Ep. #54 The Path to a Serious Girlfriend with Christian Hudson

[Angel Donovan]: Christian, it’s good to have you back on the show. How I’d like to start is like we’ve been going with a lot of guys lately to get to know them a bit better, a bit about their background so the guys can relate to you as a real person. Not just this dating coach, this guy who’s instructing them, but to get an idea of who you really are.

Before all of this dating stuff came along, what was your background? What were you doing in your life?

[Christian Hudson]: Sure. I dropped out of college a couple times, started a few dot com type businesses. I ended up starting a security software company in my early twenties, which I attempted to run for a few years. I actually got fired from that company when we failed to raise another round of capital.

Through that, I got introduced to somebody who was in the dating community. One of my employees was trolling on the message boards at the time and had found a guy who was going to be one of the big leaders of the community. I found my way connecting with this dude, getting drinks with him and pretty soon we were off to build a business together.

Around that time, I went back to college. I was finishing college from 24 to 26 while we were building this business. When I got out, he and I had sort of a falling out. I tried starting a jello shot company of all things. They’re great. It’s one of the coolest products I’ve ever done, but we get good legal guidance and we didn’t get clearance by the Alcohol Tax Tobacco and Trade Bureau.

That was a big fail. I ended up really broke and actually in a lot of debt. I ended up starting this. It was the one thing I knew how to do - talk to girls and coach guys on how to talk to girls. That’s a very abbreviated version.

[Angel Donovan]: What year was it again that you started The Social Man?

[Christian Hudson]: We registered the business in 2006. I think we started operating in 2007. I launched that book called Conquer Your Campus. I believe it was 2008 when I actually started doing coaching. I can’t remember for sure. I had been doing coaching previously starting in 2005. Under this brand, I think it was 2008.

[Angel Donovan]: Cool man. Seven years or so. That’s quite a bit already How old are you now? Where do you live?

[Christian Hudson]: 34. Splitting my time between Austin and California at this point. I just moved out of New York and am thrilled to be out of New York. I was there for seven years and it just got to be too much energy. It was a great place to be single. As you know, I’ve been in a relationship for the last three years now. The energy of the city just wasn’t really connecting with me.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Looking back over your dating life, I know you’ve been in a relationship for three years. How many dates do you think you’ve been on over that time?

[Christian Hudson]: I don’t know. That’s a really good question.

[Angel Donovan]: Hard to put a number on it.

[Christian Hudson]: Honestly, I’ve been in a lot of relationships. A lot of the women I met were through social circle stuff. My pattern rarely followed go out to a bar, pick up a girl, get her number, get her out on a date. I definitely did that probably a hundred times or so.

These days there’s Tinder. My friends are on Tinder. It’s date after date after date. One of my employees, he goes on three or four dates a week, always with new girls. He’s got his Tinder and OKCupid games pretty down. I dare say at this point he’s probably been on more dates than I have.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent. Relationships. You said you had quite a few. How many roughly has that been?

[Christian Hudson]: Serious relationships, committed, longer than six months? Seven now. That’s a higher than average number for a guy who’s not married.

[Angel Donovan]: Were those all exclusive relationships or did you do some multiple dating?

[Christian Hudson]: No, never did that. I’ve always been a monogamous, one woman, one man type of dude.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Good to hear. How many women would you say you’ve slept with?

[Christian Hudson]: That’s a question I don’t want to answer.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s totally cool, man. You’re not the first person to say that.

[Christian Hudson]: Sure. It’s not something that I ever thought was particularly important. For people who do find it important, it’s just not something that...

[Angel Donovan]: We’ve all got the right to keep whatever we want private. What’s your dating relationship lifestyle like today? You’ve got a girlfriend. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you got there?

[Christian Hudson]: We live together. It’s amazing, a great relationship. We help each other. We help each other grow. She’s a little bit younger than me, but I’ve learned so much from her. She’s learned so much from me. It’s great. It’s very symbiotic.

I’ve been through a lot of different types of women. The current relationship is just a beautiful thing. I know I’m being vague here. I don’t love talking too much about the intricate details of my personal life. It’s just absolutely wonderful.

I will say this. Everybody who’s met her is always really blown away by how down to Earth she is. How strong of a person she is without being offensively strong. I don’t mean offensively in a bad or negative way. You meet strong people who have very strong personalities who can be difficult to be around.

