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

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?

Mm -hmm, you've gotta 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. And you didn't.

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, what motivated you to keep going?

That, to be honest, my motivation waned way more in sort of your three and four and five.

cause 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.

How many books deep are you now?

15. 14 and 15 are going out in the next year.

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, buddy of mine.

Essay article, the journal post, from like 2011.

Compressing meaning and happiness, that one.

Fucking legendary, dude.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

And my whole concept of happiness rolls meaning into happiness.

Thus incorporating unhappiness into the process of getting happier.

Which of course is the standard experience of being fully alive.

You wanna be happy, you better be unhappy.

let's see how unhappy you can be before you can be happy.

The people who try to avoid their unhappiness paradoxically avoid their happiness, which is the problem.

Yeah, 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.

You're exactly right, and 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, 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 or not you embraced 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 the masters of meaning, they don't start at each day going, I'm truly grateful for all the nice things that are gonna happen to me today.

They wake up and they say, I'm truly grateful for all the things I'm not gonna like today.

That's what the master says.

Dude, you're so awesome.

Yeah, I hope you'd take a moment to reflect on just how great it is that we've got scientific insight, fantastic communication, illustrious career of teaching this to people, and then the ability to communicate it.

You're so fucking great.

I really appreciate you.

I appreciate that a lot.

It means a lot to me coming through.

You've talked to everybody in the world.

I'm slowly taking off the list. You actually know what you're talking about.

That's correct. I've slowly taken off all of the list. But yeah I just think this, you were saying it before we got started, whatever we wanna talk about this intersection of life advice, philosophy, science, research, insight, wisdom, like the contemporaries.

It's hardly fucking the Roman Agora, right?

But the opportunity to jump from a Mark Manson to an Alex Holmose to an Avel Ravikant to an Arthur Brooks to a Dr. John Delo, Like it's epic.

It's real cool. And you know, this is the time, you know, you run the scene 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're running the scene 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.

Oh, probably, I've had a lot of caffeine already so it was good.

Good, good, time for more.

Time for salt. Time for more.

Yeah, I really wonder what, I wonder how different, this would be a cool experiment to run if you could split test the universe, 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.

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.

Do you know that? But yeah, I wonder how, just how much of an effect it's having on masks?

I know a lot. There's anecdotal, I have anecdotal information about that.

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, 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 total maniac, right?

Six foot, five, he looks like me, but six foot, five, a lot of tats and hair.

Is he, oh, I was gonna say, has he got the hair, or lack of?

Yeah, well he's gonna lose his hair, too, because you know, he's a fan of the universe.

Welcome to the family.

Every bit as much as I did, and my, you know, misbegotten you.

And so, this is Carlos, and Carlos' 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.

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 them, it's a problem.

So these methods of learning from 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, they just don't like reading books.

There's something about the dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex that makes it 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, it's a business school professor.

Look, Newcastle University's 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 too - vendors, all this stuff, licensing, local councils.

It's like, why am I learning Henry Ford's theories of scientific fucking management?

Like I don't care. I don't care and I get the sense, 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 gonna be useful in few.

And sure enough, kaizen, lean management strategies and stuff have not come up, despite the fact that I've run businesses for two decades.

You know, that's right.

And it's not that it's, not just that it's not practical, that it's irrelevant.

And irrelevancy and practicality are totally different things.

And that's one of the reasons that Harvard Business School, generally the teaching method is case studies.

Is case studies of people in actual business.

That's not how I teach. 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, that 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 because that's the most complex thing that we're going to do.

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 an app for that.

There's not an app for the most complex thing in life, which is falling in love.

It's funny, because you know exactly what it is, but you can't simulate it.

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 gonna happen today.

My wife will get really mad at me probably today.

My wife is Spanish, and so they're very quarrelsome people.

It's a diplomatic way to put it, yeah.

And she would say that we're a defensive group.

Fuego. Yeah, that's right.

So we're defensive.

We're Americans and Brits.

So the result of it is that we're gonna have a conflict today, but I can't predict what it's gonna be.

I don't know what it's gonna be.

You know? And I've been married for almost 34, 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.

All right, and that's the spirit in which you go into it, which is I gotta go live this thing.

I gotta 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?

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.

on 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 the sense of euphoria, which is is norepinephrine produced by the adrenal glands, right, well the kidneys.

And that's what makes you go from, I'm really attracted to this person, to, I think she just sent 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 in 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 wanna 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, their noses 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 it's because we have in the back of our minds this sense that sort of the advertising boarding upfront still does have an impact no matter how deep and meaningful and looking past the skin and the hair and the rest of it.

The storefront. 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 gonna walk on by.

