#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness

I think if I was to give myself the three traits that I've managed to hold on to, I pay a lot of attention to detail. I have a unusual capacity for suffering or doing a delaying gratification might be an easy way to put it.
And I'm just consistent. And those three things seem to be like pretty fucking potent fuel, no matter what industry you try and get into.
Yeah, but then of course there's the natural level of curiosity high level of cognitive ability right i mean those are table stakes though that's your point right you've got to have that to play the game yeah yeah because otherwise you have that to play the game but then when things are slow at the very beginning that's when you stop your podcast correct and you didn't a lot. A lot of questions come through from people who say stuff like,

hey man, in the beginning

when you didn't have any plays or anything,

like, you know,

what motivated you to keep going?

To be honest, man,

my motivation waned way more

in sort of your three and four and five.

Because you're getting bored.

Yeah.

It's like, well, I've been there.

You're trying to inject novelty

into what you do

and you're trying, even less than that, you're just trying to not let it get stale and um you know how many books deep are you now uh 15 14 and 15 are coming out in the next year uh there's a new one about meaning the one that's coming out about meaning is coming out one year from the 14th unreal april 14th i'm so fired up for that i've been thinking about me i remember i read this roy baumeister yeah uh buddy mine essay article a journal post from like 2011 meaning and happiness that one fucking legend you did yeah yeah totally and my whole concept of happiness rolls meaning into happiness right thus incorporating unhappiness into the process of getting happier, which of course is the standard experience of being fully alive. You want to be happy? You better be unhappy.
Let's see how unhappy you can be before you can be happy. And people who try to avoid their unhappiness paradoxically avoid their happiness, which is the problem.
Yeah, there's, how do you sort of square the circle of the fact that there seems to be some data that comes out around the more that people focus on trying to be happy, the less happy they become. Is that true? That's what's going on.
What they're really trying to do when they're focusing on being happy, they're focusing on eliminating the unhappiness from their life and paradoxically miss their happiness. That's the problem.
That's what they're doing. So they're hiding from bad vibes, not just expediting good vibes.
Exactly right. And that's what's, that's really the bad advice that they're getting from the therapy industrial complex in America today and around the world is that if you're unhappy, if you're suffering, it's evidence that something's wrong and broken and you need to eliminate it.
That's exactly wrong. That's exactly incorrect.
If you had eliminated the sources of unhappiness from your life, the sources of suffering, and you would, it's not a question

of whether or not you delayed your gratification, it's a question of whether you embrace the suffering that comes along with doing a hard thing, you would have missed your success. That's what you would have missed.
And so therefore the process of getting happier means accepting, embracing, being grateful for the unhappiness that comes along along the way of being fully alive.

That's what meaning

is really all about.

It's like, you know,

the, the, the. embracing being grateful for the unhappiness that comes along along the way of being fully alive that's what meaning is really all about it's like you know the the masters of meaning they don't start each day going i'm truly grateful for all the nice things going to happen to me today they wake up and they say i'm truly grateful for all the things i'm not going to like today that's what the master says dude you're so awesome yeah i hope you take a moment to reflect on just how great it is that we've got scientific insight fantastic communication uh illustrious career of teaching this to people and then the the ability to communicate it you're so fucking great i really appreciate your work i appreciate that a lot means a lot to me coming from you've talked to everybody in the world i we're getting i'm slowly taking off the list're talking about it's correct i'm slowly taking off all of the list but yeah i just think this um you were saying it before we got started whatever we want to talk about this this intersection of life advice philosophy science research insight wisdom like the contemporaries you know is this it's hardly the fucking roman agora right but you know the opportunity to go jump from mark manson to an alex holmosi to a naval radicant to an arthur brooks to a dr john delo you know like it's epic it's really cool epic and you know this is the time you know where you're you run the seam between the scholars who would be indecipherable and the influencers who have all the audience in the world, but they don't do the science.

You run the seam between them.

Why?

Because you're connecting the best ideas to the people who can use them.

That's a big deal.

That's a huge service.

I'm trying to.

I think, I wonder what I would be like.

You've got a choice of something

caffeinated and non-caffeinated probably i've had a lot of caffeine already so which is good good

good time for more time for salt time for more uh yeah i i really wonder what uh i wonder how

different this would be a cool experiment to run if you could split test the universe um i wonder

how different people's experience of the world would be if that burgeoning industry sort of hadn't kicked off for some reason. You know, how much of it is window dressing and how much of it is really making an impact in people's lives? I do think about that because it was very formative for me.
Yeah. I know that.
But yeah, I wonder just how much of an effect it's having on mass. I know a lot.
So there's anecdotal, I have anecdotal information about that. I mean, I've got data on how much more people know than they did before.
And because of the new ways of learning, for sure. There's a ton of research on this.
But also, you know, it's very interesting to me. So two of my kids went to college and one didn't.
And, you know, my older son went to Princeton. My younger daughter is graduating from Providence College, a nice Northeastern college.
My middle son didn't go to college. He joined the Marine Corps.
And he's a sniper with the Marine Corps. He's a Marine sniper, like he's a total maniac, right? Six foot five.
He looks like me, but six foot five, a lot of tats and hair. Oh, I was going to say, has he got the hair all that? Yeah, well, he's going to's gonna lose his hair too because you know he's a welcome to the family every bit as much as i did in my you know misbegotten youth and so it's carlos and uh and carlos's friends in the marine corps none of them went to college and they were all tough guys and they were all diagnosed with adhd as kids all of them right? But what ADHD kids all have in common is not that

they can't concentrate. It's just that they have a difficult time concentrating on things that they

find boring and incredibly easy to focus for long periods of time on what they find interesting.

So my son can sit in a bush in a desert behind the scope of a rifle for four straight hours

with a tarantula on his arm. No problem,

right? But put a book in front of him, it's a problem. So these methods of learning for my son

and his friends have been miraculous for increasing the base of knowledge that they possess.

Because this is how they learn. They learn from conversations between other people.

They learn verbally. Their auditory learning is superior, absolutely.
It's not like reading books. There's something about the dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex that makes that a harder thing to do and to maintain focus, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is a miracle for a whole class of people that were kind of dismissed. Well, you get to create your own education piecemeal.
I was always very wistful that I didn't do philosophy or psychology at uni. I did a bachelor's and a master's in business and marketing, neither of which I can remember any of.
I'm sorry to say that as a business school professor. Look, Newcastle University is prestigious and fantastic in the UK, but I was disenchanted with academia within about six months of being there because I was running a business and I wasn't seeing anything in the real world that represented what I was learning in the classroom.
You know, I was operating this big nightlife business and I was HR, marketing, I was accounts, I was doing the advertising, I was B2B, I was B2C, I was vendors, all this stuff, licensing, local councils. I was like, why am I learning Henry Ford's theories of scientific fucking management? Like, I like i don't care i don't care and i get the sense it's pre-social as facebook was coming out i think the year that i went to uni you needed a university email to get facebook i remember thinking i get the sense that this is not going to be useful in future and sure enough kaizen lean management strategies and stuff have not come up despite the fact that i've run businesses for two decades.
Yeah. You know, that's right.
And it's not just that it's not practical. It's that it's irrelevant.
And irrelevancy and practicality are totally different things. And that's one of the reasons that at Harvard Business School, generally the teaching method is case studies.
It's studies of people in actual business. That's not how I teach.
I'm the, I think I'm the only faculty member that teaches science in terms of lecture and discussion. But the whole point is they form the corpus of knowledge along with me in terms of the questions that they're asking about their lives, becoming happier, seeing their lives as a startup, where the currency of their fortune is love and happiness, and then how they can become happiness teachers in the course of what they're trying to do in business.
So I'm bringing the science along, bringing the science along, and then they're actually applying it to their own lives and to their own business careers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my business education was slightly different to that.
That was, I would say that's unrepresentative of what I learned. You do something about how to fall in love and stay in love? Yeah.
Yeah. That's a lot of what I talk about is how to fall in love and stay in love.
And part of the reason is because that's the most complex thing that we're going to do. And what people, so the modern world teaches us how to use complicated formulas to solve problems.
That's what social media is all about. That's what technology is about.
That's what all of the engineering solutions that we find in life is there's a, there's an app for that. There's not an app for the most complex thing in life, which is falling in love.
You know, it's funny because you know exactly what it is, but you can't simulate it. You can't, you can't predict it.
You can't solve for it. And even though I've been married almost 34 years, I don't know what's going to happen today.
My wife will get really mad at me probably today. My wife is Spanish.
And so, you know, they're very quarrelsome people. It's a diplomatic way to put it.
Yeah. And, and, and, and she would say that we're a defensive group.
Fuego. Yeah, that's right.
So we're, we're defensive. We're Americans and Brits.
So the result of it is that we're going to have a conflict today, but I can't predict

what it's going to be.

I don't know what it's going to be, you know?

And I've been married for almost 34 years.

I'm in love.

I have a great marriage, but I still can't solve my marriage.

I can't solve for it.

I can only live it.

So this is the thing.

Everybody wants to solve problems that are complicated and they need to live the problems that are most important to us in life, which are complex. Complex problems can't be solved.
They can only be experienced. A football game is a complex problem.
That's why you watch the game. You don't just simulate it on a computer because that would be impossible.
Your marriage is a football game, right? And that's kind of, and so that's the spirit in which you go into it, which is I'm going to, I got to go live this thing. I got to go make a mistake and get my heart stomped on and learn and live the thing again and live the thing again.
And so when I'm talking about it, I talk about number one, the brain science behind what it means to fall in love and experience that. And then the ways that we get it wrong, the ways that we chronically get it wrong.
And of course, that's the unit of the class my students are most interested in. Talk to me about the brain science.
What's going on with love? So falling in love is a five-step process in your brain. Four steps, depending on how you count it.
Number one is the ignition of falling in love. Ignition is attraction in falling in love.
This is one of the reasons that, you know, even people who aren't shallow want to look good. Because you actually, if you're going to start the falling in love process, you actually have to have sex hormones involved, estrogen, estradiol, testosterone.
Both men and women have both have both just in different ratios and you need both for the ignition of the attraction for romantic love. But that's just the very beginning.
The second stage is where you actually start getting neurotransmitters involved, most notably norepinephrine and dopamine. And what those do is they bring anticipation of reward, which is dopamine, and a sense of euphoria, which is norepinephrine produced by the adrenal glands right above the kidneys, right? And that's what makes you go from, I'm really attracted to this person, to, I think she just me a text message.
Like a text message, who cares, right? But it's the anticipation of reward and the euphoria that comes from seeing the thing pop up on your phone. That's really, I mean, psychology, Chris, is biology.
And this is a perfect case study of that. And that's the second step in falling in love is those two neurotransmitters kicking in.
Okay. I just want to get, I don't want to forget our train of thought here.
So you'll have seen adolescence maybe on Netflix. I haven't actually, everybody's talking about it, but I haven't seen it yet.
Yes. I had William Costello sat in that seat last week.
He's the number one researcher of incels in the world. Interestingly, he, as an academic at David Buss's lab here at UT, Austin, had to repurpose his introduction of how he described himself.
He says, I'm an incel researcher. He says, I'm a researcher of incels.
I know, I know. Very interesting way that you formulate the sentence.
And in that, one of the claims, one of the challenges that some of the darker areas of the sort of manosphere and black pill movement online have is that you basically can't fake attraction. And that there is, in their opinion, a certain class of men who do not reach a particular threshold of attraction that is going to cause them to be, as they would refer to it, genetic dead ends.
Now, I and many of my friends in the scientific world would believe that the bar that they claim that that's at is significantly higher than it actually is. And we see all of the time people who are able to punch outside of their weight.
But you are suggesting that, hey, even the people who are there, they're just raw academics. They're just, their nose is in books all the time.
If they're going out to a party on an evening, they're going to try and make themselves look nice because we have in the back of our minds this sense that sort of the advertising boarding up front still does have an impact no matter how deep and meaningful and looking past the skin and the hair. It's your storefront, right? Once you get people into the store, okay.
But the storefront is really important, right? Because if you don't have the storefront actually looking good, people are going to walk on by. So that's critically important.
Now, this is actually one of the reasons that dating apps are so problematic because they don't go past the storefront. Storefront, storefront, storefront, storefront, right? When you're stuck talking to somebody at a party, there the initial impression which is largely physical which instigates the the chemical response in the sex hormones but then you have a conversation with the person turns out they're intelligent turns out they're funny turns out they're interesting and and then that that can solve that can just cover a multitude of sins physical sins right okay then if you actually get to the next stage that's when the that's when the neurotransmitters start to kick in.
And that's when things start to get weird. That's when the whole thing, it's like suddenly the outsized importance of a text message that comes because of this anticipation of outsized reward and the sense of euphoria that actually comes in around these little things that wouldn't matter.
Uncertainty, variable schedule. Exactly.