She’s a very strong person but super easy going. It’s wonderful. I got very, very lucky with that. As I like to say, I think she got pretty lucky with me. Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s great. Do you have any ideas, looking forward, about what the kind of lifestyle is going to be like? I don’t know if you thought about kids, marriage, or anything in the future?

[Christian Hudson]: Yes, definitely. I’m 34 now, so I definitely think about that stuff. Neither of us are in a hurry right now. We’re both focused on achieving some goals in our lives. We both have a path to achieve the goals we want to achieve.

That’s the real focus at this point rather than trying to do anything else. If things keep going along well, and I expect they will, then there are some very obvious next steps. When we go running by the beach and we see little kids playing, we definitely say oh that’s so cute.

There’s not even a dog or cat in the picture at this point. The furthest we’ve gone is a jalapeno plant that we try to keep alive. That’s about it.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s awesome. That’s good to hear. I hope it’s not too hard to keep the thing alive. I know sometimes those things can be a real pain in the ass.

[Christian Hudson]: The jalapeno’s okay. The cilantro is tough. They take too much sunlight. That’s the tricky part. We’re learning and working on it.

[Angel Donovan]: You spoke about you were dating and going out a lot more before. Was there a period of your life where you’d say you were more casual dating? Then was there a switch to more serious dating? If that was a conscious decision or anything like that? Do you remember how that evolved?

[Christian Hudson]: It was. Absolutely. I remember a very specific point in time. There was a very noticeable transition from some degree of boyhood to manhood. There was a lot of going out and partying.

Again, dating wasn’t the way I’d really look at it, but there was a lot of going out and just having a really big social circle. It was kind of a wild life, going to nightclubs or just having a lot of parties. I think I mentioned when I started this business I was really in debt. When I was 30, I moved back home with my parent for six months just to save money and to keep focusing on building this, which sucked.

I started to this girl around that time. It progressed very slowly but surely. As things started to turn around, I moved back to New York. I was splitting my time between New York and Las Vegas, where I had a very good friend, somebody I was working with closely. We remain very friendly to this day. For the sake of not gossiping, I won’t share his name.

He and I were like two peas in a pod. We lived a very symbiotic life. We partied a lot. There were a lot of girls coming in and out of it. I remember I had the choice with this guy of do I want to travel the world with him and do the whole let’s go to Eastern Europe, let’s go to Asia, let’s go to South America, whatever city you pick. Metajin or Amsterdam, or God knows where in Asia, and find girls to date.

Do we want to live that lifestyle, or am I interested in investing into what was at the time a very developing relationship. It was very uncertain. I remember consciously going through this and thinking I’ve had a lot of fun. Life has been amazing. At this point, I’m ready to focus on growth in a relationship and developments in that regard. That relationship lasted for about a year and a half.

I was single for about a month. Then I started dating my current girlfriend. We’ve been together for three years now. It was a very specific point, reached very consciously. I don’t think I would’ve been able to have the certainty about relationships I have right now if I hadn’t been through all the great times of singlehood.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Totally. It’s interesting it kind of coincides with when you started your business and started developing that. I’m just saying that because we have a similar story. When I was starting my business, I actually went back to live with my parents for a little bit as well. I had to do all of that.

I started to get more serious in my relationships I noticed as I was taking more responsibility. You’re building your own thing. It’s a different perspective on life, I guess.

[Christian Hudson]: Yes. It’s so not a surprise. I think that happens for people like you and me. Doesn’t he talk about this in Think and Grow Rich, the notion of channeling your sex drive into your business.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, Chapter 6. It’s a pretty good chapter.

[Christian Hudson]: Yes. I think it seems to make sense at the time. You mentioned a really important word, which was responsibility. I think that when a man starts to take responsibility for his life, and when you think about it, building a business is in many ways, like growing a child. It needs constant feeding, attention, and if you’re not careful with it, it might fall into the pool and drown.

If you’re trying to do that and live a really crazy lifestyle, it just doesn’t work out well.

[Angel Donovan]: You’re looking for more stability. I guess it’s just because you’re always thinking about investment as well. You can see how that would filter into different areas of your life and it just crosses over.,

[Christian Hudson]: One of the interesting things, and I’m sure this has happened to you as well, is relationships are one of the greatest places to grow as a man. You grow in different ways when you’re single. You’re forced to grow in relationships because you’re living with this person and you’re finding you have to make conscious choices about your values with things this person asks of you or doesn’t ask of you.