So that's critically important.

Now, this is actually one of the reasons that dating apps are so problematic like because they don't go past the storefront.

Storefront, storefront, storefront, storefront, right?

When you're stuck talking to somebody at a party, there is the initial impression, which is largely physical, which instigates the chemical response in the sex hormones, but then you have a conversation with the person that turns out they're intelligent, turns out they're funny, turns out they're interesting, and then 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 neurotransmitters start to kick in and that's when things start to get weird. That's when the whole thing is like suddenly the outsized importance of a text message.

That comes because this anticipation of outsize reward and the sense of euphoria that actually comes in around these little things that wouldn't matter at all.

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 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 another 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're waking up thinking about in the middle of the night usually means 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, how the brain works.

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 100 text messages in an hour like an idiot and you don't know why.

It's because you're ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating something, ruminating ruminating, 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 asked online at four in the morning, but didn't message me until eight AM.

Why was she waiting?

Exactly right, with sufficient serotonin, you'd be like, it means nothing!

Okay, she just writes okay.

You said, so I'll see you at eight.

She said okay. But when you're in low serotonin, you're gonna be like, I don't like the tone.

Of that, okay, those two letters.

I don't like the tone of those two letters.

So I did, this is really cool, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, Intelex DNA, cheek swab, put in a tube, send it off, full genetic profile done, and then mapped onto what is the likelihood, what is the prevalence in the wider population of this and what is it predictive of.

So MTHFR gene, you know you like the 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.

No. Tell me. 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 a 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 emophilia, 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, 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 you start to manage the process more and not let it manage you.

So you don't feel like you're possessed by a demon or something every time?

And then you're not freaking out scaring away girls is how this would work.

Which you'll want. Which obviously I've never done.

Okay, so that's stage three.

That's three is the serotonin stage, all right?

And stage four is really where you want to get in a relationship.

And ideally on the same schedule, and this is where relationships become pair bonds, 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 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, 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 gonna 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 is still going on, and of course, there's still, it's tons of attraction, the whole thing.

Year after year. 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 can face that, but yeah, she's looking at me, I'm find 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 on the road every week.

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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 a relationship.

The early stages are passion.

The bonding stage is what's often called companionate love, which sounds as my kids remind me, it sounds not hot.

Companionate love. But companionate love has lots of passion in it.

But 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 over the agony, you've got to go through the agony.

That's the reason that the friend zone almost never leads to these relationships because you skip the early stages.

Oh, fascinating. Yeah, the friend zone is really...

I mean I've heard people, it's like, yeah, you know, 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 that 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?

No, you gotta go through one, two and three.

You gotta 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.

Yep, 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 what you can't solve for love.

Plus, people putting together dating profiles, looking for themselves.

You curate your choices on the basis of your tastes and you want somebody who matches your tastes.

Do we not mate assortively, though?

We have a pretty minimal level of compatibility and then what really attracts us is complementarity.

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, the big majority, 71 % of Democrats won't date a Republican.

41 % of Republicans won't date a Democrat.

Why is the diff - Quiz me this, Chris.

Why the difference between Democrats and Republicans in assorted political mating?

I would guess, Democrats I would assume are more open to experience as personality profile.

But they're more likely to not date a Republican.

That's my point, but they're more open to experience as a personality profile.

So they're not only having to, whatever it is, whatever the effect it is that's going on, it's having to compensate for their openness.

Their increase in openness, so this is even more strong.

Mm -hmm. I could try and pull out as much pro -social science as I want about purity, spirals, sense of ideological rigidity.

It's actually simpler than that.

So that's good stuff.

Okay. It's about gender.

Okay. Who's choosier, men or women?

Women. Who's Democrats, men or women?

Women. Men are more likely to be Republicans.

and they were like, yeah, and it was like, Democrat, I don't know.

Show me a picture. Like, yeah exactly, yeah.

They were like, how Democrat, how Democrat are we talking?

It's like and more beautiful, it's okay.

And so that's just choosiness is kind of the way that works, but we set up date, we, I mean I've never done it because, you know, I did my pair bond mate.

You escaped velocity.

Decades before the internet, yeah, exactly right.

19, I think my last date was in 1989 or 1988 or something like that.

It's the Euros bond, fantastic.

Nice, I know. Thanks, man.

But the dating app, you set it up so that it's like, I like Sriracha, and I want somebody who likes Sriracha.

I want somebody who thinks Austin's cool.

And pretty soon you're looking at 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 no, the immuno major histocompatibility complex, the MHC, that's from the all that stuff comes from the the mid 90s T -shirt smelling tests, you know, all that research right?

Where you can, the olfactory bulb senses is 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 personality.

