Human Lie Detector: An Interview with Joshua Pellicer
Michael Fiore: Hello, this is Michael Fiore, and I want to welcome you to this bonus interview for “The Secret Survey” program. Now, as you’re getting this interview, you should have already gone through all of the main “Secret Survey” modules; eight modules as there were, plus the final lesson, introduction, and the actual survey results. And I’m always nervous when we actually give away the actual survey results because I believe… my friend Josh is on the phone here, has seen them, they’re kind of brutal. And they’re kind of ridiculously honest and dirty and involve swearing and requests for dirty things.
One of the things that I wanted to do in this interview is—and I’m going to introduce my guest in a second, he’s a fantastic guy—is give a guy’s perspective on the “Secret Survey” program. You know, as a woman you’ve gone through all of this stuff over the last, you know, 10 or 15 days, whenever you’re actually listening to this, and some of it can be kind of shocking, some of it can seem obvious, some of it can seem offensive, some of it can seem misogynistic to a certain degree. Occasionally we get women that say, “Oh Michael, you’re being misogynistic about this,” which I think people that know me know that I don’t have a misogynistic bone in my body, but that’s okay. But I wanted to invite my friend Josh, Joshua Pellicer is here. Did I say Pellicer right, Josh? Is it always—
Joshua Pellicer: You always, you always do.
Michael Fiore: I always do. I always say it right and think I’m saying it wrong, which is the problem. Joshua Pellicer is on the line with me to give a, for a couple of things that we’re going to talk about in this call, and we’ll probably go, I’d say forty-five minutes to an hour on the entire thing. We’re going to talk about a guy’s perspective on the “Secret Survey” program, because Josh was actually one of the guys who I ran this stuff by when I was creating the program. He was, in a way, a beta test. I believe he told me that his girlfriend was reading it, and he was scared of that to a certain degree.
Joshua Pellicer: Actually, I wouldn’t let her.
Michael Fiore: Oh, you wouldn’t let her.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes, if I had let her, I was like “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Michael Fiore: No I don’t think that’s a good idea. She’s going to know too much. She’s going to want too much. She’s going to know all your secrets.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s kind of scary.
Michael Fiore: We’re going to talk about a guy’s perspective on the “Secret Survey” program. Where we went right and what other guys think about this material. We’re going to talk about the experience of being male, which is a concept I touched on in the “Secret Survey” program, but sometime I really want to expand on in this conversation with Josh because I think one of the biggest things that helps women have better relationships with men is understanding what it’s like to be a guy. Just like, by the way one of the best things that helps men have better relationships with women is understanding what it’s like to be a woman, because we’re very, very different as we keep discovering more and more.
And then also as kind of a bonus to the bonus, as it were, Josh is a sneaky bastard who knows a lot about lie detecting and how to tell if somebody is lying to you. So later in this call, Josh is going to give you some tips on how to pick up if a man is lying to you.
Now in the “Why He Lies” section of this program we talk about the more innocent reasons that men often lie. We talk about how men lie because they are afraid of women’s emotions and how they react, we say that men lie because that they don’t think you want the truth, because women in a lot of ways program men not to tell them the truth by asking questions like “do I look fat in this?” and things of that ilk, and we talk about the myth of Prince Charming and how oftentimes men feel like they can’t live up to the expectation women have for men. But of course there’s also more nefarious reasons men would lie, and so we’re going to give you some ability to have super powers, to know when men are lying to you.
So Josh, before we get started, why don’t you just give a brief background on who you are and why you are such a badass, and why women should want to listen to you, and what you do for a living that might make them think, “Oh my god who is this guy?”
Joshua Pellicer: Okay so probably the most interesting thing that will get, I think that will really get people’s ears perked listening, especially women that are listening to this call now and listening to this interview, is that I have sort of cracked the code of attraction for men, for, you know, what makes a woman attracted to a man. Now this is really interesting, because I think a lot of women, when I tell this to them, they’re like, they start guessing as to what it is, and it’s so outside of anything you’ve ever heard of before that, that you would probably never guess in a million years. So I studied a lot of psychology and I ended up building a system. I found, obviously, there’s a system that every woman goes through whenever she becomes attracted to a man, and so I, you know, learned that system for myself first, because I was like “the nice guy” before. You know, I think no one lies more than the nice guy in my opinion.
Michael Fiore: Oh god no. No, no.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s how it is, you know? And so I was, I had good intentions but I was just, you know, very, very weak and unattractive as a man, and I thought that it was kind of unfair that a lot of guys who ended up with women are guys who are just louder or, you know, more aggressive. That shouldn’t really be a, in my opinion it shouldn’t have been a good reason why a woman should choose a man, so I learned how to attract women, and then I did it so well that people started paying me money to teach them, and that’s what I do for a living now. I teach guys how to attract women, and I know secrets that you probably want to know as a woman, you know? I mean just in general you want to know what guys are using on you—
Michael Fiore: Oh, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: So I teach these guys, you know, just really eerily effective, like just scary effective techniques to attract women, and we can go into those a little bit later on if you want to.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, why not. I think we can get a lot of content over this. I think you and I talking, we’ll have a lot of stuff to talk about. And my own background by the way, you know Michael Fiore, people are like, “Oh Michael, you’re such a great guy and you’re teaching people about relationships… I learned this stuff too, by the way, about how to pick up girls back in the day. One of the reasons I think that our material is good is because I’m a real guy who, you know, like a lot of guys I was a geeky guy who could not meet women, and then I learned these weird secrets of attraction much like what Josh is going to talk about. And in my own self I became louder, and more of a dick in a weird way.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: Or more confident, cockier, things like that. Women are always asking “where are the nice guys?” and the unfortunate answer from a guy’s point of view is, well, nice guys don’t get laid.
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: Nice guys don’t get laid. And they’re really mad about it, by the way.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, and that’s a huge problem.
Michael Fiore: So Josh, let’s make you less modest. So you’ve been on television, that’s pretty cool.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. Today Show, and Current TV and all that stuff.
Michael Fiore: You were on the radio for some things that we talked about.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes, Sirius XM Radio. I had that channel for a long time; I had a show on that channel.
Michael Fiore: So Josh is not just some random guy, and he’s not, I would never refer to Josh as a pick up artist. I’m going to do interviews with pick up artists later. Josh is more just a guy who was intensely interested in relationships and intensely interested in women, like all guys. Like we want women, we like women to be attracted to us. It’s a big deal. It’s like how we spend 99 percent of our time is figuring out “how do I make girls like me?” Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yup.
Michael Fiore: We will kill for such a thing. And this is somebody who I think has a lot of empathy and a lot of perspective. So Josh, let’s start out with “The Secret Survey” program and your perspective on it. Because, you know, some guys, they say to me, “Michael, I can’t believe you’re saying this stuff.”
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: I personally find a lot of the material pitched at women around relationships to be very patronizing to women, right? And very much like, you know, I was reading something the other day where somebody said “I wrote an article,” a guy wrote an article actually talking about what he first notices about a girl. Right? And the article was like, you know, “her looks are kind of important but what I really notice is her smile, and her kind…” And I’m like bullshit. Right? And so my goal with this program was to be really, really honest, and having gone through it yourself, what are your thoughts on “The Secret Survey” program? Should women have taken this seriously? Where would you go with it?
Joshua Pellicer: I mean, I’m kind of torn in two different directions here, Michael, because when you handed it to me and I started reading it, I was immediately like, “Dude, please don’t really…” Like I know, I don’t want to be mean about it, but it’s like, it’s almost like this unspoken you know, I don’t know it’s like a code…
Michael Fiore: The Bro Code right? The Bro Code.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, exactly. You know, and we just don’t, we don’t let people know this stuff, and so on one hand I was, like the dude part of me was like “aww man, please, please no,” like keep this out, at least don’t put this in, you know? Like I wanted to come back to you and be like “these are my edits.” You know?
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: But the psychology part of me, like, the part of me that’s really interested in women and really is interested in psychology in general, and the part of me that is constantly craving truth, is like look, this is going to be painful, but it has to happen. Like, people need to know this, you know? So I found that for me, when I was reading through it there was a lot of parts where I had to go okay, once you release this there’s no taking this information back, you know? And people know it.
And I know it’s kind of crazy, it sounds like maybe some kind of, like maybe you can imagine a bunch of guys getting together, being like, you know, secret meetings like the Illuminati or something, and they’re waiting in this small room and they’re like, “Okay, so should we tell women that we think this? No? Okay, well we’ll keep that secret for another hundred years. You know? Like it almost seems like that is the case but you know—
Michael Fiore: But it really is like the unspoken code, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: Like all of this stuff, the stuff talking about why men lie around emotions and such like that, that’s not about cheating, right? And the simple fact that, this is so devastating and I’ve had guys, too, get angry about me saying this, but any, every guy I’ve ever talked to says “yeah, in the right circumstances, if I wouldn’t get in trouble for it I would cheat on my wife.” Right? I mean every single one. Right? And it’s like we don’t say that, generally speaking, because it’s going to hurt women. They’re going to get really angry about it. The stuff about how men react to women every single day, the “what it’s like to be a guy sexually” when you have all this testosterone drumming through your veins, right? Why don’t we talk about that with women? Why do you think it is that, like, there isn’t any other material out there that’s like this program? Where it just says “here’s the actual truth?”
Joshua Pellicer: Well I think the actual answer to that is actually pretty embarrassing.
Michael Fiore: Okay, great.
Joshua Pellicer : Like a lot of things, but really the truth is that we’re scared. I mean, I wouldn’t, I think that what happens is for me, I have sort of faced for a long time in my life in order to just sort of get to where I am with what I do. So I’m a little bit different from most guys would be. Just take whatever I say and magnify it by 1,000 and that’s probably—
Michael Fiore: And I’ll say right now, Josh, is… a lot of guys out there are not emotionally articulate. Right? The reason that guys like Josh and I can even talk about this stuff and teach this stuff is ‘cause we are emotionally articulate, right? The vast majority of guys that women meet don’t, aren’t really aware of their emotions in any particular way. So Josh has kind of a mutant power here, because what allows him to share this stuff. But go ahead.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah you and I both kind of worked on this over time and—
Michael Fiore: A long time.
Joshua Pellicer : And tapped into it. And so really, I guess that the reason why I’ve noticed that a lot of guys are keeping this sort of Bro Code hidden, and these things that you revealed in “Secret Survey,” the reason that we kind of pull back and we don’t want people to know is literally because if we have a woman that we really adore a lot, we think that if she finds out how we really feel she’s going to leave us. You know?