My ex-girlfriend was a very conservative Christian. Whenever guys hear that, they’re always surprised. I went to church once a week. I went to Bible study with her and I really try to explore that faith. That was a real interesting one for me because it really made me think about my faith, my beliefs, my values and what I wanted for my own life and for my children as well.

In the end, we didn’t make it work because there was just too much of a value and belief mismatch. It’s a good case in point about relationships forcing us to grow. When I think back to relationships in my twenties, one of the bigger reasons they didn’t last for typically longer than six to eight months is that I hit this wall where I wasn’t ready to grow up. I wasn’t ready to be the man who was able to commit in a relationship.

A portion of that was serious selfishness. A portion of that was insecurity. A portion of that was a desire to continue to go out and have fun. A portion of that was just not really having a mission or purpose in life.

I can look back at these relationships and point to all the things they taught me about myself. Although it was very painful to go through them at the time, they all helped me develop into the person I am today, who I’m very, very happy with. I know one of the things we talked about leading up to this call was the value of relationships, what we learn in them. It’s just amazing to see that and I wanted to touch on that as part of this question.

[Angel Donovan]: You’ve got some great points there. For the guys at home, I’m thinking some of them often say they want a girlfriend. I see a lot of guys who listen to the show, because of the marketing and also because they’re taking their first steps sometimes in this area.

They’re learning about communication, about the opportunities and stuff. I think they get a little bit lost and confused about what they want. They’re not sure if they want to be player guy, which has some kind of status surrounding it, especially if it’s something they’ve never done before. You mentioned before that you’d gone through that stage, so you felt good about moving on from it. It’s certainly something that most guys have to go through.

I certainly went through that stage and had to get past that too. Is there any kind of question they can ask themselves, like are they ready? How can they know they should be going for a girlfriend now rather than going to play the field? Some stages I would say I don’t think you’re really ready to go for a girlfriend relationship yet. I think it would be good for you to play the field a little bit. If one thing, I don’t think you really know what you want. I think you need to learn more about yourself, and communication skills.

You were just saying how more challenging a relationship is. Maybe it’s better to get some of the social skills and some of the other stuff in lighter relationships before you go into that. What would your take on that be? Is there some simple way they can figure this out for themselves?

[Christian Hudson]: Simple way? No, but I’ll certainly share some thoughts about at least my perspective on it. It sounds like you’ve got some great perspective of your own. A few things.

First of all, if a guy finds himself really attracted information about how to pick up girls and conversation, seduction and all that, there’s that draw. We all have that natural draw to learn what we’re trying to grow into. If what a guy’s trying to learn and what he’s naturally attracted to is the conversations with guys like Mr. E or Brad P. who are really known for pick-up stuff, I think that’s a pretty clear sign.

Just to be clear on my end, nothing against those guys. They have great things to teach. If somebody wants to learn that stuff, by all means, go out and do it if you find yourself being responsive to that sort of stuff. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Dan Bilzerian. He’s this guy on Instragram. If you find yourself looking at that stuff and saying “Wow, that looks amazing. I really want that.” That’s another really good sign.

I was at a party he was at the other night. He is surrounded with all these girls. They’re all beautiful. No repression, total self-awareness. I’m looking at that and thinking that’s not what I want. For one thing, it’s way more work than I could ever do. I know there is a point in my life when I would have seen that and said “Wow, I definitely want that.”

I was actually talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday. I think there’s different phases of emotional and spiritual development we go through. It was very important for me to go through that phase in order to be able to have clarity about where I am right now.

That’s not to say that a guy is not ready for a relationship. I think a lot of it has to do with his sense of peace with himself, who he is in the world and what it takes to commit to somebody versus not having that and going out and having fun. For some men, it’s just not a part of their - what’s the word I’m looking for, it’s...

[Angel Donovan]: Biology?

[Christian Hudson]: Perhaps biology, but also it’s not a need for them to go out and do that. I’ve met guys like this. They just don’t need it because they find value and fulfillment in other parts of their lives.

It should be no surprise to you that this coincides with a lot of the men I met in the Christian community.They are really throwing themselves into their faith and into their work. There’s no need to prove to themselves they can go out and have a lot of women. That’s just not something that factors into their beliefs.

Just to try to wrap this up, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say we live in the society where we’ve lost right of passage. We don’t really have a way of telling a boy he’s a man now. A lot of men and boys have found themselves in this dating advice community. They find themselves trying to define their manhood by how many women they’ve dated, slept with, or what have you.