You 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, 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 it is the case.

I'm fascinated with Ebony's research. And there's more saliva exchange the more passionately you kiss somebody.

Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

Can you just explain sort of those five steps there with a bit of an adaptive lens?

Like what 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?

OK, so the first stage is 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 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 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 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.

It's one or one and two over and over again, or the emophilic 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 fellow dopamine norepinephrine addicts out there about how they can, it sounds to me like 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.

If you spend enough time around the person and you go, fuck all of the things I said I wasn't gonna fall for and there they are.

So this is true and there's a really interesting research going back to the 90s on this.

You know the work of Arthur Aaron as Sony 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 and here's how he did it.

Yeah so that 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 opposite 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 they came into the lab, they come in opposite doors, they sit down at a table across from each other, and 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 asks him 36 questions that escalate in terms of intimacy.

So question one is, if you could have lunch with anybody or dinner with anybody in the world, who would it be and why?

Right? That's a good icebreaker at a party, right?

Steve jobs, you know, whoever it happens to be.

Well, why question 30 is, um, when's the last time you cried.

And why not? 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, you're screaming through the process of intimacy with this person.

And then ha ha now it's when it gets really good.

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.

Yeah. It's horribly manipulative.

Yeah, yeah. Could you, could you get it past an ethics board now, do you think?

Yeah, an IRB. I don't know, one couple got married.

Okay. Well, not that day.

Yeah, yeah, 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. It's unreal because we think that there's some sort of Disney soul mates 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 one of the things that I teach my business students and my clients is be careful with this.

So I'm in my company, in my unit, I need a team -building exercise.

You know what I'm going to do?

I'm gonna do an off -site.

No spouses so 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 in a bar or a restaurant or something.

They wouldn't get past step one in the confede.

But workplace plus two turns them from a strong seven to a nine.

Yeah, you gotta be careful.

So if you're a boss, every boss watching us here, be careful, don't ruin people's lives.

It's like no outside work activities that don't include plus ones.

If people have partners or spouses, they have to be invited to these things.

And you should be going with your partner or 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 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, totally. And you need to account for it!

And you think well, so you're saying that my partner doesn't actually love me that much?

That you can just put them in this, you can ask these fuckin' 36 questions and put them on the lazy river and there's a 50 % chance, 30 % chance that you're gonna cheat on me.

You're telling me that that's the depth of our love?

That's what, this transcendent, what about until sickness and health?

Yeah, kind of. Respect the biology, man.

Because we have brains.

That's a good way to put it.

you'll 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.

The way that I teach this is that all the interesting questions come from philosophy and ancient wisdom, or even modern wisdom.

Ah, we got the name of the show.

There it is. There you go.

Then you talk about the biology to understand a 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 gonna 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 misses 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 and just like you wouldn't walk in a bad neighborhood to $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 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?

and mess up your relationship.

Even if you don't do anything, it just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, cuz you're gonna 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 in the house.

That's right, the near occasion of sin.

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.

Do you know that well, can you explain?

Yeah, so the whole, David, I mean everything 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 gotta 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 gonna 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, 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, according to 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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David Bussell's work is very, and he didn't, by the way, this is my practical application of this.

He's gonna watch this and disown it completely.

He loves everything that I do.

He's my number one fan.

But one of the cool things that he explained to talking about you don't get to control the cascade quite but you can I suppose reframe what you tell yourself it means if that starts.

This guy reached out to him after he read The Evolution of Desire.

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 after reading that I took such 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 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 the 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, c'mon, 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.

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 that there's 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.

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, and not just David Buss' 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 from evolutionary biology it would suggest you need somebody who's going to take complete, I mean, 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, that is the largest gazelle I've ever seen that you just dragged into the cave, man.

I mean, that is going to feed our family for three–you're so big and strong.

It almost suggests that what guys need is just admiration.

I need you to admire me more than anybody else admires me.

We're not egomaniacs, but these are differences that actually would get back to, 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 again, I need to be admired.

I do need to be adored as a husband and as a person and the whole thing so it's not that simple, but there's a lot to that.

There's a lot to that.

One of the things that all guys will say what's the secret and it's number one adore her and and number 2, be admirable.

Be admirable, actually be admirable.

She's not gonna admire you if you're not admirable, for God's sake, and adore her.

What if I don't feel it?

I 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 overperceive attraction from women, and women underperceive 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. Yeah, the smoke detector principle working in both directions.

Yeah. And this is why, you know, for all of the girls that are like, the, the, my boss, no, he's just, well, just, he's just friendly.

He's nice with me. It's like you don't see him...

You really don't understand.

