Volume One: To Him - Episode 1 | A podcast by Intend to Relate

Before you invest your time, attention, money, or hope in another person, what have you actually assessed?

The opening episode of To Him begins with somewhere to stand: the Power Position of Self-Valuation. Your time, health, pleasure, peace, opportunities, and participation in another person's life have value. The invitation is to know that operationally, not merely vaguely. This is not about asserting superiority over other people. It is about recognizing your own life as yours to encounter, assess, and direct.

We begin with a deliberately practical tool: know the base economic value of an hour of your time. That number is not your human value, your existential value, or the total value of your time. It is one measurable layer that can help you recognize a possible opportunity cost and choose more deliberately.

Then we turn toward what a price cannot adequately capture. Friendship, peace, pleasure, love, and meaning are not valueless because they are difficult to measure. From the framework's divine world perspective, we are invited to quantify and articulate the intangible values: to notice both what an experience gives us and what it costs. Four hours with a friend may be worth far more than the money we could have earned. The questions are whether we intended the experience, valued it, and found it worth choosing.

That assessment matters because infinite dignity does not make us infinite. Our time, attention, energy, and opportunities are finite. So are those of the people we love.

Against that background, the episode introduces Heuristics of Confidence: useful mental models that give us a position from which to stand, think, and act. One example draws confidence from the immense history that resulted in our being here. It is offered as a provisional orientation, not an infallible metaphysical truth. Reality testing, confidence intervals, and confrontational logic are identified as work to come.

Finally, the episode turns outward to the Default Rule of Assessment:

Who the fuck are you?
What the fuck do you want?
What's in it for me?

These are an internal cognitive structure, not instructions for greeting everybody. Who is this person actually? What do they want from you, and more broadly? What possibilities, costs, risks, and alignment with your own aims are present?

Two good people can want things that do not fit. Discovering that is useful information. The purpose of assessment is not to force every opportunity into a relationship. It is to understand the situation before unnecessarily investing in it.

My dudes, this one is for you. Everybody is welcome.

Key Ideas

  • Self-valuation is not comparison. The starting point is conscious self-possession, not a claim to be better than somebody else.
  • Your earnings are a baseline, not your worth. Base economic value is a cognitive tool, not a price on a person or on every hour of life.
  • Make intangible value visible. Peace, joy, friendship, meaning, and the costs of an unwanted experience belong in the assessment.
  • Infinite value does not make us infinite. Finitude makes assessment and allocation unavoidable.
  • Stand somewhere, then reality test it. A useful heuristic is not an exemption from examining your own propositions.
  • Assess before unnecessarily investing. Understand the actual person, their intentions, and the value and fit of your participation.
  • Full Transcript

Prepared from the episode's automatically generated transcript. Speaker labels have been removed, and paragraph breaks, section headings, and navigation timestamps have been added. The supplied spoken text is preserved.

00:00 - Welcome to To Him

Intend to Relate, Volume 1, To Him, Episode 1, Heuristics of Confidence and the Default Rule of Assessment.

Welcome to the first episode of Volume 1, To Him, a podcast by Intend to Relate. As you've probably noticed, we're moving forward along several different tracks inside the project. This one is to him. So my dudes, this is for you. Everybody is welcome, of course. But here I'm speaking directly to men, and I'm gonna do that honestly and unapologetically. Volume 2, to her will have its own voice and its own directness.

We're gonna start with two pieces of the framework that are foundational here. Heuristics of Confidence and the default rule of assessment. Both of those sit inside something larger that we're gonna keep developing. The power position of self-valuation. That's where I want to begin.

00:51 - The Power Position of Self-Valuation

The power position of self-valuation. If you're going to move intentionally through life in the world, you need somewhere to stand. You need a vantage point from which you assess, a position from which you decide, a position from which you can say, I am mine, this life is mine, this world and this universe are mine, my home, my playground, my opportunity.