That’s a very clear feedback. It’s like, okay, I’ve slept with 20 women, I slept with 50 women. Now I’m there. I think that for men who have not had in their lives either fathers who really knew how to speak into them, or other mechanisms for achieving that sense of self that comes with identifying as a man.

This path offers, I’m not going to say its the best option, but it’s just a compelling option because it calls out to our very primal desires. Again, quite a long-winded answer. I was just hoping to give listeners insight into what might be going on in their heads.

One final thing on this, I will say. It was a tremendous amount of fun. When I was living in New York, I was at this big party loft. I lived with two other guys. It was amazing. It was such a great time. Even though I was broke and struggling in life, even though I was totally fucking up, I was having an awesome time. I wouldn’t tell anybody to do that. You don’t need that.

To bring it back to square one, I think it’s what’s really calling out to you in life. If you don’t know, then just let things evolve. See what happens. I don’t think anybody should ever hold back from getting into a relationship because they don’t feel ready.

There might be hurt feelings. They might end up screwing some things up. As long as you’re constantly trying to learn and discover you, and at least not hurting the other person intentionally, then not too much bad can come of it.

[Angel Donovan]: That was an excellent answer. It goes pretty deep in some areas. There’s a lot of material for guys to work through.

[Christian Hudson]: Thank you.

[Angel Donovan]: I like the fact you brought up the word “fun” at the end. Something I’ve been thinking of also is basically when it stops being fun for you, it’s probably time to move on and start thinking of something else. I think a lot of guys get to that point and stop having the fun, but they’re in the routine of what they’ve been doing. They continue for a while and don’t always get it.

[Christian Hudson]: That’s the promoter problem.

[Angel Donovan]: The promoter problem? Is that what they do?

[Christian Hudson]: It’s guys who are promoters. They go out to nightclubs every night. They’re constantly surrounded by women. They build their connections there where their business is. It’s easy for them to meet new women. They’re income is defined by how many people they can bring in the door.

It’s difficult to transition out of that because it’s what makes you money and what gets you women. I’ve seen a lot of promoters. I know a lot of promoters who struggle with that transition. That’s exactly it.

[Angel Donovan]: For guys who’ve been doing pretty well at casual dating, and hooking up with girls but they’ve now decided to move onto serious girlfriends. They’re having trouble with that kind of transition because it’s not really working for them, for instance. Maybe the girl doesn’t want to go into a relationship for whatever reason. Maybe the relationships aren’t lasting very long.

He’s having trouble getting to the more serious girlfriend style after the uncommitted casual style. Have you seen that before? Have you got ideas on that?

[Christian Hudson]: Yes. Certainly that was me for many years. I’ve seen it with other guys I worked with. I think it comes from a variety of places. We could get into some deep psychology here but we’ll try to keep it succinct.

One of the big things is that if we still have this draw to date a lot of women and sleep around, that gets a little bit deeper. One of the things I see really screwing up relationships is a man’s ego. It can be a woman’s ego too, but we’ll just focus on the men right now.

A man’s ego can really get in the way, especially if he’s been a part of this community. I just saw this with a guy who I’m new friends with. He was in this relationship. He had the “upper hand” in the relationship and never really committed to her. She finally, after a year and a half, said “Okay, I’m done with this. I’m sick of your half commitments.” Now he’s getting super needs and doesn’t know what to do.

For a lot of men, one of the biggest challenges is to be in a relationship as a whole person who does not get validation from the relationship but who enjoys it, who loves it, who loves the girl he’s with, but whose validation comes from his own self, mission and path in life. I think that’s one of the biggest sticking points, especially if somebody’s been in this dating community a while.

They’ve been bombarded with messages from other men about how important it is to sleep with women, or at least they’re in the company of men who are always talking about this stuff. That becomes a core value for them, the need to do some small degree of dick measuring about how well they’re doing with women. Speaking personally, there were previous relationships where I was caught between, to use an old cliche, a rock and a hard place.

The rock being my girlfriend where she literally would be the rock in my life, and the hard place being the fact I felt I still wanted to go out, sleep with other girls and I still have something to prove to myself. That was a really big ego thing for me. It certainly was affected by the messaging I was receiving at the time, both from seeing this stuff in the pickup community and also just the mainstream media at large.

