'm sort of guilty as charged. I think I am more enlightened in this area. Otherwise, I'd have nothing to share here. I shouldn't even hit record, right?
“I think you could do some maturing and growing as well.” I think so, too, and part of this episode is me maturing and growing and sharing some of that that I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don't understand from the inside what it's like to be a bottom 20-percent or maybe even a bottom 50-percent guy, because even when it comes to attracting women, especially worldly success, especially academics—I have three master's degrees and a PhD, and school was a relative breeze for me—but when it came to the area of women, I’ve still had girlfriends. [56:07.4]
In fact, from my first girlfriend until I started pick-up or until my first marriage, I didn't go without a girlfriend for more than eight months and that was pointed out to me by the girls I was dating. The thing is, I felt like I had no control over that, because I didn't choose these women. They chose me. And the ones that I liked that didn't like me back, there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't understand it at all.
So, for me, I felt powerless, but looking back at it now, I was not experiencing the level of desperation, and I had a lot of privilege, just genetically and so on, and even intelligence is a privilege. Hard work, your work ethic, in many ways can be traced to genetics, whether you've inherited this hard work. Even if it's not genetic, it could be through your upbringing because you had a hard working dad or whatever.
So, I am mature enough now and will, hopefully, keep maturing to recognize that I can't take credit for all this privilege, all these gifts. I can just appreciate them, and that doesn't take away from all the pain that I endured. Even First World problems are still problems. [57:13.3]
But I can humbly say, Uros—I think that's your first name—that I don't know your reality or, even if you were to tell me in a comment back, I don't know enough to fully understand it and I may never know enough to understand it from the inside, and that is my point in the Barbie analysis.
The headline, the subject, the title is the Barbie movie, the challenge of “centering a foreign point of view,” and I’ve talked about how hard it is to even understand, for me as an Asian-American or an Asian-Canadian man now living in Taiwan and who has lived in the West and the East almost equally my life, how hard it is for me to understand a black man living in inner city America or Africa, or there's a lot of people's lives I can only understand from a distance, as hard as I might try. And then to understand what it's like to be a woman, a female, a biological female, going through these different phases of her life in different parts of the world, whatever, right? [58:10.2]
It's important when someone is showing you how they are experiencing life, if you want to understand them, you sort of just shut up and try to learn as much as you can. I'm going to take up my own advice here with Uros and I will say, I don't know where you're coming from fully. But I can feel your anger and that must be based on some pain. I don't know the source of your pain. I can only guess. But I don't have enough information to go on it, so I can't speak to your issue directly. But you’re damn right. I could do some maturing and growing, and I fully hope I do. I'm only middle-aged right now and I hope this is not the end of my life.
“As you seem to think there is only one path.” I do think there is an evolution at developmental stages, and that's based on my life and what I’ve seen in others, but I know that there are a lot of exceptions and I know that I also say you can jump around, and I also know that some people are built differently, some who don't have the curiosity around, for instance, a player stage and sleeping around. That's awesome, you can skip that, right? [59:13.7]
While I think most guys, maybe 51 percent, I feel pretty confident with that one, 51 percent or more of guys would do well to follow the path that I’ve been tracing out. And of course, I can't speak much about the path after me, right? Obviously, I haven't gone through it. I can just sort of conjecture and that’s based on theory and hearing others who are in their 80s or whatever share, but I just share the best I can.
Now I go to some of the middle so I can address some quick questions here towards the end that, hopefully, I can address quickly. “Could you please tell me why we should do the lots of extra work [to] understand a young woman fully, rather than doing all we can to make her understand how it is to be a male?” [59:56.8]
Here's why. Hopefully you've all read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, a classic. I read it around the time it came out, because my older sister, a woman, showed it to me and she was a fan. Anyway, one of the habits is to seek to understand and then be understood.
Now, if you're in business, if you've gotten any kind of negotiation training or even sales training, you know how important it is to understand your prospect or your negotiating partner, the person across the table from you, rather than just cramming your agenda down their throats without even bothering to understand them.
