LOG 136 Choices with Kevin Nahai

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media; the links are also in the episode details. And hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoyed the show.

All right, well today on The Human Behavior Podcast, we have a very special guest, our buddy Kevin Nahai. Thanks for coming on here, Kevin. We really appreciate you sitting down with us today.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, this is going to be a good one. We're going to get into everything that you do and how kind of what you do and what we do, we have similar perspectives and outlook. Something we had a great conversation last week when I called you, and we, the three of us, talked because we were introduced by a mutual friend named Reena from the "Better Call Daddy" podcast, right? And so we got linked up through there. You were on her podcast, we were on hers; it's coming out pretty soon, folks, for those of you listening, if it hasn't been released yet. But the reason why we struck up this whole conversation is she had someone on her show who was an actual 40-year-old virgin. So the guy was a virgin at 40 years old, and she said, "Alright, to him, you've got to talk to my buddy Kevin that I know out here on the West Coast and see what we can do and see if you can set him up, or I don't know what the right word would be, heal him, get him pointed in the right direction, change the way he thinks or his entire outlook on life" is probably more likely what it would have to be. But I want to throw it to you to kind of explain a little bit about that story because it's a great story, and then that's how we linked up. We'll kind of go from there if that works.

Well, Reena was just hoping that I could get this guy a willing girl, you know, who would... I'm just kidding.

That's great. So what you're trying to tell us, Doc, is that you're a pimp?

Yeah, exactly!

Hey, listen, that's why I got thrown off at Jeopardy. I was going to be the host, and then I called our guest a pimp. So sorry about that. Please, please go on, Jeff.

Well, gentlemen, my name is Kevin Nahai, and I go by Dr. Pimp, starting today.

There we go. He's going to be looking at the screen and typing real quick to make sure he gets that domain name.

Yeah, so Reena, I went on Reena's podcast like you guys did. And if people haven't heard your podcast with Reena, it's one of the most fascinating hours of my life, so everybody should go listen to that. But yeah, so basically, she introduced me to this guy who's a 40-year-old virgin. Let's call him Jack. And what she said to Jack, she connected us in an email, and what she said was, "Listen, Jack, I have this friend named Kevin. He is a coach and a public speaker, and the issues that he speaks about are dating, relationships, self-confidence, insecurity, anxiety, etcetera, etcetera. I also help people figure out what they want to do with their lives. I help them if they have depression, etcetera." But the reason that she was connecting us is basically telling him, "Your love life has not gone the way you wanted it to, and that is obviously largely due to your own emotional constitution, your own decision-making, etcetera. So maybe this guy can have a talk with you and help you get things back on track."

So she sent that email, and I wrote to him and said, "Hey, here's a little bit about how I do. I'm very hands-on, I'm very solution-oriented. This isn't going to be a situation where you come into my office and we talk about what went wrong in your life from age six until now, because we can spend 10 lifetimes unpacking that, right? Or we can spend 10 hours figuring out how to fix it and where we're going to go from here, and how to implement better decisions and better strategies, and then we can get your love life back on track, help you feel fulfilled, confident, etcetera." And that, I mean, that's generally my approach, which is a little bit about the difference between a traditional therapist and a coach, which we can get into more later. But he didn't respond to me. He responded to Reena, and he said to her, "Hey, I really don't think that I'm in need of this type of service. I think the problem is that there are no good women out there. There are especially no good women out there for the type of guy that I am." And he comes from a certain family, and he comes from a certain culture. I won't get into the details, but he's saying, you know, "For X type of person from X type of culture, I need a woman who is at the very upper echelons. And, you know, if I can just find somebody who is beautiful, attractive, trustworthy, meets all of my standards, blah, blah, blah, then I wouldn't be in the situation that I'm in," basically abdicating any ounce of personal responsibility.

Right, right.

The fact that, you know, he's 40 years old and in this situation. And the problem, by the way, is not that he's a virgin; I mean, I could care less. There are more important things in life. The problem is that he's clearly very unhappy, and that if he continues to take this approach of "it's everybody else's fault and I have no personal responsibility in this situation," then your entire life becomes a mess. And so when Reena read that email, she picked up the phone immediately, and she said, "You've got to talk to these guys, Brian and Greg. This is a little bit about what they do, but the reason I'm connecting you is that they said the exact same thing." And that's when, you know, the three of us got on a call, and we talked about how we work in very, very different spheres. The things you guys work on are much more high-stakes environments. However, our job is to recognize behavioral patterns and to understand human psychology, and to understand why people do the things they do or don't do the things that they don't do. And then hopefully try to prevent further damage, whether that's out there in the war field or in my case, just in everyday life.

No, make note, you have to make a clear distinction, everybody. Listen, one, we're never going to make fun of anybody, so we're going to talk about science for the next hour. All of us are thrust into the same glowing blue globe that's spinning through space, and I'll tell you what, it is a war zone. So, if somebody's listening right now, you're chemically linked iteratively and intuitively to every other human being on the planet. And the hardest thing to do is stay in love, to fall in love, to be in love, because people have been writing and painting pictures and doing all these wonderful things about it forever. And we have chemicals like oxytocin, which is the love drug, you know, that makes us fall in love, and we do the face platter when we meet people.

So I've got to jump back real quick on what he's saying, Brian. One, Jack... he chose Jack out of all the other names, I'm just saying, on a male that was a 40-year-old virgin. That's why I was given that warning about not doing a joke about it. But listen, heuristically speaking here, this is one of those times not to go with the gut. And this is what Reena picked up, I think, Kevin, about your approach and about our approach, is because sometimes we'll kick people to the curb. A heuristic can be something where you say, "Okay, my gut says that this is what's going on in this situation." But what he did is he turned his heuristics into a bias for action in the wrong direction. Now he says, "Hey, I've got to tell you this, I have this special list, let's call it dietary requirements for lack of a better term. And this is the list on the left. So I can't even try your asparagus."

"Well, the asparagus do something to you physically?"

"No, I've never had it in my life, but I kind of heard around here. And broccoli too, because they're both kind of green." You can't go through life like that. If you go through life like that, you might as well be the kid in the bubble because you're never going to have any experiences. Brian, remind me of Elliot Rodger later on. But this, what struck me is, one, age doesn't matter. I mean, I want everybody to be able to fall in love and have a fulfilled life. I don't care who you're with, right? And the fact that sex wasn't involved, just like you picked up on, Kevin, that's not the problem here. The problem here is inefficient communication between the same species, one sex and the other sex. And guess who the culprit is here? It's not the women. It's him. And he is setting, to quote a very scientific film on this very topic called "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," he's putting it on a pedestal. And what he's doing is he's making a set of failsafes so every time something doesn't go his way, he'll say, "See, I warned you about it." Did you get that same feeling when you were delving in there?

Yeah, I absolutely did. And that thing of, you know, "See, I warned you," or putting it on a pedestal. My practice is about 70% women. For some reason, women are more prone, they tend to be more open to working on themselves and working on issues than men are. Unfortunately, you know, and I have 30-40% men; it varies a little bit from month to month. But one of the cohorts of people that I work with are single women in their 30s who are desperate to get married and desperate to have a child, and they haven't been able to find the right person yet. You know, their love life has not gone the way that they want it to, etcetera.

And so I do this experiment with them. When they come into my office, within the first few sessions, I'll ask them one of the most annoying questions of all time, which is, "Why do you think you're single?" The question that everybody hates being asked, especially already feeling the pressure of being single. And invariably, I