That to me is one of the biggest difficulties guys can have. To sum it up very succinctly, the neediness internally and the subsequent fulfillment they have from being in a relationship and how that woman addresses that neediness in their lives. They’ve never really fixed the core of the problem. They’ve never really found something bigger than a woman to give real meaning to their lives.

That results in all sorts of really bad behavior. On one hard, you’re in the relationship and maybe you’re either secretly or overtly, or maybe your outwardly not being cool to her, not being super committed. You’re just going out trying to subtly flirt with other girls and always thinking to yourself if that other girl ever came along, who knows what I’d do.

On the other hand, when things get a little tense in the relationship, you can get super needy and you worry about losing here. You rush back and you’re like no, please don’t. It’s just bad on both hands. I’ll stop speaking about that particular problem, but for guys who’ve been through this whole community, that’s a really big one.

I can’t offer any great solution for it. Any great solution is basically going to be go find a mission in your life, and make that more important than anything. Then you’ll be in a great place to be in a relationship with a woman.

As I always like to say, the three most important searches in a man’s life, for a love, for a purpose and for truth, are never resolved at his convenience. These aren’t things that we can just snap our fingers and say okay, I’m going to go find my mission right now. It comes from overcoming these challenges, putting ourselves in difficult situations, being forced to make tough choices, being forced to go through some soul-crushing, gut wrenching, difficult periods and emerging with the truth of who we are and what’s truly important to us.

The very best thing I could say is that in order to avoid a situation like that coming up, a man should actively embrace very difficult and scary situations in his life. Things he thinks he needs to do but isn’t doing and go forward with them. Let me close this out with an example that I always like to tell.

Years ago, I was offered a job by the man who was the former head of HR at Apple. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he brought this guy on and this guy recruited a lot of Apple’s top executive talent. I got connected with him through a friend. He was building this new company. I was living in Michigan at the time. He said move out to California, I’ll buy you a surfboard. I’ll buy you a Mac Book Pro. I’ll put you up. But I demand your loyalty and I need you to help me build this company.

I said I’d really like to do that, but I’m dating this great girl. I don’t think I can leave her. I knew in my heart the relationship was terse and tense. I was just afraid of losing the commitment we had. The stupid thing was we were in Michigan, we were both graduating college at the time. She was moving to New York and she was putting her career first.

I ended up moving to New York. She was about 50% of the reason I moved there. We broke up two days after I got there. It was a flaming break up, absolutely terrible. Here it is years later, my life is wonderful. I’m actually connected with this guy again. He’s in southern California here, so we’ve been spending some time together.

I just think to myself that’s the sort of thing that’s such a perfect example of this decision where I didn’t put my mission first. I put the woman first. There are times when you can’t do that. In my relationship right now, I’m not going to sacrifice a wonderful relationship just because some guy says come work for me. This one, I knew in my heart it wasn’t a good one. I was just afraid of losing it because it gave me so much validation, because she was really hot, a “perfect ten.”

I had so much of my ego and sense of self wrapped up in that relationship that I was afraid to leave it and go do something I knew I wanted to do and that I knew was important to me in a bigger picture beyond the relationship. I know we kind of diverted the answer to that question. There’s a lot of other ways we can answer it. We talked about ego, neediness and mission, or lack thereof. Those are three big sticking points that guys have when they’re going to make or break a relationship.

[Angel Donovan]: The last point you made about looking for something you’re scared of doing is a great practical tip.

[Christian Hudson]: Thank you.

[Angel Donovan]: It’s difficult to make this kind of stuff practical obviously, because it gets so deep. That’s a great take away right there. We all feel these things.

Another thing you touched on is when the guys are talking with other guys in the pickup community, or in the dating community, they’re constantly talking about this topic. It’s reinforcing the validation of the pickup lifestyle, the player lifestyle and all of this. If you’re looking at a lot of self-help, of course, they are whatever you think about, you become. You become what you think about.

Also, you become what you talk about. It’s just occupying space in your brain. I’d say another practical tip could be to start reducing the time you’re hanging out with those guys in that community. Start saying “I’m going to invest half my week in something else” whatever it is. If you don’t know what it is yet, maybe you just have to put it somewhere else for the time being.

[Christian Hudson]: It’s interesting. Right now, you obviously know my good friend David Tiem. He and I are just in very different places in our lives. I love him to death. He will always be a close friend to me unless he goes off and murders someone. Then I might have some issues with what he does.