The way that he sees you.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

And you don't see him the way he thinks you see him, 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.

There's been the slightest hint of any attraction.

Now I get it, I mean, it's not that much to look at, but you know, there's not, not once I don't get guys who over perceive.

Never. 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, yeah. So tell, 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.

You, the serotonin is dropped.

The rationality is out of the window.

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 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 an anxious person and what that means is you have an overactive adrenal system, you have an HPA axis that 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 I realized this a few years ago.

No. Yeah I mean this is, 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 end 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 way you got to live your life is the way that that works out.

But it doesn't mean they don't go unmanaged.

So for something like anxiety, anxiety is unfocused fear.

That's the 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.

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 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.

You go to a doctor and doctor might say take a benzodiazepine drug, you know, take a little Xanax and you're gonna 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 a super anxious person, is to at the end of the day, and say, okay, five things are freaking me out.

But they're kind of like ghosts.

I'm not focusing on them.

I'm actually blocking out the real source of anxiety.

I'm just anxious. Number one, what actually is the source of 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 gonna happen.

Sometimes like I'm gonna die.

But sometimes it's like, the stock market goes to zero, then what's the probability that's gonna happen?

We're smart people.

What's the probability that worst case scenario is gonna 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've put it in its proper place.

You've given it 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 called your calm your HPA access your, 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 us.

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.

Actually four, so we're going through four, but there's not a stage five, I counted wrong.

Oh, ok. Whatever. Oxytocin is the, you know, the connection phase.

It's the stage four, yeah, yeah.

I was thinking about, um, relationships that have started to mature but are enabled by being long distance, you know, which I imagine pen palling back and forth is less common than somebody who lives in L .A.

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 takes you.

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 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 it's an 8 -hour time difference, and they're not going to see each other that often, but 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, so 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 built in our ancestral state to be living in 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.

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 who'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 gonna be more to it.

Also, don't be a jerk and you know, and take out the trash and unload the dishwasher and don't sleep with a coworker, 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 times and 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.

SIMON That's the price that you need to pay in order to make this work on the other end.

PAUL Absolutely. Absolutely.

And still it's dangerous.

It's still tough. I mean, you should be.

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

And 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.

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

I'm speaking to her.

And, you know, it's you know, phenomenal, it's great.

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You mentioned two parts, finding the right person falling in love, etc. Staying in love.

Yeah. What about that?

So Seth 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 a different pair bond, obviously but also not doing things that will pull you apart from that person, not making decisions that get in the way of the relationship.

And so that is your prominent relationship is the most important things, it's the person on whom you'll be gazing as you take your dying breath.

And that's actually what you want.

And that's really, really important.

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.

So when I'm counseling couples 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— is praying together.

That's literally the most intimate thing that a couple will ever do.

And I know couples who are, you know, churchgoers.

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 is something that's actually happening in the brain because of the neurochemistry.

I happen to believe that there is a metaphysics to it and there is a divine element to these types of things, but using those things, because it's that important.

Best -friending, turning your 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.

Yeah, 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 a friendship.

And the reason was because they're not cut out to be friends.

They don't have enough compatibility or complementary to actually be good friends to each other, or 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.

A good way of putting it, that's really nice.

It's true. You're kind of insane for half a year to two years.

Psychotic break. Correct.

You can't be trusted.

Do not run with sharp objects, do not drive heavy machinery, et cetera.

Don't buy a house. Don't go to Vegas.

But what you're basically doing, And I've been thinking, I had Taiji Shiro on recently, it was fucking fantastic.

And we were talking about this passionate companion arc we go through and how clever human biology is in sort of tricking us into doing this thing.

Getting attached to this person who we've got nothing in common with.

Yeah, they've got a nicely -shaped nose and they smell kinda cute or whatever.

I fell in love with a girl who didn't speak a word of English.

Okay. Not a word of English.

I think, didn't you say, did you drop something and go to Spain?

Did you have a scholarship?

No, I had a scholarship.

No, no, no, I just quit my job.

You quit your job. 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 wanted to be able to communicate with her.

Psychedelical hormonal fugue state.

It was insane. It was insane.

She didn't speak any English, I didn't speak any Spanish or Catalan, it was in Barcelona.

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.

And she's the mother of my children and grandmother of my grandchildren.

There is this unique period of insanity that everybody goes through, some people more quickly than others, some people out of sync with their partner.

But what you're really trying to do is you cannot use the front of the funnel, the shop window, even experientially, even if that shop window lasts for six to 24 months as something that is necessarily predictive of what you're actually trying to get to 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, but all you get to experience is romance but what you're supposed to be assessing based on is best friendship.

