Pearl - March 19, 2026


Men Can Solve Their Own Problems, Women CANNOT


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

160.81645

Word Count

2,080

Sentence Count

93

Misogynist Sentences

23

Hate Speech Sentences

20


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 You're pretty, but dumb as rocks? Better to play up your face card than try to join Mensa.
00:00:06.340 I'm Dr. Orion Taraban, and this is Psych Hacks, Better Living Through Psychology. And the
00:00:10.620 topic for today's short talk is let men solve problems. Have you ever been in this situation?
00:00:17.760 La, la, la, la, la, la, la. I'm just kidding.
00:00:20.760 The situation, gentlemen, I bet you have. The woman that you're dating-
00:00:24.360 I can't hear you, la, la, la, la.
00:00:27.040 you're married to, comes to you with one of her problems. Maybe she's frustrated with something
00:00:32.680 that happened to her at work. Maybe she's disappointed with one of her girlfriends.
00:00:37.140 Who the fuck knows? But she comes to you with this complaint, and after listening to the inputs of
00:00:43.120 her frustration or disappointment, you begin to very helpfully offer reality-based solutions to
00:00:49.520 her problems. However, when you do, she simply becomes more and more annoyed. Why do you always
00:00:56.960 have to try to solve my problems. I don't want you to solve my problems. I want you to listen.
00:01:02.280 Why can't you just listen and support me? And the man, of course, is thinking, well,
00:01:06.980 what the fuck is that going to accomplish? Right? But the woman is absolutely adamant in her
00:01:12.220 position. This is what she wants. And this is what the man is supposed to do. Does this sound
00:01:17.620 familiar? Like it's become a social cliche. However, I don't think this is something that
00:01:23.660 your father or your grandfather or your great grandfather had to deal with. So why has this
00:01:30.000 attitude become so prevalent? And why is it apparently a generational thing? I'll tell you
00:01:35.380 why. It's because of the institution of therapy. Over the last few decades, the institution of
00:01:42.820 therapy and its ancillary industries, the self-help gurus, the relationship experts,
00:01:49.300 the daytime talk show hosts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, therapists and their ilk
00:01:54.620 have convinced hundreds of millions of women that listening to a problem is somehow a solution
00:02:03.620 to a problem. And why might that be the case? Like what could possibly be the explanation
00:02:09.360 as to why an industry that literally listens to problems in exchange for money would insist that
00:02:16.720 listening to problems is the best way to solve them. Like, how could the therapeutic institution
00:02:22.440 possibly benefit from such a belief? I mean, I will leave that to you and your detective prowess
00:02:29.800 to unravel. Now, don't get me wrong. Listening has its place. Like, you have to listen in order
00:02:35.540 to understand the features of the problem you're dealing with, right? But hot take, you don't have
00:02:42.080 to listen more than that. You listen up to the point where you're able to arrive at a tentative
00:02:47.680 solution, and then you execute. You take reality-based action, which is what ultimately
00:02:53.580 solves the problem, or not, and then you troubleshoot in a recursive way until it does.
00:03:00.000 This is how I run my consultation practice. Insisting that listening to problems alone
00:03:05.500 solves problems. Yeah, and that's the problem. Women, we feel better when we talk about our
00:03:11.160 problems but it solves nothing and doesn't make them better i wish you could i could explain to
00:03:17.720 men the release we get when we talk about our problems i wish we weren't like this even as a
00:03:23.320 woman i wish i wasn't like this but for some reason you get like a release when you talk about your
00:03:30.200 problems um and the problem is sometimes you can when you are like we call it venting when you are
00:03:37.320 preventing like you say things that are really hurtful and sometimes oversharing and like
00:03:41.960 sometimes it's just not accurate but it's how you feel like at the time so as a woman you really
00:03:46.300 got to watch this because i don't know a single woman that doesn't struggle with this you got to
00:03:50.680 be careful you talk to problems is a form of gaslighting on the population level like i don't
00:03:56.200 know how else to describe it this widespread attitude is also complicit in the feminization