But then it gets even weirder

because that's when the misery kicks in.

See, the process of falling in love

entails a lot of jealousy,

a lot of surveillance behavior,

a lot of suspicion.

These are not emotions

that are typically associated with happiness.

And the big part is this third step

where serotonin levels dive.

So low serotonin levels, as we all know, are markers or they're associated with clinical depression. And part of the reason is because, I mean, it's not well understood, but they notice that when there's low serotonin in the synapse, that that has a huge correlation with clinical depression.
Okay. So what do they do? They give you Prozac, for example, which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
It leaves serotonin in the synapse longer and it alleviates depression symptoms for some non-trivial number of depression sufferers. Well, what's going on there, there's a lot of theories about this, but the best evidence suggests that there's a part of the brain called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that's especially active when serotonin levels are low.
That makes you ruminate. And ruminating sadness, for example, is a characteristic of clinical depression.
Ruminating on another person is how you bond to that other person. That rumination machine happens when serotonin levels go down.
By the way, it's also really, really characteristic of artistic temperaments because you're ruminating on a creative product like a poem or a symphony or an opera or even a business plan for when you're ruining. You can't stop thinking.
You wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night. Usually, my serotonin levels are low because you're ruminating on something that's really important to you.
That's why artists, they tend to be depressive and romantic because it's all the same part of the brain and the same neurotransmitter associated with the behavior of the brain work. So what's somebody who has very high serotonin like? What's their demeanor? That's somebody who's really calm and mellow and it's like, no problem.
And I can go think about something else. So yeah, I guess I'm falling in love, but you know, I got a lot going on.
It's all good. Right.
And so this is one of the reasons that some people will say that when they're on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, it's hard to fall in love. Because you don't have that, what's she doing right now? Rush, obsession.
Yeah, obsession. And so that's, in that period in the falling in love process, you send a hundred text messages in an hour like an idiot and you don't know why.
It's because you're ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, ruminatinguminating ruminating is this the most insane part of falling in love is this the one that rips you away from yourself the most and a lot of jealousy and a lot of behavior that's the surveillance behavior for example and things you wouldn't otherwise do you're going back into your new partner's ancient facebook past it's like are you kidding me three dudes that year really you're reading into text messages why was there no kiss at the end of that message she was last online at four in the morning but didn't message me until 8 a.m why was she exactly right and with with sufficient serotonin you'd be like means nothing okay she just writes okay you said so i'm gonna i'll see you at eight she said okay but when you're in low serotonin you'd be like i don't like this i She just writes, okay. You said, so I'm going to, I'll see you at eight.
She said, okay. But when you're in low serotonin, you'd be like, I don't like this.
I don't like this. I don't like the tone.
Of that. Okay.
Those two letters. I don't like the tone of those two letters.
Yeah. So I did, um, this is really cool.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. Intellex DNA.
Cheek swab, put in a tube, send it off full genetic profile. Um, and then mapped onto what is the likelihood or what is the prevalence in the wider population of this and what is it predictive of? So MTHFR gene, things that are to do with your processing of gluten, your predisposition for different maladies, for heart stuff.
But the interesting shit for me obsessed with human nature was how is this predictive of different things in my psychology? And the particular suite of genetics that my parents decided to either bestow or curse me with are all the same cluster, and they just pile on top of it. It is all dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, does not clear cortisol or adrenaline particularly quickly.
It's like may struggle to stop tasks once begun. It's just like if you wanted to construct an obsessed human, you would just give them that.
And you're an anxious person. Yes.
Yeah, I have a tendency. I would call myself an insecure overachiever.
So there's a lot that you can do behaviorally, by the way, once you understand the nature of anxiety. But we still haven't gotten to the end of the neurochemical cascade of falling in love.
So this is actually one of the reasons that relationships struggle, is when one person is going through the neurochemical cascade faster than the other. And certain people, they tend to go through it real quick.
There's actually a malady. There's a pathology called emophilia, not with an H.
It's not a blood disorder. It's E-M-O-philia, which is people who fall in love too quickly.
And what that means is they're just falling through this cascade really, really quickly. And they're just going, and by the second date, they're already doing surveillance behavior and jealousy and sending a million text messages.
And so it happens to women more than men. And the guys are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Like this is too much. But guys do this too.
They fall in love super fast. And the more they understand this about themselves, the more they can kind of hit the brakes and say, oh, I'm doing that.
Knowledge is power, man. Because then when you bring your prefrontal cortex into the business, you can actually start to manage the process more and not let it manage you.
So you don't feel like you're, you're possessed by a demon or something every time. And then you're not freaking out and scaring away girls is how this would work.
Which obviously I've never done. Okay.
So that's stage two. No, that's three is, is the serotonin stage.
Yes. All right.
And stage four is, is, is really where you want to get in a relationship and ideally on the same schedule. And this is where relationships become pair bonds pair and pair bond mating is the goal, right? I mean, what we all want, I mean, except for people who are really, really modern, but this isn't, this isn't common.
People want to fall in love and stay in love with one person for the rest of their lives. That's what people want, right? For a good reason.
And I think that this is sort of the natural order of things when things are working properly. The last one is usually characteristic of oxytocin and vasopressin, which are the bonding hormones.
And when this really kicks in, that's when you're at the point where you adopt somebody as your kin. This becomes your family.
and somebody from a neighboring tribe that you've never seen before, somebody from the other part of the world who doesn't even speak your language, you can adopt that person into your kin group. And that's when the oxytocin, which largely is mediated by activities like direct eye contact in real life, by touch in particular, that's how you know somebody is your kin and they know that you're theirs.
That's why it's so great when you have children, you'll see this. When you lay eyes on your newborn baby for the very first time, there's an explosion of oxytocin in your brain.
It's like the 4th of July inside your head. It's magic, actually.
It's a gift from God. It's wonderful.
And when you fall in love with somebody and you get through the agonizing stages of one, two, and three, which, by the way, you're still going to have those things. I mean, my wife's really, really mad at me.
I'm like, I'm pretty bummed out. And I've got some of those early stages still going on.
And, of course, there's still, you know, it's tons of attraction in the whole thing. Surveillance behavior is still a little vigilant here and there.
I'm trying to be vigilant. I'm not, you know, that much surveillance behavior at this point.
I don't think I could face that. But yeah, she's looking at me.
I'm fine, my friends. Where is he? Which isn't surveillance behavior.
She's just curious about where I am because I'm traveling all the time. I'm on the road every week.
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That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. But the whole point is that you want to get to this bonding.
You want to become kin together with this person in a particular relationship. And getting to that is really important.
And staying there is the ultimate goal of relationship. The early stages are passion.
The bonding stage is what's often called companionate love, which sounds as my kids rhyme be, it sounds not hot, right? Correct. Companionate love, but companionate love has lots of passion in it.
But this is, it's your, you want to get, if you're going to fall in love and stay in love, your goal is best friendship. You want to spend every night with your best friend.
That's the goal. And you can't get through, you can't get over the agony.
You got to go through the agony. That's the reason the friend zone almost never leads to these relationships because you've skipped the early stages.
Oh, fascinating. Yeah.
The friend zone is, is really, I mean, I've heard people is like, yeah, you know, we, we said to each other, look, if we're still not married in five years and, you know, we really, I mean, we get along so great, then we'll just go get married. And I've heard of that actually kind of working, but I don't believe it.
You've said you want to, your partner should be your best friend or you should be best friends with your partner. But marrying a best friend is not a strategy.
You got to go through one, two, and three. You got to have a ton of attraction.
You have to have lots of anticipation and euphoria. You have to go through the bonding stage of rumination on the other person.
And then you have to arrive at best friendship through that particular process. You can't just leapfrog straight to the end.
Yeah, exactly right. So this is why a lot of the stuff that we see in modern life is screwing up relationships so much.
So dating apps, for example, they short circuit this process. They don't let you get into later stages because you're rejecting people at the storefront.
Rejecting too many people at the storefront. That's why you can't solve for love.
Plus, people are putting together dating profiles looking for themselves. You curate your choices on the basis of your tastes.
And you want who matches your taste we don't mate assortively though we have a minimum pretty minimal level of compatibility and then what really attracts us is complementarity and and dating apps don't actually give us complementarity because you're not like i want somebody who completes me i'm a democrat i want somebody who's a republican you don't say that it's like i'm not gonna be the big majority 71 of democrats won't date a republican 41 of republicans won't date a democrat why is the difference quiz me this chris what's that why the difference between democrats and republicans in assorted political mating uh i would guess well democrats i would assume are more open open to experience as personality profile. But they're more likely to not date a Republican.
That's my point. Yeah.
But they're more open to experience as personality profile. So that seems to be, so they're not only having to, whatever it is, whatever the effect is that's going on, it's having to compensate for their openness, their increase in openness.
So so this is even more strong i could try and pull out as much bro social science as i want about purity spiral sense of ideological uh rigidity uh that's actually simpler than that so that's good that's that's good stuff okay it's about gender ah okay who's choosier men or women Uh-huh. Who's Democrats, men or women? Women.
Ah. Men tend to be more likely to be Republicans.
They're like, yeah. It's like, Democrat, I don't know.
Yeah, but you know what I mean. Show me a picture.
Like, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Like, how Democrat? How Democrat are we talking? It's like, and more beautiful? It's okay. Yeah.
And so that's just choosiness is kind of the way that works. But we set up dating.
We. I mean, I've never done it because, you know, I did my pair bond mate.
You reached escape velocity. Yeah, exactly right.
In 19, I think my last date was in 1989 or 1988 or something like that. The euro's born fantastic.
Nice. I know.
Thanks. Thanks, man.
That's okay. That's okay.
So, and, and, and, but the, the dating app, you set it up so that it's like, I like Sriracha and I want somebody like Sriracha. I want somebody who thinks Austin's cool.
And pretty soon you're looking in a mirror. Also not hot.
You're getting your sibling. That's not what we want.
We think we want that because we're narcissistic, but we actually don't want that. The happiest couples have lots of difference they have lots of interlocking in personality parts do you think that that's a psychological representation of the way that we look for immune profile difference yeah that's the mha that's the uh no the immuno uh uh major histocompatibility complex the mhc that's from, all that stuff comes from the mid-90s t-shirt smelling tests.
You know all that research, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you can, the olfactory bulb senses the major histocompatibility complex in others to get an immunological profile, a repertoire that's larger.
So you want somebody different than you. And there is no doubt that that is displayed not just in how your t-shirt smells but actually how you display your show up in the world is that an adaptive explanation for why humans kiss no doubt you're sampling the saliva you're sampling the saliva you actually want to exchange something that's you know i mean it is it has pathogens in it but it's not like dangerously pathological in the broad scheme of things yeah that's probably why that's probably why know, I mean, it is, it has pathogens in it, but it's not like dangerously pathological

in the broad scheme of things. Yeah.
That's probably why that's probably why it is the case. I'm fascinated with.
And there's more saliva exchange, the more passionately you kiss somebody. Um, can you just explain sort of those five steps there with a bit of an adaptive lens? Like what What are are our genes ultimate reasons for behavior trying to get us to do here presumably it's become attracted to something very quickly all the way down what's the reason for those five stages you you okay so the first stage is that that that's how you can actually link up with somebody potentially the second stage is one in which you have a strong

sense of wanting to be with that other person. So you will pursue getting to greater depth with that person.
The third stage is when you're really bonding to each other. And the fourth stage is when you're actually create kin and you will be with each other now and forever.
That's the whole idea. It's the whole concept of your mind, we're together, this is it.
As opposed to if you just stayed at stage one, which path a lot, people who have real pathologies in their relationships, it's just basically stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two. That's hookup culture.
Is one or one and two over and over again, or the hemophilic problem of careening through and then the other person going, whoa, and then starting again and starting again and starting again. So you're looking for somebody, people who go through the stages together and wind up bonding together permanently, but they need to go deeper and deeper and their brains need to imprint on each other in these particular ways.
That's how the psychology of falling in love is really just the biology of falling in love. Okay.
Talk to me about the, uh, fellow dopamine norepinephrine addicts out there about

how they can, it sounds to me like a biology is psychology. We're along for the ride here.