From this position, I can do those things that are right for me. I can avoid or defend against those things that are wrong for me. I can welcome invitations with open arms or decline them when that is what fits. Just being present in that posture with that line of sight, with that awareness and attitude puts me at ease and makes me feel capable of moving toward my rightful chosen ends. I call this the Power Position of Self-Valuation.

It is a position of conscious assessment. Every moment of your life has value, your attention has value, your health has value, your pleasure has value, your peace has value, your opportunities have value, and your participation in another person's life has value.

A lot of people know this vaguely. I want us to know it operationally, and this is not the same thing as ego. It is not puffing yourself up. It is not walking around saying you are better than other people. This is not a matter of comparison whatsoever. Powerful Self-Valuation.

Now let's start with the cold hard facts of the business and transactional world. Let's face our limitations and deprivations honestly, so that our power position of self-valuation does not become a posture of self-denial.

02:27 - Base Economic Value as a Cognitive Tool

The base economic value as a cognitive tool. One place to start is extremely simple. Know what an hour of your time is worth economically. If you're hourly, that's easy. If you're salaried, divide it out. If you own a business or earn irregularly, estimate it. It does not have to be perfect. This is a base number and this number is just for you. A cognitive tool to make you sharper in your assessments and to help you see value in a more deliberate way.

If your economic time is worth $50 an hour, know that. If it's $500 an hour, know that. If it's $1000 an hour. But understand what that number is. It is not your human value. It is not your existential value. It is not the total value of your time. It is one measurable base layer based on earnings.

Once you know it, you can start seeing decisions differently. Four hours on something is not just four hours. There is an economic opportunity cost there. If you make $50 an hour, could you have worked those four hours and earn $200? Maybe. That does not mean four hours with a friend were worthless. Maybe those four hours were worth far more to you than the money you could have earned.

Maybe you needed them. Maybe they strengthened a friendship. Maybe you laughed your ass off. Maybe you sat on the couch playing video games. Maybe you drank in the backyard until you passed out. I'm not grading the activity for you. The question is, did you intend it? Did you value it? And did you experience it as something worth choosing?

04:03 - Intangible Value and Divine Capital

That brings us to another formulation I want us to keep. Quantify and articulate the intangible values.

This is not a business world claim that friendship, peace, pleasure, love, or meaning literally have a cash price. And it is not just a natural world assessment of something you consume or someone you fuck. The recommendation comes from what we call the divine world perspective, an intention to see the unseen and to honor what is often most valuable precisely because it is hard to measure.

So if you knowingly choose four hours with a friend, over $200 of possible work, one cognitive model is to say, those four hours had to clear at least that $200 threshold for me, not in cash, in intangible value, in what we might call divine capital.

And the reverse matters too. If you went to hang out with your friend just to avoid work, did not enjoy yourself, resented the whole thing, and came home worse off, then maybe you did not merely fail to earn $200. Maybe in your own intangible accounting, you paid for that bad experience too.

The point is not to turn your life into a spreadsheet. The point is to stop acting as though intangible value is invisible merely because it is difficult to price. Time well spent is worth much more than money that could have been earned. Time suffered can cost much more than the temporary suffering itself. And often, we do not understand the value of something until the market changes, until health changes, a person disappears, an opportunity closes, or time simply runs out.

05:43 - Scarcity: Infinite Value, Finite Lives

Which brings us to scarcity. Scarcity. Your time is scarce. Your attention is scarce. Your energy is scarce. Your body is scarce. Your opportunities are scarce. Your life is scarce. And the time, energy, and lives of your friends, your family, and the people you love are scarce, too.

In the Intend to Relate framework, we can hold the view that every individual is infinitely valuable in the divine sense of human dignity and in the singularity of his or her own life. But infinite value in that sense does not mean that we are infinite. We are finite, and that limitation shapes value.

That means everything and every relationship involves assessment and allocation. Every date, every beautiful shared experience, every argument, every unresolved trauma or issue, every person on a roster, every love that blooms, every bloom that fades. This is not about money. This is about value. Participation is not free. And once you begin seeing that clearly, you move further into the power position of self-valuation.