00:04:01.880 of men, which is a very serious problem. Allow me to explain. We know that when confronted with a
00:04:08.660 problem, in general, men prefer problem-solving strategies and women prefer emotional coping
00:04:15.120 strategies. So when women implicitly or very commonly explicitly demand that men forego
00:04:24.000 their preferred strategies, strategies which, by the way, are actually capable of solving problems
00:04:29.760 in reality and adopt their own preferred strategies, the subcommunication is, I don't want you to act
00:04:36.960 like a man. I want you to act like a woman. And when men concede to this demand, usually out of
00:04:43.960 a misguided desire to give women what they say they want, they grow increasingly feminized.
00:04:50.220 And this feminization of men creates all kinds of problems, not only in these particular
00:04:56.540 relationships, but in society at large as well. Think about it. When women implicitly want men
00:05:03.820 to act like women, they typically feel entirely justified in their desire. And why wouldn't they?
00:05:11.240 Remember, the entire therapeutic institution supports the idea that listening and validating
00:05:17.480 is the solution to pretty much every problem of living. And what does this do? It authenticates
00:05:25.080 the female this is why men i really think men have god in them i really do i think every man
00:05:31.020 if he listens to his intuition and doesn't listen to women creates good in the world right and that's
00:05:37.460 why you got to listen to men because um men have this like problem solving ability and look at even
00:05:42.740 even being who i am oh my god there's time that it it's really difficult for me too so it's not
00:05:48.940 something that comes easy to us i think naturally we're like um you know naturally we're we're just
00:05:55.040 crash outs you know way of solving problems as the healthy way of solving problems in particular
00:06:01.960 and it communicates that the female way of doing things is the right way of doing things in general
00:06:09.220 and this to put it mildly is an irresponsible over generalization if you appreciate the
00:06:17.280 economic model on how you'll match and communication and in grad school, female preferences
00:06:24.180 about problem solving and communication and relationships have been mystified as the right
00:06:31.800 or healthy way of problem solving and communicating and relating by the official authorities on the
00:06:37.840 subject who are overwhelmingly women. And when I raised objections to this in classes where
00:06:44.720 sometimes I was literally the only man present. Do you think I changed anybody's mind? Why do
00:06:50.580 you think I had to go to YouTube, guys? Women comprise 85% of the therapeutic profession,
00:06:57.200 and women are over twice as likely to attend therapy as men are.
00:07:01.520 Yeah, but women, this is the problem with everything. Women shouldn't have credit cards.
00:07:05.860 Women, we got to take that shit away because everything's been going downhill. Women have
00:07:09.520 way too much spending power. Everyone's got to cater to women. Like imagine if like we could
00:07:17.040 cater to men, how much better the world would be. Everything would be useful. Everything would be
00:07:21.600 pragmatic. Everything would be to the point, but you got to cater to women. So everyone's just
00:07:27.280 got to lie. Into some studies, 85% of the readers of self-help books are women. And how many
00:07:34.100 Many relationship experts and dating coaches and self-care gurus are women and or are primarily
00:07:42.040 talking to a female audience.
00:07:44.220 And how are the minority of men in these fields treated when they have the temerity to speak
00:07:49.520 to men on issues that concern them using strategies that men prefer?
00:07:54.280 We have to conclude that the therapeutic institution and its ancillary industries have collectively
00:08:00.240 become a billion dollar echo chamber in which women are told what they want to hear in business
00:08:08.060 the customer is always right right and as i've said before making women feel right is big
00:08:15.020 fucking business however what and it's impossible you can't make you can't make women feel right
00:08:22.520 like we're just so unhappy with ourselves you know you got to keep a woman busy i don't know
00:08:27.620 there's some stuff in the bible but there's got to be something like you gotta you gotta put us