We don't really get to choose much of the time who we fall in love with. You know,

if you spend enough time around the person and you go, fuck, like they, that all of the things I said, to fall for and there they are. So this is true.
And this is, there's a really interesting research going back to the 90s on this. You know, the work of Art Aaron, Arthur Aaron as Suni Stony Brook.
This actually got news because it was covered in the New York Times and it became sort of pop social psychology research. This was Love in the Lab where he was actually simulating the neurochemical cascade.
Um, and here's how he did it. Artificially? Yeah.
So here's how he did it. He brought people into his lab and it was people who didn't know each other, but who based on surveys beforehand were theoretically capable of falling in love with each other.
So it wasn't people who were 30 years apart in age and it was people who are, you know sex attracted and, and who would rate pictures of attractiveness more or less the same. So as men and women, it was all heterosexual potential couples.
And they came into the lab, they come in opposite doors, they sit down at a table across from each other. And they, and they, they don't know each other at all.
They've never seen each other. Of course, it's undergraduate students because they'll do anything for 20 bucks.
And he starts asking him questions. He asked him 36 questions that, that, that escalate in terms of intimacy.
So question one is, um, if you could have lunch with anybody or dinner with anybody in the world, who would it be and why? Right. Let's get the icebreaker at a party, right? Steve jobs, you know, whoever it happens to be.
Well, why question 30 is is, when's the last time you cried and why? Now, your mom doesn't know that. Your actual partner probably doesn't know that, but you have to answer the question.
And you're going super deep. So this is simulating, you're just screaming through the process of intimacy with this person.
And then, ha ha, now it's when it gets really good. So at the end, they have to gaze into each other's eyes, blinking as little as possible for four minutes to release as much oxytocin as possible.
And they would walk one after the other at a lab saying, I feel like I just fell in love. I feel like I just fell in love.
It's horribly manipulative. Yeah.
Could you, could you get it past an ethics board now? Do you think irb i don't know one couple got married okay i mean not that day yeah right yeah but a bunch of the couples wound up dating a bunch of them the couples wound up dating and one actually after college got married wow yeah yeah no it's it's unreal because we we think that there's some sort of you know disney soulmates kind of of metaphysical thing going on, but we're made for pair bonds. Humans are made for pair bond mating.
This is one of the most important imperatives of human life and our brains are built for it. But this is the important thing that this is one of the things that I teach my business students and my clients is be careful with this.

So, you know, I'm in my company, my unit.

I need more.

I need a team building exercise. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do an offsite, no spouses so that we can really get to know each other better.
I just put them in the lab, man. And so when you're all day long with somebody and you're working with somebody with whom you could conceivably have a relationship, even though you don't want to, you're paired up and you're looking into each other's eyes and you're talking about things that are important, like your work.

And then you go on a lazy river, like canoe trip and you're telling each other stories around the campfire.

That's the reason that 31% of extramarital affairs start at work.

Have you heard of workplace plus two?

Do you know what this is? It's that she's a five on the street, but she's a seven in the workplace. And it refers to precisely this, that there's something about working with this person in the office who you might not really even think twice about looking at in a bar or a restaurant or something.
They wouldn get past step one in the decade but workplace plus two uh turns them from a you know a strong seven to a nine yeah you got to be careful and so if you're a boss every boss watching us here be careful don't ruin people's lives you know it's like no outside work activities that don't include plus ones if people if people are you know people have partners or spouses they have to be invited to these things and and you shouldn't you should be going with your partner your spouse to the christmas party isn't it interesting you know there is this sense of self and sense of attachment and something transcendent and and and uh greater than just the neurochemical cascade that's going on. It's not just neurobiology.
It doesn't feel like it's just neurobiology that's going on. And yet, you can manipulate people into that situation largely through neurobiology.
Totally. And you need to account for it.
And you think, well, what? So you're saying that my partner doesn't actually love me that much that i think you can just put them in this you can ask these fucking 36 questions and put them on a lazy river and there's a 50 chance 30 chance that he's going to cheat on me you're telling me that that's the that's the depth of our love that's what this transcendent what about the you know until sickness sickness and health and right yeah kind of respect the biology man because we have brains a good way to have to respect the biology. And this is important about everything having to do with psychology, about anything about behavioral science, is that there's such a strong biological component to it, which is why you go back just a few decades when they weren't talking about the biology very much.
They weren't, they were missing a lot about this. You know, the way that I teach this is that all the interesting questions come from philosophy and ancient wisdom or even modern wisdom.
Ah, there it is. The show.
There it is. There you go.
Then you talk about the biology to understand the mechanism of action. And then you talk about behavioral science to get the data.
And then you talk about management science such that you can actually use it. So it goes one, two, three, four, all the way through.
And this is an entirely multidisciplinary understanding of human life. But if you skip one of those stages, you're going to, you're going to miss the boat.
If you don't know any neuroscience, you can't be a good behavioral scientist. If you don't know any behavioral science, then your neuroscience won't mean anything.
It's not practical. Yeah, exactly right.
And so this is, I mean, this is a lot of what I wind up teaching is for my students to respect their own biology and respect the biology of other people and manage their lives accordingly. Don't put yourself in, you know, just like you wouldn't walk in a bad neighborhood with $20 bills hanging out of your pockets.
Don't do something that actually, it doesn't necessarily put you at risk. It just puts you at emotional at emotional peril you know why would you put yourself in a situation where you find yourself unduly attracted to somebody and you don't know why yeah and mess up your relationship even if you don't do anything it just it doesn't make sense yeah because you're going to be in turmoil avoiding temptation is way easier than resisting it it's the same reason that if you're on a diet you don't have cookies that's right the near occasion of sin yeah uh david buss wrote he's fantastic he's fucking phenomenal i don't even know him and i love his work his work on jealousy it's unbelievable the evolutionary basis of the differences in jealousy between men and women what do you know that well can you explain yeah so the whole david i mean he he writes is visionary.
He's a god. Yeah, he's fantastic.
So the whole idea is that in surveys, you find that men are especially jealous of the concept of their mate having sex with another man. Women in heterosexual relationships are driven mad by the concept of their, or the vision of their mate saying, I love you to another woman.
Emotional versus physical jealousy. And that has a biological basis to it because in the ancestral environment before DNA tests and before evidence is abundant, you got to know if you're a man that you're raising your own offspring.
And if you're a woman, you have to know that your mate is not going to run off and raise somebody else's offspring. And so that's why you have these differences.
And this really explains a lot. So for example, one of the things that you find from this is that if a man wants to be forgiven for infidelity, he should say, according to this theory, right? I'm not advocating this because don't be unfaithful, but to be forgiven for infidelity,

according to this theory, he should say, look, I mean, I didn't love her. I only love you.
I don't love her at all, but you haven't slept with me in a long time and I have needs. And that was the whole thing.
She'll take you back. Current of that theory.
Now she is unfaithful. She should say, it wasn't about the sex.
It was disgusting, but he told me he loved me. And you haven't said that in a long time.
And I need that. And he'll take you back.
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That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. David Buss's work is very, and he didn't, by the way, this is my practical application of this.
He would, he is very, he's going to watch this and disown it completely. He loves everything that I do.
He's my, he's my number one fan. Um, but, uh, one of the cool things that's, that he explained sort of talking about, uh, you don't get to control the cascade quite, but you can, I suppose, reframe what you tell yourself it means right if that starts

uh this guy reached out to him after he read the evolution of desire and in it david talks about an area of the brain that specifically gets turned on in men when men look at something that resembles anything sexual pair of rocks that look like remotely like boobs it's like you should be looking at that. That's why, you know, after reading that,

I, um,

I had,

I took such,

uh,

I contested so heavily

this idea of the toxic male gaze.

I'm like,

these are mostly accusations

that are being made

by a particular sex of people

who do not have the same circuitry

that men do.

All of that to be said,

men shouldn't make people feel weird by staring at them on trains and in the tube and all the rest of this stuff. But I did think some pretty deep-rooted fucking brain circuitry going on here that's incentivizing men to look at you in those leggings that have the thing that goes up the middle of the ass crack.
Like, come on, play the game. Anyway, this guy read the book and messaged David and said, I just wanted to thank you for saving my marriage because I found myself looking at other women and I was attracted to them.
I thought that they were hot. I didn't do anything about it.
I love my wife and I love our kids. But I thought there was something wrong with our marriage because I was attracted to other women.
And the story that I told myself about the fact that I was attracted to other women was there was something wrong with my partner. And I read your book and I realized that I'm just kind of designed to find attractive.
Shock, horror, man finds attractive women attractive. Yeah, and respect the biology is what it comes down to.
That means understand yourself, understand how you're wired, don't act on your impulses. That's respecting the biology and acting accordingly.
That's managing your brain, managing your limbic system so it doesn't manage you is what it comes down to. There's also a real understanding in that work about sort of the basics of what people need in opposite-sex relationships, for example.
I mean, it's not just David Buss's work. There's a lot of the evolutionary biology of attraction suggests that fundamentally, I mean, you're not going to be reductive about this because there's a lot that goes into falling in love and staying in love and having relationships.
But fundamentally, women require adoration. And this is often called the adoration-admiration dichotomy.
Adoration means, baby, you're everything. I would literally take a bullet for you you're so wonderful you're so beautiful because you know and from evolutionary biology would suggest you need somebody who's going to take complete i mean who's going to take a who's going to be protective completely protective way beyond what reason would suggest you're insane for that particular person whereas men need admiration which is basically you know that is the largest gazelle I've ever seen that you just dragged into the cave, man.
I mean, that's going to feed our family for three. You're so big and strong, right? And so it almost suggests that what guys need is like just admiration.
I need you to admire me more than anybody else admires me, right? And we're not egomaniacs, but these are differences that actually would get back to, I'm, I'm going to just take care of you and the kids forever. And I'm going to protect you because I adore you so much.
And you're going to admire me for this. And, and again, we're, I need to be admired.
I mean, I do need to be adored as a husband and as a person and the whole thing. And so it's not that simple, but there's a lot to that.
There's a lot to that. And so one of the things that all guys will say, what's the secret? And it's number one, adore her.
And number two, be admirable. Be admirable.
Actually be admirable. She's not going to admire you if you're not admirable for God's sake and adore her.
What if I don't feel it? don't care i don't care adore her that's the secret weirdly i mean yeah there's more to it but maybe not that much more to it did you look at the over perception and under perception bias of attraction have you seen this oh men over perceive attraction from women and women under perceive attraction from men very reliably very reliably it's like ah yeah the waitress just smiled at me i think she likes me dude she wants a tip yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the smoke detector principle working in both directions yeah and this is why you know for all of the girls they're like in the my boss no he's just a what just friend he's friendly. He's just nice with me.

It's like,

you don't see him

the way that he sees you.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah,

yeah.

And you don't see him

the way he thinks you see him.

Correct.

And that's sort of weird

that perception gets into it.

No,

that's a funny thing.