He just got out of a long relationship and he’s actively pursuing a different sort of lifestyle than is right for me. Our paths have split off a little. Our communication has split off a little bit. We’re still there for each other. We still love each other, but I know if I spend a lot of time talking to him and being close to him, it’s going to really influence me in a direction that is not important to me at this point.

It is not really relevant to me, so I just don’t have a lot to say to him about his current lifestyle. On the flip side, I think he was a little burnt out on relationships, so when he talks to me, I’m always talking about how I love my relationship. It’s great. I hope that’s good example of your point.

We’ll still be there for each other. If he called me up and was like “I need to talk to somebody” or “I need to spend time with someone,” if it was important enough, I’d hop on a flight to Singapore. Our paths have just diverged in terms of what we want out of relationships.

[Angel Donovan]: What I’d add to that though is also your relationship is not only based on the fact that you’ve been dating girls. You’ve got many different facets to your relationship as well. It’s not all based on talking about girls and relationships. It’s in a much better place than the other kind of situation we’re talking about.

[Christian Hudson]: Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: In your course, one of the things I pulled out was you say in the long run, the truth comes out. Clearly you remember what that was about. Do you want to talk about that a bit?

[Christian Hudson]: Oh yeah. Everything we’ve been talking about here is the truth of who you are. Relationships are such a wonderful mirror to reflect the best and the worst of who we are. In the long run, in a relationship, the truth of who you are comes out. Your woman is going to see it even if you don’t.

She’s going to see the fear you have towards life. She’s going to see the open heart you have towards other people. She’s going to see all the self-deception you’ve hidden from yourself because she is front and center to it. That’s the scary thing.

The amazing thing is that when you allow for that to exist, and you accept that’s going to happen, rather than becoming defensive about these things, you accept them and you attempt to grow through them. This can be a recipe for two things. This can be a recipe for neediness and it can be a recipe for losing the upper hand in a relationship.

It also requires you have a pretty clear sense of a person you’re dating. If you’re dating a gold digging whore, and she’s always calling you out on shit, it’s not necessarily going to drive you in the right direction. One of the things David and I always talked about was how a woman will test you. There’s different sorts of tests. There’s tests of insecurity and there’s tests of strength.

In my first relationship, I had a very insecure girlfriend. We dated four years. She was always testing me to see how much I loved her. How much do you love me, and tell me you love me, and all that shit. It was a teenage relationship and it was fine. Looking back on it, it’s clear it was just her neediness.

Compare that to a test of strength. The most stark example I can think of is that movie 300 when Queen Gorgo says to Leonidas “Come back with your shield or on it.” It’s the woman seeing that you’re a strong man and not accepting anything less than you being that strong man.

The first thing a man has to be able to do is distinguish between what types of tests a woman is giving him. Are they tests because she is insecure, because she demands that commitment from him and that love and because she has a hole to fill in her life that she fills with his own validation? Or is it because she herself is a whole human being, or as much of a whole human being as one could possibly be, and are the test she’s giving him those tests of I know you can do better.

To think back to a relationship in my mid-twenties, this girl would see my boss push me around. This is at the first dating advice company I worked at. She saw him push me around, she saw him screw me over on compensation. To me it felt like nagging, where she’d be “Hey, you need to stand up to him” and you need to do this and that. I’d always tell her “You don’t know the situation. You don’t know what’s going on. Just butt out.”

For her, it was that she saw in me potential. She saw strength and she wanted it to be there. I consistently failed to live up to the man who both she expected I could be and, more importantly, the man who I needed to be. She saw enough of that that she really lost attraction for me.

It even happens in my current relationship and not in an extensive way, but let’s say we have an affiliate or a partner who’s trying to push us around. Or I’m doing a negotiation with someone and if she sees something I’m not seeing, she’s going to call me out on it. She’s going to say that person’s trying to take advantage of you. I have the opportunity to get defensive or to try to synthesize what she’s saying and accept it and see how I’m going to grow through this.

If you can differentiate those tests of strength and security with a woman, and you find she’s giving you these tests of strength, then the question is are you going to be able to respond to them? And not just from her, but through the truth of who you are. That is where the truth really comes out. She will test you. If you represent you are one person on day one, day 10, day 30, and she finds out on day 90 or day 180 that you’re a very different person, which she will, then it’s not going to be so good.

I think that if a man knows that, if he accepts that, and he goes into a relationship knowing that, he can A, be mindful of what types of tests this woman is giving him, and B, be mindful of what that says about him, and then C, make decisions accordingly. He can let go of the girl if it’s always tests of insecurity and move on. That’s a tough thing to do, by the way.