00:08:31.460 on like a learning curriculum or something to keep keep our our you know otherwise we'll go nuts
00:08:38.100 this is the absolute best indicator of rightness you have it effectiveness you are right when you
00:08:47.220 correctly predict that certain means succeed in achieving certain ends but look around are
00:08:55.940 relationships achieving their ends, I think you would be hard pressed to argue that they are.
00:09:01.860 Divorce rates are up. People are dating less often. They're even hooking up less than they
00:09:06.440 used to do. So if a woman's way of doing things is the right way of doing things,
00:09:12.620 and the right way of doing things is associated with these terrible outcomes, like I honestly
00:09:19.020 don't know how to square that circle. If these strategies of relating and communicating were
00:09:25.380 right, we should have greater interpersonal harmony and relationship effectiveness, not less.
00:09:31.900 Yeah, I know. And that's the thing. Really, the only thing a therapist is going to do is like
00:09:36.480 nag. She's just basically paid to nag the husband. And the only time she doesn't is when the wife is
00:09:42.900 literally so insufferable that like even the therapist is like, all right, you're kind of
00:09:49.060 fucked up, ma'am. And of course, the most common counter argument to that is the reason we don't
00:09:53.860 is because people aren't doing it perfectly.
00:09:56.980 You just watched a feminist talk about you.
00:09:59.840 She calls you anti-feminist.
00:10:01.840 Who?
00:10:02.600 Is it worth my time?
00:10:03.840 Is this someone whose opinion I even care about?
00:10:05.860 They're not doing it good enough.
00:10:07.600 But even if we were doing more of it,
00:10:10.040 which we clearly are,
00:10:11.420 we should still see progress in that direction.
00:10:14.100 And we don't.
00:10:15.020 So there's that.
00:10:16.280 Both parties should be getting more of what they want
00:10:19.060 and less of what they don't,
00:10:20.960 which doesn't seem to be the case at all.
00:10:22.740 I'll get to the point.
00:10:23.860 it's a bad idea for women to treat their men like their girlfriends, which is what they do
00:10:31.520 when they expect them to suppress their masculine problem-solving strategies
00:10:36.300 in favor of feminine emotional coping ones. And the most rational argument against this
00:10:42.560 is that it's generally more effective in any domain of human endeavor
00:10:46.140 to play to one's strengths than attempt to transform one's weaknesses. What does this mean?
00:10:52.060 think about it you can throw the ball but you can't catch it better to perfect your abilities
00:10:58.020 as a quarterback than spend years trying to compete as a wide receiver you're pretty but
00:11:04.380 dumb as rocks better to play up your face card than try to join mensa right the time and energy
00:11:12.140 you spend perfecting your strengths will only succeed here's the problem though if women vent
00:11:18.360 about their problems to their girls then the girls oh my god then now you're fighting the
00:11:23.320 friends group chat i don't know you guys got to figure out a solution for women venting
00:11:27.460 give her more work to do maybe making your weaknesses mediocre at best of course it's a
00:11:35.240 good idea to eliminate glaring liabilities but that's not really what we're discussing here
00:11:41.320 So, ladies, your man is bad at listening, who gives a shit.
00:11:47.840 He might be good at problem solving, and he might very well be better at problem solving
00:11:54.160 than you are.
00:11:55.860 And rather than spend all that time and energy in an attempt to transform him from a bad
00:12:01.820 listener into a mediocre one, why not devote that same time and energy in an attempt to
00:12:08.680 transform him from a good problem solver into an exceptional one. Like a woman who does that
00:12:15.000 is a smart fucking woman. Because if she succeeds, well, she will not only have private access to an
00:12:23.140 exceptional problem solver, hooray, but she will have succeeded in cultivating a complementarity
00:12:30.220 of skills across the relationship that will make it much more likely that the two of them as a
00:12:36.180 couple will be able to handle like anything that comes their way. So women, if you want to be heard
00:12:43.240 and validated, that's fine. But go to your girlfriends, go to chat. Don't take your grocery
00:12:49.420 list to the hardware store, which is what you do. Okay. Yeah. I like him. He's always got good stuff.