In my almost 34 years of marriage,

nobody has ever, no woman has ever looked at me that way nobody there's been the slightest hint of any attraction now i get it i mean it's not i'm not like that much to look at but you know there's not not once i don't get guys who over perceive never uh what would be your advice to the insecure overachievers out there? Get some of their dopamine, norepinephrine under control. The insecure overachievers.
So in relationships? Yeah. So give me a story.
Well, for instance, if you are someone that finds yourself ruminating more aggressively, then you're really struggling to get that under control. Yeah.
The serotonin has dropped. The rationality is out of the window.
Yeah. You find yourself moving through this at a pace that maybe your partner can't keep up with.
Right. You're scaring people off.
You're behaving in a weird way. Knowledge is power on this.
Knowledge is always power on these things. One of the things that we find is that this is this whole literature on metacognition that suggests that when you move the experience of your emotions into your prefrontal cortex by journaling through, some people use therapy, through prayer, prayers of petition, through meditation, for example, meditation techniques, mindfulness meditation techniques, they move the experience of very strong aversive emotions into the prefrontal cortex where you can manage them more effectively.
One of the best ways to do this, by the way, is simple journaling of strong emotions and hard experiences. So this gets back to something you asked about a little bit earlier, which is anxiety, right? Anxiety.
So you're an anxious person. And what that means is you have an overactive adrenal system.
You have an HPA axis that, you know, is kind of, and that's part of your success, by the way. I mean, it's like, would you trade it away if you could? No, I realized this a few years ago.
No. Yeah.
I mean, this is, and one of the reasons is your weaknesses are your strengths and your strengths are your weaknesses. And you can try to eliminate your weaknesses, but all you'll wind up doing is eliminating your own success and satisfaction in life.
That's just the way it is. You better learn how to manage your weaknesses and embrace them and be thankful for them.
That's the only, and that's the way you got to live your life is the way that that works out. But it doesn't mean you don't go, they don't go unmanaged.
So for something like anxiety, anxiety is unfocused fear. That's what best definition of anxiety.
Fear in the ancestral environment was supposed to be episodic and intense and rare. You didn't feel fear that often, but when you did, man, it was all on.
You heard a snap of a twig behind you, you take off running and climb a tree, whatever it happened to be. In the modern environment, fear is chronic and mild.
And the reason is because there's nothing trying to chase us down and kill us. That's very rare.
On the other hand, there's Twitter, which feels like it's stalking us in some sort, or what X. It's social media.
It's the modern environment. It's stressful.
It's cars honking. It's whatever it is.
And so just the limbic system is mildly, the amygdala is sort of on, sending a weak signal to the hypothalamus and stimulating the pituitary gland in a little bit, and then asking the adrenal glands to kind of drip out cortisol so you're on. And that you're getting this epinephrine, so at two o'clock in the afternoon, that pit of the stomach feeling.
And you know this feeling because this is your life, right? So how do you deal with that? And the answer is not to avoid it. You go to a doctor and a doctor might say, take a benzodiazepine drug, you know, take a little Xanax and you're going to feel a little bit better.
And that's true because that will mute the activity in the HPA axis. It'll be inhibitory.
A much better way is to lean into what it was supposed to be, which is fear. And so a good exercise for somebody who's anxious like you or me, I'm super anxious person is to, at the end of the day say, okay, five things are freaking me out, but they're kind of like ghosts.
I'm not, I'm not focusing on them. I'm actually blocking out the real source of my anxiety.
I'm just anxious. Number one, what actually is the source of my anxiety? What is the fear that that's based on? Make it real.
Write it down. What's the fear? Step two, what's the worst thing that can actually happen? Literally the worst thing is actually going to happen.
Sometimes it's like, I'm going to die. But sometimes it's like, the stock market goes to zero.
Then what's the probability that's going to happen? We're smart people. What's the probability that worst case scenario is going to happen? And then step four, what would I do if that happened? Write it down.
Because you would do something, right? Okay. What am I really worried about? That thing, that thing, that thing, you know, it's like, it's cancer, right? What's the likelihood? Pretty low.
If it happened, what would I do? I'd get treatment. I'd actually get treatment, right? And when you do that, you've turned your anxiety into fear and you'll shut it off.
Why? Because you put it in its proper place. You've given a direction.
You've managed it. You've actually managed your limbic system, so your limbic system is not managing you.
Then go through the other four things, and you'll sleep better. And part of the reason is because you've actually, you'll calm your HPA axis.
Your adrenal system will actually, and again, there's all kinds of other things to do, like box breathing and all sorts of physiological things, but this is a good, good way to actually cope with this so that you can continue to use that gift that you have. But that gift isn't manipulating you in all sorts of ways that hurt your quality of life.
That's really cool. You mentioned about some of the challenges of digital dating enabling on the front end.
You also said that getting to stage five, getting to kin. There's actually four.
So we went through four, but there's not a stage five i counted wrong oh yeah okay right yeah whatever oxytocin is the you know the connection phase yeah stage four yeah uh i was thinking about um relationships that have started to mature but are enabled by being long distance you know which i i imagine pen palling back and forth is less common than somebody who lives in LA and someone else who lives in Wisconsin and they're dating and text a lot and all the rest of it. But the eye to eye and skin to skin is precisely what you said.
You'll crave the oxytocin. Yes.
So does that suggest that long distance relationships need a different type of work? They need to compensate in different sorts of ways. Yeah, it's very problematic.
And a lot of my students are going to be in long distance relationships because they're, you know, they'll form, some of them will pair up in business school. And then one of them will work in San Francisco and one of them in London.
And, you know, it's eight hour time difference and they're not going to see each other that often. But, you know, it's okay because we'll see each other a couple of times a year and I'm sorry because you're going to be in close proximity with other people and the neurochemical cascade is going to happen and oxytocin can occur.
So, you know, respect the biology. And, you know, I'm explaining this and they're like, and so that's one of the reasons that those long distance relationships usually don't work is because you actually, we're not, we're not built in our ancestral state to be living in a continents apart from each other.
We're supposed to do eye contact and touch. I mean, it's so important that I can practically save a marriage just by having people understand that they need to get back on the Oxytocin Express.

And the way to do that is two simple rules in every marriage. mean, it's so important that I can practically save a marriage just by having people understand

that they need to get back on the oxytocin express. And the way to do that is two simple rules in every marriage.
And this is how marriages fall apart is they stop touching and they stop looking at each other in the eyes. And so the two rules for everybody's married watching us, and they want their marriage to be like it was not like in the very beginning, because that's insane.
But they want like what it was in year four, like year three or something. Every time you're together, you're touching.
And every time you're talking, you're making direct eye contact. Those are the two rules.
Now, there's going to be more to it. Also, don't be a jerk and take out the trash and unload the dishwasher and don't sleep wither and, and yada, yada, yada.
But if you follow those two rules, the biology will be on your side instead of being on somebody else's side in this. And that's critically important, but that's what you don't get in long distance relationships.
And so when they're doing that, I'll say, okay, your number one expense is that you're going to be together two times a month. I don't care where you are in the world.
You're going to be together two times a month and setting

up your work schedule so that you've got all of your vacation time is in long weekends and all of

your discretionary income is, is plain fair. And if you're not into it, then you're not enough into

your relationship. That's the price that you need to pay in order to make this work.
Absolutely.

Absolutely. And still it's dangerous.
Still tough. I mean, you should be,

Thank you. And if you're not into it, then you're not enough into your relationship.
That's the price that you need to pay in order to make this work longer.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And still, it's dangerous.

Still tough.

I mean, you should be, I mean, it's like, you need protocols around this.

I practice these protocols as well.

I don't travel on weekends because I'm going to be home with my wife on weekends.

I'm gone all the time during the week.

48 weeks a year, I'm on the road because I'm on tour.

I'm speaking to her and, you know. I see.

No, it's phenomenal.

It's great. But I'm home on weekends because I want to sleep with my best friend.
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You mentioned two parts, finding the right person, falling in love, et cetera, et cetera. Staying in love.
Yeah. What about that? So that's really what we're talking about now is the staying in love part is actually remembering that you have a pair bond and the pair bond requires that you don't make mistakes and you continue to cultivate.
You continue to cultivate the oxytocin mediated relationship. And so it's not making mistakes and doing things that will, I mean, stupid mistakes, like getting into getting into a different pair bond obviously but also not doing things that will pull you apart from that from that person not making decisions that get in the way of the relationship and so that is your predominant relationship is the most important thing is the person on whom you will be gazing as you take your dying breath and that's actually what you want and that's.
Now, religious couples have a real advantage on this. And that's because almost every major religion has a concept of marriage, which is that marriage is your antenna to the divine.
And so most married couples who are religious, one of the things that they believe is that when I love her, it's God's love for her coming through me and vice versa. And her love for me is God's love for me coming through her.
And that's when, and so, you know, when I'm counseling couples that are, that are, that are getting ready to get married in the church, for example, I'll say the most intimate thing that you're going to do. And they think I'm going to talk about sex, praying together.
That's literally the most intimate thing that a couple will ever do. And I know couples who are, you know, church goers, they'll go 50 years and never pray in front of each other because it's too embarrassing.
They'll have like six kids, but they won't pray in front of each other because that feels more intimate. So that's one of the basic maintenance things for, or if you're not religious, then meditating together, using some sort of an antenna to the metaphysical forces that you are feeling.
And some people would say who are atheistic, they'll say it's a simulacrum, that something is actually happening in the brain because of the neurochemistry. I happen to believe that there is a metaphysics to it, that there is a divine element to these types of things, but using those things, because it's that important.
Best friend, best friending. Yeah.
Turning a partner into your best friend. Right.
Not your only friend. Very important.
How can you tell if you're a compatible romantic partner, but not a compatible best friend? Because you don't get to the best friend stage. You test by finding out that it fails.
And that's the reason that people will fall in love and two years later hate each other. They'll fall in love, but they won't get to the best friend stage.
They'll never get to companionate love. And that's because all they had was attraction.
Passionate. They had the passion that came from the obsession and that came from the bonding, but they actually never got to friendship.
And the reason was because they're not cut out to be friends they don't have enough compatibility or and or complementary to actually be good friends to each other or they're not cut out they're probably not good friends to anybody is there any way then given that we're in this psychedelic hormonal fugue state for between six and 24 months that's really nice it's true uh you're kind of insane for half a year to psychotic break correct yeah yeah you can't be trusted do not run with sharp objects do not drive heavy machinery etc don't buy a house yeah um don't go to vegas but you are what you're basically doing and i've been been thinking, well, I had tied to Chiron recently. It was fucking fantastic.
And, um, we were talking about this passionate companion at arc. Yeah.
We go through and how clever human biology is in sort of tricking us into doing this thing, you know, getting attached to this person who we've got nothing in common with. Like, yeah, they've got a nicely shaped nose and they smell kind of cute or whatever.
I'm not in love with a girl didn't speak a word of english okay not a word of english i think didn't you didn't you say did you drop something and go to spain yeah i moved to scholarship no i didn't scholarship no no i just quit my job quit your job and and and i went to spain and i found a job in the barcelona city orchestra i was a french horn player in those days and so, because I was in, I was, because I wanted to be able to communicate with her. Psychedelic hormonal fugue state.
Oh, it was insane. It was insane.
She didn't speak any English. I didn't speak any Spanish or Catalan.
It was in Barcelona. Yep.
And we learned each other's languages little by little by little. And two years later, I closed the deal and we've been married almost 34 years.
Fuck. And she's the mother of my children and grandmother of my grandchildren.

Wow.

So there is this unique period of insanity that everybody goes through.

Yeah.

Some people more quickly than others.

Some people out of sync with their partner.