Michael Fiore: Yeah. Or I would even say if she finds out what we really are, she’s going to leave us.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, I really… I guess it’s two different varying levels. For me, it’s, for me I’m tapped in to what I feel, it’s a little bit different, right? Bust most, I think for most people, and I think you’re totally right it’s, there’s no buffer between what I feel and who I am for most people, especially for most guys. It’s just like, that’s what I am, I’m angry. I’m not feeling angry, I am angry.
Michael Fiore: I am angry, yeah. That’s interesting how language, interesting language hack there right? It’s like—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. Totally.
Michael Fiore: So, go ahead.
Joshua Pellicer: We associate so much with that, that we get so scared, and you know, it’s usually because, if we break this down on just pure psychology here, if we feel like we are valuable as men, you can’t do better as a woman. Like, “you cannot meet a guy who is better than me.” If we feel that way, then we really have no problem exposing this to you.
Michael Fiore: True.
Joshua Pellicer: Because we feel like, at the end of the day, you know, who cares? You’ll find it out, if you hate me after that, like, that would be silly of you to leave. And if you do, like, judge me for it, I would be able to say, “well maybe this isn’t good. Maybe if you don’t like me for who I am, maybe this isn’t going to work out.” You know? Or “certain things I’m willing to give up or change, and certain things I’m not ‘cause it’s just who I am.” But unfortunately, most guys don’t feel that way, and this is where I come in. And you too, Michael, whenever you—
Michael Fiore: When I teach my male stuff. Yeah. Which you know, I have an entire line of products for guys, but we’ve been focused on the women and stuff for the last year or so. Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer : Right. And it’s, you know, you gotta really hit it from both ends because there’s confusion on both sides, and I’ve had, you know, I come into this and people buy my stuff and pay me a lot of money, and, you know how much they pay me—
Michael Fiore: Yes, I do.
Joshua Pellicer: And they pay me so that I can make them confident, so they don’t feel this way anymore, because it’s, it’s like… I heard this comedian who’s, like, talking about… I forgot who it was now, but he was talking about why guys just up out of nowhere have a heart attack.
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: You know. And guys die younger than women all that stuff.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, all the time.
Joshua Pellicer: So it’s just… and he’s talking about it, he’s like, “You know, it’s like we resent women because you can walk up to a puppy and go ‘oh my god, it’s so cute.’ And we want to, like, pet that puppy and talk about how cute it is, but we can’t because someone in our mind that we grew up with, as soon as we reach our hand out, goes ‘fag.’” You know? And we’re like, “Ahhh!” It’s just like, you know, 45 years of just pent-up wanting to, you know, pet a fucking puppy, but we can’t do it, you know? Just so much repression.
Michael Fiore: Or cry or, like, do any… I mean it’s just like, this is something I call, this is a concept I call, let’s transition to this really briefly here, it’s a concept I call “The Experience of Being Male,” right? Which is a fancy name for just, like, being a guy. And I think, and again ladies who are listening, I’m not saying there’s not the experience of being female too, and I’m not saying men should not learn to understand women better. They should. But that’s not what this program is, right? But the experience of just being a guy, I’m a 210 pound hairy Yeti of a guy, right? I’ve got more testosterone seeping through my pores than, you know, entire countries. And it’s like a disease to a certain degree.
There are times in my past, I talk about this in the program, I believe, when I was with my ex-girlfriend years ago, who I was desperately in love with, and the fact that I have a lot of testosterone and have a high sex drive killed our relationship. Or maybe the fact that she had no sex drive killed our relationship, right? And I remember, like being ashamed of my sexuality and being ashamed of my desires and being ashamed of just being a guy. Right? Because we don’t have control over it. It’s a chemical thing. Right?
When you’re a guy and you’ve got testosterone running through your veins, do you look at other women? Hell yes, you do, you can’t help yourself. You don’t just look at other women. You want to walk over there and grab a girl you don’t even know and ravage her and have her love it. Right? You just want to do that. And I think for most women they just don’t understand what it’s like to have those kinds of desires going all the time, right? “Why is sex so important to you?” Why isn’t sex more important to you? Right? That kind of thing.
Joshua Pellicer: I think the kind of key here is also in how women kind of look at attraction in a way that a man looks at sex and sexual—
Michael Fiore: Very interesting, very interesting. Continue, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: You know, women will look at a man and be attracted to him and be like, oh yeah, I’m attracted to him, I’m imagining, like, flirting with him, right? And I’m imagining him coming up to me and talking to me. And this is totally innocent, right? But if you told your man that you were doing that, that you were thinking about this other guy flirting with you, he’d freak out.
Michael Fiore : Oh yes.
Joshua Pellicer: So you don’t tell him that, right? So but there’s absolutely no harm in you thinking that, because you’re not investing in it, you don’t want to do it, you’re not going to do it, it’s just kind of, like, a little quick fantasy, right? Where you’re imagining him kind of, you know, being curious about you and chasing you and all the little fun games you play. Well, men are the exact same way, but about sex. Like, we look at that and we just go, oh well you know, I’m not actually going to sleep with her.
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: You know, but I was thinking about it.
Michael Fiore: And you’ll even fantasize about it. Right? And it’s not like… one of the reasons I love my girlfriend so much, there’s many reasons, she’s stupendously hot, she’s really fun, she’s got an amazing ass, there’s so many reasons I just adore her! But she doesn’t freak out. Right? Like, I can talk about, very plainly talk about my desires and very plainly, like you know, say “yeah I think that girl’s attractive, and in the right circumstances and if I wasn’t in a committed relationship…” Sure, right? And she’s like right, yeah I get it, it’s cool. Right? As opposed to having it kind of be this big problem. Because you know, I really, really want to continue on that angle of the idea of like the feminine and masculine attraction levels and how that kind of works.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, well you know, for a guy, for me, one of the biggest things that I’ve taught, that I have to teach guys, one of the first things I have to teach them is that women, yes, they think differently, but how differently? What specifically is different about a man and the way a man thinks and the way a woman thinks? And if you look at the way men and women interact with each other you can see pretty clearly what the difference is. One is that there’s a major gender role issue, a gender role difference, and in relationships your relationships will end tragically every time if you don’t monitor your gender role.
Michael Fiore: Okay.
Joshua Pellicer: The really big reason why relationships fail—
Michael Fiore: Now why do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? What is a gender role? What does that actually mean in this case?
Joshua Pellicer: Okay so, so your gender, your gender roles really, at the end of the day you don’t have to buy into any gender role. We used to live in a world where survival of the fittest, right? Biggest, strongest man survived. You know, the woman with the widest hips birthed the most children, and it was just, that’s just how it was, you know? And she would go find a mate, and that was the end. But then something entered into our world that changed everything, and that is society. Right? So it’s not survival of the fittest anymore. It’s now survival of the social fittest. So—
Michael Fiore: What you mean then is it’s not survival of the physically fittest anymore.
Joshua Pellicer: No, yeah, exactly, not at all.
Michael Fiore: Being a, you know, being seven feet tall does not really give you, I mean, it gives you some social advantage ‘cause people like tall people, but it doesn’t give you the same advantage it used to, right? And being stupendously hot as a woman, yes, it’s still an advantage, but it’s not the same thing as it used to be.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, exactly. And you know, and even so, “stupendously hot” now is like, sometimes it’s anorexic-like thin women who end up being these idolized women. That isn’t how it used to be, you know?
Michael Fiore: Yeah, I know.
Joshua Pellicer: That doesn’t make any sense at all. You know?
Michael Fiore: Give me some Marilyn Monroe, I’m a much happier personally but—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. Well, a lot of guys who kind of come to terms and are confident do feel that way. You know. So basically, what happens here is we have, now we have a really big, big, big, big problem. And that is, you can survive playing any gender role you want. Now this is a problem, it’s a problem because we have a choice, and we’ve never had a choice before. You know, when the women’s equal rights movement came out, and men were hearing we’re like dogs, you know, when you talk about that in your—
Michael Fiore: Men are like dogs and—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, you know. I mean, we hear something, we crap on the carpet, you know, twenty minutes later we are somewhere else laying in the sun, and you come home and you beat us ‘cause we crapped on the carpet. We have no idea why you’re hitting us. We’re like, don’t lay in the sun anymore! That’s what we’re thinking.
Michael Fiore: Or you… yeah, like why are you upset? “You should know why I’m upset!” But, but, but I don’t! I have no idea.
Joshua Pellicer: I should know, but I’m dumb so I really don’t know.
Michael Fiore: I don’t get it! Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: So what happens here is women were like, “look, we want equal rights,” and men heard, fine, you want to play the man’s role? Go ahead. Right? This is exactly what we heard, and that is the last thing that women meant when they had the equal rights movement. They meant equal but still different, right? Still woman. It took, I would say it took a good thirty years for guys to start noticing and being like, oh wait, this is kind of weird, something weird’s going on here, right? So now we are children of this confusion. You know? We came into a world—
Michael Fiore: It’s like the, it’s like when I talk sometimes about how feminism has created some problems. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yes.
Michael Fiore: And not, this is not like a… I think women should have equal rights. I think a woman should be president. I think women… I’ve had bosses who were women. All totally cool, but the problem is I have a lot of male friends who, especially when I was in my twenties, guys who were kind of, like, emotionally hip were like, “well how do I hit on a girl?” Like is it, do I, like… I have a friend who another friend of mine used to date, and it’s like, “yeah, he was raised by feminists and he does things like saying ‘is it okay if I touch your breast?’” And it just like turns women off like crazy, and he doesn’t get it ‘cause he’s like, well I’m being a good guy. Kind of goes from there.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, it should be working, right?
Michael Fiore: It should be. I’m doing what you, I’m logically doing what I’m supposed to do, right? But it’s like, it’s not appealing to the deep levels of who a woman is, or a man is.
Joshua Pellicer: Right. And the reason why this is such a big problem now is because we are faced, like I said before, we are faced with a decision to make. We have to choose our gender role. Right? And a lot of women are still kind of playing the male gender role as a default. And whatever your default is, you will always attract people who are the opposite.
Michael Fiore: So why are women playing the male gender role? So this was different before then, is what you’re saying. Once upon a time societally there was the masculine and feminine, and if you had a penis you were going to play the masculine; if you had a vagina you were going to play the feminine. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Exactly. And if you didn’t, you died.