06:47 - Heuristics of Confidence

Heuristics of confidence. Now let's get to one of the specific terms in the title, heuristics of confidence. I am using that phrase in our own specific way. I am not referring to every other use of confidence heuristic you may encounter in psychology or elsewhere.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, a way of simplifying something complicated enough that you can actually work with it. A heuristic is not necessarily a statement of ultimate truth. That is important, because later we are going to build into reality testing. We are going to build into confidence intervals. We are going to build into confrontational logic. We are going to build into methods for testing our own propositions.

So when I give you a heuristic of confidence, I'm not necessarily saying this is metaphysically true. I'm saying this is a useful position from which we can consider, perhaps stand, think, act, and then test. The heuristic gives me somewhere to stand.

07:44 - Existence, Goodness, and Forward Motion

Here's one from our framework. I was not here for all of history and prehistory before that. Neither were you. Whatever happened before us, cosmology, evolution, biology, ancestry, history, chance, divine intelligence, whatever the ultimate explanation may be, eventually resulted in me being here and you being here. And from my vantage point, that is fucking extraordinary. I'm here, you're here.

We have consciousness, we have experience, we have some period of time in which we get to participate in this thing and I know something about myself. I value my life. I value my consciousness. I value my experience. I value the opportunity.

I also know something else about myself. I am good. I can look in the mirror and say that I am a good human being. Whether I explain myself to an audience, the law or my creator, I can stand firmly in that goodness.

So here is the heuristic. If I apprehend myself as good and valuable, then I can provisionally apprehend the immense chain of reality that produced me as good and valuable too. Whatever that source is, cosmic history, evolution, divine intelligence, chance, or something I cannot name, it is vastly larger than me. And yet here I am downstream from it. All of that happened and now I am here. Therefore, I begin from the position that my participation here is extraordinarily valuable and that I inherit forward motion from what came before.

Within this heuristic, I apprehend this as a good universe, a universe of value, a universe that resulted in me and, from my own vantage point, is mine to encounter. And similarly, from your vantage point, it is yours. No one can insert himself between you and that basic position. No one can claim some metaphysically superior ownership of your life. Within the heuristic, standing upright in your own life is a kind of birthright. It is a matter of recognizing the immensity behind you, recognizing the scarcity ahead of you, and standing upright in the present.

You can frame that religiously if you want. You can frame it biologically. You can frame it philosophically. You can take this heuristic or leave it. Better yet, make your own. Build one that works for you and resonates with your thinking.

For me, I imagine the momentum and power of all that past surging forward and resulting in me. I experience that forward-moving power as available to my own position. That orients me toward the power position of self-valuation.

10:13 - Confidence and Reality Testing

Now, again, this is not some religious narrative I'm asking you to preach. It's a cognitive tool. And the tool is not the end of the analysis. That's where reality testing comes in. That's where confidence intervals come in. That is where confrontational logic comes in.

Confidence gives us somewhere to stand. Reality testing asks whether the ground holds. We will come back to that.

10:37 - The Default Rule of Assessment

The default rule of assessment. Now we move from the internal position to the external encounter. You have your position. Another person enters the scene. You move from encounter toward apprehension. One tool in our framework is the default rule of assessment. It is intentionally crude. It is intentionally simple. And it works across a lot of different contexts. We will build on it later.

The default rule of assessment is, who the fuck are you? What the fuck do you want? What's in it for me? That's the rule.

Obviously, that does not mean you literally walk up to everybody and say, who the fuck are you? Sometimes maybe that is appropriate. Usually not.

11:19 - Who the Fuck Are You?

This is the cognitive structure. Who the fuck are you? Who is this person? What do I actually know? What are they showing me? What is their history? What are their values? What are their patterns? What are their circumstances? What role are they actually occupying in my life? Not the role I imagined. Not the role I hope they will become. Who are they?

11:40 - What the Fuck Do You Want?