If a man feels insecure, then it can really fill his ego to have an insecure woman who needs him. I’ve certainly been there. It can be very difficult to let go of a woman who needs you and who’s sort of insecure. At the same time, he has to.

If that’s not the case, if he is dating a very confident, self-assured, self-fulfilled woman who just wants him to be better, either the relationship is going to end, because he needs to step up and go out into the void. To use another example from 300, step out into the wilderness with a spear and no clothes and fight the wolves, or he can work through it in the relationship. I think that the best you and I can do right now is just prep him with awareness of what will come and allow him to be aware in the moment of what’s going to happen and the potential outcomes of those things.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s a great perspective because it really puts the whole thing within a learning and opportunity for growth perspective. These challenges in relationships are all going to be helping you get on your way. What I’m wondering though is for guys who are getting into some of their earlier relationships, or maybe even later relationships, is there an element of self-work or groundwork they have to have done on themselves beforehand? Otherwise it’s going to be really tough for them.

[Christian Hudson]: Right. It’s funny. You and I live in a world where we are bombarded with information about how we can work on ourselves. I think you and I, we’ve both done work on ourselves and we both old self-improvement as a core virtue. Throughout history, that was not the case for many people. Yet here we are as a species and relationships have progressed accordingly.

It really could go either way. I think you’re clearly doing this because you love to help men. I love to help men as well. Whether it’s before, during or after a relationship, I would tell a man always be working on yourself. Always be growing, always be attempting to improve your skills, your self awareness, what you’re able to give to the world, whether it be through meditation or social arts, or going to engineering school.

The answer is a qualified yes. Yes, definitely be working on yourself, but I would say don’t let that hold you back from getting into a relationship. You’ve been through this, so I know you identify. You could read hundreds of pages about how to approach a woman. You’ll learn a lot more by going up and doing it 20 times. You’ll learn even more still if you do that with a coach to point out what’s happening and bring awareness into your situation.

You could read a whole bunch of relationship theory and do a whole lot of work on yourself. You’ll learn a tremendous amount more if you actually just get into a relationship and see what happens. I’ve seen a therapist twice in my life for very brief periods, but I’ve always learned a tremendous amount.

If a guy really wanted to work on himself, he could go see a therapist once a week and talk about his relationship. That person will help bring a lot of awareness to it. But that’s not necessary. It was necessary for me these two times when I things had monumentally blown up and I was “What the fuck just happened?”

This person helped bring some awareness to it. In our courses, obviously the marketing is one thing. We harp on the big ideas of get a girlfriend and all that, but as you know from going through them, we really attempt to provide a lot of grounding in the material. It’s something they appreciate.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, certainly. I’d say it’s extremely valuable. I really like [inaudible 42:41] courses.

[Christian Hudson]: I know. Thank you for that. I don’t know if you’ve seen version two yet. I think your review was for version one.

[Angel Donovan]: Yes, I was going to bring that up earlier. I actually went through it the last couple of days because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t completely different, and we were going to be talking about the same thing.

[Christian Hudson]: There’s a lot of different stuff in there. I think it’s gotten a lot better if you ask me. The first one had a lot of philosophy and it had some practical stuff. It was a lot of philosophy and mindset stuff. The new one I just tried to make really focused on the obsession story and being an obsession worthy man, and bring out the practicality elements much more.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. I saw there was a lot more step-by-step. We’re going to have to re-view. Thank you very much for the [word 43:29].

[Christian Hudson]: Of course.

[Angel Donovan]: I’d say it looks like a great effort. I wanted to ask you what was the decision that led to the re-recording?

[Christian Hudson]: In the first program, I didn’t cover the obsession story nearly enough. That was number one. Number two, I just felt the step by step stuff, I was getting a lot of questions on it from guys. It’d be the same questions again and again. Things that I just took for granted, like obviously, you just text her and ask her out, or when you’re on a first date, you put your arm around her like this.

Things I just really took for granted. The questions came in and they weren’t answered in the course. The course is selling so well that I thought I want to put my best effort here. It hasn’t always been this way, but at least in the last four years, we tried to totally over deliver on our products and have a lot of pride in what we’re teaching. I felt I needed to put forth a new effort and give guys something that would really over deliver. I hope we’ve done that.

[Angel Donovan]: We really like the practical stuff. I saw that basically the whole day two now is that step by step. I saw that you put more focus on that. I thought it was a great idea. I thought that would be really helpful.