Michael Fiore: And if you didn’t, you died, or you were ostracized even, but now we’re in a, you know, in this post feminine kind of world. Right? You can choose if you want to be—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, I think it’s actually much more liberating.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, it is much more liberating. I prefer it, right? One of the things I talk about, occasionally people will post on Facebook or whatnot saying, “Wow, things were so much better back in the ‘50s.” And I’m like, you are on crack. Right? “Back in the ‘50s men knew how to treat women.” I’m like, you mean beat them and cheat on them willy-nilly with no repercussions whatsoever? ‘Cause that’s what they were doing, they just didn’t talk about it, right?
But now we’re in this, you know, 2012—as we record—2012, is it 2012? Yeah. As we’re recording this, I sometimes forget what year it is. And there’s that whole option of choosing your gender role. So you’re saying there’s the masculine gender role, there’s the feminine gender role; the masculine tends to be the provider and to be the alpha, as it were. The feminine would be the more, they would be more of a caretaking gender role, more emotionally open and less aggressive. But now whether you’ve got a penis or a vagina in our society, to a large degree, you can kind of choose it. And you’re saying that a lot of women are inhabiting the masculine.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, they’re not making the choice, to be honest. They’re just kind of doing it out of default because, you know, there are a lot of ways in which playing a masculine gender role is really beneficial. Like, you’re in the work environment, the work environment, you fire and steal, I mean you’re talking about a masculine world. And so when you get into that corporate space been built by men, the culture still there, you have to adapt a bit of a masculine gender role to survive there.
So what women do in an effort to stay consistent, which is completely honorable I think, they do this all the time, they end up playing the male gender role all the time. And so one of the biggest decisions a woman can make is to stop playing the male gender role unless absolutely necessary. Right? So let’s say you have a kid and your kid is wandering around, and, you know, you’re a single mom and your child walks up to, she’s a little girl, she walks up to a stranger and this stranger tries to pick her up, right?
Michael Fiore: Yeah, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, so you don’t know this stranger, he tries to pick up your baby, you don’t, he doesn’t know that you’re standing over there. You don’t have someone playing the masculine gender role who’s going to walk over, and even if you did, if he didn’t walk over, let’s say you had a husband or someone was with you and they didn’t walk over and go “What the hell are you doing? Put that kid down!” Right? And be that protector. It’s okay for you to play the male gender role then. Right? You’re self sufficient and you’re allowed to do that. But the problem is—
Michael Fiore: And what would that action be? Just to make sure this makes sense. In that case, the male gender role is “get the hell away from my kid. I’m going to punch you in the nose and kill you.” Right? Like, what’s the basic, that aggression aspect which is traditionally male, at that point?
Joshua Pellicer: Exactly. And a woman would actually do the same thing.
Michael Fiore: Yes, very much so.
Joshua Pellicer: She would be like, “Step away,” and that’s that sort of motherly “get away from my babies” kind of protection, you know?
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: So the problem, the only problem… That’s perfect, that makes sense… The only problem is it’s safer to do that all the time. Right? Safer physically. So constantly playing the male gender role. And so whenever a woman is in a situation where she doesn’t feel like she has someone there who’s playing the male gender role, she ends up doing that by default. You know, out of, you know, safety. And so what happens next is that men see her, and we subconsciously are reading which role she’s trying, you know, you’re trying to play the woman, and then we are going to try to put ourselves in the opposite so there’s some kind of missing piece of the puzzle we can fit into. ‘Cause at the end of the day, you know, being a feminist, being whatever, no matter what it is, we’re looking at you as women, and we’re going, “How are we going to get laid in this situation?” You know what I mean? Like how am I going to—
Michael Fiore: Which is, which is all men’s dominant desire at the beginning. Right? Like, unless a guy’s asexual, that happens occasionally, right? But the vast majority of guys, the dominant desire is “I want to have sex with this woman.” With, and I want to have sex, to some degree unconsciously, I want to have sex with a lot of women. Kind of go from there. Okay. Continue.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, so the big question then becomes, you know, have you made a decision for your gender role, really, as a woman? You know, whenever you and I had to make this decision for ourselves, Michael, we had to kind of go through, I’m assuming you went through a similar thing ‘cause you and I are a lot alike in a lot of ways here in this, that I had to actually sit there and go, “All right, well, I am officially no longer a pussy.”
Michael Fiore: Yeah, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s just not happening anymore. If anything else comes up I’m just not going to be a pussy. It’s not going to happen, so I have to be a man, period. All the time, right? And this sort of, I think a lot of guys go through this process, and it breeds a lot of negative stuff, like “now I can’t be emotional,” right? Whatever my impression of a man is, which we don’t have any good role models. Face it, we don’t.
Michael Fiore: We don’t have role models of good guys, you know? Of solid, emotionally open but aggressive and dominant guys. Right? Actually, Josh, talk about it. From my own story to a certain degree, I mean, I share this stuff sometimes, I was a very emotional and feminine kid, right? I’m still a very emotional person, but I kind of hide it behind snark most of the time, as you may have noticed in our hanging out at bars and things like that. But when I was a kid, I was that little boy who cried all the time, right? Who, everything that happened affected me emotionally. If I saw something, you know, if I saw somebody bump their knee, I would say “oww.” Right? ‘Cause it would be like a high level, like an insane level of empathy, basically. And that was a huge problem for me as a male child, because a lot of people would assume that, okay you’re, like you said you know, “freaking fag, what are you doing?” Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right, exactly.
Michael Fiore: If you’re a little boy who is emotionally hip and that, those “more feminine, more emotional” things get beat out of you, brutally. So when women ask a lot of the times, they say, “Michael, why is he so emotionally closed off?” Well, he’s been abused for a very long time.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: Right? He’s been abused into that for a very long time.
Joshua Pellicer: And I think that—
Michael Fiore: The only reason that a guy like me, I’ve gone through what, eight years of therapy to get to the point that I could actually accept my emotions and not be ashamed of them. Right? I don’t know what you’ve gone through but—
Joshua Pellicer: A decade.
Michael Fiore: A decade of just, like, I talk to my girlfriend about this, and I say, “If you met me when I was twenty-two you wouldn’t have liked me very much.” I talk to the women who get my programs and I say, “If you met me when I was twenty-six you wouldn’t have liked me very much.” Right? Because it’s like, it’s all this, a lot of guys, they go through this experience of just like, anything they’ve done as a child… you know, some guys are just dicks, naturally. They’re just super alpha, super “masculine” from the very beginning, and they play football and they just walk around, and they’re just douchebags and whatever. And it’s fine. And you know the rest of us tend to—
Joshua Pellicer: No judgment or anything here.
Michael Fiore: No, but it’s just like, we all learn how to do that. Like, we all learn our swagger ‘cause we want to get laid, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: Like, I can play that role very well if need be. But, so many of us guys who it’s like okay, we were born and we grow up and we’re just, like, hit with these gender roles, and if you’re a kid like me who wasn’t very good at sports and didn’t understand guys very well, I didn’t personally have any male friends until, I didn’t have any really close male friends until I was in my late teens to twenties, basically. It took me that long to get guys to a certain degree. It’s really a very abusive life to go through if you’re a guy who just like, well, I’m really emotional and I’m really, and I want to talk about this and I want to talk about this, and I feel this and I feel this but as a guy culturally that’s not okay. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right, right. And that’s a big, big confusion for us, you know? And so I think that because of all these different factors that have sort of come into play over the last several years, and really over the last several decades, we’ve gotten into a place of mass confusion, and it’s necessary now to come clean with this stuff and to really, to really kind of come out with it, because everyone’s running around doing the wrong thing. It’s making everyone upset, you know?
At the end of the day women don’t want to, on average, now there’s some women that do honestly want to play the male gender role and that’s totally cool. And you’ll end up with a guy who’s very weak and submissive, and that will actually make you attracted to them.
Michael Fiore: Yeah. The word “weak” is probably not the right thing to say there as much as just—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, I agree.
Michael Fiore: He’s more—
Joshua Pellicer: I really mean emotionally weak.
Michael Fiore: He’s more emotionally open and softer in a lot of ways, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. And—
Michael Fiore: If you’re going to be the yang he needs to be the yin, as it were.
Joshua Pellicer: Right. And in this case, you know, let’s say you are a woman who wants to play the female gender role, but you’re just doing this, you know, acting like a man, so to speak, in the meantime, then any guy you do attract that is, in your mind, weak, let’s say, is going to seem like actually weak. Like it’s going to seem like that. I’m speaking from a guy’s perspective, like as one guy looking at another guy. Like okay, well, that guy’s weak, right? And that’s really what it looks like to a woman who doesn’t want that kind of guy, so if you’re the kind of woman that, for some reason you keep attracting these submissive, you know, limp wristed guys, you know—
Michael Fiore: “Why can’t I find a real man?” is the question we get all the time.
Joshua Pellicer: Exactly. I mean that’s, I’m telling you the reason why right now, and that’s the reason why.
Michael Fiore: It’s ‘cause you’re putting out this, this, this dominant thing. Now, some women… There’s two things I want to say here. One is, I’ve talked about this before and I’m sure I’ll talk about it again, the weirdest experience of my life was a few months ago. I was at a conference and I got hit on by a woman, which is not that weird, I do get hit on by women occasionally. This woman hit on me like I was a girl. Right? She was a lesbian, okay? It was a woman I met, a lesbian, who obviously was not 100 percent a lesbian and liked guys sometimes, and she tried to pick me up the way a guy would try to pick up a girl. So she, she actually did some like pick up artist stuff on me, basically. She would like nag me a little bit, in that joking way. She would, like, grab my hand kind of, and do these things, and it was the weirdest experience and the most nauseating experience of my life. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: That’s got to be a little emasculating.
Michael Fiore: It was just weird. I’m like, I’m a big, dominant guy, right? Like I’m, I’m a 210 pound bald guy, and I’m pretty cocky, and I do my stuff. And it was the weirdest feeling. I actually stopped her, like “what are you doing?” She’s like, “Well, I’m kind of hitting on you.” I’m like, “Yeah, don’t do it that way. Like that doesn’t work on the guys, that’s not going to work.”