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 relationship, 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 average 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 gonna 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 it simulates the whole experience.

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, where the magic zone is 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 more of a merger.

Louise Perry talks about this.

She uses this example of a lamp.

And she says if you haven't yet moved into a house, buying a lamp that you like is pretty easy.

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 one of the problems with actually waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, but startups that work are mature startups.

So getting married at 16 the first time through, or you meet 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, you need more experience on that.

And that means you need more failure and you need more learning typically.

James, my business partner in Newtonic, 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… 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, a hundred doors, one sale.

He's like, ok, two hundred 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, 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?

Uh, yeah. Here's the classic one.

The big thing that people learn often is that they'll get into a relationship with the so -called dark triad, and they'll know what to avoid, what personality characteristics to avoid.

And so 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 name book out soon.

Yeah, and he's the master of the, 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 a 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 and all their friends have been slept with.

They'll not make that mistake, they'll look for that again.

Lesson that hopefully you only did once.

And so heartbreak two, heartbreak three, They are usually learning different lessons unless there's a particular pathology and the pathologies are 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 is because in nature you want to look for somebody who somebody else has done the work of making, of finding them a good enough partner.

Preselection. Yeah, that's one of the reasons that men in the eyes of women go up threefold in attractiveness when they're partnered already well 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 Croamp now typical typically in the male brain dopamine is stimulated because of a hips to waist ratio which She talks, 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 women look at men, and 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.

Women's preferred, males preferred body size for women has fluctuated across time.

The waist to hip ratio, I think remains at about .68.

Yes. Typically it's.

It's quite constant.

Got follow, got follow the 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 the 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 to, and 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 this seems to be born out economically across time.

If you go back and you look at the chart, you can track it, economy's good, tin of women, economy's bad, thick of women.

Yeah, that's the same phenomenon by the way.

And, 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 and the Ferrari, 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 reef.

My conspicuous consumption of that.

Yeah, that's the reason, the fifth watch, 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 in a nightclub that you have to leave in three hours?

Yeah, exactly right.

That's and again, I mean, 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 or that the muscle protein synthesis has this scene on the Latino. But helps to manage my insulin and all the rest of it.

It's like, eh, kind of just attracts chicks.

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.

The collagen and, you know, what it suggests is a really a very, very healthy metabolism and good nutrition and so therefore high fertility.

You said this sort of a 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, less risk -taking behavior, or 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 there's really interesting new data out there that show that 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 it 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 vhs tapes of relationships that's crowding out beta max it's 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 that 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 ask me, it's like so where do I meet somebody and and you go some place 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 believe it.

The point is you don't hate it.

The point is 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 one.

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 relationship, especially for men, because men get deeply deeply addicted to it.

It grabs you. And there's a lot of research on this.

Some research that suggests it's not addictive… Do you know who Doctor David Lee is?

University of New Mexico.

I've heard of him yeah.

And as a matter of fact, I've seen some of his stuff on Psychology Today.

Yeah, he's in the circuit.

He's a Diana Fleischmann -esque, Jeffrey Miller -y type person, and I had him on the show.

And I've really been kinda conflicted so I'm super interested to hear what your sort of position is and what the data suggests to see you on porn.

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 oxytocin.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, in other words, it tends to interrupt the cycle.

You've 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 gonna 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.

So this is... don't sell yourself short.

This is not bro science.

Bro science in many ways is actually superior to real science.

Well, part of it is just because it's broader.

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This actually came up in a paper.

So David and William, number one researcher of in -cells and Dr. Bus himself, they wrote a paper based on something, 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, 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 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 this sort of silent epidemic of NEATS, 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 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 more and 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 guy's, I think, belief that men are largely being sedated out of status -seeking and reproduction through porn, video games, screens, and social media.

And, yeah, this male sedation hypothesis I think is something that they're– 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, you know, the ratio of men to women who were born over the past 30 years is 124 to 100 and had to do a sex selective abortion.

And you know, all of the, you know, the abandoned men, one of my kids was one of my kids is a Chinese girl who was abandoned at 12 hours old in the park in China, I mean, it was, and there was just millions and millions and millions 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 trouble with— Sex ratio hypothesis is a… It's a 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, there's like, guys here— Not officially inflating the sex ratio.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So this is no joke, and there's some way to sedate guys 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 the kind of choice you want to be making in a society.

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 and 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 about these things, so men don't have to make these this these weird bargains.

You know it's like okay to stay out of prison and look at porn.

It's like dystopian, it's science fiction.

Yeah, I saw a stat last week, you know, talking about, I guess some of the challenges of remaining best friends.

because if a male grows up in a non -intact household of any kind, any kind at all, there is a high likelihood of them going to prison than completing college.