But what you're really trying to do is not,

you cannot use the front of the funnel, the shop window, even experientially, even if that shop window lasts for six, 24 months, as something that is necessarily predictive of what you're actually trying to get to. Right.
Which is month 25 through month 500. You don't know.
So what are the ways, you know, if the goal is best friendship through romance right but all you get to experience is romance but what you're supposed to be assessing based on is best friendship right what can be done try learn fail try the average person goes through it five times the average person goes through this thing five times that means if they end up in a permanent relation either that or they end up in a convent right or a monastery if if the fifth one is the one that means the first four are are failure you failed but you learned right this is the same thing by the way i mean you're an entrepreneur this is startup this is how it works the entrepreneur, this is according to stuff coming out of the Kellogg School, Northwestern University, the average successful entrepreneur, successful in terms of a going concern, a business that actually makes money, has 3.8 failures. And that's pretty close to the number of failures that you're going to have in relationships if you're an average person.
That's because it's the most entrepreneurial thing you're going to do. It's a startup.
This is the startup of your life. And if you're not willing to take risk because you're actually trying to use an app to solve the problem, or you're trying to wire around to have a simulacrum of the experience through, God forbid, pornography, which is horrible for you, because all that does is that simulates the whole experience, you know, step one, one, one, one, one over and over again.
And then you're actually never going to have this unbelievably fulfilling experience of the most entrepreneurial endeavor of your life, which is your marriage. That's the startup.
And that's actually one of the reasons, by the way, that the most successful marriages typically start as startups as opposed to mergers. for the magic zone is 28, 29 28 29 30 that's when you're both getting into a startup together you're co-founders of a startup by the time you're way into your 30s sorry that it's uh it's more of a merger louise perry talks about this she uses this example of a lamp and she says uh if you haven't yet moved into a house buying a lamp that you like is pretty easy yeah but if you've built the perfect house that you want and you've got the color schemes and the decoration trying to find the perfect lamp for this very well established house becomes more difficult it is more difficult and that's what you know that's one of the problems with actually waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting but you but startups that work are mature startups so you know getting married at 16 you know the first time through or you meet somebody somebody for the first time and say, I've never felt this way before.
Let's go to the little marriage chapel in Vegas. That usually doesn't work.
High-risk dice roll. Yeah, yeah.
You need more experience on that. And that means you need more failure and you need more learning, typically.
James, my business partner in Nutonic, he used to work for Npower, a gas company, and he'd go door to door trying to convert people from British gas or whatever, Northern Grid, and put them onto his. And his boss one day said, how many more sales do you need this month? He's like, two.
He's like, how many sales do you do per door? And he's like, about 100 doors, one sale. He's like, okay, 200 doors.
And that reframing is exactly the same, which is, okay, you have a failure rate. This is the failure rate.
But what you're looking to get toward is to beat the failure rate and get to the success, the big one that matters. And the more experience that you have, the lower your failure rate is in this particular case.
So people do learn. There is a learning process for entrepreneurs and for couples.
And so your first relationship, you're like, golly, I mean, what did I learn from that? Oh yeah. Here's the classic one.
The big thing that people learn often is that they'll get into a relationship with a so-called dark triad and they'll know what to avoid, what personality characteristics to avoid. And so, you know, men who are most compelling to young women, for example, they tend to be narcissistic, Machiavellian, and somewhat psychopathic.
That's the dark triad constellation. I know you've talked about this before, and I've done a lot of work on the dark triad.
Have you had Scott Barry Kaufman? Of course. Yeah.
He's got his new book out soon. Yeah.
And he's the master of the, you know, he knows more about the dark triad than anybody else. And so the big mistake that women will make is they'll get into a relationship with the dark triad especially if they're emophilic and so they fall in love quickly dark triads feed on that because they will simulate the neurochemical cascade that they're actually not experiencing and then women when they go through it the first time and have their hearts broken and their bank accounts drained they will um and and all their friends have been slept with they'll not make that mistake they'll look for that lesson lesson that hopefully you only once and so heartbreak two heartbreak three they're usually learning different lessons unless there's a particular pathology and the pathologies are um number one mate choice copying this is a very standard thing where people who are already partnered are more attractive than people who are not partnered and the reason reason is because in nature, you want to look for somebody who somebody else has done the work of finding them a good enough partner.
Like pre-selection. Yeah, that's one of the reasons that men in the eyes of women go up threefold in attractiveness when they're partnered already.
Wow. Women find men who are a partner more attractive than people who are not partnered.
Question. Why is it that guys find pregnant women so attractive? Same reason? It's a good question.
Probably not mate choice copying. It's probably has, these are probably fertility cues is, you know, the kind of thing that you talk about.
Yeah. Typically, typically, um, in the male brain, dopamine is stimulated because of a, uh, hips to waist ratio, um, which talks as, and length and shininess of hair, symmetry of facial features, the whiteness of the irises, no, of the whites of the eyes, not the irises, the whites of the eyes, because that shows liver function and good health, and those are cues for fertility as well.
And men, or women look at the the it's the the neurochemistry is affected by the shoulders to waist ratio because this has to do with virility and fertility of men and ability to drag in the gazelle there's all the things have you looked at the environmental security hypothesis do you know this one no tell me This is fucking awesome. So, women's, males' preferred body size for women has fluctuated across time.
The waist-to-hip ratio, I think, remains at about 0.68. Yes.
Typically. It's quite constant.
Got follow, got follow figures, smaller figures, but the waist to hip has always remained the same. And the human behavioral ecology stuff that's going on at the moment, which is really fascinating how humans interact with their local environment.
This study looked at when particular body sizes, not shapes, because the shape remains the same, when particular body sizes are preferred. And it seemed like during periods of an economic recession, bigger women were preferred.
And during periods of economic prosperity, smaller women were preferred. So there was a study done on students, because that's the only people you've got to do it to.
They did it in their canteen. And they would show images of bigger and thinner women to guys before they ate and after they ate and before they ate when they were hungrier they preferred the bigger women and after they ate when they were followed they preferred the thinner women and the argument being if you were in time of resource uncertainty and you see a bigger woman you think oh she'd survive a tough winter and uh this seems to be borne out economically across time.
If you go back and you look at the trend, you can track it. Economy's good, tender women.
Economy's bad, thicker women. Yeah, that's the same phenomenon, by the way.
You want to, you're attracted by people who have resource abundance that have more than they need. That they can actually afford something that's scarce and a lot of something that's scarce.
So that's the reason that guys will go to Miami beach on spring break and rent a Ferrari and just like the street in the front, because you want women to think that that's your Ferrari because you're rich enough to have a car you don't actually need showing that you have, you have abundant res. My conspicuous consumption.
Yeah, that reason you know the fifth watch you know that's kind of what it comes down to i got maybe i need more i have more than i need it's a bottle of vodka so big that you couldn't drink it in two lifetimes yeah in a nightclub that you have to leave in three hours yeah yeah exactly right that's and so that that's and again i mean man psychology is biology it's so true and we have these weird tendencies to do these things and we don't know why it's like why are you peacocking why are you trying to actually peacock why do men put on way way way more muscle than they need i mean we can tell ourselves all day long that it's like oh man it's like really good for the muscle protein Helps to manage my insulin and all the rest of it.

It's like, eh, it kind of just attracts chicks. It's, it's what it is, is it suggests that you have more muscle than you actually need because you have resource abundance.
Long nails on women. Yeah.
Long hair on women. Mm-hmm.
Uh, it's like all the collagen and, you know, they, what, what it suggests is a really, very, very and good nutrition, and so therefore high fertility. You said this sort of startup or founder mindset when it comes to building relationships.
How should people think about project managing the task of finding their future husband or wife, especially given that we are living in a world where people are more risk averse than ever before, slow life strategy, uh, less risk taking behavior, less risky behavior, endemic everywhere among young people. Yeah.
So number one is finding people in real life. Number one is finding people in real life because what one, there's really interesting new data out there that show that the, the instigation of the relationship, if it's mediated through technology, makes it less stable to begin with.
So there's a new paper out that we can put in the show notes when I find it. I just wrote about it in this new book that I'm writing on meaning.
Oh, and it shows that marriages that actually start online, and by the way, 62% of relationships are starting online right now because it's crowded out. I mean, it's the Vs tapes of relationships that's crowding at betamax it's a an inferior technology for actually finding people that's what's available so you approach somebody in a bar and they think you're a creep at this point anyway the problem with that is that it leads to when relationships even marriages are less stable and there's less attraction when they're when it's actually mediated by.
The better relationships actually come when somebody sets you up. When you meet somebody through a mutual interest or through mutual people that you know and love, that's really what it comes down to.
So people will ask me, it's like, so where do I meet somebody? And you go someplace where you might meet the kind of person that you might conceivably find attractive. So for example, were you raised in a religion? Yeah, but I don't practice it.
I don't care. Go to church, right? Go to the church where all the young people go to, but I don't believe it.
I don't care. That's not the point.
The point is you could, you could believe it. The point is you don't hate it.
The point is you want to, you want somebody that has those values, for example, and somebody who has that in common with you potentially that you actually might find attractive and somebody who might talk to you despite the fact that you're bald or whatever thing that might not get you past the swipe left, right on the dating site. So number one is human mediated meeting.
That's number two no more simulating no more simulated no more porn no more pornography and pornography is just absolute cancer for attraction and for expectation and relationships especially for men because men get deeply deeply um addicted to it it just it grabs you and there's a lot of research on this i mean there's some research that suggests it's not addictive that's not i had uh do you know who dr david lay is university of new mexico yeah i've heard of him yeah and as a matter of fact i've seen some of his stuff on psychology psychology today yeah yeah he's in the circuit he's a diana fleischman s jeffrey millary type person and uh i had him on the show and i've really been kind of conflict. So I'm super interested to hear what your sort of position is and what the data suggests.
So I don't do this work. I don't do this work, but I find the preponderance of data compelling that it is highly addictive.
And it does actually torque the expectations that men have about the relationships with women. And it tends to objectify women in ways that will harm your ability to go through the neurochemical cascade and get to oxytocin.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
In other words, it tends to interrupt the cycle. You got to go through the stages.
And if you're interrupting the stages because of something you're doing to your brain to get the satisfaction that comes from just stage one, it's a problem. That's not what we're actually made for.
And again, I mean, I know there are some scholars that disagree with this, but I just don't find it compelling. So the suggestion is that if you're training yourself or if you're practicing stage one over and over, and then the time comes in the real world for you to go from stage one to stage two, that's...
It's going to be harder. And it's maybe not even possible.
We may have a generation of young men in particular that can't get past stage one. Can I give you...
So this is just the Chris Williamson bro science hour here. You're pretty good.
You're pretty serious consumer of this stuff. Yeah.
So this is... Don't sell yourself short.
This is not bro science. Bro science in many ways is actually superior to real science.
That's the... Well, part of it is just because it's broader.
Correct. Yeah.
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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. This actually came up in a paper.
So David and William, number one researcher of incels and Dr. Buss himself, they wrote a paper based on a conversation that we'd had, which is,

where is all of the incel violence? So you'll be familiar with young male syndrome. In societies where there is a high number of young, unmarried and unpartnered men, they tend to become

disgruntled. They push over cars and they set things on fire and they abuse granny and it's

not good. And in certain societies in our past, I think Portugal had the first male was allowed

to make sure that the and they abuse granny and it's not good. And in certain societies in our past,

I think Portugal had the first male was allowed to marry and the rest of them were put on ships

to go discover the new world,

which is not fuck up the homeland

was really what they were talking about.