That's why I do so much work understanding women and I, hopefully, can translate that to your situation, men, to sort of womansplain what it's like to be a woman so you can relate to them better, you can connect with them better. That's part of what I do. That's one of the things I enjoy most about my work actually, it’s being that bridge.
Maybe I ought to do it the other way and do a lot more content for women, and, hey, look out for that coming up because it's the same sort of bridge work that I can just stand in the gap here and just do the best I can based on what I see, given that I have a limited perspective, which is just me. [1:01:08.1]
Now we get into the next point. Hopefully, I’ve addressed that. Why should you try to understand women, rather than just trying to force her to understand you? Okay, hopefully, if that's not clear, go to the Stephen Covey book and read that section on “seek to understand before being understood.”
Okay, next question: “In what way do you think ‘our’ point of view is necessarily ‘male-centric’?” Then he goes through all of this other stuff, and he's just going off. I did a whole long podcast as this one has turned out to be, explaining that, but he didn't get it, for which, totally, maybe I should take-- I'll take responsibility as much as I can for that. Maybe I wasn't clear.
“In what way do you think ‘our’ point of view is necessarily ‘male-centric’?” I'll make it clear now, and he's replying to my reply to Bill Usher here. In my reply, I wrote, like, no duh, right? I said, the main point was that, as men, our point of view is necessarily male centric (no duh) and I was alluding to this earlier in this long episode. [1:02:01.8]
What I was getting at is I'm a male, so maybe this is too philosophical a point for you. I'm a male and this might be too obvious so it has escaped you. I am male, biologically, and my brain is in this body of mine, which is male, and my senses are being filtered through this physical body, which is male. In that sense, my experience of life is male-centric. My experience of life is not female-centric.
My experience of life as an Asian person is not black-centric. My experience of life as someone who was raised in the West for 25 years is not that of someone who’d had his entire childhood in Taiwan, right? It's not Taiwan-centric. The more I live here, the more easy it will be for me to understand and become Taiwan-centric, but it is a challenge, okay, and it is something that I have to exert effort for it, whereas I have to exert zero effort to experience life as a male. I just opened my eyes and here’s whatever, and boom, male-centric. Okay, that's what I mean and it’s that basic. [1:03:07.5]
If, as a man, you don't recognize that, it's going to get in the way of you connecting with your teenage daughter, or obviously, other women, adult women that you're trying to date or connect with. It will also, obviously, prevent you from understanding the Barbie movie and appreciating it.
Okay, so there's a lot more I wanted to cover, but, whoa, I'm doubly over the time that I had allotted for this. Hopefully, this helps you in some way. If it has, please share it with anyone else that you think would benefit from it. In this episode, I covered my story of pain and heartache, and bitterness and anger, in my sort of Ken story arc up to this point in my life and then how I found all of that anger empty.
Then I recognized that there's a small minority of people that would match with me in terms of integrity or whatever it was that I was looking for, and then I just widened the net considerably to find this person. But I also wasn't in a rush. I also wasn't too sanguine. I wasn't optimistic about finding such a person because it was supposed to be rare and I purposely made it rare, because I could always just drop my standards and settle, and I refused to do so, so that's part of the bargain. [1:04:13.3]
I also wanted to point out I was doing a kind of ode to Ken, how Ken is awesome. Ken is definitely Kenough. Then I also wanted to make the point of intellectual humility. That's really coming home to me and I can understand why sometimes I have parts that do a lot of the speaking that might come off as arrogant or demeaning. But these lessons are coming out of my own personal experience, unless I say otherwise—and the humility to recognize that, there's a whole segment of the male population that I can't understand from the inside, but I try to understand as much as I count from the outside, and I'm acknowledging that as a limitation for reaching certain segments of males.
So, that's the recap. If this helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think would benefit from it. Leave a comment. As you can see, I'm really feeding off your feedback. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [1:05:10.3]
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