And I know some women are going to say, “Josh, well if I choose the feminine, does that mean I have to be weak and submissive and a 1950s housewife? Isn’t that setting back everything we’ve worked for for the last two hundred years of women’s rights? To be like, I’m going to accept this feminine gender role. This ‘traditional’…” I know before I started studying this stuff, like, I felt the men and women are equal and the same thing for a while. And it made me really bad with girls, because I’d meet girls and I’d be like, you know, treating them like the exact same as we are, and it would never work. But I know, like, for women, it’s like I can feel some women being, like, “well, that doesn’t make me feel good. To be like, I have to, like, what I have to, like, put on a dress and, you know, get barefoot and pregnant and go in the kitchen and bake cookies?” So how does a woman like accept her feminine gender role and still be empowered?
Joshua Pellicer: Right, so I think that the answer to that question kind of lies in a really strange place, and that is in the apron.
Michael Fiore: The apron? Okay great, cool.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, so we’ll look back on the apron, and we’ll look back on the 50s. In the 50s the apron was kind of a symbol of your, your inferiority as a woman.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, very much so.
Joshua Pellicer: It didn’t seem like that on the surface, because you’re getting advertised as a woman happily wearing these aprons in the kitchen, you know, and doing whatever. But as sort of reality dawned on everyone and not everybody had a “Leave it to Beaver” lifestyle—
Michael Fiore: Let’s be honest, nobody had a “Leave it to Beaver” lifestyle.
Joshua Pellicer: Not even “Leave it to Beaver” had that lifestyle.
Michael Fiore: This is a thing of mine. The past doesn’t really exist. The past we think existed didn’t really exist.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, and it was very—
Michael Fiore: There were no good old days, by the way.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, it was very propaganda driven.
Michael Fiore : Very much so. If we keep saying things are great, they’ll be great, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right. And that worked for a while because no one paid attention to anything except the war, you know? And it’s back then, you know? So the apron now is kind of turned into a symbol of a woman’s freedom and desire to be in the kitchen. It’s completely different but the exact same thing now, right? So whereas before it would, you would have woken up in the morning, saw that thing and you, like, glare at it, you know this is your fault, you know, “You told me you were supposed to be the thing that’s suppose to make me happy. You’re supposed to get me respect from my husband, you’re supposed to make everything okay. I’m supposed to feel value in my relationship because of you,” and it wasn’t like that back then.
And now it’s really a sort of celebration of that. Just kind of like, you know, like, you know, any kind of culture where people make fun of a culture usually that word or association becomes a part of that culture in a good way. Right? You can take the power away from it by using it and accepting it. So you can kind of see the change now in the way that we view women specifically in these sort of duties, not duties but really her desires now instead of duties. It used to be duties, now they’re desires, right? So let’s look at submission as a duty versus submission as a desire. And that’s really the big difference here.
Michael Fiore: And that word submission has so much BS around it right? Like, we’re not saying it in a negative way. We’re not saying it in a BDSM way either. Right? Necessarily… Well we can go there.
Joshua Pellicer: We can go there.
Michael Fiore: We can go there, but it’s not, we’re not necessarily saying it’s all about being tied up and whipped and things like that but continue, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Well I think that if you, let’s, this is a really visceral place to come from. This is, like, where you have to really be honest. So let’s look at it this way. If you are the kind of woman who likes to have not, I’m not saying crazy dominance, not to be dominated in the bedroom, but just at least a little bit, right? To have something to fight against, so to speak.
Michael Fiore: He’ll hold you down a little bit, pull your hair, spank you on the butt. Yeah, those kinds of things.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, that kind of thing. Then you like the idea of submission when done right. You know, you like that idea, but you trust your partner in the bedroom. And this is where it all comes into play. When you trust somebody to play the male gender role properly, you will happily, happily play what you believe is a submissive female gender role because it feels good. You know? And it’s all about having a man who you can trust that will do this for you. And part of that is not training him to be afraid of you.
Michael Fiore: Let’s, I talk about this in the program. Most men are petrified of the women in their lives.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes. This is true.
Michael Fiore: I mean, even me to a certain degree. I found myself like, recently… I’m not going to go into details, there was just some stuff in my relationship and I found myself doing things I preach against. Right? Like not bringing certain things up ‘cause I was like, ”Oh, it’s going to make her upset.” And—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, exactly.
Michael Fiore: And I was like, “I know my girlfriend can handle this stuff. She’s really, really emotionally hip.” And I found myself just getting scared of her to a certain degree.
Joshua Pellicer: Well, imagine if you didn’t say that. If you didn’t say, if you couldn’t say, I know my girlfriend can handle this stuff.
Michael Fiore: Oh I know, yeah. ‘Cause a lot of women, some women have been known to overreact in the past, maybe.
Joshua Pellicer: A few.
Michael Fiore: A few… maybe,
Joshua Pellicer: But either way, you know, Michael, you are, you are without a doubt, any woman who is listening to this knows that you have a lot of knowledge around this and you’re considered by very many women around the world to be a catch. I mean, you know a whole lot about this. You’re just a powerful man, right?
Michael Fiore: I do occasionally get marriage proposals over email, it’s true, yes.
Joshua Pellicer: I’m not talking about from me, like you can leave my personal life with you out.
Michael Fiore: Oh yes, yes.
Joshua Pellicer: So, you’re a very desirable man, and the most desirable qualities that you have lie in this, you know, your, really, tendency to be a no BS kind of guy.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, sure.
Joshua Pellicer: And still, still we have, and I’m talking to you now about this, you actually still have that thought cross your mind, because every once in a while it’s scary. You know? It is scary, it’s a risk you know? And so if you are having a hard time with this, you know, like every once in a while when it pops up, imagine a normal dude.
Michael Fiore: Yeah. And having been a normal dude in the past, and I would actually say a subnormal dude emotionally, in the past—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, me too.
Michael Fiore: I know what it’s like to just be angry and rageful and ashamed all the time.
Joshua Pellicer: Right. So it’s really difficult to come to any kind of terms like this unless you have a lot of, sort of, let’s call it altitude, right? A lot of a bird’s eye view of what’s going on, where you’re not really affected as much. And women are drastically, like, drastically sort of exposed to this fear that they’re not going to find a guy like this. So they’re filtering, just, you know, relentlessly filtering out men that they believe are weak, let’s say weak men, or that they believe aren’t going to be able to stand up to them, tell them the truth, you know. Even when they’re scared, they still tell the truth. Well, the hard part about this and the absolute truth is, and this is not going to be easy to swallow, but that’s okay ‘cause that’s what we’re going with here.
Michael Fiore: It’s what we do, it’s what we do. We tell the truth even when it hurts.
Joshua Pellicer: Yup. And the truth is that perfect men are not found. You’re not going to find one. You’re going to have to find somebody that you love and then put effort in to help them step into this purely powerful masculine—
Michael Fiore: And you have to give them… Permission is something I talk about, especially in my texting programs.
Joshua Pellicer: Oh, I thought you were going to say blow job.
Michael Fiore: Blow jobs are great, too! And actually blow jobs, giving a man, yes, bluntly spoken just give him a blow job sometimes and your relationship will be better. I know, “but he doesn’t deserve it!” Yeah I don’t care, do it anyway.
Joshua Pellicer: We don’t—
Michael Fiore: It’s kind of like telling a guy “give her a massage and warm up her car and buy her flowers sometimes.” But I don’t feel like it! “I don’t care; just do it.”
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: There’s a big concept that I talk about in some of my stuff, which is permission to be what you are. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: Permission to be a guy, permission to be a woman.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s not going to be easy, either. To give that.
Michael Fiore: No, it’s never easy to be like… My girlfriend and I have this issue where she’s like, “well you know, you’re kind of a slob and you’re kind of loud and you know you fill up a room in a lot of ways.” She’s a much more, she’s not a performer the way I am, right? And it’s like, but a certain point you just gotta be like, you know what, that’s who you are.
And you gotta give, like when you open the door where you say to a guy, and I talk about this in the second sex section too, one of the most powerful things a woman can do sexually for a guy is be coy and submissive and give him permission to ravage her. Right? ‘Cause a lot of guys sexually, they’re really dissatisfied in their sex lives even if they are having a lot of sex with the same woman. They’re dissatisfied in their sex lives because they are not able to really express what they really want, which is much, as any woman who’s read the “Secret Survey” results is pretty dark and dirty. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah.
Michael Fiore: Kind of going from there. But if you can give him permission sometimes, just be like “be a guy, be a beast.” And he can give you permission sometimes to be a woman, and sometimes being a woman just means wanting to be held down and taken, or wanting to be taken care of, or not having to be the guy in the relationship. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: Or not having to make all these decisions all the time. Falling into those “more traditional gender roles” is very comfortable when it’s done—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, so—
Michael Fiore: When it’s done right.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, and I think that’s its very, it kind of reminds me of something that’s I think is worth mentioning here, and that is that when I sort of went through and started studying and researching why most relationship, long term relationships fail, it’s because of one very simple concept revolving around gender roles. And it’s really, really fascinating that this happens. Women have a way of, this has been the way that women have done things forever, and that is they’ve subconsciously, not consciously doing this but subconsciously they are testing men.
Michael Fiore: Oh, all the time.
Joshua Pellicer: Instead of going, you know, instead of asking, right, they would go “let me just do this and see what he does,” right? And it’s not malicious, nothing like that. It’s not like, you know, I don’t want to make it sound like something that women are doing premeditated or anything like that. It’s nothing like that.
Michael Fiore: It’s totally… I believe it’s usually totally unconscious.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, I do too. And part of the reason I believe that is because it is so well put together I don’t know anybody, you know, male, female or otherwise genius, that would be able to put it together like this just consciously. It would be close to impossible, right? So here’s what happens. Again, we’re like dogs, we don’t know, you know? So women will test—
Michael Fiore: And we’re not lying about not knowing, by the way.
Joshua Pellicer: No, we’re not lying about that, that’s absolutely true.
Michael Fiore: We just, we just don’t know. We don’t get it.
Joshua Pellicer: I know it’s convenient. Like, I know that’s very convenient for us to be able to say that, but it’s the absolute truth.
Michael Fiore: It’s the actual truth. We just don’t, we have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes. We’re like, you think you’re being really obvious and it’s the most subtle thing in the world to us. I mean, you got to remember that, you know, if you listen to a masculine sounding song it is ten decibels louder than any song that sounds feminine. It’s just how it is, you know? Everything in our lives are turned up louder.
Michael Fiore: And we’re single-taskers, right? We’re just like, we’re focused on one thing at a time.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes.