But in an era where we have, you know,

this sort of silent epidemic of needs,

not in education, employment, or training,

men who are largely living lives, many of them living lives mediated through virtual worlds. There is a question of, if young male syndrome has been this very present dynamic throughout all of human history, and we're in an unprecedented time of sexlessness, specifically among young men, especially if women are tending to date up socioeconomically, they're outperforming men, especially up to the age of sort of 30 or so.
So one of the ways that they can compensate from that is just sort of skew that dating age up a little bit, partner a bit higher, and they can actually bring a man in line socioeconomically. One of the biggest predictors of wealth is age.
So that's pretty easy to do. You think, well, where is the violence in kind? Where is the subsequent concern? And it was mine and the guys, I think, belief that men are largely being sedated out of status-seeking and reproduction through porn, video games, screens, social media.
And yeah, this male sedation hypothesis, I think is something that they're going to see. I think it's very compelling.
I think a very compelling hypothesis. Now, there are places in the world where you are seeing these effects.
So interior cities in China, where the ratio of men to women who were born over the past 30 years is 124 to 100. And had to do a sex elective abortion and all of the abandoned men.
One of my kids was a Chinese girl who was abandoned at 12 hours old in a park in China. I mean, it was just millions and millions and millions.
And in the early 2000s, a lot of them came to the United States because there was a big adoption movement that we were part of, as a matter of fact. But the upshot of that is in that period, those people grew up and there aren't as many women as there are men.
And There's a lot of fact. But the upshot of that is, in that period, those people grew up, and there aren't as many women as there are men, and there's a lot of trouble with...
Sex ratio hypothesis is a... It's a big problem, and this is one of the reasons for the social instability in Chinese cities, as a matter of fact, and that's why they're importing girls from Vietnam, and it's like...
Not officially inflating the sex ratio. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So this is no joke. And if there's some way to, to, to sedate guys that, that are.
Here's the really ruthless implication of it, which is, you know, a group of men who are useless and sedated, maybe, maybe on balance is better than a group of men that are dangerous and anarchistic but not by much and those two choices aren't particularly good that's not which that's not the kind of choice you want to be making in a society and that and and that's really not a choice you want to be making personally what a young man should not be having to choose between you know violent antisocial behavior and seven hours a day of pornography that's a bad choice and the whole point is you get your life together turn off the porn start paying attention to becoming more successful get serious about your education in your business and get into the gym and all of that stuff that these guys like Goggins and Jocko and Jordan Peterson are talking about that's why they're talking talking about these things. And so men don't have to make these, this, this, this awful weird bargains.
You know, it's like, okay, to stay out of prison, I'm gonna look at porn. It's like dystopian.
It's science fiction. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I saw a stat, uh, last week, you know, talking about, I guess, some of the challenges of remaining best friends. Uh, if grows up in a non-intact household of any kind, any kind at all, there is a higher likelihood of them going to prison than completing college.
Yeah. The number one predictor for a man being successful is seeing his father loving his mother.
Well, how is that defined? That's defined as dad stays home and is faithful to mom. Right.
That's what you want. It's like, as a dad, you got one job.
Love her. If you want to raise successful kids, especially boys, you have one job.
Love his mom. That's so sick.
It's crazy, but it's great in its way. It's beautiful in its way.
And look, here's the funny thing. I mean, people often ask, like, you know, what do I do? What should I teach my kids? It doesn't matter what you tell them.
You could talk to them in a foreign language. Show them.
All that matters is what you do. So the number one predictor, for example, of kids growing up and practicing a religion is whether their father practices a religion.
There's like a 40 percentage point difference in the father and the mother practicing on the predictive ability, on the predictive capacity on how how the kids are going to grow up and behave and there's almost it's almost certainly the case it's because i mean when i was a little kid i thought my dad was you know i thought he could lift the corner of the house my dad was a math professor he could not now i realize he was a nerd at the time i thought he was cool that I'm a nerd, I recognize that. But, and my dad was a very proud guy.
I mean, he never would have bent the knee to any other man, but he was on his knees on Sunday. And that had a big impact on a little dude.
There's something bigger than my dad. And I saw it and it's in there, right? That's really important in every part of life.
If you want to teach virtue, practice virtue, be the person you want your kids to actually turn into. And they will become that.
Generally speaking, they'll become that person. Yeah, I was thinking about this generation, both millennials and Gen Z, the progeny of parents who didn't have the tools to sort of relate or navigate in the same way as an infinite number of evidence-based relationship coaches and the podcast world and the self-help and all the rest of it.
Uh, I think I wonder how they should go about thinking, well, I didn't necessarily have the best example in front of me because there was challenges here and we did have uh changing dynamics and and motivations around the acceptance of divorce and maybe i did grow up in a non-intact home and such uh but that sets expectations for a good relationship is supposed to be now and there's this interesting uh not a burden i suppose but a responsibility opportunity to be a circuit breaker right and to think you know goggins talks about this so you know he explains about how um his dad hit him a lot as a kid right and he had a a brother and sometimes goggins sort of took the beatings in place of his. But he also found out that his granddad would make his father stand in front of an open stove.
And if he moved, he would hit him with a belt as a kid. So you have this lineage, this like ancestral, literal ancestral trauma, but physically being passed down.
Plus also probably epigenetically being fucking passed down as well.

And I asked David,

I didn't even know that this was the case.

It was really kind of beautiful of him to say on the podcast.

I said, if you had a child,

how would you hope to raise them?

He said, I do have a child.

I've got a 22-year-old daughter.

He'd never mentioned it previously.

And he brought it up on the episode.

And he said he basically sees himself

as kind of like a dam, sort of a breakwater with this circuit breaker thing in between the series of mistreatments of people right like no more and i kind of think i often think about that example when it comes to stuff like um your parents didn't necessarily have the tools you do yeah you didn't have an example but you have opportunity. And you have the metacognitive ability to manage your emotions so they don't manage you.
This is the most important thing to keep in mind. I mean, we're talking about the psychology being biology, but we also have will.
We also have a prefrontal cortex for a reason. That's the most important part of the neurobiology of all is the C-suite of your brain where you're actually making decisions, notwithstanding your proclivities.
I mean, you've got these urges. We all have these urges.
You know, you look at a woman who's not your wife and you go, oh man, she's really, really attractive and all that. And then your prefrontal cortex, which is the behavioral activation system, the behavioral inhibition system, that's in the prefrontal cortex, BIS and BAS, behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation, right? And behavioral inhibition is more important because, you know, I want to hit my son and my prefrontal cortex says, uh-uh, no, because my father hit me and I'm not my trauma.

That's a perfect example of metacognition.

That's a perfect example of being the master of yourself.

And we actually can do that, but you got to have knowledge.

You have to be strong, but you also actually have to have knowledge.

And that's why all this stuff matters.

That's how I teach happiness is happiness is really a process of understanding the science, practicing habits that go along with the science and then teaching it to other people so you ingrain it in yourself. And that's anything that you want to do, anything you want to get better at.
If you want to become a better golfer, learn about golfing, golf, and teach golf. You know, doctors, when they're becoming surgeons, they always say, watch one, do one, teach one.
That's how you become a surgeon. Anything in life actually follows that basic pattern, but you must have the knowledge such that the habits that you practice are not the habits that are just kind of lurking in your limbic system and being epigenetically expressed from the misbehavior of people six generations ago or some crazy thing like that we should not be prisoners of that yeah there's this gorgeous idea from uh robert writes why buddhism is true that's a nice book fuck dude blending evolutionary psychology i know with buddhism uh because the book that got me into EP was The Moral Animal from 1991 or 1992 or something.
And it's still, there's some of the stuff, a little replication crisis, but most of it's shit hot. And I loved it.
The replication crisis is a big problem in my field. Yeah.
A lot of people make their careers.

If it's too good to be true,

and grandma would have said,

I mean, I can find you a study that shows that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness.

I mean, I'm sure I could.

Some motivated reasoning by a researcher there.

For sure.

Darling, darling, honestly, I only did it.

Not only did I not love her,

but I did this for us.

I know, exactly.

And besides, studies show. And anyway and and and but the whole problem if it if a study and this is like you're talking about evolutionary psychology all the time and biology all the time and this is my stock and trade as behavioral scientists for everybody watching if your grandma would hear this result and say that's wrong she's probably right okay okay uh anyway.
Okay. Anyway, why Buddhism is true by Robert Wright.
Then there's this quote from some Buddhist teacher that says, ultimately in life, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. And I just love that idea of the, because it's the first step, the knowledge is power, right? And I think in many ways, that is why this burgeoning industry, whatever we want to call it, wisdom porn of wisdom porn.
There's some Reddit threads. I think that that is the gateway drug at the top.
I think that that's what people are looking for yeah the question that i have the potential problem i can see is for the ruminative cerebral insecure overachiever type people who enjoy content like like yours and mine um to get stuck in just the first step knowledge knowledge knowledge knowledge, knowledge, just sucking it in.

How do you advise, and I imagine that many of your students are like this too, you know,

the academic-y, intellectually people, praying at the cognitive horsepower altar.

How do you move them beyond that?

Yeah, so that's actually what academics are really bad at.

So I have this column in The Atlantic every Thursday, and I'm the retailer of academic stuff in this.

And so I'm not actually running the regressions or doing the experiments myself. I'm at the point

in my career, what I'm, I'm looking, I usually I will, I'll survey a particular topic every week.

It's a different topic, a different scientific topic in the happiness literature, the, you know,

the broader living, better literature and the neuroscience and behavioral science. And then

The first part is, here's what the science says.

The second part is, here's what the science says. The second part is here's how you can use it.
Here's it, but you got to practice it. And I practice, I'm usually 10 weeks ahead of my column and I'm practicing those things to see if it works.
So I'm a lab and this is the important thing. This is the important ethos.
You're not going to design experiments perfectly like a drug test in your own life because N equals one. And, you know, statistically, it's and there's no control group.
But you are a lab. Start living like you're a lab.
So learn something about this and set up an experiment in your life. And so you keep, yeah, I read an article and says that, you know, that the part of the limbic system dedicated to resentment is much, much larger than the part of the limbic system dedicated to gratitude.
And that's why we have a negativity bias. And that's how we revolve because resentment and suspicion and anger keeps us alive and gratitude is nice to have.
And I get it. Oh, that's very, very interesting.
Okay. What that means is you need to practice gratitude consciously to override your negativity bias.
And how do you do that? Well, I'm going to set up an experiment where I'm actually going to practice gratitude in a very particular way every day for a week. And I'm going to write, I'm going to, I'm going to keep the data.
I'm actually going to keep my own data. Is it publishable in the, in, you know, the, in psychological sciences or, you know, the journal of personality research? No, that's not the point.
The point is you living better, but you're not going to do it unless you actually change your habits and experiment on yourself and treat your life like a lab. Should you limit the bits of input, the sort of FOMO, next thing type idea, the intellectual pawning of, this is new, I must try this new, because this is a different type of growth.
Maybe it's breathing. Maybe it's breath work that I need to be doing.
Maybe it's some other, maybe it's prayer. What about the prayer thing? So is it commit in advantage? Do you have any rubrics that you get people to follow when it comes to this? Yeah.
Well, people are substituting stage one for stage two. In other words, get some information, set up an experiment and commit yourself to it.
That's the most important thing is the doing as opposed to learning. Learn, do, learn, do, learn, do.
And then by the way, teach. Because then what will happen is by the time you've done five or six of these experiments, there's one that's actually working for you and then you're teaching.
Then you start your podcast. Well, I love the thing that I really love about the teaching element is it wraps more of your identity up in this thing because you become an advocate for it.
That's you. Which deepens your practice of it.
This is a teaching podcast. Modern Wisdom is a teaching podcast.
It's not an entertainment podcast. It's an actual teaching podcast.
It's entertaining. Professor Williamson.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
But you're retailing, you're retailing serious ideas all the time again and again and again and again. And people who stop with consuming the retailed ideas are missing or missing out because what they, we've talked about a whole bunch of really practical things that people can do actually write these things down, you know, look at the show notes, put together a couple of experiments in your own life.
And if you like them, share them, like find some way to actually share them with other people. That's what social media is for.
That's what, that's why God created YouTube and social media is for sharing ideas. You mentioned resentment there.
You sort of, we've talked about all of the ways that dating and then making a long-term relationship can go right. Resentment, contempt, uh, some of these sort of real trap doors, uh, in relationships.
How can people better overcome contempt? You've had John Gottman on your podcast, right? Not yet. I'm trying to get an intro.
Got man, Julie and John Gottman. I've actually, um, I've, I've talked to them before.
They're phenomenal. They're, they're visionary.
They're actually heroes because anybody in any good societies, any strong societies based on strong families, obviously, and strong families require this one element, which is mom and dad loving each other. You know, that's what families have in common is that two parents who love each other and they've saved thousands of marriages, thousands of, it's unbelievable.
And the number one thing that really jumps out of their research is that they find the marriage killers. So in other words, not what to do right, what to stop doing wrong.
That's how you start anything. If you go to the doctor and say, oh man, I think I drink too much.
He's not going to put you on something to treat the trouble with your drinking. He's going to tell you to drink, stop drinking at the very beginning.
So that's what they talk about, things to stop doing. And the number one thing gets to the crux of your question,

which is to stop treating each other with contempt.

Now there's a whole concept in the,

it's actually in the political science literature,

but it's,

it's a psychological concept called motive attribution asymmetry.

You know about this?

Is this why Nazis called Jews vermin?

Yes.

So the good,

nice boy,

you're good.

You really know a lot about this stuff. So motive attribution asymmetry says, I love, but they hate.
Right? And so, therefore, it's related to the idea that you will, with contempt, you'll call, you know, the Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches. And, you know, the German Nazis called the Jews rats, for example.