Yeah, the number one predictor of 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 dad you've got one job, love her.

If you want to raise successful kids, especially boys, you have one job.

Love is mom. That's so sick.

It's crazy, but it's great in its way.

It's beautiful in its way.

Here's the funny thing.

People often ask, 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 the religion.

There's like a 40 percentage point difference in the father and the mother practicing on the predictive capacity on how the kids are gonna grow up and behave. And there'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. But at the time I thought he was cool.

Now that I'm a nerd, I recognize that.

but, and my dad was a very proud guy.

I mean, he never would've 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 like, 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 you know we're this generation both Millennials and Gen Z are 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 then the podcast world and self -help and all the rest of it.

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 changing dynamics and motivations around the acceptance of divorce and maybe I did grow up in a non -intact home and such but that sets expectations for what a good relationship is supposed to be now and there's this interesting, not a burden I suppose but a responsibility opportunity to be a circuit breaker and to think, you know, Goggins talks about this, so you know, he explains about how his dad hit him a lot as a kid and he had

a brother and sometimes, Goggins sort of took the beatings in place of his brother.

But he also found out that his grandad 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 is 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 have to raise them?

He said, I do have a child.

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

He'd never mentioned it previously when he brought it up on the episode.

And he said he basically sees himself as a damn, sort of a breakwater with a circuit breaker thing in between the series of mistreatments of people.

Like, no more. And I often think about that example when it comes to stuff like, your parents didn't necessarily have the tools.

You do. You didn't have an example, but you have the 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.

and 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 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 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've 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 golf, and 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.

And 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 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 Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True.

That's a nice book.

Fuck. Dude. Blending Evolutionary Psychology with Buddhism.

Cause the book that got me into EP was...

The Moral Animal. Which is from 1991 or 1992 or something.

And it's still... This is some of the stuff...

A little replication crisis.

But most of it's shit on.

And I love it. The replication crisis.

It's a big problem in my field.

Yeah, a lot of people make that...

If it's too good to be true, and grandma would have said And I mean, I can find you a study that shows that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness.

I'm sure I could. Some motivated reasoning by a researcher that, for darling, darling, honestly, I only did it.

Not only did I not love her, but I did this for us.

No, exactly. And besides studies show that.

So and anyway, so but and the whole problem, 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 a behavioral scientist. for everybody watching.

If your grandma would hear this result and say, that's wrong, she's probably right.

Okay, 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, because it's a first step, the knowledge is power, right?

That's right. And I think in many ways that is why this burgeoning industry, whatever we want to call it, wisdom porn of...

Wisdom porn. Wisdom porn, yeah, 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.

The question that I have, the potential problem I can see, is for the ruminative, cerebral, insecure, overachiever type people who enjoy content like yours and mine, to get stuck in the first step.

but 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 academically, 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 your regressions are doing the experiments myself.

I mean, the point in my career, what I'm looking, 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 how you can use it.

Here's, but you got to practice it.

And 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 and you know it's 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 a 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 gonna set up an experiment where I'm actually gonna practice gratitude in a very particular way, every day for a week.

And I'm gonna keep the data.

I'm actually gonna keep my own data.

Is it publishable in psychological sciences, or the Journal of Personality Research?

No, that's not the point.

The point is you living better, but you're not gonna 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, that sort of FOMO, nexting type idea, the intellectual pawning, this is new, I must try this new, Because this is a different type of, 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'll 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. Why, 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. You're talking.

Professor Williamson.

Thank you, thank you.

but you're 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 are 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, we've talked about all of the ways that dating and then making a long -term relationship can go right, resentment, contempt, some of these sort of real trapdoors in relationships.

How can people better overcome contempt, resentment?

You've had John Gottman on your podcast, right?

Not yet, I'm gonna have an intro with him.

Gottman, Julian and John Gottman, I've actually, I've talked to them before, they're phenomenal, they're visionary, They're actually heroes because anybody, any good societies, any strong society is based on strong families obviously and strong families require this one element which is mom and dad loving each other.

You know that's how that's what families have in common is that two parents who love each other and they've they've saved thousands of marriages.

Thousands. 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, ah, man, I don't get to 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 stop drinking in 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, 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 the 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 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 I love, I you know 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 the central idea behind that is if you have an implacable conflict that's leading to schism that you're gonna find that error behind it, mode of attribution and symmetry.

I'm not trying to sort out world you know conflict but but I can sort out a lot of couples.

Yeah, and almost all marital disillusion comes 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 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 think I do hate you.

Even though you don't feel that way.

it's 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 would that be adaptive?

It's not clear why it's adaptive, but it certainly is a habit.