What the fuck do you want? What is this person's intention? Why are they here? What are they seeking? Attention, sex, money, companionship, marriage, status, care, business, validation, help, love, something they have not figured out yet. What do they want from me? And what do they want more broadly? Those may be different questions.

12:00 - What's in It for Me?

What's in it for me? Now we reach the question people sometimes get uncomfortable asking. I don't. What's in it for me?

If I am going to participate, why? What am I seeking? What value is available here? What possibilities exist? What costs exist? What risks exist? What am I being asked to give? What am I likely to receive? Does this move toward one of my aims? Does this create something I actually want? Does it move me away from something else I value?

That is not automatically selfish. It is assessment.

12:31 - Assess Before Investing

And one of the failures men can make in relationships is investing before they have assessed. They see possibility. They see beauty. They see attention. They see sex. They see loneliness being relieved, whatever it is. And they start allocating time, money, attention, energy, expectation, hope, identity. Before they have answered the most basic questions, who the fuck are you? What the fuck do you want? What's in it for me?

And sometimes the answer is, you are a perfectly good person. You know what you want. I know what I want. And these things do not fit. Great. That is useful information.

The purpose of assessment is not to force every opportunity into a relationship. The purpose is to understand the relational situation before unnecessarily investing in it.

13:18 - Valuation: Where the Framework Goes Next

Valuation is the broader subject. We're not going further into valuation today. That's a much bigger subject. But I want to mark where we are headed. The Intend to Relate framework recommends a much more intentional assessment of relational situations and dynamics. We're going to get more precise.

What value is being created? What value is being exchanged? What is being contributed? What is being consumed? What is being risked? What is being preserved? What is being foreclosed? What is being built? What is deteriorating? Where is stress entering? Where is peace entering?

Where is time going? Where is money going? Where is attention going? Where is meaning being created? Where is meaning being destroyed? Those are valuation questions. And later we're going to build a much richer vocabulary around them.

For now, we honor ourselves and each other through assessment and allocation in relationships. My dudes, if you know the feeling of wasted time and money and experiences that were themselves unenjoyable, or even worse, traumatic, you know why the first podcast of Volume 1, To Him, starts here.

14:27 - Six Formulations to Carry Forward

So for today, the power position of self-valuation. Think about where you stand and how that vantage point shapes your perception and decisions.

The base economic value as a cognitive tool. Know your base economic unit as one measurable component.

And quantify and articulate the intangible values. Play with the idea of making invisible value more visible, both gains and costs.

Recognize scarcity. Infinite value does not make us infinite. Finitude makes assessment and allocation unavoidable.

Then heuristics of confidence. Develop useful mental models that give you somewhere to stand. Do not confuse them with infallible truth. Stand somewhere, then reality test it.

And finally, the default rule of assessment. Who the fuck are you? What the fuck do you want? What's in it for me?

That is enough for today. A handful of formulations, a few pieces of the framework, and now we can build on them. This is To Him. Until next time, be free and be good to each other intentionally.

Personal sovereignty; the natural, business, and divine worlds; assessment and allocation; relational valuation.

Introduced as future development: reality testing, confidence intervals, and confrontational logic.

Join the Conversation

Which of the three assessment questions do you most often leave unanswered before investing your time, attention, or hope?

About To Him

To Him is Volume One of Intend to Relate. This track speaks directly to men, honestly and unapologetically, while welcoming anyone interested in the inquiry. Volume Two, To Her, has its own voice and directness.

Intend to Relate is an evolving philosophy and toolkit for approaching relationships intentionally: understanding ourselves, articulating aims, encountering other people's intentions, and giving participation a more deliberate form.

Become a free member, sign up for updates, and get Relationship Agreements and Conflicting Understandings: A Primer from the member Library. Two complete stories with short analysis. No paid subscription required.

Content note: Explicit language and frank discussion of adult relationships. Philosophical and educational commentary, not individualized legal, medical, or mental-health advice. Relationship agreements do not replace ongoing consent.

Published by Intend2Relate, LLC.

Intention today. Awareness tomorrow. Freedom forever.

Be free, and be good to each other - intentionally.