Michael Fiore: We don’t multitask. And it’s like aliens, right? We can’t get you because we are fundamentally different creatures. Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, you know. So what I’ve found is that, which was really shocking to me is that because women will test to see whether or not you’re going to be playing the male gender role properly, they’ll test by trying to play the male gender role. And this is, like, been the “go to” test for women for decades, for, probably since the beginning of time, beginning of society. Is that they’ll try to do it, they’ll entice a man to go, “no, no, no I want to do that,” and whenever he steps up and goes “no, I’m doing this,” then they’re like “oh great.” Right? So this has become a problem now.
Michael Fiore: Oh yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Because we don’t recognize it’s a test anymore. We don’t see that.
Michael Fiore: Because, because men and women are equal. Right? So you’re just like okay he’s—
Joshua Pellicer: Right, exactly
Michael Fiore: And for guys, it’s like, “well you said you wanted to go to this restaurant.” “Well, I wanted you to suggest something else!” What? What?
Joshua Pellicer: This is a constant conversation, right? This is the biggest… There was this one, like, short comic online, and it was, like: when I get a restaurant I’m going to name it “I don’t know where do you want to go?” That way I can always go to that place that my wife’s always talking about. You know? And, like, that’s what they always, “I don’t know, what about you? What do you think? Oh I don’t want to go there.” You know.
So the problem is that eventually as men, just as a whole, we get to the place where we stop recognizing that you’re testing, and we don’t have the effort anymore to put into it for whatever reason, right? We’re lazy, we don’t see it, probably ‘cause we’re lazy to be honest.
Michael Fiore: Or we just don’t, we’ve done it so many times before.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, that’s what I mean. We’re burnt out on it. We just—
Michael Fiore: Really, you’re going to do this again?
Joshua Pellicer: You should believe now. Yeah, exactly. Well fine then, fine, you can do it and see how happy you are. And that’s—
Michael Fiore: This ties into the emotional castration concept, by the way. The concept of emotional castration that I talk about in the product, the program, where it’s, where men get denied so much, right? Where a guy says “I love you,” and you say, “no you don’t” or “prove it.” Or you don’t believe him, or “wow, you look beautiful!” “Meh, you have to say that. You’re my husband.” Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: Which is all little tests and all little things, and at a certain point you’re like, oh come on, really? I gotta keep doing this? I gotta do this again?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, it needs to stop at some point, you know? And so what happens is women don’t change their techniques on how to test because it’s worked in the past. That makes sense, right?
Michael Fiore: Yeah, totally.
Joshua Pellicer: And men, men don’t change their techniques on passing that test. Right? The only difference is that men go, “oh come on.” You know? Come on, stop doing this to me. And instead of saying it like that and being open and honest, ‘cause we don’t know what’s going on in their heads, we’re just feeling, I don’t know, “this is aggravating to me, just stop.”
Michael Fiore: Why am I pissed off?
Joshua Pellicer: Right, yeah. I’m just mad, so leave me alone.
Michael Fiore: Why am I mad? I don’t’ know why I’m mad, but I’m mad, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: So what ends up happening is women go, “well fine, I will play this role. I will do this, I will make all the decisions,” and they start doing it and then they get miserable.
Michael Fiore: And resentful.
Joshua Pellicer: And resentful. And then the guy’s resentful and he gets in a “yes dear” mode. If you’re in “yes dear” mode in your relationship right now, you are literally two months from a divorce if you’re married, or you’re two months from being broken up with.
Michael Fiore: If you’re a guy, yeah very much so, very much so.
Joshua Pellicer: That’s how it is.
Michael Fiore: And the women that force you into that position are the ones that really need you to step up. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right. You know, and so really I think there needs to be a complete overhaul of these techniques that we use to figure it out. In the beginning, testing is a great way to figure it out. Really, it’s extremely accurate, I’m not going to lie to you. When you walk up to a guy and he’s seeming really cocky and you say something like, you know, “why should I talk to you?” you know, “who are you?” And you’re, you know, done up or whatever, and he’s trying to hit on you. And he passes through that and he’s like, “well, because I’m awesome” right. And he doesn’t get all cheesed up, that is a really, really good accurate test, actually. That actually works, right? And he’s like, “well, because I got something that you want. I ‘m amazing, I’m going to make you laugh and we’re going to have a good time.” So that’s what you want to hear. That works.
But when you get into a relationship, all this stuff shifts. Instead you are on the same team now, you’re not on different teams anymore, and this is really scary for a lot of women. If you’re not on the same team as your man you’re done, it’s only a matter of time.
Michael Fiore: It’s kind of like… And it’s also like the techniques that men use on women. You know, sometimes women say… They’ll get “Text the Romance Back,” right, one of my other programs that’s really a good program, I’m really proud of it. A lot of women have gotten a lot out of it. And a lot of that program is about appreciation and about showing your man or your woman that you appreciate them, and seducing them and doing the other things. And women will sometimes write me and say, “But he’s supposed to chase me!” Right? “He’s supposed to chase me!” And “if I’m telling him what I like about him then he’s not chasing me.” I’m like you’re, like Josh said, you’re on the same team now. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, well, that’s true for awhile.
Michael Fiore: It’s true for awhile, and you can mix that in, you can play those games right? But the problem is, you know, like, guys are like, well, women are like, “why isn’t he interested in me anymore? Why doesn’t he seduce me the way he used to seduce me?” And there’s reasons for that, which is you’re the same woman he’s been with for ten years. Sad, but true. Like, men actually do get bored and there’s a way to deal with that, by the way, but it’s a simple fact. Right? It’s just there. Yes, men want variety, it’s a fact.
But it’s like, you can’t just, you can’t use the same techniques that you’re going to use when you meet somebody to maintain long term love. At a certain point you have to get more intelligent about it. And you move away from the visceral into the emotional companion kind of stuff, and consciously reawaken the physical and the passion. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right.
Michael Fiore: As opposed to just being like, “well, it should just be there! And he should do this, and he should do this, and he should do this.” Like well, it doesn’t really work that way anymore, sorry.
Joshua Pellicer: Right, and I think that that’s really, you know, that kind of plays into the idea that I was hitting on earlier, and I totally agree with you and that is that good relationships aren’t found, they are built from lesser parts, or from extra parts of lesser relationships really. I mean, you go through, you find something you don’t want, you go on to the next relationship. You make sure that when that pops up you say something about it, right? Instead of… Before, you didn’t like that, right, so it just ruined your relationship, so you make sure it doesn’t happen again. So you’re going through, collecting this information of what you do and don’t like in a man, and that information is sort of leading you down to find your ideal man.
Now you can find an attractive man for sure. They are found. They’re everywhere, right? You can find those guys. And you may be asking yourself, “Well, where are they? I’m looking around I don’t see any,” right? “I don’t see any attractive men.” But there are attractive men until you start talking to them. Then you enter into a new, a new level, a new sort of phase of an interaction, and in each phase the rules change.
And if you don’t know the rules for each phase, you will fail to push forward through that phase, you know? And the rules that you have in a relationship are very different to the rules that you have during the first time you connect with them; which is called the report phase. During the time when you’re flirting, which is called the attraction phase. During the first time you become sexual, which is the seduction phase. These are all very, very different personalities that come out in you and in him, and then after that you have different levels of your relationship that goes deeper over time. And so you have to recognize, I call this “seeing the Matrix,” right? You have to recognize—
Michael Fiore: That was a great, great movie. Great movie. Too bad they never made any sequels to it, ‘cause it was such a great movie. Oh wait, no. I wish they never made sequels to it ‘cause they were awful.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. That’s what you meant to say.
Michael Fiore: Exactly. Go ahead.
Joshua Pellicer: Wow. Neo.
Michael Fiore: I know sex-foo, as they say.
Joshua Pellicer: I know hung-foo.
Michael Fiore: It’s what I do. Anyway, go ahead.
Joshua Pellicer: So yeah, so the idea is that if you don’t know the rules for each one of these different stages, then you try to play the same games you did when you first started, and that doesn’t work.
Michael Fiore: And you get frustrated. And guys do the same thing, by the way. They’re like, as a guy I can tell you, you know you’re with a woman for a while and you’re like, “Well, it used to be that all I had to do was just, like, walk up and grab her hair and we’d be having a good time. And now she’s like, ‘oh, I’m tired and I have to do all this other work now.’ Like what’s going on?” And you feel gypped. You feel like “what the hell’s kind of going from there?”
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, I didn’t buy this. This isn’t what I bought.
Michael Fiore: Yeah. I thought I was going to have, just like, I thought I was going to be dating, I thought I was marrying that, you know, sexy little nymphomaniac I first seduced back in college. Oh wow, she’s different now. Right? What’s that old phrase? “Men assume women will never change, women assume men will.” Right? And it’s like, oh yeah, well, sorry. But I think the core message to this issue just really seems to be like, to me it’s the concept of the conscious relationship, right? If you want it to—
Joshua Pellicer: Yes. A new level, you know.
Michael Fiore: Actually they say, you know, women ask me “how do I make it last forever?” It doesn’t. You don’t. Right? The relationship you had when you first got together is fleeting, with very, very, very rare exceptions. There’s like, you know one percent of the population that somehow keeps that insane spark going for fifty years, but it’s very, very small. And it’s weird enough that scientists study it and try to figure out what the hell is going on. Right? They’re like, why are these people still in love? I don’t get it. But you evolve, you change. You have to be consciously in the relationship and realizing that things are going to be different. Realize that the person you’re with is a human being, he’s a man, he’s getting older, he’s changing, everything in his brain’s going is going to be different and that relation between you is going to change.
The only way to get that real, you know, rewind things back to that spark is to do it very consciously. Right? People always assume love is going to be easy. Love is hard. Love is work.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s work. Yeah definitely. My opinion, you know.
Michael Fiore: It’s mine, too. You know, I love being in a, as a guy who is listen… Yes, yes, did I personally enjoy my time sleeping with a lot of women and going off and doing that kind of thing? Yeah, it was fun, right? I really like being in a committed relationship with a wonderful woman. But it’s a challenge as a guy. You know, do I still have those desires to be like “man, it would be kind of fun to just go off and pick up a girl?” Yeah! But you don’t do it. Right? You make a conscious choice not to kind of do it, and to go from there.
But it’s work, it’s difficult. It’s always going to be difficult. I hate the myth of Prince Charming, the myth of happily ever after. Right? It never exists. The couples that make it long term are the ones that understand that they are standing on a spinning log in the middle of a river.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, you can’t go to sleep on your relationship.