And 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 what all we had before antibiotics and vaccines, was the insular cortex that gave us a sense of disgust. So that piece of chicken in back of the fridge that you forgot about, you're like, yeah, 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 throw a weight, 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 there'll be like, you always say that.

Really? Really again, sweetie, really?

Uh, 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 it.

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 and in the limbic system that's affected when you're being rejected.

That's what, that's what motivates social rejection and sadness.

That's the, that's the, the affective part of all pain.

as a matter of fact that comes from that.

And it's super acute when you're getting, and you don't say Holly did it for all 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 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 we'd be telling each other we hate each other.

That's 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, they, 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 gotta 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.

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, I'll probably grow.

But the same isn't true because my career isn't going to leave me, but my partner might.

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, I'm 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, Kris.

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 gonna 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 gonna be less happy.

And by the way, guilty, man, guilty, guilty.

I'm a completely success addict.

16 books deep. 15. Anyway.

I'm addicted to success and there's all this interesting neuroscience on success addiction.

You know, when people are told, 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 adulation that actually comes from excellence in their work and let their marriage become utterly mediocre.

Right, they've kind of become adrenaline junkies or whatever the particular hormone of neurochemical of choice is junkies and the relationship is no longer able to compete and now that you're out of passion and into companion net, it's not giving you quite the same rush, the progress isn't there.

You've kind of, 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 is that you're not adoring, that you've stopped adoring.

Again, there's two things you need to do, guys.

You need to be adoring and admirable.

And if you do 100 % admirable and 0 % adoring, you're gonna lose your relationship.

Talk to me about this balance, it's a tension that has come up an awful lot.

I did these live shows last year, I'm about to - You went on tour.

I did. Did you like it?

It's fucking awesome dude, it's sick.

Did you sell tickets?

I sold out the Eventim Apollo in London.

Three and a half thousand people, which was pretty cool.

Phenomenal. How long was your tour?

So I did four dates around Australia.

No sorry. Three dates, three dates around Australia, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney.

We did one big show in London and we were about to announce Canada and 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, Vancouver, Austin, Chicago.

So we've got a good run and we're gonna 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.

It's so fun. I mean, some people will hate it, right.

I love it. I've been on tour since I was 19.

You know, I was a French horn player.

Either a French horn or All the people talking about this.

Oh, it's the best. It's the best talking in front of real people and getting up.

But you're also very, are you an extrovert?

I would say introvert.

Are you? But I can swing both ways.

The real question about that is not whether you can perform.

The question is whether or not you 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?

Right, like, do you get it from being in your own, being around people?

Well Anna, I've been thinking about this a lot, maybe you're the person to speak to about this.

Only child, I spent a lot of time in solitude as a kid, spent a lot of time in solitude working throughout all of my 20's.

Parents together? Yup.

Good parents, 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 don't know, until the caffeine wears off and I just keep going.

I said before, one of my skill sets is maybe dealing with discomfort and being able to keep going, delaying gratification, very, very good at that.

But recently, especially the last, I'd say, five years in training, lifting things, and probably three years or so, 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 I used to be able to just happily AirPods in, listening to a podcast, prepping for a guest, listening to an audiobook, listening to some music, go in, just crack out a session at a nine out of 10 effort and then go home and not think about it.

I just found, I really, I just didn't wanna 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 when it comes to doing the live tour.

I could happily go on without an opener.

I don't need an opener.

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, lone ranger this, like this is cool.

Like it's a solo adventure, and I don't want that.

And that's been a transition that I've noticed in myself.

That's a normal transition.

Believe it or not that's a neurobiological transition.

That gets back to the work of Raymond Cottel, the British social psychologist in the 60s and 70s.

He was really 50s and 60s and 70s.

Actually, he was the world's greatest researcher in his time on intelligence.

And 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 twenties and in particularly the early part of their thirties, they find that they're less in 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, to katel.

That's working memory, individual work.

Incredible focus on something while innovation.

Individual innovation.

Right. And that's highest as you're going through your 30s.

Right. It has to peak in your late 30s and then start to fall.

Your results maybe, 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 38, I mean, you're at the top of your fluid intelligence.

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 can 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 become you should work toward going into management as you get older as opposed to holding on to past glory exactly if you're a startup entrepreneur you come up with your brilliant whizbang idea as a coder when you're 30 you should be actually a vc when you're Because 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 30s, 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 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 I 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, but what's the secret to getting great teaching evaluations?

I'm like, get old. And that's because the crystallized intelligence increases and that's the future, but you gotta 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 gonna write a book at some point called How to Reboot Your Life, because 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.

Super exciting. You know?