That's because you can other them in that particular way.

But it's based on this idea that I love Germany and they hate Germany.

They're the other.

And they don't love us.

They hate and I love.

In an implacable conflict, not just the genocidal situation, but an implacable conflict like a civil war, both sides believe that they love and the other side hates.

That's the Middle East.

No, no, no. I love.
It's like I love my people and I love this place and they just hate us. And both sides think that, and that's based on an error because both sides can't simultaneously love and hate.
And so, so the, the, the central idea behind that is if you have an implacable conflict that's leading to schism, that you're going to find that error behind it, motive, attribetry and i'm not trying to sort out world you know conflict but i can sort out a lot of couples going to yeah and almost all marital marital disillusion comes from from motive attribution asymmetry so you take a couple that's on their way to divorce court and he'll be like no i still love her but she, but she hates me. And she'll be like, no, I'm the one who loves.
He's the one who acts like he hates. And the reason is because they're behaving in a contemptuous way that says you're worthless and I do hate you, even though you don't feel that way.
John and Julie Gottman, one of their central insights is that we communicate so poorly because we're transmitting hatred when we don't feel it. Why? Why would that be adaptive? It's not clear why it's adaptive, but it certainly is a habit.
And so what the habit is basically, so he'll look at a couple that he's met just now, talk to them for an hour and watch them in the laboratory

discussing something of great contention. And he'll want to see if they're rolling their eyes because eye rolling is a real physical manifestation of contempt.
Now, contempt is two negative emotions blended together, anger and disgust. Anger is a hot emotion that's not correlated with divorce.
Thank God with my marriage to a Spaniard. Disgust is a response to a pathogen in the insular cortex of the brain, the insula of the brain.
Retreat. And what it says is that's a pathogen that might poison you.
That's all we had before antibiotics and vaccines was the insular cortex that gave us a sense of disgust. So that piece of chicken in the back of the fridge that you forgot about, you're like, never, never, never, never treat another person like a pathogen.
This gets us back to the Nazi thing that you talked about before. When you treat somebody like a pathogen, the way that you stimulate the insular cortex in an entire population is by talking about them in terms of disgust to stimulate that part of the brain, as such, making them utterly anathema and worthy of the greatest barbarity.
Justifies mistreatment. That's exactly right, because it's the same way that you'd hose off your shoes after stepping in something awful, or you'd throw away something that's rotted in your fridge, or you'd kill somebody who's an actual pathogen in your society by talking about them in this pathogenic way, stimulating this very, very volatile part of the brain.
Okay. Take those two things and put them together.

That's contempt. When you express contempt for somebody, that's interpreted as hatred.

And that's what people do when they get into these suboptimal routines in their marriage.

And they'll be like, you always say that. Really? Really? Again? Sweetie? Really?

And she interprets that as he thinks what I said is worthless. He thinks I'm worthless.
And that's what leads to this communication breakdown of, I love, but she hates. No, I love, but he hates.
And then you get divorced. People can literally get divorced because they don't know that their eye rolling is expressing hatred for their partner, which is almost in a way that when you get hatred from another person that you're supposed to love, that is as painful in the limbic system of the brain as physical abuse.
That's the same part of the brain. That's the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the limbic system that's affected when you're being rejected.
That's what motivates social rejection and sadness. That's the affective part of all pain, as a matter of fact, that comes from that and is super acute when you're getting, and you don't say, all I did was roll my eyes.
No, no, no. You spoke volumes that you didn't think that you were, you didn't even mean it.
And so what he does is what they do in the Gottman marriage lab is they treat, they teach people. Here's the beautiful thing about it.
Most couples just need to say what they really think, which is actually, I love you. I really, really love you.
Really? Well, I really, really love you too. So let's not accidentally be telling each other that we hate each other.
That's where, how the contempt comes in. And that's one of the examples of suboptimal habits that can ruin a relationship.
And if you can turn that around, and how you do that? Knowledge and practice. The knowledge is don't do it.
The practice is touch and eye contact. And then life gets better.
What else is some of the suboptimal habits? Of couples. Number one is, well, I mean, anything that actually pulls people apart so they have insufficient contact, neurophysiologically insufficient contact with each other is going to create a real problem.
And so, for example, what you'll find is the habit of doing what you're really, really good at as opposed to what you're getting worse at. People will be getting, they'll be losing their relationship chops while they're getting better in their careers.
And so they're spending a lot more time. One of the reasons they spend a lot more time at work is because that's what they're better at and that's where they're getting their satisfaction.
I had this, I got to interject. I had this insight a couple of weeks ago about why people commit themselves to their careers more than they commit themselves to their partnerships yeah the reason being that only you can leave your career but not only you can leave your partnership and there is this sense of safety it's like if i just keep grinding away on this i'll probably get better yeah i'll probably grow but the same isn't true because my career isn't going to leave me yeah Yeah.
But my partner might. Yeah.
And that's one of the things that you find is that your career will never keep you warm, but your spouse will. You're saying that people who make a trade where they get a job that is an additional hour commute there and back five days a week because it's a better job title or they think that it's going to give them fulfillment or validation or whatever.
It'll make them special. And that's the special versus happy.
A lot of people will choose specialness over happiness. Why? The world wants you to be special, wants you to stand out.
The world, Mother Nature wants you to be special. Mother Nature does not care if you're happy, Chris.
She does not care. She wants you to survive and pass on your genes.
And when you're really excellent and outstanding and getting more resources and getting better at your job, you're going to be more special. But you will be less happy.
And that's why people will become, will walk into mediocrity in their marriage while they're walking toward excellence in their work. And the result is they're going to be less happy.
They're just going to be less happy. And by the way, guilty, man, guilty, guilty.
I'm a, I'm, I'm a completely success addict. 16 books deep.
15. Anyway, it's, it's, I'm addicted to success.
And, and, and there's all this interesting neuroscience on success addiction. You know, when people are told, you know, usually good students who are also good athletes as kids,

and they get all their validation from parents,

and that gives them this neurochemical reward from,

you're such a hard worker.

And that's another good report card.

And they're looking for the next gold star

for their whole lives.

These are the people,

when they get past the flush of a relationship

and it starts to become a little bit boring,

then they'll just like lean in to the specialness. they'll lean into the

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the the the the the the they get past the flush of a relationship and it starts to become a little bit boring then they'll just like lean in to the to the specialness they'll lean into the the the the adulation that actually comes from excellence in their work and let their and let their marriage become utterly mediocre right they've kind of become um adrenaline junkies or whatever the particular hormone of neurochemical of choice is junkies and the relationship the relationship is no longer able to compete. And now that you're out of passion and into companionate, it's not giving you quite the same rush.
The progress isn't there. You know, you've kind of, you've retired, you've retired from the growth, the rushy growth, but the career can continue to give you that.
And you might be very admirable. You might be really, really admirable.
the problem is that you're not adoring that you're you've stopped adoring because all you've again there's two things you need to do guys you need to be you need to be adoring and admirable and if you do 100% admirable and 0% adoring you're going to lose your relationship talk to me about this balance it's uh attention that has come up an awful lot i did these live shows last year i'm about you went on tour i did you like it it's fucking awesome dude it's sick did you sell tickets i sold out the event in apollo in london three and a half thousand people which was pretty cool phenomenal how long was your tour uh so i did four dates around australia uh no sorry three dates three dates around australia brisbane melbourne sydney uh we did one big show in london and we were about to announce uh canada in the u.s this is boston new york la with a plus one so we could double up on that like matinee across the weekend Nashville, Utah, Toronto with a plus one. So we could double up on that, like matinee across the weekend,

Nashville, Utah, Toronto, Vancouver,

Austin, Chicago.

So we've got a good run and we're going to try and do a world tour next year.

So that would be like Jakarta, Delhi.

It's sick.

I really, I love it.

That's the best.

It's the best.

The touring is the best.

It's so fun.

Yeah.

It's so fun. I mean, some people hate it, right it right i love it i've been on tour since i was 19 you know i was a french horn player either french horning or yeah yeah oh it's the best it's the best talking in front of real people and getting up but you're also very you're are you an extrovert i would say introvert over are you but i i've got i can swing both ways i'm the real question about that is not whether you can perform the question is whether or not you've got more or less energy after a performance in front of people.
After a performance in front of people more, what I do find a little trying, this is an interesting question. I'm aware of the sort of, where do you get your energy from? Do you get it from being a neurone being around people? Anna, I've been thinking about this a lot.
Maybe you're the person to speak to about this. Only child.
Spent child spent a lot of time in solitude as a kid spent a lot of time in solitude working throughout all of parents together parents okay yep good parent parents still together yes okay uh and i really enjoyed my time alone really really enjoyed it put me in a room with a laptop and some slow moving deep house and i'll just grind until i until the caffeine wears off and i just keep going get up i said before one of my skill sets is maybe uh dealing with discomfort like being able to sort of keep going delaying gratification very very good at that uh but recently especially the last i'd say five years in training, lifting things, and probably three years or so, uh, psychologically with the way that I work, I found myself wanting to spend less time alone. And I got a trainer about two years ago here in Austin, because when I, I used to be able to just happily AirPods in listening to a podcast, prepping for a guest, listening to an audio book, listening to some music, go in, just crack out a session at, you know, a nine out of 10 effort and then go home and not think about it.
I just found that I really, I just didn't want to do that. But if you put me in front of a trainer or you get me training with a friend, flying.
And kind of the same things happened a little bit with work where I just take less pleasure from working on my own now. Uh, you know, when it comes to doing the live tour, I could happily go on without an opener.
I don't need an opener, right? I'm going to take an opener. So I want to have one of my boys there with me.
I don't want to be experiencing this on my own, despite the fact that I kind of get the sense that Chris of 10 years ago would have been like, no, the Lone Ranger, this, like, this is cool. Like it's a solo adventure.
And I don't want that. And, uh, that's been a transition that I've noticed in myself.
That's a normal transition. That's a normal transition.
That's a, that's both, believe it or not, that's a neurobiological transition. Um, that gets back to the work of Raymond Cattell, the, the British social psychologist in the sixties and seventies.
He was really fifties and sixties and seventies. Actually, he was the world's greatest researcher in his time on intelligence.
So I wrote a book on this called From Strength to Strength about how people, they go through the course of their careers and they find that their interests change and what they used to be good at, they're not as good at, and they're good at something different. And it's very disconcerting.
So super high performers in their 20s and in particularly the early part of their 30s they find that they're less and they burn out they're less interested in doing something especially with individual indefatigable focus that's because that's called fluid intelligence according to cattel that's working memory individual work um incredible focus on, innovation, individual innovation, right? And that's highest as you're going through your 30s, right? It tends to peak in your late 30s and then start to fall. Your results may vary, but they probably won't very much.
The second curve of intelligence called crystallized intelligence and comes in behind it, you've heard about this. This is wisdom, right? This is what all the things that you know, that's pattern recognition, teaching ability, mentoring, and coaching, sharing ideas.
That's what you get better and better and better. So what you're, you're 38.
I mean, you're at the top of your fluid intelligence. 37.
30 years from now, you're going to be in the zone, man. You're going to be much better even than you are now, which is going to make you super potent, but you're going to get way, way more interested in and get much more satisfaction from sharing ideas.
I mean, the fact that you've become a teacher now, that's going to go to the max as you get older because you're going to be on this crystallized intelligence curve, but you're, you're, you're a little ahead of schedule, but not that much. How would you manage that transition? That is making sure that you're walking from one curve to another.
So it's hard for some people. If you're a star litigator in your early 30s, you're the star lawyer.
You can crack any case. You can solve problems by yourself.
You should work toward going into management as you get older. As opposed to holding on to past glories.
If you're a startup entrepreneur, you come up with your brilliant whiz bang idea as a coder. When you're 30, you should be actually a VC when

you're 60 because you're, you've become a talent scout is what it comes down to. I was writing academic journal articles, you know, during using early AI algorithms in my early thirties, using something called genetic algorithms that were learning algorithms.
And I was imposing them across economic processes to see how they predicted. It was very mathematical.
I was writing papers. I can't understand today.
No way. Yeah.
And that was almost 30 years ago. And now, but I had like, it's like you're a different person.
Yeah. And, and I had, and I had like 14 readers because it was so esoteric.
Now I have 500,000 readers a week for my column because I'm retailing ideas, because I've become a teacher.