Michael Fiore: No, and you gotta, I mean for me I personally, me and my girlfriend, like, every couple of months I sit down with her and I say, “What’s good and what’s bad, babe?” Right? Just like, very bluntly, what are your complaints, what’s really bugging you right now? What’s making you furious with me? And what’s making you really happy with me? And we have a really good conversation.
Joshua Pellicer: I do the same thing.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, it’s always funny ‘cause some women see my stuff on Facebook. “Oh, you must be the perfect man to be with!” I’m just like, hell no!
Joshua Pellicer: Ask my girlfriend about that.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, ask my girlfriend about it. She loves me, I love her, we have a great time, but I’m certainly not perfect. Right? Nobody’s gonna be…
Josh let’s, we could chat about this stuff all day long, I kind of love what you’ve been saying, but let’s move on to the lie detection stuff. I think we have a relatively limited time left together, and I think this is really valuable material. And you know, for women who are listening, you know, go back and re-listen to everything we just kind of said. It’s a little disorganized there ‘cause we’re just kind of having a relatively casual conversation, but a lot of what Josh is saying about the methods of attraction and what I was talking about with masculine shame, and especially his stuff about gender roles.
You know, there is a certain point where you make a choice to be in that gender role and to give up a certain level of power and control. That’s hard to do that unless you know the other person is taking things up. It’s kind of like in my business. I have people with me who I, who work with me, who I know I can trust to handle things, so I don’t worry about it anymore and I can just be who I am and do the stuff I do. But there’s no shame, you’re not like, you know, you’re not, like, setting back feminism fifty years by letting him choose where to go to dinner. Right? Or—
Joshua Pellicer: And even if you are, like, even if that were the case, who cares if it makes you happy? You really can’t care.
Michael Fiore: Yeah! Or like, getting him a beer every once in a while, right? I’m not saying you have to be the 50s housewife who’s a submissive servant all the time, but I’m just getting you a beer ‘cause I felt like it. Nothing wrong with it, just like, you know—
Joshua Pellicer: “Because I love you,” you know.
Michael Fiore: Yeah, the same way he should just kind of go out and warm up your car for you sometimes. Right? Traditional gender roles, but hey, do it, it’s okay.
So let’s move on to the lie detection stuff to a certain degree, ‘cause I think this is, we’ll spend fifteen, twenty minutes on that ‘cause I think it’s really fun stuff. And one of the most infuriating things for women is dealing with guys who are lying. And I personally, you know I had that section “Why He Lies,” where we talk about forgiving guys for lying to a certain degree, because oftentimes lies are white lies and aren’t that big of a deal. Right? Oftentimes people are just lying to themselves right? We’re protecting ourselves in some ways and you can just kind of let that go.
But there are douchebags out there, right? There are guys who are manipulative and there’s a lot of guys who will tell you anything just to get you, into your pants. So how does a woman, let’s talk about the lie detection thing, what are your tips if a woman meets a man, or is even with a man, you know, romantically, for her to pick up on whether he’s lying or not about the important stuff?
Joshua Pellicer: Okay, so I think first it’s kind of important to note that, you know, whenever… “Why” men lie is in your book a lot, and it’s really, really powerful, probably one of my favorite sections in the entire thing, and I think I’d like to go over “how” in this one, right?
So how men lie in this one. And I think that it’s important to note that before we get started in this, that you have, when you recognize that someone is lying, you have within your possession, a weapon so powerful you can bring anyone to their knees. Right? Then you lose that power as soon as you reveal you know he’s lying.
Michael Fiore: Very interesting. So it’s the power, it’s kind of like playing, it’s like playing a board game to a certain degree. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Like poker, really.
Michael Fiore: Playing poker! I know your cards.
Joshua Pellicer: Right. I know your cards, but if I say I know your cards, you’re going to fold, right?
Michael Fiore: But you don’t know that I know. You don’t know that I know your cards, and you don’t know that I have four aces. So—
Joshua Pellicer: Right, exactly. So this is, and I might risk a little bit by using this analogy, I might risk you feeling like you are, you know—
Michael Fiore: Go for it.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. I don’t want to risk you feeling like you’re feeling like you’re on the other team here, you know, against your significant other, but either way you have a very, very important decision to make, whenever you realize that someone is deceiving you that you’re with.
And, you know, in a minute I’m going to tell you exactly how to do that, and before I do that I want you to know that when you make that decision, here’s what you’re going to have to weigh. If you believe that whatever it is that this person is lying about is not hurting you or them, and they’re coming from a positive place, I would leave it alone. And I would leave it alone, and I would be like, okay. And you can know the truth, that’s okay, and you know, you could talk about it later if you want to, right? When they’re not going to, you know, start, you know, digging themselves a hole, right? ‘Cause if you confront them about it they may actually begin to lie about other things to sort of seem consistent. And this is where you can create a lie that’s really terrible where there was not a lie.
Michael Fiore: You can create a much more important lie.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, exactly. And it can be the thing that ruins your relationship because you just wanted to push it, because you didn’t like being lied to, right?
Michael Fiore: And everybody lies.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes they do. Everybody does, and it’s okay. It’s okay that you’re—
Michael Fiore: One of the things I tell them to do is just create a lie journal of all the lies you tell today; to yourself, to other people—
Joshua Pellicer: You’ll be astounded.
Michael Fiore: I don’t care how honest you think you are. They’re everywhere, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yup.
Michael Fiore: They’re everywhere, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: For a while I, when I was in Tallahassee, Florida… I was living there, I went through a stage where I was practicing something I didn’t know really existed to anybody else, but I didn’t know this is a concept already
Michael Fiore: Radical honesty.
Joshua Pellicer: Found out later it was radical honesty, yeah. So I didn’t know this, I was just studying Zen at the time, and part of Zen was being completely open, you know? And so I started trying to correct on my lies, and I realized that I lied about little things. About the first day I tried it, was probably about 50 to 60 times that I was in conversation, not even to myself, but in conversation lying about something and I started correcting myself instantly in the conversation. I had some really weird looks, and people were like, you know… Like at one part I was like “oh yeah that girl, she was, she came and she talked to me and blah, blah, blah,” and then I was realizing that, I realized I was fantasizing about that in my head as I was saying it. That wasn’t really—
Michael Fiore: It didn’t actually happen.
Joshua Pellicer: No, so I then in the middle of my conversation I was like, “That didn’t really happen, that was a lie.” And my friend was like, “okay…” You know? All right, fine. So I went through, and I sort of broke that down for myself.
But keep in mind that whenever you do recognize a lie in someone you may or may not want to bring it up. If it’s an innocent lie that you think isn’t going to hurt anybody at all, you don’t need to bring it up. If it’s something that’s innocent that is going to hurt somebody, you definitely need to bring it up, right? So if it’s hurting them or you or anyone else, but it’s an innocent thing, you have to talk about it.
Michael Fiore: Also to a certain degree you have to let some… We all have our illusions about ourselves. Right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yes.
Michael Fiore: We all have the story we tell the world about ourselves, and it’s not necessarily true but sometimes it’s useful.
Joshua Pellicer: Well, if it’s useful and it helps you then it’s not hurting you, right? If it’s going to hurt you, then it needs to be brought up. Right? I kind of look at my duty as a man like this: my duty as a man is to, I’d say a woman is like a butterfly, right, or let’s say a woman is like a girl chasing a butterfly, let’s look at that. She’s looking at the beautiful things in the world and she’s recognizing them. My job as a man is to move everything out of her way so she doesn’t trip on rocks as she’s like following her dreams and expressing.
Now if she tries to chase this butterfly off a cliff, I’m going to stop her, ‘cause it will hurt her, right? Or she tries to chase this butterfly, you know, into me, I man up, you know, correct her a little bit so that way she’s not running into me and hurting me, right? But besides that, as long as she’s not hurting herself or me or, you know, anything like that then it’s completely fine and she can do whatever she wants to. It’s just that we have to be able to recognize when someone’s hurting themselves with a lie or hurting you with a lie.
And so if you see that at any point, feel free to reveal that this is a lie. And I’ll tell you how to do that in just a minute, but if that’s not the case if it’s, especially if you think that it is not an innocent lie, you think that it’s malicious, then you don’t want to tell them, because if you tell them that you know they’re going to back track, they’re going to get angry, they’re not going to slip up. What you want them to do is continue to lie, that’s what you want them to do. And you want them to continue to lie and create such a story around it that they are flustered and having a really hard time keeping it all together. Right? And what you do, whenever you do this, is you basically implant a negative association with this lie.
So let’s say it was like, “Where’d you go last night?” “Oh, I went down to the bar and met so-and-so for a drink.” And you see a couple triggers that I’m going to talk about in just a minute that let you recognize that that’s a lie. Then you may go, “Oh really, I’ve never been there before. Is it cool?” “Yeah, yeah, it was really cool.” “Oh really, was it packed or anything, or is it really busy? Or no?”
Ask questions that you, seem completely innocent right? And then just let him completely make up details, right? Don’t let him know that you know he’s lying.
Michael Fiore: But I also… only do this if you think it’s an important lie.
Joshua Pellicer: Yes. If it’s something that’s not going to hurt anybody.
Michael Fiore: “Why were you late last night?” “I stopped off and had a beer at this place, blah, blah, blah.” If you know the real reason he was late was because he was, I don’t know, looking at porn in his office.
Joshua Pellicer: Working late.
Michael Fiore: Or working.
Joshua Pellicer: He was late, you told him not to—
Michael Fiore: Exactly. And he’s just like, I don’t want to be hassled so I’m not, I’m just going to make up this little white lie. Don’t make it a big deal, it’s not worth it, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right. You’re basically going to train him to not, not want to, basically going to get better at lying instead of, instead of training him to really be open more.
Michael Fiore: And the way to be more open is to show that you are okay with the truth. To prove—
Joshua Pellicer: Yes. And you know it takes a little while—
Michael Fiore: And also to be honest with him, by the way. Like, the more honest you are with somebody else… My girlfriend is brilliant at this, by the way. I remember one time we were sitting on our couch and she was like, “I’m really concerned about the idea of living with you in the future because, I think, for these three reasons.” And she just said that. There was no, like, there was no anger in her voice, there was no nothing else, she just said it, and it established the tone of our relationship forevermore. We had a great conversation that led to us living together now based off of that, right? Because she was really honest, as opposed to doing that whole, like, thing that a lot of people do, both men and women, where they dance around things and they get resentful and they do. She just kind of said something. If you are more honest yourself you will encourage other people to be honest with you. Continue.