And I've done it a bunch of times.

I ran a big think tank for a long time.

I was 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, 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 version of 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.

You know, if you're 40, you're probably a grandfather 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.

Grandad, get back here.

Teach us about how you make that hot thing that has flames.

How do I create a spear?

I don't know, 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, If 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...

Exploit old people, that says Arthur Brooks.

That's the thumbnail for the whole episode.

Right old people. 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 is an old guy but you know I was given a talk at one of these tech firms because they have a lecture series always 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 old people work here?

And the guy's like, you mean over 30?

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.

There's tons of energy.

So is there, 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's 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 gonna 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 rise, your openness to change is going to rise and then fall, and your extroversion is going to change where your gregariousness is going to fall but your assertiveness is going to rise.

Mmm. That's what you find.

That's what typically, canonically, that's what we find in the literature.

Mm. And generally speaking, your personality is going to get better.

Generally speaking.

Better? Better. More optimal?

You're going be happier and 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 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 20s I was a chain smoker.

I mean, I was just like, I was self -medicating to the Hill.

Well I did build an unpronounceable nootropics company, so maybe I'm on track there.

It's the 2025 equivalent of chain smoking.

Maybe, although it's self administering nicotine, I don't know, but I feel a lot of literature on that.

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 are a success, addicted workaholic, the harder it is because that's your death threat, there's a threat to actually see how you see your own success as a human being.

The thing you're most afraid of that attacks your identity, that's your death threat.

That's, 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?

but you know it's okay.

It might be, it's okay.

But do I have a death -fear?

Well, yeah. I'm afraid of failure.

Because I wanna 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?" And I don't know.

I don't know. Anyway, the point being that when you spoke about it earlier on with regards to turn the anxiety into fear, make it more concrete, see it for what it is, get to the end 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.

It's kind of the same with the specialness, which is 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, and I'm going to be homeless under a bridge, and they have a gluten intolerance, so I'm going to lose my foot.

And 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 you?

What is it that you want from them?

Why want to be liked by people?

It's like, okay, do the people that like you, do they do that contingent on the amount of that you put out each year, is that contingent on the amount of shows that you do or the amount of, like, 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 like, huh, yeah, actually, no, you're right.

And it's just so into 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.

Part of the reason is because you're in an industry that has to feed a beast. And that, man, the monster's hungry.

Feed me more podcasts.

Most sub stack articles, 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 in 1928 or something like that, and then was kind of forgotten.

The old joke is from who's who to who's he in six months.

You know, that famous Jack Nicholson film about Schmidt, where he's like Mr. Big at an insurance company.

He's an actuary in an insurance company, And he has 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 only relevance.

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 in 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 Marana Sati.

Are you aware of this?

Do you know how this works?

The Marana Sati is an actual death meditation that Theravada Buddhist monks in the southern 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 Sri Lanka that you'll see that there are often see pictures of bodies and states of decay dead bodies I've ever seen this imagine what it's going standing on the marinasati meditation is for a couple of minutes in front of each when you say that is me and that is me why because you are going to die it is completely inevitable and And only when you make it the most familiar thing, your death, will you actually be alive.

So the Maranasati meditation requires that you look straight into your death fear to make it completely ordinary.

See, the truth of the matter is, I'm gonna fail.

I'm gonna be forgotten.

You're gonna become irrelevant.

You're not gonna 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 marinasati meditation where each part is a 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.

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'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.

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 gonna 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 gonna try to earn your wife's love.

And you're gonna 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 Marana Sadi and then 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 came where I've got so much 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 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 Arthur Brooks calm I and 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 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, but everything is at arthurworks .com.

Damn right, Arthur, I appreciate you.

Thank you, I appreciate you too.

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out, and that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found.

Fiction and non -fiction and real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it and it's completely free.

You can get it right now by going to chriswillx .com slash books.

[The Science of Love, Happiness, and Managing One's Biology]-[#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness]

📋 Summary

The Biology of Human Connection and Meaning

The Neurochemical Architecture of Love

The Paradox of Happiness and Suffering

Managing the "Insecure Overachiever"

Workplace Dynamics and the "Plus-Two" Effect

Crystallized Intelligence: The Shift to Wisdom

Conclusion: Confronting Death Fears

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Science of Love, Happiness, and Managing One's Biology]-[#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness]

📋 Summary

The Biology of Human Connection and Meaning

The Neurochemical Architecture of Love

The Paradox of Happiness and Suffering

Managing the "Insecure Overachiever"

Workplace Dynamics and the "Plus-Two" Effect

Crystallized Intelligence: The Shift to Wisdom

Conclusion: Confronting Death Fears

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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