I know we’re running out of time here.

[Christian Hudson]: These are always so much fun. In eight minutes, I’m supposed to be doing a lot of bench presses.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent.

[Christian Hudson]: I have to go change and make sure I got my water bottle and get ready to roll. That’s a great thing to wrap up on. Physical activity, the guys not being physically active.

[Angel Donovan]: There’s one question we always ask everyone before they run off to the gym. Just in that one specific situation, if you were going to recommend three top things guys who are pretty new to this should get started with, if they want good as fast as possible. Start getting results and transforming their life, what would be the top three things you would recommend?

[Christian Hudson]: Great question. I think that this is such a broad topic. I love our course. I’d recommend it to anyone. I think it’s going to give [men? 45:48] a lot of insight, whether they want to get a girlfriend or whether they just want some basic social skills. That’s not pitch. I’m really [inaudible 45:56] what we do.

I think a couple other guys people should be learning from are Nick Sparks and Mark Manson. I think both of those guys have tremendous things to teach in terms of both insights. Mark on understanding yourself, and Nick on social skills. I met a lot of coaches. I think [Ed Wines? 46:14] is a great coach as well. Any guy who really wants to get better at social skills, Nick Sparks--it just astounds me how good he is as a coach these days.

If a guy really wanted to focus on social skills, and the practical stuff of interacting with women in not a relationship, but meeting and attracting them, Nick is absolutely the guy I would learn from. To make this concrete, I’d say buy some courses. Hopefully, buy a course from me. Buy Mark’s book. Nick has a new book coming out that by the time this gets published, hopefully his book will be out. That will be on Kindle.

I would say start reading and find some coaches that attract you. The second thing would be once you found a coach, who you feel connected with, try to get coaching from that person. In my life, a lot of the retardation of my development was from not willing to get coaching and just trying to do it on my own. These days, in business specifically, I actively seek coaching. I’m willing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to get coaching from somebody who is going to rapidly help me move to the next level.

Just accepting that and finding a coach you believe in and who is available. I don’t do coaching anymore, so this isn’t a pitch for me, but finding a coach who you really believe in and just ponying up the money and throwing yourself into it would be the second big thing.

The third big thing would be attempting to carve out the time and space in your life to throw yourself into it, and to make this a big focal point for six months. That’s a lot better than lurking on the fringes for a year, two years, five years and slowly getting results. I like to think of my life, and I’m sure you do at this point as well, in term of how do I get the most leverage out of my efforts.

It’s a very low leverage thing to lurk on the sidelines of some interest of your or some change you want to make. It’s very high leverage to jump right into it, to find the best people at it, to surround yourself with those people, to pay to have access to those people, to get the feedback from those people and to just invest yourself wholly in it so the change comes very rapidly.

That’s what I would say. I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

[Angel Donovan]: It was great. That’s a very different answer than we normally got. It’s always great to get new ideas. The mentoring thing, the coaching thing, obviously that’s something I run around doing these days as well. I try to get all the best coaching I can. I’m totally with you on that. That’s one of the huge things.

It’s been great to have you here. I’m going to let you run off to the gym and do your bench presses now. It’s been great, and great to hear you’re having such a great time in California now.

[Christian Hudson]: Thank you very much. California, and I should say, Texas. It’s very important to say that because I feel very strongly about Texas. This is, by the way, a totally off in left field thing here. If you were a single guy living in the United States, I feel like Austin Texas is the best place in the world to be right now.

New York may be a close second. Very attractive women there, very open women, very educated. It’s just a great place to be single. Most of my staff lives down there. I spend a lot of time there. It’s just an amazing place for a guy to be single. I know we’re taking a little divergence. We were supposed to wrap up a minute ago, but I will add this poing.

If a guy is single and he wants to enjoy his single life, he should put himself in an environment where it’s easy to do that. This is one of those scary decisions. Holy shit, I live in Wisconsin or something. Am I really going to uproot my whole life? If you want to have fun, move to Austin, move to New York. Go somewhere where the environment is conducive to that.

Besides that, great business community in Austin. Just a little pitch for the city. Thank you for having me. It’s been a total pleasure. I love what you’re doing with your site. Hopefully, it won’t be the last time.

[Angel Donovan]: I’m sure we’ll be talking to each other again some time. Thanks man. Talk to you soon.

[Christian Hudson]: Thank you.