Joshua Pellicer: Right. Absolutely. So essentially what you’ll be doing if you let someone dig a deeper hole is, you’re creating a shit load of anxiety for them, and they associate that anxiety with a lie. Right? So then, moving forward, they’re going to want to avoid it all together. They’re not going to want to lie. And if they think that they’re going to, every time they lie you do this to them, then they will, they’ll get so much anxiety they’ll stop lying to you because they can’t handle it. We can’t handle that, it’s too much pressure. You know?
Michael Fiore: By the way, women are much better at lying than men are, actually.
Joshua Pellicer: Much better in general, yeah. Like I’m getting away with a lie, totally.
Michael Fiore: Especially when it comes to something like infidelity. There’s been some great studies on that, by the way. On how women are just like incredibly good at not leaving clues and then lying about it, whereas guys are, like, just do stupid things. But continue.
Joshua Pellicer: So speaking of stupid things, let’s talk about the ways that guys slip up, right?
Michael Fiore: Great.
Joshua Pellicer: So there’s a couple of different types of lying. There’s concealment, where you’re actually trying to take someone and put them in a different direction. Like point them into a different direction, right? That’s where you say something that’s absolutely not true, right? This is sort of trying to hide a way that you feel or something that’s true.
And then the other one is a, you’re going to look for something called a leakage. Leakage, this is a concept by Paul Eckman. Paul Eckman is a guy who’s a brilliant, studied something called micro expressions and—
Michael Fiore: Oh yeah, yeah, great stuff. I read his book, it’s great, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, and there’s a TV show made about him called “Lie to Me.” It’s fantastic. If you want to watch a TV show, it’s a good one.
Michael Fiore: You learn a lot about feet in that one.
Joshua Pellicer: You learn a lot about lying in general, too. It’s pretty accurate.
Michael Fiore: You learn a lot about how somebody’s feet are positioned is a huge indicator if they’re telling the truth or not. It’s really interesting.
Joshua Pellicer: So let’s talk about the biggest, most honest ways to tell a lie. The first thing you gotta know is, you want to look for clusters of these things. You can’t just look for one. If you see, like, let’s say that a guy was like, how do I know she was into me? And I said, “She twirls her hair while you’re talking to her, then she likes you.” Right? And imagine talking to a guy, you start twirling your hair. Do you want this guy to really think that you like him in that moment? You do that all the time for nervousness, a lot of other reasons, right? So you want to look for clusters instead of looking for one indicator. Right? And there are almost just literal.
So let’s talk about a few of the biggest ones. Whenever we feel like we’re being confronted and we’re afraid of being found out, this is the biggest kind of lie, right, we’re afraid someone’s going to catch onto us, we’ll do one of a few different types of lying. Let’s talk about body language first, one of the easiest ways to tell. When you are being confronted by somebody that you feel is going to find out a truth that you’re trying to conceal, you will almost universally put something, visually put something, in between your chest and that person.
Michael Fiore: Interesting. Almost a shield in a way. Basically.
Joshua Pellicer: A shield, that’s exactly what it is. Right? It’s protecting what you believe is the most vulnerable part of your body, which is typically your diaphragm, not your heart, right? It’s actually below your heart, it’s your diaphragm. So when a guy crosses his arms, what is he covering? He’s covering his diaphragm. Right? It’s covering that weak, vulnerable part of this stomach right there, and he’s usually bowing up a little bit to kind of, like, intimidate during that process.
Another thing that guys will do whenever they’re afraid of being attacked, and they’re afraid of being found out, is they will drop their head just slightly so that their chin is protecting their neck a little bit. Right? So this is, like, seems a little bit submissive, but it’s more like a getting-ready-to-pounce stance. Another thing that they’ll do is they’ll shift… This is a little harder to tell, but they’ll subconsciously shift the weight to the balls of their feet instead of standing flat-footed. This is a fight or flight, it’s preparing for fight or flight response, it’s involuntary, we can’t help it, right? So if they’re sitting down, though a lot of guys will have two different kinds of major, sort of reveal, sort of tells, let’s call these tells right, like in poker. They’re going to give away the truth, give away the fact that they’re lying and trying to conceal something. The first one is going to be shielding, right? And that’s in any kind of way possible. In front of the chest they can literally take a glass of water and I’ll put it in front of me, so it’s in between me and you, or I’ll have a scratch on my shoulder and instead of reaching with the same arm to scratch my shoulder, like I would normally do, I reach across my body and scratch my shoulder.
Michael Fiore: So creating a barrier between yourself and the other person.
Joshua Pellicer: And often, the funny thing is, often there is no itch, but you can’t prove that, right? You can’t say, ”You’re not itching!” You know? You can’t do that.
Michael Fiore: I’m crawling inside your body and wandering your nerves, and I know that you are not itching right now.
Joshua Pellicer: That’s our fear actually, is that what is happening, you know? And so, what we do is, we literally put stuff in between, or we’ll walk so there’s something in between us and you, you know? We try and divert ourselves away from you a little bit, especially our faces.
So that’s one way. Another thing we’ll do as men, we’ll overcompensate with confidence. And whenever this happens we begin to do things like show our palms to you for no reason. Right? So I’m going to do this kind of, on my lap, so you can kind of hear it a little bit and get what I mean by it. So if I’m talking to you and every once in a while I’m sticking my hands up, kind of like I’m holding something, right, almost like I’m about to sharpen my shoulders, right, and what will happen is, a guy will do something like this, will do that and then slap his hands down. Right? “I don’t know what you’re talking about” right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, like he seems frustrated but he’s trying to deter you. It’s over confidence in—
Michael Fiore: Hey Josh, I’m getting some static on the line here. Just talk for a second.
Joshua Pellicer: Sure.
Michael Fiore: I think it’s gone now, okay continue.
Joshua Pellicer: Okay, can you hear me okay?
Michael Fiore: I can hear you much better now, yes.
Joshua Pellicer: Okay, great, perfect. So what a guy will do often is, he’ll begin to overcompensate, and that’s one of the ways he’s overcompensating. We try to overcompensate by expressing an emotion that’s easy to fake, something like anger. Anger is easy to fake, and even more importantly smiling is easy to fake, right? But it’s very difficult to smile and continue to have a conversation, right? So we’re more likely to go into something if we think that you know us well, we’re more likely to get into a situation where you start to feel reactive too, so you lose your cool and you are not able to tell that we’re lying. Right?
So we’ll try to get you nervous. And the way we might do that, we might be like, “Look, why are you always asking me these questions?” Right? But one thing that we will do that will give us away is we’ll start to shake our heads no when we’re saying something, and slap our hands down on whatever it is we have our hands on. If it’s on a table, we’ll slap it down on a table a little bit you know. And we usually show our palms right before we do that, you know. And just to give you an idea of what showing your palms does, showing your palms exposes your wrist, it says “I trust you,” that’s what it says. So what we’re trying, literally what we’re trying to say is, “I trust you and you’re making me angry” right? I trust you and you’re making me angry, over and over and over again. And what we’re saying, what we’re lying about, we’re shaking our heads no because we literally don’t believe what we’re saying, right? So these are all qualities—
Michael Fiore: Interesting. Okay, great, great. So you’re not looking for just like one cue, there’s not any one cue. I remembering reading from Eckman’s book, one of the mistakes that people make is they obsess about one cue and they think, “Oh, he picked his nose, therefore he must actually be the murderer.” And it’s like no, no, no, no, no, no, no people just do that sometimes, but these are all indicators, they’re not proof. You have to use a combination of them. Don’t become a lie hypochondriac, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Right. A liepocondriac.
Michael Fiore: A liepocondriac. I love that. That’s a new, I’m going to coin that one.
Joshua Pellicer: So basically what you’ll be doing then, is you’ll be looking for these different series of motions that he’s in. Another fantastic one is, you want to look for the context under which he’s doing this. One time I was on a date with someone before I had my beautiful girlfriend now—
Michael Fiore: She’s pretty awesome and very cute, it’s true.
Joshua Pellicer: She’s amazing. I’ve been chasing her for ten years so.
Michael Fiore: And she kept running. That’s amazing.
Joshua Pellicer: She was, you know, it was hard.
Michael Fiore: She’s honestly way too good for you so—
Joshua Pellicer: That’s probably what it is, you know. It’s the cardiovascular thing, she’s got good cardio.
Michael Fiore: That’s why she’s so skinny, right there. But yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: That’s why she runs so well. Anyway, I was on a date, and I had, was sort of just diving into these different ideas of deception, and one of the things that I learned was context is just as important as content, right? So if every time I say something, you do a certain weird body language trigger, I not only know that you’re trying to lie to me, I know exactly what you’re lying about.
And this is very, very, very powerful. So what you want to do is, you want to pay attention and you want to try and dive into stuff a little bit to figure out what is the lie, because maybe he did go to that bar last night but maybe he didn’t meet a friend. You know? And as you start to reveal this information, and he starts to talk to you about other stuff, right, “So how was James? You met with James? How was he?” you know? And he starts doing weird stuff, and you know that he’s lying about that, right? So you can narrow this down.
If you find that it’s malicious, it’s oftentimes better to sort of research a little bit before you start talking about it, you know? Really do your research. Try to figure out if there’s anything else, because as soon as you give any kind of a clue that you’re on to him, that’s what he’s doing, he’s going through his cell phone deleting text messages, going through his email making sure there’s nothing in there, cleaning up all this tracks, you know? Make sure that he finds a way to get in touch with her—
Michael Fiore: And also just getting angry at you, at the same time.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, well that’s the stereo. As soon as he leaves—
Michael Fiore: But it’s also projection. I mean, oftentimes people will, they’ll internalize the emotion right?
Joshua Pellicer: Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Michael Fiore: And they’ll be like you, they’ll blame you. And they’ll get angry at you for all these kinds of things, so you want to prevent that. You want to prevent that fight or flight reaction. ‘Cause fighting sucks.
Joshua Pellicer: And so… Either one, fighting for flighting, in this case.
Michael Fiore: Flighting away, yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Being flighty. So the other thing I would say that is really important, of course content and context are very important, now another major trigger that you want to look for is something called, lies in something called ISS and Q’s. This can be really complicated, this is, the FBI uses these a lot to interrogate, and a lot of other government organizations use these too. And essentially what this, what we found out is, when you look into different directions you access different parts of your brain. And if a guy is looking down, he’s accessing his emotions. If he’s looking up, he’s accessing his visual brain.