Now, you know, I'll meet brand new professors coming right out of their PhDs.

And I'll look at their papers and say, do you realize what you're saying here?

They're like, I don't know.

They don't know.

They're just doing the math.

And I'm like, do you realize the implications of this thing? You know, people will come and say, what's the secret to getting great teaching evaluations? I'm like, get old. Yeah.
And that's because the crystallized intelligence increases. And that's the future.
But you got to make sure that you're walking onto that curve. And everybody in their profession, some people have to change careers.
And I'm all about that. I'm going to write a book at some point called how to reboot your life.
Cause I've done it. I've had four completely different careers.
They usually go about a decade each. And then I take the whole thing down to the studs and start again.
And it's super fun. It's super exciting, you know, and I've done it a bunch of times.
I ran a company for, I ran a big think tank for a long time as a French horn player for a whole decade. And, you know, that is great.
But to do that, you actually have to know which curve you're on. So you don't actually try to create a career in the, and a lot of guys who are very successful as entrepreneurs in fluid intelligence, they want that feeling.
They want to get that feeling back. They want to let go of this sense that I'm the rock star.
And they can't get it back. They can't get it back because their brain has changed and they'll get way more satisfaction from doing something on the correct curve.
And so I spent a lot of time coaching successful people to say, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing wrong with you.
You're just trying to get out. You're trying to stay on the old curve, walk onto the new curve.
So let go of this previous you yeah yeah yeah become the go from the innovator to the instructor go from the talent to the talent scout well i mean given how long people would have lived ancestrally it makes sense yeah you know if you're 40 you're probably a grandfather right by that point so you need to be bestowing some wisdom it's not really about you wanting to take down that gazelle on your own. Granddad, get back here.
Teach us about how you make that hot thing that has flames. How do I create the spear? I don't know.
It's like, how do I sharpen that flint? But it's also one of the reasons in the ancestral environment where people didn't live very long, that until relatively recently, we didn't have enough, we didn't have a stock of wisdom that would allow us to do these amazing things. Yeah, there was no corpus.
Yeah. So for example, it's like, of course there was no electricity in biblical times.
There weren't enough old smart people to say, we already tried that thing and it didn't work. Let's try this new thing so that you could make substantial advances that go through history.
That's why you need old people. That's why you need lots and lots of old people and you need to exploit what they've got.
This is actually one of the reasons arthur brooks yeah that's that's the thumbnail for the whole episode but the but there is not a c-suite of any substantial company in america that should have not have at least one person over 70 in it you need more old people who have vigor and health and ideas but crystallize intelligence that's one of the reasons that you look at Silicon Valley that are, there's just too

many young people.

I mean, it's like, I say this as an old guy, but, you know, I was giving a talk at, at,

at one of these tech firms, cause they have a lecture series always.

And, and somebody asked me about a diversity thing about, you know, women and minorities

in coding and engineering.

And that's a perfectly legitimate topic.

But I said, on the topic of diversity, how many people, how many old people work here? And the guy's like, you mean over 30? Punk. So, and that's why there's so many mistakes that you see in these youth-dominated cultures.
Because there's no wisdom being applied. There's not enough.
Just tons of energy. So have you looked at any mapping of introversion, extroversion over time? Is that a dynamic that does shift? Or is this just other stuff showing out as introversion or extroversion? Yeah, so extroversion has a couple of different dimensions to it.
One is gregariousness and the other is assertiveness. Those are the two dimensions of extroversion.
Extroversion is one of the big five, of course, as you know, and the big five almost all change as you get older, your personality changes. You're going to be a different person.
I am, and we all are. And your neuroticism is going to fall.
Your agreeableness is going to rise. Your conscientiousness is going to arise.
Your openness to change is going to rise and then fall. And your extraversion is going to change where your gregariousness is going to fall, but your assertiveness is going to rise.
That's what you find. That's what typically, canonically, that's what we find in the literature.
And generally speaking, your personality is going to get better. Generally speaking.
Better. Better.
More optimal. You're going to be happier.
More enjoyable. You're going to be more fun to be around and you're going to be easier to be married to.
It's a good thing. I mean, it's like one of the things that you find, especially in neuroticism, people tend to be less depressed and less anxious when they get older.
You're going to be a less anxious guy when you're my age. I mean, I was a basket case when I was your age.
And especially when I was in my twenties and I was a chain smoker. And I mean, I was just like, I was self-medicating to theicating to the hill right well i did build a unpronounceable nootropics company so maybe we're on i'm on track there i'm just avoiding it's the 2025 equivalent of chain smoking maybe although yeah yeah yeah i mean self-administering nicotine i don't know but a lot of literature on that it's uh i wonder how many people struggle to let go of that previous version of them a lot of people do and the more special versus happy you are the harder it is the more that you're a success addicted workaholic the harder it is because that's your death threat is the threat to actually see how you see your own success as a human being the The thing you're most afraid of that attacks your identity, that's your death threat.
And everybody has a death threat, has a death fear. You know, only 20% of people have thanatophobia, which is the pronounced and pathological fear of actual death.
80% of us don't. I mean, do I want to die today? No, but you know, it's okay.
If I do, it's okay. But do I have death fear? Oh yeah.
I'm afraid of failure because I want to be special because that's who I am as a person. I'm a successful person.
Isn't it fascinating? I'm using the wrong terminology here, but I would use this sort of EP equivalent, which would be proximate reasons for behavior and ultimate reasons for behavior but there's a behavioral science equivalent conditional conditioned stimuli and what's the other one i don't know uh anyway the point being that when you spoke about it earlier on with regards to uh turn the anxiety into fear right like make it more concrete see it for what it is right get to the end what and and what will happen and what will happen if that happens and how likely is it that it's going to happen as opposed to the sort of what the proximate which is i feel this thing right i am worried i am scared i am whatever right and it's kind of the same with the specialness yeah which is uh if i don't continue to release three podcasts a week then the world's going to forget about me and people are not going to think i'm interesting i'm going to be homeless under a bridge and you have a gluten intolerance i'm going to lose my foot you go right okay well let's just dig a little bit deeper so why why why do you think the world needs to see what is it that you want from what i want to be liked by people it's like okay do the people that like you do the is that contingent on the amount of work that you put out each is that contingent on the amount of shows that you do or the amount of like is it does your wife care about whether it's book 16 or book 17 or whatever it's like that or is it something else and you're huh yeah actually no you're right and it's just so when you bring it into the light when the prefrontal cortex is managing the problem, the problem becomes manageable, which is really critical. You know, and we all actually need to do that.
But you're touching on one of the greatest fears of people who are in your space, which is the fear of irrelevance. And the fear of irrelevance, and part of the reason is because you're in an industry that has to feed a beast.
And that, man,'s hungry, feed me more podcasts, you know, more and more sub-stachoticals, more and more content, but also more demand and more supply. That's how the beast gets fed.
I mean, it's when you got your millionth subscriber, hit that subscribe and like button folks. I mean, it's like feed the beast, feed the beast.
And so that leads to this pathological fear of irrelevance and irrelevance is a death fear for a lot of people now the old version of the irrelevance was the ceo who was in who's who and you know 1928 or something like that and then was kind of forgotten and the old joke is from who's who to who's he in six months you know that famous jack nicholsonolson film about Schmidt, where he's like Mr. Big at an insurance company.
He's an actuary at an insurance company. And he has his, you know, his going away party and he retires.
And he goes back to help out the young guys just to give him a hand. And he sees some guy throwing away all his files in the dumpster out back like a week after he retires.
It's incredibly disheartening. And he's trying to find himself as the whole thing because his death fear really is his own irrelevance.
And that's what a lot of people have too. But the whole point is we need to actually figure out what our death fear is.
And then the way that you confront that, I have a whole meditation I take my students through. My students are mostly afraid of failure because they've never failed.
They're super strivers. They're Harvard Business School MBA students.
I mean, they're like kings and queens of the mambo, right? And they've never gotten a B. And so their death fear is somehow failing.
So I take them through a, there's a Theravada Buddhist meditation that I take them through called the Maranasati. Are you aware of this? You know how this works? The Maranasati is an actual death meditation that Theravada Buddhist monks in the Southern tier of tier of buddhism that's what robert wright practices is that theravada buddhism and if you go into a buddhist temple in thailand or vietnam or or sri lanka that you'll the the they'll often see pictures of bodies in states of decay dead bodies and imagine what it and you stand in this.
And imagine what it, keep going, keep going.

The Marinasati meditation is for a couple of minutes

in front of each one, you say, that is me.

And that is me.

Why?

Because you are going to die.

It is completely inevitable.

And only when you make it the most familiar thing,

your death, will you actually be alive.

So the Marinasati meditation requires

that you look straight into your death fear

to make it completely ordinary.

See, the truth of the matter is I'm going to fail. I'm going to be forgotten.
You're going

to become irrelevant. You're not going to have content.
And so only staring into the beast by

looking at the pictures of the cadavers of your own content creation. And so I actually ask my

students to write a Maranisati meditation where each part is the nine part meditation canonically in Theravada Buddhism, where each part is. So for example, it'll be, I'm going to think for two minutes.
So I'm going to imagine I'm not getting the grades at the Harvard business school that I thought I was going to get. I I'm getting lower grades than my companions and friends.
Next is I'm starting to get alerts from the administration that I'm not measuring up. The next is I think I'm going to have to take a leave of absence.
The next is I'm not getting job offers. You know, step six is usually, I think my parents feel sorry for me.
That's when people start to cry.

Right? Because that's what the death fear around the fear of failure feels like to people. And so everybody watching us, what is your death fear? That is the threat to the intrinsic you.
And if you don't get your mind around it, you're going to spend your time and your effort and your energy trying to earn other people's love.

So if you're, for example,

if you're going to spend your time and your effort and your energy trying to earn other people's love. So if you're, for example, if you're a success addict, when you get married, you're going to try to earn your wife's love and you're going to ruin your marriage, earning your wife's love.
Why? Because you'll never be enough. And then you'll go to work and try to earn her love and you'll try to earn more money to earn her love.
And that's what you'll do to try to feel alive and to actually not die. And you won't understand that you're starving her of what she really needs, which is you.
This is how death fears can torque our entire lives. And so the practice of that is go die.
How do people, if they're not at Harvard Business School with a particularly one-track mind of where most of the fear probably comes from, how do people more easily investigate what theirs is? Think about what actually keeps you up at night. Think about what it is that actually bothers you the most.
When you think about what is your paranoid fantasy, what is the thing that, if it feels to you, most catastrophic? What is the thing that actually feels most catastrophic? Is it losing a particular person that you love? Is it being ridiculed and humiliated? Is it not ever being able to make a living? You know, what is the concept that would destroy, that would utterly eviscerate your own self-concept of who you are as a person? That's where you need to write your Marinassati and stare straight at it every day. And you'll be free you will be free it's hard but it's beautiful and this is one just another example that your bliss lies through misery lies through the tunnel of misery bring it on let's finish it there arthur brooks you are so great dude i already can't wait i've got so much shit i want to speak to you about i can't wait to see you again we'll do it next time and you're in Austin, Texas.
Austin, Texas, baby. I already can't wait.
I've got so much shit I want to speak to you about. I can't wait to see you again.

We'll do it next time.

And you're in Austin, Texas.

Austin, Texas, baby.

Home of the podcast.

That's where all the cool kids live.

That's like, well,

it is as long as you're here.

Where should people go?

They want to check out all the stuff you've got going on.

ArthurBrucks.com.

I have my Atlantic column

every Thursday morning

called How to Build a Life.

Putting out a lot of videos

and ideas on socials like everybody does

these days because you got to feed the beast um i have a book every two or three years that comes

out a new one that's coming out in a year called the meaning of your life how to find deep purpose

in an age of emptiness that's coming out so but everything is at arthurworks.com

damn right arthur i appreciate you thank you i appreciate you too