Now you can test this if you want to, not that it’s impossible to access your emotions when you’re looking up, but if you try this out, try thinking back on a relationship you had that went terrible, like the very end of the relationship was all kind of going terrible. If you look up the whole time you’re thinking about it, and you recall step by step everything, you’ll have one experience. If you look down and do the same thing that you just did a minute ago, you may start crying.
Michael Fiore: Interesting, very interesting.
Joshua Pellicer: The reason why is because now your emotions are flowing, right? We have an association with this. So you can recognize if he’s saying something he shouldn’t be emotional about, but he’s looking down, you know that he’s emotional about it. Now it could be that he doesn’t want to feel weak, you know, or seem weak in that moment so you can’t necessarily be like, “You’re lying,” and blah, blah, blah. You have to watch yourself.
Michael Fiore: The opposite is also true. If you ask a man, “How do you feel about me?” and he looks up.
Joshua Pellicer: Oh yeah, he’s probably not about to tell you the truth. He’s probably trying to hide something really, really bad.
Michael Fiore: Or moreover, maybe he just doesn’t know at that point, right?
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, usually.
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, but he’s not trying to figure out how he feels in that moment at all.
Michael Fiore: He’s like, he’s doing that thing that guys do when “she’s asking me this question, what’s the right response?”
Joshua Pellicer: Exactly, yeah. Let me imagine something. So he’s visualizing something, literally.
Michael Fiore: What is the actual right response that will get this situation to end as quickly as possible?
Joshua Pellicer: Right, and then the next bit here is going to be a little more helpful. Right? When you look to the left and to the right as well, like up and to the right versus up and to the left, is different. Right? So when you look left and to the right you access different parts of your brain as well. And this is between your recall memory versus your creative brain, and your creation of something. Right? This is really important. Now the hard part here is that people are different. I’ve heard people teach this one way or the other. It’s not necessarily that if you he looks right all the time, it’s this way. It’s not like that.
Michael Fiore: Yeah.
Joshua Pellicer: You have to find a baseline. You have to notice where he looks when he’s trying to recall something. Right? And when you get that baseline, you can do that by asking things that you know he’s not going to lie about and then that you know the answer to—
Michael Fiore: Which is like when somebody’s using a lie detector. You know, when a government employee or somebody like that is using a lie detector on somebody, they’ll ask baseline question for this exact same reason, what you’re basically saying. You know, they’re hooked up to it and you’re saying, “What is your name?” “Michael Fiore.” And you know that will give a positive response. “Are you sitting in a chair right now?” “Yes.” “Are you flying right now?” “No.” Right? And they’ll establish these kinds of things. You can’t do it quite as formally, ‘cause you don’t want them to know what you’re doing—
Joshua Pellicer: Are you flying right now?
Michael Fiore: No. That’s not even a lie as much… Its’ more like an incredulous kind of thing at that point but, yeah. Okay, continue.
Joshua Pellicer: So what you have to do is you have to base his, I found that generally speaking from my experiences, that when someone looks to the left it’s more likely, it’s probably 60 percent chance that they’re accessing their creative brain. And this is just my experience, people will have experienced other things as well. I would strongly suggest that you test it out, because really you only need to know the man that you’re dating, you don’t need to know too many guys, right? So test that out a little bit and find out what that is. Any time they look in that other direction, the creative brain side, you can bet your ass that they are not trying to, they’re not recalling something. They’re not remembering something, they are making something up, you know?
And sometimes it’s okay. Like if you said, “Could you imagine being on a boat with me and just living on this boat?” Okay, well if he looks up and to the left he’s not lying to you, he’s just imaging that. He’s never had that experience before, so he’s just creating that experience. So you want to watch this, any time they access their creative brain when they should be accessing their recall, you know for sure, this is one of the most amazing tells ever, you know that they are lying to you in that particular instance.
Now you don’t know why, and you don’t know what about specifically yet, so then you have to do a little bit more digging. And the last thing I would like to sort of talk about that’s a really good indicator is that we have something called “forced blinking.” This is another—
Michael Fiore: Forced blinking, okay.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah. Forced blinking is the idea that whenever we say a sentence, we will blink on the word that makes that sentence a lie.
Michael Fiore: Wow. Okay.
Joshua Pellicer: It’s really interesting. So we will, because blinking is something that we think that you cannot say that we’re doing on purpose. Right, we know this. And it is a really sneaky attempt to subconsciously hide our eye accessing cues. Right? So you don’t know which direction I’m looking in. I don’t want you to know. Right?
So one way, and usually what we’ll do is, we’ll enunciate the word and then we will literally blink during that moment. And it may be something as simple as “I did not go to the bar last night,” right? So “I did not,” when I say “not” I will blink, right? And usually tilt my head to some direction, left or right a little bit and drop my neck a little bit and, you know, usually want to curl my shoulders forward. Like, I’ll get a little bit like defensive almost, but most guys, if they’re lying to you directly, they’ll know better than to put their arms across their chest and go “No, what are you talking about?” You know? Like that kind of thing, they know better. Really good guys, who are good at lying, know better than to do that. So instead you want to look for something that’s really involuntary, which is forced blinking, you know?
And so another thing you can watch is that if a minute ago he was talking about something that is true and he’s, like, looking different directions, and all of a sudden you say something that’s innocent, and he locks eyes with you, gives you the answer and he tries not to blink at all, his eyes get kind of wide, then he’s also trying to hold back any tells that the has, to try to let you know that he’s lying. So forced blinking is probably one of the most accurate, along with eye accessing cues in general, probably one of the most accurate tells. If you get just one of those I would say that’s worth three or four of other body language cues because it is so involuntary. We just, we don’t really have any control over that.
And we, you know, usually someone who’s lied, if they think that you believe them, they’ll smirk for like a split second. Just for a split second they’ll have a little glimmer of a smile, and then they’ll go back to being whatever they’re supposed to be, right? But that’s a little bit harder to see because they think that they just got away with a lie. That makes them feel really good, make them go, “Oh god, I feel so much better now that you believe me because I was scared there for a minute.” All the tension’s gone, right?
So you may not be able to look at all these different cues, consciously all the time and tell 100 percent of the time. I want you to be equipped with them in case you are in a situation where, you know, where it’s, like, the day before he was thinking about cheating on you with a girl and you can kind of get this out and know that something’s terribly, terribly wrong, and you can stop it from happening. You know, and this is really what it’s about.
And of course if you’re in a relationship where, you know, your man isn’t faithful to you and it’s important to you that you are faithful, you know, that you guys have this sort of open, openness and you’re able at that point to say, “Look, I know you’re lying, I want to stop this now, and I want to be done with this because I’m being deceived,” right? You can stop it early and there won’t be much pain. So—
Michael Fiore: Fantastic. Josh, I mean we’ve covered a ton of stuff in our time here together, I think we should wind it down now. But thank you so much for sharing all this stuff and just having this conversation. I know women who have listened to interviews that have other guys in the past, have been like, “Wow, that’s the greatest, such great stuff, ‘cause I really get to know what it’s like to be a guy and get that kind of information without all the BS that you get when you read Cosmo” and things like that. So I just want to really, really thank you for coming on board today and—
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, thank you, Michael.
Michael Fiore: Where can somebody find out more about you? Where can someone go? I know you don’t have any programs that are aimed at women, though I think you should.
Joshua Pellicer: I would work on that. You know, on some point I will for sure, but I think that probably the most intriguing thing, and I’ve had a lot of women do this and they’re really just fascinated by it, try grabbing a copy of what I teach men. I mean, it’s really interesting when you start to see the way I break it down. It will reveal, a, it will reveal a couple things that I teach men that men will be doing to you, right, so the tricks that men use on you.
Michael Fiore: And “tricks” has such a negative connotation, right? It’s kind of like when I was, a few years ago, when I learned something about hypnosis. Right? I learned, I got pretty good at it quickly, ‘cause I’m just that kind of person. And I would go out with female friends of mine, and I would say, “Hey, I learned something about hypnosis,” and I would use that to seduce them while telling them exactly what I was doing. Right? And it was okay, we had a great time. It wasn’t, nobody was mad, nobody was like, “Oh my god, you’re manipulating me” or something like that. These are games we play, these are things we do. But when you’re aware of what’s going on you can make the choice to go along with the game or not.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, exactly. You know, I’m not saying that any guy, in fact any guy who uses this is probably, probably awesome.
Michael Fiore: He’s probably a nice guy, hopefully.
Joshua Pellicer: Yeah, ‘cause he bought my product.
Michael Fiore: He was actually just trying to meet high quality women. ‘Cause a lot of really nice guys are insanely frustrated ‘cause they’re like “why do all the beautiful, smart, wonderful women go out with assholes?”
Joshua Pellicer: Right. And I totally understand that sentiment, so you know, if you do want to find out some of, let’s say that they are like, ethical but sneaky, cause they are to be honest. They’re ethical but sneaky techniques that guys will be using, if they’re not using them with you already. They will be in the future, and it’s important to know that. If for only one reason, if you just want to know that a guy’s actually interested in you because he’s actually using these techniques with you when he’s talking to you, then that’s great. Or if you want to find out just to be prepared for when a guy does use it, so you can have sort of a leg up, just grab a copy of it and, you know, see what you think. Check it out and learn as much as you can. That’s probably the best thing for now, you know? So if I can I’ll give you a link or something, Michael, and you can put it up.
Michael Fiore: Yeah we’ll put it in the membership site for folks, so you can kind of get over there and take a look at Josh’s stuff. It’s really excellent stuff, by the way. One of the reasons I like Josh so much is because his heart is in the total right place as far as these things go. He is like myself, someone who really likes and appreciates women and thinks women are awesome, and he teaches hopefully good guys how to go out there and meet women. As opposed to some of the other people who I may interview in the future, who are a little more manipulative about it. I have one interview planned which will be with a notorious pick up artist who has slept with hundreds of women and might even be a little mean about it, I don’t know, we’ll see.
Joshua Pellicer: Hopefully.
Michael Fiore: So Josh, thank you so very, very much for coming on board. Ladies who are listening, I hope you appreciated this, and please as always, please put comments down below and let us know what you thought of the interview with Joshua Pellicer from the Tao of Badass, and we’ll have more great stuff for you in the future. Thank you so much.
Joshua Pellicer: Thank you, Michael.
Michael Fiore: Thank you.
